At Last! A Hashtag for Middle East Peace. By Rush Limbaugh.

At Last! A Hashtag for Middle East Peace. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, July 23, 2014.

Hamas Nazi Compares Netanyahu to Hitler. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, July 23, 2014. 

Rush [Hamas Nazi]: 

RUSH: Here is Osama Hamdan. He is the Hamas spokesman, and was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s the Situation Room yesterday, and Wolf Blitzer asked the Hamas spokesman, Osama Hamdan, “Are you deliberately targeting Ben-Gurion International Airport?”

HAMDAN: What the Palestinians are supposed to do? To give their, uhhh, names for this Israelis to slaughter them or to trying to defend themselves? We were expecting that international community will protect the Palestinians from the Israelis, would protect the Palestinians from the mentality of Netanyahu, who lost his morals and his army also – and, ehh, he’s reflecting a new image for Hitler and the Nazist (sic) army. They are acting in the same way, killing the Palestinians just because they are Palestinians, like what Hitler was doing in the last century.

RUSH: Alright, now, folks, this has gone beyond absurd now. Here we have the modern-day Nazis. The Palestinians, Hamas, you name it, are the modern day Nazis where the Jews are concerned. They are the current incarnation of Adolf Hitler. It is their total hatred for Jews and their anti-Semitism that defines their existence. That’s the root of the problem! It won't even be stated as such.

You know, whenever there’s anti-Semitism in America, boy, people can’t wait to point it out! They’d love to tar and feather as many anti-Semites as they could. But here you have a whole region full of ’em, and nobody will utter the word that describes the ideology of the Islamic Jihad, which is anti-Semitism. Militant, vicious, bloodthirsty anti-Semitism. This is now beyond absurd!

Here you have the modern day incarnation of the Nazis accusing the Jewish state of being a “Nazist army,” is what he said.  He meant to say Nazi, or Nazi-ist. (You have to allow for the speaking of a foreign language.) But this is just absurd. Of course incumbent in this sound bite (impression), “The Israelis are slaughtering! The Israelis are attacking! The Israelis have lost their morals! The Israelis are reflecting a new image of Nazist!”

And there’s Wolf Blitzer just standing there listening to this? Nodding his head? I didn’t see it, so I don’t know what his reaction was. But that’s how ridiculous this is. Ladies and gentlemen, ancient Islamic Jihad liters such as the old Grand Mufti himself met with the Nazis in World War II. They knew they held something major in common.

Yet they automatically are granted victim status!

It’s just absurd.

It’s beyond absurd.  It’s incomprehensibly stupid! It ought not be given any recognition. It ought not be given any cognizance. It ought not given time of day, this assertion. But that’s the Hamas spokesman. So we get a hashtag (sniveling): "#JewsAndArabsRefuseToBeEnemies, please! #JewsAndArabsRefuseToBeEnemies. “Man, I really, I’m a good person. Do you see my hashtag? I care. I wish they would all just get along.” 

 

Putin May Have Killed Russia’s Brand. By Leonid Bershidsky.

Putin May Have Killed Russia’s Brand. By Leonid Bershidsky. Bloomberg, July 21, 2014.

No Russian. By Max Skibinsky. The Vault of the Future, July 20, 2014.
 

Bershidsky:

Is the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 the end of Russia as a brand? That’s what one of the most successful Russian professionals in the tech industry, Max Skibinsky, thinks. He has a point: Whoever is really responsible for the tragedy, it’s the perception that matters.

A Moscow-trained physicist, Skibinsky is a serial entrepreneur associated with the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz LLC. Although he has spent the last two decades in the U.S., people in Silicon Valley still see him as a Russian – an identity he worries may turn into a stigma. As he put it in a lengthy blog post:

Personally, I’m thinking to start calling myself Euro-Slavic instead of “Russian.” It’s a flimsy defense, yet Russian brand, after already being tainted with gulag and the rest of its toxic legacy, is now synonymous with mass murder of innocent civilians. There is nothing of value left to recover.

Skibinsky wouldn’t be the first Russian tech guru to give up on his native country. Sergei Brin, the Google Inc. co-founder, famously called Russia “Nigeria with snow” in a 2003 interview with Red Herring magazine, adding that Russia’s rulers were “a bunch of criminal cowboys” trying to control the world's energy supply.

Skibinsky’s remarks, though, have deeper implications. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to shift blame for MH17 are not going to fly in the court of Western public opinion. U.S. President Barack Obama was simply reflecting public perception when, in a speech today, he asserted that Putin has “extraordinary” and “direct” influence on the separatists in eastern Ukraine. In the public mind, Russia is already at fault for the tragic death of 298 innocent people.

“This situation will get worse before it gets better,” wrote Skibinsky. The Kremlin “will fight to the last: we will yet see the massive flood of lies and deceit they will unleash to mitigate the anger of their recent mass murder. Very unfortunately everything they do will be branded with the words Russia or Russian.”

To Russians plugged into Western banking or technology, two industries in which they have a large presence, this means dealing with disapproval by extension. There will be nothing rational about it, just an emotional undertone, forcing them to explain without being asked that they do not support Putin and have nothing to do with his treatment of Ukraine. In Russia itself – where, according to a recent Gallup poll, 83 percent of people are in favor of Putin – only a minority gets the uncomfortable urge to dissociate themselves from leader and country. To those of us living in the West, it’s going to be a fact of daily life.

