Anti-Semitism the real issue that dare not speak its name.
Greg Sheriden . (Foreign editor).
The Australian
25 September '11
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/anti-semitism-the-real-issue-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/story-e6frg6zo-1226144877560
A YEAR or two ago, I took a taxi from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was a brilliant sunny day and all around me the hills were green, as we passed a prosperous Arab village, a beautiful kibbutz, a bit of jangled traffic.
The taxi driver was English, an English Jew who had found a better life in Israel - better pay, less anti-Semitism, safer streets, an easy air commute to his daughter in England, but close to other relatives in Israel, and lots and lots of sunshine.
That day, a Roger Whittaker song was playing on the taxi radio. This Israel, I thought, there's something beautiful here.
Let me offer you a couple of other images.
On the BBC website, a British journalist, neither Jewish nor Israeli, recounts this experience in Cairo: "While walking in the street, someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over. Turning around,
I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face. I stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim to assault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
"Relieved that the assault was over, I was appalled by the apology offered by one of my assailants: 'Sorry,' he said contritely, 'we thought you were a Jew'."
Here's a third image, this time from outside the Middle East. An acquaintance of mine, an American woman, neither Israeli nor Jewish, nor in any way connected with the Middle East, was helping to run an outreach program in southern Thailand involving Muslim and Buddhist students.
At the end, one of the Muslim students said to her words along the lines of: thank you, that was very nice. Much better than I expected. And the final sentence: "I'd never met a Zionist before."
The key issue in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and in the wider Israeli-Arab dispute, is the issue that dare not speak its name, the pervasive and profound anti-Semitism that permeates the contemporary Islamic world, especially the Middle East.
This is the real barrier to peace, and people who are concerned with peace will try to ameliorate it.
It is analytically false, historically untrue and conceptually impossible that all this anti-Semitism has arisen from Israel's sins, real and imagined.
As Richard Cohen pointed out in The Washington Post last week, when Anwar Sadat was a young army officer in 1953, he was interviewed by Al-Musawwar magazine and asked what he would say to Adolf Hitler. His reply? "My dear Hitler, I admire you from the bottom of my heart".
When he addressed the UN General Assembly in New York yesterday, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd spoke of the urgency of getting a final settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. If this did not happen soon, he feared a "spiralling of violence". If a settlement were reached, huge new Arab markets would open up to Israel, it would receive diplomatic recognition from all its Arab neighbours and attention could focus on the real security threat to the region, Iran. If it did not reach a final settlement soon, then the consequences for Israel's security would be dire.
I do not doubt Rudd's goodwill, nor his analytical competence, but I believe this analysis to be profoundly flawed at four levels.
First, Israel cannot will a peace agreement into existence if there is not a partner on the other side both willing and able to make and enforce a peace agreement that provides for Israel's security.
Second, a failed peace agreement, or one not enforced, could gravely compromise Israel's security, in far more damaging ways than exist today.
Third, Israel's security position has grievously deteriorated in recent months, through dynamics that have nothing to do with the Israel-Palestinian dispute, but which provide a far more dangerous context in which to ask Israel to take existential risks.
Fourth, you cannot have a lasting peace settlement when Israel's neighbours are consumed with hatred for Jews and contempt for Israel as a political entity.
Here's another thought. Very often, normalisation and a period of non-violence precede a peace agreement, rather than a peace agreement producing normalisation. Israel, and international partners, are working hard to normalise life in the West Bank, so that it becomes prosperous and decent, so that the Palestinians have something to lose, as it were.
It's at least as likely that normalisation could lead to peace, as that a peace agreement would magically produce normalisation.
Rudd is not alone in his analysis. It is conventional wisdom among the international conference-going class that the dispute could and must be settled quickly. But let's take my four analytical objections one by one.
Is there a peace partner for the Israelis? This is not a rhetorical question. It's a practical one. If you make peace with an enemy, you must be confident the enemy can control the forces on his side, that attacks won't continue on you.
Now here is the situation Israel confronts. Nearly half the Palestinian population is controlled by Hamas, designated by Australian and US law as a terrorist organisation. Hamas is also formally part of the broader national Palestinian government. It has not, as Western interlocutors once required, renounced terrorism, accepted Israel's right to exist, nor agreed to abide by any past agreements of the Palestinian Authority. Israel cannot just magically make Hamas into a Kumbaya peace movement. Even in the West Bank, the Fatah-led government promotes incitement and hatred against Israel from earliest school materials through to TV broadcasts and the rest. Every map of Palestine contains the whole of Israel, not just the occupied territories. More importantly, perhaps, the Palestinian government maintains itself in Ramallah only through the force of Israeli arms. It is not unreasonable for Israel to have extreme concerns about the sort of government that would eventually emerge in Ramallah.
The second objection is that a failed peace agreement could be much worse than the situation today. If the West Bank goes like Gaza, there will be a flood of rockets and other weapons into it once Israeli soldiers are gone. No Palestinian national movement is likely to accept indefinite Israeli control of its border with Jordan, yet if that border is not controlled the West Bank will likely go like Gaza. But Israel is a small, skinny nation. A Palestinian state would be within a few kilometres of the main Israeli population centres. Gaza-style rocket launches could cripple the Israeli economy. Even stray mortars would paralyse Tel Aviv airport. What if, as Hamas frequently does in Gaza, a West Bank Palestinian government encouraged such rocket launches, but then said they were really being launched by some shadowy militant group beyond its control?
This is not an argument to say that there can never be a Palestinian state. But it is entirely reasonable to ask that a Palestinian partner be able to ensure that Israel's security will be respected, as it has never been respected in the past.
Some very senior figures say privately that if outrageous attacks occurred Israel could simply re-invade Palestinian territory, but the world would know that Israel had tried to offer an independent Palestinian state.
This is wildly unrealistic. Israel never gets any credit for any offer it makes. In 2000, Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat about 95 per cent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, East Jerusalem and territory from Israel proper to compensate the 5 per cent of the West Bank that would accommodate the major Jewish settlement blocs.
