Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Israel-haters create Overland Park meme: Jews aren't really targets (update)

Earlier I posted about the horrific shootings aimed at Jews in Overland Park, and I noted that while obvious antisemitic acts are not an every day occurrence in the US, they are far more prevalent than "Islamophobic" attacks - yet from the media one would get the impression that Muslims are victims far more than Jews in the US of bigotry.

There is a certain strain of Israel haters, though, who cannot stomach the idea that traditional antisemitism exists today. Their logic is that since Israel is meant to be a haven from antisemitism, and they don't want to give Israel any excuse for existing, they must downplay and trivialize any overt murders of Jews.

Immediately after I tweeted my post, Mira Bar Hillel - who I have proven to be about as dishonest a critic of Israel as can be - tweeted back that the issue isn't Jews, but guns:

@elderofziyon EVERYBODY is being shot and killed in the US while the media is NOT talking about gun control. #NRA
— Mira Bar-Hillel (@mirabarhillel) April 13, 2014

Max Blumenthal made a similar point, minimizing the murder of three people who were killed because they were assumed to be Jews and comparing it to another shooting spree in Kansas City:

Leading up to #OverlandPark, 13 drivers were randomly shot in the past month in Kansas City: http://t.co/6A3Ej24kcJ #TheKillingOfAmerica
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 13, 2014

Max's tweet is most interesting when you recall some tweets he has made previously.

Even though there have been consistently far more antisemitic attacks than attacks on any other religious group in America, Blumenthal wrote in 2012:

Without any evidence or data, Napolitano claims Jewish orgs face "special risks," justifying whopping DHS grants http://t.co/3wr5VXxu
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 7, 2012

@kampeas 3/4 of DHS grants went to Jewish groups. It's clear what's going on here. Btw Toulouse is in France.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 7, 2012

Blumenthal, supposed defender of victims worldwide, cannot allow Jews to be considered victims, ever - because that would undermine his thesis that Israel has no moral reason to exist. So facts must be disregarded and belittled. Indeed, he instead implies that Jewish power is what is causing the DHS to give some $10 million a year to Jewish institutions for security.

Yes, he is leaning on an antisemitic stereotype to downplay the existence of antisemitism!

Overland Park (not to mention the other examples I gave of Seattle, DC, Manhattan, the Bronx, Los Angeles..) shows that Jews really are a disproportionate target of hate in America. The US is nowhere near the point that France or Sweden or other countries are, of course, and most Jews are quite safe even as those DHS grants that Blumenthal decries are going towards placing concrete planters and video surveillance systems in larger synagogues and Jewish schools nationwide. (Synagogues and Jewish schools in Europe are fortresses; America's are nowhere near that yet.)

Obviously Blumenthal and Bar Hillel and their disgusting ilk cannot accept the idea that Jews are the juiciest targets for America's bigots, both right and left wing.. Their viewpoints and thought processes are completely skewed by their own hate - something they have in common with the people who plot to kill Jews.

(h/t Joshua U)

UPDATE: I didn't know this when I wrote the last sentence: The killer, now identified as Glenn Miller Jr., has quoted Blumenthal when giving his antisemitic rants on white supremacist sites! (Here's his personal site.)

UPDATE 2: The known victims as of this writing were not Jewish, updated post to reflect that.

"Talk Yiddish to Me" (video spoof)

Yeah, it's funny:

As was once discussed in the comments, the song (NSFW) this is parodying samples a song from Balkan Beat Box - an Israeli band. So the saxophone break goes full circle.

(h/t Yerushalimey)

Jews are being shot and killed in the US while the media talks about "Islamophobia"

At least 3 people have been killed in two separate Jewish centers in Overland Park, Kansas - at a children's theatre performance and at a senior center:

The suspect, according to reports

Three people are dead after shootings at Jewish-related locations in the Kansas City area. Authorities confirm that a suspect is in custody.

One of the dead was killed in the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City.

Authorities also confirmed that a one person was undergoing surgery at Overland Park Regional Medical Center. It wasn't immediately clear whether that one person died in surgery and was one of the three dead or was a fourth person shot.

A suspect was arrested at the Valley View Park Elementary School, which is a mile away from Village Shalom. KCTV5's Bonyen Lee says the suspect appeared to yell "Heil Hitler" as he was being led away in handcuffs by Overland Park police.

