Carter at Cardozo

geoffff

Here's something different. 

Kiss of Death

What is it with peace prizes? 

The Cardozo School of Law which is part of Yeshiva University is to award Jimmy Carter something called the “International Advocate for Peace” for a life time of work of some sort This is to be done on Wednesday 10 April 2013; a day that has already  begun here and is advancing relentlessly towards New York as we speak. 

Can there be anything done to stop this? Is it too late?

Let's be frank about this. Jimmy Carter is the US's worst ever president. Not just since the war or in the last century. Ever. I say that after some reflection.  His presidency was one long low howl of humiliation and shame for America and America's friends. It is a travesty of history to give him any part of the credit for the courageous initiatives of Begin and Sadat and the peace treaty it led to.  Begin and Sadat were the statesmen. Carter was an opponent of a "separate peace" and damn near sabotaged it.   It was  just one dumb and dangerous debacle after another and a reckless negligence that bordered on the criminal from this strange and creepy man.   

Then it got worse. 

After Carter was enthusiastically tossed  out of the White House by the American people at the first opportunity he has become America's most enthusiastic friend of America's enemies and America's most prominent slanderer of Israel. You can't be one without the other.

Here's a list.  

CAMERA Roundup of Commentary on Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid

1987: Carter intervened to help a Nazi war criminal.

2006: Carter says that pressuring Hamas economically is immoral – but pressuring Israel economically is desirable.

2006: Jimmy predicts that Hamas will be a peaceful party and that they hadn’t had any terror attacks on the previous 18 months, an out and out lie.

2007: Carter quotes a fake Nelson Mandela letter to”prove” Israel is an “apartheid state”

2008: Carter claims that Palestinians in Gaza were being “starved to death” and received fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa.

2008: Jimmy entreats Europe to ignore the official US position on Gaza terrorists and embrace them instead.

2009: Carter says Gazans are “literally starving.”

2009: Jimmy reportedly asks Hamas to “Help us to help Obama to overcome the Zionist lobby”

2009: Carter was revealed to have been against a separate Israel/Egypt peace agreement.

2010: Carter praised Palestinian Arab “democracy” but casts doubts on Israel’s democracy

2012: Carter blames the Jews for the Christian exodus from Palestine.”

2012: Liberal Jimmy Carter has no problem with Islamists in power in Egypt where they can implement misogynist and discriminatory laws according to their religious duties.

2012: Carter says that if Iran has one or two nuclear weapons, it is no big deal.

My favourite American lawyer Alan Dershowitz has much to say.and has offered to debate Carter at Cardozo.  Says Dershowitz

“I can’t imagine a worse person to honor for conflict resolution. Here’s a man who has engendered conflict wherever he goes. He has encouraged terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah. He was partly responsible for Yasser Arafat turning down the Clinton-Barak peace offer,” Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told The Algemeiner in an interview. Dershowitz wrote about Carter in his book “The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace.”

“He is significantly responsible for the second Intifada. If he had told Yasser Arafat to accept that deal we might be celebrating Palestinian statehood today,” Dershowitz added. “He just prefers terrorists to Israelis.”

Read it all

Says Concerned Alumni of Cardozo

 "Jimmy Carter has an ignominious history of anti-Israel bigotry. He is responsible for helping to mainstream the antisemitic notion that Israel is an apartheid state with his provocatively titled book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”, the publication of which prompted mass resignations from the Carter Center. He has met numerous times with leaders of the terror group Hamas whitewashing their genocidal goals and undermining US efforts to isolate Hamas. And Carter’s record of slandering Israel is so voluminous that both CAMERA and Alan Dershowitz have written books refuting his lies."

What's to be done? The dean of the law school cannot attend the award ceremony if he is to distance the institution  from the award as he is being firmly counselled. Nor should the faculty. And the students?

Dershowitz has the best advice.

 "Students should attend the ceremony “and in a dignified and respectful way show contempt for Jimmy Carter,” he said. “Students should know who they’re honoring. The response to bad speech is good speech. You don’t cancel the event you use it as an educational opportunity to teach people about the evil things that Jimmy Carter has done.”"

.. in a dignified and respectful way show contempt for Jimmy Carter ...

Spoken like true lawyer. I suggest they quietly stand and turn their backs but under no circumstances should they throw their shoes. And the rest of us?

You can go to this site and vote on whether Carter deserves this award.

