FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

There is an international conspiracy that reaches throughout the world, a conspiracy that is supported by you and me, citizens of the developed nations of world.

This conspiracy involves the UN and the very well-funded network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) associated with the UN. We can call it the “Durban conspiracy”, after the UN-sponsored Durban Conference on Racism of 2001, where NGOs ambushed Israel (and ignored actual racist regimes), passing resolution after resolution accusing her of racism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, state terrorism, colonialism, denial of self-determination, apartheid, crimes against humanity, etc.

It was at Durban that the strategy of delegitimizing and discrediting Israel in order to isolate and weaken her was fully articulated. The ultimate goal is to destroy. There’s no other way to understand it.

Now, having long since taken control of the UN, the tentacles of the conspiracy are infiltrating that other bastion of progressive modern civilization, the European Union (EU):

The United Nations has scheduled an “International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace”, to be held in the European Parliament in Brussels, August 30-31. This misleading [title] not withstanding, this annual conference is held under the auspices of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the International Coordinating Network for Palestine – frameworks that promote the conflict through NGOs involved in implementing the Durban agenda of demonization. This year, for the first time, the exercise is gaining the legitimacy of sponsorship by the European Parliament, further highlighting the role that the Europe Union plays in supporting the radical NGO campaign. — NGO Monitor

If you still think that there is some possibility that this conference may actually be about peace rather than support for anti-Israel activities, note that topics include

“The situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and civil society response”, “Action by civil society organizations working in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”, workshops on “Fortieth anniversary of occupation: building on action taken by civil society…”, and “Strengthening campaigns to end occupation, including grassroots campaigns against the wall, rallying around Bil’in”

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know that our UN contains a “Division for Palestinian rights“? Here are a few of the things it does:

• Organizing the annual commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People;

• Preparing studies and publications relating to the question of Palestine and the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and promoting their widest possible dissemination, including in cooperation with the Department of Public Information;

• Maintaining liaison with NGOs which are active on the issue;

• Maintaining and developing the Web-based United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL).

UNISPAL is impressive, by the way, containing audio, multimedia, photographs, etc. There are no pictures of Qassam rockets, but here’s a nice one of a postage stamp.

And I haven’t mentioned the “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” who is required by his mandate to only see the Palestinian side of any story, or indeed the United Nations Human Rights Council:

By the beginning of 2007, the Council had passed eight resolutions condemning Israel, and none condemning any other country. More resolutions targeting Israel have been proposed for upcoming sessions. Israel, the United States and some human rights groups raised concerns about this revival of a practice of the UN’s discredited former Commission on Human Rights. — Wikipedia

These are some of the official UN agencies that exist only to target Israel. There are also more than a hundred NGOs listed by NGO watch, funded by governments, the UN, the EU, etc. that take the side of the Palestinians. Many of these are hard-core anti-Zionist organizations that exist only to support the anti-Israel cause. These were the perpetrators of the Durban conference.

So the next time someone tells you that there is a well-funded international conspiracy working behind the scenes to control the policies of nations, the contents of media, and even the minds of ordinary people, you will know exactly what he or she is talking about.

Technorati Tags: UN, EU, NGO, Durban, Palestinians, Israel

Recently I wrote about attending a lecture by a Holocaust denier at a local church. It was upsetting to listen to the speaker’s repeated statements that yes, a lot of Jews died, it was war after all, but there was no concerted effort on the part of Hitler and the Nazis to wipe out the Jewish people.

The speaker had an answer for everything, and it’s impossible to respond to every ‘fact’ that someone can invent. It takes painstaking research, and by that time they have invented another ‘fact’. So even though historical facts — this happened or it didn’t — are absolutely true or false, there is no absolute proof in history the way there is in mathematics.

But after a while the weight of the evidence, the preponderance of the research, becomes so overwhelming that we can say that we know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that such-and-such did occur. At this point, ‘revisionist’ history stops being constructive, and we need to look for motives behind it other than a disinterested search for truth. This is the way it is with the Holocaust.

