"Recycling centers accept phone books
10/30/2007
Arcata Community Recycling Center is encouraging Humboldt County residents to recycle old or unwanted phone books, according to an ACRC news release.
Outdated phone books can be recycled into new phone book pages, paper towels, toilet paper, household insulation, mulch, drywall, roofing shingles and more."
This is out-of-date environmental information. Paper products should be landfilled and not recycled in order to get more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Grow more trees, use more wood, and make and use more paper! The more wood and paper products are recycled back into the earth the more carbon dioxide is taken out of the sky.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
Realizing God’s dream for the Holy Land
By Desmond Tutu | October 26, 2007
WHENEVER I am asked if I am optimistic about an end to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I say that I am not. Optimism requires clear signs that things are changing - meaningful words and unambiguous actions that point to real progress. I do not yet hear enough meaningful words, nor do I yet see enough unambiguous deeds to justify optimism.
However, that does not mean I am without hope. I am a Christian. I am constrained by my faith to hope against hope, placing my trust in things as yet unseen. Hope persists in the face of evidence to the contrary, undeterred by setbacks and disappointment. Hoping against hope, then, I do believe that a resolution will be found. It will not be perfect, but it can be just; and if it is just, it will usher in a future of peace.
My hope for peace is not amorphous. It has a shape. It is not the shape of a particular political solution, although there are some political solutions that I believe to be more just than others.
Neither does my hope take the shape of a particular people, although I have pleaded tirelessly for international attention to be paid to the misery of Palestinians, and I have roundly condemned the injustices of certain Israeli policies that compound that misery. Thus I am often accused of siding with Palestinians against Israeli Jews, naively exonerating the one and unfairly demonizing the other.
Nevertheless, I insist that the hope in which I persist is not reducible to politics or identified with a people. It has a more encompassing shape. I like to call it “God’s dream.”
God has a dream for all his children. It is about a day when all people enjoy fundamental security and live free of fear. It is about a day when all people have a hospitable land in which to establish a future. More than anything else, God’s dream is about a day when all people are accorded equal dignity because they are human beings. In God’s beautiful dream, no other reason is required.
God’s dream begins when we begin to know each other differently, as bearers of a common humanity, not as statistics to be counted, problems to be solved, enemies to be vanquished or animals to be caged. God’s dream begins the moment one adversary looks another in the eye and sees himself reflected there.
All things become possible when hearts fixed in mutual contempt begin to grasp a transforming truth; namely, that this person I fear and despise is not an alien, something less than human. This person is very much like me, and enjoys and suffers, loves and fears, wonders, worries, and hopes. Just as I do, this person longs for well-being in a world of peace.
God’s dream begins with this mutual recognition - we are not strangers, we are kin. It culminates in the defeat of oppression perpetrated in the name of security, and of violence inflicted in the name of liberation. God’s dream routs the cynicism and despair that once cleared the path for hate to have its corrosive way with us, and for ravenous violence to devour everything in sight.
God’s dream comes to flower when everyone who claims to be wholly innocent relinquishes that illusion, when everyone who places absolute blame on another renounces that lie, and when differing stories are told at last as one shared story of human aspiration. God’s dream ends in healing and reconciliation. Its finest fruit is human wholeness flourishing in a moral universe.
In the meanwhile, between the root of human solidarity and the fruit of human wholeness, there is the hard work of telling the truth.
From my experience in South Africa I know that truth-telling is hard. It has grave consequences for one’s life and reputation. It stretches one’s faith, tests one’s capacity to love, and pushes hope to the limit. At times, the difficulty of this work can make you wonder if people are right about you, that you are a fool.
No one takes up this work on a do-gooder’s whim. It is not a choice. One feels compelled into it. Neither is it work for a little while, but rather for a lifetime - and for more than a lifetime. It is a project bigger than any one life. This long view is a source of encouragement and perseverance. The knowledge that the work preceded us and will go on after us is a fountain of deep gladness that no circumstance can alter.
Nothing, however, diminishes the fear and trembling that accompany speaking the truth to power in love. An acute awareness of fallibility is a constant companion in this task, but because nothing is more important in the current situation than to speak as truthfully as one can, there can be no shrinking from testifying to what one sees and hears.
What do I see and hear in the Holy Land? Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people’s souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.
I see and hear that ancient olive trees are uprooted. Flocks are cut off from their pastures and shepherds. The homes of some people are bulldozed even as new homes for others are illegally constructed on other people’s land. I grieve for the land that suffers such violence, the marring of its beauty, the loss of its comforts, the despoiling of its yield. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the bitter days of uprooting and despoiling in my own country.
I see and hear that young people believe that it is heroic and pious to kill others by killing themselves. They strap bombs to their torsos to achieve liberation. They do not know that liberation achieved by brutality will defraud in the end. I grieve the waste of their lives and of the lives they take, the loss of personal and communal security they cause, and the lust for revenge that follows their crimes, crowding out all reason and restraint. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the explosive anger that inflamed South Africa, too.
Some people are enraged by comparisons between the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and what happened in South Africa. There are differences between the two situations, but a comparison need not be exact in every feature to yield clarity about what is going on. Moreover, for those of us who lived through the dehumanizing horrors of the apartheid era, the comparison seems not only apt, it is also necessary. It is necessary if we are to persevere in our hope that things can change.
Indeed, because of what I experienced in South Africa, I harbor a vast, unreasoning hope for Israel and the Palestinian territories. South Africans, after all, had no reason to suppose that the evil system and the cycles of violence that were sapping the soul of our nation would ever change. There was nothing special or different about South Africans to deserve the appearance of the very thing for which we prayed and worked and suffered so long.
Most South Africans did not believe they would live to see a day of liberation. They did not believe that their children’s children would see it. They did not believe that such a day even existed, except in fantasy. But we have seen it. We are living now in the day we longed for.
It is not a cloudless day. The divine arc that bends toward a truly just and whole society has not yet stretched fully across my country’s sky like a rainbow of peace. It is not finished, it does not always live up to its promise, it is not perfect - but it is new. A brand new thing, like a dream of God, has come about to replace the old story of mutual hatred and oppression.
I have seen it and heard it, and so to this truth, too, I am compelled to testify - if it can happen in South Africa, it can happen with the Israelis and Palestinians. There is not much reason to be optimistic, but there is every reason to hope.
Desmond Tutu is the former archbishop of Cape Town, chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Posted by Sami Awad on October 29th, 2007
WHENEVER I am asked if I am optimistic about an end to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I say that I am not. Optimism requires clear signs that things are changing - meaningful words and unambiguous actions that point to real progress. I do not yet hear enough meaningful words, nor do I yet see enough unambiguous deeds to justify optimism.
However, that does not mean I am without hope. I am a Christian. I am constrained by my faith to hope against hope, placing my trust in things as yet unseen. Hope persists in the face of evidence to the contrary, undeterred by setbacks and disappointment. Hoping against hope, then, I do believe that a resolution will be found. It will not be perfect, but it can be just; and if it is just, it will usher in a future of peace.
My hope for peace is not amorphous. It has a shape. It is not the shape of a particular political solution, although there are some political solutions that I believe to be more just than others.
Neither does my hope take the shape of a particular people, although I have pleaded tirelessly for international attention to be paid to the misery of Palestinians, and I have roundly condemned the injustices of certain Israeli policies that compound that misery. Thus I am often accused of siding with Palestinians against Israeli Jews, naively exonerating the one and unfairly demonizing the other.
