FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

So, you are probably asking, who the hell is Dan Yaseen?

He’s the Vice President of our local “antiwar and social justice” organization, called ‘Peace Fresno‘. I’ve met him and he seems to be a nice guy.

Dear Dan,

Yesterday I listened to your program on KFCF, “Speaking Truth to Empire,” on which you interviewed Ali Abunimah. I tuned in late, unfortunately, so I didn’t hear the whole program. But the part I heard was all about Israel.

I heard you ask him friendly questions to elicit his opinion on this subject. And I heard him, in his polished way, spew a stream of lies. I heard him assassinate the character of a whole nation. I heard him implicitly advocate genocide — yes, you read me right, because this is what his support for Hamas means in practice.

I didn’t hear you disagree with a word of it.

Peace Fresno is supposedly against war. So how come you are on the side of those who have brought almost continuous war to the Middle East since Israel was founded (actually, since before that, because those same forces were killing Jews who wanted to live in the region since about 1920)?

Peace Fresno is supposedly against colonialism and imperialism. So how come you are against the people who actually kicked the British out of Palestine? How come you support Iran, the real imperialist in today’s Middle East?

Peace Fresno supposedly abhors war crimes. So how come you support Hizballah and Syria, who have tens of thousands of missiles — some with chemical warheads — aimed at Israel’s towns and cities? Or Hamas, which randomly shoots mortars and rockets at Israeli towns, deliberately launches rockets from locations near schools and stores them in mosques, and commits drive-by murders of pregnant women?

Peace Fresno supposedly hates racism and apartheid. So how come you are on the side of the racist, apartheid dictatorships of the Middle East?

Peace Fresno is supposedly opposed to ethnic cleansing. You are very concerned about Arab refugees. So how come you didn’t seem to notice that in 1948 the Jordanian Army forcibly removed every last Jew from Judea/Samaria and East Jerusalem? Or the hundreds of thousands of Jews forced to leave the Arab world after 1948? How come you approve of the Arab demand today that a ‘peace’ agreement must include the evacuation of every last Jew east of the 1949 armistice line?

“Israel just has to evacuate the territories and there will be peace” you’ll say. Really? Read the Hamas Covenant or even the PLO/Fatah platform (an old version? — the latest one, accepted at the Fatah General Congress in 2009 explicitly incorporates it). Think about the meaning of ‘racism’ and ‘genocide’ when you read these documents. Pay attention, too, to what happened when Israel evacuated Gaza.

Frankly, the local ‘peace and justice’ movement, including Peace Fresno, WILPF, numerous other groups, coalitions, cooperatives, etc. — and absolutely not excluding the KFCF radio station, which adds its own poison to a schedule already dripping with venom from KPFA, Berkeley — has bought into an ideology of hate, an ideology exemplified by its pantheon, including the Nazi Mufti al-Husseini, the Original Terrorist Yasser Arafat, and minor deities like the child-killers Dalal Mughrabi and Samir Kuntar, or perhaps Amna Muna.

How wrong can you people be? Why do you believe without question propagandists like Abunimah; the mentally deranged, like Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein; or the corrupt, like Human Rights Watch?

Think about it, Dan. Is this what the antiwar and social justice movement should be about?

Technorati Tags: Israel, KFCF, Ali Abunimah, Dan Yaseen, Peace Fresno

By Vic Rosenthal

This morning I heard an interview with Fresno’s own Kamal Abu-Shamsieh, the director of the Islamic Cultural Center here, on a national NPR newscast. Abu Shamsieh discussed his mosque’s decision to not hold a carnival marking Eid al-Fitr on September 11.

We didn’t want any extremists out there to exploit the pain of our country by saying that Muslims are celebrating 9/11… locally a mosque was attacked. Out of fear for our, for the safety of our community, we decided not to have huge public gatherings.

