Proportionality

When people say Israel’s response to Hamas aggression must be “proportionate”, they don’t mean it. What they actually mean is that Israel shouldn’t respond at all.

Which is fine: everyone’s entitled to their view. But Israel’s critics should at least be honest about what they’re really proposing. And what they’re proposing is that while Israel has a right to defend itself in principle, it shouldn’t do so in practice. It should just turn the other cheek.

(The Telegraph)

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Double Standards

Israel has existed in its current format since 1948. For as long as that it has been treated differently from all other states/nations in the world. It has been held to another standard than all other states/nations in the world.

Israel is expected to accept being attacked on a daily basis without responding, or if they do respond do so ‘proportionately’ – do you expect that from Russia in Chechnya, or the US in Afghanistan and Iraq? Or the Syrian government i Syria. No, you don’t. In fact no one says anything like that to any other nation using military force to deal with their terrorists. Oh, sure, every now and then there’s a slap on the wrist issued by the UN or EU against Russia, US or some other country going after terrorists, but that’s it. But never on the scale or with the ferocity they go after Israel on how they deal with Hamas.

No one calls what the US does in Afghanistan or Iraq genocide, or claims that Russia are Nazis for dealing with their terrorists. Why is that?

I think the answer is very simple. Israel has the audacity to call itself a ‘Jewish state’ – a home for all Jews that want to live there. In the expectations on Israel to deal with Hamas differently than Russia deals with Chechnya, or the US deals with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, lies a deep and dark antisemitism. Israel is being held to a different standard simply because its majority population is Jewish.

If you are not willing to stand up for Chechnya, the Taliban or Al-Qaeda the way you stand up for Hamas, Fatah and Hezbollah, then you really should not stand up for either. Really.

Ten Ways Israel Is Treated Differently

First, Israel is the only UN member state whose very right to exist is under constant challenge. Notwithstanding the fact that Israel was created with the imprimatur of the UN and has been a member of the world body since 1949, there is a relentless chorus of nations, institutions and individuals denying Israel’s very political legitimacy. No one would dare question the right to exist of Libya, Saudi Arabia or Syria. Why is it open hunting season on Israel, as if we didn’t know the answer?

Second, Israel is the only UN member state that’s been publicly targeted for annihilation by another UN member state. Think about it. The Iranian president calls for wiping Israel off the map. Is there any other country that faces such an open call for genocidal destruction?

Third, Israel is the only nation whose capital city, Jerusalem, is not recognized by other nations. Imagine the absurdity of this. Foreign diplomats live in Tel Aviv while conducting virtually all their business in Jerusalem. Though no Western nation questions Israel’s presence in the city’s western half, where the prime minister’s office, Knesset and Ministry of Foreign Affairs are located, there are no embassies there. In fact, look at listings of world cities, including places of birth in passports, and you’ll often see something striking – Paris, France; Tokyo, Japan; Pretoria, South Africa; Lima, Peru; and Jerusalem, sans country – orphaned, if you will.

Fourth, the UN has two agencies that deal with refugees. One, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), focuses on all the world’s refugee populations, save one. The other, the United Nations Refugee and Works Administration (UNRWA), handles only the Palestinians. But the oddity goes further than two structures and two bureaucracies. They have two different mandates. UNHCR seeks to resettle refugees; UNRWA does not. When, in 1951, John Blanford, UNRWA’s director, proposed resettling up to 250,000 refugees in Arab countries, those countries refused, leading to his resignation. The message got through. No UN official since has pushed for resettlement.

Moreover, the UNRWA and UNHCR definitions of a refugee differ markedly. Whereas the UNHCR targets those who have fled their homelands, the UNRWA definition covers “the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948,” without any generational limitations.

Fifth, Israel is the only country that has won all its major wars for survival and self-defense, yet it’s confronted by defeated adversaries who insist on dictating the terms of peace. In doing so, ironically, they’ve found support from many countries who, victorious in war, demanded — and got – border adjustments.

Sixth, Israel is the only country that has been censured by name — not once, but nine times — since the new UN Human Rights Council was established in June 2006. Astonishingly, or maybe not, this UN body has failed to adopt a single resolution critical of any real human rights abuser. When finally discussing the Darfur situation, the Council shamefully balked at pointing a finger at Sudan.

Seventh, Israel is the only country that, in violation of the spirit of the UN Charter, isn’t a full member of one of the five regional blocs — Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Europe and Others (WEOG) — that determine eligibility for candidacy for key UN posts. While Israel achieved a breakthrough in 2000 and joined WEOG, its membership is limited to New York, not other UN centers, and is both conditional and temporary.

Eighth, Israel is the only country that’s the daily target of three UN bodies established solely to advance the Palestinian cause and to bash Israel — the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People, and the Division for Palestinian Rights in the UN’s Department of Political Affairs.