And then you can go this site and vote on who was America's worst president.

cross posted Israel Thrives

Letter From Israel -- Learning Hebrew 1

       elinor        אלינור   

                                                                                                                        

The Israeli ulpan method of learning Hebrew is phenomenal. One is assigned a location, a teacher and a classroom full of people one would never have otherwise encountered.  I was sent to Beit Hanoar, an hour or so by bus from where I was temporarily living with my daughter in the German Colony of Jerusalem.
The course began in January and ran for months.  As usual, I am early.  There is only one other person waiting for the doors to open.  Julie, all in pink and looking 15 years old, tells me she’s from San Francisco and we have been assigned to the same class. Despite her youthful blonde blue-eyed looks, she is a graduate speech therapist who wants to learn Hebrew because she is Jewish and feels ignorant. She is ultimately called American Julie to distinguish her from Danish Julie who is almost twice her height. Everyone in the class is younger than me except Ernst, who is 63 and who disappears after every lesson.
The teacher enters the classroom, points to herself and says something in Hebrew.  I slowly realize that she’s saying Mina, my paternal grandmother’s name.  I get points for understanding my first word of Hebrew, accompanied by whistles and cheers.  Mina is instantly aware that she is facing a real handful.  However from that moment on, a word in any language other than Hebrew is forbidden.  The temperature lowers.
The Israeli system of total language immersion is so famous that a deputation of educators from Quebec has entered the room to observe the method, speaking my kind of French.  I was born in Quebec; I greet the teachers with enthusiasm.  I am chastised for not speaking to them in Hebrew.  No other option had occurred to me.
There are 19 students in our ulpan class, all somewhat staggered by the international nature of the group, from Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Germany, Great Britain, North America and one or two others.  The Biblical Tower of Babel is peanuts compared to what went on at the breaks.
There were a few local Arab students enrolled in the class.  They sought to upgrade their Hebrew, hoping to be admitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for higher studies.  I rode the bus with them.  They were young and ambitious and their English was pretty good.  One in particular decided that I should eventually learn Arabic because it is so beautiful and multi-layered that a person like me would appreciate its elegance and intricacies.  I never even had a chance to debate the value of learning even the simplest Arabic because they all disappeared from the class shortly after the first Intifada began and were never seen again.  I still wonder whatever happened to them.
American Julie, Shira and I became friendly.  In fact, all of us except Ernst and Yaacov hung out together after school.  When I was directed to be seated at the end of the front row beside Yaacov, then a chunky 19-year-old religiously observant boy from South Africa, my first thought was whatever will we say to each other, we come from totally different worlds.  He turned out to be an amusing, amazingly cosmopolitan and excellent study buddy.  It was not unusual for a snort of laughter to emanate from our location.  I hadn’t earned a censorious look from a teacher in decades and he, superb student that he was, swore he’d never received one.  After each lesson Yaacov returned immediately to his yeshiva.
Ultimately we learned that Ernst was German and wanted to make personal reparations to the Jewish people.  He had been hired by a hotel just outside Jerusalem to do rather manual labour but hoped to achieve a desk job with good Hebrew.  He left immediately after class to take his afternoon shift.
One day Shira asked if I knew anyone who had an empty living room.  Funny you should ask that, Shira—that’s exactly what I have.  Why?  Well, she said, I’d like to start a belly-dancing class.  And it began.  All the women in the ulpan class joined, but a more disparate and unlikely belly-dancing cluster might never be found.  Suddenly sensuous music poured out of my windows and the folks downstairs heard unusual thumping, mostly caused by our falling about in hysterical laughter.  They should have seen the gyrations.
The visa of Julie-the-Danish-nurse expired and she had to leave the country, but not before she taught us that cranberry juice would cure urinary infections.  Cranberry juice was impossible to obtain in those days but the sufferers held out hope.
We learned so much more than Hebrew during those months.  How to discern what Spanish Merissa was saying with her Andalusian ‘th’ and also her habit of saying why, why why, which I discovered was the Spanish version of oy, oy, oy. I always wanted to answer Because, because, because.
And then there was Olga.  Have I mentioned Olga, the Russian Tank?

cross posted Israel Thrives

Lina Makhoul -- The Voice

geoffff

This is Israel's darling Lina Makhoul who has just won The Voice Israel with the most soaring and moving rendition of the Leonard Cohen classic Hallelujah you will hear anywhere.  

Lina is a nineteen year old Israeli Arab from Acre who now has a record contract and a scholarship. Given how quickly copyright holders have pounced on internet videos that seems likely to be a handsome contract.

Before Hallelujah some may appreciate as a curtain raiser an amateur video of  Lina singing Ave Maria at the Church in Nazareth a week ago.  I did.

Now go to this CiF Watch post, turn up the speakers and settle back for Lina Makhoul's inspired performance of Hallelujah. 

Drop by CiF Watch while you are there if you have a moment. Britain's leading monitor of endemic racism at the Guardian.  Get an inside view of the depravity the British left wing media  has now reached. If you ever have dealings with a reader of the Guardian it is good to know that if at all possible***. Especially if they have anything to do with the Government.

If that is not enough of Lina  here is she a year ago in the first heat knocking out the judges with her version of the Hebrew song When the Heart is Crying.

***

Irish4Israel

geoffff

Wanted: A direct flight route between Dublin and Tel Aviv 

Some good news to refresh and inspire. The group Irish4Israel formed not so long ago is alive and thriving. 

From this side of the world it is easy to conclude that with breathtaking hypocrisy and a spiteful contempt for history the Republic of Ireland had decided to become among the most hostile states in Europe to Israel and had slipped effortlessly into the camp that ultimately proclaims that it is all Israel's and the Jews' fault for just being. 

