FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

My wife tells me that I worry too much. “Don’t borrow trouble”, she says. Well, here are a few of the things I worry about:

Nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorist proxies
The “Mutual Assured Destruction” of the Cold War was effective at preventing atomic war because both sides knew exactly who their enemy was, and where he lived. And also, to tell the truth, that regardless of what one thought about them, the leaders on both sides were not the type to get their jollies from the idea of incinerating their enemies. None of this is true today.

The internalization of antisemitism in human belief
It seems that there’s been antisemitism as long as there have been Jews (and even in places where there were not Jews), but the power of modern mass media and its deliberate employment by Israel’s enemies has caused half the world to take the idea that Jews and Israel are the embodiment of evil as an non-controversial given.

The development of radical Islam as normative Islam
For various reasons, from the simple psychological pull to extremes to complex political phenomena, more and more of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims are coming to hold radical forms of belief which promote violent and aggressive action in the name of Islam.

The loss of intellectual and moral vitality in the West
While the academic establishment rewards utter nonsense and seems to have entirely forgotten the notion of objective truth, political and business leaders pursue personal wealth at the expense of their constituents, customers, employees, stockholders, etc.

That’s probably enough for now. I can’t help worrying, it’s in the genes.

Technorati Tags: insomnia

An example of ‘unbiased’ news reporting from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress signaled its disapproval of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a vote Tuesday to tighten sanctions against his government and a call to designate his Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group.

The swift rebuke was a rare display of bipartisan cooperation in a Congress bitterly divided on the Iraq war. It reflected lawmakers’ long-standing nervousness about Tehran’s intentions in the region, particularly toward Israel—a sentiment fueled by the pro-Israeli lobby whose influence reaches across party lines in Congress…

The House passed, by a 397-16 vote, a proposal by [Tom] Lantos, D-Calif., aimed at blocking foreign investment in Iran, in particular its lucrative energy sector. The bill would specifically bar the president from waiving U.S. sanctions… [my emphasis]

The article goes on to add that

The legislative push came a day after Ahmadinejad defended Holocaust revisionists, questioned who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and declared homosexuals didn’t exist in Iran in a tense question-and- answer session at Columbia University.

And let’s not forget that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Does Congress need an Israel lobby to tell it these things?

Technorati Tags: Israel, AP, media bias, Israel lobby, Iran, Ahmadinejad, Lantos

Why does Ahmadinejad care about the Holocaust?

Possibly lots of reasons, but one of them is to make a poor argument against Israel.

“Granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people?” he said…

Ahmadinejad said he simply wanted more research on the Holocaust, which he said was abused as a justification for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians.

“Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?” Ahmadinejad asked. — Jerusalem Post report of his Columbia University speech

The Holocaust actually has little to do with the Palestinians, unless you are talking about the Palestinian Nazi, Haj Amin al-Husseini. But the idea that Israel was created as a result of the Holocaust is nonsense.

By 1939 the Zionists had put all of the institutions of the Jewish state in place. The only thing that remained was to kick out the British. And there’s no doubt that would have happened, with or without the Holocaust. Indeed, many of the six million would probably have ended up in Israel instead of the smokestacks of Auschwitz.

The Palestinians are paying the price, actually, of some choices made by their leaders and friends.

• They are paying for the choice made by al-Husseini to try to drive the Jews out of Palestine and, when this failed, to ally himself with Hitler.

• They are paying for the choice made by the Arab nations to try to destroy Israel in 1948.

• They are paying — a very high price — for the choice made by the Arab nations to not try to solve the refugee problem, but rather to exacerbate it in order to use it against Israel.

• They are paying the price for Nasser’s arrogance and desire to commit genocide in 1967.

• They are paying the price for almost everything ever done by Yasser Arafat.

• And now they are paying for electing a Hamas-dominated Palestinian authority.

Technorati Tags: Ahmadinejad, Israel, Palestinians, Holocaust

Recently I wrote about CSU Fresno’s developing Middle East Studies program. I suggested that it might — like many programs and academic departments of Middle East studies — have an uncomfortable slant, tending towards radical Islam and including tendentious anti-American and anti-Israel content.

