Jewslamists

By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen

Along with the fact that periodically some portion of the world seeks to destroy the Jews, is the reality that in every case, some portion of the Jews seeks to help them.
I don’t know how to explain the phenomenon, but I’ve read historical accounts of it in which the anomily has been given a name – conversos, kapos – and I’ve run into it in our own day.

I think the fact that there are Jews here and in Israel who align themselves with those who would just as soon see them killed or kill them themselves, tells us several things about the human psyche and the time of man.

The first and most important thing it revelas is that we are engaged in another sweeping anti-Semitic episode that will eventually rival and possibly surpass in ferocity and geography, any that has come before.

I’m not sure if the majority of the modern-day kapos think that by “showing” their enemieis they’re on their side, they will be spared, or if they just are unable to recognize an enemy when they encounter one.

I am sure some believe they are nobly standing up for “what’s right,” having swallowed whole the entire Arab revisionist historical narative, but it doesn’t matter. The outcome is the same.

Historians may one day come up with a name for the Jews who stood with the Islamo-Fascists and anti-Semites in these days. Jewslamists, maybe.

I’ll bet the Jews who converted or faked conversion to satisfy the Inquisitors found ways to justify doing that. And the ones who turned in their neighbors or collected their hair or eyeglasses or otherwise collaborated with their neighbor’s and familie’s executioners with the hope the Nazis would spare them – or even in the twisted belief that somehow the Nazis were right – justified that behavior, as well.

And today’s counterparts also feel justified in turning on their own people and aiding and abetting their own people’s sworn enemies, mostly by providing propaganda material.

To find a gentile anti-Semite who prefers the Arab lies to the truth, while unfortunate, is common and unsurprising.

To run into a Jewish one, while not surprising, is still shocking and terribly sad.
And, I’m not sure how to approach such a person, which is why I avoid the subject with anyone I wish to have in my life whose own predilictions on the issue are unknown to me.
It’s a cowardly approach, I know.

But sometimes, broaching the issue is unavoidable.

I have such a case now.
When I knew this woman, I was 10 and she was my 16-year-old guitar teacher, and I thought she was the coolest thing ever.

We “bumped into” each other on Facebook the other day, and she noticed some of what I’ve written on Israel and noted we may disagree on the subject.
Eventually, she told me that if I think Israel is anything but an apartheid state seeking to do harm to its Arab residents then I have my head “buried deep in the sand.”

She knows this because she reads Ha’aretz occasionally.

My response was this:

“I follow the news very carefully, and the news of Israel most religiously (so-to-speak), and am very familiar with its faults and foibles, which are no less or greater than any other collection of human beings. Though held to a higher standard of behavior than any other country, Israel is, in fact, similar to some and better than many – and immeasurably better than most of its closest neighbors. It is in the unique position of having to decide if its constitution is to become a suicide pact or if it can find a way to survive as the world’s only Jewish country and maintain its humanity. (The U.S. faces similar questions, BTW).
But, in any case, it is the last bastion of protection for world Jewry, and is surrounded by homicidal neighbors bent on the destruction of the nation and the people. It’s a position the Jews have been in before, only this time, we’re armed, which is a good thing.

And, like all those other times before – the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the Holocaust – there are Jews who, for whatever reason, are unwilling or unable to recognize their own enemy or understand that their enemy knows them whether they see it or not. So, history shows us that those of us who take the side of the anti-Semites, and there always are some, wind up in the same ovens as the rest of us, every time.”

I expect to be “unfriended,” but what can you do?



Political Mavens

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

UK to Check Islamic Schools After Sharia Claim and anti-Semitism

BBC says found network of more than 40 un-regulated weekend Islamic schools teaching anti-Semitic views, advocating extreme punishment for theft, sodomy

by Reuters

Britain's education department is to look at how it can check Islamic weekend schools after the BBC reported it had uncovered more than 40 of them teaching anti-Semitic views and extreme punishment for sodomy and theft.

The BBC said its "Panorama" program, which will air on Monday evening, had found a network of weekend Islamic schools in Britain were teaching children how to chop off the hands of thieves, that Zionists are trying to take over the world and that sodomy is punishable by death.

Currently the government does not regulate weekend, part-time teaching centers.

The Department for Education said it could not allow anti-Semitic material in English schools and that the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted), which inspects schools, was looking into how to monitor the part-time centers.

"Ofsted are doing some work in this area. They'll be reporting to us shortly about how we can ensure that part-time provision is better registered and better inspected in the future," the department said in a statement.

Saudi national curriculum
Panorama said the centers fell under the umbrella of the Saudi Students' Schools and Clubs in the UK and Ireland and have been teaching the Saudi national curriculum to about 5,000 children.

It said the schools, which teach children between the ages of 6 and 18, have been using textbooks that contain diagrams showing the Sharia way to cut off the hands and feet of people convicted of theft and that Zionists are plotting to take over the world for Jews.

It said it had obtained a textbook that asked children to list the "reprehensible" qualities of Jews. It also said they were told the punishment for sodomy was death and that there is a difference of opinion on whether this should be by stoning, burning or throwing off a cliff.

The Saudi Students' Schools and Clubs group could not be immediately reached for comment.

The Saudi Embassy said it would not comment on the Panorama program until it had seen it, but the BBC said it had received a letter from the Saudi ambassador saying the network of weekend schools had nothing to do with the embassy.

Quilliam, a think-tank that studies radical Islamism, said Saudi Arabia had stopped using the textbooks that Panorama referred to as it took steps to modernize its religious education and that the Saudi government should try to persuade Islamic schools in Britain to stop "hate preaching".

"It is unfortunate that these so-called Saudi schools in Britain do not seem to have similarly moved with the times. The Saudi authorities need to use their influence to ensure that hate-preaching is fully tackled both at home and abroad," Quilliam spokesman Talal Rajab said.