Israel’s Homegrown Enemies. By Caroline B. Glick.

Israel’s Homegrown Enemies. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 24, 2015. Also at Caroline Glick.com.

Glick:

By falsely accusing the state of committing torture, right-wing terrorism apologists are advancing the cause of terrorists just as Breaking the Silence advances the cause of Palestinian terrorists.

This past July, unknown assailants threw a firebomb into the home of the Dawabshe family in Duma. The mother, Reham and the father Saad along with their eighteen month old baby Ali were killed. Four year old Ahmed was critically injured.

Authorities immediately alleged that the assailants were members of a Jewish terrorist organization. The accusations were widely disregarded by members of the national religious camp, and by the Right, more generally. But following news that Jewish suspects were arrested for the crime earlier this month, those early allegations ring truer than before.

The Right had good reason to raise an eyebrow at the allegations. The IDF, the Shin Bet and state prosecutors have a long history of open discrimination against the Right.

Fourteen years before the Dawabshes were murdered, then attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein retracted five year old indictments against members of Eyal.

Eyal was a phony terror group put together in 1994 by a Shin Bet agent provocateur named Avishai Raviv. Its purpose was to demonize the national religious community. As the most outspoken critics of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, the national religious community was targeted for demonization.

Raviv and his colleagues had for years sought to entice members of the community to carry out acts of politically motivated violence. And when all else failed, he formed a fake terror group and invited reporters to film its fake swearing in ceremony.

The Shin Bet’s history, along with the IDF’s Central Command’s longstanding policy of portraying alleged Israeli vandalism of Palestinian property as the moral equivalent of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis has led many law abiding citizens on the Right to take allegations regarding Jewish terrorist cells with a grain of salt.

But this week we learned that this time the allegations may well be true. Just as bad, this week we discovered that not only do Jewish terrorists exist, they have supporters.

Wednesday night Channel 10 broadcast a video of young people dancing at a recent wedding in Jerusalem. The wedding was of friends of the men recently arrested on suspicion of involvement in the murder of the Dawabsheh family. Rather than dance around the bride and the bridegroom, as is the custom at Jewish weddings, wedding guests held up rifles, guns, Molotov cocktails and knives and danced around a photo of baby Ali Dawabshe.

The message was clear. The guests at the wedding weren’t waiting for indictments or a court verdict. They were sure their friends murdered the Dawabshehs – including their baby – and they supported the murder.

Here is the place to note that the suspects are innocent until proven guilty. The film is not evidence of guilt.

But the video does show that Jewish terrorists have supporters and those supporters believe that child killers are heroes.

How are we to relate to this state of affairs? How are we to respond to the increasingly sure knowledge that there are Jewish terrorists and that those terrorists have supporters?

Among those supporters are hundreds of people who have tried to shift the discussion from the act of terrorist murder the suspects are alleged to have committed to a discussion of allegations made by their attorneys, that since their arrest the alleged Jewish terrorists have been tortured by their investigators.

How are we supposed to react to those who rush to every open microphone and accuse the state of torturing the terror suspects, rather than consider, for a moment, what these men are suspected of having done? How are we to react to people who, even in the presence of evidence insist that the state is completely evil and the suspected terrorists are simply victims of discrimination?

Those who blithely accuse counter-terror investigators of torturing terror suspects while ignoring evidence and the nature of the crime itself, are terror apologists. In behaving as they do, they serve as the moral equivalent of anti-Zionist leftists from Breaking the Silence and its sister groups who libel Israel internationally.

Both groups of terror apologists use anti-Jewish rhetoric to harm the Jewish state. Both groups libel Israel with false allegations of torture that neither would dare to raise against any other country.

There are of course difference between the two groups.

Breaking the Silence and sister groups like B’tselem are funded by foreign governments. They disseminate their blood libels against Israel to foreign audiences. Their goal is to transform the anti-Semitic mood in foreign lands into anti-Semitic policies by foreign governments.

The ultimate goal of such groups is the destruction of Israel. They seek Israel’s destruction because they believe that Israel is illegitimate and should be replaced by a non-Jewish state of one sort or another.

Unlike their leftist counterparts, terror apologists on the Right do not receive foreign funding. They do not direct their actions to international audiences.

They don’t seek the adulation of the likes of Roger Waters or John Kerry. They don’t encourage Europe to wage economic warfare against Israel or the US to abandon Israel at the UN. They don’t legitimize Arab terrorism.

Their target audience is the Israeli public. They wish to convince the public to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish terrorists by painting them as victims.

But these terrorists are not victims. In their manifesto, the terrorists make clear that they wish to bring about the destruction of Israel. They view terrorism as a means to achieve that aim. One of the consequences of terrorism is that it weakens Israel’s international standing. And in their manifesto, the terrorists say that they seek to use Israel’s “weak points,” including its diplomatic weakness in order to destroy it.

By falsely accusing the state of committing torture, right wing terror apologists are advancing the cause of the terrorists just as surely as Breaking the Silence members advance the cause of Palestinian terrorists when they disseminate their blood libels about IDF “war crimes,” to European and US audiences.

Given the similarity of their actions and goals, it should be clear that terror apologists on both sides of the spectrum must be shunned.

This brings us to the nature of the terrorism that these apologists justify.

Are Jewish terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction different from Muslim terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction?

In two key ways they do differ. First there are the numbers. Whereas there may be a few hundred Israelis who have joined terror cells, tens of thousands of Palestinians are members of terror groups in Judea and Samaria alone. Gaza of course, is governed by a terrorist group.

Second, there are their support bases.

Jewish terrorists are condemned and rejected by every major and minor political force in Israel. Although their support base may have grown in recent years, it still numbers no more than a few thousand people, on the fringes of society.

