In the first place, although some Palestinian negotiators have given the impression that they would accept Israeli retention of the large settlement blocs in return for the surrender of some Israeli territory elsewhere, the official Palestinian and Arab position has remained that Israel must withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines, which are invariably referred to as the “1967 borders.” When the Palestinians ask individual countries to declare their support for the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, the boundaries of that state are always described as the “1967 borders.” All this creates the impression that one of the main reasons why the Palestinians are not interested in a negotiated settlement is precisely because they are not willing to accept the existence of any Israeli settlements, whether big or small, beyond the 1949 armistice lines. This impression is further reinforced by the repeated statements by Abbas and other Palestinian leaders that they do not intend to accept the presence of even one single Jew within the territory of their new Palestinian state. 

In the second place, even if the Palestinians were willing to accept some Israeli settlements while insisting that others be dismantled, Israeli agreement to this demand would not in fact represent a compromise but rather a capitulation to Palestinian antisemitism. In return for voluntarily evicting tens of thousands of Jews from their homes, with all the attendant strife and dislocation which such a step would engender within Israeli society, Israel would receive nothing in return save a meaningless promise of future peaceful intentions. A genuine compromise on the issue of the settlements would see some placed under Israeli sovereignty and some under Palestinian sovereignty, but no one thinks in these terms because everyone knows that the Palestinians would immediately move to attack any Jewish settlements placed under their authority. While the supporters of the Palestinians rave and rant against Israel as an “apartheid state,” the Palestinians themselves loudly proclaim their refusal to permit any Jews to live under their rule. And this stance is not unique to the Palestinians but is true of the entire Arab world, where hardly any Jews now remain from what were once large communities dating back literally thousands of years.

In the third place, even if a genuine compromise on the issue of the settlements were possible, there are so many other issues on which the Palestinians are not willing to compromise that no peace agreement between them and Israel is conceivable any time soon. In particular, for 20 years the Palestinians have not budged one inch from their demand for the “right of return” of millions of Palestinians to “Israel proper.” They have also continued to demand full sovereignty over the Temple Mount, plus a corridor under their exclusive jurisdiction between Gaza and the “West Bank,” plus sufficient control over their borders and air space to enable them to import offensive weapons. It would be suicidal for Israel to agree to these demands, nor do the Palestinians expect Israeli agreement. For the Palestinians, the whole point of persisting with impossible demands is to validate their strategy of trying to secure United Nations approval of the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state. Such approval would not actually give the Palestinians physical control over the territory which they claim, but what it would do is create the basis for a political, diplomatic and military offensive against the Jewish settlements. Eradication of these settlements is the Palestinian short term goal, which means that for Israel as well as for the Palestinians, the settlements are indeed the issue.

However, what seems to be troubling me most is that she (Helen Thomas) is far from alone in giving voice to feelings which, for the sake of decorum, had traditionally been left for when the staff is out of earshot.

Take for example the instantaneous reaction to the Gaza flotilla raid. Before the ships had even made port there was blanket and universal condemnation from Europe, Scandinavia, the third world... and, of course, the rest of the Middle East. These statements stopped just short of accusing the IDF soldiers of harvesting the dead 'activists' organs and baking matzoh with their blood.

There was no responsible wait for solid information... no search for facts or confirmation... but rather, like an obituary that has been diligently prepared in advance, the condemnations were issued pro-forma at the first whisper of trouble so as not to miss the tide of international bile.

Likewise, the near universal outcry for an independent inquiry of the event is as predictable as it is troubling. Would any European or Asian power submit to an international inquiry of its military missteps or accidents? Would the U.S.? Would England? For that matter, I can't name one country that in recent memory has willingly submitted to such outside review of its actions?

The U.S., Russia as well as many of the European and Asian powers have all had spectacular screw ups on the battlefield, as well as in pursuit of their national defense, whose civilian death tolls far exceeded that of the current Gaza flotilla snafu. Yet each time one of these countries stumbles, as transparent, sovereign nations they are allowed to investigate themselves, learn their lessons and share their findings with the world at a pace that suits them.

Israel, on the other hand, is expected to submit its conduct, it's political/diplomatic decisions and in many cases its very sovereignty, to immediate international oversight... as if our very existence is in some way conditioned upon the tolerance and largess of others.

President Obama's National Security Adviser, Jim Jones told the following joke, where he received lots of laughs from the audience...Is it appropriate for the national security adviser of the United States to tell jokes about miserly Jewish merchants? Do you think he would have made a joke about an African American?

The reason why Palestinians insist that all Jews must leave their future state is because they do not recognize the legitimacy of Israel or the Jewish presence anywhere in the land. And Palestinian political culture is so steeped in violence and hatred of Jews and Israel that it is literally impossible to believe that Jews, even if they behaved like Quakers, could live in a Palestinian state.

Moreover, Ya'alon's point about the example of Gaza is telling. Removing every Jew from Gaza didn't satisfy the Palestinians there. Not only did the Palestinians burn the synagogue buildings and the tomato greenhouses left behind by the Israelis for them to use, they immediately began to use that land for launching terrorist missile attacks inside of Israel. So long as the Arabs still view the conflict as zero-sum game in which the goal is to remove or kill every Jew, territorial withdrawals won't bring peace. If the Palestinian vision of peace — even the vision articulated by so-called moderates like Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — is predicated on ridding the land of Jews rather than embracing coexistence, then there will be no peace.

(Via Israel Matzav)

Incorrect reports in Israel's largest newspaper and the well known Foreign Policy publication in the United States this week illustrate how the Arab world manipulates the United States to gain concessions and place the world's ills on Israel's shoulders. This time their target was also American public opinion.

Foreign Policy's correspondent Mark Perry, a former advisor to Yasser Arafat, added his own spin to statements by U.S.CENTOM Commander General David Petraeus', in an article called: The Petraeus Briefing; Biden's Embarrassment is not the Whole Story, so that the General's statements seemed to blame Israel for casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the general never said that.

Today, I happened to spend a bit of time looking at Google logos (a/k/a Google Doodles) -- those adorable, themed logos that Goggle releases in honor of various holidays and anniversaries. Curious as to whether Google noted Israeli or Jewish holidays, I used the search function on the logo page to search for Israel.

I then clicked through the results, and discovered something extremely disturbing. In each case where I clicked a time period to see the logos for that time period, the Israeli logos that were supposedly on the page (and that had been picked up by the search engine) were not on the current page. And yet, when I clicked through to the cached version of the page, the Israeli logos were there. At some point, the current versions of the pages had been purged of all Israeli/Jewish logos -- and only those logos.

...

In each case, the Israeli/Jewish logos -- and no other logo of any other nation or ethnic group -- have been deleted from the current version of the page, an Orwellian Bowdlerization designed, it would appear, to make out of Israel an unperson.

Obama said in Sderot that he would not tolerate rocket attacks that endangered his own daughters. If Samir Kuntar's beating-death victim had been Malia or Sascha Obama, rather than 4-year-old Einat Haran, and Abbas celebrated the killing, would Obama treat Abbas as a moderate peacemaker and negotiate with him? We all know the answer.

Immediately after being sworn in as president, Obama gave Abbas the unique honor of calling him before any other world leader, yet promises to "hunt down and kill" Osama bin Laden. Why the dramatic double standard? The apparent answer is that terrorists get a free pass-not to mention billions in US taxpayer dollars-when their targets are Jewish. Is there any other explanation?

Of course, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inflames the Muslim world in a way the Chechen one does not. But why is that, when so many more Muslims are being victimized by Russia?

Then too, why does the wider world participate in the Muslim world's moral priorities?...Why does every Israeli prime minister invariably become a global pariah, when not one person in a thousand knows the name of Chechen "President" Ramzan Kadyrov, a man who, by many accounts, keeps a dungeon near his house in order to personally torture his political opponents?

I have a hypothesis. Maybe the world attends to Palestinian grievances but not Chechen ones for the sole reason that Palestinians are, uniquely, the perceived victims of the Jewish state. That is, when they are not being victimized by other Palestinians. Or being expelled en masse from Kuwait. Or being excluded from the labor force in Lebanon. Things you probably didn't know about, either. As for the Chechens, too bad for their cause that no Jew will ever likely become president of Russia.