The interviewer asked about the ‘attack’. Abu-Shamsieh responded,

The Madera mosque, which is about 25 minutes drive away from Fresno was vandalized three times in one week. At one time a brick was tossed through the window of the mosque, two signs were placed inside the compound, one was placed outside — that refers to the mosque in New York — and labeling the Muslim community as a terrorist community… Muslims are concerned [about their safety] every time we approach 9/11. That’s something that’s understandable. However, what we really don’t understand is the ongoing rhetoric that is being placed on [the] airwaves, especially during the month of Ramadan. We welcome the questions about our faith, but the comments that really put down our faith — that’s unwelcome.

A few things:

The ‘attack’ on the Madera mosque was not quite what Abu Shamsieh describes. The Fresno Bee reported that “a brick nearly smashed a window”. Several cardboard signs were placed on the property, but nothing was damaged — the ‘vandals’ didn’t even spray-paint graffiti on the property, as they often do to my back fence. Nothing is mentioned about anyone seeing the brick thrown, so it’s possible that a better description of the event is that “a brick was found near a window.”

Sheriff’s deputy with Madera mosque signs. Courtesy Fresno Bee.

Do I have to say that such acts are despicable? But its interesting that when worse vandalism has been perpetrated against Jewish institutions in the area, the reaction has been to play down, not exaggerate the threat. Why is this?

As I wrote recently,

There is a campaign underway to define all speech critical of programs, projects or activities of Muslims as anti-religious hate speech, which is out of bounds.

Abu-Shamsieh wants to make it appear that criticism of the Ground Zero mosque plan, for example, is hate speech, the verbal equivalent of the brick that was [in some alternate reality] thrown through the window in Madera. And he wants everyone who objects to the behavior of Muslims or even the political platform of radical Islamism, to shut up.

Etymologically, the word ‘Islamophobia’ should mean ‘fear of Muslims’, but Abu-Shamsieh and others use it to mean ‘hatred of Muslims’, analogous to racism or antisemitism. Muslim groups are presently making a big deal about the massive ‘threat’ posed by Islamophobia in the latter sense. But they are quite happy to create fear, because fear is an excellent tool to silence criticism.

So the Quran-burning affair — not that it constitutes legitimate criticism — is presented as a possible trigger for anti-American violence around the world, including against American troops in Afghanistan. The Iranian Foreign Minister says that if they had succeeded in murdering Salman Rushdie or the Danish cartoonists, maybe the infidels wouldn’t be burning Qurans today. Of course they are trying to kill Americans in Afghanistan every day, not to mention burning our flags almost everywhere there are Muslims, but that’s to be expected.

In fact, Mr. Abu-Shamsieh himself participated in an attempt to intimidate critics by fear. In early 2009, the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno was the main sponsor of a huge pro-Hamas demonstration here in Fresno.  They brought in literally hundreds of Muslim students from out of town who occupied three of four corners of a major intersection.

A small portion of the pro-Hamas demonstrators in Fresno, January 2009

One of their signs. Courtesy KMPH-TV.

A pro-Hamas demonstrator wrests Israeli flag from counter-demonstrator. Courtesy Fresno Bee.

No more than 25 counter-demonstrators stood on the remaining corner, as waves of pro-Hamas students crossed the street, often threatening them verbally and sometimes physically. At one point when it appeared that verbal confrontations might escalate to violence, I called the police, to be told that ‘everything was under control’ (there were no officers visible). Apparently the Islamic Center had made an agreement with the police that they [the Muslims] would prevent violence, and soon one of their marshals appeared on the scene and restrained the more aggressive students. But it was made clear to us that our safety was entirely in their hands.

What I see is a two-pronged strategy to make it impossible to criticize Muslims:

• Define criticism of Muslims, their actions or politics as bigotry akin to burning crosses; and if that doesn’t work,
• scare the hell out of the critics.