Nearly a decade later, Ehud Olmert made essentially the same offer. In neither case could the Palestinian leadership accept the offer because it would have necessitated an end of claims against Israel and an end of conflict. The Palestinians will never get a better offer than they got from Barak and Olmert, who were prepared to take the enormous risks outlined above.
You are forced to ask in the end whether the Palestinian leadership is even serious about an independent state on realistic terms or whether it is caught up either in mere short-term manoeuvering, with no long-term vision at all, or if the long-term vision is some apocalyptic plan for Israel's ultimate destruction.
The late Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, once told me of his disgust when Yasser Arafat said to him in private conversation that his ultimate aim was to tip the Jews into the sea. Perhaps the greatest analytical problem with those who urge an immediate solution is their failure to recognise the devastating deterioration in Israel's external security situation. The Israeli diplomats in the embassy in Cairo were nearly murdered by a mob two weeks ago. The Egyptian government declined to take calls from their Israeli counterparts as the mob was struggling to smash down the concrete around the embassy so they could smash to pieces the diplomats inside.
Only when US President Barack Obama personally intervened did the Egyptians dispatch soldiers to save the Israelis' lives.
Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, has in effect decided to end his country's long alliance with Israel. He seeks popularity in the Arab world now by demonising Israel and has threatened to send his navy to confront Israel. These are enormous and adverse changes to Israel's security environment. They were not remotely caused by anything to do with the Palestinian dispute. They both reflect the radical decline of US influence in the Middle East. Those arguing for an immediate Palestinian state say Israel can propitiate these concerns by granting a Palestinian state. But where is there one zot of evidence for this?
Instead, regional powers, if they want to help the Palestinians, would be reassuring Israel. But, as we have seen, Israel's neighbours hate Israel and demonise Jews.
The Palestinian leadership itself has more or less guaranteed there can be no settlement by insisting on the right of return of all Palestinians who ever lived in pre-independence Israel, and all their descendants. This amounts to five million people. It ignores, of course, the millions of Jews, and their descendants, forced to leave Arab lands because of murderous anti-Semitic violence. But in any event, as all senior Palestinian leaders know, no Israeli government will ever commit suicide by inviting five million Palestinians to live in Israel proper.
In previous private negotiations, Palestinian leaders have been willing to give up this preposterous claim. But they have made it such a strong part of their emotional denigration of Israel that to do so publicly will inevitably invite a hostile reaction among Palestinians and within the wider Arab world. Taken all together, this means no permanent settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is possible at present. To pretend otherwise is at the very least irresponsible.
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The man who could trigger a world war
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/could+trigger+world/5398190/story.html
By David Warren, Ottawa CitizenSeptember 15, 2011
The greatest threat to the world's peace, at this moment, comes from a man named Recip Tayyip Erdogan. He is the prime minister of Turkey, at the head of the Justice and Development Party ("AK," from the Turkish). A former mayor of Istanbul, he was arrested and jailed when he publicly recited Islamist verses ("the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets," etc.), in defiance of the old secularist, Ataturk constitution, which made it an offence to incite religious and racial fanaticism.
Erdogan's credentials as an anti-Semite, but also as an anti-Communist, were established from his school days. He came from an observant Muslim family, and while nothing he says can be taken without salt, he claims an illustrious ancestry, of fighters for Turkish and Ottoman causes.
He is an "interesting case" in other respects. His post-secondary education was in economics; he is a very capable technocrat, and under his direction the Turkish economy was rescued. He is a dragonslayer of inflation, and public deficits; he took dramatic and effective measures to clean up squalor in the Turkish bureaucracy, and as the saying goes, "he made the trains run on time."
Erdogan is also a "democrat," who has no reason not to be, because he enjoys tremendous and abiding domestic popularity. The party he founded came to power by a landslide, and has been twice re-elected. (He had a stand-in for prime minister at first, for he was still banned from public office.) There are demographic reasons, too, why Turkish secularism has been overwhelmed by Turkish Islamism. The Muslim faithful have babies; modern secularists don't.
The "vision" of this politician, which he can articulate charismatically, is to combine efficient, basically free-market economic management, with a puritanized version of the religious ideals of the old Ottoman Caliphate. (Gentle reader may recall that I am allergic to visionary and charismatic politicians, who operate on the body politic like a dangerous drug.)
Erdogan's vision has turned outward. His strategy has been to seek better economic integration with the West, while making new political alliances with the East - most notably with Iran. He now presents Turkey as the champion of "mainstream" Sunni Islamism, while trying to square the circle with Persian Shia Islamism. This could still come to grief over Syria, where the Turks want Iran's man, Assad, overthrown, and the Muslim Brotherhood brought into a new Syrian government.
Turkey's military was the guarantor of pro-western Turkish secularism, under the Ataturk constitution. With characteristic incomprehension of the consequences, western statesmen supported Erdogan's efforts to establish civilian control over the generals - our old NATO friends. By imprisoning several senior officers on (probably imaginative) charges of plotting a coup, Erdogan was able to induce the entire Turkish senior staff to resign, last month.
They did this because they had run out of allies. Hillary Clinton and company hung the only effective domestic opposition to Erdogan out to dry. Turkey's powerful, western-equipped military is now entirely Erdogan's baby, and the country's secularist constitution is a dead letter. Erdogan, the Islamist, now has absolute power.
It was he who sent the "peace flotilla" to challenge Israel's right to blockade Gaza (recognized under international law and explicitly by the U.N.). He made the inevitable violent result of that adventure into an anti-Israeli cause célèbre. He has now announced that the next peace flotilla will be accompanied by the Turkish navy.
This will put Israel in the position of either surrendering its right to defend itself, or firing on Turkish naval vessels. There is no way to overstate the gravity of this: Erdogan is manoeuvring to create a casus belli.
He has made himself the effective diplomatic sponsor for the Palestinian declaration of statehood next week - from which much violence will follow. Every Palestinian who dies, trying to kill a Jew, will be hailed as a "martyr," with compensation and apologies demanded.