One of the faculty members teaching several courses and proposed courses is Mary Husain. She has taught courses in the departments of Women’s Studies and Communications in the areas of “cultural studies, gender studies, and media persuasion”. She is listed to teach proposed courses in Middle Eastern Film Criticism, Middle Eastern News Analysis, and Intercultural Communication.

Ms. Husain has recently published an article with Kevin Ayotte, called “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil” (NWSA Journal, Vol. 17 No. 3). Although the article is not available on the web, I have obtained a copy from the library.

(more…)

Operation Defensive Shield (March 29 - May 3, 2002) was carried out in response to a series of catastrophic terror attacks against Israelis. Several IDF soldiers who took part are now suing Israeli Arab filmmaker Mohammed Bakri for libeling them in his film “Jenin, Jenin”:

During the fighting in Jenin, Palestinian spokesmen, human rights organizations and foreign journalists accused Israel of conducting a civilian massacre. In the end, it emerged, according to Israeli figures, that 52 Palestinians were killed in the refugee camp, including 38 armed fighters and 14 civilians. Twenty-three IDF soldiers died in the fighting.

Basing itself mainly on interviews with Palestinians in the refugee camp after the fighting ended, but also on film clips, Bakri portrayed Israeli troops as committing a series of war crimes. Although he described the film as a documentary, he did not interview Israeli officials or give them an opportunity to refute the allegations contained in the film. — Jerusalem Post

The film was full of false testimonies, dishonestly edited and faked footage, allegations of events that never happened, and so forth. Like the ’shooting’ of Mohammed al-Dura, “Jenin, Jenin” became a focal point of worldwide condemnation and fury at the “brutal massacre” that in fact did not take place.

Even after the UN investigated and agreed that the Israeli accounts of what took place were accurate, the blood libel did not go away. And “Jenin, Jenin” is still shown regularly around the world (it’s been shown several times here in Fresno, by CSU Fresno administrator Dr. Vida Samiian).

Here’s my personal connection: sometime after the film came out (and long after the facts about what actually happened in Jenin were known), my daughter met Bakri at a party in Tel Aviv. Bakri, an Israeli citizen who speaks perfect Hebrew, was asked if he actually believed that the his film was a true depiction of what had taken place.

His answer was something like this (unfortunately I have no direct quotation):

Yes, it is true. I’m an artist, not a historian, and the truth is that Israel is crushing my people and that’s what I depicted.

So, in perfect post-modern fashion, truth is whatever serves the artist’s political purposes. I will await the outcome of the trial with great interest.

Technorati Tags: Bakri, Jenin, Israel, IDF

Another anniversary approaches. The day has become part of most Americans’ internal photo albums. What were you doing when? For some reason, I remember the phone calls. My son, serving in the IDF: “What the f—?” I didn’t know. My sister-in-law, a naval doctor in Washington: she wasn’t in the Pentagon that day.

Personally, I had never liked the WTC, built on the site of the beloved Radio Row where I spent so much time as a kid. But of course afterwards it broke my heart every time I saw the New York skyline without it.

I worked my way through college as a transmitter engineer at a local broadcast station; radio and electronics have been my hobby since I learned Morse code as a boy scout. So I was particularly affected by the death of another transmitter guy and radio ‘ham’, Steve Jacobson. Here he is with the antenna structure on the roof of 1 WTC :

I also remember the President speaking from an undisclosed location, looking like a rabbit in the headlights before he and his people got their tough guy act together, and Mayor Giuliani striding through the rubble looking presidential.

The usual suspects started blaming US support of Israel for the attack, and soon the rumors started that the Jews had stayed home from work that day, that the Mossad and the Bush Administration had cooperated to carry out the attack and blame Arabs (The look on Bush’s face from the undisclosed location was enough to refute that one), and so forth.

Here in Central California, in a remarkable combination of hateful racism and abysmal ignorance, several Sikhs were attacked for wearing turbans, and in Arizona one was shot to death.