In stark contrast, the Palestinian Authority and all private and public Palestinian institutions of note lionize Palestinian terrorists. Jailed terrorists and their families receive generous governmental compensation. The general public views them as national heroes and children are taught from preschool on to follow in their footsteps and kill Jews in order to destroy Israel.

Wednesday, as Israel’s entire rabbinical and political leadership stood as one and condemned the wedding guests who glorified Jewish terrorists on the video, Fatah – the terror group and political party led by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas – published a post on its Facebook page praising the terrorist murderers who the same day killed two Israelis and critically wounded a third outside the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem.

For counterterror and law enforcement bodies, fighting Jewish terror poses the same challenges as fighting Islamic terrorism. In both cases, the central challenge is to target and arrest terrorists and infiltrate their networks while continuing to respect the civil rights of the surrounding population.

In both cases, when investigators are contending with active terror networks, they are sometimes compelled to use unpleasant interrogation techniques. As numerous courts, ministerial oversight committees and the Knesset have determined, these techniques are not torture. They are legitimate interrogation methods and they are used sparingly and only when they are required to protect the public from terrorists who target the innocent.

This then brings us back to the wedding video and the difficulty we experience in accepting that Jewish terrorism exists, support for Jewish terrorism exists and both need to be dealt with.

There can be little doubt that Jewish terrorism would be far easier to fight today if the Shin Bet and the state prosecutors had not made malicious use of agent provocateurs to demonize the national religious camp in the 1990s. So too, if IDF commanders and the Civil Administration were less quick to support anti-Israel European funded NGOs against Jewish communal interests in Judea and Samaria today, community members would have less trouble believing the worst about Jewish extremists at the fringes of society. Indeed it would be far more difficult for overzealous defense attorneys to convince anyone that suspected terrorists have undergone torture.

But while the public has legitimate grounds for suspicion, it is no longer possible to dismiss the allegations of Jewish terrorism. There are members of the nationalist camp that wish to destroy Israel. They are willing to commit terrorist attacks against Arabs as well as Jews to achieve their goals.

As a consequence, just as the vast majority of the public demands that the government take all necessary measures to destroy Palestinian terror groups, so the public must demand that the government destroy Jewish terror groups.

Just as we decry apologists for Palestinian terrorism, so we must shun apologists for Jewish terrorism.

In recent years, as the movement to delegitimize Israel from the Left has gained momentum, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has taken to referring to Israel as “the one and only Jewish state.”

To Zionist ears, his constant refrain often sounds grating. Why bother mentioning the obvious?

But today his characterization of Israel rings true. Indeed, it is a reminder of what we can lose, and what we must do everything we can to defend.

We have but one Jewish state. And we will never have another one.

Warts and all, Israel must be defended from all of its enemies. Jewish terrorists, like Palestinian terrorists, are not victims. They are enemies of the state. Their apologists – like apologists of Palestinian terrorists – are also enemies of the state. We must fight and defeat them all with equal determination.

When Extremism Isn’t Mainstream. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

When Extremism Isn’t Mainstream. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 24, 2015.

The dance of death. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, December 24, 2015.

Tobin:

One of the standard memes of press coverage of the Middle East is the conviction that extremists on both sides of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians are mirror images of each other. In this formulation, often articulated by the Jewish left, Israel’s center-right government is somehow the moral equivalent of Palestinian terrorists. This is a false argument but it has been given credence by the reluctance of the Obama administration to acknowledge that the primary obstacle to a two-state solution has not been Israeli settlements but the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn. Despite the slander about Israeli intransigence, Netanyahu and his predecessors have all offered the Palestinians statehood but have been turned down every time. Yet even if we leave aside arguments about blame for failed negotiations, the most obvious difference between the two sides is in its attitude toward terrorism.

Recent events have made this even more easily understood.

In the last three months, the Palestinian Authority has done its best to incite and then to encourage the continuation of the so-called “stabbing intifada.” PA leader Mahmoud Abbas helped foment the unrest by repeating lies about Israel planning to harm the mosques on the Temple Mount. Having played the same card that led to anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1920s and 30s by speaking of preventing “stinking Jewish feet” from polluting holy places sacred to all three monotheistic religions, Abbas and the rest of the PA have praised those who acted on his suggestions and sought to murder Jews as “martyrs” and condemned the attempts by Israeli police and civilians to defend the victims as “extrajudicial executions” — a disingenuous slander that has been taken up by some gullible or malicious foreign governments. Hamas goes even further and not only endorses terror but is actively plotting mass murder on its own in order to undermine the rule of the PA and to harm Israelis.

But it is also true that there are instances of violence against Arabs by Jews. Most outrageously, an Arab family was murdered last summer in an arson attack on the West Bank village of Duma. Extremist Jews are believed to be behind the attack. This incident has been given enormous coverage throughout the world, especially in comparison to the often-paltry attention to the daily attacks on Jews.

But rather than illustrate the moral equivalence between the two sides, this sad chapter actually demonstrates just the opposite.

From the moment the attack on Duma became known, this atrocity was unequivocally condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and every element of Israeli society and from right to left on the political spectrum. Though indictments have not yet been handed down, suspects were arrested and subjected to the same harsh terms — including being held without charges and initially being deprived of legal counsel — that are given Palestinian terrorists. Indeed, lawyers for those accused of complicity in these “price tag” attacks now claim, like the Palestinians that they have been tortured. I mention this not necessarily to praise measures that would be illegal in the United States but to point out that in Israel, there truly is equality before the law for terror suspects of all kinds.

