The title above may be a bit confusing, since the left and their media cohorts essentially treat every week as Israeli Demonization Week. So to be more precise: the official, organized, designated demonization of Israel known as Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is gearing up to launch later this month.

IAW is an annual (2012 is the eighth) international series of events held in cities and on campuses across the globe. It aims “to educate people about the nature of Israel” – by which it means to spread disinformation and propaganda – “and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns” in order to delegitimize it. They demand full equality for Arab citizens of Israel (who already have it), an end to what they falsely call the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, dismantling of the security wall that protects Israelis from Palestinian terrorist attacks, and the Palestinian right of return, which would essentially mean the end of Jews in Israel.

The IAW program begins in Europe in late February, shortly afterward in the United States, then Canada, the “Arab World” (as the website refers to it) and South Africa early in March, and finally in “Palestine.” Its speakers, conferences, rallies, workshops, panel discussions, film screenings, protests, even “flash mobs” will help hammer home their monstrous lies about Israel. The speakers featured this year at IAW include:

Max Blumenthal, a vicious character assassin masquerading as a journalist. In addition to playing an entire deck full of race cards against Republicans in his capacity as smear merchant for such entities as Media Matters, the Nation Institute (funded in part by George Soros), and the Huffington Post, Blumenthal kicked off the Internet frenzy over The Path to 9/11, a $30 million ABC miniseries in 2006 about the history behind the 9/11 attacks. He claimed ridiculously that the project was a secretive “propaganda operation” on the part of a stealth conservative cabal in Hollywood, and sparked death threats against the director and writer thanks to his lies about their political agenda.

Palestinian-Canadian attorney Diana Buttu is an international law expert and former advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization. CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, notes many instances of the media-savvy Buttu’s distortions and outright lies about Israel; for example, she buttresses her argument that Palestinian violence is the result of Israeli military occupation with her often-repeated claim that not a single Israeli died from suicide bombings during the period of the Oslo peace process. CAMERA points out that in fact, 24 Israelis died from suicide bombings during this period, and 14 more by other means at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Not to mention the Arab violence against Israelis that predates the latters’ control over the West Bank and Gaza. Jew-hatred, not “occupation,” is to blame for terrorism against the Israelis.

Last week Palestinian Media Watch revealed that the Mufti Muhammad Hussein, top cleric of the Palestinian Authority, had approvingly quoted a hadith calling for the genocide of Jews. Hussein, who was appointed to his post by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, did so at a ceremony marking the 47^th anniversary of the Fatah movement. The moderator at the ceremony chimed in that “Our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs [i.e., Jews] is a war of religion and faith.” As for Mufti Hussein, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu ordered Israel’s attorney-general to investigate him for incitement.

Palestinian Media Watch now reports that the mufti’s words have drawn international condemnation. This, actually, doesn’t amount to much—far less than, for instance, the typical round of condemnations when Israel announces plans to build homes in parts of Jerusalem that the enlightened world thinks should be Judenrein.

Alistair Burt, the UK minister for the Middle East, said: “I condemn the inflammatory words used by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and others…. To refer to the Jewish people in such a way and to talk of killing Jews is anti-semitism, pure and simple.” More surprisingly—seemingly—Palestinian Media Watch also offers a quote from Americans for Peace Now. This organization, founded in 1981 to drum up support for its Israeli parent-organization, Peace Now, states that it

strongly condemns the belligerent anti-Jewish comments made by the Palestinian Authority’s Mufti of Jerusalem at a public event in the West Bank earlier this month…. “We are appalled by these comments, coming from the most senior Muslim cleric on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll,” said Debra DeLee, APN’s President and CEO. DeLee added, “What we find particularly disturbing is that these vile comments were broadcast on the Palestinian Authority’s official television channel, amplifying their inciting [e]ffect.”

I was surprised by those seemingly unequivocal words, and checked the original statement on APN’s website.

Indeed, the context reveals that they weren’t unequivocal at all. Immediately after her above-quoted words, DeLee said further:

People in positions of religious authority, on all sides, bear a heavy responsibility of avoiding incendiary rhetoric. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a dispute between two national movements with conflicting claims to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Clerics on both sides must prevent this conflict from being perceived as a religious conflict and from becoming one.

DeLee, then, quickly turned her censure of the mufti’s words into an admonition to “both sides.” The problem is that, presumably, neither she nor the organization she represents could be so ignorant as not to realize that this is disingenuous.

Incendiary statements about Palestinians by Israeli rabbis are rare, confined to a fringe, and heavily denounced by the mainstream—if not leading to arrest, as in a case last year involving a rabbi who wrote a preface to an obscure book arguing that non-Jews could be killed in certain situations in wartime. Mufti Muhammad Hussein is, as mentioned, the governmentally appointed religious leader of the Palestinian Authority, and made his statement on official PA TV. Still more significant is that his words were hardly a fringe phenomenon but, instead, a standard and typical part of the PA’s comprehensive campaign, through media, mosques, and schools, of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incitement.

Salman Rushdie, the author of “The Satanic Verses”, was quietly deleted from India’s Jaipur Literature Festival after the protests of the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary – one of Islam’s most powerful bodies.

Rushdie went into hiding after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian Shia leader, issued a fatwa calling for his death.

Rushdie’s saga is now, in many parts of the Islamic world, associated with a “Zionist plot” and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a short book concocted by the czarist police and presented as minutes of a secret meeting where Jews plotted world domination.

According to Iranian officials, Rushdie is a “mercenary author masterminded by Zionism, Britain and the United States of America”. Today Iran is one of the major world printers of the “Protocols”, the only book that has ever had the perverse distinction of being both globally influential and, at the same time, a forgery.

There is no accurate information on the sales of the “Protocols”, but it is undoubtedly one of the best sellers of all time.

Unfortunately, the “Protocols” rarely attracts Western attention, as we like to think that it is just a bad joke. We closed our eyes for too long.

In 1983, Yasser Arafat sent a letter to the UN secretary- general accusing Jews of “poisoning Palestinian schoolgirls”. It was the beginning of the monstrous Palestinian ideology.

Originally, the “Protocols” was meant as a warning to good Russian youths. The message: Beware of the machinations of the Jews, whose hidden aim is the subjugation of the Christian world.

Now the book is one of the most powerful propaganda tools of the Arab and Islamic world.
The only time the Protocols’ popularity dipped was immediately following the Holocaust. One suspects it was a little difficult to reconcile Jewish control of the world with the obliteration of a third of the Jewish people. But soon rationalizations began to appear.

On December 27, 2011, the Palestinian-Lebanese historian Bayan Nuwayhed Al-Hout published an article in the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, which dealt, among other things, with the “Protocols” and their connection to Judaism, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel. In her article, Al-Hout claims that the “the Protocols completely correspond to the words of the great Rabbis throughout the ages, and to the Talmud itself. The Chosen People is a basic Talmudic concept, meaning the people who were chosen to rule and dictate”.

Arab anti-Semitism has adopted all of Europe’s anti- Semitic myths. The “Protocols” are now prominently displayed not only in the Middle East, but also on the Western and Christian bookshelf. Though they are a proven forgery, they nevertheless receive worldwide recognition by those who seek to rely on them for promoting their own nefarious purposes.

I have often written, sometimes bemused, sometimes incensed, about what is surely the strangest fact of Jewish life, namely, its self-division. Since time immemorial, the Jewish people have been at war with themselves, both in the Holy Land and the Diaspora, allowing themselves to succumb to one of history’s most mordant ironies. In turning against themselves, they have effectively collaborated with those who would suppress, conquer or extinguish the Jewish community.

The template was already established in the Book of Genesis, where we read how one brother slew another in jealousy and resentment and a group of conspiratorial brothers sold their sibling into slavery. From that point on, the biblical archive presents a saga of recrimination, envy, hatred and fratricidal strife that in different degrees has imperiled the very survival of the Jewish “nation.” The pattern was consolidated in the story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, the three rebels who “rose up” before Moses and challenged his authority. As the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen these people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people” (Exodus 32:9).

Brother against brother, prophet against people, king and priest, and even nation against nation form an indelible part of the Jewish chronicle. The history of the Two Kingdoms provides a continuingly relevant object lesson. After the death of King Solomon, the Israelite communality broke apart into the two warring monarchies of Israel and Judah. The shedding of kinship blood critically weakened the two kingdoms, leading to the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians and the reduction of Judah first by the Chaldeans, then by the Egyptians, and finally by the Babylonians. The Jewish epic may be described as: divide and be conquered. Indeed, surah 59:14 of the Koran tells us something very true about Jews: “There is much hostility between them: their hearts are divided…” It seems that the wise counsel of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah has no resonance for the backsliders: “All of Israel and those who are joined to it are to each other like brothers. If brother shows no compassion to brother, who will show compassion to him?”

The fault line in the Jewish sensibility is tectonic in its dimensions and destructive in its effect. Perhaps the single most resonant case study in self-division involves the institutional founder of the Christian faith. The story of St. Paul is too well known to require much in the way of comment, yet it is richly instructive. A rabid persecutor of the followers of Jesus, Saul of Tarsus experienced a blinding conversion to the new faith and was shortly thereafter  called by the name of Paul (Acts 13:9). He then became the Apostle of Christianity, considering his Jewish identity a mere rehearsal for a larger identity and at times expressing strong disapproval of Jews who held to their traditional beliefs and identity. (His quarrel with the Desposyni, the “servants of the Lord,” led by James the brother of Jesus who wished to preserve the purity and exclusivity of the original faith, is a matter of historical record.)

But the details of the Apostle’s former activities and subsequent religious convictions are specific to the time. Jews today do not persecute Christians. Indeed, they are the ones who are relentlessly persecuted—by Muslims, by secular antisemites and unhinged fanatics from both sides of the political spectrum (though massively from the Left), and by several Christian denominations associated with The World Council of Churches, replacement and liberation theologians, and the Quaker-Presbyterian axis promoting its BDS campaigns. More to the point, and the most indigestible perversion of all, countless Jews harry and denounce their own congeners. The tendency to a kind of binary kinesis seems inherent in the Jew, whether it is himself he loathes or his own people he reproaches and undermines. It is the psychic split itself, not its local content, that transcends the ages. In this respect, the Saul/ Paul fracture represents a longstanding Jewish archetype.

