"Apartheid",- the new label for Israel by the UN Secretary General.
The interesting book ( GLOBALISING HATRED. The new anti-Semitism. Denis MacShane)reviewed by Christopher Hitchens on TimesOnLine about "the New Anti-Semitism" elicited several comments from readers. Hitchens (see following post) is virtually saying that “the new anti-Semites” cannot bear the success of the Jews, whether in the USA, the world or in Israel (their "shitty little country”?)
It is amazing how often the label "apartheid Israel" is now used, even by those purporting not to be anti-Semites. No wonder,-after all, the President of the UN General Assembly accused Israel of Apartheid and called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel on the UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 24/11/08.
Really? What was the UN Partition Plan of 29/11/1945 meant to be, except the separation of the Moslem and Jewish populations in Palestine? Now it is being called “apartheid”?
What do these people think happened to disintegrating countries such as Yugoslavia in the ‘90s, or India-Pakistan-Bangladesh in '48? What have been the conflicts among the Northern Irish,- what will be happening to the feuding Iraqis, Afghanis, or to the many African warring-tribes and countries, etc.,? Why are they not called apartheid situations?
In all cases, religion is playing its part because it is not simply a matter of private conscience, but of people’s national identity as well. It is Ok for the Jews as far as these accusers are concerned, to be submerged and overwhelmed by their enemies, while every other group is ignored by the UN and Mr. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a former official of the World Council of Churches. ) because for them it's not about apartheid,- just religious nationalism?
Well, we Jews call it Zionism.
(MM)
Ref."BALKAN IDOLS: RELIGION AND NATIONALISM IN BALKAN STATES." (Viekoslav Perika)part of series on "Religion and Global Politics" available from AMAZON ONLINE.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
EYE ON THE UN
Ed. ANNE BAYEFSKY
UN General Assembly President Accuses Israel of Apartheid and calls for a boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel
NEW YORK - The President of the UN General Assembly has launched an unprecedented attack on a UN member state from the Assembly podium. Going beyond even existing UN resolutions, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua accused Israel of apartheid and called for "a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions" against it. Reminiscent of a classic antisemitic slur, Brockmann (himself a Roman Catholic priest and one-time official of the World Council of Churches) also claimed our Palestinian "brothers and sisters are being crucified" by Israel.
His remarks were made on November 24, 2008 during the UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This annual event marks the adoption of the General Assembly's partition resolution which called for the creation of a Jewish and an Arab state on November 29, 1947.
"Brockmann's assault is a gross abuse of the position of Assembly President," commented Anne Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN. "He knows full well that his outrageous personal views will be translated into six languages and webcast around the world." Brockmann assumed the Presidency in September 2008, having been nominated by the Latin American and Caribbean regional group.
Brockmann made the apartheid allegation twice in one day, once in the morning at the annual meeting of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and again in the General Assembly in the afternoon. In his words:
"I spoke this morning about apartheid and how Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories appear so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era, a continent away. I believe it is very important that we in the United Nations use this term. We must not be afraid to call something what it is. It is the United Nations, after all, that passed the International Convention against the Crime of Apartheid, making clear to all the world that such practices of official discrimination must be outlawed wherever they occur."
"Brockmann's call," said Bayefsky, "was in effect, a call for the political destruction of Israel by means of the same strategy adopted against apartheid South Africa." Brockmann said:
"More than twenty years ago we in the United Nations took the lead from civil society when we agreed that sanctions were required to provide a non-violent means of pressuring South Africa…Today, perhaps we in the United Nations should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar non-violent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel…"
The adoption of the 1947 partition resolution, accepted by Jews and rejected by Arabs, is now bemoaned by the UN. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan described Palestinian Solidarity Day as "a day of mourning and a day of grief." This year, as in years past, the UN used the occasion to fly only two flags, that of "Palestine" and that of the United Nations. Though the resolution was ostensibly the
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM? Book review.
From The Times Literary Supplement
November 19, 2008
The new anti-Semitism?
How ancient prejudice and outright hostility have re-emerged since the Nuremberg Trials
Christopher Hitchens
I was once introduced, in the Cosmos Club in Washington, to Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, a group frequently accused of being insufficiently philo-Semitic. Mr Carto unburdened himself of quite a long burst about the power of finance capital, whereupon our host, to lighten the atmosphere, said, “Come on Willis, you’re sounding like Ezra Pound”. “Ezra Pound!” exclaimed Mr Carto. “Why, I love that man’s work. Except for all that goddam poetry!” I thought then that if one ever needed a working definition of an anti-Semite, it might perhaps be an individual who esteemed everything about Ezra Pound except his Cantos.