One shooting was reported about 1 p.m. Sunday at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, according to an Overland Park Fire Department spokesman. This happened at the Lewis and Shirley White Theatre inside the center.

About 75 people were inside the theatre, most of them children.

Teens were auditioning for KC Superstar and parents were frantically trying to get to their children.

A second shooting was reported at Village Shalom, which is an assisted living center at 5500 West 123rd St.

Recently we have been seeing stories that antisemitic incidents have gone down in the US this past year, although the number of violent acts has gone up.

But there have been a number of fatal shootings at Jewish sites in recent years.

Besides today's, there was a shooting at the US Holocaust Museum in 2009, killing a guard.

A shooting by a Muslim at the Seattle Jewish federation building in 2006 killed one woman and injured five others.

In 2002, a man at the El Al counter in Los Angeles Airport killed two people and injured four others before being killed.

There were also a number of foiled bomb plots against synagogues and Jewish centers in the US - 2005 in Los Angeles, 2009 in the Bronx, and 2011 in Manhattan.

In general, the US is a great place for Jews to live. Jews have little to fear in most of their communities. It is not at all like many places in Europe or in the Arab world.

But antisemitism exists, both from the right and the left, and it regularly manifests itself with extreme violence.

Yet when was the last time antisemitism merited a front page story in a major newspaper or magazine?

Time Magazine in 2010 had a cover story on Islamophobia. As I noted then, the number of antisemitic incidents in the US in 2010 dwarfed the number of anti-Muslim incidents.

Unless I am mistaken, there has not been a single Muslim fatality due to an anti-Muslim hate crime in the US since 9/11. (One Sikh was killed in an anti-Muslim attack and two other Sikhs were killed since 9/11 under unclear circumstances, plus a horrific murder of six Sikhs who were killed by a white supremacist.) .)

There is real hate out there in the US, and real people willing to kill people in service of that hate. And the objects of that deadly hate are not Muslims.

Outside of occasional stories like these, you wouldn't know that.

(UPDATE: the information about Sikhs being attacked, h/t Dave Sigeti)

Acknowledging the Obvious: Presbyterian Aggression (Michael Lumish)

Michael Lumish, of the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular blogger at Times of Israel, will be writing a weekly column here at EoZ.

Most Americans, particularly those of us with liberal inclinations, think of Arab peoples as persecuted minorities who are struggling, to this day, to free themselves from the ongoing social and economic implications of western imperial and colonial aggression in the Middle East. For centuries white-Anglo westerners dominated that part of the world and, therefore, progressives who care about universal human rights are not surprised at the Arab push-back, including the Palestinian-Arab push-back against Israel.

Certainly those of us who marched against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan largely perceived the peoples of those countries as innocent victims of western and American hostility. We understood that those wars were racist wars that needlessly slaughtered innocent Arabs in number of lives going to at least the hundreds of thousands, if not considerably more.

What we tend not to appreciate in the United States is that the great Arab-Muslim nation was one of the foremost imperial endeavors within recorded human history. The Arab peoples are not merely pawns batted around by powerful, racist, white westerners, but peoples with long and proud histories that cannot be reduced to a demeaning history of victimhood.

In a recent piece for Arutz Sheva we are reminded of this by the San Francisco-based non-profit organization, JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East annd North Africa, which describes itself as "dedicated to educating and advocating on behalf of 850,000 Jewish refugees displaced in the 20th century, after the establishment of the State of Israel, from the Middle East and North Africa."

As people who follow the ongoing Arab aggression against the Jews in the Middle East know, the Presbyterian Church (USA) recently published a booklet entitled "Zionism Unsettled" in which the American branch of that denomination condemns Israel and Zionism for the deterioration of relations between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.

As the JIMENA author of the piece writes:

"But instead of recognizing the reality of rampant, deep-seated anti-Semitism in the Middle East & North Africa, "Zionism Unsettled" places blame on the State of Israel and presents a revisionist history of the Mizrahi refugee experience. Among many unfounded claims, the blooklet states that Mizrahis "share a history of largely harmonious integration and acculturation in their host countries. Sadly, this model of coexistence was destabilized by the regional penetration of Zionism beginning in the late 19th century."

