A response to Israel’s haters

By Joseph A. Klein

My article appearing in Canada Free Press last Friday entitled “Hamas apologist Norman Finkelstein attacks Israel again” (along with its publication by FrontPage Magazine under the title “Finkelstein’s Slander Against Israel”) has apparently brought the haters of the Jewish state of Israel out from under their rocks. And I mean that literally, since the terrorist organization Hamas, which they so zealously defend, still has its founding Charter in force which quotes the prophet Mohammed:

“The Day of Judgment 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.”

Those who take what the Hamas Charter says seriously about the goal of obliterating the Jewish state are told not to worry. Hamas has changed and wants peace, its supporters argue. It is the villainous Jewish state that refuses to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the conflict, we are told.

Yet, would any sane person trust an organization whose leaders have made statements in the last few years such as the following?

Sheik Yunus al-Astal, a Hamas legislator and imam, in a column in the weekly newspaper Al Risalah in 2008 discussed a Koranic verse suggesting that “suffering by fire is the Jews’ destiny in this world and the next.” Astal concluded “Therefore we are sure that the Holocaust is still to come upon the Jews.”

“We will not rest until we destroy the Zionist entity” stated Hamas leader Fathi Hammad in Gaza on Friday January 2nd 2009.

In a sermon aired on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa television, cleric Yunis Al Astal stated, “Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam.” He went on to say that Rome would become, “an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread though Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, even Eastern Europe.”

Hamas has repeatedly refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist, refused to disown its Charter and refused to abide by the previous commitments of the Palestinian Authority.

With that as background, let’s examine a few of the arguments that the Israel haters have thrown my way, when they weren’t engaging in their customary ad hominem attacks.

The Jewish Zionists stole the Palestinians’ land and are not entitled to have a state of their own on any portion of “Palestine.”

Hamas’ apologists love to cite international law when it suits their purposes in holding Israel to account, but then reject the international legal framework under which the Palestinians could have had their own state more than 60 years ago. They have nothing to say that would justify why the surrounding Arab states torpedoed the original UN-sponsored two-state solution in 1947-8.

All they do is whine that the land of “Palestine” was stolen from the “Palestinian” Muslim inhabitants. Aside from the long historical connection of the Jewish people to the land, including Jerusalem, that pre-dated Islam by well more than a thousand years, the region the British called the Palestine Mandate (the area that included Jordan, Israel and the “West Bank”) and out of which the British offered the two state solution adopted by the United Nations, emerged out of the pre-World War I Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire had been ruled for 400 years by the Turks who lost it when they, fighting on the German side, were defeated in World War I.

Many Jews who were living in this area had bought their homes from the absentee Turk landlords. Arab masses immigrated from outside this area along with the Jews. Most of those who were called “Palestinian Arabs” were members of families who migrated into the same region that Jews were migrating into beginning in the late 19th century. And there had been a continuous Jewish presence in the region for many centuries.

To say that European Jews had less of a right to emigrate to the ancient Jewish homeland starting in the late 19th century (and develop the land from a desolate swamp) than did Arabs who emigrated during the same period from other regions outside of the Palestine Mandate is racist, not Zionism. In any case, the majority of Jews living in Israel today are non-European – some from Africa and many expelled from their homes in surrounding Arab countries.

Jordan was created on about 75% percent of the Palestine Mandate. The majority of its population was, and still is, Palestinian. Thus, even before the two-state solution was offered with respect to the 25% remainder of the Palestine Mandate, a state made up of a majority Palestinian population was already in existence. The fact that the minority rulers of a different Arab tribe run things in Jordan is a problem for the Palestinian majority that pre-dated the creation of the state of Israel.

The 1947 UN Resolution 181 partition plan was to divide the remaining 25% of Palestine into a Jewish state and a second Arab Palestinian state (Trans-Jordan being the first) based upon population demographics. The partition was offered even though the Arab inhabitants’ leaders had sided with the Nazis in World War II.

The Jewish inhabitants accepted the partition. The Arab inhabitants rejected the partition and the rest, as they say, is history. The Palestinians could have had their own independent state more than 60 years ago but for the rejectionism of their Arab neighbors who violated international law in trying to drive “the Jews into the sea” and the refusal of the Palestinian inhabitants themselves to negotiate a two-state solution in good faith.

Israel has illegally occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem since 1967 and “oppressed” the Palestinian people in violation of international law.

Isn’t it strange how the friends of Hamas blithely skip over 20 years of history? Why weren’t the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, while those territories were in Arab hands, provided the land to create their own independent state? Where was the outcry for justice under international law back then?

After Israel took over the territories following the June 1967 war, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242 which (i) called on Israel to withdraw its armed forces “from territories occupied in the recent conflict”; and (ii) called for “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

The resolution deliberately omitted the word “all” before “territories” in (i) above to allow the parties to negotiate a peaceful solution that would best achieve the goals set forth in (ii) above.

Israel has since returned the Sinai to Egypt as part of a peace treaty, normalized relations with Jordan, withdrawn unilaterally from Gaza and offered to give back 90% of the West Bank and negotiate the fate of Jerusalem – all of which was rebuffed by Arafat and his successors.

There were no security fences or elaborate checkpoints in the years immediately following 1967. What has Israel received in return?

Every year Israeli civilians have been murdered by Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, Hezbollah or some other terrorist group. Islamic terrorists use suicide bombers and increasingly sophisticated rockets, launched from lands relinquished by Israel to the Palestinians, to kill innocent Israeli civilians. Their killing machines of choice tomorrow will be whatever weapons of mass destruction they can get their hands on, including from their buddies in Iran whose president has vowed to wipe Israel off the map.

Israel is falsely accused of ‘collective punishment’ when it strikes back to defend its citizens. Yet it is the Palestinian and other Islamic terrorists who continually violate the Israelis’ human rights under the Geneva Conventions, which state that “Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” The innocent Israeli women and children, who have been slaughtered while going about their daily lives in their homes, their schools, on buses, at shopping malls, and places of worship, have committed no wrong against the Palestinian people. They are the victims of the Islamic terrorists’ measures of intimidation and terrorism, which violate their most basic of human rights - life itself. The Islamic terrorists are pursuing nothing less than the collective annihilation of the Israeli people. Just look at the Hamas Charter and the statements of their own leaders.

When the Israeli government responded with stern but non-violent, defensive measures to protect its most vulnerable citizens from murder – for example, with border closures, security checks, economic sanctions and a separation wall which came years after the 1967 war – the terrorists’ apologists complain that it is Israel which is violating the Palestinians’ human rights under international law. Although Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2005, it is Israel’s citizens who continued to suffer intimidation and terrorism launched from Gaza in violation of their international human rights. Israel ceded the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in a good faith effort to advance peace. Gaza turned instead into hostile territory under Hamas’s control. More than 4200 rockets were launched from Gaza into Israeli residential areas after Gaza was no longer “occupied territory.”

Israel broke the cease-fire with Hamas and launched Operation Cast Lead that turned into a “massacre” of innocent Palestinian civilians. Israel’s “war crimes” are incontrovertibly documented in the Goldstone Report.

Hamas Does Not Honor Truces 


Hamas, not Israel, unilaterally decided against extending the six month ceasefire that had expired in mid-December 2008.

One fundamental problem overlooked by the Goldstone Report and other so-called “human rights” reports is that Hamas does not abide by truces or cease-fires for very long, even when it decides to enter into one. To Hamas, truces are just stalling tactics to use as lulls during which the terrorists build up their military capability. Don’t take my word for it. When asked if he could envision a 50-year hudna (cease-fire) with Israel, Hamas leader Nizar Rayyan (who was since killed in an Israeli bombing attack) responded, “The only reason to have a hudna is to prepare yourself for the final battle. We don’t need 50 years to prepare ourselves for the final battle with Israel. Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God.”