Skibinsky wrote that Silicon Valley should expect a lot of Russian resumes soon. He wants tech firms to consider these applicants seriously: “They are not just looking for a job, they looking to save themselves and their families.” He also called on the tech industry to help Ukraine by sending work to its outsourcing shops and by boycotting firms associated with the Russian government and state-owned companies (some of them, such as venture capital firm Russian Venture Co. OJSC and VTB Bank OJSC, have been looking to invest in Silicon Valley startups lately).

The industry is quite likely to follow Skibinsky’s advice, even without reading his post. Russia is getting more than unfashionable. It's on its way to taking on the Soviet Union’s onetime status as an object of fear and hatred.

The World Is Returning to Normal. By Michael Ledeen.

The World Is Returning to Normal. By Michael Ledeen. PJ Media, July 21, 2014.

Ledeen: 

Of all the popular myths about “how the world works,” the most dangerous to us at this moment is the one that goes “peace is normal, war is an aberration.”  Truth is, war is normal and peace very unusual.  We’ve lived through a happy time, ever since the Second World War.  Thanks to American superpower, and the destruction of the totalitarian regimes in Rome, Berlin and Moscow, we’ve had a happy period of relative peace.  Very few big wars.  Little genocides (China is exceptional, but they changed to accommodate the global pattern).  Deterrence (as in “mutual assured destruction”) mostly worked.

That was a rare time.  Now we’re getting back to normal.  There’s a good reason for that old Roman wisdom “if you want peace, prepare for war.”  It’s because “peace” most always happens when somebody wins a war, and then imposes conditions on the losers.  That’s what “peace conferences” are all about.  Our recent happy time was the result of war, and our adoption of the Roman wisdom.  We smashed our enemies, we created military alliances to deter our new enemies (NATO, etcetera), we built and maintained a big arsenal on land, air and sea.

We prepared for war to make peace possible.

It worked so well and lasted so long that we forgot why we were doing it. Over time, the “peace is normal” myth took hold and its attendant policies — “future wars will be economic, not military” and “guns to butter” — came to define our strategic thinking.

Moreover, Americans have always been conflicted over foreign policy.  We have always wanted two incompatible things at once:  we want to export the American model, and we want to stay out of other countries’ affairs.  We have invariably waited until the eleventh hour before fighting.  In the last century, we were torpedoed into the First World War by the Germans, bombed into the Second World War by the Japanese, and frightened into the Cold War by Stalin.

Then came 9/11 and we were reminded that there are (always) enemies out there.  In time, we forgot that, too, and now, having deceived ourselves into believing that peace is normal, we are trying to talk our way out of the global war.  It won’t work.  It never has.

So we’re back to normal.  War, and the runup to more war, is the order of the day, as it has been for most of human history.  Our real options are the same as they have always been:  win or lose.  Both lead to “peace,” but the one is a happy peace while the other is an extended humiliation.

If we accept that war, and the preparation for war, is the basic leitmotif of human history, we might also overcome the parallel myth:  that all men are basically the same, and all men want the same (good) things.  Not so.  Just ask Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, and their friends, proxies, and agents.  They want bad things for us, namely death and domination.  And they’re not likely to change, which is why it’s very dangerous to give Khamenei more money, and try to make Putin more “reasonable.”  They’re going to continue the war.

“Man is more inclined to do evil than to do good,” Machiavelli wrote, and he knew whereof he spoke.  Which is why war is normal, and peace so rare.  And why we’d better get used to it.

That happy time is done and gone, at least for now.  We’d better stop whining and get about the business of winning.

Palestinians Chose Hamas and the Mass-Murder of Civilians—Including Their Own. By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Palestinians Chose Hamas and the Mass-Murder of Civilians—Including Their Own. By Andrew C. McCarthy. PJ Media, July 22, 2014.

McCarthy: 

I argued in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy that the illusion’s signature feature is a fantasy: By holding free elections, a people is choosing freedom: joining modernity, adopting pluralism and tolerance, rejecting revolutionary violence and totalitarianism.

Today, we are yet again being inundated with tales of Palestinian woe after Hamas’s familiar barbarism has provoked an Israeli military response. It thus bears remembering that the Palestinian people chose Hamas. What ever happened to all those Democracy Project paeans to self-determination? Hamas is Palestinian self-determination. Hamas was not forced on Palestinians. Hamas did not militarily conquer Gaza. No, Hamas swept parliamentary elections freely held in the Palestinian territories in 2006 – thrashing its rival, Fatah, which is only marginally less committed to the destruction of Israel.

Hamas did not suddenly become a terrorist organization after it was elected. Hamas was elected because it was a jihadist organization. It was elected because, by its own declaration, Hamas connects Palestinians to something they find attractive: the global Islamic-supremacist movement. Palestinians widely reject Israel’s right to exist. They regard not just Gaza, Judea and Samaria but all of Israel as “occupied Palestine.” Even those Palestinians who purport to accept the “two-state solution” see it as a way-station on the march to a one-state solution in which the Jewish state eventually ceases to be. Palestinians chose Hamas precisely because Hamas was seen as more dedicated than Fatah to the achievement of that goal—not to mention, more brutally competent.

At the time of its election, Hamas was well known to be the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terrorist wing. It has been formally designated as a terrorist organization by the United States since the mid-nineties. Indeed, shortly before Palestinians endorsed Hamas at the ballot box, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted several Hamas operatives in the Holy Land Foundation case, a multi-million dollar terrorism financing conspiracy orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood in which several of the Brotherhood’s American affiliates—CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the North American Islamic Trust, among others—were proved to be complicit in the promotion of Hamas and thus designated as unindicted co-conspirators.

