Moral relativism and jihad

By Caroline Glick

Two events happened on Wednesday which should send a shiver down the spine of everyone concerned about the future of the American Jewish community. But to understand their importance it is important to consider the context in which they occurred.

On January 13, The New York Times reported on a series of virulently anti-Jewish comments Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made in speeches given in 2010. Among other things, Morsi said, “We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.” He said that Egyptian children “must feed on hatred; hatred must continue. The hatred must go on for God and as a form of worshiping him.”

In another speech, he called Jews “bloodsuckers,” and “the descendants of apes and pigs.”

Two weeks after the Times ran the story, the Obama administration sent four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt as part of a military aid package announced in December 2012 entailing the provision of 20 F-16s and 200 M1-A1 Abrams tanks.

The Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and other prominent American Jewish groups did not oppose the weapons transfer.

With the American Jewish leadership silent on the issue, Israel found its national security championed by Sen. Rand Paul. He attached an amendment to a budget bill that would bar the US from transferring the advanced weapons platforms to Egypt.

Paul explained, “Egypt is currently governed by a religious zealot… who said recently that Jews were bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and pigs. This doesn’t sound like the kind of stable personality we [sh]ould be sending our most sophisticated weapons to.”

Paul’s amendment was overwhelmingly defeated, due in large part to the silence of the American Jewish leadership.

The Times noted that Morsi’s castigation of Jews as “apes and pigs” was “a slur for Jews that is familiar across the Muslim world.”

Significantly the Times failed to note that the reason it is familiar is because it comes from both the Koran and the hadith. The scripturally based denigration of Jews as apes and pigs is legion among leading clerics of both Sunni and Shi’ite Islam.

It was not a coincidence that the Times failed to mention why Morsi’s castigation of Jews as apes and pigs was so familiar to Muslim audiences.

The Islamic sources of Muslim Brotherhood Jew hatred, and indeed, hatred of Jews by Islamic leaders from both the Sunni and Shi’ite worlds, is largely overlooked by the liberal ideological camp. And the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish leadership is associated with the liberal ideological camp.

If the Times acknowledged that the Jew hatred espoused by Morsi and his colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as by their Shi’ite colleagues in the Iranian regime and Hezbollah is based on the Koran, they would have to acknowledge that Islamic Jew hatred and other bigotry is not necessarily antithetical to mainstream Islamic teaching. And that is something that the Times, like its fellow liberal institutions, is not capable of acknowledging.

They are incapable of acknowledging this possibility because considering it would implicitly require a critical study of jihadist doctrine. And a critical study of jihadist doctrine would show that the doctrine of jihad, or Islamic holy war, subscribed to by the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, as well as by the Iranian regime and Hezbollah and their affiliates, is widely supported, violent, bigoted, evil and dangerous to the free world.

And that isn’t even the biggest problem with studying the doctrine of jihad. The biggest problem is that a critical study of the doctrine of jihad would force liberal institutions like the New York Times and the institutional leadership of the American Jewish community alike to abandon the reigning dogma of the liberal ideological camp – moral relativism.

 

Moral relativism is based on a refusal to call evil evil and a concomitant willingness to denigrate truth if truth requires you to notice evil….

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Beware of the Revisionists

By Ari Lieberman

….The facts were indisputable. Israel acted in self-defense and the aggressor Arab nations were forced to scurry with their tails between their legs. Even the traditionally hostile United Nations, which had condemned past Israeli defensive actions in knee-jerking fashion, refused to condemn her this time. In fact, Resolution 242, passed by the UN Security Council following the war, gave implicit recognition to Israeli territorial conquests and affirmed Israel’s right to safe and secure boundaries.