Amnesty purports to be "deeply concerned about the escalation of human rights abuses following the series of Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip that began on December 27th," but it fails to mention nearly all of them...Other than a pro forma reference to Hamas' indiscriminate rocket attacks, Amnesty's letter mentions none of these facts, nor any of the other human rights abuses Hamas has inflicted upon the Palestinian population under its control in Gaza, such as restrictions on religious practice, speech and due process.

Instead, Amnesty bristles at imaginary Israeli wrongdoing. Amnesty writes that "aid agencies and residents of Gaza have long ago run out of provision reserves due to the Israeli blockade" just two days after the UN's World Food Program informed the Israel Defense Forces that it would not be resuming shipment of food commodities to Gaza through Israeli crossings because WFP warehouses were already at full capacity...

(Thanks to alkimija for the reference)

There have been many natural disasters in the Muslim world over the past few decades where Israel has offered to provide medical supplies, emergency personnel and... blood. This last bit has always been a sticking point. You see, Jewish blood is considered unacceptable by the people we are supposed to be trying to make peace with. It is, according to them, 'filthy'.

The New York times almost - but not quite - made reference to this seldom discussed fact in the 19th paragraph of an article (link or seed). Here, read the following and tell me if you spot it:

"Israel sent in [to Gaza] some 40 trucks of humanitarian relief, including blood from Jordan and medicine. Egypt opened its border with Gaza to some similar aid and to allow some of the wounded through"

Did you catch it? Why would Israel need to send blood from Jordan? We never have a huge surplus of blood, but we always have some on hand! Is Jordan's medical establishment better prepared than Israel's??? And why would Egypt need to send 'similar aid'? If Israel is controlling everything going in and out of Gaza right now, why are we suddenly talking about sending trucks of our own humanitarian aid... but blood from Jordan and Egypt?

Wednesday's New York Times included an appalling, sickening article in which the 'gray lady' attempted to turn Lebanese mass murderer Samir al-Kuntar - who bashed in the head of 4-year old Einat Haran HY"D with a rifle butt - into a victim of a 'difficult childhood'. In the process, the Times also pretends that Kuntar landed on the beach in Nahariya in the middle of the night 29 years ago intending to have a barbacue or a cup of tea with its residents rather than inteding to murder as many Jews as possible.

That raid went horribly wrong, leaving five people dead, a community terrorized and a nation traumatized. Two Israeli children and their father were among those killed.

Note that the Times says "five people dead." But Kuntar was only responsible for four murders: Policeman Eliyahu Shahar and Danny Haran, who were both shot by Kuntar, 4-year old Einat Haran, whose head Kuntar bashed in with a rifle butt, and 2-year old Yael Haran who suffocated while hiding from Kuntar in a crawl space. The fifth person who died that night? One of the terrorists. In the despicable leftist universe of the New York Slimes, the terrorists and their victims are all the same.

Yesterday the French appeals court vindicated Phillipe Karsenty in his accusations against French Channel 2 that they had falsified and deliberately misreported the death of Muhammad Al-Dura. Karsenty had the following to say:

Today a French court ruled that I did not defame France 2 when I said that its news report was a staged hoax. Because I refused to be brainwashed, I was sued for defamation.

Our victory today was a victory for freedom — the freedom to think and to speak one's mind; the freedom to question what one is told; and the freedom to disbelieve the solemn pronouncements of others when the individual concludes that his reasoning is correct and that the state and the state-run media — and all of the institutions they represent — are wrong.

The al-Dura lie is an assault on our ability to think, to criticize, to evaluate, and finally to reject information — especially the right to reject information on which we base our most cherished assumptions. One of Europe's most cherished assumptions is that Israel is a vicious Nazi-like entity that deliberately murders Palestinian Arab children. Moreover, polls conducted in Europe have identified Israel as the greatest threat to world peace, greater than Iran and North Korea, Pakistan and Syria. The al-Dura hoax is one of the pillars on which these assumptions rely.

I have written about the Al-Dura case previously.

This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian "refugee problem" forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel's alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950's, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel's revisionist "new historians," and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel's "original sin," grudgingly stipulated that there was no "design" to displace the Palestinian Arabs.

The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel's early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the "new historians," paint a much more definitive picture of the historical record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreportedblockquote>

It was quite a day for Israel haters: At the same time that the Human Rights Council voted in Falk, it announced that Jean Ziegler, from Switzerland, had been elected to its advisory committee. Ziegler is on record for, among other things: claiming members of the Israel Defense Forces are no different than concentration camp guards; embracing a discredited Holocaust denier; rejecting the notion that Hizbullah engages in terrorism; and justifying the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. It's not difficult to imagine the type of "advice" he will give to the Council.

The Falk and Ziegler appointments are all the more troublesome because their bigotries were well-known to those on the Council. Pro-Israel activists strongly protested, urging members of the Council to reject their appointments. Despite - or more likely, because of - their anti-Zionist positions, the pair were welcomed with open arms. In the end, the prospect of further reinforcing the UN's animus toward Israel was just too delicious to pass up. It is hard to interpret the Council's actions as anything other than an endorsement of noxious views which, in any civilized and objective forum, would be rejected out of hand.
...

Let's give credit, however, where credit is due: one certainly cannot accuse the UN of being inconsistent. Whenever there's a chance to stick it to Israel, rest assured that leading the charge will be bureaucrats from the UN.

No translation necessary.

Female Israeli tennis player Shahar Pe'er is ranked 17th in the world.

But her reign towards the top of women's tennis hasn't prevented her from acting like a desperate lowlife, just wanting to be loved.

As I've repeatedly noted on this site, until yesterday Peer couldn't set foot in any of the Gulf states. She was not allowed to play in the Dubai Open or the Qatar Open.

That's because all of the Gulf states not only officially boycott Israel and don't recognize its existence, but they openly state on their websites that those with Israeli passports or stamps from Israel on their passports will not be allowed into the countries. While that's the official policy, exceptions are routinely made for Muslims with Israeli passports or stamps on their passports. That's how so many Muslims from Israel are able to make the hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Because only Muslims with Israeli passports and stamps are allowed in--and not Jews--it's quite clear that the idea is to exclude Jews from the Gulf states. The policy is anti-Semitic and, frankly, a form of anti-Jewish apartheid.

The refusal of the Palestinian Authority to acknowledge Israel as a legitimate Jewish state isn't a denial of reality; it is a sign of their determination to change that reality. Like Arab leaders going back a century, they seek not to live in peace with the Jewish state, but in place of the Jewish state. Olmert can show up at Annapolis bearing Palestinian sovereignty on a silver platter, with half of Jerusalem thrown in for good measure. He will not walk away with peace. On the contrary: He will intensify the Arab determination to replace the world's one Jewish state with its 23rd Arab state.

The key to Arab-Israeli peace is not Palestinian statehood. It is to compel the Arab world to abandon its dream of liquidating Israel. As a matter of national self-respect, Olmert should repeat his demand that the Palestinians acknowledge Israel's Jewish identity - and make it nonnegotiable. If Israel cannot insist even on so fundamental a point of honor, it has already lost more than it knows.

These days, it's becoming downright chic to hint forebodingly that America's Jews are just too powerful. But whether it's the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt or former president Jimmy Carter, those who accuse modern Jews of having excessive clout are getting it precisely backward. In the real world, Jews have too little power and influence. They also have too little self-confidence about defending themselves.

Consider a basic paradox. Even anti-Semites often give Jews credit for having exceptional intelligence. Self-congratulatory Web sites reckon that Jews, who make up about 0.2 percent of the world's population, have been awarded more than 160 Nobel Prizes. But if Jews are so smart, why do 22 Arab League countries account for a tenth of the Earth's land surface while the Israelis struggle to secure a country that is 1/19th the size of California? If Jews are so powerful, why does Israel attract twice as many venture-capital investments as all of Europe, even while it's the only one of the United Nations' 192 member states that has been charged with racism for the crime of its existence? How powerful is that?

