Betsy's Page: Cruising the Web

Betsy's Page: Cruising the Web

Israel as punching bag

James Taranto links to this essay by Israeli journalist Matti Friedman about how the media cover Israel. Friedman points out that the media cover Israel and the Palestinians as if it's the most important story on earth with move coverage than any other conflict on earth.

Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.

To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel....

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

I suspect that part of this discrepancy is that it is much easier and pleasanter to be a reporter in Israel than one in Syria or Pakistan or Tibet or Congo. He goes on to point to how the media frame the story by totally ignoring the Palestinians as having any responsibility for their situation. They ignore the corruption in the Palestinian Authority yet drill down on the slightest negative story about Israeli society. The media ignore or downplay the fact that Hamas censors and intimidates them in their coverage of conflict in Gaza. It is like after the fall of Saddam Hussein, CNN's Eason Jordan told the world of how CNN had kept certain stories to themselves because of their fear of what Saddam would do to Iraqis who had worked with CNN if they had made stories of atrocities committed by Saddam and his sons. Yet reporters in Gaza don't seem to care about presenting a true picture of life in Gaza because they're too focused on blaming everything on Israel. Friedman goes on to say many perceptive things about how the media and their western audiences see conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and fail to see those tensions as part of of conflicts throughout the Middle East. And, by portraying the conflict as simply one between Israel and Palestinians they get to portray Israel as the stronger entity instead of framing the conflict as one between Israel and Arabs or between Israelis and Muslims if one were to include the hostile countries of Turkey and Iran. Such a framing would make Israel be a tiny country of 6 million facing 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. 

And what explains this invidious depiction of Israel? Westerners can project onto Israel everything they despise about their own nation's histories.

When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain....

White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “Manhattan” or “Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics. Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “segregating buses.” And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy hearing the Jews accused of genocide.

You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.

Bret Stephens ponders the intriguing way that Obama's aides describe his personal reactions to various conflicts around the world.

Barack Obama "has become 'enraged' at the Israeli government, both for its actions and for its treatment of his chief diplomat, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. " So reports the Jerusalem Post, based on the testimony of Martin Indyk, until recently a special Middle East envoy for the president. The war in Gaza, Mr. Indyk adds, has had "a very negative impact" on Jerusalem's relations with Washington.

Think about this. Enraged. Not "alarmed" or "concerned" or "irritated" or even "angered." Anger is a feeling. Rage is a frenzy. Anger passes. Rage feeds on itself. Anger is specific. Rage is obsessional, neurotic.

And Mr. Obama—No Drama Obama, the president who prides himself on his cool, a man whose emotional detachment is said to explain his intellectual strength—is enraged. With Israel. Which has just been hit by several thousand unguided rockets and 30-odd terror tunnels, a 50-day war, the forced closure of its one major airport, accusations of "genocide" by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitic protests throughout Europe, general condemnation across the world. This is the country that is the object of the president's rage.

Think about this some more. In the summer in which Mr. Obama became "enraged" with Israel, Islamic State terrorists seized Mosul and massacred Shiite soldiers in open pits, Russian separatists shot down a civilian jetliner, Hamas executed 18 "collaborators" in broad daylight, Bashar Assad's forces in Syria came close to encircling Aleppo with the aim of starving the city into submission, a brave American journalist had his throat slit on YouTube by a British jihadist, Russian troops openly invaded Ukraine, and Chinese jets harassed U.S. surveillance planes over international waters.

Mr. Obama or his administration responded to these events with varying degrees of concern, censure and indignation. But rage?

Nope. Not so much. He saves that for the Israelis.

PC as an autoimmune disease

From the May 3, 2013 Goldberg File:

America's Autoimmune Crisis

I think you could write a pretty good book on the idea behind my column today. I write:

Is the American body politic suffering from an autoimmune disease?

The "hygiene hypothesis" is the scientific theory that the rise in asthma and other autoimmune maladies stems from the fact that babies are born into environments that are too clean. Our immune systems need to be properly educated by being exposed early to germs, dirt, whatever. When you consider that for most of human evolutionary history, we were born under shady trees or, if we were lucky, in caves or huts, you can understand how unnatural Lysol-soaked hospitals and microbially baby-proofed homes are. The point is that growing up in a sanitary environment might cause our immune systems to freak out about things that under normal circumstances we'd just shrug off.

