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The Israeli Spring: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Aug. 29, 2013—Israel could be forgiven for having a siege mentality — given that at any moment, old frontline enemies Syria and Egypt might spill their violence over common borders. The Arab Spring has thrown Israel’s once-predictable adversaries into the chaotic state of a Sudan or Somalia.
On Foreign Shores, Anti-Semitism Still Rages: Barbara Kay, National Post, Aug. 28, 2013—It’s been many years since anti-Semitic motifs — like cartoons showing money-obsessed Jews lusting after power — have been part of mainstream culture here in North America. Yet in other parts of the world, such offensive notions are flourishing.
Questions for the European Left: Pilar Rahola, Portal of Ideas, Jan. 3, 2009—I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not anti-Israeli like my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel . To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.
Young, Hidden Polish Jews Discover Heritage in Israel: Rachel Avraham ,Jewish Press, Aug. 27, 2013— Shavei Israel, an Israeli organization dedicated to discovering hidden Jewish communities and lost Jews, recently brought 16 Polish Jews to Israel to rediscover their Jewish identity.
Jews with Six Arms: Pilar Rahola, Jerusalem. Dec. 16, 2009—I accuse, then, in a formal manner: the main responsibility of the new antisemite’s hatred, disguised as anti-zionism, comes from those who should have to defend freedom, solidarity and progress. Far from it, they defend despots, forget their victims and remain silent before medieval ideologies which aim at the destruction of free societies. The treason of the left is an authentic treason against modernity.
Zionist Wine and Sour Grapes: David M. Weinberg, Israel Hayom, Aug 11, 2013— Catherine Ashton and her acrid European Union colleagues that are boycotting Israel are going to miss out on a lot of great Israeli wine. Perhaps it bothers the EU that there are Biblical echoes resonating in every glass…
Rediscovering the Real Bar Kokhba: Eli Kavon, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 25, 2013— Yigael Yadin, the prominent Israeli archeologist and statesman, made an extraordinary discovery in the Judean desert, near Ein Gedi, in 1961. Yadin and his excavation team found letters in a canyon crevice signed by Simon Bar Kosiba. The letters confirm that Bar Kosiba was the leader of an independent Jewish state that rebelled against the Roman Empire for three years, from 132 to 135 CE.
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, Aug. 29, 2013
Israel could be forgiven for having a siege mentality — given that at any moment, old frontline enemies Syria and Egypt might spill their violence over common borders. The Arab Spring has thrown Israel’s once-predictable adversaries into the chaotic state of a Sudan or Somalia. The old understandings between Jerusalem and the Assad and Mubarak kleptocracies seem in limbo.
Yet these tragic Arab revolutions swirling around Israel are paradoxically aiding it, both strategically and politically — well beyond just the erosion of conventional Arab military strength. In terms of realpolitik, anti-Israeli authoritarians are fighting to the death against anti-Israeli insurgents and terrorists. Each is doing more damage to the other than Israel ever could — and in an unprecedented, grotesque fashion. Who now is gassing Arab innocents? Shooting Arab civilians in the streets? Rounding up and executing Arab civilians? Blowing up Arab houses? Answer: either Arab dictators or radical Islamists.
The old nexus of radical Islamic terror of the last three decades is unraveling. With a wink and a nod, Arab dictatorships routinely subsidized Islamic terrorists to divert popular anger away from their own failures to the West or Israel. In the deal, terrorists got money and sanctuary. The Arab Street blamed others for their own government-inflicted miseries. And thieving authoritarians posed as Islam’s popular champions.
But now, terrorists have turned on their dictator sponsors. And even the most ardent Middle East conspiracy theorists are having troubling blaming the United States and Israel. Secretary of State John Kerry is still beating last century’s dead horse of a “comprehensive Middle East peace.” But does Kerry’s calcified diplomacy really assume that a peace agreement involving Israel would stop the ethnic cleansing of Egypt’s Coptic Christians? Does Israel have anything to do with Assad’s alleged gassing of his own people?
There are other losers as well. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to turn a once-secular Turkish democracy into a neo-Ottoman Islamist sultanate, with grand dreams of eastern-Mediterranean hegemony. His selling point to former Ottoman Arab subjects was often a virulent anti-Semitism. Suddenly, Turkey became one of Israel’s worst enemies and the Obama administration’s best friends.
