%20(1)%20(4)%20(1).jpg)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Friedman is seldom right but because he writes for The NYT's he is deemed credible as is the paper:+++
Globalists Were Wrong. The World Isn't Flat.
First it was baby formula, now there’s a tampon shortage. Tampons are affected by the rising price of oil affecting the cost of plastic and higher cotton prices due to mask manufacturing and the war in Ukraine. A whole lot of fertilizer comes out of Ukraine and Russia. So does neon which is used to make semiconductor chips. The chip shortage is shutting down car plants. It's also keeping the Biden administration from issuing gas refund cards.
This is the thoroughly interconnected world celebrated in prose by journalists like Thomas Friedman who marveled at how Big Data and globalization brought everything together.
"No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other," Friedman once claimed. In his greatest paean to globalization, The World Is Flat, he argued that, "No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."
McDonald's in Russia has closed and the ones in Ukraine might be blown up any time. Russia restricted its neon exports while Ukraine's neon exports have fallen sharply. Dell's CEO Michael Dell has warned that the global chip shortage could last for years.
So much for the Golden Arches and Dell theory of globalist conflict prevention.
The world isn’t flat, it’s all too round. Much like history isn’t an ascending trend line to the right side, it’s also a circle. That’s why Islam is once again at war with Europe, Russia is invading Ukraine, China is relaunching its empire, and the ‘flatland’ is experiencing a dimensional shift.The American economy increasingly looks like the Soviet Union with rigid central planning that is incapable of adjusting to the dynamism of the market and whose institutions are so uncompetitive that they lack the incentive to do more than pretend to try. And like the Russians, Americans are being forced to learn to live with unexpected expected shortages.
Globalization advocates had just recreated Marxist central planning with a somewhat more flexible global model in which massive corporations bridged global barriers to create the most efficient possible means of moving goods and services around the planet. Borders would come down and cultural exchanges would make us all one ushering in the great union of humanity.
What an interdependent world really means is Algerian Jihadists shooting up Paris, gang members from El Salvador beheading Americans within sight of Washington D.C. tampon and car shortages caused by a war in Ukraine, and more radicalism and extremism than ever.
Trying to “flatten” the world just makes it pop up again.
The technocratic new world order of megacorporations consolidating markets and then doling out products with just-in-time inventory systems now flows through a broken supply chain. Rising inflation and international disruptions makes it all but impossible for even the big companies to plan ahead, and so they produce less and shrug at the shortages.
We’re in a wartime economy because our system has become too vast and too inflexible to adjust to chaos. Biden keeps trotting out the Defense Production Act for everything until given time the entire economy has been Sovietized. The more that the government tries to impose stability on the chaos, the less responsive and productive the dominant players become.
Market consolidation due to government regulations has left a handful of companies sitting atop the market. When one of them, like Abbott for baby formula, has a hiccup, the results are catastrophic, others like Procter & Gamble, which controls about half the menstrual products market, don’t have to worry about losing market share to competition. Similar consolidation in food, paper products, and supermarkets have replaced a dynamic economy with cartels.
Behind all the brands on the product shelves is a creaky Soviet system in which a handful of massive enterprises interconnected with the state lazily crank out low-quality products from vast supply chains that they no longer control and feel little competitive pressure to perform better. The only thing that is still American about the supermarket experience is the advertising.
The problems with the system were less noticeable when its predictive mechanisms worked and its foreign suppliers were eager for American dollars. Under stress, the failure points are all too obvious and what is less obvious is that the system has no intention of repairing any of them.
It doesn’t need to.
An out-of-touch elite responds to problems with meaningless reassurances, glib jokes and wokeness. Like Soviet propaganda, the only thing corporate statements communicate is the vast distance between the lives of those running the system and those caught inside its gears.
But despite their complicity, the massive monopolistic enterprises didn’t make this world.
Biden and the Democrats have been eager to blame companies for “profiteering” from the inflation created by federal spending. Few companies prefer the current crisis to 2019. Hardly anyone except bottom feeders enjoys not being unable to rationally plan for the future. Major corporations and their investors care more about a growth plan than quarterly profits.
The Democrats were the biggest champions of globalization. Their regulations led to record market consolidation and domestic job cuts. Corporations were pressured to export dirty Republican jobs to China and keep the ‘clean’ Democrat office jobs at home. The devastation wreaked havoc on the working class and the middle class, and rebuilt our entire economy to be dependent on China and a worldwide supply chain only globalists could believe was bulletproof.
