The time to have Israel's back is right now

By Joseph Marx

Over the last year or so, Ron Estes has written articles titled “Israel supporters attack critics not the criticism,” “Romney is still weak on foreign affairs,” “Israel attack on Iran could spark Middle East conflict,” “US cannot afford to lose its Arab allies,” “US vote on Palestine could effect 2012 elections,” “Rejects pro-Israel comments as propaganda” and his latest “Israel attack in Iran would hurt US interests.”

Call me crazy, but I seem to detect a common thread in all of these letters and articles. Israel is the pariah state in this conflict and the US interests would be better served siding with the Arabs, contrary to Obama’s disingenuous declaration to Israel “we have your back.”

I would like to remind the readers of The Record that Israel is the one democracy and the one true and steadfast friend of the U.S. in this conflict. Their values regarding life, liberty, justice and freedom are our values.

I would also like to remind everyone that Israel is a 1 bomb country the size of New Jersey surrounded by half a billion hostiles. In his most recent letter, Mr. Estes makes the statement that “… the U.S. and the western world lived over four decades facing a hostile, belligerent nuclear armed Soviet Union … and the west avoided a nuclear confrontation …

That is all well and good when you are negotiating with an adversary of enormous land mass populated with people who hold life precious. The Soviet Union knew they could never launch enough nukes to remove our retaliation capabilities on a first strike. This scenario does not hold true in the case of Iran vs Israel where just a few warheads could destroy the entire country of Israel on a first strike. It wouldn’t do Israel much good at that point knowing the U.S. had its back because there would be nothing left to defend.

In addition, Israel has become a center of technology innovation for the entire world. Drive thru the cities of Herziliya and Netanya and the large office buildings have names like Motorola, Google, Apple and Microsoft. The product R & D coming out of this area is a vital U.S. interest not to be underestimated and certainly worth safeguarding.

The US has been negotiating with the Middle East in general and Iran in particular since the 1970s with very little effect. We have frittered away over 30 years dealing with this problem ineffectually. If we give Iran any more time, they will possess enough enriched uranium to build multiple bombs and even if they don’t launch a strike against Israel, I have zero confidence that Iran wouldn’t sell some of this material to radical groups to attack “The Great Satan.”

The sand in this hourglass has run out. It is time for the US to draw some well defined lines in the sand and be willing to back them up militarily. Europe and the U.S. tried appeasement and playing for time in the 1930s and when we were forced to fight, it was much bloodier than if we put our collective foot down in the beginning. If we have learned anything from history, we should have learned that you can’t negotiate with leaders who stall and won’t negotiate in good faith.

The time to have Israel’s back is right now. It is in the long term interest of the U.S. to do so.

This column, written by one of my friends from college, was published in the St. Augustine Record, where it may also be read at http://staugustine.com/opinions/2012-09-30/guest-column-time-have-israels-back-right-now#.UGroArRrDGJ. It's posted here with the permission of the author.

Hebron, Not Jerusalem, Will Be the Key Issue if the Palestinian Arabs Ever Change Their Stripes

This was published as a letter to the editor in the Waterbury Republican-American on Friday, August 31, 2012, under the title "Future of Hebron in Israel Is Sticking Point in Talks."

The Aug. 27 article "Market stalls at heart of fight for Hebron" brings up a generally ignored reality: If the Palestinian Arabs ever give up their goal of destroying Israel and decide to try to live in peace, the thorniest issue will be Hebron, not Jerusalem.

Except as a tool for fomenting anti-Israel fanaticism, Jerusalem has never been all that important to the Palestinian Arabs; indeed, it was generally ignored when the Old City, including the Temple Mount and Western Wall, was under Jordanian occupation and Jews barred from their holiest sites. A key signal from the Palestinian Arabs that they are finally interested in peace would be for them to drop their outrageous demand that Jerusalem be redivided.

Hebron is a different matter. Geographically, it is within those areas that naturally would go to the Palestinian Arabs. On the other hand, it is historically and religiously the second most important city to the Jewish people, far more important to Jews than Jerusalem is to Muslims.

Hebron, also known in the Bible as Kiryat Arba, contains Me'arat ha-Machpela, the Cave of the Patriarchs, the burial site of the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as well as Sarah, Rebecca and Leah. Indeed, the sale of that burial site by the Hittites to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, is probably the earliest recorded real estate transaction in history.

Even with goodwill, something the Palestinian Arabs have yet to demonstrate, resolving the conflict between the physical location of Hebron and its importance to the Jewish people will be extremely difficult.

Alan Stein
Waterbury

The writer is president emeritus of PRIMER-Connecticut (Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting; www.primerct.org).

Anti-Semitism Denial

A Reminder:

Edward Alexander
FrontPage Magazine
April 9, 2004

http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/1111

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12882

 

On September 20, 2002 Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard University, delivered to the Harvard community a speech deploring the upsurge of antisemitism in many parts of the globe: he specified synagogue bombings, physical assaults on Jews, desecration of Jewish holy places, and (this with special emphasis) denial of the right of "the Jewish state to exist." But his most immediate concern was that "at Harvard and ...universities across the country" faculty-initiated petitions were calling "for the University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested."1

 

One of the Harvard faculty, Ruth Wisse, had described the divestment petition as "corrupt and cowardly" in offering its reasons for calling on the U. S. government to stop military aid and arms sales to Israel and upon universities to divest both from Israel and from American companies selling arms to Israel. "The petition," wrote Wisse,"requires that Israel comply with certain resolutions of the UN--the terms of which it distorts to say what those resolutions do not mean"; she also pointed out that the petition says nothing of the fact that all the Arab states remain in perpetual non-compliance with the entire UN Charter, which is based on the principle of mutual respect for the sovereignty of member states, which are to settle disputes by peaceful means.2

But of course the advocates of disinvestment in Israeli companies took a less benign view of Summers' position. Amidst the numerous wails of outrage Summers provoked, one, because of its great length and still greater indignation, stands out as a classic utterance of what has come to be called "antisemitism denial": Judith Butler's essay in the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (21 August 2003) entitled "No, it's not anti-semitic."