Gaza’s fellow Arab neighbors in Egypt have witnessed first hand Hamas’s destructive ways. In the wake of the militants’ blasting of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt, more Egyptians finally realized themselves where the source of the Palestinians’ problems and of the real threat to peace lies.

For example, Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies director Dr. ‘Abd Al-Mun’im Sa’id criticized Hamas’s failed policies in a column he wrote for Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party weekly Al-Watani Al-Yawm:

“Hamas’s election by the majority of the Palestinian people has invested it with the formidable responsibility of leading the Palestinian people, protecting its interests, developing its abilities, and managing its relations with the world and with Israel. Its military coup against the Palestinian Authority and its [currently] exclusive control of the Gaza Strip have forced it to assume complete responsibility over the Gazans, in financial, social, and security matters.

However, Hamas has failed to fulfill this responsibility, both after it was elected and following its [Gaza] coup. In fact, it has done nothing but publicly condemn Israel and the PA, on television and in daily communiqués to the world, and to the Islamic Arab countries…

The rockets, [which are being used] as a means of opposing the peace process and applying pressure [on it], are not for pressuring Israel, but for gaining popularity among the Palestinians…”

The editor of the Egyptian government daily Al-Gumhouriyya and Egyptian MP Muhammad ‘Ali Ibrahim was even blunter in his column:

“The Hamas fighters are not satisfied with Abu Mazen’s [i.e. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s] way of reaching a permanent and definitive solution with the Hebrew state that will ensure the establishment and continuity of the Palestinian state. This is because the only aim of [Hamas Political Bureau head] Khaled Mash’al and his men is to keep this issue hot, so that regional [forces] such as Iran and Syria can continue playing the card of the Palestinian problem to promote their private interests – that is, Iran’s nuclear dossier, the liberation of the Golan Heights, etc…

The Egyptians know their Gazan neighbors very well. They blame Hamas for sabotaging any prospects for peace with Israel and for the Gazan residents’ current suffering. Egypt wants to be left alone from Hamas’s aggression and interference with its sovereignty. So does Israel. And don’t tell me that Egypt is in cahoots with Israel. They have what is called a cold peace. They are barely on speaking terms.

Hamas uses its own civilians as human shields

This is not some wild charge of Israeli propagandists. It is based on the boasts of Hamas officials themselves. 

Following are excerpts from a speech delivered by Hamas MP Fathi Hammad, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on February 29, 2008: 


Fathi Hammad: [The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: “We desire death like you desire life.” (Emphasis added)

The Goldstone Report

The Goldstone fact-finding panel, commissioned by the anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council, concluded that Israel “may” be guilty of war crimes based on the assumption that the country’s military forces and leaders deliberately targeted civilians. Israel’s enemies have seized on this conclusion to brand Israel’s military operation a “massacre,” to use Norman Finkelstein’s term. It is worth noting that not once in its 575 page report did the Goldstone panel actually use the term “massacre” to describe Israel’s actions during the Gaza conflict.

One of the most serious charges leveled against Israel’s operation during Project Cast Lead was its use of white phosphorous. Yet while the Goldstone Report concluded that Israel was reckless in its use in built-up areas it also noted that “white phosphorous is not at this stage proscribed under international law.” The report cited one specific example of a family in which children were alleged to have died as a result of injuries from white phosphorous. This is tragic to be sure, but it hardly demonstrates a widespread pattern of deliberate and indiscriminate burning to death of Palestinian children by Israel’s military that Norman Finkelstein and his followers try to portray.

It is curious why Israel’s enemies felt they had to exaggerate the Goldstone Report’s findings since the Goldstone panel was biased against Israel in the first place. It consisted of four members, three of whom considered Israel guilty before their investigation began. Judge Goldstone was outnumbered 3-1, even giving him all the credit in the world for his own objective judicial temperament.

Here are just a few examples of the Goldstone Report’s distortions of the facts as compiled and written up by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America: 



REPORT:
There is no evidence of Palestinian fighters using civilian clothes. 


FACT:
Journalists and eyewitnesses repeatedly noted the use of civilian clothes by Hamas fighters. 



REPORT:
There is no evidence of armed groups directing civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forcing them to remain in the vicinity of attacks. 


FACT:
Palestinian witnesses and video evidence reveal that fighters did direct civilians to areas where attacks were being launched.

REPORT:
There is no evidence that hospitals or ambulances were used for military activities.

FACT:
Eyewitnesses describe Palestinian firing from hospitals and using ambulances. Why, for example, did the Goldstone fact-finding mission choose not to visit the al-Shifa Hospital or investigate allegations that Hamas leaders and fighters used this hospital as a base, especially given the testimony by a captured Islamic Jihad fighter to this effect?

REPORT:
The mission could not determine whether mosques were used for military purposes.

FACT:
There is video evidence of weaponry stored in a mosque, and of secondary explosions of mosques consistent with the storage of explosives. While the Report refers to allegations of mosques being used for military purposes and notes that it cannot rule out the inappropriate use of other mosques by Palestinians, the Mission nevertheless chose not to fuhrther investigate these possible war crimes by Palestinians and dismissed or ignored the readily available pictorial and testimonial evidence indicating that this was indeed the case.

CONCLUSION

I could go on and on, but one thing is clear. There can be no real peace so long as the Palestinian terrorists and their state sponsors such as Iran want more innocent Jews to die for death’s sake and will settle for nothing short of Israel’s extermination. As long as they allow Hamas and other extremists to rule them, the Palestinians will remain their own worst enemies.



Canada Press

Why Don't the Israel Haters Boycott Syria?

By Arsen Ostrovsky

This week begins an annual part of the global campaign to delegitimize and vilify the Jewish state, as anti-Israel activists and student groups on campuses around the world, including United States and Canada, mark the eighth annual Israel Apartheid Week [IAW].

According to organizers of the IAW, the purpose of the movement is to "to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns."

First, let's make one thing crystal clear -- attempts to brand Israel as an "apartheid" state or compare it to white South Africa are at best uninformed; and at worst, maliciously dishonest and anti-Semitic. It also does a great injustice to the real victims, who had to endure institutionalized segregation and apartheid in South Africa.

The irony is that, despite problems in Israel (as in any democracy), Arab citizens still enjoy more rights, freedoms, and liberties than do their neighbors in any number of Middle East countries currently fighting and dying for these very same privileges.

As the Muslim Arab Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh says: "Israel is not an apartheid state...[it] is a free and open democratic country. The law of Israel does not distinguish between a Jew and an Arab... I would rather live as a second class citizen in Israel, even though I'm not, than a first class citizen in any Arab country."

Notably, those using the IAW to demonize Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, and which respects the rights of women, minorities, homosexuals, and people of other faiths, are holding no such events for Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has already butchered some 7,500 pro-democracy protestors.

Nor are they holding similar events against Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is a crime, in Egypt, where the Copts continue to be persecuted both pre- and post-Mubarak, or Iran, where women and the Baha'i are repeatedly tortured and executed.

Of course, other great bastions of human rights and democracy, like Russia and China, which recently vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for the ousting of al-Assad, get a free pass too.

So why is Israel the only country singled out for special opprobrium?

During the IAW, you will hear all sorts of lofty humanitarian labels like "justice," "equal rights," and "peace." But don't be fooled. It is all a charade. They have no such interest. The sole purpose of the BDS movement is the vilification, delegitimization, and destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.
Just listen to what their leaders say.

Omar Barghouti, one the founders of the BDS Movement (and ironically, also a PhD student of ethics at Tel Aviv University), has said that the Palestinian refugees "Right of Return" is the "litmus test of morality for anyone suggesting a just and enduring solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."

To put it a little more bluntly, he added: "I clearly do not buy into the two-state solution...[I]f the refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution, you would have a Palestine next to Palestine, rather than a Palestine next to Israel."

Other BDS leaders are equally forthright.

