Sanda's Place for Coffee and Voice

Day 200, April 1st, 2011

2011-04-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

"Life is the sum of
all your choices."

Albert Camus

Do not call me a racist, I am siting a book

2011-01-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

Las conversaciones de paz con el negociador palestino Saeb Erekat

2010-12-29T22:29:00.000-08:00

Las conversaciones de paz con el negociador palestino Saeb Erekat

Take-A-Pen for Israel - 2010

El Dr. Saeb Erekat, es el principal negociador oficial de la Autoridad Palestina en las consversaciones de paz

Las recientes conversaciones de paz entre Israel y los palestinos avanzan lentamente a través de la mediación de EE.UU y Erekat, ha sido el principal opositor a ellas .

La mera palabra PAZ abre nuestros corazones y mentes. Pero, por desgracia, esta palabra también se utiliza con frecuencia con fines demagógicos. Los dos dictaduras más sangrientasde la historia moderna, la Alemania nazi y La Unión Soviética Stalinista, fueron campeones sin rival de la demagogia por la paz y la predicaban a diario sólo para encubrir sus malas acciones y sus perversos propósitos .

Por esta razón, es vital entender quién es el socio en las conversacionesde paz y cuales son sus objetivos reales. Las conversaciones de paz entre Israel y los palestinos podrían ser, como lo han sido hasta ahora, un mero encubrirmiento e incluso una justificación para las peores olas de terrorismo por parte de los árabes en la historia del conflicto árabe-israelí. Recordemos que, tanto el Acuerdo de Paz de Oslo como las Negociaciones de Paz de Camp David, fueron seguidos por oleadas terroristas sin precedentes, --"Intifadas"-- las que habían sido planeadas mucho antes de que las negociaciones hubieran comenzado.

¿Quién es entonces el verdaderonegociador árabe Saeb Erekat ?

Él es un político árabe que habla el Inglés en forma clara, concisa y elocuente. Nació en 1955 dentro de una familia musulmana muy conocida en Jerusalem. Sus seis hermanos y hermanas han estado viviendo fuera de Israel y ajenos a la Autoridad Palestina por décadas. Erekat fue educado en Occidente, estudió en los EE.UU., hizo su doctorado en Inglaterra y entró en la política "palestina" como funcionario de alto nivel durante las negociaciones de paz en Oslo.

¿Qué aspecto tiene? No hay mayores discrepancias sobre esto. Durante dos décadas desde que regresó de los EE.UU. para unirse a líderes palestinos, él apareció en público y se mostró al exclusivo "estilo Arafat" llevando una barba de siete días -- obviamente, para complacer a su público radical-- En 2010 esto ha cambiado, y un recientemente afeitado, más viejo pero caballeroso y aún apuesto Saeb Erekat emergió ahora para complacer a Occidente.

Sus palabras son mucho más controversiales que su aspecto físico. Wikipedia dice brevemente que "Erekat, acusó al ejército israelí en 2002 de cometer un asalto sobre la ciudad árabe de Jenin y lo tildó como una" masacre" y un "crimen de guerra ', acusaciones que el ejército israelí ha negado repetidamente [hoy se sabe la verdad] .

El periodista Bret Stephens, ex-editor en jefe del Jerusalem Post en aquel momento (hoy en el Wall Street Journal) escribió acerca de Saeb Erekat y dijo: " ' Cada palabra [s] que dice es una mentira, incluyendo 'y' , ' pero' y 'si ' ".

Lo que Mary McCarthy dijo de Lillian Hellman es lo que se podría decir de Saeb Erekat : "¿Por qué semejante atropello? ".

Vamos a demostrar aquí que la acusación de Erekat sobre el número de caídos en la "supuesta masacre" fue muy inferior : en abril de 2002 Saeb Erekat dio un informe personal dramático para el Servicio Mundial de la BBC transmitido en 40 idiomas. El afirmó que unos 3.000 civiles palestinos habían sido "masacrados por Israel". Tres días más tarde, sus números descendieron a una "masacre" de 500 civiles" .

Luego ,el informe Oficial del Comité Investigativo de la ONU -- que se publicó en agosto y que está disponible para verificar su exactitud --reportó oficialmente : "el número de caídos en Jenin asciende a 52, de los cuales la mayoría eran hombres jóvenes y armados ".

Erekat, nunca se retractó de sus falsas acusaciones ni admitió sus distorsiones.

Así es como diferenciamos una mentira deliberada de un error : una mentira deliberada es una acusación falsa que nunca es corregida después que los hechos oficiales han demostrado lo contrario .

En los años siguientes a la difamación de Saeb Erekat acerca de Jenin, Take-A-Pen lo encontró mintiendo deliberadamente con fines propagandísticos otra vez.
-----------------------------------

Conclusión:

En los últimos meses, tras las convocatorias del presidente Obama, todo el mundo está hablando nuevamente de la paz -- Saeb Erekat incluido--. La pregunta crucial es: ¿quién es sincero acerca de la paz y quién miente ?

Como mínimo falta un detalle para poder considerar a Erekat como un negociador serio y como un socio aceptable para las conversaciones de paz : Saeb Erekat, tiene que admitir y luego condenar sus propias calumnias e incitaciones contra Israel y los Judios que viven allí.

NO se puede creer ni una sola palabra dicha por Saeb Erekat . Cuando comience un nuevo capítulo en las negociaciones y se haga con honestidad , recién entonces y con suerte, ello conducirá a nuevos, y tal vez sinceros acuerdos para una paz duradera .

* Por Endre (Andre) Mozes y Dvoretzky Zelda, TakeAPen4israel, http://www.takeapen.org/

Shame on you Kissinger!!

2010-12-24T23:12:00.000-08:00

And esp. if said to an antisemite as Nixon !!, Jews in foreign governments are a disgrace to their people !!

Kissinger apologizes for 'gassing Jews' remark

By JPOST.COM STAFF

12/25/2010 01:37

Former US secretary of state writes opinion piece regretting comments regarding Soviet Union Jews; says taken out of context.

Talkbacks (4)

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger apologized on Friday for saying it wouldn’t be an American concern if the Soviet Union sent its Jews to the gas chambers during a conversation with then US President Richard Nixon in 1973.

Kissinger made the apology in a Washington Post opinion piece and said "references to gas chambers have no place in political discourse, and I am sorry I made that remark 37 years ago."

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Kissinger's conversation with Nixon, had been recorded and he could be heard saying "the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."

The former secretary of state argued in his opinion piece that his comment was largely taken out of context, while emphasizing that the Nixon administration had worked at helping Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union.

"For someone who lost in the Holocaust many members of my immediate family and a large proportion of those with whom I grew up, it is hurtful to see an out-of-context remark being taken so contrary to its intentions and to my convictions, which were profoundly shaped by these events," Kissinger wrote.

Referring to his conversation with Nixon, where his gas chambers remark was made, Kissinger wrote "the conversation at issue arose not as a policy statement by me but in response to a request by the president that I should appeal to Senators Javits and Jackson and explain why we thought their approach unwise."

More about: Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, The Washington Post, President of the United States

An open letter to the Managing director of Saley's

2010-12-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

When a muslim-owned South African store refused to fill an order from a Jewish organization, Maurice Ostroff sent them the open letter reproduced below. It's worth saving (and editing somewhat) for use in future situations of a similar nature - and there WILL be others!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jewish Chronicle 2 Nov 2010

Hall of Infamy: Saley's Travel Goods

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa --

Saleys, a Muslim-owned supplier in Johannesburg canceled an order placed by a South African Jewish group with comments about "blood money." The South African Zionist Federation had ordered conference bags from Saley's Travel Goods previously without problems, and had received a confirmation from them the day prior to their hate-filled rejection of Jewish business. Saley's faxed a hand-written cancellation of the confirmation, on which they printed these phrases:

"Please don't pay! Don't contaminate our account with your blood money

"We cannot supply you any of our goods as we don't want or need your blood money! Please do not contact us any more."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An open letter to the Managing director of Saley's

From Maurice Ostroff

Congratulations on your brave refusal to continue to do business with a long-standing customer because of your antagonism to Zionism. To ensure that your action is not a meaningless gesture, we look forward with great interest to seeing you demonstrate your sincerity and consistency by following through with a complete boycott of all Israeli products.

You can make an immediate start by examining your computer and throwing it out if it contains software or an Intel Pentium chip that was developed in Israel. Of course you should also avoid instant messaging based on ICQ, that was invented by Israeli teenager Arik Vardi and three friends. And you will of course avoid mobile telephony, developed in Israel by Motorola, the camera telephone chip and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) as used in Skype and similar applications.

You will be hard pressed to locate all the Zionist components in your Security Software, Network Firewalls, Anti-virus programs, System Software, Microsoft Operating Systems (XP and Vista), Google, Disk on Key and Wi-Fi, but I am sure you will assiduously check your equipment and rule out everything with Zionist roots. Unless you do so thoroughly, it will appear that you don't have the courage of your convictions and that your refusal of the small SAZF order was an insincere gesture playing to the anti-Israel gallery.

I could go on and on about the items you must avoid to be consistent in your attitude, but for humanitarian reasons you will be excused if for medical reasons you or members of your family use the "camera pill" developed in Israel to investigate the intestines painlessly by swallowing a pill containing a mini camera and transmitter.

Despite your anti-Zionist feelings, if you have a heart attack, don't hesitate to let the surgeon insert a stent, which was developed in Israel.

You will also be excused if you or members of your anti-Zionist business use new Israeli methods to measure and inject insulin for diabetics or Copaxone to reduce the physical breakdown caused by MS and other MS medicines such as Betaseron and Avonex. Similarly you will be excused for using Israeli developments in computerized tomography (CT), magnetic resonance systems (MRI), ultrasound scanners, nuclear medical cameras and laser surgery.

You will be excused too, if you use the Israeli developed Resperate, an interactive breathing device, for lowering blood pressure as well as treatments for cancer, diabetes, AIDS, auto immune diseases, Alzheimer, cardiovascular diseases and aging as well as the ReWalk, a robot suit that enables wheelchair users to walk, sit and stand again.

On second thoughts I suggest that it would be more rational to re-examine your prejudices and enter into a civil discourse with the Zionists. You may be pleasantly surprised to find that we have much in common and I would be happy to enter into a dialog with you about the issues on which you feel so strongly.

This letter is being publicized as will the response I hope to receive from you.

Sincerely

Maurice Ostroff

Byron

2010-11-28T09:22:00.000-08:00

http://www.eby.co.il/

A Holocaust Survivor's View on Islam

2010-10-25T05:05:00.001-07:00

A Holocaust Survivor's View on Islam

Emanuel Tanay, M.D. - 1913 Intel, March 6th, 2010

http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/news/?p=5482

A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates . When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism . 'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care . I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools . So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen . Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come . My family lost everything . I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'

We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace . Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant . It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history . It is the fanatics who march . . . It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide . It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave . It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill . It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque . It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals . It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.

The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the ’silent majority,’ is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people . The peaceful majority were irrelevant . China ’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist . Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery . Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace loving’?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:

Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.

Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany , they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late . As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts — the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand . So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world-wide, read this and think about it, and send it on – before it’s too late.

Emanuel Tanay, M . D . 2980 Provincial St . Ann Arbor , MI 48104

Dr . Emanuel Tanay MD is a well-known forensic psychiatrist who has been an expert witness in many famous cases . He has served as an officer or committee member on the Michigan Psychiatric Society, the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and others . He is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and of the American Board of Forensic Psychiatry and a distinguished fellow of the APA and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFC).

A Holocaust survivor himself, Dr Tanay coauthored a book about the survivors of the Holocaust and was asked by the German government to consult on just compensation for the Holocaust survivors . Dr . Tanay has served on several journal editorial boards, authored many publications, and presented countless times on forensic medicine . His efforts have also produced many awards and commendations from groups such as the Michigan State Medical Society, APA, the Detroit Institute of Technology, and AAFC, among others.

Israel world's 8th happiest country

2010-08-28T11:03:00.000-07:00

Israel world's 8th happiest country

By JPOST.COM STAFF
07/29/2010 16:55

Scandinavians top list, Africans end it.
Talkbacks (51)
Israel is tied with Canada, Switzerland, and Australia as the world's eighth happiest country out of 155 surveyed, according to a Gallup World Poll posted by Forbes Thursday.

Forbes said the richest countries were by and large the happiest. Scandinavian countries dominated the list, with Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands taking all top five spots. African nations took up most of the bottom, with Sierra Leone, Cambodia (not African), Comoros, Buriundi, and Togo ranking as the unhappiest countries on earth.

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Israel far outstripped its neighbors in happiness, with Jordan ranking 52, Lebanon 73, Egypt and Syria 115. The Palestinian Territories were 88 on the list.

The US ranked number 14 on the list, ahead of Britain, 17.

Iran came in at the middle, with 81. War-torn Iraq ranked 110, and Afghanistan 115.

The four-year survey asked thousands of respondents in the 155 countries to give a "life evaluation" score between one and ten, and cataloged their daily feelings to decide what percentage of people in each country were "thriving, struggling, or suffering." The survey was taken between 2005 and 2009.

"Money is an object that many or most people desire, and pursue during the majority of their waking hours," researchers wrote in the report. "It would be surprising if success at this pursuit had no influence whatsoever when people were asked to evaluate their lives."

Although the study showed happiness to be highly correlated with wealth, regional correlation was strong as well, given the unbroken string of Scandinavian countries at the top and the majority of African ones at the bottom.

"The Scandinavian countries do really well," said Jim Harter, a chief scientist at Gallup. "One theory why is that they have their basic needs taken care of to a higher degree than other countries. When we look at all the data, those basic needs explain the relationship between income and well-being."

According to the Forbes table, the happiest country in the Americas was Costa Rica, which came in at number six worldwide, according to the report. "Costa Rica ranks really high on social and psychological prosperity," said Harter. "It's probably things systemic to the society that make people over time develop better relationships, and put more value on relationships. Daily positive feelings rank really high there."

Israel 'world's 22nd best country'

2010-08-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

August 17, 2010 Tuesday 7 Elul 5770 12:31 IST

Israel 'world's 22nd best country'

By BEN HARTMAN AND DOV PREMINGER
17/08/2010

Newsweek: Jewish state is best in the Middle East.