In fact, there's an excellent historical reason why Jewish intellectual achievement sits alongside political weakness. Simply put, Jewish achievement in other areas has come at the expense of political strength, and the strange relationship of Jews and power has made them history's favorite prey. Centuries of survival in other people's lands prevented Jews from achieving full acceptance -- and access to the levers of government. Some individual Jews may have lived large, but the Jewish people as a whole lived on sufferance, afraid to antagonize those from whom they sought tolerance.

A crop of Israel's critics--most prominently Jimmy Carter and now Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"--have managed something of a feat: They express no concerns about the massive pro-Arab effort, funded in significant measure by foreign oil money, taking American Jews to task for participating in the American political process; meanwhile, they inoculate themselves against charges of anti-Jewish bias by pre-emptively predicting that "the Jewish lobby" will accuse them of it.

Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer, in particular, have been heralded by Israel's critics for their "courage" in attacking American Jews, who have allegedly "strangled" criticism of Israel. Their case seems one part laughable, and one part eyebrow-raising.

...

In other words, for those who accept the Arab line on the Israel-Arab conflict--namely, that it is the product of Israeli intransigence in some form or another--the increasing proliferation of Middle East-funded enterprises all across the country aimed at advancing the Arab view of the conflict constitute "nothing wrong." Nor are those hewing to the anti-Israel line troubled by the way in which the massive Islamic bloc of nations, by dint both of their number and their economic leverage over the rest of the world, are able to guarantee an incessantly anti-Israel agenda at the United Nations and other international fora.

Although the aggressive deployment of petrodollars and oil-based influence from foreign sources aimed at advancing a pro-Arab line constitutes "nothing wrong" as far as Israel's critics are concerned, a new political fashion holds that there is something very wrong indeed about American Jews and other American backers of Israel expressing their support for Israel, and urging their political leaders to join them in that support.

...

If the charge that American Jews are able to stifle criticism of Israel is simply silly, the leveling of the charge that there is something nefarious about Jews urging support for the Jewish state raises questions about whether Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have descended into a certain ugliness. And the tactic of trying to neutralize those questions by loudly predicting that they will be asked, however clever a tactic it may be, does not neutralize them.

It is apparently the authors' position that, even in the face of the overwhelming leverage of an Arab world swimming in petrodollars, with a lock on the U.N. and an unlimited ability to pay for pro-Arab public relations, American Jews are obliged to stay silent. In essence, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have repackaged the "the-Jews-run-the-country" stuff which has long been the bread and butter of anti-Semites.

CNN's "God's Warriors," hosted by Christiane Amanpour, is a three-part series intended to examine the growing role of religious fundamentalism in today's world. Unfortunately, the first program in the series, "God's Jewish Warriors," is one of the most grossly distorted programs to appear on mainstream American television in many years. It is false in its basic premise, established in the opening scene in which Jewish (and Christian) religious fervency is equated with that of Muslims heard endorsing "martyrdom," or suicide-killing. There is, of course, no counterpart among Jews and Christians to the violent jihadist Muslim campaigns underway across the globe, either in numbers of perpetrators engaged or in the magnitude of death and destruction wrought.

(I guess according to CNN, I am one of God's Warriors. Yippee)

See the linked cartoon. It is referring to the following quote:

"They're firing at us, firing RPGs, firing mortars. We're not Jews," the brother of Jamal Abu Jediyan, a Fatah commander, pleaded during a live telephone conversation with a Palestinian radio station.

Minutes later both men were dragged into the streets and riddled with bullets.

Also see Hamas' new song about murdering Jews (ref),

Trying to minimize the defeat, Arabs have long called the Six Day War the "naksa," or "setback," but its impact remains a deep wound.

Egyptian columnist Wael Abdel Fattah wrote in the independent weekly Al-Fagr newspaper that Arabs blame the defeat for "everything" — from "price hikes, dictatorship, religious extremism, sectarian strife, even sexual impotence."

Well, I've heard a lot of different things blamed on the Jews, but this is definitely a first for me...

The next Prime Minister of Israel responds to the academic boycott of Israel just passed by a British academic union.

The extermination of Jews is Allah's will and is for the benefit of all humanity, according to an article in the Hamas paper, Al-Risalah. The author of the article, Kan'an Ubayd, explains that the suicide operations carried out by Hamas are being committed solely to fulfill Allah's wishes. Furthermore, Allah demanded this action, because "the extermination of the Jews is good for the inhabitants of the worlds."

The killing of innocent Jews by terrorist attacks is portrayed as Allah's plan for the benefit of humanity.

UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer gives the UN Human Rights Council a piece of his mind.

Mr. President,

Six decades ago, in the aftermath of the Nazi horrors, Eleanor Roosevelt, Réné Cassin and other eminent figures gathered here, on the banks of Lake Geneva, to reaffirm the principle of human dignity. They created the Commission on Human Rights. Today, we ask: What has become of their noble dream?

In this session we see the answer. Faced with compelling reports from around the world of torture, persecution, and violence against women, what has the Council pronounced, and what has it decided?

Nothing. Its response has been silence. Its response has been indifference. Its response has been criminal.

One might say, in Harry Truman's words, that this has become a Do-Nothing, Good-for-Nothing Council.

But that would be inaccurate. This Council has, after all, done something.

It has enacted one resolution after another condemning one single state: Israel. In eight pronouncements—and there will be three more this session—Hamas and Hezbollah have been granted impunity. The entire rest of the world—millions upon millions of victims, in 191 countries—continue to go ignored.

Please go to the linked page for an approximate transcript of the entire speech, along with a video of the speech.

The funniest (and most telling) part is the last minute of the video, when the President of the UN Human Rights Council, Luis Alfonso de Alba responds by basically calling Neuer rude and threatening to remove his speech from the official record of the proceedings. He does not however respond to any of the charges leveled against him and his council by Neuer and UN Watch.

Although it is not a new phenomena, I am getting more annoyed of late at the one-sided portrayal of events in Israel designed to cast Israeli as the evil, apartheid, hate-driven society that seeks to oppress the peace-loving Muslims who "just want to get along". Here is a recent example, from a seed by Keld (titled "Apartheid looks like this").

As a result (of the many checkpoints put by Israel in the West Bank - Y), moving goods and people from one place to the next in the West Bank has become a nightmare of logistics and costly delays. At the checkpoints, food spoils, patients die, and children are prevented from reaching their schools. The World Bank blames the checkpoints and roadblocks for strangling the Palestinian economy.

Pretty clear cut case, right? Jimmy Carter sure knows what he is talking about!

Now please read the same paragraph again, this time with my comments inserted (in italics):

As a result, moving goods and people from one place to the next in the West Bank has become a nightmare of logistics and costly delays. Thus, the checkpoints accomplish their primary goal. Terrorists have had a much harder time transporting their supplies and personnel in order to set up attacks on Israeli civilians. Other terrorists gangs have been thwarted in their attempts at kidnapping and murdering Israeli citizens by these checkpoints. The existence of these checkpoints is credited with saving dozens if not hundreds of Israeli lives (Jew and Arab alike) and many more injuries. At the checkpoints, food spoils, patients die, and children are prevented from reaching their schools. Though the reader may be surprised as to why these people and items are stopped at checkpoints when there should obviously be no reason for this, Israels motive become clearer when one is made aware that in the past, Hamas, the PLO and their brother organizations have used ambulances (with patients and without), women (pregnant or not), food and medical shipments, and children as delivery vehicles for terrorists on their way to murder Israelis, or for explosives being sent to their final destination. It in reaction to this type of unconscionable behavior on the part of the terrorist organizations that the Israel security forces have responded by being cautious of all traffic crossing the checkpoints. The World Bank blames the checkpoints and roadblocks for strangling the Palestinian economy. However, many people who have read of the civil war between the PLO and Hamas over the past few months, as well as the destructive behavior of the Palestinian population in Gaza following Israel's surrendering the Strip a year and a half ago blame the leaders of the various Palestinian terrorist organizations for choosing to war over the needs of their own people and thus strangling of their own economy.

