U.S. Applauds Arab League Attendance at AnnapolisNovember 26, 2007 Eli E. Hertz
Myths and Facts
The Arab League, which has systematically opposed and blocked peace efforts for 60 years and is to this moment in a declared state-of-war with Israel, and more recently, proudly and publicly supported the deeds of suicide bombers, is now deemed by the United States Administration to have something significant to contribute regarding the peace with Israel.
One is struck by the fact that most of the 21 Arab states that will be represented by the Arab League in Annapolis are rated and categorized as some of the worst offenders of human rights for which:
"Political rights are absent or virtually nonexistent as a result of the extremely oppressive nature of the regime or severe oppression in combination with civil war. States and territories in this group may also be marked by extreme violence or warlord rule that dominates political power in the absence of an authoritative, functioning central government."1
President Bush in a speech given on March 8, 2005 had this to say about freedom and democracy in the world:
"It should be clear that the advance of democracy leads to peace because governments that respect the rights of their people also respect the rights of their neighbors ... it should be clear the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance kindled in free societies."2 (emphasis added)
In Annapolis, President Bush is ready to surrender his Freedom and Democracy Principle - endangering the very survival of the Jewish state and advancing Palestinian society's belief that violence pays-off.
Professor, Judge Schwebel, the former President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) explains:
"... no legal right shall spring from a wrong, and the Charter principle that the Members of the United Nations shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State."3
Simply stated: Arab illegal aggression against the territorial integrity and political independence of Israel, can not and should not be rewarded.
The outcome of consistent Arab aggression was best described by Schwebel:
"As between Israel, acting defensively in 1948 and 1967, on the one hand, and her Arab neighbours, acting aggressively in 1948 and 1967, on the other, Israel has better title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem."4 (emphasis added)
It is most important for the people of Israel and Jews everywhere not to forget the late Israeli diplomat Abba Eban that in an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, described Israel's pre-Six-Day War borders as "Auschwitz" lines.
Eban, a lifetime dove, vowed:
"We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. We shudder when we think of what would have awaited us in the circumstances of June, 1967, if we had been defeated; with Syrians on the mountain and we in the valley, with the Jordanian army in sight of the sea, with the Egyptians who hold our throat in their hands in Gaza. This is a situation which will never be repeated in history."5
Is devastating Israel cheaper than democratizing the members of the Arab League?
Freedom House, an NGO founded nearly sixty years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt, monitors the degree of freedom accorded citizens of various countries according to various parameters, and classifies countries accordingly. For the full report see: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=1.
Jim VandeHei, Washington Post, Wednesday, March 9, 2005.
Professor, Judge Schwebel. What Weight to Conquest? in "Justice in International Law", Cambridge University Press, 1994. Opinions quoted in this critiques are not derived from his position as a judge of the ICJ.
Ibid.
Abba Eban: "The June 1967 map represented Israel's 'Auschwitz' borders," http://israelvisit.co.il/cgi-bin/friendly.pl?url=Nov-17-02!silvertongue.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
IS ISRAEL A JEWISH STATE?
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
http://www.boston. com/bostonglobe/ editorial_ opinion/oped/ articles/ 2007/11/14/ is_israel_ a_jewish_ state
In advance of the upcoming diplomatic conference in Annapolis, Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced the other day that he expects the Palestinian Authority to finally acknowledge Israel's existence as a Jewish state. A newly arrived visitor from Mars might wonder why this should even be an issue -- after all, Israel *is* a Jewish state. If the more than 55 countries that make up the Organization of the Islamic Conference are entitled to recognition as Muslim states, and if the 22 members of the Arab League are universally accepted as Arab states, why should anyone balk at acknowledging Israel as the world's lone Jewish state?
Yet Olmert's demand was rebuffed. Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian Authority negotiator, said on Monday that Palestinians would refuse to recognize Israel's Jewish identity on the grounds that "it is not acceptable for a country to link its national character to a specific religion." According to the Jerusalem Post, Erekat told Radio Palestine: "There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined. "
In fact, there are many countries in which national identity and religion are linked. Argentinian law mandates government support for the Roman Catholic faith. Queen Elizabeth II is the supreme governor of the Church of England. In the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the constitution proclaims Buddhism the nation's "spiritual heritage." The Danish and Norwegian royal families must be members, respectively, of the Church of Denmark and the Church of Norway. "The prevailing religion in Greece," declares Section II of the Greek Constitution, "is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ."
In no region of the world do countries so routinely link their national character to a specific religion as in the Muslim Middle East. The flag of Saudi Arabia features the shahada -- the Islamic declaration of faith -- in white Arabic script on a green background; on the Iranian flag, the Islamic phrase "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great") appears 22 times. And then there is Erekat's own Palestinian Authority, whose Basic Law provides in Article 4 that "Islam is the official religion in Palestine" and that "the principles of Islamic sharia shall be the main source of legislation. "
Clearly, then, Erekat and the Palestinian Authority do not refuse to accept Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state out of some principled opposition to linking national and religious identity. Perhaps, our visiting Martian might surmise, their objection is simply tactical: Are the Palestinians withholding formal recognition from Israel in order to extract some corresponding recognition for themselves?
But that explanation also doesn't hold water. Olmert has repeatedly endorsed the creation of a sovereign state of Palestine. "We support the establishment of a modern, democratic Palestinian state," he says. "The existence of two nations, one Jewish and one Palestinian, is the full solution to the national aspirations and problems of each of the peoples." Last week he went so far as to suggest that a plan for Palestinian peace and statehood might be achieved "even before the end of President Bush's term in office."
So why won't the leaders of the Palestinian Authority acknowledge the obvious -- that Israel is the Jewish state? The Jewish connection to Palestine is a matter not just of rich historical fact, but of international law. When the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, it expressly recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and the rightfulness of "reconstituting their national home in that country." By that point, Britain had already transferred 80 percent of historic Palestine to Arab rule -- today's Muslim kingdom of Jordan. All that remained for a Jewish state was the residual 20 percent (and even that was later subdivided). But there, at least, it was clear that the Jewish community was "in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance," as Winston Churchill underscored at the time.
Eighty-five years later, that small sliver of the Middle East is home to nearly half the world's Jews. If that isn't a Jewish state, what is?
Yet all this is beside the point. The refusal of the Palestinian Authority, and for that matter most of the Arab world, to acknowledge Israel as a legitimate Jewish state isn't a denial of reality; it is a sign of their determination to undo that reality. Like Arab leaders going back a century, they seek to live not in peace with the Jewish state, but in place of the Jewish state. Olmert can show up at Annapolis bearing Palestinian sovereignty on a silver platter, with half of Jerusalem thrown in for good measure. He will not walk away with peace. On the contrary: He will intensify the Arab determination to replace the world's one Jewish state with a 23rd Arab state.
The key to Arab-Israeli peace is not Palestinian statehood. It is to compel the Arab world to abandon its dream of liquidating Israel. As a matter of national self-respect, Olmert should repeat his demand that the Palestinians acknowledge Israel's Jewish identity -- and make it nonnegotiable. If Israel cannot insist even on so fundamental a point of honor, it has already lost more than it knows.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
The Boston Globe
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
http://www.boston. com/bostonglobe/ editorial_ opinion/oped/ articles/ 2007/11/14/ is_israel_ a_jewish_ state
In advance of the upcoming diplomatic conference in Annapolis, Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced the other day that he expects the Palestinian Authority to finally acknowledge Israel's existence as a Jewish state. A newly arrived visitor from Mars might wonder why this should even be an issue -- after all, Israel *is* a Jewish state. If the more than 55 countries that make up the Organization of the Islamic Conference are entitled to recognition as Muslim states, and if the 22 members of the Arab League are universally accepted as Arab states, why should anyone balk at acknowledging Israel as the world's lone Jewish state?
Yet Olmert's demand was rebuffed. Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian Authority negotiator, said on Monday that Palestinians would refuse to recognize Israel's Jewish identity on the grounds that "it is not acceptable for a country to link its national character to a specific religion." According to the Jerusalem Post, Erekat told Radio Palestine: "There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined. "
In fact, there are many countries in which national identity and religion are linked. Argentinian law mandates government support for the Roman Catholic faith. Queen Elizabeth II is the supreme governor of the Church of England. In the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the constitution proclaims Buddhism the nation's "spiritual heritage." The Danish and Norwegian royal families must be members, respectively, of the Church of Denmark and the Church of Norway. "The prevailing religion in Greece," declares Section II of the Greek Constitution, "is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ."
In no region of the world do countries so routinely link their national character to a specific religion as in the Muslim Middle East. The flag of Saudi Arabia features the shahada -- the Islamic declaration of faith -- in white Arabic script on a green background; on the Iranian flag, the Islamic phrase "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great") appears 22 times. And then there is Erekat's own Palestinian Authority, whose Basic Law provides in Article 4 that "Islam is the official religion in Palestine" and that "the principles of Islamic sharia shall be the main source of legislation. "
Clearly, then, Erekat and the Palestinian Authority do not refuse to accept Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state out of some principled opposition to linking national and religious identity. Perhaps, our visiting Martian might surmise, their objection is simply tactical: Are the Palestinians withholding formal recognition from Israel in order to extract some corresponding recognition for themselves?
But that explanation also doesn't hold water. Olmert has repeatedly endorsed the creation of a sovereign state of Palestine. "We support the establishment of a modern, democratic Palestinian state," he says. "The existence of two nations, one Jewish and one Palestinian, is the full solution to the national aspirations and problems of each of the peoples." Last week he went so far as to suggest that a plan for Palestinian peace and statehood might be achieved "even before the end of President Bush's term in office."
So why won't the leaders of the Palestinian Authority acknowledge the obvious -- that Israel is the Jewish state? The Jewish connection to Palestine is a matter not just of rich historical fact, but of international law. When the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, it expressly recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and the rightfulness of "reconstituting their national home in that country." By that point, Britain had already transferred 80 percent of historic Palestine to Arab rule -- today's Muslim kingdom of Jordan. All that remained for a Jewish state was the residual 20 percent (and even that was later subdivided). But there, at least, it was clear that the Jewish community was "in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance," as Winston Churchill underscored at the time.
Eighty-five years later, that small sliver of the Middle East is home to nearly half the world's Jews. If that isn't a Jewish state, what is?
Yet all this is beside the point. The refusal of the Palestinian Authority, and for that matter most of the Arab world, to acknowledge Israel as a legitimate Jewish state isn't a denial of reality; it is a sign of their determination to undo that reality. Like Arab leaders going back a century, they seek to live not in peace with the Jewish state, but in place of the Jewish state. Olmert can show up at Annapolis bearing Palestinian sovereignty on a silver platter, with half of Jerusalem thrown in for good measure. He will not walk away with peace. On the contrary: He will intensify the Arab determination to replace the world's one Jewish state with a 23rd Arab state.
The key to Arab-Israeli peace is not Palestinian statehood. It is to compel the Arab world to abandon its dream of liquidating Israel. As a matter of national self-respect, Olmert should repeat his demand that the Palestinians acknowledge Israel's Jewish identity -- and make it nonnegotiable. If Israel cannot insist even on so fundamental a point of honor, it has already lost more than it knows.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
Our World: Islam and The nation-state
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Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Nov. 12, 2007
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Throughout the world, one of the most prevalent causes of war, terrorism and political instability is the ongoing weakening of the nation-state system. There are several reasons that the nation-state as a political unit of sovereignty is under threat. One of the most basic causes of this continuous erosion of national power throughout the world is the transformation of minority-dominated enclaves within nation-states into ungovernable areas where state power is either not applied or applied in a haphazard and generally unconstructive manner.
While domestic strife between majority and minority populations has been an enduring feature of democratic and indeed all societies throughout history, the current turbulence constitutes a unique challenge to the nation-state system. This is because much of the internal strife between minority and majority populations within states today is financed and often directed from outside the country.
