FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Egyptian demonstrator sends a message about US support of Morsy

President Obama’s statement in response to the military coup in Egypt is remarkable:

As I have said since the Egyptian Revolution, the United States supports a set of core principles, including opposition to violence, protection of universal human rights, and reform that meets the legitimate aspirations of the people.  The United States does not support particular individuals or political parties, but we are committed to the democratic process and respect for the rule of law.  Since the current unrest in Egypt began, we have called on all parties to work together to address the legitimate grievances of the Egyptian people, in accordance with the democratic process, and without recourse to violence or the use of force.

The United States is monitoring the very fluid situation in Egypt, and we believe that ultimately the future of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people. Nevertheless, we are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy and suspend the Egyptian constitution. I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters. Given today’s developments, I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt.

Although the diplomatic language doesn’t specifically say that it would please the US if the military were to turn around and restore Morsy to power — it says “a democratically elected civilian government,” not “the … government” and asks the army to avoid “arbitrary” arrests, presumably allowing ones for which the army can give reasons — it clearly expresses the idea that the coup is an unwarranted intrusion of authoritarianism to overthrow a democratic and legitimate regime.

Apparently for Obama, the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood attained power after a more-or-less free election outweighs the considerations that the Brotherhood’s own political principles are thoroughly anti-democratic, with the constitution it sponsored calling for clerical rule via shari’a, and inferior status for women and non-Muslims. It also condoned, if it it did not encourage, violence and murder against Christians, as well as employing torture and rape to suppress popular opposition. In addition, the impetus for the army’s action was nothing less than what has been called the largest political demonstration in human history.

All this can be ignored, it seems, because the regime came to power through an election, a distinction shared with Adolph Hitler and Hamas. Does anyone think that having achieved power, the Brotherhood would ever expose itself to a fair election again?

Although the official line is that the US was neutral, Barry Rubin explains what the Obama Administration did to help the Brotherhood:

Let us remember that four years ago Obama gave his Cairo speech sitting the Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the front row. President Husni Mubarak was insulted and it was the first hint that the Obama Administration would support Islamist regimes in the Arab world. Then Obama vetoed the State Department plan for a continuation of the old regime without Mubarak. Then Obama publicly announced — before anyone asked him — that the United States would not mind if the Brotherhood was in government. Then Obama did not give disproportionate help to the moderates. Then Obama pressed the army to get out of power quickly, which the moderates opposed since they needed more time than the Islamists to organize.

Many will say that the president of the United States cannot of course control events in Egypt. That’s true. But he did everything possible to lead to this crisis.

Rubin suggested this question for defenders of administration policy:

Does it bother you that the United States is backing a regime led by anti-American, anti-Christian, antisemitic, anti-women, and anti-gay rulers who are unrepentant former Nazi collaborators?

Now that the regime is overthrown, there will need to be a new policy. Let’s hope that this time it agrees with the president’s stated goal of “opposition to violence, protection of universal human rights, and reform that meets the legitimate aspirations of the people.”

Technorati Tags: Egypt, Morsy, coup, Barack Obama

“Price Tag” graffiti in an Arab village. The inscription says “a good Arab is a dead Arab” and “price tag”

L. Cassius ille quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat identidem in causis quaerere solebat ‘cui bono’ fuisset. — Cicero
[The famous Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a very honest and wise judge, was in the habit of asking, time and again, ‘To whose benefit?’]

News item:

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Planning and carrying out “price tag” attacks in Israel will now be defined as “illegal organizing,” which puts the acts on the same level as Islamic terror groups.

The new designation announced Monday by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon means that the Jewish perpetrators of such violence [sic] would face the same legal repercussions as Palestinian terrorists.

The new designation will allow Israeli security services and police to hold suspects in jail longer, keep them under arrest until the end of legal proceedings and investigate without the presence of an attorney. Those who plan and fund price tag attacks will be subject to the same proceedings.

I would be the last to say that harsh treatment for Price Tag vandals isn’t justified, although calling it ‘violence’ is a bit exaggerated. It certainly doesn’t compare to throwing grapefruit-sized rocks through the windshields of moving cars.

It is interesting that there have been very few arrests, despite a huge amount of publicity and official hand-wringing.

But like Lucius Cassius and Lt. Colombo, I ask, cui bono, who benefits?

