FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

When you're in a hole, stop digging

A few weeks ago I wrote about the incredible behavior of the IRS in seeking to deny tax-exempt status to the pro-Israel organization Z Street (see “Obama and Nixon would agree on this“).

Z Street sued the IRS, claiming in part that

21.   Agent [Diane] Gentry also informed Z STREET’s counsel that the IRS is carefully scrutinizing organizations that are in any way connected with Israel.

22.   Agent Gentry further stated to counsel for Z STREET: “these cases are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”

Now the IRS has responded, and their response is even more incredible. Here’s an excerpt:

a. The application indicated that Z Street could be providing resources to organizations within Israel or facilitating the provision of resources to organizations within the state of Israel;
b. Israel is one of many Middle Eastern countries that have a “higher risk of  terrorism.” (LR.M. 7.20.6.7.5.2(1). See also http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2008/122433.htm); and
c. A referral to TAG is appropriate whenever an application mentions providing resources to organizations in a country with a higher risk of terrorism.

Just to put this into perspective, I wrote that

…some other organizations which had received 501(c)(3) status from the IRS, [include] unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing case CAIR and ISNA, as well as Codepink, a group which regularly accuses the US of war crimes and has called for support of the ‘Iraqi resistance’ and US military deserters.

But the IRS chose to “scrutinize” an organization that supports the world’s biggest target of terrorism, Israel! Anyway, Z Street’s original application clearly stated that it did not ‘provide resources’ to anyone outside of the US, but was only concerned with pro-Israel advocacy within the US.

And there is also an affidavit from agent Diane Gentry in which she says “I never said that stuff”:

7. Although I had telephone conversations with [Z Street attorney] Bullock on July 19, 2010 and July 27, 2010, I never told her that the IRS had a special concern about organizations whose positions contradict the Obama Administration’s Israel policy or that cases are sent to a special unit in the Washington, D.C. office to determine whether an organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s  public policies.

8. I never told Ms. Bullock that the IRS has an “Israel Special Policy” governing the processing of applications for tax exemption by organizations that are believed to be operated by persons holding political views inconsistent with those espoused by the Obama administration.

Z Street points out that they never said “Obama” and did not use the words “Israel Special Policy”, so Ms. Gentry’s statement is technically true. But they stand by their original filing.

Z Street’s suit calls for

A. Barring application of the Special Policy to its pending application for tax-exempt status pursuant to §501(c)(3) of the Code;
B. Requiring that Defendant adjudicate Plaintiff’s application for tax-exempt status expeditiously and fairly and without any consideration of whether the positions espoused by the Plaintiff or its officers are or are not consistent or inconsistent with the policy positions taken by the Obama administration;
C. Mandating complete disclosure to the public regarding the origin, development, approval, substance and application of the Special Policy.
D. Awarding to Plaintiff of its attorney’s fees and costs pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §2412; and
E. Such other and further relief as the Court may deem proper.

The embarrassed government (at least I hope they are embarrassed) wants the case to be dismissed on technical grounds, saying that Z Street has an “adequate remedy at law” to get their exemption. But that would not accomplish item C above, which is to expose the cynical use of the IRS by the administration to punish its ideological opponents.

Although the case has been heavily discussed in blogs and Jewish media, it’s interesting that the ‘regular’ media has almost entirely ignored it, despite its constitutional implications. Archival searches of the Washington Post, NPR and the NY Times — which not so long ago published a long article viewing with alarm the possible use of charitable donations to support settlements — show ZERO relevant hits.

Technorati Tags: Z Street, IRS, First Amendment

You can say a lot in a single sentence.

The great Melanie Phillips does it in an admittedly long one:

Israel, the victim of six decades of Arab aggression, is to be punished for frustrating ‘peace’ talks with its aggressors in which it is prepared to take part, on the grounds that it refuses to halt building homes which are said to be illegal but are not; while no punishment is to be meted out to the Arab aggressors who refused to take part in negotiations during the ten months that Israel did halt building these homes — within territories which during these past nine decades it has been entitled to settle under international law – even though these Arabs are the belligerents in the Middle East conflict and continue repeatedly to assert that they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state and who accordingly teach their children to grow up to hate and kill Israelis in order to achieve their never-renounced aim of destroying Israel; nevertheless these genocidal belligerents who have repeatedly turned down a state of their own ever since this was first offered to them more than seven decades ago because they wanted to wipe out Israel instead are to be rewarded by the EU while their victim is to be punished; and all to realise the creation of a state of Palestine which will surely turn in short measure into part of greater Iran, to the terrible cost of the Arabs living in such a state of Palestine and placing the free world in even more danger.

Elder of Ziyon nails it in even fewer words:

People have to start realizing that Palestinian Arab demands do not equal rights, and that a Palestinian Arab state cannot and should not be defined in a way that deprives the Jewish state and people of their own competing rights.

The fact that this needs to be said is testimony to the powerful reality distortion field that surrounds the conflict. There are other conflicts, some even longer-lasting and as seemingly intractable. But very rarely does one side get to make up its facts and have them automatically taken seriously by much of the world.

For example, as Elder of Ziyon also said, “Not one person has ever yet explained why Jerusalem must be a part of a Palestinian state.” Jerusalem was historically the seat of a Jewish kingdom and today is the capital of Israel. In modern times it has had a Jewish majority since the 1860’s. Yet the eastern portion thereof, from which Jews were driven at gunpoint in 1948 and where the holiest site in Judaism is located, is regularly referred to as ‘Arab East Jerusalem’, and the US, EU and UN consistently oppose construction inside Jewish neighborhoods there because “the Palestinians want that for the capital of their state.”

When did wanting become deserving?

Another distortion — alluded to by Phillips — is the inversion of aggression and victimization. Arabs have been starting wars and killing Jews and Israelis, violently opposing Jewish self-determination for at least a hundred years, and yet they are presented as the victims. Here are another two sentences to explain this, these by Canadian historian Gil Troy:

Arabs learned, that before a lazy, complacent world, they could mask sexism and homophobia, terrorism and dictatorship, their continuing rejection of Israel’s right to exist, behind a smokescreen of rhetoric treating the national struggle between Israelis and Palestinians as an expression of Jewish racism, colonialism, and imperialism. This New Big Lie was so potent it would outlast its Soviet creators, derail the UN, hurt the cause of human rights – and make Israel what the Canadian MP and human rights activist Professor Irwin Cotler calls the Jew among nations.”

Recently, a local acquaintance pointed to one of Roger Cohen’s diatribes about the illiberality of Israel and suggested that ‘progressive Jews’ needed to pay serious attention to the message therein, the message being that we shouldn’t support Israel because (according to Cohen and my acquaintance) it doesn’t live up to ‘progressive’ ideals — in a Middle East where it is a regular thing to punish free speech with imprisonment or bullets, where they hang gays and strangle uppity women!

The New Big Lie lives, even in Fresno.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Melanie Phillips, Elder of Ziyon, Gil Troy, Arab aggression, big lie