In spite of the ongoing security concerns and stifling heat, Israel is a pretty good place to live, or so says "Newsweek", which this week published a special article that rated Israel the 22nd best country in the world, and the best in the Middle East.

In an article entitled "The Best Countries in the World", Israel was sandwiched between Spain and Italy, scoring seventh in health, 25th in quality of life, and 15th in economic dynamism. In a rating that would surprise many Israelis, Newsweek ranked Israel a respectable 27th in political environment.

The next Middle East country to make the list was Kuwait at 40, while neighboring Jordan placed 53rd. Iran and Syria also made the list, ranked 79 and 83 respectfully.

The study followed a recently released Gallup poll which contended that Israel was the world's 8th happiest country, published in Forbes magazine.

Interestingly, the the "best" countries profiled in Newsweek's study showed marked correlation with the "happiest" countries measured in Gallup's poll, at least among the top-ranked contenders.

The United States and Britain placed 11 and 14 in the Newsweek study, compared with 14 and 17 on Gallup's list.

Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands were all in the top 10 in Newsweek's analysis, whereas they took top five in Gallup's. Iran was 79 on Newsweek's list, and 81 on Gallup's.

While the Gallup survey took a bottom-up approach, questioning thousands of respondents in 155 countries over four years, the Newsweek study took "several months" to compile with the aid of a Nobel laureate, a McKinsey & Co. director, and various university professors. The Newsweek study only listed the top 100 countries.

Newsweek ranked the "best countries" by how well they scored in five categories, which were: Education, health, quality of life, economic dynamism, and political environment. The rankings were based on international indices such as economic indicators, the Gini coefficient, the Innovation Index, and the Global Peace Index.

While Israel scored 22nd overall, it scored better in the health sub-ranking, in which it ranked seventh of 100.

Education was Israel's worst category out of the five studied, coming in at number 41, despite Israel having the highest ratio of university degrees to the population of any country in the world.

Because Israel does not administer a TIMMS or PISA test, its score according to the study was calculated by a regression of literacy rate and average years of schooling.

http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=185064

I am an Ambassador for Israel

2010-06-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Third Jihad

2009-12-29T11:26:00.000-08:00

Viejos amigos q ya no contestan emails

2009-11-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

Marido de mi amiga Hebe de mis dias en Buenos Aires, de esos amigos muy particulares o no tan fieles q so pretexto de q no les gusta escribir prefieren perder una amistad de tantos anios. Mi ultimo contacto con ellos, a pesar de q el mio nunca falto, fue cuando me llamo p pedirme por favor aloje a su hijo Alejandro en mi casa, cuando vivi tantos anios en Peru, antes de mi allyah, porq el, Alejandro venia a conocer Macchu Picchu p despues desaparecer de la faz de la amistad, no me quejo, los q pierden son ellos, no yo, pero q tal coincidencia desaparecer luego de q pediste un gran favor, jode, no ??????, total le preguntaria si aun sigue tan antisemita y tan antiiesraeli como cuando eramos amigos hace tantos anios como la decada de los 60 cuando en la guerra de los 6 dias muy suelto de huesos me dijo q los arabes nos iban a hacer papilla y a los 6 dias se tuvo q tragar su audacia !!, con todo ese background, segun palabra de ellos y no mia, en un viaje a Brasil conocen a unos peleteros judios de Argentina se hacen tan amigos q ellos le dieron trabajo y le abrieron las puertas de su futuro, sin desmerecer sus propias cualidades, seguira mi amigo humberto a qn igual quiero, teniendo el mismo concepto de los judios, de hecho, el es hijo de los perfectos catolicos argentinos !!, mi querida amiga hebe, q pena no tengas un minuto p escribir una sola linea y dejas morir una amistad, o a lo mejor no lo era como yo lo senti

suerte y besos

Pelajes

Sobre el mundo de las pieles, palabras de un experto, Humberto Borsani

> Ir a la nota
lanacion.com Moda y belleza Jueves 13 de agosto de 2009

SILICON ISRAEL

2009-11-10T00:26:00.000-08:00

George Gilder

Silicon Israel

How market capitalism saved the Jewish state
Summer 2009

The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius, which we may define as the
ability to devise significant inventions that enhance survival and prosperity. At any one time, genius is embodied in just a few score thousand people, a creative minority that accounts for most human accomplishment and wealth. Cities and nations rise and thrive when they welcome entrepreneurial and technical genius; when they overtax, criminalize, or ostracize it, they wither.

During the twentieth century, an astounding proportion of geniuses have been Jewish, and the fate of nations from Russia westward has largely reflected how they have treated their Jews. When Jews lived in Vienna and Budapest early in the century, these cities of the Hapsburg Empire were world centers of intellectual activity and economic growth; then the Nazis came to power, the Jews fled or were killed, and growth and culture disappeared with them. When Jews came to New York and Los Angeles, those cities towered over the global economy and culture. When Jews escaped Europe for Los Alamos and, more recently, for Silicon Valley, the world’s economy and military balance shifted decisively. Thus many nations have faced a crucial moral test: Will they admire, reward, and emulate a minority that has achieved towering accomplishments? Or will they writhe in resentment and plot its destruction?

The test has assumed a global face today, when a large proportion of the world’s genius resides in Israel. Israel has very recently become a center of innovation, second in absolute achievement only to the United States, and on a per-capita basis dwarfing the contributions of all other nations, America included. How Israel is treated by the rest of the world thus represents a crucial test for civilization.

Will we pass it?

My interest in Israeli innovation began in 1998, when I invited an Israeli physicist named David Medved to speak at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm conference. Medved described the promise of “freespace optics”—what most of us call “light”—for high-end communications among corporate buildings and campuses. He also spoke of air force experiments in Israel that used the still-higher frequencies and shorter waves of ultraviolet light for battlefield communications. Some of the most important explorations of electromagnetic technology, I realized, were happening in Israel. Nearly a decade later, Medved introduced me to his son Jonathan, a pioneering Israeli venture capitalist. In his offices high over Jerusalem, the younger Medved told me the startling tale of Israel’s rapid rise to worldwide preeminence in high technology. I had long known that Israel held laboratories and design centers for American microchip companies. I knew that, in a real sense, much American technology could reasonably bear the label israel in side. I was familiar with a few prominent Israeli start-ups, such as the electric-car company launched by Wired cover boy Shai Agassi, which boldly bypassed the entire auto industry in redesigning the automobile from scratch, and Gavriel Iddan’s company Given Imaging, with its digestible camera in a capsule for endoscopies and colonoscopies.

But what I learned in Jerusalem was that Israel was not only a site for research and outsourcing and the occasional conceptual coup, but the emerging world leader, outside the United States, in launching new companies and technologies. This tiny embattled country, smaller than most American states, is outperforming European and Asian Goliaths ten to 100 times larger. In a watershed moment for the country, Israel in 2007 passed Canada as the home of the most foreign companies on the technology heavy NASDAQ index; it is now launching far more high-tech companies per year than any country in Europe.

To take one example among many, Israel is a prime source not only of free-space optics but also of another form of hidden light: ultra-wideband technology. This technology features wireless
transmissions that are not, like cell-phone signals, millions of hertz wide at relatively high power, but billions of hertz wide—gigahertz—at power too low to be detected by ordinary antennas. The technology is typically used for mundane purposes, such as connecting personal computers and televisions wirelessly. But a firm called Camero, in Netanya, Israel, has invented an ingenious ultra wide band device that enables counterterrorist fighters and police to see through walls and identify armed men and other threats within. An easily portable box about the size and weight of a laptop computer, Camero’s Xaver 400 could suffuse an urban battlefield with hidden light that would penetrate walls and bunkers and be detectable only by its users. Such inventions are changing the balance of power in urban guerrilla warfare, to the advantage of the civilized and the dismay of the barbarians.

As I investigated companies like Camero, it became clear to me that Israel had achieved an economic miracle that was important to the United States and to the world. As late as the mid-1980s, Israel was a basket case, with inflation rates spiking from 400 percent to nearly 1,000 percent by early 1985. As recently as 1990, Israel was a relatively insignificant technology force, aside from a few military and agricultural initiatives. Y et in little more than a decade, the country has become an engine of global technology progress. Still more important, Israel’s technology leadership has made it a vital ally of the United States against a global movement of jihadist terror. How did it make such an astonishing leap?

With the history of twentieth-century science and technology largely a saga of Jewish
accomplishment, it might seem to have been foreordained that after World War II, the rising Jewish nation would emerge as a scientific and technological leader. Yet for all the talk of deserts in bloom, the miracle did not occur quickly. For many decades after Israel achieved independence in 1948, the Jews assembled there generated few significant companies or technologies, no significant financial institutions to fund them, and little important science. Accomplishments made in American states like California, New York, and even New Jersey exceeded those of Israeli enterprise, and Jews outside Israel far outperformed Jews in Israel.

In the country’s early years, its research activities were mostly public, devoted to defense, and paltry by any standard. As late as 1965, the ratio of research-and-development spending in Israel to its gross domestic product was under 1 percent, nearly the lowest in the entire Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, behind only Italy. Just one-tenth of 1 percent of Israel’s employees were engineers, putting it far behind the United States and even Sweden. Michael Porter’s definitive 1990 tome The Competitive Advantage of Nations mentioned Israel only once.

All this despite the presence of the Technion, one of the world’s supreme institutions of practical science and the chief contribution of Israel’s founders to its eventual preeminence in technology.
Located atop a hill overlooking Haifa, the institute sprawls over its spectacular site with a massive maze of concrete institutional architecture as formidable as MIT’s: labs, auditoriums, nuclear facilities, giant telescopes, and research monoliths, mostly named for American Jewish tycoons. But nearly 80 years passed after the Technion’s opening in 1924, with Jews around the world forging the science of the age in an intellectual efflorescence unparalleled in human history, without any exceptional contributions from Israel.

How to explain this lassitude? For much of Israel’s short history, the country has been a reactionary force, upholding a philosophy of victimization and socialist redistribution that could only impede its progress. In 1957, a team of American economic consultants found that Israel’s “high labor costs . . . reflected the high degree of job security . . . [and] the absence of adequate incentive to or rewards for superior efficiency or performance.” This was partly a result, they added, of “virtually complete protection from foreign competition.” Two years later, A. J. Meyer of the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies noted “uncertainty in the minds of many [Israeli] industrial producers that theirs is the ‘good’ occupation or that society really gives them credit—financially and in status—for their efforts.” He also cited “welfare state concepts [that] often dictate that incompetent workers stay on payrolls.”

Many of Israel’s Jews, as the writer Midge Decter described them, “were coming into the country armed with their socialism and their ideologies of labor and a Jewish return to the soil.” Imagine it: urban socialists trying to reclaim their past glory and save themselves in a hostile world by returning to the soil in a desert! They created communal experiments—kibbutzim—and put intellectuals to work with hoes and shovels, for all the world like a voluntary version of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In a truly menacing démarche of ideological madness, they attempted to abolish the family and private property.

Panicked, moreover, by the Jewish caricatures and stereotypes wielded by their enemies, they resolved to become mendicant nebbishes—touring the centers of Western money and industry with tin cups in hand—rather than bankers and financiers. They assigned close to a third of the economy to the ownership of Histadrut, a socialist workers’ organization prone to threatening nationwide strikes. Under Histadrut pressure, they instituted minimum wages that stifled employment and propelled inflation. Then they imposed more controls on wages, prices, and rents, making everything scarce. In a general enthusiasm for public ownership of the means of production and finance, the government through the 1990s owned four major banks, 200 corporations, and much of the land.

Israel’s taxes rose to a confiscatory 56 percent of total earnings, close to the highest in the world, stifling even those private initiatives that managed to pass through the country’s sieves of socialism. Erecting barriers of bureaucracy, sentiment, and culture, Israeli leaders balked the entrepreneurs and inventors who gathered there, creating a country inhospitable to Jewish genius. Far more welcoming of Jewish and Israeli talent in those days were American companies, particularly Intel. It was an Israeli engineer, Dov Frohman, who invented electrically programmable read-only memory (EPROM), a chip-based permanent memory that could retain a personal computer’s core programming even when the power was off. EPROM would contribute some 80 percent of Intel’s profits over the next decade and sustain the company’s growth to become the world’s leading semiconductor company. (With the help of a company called Xicor, started by Israeli Raffi Klein, EPROM soon evolved into the flash memories that today dominate the industry. Today, flash memories are a forte of the Israeli microchip industry and lie behind many American miracles of miniaturization, from so-called thumb drives to Apple’s newer iPods to Hewlett-Packard’s Mini netbooks.)

After leaving Intel in 1974 for a charitable sojourn teaching electrical engineering in Ghana, Frohman returned to Israel to establish an Intel design center in Haifa. This laboratory soon conceived the so called 8088 microprocessor, which was incorporated into the first IBM personal computer. In 1979, also in Haifa, Frohman supervised the development of Intel’s first mathematical floating-point coprocessor, a critical element in most subsequent personal computers and workstations. As a guest in the country, albeit an imposing one, Intel could tap the genius of Jews while bypassing the rules, tolls, and taxes that frustrated Israeli companies. Following the Haifa design center, Frohman wanted Intel Israel to establish a semiconductor “fab,” or factory, in Jerusalem, together with the necessary chemical and engineering support services. After a battle with Intel executive Andrew Grove—himself a Hungarian Jew who became a legendary figure in Silicon Valley—over the costs of training Israelis to run the fab, Frohman managed to enlist $60 million in subsidies from the Israeli government and led the project to completion in three and a half years. By the late 1980s, the Jerusalem fab, Intel’s first outside the United States, was producing some 75 percent of the global output of Intel’s flagship 386 microprocessor and was gearing up to produce the 486 as well. Frohman later persuaded Grove to open production plants in Kiryat Gat in the Negev, Israel’s desert.

