FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

The controversy about the Ground Zero whatever-it-is (supporters say it is not a mosque and not at Ground Zero, but it includes a mosque and is two blocks away) has left the realm of rational discourse. Once you have The Opposition — Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich — weighing in on one side, you could have expected that the administration and its friends would take the opposing view with both feet. The latest broadside comes from the liberal Jewish establishment:

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) — Jewish groups have stepped up efforts to combat anti-Muslim bigotry, with several national initiatives announced this week and supporting statements coming in from a range of Jewish voices.

In Washington, officials from several Jewish organizations took part Tuesday in an emergency summit of Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders that denounced anti-Muslim bigotry and called for a united effort by believers of all faiths to reach out to Muslim Americans.

Also Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League announced the creation of an Interfaith Coalition on Mosques, which will monitor and respond to instances of anti-Muslim bias surrounding attempts to build new mosques in the United States.

Meanwhile, six rabbis and scholars representing the Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox streams have launched an online campaign urging rabbis to devote part of their sermons this Shabbat to educating their congregations about Islam.

The efforts come in response to what organizers describe as a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment resulting from the impending ninth anniversary of 9/11 and the controversy surrounding efforts to build a Muslim community center and mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan. Jewish bloggers and pundits, mostly on the right, have become more vocal in opposing the center and calling for greater scrutiny of American mosques. [my emphasis]

There are still plenty of good reasons to want the mosque to be built somewhere else, and they don’t include “anti-Muslim bigotry”. There are questions about the Imam’s support of radical Islamism, the funding of the project, and the understanding of its significance in the Muslim world. This is not changed by some drunk and mentally disturbed student stabbing a cabbie or a nutcase burning copies of the Quran in Florida.

I’ve been denounced more than once as a ‘bigot’ who is against to free exercise of religion for opposing the project. The people who denounce me are remarkably obtuse, so what follows may be hard for them to understand. But I’ll say it anyway.

There is a campaign underway to define all speech critical of programs, projects or activities of Muslims as anti-religious hate speech, which is out of bounds. Islam is, of course, a religion, but like the Christianity of the 11th – 13th centuries, it — more correctly, a significant faction within it — has a political program. This program includes aggressive expansion of Islamic rule, by violence, by subversion, or even by democratic processes. It’s called “Islamism,” to distinguish it from Islam in general.

Arguably the most significant political conflict in the world today is  the one between more traditional conservative Muslims and radical Islamists. Radical Islam is championed by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood — to which some American Muslim groups are linked — and the Shiite Iranian regime. Saudi Arabia funds radical Islamist groups, mosques and schools the world over, perhaps buying temporary protection for its monarchy from the radicals.

A large number of the world’s Muslims — including, in my opinion, Imam Abdul Rauf of the Ground Zero mosque, as well as the main organizations purporting to represent Muslims in the US, such as CAIR, ISNA, MPAC, etc. — support the Islamist project. Insofar as it envisions the ‘conquest’ (in a violent or nonviolent way) of the United States and the replacement of its Constitution with Islamic law, it is imperative that Americans be able to express their opposition to it. Defining speech critical of this political idea as ‘hate speech’ makes it impossible to do so.

The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which convened the ’emergency summit’ to deal with the “wave of anti-Muslim sentiment”, does not want to make this distinction, in my opinion, because they support the goals of Islamism. They want to conflate the religion of Islam with the political program of Islamism.  And they have an interest in exaggerating the degree of anti-Muslim prejudice, because they want to create an atmosphere in which nobody can say anything negative about anything Muslims say or do, short of actual violent terrorism.

Incidentally, one way to tell if an organization or individual is an Islamist is to ask him how he feels about Hamas or Hizballah. Islamists may deplore the terrorism that these groups engage in, but they will not condemn their goals, and usually they will ‘understand’ why the resort to terrorism even if they don’t approve of it (Abdul Rauf won’t even call Hamas a “terrorist group”).