Nevertheless, I insist that the hope in which I persist is not reducible to politics or identified with a people. It has a more encompassing shape. I like to call it “God’s dream.”
God has a dream for all his children. It is about a day when all people enjoy fundamental security and live free of fear. It is about a day when all people have a hospitable land in which to establish a future. More than anything else, God’s dream is about a day when all people are accorded equal dignity because they are human beings. In God’s beautiful dream, no other reason is required.
God’s dream begins when we begin to know each other differently, as bearers of a common humanity, not as statistics to be counted, problems to be solved, enemies to be vanquished or animals to be caged. God’s dream begins the moment one adversary looks another in the eye and sees himself reflected there.
All things become possible when hearts fixed in mutual contempt begin to grasp a transforming truth; namely, that this person I fear and despise is not an alien, something less than human. This person is very much like me, and enjoys and suffers, loves and fears, wonders, worries, and hopes. Just as I do, this person longs for well-being in a world of peace.
God’s dream begins with this mutual recognition - we are not strangers, we are kin. It culminates in the defeat of oppression perpetrated in the name of security, and of violence inflicted in the name of liberation. God’s dream routs the cynicism and despair that once cleared the path for hate to have its corrosive way with us, and for ravenous violence to devour everything in sight.
God’s dream comes to flower when everyone who claims to be wholly innocent relinquishes that illusion, when everyone who places absolute blame on another renounces that lie, and when differing stories are told at last as one shared story of human aspiration. God’s dream ends in healing and reconciliation. Its finest fruit is human wholeness flourishing in a moral universe.
In the meanwhile, between the root of human solidarity and the fruit of human wholeness, there is the hard work of telling the truth.
From my experience in South Africa I know that truth-telling is hard. It has grave consequences for one’s life and reputation. It stretches one’s faith, tests one’s capacity to love, and pushes hope to the limit. At times, the difficulty of this work can make you wonder if people are right about you, that you are a fool.
No one takes up this work on a do-gooder’s whim. It is not a choice. One feels compelled into it. Neither is it work for a little while, but rather for a lifetime - and for more than a lifetime. It is a project bigger than any one life. This long view is a source of encouragement and perseverance. The knowledge that the work preceded us and will go on after us is a fountain of deep gladness that no circumstance can alter.
Nothing, however, diminishes the fear and trembling that accompany speaking the truth to power in love. An acute awareness of fallibility is a constant companion in this task, but because nothing is more important in the current situation than to speak as truthfully as one can, there can be no shrinking from testifying to what one sees and hears.
What do I see and hear in the Holy Land? Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people’s souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.
I see and hear that ancient olive trees are uprooted. Flocks are cut off from their pastures and shepherds. The homes of some people are bulldozed even as new homes for others are illegally constructed on other people’s land. I grieve for the land that suffers such violence, the marring of its beauty, the loss of its comforts, the despoiling of its yield. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the bitter days of uprooting and despoiling in my own country.
I see and hear that young people believe that it is heroic and pious to kill others by killing themselves. They strap bombs to their torsos to achieve liberation. They do not know that liberation achieved by brutality will defraud in the end. I grieve the waste of their lives and of the lives they take, the loss of personal and communal security they cause, and the lust for revenge that follows their crimes, crowding out all reason and restraint. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the explosive anger that inflamed South Africa, too.
Some people are enraged by comparisons between the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and what happened in South Africa. There are differences between the two situations, but a comparison need not be exact in every feature to yield clarity about what is going on. Moreover, for those of us who lived through the dehumanizing horrors of the apartheid era, the comparison seems not only apt, it is also necessary. It is necessary if we are to persevere in our hope that things can change.
Indeed, because of what I experienced in South Africa, I harbor a vast, unreasoning hope for Israel and the Palestinian territories. South Africans, after all, had no reason to suppose that the evil system and the cycles of violence that were sapping the soul of our nation would ever change. There was nothing special or different about South Africans to deserve the appearance of the very thing for which we prayed and worked and suffered so long.
Most South Africans did not believe they would live to see a day of liberation. They did not believe that their children’s children would see it. They did not believe that such a day even existed, except in fantasy. But we have seen it. We are living now in the day we longed for.
It is not a cloudless day. The divine arc that bends toward a truly just and whole society has not yet stretched fully across my country’s sky like a rainbow of peace. It is not finished, it does not always live up to its promise, it is not perfect - but it is new. A brand new thing, like a dream of God, has come about to replace the old story of mutual hatred and oppression.
I have seen it and heard it, and so to this truth, too, I am compelled to testify - if it can happen in South Africa, it can happen with the Israelis and Palestinians. There is not much reason to be optimistic, but there is every reason to hope.
Desmond Tutu is the former archbishop of Cape Town, chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Posted by Sami Awad on October 29th, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Covert Crimes against Humanity--Israel style
Oct 27, 2007 17:26 | Updated Oct 28, 2007 15:53
Israeli energy company: Fuel cuts to Gaza implemented
By JPOST STAFF AND AP
Dor Alon, the Israeli energy company that sells fuel to Gaza, confirmed Sunday that it had received instructions from the Defense Ministry to reduce shipments. The confirmation followed a report by head of the Palestinian Fuel Agency, Mujahad Sa'alama, who said that on Saturday, a reduction of 40-50 percent was recorded in the supply of diesel fuel and that there was a decrease of 12% in fuel for the Gaza power station.
Nevertheless, Lt. Shadi Yassin, spokesman for Israel's Coordination and Liaison Administration, denied that the planned power cuts had been implemented. "Defense Minister Ehud Barak has not given any order and therefore, there have been no cuts in supplies," he said in a statement.
The reported fuel reduction move drew harsh condemnation from Palestinians in Gaza, which relies on Israel for almost all its fuel and gasoline and more than half of its electricity.
"This is a serious warning to the people of the Gaza Strip. Their lives are now in danger," said Ahmed Ali, deputy director of Gaza's Petroleum Authority, which distributes Israeli fuel shipments to private Palestinian companies. "The hospitals, water pumping station and sewage will now be affected by the lack of fuel."
Ali said daily fuel shipments on Sunday were more than 30 percent below normal. He said Israel delivered 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, compared to 350,000 liters on a normal day, and 90,000 liters of gasoline, instead of the regular supply of 150,000 liters.
He said it would take several days for the fuel crunch to be felt, since Gaza keeps about four days of fuel in reserve. But truck drivers at Gaza's main fuel depot complained that they were unable to fill their tankers, and some drivers said they were turned away altogether.
The report came a day after Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i told Israel Radio that Israel would begin to make the cuts to Gaza's fuel and electricity supplies as early as Sunday or Monday, after the court system gives the government its final authorization.
The plan, approved by Barak Thursday, is to cut electricity for an initial 15 minutes after a rocket attack, gradually increasing the length of outages if the attacks continue.
MK Ami Ayalon (Labor) said that the plan must be implemented carefully in order to avoid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. He told Israel Radio Sunday that the power cuts will only be useful if there is an ongoing peace process.
In Tel Aviv, several Meretz and Peace Now activists demonstrated outside the Defense Ministry, calling on Barak not to carry out the power cuts.
