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Claudia Milani, the girlfriend of brutally murdered 'activist' Vittorio Arrigoni, visits his mourning tent in Gaza, wearing a checkered kefiya and what appears to be a PLO flag.

Arrigoni was an International Solidarity Movement activist, full of hatred for Israel, so much so that he was unable to feel sympathy for Gilad Shalit, imprisoned alone in a bunker in Gaza since June 2006 without Red Cross visits or communication with his family. Arrigoni created this album of cartoons, and he had the word ‘resistance’ in Arabic tattooed on his right arm. His death generated outrage in the ranks of Hamas (as well as a very clumsily photoshopped picture of Arrigoni with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh).

He was probably kidnapped by a group called “tawhid wal jihad” (monotheism and holy war), which demanded the release of its leader, who was in a Hamas jail. But long before the deadline expired, Arrigoni was found dead, hanged or strangled. Their motives aren’t clear, but it’s been suggested that the ‘monotheists’ wanted to establish their bona fides as uncompromising fighters against ‘Western corruption’.

So what about his girlfriend? It would be surprising if Claudia Milani had a different point of view than Arrigoni, and apparently she didn’t. Here is a photo from a Facebook page created by Arrigoni (in Italian) and a comment posted by Milani (h/t: Harry’s Place):

Sign in the window of a cafe in Petra, Jordan

Milani’s comment:

Sì, è eccessivo.

Ma è la riprova, se mai ce ne fosse bisogno, se mai la Storia non fosse riuscita ad insegnarci alcunché e noi da Lei nulla siamo stati in grado di imparare, del fatto che l’apartheid generi odio, l’odio rabbia, la rabbia il …torpore della ragione.

Inaspettatamente ingenuo, Israele, e con esso l’Occidente tutto, se ha creduto che il genocidio del popolo palestinese potesse restare impunito, stanca di ripeterlo.

Ancora grazie a te, Vik, che mai ti unisci al nostro coro e mentre noi gridiamo che questo mondo ci ripugna, stai in prima linea nel tentativo di rivoltarlo.

Here is a translation (thanks to a reader it’s much better than the Google version). Her position is clear:

Yes, it is excessive.

But it is proof if ever proof were needed, if ever history was not able to teach us anything, and if we haven’t been able to learn from it, that apartheid engenders hatred, hatred rage, and rage the slumber of reason.

Surprisingly naive, Israel and with her all the West has believed that the genocide of the Palestinian people would go unpunished, one gets tired of repeating it.

Again, thank you, Vik [Arrigoni], who never joined our choir while we cried that this world is repugnant to us, you were at the forefront in trying to overturn it.

Why do I care that the girlfriend of this murdered supporter of terrorists shares his offensively false beliefs?

Because she works for Amnesty International, which is supposed to be concerned with everyone’s human rights. I submit that taking the insane position that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian Arabs disqualifies her as having even a semblance of the impartiality that we must demand from this organization.

By the way, one of the first bloggers to notice this connection was Elder of Ziyon, who was taken to task by Amnesty for ‘targeting’ the bereaved woman. It also denied any anti-Israel bias. Here is part of his response:

In fact, Amnesty itself has no problem partnering with organizations that are explicitly dedicated to Israel’s destruction. If Amnesty accepts ab initio that the destruction of the Jewish state is a legitimate position, it is difficult to accept their argument that they are not biased against Israel.

It’s an unfortunate fact that the human rights industry devotes far more of its resources to the alleged violation of the rights of Palestinian Arabs, than to any other national or ethnic group — including those that actually are targets of genocide. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, many lesser NGOs and the UN human rights establishment itself, seem to exist primarily to attack Israel.

Another example is that of Hina Jilani, the Pakistani feminist lawyer, a co-author of the libelous Goldstone Report which accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza. After the principal author, Judge Richard Goldstone, recanted the most vicious accusation, that Israel deliberately intended to harm the civilian population, Jilani (with the other two co-authors) reiterated her support for the report’s conclusions.

Phyllis Chesler, an American Jewish and feminist activist, wrote an open letter to Jilani, asking how it was possible that they could both share a concern for oppressed women, while Jilani could not see the blatant bias against Israel and antisemitism that suffused the UN and the human rights NGOs. Chesler wrote,

I once worked at the United Nations. In my opinion, it is completely ineffective save in two areas: It has legalized Jew-hatred with a vengeance and it has provided a High Life for many Third World/developing world professionals who wish to be well paid to live in the West and yet also wish to retain or achieve reputations as champions of justice. Therefore, I understand the price you would have to pay if you broke with UN-Think or with Third World Think which is so intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israel—the convenient scapegoats for all the crimes and ills of the Arab and Muslim world.

Chesler’s letter is worth reading in its entirety. Will she get a meaningful answer? I doubt it.

