Diaspora Jews Demanding the Boycott of Jews Born in the Wrong Place

geoffff

Seriously, is there anything more disgusting? Can you imagine any other people on the face of the planet who would attack their own because of an accident of birth, no matter what they might perceive to be their politics?


What Isi Leibler said:

...

Diaspora Jews fall into an entirely different category. When they call for global boycotts of Israeli settlements, they are effectively promoting delegitimization and paving the way for broader boycotts. Besides, unlike their delusional Israeli counterparts, they are mere observers, physically unaffected by the negative repercussions of their actions.

...

Today, we are witness to a sea change in public opinion at the grassroots level, both in Israel and the diaspora, with a broad recognition that the current Palestinian leadership cannot possibly be considered to be a genuine peace partner. One can of course debate the pros and cons of this approach. However, to legitimize and describe as a Zionist, a Jew calling for a boycott of Israeli settlements, gives credence to activities which have the potential of impacting disastrously on Israel. There must be red lines. Many of us have reservations about diaspora Jews publicly condemning the democratically elected Israeli government on security issues but we recognize that in a democracy they are entitled to their views. But that surely does not apply to those directly calling for boycotts against sectors of Israeli society.

Exactly. In fact I would put it far more strongly than Isi Leibler. Far more. I would start with the phrase "sheer mindless gutlessness combined with wilful fuck you ignorance" and move on from there.

In the meantime demanding the murder of Israeli soldiers is now an acceptable form of Judge Stamped free  expression in Australia. The Netzarim Junction blood libel has made it to the streets of Sydney thanks to a Sydney judge.. 




Crossposted Israel Thrives 

All Criticism of Israel is Anti-Semitic!

Mike L.

(Cross-Posted at Israel Thrives)

There is an article in this morning's Jerusalem Post by Benjamin Kerstein entitled, "Yes, all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic!" When I first noticed it I rolled my eyes and moved on by because the premise is so obviously nonsensical. Of course not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. If all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic then Israel, itself, is the most anti-Semitic country on the entire planet.

Nonetheless the idea seemed so outrageous and so patently false on its very face that I decided to see what the writer was saying. Perhaps his title, like mine above, was meant as snark. But, nope. Kerstein means precisely what he says. All criticism of Israel is inherently anti-Semitic for historical reasons. This is what he writes:

All criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic because of the specific historical circumstances under which we currently live. That is to say, the historical circumstances under which Israel and the Jews exist in the world today render any non-anti-Semitic criticism of Israel impossible. And, ironically, these are circumstances that Israel’s opponents have themselves created.

To hold that this is not the case requires acting – and demanding that others act – as if these circumstances do not exist, even as they sit as patiently as a pachyderm in the parlor waiting for us to notice them and, sometimes, when our self-willed ignorance grows too infuriating, murder our children and set off bombs in our streets.

Nonetheless, these circumstances are not complex, nor are they numerous. They are simply these: A large portion of the world, West and East, has come to believe that Arabs and Muslims have earned the right to murder Jews.

This last bit, I have to say, is unquestionably true. Those of us who follow the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic party on the question of the Long Arab War against the Jews see this constantly. That is, we are constantly told that the reason that so many Arabs and Muslims seek to murder the Jews in the Middle East is because those Jews are mean. In places like Daily Kos or the Huffington Post or the UK Guardian (not to mention TIME magazine, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania) we are constantly told that the reason Palestinians strap suicide belts onto children and send them off into areas crowded with Jews is because Israel is a racist, colonialist, imperialist, apartheid state and that if Israel would simply end the Occupation (with a capital "O") then the local Arabs would become as gentle as narcofied lambs.

In this way, the Jews of the Middle East, who, as a tiny minority in that part of the world, have been subject to 14 centuries of persecution, are at fault for that persecution. Just as so many Germans in the early-middle part of the twentieth century told one another that the Jews have it coming, so today many, many western progressives tell themselves precisely the same thing. What it amounts to is the notion that if for 2,000 years we Jews have been unjustly persecuted and oppressed, thus artificially holding down our numbers, in this generation we really DO deserve whatever beating the Arab world wishes to give out.

Every generation of Jews prior to 1948 was perfectly innocent, but NOW we just happen to actually be guilty.

Derived from this right, they have also come to believe that the destruction dismantling, and erasure of the State of Israel, and the slaughter, expulsion, and/or perpetual subjugation of its Jewish population are entirely legitimate and indeed desirable.