OPEC’s impact on fuel prices under Carter became the model for the entire economy. A war anywhere impacts Americans. Dozens of countries have the power to wreck our economy, intentionally or even unintentionally. Even the environmental promises of energy independence have become a farce in which our government pleads with China for more solar panels.
Interdependence hasn’t even led to the world government that globalists wanted, but global chaos in which impotent western powers try to talk the rest of the world out of fighting to avoid being swamped by refugees, high energy bills, and empty shelves in supermarkets.
After selling off American economic sovereignty, globalists proved unable to maintain global stability. Lacking the will to actually stand up to China, Iran, or Russia, all they can do is hold more international conferences and build up a useless multinational bureaucracy.
Say what you will about the League of Nations, but it only had 700 employees in Geneva. The UN's 44,000 employees are just the tip of the iceberg in the huge ranks of multinational organizations who all claim to be upholding the international order while running up the tab.
Globalization globalizes the ineptitude of the global order. Its grand plans, like those of the Soviet Union, are never a match for the chaos of human nature and its ambitions. Politicians, philanthropists, and philosophers had labored to replace American dynamism with a clockwork machine. The old Baggage clockworks became servers upholding a cloud that proved to be very handy for instant communications, but ran up against the same ‘flattening’ limitations.
America was never meant to be flat. It was a land discovered by those who understood that the world was round. Flattening America has depressed its economy and its spirit. A flat world with no room for American exceptionalism is instead becoming a playground for Chinese and Russian exceptionalism. And America’s economy is becoming one big permanent shortage.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In this fascinating article, Daniel Gordis weaves the story of boisterous Israeli teenagers and Herzl's own "I have a dream "and warning.As for myself, I am a Zionist and believe it is critical, in view of our history, we Jews have another welcoming home and I embrace the fact that home is Israel by reason of history, victorious wars and because of basic morality.
There never was a nation called Palestine. It is a created figment of their imagination, defies fact and basic law. In The War of Independence, Palestinians decided to leave, though the Israelis urged them to remain. They chose to leave mistakenly believing upon their return they would be rewarded by the consequently victorious combined Arab armies, ie. much akin to the history of today's Ukrainians.
The Israeli victors have made their home blossom and all reported indices reflect and support these facts and assertions. To the victor come spoils. Time and again, Israel has sought peace but, unlike Sadat, who was killed for agreeing to have peace, Israel, until Trump and The Abraham Accords, has had no reliable partner with whom to negotiate.
Once given the realistic opportunity to negotiate, Israel jumped and the fruit tree of peace has begun to blossom with untold benefits for all but he Palestinians who continue to embrace hatred, are led by gutless and corrupt leaders and remain under the sway of radicals, terrorists and Iranian threats and control.
The U.N has also proven largely worthless and counter productive because they too remain hostage to the same Palestinian attitudes, narratives and hatreds. Obama chose to add another log to the fire
by reason of his unconstitutional agreement (JCPOA) purposely used to circumvent The Senate's legal responsibility to accept and approve all treaties. And so it goes as Biden continues to reinstate Obama's JCPOA agreement which the Ayatollah rejects while adding new demands.
Israel has become powerful and influential, in it's own right, has proven a sound, reliable partner and is not leaving.
This reality gives heartburn to our president who has given his witless soul to the radical element within his own pathetic party.
AND:
New Biden Nominees Opposed Abraham Accords & Involved in Israeli Election Interference
By Dmitriy Shapiro
(JUNE 17, 2022 / JNS) Two Biden administration nominees for top posts related to the Middle East came under fire for alleged anti-Israel bias by Senate Republicans in their confirmation hearing on Thursday.
The hearing, held in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, comes at a critical time as U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to travel to Israel and Saudi Arabia next month while the United States is struggling to repair its frayed relationship with the Arab kingdom amid skyrocketing gas prices.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took issue with Tamara Cofman Wittes, the nominee for assistant administrator for the Middle East at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is responsible for distributing aid for development in the Middle East.
Cruz said that rather than a confirmation hearing, the Democratic majority convened a hearing on the “profound anti-Israel bias of the Biden administration.”
