Miriam's Topical Topics.

Lessons to be learned from Holocaust/Shoa

2009-07-12T04:10:00.000-07:00

We are living in a post holocaust period. Yet the threats to the Jews living in the land of Israel are now coming from a fanatical and tyrannical Iran. Yet no one seems overly concerned. We Jews seem to be living in our wonderland, the political leaders can not seem to get together to make a stand against Ahmadinejad and the Iranian nuclear program. The Israeli parliament can't agree on any method of ending the increasing terror on its border and seems each day coming closer to giving the (Arabs) their own government with out seeing any concessions from them.
Are we falling into the trap that the Jews in Europe did some sixty-seventy years earlier?
Why do we not learn from history the horrors that crazy dictators like Ahmadinejad can bring?

http://www.jewishmag.com/135mag/warsaw_ghetto_uprising/warsaw_ghetto_uprising.htm

If we could say that there was a bright spot in the gloomy and somber history of the holocaust, perhaps we could point to the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.
If in all the dark and disgusting annals of recent history, when Jews were led to murder like sheep let to slaughter, when Jews were tortured for fun, it was the revolt in the Warsaw ghetto.
This alone stands out as a monument to the Jewish ability to resist the Nazi onslaught. Yet I believe that it is precisely in the story of the uprising that the deeper cause of the holocaust can be seen.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the causes of the Holocaust
By N. Shuldig –

July 2009

Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933. His plans were obvious from his speeches and his book, Mein Kampf, first published in, yet we find that the Jews did not seem to be particularly worried or anxious at that time. As Hitler became stronger and bolder and began instituting his laws against the Jews, and allowing atrocities to take place against the Jews, most German Jews felt that this would pass. After all, was not Germany an enlightened country; wasn't Germany one of the first countries to give Jews equal rights; didn't Jews serve in the German Parliament, the Bundestag, and distinguish themselves in the first World War? Jews enjoyed equal rights in Germany from the mid 1800's and participated fully in the nation's affairs.
Yet with all of this goodness bestowed upon them from the previous German governments, 1933 saw the beginning of the oppression of the Jews in Germany. Jewish stores and offices were officially boycotted; Jews were refused work and fired; Jewish children were not welcome in public schools. As the years progressed, the oppression increased. In 1938 Kristallnacht increased the persecution and began a series of wanton killing and confiscation of Jewish properties. It was not until 1941 that Auschwitz was chosen to be the first extermination camp.

(The rest of the article is on the link above)

ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS REQUIRED.
http://picasaweb.google.com.au/AUSSIEHEGMA/WALKFORHARMONY?feat=email#
You are invited to view photo album: WALK FOR HARMONY

RELIGIOUS POLICE IN GAZA

2009-07-06T03:47:00.000-07:00

The difference between Gaza and the West Bank for the Palestinian Arab population is a difference between modernity in the latter and Islamic fundamentalism in the former. Democracy might have got Hamas elected to rule over the Gazans, but did the people really want an Iran or Saudi or Taliban-style government to rule them?
They may have wanted to rid themselves of corruption in Arafat's Fatah Movement and get more services for themselves. But a religious police? "The Free Gaza Movement" had better know what freedom they really want for the Palestinians. MM
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Report: Gaza Religious Police Now Official

by Maayana Miskin

A violent group calling itself “The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” has carried out attacks in Gaza since shortly after Hamas took over the area in mid-2007. Now a female Arab journalist reports that the “unaffiliated” group is clearly an official branch of Hamas, charged with enforcing the group's strict interpretation of Islamic law.

The journalist, Asma abu-Ghul, told Al-Arabiya that she was stopped by the committee's policemen at the beach. Ghul said she was detained for allegedly laughing too loudly and appearing in public with uncovered hair.

The “prevention of vice” police body reports directly to Hamas's Ministry of Waqf Affairs, Ghul said. The force is increasingly visible on the streets of Gaza, she reported, and its officers patrol public beaches and parks as well as businesses such as restaurants and coffee shops.

Hamas Denies Connection

Hamas officials admit that Hamas police patrol beaches and may tell women who they believe are dressed immodestly to go elsewhere. However, Hamas has not claimed any affiliation to the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, and has refused to even admit that the group exists.

The committee lists its goal as hunting down “slaves of the devil who commit blasphemy.” Its first public act, in late 2007, was to beat a local singer for giving a concert. Soon afterwards, members of the group carried out a vicious assault on two residents of southern Gaza accused of “disrespect for Allah.”

A similarly-named group exists in Saudi Arabia as an official government body. The Saudi Arabia organization is tasked with enforcing religious laws, such as ensuring that men and women who are not immediate family members do not interact and maintaining Islamic dress codes.

Police forces responsible for enforcing Islamic law exist in other Muslim states as well, among them Afghanistan and Iran.

Hamas Funds Koran Studies, Supports Covering Girls' Hair

Hamas recently announced that it would cut its employees' salaries by 1% in order to finance Koran studies in Gaza. Former Hamas terrorists and those imprisoned in Israel report that Koran study centers are often the place where young boys in Gaza are first recruited to Islamic terrorist groups.

Last year, the group officially adopted the traditional Muslim criminal code, which includes penalties such as lashes, amputation and crucifixion.

According to the Jerusalem Post, residents of Gaza believe Hamas plans to make hair covering mandatory for all girls in school in the near future. The requirement would affect girls as young as age five.

IRANIAN REVOLUTION #2.?

2009-06-25T02:37:00.000-07:00

OBAMA/CHAMBERLAINE ATTEMPT AT RECONCILIATION.

So US.President Obama thinks that he should still pursue dialogue with the Iranian rulers.

The Mullahs, Ayatollas and their spokesman Ahmadinejad have chosen to rule according to "Mein Kampf", complete with the trappings of a "democratic election", setting up a Gestapo (Revolutionary Guard), the Hitler Jugend (Basij militia), spending vast sums of money on arms rather than on their people and of course getting stuck into the "Zionists to be wiped off the earth". Those theocratic rulers don't seem to care anymore than Hitler did, who gets killed in their boundless ambitions to expand their hegemony not only at home but over ever vaster territories and nations like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and beyond.They want a Shia hegemony apparently.

A policy of intimidation with all resistance to be quashed is part of it, but perhaps the Iranian people who are slightly more sophisticated and independent of thought than the Germans were, have recognised their leaders for what they are and are prepared to cast off this kind of rule.They probably realize that they will only lead them to the same self-destruction as did the Nazis.

Let us hope that at least some good will arise from the current Iranian people's sacrifices and not finish up to have been in vain, or all our free nations may end up suffering a WW2/3 fate,- in spite of Obama's Chamberlaine-like advances!
But with the US and its allies deserting the Iraqis, who will help the Iranian people now?

JUST AS THE AMERICAN ARMY IS PREPARING TO LEAVE IRAQ TO THE IRAQI ARMY, THE VIOLENCE HAS ERUPTED WORSE THAN EVER AGAIN, WITH DOZENS KILLED AND HUNDREDS MAIMED.

Perhaps Israel could save the Iranian people?! Wouldn't that be ironic!So much for their Islamic revolutions and Islamic Theocracies. Hopefully Hamas, Hetzbollah, Taliban etal. are taking note.
mm

IRAN AND ITS WOMEN: a new film.

2009-06-22T05:10:00.000-07:00

A Revolution Named Zahra:

by Kathleen Parker .

In some parts of the world, a woman can be destroyed at a man's whim without consequence.

There's a "new" old name suddenly in circulation that is both filled with ancient history and ripe with a revolutionary spirit for today's game-changing events.

Zahra.

Well known to Muslims, Fatima az-Zahra was one of four daughters of the prophet Muhammad. Today, Zahra is also the name of two important, outspoken women of Iran.

One is Zahra Rahnavard, the courageous and charismatic wife of the allegedly defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. The other is Zahra Khanum, the equally courageous and charismatic woman portrayed in a new movie, "The Stoning of Soraya M.," about the death of an Iranian woman on trumped-up charges of adultery.

Begging forgiveness for this confederacy of cliches, but we seem to have a perfect storm of tipping points.

Beneath the surface of news blasts covering Iran's tainted elections, riots, protester deaths and government crackdowns, a subtext of women's rights is emerging. It is a subtext only to the extent that women's oppression isn't often acknowledged directly -- not even by the leader of the free world. But human rights are at the core of what is occurring now.

A government that oppresses its people can only sustain itself with violence, as the world is witnessing yet again as thousands take to Iran's streets. And, in Iran as elsewhere in the Muslim world, violence against women -- as well as against homosexuals and others considered inferior according to the mullahs' masculinist standards -- isn't only permitted but justified with religious doctrine.

Mousavi challenged these notions -- and the government, apparently, saw fit that he lose. Even in the midst of so much heat, Mousavi's wife, Zahra, on Monday urged students at a Tehran University protest to hold fast in their resistance. Climb to the rooftops, she said, and shout, "God is great!"

Zahra R., who holds a PhD in political science and was an adviser to former president Mohammad Khatami, also has been vocal in urging reforms that would eliminate "morality police" as well as end discrimination against women.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that monument to self-confident masculinity, reportedly was so undone by Zahra's power on the campaign trail that he questioned whether her doctorate was legitimate.

Americans will begin getting a glimpse of the other Zahra as soon as "The Stoning" opens in select cities. Based on a true story, the movie is adapted from French Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam's 1994 novel of the same name.

In the film, produced by Stephen McEveety ("Braveheart" and "The Passion of the Christ"), the journalist-author is stranded in a small village when his car breaks down. Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo) dodges the threatening stares of her fellow villagers and persuades the reporter to come to her house and record her story. Evil has visited her village, she tells him, and she wants the world to know.

Briefly, Zahra's niece Soraya, mother of four, had been accused of adultery by her abusive, unfaithful husband. The truth was that he wanted a divorce so he could marry another. When Soraya refused, he and the village mullah conspired to accuse her of adultery.

As the title suggests, Soraya was convicted and condemned to death by stoning.

I saw a rough cut of this film several months ago. Since that time, I've been unable to shake the story or images that I suspect will haunt me forever. Be forewarned: It is brutal. McEveety and director Cyrus Nowrasteh felt that the stoning scene needed to be accurately portrayed or the film would be an insult to Soraya's suffering.

It will be hard for many to get through to the end, but staying with the movie brings a reward. Despite the brutality, the film is also beautiful and true. It reminds us that a woman in some parts of the world can be destroyed at a man's whim without consequence. The beauty is that truth will out.

"The Stoning," which will be in most theaters June 26, was intentionally timed for release after Iran's elections. Dennis Rice, charged with promoting the movie, figured the election would help create interest, but he didn't anticipate the serendipitous intersection of the two Zahras. "Irony?" he asks. "I think not."

In Arabic, Zahra means "The Shining One."

In English, we'd call that a beacon.
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This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.

See this article online:
http://www.aish.com/societyWork/arts/A_Revolution_Named_Zahra.asp

Israel, Obama and American Jewry. (Shmuel Boteach)

2009-06-21T06:43:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION: It was obvious that as soon as President Barak Hussein Obama would be elected, he was going to set himself up as a 'friend' of the Islamic world. To prove it, he has to prove that he is pressurizing Israel somehow. Stopping building in the Settlement communities, seemed to be the easiest way to do that probably. Rabbi Boteach argues that the Jewish community in the USA is too ready to support Obama in this. (MM)

The coming storm: Obama and American Jewry

Jun. 15, 2009
Shmuley Boteach ,

THE JERUSALEM POST

There's a storm coming. It will pit a well-organized community of substantial resources but also substantial insecurity - particularly when it comes to charges of dual loyalty - against a popular president of considerable eloquence but misguided policies that identify Israeli settlements as the main obstacle to Middle East peace. The inevitable clash will separate sunshine Jewish patriots who back Israel when convenient against those who stand with Israel even when it means losing their invitation to the White House Hanukka party.

The bogus issue of settlements is already being swallowed whole by many well-meaning Jews. Last week Dan Fleshler, a leader of Americans for Peace Now, wrote in the New Jersey Jewish Standard that Obama has no choice but to pressure Israel because "it is fruitless for a well-armed, occupying power to negotiate the terms of a viable settlement with an almost defenseless occupied people unless a third party mediates and presses both sides."

In reading Fleshler one wonders whether he has been himself occupied with building a settlement on the moon with no knowledge of events on Earth. Is he seriously suggesting that the thousands of Katyusha rockets and nonstop suicide bombers that have killed more than a thousand Israelis (the equivalent of 30,000 dead Americans) have come from a "defenseless" foe? Would Fleshler likewise argue that the US ought to have pressure from, say, Russia or China to make peace with the terrorists in Afghanistan, seeing that America now represents a "well-armed, occupying power" against the comparatively defenseless Taliban? Or is it only Israel that is forbidden from defending itself.

Sorry Mr. Fleshler, but Jewish values do not dictate that the only moral Jew is a dead one who refuses to fight in the face of a 60-year terror onslaught.

Any return to the 1967 borders, which is what Obama's attack on the settlements represents, is simply suicide for Israel. The borders are utterly indefensible. The Arabs know it, which is why they press for it. Had Israel not dismantled its settlements in Gush Katif, Gaza would not have become a terrorist state ruled by Hamas, an organization that kills even more Palestinians than it does Israelis.

BUT MISGUIDED Jewish apologists aside, are the rest of us prepared to speak up against the policies of the administration? By this I do not mean the drunken racist rants of the American Jewish hooligans who got attention disgracing themselves on YouTube last week; their bigoted drivel against our democratically elected president represents an abomination to Judaism. I have already written several columns lamenting how a small minority of the large and praiseworthy contingent of Jewish youth who go to Israel from the US after high school ostensibly to study in yeshivot end up instead hanging out on Rehov Ben Yehuda making asses of themselves. That they have no proper supervision and that they are allowed to go through their year in a drunken stupor is an outrage that must be finally addressed by the institutions which host them.

Rather, I mean courageous and intelligent criticism that accepts the president's praiseworthy efforts in making peace but decries his soft posture on tyranny when he bows to an Arab potentate who oppresses women and warmly embraces the dictator of Venezuela.

Asher Lopatin was one of the first students I met at Oxford and the university's first Orthodox Rhodes scholar. Today he is the successful rabbi of one of Chicago's most youthful congregations. He is also Rahm Emanuel's rabbi. But that did not stop him from criticizing the White House chief of staff in Newsweek for his unfair pressure on Israel. Lopatin could easily have basked in the aura of being rabbi to one of the most influential men in the world. Instead, he spoke truth to power.

In promoting the new translation of his Hebrew prayer book, British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks constantly reminds us that he studies Bible with the prime minister of the United Kingdom. That's nice. But a few years ago Sacks spoke out publicly against Israel, telling London's Guardian newspaper, "There are things that happen on a daily basis which make me feel very uncomfortable as a Jew."

Sacks is a brilliant man but with a long history of pandering to whatever audience he happens to be addressing. He would do well to remember the admonishment of Mordechai to Esther on the responsibility of being close to political power: "If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place."

But while Europe and the UK are significant, the main battle lines will be here in the US and now is the time for American Jewry to organize. From schools to universities to synagogues and JCCs, we must make it clear that when 78 percent of Jews voted for Obama and filled his campaign coffers with cash it was not in the expectation of biased policies against Israel. We're upset, disappointed and we won't take it. We'll march in the streets, write op-eds and blogs, and publish ads making it clear that America should be standing with the Middle East's only democracy and America's most reliable ally.

As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, our president undermines his moral authority when he pledges that henceforth America will "forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions," but then only applies that pledge to Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, but not to Israel.

Last year, right after Obama captured the democratic nomination, I received a phone call from his campaign asking if I would serve as one of the national chairs of "Rabbis for Obama." It was a tempting offer. I was moved by the candidate's remarkable personal story, his iron discipline, his soaring oratory and, most of all, the fact that his victory would be the culmination of my hero Martin Luther King's dream of a man being judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. In the end I declined because I feared that Obama would draw a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians and pressure the former to appease the latter. But even I never suspected that it would happen so quickly and so lopsidedly.

The writer is the founder of This World: The Values Network. His upcoming book is The Blessing of Enough: Rejecting Material Greed, Embracing Spiritual Hunger

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371106463&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull[ Back to the Article ]
Copyright 1995- 2009 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/

Therapists to the Jews: psychologising the Jewish question!

2009-05-26T05:47:00.000-07:00

His analysis of Rose, Churchill and Lerman is correct, but I see it as a common fallacy among many of the Jewish Left,- they cannot imagine Jews sticking up for themselves. It is they who suffer from psychological guilt traumas. The modern Zionists have shed their feelings of inferiority, thanks to the brave Israelis who have known nothing but war and terror. Imagine,- they didn't give up and run away, but fought and fight back. The racists cannot take it, so they in turn have to accuse the Jews of racism against,- whom? Palestinians,- they are hardly the Left's favorite allies, but they'll do as long as they are anti-Jews. Only those Jews who feel guilty take it out on their own. See article
http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=6090&ICJS=139&article=1939.
But blaming it on some psychological pay-back is ludicrous!MM

Therapists to the Jews

by Shalom Lappin
Wednesday May 20, 2009

Psychologising the Jewish question

In the past few years an interesting mode of discourse has gained currency among some critics of Israel. It consists in characterizing most Israelis, and the Jews who are concerned about Israel's continued existence, as suffering from a deep collective psycho-pathology that conditions them to commit or to endorse systematic brutalization of the Palestinians. It takes Israel and its supporters to be acting out the effects of a long term historical trauma that reached its climax in the Holocaust. They are deflecting the intense anger, helplessness and shame accumulated over centuries of persecution in Europe on to innocent Arab victims in Israel/Palestine. These victims are surrogates for the real but no longer accessible oppressors of the Jews. The analogy driving this discourse is that of the abused child who grows into an abusive adult, imposing his childhood experiences of violence on members of his family and his adult environment.