It staggers the imagination to realize the degree of hatred, ignorance and moral stupidity required of the Presbyterian Church for them to publish such toxic rubbish under their official seal. Whatever their reasonings or excuses or justifications or apologetics, this little "booklet" is nothing less than a true kick in the head to the Jewish people.

First, let it be understood that the Jews of the Middle East outside of Israel do not, and did not, live in "host countries." That land is land that Jews have been living upon for thousands of years before the birth of Muhammad and the rise of imperial Islam. That land was conquered and controlled by the armies of Islam following the death of the founder of the faith in the 7th century - long after the Jewish presence - and the non-Islamic population were pressed into submission under the terms of dhimmitude as laid out in the seventh-century Pact of Omar.

There was, furthermore, never "largely harmonious integration" among Jews under Arab-Muslim domination. In some times and places the conditions of dhimmitude and submission represented lighter and more benevolent systems of oppression and in some times and places those systems of oppression were much worse. However, to describe the circumstances of dhimmitude throughout the history of the Jews under Arab-Muslim rule as "harmonious integration" would be something akin to describing the plight of black people living under Jim Crow in the American South as "harmonious integration."

In other words, the very notion of it is total nonsense.

JIMENA writes:

In his "Open letter to the Presbyterian Church USA from an Iraqi Jew", Joseph Samuels describes the ongoing brutality which culminated in the Farhud, a Nazi-incited riot in 1941 that claimed the lives of 180 Jews, destroyed Baghdad's Jewish quarter, and forced the couuntry's Jewish population to live in absolute fear.

"The cause of the Farhud wasn't Zionism...[it was] purely an anti-Jewish act. At 14, I was chased by two Muslim youths with a knife for stopping them from molesting my neighbor's teenage daughter in broad daylight. At 18, after graduation from Al A'Adadiah High School, I was refused an exist visa to leave Iraq to study in American because I was Jewish. My story is not unique. I am one of 150,000 Iraqi Jews who was discriminated against, oppressed, and forced to escape religious persecution because of my faith." The fear of impending violence dictated and suppressed Iraqi Jewish life.

So much for "largely harmonious integration."

It's doubtful that most westerners are familiar with the Farhud and most are probably unfamiliar with the fact that the Arabs, including the Palestinian-Arabs, generally allied themselves with the Nazis during World War II. The genocidal riots in Baghdad in early June of 1941 were because of pure genocidal racism and had nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the movement for Jewish national liberation.

In The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust, by Edwin Black, we read this:

Baghdad was a burning madhouse. It burned not just with ethnic hatred but with cries to murder and destroy the Jewish community who had lived peacably in the country for 2,600 years, since a millenium before the advent of Islam. The rampage would be forever seared uponn the collective Iraqi Jewish consciousness as the Farhud. In Arabized Kurdish, farhud means something beyond mere chaos, something more than a riot. Perhaps farhud is best translated as "violent dispossession." Some translate it as "mass rape and killing."

But the events of June 1 and 2, 1941, were not just the sudden frenzied carnage of local Arab hooligans against their neighbors. This was a well-planned Holocaust-era pogrom, organized by Arab Nazis in sympathy with, and under the direction of the Third Reich's surrogates in Iraq, the Arab and Islamic world, as the ignition switch for an international Arab-Nazi alliance. This alliance, embraced by many ordinary Arabs, was led by Hajj Muhammmad Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti was acknowledged by Hitler himself as Berlin's most important leader in the Arab nation.

(Black, Edwin, The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust, Dialog Press, pg. 4, 2010.)

Finally, Zionism did not "penetrate" anything at the end of the nineteenth-century since it had been around in that part of the world since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD. All "Zionism" means is the longing of the Jewish people to reestablish our home on the land that we come from and that longing has been part of the Jewish soul for thousands of years, now. This is so in part because, like all peoples, the Jewish people wish to have sovereignty on the primary land of their history, and because of the remarkable mistreatment of Jewish refugees by majority populations throughout the diaspora over the course of millennia, whether in the Middle East or in Europe.

Shortly we are going to again celebrate Passover which, along with Thanksgiving, is one of my favorite holidays. We will celebrate the freedom of the Jewish people from oppression and submission.