Updated [24 April 1644 PDT]: A reader who reads Italian has improved the translation greatly from the Google version.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Vittorio Arrigoni, Claudia Milani, Amnesty International, Hila Jilani, Phyllis Chesler

It’s a truism that so many Jews who purport to care about human rights seem to care far more about the rights of Palestinian Arabs than those of other Jews, in particular, other Jews who live east of the Green Line — who have no rights at all.

Here is a really shocking example. The following article appeared in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv (the original Hebrew article is here) and was translated by NGO Monitor. The translation doesn’t appear to be on their website yet, so I’ve reproduced it for your edification:

The radical left identifies with the families of the murderers from Awarta

Kalman Liebeskind, Maariv

April 17, 2011

A week ago, subscribers to the mailing lists of extreme left organizations received an important invitation. The activists were summoned to visit the village of Awarta on Saturday, calling it a “solidarity visit” is not a distortion. The email invitation, which was signed by the Coalition of Women for Peace [which receives funding from the New Israel Fund in the US], Combatants for Peace, Gush Shalom, and Humans without Borders, included a few lines on the plight of the villagers of Awarta following the attack in Itamar and after the IDF began to suspect that the killers were from there: Harsh searches, property damage and curfews. Bus transportation [to the solidarity visit] would be provided from Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba and Jerusalem.

Today, the names of the murderers were released — Palestinian human animals who slaughtered the Fogel couple and their children. Today, everyone who heard the details, exposed in the GSS interrogations, could not remain indifferent. This terrorist attack horrifies, boils the blood, and maddens the mind.

But within our midst, there are groups who, more than being concerned for the murdered, are worried about what the killers and their families are going through. It is not the murder that keeps them up at night, but the details of how the IDF treats the suspects. Disgusting.

As mentioned, this visit of extreme left-wing activists can not be called anything other than a solidarity visit. With what exactly do they identify? This I leave to your imagination. However, this is what one of the organizers, Yaakov Manor, posted on the website of the Alternative Information Center (AIC) after the visit:

“Zacharia and I arrived today at Awarta around 3:00 pm. The village was under curfew; a military jeep blocked the main entrance to the village. We found a way to bypass the obstruction. We held the first meeting at the Village Council building. Qais Awad, head of the Council and other local activists attended. The local participants reviewed the situation in the village since the killings in the settlement of Itamar … Since the murder, most of the searches by Israeli security forces focus on Awarta … Dozens of villagers were arrested for investigations that were conducted roughly and under threats… more than 20 villagers are still detained by the security forces.”

Manor details here, in shock, the version of some detainees on the insulting questions asked and the treatment they received from their interrogators. His Palestinian hosts in Awarta also had an explanation as to why the IDF’s searches were focused specifically on them. Is it because there is intelligence information about their involvement? Absolutely not. Is it because this village has already produced several murderers? No way. Is it because maybe the two killers of the Fogel family used to live next door to some of the villagers and were assisted by some villagers? Of course not. The head of the council explained to the left-wing activist “that the army is laying the groundwork for expropriating over 1,000 acres of olive groves near the settlement.” You get it? It’s all a conspiracy. The activists, it seems, were easily convinced.

The website excitedly reports about the IDF’s intrusion into the villagers’ homes and searches conducted while damaging property and hurting residents. Really terrible. It would have been better to pick up a phone and ask if it would please the killers to enter the nearest police station. The friends of the extreme left activists in Awarta would probably help immediately. Actually not. Do you know why not? Because the “village elders,” so tells us Manor, “firmly denied any guilt in the act and claimed collective punishment in the most brutal fashion.” Well, if the friends from Awarta strongly deny, who are we not to believe them? In any event, after the meeting, the justice seeking left-wing activists went to the homes of two families, to show their sympathy for their sorrow.

Yes, you guessed it. It is the families of the murderers. “The horror we saw in house of Mohammed Awad’s family, can not be described but as a pogrom for its own sake,” wrote the left-wing activists. The murder in Itamar did not remind the Tel Avivian friends of a pogrom. The search in the house of the killer is what triggered memories of dark days. The family was taken from their beds in the morning chill, and an IDF soldier even took one of girl’s blankets. The activists sympathized with the family. The son of these poor wretches – the murderer, slaughterer, butcher, or whatever you choose – was arrested that same morning. The leftists were troubled by his sister’s blanket. Manor describes him as a first year university student, and his mother “seems broken, stunned by grief and sorrow. The fear and terror can still be seen in her eyes.” Indeed difficult images. “No wonder there was a gag order imposed on all the events in the village. Under this cover you can pull any mischief without criticism,” he concludes.

These friends, from the radical left, are proceeding to remove themselves from Israeli society. They are no longer part of us. Those who are damaged the most by their activity is the legitimate Zionist left, who must denounce them and remove them from its camp. It must.

Shabbat shalom.