In many ways, they couldn’t buy the kind of help they are getting from Terry Jones. First, he makes the case that there is a huge wave of Muslim-hatred out there — even though Jones supposedly has a congregation of only about 30. Second, he provides an excuse for Muslims around the world to fly into a rage, to burn and destroy and maybe kill people — thus reinforcing the idea that anti-Muslim speech is not only bigoted but downright dangerous.

Our own ‘useful idiots‘, particularly the Religious Action Center of the Union for Reform Judaism, which co-sponsored the ‘summit’, have been front and center in helping the Islamists by blurring the very important distinction between anti-religious prejudice and opposition to a radical political program.

These are not unintelligent people, so I can only conclude that the opportunity to display their moral superiority to the supposedly bigoted Right — and their leaders, Palin and Gingrich — has been so irresistible as to short-circuit their faculty of analytic thinking.

Our administration, much of the media and the liberal religious establishment is using this issue as a political weapon against what they view as the threat from the right wing, which they apparently see as more dangerous than radical Islamism.  That’s a mistake.

Technorati Tags: burning Qurans, Ground Zero mosque, ISNA

Very revealing:

Defining Israel as a Jewish state is something that arouses concern, according to Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit who spoke to the Al Arabiya network on Monday.

Aboul Gheit feared for the fate of Israeli Arabs in the case that the UN approves a decision to define Israel as a Jewish state.  “Would they give them all the citizens rights that they deserve? Would they remain a minority or could it be that they would be deported?” Aboul Gheit said in the Al Arabiya report. — Jerusalem Post

[As an aside, there’s a bit of hypocrisy here. While the Egyptian constitution calls for the protection of religious and other minorities, in practice this is not realized. Discrimination against Christian Copts and members of the Bahai faith are widespread and ignored by authorities.]

Aboul Gheit isn’t the only one. Our ‘partner’ Mahmoud Abbas also worries about the danger posed by an explicitly Jewish state:

Abbas said that in recent meetings with leaders of the Jewish community in the US, he made it clear that the Palestinians would not recognize Israel as a Jewish state. “I told them that this is their business and that they are free to call themselves whatever they want,” Abbas said. “But [I told them] you can’t expect us to accept this.”

Abbas said that by raising the issue of Israel’s right to be a Jewish state, Netanyahu was seeking to “strip” Israeli-Arabs of their rights and turn them into illegal citizens. He said that Netanyahu’s goal was also to block any chance of Palestinian “refugees” from returning to their original homes inside Israel.

On the face of it, the charge is ridiculous. After all, Israel has defined itself as a Jewish state since its founding. And during that time Israel’s Arab minority has had full civil rights, if not the national rights that they demand. When Meir Kahane’s Kach party advocated the transfer of Arabs out of Israel — including Israeli Arabs who did not agree to follow the seven Noachide Laws (which would preclude terrorism) — his party was categorized as ‘racist and undemocratic’ and banned from participating in the 1988 election.

So is this just the usual Arab delegitimization of Israel? Yes, in part, but something else is going on here that is worthy of note. It’s what I call ‘political projection’.

Here’s an explanation of the psychological concept of projection:

According to Sigmund Freud, projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else. Emotions or excitations which the ego tries to ward off are “spit out” and then felt as being outside the ego…perceived in another person… To understand the process, consider a person in a couple who has thoughts of infidelity. Instead of dealing with these undesirable thoughts consciously, they unconsciously project these feelings onto the other person, and begin to think that the other has thoughts of infidelity and may be having an affair.

Sound familiar? It should. In fact, I would say that you can often tell what the Arabs want to do to the Jews by what they claim the Jews are doing to them.

They accuse Israel of being a racist, apartheid state, of ethnic cleansing, even of genocide. But think about Arab attitudes, their leadership and their behavior.

To modify a famous remark by Tip O’Neill, in the Arab world all politics is ethnic and religious. Ethnic cleansing is the rule rather than the exception. When the Jordanians captured Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem in 1948, all the Jews living their were driven out at gunpoint. Does anybody doubt that one of the conditions for the state of ‘Palestine’ will be that it will not have Jews living in it?