Traditionally, minorities used various local means to engage the majority population in a bid to influence the political direction or cultural norms of the nation state. The classic examples of this traditional minority-majority engagement are the black civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s and the labor movements in the West throughout the 20th century. By and large, these movements were domestic protests informed by national sensibilities even when they enjoyed the support of foreign governments.
Today while similar movements continue to flourish, they are now being superseded by a new type of minority challenge to national majorities.
This challenge is not primarily the result of domestic injustice but the consequence of foreign agitation. The roots of these minority challenges are found outside the borders of the targeted states. And their goals are not limited to a call for the reform of national institutions and politics. Rather they set their sights on weakening national institutions and eroding national sovereignty.
MUSLIM MINORITIES throughout the world are being financed and ideologically trained in Saudi and UAE funded mosques and Islamic centers. These minorities act in strikingly similar manners in the countries where they are situated throughout the world. On the one hand, their local political leaders demand extraordinary communal rights, rights accorded neither to the national majority nor to other minority populations. On the other hand, Muslim neighborhoods, particularly in Europe, but also in Israel, the Philippines and Australia, are rendered increasingly ungovernable as arms of the state like the police and tax authorities come under attack when they attempt to assert state power in these Muslim communities.
Logic would have it that targeted states would respond to the threat to their authority through a dual strategy. On the one hand, they would firmly assert their authority by enforcing their laws against both individual lawbreakers and against subversive, foreign financed institutions that incite the overthrow of their governments and their replacement with Islamic governments. On the other hand, they would seek out and empower local Muslims who accept the authority and legitimacy of their states and their rule of law.
Unfortunately, with the notable exception of the Howard government in Australia, in country after country, governments respond to this challenge by attempting to appease Muslim irredentists and their state sponsors. The British responded to the July 7, 2005 bombings by giving representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood an official role in crafting and carrying out counter-terror policies.
In 2003, then French president Jacques Chirac sent then interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy to Egypt to seek the permission of Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi of the Islamist al-Azhar mosque for the French parliament's plan to outlaw hijabs in French schools.
In the US, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI asked the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations to conduct sensitivity training for FBI agents.
In Holland last year, the Dutch government effectively expelled anti-Islamist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the interest of currying favor with Holland's restive Muslim minority.
THE FOREIGN policy aspect of the rush to appease is twofold. First, targeted states refuse to support one another when individual governments attempt to use the tools of law enforcement to handle their domestic jihad threat. For instance, European states have harshly criticized the US Patriot Act while the US criticized the French decision to prohibit the hijab in public schools.
More acutely, targeted states lead the charge in calling for the establishment of Muslim-only states. Today the US and the EU are leading the charge towards the establishment of a Palestinian state and the creation of an independent state of Kosovo.
In two weeks, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will host the Annapolis conference where together with her European and Arab counterparts, she will exert enormous pressure on the Olmert government to agree to the establishment of a jihadist Palestinian state in Israel's heartland with its capital in Jerusalem and its sovereignty extending over Judaism's most sacred site, the Temple Mount.
The establishment of the sought-for Palestinian state presupposes the ethnic cleansing of at a minimum 80,000 Israelis from their homes and communities simply because they are Jews. Jews of course will be prohibited from living in Palestine.
FOR ITS part, the Palestinian leadership to which Israel will be expected to communicate its acceptance of the establishment of Palestine, is one part criminal, and two parts jihadist. As Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues have made clear, while they are willing to accept Israel's concessions, they are not willing to accept Israel. This is why they refuse to acknowledge Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.
A rare consensus exists today in Israel. From the far-left to the far-right, from IDF Military Intelligence to the Mossad, all agree that the Annapolis conference will fail to bring a peace accord. Since Rice's approach to reaching just such an accord has been to apply unrelenting pressure on Israel, it is fairly clear that she will blame Israel for the conference's preordained failure and cause a further deterioration in US-Israeli relations.
While Israel is supposed to accept a Jew-free Palestine, it goes without saying that its own 20 percent Arab minority will continue to enjoy the full rights of Israeli citizenship. Yet one of the direct consequences of the establishment of a Jew-free, pro-jihadist State of Palestine will be the further radicalization of Israeli Arabs. They will intensify their current rejection of Israel's national identity.
With Palestinian and outside support, they will intensify their irredentist activities and so exert an even more devastating attack on Israel's sovereignty and right to national self-determination.
SHORTLY AFTER the Annapolis conference fails, and no doubt in a bid to buck up its standing with the Arab world, the US may well stand by its stated intention to recognize the independence of Kosovo.
On December 10, the UN-sponsored troika from the US, Russia and Germany is due to present their report on the ongoing UN-sponsored negotiations between the Kosovo Muslims and the Serbian government regarding the future of the restive province of Serbia. Since the Kosovo Muslims insist on full sovereignty and Serbia's government refuses to accept Kosovo's independence, those talks are deadlocked. Since Russia refuses to support Kosovo's removal from Serbia, there is no chance that the UN Security Council will pass a resolution calling for Kosovar independence.
The push for Kosovar independence was begun by the Clinton administration. It was the natural consequence of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Yet the basic assumptions of that bombing campaign have been turned on their head in recent years. In 1999, Serbia was run by a murderous dictator Slobodan Milosovic. He stood accused of ethnically cleansing Kosovo of its Muslim population which was perceived as innocent. Today, led by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia is taking bold steps towards becoming a liberal democracy which abjures ethnic cleansing and political violence. On the other hand, the Saudi-financed Kosovo Muslims have destroyed more than 150 churches over the past several years, and have terrorized Kosovar Christians and so led to their mass exodus from the province.
As Julia Gorin documented in a recent article in Jewish World Review, Kosovo's connections with Albanian criminal syndicates and global jihadists are legion. Moreover, Kosovar independence would likely spur irredentist movements among the Muslim minorities in all Balkan states. In Macedonia for instance, a quarter of the population is Muslim. These irredentist movements in turn would increase Muslim irredentism throughout Europe just as Palestinian statehood will foment an intensification of the Islamization of Israel's Arab minority.
The Kosovo government announced last month that given the diplomatic impasse, it plans to declare its independence next month. Currently, the Bush administration is signaling its willingness to recognize an independent Kosovo even though doing so will threaten US-Russian relations.
In a bid both to prevent the Bush administration from turning on Israel in the aftermath of the failure of the Annapolis conference and to make clear Israel's own rejection of the notion that a "solution" to the Palestinian conflict with Israel can be imposed by foreign powers, the Olmert government should immediately and loudly restate its opposition to the imposition of Kosovar independence on Serbia.
In the interest of defending the nation-state system, on which American sovereignty and foreign policy is based, the US should reassess the logic of its support for the establishment of Muslim-only states. It should similarly revisit its refusal to openly support the right of non-Islamic states like Israel, Serbia and even France, to assert their rights to defend their sovereignty, national security and national character from outside-sponsored domestic Islamic subversion.
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Copyright 1995- 2007 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/
Myths and Facts - "The truth is not always win, but it is always right"
November 13 , 2007 | Eli E. Hertz
Is antisemitism1 Coming to Annapolis?
"Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation" is antisemitism.
U.S. Department of State
Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/56589.htm
A case in point: Yardsticks - Turkey versus Israel.
For over 44 years, Turkey has knocked on Europe's door requesting membership in the European Union. The Europeans, however, have been in no rush to invite a Muslim country into their midst, even if it is the most westernized and most democratic Muslim country in the Middle East. To add to it, Turkey is already a strategic partner in NATO and nearly 3 million of its citizens are peaceful and productive immigrants/guest workers in Europe.
Joining the EU, however, demands of Turkey far-reaching political and social reform "on the ground" and "10 to 15 years of negotiations" while the Turks prove democratic changes are "irreversible."2
On the other end, U.S. (and the Quartet) yardsticks for the Palestinian Arabs, a hostile society, demanding acceptance into the Family of Nations, amounts to praise for fabricated non-existent reforms and calls to abandon the required incremental progress as clearly stated in the "goal-driven Roadmap."3
The end to violence and democratic reform, that Palestinians have yet to begin, is tolerable by the U.S. administration - all in order to forge the way for the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, one which will endanger the very survival of a democratic Israel and the rest of the free world.
Comparison of the goals and the ramifications of each: The Turks' goal is membership in the European Union - a political alliance that the Europeans have already stated will have an iron-clad reversibility clause for Turkey if it fails to live up to its commitments.
The Palestinians' goal is sovereignty as a State - status for which there is no reversibility mechanism if 'Palestine'4 turns into a rogue state - the kind of polity the U.S. is currently grappling with in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.
Logically, the yardsticks of judging readiness and maturity should be at least equal, if not more stringent for the Palestinian Arabs, a society that consciously and purposely sacrifices its own youth for political gain and tactical advantage, with a leadership that champions suicide bombers.5
These "realities on the ground" are totally ignored by the U.S. in its effort to advance immediate Palestinian statehood, come hell or high water.
Requiring Israel to cede parts of its land in favour of the Palestinians' empty promises, while their Charters call for the dismantling of the Jewish State, is "applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation." Clearly, antisemitism comes in many forms...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. The term Semite refers broadly to speakers of a language group which includes both Arabs and Jews. However, the term antisemitism is specifically used in reference to attitudes held towards Jews.
2. For EU benchmarks see:
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/04/1180&format=HTML&aged=0&language=en&guiLan guage=en.
3. A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. See U.S. Department of State at:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/20062.htm.
4. Before local Jews began calling themselves Israelis in 1948 (when the name "Israel" was chosen for the newly-established Jewish State), the term "Palestine" applied almost exclusively to Jews and the institutions founded by new Jewish immigrants in the first half of the 20th century, before the state's independence. For more see the "Mandate for Palestine" at:
http://www.mythsandfacts.com/Conflict/mandate_for_palestine/MandateN2%20-%2010-29-07-English.pdf.
5. See Children Dying To Kill at:
http://www.mythsandfacts.com/Conflict/9/childrendyingtokill1.htm#B1.
Is antisemitism1 Coming to Annapolis?
"Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation" is antisemitism.
U.S. Department of State
Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/56589.htm
A case in point: Yardsticks - Turkey versus Israel.
For over 44 years, Turkey has knocked on Europe's door requesting membership in the European Union. The Europeans, however, have been in no rush to invite a Muslim country into their midst, even if it is the most westernized and most democratic Muslim country in the Middle East. To add to it, Turkey is already a strategic partner in NATO and nearly 3 million of its citizens are peaceful and productive immigrants/guest workers in Europe.
Joining the EU, however, demands of Turkey far-reaching political and social reform "on the ground" and "10 to 15 years of negotiations" while the Turks prove democratic changes are "irreversible."2
On the other end, U.S. (and the Quartet) yardsticks for the Palestinian Arabs, a hostile society, demanding acceptance into the Family of Nations, amounts to praise for fabricated non-existent reforms and calls to abandon the required incremental progress as clearly stated in the "goal-driven Roadmap."3
The end to violence and democratic reform, that Palestinians have yet to begin, is tolerable by the U.S. administration - all in order to forge the way for the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, one which will endanger the very survival of a democratic Israel and the rest of the free world.
Comparison of the goals and the ramifications of each: The Turks' goal is membership in the European Union - a political alliance that the Europeans have already stated will have an iron-clad reversibility clause for Turkey if it fails to live up to its commitments.
The Palestinians' goal is sovereignty as a State - status for which there is no reversibility mechanism if 'Palestine'4 turns into a rogue state - the kind of polity the U.S. is currently grappling with in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.
Logically, the yardsticks of judging readiness and maturity should be at least equal, if not more stringent for the Palestinian Arabs, a society that consciously and purposely sacrifices its own youth for political gain and tactical advantage, with a leadership that champions suicide bombers.5
These "realities on the ground" are totally ignored by the U.S. in its effort to advance immediate Palestinian statehood, come hell or high water.