Six years after, the controversy about the motives of the 9/11 attackers continues. It is impossible, however, to understand the attackers without taking into consideration their radical Islamism, which sees the West as an enemy which must be crushed or fundamentally changed.

On Tuesday (this year, as in 2001, September 11 is a Tuesday), the local Islamic Cultural Center has organized a “Unity walk” to a local church. There will be speakers and refreshments, and I presume that the point will be made that there is a difference between moderate Islam and the radical Islamism of the terrorists, which of course is correct.

I’ll have details on the rest.

Technorati Tags: 9/11

The teenage daughter of a friend of mine recently returned from a 6-week trip to Israel. She went with a group of American and Israeli Jewish kids, of various backgrounds — secular, liberal, and orthodox. They traveled all over the country and met all kinds of people, including settlers, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians.

Someone asked her “if there is one thing that you learned on this trip that you would like to tell us about, what was it?”

She said something like this: “Beforehand, I thought that all we had to do to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was to get the two sides to understand each other’s point of view. Now I see that it’s much harder than that — it goes very, very deep”.

Indeed. This young woman has been active in interfaith activities. I’m sure that the emphasis was on understanding, listening to the other side’s point of view, and getting to know each other as individuals, not as stereotypes.

And probably what she heard was that if it were possible to prevent “a few extremists on both sides” from stirring up hatred and violence, the conflict could be solved by reasonable people talking, listening, and compromising.

But, as she found out, it’s not that easy. There are several kinds of basic disagreements between Israelis and Palestinians that can’t be settled this way. Here are just a few of many that inform the conflict:

• Disagreements about what happened in the past. Did the Zionists dispossess Arabs? Did the Arabs commit pogroms against the pre-state yishuv? Did the Palestinians and the Arab Nations attack the Jewish State in 1947-48 or did the Jews try to drive the Palestinians out? Why did the Palestinian refugees flee? Why did the Jews flee from Arab countries at the same time? What was Nasser’s true intent in 1967? Why did Oslo fail? Were most of the Lebanese casualties of the 2006 war civilians or Hezbollah soldiers? How many were there, anyway? Who shot Mohammad Dura (if anyone)?

• Disagreements about what is happening now. Are Palestinians in Gaza suffering from the international boycott of Hamas, or is Hamas getting plenty of aid and using it for a military buildup? Does Fatah represent anyone other than the US? Is Palestinian terrorism justified resistance to illegal occupation, or aggressive warfare against a legitimate state?

• Disagreements about intentions. Is Israel building the security fence primarily to keep out terrorists or to steal land? Does Fatah (assuming that it represents anyone) really intend to abide by a two-state peace treaty, or would they consider a Palestinian state in the territories merely a stepping stone to the conquest of Israel?

And the most difficult kind of disagreement of all,

• Disagreements about principles and ideology. Can Muslims live in a Jewish state? Can a Jewish state also be democratic? Can there be a Jewish state in the Middle East at all? Do Jews have a historic right to live in Judea and Samaria? Should the 1929 Hebron pogrom or the 1948 ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem be allowed to stand? Who must have authority over the Temple Mount? What should be the rights, if any, of descendants of refugees?

None of this is easy, and it is all connected, with the historical narratives serving as justification for today’s ideology. And there is one whole additional dimension of the conflict, which actually has little to do with Israelis and Palestinians:

• The meddling of outside interests. What are the goals of Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the US, the EU, Egypt, Syria, etc.? And what do they all expect to get out of the conflict?

Technorati Tags: Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The UN/EU attacks on Israel seem to be reaching new levels lately:

A UN conference, held at the European Parliament in Brussels, heard an array of speakers call for a boycott against Israel and strategize on ways to achieve its international isolation, during the first day of an event billed by organizers as a gathering to promote “Middle East peace”.

The ‘International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace’ has been organized by the UN’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and attracted political figures and pro-Palestinian members of non governmental organizations (NGOs).