He has been playing Egyptian politics, by adding to the rhetorical fuel that propelled an Islamist mob into the Israeli embassy in Cairo last Friday. He is himself in Cairo, this week, on a mission to harness grievances against Israel, in the very fluid circumstances of the "Arab Spring." For action against this common enemy is the one thing that can unite all disparate Arab factions - potentially under Turkish leadership.
The West is just watching, while Erdogan creates pretexts for another Middle Eastern war: one in which Israel may be pitted not only against the neighbouring states of the old Arab League, but also Turkey, and Iran, and Hamas, and Hezbollah.
This is what is called an "existential threat" to Israel, unfolding in live time. It could leave the West with a choice between defending Israel, and permitting another Holocaust. In other words, we are staring at the trigger for a genuine world war. With Recip Erdogan's twitching finger on it.
David Warren's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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Monday, September 26, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
I am tired of not standing up for ourselves!
"If we are not for ourselves who will be?"
I am tired of the Palestinians' constant claims of victimhood. Why does no one ask them: didn't you have enough time to stop warring and make peace with your neighbours and build your own State by now since '48?
I am tired of the constant finger pointing to the Jewish State of Israel as being an "apartheid State" when it is the Jews who are not wanted by the Arabs in their midst.
Why?
Because they show them up? After a mere 60+ years and the Arabs' constant efforts to defeat them in war after war, Israel is now a booming economic success story. But the cost of keeping vigilant against these enemies surrounding them is at the expense of the standard of living of the average population. They are now saying "we are tired" of bearing this cost!
But they are doing it with civility in their protestations!
I am tired of everyone blaming Israel for the fate of the Palestinians when it is they who refused a State in '48 and when it is the Arabs who went to war and attacked Israel not once but over and over again to this day,- now continuing with daily and constant rocket attacks from the "poor Gazans",- those "Hamasniks" who impose Sharia laws and keep their hapless young people and women and their population under Islamic siege!
The Islamists want it all,- not just alongside Israel!
I am tired of hearing about the 'Palestinian refugees' when it is the Arabs who are keeping their own brethren in refugee camps within the Palestinian territories in the West Bank & Gaza, let alone in Lebanon and Jordan and everywhere else they happen to be in the Arab world!
(N.B. No wonder they prefer to come back to Israel,- in the Jewish State the Israeli 20%Arab population live in comfort and freedom! Those other people do not know the word 'resettlement'!)
Now that Abbass wants to declare for his people their own Palestinian State, will they still claim UNWRA moneys in the billions for their own people and will they continue to keep their brethren in refugee camps at the expense of the stupid Western world?
I am tired of everyone being forced to be 'politically correct' without daring to point the finger at the perpetrators of hatred and intimidation amongst us all, while we in the Jewish communities all over the world have to spend millions to protect ourselves, our businesses, our communal institutions, our Synagogues and schools against possible violent anti-Semitic attacks.
The article below spells it out very well,- David Horowitz is one hell of a brave American doing a splendid job standing up for us among the hate-filled 'intelligentsia' on college campuses,where the Islamists' 'useful idiots' are being indoctrinated!
MM
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http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/11/its-time-for-the-jews-to-stand-up-for-themselves/
It’s Time for the Jews to Stand Up for Themselves
Posted by David Horowitz on Mar 11th, 2011
"I was not looking forward to my speech at Brooklyn College last night during “Israel Apartheid Week.” The campus atmosphere was so hostile to Jews that no student organization was willing to host my appearance, not even the Jewish organizations – and with 3,500 Jewish students on campus, there were several. My visit was only made possible by the courage of one professor, Mitchell Langbert, who reserved a room in the school library and the bravery of one student, Yosef Sobol, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who organized the event.
The college paper, Excelsior, is edited by a 9/11 “truther” who had declared on the Internet that a memorial should be erected to Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 terrorists and who had turned the Excelsior into an anti-Israel propaganda sheet. Despite the fact that the Jews who attend Brooklyn college are members of a minority who are the victims of eight times the number of hate crimes that are committed against Muslims — let alone Arabs — according to FBI statistics, faculty required all incoming freshman to read a single book – about discrimination against Arabs in America: “How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?” Faculty also hired an instructor who was an activist for Hamas and its terrorist state in Gaza.
For two weeks prior to my arrival an adjunct professor at the college had been calling on students and political radicals to protest my appearance, while denouncing me as a “racist” and “McCarthyite.” This professor is a Muslim member of the International Socialist Organization, a communist party that seeks a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in America. He urged students and outsiders to attack the event both outside the auditorium and inside it during my speech.
My bodyguard – a requisite at any campus at which I speak – called campus security two days before the event and was told the policy of the university was that protesters who tried to obstruct my speech would not be removed from the room. Consequently, I was fully prepared for the fact that I might not be able to speak at all and readied myself for the battle.
But then something totally unexpected happened. A trustee of the CUNY system, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, was aware of Yosef’s efforts decided to intervene. He demanded that the university protect the students who had invited me and to see that their event took place. In all my years traveling to over 400 universities this had never happened before. As a result of Wiesenfeld’s intervention, there were seven armed and imposing guards at the entrance to the hall. They inspected each individual, wanding them and searching their bags before they entered. The campus Chief of Public Safety was there too, along with an official from the university who warned would-be protesters that they would be removed if they obstructed my speech.
And so I was able to speak for an hour in a civil atmosphere, and the students who came were able to hear what I had to say. Let me pause here to say that campus violence which comes exclusively from leftists and Muslim radicals, and the obstruction of speakers, which comes exclusively from the same source, would disappear if university administrators did their job and if university trustees met their responsibility to ensure that an appropriate atmosphere prevails on their campuses. Would that there were a hundred trustees like this one.