Hence, goes the theory, the explosion in asthma rates in the industrialized world, the rise in peanut and wheat allergies and, quite possibly, the spike in autism rates. There's also a puzzling explosion in autoimmune diseases. That's where the body attacks healthy organs or tissues as if they were deadly invaders.

Which brings me to my point. If you think of bigotry as a germ or some other infectious disease vector, we live in an amazingly sanitized society . . .

I then go on to suggest that the absolutely ridiculous obsession with racism on college campuses and elsewhere is a kind of autoimmune crisis.

One thing I didn't get to (I found the idea of the Klan laying siege to Oberlin College too funny to ignore) is the obsession with the "Muslim backlash" in America that continues to elude us.

When you suffer from an autoimmune disease your body thinks healthy organs are in fact somehow invasive threats. Last week, Eric Holder's response seemed like an autoimmune misfire. Americans get blown up by jihadi immigrants and the body politic's response is to unleash antibodies in search of anti-Muslim bigotry.

This is of a piece with the Left's instinctual, visceral need for terrorist attacks to be committed by white, Christian, conservative men. There's some glitch in their metaphorical genetic coding that makes them want to fight the wrong threat. Some liberal writers remind me of obsessive-compulsive hand-washers. They have a plausible concern -- dirty hands -- but they take it to the point where they wash their hands into bloody stumps for fear of a wildly exaggerated threat.

In every year since 9/11, there have been more hate crimes against Jews than against Muslims in this country -- by a wide, wide margin. And don't get me wrong, I don't think America is bad for Jews. Quite the opposite: Without America, it's possible the Jews would simply be gone. This country is, in many ways, more Judaism's savior than Israel is. But to listen to the Left, anti-Semitism in this country is a weird hang-up but "Islamaphobia" is an epidemic. There's a Marcusian flavor to our autoimmune crisis. Herbert Marcuse's shtick talked up "oppressive freedom," "repressive tolerance," and "defensive violence" as ways of saying that American liberty was really tyranny and Marxist oppression was really liberating. It was all verbal alchemy, transmogrifying bulls*** into eggheady gold. The problem, alas, is that it worked.

I wonder if the same sort of thing might account for "zero tolerance" rules that wind up with kids being suspended from school for pointing a finger and saying "pow".

Jewish Voice for Peace: Animation FAIL

Link: http://www.bluetruth.net/2012/12/jewish-voice-for-peace-animation-fail.html

Jewish Voice for Peace has released a 6 minute animation which purports to be an introduction to the Israeli-Arab conflict.  Like much of JVP's other work, it's cute, simple-- as well as wrong on the facts. It's also misleading with respect to JVP's actual agenda, which includes consistent support for "river-to-the-sea" rejectionist groups and support for BDS.   

....

The video notes that "several" Arab armies invaded Israel; it might have been appropriate to mention that their goal, as with the Arab population of Palestine, was not a Palestinian state but the destruction of the Jewish one. Had the Palestinians accepted the partition plan, there would have been no war and no refugees, and Arab villages would not have been left as ghost towns to be built over. Even Mahmoud Abbas recognizes this choice as one of the two worst decisions made by the Palestinians. 

Have you taken the Israel test yet? - ICJS Research

Link: http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?article=4312 (via shareaholic.com)

The double standard inherent in this shrill, ahistorical response to Israeli militarism is clear if one contrasts it with the response to something like the Obama administration's bombings in Pakistan. In many ways, Obama has already done to rural parts of Pakistan what Israel is currently doing to Gaza – that is, he has launched bombing raids against militants which have inevitably killed or injured large numbers of innocents, too. Where Israel has said to have killed 130 in Gaza over the past week – some of them Hamas militants but many of them not – Obama's drone attacks in Pakistan in recent years have killed many more: an estimated 2,600, in fact, only around 13 per cent of whom were militants. This means that around 2,200 ordinary Pakistanis have been killed in bomb attacks okayed by Obama. Yet far from Obama's drone attacks generating public protests, or being described as 'murderous' and 'Nazi-esque' by respectable, caring newspapers, Obama remains a hero of the very same set that sees red whenever Israel fires a missile or a gun.