On Friday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that he would not cause a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, despite his government's declared intention to carry out the power cuts in an attempt to curb Palestinian rocket attacks into southern Israel.
Despite the clear indication that the planned power cuts was retaliation for Kassam attacks, Vilna'i insisted Saturday that the decision was another stage in disengaging from Gaza and was not a part of any "punishment policy."
He said the sanctions are meant to wean Gaza's dependence on Israel and conceded that they were unlikely to halt rocket fire.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Israel's is a democracy--if you are Jewish. Not so if you are Arab.
Israel restricts Christian clergy travel
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oct 26, 2007 21:24 | Updated Oct 26, 2007 21:34
Israel has rescinded some travel privileges for Arab Christian clergy traveling to and around the West Bank because of security concerns, an Israeli spokeswoman said Friday.
Father Jack Abed said the new rule violated understandings between Israel and the Vatican.
The decision means the religious leaders' visas will be good for one entry only, and not for repeat visits as in the past, Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said. This means they will be required to coordinate each trip they make, she said.
"According to a request by security officials, we restricted the visas of the clergy," Haddad said. "We are trying to find a solution to make it easier for them."
Israel and the Palestinian territories are home to a small Christian minority, with members of the religion comprising less than two percent of the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was not immediately clear how many Christian leaders would be affected by the change.
Israel has in the past tried to maintain warm ties with Christians, often easing restrictions to allow pilgrims entry into the West Bank town of Bethlehem for the Christmas holiday.
Father Jack Abed, a parish priest of the Melkite Catholic community near the West Bank town of Ramallah, said the new rule violated understandings between Israel and the Vatican.
"One of the agreements is the freedom of movement and worship," he said. "There is no freedom of movement if Israel wants to limit visas to a single entry"
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oct 26, 2007 21:24 | Updated Oct 26, 2007 21:34
Israel has rescinded some travel privileges for Arab Christian clergy traveling to and around the West Bank because of security concerns, an Israeli spokeswoman said Friday.
Father Jack Abed said the new rule violated understandings between Israel and the Vatican.
The decision means the religious leaders' visas will be good for one entry only, and not for repeat visits as in the past, Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said. This means they will be required to coordinate each trip they make, she said.
"According to a request by security officials, we restricted the visas of the clergy," Haddad said. "We are trying to find a solution to make it easier for them."
Israel and the Palestinian territories are home to a small Christian minority, with members of the religion comprising less than two percent of the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was not immediately clear how many Christian leaders would be affected by the change.
Israel has in the past tried to maintain warm ties with Christians, often easing restrictions to allow pilgrims entry into the West Bank town of Bethlehem for the Christmas holiday.
Father Jack Abed, a parish priest of the Melkite Catholic community near the West Bank town of Ramallah, said the new rule violated understandings between Israel and the Vatican.
"One of the agreements is the freedom of movement and worship," he said. "There is no freedom of movement if Israel wants to limit visas to a single entry"
Friday, October 26, 2007
Progressive political schizophrenic parlance over Israel
In Eric's SoHum Parlance blog one sees the way in which Zionists are trying to sell Israel's wars with Palestinians and its Arab neighbors.
At all times any historical information exposing European Ashkenazi Zionism's agenda of creating another Ashkenazi-Khazar kingdom in Palestine for Jewish converts is to be discredited.
Official European and American political acts creating Israel through their control of the United Nations without any Palestinian representation is to be the final authority on the right of Israel to exist.
Palestinians, do not exist as a national people, only as homeless Arabs without modern culture or modern industrial experience and ambitions. Israelis are the intelligent guiding light of civilized democratic progress in the Middle East.
Palestinians are virtually savages without regard for human life willing to kill innocent Israeli children in order to defy Israel's occupation and control of the West Bank and Gaza for the Palestinians' own good.
Eric asks what Progs consider a righteous war. Would Progs fight the Nazis for example? When is war appropriate and when is peace capitulation to evil? Would Progs join the Palestinians against Israelis or would they join the Israelis against the Palestinians is the question Eric is beating around the bust about.
I think he hopes to link Zionism with anti-fascism but it's going to be a real hard sell given that the modern fascists here are in the uniforms of the Israel Defense Force.
These days, few nations are buying the "Manifest Destiny", "Master Race", "Chosen People" racist religious and political ideologies ambitious and aggressive and amoral Europeans foisted onto the non-industrialized peoples they enslaved, stole their lands, and killed off those natives who resisted foreign aggression, occupation and European takeover of their homelands.
Poor Ashkenazi Jewish converts! The smartest people in the world they claim yet they managed to pull one of the dumbest stunts in modern history--the attempt to copycat in the 20th and 21st centuries the prior 500 year European colonizing period when Europeans succeeded with brutal force and massive migration the conquest and establishment of European colonies all over the pre-industrialized world.
What worked for Europeans in North, Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, has failed miserably for European Jewish converts in modern Israel/Palestine. Like India, like South Africa, Palestinians are bound and determined to throw the foreign invaders out. At least out of power.
Any Progressive who has a social conscience has only to ask and answer these two questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to determine which side is in the right and which is in the wrong:
Was it morally right for Europeans and Americans controlling the United Nations in 1947 to partition Palestine without any Palestinian representation at all during those eventful decisions that have left a 60 year legacy of human tragedy?
Is it morally right to allow foreign nationals from Europe and America to have a "right of return" (actually immigration or legal entry into Israel) that annuls the internationally recognized legal right of return of the native Palestinian population?
60 years is not 200 or 400 years of solid history of ethnic population defeat by the victims of European colonial aggression. Not only that, this time the natives have a voice in the world, not much of one, but still loud enough to be heard even through the daily din of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, propaganda constantly spewed out by the Zionist pro-Israel public relations political and cultural control machinery.
Hillary is in Israel's pocket, just like her husband was when Israel put the screws to Bill with Monica, making sure American presidents, college professors, and anyone else know they can't buck Israel and hold their jobs.
Know what's coming: Hillary's coming in, and so we can expect more wars with the Middle East enemies of Greater Israel and greater local Prog moral schizophrenia about Zionism and anti-Zionism.
There's only one moral choice:
At all times any historical information exposing European Ashkenazi Zionism's agenda of creating another Ashkenazi-Khazar kingdom in Palestine for Jewish converts is to be discredited.
Official European and American political acts creating Israel through their control of the United Nations without any Palestinian representation is to be the final authority on the right of Israel to exist.
Palestinians, do not exist as a national people, only as homeless Arabs without modern culture or modern industrial experience and ambitions. Israelis are the intelligent guiding light of civilized democratic progress in the Middle East.
Palestinians are virtually savages without regard for human life willing to kill innocent Israeli children in order to defy Israel's occupation and control of the West Bank and Gaza for the Palestinians' own good.
Eric asks what Progs consider a righteous war. Would Progs fight the Nazis for example? When is war appropriate and when is peace capitulation to evil? Would Progs join the Palestinians against Israelis or would they join the Israelis against the Palestinians is the question Eric is beating around the bust about.
I think he hopes to link Zionism with anti-fascism but it's going to be a real hard sell given that the modern fascists here are in the uniforms of the Israel Defense Force.
These days, few nations are buying the "Manifest Destiny", "Master Race", "Chosen People" racist religious and political ideologies ambitious and aggressive and amoral Europeans foisted onto the non-industrialized peoples they enslaved, stole their lands, and killed off those natives who resisted foreign aggression, occupation and European takeover of their homelands.