More to the point, even those on the political right in Israeli, like Education Minister Naphtali Bennett, who is labeled an extremist by foreigners, has not merely condemned the Duma attack but also the extremist fringe that supports such behavior. There is no denying that there is a tiny fraction of Jewish settlers in the West Bank who believe in such violence. But even as we join in the condemnations of their disgusting actions — such as the video now circulating of a group of these extremists actually celebrating the deaths of the Duma victims — it is important to remember that even the most nationalist rabbis in the settlements share our anger about this crime and those few who cheer it.

The existence of such extremists is deplorable not just because it is shameful that a tiny minority of Jews should be terrorists but also because these elements constitute a threat to the Jewish state. Unlike ordinary dissenters on the left or the right, anyone who is willing to use violence or go outside the law to obtain their objectives is at war with democracy and the rule of law. That’s why no one who cares about Israel should be sympathetic to these people or listen to their protests about the way the police or the army treats them. Nor does Arab terrorism which happens on a daily basis excuse their violence and hate.

But as troubling as they are, they do remind us of the stark difference between Israeli and Palestinians society. Those Palestinians that support terror against Jews are not a minority. They not only have the support of Palestinian leaders but also reflect mainstream public opinion among their people. Even the most right-wing Israeli leaders condemn Jewish terrorists.

That this is so is nothing for Jews to celebrate, as it is merely what we should expect of a decent society. Until a sea change in Palestinian culture leads them to treat their terrorists in the same way, peace is nowhere in sight.

Horovitz:

Every society has its fringe groups, but the youths seen at a Jerusalem wedding celebrating murder have the potential to bring ruin down upon us all.

The sight is nauseating, unthinkable. And, it turns out, not entirely new.

On its nightly news Wednesday, Channel 10 broadcast footage of dozens of young, ostensibly Orthodox Israeli Jews dancing at a wedding. Rather than celebrating the union of two young people as they set out to build a life together, this clip shows a frenzied celebration of death: the killings of the Dawabsha family — 18-month-old Ali, and his parents Riham and Saad — who were murdered when assailants firebombed their home in the West Bank village of Duma on July 31.

The Israeli far right has sought to deny the investigating authorities’ contention that the Dawabsha killings were an act of Jewish terrorism. The lawyers for several Jewish suspects in the case have sought to blacken the name of the Shin Bet security agency for allegedly torturing them. Several Knesset members have lent a degree of support to this campaign. Hundreds have demonstrated on the suspects’ behalf.

But the scenes from this wedding this month in Jerusalem tell an awful, unmistakable story. For here, gathered together in wild revelry, are dozens of young Israeli Jews delighting in the deaths of the Dawabsha family.

Described variously in reports Wednesday and Thursday as members of the extreme far-right and the “Hilltop Youth,” with one or both of the happy couple reportedly “known” to the security authorities, they chant a song that hails “revenge” against the Palestinians. One celebrant holds a Molotov cocktail in homage to the killers’ means of murder. Others wave machine guns and knives. At the height of the festivities, a photograph of baby Ali Dawabsha is “stabbed.”

Condemnation of the youths has rolled in over the past few hours from pretty much the entire political spectrum. There have been innumerable professions of horror and shock.

And yet the owner of the venue told the Yedioth Ahronoth daily that there are “dozens of weddings like this every month,” and that the Israeli authorities are well aware of them. He said that after the older folks have gone home, the youths dance like this, and sometimes some of them get arrested.

Another interviewee, in the same newspaper, spoke of going to such weddings “for years,” adding, however, that the brandishing of weapons and the “stabbing” of a photograph of the murdered baby “really mark the crossing of a red line.”

Now, perhaps, we better understand why President Reuven Rivlin, on the morning after the Duma killings, lamented that “we have been lax in our treatment of the manifestations of Jewish terrorism. Perhaps we did not internalize that we are faced with a determined and dangerous ideological group,” he said, “which aims to destroy the fragile bridges which we work so tirelessly to build.” And why, at a rally the next day, Rivlin elaborated: The flames of hatred, violence and “false, distorted and twisted beliefs are spreading through the land… These flames, which are consuming all of us, cannot be extinguished with weak condemnations [by politicians],” Rivlin said. “From the educational system, to those who enforce the law, through to the leadership of the people and the country: We must put out the flames, the incitement, before they destroy us all.”

Now, perhaps, we better understand the description, given to this reporter by security officials a month after the Duma murders, of a Jewish extremist fringe that has become so radical as to lie beyond the influence of even the most hawkish rabbinical leadership. Its members heed no authority, I was told. Some are prepared to kill, to go to jail for life, and to be killed if necessary, in support of a coldly deranged championing of land and perceived religious imperative over life.

Now, perhaps, we better understand the warnings, including from Education Minister Naftali Bennett, that these shameful Jewish youths threaten the very existence of the State of Israel. “There are a few dozen people whose goal is not murder; murder is just their means to undermine the foundations of the state,” said Bennett this week.

Rabbi Eli Sadan, founder of the pre-army yeshiva academy at Eli in the West Bank, said sadly on Army Radio Thursday that all societies have their fringe youth, their violent dropouts. That they do. But in our ultra-combustible reality, a fringe like this, as the Duma killings and their violent aftermath underline, has the potential to set the entire enterprise aflame.

Bennett, who heads the Orthodox-nationalist Jewish Home — the Knesset party most clearly identified with the settlement movement — said Thursday that he has tried in the past to reason with the so-called “Hilltop Youth” extremists, from whose ranks perpetrators of dozens of church-burnings, tire-slashings and other hate crimes are alleged to have sprung, and from whose ranks the Duma killers, too, are said to have emerged. But they paid no heed to him, he said, and called him a “traitor.” Where the suspects in the Duma case are concerned, he observed, it was now too late for education.