How to Confront the Anti-Israel Fixation of the Left

How to Confront the Anti-Israel Fixation of the Left

via PJ Media by Belladonna Rogers on 1/3/12

PJ Advice Columnist Belladonna Rogers on how to challenge the Israel-bashers and how to tell when their efforts to delegitimize Israel are based on anti-Semitism.

Back to the 1930s

Back to the 1930s

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Green Lantern on 11/29/11

There's an old saying popular among liberals and leftists: "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid." The aphorism attempts to account for the troubling resemblance of the main propaganda line for socialism -- there is a small, infinitely powerful, infinitely wealthy cabal at the center of society that controls the entire economy -- with the other propaganda line that there is a small, infinitely powerful, infinitely wealthy, Jewish cabal at the center of society controlling everything. According to this flippant dismissal, only a stupid person would distort the shining truths of socialism by muddying them with theories about race or religion.
Somehow it never occurs to liberals that the equation also runs the other way. Socialism is the anti-Semitism of the intelligentsia.
The political dialogue of the "1 percent versus the 99 percent" that currently consumes the liberal press is beginning to take the aura of the 1930s. That was the era, of course, when the world was divided into the "plutocrats" and "the masses," when the Monopoly board's depiction of "the rich" as a portly, tuxedo-and-top-hat-wearing breed apart was perceived as social reality. It was the 1930s, after all, that gave us Daddy Warbucks, that billionaire-who-could-do-anything, who was, let us not forget, a friend of President Franklin Roosevelt.
So why anyone would want to revive the politics of a "low, dishonest decade," as W.H. Auden described it, that led directly to the outbreak of World War II? It seems beyond comprehension. Nevertheless, thanks to the distorted scholarship of liberal scholars and the New--Dealification of the economy under President Barack Obama, here we are back in 1935.
The Occupy Wall Street crowd, as anyone who has studied 1930s history can see, is only one or two steps away from becoming the Brown Shirts of our era. The run-up to World War II was fought in the precincts of Berlin and other European capitals by political gangs that had abandoned electoral politics and decided to win their case "into the streets." By comparison, the Occupy-Whatever movement has so far been relatively benign. There is the usual agitprop of trying to provoke the police into overreaction so that the aggressors can celebrate themselves as "victims of the establishment who have unmasked the iron fist of the establishment," etc. etc. (Why is it that every movement that starts out denouncing billionaires ends up fighting $35,000-a-year cops from Queens?)
In any case, the Occupiers' form of extra-political violence isn't likely to reach true 1930s levels until it abandons the relative safety of urban parks and college campuses and goes out to Iowa, where they are promising to "Occupy the Iowa Republican Caucuses." At that point things are likely to get nasty. While the relatively tame urban police forces have learned their lessons from the 1960s on how to deal with protesters, inexperienced folks out in the Midwest are not likely to be as tolerant of political thuggery.
So how did we get to a point most sensible historians had assumed we left 80 years behind us? There are two answers: President Obama's politics and liberal scholarship.
The Occupiers have the germ of a case -- just as did the inhabitants of Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army that descended on Washington in 1932. (They had written promises of bonuses for their service during World War I that Congress had failed to honor.) The economy stinks. There are few jobs to be had. Yet except for James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, no news commentators have yet used the term "Obamaville" to describe the tent cities that have popped up around the country. Our President has managed to fashion the worst economy since the 1930s -- one that may soon eclipse the 1930s if Europe follows the present trend and goes under. Yet his only response has been to cartelize the economy in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt and then follow by emulating the worst demagogues of that era. Try this for example:

According to the tables which we have assembled, it is our estimate that 4 percent of the American people own 85 percent of the wealth of America and that over 70 of the American people don't own enough to pay the debts they owe. How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of the grub he ain't got no business with.

Is this Obama addressing a group of dewy-eyed freshmen in Colorado? No, it is Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, "The Kingfish," delivering his "Share the Wealth" address to an assembly of Congressional staffers in the Capitol Building in 1935. The Hill staffers applauded rapturously as Long went on to propose stripping John D. Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and the rest of the millionaires of all their wealth and redistributing it to the American people:

We say to America 125 million, none shall be too big, none shall be too poor… but… that America will become a land, sharing the fruits of the land, not for the favored few, not to satisfy greed but that all may live in the land in which the Lord has provided an abundance sufficient for the luxury and convenience of the people in general.