 

Prior to the autumn of 2003, this University of California professor of rhetoric and comparative literature was, like many members of Berkeley's "progressive" Jewish community with which she habitually identifies herself, somebody who defined her "Jewishness" (not exactly Judaism) in opposition to the State of Israel. She was mainly a signer of petitions harshly critical of the Jewish state, full of mean spite towards its alleged "apartheid" and "bantustan" practices, oily sycophancy towards such Palestinian figures as Sari Nusseibeh, and a habit of covering over the brutality of Arab terror with the soft snow of Latinized euphemisms. She was one of the 3700 American Jews opposed to "occupation" (Israeli, not Syrian or Chinese or any other) who signed an "Open Letter" urging the American government to cut financial aid to Israel; later she expressed misgiving about signing that particular petition--it "was not nearly strong enough...it did not call for the end of Zionism."3 In autumn of 2002 she requested, with ponderous irony, honorary membership in the Campus Watch organization's listing of Middle East specialists polemicizing in their classrooms on behalf of Radical Islam and against Israel and America. In June 2003 her name could be found on the ubiquitous "Stop the Wall Immediately" petition.

 

The wall, Butler and her fellow adepts in the rhetoric of inverted commas alleged, was "supposed to block 'terrorist attacks' but certainly won't prevent missiles and helicopters from hitting their human target." Suicide bombings, lynchings, pogroms, and roadside shootings were not terrorist attacks but only "terrorist attacks," whereas Israeli response to those so- called "terrorist attacks" injured real human targets.

 

But deeper currents were also stirring in Butler. She had undertaken some abstruse research into the history of Zionism and discovered that there had been "debates among Jews throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries as to whether Zionism ought to become the basis of a state."4 From this discovery the Hannah Arendt professor of philosophy (as she is called at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland) promptly concluded that demanding an end to Zionism in 2003, that is, calling for politicide (and the genocide that would surely accompany it) was no different from taking a debater's position against Zionism 75 or 100 years ago. She was helped in following this arrow-straight course from Buber and Magnes to "post-Zionism" by her conviction that the crucial ethical activity for Jews "is relating to the other,"5 i.e., that Jews must dance at everybody's wedding except their own.

 

Butler had herself signed the divestment petition at its place of origin, Berkeley, where it had circulated in February 2001. She therefore found Summers' remarks not only wrong but personally "hurtful" since they implicated Judith Butler herself in the newly resurgent campus antisemitism. Butler could hardly have failed to notice that the Berkeley divestment petition had supplied the impetus and inspiration for anti-Israel mob violence on her own campus on 24 April 2001, a few weeks after it had been circulated, and for more explicitly anti-Jewish mobs at San Francisco State University in May of the following year. Slander of Israel has provoked physical violence on many campuses, especially those (like Wayne State in Detroit or Concordia in Montreal) with a large Arab presence.

 

Summers, aware of how ubiquitous in anti-Israel discourse is the straw man called "the defender of Israel who decries any criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitism," went out of his way in his address to separate himself from this (conjectural) figure: "I have always throughout my life been put off by those who ... conjured up images of Hitler's Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel." Nobody has ever discovered just who these conjurors (a term Butler picked up in her rebuttal) might be, but if Summers thought that he would distance himself from them by this disclaimer, he was greatly mistaken.

In fact, the corruption of discourse about the ongoing Arab war against Israel--as Butler would soon demonstrate--consists precisely of the now deeply ingrained rhetorical habit of calling virtually all assaults on Israel, on Zionism, on Israelis, from verbal to physical, "criticism of Israeli policy." In a recent issue of JUDAISM, for example, one Andrew Bush (whose name pops up near Butler's in some anti-Israel petitions) writes that "The Intifada"--i.e., the murderous assaults by Arabs against Jews that were unleashed by the Oslo Accords--"is also a critique of Zionism...[and] it is precisely Postzionism that allows one to read the violent language [!] of the Intifada as critique."6 It is indeed the compulsive repetition, with the regularity of a steam-engine, of the euphemism "criticism of Israel" that characterizes Butler's "No, it's not anti-semitic."

 

Despite the large role played in promoting the divestment campaign by people like Noam Chomsky, Summers had chivalrously gone out of his way to say that "Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent." To annihilate Summers' distinction between intentional and effective antisemitism is the primary aim of Butler's counter-attack. Her strategy is what logicians call the tu quoque (i.e., you too, or you're another) argument: Summers' accusations, says Butler, are "a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not intent." His words have had "a chilling effect on political discourse." No evidence, of course, is (or could be) adduced for the allegation. Of one thing we can be sure: the chill did not extend to Harvard itself, whose English department would soon (in November, to be precise) play host to the racist hoodlum from Oxford, Tom Paulin, who had urged (in yet another "criticism of Israeli policy") that Jews living in Judea/Samaria "should be shot dead," or to Columbia, where Paulin continued merrily through autumn semester as a visiting professor, or to the New York Review of Books, which in October 2003 would establish a new front in its 36-year old assault on Israel by publishing Professor Tony Judt's "Israel: The Alternative," a call for an end to the State of Israel that had already appeared in shorter form in the Los Angeles Times. Neither did Summers dampen the fires of Israel-hatred at the London Review of Books itself, which in January 2003 published another 133 lines of Paulin doggerel called "On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card," a versified rehearsal for Butler's "No, it's not anti-semitic.". If Summers' speech had a chilling effect on antisemitic clarion calls, including incitement to raw murder, one would not want to know what the fully heated versions would sound like.

