An American!
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I believe on November 7, HBO is going to have an original documentary film portraying how Hispanics have contributed to American culture in the field of music and other art forms. It will feature well know stars, musicians etc. The documentary suggests that by 2050, 1 out of 3 Americans will be of Hispanic Heritage. According to HBO, America is reputedly the second largest Hispanic nation in the world.
I have nothing against Hispanics or their culture. I just believe they should be here legally.
===
Politicians often find themselves in a no win situation because they want to take immediate credit for something and then things go awry and they have to reverse course.
This has been a recurring theme of the Obama Administration because Obama is so anxious to take instant credit for happenings which are still fluid.
This began during his first campaign when he lied about keeping your doctor, followed by the police episode at Harvard, then we had Ferguson and other events and now we have the latest about sending troops to Syria, which he stated he would never do, and made a big display of such. But of course, these troops are not going to be engaged in combat. They are being sent to train and should bullets come in their direction they have been ordered to duck so Obama can validate his ridiculous claim.
Americans are tired of being lied to, they are fed up with political double talk and thus the appeal of Trump and Carson. In the case of Trump, he tells it like he feels at any given moment and that is refreshing but there is never any back up or proof he can accomplish his outlandish assertions. In the case of Carson, he is the personification of understatement and his comments are not rope with which he can later be hung but he does lack political experience. I would love to see him or Carly on the Republican ticket as a V.P nominee. They both bring a variety of different talents and would be fast learners.
I am still undecided as to who I would like to head the ticket but it is narrowing down to Rubio, Christie, Cruz and Kasich and JEB, only because of their accomplishments but not because of their winning style.
Hillarious continues to be proven the liar we know she has been virtually her entire adult life. Add to that her utter disregard of national security in order to suit her personal desire to remain secretive and you have a flawed and dangerous candidate. If she is to be our first elected female president it would set as bad a precedent as Obama has as our first light black president.
If voters are unable to return to embracing proven achievements and competence as the measure of presidential qualifications then we are sunk. This might give comfort to the press and media, to anarchists among us, the Soros' of this country, Demwits, who place partisan politics above national security, and those who are enslaved to government and entitlements but this is not the nation or American I know.
The nation and American I know are independent and spirited, patriotic, generous, sentimental and willing to die for the freedoms they richly enjoy. They are hard workers, honest and family oriented. They have a religious bias and at one time had respect for the law.
A lot of this has changed because we sought to meld different cultures thinking we could take the best of all and not lose something in the process. The experiment worked for a while but as government grew, dependency grew with it, laws came to mean nothing and a PC culture began to dictate our behaviour.
I do not believe we will ever re-capture what it means to be a Yank again. The best we can hope for is to staunch the bleeding, slow our weakening pace of our decline as a world power because we are financially bankrupt and spiritually depressed and confused.
In far too many ways the essence of our culture, like the proverbial tooth paste, is out of the tube and you cannot put it back.
There are those who do not have this dour view and believe we can right our ship of state and I pray they are correct.
If they believe Hillarious' is the solution I submit they are mindless and blind.
Perhaps Savannah's governance is a microcosm of same?
Time will tell. (See 1 below.)
===
The Genesis of press and media bias against Israel. (An excellent read.) (See 2 below.)
Will not see in The New York Times! (See 2a below.)
And from my Arab Israeli fiend that you will also not see in The New York Times or any American reporting. (See 2b below.)
===
Israel could teach Obama a thing or two. (See 3 below.)
===
IAEA and Parchin! (See 4 below.)
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In 2016, will another currency challenge the dollar as the prime medium of exchange and trade? I believe the chance of that happening is growing and if so dollar denominated assets will be hurt.
Just another consequence of Obama's efforts to wreck America.
===
Dick
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1) This from another dear friend, a Letter To The Editor Writer, and fellow memo reader:
"Amazing to me how much we have forgotten!
When Bill Clinton was president, he allowed Hillary to assume authority over a health care reform. Even after threats and intimidation, she couldn’t even get a vote in a democratic controlled congress. This fiasco cost the American taxpayers about $93 million in cost for studies, promotion, and other efforts.
Then President Clinton gave Hillary authority over selecting a female attorney general. Her first two selections were Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood – both were forced to withdraw their names from consideration.
Next she chose Janet Reno – husband Bill described her selection as “my worst mistake.” Some may not remember that Reno made the decision to gas David Koresh and the Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas resulting in dozens of deaths of women and children.
Husband Bill allowed Hillary to make recommendations for the head of the Civil Rights Commission. Lani Guanier was her selection. When a little probing led to the discovery of Ms. Guanier’s radical views, her name had to be withdrawn from consideration.