All that's missing is Obama's customary invocation of "folks."
But it isn't just the President's channeling of the demagogues of the 1930s that has created the poisonous mood. Liberal scholars have labored long and hard to bring about this moment. Two of the most noteworthy are Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, a pair of French Marxists who parachuted into Berkeley in the 1990s and without ever bothering to check out the neighborhood started dissecting income tax records trying to prove that America has as much inequality as France in the days of Louis XVI. All this has since been fought out in the academic journals, with Alan Reynolds standing toe-to-toe with Piketty and Saez, critiquing their work every step of the way. Suffice to say that P&S are the main source of the "1 percent" argument that has become the touchstone of Democratic politics.
Here's how P&S arrived at their conclusions:
1. First, they looked at individual tax returns, rather than households or families. Individual returns reflect every teenager who earned $3,000 at a summer job. Not taking account that people share income and support each other naturally skews things toward the lower end.
2. P&S took no account of government transfers, which now make up a huge portion of the income of poorer households. Welfare payments, SSI, food stamps, housing vouchers and Medicaid -- all are non-taxable and constitute a major source of income to most poor families.
3. A vast number of "the rich" who show up at the top end of the income scale are Subchapter S corporations, not individuals. The 1986 tax reform raised corporate taxes to 36 percent while lowering personal rates to 28 to 35 percent. This set off a stampede out of Schedule C corporate filings and into Subchapter S, where a corporation's earning can be shared by up to 100 individuals. Almost half the corporations in America now file "personal" income taxes. Banks making $10 million in revenues now file under Subchapter S. This makes it appear as if there are fabulously rich individuals roaming the land when in fact they are small and mid-sized corporations. By failing to take this into account, P&S decided there has been a huge and growing "inequality gap" since 1986.
All this is lost in the shuffle, however, as the campaign to scapegoat the "1 percent" becomes an obsession of the liberal obsession. The New York Times now runs a front-page story almost every day highlighting the comparison between "the 1 percent and the other 99." The one before Thanksgiving featured a lament of how the 99 percent must camp out in front of Targets and Wal-Mart "racing for bargains at ever-earlier hours while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home." Three days before that it was how "the gap between first class and coach" on international flights "has never been so wide."

Carriers… are offering private suites for first-class passengers, three-star meals and personal service once found only on corporate jets. They provide massages before takeoff, whisk passengers through special customs lanes and drive them in a private limousine right to the plane. Some have bars. One airline has installed showers onboard.
The amenities in the back of the cabin? Sparse.

That these luxury passengers are paying $15,000 a seat and provide more than half the revenues from each flight did not seem to make much difference.
Finally last Sunday the Times found an éminence grise in former Republican mayoral candidate Ron Lauder, who spearheaded the campaign to impose term limits on New York City politicians. Pictured in front if a $135 million painting in light that made him look like a German baron who supported the Nazis in 1933, Lauder was stigmatized as a manipulator "now worth $3.1 billion" who is making "shrewd use of the tax code [to achieve] deductions worth tens of millions of dollars in federal income taxes." Lauder's sin is that he has donated paintings from his personal collection to establish the Neue Galerie of Austrian and German art in Manhattan. When the New York Times starts pillorying art galleries, you know you're in a new era.
Still, all this hasn't been enough for Paul Krugman, the only certifiable lunatic ever to win a Nobel Prize. Last Friday Krugman informed readers that aiming at the 1 percent is all wrong. They should be raising their sites:

If anything… the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent's gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent -- the richest one-thousandth of the population.

Dismissing the objection that the .01 percent might include some "job creators" (Times style is now to put ironic quotation marks around "job creators"), Krugman goads his followers to action:

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about "job creators" and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

Seriously, what's the point of singling out the "0.1 percent" if not to hate them? But let's go Krugman one better. I'll bet it's not just the 0.1 percent or the 0.01 percent or the 0.0001 percent that's responsible for this country's ailing economy. I'll be there's one individual behind it all, one sinister billionaire who is manipulating the system, thwarting poor old President Obama efforts to bring prosperity to the people. I'll bet we even know his name. It's Goldstein, Emmanuel Goldstein.