Requiring Israel to cede parts of its land in favour of the Palestinians' empty promises, while their Charters call for the dismantling of the Jewish State, is "applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation." Clearly, antisemitism comes in many forms...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. The term Semite refers broadly to speakers of a language group which includes both Arabs and Jews. However, the term antisemitism is specifically used in reference to attitudes held towards Jews.
2. For EU benchmarks see:
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/04/1180&format=HTML&aged=0&language=en&guiLan guage=en.
3. A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. See U.S. Department of State at:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/20062.htm.
4. Before local Jews began calling themselves Israelis in 1948 (when the name "Israel" was chosen for the newly-established Jewish State), the term "Palestine" applied almost exclusively to Jews and the institutions founded by new Jewish immigrants in the first half of the 20th century, before the state's independence. For more see the "Mandate for Palestine" at:
http://www.mythsandfacts.com/Conflict/mandate_for_palestine/MandateN2%20-%2010-29-07-English.pdf.
5. See Children Dying To Kill at:
http://www.mythsandfacts.com/Conflict/9/childrendyingtokill1.htm#B1.
Monday, November 12, 2007
PA/PLO - Israel? Ok. Jewish Israel? No way
Antisemitism
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By Stan Goodenough
November 12, 2007
Just weeks before the Bush administration is set to convene its conference on the creation of Palestine, one of the PLO/PA's most senior spokesman declared that the "Palestinians" will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Saeb Erekat was speaking on Palestine Radio Monday when he gave the rationale for the "Palestinian" position.
"There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined," he said.
The words thus spelled out by PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas' right hand man shone light on a central component of the deceptive, and usually hidden, PLO strategy whose end goal has always been the eradication of a sovereign Jewish state from the Muslim Middle East.
Since US President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker began the land-for-peace process in 1991, a demand made on the PLO and other elements in the anti-Israel terrorist front has consistently been that they recognize the State of Israel.
After ducking and diving their way around this demand, the Arab side finally found the key:
They would recognize Israel as "a state" but not as a "Jewish state."
To this end they - including the Palestinian Arabs who enjoy Israeli citizenship - support the institution of a "one-man-one-vote" democracy that will erode and finally erase Israel's identity as "a Jewish state."
The PLO's insistence that the "right of return" be given to all its refugees is designed to help hasten the explosion of the demographic time bomb.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected this position outright.
"We won't hold negotiations on our existence as a Jewish state, this is a launching point for all negotiations," he said.
"We won't have an argument with anyone in the world over the fact that Israel is a state of the Jewish people.
“Whoever does not accept this cannot hold any negotiations with me. This has been made clear to the Palestinians and the Americans."
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Our World: Our friends the Syrians
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 3, 2007
Just ahead of Sunday's Duma elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin took yet another step towards ending the post-Cold War thaw in Russia's relations with the West by signing a law suspending Russia's participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Starting next week, Russia will halt NATO countries' inspections and verifications of its military sites and will no longer be obligated to limit the number of its conventional weapons deployed west of the Urals. The signal the move sends former Soviet republics and satellites like Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Rumania is a chilling one.
Russia's hostility towards the West extends from Europe to the Middle East. During Israel's war with Hizbullah in 2006, Russian military advisors in Syria provided real-time intelligence to both Syria and Hizbullah. Hizbullah's missiles were transferred to the terrorist organization in their original packing from Syria's Ministry of Defense after they arrived from Russia. Since the war, Russia has sold massive amounts of advanced arms to both Syria and Iran. Russian arms continue to comprise the bulwark of Hizbullah's newly replenished missile stocks.
Diplomatically, Russia has acted as Syria's and Iran's shield in the UN Security Council and other international forums. It has placed obstacles on the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has prevented the Security Council from taking any consequential actions against Iran's nuclear weapons program. And it has continued its sponsorship of Iran's nuclear program by maintaining its involvement at the Bushehr nuclear reactor which it built. Just this week, the pro-Iranian IAEA approved Russia's plan to ship nuclear fuel to Bushehr.
IN THE midst of all of this, in their wisdom, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government have decided to accept Russia as the lead mediator in negotiations between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights.
According to reports in Ma'ariv, Olmert has been conducting secret talks with Assad regarding an Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights through Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov. At the Annapolis conference last week, those talks - and Russia's central role in promoting them - were brought into the open.
Olmert agreed to Israeli participation in a Russian remake of Annapolis in Moscow in January. There, Syria's demand for an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will take center stage.
According to the Ma'ariv report, Israeli officials are enthusiastic about Russia's lead role in the talks. While Syria is suspicious of the US, it trusts and respects its Russian defender Putin. By Olmert's lights, this is a good thing.
RUSSIA'S hostility towards the US and Israel and close ties to Israel's primary enemies Syria and Iran make Israel's enthusiastic embrace of Russian mediation with Syria difficult to stomach. Sickening or not, it would make sense if in exchange for Israeli legitimacy, Moscow were to mitigate its bad behavior. But there have been no signs that this has occurred.
Ma'ariv claimed that Olmert's sudden visit to the Kremlin last month was a consequence of developments in Sultanov's shuttle diplomacy.
Perhaps this is true. But coming as it did immediately after Putin returned from his state visit to Iran, where he restated his support for Iran's development of nuclear technology and pledged to complete the Bushehr reactor, Olmert's visit was perceived as an Israeli acceptance of Russia's support for Iran.
There is the off chance that the officials who spoke with Ma'ariv are correct. Perhaps under Russian mediation the Syrians will be more willing to agree to sign an agreement with Israel in which Israel commits itself to handing the Golan Heights over to Damascus than it would be under American mediation. But such an agreement would be a strategic disaster for Israel.
Given the anti-democratic nature of the Russian and the Syrian regimes, it is clear that such an agreement would not include any strong provision for Syrian political liberalization. And since only a liberalization of Syrian politics could cause Damascus to abandon its support for jihad, its strategic alliance with Iran and its development of weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that an accord with Israel would not lead to a decrease in Syrian bellicosity.
Syria's abiding hostility makes the notion of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights strategically indefensible. Without the Golan, all of northern Israel would be exposed to Syrian forces. And those forces are vastly more powerful today than they were before 1967 when they made life for the Israeli communities beneath the strategic plateau unbearable. Indeed, given Syria's advanced Russian arsenal, it would be all but impossible for Israel to re-conquer the Golan Heights and so win a future war.
IN THE meantime, simply by conducting Russian-mediated negotiations with Syria, the Olmert government is conferring undeserved legitimacy on both Damascus and Moscow. By extension, the government is eroding Israel's regional posture still further.
The Olmert government isn't alone in its embrace of Damascus. The Bush administration is following a pro-Syrian policy of its own, with similarly disastrous results.
Speaking to the New York Times of the administration's decision to invite Syria to last week's Annapolis conference, a senior administration official argued, "Look, a handful in the Arab League were saying they could not attend the conference unless Syria was put on the agenda. So we put Syria on the agenda. What did it cost us? Nothing."
Although perhaps no actual money changed hands, to say that the US paid no price for its decision to invite Syria to participate in the conference is to ignore reality. What Syrian participation at Annapolis cost the US was Lebanon.
Immediately after the conference, the anti-Syrian majority in the Lebanese parliament agreed to support Syria's candidate, General Michel Suleiman as the next Lebanese president to replace Syrian agent, former president Emil Lahoud. As Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University told the Times, "The Syrians did not want to go to Annapolis and without them the conference would have been a failure…. The Syrians traded their participation, which did not cost them anything, with a deal on the Lebanese presidency."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Stan Goodenough
November 12, 2007
Just weeks before the Bush administration is set to convene its conference on the creation of Palestine, one of the PLO/PA's most senior spokesman declared that the "Palestinians" will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Saeb Erekat was speaking on Palestine Radio Monday when he gave the rationale for the "Palestinian" position.
"There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined," he said.
The words thus spelled out by PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas' right hand man shone light on a central component of the deceptive, and usually hidden, PLO strategy whose end goal has always been the eradication of a sovereign Jewish state from the Muslim Middle East.
Since US President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker began the land-for-peace process in 1991, a demand made on the PLO and other elements in the anti-Israel terrorist front has consistently been that they recognize the State of Israel.
After ducking and diving their way around this demand, the Arab side finally found the key:
They would recognize Israel as "a state" but not as a "Jewish state."
To this end they - including the Palestinian Arabs who enjoy Israeli citizenship - support the institution of a "one-man-one-vote" democracy that will erode and finally erase Israel's identity as "a Jewish state."
The PLO's insistence that the "right of return" be given to all its refugees is designed to help hasten the explosion of the demographic time bomb.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected this position outright.
"We won't hold negotiations on our existence as a Jewish state, this is a launching point for all negotiations," he said.
"We won't have an argument with anyone in the world over the fact that Israel is a state of the Jewish people.
“Whoever does not accept this cannot hold any negotiations with me. This has been made clear to the Palestinians and the Americans."
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Our World: Our friends the Syrians
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Dec. 3, 2007
Just ahead of Sunday's Duma elections, Russian President Vladimir Putin took yet another step towards ending the post-Cold War thaw in Russia's relations with the West by signing a law suspending Russia's participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Starting next week, Russia will halt NATO countries' inspections and verifications of its military sites and will no longer be obligated to limit the number of its conventional weapons deployed west of the Urals. The signal the move sends former Soviet republics and satellites like Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Rumania is a chilling one.
Russia's hostility towards the West extends from Europe to the Middle East. During Israel's war with Hizbullah in 2006, Russian military advisors in Syria provided real-time intelligence to both Syria and Hizbullah. Hizbullah's missiles were transferred to the terrorist organization in their original packing from Syria's Ministry of Defense after they arrived from Russia. Since the war, Russia has sold massive amounts of advanced arms to both Syria and Iran. Russian arms continue to comprise the bulwark of Hizbullah's newly replenished missile stocks.
Diplomatically, Russia has acted as Syria's and Iran's shield in the UN Security Council and other international forums. It has placed obstacles on the UN investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. It has prevented the Security Council from taking any consequential actions against Iran's nuclear weapons program. And it has continued its sponsorship of Iran's nuclear program by maintaining its involvement at the Bushehr nuclear reactor which it built. Just this week, the pro-Iranian IAEA approved Russia's plan to ship nuclear fuel to Bushehr.
IN THE midst of all of this, in their wisdom, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government have decided to accept Russia as the lead mediator in negotiations between Israel and Syria towards an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights.
According to reports in Ma'ariv, Olmert has been conducting secret talks with Assad regarding an Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights through Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov. At the Annapolis conference last week, those talks - and Russia's central role in promoting them - were brought into the open.
Olmert agreed to Israeli participation in a Russian remake of Annapolis in Moscow in January. There, Syria's demand for an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will take center stage.
According to the Ma'ariv report, Israeli officials are enthusiastic about Russia's lead role in the talks. While Syria is suspicious of the US, it trusts and respects its Russian defender Putin. By Olmert's lights, this is a good thing.
RUSSIA'S hostility towards the US and Israel and close ties to Israel's primary enemies Syria and Iran make Israel's enthusiastic embrace of Russian mediation with Syria difficult to stomach. Sickening or not, it would make sense if in exchange for Israeli legitimacy, Moscow were to mitigate its bad behavior. But there have been no signs that this has occurred.
Ma'ariv claimed that Olmert's sudden visit to the Kremlin last month was a consequence of developments in Sultanov's shuttle diplomacy.
Perhaps this is true. But coming as it did immediately after Putin returned from his state visit to Iran, where he restated his support for Iran's development of nuclear technology and pledged to complete the Bushehr reactor, Olmert's visit was perceived as an Israeli acceptance of Russia's support for Iran.
