Sunday, November 29, 2009

Neve Gordon turns His Own Home into a Spa for Convicted Terrorist

Neve Gordon turns His Own Home into a Spa for Convicted Terrorist

http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/30/sheltering-extremism-by-paul-shindman/


Sheltering Extremism – by Paul Shindman

Posted By Paul Shindman On November 30, 2009 @ 12:07 am In FrontPage | No Comments

gordon4

Jerusalem – Dr. Neve Gordon of Israel's Ben Gurion University is known as one of the most radical academic Palestinian sympathizers. However, his activities appear to have peaked this year with a call for an anti-Israel boycott, and revelations that he hosted a convicted Palestinian sentenced to house arrest.

Despite being the chairman of the political science department at Israel's Ben Gurion University, Gordon wrote an L.A. Times op-ed calling for a worldwide boycott [1] of Israel, including Israeli universities, to achieve what he calls "ending our apartheid."

Gordon's call was widely seen as an anti-democratic attempt to undermine Israeli democracy and sovereignty and drew scathing criticism from his peers in both the academic and activist communities.

The president of BGU, Rivka Carmi, went so far as to say Gordon's call meant the university " is being threatened by the egregious remarks of one person, under the guise of academic freedom [2]."  In a rebuttal editorial, Carmi had to point out that it was only Israeli labor law that prevented the university from firing Gordon. In a harsh assessment, she said his boycott call meant "Gordon has forfeited his ability to work effectively within the academic setting, with his colleagues in Israel and around the world."

Veteran Israeli left wing anti-Zionist activist Uri Avnery was with Gordon and other Israeli extremists when they barricaded themselves in Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Ramallah compound during a prolonged siege by the Israeli army in 2002. Despite their common background, even Avnery rejected Gordon's op-ed, saying it was an "example of a faulty diagnosis leading to faulty treatment. To be precise: the mistaken assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resembles the South African experience leads to a mistaken choice of strategy."  This was harsh criticism from a political colleague that raised questions about Gordon's professional abilities as an academic.

Gordon is viewed in his own country as notorious for his venomous anti-Israel writings and statements.  The Israeli media reported when Gordon and other activists illegally entered Ramallah in 2002 to serve as human shields inside Yasser Arafat's headquarters.  They wanted to prevent the Israeli army from arresting the suspects wanted for the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister.  Gordon was shown in newspaper photos embracing Arafat. The terrorists were eventually apprehended, tried and convicted.

Gordon also has a fractious track record in his teaching career with numerous run-ins with students who hold opposing views.  Gordon regularly denounces Israel as a fascist apartheid entity and admitted that his boycott call was a tactic to force Israeli concessions with the Palestinians. Gordon's articles are so openly anti-Israel that they are often published on neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial web sites.

Around the same time as the boycott call, Gordon turned his own home into a refuge for convicted Fatah organizer Mohammed Abu Humus, a resident of the Issawiya neighborhood of East Jerusalem.  As a local Fatah organizer, Abu Hums had previous convictions for several security related offenses including arson and assault. Despite the latest conviction for directing demonstrators to throw rocks, Gordon described Abu Humus as a "political prisoner" and "a Fatah leader."

A Jerusalem district judge earlier this year convicted Abu Humus and handed down a nine-month sentence, converted to house arrest.  Gordon organized a group of far-left academics to testify on behalf of Abu Humus, and Gordon offered the court to host Abu Humus in Gordon's own home in Beersheva for the duration of the house arrest.  It is evidently the only case on record of a Palestinian terrorist being released to house arrest in the home of a Jewish Israeli citizen.

Abu Humus and Gordon have collaborated in the past in an organization called Ta'ayush, which Gordon himself is on record as describing as a seditious group, but according to its website its activities appear to have petered out in 2007.

Abu Humus provided an interesting complement to Gordon's position. Interviewed at his office in the Alternative Information Center, a pro-Palestinian lobby group in Jerusalem, Abu Humus stated that archeological excavations in the Old City prove that despite Jews worshipping at the remaining wall of the ancient Jewish temple, the Jews had no claim to Jerusalem. After years of archeological digging, he insisted no evidence of the Jewish temple exists.

"Have they found anything of the Jews? They didn't find anything," Abu Humus said.

Talking about the holy sites appeared to get Abu Humus riled up. Despite Gordon's testimony that Abu Humus was a tolerant pacifist opposed to violence, the activist continued on a roll.

"If somebody believes in (the Jewish or Christian) religion, he has to change his religion," Abu Humus said. "And after Jesus came, it says Mohammed will come. And Mohammed came. If you are religious as a Jew, you have to believe in Mohammed. You have to believe in Jesus."

Gordon is the father of two small children and stated in the media that the time Abu Humus spent in his home under house arrest was "in a way, it's a wonderful experience, probably the best political education that you can give to a child."

