Misguided and Disingenuous J Streeters Rejected and Why I Applaud The Decision!

It's a beautiful Passover day and the rabbi goes to the bakery to pick up some fresh matzo.

It's so nice a day, so he walks over to the park, sits on a bench and starts eating some.

He notices a blind man sitting down the bench from him and hands him a piece of matzo.

The blind mans takes the matzo, runs his fingers over it, and says, "Who writes this kind of crap?"
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An American Jewish Umbrella Organization rejects misguided, far Left apologists Jews who have a problem with their Jewishness and Israel. (See 1 below.)

So many of my Christian friends ask me why Jews are so liberal and how can they continue to support Obama.?  I have answered this before by citing Norman Podhoretz' view that Liberal Jews have substituted  politics for religion and do not truly understand how conservative our religion is when it comes to how we are commanded to live our lives and what responsibilities we have, not only to ourselves and families but also to the community at large.

Our love of the human spirit should keep us from succumbing to the siren song of dependency. Jewish achievements, in virtually every human endeavor, should serve as testimony to what man can accomplish if left to his own devices.

I believe Norman has a point but I also believe far too many Liberal Jews feel threatened by Israel's prominence and/or the controversy that surrounds it and its policies.

When their Liberal friends , and the world at large, attack Israel for being an apartheid state far too many Jews are either uniformed and thus incapable of responding or fear being exposed if they defend Israel by pointing out the falseness of these accusations.  Because so many Jews have achieved prominence and now serve on elite boards and public institutions, belong to once restricted country clubs etc. they fear they  might fall from grace if they were prominent and outspoken with respect to their Jewishness.

And then there are historical reasons because so many immigrated from Eastern Europe knew Socialism which  was part of the political landscape. When they came to America, unions supported many of their legitimate needs.  Today unions have largely out served their purpose as they are currently constructed and managed and are more the problem than the solution. Sound familiar?

I have never worried about being accepted because, being an only child, I am sort of a loner type but because my father was an active Zionist and helped Israel become a nation I have a heritage and feelings towards Israel that others may not have.  I also have been willing to side with the under dog if I felt the cause was just.

This is why I support candidates for office who often are not front runners but, in my opinion, have the better message and are more likely to serve honestly.

Finally, I am just outspoken because remaining silent is not part of my DNA.  I love America and am just as willing to defend its exceptionalism as I am Israel's  exceptionalism.  I believe democracies are the best hope for peace, stability and  progress. I challenge anyone, in their right mind, to argue against the fact that more people want to come to our country than any other.  Why is this so if we are as bad as Obama would have us believe?

Are we perfect? No. Is any nation?  Of course not.

That said, America has  done more for mankind than any comparable nation and our economic system has produced more benefits and a higher standard of living for more than any other nation.  This is why I am happy to rail against the backwardness of Liberal Progressiveness because, empirically speaking, it  has proven to be destructive. This is why I believe freedom is preferable to government dictates and the opportunity to fail and learn is preferable to dependency and entitlements. This is why I abhor PC'ism!

Finally, this is why I believe a strong family unit and education are crucial for the survival of this great nation and this is why I oppose union thuggery and protection and Obama's divisive ways purely for political gain.

So with that said, I am off to Italy.  The land of good food and wine, friendly people who are crippled by a government that suffers from political  arterial sclerosis and corruption.

How sad indeed!
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Not holding my breath.  (See 2 below.)

As I e mailed previously, when  negotiating with Arabs, their cultural tribal mentality leads them  to never ending seeking concessions.  (See 3 and 3a below.)

Also, stop and think.  Is there another country in The Middle East, besides Israel, that protects the churches and worship of a multitude of religions?