This history of self-estrangement, political strife and cultural rupture has been played out from the biblical era through the centuries of religious factionalism and reciprocal excommunication culminating in our own epoch. The profound antipathy between assimilated Jews and their irredentist counterparts in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron, as well as the caste-like contempt of Western Jewish intellectuals for the Ostjuden, that is, their assumed “plebeian” and “uneducated” East European brethren, are facts of modern Jewish history. The shame of many of the Jewish Councils in Nazi Europe that collaborated with their murderers (not all, as Gershom Scholem justifiably argues in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis) cannot be forgiven, despite attempts to explain it away as the least of worst alternatives. The legacy of the celebrated Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the equally acclaimed Jewish political writer Hannah Arendt, who could never forget their German patrimony and were corrosively suspicious of the Zionist project, has been broadly and unambiguously noxious. In the present moment we observe their offspring, that is, left-wing “peace activists,” liberal rabbis and “post-Zionist” intellectuals, who strive to erode the Jewish character of the state of Israel and so deprive it of its legitimacy. The Jewish Left, as it dances around the golden calf of a fictitious peace, represents perhaps the gravest danger to the survival of the country.

Many Jews, as I wrote in Hear, O Israel!, tend to transpose the fight against iniquity and oppression to other nations and communities rather than press for the rights of their own people. Or they believe, “in traditionally Marxist fashion,” as Sol Stern writes in City Journal, “that the way to fight anti-Semitism was through the broader struggle for international socialism.” Thus they pursue their fugitive merit. Like Paul, their main focus falls on the Corinthians and Ephesians et al. of the time. Indifferent to the reality of their own condition—ignoring the rain clouds until they are drenched and catch pneumonia, as the 19^th century Jewish philosopher Max Nordau noted—these are the ostensibly benevolent Jews who wish to “repair the world” (Tikkun Olam). That it would be a world in which their place would nevertheless remain precarious escapes them entirely.

The benevolent Jews are bad enough. Their spirit of pharisaic charity, however, is exceeded by that of the reprobate Jews, who take their “idealism” to the next level of unctuous self-effacement. They struggle against injustice by reprehending, for example, not Palestinian terrorists and Hezbollah jihadists but Israeli Jews themselves whose right to national legitimacy they perceive as an affront and do everything in their power to misrepresent. Again, like Paul, they regard their own people as “those who please not God, and are contrary to all men” (1 Thessalonians 2:15).

Ten years ago this week, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan, after he had been lured into what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani about the links between al Qaeda and the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. The shadowy Pakistani group that kidnapped Pearl accused him of being a spy for the CIA, and made several demands, including the release of Pakistani detainees from Guantanamo. Nine days later, Pearl was murdered and beheaded, and on February 21, a video was released called “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.” The footage showed Pearl’s “confession” and brutal decapitation, interspersed with images of dead Muslims, George Bush shaking hands with Ariel Sharon, and Palestinians allegedly killed by Israeli Defense Forces, including 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura, whose death was later exposed as a Palestinian fabrication. Later, captured 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would brag to interrogators that he personally had beheaded Pearl. As for his abductor, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, though tried and condemned to death, still lives in a Pakistani jail cell, from which according to some reports he has planned other terrorist attacks.

The killing of Pearl concentrated much of what Andrew McCarthy calls the “willful blindness” of many in the West to the Islamic roots of the perpetrators’ violence. At the time, most of the media mainly decried Pearl’s death because he was a reporter. Worse yet were the comments that scolded the terrorists for not understanding that American journalists are neutral observers whose impartiality could help them get their story out.  As a New York Times editorial put it,

“The terrible irony of Mr. Pearl’s murder is that he and other independent journalists have been trying to present a detailed and informed portrait of the mindset, motives and grievances of the Islamic fundamentalists in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan. That work will continue despite the killing, but the kidnappers have only undermined their cause by their acts.”

The professional corruption of the mainstream-media was revealed in this statement, with its claims that journalists are objective (mostly false) and have no loyalties to their own country and people (mostly true), and that the murderers had a legitimate “cause” and “grievances” (moral idiocy and cowardice).

Most commentary also ignored the Koranic-inspired anti-Semitism of the words Pearl was forced to say in the execution video: “My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California U.S.A. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel. Back in the town of Bnei Brak there is a street named after my great grandfather Chaim Pearl who is one of the founders of the town.”

The claim that Pearl was a C.I.A. agent was obviously a pretext; his real offense was being a Jew, a race the Koran calls “laden with Allah’s anger,” destined to suffer forever “abasement and poverty” and eventually to be transformed into “apes and swine.” In emphasizing Pearl’s Jewish ancestry and Zionist connections, the terrorists were conforming to the genocidal ambitions of many Muslims, from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has vowed to “wipe Israel from the map,” to the Muslim Brother affiliate Hamas, whose charter quotes the hadith proclaiming, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” As for the beheading, that too has its justification in Koran 8.12: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads.”

Yesterday FrontPage Magazine ran the first part of this interview with scholar of Islam Andrew Bostom, on the roots of Islamic Jew-hatred. In this second and final part, Dr. Bostom details the facts about the often-misunderstood connection between Islam and Nazism, and describes his new upcoming book, Sharia versus Freedom – The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism (to be published by Sept 2012 with a foreword by the incomparable Andrew C. McCarthy).

Andrew Bostom, M.D., M.S., is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital, the major teaching affiliate of Brown University Medical School. He is the author of two essential, extraordinary, and meticulously documented works of scholarship, The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. He has published articles and commentary on Islam here on FrontPage and in the Washington Times, National Review Online, Revue Politique, American Thinker, and elsewhere in print and online.

This Tuesday in Los Angeles, Dr. Bostom will present “Understanding the Islam in Muslim Jew-Hatred.” See here for information about attending.

Mark Tapson: Dr. Bostom, some say that modern Islamic anti-Semitism was shaped by the influence of Nazism – but isn’t it the other way around? Can you elaborate on their symbiotic relationship?

AB: There are concordances between Nazism and jihadism over an historical continuum evident since the advent of the Nazi movement. This nexus was already apparent in Hitler’s own observations from 1926, elaborated upon over the following decades by both the Nazi leader, and other key Nazi officials, and ideologues. Not surprisingly, there are two predominant, recurring themes in this discourse: jihad as total war, and the annihilationist jihad against the Jews.

Perhaps the earliest recorded evidence of Hitler’s serious interest in the jihad was provided by Muhammad ‘Inayat Allah Khan (who adopted the pen name “al-Mashriqi”—“the Orientalist” or “the Sage of the East”). Born in the Punjab in 1888, al-Mashriqi was a Muslim polymath who attended Cambridge on a government scholarship, and excelled in the study of oriental languages, mathematics, engineering, and the sciences.

Not only did Mashriqi translate the standard abridged version of Mein Kampf (then commonly available) from English into Urdu, during one of his sojourns in Europe, which included time spent in Berlin, he met Hitler in the early years of the Fuehrer’s leadership of the National Socialist [Nazi] Party. Their meeting took place in 1926 at the National Library. ^4k Here is the gist of Mashriqi’s report on his interaction with Hitler as described in a letter to the renowned scholar of Indian Islam, J.M.S. Baljon:

I was astounded when he [Hitler] told me that he knew about my Tazkirah. The news flabbergasted me. . . I found him very congenial and piercing. He discussed Islamic Jihad with me in details. In 1930 I sent him my Isharat concerning the Khaksar movement with a picture of a spade-bearer Khaksar at the end of that book. In 1933 he started his Spade Movement.

Mashriqi also wrote this independent summary of his 1926 encounter with Hitler on May 31, 1935:

If I had known that this was the very man who was to become Germany’s savior I would have fallen around Hitler’s neck, but on the occasion I was engaged in small talk and tried to find out what he understood about Germany’s weakness at the time. Professor [Weil, the host] said, introducing Hitler to me: “This is also a very important man, an activist from the Worker’s Party.” We shook hands and Hitler said, pointing to a book that was lying on the table: “I had a chance to read your al-Tazkirah.” Little did I understand at that time, what should have been clear to me when he said these words! The astonishing similarities—or shall we say the unintentional similarity between two great minds—between Hitler’s great book and the teachings of my Tazkirah and Isharat embolden me, because the fifteen years of “struggle” of the author {Hitler] of “My Struggle” [Mein Kampf] have now actually led his nation back to success. But only after leading his nation to the intended goal, has he disclosed his movement’s rules and obligations to the world; only after fifteen years has he made the means of success widely known. It is possible that he has arrived at those means and doctrines by trial and error, but it should be absolutely clear that Mashriqi [referring to himself in the third person] has identified those means and doctrines in al-Tazkirah a full nine years and in the Isharat a full three years before the success of the Nazi movement, simply by following the shining guidance of the Holy Koran.

Albert Speer, who was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, wrote a contrite memoir of his World War II experiences while serving a 20-year prison sentence imposed by the Nuremberg tribunal. Speer’s narrative includes a discussion which captures Hitler’s effusive praise for Islam, “…a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.” Hitler, according to Speer’s account, repeatedly expressed the conviction that, “The Mohammedan religion…would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” These sentiments were also expressed by Hitler to Dr. Herman Neubacher, the first Nazi Mayor of Vienna, and subsequently, a special delegate of the Nazi regime in southeastern Europe. Neubacher wrote that Hitler had told him Islam was a “male religion,” and reiterated the belief that the Germans would have been far more successful conquerors had they adopted Islam in the Middle Ages. ^4t Additional confirmation of Hitler’s very favorable inclination towards Islam is provided by General Alexander Loehr, a Lutwaffe commander (executed in 1947 for the mass-murders of Yugoslav civilians). Loehr maintained a smiling Hitler had told him that Islam was such a desirable creed the Fuehrer longed for it to become the official SS religion.

Hitler appears to have viewed the uniquely Islamic institution of jihad as an appropriate model for waging genocidal, total war. During the mid to late 19th century, jihad total war campaigns—adapted to the conditions of modern warfare—were waged by the Ottoman Empire against its Bulgarian and Armenian Christian minorities. The Ottoman tactics included innumerable atrocities, mass slaughter, and extensive, murderous deportations. Official Ottoman jihad declarations during World War I assured that the genocidal aspects of Islamic doctrine were “updated” by the application of modern total war offensive doctrines, and directed at the Armenians, in particular. This jihad-inspired policy begot razzias (raids), massacres of villagers, massacres of Armenian conscripts in work battalions, and mass deportations—all representative of an overall total-war strategy implemented by the Ottoman state, and military high command.

And the disintegrating Ottoman Empire’s World War I jihad genocide against its Armenian minority,  specifically, served as an “inspirational” precedent to Hitler. During August of 1939, Hitler gave speeches in preparation for the looming invasion of Poland which admonished his military commanders to wage a brutal, merciless campaign, and assure rapid victory. Hitler portrayed the impending invasion as the initial step of a vision to “secure the living space we need,” and ultimately, “redistribute the world.” In an explicit reference to the Armenians, “Who after all is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?,” Hitler justified their annihilation (and the world’s consignment of this genocide to oblivion) as an accepted new world order because, “The world believes only in success.”