Apparently a slow learner, husband Bill allowed Hillary to make some more recommendations. She chose former law partners Web Hubbel for the Justice Department, Vince Foster for the White House staff, and William Kennedy for the Treasury Department. Her selections went well: Hubbel went to prison, Foster (presumably) committed suicide, and Kennedy was forced to resign.
Many younger votes will have no knowledge of “Travelgate.” Hillary wanted to award unfettered travel contracts to Clinton friend Harry Thompson – and the White House Travel Office refused to comply. She managed to have them reported to the FBI and fired. This ruined their reputations, cost them their jobs, and caused a thirty-six month investigation. Only one employee, Billy Dale was charged with a crime, and that of the enormous crime of mixing personal and White House funds. A jury acquitted him of any crime in less than two hours.
Still not convinced of her ineptness, Hillary was allowed to recommend a close Clinton friend, Craig Livingstone, for the position of Director of White House security. When Livingstone was investigated for the improper access of about 900 FBI files of Clinton enemies (Filegate) and the widespread use of drugs by White House staff, suddenly Hillary and the president denied even knowing Livingstone, and of course, denied knowledge of drug use in the White House. Following this debacle, the FBI closed its White House Liaison Office after more than thirty years of service to seven presidents.
Next, when women started coming forward with allegations of sexual harassment and rape by Bill Clinton, Hillary was put in charge of the “bimbo eruption” and scandal defense. Some of her more notable decisions in the debacle was:
She urged her husband not to settle the Paula Jones lawsuit. After the Starr investigation they settled with Ms. Jones.
She refused to release the Whitewater documents, which led to the appointment of Ken Starr as Special Prosecutor. After $80 million dollars of taxpayer money was spent, Starr's investigation led to Monica Lewinsky, which led to Bill lying about and later admitting his affairs.
Hillary’s devious game plan resulted in Bill losing his license to practice law for 'lying under oath' to a grand jury and then his subsequent impeachment by the House of Representatives.
Hillary avoided indictment for perjury and obstruction of justice during the Starr investigation by repeating, “I do not recall,” “I have no recollection,” and “I don’t know” a total of 56 times while under oath.
After leaving the White House, Hillary was forced to return an estimated $200,000 in White House furniture, china, and artwork that she had stolen.
What a swell party – ready for another four or eight year of this type low-life mess?
Now we are exposed to the destruction of possibly incriminating emails while Hillary was Secretary of State and the “pay to play” schemes of the Clinton Foundation – we have no idea what shoe will fall next. But to her loyal fans - "what difference does itmake?"
Electing Hillary Clinton president would be like granting Satan absolution and giving him the keys to heaven! G--"
-------------------------------------------------------------2)
On 26 January 2015 the former AP reporter Matti Friedman delivered the keynote speech at BICOM’s annual dinner in London. Expanding on a widely-noted argument first set out in Tablet and The Atlantic, Friedman spoke about how the media dissect and magnify Israel’s flaws while purposely erasing those of its enemies. He spoke about a fashionable and extravagant disgust for Israel among many in the West, and the rise of a ‘cult of the Occupation’ which positions Jewish arrogance and perfidy at the heart of all the problems of the Middle East.
Original Story can be found at Fathom IsraelSeen.com » Blog Archive » Matti Friedman –
One night several years ago, I came out of Bethlehem after a reporting assignment and crossed through the Israeli military checkpoint between that city and its neighbour, Jerusalem, where I live. With me were perhaps a dozen Palestinian men, mostly in their 30s – my age. No soldiers were visible at the entrance to the checkpoint, a precaution against suicide bombers. We saw only steel and concrete. I followed the other men through a metal detector into a stark corridor and followed instructions barked from a loudspeaker – ‘Remove your belt!’ ‘Lift up your shirt!’ The voice belonged to a soldier watching us on a closed-circuit camera. Exiting the checkpoint, adjusting my belt and clothing with the others, I felt like a being less than entirely human and understood, not for the first time, how a feeling like that would provoke someone to violence.
Consumers of news will recognise this scene as belonging to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which keeps the 2.5 million Palestinians in that territory under military rule, and has since 1967. The facts of this situation aren’t much in question. This should be an issue of concern to Israelis, whose democracy, military, and society are corroded by the inequality in the West Bank. This, too, isn’t much in question.
