This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

More Sedition at Ben Gurion University

Ben Gurion University's Neve Gordon (political science department chairman) has uncovered the reason for Israel's "aggression" and "war crimes" in his latest anti-Israel diatribe in the anti-Semitic pro-jihad neo-Stalinist web site Counterpunch, often described as a leftwing neo-Nazi web magazine:

'The assault on Gaza is also being carried out to help Kadima and Labour defeat Likud and its leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who is currently ahead in the polls....Yet, the government is actively misleading the public, since Israel could have put an end to the rockets a long time ago. Indeed, there was relative quiet during the six-months truce with Hamas, a quiet that was broken most often as a reaction to Israeli violence: that is, following the extra-judicial execution of a militant or the imposition of a total blockade which prevented basic goods, like food stuff and medicine, from entering the Gaza Strip. Rather than continuing the truce, the Israeli government has once again chosen to adopt strategies of violence that are tragically akin to the ones deployed by Hamas; only, the Israeli ones are much more lethal. If the Israeli government really cared about its citizens and the country's long term ability to sustain itself in the Middle East, it would abandon the use of violence and talk with its enemies.'

Update: For those with a delicious sense of macabre irony:

Ben Gurion University Prepares for Possible Attack
The Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva has gone into emergency preparedness in light of Israel's counterterror operation in Gaza and the fact that the city is within range of rockets launched by Gaza terrorists.
The university's planning, in conjunction with the Homefront Command, covers protection from rockets in public places and university residences, coordination of firefighting efforts and removal of fallout and dangerous materials.

(Translation – the massive rocket attack directly produced in part by the treasonous anti-Israel activities of so many faculty members at Ben Gurion University, including at least one entire department, is now threatening the campus itself!)

Update: The notorious Solidarity-with-Terrorism duo Neve Gordon, chairman of the political science department at Ben Guion University, and Jeff Halper , the latter who used to teach at ben Gurion University, denounce Israel in the leftwing neo-nazi web magazine Counterpunch for bombing terrorists holed up in an Islamofascist "university" in Gaza, the very same day that Gordon's own university, Ben Gurion University, had to shut down because of rockets landing in Beer Sheba. In other words, they are upset that Israel attacked the very same terrorist "university" in Gaza that was being used as a warehouse for rockets being aimed at Ben Gurion University! One of those rockets hit a Beer Sheba classroom yesterday that was fortunately empty at the time. No doubt Counterpunch magazine editors were terribly upset that no children were inside.
Their filth is at http://counterpunch.com/gordon12312008.html
See also: http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2009/01/ah-irony-of-it.html

Lou Grant, Left-Wing Mountebank

(Pictured: Ed Asner, actor and leftist loon.)

Actor and left-wing activist Ed Asner is the winner of our fifth annual Henry Schwarzschild Award, bestowed on a person in the public spotlight who, by his or her statements, displays contempt for the Jewish people, disregard for historical truth, a desire to sup at the table of Israel's enemies, or who otherwise plays into the hands of the enemies of Jews and Israel.

Before we get to Asner, a little something about Schwarzschild, who died in 1996 and was a longtime activist in groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Jewish Peace Fellowship.

In the wake of the Israeli siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, he wrote a public letter of resignation from the editorial advisory board of the journal Sh'ma - a letter that will stand in perpetuity as a monument to the monstrous neuroses and insecurities afflicting secular leftist Jews.

Schwarzschild's main points:

"[T]he War on Lebanon has now made clear to me that the resumption of political power by the Jewish people after two thousand years of diaspora has been a tragedy of historical dimensions. I will not avoid an unambiguous response to the Israeli army's turning West Beirut into another Warsaw Ghetto. I now conclude and avow that the price of a Jewish state is, to me, Jewishly unacceptable and that the existence of this (or any similar) Jewish ethnic religious nation state is a Jewish, i.e. a human and moral, disaster and violates every remaining value for which Judaism and Jews might exist in history.

"The lethal military triumphalism and corrosive racism that inheres in the State and in its supporters (both there and here) are profoundly abhorrent to me. So is the message that now goes forth to the nations of the world that the Jewish people claim the right to impose a holocaust on others in order to preserve the State. I now renounce the State of Israel, disavow any political connection or emotional obligation to it, and declare myself its enemy."