And this is the way it is for the Armenian Genocide.

Which brings me to Watertown Massachusetts, where local Armenians are asking the city to remove itself from an ADL program (”No Place for Hate”) because the ADL does not take a position on the Armenian Genocide and lobbied against a congressional resolution calling on the US to recognize it:

[ADL director Abraham] Foxman said he is surprised that he has become a target of Armenians. The ADL, a group founded in 1913 to fight anti-Semitism, has no official position on the Armenian genocide, he said.

“I’m not going to be the arbiter of someone else’s history,” he said in the interview, adding that he does not believe that Congress should either. When asked specifically if what happened to Armenians under the Ottoman Empire was genocide, he replied, “I don’t know.” The ADL only takes positions, he said, on current events, not on something that happened in the past.

Many groups oppose the resolution, including of course the Turkish Republic — although the resolution makes it quite clear that the guilty party was the Ottoman Empire. However, general international recognition of the genocide might make it possible for Armenians to claim compensation from Turkey. Turkey has applied pressure in many directions, including that of the US State Department which is concerned about Turkey’s relations with the Kurds in northern Iraq, and the State of Israel which sees Turkey as its only Muslim ‘ally’ (although in my view it’s a pretty poor ally).

It’s also possible that the ADL was influenced by an implied threat to the Turkish Jewish community.

Nevertheless, Foxman’s position is not supportable:

“You would never ever say that about the genocide in Darfur; you would never ever say that about the Holocaust,” said [Sharistan] Melkonian. “You need to stop genocide anywhere you can, and the only way to stop genocide in the future is to acknowledge that it happened.” — Boston Globe

It is contradictory for the ADL to oppose Holocaust denial vigorously, as it should, while refusing to take a position on another historically documented genocide.

And it doesn’t set a good precedent, either, in a practical sense. Today, pseudo-historical revisionism is being used by Israel’s enemies to claim that Jews dispossessed Palestinian Arabs unfairly from their lands, that Israel engineered the war in 1967 for expansionist motives, etc.

The ADL is wrong about this issue and should change its position.

Technorati Tags: ADL, Armenian Genocide, Watertown

One of the most effective propaganda techniques around is to keep repeating the most extreme exaggerations and outrageous falsehoods imaginable about your enemy; the reader applies a reasonable discount and assumes that maybe 25% of what you say is true. Of course, the real percentage is close to zero.

This works especially well if your enemy is more or less truthful. Then the reader is inclined to split the difference, and believes 50% of your rubbish.

Ami Isseroff has written a colorful description of much of the Arab media, with examples:

I am tired of being inundated with the flood of intellectual effluvia that spews forth from the sewers of official Arab world publications. These concoctions often have what can be politely described as “authentic Middle Eastern flavor.” Middle Eastern food is famously redolent of savory flavors and exquisite odors: mint and sesame, hel and kusbarah, garlic and onion, the smoke of open fires, and occasionally, though less discussed in polite company, camel and donkey excrement and similar odors…

The flavor and aroma of Middle Eastern journalism, too often tends in the direction of the camel dung, bad sanitation, rotten eggs and spoiled meat of racism and xenophobia, rather than the kusbarah and hel and fresh ground Turkish coffee of original and imaginative thought.

Read the article and note the examples. We can laugh at the crazy rantings that pass for ‘news’ and ‘analysis’ in the Arab world, but the fact is that it is highly effective, especially with people who read only Arabic (or who are illiterate and learn their facts from TV and radio). In that case, the believability factor is not 25% or 50% but approaches 100%.

It can be argued that this phenomenon — much more than differences in the concrete interests of the parties — is a major motivator of terrorism, and perhaps even the single most important factor preventing real peace settlements between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab nations.