 

Butler perfunctorily assented to Summers' recommendation that--as she deviously restates it--"every progressive person ought to challenge anti-semitism vigorously wherever it occurs," but she seemed incapable either of recognizing it in such (to her) innocent "public criticisms" as economic warfare against the Jewish state or calls for its dismantling or assaults on Zionism itself or opposing any effort (however feeble) Israel might make to defend herself against suicide bombers; indeed, she made it clear that she saw no difference between Jews intentionally murdered by suicide bombers (also their sponsors and despatchers) and Arabs accidentally killed by Israeli efforts to repel would-be murderers. Although nobody can recall Judith Butler saying anything more critical of Arab butchery of Jews than that it is "unacceptable," she here presented herself, with characteristic brazenness, as offering Jews a salutary warning against crying wolf: "if the charge of anti-semitism is used to defend Israel at all costs, then its power when used against those who do discriminate against Jews--who do violence to synagogues in Europe [synagogues, bar mitzvahs, and Passover seders in Israel are not mentioned], wave Nazi flags or support anti-semitic organizations--is radically diluted." And so on and on--ad nauseam.

 

In trying to confute Summers' distinction between intentional and effective antisemitism, Butler calls it wildly improbable that somebody examining the disinvestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had done, and as gleeful readers of the London Review of Books were about to do) as condoning antisemitism.7 She therefore poses this (as she assumes) unanswerable conundrum: "We are asked to conjure a listener who attributes an intention to the speaker: so-and-so has made a public statement against the Israeli occupation, and this must mean that so-and-so hates Jews or is willing to fuel those who do." But Summers was perfectly correct in stating that one need not "hate Jews" in order to perform actions or utter words that are "antisemitic in their effect if not their intent."

 

Let us take a well-known case: when Dickens wrote OLIVER TWIST he harbored no hatred of Jews and had no programmatic or conscious intention to harm them. Indeed, he said of his Jewish monster Fagin that "he's such an out and outer I don't know what to make of him." The reason for Dickens' puzzlement was that, in an important sense, he did not indeed "make" Fagin, and therefore didn't know what to make of him. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the traditional folklore of Christendom, which had for centuries fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, surrogate of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young; to which list of attributes Butler and her friends would now add "Zionist imperialist and occupier," or--I quote from the statement that was the germ of the whole divestment campaign--"criminal apartheid regime." Has OLIVER TWIST often been antisemitic in its effect? Of course--or does Butler think that it is because of their interest in the plight of the homeless in early Victorian England that Arab publishers have long kept cheap paperback translations of the book in print?

 

Butler also uses the tu quoque "argument" in rebutting or rather evading (for she never really acknowledges it) the charge of discriminatory selectivity that Summers (like countless others) had made. Why, among all the nations on earth, has Israel alone been singled out for punishment and pariah status by the advocates of disinvestment? Where is their advocacy of disinvestment in China until China withdraws from Tibet, or from Morocco until that country ceases to occupy Western Sahara, or from Zimbabwe until it ceases persecuting its white citizens, or from Egypt until it stops building tunnels for the smuggling of arms to Palestinian killers? Could the singling out of Israel possibly have anything to do with the fact that it is a Jewish country? Despite the inordinate length of her essay, Butler cannot find space to answer this question. Instead, she accuses Summers himself of biased selectivity. "If we say that the case of Israel is different, that any criticism of it is considered as an attack on Israelis, or Jews in general, then we have singled out this political allegiance from all other allegiances that are open to public debate. We have engaged in the most outrageous form of 'effective' censorship...."

 

Her ultimate use of the tu quoque strategy is to make Summers, the critic of antisemitism, himself guilty of what he attacks. Why? Because he assumes that Jews can only be victims, conflates "Jews" with Israel, and writes as if all Jews were a single, undifferentiated group.

 

Apparently the 1135 Israelis murdered and the nearly 10,000 mutilated (in a Jewish population of under five million) by Arab pogromists, lynch mobs, and suicide bombers between 27 September 2000 and the time Butler published her essay were not sufficient to meet her stringent requirements for (Jewish) victim status.8 But if Israelis are not the victims of Palestinian aggression in the latest round of the Arab nations' 56-year old war to eradicate the Jewish state, why is it that Jewish schools in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem must be protected by armed guards while Arab schools in Nazareth or Jenin require no such safeguards? Why is it that getting on a bus in Jerusalem or going to a cafe or discotheque in Haifa is a form of Russian roulette, a far more dangerous activity than prancing about as a "human shield" for Arafat in Ramallah? One might forgive Butler for overlooking a seminal essay in the June 2000 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN9 which demonstrated massively that ours is a time of a new kind of war, "characterized by routine massacre of civilians," in which relatively little of the destruction is inflicted by tanks and artillery. It is harder to forgive her for overlooking 9/11 of 2001, in which a small number of technically competent Islamicist barbarians, heavily armed with fanatical indifference to human life, including their own, succeeded in attacking two major cities of the greatest power on earth, killing 3000 people, shattering whole industries, and causing billions of dollars in economic damage.

 

As for the argument that nothing is antisemitic which does not explicitly target every single Jew in the world, it is Butler at her most jejune. After all, she says (as if she had to remind us!) not all Jews are heavily "invested" in Israel: "Some Jews have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches."10 But does she really think that when Josef (later Johannes) Pfefferkorn, whose distinction between "good" and "bad" Jews became the paradigm for Jewish self-haters, urged his countrymen (in the1520s) to "drive the old Jews out [of Germany]" he had himself in mind? When Karl Marx excoriated Jews as "the filthiest of all races," did he really mean to include himself? Do the operators of Nazi websites have trouble making "exceptions" for the writings of Chomsky or his disciple Norman Finkelstein? Indeed, Butler's requirement of total inclusiveness would have allowed Hitler himself to say (had he so wished) of his racial policy: "No, it's not antisemitic." And since Butler writes as if antisemitism were a genetic affliction from which Jews, most especially her "post-Zionist" Israeli friends, are protected by virtue of being born, this line of argument would leave poor Summers as virtually the only Jewish antisemite in the whole world.