Schwarzschild's screed was immediately published by the far-left Nation magazine and has, for two and a half decades, remained a favorite of left-wing Jews. Playwright Tony Kushner and journalist Alisa Solomon thought so much of it that they included it in Wrestling with Zion, a compilation of essays by leftists struggling with their feelings of ambivalence toward Israel.

Asner, this year's Schwarzschild's "honoree," is best remembered for his portrayal of lovably gruff Lou Grant on the old "Mary Tyler Moore" show (CBS, 1970-77) and later on "Lou Grant" (CBS, 1977-'82).

In real life he's a hard core leftist who sings the praises of Castro's Cuba, supported communist guerrillas in El Salvador, lends his name to groups that imply U.S. governmental involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and in 2002 signed an ad opposing the U.S. invasion of Al Qaeda-harboring Afghanistan and decrying "the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration .... [whose] brutal repercussions have been felt from the Philippines to Palestine where Israeli tanks and bulldozers have left a terrible trail of death and destruction."

Now Asner has taken up the cause of Israelis who refuse to serve in the IDF, penning an article that appeared earlier this month on The Huffington Post and other left-leaning websites and blogs in which he approvingly cited the "courage" of Omer Goldman, a young Israeli woman who has already served two terms in an Israeli military jail for, in Asner's words, "standing up to the government."

Asner excitedly quoted Goldman's observation that "the most dangerous thing in Palestine is the Israeli soldiers, the very people who are supposed to be on my side" and then offered his own bit of wisdom: "I find it hard to believe than anyone can look Omer in the eye and tell her that she has to risk her life and her future for Israel whether she wants to or not. It's just not right. Especially during this time of year, when many of us are getting ready to celebrate a holiday about freedom.... "

No wonder Asner had no problem putting his name to an ad that spoke of "Israeli tanks and bulldozers [leaving] a terrible trail of death and destruction." What is a wonder, though, is that Jewish groups see fit to honor him, as Seattle's Jewish Family Service did last year and as Women's American ORT did in 2005, bestowing on him its Tikkun Olam Award because, said the organization's then-national president, "we feel he represents our ideals and commitments."

Maariv Editor Denounces Hebrew University Professor as anti-Semite and Traitor

(to the right - new faculty members to be recruited by the Hebrew University?)
While almost all Israeli journalists coddle the leftist anti-Zionist academics at Israeli universities and pander to their treason, praising them as courageous moral role models, Ben Dror Yemini, the deputy editor of Maariv, is a notable and heroic exception. While a bit left of center in his own personal outlook, he nevertheless is willing to call a leftist spade a spade and often is willing to call a leftist spade a traitor. He has frequently attacked leftist seditious Israeli Jewish professors by name.

In his weekend column yesterday, he outdoes even himself. He takes on Prof. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, the very same moonbette whom we cited and commented about in a posting a few days ago. To remind you, Elhanan-Peled is a professor of education at the Hebrew University. She is sister to Marxist professor of history Yoav Peled at Tel Aviv University and her own daughter was murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber in Jerusalem. In response to that murder, Elhanan-Peled has since devoted herself to promoting the agenda and cause of the very same terrorists who murdered her own daughter. Her latest outburst of cheering on behalf of the Hamas was posted by us a few days back and can be read at this URL.

Yemini viciously attacks Elhanan-Peled in his column on Dec 26. It can be read in Hebrew here.

Significantly, Yemini explicitly calls her an anti-Semite and a traitor in his column. I translate the relevant parts for you (my own translation) here:

'The Hamas will also Take Care of the Lecturer

'There is in fact no reason to wait for any imminent military action. The Lie Factory is already hard at work at full steam. This week a new record was broken. A lecturer at the Hebrew University wrote an article, "The Heroes of the Gaza Strip," about those Gazans who express the "free spirit of humanity" in opposition to the "military plan about to commence by the criminals of the occupation army." The writer uses the word "thugs," that favorite term for Jews used by anti-Semites, to describe the Jewish bullies who are in secret control of the world. The use of the term is not naïve and innocent. It erases the distinction between anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. The propaganda of "atrocities" has already arrived. No need to await a large action.