Ninth, Israel is the only country that is the target of a boycott by the British-based National Union of Journalists. An earlier British boycott against Israeli academic institutions was voided on a technicality because the union that adopted the measure merged with another. There is now an incipient call by some in the British Medical Association to exclude its Israeli counterpart from the World Medical Association.

And tenth, Israel is the only country where some associated with its majority population, i.e., Jews, openly call, for political or religious reasons, to dismantle the state. Is there a comparable situation to those religious voices of Neturei Karta, for example, who traveled to Teheran to join publicly with a leader seeking Israel’s destruction, as well as those political extremists who seek to delegitimize the State of Israel and call for a “one-state” solution? Speaking of our own worst enemies… Tackling any one of these ten, much less all of them, is a daunting challenge, to state the painfully obvious. And, as I suggested, this list is far from complete. But it gives a sense of what’s going on beyond the daily headlines.

The old ad used to say that you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Jewish rye bread. Well, surely, you don’t have to be an ardent pro-Israel activist to be troubled by the unjust treatment of Israel. All it takes is a capacity for outrage that things like this are going on before our very eyes.

This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post.

Anti-Semitism, A Global Issue

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A report from the U.S. State Department details “an upsurge” across the world of anti-Semitism — hostility and discrimination toward Jewish people.

A German police officer holds items seized from an extremist group in Goerlitz, Germany, in 2006.”Today, more than 60 years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is not just a fact of history, it is a current event,” the report says.The report — called Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism and given to Congress on Thursday — is dedicated to the memory of the late U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, a survivor of the Holocaust, the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War II.The report details physical acts of anti-Semitism, such as attacks, property damage, and cemetery desecration. It also lists manifestations such as conspiracy theories concerning Jews, Holocaust denial, anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel.

“Over much of the past decade, U.S. embassies worldwide have noted an increase in anti-Semitic incidents, such as attacks on Jewish people, property, community institutions, and religious facilities,” the report says.

The report also deals with efforts to combat the bigotry, described by Gregg J. Rickman, the department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, as “one of the oldest forms of malicious intolerance.”

The report says violent acts and desecration of Jewish property happen whether there are a lot of Jews or only a few living in the region. Bigoted rhetoric, conspiracy theories regarding Jews, and anti-Semitic propaganda are transmitted over the airwaves and on the Internet.

It says that although Nazism and fascism are rejected by the West “and beyond,” blatant forms of anti-Semitism are “embraced and employed by the extreme fringe.”

“Traditional forms of anti-Semitism persist and can be found across the globe. Classic anti-Semitic screeds, such as ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ and ‘Mein Kampf’ remain commonplace.

“Jews continue to be accused of blood libel, dual loyalty, and undue influence on government policy and the media, and the symbols and images associated with age-old forms of anti-Semitism endure.”

New forms of anti-Semitism are reflected in rhetoric that compares Israel to the Nazis and attributes “Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.”

This kind of anti-Semitism, the report says, “is common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe, but it is not confined to these populations.”

The report says various U.N. bodies are regularly asked to launch “investigations of what often are sensationalized reports of alleged atrocities and other violations of human rights by Israel.”

“The collective effect of unremitting criticism of Israel, coupled with a failure to pay attention to regimes that are demonstrably guilty of grave violations, has the effect of reinforcing the notion that the Jewish state is one of the sources, if not the greatest source, of abuse of the rights of others, and thus intentionally or not encourages anti-Semitism.”

The report gives examples of leaders and governments that “fan the flames of anti-Semitic hatred within their own societies and even beyond their borders.” It cites Syria, Belarus, Venezuela, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

“Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has actively promoted Holocaust denial, Iran’s Jewish population faces official discrimination, and the official media outlets regularly produce anti-Semitic propaganda,” the report adds.

It notes “societal anti-Semitism” in places where there have been efforts to fight the problem. Among the countries are Poland, Ukraine, Russia, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

“Recent increases in anti-Semitic incidents have been documented in Argentina, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and beyond,” the report said.

The report is a follow-up to the State Department’s January 2005 “Report on Global anti-Semitism.”

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I chose to quote the entire article because the quotes from the Report are interspersed and quoting just the quotes, when I have no source reference for them wouldn’t make any sense. I guess you’d have to be Jewish to be aware that Anti-Semitism has never really died out, or that it is now on the rise. One would also have to be pretty savvy when it comes to identifying the underlying “philosophical” source of Anti-semitism in our “Modern Society” to actually realize that a lot of is heard and done today is not as politically correct as some want to pretend.

For instance the almost complete indifference towards OTHER human rights violations, than those of Israel, in the general media, most Human Rights Groups and among those who traditionally have stood for the fight against violations of human rights.