Meanwhile, from Intel’s Israeli design centers—by now, there were several—emerged several
generations of the Pentium microprocessor, as well as the Centrino low-power processor that
integrated Wi-Fi wireless capabilities into portable PCs. For all the achievements of Israelis working for Intel and other foreign firms, Israel’s native technology sector languished. Redemption came in unexpected forms. One was an infusion of genius: nearly a million immigrants, chiefly from the Soviet Union, whom Israel absorbed in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Impelled by constant harassment from the U.S. government—including Senator Henry
“Scoop” Jackson’s emancipation amendment, which for a decade was attached to any American
legislation of interest to the USSR—the Soviet government finally agreed to a frontal lobotomy of its economy. Under Gorbachev, it released the bulk of the Soviet Jews, who had continued, despite constant oppression, to supply many of the technical skills that kept the USSR afloat as a superpower.

The influx of Soviet Jews into Israel represented a 25 percent population increase in ten years, a tsunami of new arrivals that would be equivalent to the entire population of France being accepted into the United States. Largely barred in the USSR from owning land or businesses, many of these Jews had honed their minds into keen instruments of algorithmic science, engineering, and mathematics. Most had wanted to come to America but were diverted to Israel by an agreement between Israel and the United States. Few knew Hebrew or saw a need for it. At best, they were ambivalent Zionists. But many were ferociously smart, fervently anti-Communist, and disdainful of their new country’s bizarre commitment to a socialist ethos that punished achievement. At the same time as the flood of Soviet immigrants, a smaller but seminal wave of Americans arrived in Israel from such companies as IBM and Bell Laboratories, with a knowledge of Silicon Valley and an interest in opportunities in Israel. Capping off and funding these catalytic outsiders was a generation of eminent American retirees who arrived in Israel with billions of dollars of available capital, petawatts of imperious brainpower, a practiced disdain for bureaucratic pettifogs, and Olympian confidence in their own judgment and capabilities.

Mix the leadership of these dynamic capitalists with a million restive and insurgent Soviets, and the reaction was economically incandescent. Throw in natural leadership from the irrepressible Natan Sharansky, who had faced down confinement in the Gulag and formed a new conservative political party in Israel to mobilize his Russian compatriots, and the impact reverberated through the social and political order as well. Such an influx could not be clamped or channeled, tapered or intimidated into the existing economic framework, and, as Israeli financier Tal Keinan remarks of the Russian newcomers, “they could not all work for Intel.” Today, immigrants from the former Soviet Union constitute fully half of Israel’s high-tech workers.

Despite the dramatic progress of the 1990s, at the dawn of this century, Israel still lacked a financial sector capable of propelling the nation into the globally dominant role it stands poised to fill today. To get there would take one more great reform. The successful allocation of capital, like the launch of a new technology, is an elegant expression of the capitalist law that mind rules and matter serves. Jews throughout history have excelled in this most intellectual of capitalist endeavors. And yet Israel until recently had virtually no investment houses, deep capital markets, or venture capital. With performance fees barred, hedge funds were essentially illegal. “All my Jewish friends were making their money at Goldman Sachs, while Israel’s finance was dominated by a heavily subsidized labor union,” remembers Keinan. “The Zionist Rothschilds dominated European banking, but the only significant Rothschild presence in Israel was a winery.”

In the mid-1980s, Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud government, with Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu as its United Nations ambassador, did cut taxes—increasing the rewards of work and investment by some 30 percent, dramatically boosting economic growth, and reducing inflation. As prime minister in the 1990s, Netanyahu also ushered in dramatic deregulation, along with tax cuts that brought in floods of new revenue. Further spurring local entrepreneurs was the Yozma program in 1993, which waived double taxation on foreign venture-capital investments in Israel and put up a matching fund of $100 million from the government. Demand for the money became so intense that the government hiked the amount and doubled the matching-funds requirement. Nevertheless, throughout the 1990s, most of the money powering Israel’s technological ascent came from the Israeli government or from American technology companies. As the millennium dawned, Israel had failed to create a financial services industry or to wrest control of much of Israel’s capital from the hands of Histadrut.

The force driving the Israelis decisively out of their socialist slough into the modern world of finance was once again the ingenuity of Netanyahu. As finance minister, Netanyahu used the financial crisis of 2003 and 2004, precipitated by the latest campaign of Palestinian terror, as a lever to transform Israel’s economy from a largely socialized domain dependent on foreign finance into one of the world’s most open and flourishing financial systems. In the process, he created what occasional advisor Keinan today calls “the greatest opportunity in our lifetimes.”
An Israeli supply-sider, Netanyahu faced the adamant opposition of Histadrut and its allies in the Knesset. To overcome the hostility to finance capitalism that had long hobbled the Israeli economy, Netanyahu enlisted vital help from President George W. Bush and his treasury secretary, John Snow. Netanyahu sought a sovereign loan guarantee that would give Israeli bonds the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury, so that despite intifadas and other perils, Israel could issue bonds on the same terms as the world’s leading economy. Not wanting the U.S. to appear a patsy, Snow refused to do the deal without a significant quid pro quo, stipulating that Netanyahu secure from the Knesset a series of major financial reforms.

First, Histadrut, which dominates the pension system in Israel, had to give up its direct line to the Israeli treasury, which had guaranteed it an inflation-adjusted 6 percent annual yield. This special arrangement would be phased out over a period of 20 years. Starting immediately with the first 5 percent of its holdings, Histadrut would need to begin finding other ways to invest its $300 million per month of cash flow. Somehow a financial industry would have to arise in Israel to handle this huge trove of funds. A second briar-patch reform demanded by Snow was the immediate privatization of Israel’s state-owned industries, reducing the government’s stake in these companies from an average of 60 percent ownership to minority ownerships of about 20 percent. Among the privatized ventures were oil refineries, nearly all the banks, the Bezeq telephone monopoly, and the national airline, El Al. The third key reform was the emancipation of the financial-services industry, complete with legalization of investment banks, international private equity funds, and performance fees for hedge funds. Eliminated were double taxes not merely on investments in Israel but also on international investment activities by Israelis. The Netanyahu-Snow agenda went into effect on January 1, 2005.

In under 25 years—starting from those first modest tax reforms of the mid-1980s—Israel has
accomplished the most overwhelming transformation in the history of economics, from a nondescript laggard in the industrial world to a luminous first. Today, on a per-capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity. Between 1991 and 2000, even before the big reform of 2005, Israel’s annual venture-capital outlays, nearly all private, rose nearly 60-fold, from $58 million to $3.3 billion; companies launched by Israeli venture funds rose from 100 to 800; and Israel’s information-technology revenues rose from $1.6 billion to $12.5 billion. By 1999, Israel ranked second only to the United States in invested private-equity capital as a share of GDP. And it led the world in the share of its growth attributable to high-tech ventures: 70 percent. Even a year or two later—while the rest of the world slumped after the millennial telecom and dotcom crash and Israel suffered an acute recession—its venture capitalists strengthened its lead in technological enterprise. During the first five years of the twenty-first century, venture-capital outlays in Israel rivaled venture-capital outlays in all of the United States outside California, long the world’s paramount source of entrepreneurial activity in high technology. Today, Israel’s tech supremacy is even greater. A 2008 survey of the world’s venture capitalists by Deloitte & Touche showed that in six key fields—telecom, microchips, software, biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, and clean energy—Israel ranked second only to the United States in technological innovation. Germany, ten times larger, roughly tied Israel. In 2008, Israel produced 483 venture-backed companies with just over $2 billion invested; Germany produces approximately 100 venture-backed companies annually. The rankings registered absolute performance, but adjusted for its population, Israel comes in far ahead of all other countries, including the United States. Venture capital is the most catalytic force in the world economy. In the United States, venture-backed companies produced nearly one-fifth of GDP in 2007. At a time when American venture capital is flagging under the financial crisis, the emergence of a comparable venture scene in Israel, linked closely to Silicon Valley, is providential for both the American economy and its military defense.

This development makes Israel one of America’s most important economic allies. Israel’s creativity now pervades many of the most powerful and popular new technologies, from personal computers to iPods, from the Internet to the medical center. Early in 2009, for example, Intel launched a massive new advertising campaign to celebrate what it described as its most important advance since its initial invention of the microprocessor chip some 40 years ago: the new Core i7 device, code-named “Nehalem,” which combined leading-edge computing
power with unprecedented economy of energy use. Like many of the inventions that have made Intel the world’s leading microchip company, the Core i7 was designed in Israel.

Israelis are also leaders in arguably the most important technology arena today, particularly for
military uses. This is the ability of computers using parallelism to sense, accept, and process information as quickly as modern transmission techniques—especially fiber-optics lines—can deliver it. A representative device in this effort, and a powerful symbol of Israel’s leading position in Internet technology, is the “network processor.” Just as a Pentium microchip is the microprocessor that makes most PCs work, the network processor is the device that makes the next-generation Internet work, doing the vital routing and switching at network nodes. The next-generation Internet will allow “petaflops” (1015 floating-point operations per second) of real-time computational power to be deployed to virtually any point on the earth. The network processor will let any desktop computer access data and processing power exponentially greater than that incorporated in any PC or any single corporate data center. The next-generation Internet and its associated technologies will be both the next great machine of capitalism and the next great weapon in its defense. Only by accepting and processing sensory data as fast as or faster than the human brain registering a glimpse of a known terrorist’s face buried beneath
$100,000 worth of plastic surgery will computers make the leap from glorified adding machines to indispensable allies against the forces of chaos and terror. Leading the field are companies like Eli Fruchter’s EZchip (in which I have long been an investor), launched in the late 1990s with a few dollars, no customers, and a compelling PowerPoint presentation in lieu of any actual products. In less than a decade, EZchip drove most of its rivals—firms like Intel, Motorola, and IBM—to the sidelines, and welcomed the rest, like Cisco and Juniper, to its list of major customers. During a trip to Israel in 2008, Fruchter, Amir Eyal, and Guy Koren of EZchip took me out to dinner in Caesarea. The restaurant was on the Mediterranean beach. Above the beach stood the ruins of Roman temples and terraces, theaters and arches, all surfaced with golden sandstone and carefully refurbished and illuminated. Shops and restaurants were decorously arrayed along the beach. The rush of water on the sand, the scent of fish in the air, the glow of sunset, and the lights on the Roman stone all lent the area a magical feeling of peace and prosperity.

I thought of Gaza, under 100 miles to the south, with similar beaches and balmy weather, and similar possibilities of human advance. Could the Gazans join the Israelis to create a Riviera on their exquisite beaches, their glowing sands? To do so, they would have to leave behind a world of zero-sum chimeras and fantasies of jihadist revenge. And they would discover that their greatest ally is a man long portrayed as their most feared enemy, a man who, having led for decades the fight to liberate Israeli Jews from self-destructive socialist resentment, now offers to bring all of Palestine and perhaps all of Arabia on the same journey.

Netanyahu’s vision is an Israel that, as a global financial center, could transform the economics of the Middle East. Israel could become a Hong Kong of the desert. Just as Hong Kong ultimately reshaped the Chinese economy in its own image when Deng Xiaoping mimicked its free economy, Israel could become a force for economic liberation in the Middle East, reaching out to Palestinians and other Arabs with the blandishments of commercial opportunity. After all, it has long been Israeli enterprise that has attracted Arabs to Palestine. Between 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and 1987, when the first intifada erupted, those two territories were one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. GDP surged 30 percent a year for a decade, the Arab population nearly tripled, six new universities were launched, and Arab longevity jumped from 43 years to 74. Netanyahu has long believed that the peace process as we know it is irrelevant, focused on a handful of issues that breed anger and perpetuate conflict. Meanwhile, true peace—and the promise of a decent life—lies waiting to be picked up by those Palestinians and Israelis who are willing, and now increasingly able, to invest in creation over destruction.

George Gilder is the founding director of Gilder Technology Associates, a venture capital fund, and a

contributing editor of Forbes. His books have sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. The newest is The Israel Test.

http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=5105

Sanda's family tree on Family-Mingle.com

2009-04-16T06:14:00.001-07:00

Safed-Tzfat: Yo soy sionista - Yair Lapid - Ynet

2009-02-10T05:49:00.000-08:00

Safed-Tzfat: Yo soy sionista - Yair Lapid - Ynet

2009-01-25T00:10:00.000-08:00

Puede ser la famosa imagen del canal 2 de Francia sobre Muhammad al-Durrah un fraude?

O semejante aseveración es un libelo ?
Un Dia Crucial en las Cortes de Paris

Antecedentes de Take-A-Pen - 25 de Octubre de 2007, actualizado el 3 de Noviembre
El 30 de Septiembre del 2000, el mundo observo con horror y pena la imagen del canal 2 de la televisión francesa mostrando como un chico palestino, Muhammad al-Durrah, habia sido asesinado en medio de un fuego cruzado entre pistoleros palestinos y soldados israelíes. Con su voz en narrativa el reportero del canal 2 frances, Charles Enderlin afirmo (a pesar de que, como luego fue probado, el no había estado presente en los acontecimientos y solo se entero de lo ocurrido a traves de un solo testigo el cameraman palestino Talal Abu Rahma) que Israel asesino al chico, dejando implícito el hecho de que este habia sido deliberado.

El video se disperso como fuego por todo el mundo, y este en conjunto con la acusación en contra de Israel, se convirtieron en la mas poderosa arma de odio; para los palestinos, para la Jihad mundial y para Israel- y para los que odian a los judíos en todo el mundo. Por ejemplo, los asesinos del periodista judío Daniel Pearl escogieron la imagen del video de al-Durrah como telón de fondo para mostrar la imagen de la decapitación de Pearl.

Desde entonces un numero cada vez mas grande de expertos alrededor del mundo – y recientemente las mismas Fuerzas de Defensa de Israel – llegaron a la conclusión de que la versión cinematográfica del corto al-Durrah debe haber sido un invento, un falso montaje y de que la versión del France 2 era también falsa. Análisis de la escena del supuesto crimen y el escenario y la evidencia balistica eventualmente probaron que los soldados de la IDF no podrían haber matado al chico.

Las imágenes que el canal 2 francés emitió duran menos de 1 minuto del total de 27 que se filmo inicialmente sin editar por Rahma. La emisión completa del mismo hubiera hechado luz sobre la verdad, pero el France 2 ha rehusado constantemente hacer publica esta evidencia crucial menos aun a los expertos en la materia o al publico en general. En cambio, ellos acusaron al investigador y reportero frances Philippe Karsenty, uno de tantos otros que dijeron que el video era un fraude, de libelo. El año pasado France 2 parecia estar ganando el juicio. Karsenty, a pesar de la recomendación del procurador de fallar a favor del demandado, fue encontrado culpable y fue multado con 1 Euro por daños.