'The writer is Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, the granddaughter of the late reserve general Matityahu Peled (a notable Israeli communist ironically named Matityahu --- SP). She is a begrieved mother, whose own daughter was killed in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. She of course blames Israel for that, not the murderers. She goes out of her way to JUSTIFY the murderers! And if we yearn to understand why the freedom of spirit is being defeated and why the Islamist anti-Semitism is winning, it behooves us to continue to read her malicious propaganda in this regard.

'Israel, according to the writer Peled-Elhanan, "is sunk up to its neck in the blood of innocent (Palestinian) babies and every breath that we take shoots out red bubbles of blood into the air of the holy land." Peled-Elhanan then makes a blood-chilling misuse of the famous poem by Bialik about the Kishinev pogrom, "On the Massacre," which includes the famous line, "The revenge for the death a small child has not yet been invented by the Devil." That poem was written about the Kishinev pogrom. But she declares that "the child in question is the Palestinian from Gaza, and his butchers are the Jewish soldiers." Here we have yet another medieval blood libel. Again the Jews are murdering children.

'She writes about "cities of massacre," about a massacre supposedly being perpetrated against Palestinians. Except that she knows perfectly well that Israel has never carried out any massacre, ever, and not even something resembling a massacre, during the entire 40 years of occupation of the occupied territories. In reality, the number of Palestinians injured has been extremely low, both relatively and in absolute numbers, in comparison with any other conflict anywhere on the planet. But since when do anti-Semites care about facts.

'She refers to the Hamas murderers as "freedom fighters." No doubt she also considers the Nazis to have been also when they were struggling against the Jews. After all, years and years of demonization of Jews, of painting the Jews as the "threat to world tranquility," preceded annihilation of the Jews back then also. Peled-Elhanan continues their work. She is now perpetrating the demonization of Jews. At one time someone like Peled-Elhanan would have been tossed into prison as a traitor. The world has changed. Peled-Elhanan is the recipient of the "Sakharov Prize" granted to her by the European parliament.

'So what does one do with sicknesses like this? Silencing them would be prohibited, would turn them into martyrs. You know – the victims of the Israeli stormtroopers. What needs to be done is to do to them what they are trying to do to Israel – to turn them into lepers. To expose the anti-Semitic essence in them. And the fact that they are barons in the factory of lies. That they are the defense advocates of the anti-Semitic regime at our gates. Peled-Elhanan is operating among us and at times at our expense. She and her ilk are in service to the murderous Hamas regime. She and her ilk are perpetuating bloodshed. And in spite of that, we are commanded not to prosecute the anti-Semites in our midst. (I disagree --- SP)

'If her plot succeeds, the Hamas will be victorious and rule over us here and IT will then do the dirty job! Both to us and to her!'

****
Up to this point were the words of Ben Dror Yemini. (In the remainder of his column he attacks Israeli leftists who protested when Israel barred the anti-Semitic Professor Richard Falk from entering Israel as a UN delegate after he had smeared Israel as a Nazi entity.)

Please take a few moments and send a letter of outrage to the heads of the Hebrew University and to all Hebrew University "friends of" offices around the world. Let them know what you think of people like Elhanan-Peled being emplyed using the funds of Israeli taxpayers, alumni, and overseas donors. Please cite Yemini and demand that the Hebrew University take action against the pro-terror anti-Semites on its faculty (of whom Elhanan-Peled is not the only one!). To do so, contact:

President of the Hebrew University
Prof. Menachem Magidor
Email hupres@cc.huji.ac.il
menachem@math.huji.ac.il
Menachem.Magidor@huji.ac.il
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 91905
Tel. 02-6584143, 02-5881905
Fax. 02-5811023
President of the Hebrew University
Prof. Menachem Magidor
Email hupres@cc.huji.ac.il
menachem@math.huji.ac.il
Menachem.Magidor@huji.ac.il
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 91905
Tel. 02-6584143, 02-5881905
Fax. 02-5811023

The Rector of the Hebrew University is
Title : Prof.
First Name: Sarah
Family name: Stroumsa
Department: Rector of the Hebrew University
Primary Email address: stroums@vms.huji.ac.il
Other Email addresses:
Sarah.Stroumsa@huji.ac.il
stroums@huji.ac.il

Telephone: 026719698
Telephone (extra): 025883676
URL: http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~stroums/
List of Hebrew University "Friends of" Offices with email addresses and faxes:
http://www.huji.ac.il/huji/eng/friends_e.htm

Finally, please note that Isracampus.org.il is the Israeli watchdog group that monitors and exposes academic treason in Israel, following the shenanigans of Israel's Academic Fifth Column, and exposing campus politicization and extremism in Israel. It needs your help, support, and assistance!