Brooklyn College is a commuter school and it was a blustery and rainy evening, but the library auditorium was filled with over 100 people, mainly students, virtually all of them either Jewish or Palestinian, with the Jews representing about 80 percent of those present. I began by asking everyone how it felt to go through a “checkpoint” – the “injustice” of checkpoints being a focus of recent demonstrations by the newly created “Palestinian Club” whose members constituted 20 percent of the audience that night. I said, “Well, our checkpoint made me feel safe, and that is the point of checkpoints – to protect the innocent from attacks by people who want to kill them.”
I then addressed the atmosphere of intimidation that prevailed at Brooklyn College as a result of the attacks by the anti-Israel and pro-jihad left. The Brooklyn College administration had ignored and thereby encouraged these attacks as had university administrations across the country in the face of a nationwide campaign by leftists and Muslim activists to silence those who opposed them. I recalled how Nazis and Communists in the 1930s had conducted a joint campaign to break up the public meetings of their opponents and how that had spelled the end of democracy in Germany and the rise of the totalitarian state.
I said the frontline battle in our present war with totalitarianism was the First Amendment’s right to disagree. When protests were designed to shut down speakers, when speakers were defamed in advance of their appearances, one side of the argument was effectively silenced, and if that were allowed to continue we would soon lose our democracy. I said the attacks on freedom of speech had already gone so far in this country that you couldn’t mention terror and Islam in the same breath without being labeled a bigot or an Islamophobe, accused of labeling all Muslims as terrorists.
Even President Bush who had heroically defended us against the attacks of Islamic terrorists could not identify our enemies by name for fear of offending other terrorists and their sympathizers and allies. He could not identify them as Islamic extremists or Islamic radicals or Islamic jihadist which is what they call themselves. I happened to be speaking on the day Congressman Peter King opened his hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America and had watched the attacks on those hearings on my hotel television screen. I said we had reached a point in our country where we could not even make inquiries about the threat of domestic terrorism posed by militant Islamists who are responsible for 17,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11 without being attacked as “McCarthyites” and “bigots.”
This is the primary political strategy of all Islamic terrorists and their enablers – to identify anyone who speaks about Islamic terrorism as someone who is attacking all Muslims as terrorists. The terrorists seek to identify themselves with Islam, to hide themselves and their sinister agendas in the Muslim community and use its numbers as a protective shield. The charge that an attack on one Muslim terrorist is an attack on all Muslims is an insult to the Muslim community and abuse of its members. All Muslims are not terrorists but there are also not enough Muslims coming forward to separate themselves and Islam from the radical jihad, or to condemn organizations like Hamas. Here I mentioned a Muslim, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, who had testified that day and who said, “This is our problem, and it is our responsibility to solve it.”
Finally, I praised Wiesenfeld (but did not feel free at the time to divulge his name) who made the evening possible. He had struck an important blow for democracy at Brooklyn college against the jihadist assault.
I then read a series of statements by Palestinian leaders and by the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood each of which promised to finish the job that Hitler started. Here are two:
Mahmoud Al-Zahar, founder of Hamas said in 2007: “There is no place for you Jews among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.”
In that same year, Ahmad Bahar, Acting Chairman of Gaza Parliament said:
“Be certain that America is on its way to disappear,… Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies, Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies… Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don’t leave even one.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know who these people are, I said. “They are Nazis, and they want to kill the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. Their goal is not peace but to push the Jews of Israel into the sea. On campuses all across America, I said, the Muslim and socialist left are chanting “From the river to the sea…” I was then interrupted by a voice from the audience who turned out to be the Muslim Marxist organizer of the protest, who completed the chant “…Palestine will be free.” I pointed out that the eastern boundary of Israel is the river and the western boundary is the Mediterranean sea, and that this was just another way of saying we want to kill you Jews and destroy your state and push you into the sea. They are Nazis.
I said the embargo on free speech is already so far advanced in America that we speak of a “peace process,” as though there was one. There is not a single Palestinian leader willing to recognize the Jewish state. Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority want to “liberate” Palestine “from the river to the sea.” How can you make peace with people who don’t want you to exist? How can you negotiate a peace with Nazis who want to kill you? You can’t. You have to demand that they stop being Nazis or that the people who support them elect other leaders. I said we have to stop capitulating to the censors of our language and call things by their right names. That is the only way to have clarity and to begin to be able to defend ourselves.
I then asked why the left is willing to embrace Hamas Nazis who want to kill the Jews. Leftists would answer this question by claiming that Palestinians are oppressed, and that it is the Jews who are responsible for their suffering. The Jews stole their land and put them under military occupation and have since subjected them to all manner of indignities, like checkpoints. I then said, let’s put off the question as to whether there is any truth in these claims, and just look at the claim that suffering explains their resort to suicide bombings and their desire to kill the Jews and push them into the sea.
For thousands of years nations, ethnic groups, races and religions have suffered. They have been enslaved, they have been occupied, they have been oppressed. But never in the history of mankind until now has their been a people like the Palestinians who strap bombs on their own children and tell them to blow themselves up and kill other children, and that if they do so they will go to heaven and become saints. No other religion besides Islam makes murderers into saints. In the entire history of mankind no people has sunk to such moral depths as the Palestinians in their war against the Jews.
Let’s also look at the claims that Jews oppress Palestinians rather than the other way around. Let’s begin with biggest lie of the entire Middle East conflict — that Israel “occupies” Arab land, let alone “Palestinian” land. To begin with, there hasn’t been a political entity or state called Palestine since Roman times, when Rome affixed the name Philistina (or “Palestine) to the homeland of the Jews which is Judea and Samaria, which is today the Palestinian occupied West Bank. The Romans did this because the Philistines, who were not Arabs, were the Jews’ enemies and they wanted to humiliate the people they had conquered and dispersed to the four corners of the globe.
In the second place the entire region around the Jordan out of which Israel was created was not Arab and had not been for four hundred years. The Arabs’ claim to Israel is about as credible as the Dutch claim to New York. For four hundred years prior to the creation of the state of Israel – not to mention Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – the land belonged to the Turks who are neither Palestinians nor Arabs.
