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Quote of the week: the Muslim-Jewish conflict

Friday, October 29th, 2010

This week’s quotation is from a review of Martin Gilbert’s “In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands” by Jonathan Kay:

The creation of the Zionist movement radically changed the Western understanding of the Muslim-Jewish conflict — sweeping up generations of campus intellectuals who have projected upon it all their own obsessions with colonialism and class struggle. But in the Muslim world, Gilbert’s narrative shows us, Israel’s creation actually didn’t change the Muslim-Jewish dynamic as much as is commonly imagined. The rhetoric and barbarism hurled against Israeli Jews after the Zionist project began were not new but simply the old, more diffuse rhetoric and barbarism being redirected, as by a lens, toward a particular pinprick on a map. This is tied up with the reason that many Muslims refuse even to say the word “Israel,” preferring terms such as “the Zionist entity”: Deep down, they regard Israel not as a country in the proper sense but rather as a sort of soil-and-concrete stand-in for the stubborn, maddeningly ineradicable Jewish presence in Middle Eastern life since the age of Muhammad.

Kay’s review is titled “Fourteen Centuries of Hatred” and that about sums it up. Unfortunately, unlike the Catholic Church, which (perhaps as a result of the Holocaust) officially renounced and condemned the baseless hatred that had characterized its relationship to the Jewish people for centuries, Islamic authorities in general have not preached an end to antisemitism. Rather, as Kay suggests above, they have simply focused it more sharply.

This helps explain the persistent anti-Israel incitement that flows from Arab sources:

Jew eats Dome of the Rock in Jordanian cartoon

Jew eats Dome of the Rock in Jordanian cartoon

Hatred justified by an appeal to Islam persists even in the US: last month Kaukab Siddique, a professor at Lincoln University in rural southeastern Pennsylvania made a speech in Washington at which he said (in part),

The time has come that we must stir up our ‘religious leaders’ in this country to speak the truth about Israel. They must put their hands on the Quran and say that they do not recognize Israel as a legitimate entity. If they cannot do that, they must be branded as kaffirs [infidels]. It’s as simple as that. Because the Quran says – drive them out from where they drove you out.

For the Christians I say please pray for Gaza. For the Jews I would say see what could happen to you if the Muslims wake up. And I say to the Muslims, dear brothers and sisters, unite and rise up against this hydra-headed monster which calls itself Zionism. Each one of us is their target and we must stand united to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel if possible by peaceful means. Perhaps, like Saladin, we will give them enough food and water to travel back to the lands from where they came to occupy other people. There’s no question of just removing the settlements. These settlements are only the tentacles of the devil who resides in Tel Aviv…

Siddique also denies the Holocaust and expresses the view that Jews

…are a small minority in America, yet they have taken over this country by devious and immoral means. They control the government, the media, education, the libraries, the book chains, the banks, Hollywood, Wall Street, Madison Avenue.

Nevertheless, he claims that he doesn’t hate Jews, just the “behavior of the Jews who are governing the ‘state of Israel’ and all of the ones who support their current behaviors.” He follows this with a list of anti-Jewish quotations from the Christian Gospels (proving precisely what?).

Siddique’s attitude toward Israel is an absolutely perfect example of how present-day anti-Zionism is “the old, more diffuse rhetoric and barbarism being redirected, as by a lens, toward a particular pinprick on a map” — although in Siddique’s case, he remains partial to unredirected barbarism toward Jews as well.

Incidentally, Lincoln University’s president feels that tenured Associate Professor Siddique

is entitled to express his personal views in conversation or in public forums, as long as he does not present such opinions as the views of the University. Dr. Siddique has made it apparent that his opinions are his own and are not a part of his curriculum.  Like all professors, he is expected to adhere to an approved syllabus.

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Academics ‘prove’ Israel shouldn’t defend herself

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

Even pacifists often agree that violence is justified in cases of self-defense. One would think that most people would agree with the principle that when you are hit, you are allowed to hit back.