But it is not too late for education where the dozens who participated in that inhumane wedding dance of death are concerned. It is not too late for political leaders and rabbis and parents and siblings and friends to pull these deranged youths back from the brink. It is not too late for the State of Israel to reassert its insistence on upholding the core Jewish values that these young people have lost — and chiefly, of course, the fundamental respect for the divine gift of human life.

Otherwise, these dancing youths, derangedly and delightedly celebrating the death of innocents, will bring down ruin upon us all.

Judge a Society Not by Isolated Events But by Its Reaction to Them. By Elder of Ziyon.

Judge a society not by isolated events but by its reaction to them. Elder of Ziyon, December 24, 2015.

Clip shows far-right wedding guests celebrating Duma killings. The Times of Israel, December 23, 2015. YouTube.

Video Shows Jewish Radicals Celebrating Wedding by Stabbing Photo of Dawabsheh Baby. By Chaim Levinson. Haaretz, December 24, 2015. Also here. YouTube.

Video Shows Israeli Extremists Celebrating Palestinian Child’s Death. By Diaa Hadid. New York Times, December 24, 2015.

Remi Kanazi on Twitter, December 23, 2015.






Elder of Ziyon:

Israelis in an uproar over the airing of a video showing Jews at a wedding celebrating the deaths of innocent Arabs:

Footage released on Wednesday showed dozens of young Israeli right-wing extremists, said to be linked to the suspected perpetrators of the Dawabsha family murder, celebrating the killing at a wedding last week. The images in the clip immediately sparked wide condemnation.

The video, aired by Channel 10, shows revelers at the Jerusalem celebration waving knives, rifles, pistols and a Molotov cocktail during the wedding.

Amid the festivities, a photo of baby Ali Dawabsha, who was burned to death in the July 31 firebombing in the West Bank village of Duma, is shown being repeatedly stabbed.

The crowd in the video chants the lyrics of a song which include a verse from Judges 16:28, quoting Samson, blinded in Gaza, saying “let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes” — but changing the word Philistines to Palestine.

The video is indeed horrific and sickening. And already the Arab world is pointing to it as evidence that Israeli Jews are hateful, murderous bigots.

Every society has its fringe elements just as every Internet forum has its crazies. It is lazy and dishonest to point to one or five sick incidents as evidence of a society's attitudes. Not that they should be swept under the rug, but neither should they be used as proof.

But you can judge a society by how it reacts to such events in its midst.

...The video was met with harsh condemnation from across the political spectrum.

 Minutes after the clip was aired, Zionist Union MK and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni got up before the Knesset and railed against the youngsters in the film, saying “this is the group that wants to destroy the Jewish Israel, to destroy this state from within, to destroy the government from within and sow hate.”

Pointing at Jewish Home MK Bezalel Smotrich, Livni said: “These are the people you protest being interrogated by the Shin Bet.”

“My Judaism is not the Judaism of those dancing on the blood of babies,” she added on Twitter.

Smotrich condemned the “evil price tag ideology,” referring to right-wing attacks against Palestinians, but attempted to disassociate himself from the extremists, saying it “is not the way of religious Zionism, period.”

“The demonic dance with the picture of the murdered baby represents a dangerous ideology and the loss of humanity,” he said, according the Israel National News website.

Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel (Jewish Home), an outspoken supporter of the settlement movement, condemned the participants at the wedding.

“The clip published by Channel 10 news this evening is shocking and one cannot allow the activity of radical groups fueled by hate,” Ariel wrote on Facebook.

“Violence and support of violence deserve only condemnation. This is not the path of Zionism and this is not the path of the settlement movement,” wrote Ariel, who a day earlier had called for the Shin Bet to close down its division that deals with Jewish terror cases.

The video clip was also denounced by Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau, who said it went against Jewish tradition. Other religious figures also spoke out against it.

And it isn’t only politicians. Blogs, Facebook posts, and op-eds out of Israel are united in condemnation for this event – and not only because it makes Israeli Jews look bad, but  because Israeli Jews are naturally horrified by it and want to rid themselves of such evil in their midst.

The contrast to how Palestinian society reacts to their own outrages could not be more clear. After months of stabbing, car ramming and firebombing attacks on innocent Jews, I have yet to see a single statement in any Palestinian news or social media outlet that condemns those actions for being immoral. Not one.

On the contrary, the universal reaction is to justify these attacks or even to celebrate them.

The Henkins murdered in cold blood – nothing.

The massacre of the Fogels – nothing.

The Har Nof synagogue massacre – nothing.

Except for the occasional pro forma and hypocritical “condemnation” by Mahmoud Abbas (which disgust the Palestinian street), there is never any moral outrage or soul-searching that follows every attack by Jews on innocent Arabs.

While Jews condemn, Palestinians celebrate. While Jews try to root out the evil in their midst, Palestinians name schools and sporting events after their “hero” murderers. While Jews distance themselves from crimes in their name, Palestinians embrace them and encourage their people to do more.

Zionist Jews are rightly sickened at the sight of seemingly religious Jews acting in such a disgusting manner. The day that Palestinian Arabs start to react the same way to their celebrations of murdering Jews will be the day that peace might actually be a possibility.

There is no indication that it will ever happen.

Even Amira Hass Is Too “Zionist.” By Evelyn Gordon.

Even Amira Hass Is too “Zionist.” By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, December 23, 2015.

My Message to Diaspora Jews: Don’t Become Accomplices to Israel’s Crimes. By Amira Hass. Haaretz, December 21, 2015.

Culture of Violence: A Palestinian Hobby. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, August 5, 2013. With related article links.