The state of Jordan was also created out of what was called the Palestine Mandate, when it was administered by the victorious powers in World War I. The majority of Jordan’s population are Arabs who today would be referred to as “Palestinians” – a “nationality” created in 1964 to combat the Jewish state. The “Palestinians” of Jordan are ruled and oppressed by a Hashemite minority. But no one is calling for their liberation. That is because the true goal of the Palestinian liberation movement is not a Palestinian state (which has been rejected by the Arabs as recently as 2000) but to push the Jews into the sea.
I went on to discuss the other indefensible lies that make up the total case against Israel – for example that Jewish settlements are a problem. There are a million Muslim Arabs settled in the state of Israel, who enjoy more rights as Israeli citizens than the Muslims or Arabs in any Muslim or Arab state. If Muslim communities in Israel are not a problem, why are Jewish communities in the Arab world or on the West Bank or in Gaza? Because the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East are racists and refuse to live side by side with any non-Arab or non-Muslim people. That is the straightforward, factually accurate, but politically incorrect answer. There were two democracies in the Middle East after the Second World War: Israel and Lebanon. Lebanon was actually a Christian democracy. Democratic Lebanon has been destroyed by the Islamic jihad and the Christians of the entire Middle East are under the gun or in flight.
I had encouraged the Brooklyn students to erect a “Palestinian Wall of Lies” (www.walloflies.org) that we had created to combat the malignant “Israel Apartheid Wall” that the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish left on campus was going to erect during “Israel Apartheid Week.” When the Brooklyn College administration learned of these plans they banned both walls. This is what a victory looks like in collegiate America today.
“Israel Apartheid Week” is a hate week against Jews, nothing more nothing less. Israel is, in fact, the only state in the Middle East that is not an apartheid state. Jews have created the only multicultural society in the Middle East, the only society that respects the rights of all ethnic and religious groups – and all genders as well. Jews have built the only society that respects women and gays. The very name “Israel Apartheid Week” is thus an obscenity whose only purpose is to demonize the Jewish state and make it vulnerable to the terrorist armies who whose rockets are poised to destroy it and whose goal is to push its Jews into the sea.
If this campaign had been directed against African Americans or any other campus ethnic group – including and especially Muslims – no university community would tolerate it. But because it is directed against Jews, Israel hate week is protected and funded by student governments and protected by university administrators. Moreover, and most disturbingly, the Jewish organizations on campus have been unwilling to stand up for themselves and to claim the same rights and respect as the groups who are attacking them. The Hillel organization on the Brooklyn College campus is 1,000 Jews strong but it would not sponsor our event. The Palestinian Club is 100 Muslims strong, but they came to attack it.
By now you are probably wondering about the reaction of these members of the Palestinian Club who came to protest my speech. You are wondering how they responded to the detailed arguments I made refuting their claims and self-justifications or to my statement that while Palestinians were indeed suffering, the cause of their suffering was their own leaders and the Arab states who for sixty years have rejected peace because they want to push the Jews into the sea. The answer is that they didn’t. It was as though members of the Palestinian Club had not heard a word I said.
I have had the same experience on a score of campuses where I have confronted audiences, which included sizeable contingents from the Muslim Students Association, a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and a sister organization to Hamas, along with their leftwing enablers. The reactions at the end of my talks are always the same. The only way I can truly convey what happens is to recount a speech I arranged for the Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, who is under indictment for “insulting Islam” in the Netherlands. Wilders made very clear that he was not opposed to Muslims but to an intolerant and totalitarian ideology that demanded total submission to its doctrines and oppressed minorities whom it regarded as “infidels.”
During his speech Wilders turned to address directly the two dozen leftists and Muslims in the audience. He appealed to them saying “Look, I am doing your work. You say you are for the rights of women and gays. Under Sharia law and in many Islamic countries gays are hung from cranes and women are treated as chattel, denied education, and beaten with impunity by their husbands. I oppose the version of Islam that oppresses women and homosexuals. You need to do so as well.”
As soon as Wilders had finished his speech, the Muslims and leftists in the audience stood up en masse and started chanting “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Geert Wilders go away!” and marched from the room.
So it was with the Muslims who came to protest my talk. When they went to the microphones to ask questions after the speech they all had one talking point and it was the strategic talking point of the jihadists: “Mr. Joe McCarthy” (this is how the leader of the protest actually addressed me, “you said that all Muslims are terrorists….” Others before him had made the identical charge bolted from the room. None had even made a pass a questioning the history I had reviewed or the facts I had presented.
What struck me afterwards was this. Every Muslim in the room was a member of the Palestinian Club; most I was told afterwards were from Ramallah. But not one of them spoke as a Palestinian. I had said that Palestinians had elected two terrorist governments to rule over them, that Palestinians were willing to kill their own children in order to kill other children, that their schools taught their children to hate and kill Jews, that as a people they had sunk to the lowest moral level in history. I had said that they were indistinguishable from Nazis. And not one Palestinian in that room stood up to defend themselves as Palestinians. To a man and woman they said, “You are accusing all Muslims of being terrorists.
I said to them, you are acting as foot soldiers for the terrorists – which provoked an outraged cry. I confronted the professor ringleader and said: “Will you condemn Hamas?” He hemmed and hawed and stuttered, and then began his evasion of the question, but everyone in the room who was not a member of the Palestinian Club knew they already had their answer. Yes these Muslim students from the “Palestinian Club” were all supporters of the terrorist war against the Jews.
There was one questioner who actually did offer an intellectual challenge to an argument I had made, and did make an attempt to defend Palestinians as an ethnic group – as opposed to a religious sect of Islam. This person was a Jew from Hillel who suggested that Japanese kamikaze pilots were akin to suicide bombers and therefore Palestinians were not the only people in history who had sunk so low. But, of course, kamikaze pilots were soldiers not civilians, and they targeted battleships and aircraft carriers not women and children in pizza parlors.