The Wall Street Journal gets close to the heart of the matter in its fine editorial this morning about Hamas’s “civilian death strategy”:

The people of Gaza overwhelmingly elected Hamas, a terrorist outfit dedicated to the destruction of Israel, as their designated representatives. Almost instantly Hamas began stockpiling weapons and using them against a more powerful foe with a solid track record of retaliation.

What did Gazans think was going to happen? Surely they must have understood on election night that their lives would now be suspended in a state of utter chaos. Life expectancy would be miserably low; children would be without a future. Staying alive would be a challenge, if staying alive even mattered anymore.

To make matters worse, Gazans sheltered terrorists and their weapons in their homes, right beside ottoman sofas and dirty diapers. When Israel warned them of impending attacks, the inhabitants defiantly refused to leave.

On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.

It also calls your parenting skills into serious question. In the U.S. if a parent is found to have locked his or her child in a parked car on a summer day with the windows closed, a social worker takes the children away from the demonstrably unfit parent. In Gaza, parents who place their children in the direct line of fire are rewarded with an interview on MSNBC where they can call Israel a genocidal murderer.

I say this “gets close to the heart of the matter” because it pulls up just short. The problem in the Palestinian territories is not Hamas; it is the Palestinians. Hamas is a natural outgrowth of the Islamic supremacist ideology that is dominant among Palestinians. It is not just that the Palestinians chose Hamas with eyes open. It is that the Palestinians are Hamas. That Hamas Charter speaks for Palestinians, particularly in its scripturally-based Jew hatred. “[O]ur struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave,” its Introduction proclaims, “so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.”

That is just a warm-up for Jew-hatred that pervades the Charter’s Article Seven:

Hamas is one of the links in the Chain of Jihad in the confrontation with the Zionist invasion. It links up with the setting out of the Martyr Izz a-din al-Qassam and his brothers in the Muslim Brotherhood who fought the Holy War in 1936; it further relates to another link of the Palestinian Jihad and the Jihad and efforts of the Muslim Brothers during the 1948 War, and to the Jihad operations of the Muslim Brothers in 1968 and thereafter. But even if the links have become distant from each other, and even if the obstacles erected by those who revolve in the Zionist orbit, aiming at obstructing the road before the Jihad fighters, have rendered the pursuance of Jihad impossible; nevertheless, the Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree.

This is what Palestinians voted for. The highlighted section of Article Seven comes straight from Islamic scripture, from the authoritative Bukhari and Muslim collections of hadith (the sayings and doings of the prophet Mohammed). It foretells an eternal struggle until the end of time, when, with Allah’s intercession, the rocks and trees will help Muslim battalions find and kill every remaining Jew.

Tellingly, as I recounted in The Grand Jihad, other than the Hamas charter, the place where you are most likely to find repetition of the doctrinally-based call to jihad against Jews is in the sermons of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He is the chief sharia jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood and, perhaps, the most influential Sunni Islamic-supremacist figure in the world. He is also a staunch champion of Hamas, having issued fatwas that enthusiastically authorize suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. “They are not suicide operations,” he claimed in April 2001. “These are heroic martyrdom operations, and the heroes who carry them out don’t embark on this action out of hopelessness and despair but are driven by an overwhelming desire to cast terror and fear into the hearts of the oppressors.”

But what about the fact that these indiscriminate “martyrdom operations” kill Israeli civilians? Qaradawi rejects the premise – there are, he maintains, no Israeli civilians. “Israeli society is a military society, and every person is either a soldier in the Israeli Army or a reserve soldier,” he told al-Jazeera that same spring – repeating a theme that, for him, is a constant. Israelis, therefore, “must be intimidated, until they return to the countries from which they came.” This, it should be noted, is substantially indistinguishable from al Qaeda’s rationale for mass-murdering American civilians. As Osama bin Laden explained, Americans choose and arm their government and should thus be attacked the same way a jihadist would attack their government.

To its great credit, Israel does not target Palestinian civilians even though, in the Palestinian terrorist jihad, there are few real civilians among a population that chose Hamas as its leader and provides Hamas’s atrocious campaigns with material support and encouragement. Like any competent military fighting a defensive war for its nation’s survival, Israel’s defense forces kill some Palestinian non-combatants collaterally, in the pursuit of necessary and wholly legitimate military objectives. The killings of non-combatants are inflated by the Palestinian practice of using “civilians” as human shields, the better to wage the all-important propaganda part of the jihad that is so effective in swaying Western progressives.

The war will not end unless Israel is allowed to fight until victory is achieved and the Palestinians, with their will having been broken, abandon the jihad and accept peaceful coexistence. As we all know, it is a peaceful coexistence they could have right now if they weren’t hell-bent on killing every Jew. In any event, people who claim a right to kill every enemy civilian, whose savage way of war is to target enemy civilians and deny them civilian status, should not be heard to complain about civilian casualties.

Can Vladimir Putin Survive? By George Friedman.

Can Vladimir Putin Survive? By George Friedman. Real Clear World, July 22, 2014.

Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist. By Danusha V. Goska.

Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist. By Danusha V. Goska. American Thinker, July 20, 2014.

My Generation Needs to be Proactive for Israel. By Laura Elizabeth Adkins.

My Generation Needs to be Proactive for Israel. By Laura Elizabeth Adkins. Legal Insurrection, April 10, 2014.