Vahakn Dadrian—the foremost scholar of the Armenian genocide—observes that although Hitler’s motives in seeking to destroy the Jews were not identical with those of the Ottoman Turks’ in their attempts to eliminate the Armenians, “…the two victim nations share one common element in Hitler’s scheme of things: their extreme vulnerability.” Moreover, Hitler emphasized the urgent task, “…of protecting the German blood from contamination, not only of the Jewish but also of the Armenian blood.” Predictable impunity—the ease with which the Armenian genocide was committed and how the perpetrators escaped retributive justice—clearly impressed Hitler and his henchmen, considering a similar action against the Jews. Indeed, the German Jew, Richard Lictheim who as a young Zionist leader had negotiated with Ottoman leaders in Turkey during World War I, characterized the “…cold-bloodedly planned extermination of over one million Armenians…[as] akin to Hitler’s crusade of destruction against the Jews…” And as historian Abram Sachar noted, “…the genocide was cited approvingly twenty-five years later by the Fuehrer…who found the Armenian ‘solution’ an attractive precedent.”

Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS (Nazi Secret Service), and eventually all German police forces, was another champion of Islam’s singular bellicosity. Accordingly, Himmler foresaw that within the framework of the Waffen-SS, several Muslim divisions would be created to wage jihad “shoulder to shoulder” with Nazi and Axis power soldiers. Himmler was the guiding force behind the establishment of a Waffen-SS 13th (later dubbed Handzar) Division—comprised exclusively of Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He argued in support of the creation of this Muslim division that the global Islamic community (umma) was very sympathetic to Nazism, and that the targeted Balkan Muslims had a special consciousness of their Muslim Bosnian-Herzegovinian identity. Indeed, Himmler and his collaborators believed that these Balkan Muslims were ideally suited to forge a nexus between the Nazi Germanic “racial north,” and the Islamic east. SS General Gottlob Berger described how Himmler’s creation of the Handzar division was the apotheosis of this vision:

For the first time a connection is being established between Islam and National Socialism on an open, honest base, since it will be ruled from the North where blood and race are concerned, and from the East ideologically and spiritually.

As the ultimate fulfillment of his vision, Himmler also strove to re-create a contemporary version of the Ottoman Muslim devshirme levy [the Ottoman practice of expropriating some 500,000 to 1 million Balkan Christian children during a period of 300 years, forcibly converting them to Islam, and making them slave soldiers—“janissaries”—waging jihad against their indigenous Christian societies), and form a modern janissary corps, not only in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but the Sanjak (regions in Serbia and Montenegro), most of Croatia, and the major part of Srem (which includes provinces in Serbia and Croatia between the Danube and Sava rivers). Historian Jennie Lebel describes this effort:

In order to supply the Reich on time with a “loyal population” for this planned SS border area [i.e., as outlined above in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia], Himmler gave orders to collect children, male and female, who had been left without one or both parents and send them to Germany in order “to create a kind of Janissaries” and the “future soldiers and soldiers’ women of the old military border of the Reich.” The collection of the children was to be taken care of by the commanders of the Waffen-SS divisions. They had to report once monthly to Himmler personally on the number of children collected. This was stated in two letters by Himmler, one addressed to General Arthur Phleps on May 20, 1944, and the other to General Gottlob Berger on July 14 of the same year. Copies were sent to General Kammerhofer, SS representative for the NDH [Croatia], to General Erwin Rosener in Slovenia, General Hermann Behrends in Serbia and General Herman Foegellein, liason officer of the Waffen-SS with Hitler.

Almost 40 years ago (1973/74) Bat Ye’or published a remarkably prescient analysis of the Islamic antisemitism and resurgent jihadism in her native Egypt, being packaged for dissemination throughout the Muslim world. The primary, core Antisemitic and jihadist motifs were Islamic, derived from Islam’s foundational texts, on to which European, especially Nazi elements were grafted.

Nazi academic and propagandist of extermination Johannes von Leers’ writings and personal career trajectory — as a favored contributor in Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, to his eventual adoption of Islam (as Omar Amin von Leers) while working as an anti-Western, and antisemitic/anti-Zionist propagandist under Nasser’s regime from the mid-1950s, until his death in 1965— represents the apotheosis of this convergence of jihad, Islamic antisemitism, and racist, Nazi antisemitism, described by Bat Ye’or.

Upon his arrival in Egypt in 1956, it was the jihadist and Nazi ally, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem, who welcomed von Leers, stating, “We are grateful to you for having come here to resume the struggle against the powers of darkness incarnated by international Judaism.” The ex-Mufti oversaw von Leers’ formal conversion to Islam, and remained one of his confidants. And von Leers described the origins of the Muslim “forename,” Omar Amin, that he adopted as part of his conversion to Islam in a November, 1957 letter to American Nazi H. Keith Thompson,

I myself have embraced Islam and accepted the new forename Omar Amin, Omar according to the great Caliph Omar who was a grim enemy of the Jews, Amin in honor of my friend Hajj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti.

Already in essays published during 1938 and 1942, the first dating back almost two decades before his conversion to Islam while in Egypt, von Leers produced analyses focused primarily on Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina. These essays reveal his pious reverence for Islam and its prophet, and a thorough understanding of the sacralized Islamic sources for this narrative, i.e., the Koran, hadith, and sira. which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim apologetics.

Von Leers’ 1942 essay simultaneously extols the “model” of oppression the Jews experienced under Islamic suzerainty, and the nobility of Muhammad, Islam, and the contemporary Muslims of the World War II era, foreshadowing his own conversion to Islam just over a decade later. ²¹ And even earlier, in a 1938 essay, von Leers sympathized with, “the leading role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Arabians’ battles against the Jewish invasion in Palestine.” Von Leers observes that to the pious Muslim,

…the Jew is an enemy, not simply an ‘unbeliever’ who might perhaps be converted or, despite the fact that he does not belong to Islam, might still be a person of some estimation. Rather, the Jew is the predestined opponent of the Muslim, one who desired to bring down the work of the Prophet.

Von Leers, for example, offers this reverent summary characterization of Muhammad’s activities in Mecca, and later Medina, which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim apologetics:

[Mecca] For years Muhammad sought in Mecca to succeed with his preaching that there was only one God, the sole, all-merciful king of Judgment Day. He opposed to the Christian Trinity the unity of God, rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin and salvation, and instead gave every believer as a guiding principle the complete fulfillment of the commands of the righteous, given by a compassionate and just God, before whom every individual person had to account for his acts.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/24/understanding-the-islam-in-muslim-jew-hatred-part-ii/feed/ 3 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/23/understanding-the-islam-in-muslim-jew-hatred/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/23/understanding-the-islam-in-muslim-jew-hatred/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 04:12:31 +0000 Mark Tapson http://frontpagemag.com/?p=120068

In the wake of the farcically mislabeled “Arab Spring,” we are witnessing a swelling tide of Jew-hatred emanating from the triumphant Islamists throughout the Middle East who don’t even bother to conceal it. And why should they? Our own willfully blind and/or complicit media downplay it or ignore it altogether.

Some argue that what is mistaken for contemporary Islamic anti-Semitism is just a reaction to Israel’s “occupation” and “genocidal oppression” of the Palestinians. Or that it is not intrinsic to Islam but derives from the influence of Nazism. Or that it is a perversion of Islam on the part of a tiny minority of extremists. What are the true roots of Islamic Jew-hatred?

Andrew Bostom, M.D., M.S., has documented the answer. An Associate Professor of Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital, the major teaching affiliate of Brown University Medical School, he is the author of two essential, extraordinary, and meticulously documented works of scholarship, The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, and of the upcoming Sharia versus Freedom (with a foreword by the incomparable Andrew C. McCarthy). He has published articles and commentary on Islam here on FrontPage and in the Washington Times, National Review Online, Revue Politique, American Thinker, and elsewhere in print and online.

This Tuesday in Los Angeles, Mr. Bostom will present “Understanding the Islam in Muslim Jew-Hatred.” See here for information about attending.

Mark Tapson: Dr. Bostom, what inspired you as a scholar to focus on Islam?

Andrew Bostom: It’s pretty straightforward. The stimulus was 9/11/2001. Until then I was simply a medical academic at Rhode Island Hospital (the major teaching hospital of The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University), and an average citizen trying to keep abreast of world events. I am not particularly religious as a Jew though I certainly support the state of Israel. But I grew up in New York, living in Queens most of my life, and I went to medical school in Brooklyn. My wife and I still have family in New York City, so the day of 9/11/2001 itself was traumatic, trying to make sure everyone was OK. A colleague’s wife was in the second tower. She was very lucky, barely getting out before it collapsed.

On the way home I grabbed a book by Karen Armstrong about Islam. I was reading it and commenting to my wife that it just didn’t seem to jibe. (I learned later that Armstrong is a notorious apologist.) As I read it out loud my wife was just laughing. I didn’t find it particularly funny. Nor the news reports over the next days that were transparently apologetic. And I was alarmed at stories that appeared in the New York Times (and other New York area newspapers) about an Egyptian Imam who was preaching at a large Mosque in Manhattan, and spreading conspiracy theories about Jews leaving the World Trade Center in advance of the attacks, due to their “prior knowledge.”

So I started reading independently. A small book by Yossef Bodansky, a terrorism expert, discussed Islamic anti-semitism as a political instrument, and referenced the work of Bat Ye’or on the dhimmi. I got that book by Bat Ye’or, and everything else she has written in English—all her books, essays, and published lectures. I met Bat Ye’or after a correspondence with Daniel Pipes, and brought her to Brown University to give a guest lecture. She became a very close mentor, and introduced me to Ibn Warraq and that’s how things started. I had begun writing short essays within a year of 9/11. Ibn Warraq resided with us in 2003, for a time, and he encouraged me to consider a book project. I was increasingly interested in the Jihad and it was with Warraq’s support that I put that first book, The Legacy of Jihad, together.

MT: What do you say to the common defense that Islam preaches tolerance toward Christians and Jews – “the people of the book” – and that Jew-hatred is not inherent within it?

AB: Although often invoked, these apologetic canards are diametrically opposed to Islamic doctrine and the sad, if predictable historical realities this sacralized hatred has engendered.

What has always been the nature of the system of governance imposed upon indigenous non-Muslims conquered by Islam’s timeless, institutionalized jihad wars?