 

Although Butler's essay is such a loose, baggy monster that only a journal fanatically committed to erasing the Jewish state would have published it, what it leaves out is even more outrageous than what it includes. It omits history altogether, torturing a text and omitting context. Did it never occur to Butler that the divestment effort is merely the latest installment of the 50-year old Arab economic boycott of Israel, one prong in the endless Arab campaign to destroy the Jewish state, or that the Arab boycott is itself an imitation of the Nazi boycotts of the 1930s? Does she see no connection between the Nazi denial of the Jews' right to live and her own effort to make Israel's "right to exist" contingent upon its conformity to her political prejudices? And then, of course, there is the omission of context that is de rigueur among all those who have made the "Palestinian cause" and the erasure of Israel the touchstone of contemporary liberalism. The "occupation" which they constantly bemoan did not precede and cause Arab hatred and violence; it was Arab hatred and violence that led--in 1967 as in 2002--to occupation.

 

But the crucial omission from this essay by somebody who has relentlessly insisted on the political implications of language is--the political implications of the language of the advocates of divestment, of boycott, of "an end to Israeli occupation," of an end to Zionism, of stopping the "wall," etc. Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly DER ZEIT, has succinctly defined the linguistic difference between "criticism of Israeli policy" and antisemitism:

 

Take this statement: 'Demolishing the houses of the families of
terrorists is morally wrong because it imputes guilt by
association, and politically wrong because it pushes more people
into the arms of Hamas.' Such a statement is neither anti-Israel
nor anti-Semitic; it might even be correct. By contrast, 'the
Israelis are latter-day Nazis who want to drive the Palestinians
from their land in order to realize an imperialist biblical
dream' inhabits a very different order of discourse, ascribing
evil to an entire collective and, in its equation of Israelis and
Nazis, revealing an obsessive need for moral denigration.11

The Harvard/MIT divestment petition that Butler champions against Summers was promoted at MIT by Noam Chomsky, a person who would be rendered almost speechless on the subject of Israel if deprived of the epithet "Nazi"; it was promoted at Harvard by Professor Paul Hanson, who referred to Israel as the "pariah" state. Butler was herself among the "first signatories" of a July 28, 2003 petition that uses the Israeli-Nazi equation beloved of nearly all denigrators of the Zionist enterprise (going back to British official circles in Cairo in 1941) by stating that "concrete, barbed wire and electronic fortifications whose precedents...belong to the totalitarian tradition" were transforming the Israel "'defense forces'" (again the rhetorical quotation marks) and indeed "Israeli citizens themselves into a people of camp wardens."12

 

And so it would seem that, for Butler, "Language plays an important role in shaping and attuning our...understanding of social and political realities"13 except when it happens to be the antisemitic language that demonizes Israel as the devil's own experiment station, black as Gehenna and the pit of hell.

Edward Alexander is professor of English at University of Washington and the author of IRVING HOWE--SOCIALIST, CRITIC, JEW (Indiana University Press).

 

Notes:

1. The full text of Summers' speech may be found in CONGRESS MONTHLY
(September/October 2003)

2. Ruth Wisse, "How Harvard and MIT Professors are Planting a Seed of Malevolence," NEW YORK SUN, 20 May 2002.

3. LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, 21 August 2003.

4. Ibid.

5. HA'ARETZ interview of 6 January 2004.

6. JUDAISM, 52 (Winter/Spring2003), 111.

7. A delicious letter from a reader published in LONDON REVIEW on 11 September 2003 thanked Butler for saving him from thinking of himself as an antisemite: "As someone rather too ready to allow strong disapproval of Israel's policies to slide into anti-semitic prejudice, may I say how illuminating and helpful I found Judith Butler's article." Very helpful indeed. The only letter printed by the journal critical of Butler's essay was by Mona Baker, originator of the academic boycott of Israel: she found Butler too soft on Zionists and was angered at Butler's linking her to the arch-villain Summers himself.

8. Butler's feminist followers may wish to contemplate the following statistic: of the Palestinian fatalities at that stage of "Intifada II" 116 were women; of the Israel fatalities 271 were women.

9. Jeffrey Boutwell and Michael T. Klare, "Special Report: Waging a New Kind of War," SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 282 June 2000).

10. LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, 21 August 2003.

11. "The Demons of Europe," COMMENTARY, 117 (January 2004), 30.

12. "Israel and Palestine: Stop the Wall Immediately" petition.

13. "A 'Bad' Writer Bites Back," NEW YORK TIMES, 20 March 1999.

 

Is there a better word to use than "culture?"

Sent to the Boston Globe in the aftermath of the Palestinian Arab pique over hearing an obvious truth about the reasons their economy isn't so great.

As of today, more than three weeks after the article was published, the Boston Globe has published five letters relating to the article. Of those five, four have been biased against Israel and only one was not biased against Israel.

This letter, not being biased against Israel, has not been published.

To the editor:

The article "Romney provokes Palestinian outrage," published July 31, showed a lack of understanding both of history and current reality; the letters published August 2 about that article did nothing to enlighten anyone.

Roughly 95 percent of the Arabs living in the disputed territories have been living under the Palestinian Authority, not the so-called "Israeli occupation," for nearly two decades. Ironically, the conditions under which they live improved dramatically only during the period Israel administered those areas.

Particularly ironic are the complaints about "border-crossing restrictions," especially given the alleged desire of the Palestinian Arabs for their own state. After all, one of the obvious consequences of being a citizen is needing permission to enter other states.

Based on actions, it would appear Israel is far more interested in establishing a Palestinian Arab state than the Palestinians themselves, whose present leader, the so-called "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas, has refused to even negotiate with Israel since ignoring an offer in 2008 for independence in the equivalent of all the disputed territory.

Maybe there's a better word to use than culture, but the key to improving their economic conditions lies mostly with the Palestinian Arabs.

Sincerely,

Alan H. Stein

Poor Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader performed some valuable service when he was young, but as he's gotten older he seems determined to (a) make Harold Stassen seem normal and (b) spread as much anti-Israel hatred as he can.


One of his anti-Israel op-eds was published in several Litchfield County (Connecticut) newspapers in May, 2012. The following was written in response and submitted as an op-ed, but wasn't published.