Yet if Erdogan has charmed President Obama, he has alienated almost everyone in the Middle East. Islamists such as former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi felt that Erdogan was a fickle and opportunistic conniver. The Gulf monarchies believed that he was a troublemaker who wanted to supplant their influence. Neither the Europeans nor the Russians trust him. The result is that Erdogan’s loud anti-Israeli foreign policy is increasingly irrelevant.
The oil-rich sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf once funded terrorists on the West Bank, but they are now fueling the secular military in Egypt. In Syria they are searching to find some third alternative to Assad’s Alawite regime and its al-Qaeda enemies. For the moment, oddly, the Middle East foreign policy of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the other oil monarchies dovetails with Israel’s: Predictable Sunni-Arab nationalism is preferable to one-vote, one-time Islamist radicals.
Israel no doubt prefers that the Arab world liberalize and embrace constitutional government. Yet the current bloodletting lends credence to Israel’s ancient complaints that it never had a constitutional or lawful partner in peace negotiations.
In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s corrupt dictatorship is gone. His radical Muslim Brotherhood successors were worse and are also gone. The military dictatorship that followed both is no more legitimate than either. In these cycles of revolution, the one common denominator is an absence of constitutional government.
In Syria, there never was a moderate middle. Take your pick between the murderous Shiite-backed Assad dictatorship or radical Sunni Islamists. In Libya, the choice degenerated to Moammar Qaddafi’s unhinged dictatorship or the tribal militias that overthrew it. Let us hope that one day westernized moderate democracy might prevail. But that moment seems a long way off.
What do the Egyptian military, the French in Mali, Americans at home, the Russians, the Gulf monarchies, persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, and the reformers of the Arab Spring all have in common? Like Israel, they are all fighting Islamic-inspired fanaticism. And most of them, like Israel, are opposed to the idea of a nuclear Iran.
In comparison with the ruined economies of the Arab Spring — tourism shattered, exports nonexistent, and billions of dollars in infrastructure lost through unending violence — Israel is an atoll of prosperity and stability. Factor in its recent huge gas and oil finds in the eastern Mediterranean, and it may soon become another Kuwait or Qatar, but with a real economy beyond its booming petroleum exports.
Israel had nothing to do with either the Arab Spring or its failure. The irony is that surviving embarrassed Arab regimes now share the same concerns with the Israelis. In short, the more violent and chaotic the Middle East becomes, the more secure and exceptional Israel appears.
ON FOREIGN SHORES, ANTI-SEMITISM STILL RAGES
Barbara Kay
National Post, Aug. 28, 2013
It’s been many years since anti-Semitic motifs — like cartoons showing money-obsessed Jews lusting after power — have been part of mainstream culture here in North America. Yet in other parts of the world, such offensive notions are flourishing. Extreme Judeophobia is widespread in the Middle East, where many Arabs imbibe it at home, school and mosque. All educated people know that. But many readers might be shocked at how acceptable openly expressed Jew-hatred has become among some people in the “civilized” countries of Britain, Europe and Scandinavia.
Since 9/11, many reliable polls have revealed rampant credulity in these nations around anti-Semitic myths, fraudulent reports and conspiracy theories. Often the culprits disseminating them are intellectuals and the media. According to the Simon Weisenthal Center, six out of 10 of the world’s most virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli slurs are of European origin.
Anti-Semitism thrives in the far left and the far right. But the latter has no credibility with ordinary citizens. The far Left, however, finds respectable conduits for its anti-Semitism, sometimes thinly veiled as anti-Zionism, through academia, the media, NGOs, some Christian organizations such as the World Council of Churches, trade unions, “peace” activism, far-left Jewish academics and the UN. Some political centrists trustingly sip their toxic Kool-Aid, its poison dissolved in sugary compassion for Israel’s enemies, who are always, for the far left, the victims.
Evidence for these assertions can be found in the newly published book “Demonizing Israel and the Jews,” a useful compendium of interviews with scholars, politicians, journalists and artists from a wide variety of countries and professional domains, edited by the Israeli writer Manfred Gerstenfeld. Gerstenfeld, an expert on anti-Semitism attached to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, focuses half of his interviews on the demonization of Israel, and half on the demonization of Jews. Highlight contributors to his volume include Canada’s Irwin Cotler on Iran; U.S. lieutenant colonel and psychiatrist Daphne Burdman on the indoctrination of hatred and incitement to violence in Palestinian children; Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Kenneth Levin on the “psychology of Jews who embrace their enemy”; and Norwegian academic Hanne Nabintu Herland, who has declared that Norway is “the most anti-Semitic country in the West.”