In his seminal The Laws of Islamic Governance, al-Mawardi (d. 1058) — a renowned jurist of Baghdad — examined the regulations pertaining to the lands and infidel populations subjugated by jihad. This is the origin of the system of dhimmitude. The native infidel “dhimmi” (which derives from both the word for “pact” and also “guilt” — guilty of religious errors) population had to recognize Islamic ownership of their land, submit to Islamic law, and accept payment of the Koranic poll tax (jizya, the tax paid in lieu of being slain) based on Koran 9:29. Al-Mawardi notes: “The enemy makes a payment in return for peace and reconciliation. … Reconciliation and security last as long as the payment is made. If the payment ceases, then the jihad resumes.” A treaty of reconciliation may be renewable, but must not exceed 10 years.

This same basic formulation was reiterated during a January 8, 1998, interview by Muslim Brotherhood “Spiritual Guide,” and immensely popular Al-Jazeera television personality Yusuf al-Qaradawi, confirming how jihad continues to regulate the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims to this day. The “contract of the jizya,” or “dhimma,” encompassed other obligatory and recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim “dhimmi” peoples. Collectively, these “obligations” formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims — Jews and Christians, as well as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists — subjugated by jihad. Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include:

– The prohibition of arms for the vanquished dhimmis

– The prohibition of church bells

– Restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples

– Inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law

– The refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts

– A requirement that Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes

– The overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims

It is important to note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred Islamic law, or Sharia. The writings of the much lionized Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali (d. 1111) highlight how the institution of dhimmitude was simply a normative and prominent feature of the Sharia:

The dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle. … Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims]. … On offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible]. … They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells. … Their houses may not be higher than the Muslim’s, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddle-work is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths. … [Dhimmis] must hold their tongue.

The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized by the great historian of Muslim and non-Muslim (especially Jewish) relations during classical Islam, S.D. Goitein, in 1970 :

Taxation [by the Muslim government] was merciless, and a very large section of the population must have lived permanently at the starvation level. From many Geniza letters [a trove of Oriental Jewish correspondence etc., particularly from the Middle Ages, discovered in Egypt] one gets the impression that the poor were concerned more with getting money for the payment of their taxes than for food and clothing, for failure of payment usually induced cruel punishment. … The Muslim state was quite the opposite of the ideals … embedded in the constitution of the United States. An Islamic state was part of or coincided with dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Its treasury was … the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were not citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term dhimma … They were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating laws. … As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in existence. … In times and places in which they became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling or even complete extinction of the minorities.

Important scholars of Islamic Antisemitism — from Hartwig Hirschfeld in the mid-1880s, Georges Vajda in the late 1930s, S.D. Goitein in 1971, and Haggai Ben-Shammai in 1988 — have demonstrated, collectively, all of the following:

– Clear historical evidence of specific Islamic anti-semitism, from the Geniza record of the high Middle Ages — including the coinage of a unique Hebrew word to characterize such Muslim Jew hatred, sinuth — published in full by Goitein as of 1971

– The content of foundational Muslim sources detailing the sacralized rationale for Islam’s anti-Jewish bigotry, including Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid-1880s essay series on Muhammad’s subjugation of the Jews of Medina, based upon the earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad

– George Vajda’s elegant, comprehensive 1937 analysis focusing primarily on the hadith (the putative words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as recorded by his earliest pious Muslim companions)

– Haggai Ben-Shammai’s concise 1988 study of key examples of Jew-hatred in the Koran and Koranic exegesis

For example, Koran 3:112 is featured before the pre-amble to Hamas’ foundational Covenant—it is literally part of the very first statement of the document. Here is the standard Arberry translation of 3:112:

Abasement shall be pitched on them, wherever they are come upon, except they be in a bond of God, and a bond of the people; they will be laden with the burden of God’s anger, and poverty shall be pitched on them; that, because they disbelieved in God’s signs, and slew the Prophets without right; that, for that they acted rebelliously and were transgressors.

In classical and modern Koranic exegeses by seminal, authoritative Islamic theologians this central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and pigs (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). Muhammad himself — Islam’s founding prophet — repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322), “He [Muhammad] then recited the verse [5:78]: ‘…curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary’”. And the related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews—as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did in a January 2007 speech, citing Koran 5:64—of being “spreaders of war and corruption,” a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/23/understanding-the-islam-in-muslim-jew-hatred/feed/ 18 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/20/three-days-of-hate-at-u-penn/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/20/three-days-of-hate-at-u-penn/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:28:35 +0000 Sara Dogan http://frontpagemag.com/?p=119927

What do the administrators at the University of Pennsylvania know about the 2012 National Conference of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement about to take place at Penn and when did they know it?

“BDS,” as this virulent anti-Israeli hatefest is commonly called, is coming to the Penn campus on February 3-5, but university officials have hid from the implications of hosting such an event.  They say that the university is on record as not supporting this movement, yet they let the event go forward, providing space and possibly funding, despite the fact that the sponsors may not meet school requirements as a recognized group and that their anti-Semitic message is deeply hostile to academic freedom and basic human decency. The university appears to be bending rules that would be rigidly enforced for sponsors of another cause.

U Penn’s willingness to enable the BDS conference is particularly inexplicable given the fact that this growing movement to boycott Israel and Israeli-produced goods, force divestment from any companies that do business with Israel, and establish sanctions against Israel due to its supposed violations of human rights, was created by nations and groups seeking to delegitimize and destabilize Israel such as the terrorist-sponsoring nation of Iran and the terrorist groups Hezbollah, and Hamas.

As Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz has noted, the BDS movement abets terrorism: “People who advocate boycotts and divestiture will literally have blood on their hands,” he said. “They encourage terrorism and discourage the laying down of arms.”  Even Noam Chomsky stated recently that BDS was “hypocritical” in its pretense to be concerned about Israeli human rights violations and that the movement could be called anti-Semitic “with justice.”

Among the scheduled speakers at the upcoming conference is Anna Baltzer, a “Jewish American Palestinian human rights activist,” who summarizes the line of attack on Israel when she bluntly states that its polices of  “ethnic cleansing and apartheid must be stopped.”   These terms are not arguments; they are knowing lies designed to weaken the Jewish State and soften it up for the kill. The insidious segregation of “apartheid” does not exist in Israel. Arabs are granted full civil rights under Israeli law, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or sex. Israeli Arab citizens vote in national elections, have representatives in the Israeli Parliament, serve as tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities, and sit on the benches of Israeli courts (including the Israeli Supreme Court). They have more rights, and enjoy more freedom, education, and economic opportunity than the Arabs of any Arab state.

The BDS conference at Penn will feature, in addition to BALTZER, a cavalcade of anti-Israel speakers, including founder of the Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, whose views are summed up when he says, ”Israel is a society where virulent anti-Arab racism and Nakba denial are the norm although none of the European and American leaders who constantly lecture about Holocaust denial will dare to admonish Netanyahu for his bald lies and omissions about Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.”

The BDS National Conference at U Penn is by no means a stand-alone event.  In fact the BDS movement shares radical political DNA (and personnel) with the international “Israel Apartheid Weeks” and “Palestine Awareness Weeks” scheduled to take place on campuses around the country this spring.  The goal of these events, designed by Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), is to garner support for the Palestinian Authority and Hamas who seek to “push the Jews into the sea” and annihilate the Jewish state.  These “weeks” have regularly sought to intimidate Jewish students, occasionally through acts of physical violence, and have become frequent occurrences at campuses like the University of California, Irvine.

The growing BDS movement pursues these same ends by other means—delegitimating Israel by cutting its financial and cultural ties to America. Along with others in his group, Omar Barghouti, the founder of the BDS movement, is a regular speaker on college campuses during Israel Apartheid Week.  Barghouti expresses the genocidal logic at the heart of the anti-Israel movement when he says of its attempt to defend itself: “Israel is never retaliating, because it’s the occupying power, and occupation by definition is aggression and violence.”

Despite the intention of the BDS conference to preach three days of systematic ethnic hatred against Jews that the university would not countenance if it were directed, say, at Muslims, U Penn officials have turned a blind eye (and deaf ear) to the growing public outcry about the conference, claiming that it is solely a student matter and that, to stretch credulity, the university literally has no information regarding the conference, its funding, its sponsors, or its arrangements to use university facilities.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/20/three-days-of-hate-at-u-penn/feed/ 109 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/19/ron-pauls-racist-cult/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/19/ron-pauls-racist-cult/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:06:31 +0000 Frontpagemag.com http://frontpagemag.com/?p=119857

Yesterday, FrontPage Magazine featured an article by Joseph Klein critical of Congressman Ron Paul’s proposal that the US use the “Golden Rule” in dealing with radical Islamists. As usual, Ron Paul followers descended on the article, unloading a wealth of hateful invective and anti-Semitic comments. A typical occurrence with such articles, the following selection of comments from the piece reflect a dark and disturbing sector of the Ron Paul movement. (Note: comments have not been edited for spelling or grammar.)

***

“Why don’t you quote some scripture from the jewish talmud, like any non jew is subhuman and is on earth to be a jew slave. You are either a fool or are being paid by your jewish masters to write this filth. I am amerian, I do not pledge alegience to israel and I don’t care what happens to them just like I don’t care what happens to the arab country”

“LOL – I never can figure out how all the obvious fascists ended up Zionists?”

“This ‘journalist’ reminds me of the Jews who chose to spare Barabas over Christ. Sad, really…”

“Surprise surprise, another Zionist hit job against Dr. Paul from the loons at FPM. You Israel-firsters are getting pretty desperate, aren’t you? Anyone who doesn’t bend over and kiss Bibi’s rear isn’t a worthy puppet for you people, huh? What a disgraceful, treasonous lot you are. You are the primary reason why anti-Semitism still exists in the world, and you owe all the Jews of upstanding character (i.e., anti-Zionist) in the world a giant debt for the trouble you’ve caused them. Indeed, Jews would be a lot better off in the long run if Israel were erased from the pages of time.”

“Joseph Kleim is such a bad man that he believes even the Golden Rule is an object that belongs to the Jews, and is something to not only use for evil but to prevent other people from having. Really, Joseph? The Golden Rule is Jews’ intellectual property? You are wicked.”

“bloodthirsty AIPAC Neocon war profiteers”

“Interesting Perspective. We give Israel over 5 Billion a year in foreign aid. Some of it not just financial but hardware. I am sure Israel would never start a smear and fear campaign to ensure they keep getting our tax payer dollars. www.jewwatch.com”

“A ‘twist on the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule’?! You are the person whom Jesus was referring to when he said (to paraphrase): ‘Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.’ Or, ‘But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken.’ Daft is not a good enough word for you Mr. Klein – you are Shylock. Take your pound of flesh.”

