FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Do you remember the New Israel Fund (NIF), the US charity that was recently the center of controversy when an Israeli Zionist group, Im Tirtzu, claimed that they funded the organizations responsible for the majority of the ‘documentation’ of alleged IDF crimes in the notorious Goldstone report?

The ‘moderate’ Left, including the Union for Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center, rushed to their defense. Im Tirtzu was accused of being composed of right-wing extremists or worse.

But let’s see who the real extremists are.

The BDS movement  (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) attempts to delegitimize Israel as a state, calling for boycotts in every area, economics, academics, sports, culture, science, etc. The campaign is designed on the model of the boycott of apartheid South Africa, the implication being that the Jewish state is equally immoral and illegitimate. The boycott is to be continued until Israel meets the following conditions:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.

One would think that a pro-Israel charity would not fund groups calling for the ‘return’ of 4.5 million hostile ‘refugees’, something which, if it happens, would certainly mark the end of the state of Israel and the beginning of a bloody civil war. So what is the policy of the New Israel Fund with regard to BDS? Here is an excerpt from their FAQ (h/t: Israel Academia Monitor):

What is NIF’s position on boycott, divestment and sanctions?

NIF supports an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories as a central tenet of the strategic framework in which we operate.  The tactics known as ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ (BDS) are designed to pressure Israel to end the occupation, but NIF believes these tactics to be unproductive, inflammatory and ineffective because of the difficulties in defining an approach that is not overly broad, does not delegitimize Israel and will achieve the long-term goal.

So far, so good. Very moderate, if leftish. But it continues,

Although we will continue to communicate publicly and privately to our allies and grantees that NIF does not support BDS as a strategy or tactic, we will not reduce or eliminate our funding for grantees that differ with us on a tactical matter. NIF will not fund BDS activities nor support organizations for which BDS is a substantial element of their activities, but will support organizations that conform to our grant requirements if their support for BDS is incidental or subsidiary to their significant programs.

In other words, if an organization claims that its main goal is to improve the condition of Palestinian women but also supports BDS — no problem. And in fact there are numerous groups like this, since the universal Palestinian Arab position is that all of their problems are a direct result of ‘occupation’ — that is, the existence of Israel — and have no other cause.

So it’s clear that the NIF does fund groups working to delegitimize Israel — as long as they don’t say that this is their primary purpose!

Like J Street and others, the NIF trades on the Jewish commitment to social justice and helping others to turn the resources of the Jewish community against its own interest, the preservation of the state of Israel.

Technorati Tags: Israel, NIF, BDS

I don’t know how many posts I’ve written about anti-Israel Jews — J Street, Israeli intellectuals, leftist anti-Zionists, etc. I even thought about creating a special category called “With Jews like these, who needs Arabs?”

The inimitable Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine, for example, recently gave an award to Richard Goldstone because… get ready for this — “the peace community both in Israel and around the world see Justice Goldstone as upholding the best ethical values of the Jewish community”. Ethical values?

It doesn’t work anymore to say “Oh, Michael Lerner (or Chomsky, or Finkelstein, or half the faculty of Tel Aviv University, etc.) is crazy. If the problem is mental illness, it’s an epidemic.

The latest is a new European organization called “JCall“. Like J Street, JCall claims to be “unfailingly” committed to the Jewish state, but nevertheless holds that “Systematic support of Israeli government policy is dangerous and does not serve the true interests of the state of Israel,” and calls for the EU and the US to “put pressure on both parties” to achieve a “solution” to the conflict.

I suppose it’s worth saying again why ‘putting pressure on both sides’ won’t end the conflict (a more complete argument is here):

• While it’s possible to force Israeli concessions — viz. the recent ‘secret’ Jerusalem construction freeze — they are never matched by any softening of the Palestinian side, which will not even go so far as to agree that the Israel that will be left will belong to the Jews.
• As long as Hamas is in control of Gaza where 40% of the Palestinian Arabs live, no agreement will be worth anything.
• The Palestinian Authority has very little support. It’s famously corrupt, and is dominated by the Fatah ‘old guard’. There is almost no  interest in permanent peace with Israel among any of the Fatah members, old or young, who tend to see agreements only as a stepping stone to ultimate victory.
• Therefore, an imposed agreement would not ‘solve’ anything. Rather, it would simply create another hostile entity right next to the most heavily-populated part of Israel, making a three-front war almost a certainty.

This is not rocket science. If you are pro-Israel, you do not invite the 1000-pound gorillas of the EU and the US to sit on Israel and impose a solution that serves their own narrow interests.