That is, ultimately, what anti-Semitic anti-Zionism of the kind found so commonly on the left is about. That's what anti-Zionism means. It means that after 2,000 years of getting our collective ass kicked it is immoral and wrong for Jewish people to come together in their own self-defense because it means effectively fighting back against Arab Muslim persecution and, as everyone seems to know, Jewish self-defense is immoral and unacceptable.

Derived from the preceding is the belief that the Jewish people in general, in Israel or the Diaspora, either do not exist as a people deserving the same rights as other peoples, or are an evil and debased people who must be slaughtered, expelled, and/or perpetually subjugated in order to prevent them from committing further debased evils.

The western left never puts it in these kinds of terms. They never would because they see themselves as enlightened anti-racists. Instead, they often talk to one another about the Occupation (with a capital "O") and what a shame it is that the Jews are behaving something like Nazis. What usually, but not always, goes unspoken is the idea that if Israel is something akin to Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa then it must be dismantled as a Jewish state and any such effort can only lead to war, if not a second Holocaust.

So, is all criticism of Israel anti-Semitic?

No.

I'm sorry, but despite the above the very notion is still ridiculous on its face. Nonetheless, it's not really that difficult to understand where Kerstein is coming from. Israel represents about half the world's Jewish population and it is surrounded by people numbering 60 to 70 for every Jew and a very great proportion of those people hold murderous hostility toward those Jews. People in the west do not really understand, or care to understand, what a precarious position those Jews live under. People in the west do not really understand, or care to understand, that the Jews in the Middle East have been living under siege since they were freed from dhimmitude in the early part of the twentieth century.

In the comments of Kerstein's op-ed we read this:

Freezey

Bizarre and counter-intuitive proposals like all criticism is anti-semitic are a mark of either Power or Desperation.

The western progressive-left thinks that Israel is powerful, but the truth is that the Jews of the Middle East are desperate. They desperately wish to be left alone to raise their children in peace, to work on computer and medical technology, and to send Natalie Portmans out into the world. That's what they want, but instead they live with constant hatred coming at them from all quarters and bloodthirsty violence directed at them from many in the local Palestinian population.

When malicious progressives direct their hatred toward the Jews of the Middle East they are confusing victims with victimizers and seeing their own hatred in noble terms.

There is a reason why young Jewish kids in Israel must go into the IDF and it is not because the Jews of the Middle East are essentially militaristic and mean. It is because so many of the 400 million Arabs surrounding those Jews are hell-bent for fury and hundreds of millions of westerners seem to favor the Arabs over those Jews.

One thing that I know for certain is that if the shit ever really hits the fan over there and we end up with a whole mess of dead Jews (and dead Arabs), the tendency on the western left will be to blame the Jews for the hostility against us.

That's the way it has been every generation for 2,000 years.

This one is no different.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem --- And the Media Lie of Two Cities

The Czechs Get It.

geoffff




It is easy to look at Europe and despair at how easy it is for free people to surrender even their basic liberties in the face of a bizarre prevailing political culture of the hour or even to submit to outright physical intimidation. People of the fashionable left who march in the streets of London or Paris behind banners that glorify Hamas or the "Palestinian Resistance" or which proclaim "We are all Hezbollah Now" have already lost any respect for themselves and the vast cultural achievements of their countries.  Little European countries that prosecute politicians for "hate speech" for making some observations about the dangers of Islamic extremism while savagely defending and protecting the worst forms of genocidal racist incitement pouring from Islamic extremists are already priming themselves for another Nazi occupation.

It is gratifying to see that there are still some liberal democracies in Europe that have enough respect for human rights and their own nationhood to actually support liberal democracy abroad and enough courage to stand up to the ugly fanatics who want to see it torn down at home; and to recognise them for who they are. These tend to be countries of liberal tradition that not only had to endure fascist occupation seventy years ago but also had to throw off Stalinist rule within the living memory of most.

The Czech Republic is the prime example.

Yesterday Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu visited Prague with seven Cabinet ministers. Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas took the opportunity to tell the Israeli press that the Czechs had “a special feeling” for Israel.

“We’ve got a full understanding of Israel’s situation as a small, democratic country in a very dangerous region with very dangerous neighbors,” Necas told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview before the meeting.

He said the Czech Republic would like to continue to be a strong supporter of Israel within the European Union. “We are concerned about the Iranian missile and nuclear programs,” he said.