Does NYU have a Jewish problem? By Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith. New York Daily News, June 1, 2014.

Articles about Lisa Duggan at Legal Insurrection.


Adkins: 

Despite the torrential downpour that unleashed itself over downtown Manhattan Monday evening, nearly 100 students and members of the general public gathered at New York University for an inspiring event that brought together business experts, disruptive artists, media revolutionaries, journalists and jazz musicians.

Innovation Israel, a project spearheaded by TorchPAC at NYU and the Stern Political Economy Exchange (SPEX), proved to be a tremendous opportunity for those in attendance unfamiliar with Israel to experience the incredible spirit and passion of a tiny country in the Middle East, but was also a chance for pro-Israel activists to engage in conversation face-to-face about the challenges facing the pro-Israel community today.

The Innovation Israel showcase was one of the more visible efforts of NYU’s Pro-Israel community this year, but readily visible relationship building and showcasing of Israeli innovation is only one small, small part of the important work being done to defend Israel on US campuses.

Far too often in recent times, extreme voices have made a presence for themselves in the intellectual (or often, pseudo-intellectual) arena; earlier this year, NYU faced strongly anti-semitic activities from NYU professor Lisa Duggan culminating in the form of an Anti-Israel Conference.

Much has been written, most notably by Forbes Contributing Editor of Investigations Richard Behar, that more than adequately elucidates the troubling event and hijacking of the American Studies Association by Duggan and her extreme colleagues in painstaking detail.

Notable Israel detractors Max Blumenthal and Ali Abunimah also spoke at NYU earlier this year, at an event brimming with hatred and rife with factual inaccuracy, including repulsive allusions to the Holocaust.

In his speech, Blumenthal described a place called “Saharonim,” a facility on the border of Israel and Egypt where African refugees seeking refuge in Israel first live, and painted a tale of holocaust-esque roundups and mass starvation. As Josh Voss, NYU Freshman and former IDF soldier who attended the Blumenthal speech recounted:

I’ve seen the facility; my unit prevented smuggling on the the exact border where it is located. I’ve met with Africans who lived there, as they walked into the nearby village Kadesh Barnea to buy groceries, the same grocery store where I used to buy hummus and apples. If Israel was starving them, it was definitely doing a horrible job. No one, especially not the Sudanese and Rwandans that live there will tell you they’re being rounded up and starved to death.

How does one even begin to counter these foul distortions of reality?

Organizations such as CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) do an incredible job of countering bias in the mass media, though this fight is one that unfortunately requires vast resources as well as constant vigilance.

In order to counter the smear campaign against Israel taking place through Duggan at NYU, TorchPAC organized meetings with the NYU administration and authored an open letter to NYU President John Sexton that called for the administration to “begin to take a serious look at… the policies and practices of the ASA.”

Pro-Israel organizations can be generally divided into two camps: those that primarily work towards relationship building and promoting Israel’s modernity as well as strategic importance, and those that primarily work to correct historically and factually inaccurate depictions of Israel in the public narrative. These different arenas are traditionally thought to require very distinct strategies. But what if we were to question the narrative that these aims could not be accomplished concurrently? What if Pro-Israel groups formulated their 5-year plans around making strides in both vital arenas?

Let me be frank: ideas being used in the battle raging on our campuses and across the world concerning the legitimacy of the state of Israel, as well as the outright lies perpetrated by the likes of Duggan and Blumenthal with the express purpose of delegitimizing the state of Israel, are laced with far-too-much emotional venom to be effectively countered with either relationship building or sterile cerebral arguments alone.

Our movement is stuck in the defensive, with no fully coherent strategy; today’s consumer is assailed by misinformation and hard-hitting emotional arguments from the anti-Israel camp in too many arenas for disjointed efforts be adequate.

This generation’s challenges will require a reinvigorated effort in the Jewish community that results in a revamped strategy which many people on either side will be uncomfortable with, but which represents our only hope of defeating anti-Israel sentiment on today’s campuses. If we are to expect people to take Israel seriously, we have to show them that Israel is serious; with such an uneven playing field, we need to step up our game and pull ourselves into the real world, where facts are always considered along with feelings.

A campus charm offensive where we avoid facts will be futile, but as much as it pains me as an intellectual and truth-seeker to say, so too will even the most meticulously executed correction of the anti-Israel movement’s distortions of fact if anything beyond the purely “factify-able” is ignored. In the words of Jackie Retig, NYU Senior and Co-Chair of Campus Relations for TorchPAC:

Torchpac strives to find a balance between political activities, such as meeting with members of Congress to discuss issues pertaining to the U.S.-Israel relationship, with events that reach a broader student body through showcasing Israel’s unique opportunities and innovation. In this way we hope to strengthen our ties with Israel across different communities and through new avenues.

As a Pro-Israel community, we have allowed ourselves to become complacent and self-polarized; many of us choose to treat our Israel either as a doting mother would her child, ignoring the flaws while showcasing every success, or as an aloof professor would treat a sloppy essay, shaking his head as he slashes through inaccuracies with his red pen and adds painstaking commentary, never realizing that his pupil will take one look at the returned assignment and toss it into the trashcan.

This is my generation’s task: not only to redefine the narrative on campus, but to revamp and revitalize our Pro-Israel organization and way of thought. We will only be remembered as a compelling and proactive generation of advocates for Israel if we are able to reunite facts with feelings and execute a strategy which always considers both.