Apparently many disagree when those trying to defend themselves are Israelis. In almost every case, from 1948 to the Mavi Marmara, when Israel or Israelis have had to defend themselves, they’ve been accused of everything from ‘disproportionate use of force’ to murder.

But for sheer outrageousness, consider this study which argues that Israel ought not to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An unusual attempt to quantify the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians shows that both act in retaliation for violent attacks, researchers reported on Monday.

They said their findings defy the perception that Palestinians attack randomly and demonstrate that both sides damage their own interests with acts of violence.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers also said they hope to shed some light on the psychology that makes both Israelis and Palestinians feel they are the victims in the conflict.

I’m not sure that anyone thinks that “Palestinians act randomly.” Violent terrorism by Hamas and Fatah is easily seen to be calibrated to achieve political objectives, for example to create a sense of urgency that supports efforts by third parties to force Israel to make concessions in the diplomatic realm.

But the writers produce an analysis that purports to show that Arab attacks are primarily responses to Israeli violence:

“The previous evidence suggested that Israeli attacks were often responses to Palestinian aggression, whereas this did not appear to be true for Palestinian attacks,” Biletzki said in a statement.

“This implied that the conflict was one-sided, with Palestinians attacking Israel, and the Israeli army merely responding to this aggression. Our findings suggest that the situation is more balanced than that.”

They studied Qassam rocket attacks during 2000-2008, using a statistical method called vector autoregression to link the deaths of 4,874 Palestinians and 1,062 Israelis to various acts of violence, including air strikes, missiles and the destruction of homes.

“The main finding is that both sides retaliate,” Haushofer said.

They found that when Israeli forces kill five Palestinians, they increase the probability that Israelis will die from Palestinian attacks the following day by 50 percent.

The apparently sophisticated math masks the false assumption that Israeli attacks on Hamas, for example, are simply tit-for-tat retaliation, when they are in fact usually targeted at the assets used by Hamas in their attacks: weapons smuggling tunnels, rocket launching teams, rocket manufacturing facilities, etc.

And nobody would deny that Arabs often retaliate for Israeli actions, although — unlike Israel — they normally retaliate against soft targets, like civilians.

But this doesn’t imply that they would not attack these targets anyway in order to accomplish their political and psychological goals. And it ignores the fact that Hamas would have much greater capability to carry out such attacks if it were not for the suppressive effect of Israeli operations.

After all, Operation Cast Lead clearly reduced the number of rockets falling on Israel (and would have stopped them entirely if it had been allowed to continue).

This is a typical example of a technique of fallacious argument that is common among logically-challenged academics today: put forward a trivial proposition, prove it, conflate it with a significant (but false) proposition, and claim that you have proved the latter.

So this study proves the obviously true fact that Palestinian Arabs retaliate for Israeli actions, conflates it with the false proposition that terrorism would be reduced if there were no Israeli actions, and claims to have proved that!

The study completely ignores the ideological motivation of Arab terrorists. It assumes that the conflict is simply a ‘cycle of violence’ and that the cycle would end if it could be interrupted. It does not consider the possibility that Arab terrorism is a form of warfare aimed at a particular objective: the weakening and ultimate destruction of the state of Israel. And it does not consider that Israeli actions in opposition to this warfare may be to some extent successful in suppressing it.

Now you are probably asking, “who could be so ignorant and/or stupid to miss this?”

[Johannes] Haushofer [of the University of Zurich] worked with Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anat Biletzki of Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, who is a member of BT’selem [sic], an Israeli human rights organization that collected Israeli military data used in the study.

Not only the logic but B’Tselem’s data about which side initiated violence is suspect. In a January 2009 article, Kanwisher discussed the end of the ceasefire which preceded the Qassam barrage immediately prior to operation Cast Lead. She wrote,

…the latest ceasefire ended when Israel first killed Palestinians, and Palestinians then fired rockets into Israel.