But time or rather its passage serves to dampen memories and opens the door to creative and rather obscene narratives that serve to obfuscate and perpetuate falsehoods. History is replete with such examples. Truman’s decision to drop atom bombs on Japan was rightfully heralded at the time as a courageous decision that saved the lives of hundreds of thousands and served to end a war imposed on us by an aggressor nation. But today, the decision is questioned by nefarious elements who offer all sorts vile conspiracy theories as reasons for Truman’s actions. The Holocaust, which claimed the lives of six-million, is today routinely challenged by Islamist heads of state with banal regularity. Even the so-called moderates, such as Palestinian Authority chieftain Mahmaoud Abbas, have issued denials of the genocide claiming that that it was a “fantastic lie,” that gas chambers were never used to kill Jews and that no more that “890,000” Jews perished.

In similar vain, Arab “scholars” and some of their useful idiot allies in the West, such as Tom Segev, have been on a crusade to present a fallacious view of the events preceding the Six-Day War. They do so by inventing facts, providing out of context statements and conflating statements that result in the presentation a skewed narrative. The stakes concerning which side was the aggressor and apportionment of blame are highly consequential. The aggressor loses the moral and legal high ground and thus loses whatever benefit it derived from the war, including territorial conquest.

Those who present the false Arab narrative are thankfully still a marginal lot, regulated to spewing their hate on fringe outlets such as Press TV andCounterpunch. But lies if repeated often enough have an insidious way of infiltrating mainstream discourse and the ill informed are most susceptible.

Michael Oren, considered the preeminent authority on the Six-Day War hadharsh words for the revisionists and noted that the Arabs – Jordan, Egypt and Syria – “had planned the conquest of Israel and the expulsion or murder of much of it Jewish inhabitants in 1967. Many of the so-called ‘revisionist historians’ today are claiming that the Arabs never had aggressive intentions toward the Jewish state and that Israel precipitated the Six-Day War in order to expand territorially. The documentary evidence refutes this claim unequivocally.”

We must therefore never forget who the aggressor was in the Six-Day War, that the ramifications of an Israeli loss would have been calamitous on par with the Holocaust and that the Arabs have only themselves to blame for their sorry predicament.

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Understanding UN Bias Against Israel

The United Nations has made the democratic State of Israel the target of incessant condemnation while neglecting its mandate in challenging the oppressive regimes around the world. The following film clip uncovers the factors behind the UN’s bias against Israel. We encourage you to view the clip, forward to friends, and partner with us to counter the hypocrisy and expose the truth:

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Bye-bye London

By Caroline Glick

In an interview with Haaretz in November 2010, British novelist Martin Amis said the following about discussions of Israel in his motherland:

I live in a mildly anti-Semitic country, and Europe is mildly anti-Semitic, and they hold Israel to a higher moral standard than its neighbors. If you bring up Israel in a public meeting in England, the whole atmosphere changes. The standard left-wing person never feels more comfortable than when attacking Israel. Because they are the only foreigners you can attack. Everyone else is protected by having dark skin, or colonial history, or something. But you can attack Israel. And the atmosphere becomes very unpleasant. It is traditional, snobbish, British anti-Semitism combined with present-day circumstances.

After participating last week in a debate in London about Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines organized by the self-consciously pretentious Intelligence Squared debating society, I can now say from personal experience that Amis is correct. The public atmosphere in England regarding Israel is ugly and violent.

The resolution we debated read: “Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy. If settlement expansion continues Israel will have no future.”

My debating partner was Danny Dayan, the outgoing head of the Yesha Council.

We debated Daniel Levy, one of the founders of J-Street and the drafter of the Geneva Initiative, and the son of Lord Michael Levy, one of Tony Blair’s biggest fundraisers; and William Sieghart, a British philanthropist who runs a non-profit that among other things, champions Hamas. Levy has publicly stated that Israel’s creation was immoral. And Sieghart has a past record of saying that Israel’s delegitimization would be a salutary proces and calling for a complete cultural boycott of Israel while lauding Hamas.

We lost overwhelmingly. I think the final vote tally was something like 500 for the resolution and 100 against it.