With the Oslo Dream Shattered, Israel Must Do the Creative Thinking. By Shlomo Avineri.

With the Oslo dream shattered, Israel must do the creative thinking. By Shlomo Avineri. Haaretz, July 16, 2014.

“We were incredibly stupid.” Israel Matzav, July 13, 2014. [Translates original Hebrew version of Avineri article with comments]

Avineri: 

The Palestinians do not recognize the Jews’ right to a state, so Israel must take steps on its own to improve the atmosphere.

In the Haaretz magazine for its Israel Conference on Peace, Aluf Benn raises an important question about the reasons for the failed process that began 21 years ago in Oslo. There’s no doubt that those who launched the process truly believed it would lead to a historic compromise between us and the Palestinians.

Oslo’s sponsors saw the conflict as one between two national movements and believed – as did I – that direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO could find a solution to the territorial and strategic issues that were the cornerstones of the dispute. It wasn’t easy to convince Israelis, even those in the Labor Party, that the other side was a national movement – one that admittedly had terrorist facets but was fundamentally entitled, just like the Zionist movement, to exercise national self-determination.

We were wrong.

The Palestinians don’t think this is a conflict between two national movements. From their perspective, this is a conflict between a single national movement – the Palestinian one – and a colonialist, imperialist entity that is destined to vanish from the world. Therefore, the analogy that appears in Palestinian textbooks is Algeria: not the West Bank as Algeria, but all of Israel as Algeria. And the Israelis will disappear one way or another, just as the French settlers in Algeria did.

The Israeli position talks about “two states for two peoples.” But in the Palestinian version, the phrase “two peoples” doesn’t appear; it only talks about “two states.” If anyone thinks this is hairsplitting, let him ask a Palestinian interlocutor for his opinion on the “two states for two peoples” formula. Sooner or later, he’ll get the answer that there is no Jewish people. This is also why the Palestinians rejected the formula proposed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that spoke of an agreement between “two nation-states.”

The truth is that in the Palestinian narrative, the Jews are neither a people nor a nation, but merely a religious community; therefore they aren’t entitled to a state. This is also the reason for the sweeping, uncompromising Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as the Jewish nation-state.

This is the root of the conflict – not borders, not the settlements, not even Jerusalem. And of course, the Palestinian refusal to give up the principle of the “right of return” is tied into this. There are good reasons to criticize the Netanyahu government’s conduct during Kerry’s attempts to revive the talks, but to deny these deeper reasons is intellectual dishonesty.

Zionism in 1948, when it accepted the principle of partition, believed, just as the people behind Oslo did, that the Palestinian national movement was a mirror image of what Zionism thought – that this was a conflict between two national movements. In such a conflict, compromise is possible. But if you view your movement as fighting against a colonialist, imperialist movement, there is no chance of compromise and no moral justification for it.

What can be done? Even in the current difficult atmosphere, it’s necessary to think ahead.

Nothing can be expected from the United States or the Netanyahu government. The Obama administration has failed in every foreign-policy challenge – Crimea and Ukraine, Syria and Iraq, the Iranian nuclear issue, the delusional flirtation with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Obama’s declarations of personal friendship with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is revealing himself more and more as an autocrat. The Netanyahu government is focused solely – and unsuccessfully – on public diplomacy enabling it to continue the status quo, which anyone with eyes in his head understands is disastrous.

This presents an opportunity for the opposition, headed by the Labor Party, to propose an alternative. There’s no reason to keep reiterating the mantra that we must resume peace talks, because even if we do, it’s clear that, just as in the past, they won’t bear fruit.

Without retreating from the principle of “two states for two peoples,” the opposition must propose interim steps right now – not as an alternative to a permanent solution, but as a gradual way to move toward it. The opposition must demand a complete halt to construction in the settlements, the evacuation of illegal outposts, a reexamination – once the current tension has ebbed – of the Israel Defense Forces’ deployment in the West Bank, and the removal of what remains of the Gaza blockade (possibly in coordination with Egypt after the current fighting ends). Finally, it must propose an initiative to reduce Israel’s civilian presence in the West Bank by developing an evacuation-compensation plan.

Most Israeli settlers in the West Bank came there not for ideological, nationalist or religious reasons, but for the economic vistas opened by government subsidies for spacious, comfortable housing. The Israeli left must recognize that for tens of thousands of families, the possibility of moving to subsidized housing in the West Bank, in the absence of meaningful public housing in Israel proper, was a lever for social mobility and a significant improvement in their lives.

Therefore, they must be offered an alternative: Anyone who wishes to return to Israel will receive generous government support. This is likely to create a rift between some settlers and the right-wing government. The idea is also likely to find supporters among those who voted for the centrist Yesh Atid and Hatnuah parties, as well as their representatives in government.

Those of us who supported Oslo – and who still think it was the right step – must recognize that salvation won’t come from the Palestinians. They’re genuinely uninterested in a solution of two states for two peoples because they’re unwilling to grant legitimacy to the Jewish right of self-determination. We can rely only on ourselves – not in the sense of our military power, but of our wisdom, our desire to maintain a Jewish nation-state here, and our ability to realize this desire, even under difficult conditions of deep-seated rejection by the other side.

The Search for a Progressive Reagan. By Chrystia Freeland.

The Search for a Progressive Reagan. By Chrystia Freeland. Politico, July 15, 2014.

There’s Something Very Ugly In This Rage Against Israel. By Brendan O’Neill.