Certainly not the Jewish population of Judea and Samaria, when the incidents are used to demonize them as, for example, here:

“Price tag” crimes are attacks on Palestinians and Palestinian property by Israeli settlers, which are meant to both intimidate Palestinians into leaving Palestine and serve as payback for perceived setbacks to Israel’s colonization efforts. Officially promulgated by Israeli settlers in 2011, the price tag movement follows more than six decades of official and unofficial attempts to terrorize Palestinians into leaving their homeland. …

But the hooligan Israelis who carry out these price tag attacks are striving for the same goals as Messrs. Peres, Bennett, and Netanyahu: namely, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel/Palestine.  They merely use different means to accomplish that goal.  In fact, price tag vandalism, while indeed reprehensible, pales in comparison to the far more insidious and far more powerful policies that the Israeli government has long enacted and enforced.

Let me just say that if there is ethnic cleansing being carried out, it is highly ineffective, insofar as the Arab population of pre-1967 Israel and the territories have increased several times over since 1948. So much for the “insidious” and “powerful” machinations of the government!

But to return to the question: price tag activities, in fact, benefit no one more than those who wish to see ‘settlers’ portrayed as criminals, and who wish to see them, not the Arabs, removed from their homeland.

The recent vandalism in Abu Ghosh, a village that has been remarkably friendly to the state since 1948, was particularly damaging. Indeed, former Lehi activist and right-wing member of the Knesset Geula Cohen recently recalled that Arabs from Abu Ghosh helped her escape from a British prison in the 1940’s.

I’m sure that there are some Jewish vandals who don’t understand that what they are doing is beyond stupid. But I also am confident that some of these incidents, if fully investigated, would turn out to have been perpetrated by anti-state actors — leftists, anarchists or Arab extremists.

There are some cases in which there is evidence that the perpetrators were not right-wing Jews. For example, take the case of the mosque in the Israeli Arab village of Tuba Zangaria, which was damaged by fire in 2011. A local Arab later came forward and accused village residents of setting the fire and spraying the words “price tag” on the building to deflect suspicion. For his trouble, his house was sprayed with bullets.

One straightforward reason that there are few arrests could be that the police are looking in the wrong places. In the Tuba Zangaria case, a Jewish student was initially arrested (with a great deal of fanfare) and then released for lack of evidence.

But there is another possibility, a somewhat ugly one. It has recently become known that the Internal Security Service (the Shabak) has infiltrated right-wing Jewish groups and agents even took part in anti-Arab attacks:

The Esh Kodesh man reportedly gathered his friends and admitted to them that he had been working with the Shin Bet for some time, and had passed on much information on anti-Arab activity to the agency, including information that helped the group to thwart attacks. The man himself was complicit in several of the attacks he reported.

It wouldn’t be beyond imagination that elements in the Shabak who wanted to discredit the settlement enterprise encouraged this behavior in unstable members of extreme nationalist groups.

The tactic of provoking, or even faking, extreme behavior in order to discredit political opponents is not unknown in Israel. Shortly before the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, a Shabak agent invented a right-wing extremist group called ‘Eyal’, which did such things as display posters of Rabin in an SS uniform. The group received massive media publicity. All this was established by the Shamgar Commission, which investigated Rabin’s murder. Some Israelis think that the assassination of Rabin was actually intended to be a staged attack using blank cartridges that went wrong when the murderer, Yigal Amir, replaced the blanks with live ammunition.

This was far more serious than spraying slogans on mosques and flattening tires.

Is it possible that the vandalism in Abu Ghosh, for example, was not initiated by right-wing anti-Arab ‘settlers’? Yes, there is a precedent. Did it happen this way? Ask yourself: cui bono?

Technorati Tags: price-tag vandalism, Israel, Abu Ghosh, Shabak

Chip Cantor, persona non grata in the UK

I’ve recently written that Israel’s greatest enemy in the future will not be Iran — which I predict will soon have its fangs pulled — but Western Europe.

I’ve also noted a recent sharp increase in anti-Jewish expression in the UK (see also here).

The incident reported below in a Kansas City Jewish newspaper (h/t Caroline Glick) may represent a new low in British behavior, unless there is something very significant that is left out.

Chip Cantor told his story to two local television stations last week. On Tuesday, June 4, the 23-year-old student told KMBC he was traveling to the U.K. to visit and gain summer work experience and to participate in a fundraiser for a child who has cancer. He left Kansas City on Wednesday, May 29, on an early-morning flight and waited in line to go through customs after landing in the country after 10 p.m. London time. When he got to the front of the line, a female customs agent began looking at his passport and treated him courteously. The routine exercise ended when she noticed the two pages in his passport with Israeli visas.

“I spent my freshman year studying abroad in Israel,” he said. …

Chip’s father Chuck Cantor said his son told him the female customs agent — who for some reason was not dressed in a customs uniform — was very pleasant toward him until she saw the Israel stamps in his passport. Then she simply walked away with his passport without speaking a word to him. Chip told his father he estimates she was gone 45 minutes to an hour. He never saw her again.