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has a different definition. For him, anti-Semitism is revealed not when someone criticizes the state of Israel, but when someone denies the right of Israel to exist. This, however, will not do, since many Orthodox Jews and Marxist Jews were opposed ab initio to the founding of a Jewish state, and indeed, for the first few years of the Zionist movement’s existence, almost all its enemies were Jewish. (By the same token, the idea of a Levantine state into which European Jewry could be decanted often found favour with those who were not all fond of Jewry per se.)
The overt expression of anti-Semitic views has been extremely muted since the Nuremberg Trials, and the somewhat later decision of the Roman Catholic Church to withdraw its historic charge of “deicide” against the Jewish people as a whole. But the Labour MP Denis MacShane, who chaired an all-party commission of inquiry into the subject, argues that this most ancient and fierce of hatreds is undergoing a worldwide recrudescence. Rather dauntingly, he begins his book Globalising Hatred with a taxonomy of six distinct kinds of anti-Semitism, as compiled by the no less dauntingly named Professor Armin Pfahl-Traughber. The disease, it seems, can present as religious, social, political, racist, secondary or anti-Zionist, and of course these symptoms are not mutually exclusive and may often be found in clusters.
I would propose to begin more economically, by separating anti-Semitism from other forms of prejudice. One might certainly begin by distinguishing it from any too obvious stratification: MacShane likes to put the word “upper-class” in front of his main noun, but it was the great German socialist August Bebel who characterized anti-Jewish ranting as “the socialism of fools” and identified it as a perverted form of class resentment. This may have been slightly reductionist, as if to place a creepy and occult belief on all fours with more ordinary styles of xenophobia. British people who dislike Pakistanis, say, or Sinhalese who dislike Tamils, or Ulstermen who look down on Gaels, will tend to express themselves in fairly vulgar terms. The disliked ones are dirty and lazy, and have over-large families and a generally low cultural level. Anti-Semitism, by contrast, has something almost vicariously admiring about it. The targeted and hated tribe is believed to have awesome secret power and a positive genius for finance, as well as an ability to infiltrate and annex large swathes of professional life, such as the law and medicine. Not only this, but the Jew is seen as so protean as to have been – in the course of the past century alone – the covert engineer of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Examples of this combination of envy with paranoia are not difficult to locate: a recent New York Times report from Egypt described a settled conviction at all levels of society that, while nineteen Arabs could not have brought down the World Trade Center, the Israeli Mossad had the means, the method, the motive and the opportunity to do so. (One might pause to note the element of Arab self-hatred that is latent in this view.) When asked for proof, the believers point to the fact, which “everybody knows”, that all the Jews employed in the Twin Towers left work shortly before the planes arrived. I have myself heard this alleged at elite dinner parties in Islamabad, and MacShane has heard it from educated Muslims in his own constituency of Rotherham.
Perhaps over-anxious not to single out these as if they were the only offenders, MacShane is careful to spread his net wide. Neo-fascists in Argentina and Germany, the British National Party, the anti-Israeli American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the demagogues of Radio Maria in Poland, the sneers of Alan Clark in his Diaries, the gibes of David Irving, and a few of the anti-Zionist positions taken by Noam Chomsky and Perry Anderson are all included in the trawl. Surely this is too indiscriminate, especially in the case of the last two named? More important, does it not run the risk of treating Islamist anti-Semitism as if it were merely one form of the malady among many?
In point of fact, there is only one area of the world where pure, old-fashioned undiluted Jew-hatred is preached from the pulpit, broadcast on the official airwaves, given high-level state sanction and taught in the schools. All across the Muslim Middle East and well into Muslim Asia, the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion are freely available, often disseminated by ruling circles as well as by insurgent and now quasi-government movements such as Hamas and Hizbollah. (Incidentally, it is wrong to call this toxic document a “forgery”, since a forgery is a copy of something authentic. The Protocols are a mere fabrication, put together by Eastern Orthodox Christian fanatics in the pay of the tsarist secret police. Despite their suggestive name, they contain no mention of Israel or Zionism, as MacShane appears to think.)
When he does turn his attention to this region, however, MacShane’s treatment of the lucubrations of Tariq Ramadan and Sayyid Qtub is fairly comprehensive. Not everybody will agree with his generally lenient approach to the state of Israel, but he does argue convincingly, with some telling quotations, that resentment at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank simply cannot explain some of the more lurid formulations of Arab and Muslim propaganda. The fairly temperate Ghada Karmi, for example, speaks of Israel “encircling the Arab world” (my italics), while regional self-pity – a natural sibling of self-hatred by the way, as is self-righteousness – often blames all the ills of a backward and benighted region on arcane Jewish manipulations. The relatively recent history of Europe shows how fantastically dangerous such delusions can be, and MacShane is right to stress the comparison as well as the implications.