Paul Shindman is a veteran freelance journalist in Israel who has worked with several North American media outlets and the BBC. He is the former Jerusalem bureau chief for United Press International.
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[1] for a worldwide boycott: http://mobile.latimes.com/inf/infomo;JSESSIONID=CEE61D4835C065AF1DF6.4305?view=page6&feed:a=latimes_1min&feed:c=opinion&feed:i=48747036&nopaging=1

[2] is being threatened by the egregious remarks of one person, under the guise of academic freedom: http://mobile.latimes.com/inf/infomo;jsessionid=B156184E0ECC59444976.4303?view=webarticle&feed:a=latimes_1min&feed:c=opinion&feed:i=48986796&nopaging=1

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Want to tell the heads of BGU what you think of this?

Write to:
Ben Gurion University:

Rivka Carmi, President

P.O. Box 653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel,

rcarmi@bgumail.bgu.ac.il

and president@bgu.ac.il

Tel: 972-8-6461211/9

Fax: 972-8-6472991

 

Prof. Jimmy Weinblatt, Rector

P.O. Box 653, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel

rector@bgu.ac.il

Tel: 972-8-6461223

Fax: 972-8-6479434

 

Other officers listed here: http://cmsprod.bgu.ac.il/Eng/Units/management/

University "Friends of" Offices outside Israel are listed here: http://web.bgu.ac.il/Eng/Units/associates/WorldwideAssociatesOffices

 

 


Thursday, November 26, 2009

The Eight Days of Cowardice

 

 

1. The miraculous eight days of Hanukka, 5770:

 

On the first day of cowardice my PM said to me, let's have a settlement freeze.

On the second day of cowardice my PM said to me, let's agree the savages can have their own state.

On the third day of cowardice my PM said to me, let's agree to judicial activism.

On the fourth day of cowardice my PM said to me, let's let the Court kill prison privatization.

On the fifth day of cowardice my PM said to me, let's forget reform of water policy.

On the sixth day of cowardice my PM said to me, let's forget about splitting the Attorney General from Legal Advisor to the government. because such a split upsets the Left.

On the seventh day of cowardice my PM said to me, let's forget about doing anything about the violent "anarchists" who attack Israeli police and soldiers.

On the eighth day of cowardice my PM said to me, let's just release all the terrorists we have to buy back a kidnapped soldier.

 

 

2.  Well, Richard Goldstone has emerged as an Israel-bashing anti-Semite, willing to sell his soul to the UN in order to find favor with his leftist friends.  Well, not only is Goldstone a liar willing to toady up to his anti-Semitic masters.  It turns out he also has an interesting track record of groveling to the apartheid authorities back when he was a judge in South Africa.  Read on:

 

FROM WND'S JERUSALEM BUREAU
U.N. judge jailed 13-year-old for protesting apartheid
Author of report condemning Israel ruled against teenage Mandela backers


Posted: November 22, 2009
5:19 pm Eastern

By Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

 

Richard Goldstone, the United Nations investigator whose controversial report recently accused Israel of war crimes, once sentenced a 13-year-old boy to prison for protesting South African apartheid.

The case was one of several of Goldstone's questionable and highly criticized rulings during some of apartheid South Africa 's most violent years.

Goldstone served as a judge on South Africa 's Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 until he was appointed judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court in 1989 – all during South Africa 's apartheid regime.

In a blog piece at the Huffington Post, researcher Ashley Rindsberg references a case in which Goldstone ruled against the 1986 appeal of a 13-year-old boy who had been sentenced to jail for disrupting school as a protest against apartheid and increasingly draconian "emergency laws" used to squelch opposition to the government.

The New York Times reported Goldstone provided no immediate comment on his decision to uphold the sentence of the lower court.

Rindsberg also pointed out that Goldstone ruled against two appellants who had been convicted for possession of a cassette tape that contained a recording of an interview with Oliver Tambo, who, along with Nelson Mandela, was a founding member of the African National Congress's Youth League. The ANC has been South Africa 's ruling party since the establishment of nonracial democracy in 1994.

Goldstone ruled that by possessing the tape, the two young men had violated South Africa 's Internal Security Act No. 74 of 1982 – a piece of legislation that some human rights scholars have called a crucial weapon in the regime's "arsenal of terrorism legislation."

Goldstone commented in that case that Tambo's opening words on the recording indicated "beyond a reasonable doubt that the cassette in question was published or disseminated under the direction or guidance or on behalf of the African National Congress."

According to Goldstone's Supreme Court ruling on the case, the tapes also included audio of Tambo encouraging the people of South Africa to resist the apartheid regime, as well as the leader's call to "let us change our own country into the kind of society we want it to be."