The question we must ask, as observers of the world, is why this conflict has come over time to draw more attention than any other, and why it is presented as it is. How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 per cent of the world’s surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other? We must ask how Israelis and Palestinians have become the stylised symbol of conflict, of strong and weak, the parallel bars upon which the intellectual Olympians of the West perform their tricks – not Turks and Kurds, not Han Chinese and Tibetans, not British soldiers and Iraqi Muslims, not Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Christians, not Saudi sheikhs and Saudi women, not Indians and Kashmiris, not drug cartel thugs and Mexican villagers. Questioning why this is the case is in no way an attempt to evade or obscure reality, which is why I opened with the checkpoint leading from Bethlehem. On the contrary – anyone seeking a full understanding of reality can’t avoid this question. My experiences as a journalist provide part of the answer, and also raise pressing questions that go beyond the practice of journalism.
I have been writing from and about Israel for most of the past 20 years, since I moved there from Toronto at age 17. During the five and a half years I spent as part of the international press corps as a reporter for the American news agency The Associated Press (AP), between 2006 and 2011, I gradually began to be aware of certain malfunctions in the coverage of the Israel story – recurring omissions, recurring inflations, decisions made according to considerations that were not journalistic but political, all in the context of a story staffed and reported more than any other international story on earth. When I worked in the AP’s Jerusalem bureau, the Israel story was covered by more AP news staff than China, or India, or all of the 50-odd countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. This is representative of the industry as a whole.
*
In early 2009, to give one fairly routine example of an editorial decision of the kind I mean, I was instructed by my superiors to report a second-hand story taken from an Israeli newspaper about offensive t-shirts supposedly worn by Israeli soldiers. We had no confirmation of our own of the story’s veracity, and one doesn’t see much coverage of things US Marines or British infantrymen have tattooed on their chests or arms. And yet t-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers were newsworthy in the eyes of one of the world’s most powerful news organisations. This was because we sought to hint or say outright that Israeli soldiers were war criminals, and every detail supporting that portrayal was to be seized upon. Much of the international press corps covered the t-shirt story. At around the same time, several Israeli soldiers were quoted anonymously in a school newsletter speaking of abuses they had supposedly witnessed while fighting in Gaza; we wrote no fewer than three separate stories about this, although the use of sources whose identity isn’t known to reporters is banned for good reason by the AP’s own in-house rules. This story, too, was very much one that we wanted to tell. By the time the soldiers came forward to say they hadn’t actually witnessed the events they supposedly described, and were trying to make a point to young students about the horrors and moral challenges of warfare, it was, of course, too late.
Also in those same months, in early 2009, two reporters in our bureau obtained details of a peace offer made by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, to the Palestinians several months before, and deemed by the Palestinians to be insufficient. The offer proposed a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in a shared Jerusalem. This should have been one of the year’s biggest stories. But an Israeli peace offer and its rejection by the Palestinians didn’t suit our story. The bureau chief ordered both reporters to ignore the Olmert offer, and they did, despite a furious protest from one of them, who later termed this decision ‘the biggest fiasco I’ve seen in 50 years of journalism.’ But it was very much in keeping not only with the practice at the AP, but in the press corps in general. Soldiers’s vile t-shirts were worth a story. Anonymous and unverifiable testimonies of abuses were worth three. A peace proposal from the Israeli prime minister to the Palestinian president was not to be reported at all.
Vandalism of Palestinian property is a story. Neo-Nazi rallies at Palestinian universities or in Palestinian cities are not – I saw images of such rallies suppressed on more than one occasion. Jewish hatred of Arabs is a story. Arab hatred of Jews is not. Our policy, for example, was not to mention the assertion in the Hamas founding charter that Jews were responsible for engineering both world wars and the Russian and French revolutions, despite the obvious insight this provides into the thinking of one of the most influential actors in the conflict.
100 houses in a West Bank settlement are a story. 100 rockets smuggled into Gaza are not. The Hamas military build-up amid and under the civilian population of Gaza is not a story. But Israeli military action responding to that threat – that is a story, as we all saw this summer. Israel’s responsibility for the deaths of civilians as a result – that’s a story. Hamas’s responsibility for those deaths is not. Any reporter from the international press corps in Israel, whether he or she works for the AP, Reuters, CNN, the BBC, or elsewhere, will recognise the examples I’ve cited here of what is newsworthy and what is not as standard operating procedure.
In my time in the press corps I saw, from the inside, how Israel’s flaws were dissected and magnified, while the flaws of its enemies were purposely erased. I saw how the threats facing Israel were disregarded or even mocked as figments of the Israeli imagination, even as these threats repeatedly materialised. I saw how a fictional image of Israel and of its enemies was manufactured, polished, and propagated to devastating effect by inflating certain details, ignoring others, and presenting the result as an accurate picture of reality. Lest we think this is something that has never happened before, we might remember Orwell’s observation about journalism from the Spanish Civil War: ‘Early in life,’ he wrote, ‘I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. (…) I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”’ That was in 1942.