When all this is taken into account, though, I am not sure that he is correct in so often using the prefix “neo” to describe the resurgent phenomenon. The pseudo-intellectual and superstitious tropes of Judaeophobia are very much the same as they ever were. They involve the hatred of the countryside for the urban (and the urbane), the hatred of the provinces for the capital (and for capital), the disdain of the settled establishment for the subversive, and the visceral loathing of the tradition-minded “organic” community for the rootless and the cosmopolitan. In this, one can understand both the nastier moments that one may encounter in the study of T. S. Eliot and also the mentality of those Argentine fascists who tortured the Jewish editor and journalist, Jacobo Timerman. As Timerman recalled the obsessions of the death-squad Right in his imperishable book Prisoner without a Name: Cell without a number, his interrogators believed that “Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space”. I went to look this up after I had read MacShane citing Argentine military men who to this day believe that there is a Jewish conspiracy to annex and Zionize the remoter areas of Patagonia, the better, presumably, to extend Protocol power to the Jew-free wastes of Antarctica.
“You catch it on the edge of a remark”, as Harold Isaacs phrases it in Chariots of Fire. I have felt myself “catching” it quite a few times of late, as when chaps from the BBC insisted despite repeated correction on saying Paul “Vulfovitz” with a special emphasis, instead of pronouncing the name correctly the first time round, as the BBC used to train people to do. Writing about the same person, the American isolationist and Charles Lindbergh admirer Patrick J. Buchanan referred to him as playing Fagin to George Bush’s Oliver Twist which, an arresting image as it certainly is, makes rather the same point in an only somewhat different way. And meanwhile I would never expect to read the sort of criticism of Pakistan that I read every day about Israel. Yet of these two states, born at almost the same moment at the close of Britain’s imperium, can it really be said that Israel is so much the greater offender in terms of democratic rights for citizens, invasions of neighbours like Afghanistan, oppressions of non-Punjabi minority inhabitants, massacres of co-religionists as in Bangladesh, and illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons? One can just about picture a worldwide campaign to redress the injustices of Pakistan, in which unions of British teachers and journalists would join with their own courageous boycotts, but I confess to a slight difficulty in picturing the same level of enthusiasm and commitment. There is some sense in which any challenge to what can be viewed as specifically Jewish power is more exciting and possibly more “transgressive”, and we might be more honest if we admitted as much. Here’s a thought experiment: you get an email telling you that all the Anglo-Saxons left the World Trade Center just an hour before the planes hit (not having merely stayed away with all the benefit of their advance warning, but having actually gone to all the trouble of turning up at 8 a.m. and trustingly assuming that the terror-strike would take place just on schedule and thus give them time to check their Rolexes for an orderly and early departure). See what I mean? It’s just not such a thrilling hypothesis. When directed at the Jews, however, it at least adds insult to injury, and the true bigot knows that every little helps.
“The bitch that bore him is on heat again”, as Brecht has his closing speaker say about Hitler at the curtain of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The next nightmare will not take the same shape or form, but it will be sure to emit the same plain and unmistakable warnings. MacShane has done a service by giving us a handbook of the signs.
Denis MacShane
GLOBALISING HATRED
The new antisemitism 188pp. Orion. £12.99.
978 0 297 84473 0
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book, God Is Not Great: The case against religion, appeared earlier this year.
Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
November 19, 2008
The new anti-Semitism?
How ancient prejudice and outright hostility have re-emerged since the Nuremberg Trials
Christopher Hitchens
I was once introduced, in the Cosmos Club in Washington, to Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, a group frequently accused of being insufficiently philo-Semitic. Mr Carto unburdened himself of quite a long burst about the power of finance capital, whereupon our host, to lighten the atmosphere, said, “Come on Willis, you’re sounding like Ezra Pound”. “Ezra Pound!” exclaimed Mr Carto. “Why, I love that man’s work. Except for all that goddam poetry!” I thought then that if one ever needed a working definition of an anti-Semite, it might perhaps be an individual who esteemed everything about Ezra Pound except his Cantos.
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has a different definition. For him, anti-Semitism is revealed not when someone criticizes the state of Israel, but when someone denies the right of Israel to exist. This, however, will not do, since many Orthodox Jews and Marxist Jews were opposed ab initio to the founding of a Jewish state, and indeed, for the first few years of the Zionist movement’s existence, almost all its enemies were Jewish. (By the same token, the idea of a Levantine state into which European Jewry could be decanted often found favour with those who were not all fond of Jewry per se.)