There’s something very ugly in this rage against Israel. By Brendan O’Neill. spiked, July 15, 2014.

Is the Left anti-Semitic? Sadly, it is heading that way. By Brendan O’Neill. The Telegraph, July 27, 2014.

O’Neill [rage against Israel]:

In the virtual world, too, the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has become blurrier during this latest Gaza conflict. When a Danish journalist published a photo of what he claimed to be a group of Israelis in Sderot eating popcorn while watching Israeli missiles rain on Gaza, it became a focal point of fury with Israelis – every newspaper published the pic and Amnesty tweeted about it – and it generated the expression of some foul views. Israelis (not Israel in this case) are “disgraceful”, “murderous, racist”, “inhuman scum”, “pigs”, etc, said angry tweeters. It wasn’t long before actual bona fide anti-Semites were getting in on this rage against Israeli people, with one racist magazine publishing the Sderot picture under the headline “Rat-Faced Israeli Jews Cheer and Applaud Airstrikes on Gaza Strip.” The speed with which what purported to be an anti-war sentiment aimed at Israel became a warped fury with Israeli people, and the ease with which demonstrations against Israeli militarism became slurs against or physical attacks on Jews, suggests there is something extremely unwieldy about fashionable anti-Israel sentiment, something that allows it to slip, sometimes quite thoughtlessly, from being a seemingly typical anti-war cry to being something much uglier, prejudiced and ancient in nature.

Such is the visceral nature of current anti-Israel sentiment that not only is the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism becoming harder to see – so is the line between fact and fiction. As the BBC has reported, the wildly popular hashtag #GazaUnderAttack, which has been used nearly 500,000 times over the past eight days to share shocking photographs of the impact of Israel’s assault on Gaza, is extremely unreliable. Some of the photos being tweeted (and then retweeted by thousands of other people) are actually from Gaza in 2009. Others show dead bodies from conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Yet all are posted with comments such as, “Look at Israel’s inhumanity.” It seems the aim here is not to get to the truth of what is happening in Gaza but simply to rage, to yell, to scream, to weep about what Israel is doing (or not doing, as the case may be), and the more publicly you weep, the better, for it allows people to see how sensitive you are to Israeli barbarism. It’s about unleashing some visceral emotion, which means such petty things as accuracy and facts count for little: the expression of the emotion is all that matters, and any old photo of a dead child from somewhere in the Middle East – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will suffice as a prop for one’s public emotionalism.

How has this happened? How has opposing Israeli militarism gone from being one facet of a broader anti-imperialist position, as it was in the 1980s, to being the main, and sometimes only, focus of those who claim to be anti-war? Why does being opposed to Israel so often and so casually tip over into expressions of disgust with the Israeli people and with the Jews more broadly? It’s because, today, rage with Israel is not actually a considered political position. It is not a thought-through take on a conflict zone in the Middle East and how that conflict zone might relate to realpolitik or global shifts in power. Rather, it has become an outlet for the expression of a general feeling of fury and exhaustion with everything - with Western society, modernity, nationalism, militarism, humanity. Israel has been turned into a conduit for the expression of Western self-loathing, Western colonial guilt, Western self-doubt. It has been elevated into the most explicit expression of what are now considered to be the outdated Western values of militaristic self-preservation and progressive nationhood, and it is railed against and beaten down for embodying those values. It is held responsible, not simply for repressing the Palestinian desire for statehood, but for continuing to pursue virtues that we sensible folk in the rest of the West have apparently outgrown and for consequently being the source of war and terrorism not only in the Middle East but pretty much everywhere. A poll of Europeans discovered that most now consider Israel to be the key source of global instability.

This is where we can see what the new anti-Zionism shares in common with the old anti-Semitism: both are about finding one thing in the world, whether it’s a wicked state or a warped people, against which the rest of us might rage and pin the blame for every political problem on Earth.

The Palestinian Blessing. By Bret Stephens.

The Palestinian Blessing. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2014.

Stephens:

Israel’s enemies deliver an unwitting favor. 


From time to time Israel and her supporters should give thanks for having as enemies the Palestinians and their supporters.

As of midday Monday, Hamas had fired more than 1,000 missiles at Israel, aimed more or less indiscriminately, without inflicting a single Israeli fatality. It isn’t every enemy whose ideological fanaticism, however great, is exceeded by its military and technological incompetence.

It’s true that much of the incoming fire has been shot down mid-flight by Israel’s Iron Dome, but Hamas must have seen that coming since the defense system was first deployed during the last round of fighting in 2012. It’s as if the French had concluded from the Battle of Agincourt that the English long bow wasn’t as effective as advertised and would surely fail against a more determined cavalry charge.

Alongside Hamas in Gaza there is the rump regime of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. Mr. Abbas is supposed to be a bystander in this conflict. But he made his sympathies known when, within a day or two of the fighting and with fewer than 50 Palestinian fatalities, he accused Israel of “genocide” and “war against the Palestinian people as a whole.”

“Shall we recall Auschwitz?” he added.

I sometimes wonder whether supporters of the Palestinian cause—at least those capable of intellectual, if not moral, embarrassment—cringe a little at the rhetorical flourish. Bashar Assad, in whose court Palestinian leaders bowed and scraped for a decade before the current uprising, used chemical weapons against the Palestinian refugee town of Yarmouk a year ago and then starved out the remaining residents. More than a quarter-million Palestinians living in Syria for decades have also been made refugees by Mr. Assad’s assaults.