Israel’s situation was reminiscent of Czechoslovakia’s in the 1930s, Necas said. In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded the country, citing the need to defend its German-speaking minority.

“We’ve got a special feeling for Israel’s situation – that of a small nation surrounded by enemies. We remember our situation in the 1930s, when the small democratic Czechoslovakia had neighbors that wanted to destroy it or take part of our territory.”

Without question the Czechs will remember something else.

In 1938 Czechoslovakia  not only was an advanced liberal democracy but had a strong and professional military and a world class armaments industry. This did not prevent the cowards of London and Paris in charge of the two great democracies of Europe selling out the little country to the Nazis in a midnight meeting with Hitler while the Czech ambassador was forced to wait outside the door to hear the fate of his nation.

It would be three generations before the Czech people were free of totalitarianism and were to get back their democracy.

The appeasement of racist hatred and tyranny only serves to inflame it. The Czechs know this. We are watching exactly the same thing now. Appeasement of totalitarian imperialism does not avert war. By its nature totalitarian imperialism in any form will only be satisfied by complete submission. Appeasement ensures war and makes certain that when it comes it will more terrible than anyone can imagine. 

Crossposted Israel Thrives

Say "Hello" to Daphne Anson

Mike L.

(Cross-Posted at Israel Thrives.)

One of my favorite new pro-Israel bloggers is Daphne Anson. I am highlighting her blog because I think that it is important that pro-Israel bloggers support one another and because I just happen to like her work.

She says of herself:

I'm a writer/researcher, with many academic books and articles under my own name. Daphne Anson is my blogging alias. Combining the names of two ships, it's a moniker of special significance to me - I'm a naval history buff. I use an alias owing to a perceived need to keep my blogging and professional identities separate. An Aussie, I've long been interested in politics and foreign affairs, having studied International Relations in the USA and Britain for my first degree, and I also hold a doctorate. I began blogging in response to the exponential rise in antisemitism and hostility to Israel in the wake of the Mavi Marmara affair.

Interestingly enough, as my readers know, it was the Mavi Marmara affair that also inspired me to start pro-Israel blogging in earnest. What shocked me at the time was that the effort to break the blockade of Gaza was an effort that saw a coalition of western progressives working with actual murderous Jihadis for the purpose of violently confronting Jews on the high seas.

That was quite a wake-up call, I have to tell you.

In any case, I very much encourage the Bar and Grill readership to check in with Daphne. She is very much a welcome addition to the pro-Israel / pro-Jewish blogosphere... despite the fact that, sadly, she is probably not a San Francisco Giants fan.

The Netzarim Junction Blood Libel -- When Will the Western Media be called to Account?

Part One

geoffff




This blog has an ongoing interest in what is commonly called the Muhammad al-Durrah incident, perhaps the most dangerous and vile blood libel in all of history. Without question it is the fastest and most widely spread. What once took days and months to reach perhaps a county or country now reaches the world in a second and once it is planted is there forever.

Previous pieces on this affair are here,  here and here.

I know the Bar and Grill has readers who may not be completely familar with the concept of the "blood libel" and what a truly disgusting and dangeous thing it is. Wikipedia has a pretty good run down  on this strange and cultish phenonomen but the internet is teeming with reliable information as always.

A blood libel in its purest form is the ancient allegation that Jews murder Christian (or more latterly Muslim) children as part of their religious rituals. At one time the libel was that the Jews crucified a Christian child at around Easter time to re-enact the killing of Christ. The innocence of the child was symbolic of the innocence of Jesus. Common variations include Jews drain the childrens' blood to use in the baking of matzo as part of the Passover ceremony (which usually occurs around Easter).

Likely these choice little fantasies from hell have their origins in the Christian Bible and specifically to a reference in  Matthew 27:25. where after Pontius Pilate has publicly washed his hands of the fate of Jesus the  crowd shouts "His blood be on us and on our children" about yet another Jew (one of thousands) about to suffer an horrific death under the Roman occupation.

Sure. That sounds likely.

In doing so, so the story goes, in some mediaeval Christian minds at least, the Jewish people as a whole and for perpetuity bore direct responsibility for the crucifixion and were therefore fair game for persecution and extermination. Or so The Guardian says, and The Guardian is never short of a good story  when it can be twisted into an opportunity to bash conservatives and Americans.

