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By David Horowitz
www.frontpagemag.com

Forget for a moment all the strategic and geopolitical rationales for the Gaza pullout and consider the reason that the Jewish settlements in Gaza are an issue at all: Palestinian Arabs and indeed all the Arab states of the Middle East hate Jews. They hate Jews so ferociously that they can’t live alongside them. Not even if there are 8,000 Jews living among 2 million Arabs. There is not an Arab state or an Arab controlled piece of territory in the Middle East that will allow one Jew to live in or on it.

By contrast there are more than a million Arabs, Muslim and Christian, living safely in Israel where they enjoy more citizen rights than the Arabs living in any Arab country — or for that matter the Muslims living in any Muslim country. But not a single Jew can live in a single Arab state.

The ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the Middle East began in 1921 when Churchill created the state of Jordan out of 80 percent of the Palestine mandate. The order creating the state of Jordan said no Jew is allowed to live on this land. That was what the Arabs wanted. No Jew should dirty this land. Seventy-percent of the population of Jordan is Palestinian Arabs. But they don’t want Jordan as their Palestinian state because there are no Jews there to drive into the sea. Palestinians have shown twice — in 1948 and again in 2000 — that they want to kill Jews more than they want a Palestinian state. Jew-hatred is the cause of the Middle East conflict and it is the only reason the Jews in Gaza are an issue at all.

Unlike the Muslim Arabs in Europe, for example, who are responsible for outrageously disproportionate crimes, the Jews in Gaza are law-abiding and productive citizens. But they are Jews. And therefore they must killed (which is why the Israeli Army has to be present) and driven out.

American and European leftists claim to hate racism and racial oppression. But when it comes to the racial oppression of the Jews, they hate the Jews more than they hate racism or oppression. How can any self-respecting progressive support the expulsion of the Jews from Gaza? How can they support the Palestinian Nazis who are responsible for the Jew hatred in the Middle East? The answer is: They hate the Jews more. And why do they hate the Jews? They hate the Jews because Israel is America’s only real ally in the entire Third World — the world of ethnic minorities and the oppressed. They hate the Jews because the Jews expose their hypocrisy in supporting mayhem and murder and tyrannical oppression in the name of compassion and social justice.

Jew-hatred comes naturally to leftists. Karl Marx was a Jew hater, albeit a Jew himself. Marx, who once sneered at the rival socialist Lassalle, calling him a “Jewish nigger,” wrote a famous essay about the problem of the Jews. Like today’s left he identified the Jews with capitalism, with the essence of capitalism which was creating wealth for the world. The solution to the “Jewish Question” according to Marx was a world without Judaism and without Jews. How simple! How refreshing.

The leftist world outlook is conspiratorial in its essence. According to the left, the world is controlled by THEM — capitalists, corporations, Halliburton. THEY are responsible for evil throughout the world. Are there Islamic fanatics who blow up tall buildings? That’s only because THEY made them desperate. And of course the Jews knew in advance. Is Saddam Hussein a monster who needs to be removed? Only the Jews think so, but THEY control the White House. Neocon Jews are behind it all. Just ask Cindy Sheehan. Since the Jews and Halliburton are responsible for global evil, eliminating THEM is the only way to create a world in which there will be “social justice.” How far is this from the raving lunacies of anti-Semites?

The left embraced the cause of Palestinian terror and its goal of a genocide for the Jews forty years ago. Gaza is just one territory along the way.

www.ynetnews.com
By Ali Waked

I have lately been watching Arabic news reports on “Mosaic,” a program on the Link Channel (Direct TV 375). I’ve reported previously that virtually all of the news is “managed” by the various dictatorial governments. I’ve confessed to being a loss to refute the “news” from Iran, which seemed to be totally invented.

The story below, from Syria, shows the incredible extremes to which these pathetic dictatorships will go to discolor a story. The whole world has seen the Gaza withdrawal and understands that it was a unilateral Israeli decision, not at all influenced by anything the Palestinians did. Yet this story, which well could have appeared in Alice in Wonderland, draws an entirely different picture for gullible readers. It’s no wonder that Arab citizens, many of whom are illiterate to tell the truth, generate so much hatred for this cartoon picture of Israel and its situation with the Palestinians.