Ralph Nader seems almost disappointed so many of the rockets which Gaza terrorists send into Israel miss their targets. "The rockets failed to reach any population centers 99 percent of the time", he says. However, instead of urging Gaza to stop the violence, he jumps in and unjustifiably maligns Israel for everything that has befallen the troubled people of Gaza.

Little more than a week ago, I visited one of the primary targets of those rockets. Sderot, a small city with the misfortune of being situated just a few kilometers from Gaza, has a collection of those Kassam rockets. I even got to hold some and spoke with the mayor, who was clearly frustrated that the Israeli government has not succeeded in stopping the constant bombardment. I also suspect he'd be insulted to find Ralph Nader doesn't consider his beleaguered city to be a population center.

Gaza just didn't happen. There is a history that has led to the current simmering conflict, a history easily accessible to anyone interested. The violent anarchy and repression that roils Gaza is self-inflicted.

There is an obvious solution for the problems about which Nader rails, albeit one that Mr. Nader doesn't want to hear: Hamas merely needs to stop its daily attacks against Israel. If they did that, all hostilities would cease. If Israel, on the other hand, dismantled its defenses and opened its borders, only slaughter and killing would ensue at the hands of Hamas and its subcontractors, including the Islamic Jihad terror group.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. She has both ancient and modern claims to that land, but chose to withdraw those claims in the hopes of promoting peace. In the process, Israel evicted and displaced over 9,000 of its own citizens, even though many if not most of them lived on property that had been owned by Jews even back in 1948, when Egypt stole their property and ethnically cleansed Gaza of any Jewish presence.

Instead of seizing the golden opportunity offered by Israel and building a modern society, Hamas and other terrorist gangs intensified their rocketing directed at all the Israeli population centers that they could reach. The number of rockets and missiles fired into Israel since the withdrawal is over 8,000. Imagine what America's reaction would be if one of its neighbors was a terrorist entity and fired even a single rocket at one of our cities!

Amazingly, Israel continues to supply massive amounts of fuel, food and medical supplies to the very people launching Kassam rockets at Israeli civilians. Maybe Nader missed the fact that tons of supplies flow across the border from Israel into Gaza every day. Gaza's GDP grew close to 25 percent in the first 3 quarters of 2011. Gazan residents often cross over to Israel for medical care. In fact, the local Red Cross Office said that "numerous international organizations have said clearly that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza." Sadly, in return for what it provides to Gaza, all that Israel receives is the abduction of its soldiers, cross border violence and more daily rockets and missiles which are growing in effectiveness and numbers.

Contrary to Nader's assertion, there is journalist access to Gaza. Not many, though, choose to go there because of the danger. Those who do enter Gaza are careful not to report anything that Hamas does not want to reveal to the world, since to do otherwise would compromise the journalists’ safety and the safety of their colleagues, some of whom have paid for their honesty with their lives. Much of what happens in Gaza, therefore, remains shrouded in secrecy.

The Arab claim to Gaza and to all of Israel, not just the so-called “occupied territories,” rests on layer upon layer of fabricated “atrocities,” dispossession, and wildly exaggerated reports of civilian casualties on those rare occasions when Israel actually defends itself. Although there is little basis in reality, that doesn’t stop the Arab world and their allies from employing the “big lie.”

Ralph Nader repeats the same “big lies” en masse and wholesale in his column and substantiates them only with third-party quotes and assertions. The actual facts are that the violence and brutality which Gaza residents endure comes mostly from the Hamas gangs and criminal elements that enforce their form of discipline and “justice” on their own population. Their government, as in almost all Arab countries, is administered at the point of a gun.

Ralph Nader's invective against Israel in his column is not new. He's done it many times before. Instead of just accusing and name calling, Nader would serve us all better if he dealt with the facts on the ground and ascribed blame for the violence to the groups that foment it and not to a country which is one of the few actually doing anything to improve in the lives of those that live in Gaza.

Rather than expressing disappointment that most of the terror rockets fired from Gaza miss their intended victims in Israel, Nader ought to encourage the Palestinian Arabs to finally choose peace over their genocidal war against the world's only Jewish state.

We are at War

              GS Don Morris, Ph.D.

Ever listened in while you children were playing out on the playground? You can learn a lot about your child’s character as well as the characters your child “hangs out with”! There is usually a “pecking order”, you know a couple of kids who serve as the captains and “pick their players”. These “leaders” learn at an early age to use language as a major weapon against their classmates. Often in a situation when a certain play disrupts in arguments, the clever leader steps up and “rips” the leader and players using offensive language, body positioning power stances, ridiculing select other players on the opposing team and basically controlling the verbal exchanges-one team usually “backs down” and gives in to this type of leadership.

Children learn an enhanced lesson-use the power of language embedded with enough half truths to be considered plausible and you have now latched onto one of the most powerful weapon systems in the world-cognitive warfare.  You control the narrative and always put your opponents on the defensive.

In order for cognitive warfare to be effective one side in the war must have the following behavioral needs: a desire to never offend anyone, wanting to be looked upon favorably, avoid confrontation at all costs and believing that you are superior to the other party but you must uphold your humanness values through appeasement.  I call these conditions of support that unwittingly leads to our downfall as a nation.

Our enemies are very intelligent and clever.  They almost seem to know us better than we know ourselves. They learned many years ago that there is more than simply conventional warfare to destroy an enemy; control a country’s narrative and over a period of time you defeat them from within.

What is an operational strategy to utilize this powerful cognitive weapon system? First, infiltrate inside your enemy’s major institutions, i.e., law enforcement, academia (K-University), government, government, business to name but a few. Infiltration demands a lengthy time frame and thus you must be incredibly patient and not require immediate gratification. The endgame of the infiltration is to shift the institution’s narrative toward one’s enemy. Multiple tactics are use.

The following represent a short list of tactics and serve only as examples demonstrating how insidious is their penetration into our Western society and culture.