Ali Abunimah is the executive director of the anti-Zionist website, Electronic Intifada, and one of the leading proponents of the one-state solution as a supposedly "just" and "non-violent" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He sees the BDS as key to achieving this. But only last month, he tweeted: "Isn't it the time for a popular Palestinian revolution in the form of a third intifada?" Is that because the first and second intifadas were so "non-violent" also?

And then only two week ago, in what came as a major blow to the legions of Israel haters, anti-Zionist poster-boy Norman Finkelstein said the BDS Movement's call for the "Right of Return" was just "a cover for its desire to see the destruction of Israel," calling the movement "disingenuous" and a "cult."

Granted, Finkelstein made these comments not out of a new found Zionism or desire to advance peace in the Middle East, but rather he believes there are other "more efficient" means for anti-Israel activists to achieve the goals.

But undoubtedly the most illuminating of all the statements by BDS leaders came from Ahmed Koor (another proponent of the Palestinian "Right of Return'", who wrote in April 2010: "Ending the occupation doesn't mean anything if it doesn't mean upending the Jewish state itself...BDS is not another step on the way to the final showdown; BDS is The Final Showdown."

The similarity between Koor's "Final Showdown" and Hitler's "Final Solution" is as unmistakable as it is chillingly revealing about the BDS Movement's true motives.

Whereas Hitler's "Final Solution" sought to bring about the end of the Jewish people, the BDS Movement's "Final Showdown" seeks to bring about the end of Israel as the Jewish state, by endorsing a one-state solution and flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians.

The BDS movement is nothing short of racist, insidious, and anti-Semitic. Its goal is not to advance Palestinian rights, but to deny and strip Israel of its rights, with the ultimate objective being the destruction of the Jewish state.

The most unfortunate thing is that supporters of IAW and BDS do nothing to advance the cause of peace or well-being of Palestinians or Israeli Arabs. But then again, that has never been their goal in the first place. They only breed further hate and extremism at a time when peace and cooperation is needed most.



Huffington Post

Lebanon War Distortions

Study shows NGOs issued baseless, fabricated accusations against Israel.

BY: Abraham Bell, Gerald M. Steinberg

This summer marks the five-year anniversary of the Lebanon war between Israel and the Lebanese-Iranian terrorist organization Hezbollah. The Second Lebanon War traumatized Israel politically as well as militarily. Militarily, Israel failed to dislodge the terrorist organization from its southern Lebanese foothold; politically, Israeli leaders found themselves overwhelmed by a flood of false accusations of “war crimes,” “indiscriminate and disproportionate” force, and “violations of international law.”

International non-governmental organizations played a critical role in the political warfare against Israel. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – ostensibly neutral watchdogs – led the campaign. In 35 days, they issued over 40 press releases, statements and pseudo fact-finding reports, comprising hundreds of pages, largely ignoring the war crimes committed by the terrorist organization and instead focusing overwhelmingly and negatively on alleged Israeli crimes.

The HRW and Amnesty allegations were immediately accepted, at face value, by the world’s media. Politicians and diplomats then echoed the war crimes accusations, without any fact-checking.

We are now completing a multi-year study of all the HRW and Amnesty allegations regarding the 2006 Lebanon war, and the results so far are shocking. In our systematic and detailed research, supported by the Israel Science Foundation, we found major contradictions as well as numerous unsupported charges, double standards and false or invented “evidence.”

In some reports, such as on incidents in the Shiite towns of Srifa and Qana - Hezbollah strongholds from which numerous rocket attacks were launched - the NGOs published wildly inconsistent civilian casualty claims within a few days of each other. Errors were overwhelmingly in one direction; almost without fail, errors consisted of exaggerated Lebanese casualties or unfounded accusations against Israel.

In many incidents, HRW and Amnesty reports initially relied both on Lebanese witnesses and the personal observations of its own “researchers” to deny any Hezbollah military presence in the area of an Israeli strike, while later publications acknowledged that Hezbollah had been present, meaning the witnesses had lied and the NGO researchers were incompetent. Regarding Srifa, even after reducing the number of reported Lebanese casualties from “at least 42” to 26 to 19 before finally settling on 22, HRW found itself forced by critics and the evidence to eventually acknowledge that most of the “civilian” casualties it had “documented” were, in fact, Hezbollah combatants.

Hold NGOs accountable

Indeed, in all of the incidents, the lack of reliable sources of information for the HRW and Amnesty accusations against Israel stands out. In each case, it is clear that when HRW and Amnesty issued their initial condemnations of Israel, usually within a few hours of the incident, the organizations had little or no information about the central issues of military necessity and the nature of casualties. And later reports with altered condemnations were based more on conjecture than substantive research.

The most blatant example was the incident in Qana, where Israel responded to heavy Hezbollah rocket attacks with an air raid. One of the buildings was hit and collapsed, causing a number of deaths and injuries. Within hours, HRW blasted a press release in which Executive Director Ken Roth claimed that the "Israeli military is treating southern Lebanon as a free-fire zone, relating to the strike on Qana, killing at least 54 civilians, more than half of them children." HRW then launched a campaign charging Israel with war crimes, with nine separate “reports” and op-eds, as well as press conferences.

HRW’s campaign was echoed in media headlines, creating intense international pressure, and leading Prime Minister Olmert to declare a “48-hour suspension of aerial activity pending an investigation...” A unilateral halt in military action due to unverified NGO allegations was unprecedented, allowed Hezbollah forces to regroup, prolonging the war, and probably costing many lives.

Yet, as our research reveals, HRW had no credible evidence for its claims. Roth, HRW researcher Lucy Mair (who had written propaganda for Electronic Intifada before joining HRW) and others far from the battleground, had inflated civilian casualty claims and erased the Hezbollah attacks that constituted the real war crimes as well as legal justification for Israeli actions. To create the façade of “fact finding”, the initial HRW statement referred to “researchers” in Lebanon, but they provided no names or means to verify HRW’s claims. Later reports either provided no sources or attributed allegations to “witnesses” who could well have been Hezbollah allies or operatives. The allegations that Israel had criminally and deliberately bombed Lebanese civilians were unsourced and false.

As the contradictions emerged, HRW’s Mair admitted that the Lebanese Red Cross had reported 28 dead, including Hezbollah “martyrs,” but HRW chose to continue its false accusations against Israel.

The catch-22 in which the NGOs placed Israel is illustrated by their “proof” that Israel knew that civilians were in the building, near the Hezbollah targets. On August 3, 2006, Amnesty International “proved” that an Israeli investigation showing that the Israeli military had not known of the civilians was a “whitewash” because “survivors of the attack … stated that they had been in the building for some two weeks and that their presence must have been known to Israeli forces.” On the same day, August 3, 2006, Human Rights Watch “proved” that the Israeli claim that the “civilians were not seen because they had been hiding in the building for some days” could not be believed because a “survivor” of the attack stated that the civilians only entered the building “around 6 pm on July 29,” i.e., only seven hours before the bombing.

Two opposite and contradictory accounts of the facts, but the same result: the NGOs pronounced that the facts prove Israeli guilt.

Sadly, observers - even Israeli officials - have tended to give the NGOs a free pass for their fabrications. And the model of making up the facts to “prove” an Israel guilt presumed from the start has been repeated in subsequent conflicts, most prominently by the Goldstone Mission’s now discredited 2009 report on the Gaza conflict.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch claim to be promoting universal values by prosecuting their political war against the State of Israel. But justice will only truly be served when the NGOs are held accountable for their distortions.

Abraham Bell is professor of law at Bar Ilan University. Gerald Steinberg is professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University



Ynet News

I Hate Israel

Great series of short videos about Israel, Palestine and the Middle East Conflict. Debunking the lies of the so called 'Palestinian' and the entire Muslim world. To the Jew haters, you might get the facts straight and stop making fool of yourself. Enjoy watching!