Over time, I came to understand that the malfunctions I was witnessing, and in which I was playing a part, were not limited to the AP. I saw that they were rather part of a broader problem in the way the press functioned, and in how it saw its job. The international press in Israel had become less an observer of the conflict than a player in it. It had moved away from careful explanation and toward a kind of political character assassination on behalf of the side it identified as being right. It valued a kind of ideological uniformity from which you were not allowed to stray. So having begun with limited criticism of certain editorial decisions, I now found myself with a broad critique of the press.
Eventually, however, I realised that even the press wasn’t the whole story. The press was playing a key role in an intellectual phenomenon taking root in the West, but it wasn’t the cause, or not the only cause – it was both blown on a certain course by the prevailing ideological winds, and causing those winds to blow with greater force. Many journalists would like you to believe that the news is created by a kind of algorithm – that it’s a mechanical, even scientific process in which events are inserted, processed, and presented. But of course the news is an imperfect and entirely human affair, the result of interactions between sources, reporters, and editors, all of whom bear the baggage of their background and who reflect, as we all do to some extent, the prejudices of their peers.
In the aftermath of last summer’s Gaza war, and in light of events in Europe in recent months, it should be clear that something deep and toxic is going on. Understanding what that is, it seems to me, will help us understand something important not only about journalism but about the Western mind and the way it sees the world.
What presents itself as political criticism, as analysis, or as journalism, is coming to sound more and more like a new version of a much older complaint – that Jews are troublemakers, a negative force in world events, and that if these people, as a collective, could somehow be made to vanish, we would all be better off. This is, or should be, a cause for alarm, and not only among people sympathetic to Israel or concerned with Jewish affairs. What is in play right now has less to do with the world of politics than with the worlds of psychology and religion, and less to do with Israel than with those condemning Israel.
The occupation of the West Bank, with which I opened, would seem to be at the heart of the story, the root cause, as it were, of the conflict portrayed as the most important on earth. A few words, then, about this occupation.
The occupation was created in the 1967 Mideast War. The occupation is not the conflict, which of course predates the occupation. It is a symptom of the conflict, a conflict that would remain even if the symptom were somehow solved. If we look at the West Bank, the only Palestinian area currently occupied by Israel, and if we include Jerusalem, we see that the conflict in these areas claimed 60 lives last year – Palestinian and Israeli.
An end to this occupation would free Palestinians from Israeli rule, and free Israelis from ruling people who do not wish to be ruled. Observers of the Middle East in 2015 understand, too, that an end to the occupation will create a power vacuum that will be filled, as all power vacuums in the region have been, not by the forces of democracy and modernity, which in our region range from weak to negligible, but by the powerful and ruthless, by the extremists. This is what we’ve learned from the unravelling of the Middle East in recent years. This is what happened in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, and before that in Gaza and southern Lebanon. My home in Jerusalem is within an easy day’s drive of both Aleppo and Baghdad. Creating a new playground for these forces will bring the black-masked soldiers of radical Islam within yards of Israeli homes with mortars, rockets, and tunnelling implements. Many thousands will die.
Beyond the obvious threat to Palestinian Christians, women, gays, and liberals, who will be the first to suffer, this threatens to render much or all of Israel unliveable, ending the only safe progressive space in the Middle East, the only secure minority refuge in the Middle East, and the only Jewish country on earth. No international investment or guarantees, no Western-backed government or Western-trained military will be able to keep that from happening, as we have just seen in Iraq. The world will greet this outcome with sincere expressions of sympathy. Only several years ago I, like many on the left, might have dismissed this as an apocalyptic scenario. It isn’t. It is the most likely scenario.
People observing this conflict from afar have been led to believe that Israel faces a simple choice between occupation and peace. That choice is fiction. The Palestinian choice, it is said, is between Israeli occupation and an independent democracy. That choice, too, is fiction. Neither side faces a clear choice, or clear outcomes. Here we have a conflict in a region of conflict, with no clear villain, no clear victim, and no clear solution, one of many hundreds or thousands of ethnic, national, and religious disputes on earth.
*
The only group of people subject to a systematic boycott at present in the Western world are Jews, appearing now under the convenient euphemism ‘Israelis.’ The only country that has its own ‘apartheid week’ on campuses is the Jewish country. Protesters have interfered with the unloading of Israeli shipping on the West Coast of the United States, and there are regular calls for a boycott of anything produced in the Jewish state. No similar tactics are currently employed against any other ethnic group or nationality, no matter how egregious the human rights violations attributed to that group’s country of origin.