The overt expression of anti-Semitic views has been extremely muted since the Nuremberg Trials, and the somewhat later decision of the Roman Catholic Church to withdraw its historic charge of “deicide” against the Jewish people as a whole. But the Labour MP Denis MacShane, who chaired an all-party commission of inquiry into the subject, argues that this most ancient and fierce of hatreds is undergoing a worldwide recrudescence. Rather dauntingly, he begins his book Globalising Hatred with a taxonomy of six distinct kinds of anti-Semitism, as compiled by the no less dauntingly named Professor Armin Pfahl-Traughber. The disease, it seems, can present as religious, social, political, racist, secondary or anti-Zionist, and of course these symptoms are not mutually exclusive and may often be found in clusters.
I would propose to begin more economically, by separating anti-Semitism from other forms of prejudice. One might certainly begin by distinguishing it from any too obvious stratification: MacShane likes to put the word “upper-class” in front of his main noun, but it was the great German socialist August Bebel who characterized anti-Jewish ranting as “the socialism of fools” and identified it as a perverted form of class resentment. This may have been slightly reductionist, as if to place a creepy and occult belief on all fours with more ordinary styles of xenophobia. British people who dislike Pakistanis, say, or Sinhalese who dislike Tamils, or Ulstermen who look down on Gaels, will tend to express themselves in fairly vulgar terms. The disliked ones are dirty and lazy, and have over-large families and a generally low cultural level. Anti-Semitism, by contrast, has something almost vicariously admiring about it. The targeted and hated tribe is believed to have awesome secret power and a positive genius for finance, as well as an ability to infiltrate and annex large swathes of professional life, such as the law and medicine. Not only this, but the Jew is seen as so protean as to have been – in the course of the past century alone – the covert engineer of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Examples of this combination of envy with paranoia are not difficult to locate: a recent New York Times report from Egypt described a settled conviction at all levels of society that, while nineteen Arabs could not have brought down the World Trade Center, the Israeli Mossad had the means, the method, the motive and the opportunity to do so. (One might pause to note the element of Arab self-hatred that is latent in this view.) When asked for proof, the believers point to the fact, which “everybody knows”, that all the Jews employed in the Twin Towers left work shortly before the planes arrived. I have myself heard this alleged at elite dinner parties in Islamabad, and MacShane has heard it from educated Muslims in his own constituency of Rotherham.
Perhaps over-anxious not to single out these as if they were the only offenders, MacShane is careful to spread his net wide. Neo-fascists in Argentina and Germany, the British National Party, the anti-Israeli American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the demagogues of Radio Maria in Poland, the sneers of Alan Clark in his Diaries, the gibes of David Irving, and a few of the anti-Zionist positions taken by Noam Chomsky and Perry Anderson are all included in the trawl. Surely this is too indiscriminate, especially in the case of the last two named? More important, does it not run the risk of treating Islamist anti-Semitism as if it were merely one form of the malady among many?
In point of fact, there is only one area of the world where pure, old-fashioned undiluted Jew-hatred is preached from the pulpit, broadcast on the official airwaves, given high-level state sanction and taught in the schools. All across the Muslim Middle East and well into Muslim Asia, the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion are freely available, often disseminated by ruling circles as well as by insurgent and now quasi-government movements such as Hamas and Hizbollah. (Incidentally, it is wrong to call this toxic document a “forgery”, since a forgery is a copy of something authentic. The Protocols are a mere fabrication, put together by Eastern Orthodox Christian fanatics in the pay of the tsarist secret police. Despite their suggestive name, they contain no mention of Israel or Zionism, as MacShane appears to think.)
When he does turn his attention to this region, however, MacShane’s treatment of the lucubrations of Tariq Ramadan and Sayyid Qtub is fairly comprehensive. Not everybody will agree with his generally lenient approach to the state of Israel, but he does argue convincingly, with some telling quotations, that resentment at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank simply cannot explain some of the more lurid formulations of Arab and Muslim propaganda. The fairly temperate Ghada Karmi, for example, speaks of Israel “encircling the Arab world” (my italics), while regional self-pity – a natural sibling of self-hatred by the way, as is self-righteousness – often blames all the ills of a backward and benighted region on arcane Jewish manipulations. The relatively recent history of Europe shows how fantastically dangerous such delusions can be, and MacShane is right to stress the comparison as well as the implications.