1) I Hate Israel - Zionism

A Jewish nation is unique in being Jewish. A review of the dozens of christian and Muslim countries in the world and the history of Zionism



2) I Hate Israel - Murderer

A review of capital punishment around the Middle East



3) I Hate Israel - Racism

Double standards for Israel



4) I Hate Israel - Gaza Blockade

The Gaza blockade compared to the blockade of Cuba



5) I Hate Israel - The UN Told Me So

The UN track record on reviewing world abuses really only focuses on Israel.



6) I Hate Israel - Right of Return

A description of the Law of Return in global context



7) I Hate Israel - Security Wall

The security border has been a big step forward for those parties seeking a two-state solution



8) I Hate Israel - Persecuting Christians

A review of the current state of Christian persecution in the Middle East



9) I Hate Israel - Displacing People

A comparison of the population of arabs and jews in the middle east with global trends

The Thomas Friedman Myth

Columnist's application of globalization theory to Arab-Israeli conflict is delusional.

by Giulio Meotti

Thomas Friedman is one of journalism's greatest celebrities, the single most famous US interpreter of the Middle East and the liberal columnist who has the most influence on the way Americans understand Israel. His 1989 book “From Beirut to Jerusalem” has been a best-seller, as was “The world is flat.”

Friedman also plays a major role in shaping Obama’s rhetoric about Israel’s return to the pre-1967 armistice line, which the late Abba Eban dubbed the “Auschwitz borders.”

For the first time now, the four digits (1967) have become formal American policy. It was also a Friedman victory. It was he, after all, who invented the so-called “Saudi plan for peace in the Middle East.” And it was Friedman who wrote that the White House is “disgusted” with Israeli interlocutors.

In Manhattan, Friedman is an elegant and wealthy Jewish intellectual. But what are the consequences of his ideas for Israel, the only UN member surrounded by neighbors willing to kill themselves to destroy the Jews, and the nation globally elected to be an emblem of evil?

Friedman has created a myth of personal disillusionment with Israel that is designed to lend credibility to his indictment against the Jewish State. His method is simple and delusional: Applying the globalization theory to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mutual respect, money, education, computers, Internet, hedonism and modernity are Friedman’s solutions to the nationalistic bloodbath. Economics trumps politics in his technocracy.

As a Jewish reporter in Beirut and Jerusalem, Friedman confessed, he was unable to remain objective because of the “tribal” nature of the conflict. He has described his personal biography as the story of “a Jew who was raised on . . . all the myths about Israel, who goes to Jerusalem in the 1980s and discovers that it isn’t the summer camp of his youth.”

The famous columnist has always been a militant of the Palestinian cause. By the time he graduated from Brandeis University, he was identifying with “Breira”, a pariah group within the American Jewish community. He belonged to the steering committee of a self-styled “Middle East Peace Group” that vigorously opposed the mounting storm of protest among American Jews over Yasser Arafat’s appearance before the United Nations in a time when the Palestinian leader proudly claimed Jewish lives.

In 1985, after the Shiite hijacking of a TWA airliner, Friedman attacked Israel for not releasing the 700 terrorists whose freedom the hijackers were demanding. Israel’s refusal, he claimed, “certainly contributed” to the hijacking.

Friedman has always defended Yasser Arafat and failed to draw attention to his evident connections to terrorism. Friedman then demonized Ariel Sharon, while praising Arab dictators such as Saudi Prince Abdullah. Friedman also “criticized” the Israeli settlers, an entire population group that loyally serves in the army, pays its taxes and defends the state, demonizing them in global columns.

According to the US columnist, Israeli settlers are a “cancer for the Jewish people” and those who “collaborate” in the building of settlements are “enemies of peace” and “enemies of America’s national interest,” no less. Friedman has compared Islamist fanatics who want to destroy Israel to the “lunatics of the Likud” and Arab dictators whose endorsement of suicide bombings threatens Islam to the “collaborators” whose support for a “colonial Israeli occupation” threatens coexistence.

Friedman has always been diligently undermining Israel’s claim to the moral high ground by placing victims of terrorism on the same plain as their barbaric perpetrators. “What Israeli settlers and Palestinian suicide bombers have in common is that they are each pushing for the maximum use of force against the other side,” he wrote after the killing of Kobi Mandell.

For Friedman, building a home on disputed territory is apparently the moral equivalent of stoning Jews to death. To equate the two, as Friedman always does, is to create moral mush. At age fourteen, Kobi was immobilized and stoned to death, his body hidden in a cave. The terrorists soaked their hands in the boy’s blood and smeared the walls of the cave with it.

Friedman also compared terrorist militias in Iraq, who butchered Americans and Iraqis alike, to the Jewish inhabitants of Judea and Samaria. One of Friedman’s columns in 2004 was particularly shocking: “...Mr. Sharon has the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under house arrest in his office in Ramallah, and he’s had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who’s ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates.”

Friedman’s language resembled that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His incredible words, coming at a time when anti-Semitism is skyrocketing globally, were repulsive. From Friedman’s mansion in the Maryland’s woods the Middle East maybe looks really flat. But that’s not an excuse for pushing what can be called Zionicide.

Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism



Ynet News

The Secret History of Neturei Karta

By Mordechai Levy

Recently a major scandal broke over a group of religious-looking Jews belonging to the Neturei Karta sect speaking at a "Holocaust is a Hoax" conference sponsored by the anti-Semitic President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. After it came out that top neo- Nazi leaders and the former KKK leader David Duke would be in attendance, many Jews, especially in the Orthodox community, were truly angered at Jewish attendees. Many Chassidic groups blasted the Neturei Karta in public.

In the past, we've seen them picket with various Islamic terrorist groups, chanting "Death to Israel" at rallies. Few, if any, however, knew that the full extent of Neturei Karta’s connections to neo-Nazis and Moslem terrorists.

Neturei Karta has an actual office in Monsey, N.Y. In recent month, they honored top Lieutenants of Louis Farrakhan, a long time Jew-hating Black racist who runs the violently anti-Semitic and anti-White "Nation of Islam".

Neturei Karta has shared podiums with Farrakhan in Washington, D.C. at his Million Families March four years ago. They also came out with banner claiming that "Farrakhan is a Friend of the Jews!"

On other occasions NK would lie on TV, denying that Farrakhan has ever made anti-Semitic remarks.

Many may ask, "when did NK start helping various Jew-hating groups and why?"

We will now list briefly the real history of NK, which most reporters simply don’t know. It’s is sordid and very scandaloud, but has to be told.

The first known contact with Arab terrorists was in 1974 when Yassir Arafat was at the UN with a gun on his hip threatening to destroy Israel. Arafat mentioned NK in his speech.

NK ran an ad in the NY Times welcoming Arafat to New York and praising him, and made it clear that NK hoped the PLO would succeed in their efforts to destroy the Jews in Israel.

Now, NK used code word for Jews is "Zionists." At the time, the new head of NK in Israel was Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, who later served as Palestinian Authority's Minister for Jewish Affair. At the time when NK would run actual ads a number of times each year, many wondered where the NK got the $50,000 per ad that the NK types simply did not have.

Many Jewish activists had come across rumors that NK was getting big money from Arab terrorist groups. In the meantime NK in the US had several main persons behind it. One was a mysterious Rabbi Beck, the other Mordechai Weberman, the third was "Rabbi" Yisroel David Weiss of Monsey, who later would be the spokesman of the group.

The main contributor to the group was G. Neuberger a businessman from NY. Neuberger assigned his secretary Hariet Karchmer to work full time for the group. Karchmer, Jewish but not Orthodox, would open the incoming mail that NK was sent from various Arab terror groups and neo-Nazis from across the US. At one point after reading all these anti-Jewish screeds put out by the assorted anti-Semitic groups she came to the opinion that both the Jews as a race were evil and that the Holocaust was a Hoax.

At the time, NK traveled to Libya to meet teror-sponsor Muammar Quadaffi and attend a conference against Israel and Zionism. It was Neuberger that led the "Jewish Delegation" to top Moslem terrorist money-man Quadaffi. At the time without a doubt NK took money secretly from Libya.