Rindsberg noted Goldstone's ruling against the 13-year-old boy transpired amidst a wave of national protests and school disruptions by South Africa 's black youth against apartheid. Authorities at the time responded with mass detention of almost 2,000 children who participated in the protests or who were suspected of doing so.

Goldstone was slammed by South African human rights organi za tions for his 1986 ruling against the boy. He later told the New York Times that South Africa 's emergency laws left him "no way out."

Goldstone recently penned a U.N. report that claimed both Hamas and Israel were guilty of war crimes during the Jewish state's defensive war in Ga za last December and January.

Goldstone's report claimed Israel deliberately targeted civilians during the Ga za conflict, which started after Hamas refused to extend a cease-fire. The terrorist group instead launched a rocket offensive against Israeli population centers. The U.N. report equated Israel , which worked to minimize civilian casualties in Ga za , to Hamas, which utilized civilians as human shields and fired rockets at Jewish cities from Palestinian hospitals and apartment buildings.

During the Ga za war, Israel sent hundreds of thousands of text messages and placed tens of thousands of calls warning local Palestinians of incoming attacks against Hamas' military infrastructure in Ga za .

As WND previously reported, Goldstone's investigation may have relied on false witnesses and Palestinian misinformation.

 

 

3.  I think that "Kick a Jew Day" is a great idea.  Go to  http://www.abc-7.com/Global/story.asp?S=11558731#   For a list of Jews who should be kicked, go to www.isracampus.org.il

 

 

4.  Turkeys:  http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/26/turkeys-of-the-year-by-michelle-malkin/

 

5.  Dear Barack:  http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/41578

 

6.  Israeli "Academics" seeking Israel's annihilation thru the Alternative Information Center:  http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Lee%20Kaplan%20-%20Israeli%20Academics%20doing%20the%20dirty%20work%20for%20the%20AIC.htm

 

 

 

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Amnon Rubinstein, ex-Minister of Education from Meretz, Dean of IDC, denounces Leftist Fascism at Tel Aviv University; Denounces Neve Gordon

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1258705173959&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
 

Freedom of expression belongs to professors and students alike

Nov. 23, 2009
Amnon Rubinstein , THE JERUSALEM POST
(Dean, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya)

According to a recent report in Ha'aretz, students at Tel Aviv University are complaining bitterly about leftist professors. The students are said to be hurt by the professors' positions, "but are afraid to express contrary views, lest this harm their grades."

So wrote Prof. Nira Hativa, head of the university's center for advancement of teaching. She added that in many end-of-year feedback forms, students complained about professors who "attack the state of Israel, the IDF, the Zionist movement and even worse than that."

She also added that the complaints allege that "Leftist professors, as distinct from rightist ones, feel absolutely free to express their political views, even when there is no relevance whatsoever to the subject they teach."

The head of the university's student union tells of similar student complaints, and the talkbacks to this news item - whatever their credibility - also told about students who are afraid to argue with such professors.

THIS NEWS item did not surprise me. A small group of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel faculty members has turned Tel Aviv University into a podium from which to broadcast their political propaganda.

Two notable instances: a group of 30 professors signed a pro-Iranian petition last year warning against Israeli and American designs and "adventurism" against the Islamic Republic, without even mentioning its president's threat to wipe Israel off the map and his Holocaust-denying outbursts.

The second example was a conference held by the Tel Aviv Law School in which the subject was the alleged mistreatment of "political prisoners" (i.e. convicted Palestinian terrorists) that invited, as guest speaker, a released prisoner sentenced to 27 years in jail for throwing a bomb into a Jewish civilian bus.

This is not academic freedom. This is using academic podiums to deliver Israel-bashing propaganda.

When I taught at Columbia University, I could see how TAU guest professors would stoke the flames of anti-Israel rhetoric; one of them insisted that the university show the film Jenin, Jenin, which charges Israel with perpetrating a famously imaginary massacre.

The usual defense of these TAU excesses is that all professors are entitled to academic freedom. This is inherently true in principle. Academic freedom, a special niche of the freedom of speech principle enshrined in Israeli law, should incorporate marginal and iconoclastic views. This is especially true in a society like Israel which suffers from a constant state of emergency and stress.

But academic freedom, like all human rights, is not unlimited. Austrian and German courts rightly decided that Holocaust denial is not protected speech; Jean Paul Sartre went further, believing that all anti-Semitic expressions are unprotected by the right to freedom of speech.

A call to boycott Israel, such as was made by a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University's political science department, is certainly unprotected, in a similar way to the Supreme Court's ruling that a party which seeks the destruction of Israel cannot run in the Knesset elections.

But there is one further point: academics cannot seek shelter behind their much-touted freedom, while denying the students' right to express their own opinions. If what is alleged in Ha'aretz is true, then these TAU professors are violating the law.