When all this is taken into account, though, I am not sure that he is correct in so often using the prefix “neo” to describe the resurgent phenomenon. The pseudo-intellectual and superstitious tropes of Judaeophobia are very much the same as they ever were. They involve the hatred of the countryside for the urban (and the urbane), the hatred of the provinces for the capital (and for capital), the disdain of the settled establishment for the subversive, and the visceral loathing of the tradition-minded “organic” community for the rootless and the cosmopolitan. In this, one can understand both the nastier moments that one may encounter in the study of T. S. Eliot and also the mentality of those Argentine fascists who tortured the Jewish editor and journalist, Jacobo Timerman. As Timerman recalled the obsessions of the death-squad Right in his imperishable book Prisoner without a Name: Cell without a number, his interrogators believed that “Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space”. I went to look this up after I had read MacShane citing Argentine military men who to this day believe that there is a Jewish conspiracy to annex and Zionize the remoter areas of Patagonia, the better, presumably, to extend Protocol power to the Jew-free wastes of Antarctica.
“You catch it on the edge of a remark”, as Harold Isaacs phrases it in Chariots of Fire. I have felt myself “catching” it quite a few times of late, as when chaps from the BBC insisted despite repeated correction on saying Paul “Vulfovitz” with a special emphasis, instead of pronouncing the name correctly the first time round, as the BBC used to train people to do. Writing about the same person, the American isolationist and Charles Lindbergh admirer Patrick J. Buchanan referred to him as playing Fagin to George Bush’s Oliver Twist which, an arresting image as it certainly is, makes rather the same point in an only somewhat different way. And meanwhile I would never expect to read the sort of criticism of Pakistan that I read every day about Israel. Yet of these two states, born at almost the same moment at the close of Britain’s imperium, can it really be said that Israel is so much the greater offender in terms of democratic rights for citizens, invasions of neighbours like Afghanistan, oppressions of non-Punjabi minority inhabitants, massacres of co-religionists as in Bangladesh, and illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons? One can just about picture a worldwide campaign to redress the injustices of Pakistan, in which unions of British teachers and journalists would join with their own courageous boycotts, but I confess to a slight difficulty in picturing the same level of enthusiasm and commitment. There is some sense in which any challenge to what can be viewed as specifically Jewish power is more exciting and possibly more “transgressive”, and we might be more honest if we admitted as much. Here’s a thought experiment: you get an email telling you that all the Anglo-Saxons left the World Trade Center just an hour before the planes hit (not having merely stayed away with all the benefit of their advance warning, but having actually gone to all the trouble of turning up at 8 a.m. and trustingly assuming that the terror-strike would take place just on schedule and thus give them time to check their Rolexes for an orderly and early departure). See what I mean? It’s just not such a thrilling hypothesis. When directed at the Jews, however, it at least adds insult to injury, and the true bigot knows that every little helps.
“The bitch that bore him is on heat again”, as Brecht has his closing speaker say about Hitler at the curtain of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The next nightmare will not take the same shape or form, but it will be sure to emit the same plain and unmistakable warnings. MacShane has done a service by giving us a handbook of the signs.
Denis MacShane
GLOBALISING HATRED
The new antisemitism 188pp. Orion. £12.99.
978 0 297 84473 0
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book, God Is Not Great: The case against religion, appeared earlier this year.
Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Friday, November 14, 2008
RACISM 60 YEARS AFTER DEFEAT OF NAZISM
NAZI HATE ROCK
On Wednesday, 12 Nov 2008 Australian TV ABC2 showed the above Documentary . Donal MacIntyre investigated the disturbing and secretive world of white power music and how the money made helps fund far right political organisations in many countries, including the British National Party in the UK, whose leader is even now trying to come to Australia to foster race-hatred!
Watching this kind of hate-fest as exposed in the documentary sent shivers down my spine, particularly after watching some of the current crop of excellent 2008 Jewish Film Festival movies about the Shoa.
Our community is so involved with the problems facing Israel that we sometimes forget that out there in the wide world is a growing menace of a resurrection of Nazism, via the use of rock and pop music which appeals to a new and young generation of racists.
Well we may say "never again",- those thugs seem to have other plans! May they never realize them, but we must never drop our guard and vigilance. On the other hand, too often we cry "racism" against everyone who protests when an ethnic minority group or individual claims exemptions from legal or even social obligations (such as dress,or pushing a pedestrian-traffic light on a Sabbath) which apply to all others. Democracy and tolerance does have its limits after all.
Some groups and individuals may be better off to live in theocracies instead of expecting constant privileges on the basis of religious or cultural diversity in our democracies. Objecting or denying sometimes such privileges seems to attract labels of "racism" even if it appears totally fair and acceptable to the majority. It would be better to leave the tags of "racism" to those groups like the above, i.e. racism meaning the "incitement to hatred", instead of it losing its meaning through overuse.