At the very end we will raise our glasses and cry out, "Next year in Jerusalem!"

For two thousand years the Jews have yearned to restore our country and now we finally have.

I may like to return to Jerusalem next year, but for something approaching half the world's Jews they do not have to wait until next year because they are home now.

They are home and they are going to continue to build their home and create lives for themselves and their children in their home.

Our home.

The restitution of the Jewish people upon traditional Jewish land is now an historical fact and if the Presbyterian Church (USA) does not like it, well, we all know what they can go do... pound sand.

04/13 Links: The racism of the Israel-bashers; Europe’s chutzpah; Quit Kerrying On

From Ian:

The racism of the Israel-bashers

We who have visited Israel know the truth first hand. The country isn’t perfect (whose is?), but it strives for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. Israel is the Middle East’s lone functioning democracy and by leaps and bounds the region’s leader in respecting human and civil rights.
Israel welcomes Arabs as citizens contributing to its democracy and legislative process, its military institutions,and universities, sitting in its parliament and in high judicial posts. It’s also the only nation in history to bring tens of thousands of Africans (Ethiopian Jews) out of Africa to be citizens, not slaves.
Valdary’s writings eloquently make the substantive argument for Israel. The comments by Silverstein and his allies show that there is still hate, racism and ignorance in this country that must be confronted.
So while Chloé Simone Valdary continues to fight for Israel, let all good people denounce Silverstein’s racism and stand with her. This is doubly true for liberal Americans, who have so long stood for rooting out hatred, discrimination and bigotry. They should make clear that they believe in these things just as strongly when it comes to the subject of Israel.
Anthony Hardy Williams is the Democratic whip in the Pennsylvania state Senate. His father, Hardy Williams, worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and broke the color barrier at Penn State.

Europe’s chutzpah can’t hide decline

"European Union officials alleged on Friday that Israel demolished EU-funded housing shelters outside of Ma’aleh Adumim earlier in the week, AFP reported.
EU officials demanded financial compensation from Israel to Brussels in response to the demolition of three of the structures, Belgian news service EurActiv reported."
The thought processes of the “EU officials” are remarkable. They finance illegal construction, and then expect to be compensated for their losses when the authorities intervene. If I pay someone to steal a car for me and he is arrested, can I sue the police to get my money back? Probably I would get arrested too! What should happen here is that the EU should pay any relevant fines plus the cost of demolishing the illegal structures.
But there is more. The EU gives large amounts of money to the Palestinian authority, much of which is used to pay the salaries of jailed terrorists — in other words, to reward them for every manner of crime, including murder. How about the EU paying Israel compensation for the actions of its, well, employees?

People with autism help IDF intelligence gathering

From the IDF:

Special intelligence Unit 9900 is dedicated to everything related to geography, including mapping, interpretation of aerial and satellite photographs and space research. Within this unit there is a small unit of highly qualified soldiers, who have remarkable visual and analytic capabilities. They can detect even the smallest details, undetectable to most people.

The uniqueness of this elite group of intelligence soldiers in Unit 9900 lies in the fact that they are all diagnosed on the autism spectrum. We interviewed Col. J, the commander of Unit 9900, in order to learn more about this inspiring group of soldiers.

Their job is to take visual materials from satellite images and sensors that are in the air. With the help of their officers and decoding tools, they analyze the images and find specific things they need in order to allow those who are planning a mission to get the best data of the area.

Mr. V and Ms. S, veterans of the IDF and the Intelligence organizations, introduced an idea – to utilize the special strengths of people on the autistic spectrum for the needs of the IDF and Israeli intelligence.

They contacted Unit 9900, who showed great interest in the idea and decided to be a partner for the first trial – interpretation of aerial and satellite photographs.

They then Contacted the Ono Academic College – a private academic institution and registered NGO, which also has a school for health professions. Ono Academic College has a vision of “Changing the face of Israeli society,” and therefore its management decided to Join the initiative, and together they set up the RR Program – (Roim Rachok – which in Hebrew means looking far beyond the horizons).

The aim of the RR Plan is to teach people on the autistic spectrum professions that utilize their special abilities, thus creating a Win-Win effect. The courses take place in the Ono Academic College. After the students finish the 3 month course, they join the army, where the RR program is still involved in guidance and assistance of the soldiers and their commanders.