When it was over, I was glad I had come. I was proud of the small vanguard of Jewish students who had invited me and arranged my appearance, and come to my speech. I was proud of Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the Jewish trustee who had gone out of his way to protect me, and the students who came to hear me. And I was gratified that they understood my message and would take it to the rest of the Jewish community at Brooklyn College: If we are not for ourselves who will be?
It is the same message I take to other campuses where my audiences are mainly non-Jewish. Israel is the canary in the mine. The chant of the Islamo-Nazis in the Middle East – shouted by millions – is, “Death to Israel! Death to America!” If we in America do not stand up for ourselves now, there will be no America tomorrow.
I am tired of the Palestinians' constant claims of victimhood. Why does no one ask them: didn't you have enough time to stop warring and make peace with your neighbours and build your own State by now since '48?
I am tired of the constant finger pointing to the Jewish State of Israel as being an "apartheid State" when it is the Jews who are not wanted by the Arabs in their midst.
Why?
Because they show them up? After a mere 60+ years and the Arabs' constant efforts to defeat them in war after war, Israel is now a booming economic success story. But the cost of keeping vigilant against these enemies surrounding them is at the expense of the standard of living of the average population. They are now saying "we are tired" of bearing this cost!
But they are doing it with civility in their protestations!
I am tired of everyone blaming Israel for the fate of the Palestinians when it is they who refused a State in '48 and when it is the Arabs who went to war and attacked Israel not once but over and over again to this day,- now continuing with daily and constant rocket attacks from the "poor Gazans",- those "Hamasniks" who impose Sharia laws and keep their hapless young people and women and their population under Islamic siege!
The Islamists want it all,- not just alongside Israel!
I am tired of hearing about the 'Palestinian refugees' when it is the Arabs who are keeping their own brethren in refugee camps within the Palestinian territories in the West Bank & Gaza, let alone in Lebanon and Jordan and everywhere else they happen to be in the Arab world!
(N.B. No wonder they prefer to come back to Israel,- in the Jewish State the Israeli 20%Arab population live in comfort and freedom! Those other people do not know the word 'resettlement'!)
Now that Abbass wants to declare for his people their own Palestinian State, will they still claim UNWRA moneys in the billions for their own people and will they continue to keep their brethren in refugee camps at the expense of the stupid Western world?
I am tired of everyone being forced to be 'politically correct' without daring to point the finger at the perpetrators of hatred and intimidation amongst us all, while we in the Jewish communities all over the world have to spend millions to protect ourselves, our businesses, our communal institutions, our Synagogues and schools against possible violent anti-Semitic attacks.
The article below spells it out very well,- David Horowitz is one hell of a brave American doing a splendid job standing up for us among the hate-filled 'intelligentsia' on college campuses,where the Islamists' 'useful idiots' are being indoctrinated!
MM
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http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/11/its-time-for-the-jews-to-stand-up-for-themselves/
It’s Time for the Jews to Stand Up for Themselves
Posted by David Horowitz on Mar 11th, 2011
"I was not looking forward to my speech at Brooklyn College last night during “Israel Apartheid Week.” The campus atmosphere was so hostile to Jews that no student organization was willing to host my appearance, not even the Jewish organizations – and with 3,500 Jewish students on campus, there were several. My visit was only made possible by the courage of one professor, Mitchell Langbert, who reserved a room in the school library and the bravery of one student, Yosef Sobol, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who organized the event.
The college paper, Excelsior, is edited by a 9/11 “truther” who had declared on the Internet that a memorial should be erected to Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 terrorists and who had turned the Excelsior into an anti-Israel propaganda sheet. Despite the fact that the Jews who attend Brooklyn college are members of a minority who are the victims of eight times the number of hate crimes that are committed against Muslims — let alone Arabs — according to FBI statistics, faculty required all incoming freshman to read a single book – about discrimination against Arabs in America: “How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?” Faculty also hired an instructor who was an activist for Hamas and its terrorist state in Gaza.
For two weeks prior to my arrival an adjunct professor at the college had been calling on students and political radicals to protest my appearance, while denouncing me as a “racist” and “McCarthyite.” This professor is a Muslim member of the International Socialist Organization, a communist party that seeks a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in America. He urged students and outsiders to attack the event both outside the auditorium and inside it during my speech.
My bodyguard – a requisite at any campus at which I speak – called campus security two days before the event and was told the policy of the university was that protesters who tried to obstruct my speech would not be removed from the room. Consequently, I was fully prepared for the fact that I might not be able to speak at all and readied myself for the battle.
But then something totally unexpected happened. A trustee of the CUNY system, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, was aware of Yosef’s efforts decided to intervene. He demanded that the university protect the students who had invited me and to see that their event took place. In all my years traveling to over 400 universities this had never happened before. As a result of Wiesenfeld’s intervention, there were seven armed and imposing guards at the entrance to the hall. They inspected each individual, wanding them and searching their bags before they entered. The campus Chief of Public Safety was there too, along with an official from the university who warned would-be protesters that they would be removed if they obstructed my speech.
And so I was able to speak for an hour in a civil atmosphere, and the students who came were able to hear what I had to say. Let me pause here to say that campus violence which comes exclusively from leftists and Muslim radicals, and the obstruction of speakers, which comes exclusively from the same source, would disappear if university administrators did their job and if university trustees met their responsibility to ensure that an appropriate atmosphere prevails on their campuses. Would that there were a hundred trustees like this one.
Brooklyn College is a commuter school and it was a blustery and rainy evening, but the library auditorium was filled with over 100 people, mainly students, virtually all of them either Jewish or Palestinian, with the Jews representing about 80 percent of those present. I began by asking everyone how it felt to go through a “checkpoint” – the “injustice” of checkpoints being a focus of recent demonstrations by the newly created “Palestinian Club” whose members constituted 20 percent of the audience that night. I said, “Well, our checkpoint made me feel safe, and that is the point of checkpoints – to protect the innocent from attacks by people who want to kill them.”