During questioning, Cruz pointed to Cofman Wittes’s controversial past of being highly critical of the Abraham Accords during the Trump administration, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“Why were you urging Arab countries not to deepen ties with Israel?” he asked, referring to a September 2020 tweet, reported by the Washington Free Beacon, where she wrote: “If I were an Arab leader weighing ties with Israel, I would have 2 things in mind. 1) A promise from [Trump adviser Jared] Kushner now isn’t worth much. Why not wait until after Nov elections? 2) Bibi’s backtracked on his commitments to UAE; his promises aren’t worth much either. Let’s wait & see … ”
+++
Ten Spies, 60 Israeli Teenagers, Istanbul and Theodor Herzl
The "new Jew" Zionism so desperately sought to create, now everywhere one turns
By Daniel Gordis
I don’t typically mention the week’s Torah portion in these columns, but then again, it’s not often that while following the reading I’m reminded of a train ride, which in turn reminded me of Theodor Herzl. And throw in Istanbul for good measure.
But that’s the sort of place this is.
The day before yesterday, the weekly Torah portion in Israel was Shelakh Lekhah, which includes the story of the twelve spies whom Moses sent to scout out the land to which they were headed.
Two of them (Joshua and Calev) issue a glowing (and now famous) report:1
The land through which we passed to scout, the land is very, very good. If the LORD favors us, He will bring us to this land and give it to us, a land that is flowing with milk and honey.
Before them, though, the ten other spies had issued a dire warning about the land:2
The land through which we passed to scout is a land that consumes those who dwell in it, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of huge measure. And there did we see the Nephilim, sons of the giant from the Nephilim, and we were in our own eyes like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes.
It’s a much-discussed passage, not surprisingly, because it raises myriad questions. How could twelve people have seen the same land and returned with such different impressions? Given that these people had already escaped Pharaoh and his army, of what were they so afraid? Why did they feel as meek as grasshoppers? And since even the ten spies who gave the negative report agreed that it was “a land flowing with milk and honey,” what was so horrific about what they saw that led to the dire warnings?
Over the centuries, numerous explanations have been offered. For reasons that will become clear in a moment, I want to focus on that offered by the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), in his very popular book Nine Talmudic Readings.3 Basing himself on a Talmudic text which we won’t discuss here, Levinas suggests the following possibility:4
… the explorers, confronted by the inhabitants of Palestine, had misgivings [like that which] many others have said when they speak of Israeli children. Perhaps the explorers caught a glimpse of sabras. Fear seized them; they said to themselves: this is what awaits us there; these are the future children of Israel, those people who make holes wherever they set foot, who dig furrows, build cities, and wear the sun around their necks. But that is the end of the Jewish people!
“A different Jew, an unrecognizable Jew, is the end of the Jewish people,” they thought. A Jew who digs furrows and builds cities is too different to be an authentic continuation of the Jews they knew. Jews who “wear sun around their necks” are a different kind of Jew. Too different?
I’m not sure what Levinas meant by Jews who “wear sun around their necks,” but the phrase reminded me of a passage in Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, Matti Friedman’s fabulous new book about Leonard Cohen’s visit to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Friedman describes some of the soldiers lackadaisically resting at their base early on Yom Kippur, and remarks about one of them that he5
grew up poor in Haifa after his parents escaped the country called “the Holocaust.” (Where are your parents from? From the Holocaust.) These kids didn’t have much to do with that. They were the first generation of native “Israelis”—not tortured, not a minority, not religious, not exactly Jews, but creatures sprung from sunlight and salt water.
Not religious. Not exactly Jews. Akin, perhaps, to what Levinas imagines might have worried the ten spies.
But those young soldiers, some of whom would die in the very first minutes of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, were not exactly not-Jews, either. What were they? They were the products of the central project that is at the core of Israel’s very being: reimagining what it means to be a Jew – what one should do, what one should know, what one should be committed to, even what one should look like.
Reimagining and recreating the Jew is what this place is all about.
Levinas and Friedman are pointing to the same phenomenon – coming to this land would mean becoming like this land. Coming to a region soaked in sun would make us sun-creatures. Leaving Europe would mean leaving much of European Judaism behind. We would build, said the Zionist ideologues of old, not only a new Jewish state, but a new Jew, no less. One could love that Jew or not, perhaps even find her/him distasteful, but it was going to happen. No matter what people felt about it.
Yes, this would be a state, but the state would be a laboratory—a lab that imagined and created new Jews.
Which leads us to the train.