Three clear examples of this psychologized view of the Israel-Palestine conflict are Jacqueline Rose's book The Question of Zion(Princeton University Press, 2005), Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children, recently staged at the Royal Court Theatre, and Anthony Lerman's article 'Must Jews always see themselves as victims' (The Independent, March 7, 2009). Rose argues that Zionism, and the country that it created, derive from the the same psychological disorder that generated the false messianism of Shabbtai Zvi and his followers. She regards it as a form of mass hysteria generated by the inability of Jews to respond rationally to prolonged suffering. Churchill adapts this diagnosis of Zionism to Israel's recent offensive in Gaza. She portrays Jewish children as obsessively raised with the collective memory of historical trauma as the pervasive background against which Israeli acts of murder and expulsion are justified or denied. Lerman invokes the work of Israeli political psychologist Daniel Bar Tal to claim that the inability of Israelis and Jews to deal adequately with the experience of the Holocaust has given rise to a persecution complex that is responsible for Israel's perverse behaviour towards the Palestinians, as well as the willingness of Jews abroad to support this behaviour.
There are at least five features of the psychologizing discourse worth noting. First, it provides an ostensibly scientific basis for attributing negative properties to an ethnic group. Inter alia, most (but not all) Israelis, and many of their Diaspora Jewish supporters suffer from a blood lust. They are insensitive to the suffering of innocent Palestinians. They are exclusively concerned with the welfare of their own people. They engage in illicit lobbying and hysterical political campaigning to promote a narrow and destructive group agenda. They refuse to acknowledge the normal constraints of universal human rights and morality. These are, of course, versions of longstanding anti-Jewish bigotries that infect European and Middle Eastern history. They are, however, rendered opaque and acceptable through translation into the psychological symptoms of a disturbed group. The painstaking clinical studies required to support serious psychological diagnoses are singularly absent from the psychologizing discourse. It is, in fact, a vintage case of pseudo-science in the service of prejudice. It does, however, serve an important political and cultural role. It renders acceptable attitudes and assumptions that would be inadmissible if expressed in traditional terms.

Second, the practitioners of psychologizing discourse do not, in general, present themselves as adversaries of Israel and the Jews. On the contrary, they are therapists moved by the highest motives of public responsibility. They seek to cure the patients of their collective disease by getting them to see the full extent of their malady and to recognize its roots in a historically disordered collective spirit. They do not see Israel and the Jews as evil, but as deeply pathological and in need of proper care. That they may, in many cases, prescribe a therapy that requires the patients (in the case of Israel) to cede their own collective existence is not an expression of hostility. It is a desire to free the patients from the agony that they are inflicting upon themselves and the rest of the world.
Third, this discourse is a particularly effective method for shutting down serious political discussion and controlling reaction. If members of the deranged group dissent from this account, their comments are summarily dismissed as the delusional resistance of patients to the benign efforts of the therapist to treat their illness. Moreover, events like Israel's operation in Gaza are not construed as the destructive and misguided actions of an unpleasant government, phenomena common enough in other parts of the world. They are taken to be direct expressions of a perverse national psychology working itself out with the grim inexorability of a medical condition. They require not the sort of criticism appropriate for normal people and countries, but a complete quarantine of the patients for their own good, as well as that of everyone else. Jews and Israelis do not act from the same motives that determine the behaviour, good or bad, of balanced people. Their conduct is the result of a diseased nature that requires radical revision to restore them to health.
Fourth, the psychologizing discourse contrasts with 'root cause' explanations applied to terrorist violence and extremism from oppressed groups.

These explanations use past persecution to exculpate the agents of violence from responsibility for their choices. The actions that they commit are ultimately reduced to the oppression that they or their people have experienced. The therapists to the Jews do not treat Jewish suffering as a basis for mitigating Jewish or Israeli misbehaviour. Instead, it is used to highlight the depth of the pathology that generates it, and to focus on the need for drastic corrective measures, where these frequently require that Israel be politically eliminated as the best way of eradicating the disease.

Finally, the use of the psychologizing discourse for the Israel-Palestine conflict is sui generis. If anyone were to construe other conflicts in analogous terms, they would be quickly dismissed as racists or neo-colonialists. Imagine, for example, how progressive opinion would receive the suggestion that Africans were disposed to mass murder and civil war because they had been traumatized by centuries of colonial rule and so had internalized the treatment and mores to which Europeans had subjected them. Similarly, it seems unlikely that any attempt to analyze the contemporary Muslim world as suffering from a collective psychosis brought on by the trauma of European violence over the centuries will meet with much enthusiasm among people who regard themselves as politically enlightened. But it is precisely the fashionably 'progressive' who accept as the height of wisdom the psychologizing discourse about Jews and Israel.

Using group psychological profiling to attribute to Jews an unnatural and diseased nature is not new. In 1901 Otto Weininger published Sex and Character in Vienna (an anonymous English translation appeared in 1906, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York). In this book, Weininger contrasts masculine and feminine character types. He identifies men with reason, virtue, heroism, ego, cultural creativity (genius) and social order. The female is weak, dependent, cowardly, amoral, lacking in ego, driven by sexual passion, incapable of genuine creativity, and subversive of order. Weininger cites a variety of biological and medical 'facts' to argue for his description of male and female typologies. He then distinguishes between 'Aryan' and Jewish characters, claiming that the Aryans instantiate male properties, while the Jews are largely feminine in nature.

Weininger wrote in turn of the century Vienna, when pseudo-scientific theories of race and sex were invoked to support racist anthropological views and misogynist attitudes towards women. These cultural themes defined the context in which Weininger formulated his ideas. They also provided the basis for Nazi policies in the following decades. However, it is important to distinguish carefully between some of these themes and Weininger's enterprise. While there are clear racist elements in his book, he is careful to insist that he is not characterizing Jews as a racial entity, but as an idealized psychological type, instantiated to a greater or lesser degree by actual Jews. He also clearly states that he opposes any attempt to persecute or disenfranchise Jews. He holds out the prospect of escape from their respective natures to both individual women and Jews. For women this requires adopting male values and forms of behaviour. Jews can redeem themselves from their type by converting to Christianity and embracing Aryan culture. Weininger himself had adopted Lutheranism. He identified with Protestantism, rather than Catholicism, because of a strong admiration for Kant and the reliance on individual conscience in achieving moral responsibility.

It is tempting to dismiss Weininger as a crackpot (Freud, who met him briefly, described him as 'highly gifted but sexually deranged'). He committed suicide at the age of 23, two years after the publication of Sex and Character, and became a romantic cult figure. In fact, his book had a significant impact on intellectual life in Vienna and abroad. Prominent cultural figures hailed it as a work of genius. So, for example, Karl Kraus, the noted Viennese satirist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the influential Austrian philosopher, expressed great admiration for Weininger's work. Like him, they were both converted Jews. Weininger's view of Jews resonated widely through Austrian literary society.

Weininger was an early therapist to the Jews. There are, however, fundamental differences between his project and that of the latter-day therapists: he regarded Jews and Judaism as a disease to be escaped; they, in general, do not, although they frequently slide into such a view of Israel. Some even present themselves as the guardians of 'true' Jewish values in the face of Zionist corruption. The traits that Weininger stigmatizes in his caricature of a Jewish cultural type are largely disjoint from those that the contemporary therapists select for opprobrium. Weininger states that the origins of the Jewish type are a mystery to him. By contrast the contemporary therapists explain negative collective Jewish features as the result of group trauma.

But important analogies do exist between Weininger's writings on Jews and the psychologizing discourse that has emerged in recent years. In both cases traditional anti-Jewish prejudices are effectively legitimized through a pseudo-scientific exercise in collective psychological portraiture. Weininger and the latter-day therapists both offer an exit from group stigma through recognition of the pathology that provokes it, and the adoption of an alternative set of cultural commitments. For the Jews among the therapists, this is a route out of quarantine into the mainstream of civilized opinion. No wonder, then, that it should prove to be attractive in the face of a hostile social environment.

Most therapists to the Jews would probably recoil at the suggestion that they share a common set of concerns with Weininger. They are undoubtedly sincere in their professed intention to be helpful and constructive. It is unfortunate that they have apparently failed to examine the defining assumptions of their enterprise. Should they do so, they may well be surprised to discover the deeply racist nature of some of these assumptions.

(Shalom Lappin, King's College, London)
__._,_.___

THE POPE IN THE ME: the limits of interfaith (Jerusalem Post).

2009-05-13T04:12:00.000-07:00

"The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition"

Limits of interfaith
May. 12, 2009

THE JERUSALEM POST

Perhaps we expect too much of priests, rabbis and imams. We want our clergy to be spiritual beacons, above the temporal fray; and to be politically savvy. Alas, on this earth there is no unscrambling politics and religion. And this inevitable mingling of the holy and the profane sometimes leaves us dismayed that those who claim a deeper understanding of the Creator's will should behave parochially.
Still, man is a political animal and in his image did he create religion.

At Yad Vashem on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI spoke mostly as a theologian - which left many Jews wanting. Granted, the German-born pontiff expressed opposition to Holocaust denial: "May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled, or forgotten!" Yet his pledge on arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport to "honor the memory of the six million" would have been better fulfilled had he referenced the relationship between the Church's age-old "teaching of contempt" and what the Nazis did.

It was a stark contrast to the March 2000 visit by the charismatic John Paul II, who found a way, politically, to combine personal testimony with the Catholic attestation: "The Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."

At the Western Wall on Tuesday, Benedict's decision to speak briefly in Latin in theological vein, citing the Book of Lamentations, seemed eminently sensible. Moments earlier, on the Temple Mount, visiting what the Holy See diplomatically referred to as "Mosques Square," he also delivered an altogether apolitical, mildly theological statement about the children of Abraham.

Only at Hechal Shlomo, where his Orthodox audience received his denunciation of moral relativism with silent approval, did the pope manage the right combination of politics and religion, saying: "The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council."

We found ourselves feeling oddly positive about the Chief Rabbinate yesterday.
Politically and theologically, the Jewish world speaks to the Church in three ways - via world Jewish bodies; via biannual meetings between the chief rabbinate and the Vatican; and via the Israel Foreign Ministry. Hechal Shlomo united all three channels. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and his Ashkenazi counterpart Rabbi Yona Metzger acquitted themselves well - they could have been mistaken for the national religious chief rabbis of old. Their performances almost justified their annual budget.
And yet, to Palestinian Arab ears, their remarks must have sounded politically loaded.

WITH HIS vitriolic Monday night performance at Notre Dame, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, embodied the most awful combination of politics and religion.
Tamimi stole the podium to deliver a harangue bereft of spirituality and drenched in the politically profane. Remember that Tamimi represents - not Hamas, but the moderate side of Palestinian religiosity. His Christian compatriots, no more moderate, waved PLO flags at yesterday's papal mass in the Kidron Valley, amid a sea of Vatican and Israeli flags. And if you missed the Palestinian Authority's apology for Tamimi's theatrics, so did we. The dirty little secret about interfaith work is that it's invariably spearheaded by non-Muslims.

The pope, visibly discomfited by Tamimi's tirade - though he didn't understand it - left earlier than scheduled, after a forced handshake with the Muslim cleric. Dozens of Arabs in the interfaith audience applauded the sheikh's anti-Israel calumnies.
The Vatican, to its credit, criticized Tamimi for this "direct negation of what a dialogue should be." To that, amen.
Tamimi will be delighted to learn that the Protestant World Council of Churches is planning its own week-long blitz in June: agitation against the "occupation," "settlements" and Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Fortunately, WCC-affiliated churches are in decline, whereas evangelical denominations displaying profound empathy with the Jewish state are thriving.

Since there is no separating politics from religion, the best we can strive for is that the spiritual in religion informs our politics more than the worst in our politics informs our religion.
Pray we have the wisdom to know the difference.
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L ETTER TO THE EDITOR IN THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS. (6th MARCH 2009)

(MM)

Rabbi David Stav is quoted (AJN 27/2) as saying that Israel is divided in the middle between (Orthodox) religion and secular Israel. Unfortunately, the problems Israelis face in areas of personal status dealing with conversion, marriage, divorce, birth and death are due to the "politics of religion", not just religion.

Given the pluralist (religious) Judaism enjoyed by Jews all over the world, except in Israel, it is obvious that it is politics that is at the root of all the problems which Israelis face also internally. While Ben Gurion who gave over those rights exclusively to the Orthodox Rabbinate to rule over, did not know any other way of keeping Israel Jewish, it is totally different in this day and age.

I believe the majority of Western Jews today who are Zionist, practice their Judaism in an inclusive, modern, Progressive tradition. To whom was Rabbi Stav addressing himself when he said he would like Jewish people outside Israel to help ? "I think it is one of [the diaspora's] duties to take part in this dialogue" i.e. between secular and religious Jews. How can they when their leaders hardly communicate with each other in the diaspora, let alone with Israelis?

If Progressive Judaism's credentials would be recognised by the Israeli State, the push for the separation between religion and State on issues of personal status would be virtually eliminated. There would be no need for even totally Jewish couples to travel abroad to get married, given the difficult issues of divorce and agunot which are imposed on all non-Orthodox Israeli Jewish women and the difficulties currently imposed by the Rabbinate on conversions would certainly be eased for those who prefer to be non-Orthodox.

Will this make the State less Jewish? Hardly. It will make it a more harmonious, inclusive, tolerant and pluralist Jewish society in law as well as in fact. It will also prove far more inviting to Diaspora's modern Jews.
(MM,- March 2009)

VALE Dick Pratt

2009-05-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

When a person is a 'mensch'(a real humamn being in Yiddish) and befriends all,- from the smallest employee to the big and powerful, they stand by you in times of trouble as well as in the good times.
At least one hopes so.
Justice Marcus Einfeld was not so lucky.He may have done a lot of good for the Aboriginal community and perhaps others, but as an individual he was unfortunately not well liked.

Personally, I am happy to see that all the powerful elite stood by Richard at the end. However, the radio and Letters pages in The Age and elsewhere, keep harping about how much money he skimped off everyone in this cartel business.

Well, as a former very small businesswoman I can assure you that this business of "fair competition" is the worst myth perpetrated by the ACCC and everyone who believes them.

Why couldn't we in our retail shop be supplied by wholesalers at the prices the supermarkets were being supplied? We had to buy drinks like Coke, etc. from the supermarkets and sell them dearer of course, if we wanted to make a few cents on them. Then, when we bought a new product to try out, - next thing we knew, the supermarkets, or a bigger customer up the street would put pressure on the supplier not to supply it to us at all!

The big boys always win out over the small ones,- so who is kidding whom?
Consumers might have paid a few cents more per item for the packaging,- which then Visy recycled for everyone to save contaminating the earth with discarded waste.

The public company Amcor dobbed-in the individual businessman, Richard Pratt, - he who tried to give them each a chance not to drive one into the ground because he might be smaller and unable to survive the bigger one's competitive advantage. Big deal!

I am glad that all the VIPs whom Richard befriended and all those whom he helped, understood this very well,- it is only the small-minded who insist that he didn't deserve the adulation he actually received. They will disappear into insignificance, but Richard Pratt's contribution to society will remain into the future.

One just needs to read the hundreds of tributes from his employees to understand what kind of man he must have been. I know individuals whom he helped anonymously.

http://www.richardpratttribute.com

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HAPPY 61ST YOM HAATZMAUT ISRAEL!

2009-04-24T01:01:00.000-07:00

UN RACIST TALKFEST AIDS PROPAGANDA FOR RACISTS!

In predictable fashion, Ahmadinejad was given a platform by the UN, feted by the Swiss government to peddle his racist views at the supposedly anti-racism conference and gleefully reproduced by the world's media. What a propaganda coup!

Strangely, his supporters' countries and his own supply the majority of the world's asylum seekers flooding the Western world. These are the same countries that have denied their fellow Arab brethren in the Palestinian refugee camps for over 60 years, even the basic modicum of resettlement opportunities in countries awash with petro=dollars. Where do these refugees want to go? To that supposedly racist "Zionist entity",- democratic, free and Jewish Israel.

The supposedly discriminated Israeli Arab citizens have permission to travel wherever they want, with passports and visas. Are they the asylum seekers escaping racist, gender, or any other tyrannies? Or is it the Islamic countries that provide the world's flood of desperate seekers of safe havens from their own Theocratic rulers?

70 years ago the Jewish refugees had no country and were denied refuge out of Europe,- anywhere by anyone. Now it is the turn of refugees who seek asylum while fleeing from their own despotic regimes.

Legal immigration and emigration is a different matter altogether. Fleeing illegally across borders is a deperate game of life and death. As long as the Ahmadinejads of this world hold on to their racist views, the flood of desperates will only intensify and all of us may end up suffering.

HAPPY 61ST YOM HAATZMAUTH ISRAEL,-THE JEWISH STATE FOREVER.
AND HAPPY 100TH ANNIVERSARY TO TEL AVIV.

MM

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
For Immediate Release:
THE HUDSON INSTITUTE

April 23, 2009
Leading Muslim Scholars Condemn Racism and Intolerance
Disguised as Cultural Diversity

Responding to the Declaration of the Durban Review Conference Zeyno Baran, Khaled Abu Toameh, Tarek Heggy, Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, Irfan al-Alawi and Veli Sirin decry the failure to recognize and condemn rampant oppression in the name of Islam.

The Hudson Institute hosted a panel today during the Durban Review Conference with an eminent group of Muslim scholars from Egypt, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. All were highly disappointed by the conference's failure to grapple with one of the leading sources of intolerance in the world today - namely, bigotry and xenophobia in the name of religion itself and Islam in particular.

"The conference reaffirms the perception that Islam has been hijacked by a dominant minority of thugs, extremists and anti-Semites who claim that they are speaking on behalf of a majority of Muslims. Ahmadinejad and his likes should be the last to talk about racism, human rights and tolerance" said Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli-Arab journalist and filmmaker.

Zeyno Baran, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, remarked that "It is time the silent majority of Muslims speaks up in defense of universal human rights for all, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or gender. Humanity is one; labels have tragically divided us and Durban II sadly has missed another opportunity for an honest discussion."

