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PLEASE SEE THE CIJR CALENDAR OF IRAN NUCLEAR “DEAL” EVENTS AT THE END OF TODAY’S DAILY BRIEFING—ED.
Who is to Blame for the Drowning of Alan Kurdi?: Tarek Fatah, Toronto Sun, Sept. 3, 2015 — A single photograph of a three-year old boy named Alan Kurdi, lying dead on a Turkish beach, has rocked the conscience of the world.
The American Jewish Future: More Shmuley Boteach Than Woody Allen?: David Bernstein, Washington Post, Aug. 27, 2015 — According to recent Pew Foundation data, Orthodox (strictly observant of Jewish law) Jews are only 10 percent of the American Jewish population, with the latter population defined somewhat broadly.
Modern Middle East Studies vs. Scholarship: Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, Aug. 10, 2015— It would be a mistake to say Middle East Studies have been corrupted.
Dear Adolf: We Won!: Paul Lewis, Jewish Philanthropy, July 29, 2015 — Dear Adolf: Screw you, you bastard! We won!
The Second Coming: William Butler Yeats, Poem of the Week, 1919 — Turning and turning in the widening gyre…
Pres. Obama on the Iran Nuclear Agreement: Jewish Federations, Aug. 28, 2015
Analysis: New Pew Report Has Seen the Jewish American Future and It’s Orthodox: Jewish Press, Sept. 3, 2015
The Coddling of the American Mind: Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, Sept. 2015
The U.N.’s Anti-Israel Agency? (Video): Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31, 2015
The Israeli Thank-You Video That Became a Hit in China: Tom Dolev, Jerusalem Online, Sept. 1, 2015
WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THE DROWNING OF ALAN KURDI?
Tarek Fatah
Toronto Sun, Sept. 3, 2015
A single photograph of a three-year old boy named Alan Kurdi, lying dead on a Turkish beach, has rocked the conscience of the world. The picture will remain seared in our collective memory forever, just as the image of a nine-year-old girl running naked on a road after being severely burned on her back in a napalm bomb attack shook us up on June 8, 1972. That was Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who later settled down in Canada.
Despite what was initially reported by Canadian media, Alan Kurdi was never headed to Canada. His aunt in Vancouver, Tima Kurdi, tried to sponsor Alan’s uncle and family under what is known as a “G5 privately sponsored application for asylum.” Citizenship Minister Chris Alexander personally took up her application after receiving it from Fin Donnelly, the MP for Port Moody-Coquitlam. However, because the UN in its wisdom wouldn’t register the Kurdi family as refugees, and because the Turkish government wouldn’t grant them exit visas (as they didn’t have passports), the application for asylum in Canada couldn’t proceed any further.
With no legal options, the family did what tens of thousands of refugees in Turkey have done — they took a risky boat ride from Bodrum in a flotilla of dinghies headed for the Greek island of Kos. The boat capsized about 30 minutes after it set off. Alan, his brother Ghalib, 5, their mother Rehan, and many others drowned. It’s a tragedy that should have brought out the best in all of us.
Unfortunately, the New Democrats and Liberals tried to use it to attack Chris Alexander and the Conservatives and depict them as heartless and cruel, in the most unethical and immoral manner. To understand the calamity unfolding in the Mediterranean, illustrated by the photograph of Kurdi, we need to step back a century, but even a year is helpful. In essence, it’s the story of a Kurdish family that fled an Arab country after an Islamist attack and took refuge across the border in Turkey, a country known for its hostility towards its own Kurdish population. In the words of the boy’s aunt in Vancouver, the treatment of her family in Turkey was “horrible.”
Instead of targeting the most visible and apparent villains in this drama — the Assad regime in Syria, the Turks, ISIS, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — the Liberals and the NDP sharpened their knives and went after Alexander, the very man who has been quietly helping people escape tyranny and settle down in Canada. We cannot lose sight of the Syrian Revolution that began as protests in the early spring of 2011 as part of the Arab Spring. Instead of paying heed to his people, President Bashar al-Assad unleashed his military forces in violent crackdowns that forced 3.2 million people to flee the country and internally displaced 6.5 million others. Alan was just the latest victim.
Hadi Elis, spokesman for the Kurdish Community Centre of Toronto, told me he was shocked how Trudeau and an NDP MP from B.C. used Alan’s tragic death to attack Alexander. “Minister Alexander has been one of the strongest allies of the Kurdish community and stood by the Syrian Kurds in their darkest hour in Kobani from where the boy and his family fled in the face of attacks on them by Islamist ISIS and their Turkish allies,” Elis wrote in an e-mail. “It is despicable for Liberal and NDP politicians to use the dead boy as a political tool to score partisan political points. Shame on them. They want Canada to stop attacking ISIS, and then shed crocodile tears when a victim of ISIS drowns on a Turkish beach,” he continued.