Evacuated Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, looted by Arabs in 1948

The part about the ‘refugees‘ is interesting. It seems as though Abbas believes that there is some chance that Israel can be forced to permit the entry of millions of hostile claimants to ‘Palestinian nationality’, although everyone knows that this would be suicidal.

But not only do the Palestinians project on the Jews their own bloody designs, they also do the reverse — they usurp themes from Jewish history and apply them to themselves. In this story, ‘return’ makes sense.

According to them the ‘nakba‘ can be compared to the Holocaust (President Obama believes this one), there was a great Palestinian civilization that goes back centuries, and the  descendants of former inhabitants have a right of return. They spend a great deal of energy trying to deny Jewish provenance in the land — Arafat claimed that there never was a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount — and inventing their own (including a ridiculous theory that Palestinian Arabs are the descendants of biblical Canaanites).

The realities of Palestinian Arab history, from the recent beginnings of nationalism in the 1920’s through their self-definition as a ‘people’ after 1967, and all along the effort to prevent the assimilation of the refugees or the amelioration of their condition, as well as the embrace of murder and terrorism (even suicide terrorism) as a preferred tactic — all this is ignored, as is the true nature of their racist founding fathers, al-Husseini and Arafat.

The Palestinian Arabs, despite everything they say about their culture, have only managed to define themselves in opposition to the Jews.

Technorati Tags: Palestinian Arabs

As Israelis are about to begin their High Holiday season — one of introspection, resolutions and repentance for religious and secular Jews alike — TIME magazine gives us a cover story entitled “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.”

TIME slanders Israel for Rosh Hashana

The article itself is so stupid as to be not worth refuting. Those Jews, it points out, haven’t changed much since the Middle Ages:

In the week that three Presidents, a King and their own Prime Minister gather at the White House to begin a fresh round of talks on peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the truth is, Israelis are no longer preoccupied with the matter. They’re otherwise engaged; they’re making money…

They make their case by quoting a couple of Israeli political analysts — no, actually, they are real estate salespeople — who say with authority,

“The people,” Heli says, “don’t believe.” Eli searches for a word. “People in Israel are indifferent,” he decides. “They don’t care if there’s going to be war. They don’t care if there’s going to be peace. They don’t care. They live in the day.”

So much for TIME.

But what can it mean to say that Israel doesn’t care about peace? In 2006, there was a smallish war in Lebanon. 121 Israeli soldiers were killed. These soldiers have families, it is a small country, and most Jewish Israelis serve in the IDF. My own son is a reservist in a combat unit, and he will certainly take part in the next Hizballah war, which is generally regarded as inevitable.

In 2006 42 Israeli civilians were killed and 4,262 wounded by Hizballah rockets (figures here). Hizballah is known to possess at least twice as many rockets and long-range missiles than in 2006, and it’s expected that the next war will also involve Syria, which has thousands of weapons aimed at Israel as well. The government expects that home front damage and casualties will be much greater than 2006.

So, we are expected to believe that Israelis don’t care about peace?

As is so often the case, there is a semantic problem here. The word ‘peace’ is ambiguous, and people like TIME’s writers tend to conflate different meanings. Jews love to draw distinctions — the Talmud is full of them — so I propose a distinction and a new word to illustrate it.

‘Peace’ will continue to mean what it has always meant: an absence of war, a state of quietude in which people are free to follow economic, creative and spiritual pursuits without fear of someone trying to kill them. A state, in other words, which Israel has not known since its founding, but which 99% of Israelis profoundly wish for.

There is, however, another concept for which I will coin a new word: poose. ‘Poose’ will mean the thing that Israelis don’t much care about, the state in which Israel agrees to give up enough territory, security, sovereignty and autonomy that the Palestinian Arabs will agree to take it — and Barack Obama will be happy.

Not many Israelis are yearning for poose, because they know that the Palestinians have no intention to give them peace. Palestinians prefer poose, because poose will make it easier for them to get what they really want, which is the replacement of Israel by an Arab state.