Egyptian scholar Tarek Heggy noted that "The west has been listening to and dealing with a single Islamic voice - an extremely rigid one. It is the historic responsibility of the west to now listen to the many other voices, some of which are entirely different."

"Durban II," pointed out Dr. Irfan al-Alawi, executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation UK, "has been discredited by hate speech, efforts to deny freedom of expression and attempts to limit the reach of anti-racism treaty obligations. The ploy has undermined, rather than supported, diversity in religion and culture. The United Nations has repeatedly failed to protect human rights and, ironically, Durban II uses alleged human rights principles to continue that inauspicious record." Al-Alawi, noted that the attempt to limit free speech by invoking Islam was illegitimate. "Islam benefits from debate and criticism. Islam needs free speech and Islam is strong enough to withstand negative speech."

Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, executive director of the Center of Islamic Pluralism added that "All religion and spirituality originates with criticism and freedom of speech. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all began with a criticism of earlier, idolatrous religion, and no religion can flourish without freedom of opinion."

Veli Sirin, director of the Zentrum fur den Islamische Pluralismus (ZIP) in Germany and an activist in the Alevi youth opinion, said: "The experience of the Alevis in Turkey shows the negative consequences of monolithic attitudes in religion and the use of differences as a pretext for the brutal suppression of minorities. By ignoring the experience of these minorities, Durban II has done a tremendous disservice to many victims of racism and intolerance."

Hudson Institute is a non-partisan policy research organization dedicated to innovative research and analysis that promotes global security, prosperity, and freedom.

For further information, please contact:
Zeyno Baran, +1-202-255-2073, zeyno@hudson.org

Will Israel survive OBAMA's new America?

2009-04-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

[It amazes me how the West's pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel 'left' are ecstatically embracing Obama's apparent 'new policy' of appeasement of the anti-Western Islamic world, as though ditching support for Israel as a result is a fait-accomplit! A bit of pressure, some push and shove on "territories" perhaps. But in the end, will we actually see America abdicating its responsibilities to assist its democratic allies, including Israel? I cannot imagine that Obama will be allowed to do that,- no matter how much he will appear to embrace America's Islamic enemies!
I agree with Caroline Glick below, that Israel will find plenty of partners in new self-help alliance building. In fact, with Israeli hi-tech know-how as an inducement, I am not sure that even the Soviets and/or Chinese will not be vying to usurp America's role as Israel's 'benefactor'. Would Obama be happy about that? Will the USA really accept that? Will Egypt, Jordan, even the Saudis be happy about Obama's new 'mates',- Iran, Hetzbollah, Hamas, Taliban, perhaps even AlQueda? We have Eurabia already, will we have also USArabia?
Cuba is in another category. It's about time the USA reviewed its policies in its own backyard first and foremost.]MM
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Jewish World Review April 13, 2009 / 19 Nisan 5769

Surviving in a post-American world By Caroline B. Glick

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |

Like it or not, the United States of America is no longer the world's policeman. This was the message of Barack Obama's presidential journey to Britain, France, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Iraq this past week.

Somewhere between apologizing for American history — both distant and recent; genuflecting before the unelected, bigoted king of Saudi Arabia; announcing that he will slash the US's nuclear arsenal, scrap much of America's missile defense programs and emasculate the US Navy; leaving Japan to face North Korea and China alone; telling the Czechs, Poles and their fellow former Soviet colonies, "Don't worry, be happy," as he leaves them to Moscow's tender mercies; humiliating Iraq's leaders while kowtowing to Iran; preparing for an open confrontation with Israel; and thanking Islam for its great contribution to American history, President Obama made clear to the world's aggressors that America will not be confronting them for the foreseeable future.

Whether they are aggressors like Russia, proliferators like North Korea, terror exporters like nuclear-armed Pakistan or would-be genocidal-terror-supporting nuclear states like Iran, today, under the new administration, none of them has any reason to fear Washington.

This news is music to the ears of the American Left and their friends in Europe. Obama's supporters like billionaire George Soros couldn't be more excited at the self-induced demise of the American superpower. CNN's former (anti-)Israel bureau chief Walter Rodgers wrote ecstatically in the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, "America's... superpower status, is being downgraded as rapidly as its economy."

The pro-Obama US and European media are so pleased with America's abdication of power that they took the rare step of applauding Obama at his press conference in London. Indeed, the media's enthusiasm for Obama appeared to grow with each presidential statement of contrition for America's past uses of force, each savage attack he leveled against his predecessor George W. Bush, each swipe he took at Israel, and each statement of gratitude for the blessings of Islam he uttered.

But while the media couldn't get enough of the new US leader, America's most stable allies worldwide began a desperate search for a reset button that would cause the administration to take back its abandonment of America's role as the protector of the free world.

Tokyo was distraught by the administration's reaction to North Korea's three-stage ballistic missile test. Japan recognized the betrayal inherent in Defense Secretary Robert Gates's announcement ahead Pyongyang's newest provocation that the US would only shoot the missile down if it targeted US territory. In one sentence, uttered not in secret consultations, but declared to the world on CNN, Gates abrogated America's strategic commitment to Japan's defense.

India, for its part, is concerned by Obama's repeated assertions that its refusal to transfer control over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir provinces to Pakistan inspires Pakistani terror against India. It is equally distressed at the Obama administration's refusal to make ending Pakistan's support for jihadist terror groups attacking India a central component of its strategy for contending with Pakistan and Afghanistan. In general, Indian officials have expressed deep concern over the Obama administration's apparent lack of regard for India as an ally and a significant strategic counterweight to China.

Then there is Iraq. During his brief visit to Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon, Obama didn't even pretend that he would ensure that Iraqi democracy and freedom is secured before US forces are withdrawn next year. The most supportive statement he could muster came during his conversation with Turkish students in Istanbul earlier in the day. There he said, "I have a responsibility to make sure that as we bring troops out, that we do so in a careful enough way that we don't see a complete collapse into violence."

Hearing Obama's statements, and watching him and his advisers make daily declarations of friendship to Iran's mullahs, Iraqi leaders are considering their options for surviving the rapidly approaching storm.

Then there is Europe. Although Obama received enthusiastic applause from his audience in Prague when he announced his intention to destroy the US's nuclear arsenal, drastically scale back its missile defense programs and forge a new alliance with Russia, his words were anything but music to the ears of the leaders of former Soviet satellites threatened by Russia. The Czech, Polish, Georgian and Ukrainian governments were quick to recognize that Obama's strong desire to curry favor with the Kremlin and weaken his own country will imperil their ability to withstand Russian aggression.

It is not a coincidence, for instance, that the day Obama returned to Washington, Georgia's Moscow-sponsored opposition announced its plan to launch massive protests in Tblisi to force the ouster of pro-Western, anti-Russian Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. And as for Russia, like Iran, which responded to Obama's latest ode to the mullahs by opening a nuclear fuel plant and announcing it has 7,000 advanced centrifuges in operation, so Moscow reacted to Obama's fig leaf with a machine gun, announcing its refusal to support sanctions against North Korea and repeating its false claim that Iran's nuclear program is nonaggressive.

Finally there is Israel. If Obama's assertions that Israel must support the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, his declarations of support for the so-called Saudi "peace plan," which requires Israel to commit national suicide in exchange for "peace" with the Arab world, and his continuous and increasingly frantic appeals for Iran to "engage" his administration weren't enough to show Israel that Obama is sacrificing the US's alliance with the Jewish state in a bid to appease the Arabs and Iran, on Tuesday Vice President Joseph Biden made this policy explicit.

When Biden told CNN that Israel would be "ill-advised" to attack Iran's nuclear installations, he made clear that from the administration's perspective, an Israeli strike that prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power is less acceptable than a nuclear-armed Iran. That is, the Obama administration prefers to see Iran become a nuclear power than to see Israel secure its very existence.

AMERICA'S BETRAYAL of its democratic allies makes each of them more vulnerable to aggression at the hands of their enemies — enemies the Obama administration is now actively attempting to appease. And as the US strengthens their adversaries at their expense, these spurned democracies must consider their options for surviving as free societies in this new, threatening, post-American environment.

For the most part, America's scorned allies lack the ability to defeat their enemies on their own. India cannot easily defeat nuclear-armed Pakistan, which itself is fragmenting into disparate anti-Indian nuclear-wielding Islamist and Islamist-supporting factions.

Japan today cannot face North Korea — which acts as a Chinese proxy — on its own without risking a confrontation with China. Russia's invasion of Georgia last August showed clearly that its former republics and satellites have no way of escaping Moscow's grip alone. This week's Arab League conference at Doha demonstrated to Iraq's leaders that their Arab brethren are incapable and unwilling to confront Iran.

And the Obama administration's intense efforts to woo Iran coupled with its plan to slash the US's missile defense programs — including those in which Israel participates — and reportedly pressure Israel to dismantle its own purported nuclear arsenal — make clear that Israel today stands alone against Iran.

THE RISKS that the newly inaugurated post-American world pose for America's threatened friends are clear. But viable opportunities for survival do exist, and Israel can and must play a central role in developing them. Specifically, Israel must move swiftly to develop active strategic alliances with Japan, Iraq, Poland, and the Czech Republic and it must expand its alliance with India.

With Israel's technological capabilities, its intelligence and military expertise, it can play a vital role in shoring up these countries' capacities to contain the rogue states that threaten them. And by containing the likes of Russia, North Korea and Pakistan, they will make it easier for Israel to contain Iran even in the face of US support for the mullahs.

The possibilities for strategic cooperation between and among all of these states and Israel run the gamut from intelligence sharing to military training, to missile defense, naval development, satellite collaboration, to nuclear cooperation. In addition, of course, expanded economic ties between and among these states can aid each of them in the struggle to stay afloat during the current global economic crisis.

Although far from risk free, these opportunities are realistic because they are founded on stable, shared interests. This is the case despite the fact that none of these potential alliances will likely amount to increased support for Israel in international forums. Dependent as they are on Arab oil, these potential allies cannot be expected to vote with Israel in the UN General Assembly. But this should not concern Jerusalem.

The only thing that should concern Jerusalem today is how to weaken Iran both directly by attacking its nuclear installations, and indirectly by weakening its international partners in Moscow, Pyongyang, Islamabad and beyond in the absence of US support. If Japan is able to contain North Korea and so limit Pyongyang's freedom to proliferate its nuclear weapons and missiles to Iran and Syria and beyond, Israel is better off. So, too, Israel is better off if Russia is contained by democratic governments in Eastern and Central Europe. These nations in turn are better off if Iran is contained and prevented from threatening them both directly and indirectly through its strategic partners in North Korea, Syria and Russia, and its terror affiliates in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For the past 16 years, successive Israeli governments have wrongly believed that politics trump strategic interests. The notion that informed Israel's decision-makers — not unlike the notion that now informs the Obama administration — was that Israel's strategic interests would be secured as a consequence of its efforts to appease its enemies by weakening itself. Appreciative of Israel's sacrifices for peace, the nations of the world — and particularly the US, the Arabs and Europe — would come to Israel's defense in its hour of need. Now that the hour of need has arrived, Israel's political strategy for securing itself has been exposed as a complete fiasco.

The good news is that no doubt sooner rather than later, Obama's similarly disastrous bid to denude the US of its military power under the naive assumption that it will be able to use its new stature as a morally pure strategic weakling to win its enemies over to its side will fail spectacularly and America's foreign policy will revert to strategic rationality.

But to survive the current period of American strategic madness, Israel and the US's other unwanted allies must build alliances with one another — covertly if need be — to contain their adversaries in the absence of America. If they do so successfully, then the damage to global security induced by Obama's emasculation of his country will be limited. If on the other hand, they fail, then America's eventual return to its senses will likely come too late for its allies — if not for America itself.

_____

THE JEWISH DIASPORA'S RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL AND ISRAELIS.

2009-04-01T03:09:00.000-07:00

Subject: THE "DIASPORA" HAS A PROBLEM WITH JEFF HALPER

AN OPEN LETTER FROM A MEMBER OF THE AUSTRALIAN JEWISH COMMUNITY.

Dear Jeff Halper,

There are any number of critics of Israel in Australia,- both Jewish and non-Jewish. We all read the Israeli newspapers, as do most Australian policy-makers and everyone interested in what goes on in the ME.

Listening to polemicists from Israel about their government's policies, quite frankly is of no interest to our Jewish community. For years we had Israelis from the Far-Left, such as Shulamit Aloni and others, coming to us and speaking about their DREAMS AND HOPES for the future,- but all made sure that outside Israel they did not criticize the Government. Why? Because they know full well that there are those who wish, not just to see the downfall of the particular Israeli Government of the day, but for the DOWNFALL OF ISRAEL.

THE ONLY TRUE FRIENDS ISRAEL HAS,- IRRESPECTIVE OF WHICH P.M. OR GOVERNMENT IS IN POWER, IS THE DIASPORA'S JEWISH AND NON-JEWISH ISRAEL SUPPORTERS.

As for our Jewish community's ties to Israel, it is because we know that the only countries where Jews can feel free of officially-sponsored anti-Semitism nowadays, is where the Government also supports the Jewish State against its enemies. Do you realize what happened to the Jews of Venezuela,- just to mention the latest casualty,- where they never suffered from anti-Semitism until Chavez changed his stand on Israel?

Just because some of you, as Americans, never suffered from anti-Semitism elsewhere in the Diaspora, you seem to believe that the elusive peace for which you rightfully yearn in Israel, will come about because you are such goody-goody Jews who will invite your fellow Palestinian Arabs to share in your wonderful country and they will embrace you as brothers. What we see in the wider Islamic world out there however, doesn't fill us with any optimism that this will happen any-time soon.

If your fellow Israelis would agree with you, then Meretz and the far Left in Israel would reign supreme in the Knesset. Then we in the Diaspora would have to support that Government of the day. It is you, the Israeli citizens,- you are the ones to decide what kind of country you want. At the moment you are not representing the majority of Israelis and we do not see the need to give you a 'hechsher' from our organised Jewish community. Let the enemies of the State among us, host you and perhaps you can do some further incitement against your Israeli people amongst them and among the rest of the anti-Zionists.

Until then, we prefer the Israelis who explain, not criticize, their own Government. We don't care if you are extreme on the L or R,- in the Australian milieu we would rather you keep to your pro- or anti- Israel and Palestinian rhetoric to your own country.

Just be pro-Israel outside and we would welcome you with open arms..

M. M.

Melbourne
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Jeff Halper writes:

An unhelpful discourse on Israel

The following article is written by Israeli/American peace activist Jeff Halper for the Australian Jewish News but the paper refuses to run the piece, despite spending weeks attacking Halper and his supporters in its pages:

The uproar in the organized Jewish community over the prospect of my speaking in Australia is truly startling to an Israeli like me. Granted, I am very critical of Israel's policies of Occupation and doubt whether a two-state solution is still possible given the extent of Israel's settlements, but this hardly warrants the kind of demonization I received in the pages of The AJN. Opinions similar to mine are readily available in the mainstream Israeli media. Indeed, I myself write frequently for the Israeli press and appear regularly on Israeli TV and radio.
Why, then, the hysteria? Why was I banned from Temple Emmanuel in Sydney, a self-proclaimed progressive synagogue? Why did I, an Israeli, have to address the Jewish community from a church? Why was I invited to speak in every university in eastern Australia yet, at Monash University, I was forced to hold a secret meeting with Jewish faculty in a darkened room far from the halls of intellectual discourse? Why, when the "leaders" of the Jewish community were excoriating me and my positions, did the Israelis who attended my talks express such appreciation that "real" Israeli views were finally getting aired in Australia, even if they did not all agree with me? Given the support my right to speak evidenced by most of the letters published in The AJN, this all raises disturbing questions over the right of Australian Jews to hear divergent views on Israel's conflict with the Palestinians held by Israelis themselves.
It raises an even deeper issue, however. What should be the relationship of Diaspora Jewry to Israel? Whatever threat I represented to the organized Jewish community of Australia had less to do with Israel, I suspect, than with some damage I might to do to the idealized "Leon Uris" image of Israel which you hold onto so dearly. This might seem like a strange thing to say, but I do not believe that you in the Diaspora have internalized the fact that Israel is a foreign country as far from your idealized version as Australia is far from its image as kangaroo-land. Countries change, they evolve. What would Australia's European founders think - even those who until very recently pursued a "White Australia" policy - if they were to see the multi-cultural country you have become? Well, almost 30% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, we may very well have permanently incorporated another four million Palestinians - the residents of the Occupied Territories - into our country and, to top it off, it's clear by now that the vast majority of the world's Jews are not going to emigrate to Israel. Those facts, plus the urgent need of Israel to make peace with its neighbors, mean something. They mean that Israel must change in ways Ben Gurion, Leon Uris and Mark Leibler never envisioned, even if that's hard for you to accept.
Yet I see this as a positive thing, a sign of a healthy country coming to grips with reality, some of it of its own creation, even if it means that Israel will evolve from a Jewish state into a state of all its citizens - a bi-national or democratic state. Rather than "eliminating" Israel, this challenge is in fact a natural and probably inevitable development. It will not be easy, but if you can become multi-cultural, so can we.
But that's our problem as Israelis. What's your problem? Why should discussing such important issues for Israel be the cause of such distress for you? Because, I venture to say, you have a stake in preserving Israel's idealized image that trumps dealing with the real country. In my view, Israel is being used as the lynchpin of your ethnic identity in Australia; mobilizing around a beleaguered Israel is essential for keeping your kids Jewish. I would go so far as to accuse you of needing an Israel in conflict, which is why you seem so threatened by an Israel at peace, why you deny that peace is even possible, why a peaceful Israel that is neither threatened nor "Jewish" cannot fulfill the role you have cast for it, and thus why you characterize my message as "vile lies."
This, to be honest, is the threat I represent. Only this can explain why rabbis, community "leaders" and Jewish professors choose to meet me secretly rather than have me, a critical Israel, in their synagogues or classrooms. This is all understandable. You do need a lynchpin if you are to preserve your identity as a prosperous community in a tolerant multi-cultural society. I would just question whether the real country of Israel can fulfill that role, or even if it's fair to Israel to expect it to.
We are different peoples. Israel can no more define Diaspora Jewish life than you can define Israel. Rather than knee-jerk defense of an imaginary place, you need to develop a respect for Israel and Israeli voices, a respect that will come only when you start regarding Israel as a real country. And you have to get a life of your own. You have to develop alternative Diaspora Jewish cultures and identities. Ironically, after all I have said, the Israeli government will resist that, for it uses you as agents to support its policies, often extreme right-wing and militaristic policies that contradict your very values of cultural pluralism and human rights. Remember: Israel does what it does in your name. Unless you take an independent position, you are complicit.
What befell me in Australia is just a tiny piece of a sad story of mutual exploitation: you using Israel to keep your community together, Israel using you to defend its indefensible policies. Perhaps something good can emerge from all this: robust discussion on the nature of Israeli-Diaspora relations. I'm going home to Jerusalem. You have to let Israel go and get a [Jewish] life.

[Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a peace and human rights organization dedicated to achieving a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He can be reached at <jeff@icahd.org>]

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The World Media and Israel: responding to Arab Propaganda.

2009-03-24T15:05:00.000-07:00

[A brilliant analysis of Israel's image in the world today: reasons for and against it in the media. Ha'aretz is the Left-wing daily newspaper in Israel.]

Why does the world media love to hate Israel?
By Bradley BURSTON
Ha'aretz
23 March 2009

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1073231.html

I was just in the States, speaking to members of Ameinu, an organization which, the times notwithstanding, remains outspoken both in its support for peace and its support for Israel.

Among the topics I was asked to address was the portrayal of the Jewish state in the news media. Phrased a little less delicately, the issue amounts to: "Why does the press love to hate Israel?"

The question has taken on an unusual urgency of late, its pivot points Israel's war in Gaza, the debate over engaging a proto-nuclear Iran, the UN's upcoming Durban II World Conference against Racism, Avigdor Lieberman's Arab-baiting campaign for Knesset, and, not least, disclosures in Haaretz, Ma'ariv, and Israeli broadcast media quoting IDF troops describing moral failings during the Gaza offensive.

Allow me to begin with the underlying first question.

Are there journalists who truly dislike Jews, and allow their Jew-hate to color their coverage?

Yes. I've met and, in fact, worked with, a number of them. Some of them, it will come as no surprise to report, are themselves Jewish. But does this explain or account for a significant portion of negative coverage of Israel in the media? It does not. Not at all.

What does?

1. What Israel says, and what Israel does.

A. In all the world, there is no bait more tempting for a reporter than Israel's assertion that its military is the "most moral in the world." This is the socially clueless Goliath wearing a sign reading "Kick Me." It is the one irresistible soft target of sound bites.

B. Anyone who has been in a war, as a participant, reporter, or civilian bystander, knows that any war, every war, spawns war crimes. The question, when examining the Cast Lead operation in Gaza, was whether there was something different, something exceptional and intentional and, especially, a matter of policy and command direction, that either trapped or targeted large numbers of civilians, resulting in a human tragedy far beyond the horrible reality of the very fact of warfare.

Was, in other words, this war different from all other wars? Or was this war the trigger for an outpouring of anti-Israel animus that was, for lack of a better term, disproportionate?

Although the jury is still out pending further independent inquiry, the likely answer to both is: Yes.

C. There is reason to believe that, at least in certain units, massive and, in retrospect, excessive firepower was employed, the apparent result of a miscalculation about how, and where, Hamas fighters were likely to engage in combat. In the main, Hamas, whose men had fought to the death in previous encounters, refrained from engaging the IDF at all.

There remains a need for intensive and impartial investigation to determine the extent and the cause of actions which led directly to the deaths of innocents.

D. The fact that may be most difficult to digest - either for haters of Israel or its most ardently positive supporters - is that Israel's armed forces have always been marked by an extraordinary degree of autonomy, down to the level of the individual grunt.

As a direct result, there were instances of Israeli soldiers who risked their own lives to save those of innocents, and there were Israeli soldiers who were predisposed to take the lives of innocents without just cause.

2. What Palestinians say that Israel does.

There are journalists who accept without reservation or corroboration the accounts of Palestinians regarding the actions of Israeli soldiers. There are television networks, some of them financed by Qatar, whose coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even during studio interviews, is accompanied by unending, obscenely graphic footage of infants and children wounded and killed in the war.

The first rule of covering the Holy Land is also in some ways the only rule:

3. Everyone lies to the press here. Everyone. All the time.

This is similar to, but not the same as:

4. Middle East news, like news in general, is marketing.

We are, all of us, in marketing. We are, all of us, in the business of selling a story. This includes the eyewitness, the victim, the military commander, the Hamas official, the Israeli spokesman, the betrayed, the bereaved, the film crew, the pundit.

Every news outlet has a lens through which it believes the story will best sell to an increasingly news-inured public. Every individual, Israeli or Palestinian, has an axe to grind, and a world full of good reasons to grind it.

5. Sometimes Israel looks bad because it is made to look bad. At other times, however, Israeli actions appear brutal because they, in fact, are.

Much has been made of what may be the least translatable word in the Hebrew language, Hasbara, literally, the act of explaining:

"It is true that the world media, generally speaking, doesn't like Israel very much, and stacks the deck against it, but good hasbara starts with not allowing soldiers to vandalize Palestinian homes and shoot Palestinian women," writes Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, a veteran of the IDF, of the disclosures over the past week in Haaretz.

"Public relations isn't a morally relevant category, in any case: The crucial question is, how should a civilized country behave when confronting barbarism? With barbarism? Or with respect for innocent life? Pardon me for saying so, but the Jewish people didn't struggle for national equality, justice and freedom so that some of its sons could behave like Cossacks.

"Please don't get me wrong: I'm not equating the morality of the IDF to that of Hamas. The goal of Hamas is to murder innocent people; the goal of the IDF is to avoid murdering innocent people. But when the IDF fails to achieve its goal, and ends up inflicting needless destruction and suffering, it sullies not only its own name, but the name of the Jewish state. It risks making a just cause - Jewish nationhood - seem unjust, and it ultimately endangers what it is supposed to protect."

6. Israelis, as a people and individually, are execrable at public relations because they abhor and distrust the very concept.

There is a reason why Israelis are so breathtakingly inept at furthering their own cause.

It is not only becuse this war was a frank and literally misguided attempt to redress years of misguidance. Or because the war between the Jews and the Arabs, this war which has raged for more than a hundred years, has robbed both sides of its ability to see the humanity of the other.

It is also because Israelis hate the very idea of public relations. They live in a country which has been under effective world quarantine for nearly all if its history.They live in a society whose trait of unbridled openness has become something of a learning disability. They speak a language which is light years and thousands of literal years away from television English. They are bathed in a culture which insulates itself and armors itself and has had little reason to believe the world will give it a fair shake.They have a shared, largely unspoken truth which is based, in part, on the world's inability to fathom their behavior. And they believe that no matter what they do, much of the world is likely to condemn them. And in this,at least, they have seldom been proven wrong.

===================================================
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_OGhj43GAE

Watch a Palestinian video about Hamas.

Do Palestinian Arabs deserve a State of their own?

2009-03-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

[Lenny Ben David below argues that they don't deserve it yet. There is no doubt that they haven't proven themselves capable of establishing or running a united people's nation-State.
The reality is that they weren't ready in '48 when the UN offered them one;and they haven't been ready to do anything other than fight to try to take over what the Jews have established with their hard-earned toil and tears. Whenever they were given a chance to prove themselves, such as in Gaza where everything was left for their economic infrastructure to succeed as did that of the previous settlers, all they were instructed to do, was to destroy it!
The virulent Islamic mentality of Hamas et al. made sure that no vestige of Jewish success will be utilised to help their own people! How on earth can such medieval hatred of a people towards other people ever succeed to become a worthy nation-State among the world community of enlightened nations, as Israel is? MM]

The Palestinians should get a State, but do they deserve one? Not yet!
by Lenny BEN-DAVID
http://lennybendavid.com

March 8, 2009
http://lennybendavid.com/2009/03/palestinians-should-get-state-but-do.html

Why Secretary Hillary Clinton Didn’t See What I Saw

I spent one day in 1996 in Ramallah visiting the nascent Palestinian state. I traveled the few miles from Jerusalem to Ramallah with a colleague to attend a session of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) – the Palestinian parliament. It was soon after the Palestinian elections, and the scene in the Ramallah parliament was effervescent. Lobbyists were busy plying their trade in the hallways. MPs were jumping up to object to one point or another. And my translator – the daughter of a moderate PLO official stationed in Europe who was assassinated by radical Palestinians – was practically shaking with excitement. The elected body (yes, it was stacked with many of Arafat’s hand-picked candidates) was debating civil service reform, and members kept referring with approval to how things were done “over there.” It was understood by all they were talking about Israel.

Those were the days. And they may never return.

The language of the debate in the PLC was different but the sense of democracy at work reminded me of the debates in the Knesset or the discussions in the corridor outside of the House of Representatives cloakroom.

At that point in history, the close contact between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza was almost 30 years old. Palestinian women’s groups had learned feminist culture from their Israeli sisters. Palestinian newspapers were publishing uncensored stories out of Jerusalem. Agricultural extension experts from Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture were working with their Palestinian counterparts to improve Palestinian agricultural and livestock yields.

Palestinian bankers, businessmen, doctors and nurses were studying Hebrew in the Israeli language school, Ulpan Akiva, so that they could apprentice in Israeli institutions in order to improve skills and facilitate joint projects. Fundamentalist Palestinian Gazans at the ulpan complained to me once that Israeli television broadcasts in Arabic were featuring clips of naked women to entice male viewers, so I introduced them to Israeli feminists so that they could together challenge the broadcast authorities. At the ulpan in Netanya I first met Dr. Ezzeldin Abu Elaish, the Gazan doctor who tragically lost three children during the Hamas-Israeli war in January.

We met with several Palestinian legislators in the Ramallah parliament building, including a young firebrand, Marwan Barghouti, the Secretary-General of Fatah. He was determined to fight Palestinian corruption and to push for independent Palestinian statehood. We thought that it was a positive sign that Barghouti was channeling his passions in the legislative body. But in 2002 Barghouti was arrested by Israeli troops as the mastermind of terrorist attacks against Israelis. He was convicted for the murder of four Israelis and one Greek Orthodox priest and is currently sitting in Israeli prison.

When Secretary of State Clinton travelled to Ramallah from Jerusalem last week she undoubtedly asked herself, “What went wrong?” What turned Barghouti into a murderer, or was he always a terrorist masquerading as a legislator? What evil force dispatched Palestinian suicide bombers into Israeli streets just a few years later? Why did Palestinian security forces, often trained by the CIA and armed by Israel, turn their guns on Israeli civilians and soldiers? What generated the winds of war that could only be blocked by the building of fences and walls separating Arabs and Jews? And now the Katyushas, Grads and Kassams fly over the fences by the thousands. Today, my meetings at Ulpan Akiva seem like fantasies, and in all honesty, I would not venture into Ramallah today for fear of being lynched as a Jew. That was the fate of two Israeli reservists who accidentally wandered into Ramallah four years after my visit.

What went wrong? Critics of Israel quickly respond that Ariel Sharon’s 2000 visit to the Temple Mount (Haram el Sharif to the Arabs) was the catalyst. But we know today that Arafat was planning the second “Intifada” months before Sharon’s visit, even as he met with President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak at Camp David in the summer of 2000. Some of Israel’s detractors would argue that the Israeli settlements led to Palestinian despair and violence. But settlements had existed since 1968; and already in 1997 Palestinian diplomats with whom I dealt were willing to cede 10 percent of the territories, including the settlements, to Israel.

The blame falls primarily on Arafat for poisoning the tentative but promising ties that were developing between Israel and the Palestinians. All cooperation was stopped after he arrived in Gaza in 1994. Local Palestinian leaders and heads of Palestinian government agencies were replaced by Arafat’s minions who accompanied him from Tunis. The “multilateral talks” established in the 1991 Madrid Conference to discuss the vital issues of water, environment, arms control, refugees and economic development were permanently shelved.

It became clear to American negotiators that Arafat was opposed to the two-state solution. “He was not interested or capable of doing an agreement that ended the conflict,” American negotiator Dennis Ross explained before Arafat’s departure from this world. “As long as [Arafat] didn’t have to make an irrevocable commitment, he was quite prepared to sign up to any agreement. Arafat is someone who will never close a door, never foreclose an option. He has to be able to say that he still has claims, still has grievances, and in light of that, the conflict at a certain level goes on....He doesn’t want to be the one that goes down in Palestinian history as the one who precluded a one-state solution [emphasis added].”

Frankly, the U.S. and Israel share some of the blame for covering up Arafat’s aggression. Palestinian newspapers, radio and TV amplified Arafat’s anti-Israeli line. The preachers in Palestinian mosques were appointed by Arafat and spewed forth anti-Semitism. And Palestinian children were poisoned by a toxic, anti-Semitic, bellicose curriculum even before Hamas gained its political power. While serving as a senior Israeli diplomat in Washington in the late 1990s, I was instructed by Israel’s leaders not to circulate a video called Jihad for Kids, a frightening collection of anti-Semitic TV broadcasts recorded off of Palestinian TV. Israeli and American leaders did not want to endanger what remained of the peace process and chose to ignore the venomous pollution of the Palestinian grassroots.

Hillary Clinton came to realize the danger of the Palestinian incitement. While serving as Senator, she reviewed Palestinian propaganda and concluded in a Palestinian Media Watch press conference two years ago: “This propaganda is dangerous. You know, words really matter. Some people sort of downplay the importance of words. But words really matter. Because in idealizing for children a world without Israel, children are taught never to accept the reality of the State of Israel, never to strive for a better future that would hold out the promise of peace and security to them, and is basically a message of pessimism and fatalism that undermines the possibility for these children living lives of fulfillment and productivity.”

The United Nations Charter declared in 1945 that “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” That declaration is the basis for many nations’ claim to statehood, including the Kurds, Chechens, Basques and the Palestinians.

Many Israelis believe that right of self-determination should apply to the Palestinians, and Israel proved itself ready to help the development of the Palestinians’ civil society toward that goal. But, after the Palestinians retreated from all forms of cooperation with Israel, choosing a path of confrontation leading to a judenrein one state solution, it was not surprising that a majority of Israelis signaled at the polls last month that they wanted leadership to put the brakes on the establishment of a Palestinian state in the near term. The UN Charter is applicable to “all people” as long as they do not seek the destruction of another. As long as the genocidal Hamas rules a large part of the Palestinian population and threatens to capture control of even more Palestinians in the West Bank and the teeming refugee camps of Lebanon, the Palestinian people will not deserve statehood.

The writer's visit to Ramallah took place when he headed the Jerusalem office of an American Jewish organization, not as an Israeli diplomatic official.

DUBAI's failing oil wealth & Israeli tennis star's exclusion.

2009-02-26T03:08:00.000-08:00

The Curse of Oil Wealth:Dubai's Dramatic Drop
by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.comFebruary 25, 2009

http://www.danielpipes.org/6190/dubais-dramatic-dropSendCommentRSS

As the Muslim world settled into ever-deeper decline over the past decade, mired in political extremism, religious sickness, economic irrelevance, WMD, anarchy, dictatorship, and civil wars, Dubai stood out as a happy anomaly.Burj Al Arab claims to be the world's only 7-star hotel.

Under the leadership of HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai (one of seven polities within the United Arab Emirates) invited peoples from around the world to come make money and they did; about 83 percent of its population of 1.4 million is foreign. The emirate intelligently exploited the energy boom surrounding it and had the ambition not just to globalize but to become a leader at globalization. Dubai became renowned for the world's only tropical desert ski slope, the world's only 7-star hotel, and the world's very highest building, all done with a new-agey twist. (Publicity for the skyscraper, for example, presents it as "an unprecedented example of international cooperation" and "a beacon of progress for the entire world.")But if Dubai seemed to be an exception to the general Muslim trajectory, it was only temporary.In three distinct arenas – economics, culture, and sports – very recent developments show how much the statelet has in common with the impoverishing and separating Muslim world.

Economics
Dubai was the froth of the early 2000s, the purest example of a bubble economy based on rising prices and boosterism, a Ponzi scheme among the nations. Already in 2006, financial writer Youssef Ibrahim dissected its trompe d'oeil economy:The huge oil revenues that have been pouring in for two years have nowhere else to go but into more and more real estate speculation. It makes for great business for the developers and their Western and Asian contractors, as well as for the owners - the sheiks, kings, emirs, and their big businessmen friends who own the deserts on which these mirage-like projects are being erected.The formula from their perspective is straightforward: Sell desert land to investors at a premium. Then double the profits by financing the construction of artificial islands, lakes, and massive air-conditioned shopping malls, alongside pie-in-the-sky projects like the largest ski slope in the desert, a Jurassic Park complete with mechanical dinosaurs right out of the movie, and millions of housing units. Then get the hell out and let them eat cake.Burj Dubai is the world's highest building; but will it be inhabited?