Article 5 of the Student's Rights Law states this explicitly: "Every student has the freedom to express his views and opinions as to the contents of the syllabus and the values incorporated therein."

In other words, the students, too, have a measure of academic freedom. If the allegations made by the students - probably mainly in TAU's social sciences departments - are true, the university is violating the students' lawful rights.

The writer is a professor of law at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a former education minister and Knesset member, as well as the recipient of the 2006 Israel Prize in Law.

www.amnonrubinstein.org.


Monday, November 23, 2009

Shorts - while we await the ultimate Israeli Capitulation to the Hamas (over Shalit)

 

 

1.  Tel Aviv University in the News:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1129984.html

 

The rabbis in attendance included Zalman Baruch Melamed, rabbi of Beit El....


"The IDF sends solders to be educated at Tel Aviv University, where lecturers openly call for refusing orders. The demand [of not encouraging refusal of orders] cannot be imposed only on rabbis when the IDF funds refuseniks," he reportedly said.

 

 

2.  Hey no fair – how come Israel's Post-Zionists are not getting funds?  Or are they?  http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1130072.html

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/columbia_rutgers_on_spy_group_gift_JOTKcEIJ5qgzRWPVeBxxNN

 

 

3.  Remember the Hebrew University's thesis that showed that Jewish soldiers do not rape Arabs because the Jews are such racists?   Well, now comes

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134565

First-Ever Conference on Arab's Anti-Jewish Sexual Harassment

 

No doubt Hebrew University will proclaim these terrorists progressive protesters against racism!

 

A panel of experts and activists assembled at Likud headquarters in Tel Aviv Sunday, the International Day for Combating Violence against Women, to discuss one feminist topic that leftist feminists do not talk about: nationalistic sexual harassment by Arabs.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar Ilan University provided a short history of women's objectification in Islamic culture, from the days of Mohammed to the current mass rape in Darfur. He explained that from its outset, Islam allowed "mut'ah" marriages, a form of temporary marriage for pleasure, which enables a man to marry a woman for a period of time that can be measured in hours or even minutes, solely for the purpose of his gratification. This form of marriage is still allowed among Shi'ite Muslims, he said.

Jurist and journalist Daphne Netanyahu explained to the audience, which was made up mostly but not solely of women, that feminism was developed by the Left and is the successor to communism. She said that feminism, like communism, is opposed to nationalism and it expects a Jewish woman to identify with an Arab woman who raised her son to be a terrorist more than she identifies with her own husband, father or son.

Likud Knesset Member Tzipi Hotobeli told the gathering that several months ago she was invited, as the chairman of the Knesset Committee for Advancement of Women's Status, to visit a hostel in Jerusalem for Jewish women who had left abusive relationships with Arabs. She met a group of 20 women aged 15 to 30, and discovered to her surprise that these women had not come from "peripheral" areas but from central Israel.

She also visited a religious group in Yafo, where Arabs frequently threaten their Jewish neighbors, and learned of a growing phenomenon of Jewish girls in the central Yafo High School who are seduced by Arabs and marry into Islam.

Anat Cohen of Hevron told of a repeated pattern of sexual harassment of women in Hevron by Arabs as part of an ongoing campaign aimed at intimidation and humiliation of the Jews. She said that she had turned to the police and repeatedly demanded, in vain, that they do something about the problem. When an Arab accosts a Jewish woman and a Jewish man intervenes to protect her, the police arrest the Jew and not the Arab, she said.

Gil Ronen, who heads the Familists organization, spoke of a leftist-feminist "mafia" in academia and the press which censors all attempts to challenge its absolute authority on all matters pertaining to men, women and the relations between them. The right wing, he says, needs to take back morality, because "he who controls morality controls the country."   

Amit Barak of the growing student movement Im Tirtzu told stories similar to Cohen's regarding Upper Nazareth – a town founded to create a Jewish presence in a predominantly Arab environment. Gradually, he said, Arabs are moving into the town and Jews are moving out. The daily threat of harassment which women face when walking down the street in Nazareth Illit is a major consideration causing many families to leave, he explained. 

Attorney Tamar Har-Paz of the Zionist Women's Forum, the group that organized the panel, said that it intends to fight for recognition by the establishment and to seek funding for its activity. One idea the group would like to advance involves the creation of neighborhood patrols to give Jewish women and men greater safety in the streets of the mixed cities. 