This is why they want everyone to think there is a large amount of bigoted Muslim-hatred out there (although FBI figures show that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes is less than one-tenth the number of anti-Jewish ones), while at the same time doing their best to create a healthy fear of the consequences of saying things that Muslims don’t like.

Technorati Tags: Fresno, Madera, Kamal Abu-Shamsieh, Muslims, Islamophobia

Recently, a fellow mentioned that he was putting together a new pro-Israel organization and that he was trying to decide what to name it.

He was considering something like “Peace and Justice for the Middle East.”

My first thought was that this sounds like an anti-Israel group. All he would need to add would be something about human rights and it would be perfect. Of course this is because the people who want to see an end to the Jewish state have co-opted the language of peace, justice and human rights. They own it now, despite the fact that this entails an Orwellian reversal of meaning.

For example, let’s take a local organization, Peace Fresno. They support the ‘right of return’ for Palestinian Arab ‘refugees’. Now I know a number of their members and they say they are against all war. I would like to ask them how the influx of several million violently hostile Arabs into tiny Israel would affect matters of war and peace. Would it make things more peaceful? We know that it would be the beginning of a bloody civil war, 1948 all over again except with ten times the number of combatants. We know this because the Palestinians themselves tell us.

But they would say that the Palestinian refugees deserve justice. Really? Is it just that the Palestinian Arabs, who started the 1948 war under the leadership of the Nazi Mufti al-Husseini and lost it, should have the result of that war reversed after 62 years?  Is it just that other refugees, like the 800,000 Jewish ones who fled Arab countries between 1948 and the 1960’s were absorbed by Israel and other countries, but the Arab nations refuse to absorb even one Palestinian?

More generally, is it just that there are 23 Arab nations with a combined population of 358 million and one Jewish state with about 5.5 million Jews, and this is intolerable to the Arabs?  Is it just that one unelected royal family rules all of Saudi Arabia, where they have institutionalized racism, misogyny and antisemitism? Is it just  that Arab terror organizations are rewarded for their murder campaigns?

Peace Fresno also calls for justice for the ‘victims’ among the ‘peaceful activists’ (Turkish IHH thugs) on board the Mavi Marmara. Justice must mean that you can beat somebody with an iron pipe until his brains start coming out and he is expected to do nothing. ‘Justice’ must mean something different for Israelis and Turks.

And Peace Fresno wants no restrictions on traffic of goods or people in and out of Gaza. Their Hamas friends in Gaza need more building materials, so they can rebuild after the recent war that they started and were losing, at least until the incoming Obama administration made Israel stop fighting. They have already started rebuilding — fortifications and tunnels and a big new prison (with a reinforced basement bunker, I’m sure), not homes. That’s how to promote peace.

Speaking of human rights, the ‘activists’ on the Gaza Flotilla, who belonged to multiple organizations with ‘peace’, ‘justice’ and ‘human rights’ in their names, were asked to deliver a message to Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped four years ago (when he was 19 years old) and has been held incommunicado — in violation of international law — ever since. They refused, because apparently ‘human rights’ mean something different for Israelis and Arab residents of Gaza.

So who wants peace? Israel, which wants to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority (PA), or the PA, which refuses to negotiate unless Israel agrees to all of its demands in advance? Hamas, which — still — fires rockets into Israel and continually probes the border, trying to kidnap more Israelis?

Who is more concerned with justice? Israel, whose Supreme Court often issues orders that Palestinian rights require changes in the route of the security fence, whose army command arrests and tries Israeli soldiers for improper behavior in wartime, and which allows security prisoners — even those convicted of multiple murders — access to television and university courses in prison? Or Hamas, which executes ‘collaborators’ and political opponents without trial, and will not let the Red Cross visit Gilad Shalit in his underground bunker?

But it’s no use. The language is corrupted. Better he should call his group “The Zionist  League for Preemptive Self-Defense,” in keeping with the adage that if you can’t be liked, you might as well  be respected.

Technorati Tags: Israel, peace, justice, human rights, Peace Fresno