There is the off chance that the officials who spoke with Ma'ariv are correct. Perhaps under Russian mediation the Syrians will be more willing to agree to sign an agreement with Israel in which Israel commits itself to handing the Golan Heights over to Damascus than it would be under American mediation. But such an agreement would be a strategic disaster for Israel.
Given the anti-democratic nature of the Russian and the Syrian regimes, it is clear that such an agreement would not include any strong provision for Syrian political liberalization. And since only a liberalization of Syrian politics could cause Damascus to abandon its support for jihad, its strategic alliance with Iran and its development of weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that an accord with Israel would not lead to a decrease in Syrian bellicosity.
Syria's abiding hostility makes the notion of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights strategically indefensible. Without the Golan, all of northern Israel would be exposed to Syrian forces. And those forces are vastly more powerful today than they were before 1967 when they made life for the Israeli communities beneath the strategic plateau unbearable. Indeed, given Syria's advanced Russian arsenal, it would be all but impossible for Israel to re-conquer the Golan Heights and so win a future war.
IN THE meantime, simply by conducting Russian-mediated negotiations with Syria, the Olmert government is conferring undeserved legitimacy on both Damascus and Moscow. By extension, the government is eroding Israel's regional posture still further.
The Olmert government isn't alone in its embrace of Damascus. The Bush administration is following a pro-Syrian policy of its own, with similarly disastrous results.
Speaking to the New York Times of the administration's decision to invite Syria to last week's Annapolis conference, a senior administration official argued, "Look, a handful in the Arab League were saying they could not attend the conference unless Syria was put on the agenda. So we put Syria on the agenda. What did it cost us? Nothing."
Although perhaps no actual money changed hands, to say that the US paid no price for its decision to invite Syria to participate in the conference is to ignore reality. What Syrian participation at Annapolis cost the US was Lebanon.
Immediately after the conference, the anti-Syrian majority in the Lebanese parliament agreed to support Syria's candidate, General Michel Suleiman as the next Lebanese president to replace Syrian agent, former president Emil Lahoud. As Talal Atrissi, a political analyst at Lebanese University told the Times, "The Syrians did not want to go to Annapolis and without them the conference would have been a failure…. The Syrians traded their participation, which did not cost them anything, with a deal on the Lebanese presidency."
Saturday, November 10, 2007
AL-DURA-AND THE "PUBLIC SECRET" OF MIDDLE EAST JOURNALISM
November 10, 2007 1:00 AM
Hooray for Pallywood?
by Richard Landes
In the summer of 2006, Reuters News Agency, humiliated when bloggers caught them duped by obvious photographic manipulation, fired both the photographer and the chief of their photographic bureau. They then removed all the photographer™ photos from their news archive. In so doing, they acted decisively in punishing two of the cardinal sins of modern journalism: creating evidence and getting duped by created evidence.
These principles i.e., the ethics of a free press go so deep, that Westerners apparently have difficulty imagining that others might not share our commitments. Thus few people believe claims that footage of Muhammad al Dura, the twelve year old boy allegedly gunned down by Israelis at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000, was staged. Charles Enderlin, the correspondent for France2 who presented the tale to the world, derisively and successfully dismisses such claims as a conspiracy theory as ludicrous as those about 9-11. How absurd: Palestinian journalists would not do such a thing; and if they did, the Western media would catch it. To this day, most journalists still ask, Who killed al Dura? not, Was he killed in the footage we see?
The last time we see al Dura on Talal™ camera: He holds his hand over his eyes not his allegedly deadly stomach wound. He lifts up his arm and looks around. Enderlin had already declared him dead in an earlier scene, and (therefore?) cut this scene from his broadcast.
And yet, one of the major differences between Western journalism and self-styled Islamic media men emerges on just this issue of the permissibility of staging the news and attitudes towards what constitutes honest information. According to the Islamic Mass Media Charter (Jakarta, 1980), the sacred task of Muslim media men [sic], is on the one hand to protect the Umma from imminent dangers, indeed to censor all materials, towards that end, and on the other, To combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people.
So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded: These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth! We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth. When Talal abu Rahmah received an award for his footage of Muhammad al Dura in Morocco in 2001, he told a reporter, I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.
These remarks serve as an important prelude to considering the France2 rushes that will be shown in court in Paris on November 14 in the Enderlin France2 vs. Philippe Karsenty defamation case. These tapes were filmed by Talal abu Rahmah on September 30, 2000, and for seven years, Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Dura that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well; and still more disturbingly the rest of the rushes are filled with staged scenes. Indeed there seems to be a kind of public secret at work on the Arab street: people fake injury, others evacuate them hurriedly (and without stretchers) past Palestinian cameramen like Talal, who use Western video equipment to record these improvised scenes. Pallywood: the Palestinian movie industry.
Which brings us to a problem more complex than the fairly straightforward observation that Palestinian journalists play by a different set of rules in which this kind of manipulation of the truth is entirely legitimate. What do Western journalists do with these products of propaganda? Do they know these are fakes or are they fooled? Do they tell the cameramen working for them and using their equipment that filming such staged scenes is unethical and unacceptable? And if they do, why do cameramen who have worked for them for years Talal worked for Enderlin for over a decade when he took these rushes continue to film these scenes. And how often do our journalists run this staged footage as real news?
the rest of the article can be read at PJMedia or my blog.
Richard Landes
The Second Draft
The Augean Stables (blog)
rl.seconddraft@gmail.com
617-504-7837
Hooray for Pallywood?
by Richard Landes
In the summer of 2006, Reuters News Agency, humiliated when bloggers caught them duped by obvious photographic manipulation, fired both the photographer and the chief of their photographic bureau. They then removed all the photographer™ photos from their news archive. In so doing, they acted decisively in punishing two of the cardinal sins of modern journalism: creating evidence and getting duped by created evidence.
These principles i.e., the ethics of a free press go so deep, that Westerners apparently have difficulty imagining that others might not share our commitments. Thus few people believe claims that footage of Muhammad al Dura, the twelve year old boy allegedly gunned down by Israelis at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000, was staged. Charles Enderlin, the correspondent for France2 who presented the tale to the world, derisively and successfully dismisses such claims as a conspiracy theory as ludicrous as those about 9-11. How absurd: Palestinian journalists would not do such a thing; and if they did, the Western media would catch it. To this day, most journalists still ask, Who killed al Dura? not, Was he killed in the footage we see?
The last time we see al Dura on Talal™ camera: He holds his hand over his eyes not his allegedly deadly stomach wound. He lifts up his arm and looks around. Enderlin had already declared him dead in an earlier scene, and (therefore?) cut this scene from his broadcast.
And yet, one of the major differences between Western journalism and self-styled Islamic media men emerges on just this issue of the permissibility of staging the news and attitudes towards what constitutes honest information. According to the Islamic Mass Media Charter (Jakarta, 1980), the sacred task of Muslim media men [sic], is on the one hand to protect the Umma from imminent dangers, indeed to censor all materials, towards that end, and on the other, To combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people.
So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded: These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth! We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth. When Talal abu Rahmah received an award for his footage of Muhammad al Dura in Morocco in 2001, he told a reporter, I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.
These remarks serve as an important prelude to considering the France2 rushes that will be shown in court in Paris on November 14 in the Enderlin France2 vs. Philippe Karsenty defamation case. These tapes were filmed by Talal abu Rahmah on September 30, 2000, and for seven years, Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Dura that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well; and still more disturbingly the rest of the rushes are filled with staged scenes. Indeed there seems to be a kind of public secret at work on the Arab street: people fake injury, others evacuate them hurriedly (and without stretchers) past Palestinian cameramen like Talal, who use Western video equipment to record these improvised scenes. Pallywood: the Palestinian movie industry.
Which brings us to a problem more complex than the fairly straightforward observation that Palestinian journalists play by a different set of rules in which this kind of manipulation of the truth is entirely legitimate. What do Western journalists do with these products of propaganda? Do they know these are fakes or are they fooled? Do they tell the cameramen working for them and using their equipment that filming such staged scenes is unethical and unacceptable? And if they do, why do cameramen who have worked for them for years Talal worked for Enderlin for over a decade when he took these rushes continue to film these scenes. And how often do our journalists run this staged footage as real news?
the rest of the article can be read at PJMedia or my blog.
Richard Landes
The Second Draft
The Augean Stables (blog)
rl.seconddraft@gmail.com
617-504-7837
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Disappearance of Bishop Tutu
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Disappearance of Bishop Tutu
By Simon DengFriday November 16, 2007Jewish AdvocateLate last month, I went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu speak at Bostons Old South Church at a conference on Israel Apartheid. Tutu is a well respected man of God. He brought reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. That he would lead a conference that damns the Jewish state is very disturbing to me.The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families “even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here." None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutus South Africa.I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than Apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer, they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their leaders. Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud.Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children. Tutu wants checkpoints removed. Do you not have doors in your home, Bishop? Does that make your house an apartheid house? If someone, Heaven forbid, tried to enter with a bomb, we would want you to have security people humiliating your guests with searches, and we would not call you racist for doing so. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist? No.Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives?Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela's freedom, we Africans all over Africa joined in. "Our support was key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent."Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans. I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom? Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?Simon Deng, a native of the Shiluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, is an escaped jihad slave and a leading human rights activist.
Disappearance of Bishop Tutu
By Simon DengFriday November 16, 2007Jewish AdvocateLate last month, I went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu speak at Bostons Old South Church at a conference on Israel Apartheid. Tutu is a well respected man of God. He brought reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. That he would lead a conference that damns the Jewish state is very disturbing to me.The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families “even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here." None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutus South Africa.I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than Apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer, they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their leaders. Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud.Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children. Tutu wants checkpoints removed. Do you not have doors in your home, Bishop? Does that make your house an apartheid house? If someone, Heaven forbid, tried to enter with a bomb, we would want you to have security people humiliating your guests with searches, and we would not call you racist for doing so. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist? No.Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives?Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela's freedom, we Africans all over Africa joined in. "Our support was key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent."Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans. I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom? Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?Simon Deng, a native of the Shiluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, is an escaped jihad slave and a leading human rights activist.