A couple of impressions I took away from the experience: First, I can say without hesitation that I hope never to return to Britain. I actually don’t see any point. Jews are targeted by massive anti-Semitism of both the social and physical varieties. Why would anyone Jewish want to live there?…

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Awesome: Ultra-Orthodox troops rescue Palestinians from river

By Yoav Zitun

Lifesaving cooperation occurred Tuesday between haredi IDF troops and Palestinians who were trapped in a stream growing violent due to the stormy weather.

 

Soldiers of the IDF’s haredi battalion Netzah Yehuda managed to rescue three Palestinian men before the fierce currents washed over them. Ynet obtained a documentation of the rescue.

 

The IDF troops were called to an area near the Nablus River, where, they were told, cars were stranded with their drivers trapped in a constantly intensifying current.

The storm was too severe for helicopters to arrive at the scene, and the battalion commander resorted to utilizing a Palestinian’s tractor that was passing by.

The commander mounted the tractor, as he and the owner drove toward the trapped cars, rescuing three men. A fourth man is known to have also been trapped in the river, but he was not found and was reported missing.

 

The tractor exited the flooded area just before the asphalt started collapsing. The soldiers gave the rescued men initial medical care at the scene.

 

Throughout Wednesday, Netzah Yehuda rescued some 33 people, of whom 30 who were trapped in a bus. In many of the rescues, the troops worked in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority’s rescue forces.

 

Unit 669’s intricate rescue

The Air Force’s special search and rescue division, Unit 669, involved in Tuesday’s rescues resulting from the stormy weather, also faced a challenging rescue mission on Wednesday, when it was called in to help a family trapped on the roof of a Tayibe house, surrounded by water….

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Erasing Israel from the Map

By Eileen F. Toplansky

The denial of Israel’s right to exist by erasing it from maps is a regular component of Palestinian children’s schoolbooks. In September 2011 the official PA map of “Palestine” featured the PA areas and all of Israel (excluding the Golan Heights) wrapped in the Palestinian flag.

In 2009 the British airline, BMI “removed Israel from the electronic maps displayed to passengers in some of its planes.” This was done to avoid offending Muslim passengers. Israel “does not appear in maps on BMI flights between London and Tel Aviv, and Khefa, the pre-independence Arabic name for Haifa, appears on the maps.” A spokesman explained that BMI makes “every effort to take passengers’ sensitivities into account through an apolitical policy.”

In November 2012, activists with links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas came together for an American Muslims for Palestine’s (AMP) Conference for Palestine in the U.S.: A Movement United. The AMP “home page depicts the conference logo-a map of Palestine made from birds showing the Palestinian state encompassing all of Israel.”

Also in November 2012, Flickr, a social photo hosting service, “decided to remove the maps of Israel from its site.” Flickr was contacted to determine whether this was a technical glitch, but it was discovered that Flickr map services are actually powered by Nokia Maps which “also has Israel as completely blank.” In response to requests about the deletion of Israel as well as Cyprus, the following statement was made

Nokia Australia has responded to CNET Australia’s request for comment with the following statements in regards to mapping data in Israel and Cyprus.

Nokia has the world’s largest maps and navigation platform, with voice-guided navigation for around 100 countries worldwide and maps available for over 190 countries and regions. As per Nokia’s long-standing policy, we are committed to neutrality and impartiality with regards to political issues. While we currently do not offer maps for Cyprus, we work hard on refining and improving Nokia Maps continuously and make maps available in as many countries and regions as possible. Because of these efforts we are confident that we will be able to offer maps for Cyprus in the coming months.

….In order to guarantee our users the best experience when using Nokia Maps we aim for the highest possible quality standards when offering our service. Based on the available map data, we work hard on refining and improving Nokia Maps continuously and make maps available in as many countries and regions as possible. Because of these efforts we are confident that we will be able to offer maps for Israel in the coming months.

In August of 2011, outraged customers of the cosmetic giant Nivea discovered that Nivea’s international website failed to mention Israel, but did list the “Palestine Territories.” Only after pressure and when Glenn Beck talked about it on the radio, did Nivea finally add the link. In a “statement to The Blaze, the company said the link was originally not there because the Israel site was under construction.”