Please visit the web site weekly to learn what is happening on Israeli campuses! Please advise others to provide assistance and support to it.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

Hebrew University Professor Devotes Herself to Promoting Palestinian Terror

Nurit Peled-Elhanan is one of the most openly pro-terrorism faculty members at the Hebrew University, where she teaches education of all things. She may be best known for blaming Israel when her own daughter was murdered on a bus by a Palestinian suicide bomber.

As reward for her lobbying on behalf of terrorists, including those who murdered her daughter, she was awarded a "Sakharov Prize." Now she has decided to capitalize on that by escalating her work on behalf of terrorism. In a public statement this week, she stated the following:

'These words are dedicated to the heroes of Gaza, the mothers and fathers and children, the teachers and doctors and nurses who are proving every day and every hour that no fortified wall can imprison the free spirit of humanity and no form of violence can subdue life. The pogrom being carried out by the thugs of the Occupation army against the residents of the Gaza Strip is known to everyone and yet the world is impotent as always…. He (Bialik) did not imagine that those foundations would be the foundations of the state of Israel. That the Jewish and Democratic State of Israel would demagogically use the expression "blood on his hands" to justify its refusal to release freedom fighters, children and peace leaders from the worst of prisons, while immersing all of us in the blood of innocent babes up to our necks, up to our nostrils, so that every breath we take sends red bubbles of blood into the air of the Holy Land. But the siege of Gaza is only one of many sieges imposed today in the world by democratic powers as well as by non-democratic ones. All those sieges are meant for one purpose: to silence the voice of freedom and justice.'

The source for the previous quote is here. She is in effect promoting the political agenda of the very same terrorists who murdered her own daughter.

For more on Elhanan-Peled's anti-Israel agitprop, see this.

Want to tell the heads of the Hebrew U what you think of her being on the faculty? Here are the details for how to complain:
Hebrew University:
President of the Hebrew University
Prof. Menachem Magidor
Email hupres@cc.huji.ac.il
menachem@math.huji.ac.il
Menachem.Magidor@huji.ac.il
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 91905
Tel. 02-6584143, 02-5881905
Fax. 02-5811023

Rector of the Hebrew University
Title : Prof.
First Name: Sarah
Family name: Stroumsa
Department: Rector of the Hebrew University
Primary Email address: stroums@vms.huji.ac.il
Other Email addresses:
Sarah.Stroumsa@huji.ac.il
stroums@huji.ac.il
Telephone: 026719698
Telephone (extra): 025883676

Hebrew University "Friends of" Offices with email addresses and faxes:
http://www.huji.ac.il/huji/eng/friends_e.htm

From The Pages of The Jewish Press

On Our Own
by Cheryl Kupfer

I recently became a bubbe again with the birth of a granddaughter, Kayla Elisheva. While I am delighted, I am still trying to wrap my head around the fact that my youngest child Moshe is now a father. When he and his wife Maya told me that they were expecting (silly me, I attributed her nausea during Pesach to matzah and the late-night feasting at the Seders) I called my sister-in-law to share the good news.

"My baby is having a baby," I told her, and as I said it a wave of excited disbelief sprinkled with droplets of sadness washed over me.

Just yesterday, he was tugging at my skirt and asking me for a "dink," toddling around the house barefoot cause he'd pull his socks off almost as soon as they were on. When did he and his brothers grow up?

This is a head-shaking question that is surfacing more and more frequently in the minds of members of my generation, who with awed wonder - often paired with regret - ask themselves, "Where did the years ago?"

I wrote the following poem on a particularly chaotic day when my children were still children. I had no idea then that the time in my life that I "longed" for at that moment - one that seemed endless years away, would come upon me so quickly - that I am still catching my breath.

However, even then, I understood that time is a river whose current becomes faster with each passing day, and that I would one day look back and miss the yesterdays that were forever out of my reach.

A Mother's Lament

For years I dreamt of a house so neat,
No toys on the porch spilling out to the street,
No coats, no book bags, piled up on the floor,
No clutter, no mess, as I opened the door.

For years I dreamt of a house so still,
No screams, no yells that pierced like a drill,
No quarrels, no squabbles to referee,
No rebellion, no defiance, no testing of me.