If you want to know who desires peace and who doesn’t, just ask “who sponsors the incitement”?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arab nations, Palestinians

It’s time for some clarity regarding the relationship of the Bush administration to Saudi Arabia — in terms of the national interest of the US as well as the consequences for Israel.

A complete discussion of Saudi influence in the US is beyond the scope of a blog post, but it’s well known that it is enormous — both in the private and government spheres.

Jimmy Carter’s Saudi funding — both for the Carter Center and for, shall we say, more personal needs, is well known. It’s also common knowledge that Saudi money has built and supported mosques throughout the nation, mosques where political as well as religious doctrine is propagated.

The House of Saud has developed a technique of gaining influence over the US government that Daniel Pipes calls “preemptive bribing“:

A hint of the problem comes from none other than Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Washington Post reports that he boasted of his success at cultivating powerful Americans: “If the reputation . . . builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.”

The extent of this practice is remarkable:

[Former CIA case officer Robert] Baer notes that every Washington think tank has taken Saudi money, as have numerous lobbyists, PR firms, lawyers, and every presidential library of the last thirty years. Nor is this all.

Despite CIA censorship, [Baer’s book] Sleeping With The Devil reveals that there is hardly a living former CIA director, assistant secretary of state for the Near East, White House staffer, or member of Congress who hasn’t ended up on the Saudi payroll in one way of another. “At the corporate level, almost every Washington figure worth mentioning has served on the board of at least one company that did a deal with Saudi Arabia.” — Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Nor are the media free of Saudi influence. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns large stakes in Time Warner and even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The Bush family and administration is especially close to the Saudis. Adviser James Baker’s law firm represents the Saudi government and he was senior counsel to the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with large investments in Saudi Arabia. Former President George H. W. Bush was a Carlyle Group Adviser and is a large shareholder. Indeed, representatives of the Bin Laden family were in Washington for Carlyle’s annual meeting on 9/11 (and were allowed to leave the country shortly thereafter, as Michael Moore gleefully pointed out in “Fahrenheit 911″).

The Saudi kingdom’s support for radical Sunni Islamism should be worrisome to the US, which is one of its prime targets. And Saudi Arabia’s influence on US policy, such as the decision to invade Iraq (for which some blame Israel!), is a highly dangerous aspect of the relationship.

The President’s new Israel/Palestine policy, as enunciated in his speech yesterday, also shows traces of the Saudi hand, probably by way of James Baker. There’s no doubt that the President’s adoption of the highly unbalanced Arab (Saudi) Initiative represents that Saudi point of view, as does the build-up of a powerful Fatah army as a counterforce to the Iranian/Syrian supported Hamas.

As I wrote Monday, the development of a massive Fatah army in the West Bank is terribly dangerous for Israel, and will not result in the elimination of Hamas or its conversion into a moderate force, as the plan’s proponents seem to suggest.

If the US wants a two-state solution which includes a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel, a huge military buildup of forces opposed to the existence of Israel is not the way to achieve it.

But one can see the Saudi vision of ‘peace’ in this proposal: the Israeli state forced back to 1967 borders, forced to take in Palestinian ‘refugees’, and forced to accept a powerful enemy, armed and financed by the US and perhaps the Saudis, sitting in the West Bank a few miles from her population centers.

Technorati Tags: Saudi Arabia, George Bush, James Baker, Iraq, Israel

More and more prisoners and fugitives connected to Fatah are to be released or pardoned. Israel has given the Palestinians a list of 256 prisoners that will be freed shortly as a goodwill gesture to the Abbas/Fayyed government in the West bank.

In addition, Israel agreed to pardon 178 fugitives, including the al-Aqsa brigades commander in Jenin, Zakaria Zubeidi, if they agreed to “lay down their arms” and not engage in terrorism against Israel again. These former terrorists are now being absorbed into the Palestinian Authority’s ’security’ services, where of course they will be issued new weapons.

But even that is apparently not enough. Today, YNet reports that

Israeli and Palestinian security officials met Monday to discuss expanding the list of 178 wanted Fatah members set to receive amnesty from Israel.