Poor Ashkenazi Jewish converts! The smartest people in the world they claim yet they managed to pull one of the dumbest stunts in modern history--the attempt to copycat in the 20th and 21st centuries the prior 500 year European colonizing period when Europeans succeeded with brutal force and massive migration the conquest and establishment of European colonies all over the pre-industrialized world.
What worked for Europeans in North, Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, has failed miserably for European Jewish converts in modern Israel/Palestine. Like India, like South Africa, Palestinians are bound and determined to throw the foreign invaders out. At least out of power.
Any Progressive who has a social conscience has only to ask and answer these two questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to determine which side is in the right and which is in the wrong:
Was it morally right for Europeans and Americans controlling the United Nations in 1947 to partition Palestine without any Palestinian representation at all during those eventful decisions that have left a 60 year legacy of human tragedy?
Is it morally right to allow foreign nationals from Europe and America to have a "right of return" (actually immigration or legal entry into Israel) that annuls the internationally recognized legal right of return of the native Palestinian population?
60 years is not 200 or 400 years of solid history of ethnic population defeat by the victims of European colonial aggression. Not only that, this time the natives have a voice in the world, not much of one, but still loud enough to be heard even through the daily din of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, propaganda constantly spewed out by the Zionist pro-Israel public relations political and cultural control machinery.
Hillary is in Israel's pocket, just like her husband was when Israel put the screws to Bill with Monica, making sure American presidents, college professors, and anyone else know they can't buck Israel and hold their jobs.
Know what's coming: Hillary's coming in, and so we can expect more wars with the Middle East enemies of Greater Israel and greater local Prog moral schizophrenia about Zionism and anti-Zionism.
There's only one moral choice:
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
‘Awareness’ weak on Islamic reality
by Adam Lichtenheld
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
It has received little press coverage, but starting Monday, Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week will be hitting college campuses across the country. Part of the David Horowitz Center’s Terrorism Awareness Project, the program is promoted as an effort to educate the public about the threat of “Fascist Islam.”
David Horowitz, the infamous architect of Students for Academic Freedom — which, despite its name, threatens academic freedom in college classrooms to promote its own conservative agenda — is no stranger to controversy. By using the label “Islamo-fascism,” he displays an inept understanding of the religion he intends to judge next week. Anyone knowledgeable about politics can tell you that fascism — a system where citizens are subservient to the state — is the antithesis of radical Islam — a system where practitioners are subservient to the Quran. Coining the oxymoron “Fascist Islam” has allowed radical Zionists like Mr. Horowitz to compare today’s terrorists with Germany’s Nazis, evoking shameful and chilling reminders of the Holocaust to help justify Israel’s aggressive military policies and America’s support for them.
Mr. Horowitz and his hounds claim that the event’s purpose is to advocate for moderate Muslims struggling against fundamentalism and highlight the oppression of Islamic women, while refraining from attacking Islam directly. This is hard to believe when looking at the week’s speaking lineup.
It includes Daniel Pipes, creator of Campuswatch.com, a forum of McCarthyist attacks on Middle East Studies professors who refuse to sympathize with Israel; Ann Coulter, the savage pundit whose rants of unfathomable ignorance have included assertions that Muslims — whom she labels “ragheads” — have a “predilection for violence;” Rick Santorum, the xenophobic, Bible-thumping ex-senator from Pennsylvania infamous for his anti-women voting record; Robert Spencer, the conservative commentator who denounces Islam and blames its teachings for producing terrorism worldwide; Dennis Prager, who condemned a Minnesota congressman for ceremoniously swearing on the Quran because it excluded the Bible and “failed to acknowledge America’s Judeo-Christian value system;” Mike Adams, a religious zealot who compares women who have abortions to Charles Manson; and Michael Medved, a guest-host for Rush Limbaugh who has claimed that Islam has a “special violence problem.”
In addition, the week incorporates the showing of controversial films including a piece on Palestinian suicide bombers that received widespread criticism for its pro-Israel bias; a short film that demonizes Muslims by attributing terrorism to the “violent, expansionary ideology” of Islam; an ABC miniseries ridiculed for portraying the Clinton administration as responsible for Sept. 11; and a documentary connected to a watchdog group that monitors the media for negative portrayals of Israel.
One is left to wonder how Mr. Horowitz could claim that his campaign is not meant to negatively portray Islam when its content is dripping with anti-Muslim sentiment. Many of the speakers are not only completely out of touch with the mainstream; they lack the qualifications or general credibility to foster intellectual discussions on Islam, terrorism, or women’s rights. People need to see Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week for what it is: a strategic, fear-mongering maneuver meant to salvage support for the Iraq war as public discontent reaches an all-time high.
According to Mr. Horowitz’s website, he is targeting college campuses because they serve as “institutional bases for the academic left” which has “mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy.” Such is the arrogant simplicity by which the right defines patriotism — the mere blind obedience that classifies every global issue as a watered-down version of “Us vs. Them.”
Yet it is at universities where attempts to analyze and understand threats to American security help create critical research for government intelligence and public intellectualism. So in what lapse of rational thought did efforts to “understand” the enemy amount to being “sympathetic” to them? American universities were not the breeding grounds for the nineteen men who crashed planes into U.S. buildings six years ago. American universities are not responsible for recruiting Iraqi insurgents to kill U.S. soldiers or inciting suicide bombers to blow up people in Gaza.
It is at these institutions where the rights of Islamic women have been fought for so strongly and where the millions of Muslims around the world whose faith does not involve killing innocent people are most adamantly defended. It is at these institutions where vital efforts to extinguish the prejudice and intolerance that underlies the East-West gap originated — the same kind of intolerance the Horowitz Center intends to perpetuate next week.
In order to show that a majority of Americans reject this sick strain of racism — just as many Muslims reject terrorists who murder in the name of Islam — campus groups like Hillel and College Republicans should take the initiative to co-sponsor an event with the Muslim Students’ Association that is informative, factual and free of the extremist bias of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.
Anything less would be a sign of complacency.
Adam Lichtenheld (alichtenheld@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in political science and African studies.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
It has received little press coverage, but starting Monday, Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week will be hitting college campuses across the country. Part of the David Horowitz Center’s Terrorism Awareness Project, the program is promoted as an effort to educate the public about the threat of “Fascist Islam.”
David Horowitz, the infamous architect of Students for Academic Freedom — which, despite its name, threatens academic freedom in college classrooms to promote its own conservative agenda — is no stranger to controversy. By using the label “Islamo-fascism,” he displays an inept understanding of the religion he intends to judge next week. Anyone knowledgeable about politics can tell you that fascism — a system where citizens are subservient to the state — is the antithesis of radical Islam — a system where practitioners are subservient to the Quran. Coining the oxymoron “Fascist Islam” has allowed radical Zionists like Mr. Horowitz to compare today’s terrorists with Germany’s Nazis, evoking shameful and chilling reminders of the Holocaust to help justify Israel’s aggressive military policies and America’s support for them.
Mr. Horowitz and his hounds claim that the event’s purpose is to advocate for moderate Muslims struggling against fundamentalism and highlight the oppression of Islamic women, while refraining from attacking Islam directly. This is hard to believe when looking at the week’s speaking lineup.