Dubai's leadership, Ibrahim notes, invested its profits "from selling Disneyland desert fantasies in enduring assets outside the Gulf," such as port facilities and hotel properties.When the music stopped last fall, with a world-wide recession and the price of oil tumbling over two-thirds, no one got harder hit than the Dubai dream machine. Just as it ascended with panache, so it now sinks con brio. One example, as reported by Robert F. Worth in the New York Times:With Dubai's economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.This unique abandoned-car syndrome results in part from the emirate's stringent work rules. As Worth explains, "jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town."Signs of the new penury abound:real estate prices, which rose dramatically during Dubai's six-year boom, have dropped 30 percent or more over the past two or three months in some parts of the city. …

So many used luxury cars are for sale, they are sometimes sold for 40 percent less than the asking price two months ago, car dealers say. Dubai's roads, usually thick with traffic at this time of year, are now mostly clear.Expatriates in Dubai are now so down on the country, Worth explains, some see it "as though it were a con game all along."There is every reason to think that the economic descent has just begun and has a long way to go. As this happens, foreigners are fleeing. Christopher Davidson, a specialist on the UAE at Durham University, notes that "When Dubai was rich and successful, everyone wanted to be its friend. Now that it has no money in the pocket, nobody wants to be pals anymore.
"Culture"
When it comes to cultural extravagance, Dubai cedes first place to its neighbor, Abu Dhabi, which in early 2007, announced the "Cultural District of Saadiyat Island" to include satellites of the Guggenheim (costing US$400 million) and Louvre ($1.3 billion) museums, plus about two dozen other museums, performing arts centers, and pavilions.Still, Dubai has ambitions, if more modest ones and the first Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature, opening on Feb. 26, is to serve as its literary coming-out party. A welcoming message from the director of the festival, Isobel Abulhoul, explains:EAIFL is the first true literary Festival in the Middle East celebrating the world of books in all its infinite variety, with over 50 events featuring authors whose books range from some of the finest contemporary literary fiction to inspirational lifestyle titles, via the magical worlds of children's, fantasy and science fiction writing. We invite you to share and enjoy their company in a relaxed Festival atmosphere, made even richer by our vibrant fringe which showcases the wonderful and diverse talents from our very special city, Dubai.British author Geraldine Bedell was disinvited from Dubai because her novel The Gulf Between Us tells about a gay sheikh.
The festival boasts authors from twenty countries, including such big names as Frank McCourt and Louis de Bernières.All good, but the EAIFL hit a bump before it even opened, one that threatens to overshadow the event itself. Never mind "the world of books in all its infinite variety"; the festival banned British author Geraldine Bedell because Sheik Rashid, one of the minor characters in her novel The Gulf Between Us (Penguin), is a homosexual Arab with an English boyfriend; to make matters worse, the plot is set against the background of the Kuwait War.As Abulhoul wrote to Bedell, disinviting her. "I do not want our festival remembered for the launch of a controversial book. If we launched the book and a journalist happened to read it, then you could imagine the political fallout that would follow." As for the Kuwait War, that "could be a minefield for us."Bedell responded that her novel "is incredibly affectionate towards the Gulf. I feel very warmly towards it, except when things like this happen. It calls into question the whole notion of whether the Emirates and other Gulf states really want to be part of the contemporary cultural world ... You can't ban books and expect your literary festival to be taken seriously."Indeed, the biggest name of the Dubai event, Canadian author Margaret Atwood, stayed away in protest at Bedell's exclusion ("I cannot be part of the festival this year."), eventually agreeing to appear via video link-up in a debate on censorship to be staged by International PEN at the festival.

Sports
Shahar Peer is the Israeli tennis star excluded from a tournament in Dubai because of her nationality.
Nor can you ban one of the game's finest players and expect your tennis tournament to be taken seriously. But Dubai did that earlier this month when it banned Shahar Peer, 21, ranked 45th among female players globally, from its $2 million women's Barclays Dubai Tennis Championships.Why? Well, she is Israeli. Organizers of the event cited security fears as their reason to bar Peer.In consultation with Peer, the Women's Tennis Association decided to continue with the Dubai tournament. "She didn't want to see her fellow players harmed the same way she was being harmed," said Larry Scott, CEO of the WTA.

Still, Peer's exclusion had immediate repercussions for Dubai. The Tennis Channel canceled coverage of the event; The Wall Street Journal Europe revoked its sponsorship; event organizers were fined US$300,000 ($44,250 of which will go to Peer); and American star Andy Roddick said he would boycott the male championship in Dubai. During the trophy ceremony, tournament winner Venus Williams discomfited the hosts by mentioning Peer's exclusion.

Not only was Scott bombarded with messages from upset fans ("It's an issue that obviously touches a nerve") but he reported "a real snowballing effect": "I've been contacted by representatives of other businesses, academic institutions, cultural institutions that equally would only have invested in being in the UAE if they had the same assurances we had that Israelis could participate in the activities."As a result of the Peer fiasco, Andy Ram, an Israeli ranked 11th among male tennis players was granted a "special permit" to enter Dubai and will play this week in the male Barclays Dubai Tennis Championships. To stay on the tour schedule in 2010, the Dubai organizers must guarantee Peer a wild-card entry, so she gets to play there even if she fails to qualify, and must grant qualifying Israeli players visas eight weeks in advance.In other words, Dubai must accept international rules or it excludes itself from championship play

. That is no small matter in a statelet that has gone into top-tier sports in a big way as a way to attract tourism; the Associated Press notes that it "hosts the world's richest golf tournament and horse race, is home to the world governing body for cricket and is building a $4 billion Dubai Sports City to house stadiums, sports academies and one of several lush golf courses.

"Conclusion"
Through a heady mix of speed and affluence, Dubai tried to vault over tough economic, religious, and political decisions. The establishment hoped that building big would substitute for a sound base. It hoped to finesse troublesome issues, that glitz would overwhelm substance. For example, it expected that patronizing prestigious events would permit it to change the rules; Dubai says no minor homosexual literary characters or no Israeli tennis players? So be it! Dubai rules, the globe follows.But that will not happen. The sharp drop in oil prices exposed the country's inescapable weakness, while Dubai's literary and tennis debacles confirmed the point. Instead, an entirely different model now tempts it – what I call the separation of civilizations. Unable to impose their way, Persian Gulf Arabs are retreating into a Muslim ghetto with its own economics (including Shar'i compliant tools), consumer goods, media, transportation, fast foods, sports competitions, search engines, and even systems of keeping time.

This course is doomed to failure. At a certain point, the issues at the center of Muslim life for the past two centuries – the tension between tradition and modernity, the opposition of Muslim identity to universal values, the strains of economic development – will have to be faced. Hucksterism and fast talk will not solve these problems. As Dubai's vacation from history abruptly ends, its hard work begins.

Related Topics: Persian Gulf : www.DanielPipes.org

VICTORIAN BUSHFIRES 2009.

2009-02-12T01:02:00.000-08:00

BUSH FIRES TRAGEDY, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA, February 7, 2009.
Initial Jewish Community Response

There has been an incredible out pouring of concern and a desire to help by the Australian Jewish community.Apart from important individuals who immediately donated on their own behalf,we were very quickly able to establish a common appeal that was supported by a broad section of the community (Jewish Community Council of Victoria, UIA, Rabbinical Council of Victoria, Union for Progressive Judaism, Shira Hadasha, National Council of Jewish Women of Australia ( and Vic), Magen David Adom Australia, Mazon, Jewish Emergency Management Plan (JEMP), Jewish Care, ACT Jewish community, Am echad association of Soviet Jewry and jewishaustralia.com) who are all asking their members and friends through the 3 organisations nominated to collect.

In particular, my organization, NCJWA around Australia is collecting money and goods to aid those who have been devastated by the terrible bushfires which hit our State of Victoria. It was an unbelievable conflagration which hit some communities in a way that has never happened before. We have annual bushfires, but they are usually contained away from habitation and only twice in the last 70 years was there any loss of life,- but never of the magnitude of this time. Everyone, everywhere is collecting money, individuals are offering goods, services, accommodation for thousands of homeless, -it's like a war zone in some communities. (They are even talking about building underground shelters for every house in the future!)

Many places where we usually go for holidays from Melbourne, in the cool mountains, have been completely razed to the ground. One particular guest-house in Marysville which many Orthodox people take over with a Kosher caterer annually for Pesach, has disappeared together with most of the township. Our friends and many holiday-makers spent Christmas and New Year's eve holidays there,- imagine if the fires had broken out then.

Everyone around the world has shown great concern and we are all very heartened by the support offered. Of course our Governments, State and Federal have set up a lot of assistance and aid facilities for the victims . It will be difficult to rebuild those burnt-out communities because many look like blackened moon-scapes at the moment while before this,they were lush, green forested environments.

That may be all due to global warming and climate change, or whatever,- so they warn us that we can look forward to more of the same in future. In the North of Australia, in the meantime,- they have huge floods and rain deluges! That's Australia!We live on a big continent with all the varieties of the world's climates in one country.

The environmentalists however,- it seems now in retrospect that they have a lot to answer for, because the homes in the bush are not allowed to clear enough land to ensure sufficient fire-break space between them and the trees which provide the fuel for the fires, - particularly in times of drought as we are experiencing at present in Victoria. Greenery is fine, forests are lovely,- but the land here regenerates regularly through burning down and regrowth. It seems that too many city-slickers have embraced the country-lifestyle without the experience of the local country-folk and farmers. Bureaucrats and the politics of the "Greens" seem to have dictated Councils' building regulations and flora conservation based on their ideology and city lifestyle experiences, ignoring the locals' expertise and going against the real experts' warnings and advice.

We shall see what the future brings for all those poor people who have been displaced from their homes. However, unlike the millions of displaced persons around the world, they won't be allowed to suffer for long, I am sure.

(Certainly not for 60 or more years so that they fester and become mortal enemies of the State, as some ended up in the ME through their own Arab and Islamic brethrens' cruel and fanatical intransigence.)

Miriam M.
Melbourne

WHO WON ISRAEL'S ELECTIONS?

2009-02-12T00:26:00.000-08:00

Daniel Pipes
February 11, 2009

Who Won in Israel's Elections?
by Daniel Pipes

Wed, 11 Feb 2009

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2009/02/who-won-in-israels-elections.htmlSendCommentRSS

Tzipi Livni, the head of the Kadima party, can credibly claim victory in the elections on Tuesday because her party won the most seats. Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud party can also claim victory as the head of the largest party in the larger of the two coalitions, the national camp.Both Livni and Netanyahu can plausibly claim "I won" the elections this week - but neither did.
But the real winner was the politically and personally unpredictable figure, Avigdor Lieberman, 50, of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. A Moldovan immigrant who started his career in Likud and as then served as director-general of Netanyahu's prime ministerial office, he founded Yisrael Beiteinu in 1999.Lieberman has introduced a new issue into Israeli domestic politics – the place of the country's Arab citizens. Noting their increasingly public disloyalty to the state, he has argued that they should lose their citizenship and their right to live in Israel unless they declare their loyalty to the Jewish state.This topic has clearly struck a nerve among the Israeli Jewish electorate and prompted responsible Arab voices to acknowledge that Israeli Arabs have "managed to make the Jewish public hate us." As I wrote in 2006, Israel's "final enemy" may finally, be joining the battle. The consequences of this for the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole could well be profound.

DanielPipes.org

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Y-NET
news .com

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3668921,00.html

(Responsible Arab voices)

Lieberman. 18 Knesset seats no longer a political game

We got what we deserve

Ali Zahalka slams Israeli-Arab leadership for radicalism that boosted Avigdor Lieberman

Ali Zahalka

The Arab-Israeli leadership is increasing pushing us into anti-Israel radicalism. This extremism climaxed with the “Death to the Jews” chants during Operation Cast Lead. Here is what I have to say to those leaders: Look at what you’ve done. We did not cry out in the face of rocket attacks on southern residents that went on for years. We did not cry out in the face of the suffering of our brethren, Gaza residents, who have been brutally repressed by Hamas. Yet we cried out, of all things, in the face of an onslaught against the most radical element in the Arab world. The Arab-Israeli leadership won’t connect, heaven forbid, to the moderate Arab elements such as Egypt, Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, or Jordan. These are of no interest to it. We saw Azmi Bishara, who left, and we saw where he went to. I don’t need to explain what Hamas is all about. The Egyptians and Palestinian Authority officials are doing it better than me. They ask Hamas how it can talk about victory when the war against Israel – which it sought and advanced – was managed on the backs and blood of thousands of Palestinians that were killed, wounded, or lost their property, while Hamas’ leadership stayed at fortified bunkers or in Damascus. So now we can accurately measure the result of this conduct: 18. Why 18? Because this is the number of Knesset seats that the polls predict for Avigdor Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu. Apparently, we got what we deserve. If we, citizens of the State of Israel, which has a Jewish majority, connect to the worst enemies of the State, why are we surprised that this is what we get? Lieberman and his party are not a marginal political element such as Meir Kahane’s party, Kach. We are dealing with immense political power that constitutes tangible danger to Israeli Arabs. He hates us and incites against us, and we can see that it’s going very well for him: The more he incites against us, the stronger he gets. Moment of truth
That is, we managed to make the Jewish public hate us so much that many are willing to support a racist party. If a party was similarly inciting against Jews overseas, those same Lieberman supporters would probably cry out “anti-Semitism.” Our leadership, which for years had been leading us in a way that portrays us as the enemies of the State of Israel, while failing to take care of any of the real needs of Israel’s Arab residents, is now asking for our votes again. Yet we interest our leadership just about as much as the Gaza population interests Hamas. For this leadership, we are merely a political means that allows it to make its damaging voice heard again and again. I turn to Arab residents of Israel: This is a moment of truth for us. We are facing grave danger, and don’t say that you weren’t warned. Eighteen Knesset seats for Lieberman is no longer a political game. For us, it’s genuine trouble. We cannot stand by and watch on, as if this does not pertain to us. We must enlist and massively support the moderate parties that will weaken Lieberman.
We constitute 20% of the population in Israel and we have the ability to exert significant influence. We do not have the privilege to stay at home at this time and avoid the political game. If we fail to play it, others shall play it on our backs. Therefore, do not abstain from voting, and do not vote for the radical Arab parties. Rather, vote in a way that reduces the great danger we are facing today – Lieberman and his colleagues. In other words: Support parties that are still willing to give us the opportunity to integrate as citizens with equal rights.

The writer is the principal of an elementary school at Kfar Kara

[MM]

"DEATH TO ALL JUICE" Anti-Israel/anti-Semitic Demos.

2009-01-29T00:17:00.000-08:00

[ Apropos below:
Some 30 years ago, we were visiting Tokyo for the first time and took a half-day tour of the city to acclimatise ourselves. The assorted group of tourists came from all over the world. The guide was busy enumerating the various ethnic groups residing in Tokyo, but no mention of any Jewish people. An American voice from the back called out : "any Jews?" The guide kept asking, -"please?" after the questioner repeated it a second and third time, but still no understanding from the guide. Eventually another passenger yelled out:"there is orange juice, apple juice, all kinds of juices!"]

"DEATH TO ALL JUICE"
DAVID HARSANYI (Denver Post, USA)

In our nation, even twisted extremists are welcome to express their opinions.

Take, for instance, the young Muslim woman in Florida who used her constitutional right to tell Jews to "go back to the oven!" last week. Or the more befuddled protester in New York who brandished a sign that read, "Death to all Juice." (And I thought we Jews ran the country. Clearly, someone is sleeping on the job.)

These rare but revolting displays of hate do offer the "Juice" a valuable reminder that a secure Jewish state in Israel is a historic imperative.

Nevertheless, it is distressing to hear the large number of supposedly peace- loving critics of Israel in essence defend Hamas, one of the most virulently un-intellectual, illiberal, bellicose, misogynistic, hateful and violent brands of religious fanaticism on Earth.

That's no easy trick, mind you. After all, the magnificently overused "cycle of violence" — a platitude that shrewdly spreads blame equally among the culpable and innocent — has thankfully cliched itself to death. So now, detractors have turned to a feeble argument that claims Israel is guilty of failing to deploy a "proportional" response against Hamas.

It is said that every story has two sides. In this tale, one group has a nihilistic interest in placing Jews in ovens (though Hamas, without Iran, lacks the technological capacity to construct a match, much less an oven) and the other side has a stubborn habit of postponing this fate.

For Israel, there is no choice. There is no political solution. No happy ending. The present circumstance in Gaza refutes the Left's quixotic notion that antagonists can just, you know, hug it out for peace. It also counters the neoconservative idea that democracy will spread among people who place no value in it.

Because Gaza is free. Obviously the Palestinians cannot be placated with an independent state — a gift they never had until Israel handed them Gaza with nary a condition. But this is not a 3,000-year-old war steeped in ancient history, despite widespread perceptions. This was a 20th century battle between Jewish and Arab nationalists. It has turned into a more insidious 21st century war with Islamic fundamentalism.

Hamas will not be romanced by the idea of "building bridges" with Israel. There are not enough conference rooms in Oslo or Davos to persuade Hamas to even recognize the existence of a Jewish state. And Hamas is uninterested in ceasefires, except when it is in need of re-loading rocket launchers — supplied by Iran.

When asked if he could ever imagine a long-term ceasefire with Israel, Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan responded: "The only reason to have a hudna [cease-fire] is to prepare yourself for the final battle."

Reportedly, Rayyan celebrated the idea of martyrdom and death in this glorious battle against Jews, not only for himself, but for his family as well. The Israeli air force blew Rayyan into nano-pieces last week in what we call a "win-win" situation. Rayyan's four wives and 11 of his children unfortunately died along with him.

But make no mistake: Every Arab civilian that perishes does so at the hands of Hamas. The group provoked Israel with thousands of rocket attacks indiscriminately aimed at civilian centers. Once Israel responded — after years of warnings — Hamas placed caches of weapons near schools, mosques and homes in an effort to cause carnage on its own people. Civilian death is the point.

Most reasonable Americans will understand that Israel did not invade Gaza to terrorize the civilian population or murder the innocent. Israel is there to dismantle Hamas' infrastructure and dispose of as many jihadists as possible.

Will Israel's latest assault radicalize Palestinians even further? It's possible. But what other nation would allow a terror state to attack it on a daily basis without defending itself? The answer is none.

GAZA: FALLOUT FOR JEWS AND ANALYSIS OF CAMPAIGN

2009-01-20T04:06:00.000-08:00

THE BBC IS NOT KNOWN FOR ITS PRO-ISRAEL STANCE!On the contrary, it is usually shrill in its condemnations of Israel at every opportunity. Hence it is surprising to see such an interview aired.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009
From the BBC ..strange that our Australian news organisations have decided not to show it...

BICOM - Videos - BBC News: Military analysis :interview of expert.

http://www.bicom.org.uk/news/operation-cast-lead/videos/bbc-news--military-analysis

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

Standing against a tide of hatred

It is not Israel's action, but the vitriolic reaction to it that has been disproportionate. There's only one explanation: antisemitism

Elizabeth Wurtzel

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 January 2009 10.00 GMT
Is it good for the Jews?