For years I dreamt of time for myself,
No stopping what I was doing to get toys off the shelf,
No early dawn breakfasts, no demands for more,
No mopping up spills on a newly washed floor.

For years I dreamed of a childfree house,
No more canceled plans for me and my spouse,
No simchas left early because of a call,
Or lacking a sitter - not going at all.

No need to dream - the years have flown,
The children have left - all are grown.
They are immersed in lives of their own,
So busy and distracted - now and then they phone.

When I come home, and turn the lock,
I'm greeted by the faint ticking of a distant clock,
I gaze into a hallway that is silent and dark,
The once- crayoned walls are shadowy and stark.

No longer are there explosions of noise,
No playtime invasions by girls and boys,
There is just a heavy quiet that is loud to my ear
And an absence of laughter that gets harder to bear.

This was the time I looked so forward to,
There were so many things I had planned to do.
Yet these longed- for activities have lost their appeal,
Life has a void my many hobbies can't fill.

To pass the time, I often walk,
I usually end up in our neighborhood park,
And as I sit and watch the children play,
How I ache for yesterday.

Cheryl Kupfer is a columnist and editorial staffer for The Jewish Press.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

Speaking of Ponzi schemes

The whole world is talking about Bernard Madoff, the con man who ran a fund and managed to lose at least $50 billion of the wealth of his clients, which include much of the Jewish world. Yeshiva University lost much of its entire endowment. Jewish charity funds lost millions. The Technion lost at least 6 million dollars there. The Elie Wiesel fund lost. So did Steven Spielberg.

The YNETnews.com web site run by Yediot Ahronot decided to interview a representative of Jewish charity funds in the US about the scandal. They chose a rep from the anti-Israel New Israel Fund.

Naw, the Israeli media are not biased.

Meanwhile, the media all over the world are reporting this as the world's largest Ponzi scheme or pyramid con. It is not. The Israeli bank share scandal of the 1980s was probably larger in inflation-adjusted dollars and certainly much larger as a proportion of the Israeli economy, compared to Madoff's scam relative to the US economy. It was larger than the recent pyramid scheme in Columbia, south America, which paralyzed the country.

It was larger than the pyramid schemes that ravaged Albania, Russia, and other countries.

Israelis are still paying for the 1980s bank share Ponzi con. And not just in cash. That bank share scandal discredited the Likud and reinstated the Labor Party as a credible governing alternative. Labor had been largely discredited after 1974, thanks to the military fiasco in the early stages of the Yom Kippur War. The 1980s bank share boondoggle restored Labor to its "respectability," convinced lots of Israelis that the Likud consists of incompetent boobs, which it generally does.

Indirectly the bank share Ponzi scheme, which operated under the noses of the Likud government, caused Oslo. In 1983 the only people in all of Israel unaware that a giant Ponzi scheme was operating were the Likud Minister of Finance and the Governor of the Bank of Israel.

The Likud bears direct responsibility both for the 1980s bank share Ponzi scheme and for its horrific political side effects. The Oslo dead are in part the collateral damage of the Likud's own gigantic Ponzi scam.

The Bloom Comes Off the Mayor

Mayor Bloomberg has enjoyed the sort of adulatory media coverage that would make even Barack Obama envious. Well, maybe not Obama, but certainly any merely mortal politician. Which makes Fred Siegel's stubborn refusal to join Bloomberg's Hallelujah chorus all the more startling.

Siegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic Innovation and a prolific writer on New York City politics, has long been a discordant voice among a local and national punditocracy all too eager to spread the message that Bloomberg, in the words of former New Yorker editor Tina Brown, is "the city's greatest mayor."

Recently, Brown and five other prominent New Yorkers were asked by New York magazine to name the ten individuals "who reshaped the city." Four of the six had Bloomberg on their list. Only two included Rudy Giuliani, and one of those gave him a decidedly mixed review.

To illustrate the absurdity of the above, just think back to the state of the city in January 1994 when Giuliani took over from David Dinkins and the state of the city (9/11 notwithstanding) in January 2002 when Bloomberg took over from Giuliani. Which mayor faced the greater challenges and which has left more of an impact on the city?