The officials discussed the possibility of adding 206 members of the organization’s armed wing – the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - to the list. However, the list presented by the Palestinians to Israel includes the names of 28 operatives to whom Israel refuses to grant amnesty.

Ynet has learned that Israel may agree to allow these members to move to other cities in the West Bank, or move abroad for several years, an option the Palestinians have so far rejected.

The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades is a murderous terrorist organization that targets Israelis, civilians and soldiers, both inside and outside the Green Line. It has probably killed more Israelis than any other terrorist group, including Hamas.

What can possibly explain the mad rush to make dangerous concessions of this type? What is Israel getting in return from the Palestinians?

My opinion is that pressure is coming from the US. This is the implementation of the policy enunciated by President Bush in his speech yesterday, in which he mentioned the Palestinian security services no less than three times.

The plan seems to be that a Fatah army will be built to confront Hamas, in the West Bank and possibly in Gaza. Made up of former terrorists (after all, they are the ones capable of fighting), possibly including Palestinian Badr Brigade members from Jordan, and armed and trained by the US, they will be the tool by which Hamas is to be opposed.

I can’t think of a stupider plan, from Israel’s point of view. Take a bunch of violently anti-Israel terrorists located a few miles from Israel’s population centers, arm them, train them, even invite more of the same from other countries, and pay them to fight another terrorist group!

Suppose they succeed in destroying Hamas? Then what? Do they suddenly become peace-loving vegetarians who devote their energies to gardening?

Or suppose they decide that their common interest with Hamas — killing Jews — permits a temporary alliance to further their goal?

Or suppose that, after the arming and training and “bolstering”, Saudi Arabia comes along and manages to negotiate a unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas? Then Israel is facing hostile non-state armies on three sides.

I know that President Bush strongly supports Israel, but I think he has been sold a bill of goods by the Saudi-influenced Baker faction. This plan simply creates a monster that will sooner or later turn on Israel.

Israel must, somehow, get free of US domination and make her own security decisions. One lesson of the Holocaust is that the Jewish people can’t leave its security in the hands of others, no matter how well-meaning they may seem.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Bush, Fatah, Hamas

Hamas TV has replaced the murdered Farfour the mouse with a new character, a bee named Nahoul who plans to take revenge on the “enemies of Allah, the killer of the prophets and of the innocent children” as well as the killers of his cousin Farfour.

One interesting difference is that Nahoul, unlike the defenseless Farfour — who was beaten to death by a hateful Israeli who wants to steal his land — has a stinger. We will see how this plays out.

What chills me about this is that the program is aimed at little children. I remember watching Howdy Doody as a child of six and passionately following Howdy’s struggle to defeat the nefarious plans of Mr. Bluster. Of course the worst thing that Mr. Bluster ever did was to scheme to take over Howdy’s circus.

What they are learning is that Israelis and Jews are horribly, irredeemably evil creatures who want to kill Palestinian children and steal their land. They are learning that the only way to redeem Palestine is through violent Jihad, and that the highest goal is martyrdom in its service. They are learning the value of revenge. And so on.

Looking at the history of Jews and Arabs in the land of Israel for the last 100+ years is depressing, because it’s clear that it’s coming down to this: us or them. There isn’t going to be peace until one side is gone.

Have all the failures to reach agreement in recent history been due to mistakes and miscalculations on one or both sides? Or is it something deeper? Something that keeps coming back, like Nahoul?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, Farfour, Nahoul

Here goes, the UN is planning to stick it to Israel yet again:

The Sheba Farms, a small tract of land in the north of Israel, is Lebanese territory, according to an expert UN cartographer, Israel Radio reported Wednesday, quoting an unnamed official in Jerusalem.