 

4.  Dersh on Judge Goldtone's jihad:  http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3809194,00.html

 

 

5.  Anti-democratic judicial activism, where the courts invent laws that the legislature refuses to pass, strikes again:  http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134549

 

6.  20 years of treason:  http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134549

 

7.  Foreign Government Funding for NGO Political Activity in Israel

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009, 1-4pm
Jerusalem Hall, Knesset

NGO Monitor invites you to attend a conference under the auspices of Minister Michael Eitan and MK Zeev Elkin on Foreign Government Funding for NGO Political Activity in Israel.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play an important role in shaping government policy and public opinion on many core issues in Israel. They receive tens of millions of shekels per year from foreign governments, as well as from bodies such as the EU, to finance their activities. Details as to the extent and nature of this funding have recently been documented in a research report (Hebrew) published jointly by NGO Monitor and the Institute for Zionist Strategies. The conference will deal with the political, diplomatic and legal issues raised by this phenomenon, as well as with legislative proposals put forward in response.

 
 
8.  The Jerusalem Post reports that Bibi Netanyahu's brother-in-law is calling on Netanyahu to resign rather than sign the cowardly capitulation to the Hamas that will release hundreds of murderers. and will result in untold numbers of murdered Jews.
 
  Who says that no one in the Netanyahu family has any common sense?

 


Sunday, November 22, 2009

The Israeli Court Gets one Right for a Change

 

 

(Apologies to those who got the posting yesterday about Abe Lincoln's battle against the Two-State Solution carrying a long address list in the header.  I had meant it to be in BSS, not CC.  Sorry – I am getting old!)

 

 

1.  Haaretz reports gleefully that the Israeli military command in the West Bank issued an order that any settlers who cuss at soldiers at checkpoints should be arrested.

 

      Now, let's put aside the constitutional question of whether cussing at and insulting soldiers should be protected speech.  I can live with a system that penalizes hooligans of any sort who cuss Israeli soldiers.  But the real problem here is that, like so much else in Israel, the new order is being implemented in a discriminatory manner that coddles the Left and panders to the anti-Semitic "anarchists."   While some guttersnipes from the Right do in fact cuss soldiers, vulgar and violent attacks on Israeli soldiers and police by the Left take place every single week in the West Bank.  The Israeli leftists, with their Palestinian terrorist friends, joined by the "internationals" and "anarchists" from the International Solidarity Movement (or ISM, which really stands for I Support Murder), attack Israeli soldiers guarding the construction of Israel's security fence all the time.  The army is under orders to coddle them and not arrest them.

 

   And since the army is now going to arrest settlers who behave in an uncivilized way, when will the police and the University of Haifa shut down the "ALEF List."  The "ALEF" list is a chat list of anti-Semites and Neo-Nazis that operates under the auspices of the University of Haifa.  See this:  http://isracampus.org.il/ALEF%20Watch.htm

 

   A few months ago it circulated materials with the photos and addresses of Israeli army officers and with the caption "War Criminals."   When someone circulated the photo of an Arab judge in Tel Aviv with his address, the police interpreted that as attempted murder.  The ALEF list's distribution of the photos of army officers was even more clearly a call for murdering them.  For details on this story, go here:  http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Alef%20watch%20-%20Dorothy%20Naor%20-%20incitement%20to%20murder.htm

 

   If cussing soldiers is criminal behavior, what is this?

 

2.   Now as reluctant as I am to concede that the dual Israeli court system has done something proper and correct, I have to concede that it has done so this past week.

 

    It seems that one Matan Cohen, a young "anarchist" from the above-mentioned hooligan gangs that attack Israeli police, suffered a serious injury to one of his eyes.  Cohen sued Israel in Israeli court for millions of shekels, claiming that his eye was damaged as a result of rubber bullets being fired at the rampaging rioters in whose midst he was jihading.  Cohen and his buddies went on a media campaign, appearing on Channel 10, and accused the soldiers of trying to murder him.

 

   Just one itsy-bitsy problem.  The judge, Dalia Ganot in Tel Aviv District Court, investigated and found  out that young Cohen's eye was the victim of a rock being thrown by his jihad friends at the police and soldiers, a rock his trajectory his the wrong Jew (or – if you prefer – the right Jew) by mistake.  Cohen was standing out of range of the rubber bullets and video film of the events showed that no soldiers were shooting anything at all when he was injured.  The judge added diplomatically that Cohen is a person for whom the facts and the truth are never in danger of being found in his possession.  She noted that Cohen had kept changing his version of his story.

 

   And best of all, Judge Ganot hit Cohen with court costs in the amount of 50,000 shekels.

 

   I would have preferred of course that the Judge had ruled that even if Cohen HAD been shot by a rubber bullet while assaulting the cops and the soldiers, he would STILL be un-entitled to any compensation.  In fact, he should have been charged the cost of the bullet.