Ronald Evans, founder of the world’s first complaint bureau for combating Internet hatred, writes that Facebook’s European director told him they remove most postings on Holocaust denial, but not “the Holocaust denial which is not considered hatred.” Eissens says he expressed incredulity, for Holocaust denial is always evidence of hatred.
In terms of anti-Semitic incidents in Europe, the worst — such as the 2006 torture-murder of Ilan Halimi in France — tend to be perpetrated by first- or second-generation immigrants from developing countries. The influx of significant numbers of Judeophobes into European culture is a serious threat to Jewish communities, who rightly voice concern at their own government’s failure — France, Sweden, others — to adequately protect them.
The Netherlands, with its justifiably uncomfortable war memories, and its million Muslims, many overtly Judeophobic, is particularly tense for its 45,000 Jews. Frits Bolkestein, former Dutch defense minister, and professor at Leiden University, has said: “Jews have to realize that there is no future for them in the Netherlands and that they best advise their children to leave for the United States or Israel.”
Leon de Winter, a well-known Dutch writer, says what many Jews secretly think: “What is happening in the Netherlands and Europe is a prelude of terrible things to come. The great story of the love Jews have for Europe has come to an end. In this sense, the Nazis have been successful. The presence of Jews in Europe will end.” Anyone wishing to grasp the diversity and scope of the global cultural and ideological war being waged against Israel and Jews will find an excellent reference tool in this compact, enlightening anthology.
QUESTIONS FOR THE EUROPEAN LEFT
Pilar Rahola
Portal of Ideas, Jan. 3, 2009
Why don't we see demonstrations against Islamic dictatorships in London, Paris , Barcelona? Or demonstrations against the Burmese dictatorship?
Why aren't there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection?
Why aren't there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs where there is conflict with Islam?
Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of Islamic dictatorship in Sudan? Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel?
Why is there no outcry by the European left against Islamic fanaticism? Why don't they defend Israel's right to exist?
Why confuse support of the Palestinian cause with the defence of Palestinian terrorism? And finally, the million dollar question: Why is the left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the left doesn't care.
And then, to the concept of freedom. In every pro-Palestinian European forum I hear the left yelling with fervor: "We want freedom for the people!"
Not true. They are never concerned with freedom for the people of Syria or Yemen or Iran or Sudan, or other such nations. And they are never preoccupied when Hamas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. The resulting consequence of these ideological pathologies is the manipulation of the press.
The international press does major damage when reporting on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. On this topic they don't inform, they propagandize.
When reporting about Israel, the majority of journalists forget the reporter code of ethics. And so, any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide. So many stupid things have been written about Israel that there aren't any accusations left to level against her.
At the same time, this press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel, the indoctrination of children, and the corruption of the Palestinians. And when reporting about victims, every Palestinian casualty is reported as tragedy and every Israeli victim is camouflaged, hidden or reported about with disdain.
And let me add on the topic of the Spanish left. Many are the examples that illustrate the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments that define the Spanish left. For example, one of the leftist parties in Spain has just expelled one of its members for creating a pro-Israel website. I quote from the expulsion document: "Our friends are the people of Iran, Libya and Venezuela, oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel."
In another example, the socialist mayor of Campozuelos changed Shoah Day, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, with Palestinian Nabka Day, which mourns the establishment of the State of Israel, thus showing contempt for the six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Or in my native city of Barcelona, the city council decided to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, by having a week of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus, they invited Leila Khaled, a noted terrorist from the 70's and current leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization so described by the European Union, which promotes the use of bombs against Israel.
This politically correct way of thinking has even polluted the speeches of President Zapatero. His foreign policy falls within the lunatic left, and on issues of the Middle East, he is unequivocally pro-Arab. I can assure you that in private, Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East , and the policies of Foreign Minister Moratinos reflect this. The fact that Zapatero chose to wear a kafiah in the midst of the Lebanon conflict is no coincidence; it's a symbol.
Spain has suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe and it is in the crosshairs of every Islamic terrorist organization. As I wrote before, they kill us with cell phones hooked to satellites connected to the Middle Ages. And yet the Spanish left is the most anti-Israeli in the world. And then it says it is anti-Israeli because of solidarity. This is the madness I want to denounce in this conference.