But in fact the Israeli operation that killed a Hamas operative was a raid to destroy a 250-meter long tunnel that Hamas was digging under the border fence, with intent to kill or kidnap Israeli soldiers like Gilad Shalit, who has been held by Hamas since 2006. In response, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets and mortars. Israeli helicopters struck the launchers, killing five more Hamas guerrillas. Should Israel have ignored the tunnel? Is preemption of violence the same as initiation of violence?

Anat Biletzki is the former chair of B’Tselem, an NGO funded primarily by US-based New Israel Fund (NIF) and the European Union. She is an anti-Zionist who supports the right of return for Arab ‘refugees’ — that is, an end to the Jewish state.

Here is a quotation from the so-called ‘Olga document‘ (written at Givat Olga in 2004) which she signed:

We are united in a critique of Zionism, based as it is on refusal to acknowledge the indigenous people of this country and on denial of their rights, on dispossession of their lands, and on adoption of separation as a fundamental principle and way of life…

We are united in the recognition that this country belongs to all its sons and daughters – citizens and residents, both present and absentees (the uprooted Palestinian citizens of Israel in ’48) – with no discrimination on personal or communal grounds, irrespective of citizenship or nationality, religion, culture, ethnicity or gender. Thus we demand the immediate annulment of all laws, regulations and practices that discriminate between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, and the dissolution of all institutions, organizations and authorities based on such laws, regulations and practices.

We are united in the belief that peace and reconciliation are contingent on Israel’s recognition of its responsibility for the injustices done to the indigenous people, the Palestinians, and on willingness to redress them. Recognition of the right of return follows from our principles. Redressing the continued injustice inflicted on the Palestinian refugees, generation after generation, is a necessary condition both for reconciliation with the Palestinian people, as for the spiritual healing of ourselves, Israeli Jews. Only thus shall we stop being plagued by the past’s demons and damnations and make ourselves at home in our common homeland.

It is not at all surprising that Biletzki would be opposed to Israeli self-defense, given the above.

Interestingly, Haushofer has degrees in economics and neuroscience and has written about the relationship of brain activity to moral judgments, while Kanwisher is also a neuroscientist. Perhaps they should make Biletzki subject of a neurological study to answer the really mystifying question here, which is how a person can so thoroughly identify with those who want to kill her.

Update [6 Oct 1057 PDT]: Here’s how Biletzki was quoted yesterday in Ha’aretz:

I don’t need scientific research to determine that all the behavior of the Palestinians is a reaction to the Israeli occupation. For this, common sense is enough.

Unbelievable! What world does she live in?

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An empirical test for academic hypocrisy

Sunday, September 5th, 2010
Dr. Fred Gottheil

Dr. Fred Gottheil

I and others have often written that many ‘critics’ of Israel who purport to be concerned with issues of human rights, fairness, racism and so on actually have a different agenda. We’ve claimed that they are more concerned with demonizing the Jewish state than helping its alleged ‘victims’.

Sometimes it’s not hard to show that ‘non-political’ human rights groups, for example, actually have a financial interest in bashing Israel. For example, there is the case of Human Rights Watch fund-raising in Saudi Arabia, or the huge sums donated to extremist non-governmental organizations in Israel by the European Union.

But what about the legions of anti-Israel academics who are always prepared to bash Israel in the vilest terms? They claim to be motivated by concern for human rights — but are they?

Now Fred Gottheil, a professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, has devised an empirical test to find out. Dr. Gottheil took the case of a petition addressed to President Obama after the Gaza war in December-January 2008-9:

[Dr. David C.] Lloyd’s petition was notable not only for its criticism of Israeli policy — that is standard fare among the set of academics who subscribe to a post-colonial view of the world — but rather for its demonizing of the Jewish state.

His technique was anything but novel. It associated Israel with pre-Mandela South Africa. Lloyd’s South African-linking brushstrokes were many and crude, citing “collective punishment,” “apartheid regime,” “racist regime,” “besieged Bantustans,” “crimes against humanity,” and “ethnocidal atrocities.” These were layered on his fact-distorting canvas like icing on a poisoned cake.