·      Appear the victim and draw attention to your victim condition

·      Demonstrate the conflict that obviously exists between victim treatment and the greater society’s belief in humanness

·      Publicly cry out how you are being mistreated

·      Create “support” groups in certain of the aforementioned institutions and get them to assist you

·      Align yourself with counter-culture groups who despise the American culture-use them as co-conspirators-you remain a silent component-let them do the work for you

There are many additional tactics; I only want you, in this article, to be introduced to a few. 

Second, shift the accepted cultural mores and behaviors over a long period of time. Again, there are multiple tactics currently in play as I write-here are several:

·      Run for local political office, e.g., school board, city council, planning board, 527 groups to identify a few. Use your position to make favorable political decisions for your group

·      Target specific individuals/groups and begin a campaign of delegitimization using many different techniques

·      Create outreach programs designed to enroll others outside your group to believe something positive about your group yet is contrary to your actual intent.

·      Initiate legal action against those who oppose your point of view

·      Slowly introduce changes to the local, regional, state and finally federal legal system making it illegal for anyone to dare confront your positions

·      Increase your population so that your group comprises between 5-10% of the country’s total population. When this happens, the research shows you emerge the winner!

All of the preceding are non-military weapons, the per unit cost is a fraction of any military armament or weapons’ systems. Our enemy learned this a long time ago and for literally “a song and a dance” realized the weapons of cognition. They are organized, focused, they veer not off message and realize how vulnerable America and the rest of the West is to this tool.

Of course this cognitive warfare requires a compliant society and culture.  As long as we are unwilling to engage in confrontation with our enemy they know we loose. They are counting on this principle alone to defeat us. As long as Westerners believe they are responsible for other peoples’ thoughts and feelings, we have no chance of victory. I address this version of cognitive weaponry in a recent article. (Going to the well time and again pays off-why not keep going?)

 

The West can win this war, we have the truth on our side, and our societal values are as valued today as they were so many generations ago. The question becomes when will we find the resolve to take a stand and defend ourselves? Our enemy is counting on never!

Going to the well time and again pays off-why not keep going?

 By

 GS Don Morris, Ph.d.

Take advantage of the situation-never let a good …fail.  Let us examine what has happened-again. Internal Israeli politics have ramped up regarding housing units in Judea and Samaria. The issue has become a nightmare for all of us here in Israel. Our Prime Minister finally made a decision and of course the “winners” are smiling, the “losers” are not only frowning they are truly p….. off. Conveniently Mr. Abbas seizes upon this moment and offers “offers dialogue for prisoners, arming police” and if Israel engages in a full settlement freeze, he will be willing to actually sit down with us and resume talks. In return for certain gestures (code for reward irresponsible behavior) Abbas and his crew will grant us a seat at a table to discuss the future. Let us stop this insanity-you do not alter any behavior situation or act by continuing the same reinforcement process.

Let’s ask ourselves what do we know about human behavior.  You don’t have to be a psychologist or behavior therapist to know some simple, common sense behavior concepts. Let us examine how you treat your own children.

When your child misbehaves or displays inappropriate behavior do you ignore it?  Let’s say yes, you ignore it up to a point in time-for most of us when the same behavior shows up time after time-my rule is 3-what is your rule before you intervene and take action so the behavior changes?

The actual technique varies from one person to another but the nature of something called reinforcement is basically the same for all of us. You know it as do I. Common sense and your own life experiences taught you the truth. It is just this simple: to change a behavior do not reinforce the inappropriate behavior. When your child acts out do you smile, give him/her a treat-of course not. You know not to reward this behavior. Have you, as your children grew in age and ability to understand required your child to learn about personal responsibility? For example, if your child is asked to clean up his/her room and does not do it, do you hold the child accountable?  When you don’t, ever notice how the child simply keeps on repeating the same behavior?

Of course you know this and have done a good job raising self-reliant responsible young adults-they have learned how to act in order to fit within their community and thus be respected as a thoughtful, caring and responsible young person.

Isn’t it amazing how this foundational behavior principle is not used with the “Palestinian” leadership? Yes, the preceding principle applies conceptually to the Israeli-Arab arena. Every time we in Israel have been forced to make concessions the outcome has resulted in attacks, injuries, deaths and continued aberrant behavior by our “neighbors”. There is NO CHANGE in their behavior.

Once again, Abbas and company visit the “giving well” of appeasement-why?  You know the answer; that’s it, say it out loud. Just as a spoiled child, one who does not have to learn how to grow up, the international community has failed as a constructive “nation building parent”.

This behavior technique has morphed into a cognitive warfare weapon. It is part of their weapon cache and is used time after time. Our enemy understands how important cognitive warfare is in terms of shaping the international narrative against Israel.

The West refuses to stand up for basic human behavior principles-it refuses to defend its behavioral values and allows its enemies to control the cognitive battlefield. The political correctness, another cognitive tool used by our adversaries, has us heading along the path of destruction-our homes have been infiltrated by “ideas” meant to destroy us.

Note how our enemy does not hesitate to offend us in every way, every day. They do not “buy into’ PC; they have learned that our Achilles heel in the West is our perceived need to be liked as we actually worry about offending others. Our enemy uses this powerful cognitive weapon-is it not time to stand and defend ourselves? Do we not do this on the battlefield? It is time to stand united against the weapons of mass disintegration of American values and ideals. Stop rewarding actions that do not change behavior in a responsible manner.

Understanding the Iran talks

By Jay Bergman

This op-ed by PRIMER board member Jay Bergman was published in The Jerusalem Post June 3, 2012. It is reproduced here with the permission of the author.

For good reason Munich has become code for the appeasement of regimes that cannot be appeased because there is no limit to the demands they will make. Photo: REUTERS As a professional historian, I normally do not place much stock in historical analogies. They usually obscure and confuse more than they clarify.

But in the case of the recent P5 + 1 talks in Baghdad that will resume in Moscow later this month -- when the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, will try again to negotiate an agreement with Iran that will prevent its nuclear program being used to develop nuclear weapons -- an analogy comes to mind that suggests what the results of these negotiations are likely to be.