In propaganda, the idea seems to be to work in some lies and half truths in a general frame of truth. In this story, every single statement is a lie. —Zola

The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip constitutes an Israeli defeat, according to comments made on Syria’s official radio station. Notably, the station represents the government view on political affairs.

The pullout is a “victory for the Palestinian people and proof of Israel’s failure despite the military pressure exerted on the Palestinians by (Prime Minister) Sharon,” commentators said.

According to the Syrians, the withdrawal marks the “failure of Israeli crimes, which were manifested through killings, assassinations, home demolitions… and other war crimes forbidden by international law.”

The Syrian commentators spoke excitedly about the pullout and said it marks “Israel’s admission to its defeat and its collapse under the blows delivered against it by Palestinian resistance groups, which did not spare victims in order to fight the occupation.”

“This victory and the Israeli withdrawal are an important step on the way to completing Palestine’s liberation ahead of the establishment of a Palestinian state,” one commentator said.

Despite the great excitement, however, the Syrians stressed that the road to a Palestinian state would not be easy, “as we’re talking about a racist enemy that does not hesitate to commit cold-blooded, barbaric crimes.”

The Syrians also said Prime Minister Sharon is using the pullout as an attempt to evade the American-brokered road map peace plan.

Israel Today

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an independent Israeli group that monitors incitement in the Palestinian press, has published a report charging that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is funding Palestinian universities that sponsor terrorism.

The report says American development assistance has gone to universities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza with student chapters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. American aid money has even funded the building of roads named after suicide bombers! “If they think they can pour millions into Palestinian universities while turning a blind eye to the Hamas branches at those universities, they are making a mockery of the United States anti-terror policy,” PMW director Itamar Marcus told a subcommittee of the US Congress. In the past year, USAID gave $41 million to Palestinian universities.

PMW garners most of its evidence from Palestinian press reports:

“The Islamic Bloc [the Hamas student organization] of Al-Najah University [in Nablus] organized the ‘Bridge of the Shahids [“martyrs,” the Palestinian euphemism for suicide bombers]’ exhibition….” The exhibition’ was opened by the faculty dean, Dr. Samir Mayalah, and some lecturers and a representative of the Islamic Bloc. (From the Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida).

PMW said one exhibit showed a mock Sbarro pizza shop, which was bombed in Jerusalem in 2001, and decorated the walls and tables with images of pizza and body parts.

“In Hebron, there was an assembly marking the first anniversary of the assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin…The assembly was… held in the Al-Quds Open University… Taysir Abu Sakur, on behalf of the university’s administration… recalled the Shahids of our people.” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida)

“The student council at Al-Azhar University [in Gaza]…held a mass meeting yesterday under the title ‘Oath and Loyalty to the Shahids.’…University President, Dr. Hani Najem, emphasized in his speech that our people will continue to be loyal to the blood of our Shahids.” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida)

All of these universities are financed by USAID. Nevertheless, according to US law, all government institutions, organizations and companies are prohibited from funding terrorism.

“Today,” the PMW report concluded, “US money continues to be used to directly and indirectly promote and honor terrorists.”

By Barry Rubin
www.frontpagemag.com

For several years I have watched the revival of anti-Semitism with growing dismay. Then along comes Steve Erlanger’s article in The New York Times, regarded by itself and many of its readers—especially Jewish ones—as the world’s greatest newspaper. He writes about an Israeli archaeologist who has uncovered the ruins of an important two-thousand-year-old building which, she asserts, was part of King David’s palace.

Maybe she is right; maybe not. Archaeologists are not certain; more evidence and study is no doubt necessary. That is how science works. We are then informed, accurately, that archaeologists are debating whether David’s kingdom was a great power or merely a tiny chiefdom. While not all her colleagues agree with her conclusion about the building, all those quoted respected the importance of the find.

But under the new post-rational ideology, the author tries at the very start to discredit the archaeologist in advance. Despite the fact that she is a respected scholar, the framework for the article is set by a claim that she is working for an institution partly funded by a “conservative” businessman who supposedly wants to prove a Jewish connection with Jerusalem for political purposes.

In other words, there is something supposedly shady about the whole enterprise, an assertion merely based on the fact that one of the donors also gives money to a conservative Israeli think tank. Thus, there is no such thing as professional ethics or a search for truth but merely hirelings for some cause making propaganda. Such things do happen but some real evidence is supposed to be required for such charges.