 

 

 

3.  Long but very interesting read:

 

http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=3&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=624&PID=0&IID=3186&TTL=How_to_Fight_the_Campus_Battle_against_Old_and_New_Anti-Semites:_Motifs,_Strategies,_and_Metho

How to Fight the Campus Battle against Old and New Anti-Semites:

Motifs, Strategies, and Methods*

Manfred Gerstenfeld

 


Saturday, November 21, 2009

A Draft of a Letter from Prime Minister Netanyahu to President Obama

 

 

A Draft of the Letter to President Obama that Bibi Netanyahu should Send

 

By Steven Plaut

 

 

Dear Mister President:

 

    In recent days you have called for a freeze on all construction activities in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo.  It has been your opinion that this is "occupied territory," because it lies outside the 1949 ceasefire lines that separated Israel from the Kingdom of Jordan while the latter illegally held East Jerusalem until 1967.  Gilo of course has also been the target of numerous terrorist attacks from the very same savages that your State Department would like to see seize control of Gilo and of Jerusalem's Holy sites in the Old City.

 

    Well, Mister President, I have taken your words under careful consideration.  I have reached the conclusion that you are correct.  It is indeed time to put a stop to construction in the capital city in the area of disputed ownership beyond the Green Line.  The disputed area must remain as it is, with no new building at all, until a new state is erected that can take it over and perhaps even establish its national capital there.

 

   I am of course referring to Alexandria, Virginia.  Alexandria, and all the Virginia territories seized by the United States using force of arms that lie across the Potomac, are outside the legitimate boundaries of Washington, DC.  They lie across the Green Line, by which I mean the Potomac River, which turns green in the summer.  Obviously Alexandria is part of the sovereign state of Virginia. 

 

    Now it is true that no Confederacy exists today, just like no Palestinian state exists.  But who is to say that none will ever arise within the framework of diplomatic free exchange?  And if the Confederacy does achieve statehood and independence, its leaders will naturally wish its capital to be in Alexandria.  Richmond is a little too far away.

 

   Since the ultimate status of Alexandria is a subject of contention, the only fair thing to do is to halt all American construction activity there at once.  Ditto for Arlington.  To continue to build there is a provocation and an obstacle to peace.  And we really do think the time has come to remove that military outpost and illegal settlement out of Arlington that you people maintain in the Pentagon.

  

     I realize that some people reject the idea of an independent Confederacy as inherently racist, and that various anti-democratic pro-violence extremist groups are leading the campaign for such an independent state.  But those groups are light years more progressive, peaceful and tolerant of ethnic differences than are the Islamofascists to whom you are trying to grant statehood in the Palestinian-occupied Jewish homelands.

 

  

Respectfully yours,

 

Benjamin Netanyahu

Prime Minister, Jerusalem – Capital of Israel


Thursday, November 19, 2009

British Lies about a Zionist Lobby Cabal (Wall St Journal)

  • The Wall Street Journal
  • Another Vast Jewish Conspiracy

    British media and society are gripped by lies about a "secret" Israel lobby controlling foreign policy.

    By ROBIN SHEPHERD

    Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.

    The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide." The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.

    In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper's flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group's virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a "Protocols of Zion"-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.

    Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain.

    Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark  documentary, "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby," on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran's Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.

    The makers of the documentary—top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors' own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power.

    It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.

    "The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza," they wrote. "We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it 'strives to protect innocent life.' This remark was not intended satirically."

    Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.

    If you think this all sounds familiar, you'd be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"—another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.

    But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.

    It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. One of them, Poju Zabludowicz, the billionaire funder of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is good friends with Madonna—not exactly the kind of company you'd choose if you were trying to hide behind a veil of obscurity.

    Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment's reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.

    Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4's widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby's "seditious behavior," its "disgusting attack on British democracy," "the hand of global Zionism at work," and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: "We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out."

    If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.

    Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel's defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.

    Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel—already a small and diminishing group in Britain—will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the "Lobby."

    Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.

    Mr. Shepherd is director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His new book, "A State Beyond the Pale: Europe's Problem With Israel," has just been published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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    Wednesday, November 18, 2009

    Harvard's Jewish Hamas Dumpling

    http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/18/collaborators-in-the-war-against-the-jews-sara-roy/
     

    Collaborators in the War Against the Jews: Sara Roy

    Posted By Steven Plaut On November 18, 2009 @ 12:20 am In FrontPage | No Comments

    Sara_Roy_2

    Sara Roy, who holds a non-tenured "research" position at Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), claims to be a "political economist," although she apparently has no training in economics or political science.  She also claims to be an expert in Middle East Studies, but has no degree in that either.  Her PhD is in Education.

    Roy claims to be an expert on the political economy [1] of the Gaza Strip, but her real expertise is in anti-Israel leftist political propaganda.  She worked on her doctoral dissertation in education part of the time while living for a while in the Gaza Strip, and got paid as a a research assistant by the West Bank Data Base Project, a propaganda project directed by anti-Israel radical Israeli [2] non-academic leftists.