At any rate, getting back to Fred Siegel, he's lately been in a higher state of dudgeon than usual about Bloomberg, mainly, as he wrote in the New York Post, because of the way the mayor "deployed his vast personal and political power to overturn the term limits law ... [and] his unlawful refusal to send out property tax rebate checks that have been due since Oct. 1."Siegel quoted Bloomberg's excuse that "We have no money ... this is not a legal issue, it's a fiscal issue" - a statement, according to Siegel, "that boils down to 'I know better.' "

Don't believe it, said Siegel; "the cupboards are bare because Bloomberg has emptied them for his own political ambitions. While the stock market was heading south, Bloomberg, one eye on a potential presidential run, raised his approval numbers by expanding the city payroll. Since 2004, he has hired at least 40,000 new city employees, while bringing his own mayoral staff to record levels. "

And, continued Siegel, while "Bloomberg touts himself as a CEO who can negotiate the best deal for the city ... part of running the city includes bargaining with people he can neither give orders to, nor buy like the City Council. That's made Bloomberg a singular failure in Albany, where the mayor tried to steamroll his ill-conceived congestion pricing plan through the Assembly.

"The plan, which seemed designed as much to provide Bloomberg with a green issue for his presidential campaign as to decongest Manhattan, met with a skeptical response. Bloomberg's reaction was to blame his defeat on 'gutless' opponents. While arguing over whether to reauthorize Off Track Betting, the mayor clashed with the normally mild-mannered Governor Paterson, whose support is essential for the city; Paterson came away describing the mayor to the Post's Fred Dicker as 'a nasty, untrustworthy, tantrum-prone liar who has little use for average New Yorkers.' "

Siegel went after the mayor in similar fashion last month in The Weekly Standard, writing that "Until a few weeks ago New York had a term-limits law - twice ratified by public referenda - that limited the mayor and the city council to eight years in office. Bloomberg could have held a referendum on overturning them - a referendum he was very likely to win given his 70 percent approval rating. But there were dangers in taking the democratic path. The referendum would have been scheduled for February 2009, and, as Baruch College's Doug Muzzio notes, voters are likely to be hit before then by hikes in their property taxes, water bills, and subway fares.

"Instead, operating on the basis of ambiguities in the city charter, Bloomberg strong-armed the city council into overturning term-limits: threatening to cut off funds to their districts and stop his 'anonymous' donations to the nonprofits they count on to get out the vote if they opposed his plan."

Mincing no words, Siegel mocked the mayor's claims of indispensability: "For the time being Bloomberg, who presided over the great spending spree of the last few years, has been reduced to insisting that only a genius like himself can save Gotham from the fiscal dangers imposed by Wall Street's collapse (and his own maladministration)."

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

The Left and Right of Law Breaking

One of the more amusing pastimes in Israel these days is watching the Far left suddenly get indignant when it comes to law breaking. The Left in Israel has never believed that the obligation to obey the law applies to itself. That is why for decades it has promoted mutiny and insurrection among soldiers, urging them not to serve in the army until Israel adopts national policies that the 3% of the electorate who support Meretz would endorse. The Left cheers on the "heroic" thugs and hooligans who attack Israeli police and soldiers every week next to the security fence. The leftists there try to vandalize the fence so that it will be easier for the suicide bombers to get through to murder Jews. The greatest champions for the Left these days are those people trying to break the "blockade" of the Hamas in Gaza and illegally bring in boats full of supporters and support for the terrorists. Then there were the campaigns by the Left to support terrorists like Tali Fahima and spies like Azmi Bishara, whose espionage also happened to be against the law. Finally there are those on the Left actively promoting international boycotts of Israel, which happen to be illegal not only in Israel but also in the US and in some other places.

So how come the Left is all of a sudden so high and might righteous in denouncing law breaking? Because the law breaking in question involves some "settlers." Haaretz not only denounces the settler perps as lawbreakers, but as terrorists! Really. The same journalistic mouthpiece of the anti-Zionist Left, which described the Mumbai murderers as activists, has rediscovered the "T" word. Take a look here.

The NY Times, by the way, only saw "gunmen" in Mumbai, no terrorists.