One such example is the fact that the issue of Israel/Palestine covers discussions threads in the double numbers in a Discussion Group with more than 66.000 members, while f.i human rights violations in China, Burma or several African Nations together doesn’t even get to 10… In all fairness it has to be said that Israel doesn’t top the list of issues discussed in this Group – the USA is – but if we say that the US covers 50%, Israel 40% and the rest of the world 10%, we are not very far off. I know this because I happen to be one of the Admins of that specific Group. Over the years I have, together with my wife, had to work hard to balance out the “Anti-Israel Lobby”, and in doing so having been dubbed Extreme Zionist, NaZionist and other epithets simply for saying that the criticism has to be balanced, truthful and fair and that Israel has a right to exist. I have met all kinds of Antisemitism in this specific work, everything from blatant hatred for everything Jewish and honest belief that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an authentic document that proves a Jewish World Conspiracy, to Antisemitism cloaked as Antizionism and Antiisraelism, where Israel and Mossad is being equated with Jews in general.

What has been a red thread through all of this is the idea that Israel, Zionists, and Jews do what they do because they are Jewish, the innate reason for any action by Israel, Zionists and Jews is believed to be their Jewishness. This is Antisemitism at its very core.

Of course people may live in denial, claim that Antisemitism is a thing of the past and that today’s Antisemitism is “just” a reaction to the actions of Israel, and not Antisemitism at all but justified criticism of a Jewish State. However the disproportionality, the lack of objectivity and reason, does beg the question.

SoB

Being Jewish is Separatist and Discriminatory…

“By calling it a Jewish State, whatever that is meant to mean, it appears to be separatist, to be discriminatory.”

All Nations are Ethno-centrists in terms of being focused on a common identity. Sweden is a Swedish nation, Denmark is a Danish nation, the US is an American nation, why should Israel, which was created to be a Jewish Homeland, be any different? It’s not like people of other identities are not welcome or do not have any legal rights. All nations have problems with attitudes towards foreigners and immigrants – it’s called racism – and Israel, as a Jewish nation has that problem just as every other nation. Every other nation in the world, at least if it’s somewhat democratic has difficulties with supremacist groups, why should Israel, as a Jewish State be any different.

Finland have Swedish Finns and Finnish Finns, it also have two very different languages – just like Israel has Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis and two different languages – it really is that simple. Yes, Israel wants to remain Jewish, because that is majority identity in Israel – Sweden wants to remain Swedish – if the Poles or Assyrians, or for that matter the Finns (which are the largest immigrant group in Sweden) came and demanded that Sweden stop being distinctly Swedish, that in fact Sweden should cease to exist – because it’s Swedish – and 8 million Swedes should suddenly over night become Finns, because the two groups share a common land mass, and once upon a time Sweden occupied Finland, then you’d have Sweden and the Swedes up in arms about it, demanding that Sweden remain Swedish, and most likely the Finns living in Sweden would be deported to Finland.

Now, by claiming that the problem with Israel is that its majority identity is Jewish and that it wants to remain Jewish, you are actually making being Jewish something BAD, which, like it or not, smacks of antisemitism.

Instead of attacking Israel for being Jewish, it would be more fruitful to attack those policies within Israel that makes being something other than Jewish less than being Jewish.

Also, funny isn’t it – my Blog wasn’t about Israel being Jewish or about the relations to the Palestinians, but about Neonazi/White supremacist Groups within Israel, and the rather complacent attitude taken by the Israeli Government on the matter. My Blog is about the fact that Jews are being attacked for being Jews inside Israel.

Reform Judaism has a point, Nu?

 

 

“MK Yossi Beilin (Meretz-Yahad) is adamantly opposed to changing the law. “Israel’s door must be much broader, not closer to halakhic definitions,” he said yesterday. “There is no reason that the children and grandchildren, and even great grandchildren [of Jews], cannot immigrate, and recently we have had cases of great grandchildren who want to come.”
Opposition to amending the Law of Return also came from the other side of the political spectrum. “If we do not let grandchildren immigrate, it will hurt thousands of people who grew up in Jewish families, with a clear connection to Judaism, and who suffered from anti-Semitism,” said MK Zeev Elkin (Kadima). He believes that changes to the Jewish Agency’s immigration encouragement policies would be sufficient to keep out “undesirable” immigrants- non-Jews and those with a minimal attachment to Judaism. Elkin, a former consultant to the head of the Jewish Agency, says the organization focuses its immigration efforts on remote areas of the former Soviet Union, where the population is poorer. It is more difficult to persuade Jews in the larger cities, where economic conditions are better, to come to Israel, he noted.”

Halacha accepts anyone as Jewish if they have a Jewish mother or have converted to Judaism in accordance with Orthodox Tradition. Law of Return accepts anyone with a Jewish Ancestor… Hitler did as much for the Jews too – and see it put us in a pickle a second time.