In the early 1980’s, NK follower Betzalel Chaim submitted an article in the Holocaust-denying magazine "Journal of Historical Review" and not only blasted the Zionists and the state of Israel, but even claiming just like Weiss would last week in Iran that the Holocaust numbers of Jews murdered was a "big Zionist invention." A year ago, members of NK went to a Holocaust Hoax meeting made by neo-Nazis in America saying the same thing. Mr Chaim owned a bookstore in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where many Chassidim live. Most Jews there had no idea that NK had made contact with hardcore neo-Nazis.

From that point on NK started corresponding and meeting with numerous neo-nazis secretly. They tried helping assorted neo-nazis in England. NK in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s appeared at more and more Islamic groups various Jew-Hating "Death to Israel" rallies.

Now an open attendance at a "Holocaust is a Hoax" conference in Iran run by the man who wants to destroy Israel. In fact a month ago NK showed up at the hotel where Ahmedinejad was staying at in New York they gave him a clay pot of flowers.

Further NK made a public statement that its alright for Iran to have nuclear weapons as it will only be used against Israel. In one interview for some radical Islamic pro-terror magazine they are asked by the interviewer if Islamic groups are allowed in NK’s opinon to use terror attacks against Jews in Israel. NK representative answered, "absolutely yes!"

At all meetings with both Arab terror groups, NK has asked that when the "legitimate" uprising against Jews be it Israel or America that NK will be spared! They believe that any Jew who does not work to physically destroy Israel has no reason to be " saved" but deserves to be killed by Arab terrorists. In fact one New York NK member, Joseph Friemann, thought he had "every right" to hate, torture, and kill his own mother.

JDO and the Vaad Harrabonim of Flatbush are organizing a loud-legal-lawful rally at the Headquarters of the Neturei Karta traitors in Monsey on Sunday January 7 at 1 PM at 102 Saddle River Road Monsey. To learn more, visit www.jdo.org and read about "Operation Screwball".

Mordechai Levy is the National Director of the Jewish Defense Organization (JDO).

Mark LeVine

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews:
By Steven Plaut

Over the past decade the University of California at Irvine has become a center of Israel hatred and Jew bashing. It hosts countless radical Islamist events, many openly supportive of terror and jihad. Its chapter of the Muslim Student Union may be the most openly jihadi and pro-terror in the country. Its anti-Israel and anti-Jewish events have included a conference on the “Holocaust,” the one its organizers claim Israel is perpetrating against Palestinians. UCI holds regular events in which anti-Semitic speakers call for Israel’s annihilation. Moslem students walk about campus with signs that read: “Death to Infidels. Death to Israel.” Faculty and students attend UCI rallies that openly support the Hamas. Anti-Semitism at UCI has been so blatant that it was the subject of an official investigation by the US Office for Civil Rights. The atmosphere at UCI is so rancid that few eyebrows were raised when an impersonator of a Holocaust Survivor brought in to bash Israel.

And right in the center of all this is UCI Professor Mark LeVine, who claims to be an expert in Middle East history. In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I myself taught at UCI for a while in the late 1990s. Back then UCI was a calm apolitical campus consisting of students, with a large percentage of Asian-Americans, mainly interested in advancing their careers. But in the years since, UCI has become a den of Islamist extremism, a development in which LeVine has been deeply implicated.

Mark LeVine was made full professor by UCI in record time, in an unprecedented rush after he finished his PhD at NYU in 1999 and then did a post-doc at Cornel. He was hired in large part on the basis of publications that would not be considered bona fide research at many institutions. Some of his writings about the Middle East should be shelved in the library’s fiction section. Others are just plain wacky, like his book and articles claiming that Heavy Metal rock and roll music is in the process of converting Moslem civilization into peace loving societies.1
LeVine’s “academic record” consists largely of churning out Bash-Israel books and articles, together with numerous Bash-America and Bash-Capitalism diatribes. Many of these have been mocked savagely by serious Middle East scholars. Martin Kramer dismisses LeVine as little more than a fringe figure.

While hardly the only Israel-hating extremist at UCI, LeVine has built an academic career on it in a way that others have not. There are few anti-Israel or pro-jihad events at UCI in which he is not somehow involved. LeVine regularly addresses the anti-Semitic Hate Rallies at UCI organized by the student supporters of Hezb’Allah and al-Qaeda, in which Jews are denounced as “Zio-nazis.” LeVine rationalizes and defends the UCI intifada, and blames violence and tensions at the UCI campus on the malevolent Zionist Lobby. The local Orange County Register cites his view that “The only thing that would satisfy the critics now would be if they expelled every Muslim student and painted stars of David on all the buildings.” ‘

For LeVine Israel is entirely to blame for ALL of the violence in the Middle East conflict. Israel also constitutes a “belligerent,” “autocratic,” and “violent” regime that should receive no support at all from the West. LeVine is a leading voice in the call for a so-called “One State Solution,” in which Israel will cease to exist altogether and will be enfolded within a larger Arab Islamic Palestinian state. LeVine has not only led the movement to boycott and divest from Israel, but has insisted that it does not go far enough. Unsurprisingly, LeVine insists that he takes his positions for Israel’s own good.

When not turning out anti-Israel propaganda, misrepresented as academic research, LeVine plays his electric guitar He named his own home web page (and we are not making this up!) www.culturejamming.org. Years ago he rearranged his family name, Levine, into the pseudo-French “LeVine,” evidently because he is ashamed at being a descendent of the Biblical tribe of Levi. His “scholarly” writings include all the fringe venues that combine 60s hippy nonsense with far-left politics, and so they range from Mother Jones to ZNET to Tikkun Magazine He has published in the “Journal of Palestine Studies,” which is a propaganda magazine controlled by the PLO. In his bio he claims that he “lived next door to Hamas mosques, stood against bulldozers, dodged terrorist bombs, and uncovered damning files in dusty archives. He knows the history, politics, religions and most important, the peoples of the region as a friend, but with a highly critical eye.”

LeVine is a proud groupie of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. Scholar Robert Spencer describes him as being “guilty of the very crime that his revered Said leveled so devastatingly against the genuine scholars he smeared as racist “Orientalists”: he sees America and the West as the only real actor on the world stage, and discounts or overlooks altogether (even as he chats with them in their native tongues) what the indigenous peoples are saying — except insofar as it confirms the Leftist caricature of America victimizing the world for its economic benefit.” LeVine’s sources in his “research” consist in large part of citations from other anti-Israel hate propagandists, including radical anti-Israel academics from Israel, whom LeVine routinely celebrates. This is a bit like doing research on United States history and politics that consists entirely of citations from Ward Churchill and Michael Moore.

LeVine routinely organizes anti-Israel “scholarly conferences” at UCI, which are little more than anti-Israel indoctrination camps. No dissident pro-Israel opinion may be expressed in them. The standard LeVine format is to include Arab haters of Israel alongside Israeli far-leftist anti-Israel radicals, and then present the invariable bashing of Israel as the consensus position of both Jews and Arabs seeking peace. Among the Israelis who have been included in LeVine “panels” have been Oren Yiftachel, a geographer and fanatic anti-Zionist from Ben Gurion University, best known for his endless rants against Israeli “apartheid,” and Yoav Peled, a hard-core Stalinist Israeli professor of Political Science from Tel Aviv University.

For LeVine, Israel is a vicious fascist monstrosity that randomly beats and murders people, and not just Palestinians. He writes, “Not just Palestinian activists, but foreign peace activists and even Israelis are routinely beaten, arrested, deported, or even killed by the IDF, with little fear that the Government of Israel would pay a political price for crushing non-violent resistance with violent means.”