Sensacional descubrimiento esperado para el 14 de Noviembre

Sin embargo este año el caso ha dado otro giro. El 12 de Septiembre, el primer dia de la apelación actual del juicio, el juez ordena que France 2 debe presentar las imágenes completas a la corte en la siguiente audiencia el 14 de Noviembre. (Take A Pen y sus amigos, dentro y fuera de nuestra organización, pueden sentir verdadera satisfacción; nuestra previa e intensiva campaña de envio de cartas, a France 2 y al presidente frances Sarkozy**, seguramente ha contribuido a la atmosfera que llevo a la corte a fallar a favor, esta vez, de la entrega completa del material filmado.

El fallo ha tenido un gran significado. Por un lado si el 14 de Noviembre el material sin editar de la filmacion va a revelar contradicciones en cuanto a la autenticidad de la filmacion emitida por el canal, o si France 2 no presenta la filiación original; uno tendría una buena razón para no confiar mas en la historia del France 2 de al-Durrah, literalmente hablando ‘el show de un solo hombre’.

Ese es el motivo por el cual gente bien informada espera con ansiedad el siguiente día en las cortes.

Nuestro deseo mas fuerte es que la verdad sea hallada. Y que Philippe Karsenty no vuelva a ser El futuro ? En Paris, la ciudad donde el Capitan Dreyfuss fue una vez injustamente sentenciado y mucho mas tarde rehabilitado, TV France 2 se convertiria en la parte acusada de libelo por el demandante; por diseminar su supuesta y probable filmacion falsa de la pelicula de Muhammad Al-Durrah y las infundadas acusaciones que se hicieron, y por obstruir la búsqueda de la verdad, intentando ocultar la filmacion completa por tanto tiempo.

Take-A-Pen, en un proyecto especial en conjunto con la prestigiosa HonestReporting, estará presente en las cortes de Paris, el 14 de Noviembre, para inmediatamente informarte a TI sobre el resultado de la audiencia!

*** Transducción - translated into Spanish by - Sanda Abramovici-Lam

Turning my first young 60s on January 27th, 2009

2009-01-03T22:41:00.000-08:00

Facebook Sanda Abramovici-Lam

Friends of Israel

2008-06-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Friend of Israel,

jewish charities

I was gratified to learn that you have added an image to your site which declares "Israel I Love You" or "I'm a Proud Friend of Israel". Your decision to identify with our country is particularly meaningful at this time while Israel is struggling to earn legitimacy within the family of nations as a peace seeking and progressive, democratic nation, in the face of unrelenting international attempts to deligitimize its right to existence.

I am writing on behalf of Israel La'ad, an organization which offers programs to Israel's less fortunate citizens – particularly economically deprived school-age children and the elderly.

Israel La'ad sponsors three main projects:
1. An after-school remedial educational program to help children excell in school, complete their homework and prepare for tests;
2. "Ride for Pride" a bike riding program which provides children with an extra incentive for working hard in school and instills a sense of pride. Participants come from families who can't afford the luxury of purchasing a bike;
3. "Feed The Hungry"a food delivery program that brings food baskets to the elderly and poor in Israel's poorer neighborhoods.
As the owner of a web site, you can make a "virtual" contribution to our efforts which is no less significant than a monetary donation.

A virtual link on your site, which need not be particularly prominent on your web page, is a statement of identity both with the aims of Israel La'ad and the people of the holy land. By expressing your support in this way, you will help bring the message of our charitable deeds to many people like yourself, who feel a bond and closeness to the people of Israel, especially those who turn to us for financial aid and sustenance.

Any of the following options will be facilitate creating a link (in HTML code):
http://www.israel-laad.org>israel charity

If you would like more information about Israel La'ad's projects in Israel, please view our website, www.israel-laad.org, read our recent newsletter available at: http://israel-laad.org/newsletter/2008-april/newsletter_april08.html or call our local U.S. number 617-395-7672, and ask to speak to Danny.

Shalom from Israel,
Raanan LevyFounder and Director of Israel La'ad

Now do you understand why I am afraid? by Denis MacEoin

2008-03-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

I’m afraid. Let me try to explain why. I was born four years after the end of the Second World War. Throughout my childhood and early youth, I was taught about why that war had been fought, why it had been essential to defeat Nazi Germany, and why we must never let something like that happen again. Above all, it was instilled in me that we must never allow a second Holocaust to happen. It had been the greatest crime in human history, and the Nazis had been the greatest criminals of all time.The worst thing about the Third Reich was that it came to power in a modern nation, a nation that prided itself on its culture, its science, its legal system, its religious and social values. This was the horror, that something primitive, bestial, and anti-human came out of what both Germans and their neighbours considered a civilized and progressive people. Even today, when we read or watch newsreels about the Reich, the Nazi Party, the SS, the vast apparatus of that singular evil, we are confronted by a cold-hearted wickedness that has no parallel in modern history. It remains the supreme evil of modern times, despite the emergence of many tyrannies and tyrants since its time.When we think of German fascism, we think of the ruthlessness of the blitzkrieg, the extermination of villages, the destruction of Warsaw, the mass killings of Jews by einzatsgruppen, the torture and murder refined by the Gestapo, the utter abuse of innocence by a conscious option for evil, and, above all, the death camps. To my generation, the swastika and the totenkopf, the chic black uniforms, the rallies, the goose-stepping formations, the diving stukas, the barbed wire, the piano-wire hangings, the gas chambers, the watchtowers, the jackboots, the Hitlergrüss salutes, the lightning-flash SS badges, the black coats of the secret police, the U-boat packs, and the overweening arrogance all spoke of one thing: an evil so removed from good that it should never be repeated, however long the human race endures.I began by saying I am afraid. Afraid of what? Of the truth that, just over sixty years after the end of that long and costly war, after the Nuremberg trials that laid bare Germany’s infamy, after the sorrow and grief that consumed Europe and Russia, I hear our understanding of that evil abused. It is as if a new generation has forgotten what Nazism was all about, as if all our common understandings have been twisted until they are no longer recognizable.In what way? In the repeated statements found among sections of the left and centre that describe Israelis as Nazis, that speak of a ‘Palestinian Holocaust’, that define Israel as the new Reich and its actions on a par with those of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It is scarcely possible to say how sick and frightened it makes me to read such remarks, not least when I realize that they are often made by seemingly intelligent, well-educated people. What is worse, they have become part of a wider distortion of historical truth that denies the Holocaust, blames the Jews for having provoked Hitler and everyone who ever persecuted them throughout history, and finds an excuse for its anti-Semitism in mealy-mouthed declarations of guiltlessness: ‘I am only anti-Zionist’.So let’s put some of this to rest. Leaving aside the Suez debacle (in which Britain and France were also involved), Israel has only ever fought defensive wars. Again and again, Israelis have fought, not just for their own lives, but for the life of their nation — a nation created to provide a haven for Jews in a world that had just disposed of six million of them. They have never used the total war tactics of the Nazis, nor have they once envisaged the genocide of the Palestinians. If they had really been Nazis, does anyone imagine they would have left a Palestinian alive? If they really used Nazi military tactics, do you think the death toll in the recent war in Lebanon would have been around 1,000, most of the dead Hizbullah guerrillas?There’s simply no point in using derogatory terms like ‘Nazi’, ‘genocidal’, or ‘racist’ if they don’t fit. And such language doesn’t fit Israel. Criticize Israel by all means — Israelis do it all the time — but play fair. Too many people on the Left have betrayed their own ideals of honesty and justice by demonizing a people whose only wish is for peace and security. There are things wrong about Israel, and you should take care to identify them and write to your nearest Israeli embassy about them: you’ll find a listening ear, and maybe your criticisms will do real good. But there’s no point in standing on street corners with a megaphone, yelling to the general public that Israelis are Nazis, because only someone as badly informed as yourself will listen to you.What frightens me more than anything, though, is the hypocrisy. Left-wingers and liberals always had an honourable history of opposition to anti-Semitism. They stood up for Jews, in the same way Jews in the 60s were among the most active figures in the American Civil Rights Movement. Back in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, it was a matter of honour for liberals to defend the Jews in their own countries and Israel abroad. But now? The Left has sold out totally to the lure of anti-Semitism. ‘We only hate Israel, not Jews,’ you say? Then why have so many left-wingers and liberals joined forces with the Palestinians and other Arabs, or with Iranians or Pakistanis, whose cultures are saturated with the most obnoxious anti-Jewish imagery and rhetoric that has existed outside the Third Reich? I’m not talking here about something half-hidden, some dirty secret that you might well not have come across. I’m talking about mainstream TV shows, broadcasts on a variety of national radio stations, children’s cartoons, school textbooks, mosque sermons, and large political rallies.It’s all there: the hooked noses, the grasping hands, the conspiracies, the sacrifice of Christian and Muslim children, the mixing of their blood with matzo flour, the secret cabals, the sheer Nazi-like horror of the filthy, blood-sucking, world-dominating Jew. If you think you’re a liberal, then what in God’s name induces you to throw in your lot with real Nazism, pour scorn on Jews who have been fighting for their lives for well over sixty years, and then gallingly call those same Jews Nazis?You say you haven’t seen any of this? Then you really are a fool to give your support to a society you know next to nothing about. You consider Hamas ‘freedom fighters’: have you noticed the salute they give in rallies? You think of Hizbullah as ‘heroes of the resistance’: have you ever seen how they salute? If it was Hitler up on the podium, no-one would be surprised.This all requires a more detailed discussion. For the moment, I will only say that this link between modern Arab anti-Semitism and the Third Reich variety is not accidental. While Jews were dying in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Birkenau, the Palestinian leadership was collaborating with the Reich, recruiting troops for the SS, and planning to build a death camp in Hebron. Jew-hating fascism did not die with the overthrow of the Third Reich: it moved to the Arab world where, believe it or not, the world’s liberals now sing its praises, thinking they are fighting for Palestinian freedom. If you are still in any doubt about how sick this is, read the Hamas Charter, which openly calls for the slaughter of all the Jews in Israel, or early documents of Hizbullah, where the same aim is made explicit, or the more recent calls by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, to wipe Israel from the map. They want to finish the job Hitler started. Don’t take my word for it, read any of the books and pamphlets in which just this claim is made. I forgot, you probably don’t read Arabic. I do. Don’t you think that you, as an intelligent and open-minded liberal, might actually base your view of this on something more solid than a couple of articles in The Guardian? I read The Guardian too, but I don’t swallow everything its extraordinarily biased op-eds say about the Middle East.Where does this leave us? You, the anti-Israel liberal, me, the pro-Israel liberal. At loggerheads, I suppose. But there is a difference: I believe in your inherent goodness because some sort of love of humanity must inform your political options, your love of free speech, of human rights, of the right of all peoples to independence and nationhood. I know you are impelled to support the Palestinian cause because of such imperatives, and I admire your impulse. But I also think — or, rather, know — that you are ignorant, perhaps profoundly so. Otherwise, I cannot in all conscience imagine why you would so freely give your voice and your actions to support a people who seek only genocide, and withhold your support from the very people that has suffered the greatest act of genocide in the last or any other century.If you believe in the self-determination of peoples, why do you condemn the establishment of the single state of Israel, the only Jewish state in two thousand years? From the very beginning, the people of Israel have sought for the creation of an Arab state next to theirs. Given peace and security, there are few limits to what Israel would do to make a Palestinian state an economic and social success. They have never talked of genocide. The Palestinians talk of little else. Hamas explicitly rejects peace treaties, peace conferences, compromises, and negotiations. Why would a peace-loving liberal extend the hand of greeting to such intransigence and spit on the hand that offers all of that and more? If liberals can support the worst sort of anti-Semitism, doesn’t that open the way to forces that will crush us all, Jews and non-Jews alike? I’m afraid. Let me try to explain why. I was born four years after the end of the Second World War. Throughout my childhood and early youth, I was taught about why that war had been fought, why it had been essential to defeat Nazi Germany, and why we must never let something like that happen again. Above all, it was instilled in me that we must never allow a second Holocaust to happen. It had been the greatest crime in human history, and the Nazis had been the greatest criminals of all time.The worst thing about the Third Reich was that it came to power in a modern nation, a nation that prided itself on its culture, its science, its legal system, its religious and social values. This was the horror, that something primitive, bestial, and anti-human came out of what both Germans and their neighbours considered a civilized and progressive people. Even today, when we read or watch newsreels about the Reich, the Nazi Party, the SS, the vast apparatus of that singular evil, we are confronted by a cold-hearted wickedness that has no parallel in modern history. It remains the supreme evil of modern times, despite the emergence of many tyrannies and tyrants since its time.When we think of German fascism, we think of the ruthlessness of the blitzkrieg, the extermination of villages, the destruction of Warsaw, the mass killings of Jews by einzatsgruppen, the torture and murder refined by the Gestapo, the utter abuse of innocence by a conscious option for evil, and, above all, the death camps. To my generation, the swastika and the totenkopf, the chic black uniforms, the rallies, the goose-stepping formations, the diving stukas, the barbed wire, the piano-wire hangings, the gas chambers, the watchtowers, the jackboots, the Hitlergrüss salutes, the lightning-flash SS badges, the black coats of the secret police, the U-boat packs, and the overweening arrogance all spoke of one thing: an evil so removed from good that it should never be repeated, however long the human race endures.I began by saying I am afraid. Afraid of what? Of the truth that, just over sixty years after the end of that long and costly war, after the Nuremberg trials that laid bare Germany’s infamy, after the sorrow and grief that consumed Europe and Russia, I hear our understanding of that evil abused. It is as if a new generation has forgotten what Nazism was all about, as if all our common understandings have been twisted until they are no longer recognizable.In what way? In the repeated statements found among sections of the left and centre that describe Israelis as Nazis, that speak of a ‘Palestinian Holocaust’, that define Israel as the new Reich and its actions on a par with those of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It is scarcely possible to say how sick and frightened it makes me to read such remarks, not least when I realize that they are often made by seemingly intelligent, well-educated people. What is worse, they have become part of a wider distortion of historical truth that denies the Holocaust, blames the Jews for having provoked Hitler and everyone who ever persecuted them throughout history, and finds an excuse for its anti-Semitism in mealy-mouthed declarations of guiltlessness: ‘I am only anti-Zionist’.So let’s put some of this to rest. Leaving aside the Suez debacle (in which Britain and France were also involved), Israel has only ever fought defensive wars. Again and again, Israelis have fought, not just for their own lives, but for the life of their nation — a nation created to provide a haven for Jews in a world that had just disposed of six million of them. They have never used the total war tactics of the Nazis, nor have they once envisaged the genocide of the Palestinians. If they had really been Nazis, does anyone imagine they would have left a Palestinian alive? If they really used Nazi military tactics, do you think the death toll in the recent war in Lebanon would have been around 1,000, most of the dead Hizbullah guerrillas?There’s simply no point in using derogatory terms like ‘Nazi’, ‘genocidal’, or ‘racist’ if they don’t fit. And such language doesn’t fit Israel. Criticize Israel by all means — Israelis do it all the time — but play fair. Too many people on the Left have betrayed their own ideals of honesty and justice by demonizing a people whose only wish is for peace and security. There are things wrong about Israel, and you should take care to identify them and write to your nearest Israeli embassy about them: you’ll find a listening ear, and maybe your criticisms will do real good. But there’s no point in standing on street corners with a megaphone, yelling to the general public that Israelis are Nazis, because only someone as badly informed as yourself will listen to you.What frightens me more than anything, though, is the hypocrisy. Left-wingers and liberals always had an honourable history of opposition to anti-Semitism. They stood up for Jews, in the same way Jews in the 60s were among the most active figures in the American Civil Rights Movement. Back in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, it was a matter of honour for liberals to defend the Jews in their own countries and Israel abroad. But now? The Left has sold out totally to the lure of anti-Semitism. ‘We only hate Israel, not Jews,’ you say? Then why have so many left-wingers and liberals joined forces with the Palestinians and other Arabs, or with Iranians or Pakistanis, whose cultures are saturated with the most obnoxious anti-Jewish imagery and rhetoric that has existed outside the Third Reich? I’m not talking here about something half-hidden, some dirty secret that you might well not have come across. I’m talking about mainstream TV shows, broadcasts on a variety of national radio stations, children’s cartoons, school textbooks, mosque sermons, and large political rallies.It’s all there: the hooked noses, the grasping hands, the conspiracies, the sacrifice of Christian and Muslim children, the mixing of their blood with matzo flour, the secret cabals, the sheer Nazi-like horror of the filthy, blood-sucking, world-dominating Jew. If you think you’re a liberal, then what in God’s name induces you to throw in your lot with real Nazism, pour scorn on Jews who have been fighting for their lives for well over sixty years, and then gallingly call those same Jews Nazis?You say you haven’t seen any of this? Then you really are a fool to give your support to a society you know next to nothing about. You consider Hamas ‘freedom fighters’: have you noticed the salute they give in rallies? You think of Hizbullah as ‘heroes of the resistance’: have you ever seen how they salute? If it was Hitler up on the podium, no-one would be surprised.This all requires a more detailed discussion. For the moment, I will only say that this link between modern Arab anti-Semitism and the Third Reich variety is not accidental. While Jews were dying in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Birkenau, the Palestinian leadership was collaborating with the Reich, recruiting troops for the SS, and planning to build a death camp in Hebron. Jew-hating fascism did not die with the overthrow of the Third Reich: it moved to the Arab world where, believe it or not, the world’s liberals now sing its praises, thinking they are fighting for Palestinian freedom. If you are still in any doubt about how sick this is, read the Hamas Charter, which openly calls for the slaughter of all the Jews in Israel, or early documents of Hizbullah, where the same aim is made explicit, or the more recent calls by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad, to wipe Israel from the map. They want to finish the job Hitler started. Don’t take my word for it, read any of the books and pamphlets in which just this claim is made. I forgot, you probably don’t read Arabic. I do. Don’t you think that you, as an intelligent and open-minded liberal, might actually base your view of this on something more solid than a couple of articles in The Guardian? I read The Guardian too, but I don’t swallow everything its extraordinarily biased op-eds say about the Middle East.Where does this leave us? You, the anti-Israel liberal, me, the pro-Israel liberal. At loggerheads, I suppose. But there is a difference: I believe in your inherent goodness because some sort of love of humanity must inform your political options, your love of free speech, of human rights, of the right of all peoples to independence and nationhood. I know you are impelled to support the Palestinian cause because of such imperatives, and I admire your impulse. But I also think — or, rather, know — that you are ignorant, perhaps profoundly so. Otherwise, I cannot in all conscience imagine why you would so freely give your voice and your actions to support a people who seek only genocide, and withhold your support from the very people that has suffered the greatest act of genocide in the last or any other century.If you believe in the self-determination of peoples, why do you condemn the establishment of the single state of Israel, the only Jewish state in two thousand years? From the very beginning, the people of Israel have sought for the creation of an Arab state next to theirs. Given peace and security, there are few limits to what Israel would do to make a Palestinian state an economic and social success. They have never talked of genocide. The Palestinians talk of little else. Hamas explicitly rejects peace treaties, peace conferences, compromises, and negotiations. Why would a peace-loving liberal extend the hand of greeting to such intransigence and spit on the hand that offers all of that and more? If liberals can support the worst sort of anti-Semitism, doesn’t that open the way to forces that will crush us all, Jews and non-Jews alike?Now do you understand why I am afraid?
Denis MacEoin
maceoin@btinternet.com
http://mid-eastplus.blogspot.com/Denis MacEoin
maceoin@btinternet.com
http://mid-eastplus.blogspot.com/