 

Reform Judaism accepts anyone as Jewish if they have one Jewish parent AND has been raised Jewish, with a clear connection to Judaism – now if Halacha and the Law of Return has some sense they would pick up the logic of Reform Judaism on this and implement it ASAP.

“This isn’t enough; we have to finish you off.”

Police in Israel have uncovered a neo-Nazi ring which was responsible for vandalising synagogues and carrying out attacks on Jews and foreign workers in Israel, a court was told [on September 9].

It appears that the number of Russian Jews who will emigrate to Germany this year will be larger than the number who come to Israel; the law under which Jews from the former Soviet Union can immigrate to Germany is close to the restricted definition of “Jewish under Jewish law.” The Israeli Law of Return, however, is in fact based on the Nuremberg Laws, in which the Germans expanded the definition of who is Jewish in accordance with their own needs.

In November, 2002, an immigrant social worker was called urgently to a school in Kiryat Menachem in Jerusalem to help children and families who were hurt in a terror attack on a bus in the neighborhood. Distressed and anxious, she made her way to the neighborhood by bus. Before she got off the bus, one of the passengers, a Russian-speaking woman, said: “This isn’t enough; we have to finish you off.”

 

Recently, skinheads have been seen in Hatzor and Kiryat Shmona. In Russian bookstores in Israel, books that promote Holocaust-denial are sold openly (which is against the law), as are cassettes of neo-Nazi songs like “The Nazis are Coming.”

I thought I had seen and read everything. Am I shocked? Yes. And. No. After all Anti-Semitism has always been staple attitude in Russia, so if you don’t really identify with being Jewish, because basically, your parents are half-ass Jews brought to Israel under the Law of Return – which will take anyone with at least one Yid in the family, then is it any surprise that you bring along a culture of hatred for the Jews – after all your are not Jewish, right?

 

“There is a metaphysical dimension in the Law of Return that comes in to compensate for every drop of Jewish blood for which the Nazis wanted to slaughter the Jewish people,”says writer and essayist Maya Kaganskaya, who has also made a study of fascism in Russia. “Metaphysically, I also agree with it. But in the real sense, the Jewish people is in danger because of it. There is a problem here that is difficult to solve. It’s easy to deal with the neo-Nazi movement – they should simply be thrown out of here. I am familiar with this phenomenon from Russia, where it’s fairly popular. Nazis and Hitler become surrounded by a halo of romanticism in the struggle against the new world. But the real problem is the Law of Return. A Jewish state according to Jewish religious law and a state built on the Law of Return as it stands both lead to the end of the state. It is necessary to bring together intellectuals, demographers and legal experts who will reexamine to what extent and according to what test it is possible to accept immigrants here.”

Yup, revoke their citizenship, deport them back to Russia, and make some real changes to the legislation. It is ironic that Gentile Converts to Judaism, who most often have a true love for the Jewish People and the True Land of Israel, are often forced to jump through insane hoops to get a certified Aliyah Card and be eligible for immigration under the Law of Return, but those little scumbags can slide in, uncircumcised, uneducated and illiterate simply because they have a drop of Jewish blood in their veins. Sorry, but that’s sick.

 

“For about three years now, the Information Center for Victims of Anti-Semitism in Israel has been active. Its members track manifestations of anti-Semitism in this country through “open” sources, such as the press, and individual complaints that are made to them. The center is headed by Zalman Gilichinsky, 39, a painter by profession, a newly observant Jew who immigrated to Israel from Kishinev.

Over time he has accumulated hundreds of incidents that elsewhere in the world would be defined as “manifestations of anti-Semitism,” but in Israel, the political system and the law-enforcement authorities relate to them with studied indifference. The range of incidents is wide: non-Jewish immigrants calling Jewish immigrants Zhid, an elderly Jewish immigrant woman in Jerusalem being beaten by a non-Jewish caregiver who calls her “Zhidovka,” comments like “Hitler didn’t finish the job,” swastika graffiti found all the time in predominantly Russian-speaking neighborhoods, vandalism in synagogues and cemeteries.”

The Secular Zionist Idea has clearly gone Absolutely Stark Raving Mad!

The hypocrisy of the Radical Far Left

From an earlier post:

They [the radical left] like to make comparisons to South Africa and the Apartheid Regime. I was part of the movement against Apartheid – and let me tell you, not once did I hear anyone call for the obliteration of the white population of South Africa or a call to eradicate South Africa as a State – not once. But I do hear those cries from the Radical Far Left in regards to Jews and Israel.

I have some additional thoughts here.

Just as I did not “hear anyone call for the obliteration of the white population of South Africa or a call to eradicate South Africa as a State – not once…,” nor did I hear anyone suggest that South Africa be usurped by Namibia or Zimbabwe, or that the white population be deported out of Africa all together.

They claim it’s the same, but they are not willing to suggest the same solution. That’s the hypocrisy of the Radical Left on the issue of Israel.