All the ruckus has to do with efforts by the Olmert junta to evict Jews from a house they bought and legally own in Hebron. The fundamental operating axiom of the cult of Oslo has always been that peace with the Palestinians can only be based on creating a judenrein Lebensraum for the Palestinians, areas in which no Jew pollutes the place with his presence. The very presence of a live Jew so offends the delicate sensitivities of Palestinians that they will be unwilling to make peace, but will be happy to live in peace if Israel kicks that Jew out. If anyone were to suggest that a black American family be denied the right to live in a neighborhood of white Americans, the Left would be soiling itself with outrage and indignation.

Now the "settlers" are unwilling to accept that quasi-Nazi working axiom. Indeed, they are unhappy that the army, at governmental orders, is trying to force the Jews out of what has been dubbed in the Israeli media the "Hebron House of Controversy." The settlers call it the Peace House. The only real controversy is that Olmert's people are unwilling to acknowledge that Jews legally own the place and so have a right to live there.

Some of the hotter younger Jewish heads in Judea then reacted with non-non-violence, or what the Left likes to call "civil disobedience." Some threw rocks at soldiers trying to evict Jews, others cursed or threw punches.

Heavens to Mergatroyd, scream the leftist media! Such bad behavior!

Now let me first make it clear that I oppose the violence of the Jewish hotheads in Judea, and unreservedly denounce any acts of violence on their parts directed against Israeli soldiers and police. Such behavior discredits the Right almost as effectively as the idiotic conspiracism afflicting parts of the Right, and helps perpetuate the hegemony of the Left. No doubt, less than 1% of settlers lost their cool and got violent, but it allows the media to paint 100% of them as hooligans and criminals.

I have no doubt that much of the violence was in fact counter-response to police use of force. The Left weeps its eyes out over "disproportionate use of force," except when the police break up protests of Rightists. Then the media want weapons of mass destruction used.

One Act of Kindness

Thousands of European Jews found safe harbor in the Dominican Republic during the 30's and 40's. In this week's Jewish Press front-page essay Myrna and Robert Ulfik share how it happened.

"After the Anschluss, Roosevelt realized Europe would soon be awash with refugees. Eleven days later, he invited thirty-three nations to confer on the refugee problem at Évian-les-Bains, France. FDR had carefully circumscribed the goals of the conference to head off opposition: The agenda stipulated that no nation would be expected to admit more refugees than its present laws permitted, making it crystal clear that the haven sought was to be outside the United States. And lest Germany take offense, no mention was made of that country or of Jews.

Sure enough, at Évian the U.S. would do no more than cut existing State Department red tape for German and Austrian refugees. Thus, for the first time, the U.S. would allow the number of such immigrants to reach the legal quota of 25,957. (The U.S. fulfilled its annual quota of German-Austrian immigrants only once in the next six years – in 1939, following the shocked reaction to Kristallnacht, in November 1938.)

The other delegates readily followed suit: France had taken enough refugees; Britain was not a “receiving nation” and Palestine, of course, was off limits; a senior Canadian official said “None is too many.” (A number of high Canadian officials of the day were anti-Semitic, including the prime minister.)

The sole glimmer of hope came when the delegate from the Dominican Republic, Virgilio Molina, rose to declare that his country would take in up to 100,000 Jewish refugees as settlers on the land – a staggering number for a small country of only 1.5 million.

The conference closed after creating a permanent body, the Intergovernmental Committee on Political Refugees (IGC) to study the problem further.

Ironically, the idea of saving European Jews had originated with Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the ruthless dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist.

Trujillo, widely known as el Jefe, exerted absolute power over the populace with unbridled brutality and a secret police force that didn’t shrink from torture and murder to achieve its ends. Though the nation’s populace was poor, he was counted among the world’s richest men, because he and his relatives used the country as a family business.

The dictator was so consummately evil it was difficult to imagine. He had an interest in medicine; so, Mengele-like, he tested his crackpot health remedies on his unfortunate underlings. The previous year, he had drawn worldwide criticism for beheading 20,000 Haitians living as illegal aliens in the Dominican Republic.

Why would a Latin-American mass murderer offer to save the Jews from a European mass murderer? Some thought he wanted the European influx to lighten the racial stock of the country. Others thought he wanted to curry favor with the United States by helping Roosevelt with the refugee problem.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is the most convincing. When Trujillo’s daughter Flor de Oro was attending school in Paris, the other girls snubbed her because she was dark-skinned. A Jewish girl, Lucy Cahn, befriended her and el Jefe never forgot the kindness: when Lucy married, he gifted the couple with a tobacco plantation."

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