At least once a week, my wife and I spend the day in Tel Aviv / Givatayim, taking care of our grandson. Traffic in and out of both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv is often horrific, so some weeks we drive, but at other times, we take the train. The train’s especially great for the way home, when instead of battling the cars after a long and tiring day, we can doze or zone out until we get to Jerusalem.
The week before last, we took the train. It was surprisingly crowded for that time of the evening, but still, we found two seats.
There are a few stops in Tel Aviv, so the train crept for a couple of minutes until the stop just south of where we’d boarded. I was already AirPod’ed up and listening to music, hoping just to rest or even sleep until the train arrived in Jerusalem about 40 minutes later. But at that next stop, the train (or at least our portion of it) was suddenly overtaken by at least sixty exceedingly loud, hormonally overdosed Israeli teenagers, probably about 16 or 17 years old. Boys and girls, they were laughing, yelling to each other from opposite ends of the car. They were being … kids. It was impossible to hear anything other than them.
So much for the music. So much for the snooze.
I actually tried to summon up a modicum of righteous indignation, some reason to be justified in my being entirely annoyed. So I looked around, but tragically, they weren’t actually doing anything wrong. By the time they’d gotten on the train, there were hardly any seats left, so they were mostly standing in the aisle. But they were being pretty considerate of the people sitting near them, making sure that their backpacks didn’t swing into people, and they tried, as best they could, to give us all some space.
Still, it was annoying in the extreme, loud beyond description. But trying desperately to come up with a good reason to be legitimately appalled, I suddenly remembered meetings with the Foreign Ministry in my previous job, and found myself not annoyed, but moved by these kids.
In that job, almost twenty years ago, I used to go to Europe for work. Before our groups would depart, someone from the Foreign Ministry would invariably come to meet with us. The instructions were always the same: no Hebrew on your briefcase or backpack. No speaking Hebrew on the Tube or the Metro. Just stay quiet. Don’t call attention to yourself. If people on the train in France (particularly) or elsewhere find out that you are Jews, or Israelis, what then could happen may not be pretty.
Those kids on our train, had they been on a train in England or Germany, would have known very well that sixty ultra-rowdy Jewish teenagers on a train would have ended badly. They would have known that they had to be quiet. They would have known to stay under the radar. And that, of course, is the point of this place:
They get to be who they are without worrying that they have to make anyone else happy.
Zionist’s early ideologues knew that Europe would never become that. Nowhere, except for home, would ever become that. Remember what Herzl wrote in his 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish State, which set the Jewish world on fire and launched political Zionism.6
We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes; in vain do we make the shame sacrifices of life and property as our fellow-citizens; in vain do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering. The majority may decide which are the strangers; for this, as indeed every point which arises in the relations between nations, is a question of might. … In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period wilt probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the Huguenots who were forced to emigrate. If we could only be left in peace. . . . But I think we shall not be left in peace.
Herzl was convinced that Jews having to hide, that Jews having to be on the defensive, was by no means solely a European phenomenon. He believed it was universal.7
Anyone who has, like myself, lived in this country [France] for a few years as a disinterested and detached observer can no longer have any doubts about this. In Russia there will simply be a confiscation from above. In Germany they will make emergency laws as soon as the Kaiser can no longer manage the Reichstag. In Austria people will let themselves be intimidated by the Viennese rabble and deliver up the Jews. …So they will chase us out of these countries, and in the countries where we take refuge they will kill us.
So they will chase us out of these countries, and in the countries where we take refuge they will kill us.
Herzl would not have been in the least bit surprised by the Boston Mapping Project and its not-so-subtle invitation to attack the Boston Jewish community (we’ll address that in a different column). What might have surprised him, though, and what might have given him pleasure, was Israelis’ reaction to being told by the Foreign Ministry that they should depart Istanbul at once, for Iranian agents are apparently searching Istanbul for Israelis to kidnap or murder this week.
Some Israelis, I assume, either cancelled their trips to Turkey or departed Istanbul early. What was more interesting, though, was that many did not. Speaking to the Israeli press, one Israeli tourist said that they were not worried. With Israeli and Turkish security forces in a desperate manhunt and a race against time to find the Iranian agents preying for Israeli victims, one could only hope that the confidence was not misplaced. “They’re always trying to frighten us,” they said of the Foreign Ministry.