The analogy is with the Munich conference at the end of September 1938, at which Nazi Germany, Italy, France, and Great Britain forced Czechoslovakia to cede to Germany the so-called Sudetenland, in the western part of the country, where some (but by no means all) of the three million ethnic Germans living there were demanding, in the name of self-determination, that it become part of Germany.

Hitler favored this because it made easier the destruction of Czechoslovakia, which in turn would facilitate the acquisition of lebensraum (living space) in Russia for the Aryan race. Additionally, the Czech government was required by the Munich agreement to cede to Poland all parts of Czechoslovakia where the population was more than 50% Polish, and to Hungary all territory where the population was more than 50% Magyar.

THAT THE agreement was negotiated by the four heads of state -- Hitler, Mussolini, Edouard Daladier for France, and Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister -- rather than by their foreign ministers underscored its significance. Hitler had scheduled an invasion of Czechoslovakia for October 1 - a fact known to the British and the French -- if it did not meet the Sudeten Germans' demand, and for that reason the Munich agreement seemed to preclude a European war. In reality it merely postponed it.

Conspicuously absent from the conference were the United States, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia itself, whose vital national interests the participants at Munich did not consider legitimate enough for the Czechs to be present to protect. The closest any representatives of the Czech government got to the negotiating table was a room adjacent to it, where two lowlevel functionaries sat in silence, forbidden to participate in the negotiations.

For good reason Munich has become code for the appeasement of regimes that cannot be appeased because there is no limit to the demands they will make.

The obvious analogue of Czechoslovakia in the P5 + 1 talks is Israel. Like Czechoslovakia in 1938, it is the only country whose existence is deemed illegitimate by a participant in the talks, namely Iran. The Iranian government has repeatedly, and with increasing vehemence, threatened to annihilate Israel -- most recently by Major General Hassan Firouzabadi in a speech in Tehran this past Sunday. Nonetheless, Israel is not represented at the talks; there are not even any Israelis in an adjacent room. And like Nazi Germany in 1938, Iran will not be deterred by any agreement it signs from its longstanding intention of acquiring nuclear weapons for the purpose of annihilating Israel and dominating the entire Middle East. Like Hitler, who six months after Munich ordered German troops to occupy the rump that remained of Czechoslovakia, the Iranians several times have agreed to limits on their actions, for example on the percentage to which they will enrich low-grade uranium, only to ignore these limits when it became possible politically to do so.

By consenting to America's participation in these talks, President Obama is acquiescing in a process that can only jeopardize the lives of the six million Jews (and the one million Arabs) who live in Israel. That he is doing so while claiming "to have Israel's back" is an act of cynical calculation worthy of the appeasers at Munich.

The writer is a Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and the author, most recently, of Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov.

Abbas to send 'mother of all letters' to Netanyahu

The following article by Khaled Abu Toameh was published in the Jerusalem Post. We have modified it to reflect what would have been reported were Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and PA Foreign Minister Riyad Malki honest men. We have crossed out the items that are being deleted and write the replacements in red.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is about to send Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu the "mother of all letters" regarding the future of the peace process, a PA official in Ramallah said Sunday.

The official said that the letter was not ready yet and that Abbas has so far completed the "historic introduction" in which he details the major reasons behind the failure of the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian leadership is scheduled to hold a meeting in Ramallah on Wednesday to discuss the contents of the letter, which will also be sent to the UN secretary-general.

The letter will hold Israel the Palestinian Arabs fully responsible for the failure of the peace process because of its failure to insistence that Israel stop construction in the settlements and east Jerusalem and refusal to accept the pre-1967 lines as the basis for a two-state solution, along with general intransigence and the refusal to make any compromises, the official said.

He added that the "mother of all letters" would not be brought to the attention of the current US administration and some EU countries before it is delivered to Netanyahu.

The Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya TV station said last weekend that Abbas was planning to send the letter directly to Israel rather than sending it indirectly through the Jordanian government.

PA Foreign Minister Riyad Malki said that the letter would not bother to seek clarifications regarding Israel's position on the resumption of the peace talks, since we already know Israel is eager to negotiate and puts forth no preconditions. The letter will be delivered to Israel as soon as Netanyahu returns from his current visit to the US, Malki said.

Malki added that Abbas's letter will admit the Palestinian Arabs are to blame Israel for failing to fulfill its obligations under the agreements between the two sides. The letter will stress that the Palestinians Israelis have, on the other hand, more than fulfilled all their obligations, he added.

The Israeli response to the letter will not determine whether the Palestinians will return to the negotiating table or not, Malki said. Rather, regardless of what Israel does, the Palestinian Arabs will continue to come up with excuses to stay away from negotiations and will never make the compromises necessary in good faith negotiations.

'Jews are like the canary in the coal mine'

By Elie Leshem

Published in The Times of Israel, the new Jerusalem-based online newspaper founded by former Jerusalem Post and Jerusalem Report editor David Horovitz in 2012 to document developments in Israel, the Middle East and around the Jewish world.

Dr. Charles Small is in the market for a new home. In the months since Yale University pulled the plug on the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, which he had been presiding over since 2006, Small has been scouring the East Coast of the United States for a campus to host his institute.

Yale's decision to shutter YIISA in June 2011 was met with a spate of responses, as well as a spirited and sometimes-vociferous debate between advocates of the move and detractors. At the time, Small told the Yale Daily News that "radical Islamic and extreme left-wing bloggers" were to blame for the "bad publicity" that ultimately led to Yale's decision. The sentiment echoed those of American Jewish Committee director David Harris and Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defmation League, who derided Yale for creating the impression that "the anti-Jewish forces in the world achieved a significant victory."

But while supporters of the institute maintained that Yale had capitulated to pressure from elements threatened by YIISA's continuing focus on Islamic manifestations of anti-Semitism, Yale insisted that the move was the inevitable result of YIISA's "failure to meet the university's high standards for research and instruction." Others claimed that the initiative had sealed its own fate by losing sight of its raison d'être and engaging in advocacy rather than pure scholarship.