I have seen checkpoints with my own eyes. I drive through them all the time. I would be lying if I said that they are not disruptive to the Palestinian population living in Judea and Samaria. However, I would also be lying if I said something along with the one-sided rubbish quoted by the Electronic Intifada or Jimmy Carter and pretended that Israel was not actually trying to defend itself from daily threats against its infrastructure and civilian population by groups that want Israel's destruction. Israel is not completely innocent. But to pretend that they are completely guilty by painting a false picture accomplishes nothing, misinforms other people and only leads to more hatred.

Early this past January we were bombarded with news of horrible abuse perpetrated by the "settlers" of Hebron against their peace loving Palestinian neighbors.

We were told about how a "settler woman" verbally abused a Palestinian and how no soldiers came to the aid and protection of the Palestinian. All the major news sites made a big deal of the story. Many of them even carried a video of the woman cursing at the Palestinian. We were not given any background to the story.

[snip]

Why do I write about this 6 weeks later?

Because last night a Jewish man was found dead. He died from multiple stab wounds. According to the news sources, the evidence points clearly to the source of the murder being terrorism and he must have been stabbed by a Palestinian.

How was this incident treated in the news and around the world?

With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."

She was not saying anything new. As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.

[snip]

Western leaders today who say they are shocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference this week denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world, the Holocaust is not a major historical event that they deny. We simply do not know it ever happened because we were never informed of it.

Nothing demonstrates more clearly the defects of Jimmy Carter's latest brief against Israel, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, than the ex-president's reluctance to defend the book on its merits. Rather than take up that unenviable task, Carter has sought to shift the focus away from the criticism -- especially as it concerns the book's serial distortions and outright falsehoods -- and onto the critics.

In particular, Carter claims that critics are compromised by their support for Israel, their ties to pro-Israel lobbying organizations, and -- a more pernicious charge -- their Jewish background. In interviews about his book, Carter has seldom missed an opportunity to invoke what he calls the "powerful influence of AIPAC," with the subtext that it is the lobbying group, and not his slanderous charges about Israel, that is mainly responsible for mobilizing popular outrage over Palestine. In a related line of defense, Carter has singled out "representatives of Jewish organizations" in the media as the prime culprits behind his poor reviews and "university campuses with high Jewish enrollment" as the main obstacle to forthright debate about his book on American universities. (Ironically, when challenged last week by Alan Dershowitz to a debate about his book at Brandeis University, which has a large Jewish student body, Carter rejected the invitation.)

Bluster aside, Carter's chief complaint seems to be that anyone who identifies with Israel, whether in the form of individual support or in a more organized capacity, is incapable of grappling honestly with the issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict. But Carter is poorly placed to make this claim. If such connections alone are sufficient to discredit his critics, then by his own logic Carter is undeserving of a hearing. After all, the Carter Center, the combination research and activist project he founded at Emory University in 1982, has for years prospered from the largesse of assorted Arab financiers.

So it seems that the official position of the United Parcel Service is that they will not deliver to places "over the Green Line" under Israeli control (for security reasons) but they have no problem delivering to Ramallah and Jenin (because it is much safer there, obviously).

Last night, I called UPS to verify this, and, in fact it is true. Not only is it true, but UPS will not recognize even parts of Israel that are within the "Green Line," such as the Golan Heights. A man from UPS read me the following statement (which is not on the UPS website--perhaps they are too cowardly to acknowledge this online):

UPS service is provided to and from most addresses within Israel and the Palestine [sic] Authority area, except for Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a few remote areas in the Golan Hieghts, and the Southern Negev desert.

I asked the UPS employee if I could send a package to "Palestinian" areas of the West Bank. He said yes. I asked him if I could send a package to terrorist infested Ramallah. He said yes. I asked him if I could send a package to Arab areas in the Golan Heights. Again, the answer was "YES."

In a recent seed on the topic of Jimmy Carter and his new book (linking to an interview with carter in the LA Times), the egyptian asked the following question:

Can anyone make a real, honest argument that he is motivated by anti-Semitism

I don't know what his motivations are. I can't say whether he is motivated by anti-Semitism. But I can say that he as come into his analysis of the situation in Israel with his own preconceived notion o who is right (the Palestinians) and who is wrong (Israel). He bases this on his pronouncement that US policy is pro-Israel for the sole reason that there is a strong Israel-lobby in Washington, and he, Jimmy Carter, unencumbered by such political artifices, will lead the way in pronouncing the truth.

He claims that "the International Quartet's "Roadmap for Peace," which has been accepted by the PLO and largely rejected by Israel". Excuse me? The "Roadmap for Peace" (what a stupid name) was accepted by the PLO and rejected by Israel? Israel is 100% to blame for its failure? Did he sleep through the intifada? Through the constant pronouncements coming from the Palestinians side affirming their allegiance to the founding principles of their movement (death to Israel)?

But more damning is his uninhibited use of the term "apartheid" as his main adjective for Israel. Israel diverges in a major way from the concept of apartheid invented and popularized in South Africa: Israel is not restricting the movement of Palestinians based on racist beliefs and principles. Any time that a fence is built or a checkpoint manned, it is because were it not for these physical barriers, many more Israelis and Jews would be killed by terrorists seeking to enter Israel and commit mass-murder. Carter criticizes Israel for "abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank", yet never once pauses to question whether this is being done for the purpose of anything more than making a land-grab. This is ignoring reality. When Israel allows free passage of Palestinians into Israel, Israelis die. It is a very simple equation. Though Carter admits that the "apartheid" is not based on racist motivations, by using that very term (with all of the emotional and historical weight that it carries), it is impossible to avoid accusing Israel of that very act.

Carter indicts Jewish organizations who would dare to criticize him (after all, he own the Nobel Peace Prize, so he has to be a good guy, right?) since they would be "unlikely to visit the occupied territories". Well, I will then go ahead and criticize Carter for the same sin. While he may gleefully visit Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jenin to converse with "the beleaguered residents", I don't remember him ever visiting Beit El, Jerusalem, Kochav haShachar, Haifa or Kedumim to commiserate with the Jews who live there about how he wishes that they did not have to live with the daily fear that an Arab would try to kill them for the crime of Driving-While-Jewish.

Three weeks ago, a Palestinian flag was found on the fence around my community (3 miles North of Jerusalem, in the "West Bank"). The next day, armed terrorists cut a whole in the fence and attempted to infiltrate the neighborhood next to me. Thankfully, the IDF was on hand to chase them away (no casualties) and put on extra guards. I guess in Carter's eyes I am just one of a "minority of Israelis" who is seeking to "confiscate and colonize choice sites in Palestine" (where?? Oh, and the place that I live was a barren hilltop before a few Jews came here with tents 20 years ago and built from the ground up a nice town. It only becomes a "choice site" after the Jews get there). I guess Carter would not see me (and hundreds of thousands of others) as an "innocent civilian" against whom he would "condemn acts of terror".

If Carter is not motivated by anti-Semitism, then he is propelled by ignorance and propaganda. He bases his conclusions on an incomplete, one-sided analysis of the situation, and the presumption that any action done by Israel is done not for the sake of defense and security, but rather with the malicious intention of colonization and oppression, while ignoring or sweeping under the carpet any intimation that perhaps the PLO and Hamas (organizations that are committed to the destruction of Israel) are interested in anything other than Jimmy's vision of how things should be done.

I pass this monument and the two small trees that kept it company nearly every day on my way to and from work... and I probably wouldn't have bothered to mention them here except for the troubling fact that not long after the memorial had been erected along the side of the road, some local Arabs took it upon themselves to deface the stone marker and to cut down the trees. If you didn't see the post and pictures I encourage you to do so.

Since then, there have been several additional incidents at the site. Swastikas and Arabic curses were spray painted on the stone, and a fire was set agsaint the monument so as to blacken it.

Each time an act of vandalism ocurred, friends and/or family of the murdered man came to try and scrub away the paint... the soot... the hate.

A longtime aide to Jimmy Carter has resigned from the Carter Center think tank, calling the former president's new book on Israel and the Arabs one-sided and filled with errors.

Kenneth Stein, the Carter Center's first executive director and founder of its Middle East program, sent a letter that bluntly criticized the book to Carter and others.

Stein wrote that the book, "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid," was replete with factual errors, material copied from other sources and "simply invented segments," according to an excerpt of the letter published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

See here for more on Carter's latest publication

They call themselves the ultras. They are the hardest of the hard-core soccer fans of France, the ones with the edgy reputations for being racist, right-wing, anti-Semitic and even violent.