Anyone who questions why this is so will be greeted with shouts of ‘the occupation!’, as if this were explanation enough. It is not. Many who would like to question these phenomena don’t dare, for fear that they will somehow be expressing support for this occupation, which has been inflated from a geopolitical dilemma of modest scope by global standards into the world’s premier violation of human rights.
The human costs of the Middle Eastern adventures of America and Britain in this century have been far higher, and far harder to explain, than anything Israel has ever done. They have involved occupations, and the violence they unleashed continues as I speak here this evening. No one boycotts American or British professors. Turkey is a democracy, and a NATO member, and yet its occupation of northern Cyprus and long conflict with the stateless Kurds – many of whom see themselves as occupied – are viewed with a yawn; there is no ‘Turkish Apartheid Week.’ The world is full of injustice. Billions of people are oppressed. In Congo, five million people are dead. The time has come for everyone to admit that the fashionable disgust for Israel among many in the West is not liberal but is selective, disproportionate, and discriminatory.
There are simply too many voices coming from too many places, expressing themselves in too poisonous a way, for us to conclude that this is a narrow criticism of the occupation. It’s time for the people making these charges to look closely at themselves, and for us to look closely at them.
Naming and understanding this sentiment is important, as it is becoming one of the key intellectual trends of our time. We might think of it as the ‘Cult of the Occupation.’ This belief system, for that it what it is, uses the occupation as a way of talking about other things.
As usual with Western religions, the centre of this one is in the Holy Land. The dogma posits that the occupation is not a conflict like any other, but that it is the very symbol of conflict: that the minute state inhabited by a persecuted minority in the Middle East is in fact a symbol of the ills of the West – colonialism, nationalism, militarism, and racism. In the recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, a sign hoisted by marchers linked the unrest between African Americans and the police to Israeli rule over Palestinians.
The cult’s priesthood can be found among the activists, NGO experts, and ideological journalists who have turned coverage of this conflict into a catalogue of Jewish moral failings, as if Israeli society were different from any other group of people on earth, as if Jews deserve to be mocked for having suffered and failed to be perfect as a result.
Most of my former colleagues in the press corps aren’t full-fledged members of this group. They aren’t true believers. But boycotts of Israel, and only of Israel, which are one of the cult’s most important practices, have significant support in the press, including among editors who were my superiors. Sympathy for Israel’s predicament is highly unpopular in the relevant social circles, and is something to be avoided by anyone wishing to be invited to the right dinner parties, or to be promoted. The cult and its belief system are in control of the narrative, just as the popular kids in a school are those who decide what clothes or music are acceptable. In the social milieu of the reporters, NGO workers, and activists, which is the same social world, these are the correct opinions. This guides the coverage. This explains why the events in Gaza this summer were portrayed not as a complicated war like many others fought in this century, but as a massacre of innocents. And it explains much else.
So prevalent has this kind of thinking become that participating in liberal intellectual life in the West increasingly requires you to subscribe at least outwardly to this dogma, particularly if you’re a Jew and thus suspected of the wrong sympathies. If you’re a Jew from Israel, your participation is increasingly conditional on an abject and public display of self-flagellation. Your participation, indeed, is increasingly unwelcome.
What, exactly, is going on?
Observers of Western history understand that at times of confusion and unhappiness, and of great ideological ferment, negative sentiment tends to coagulate around Jews. Discussions of the great topics of the time often end up as discussions about Jews.
In the late 1800s, for example, French society was riven by the clash between the old France of the church and army, and the new France of liberalism and the rule of law. The French were preoccupied with the question of who is French, and who is not. They were smarting from their military humiliation by the Prussians. All of this sentiment erupted around the figure of a Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, accused of betraying France as a spy for Germany. His accusers knew he was innocent, but that didn’t matter; he was a symbol of everything they wanted to condemn.
To give another example: Germans in the 1920s and 1930s were preoccupied with their humiliation in the Great War. This became a discussion of Jewish traitors who had stabbed Germany in the back. Germans were preoccupied as well with the woes of their economy – this became a discussion of Jewish wealth, and Jewish bankers.
In the years of the rise of communism and the Cold War, communists concerned with their ideological opponents talked about Jewish capitalists and cosmopolitans, or Jewish doctors plotting against the state. At the very same time, in capitalist societies threatened by communism, people condemned Jewish Bolsheviks.
This is the face of this recurring obsession. As the journalist Charles Maurras wrote, approvingly, in 1911: ‘Everything seems impossible, or frighteningly difficult, without the providential arrival of anti-Semitism, through which all things fall into place and are simplified.’