If you were so inclined, you could ask that question about the Madoff mess, the Gaza offensive, the latest screed from Alan Dershowitz – or about a new recipe for angel-food cake. Which is to say, if you are looking for antisemitism, you can find it anywhere, even in a dessert cookbook. But if even paranoids have enemies, I think it's fair to say that these are tough times for Jews.

While I would prefer to equate the fate of the Palestinians with that of Israel – meaning, I'd like to believe we're all on the same side – I think that might be a difficult political fiction to maintain at the moment. And while I'd like to artificially separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism, like most American Jews, I'm not willing to make that false distinction: when there is more than one Jewish state, the world's hatred of Israel might become no different from its exasperation with any other country, but since Israel is the only homeland, and really it is nothing more than six million Jews living together in an area the size of New Jersey, I can't pretend that the problem with Israel is that it's a poorly located country that happens to be at odds with its neighbours and only coincidentally happens to be Jewish. The trouble with Israel is the trouble with Jews.

This situation makes me profoundly uncomfortable. As the kind of left-leaning liberal who tends to agree with the positions taken by The Nation in most instances, I hate having to differ so completely on the Israel issue with many I otherwise would align with. As it is my good fortune to be American, I live in the only country that as a matter of policy is pro-Israel regardless of party allegiance; Democrats and Republicans equally unite behind the blue-and-white. But to communicate with anyone I think of as rightminded (and left-leaning) in any other part of the world is to experience the purest antisemitism since the Nazi era. In fact, in Europe right now, it is de rigueur to liken the current regime in Israel with the Nazi party, and to view the experience of the Palestinians as a form of ethnic cleansing. Hamas and Hezbollah are thought by the French and British to be social welfare organisations, and Israel is viewed as a terrorist state. Here, we honor the linguistic discoveries of Noam Chomsky and otherwise experience him as a quaintly brilliant crank, but in the bookstores in London there are entire sections devoted to his political thought – and he is read as if the distinctions between Leninist and Trotskyite philosophy had genuine consequence in today's world.

Excepting a business trip I took to England, Scotland and Ireland in early 2002, I have not been to Europe since 9/11. It's become an unbearable place to be, as the anti-American feelings in light of the Iraq war have mingled with antisemitism to a point where they are indistinguishable, the new phobias of the First World. Because I like taking the occasional trip abroad, especially now that even the Euro is sinking, I am doing my best to understand the European perspective, or somehow excuse it. After all, beyond being a Jewish homeland, Israel is also a geopolitical actor with nuclear weapons, and it might be construed as fair to criticise the actions the country has taken as a very well-armed American client that is dropping bombs on Hamas targets, to the terrible detriment of the civilian population. It's impossible not to feel sorry for the plight of the Palestinians, and it's even more impossible to imagine how any Palestinian could feel anything for Israel but animosity. I can see the problem.

But I think it is this very fact – my attempt to understand both sides – that disturbs me the most. Because trying to see all sides, such an instinct is particularly Jewish. The most vehement critics of Israel and champions of the Palestinians – hello, Professor Chomsky; greetings, Norman Finkelstein – are always Jews: we are always trying in our even, level, thoughtful way to see reason in the behaviour of those who are lobbing rocket grenades at us. As a people, we are hopeless Talmudists, we examine all the arguments and try to sort out an answer. What is both strange and difficult for Jews to watch in the case of Israel is that, as a nation surrounded by enemies, it does not make such calculations; it does not have the luxury of rationality that is eventually irrational. Israel fights back, which is very much at odds with the Jewish instinct to discuss and deconstruct everything until action itself seems senseless. Israel, hell-bent on survival, has learned to shoot first – or, at least, second – and blow away the consequences. Whereas it actually hurts my feelings when someone says something nasty about Israel, or even the United States, for Israelis, this is just the way of the world: they probably manufacture their flags to be flammable.

So, it is quite difficult to be Jewish, on the sidelines of this international crisis. Or maybe it's just difficult to be Jewish. Before his death, the literary philosopher Jacques Derrida described the experience of living in the Jewish ghetto in Paris during the Nazi occupation: because Jews were not allowed to work or attend school, but had always been the most brilliant professors and teachers, this shtetl existence was gloriously intellectual and incandescent – the only problem was that they were stuck, imprisoned by their Jewishness. This, Derrida explained, is what it's like to be Jewish: to know everyone around you is gifted, and to wish you could find a way out. Jews pride themselves on the over two hundred Nobel Prizes the group has won; and Jews pride themselves on being told: "But you don't seem Jewish." Or better still: "You certainly don't look Jewish."

Judaism will be enmeshed in pride and shame for as long as it endures. But to endure as a country, Israel must shun both these tendencies.

I watch the pro-Palestinian rallies that have been staged in capitals across the globe, and I try to tell myself that these people are not against me, or even Israel; that they just are dismayed with all the violence. I tell myself, as Jean Renoir pointed out with such pellucid irony in The Rules of the Game, that everybody has their reasons. But here is what I finally know: with all the troubles in the world, with the terrible things that the Chinese do in Tibet, and do to their own citizens; with the horrors of genocide committed in Darfur by Sudanese Muslims; with all the bad things that Arab governments in the Middle East visit upon their own people – no need for Israel to have a perfectly horrible time – still, the focus is on what the Jews may or may not be doing wrong in Gaza. And it makes people angry and vehement as nothing else does. The vitriol it inspires is downright weird. But that makes sense, because antisemitism itself – creepy, dark, ancient and insidious – is, more than anything else, just plain weird.

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

Gaza war's outcome determined in first 4 minutes

January 19, 2009, 9:12 PM (GMT+02:00)

The Israel air force demolished two key Hamas war systems in the first 4 minutes of its massive offensive on Gaza Saturday morning, Dec. 27, DEBKAfile's military sources report. The bombers destroyed six mosques in Gaza City which held the terrorists' biggest weapons arsenals and scores of "beehives" containing launchers primed for the simultaneous, automatic release of hundreds of powerful rockets against Israeli cities.

These launchers were rigged for precision-targeting in Israeli town centers. They were operated by a unit of 300 special Hamas operatives trained for their mission at a Syrian military bases under the instruction of Hizballah rocket specialists.

The aerial offensive knocked out 80 percent of the rockets Hamas had prepared to launch and saved Israel's southern cities. The Palestinian Islamists were left only with inferior projectiles. Therefore, 98 percent of the hundreds o f missiles they managed to fire in the 22-day war missed their targets and exploded in open ground.

Answering questions about the extreme destruction wrought in Gaza and the high number of casualties – more than 1,300 - Israel commanders described combat conditions as the most complicated they had ever faced: Every second apartment building was booby-trapped and every third building concealed arms caches. Weapons were concealed under children's beds and in basements. Inside of fighting out in the open, Hamas gunmen by and large avoided engaging Israeli troops, relying on these death traps.

Monday, Jan. 19, the second day of the ceasefire, the second-echelon of the Hamas leadership emerged from their fortified bunkers after three weeks underground, claiming they had vanquished the Israeli enemy. The top leaders remained invisible. The homeless people picking their way through the rubble for their broken possessions were not exactly welcoming.

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

Copyright 2000-2007 DEBKAfile. All Rights Reserved.
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Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 9:32 AM
What a way to start the life of a child?
Log on to the following Internet site.

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=eTGbP55HGi8

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WESTERN PROXY WAR AGAINST IRAN
Daily Mail,
5 January 2009

War is always terrible and to be avoided if humanly possible. War in Gaza, where Hamas terrorists are embedded within densely crowded areas, is particularly awful. No one wants to see civilians being killed. Every decent person will be dismayed that it has come to this. What is profoundly troubling, however, is that as the Israeli ground offensive escalates hostilities still further, so many in Britain don’t understand that, appalling as this war is, the alternative is even worse.

This is a war that Israel spent more than seven years trying to avoid, while no fewer than 6,000 rockets and other missiles rained down from Gaza upon its southern towns. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands while its traumatised children were raised in bomb shelters!

The often-made comparison with IRA terrorism spectacularly misses the point. Hamas actually run Gaza. The equivalent would have been the Irish government firing 6,000 rockets at England. Does anyone seriously doubt that, in such a hypothetical situation, Britain would have been at war with Ireland long before that total had been reached?

Far from acting out of political opportunism, as some so offensively suggest, Israel has taken massive risks on every front with this operation. A ground war almost certainly means many of its soldiers will die. If just one of its shells were to go astray and hit a school or hospital, a hostile western world would unleash the furies against it.

And in Lebanon, Hezbollah may launch its ferocious arsenal of rockets pointing at northern Israel, forcing it to fight on two fronts. But the brutal fact is that tiny, besieged Israel is damned if it does and dead if it doesn’t. While Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas blame Hamas for provoking this war, it is Israel which is drawing western protests. These are not confined to the thuggish demonstrations organised by an alliance of Islamists and the far-Left we have seen on the streets of London at the weekend. Many others also share the view that Israel is in the wrong. So why is a country under attack from genocidal fanatics pilloried for defending its citizens against slaughter?

The main complaint is that Israel’s response is ‘disproportionate’, since some 500 Palestinians have been killed compared with ‘only’ four Israelis (now eight!) since the war started nine days ago. This is absurd. In World War II, 20 times more civilians were killed in Germany than in Britain. Did that make the war against the Nazis ‘disproportionate’? Of course not.

Then there’s the belief that the Hamas rockets are some kind of homemade, harmless Dad’s Army effort which could and should be ignored. But the only reason more Israelis haven’t been killed by them is that in the south, the population has been all but living in bomb shelters. And there is nothing ‘homemade’ about the Russian-designed Katyushas and Iranian Grad rockets now putting around one-tenth of Israel’s population within their range.

Contrary to Arab propaganda, the Israelis are taking enormous pains to avoid civilian casualties in their attempt to curb these rocket attacks. The UN has confirmed that the vast majority (75 per cent) of the dead in Gaza have been Hamas terrorists. Given the huge number of bombing sorties that have been conducted, this proves that the Israelis are specifically targeting the Hamas infrastructure. Alas, the civilian death toll will unavoidably mount, which is deeply regrettable. But what must be understood is that Hamas have deliberately situated their weapons under apartment blocks, in mosques and in hospitals.

The Israelis build bomb shelters for their civilians; Hamas store bombs underneath their civilians in order to create as many civilian casualties as possible to manipulate world opinion. What people find so hard to grasp is that Hamas actually want to maximise the number of Palestinians who are killed because, as they boast: ‘We desire death as you desire life.’ Despite this fanaticism, many fear that Israel’s attack will merely create yet more suicide bombers. There is a grain of sense in this — but only a grain. This is because every single act of self-defence against Islamist aggression is used as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamic holy war. So if this is allowed to dictate world responses, it follows that no one can ever defend themselves against Islamist rockets and bomb attacks — not just in Israel but in Afghanistan or against Al Qaeda anywhere.

Islamists such as Hamas are galvanised into battle by the perceived weakness of their victims, and are deterred only by implacable strength. That’s why the ferocity of suicide bomb attacks actually rises after peace initiatives. Gaza’s rocket barrage against Israel went up by 500 per cent after Israel ended its occupation. And the 2000 Intifada which killed thousands of Israelis was the Palestinians’ response to being offered more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza for a state of their own. What is so distressing is the desperate unfairness of so much Western reaction. Thus Israel is accused of causing a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, even though it is allowing hundreds of trucks of supplies through the crossing points — so that at one stage aid agencies in Gaza said their storehouses were full. Few are aware that wounded Gazans — 65 per cent of whom voted for Hamas — are continuing to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Nor are they aware that in a Gaza hospital, by contrast, Hamas shot dead five suspected Palestinian ‘collaborators’ — and murdered a further 30 elsewhere. Killing 35 of their own civilians?!

The reason for this grotesquely unfair reaction is that so many in Britain now believe as fact the Arab lies about the Middle East impasse. Many think, for example, that the Palestinians are the rightful inheritors not just of Gaza and the West Bank but Israel itself. But this is totally false. The Jews are the only people for whom ‘Palestine’ was ever their nation state, hundreds of years before Mohammed was even born. It was in recognition of that inalienable right that in the 1920s the British undertook the legally binding international obligation — never rescinded — to settle Jews in every part of Mandatory Palestine. That included not just modern Israel but the West Bank and Gaza, too. Despite this, Israel is willing for the Palestinians to have their own state — as was first offered to them in 1937 — but not if its only purpose is to be a launching pad for the final destruction of its Israeli neighbour.

No other country on the planet has ever been expected to make suicidal concessions to its enemies even while they continue to try to destroy it. Yet that is what the world expects of Israel. Now the British Government, among others, has called for an immediate ceasefire. But this would effectively mean victory for Hamas. Gordon Brown wouldn’t dream of calling for a ceasefire with al Qaeda. So why the double standard where Israel is concerned? Most important of all, this war is not actually about Israel and the Palestinians. Hamas is controlled by Iran. Unless Hamas is stopped, Iran’s growing influence in the region will be entrenched and put Britain and the West in even greater danger from Islamist aggression and blackmail.Israel may or may not eventually manage to stop the Hamas rockets. But the Middle East conflict will not end until and unless the West comes to realise that Israel is in the frontline of the West’s own fight for survival, and starts properly defending the country struggling to defend civilisation instead of siding with those waging holy war against it.
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Imagine a British Blog, January 3rd, 1944.

2009-01-14T00:05:00.000-08:00

This blog was filed on January 3rd 1944. There may have been a slight delay with the post appearing due to server problems...

Dateline: January 3rd 1944

Fury continues to mount worldwide about the senseless loss of civilian life in Germany caused by England's callous bombing of German cities including Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden.

As of today many innocent German women and children have died in these utterly brutal bombing missions. And now there are ground offensives starting on mainland Europe.

The English have claimed that they are merely retaliating against the V-1 flying bombs being launched indiscriminately by Nazis at their civilian population in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry and other cities. The English point out that their enemy is sworn to its utter destruction and has used the missiles and flying bombs against its civilians without any regard to English loss of life. Moreover it makes the case that their own bombing missions are specifically directed to military targets that the German army has intentionally planted in the heart of civilian populations to try and deter English counter-attacks.

These points may of course be true - but they are utterly besides the point.

Of course England has a right to exist. Of course England has a right to defend itself. But it should ensure that its responses are PROPORTIONATE.

Since many more Germans are dying than English - the English should either tone down the success and accuracy of their bombing - or allow the Germans to catch up on the death count.

To be honest - if more English women and children were dying - we wouldn't feel quite so bad about the number of Germans dying. But it's just so UNFAIR that more Germans are dying...

Perhaps some English people could arrange to kill themselves to match the number of Germans dying as a result of the English retaliation bombing? It would be so considerate - and it might help England's critics feel less miserable about the number of Nazis dying. Something that is causing them so much concern.

It would also put paid to that wretched proportionality argument.

Alternatively, perhaps the English could arrange to be less effective in their bombing? Or only bomb military targets that are nowhere near civilians - even though the vast majority of the V-1 rockets are intentionally being launched from the heart of civilian population centers.

Now the English will argue that the Germans have INTENTIONALLY positioned all their launch pads for the V-1 rockets in the middle of civilian populations to inhibit the English from bombing those launch sites. Well - tough noogies to the Brits! Sorry - but if the Germans are smarter or more skillful at cynically using their civilians as human shields than you - tough luck!

You can't have it both ways. If you truly wish to save your nation from being annihilated by Nazi missiles you'd better stop looking to win a popularity contest. The Nazis are waging this war to win and to utterly destroy England. If all you Brits care about is popularity - then you may as well resign yourself to speaking German...

It's about time that little nations who wish to defend themselves wised up to their responsibilities.

Otherwise the same stupid complaints will be made at some point in the 21st Century when some little nation finds itself under constant attack from rockets fired at its civilian population by a terrorizing enemy that has sworn to destroy it....

Cliffs Notes To Assist the Hard-Of-Thinking

"Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?" - Adolf Hitler - circa 1938

"We have suffered so much that it only steels us to fanatical resolve to hate our enemies a thousand times more and to regard them for what they are destroyers of an eternal culture and annihilators of humanity. Out of this bate a holy will is born to oppose these destroyers of our existence with all the strength that God has given us and to crush them in the end." - Adolf Hitler - 24 February 1945

"I will carry on the fight until the last traces of the Jewish-Communist European hegemony have been obliterated." Adolf Hitler - 28th November 1941 to Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (The Grand Mufti) - seen in the photo at the top of this page saluting his SS buddies in 1941. Oh the ties that bind...

"We will not rest until we destroy the Zionist entity" - Hamas leader Fathi Hammad in Gaza - January 2nd 2009

"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." - Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant

Hamas vs.Israel. Daily Mail. + Letter from Gedera.

2009-01-06T15:36:00.000-08:00

ISRAEL'S LAST STAND AGAINST TERRORISTS' INTRANSIGENCE.

Hamas, AlQueda, Hitzbullah, Taliban, Jihadists,- all in the same boat!

Daily Mail,
5 January 2009

War is always terrible and to be avoided if humanly possible. War in Gaza, where Hamas terrorists are embedded within densely crowded areas, is particularly awful. No one wants to see civilians being killed. Every decent person will be dismayed that it has come to this. What is profoundly troubling, however, is that as the Israeli ground offensive escalates hostilities still further, so many in Britain don’t understand that, appalling as this war is, the alternative is even worse.

This is a war that Israel spent more than seven years trying to avoid, while no fewer than 6,000 rockets and other missiles rained down from Gaza upon its southern towns. No other country in the world would have sat on its hands while its traumatised children were raised in bomb shelters!

The often-made comparison with IRA terrorism spectacularly misses the point. Hamas actually run Gaza. The equivalent would have been the Irish government firing 6,000 rockets at England. Does anyone seriously doubt that, in such a hypothetical situation, Britain would have been at war with Ireland long before that total had been reached?