Thanks alot, lunatic religious fanatics with mediaeval minds. Deicide. This blog admits to the occasional rough night over the course of his life and for sure some beer has been spilt and the odd glass broken. But I have never killed anybody; least of all God. I'm certain I would remember if I had.

Perhaps the most repellant feature of the twentieth -first century so far is how many lunatic religious fanatics with medieval minds there are,  more than ever it seems, and how tolerated they are even in the heart of Europe at the very scene of countless atrocities inspired  by the mindset.

The Guardian curiously ignores the substantial English contribution to the blood libel. A nasty piece of theological propaganda written perhaps a hundred years after the death of Christ and at the peak of the turmoil of the Judeo/Christian split, as bad as it was, was raised to a much more potent and dangerous level first in England. The libel was tied to an actual child's death, who was then given the status of martyr and the central figure of an officially condoned cult that drove the murder and persecution of Jews, happened first in England. This is indeed the defining pattern of the blood libel since the twelth century. This is what distingushes it from even the most venal kinds of war propaganda such as WW1 images of German soldiers spearing and hoisting babies on bayonets.

The blood libel is different.  First there is the sick lie. Then comes the glorious martyr. Next the cult and finally the massacres of innocent and helpless Jews over and over again including inevitably the killing of children in the cruelest ways possible. This apparently is important for the libellers. There have been hundreds of these. In 1144 there was William of Norwich.  In 1255 there was Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln.  Simon of Trent in 1475. The Holy Child of La Guardia in 1491.

It is so easy to think of this as the work of a depraved clergy from an ignorant and superstitious age when the supernatural ruled the everyday that has now passed into distant history. Since then there has been the Enlightenment surely?

Lest we think that this is entirely a thing of the Dark Ages that went out of fashion with witchhunts and the Inquisition, all of these children were among those canonised by the Roman Catholic Church as late as the ninteenth century and often retained their sainthood and cult status, based entirely on the fabrication of Jewish ritual murder, as late as 1964. The Russian Orthodox Church to this day has only one child saint. , the patron saint of children with his own annual feast day, who the Church alleges was ritually murdered by Jews to make matzo for Passover.

It took until 1955 for the Anglican Church to place a plaque at the former shrine of Little Saint Hugh whose remains were buried in the Lincoln Cathedral to say his death  inspired a hateful and murderous legend and cult.

In the twentieth century the blood libel prospered and moved on from Christianity. It was a staple of the Nazi gutter press of course but had already infected the Muslim world and this was spread with relish by Nazi allies and Islamic ideologues  such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

In  1910 the Jews of  Shiraz, Iran were  accused of murdering a Muslim girl. The  Jewish quarter was pillaged and12 Jews killed in the subsequent pogrom. In 1928, the Jews of Massena, New York were  accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl. The 1946 Kielce pogrom against Holocaust survivors in Poland was sparked by an accusation of blood libel. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia specifically accused Parisian Jews of a blood libel.

In 1986 the Syrian Defense Minister, as his contribution to Arab literature, published The Matzah of Zion. The book renewed ritual murder accusations against the Jews of Damascus. It has been cited by Syrian UN delegates and  at October 2002 was into  its eighth reprint and being translated into English, French and Italian

And on and on it goes. In 2003 a 29 part television series Ash Shatat ("The Diaspora") was broadcast in Lebanon by Hezbellah and since across the Arab world. The series is based on the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, (also now a staple across the Muslim world) depicts the Jewish people as engaging in a conspiracy to rule the world and presents Jews as people who murder children for their blood.

The Arab Muslim world, and Iran, and beyond, is drenched in the blood of the blood libel.

• .

A hundred years ago the Jew haters only had the pulpit and the printing press to spread their hideous lie.


"Christians, take care of your children!!! It will be Jewish Passover on March 17"

They still have the pulpit and the press of course, but now they have something new and I don't mean just the internet. They have the entire Western left/liberal media at their disposal. Which brings us to the Netzarim Junction blood libel; the first fresh blood libel of the twenty-first century..




This was a blood libel in its purest sense and across the Muslim world it played as such as was intended. It has all the elements. The contemptible and sick lie in this case cynically staged. The irretrievably evil Jews forever condemned by God himself. The noble and innocent child martyr well on his way to sainthood.. The blood thirsty religion inspired cult and then the massacres of innocent Jewish people with a special emphasis on their children.