The West today is preoccupied with a feeling of guilt about the use of power. That’s why the Jews, in their state, are now held up in the press and elsewhere as the prime example of the abuse of power. That’s why for so many the global villain, as portrayed in newspapers and on TV, is none other than the Jewish soldier, or the Jewish settler. This is not because the Jewish settler or soldier is responsible for more harm than anyone else on earth – no sane person would make that claim. It is rather because these are the heirs to the Jewish banker or Jewish commissar of the past. It is because when moral failure raises its head in the Western imagination, the head tends to wear a skullcap.
One would expect the growing scale and complexity of the conflict in the Middle East over the past decade to have eclipsed the fixation on Israel in the eyes of the press and other observers. Israel is, after all, a sideshow: The death toll in Syria in less than four years far exceeds the toll in the Israel-Arab conflict in a century. The annual death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is a morning in Iraq.
And yet it is precisely in these years that the obsession has grown worse.
This makes little sense, unless we understand that people aren’t fixated on Israel despite everything else going on – but rather because of everything else going on. As Maurras wrote, when you use the Jew as the symbol of what is wrong, ‘all things fall into place and are simplified.’
The last few decades have brought the West into conflict with the Islamic world. Terrorists have attacked New York, Washington, London, Madrid, and now Paris. America and Britain caused the unravelling of Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead there. Afghanistan was occupied and thousands of Western soldiers killed, along with countless civilians – but the Taliban are alive and well, undeterred. Gaddafi was removed, and Libya is no better off. All of this is confusing and discouraging. It causes people to search for answers and explanations, and these are hard to come by. It is in this context that the ‘Cult of the Occupation’ has caught on. The idea is that the problems in the Middle East have something to do with Jewish arrogance and perfidy, that the sins of one’s own country can be projected upon the Western world’s old blank screen. This is the idea increasingly reflected on campuses, in labour unions, and in the media fixation on Israel. It’s a projection, one whose chief instrument is the press.
As one BBC reporter informed a Jewish interviewee on camera several weeks ago, after a Muslim terrorist murdered four Jewish shoppers at a Paris supermarket, ‘Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffered hugely at Jewish hands as well.’ Everything, that is, can be linked to the occupation, and Jews can be blamed even for the attacks against them. This isn’t the voice of the perpetrators, but of the enablers. The voice of the enablers is less honest than that of the perpetrators, and more dangerous for being disguised in respectable English. This voice is confident and growing in volume. This is why the year 2015 finds many Jews in Western Europe eyeing their suitcases again.
The Jews of the Middle East are outnumbered by the Arabs of the Middle East 60 to one, and by the world’s Muslims 200 to one. Half of the Jews in Israel are there because their families were forced from their homes in the 20th century not by Christians in Europe, but by Muslims in the Middle East. Israel currently has Hezbollah on its northern border, Al-Qaeda on its north-eastern and southern borders, and Hamas in Gaza. None of these groups seek an end to the occupation, but rather openly wish to destroy Israel. But it is naïve to point out these facts. The facts don’t matter: We are in the world of symbols. In this world, Israel has become a symbol of what is wrong – not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Great Britain, not America, not Russia.
I believe it’s important to recognise the pathologies at play in order to make sense of things. In this context it’s worth pointing out that I’m hardly the first to identify a problem – Jewish communities like this one, and particularly organisations like BICOM, identified a problem long ago, and have been expending immense efforts to correct it. I wish this wasn’t necessary, and it shouldn’t be necessary, but it undoubtedly is necessary, and becoming more so, and I have great respect for these efforts. Many people, particularly young people, are having trouble maintaining their balance amid this ideological onslaught, which is successfully disguised as journalism or analysis, and is phrased in the language of progressive politics. I would like to help them keep their bearings.
I don’t believe, however, that anyone should make a feeling of persecution the centre of their identity, of their Judaism, or of their relationship with Israel. The obsession is a fact, but it isn’t a new fact, and it shouldn’t immobilise us in anger, or force us into a defensive crouch. It shouldn’t make us less willing to seek to improve our situation, to behave with compassion to our neighbours, or to continue building the model society that Israel’s founders had in mind.
I was in Tel Aviv not long ago, on Rothschild Boulevard. The city was humming with life. Signs of prosperity were everywhere, in the renovated Bauhaus buildings, in the clothes, the stores. I watched the people go by: kids with old bikes and tattoos, businesspeople, men with women, women with women, men with men, all speaking the language of the Bible and Jewish prayer. The summer’s Hamas rockets were already a memory, just a few months old but subsumed in the frantic, irrepressible life of the country. There were cranes everywhere, raising new buildings. There were schoolchildren with oversized knapsacks, and parents with strollers. I heard Arabic, Russian, and French, and the country went about its business with a potent cheer and determination that you miss if all you see are threats and hatred. There have always been threats and hatred, and it has never stopped us. We have enemies, and we have friends. The dogs bark, as the saying goes, and the convoy rolls by.