For two decades, they have operated openly as fan associations without much interference from the police or soccer officials, who have claimed that they have limited authority to stop them.

On Thursday night, a group of these ultra-right-wing supporters of the Paris St.-Germain team set off a chain of events that ended with one of their own being shot to death by a black policeman.

The episode has set off nationwide soul-searching and finger-pointing as the French government as well as soccer officials, analysts and fans have confronted the violence and hate that have poisoned the sport.

[snip

The trouble began outside the stadium, as is often the case, after the Paris team was defeated, 4-2. Dozens of Paris supporters pursued and cornered Yanniv Hazout, 25, a French fan who is Jewish.

A 32-year-old plainclothes transport police officer, Antoine Granomort, who was guarding a nearby parking lot, rushed to shield him from the crowd.

"The crowd hurled insults — 'dirty Jew,' 'dirty Negro' and monkey cries — and raised Nazi salutes," a Paris prosecutor, Jean-Claude Marin, said afterward. He added that they also shouted, "Le Pen, president!" a reference to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right National Front leader who plans to run for president in the election in April. According to Mr. Sarkozy, some fans shouted, "Death to the Jew!" before attacking Mr. Hazout.

When the crowd began kicking and beating Officer Granomort and apparently threatened to kill the fan he was protecting, he fired his service revolver, killing Julien Quemener, 25, a home appliance technician, and wounding Mounir Boujaer, 26, a truck driver, according to several witness accounts. A fan who called himself Maxmax wrote Friday on an ultra Internet message board that someone shouted, "Jews to the ovens!" after the shooting.

Sudan's President Field Marshal Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir claimed Tuesday that reports in western newspapers of hundreds of thousands dead in his country's brutal civil war are all part of an Israeli-led worldwide conspiracy.

Obviously, what is going on in Sudan is the Jews fault.

I just finished watching a 40 minute show (which is currently available on YouTube) by Glenn Beck called Exposed: The Extemist Agenda (originally aired on CNN). Its focus is to publicize the threats that are being posed to the world by extremist Islam. He takes care to make it clear that this is not representative of all of Islam (and at the end of the show, gives examples of people in the Arab world who are trying to spread the opposite message). However, the messages, propaganda, and hatred, of Jews, Israel and the entire Western world, are an extreme threat to world peace, and the safety and well being of perhaps anyone reading this. If you can spare the time to watch the show, please do so. Below are some notes that I took while watching the program:

Examples of propaganda showed:

• Series from Iran TV that features Israelis removing the eyes from Arab children
• Series from Jordanian TV that features Jews plotting to kill a Christian child for making Matzah on Passover (the classic Blood Libel)
• Cartoon from the official PA newspaper, showing Bush and Sharon drinking from a bottle of Palestinian blood
• An expose on Iranian TV about how Jews control Coca Cola (who is plotting to overthrow the government of Iran) and how Pepsi stands for "Pay Each Penny Save Israel" (which is kind of ironic since Pepsi was one of the countries who gave in to the Arab boycott of Israel for so many years).

Ahmadinejad & The Two Faces of Iran:

• On Iranian TV: "The whole world knows that America and England are the enemies of the Iranian nation". Compare this with what he tells US interviewers: "We love the American people as we love our own"
• On Iranian TV:"The rage of the Muslim peoples may soon reach the point of explosion. Death to Israel! Death to America!". On US TV: "We want peace to be established there (in Israel). We care for Jews that live under pressure there as well".
• To the world: "We are no threat to anyone. The issue of making nuclear weapons has no place in Iran's policy". To Iranian TV: "Today the Iranian people are owners of nuclear technology. If some believe they can keep talking to the Iranian people in the language of threats an aggressiveness, they should know that they are making a bitter mistake.
• "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury".
• Netanyahu: "Iran is gearing up to produce 25 atomic bombs a year, 250 bombs in a decade...they are building missiles that will reach the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Like Nazism, they start with the hatred of the Jews, they want to annihilate the Jews, but that is only the first stop. The goal is Western civilization"

Suicide Bombing Propaganda:

• Video from Hizballah television, featuring an interview of a small boy describing how his father committed his act of suicide murder
• The goal of suicide bombers is to use the media to leap-frog over the military and directly reach the home audience.

How Hate is Taught to Children:

• Videos showing a three year old girl proclaiming that Jews are "apes and pigs".
• In a different video, a young girl cries out "With my soul and my blood I call upon thee, my country, with stones and with bullets I shall redeem you, my country, your martyrs and prisoners protect you, my country"
• A Kuwaiti sheikh in a video for parents, telling them what to teach their children: "We seek martyrdom. Oh mothers and fathers: You must train your children every night, before they go to bed, to go on raids in order to liberate Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, and when he goes to sleep...he should recite together with you the prayer for martyrdom...Do this every night"
• Childrens cartoons glorifying suicide bombings, specifically aimed at dehumanizing Jews and legitimating their murder
• Walid Shoebat testifying about how he has personally experienced (as a child) his teachers demonizing and dehumanizing Jews
• Brigitte Gabriel: The government of Saudi Arabia is funding 25,000 schools worldwide, supplying them with books full of hate, glorification of suicide bombers. From an eighth grade book (being used in the US): "Jews and Christians were cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs."
• Gabriel: "Political correctness is the disease that is killing the West. It is the apathy by which the Muslims are killing us one by one. We have got to throw it in the garbage, which is where it belongs. People have to develop the backbone to stand up to and identify the enemy, because the West right now is plagued with Islamofascism, a disease...that is going to kill our body unless we fight it and kill it first."

At one point in this video, Binyamin Netanyahu (former and perhaps future Prime Minister of Israel) talked about how Condaleeza Rice has said about Ahmadinejad that we should not pay attention to his words, and only consider his actions. He then talked about how a holocaust survivor told him that if there is one thing that he learned from Hitler, it is that when someone says that they are out to kill, murder and massacre you and your people, you had better listen.

Rice's prefered course of action may be more prudent politically, but it also is the most irresponsible thing that one can do in the face of the threats that are described in this video. Now is not the time to just sit back and pretend that these things are not going on. You have all been warned.

In its (fairly complementary) review of the upcoming film Borat, Manohla Dargis writes:

That Mr. Baron Cohen plays the character's anti-Semitism for laughs is his most radical gambit. The Anti-Defamation League, for one, has chided him, warning that some people may not be in on the joke. And a sampling of comments on blogs where you can watch some of the older Borat routines, including a singalong in an Arizona bar with the refrain "Throw the Jew down the well," indicates that the Anti-Defamation League is at least partly right: some people are definitely not in on the joke, though only because some people are too stupid and too racist to understand that the joke is on them. As the 19th-century German thinker August Bebel observed, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, a truism Mr. Baron Cohen has embraced with a vengeance.

For those who have not seen any of the show on HBO or any of the hundreds of clips on YouTube, Borat is a Kazakh journalist who (for our purposes) is quite open about his dislike for Jews. In this case, people generally accept it because the actor who plays Borat is himself Jewish (and a Jew can never be anti-Jewish, right?), and his style of humor is to use his characters to poke fun at his interviewees and other victims (thus, when he starts singing about "throwing Jews down the well, so that his country can be free" with an entire bar of red-necks singing along, the joke is really on the people at the bar who got duped into showing their true feelings by innocent Borat).

In the excerpt from the review above, it is noted that not everyone is so enthusiastic about Borat's style of humor. It is claimed that not everyone is able to "get the joke", and that many (out of innocence, stupidity or both) accept it at face value and use it as an object of veneration. Although many people will look down on those who do this (for the same reason as we laugh at the people singing in the bar), the fact that it happens so openly is at the very least, quite troubling.

Ultimately the reviewer partially dismisses such concerns with a quote from August Bebel: "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools".

But can these concerns be so easily dismissed?

If we look at events in the world outside of Hollywood and unconnected with English comedians, we see other instances of popular anti-Jewish behavior. Newspapers sponsored by Fatah are very open about their ingrained hatred of Jews, while anti-Jewish trends throughout Europe are very much on the rise. And these occurrences have much more significance than some drunk people singing in a bar. These lead to murders and indoctrination of a generation of children for more hatred and war.