Yet last month Mr. Abbas congratulated Mr. Assad on his re-election: “Your election to the presidency of the Syrian Arab Republic guarantees Syria’s unity and sovereignty,” the Palestinian president groveled, “and starts a countdown to the end of Syria’s crisis and its war against terrorism.”

This detail, reported by AFP, seems to have escaped mainstream attention, though it remains a useful reminder of just who—and what—Mr. Abbas is.

Similarly with pro-Palestinian demonstrators marching in the civilized nations. In Paris on Sunday, one such group of demonstrators tried to lay siege to a synagogue “with bats and chairs,” according to the Associated Press, trapping 150 Jewish congregants inside until police could rescue them. A day earlier, a firebomb was thrown at a synagogue in a Paris suburb. At yet another French protest there were calls for the “slaughter of the Jews.” In Seattle, a Voices for Palestine rally posted signs reading “Zionist Israel=Nazi Germany.” In Frankfurt, protesters held signs reading “You Jews are Beasts.” Police lent the protesters a loudspeaker, ostensibly to “de-escalate the situation,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

Maybe the Presbyterian Church, USA, which last month voted to divest from companies doing business with Israel, will issue a statement of concern. But don’t count on it.

All of which, as I say, is a blessing for Israel and her supporters.

If you must have a nemesis, better it be a stupid one. If your adversary has an undeserved reputation for moderation and sincerity, better that he should give his own extremism and hypocrisy away. If you are going to be the object of mass protests and calumny, better to be hated by the worst than by the best. Israel’s enemies continuously indict themselves, whether or not the rest of the world has the wit to see it.

What if it were otherwise? It has always been something of a surprise to me that Israel’s enemies and critics have usually been too consumed by their own hatred to spot, or exploit, the Jewish state’s most obvious weakness. This is not the narrowness of its borders, or the fractiousness of its politics, or its vulnerability to atomic attack, or this or that ticking demographic bomb, whether of the Palestinian, Israeli-Arab or ultra-Orthodox variety.

The real weakness is a certain kind of vanity that confuses stainlessness with virtue, favors moral self-regard over normal self-interest, and believes in politics as an exercise not in power but in self-examination. People, and nations, with such attitudes cannot be beaten militarily. But they can easily—too easily—be shamed. Witness the outpouring of national self-reproach following this month’s murder of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish assailants. The killing was appalling, but it took Hamas’s missiles to prevent it from turning into an excruciating morality play.

It may someday be that Palestinians will wise up; that the next intifada, should it come, will be Gandhian in its methods and philosophy; that the next Palestinian leader will be in the mold of Vaclav Havel, not Fidel Castro. In the face of that kind of movement, Israeli resistance to a Palestinian state would crumble.

But that’s not the direction in which Palestine is going. Every Hamas missile and every barbaric protest is a reminder that the supreme purpose of Israel is to defend its people, not flatter them.

Islamist Jew-Haters and Their Leftist Enablers: “The Jews are Beasts.” By William A. Jacobson.

Islamist Jew-haters and their leftist enablers: “The Jews are Beasts.” By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, July 15, 2014.

Shocking anti-Semitic hatefest in downtown Seattle. By Michael Behar. The Mike Report, July 13, 2014. 

Anti-Semites Hold Hateful Demonstration in Seattle; Pro-Israel Rallies Disrupted in Los Angeles, Boston. The Algemeiner, July 14, 2014. 

A demonstration for Palestine in Seattle. Video. nader ali kaifa, July 12, 2014. YouTube. 




BDS and the Future of Israel-Palestine, 6/20/14 Seattle. Video. Todd Boyle, June 24, 2014. YouTube.

Rana Baker Justifies Palestinian Terrorism as Mere “Anti-Colonialist Counter-Discourse.” By the Elder of Ziyon.

Arab writer justifies Palestinian terrorism as mere “anti-colonialist counter-discourse.” Elder of Ziyon, July 14, 2014.

Rejecting victimhood: The case for Palestinian resistance. By Rana Baker. Open Democracy, July 14, 2014.

Finding my way to Palestine through narrative. By Rana Baker. The Electronic Intifada, August 15, 2013.

Supporting Terrorism and Bigotry at the Electronic Intifada: Anti-Israel Activists Thrilled by Abduction of Israeli Teens. By Petra Marquardt-Bigman. The Algemeiner, June 15, 2014. 


The Elder: 

Sometimes, pseudo-intellectual haters of Israel use their pretentiousness to justify the most heinous crimes. 

Introducing Rana Baker.

Baker writes regularly for Electronic Intifada, and she has also written for The Guardian. When the three Israeli teens were abducted, she gloated.

This article by Baker is in Open Democracy:

I wonder whether, when the settler-colonial army of Israel is pounding Gaza, Palestinians should grab guitars, pianos, and white ribbons, look up at their oppressors flying over their heads in apaches and F16s, and sing a lullaby of peace. Perhaps, then, we can impress Middle East “experts” and “non-violent resistance” – mind you, I am using the V word – butterflies. I wonder, moreover, what authority, defined by what experience, entitles these experts and butterflies to ask us, the Palestinians, to put down our arms. Nonsense.