Pat Condell: The great Palestinian lie

Pat Condell: The great Palestinian lie

via Jihad Watch by Robert on 10/6/11


"This is not about territory, and it certainly isn't about justice or human rights, because Arab societies don't know the meaning of those words. It's about Jew-hatred, as mandated by the Qur'an and as preached in the mosques and taught to the children in Arab countries day in and day out, generation after poisoned generation."
Be sure to watch it all. There is a special note for pro-Palestinian Leftists toward the end. (Video thanks to Cheryl.)

UN Moves Forward to Implement Goldstone Report

UN Moves Forward to Implement Goldstone Report | The Weekly Standard

The gist of the report: Everything is Israel's fault.

About those "occupied territories"

From The American Thinker, Ted Belman writes about which laws Israel is breaking in occupying the West Bank. Or more precisely, not breaking.

Israel is accused of occupying the West Bank and Gaza. In fact, these territories are described as "the occupied Palestinian territories." Not only are they not occupied in a legal sense, but also, they are not "Palestinian" lands in a sovereign sense.

The Forth Geneva Convention (FGC) is a treaty among signatory states that are called High Contracting Parties (HCP). It regulates the obligations of one HCP, who occupies the land of another HCP. It defines the terms "Occupying Power" and "Occupied State." Thus, this convention does not apply to the territories because they were not the land of any HCP. They have never been the land of an HCP. Prior to 1967, Jordan was in occupation of these territories, just as Israel is currently in occupation. Jordanian sovereignty over these lands was never recognized, and ultimately, Jordan relinquished any claims over them. The FGC was never applied when Jordan occupied the land, and it shouldn't be applied now that Israel does.
....
According to David Matas, an international lawyer of considerable repute.... Matas notes that "the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War do not recognize the legal possibility of the occupation of a people, only the occupation of the territory of a state." A Protocol to these conventions does recognize such a possibility, but Israel is not a signatory to it and is thus not bound by it.

It must be clearly understood that Israel's occupation is not illegal, and the U.N. has never claimed it to be. In fact, Resolution 242 permits Israel to remain in occupation until they have an agreement on "secure and recognized borders."

The Palestinians have no greater claim to a state than any minority group in any other state that wants a state of its own. The Basques and the Kurds come to mind. No one is demanding that they be given statehood.
....
Settlements

The anti-Zionists argue the settlements are illegal and rely solely on the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which provides that the occupying power is prohibited from transferring civilian populations to occupied territories. They say that the prohibition against transfer includes a prohibition against encouragement to settle. The matter has never been put to a court for interpretation or determination. But the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) advises "that this provision was intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War in which certain powers transferred portions of their populations to occupied territories for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed to colonize those territories."
....
The anti-Zionists reject the notion that the proscription is against only forced transfers and argue that the FGC proscribes inducement to move as well. But how can there be a crime of inducement when the person committing the act, the settler, has done nothing wrong? How can you be guilty of a crime by inducing someone to do something which is not a crime? Furthermore, this inducement would be a war crime on an equal footing with genocide. The equation is ludicrous. And if the settlers settle of their own volition and not due to inducements, what then? Also, it is impossible to prosecute an occupying power. So what individuals would be held responsible?
....
Matas opines, "The interpretation defies the ordinary understanding of criminal responsibility where the person committing the act is the primary wrongdoer and the person inducing the act is only an accessory."

Matas concludes, "There is all the difference in the world between forcible transfer, the offence of the Geneva Convention, and voluntary settlement, even where the settlement is encouraged" (by are merely providing inducements). [...] "Transfer is something that is done to people. Settlement is something people do."

George Will on Israel

George Will writes in the Washington Post: Skip the lecture on Israel's 'risks for peace'

In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."
....
The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

Frank Luntz on Why American Jewish Students Won’t Defend Israel

Liberal (n): A man who is too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel. 

     -- Robert Frost

 

Evelyn Gordon writes at Commentary Magazine:

 

Frank Luntz on Why American Jewish Students Won't Defend Israel

 

PR guru Frank Luntz gave a lengthy interview last week to the Jerusalem Post's David Horovitz. Much of it was what one might expect from a PR guru. But one incident he described was shocking: a session with 35 MIT and Harvard students, 20 non-Jews and 15 Jews:

"Within 10 minutes, the non-Jews started with 'the war crimes of Israel,' with 'the Jewish lobby,' with 'the Jews have a lot more power and influence' – stuff that's borderline anti-Jewish.