You could read the paper and shake your head in dismay, asking yourself, “why are these people so stubborn, so nuts?” Alternatively, though, you could note that what Israel has done is to eradicate the fear, the nervousness, the tentativeness that Herzl believed would always characterize Diaspora life. Fear is no longer an instinct. For better and for worse, many Israelis have forgotten how to be afraid.
They’ve also forgotten how to be quiet on trains because they’ve forgotten how to be self-conscious.
If you’re a tired grandparent, it’s annoying in the extreme. But it’s also precisely what Herzl would have wanted.
Arriving to work last week, I happened upon these two students walking directly ahead of me, and couldn’t resist taking a quick photo. I don’t know if they were headed to reserve duty or were accompanying a group traveling somewhere, but I loved the nonchalance: both of them staring at their phones, chatting with each other, the flip-flops and M-16’s.
It’s not how Jews show up to class anywhere else, because Jews here are not like Jews anywhere else.
So once more, Levinas and his interpretation of what the spies were so afraid of:
Perhaps the explorers caught a glimpse of sabras. Fear seized them; they said to themselves: this is what awaits us there; these are the future children of Israel, those people who make holes wherever they set foot, who dig furrows, build cities, and wear the sun around their necks. But that is the end of the Jewish people!
Actually, not.
It’s not the end of the Jewish people, just the end of a certain kind of Jewish people.
On campus pathways, on intercity trains and even in Turkish hotels — one can’t help but notice that these young Israelis might not wear the sun around their necks, but, as Matti Friedman put it so adroitly, they are “Israelis—not tortured, not a minority, not religious, not exactly Jews, but creatures sprung from sunlight and salt water.”
Not everyone loves these new creatures, unafraid, unabashed, in-your-face and brimming with confidence. But, they would say to the world, if they were asked —
“You can love us or you might not. The whole point of this place is that we no longer care.”
With the Bennett government teetering (and possibly falling in the coming days), we reached out to the first MK who challenged the legitimacy of the coalition from the very beginning. MK Amichai Chikli, a member of Bennett’s Yamina party, refused to vote with the coalition from the very beginning, and has now been ousted from the party.
Chikli did speak about that, explaining why he thinks Bennett never should have been Prime Minister in the first place, but with his characteristic “take no prisoners” style, he also spoke about progressivism in the United States and its danger to Israeli youth, why he is worried about Israel’s next generation of adults, the anti-Semitism of BLM and the Palestinian movement, why he refused to sit in a coalition with Mansour Abbas’ party, and much more.
You will likely not agree with everything that Chikli says, and if you’re more comfortable with the (usually) genteel style of American political interviews (apropos the “in your face” style in the column above, you’ll have to hold on to your seat for this one.
But I suspect that, agree or not, you will find yourself moved by the passionate devotion to Zionism, the clear-eyed take on what is happening in many parts of Israel, and the confidence of a still-young politician who has many years of productivity ahead of him.
On Wednesday, we will post a brief excerpt of our conversation accessible to all, and the full podcast as always, for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Part VII: CONCLUSION: The Holocaust Has NO Equivalents
Alex Grobman PhD.21
*Editor’s Note: This is Part VII in the author’s second series with JPRESS ONLINE, dealing with Nazi persecution of Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities.
There is a tendency among historians, opined historian Richard J. Evans, to regard the Holocaust as a genocide with parallels in other countries and at other times. [1] This is not a “contest to measure pain or degrees of victimization,” historian Henry L. Feingold noted. “What is being measured is the importance of the event in history, and there clearly the Holocaust is an entirely different order of events in terms of its historical weight. History is not democratic, it does not assign equal import to like events. To forget that difference, to permit it to be subsumed in facile comparisons with every trespass human flesh has been heir to, is to risk losing the possibility of retrieving some meaning from the event. When that meaning is found, it will be in its specificity rather than in what it shares with other catastrophes. [2]
Though these comparisons assist us in understanding the Nazi period, Evans said, “they can also blur distinctions by homogenising all acts of mass murder until it is impossible to tell them apart….For Hitler, the Jews were not merely sub humans to be eliminated in the interests of an allegedly superior race, they were the ‘world enemy’ of the ‘Aryans,’ endowed with almost superhuman qualities, to be hunted down and ritually humiliated… before they were killed without exception. That is why modern neo-Nazis find it so important to deny the atrocities of Auschwitz, and that is the reason above all others why the Nazis linger so powerfully and persistently in our collective memory.” [3]
Why Emphasize the Differences Between Genocide and the Holocaust?