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/19/ron-pauls-racist-cult/feed/ 194 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/18/soros-firsters-bash-israel/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/18/soros-firsters-bash-israel/#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:25:43 +0000 Daniel Greenfield http://frontpagemag.com/?p=119695

When the far left took on the far right’s habit of referring to Jews who don’t support their drive for the destruction of Israel as “Israel Firsters” they forgot one important thing. To accuse someone else of being unpatriotic, you have to be able to assert your own patriotism. To accuse someone else of dual loyalty, you first have to be loyal to the United States.

The Muslim bloggers at the Center for American Progress, an Obama Administration think tank funded by George Soros, a Nazi collaborating billionaire, along with a secret list of other rogue titans, have no such credibility, not because they are Muslim, but because they have a long record of undermining and attacking American national defense and national security. The Soros Shadow Party may use the name “American” in organizations such as the Center for American Progress or the New America Foundation but those groups are invariably Anti-American.

When Zaid Jilani, a blogger at the Center for American Progress, uses “Israel Firsters,” no one bothers to ask him the obvious question. What country does he put first? It certainly isn’t the United States whose foreign policy Jilani has blamed for Muslim terrorism against America. When making that argument Zaid Jilani claimed, “saying that instantly gets you labeled a Blame America Firster or some other kind of nonsense.”

Jilani, like most of his colleagues, is indeed a Blame America Firster. The Center for American Progress is really The Center for Blaming America First, which gives it very little credibility when it decides to tar anyone to the right of them, a wide swath of the populace that covers anyone who doesn’t believe that all our problems with Islamic terrorism are due to a few million Jews living in the 9 miles between Tel Aviv’s view of the Mediterranean and the West Bank’s Muslim terrorist encampments filled with people so angry and hate-filled that they could only find work as Jihadists or blogging at the Center for American Progress.

But when Jilani complained two years ago that Americans irrationally hate and smear Pakistan, no one called him a Pakistan Firster. When he wrote last year, “As a Pakistani-American, I’ve grown up caught between two worlds: the United States, the rich country that is the world’s lone superpower, and Pakistan, the troubled land of my parent’s birth (sic)” and concluded with an observation of the book he was discussing that “the motivations of Al Qaeda were obscured or misinterpreted in the major media narratives about the attacks, and that the terrorists viewed themselves as retaliating against American foreign policy,” he had done far more to earn the label of a Pakistan Firster than any of his targets had to earn the label of Israel Firster.

Ali Gharib, another Center for American Progress blogger, accused a Republican Senator who supported sanctions against Iran of not caring about anyone but Israel. But Gharib, CAP’s point man on opposing sanctions on Iran, cares mainly about Iran acting like, dare one say it, an Iran Firster. What kind of sanctions on Iran is Gharib opposed to? Any sanctions really. An extensive Think Progress post by him last month warned against barring American companies that do business through Iran’s central bank. Iran’s central bank CBI is government owned and finances its terrorist activities. Its governor is a stooge of genocidal lunatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Opposing bipartisan sanctions that would undermine the Iranian regime and its leading madman is not exactly the behavior of a great patriot.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/18/soros-firsters-bash-israel/feed/ 49 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/17/friends-seminary-legitimates-anti-semitism/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/17/friends-seminary-legitimates-anti-semitism/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:08:04 +0000 Alan M. Dershowitz http://frontpagemag.com/?p=119351

If you want to understand why anti-Semitism seems to be increasing among young people—especially young people on the hard left—consider a recent invitation extended by a left leaning school in New York to a self-proclaimed Jew hater.

The Friends Schools around the country are legendary.  Presidents’ children attend them, my own daughter and nephew were students, and they are regarded as among the most elite schools in the world.  That is why it is so shocking that the Friends Seminary in New York has lent its imprimatur to a notorious anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.  Friends Seminary has a reputation for propagandizing its students against Israel, but it has now crossed a red line into legitimating anti-Semitism.

Gilad Atzmon, who was invited to be a featured performer in a celebration of Martin Luther King at the Friends Meeting House, has written an overtly anti-Semitic book entitled “The Wandering Who?”, which, he acknowledges, draws…much of his “insights from a man who…was an anti-Semite as well as a radical misogynist.”

Among the “insights”  Atzmon seeks to share with students are the following:

While the Holocaust “was not at all an historical narrative,” and Auschwitz was not a “death camp,” the “accusations of Jews making matzo out of young Goyim’s blood,” may be true.

“The Jews” caused the recent credit crunch, which the author calls “the Zio-punch.”

If Iran and Israel fight a nuclear war that kills millions of people, “some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all.’”

The “new Jewish religion…could well be the most sinister religion known to man…”

The author of the book containing these statements has told students that he cannot “say whether it’s right or not to burn down a synagogue. I can say that it is a rational act.” He has also apologized to the Nazis for having earlier compared them to Israel:  “Israel is in fact far worse than Nazi Germany.”

He has written that we “must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously,” and that “with Fagin and Shylock in mind, Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum.”

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/17/friends-seminary-legitimates-anti-semitism/feed/ 90 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/16/hannah-arendt-and-the-origins-of-israelophobia/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/16/hannah-arendt-and-the-origins-of-israelophobia/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:25:27 +0000 Sol Stern http://frontpagemag.com/?p=119312

This article is reprinted from City Journal.

In last year’s extensive commentary marking the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial, one name—Hannah Arendt—was mentioned nearly as often as that of the trial’s notorious defendant. It’s hard to think of another major twentieth-century event so closely linked with one author’s interpretation of it. Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany at 27, was already an internationally renowned scholar and public intellectual when she arrived in Jerusalem in April 1961 to cover the trial for The New Yorker. Arendt’s five articles, which were then expanded into the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, proved hugely controversial. Many Jewish readers—and non-Jews, too—were shocked by three principal themes in Arendt’s report: her portrayal of Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion as the cynical puppet master manipulating the trial to serve the state’s Zionist ideology; her assertion that Eichmann was a faceless, unthinking bureaucrat, a cog in the machinery of the Final Solution rather than one of its masterminds; and her accusation that leaders of the Judenräte (Jewish councils) in Nazi-occupied Europe had engaged in “sordid and pathetic” behavior, making it easier for the Nazis to manage the logistics of the extermination process.

Since the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, serious scholars have debunked the most inflammatory of Arendt’s charges. Nevertheless, for today’s defamers of Israel, Arendt is a patron saint, a courageous Jewish intellectual who saw Israel’s moral catastrophe coming. These leftist intellectuals don’t merely believe, as Arendt did, that she was the victim of “excommunication” for the sin of criticizing Israel. Their homage to Arendt runs deeper. In fact, their campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel and exile it from the family of nations—another kind of excommunication, if you will—derives several of its themes from Arendt’s writings on Zionism and the Holocaust. Those writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancor, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel’s ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.

One might imagine the young Hannah Arendt as the heroine of a Philip Roth novel about a precocious Jewish undergraduate having an affair with her famous professor. According to her late biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt grew up in a completely assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. She identified herself as fully German by virtue of her love of the Muttersprache (mother tongue) and of German Kultur. The word “Jew,” Arendt would later recall, “was never mentioned” in her home; the only religion there was her mother’s ardent socialism.

In 1924, at 18, Arendt went to study philosophy at the University of Marburg, where Martin Heidegger was establishing his reputation as the most important continental philosopher of the twentieth century. Like many of Heidegger’s brilliant Jewish students (Herbert Marcuse was another), Arendt was mesmerized by his lectures. Heidegger, in turn, quickly recognized Arendt’s intellectual gifts and agreed to mentor her dissertation. He also became her secret lover, though he was more than twice her age and married with children. A decade later, Heidegger became a committed member of the Nazi Party and the head of the University of Freiburg, where he encouraged his students to give the Nazi salute and enthusiastically carried out the party’s directive to purge all Jews from the faculty.

Fearing a public scandal if their relationship were discovered, Heidegger sent Arendt to Heidelberg to finish her studies with his friend Karl Jaspers, who became Arendt’s second dissertation advisor and her lifelong friend. Arendt was just 23, and had been trained by two of the world’s greatest philosophers, when her treatise on Saint Augustine was accepted by one of Germany’s most prestigious academic publishers and was reviewed in several leading philosophical journals.

Up to this point, the young woman seems hardly to have given a thought to the “Jewish question” in Germany. But the rise of Nazism forced Arendt to act and think as a Jew for the first time in her life. Many of her university friends believed, in traditionally Marxist fashion, that the way to fight anti-Semitism was through the broader struggle for international socialism. Arendt had the foresight to see that if even deracinated Jews like herself found themselves under attack as Jews, they had to fight back as Jews. She praised the German Zionists for doing just that. In Berlin in 1933, she courageously carried out an illegal mission for her friend Kurt Blumenthal, the German Zionist leader. Her assignment was to collect material from the state archives documenting the Nazi-dominated government’s anti-Jewish measures, which would then be presented at the next Zionist Congress in Prague. Arendt was caught, arrested, and sent to jail for eight days.

That experience led Arendt to make the painful decision to flee Germany. Later that year, she illegally crossed the Czech border and settled temporarily in Prague. Eventually, she joined the growing community of stateless, destitute German Jewish refugees in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, the Zionist group that sent the children of Jewish refugees to Palestine. She studied Hebrew and declared to a friend: “I want to get to know my people.” She wasn’t committed to any Zionist party or even to the necessity of a sovereign Jewish state. But she now believed that immigration to Palestine and building the Jewish homeland there were honorable responses to the Nazi assault on the Jews.

Soon after the fall of France, Arendt and her husband, the communist Heinrich Blücher, were among the lucky few to obtain visas to the United States. Arendt was penniless when she arrived in New York in May 1941, but for her first few months in America she maintained herself with a $70 monthly allotment from the Zionist Organization of America, which helped Jewish refugees. Though she wasn’t fluent in English, her absorption into New York intellectual circles was seamless. Within a year, she had mastered the language well enough to write a scholarly article on the Dreyfus Affair for the prestigious academic journal Jewish Social Studies. She was then offered a regular column in the German Jewish weekly Aufbau. For the duration of the war, she used that platform and other publications to comment on the two most important issues facing the Jews—the struggle against Nazism and the future of the Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war.