…British Member of Parliament Clare Short said during her speech that Israel was not interested in a two-state solution, and blasted the EU for “allowing” Israel to build “an apartheid wall”. “The boycott worked for South Africa, it is time to do it again,” Short was quoted as saying…

Pierre Galand, European coordinator of the Committees and Associations for Palestine, claimed that the conference was taking place despite pressures to cancel it, and blamed the Fatah-Hamas conflict on “Israeli policy”. — YNet

So we have two of the major organizations which should be responsibly working to solve problems and promote peace, taking the side of the forces which are trying to use the Palestinians as a club to crush the Israeli state.

The behavior of the UN is not surprising, with its plethora of committees, divisions, special functionaries, etc., all of which exist simply to damage Israel. By hosting this conference, which was clearly designed as an anti-Israel tool, the EU too demonstrates that it is officially partisan in this regard.

The UN, meanwhile, continues to plan the “Durban II” conference on racism that will be held in 2009. With Libya chairing the planning committee, it’s hard to imagine that it will be friendly to Israel:

On Monday, Pakistan called for the 2009 conference, dubbed Durban II, to focus on the plight of Palestinians. A number of countries also spoke of expanding the definition of anti-Semitism to cover all Semitic people, i.e. Arabs. — Jerusalem Post [my emphasis]

This Orwellian attempt to define Jew-hatred out of existence seems obviously wrong and remarkably stupid to me, but the fact that “a number of countries” support it indicates the true extent of the antisemitic mindset — in which this seems perfectly sensible — throughout the world.

Technorati Tags: UN, EU, Israel, antisemitism, anti-Semitism

From the Gulf News (George S. Hishmeh):

My niece, Irene, called me a few days ago indignant that some of her American friends, including some Jews, keep describing typical Arab foods such as falafel, hummus and shawarma, among others, as Israeli…

My first impulse was to tell my niece that Israel was almost 60 year old and these food items have obviously existed long before then.

Actually, these foods predate the arrival of the Arabs in the region as well. Chickpeas (the main ingredient in hummus and falafel) were eaten by the ancient Egyptians. And the roasting of lamb on a spit (shawarma) probably goes back to prehistoric times.

So why are these Arab foods, George? Is there any reason to doubt that the Jews that lived in Land of Israel before the founding of the state — indeed all the way back to Abraham — ate these foods?

They are Middle Eastern foods, and Jews are no less Middle Easterners than Arabs, to the latter’s great and oft-times violent chagrin.

Technorati Tags: Jews, Arabs, Middle East, hummus, falafel, shawarma

Dear Mr. Ambassador,

You have asked Israel to “…’deliver’ American Jewish organizations and ensure that the US Congress does not pass a resolution characterizing as genocide the massacre of Armenians during World War I”.

Israeli officials tried to explain to you that Israel did not control American Jewish organizations such as the ADL, whose chairman recently issued a statement that (at least obliquely) recognized the Armenian Genocide committed by your Ottoman predecessors.

But you refused to accept this, saying “On some issues there is no such thing as ‘Israel cannot deliver’”.

Possibly you think that there is an international Zionist conspiracy which takes orders from Jerusalem, and it’s just a question of Israel issuing them. Coming from a country where journalists are jailed for ‘insulting Turkishness’, you expect orders to be obeyed.

Well, Mr. Ambassador, I have news for you.

The government of Israel (sometimes to its sorrow) does not control Jewish organizations, either right-wing or left-wing, in America, Israel, or anywhere else. Abe Foxman cannot be arrested for ‘insulting Jewishness’.

Your attempt to hold Turkish-Israeli relations hostage in order to force Jews to take a position that is contrary to their conscience is reprehensible, and in any event doomed. Jews will be Jews, they will not take orders, and they have very strong feelings about genocide denial.

My expectation is that the pressure will backfire, and Jews will close ranks and support the congressional resolution — even those who had previously stood aside for ‘practical’ reasons.

Update [28 Aug 1027 PDT]: The ADL has rehired Andrew Tarsy as New England regional director. Tarsy had been fired last week for opposing the (then) national organization’s position on the Armenian Genocide. See what I mean?