Poose is what Israel got in South Lebanon with UNSC resolution 1701 in 2006, an agreement which was supposed to end the war and prevent Hizballah from rearming, but which instead prevents Israel from preventing Hizballah from rearming.

Poose is also what Israel got from the Oslo Accord, which brought Original Terrorist Yasser Arafat back from exile, funded and provided arms for the murderers he dispatched, and ultimately gave birth to the second Intifadah in which more than a thousand Israelis (and many Palestinian Arabs) died.

Poose, in other words, brings war. No wonder Israelis are opposed to it!

Recently, the US Agency for International Development paid an Israeli organization called The Geneva Initiative to develop advertisements featuring Palestinian figures calling for Israelis to trust them. “We are partners for peace,” they say. “What about you?” But the nature of Palestinian demands makes it clear that what they are offering is poose, not peace.

Here is one of the ads, featuring Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. Erekat speaks English, and there are Hebrew subtitles. But in order to illustrate the difference between peace and poose, Elder of Ziyon has inserted English subtitles that express Erekat’s true, pooseful, intentions:

Technorati Tags: Israel, peace, poose, Palestinians

The ‘direct talks without preconditions’ that have begun are not in fact without preconditions. There is no doubt that they will be cut short unless the US can force Netanyahu to agree on continuing a freeze on construction activity in Judea, Samaria and (unofficially) East Jerusalem. The concession might be public or private, but the effect will be the same.

There may be other unstated conditions. For example, if Israel were to send the IDF after the Hamas terrorists who are playing ‘bad cop’ in the drama that has so far cost four Israeli lives, or retaliate against Hamas in Gaza, the PA would undoubtedly break off the talks. Israel is expected to show restraint and let the PA handle ‘security’.

If the past is a guide, the script calls for the PA to pick up a bunch of Hamasniks and make a lot of noise. In short order they will all be released. The PA did say that they had arrested the car that was used in at least one of the assaults, but that’s small comfort.

What this means is that Hamas has been given a license to kill for the duration of the talks. Several commentators have already suggested [and I agree] that this is far too much to pay for a process which is designed primarily to boost Barack Obama’s credentials before the coming election, and which cannot possibly have an outcome that’s beneficial to Israel.

Israel has also made some demands, but unlike Palestinian ones, none of them are considered preconditions. But some of them absolutely should be.

First, Israel has asked that the PA stop ‘incitement’. What is incitement? It’s the continuous propaganda being fed to the Arab population — in Israel as well as the PA-controlled areas — to hate Jews, to venerate Arab terrorists who have killed Jewish civilians and to expect that all of ‘Palestine’ will soon be in the hands of its true ‘owners’, the Palestinian Arabs. One can’t expect the PA leadership to have popular support for a real peace agreement as long as this continues. And one shouldn’t expect Israelis to talk to someone who is at that moment calling them pigs and a monkeys.

Second, Israel wants any agreement to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Some say “why insist on a formulation that is objectionable to the Arabs? After all, it’s just words”. But there is a huge significance in this formulation because of what it tells us about the future behavior of the state of ‘Palestine’.

One might think that the purpose of the negotiations is to partition the land into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, and to determine borders, etc. But the Palestinians are not prepared to admit that the part that they don’t get does not also belong to them. Just look at how Israeli Arab Knesset member Haneen Zouabi talks. Would you buy a car from someone who agrees to take your money, but insists that the car will always belong to him?

Third, Israel wants a commitment that what will be agreed to will end the conflict, that the Palestinian Arabs will have no further claim on Israel. This isn’t an idle demand. In 1974 the PLO adopted a program that views the creation of an “independent national authority” as a step to the complete liberation of ‘Palestine’ (the so-called “phased plan”). Israel has a right to demand that a Palestinian state will not be simply another hostile entity from which to wage war.

These three demands ought to be treated as preconditions. There should be no talks without them, because without them there is nothing to talk about.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, direct talks