The petition was signed by nine hundred academics, mostly in the US. Gottheil decided to test their commitment to human rights:

But accepting as genuine the petitioners’ stated goal of seeking social justice in the Middle East, I thought it fitting to contact the signatories of the Lloyd petition to offer them yet another opportunity to express their commitment to social justice in the region, this time by endorsing a Statement of Concern regarding human rights abuses practiced against gays and lesbians and against women in general in many of the Middle Eastern countries, including the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. The idea was really uncomplicated: Since they expressed a concern about social injustice in Israel, they might also be willing to express their concern about human rights abuses practiced against women, gays, and lesbians in other parts of the Middle East.

The detailed material for this Statement of Concern was gathered from sources as widespread as U.N. agencies, survey research units, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, scholarly journals, and social justice-related NGOs such as Asylum-Law and Human Rights Watch.

The Statement provided evidence of both the practice and the condoning of the practice by religious, political, and even academic authorities of honor-killing, wife-beating, and female genital mutilations. Documentation was offered for specific countries, for specific practices, and referred to specific authorities condoning the practices identified.

Gottheil carefully checked the credentials of the signers and excluded those who were outside of the US, or who were non-academics. In the case of graduate students, only those with evidence of teaching or published research were included. He ended up with 675 names, to which he sent the Statement of Concern, along with a request for endorsement. He did not indicate any connection between his statement and the Lloyd petition.

You probably know what’s coming, but it is even more outrageous than you think:

Only thirty of the 675 “self-described social-justice seeking academics” responded, 27 of them agreeing to endorse the Statement. But these 27 signatories represent less than five percent of the 675 contacted. In other words, 95 percent of those who had signed the Lloyd petition censuring Israel for human rights violation did not sign a statement concerning discrimination against women and gays and lesbians in the Middle East.

But wait! There’s more:

As many as 25 percent of the Lloyd petition-signing academics were faculty associated with gender and women studies departments. Yet of these, only 5 endorsed the Statement calling for attention to the discrimination against women in the Muslim countries of the Middle East. Put more bluntly, 164 of the 169 faculty who had chosen to focus their life’s work on matters affecting women, and who felt comfortable enough to affix their names to Lloyd’s petition censuring Israel, chose not to sign a Statement of Concern about documented human rights violations against gays, lesbians, and women in the Middle East. [my emphasis]

This does not come as a surprise to me, who often marvels at the sheer insanity of academics, especially those in ethnic or gender studies programs. An example was the Israeli Ph.D. candidate who argued that the fact that IDF soldiers do not rape Arab women proves that they are racists, and won an academic prize!

A common view on the Left is that all of the problems of Palestinian Arab women are a result of Israeli oppression (although many Palestinians themselves are quite clear about their culture’s poor treatment of women). I recall a radio program on Berkeley’s KPFA on the subject of  “The Palestinian Women’s Movement”: the presenter explained that this ‘movement’ was all about supporting their men in the struggle against Israel.

Perhaps the academics who signed the Lloyd petition but did not sign Gottheil’s statement held this view. Of course “the occupation” doesn’t explain the violent oppression of women and gays everywhere else in the Muslim Middle East.

Another possibility is that the academics take the racist position that backward Muslim Middle Easterners can’t be expected to know better, and therefore their behavior can be excused. Israel, on the other hand, is held to a standard so high that even self-defense is prohibited.

Or maybe they think that everything Israel does is wrong because it is a ‘colonial power’. It’s interesting that they don’t see the truly imperialist Iran — which controls Syria, is taking over Lebanon by way of Hizballah, and is working to assert its hegemony over Iraq — in that light.

Maybe the simplest explanation is best: while they favor Palestinian nationalism, Iranian imperialism and radical Islamism — and are prepared to keep quiet about the victimization of women and gays so as to avoid damaging these causes — they find the idea of Jewish nationalism, as expressed by the one Jewish state, repugnant.