And guess what? Did the Jewish kids at the best schools in America, did they stand up for themselves? Did they challenge the assertions? They didn't say sh*t. And in that group was the leader of the Israeli caucus at Harvard. It took him 49 minutes of this before he responded to anything."

After three hours, Luntz dismissed the non-Jews and confronted the Jews, furious that "you all didn't say sh*t."

"And it all dawned on them: If they won't say it to their classmates, whom they know, who will they stand up for Israel to? Two of the women in the group started to cry. … The guys are like, "Oh my God, I didn't speak up, I can't believe I let this happen." And they're all looking at each other with horrible embarrassment and guilt like you wouldn't believe."

But Luntz didn't stop with illustrating this gaping hole in what American Jews are evidently teaching their children; he also explained it:

"The problem that I see is that so many parents in the Jewish community taught their kids not to judge. I'm going to say something that's a little bit ideological, but I find that kids on the right are far more likely to stand up for Israel than kids on the left. Because kids on the right believe that there is an absolute right and wrong; this is how they've been raised.

Kids on the left have been taught not to judge. Therefore those on the left will not judge between Israel and the Palestinians; those on the right will."

This is a travesty — because this particular right/left difference shouldn't exist. First, it's a travesty of everything the left once stood for — which was upholding a particular set of values, not refusing to judge between those values and others. Willingness to defend your own values shouldn't be a trait limited to the right.

But it's also a travesty because it shouldn't be hard for any Jewish leftist to explain why Israel, for all its flaws, is still a far better example of the left's one-time values, such as freedom, democracy, tolerance, and human rights, than any of its enemies. As Israel's first Bedouin diplomat, Ishmael Khaldi, said in explaining why he chose to represent a country that allegedly oppresses his fellow Muslim Arabs, "We're a multicultural, multilingual, multireligious country and I'm happy and proud to be part of it."

Israel's PR failings are innumerable. But if American Jews can't get this particular message across to their children, the fault isn't Israel's; it's their own. And only American Jews themselves can fix it.

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" -- Hillel

Gazan suffering

Gazan suffering

The popular meme amongst the unholy cabal that is Islam and the Left is that Israel is a murderous genocidal regime that is currently using the blockade to impose unimaginable suffering on the Gazans.  Fortunately, modern communications allow us to see the full extent of that "suffering" (h/t Sadie):

Click here to view the embedded video.

By the way, Gaza is governed by Hamas, and I thought I'd share with you some gems from the Hamas charter:

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).

"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. "

"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

"After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."

"Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.' (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim)."

Delegitimizing the Delegitimizers

From Commentary's "Contentions" blog:

Delegitimizing the Delegitimizers

by Jennifer Rubin on 6/24/10

In the Knesset, Bibi went after international efforts to delegitimize Israel:

"They want to strip us of the natural right to defend ourselves. When we defend ourselves against rocket attack, we are accused of war crimes. We cannot board sea vessels when our soldiers are being attacked and fired upon, because that is a war crime."

"They are essentially saying that the Jewish nation does not have the right to defend itself against the most brutal attacks and it doesn't have the right to prevent additional weapons from entering territories from which it is attacked," he said.

Netanyahu stressed that Israel has taken steps to push forward a resolution with the Palestinians though they have not reciprocated the gesture.

"The Palestinian side promoted the Goldstone report, organized boycotts, and tried to prevent our entrance into the OECD. The Palestinian Authority has no intentions of engaging in direct talks with us," Netanyahu exclaimed.

Israel's enemies have been at this for some time. But the efforts to use international organizations to delegitimize and constrain Israel have accelerated under Obama for at least three reasons.

First, he's raised the profile of international organizations, conferred on them new prestige, elevated gangs of thugs like the UN Human Rights Council, and made clear that international consensus is near and dear to him, a priority above many other foreign policy goals. This has emboldened Israel's foes, who now enjoy more respect and more visibility. Because Obama has put such a high price on consensus in these bodies and on internationalizing decisions, he is handing a veto to the more aggressively anti-Israel members.