Today, when everyone can see the success of the first trial course graduates, the RR plan is developing two more courses that utilize other strengths of the autistic spectrum. One course is for software quality assurance (QA) and the other is for information management. Both courses are developed in cooperation with Intelligence Units of the IDF, which will eventually be the home units for the course graduates.

It is important to remember that people on the autism spectrum have strengths in music, mathematics, as well as the visual field. These autistic soldiers of Unit 9900 play a major role in intelligence gathering–a role not easily filled due to the difficulty of the task that this unit. The IDF believes in the ability of these autistic soldiers and will continue to work for their advancement in military and civilian life.

They have excellent relations with the soldiers of the unit – from time to time, out of the building where they work I see them sitting with others in the unit, having lunch or just having a cup of coffee. No one forces them to do so. It is very natural, and I think that says it all.

Khamenei's Twitter: Iranian nuclear development will never slow down

From Ayatollah Khamenei's Twitter feed:

I couldn't have done a better job myself.

The next day the Iranian regime realized that this didn't look good for them, so they sent out a clarifying poster:

Yes, J-Street has a Haggadah insert as well

Here's part of J-Street's Haggadah insert for this year:

Here's part of what it says (not pictured):

Though the spiritual connection of the Jewish people to the historical land of Israel, the future of the State of Israel depends on our ability to separate from a part of it. Freedom for the State of Israel will come only by breaking from a piece of itself.

As we break this matzoh tonight we do so with the recognition that sometimes we must encounter brokenness if we are to become free. We break this matzoh in the hope that it breaks us free from the
bondage of violence, from the bondage of hatred, from the bondage of occupation.

So I decided to make a more accurate J-Street insert (click to enlarge):

(h/t Daniel Mael)

04/12 Links: Mark Steyn: The Wretched Jelly-Spined Nothing Eunuchs of Brandeis; The J Street Challenge

From Ian:

Mark Steyn: The Wretched Jelly-Spined Nothing Eunuchs of Brandeis

Jamie Weinstein: And people when they get honorary degrees, it's not like they only go to non-political people. Universities have awarded them in the recent past to people that want Israel to be wiped off the map and destroyed. Is that not right?
Mark Steyn: Yeah, that's true. And that was Brandeis, a guy called Tony Kushner... I stand back and occasionally roll my eyes at the dreary left-wing hacks invited to give commencement speeches, garlanded with state honors, things that if you trend to the right side of the spectrum, you know you're going to be labeled 'controversial conservative', and you'll never get anywhere near. But this woman is a black, feminist atheist from Somalia. And so what we're learning here, which is fascinating, in the hierarchy of progressive-politics identity-group victimhood, Islam trumps everything. Islam trumps gender. The fact that she's a woman doesn't matter. It trumps race. The fact that she's black doesn't matter. It trumps secularism. The fact that she's an atheist doesn't matter. They wouldn't do this if it was a Christian group complaining about her, if it was a Jewish group complaining about her. But when the Islamic lobby group says oh, no, we're not putting up with this, as I said, these jelly-spined nothings at Brandeis just roll over for them.

The J Street Challenge

What should happen then, if the conflict turns out to be absolutely insoluble? Let’s say even J Street, which defended every single “no” given by Palestinian leaders since 2000, comes to the conclusion that establishing a Palestinian State will not end the conflict, and the true dilemma will be between an existential conflict and giving up the only Jewish State in the world? What will J Street choose?
One of the intervewees, a young and enthusiastic J Street activist, has a simple answer to this difficult question: “I just have to believe that peace is possible.” But Daniel Levy takes this bull by the horns: “If we’re wrong, and if a collective Jewish presence in the Middle East can only survive because of the sword, if we can’t get recognition, and if they hate us not because of what we do but because of who we are, then if so, then apparently Israel isn’t a good idea.”
In other words, if it does turn out even to J Street that the very existence of a Jewish national state requires an unending struggle, than the whole thing isn’t worth it. If Zionism can’t match up with the values that Ben-Ami and Levy define as “Jewish”, then there must be a problem with Zionism itself. This is why Ben-Ami often quotes Peter Beinart: “We can’t teach our children to give up Jewish values for Zionism.”
Both Jeremy Ben-Ami and Daniel Levy left Israel after they failed to impose an “eternal peace” on the Middle East. They figure that if you’re going to experiment with human lives, better to do it in the safe comfort Washington or London, and not near the cafes and buses that might at any moment demonstrate the difference between utopia and reality. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Why Have American Taxpayers Supported Hamas Trainers?