If all murder is the same, then why differentiate between murder, genocide and individual attacks against people attending a concert or random acts of violence? We do so, Yehuda Bauer explains, for practical reasons. Just as we do not use the same protocols to treat cancer, diabetes or any other medical issues, we need to address mass murder differently than genocides and Holocausts. By distinguishing between these events, we learn about the perpetrators, bystanders and how the victims
and their leaders responded to this calamity. Though history does not repeat itself in the same manner, there are some similarities and features. That is why they have universal implications. If it happened once, it could happen again to any of us, since we are all potential victims, perpetrators or bystanders. [4]
One Final Note
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Germans and their Axis allies murdered about 25 percent of all Roma in Europe. Of the little less than one million Roma assumed to be ln Europe prior to WWII, about 250,000 were killed. [5]
The Gypsies were a statistically negligible and marginalized group within German society and considered a “nuisance” and a “plague,” but never viewed as a serious threat to Germany. Nevertheless, the Nazis murdered a clear majority of German and Austrian Gypsies and many thousands of additional Gypsies in other parts of German territory. That the Nazis could execute such a murderous offensive against a group for whom Hitler had no or very limited concern, illustrates how precarious a combination of widespread intolerance, bias, bigotry and institutionalized racism can be when a police state bureaucracy begins to use repression and mass murder to resolve problems. [6]
“The Gypsy people suffered terribly under the Nazi regime, and there is no need to exaggerate the horrors they experienced” asserts Guenther Lewy. We examined how the Germans viewed them, the decrees issues against them and how they were treated. Lewy warned that“ Simplified accounts” which claim Gypsies, like the Jews, were oppressed and exterminated simply because of their “biological existence,” are not only a historical distortion, but also an impediment to establishing better relations between Gypsies and non-Gypsies. Only by understanding why Germans from all segments of society view them with such enmity and suspicion can a recurrence be prevented. [7]
Footnotes
[1] Richard J Evans, “Why are we obsessed with the Nazis?” The Guardian (February 6, 2015).
[2] Henry L. Feingold, “Determining the Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Factor of Historical Valence,” Shoah (Spring 1981): 10-11.
[3] Richard J Evans, op.cit.
[4] Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2001), 67. [5] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945.
[6] Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-1942 (Lincoln: Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004),179.
[7] Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New Yok: Oxford University Press, 2000),228
And:
To: Brith Sholom Media Watch (“BSMW”) Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #1117, 6/19/22
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I had a guest column on Stu’s website last week. I wrote that our homeland, the land of Israel, extends from the Sea to the Jordan River, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. A reader commented that I ignore the room’s elephant – Palestinian nationalism that can only be fulfilled in an inside the land of Israel “two-state solution.” I countered that the elephant he ignores is Palestine in its entirety, with Jewish and Arab nationalism residing respectively in the Jewish west and Palestinian Arab-majority east.
+++
AND:
“The Elephant in the Room” – Palestinian Arabs or Palestine West & East
By me, former Philadelphia Daily News and now independent journalist Stu Bykofsky wins the Sirius Black Award for having emerged into the sunlight from close to a half-century in Azkeban, the Philadelphia Inquirer-Daily News premises, with his mind almost intact.
The less-than-Israel-infatuated Inq, as long-time subscribers hereto doubtless recall, was the chief object of my disaffection during the early years of these weekly BSMW epistles. The Daily News, as habitually obsessed with covering sports as its sister Inq with miscovering the homeland of Jews, nonetheless took a few doubtless Inq-inspired shots at it, one an inappropriate front-page-lede survey of support for Israel among Green Bay Packer fans. As BSMW noted at the time, more to the Philly Daily News’ shtick would have been surveying support for the Green Packers among Israeli fans.
Stu Bykofsky for a couple years now has had his own highly reader-interactive website, www.stubykofsky.com, featuring mostly his own postings on Philly and U.S. politics and life, with plentiful easily-posted comments by readers, comments to comments, and comments to them. Well worth your visit.
A fortnight ago, Stu, with whom I mostly agree, conferred upon me a much-appreciated invitation to post on his site a guest column with its hook right from my tackle box – a commentary on Jews’ right to all of our homeland, starting from Rep. Tlaib et ilk’s new U.S. House of Representatives’ bill to bestow official American hechsher upon “the Nakba” and “Palestinian Arab Refugees’ Rights.” To view my June 5 posting itself and exchange of comments thereon, especially two sets between me and Stu reader “Tom” (maybe more by the time you read this), visit Stu’s site, scroll down to the second set of articles and look for “Guest Essay: Israel’s Right To Exist, Where It Is.” Summaries of my essay and of Tom’s comments, and in full my replies to them, follow.