During much of that period, Arendt wrote as a committed Zionist. She referred to Zionism as “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people,” for example, and she praised the socialist Zionist parties representing “the workers” in Palestine: “For if the Jews are to live in Palestine by right and not by sufferance, it will only be by the right they have earned and continue to earn every day with their labor” (the emphasis is hers, and these translations of the Aufbau columns are from a collection of her work called The Jewish Writings). Arendt’s intentions in supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine were sincere, but her writing displayed an astonishing lack of political judgment—as in her belief that the accomplishments of Jewish “labor” might somehow win Arab acceptance of Jewish rights in Palestine.

In her very first Aufbau column, Arendt suggested the creation of a Jewish army—independent of any nation, but under Allied command—to fight the Nazis. The project reflected the political lesson that she had learned from her own experience with Nazism: “You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman” (again, the emphasis is hers).

But Arendt damaged the Jewish-army cause by unremittingly attacking the one organization already lobbying for it. Long before she embraced the idea, the Zionist Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky had formulated a detailed plan for a military force composed of Palestinian Jews and Jewish refugees. One of Jabotinsky’s lieutenants in America, a Palestinian Jew named Peter Bergson, created an organization called the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews. The committee, supported by such popular writers as Ben Hecht and Max Lerner, launched a lobbying campaign in Congress and succeeded in getting a resolution introduced in the House of Representatives supporting the creation of a separate Jewish army.

Arendt’s response was to attack Bergson and other activists associated with his committee as “Jewish fascists.” The charge was a canard. As almost every objective historian of the period has acknowledged, Jabotinsky was a classic nineteenth-century liberal nationalist. He supported separation of religion and state and civil rights for non-Jews in a future Jewish state. According to the model constitution that he wrote for that state, in every government department headed by a Jew, the deputy minister had to be an Arab, and vice versa. There wasn’t a fascist bone in his body.

Nevertheless, with little thought or evidence, Arendt repeated the inflammatory accusations regularly made by the labor Zionists against their nonsocialist rivals in Palestine. In published comments that a later era would have called “McCarthyite,” Arendt suggested that “Jewish fascists” had duped the prominent personalities supporting the committee. “One can surely assume that people like . . . [the actor] Melvyn Douglas, Max Lerner, . . . [and] Reinhold Niebuhr . . . would wish to protect their names from any fascist stain,” Arendt wrote in one of her Aufbau columns. Even Arendt’s admiring biographer conceded that Arendt’s charge of fascism was “too extreme.”

On November 24, 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise, America’s most prominent Zionist leader, convened a press conference in Washington to make a shocking announcement. Wise had been authorized by the State Department to confirm that the Nazis were carrying out a plan to exterminate European Jewry. More than 2 million Jews had already been murdered, he said.

It was hardly a secret that the European Jews had been targeted for elimination. In one of her Aufbau columns earlier that year, Arendt herself wrote about Hitler’s intentions: “In the National Socialist weekly Das Reich, Goebbels has explained that the extermination of the Jews in Europe ‘and perhaps outside of Europe’ is about to begin.” But the Wise press conference marked the first time that the U.S. government had verified the Final Solution.

Reporters covering the press conference were handed the biggest mass-murder story in history. Unfortunately, their editors didn’t think that the extermination of European Jewry had much news value. The Washington Post gave the revelations four inches on page six. The New York Times buried the extermination story in the back pages, while its front page featured a story about holiday shoppers on Fifth Avenue.

This deliberate inattention was a stunning confirmation of the low value that the democracies placed on Jewish lives in Nazi-occupied Europe. Both newspapers, though owned by Jews, took their cues from the Roosevelt administration, which deliberately downplayed the announcement of Hitler’s Final Solution by handing it to Rabbi Wise rather than an administration official. For the duration of the war, the government, believing that “rescue through victory” was the only reasonable policy, tried to head off public agitation for special efforts to rescue European Jewry. And for the duration of the war, both newspapers cooperated by burying details of the Holocaust.

Wise, sometimes called the “King of the Jews” because of his leadership of an incredible array of Jewish organizations and umbrella groups, might have been expected to press for rescue efforts and for lifting immigration restrictions on Jewish refugees. But Wise had a close personal relationship with the president (whom he called “boss”) and never attained the independence of judgment to recognize that his hero, despite public expressions of friendship for Jews in general, was acquiescing in the murder of the European Jews. Only a popular grassroots campaign, bypassing the official Jewish leadership, might have overcome the administration’s hostility and the indifference of the mainstream media.

That is what the Committee for a Jewish Army pledged to do. The Bergson group, as it came to be called, shifted its efforts toward pressing the administration to authorize concrete military and diplomatic efforts to save as many European Jews as possible. In July 1943, Bergson organized a major conference exploring opportunities for rescue, featuring panels of experts in the fields of diplomacy, psychological warfare, and refugee-relief logistics. Each panel recommended practical rescue actions by the Allies that would have saved lives without harming the war effort.

Out of that meeting came a new bipartisan organization, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, to lobby for the adoption of the rescue proposals. Bergson and Ben Hecht emerged as effective publicists with a flair for recruiting key politicians and major celebrities. Among the public figures who joined their cause were liberal congressman Will Rogers, Jr.; conservative newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, Jr.; and the leader of the left-wing American Labor Party, Dean Alfange. The Emergency Committee staged public protests on the plight of the European Jews, including a pageant, scripted by Hecht and produced by Broadway impresario Billy Rose, that filled Madison Square Garden twice.

The committee’s most important practical achievement was mobilizing support for a joint congressional resolution urging the creation of a U.S. government rescue agency. Just as the resolution was about to pass—in the election year of 1944—the Roosevelt administration withdrew its opposition and established the rescue agency on its own. Named the War Refugee Board, it recruited operatives in occupied Europe to save Jews from deportation to the death camps. One of those agents, the heroic Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, managed to pull thousands of Hungarian Jews from trains bound for Auschwitz during the war’s waning months. Unfortunately, the administration’s efforts were too little and too late. (Roosevelt’s moral failure has been thoroughly documented in historian David S. Wyman’s 1984 study The Abandonment of the Jews.)

Inexplicably, Hannah Arendt was AWOL during the desperate two years from 1942 to 1944, when the cause of rescuing European Jews needed the support of every person of influence. The Bergson group urged the Zionist parties to put aside their differences over the future of Palestine and, at least for the duration of the emergency, focus entirely on rescue. But Arendt continued attacking the leaders of the group as “charlatans,” “fascists,” and supporters of “terrorism”; the Democratic and Republican congressmen who supported the rescue committee were dupes, she wrote.

The troubling question is why Arendt herself never advocated for the cause of rescue. According to Arendt’s biographer, “There was no practical action that [she] could take for her people without a base in the Zionist community.” This is an unconvincing rationalization. Arendt did have a “base” in the Jewish community: her Aufbau column and her access to other important publications. Other Jewish writers, such as Hecht and Lerner, used their columns in the popular liberal newspapers PM and the New York Post to apply pressure to the Roosevelt administration on the rescue issue; another famous writer, Varian Fry, wrote a December 1942 cover story for The New Republic, “The Massacre of the Jews,” condemning the U.S. and British governments for inaction.

But Arendt never commented on the congressional rescue resolution. President Roosevelt appeared in just one of her wartime columns, a 1945 article praising the president for his support of Saudi king Ibn Saud’s proposal for settling the Arab-Jewish dispute over Palestine (a “settlement” that would have prevented the establishment of a Jewish state, by the way). Arendt was one of the lucky few Jews fleeing Nazism to gain admission to the United States, yet she never used her platform in Aufbau to protest the State Department’s shameful refusal to fill even the small official quota of immigration visas for European Jewish refugees.

Years later, Arendt pilloried European Jewish leaders facing the Nazi murder machine for their “pathetic” behavior. But what did she do for the cause of rescue while living safely in the United States? According to Young-Bruehl, Arendt and her husband took long, melancholy walks in Riverside Park and thought about the catastrophe in Europe. She wrote a poem, “Park on the Hudson,” describing her thoughts. It ends with the lines:

A loving couple passes by
Bearing the burden of time.

During the war, Arendt did continue to write about internal Zionist politics. She attended the Biltmore Conference (named for the New York hotel where the conference was held), in which a wide spectrum of Zionist groups endorsed the establishment of a “Jewish commonwealth” in Palestine after the defeat of Hitler. But in her Aufbau columns, she attacked every Zionist party that expressed support for a Jewish state in Palestine—an entity that could not survive, Arendt predicted, without an agreement with the Arabs. She derided world Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann as a lackey of the British imperialists. The Revisionists were, of course, “Jewish fascists.” Not even her favorite Zionist factions, the “workers’ parties,” were now immune from her withering criticism. Arendt’s contempt for the Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion was particularly intense.

If all the Zionist parties, from left to right, were on the wrong track, who did understand how to deal with the Jewish national question? In the most bizarre, ill-considered political judgment of her career, Arendt settled on Joseph Stalin. During a wartime visit to the United States, the writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Itzik Pfeffer described in glowing terms the status of their fellow Soviet Jews. Arendt fell blindly for the propaganda. In two columns in Aufbau, she reported that the Soviet Jews were the “first Jews in the world to be legally and socially ‘emancipated,’ that is, recognized and liberated as a nationality.” The Soviet Union’s constitution, according to Arendt, “equates antisemitism with an attack on one of the nationalities of the USSR and pursues and punishes it as a crime against society, like theft or murder. [This constitutes] a national liberation of Russian Jews—because they are the first Jews to be emancipated as a nationality and not as individuals, the first who did not have to pay for their civil rights by giving up their status as a nation.” So the scholar who would later be recognized as the leading theorist of twentieth-century totalitarianism and its propaganda techniques accepted at face value the Soviet regime’s claims about its benevolent treatment of the Jews.

Before World War II and the Holocaust, Zionism remained a minority movement among American Jews. The Jewish-state idea was dismissed by socialists and communists as a diversion from the international proletarian struggle; by the ultraorthodox as a profanation of God’s plan for the Jews; and by liberal assimilationists, such as the owners of the New York Times and the Washington Post, because of fear that Zionism would create the specter of “dual loyalty” for American Jews. Hannah Arendt also worried about the dual-loyalty issue, particularly if the Zionists pushed for immigration of American Jews to Palestine. Mostly, however, she focused her critique of Zionism on what she regarded as the Zionist leadership’s colonial policies toward the native Arab population in Palestine.

As the war in Europe was grinding to a close, Arendt finally broke with Zionism. Her romance with what she had called the “national liberation movement” of the Jewish people began with the rise of Hitler and ended abruptly, 12 years later, with Hitler’s defeat. In a series of strongly worded essays in America’s most influential Jewish publications, Arendt now depicted mainstream Zionism as reactionary, blood-and-soil nationalism.