It includes Daniel Pipes, creator of Campuswatch.com, a forum of McCarthyist attacks on Middle East Studies professors who refuse to sympathize with Israel; Ann Coulter, the savage pundit whose rants of unfathomable ignorance have included assertions that Muslims — whom she labels “ragheads” — have a “predilection for violence;” Rick Santorum, the xenophobic, Bible-thumping ex-senator from Pennsylvania infamous for his anti-women voting record; Robert Spencer, the conservative commentator who denounces Islam and blames its teachings for producing terrorism worldwide; Dennis Prager, who condemned a Minnesota congressman for ceremoniously swearing on the Quran because it excluded the Bible and “failed to acknowledge America’s Judeo-Christian value system;” Mike Adams, a religious zealot who compares women who have abortions to Charles Manson; and Michael Medved, a guest-host for Rush Limbaugh who has claimed that Islam has a “special violence problem.”
In addition, the week incorporates the showing of controversial films including a piece on Palestinian suicide bombers that received widespread criticism for its pro-Israel bias; a short film that demonizes Muslims by attributing terrorism to the “violent, expansionary ideology” of Islam; an ABC miniseries ridiculed for portraying the Clinton administration as responsible for Sept. 11; and a documentary connected to a watchdog group that monitors the media for negative portrayals of Israel.
One is left to wonder how Mr. Horowitz could claim that his campaign is not meant to negatively portray Islam when its content is dripping with anti-Muslim sentiment. Many of the speakers are not only completely out of touch with the mainstream; they lack the qualifications or general credibility to foster intellectual discussions on Islam, terrorism, or women’s rights. People need to see Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week for what it is: a strategic, fear-mongering maneuver meant to salvage support for the Iraq war as public discontent reaches an all-time high.
According to Mr. Horowitz’s website, he is targeting college campuses because they serve as “institutional bases for the academic left” which has “mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy.” Such is the arrogant simplicity by which the right defines patriotism — the mere blind obedience that classifies every global issue as a watered-down version of “Us vs. Them.”
Yet it is at universities where attempts to analyze and understand threats to American security help create critical research for government intelligence and public intellectualism. So in what lapse of rational thought did efforts to “understand” the enemy amount to being “sympathetic” to them? American universities were not the breeding grounds for the nineteen men who crashed planes into U.S. buildings six years ago. American universities are not responsible for recruiting Iraqi insurgents to kill U.S. soldiers or inciting suicide bombers to blow up people in Gaza.
It is at these institutions where the rights of Islamic women have been fought for so strongly and where the millions of Muslims around the world whose faith does not involve killing innocent people are most adamantly defended. It is at these institutions where vital efforts to extinguish the prejudice and intolerance that underlies the East-West gap originated — the same kind of intolerance the Horowitz Center intends to perpetuate next week.
In order to show that a majority of Americans reject this sick strain of racism — just as many Muslims reject terrorists who murder in the name of Islam — campus groups like Hillel and College Republicans should take the initiative to co-sponsor an event with the Muslim Students’ Association that is informative, factual and free of the extremist bias of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.
Anything less would be a sign of complacency.
Adam Lichtenheld (alichtenheld@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in political science and African studies.
For American Jews, Dissent Against Israel Has Become Mainstream
By Tony Karon, Tomdispatch.com. Posted September 15, 2007.
The exceedingly narrow range of "correct opinion" on Israel for American Jews isn't holding together like it used to. Is a Jewish glasnost coming to America?
First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list -- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others -- as "self-haters" is not unfamiliar to me.
In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on Lebanon.
By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of citizenship.
Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to warn others off expressing similar views.
What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it -- is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is: "Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands..."
A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent
The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very personification of Jewishness.
So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent."
Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism."
Says Shepherd: "Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as ‘bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."
I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but offensive in its intent, although not "racist". But the logic of suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa? What then?
Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label on anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2 million of them -- almost two thirds -- have chosen not to live.
Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the destruction of the State of Israel a "personal tragedy." Less than half of those aged under 35 answered "yes" and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.
As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen, reflected "very significant shifts that have been occurring in what it means to be a Jew."
Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the absurdity of Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to "defame an entire people." They also help frame the context for what I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then, it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians or for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was the angry renunciation of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.
And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun, Americans for Peace Now, and the Israel Policy Forum, among others, to anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voices for Peace, had not yet taken shape. Indeed, there was no Ha'aretz online English edition in which the reality of Israel was being candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed heretical in much of the U.S. media.
Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like "Birthright Unplugged," which aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright Program," funded by Zionist groups and the government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the State. (The "Unplugged" version encourages young Jews from the U.S. to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)
Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist establishment -- the America Israel Political Action Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others -- to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded. It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was originally a Jewish movement -- the majority of European Jews before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of Zion before the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).
Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.
But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited above suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was the "manifest destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures, some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.
The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice
Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency -- apparently oblivious to the irony of its own actions -- has complained to Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior. If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of "anti-Semitism" when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel's most fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.
That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion.
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts are good for Israel.
But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an emerging Jewish glasnost. Of course, like any break with a long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein -- the noted Holocaust scholar and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul University in a campaign of vilification based precisely on the idea that fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of "hate speech" -- could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of the ultranationalists is weakening.
So, too, could Joel Kovel. After all, he found his important book Overcoming Zionism pulled by his American distributor, the University of Michigan Press, also on the "hate speech" charge. (This decision was later reversed, but it may have long-term consequences for the distributor's relationship with Kovel's publisher, the British imprint Pluto.)
Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on Israel -- and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism as well. But I'd argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment -- a panic born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet Union with the actual glasnost moment, this is a process, once started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.
Last year, a very cranky academic by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a flurry of attention by warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a "new anti-Semitism."
"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel."
In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write, in reference to Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of Israel's present occupation of the West Bank are objective realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to "delegitimize" Israel and promote anti-Semitism.
Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was slated to speak to the British Zionist Federation – and then, at the last minute, his speech was canceled. The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities." (While many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to accept the apartheid comparison, that's not true of their Israeli counterparts who actually know what's going on in the West Bank. Former education minister Shulamit Aloni, for example, or journalist Amira Hass use the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel, warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The population there, they told us, would never be given the right to vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put it, "an apartheid situation.")
Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, for example -- ask them about the validity of the comparison, and you know the answer you're going to get.
Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.
In an earlier commentary, perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:
"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."
Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition.
Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others.
Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we live only among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests it's essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of Jewish history, and I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel's relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its citizens, but to those it has hurt.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts.
The exceedingly narrow range of "correct opinion" on Israel for American Jews isn't holding together like it used to. Is a Jewish glasnost coming to America?
First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list -- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others -- as "self-haters" is not unfamiliar to me.
In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on Lebanon.
By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of citizenship.
Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to warn others off expressing similar views.
What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it -- is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is: "Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands..."
A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent
The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very personification of Jewishness.
So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent."
Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism."
Says Shepherd: "Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as ‘bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."
I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but offensive in its intent, although not "racist". But the logic of suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa? What then?
Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label on anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2 million of them -- almost two thirds -- have chosen not to live.
Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the destruction of the State of Israel a "personal tragedy." Less than half of those aged under 35 answered "yes" and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.
As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen, reflected "very significant shifts that have been occurring in what it means to be a Jew."
Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the absurdity of Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to "defame an entire people." They also help frame the context for what I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then, it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians or for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was the angry renunciation of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.
And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun, Americans for Peace Now, and the Israel Policy Forum, among others, to anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voices for Peace, had not yet taken shape. Indeed, there was no Ha'aretz online English edition in which the reality of Israel was being candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed heretical in much of the U.S. media.
Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like "Birthright Unplugged," which aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright Program," funded by Zionist groups and the government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the State. (The "Unplugged" version encourages young Jews from the U.S. to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)
Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist establishment -- the America Israel Political Action Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others -- to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded. It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was originally a Jewish movement -- the majority of European Jews before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of Zion before the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).
Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.
But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited above suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was the "manifest destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures, some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.
The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice
Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency -- apparently oblivious to the irony of its own actions -- has complained to Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior. If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of "anti-Semitism" when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel's most fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.
That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion.
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts are good for Israel.
But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an emerging Jewish glasnost. Of course, like any break with a long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein -- the noted Holocaust scholar and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul University in a campaign of vilification based precisely on the idea that fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of "hate speech" -- could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of the ultranationalists is weakening.
So, too, could Joel Kovel. After all, he found his important book Overcoming Zionism pulled by his American distributor, the University of Michigan Press, also on the "hate speech" charge. (This decision was later reversed, but it may have long-term consequences for the distributor's relationship with Kovel's publisher, the British imprint Pluto.)
Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on Israel -- and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism as well. But I'd argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment -- a panic born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet Union with the actual glasnost moment, this is a process, once started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.
Last year, a very cranky academic by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a flurry of attention by warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a "new anti-Semitism."
"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel."
In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write, in reference to Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of Israel's present occupation of the West Bank are objective realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to "delegitimize" Israel and promote anti-Semitism.
Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was slated to speak to the British Zionist Federation – and then, at the last minute, his speech was canceled. The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities." (While many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to accept the apartheid comparison, that's not true of their Israeli counterparts who actually know what's going on in the West Bank. Former education minister Shulamit Aloni, for example, or journalist Amira Hass use the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel, warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The population there, they told us, would never be given the right to vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put it, "an apartheid situation.")
Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, for example -- ask them about the validity of the comparison, and you know the answer you're going to get.
Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.
In an earlier commentary, perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:
"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."
Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition.
Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others.
Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we live only among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests it's essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of Jewish history, and I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel's relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its citizens, but to those it has hurt.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Take Action: Speak Out Against "Islamo-Facism Awareness Week"
From US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
During the week of October 22-26, 2007, right-wing and neo-conservative political forces led by the
If this event is coming to your campus or neighborhood - and even if it's not - speak out against this racist assault on Muslims, Arabs, Arab-Americans, South Asians and anyone viewed as sympathetic towards those communities. While some people might dismiss the neo-conservatives as fringe elements who don't impact on
The stakes are simply too high to ignore, and we should respond to the so-called "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" - and to all such provocations - pro-actively, not defensively.
To find out what action you can take on your campus and in your community and to read about what others are doing, click here. To learn more about the forces driving this agenda, read " Understanding Why Islamophobia is on the Rise," the analysis by Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, and member of the U.S. Campaign's steering committee.
By defending basic freedoms of thought, speech and belief, we underscore three simple messages:
We stand for free speech, not hate speech.
We stand for tolerance, not bigotry.
We stand for education, not demagoguery.
SPEAK OUT FOR FREE SPEECH, TOLERANCE, AND EDUCATION!
"Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" speakers and venues:
Berkeley -- Nonie Darwish, October 22
Brown -- Robert Spencer, October 24
Cal Poly -- Greg Davis, October 25
Cal State Fullerton -- Nonie Darwish
Clemson -- Mike Adams, October 25
Columbia -- Phyllis Chesler, Ibn Warraq, Christina Hoff Sommers
Columbia -- Sean Hannity, David Horowitz, October 26
DePaul -- Robert Spencer, October 25
Emory -- David Horowitz, October 24
George Mason -- Luanah Saghieh, Alan Nathan, October 22
Lawrence Univ. -- Jonathan Schanzer
Maryland -- Michael Ledeen
Michigan -- David Horowitz, October 23
Northeastern -- Daniel Pipes, October 24
Ohio State -- David Horowitz, October 25
Penn -- Rick Santorum, October 24
Penn State -- Rick Santorum, October 23
Rhode Island -- Robert Spencer, October 24
San Francisco State -- Melanie Morgan, October 24
Stanford -- Wafa Sultan
Temple -- Rick Santorum, October 24
Tulane -- Ann Coulter, October 22
UC Santa Barbara - Dennis Prager, October 25
UC Irvine -- Ann Coulter
UCLA -- Nonie Darwish, October 24
UCLA -- Frank Pastore, John Ziegler
USC -- Ann Coulter, October 25
Virginia -- Frank Gaffney
Washington -- Kirby Wilbur
Washington -- Michael Medved, October 25
Wisconsin -- David Horowitz, October 22
Monday, October 15, 2007
A NEW ISRAELI STUDY CONFIRMS OUR WORST FEARS
On the academic research of Psychologist Nofer Ishai-Karen and Psychology Prof. Joel Elitzur,
Dalia Karpel
shortened translation of article in Haaretz `Hamedovevet`
21.09.07
`We - Israeli Soldiers - were put there to punish the Palestinians`, says Ilan Vilenda, an Israeli soldier who served in Rafah during the first Intifada.
Ilan is the only soldier of 21 who agreed to have his name published, after he was interviewed by psychologist Nofer Ishai-Karen.
The soldiers spoke freely to Nofer, who served with them in the same ASHBAL platoon 20 years ago; They disclosing their innermost emotions about the horrendous crimes, in which they took part: Murder, breaking bones of Palestinian children, actions of humiliation, destruction of property, robbery and theft.
Soldier `A` testimony:
`We decided to turn an old shower in our base to a make-shift detention cell. A Palestinian was brought there, handcuffed and mouth banded so he couldn`t talk, or move. We `forgot him there for three days`...
Soldier `B` testimony:
`I was on my first patrol. Others simply shot like mad. I started to shoot as they did. They `set my on`. I took my weapon and shot. Nobody was there to tell me otherwise`
-- Psychologist Ishai-Karen was shocked to find that the soldiers enjoyed the `intoxication of power`, and had pleasure from using violence. She said: `Most of my interviewees enjoyed their own instigated violence during their Occupation service``.
Soldier `C` testimony:
`The truth is that I love this mess - I enjoy it. It is like being on drugs.
If I didn`t enter Rafah, to put down some rebellion -at least once a week-
I`d go berserk.
Soldier `D` testimony:
What is great is that you don`t have to follow any law or rule. You feel that YOU ARE THE LAW; you decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories YOU ARE GOD`.
Emotional dumbness
Soldier `E` testimony:
We drove an APC through Rafah. A man of 25 walked nearby. He didn`t hurl a
stone at us or anything. Then without any reason `X` shot him in the stomach. We left him lying on the sidewalk`.
Soldier `F` testimony:
Some `tough guys` developed it into `an ideology`, according to which we have to react brutally even for minor events. A woman threw a sandal at me. I kicked her with my foot at her crotch. I broke her. She can`t have children any longer. Next time she won`t throw sandals at me... and when another woman spat at me she got the butt of my gun in her face. She can`t spit now.