I then addressed the atmosphere of intimidation that prevailed at Brooklyn College as a result of the attacks by the anti-Israel and pro-jihad left. The Brooklyn College administration had ignored and thereby encouraged these attacks as had university administrations across the country in the face of a nationwide campaign by leftists and Muslim activists to silence those who opposed them. I recalled how Nazis and Communists in the 1930s had conducted a joint campaign to break up the public meetings of their opponents and how that had spelled the end of democracy in Germany and the rise of the totalitarian state.
I said the frontline battle in our present war with totalitarianism was the First Amendment’s right to disagree. When protests were designed to shut down speakers, when speakers were defamed in advance of their appearances, one side of the argument was effectively silenced, and if that were allowed to continue we would soon lose our democracy. I said the attacks on freedom of speech had already gone so far in this country that you couldn’t mention terror and Islam in the same breath without being labeled a bigot or an Islamophobe, accused of labeling all Muslims as terrorists.
Even President Bush who had heroically defended us against the attacks of Islamic terrorists could not identify our enemies by name for fear of offending other terrorists and their sympathizers and allies. He could not identify them as Islamic extremists or Islamic radicals or Islamic jihadist which is what they call themselves. I happened to be speaking on the day Congressman Peter King opened his hearings on the radicalization of Muslims in America and had watched the attacks on those hearings on my hotel television screen. I said we had reached a point in our country where we could not even make inquiries about the threat of domestic terrorism posed by militant Islamists who are responsible for 17,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11 without being attacked as “McCarthyites” and “bigots.”
This is the primary political strategy of all Islamic terrorists and their enablers – to identify anyone who speaks about Islamic terrorism as someone who is attacking all Muslims as terrorists. The terrorists seek to identify themselves with Islam, to hide themselves and their sinister agendas in the Muslim community and use its numbers as a protective shield. The charge that an attack on one Muslim terrorist is an attack on all Muslims is an insult to the Muslim community and abuse of its members. All Muslims are not terrorists but there are also not enough Muslims coming forward to separate themselves and Islam from the radical jihad, or to condemn organizations like Hamas. Here I mentioned a Muslim, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, who had testified that day and who said, “This is our problem, and it is our responsibility to solve it.”
Finally, I praised Wiesenfeld (but did not feel free at the time to divulge his name) who made the evening possible. He had struck an important blow for democracy at Brooklyn college against the jihadist assault.
I then read a series of statements by Palestinian leaders and by the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood each of which promised to finish the job that Hitler started. Here are two:
Mahmoud Al-Zahar, founder of Hamas said in 2007: “There is no place for you Jews among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.”
In that same year, Ahmad Bahar, Acting Chairman of Gaza Parliament said:
“Be certain that America is on its way to disappear,… Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies, Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies… Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don’t leave even one.”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know who these people are, I said. “They are Nazis, and they want to kill the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. Their goal is not peace but to push the Jews of Israel into the sea. On campuses all across America, I said, the Muslim and socialist left are chanting “From the river to the sea…” I was then interrupted by a voice from the audience who turned out to be the Muslim Marxist organizer of the protest, who completed the chant “…Palestine will be free.” I pointed out that the eastern boundary of Israel is the river and the western boundary is the Mediterranean sea, and that this was just another way of saying we want to kill you Jews and destroy your state and push you into the sea. They are Nazis.
I said the embargo on free speech is already so far advanced in America that we speak of a “peace process,” as though there was one. There is not a single Palestinian leader willing to recognize the Jewish state. Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority want to “liberate” Palestine “from the river to the sea.” How can you make peace with people who don’t want you to exist? How can you negotiate a peace with Nazis who want to kill you? You can’t. You have to demand that they stop being Nazis or that the people who support them elect other leaders. I said we have to stop capitulating to the censors of our language and call things by their right names. That is the only way to have clarity and to begin to be able to defend ourselves.
I then asked why the left is willing to embrace Hamas Nazis who want to kill the Jews. Leftists would answer this question by claiming that Palestinians are oppressed, and that it is the Jews who are responsible for their suffering. The Jews stole their land and put them under military occupation and have since subjected them to all manner of indignities, like checkpoints. I then said, let’s put off the question as to whether there is any truth in these claims, and just look at the claim that suffering explains their resort to suicide bombings and their desire to kill the Jews and push them into the sea.
For thousands of years nations, ethnic groups, races and religions have suffered. They have been enslaved, they have been occupied, they have been oppressed. But never in the history of mankind until now has their been a people like the Palestinians who strap bombs on their own children and tell them to blow themselves up and kill other children, and that if they do so they will go to heaven and become saints. No other religion besides Islam makes murderers into saints. In the entire history of mankind no people has sunk to such moral depths as the Palestinians in their war against the Jews.
Let’s also look at the claims that Jews oppress Palestinians rather than the other way around. Let’s begin with biggest lie of the entire Middle East conflict — that Israel “occupies” Arab land, let alone “Palestinian” land. To begin with, there hasn’t been a political entity or state called Palestine since Roman times, when Rome affixed the name Philistina (or “Palestine) to the homeland of the Jews which is Judea and Samaria, which is today the Palestinian occupied West Bank. The Romans did this because the Philistines, who were not Arabs, were the Jews’ enemies and they wanted to humiliate the people they had conquered and dispersed to the four corners of the globe.
In the second place the entire region around the Jordan out of which Israel was created was not Arab and had not been for four hundred years. The Arabs’ claim to Israel is about as credible as the Dutch claim to New York. For four hundred years prior to the creation of the state of Israel – not to mention Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – the land belonged to the Turks who are neither Palestinians nor Arabs.
The state of Jordan was also created out of what was called the Palestine Mandate, when it was administered by the victorious powers in World War I. The majority of Jordan’s population are Arabs who today would be referred to as “Palestinians” – a “nationality” created in 1964 to combat the Jewish state. The “Palestinians” of Jordan are ruled and oppressed by a Hashemite minority. But no one is calling for their liberation. That is because the true goal of the Palestinian liberation movement is not a Palestinian state (which has been rejected by the Arabs as recently as 2000) but to push the Jews into the sea.