Why would Hamas see nonviolence as a useful tool?
Simple.
It’s not just acts of terror that makes groups like Hamas effective, but the story they tell to justify and frame this violence. And Awad’s Holy Land Trust, has given Hamas and other militant groups expertise in framing their acts of terror for Western audiences.
As I have written elsewhere, “Awad’s group, the Holy Land Trust, has taught Hamas and other militant groups that seek Israel’s destruction how to speak the language of peace activists in the West and appeal to the conscience of human rights activists in the U.S. and Europe.”
In addition to being irresponsible, it may also be illegal. Federal law prohibits providing terrorist organizations with material support, which according to the statute includes “training” and “expert advice.” That seems to describe what HLT has, by Awad’s admission, provided to Hamas and other militant groups.

Activists Want Israeli Justice Minister Banned from Britain

Livni is due to speak in London on May 15 at two events organised by the Jewish National Fund.
Anti-Israel activists claim her visit is "an outrageous racist provocation and an incitement to hatred".
May 15 is observed as Nakba (Catastrophe) Day in anti-Israel circles, as it is the anniversary of the failure by invading Arab armies to annihilate the newly declared state of Israel in 1948.

Brandeis using J StreetU to repair relations with Al Quds U

I had to check the calendar, but no, Purim was a month ago and we are past April Fools as well.

From Free Beacon:

Two student leaders of J Street who recently came under fire for heckling an Israeli soldier have been selected by Brandeis University to help repair the school’s relationship with the Palestinian Al Quds University, which has hosted several anti-Israel terror rallies on its campus.

Brandeis was forced to sever its long-term partnership with Al Quds after it hosted a military rally last year that featured masked men performing the traditional Nazi salute. A second Hamas rally was held in late March.

Two leaders of J Street’s campus group, J Street U, were recently given a $10,000 grant to travel to Al Quds and spearhead a “student dialogue initiative” aimed at repairing relations between the two universities.

The students—Eli Philip and Catriona Stewart—serve as the copresidents of Brandeis’s J Street U group. They most recently drew headlines for heckling a former IDF soldier who was speaking on campus.

The Al Quds dialogue initiative comes at a critical time for Brandeis, which is facing a fierce backlash for rescinding an honorary degree from the Islamic human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The J Street leaders were awarded the $10,000 as part of Brandeis’s Davis Projects for Peace program, which encourages students to “design grassroots projects for peace.”

...Al Quds students associated with Islamic Jihad’s campus faction donning black military gear and mock automatic weapons. They then marched across the school’s campus flashing the traditional Nazi salute.

J Street leaders Philip and Stewart say that the Nazi rally inspired them to pursue the new partnership, which will allow a delegation of Brandeis students to spend a week at Al Quds.

...The students claim that Brandeis’s decision to cut ties with Al Quds “lacked appreciation for [former Al Quds University head Sari] Nusseibeh’s desire to uphold the values of free speech and respect, as well as for the realities of life in the West Bank.”

J Street U sparked a row on Brandeis’s campus late last year, when Philip and others were reported to have been “disruptive and rude” during a speech by former IDF spokesman Barak Raz.

“Philip and his [J Street U] colleagues were so disruptive during Raz’s talk that there were calls for him to resign his student leadership position for having embarrassed the Brandeis community,” the Jewish Press reported at the time.

Raz later responded to the incident by stating that Philip “walked in [to the event], over an hour late, and aside from the disruptive chatter, missed the points that were made.”

“The behavior you displayed was quite sub-par,” Raz wrote, adding that “should you desire to continue this conversation, it’s probably best done in a way that reflects a little more integrity. I’m surprised that while you came to learn and listen, you refused to do that.”

Here's part of the grant proposal.

Brandeis seems to be teaching the philosophy that the worse people act, the more important it is to reward them.