'The kosher conspiracy'
November 1, 2007By Suzanne Fields
The wraiths and witches of Halloween have retreated once more to the crevices of youthful imagination, but real ghosts continue to stalk our humanity. None are so spooky as the costumes of the anti-Semites who once more grow bold. When the grim outlines of the Holocaust were first revealed a mantra of "never again" echoed sympathy for the Jews, translated into support for the state of Israel. Nowhere was this more dramatic than in Europe, where six million Jews died as bystanders insisted they didn't know what was going on.A new hostility toward Jews is emerging in England, like Germany one of the most civilized of nations. This time it's difficult to avert the eyes. The anti-Semites of Nazi Germany are easy to characterize as thugs and brutes who threw people and pianos out windows, but other anti-Semites listened to Mozart, Beethoven and Bach while plotting the Holocaust.In England today anti-Semites read poetry, enjoy fine arts and sip fine wines, sneering at Jews with haughty abandon. Anti-Jewish themes gain acceptability. "In public and private discourse in Britain... there is a danger that this trend will become more and more mainstream," a Parliamentary survey warned only last year. Melanie Phillips, author of "Londonistan," documents how rife the Jew-hating disease is in the growing Muslim communities of England. But she shows how it also permeates the elite cultures of the media, the political and academic left and even the Church of England. The targeting has been recalibrated from the Jewish race to the Jewish state."Zionism is now a dirty word in Britain, and opposition to Israel has become a fig leaf for a resurgence of the oldest hatred," she writes in City Journal. "What anti-Semitism once did to Jews as people, it now does to Jews as a people." The old Jew-haters wanted the religion to disappear. The new haters want Israel with all those Jews to disappear.The ghost of Winston Churchill, who admired Jews for their energy, their intellect and their creative drive, is surely spinning in a narrow English coffin. "He was both a friend in their hours of need and a friend in deed," writes British historian Martin Gilbert in his new book "Churchill and the Jews." It has never been more relevant. America's favorite prime minister couldn't understand why the Arabs refused to learn agricultural techniques from the Jews of Palestine eight decades ago. He couldn't understand why the presence of Jews was considered an injustice to Arabs, nor why certain Englishmen thought they had more to gain from the Arab occupation of the unworked arid land than the Jews who transformed the desert into a vast oasis."Why is there harsh injustice done if people come and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves?" Sir Winston asked. "Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everyone? There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for a thousand years." He defended the Jewish presence in Palestine as historical precedent. Jews arrived before the Arabs, who arrived as outsiders and conquerors. "In the time of Christ," Churchill observed, "the population of Palestine was much greater when it was a Roman province." The majority in that Roman province were Jews.Journalists in England today are not just selective in their historical facts, but adopt the language of the worst of the anti-Semites, sprinkling their commentary with allusions to the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Sometimes they freshen up the label with code words. The influential New Statesman illustrates what it calls the "Kosher conspiracy" with the point of a gold six-pointed Star of David piercing the Union Jack. Critics of the Iraq war blame American "neoconservatives" — a fashionable euphemism for Jews, however inaccurate. British Jews who support Israel are accused of "dual loyalty." Boycotts of Israel have failed, but not without support of a wide range of professionals — academics, journalists, architects, doctors. The boycotters ignore the abundance of tyrants in the region to target only Israel.The Anglican Peace and Justice Network compares Israel's defensive fence, which has thwarted most of the suicide bombers, to the barbed wire of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In this Orwellian world self-defense is denounced as aggression. The only virtuous Jews are dead Jews.Gordon Brown, the new British prime minister, says he stands with Israel "in bad times as well as good times." The rest of the civilized world must hope the bad times won't get worse. The precedent is not encouraging.
The wraiths and witches of Halloween have retreated once more to the crevices of youthful imagination, but real ghosts continue to stalk our humanity. None are so spooky as the costumes of the anti-Semites who once more grow bold. When the grim outlines of the Holocaust were first revealed a mantra of "never again" echoed sympathy for the Jews, translated into support for the state of Israel. Nowhere was this more dramatic than in Europe, where six million Jews died as bystanders insisted they didn't know what was going on.A new hostility toward Jews is emerging in England, like Germany one of the most civilized of nations. This time it's difficult to avert the eyes. The anti-Semites of Nazi Germany are easy to characterize as thugs and brutes who threw people and pianos out windows, but other anti-Semites listened to Mozart, Beethoven and Bach while plotting the Holocaust.In England today anti-Semites read poetry, enjoy fine arts and sip fine wines, sneering at Jews with haughty abandon. Anti-Jewish themes gain acceptability. "In public and private discourse in Britain... there is a danger that this trend will become more and more mainstream," a Parliamentary survey warned only last year. Melanie Phillips, author of "Londonistan," documents how rife the Jew-hating disease is in the growing Muslim communities of England. But she shows how it also permeates the elite cultures of the media, the political and academic left and even the Church of England. The targeting has been recalibrated from the Jewish race to the Jewish state."Zionism is now a dirty word in Britain, and opposition to Israel has become a fig leaf for a resurgence of the oldest hatred," she writes in City Journal. "What anti-Semitism once did to Jews as people, it now does to Jews as a people." The old Jew-haters wanted the religion to disappear. The new haters want Israel with all those Jews to disappear.The ghost of Winston Churchill, who admired Jews for their energy, their intellect and their creative drive, is surely spinning in a narrow English coffin. "He was both a friend in their hours of need and a friend in deed," writes British historian Martin Gilbert in his new book "Churchill and the Jews." It has never been more relevant. America's favorite prime minister couldn't understand why the Arabs refused to learn agricultural techniques from the Jews of Palestine eight decades ago. He couldn't understand why the presence of Jews was considered an injustice to Arabs, nor why certain Englishmen thought they had more to gain from the Arab occupation of the unworked arid land than the Jews who transformed the desert into a vast oasis."Why is there harsh injustice done if people come and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves?" Sir Winston asked. "Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everyone? There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for a thousand years." He defended the Jewish presence in Palestine as historical precedent. Jews arrived before the Arabs, who arrived as outsiders and conquerors. "In the time of Christ," Churchill observed, "the population of Palestine was much greater when it was a Roman province." The majority in that Roman province were Jews.Journalists in England today are not just selective in their historical facts, but adopt the language of the worst of the anti-Semites, sprinkling their commentary with allusions to the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Sometimes they freshen up the label with code words. The influential New Statesman illustrates what it calls the "Kosher conspiracy" with the point of a gold six-pointed Star of David piercing the Union Jack. Critics of the Iraq war blame American "neoconservatives" — a fashionable euphemism for Jews, however inaccurate. British Jews who support Israel are accused of "dual loyalty." Boycotts of Israel have failed, but not without support of a wide range of professionals — academics, journalists, architects, doctors. The boycotters ignore the abundance of tyrants in the region to target only Israel.The Anglican Peace and Justice Network compares Israel's defensive fence, which has thwarted most of the suicide bombers, to the barbed wire of the Buchenwald concentration camp. In this Orwellian world self-defense is denounced as aggression. The only virtuous Jews are dead Jews.Gordon Brown, the new British prime minister, says he stands with Israel "in bad times as well as good times." The rest of the civilized world must hope the bad times won't get worse. The precedent is not encouraging.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Background Information about Sabeel:
SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS
We are deeply concerned about the programs and message that the Palestinian Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center is bringing to America and to mainline Christian churches. They undermine hopes for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, for greater understanding about the conflict and for the spread of religious tolerance.
Sabeel promotes the extremist Palestinian narrative and excuses terrorism. Sabeel founder Naim Ateek has written that he does not believe Israel has a right to exist. He prefers a one state solution--that is, the dismantling of the Jewish state. He claims to condemn terrorism, but draws a parallel between suicide bombers and the self-sacrifice of Christ. Sabeel never calls for the dismantling of terrorist groups or for an end to terrorism.
Sabeel distorts facts in order to demonize Israel. Sabeel documents claim Israel started all the Arab-Israeli wars. Sabeel denounces Israel’s current counter terrorism measures as a “morbid fear of peace” without even acknowledging the terrorist war unleashed in 2000 that made them necessary. Sabeel claims Israel has never sought peace, ignoring Israel’s search for compromise since 1920 and its record of relinquishing land and even uprooting Jewish communities for peace. It did so in its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. By 1996, it had carried out a withdrawal from the Territories, leaving 98% of Palestinians self-governing under the Palestinian Authority. In 2001, it offered Palestinians a state on 97% of the West Bank and 100% of Gaza, a capital in east Jerusalem and removal of Jewish communities. In 2005, it unilaterally withdrew from the rest of Gaza, and uprooted all Jewish communities there and four Jewish communities in the northern West Bank.
Sabeel promotes one-sided programs. The Israeli side is silenced. Those who wish to dispute Sabeel’s claims, including representatives of Israel, are not allowed to speak. Instead, Sabeel brings in Israelis or Jews who belong to the fringe group of anti-Zionist Jews in order to give the appearance of balance and fairness.
Sabeel promotes intolerance and extremist theology. It foments traditional prejudices against Jews which have no place in the modern world. Sabeel revives the “teachings of contempt” which are hostile to Jews and Judaism and which claim Jews killed Christ. Such views were denounced by the 2nd Vatican Council for contributing to the Holocaust. But Sabeel leaders use metaphors that describe Israel as a Christ-killing nation:
“The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily. Palestine has become the place of the skull.”
“It seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him.”
“The challenge to pastors and Bible teachers is to de-Zionize the Bible.”
“By espousing the nationalist tradition of Zionism, [Jews have] become oppressors and warmakers themselves. This has been a revolutionary change from the long-held belief that the Jews have a vocation for suffering.”
Sabeel promotes continued intolerance against Christians in the Palestinian Authority and the larger Middle East. Sabeel intentionally misrepresents the plight of Christians in the PA. It is silent about the increasing persecution of its fellow Christians who presented a dossier to Christian authorities in Jerusalem in September 2005 listing 93 incidents of Muslim or PA abuse against Christians, including rape, murder and confiscation of property. “Almost every day - I repeat, almost every day - our communities are harassed by the Islamic extremists in these regions. And if it's not the members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, there are clashes with the 'rubber wall' of the Palestinian Authority.” Custodian of the Holy Land, Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa
Sabeel promotes the new anti-Semitism. It does not condemn the anti-Semitic, racist incitement that is rife in the PA and terrorist groups. Rather, it promotes the new anti-Semitism which includes the demonization and delegitimization of Israel and applying a double standard that requires Israel to live up higher standards than all other nations.
Sabeel promotes policies that will retard instead of advance the peace process. Sabeel calls for Christian churches to divest from Israel. This is counter-productive. It punishes Israel instead of praising it for its recent withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. It makes no demands on the PA to stop terrorism and Israel’s need for counterterrorism measures. This is a time to invest in both Israel and the PA and to help the PA develop a viable state that is not crippled by lawlessness, terrorists and corruption.
For more information about Sabeel and the coalition visit www.c4rpme.org. --> -->
The world must hear the voices of both Christians and Jews to better understand the truth about Israel, a humane,
multi-cultural, peace-loving democracy.
We are deeply concerned about the programs and message that the Palestinian Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center is bringing to America and to mainline Christian churches. They undermine hopes for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, for greater understanding about the conflict and for the spread of religious tolerance.
Sabeel promotes the extremist Palestinian narrative and excuses terrorism. Sabeel founder Naim Ateek has written that he does not believe Israel has a right to exist. He prefers a one state solution--that is, the dismantling of the Jewish state. He claims to condemn terrorism, but draws a parallel between suicide bombers and the self-sacrifice of Christ. Sabeel never calls for the dismantling of terrorist groups or for an end to terrorism.
Sabeel distorts facts in order to demonize Israel. Sabeel documents claim Israel started all the Arab-Israeli wars. Sabeel denounces Israel’s current counter terrorism measures as a “morbid fear of peace” without even acknowledging the terrorist war unleashed in 2000 that made them necessary. Sabeel claims Israel has never sought peace, ignoring Israel’s search for compromise since 1920 and its record of relinquishing land and even uprooting Jewish communities for peace. It did so in its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. By 1996, it had carried out a withdrawal from the Territories, leaving 98% of Palestinians self-governing under the Palestinian Authority. In 2001, it offered Palestinians a state on 97% of the West Bank and 100% of Gaza, a capital in east Jerusalem and removal of Jewish communities. In 2005, it unilaterally withdrew from the rest of Gaza, and uprooted all Jewish communities there and four Jewish communities in the northern West Bank.
Sabeel promotes one-sided programs. The Israeli side is silenced. Those who wish to dispute Sabeel’s claims, including representatives of Israel, are not allowed to speak. Instead, Sabeel brings in Israelis or Jews who belong to the fringe group of anti-Zionist Jews in order to give the appearance of balance and fairness.
Sabeel promotes intolerance and extremist theology. It foments traditional prejudices against Jews which have no place in the modern world. Sabeel revives the “teachings of contempt” which are hostile to Jews and Judaism and which claim Jews killed Christ. Such views were denounced by the 2nd Vatican Council for contributing to the Holocaust. But Sabeel leaders use metaphors that describe Israel as a Christ-killing nation:
“The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily. Palestine has become the place of the skull.”
“It seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him.”
“The challenge to pastors and Bible teachers is to de-Zionize the Bible.”
“By espousing the nationalist tradition of Zionism, [Jews have] become oppressors and warmakers themselves. This has been a revolutionary change from the long-held belief that the Jews have a vocation for suffering.”