LeVine compares Israel’s military defense of its civilians from Palestinian rockets to the German demolition of the Warsaw Ghetto. LeVine has even discovered concentration camps in the Middle East run by Israel. He writes in Aljazeera: “The Gaza ghetto is a `concentration camp’ – as Cardinal Renato Martino, the Vatican’s justice and peace minister, termed it – intended to force Palestinians to accept a rump state with a few trappings of sovereignty, bisected by huge Jewish settlement blocs, severed from East Jerusalem, and without hope for returning anything but a miniscule percentage of refugees to their homeland.” He claims that Israel conducts a “slave trade” and one of his graduate students (Vanessa Zuabi) composed an entire dissertation devoted to that theme under LeVine’s careful direction.

Not surprisingly, Levine’s books have been mocked savagely by serious Middle East scholars. Writing in the Middle East Quarterly, Prof. Fred M. Gottheil says that LeVine got just about everything wrong in his book, “Overthrowing Geography.” He adds: “LeVine, … believes that Arab peasants in 1920s Palestine had it good until the Zionists sneaked in, bringing with them modern technology and loads of cash. The end result was the destruction of Arab economic well-being. LeVine does not mince words: In the setting of Jaffa and Tel-Aviv, Zionists `pulverized’ the Arabs with `the power of penetrating modernity.’ The founding of Tel Aviv, he claims, `erased’ numerous surrounding villages. He provides maps, tables, figures, posters, poems, drawings, and archival excerpts to make the point. Except that he fails to make his point. The maps he offers, in fact, undermine his contention.”

In his pseudo-history of Tel Aviv written for Aljazeera.net, LeVine writes, “Despite its image of diversity and vibrancy, Tel Aviv has long been a site of significant intercommunal violence. The first major Jewish-Palestinian riots erupted along the border between the two towns in 1921, as did the Arab Revolt of 1936-39.” Leave it to LeVine to obfuscate about the fact that those riots were Arab pogroms against Jews, and not Jewish violence against Arabs. Elsewhere, LeVine describes the 1929 pogroms against Jews as “riots” caused by the racist evil of Jews, who dared to pray at the Western Wall: “An attempt by Jewish worshippers to change religious protocol at the Western or Wailing Wall was the spark for the `riots’ of 1929. The underlying cause for the conflict was, however, the increasing competition for land between the burgeoning Zionist population and Palestinian peasants.”

Dozens of LeVine diatribes against Israel and against the United States have been published on the pro-jihad pro-terror Aljazeera.net web sit. In one, LeVine calls for an international indictment of President Bush before the International Criminal Court alongside Sudan’s genocidal president. In others he denounces the United States for an endless list of “war crimes” and human rights abuses In LeVine’s words:

“While the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – for which Bush, and along with him, the American people who twice elected him, are responsible – is tragic, it should not be understated that the invasion itself was a crime against humanity. The war and invasion were in clear breach of the UN charter, which prohibits invading other countries except when an attack on one’s sovereign territory is about to occur or has just occurred. Add to that US torturing of prisoners, illegal secret renditions, and a host of other human rights abuses, and you have a long list of actions that are prohibited and outlawed by US federal law.”

It is not surprising that LeVine is a charter member of Iraq Occupation Watch. In the Huffington Post he let readers know what he thinks about Americans in his review of the Borat movie: “It’s that he reveals to Americans just how brutish and ugly we can be underneath our veneer of civility and hospitality. Of course, Iraqis have already discovered this the hard way, while the rest of the world has looked on in disgust. Let’s hope Americans get the message.” In yet another recent “cultural” diatribe, LeVine attacks the Toronto Film Festival in which films about Tel Aviv were screened. Evidently LeVine considers Tel Aviv to be occupied Palestinian territory, and so its very existence is a war crime against Arabs, unworthy of being celebrated in Toronto. He writes, “The festival narrative of Tel Aviv will make it harder for attendees to begin the much-needed conversations – within themselves as much as with others – about why Israel is rushing headlong into a future of full-blown apartheid that other former settler colonial societies have worked hard to escape.” Naturally, he routinely refers to Israel’s security barrier, built to keep Palestinian suicide bombers and other mass murderers away from Israeli civilians, as Israel’s “Apartheid Wall.” Intifada violence and terrorism are “symbolic” and little more than a muscular form of protest in LeVine’s view.

LeVine defends his own Marxism-in-the-classroom thus: “As for teaching Marx, I’ve been known to do it on occasion, but so do most business schools.” He is addicted to infantile theories about cabals of capitalists plotting to control the world: “War and occupation are wonderful opportunities for corporations to make billions of dollars in profits, unchecked by the laws and regulations that hamper their profitability in peace time.” As Tzvi Kahn pointed out in Frontpage Magazine: “Not surprisingly, in many of his writings, LeVine deliberately places “war on terrorism” in quotation marks – the evil of airplanes destroying skyscrapers can hardly compare with the evil of capitalism destroying, well, communism.”

Soon after 9-11, LeVine’s expressed his real concern that the attacks might lead the United States to defend rather than blame itself. He wrote on the ultra-Marxist ZNET that he feared that “Americans would never face the causes of the extreme violence perpetrated against us by those whose oppression we have supported and even enforced, and engage in the honest introspection of what our role has been in generating the kind of hatred that turns commuter jets into cruise missiles.”

LeVine’s Muslims justly despise America because it is a criminal nation, but at the same time they do not dislike the Christian West or the United States at all, according his book Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil published by the obscure Oneworld Publications. There he argues that Muslims mainly don’t like globalization, just as he himself does not. Remember those subway train bombing in London? They were protests against globalization also, insists LeVine. He adds:

“Most Americans have never experienced globalization physically, materially, and spiritually, in the way that the majority of citizens of the developing–and especially Muslim–world have felt its effects. Globalization’s consequences for Muslims–massive politically and economically motivated population migrations, economic marginalization of the Muslim world, and intense cultural penetration and even military occupation by the forces of globalization in their home countries–all have created a potentially poisonous brew of alienation and rootlessness that groups like Al Qaeda expertly exploit to recruit new followers.”

Moreover, in bombing London al-Qaeda was just adopting and copying what large corporations do: “As a brand with its own `lifestyle’ and image attached to it, Al Qaeda is using the strategy developed by many of the biggest corporations in the global era. While in the 20th century, major industrial corporations such as General Motors or General Electric actually made the products they sold in their own factories, today, global corporations such as Nike or Microsoft are primarily brand-producers, engaging in research and development of products that are manufactured by others (mostly subcontractors in the developing world).”

In 2003, LeVine called for the United States to end its “war” against radical Islamofascism: “It is time for the United States to declare a truce with the Muslim world, and radical Islam in particular.” He frequently denounces the United States as a “criminal nation.”

LeVine is a supporter of the pro-terror “International Solidarity Movement” or ISM, which openly advocates Palestinian “armed resistance.” Writing in the far-left anti-Israel “Jewish” magazine Tikkun, he joined the lobby of disinformation after ISM terrorist-supporter Rachel Corrie committed suicide by diving in front of an Israeli bulldozer destroying terrorist smuggling tunnels: “She and the other human shields, like their colleagues in Iraq, are true soldiers of peace.” LeVine has endorsed the shallow wacky “Politics of Meaning” invented by Tikkun’s pseudo-rabbi editor Michael Lerner.

For LeVine, Hamas is simply misunderstood and its leaders are actually interested only in peace: “The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.”
For this “scholar,” the enemy of his enemies (Israel and the U.S.) is always a friend.





Front Page magazine

Neve Gordon

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews:
By John Perazzo

The campus war against Israel and the Jews is led by a group of anti-Semites, many of them faculty members, who have made a career for themselves by traveling from one university to another supporting Arab terrorism. They invariably pretend that they are promoting peace. But in the Orwellian bubble where they live, Arab aggression and terror become self-defense, and Israeli self-defense becomes aggression and terror. Similarly, Israeli democracy is apartheid, while Arab genocide is liberation.