    Roy's Middle East studies publications are by and large propaganda diatribes, and many appear in non-academic anti-Israel propaganda magazines, some of which appear in openly anti-Semitic web magazines [1], at least one having intimate ties to the PLO.   Phyllis Chessler calls her one of "the most savage critics—of America and Israel."  Roy is a prolific writer of newspaper op-eds and spends much of her time giving "expert" lectures about the Arab-Israel conflict.

    Sara Roy was born Jewish, and she uses this circumstance as a lever to better support Israel's enemies. She refers frequently to something she calls a "Jewish ethical perspective" whenever bashing Israel and cites her "Jewish roots" when promoting the Hamas on anti-Semitic web sites such as [3] the Neo-Stalinist Counterpunch.

    Roy is, in fact, arguably the leading apologist for Hamas [4] in American academia today.  She is the inventor of an imaginary "New Hamas," [4] a fictional group that seeks peace and social wellbeing for Palestinians, unlike the real Hamas, which seeks to carry out a second Holocaust of Jews.  Roy has been described as [5] "the ringmaster of Harvard's bash Israel circus."   According to Middle East scholar Martin Kramer [6]:

    'Her current project is the whitewashing [7] of Hamas, but she's best known for invidious comparisons [8] she drew in April 2002 between the Israeli occupation and the Holocaust. (She thinks being the child of Holocaust survivors gives her a license.) "There is no let-up," Roy moans about the criticisms of Middle Eastern studies. She's right about that. Permanent contention: get used to it.'

    Roy is so goofy that she was invited to give the Edward Said Lecture at the Australian [9] University of Adelaide in 2008.  The entire lecture was devoted, with frequent invocations of "Edward," to showing how the only lesson from eons of Jewish suffering is that everyone must support the Palestinian war against Israel.

    While enjoying unrestricted exposure in the media, she simultaneously claims that she is being censored by the Right Wing Conspiracy.  A case in point is the locally famous case of a book review which was rejected by Tufts University's Fletcher Forum of World Affairs [10].  In this essay she tried to trash Matthew Levitt's Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad [11] (2006) because it said mean things about the terror group. When the journal refused to run the piece,  she pouted that this constituted [12] a "blatant…case of censorship."   She has denounced [13] Campus-Watch [14] as well for its exposure of extremist propaganda in Middle East studies.  In her words, "What all this boils down to is an attempt to silence criticism of US policy, and put an end to disagreement with the neo-conservative agenda. It is not diversity that is being sought but conformity."

    When Roy gets bored with Harvard, she goes on anti-Israel speaking [15] walkabouts.  Her message is always the same:  The Palestinians are innocent victims of Israel's brutal oppression.  Hezb'Allah and Hamas terrorism is an entirely understable response to Israeli evil.  Israel gobbles up "Arab land [16]" out of imperialist obsession.  .   Every use of force by Israel is a brutal provocation; every act of terror by Arabs is a protest against occupation.

    Writing recently in the Harvard student [17] newspaper, Roy opined: "Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers. This context is undeniably one of mass suffering, created largely by Israel but with the active complicity of the international community, especially the U.S. and European Union, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank."  Got that?  Even the Palestininan opponents of Hamas and the EU are collaborators with Israel in its unspeakable crimes.  (Roy was subsequently taken apart for her bias [18] by a Harvard student writing in the paper.)

    Roy is the  author of two books: The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (1995), and The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment (1999).   To call her viewpoint one dimension is to praise it unjustly. Her repetitious theme is that there is nothing at all wrong with Palestinian society that cannot be blamed directly on the Jews.  Destroying the Palestinian economy is why Israel constructed its security fence [19], for instance; this decision had nothing at all to do with countless terrorist atrocities against Jews carried out by Palestinians.

    Her work in recent years at Harvard has been devoted to prettifying Hamas [20] and other Islamofascist movements among Palestinians, and to try to prove how moderate [21] they are.  In her "study" of Hamas [20], she displays complete ignorance as to the background of  Hamas [22] and its roots in the Islamofascist "Muslim Brotherhood" movement.  She paints it as a pastoral little social welfare group.  She has published at least one anti-Israel article together with someone [23] from a notorious Hamas front group, the so-called Gaza Community Mental Health Program.

    Writing in the al-Jazeera newspaper [24] – with its intimate links to al-Qaeda – in 2003, Roy insisted that the only way to stop Hamas terrorism was to first end Israel's "occupation."   But the following year Israel totally ended its occupation of Gaza. The direct consequence was the bloody campaign of Hamas rocket and other terror attacks from Gaza against Israeli civilians inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. This terror campaign directly lead to the "Cast Lead" military operation by Israel last year.  Roy has never apologized nor repudiated her earlier false prophecy.  To the contrary, the behavior of Hamas since Israel's Gaza withdrawal has simply persuaded her all the more that Israeli "occupation" is the exclusive cause of all Middle East violence, even when it does not exist.