Second, the U.S. has done nothing to discourage or rebut the delegitimizing. We've sat mutely when the UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel. We haven't denounced or even chastised the Israel-bashers. When Jeane Kirkpatrick or John Bolton held their posts, you would at least see the Israel-haters' arguments demolished and their representatives put in their place. No such defense is offered these days by Susan Rice.

And finally, Obama  outside the confines of these bodies, has signaled that it's fine to slap Israel around. When the American government condemns Israel, others are sure to follow. He's announced his intention to put daylight between the U.S. and the Jewish state, which tells the Israel-haters they have a green light to take their own swings.

So if the goal were to delegitimize the delegitimizers, then we should do the opposite of what the Obama team has been doing. We should try to reduce the importance and prestige of these bodies while elevating that of democratic alliances. We should forcefully refute the arguments and resolutions and wield our veto. We should not participate in, fund, nor countenance assaults on Israel's legitimacy and right to defend and manage its own affairs. And finally, we should in word and deed stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel, making clear that those who take on Israel will pay a price — financial, diplomatic, or otherwise. None of this will end the attempts at delegitimizing, but it may give those on the fence second thoughts about joining in the efforts and discourage those who now believe they can act with impunity. Right now the incentives are all going in the wrong direction.

A link to spread around as much as possible

A link to spread around as much as possible, please *UPDATED*

via Bookworm Room

This is the public outreach YouTube site for the Israel Defense Forces.  Bookmark it, send it to your friends, check it often.

Here is the latest IDF real time video from the ship boarding, showing the "peace" activists in full fury:

The West is being played — although perhaps that's the wrong thing to say.  The West is joyously joining in the game.

Seraphic Secret understands what's really going on, especially at the UN.

UPDATED:  The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has set up a website that explains Israel's basic security needs.  The outlines won't surprise you all, but the details, of course, are illuminating.  Everything would be a surprise, though, to the West's credulous, useful idiots.  (h/t Bruce Kesler.)

A good friend of mine has suggested that Israel, before releasing the useful idiots, take them on a tour of Israel, showing both her freedoms and the horrors inflicted on people through rockets and bombs.

Double Standards at Journalism School

This reported by Jesse Kline at the Western Standard.

After going home for Christmas to visit with friends and family, I found myself confronting my second semester of journalism school. This semester, we were expected to participate in a blogging assignment. Two posts a week on a specific topic. I was excited that I finally had a chance to stop pretending to be objective and start writing what was really on my mind.
....
My first post was on the war in Gaza and the problems I had with students and pundits who claimed that Israel was using a disproportionate amount of force. "If Israel sent in missiles without aiming, would that be proportional? If Israel deliberately fired upon civilian, rather than military targets, would that be proportional? Because that is exactly how Hamas has been terrorizing the innocent people living in Southern Israel.… Of course, I would not expect information such as how Israeli hospitals are treating injured Palestinians, while Palestinian hospitals are allowing Hamas agents to shoot injured prisoners in their hospital beds, to be disseminated in a lefty institution like a Canadian university," I wrote.

Before I was able to publish the piece, I was pulled into my professor's office and told that my writing was unacceptable; that I was unqualified to write on the war in Gaza because I am not a international relations expert and I've never served with the Israeli army. He also said that the piece was too opinionated and that I would have to provide proof of everything I said, including my assertion that Hamas is a terrorist organization, even though it is listed as such by both the American and Canadian governments.

I initially gave my professor the benefit of the doubt and switched my topic. After receiving feedback on my next post, I asked for examples of best practises and was sent to a blog post written by one of my classmates. She also wrote about the war in Gaza, but she was on the opposite side of the issue, claiming that Israel was using disproportionate force and that the Canadian government was wrong not to condemn it. It quickly became apparent to me that my previous post had been censored, not for any of the reasons I was given, but because my political opinions conflicted with those of my professor.

And what were the other student's qualifications to write on Gaza?

A Visit Inside Turkey's Islamist IHH

A lengthy piece from The Weekly Standard: A Visit Inside Turkey's Islamist IHH

Friends of Israel petition

Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has put forth a petition in support of Israel.