Sabeel promotes continued intolerance against Christians in the Palestinian Authority and the larger Middle East. Sabeel intentionally misrepresents the plight of Christians in the PA. It is silent about the increasing persecution of its fellow Christians who presented a dossier to Christian authorities in Jerusalem in September 2005 listing 93 incidents of Muslim or PA abuse against Christians, including rape, murder and confiscation of property. “Almost every day - I repeat, almost every day - our communities are harassed by the Islamic extremists in these regions. And if it's not the members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, there are clashes with the 'rubber wall' of the Palestinian Authority.” Custodian of the Holy Land, Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa
Sabeel promotes the new anti-Semitism. It does not condemn the anti-Semitic, racist incitement that is rife in the PA and terrorist groups. Rather, it promotes the new anti-Semitism which includes the demonization and delegitimization of Israel and applying a double standard that requires Israel to live up higher standards than all other nations.
Sabeel promotes policies that will retard instead of advance the peace process. Sabeel calls for Christian churches to divest from Israel. This is counter-productive. It punishes Israel instead of praising it for its recent withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. It makes no demands on the PA to stop terrorism and Israel’s need for counterterrorism measures. This is a time to invest in both Israel and the PA and to help the PA develop a viable state that is not crippled by lawlessness, terrorists and corruption.
For more information about Sabeel and the coalition visit www.c4rpme.org. --> -->
The world must hear the voices of both Christians and Jews to better understand the truth about Israel, a humane,
multi-cultural, peace-loving democracy.
Et tu, Tutu?
By Charles JacobsTuesday September 18 2007
Most of our parents voted for Stevenson, despised McCarthy and fought racism before the rest of America saw it was the right thing to do. We stood with Martin Luther King and were crushed when he – and John and Bobby Kennedy – were killed. We hated Nixon, boycotted grapes with Caesar Chavez, cheered for Bella and Gloria on women’s rights and defeated apartheid in South Africa.
Like most of America’s Jews, we’re LFBs – Liberals From Birth. Why? Because Jewish and American values are in almost perfect harmony.
On Israel, we were never uncritical, but loyal to the cause of a Jewish homeland and to the Jews who fought to keep it. Not only because we were Jews, but also because tiny beleaguered Israel is, or should be a, liberal cause.
But it’s not. Not now. Many of our friends disagree with us about Israel, and in increasingly disagreeable ways. They got the story wrong, from the media, from academics, and from clergy. Painfully, we see former allies, even heroes of past struggles, attacking the Jewish state – and its supporters: us.
So what will Boston’s Jews do when Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid hero who likens Israeli treatment of Arabs to apartheid, headlines an anti-Israel hate-fest at the Old South Church in October? The “Israel Apartheid” Conference is organized by Sabeel, whose leader says Israelis are “crucifying” Arabs like the Jews did Jesus.
The two-day rant against Israel features speakers who pose as human rights activists who care about injustice – yet their concerns are oh so selective. Israel is an “apartheid state,” they say, with an “apartheid wall.” It’s worse for Palestinians than South Africa was for blacks. It’s the world’s worst human rights situation. None of this is close to being true.
Israel’s Arab citizens vote, are elected to the Knesset, and enjoy better health care and education than most Arabs in the region. Yes, Arabs in the territories are treated differently, yet not because of their “race” – but because their leaders are at war with Israel. Israelis don’t act on the basis of race, like white South Africans did. Shame on Desmond Tutu for deliberately ignoring all this.
Calling Israel racist pleases the Sabeel-ites, but has nothing to do with a concern for justice. There is real apartheid in the Middle East – racist apartheid: blacks slaughtered and enslaved by Arabs in Sudan; gender apartheid: women in Saudi Arabia may not drive cars or walk unaccompanied; religious apartheid: churches cannot be built in Saudi Arabia and Jews can’t be citizens in Jordan. It’s not justice these folks are fixated upon, it’s the Jewish state.
Some Boston Jews and LFB’s may have turned away from this conflict. But now it’s time to choose: When Tutu comes, many of us will protest. If the anti-Israel demagogues are led by a black man who led his people to freedom – but who attacks and defames another free people – Israel’s and America’s Jews must decide: Which side will you be on?
Most of our parents voted for Stevenson, despised McCarthy and fought racism before the rest of America saw it was the right thing to do. We stood with Martin Luther King and were crushed when he – and John and Bobby Kennedy – were killed. We hated Nixon, boycotted grapes with Caesar Chavez, cheered for Bella and Gloria on women’s rights and defeated apartheid in South Africa.
Like most of America’s Jews, we’re LFBs – Liberals From Birth. Why? Because Jewish and American values are in almost perfect harmony.
On Israel, we were never uncritical, but loyal to the cause of a Jewish homeland and to the Jews who fought to keep it. Not only because we were Jews, but also because tiny beleaguered Israel is, or should be a, liberal cause.
But it’s not. Not now. Many of our friends disagree with us about Israel, and in increasingly disagreeable ways. They got the story wrong, from the media, from academics, and from clergy. Painfully, we see former allies, even heroes of past struggles, attacking the Jewish state – and its supporters: us.
So what will Boston’s Jews do when Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid hero who likens Israeli treatment of Arabs to apartheid, headlines an anti-Israel hate-fest at the Old South Church in October? The “Israel Apartheid” Conference is organized by Sabeel, whose leader says Israelis are “crucifying” Arabs like the Jews did Jesus.
The two-day rant against Israel features speakers who pose as human rights activists who care about injustice – yet their concerns are oh so selective. Israel is an “apartheid state,” they say, with an “apartheid wall.” It’s worse for Palestinians than South Africa was for blacks. It’s the world’s worst human rights situation. None of this is close to being true.
Israel’s Arab citizens vote, are elected to the Knesset, and enjoy better health care and education than most Arabs in the region. Yes, Arabs in the territories are treated differently, yet not because of their “race” – but because their leaders are at war with Israel. Israelis don’t act on the basis of race, like white South Africans did. Shame on Desmond Tutu for deliberately ignoring all this.
Calling Israel racist pleases the Sabeel-ites, but has nothing to do with a concern for justice. There is real apartheid in the Middle East – racist apartheid: blacks slaughtered and enslaved by Arabs in Sudan; gender apartheid: women in Saudi Arabia may not drive cars or walk unaccompanied; religious apartheid: churches cannot be built in Saudi Arabia and Jews can’t be citizens in Jordan. It’s not justice these folks are fixated upon, it’s the Jewish state.
Some Boston Jews and LFB’s may have turned away from this conflict. But now it’s time to choose: When Tutu comes, many of us will protest. If the anti-Israel demagogues are led by a black man who led his people to freedom – but who attacks and defames another free people – Israel’s and America’s Jews must decide: Which side will you be on?
Boston's Old South Church Welcomes Sabeel
October 10, 2007
by Dexter Van Zile
On Oct. 26-27, Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center will hold a conference at Old South Church, the flagship church of the United Church of Christ (UCC) in Boston. Old South’s decision to allow its worship space to be used by Sabeel is only the latest instance in which a prominent UCC institution has helped legitimize an anti-Zionist organization that traffics in anti-Judaic themes. Despite complaints from mainstream Jewish groups in the United States about Sabeel’s hostile rhetoric and agenda, the United Church of Christ continues to portray the organization as an ecumenical “partner” for peace in the Middle East .
(Click here for full article)
by Dexter Van Zile
On Oct. 26-27, Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center will hold a conference at Old South Church, the flagship church of the United Church of Christ (UCC) in Boston. Old South’s decision to allow its worship space to be used by Sabeel is only the latest instance in which a prominent UCC institution has helped legitimize an anti-Zionist organization that traffics in anti-Judaic themes. Despite complaints from mainstream Jewish groups in the United States about Sabeel’s hostile rhetoric and agenda, the United Church of Christ continues to portray the organization as an ecumenical “partner” for peace in the Middle East .
(Click here for full article)
Tutu's Words of Philo-Semitism Ring Hollow
November 5, 2007
by Dexter Van Zile
In his book, After Auschwitz, Richard Rubinstein warns that “recalling Jewish virtues and contributions to humanity's spiritual treasury ... is inevitable in a time of reconciliation, but it may have about it more than a little fattening of the sacrificial lamb for another round of slaughter. In any event, philo-Semitism is as unrealistic and pernicious as anti-Semitism, for it destroys our most precious attribute, our simple humanity. Jews are not, nor are they obliged to be, paragons of virtue or models of holiness. To expect us to be more than other men, to pay us the unwanted and unasked-for complement that we are, is an unintended cruelty but a cruelty nonetheless.”
Such cruelty, unintended or not, was evident during Archbishop Desmond Tutu's speech at the Sabeel conference at Old South Church in Boston. During his speech, the Archbishop from South Africa said the Jewish people are indispensable for “a just and caring world” but failed to condemn those who would murder Jews because they are Jews. He also invoked Hebrew Scripture against Israel in a patently discriminatory manner, directing his theological and scriptural cri de coeur exclusively at Jews, and not the Palestinians.
The following CAMERA-authored piece briefly analyzing Archbishop Tutu's speech was published in the Jewish Journal on Nov. 1.
Tutu’s Words of Philo-Semitism Ring Hollow
(Dexter Van Zile is Christian media analyst for CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) in Boston.
Judging from his October 27 address at the Old South Church in Boston, Archbishop Desmond Tutu loves the Jewish people. “Spiritually, I am of Hebrew descent. That legacy has been of crucial importance to me in our struggle against Apartheid.”
The Archbishop picked an odd place to express his philo-Semitism, however. Tutu was speaking at a conference organized by Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, an organization led by Anglican Canon Naim Ateek, who has written, among other things, of an “Israeli government crucifixion system operating daily” in the disputed territories. Rev. Ateek’s portrayal of the Palestinians as innocent sufferers at the hands of Israeli crucifiers prompted Rabbi Ronne Friedman from Temple Israel in Boston to write recently that Ateek uses “explicit and implicit images that echo the New Testament polemic against the Jews, one that we’ve been forced to defend against for two millennia.”
While Archbishop Tutu offered no rebuke for Ateek’s hateful writings, he himself spoke of the Jewish people in loving terms. “The world needs the Jews, Jews who are faithful to the vocation that has meant so much for the world’s morality, of its sense of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what is just and unjust, what is oppressive and what sets people free. Jews are indispensable for a good compassionate, just and caring world. And so are Palestinians.”
Sadly, Archbishop Tutu’s insistence that Jews struggle with their conscience over Israeli policies is coupled with a failure to acknowledge that they are also fighting for their lives in the Middle East. For all his philo-Semitism, Archbishop Tutu could not bring himself to condemn by name those who would murder Jews because they are Jews. At no point in his speech did he mention groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or other groups in the Middle East that deny Israel’s right to exist and which espouse vicious attitudes toward Jews. (Hamas, for example, has posted video on the Internet of a suicide bomber expressing a desire to drink Jewish blood.) Archbishop Tutu remained silent about this hate but instead focused exclusively on Israeli checkpoints and the security barrier.
But instead of acknowledging Palestinian misdeeds that might explain why Israel instituted the checkpoints or built the security barrier, he directed a cri de coeur exclusively toward the Jewish people to “be on the side of the God who revealed a soft spot in his heart for the widow, the orphan and the alien.” He cautioned Jews to not fight against the God, their God who hears the cry of the oppressed, who sees their anguish and who will always come down to deliver them.”
This is the Jewish calling, Archbishop Tutu said. “If you disobey that calling, if you do not heed it, then as sure as anything, one day you will come a cropper.” At no point in his speech, however, does the archbishop direct any such theological demands or warning toward the Palestinians to exhibit mercy toward Jews. Yes, Archbishop Tutu does condemn “acts of terrorism by whoever they are committed,” but when it comes to naming the perpetrators of misdeeds, he names only the Jewish people and their institutions.