“If there is anyone who is guilty of this crime, it is Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UN, all those who have refused to embrace hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war, not Minister Chris Alexander who needs no lectures on compassion by politicians who are catering to the Islamists inside Canada.” Neither the NDP nor the Liberals dare say a single word against Turkey, Saudi Arabia or even Pakistan for fear of losing the imagined Muslim vote in Canada’s large riding-rich cities. Instead, by depicting the Conservatives and Alexander as anti-refugee and anti-Muslim, they hope to harvest a supposed rich crop of pro-Islamist voters.
It’s possible they might even succeed in this venture given the way many mainstream media outlets have formed a lynch mob targeting the Conservatives with disdain and shameless partisanship.
Canadian voters, on the other hand, must recognize the stories they’re reading or watching also reflect an illiteracy and ignorance among Canada’s chattering heads on matters of the Middle East and South Asia — ignorance they cover up by ensuring no one with a background in the area is given the opportunity to challenge what wrongly passes for objective and balanced discourse.
The fact is all these refugees fleeing war zones in the Arab World could very easily be accommodated in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Instead, while Turkey wants to dump them in the sea and hope bleeding-heart, guilt-ridden liberal Europeans embrace them and pay for their resettlement, the Saudis have an even simpler solution: Shut down the border and seal it so not a single Alan Kurdi dare walk across from Iraq or the new “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” into its territory. Period.
Strictly from a management perspective and common sense, Saudi Arabia has the land, the resources and lies in the vicinity of the crisis. The refugees and the Saudis speak the same language and settlement and integration could happen sooner and at a fraction of the cost. But it’s far easier to call for the head of Chris Alexander than to be honest and admit the villain in the drama is Saudi Arabia and criticising the Saudis might upset the Islamist vote bank both the Liberals and the NDP covet.
MORE SHMULEY BOTEACH THAN WOODY ALLEN?
David Bernstein
Washington Post, Aug. 27, 2015
According to recent Pew Foundation data, Orthodox (strictly observant of Jewish law) Jews are only 10 percent of the American Jewish population, with the latter population defined somewhat broadly. The Orthodox subset of the Jewish community, however, is growing rapidly. I recently attended a Tikvah Fund seminar on the future of American Jewry. I learned a lot of interesting things, but perhaps nothing raised my eyebrows more than the growth in enrollment in grade schools run by the so-called “ultra-Orthodox,” the more insular group of Orthodox Jews who constitute about two-thirds of the Orthodox population. (Caveat: Participants in the Tikvah seminar noted that Pew classifications are inexact and that some percentage of those Pew considers ultra-Orthodox are, in fact, what is often called “Centrist Orthodox.”) Over a 15-year period, enrollment in these schools, Hasidic and non-Hasidic, had more than doubled.
Consider what sort of birthrate that implies! Participants in the seminar with relevant expertise estimated that 20 to 25 percent of Jews raised in ultra-Orthodox communities go “off the derech,” i.e., leave the fold. But even with a 20 to 25 percent attrition rate, the school enrollment figures suggest exponential growth in the ultra-Orthodox community — not to mention that attrition is not a one-way street and that various Orthodox outreach efforts, most prominently those of Chabad-Lubavitch, mean that about 30 percent of adult Orthodox Jews were raised in non-Orthodox homes.
Meanwhile, the non-Orthodox community seems destined to shrink, with birthrates below replacement level, and about a quarter of Jews not raising their children as Jews. Moreover, among the non-Orthodox Jewish population, the percentage who don’t practice the religion and don’t meaningfully affiliate with the community is growing. The population of active Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist Jews is shrinking, especially among the young. (Aside: It is, by the way, among the former unaffiliated group that disinterest or hostility to Israel is concentrated. When you hear from the likes of Peter Beinart that young Jews are increasingly disaffected from Israel, it’s not only inaccurate, but refers mainly to this unaffiliated group, secular individuals with overwhelmingly left-wing politics, not raised in the Jewish religion, who still consider themselves at least partially Jewish. …
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—ED.]
MODERN MIDDLE EAST STUDIES VS. SCHOLARSHIP
Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review, Aug. 10, 2015
It would be a mistake to say Middle East Studies have been corrupted. For the program’s very purpose has been to serve as a corrupting agent. Specifically, it puts the essence of study — the objective pursuit of knowledge — in disrepute.
Here, of course, I am referring to the modern incarnation of Middle East Studies: an amalgam of leftist and Islamist political dogma that masquerades as an academic discipline. By contrast, the actual study of Middle Eastern history, like the intimately related study of Islamic civilization, is a venerable and vital pursuit — and is still pursued as such by, to take the best example, ASMEA, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Alas, in our hyper-politicized society, the traditional notion of study seems quaint: a vestige of a bygone time when the designations “Orientalist” and “Islamist” referred to subject-matter expertise, not political activism, much less radicalism.