“Guest Essay: Israel’s Right To Exist, Where It Is”
I began that Rep. Tlaib’s House Resolution 1123, “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugees; Rights,” did us a favor by making clear that it’s the “catastrophe” of the 1948 independence of a Jewish State period that’s the “Catastrophe” to our homeland’s foes. So I recapped our Jewish people’s three-millennia homeland presence, starting from the hill country sites of the late second millennium BCE through the biblical period; that we weren’t exiled by Rome but remained a significant presence in the land; and that 78% of Mandated Palestine became all-Arab Jordan and 22% today’s Israel, the land of Israel’s next native state. I referenced Diaspora Jews’ persecuted history in Europe and Muslim lands; that Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel; and that Israel today is majority Mizrahi (Middle-eastern), not “White.” I called on grassroots American Jews to “forcefully and forthrightly stand up for the historic, international treaty-recognized Jewish national home – Israel, where it is, with its current borders and historic Jerusalem.”
The First Comment by Tom
I got a smattering of supportive Stu reader comments, one of which cited the mutual benefits the US and Israel provide each other. I could not resist appending to my appreciative reply: “But the US administration must understand that Israel just cannot go back to the existentially perilous, historic Jerusalem excluding ceasefire lines of 1949 in a western Palestine ‘two-state solution,’” and that Palestinian Arabs are Jordan’s, eastern Palestine’s, majority population.”
Enter Tom, defending a “two-state solution,” not necessarily on the 1949 lines, with Jerusalem maybe an “international” rather than divided city. He sees a need to satisfy inside the land of Israel Palestinian nationalism. “The lack of historical roots for Palestinian nationalism does not mean it does not exist.” He believes it cannot be met by Israeli “annexation” over the ’49 lines, with either “transfer” or “dhimmi-hood/second class rights for the Arabs,” or even, “because of the practical consequences,” with Palestinian Arabs’ full citizenship and voting rights in the Israeli state. There have to be two western Palestine states.
My Reply to Tom #1
Hi, Tom,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. A majority of America’s Jews agree with you. Part of the reason I don’t is that Palestinian Arabs are already the majority population of eastern Palestine, the 78% of the Palestine Mandate east of the River, today’s Jordan. The Mandate clause allowing Britain to “withhold” part of the Mandate from the Jewish national home was limited to east of the River. If Jordan’s not “Democratic & Arab,” make its king a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth, don’t renege on the Mandate by taking away much of the 22% the Mandate recognized as the Jews’.
The main reason I reject a western Palestine “two-state solution” is that Jerusalem (three times Jewish state capital and renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule) and Judea-Samaria (what the UN itself called it in 1947) are the core parts of the historic homeland of Jews. And the Jordan River and Judea-Samaria ridge is a natural defensible border. The meandering 1949 ceasefire lines (thank you for not miscalling them “Israel’s 1967 borders”) are not. Nor would be other inside-the-land-of-Israel lines.
Israel’s Jews, most of whom reject an inside-the-land-of-Israel two-state solution (as do the Palestinian Arabs, who want all of Palestine) are not ultra-nationalist claimers of a “Greater Israel.” It’s those who’d take away historic Jerusalem and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland from us Jews who are seeking a “Lesser Israel” than what by history and international treaty is the Jewish national home. God knows we need it, and it needs to be militarily defensible and Jewishly meaningful.
Tom #2
Tom begins: “But you ignore the elephant in the room, which is the Arab population who live there.” He says the Mandate was “legally abrogated” by the UNGA’s 1947 partition resolution. He says that if you favor annexation and full citizenship rights for Judea-Samaria Arabs, “then you are with Tlaib….You should work with her.” Annexation with second class citizenry or “transfer” would betray what Israel is. “My position is not the slightest claim that Israel’s existence is in any way unjustified or illegitimate,” but the choice is “half a loaf or none,” so to avoid destruction “by outside forces or its own acts,” Israel should agree to a two-state solution. “It is not an argument for a ‘lesser Israel,’ but for Israel period.”