Israel, the filthy germ by Israel, the filthy germ

2008-03-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

Israel, the filthy germ
Denis MacEoin

One of the first things that strikes the visitor to Iran is how polite everybody is. Hands go on chests (male chests anyhow) in a gesture of humility, it is commonplace to address someone as jenab, ‘your excellence’, to call oneself ‘your sacrifice’, and much besides. It’s an old fashioned society in which interpersonal relations are valued at all levels.
But ever since the revolution of 1979, there are more and more ways of insulting anyone perceived to be the enemy of Iran or Islam. Almost the first slogan of that revolution was marg bar-Amrika, ‘death to America’. Later, marg bar-Isra’il was added to the chants after every Friday prayer meeting. Verbal insults were matched by vicious disrespect for the most basic human dignity, in the parading of the US embassy hostages, the broadcasting of film of the US pilots burned in their helicopters during the failed Eagle Claw operation to rescue those hostages, the 2006 exhibition of cartoons mocking the Holocaust and its victims, or the conference on Holocaust denial held later that year.
Now, Ahmadinejad has made a speech in which he describes Israel as ‘a filthy germ’ and ‘a savage beast’. A few days earlier, Muhammad ‘Ali Ja’fari, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards wrote to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, saying ‘In the near future, we will witness the destruction of the cancerous germ of Israel by the powerful and competent hands of the Hezbollah combatants’. Clearly, Ahmadinejad’s words are not just the expression of some personal pique. They could even spark a war.
All of this talk of germs and viruses is disturbingly old hat, but none the less vicious for that. In 1942, Adolf Hitler declared that ‘the discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world’. Elsewhere, he says Jews are like ‘tubercles which can infect a healthy body’. You find this everywhere in Nazi discourse. German has been infected by the Jews, their destruction will bring it back to health. Dr. Fritz Klein, one of the infamous Nazi doctors, said ‘The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind’ and continued ‘whether you want to call it an appendix or not, it must be extirpated (exterminated, eradicated: ausgerottet)’
Familiar? On many occasions, Iran’s outspoken president has called for the destruction of Iran. Don’t be misled by attempts to water this down: in one speech he calls on the Islamic nations to ‘exterminate’ Israel (qal’ o qam’ kard). His aim, like that of Hezbollah and Hamas among others, is the total elimination of Israel. Since Hezbollah’s apparent (though only apparent) victory in the 2006 war with Israel, Iran and its allies have grown in confidence. They now think they are only a short time from total success. Yet the international community does next to nothing to prevent a second Holocaust, a second cleansing of the Ewige Jude, the eternal virus.
One might ask some pointed questions. For one thing, in what way does the existence of Israel threaten Iran, whether in the short or long term. In all the years it has existed, there have been no signs of the Israeli virus passing on infection to its surrounding states — quite the contrary, in fact. Some virus. Some threat. Does Israel plan to expand aggressively beyond its current boundaries? If that had been the Israeli scheme, they would have done it many years ago. Israel doesn’t border on Iran, and the countries between them are all hostile to Israel.
The only way Iran would ever benefit from Israel’s death would be to raise its own esteem among the anti-Israeli nations. Given that Iran’s theological position is many football fields away from that espoused by other Muslims except the Iraqi and Lebanese Shi’a, that boost to Iran’s status would be undeniably welcome; but it would do absolutely nothing to expunge the taint of being a Shi’ite country.
But let’s just look at what Ahmadinejad is saying about Israel in another light. The fact is that Israel is the only genuine democracy for a long way about. There is no other country in the Middle East that is a successful multi-party state, that has a democratic system of law, that gives full rights to religious and ethnic minorities, women, and homosexuals; that does not censor its press or book publishers; that has such high numbers of university graduates; that participates so seriously in international aid provision; and that has such an international standing in medical and technological research, producing the most vibrant economy in the region.
If this is indeed a virus, we must surely expect democracy and human rights to spread like a benign plague across the region. In fact, Israel’s Arab (and Iranian) neighbours have proved remarkably resistant to every strain of the virus that has reached them. Surely any decent-minded person should be hoping for the Israel virus to get its teeth into Egypt or Syria or Jordan.
If there is a virus, it has to be the curious one that has infected so many in the West, notably on the left. No matter how strong the moral and rational arguments in Israel’s favour, this benighted group persists in mouthing slogans, calling for boycotts, boosting terror groups like Hamas (freedom fighters even when they are attacking kindergartens), and denying any rights to Israel whatever. And when the Islamic state has been established, and they start stoning women and hanging gays and killing the Baha’is, and imprisoning the socialists, no doubt our brave enemies of Israel will slink off to find another cause. May that day never come.

Professor Barry Rubin ME Affairs

2008-01-22T07:14:00.000-08:00

Professor Barry Rubin,Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal Editor, Turkish Studies

The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East

2007-07-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

Barry Rubin, The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East. Can be ordered at: http://www.amazon.com/Long-War-Freedom-Struggle-emocracy/dp/0471739014

The fate of many a current crisis--and much of America’s and even the whole world’s future—depends on the struggle for power in the Arab world. In The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in The Middle East Barry Rubin narrates the battle among reformers, regimes, and radical Islamists. He pays tribute to the liberals’ courage but also points to their weakness, lack of success, and the tremendous forces against them. Among the issues covered are the battles among Arabs to define Islam, America, Israel, the war in Iraq, women’s rights, and terrorism.
$25.95 cloth/ ISBN: 0-471-73901-4/To order can call 1-800-255-5945. In Canada, call 1-800-567-4797.

Professor Barry Rubin,Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) CenterEditor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) JournalEditor, Turkish Studies

THE TRUTH ABOUT SYRIA

2007-07-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

THE TRUTH ABOUT SYRIA

By Barry Rubin
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007

Among the biggest world problems and greatest threats are terrorism, radical Islamism, and Middle East crises. Among its greatest challenges are the Iraq issue, the growing power of Iran, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. In all of these issues, Syria plays
a central role; in most of them it is one of the greatest or the number-one obstacle. Today, Syria sponsors terrorist groups that attack the United States, Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon.
Syria is also central to America’s current role in the world, the dangers it faces, and the wars that engage it. This book provides a comprehensive explanation of Syria’s regime, interests, policies, and society. In turn, Syria provides a model for understanding the Arab and Muslim worlds today.
While the Syrian regime poses as being desirous of peace and engagement with the West, in fact its institutions, ideology, propaganda, and activities go in the exact opposite direction. To survive, the minority-dominated, dictatorial, and economically incompetent government needs radicalism, control over Lebanon, regional instability, anti-Americanism, and using Israel as a scapegoat.
The Truth About Syria explains how the country has run; how it tries to attack U.S. interests; and why the regime is incapable of another type of policy.
Barry Rubin has been a writer and analyst on the Middle East for more than 30 years. He was written 23 books and edited an additional 32 books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. Dr. Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, the world’s largest journal on the region.
ISBN - 10: 1-4039-8273-2; ISBN-13: 978-10439-8273-5.
To order from Amazon:

For more information on the book:

Review copies-- "Ellis Trevor"
Publicity information-- "William Smith" william.smith@stm artins.com

Professor Barry Rubin,Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) CenterEditor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) JournalEditor, Turkish Studies

THE CASE OF THE MURDERED MOUSE

2007-07-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

THE CASE OF THE MURDERED MOUSE

By Barry Rubin

Professor Barry Rubin,Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) CenterEditor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) JournalEditor, Turkish Studies