Far from acting out of political opportunism, as some so offensively suggest, Israel has taken massive risks on every front with this operation. A ground war almost certainly means many of its soldiers will die. If just one of its shells were to go astray and hit a school or hospital, a hostile western world would unleash the furies against it.

And in Lebanon, Hezbollah may launch its ferocious arsenal of rockets pointing at northern Israel, forcing it to fight on two fronts. But the brutal fact is that tiny, besieged Israel is damned if it does and dead if it doesn’t. While Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia as well as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas blame Hamas for provoking this war, it is Israel which is drawing western protests. These are not confined to the thuggish demonstrations organised by an alliance of Islamists and the far-Left we have seen on the streets of London at the weekend. Many others also share the view that Israel is in the wrong. So why is a country under attack from genocidal fanatics pilloried for defending its citizens against slaughter?

The main complaint is that Israel’s response is ‘disproportionate’, since some 500 Palestinians have been killed compared with ‘only’ four Israelis (now eight!) since the war started nine days ago. This is absurd. In World War II, 20 times more civilians were killed in Germany than in Britain. Did that make the war against the Nazis ‘disproportionate’? Of course not.

Then there’s the belief that the Hamas rockets are some kind of homemade, harmless Dad’s Army effort which could and should be ignored. But the only reason more Israelis haven’t been killed by them is that in the south, the population has been all but living in bomb shelters. And there is nothing ‘homemade’ about the Russian-designed Katyushas and Iranian Grad rockets now putting around one-tenth of Israel’s population within their range.

Contrary to Arab propaganda, the Israelis are taking enormous pains to avoid civilian casualties in their attempt to curb these rocket attacks. The UN has confirmed that the vast majority (75 per cent) of the dead in Gaza have been Hamas terrorists. Given the huge number of bombing sorties that have been conducted, this proves that the Israelis are specifically targeting the Hamas infrastructure. Alas, the civilian death toll will unavoidably mount, which is deeply regrettable. But what must be understood is that Hamas have deliberately situated their weapons under apartment blocks, in mosques and in hospitals.

The Israelis build bomb shelters for their civilians; Hamas store bombs underneath their civilians in order to create as many civilian casualties as possible to manipulate world opinion. What people find so hard to grasp is that Hamas actually want to maximise the number of Palestinians who are killed because, as they boast: ‘We desire death as you desire life.’ Despite this fanaticism, many fear that Israel’s attack will merely create yet more suicide bombers. There is a grain of sense in this — but only a grain. This is because every single act of self-defence against Islamist aggression is used as a recruiting sergeant for the Islamic holy war. So if this is allowed to dictate world responses, it follows that no one can ever defend themselves against Islamist rockets and bomb attacks — not just in Israel but in Afghanistan or against Al Qaeda anywhere.

Islamists such as Hamas are galvanised into battle by the perceived weakness of their victims, and are deterred only by implacable strength. That’s why the ferocity of suicide bomb attacks actually rises after peace initiatives. Gaza’s rocket barrage against Israel went up by 500 per cent after Israel ended its occupation. And the 2000 Intifada which killed thousands of Israelis was the Palestinians’ response to being offered more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza for a state of their own. What is so distressing is the desperate unfairness of so much Western reaction. Thus Israel is accused of causing a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, even though it is allowing hundreds of trucks of supplies through the crossing points — so that at one stage aid agencies in Gaza said their storehouses were full. Few are aware that wounded Gazans — 65 per cent of whom voted for Hamas — are continuing to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Nor are they aware that in a Gaza hospital, by contrast, Hamas shot dead five suspected Palestinian ‘collaborators’ — and murdered a further 30 elsewhere. Killing 35 of their own civilians?!

The reason for this grotesquely unfair reaction is that so many in Britain now believe as fact the Arab lies about the Middle East impasse. Many think, for example, that the Palestinians are the rightful inheritors not just of Gaza and the West Bank but Israel itself. But this is totally false. The Jews are the only people for whom ‘Palestine’ was ever their nation state, hundreds of years before Mohammed was even born. It was in recognition of that inalienable right that in the 1920s the British undertook the legally binding international obligation — never rescinded — to settle Jews in every part of Mandatory Palestine. That included not just modern Israel but the West Bank and Gaza, too. Despite this, Israel is willing for the Palestinians to have their own state — as was first offered to them in 1937 — but not if its only purpose is to be a launching pad for the final destruction of its Israeli neighbour.

No other country on the planet has ever been expected to make suicidal concessions to its enemies even while they continue to try to destroy it. Yet that is what the world expects of Israel. Now the British Government, among others, has called for an immediate ceasefire. But this would effectively mean victory for Hamas. Gordon Brown wouldn’t dream of calling for a ceasefire with al Qaeda. So why the double standard where Israel is concerned? Most important of all, this war is not actually about Israel and the Palestinians. Hamas is controlled by Iran. Unless Hamas is stopped, Iran’s growing influence in the region will be entrenched and put Britain and the West in even greater danger from Islamist aggression and blackmail.

Israel may or may not eventually manage to stop the Hamas rockets. But the Middle East conflict will not end until and unless the West comes to realise that Israel is in the frontline of the West’s own fight for survival, and starts properly defending the country struggling to defend civilisation instead of siding with those waging holy war against it.
-----

From
Michele
Gedera.

Dear Family and Friends,

Please forward this mail to everyone you know. It is important that people will be aware of what is TRULY going on !!!!

This morning a missile caused damage to my cousins' house in Gedera. Thank God that the family was in the shelter room and there are no life casualties!!!

Be sure that the Israelis are fighting for our life and our future in this country. We have a lasting and unfinished struggle with terrorist - defined as such by the whole world. They are neither peace seekers nor peace makers. For 8 years they are constantly devastating families' lives in the southern part of Israel. Children and their families are paying an unbearable toll for these terrorists' hatred. This must be stopped!!! This time - the Israeli government took the expected decision - to put an end to the Hamas terror and bloodshed.

Watch the film and see how little babies are brought up... be sure - this kind of terror will be spread all over the world. "September 11" - was just a reminder of what terror can be and do.

Please pass this mail to your friends. See the source ofHmas hatred.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=eTGbP55HGi8

Thanks,

Shlomit

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

"Those Australians, Americans and other coalition soldiers who, in trying to help free the Afghanis and Iraqis, but are dying fighting the Taliban , AlQueda and similar terrorist groups killing and maiming their own, - they understand very well what Israel is up against in Gaza with Hamas.

When a New York based UN official was asked (3LO this morning) whether Israel would have deliberately attacked the latest UN-school in Gaza, said ' I cannot believe that,- I can't get my head around that'.

They know very well the tactics used,- the leaders cower underground, while the populations is deliberately exposed for the benefit of the international media. The reverse of course is true about Israelis who value human lives and therefore safeguard them.

Too many locals in response choose to believe the worst of Israel and take the side of the terrorists' spin.

Is that ignorance, bias, fear of Islamic backlash or blatant anti-semitism?"

Miriam M.
Melbourne.

__._,_.___
__._,_.___

GAZA- FAQS.

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

1. HAMAS REALITY

This video was made not by Israelis, but by an Arab, a Palestinian
who shows you who and what Hamas really is!
Israel has been telling this to the world for years , but
the world prefers to turn a deaf ear and blind eye to the
sad truth ! Hamas against the Palestinians ! This is how they
succeeded in being elected - by force !
Please watch the video , if you don't have 10 minutes
to spend on it it's OK - the first 2-3 minutes are enough
to understand .
I am still shocked from what I've seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_OGhj43GAE

Like the coalition forces trying to free the Afghanis from the grip of
the Taliban and the Iraqis from Saddam and now AlQueda,
the Gazan Palestinians may yet be grateful to be freed from Hamas.
The Lebanese would have loved to get free from the Hitzbullah.
Israel was stopped short of doing it. The soft West hasn't the stomach
to fight them for " freedom and democracy (!) ".
I SHUDDER TO THINK WHAT THEIR POOR WOMEN ARE SUFFERING.

2.Questions about Operation Cast Lead
Why did Israel start this war?

Israel did not start this war.
They were provoked into responding to attacks over 8 years.

This war was started by Palestinian terrorists, who in 2008 alone have launched over 3000 missiles from Gaza into Israel, targeting civilian centres.
In June 08, a temporary calm was brokered by Egypt. This so called truce had a six month expiry date. Despite the “truce”, rockets continued to be fired across the Israeli border, sending the people of Sderot and other southern Israeli towns running several times daily to bomb shelters.

On December 19 2008, the truce expired. Israel wanted to continue it, and Egypt was prepared to broker its renewal. Hamas rejected this and commenced increased bombardment of Israeli towns and villages.

Israel has a responsibility and an obligation to protect and defend her citizens. No other country would allow such provocation without a response.

Ultimately, Israel has engaged in this war to show Hamas that continued attacks on Israeli citizens can’t and won’t be tolerated.

Israel wants peace. Israel wants to see the creation of a sustainable and flourishing Palestinian state alongside it, with peaceful borders, hence it withdrew totally and completely from Gaza in 2005. When the Palestinians cease attacks and commit to negotiation, peace in the region will be that much closer.
Click here to view the website of Palestinian Media Watch, which has great resources and articles on this topic.

Why did Hamas send rockets into Israel, knowing full well that ultimately Israel would respond?

Hamas has a very clear objective – to annihilate the state of Israel. It’s in their charter. See Article 31,
http://www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html,

Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, and their actions are designed to continually terrorise the Israeli civilian population and keep them under constant threat.

Hamas has had an unrelenting strategy of launching missiles from Gaza into Israeli population centres since 2001. Over a quarter of a million Israelis live in terror and fear of the next attack. The fact that the 8200 missiles launched have not killed or injured more people is because:

(a) Israel has taken responsibility for the safety of her citizens and ensured that bomb shelters were built and detection and evacuation procedures are in place; and
(b) The inaccuracy of the Palestinian missiles.

Yet the damage caused by these attacks has been terrible. Dozens have been killed and hundreds injured. Communities have been destroyed. Sirens sound off day and night, requiring everyone to run to the shelters within 15 seconds.
15 Seconds
Hamas well knew that escalating these attacks would provoke a response from Israel. They anticipated the media’s response, and the likelihood of media picking up on inevitable instances of civilian fatalities and casualties. They maximise the possibilities by locating military targets and operations within their own civilian centres, putting their own people at grave risk.

Why are there so many Palestinian deaths and so few Israeli deaths?

Israeli citizens are protected by their government, by ensuring adequate shelter protection for all. Palestinian leaders hide, while leaving their civilian brethren exposed to danger.

Israel has scrupulously and meticulously targeted military and strategic locations in Gaza. They try to warn the population by leaflet-drops, even phoning the targeted militants to send their families out before their homes will be blown up!

Even the UNRWA has estimated that 15% of the Palestinian deaths, are civilian and over 85% are Hamas militants (terrorists). Sadly too many of the civilian deaths are children.
The unfortunate consequence of any war is the inevitable loss of innocent lives.

Israel has attempted to limit such fatalities by:
(a) Specifically targeting military sites;
(b) Telephoning and flyer dropping to warn civilians to leave their homes, where they are located close to Hamas targets, even though this detracts from strategic surprise elements;

Hamas, on the other hand, has a defined strategy of placing its installations amongst civilian population centres, putting its own people at grave risk. As was written in the Boston Globe on 30/12:

“In direct contravention of international law, Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, utilizing homes, schools and community centers as launching pads, content in the knowledge that if innocent Palestinian civilians are caught in the cross-fire, it will be Israel that is criticized. This amounts to a sort of Daily Double of human rights violations: the use of innocent Palestinians as human shields for the infliction of violence upon innocent Israelis.” While Israel regrets the loss of innocent lives and does everything possible to limit it, Hamas specifically targets civilians in Israel. http://www.aish.com/movies/15seconds.asp

During the eight years of sustained attacks by Hamas, Israel has built shelters for the people in the south, fortified community, school and kindergarten buildings and ensured that people know the procedures when the “code red” siren sounds.

Conversely, Hamas has built tunnels for smuggling weapons, developed its weapons infrastructure and built its weapons stores within civilian population centres.

Why is Israel’s response so disproportionate?

The Australian (31/12) ran an article which goes a way to explaining what disproportionate is – or is not. Here’s an excerpt:

“LET'S have a pointless discussion about Gaza and begin it by talking about
whether Israel's bombing is "disproportionate".

To illustrate the meaninglessness of such a debate, let us attempt to agree what "proportionate" would look like.

Would it be best if Israel were to manufacture a thousand or so wildly inaccurate missiles and then fire them off in the general direction of Gaza City?

There is a chance, though, that since Gaza is more densely packed than Israel, casualties might be much the same as they are now, so although the ordnance would be proportionate, the deaths would not.

Of course, if one of Gaza's rockets did manage to hit an Israeli nursery school at the wrong time (or the right time, depending on how you look at it), then the proportionality issue would be solved in one explosion. Would you be happy then? “ (From “Sound and Fury… and it still signifies nothing” David Aaronovitch, The Australian; 31/12/08).

Since when is war a mathematical equation? The basic objective of any warring party is to inflict maximal damage on the enemy while minimizing its own casualties. Was there anything proportional about the US war in Iraq? Or about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait for that matter? Or about Russia's recent war against Georgia? Israel is doing exactly what any other country has done in the past. This is how war works.

Would an Australian citizen complain that "too few" Australian soldiers are being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan? Probably not.

And on a more elementary note: Palestinian military inferiority is not an indication of moral superiority. Palestinian insistence on resorting to violence despite this military weakness is an indication of poor judgment perhaps - yet it is by no means an indication of moral virtue. Being militarily weak does not make the Palestinians right. It makes them indifferent to the possible repercussion of their actions towards their own civilians.

Is there a relationship between Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran?
YES – a resounding yes.

They share a dedication to Israel’s destruction – Hezbollah’s Nasrallah and Iran’s Ahmadinejad have notoriously declared their goal to wipe Israel off the map.

Hamas belongs to the school of extremist elements espousing violence, such as Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the World Jihad, and others. This is manifested in instructions to carry out terror, training and drills, smuggling means of warfare, supplying monies, etc. In an interview with the Sunday Times published on March 9, 2008, a Hamas official related, “The Iranian Revolutionary Guards have been training Hamas operatives in Tehran ever since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip…in field warfare tactics and weaponry. The operatives come into the Strip with skills they have acquired in advanced technologies, rocket firing, setting off charges, sharpshooting and other tactics similar to those used by Hezbollah.”

For more information: visit the Zionist Council of Victoria’s website
www.zcv.org.au

Hipocrisy at work re Gaza

2008-12-29T03:13:00.000-08:00

People are wringing their hands in despair at the suffering of the Gazans.The situation of the people is dire, but it's of their own leaders' making.
Everyone in the West has advice: Israel should talk to Hamas; Israel should not do this, etc., etc. What exactly should Israel have done to stop Hamas' provocations over months and momths?

As for "talking" to Hamas? Who can talk to Hamas,or Islamic Jihad, AlQueda, Taliban, Iranians, Hezbollah, etc. etc. Actually, they tried, via the Egyptians,- and a "truce" was organised. It was one-sided,- it didn't stop the daily barrage of rockets and it only escalated on the day the 6-month truce ended.

I don't know what different "tactics" could have been used by Israel. Perhaps there is a different kind of supernatural being that protects the Israelis, North and South from the barrage of daily rockets which they had to endure before and now. The rocket-senders would like to inflict the same deaths and destructions but luckily they somehow can't succeed.

That is their frustration,- so perhaps what Israel could have done is a daily tit-for-tat and spread the same terror on a daily basis to their tormentors. But I bet their aim would have been far more effective and far more lethal, particularly in crowded Gaza. Would that make any difference to the 'Arab streets'? I doubt it,- there is no current hope of overcoming the inherent hatred from the Arab 'street' and the militant Islamic world towards Israel and all Jews. It has been carefully nurtured by their religious leaders for decades. The leaders of the supposed 'religion of peace'.

I look at the poor people of Zimbabwe, for example, who suffer equally from economic sanctions, ill-health and every kind of oppression, deprivation and death due to their own leadership. There is no one to save them from their despotic Mugabe's regime. The Palestinians' problem is the same,- their only hope is another regime that will care more for its people than trying to wipe out Israel. As long as the raison d'etre for the Palestinians remains the defeat of Israel, they will get nowhere!

The demonstrating Arabs and Islamists in other countries will be doing what they always do,- this is what they are good at, massing, shouting, yelling and screaming,- without anything productive coming out of it. Local Arabs or Palestinian sympathisers should have demionstrated against the Hamas rocket launchers before the inevitable retaliation took place. Their and everyone's silence while the Israelis had to live under constant bombardments was OK.

It just shows their hypocrisy at work! Too late to cry now.

MM
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BEWARE OF WELL-MEANING HYPOCRISY
Rabbi Dow Marmur Jerusalem

In view of my general predisposition, I’m on the mailing list of several Jewish organizations on the Left. Some of them have been urging me to sign petitions in response to Israel’s present action in Gaza. I’ve refused. For though I too abhor violence in any form, I don’t know what else Israel should, or could, have done in order to protect its citizen from the shelling of towns and settlements in the south of the country.

The calls for proportionate retaliation by Israel may be sincere, but does that mean that it would have been OK if it had set up rocket launchers on its side of the border with Gaza and match the daily barrage from the other side with an equal number? As the missiles that Hamas and its stooges are firing fall indiscriminately on Israelis, should Israel’s missiles also be imprecise to let casualties be, literally, a matter of hit and miss? Would that be a better protection for the civilians in densely populated Gaza? And would it in any way stop Hamas and its Iranian pay masters from continuing doing damage to life, limb and property?

All war is horrible and war against terrorists even more so, because the enemy usually operates from among civilians and exposes them to additional dangers. There’s much to suggest that Israel knows it and is trying to minimize innocent casualties, but it’s also clear that it cannot prevent them. Thus even in the current war situation it allows some humanitarian aid to get through. Therefore to sign pious petitions, however well-meaning, seems little short of hypocrisy.