(h/t Daniel Mael)

04/11 Links Pt2: ScarJo Tells the Truth About Anti-Semitism; Code Pink Funded by CAT Shares

From Ian:

ScarJo Tells the Truth About Anti-Semitism

In an interview with the Guardian, she refused to accept the premise that settlements were illegal and defended the factory as a model of coexistence. That has brought down on her the contempt of anti-Israel ideologues and left open the question as to whether the career of the woman who was twice named the “sexiest woman in the world” by Esquire would suffer in an industry dominated by the left and more dependent than ever on revenue from international markets.
Reportedly in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine to be published in May, the actress doesn’t shy away from getting to the heart of this matter. As YNet reports:

American Jewish actress Scarlett Johansson believes anti-Semitism is to blame for much of the fire she drew earlier this year over her endorsement of Israeli company SodaStream, which operates a factory in the West Bank.
“There’s a lot of anti-Semitism out there,” Johansson told Vanity Fair, in an interview for the cover of their May edition.
A member of the Hollywood elite has never spoken truer words. While this will undoubtedly cause even more criticism of the actress, by raising the question of anti-Semitism, Johansson has cut straight to the heart of the problem with the movement that seeks to boycott Israel.

Multi Millionaire BDS'er Medea Benjamin is a shareholder of Caterpillar

The anti-Israel movement is built upon a fragile foundation of lies, omissions and hypocrisy. Shake it just a bit, it comes crumbling down. Wait for the dust to clear- you’ll be surprised at what’s revealed.
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of Global Exchange. Wearing her Code Pink hat, she was front and center at the occupy movement, bemoaning the influence of the 1%. Yet both her and her colleague Jodie Evans are 1 percenters, who toy with their activists like true puppetmasters.
In spite of her populist rhetoric, Medea Benjamin controls the assets of a foundation worth 12 million dollars.
What does the Benjamin Foundation spend its funds on? Just what you’d expect. Extremist groups like Code Pink and JVP. Agitprop sites like Mondoweiss and Democracy now. Thats not a surprise. However, this might be.
Where does Medea Benjamin invest her money? In classic "Do as I say, not as i do" mode Medea's money is working hard for her in Intel, General Electric, and wait for it...Caterpillar. All objects du rage for the BDS cru. Apparently divestment does not begin at home.

Caroline Glick: A moving, just discovered speech by the immortal Ben Hecht, Jewish warrior

I just read an amazing speech Ben Hecht gave in 1948 at a fundraiser for the Etzel or Irgun, Menachem Begin’s Zionist army in the pre-state years that played a decisive role in forcing the British to finally leave the land of Israel.
The entire text, and the backstory are published in The Jewish Review of Books.
Here’s an excerpt, but the entire address is moving and informative. I urge you to read the whole thing and think about Hecht, and be inspired by his legacy at Pessach.

Rima Khalaf

In late February I wrote about a report written by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), where Israel wa blamed for pretty much all the problems in the Arab world.

The head of ESCWA, Rima Khalaf, amplified the report's thesis when she effectively said Israel has no business existing:

Foreign interference comes in various forms, such as violations of Arab rights and dignity, but its worst manifestation is the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Syrian Golan Heights and Lebanese territories, in flagrant breach of all international conventions and resolutions.

The authors of the report claim that the damage caused by Israeli policies is not limited to occupation activities, but they believe that aggressive Israeli policies, including its support for discord aimed at establishing Arab sectarian mini-States and its nuclear programme that is not subject to international monitoring, pose a continuous threat to the security of Arab citizens in the region as a whole.

The most dangerous of these policies is Israel's adamancy that it is a Jewish State, which violates the rights of both the Muslim and Christian indigenous populations and revives the concept of state ethnic and religious purity, which caused egregious human suffering during the twentieth century.

The report claims that Arab rights would not have been trampled; Jerusalem would not have suffered under Judaization policies, land confiscation and the expulsion of populations; and Muslim and Christian holy shrines would not have been desecrated if Arabs had stood united and coordinated their efforts, or at least met their existing commitments to joint defence.

According to Arabic media, Israel is demanding the the UN fire Rima Khalaf for these remarks. The story says that Ambassador Ron Prosor wrote a letter to Ban Ki-Moon requesting her removal from her position.