Background: The Hamas satellite TV channel produced a children’s show Tomorrow’s Pioneers, which should have been called Tomorrow’s Suicide Bombers, designed to get children to kill Israelis, or Jews in general, and participate in a radical Islamist attempt at world conquest. We know this because that is what the show’s hosts and their mascot, the high-voiced Farfur the mouse (based on Mickey) said. International media often reported that the show only asked the children to “fight” or “resist” Israel but this was a clear misrepresentation of the program’s incitement to terrorism, antisemitism, and even—in a departure from past Hamas propaganda—calls for an Islamist-dominated planet.
Given the controversy around Farfur, however, Hamas decided to make him a true example for the children to emulate, by becoming a martyr. Thus, Al-Aqsa television claimed that Farfur was murdered by an Israeli official wanting to grab his land. But is that true? The killing was not actually shown on television. One wonders….
Gaza City, another hot and dreary night. The air was unbearably humid and still off the Mediterranean. It was sweltering. Especially for those of us who lacked air-conditioning. I can’t afford it because business isn’t too good. My name is Sami Spade and I’m a private detective. A good and honest one, which is to say a very poor one.
I can’t even afford a secretary. It isn’t that there isn’t a lot of crime around Gaza City but the police are corrupt, the courts are corrupt, and most of the crime is being done by the authorities and their friends, relatives, patrons, and clients. Kidnappings? In plenty but those who grab people are too powerful to get them sprung. Disappeared people? There are lots of folks who want them to stay disappeared. Extortion, terrorism, gun battles. Above my pay level. That’s for sure.
And that’s why I was surprised by a knock on my door. Well, not a knock exactly, more like a scratching. It was persistent. The rent was overdue, of course, but my landlord didn’t scratch at the door, he knocked it down altogether. Curious I carefully tiptoed to the portal and with a single heave pulled it open fast.
To my amazement a tiny mouse fell across my threshold heavily to the floor with an anguished squeak.
“Who are you and what do you want? I haven’t got any cheese,” I growled.
The mouse got up and dusted himself off. “You got me wrong. I don’t need no stinkin’ cheese,” said the mouse. “I’m here on business.” The mouse looked around, “Quite a hole ya got here,” he added.
“What kind of business do you have with me?”
“An investigation of course. You’re a PI aren’t you.”
“That’s what it says on the door, rodent,” I answered.
The mouse looked hurt. “We don’t like that term. You don’t have to get personal,” he answered softly.
“Sorry,” I said back. “Ok. Come in and sit down.” The mouse walked in and climbed on my only other chair. I settled behind my desk, checking the drawer to make sure my .45 automatic was there. Just in case. The mouse could be setting a trap. “Any way, how can a mouse pay for a PI?”
“Don’t worry,” said the mouse smugly. “I have a lot of dough, a lot of bread even. But let me explain. My name is al-Hammett. But I’m so fast that my friends call me Dash.”
“Dash al-Hammett,” I mused, “sounds familiar. What’s up?”
“Have you heard of Hamas’s biggest TV star? Farfur? He’s my cousin. Or should I say he was my cousin. Farfur has been murdered. I have a very rich uncle who lives in Hollywood, name of Mickey. He wants to find out what really happened to Farfur. And he’s willing to pay. How about 500 dinars a day plus expenses?”
I couldn’t help but whistle. “Sounds pretty good to me. Tell me more.”
“As you know, Hamas says that Israel did him in because he wouldn’t sign over his land. I think it’s a frame. That Saraa, the teenage host? I never trusted her. And Mickey said something before he died.”
“Yeah?”
“He told me that if anything happened to him not to believe it was the Israelis. Look, Sam, I know you don’t mix in politics….”
“I’ve found it’s a lot healthier that way.”
“Sure I know what you mean. But here’s the story. All the Arab regimes and radical movements blame America and Israel for everything to cover up their own crimes. Right?”
I nodded. “Everyone knows that, everyone but most of the Western Middle East experts, a lot of the journalists, and some of the politicians. So you think that’s what’s going on here?”
“Absolutely. Maybe Farfur got the goods on some corrupt act or something. And they knocked him off because he knew too much. Wouldn’t be the first time. Will you take the case?”
“Sounds pretty risky,” I said.
“OK, make it 600 dinars a day.” He reached into a pouch around his waist and pulled out a thick wad of bills.
“You have a deal,” I said.
Later that night, much later, I headed for Al-Aqsa TV studios, wearing my trench coat and fedora. There were no stars and the night was dark. I had the tools of my trade with me and the night-watchman there was known to fall asleep on the job. Sure enough I easily jimmied the backdoor, slid inside, switched on my flashlight, and headed straight for Saraa’s office. It wasn’t hard to find the documents. They were right on her desk. They told the real tale. Farfur wasn’t killed by the Israelis. He had decided that Gaza was too hot for him, he was fed up by the lies, the propaganda, the killing. Makes sense. Hell of a job, luring little children to blow themselves up by giving them promises of rewards in heaven. Makes me sick to my stomach just to think of it.
Suddenly, I heard a sound and darted behind the desk. It looked like the whole Hamas army barrelled in. I had set off a silent alarm. I looked at the window and then I looked at the machineguns levelled at me. It was no contest. I raised my hand.
“So, Sami Spade,” said their leader. I knew who he was, too, Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister. “We meet again.”
“Listen, Haniyeh I retorted,” knowing only a tough act could let me bluff my way out. “I know about your scheme. You murdered Farfur because he was going to flee and tell all about your con game.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Ah, Sami you have always been a sucker for a pretty face or a big bank roll. Do you think you can fight us? We write op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post about how we want peace!” His henchmen guffawed. “The Europeans are ready to give us lots of money!” One of the gunsels started to shake with mirth. “And even the U.S. State Department is talking about dealing with our brothers in Egypt and elsewhere!” The gunsel actually fell on the floor and rolled around laughing hysterically.
“Do you think you can stop us? Soon we will be even in New York, like our friends on September 11.”
“There are areas of Brooklyn I wouldn’t go into if I were you,” I sneered.
“Don’t worry about us, Sam. Everyone will think that we can be made moderate. And everyone will think that the Israelis murdered Farfur, just like we made them think they killed Muhammad al-Durra.”
“You won’t get away with it. The democracies will resist you and help the liberal Arabs fight you. Don't you know that September 11 changed everything?”
“Oh, yes,” smiled Haniyeh. “You just don’t get it. The last man who said that is now the most unpopular leader in the world. You see, the decadent West thinks that sex sells while we believe that antisemitism sells even better. Take him away, boys,” Haniyeh gestured.

Barry Rubin is director of the GLORIA Center http://gloria.idc.ac.il and editor of
the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal
http://meria.idc.ac.il. His latest book is The Truth About Syria
(Palgrave-Macmillan) http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1403982732

************************************************
From Translation of Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin - July 1, 2007
“Hamas TV Mickey Mouse beaten to death by Israeli - becomes Martyr in final episode “by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
[Text:] “Farfur in Interrogation”Israeli interrogator: “Sit down, Farfur… Farfur, we want to buy the land, we will give you a lot of money. You will get a lot of money, and we will take the documents.”Farfur: “No!! We will not sell our lands to terrorists!”Interrogator: “Farfur!!! I want you to give me the documents, give me the documents!”Farfur: “I’m not giving the documents! Not giving! Not giving!”Interrogator: “Farfur!!! [Visual: interrogator beats Farfur] Farfur! Hand me the documents. Farfur! Hand me the documents, Farfur!”Farfur: “I am not handing them to criminals, to terrorists!”Interrogator: “You call us terrorists, Farfur?! [Visual: interrogator beats Farfur again] Take this! Take this! Take this! Take this!”Farfur: “Stop! Stop!” Saraa’: “Yes, our children friends, we lost our dearest friend, Farfur. Farfur turned to a Martyr while protecting his land. He turned into a Martyr at the hands of the criminals, and murderers. The murderers of the innocent children… [Talking to a child caller] You saw that the Jews let Farfur die as a Martyr. What do you want to say to the Jews?”Shaimaa’, 3 years old, on the phone: “We don’t like the Jews because they are dogs! We will fight them!”Saraa’ [sarcastically]: “No, the Jews are good, oh Shaimaa’. The Jews are our friends, and we play with them, isn’t it so?”Shaimaa’: “They killed Farfur!”Saraa’: “That’s right, oh Shaimaa’. The Jews are criminals and enemies, we must expel them from our land.” [Hamas, Al-Aqsa TV June 27, 2007]

I'm a Proud Friend of Israel !!! Are you ???

2007-03-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

My Koolanoo Home

2007-01-24T08:51:00.000-08:00

2007-01-15T13:56:00.000-08:00

Self hating Jews: Google Zionism or Israel - Find complete failure

2007-01-15T13:00:00.000-08:00

Denis McEoin's Blog-Highly recommended !!

Judios Ocultos de Espania-en castellano

2007-01-09T13:45:00.000-08:00

JUDIOS SECRETOS EN CATALUNYA

Judíos secretos

Por Eugeni Casanova

Sobrevivientes a la Inquisición se reúnen en Catalunya - Piden al
Gran Rabinato el derecho a pertenecer al pueblo de Israel

El venerable rabino Boaron no daba crédito a lo que veían sus ojos.
Francesc Bellido de Sant Feliu desplegaba con primor un talit que su madre
le había tejido cuando era un niño, 60 años atrás, para que siguiera los
preceptos de su religión secreta. Blanco con franjas azules en sus
extremos, el manto de oración judaico no se diferenciaba en nada del que su
propia madre le había legado a él o a millones de judíos en todo el mundo.
Lo extraordinario era que Bellido había nacido y crecido en Cirat, en el
abrupto interior de Castellón, en una tierra donde oficialmente los judíos
se habían acabado cinco siglos atrás, cuando los Reyes Católicos les dieron
a escoger entre el exilio o la conversión.

Boaron, la mano derecha del Gran Rabino de Israel, estuvo con una
delegación religiosa en Barcelona el 31 de marzo y el 1 de abril (el 2
visitaron la antigua judería de Girona) para escuchar los casos de decenas
de descendientes de conversos de la península ibérica que reclaman el
derecho a pertenecer al pueblo de Israel. Lo que resultó más extraordinario
a la comisión es que la mayoría de estas personas han conservado no sólo la
memoria, sino también rituales y tradiciones de sus antepasados israelitas.

Bellido recitó oraciones en hebreo que su madre le había enseñado,
explicó que encendía las velas del Sábado, que le instruyó en el
cumplimiento de los preceptos e incluso le recitaba algún viejo proverbio:
"De Sefarad (Hispania) soy un jayao (soldado)/ fablo el safá (idioma)
castellano/ como el más puro villano/ que nunca cató el jalá (pan
sabático)". En su casa de Cirat (en el Alto Mijares valenciano, de lengua
castellana), Bellido recuerda una mezuza,la cápsula con oraciones que todos
los hogares judíos ponen en el dintel de la puerta. Sin embargo, ellos la
tenían en el interior, ya en el recibidor, y cubierta con yeso. Otros
objetos rituales, como la menorá,el candelabro de siete brazos, estaban
escondidos en un armario.

El caso de Bellido se repite en todo el territorio ibérico, donde
muchas familias han conservado a través de las generaciones rasgos judaicos
y, en algunos casos, los preceptos al completo. Es imposible dar cifras,
porque continúan escondidos, pero las personas que se reclaman
descendientes de israelitas son varios miles. "En todas partes, en las 52
provincias españolas, hay judíos secretos, pero España sigue siendo un país
muy antisemita y todavía no nos sentimos seguros", dice un valenciano que
prefiere que su nombre no aparezca.

La pervivencia del judaísmo está documentada en España y Portugal
hasta finales del siglo XVIII, 300 años después del decreto de los Reyes
Católicos. Los archivos de la Inquisición revelan decenas de miles de casos
de herejía hasta esas fechas. Los historiadores aseguran que más de la
mitad de los judíos evitó el exilio convirtiéndose al cristianismo, pero la
mayoría también siguió practicando clandestinamente la religión de sus
padres. Así nacieron los criptojudíos, que fueron llamados también
marranos, un nombre que se conserva muy vivo en muchas familias
portuguesas.

Cuando el tribunal capturaba a un hereje acusado de judaizar,
inmediatamente caían parientes y amigos de distintos puntos de España y
Portugal, porque durante siglos los criptojudíos mantuvieron una red de
contactos que les permitía ayudarse, reunirse para las fiestas y pactar
matrimonios, sin los cuales la tradición hubiera desaparecido. Los
judaizantes desaparecen de los archivos justamente cuando el Santo Oficio
que los perseguía se modera, a finales del XVIII, y, finalmente, es abolido
a principios del XIX.

Un jamón por estrenar

La también valenciana Marina de Paz Peris cuenta como sus abuelos
paternos encendían en el pueblo gallego de Rivadavia las velas sabáticas
dentro de un puchero para que sus vecinos no las percibieran y que de niña
descubrió en su desván libros escondidos escritos "con casitas", que más
tarde supo que era el alfabeto hebreo. Su abuela materna guardaba las
apariencias culinarias para evitar ser descubierta. La Inquisición procesó
a muchísimos sospechosos por cocinar con aceite vegetal o por no consumir
cerdo. "Yo siempre ví un jamón en la despensa - cuenta Marina-, que debía
ser heredado, porque llevaba años ahí, para que los vecinos lo vieran".

La abuela regalaba los conejos que criaba (prohibidos por la ley
rabínica) a los vecinos; "en cambio, pollos no regalaba ni uno". La familia
de Marina de Paz tuvo que hacer equilibrios durante el largo franquismo
para ocultar su verdadera religión. Cuando en algún acto social rechazaban
el cerdo, alegaban que engordaba, y decían que el marisco les producía
trastornos. Cuando les invitaban a una boda llegaban siempre al final de la
misa, "con la excusa de la modista o de un zapato roto", porque tenían
reparos para entrar en la iglesia.

La familia se las arregló también para tener una parcela en el
cementerio sin una sola cruz, donde también enterraban a ateos y suicidas.
Cuando en 1948 se fundó el Estado de Israel, 37 de sus primos emigraron en
masa protagonizando una aliyá (retorno) increíble para el mundo, porque
teóricamente los judíos se habían acabado en Sefarad hacía siglos.

Marina, que tiene 55 años, todavía conoció la red clandestina que
unía a los judíos ibéricos. Cuando cumplió 18 años, sus padres le llevaron
a casa algunos jóvenes para que se casara dentro del grupo. "Era una
especie de servicio secreto criptojudío. Había alcahuetas que ponían en
contacto a la gente, y a mí me trajeron chicos de Córdoba, de Navarra y de
la misma Valencia, y alguno centroeuropeo, de familias que se relacionaban
con mis padres", cuenta.

La comisión rabínica escuchó también a representantes lusos. En
Portugal - donde los judíos fueron convertidos a la fuerza, sin la
posibilidad de exiliarse- se han mantenido algunas comunidades
perfectamente constituidas, y durante las décadas de 1920 y 1930 hubo un
importante movimiento, la Obra do Resgate, que llevó a muchos marranos a la
sinagoga y creó escuelas para los niños.