Gordon:

Many well-meaning people still believe that “pro-Palestinian activists” are exactly what the term sounds like – people anxious to better the Palestinians’ lot by ending “the occupation” and creating a Palestinian state. But Haaretz journalist Amira Hass provided a window onto these activists’ true nature in a column this week: They are people for whom even Hass – a self-described non-Zionist who deems Jewish immigration to Israel a “crime” and Palestinian violence against Israel a “right” – is a “Zionist,” and therefore beyond the pale. In short, they are people whose world has no place for any Israeli Jew of any political persuasion, and for whom the only “pro-Palestinian” future worth contemplating is one where Israel ceases to exist.

To understand just how extreme a worldview is required to label Hass too “pro-Israel,” some background is in order. Hass is Haaretz’s longtime Palestinian affairs analyst, but she’s unique among the Israeli journalists covering this beat in that she doesn’t live in Israel; she has lived for over two decades among the Palestinians, first in Gaza and then in Ramallah. This isn’t merely out of journalistic dedication; it’s where her avowed sympathies lie.

She states explicitly that she isn’t a Zionist. As she put it in the abovementioned column, during a panel she moderated at last week’s Haaretz conference in New York, “The newspaper’s representatives made it clear that Haaretz is a Zionist publication, that its opposition to the occupation stems from Zionist principles. I found it appropriate to distinguish myself from this stance.”

In this same column, she wrote that overseas Jews who move to Israel “would be choosing to participate in another crime,” a message she said she has delivered at forums ranging from the Haaretz conference to meetings with South African Jews. As she correctly noted, this is the antithesis of Zionism, which “preaches in favor of the immigration of Diaspora Jews to Israel.” In contrast, she appears to favor letting Palestinians immigrate to Israel; at any rate, she devoted several paragraphs to decrying Israel’s refusal to let them to do so.

Moreover, she believes Palestinians have a “right” to kill Israelis; in a now-infamous column in 2013, she wrote, “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule.” That those stones are lethal weapons whose victims are primarily innocent civilians – the list of Israelis killed by Palestinian stone-throwers ranges from infants through toddlers to senior citizens – evidently doesn’t cause her any moral qualms.

So what could Hass possibly have done to enrage those “pro-Palestinian activists” to the point of accusing her of the worst crime in their book – Zionism? In her own words, “The thing that apparently angered them most was that I dared claim that the use of weapons does not advance the Palestinians’ cause today.”

This claim was not, heaven forbid, advanced “because of my Israeli identity” – i.e. out of any squeamishness about the murder of her countrymen. It’s just that in any armed conflict between the Palestinians and the vastly better-equipped Israeli army, the Palestinians are inevitably going to lose. Or to put it in her own, more pejorative, terms, the Israelis’ “capacity for destructive revenge is bigger.”

This, incidentally, is also the stated position of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He, too, has repeatedly said that while he considers “armed struggle” legitimate in principle, he believes it has proven counterproductive in practice and should therefore be eschewed. So in the eyes of these “pro-Palestinian activists,” Abbas would also apparently qualify as a despised “Zionist.” And since he did, once upon a time, win election on this platform (though he’s now in the 11th year of his four-year term), all the Palestinians who once voted for him are presumably also “Zionists,” and therefore similarly beyond the pale for these “pro-Palestinian” purists.

Granted, the activists in question were South African, and the South African branch of BDS has long been even more pro-violence and more virulently anti-Semitic than the rest of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. But the difference is one of degree rather than kind; “pro-Palestinian” activists elsewhere are also often both pro-violence and anti-Semitic.

Judging by her column, Hass learned nothing from the fact that even she was ostracized as too “Zionist” by these activists. But other well-meaning liberals ought to do so. “Pro-Palestinian activists” who have no place even for Amira Hass in their world have no place for anyone who seeks anything other than Israel’s violent demise. Thus by cooperating with such activists, liberals are not promoting a peaceful two-state solution; they’re promoting the activists’ goal of a world without Israel.

Hass:

I tell my audiences exactly what they don’t want to hear – and to Jews outside Israel I say: Don’t make aliyah.

“I should warn you. Amira Hass is a Zionist,” a pro-Palestinian activist in South Africa wrote about me two months ago. When she left the room, her fuming eyes already conveyed that what I had said in my conversation with her and her colleagues had gone beyond the party line. For example, I didn’t come out in favor of the magic, one-state solution and didn’t define the wars against Gaza as genocide.

I also told that same audience that it is not enough to analyze the colonial roots of Israel. The historical context must also include the Nazi industry of murder and the fact that most countries refused to take in large numbers of Jewish refugees.

The thing that apparently angered them most was that I dared claim that the use of weapons does not advance the Palestinians’ cause today. It was not because of my Israeli identity that I was critical of the worship of the armed struggle and wars, I clarified, but rather out of a feminist and socialist worldview. I disparaged the lethal male mimicry (whether among soldiers or between Palestinians and soldiers) of competing over “whose is bigger.” The Israelis’ is bigger. Their capacity for destructive revenge is bigger so other means need to be found in the struggle. After all, there is also revolutionary responsibility for preventing more devastation and destruction, and not just understanding the human need of the oppressed for revenge.

I tell every audience also what it doesn’t want to hear. I tell Zionists how surprising it is that Palestinian acts of violence are so few compared to the systematic and humiliating violence that Israelis authorities employ against them. At a pro-Palestinian conference in the Netherlands about two years ago, I said that the Jewish linkage to the Holy Land cannot be ignored, which also prompted fuming eyes, as if I had never written against the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians.

In meetings with socialist Zionist youth in South Africa I told them they should not immigrate to Israel. As the other Whites, they still benefited from past privilege of criminal proportions in South Africa, so they should stay in their country and fight to genuinely curb the crimes of apartheid. Fully consciously exploiting additional privilege and moving to Israel would be choosing to participate in another crime.