In a 1944 column in Menorah Journal, Arendt returned once again to her obsession with the “fascist” Revisionists. Though Jabotinsky’s followers were a minority within the Palestinian Jewish community (their political party, Herut, would soon win just 14 out of 120 seats in the first Knesset), Arendt couldn’t get it out of her head that Revisionist ideas had somehow managed to win out in Palestine through the policies carried out by the perfidious Ben-Gurion. “Why ‘general’ Zionists should still quarrel officially with Revisionists is hard to understand,” she wrote, “unless it be that the former do not quite believe in the fulfillment of their demands but think it wise to demand the maximum as a base for future compromises, while the latter are serious, honest, and intransigent in their nationalism.”

Arendt willfully ignored the fact that Ben- Gurion had accepted a British partition plan in 1938 that proposed giving the Jews only a tiny sliver of the territory west of the Jordan River—a plan that horrified the Revisionists, who envisioned a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. Time after time, the mainstream Zionists supported territorial compromise, while the Palestinian leadership rejected every proposal to divide the land. Nevertheless, in “pushing ahead” for a Jewish state, Arendt charged, Ben-Gurion “forfeited for a long time to come any chance of pourparlers with Arabs; for whatever Zionists may offer, they will not be trusted.”

Arendt repeated the same false claims about the Arab-Jewish conflict for the rest of her life. She accused the Zionists of deliberately ignoring the Arab presence in the land and held them solely responsible for the failure to reach any agreement. She ignored the grim reality of Palestinian rejectionism and Jew hatred. While repeating ad infinitum her characterization of the Revisionist Zionist movement as “fascist,” her articles never mentioned that the official leader of the Palestinian national movement—Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem—was an ally of the Nazis who spent the war years in Berlin, recruited Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht and the SS, and consulted with Hitler and Heinrich Himmler about extending the Final Solution to the Jews of Palestine.

After her brief flirtation with Zionism as a legitimate national liberation movement, Arendt experienced a failure of nerve. The Jewish state now looked like a bridge too far into the Arab heartland and could never become viable, other than by imperialist intervention. “Zionism will have to reconsider its whole obsolete set of doctrines,” Arendt declared in Menorah Journal. “It will not be easy either to save the Jews or to save Palestine in the twentieth century; that it can be done with categories and methods of the nineteenth century seems at the very most highly improbable.”

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/16/hannah-arendt-and-the-origins-of-israelophobia/feed/ 34 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/13/anti-israel-hypocrisy-at-the-un/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/13/anti-israel-hypocrisy-at-the-un/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:05:34 +0000 Joseph Klein http://frontpagemag.com/?p=118910

Morocco, replacing Lebanon on the United Nations Security Council, wasted no time in raising the issue of Israeli settlements after a closed-door Security Council meeting on January 10th about the unrelated topic of Children and Armed Conflict. As the United States representative is reported to have pointed out, Morocco’s request was “ill-timed and counter-productive.” Morocco’s decision to begin its tenure on the Security Council by carrying the Palestinians’ torch on the Israeli settlements issue is also the height of hypocrisy, considering Morocco’s continuing illegal occupation of the Western Sahara territory and repression of its people who yearn for self-determination.

Expect to see a continuing effort to insert the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, particularly the settlements issue, on the Security Council agenda whenever the Palestinians’ allies, such as Morocco, possibly can. It’s all part of the Palestinians’ campaign to persuade more Security Council members to support the Palestinians’ bid for full UN membership and to isolate the United States diplomatically if it does not drop its veto threat. So far, the United States has not had to exercise its veto power because the Palestinians were unable last year to garner a majority of other members to support their application for membership.

Palestine’s Observer to the UN, Riyad Mansour, told UN correspondents last week that the Palestinians would employ “new creative ideas” to gain full membership in the United Nations:

Are we giving up because there is one powerful country that has a veto power saying the Security Council should not be involved? We’re not giving up. So now we’re coming up with these new creative ideas.

Mansour referred to a letter he had handed to Bass Sangqu, the UN Ambassador from South Africa, which holds the Security Council presidency for the month of January. The letter purports to document “crimes committed by the occupying authority against our people in the occupied territory, including the terrorist activities by the settlers against our civilian population.” And Mansour called for a report on Israeli settlements to the Security Council by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Mansour also announced that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will be visiting Palestinian leaders in the West Bank within the month, presumably to report back to the Security Council their testimonials of Israeli “crimes.”

How about Ban Ki-moon adding to his itinerary a stop in the Western Sahara, illegally occupied by Morocco? The people of Western Sahara, which was once a Spanish colony, were entitled under international law to decide for themselves whether they wanted complete independence or association with another state after the colonizing power gave up control. Morocco never gave the people of Western Sahara this chance. Instead, it invaded and occupied their territory.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/13/anti-israel-hypocrisy-at-the-un/feed/ 47 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/11/leftism-makes-you-meaner/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/11/leftism-makes-you-meaner/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 04:06:34 +0000 Dennis Prager http://frontpagemag.com/?p=118751

Only a fool believes that all those with whom he differs are bad people. Moreover, just about all of us live the reality — often within our own family — of knowing good and loving people with whom we strongly differ on political, religious, social and economic issues.

That said, I have come to believe that the more committed one is to leftism, the more likely one is to become meaner.

Two examples in just the past week offer compelling evidence.

Prominent left-wing commentators used the way in which Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of one of their children to attack — make that mock — the former Pennsylvania senator.

In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness. But one just assumes that some things — not many, just some — are off limits to political pundits and activists.

Among these few things, one has to believe, is the death of a child.

But I was wrong.

In 1996, Karen Santorum gave birth to a premature baby boy who died two hours later. After spending the night in the hospital with their baby son between them, the grieving parents brought the lifeless infant home for a brief period because, Santorum explained, it was important to them for their other children to “know they had a brother.” The Santorums didn’t want Gabriel Michael Santorum to be an abstraction to his siblings.

First, Alan Colmes on Fox News: “Once (voters) get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his 2-hour-old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple of hours so his other children would know that the child was real …”

Colmes was then interrupted by Rich Lowry: “You are mocking him. They lost a child, Alan. That’s very serious and it’s not something you should be mocking on national TV.”

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/11/leftism-makes-you-meaner/feed/ 13 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/06/eric-hoffer-and-israel/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/06/eric-hoffer-and-israel/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:17:44 +0000 Daniel Flynn http://frontpagemag.com/?p=118215

Google “Eric Hoffer” and one is bound to stumble across articles and posts extolling the longshoreman philosopher as one of America’s great Jewish intellectuals. I certainly shared that assumption when researching him for my book, Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America. But when I brought up Hoffer’s religious background to Lili Osborne, his late, longtime, lady friend, she responded with a quizzical stare. Eric Hoffer wasn’t Jewish, insisted the person who knew him best.

But he had read Ernest Renan’s five-volume History of the People of Israel. This set of books, coupled with the experience of living through what he referred to as the Hitler-Stalin decade, provoked both a great admiration for, and an instinctual defense of, the Jewish people. His quarter-century as a stevedore stemmed from the fortysomething’s thwarted attempt to enlist during World War II. He wished to fight against totalitarianism the best he could, and in the wake of his rejection from the armed services he reasoned that working the San Francisco docks was the way to do that. He later tried to make sense of the bewildering Hitler-Stalin decade in 1951’s The True Believer. The agnostic warned of the irreligious making politics a religion. “The hammer and sickle and the swastika are in a class with the cross,” The True Believer noted. “The ceremonial of their parades is as the ceremonial of a religious procession. They have articles of faith, saints, martyrs and holy sepulchers.”

In the late 1960s, Israel had come under attack in a figurative sense from the intellectuals and in a literal sense from neighboring Arab states. Whereas the author of The True Believer had been caught flat-footed by the events of the thirties, he reacted in real time, and with a massive megaphone, to sixties anti-Semitism. Hoffer took up his pen in defense of Israel.

“The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews,” he wrote in a 1968 op-ed. The piece, and subsequent ones that ran in the 400 or so newspapers that carried his column, outlined the peculiar indignation raised against Israel by those silent to offenses committed by non-U.S.-allied states.

“Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms,” he noted. “But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.” He continued, “Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover. But should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed.”

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/06/eric-hoffer-and-israel/feed/ 5 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/05/nazism-returns-to-germany/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/05/nazism-returns-to-germany/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 04:00:57 +0000 Frontpagemag.com http://frontpagemag.com/?p=118096

German police remove Israeli flags posted in defiance to a Palestinian hate rally in Berlin:

 

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/05/nazism-returns-to-germany/feed/ 69 http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/04/why-anti-semitism-is-moving-toward-the-mainstream/ http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/04/why-anti-semitism-is-moving-toward-the-mainstream/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:20:08 +0000 Alan M. Dershowitz http://frontpagemag.com/?p=118010

For the first time since the end of World War II, classic anti-Semitic tropes—“the Jews” control the world and are to blame for everything that goes wrong, including the financial crisis; The Jews killed Christian children in order to use the blood to bake Matzo; the Holocaust never happened—are becoming acceptable and legitimate subjects for academic and political discussion.  To understand why these absurd and reprehensible views, once reserved for the racist fringes of academia and politics, are now moving closer to the mainstream, consider the attitudes of two men, one an academic, the other a politician, toward those who express or endorse such bigotry.  The academic is Professor Brian Leiter.  The politician is Ron Paul.

You’ve probably never heard of Leiter.  He’s a relatively obscure professor of jurisprudence, who is trying to elevate his profile by publishing a gossipy blog about law school professors.  He is a colleague of John Mearsheimer, a prominent and world famous professor at the University of Chicago.

Several months ago Mearsheimer enthusiastically endorsed a book, really a pamphlet, that included all the classic anti-Semitic tropes.  It was entitled “The Wandering Who” and written by Gilad Atzmon, a British version of David Duke, who plays the saxophone and has no academic connections.  Atzmon writes that we must take “very seriously” the claim that “the Jewish people are trying to control the world.” He calls the recent credit crunch “the Zio punch.” He says “the Holocaust narrative” doesn’t make “historical sense” and expresses doubt that Auschwitz was a death camp.  He invites students to accept the “accusations of Jews making Matzo out of young Goyim’s blood.”

Books and pamphlets of this sort are written every day by obscure anti-Semites and published by disreputable presses that specialize in this kind of garbage.  No one ever takes notice, except for neo-Nazis around the world who welcome any additions to the literature of hate.

What is remarkable about the publication of this hateful piece of anti-Semitic trash, is that it was enthusiastically endorsed by two prominent American professors, John Mearsheimer and Richard Falk, who urged readers, including students, to read, “reflect upon” and “discuss widely” the themes of Atzmon’s book.  Never before has any such book received the imprimatur of such established academics.