Otro colectivo que explicó su caso a los rabinos fue el de los
chuetas, los mallorquines portadores de 15 apellidos, descendientes de los
últimos conversos repremidos por la Inquisición a finales del siglo XVII,
que estuvieron estigmatizados hasta hace muy poco, porque vivían agrupados
en el viejo call de s´Argenteria de Palma. Tras Barcelona, la comisión
israelí viajó a Mallorca y a Oporto. El rabino Boaron se declaró
impresionado por los testimonios que había escuchado y reconoció a Sefarad
como tierra de judíos. Según sus palabras, existe una buena disposición del
Gran Rabinato para que los bnei anusim (los hijos de los forzados) regresen
al pueblo de Israel con todos los honores.

E. Casanova es autor del libro "Els jueus amagats. Supervivents de
la Inquisició a la Sefarad del segle XXI" (Columna, 2005).

The Rise of AFSI versus the Doom of AIPAC

2006-12-06T21:56:00.000-08:00

Thursday, May 26. 2005

THE RISE OF AFSI VERSUS THE DOOM OF AIPAC by Dr. Yehuda Tzoref

THE RISE OF AFSI VERSUS THE DOOM OF AIPAC

by Dr. Yehuda

TzorefIsraelNationalNews.com -May 25, '05 / 16 Iyar 5765

Whether AIPAC represents the majority of American Jewry, that’s questionable, however AIPAC’s open support for Sharon’s planned destruction of the Jewish province of Gush Katif is a shameful display of inexcusable depravity. For Sharon’s policy is a reprehensible disengagement from the basic values of democracy, humanism and Jewish morals.

By its avowed backing of Sharon, AIPAC leadership betrays not only the sustainable future of Israel but also the American constitutional principles of justice, defense and liberty. The so-called Disengagement Plan is unheard-of in the history of moral civilizations, least of all in USA. No nation would ever dare to be morbidly infected by even hypothetically consider such perpetration of ethnic cleansing against its own fellow-countrymen.Whether AIPAC members do not have a clue about Sharon’s political brutality, that’s indeed conjectural, but their double-standard morality syndrome, that selectively blinds their senses as well as conscience, should be traced down to the enemies of Israel. In his obsessive and reckless stampede to press the Disengagement, Sharon has been violating every possible value of democracy. Not only is the Disengagement is a flagrant violation of the fundamental democratic law of Human Freedom and Dignity, the “plan” has been promoted by deception of the electorate. The election results granted solid electoral majority to a national platform committed to the integrity of all Jewish settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza Strip.

However, Sharon disregarded the election results in order to enforce a far-left policy against the conscience and conviction of the right-wing majority that brought him to power.Sharon’s treacherous deception of his staunch electorate and betrayal of their democratic confidence are just the tip of the iceberg in the twilight zone of his crimes against democracy. Within a few years of his term in power, Sharon has been persistently undermining the very existence of Israel. A thorough process of national restoration will be required after the termination of Sharon’s reign of corruption, tyranny, bribery, crime and anarchy, that inflicted deadly blows on Israel’s fragile democracy, national solidarity, morality, morale, security and durability.

This is the “democratic leader” so fervently acclaimed by AIPAC. In an inspiring contrast to the AIPAC doom agenda, the movement of Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI) delivers the message of hope to the Jewish state by joining forces with other truthful organizations, such as American Committee for the Preservation of the Land and People of Israel, Freeman Center for Strategic Studies and Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).

Dr. Judah (Yehuda) Tzoref, an extra-parliamentary activist for Eretz Israel, is engaged in independent research on theoretical physics

Posted by Freeman Center For Strategic Studies in ISRAELI POLITICAL, RESISTANCE TO

Guilty of Poor Marksmanship

2006-11-18T07:45:00.000-08:00

17th November, 2006

Guilty of Poor Marksmanship

Three tragic events took place on the same day early this month:

1) 82 police officer killed by terrorists in Pakistan;

2) 60 people killed in Iraq in several terror bombings;

3) 19 Palestinians killed in Beit Hanoun, Gaza by Israeli artillery.

The events in Pakistan and Iraq got their 15 minutes of fame, but the incident in Gaza was played up in the media over and over again, complete with gory pictures of blood flowing in the streets, dead babies, and mourning adults. Why this disproportional coverage on Gaza?

Good journalism requires that a story include all of the 5 W's:

Who, What, Where, When and Why.

We got very detailed coverage on the first four W's, but very little on the last one - WHY?

Some reports did mention that rocket fire had first been directed from Gaza into Southern Israel, but mentioned it at the end of the story. By that time most readers had their minds made up and didn't even reach the last paragraph. An exception was the Canadian national daily, the Globe and Mail, which provided the missing WHY!

From the article "AFTER BEIT HANOUN", dated November 10th, 2006:

What happened this week to residents in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun was a terrible tragedy. A misdirected artillery barrage claimed the lives of 18 members of an extended Palestinian family, eight of them children, and injured 54 other people. The Israeli military, which had just withdrawn from the community after a six-day offensive, must shoulder the responsibility for the accident. But Palestinian authorities must share the blame. Because they did nothing to stop teams of militants from setting up in Beit Hanoun and brazenly firing Kassam rockets at Israeli communities, they set the stage for the inevitable Israeli response.

No nation could stand by indefinitely while its citizens' lives were put at risk by wanton violence rained down on them daily for months on end. Israel had no choice but to strike back. When another batch of rockets reached the suburbs of a town even deeper inside Israel after the withdrawal of its soldiers, Israel responded with artillery. The Israelis were apparently targeting a grove where rocket fire had been spotted, but missed their mark.

Sadly, Palestinian political leaders are all too ready to make a dreadful situation worse by escalating the violence. Hamas has declared that it will return after a two-year absence to its preferred terrorist tactic of sending suicide bombers into Israel. "The armed struggle is free to resume, and the resistance will be dictated by local circumstances," Khaled Meshaal, Hamas's exiled political leader, said in Damascus. "There must be a roaring reaction so that we avenge all those victims." Other militant groups have also vowed revenge, conveniently ignoring that they could have prevented the bloodshed in the first place. What Israel was actually guilty of is poor marksmanship! It is a given in the military that at least one missile in a hundred will go astray. This is called "collateral damage" in all other wars. The Israeli try to minimize civilian casualties, but this is difficult against an enemy fighting in civilian clothing and hiding behind a civilian shield. In Lebanon, Israel could have levelled the suburbs of Beirut and all of South Lebanon where Hezbollah has their headquarters, TV stations, and supplies of military hardware.

Instead, out of consideration for civilian lives, Israel targeted only military installations. Meanwhile, the terrorists -- Hezbollah in the North, Hamas in the South -- load their rockets with thousands of ball-bearings for maximum kill and aim randomly at the Israeli towns and villages within their range. These pellets can penetrate steel guard-rails, imagine what they good do to a human body!As is usual in similar cases, a motion was presented at the UN Security Council, putting all the blame on Israel. It was vetoed by the USA, but ten of the fifteen members were ready to vote in its favour. Peace will come when the terrorists lay down their arms, accept the existence of Israel, renounce violence, and resume negotiations on the "Road Map to Peace" between two nations, living side by side, in harmony.

Shalom from Max.

Anti-Zionism is Racism

2006-11-16T15:31:00.000-08:00

About the Author:

Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son. Daniel Pearl was a journalist who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan while investigating the case of a convicted shoe bomber. The Foundation seeks continue Daniel Pearl's mission and uphold his principles which included: uncompromised objectivity and integrity; insightful and unconventional perspective; tolerance and respect for people of all cultures; unshaken belief in the effectiveness of education and communication; and the love of music, humor, and friendship. Judea Pearl is co-editor of “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl” (Jewish Lights, 2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Anti-Zionism is Racism

by Judea Pearl

In the past three months, I have visited four “troubled” campuses — Duke, York (Canada), Columbia and UC Irvine — where tensions between Jewish and anti-Zionist students and professors have attracted national attention. In these visits, I have spoken to students, faculty and administrators, and I have obtained a fairly gloomy picture of the situation on those and other campuses.Jewish students are currently subjected to an unprecedented assault on their identity as Jews. And we, the Jewish faculty on campus, have let those students down. We have failed to equip them with effective tools to fight back this assault. We can reverse this trend.Many condemn anti-Zionism for being a flimsy cover for anti-Semitism. I disagree. The order is wrong. I condemn anti-Semitism for being an instrument for a worse form of racism: anti-Zionism.In other words, I submit that anti-Zionism is a form of racism more dangerous than classical anti-Semitism. Framing anti-Zionism as racism is precisely the weapon that our students need for survival on campus.Anti-Zionism earns its racist character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives (e.g. Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination.Are Jews a nation? A collective is entitled to nationhood when its members identify with a common history and wish to share a common destiny. Palestinians have earned nationhood status by virtue of thinking like a nation, not by residing where their ancestors did (many of them are only three or four generations in Palestine).

Jews, likewise, are bonded by nationhood (i.e., common history and destiny) more than they are bonded by religion.The appeal to Jewish nationhood is necessary when we consider Israel’s insistence on remaining a “Jewish state.” By “Jewish state” Israelis mean, of course, “national Jewish state,” not “religious Jewish state” — theocratic states (like Pakistan and Iran) are incompatible with modern standards of democracy and pluralism. Anti-Zionist racists use this anti-theocracy argument repeatedly to delegitimize Israel, and I have found our students unable to defend their position with conventional ideology that views Jewishness as a religion. Jewishness is more than just a religion. It is an intricate and intertwined mixture of ancestry, religion, history, country, culture, tradition, attitude, nationhood and ethnicity, and we need not apologize for not fitting neatly into the standard molds of textbook taxonomies — we did not choose our turbulent history.As a form of racism, anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. It targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity. To put it more bluntly, anti-Zionism condemns 5 million human beings, mostly refugees or children of refugees, to eternal statelessness, traumatized by historical images of persecution and genocide.

Anti-Zionism also attacks the pivotal component of our identity, the glue that bonds us together — our nationhood, our history. And while people of conscience reject anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a mark of academic sophistication and social acceptance in Europe and in some U.S. campuses.Moreover, anti-Zionism disguises itself in the cloak of political debate, exempt from sensitivities and rules of civility that govern interreligious discourse. Religion is ferociously protected in our society — political views are not.Just last month, a student organization on a UC campus hosted a meeting on “A World Without Israel.” Imagine the international furor that a meeting called, “A World Without Mecca,” would provoke. So, in the name of “open political debate,” administrators would not think twice about inviting MIT linguist Noam Chomsky to speak on campus, though his anti-Zionist utterances offend the fabric of my Jewish identity deeper than any of the ugly religious insults currently shocking the media. He should be labeled for what he is: a racist.Strategically, while accusations of anti-Semitism are worn out and have lost their punch, charging someone with racism makes people ask why anyone would deny people the right of self-determination in a sliver of land in the birthplace of their history. It shifts the frame of discourse from debating Israel’s policies to the root cause of the conflict — denying Israelis their basic rights as a nation.Charges of “racism” highlight the inherent asymmetry between the Zionist and anti-Zionist positions. The former grants both Israelis and Palestinians the right for statehood, the latter denies that right to one, and only one side. This asymmetry is the most effective weapon our students should use in campus debates, for it puts them back on the high moral grounds of “fair and balanced” and forces their opponents to defend an ideology of one-sidedness. For example, I have found it effective, when confronting an anti-Zionist speaker, to ask: “Are you willing to go on record and state that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a conflict between two legitimate national movements?” Western audiences adore even-handedness and abhor bias. The question above forces the racist to unveil and defend his uneven treatment of the two sides.America prides itself on academic freedom, and academic freedom entails freedom to teach hatred and racism — we graciously accept this fact of life. However, academic freedom also entails the freedom of students to expose racism, be it white-supremacy, women-inferiority, Islamophobia or Zionophobia wherever it is spotted. Not to censor, but to expose — racists stew in their own words.In summary, I believe the formula “Anti-Zionism = Racism” should give Jewish students the courage to both defend their identity and expose those who abuse it.

This opinion piece appeared in The New York Jewish Week.Source -

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=14207Notice -

This article is reprinted by permission of the author. He has also given us permission to allow others to copy this article for their own websites. Please do post a copy fo this article if you feel it is relevent to your site. A link back to Zionism and Israel on the Web (ZionismOnTheWeb.org) would be greatly appreciated.

A STRATEGY FOR BRITISH SUPPORTERS OF ISRAEL

2006-11-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

Denis Vandervelde
October 2005

A STRATEGY FOR BRITISH SUPPORTERS OF ISRAELI have observed the public (i.e. overt) strategies pursued by many of Israel’s keenest supporters for more than three years, participating whenever possible. Throughout that time, I have published an occasional Newsletter and distributed news and comment by others about Israel which I thought important, to a small circle of interested parties. I have tried to focus on what supporters of Israel can usefully do.Prompted by three of my correspondents, I now try to evaluate these and to draw up alternatives, because – alas – those we have been using have been mostly ineffective.Current strategies.1.Letter and email writing in response to ‘knocking copy’. Our opponents have become very skilful in getting outrageously anti-Israel comments into the press or on radio/T.V.. Consequently, most of our own efforts have been countering these, leading the naïve reader to assume that ‘there’s no smoke without fire’: and even that ‘the lady doth protest too much’. Of course we must object to lies and distortions. But how ?We really shoot ourselves in the foot by the concessions we make to supposed reader/viewer sensibilities.