I said something similar on a panel that I moderated at the HaaretzQ conference in New York last week that dealt with struggles for equality. The audience comprised mostly liberal Zionists. The newspaper’s representatives made it clear that Haaretz is a Zionist publication, that its opposition to the occupation stems from Zionist principles. I found it appropriate to distinguish myself from this stance.

Zionism preaches in favor of the immigration of Diaspora Jews to Israel. Every liberal Zionist Jew living well in the Diaspora needed to know that even without “making aliyah,” Israel was granting them rights denied to Palestinians who were born in the country or whose parents were. Diaspora Jews have the right to visit Israel, to acquire Israeli citizenship, to live and work on either side of Israel’s pre-1967 border with the West Bank, to marry an Israeli, travel between Israel and the United States and not lose their rights in either country.

Everything Israel provides Diaspora Jews, it denies the Palestinians. Most of the Palestinians who live abroad are not even entitled to visit the land of their mothers and grandmothers (their real ones; not imaginary ones from thousands of years ago). Those who are allowed to visit are subject to restrictions: Some can’t leave the West Bank, others are not allowed to enter the West Bank, most are barred from going to Gaza.

Israel is not only barring them from returning to their country. It is also preventing them from settling down in the enclaves of the West Bank. Palestinians who have fled or are trying to flee the nightmare of the Syrian slaughterhouse can’t even dream about the most rational of options: taking refuge in their country of origin.

As a rule, Israel bars Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from traveling abroad, to Israel or to the West Bank. It bars them from living in the West Bank and bars West Bank Palestinians from living in about 60 percent of West Bank territory. Jews from Brooklyn or Tel Aviv can settle tomorrow in the Jewish settlement of Ofra. Residents of the Palestinian village of Silwad, whose land was stolen for Ofra, are not entitled to settle in Jaffa or to establish a community on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Palestinian citizens of Israel lose their social rights if they dare live in the West Bank.

People born in Jerusalem are expelled from the country and lose their residency status if they dare marry and work in the U.S. By the way, Israel also prohibits them from living in Kafr Qasem inside Israel, or in Be’er Sheva. They are only allowed to live in the ghettos that we created for them in the united city.

Israel uses Jewish immigration to excuse and deepen the dispossession. Immigrants to Israel become conscious collaborators with the increasingly extreme apartheid policy. Apartheid is considered a crime. We who were born in this country are collaborators against our will. All that remains for us is to use our privileges to fight the regime of privileges and, as much as possible, reduce the level of our collaboration with the dispossession. This course of action is not unique to us. Israel is not the only evil regime in the world creating rights for some groups and depriving others of them. But Israel, by default, is our home.

Chilling Screams of Yazidi Women Dragged Away to be Sex Slaves by ISIS.

Chilling screams of Yazidi women dragged away by ISIS. Video. Daily Mail, December 18, 2015. YouTube. YouTube.

Harrowing footage released by Yazidi group shows terrified families scream as ISIS gunmen surround them and drag away their wives and daughters to become sex slaves. By Simon Tomlinson. Daily Mail, December 18, 2015.

See also Right Wing News.





Tomlinson:

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Screaming girls torn from their parents and corralled into a separate group. Some are dragged by their hair by fighters armed with AK-47 machine guns. ISIS has massacred hundreds of Yazidis and enslaved their wives and girls.

Harrowing footage has emerged which appears to show ISIS gunmen dragging terrified wives and daughters from their families to make them sex slaves. The video, posted online by activists, shows a crowd of screaming Yazidis being separated one by one by militants armed with AK-47s in what appears to be an apartment block.

Terrified girls try to cling to their parents but are ripped away, some by their hair, and corralled into another group at gunpoint. Above them, the sinister ISIS black flag is hung from a balcony beside more jihadists, one of whom appears to be brandishing a rocket launcher.

The video, which appears to have been uploaded to Facebook by Yazidi activists, has not been independently verified and the fate of the captives is not known.

ISIS massacred as many as 5,000 Yazidi men and abducted hundreds of women and young girls, when it swept through the Iraqi town of Sinjar last year. Some women have been lucky enough to escape or be freed, but have given horrific accounts of rape, torture and suicide. Pregnant women have also been forced to undergo abortions leaving them unable to move or speak. ISIS jihadists would bring their own gynaecologists to “slave markets” where captured women who were found to be pregnant would be subjected to painful abortions so they could be used for sex.

Some captives have chosen to kill themselves than endure further torture.

Sonja Bochow, Right Wing News:

When life is worth nothing, when sex is simply another service in the marketplace, when women have no value except as slaves…then this is what happens. ISIS is a radical Islamic death cult whose members use other human beings as their own personal playground or political statement. This kind of disregard for human life is horrific.

Some of these women are so desperate, that death is preferable to being the slave of violent killers. Who will stop these evil men? Who speaks for the women and little girls whose are abused, maimed and murdered? When will the world stand up and say “No more.”? There is a true war on women, and it is not in America. Look no further than ISIS.

Islam and the West: An Irreconcilable Conflict? By Patrick J. Buchanan.

Islam and the West: An Irreconcilable Conflict? By Patrick J. Buchanan. Human Events, December 22, 2015. Also at Buchanan.org, Real Clear Politics.

Buchanan:

“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here … and … around the world, that there is a ‘clash of civilizations.’”

So said Hillary Clinton in Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate.

Yet, that phrase was not popularized by Donald Trump, but by Harvard’s famed Samuel Huntington. His “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” has been described by Zbigniew Brzezinski as providing “quintessential insights necessary for a broad understanding of world affairs in our time.”