Granted, Borat is a funny guy. But does that alone excuse his brand of humor? Or does it help us to ignore and dismiss anti-Jewish behavior that is occurring on a global scale?

"There is one global stock market situated in New York, and it is controlled by Jews… In order for this idea to be realized, it was necessary to initiate wars, because wars are a customary (practice) of the Jews… as they did in the first and second World Wars," the article said.

"In conclusion, the role of the Jews in fanning the flames of evil, and fuelling the fire, and provoking wars - such as the war against Iraq – will inevitably cause the downfall of the American military power... and the beginning of World War III," it concluded.

An exerpt from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Nope, try again. This was published in the Palestinian Authority's official newspaper, Al Hayat Al Jadida.

So Hamas is up to their old tricks again, right? Good thing that we have Abbas the Moderate to make sure that everyone plays nice...wrong again:

"When you're pumping out pure hatred, you're guaranteeing that at some point it's going to explode in violence, and that's what we're seeing now," Marcus warned. "And I stress, this is coming from (PA President) Mahmoud Abbas. This isn't coming from Hamas."

"Al Hayat Al Jadida is a paper owned by the Palestinian Authority and controlled by Fatah," Marcus added.

"The media is in the hands of Mahmoud Abbas. Right after the (Palestinian) elections, he transferred the control of the newspaper and television to the office of the president. So he now controls them. And we have seen an increase in incitement to hatred," said Marcus.

Last Thursday a French court found Philippe Karsenty guilty of libeling France 2 television network and its Jerusalem bureau chief Charles Enderlin. Karsenty, who runs a media watchdog Web site called Media Matters, called for Enderlin and his boss Arlette Chabot to be sacked for their September 30, 2000 televised report alleging that IDF forces had killed 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura at Netzarim junction in Gaza that day.

[snip]

Both men separately proved mathematically and physically that the IDF forces on the ground could not see the Duras from their position and that it was physically impossible for their bullets to have killed Muhammad.

[snip]

In the intervening years, private researchers and media organizations have taken it upon themselves to investigate what happened that day. Their findings have shown that at a minimum, the probability that the IDF killed Dura is minuscule and more likely, the event was either staged or edited to engender the conclusion that Dura had been killed by Israel. The few people who have been allowed to watch Rahma's entire film have stated that it is impossible to conclude that Muhammad was killed because he raises his head and props himself up on his elbow after he was supposedly shot.

Respected media organizations like The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Atlantic Monthly and Commentary magazine have published detailed investigations that all conclude that the footage was either staged or simply edited to show something that didn't happen.

Yet, even as private individuals were dedicating their time and passion to proving that France 2 had purposely broadcast a blood libel against Israel that caused the death and injury of Israelis and Jews throughout the world and marred the honor of the IDF, official Israel remained silent.

Continues Khader: "The first connection of the Jews to this site began in the 16th Century. … The Jewish connection to this site is a recent connection, not ancient … like the roots of the Islamic connection."

The Muslim academic goes on to claim the Western Wall, which predates the Al Aqsa Mosque by over 1,100 years, actually is part of the mosque and once served as a post for Muhammad's horse, Al-Buraq.

"Know that this wall is the only one of the four walls of the Al-Aqsa Mosque – the mosque has four sides – this wall is the only one that carries an Islamic name since the beginning of Islam.

The Western Wall dates from the time of the Second Jewish Temple, which was rebuilt in 515 B.C. after Jerusalem was freed from Babylonian captivity. The second temple was destroyed by the Roman Empire in A.D. 70.

The PA television denial of a Jewish historic connection to the Western Wall is not uncommon in the Middle East. Many leaders of the Waqf, the Muslim custodians of the Temple Mount, openly deny Jewish connections to the holy site.

The unfortunate thing about claims like this one is (much like claims that the Holocaust didn't happen) that despite whatever historical evidence you have, the more often you repeat it, the more often the mAsses around the world will start to believe it.

That moment, I fear, has come. The very existence of Israel (which whatever its virtues or failings is home to nearly half of all Jews living today) has become in the eyes of much of the world a big bother. And we are not speaking here about the Moslem or Arab world, but about much of the West.

A disturbing analysis by columnist Jonathan Rosenblum of how the sentiment that Israel should not exist is one that is becoming much more popular around the world today (and not just in Arab countries). Israel is responsible for all Arab terrorism (and for North Korea and Sudan) and until the Jews are out of Palestine, there will be no peace (since obviously the Muslims should not be held responsible for any of their own actions, since Israel is really at fault).

Much of the West does not just lament the error of Israel's creation, but is prepared to assist, either actively or passively, in reversing that historical mistake. Iranian president Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel or the map, and his predecessor publicly offered his calculus for a nuclear exchange with Israel: one nuclear bomb could wipe out Israel's five million Jews, whereas the loss of an equal number of Iranians would still leave another 15 million alive.

Despite the blatant threats against Israel's existence, Ahmadinejad is still treated to submissive visits from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a host of European dignitaries, and a fawning interview by America's "toughest" TV journalist focusing on his sweet family and sartorial tastes. Meanwhile, after more than 3 years of diplomatic talk-talk, we are no closer to the most minimal collective action to halt Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Even more telling is the West's refusal to grant Israel the right to defend itself from attack. It is the West that has made the terrorists' tactic of embedding themselves among civilians a win-win proposition: If their missiles kill Israelis, that is a win; and if Israel strikes back at those firing those missiles and kills civilians as well, the ensuing media condemnations of Israel are an even greater win.

Apparently sixty years was the amount of time necessary for the world to forget.

On September 23rd, an article was published in the Israeli newspaper Maariv. The original, entitled And the World was Silent (hebrew) is here. It was translated into English by a blogger named Imshin (intro, page 1, page 2, page 3).

Here is a quote from the first page of the article, giving a synopsis of the general point being made by the author, Ben Dror Yemini:

Under an academic and/or journalistic umbrella, today's Israel is compared to the damned Germany of yesteryear. In conclusion, there are those who call to terminate the 'Zionist project'. And in more simple words: because Israel is a country that perpetrates so many war crimes and engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide – it has no right to exist. This, for instance, is the essence of an article by the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder (writer of "Sophie's world"), who wrote, among other things: "We call killers of children by their name"). The conclusion is that Israel has no right to exist.

The tragedy is that in Arab and Muslim countries a massacre is happening. A genocide protected by the silence of the world. A genocide protected by a deception that is perhaps unparalleled in the history of mankind. A genocide that has no connection to Israel, to Zionism or to Jews. A genocide of mainly Arabs and Muslims, by Arabs and Muslims.

This is not a matter of opinion or viewpoint. This is the result of factual examination, as precise as possible, of the numbers of victims of various wars and conflicts that have taken place since the establishment of the State of Israel up till this time, in which the massacre continues. It is, indeed, death on a massive scale. A massacre. It is the wiping out of villages and cities and whole populations. And the world is silent. The Muslims are indeed abandoned. They are murdered and the world is silent. And if it bothers to open its mouth, it doesn't complain about the murderers. It doesn't complain about the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity. It complains about Israel.

Blogger Chayyei Sarah has gone through the article and printed a summary of the various statistics here. Here are her words:

The next time Arabs and/or Muslims complain about the persecution they suffer at the hands of the Americans and Israelis, remember this . . .Since 1948, the number of Muslims killed by the Americans and Israelis combined is still less than the number killed by the French. And the number of Muslims killed by the French, Israelis, and Americans combined is still less than the number killed by the Soviets/Russians. And the number of Muslims killed by the Soviets, Russians, French, Israelis, and Americans, combined, is still about 1/3 of the number of Muslims who have been killed by Muslim states.

I don't mean to minimize anyone's suffering, and as an Israeli I'm interested in continuing to pressure Israel to keep Arab casualties at a minimum while still protecting Israelis. But if the goal is to save lives, then to focus one's pressure on the deeds or misdeeds of Israel is to apply an incredible, ridiculous double standard, one clearly motivated by anti-Semitism and nothing more. If the goal is to spare Muslim lives, then the Muslims could start with themselves, and come back to us when they value each other. (Oh, and when they themselves don't think anymore that 1,000 of them is worth 2 of us.)