As Barry Rubin pointed out in the ‘freeze’ article linked above, Israel’s government is in essence a unity government which includes the left-wing Labor Party of Ehud Barak. It is not a right-wing extremist government whose policy doesn’t serve the “true interests” of the state, as JCall implies. Israelis, who elected this government and who either fight to defend the state or send their children to do so, don’t need European Jews to tell them their business.

But the fact is that J Street, JCall, Tikkun, etc. are not pro-Israel, even though some of their donors are uninformed or stupid enough to accept their facile arguments. Their fully conscious members have to realize this, just like Richard Goldstone has to realize by now that he was snookered; and if he really were deserving of an ethics award he would admit it.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jews, JCall, Goldstone 

The US Supreme court recently struck down a law banning animal abuse videos, videos so bad that just the idea is nauseating. I was distressed, but I understood. The principle of free speech is one of the foundations of our free society, and there is probably no place in the world where it is taken more seriously.

Some time ago I went to a talk by a Holocaust denier in my own neighborhood. That, too, was nauseating. But I understood why it was impossible to prevent this person from speaking. Unfortunately, this is the price we pay for the kind of society we want. Other nations have made different choices; Holocaust denial can get you put in jail in some European countries.

So when a young man warned the producers of South Park (of which I am not particularly a fan) that they might end up dead for depicting the Prophet Mohammad, he in effect crashed an airliner into one of the most important edifices of our American culture (please read what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who should know, wrote about this).

Threats of lawsuits, boycotts, nasty blogs, etc. are one thing. They may or may not have what lawyers like to call a ‘chilling effect’ on free speech. But threats of murder are something else entirely, especially since there are numerous precedents that threats like this will be carried out. Think of Salman Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh, Kurt Westergaard, Hirsi Ali herself, etc. Indeed, Comedy Central bleeped out the mention of the name ‘Mohammad’ in a follow-up episode.

The first episode did not actually present an image of Mohammad, but had his voice come from inside a bear suit. In the same episode, Jesus is shown watching porn and Buddah snorting cocaine. The relatively mild treatment of Mohammad may already imply a degree of self-censorship.

Mohammad in a bear suit on South Park

The individual who made the threats, as well as publishing the names, addresses and pictures of the producers, is Abu Talhah al-Amrikee — Abu Talhah the American — who used to be called Zachary Adam Chesser, and was a student at George Mason University. His nom de guerre is ironic, since his actions are about as anti-American as anything one can imagine. And it doesn’t matter how marginal or crazy he is. It doesn’t take a sane man to pull a trigger.

Abu Talhah al-Amriki

The strategy of responding to self-defined insults with murderous violence is  an attack on a principle that Western culture has developed over several centuries at great cost; as I said, a foundation of our free society. The intent is to propel us back into the Middle Ages, where radical Islam lives.

It must be resisted as strongly as we resist attempts to crash airliners into our physical structures.

Technorati Tags: South Park, Abu Talhah al-Amrikee, radical Islam, Muslim violence

Ami Isseroff gives us a convincing description of the most likely scenario if Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon is not stopped:

By “nuclear Iran,” I mean an Iran that at least makes a convincing case that it has or could have nuclear weapons – that it has completed the fuel cycle. They needn’t test an actual bomb. They will use their military muscle as an umbrella to further their two goals: eliminating the Great Satan, the USA, from influence in the Middle East, and eliminating the Little Satan, Israel. They will create a Hezbollah movement in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia for example, where there are aggrieved Shi’ite populations (a majority in Bahrain) and a lot of oil. They will certainly gain control of Iraq, as well as tightening their grip on Syria and Lebanon.

They will control most of the oil reserves of the Middle East and demand a price for the oil. That price will be, as their leaders have stated, a “referendum” about the future of “Palestine” (meaning Israel) in which all the “Palestinian Arabs” in the world are allowed to participate. As there are a very large number of candidates for eligibility as “Palestinian Arabs” if criteria are sufficiently lax and imaginative, there is little doubt as to what the result of the referendum would be. Mr. Obama might be able to “live” with that for a while, but of course that would not be the end of Iranian demands, since their ultimate goal as Mr. Ahmadinejad announced, is a “world without the United States and Zionism.”

There are various things that might derail this plan, but an imposed Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace’ agreement is not one of them. Indeed, such a deal with the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority and in the presence of Hamas will simply create a hostile entity — another Gaza, if you will — next door to Israel’s heartland, completing its encirclement by Iran-linked enemies, and threatening a three-front war.