“He has a lot of Israel stamps,” Chuck said. Chip has been to Israel several times including two programs sponsored by Young Judaea — the six-week Machon program and a gap-year program. Chip Cantor graduated from Shawnee Mission East High School in 2009 and will be a senior in the fall at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Finally, according to Chuck, a different, uniformed customs agent came to see him. Chip was told they were taking his bags and detaining him for questioning. He was not told why.

Once in the interview room Chip told his father that he was told if he changed any of his answers to any questions, he was going to go to prison.

“He said, ‘Why would I change my answers? I told you the truth,’ ” Chuck said.

Chip wasn’t allowed to be in sight of his luggage and eventually was put into what he described to his father as a detention cell.

“At some point a woman who was wearing a burka came to the cell to photograph him,” Chuck said. At that point he was fingerprinted as well.

As she’s doing this, she said to him, “We’re putting your name and fingerprints and photos into a database. From now on it is going to be very difficult for you to ever travel in the United Kingdom or anywhere in the E.U. It will be up to each individual country to decide if they want to admit you,” Chuck said his son was told.

Chuck said Chip kept telling the customs agents he had not committed any crimes or done anything wrong. Eventually another agent came to tell Chip he was being deported. Now several hours after he was detained, Chip was given the opportunity to call his father.

Chuck said he advised his son to ask to speak to someone from the American consulate or the U.S. embassy. Those requests were denied. …

In the morning, Chip was escorted to the plane by another customs agent for a flight back to the United States. At this time Chip asked the agent for his passport and was refused.

“The guy walks him onto the plane and in front of everyone, like a prisoner, he says here is this man’s passport. Do not give him his passport until you land in the United States,” Chuck said he was told. The American Airlines purser told Chip that, in 17 years flying internationally, he had never seen anything like it.

Less than 36 hours after leaving Kansas City, Chip was back in town.

There are more details in the story, and some are pretty ugly.  Naturally, UK officials denied that anything improper occurred, and claimed that Cantor’s visa was not in order. Cantor said that he had appropriate documentation, and his family has contacted their congressman to demand an explanation.

It used to be the case — probably it still is — that if you wanted to visit an Arab country you needed a passport without any entry stamps from Israel. So is the UK now the same?

Friends that live in the UK tell me that anti-Jewish feeling always existed under the service, but they do not recall a time when it was so often publicly expressed.

As I speculated in my previous post, Europeans — and apparently that includes Brits — may find it disturbing to compare Israel’s cultural and economic vitality with their own malaise and fear of submersion in an alien Muslim culture. So perhaps they are striking out in frustration at the usual scapegoats?

Technorati Tags: UK, Jew-hatred, Chip Cantor

In a YNet op-ed, Hagai Segal writes,

Our Declaration of Independence includes 650 words. The word “Jewish,” in its different forms, appears 20 times, while the word “democracy” doesn’t even appear once.

The people who drafted the declaration and signed it had the highest regard for democratic values, but first and foremost they wanted to stress its Jewish side. Perhaps they said to themselves that there are many democracies in the world, but only one Jewish country. It’s important to protect it.

These days it’s even more important. From the outside and from within attempts are being made to undermine the Jewish character of the Jewish state. The dark forces rely on the fatigue of the Zionist material in order to internationalize Israel and declare it a state of all its citizens. They are taking advantage of the fact that over the years the fashion here has changed, and democracy has been emphasized at the expense of Judaism.

The Israeli Left takes its cues from Western Europe and the US. From Europe it gets the ideas of multiculturalism, postnationalism, hedonism and hatred of religion. Together these are a recipe for a low native birthrate and a rapidly increasing, non-assimilating Muslim population. Europe is rapidly moving toward a point of no return, in which, paradoxically, the very features of its Enlightenment culture that support openness and egalitarianism will lead to its replacement by a distinctly non-democratic, authoritarian Islamic one.

America is another source of ideas, in this case the absolute maximum of freedom of expression. Where else would the outrageous Westboro Baptist Church be tolerated? American freedom of expression is remarkable in the world, and that may be in part because the US is a large nation both physically and by population, with friendly neighbors, separated by oceans from its enemies. It is also composed of diverse groups that more or less buy into the general narrative of the nation. That doesn’t mean that nothing can bring it down, but it can absorb a great deal of internal and external pressure without breaking.

Israel, on the other hand, is small and surrounded by enemies. One out of every five Israelis is an Arab, the same ethnicity of most of its enemies, who — while he may be loyal to the state — almost certainly believes in a historical narrative in which the state is not only illegitimate, but his oppressor, responsible for the dispossession of his relatives in the great ‘disaster’ of 1948. There are also Jewish Israelis who believe, for religious reasons, that Jewish sovereignty is an abomination.