I don't have so much to add to the commentaries cited above. (Just to note that the statistic of 60,000 Arab deaths in the Arab-Israel conflicts since 1948 were almost entirely as a result of wars started by the Arab countries in which they sought to destroy Israel). Although the matter is disturbing, it is not also very surprising, given the agenda of the Arab world (as well as most of the UN) for the past half century regarding Israel. I am interested in seeing what (if any is possible) cogent response can be given to this by those who spend their days calling Israel dirty names all in the name justice. If you are so interested in saving (Arab) lives (as opposed to destroying Jewish countries), given the statistics cited above, what is your defense?

It has gone on for too long.

From this point on, every moment that the State of Israel does not withdraw itself is immoral, unjust and inexcusable.

If the State of Israel is interested in doing not only what is in her own best interest, but in also doing something that will earn it the respect of the nations of the world, then it will withdraw immediately.

No, I am not talking about the Jewish State of Israel withdrawing her forces from Lebanon or Gaza, and I am not talking about the Jewish State of Israel withdrawing from Judea and Samaria.

It's time for Israel to unilaterally withdraw itself from the United Nations.

Although I do not know how positive or wise such a move on Israel's part would be right now, the points laid out in this blog post are still worth considering as the UNIFIL charter in Southern Lebanon is about to be extended once more, in order to fulfill a "peacekeeping" role in a region in which its behavior in the past can be described as a failure, at best.

Ahmadinejad says that while main solution for conflict in region is 'elimination of Zionist regime,' at this stage immediate ceasefire was needed to end fighting between Israel, Lebanon

Thanks for clearing that up, Mahmoud. As a member of the Zionist regime, I am so comforted by your concerns and the efforts that you go to on behalf of peace in the region.

From a speech given by Brigitte Gabriel at Duke University in October, 2004:

I'm proud and honored to stand here today as a Lebanese speaking for Israel -- the only democracy in the Middle East. As someone who was raised in an Arabic country, I want to give you a glimpse into the heart of the Arabic world.

I was raised in Lebanon where I was taught that the Jews were evil, Israel was the devil, and the only time we will have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea.

When the Muslims and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they started massacring the Christians city after city. I ended up living in a bomb shelter underground from age 10 to 17 without electricity eating grass to live and crawling under sniper bullets to a spring to get water.

It was Israel that came to help the Christians in Lebanon. My mother was wounded by a Muslim's shell and was taken into an Israeli hospital for treatment. When we entered the emergency room I was shocked at what I saw. There were hundreds of people wounded, Muslims, Palestinians, Christian Lebanese and Israeli soldiers lying on the floor. The doctors treated everyone according to their injury. They treated my mother before they treated the Israeli soldier lying next to her. They didn't see religion. They didn't see political affiliation. They saw people in need and they helped.

For the first time in my life, I experienced a human quality that I know my culture would never have shown to its enemy. I experienced the values of the Israelis -- who were able to love their enemy in their most trying moments. I spent 22 days at that hospital. Those days changed my life and the way I listen to the media. I realized that I had been sold a fabricated lie by my government about the Jews and Israel that was so far from reality. I knew for a fact that if I was a Jew standing in an Arab hospital, I would be lynched and thrown over to the grounds as shouts of joy of "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) would echo through the hospital and the surrounding streets.

In the same way that ordinary Muslims need to separate themselves from the blood-drenched ideology of Hezbollah, Hollywood needs to separate itself from the odious racism of Gibson. And I don't make that connection lightly. Remember, during his DUI tirade, Gibson claimed, "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." That kind of thinking makes him psychological soul mates with Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who has said, "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak, and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology, and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew."

Gibson's no-longer-deniable brand of bigotry has led to the extermination of millions -- and continues to fuel much of the strife and suffering in the world today. Which is why Hollywood cannot sit this one out and wait for the reviews to come in.

For years, social conservatives have questioned the morals and ethics of the entertainment community -- tossing around the shibboleth of "Hollywood values" as an oxymoronic grenade in the culture wars. Well, now is the time for Hollywood to show what those values really are by making Gibson pay the price for his bigotry and intolerance.

But...the alcohol made him say it...

Kudos to ABC for canceling Mel's TV series on the Holocaust.

There is a recognition from the broad Israeli peace camp that, unlike the PLO, Hizbollah does not recognise that the Jews have a right to national self-determination. For Hizbollah, it is 'a clash of civilisations' and Israelis are a hateful symbol of 'Westoxification'. Unlike the PLO, which went to strenuous lengths to distance itself from accusations of anti-Jewish - as opposed to anti-Zionist - sentiment, Hizbollah has no qualms about espousing an anti-Judaism ideology.

According to Lebanese academic Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbollah representative Hasan Nasrullah is prone to diatribes such as: 'If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.'

Two weeks ago, a Norwegian newspaper published a cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as the infamous commander of a Nazi death camp who indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them at random from his balcony.

The caricature by political cartoonist Finn Graff appeared in the Oslo daily Dagbladet. Norway's small Jewish community was outraged and the Simon Weisenthal Center submitted a protest to the Norwegian government. Just half a year ago, Graff declared that he would never draw a cartoon of Muhammed out of "fear and respect." I guess that drawing cartoons of Jews is differernt in Graff's eyes.

This is saddening but unfortunately, not very surprising either.

Anyone think that Jews all over the world are going hold riots condemning the cartoon and calling for the death of the artist and editors responsible for publishing it?

I know that this may upset some of you very much. But then again, what's new (watch the video to see what I mean).

Noam Chomsky and his hard left gang of Israel bashers are at it again. This time it is about the current crisis in the Middle East, which they blame entirely on Israel.

Chomsky is circulating a letter which he got two naïve Nobel Prize winners--the playwright Harold Pinter and the poet José Saramago--to sign.

It is vintage Chomsky, beginning with its first sentences: "The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press." Chomsky typically cites obscure news reports in languages no one can read. This time it's "the Turkish Press." The problem with Chomsky's assertion is that a five minute Google News check reveals that the incident he points to was widely reported by the English language press, including The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, BBC, Reuters, and the Associated Press. (Lie number one).

Read the rest of the article for more lies.

Much of the conversation relating to Israel today (on Newsvine and beyond) features some very polarized view points. Many commenters (myself included) are strong supporters of Israel, her policies and actions. Many other commenters have the exact opposite view: they are against Israel's policies and think that Israel's actions are wrong (or racist, genocidal, criminal, etc). Some people in the anti-Israel group admit that they think the world would be better off without Israel. Others claim that as long as the racist, ultra-national Zionists are out of the picture, everything would be fine.

In nearly all of these discussions, at one point or another, someone will bring in an accusation of anti-Semitism. The exchange will go something like this (PI = Pro-Israel, AI = Anti-Israel):

AI: (Says one or some of the following) Israel is wrong, their leaders are criminals, they respond out of proportion, Hizballah is not a terrorist group, suicide bombings are ethical, etc, etc

PI: Your comments are so anti-Semitic. It is really disgusting. Now everyone knows how you really feel.

AI: I am not anti-Semitic. How dare you call me that. Just because I am anti-Israel doesn't mean that I am anti-Semitic

I have seen this exchange take place countless times, in some form or another. Personally, I do not think that every anti-Israel statement belies an anti-Semitic viewpoint. I make statements that are anti-Israel (if you consider a statement critical of the Israeli government to be anti-Israel) and I do not consider myself to be anti-Semitic. There are others on Newsvine who are more consistently anti-Israel, whom I am pretty sure are not anti-Semitic. However, there are others from whom the anti-Israel statements are made with such venom and conviction, and with such consistency that I really do think: "this person hates Jews".

Of course, up until now these thoughts have been mere speculation, and the exchanges usually end up reverting to the "am not"..."are too"..."am not" pattern. Unless someone says something that is obviously anti-Semitic, it has been very hard to say whether or not a connection exists, whether the accusation of anti-Semitism is coupled with anti-Israel too often and whether this is really a fair accusation to make in a serious discussion.