This kind of reasoning is often employed nowadays by people who should know better. The scientific method which puts the emphasis on examining evidence is thrown out the window in exchange for the crude radical concept of “who benefits.” This, incidentally, is the foundation of the conspiracy theories that bedevil the Arab and Muslim worlds.

It is also the crudest form of Marxism, arguing that consensual reality is only a construct created by ruling classes to remain in power, merely one narrative among many. Out of such thinking comes a paragraph in the article that should live in infamy as a prime exemplification of this kind of intellectual malpractice. Let me quote it in full:

“The [archaeological] find will also be used in the broad political battle over Jerusalem—whether the Jews have their origins here and thus have some special hold on the place, or whether, as many Palestinians have said, including the late Yasir Arafat, the idea of a Jewish origin in Jerusalem is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.”

Do the Jews have any connection with Jerusalem and the land of Israel? Well, according to the Times, it is just a matter of political debate now, in which the views of Palestinian propagandists have equal weight. While the statements or findings of Western, democratic, or moderate sources are subjected to the highest degree of cynicism and challenge, those of radicals are treated with the utmost respect.

Let us ponder the awesome implications of this paragraph. Whether or not Jerusalem should be partitioned as part of a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict is a valid subject for discussion. It should be noted that in 2000 Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered such a deal at Camp David and it was extended further in the Clinton plan. Nevertheless, the Jewish connection with Jerusalem cannot be in doubt, attested to not only in Jewish writings but also in Christian and Muslim writings.

Whether or not King David’s palace is found will have no effect on the contemporary political debate. We already know and take for granted this historical connection, which is accepted by every real archaeologist who has dealt with that subject. One might reject giving up (east) Jerusalem because of its overwhelmingly central historic and religious importance to the Jewish people for 3000 years—or favor it as a necessity based on what is needed to attain peace, international attitudes, and the large Palestinian population in the eastern part of the city.

Yet now Erlanger gives equal credence to the “expertise” of Arafat who, let’s face it was no archaeologist but the most important terrorist of modern times and a proven serial liar. {Having written a biography of Arafat I am well aware that even the statement that Arafat was a terrorist is highly controversial among the West’s cultural ruling class.} After all, Arafat also claimed that Israel carried out most of the terrorist attacks on itself, poisoned Palestinians with gas, water, and chewing gum, and aimed to rule the entire Middle East. Why should he only be given credence on the Jerusalem issue?

In contrast, when Arafat tried that nonsense about Jerusalem at the Camp David summit, President Bill Clinton rightly called him on it, saying, “I’m not a Jew, I’m a Christian. It’s well known this is where the Temple is.”

On the basis of this latest article, though, one can imagine a parallel Times article from an equivalent controversy of the previous century: “The claim by a Jewish writer, financed by those trying to prove this case, that his people have accurately recounted their history will become part of the debate over whether, as many Germans have said, including cabinet minister Joseph Goebbels, this story is a myth used to justify conquest and occupation.”

That example was not meant as a joke or exaggeration. Such things are the precise historical equivalent of the kind of ideology far too often prevalent nowadays. For the assumption behind the post-Marxist, pre-Enlightenment ideology is that truth is merely a question of (political) faith. Fascism, as the Soviet foreign minister said in 1939 is a matter of taste. Or as a British reporter sneered last month at his country’s ambassador who was demanding the UN act strongly against terrorism, but isn’t one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter?

Don’t the purveyors of such ideas understand how this type of thinking has always been responsible for the worst type of prejudice, racism, and anti-rationalism throughout history? What we have here is the return of medievalism in its worst guise. One can almost hear in many reports today the equivalents for what the BBC would have sounded like in the eleventh century: “The body of a young boy has been discovered in Lincoln, England, apparently murdered by local Jews to make Passover matzo. Film at eleven.”

Even the true life story of Hugh of Lincoln—which led to massacres of Jews at the time—is not far-fetched when one recalls recent such lies that justified bloodshed of the same sort: a widely reported but non-existent massacre in Jenin; continuing claims of ritual murder to make matzo in the Saudi press; and the case of a young Palestinian turned into a global martyr after the world media falsely reported he was killed by Israeli bullets.