There are also great external pressures opposed to emphasizing the Jewishness of the state. To a large extent they come from Europe, which is jealous of Israel’s cultural and economic vitality, angered that is succeeding on a path so divergent from Europe’s, and suffused with guilt about the recent genocide of its own Jewish population. Europe is acting on its beliefs, both by explicit pro-Arab diplomacy, and by covertly expending millions of Euros to support NGOs in Israel that promote its anti-nationalist (and even anti-state) line.

Another force is the American Jewish Left, as represented by the New Israel Fund (NIF) and to some extent by the Union for Reform Judaism. The NIF is particularly dangerous, supporting Israeli Arab groups that would like to redefine the state as binational.

A state that requires sacrifice from its people to survive, will only get it if there is a compelling ideological motivation driving its citizens to make the requisite sacrifices. This is how Israel has survived until now. But there is no compelling ideology for maintaining a “state of its citizens” next door to Hizballah, Hamas, the Muslim Brothers and whatever vicious regime will rule Syria.

Jews yearned for Jerusalem for 2000 years, and Zionists have struggled for more than 100 — and are continuing to struggle — to restore and now preserve Jewish sovereignty in Land of Israel, which I believe has become a necessary condition for the survival of the Jews as a people. I can’t see today’s Judaism surviving another diaspora. A great deal is at stake here.

The Europeans and anti-Zionist leftists who are working to de-Zionize Israel know exactly what they want. Perhaps liberal American Jews only think they know, but it doesn’t matter.

We mustn’t allow the blood and struggle that has been expended by the Jewish people to be thrown away.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jewish state, Zionism

Could this be you?

Dear John,

I know that you won’t be happy to hear this, but as someone who cares, I just had to write this letter.

Don’t do it. Or rather, stop doing it before you look even dumber than you already look.

You are using up valuable time, money and most of all, the reputation of the United States by following your obsession.

You’re not the first, but I have to say that it’s often impossible for me to understand some people’s weird obsessions. Like Anthony Weiner, for example. What could he have been thinking?

But I digress. I’m talking about the so-called ‘peace process’ of course, although I devoutly wish it were just another sex scandal. At least sometimes the sex scandals make sense.

Look, you have two groups of Palestinian Arabs, both of which have written charters calling for the violent destruction of Israel, and one of which even wants to murder all the Jews in the world. Members of these groups hate and kill each other, and the only thing they seem to be able to agree on is hating Israel. They both believe that their lands, livelihoods and honor were stolen from them by the Jews in 1948 and they are prepared to struggle and sacrifice for as long as necessary to get them back.

The last thing that either of these groups want is to live peacefully alongside Israel. If there once were any grass-roots Palestinians that did want that, the two main groups have been ‘educating’ their followers with the vilest anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda for decades. And if a leader were to arise that wanted to change that, he would be dead meat, since the nationalist and religious ideologies of these groups are, above all, violent. There is always an aspiring martyr waiting for his virgins.

So when you come along and say to the nationalistic ones “give up your plan to eliminate Israel and we’ll give you money to set up a state alongside it,” they think you must be nuts.

Maybe after they stop being insulted or laughing at your naivete, they’ll string you along: take your money (and weapons if possible), and promise to talk to Israel — after you get Israel to release a few prisoners, stop building, etc. Why not? Whatever they can get for free, they’ll take. Yasser Arafat got billions of dollars for his Swiss bank accounts, plus fame, a private army and much territory by playing this game.

But for some reason, a deal will never get off the ground, no matter how clever. Because they simply are not interested in what you are selling. And even if the nationalist Arabs were, the religious ones wouldn’t go along with them, and would try to overthrow them.

One of the ironies is that the Israeli side — virtually every Israeli — understands this. If they didn’t understand it in 1993 when a few left-wingers maneuvered the government into signing the Oslo accords that even Yitzhak Rabin wasn’t comfortable with, they certainly did after the Second Intifada and the disastrous ‘disengagement’ from Gaza.

But most Israeli officials won’t tell you that (although there are more that would today than in the recent past). They know how important to you it is that there is ‘progress’, and they want your help dealing with the Iranian threat. They want you to sell them F-35’s. So they, too, will go along with the pretense, knowing that the Palestinians will never agree to anything serious. In the meantime, their job is to keep from giving away the store in ‘confidence-building’ concessions.

So here is how you look, John: you are sitting at a table with two sides, and they both think you are the fish, the sucker, the goat, whatever you want to call it.

Isn’t that embarrassing? Don’t you have real work to do?

Technorati Tags: John Kerry, peace process