    Roy is a nominal board member of Marc Ellis' [25] radically anti Israel Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University.  She sits on the boards of other anti-Israel organizations.  Like Norman Finkelstein, Roy uses the fact that her own parents were Holocaust survivors  to grant her own hatred of Israel and work against it [26] legitimacy.  As one example, she published the following in the "Journal of Palestine Studies," a propaganda magazine controlled by the PLO:  "[I]t was perhaps inevitable [because of her parents' experiences] that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue."  She then draws parallels between Nazi treatment of Jews and Israeli soldiers' treatment of Palestinians which, in her opinion, "were absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize." [Like Ellis, she argues obsessively that the only real lesson of value to be learned from the Holocaust of European Jews during World War II is that Israel has no right to exist.

    Articles in Frontpage's Collaborators series:

    Howard Zinn [27]

    Joel Beinin [28]

    Mark LeVine [29]

    Neve Gordon [30]

    Norman Finkelstein [31]

    Tony Judt [32]

    Michael Lerner [33]

    Marc H. Ellis [34]

    • Share/Bookmark [35]

    Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

    URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/18/collaborators-in-the-war-against-the-jews-sara-roy/

    URLs in this post:

    [1] expert on the political economy: http://www.counterpunch.org/roy10042006.html

    [2] anti-Israel radical Israeli: http://frontpagemag.com../../AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Low/Content.IE5/TTTR00YH/isracampus.org.il

    [3] on anti-Semitic web sites such as: http://www.counterpunch.org/roy04072007.html

    [4] leading apologist for Hamas: http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/4195

    [5] been described as: http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/7300

    [6] Martin Kramer: http://sandbox.blog-city.com/sandbox_april_2004.htm

    [7] whitewashing: http://www.ceip.org/files/pdf/2004-02-17-roy.pdf

    [8] comparisons: http://www.afsc.org/pwork/0212/021222.htm

    [9] Edward Said Lecture at the Australian: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/esml/transcripts/2008/ESML-BY-Sara-ROY-2008.pdf

    [10] Fletcher Forum of World Affairs: http://fletcher.tufts.edu/forum/

    [11] Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC04.php?CID=265

    [12] she pouted that this constituted: http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2007/07/sara-roy-the-harvard-professor-who

    [13] She has denounced: http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/1098

    [14] Campus-Watch: http://frontpagemag.com../../AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Low/Content.IE5/TTTR00YH/campus-watch.org

    [15] goes on anti-Israel speaking: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2001/04/23/3008

    [16] gobbles up "Arab land: http://www.lebanonwire.com/0309/03092318DS.asp

    [17] recently in the Harvard student: http://www.thecrimson.com/favicon.ico

    [18] taken apart for her bias: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/7/1/gazas-past-and-present-to-the

    [19] why Israel constructed its security fence: http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=3

    [20] prettifying Hamas: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer214/214_roy.html

    [21] to try to prove how moderate: http://cmes.hmdc.harvard.edu/people/research-associates

    [22] background of  Hamas: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35191

    [23] least one anti-Israel article together with someone: http://www.counterpunch.org/roy01282008.html

    [24] in the al-Jazeera newspaper: http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2003%20Opinion%20Editorials/June%202003%20Opinion/20ob/How%20to%20stop%20Hamas,%20First,%20end%20the%20occupation,%20Sara%20Roy.htm

    [25] Marc Ellis': http://frontpagemag.com../readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36028

    [26] grant her own hatred of Israel and work against it: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/from-the-brilliant-and-wonderful-sara-roy

    [27] Howard Zinn: http://frontpagemag.com/2009/10/21/collaborators-in-the-campus-war-against-israel-and-the-jews-howard-zinn/

    [28] Joel Beinin: http://frontpagemag.com../2009/10/16/collaborators-in-the-campus-war-against-israel-and-the-jews-joel-beinin-%E2%80%93-by-steven-plaut/

    [29] Mark LeVine: http://frontpagemag.com../2009/10/14/collaborators-in-the-campus-war-against-israel-and-the-jews-mark-levine-%E2%80%93-by-steven-plaut/

    [30] Neve Gordon: http://frontpagemag.com../2009/10/13/collaborators-in-the-campus-war-against-israel-and-the-jews-neve-gordon-by-john-perazzo/

    [31] Norman Finkelstein: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36406

    [32] Tony Judt: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36238

    [33] Michael Lerner: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36178

    [34] Marc H. Ellis: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36028

    [35] Image: http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Ffrontpagemag.com%2F2009%2F11%2F18%2Fcollaborators-in-the-war-against-the-jews-sara-roy%2F&linkname=Collaborators%20in%20the%20War%20Against%20the%20Jews%3A%20Sara%20Roy


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