Up until now anyway.

On July 5, two professors from Yale University, Edward H. Kaplan and Charles A. Small, who are involved in a seminar on anti-Semitism, released a paper titled "Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe: A Statistical Study" (PDF link). The abstract of this paper reads as follows:

In the discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, extreme criticisms of Israel (e.g. Israel is an apartheid state, the Israel Defense Forces deliberately target Palestinian civilians) coupled with extreme policy proposals (e.g. boycott of Israeli academics and institutions, divest from companies doing business with Israel) have sparked counter-claims that such criticisms are anti-Semitic (for only Israel is singled out). Our research shines a different, statistical light on this question: based on a survey of 500 citizens in each of 10 European countries (for a total sample of 5,000), we ask whether those with extreme anti-Israel views are more likely to be anti-Semitic. Even after controlling for numerous potentially confounding factors, we find that anti-Israel sentiment consistently predicts the probability that an individual is anti-Semitic, with the likelihood of measured anti-Semitism increasing with the extent of anti-Israel sentiment observed.

In other words, there is a very direct relation between the prevalence and intensity of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel opinions (check the end of their report for all of the raw data, charts, calculations, etc for the statistically-inclined).

What significance does this have for our discussions here and elsewhere regarding Israel? For me personally it will definitely give me pause when I am considering whether or not to enter a discussion where the commenters display an over-zealous tendency to blame, criticize and lambaste Israel without considering the possibility that some of Israel's actions may be legitimate and that some of Israel's opponents may be in the wrong. I am willing to participate in a discussion relating to Israel where the other people participating are there to contribute what they know to best present their opinions and are open to the possibility that they might be mistaken in some points. However, if the person with whom I am "conversing" is using his anti-Israel opinions as a mask for his anti-Semitic views I really have better (and more productive) things to do with my time.

It also strikes me as being an interesting new addition to the common exchange mentioned above. We read (and I myself have written) responses quite often that are along the lines of "don't just accuse someone of anti-Semitism because they are anti-Israel. The two are not the same!". Does this study make the equation of the two a more valid statement?

(Hat tip: Cross-Currents)

The rising tide of anti-Semitism in France is causing some Jews to shed their Jewish identity, according to a visiting expert.

"People do not know how to defend Jewish culture, so they are turning against Israel, and some are even disowning the values of Jewish culture," said Dr. Shimon Samuels, the director of international relations at the Simon Wiesenthal's Paris office.

Sad events in France that could soon be echoed across Europe (though it wont be as visible, since France has one of the largest Jewish populations in the disapora) as the continent's often radical Muslim populations grow in numbers and strength. The result: Jews are forced to choose between assimilation and immigration.

He said 3000 Jews left France last year out of a total Jewish population of approximately 600,000. And he predicts a further 25,000 will leave if the situation does not improve.

France is not anti-semitic. Uh huh. Very interesting.

He chalked initial French inaction following rising anti-Semitism at the beginning of the decade to a government "who wanted to deny the problems of security." That changed, he said, when then Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was replaced in 2002.

Rothschild described Jacques Chirac, who served as president before and after the change in administration, as "profoundly philo-Semitic" and "quite interested in the basis of Judaism."

In France on Wednesday, Olmert told the French president that he was "one of the world's great fighters against anti-Semitism."

Is this the same Chirac who visited Arafat in his hospital room on order to pay tribute to "a man of courage and conviction who for 40 years incarnated the Palestinians' fight for recognition of their national rights"? Wow, he has made quite a turn-around.

A paper was published two weeks ago claiming that Jews exert undue influence on the government of the United States, convincing the government to follow the interests of Jews even when it is against the best interests of the country. The Jews have "inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security". They are "unhealthy for democracy" and "increase the terrorist danger that all states face". They must be recognized and stopped.

The Palestinian Authority's American Mission and the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood have both praised the article. After expressing appreciation to the article's authors for "validat(ing) every major point I have been making since even before the war even started", David Duke had the following to say: "The task before us is to wrest control of America's foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist Neo-cons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War IV."

So who wrote the article and where was it published? Was it written by people who have already established themselves as people who are against the Jewish people and Israel? Hanan Ashrawi? Noam Chomsky? Osama Bin Laden?

Nope. It was written by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. If you are not familiar with the names of the authors, Mearsheimer is the "R. Wendell Harrison Distiguished Service Professor of Political Science" at the University of Chicago. Walt is the "Belfer Professor of International Relations" and Academic Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Political Science at Harvard University. The paper they have released is entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" and is available for download from a Harvard University website. It is 82 pages long (nearly half of which is endnotes and sources).

So what? They are obviously very respected academics. They have obviously thoroughly researched their sources. If they say it, it must be true. Right?

Not everyone seems to think so. CAMERA has published a point-by-point refutation fo the article, starting off their analysis with the following remarks:

reveals that it is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in "serious dispute."

In other words, a student who submitted such a paper would flunk.

Alan Dershowitz had the following to say (from New York Sun, 3/24/06):

"What we're discovering first of all is that the quotes that they use are not only wrenched out of context, but they are the common quotes that appear on hate sites," Mr. Dershowitz, who is identified in the paper as part of the "lobby," told The New York Sun yesterday.

"The wrenching out of context is done by the hate sites,and then [the authors] cite them to the original sources, in order to disguise the fact that they've gotten them from hate sites.

"They didn't do direct research, they didn't do primary research," Mr. Dershowitz said of the paper's authors. "They're just taking ideas that already existed out there in hate sites - in the work of Chomsky, in the work of Buchanan, and in the work of David Duke - and they're claiming it as their scholarship."

Harvard has already distanced themselves from the paper (they had their logo removed from the first page, and had the following disclaimer put in:

The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty, and this article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of either institution.

The most concerning part of this is not that David Duke supports their positions. He is in the Ku Klux Klan. He has been saying this stuff for years. What is alarming is where it came from - two respected professors from two of the top Political Science schools in the country. What a few years ago was reserved for people who preached hate for a living is now acceptable for a Harvard Dean.

This is expressed very well by an In Dark Times, Blame the Jews, an editorial in The Forward:

What is new and startling is the document's provenance. Its authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America's most respected foreign-affairs theorists. One, Mearsheimer, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. The other, Walt, is academic dean of the nation's most prestigious center of political studies, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Though it's tempting, they can't be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream. They are the mainstream.

...Some of Israel's more overheated defenders were trying this week to diagnose the problem as a character flaw in the authors. Their solution is to counterattack. That's a mistake. Leaving aside the folly of trying to answer a claim that Israel is a bully by bullying the messenger, the response misses the point. Mearsheimer and Walt are products of their time.

These are dark, poisonous days we live in, and the poison is spreading. In Iraq, America has stumbled into a quagmire of historic proportions, with global consequences that are proving nothing short of catastrophic. If that weren't enough, our nation is nearly bankrupt, with a national debt nearly equal to our Gross Domestic Product. And the Arctic is melting. The miscalculations seem inexplicable. There must be someone to blame.

We shouldn't be surprised, then, at the sight of respected professors, and not only professors, coming unhinged.

The Mearsheimer-Walt paper shows how far the notion that Israel is to blame for the Iraq War has moved from the crackpot fringe to the center. Three years ago it was heard mainly from campus radicals. Two years ago it started getting picked up by a handful of Washington insiders, memorably including Senator Ernest Hollings and General Anthony Zinni. Now it's reached the heart of the academic establishment.

These are scary times we live in. In some ways, starting to echo many of the events in pre-WWII Germany (and every other time that Jews have been expelled from the countries of the world over the years). Though the holocaust was only 60 years ago, already its historical validity and magnitude is being contested. Today by crackpots, tomorrow by Harvard Professors. It is for these reasons that having a strong Israel is even more important today - now more then ever.

Caroline Glick makes connections between the torture and murder of Isaac Halimi, and the age-old anti-semitic quest to destroy and murder the Jewish people. This tradition is being helped now by Israel's irresponsible "conditionally-Zionist" leadership ("Kadima"), who in their failure to even condemn his murder, is" doing everything in its power to lull the Israeli people into complacency towards the storm of war raging around us."

Reference from Carl.