My Reply to Tom #2
[1] “The elephant in the room,” Tom, is Palestine, all of it, west and east of the Jordan River, both of which were embraced within the UN-officially-adopted League of Nations Palestine Mandate, which recognized my Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine and specified reconstituting there the Jewish national home. The Mandate gave an option to its trustee, Britain, to “withhold” from it only the portion of Palestine east of the River, which Britain with alacrity did, creating in that 78% of Palestine all-Arab Transjordan. The UN General Assembly’s 1947 resolution to again partition between Arabs and Jews the remaining 22% which Britain’s excision of Jordan from the Mandate left for the Jews had no power to renege on the Mandate, and was anyway unanimously rejected by Arabs, intent as they were on “driving the Jews into the sea.” Palestinian Arabs are the majority population of Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate
[2] Your suggestion that we “work with Tlaib,” whose House resolution is titled “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugees’ Rights,” is unrealistic in the extreme. Her “Nakba” [“Catastrophe”] is that Israel exists. If Israel was “created” in an Arab land in 1948, how is it that a homeland army of homeland Jews threw back and then some the instant invasion of several neighboring Arab states, in which Palestinian Arabs fully participated on the Arab side? It’s true that we Jews were only a third of Palestine’s 1948 population, but the exclusively foreign empires which ruled between Rome’s final defeat of ancient Israel in 135 CE and Israel’s independence as the land’s next native state in 1948 [Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever] slaughtered homeland Jews over and over, barred Diaspora Jews’ return home, including the Mandate duty-defying Britain in its before-during-and-after the Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine blockade. Count on the Jewish population side the homeland Jews slaughtered by the (mostly non-Arab) foreign rulers over the centuries, and the homeland-striving Holocaust survivors locked in European “Displaced Persons” camps in 1948 and in British prison camps on Cyprus. We’d have been the 1948 population majority, not just a third, but for all that.
[3] And as for Tlaib’s “Palestinian Refugees’ Rights,” more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in the 1948 war and its wake than Arabs left tiny Israel. Israel’s population today is majority Mizrahi (Middle-eastern origin) Jews.
By history and international treaty, San Remo and the Mandate, Tom, the land of Israel, the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, City of David and all) included – is the homeland of Jews, including the right of endangered Diaspora Jews to come home, and we will not give it up to Arabs who have a four-times larger Palestine homeland next door, along with almost all of the land of the Middle East.
Where We Come Out
Stu site commentator Tom isn’t alone in ignoring that Britain’s early 1920’s excision of Jordan from the Palestine Mandate constituted a 78/22% partition of Palestine between, respectively, Arabs and Jews. The world, in seeking to partition between Arabs and Jews the 22% of Palestine that its first partition left for the Jews, excludes the eastern Palestine elephant by moving inward a wall of the room. The world says in effect, “the part of Palestine that’s Arabs’ is Arabs’, the part that’s Jews’ is partitionable.” Rabbit, shmabbit, the world’s pulling an elephant out of a hat.
Regards,
Jerry
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
This was sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader who is more cynical than even I am! It is totally politically incorrect and that is even more reason to post and embrace.
+++
Rules of Life
There are three things that cannot be easily hidden: The Sun, The Moon, and the Truth.
The following are 2 Simple Truths, 5 Rules of Life, and 3 Bonus Rules:
SIMPLE TRUTH 1:
Lovers help each other undress before sex.
After sex, they always dress on their own.
Moral of the story -- In life, no one helps you once you're screwed.
SIMPLE TRUTH 2:
When a woman is pregnant, all her friends touch her stomach and say, "Congratulations."
But none go up to the man, touch his penis and say, "Good Job."
Moral of the story -- Hard work is rarely appreciated.
FIVE RULES TO REMEMBER IN LIFE:
1. Money can't buy happiness - but it's far more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than on a bicycle.
2. Forgive your enemy - but remember the asshole's name.
3. If you help someone when they're in trouble - they will remember you when they're in trouble again
4. Alcohol does not solve any problems - but then, neither does milk.
5. Many people are alive only because it's illegal to shoot them.
BONUS RULES:
1. Condoms do not guarantee safe sex! A friend of mine was wearing one when he was shot by the woman's husband.
2. I think all politicians should wear uniforms. You know, like NASCAR drivers, so we could identify their corporate sponsors.
3. Also, all politicians should serve only two terms - one in office and one in prison.
++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
YOU DECIDe:+++
AND:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
No comments:
Post a Comment