. . . Resistance rockets fired from the Gaza Strip provide a necessary counter-discourse. The Israeli Jewish public must understand that there shall be no security so long as they do not turn their anger and frustration at their very supremacist privilege and ideological system which is embodied in the Israeli government, left-wing, centrist, or right-wing. No one is asking them to leave, but they must accept Palestinian resistance insofar as they accept the arrogance which characterises the Zionist ideology. The radical potential of Palestinian rockets, of sirens going off, lies in these rockets’ ability to disrupt a system of privilege which Israeli Jews enjoy at the expense of colonised and displaced Palestinians. Rockets, in other words, are a radical declaration of existence and unmediated expression of self-determination.

 . . . Israel was born in May 1948 after a mass wave of ethnic cleansing which led to the expulsion of more than half the native Palestinian population. This is the aggression to which every Palestinian rocket, demonstration, and burned tire, is a response. Until Palestine is liberated, and by Palestine I mean historical Palestine, Palestinian resistance cannot be expected to wane. To be clear, Palestinians fire rockets into what belongs to them in the first place.

There is a lot more nonsense in the article, but this is enough to demonstrate the lengths some people will go to in order to justify the rabid antisemitism that the Arab world has towards Jews – which is the real root cause of the conflict.

To perverts like Baker, terrorism is moral, and the only self-determination that means anything is that of a newly-minted people whose existence is impossible to find in any literature that is over a century old. Jews, of course, aren’t a people at all.

Baker’s invocation of “historic Palestine,” whose borders were drawn by her hated colonial powers, proves as well as anything that she is not really interested in justice or self-determination – she’s interested in only the land that happens to be controlled by Jews. The complete silence of these supposed ideologues regarding any part of Transjordan is all the proof you need that their agenda isn't as pure as they pretend.

But this essay is more than just about Baker's hypocrisy.

Rana Baker is creating and pushing her own, new model of morality, where Palestinians - and only Palestinians – do not have to adhere to any laws, ethics or standards. 

Once you justify terror rockets in whatever bizarre and disgusting worldview you have, you justify everything. Arabs can rape Israeli Jewish women for the cause. Gazans can strap bombs to newborn babies and throw them over the fence. Hamas is allowed to place Arab women and children in mortal danger in the hope that Israel will be blamed. (Oh, right, they already do that.)

This is the perverted moral universe that Rana Baker is advocating.

Not surprisingly, it is the exact same moral universe that Hamas and Islamic Jihad operate in. Just they use the Koran to come up with their justification, and Baker uses a twisted concept of liberal values like “self-determination” and “anti-colonialism.” It doesn’t matter – because the justification isn’t important, only the results are. And both Baker and Hamas want a lot of dead Jews.

If Jews who believe that the land belongs to them would adopt Baker’s mindset, then flattening Gaza is not only allowed, but morally necessary. Israel’s morals interfere with Baker’s morals? Well, too bad, she made the rules. Now that anyone can do anything they want if they consider themselves oppressed, we can dispense with such irritating constructs as international law or the laws of armed conflict or The Golden Rule. Baker justifies living in a post-moral world.

Not that she would admit that. She believes that her cause is unique and only Palestinians can act in any manner they choose in order to take away Jewish human rights. She is advocating a form of Palestinian supremacy, where the rules that apply to the rest of the world do not apply to Palestinians, and anything goes.

If a Zionist Jew would write essays using the exact same language justifying terror against Palestinian Arab civilians as a necessary part of their right to self-determination, he or she would (rightly) be called racists, while Baker’s paean to the beauty of terrorism is considered merely “anti-colonialist.” You see, after decades of Palestinians believing that they do have a unique set of rules that apply only to them, many in the world actually start to believe it.

Isn’t that interesting?

Consistency in rhetoric isn’t important to Baker and her ilk, except for in a single, narrow dimension. The only moral or rhetorical consistency for people like Baker is that, to them, the existence of Jews maintaining anything other than their natural status of dhimmis is unnatural and must be fought, with whatever means is necessary: rockets, suicide bombs, nuclear weapons, or tendentious essays that give the Jew-haters a means to justify their sickening immorality. As one cheerleading commenter writes:

Rana, I wonder if you realise what brilliant piece you just penned down. As Arundhati Roy wrote “Gandhi get your gun” in Walking With The Comrades I say keep those rockets from Gaza coming and let the siren echo in every stolen corner, square, street, park and home.

Baker provides the veneer of intellectualism to justify terror for those who are still uncomfortable with the concept. The murderous rampages in Paris and Frankfurt are a natural result of the sickening supremacism of Rana Baker – because if proudly targeting civilians is a moral obligation, then so is attacking Jews wherever they might be.

What is scary is that so many so-called “progressives” would never think about calling Baker what she is: a disgusting cheerleader for murder.

(h/t Geuzen1)

UPDATE: I forgot that I fisked her before.

UPDATE 2: Best comment on the thread at Open Democracy from Podein: (h/t Alexi)

If rockets are the way Palestinians engage in discourse, then Apaches, gunships and assassinations are simply the way Israelis correct their grammar.

The One-State Solution Is Almost Here. By David P. Goldman.

Between the Settlers and the Unsettlers, the One-State Solution Is on Our Doorstep. By David P. Goldman. Tablet, July 14, 2014.

Netanyahu finally speaks his mind. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, July 13, 2014. 

Netanyahu: Gaza conflict proves Israel can’t relinquish control of West Bank. The Times of Israel, July 11, 2014.

Does Obama Want 20 More Gazas? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 11, 2014.

Our EuroPresident. By Matthew Continetti.

Our EuroPresident. By Matthew Continetti. National Review Online, July 12, 2014.

Is Obama’s Foreign Policy Too European? By Clemens Wergin. New York Times, July 8, 2014.