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Short takes: Hamas likes mosque, AP distorts, Harvard doesn’t divest

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Hamas supports Ground Zero mosque

One of the objections to the proposed Ground Zero mosque has been that radical Islamists around the world will understand it as a triumphalist symbol of America’s defeat at the hands of Islam. Hamas’ Mahmoud Zahar didn’t exactly say that, but he came close:

Two days after President Obama came out in support of a plan to build an Islamic cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero, the controversial project has received yet another high-profile endorsement – this one from the chief of the terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

“We have to build the mosque, as you are allowed to build the church and Israelis are building their holy places,” stated Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas who is regarded as the chief of the group in Gaza.

Zahar said that as Muslims, “We have to build everywhere.”

It can’t be helpful to Barack Obama to find himself on the same side as Hamas!

***

AP blames Israel for Palestinian intransigence

Here’s what I read this morning in the Fresno Bee:

By Karin Laub, Associated Press

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israel will not accept conditions for resuming direct negotiations with the Palestinians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top Cabinet ministers affirmed in a meeting late Sunday, reflecting a hard line just as invitations to the talks appeared to be near.

“Hard line?” Are you nuts, Karin Laub? Netanyahu has been agreeing to direct talks without preconditions for months. What could be less hard line than that? Isn’t the function of negotiations to, er, negotiate?

The Palestinian Authority (PA), on the other hand, has refused to talk unless their demands are met in advance. In Laub’s words,

Abbas wants Israel to accept the principle of Palestinian statehood in the lands Israel occupied in the 1967 Mideast war with minor modifications, and wants all Jewish settlement building to stop during negotiations.

I’ll note yet again the deliberately misleading formulation “Jewish settlement building” to mean “any construction activity outside 1949 lines,” suggesting that Israel is building new settlements or even expanding the boundaries of existing ones, which has not happened for years.

The PA wants negotiations to pick up where they left off when various generous offers — the Clinton-Barak ideas of 2000-1, and Olmert’s 2008 proposal — were made. Of course, these were presented by Israel as absolute final offers, which were rejected by the PA as inadequate. It’s ludicrous for them to become starting points for new talks, in which the PA will demand even more — not to mention that the response to the Clinton-Barak offer was to start a war.

The AP’s original headline, “Israel: No conditions for talks with Palestinians” is not so  bad. My friends at the Bee changed it to this: “Israel refuses conditions on talks”, to make sure that everyone gets the message that it’s Israel’s fault.

What are my neighbors in Fresno likely to think when they read this propaganda disguised as news?

***

Harvard does not divest

Some blogs and even mainstream media sources have been saying that Harvard University’s endowment fund has ‘divested’ from Israel. Actually, what happened is that Israel’s economy is so good that its stocks have been shifted from an ’emerging country’ index to a ‘developed country’ one. Harvard rebalanced its portfolio by selling some stocks in Israeli companies and buying some from ’emerging’ countries.

And they probably had a nice capital gain, too.

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Antisemitic craziness for beginners

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

Question: which Hamas leader wrote the following this past week?

… the full lunacy and vileness of this latest Israeli war crime is becoming clear to all who can read. Israeli propaganda has worked overtime, based on the kidnapping of the activists, isolating them from the whole world, confiscating all their material evidence, on top of the brutalities of maiming and murdering many of them. This meant that for the last few days, only the the voice of Israeli propaganda was available to the international media. Fictional narratives, more complex than most Hollywood scripts, were woven and reinforced by what must be the largest propaganda machine anywhere.

Of course, this matter [sic] little now. The facts are now coming out, and many inquiries will be conducted and will establish the full horror of this murderous piracy. The world will not be fooled by this anymore…

The resolution of this conflict will only be reached by the annulling Zionism and its racism, its military and ‘civil’ racist machineries, the total removal of all settler communities, and the return of Palestinian refugees, as well as the payment of full compensation to all those who were hurt by the Zionist enterprise over the last few decades.