Finally, ask any Israeli Arab, and ye, they have legitimate complaints as a minority, but I daresay they do not want to leave Israel to go to another Arab/Muslim country.  I have put this question directly to Arab cab drivers, waiters, hotel employees.  My friend Toameh has also verified this fact and he is an Israeli Arab working for The Jerusalem Post and a courageous man as well because he writes the truth which Arabs do not want to hear just as in this country regarding far too many black Americans are afraid to hear comparable truths about their plight. (See 3b below.)
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Dick
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J Street rejected by American Jewish umbrella group in ‘big tent’ litmus test J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami By Alina Dain Sharon and Sean Savage/JNS.org In what many observers will see as the de facto expression of mainstream U.S. Jewry’s outlook on J Street, members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on Wednesday voted 22-17 (with three abstentions) to reject the membership application of the self-labeled “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby. J Street secured the votes of only about a third of the Conference’s 50 members. The 42 Conference members in attendance in New York exceeded the 75-percent quorum needed to hold the vote, but J Street fell significantly short of the required threshold of a two-thirds affirmative vote from the Conference’s full membership. The result that 25 organizations either voted against J Street or abstained meant that half of the Conference’s members declined to support J Street’s application. “The Conference meticulously followed its long established Process and Procedures Guidelines in considering J Street’s application. ... The present membership of the Conference includes organizations which represent and articulate the views of broad segments of the American Jewish community and we are confident that the Conference will continue to present the consensus of the community on important national and international issues as it has for the last 50 years,” said Conference of Presidents Chairman Robert G. Sugarman and Executive Vice Chairman/CEO Malcolm Hoenlein. J Street said in a statement, “This is a sad day for us, but also for the American Jewish community and for a venerable institution that has chosen to bar the door to the communal tent to an organization that represents a substantial segment of Jewish opinion on Israel.” Jewish leaders have used a “big tent” metaphor to describe which views on Israel and U.S. foreign policy are encompassed within the community’s consensus. Since its formation in 2008, J Street has been a frequent subject of debates on how far that tent stretches, and the group’s bid to join the Conference of Presidents proved no different. The Forward reported that at an April 11 meeting during which J Street had failed to win the endorsement of a crucial committee for membership in the Conference, J Street was questioned over donations it has received from liberal billionaire George Soros—whose foundations have come under scrutiny for allegedly funding anti-Israel groups—and over the lobby’s support of the United Nations-sponsored Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes against the Palestinians. Furthermore, J Street was accused of collaborating with anti-Israel groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. Some Conference members were also troubled that J Street, if voted in, would have been the only organization in the Conference of Presidents that endorses or raises money for political candidates through a political action committee.  Andrea Levin—executive director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, a Conference of Presidents member—toldJNS.org that J Street is taking positions “totally out of sync with the Jewish mainstream,” noting its opposition to a 2011 congressional letter criticizing Palestinian incitement in the wake of the Itamar massacre that killed five members of an Israeli family, and more recently, its refusal to condemn the Fatah-Hamas unity deal. In an op-ed for JNS.org last year, however, J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami called his group’s position on Israel “the same as that of the Israeli government, the Obama administration and the vast bulk of the American Jewish community.” “At the end of the day, J Street exists to help Israel reach the deal it needs and wants so much and which is so central to its future as a Jewish state and as a democracy,” wrote Ben-Ami, referring to a two-state solution, whose achievement is central to J Street’s stated mission.  Yet Sarah Stern—president of the Washington, DC-based Endowment for Middle East Truth think tank and policy group—believes members of Congress are often confused about where J Street stands on Israel. She noted that J Street “has consistently taken the same positions as the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).” CAIR has been accused of being a front group for the Hamas terrorist group, and NIAC routinely takes anti-Israel positions. “It’s hard enough for members of Congress to listen to a growing Muslim and Arab demographic, but when they have a Jewish constituency that is basically siding with the enemies of Israel, I think it’s extraordinarily deleterious for the Jewish community here in the U.S,” Stern told JNS.org. Georgetown University professor and Middle East analyst Moran Stern, meanwhile, does not believe it is particularly relevant to be asking whether or not J Street is a “mainstream” American Jewish organization. “The surge of J Street is a fact,” he said. “What the Conference of Presidents and other Jewish organizations in the U.S. that might have conflicting views on J Street are doing, and I think are doing very wisely, is they are identifying the surge of J Street. They recognize it and they adapt accordingly.” Before Wednesday’s vote, a number of Conference of Presidents member groups publicly expressed their intent to support J Street’s application. Ameinu—which says its “connects liberal American Jews with a progressive Israel”—posted on Twitter, “Ameinu will vote for J Street’s inclusion in the Conf. of Presidents. They meet all of the requirements. Simple.” In a blog post for the Times of Israel, URJ’s Rick Jacobs wrote that there should not be an “ideological litmus test” for joining the umbrella organization. “If the Conference begins to limit its membership based on organizations’ views on specific policy issues, it ceases to represent the entire American Jewish community,” Jacobs wrote. The leadership of Conservative Judaism’s congregational umbrella group echoed the call for accepting a diversity of views. “The Conference of Presidents is designed as a forum in which the Jewish community, in all its diversity, can come together to discuss the major issues of the day and speak with world leaders and organizations as representatives of the Jewish people,” said United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism CEO Rabbi Steven Wernick and International President Richard Skolnik. On the flip side, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) campaigned aggressively against J Street’s bid. Ahead of the vote, ZOA distributed 18 bullet points for why it believed J Street should not be admitted to the Conference of Presidents, and issued press releases slamming J Street’s statements on the Palestinian unity deal and Secretary of State John Kerry’s remark warning that Israel could become an “apartheid state.” Reacting to criticism of Kerry’s comments, J Street had said, “Instead of putting energy into attacking Secretary Kerry, those who are upset with the Secretary’s use of the term should put their energy into opposing and changing the policies that are leading Israel down this road.” ZOA then said, “J Street has again demonstrated that it is an extremist group, hostile to Israel, by supporting Secretary of State John Kerry’s ‘apartheid’ accusation against Israel.” Moran Stern, however, told JNS.org that from his observations of the culture of U.S. Jewish organizations, he has witnessed a “reservoir” of talented and educated young American Jews among the J Street ranks, and questioned the premise of abandoning that cadre of Israel advocates. “The question is what do you do with that reservoir,” he said, explaining that leaving out J Street might “play into the hands of those who are anti-Israel because they will say, ‘Look at the Conference of Presidents that claims to be pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, and here there is a group like J Street that supports the two-state solution and all that, and when they try to be part of that club they are being denied.’”   The professor added that given J Street’s popularity on college campuses, it is important not to neglect those young American Jews who care about Israel but may have a different approach than traditional pro-Israel advocates. “I think that while you may not accept certain ideas, J Street certainly doesn’t fall under this category,” he said. “They do not call for the one-state solution, for the destruction of Israel, for boycotting Israel. Quite on the contrary.”  But Dr. Charles Jacobs—president of Boston-based Americans for Peace and Tolerance, the group behind the new documentary “The J Street Challenge”—explained that J Street breaks a long-honored tradition between American Jews and Israel. “[American Jews] can freely criticize Jewish leaders in Israel—we can do it publicly, but we who do not live there or have our children on the front lines do not have the right to use our American power to circumvent Israeli democracy, and to try to lobby to get an American administration to impose our views and policies on the Israelis. … J Street’s entire program is designed to break this longstanding agreement,” Jacobs told JNS.org. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2) Hamas must repudiate the anti-Semitism in its charter

Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day has passed. But then, as far as I’m concerned, it is always Holocaust Remembrance Day — a perpetual and frustratingly futile attempt to come to terms with murder so vast and incomprehensible it is like pondering what came before the big bang. And yet in a corner of the world, the Holocaust is considered no mystery at all. The Jews did it to themselves to foster the creation of Israel. This is what Hamas believes.

Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian leader, has made peace with Hamas — and it with him. Abbas had earlier acknowledged the Holocaust but recently called it “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era.” This sounds like a prosaic statement of fact, but coming from a man who once held the Jews complicit in their own near-destruction, it is significant. For Abbas to have elevated the Holocaust over the Palestinian Nakba — the forced and non-forced evacuation of Arabs from Israel — is an important concession.

Not surprisingly, Abbas’s rendezvous with history was dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is Netanyahu’s default position when it comes to Palestinian concessions. Yet this time, he has a point. Hamas is indeed the terrorist organization Israel and the United States say it is. Its opposition to the mere existence of Israel is stated not just in the usual terms of Palestinian grievance or nationalism but also by a remarkable and stupendously stupid anti-Semitism.

In fact, according to the Hamas charter, it’s nothing less than a miracle that Hamas exists at all. Its enemy, the Jews, are so rich and powerful that “they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. . . . They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about.” The Jews had help, of course — and the Hamas charter names their allies: “Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others.” How the Elks and the Civil Air Patrol got left out is beyond me.

The charter does not stop there. The Jews, it says, “were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state.” In other words, the Holocaust — not that it happened, mind you — was a clever Jewish ruse to win the world’s sympathy and thereby establish the state of Israel. Mazel tov! It worked.