But at once, while this was going on in all its fury, in the West it was given just a very slight new spin by the self appointed high priests of this secular multicultural era; the progressive left intelligentsia in the universities and the left/liberal media. In an instant they grabbed the libel with both hands and in a frenzied mob rage they waged their own paper pogrom against the very concept of a Jewish state.

They took God out of it of course. It would have been unenlightened and embarrassing to leave him there and besides he was no longer needed. They knew you could get a perfectly good blood libel raging against the Jews without resorting to God, at least in the West. The Nazis and the Stalinists had proven that.

All you need is faith.

.

[To be continued]

Update 22 May 2013  Another post on this here

Crossposted at Israel Thrives

The Failures of Progressive-Left Zionism: The Settlers

Mike L.

(Cross-Posted at Israel Thrives.)

Progressive-left Jewish Zionists are failing the Jewish people.

If the first way in which progressive-left Zionism is failing is in its ostrich-like reluctance to acknowledge, and seriously discuss, the rise of the Jihad throughout the Muslim Middle East, another way is through their justifying bigotry against their own people.

Progressive-left Jews are encouraging hatred toward their fellow Jews.  Jews who dare to live in Judea and Samaria are targets not only of Palestinian terrorists, but of progressive-left diaspora Jews who spit hatred at those people.  What is most galling, perhaps, is that these "settlers" are living under exceedingly difficult circumstances, while their Jewish prosecutors live in clean, safe apartments and houses in Europe, Australia, and North America.  Those of us who live in the United States need not worry that a crazed Jihadi will sneak into our 3 month old baby daughter's room and chop off her head.  Yet, progressive-left diaspora Jews feel free to malign these people.

I think that it is a disgrace and I've written about this before. In a 2010 piece entitled Liberal Jewish Suckers, I wrote:

I personally do not care whether Jews live there or not. I am not in favor of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Nor do I oppose Jewish settlements in the West Bank. For that matter, I also do not oppose Episcopalians living in Skokie, Illinois, nor Rastafarians living in Kathmandu, Nepal, nor Ethiopians living in Walla Walla, Washington. What we are being told, though, is that Jews living, and thus building, in the West Bank is an impediment to the peace process. This is nonsense. How can the mere presence of Jews in the West Bank prevent Mahmoud Abbas from sitting across the table from Benjamin Netanyahu? All they need to do is agree on Israel's final borders, and thus the borders of the forthcoming Palestinian state, and then those Jews who live in the newly formed state of Palestine will be living under Palestinian rule. Presumably many will leave under those conditions because, or so I guess, most would prefer not to live under Palestinian sovereignty. But should that not be up to them?

Of course, it should. The problem is that when Barack Obama demanded "total settlement freeze" then Mahmoud Abbas was put into the position in which he could demand nothing less, thus ruining any potential there may have been for a negotiated peace. Now, this is, of course, terrible enough, but what compounds the problem is progressive-left Jewish hatred toward those very people who Abbas and Obama do not want living, and thus building, on historically Jewish land.

To my mind there are few things in this world more revolting than Jews who whip up hatred toward other Jews. I do not like it when anti-Semitic Jewish anti-Zionists, the Finkelsteins of the world, spit poison and hatred at the Jewish state of Israel and I do not like it when progressive-left diaspora Jews spit poison and hatred at the so-called "settlers." It creates bigotry and it justifies violence against us. It gets used by anti-Semites to justify the very hatred that necessitated the creation of the Jewish state to begin with.

Why must any future state of Palestine be Judenrein? Israel does not demand that their Palestinian population pack up and move out, yet not only does Abbas and the PA insist upon the dismantling of Jewish settlements in their areas of jurisdiction, but even liberal American Jews do so. This is not only a form of unjust bigotry, it is, itself, an impediment to the peace process. Let me be clear. It is not Jewish settlements in the West Bank that is an impediment to the peace process, but the insistence that Jews must not be allowed to live, and thus build, in the West Bank that is the impediment to the peace process.

In this way progressive-left diaspora Jews, who complain bitterly about Jews building housing for themselves in Judea, end up justifying the conflict. If the very idea of Jews building housing for themselves in Judea is so horrendous, and if diaspora Jews whine and bitch and moan about it, how can we blame the Palestinians for refusing to accept Jewish people on that land?

I know that some will say that it's not about Jews, per se, but about Israeli nationals. This is nonsense. Does anyone honestly think that anyone else would care if those people were Muslim? Of course, not. The problem here is not that they are Israelis, but that they are Jews.

Pretending otherwise fools no one.