Yet, for Edward Said, the seminal figure in modern Middle East Studies, the object of the game was to slander knowledge itself. Joshua Muravchik nailed it in a 2013 profile of the renowned academic. Said’s animating theory held that “knowledge” was the key that enabled the West to dominate Orientals: The point of pursuing knowledge about “the languages, culture, history, and sociology of societies of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent,” Said elaborated, was to gain more control over the “subject races” by making “their management easy and profitable.” With real study caricatured as the engine of colonial exploitation, the way was paved for a competing construction of “study” — political agitation to empower the have-nots in the struggle against the haves.
Said was a fitting pioneer for such a fraud. To begin with, he was a professor not of Middle East Studies but of comparative literature. Moreover, the personal history he touted to paper over his want of credentials was sheer fiction: Far from what he purported to be (a Palestinian victim exiled by Jews from his Jerusalem home at age twelve), Said was actually a child of privilege, raised in Cairo and educated in top British and American schools. His Palestinian tie of note was membership in the PLO’s governing council. Like Rashid Khalidi — his protégé, who was later awarded the chair in Modern Arab Studies that Columbia University named in Said’s honor — Said was a reliable apologist of Yassir Arafat, the indefatigable terrorist who infused Palestinian identity with a Soviet-backed Arab nationalism.
To thrive in an Islamic culture, it was not only useful but necessary for Palestinian militancy to accommodate the Islamist sense of divine injunction to wage jihad. From its roots, then, modern Middle East Studies is a political movement aligning leftism and Islamism under the guise of an academic discipline. It is not an objective quest for learning guided by a rich corpus of history and culture; it is a project to impose its pieties as incontestable truth — and to discredit dispassionate analysis in order to achieve that end.
The embrace of Islamism usefully advances this project because Islamist ideology similarly stigmatizes the pursuit of knowledge. Where the leftist frames the West’s reverence for reason as imperialism, the Islamist attacks it on theological grounds. Sharia, they maintain, is the complete and perfect societal framework and legal code, the path to human life lived in conformity with Allah’s design. Thus, what the West calls “reason” or “the objective pursuit of knowledge” is merely a rationalization for supplanting Allah’s design with the corrupting preferences of Western civilization. We see how this teaching plays out in practice. Muslim countries that supplement sharia with other legislation add the caveat that no man-made law may contradict Islamic principles. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation — a group of Islamic governments that form a large bloc in the United Nations — even found it necessary in 1990 to promulgate a Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, because Islamists could not accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spearheaded by non-Muslim governments after World War II…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—ED.]
Paul Lewis
Jewish Philanthropy, July 29, 2015
Dear Adolf: Screw you, you bastard! We won! You must be turning over in your grave with all that is happening in your beloved Berlin this week. You should have seen it: more than 2,000 Jewish athletes from 39 countries around the globe just paraded through your Olympic Park in the Opening Ceremonies of the European Maccabi Games, sort of a European Jewish Olympics.
That’s right – the same complex with the iconic stadium you built for the 1936 Olympics, as you were planning the Holocaust, was filled with Jews tonight. You banned German Jewish athletes from participating 79 years ago but tonight Yids filled the Olympic Park. There were Jewish swimmers from Argentina and Jewish runners from Australia; Jewish basketball players from Canada, Jewish tennis players from South Africa and Jewish soccer players from the USA.
You came so close to exterminating all the Jews of Europe, but, tonight, European countries, including Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and France, were proudly represented by Jewish athletes. We’re still here. Oh, and there’s another country here this week. It’s called Israel, the ancient and modern homeland of the Jewish People, reborn from the ashes of the Shoah. Israel’s existence guarantees that your Final Solution will not be implemented again. Not that there aren’t people who would still like that to happen. At the same time there is a resurgence of Jewish life in Berlin, the antisemitic sickness you nearly perfected is alive and growing again in Europe. It’s worse now than any time since you were in power. Every week brings another incident – a firebombing or an attack on a school, a museum or a kosher market. Why? Simply because they are Jews.
Frankly, with all the history of Jew-hatred in Germany, I never thought I would be here. My father came to Germany, courtesy of Uncle Sam, at the end of your reign of terror. He was part of the Allied force that liberated Dachau. Like so many of the Greatest Generation he never talked about it, but was changed by it forever. Maybe that’s why I was determined never to come. Besides, it may be ignorant and impolite to say, but no matter what words are spoken in German, they all sound to me like achtung and mach schnell. And while the Holocaust is history for me, I remember all too well the massacre in Munich of 11 Israeli Olympians in 1972. No, Germany was never on my “must visit” list.