The Friends of Israel have joined together in a new international initiative on the basis of the following convictions:

1. Israel is a Western country...
2. Israel´s right to exist should not be questioned. ...
3. Israel, as a sovereign country, has the right to self-defense. ...
4. Israel is on our side. ...
5. We believe in peace, but peace in the Middle East is not just about Israel and the Palestinians....
6. We share the same threats and challenges....
7. Believing that the continuous deligitimation of Israel has a great deal of responsibility in raising an aggressive and dangerous anti-semitism, in a spirit of solidarity with the State of Israel, and in recognition that we, the Western nations, must stand together lest we fall together, we therefore launch the Friends of Israel Initiative to do the following:
   1. To combat the deligitimization of the State of Israel at home, abroad and inside the institutions of the international community.
   2. To publicly show our solidarity with Israel’s democratic institutions – the legitimate expression of the Jewish people’s millennial aspiration to live in peace and freedom in its national homeland.
   3. To support Israel’s inalienable right to secure borders unmolested by terrorists or tyrannical regimes so that its citizens can continue living with the same guarantees that our own societies enjoy.
   4. To consistently and firmly oppose the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran.
   5. To work to ensure that Israel is fully accepted as a normal Western country, an essential and indivisible part of the Western world to which we belong.
   6. To reaffirm the value of the religious, moral, and cultural Judeo-Christian heritage as the main source of the liberal and democratic Western societies.

Israel up for grabs?

According to Mark Steyn, maybe it is.

In 1936, during the Cable Street riots, the British Union of Fascists jeered at London Jews, "Go back to Palestine!", "Palestine" being in those days the designation for the Jewish homeland. Last week, Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, jeered at today's Jews, "Get the hell out of Palestine," "Palestine" being now the designation for the land illegally occupied by the Jewish apartheid state. "Go home," advised Miss Thomas, "to Poland and Germany." Wherever a Jew is, whatever a Jew is, he should be something else somewhere else. And then he can be hated for that, too.

North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community.

Odd. But why?

Because Israel is supposed to be up for grabs in a way that the Congo, Sudan or even North Korea aren't. Only the Jewish state attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence, and insisting that, after 62 years of independence, that issue is still not resolved. Let's take a nation that came into existence at precisely the same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of postwar British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift, and in Canada a "human rights" complaint or three.

The "Palestinian question" is a land dispute, but not in the sense of a boundary-line argument between two Ontario farmers. Rather, it represents the coming together of two psychoses. Islam is a one-way street. Once you're in the Dar al-Islam, that's it; there's no checkout desk. They take land, they hold it, forever.

....

That's the reason the "Palestinian question" is never settled. Because, as long as it's unresolved, then Israel's legitimacy is unsettled, too.

Still, the impatience of the new globalized Judenhass is now palpable. I used to think that, when Iran got the bomb, it wouldn't use it. I wouldn't take that bet now. The new anti-Semitism is a Euro-Islamic fusion so universal, so irrational and so fevered that it's foolish to assume any limits.

Israel hasn’t changed; the world has *UPDATED*

From Bookworm Room Israel hasn’t changed; the world has

Flotilla: Before the Commandos Landed

Scott Johnson at PowerLine calls attention to film footage of a pep talk that occurred before the Israeli commandos reached the Mavi Marmara:

 Ynetnews reports reports that Israel's Foreign Ministry has released an illuminating new video filmed on board the Mavi Marmara before the IDF's interception of the ship. The footage was found among the possessions of one of the flotilla's passengers and shows Bulent Yildirim, leader of the IHH group that organized the flotilla to the Gaza Strip, speaking to the passengers on board.

Islam seems to have something to do with the mission to break Israel's blockade of Gaza. "We don't want to be recorded in Allah's book as cowards," Yildirim said. "Now they are saying that they will launch a fleet against us. That they will send the commandos here. And we say, 'If you send the commandos, we will throw you down from here and you will be humiliated in front of the whole world'," he told the assembled passengers, who responded by chanting "Allahu akbar."

Ynetnews adds that another speaker told those present in Arabic: "Don't be like the ones who turned back and don't turn back." An Egyptian parliament member then shouted to the crowd: "Millions of martyrs marching to Gaza," and the crowd echoed his words. Hamas supporter Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement's northern branch, can be seen sitting among the crowd.

The Mavi Marmara was no ship of fools. Those on board knew exactly what they were doing. The fools are on dry land, reaching right to the top of the Obama administration.