If Archbishop Tutu truly loves both the Palestinians and the Jewish people, he must direct his cri de coeur at both Israelis and Palestinians. To target Israel, and only Israel, with theological condemnations rooted in Hebrew scripture, and to remain silent about Arab hostility toward Jews, is using the Bible as a club against the Jewish people. That’s not love. It’s abuse of both scripture and of people.
by Dexter Van Zile
In his book, After Auschwitz, Richard Rubinstein warns that “recalling Jewish virtues and contributions to humanity's spiritual treasury ... is inevitable in a time of reconciliation, but it may have about it more than a little fattening of the sacrificial lamb for another round of slaughter. In any event, philo-Semitism is as unrealistic and pernicious as anti-Semitism, for it destroys our most precious attribute, our simple humanity. Jews are not, nor are they obliged to be, paragons of virtue or models of holiness. To expect us to be more than other men, to pay us the unwanted and unasked-for complement that we are, is an unintended cruelty but a cruelty nonetheless.”
Such cruelty, unintended or not, was evident during Archbishop Desmond Tutu's speech at the Sabeel conference at Old South Church in Boston. During his speech, the Archbishop from South Africa said the Jewish people are indispensable for “a just and caring world” but failed to condemn those who would murder Jews because they are Jews. He also invoked Hebrew Scripture against Israel in a patently discriminatory manner, directing his theological and scriptural cri de coeur exclusively at Jews, and not the Palestinians.
The following CAMERA-authored piece briefly analyzing Archbishop Tutu's speech was published in the Jewish Journal on Nov. 1.
Tutu’s Words of Philo-Semitism Ring Hollow
(Dexter Van Zile is Christian media analyst for CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) in Boston.
Judging from his October 27 address at the Old South Church in Boston, Archbishop Desmond Tutu loves the Jewish people. “Spiritually, I am of Hebrew descent. That legacy has been of crucial importance to me in our struggle against Apartheid.”
The Archbishop picked an odd place to express his philo-Semitism, however. Tutu was speaking at a conference organized by Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, an organization led by Anglican Canon Naim Ateek, who has written, among other things, of an “Israeli government crucifixion system operating daily” in the disputed territories. Rev. Ateek’s portrayal of the Palestinians as innocent sufferers at the hands of Israeli crucifiers prompted Rabbi Ronne Friedman from Temple Israel in Boston to write recently that Ateek uses “explicit and implicit images that echo the New Testament polemic against the Jews, one that we’ve been forced to defend against for two millennia.”
While Archbishop Tutu offered no rebuke for Ateek’s hateful writings, he himself spoke of the Jewish people in loving terms. “The world needs the Jews, Jews who are faithful to the vocation that has meant so much for the world’s morality, of its sense of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what is just and unjust, what is oppressive and what sets people free. Jews are indispensable for a good compassionate, just and caring world. And so are Palestinians.”
Sadly, Archbishop Tutu’s insistence that Jews struggle with their conscience over Israeli policies is coupled with a failure to acknowledge that they are also fighting for their lives in the Middle East. For all his philo-Semitism, Archbishop Tutu could not bring himself to condemn by name those who would murder Jews because they are Jews. At no point in his speech did he mention groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or other groups in the Middle East that deny Israel’s right to exist and which espouse vicious attitudes toward Jews. (Hamas, for example, has posted video on the Internet of a suicide bomber expressing a desire to drink Jewish blood.) Archbishop Tutu remained silent about this hate but instead focused exclusively on Israeli checkpoints and the security barrier.
But instead of acknowledging Palestinian misdeeds that might explain why Israel instituted the checkpoints or built the security barrier, he directed a cri de coeur exclusively toward the Jewish people to “be on the side of the God who revealed a soft spot in his heart for the widow, the orphan and the alien.” He cautioned Jews to not fight against the God, their God who hears the cry of the oppressed, who sees their anguish and who will always come down to deliver them.”
This is the Jewish calling, Archbishop Tutu said. “If you disobey that calling, if you do not heed it, then as sure as anything, one day you will come a cropper.” At no point in his speech, however, does the archbishop direct any such theological demands or warning toward the Palestinians to exhibit mercy toward Jews. Yes, Archbishop Tutu does condemn “acts of terrorism by whoever they are committed,” but when it comes to naming the perpetrators of misdeeds, he names only the Jewish people and their institutions.
If Archbishop Tutu truly loves both the Palestinians and the Jewish people, he must direct his cri de coeur at both Israelis and Palestinians. To target Israel, and only Israel, with theological condemnations rooted in Hebrew scripture, and to remain silent about Arab hostility toward Jews, is using the Bible as a club against the Jewish people. That’s not love. It’s abuse of both scripture and of people.
The Zionist knows apartheid
Jerusalem Watchman
Jimmy Carter’s book slandering Israel continues to feed the hatred towards the Jewish state felt by many people who still regard the peacenik former president as a credible authority.
So I thought I should confront this lie once again.
I am a white South African who became a journalist mostly because I wanted to report and expose the evils of apartheid in the Eastern Cape of my country.
A political reporter for the Daily Dispatch in the dying years of that institutionalized racist system, all I read, talked and wrote about in those days had to do with the origins and establishment of apartheid, its manifestations (which I was also daily witness to) the forces opposing it and the need to bring it down. I supported the African National Congress (ANC), as did my brother, a skilled fellow journalist who was sought by the dreaded security police, had to flee, and became a refugee under the UNHCR. I also took a public, if belated stand against continuing to serve in the South African Defense Forces, because I grew to understand that they were used more to enforce apartheid and keep it alive than to defend the country.
For the past 20 years, since the collapse of “the system,” I have lived in Israel as a reporter and writer. When I left South Africa, a friend and fellow anti-apartheid activist assumed I was moving take up the pen for the “poor Palestinians.” He was unable to accept what I told him: that in the Middle East it was Israel, and not the “Palestinians,” that was the persecuted and hated nation; that the Jews were the victims of the worst and longest-standing form of prejudice known to – and almost universally practiced by – man.
I know about apartheid. Before I became a man I had lived in all South Africa’s major centers and many of its little towns, even a village or two. I lived among whites and I lived among blacks. My father – a doctor, sometimes a mission doctor – had practices in white areas and in black townships. He cared for more black than white patients in all his years of service.
I saw apartheid; was intimately acquainted with its despicable nature and expression. As a reporter it was in my face as I covered life in the townships and squatter camps, the mass evictions and family breakups of people made “illegal aliens” in the country of their birth. I witnessed – often – the vicious treatment by policemen and soldiers of black men, women and children, often beaten up in broad daylight before the eyes of uncaring or approving whites.
My brother exposed and helped send to prison one of the biggest mass-murderers of all time – a white security guard who used black children for target practice and was repeatedly exonerated by the white court system. (See Borderline: Murder, corruption and intrigue on the Eastern Frontier by Patrick Goodenough, available at http://www.amazon.com/Borderline-corruption-intrigue-Eastern-Frontier/dp/1430315911/ref=sr_1_1/103-0836479-2732648?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183365360&sr=1-1) I knew I as a white lived in luxury and could earn a decent salary because they as blacks were forced to live in squalor and were paid slave wages.
I covered coup after coup as the illegitimate puppet Bantustan “governments” exploited their people and were overthrown only to be replaced by more corrupt and brutal leaders. As the edifice crumbled under massive pressure from the international community I marched through the streets of East London, King Williams Town, Johannesburg and Cape Town with the hundreds of thousands of South Africans who suddenly smelled freedom in the air.
I know about apartheid.
During my 20 years in Israel I have seen NOTHING that in any way compares to that system - whether on the books (in the government, judiciary and security services) or on the streets - among the Israelis I have come to know so well.
Mandela imprisoned (who, since his release, has embraced Israel’s enemies, become an enemy of the Jews, and lost my support and respect) was no Arafat. The ANC was no PLO. White South Africans are no Jews. Black South Africans are no “Palestinians.” The “occupied territories” are no Bantustans. The IDF and Israeli police forces are no SADF and SAP. South Africa is not Israel. Zionism is not apartheid.
One other interesting observation: South Africa’s blacks had very real and deep grievances, plenty of cause to abhor and want to kill us whites. But the vast, vast majority never allowed such sentiments into their hearts.
I remember, late one night, hearing from a group of men who in the morning would face dogs, teargas, beatings, separation from their families and deportation to “their” Bantustans:
“We do not hate you,” they told me, as we huddled together in their makeshift shelter in the large Crossroads camp near Cape Town, winter rain driving down on us. “We do not want to hurt you or throw you out. We do not want to take what you have. All we want is to live among you, and have you live among us; together; as equals. We have much to give and receive from one another. South Africa has much to give us all. Why can’t we share this land?”
The (for most whites unexpectedly) peaceful transition to a one-man-one-vote democracy, and the bright promise with which South Africa entered its new existence as “The Rainbow Nation,” bore testimony to how widely-shared was the good will held by these men. Tragically, the dream is dying. But today’s out-of-control violence and massive AIDS epidemic etc are first and foremost the decayed fruit of the dead apartheid era – the detritous left by the decades of discrimination. They have nothing to do with blacks hating whites.
How different from the reality in the Middle East. In all the years I have lived in Israel I have yet to hear, or even read about, a single Muslim, much less one group of “Palestinians,” expressing anything remotely resembling the sentiments of my black countrymen.
There are a number of reasons for this contrast. One has to do with tolerance and respect:
While there were small groups – like the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (with their “One settler, one bullet” slogan) and the South African Communist Party – the great mass of popular support was with the African National Congress, which finally was voted in to lead the country, and whose Freedom Charter begins with the words: “We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white…”
Compare that with the realities in the Arab world, where ethnic cleansing is the order of the day: The Jews had to get completely out of the Gaza Strip and are expected to get completely out of Samaria and Judea. Without exception, all the “Palestinian” “liberation” movements (the terrorist organizations) share a common goal of expunging the Jewish people from every scrap of land in Eretz Yisrael. The PLO Charter begins: “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”
Blacks share South Africa with whites, even though they (blacks) have an older claim to and history in the land. For the “Palestinians,” however, there is no room for the Jews - who have a much older claim to and history in this land. For a Palestinian Arab to sell his house to a Jew, the punishment is death.
Another reason has to do with religion:
In the late 1980s, many millions of Black South Africans were practicing Protestant Christians. Islam had virtually no foothold in my homeland, its adherents restricted to specific communities in particular parts of the country, the cry of jihad never heard. (This is changing radically now.)
The Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, are almost all Muslim. ’Jihad!’, and ‘Itbach al-Yahud!‘ (Kill the Jews) are their battle cries. Their religion, its sacred writings and its teachings, engenders deep hatred for Israel’s Jews.
But to wrap it up for now: Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, clearly either knows very little about apartheid, or he knows very little about Israel. I would guess that as an American southerner he probably knows something about white-on-black racism.
Which leads me to conclude that his knowledge about Israel is limited to what he has imbibed from his good friends the “Palestinians.”
They – as I have observed after nearly two decades of closely watching and listening to them – have perfected the art of turning myths into facts and truth into lies, winning the world to their side by the simple dint of being shameless liars and inveterate propagandists.
Jimmy Carter’s book slandering Israel continues to feed the hatred towards the Jewish state felt by many people who still regard the peacenik former president as a credible authority.
So I thought I should confront this lie once again.
I am a white South African who became a journalist mostly because I wanted to report and expose the evils of apartheid in the Eastern Cape of my country.
A political reporter for the Daily Dispatch in the dying years of that institutionalized racist system, all I read, talked and wrote about in those days had to do with the origins and establishment of apartheid, its manifestations (which I was also daily witness to) the forces opposing it and the need to bring it down. I supported the African National Congress (ANC), as did my brother, a skilled fellow journalist who was sought by the dreaded security police, had to flee, and became a refugee under the UNHCR. I also took a public, if belated stand against continuing to serve in the South African Defense Forces, because I grew to understand that they were used more to enforce apartheid and keep it alive than to defend the country.