In a recent meeting in Jerusalem, Small rejected any attempt to challenge YIISA's academic credentials, decrying the current atmosphere in the United States and some of the trends - and individuals - he felt had been involved in Yale's decision.

"I think we were engaging in issues that some people, for their own agendas, didn't want us to engage in," Small said. "People accused us of being advocates, but those who were accusing us are themselves advocates. I think our record stands for itself... and we're proud of what we've achieved so far."

Asked to elaborate on the motives and identities of the people in question, Small recalled a large conference held by YIISA in August 2010 under the heading "Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity," that some have cited as the "last straw" that led to YIISA's closure.

'The US administration seems to be siding with the Muslim Brotherhood, riding the wave of radical Islam, instead of confronting its human rights abuse.'

"The plenary sessions in the first days were dedicated to looking at anti-Semitism in the Middle East, and there were people at Yale who thought that if you critically examine these issues, you're somehow making excuses for Israel, or you're a Likud member or a Bush supporter. It's ridiculous," Small said.

"It's part of a general atmosphere in the United States," he continued. "The US Administration seems to be siding with the Muslim Brotherhood, riding the wave of radical Islam, instead of confronting its human rights abuses and its skewed worldview when it comes to the rights of citizens; and it's becoming increasingly clear that we're going to reap the 'rewards' of this error for generations if this continues."

Advocacy or scholarship

In the wake of YIISA's closure, one of the most prominent figures to cast doubt on the academic value of its activities was Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who had participated in some of YIISA's earlier events. In an opinion piece in The Jewish Daily Forward, Lipstadt equated YIISA's programs with a recent inflation of "advocacy and polemics" at some Middle East Studies departments in US universities, concluding that Small and YIISA had "entered a zone in which advocacy masquerades as scholarship."

Small, for his part, doesn't mince words when it comes to Lipstadt and others in "liberal elitist institutions, in academia, or in the media," who, he says, are burying their heads in the sand and refusing to acknowledge the gravity of the threat emanating from the Muslim Brotherhood and Tehran.

More specifically, he said, "You have people like [New York Times columnist] Thomas Friedman... defending this worldview in the [Obama] administration; you have Deborah Lipstadt in Haaretz, using the words 'hysterical' and 'neurotic' ... when referring to people who are very concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism, i.e., Iran and radical Islam. She accused Jews in Israel and in the United States, who are concerned and even alarmed, of being hysterical and neurotic."

Noting her recent appointment to the Holocaust Memorial Council by US President Barack Obama, Small cited Lipstadt as an example of intellectuals, journalists, and scholars who are "close to Obama's administration and are doing his dirty work."

And this at a time, he said, "when there are radical Islamists, the Iranian revolutionary regime and the Brotherhood in Egypt, that are not only Holocaust deniers; they're holocaust advocates."

Did Small believe that something had been changing in the approaches of scholars such as Lipstadt, who has been engaging anti-Semitism for decades and was even taken to court by Holocaust denier David Irving following the publication of her book, "Denying the Holocaust," in 1996?

"I can't get inside these people's heads, but I think it's a so-called 'liberal' worldview," he said. "I consider myself a liberal, politically and intellectually, and to me a liberal is someone who believes in strong notions of citizenship; in the equality of all citizens under one legal system; in the rights of minorities, women, and gay people; in pluralism and workers' rights."

At the same time, he noted, "These people are connected to Obama and share his vision that through engagement and by being, in a way, reconciliatory, things will change... In a sense Israel is getting in the way of the realization of this worldview, and I think that rather than attack the problem and care about human rights and the rights of women, gay people, and religious minorities... perhaps it's easier for them to blame Israel."

Responding by email to Small's statements, Deborah Lipstadt praised some of the work done by Charles Small and YIISA's, allowing that the initiative had done "many very good things," although "at times it crossed the line from academia to advocacy."

Lipstadt maintained that she had "never said that contemporary anti-Semitism is not a real threat in certain places," and noted that during the Haaretz interview cited by Small, she had stressed that it was, in fact, a "real danger."

However, Lipstadt added, "I also said that there is a heightened fear in the Jewish community that often becomes hysteria, and that there are people who play upon these fears... I don't believe we accomplish anything by branding people and calling them names."

Thomas Friedman could not be reached for comment.

The canary in the coal mine

Small seemed taken aback when asked whether Israel could be undermining its own cause or cheapening the memory of the fallen by evoking the Holocaust as a point of reference in warning of the magnitude of the threat emanating from Tehran.

"The discourse on anti-Semitism, politically and academically, is astounding," he replied. "The very fact that you're even asking me this question is interesting in and of itself. Would educated people, when they meet a South African, say, 'It's been 20 years since apartheid - shut up about apartheid'? I don't think anyone would have the audacity and insensitivity to tell a South African who had lived through a crime against humanity that it's time to be quiet."

'Why are Israelis silent? I would say that we, in Israel, are too silent; never mind the Wes.'

Jews are like "the canary in the coal mine," Small added. "Anti-Semitism is a deep, deep hatred, and once we permit this hatred to exist or target one group, it'll only be a matter of time before other groups are targeted. And mark my words: If the Muslim Brotherhood rises to power and governs - and it looks like they will to some extent, depending on their relations with the Egyptian military - watch the rights of women, watch the rights of gay people, watch the Coptic community.

"And yet, the issue of their hatred of the Other is not being dealt with because it's anti-Semitism, because people don't want to hear about it. And to be honest, I'm surprised that the Israeli government does not speak out loud and clear about this social movement that is rising to power, which is antidemocratic and anti-Semitic, and which will violate human rights.

"Why are Israelis silent? I would say that we, in Israel, are too silent; never mind the West. And it's interesting, why people like Thomas Friedman and Deborah Lipstadt actually blame the Jews for the issues in various areas; it's fascinating, worthy of study."