An official UN statement on the issue was yet to be published…

Israel was against any decisive UN statements regarding the area, fearing that a public admission that the territory was Lebanese would effectively render Israel’s 2000 pullout from Lebanon incomplete and give Hizbullah justification to re-ignite a military confrontation with Israel. — Jerusalem Post

Who gives a rat’s posterior about this tiny (10 sq. miles) militarily unimportant piece of ground on the border between the Golan and Lebanon?

Nobody, really, except the residents. Like the Palestinian refugees, it’s a club to beat Israel with. The area was generally considered Syrian, and Israel conquered it along with the rest of the Golan in 1967.

In 2000, Israel withdrew from South Lebanon. In order to ensure that nobody could claim that Israel was occupying Lebanese territory, she asked the UN to demarcate the border between Israel and Lebanon (the so-called ‘Blue line’) and to certify that Israel had withdrawn completely from Lebanese territory. This they did.

Hezbollah, however, has always claimed as a pretext for cross-border raids, missile attacks, etc. that the Sheba farms area was actually part of Lebanon, and that their terrorism was actually ‘legitimate resistance’ against an illegal occupation.

Now the UN may be planning to reverse itself and side with Hezbollah.

I can’t think of one positive thing the UN has done regarding Israel since 1947. Can you?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Sheba Farms, Lebanon, Syria, UN

While PM Olmert prepares for a visit from Condoleeza Rice — who will certainly be wanting to talk about new ways of ’strengthening Abbas’ — Hamas has been strengthening itself in Gaza:

Hamas’ military industry is giving serial production numbers to the roadside charges and Qassam rockets it manufactures, a senior intelligence officer in the Southern Command told Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi during his visit to the rocket-battered town of Sderot on Monday.

According to the officer, intelligence sources believe that a real ‘Hamas army’ exists in the Gaza Strip and includes between 7,000 and 10,000 soldiers, who are being armed continuously with weapons smuggled through the Philadelphi route…

In spite of the smuggling of weapons from Egypt to Gaza, the most worrying thing as far as the IDF and the Shin Bet are concerned, is the fact that representatives of the organization acquire knowledge outside the Strip, mainly in Tehran.

The return of the “students” to Gaza and the passing of knowledge to many others constitutes a key threat which cannot be fully addressed even through a wide-scale ground operation in the Strip. — YNet

Meanwhile, Rice will be talking to Israeli PM Olmert and Palestinian President Abbas, in the words of US State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack,

…to try to move the process forward, move the Israeli-Palestinian track forward — a number of different levels, to talk on a very practical level day to day, how can each side try to make the lives of their respective populations a bit better. And on both sides, we know what that entails, so — and also to try to talk a little bit about the political horizon and the fact that it is important to work at both levels. So it’s also a trip that was intended to support Prime Minister Olmert’s statements about wanting to build a foundation for discussions about a future Palestinian state. It’s also a trip that’s designed to support President Abbas.

Translation: Israel will be told to free prisoners, continue transferring funds, remove roadblocks and checkpoints from the West Bank, etc. Abbas will be asked to say that he is opposed to terrorism. Then everyone will say how wonderful it will be when Palestine is established with Abbas as President, all the while ignoring the monster in the basement.

McCormack continues and does say a number of negative things about Hamas. But then he adds,

Now, it’s our view that President Abbas is the President for all the Palestinian people that Prime Minister Fayyad is the Prime Minister for all the Palestinian people. But ultimately, they’re going to need to reconcile those differences.

What could he possibly mean? Is he suggesting that some day Hamas will just give up, and go away? Will it accept a Palestinian government for “all the people” run by Abbas? I don’t think they machine-gunned and deculmenated* all of those Fatah people in order to fade away. Or is he suggesting that Fatah and Hamas must ultimately join together in some kind of unity government?

Since the latter is apparently the position of the Saudi regime, it would not surprise me at all to learn that the US State Department feels the same way.