I was not shocked by these endorsements, because I knew that both of these academics had previously crossed “red lines,” separating legitimate criticism of Israel from subtle anti-Semitism.  Mearsheimer has accused American Jews of dual loyalty, and Falk has repeatedly compared Israel to Nazi Germany.  Both were so enthusiastic about Atzmon’s anti-Zionism—he has written that Israel is “worse” than the Nazis—that they were prepared to give him a pass on his classic “blood libel” anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.  No great surprise there.

What was surprising—indeed shocking—was the fact that Mearsheimer’s relatively apolitical colleague, Brian Leiter, rushed to Mearsheimer’s defense.  Without bothering even to read Atzmon’s book, Leiter pronounced that Atzmon’s “positions [do not mark him] as an anti-Semite [but rather as] cosmopolitan.” Leiter also certified that Atzmon “does not deny the Holocaust or the gas chambers.” Had Leiter read the book, he could not have made either statement.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/04/why-anti-semitism-is-moving-toward-the-mainstream/feed/ 81 http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/29/ron-paul%e2%80%99s-undeniable-war-on-israel/ http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/29/ron-paul%e2%80%99s-undeniable-war-on-israel/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:09:04 +0000 Ryan Mauro http://frontpagemag.com/?p=117396

Rep. Ron Paul is now in first place in the Iowa caucus polls, second in New Hampshire and third nationally. This has prompted a former close aide of his, Eric Dondero, to speak out about the anti-Israeli views he expressed to him in private. The Paul campaign is ridiculing Dondero as a “disgruntled former staffer” and another aide, an Israeli, is defending Paul. A close examination of Paul’s books, newsletters and statements give credence to Dondero.

Dondero worked closely with Paul from 1987 to 2003. After he left, he nearly ran against Ron Paul but instead supported another candidate. Dondero claims that the presidential candidate is not anti-Semitic but “wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all.” Dr. Leon Hadar, a dual American-Israeli citizen who served as a foreign policy advisor to Paul during his 2008 presidential campaign, has risen to Paul’s defense. He says that Paul does not want to see Israel eliminated as a state, yet Paul praises an anti-Zionist group that envisions just that.

On page 317 of his book, “Liberty Defined,” Paul laments the influence of the Israeli government on America and the “apartheid conditions that Palestinians are subjected to.” He says that “Even newspapers in Israel are willing to discuss this issue openly, but it is essentially never permitted in the United States.” He praises J-Street for challenging “AIPAC’s monopoly control of the discussion” and Peace Now. He expresses his pleasure that an anti-Zionist group called the American Council for Judaism has growing support.

The American Council for Judaism is opposed the concept of Jewish nationality and a Jewish state. The editor of its publications, Allan C. Brownfield, told the New York Times that “While we wish Israel well, we don’t view it as our homeland.” In the fall of 2010, he wrote a glowing book review of “The Dark Side of Zionism.” The title speaks for itself.

In spring 2009, the American Council for Judaism’s Issues publication carried an article by Yakov M. Rabkin that defends Iran and bashes Israel. He writes that Jews are treated well in Iran and that “the role of the Israel Lobby has been seminal in the anti-Iran hysteria.”

“The religiously inspired Iranian president predicts the end of the Zionist regime, but he does not threaten to massacre the inhabitants of Israel,” the ACJ’s publication states. The author agrees with Ahmadinejad in predicting the eventual disappearance of Israel and talks about the “contradictions” between Zionism and Judaism. He also says that Zionism “takes precedence over the human welfare and the very survival of the Jews.” This is the group that Ron Paul speaks fondly of.

Voters first saw a glimpse of Paul’s attitude towards Israel during an argument with Newt Gingrich. The former House speaker was under fire for calling the Palestinians an “invented” people. Paul did not necessarily disagree, conceding that “Technically and historically” Gingrich is right. He then added, “You know, under the Ottoman Empire, the Palestinians didn’t have a state, but neither did Israel have a state then, too.”

Ron Paul defends Iran’s innocence, going so far as to say there is no evidence that it is seeking a nuclear weapon, stands in sharp contrast to the heaps of criticism he levels towards Israel. In January 2009, he talked to Iranian state TV about the “tragedy of Gaza” (his words) and said, “To me, I look at it like a concentration camp, and people [in Gaza] are making homemade bombs, like they are the aggressors?”

He made similar comments in an interview in June 2010 with Don Imus, calling the flotilla raid “horrible” and again accusing Israel of turning the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip into a “concentration camp” by blocking the arrival of humanitarian aid.

He consistently paints the terrorist threat as beginning and ending with U.S. support for Israel. He writes in “A Foreign Policy of Freedom” that American “dollars and weapons are being used against the Palestinians as the Palestinian territory shrinks and Israel’s occupation expands.” Elsewhere in the book, he complains that “all recent presidents have reiterated our obligation to bleed for Israel.”

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/29/ron-paul%e2%80%99s-undeniable-war-on-israel/feed/ 205 http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/28/israel-poland-a-sordid-past-and-a-bright-future/ http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/28/israel-poland-a-sordid-past-and-a-bright-future/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 04:10:49 +0000 Joseph Puder http://frontpagemag.com/?p=117129 Poland currently holds the presidency of the European Union (EU) – a position that rotates every six months – and one that will end at the end of December. Poland, with its long history of anti-Semitism has, ironically, become one of Israel’s closest allies in Europe, and it is now in position to render support to the Jewish nation by promoting Israel’s narrative in the EU.  For Israel, it is an opportunity to drum up support in Europe, where the delegitimization campaigns against Israel have increased, particularly in western European media and on campuses.

Poland, during the Middle Ages, served as a refuge for scores of persecuted Jews fleeing Germany. The population of Jews in Poland just prior to the outbreak of WW II, was the largest in all of Europe and, Warsaw, Poland’s capital, boasted a vibrant Jewish cultural life.  More than a third of Warsaw’s residents were Jews, and the 3.3 million Jews of Poland represented 10% of the country’s population – the highest such demographic in Europe.  The Holocaust, which took place on Polish soil, decimated Polish Jewry.  More than 90% of the Jews perished in Nazi run death camps – including Treblinka (where Warsaw’s Jews were sent to their death) Auschwitz, Belzec, Maidanek and Sobibor.  Those who were not murdered in death camps died of starvation, beatings, and betrayal by anti-Semitic Poles.  Conversely, many individual Catholic Poles risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbors.

Poland’s Communist past is another sorry episode in the history of this former Soviet satellite and the Jewish nation. State sponsored anti-Semitism was pervasive throughout the 43-year long Communist rule. Poland, however, emerged from the fall of Communism as a strong constitutional democracy. Lech Walesa, the famed Solidarity Trade Unionist leader, became Poland’s first democratic president and he made a conscious effort to improve relations with the Jewish nation.  The New York Times reported on May 21, 1991, that in an unusual, emotional speech to the Israeli Parliament, President Lech Walesa of Poland apologized for the anti-Semitism in Polish history.

Walesa, addressing the Knesset chamber filled with Israel’s leaders – some of whom were survivors of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps built in Poland after the Germans overran the country, said, “Here in Israel, the land of your culture and revival, I ask for your forgiveness.”  He issued his words knowing that many in the audience and others, who would read the account, blamed the Poles for not having done more to protect Jews from the Nazis.

“I am a Christian, and I cannot weigh with a human scale 20 centuries of evil for both of our people,” he said.

Responding to Walesa, Israel’s Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir, who was born in Poland and whose father was murdered by anti-Semitic Poles during WWII said, “The Polish president represents in his history and character the new Poland, liberated and rejuvenated, a Poland which aspires to join the era of integration into democratic, free nations,” Shamir said, “We want to hope and believe that the first official visit is a sign of the opening of a new page in relations between our people.”

Pragmatic considerations, no doubt, influenced the Polish government rapprochement with Israel. Hoping to capitalize on Jewish clout in Washington’s corridors of power, and the need to rehabilitate the ailing Polish economy were indeed some of the factors. The desire to benefit from Israeli expertise also played a crucial role.  And, Poland’s normalization process with Israel was a way to assert its independence from Soviet control. With the onset of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (the Oslo Accords); the Polish government was encouraged to seek a role in the peace-making process.

]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/28/israel-poland-a-sordid-past-and-a-bright-future/feed/ 108 http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/22/why-thomas-friedman-abetted-anti-semitism/ http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/22/why-thomas-friedman-abetted-anti-semitism/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:12:32 +0000 Dennis Prager http://frontpagemag.com/?p=116931

After a lifetime of studying the left, I have concluded that leftism is a form of moral poison. It causes otherwise decent and kind people who take it into their systems to say and/or do cruel and sometimes evil things.

While not specifically about the left, a major new scholarly book, “Pathological Altruism” (Oxford University Press), explores this phenomenon of people wanting to do good things yet ending up doing bad. It applies to The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who has a deep altruistic urge to bring peace to the Middle East. But because he sees the world through the liberal/left prism, he says morally reprehensible things — statements that individuals associated with hate-filled, non-altruistic groups and ideologies would make.

In his Dec. 13 column, yet another of his attacks on Israel and its supporters, Friedman wrote: “The standing ovation (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) got in Congress this year was … bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

If a non-Jew had written this, he would have been severely condemned for writing something outright anti-Semitic. The notion that Jews manipulate the levers of power in Western societies for their own nefarious ends is probably the most enduring of all the West’s Jew-hating myths. It was a staple of Nazi anti-Semitism and is the single most repeated charge of those in the Arab and larger Muslim worlds who seek to annihilate Israel, since its purpose is to convince people that non-Jews who support Israel have been paid off by Jews.

But Friedman, who is a Jew and a liberal, can get away with it — even though it is so morally repulsive that Jew-haters can now assert they are merely quoting a well-known Jew. Who’s going to call him on it? The New York Times?

To his credit, one congressman did condemn Friedman. Rep. Steven R. Rothman (D-N.J.) released this statement: “Thomas Friedman’s defamation against the vast majority of Americans who support the Jewish State of Israel, in his New York Times opinion piece today, is scurrilous, destructive and harmful to Israel and her advocates in the U.S. Mr. Friedman is not only wrong, but he’s aiding and abetting a dangerous narrative about the U.S.-Israel relationship and its American supporters.

“I gave Prime Minister Netanyahu a standing ovation, not because of any nefarious lobby, but because it is in America’s vital national security interests to support the Jewish State of Israel, and it is right for Congress to give a warm welcome to the leader of such a dear and essential ally. Mr. Friedman owes us all an apology.”

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