Technorati Tags: Awarta, Fogel murders, NGO Monitor

Lately I’ve been wondering — given what we know about the nature of the ‘Palestinian cause’, why does it have so many supporters? What is the secret of the propaganda success of one of the ugliest, most vicious political movements around, one that explicitly calls for the violent destruction of another nation and displays its adherence to this principle by murdering vulnerable members of its civilian population on an almost daily basis?

The answer is that like a successful prostitute, the Palestinian movement is whatever its ‘clients’ want it to be, with appropriate targeted messages aimed at various communities:

A religious message for the Muslim world, in which Jewish Zionists have usurped Muslim control of a part of dar al Islam, which must be redeemed. This has been hugely successful with the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, even outside of the Middle East. For Arabs, there is the associated issue of Arab honor which must be regained.

A postcolonialist message aimed primarily at Europe, troubled by guilt for its exploitation of indigenous peoples throughout the world. Palestinian Arabs are presented as an indigenous people oppressed by European colonialist invaders who have taken their land and dispossessed them. Although based on a false historical narrative, this resonates well in Europe and also in the halls of academe in the US, Canada and the UK. For academics, there is the added benefit that the popularity of post-modernist theories of truth make it impossible to refute any theory, no matter how nonsensical.

An anti-racist message aimed primarily at the US, where the white population is suffused with guilt for the institution of slavery followed by institutional discrimination against African-Americans. Palestinian Arabs are (nonsensically) presented as discriminated against because of their ‘race’, comparisons are made to apartheid South Africa, and violent terrorism is compared to the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. This argument is epitomized by a recent article by Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch.

A human-rights message aimed at the West generally, in which the conflict is presented as a powerful militarized state oppressing powerless victims for reasons of race, ethnicity or just to exploit them and take their land and resources. This message is designed to obscure the real nature of the conflict, which is that the Palestinian Arabs are pawns in a concerted effort by the relatively powerful Arab states and Iran to destroy Israel.

In order to make the objective of destroying the Jewish state more palatable in the West, organizations like the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and various Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) sponsoring groups often present themselves as nonviolent. But the ISM functions to provide human shields for violent Arab terrorists, and the international BDS leadership says that they will not be satisfied until Arab ‘refugees’ get their ‘right to return’, so at best they are using nonviolent tactics to support a violent and murderous movement.

A message aimed at Christians, in which Israel is accused of driving Arab Christians out of Bethlehem and other places (in fact, Muslim fundamentalists are responsible), and of violating Christian principles in its treatment of Palestinian Arabs. It is also often combined with ‘replacement theology’, in which Judaism itself is attacked as illegitimate, as well as traditional Christian antisemitic concepts (“the Jews were responsible for the death of Christ”), etc. This message takes different forms, but has been effective with both liberal Protestants and some Evangelical Christians in the US.

A message aimed at liberal US Jews, in which it is falsely suggested that Israel is becoming a racist, undemocratic Orthodox theocracy, incompatible with the universalist ethics of liberal Judaism — and that it is therefore not worthy of support. This is the position I call “Beinartism.” Organizations such as J Street promulgate this view, and even claim to be “pro-Israel” while they work to undermine it.

The movement has attracted a great number of ‘useful idiots’ (a phrase attributed to Lenin), people from Western societies who are misled about the historical realities and the true ideology of the Palestinian movement, but whose fantasies are titillated by some of the false messages above. A paradigm case is “Queers for Palestine,” a group which somehow manages to ignore the fact that both the Muslim fundamentalist and Arab nationalist branches of the Palestinian movement would murder them as soon as look at them.

Another example is that of female volunteers for ISM and other pro-Palestinian groups who have been systematically sexually abused by Arab men.

Finally, last but not least:

A message for Jew-haters, in which it is pointed out that the enemies of the Palestinian cause are mostly Jews. And you can’t find a better argument than this one for a surprisingly large segment of the world’s population.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Arabs

Jerusalem Post writer Herb Keinon is right on target:

What do the murders and, even more so, the reactions to them or the fact that one-third of Palestinians, according to a Palestinian poll, support the Itamar attack, indicate about the Palestinian zeitgeist, that nation’s cultural, intellectual, spiritual and political climate? Is this a statehood-ready zeitgeist?

There are a few other little issues that Rich Richman recently noted:

Not to put too fine a point on it: if you can’t finish drafting your constitution; if your “president” is in the seventh year of his four-year term; if you have no functioning legislature and cannot hold parliamentary elections; if half your putative state is occupied by terrorists; if your education system is a cesspool of anti-Semitism; if you insist upon dedicating public squares to those who massacred civilians; if your ruling party is corroded by corruption; if you have no free press or independent judiciary; if you cannot implement anything in negotiations that you refuse to conduct in any event; and if you haven’t finished Phase I of the Roadmap . . . well, you might not be ready for a state.