While the Iranian leadership obviously has religious and ideological reasons to want to eliminate Israel, there are also geopolitical ones: 1) Israel is the only state in the Middle East that is strong enough to be a threat to Iran’s plan to dominate the region, and 2) insofar as it is an ally of the US, it serves as a way for the US to project its power in the region.

It’s been suggested that an anti-Israel policy will get the conservative Arab regimes on our side, which will strengthen our hand with Iran. But those regimes will be the first targets of Iranian expansionism and they are already ‘on our side’ with regard to Iran (interestingly — although they will never say so publicly — some in the Arab world are hoping that Israel will solve the Iranian problem for them).

Israel is the keystone of Western interests in the region. If it’s removed, the structure will fall.

Can you imagine a world in which a third of the oil reserves — more, if you include Venezuela in the anti-US bloc — is under the control of Iran, where political speeches invariably close with shouts of “death to America!”?

US policy to contract and weaken Israel actually aids Iran, a declared enemy of the US. This policy is at best irrational and at worst treasonous.

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Just because someone is irrational doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have motives. Hitler lost the war in part because his irrational desire to wipe out the Jews of Europe at all costs interfered with rational decision-making.

There’s no shortage of important people who oppose Israel. There has always been a strong element, primarily in the State Department, that believes that the relationship between Israel and the US is an embarrassment, forced upon us by the Jewish Lobby. Truman recognized the state of Israel in 1948 in defiance of this group. It’s safe to say that there’s more than a bit of antisemitism among them.

There is also a Saudi-paid army of former officials and lobbyists that push this view. Chas Freeman, Jimmy Carter, James A. Baker, etc. are examples. Whatever their arguments, there’s a strong element of simple self-interest here.

More recently they’ve been joined by left-wing anti-Zionists, who consider the Palestinians third-world ‘people of color’ (never mind the actual colors of representative Israelis and Palestinians) who have been ‘colonized’ by Israel; these types suffuse the Obama Administration and apparently set the tone for White House attitudes. This is most likely Obama’s own view, although he plays his cards close to the vest. In recent years this group has also begun to be characterized by antisemitism.

Probably the only way to improve this administration’s policy will be to replace it.

Technorati Tags: Iran, Israel, Obama

News item:

Aides to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas say the Palestinian leader could meet with US President Barack Obama soon.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that the Palestinians requested such a meeting and were told by Obama’s envoy that the US leader would see Abbas in the near future. Erekat said Sunday that no date was set.

Another aide, Yasser Abed Rabbo, told Palestinian radio that “there is talk about an invitation for President Abbas to visit Washington,” possibly next month.

Will there be a photo-op with the press for this ‘leader’ who has zero support from his own people except those that are paid with US dollars? Will he be offered more of those dollars even though he represents Fatah, a terrorist organization that has killed more Israelis than any other, and which still — despite promises and signed agreements — swears to erase Israel from all of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean?

Will there be a special halal dinner served to this man who wrote a book based on his doctoral dissertation called “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” in which he wrote

A partnership was established between Hitler’s Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist movement… [the Zionists] gave permission to every racist in the world, led by Hitler and the Nazis, to treat Jews as they wish, so long as it guarantees immigration to Palestine.

And this,

Having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner — suffering victims in a battle — it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting…

It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement…is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.

PM Netanyahu, who had to enter the White House by a side door and who did not get a photo-op or dinner (did Obama expect him to stop for a Big Mac on the way home?) has accepted the idea of a Palestinian state for the ‘Palestinian people’ alongside Israel and called for immediate negotiations with the Palestinians to this end, with no preconditions.

Abbas, for his part, has refused to talk unless Israel stops all construction in East Jerusalem, even in established Jewish neighborhoods, because — as the media invariably report with a straight face — the Palestinians ‘want East Jerusalem for the capital of their state’. And our president humiliated PM Netanyahu because he would not accept this demand, because he refused to give up sovereignty in his own capital because Abbas — whom, you recall, refuses to accept the idea of a Jewish state at all, anywhere –  ‘wants’ it!

After the manufactured ‘insult’ to the US during the Biden visit, Hillary Clinton called PM Netanyahu and made a series of new demands on Israel; stop all building in East Jerusalem, extend the freeze in Judea and Samaria, make further concessions on security measures, etc.

Will Abbas get the same treatment? Will Obama demand that the Palestinian leadership finally say — publicly, in Arabic — that a peace agreement with Israel will be with a state that belongs to the Jewish people, and send him out for a Big Mac if he refuses?

Nah, I’m betting that Obama treats him like a king.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Obama, Abbas, Netanyahu