Conclusion:
I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not anti-Israeli like my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.
As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles, principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say, that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty, I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too. The struggle of Israel, even if the world doesn't want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.
Pilar Rahola is a Spanish-Catalan journalist, writer, and former politician and MP. Her areas of interest include women's rights, international human rights, and animal rights. In recent years she has spoken out about what she considers to be the hypocrisy of left wing politicians with regards to Israel and Zionist. In 2013 the Keren Kayemet planted a forest with 2,500 trees in her honor in Yatir, in the Negev.
YOUNG, HIDDEN POLISH JEWS DISCOVER HERITAGE IN ISRAEL
Rachel Avraham
Jewish Press, Aug. 27, 2013
Shavei Israel, an Israeli organization dedicated to discovering hidden Jewish communities and lost Jews, recently brought 16 Polish Jews to Israel to rediscover their Jewish identity. Michael Freund, chairman of Shavei Israel, explained, “In Poland, in most people’s eyes, to be Polish means Catholic. In Poland, the sense of identity is very much linked to religion, so when a person discovers he is Jewish or has Jewish ancestry, it comes as a shock to people. They become outsiders. It can be traumatic.”
During the Holocaust, 90 percent of Polish Jewry was murdered, decimating the 3 to 3.5 million Jews that lived in Poland on the eve of the Nazi invasion, leaving only 350,000 alive by war’s end. While most surviving Jews left Poland after a brief return to search for relatives, some remained. Due to communist rule and memories of the Holocaust, many hid their Jewish identity. Today, there are many communities with “hidden Jews,” who are disconnected from their Jewish roots and ancestry.
“There are people who suspect they might have Jewish roots and want to know yet don’t change their life styles. Others could return to Judaism or pursue a secular journey to learn about Jewish culture. We are talking about a human phenomenon, so different people react different,” Freund explained. “Some of them become religious Jews and do a conversion, while others are struggling with their new identity and are trying to figure out what to make of it and how it should impact their life. One thing that unites them is that they all want to learn more about their heritage and want to see the land of their ancestors.”
Some hidden Jews grew up as Catholic, the children of Jews who converted while hiding in Catholic orphanages. Others were raised without religion playing any role in their lives. According to Freund, “One young man [in this group of 16] who began to get interested in his family genealogy and then at the same time took a DNA test discovered that he has Jewish background. That combined with documents he found convinced him he has Jewish ancestry. He was even able to locate distant cousins in the US that are Jewish. This prompted him to study more about Judaism. He converted and became religiously observant.” Most of the 16 Jews in this group, however, are at an earlier stage in their journey.
“In many other cases, they have a grandparent who revealed it to them or are people who don’t know for sure, since their family will not discuss it with them,” said Freund. Their suspicion grew out of their lack or church attendance or extended family. “They have relatives who refuse [to speak about it] and that fuels their speculation even more.” Freund believes that roots are powerful. “When we walk the streets of Jerusalem, the trees are uneven and the roots have spread out and lifted the rocks up. If that is true of a tree, how much more so of a human being! Sometimes they burst upwards to show they are still there. More people through out Poland are discovering and embracing their Jewish roots. They are trying to go home.”
Jews with Six Arms: Pilar Rahola, Jerusalem. Dec. 16, 2009—I accuse, then, in a formal manner: the main responsibility of the new antisemite’s hatred, disguised as anti-zionism, comes from those who should have to defend freedom, solidarity and progress. Far from it, they defend despots, forget their victims and remain silent before medieval ideologies which aim at the destruction of free societies. The treason of the left is an authentic treason against modernity.
Zionist Wine and Sour Grapes: David M. Weinberg, Israel Hayom, Aug 11, 2013—Catherine Ashton and her acrid European Union colleagues that are boycotting Israel are going to miss out on a lot of great Israeli wine. Perhaps it bothers the EU that there are Biblical echoes resonating in every glass…
Rediscovering the Real Bar Kokhba: Eli Kavon, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 25, 2013—Yigael Yadin, the prominent Israeli archeologist and statesman, made an extraordinary discovery in the Judean desert, near Ein Gedi, in 1961. Yadin and his excavation team found letters in a canyon crevice signed by Simon Bar Kosiba. The letters confirm that Bar Kosiba was the leader of an independent Jewish state that rebelled against the Roman Empire for three years, from 132 to 135 CE.
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