That Clinton is unaware of the thesis, or dismisses it, does not speak well of the depth of her understanding of our world.

Another attack on Trump, more veiled, came Monday in an “open letter” in The Washington Post where four dozen religious leaders, led by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, charge “some politicians, candidates and commentators” with failing to follow Thomas Jefferson’s dictum:

“I never will, by any word or act … admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”

Intending no disrespect to Jefferson, if you do not inquire “into the religious opinions of others” in this world, it can get you killed.

“We love our Muslim siblings in humanity,” said the signers of Cardinal McCarrick’s letter, “they serve our communities as doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, journalists, first responders, and as members of the U.S. Armed forces and Congress.”

Undeniably true. But, unfortunately, that is not the end of the matter.

Did the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, 9/11, have nothing to do with the Islamic faith?

Did Fort Hood and the San Bernardino massacres, the London subway bombings and the killings at Charlie Hebdo, as well as the slaughter at the Bataclan in Paris, have nothing to do with Islam?

Does the lengthening list of atrocities by terrorist cells of ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaida, al-Shabaab and the Nusra Front have nothing to do with Islam? Is it really illiberal to inquire “into the religious opinions” of those who perpetrate these atrocities? Or is it suicidal not to?

There has arisen a legitimate question as to whether Islamism can coexist peacefully with, or within, a post-Christian secular West.

For, as the Poet of the Empire, Rudyard Kipling, wrote: “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.”

As of 1960, the Great Wave of immigration into the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe had been halted for 35 years. And the children of these millions had been largely assimilated and Americanized.

Yet, 50 years after the Turkish gastarbeiters were brought in the millions into Germany, and Algerians and other North Africans were brought into France, no such wholesale assimilation had taken place.

Why not? Why are there still large, indigestible communities in France where French citizens do not venture and French police are ever on alert?

What inhibits the assimilation that swiftly followed the entry of millions of Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews into the United States from 1890 to 1920? Might it have something to do with Islam and its inherent resistance to a diversity of faiths?

Set aside faith-based terrorism and Islamist terrorism, and consider the nations and regimes of the Middle and Near East.

Iran holds presidential elections every four years, but is a Shiite theocracy where the Ayatollah is a virtual dictator. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni kingdom and home to Wahhabism, a Sunni form of puritanism.

Those ruling regimes are rooted in Islam.

And while secular America embraces expressions of religious pluralism and sexual freedom, homosexuality and apostasy are often viewed as capital crimes in Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Where Islam is the ruling faith, the Quran is secular law.

Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc saw our future on its way, even before World War II: “[I]n the contrast between our religious chaos and the religious certitude still strong throughout the Mohammedan world … lies our peril.”

Historically, Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire through preaching, teaching, example and martyrdom. Islam used the sword to conquer the Middle and Near East, North Africa and Spain in a single century, until stopped at Poitiers by Charles Martel.

And this is today’s crucial distinction: Islam is not simply a religion of 1.6 billion people, it is also a political ideology for ruling nations and, one day, the world.

To the True Believer, Islam is ultimately to be imposed on all of mankind, which is to be ruled by the prescriptions of the Quran. And where Muslims achieve a majority, Christianity is, at best, tolerated.

Nor is this position illogical. For, if there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet, all other religions are false and none can lead to salvation. Why should false, heretical and ruinous faiths not be suppressed?

Behind the reluctance of Trump and other Americans to send another U.S. army into a region that has seen wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan leave us with ashes in our mouths, lies a wisdom born of painful experience.

What Trump Gets Right About Putin. By Robert W. Merry.

What Trump Gets Right About Putin. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, December 21, 2015.

Merry:

Donald Trump has a problem, perhaps best defined as a tendency to wrap worthy observations in outlandish language, thus undermining his rhetorical force and subjecting him to severe criticism. So far this weakness doesn’t seem to have held him back in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, but it could catch up with him in coming weeks and months.

Take, for example, the recent exchange between Trump and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who thinks Trump is the cat’s meow of American politics. When Trump welcomed recent praise from Putin, Scarborough said, “Well, it’s also a person who kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries. Obviously that would be a concern, would it not?”

Trump: “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”

Scarborough: “But, again, he kills journalists that don’t agree with him.”

Trump: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe, you know. There's a lot of stupidity going on in the world now, Joe, a lot of killing, a lot of stupidity.”

When Scarborough suggested that Trump obviously must condemn Putin’s killing of journalists and political opponents, the GOP frontrunner replied, “Oh, sure, absolutely.” It seemed to be a kind of afterthought.

But then he also said Putin’s Russia could be a “great asset” to the United States if the two nations had a better relationship—“a positive force,” particularly in battling ISIS, the bloodthirsty Islamic State that has consolidated territory in Syria and Iraq and is bent on attacking the West whenever possible.

Herewith a post-mortem on that exchange and its aftermath, including the plastering that Trump sustained from establishment thinkers, including former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and former GOP presidential standard-bearer Mitt Romney. There are three areas of interest that deserve inquiry—the question of U.S. relations with Russia; the matter of Putin’s approach to ruling Russia; and the lessons in political discourse posed by the exchange. All were intermingled in the Trump-Scarborough interview.

Suppose Trump had handled the exchange more along the lines of this hypothetical exchange:

Scarborough: “Well, it’s also a person that kills journalists and political opponents, invades countries,” etc.

Trump: “Well, Joe, I don’t have any independent knowledge of Putin actually killing journalists, do you? Everyone in the media says so, but can you confirm it? Marco Rubio accuses Putin point-blank of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine, without any evidence at all. Is that responsible? As for invading foreign countries, he has operated strictly within his traditional sphere of influence, just like America did when it invaded Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Granada. We were trying to protect our national interest in what might be called our near abroad. So I don’t know that this should be disqualifying in terms of dealing with Putin.”