To our ears, this is all loony stuff. But history demands that attention be paid. In its tone, in its detail, in its sheer monumental idiocy, the Hamas charter is nothing but warmed-over Hitlerism. It is no crazier than what Hitler laid out in “Mein Kampf.” Yet this was a doctrine that helped make him Germany’s paramount leader and enabled the murder of 6 million Jews. Hamas proclaims its anti-colonialist bona fides yet it has swallowed whole European anti-Semitism.

The Hamas charter was adopted in 1988 and possibly no longer accurately reflects the thinking of the current Hamas leadership. If so, it should be repudiated — and not without fanfare. Anti-Semitism has come to reside in the Middle East. If Israel was always a diversion for the region’s rulers, then anti-Semitism is a useful explanation. It is the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories. It seems to account for the region’s poverty, its haplessness, its relative weakness vis-a-vis Israel and so much more. If the Jews were behind the French Revolution, then why not, too, the collapse of the Arab Spring?

Palestinians have legitimate grievances. They lost their land and the hurt is great. But they are not children and they should not be patronized. Europeans and others who find such unalloyed virtue and victimhood in Hamas and the Gaza it rules ought to demand a repudiation of the charter. How some of these sympathizers can go from the lands of the Holocaust itself to a place where anti-Semitism is official doctrine ought to trouble them. It doesn’t, I know — and that ought to trouble the rest of us.

If there is ever to be a lasting peace in the Middle East, Arab anti-Semitism must be repudiated. Instead, the Jew-hatred that was introduced to the region by Nazi agents has become semi-official or official doctrine — so much so that it was both brave and newsworthy for Abbas merely to acknowledge the primacy of the Holocaust. Now, though, he must take the next step and demand that his new buddies in Hamas purge their charter of its vile anti-Semitism. Palestinians would benefit more than Jews.

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3)   Clinton: Israel Offered the Temple Mount to the PA

By Elad Benari 

Former United States President Bill Clinton claimed on Wednesday that Israel had offered the Palestinian Authority (PA) control of the Temple Mount in 2000.

Channel 2 News reported that Clinton’s comments were made during a speech at Georgetown University in Virginia, during which he made some revelations regarding the Camp David Summit attended by himself, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and then-PA Chairman Yasser Arafat.

"The Israelis offered to give it (the Temple Mount) to the Palestinians," Clinton was quoted by Channel 2 as having said.

“They disagreed about only 16 meters of the Western Wall, about which Israel was right,” he continued, saying that the 16 meters in question were land leading to the Western Wall tunnels and that “if you got in, you could do mayhem to the ruins of the temples.”

According to a report on CNN, during the speech Clinton dismissed criticism leveled towards him that the Camp David Summit had collapsed, saying, "Somehow you have to find a way to establish trust among adversaries Agreement is not nearly as important as trust."

He continued, "Everybody talks about the collapse of Camp David. That is a big load of bull. Camp David was a roaring success in my point of view because they had never sat together and talked about all these issues."

It is known that during the 2000 summit, Barak had made Arafat an unprecedented offer including Israeli redeployment from 95% of Judea and Samaria and 100% of Gaza; the creation of a Palestinian state in the areas of Israeli withdrawal; the removal of isolated communities and transfer of the land to Palestinian Arab control; other Israeli land exchanged for settlements remaining under Israeli control; Palestinian Authority control over eastern Jerusalem, including most of the Old City; "Religious Sovereignty” over the Temple Mount, replacing Israeli sovereignty in effect since 1967.

Arafat rejected the offer and proceeded to begin the Second Intifada, also known as the Oslo War, in which more than 1,000 Israelis were killed in murderous terrorist attacks.

Clinton’s speech comes just one day after the latest round of peace talks officially failed, as a deadline set for reaching a full peace treaty expired without a deal.

Israel officially pulled out of the talks last week, in response to a unity pact between Fatah and the Hamas terrorist group and has begun to implement sanctions on the PA following the pact.

The latest talks were led by Secretary of State John Kerry, who single-handedly dragged the sides back the negotiations after a three-year hiatus.

Despite the failure, however, Kerry’s spokeswoman said Tuesday that he “has not a moment of regret about every ounce of time he's spent on this effort.”