Interestingly, an Arab League delegation may or may not be coming to Jerusalem this week, and it may or may not represent the Arab league, but in any event the intent is to push the Arab League Peace Initiative again. It’s likely that this will be conditioned on unity among Palestinian factions. The “international community” will be hard put to object, since it is all in the interest of peace.

Of course, if the Palestinians decide to kiss and make up, or at least pretend to work together, all of the aid and weapons that have been given to Abbas to “strengthen” him will also be in the hands of Hamas; and Hamas members will come in out of the cold as part of the new Palestinian regime.

* Deculmenate - v., to throw off of a roof (after the model of defenestrate).

Technorati Tags: Israel, Abbas, Hamas, Condoleeza Rice, Arab League

It’s about time:

Men who immigrate to Israel between the ages of 24 and 29 are often drafted by the IDF for an abbreviated and - many complain - purposeless service as truck drivers or guards. Now, with the focus of aliya shifting to the affluent nations of the West, the government is launching a program to offer these young men, who often have valuable skills, a more meaningful military service. — Jerusalem Post

I was in my 30’s when I moved to Israel. I rather enjoyed my four weeks of basic training. My fellow recruits were of a similar age and of diverse backgrounds. Many were from Soviet Georgia, and they enjoyed singing songs in Russian as we marched around (the only words I could catch were “Comrade Stalin”). They insisted on calling me ‘Steve’, pronounced Styiv, because “all Americans are named Styiv“. I had learned to shoot while working on the Riflery Merit Badge in the Boy Scouts, but the Georgians insisted that I must have served in Vietnam (”you shoot good Styiv, Vietnam”), and would greet me by saying “Styiv blat, Vietnam!”

When the fun was over, I went to the officer who was deciding what we would do in our future careers as reservists. I explained to him that I made my living as a computer programmer capable of working in many languages, that I had worked my way through college as a broadcast transmitter engineer, and was well versed in electronics. I was even expert in Morse code! “Tzahal has a place for you”, he said. “You will go to the Air Force.”

(more…)

By Vic Rosenthal

Some time ago I wrote about Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel (see The Church of Antisemitisim). Last night I had the opportunity to meet his wife.

Ingrid Rimland Zündel is of German Mennonite extraction; so it wasn’t surprising that she has been in our valley — home to many Mennonites — more than once. Last night she spoke at a local Mennonite church.

I went with some trepidation, imagining the place packed with skinheads and Jew-hating survivalists from the mountains. I invited retired newsman Murray Farber (known on the streets of New York as “fearless Farber” some 60-odd years ago) to accompany me. Both Murray and I had family members in Europe murdered by the Nazis.

I needn’t have worried. The only skinheads present were involuntary ones, older church members. There was a total of 13 people in the audience, including Murray and me. One of the reasons for this became clear in the parking lot, where we met the pastor of the church handing out flyers saying that the event was not sponsored by the church, and that the content did not reflect its (or his) views. He told us that he had done his best to discourage members from attending. One of the members of the congregation, an immigration lawyer who had represented Ernst Zündel when he was deported from the US, had been very persistent in promoting the event.

Mrs. Zündel appeared to be a pleasant woman in her sixties, and spoke about her husband’s difficulties with the authorities in Canada, the US, and Germany. He was persecuted unfairly and terribly, she said, because of his tireless work to spread the truth. This is not allowed because the Holocaust “myth” is a huge “cash cow”, used to extort reparations from Germany and sympathy for Jews and Israel in the US. It is a fraud and a hoax, she said.

“There is an enormous amount of money flowing to Israel because of the Holocaust; that’s why the US, Canada, and Germany spent so much money prosecuting my husband”, she explained.

She insisted that nobody was gassed at Auschwitz — Zyklon B was only used for delousing. Of course the Germans were very angry at the Jews (!), and many of them were shot because they were “collaborating with the enemy and sabotaging us”. Anyway, bullets were cheaper than gas. But only 278,000 died in Auschwitz, mostly from disease. “There was never a Fuehrer order” to kill the Jews. “It was not in Hitler’s interest” for PR reasons to have a genocide.