The latest example of texts wiping Israel off the map has occurred in Great Britain…..

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The MOST Important Video About Israel You’ll Ever See!

Martin Peretz – an appreciation

By Caroline Glick

By the time I began developing a political consciousness in the early 1980s, I didn’t have any choice but to be on the right side of the political spectrum. By the early 1980s, the political Left in the US had already abandoned support for Israel.

When I grew up in what would later become Barack Obama’s neighborhood in Chicago, the black political machine in the neighborhood and the city, led by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan was openly anti-Semitic and pro-Muslim. The white Left was also hostile. The Communists were anti-Israel. The media was anti-Israel.

As a proud Jewish girl, it was clear to me from adolescence on that I could only locate myself on the political Right.

This was not the case for people who came of age in the 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, the USSR had not yet cut off its relations with Israel. The civil rights movement was a joint Jewish-black movement….

….The reason I entitled this post “Martin Peretz, an appreciation,” is not for what he wrote in 1967, but because of what has happened to the Left, the Jewish Left and to Peretz in the 46 years that have passed since he wrote that article.

In the late 1960s, Peretz wasn’t alone in defending Israel against the radical Left – white and black. In 1967, even Jewish Communists were willing to break ranks to support Israel. And as the 1968 New York Teachers Strike showed, at the time, liberal Jews in general were willing to defend themselves from attacks by black anti-Semites.

But in the intervening years, fewer and fewer voices on the Left, and specifically on the Jewish Left were willing to take such positions and pit themselves against their movement. And so as the decades passed, what were the positions of the radical Left in the 1960s became increasingly the positions of the mainstream Left, until by last summer, they became the positions of the majority of delegates at the Democratic National Convention.

When I was growing up in Chicago, the local Jewish establishment’s refusal to support Israel in the 1982 Lebanon War is what made me decide to make aliyah. By the time I arrived at Columbia in 1987, and the Palestinian uprising broke out, it was hard to find Jewish leaders who were willing to stand up for Israel without stuttering.

Today the situation has become simply untenable. Suffice it to say that Bill Ayres’s political protégé Barack Obama’s success in garnering 70 percent of the Jewish vote is not an aberration.

Yet through it all, Martin Peretz has rarely wavered. Despite his attempts to support the Palestinians, he has not allowed his desire to see the Arab conflict with Israel resolved  diminish his support for Israel. He has remained a staunch, loyal defender of Israel. When I was growing up, I relied on his New Republic for its reporting on Israel and the Middle East. Peretz was one of my intellectual heroes.

In recent years, I’ve felt more bemused by than respectful of Peretz. A colleague of mine quipped some years back that Peretz and Allan Dershowitz live in an intellectual universe populated only by Peretz and Dershowitz and they refuse to acknowledge that they are alone. That quip has probably anchored my thinking on both men ever since.

But even if my colleague’s remark was more true than false, reading the FBI report, I decided I should discard its snide diminution of Peretz. The fact is, he has been fighting this fight for nearly fifty years. As a man of the Left, he has fought the fight for Israel and Jewish rights, increasingly alone for nearly fifty years, and has done so despite what must have been enormous personal costs as his comrades all jumped ship, and in many cases, joined the cause of Israel’s enemies.

Cervantes’s Don Quixote is generally reviled as a fool for his futile battle against windmills. By the same token, Leftists who insist that their movement — which long ago parted company with the ideals it claims to represent, and serves as a warm political home for totalitarian anti-Semites — must  side with good against evil, necessarily call up the image of Don Quixote fighting the forces of nature.

But when you think about it, there is something heroic about keeping up a battle even if it is doomed to fail, simply because it is the right thing to do. So hats off to Peretz for keeping true.