Soldier `G` described his first forced entry to a home to detain a
Palestinian:
`He was real big, some 30 years old. He refused detention. We hit
him but couldn`t force him down. Some people came hurling stones at us. We
beat him and told him to lie down. Till he finally did. We drove to the base
with him. By that time he had lost consciousness. He died some days later`.
Nofer Ishai-Karen: `Some NCOs encouraged the soldiers to behave brutally, and provided their own example.
Soldier `H` testimony:
After two months in Rafah a new NCO commander arrived. The first patrol, which he commanded, was at 06 hours. Rafah was under curfew. Not a soul was on the street. Then he saw a young boy, of about 4, playing in the sand in the courtyard of his home. The kid was building a castle in the sand. Suddenly the NCO, a guy from the Engineers Corps, ran to chase the kid. We followed. He captured the kid and broke his elbow. Broke the kid`s elbow! Damn me if I`m not telling the truth! Then the NCO treaded on the kid`s stomach three times, before he moved on. We couldn`t believe our eyes... But the next day we went on patrol with that guy and the soldiers started to imitate him...
What happened then?
Some guys couldn`t stomach it. The case of severe abuse of three young
adolescents, who were bounded hand and foot by a staff sergeant, got them to
alert a senior officer. `When the medic arrived the boys were bleeding all
over, their clothes were soaked with blood, and they were shivering from fear.
They were made to kneel like dogs and were afraid to move`. The NCO was
punished by 3 months detention. But the platoon commander backed the NCO and
reprimanded the conscientious soldiers for `defaming the platoon`.`
Nofer Ishai-Karen: The sacred value in the [Israeli] Army is `fighters`
solidarity`, i.e., loyalty towards your fellow combatants. The platoons
protected its secrets, as a family defends its `black sheep`. The fellows
regard as `traitors` the conscientious soldiers, says Nofer Ishai-Karen. The
cover-up was complete when our `good guy` was excommunicated and ostracized by the entire platoon. And the NCO? He left the country, and now lives in the U.S. of A. The majority of the soldiers of these platoons had left Israel. Only five or six remain in Israel.
Nofer studied two platoons ESHBAL and ESHKHAR, the last was more extremely
violent, she says.
Finally back to Ilan Vilenda, the only soldier who allowed Nofer to use his
full name and even be photographed. Vilenda was a staff sergeant in charge of `operations`.
ILAN` VILENDA`S testimony:
`Our job was to beat them... I personally hit a boy and another. I used my
hands or the truncheon. We beat more severely [Palestinian] adults. We acted
like policemen but we acted outside the law. There was this Palestinian who
had a TV at home. The World Cup in Soccer was on, and we used to invade his
privacy to watch the games. After a while he had enough, and asked us take the TV set and move.
`I was born on a Kibbutz, to a family whose values were humane `Zionist left
wing`. The Palestinians threw tons of stones at us. Whereas at the beginning
my ideological commitment restrained my actions, my anger accumulated, and I
released it violently. It was meant to be. We were there `to make them
[Palestinians] pay. My political views changed too. I now support the extreme-right-religious National-Religious Party. After his release from the army, Vilenda and 5 other Israelis were arrested in Goa, India for possession of LSD. `I wanted to serve my country. This was my task... but the entire IDF is executing illegal-orders.
Who is responsible?
General Matan Vilna`i [now serving under Ehud Barak as vice Minister of
Defense] was at the time [during the FIRST INTIFADA] Chief of the IDF Southern Command. He often visited our platoon and discussed with soldiers, says Nofer But... there you go... the `Instruments of DENIAL and CONCEALMENT` went to work...`
Besides: The Israeli Army didn`t provide the unit with regular training, not
were the soldiers given regular leaves, or provided with free time to
recuperate and recover. The interviewed soldiers maintained that the longer
they operated [against the Palestinians in Rafah] without leave, the more
violent they became in imposing their kind of `Law and Order`. They claimed
`Army [commanders] were aware of the erosion towards violence, and encouraged it in order to save manpower`.
NOTES:
General Matan Vilna`i must have known what happened. High-ranking officers who served on the Occupied West Bank had voiced similar warnings against Israeli Army behavior. `The orders left a wide gap, a margin... of intentionally un-specified `grey zone`, which encouraged violent behavior of soldiers`, said Reserve Colonel Elisha Shapira, who served in the Nablus Area at the same time. Soldiers were told `don`t hit Palestinians - but bring them to interrogation `swell-headed` - blown-up`.
The events, which Nofer Ishai-Karen researched, happened some 17 years ago.
The situation has further deteriorated since that time. Now Israeli Army and
Air Force General openly take pride in acts of revenge against Palestinian
civilians. Maj-Gen Eliezer Shkeidi took pride in announcing that his pilots
break the sound barrier over Gaza, producing sonic booms.
These cause severe PTSD symptoms among young children; they have also caused
miscarriages among pregnant women. The indiscriminate shelling of Palestinian homes had caused many deaths lately, including many children. Perhaps last but not least: The Israeli cabinet, backed by Washington, said it would disrupt power and fuel supply to Gaza.
[1] This is an abbreviated translation of an article by Dalia Karpel titled
HAMEDOVEVET [=the one who makes people talk]. The article appeared on the
Hebrew Weekend Supplement, on 21 September 2007. It is based on academic
research, which Nofer Ishai-Karen and Psychology Prof. Joel Elizur, of the
Hebrew University published in ALPAYIM Magazine Vol. 31.
[2] The article was not translated to English and thus did NOT appear in
Haaretz English Language edition.
[3] Psychology Prof. Joel Elizur, of the Hebrew University, who guided Nofer Ishai-Karen in her Master`s thesis, served in the reserves in the Mental Health Department of the Israeli Army. But the IDF wouldn`t allow him to research into Israeli Soldiers` violence. The researchers hold the interview raw audio material.
[4] To my best knowledge the Israeli Army hasn`t either charged a single case of abuse or murder by soldiers of Palestinians in proper court.
RH
Dalia Karpel
shortened translation of article in Haaretz `Hamedovevet`
21.09.07
`We - Israeli Soldiers - were put there to punish the Palestinians`, says Ilan Vilenda, an Israeli soldier who served in Rafah during the first Intifada.
Ilan is the only soldier of 21 who agreed to have his name published, after he was interviewed by psychologist Nofer Ishai-Karen.
The soldiers spoke freely to Nofer, who served with them in the same ASHBAL platoon 20 years ago; They disclosing their innermost emotions about the horrendous crimes, in which they took part: Murder, breaking bones of Palestinian children, actions of humiliation, destruction of property, robbery and theft.
Soldier `A` testimony:
`We decided to turn an old shower in our base to a make-shift detention cell. A Palestinian was brought there, handcuffed and mouth banded so he couldn`t talk, or move. We `forgot him there for three days`...
Soldier `B` testimony:
`I was on my first patrol. Others simply shot like mad. I started to shoot as they did. They `set my on`. I took my weapon and shot. Nobody was there to tell me otherwise`
-- Psychologist Ishai-Karen was shocked to find that the soldiers enjoyed the `intoxication of power`, and had pleasure from using violence. She said: `Most of my interviewees enjoyed their own instigated violence during their Occupation service``.