How then can one be surprised that many Europeans, much less Arabs and Muslims, believe the September 11, 2001 attacks were carried out by American or Israeli intelligence and similar nonsense? In the same vein, many British writers responded to the London terrorist attacks by attacking their own country. Suicide blamers act as apologists for suicide bombers.

Here, for example, are some of the things I learned about the Middle East in just 24 hours of listening to National Public Radio:

• A discussion of terrorism: in 1972, “extremists” attacked the Israeli Olympic team in Munich according to an “expert” and the segment’s host, who took almost excruciating care to avoid mentioning that these were PLO terrorists in an operation directed by that organization’s top leadership.
• Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis are “barbaric” people claiming all Muslims are terrorists, according to a Muslim-American “liberal reformer.” whose words were not challenged by the interviewer. This is despite the fact that both have repeatedly acclaimed moderate Islam and the latter is the main champion of the argument that Islam is in no way intrinsically anti-democratic.
• Terrorism is only a typical tactic used by Europeans and Asians faced with occupation armies, according to an “expert” on comparative culture. I don’t seem to remember even the much-provoked French or Italian resistance deliberately murdering German children and exulting at their successes in doing so. As I recall, it was the Nazis who were the terrorists. That’s why they are so reviled, remember?

What we have here goes beyond merely passionate political debate or different points of view. It is a profoundly anti-intellectual, anti-rational, and anti-liberal mode of thought alongside an abandonment of professional standards. Every such instance should be challenged.

by Emery P. Dalesio
www.newsobserver.com

The religious texts of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and faiths other than Christianity should be allowed in North Carolina courts for oaths promising truthful testimony, the ACLU argued in a lawsuit filed against the state Tuesday.

State law allows witnesses preparing to testify in court to take their oath either by laying a hand over a “Holy Scripture,” by saying “so help me God” without the use of a religious book or by using no religious symbols.

“We hope that the court will issue a ruling that the phrase “holy scripture” includes the Koran, Old Testament, and Bhagavad-Gita in addition to the Christian Bible,” said Jennifer Rudinger, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina.

The ACLU called on the state Administrative Office of the Courts to adopt a policy allowing use of the Koran and other religious texts in North Carolina courtrooms. The request came after the two top judges in Guilford County decided that Muslims could not legally take an oath on the Koran.

AOC director Ralph Walker replied in a letter July 14 that his office would not sanction use of religious texts other than the Bible until the General Assembly or the courts settled the matter.

“The lawsuit is seeking a declaration by the court that this is what Holy Scripture means in the law,” she said.

The issue surfaced after Muslims from the Al-Ummil Ummat Islamic Center in Greensboro tried to donate copies of the Koran to Guilford County’s two courthouses.

Guilford Senior Resident Superior Court Judge W. Douglas Albright and Guilford Chief District Court Judge Joseph E. Turner said an oath on the Koran is not a legal oath under state law, which refers to someone laying his hands on the “Holy Scriptures.” The two judges interpreted that to mean the Christian Bible.

In response, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.), asked for a statewide policy allowing oaths to be taken using the Koran. The ACLU of North Carolina claimed that an 1856 state Supreme Court decision sets a clear precedent for oaths with religious texts. The court decision noted that North Carolina’s oath-taking statutes were written for Christians but do not limit others from swearing in the way they deem most sacred.

The ACLU contends the change signals that legislators were trying to be more “inclusive.”

Denying use of other religious texts would violate the Constitution by favoring Christianity over religions, the ACLU said in its lawsuit.

By Jonathan Tobin
Jewish World Review

For supporters of Israel, the sense of cognitive dissonance about current events is by now commonplace.

In August, Israel left the Gaza Strip 38 years after it conquered the small territory in a defensive war.

Jewish residents of the area have been forcibly removed. Farms, towns, homes, synagogues and even cemeteries were either destroyed or carted back inside the 1949 armistice lines.

In order to do this, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon divided his Likud Party, forced out some of the most talented members of his Cabinet and set in motion a series of events that threatens at times to tear Israeli society to pieces.

In exchange for this angst, Israel is getting from the Palestinians nothing but the knowledge that the retreat will most likely strengthen the hands of those who believe terror is the best way to deal with the Jewish state.

Sharon has powerful reasons for the Gaza move, including the need to keep the area’s million-plus Arabs outside of Israel’s borders, and create a more defensible position than the current deployment of troops who defended the settlements.