One of the most bizarre aspects of this campus war against the Jews is how numerous self-hating, anti-Semitic Jews are in the ranks of the movement to achieve the annihilation of Israel. For reasons that only a psychiatrist could fully understand, these people use their birthright to give authenticity to the campaign of delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. Today the leading promoters of “divestment” and of boycotting Israel are academic Jewish leftists, some of them from Israel itself. In a few extreme cases, this detestation of Israel is combined with a fawning courtship of Islamic terrorists, American and European Neo-Nazis, and even Holocaust Deniers.
One of these anti-Semitic Jews is Dr. Neve Gordon, chairman of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev. During the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1991), Gordon served as director of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, an organization that consistently condemns Israeli military reprisals against Palestinian terrorists while turning a blind eye to the homicidal atrocities committed by the terrorists themselves. In 1999 Gordon earned a Ph.D. from Notre Dame University. Before joining the BGU faculty, he worked variously as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the Watson Institute at Brown University.

Though he is an Israeli citizen, Gordon invariably sides with Israel’s enemies in the ongoing Mideast conflict. During the siege of Ramallah in 2002, for instance, he barricaded himself with Yasser Arafat, the terrorist responsible for the deaths of more Jews than any human being since Adolf Hitler. For years, Gordon has been referring to Israel as a fascist, terrorist, “apartheid” state that “resembles Nazi Germany.” He has posted numerous writings on Holocaust-denial websites. And he has repeatedly advocated a “one state” solution, in which Israel, by way of the so-called Palestinian “right of return,” would be inundated with Arab “refugees” whose inevitable political supremacy would spell the de facto end of Israel.

Recognizing that Israelis are highly unlikely to ever agree to such an arrangement, Gordon concedes that “the two-state solution is more realistic.” As Gordon explains it, that option “entails Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders,… the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel.”

Gordon was formerly a regular columnist for the Hamas media apologist, AlJazeera.com, where he regularly accused Israel of seeking to sabotage the peace process and steal Arab lands. Last December, when Hamas rockets and missiles were raining down on much of southern Israel — some of them hitting the BGU campus — Gordon did not denounce the Hamas terrorists. Instead he condemned the Israeli military for “targeting” the building called “Gaza University,” a structure used as a repository for the rockets intended to kill Israelis.

In January 2009, when Israel was engaged in its Operation Cast Lead campaign to diminish the strength of Hamas and put an end to the latter’s relentless rocket bombardment of Israeli towns, Gordon sneered at claims that the Israeli military was taking pains to avoid inflicting civilian casualties:

“The fact that the Israeli military could have razed the entire Gaza Strip, but instead destroyed only 15% of the buildings does not make its actions moral. The fact that the Israeli military could have killed thousands of Palestinian children during this campaign, and, due to restraint, killed ‘only’ 300, does not make Operation Cast Lead ethical.

“Ultimately, the moral claims the Israeli government uses to support its actions during this war are empty. They actually reveal Israel’s unwillingness to confront the original source of the current violence, which is not Hamas, but rather the occupation of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

Absent from Gordon’s condemnation of the Israeli “occupation” is any mention of the way that occupation came about in the first place. David Horowitz explains:

“In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan attacked Israel for a second time and were again defeated. It was in repelling these aggressors that Israel came to control the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as the oil-rich Sinai desert. Israel had every right to annex these territories captured from the aggressors — a time-honored ritual among nations, and in fact the precise way that Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan had come into existence themselves. But Israel did not do so. On the other hand, neither did it withdraw its armies or relinquish its control.”

On August 26, 2009, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece by Gordon titled “Boycott Israel,” which depicted Israel as “an apartheid state” wherein “[t]he Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights.” “[T]he only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel,” said Gordon, “is through massive international pressure” in the form of a boycott beginning with divestment from companies operating in Judea and Samaria, and later moving on to firms that “help sustain and reinforce the occupation.”

Before submitting the foregoing article to the LA Times, Gordon gave his department at BGU advance knowledge of what he intended to say in the piece, and offered to step down as department chair if his colleagues thought his words would prove too embarrassing to them. Yet those colleagues decided unanimously not to let him step down; rather, they stood firmly behind him.

Clearly, the Jewish collaborators in the campus war against Israel are not waging their battle alone. They enjoy a wealth of tactical and ideological support from their fellow faculty members.





Front Page Magazine

Sara Roy

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews:
By Steven Plaut

Sara Roy, who holds a non-tenured “research” position at Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies (CMES), claims to be a “political economist,” although she apparently has no training in economics or political science. She also claims to be an expert in Middle East Studies, but has no degree in that either. Her PhD is in Education.

Roy claims to be an expert on the political economy of the Gaza Strip, but her real expertise is in anti-Israel leftist political propaganda. She worked on her doctoral dissertation in education part of the time while living for a while in the Gaza Strip, and got paid as a a research assistant by the West Bank Data Base Project, a propaganda project directed by anti-Israel radical Israeli non-academic leftists.

Roy’s Middle East studies publications are by and large propaganda diatribes, and many appear in non-academic anti-Israel propaganda magazines, some of which appear in openly anti-Semitic web magazines, at least one having intimate ties to the PLO. Phyllis Chessler calls her one of “the most savage critics—of America and Israel.” Roy is a prolific writer of newspaper op-eds and spends much of her time giving “expert” lectures about the Arab-Israel conflict.

Sara Roy was born Jewish, and she uses this circumstance as a lever to better support Israel’s enemies. She refers frequently to something she calls a “Jewish ethical perspective” whenever bashing Israel and cites her “Jewish roots” when promoting the Hamas on anti-Semitic web sites such as the Neo-Stalinist Counterpunch.

Roy is, in fact, arguably the leading apologist for Hamas in American academia today. She is the inventor of an imaginary “New Hamas,” a fictional group that seeks peace and social wellbeing for Palestinians, unlike the real Hamas, which seeks to carry out a second Holocaust of Jews. Roy has been described as “the ringmaster of Harvard’s bash Israel circus.” According to Middle East scholar Martin Kramer:

‘Her current project is the whitewashing of Hamas, but she’s best known for invidious comparisons she drew in April 2002 between the Israeli occupation and the Holocaust. (She thinks being the child of Holocaust survivors gives her a license.) “There is no let-up,” Roy moans about the criticisms of Middle Eastern studies. She’s right about that. Permanent contention: get used to it.’
Roy is so goofy that she was invited to give the Edward Said Lecture at the Australian University of Adelaide in 2008. The entire lecture was devoted, with frequent invocations of “Edward,” to showing how the only lesson from eons of Jewish suffering is that everyone must support the Palestinian war against Israel.

While enjoying unrestricted exposure in the media, she simultaneously claims that she is being censored by the Right Wing Conspiracy. A case in point is the locally famous case of a book review which was rejected by Tufts University’s Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. In this essay she tried to trash Matthew Levitt’s Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (2006) because it said mean things about the terror group. When the journal refused to run the piece, she pouted that this constituted a “blatant…case of censorship.” She has denounced Campus-Watch as well for its exposure of extremist propaganda in Middle East studies. In her words, “What all this boils down to is an attempt to silence criticism of US policy, and put an end to disagreement with the neo-conservative agenda. It is not diversity that is being sought but conformity.”

When Roy gets bored with Harvard, she goes on anti-Israel speaking walkabouts. Her message is always the same: The Palestinians are innocent victims of Israel’s brutal oppression. Hezb’Allah and Hamas terrorism is an entirely understable response to Israeli evil. Israel gobbles up “Arab land” out of imperialist obsession. Every use of force by Israel is a brutal provocation; every act of terror by Arabs is a protest against occupation.

Writing recently in the Harvard student newspaper, Roy opined: “Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers. This context is undeniably one of mass suffering, created largely by Israel but with the active complicity of the international community, especially the U.S. and European Union, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.” Got that? Even the Palestininan opponents of Hamas and the EU are collaborators with Israel in its unspeakable crimes. (Roy was subsequently taken apart for her bias by a Harvard student writing in the paper.)