Soldier `C` testimony:
`The truth is that I love this mess - I enjoy it. It is like being on drugs.
If I didn`t enter Rafah, to put down some rebellion -at least once a week-
I`d go berserk.
Soldier `D` testimony:
What is great is that you don`t have to follow any law or rule. You feel that YOU ARE THE LAW; you decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories YOU ARE GOD`.
Emotional dumbness
Soldier `E` testimony:
We drove an APC through Rafah. A man of 25 walked nearby. He didn`t hurl a
stone at us or anything. Then without any reason `X` shot him in the stomach. We left him lying on the sidewalk`.
Soldier `F` testimony:
Some `tough guys` developed it into `an ideology`, according to which we have to react brutally even for minor events. A woman threw a sandal at me. I kicked her with my foot at her crotch. I broke her. She can`t have children any longer. Next time she won`t throw sandals at me... and when another woman spat at me she got the butt of my gun in her face. She can`t spit now.
Soldier `G` described his first forced entry to a home to detain a
Palestinian:
`He was real big, some 30 years old. He refused detention. We hit
him but couldn`t force him down. Some people came hurling stones at us. We
beat him and told him to lie down. Till he finally did. We drove to the base
with him. By that time he had lost consciousness. He died some days later`.
Nofer Ishai-Karen: `Some NCOs encouraged the soldiers to behave brutally, and provided their own example.
Soldier `H` testimony:
After two months in Rafah a new NCO commander arrived. The first patrol, which he commanded, was at 06 hours. Rafah was under curfew. Not a soul was on the street. Then he saw a young boy, of about 4, playing in the sand in the courtyard of his home. The kid was building a castle in the sand. Suddenly the NCO, a guy from the Engineers Corps, ran to chase the kid. We followed. He captured the kid and broke his elbow. Broke the kid`s elbow! Damn me if I`m not telling the truth! Then the NCO treaded on the kid`s stomach three times, before he moved on. We couldn`t believe our eyes... But the next day we went on patrol with that guy and the soldiers started to imitate him...
What happened then?
Some guys couldn`t stomach it. The case of severe abuse of three young
adolescents, who were bounded hand and foot by a staff sergeant, got them to
alert a senior officer. `When the medic arrived the boys were bleeding all
over, their clothes were soaked with blood, and they were shivering from fear.
They were made to kneel like dogs and were afraid to move`. The NCO was
punished by 3 months detention. But the platoon commander backed the NCO and
reprimanded the conscientious soldiers for `defaming the platoon`.`
Nofer Ishai-Karen: The sacred value in the [Israeli] Army is `fighters`
solidarity`, i.e., loyalty towards your fellow combatants. The platoons
protected its secrets, as a family defends its `black sheep`. The fellows
regard as `traitors` the conscientious soldiers, says Nofer Ishai-Karen. The
cover-up was complete when our `good guy` was excommunicated and ostracized by the entire platoon. And the NCO? He left the country, and now lives in the U.S. of A. The majority of the soldiers of these platoons had left Israel. Only five or six remain in Israel.
Nofer studied two platoons ESHBAL and ESHKHAR, the last was more extremely
violent, she says.
Finally back to Ilan Vilenda, the only soldier who allowed Nofer to use his
full name and even be photographed. Vilenda was a staff sergeant in charge of `operations`.
ILAN` VILENDA`S testimony:
`Our job was to beat them... I personally hit a boy and another. I used my
hands or the truncheon. We beat more severely [Palestinian] adults. We acted
like policemen but we acted outside the law. There was this Palestinian who
had a TV at home. The World Cup in Soccer was on, and we used to invade his
privacy to watch the games. After a while he had enough, and asked us take the TV set and move.
`I was born on a Kibbutz, to a family whose values were humane `Zionist left
wing`. The Palestinians threw tons of stones at us. Whereas at the beginning
my ideological commitment restrained my actions, my anger accumulated, and I
released it violently. It was meant to be. We were there `to make them
[Palestinians] pay. My political views changed too. I now support the extreme-right-religious National-Religious Party. After his release from the army, Vilenda and 5 other Israelis were arrested in Goa, India for possession of LSD. `I wanted to serve my country. This was my task... but the entire IDF is executing illegal-orders.
Who is responsible?
General Matan Vilna`i [now serving under Ehud Barak as vice Minister of
Defense] was at the time [during the FIRST INTIFADA] Chief of the IDF Southern Command. He often visited our platoon and discussed with soldiers, says Nofer But... there you go... the `Instruments of DENIAL and CONCEALMENT` went to work...`
Besides: The Israeli Army didn`t provide the unit with regular training, not
were the soldiers given regular leaves, or provided with free time to
recuperate and recover. The interviewed soldiers maintained that the longer
they operated [against the Palestinians in Rafah] without leave, the more
violent they became in imposing their kind of `Law and Order`. They claimed
`Army [commanders] were aware of the erosion towards violence, and encouraged it in order to save manpower`.
NOTES:
General Matan Vilna`i must have known what happened. High-ranking officers who served on the Occupied West Bank had voiced similar warnings against Israeli Army behavior. `The orders left a wide gap, a margin... of intentionally un-specified `grey zone`, which encouraged violent behavior of soldiers`, said Reserve Colonel Elisha Shapira, who served in the Nablus Area at the same time. Soldiers were told `don`t hit Palestinians - but bring them to interrogation `swell-headed` - blown-up`.
The events, which Nofer Ishai-Karen researched, happened some 17 years ago.
The situation has further deteriorated since that time. Now Israeli Army and
Air Force General openly take pride in acts of revenge against Palestinian
civilians. Maj-Gen Eliezer Shkeidi took pride in announcing that his pilots
break the sound barrier over Gaza, producing sonic booms.
These cause severe PTSD symptoms among young children; they have also caused
miscarriages among pregnant women. The indiscriminate shelling of Palestinian homes had caused many deaths lately, including many children. Perhaps last but not least: The Israeli cabinet, backed by Washington, said it would disrupt power and fuel supply to Gaza.
[1] This is an abbreviated translation of an article by Dalia Karpel titled
HAMEDOVEVET [=the one who makes people talk]. The article appeared on the
Hebrew Weekend Supplement, on 21 September 2007. It is based on academic
research, which Nofer Ishai-Karen and Psychology Prof. Joel Elizur, of the
Hebrew University published in ALPAYIM Magazine Vol. 31.
[2] The article was not translated to English and thus did NOT appear in
Haaretz English Language edition.
[3] Psychology Prof. Joel Elizur, of the Hebrew University, who guided Nofer Ishai-Karen in her Master`s thesis, served in the reserves in the Mental Health Department of the Israeli Army. But the IDF wouldn`t allow him to research into Israeli Soldiers` violence. The researchers hold the interview raw audio material.
[4] To my best knowledge the Israeli Army hasn`t either charged a single case of abuse or murder by soldiers of Palestinians in proper court.
RH
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About Me
- Steve Lewis
- Prophesy bearer for four religious traditions, revealer of Christ's Sword, revealer of Josephine bearing the Spirit of Christ, revealer of the identity of God, revealer of the Celestial Torah astro-theological code within the Bible. Celestial Torah Christian Theologian, Climax Civilization theorist and activist, Eco-Village Organizer, Master Psychedelic Artist, Inventor of the Next Big Thing in wearable tech, and always your Prophet-At-Large.