For the past 20 years, since the collapse of “the system,” I have lived in Israel as a reporter and writer. When I left South Africa, a friend and fellow anti-apartheid activist assumed I was moving take up the pen for the “poor Palestinians.” He was unable to accept what I told him: that in the Middle East it was Israel, and not the “Palestinians,” that was the persecuted and hated nation; that the Jews were the victims of the worst and longest-standing form of prejudice known to – and almost universally practiced by – man.
I know about apartheid. Before I became a man I had lived in all South Africa’s major centers and many of its little towns, even a village or two. I lived among whites and I lived among blacks. My father – a doctor, sometimes a mission doctor – had practices in white areas and in black townships. He cared for more black than white patients in all his years of service.
I saw apartheid; was intimately acquainted with its despicable nature and expression. As a reporter it was in my face as I covered life in the townships and squatter camps, the mass evictions and family breakups of people made “illegal aliens” in the country of their birth. I witnessed – often – the vicious treatment by policemen and soldiers of black men, women and children, often beaten up in broad daylight before the eyes of uncaring or approving whites.
My brother exposed and helped send to prison one of the biggest mass-murderers of all time – a white security guard who used black children for target practice and was repeatedly exonerated by the white court system. (See Borderline: Murder, corruption and intrigue on the Eastern Frontier by Patrick Goodenough, available at http://www.amazon.com/Borderline-corruption-intrigue-Eastern-Frontier/dp/1430315911/ref=sr_1_1/103-0836479-2732648?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183365360&sr=1-1) I knew I as a white lived in luxury and could earn a decent salary because they as blacks were forced to live in squalor and were paid slave wages.
I covered coup after coup as the illegitimate puppet Bantustan “governments” exploited their people and were overthrown only to be replaced by more corrupt and brutal leaders. As the edifice crumbled under massive pressure from the international community I marched through the streets of East London, King Williams Town, Johannesburg and Cape Town with the hundreds of thousands of South Africans who suddenly smelled freedom in the air.
I know about apartheid.
During my 20 years in Israel I have seen NOTHING that in any way compares to that system - whether on the books (in the government, judiciary and security services) or on the streets - among the Israelis I have come to know so well.
Mandela imprisoned (who, since his release, has embraced Israel’s enemies, become an enemy of the Jews, and lost my support and respect) was no Arafat. The ANC was no PLO. White South Africans are no Jews. Black South Africans are no “Palestinians.” The “occupied territories” are no Bantustans. The IDF and Israeli police forces are no SADF and SAP. South Africa is not Israel. Zionism is not apartheid.
One other interesting observation: South Africa’s blacks had very real and deep grievances, plenty of cause to abhor and want to kill us whites. But the vast, vast majority never allowed such sentiments into their hearts.
I remember, late one night, hearing from a group of men who in the morning would face dogs, teargas, beatings, separation from their families and deportation to “their” Bantustans:
“We do not hate you,” they told me, as we huddled together in their makeshift shelter in the large Crossroads camp near Cape Town, winter rain driving down on us. “We do not want to hurt you or throw you out. We do not want to take what you have. All we want is to live among you, and have you live among us; together; as equals. We have much to give and receive from one another. South Africa has much to give us all. Why can’t we share this land?”
The (for most whites unexpectedly) peaceful transition to a one-man-one-vote democracy, and the bright promise with which South Africa entered its new existence as “The Rainbow Nation,” bore testimony to how widely-shared was the good will held by these men. Tragically, the dream is dying. But today’s out-of-control violence and massive AIDS epidemic etc are first and foremost the decayed fruit of the dead apartheid era – the detritous left by the decades of discrimination. They have nothing to do with blacks hating whites.
How different from the reality in the Middle East. In all the years I have lived in Israel I have yet to hear, or even read about, a single Muslim, much less one group of “Palestinians,” expressing anything remotely resembling the sentiments of my black countrymen.
There are a number of reasons for this contrast. One has to do with tolerance and respect:
While there were small groups – like the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (with their “One settler, one bullet” slogan) and the South African Communist Party – the great mass of popular support was with the African National Congress, which finally was voted in to lead the country, and whose Freedom Charter begins with the words: “We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white…”
Compare that with the realities in the Arab world, where ethnic cleansing is the order of the day: The Jews had to get completely out of the Gaza Strip and are expected to get completely out of Samaria and Judea. Without exception, all the “Palestinian” “liberation” movements (the terrorist organizations) share a common goal of expunging the Jewish people from every scrap of land in Eretz Yisrael. The PLO Charter begins: “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.”
Blacks share South Africa with whites, even though they (blacks) have an older claim to and history in the land. For the “Palestinians,” however, there is no room for the Jews - who have a much older claim to and history in this land. For a Palestinian Arab to sell his house to a Jew, the punishment is death.
Another reason has to do with religion:
In the late 1980s, many millions of Black South Africans were practicing Protestant Christians. Islam had virtually no foothold in my homeland, its adherents restricted to specific communities in particular parts of the country, the cry of jihad never heard. (This is changing radically now.)
The Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, are almost all Muslim. ’Jihad!’, and ‘Itbach al-Yahud!‘ (Kill the Jews) are their battle cries. Their religion, its sacred writings and its teachings, engenders deep hatred for Israel’s Jews.
But to wrap it up for now: Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, clearly either knows very little about apartheid, or he knows very little about Israel. I would guess that as an American southerner he probably knows something about white-on-black racism.
Which leads me to conclude that his knowledge about Israel is limited to what he has imbibed from his good friends the “Palestinians.”
They – as I have observed after nearly two decades of closely watching and listening to them – have perfected the art of turning myths into facts and truth into lies, winning the world to their side by the simple dint of being shameless liars and inveterate propagandists.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Hate at the altar
Sunday, October 28, 2007
By Dexter Van Zile
IF A church in Boston announced that it was renting space to a self-described peace group whose leader hung nooses from trees in former slave-holding states, the interfaith community would be outraged, the church would be condemned, and the wisdom of its pastor and governing council would be called into question, with good reason.
Any organization led by someone who would display an image with such a bloody and violent history would immediately be repudiated by people of good will. Virtually everyone knows that a noose hanging from a tree is a prelude to a lynching. Its display is a vile act intended to intimidate African-Americans and other minorities into submission. It is a vestige of the Old South that has been discarded by all but the irredeemably racist.
Sadly, Old South Church in downtown Boston is playing host to just such a group this weekend - with one slight difference. Instead of displaying a noose during a time of racial tension, the leader of the group in question - the Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, founder of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center - invoked the anti-Semitic trope of Jews as Christ-killers during the second intifada, when Palestinian suicide bombers were murdering citizens of Israel.
The portrayal of Jews as Christ-killers has contributed to untold violence and hostility toward the Jewish people, but for some reason, Old South Church is allowing Sabeel and Ateek, an Anglican priest from Jerusalem, the use of its worship space.
For the past three decades, Sabeel has billed itself as the voice of the beleaguered community of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. Over the years, Sabeel has been successful in convincing well-meaning, but largely ignorant Christians in the United States and Europe that the Palestinian people are innocent sufferers and the Israeli government their brutal oppressors.
The centerpiece of this effort can be seen in the hostile rhetoric of Ateek. For example, his 2000 Christmas message portrayed Israeli officials as Herod, who, according to the Christian gospel, murdered all the infants of Bethlehem in an attempt to kill the infant Jesus. In his 2001 Easter message, Ateek wrote, "The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily" and that "Palestine has become the place of the skull." And in February 2001, Ateek compared the Israeli occupation to the stone blocking Christ's tomb.
With these three images, Ateek has figuratively blamed Israel for the attempted murder of the infant Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus the prophet, and for blocking the resurrection of Christ the Savior.
In the context of Christian-Jewish relations, language like this - which has preceded and justified the killing of Jews for nearly two millennia - is the equivalent of a noose hanging from a tree in the Old South. Its use during a time of violence can only serve to justify continued violence against Israeli civilians. Sadly, Ateek's defenders have said that he is merely using the "language of the cross" to describe Palestinian suffering, but in fact, he is describing Israeli behavior.
Taken to its logical end, language like this suggests that the only solution to Palestinian suffering is Israel's elimination, which Sabeel called for in a 2004 document that stated the organization's "vision for the future" is "one-state for two nations and three religions."
To make matters worse, Ateek has invoked the notion of the wandering, defenseless Jew as a good thing by writing that Jewish statehood contradicts the Jewish call to suffer. This type of language has been regarded as taboo by responsible Christians since the Holocaust, and its reemergence in Ateek's writing is as ominous as a noose hanging from a tree.
This is not peacemaking; it is demonization. Such language might have been tolerable in the Old South, but not today.Not in Boston's Old South.
Dexter Van Zile is the Christian media analyst at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
By Dexter Van Zile
IF A church in Boston announced that it was renting space to a self-described peace group whose leader hung nooses from trees in former slave-holding states, the interfaith community would be outraged, the church would be condemned, and the wisdom of its pastor and governing council would be called into question, with good reason.
Any organization led by someone who would display an image with such a bloody and violent history would immediately be repudiated by people of good will. Virtually everyone knows that a noose hanging from a tree is a prelude to a lynching. Its display is a vile act intended to intimidate African-Americans and other minorities into submission. It is a vestige of the Old South that has been discarded by all but the irredeemably racist.
Sadly, Old South Church in downtown Boston is playing host to just such a group this weekend - with one slight difference. Instead of displaying a noose during a time of racial tension, the leader of the group in question - the Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, founder of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center - invoked the anti-Semitic trope of Jews as Christ-killers during the second intifada, when Palestinian suicide bombers were murdering citizens of Israel.
The portrayal of Jews as Christ-killers has contributed to untold violence and hostility toward the Jewish people, but for some reason, Old South Church is allowing Sabeel and Ateek, an Anglican priest from Jerusalem, the use of its worship space.
For the past three decades, Sabeel has billed itself as the voice of the beleaguered community of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel. Over the years, Sabeel has been successful in convincing well-meaning, but largely ignorant Christians in the United States and Europe that the Palestinian people are innocent sufferers and the Israeli government their brutal oppressors.
The centerpiece of this effort can be seen in the hostile rhetoric of Ateek. For example, his 2000 Christmas message portrayed Israeli officials as Herod, who, according to the Christian gospel, murdered all the infants of Bethlehem in an attempt to kill the infant Jesus. In his 2001 Easter message, Ateek wrote, "The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily" and that "Palestine has become the place of the skull." And in February 2001, Ateek compared the Israeli occupation to the stone blocking Christ's tomb.
With these three images, Ateek has figuratively blamed Israel for the attempted murder of the infant Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus the prophet, and for blocking the resurrection of Christ the Savior.
In the context of Christian-Jewish relations, language like this - which has preceded and justified the killing of Jews for nearly two millennia - is the equivalent of a noose hanging from a tree in the Old South. Its use during a time of violence can only serve to justify continued violence against Israeli civilians. Sadly, Ateek's defenders have said that he is merely using the "language of the cross" to describe Palestinian suffering, but in fact, he is describing Israeli behavior.
Taken to its logical end, language like this suggests that the only solution to Palestinian suffering is Israel's elimination, which Sabeel called for in a 2004 document that stated the organization's "vision for the future" is "one-state for two nations and three religions."
To make matters worse, Ateek has invoked the notion of the wandering, defenseless Jew as a good thing by writing that Jewish statehood contradicts the Jewish call to suffer. This type of language has been regarded as taboo by responsible Christians since the Holocaust, and its reemergence in Ateek's writing is as ominous as a noose hanging from a tree.
This is not peacemaking; it is demonization. Such language might have been tolerable in the Old South, but not today.Not in Boston's Old South.
Dexter Van Zile is the Christian media analyst at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
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