But disengagement also has led many American Jews to piously hope that this sacrifice will win Israel the plaudits of the world — or at least lessen the drumbeat of criticism that can be found every day in the pages of major daily newspapers and on television news.

By giving up Gaza, they reason, Israel has confirmed its status as the certified good guy of the conflict.

But those who think that giving up Gaza will make Israel more popular are deluded themselves. Its enemies aren’t impressed by its desire for peace or its willingness to give up part of its historic territory after winning wars, something no other sovereign state has ever done.

Shimon Peres, currently a member of Sharon’s coalition, once famously said that Israel didn’t need a smart public—relations effort to tell its story. It just needs smart policies.

By that, he meant that all it had to do was to give the Palestinians what they wanted: a state in Gaza and the West Bank. After he concluded the Oslo accords with former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and made such a state inevitable, Peres was convinced that he’d done exactly that. We all know now just how wrong he was to believe Arafat wanted peace. But what has not yet been fully discussed was just how flawed his information policy turned out to be.

Once Arafat was installed as head of a Palestinian territory, his “police” armed and terrorists released from Israeli prisons, the false idea that Israel was a murderous occupier that killed babies became far more prevalent throughout the world, not less.

Even more recently, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak — whose bold bid for peace at the 2000 Camp David summit put almost all of the territories (including Gaza) on a silver platter for Arafat — was burned as well. Not only did Arafat say no to Barak’s peace offer, within months he launched a bloody terror war.

But Israel gained no credit for its peace offer, and sympathy for the Palestinian cause did not decrease because of the decision to pursue the murder of innocents on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Instead, for the first time in decades, Israel’s existence and the very legitimacy of Zionism become a matter of debate in respectable circles.

Ironically, Israel’s image in the West was probably stronger when it was led by Yitzhak Shamir, a poor communicator who made no secret of his opposition to all concessions to the Palestinians.

And now, even after weathering four years of heightened terrorism that took more than a thousand Jewish lives and having handed Arafat’s successor — and his Islamist allies — all of Gaza without even so much as requiring them to sign another piece of paper, just where does Israel stand?

In Europe, anti—Jewish and anti—Zionist agitation continues to grow. Here in America, liberal Protestant denominations that Jews have always considered allies now line up to denounce even passive Israeli measures of self—defense, such as its security fence, while some also endorse an economic boycott of the Jewish state via divestment.

The poison of anti-Zionism has even leeched into some anti-Iraqi war protests, which are then treated sympathetically in the mainstream press. Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier who fell in Iraq, has become a popular focus of hostility to the Bush administration through her sit-in outside the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. But some of her views seem to have gone virtually unmentioned by the mainstream press: one of them being hostility to Israel.

Sheehan has written that her son was killed for a “neo-con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel.” She also reportedly said, “Get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine, and you’ll stop the terrorism.”

The fact that she would say such things, and otherwise respectable churches would denounce Israel just as it is giving the Palestinians yet another chance for peace, has to tell us something about this dynamic.

What’s the root of this madness? Historians will debate this question in the future, but the most plausible theory is that the moment that Israel’s spokespeople and friends abroad began talking about balancing Palestinian rights to statehood and Israel’s need for security, it started to lose the media war.

Rights can only be balanced in the public eye with other rights, not pleas for safety. If the Palestinians portray themselves as the only ones with legitimate rights to disputed territories, and Israel repeatedly fails to offer an effective rejoinder, then why won’t more people consider the Palestinians in the right?

And once they’ve gotten editors and church leaders to think of Israel as an “occupier” and inherently in the wrong, then all Palestinian tactics — even murder — become legitimate and all Israeli countermeasures become illegitimate. That is the challenge as we await the launch of a third Palestinian “intifada,” as the head of Israeli army intelligence predicted before a Knesset committee last week.

Israelis had their own good reasons to say good riddance to Gaza, but they should expect no credit for it on the pages of The New York Times, or on CNN or NPR. Years and years of concessions have only served to reinforce the idea that Israel was always in the wrong. And nothing — not giving up Gaza or even the whole of the West Bank and Jerusalem— will change that.

Until the day when Israel and its friends begin speaking once again of inalienable Jewish rights to this land, the most we can expect is still more of the same.