But I’m here and glad for it. Fortunately, Germany today is far different from the way it was in your time. Berlin is a complex, fascinating city, full of energy and culture. The Nazi past is openly acknowledged and appropriately memorialized in several ways and places. This week I toured your first concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, just 22 miles north of the Berlin. You started housing political prisoners there in 1936, the same month you used the Olympics to hoodwink the world into believing Nazi Germany was peaceful and tolerant. By 1945, 30,000 inmates had died at Sachsenhausen from disease, malnutrition and execution. It was the testing facility where the SS learned and practiced the mass killing methods they would later use at other Nazi death camps. Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Makes You Free – appears on the ironwork entry gates, just as it does at Auschwitz, Dachau and Theresienstadt.
Even though the Holocaust didn’t happen on American soil, it deeply influenced the post-World War II American Jewish experience. Perhaps that’s a nod to the Jewish value that all Jews are responsible for each other; perhaps it’s a bit of guilt that we didn’t raise our collective voices loudly enough while you were in power. Either way, American Jewish education and philanthropy over the last 70 years have been heavy on the Holocaust and antisemitism. So much so that in a recent survey of American Jews, 73 percent said remembering the Holocaust is an essential part of what being Jewish means to them. That’s even more than the 69 percent who said leading an ethical and moral life is essential to their Jewishness.
As important as it is to remember the atrocities you unleashed on our people, the Holocaust and antisemitism can not and should not be the central, defining reasons for our Jewishness. Some call it an obsession; others call it a continuing siege-mentality and fear for survival. Whatever it is, over-concentrating on it runs the risk, it seems to me, of overshadowing the richness and beauty of our tradition that provides real answers to the question Why be Jewish? Of course, I recognize it’s easy for an American Jew to say that. Not so for European Jews who really are facing existential questions every day. Again.
As the parade of athletes continues through this historic place it’s as though someone is repeatedly pressing a TV remote control’s “previous channel” button. My mind switches between the old newsreels and the scene I am witnessing in person. On the 1936 channel, the Berlin Olympic stadium, in black and white, is draped in swastikas alongside the Olympic rings. On the 2015 channel, the Opening Ceremony is a sea of color as each delegation joyously enters the arena. The uniforms are all different but have one thing in common: a Jewish Star of David. But unlike in your time, these stars are not yellow.
In the 1936 newsreels you are smiling with your right arm raised. Thousands of Germans in the stands eagerly return your Nazi salute. In 2015, thousands of Jewish family members and friends are in the stands, waving their arms at the Jewish athletes parading by. The symbolism is lost on no one as 15,000 Jews from throughout the world join as one – in Berlin of all places – and sing Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem. We survived. We are still here. We won. Am Yisrael Chai. The Jewish people lives.
William Butler Yeats
Poem of the Week, 1919
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Pres. Obama on the Iran Nuclear Agreement: Jewish Federations, Aug. 28, 2015
Analysis: New Pew Report Has Seen the Jewish American Future and It’s Orthodox: Jewish Press, Sept. 3, 2015 — The Pew Research Center has issued a further analysis of its 2013 survey of US Jews which, at the time, shattered some people’s long held beliefs about the Jewish community in America.
The Coddling of the American Mind: Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, Sept. 2015— Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.
The U.N.’s Anti-Israel Agency? (Video): Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31, 2015 — UN Watch Executive Director (And former CIJR Dateline M.E. Editor) Hillel Neuer on a new controversy surrounding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Photo credit: Getty Images.
The Israeli Thank-You Video That Became a Hit in China: Tom Dolev, Jerusalem Online, Sept. 1, 2015 — 70 years after the end of World War II, the Israeli Consulate in Shanghai found a creative way to thank the residents of the city for saving more than 20 thousand Jews during the holocaust.
“Day of Jewish Unity” Ahead of Congress Iran Vote: Tues., September 8, 7:00AM-12PM, Everywhere!
Tuesday, September 8, 12:30 PM Washington, D.C.
Iran Deal Press Conference, featuring Members of Congress, Americans effected by Iranian terrorism, and luminaries to speak out against the Iranian Nuclear Deal.
Where: Washington DC: "West Grassy Area," facing the ellipse, in front of the Capitol building.
Wednesday, September 9, Toronto, ON, 4:30-6:30PM
Rally to protest the proposed agreement with Iran and the relentless ISIS genocide of the Yezidi people.
Where: in front of the US Consulate at University and Queen Streets in Toronto.
Wednesday, September 9, Washington, D.C.
Tea Party Patriots, Center for Security Policy, Zionist Organization of America To Host DC Rally
Where: West Lawn of the Capitol, Washington, D.C.
Keynote speakers: Sen. Ted Cruz , Donald Trump
Wednesday, September 9, 8:00 PM – New Jersey
Where: Congregation B'nai Tikvah, 1001 Finnegan Lane, North Brunswick Township, NJ