Let's face it the list is long and ugly and has a fair history. Ireland was neutral in the war against the Nazis and you had a better chance of finding asylum in Ireland after the war if you were a Nazi criminal on the run than a Holocaust survivor.  Irish journalists and commentators refer to Israel as a "cancer" and splash around words like "genocide",  "ethnic cleansing", "imperialist endeavour" and "illegal" with a frequency unmatched in the English language pretty much anywhere outside of the Guardian. You can only imagine what they are saying in Gaelic. The Irish  "pro-Palestine" lobby is among the most vocal and least troubled by antisemitic canards. 

Mary Robinson was  the drive behind making Israel the sole target of UN "human rights" activism. She presided over the 2001 UN Conference on Racism which melted into an Orwellian moment of pure hate at the very image of the world's only Jewish state.  There's been no improvement in the attitude. Years later she still dismisses criticism of this sickening moral inversion as "bullying by certain elements of the Jewish community".
  .   
Have a look at this tremendous recently formed group. What a great page. People informed about the truth and who actually give a damn. What a great bunch. They deserve support. Great to see they are getting some.

Now I Remember Why I Like The Irish 


Here's a recent piece on the pluck of these Irish

Irish4Israel was founded in 2010 by Barry Williams, a non-Jewish student at University College Cork. It uses Facebook as its main platform for communication and organizing. Williams said the group has 2,500 members on Facebook, with most of them under the age of 35.

The group focuses on challenging anti-Israel bias in the media, said Williams, 26. Members are encouraged to sign petitions and write or call media outlets and politicians to protest anti-Israel coverage and rhetoric.

“We also stage Israel ‘buycotts,’ when we encourage people to go out and buy Israel-made products, and we advocate against cultural boycotts against Israeli artists,” Williams said.

...

BlueStar is designing large posters that will be printed in Ireland and displayed on the side of seven bus shelters for two weeks starting on April 22.

The posters — modified versions of previously used BlueStar posters — show young women enjoying everyday life in Tel Aviv (shopping, walking in the street, eating at a café).

“To show that Israel is not an apartheid state, you don’t reiterate the negative charges,” Carey explained. “You focus on the positives. You show happy, engaging women walking down the street and a warm, open invitation to visit Israel.”

The “invitation” to Israel is an actual one, with the posters announcing a “win a free trip to Israel” contest. Entrants are instructed to write on Irish4Israel’s Facebook page why they want to visit Israel. The Israeli Embassy will help judge the entries, and BlueStar is helping to raise the funds to sponsor the trip.

[end]

Read it all. Note at the end the ambivalence, even trepidation of Ireland's tiny Jewish community about the campaign. Maybe the truth will whip up more hatred. That is common enough in small Jewish communities and not so small.

Barry Williams does not agree.

“The [Irish] Jewish community does like to keep quiet about Zionism, but Irish4Israel says you can’t keep quiet,” he said. “Ireland is not anti-Israel, but there is a loud and vocal minority that is. We need to challenge those lies and let people know there are two sides to the story.”

Good for him

Good for Irish4Israel

You can see the character of the people they must contend with from their Facebook page

And they have perhaps the best toxin antidote map to counter the cynically dishonest  "four map" slander I've seen. Check it out at their link.

hat tip

Shirlee 

This Is Hamas

geoffff

Some clips from Hamas occupied "Palestine".

Been offended lately?

geoffff

Pat Condell is offended by "Islam"...

... in so many ways.

 My question is why aren't Muslims?

Sharia courts "as consensual as rape"

Female genital mutilation - unreported, ignored, unpunished

Migrants from Europe bringing girls to tolerant Britain for genital mutilation

Saudi school lessons in UK concern government

BBC's Panorama claims Islamic schools teach anti-Semitism and homophobia

British schools where girls must wear the Islamic veil

“Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover”

geoffff



In 2003 the Sydney Peace Prize was presented to Dr Hanan Ashrawi by then NSW Premier Bob Carr at NSW Parliament House.  Ashrawi is founder and Secretary General of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH)

In 2003 MIFTAH was in coalition with Fatah and Ashrawi was a close associate of Yassir Arafat. 

In 2003 210 Israelis were murdered and 1123 were wounded by terrorists sent by Arafat, Fatah and its allies. A list of their names and who they were is here. 

"Jews Over The Line Are Illegal" (JOLLI)  Founder, Chairperson and global activist..
The other one is Hanan Ashrawi.

In 2013 and ten years later MIFTAH published an article on its website that claimed “Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover”.  The article was published just before the Easter and Passover holidays and was a response to Obama's first speech in Israel.  Ashrawi has refused to apologise claiming that spreading the blood libel was due to its editorial policy of "open dialogue".

More on the nature and history of the blood libel and its latest manifestation is here.

More on the Sydney Peace Prize is here, here and here.

More on Bob Carr is here.

"What is an occasional violent racist blood libel when you are among friends?"