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Poster by agent provocateur Avishai Raviv showing Yitzhak Rabin in a Nazi uniform

News item:

…the Shin Bet head during the time of Rabin’s assassination, Carmi Gillon, warned on Wednesday that “price-tag ‘incidents’ could lead to assassination attempts on prime ministers in the future.”

Speaking at the Holon Technical Institute, Gillon said: “Today it is called ‘price-tag’ because currently there is no real threat of returning land [to the Palestinians], but this is where the ideals for the next assassin of a prime minister who chooses to return land are formed.”

Yes, he is correct. It is a bad idea to incite hatred.

Carmi Gillon should know. Under his direction, the Shabak paid agent provocateur Avishai Raviv to tar the Right with the brush of violent extremism. Here is a description, short and not so sweet:

Under orders from the Shin Bet Raviv created [the fake right-wing organization] Eyal to perpetrate acts of violence to discredit the Israel right wing. Raviv recruited Yigal Amir, a religious law student from Bar-Ilan University, who fiercely opposed the Oslo Accords.

At one protest, Raviv was filmed with a picture of Rabin in an SS uniform prior to Rabin’s murder. Raviv allegedly knew of Yigal Amir’s plans to assassinate Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, based on a controversial classification of handing over “Jewish land” in the category of “din rodef” (“law of the pursuer”).  …  Uri Dan, a journalist close to Ariel Sharon, wrote that witnesses heard Raviv tell Amir: “Be a man! Kill him already!”

After Rabin was assassinated, the journalist Amnon Abramowitch revealed that Raviv was an agent of the Shabak.

Raviv was brought to trial in 2000 for not preventing Rabin’s assassination. Raviv mounted a successful defense on the grounds that he had just been doing his job and events had spun out of control.

Gillon resigned after the assassination, taking responsibility for the failure to protect Rabin. When asked later what the Shabak’s fatal mistake was, he said,

Yigal Amir is alive today due to a mishap … He should have died that night after firing the first shot, definitely after the second.

I’m sorry to say the security guards did not act in accordance with the lessons we taught them. They failed, because they didn’t shoot him like a dog, like any despicable terrorist. From a security point of view, it was a failure. …

If they would have killed him on the spot, he wouldn’t have become a symbol for the radical right. By becoming a symbol, he pours fuel on the fire, giving energy for the next political murder.

My personal view is that the fatal mistake was made long before Amir fired his shots. The mistake was to in effect create violent extremism in an effort to discredit the very legitimate opposition to Oslo, which — in hindsight — was quite correct.

Would Amir have murdered Rabin if there had been no Avishai Raviv? Who knows?

Technorati Tags: Carmi Gillon, Avishai Raviv, Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin, Israel

One of the favorite techniques of Israel’s enemies is to invent an atrocity. Naturally it is much harder to prove that something did not happen than it is to claim that it did, and Israeli denials are met with further inventions, until the invented story becomes a controversy, something with two sides that can be debated endlessly. This is the same method used by Holocaust deniers, and it works because irrational Jew-hatred or its direct descendent, Israel-hatred, predisposes its subjects to believe these stories.

“A lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,” said Mark Twain. Here are some examples of lies sent around the world by the enemies of Israel:

The ‘death’ of Mohammad al-Dura

The “Gaza beach incident”

The Red Cross ambulance story

The Jenin ‘Massacre’

The Tantura ‘Massacre’

There are others. Sometimes they are based on a nucleus of truth that is wildly exaggerated (Deir Yassin), and sometimes they are simply made up from whole cloth.  And in the non-Western world there are even worse ones, like claims that Israel perpetrated 9/11 or has biological weapons able to selectively kill Arabs.

No matter how many times they are refuted, they never go away. It’s especially ugly when the promulgators of these libels are Jews, like Ilan Pappé, the renegade Israeli academic who was primarily responsible for spreading the Tantura story. Pappé famously said “I am not as interested in what happened as in how people see what’s happened,” and in his writing he often presents the latter as if it were the former.