The urge to do so is often fuelled by media reports. Journalists, in their legitimate endeavors to tell what they see and hear, describe the carnage and the devastation they witness. Being far away from where the action is we, in turn, are tempted to offer simplistic explanations and apportion blanket blame. A state known for its military prowess like Israel is more likely to incur the wrath of indifferent bystanders than “freedom fighters,” even if they’re nothing more than terrorists.

In their blind zeal and total disregard for human life, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Taliban in Afghanistan have much in common. Each puts blind ideology before the welfare of real persons. When Afghanistan was identified as the main locus of the terrorism that led to 9/11, the international community intervened. The result has been many civilian deaths. Yet nobody recommends proportional retaliation by NATO forces, because that would be quixotic. The situation in Gaza is comparable.

Thus, in the same way that many women and men on the political Left in the West have accepted joint responsibility for bringing stability to Afghanistan, so it seems reasonable for them to hope that Israel will do the same in Gaza. Even Israel’s Left-wing Meretz party concurs. Abu Mazen, the president of the Palestinian Authority, seems to be in a similar frame of mind, for he has stated truthfully that Hamas is the real culprit when it broke the truce with Israel and provoked it to respond. In their muted reactions neighboring Arab states reflect a similar opinion.

Israelis have responded with relief that, at last, their government is doing something about it and that this time its armed forces are better prepared than they were some two-and-a-half years ago when the country had to respond to a similar situation in the north where the population was exposed to Hezbollah rockets. Though it’s quiet there now, albeit uneasily so, the price was unnecessarily high. We all hope that it’ll be different here, not least for the hapless population in Gaza.

But nobody I’ve heard is over-optimistic or believes that it’ll be easy. The war on terror seems never ending, yet even democratic states engage in it because the alternative is worse. That’s why few of us are in the mood to sign petitions urging “both sides” to sue for peace. Everybody knows that in this case it only requires one side – Hamas – to declare a truce and Israel will respond, as it did during the previous six months, even though the rockets never quite stopped raining over its population.

Jerusalem 29.12.08 Dow Marmur

FROM THE CARMEL TO ICELAND

2008-12-26T01:53:00.000-08:00

A story about UNWRA & non-UNWRA refugees.

BENNY ELON (IsraelNN.com)

This fascinating story begins on the slopes of the Carmel mountains. During the War of Independence, Arab villages in the area were abandoned - as in all the areas where the Jews enjoyed strategic superiority - and their inhabitants became refugees. Today, we call those refugees "Palestinians". Farming communities and kibbutzim were established on the ruins of Arab villages that became home to Jewish refugees - refugees who streamed here from Europe after the Holocaust and from the Arab world that expelled the Jews from their midst.

What has happened since to both sets of refugees?

The Jewish refugees have long forgotten their refugee status. The country that absorbed them, the Jewish state, has turned them into its own flesh and blood. The transit camps have become cities, villages and farming communities, and within a decade not one single person remained a refugee in this country.

The Arab refugees, however, have maintained their refugee status. The countries they fled to, Arab countries, have chosen not to grant them citizenship, not to grant them rights and a future, and to leave them as refugees serving as live propaganda and a political weapon against the legitimacy of the Jewish state. The refugee camps have become the biggest hothouse for creating terror, a never-ending well of hatred and incitement towards Israel, towards America and towards anyone who is not an Arab Muslim.

UNRWA is the agency whose sole mandate is to take care of Arab refugees. As opposed to the UN Commission for Refugees, the body that takes care of all the other refugees in the world, UNRWA isn't authorized and doesn't attempt to rehabilitate the refugees, to naturalize them in the countries they are residing in or in a third country, or to give them the opportunity for a life other than that of refugees. Instead of solving the problem, UNRWA reinforces it. This is also the reason why only the Palestinian refugees who are registered with UNRWA preserve their refugee status from generation to generation. If your father was a refugee, then you are also defined as a refugee and so is your son. This is a unique and unacceptable definition. According to the UN Commission for Refugees, a refugee is only one who was expelled himself from his country due to a war. His sons will already be raised in another place after a period of rehabilitation. Tens of millions of refugees from all over the world have been rehabilitated in this way since World War II - with the exception of one national-ethnic group: Israeli Arabs, the Palestinian refugees.

And then, one Tuesday in August, the UN Commission for Refugees announced that it is sending 200 Palestinian refugees to be rehabilitated in Scandinavia. They will be absorbed by the governments of Sweden and Iceland and will construct new lives for themselves. Why were these 200 people awarded this privilege? In what way are they different from the hundreds of thousands crammed into Gaza, one big refugee camp?

The answer is simple. These refugees were never under UNRWA's umbrella. Because they were enlisted - while still on the Carmel mountains - into the Iraqi army that participated in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. Together with their families, they withdrew with the army to Iraq. They weren't granted civilian status there, but they also didn't encounter UNRWA. Today, when they became refugees for the second time following the American-led war in Iraq, they were put on the UNHCR's refugee list, which is, after all, the UN commission for "normal" refugees - those who are to be rehabilitated, as opposed to the refugees under the auspices of UNRWA, whose refugee status is destined to be perpetuated.

The residents of Kerem Maharal and Geva in the Carmel can relax. The Arabs who lived there several years before them won't return, and they are not even waiting for them in Jabalya or in Nahar El-Barid. They boarded the plane to Scandinavia and, instead of the energies their brothers invest in cultivating suicide bombers, they will likely invest in establishing themselves financially and in building new lives, sixty years late.

__._,_.___
MM

UN Globalizing Hatred.

2008-11-27T23:26:00.000-08:00

"Apartheid",- the new label for Israel by the UN Secretary General.

The interesting book ( GLOBALISING HATRED. The new anti-Semitism. Denis MacShane)reviewed by Christopher Hitchens on TimesOnLine about "the New Anti-Semitism" elicited several comments from readers. Hitchens (see following post) is virtually saying that “the new anti-Semites” cannot bear the success of the Jews, whether in the USA, the world or in Israel (their "shitty little country”?)

It is amazing how often the label "apartheid Israel" is now used, even by those purporting not to be anti-Semites. No wonder,-after all, the President of the UN General Assembly accused Israel of Apartheid and called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel on the UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 24/11/08.

Really? What was the UN Partition Plan of 29/11/1945 meant to be, except the separation of the Moslem and Jewish populations in Palestine? Now it is being called “apartheid”?
What do these people think happened to disintegrating countries such as Yugoslavia in the ‘90s, or India-Pakistan-Bangladesh in '48? What have been the conflicts among the Northern Irish,- what will be happening to the feuding Iraqis, Afghanis, or to the many African warring-tribes and countries, etc.,? Why are they not called apartheid situations?

In all cases, religion is playing its part because it is not simply a matter of private conscience, but of people’s national identity as well. It is Ok for the Jews as far as these accusers are concerned, to be submerged and overwhelmed by their enemies, while every other group is ignored by the UN and Mr. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a former official of the World Council of Churches. ) because for them it's not about apartheid,- just religious nationalism?
Well, we Jews call it Zionism.
(MM)
Ref."BALKAN IDOLS: RELIGION AND NATIONALISM IN BALKAN STATES." (Viekoslav Perika)part of series on "Religion and Global Politics" available from AMAZON ONLINE.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
EYE ON THE UN
Ed. ANNE BAYEFSKY

UN General Assembly President Accuses Israel of Apartheid and calls for a boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel

NEW YORK - The President of the UN General Assembly has launched an unprecedented attack on a UN member state from the Assembly podium. Going beyond even existing UN resolutions, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua accused Israel of apartheid and called for "a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions" against it. Reminiscent of a classic antisemitic slur, Brockmann (himself a Roman Catholic priest and one-time official of the World Council of Churches) also claimed our Palestinian "brothers and sisters are being crucified" by Israel.

His remarks were made on November 24, 2008 during the UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This annual event marks the adoption of the General Assembly's partition resolution which called for the creation of a Jewish and an Arab state on November 29, 1947.

"Brockmann's assault is a gross abuse of the position of Assembly President," commented Anne Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN. "He knows full well that his outrageous personal views will be translated into six languages and webcast around the world." Brockmann assumed the Presidency in September 2008, having been nominated by the Latin American and Caribbean regional group.

Brockmann made the apartheid allegation twice in one day, once in the morning at the annual meeting of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and again in the General Assembly in the afternoon. In his words:

"I spoke this morning about apartheid and how Israeli policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories appear so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era, a continent away. I believe it is very important that we in the United Nations use this term. We must not be afraid to call something what it is. It is the United Nations, after all, that passed the International Convention against the Crime of Apartheid, making clear to all the world that such practices of official discrimination must be outlawed wherever they occur."

"Brockmann's call," said Bayefsky, "was in effect, a call for the political destruction of Israel by means of the same strategy adopted against apartheid South Africa." Brockmann said:
"More than twenty years ago we in the United Nations took the lead from civil society when we agreed that sanctions were required to provide a non-violent means of pressuring South Africa…Today, perhaps we in the United Nations should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar non-violent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel…"

The adoption of the 1947 partition resolution, accepted by Jews and rejected by Arabs, is now bemoaned by the UN. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan described Palestinian Solidarity Day as "a day of mourning and a day of grief." This year, as in years past, the UN used the occasion to fly only two flags, that of "Palestine" and that of the United Nations. Though the resolution was ostensibly the

THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM? Book review.

2008-11-26T03:00:00.000-08:00

From The Times Literary Supplement
November 19, 2008

The new anti-Semitism?

How ancient prejudice and outright hostility have re-emerged since the Nuremberg Trials

Christopher Hitchens

I was once introduced, in the Cosmos Club in Washington, to Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby, a group frequently accused of being insufficiently philo-Semitic. Mr Carto unburdened himself of quite a long burst about the power of finance capital, whereupon our host, to lighten the atmosphere, said, “Come on Willis, you’re sounding like Ezra Pound”. “Ezra Pound!” exclaimed Mr Carto. “Why, I love that man’s work. Except for all that goddam poetry!” I thought then that if one ever needed a working definition of an anti-Semite, it might perhaps be an individual who esteemed everything about Ezra Pound except his Cantos.

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has a different definition. For him, anti-Semitism is revealed not when someone criticizes the state of Israel, but when someone denies the right of Israel to exist. This, however, will not do, since many Orthodox Jews and Marxist Jews were opposed ab initio to the founding of a Jewish state, and indeed, for the first few years of the Zionist movement’s existence, almost all its enemies were Jewish. (By the same token, the idea of a Levantine state into which European Jewry could be decanted often found favour with those who were not all fond of Jewry per se.)

The overt expression of anti-Semitic views has been extremely muted since the Nuremberg Trials, and the somewhat later decision of the Roman Catholic Church to withdraw its historic charge of “deicide” against the Jewish people as a whole. But the Labour MP Denis MacShane, who chaired an all-party commission of inquiry into the subject, argues that this most ancient and fierce of hatreds is undergoing a worldwide recrudescence. Rather dauntingly, he begins his book Globalising Hatred with a taxonomy of six distinct kinds of anti-Semitism, as compiled by the no less dauntingly named Professor Armin Pfahl-Traughber. The disease, it seems, can present as religious, social, political, racist, secondary or anti-Zionist, and of course these symptoms are not mutually exclusive and may often be found in clusters.

I would propose to begin more economically, by separating anti-Semitism from other forms of prejudice. One might certainly begin by distinguishing it from any too obvious stratification: MacShane likes to put the word “upper-class” in front of his main noun, but it was the great German socialist August Bebel who characterized anti-Jewish ranting as “the socialism of fools” and identified it as a perverted form of class resentment. This may have been slightly reductionist, as if to place a creepy and occult belief on all fours with more ordinary styles of xenophobia. British people who dislike Pakistanis, say, or Sinhalese who dislike Tamils, or Ulstermen who look down on Gaels, will tend to express themselves in fairly vulgar terms. The disliked ones are dirty and lazy, and have over-large families and a generally low cultural level. Anti-Semitism, by contrast, has something almost vicariously admiring about it. The targeted and hated tribe is believed to have awesome secret power and a positive genius for finance, as well as an ability to infiltrate and annex large swathes of professional life, such as the law and medicine. Not only this, but the Jew is seen as so protean as to have been – in the course of the past century alone – the covert engineer of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Examples of this combination of envy with paranoia are not difficult to locate: a recent New York Times report from Egypt described a settled conviction at all levels of society that, while nineteen Arabs could not have brought down the World Trade Center, the Israeli Mossad had the means, the method, the motive and the opportunity to do so. (One might pause to note the element of Arab self-hatred that is latent in this view.) When asked for proof, the believers point to the fact, which “everybody knows”, that all the Jews employed in the Twin Towers left work shortly before the planes arrived. I have myself heard this alleged at elite dinner parties in Islamabad, and MacShane has heard it from educated Muslims in his own constituency of Rotherham.

Perhaps over-anxious not to single out these as if they were the only offenders, MacShane is careful to spread his net wide. Neo-fascists in Argentina and Germany, the British National Party, the anti-Israeli American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the demagogues of Radio Maria in Poland, the sneers of Alan Clark in his Diaries, the gibes of David Irving, and a few of the anti-Zionist positions taken by Noam Chomsky and Perry Anderson are all included in the trawl. Surely this is too indiscriminate, especially in the case of the last two named? More important, does it not run the risk of treating Islamist anti-Semitism as if it were merely one form of the malady among many?

In point of fact, there is only one area of the world where pure, old-fashioned undiluted Jew-hatred is preached from the pulpit, broadcast on the official airwaves, given high-level state sanction and taught in the schools. All across the Muslim Middle East and well into Muslim Asia, the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion are freely available, often disseminated by ruling circles as well as by insurgent and now quasi-government movements such as Hamas and Hizbollah. (Incidentally, it is wrong to call this toxic document a “forgery”, since a forgery is a copy of something authentic. The Protocols are a mere fabrication, put together by Eastern Orthodox Christian fanatics in the pay of the tsarist secret police. Despite their suggestive name, they contain no mention of Israel or Zionism, as MacShane appears to think.)

When he does turn his attention to this region, however, MacShane’s treatment of the lucubrations of Tariq Ramadan and Sayyid Qtub is fairly comprehensive. Not everybody will agree with his generally lenient approach to the state of Israel, but he does argue convincingly, with some telling quotations, that resentment at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank simply cannot explain some of the more lurid formulations of Arab and Muslim propaganda. The fairly temperate Ghada Karmi, for example, speaks of Israel “encircling the Arab world” (my italics), while regional self-pity – a natural sibling of self-hatred by the way, as is self-righteousness – often blames all the ills of a backward and benighted region on arcane Jewish manipulations. The relatively recent history of Europe shows how fantastically dangerous such delusions can be, and MacShane is right to stress the comparison as well as the implications.

When all this is taken into account, though, I am not sure that he is correct in so often using the prefix “neo” to describe the resurgent phenomenon. The pseudo-intellectual and superstitious tropes of Judaeophobia are very much the same as they ever were. They involve the hatred of the countryside for the urban (and the urbane), the hatred of the provinces for the capital (and for capital), the disdain of the settled establishment for the subversive, and the visceral loathing of the tradition-minded “organic” community for the rootless and the cosmopolitan. In this, one can understand both the nastier moments that one may encounter in the study of T. S. Eliot and also the mentality of those Argentine fascists who tortured the Jewish editor and journalist, Jacobo Timerman. As Timerman recalled the obsessions of the death-squad Right in his imperishable book Prisoner without a Name: Cell without a number, his interrogators believed that “Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space”. I went to look this up after I had read MacShane citing Argentine military men who to this day believe that there is a Jewish conspiracy to annex and Zionize the remoter areas of Patagonia, the better, presumably, to extend Protocol power to the Jew-free wastes of Antarctica.

“You catch it on the edge of a remark”, as Harold Isaacs phrases it in Chariots of Fire. I have felt myself “catching” it quite a few times of late, as when chaps from the BBC insisted despite repeated correction on saying Paul “Vulfovitz” with a special emphasis, instead of pronouncing the name correctly the first time round, as the BBC used to train people to do. Writing about the same person, the American isolationist and Charles Lindbergh admirer Patrick J. Buchanan referred to him as playing Fagin to George Bush’s Oliver Twist which, an arresting image as it certainly is, makes rather the same point in an only somewhat different way. And meanwhile I would never expect to read the sort of criticism of Pakistan that I read every day about Israel. Yet of these two states, born at almost the same moment at the close of Britain’s imperium, can it really be said that Israel is so much the greater offender in terms of democratic rights for citizens, invasions of neighbours like Afghanistan, oppressions of non-Punjabi minority inhabitants, massacres of co-religionists as in Bangladesh, and illegal acquisition of nuclear weapons? One can just about picture a worldwide campaign to redress the injustices of Pakistan, in which unions of British teachers and journalists would join with their own courageous boycotts, but I confess to a slight difficulty in picturing the same level of enthusiasm and commitment. There is some sense in which any challenge to what can be viewed as specifically Jewish power is more exciting and possibly more “transgressive”, and we might be more honest if we admitted as much. Here’s a thought experiment: you get an email telling you that all the Anglo-Saxons left the World Trade Center just an hour before the planes hit (not having merely stayed away with all the benefit of their advance warning, but having actually gone to all the trouble of turning up at 8 a.m. and trustingly assuming that the terror-strike would take place just on schedule and thus give them time to check their Rolexes for an orderly and early departure). See what I mean? It’s just not such a thrilling hypothesis. When directed at the Jews, however, it at least adds insult to injury, and the true bigot knows that every little helps.

“The bitch that bore him is on heat again”, as Brecht has his closing speaker say about Hitler at the curtain of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. The next nightmare will not take the same shape or form, but it will be sure to emit the same plain and unmistakable warnings. MacShane has done a service by giving us a handbook of the signs.

Denis MacShane
GLOBALISING HATRED
The new antisemitism 188pp. Orion. £12.99.
978 0 297 84473 0

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book, God Is Not Great: The case against religion, appeared earlier this year.

Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.