We should bite our tongue before saying, “whatever you think of Sharon”, or “nobody suggests that Israel is perfect”. When did you read an Islamicist writing “whatever you feel about Sharia Law”, or “however self-seeking you think Yasser Arafat was…” ?When we write denying lies about Israel, it is only the Jewish Press which is likely to print it, and even that is far from a foregone conclusion. Consequently, our natural constituency, Anglo-Jewry, is riven by doubt. We have always known self-hating Jews : my own dear mother, a highly intelligent and bold woman, lived in dread that her non-Jewish neighbours would realise her allegiance. But the present malaise goes much deeper. At my synagogue, (Alyth Reform), speakers on Israel are invariably confronted by what our Christian friends call Doubting Thomases : members of the congregation who wish aloud that Israel could be more flexible, that we must respect the views of any Arab politician with a following, however vile his behaviour, that land doesn’t matter, that all ‘settlers’ are fanatics Denying lies simply ‘does not wash’ for such people.2. We are terrified of being thought to have dual loyalties : even Melanie, for whom I have unbounded respect, was flummoxed by this accusation in a television discussion a year ago. Yet no-one thinks any worse of a Protestant politician who describes himself as both British and Irish, while the idea of Charles Kennedy needing to be ashamed of his Scottish roots and accent in an English parliament is absurd. The thousands of Brits who have retired to warmer climes have no problem in declaring themselves French or Spanish, Portuguese or Maltese, while still remaining British. I longed for Melanie to say, “I am a CITIZEN of the free world, proud of my British nationality : YOU are a SUBJECT of little England.” In short, we need attack rather than defence.3. So far as I know, we have made no serious efforts to ‘know our enemy’. When details of Saddam Hussein’s grants of oil rights to sundry supporters were leaked a couple of years ago, no serious attempts seem to have been made in this country (or the U.S.A. so far as I am aware), to ascertain the truth. Instead, hints were published without proper investigation, playing into the hands of such notoriously litigious figures as the loathsome George Galloway M.P., who actually turned the fact that he had not cashed his allocation, into ‘proof’ of his superior morality !Surely the Jewish community does not lack investigative journalists or criminal lawyers who could have exposed such instances, if they were indeed true ? There are many other politicians and opinion-formers whose finances or sources of income might not stand up to scrutiny – but where are the scrutineers ?I am not talking only of improper gifts and bribery. We now have evidence, soundly-based so far as I know, of legitimate Arab, (especially Saudi) investment in our media. Is it too much to hope that someone, better qualified than I, is preparing a full report ?4. Because of fear of being thought disloyal to the U.K., (point 2. above), we hesitate to criticise words and actions which most Britons (including Jews) would rush to the media with, if they related to Israel. Like good ‘subjects’, we never wondered aloud why so little fuss is made of the rape of dozens of tribeswomen in Kenya by British soldiers over a period of more than a decade : of the fact that our Government concentrates attention exclusively on I.R.A. lawlessness in Ulster when the facts suggest that Protestant violence has been far more bloody : that the Northern Bank robbery in Ireland has unequivocally been attributed to Republicans, though there is not a shred of evidence to support what must have been a largely fruitless exercise, (more than 80% of the notes were unusable) - unless it was intended to discredit the Republican movement.

There are times when speaking out against wrongs committed by one’s own country is meritorious. It is extraordinary that the only country where it happens all the time is Israel, many of whose citizens are constantly alert to every misdemeanour .Surely they are right in principle, if sometimes wrong in practice. But should we Britons not be equally fastidious ? The recent Daily Mail exposure of ‘British perfidy in Palestine’ in 1947-48 is an excellent example. We note it, tut-tut, and say nothing. It seems that we are still nervous about denouncing the scandalous behaviour of the U.K. government, when confronted by the emergence of a Jewish state, 57 years ago.If it is true that, (as a French document published in December 1948 alleges), “the British sent thousands of Nazi p.o.w.s, including top war criminals, to assist the Arab attack”{on Israel}, why has no M.P. raised this in Parliament, calling on the present Government to make a full apology for such unforgiveable conduct ? Even the most conservative of Englishmen are a little queasy nowadays about declaring “my country, right or wrong”. And it seems to me that Israel has less to be ashamed of than Britain. Some proposed alternative approaches.These fall into five broad categories.a). In pursuing present methods, be far less inhibited or apologetic. Do not hesitate to point out that more often than not, Israel gets right what other countries get wrong. I am still hoping to see an article in the serious press or on T.V. which points out the amazing differences between insurgency in Iraq and in Palestine/ Israel. Three years ago, deaths caused by terrorism were running at an average of 50 a month in each sphere. Since then, Iraq has seen deaths well in excess of 500 a month : Israel/ Palestine, fewer than a dozen, and mostly of self-proclaimed members of terrorist movements. In Iraq, the warring Shia and Sunni are agreed on only one thing, that killing infidels is good : in Israel, hardly any terrorist strikes have been perpetrated by the more-than-a million Arab citizens of Israel. If these FACTS are made known whenever a supporter of Israel gets in front of a microphone, public doubts about the wisdom or validity of Israeli policy would begin to fade.b) Do not hesitate to attack even ‘moderate’ Moslem regimes for their corruption, their espousal or tolerance of violence, or their plain stupidity. Why has so little publicity been given to the Saudi attempt to support extremism amongst Moslems outside the Kingdom, even funding the late unlamented.

Arafat, alongside Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbollah, while battling hysterically with identically-motivated terrorists within their own Kingdom ? Why not expose the duplicity of the rulers of Egypt and Pakistan ? We need not worry about incurring their hostility : that remains ‘a given’. What we need to do is, firstly to enlighten Great Britain, then Europe and finally an increasingly bewildered U.S.A. of the worthlessness of the Moslem regimes they are courting.c) Make clear the hopelessly inadequate response of Abu Mazen’s P.A. to the new opportunities since disengagement from Gaza. Their response has been pathetic and squalid. Their failure to secure the Gaza hothouses purchased for the Palestinians by generous (mostly Jewish) philanthropists is but the latest example. Some other, more serious examples have been unchanged since the first Intifada, or even since 1948.For instance, we should not be inhibited from making public the appalling ‘education’ offered to children by the P.A. and UNWRA: not just that Israel is an enemy occupying ‘their’ land, but that Jews have no history in the region, that all infidels who will not bow before Allah deserve death, that the highest purpose for a Palestinian child is to be a Shahid – one who sacrifices his or her own life to kill as many infidels as possible. This seems to me the most terrible of the policies of the P.A., endorsed by Abu Mazen.But not the only one. You will have read the excellent Email sent by Sanda Abramovici-Lam, “It’s the Palestine Authority, Stupid”. I see no need to repeat the detail here.d). Ensure that this wholly inadequate and corrupt regime is not funded grossly and indiscriminately by the E.U., and western countries in general. The figures are obscene : a basic $3 billion a year is proposed, with many add-ons, for an embryo-State of three million people. Given an almost total absence of governance, it is inevitable that what is not pocketed by corrupt officials – Arafat lives ! – will be used to purchase weaponry. And I shudder to think what weapons money of this order could buy. We must ensure that the P.A. is held to strict account, which means WE must hold OUR laissez-faire politicians to account.e).

I have left till last the proposed amendments to English law, to prevent the glorification of terrorism and to extend the time suspects can be held without trial. Yes, these are important and relevant, but I do not think we need spend too much of our precious resources on them. I find the notion of extended detention on mere suspicion distasteful, but knowing that in the cases of suspected terrorists there are invariably minor offences on which the suspect CAN be charged, I see no reason why these should not be used to hold the miscreants, while investigation of the major suspicions proceeds.As for ‘glorification’, I think the legal profession can be left to sort out whether this is meaningful. There are laws enough already for almost all that the government needs to do. Firstly, refusal of entry to ALL who are on record as having espoused violence, racial or religious hatred or endorsement of criminal acts. There is no obligation for any government to admit any visitor it does not want on its territory. The same rules should apply to would-be immigrants with suspect histories. If they are not admitted, then the alleged problems of ‘sending them back to where they might be tortured or killed’ simply does not arise.Given the widespread understanding in all Western countries that, whatever the reasons, Moslems have an unenviable and unparallelled recent history of communal violence, I see no reason why ALL foreign applicants for asylum or student places in British higher education, or work permits, should not be vetted.

They would be asked details of family background and religious affiliation ; and those with families in Moslem countries or professing Islam could fairly be asked whether they knew their home country’s attitude to (say) Shahids, Sharia law and the State of Israel. Those from a self-defined suspect background could be asked to make a public disavowal of such views personally, (with a sworn statement in writing in both English and their own language). They could then be admitted, not as citizens, but as approved residents, obliged to report to the British authorities on a regular basis. My wife’s Jewish grandmother, having married a Jewish Romanian, (automatically an Enemy Alien), was obliged to report to the police annually until well into the 1950s. In the case of citizens of Islamicist governments, this would seem no more than common sense.We are left with the British-born terrorist suspects, (still a minority of the instances under consideration). Here there is a case for pragmatism, which probably needs no new legislation. Our police are already supposed to monitor and video attendances at meetings where sedition, race hatred or incitement to violence is being expressed. (In view of police confirmation that they had no information on any of the bombers who attacked London in July, it seems that they may have neglected to do so.) At present, any such reports and videos gather dust unless there is an outrage, when they will be scanned for evidence of participation.

Surely, once it has been decided that such-&-such a meeting WAS unacceptable, all those attending who can be identified – even harmless rubber-neckers - could be sent a standard letter telling them that their personal attendance at (wherever) has been reported, and asking whether they were aware of whatever was being advocated there.. They would be asked to contact XXX by letter or email if they wish to refute the report of their attendance, or explain why they remained.Those who had been misidentified and others who were indeed almost certainly mere observers could be sent apologies. All others, including those who did not respond, should be stored on a nationwide record of ‘sympathisers’ with suspect persons or organizations, to be told periodically they are under surveillance. Only the most brazen would still think it worthwhile attempting an outrage.

SUMMARY

Those who have stayed the course with me this far may appreciate a SynopsisCurrent strategy is well-meaning but largely ineffective. Specifically,1. Slurs against Israel must be answered, but recognize that this is unlikely to win over even Jewish doubters – and beware of making self-accusatory concessions.2. Be bold. We can be good Zionists AND good Britons.3. Attack the corrupt supporters of Moslem regimes, and question the Moslem infiltration of British (and other Western) media with facts..4. Point out that Israel has at least as honorable standing in international morality as the U.K. (or the U.S.A.), and a much better one than her criticsAs the NatWest Bank advertisements say, “there is another way”. Some suggested alternatives includea. Compare Israel’s war on terror with that of the Allies in Iraq (or Afghanistan).b. Demonstrate flaws in the practices and policies of even the ‘moderate’ Arab regimes.c. Make clear how little Abu Mazen has achieved or even attempted in his fiefdom.d. Demand proper accountability for the Western cash being thrown at the Palestinians.e. Argue for the sensible enforcement of existing or dormant British laws to control subversive Islamicist elements.

Denis Vandervelde

Responding to Bias: Fight or Flight?

2006-11-16T15:01:00.000-08:00

Responding to Bias: Fight or Flight?

by Andrea Levin

Denigration and defamation are likely to nullify any positive images of Jewish generosity, creativity and good works if the epithets and misinformation are left unchallenged. The stunning power of headlines, photographs, daily newspaper reports and television footage to skew public sentiment has deeply shaken those concerned about Israel's fate. In all too many media outlets, jaw-dropping disregard of existential threats and lack of awareness of Israel's restraint in the face of terrorist bloodletting have prompted near-panicked efforts in some quarters to win public understanding.The great debate underway is how best to counter media shortcomings and reach citizens of the world and government policymakers with a full, accurate picture of the Jewish state. Numerous efforts seek to present the good face of Israel to audiences -- the normal face beyond the conflict.

Look, say proponents of this approach, at how much Israel gives to mankind: medical advances, agricultural invention, high-tech brilliance. Look at the value added to world culture and comfort by the resourceful Israelis. All that has to be done, according to this thinking, is to change the paradigm; to separate Israel from its tainted association with the endless conflict involving the Arabs by injecting stories about Israeli innovation and good works into the news stream.Such efforts may, indeed, engender positive feelings in some news consumers. Likewise, publicizing (as other endeavors have) the fact that Israel's Arab citizens, including Arab women, participate in its democracy can add in a constructive way to appreciation of the country's commitment to pluralism and tolerance. But there are profound strategic flaws in any efforts to advance public understanding of Israel's circumstances that do not tackle and defeat false and damaging information about the Jewish state. The notion that telling the world how clever and beneficent Israel is will garner public affection founders on the grim evidence of Jewish history. The Jews of Germany won 37% of the Nobel prizes for science and literature awarded to German citizens between 1905 and 1936, even though they were only 1% of the population. Needless to say, their accomplishments won few hearts or minds.In late 19th and early 20th century Vienna, a time and place renowned for dazzling achievement in music, Jews were central. Composers Gustave Mahler and Arnold Schonberg were Jewish, as were many of Vienna's other composers, librettists, musicians, performers, patrons and audiences in a population where Jews were less than 10% of the population. But Austrians welcomed the Nazis, and soon constituted 40% of those engaged in Hitler's exterminations. The lesson then and today is that denigration and defamation are likely to nullify any positive images of Jewish generosity, creativity and good works if the epithets and misinformation are left unchallenged.

When Chris Hedges, for instance, wrote in Harper's in the fall of 2001 that Israeli soldiers in Gaza "entice [Palestinian] children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport," the incendiary, baseless charge became a feature of anti-Israel comment. National Public Radio's Fresh Air promptly enlisted Hedges for an interview in which he spread the smear across the air waves. Consider: would those who read or heard Hedges recite his false charges of child murder be persuaded to like the Jewish state on the basis of learning that it leads in nanotechnology? When basic facts such as the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 242 are misreported to claim that Israel is required to cede the entire West Bank and Gaza, and is therefore violating core principles for settling the conflict, what are news consumers to think but that Israel is obstructing peace? When the terms of the so-called "road map" are continually misrepresented to cast Israel as a violator and the Palestinians as the aggrieved, what is the cumulative effect on readers?When Hamas and Islamic Jihad are depicted as seeking an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza -- reasonable goals in the minds of many -- rather than working to extinguish Israel, Israeli measures in self-defense appear excessive. All these are cases in which serious errors and distortions must be and have been extensively challenged. The end result has been to correct errors and halt their repetition in key media; or, where no correction has been forthcoming, to widely expose and debunk the misinformation. Yes, there are lessons to be learned from the world of public relations, but they come from such instructive examples as the "war room" of former president Bill Clinton's election campaign. There, media coverage was monitored intensively, and every news account deemed incorrect, distorted or incomplete was swiftly challenged. The strategy worked so successfully that it was later applied to promoting president Clinton's policy initiatives.No less an effort is necessary in defending the facts about Israel. Just as all that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing, so too distortions and lies about Israel triumph when they go unchallenged. Those who argue that there is an easier way, a shortcut to making Israel's case, are simply ducking the essential task.This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem PostAuthor Biography:Andrea Levin is Executive Director of CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.