Scarborough might then have noted that, after all, Russian journalists and other Putin opponents have indeed been killed in Russia and abroad. What’s Trump’s explanation for that?

Trump: “Well, Joe, Russia went through a complete humiliation in the 1990s, after its defeat in the Cold War. I’m glad of that defeat. I’m proud of our victory. But Putin is trying to bring Russia back to a place of respect and influence in its crucial Eurasian region. In doing that, he has embraced a political system that combines some economic and cultural freedoms with something approaching a state monopoly on politics. The stakes are huge in Russia right now; people get killed in those situations. It’s certainly not my kind of system; I’m glad we don’t have that here in America. But we have dealt with all kinds of countries in our history with all kinds of governmental systems, and I think our geopolitical interests should take precedence over any ideological purity.”

That would have provided a foundation for Trump’s most intriguing point, which is that Russia perhaps could be a positive force in the world and a possible asset to America if managed with some foreign policy adroitness.

To understand this potential, it’s necessary to understand Putin and his Russia. A good place to start might be a 2012 book (since updated) by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution, entitled Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. Elements of their thesis appeared in the January/February 2012 issue of the National Interest. In that piece they explore what they call “two central elements of the Putin persona: his firm conviction that his personal destiny is intertwined with that of his country; and his resolve to fashion the Russian destiny through slow, methodical decision making over a long period of time.”

Certain convictions and traits illuminate these elements. First, he is a statist, in the tradition of Russian history going back far beyond the Soviet era and extending through the 300-year Czarist period. “In the United States,” write Hill and Gaddy, “the state exists to protect the rights of the individual. In Russia, the state is primary. The state stands above the individual, who is subordinate to the state and its interests.” This is almost impossible for many Americans to understand and appreciate, but it is central to understanding Putin and also to understanding the reality that his statist views “have broad resonance in Russia,” as Hill and Gaddy put it.

Another element is the Russian obsession with survival, born of the country’s geopolitical vulnerability to invasion and its history of struggle (often to fend off the multiple invasions it has experienced over the centuries). This bolsters the country’s statist impulse as people there look for a strong government to protect them from the vicissitudes of fate. Write Hill and Gaddy, “The ‘survivalist’ may be the mentality that is the most widespread among Russians of nearly all backgrounds and ages, given the shared experiences of war and privation.”

The authors also explore Putin’s embrace of free market principles. Many Russians were prepared to toss aside these convictions after the disastrous 1990s, when, in the name of free enterprise, the country was essentially auctioned off to well-positioned citizens who got fabulously rich in the process. Putin went after these people—the so-called Oligarchs—while clinging to his view, formulated during the disastrous final Soviet years, that central economic planning could not work. Thus, he emerged, as Hill and Gaddy put it, “as a statist who determines the state’s interests but protects entrepreneurs, gives them a free hand, and only intervenes in businesses’ decisions and operations in extreme cases that appear to threaten state priorities.”

Thus, he forged a classic authoritarian system, preserving the state’s control over politics while opening up other facets of civic and personal life. It was and remains a far cry from the totalitarian Soviet system, with its assault on the country’s traditional religion and cultural heritage, the freezing of artistic expression, and its gulag of dreary prison camps to enforce its total dominance over the private life.

Through this lens it can be seen just how foolhardy it was for the West to push eastward toward the Russian border after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to seek to lure into NATO countries that for centuries had constituted a buffer zone between Western Europe and Orthodox Russia—or, worse, had been part of Russia’s sphere of influence for centuries.

Particularly incendiary was the effort to pull Ukraine, right on the Russian border, out of Russia’s influence zone, where it has resided for nearly four centuries. No self-respecting country could allow that, particularly given that the crucial strategic enclave of Crimea, Russian territory through most of modern history, was part of Ukraine. Russia promptly took back Crimea and extended support to Eastern Ukraine, populated largely by Russian-speaking people with deep Russian sympathies.

The result of all this has been the widespread demonization of Vladimir Putin throughout America, expressed in harsh, dismissive language by journalists, academics and politicians of all stripes and both parties. He’s a killer, they say, a tyrant, a gangster.

And then along comes Donald Trump, a brash, undisciplined developer with no political background or foreign policy sophistication. But somehow he sees what the vast majority of establishment denizens can’t seem to perceive. He says, essentially: There’s something wrong here. Putin seems to be doing what any effective leader would do in the same circumstances. He could easily take Ukraine’s eastern regions militarily and nobody could stop him, but he hasn’t. His proposals for a negotiated settlement have been summarily rejected by the West. He’s true to his allies in the Middle East, such as Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, in sharp contrast to President Obama, who threw over Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for no particular reason. He could become a significant geopolitical counterweight to a rising China, which is emerging as a major U.S. adversary. So, I think I could get along with the guy, and I certainly think it’s worth a try.

It’s unfortunate that Trump doesn’t know how to press his case with finesse. But his instincts merit some respect, as does his fortitude in taking on a foreign policy outlook that is so thoroughly embedded in elite thinking throughout the country. But then, one reason Trump seems to beguile so many Americans, as reflected in the polls, has been his willingness to slam the elites that have left the nation mired in such a civic mess.

Of course the West must always fortify itself against any possible encroachment by the Russian bear, as it has had to do for centuries. But that doesn’t mean America and Europe need to pursue their own policies of encroachment or employ the kind of bellicose diplomatic language that destroys prospects for finding common ground on matters of mutual interest. The country is on the wrong course on this powerful diplomatic matter. Nobody in politics seems to see it or care about it—except Donald Trump. Kudos to him.