French and other European Jews are making 'alyah' in ever increasing numbers. Even if not permanently residing in Israel, they are investing heavily in apartments which are only used for holidays,- at present. 'Eurabia' they feel, is again no longer as safe as they thought it should be.
See letter and extract of Isi Leibler's review of a book about Scandinavian anti-Semisitism, below.
Yet Avraham Burg in his latest book argues that "the Holocaust is over. We must rise from the ashes."
[MM][
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
French Jews.
[A personal letter which has been widely distributed.]
"Will the world say nothing - again - as it did in Hitler's time? He writes, "I AM A JEW -- therefore I am forwarding this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do nothing." Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France: In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil - all recently. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words "Dirty Jew" were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
"According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming "Jews to the gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews." A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20's were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France The woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France . This was just in the past week.
"So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:
" First, care enough to stay informed. Don't ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight. I remind you of what Pastor Neimoller said in World War II: "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me".
The number one bestselling book in France is...."September 11: The Frightening Fraud," which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon.
Brenda H. Mitchell
Executive Assistant to the Rabbis
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nordic exposure
by Isi Leibler
November 9, 2008
http://www.leibler. com/article/ 370
Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The Nordic Countries, Israel and the Jews.
Edited by Manfred Gerstenfeld Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs/Simon Wiesenthal Center 256 pages; $29
When Scandinavia is mentioned, we instinctively conjure up images of decent people who are our friends. We associate them with the king of Denmark's refusal to implement the Nazi racial laws, the rescue of 7,000 Danish Jews to neutral Sweden and noble humanitarians like Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat in Hungary who emerged as the role model for Righteous Gentiles. Many of us also remember Per Ahlmark, the former Swedish deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party, who was a stalwart campaigner against anti-Semitism and probably the first non-Jewish statesman to publicly proclaim that hatred of Israel was being exploited as a surrogate for traditional anti-Semitism.
Yet regrettably, this beatific image of philo-Semitic Scandinavians is a far cry from reality. Despite the presence of only minuscule Jewish communities in the region, Scandinavian countries are today at the forefront of promoting the most vicious expressions of the new anti-Semitism and are at the vanguard of the global campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel. What makes their application of double standards and virulent bias grate even more is the sanctimonious manner in which they cloak their venom against the Jewish state and Jews in general.
(Extract only)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book review 2. "The Holocaust is over. We must rise from the Ashes."
"Avraham Burg: Israel's new prophet?
Avraham Burg was a pillar of the Israeli establishment but his new
book is causing a sensation. It argues that his country is an "abused
child" which has become a "violent parent". And his solutions are
radical, as he explains to Donald Macintyre
Saturday, 1 November 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/avraham-burg-israels-new-prophet-979732.html
On Wednesday, 12 Nov 2008 Australian TV ABC2 showed the above Documentary . Donal MacIntyre investigated the disturbing and secretive world of white power music and how the money made helps fund far right political organisations in many countries, including the British National Party in the UK, whose leader is even now trying to come to Australia to foster race-hatred!
Watching this kind of hate-fest as exposed in the documentary sent shivers down my spine, particularly after watching some of the current crop of excellent 2008 Jewish Film Festival movies about the Shoa.
Our community is so involved with the problems facing Israel that we sometimes forget that out there in the wide world is a growing menace of a resurrection of Nazism, via the use of rock and pop music which appeals to a new and young generation of racists.
Well we may say "never again",- those thugs seem to have other plans! May they never realize them, but we must never drop our guard and vigilance. On the other hand, too often we cry "racism" against everyone who protests when an ethnic minority group or individual claims exemptions from legal or even social obligations (such as dress,or pushing a pedestrian-traffic light on a Sabbath) which apply to all others. Democracy and tolerance does have its limits after all.
Some groups and individuals may be better off to live in theocracies instead of expecting constant privileges on the basis of religious or cultural diversity in our democracies. Objecting or denying sometimes such privileges seems to attract labels of "racism" even if it appears totally fair and acceptable to the majority. It would be better to leave the tags of "racism" to those groups like the above, i.e. racism meaning the "incitement to hatred", instead of it losing its meaning through overuse.
French and other European Jews are making 'alyah' in ever increasing numbers. Even if not permanently residing in Israel, they are investing heavily in apartments which are only used for holidays,- at present. 'Eurabia' they feel, is again no longer as safe as they thought it should be.