But it is still worse when organizations dedicated to supporting the Jewish people become complicit. “The Admission” is a play by left-wing Israeli writer Motti Lerner which lightly fictionalizes the Tantura allegation, and which created a furor when a DC Jewish theater group planned to put it on.  The Washington Post reports,

Officials at the D.C. Jewish Community Center (DCJCC), where Theater J performs and gets other cost-defraying support, in tandem with Theater J’s artistic director, Ari Roth, have decided to pull back “The Admission” from a 34-performance, full-production run in March. It will now be presented in what they are describing as a “workshop” run, lasting 16 performances, in proposed repertory with “Golda’s Balcony,” a biographical play about the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.

Like Ilan Pappé, Lerner believes that there is a more subtle ‘truth’ than one based on mere historical facts:

Playwright Lerner, who grew up in Zichron Yaakov, not far from Tantura, said he recalled hearing stories of the massacre from neighbors. He issued his own statement saying that “the play is not an attempt to make a historical judgment based on the materials I collected, but an attempt to explore how Jews and Arabs in Israel have created their historical memories as a means for survival.”

Translation: it’s bullshit, but bullshit that Arabs like to believe — so we need to take it seriously. This is precisely the argument used by Israeli Arab filmmaker Mohammed Bakri whose film “Jenin, Jenin,” a purported documentary about the “Jenin Massacre,” was composed of made-up atrocity stories (and like the master’s thesis which began the Tantura libel, was the subject of a lawsuit by outraged Israeli soldiers).

The DCJCC received over $400,000 in 2012 from the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. One can understand that some of the donors to the Federation — which in years past supported efforts to get Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine, and later helped Soviet Jews leave the USSR — were angry.

It’s offensive for the performance, even in ‘scaled down’ form, to be supported by Jewish funds. The Palestinian Authority paid for the legal defense of Teddy Katz, Pappé’s student whose master’s thesis introduced the Tantura libel. Perhaps it ought to finance this performance as well?

Technorati Tags: Theater J, DC Jewish Federation, Tantura, The Admission

On Friday, I mentioned the brutal murder of Sariya Ofer by Palestinian Arabs, who beat him to death with metal bars and axes.

The police have arrested several Arabs, two of whom have confessed. But the police have not said whether the motive was ‘nationalistic’ — in other words, terrorism — or criminal.

There is no difference, in any sense.

Since the time of Mohammed, criminal activity against infidels has been a form of warfare. Islamic banditry and piracy strangled Mediterranean commerce in the second half of the first Millennium of the Common Era, so much so that it lead some writers to argue that it was the major factor that brought an end to the classical era and ushered in the dark ages.

The so-called “Barbary Pirates,” whom the US Marines fought on the “shores of Tripoli” continued the tradition. These pirates, who captured ships primarily to take infidels as slaves, also raided coastal areas for the same purpose. The similarity with today’s terrorists — for example, the adoption of Western technology — and the huge scope of the problem are notable:

Corsairs captured thousands of ships, and long stretches of coast in Spain and Italy were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants, discouraging settlement until the 19th century. From the 16th to 19th century, corsairs captured an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million people as slaves.  Some corsairs were European outcasts and converts such as John Ward and Zymen Danseker. Hayreddin Barbarossa and Oruç Reis, the Barbarossa brothers, who took control of Algiers on behalf of the Ottomans in the early 16th century, were also famous corsairs. The European pirates brought state-of-the-art sailing and shipbuilding techniques to the Barbary Coast around 1600, which enabled the corsairs to extend their activities into the Atlantic Ocean, and the impact of Barbary raids peaked in the early to mid-17th century [and continued until the French conquest of Algiers in 1830].

In today’s Israel, Muslim banditry takes the form of arson, theft of agricultural products, animals and equipment, stealing cars, robbery, burglary, rape, etc.

The Palestinian Arabs are characterized by a pervasive sense of victimization and lost honor which serves to ‘justify’ criminal actions (“they stole my land so I can take their cars”). There is the element of satisfaction that comes from humiliating their enemies, as violently as possible. Then we add a cupful of personal gain, along with the ability to present harming Jews as an idealistic act done for ‘the Palestinian cause’ even if the initial motivation was just to steal a car or rape a woman.