Technorati Tags: Turkey, Israel, Armenian Genocide, ADL

With all due respect to Anne Carr and to the bloody intractability of the conflict in Northern Ireland, Ms. Carr doesn’t get it:

A Northern Ireland peace activist told an audience of Arabs and Jews at the St. George Hotel in east Jerusalem on Friday, “If we Irish can solve our conflict, then so can anybody.”

Anne Carr, who opened the first integrated (Protestant-Catholic) school in Northern Ireland in 1986, was delivering the keynote address at a conference organized by the Bereaved Families Forum as a part of its “Knowing it the Beginning” project, which aims to bring together families who have suffered loss from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so that they can better understand each other…

“We have to work out a way of living together, respecting the dignity of each other, not creating a humiliating peace so we can feel contentment with our lot, and not resentment with our lot,” she said. — Jerusalem Post

There are of course some similarities between the Troubles and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in particular the employment of terrorism. But there are also fundamental differences.

The nationalists did not view the unionists as interlopers who must be killed or expelled from Ireland, as most Palestinians view the Jews in Israel. If they had come to power, they would not have ethnically cleansed the Protestant neighborhoods. The Roman Catholicism practiced in Ireland does not call for Catholics to hunt down and kill Protestants.

Although the British government may have sided with the unionists, they do not fire rockets into Catholic areas. Northern Ireland is not surrounded by hostile nations who wish to destroy the state using chemical or nuclear weapons, supposedly to help the Catholics.

There are not four or five million hostile Catholics in camps located in the Irish Republic who are not permitted to live normal lives, but are kept in a permanent state of limbo until they can be introduced into Northern Ireland to change the demographics (and incidentally, to wreak violent havoc).

The question in Northern Ireland is how the area will be governed. Will it be a part of the UK, the Irish Republic, or something in between? In the Mideast, one asks whether the Jews will keep their state or, after a bloody war which may become nuclear, the survivors will be dispersed again throughout the world.

The idea that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can be solved if only the two sides could sit down and talk enough is seductive but false. This is in part because the Palestinians have a wholly unrealistic view of what they are entitled to in any settlement. The Palestinian position is based on a narrative which distorts historical facts, perverts justice, and does not admit that they bear any responsibility for their actions.

I said ‘in part’ because the other part is the fact that in the Middle East the Palestinians are just the tip of the iceberg. Israel is under siege by the entire Arab world, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia, who are pumping large sums of petrodollars into support for Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas which directly confront Israel, and which shortly will be at war with her. There is nothing even remotely analogous to this in the Irish example.

So, while I am certainly in awe of the Irish, who may have ended a conflict that has been going on in some form or other for centuries, I suggest that there’s more than “working out a way of living together” that has to occur before there will be peace in the Middle East.

Technorati Tags: Northern Ireland, Anne Carr, Israel, Palestinians

Abraham Foxman of the ADL has issued a new statement regarding the Armenian Genocide, which includes the following truly remarkable paragraph:

We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as massacres and atrocities. On reflection, we have come to share the view of Henry Morgenthau, Sr. that the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide. If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide. [my emphasis]

Does Mr. Foxman think he is writing some kind of international treaty whose language must be creatively ambiguous? Or perhaps one of those software licensing agreements?

What he should be saying is that the ADL was wrong in not applying the word ‘genocide’ to the aforesaid events, which in fact were a genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire. It would have been much easier to write than the tortured prose above, which is not going to win him a lot of friends among either Turks, Armenians, or Jews who understand the importance of calling genocide by its name.

The statement also includes the following explanation:

Having said that, we continue to firmly believe that a Congressional resolution on such matters is a counterproductive diversion and will not foster reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and may put at risk the Turkish Jewish community and the important multilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel and the United States.

Of course I don’t know what threats the Turkish government has made. However, if they are attempting to hold the Turkish Jewish community hostage for actions taken by the US Congress, this should be exposed as a clear violation of their human rights, and Turkey should be censured for it.

Technorati Tags: ADL, Foxman, Armenian Genocide