Or, in the words spoken by J Street co-founder Daniel Levy about a different Mideastern nation,

Maybe … [Palestine] really ain’t a good idea.

No, it ain’t. But Oslo Syndrome sufferers — the Syndrome is endemic among Israeli intellectuals, artists and media people — continue to publicly act out their delusional psychosis, believing that only meeting all the demands of the Arab antisemites will purify Israel of its original sin:

JERUSALEM (Ethan Bronner, NY Times) — Dozens of Israel’s most honored intellectuals and artists have signed a declaration endorsing a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 lines and asserting that an end to Israel’s occupation “will liberate the two peoples and open the way to a lasting peace.” …

Of the more than 60 who signed by Tuesday, about 20 were winners of the Israel Prize and a number of others were awarded the Emet Prize, given by the prime minister for excellence in science, art and culture. Signatures were still being collected.

“The land of Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish people where its identity was shaped,” the statement begins. “The land of Palestine is the birthplace of the Palestinian people where its identity was formed.” It goes on to say that now is the time to live up to the commitment expressed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence by its founders to “extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness.”

The Land of Israel is indeed the birthplace of the Jewish people, more than 3,000 years ago. The Land of Israel is also the birthplace of the ‘Palestinian people’, who defined themselves into being in opposition to the Jewish people a bit more than 30 years ago. There was only a ‘land of Palestine’ twice that I can think of: once when the Romans renamed Judea Syria Palaestina after they crushed the Bar Kochba revolt in 132 CE, and once when the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate over a chunk of the former Ottoman Empire, where a Jewish National Home was to be established (the Brits turned out to be about as friendly to Jewish national aspirations as the Romans had been).

We started hearing about a ‘Palestinian people’ in the 1960’s, but before that they were just ‘Arabs’, much like other Arabs living in neighboring lands. I can’t guess whether an accommodation would eventually have been reached between them and Israel, because in 1993 Israeli leaders made the fateful mistake that would give a name to the system of delusions that rendered them blind to reality: they signed the Oslo agreements.

They agreed that the PLO, the same people that gave us the Munich Massacre, the Ma’alot Massacre, the Achille Lauro hijacking, the Bus of Blood and more, the terrorist organization that killed more Jews than any other, the group headed by the duplicitous murderer Yasser Arafat, would be “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Then they formed the governing authority for Palestinian Arabs, the Palestinian National Authority (PA) from the PLO, with Arafat as President. And they committed themselves to ultimately cede control of territory captured in 1967 for an Arab state that would grow out of the PA.

The first thing that Arafat did was to take control of the systems of education, media and state religion and turn them into one massive tool for indoctrination. While the Israeli educational system was being changed (by Oslo Syndrome addled left-wing politicians) to de-emphasize the history of the Jewish people and to replace nationalism with universalism, while the media worked to convince the worried public that increasing  terrorism was the result only of ‘extremists’ who were ‘against peace’, Arafat’s constituency was taught to hate.

They were taught that all of ‘Palestine’, from the river to the sea, belonged to them, and that they would get it back through violent ‘resistance’. They were taught that martyrdom for the Palestinian cause was the highest honor that a Palestinian could achieve. They were taught that Jews were evil and corrupt. They wrote poetry about killing Jews and gave it to children to recite on television. They learned all the traditional antisemitic themes.

A unique national culture was created among the Arabs, melding them together in the fire of their hatred, the culture that gave birth to the monsters that butchered the Fogel family, the culture that helped, protected and justified the crime of those monsters.

Arafat made no secret of any of this, calling for Jihad in Arabic while telling Israeli and American leaders in English that he wanted peace. Arafat inspired terrorists and paid them for their work, all the while pretending to cooperate in peace negotiations. Evidence of his duplicity was everywhere, but Oslo Syndrome victims were unable to see it.

Even when Arafat torpedoed negotiations in 2000 and began a vicious war in which more than a thousand Israelis were to die, stubborn cases of Oslo Syndrome persisted.

And so the intellectuals, artists, etc. who signed this declaration honestly but pathologically believe that the reason that there isn’t peace between Arabs and Israelis in the Land of Israel is that they, the Jews, haven’t tried hard enough. Nothing, of course, is expected of the Arabs, because it is all the Jews’ fault. If only the Jews would become better people and make up for the original sin of establishing a Jewish state in their historical homeland by giving in to all Arab demands, then there would be peace.

So take a group of people that is boiling with hatred, a group that has very little else in the their arts, literature, drama and politics except expressions of hatred, a group that has taken no practical steps toward building the infrastructure of a state — why would they need, for example, a free press or independent judiciary when the only immediate objective they have is to kill and drive out the hated Jews from ‘their’ land? — and give them a sovereign platform from which to realize their genocidal intentions.

Do this in the name of peace, they ask. How could this be a bad idea?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Arabs, Herb Keinon, Rich Richman