See letter and extract of Isi Leibler's review of a book about Scandinavian anti-Semisitism, below.
Yet Avraham Burg in his latest book argues that "the Holocaust is over. We must rise from the ashes."
[MM][
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
French Jews.
[A personal letter which has been widely distributed.]
"Will the world say nothing - again - as it did in Hitler's time? He writes, "I AM A JEW -- therefore I am forwarding this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do nothing." Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France: In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil - all recently. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words "Dirty Jew" were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
"According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming "Jews to the gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews." A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher's shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20's were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France The woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France . This was just in the past week.
"So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:
" First, care enough to stay informed. Don't ever let yourself become deluded into thinking that this is not your fight. I remind you of what Pastor Neimoller said in World War II: "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me".
The number one bestselling book in France is...."September 11: The Frightening Fraud," which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon.
Brenda H. Mitchell
Executive Assistant to the Rabbis
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nordic exposure
by Isi Leibler
November 9, 2008
http://www.leibler. com/article/ 370
Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The Nordic Countries, Israel and the Jews.
Edited by Manfred Gerstenfeld Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs/Simon Wiesenthal Center 256 pages; $29
When Scandinavia is mentioned, we instinctively conjure up images of decent people who are our friends. We associate them with the king of Denmark's refusal to implement the Nazi racial laws, the rescue of 7,000 Danish Jews to neutral Sweden and noble humanitarians like Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat in Hungary who emerged as the role model for Righteous Gentiles. Many of us also remember Per Ahlmark, the former Swedish deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party, who was a stalwart campaigner against anti-Semitism and probably the first non-Jewish statesman to publicly proclaim that hatred of Israel was being exploited as a surrogate for traditional anti-Semitism.
Yet regrettably, this beatific image of philo-Semitic Scandinavians is a far cry from reality. Despite the presence of only minuscule Jewish communities in the region, Scandinavian countries are today at the forefront of promoting the most vicious expressions of the new anti-Semitism and are at the vanguard of the global campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel. What makes their application of double standards and virulent bias grate even more is the sanctimonious manner in which they cloak their venom against the Jewish state and Jews in general.
(Extract only)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book review 2. "The Holocaust is over. We must rise from the Ashes."
"Avraham Burg: Israel's new prophet?
Avraham Burg was a pillar of the Israeli establishment but his new
book is causing a sensation. It argues that his country is an "abused
child" which has become a "violent parent". And his solutions are
radical, as he explains to Donald Macintyre
Saturday, 1 November 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/avraham-burg-israels-new-prophet-979732.html
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
WHAT’S IN A DRESS CODE ? Bare or burkha?
Baring it all or covering up,- is that the question for women of the world today?
I recently read a newspaper article by an Australian journalist who after traveling for a couple of weeks through Morocco where she wore loose clothing masking her body shape to conform with the local customs where women were totally covered up,- she then returned to Italy to find herself being taken aback by the open sexuality which is normal in that country. The contrast suddenly made her feel almost prudish and she wondered whether to return to wearing her usual figure-hugging jeans!
Questioning the Islamic way of covering up their women,- from just the hair, to almost totally as in Afghanistan,- whether it is a liberating experience or a form of enslavement for the women, the journalist was trying to justify those burkha-clad women who claimed that they prefer their dress code to the Western one. This is where we start to go from one extreme to the other. Head coverings,- whether with wigs or scarves or saris,- are common in many cultures. Observant orthodox Jewish women, moderate Moslem women, as well as many religious sects in many countries, will traditionally cover their hair in some fashion, while also dressing modestly to cover-up most of their figures. These women will often claim to make a “statement” through this form of dress,- i.e. they openly declare their faith or culture to the world at large. But if someone doesn't like this form of dress, they should be able to declare their dislike without being labelled "anti-Semitic" or just "racist".We all have freedom of choice in a democracy, including the likes and dislikes of other people's form of dress, particularly in public places of employment.
The rest of women’s attire should also reflect the traditions of the country in which they live, not the one from which they or their previous generations may have originated. For example, covering up of women in Sharia-Islamic countries seems to be not a matter of choice but of strict official control. Where there is no freedom of choice it is obviously a form of subservience for the women at the behest of their patriarchal and theocratic societies. The men must become totally lascivious as a result of not seeing any other female forms except their own families in their own homes’ - unless they travel to the West (or frequent brothels, which probably abound aplenty in those countries)! With polygamy allowed and practiced under Sharia law in many Islamic countries, not to mention child-brides and so called “honour killings” if any female even dares to question her fate, it is no wonder those men want to maintain their hegemony over their womenfolk.