Roy is the author of two books: The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (1995), and The Economics of Middle East Peace: A Reassessment (1999). To call her viewpoint one dimension is to praise it unjustly. Her repetitious theme is that there is nothing at all wrong with Palestinian society that cannot be blamed directly on the Jews. Destroying the Palestinian economy is why Israel constructed its security fence, for instance; this decision had nothing at all to do with countless terrorist atrocities against Jews carried out by Palestinians.
Her work in recent years at Harvard has been devoted to prettifying Hamas and other Islamofascist movements among Palestinians, and to try to prove how moderate they are. In her “study” of Hamas, she displays complete ignorance as to the background of Hamas and its roots in the Islamofascist “Muslim Brotherhood” movement. She paints it as a pastoral little social welfare group. She has published at least one anti-Israel article together with someone from a notorious Hamas front group, the so-called Gaza Community Mental Health Program.

Writing in the al-Jazeera newspaper – with its intimate links to al-Qaeda – in 2003, Roy insisted that the only way to stop Hamas terrorism was to first end Israel’s “occupation.” But the following year Israel totally ended its occupation of Gaza. The direct consequence was the bloody campaign of Hamas rocket and other terror attacks from Gaza against Israeli civilians inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. This terror campaign directly lead to the “Cast Lead” military operation by Israel last year. Roy has never apologized nor repudiated her earlier false prophecy. To the contrary, the behavior of Hamas since Israel’s Gaza withdrawal has simply persuaded her all the more that Israeli “occupation” is the exclusive cause of all Middle East violence, even when it does not exist.

Roy is a nominal board member of Marc Ellis’ radically anti Israel Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University. She sits on the boards of other anti-Israel organizations. Like Norman Finkelstein, Roy uses the fact that her own parents were Holocaust survivors to grant her own hatred of Israel and work against it legitimacy. As one example, she published the following in the “Journal of Palestine Studies,” a propaganda magazine controlled by the PLO: “[I]t was perhaps inevitable [because of her parents’ experiences] that I would follow a path that would lead me to the Arab-Israeli issue.” She then draws parallels between Nazi treatment of Jews and Israeli soldiers’ treatment of Palestinians which, in her opinion, “were absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize.” [Like Ellis, she argues obsessively that the only real lesson of value to be learned from the Holocaust of European Jews during World War II is that Israel has no right to exist.





Front Page Magazine

Ian Lustick

Collaborators in the War Against the Jews:
By Steven Plaut

Three years ago, the tenured  left at DePaul was attempting to force the university into granting tenure to the anti-Semitic embarrassment Norman Finkelstein, who has no bona fide academic publications, and is well known as a collaborator with the Hezbollah terrorists.  To manipulate the tenure system, these leftists needed to recruit letters of recommendation from people at other schools  who could be counted upon to endorse and support Finkelstein out of a sense of political solidarity with his propaganda.  Two academics were willing to play ball.  One was Avi Shlaim, a former Oxford professor known as a hater of Israel despite his own Israeli heritage.  The other was Ian Lustick, a radical Jewish anti-Israel and anti-American professor at the University of Pennsylvania who also stood and delivered for Finkelstein, although his opinion was not enough to convince the DePaul to give him tenure.

Lustick used to be Associate Director of the Solomon Asch Center for Ethnic Studies at Penn, named after a famous Gestalt psychologist who must be rolling in his grave at the fact that the Center named for him has hosted radicals and published work that includes a vilification of Israel for building its security wall to keep out suicide bombers.

Lustick has made an academic career out of bashing Israel and fighting against the war on terror.  He speaks frequently before anti-Israel and pro-terror conferences and organizations.   He has also written for Michael Lerner’s goofy pseudo-Jewish anti-Israel magazine, Tikkun.

Israelis who insist upon rejecting the demands made upon them by Islamofascist terrorists are denounced by Lustick as “dangerous fundamentalists.”  Lustick has long campaigned for a Palestinian state and for the division of Jerusalem.  He has compared the Palestinian “suffering” to that of the Jews in the Holocaust, and he has called on Israel to teach about this Palestinian experience in its schools just like German children study the Holocaust.  Meanwhile, he denounced the President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, for claiming that the “Divest from Israel” movement is anti-Semitic.  Like his client Norman Finkelstein, Lustick likes to rant about the nefarious powers of the “Israel Lobby.”

In one of those Orwellian ironies, Lustick actually once headed the Association for Israel Studies in the United States.  He has never spent much time in Israel, although he claims that nation’s history and politics as a specialty. He is a defender of Israel’s own anti-Israel “New Historians,” who use historic revisionism to promote the agenda of Israel’s enemies. Lustick has spoken favorably of the so-called “One-State Solution” in which Israel will cease to exist altogether.  (Cynics refer to it as the Rwanda Solution.)  Lustick took part in the anti-Israel York University conference last year devoted to discovering an alternative to Israel’s continuing existence.

Lustick is almost as anti-American as he is anti-Israel.  He may be best known for his expressions of regret that America did not lose more soldiers in the campaign to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan. Denying that terrorism is a valid concept, he deconstructs the term by claiming that activities can be classified as “terrorist” if they encompass any violent “actions and threats” by governmental militaries and even tax collectors, as well as insurgents.”

Lustick describes America’s relationship to Israel as “like [that of] a friend to a drug addict.”  He denounces the United States as a “neo-imperialist” power.  He likes to rant against “hegemonists,” by which he means mainly the US, the West, and Israel.  He frequently speaks about nefarious cabals – his word – notably those “of neocon warriors driving this juggernaut”  He insists that President Bush and not al-Qaeda was the true cause of world terrorism.  He has campaigned staunchly against America’s war against terrorism and expressed his hostility in his book Trapped in the War on Terror.

Denouncing America’s military efforts in “The Nation,” Lustick wrote:

‘This is a supply-side war. There is very little demand for the war, and nothing in the way of a compelling necessity for it. But the enormous supply of political capital flowing toward the President after 9/11 combines with the overweening preponderance of US military power on a global level to make the production of war in Iraq not a trivial affair but one that can be embraced with relatively little thought and almost no need to appeal to a readiness to sacrifice.”

Meanwhile, Lustick engages in equally tortured apologetics for Hamas, which he claims  “is mainly popular because one of the things it is trusted to do is probably be ready to live with Israel, even if not officially, for a very long time.”

Why is there no peace in the Middle East? Here is the Lustick answer, according to a  Campus Watch report of a University of Pennsylvania event: “Lustick expressed grave doubts about a resolution to the conflict, and said that insisting on a ‘Jewish state’ and not a ‘predominantly Jewish polity’ in the Middle East is one barrier to any solution.”  A Jewish state is the obstacle; a Palestinian state is the solution.

When it came to Afghanistan, Lustick yearned for a longer war and was concerned only to discredit the so-called “cabal.” Said Lustick: “What I wanted was a war, a Goldilocks war, not too fast and not too slow, but we didn’t get it. We got one that was too fast and it gave the whip end to the cabal.” This cabal, Lustick contended, comprised “neo-conservative warriors” who aspired to nothing less than “American-military-enforced new order in the Middle East with pretensions and fantasies of democratization of the region of an American rule, domination of the oil wealth there, establishment of large, semi-permanent military bases in the heart of the region and the elimination of all pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza.”

A few years back Lustick was in the news for what has become known as the Gil-White Affair.  Francisco Gil-White was fired by Penn at the initiative of Lustick and claims that this was because of the fact that Lustick disapproved of the pro-Israel opinions and activism of Gil-White, who alleges that Lustick’s motivation for this opposition was Gil-White’s research into the historical origins of Arab terrorism.

Such research is, for Lustick, illegitimate.  Norman Finkelstein’s pro-terror political opinions are another matter altogether.





Front P:age Magazine