As she spoke and warmed to her subject, she stopped seeming like a pleasant woman to me. I began to feel the chill of the 1940’s, when my parents and grandparents gathered around the radio, listening to the news reports from Europe and wondering about their siblings and cousins (none of whom, we later determined, survived the war). I began to feel the presence of something very old and very bad.

Americans need to wake up, said Mrs. Zündel, before they lose their freedom as Ernst has. The Palestinians understand “this criminal racket” but most of the rest of the world is “brainwashed”. The judicial system has been “co-opted”. We have been lied to about the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11, Vince Foster, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Holocaust. “The truth can free the world if it comes out”.

“There will be no peace in the US until this weapon [the Holocaust] can be taken away from what is plaguing this country”. She didn’t specify exactly “what is plaguing this country”, but she didn’t need to at this point.

Murray asked her about the evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials. “Nuremberg was a tool that allowed Israel to be created”. What about the testimony of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss? “He made his confessions under torture”. What about the Wannasee conference? “All lies”.

The local lawyer who had organized the event spoke a bit afterwards. He said that one of the problems he had in getting attention paid to Ernst Zündel’s allegedly illegal treatment by the US authorities was that “immigration lawyers are predominately Jewish”, so they wouldn’t take the issue seriously. He added that there is a “high level of control of a certain segment of the community over the media”, which prevents the truth from being known.

Murray and I didn’t stay for the refreshments after the talk.

Technorati Tags: Fresno, Holocaust denial, Zundel, antisemitism, anti-Semitism

‘Real’ American baseball has come to Israel, thanks to American Jewish businessmen connected to Major League Baseball.

You can read about it in the link above. For me it brings back memories from 25 years ago, when I coached a baseball team on my kibbutz.

The kids enjoyed playing a game called hakafot which was similar to baseball in that it involved hitting a ball with a stick and running, at which point the relationship ended. But American baseball games were televised by a Christian missionary TV station in Lebanon, and my son was immediately hooked.

I don’t know why. My son came on aliyah when he was 2-1/2 years old. None of the Israeli-born kids were particularly interested in the games on TV (at first). But somehow my son knew. It was in his genes.

(more…)

By Vic Rosenthal

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one — A. J. Liebling, journalist.

The New York Times owns several. And so do the Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, and other newspapers, which they used to print an op-ed by Ahmed Yousef, an advisor to Gaza Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh last week.

Big media organizations have an arrogance that comes with power. Presses (and tv/radio transmitters too) are expensive, and they dole out access according to their priorities.

My local newspaper will publish a maximum of one letter a month from me, not to exceed 200 words (assuming that they find it interesting and not objectionable). Hey, it’s their press.

But those who own large numbers of big presses also have responsibilities beyond their bottom lines.

When the spokesman for an organization with an explicitly antisemitic charter, a charter that explicitly calls for another genocide against the Jewish people, writes an op-ed calling for the destruction of a legitimate state, should his voice be amplified by the ‘responsible’ media?

Yes, he calls for the destruction of a legitimate state. Yousef writes:

Yet it remains that Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and other parties, and they all share the same goals — the end of occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace. For more than 60 years, Palestinians have resisted walls and checkpoints intended to divide them. Now they must resist the poisonous inducements to fight one another and resume a unified front against the occupation. — (no link, I own this press) [my emphasis]

If the Hamas covenant were not clear enough, it’s obvious from this that to Hamas the ‘occupation’ is not just the occupation of the territories captured in 1967, nor even the ‘occupation’ marked by the establishment of the state of Israel — it is the presence of Jews in what they consider their land, Muslim-only land.

Terrorism lives in a symbiotic relationship with the media. Groups like Hamas feed on media coverage. Giving them a voice is aiding and abetting them.

Thank you, New York Times, Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, and so forth. Sleep well.

Technorati Tags: Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, New York Times, Washington Post, Sacramento Bee