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EXPOSÉ: No-go Areas for Jews in Europe

….A few weeks ago a Jewish man was attacked and rendered unconscious in a Paris metro. How did the anti-Semitic mob recognize that he was Jewish? Because of a philosophy book by the chief rabbi of Paris that he was reading in the metro when he was attacked.

Meanwhile, half the Jewish families in Villepinte, working-class suburb north of Paris, have left due to anti-Semitism, fleeing to other Paris neighborhoods considered safer for Jews, or out of France entirely. Villepinte’s 40-year-old synagogue, already torched in 2001, will close because it often lacks a minyan.

In the UK, there have been many cases like that of an Orthodox child, who was wearing a kippa and tzitzit, verbally threatened and physically intimidated by a hooded youth as he travelled on a London bus.

When the faithful leave Rome’s main synagogue they immediately hide the skullcap. Police patrol the area day and night.

In the Netherlands, the country of Baruch Spinoza, police officers began wearingyarmulkes to catch Dutch Jew haters in the act of physical or verbal assault. Jewish students are told to “put a cap over your kippah”.

In Amsterdam, the shelter of Spanish Jews who fled from Inquisition, the twenty-five Lester M. Wolff van Ravenswade described the difficulties faced by Jews living in an open letter to the newspaper NRC Handelsblad: “I cannot go to public events dressed as a Jew, let alone go out on Saturday night. Which party do I have to vote for in order to live safely with the kippah on my head?”.

Everywhere in Europe, steel barriers are in place outside certain buildings with Jewish or Israeli connections to prevent parking.

In many British areas where Jews live the “Shomrin”, or guardians, patrol the streets like Israelis do in isolated “settlements” in Israel.

Last autumn the ancient Dutch synagogue of Weesp became the first synagogue in Europe since the Second World War to cancel Shabbat services due to the threats to the safety of the faithful.

Eighty years ago next January, Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany.

Every time I see a Jewish child walking down the street in Vienna, Paris or Rome wearing a kippah, I know that Hitler did not get to finish his job. It makes me feel proud – or at least somewhat better.

But the Holocaust, in which two thirds of European Jewry were annihilated, did not end when Nazi Germany and its satellites were routed militarily. The spirit of annihilation continues eighty years later. That’s why Israel’s former chief rabbi, Meir Lau, predicted that European Jewish history is nearing its end.

Indeed, it seems a tragic but unavoidable process: Europe as a Jew-free continent or a realm of fear in which Jews will survive as “invisible”, like during the Inquisition, where even lighting candles on Shabbath is a hazard because someone could see the holy flames from the street.

Europe’s streets are getting very dark these days and the sublime orchestras are playing Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and “Die Meistersinger” once more, while the faith in “truth as beauty and beauty as truth” can again  meet its horrible end.

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‘Syrian jets bomb Palestinian camp, killing 25’

By REUTERS, JPOST.COM STAFF

PHOTO: REUTERS/ABDALGHNE KAROOF

BEIRUT – Syrian fighter jets rocketed the Palestinian Yarmouk camp in Damascus on Sunday, killing at least 25 people sheltering in a mosque in an area where Syrian rebels have been trying to advance on the capital, opposition activists said.

They said the deathsresulted from a rocket hitting a mosque in the camp, to which refugees have fled from other fighting in nearby suburbs of Damascus. It was the first reported aerial attack on the camp since the revolt against Syrian President Bashar Assad erupted last year.

Yarmouk, in southern Damascus, is part of an arc sweeping from the east to southwest of the Syrian capital where Assad’s forces have been trying for several weeks to push back rebels from the gates of his power base.

A video posted on Youtube shows bodies and body parts scattered on the stairs of what appears to be the mosque.

Syria is the home of more that 500,000 Palestinian refugees, most of them living in Yarmouk. Assad’s government and Syrian rebels have enlisted and armed Palestinians refugees during the 21-month uprising, which has escalated into a civil war….

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What? Muslims killing Muslims sheltering in a mosque? Outrageous! I demand that the UN at the very least send a strongly worded letter to the Syrian leadership!  –ed.