One of the questions presented to us by the wars of the modern age is what now constitutes victory. In the 21st century, when a battlefield is no longer conquered or lost, when land isn’t changing hands and no one ever surrenders, what does it mean to win?
The answer is that victory is no longer determined on the battlefield. It’s determined in the centre, in the society itself. Who has built a better society? Who has provided better lives for people? Where is there the most optimism? Where can the most happy people be found? One report on world happiness ranked Israel as the 11th happiest country on earth. The UK was 22nd.
Israel’s intellectual opponents can rant about the moral failings of the Jews, obscuring their obsession in whatever sophisticated way they choose. The gunmen of Hamas and their allies can stand on heaps of rubble and declare victory. They can fire rockets, and shoot up supermarkets. But if you look at Tel Aviv, or at any thriving neighbourhood in Jerusalem, Netanya, Rishon LeZion, or Haifa, you understand that this is victory. This is where we’ve won, and where we win every day.
Matti Friedman – The ideological roots of media bias against Israel
2a)Antisemitic hate speech by
Abbas' advisor on Islam:
- Jews represent "evil"
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is
"Allah's project vs. Satan's project"
Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
Abbas' advisor on Islamic Affairs and Supreme Shari'ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash demonized Jews and Israel using classic Antisemitic hate speech, presenting Jews as "evil" and Israel as "Satan's project." He presented the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as an expression of "the historic conflict" - a conflict between "good and evil, between two projects: Allah's project vs. Satan's project," during a sermon on official PA TV. Palestinian Media Watch has exposed the repeated Antisemitic content of another Palestinian teacher of Islam, teaching at the Temple Mount. He recently stated that "Jews worship the Devil."
Abbas' advisor on Islam spread his Antisemitic beliefs in a Friday sermon broadcast on official PA TV:
Mahmoud Abbas' Advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs and Supreme Shari'ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash: "The conflict here in Palestine between us and the criminal occupation and its criminal leaders, is a further manifestation of our trials, a further manifestation of the historic conflict between truth and falsehood, between good and evil. Throughout history, there has been a conflict between good and evil. The good is represented by the prophets and their supporters. The evil is represented by the devils and their supporters, by the satans and their supporters. We are not inventing [IM2] anything new here (i.e., Palestinian-Israeli). This is a conflict between two entities, good and evil, between two projects: Allah's project vs. Satan's project, a project connected to Allah, which is his will - true and good - and a project connected to oppression and Satanism, to Satanism and animosity, occupation and barbarism."
[Official PA TV, Oct. 23, 2015]
Also invoking Antisemitism, Abbas' Fatah posted on Facebook a picture of an Antisemitic Nazi children's book from 1936, showing a Jew and a fox with the words translated into Arabic: "Trust no fox on his green heath, and trust no Jew on his oath."
2b)
Iran's New Palestinian Terror Group: Al-Sabireen
The nuclear deal between Iran and the world powers has paved the way for the Iranians to resume their efforts to spread their influence throughout the Middle East.
As the Obama Administration and the rest of the international community choose to look the other way, Iran evidently feels that this is the appropriate time to meddle in the internal affairs of Arabs and Muslims
Iran's main goal, from all appearances, is to dominate the entire Middle East by destroying Israel and most of the Arab and Islamic regimes that are considered too "moderate" and "pro-West." So far, thanks to the indifference of the Obama Administration and most Western countries, the Iranians seem to be marching in the right direction toward achieving their goal.
Iran is already deeply involved in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. In recent months, the Iranians have also returned to the Palestinian arena, this time through a new group called Al-Sabireen Movement For Supporting Palestine. Translated into English, Al-Sabireen means "The Patient Ones."
The new Iranian-backed Al-Sabireen was established in wake of tensions between Iran and its two former allies in the Gaza Strip: Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Since the beginning of the Syrian crisis four years ago, relations between Tehran and Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been strained. The refusal of Hamas and Islamic Jihad publicly to support Iran's ally, President Bashar Assad, in his fight against the Syrian opposition, has resulted in the expulsion of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders from Syria. It has also prompted the Iranians to cut off financial aid to the two groups, an abandonment that has left them facing a severe and unprecedented crisis -- the worst in more than two decades.
Al-Sabireen, whose emblem is identical to that of another Iran proxy, Hezbollah, so far has about 400 followers in the Gaza Strip. Each onereceives a monthly salary of $250-$300, while the senior officials of the group get at least $700.