One reads of frequent rapes in such countries which on top of it, are then blamed on the poor female victims because “she must have asked for it”! There is in addition, still the barbaric slave trade where young girls are sold by their poverty-stricken families in many third-world countries, while the trafficking of women and girls is a growing menace in most parts of the world. Most of these archaic trades in human lives are happening in countries where women are kept covered up from head to toe, in public.
DRESS FOR RESPECT.
Such covering-up of females in Western societies is totally uncalled-for and should be also unacceptable for those who immigrate from other cultures.. This does not mean that some amount of self-control should not be exercised even in our cultures in the democratic West, by choosing the appropriate form of dress to suit the climate, the environment in which one finds oneself and respect for the effect one’s attire has on others. Flaunting one’s bodily assets in public by the very young, is not a sign of freedom of expression in appearance but an attention-seeker, while a more mature approach requires a modicum of common sense. The former may attract perhaps some unwanted attention, while the latter should command respect
As they say “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”,- unless a woman wants to draw attention to herself. Then she must ask herself,- what is the kind of attention that she seeks.By avoiding the extremes, no one will question her,- but the wrong dress on the wrong person in the wrong place may have unpleasant consequences! Women, particularly the young don’t have to go the extreme of baring it all, nor covering up in burkhas in our Western democracies. Our men have to learn self-control and our women, independent self-respect.
MM
I recently read a newspaper article by an Australian journalist who after traveling for a couple of weeks through Morocco where she wore loose clothing masking her body shape to conform with the local customs where women were totally covered up,- she then returned to Italy to find herself being taken aback by the open sexuality which is normal in that country. The contrast suddenly made her feel almost prudish and she wondered whether to return to wearing her usual figure-hugging jeans!
Questioning the Islamic way of covering up their women,- from just the hair, to almost totally as in Afghanistan,- whether it is a liberating experience or a form of enslavement for the women, the journalist was trying to justify those burkha-clad women who claimed that they prefer their dress code to the Western one. This is where we start to go from one extreme to the other. Head coverings,- whether with wigs or scarves or saris,- are common in many cultures. Observant orthodox Jewish women, moderate Moslem women, as well as many religious sects in many countries, will traditionally cover their hair in some fashion, while also dressing modestly to cover-up most of their figures. These women will often claim to make a “statement” through this form of dress,- i.e. they openly declare their faith or culture to the world at large. But if someone doesn't like this form of dress, they should be able to declare their dislike without being labelled "anti-Semitic" or just "racist".We all have freedom of choice in a democracy, including the likes and dislikes of other people's form of dress, particularly in public places of employment.
The rest of women’s attire should also reflect the traditions of the country in which they live, not the one from which they or their previous generations may have originated. For example, covering up of women in Sharia-Islamic countries seems to be not a matter of choice but of strict official control. Where there is no freedom of choice it is obviously a form of subservience for the women at the behest of their patriarchal and theocratic societies. The men must become totally lascivious as a result of not seeing any other female forms except their own families in their own homes’ - unless they travel to the West (or frequent brothels, which probably abound aplenty in those countries)! With polygamy allowed and practiced under Sharia law in many Islamic countries, not to mention child-brides and so called “honour killings” if any female even dares to question her fate, it is no wonder those men want to maintain their hegemony over their womenfolk.
One reads of frequent rapes in such countries which on top of it, are then blamed on the poor female victims because “she must have asked for it”! There is in addition, still the barbaric slave trade where young girls are sold by their poverty-stricken families in many third-world countries, while the trafficking of women and girls is a growing menace in most parts of the world. Most of these archaic trades in human lives are happening in countries where women are kept covered up from head to toe, in public.
DRESS FOR RESPECT.
Such covering-up of females in Western societies is totally uncalled-for and should be also unacceptable for those who immigrate from other cultures.. This does not mean that some amount of self-control should not be exercised even in our cultures in the democratic West, by choosing the appropriate form of dress to suit the climate, the environment in which one finds oneself and respect for the effect one’s attire has on others. Flaunting one’s bodily assets in public by the very young, is not a sign of freedom of expression in appearance but an attention-seeker, while a more mature approach requires a modicum of common sense. The former may attract perhaps some unwanted attention, while the latter should command respect
As they say “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”,- unless a woman wants to draw attention to herself. Then she must ask herself,- what is the kind of attention that she seeks.By avoiding the extremes, no one will question her,- but the wrong dress on the wrong person in the wrong place may have unpleasant consequences! Women, particularly the young don’t have to go the extreme of baring it all, nor covering up in burkhas in our Western democracies. Our men have to learn self-control and our women, independent self-respect.
MM
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)