I went on to discuss the other indefensible lies that make up the total case against Israel – for example that Jewish settlements are a problem. There are a million Muslim Arabs settled in the state of Israel, who enjoy more rights as Israeli citizens than the Muslims or Arabs in any Muslim or Arab state. If Muslim communities in Israel are not a problem, why are Jewish communities in the Arab world or on the West Bank or in Gaza? Because the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East are racists and refuse to live side by side with any non-Arab or non-Muslim people. That is the straightforward, factually accurate, but politically incorrect answer. There were two democracies in the Middle East after the Second World War: Israel and Lebanon. Lebanon was actually a Christian democracy. Democratic Lebanon has been destroyed by the Islamic jihad and the Christians of the entire Middle East are under the gun or in flight.
I had encouraged the Brooklyn students to erect a “Palestinian Wall of Lies” (www.walloflies.org) that we had created to combat the malignant “Israel Apartheid Wall” that the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish left on campus was going to erect during “Israel Apartheid Week.” When the Brooklyn College administration learned of these plans they banned both walls. This is what a victory looks like in collegiate America today.
“Israel Apartheid Week” is a hate week against Jews, nothing more nothing less. Israel is, in fact, the only state in the Middle East that is not an apartheid state. Jews have created the only multicultural society in the Middle East, the only society that respects the rights of all ethnic and religious groups – and all genders as well. Jews have built the only society that respects women and gays. The very name “Israel Apartheid Week” is thus an obscenity whose only purpose is to demonize the Jewish state and make it vulnerable to the terrorist armies who whose rockets are poised to destroy it and whose goal is to push its Jews into the sea.
If this campaign had been directed against African Americans or any other campus ethnic group – including and especially Muslims – no university community would tolerate it. But because it is directed against Jews, Israel hate week is protected and funded by student governments and protected by university administrators. Moreover, and most disturbingly, the Jewish organizations on campus have been unwilling to stand up for themselves and to claim the same rights and respect as the groups who are attacking them. The Hillel organization on the Brooklyn College campus is 1,000 Jews strong but it would not sponsor our event. The Palestinian Club is 100 Muslims strong, but they came to attack it.
By now you are probably wondering about the reaction of these members of the Palestinian Club who came to protest my speech. You are wondering how they responded to the detailed arguments I made refuting their claims and self-justifications or to my statement that while Palestinians were indeed suffering, the cause of their suffering was their own leaders and the Arab states who for sixty years have rejected peace because they want to push the Jews into the sea. The answer is that they didn’t. It was as though members of the Palestinian Club had not heard a word I said.
I have had the same experience on a score of campuses where I have confronted audiences, which included sizeable contingents from the Muslim Students Association, a front for the Muslim Brotherhood and a sister organization to Hamas, along with their leftwing enablers. The reactions at the end of my talks are always the same. The only way I can truly convey what happens is to recount a speech I arranged for the Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, who is under indictment for “insulting Islam” in the Netherlands. Wilders made very clear that he was not opposed to Muslims but to an intolerant and totalitarian ideology that demanded total submission to its doctrines and oppressed minorities whom it regarded as “infidels.”
During his speech Wilders turned to address directly the two dozen leftists and Muslims in the audience. He appealed to them saying “Look, I am doing your work. You say you are for the rights of women and gays. Under Sharia law and in many Islamic countries gays are hung from cranes and women are treated as chattel, denied education, and beaten with impunity by their husbands. I oppose the version of Islam that oppresses women and homosexuals. You need to do so as well.”
As soon as Wilders had finished his speech, the Muslims and leftists in the audience stood up en masse and started chanting “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Geert Wilders go away!” and marched from the room.
So it was with the Muslims who came to protest my talk. When they went to the microphones to ask questions after the speech they all had one talking point and it was the strategic talking point of the jihadists: “Mr. Joe McCarthy” (this is how the leader of the protest actually addressed me, “you said that all Muslims are terrorists….” Others before him had made the identical charge bolted from the room. None had even made a pass a questioning the history I had reviewed or the facts I had presented.
What struck me afterwards was this. Every Muslim in the room was a member of the Palestinian Club; most I was told afterwards were from Ramallah. But not one of them spoke as a Palestinian. I had said that Palestinians had elected two terrorist governments to rule over them, that Palestinians were willing to kill their own children in order to kill other children, that their schools taught their children to hate and kill Jews, that as a people they had sunk to the lowest moral level in history. I had said that they were indistinguishable from Nazis. And not one Palestinian in that room stood up to defend themselves as Palestinians. To a man and woman they said, “You are accusing all Muslims of being terrorists.
I said to them, you are acting as foot soldiers for the terrorists – which provoked an outraged cry. I confronted the professor ringleader and said: “Will you condemn Hamas?” He hemmed and hawed and stuttered, and then began his evasion of the question, but everyone in the room who was not a member of the Palestinian Club knew they already had their answer. Yes these Muslim students from the “Palestinian Club” were all supporters of the terrorist war against the Jews.
There was one questioner who actually did offer an intellectual challenge to an argument I had made, and did make an attempt to defend Palestinians as an ethnic group – as opposed to a religious sect of Islam. This person was a Jew from Hillel who suggested that Japanese kamikaze pilots were akin to suicide bombers and therefore Palestinians were not the only people in history who had sunk so low. But, of course, kamikaze pilots were soldiers not civilians, and they targeted battleships and aircraft carriers not women and children in pizza parlors.
When it was over, I was glad I had come. I was proud of the small vanguard of Jewish students who had invited me and arranged my appearance, and come to my speech. I was proud of Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the Jewish trustee who had gone out of his way to protect me, and the students who came to hear me. And I was gratified that they understood my message and would take it to the rest of the Jewish community at Brooklyn College: If we are not for ourselves who will be?
It is the same message I take to other campuses where my audiences are mainly non-Jewish. Israel is the canary in the mine. The chant of the Islamo-Nazis in the Middle East – shouted by millions – is, “Death to Israel! Death to America!” If we in America do not stand up for ourselves now, there will be no America tomorrow.
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