"We've reached a point... where a pause is necessary... a holding period, where parties will figure out what they want to do next," said Jen Psaki

3a) Israel Population Now 8.2 Million, 75% Are Jewish

By Yaakov Levi 

Since last Independence Day, the Central Bureau of Statistics said Thursday, Israel's population has grown by 157,000, and now totals 8,180,000.

Jews account for 75% of that total, with the Jewish population at 6,135,000. There are 1,694,000 Arabs in Israel (Muslims and Christians), as well as 351,000 “others” - non-Arab Christians and members of other religions – constituting 4.3% of the population.

Since last Independence Day, 178,000 new babies were born in Israel, while 42,000 people died. A total of 24,000 immigrants came to the country. Currently, about 75% of the country's residents were born in Israel.

In 1948, the CBS said, there was just one city in Israel with a population greater than 100,000 – Tel Aviv. Today, 13 other cities have joined that list, with six cities – Tel Aviv, Haifa, Rishon Lezion, Jerusalem, Petach Tikvah, and Ashdod now having over 200,000 residents.

3b)Will Dunbar Rise Again?

By Thomas Sowell

Dunbar High School in Washington is becoming a controversial issue again -- and the controversy that is beginning to develop has implications for American education well beyond the District of Columbia.

There has not been much controversy about Dunbar High School for a long time. Since sometime in the late 1950s, it has been just one more ghetto school with an abysmal academic record -- and that has been too common to be controversial.

What is different about the history of Dunbar is that, from its founding in 1870 as the first public high school in the country for black students, until the mid 1950s, it was an outstanding academic success.

As far back as 1899, when tests were given in Washington's four academic high schools at that time, the black high school scored higher than two of the three white high schools. That was the M Street School that was renamed Dunbar High School in 1916.

Today, more than a hundred years later, it would be considered Utopian to even set such a goal, much less expect it to happen. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared that separate schools were inherently unequal, no doubt in ignorance of Dunbar, which was within walking distance of the site of that sweeping pronouncement.

The test results in 1899 were no isolated fluke. Over the next several decades, four-fifths of Dunbar graduates went on to college -- far more than for either black or white high school graduates in the country at large during that era.

Most went to inexpensive local colleges but, among those who went on to Ivy League and other elite colleges, a significant number graduated Phi Beta Kappa. At one time, Dunbar graduates could get into Dartmouth or Harvard without having to take an entrance exam.

That was when Dunbar was controversial.

Some in the black community were proud and grateful that there was such a school where any black youngster in the city, no matter how poor, could go to get an education that would equip him or her to go on to college anywhere and compete with anybody.

But others decried Dunbar as an "elitist" school with academic standards that many black youngsters could not meet and a set of attitudes and behavior that some in today's world would call "acting white."

Nor was this accidental. A handbook issued to students entering Dunbar prescribed behavioral standards and values, not just for the school but for life outside as well. Without saying so, those standards and values were an implicit repudiation of the way many poorer and less educated blacks behaved.

It would be hard to exaggerate the hostility, and even bitterness, toward Dunbar by some of those who never went there -- and who saw, and resented, the differences in attitudes and behavior between Dunbar students and themselves.

The late William Raspberry once wrote in his Washington Post column that you could turn any social gathering of local blacks into warring camps just by saying the one word "Dunbar."

What destroyed more than 80 years of academic achievement at Dunbar High School, virtually overnight, was changing it from a selective school, to which black youngsters from anywhere in the city could apply, to a neighborhood school, located in a poor ghetto neighborhood.

Now there is a new controversy brewing as some have suggested that the new Dunbar High School building be made a city-wide selective high school, rather than remain a neighborhood school.

All the talk about elitism, and about abandoning neighborhood youngsters, in order to serve others, has been revived and another poisonous issue now added -- race.

Those black spokesmen who see all issues through a racial prism see the proposed change as a way to accommodate whites who want to send their children to a public school that keeps out many ghetto blacks. But the issue of selectivity was controversial even when Dunbar was an all-black school.

With or without racial issues, there is no way to provide a good education for youngsters who want to learn when there are less able and more disruptive kids in the same classes. Are those who came to learn going to be sacrificed until such indefinite time as it takes for us to "solve" the "problems" of those who don't?

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