So can we really distinguish between crime and terrorism? Should we bother to try?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Muslims, Pirates

A Jewish man was murdered yesterday, beaten and hacked to death by two Arabs with metal bars and axes. Here is a bit from the BBC news item:

The incident happened in a part of the Jordan Valley which Israel captured in the war of 1967 where the construction of Israeli homes and businesses is widely considered a breach of international law – something Israel does not accept, says the BBC’s Kevin Connolly in Jerusalem.

The dead man is the third Israeli to be killed in what Israel characterises as “terror attacks” in the last month in the West Bank. Two serving soldiers have also died.

So what exactly does what is “widely considered” have to do with this murder?

It is also widely considered — by many authorities in international law, not just ‘Israel’ — that construction of such buildings is not illegal. In fact, before the Jordanian occupation of this area in 1948, nobody said that Jews couldn’t build in this area.

Then — in actual violation of international law and the UN Charter — Jordan invaded the area, annexed it, and ethnically cleansed it of its Jewish population. The only country that recognized the annexation was the BBC’s homeland, the UK. But I don’t recall protests against illegal Jordanian construction.

In 1967, in a defensive war, Israel reversed these illegal acts. The least the international community could do would be to say thanks! Instead, it became “widely” thought that it was illegal for Jews to live there.

Is it being insinuated that the victims (the man’s wife was injured but escaped) deserved what they got? Or that the murders were somehow justified, or if not justified, understood?

Incidentally, the word ‘murdered’ does not appear in the piece. Only ‘killed’.

Shabbat shalom!

Technorati Tags: Israel, BBC

It probably annoys the hell out of the antisemites there (practically everybody), but Israel is a better friend to Egypt than the US. And maybe vice versa.

OK, nations don’t really have ‘friends’. It’s a philosophical category mistake, like saying that colors are things.  What they have are interests, and Israel’s interests align with Egypt’s more closely than either nation’s interests do with those of the US.

Israel and Egypt’s military regime see Hamas as a dangerous destabilizing force which challenges both of them. Egypt has probably destroyed more of Hamas’ smuggling tunnels under its border with Gaza in the last few months than Israel ever did (to great international silence, by the way). The US defines Hamas as a terrorist organization, but forced Israel to end economic pressure on it after the Mavi Marmara affair.

Hamas, of course, is the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, closely aligned with the Brotherhood in Egypt. There are reasons to think that the Brotherhood is excessively influential with the Obama Administration.

Hamas’ biggest buddy in the Middle East has become Turkey, whose ruler Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan has turned his country from an ally to an enemy of Israel. President Obama has emphasized his closeness to ErdoÄŸan, the first national leader with whom he had a bilateral meeting after his election.

Hamas also gets weapons and support from its ideological enemy but pragmatic patron, Iran, Egypt’s historic rival — and Israel’s foe.

Speaking of Iran, we note that both Israel and Egypt find the idea of an Iranian bomb unacceptable. Despite statements to the contrary, so far the US is acting in a way that will provide Iran the time to develop nuclear weapons, and has prevented Israel from taking direct action.

The recent partial cutoff of US aid to Egypt, along with a humiliating lecture on the subject of “inclusive democracy,” has done a great deal of damage to relations between Egypt and the US. Although it is probably true that Egypt doesn’t need F16s or Abrams tanks,  the US also cut off several hundred million dollars of cash aid to the regime. And while it could have shifted the cost of the ‘big weapons’ to food aid and other economic help, it did not do so.

Note also that continuing US aid to Egypt is part of the Camp David Accords that brought ‘peace’ between Israel and Egypt, and interrupting it weakens the treaty.

The worst part of the US action, in my opinion, is the way it is tone deaf to the realities of the Middle East. Does it expect the military leaders to become “inclusive” about the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to kill them?

By the way, the argument that the US “had to cut aid” against Egypt due to a law that prohibits assistance after a coup is wrong, because senior US officials say that there has not been — and there is no need for — an official determination that the takeover was a “coup.”

And it won’t save our struggling government much money either, because as officials also point out, the government has obligations to defense contractors that will be met regardless of where the F16s and tanks end up.

The whole idea was to “send a message” to Egypt!

Well, the first part of the message is received, in Egypt and Israel, that the USA does not support its allies.

The rest will be coming shortly when the final chapter in the saga of the Iranian nuclear project is written.

Technorati Tags: Egypt, Obama Administration, Iran, Israel