Although Al-Sabireen has been operating in the Gaza Strip for several months now, its name surfaced two weeks ago when one of its top military commanders was shot and killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The man, Ahmed Sharif Al-Sarhi, was responsible for a series of shooting attacks on Israel before he was fatally shot by IDF snipers along the border with the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian sources said that most of the Al-Sabireen terrorists are former disgruntled members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The sources said that Iran has been supplying Al-Sabireen with various and new types of weapons that are being used to attack Israel. According to the sources, Al-Sarhi was killed by the IDF while he was trying to fire from a new Steyr HS .50 long-range sniper rifle he had recently received from the Iranians.
The Iranians are also believed to have supplied their new terrorist group in the Gaza Strip with Grad and Fajr missiles that are capable of reaching Tel Aviv.
The leader of Al-Sabireen, Hisham Salem, is a former commander of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. His activities and rhetoric have worried many in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who fear that his group is beginning to attract many of their followers.
Two weeks ago, unidentified assailants stabbed and moderately wounded Salem shortly after he gave a newspaper interview in the northern Gaza Strip. Although no group has claimed responsibility, it is widely believed that the assailants belong to either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Salem has been accused by many Palestinians of helping Iran spread Shia Islam inside the Gaza Strip, where all Muslims belong to the rival Sunni denomination.
Al-Sabireen is also believed to have succeeded in recruiting scores of militiamen belonging to President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction in the Gaza Strip. These militiamen have gone to the Iranian-backed group mostly for financial considerations. This, of course, is bad news for Abbas, who is now watching as many of his former loyalists have come onto Iran's payroll and are sharing its radical ideology.
Iran's presence in the Gaza Strip -- this time through Al-Sabireen -- is bad news not only for Israel, but also for many Palestinians and Arabs in the region. The Egyptians, who have been waging a relentless war on Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip and Sinai, are already voicing concern over Iran's new Palestinian proxy. The last thing Abbas, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi and Jordan's King Abdullah need is another Iranian terror group similar to Hezbollah in the Middle East.
It now remains to be seen whether the Obama Administration and other Western powers will wake up and realize that the Iranians are continuing to fool them, not only regarding Tehran's nuclear program, but also concerning its territorial ambitions in the Middle East. Iran's Al-Sabireen group states that its main goal is to "eliminate the Zionist entity."
On its way to achieving its goal, the group will also kill Arabs and Muslims who do not share its objectives and ideology. It also seeks to kill Israel's Western friends, especially those living in the U.S. and Europe. Unless the U.S. and Western powers realize that Iran remains a major threat to world peace, Al-Sabireen and other terrorist groups will one day manage to establish a UN-recognized Palestinian state that would pose an existential threat to Israel and destabilize the entire Middle East.
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3)
| Israeli fighter jets hit targets in Syria, Arab media reports |
In what would be the first airstrikes since the Russian air force began operating in Syria, Israeli jets allegedly hit two Syrian army bases housing long-range missiles and a Hezbollah post • Syrian state TV makes no mention of reports.
By Daniel Siryoti and Israel Hayom Staff
For the first time since the Russian air force began flying missions in Syria, Israeli fighter jets attacked targets in the country, Arab media outlets reported on Saturday.
News outlets in Syria and Lebanon reported that Israel Air Force jets hit Syrian military bases and Hezbollah positions overnight Friday at approximately 11 p.m. near the Qalamoun Mountains on the Lebanese-Syrian border. The reports, it must be noted, are unsubstantiated, and official state news agencies in Syria made no mention of any Israeli attacks.
According to the reports, eyewitnesses in Syria and Lebanon said four Israeli planes carried out a number of attacks and bombed two bases and positions near the village of Al-Qutayfah (some 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, east of Damascus). They also claimed a Hezbollah outpost was hit, across the border from the northern Israeli village of Ras al-Ein.
The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also cited eyewitnesses in Syria and Lebanon who said the Syrian army's 155th Division was targeted in the airstrikes. According to the reports, the bases sustained heavy damage and weapons warehouses were allegedly destroyed. The reports made no mention of casualties.
A Lebanese defense official told local news stations that the bases that were reportedly attacked stored long-range ballistic missiles, supposedly earmarked for transfer to Hezbollah.
It must be noted that Arab media outlets in recent days have reported that Russian and Syrian jets have flown missions together in the vicinity of Quneitra and Daraa in southeastern Syria, near the borders with Jordan and Israel, and have bombed rebel positions in the area. The Kuwaiti paper Al Rai reported that Russian jets mistakenly bombed a Hezbollah squad near the border with Syria and southern Lebanon, killing between seven and 10 Hezbollah fighters.
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