Give up?

Haim Bresheeth

Haim Bresheeth

No Hamas leader, not even a Turkish Hamas supporter! It was an Israeli Jew and a child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Haim Bresheeth (h/t, Israel Academia Monitor), Chair of Media and Cultural Studies, Deputy Dean of School, University of East London, formerly of Sapir College in the Western Negev — not far from Sderot, a favorite Hamas target. Maybe the din of Qassams landing addled his brain (in case you think he makes sense, the truth about the boarding of the Mavi Marmara is here, here and here).

Bresheeth is the author of several books, including one actually titled “Holocaust for Beginners,” (also translated into Turkish and Croatian!) and numerous articles.  Here is another example of his writing, from in article in the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram (2006):

A sorry tale of collusion emerges from almost every leading newspaper, every hour of quality radio, every current affairs television programme. It is well known that many Jews front numerous media outlets and discourse on the continued Middle Eastern saga of pain, violence and propaganda, yet no one seems to think this strange. There are no Arabs, or even influential Muslims, in similar positions in the British or American media. That in itself is worrying, but would have been less so if we had examples of a wide variety of positions taken by influential Jews — if some were, for example, doing better than mouthing Israeli propaganda, and imaginatively representing the Palestinian, Arab or Muslim perspective, or being sometimes critical of Israel’s positions, especially when they are so obviously not just immoral, but counter- productive. That day has not yet come, it seems.

So the Jews control the media, there are no anti-Israel Jews among Jewish news personalities, and there are no Arab or Muslim commentators heard? The mind boggles.

In 2002, after literally hundreds of Israelis were killed in a series of bloody suicide bombings which followed Arafat’s rejection of the Camp David peace proposals — it seemed at times that every few days there was a new atrocity, 20 or 30 dead — Israel embarked on Operation Defensive Shield, in which the IDF entered the Palestinian-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria and rooted out the terrorists. One of the most effective counter-terrorist operations ever, it ended the string of bloody attacks.

Naturally, there were howls of protest and condemnation from Palestinians and their supporters who saw their best weapon taken from them. Bresheeth did his part, comparing Israel’s self-defense to Nazi genocide  in an article called “The ghetto is calling“:

At this time Jews who remember the Holocaust should stand up and be counted. They should clearly say that they are totally against Israeli occupation and totally for liberation of the Palestinians from the Israeli yolk [sic]. If the future life of people in the region is dear to them, they should help Israel to free itself from the diseased and debilitating cycle of brutality that they have plunged themselves and the Palestinians into. They should clarify that Israel has not got them on its side, and is not acting in their name. It is not the Palestinians who need to be under pressure after all these years of atrocities, but the short-sightedness of the Israeli public, and its refusal to face reality.

What must come now are sanctions of every kind, withdrawal of help and cooperation from Israeli organisations, up to the point of sending an international force into the region to force the evacuation of the territories. The time has come to take a stand.

If, despite the pressing need to force an end to the violence by ending the occupation, nothing will be done — well, we know well enough what will follow. We have seen it time and again on our screens in the former Yugoslavia. Do we want to wait until all is lost? Our Palestinian friends are calling out to us. Please, let us not abandon them as European society of the 1940s abandoned my own family to their fate.

But that’s nothing. Bresheeth wrote an article in 1989, which now appears on the viciously antisemitic “Radio Islam” web site, called “Zionism and the Holocaust.” In it, he argues that German Zionists colluded with the Nazis, that “Zionism agrees with the basic tenet of anti-Semitism, namely that Jews cannot live with non-Jews,” and that Zionists helped the Germans exterminate the Hungarian Jews. This one, and the site that it appears on, is so vile that I won’t link to it. Google it if you must.

Anti-Israel Jews aren’t news, especially when they are Israeli academics. But Haim Bresheeth is notable because he is also an antisemite, and because the rubbish that he writes is far out even for its genre.

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