AMAZING SPEECH by Glenn Beck

Highlights from Glenn Beck's keynote speech at the Christians United for Israel summit in Washington, D.C.Tuesday July 19th. He boldly states, If the world goes down the road of dehumanizing Jews again, "then count me a Jew and come for me first."

Israel Thanks Canada for Defense at G8 Summit

by Chana Ya'ar - Arutz Sheva

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman made sure to pick up the phone and call his counterpart in Ottawa this weekend to thank him for Canada's stance at the G8 summit last week.

Lieberman told John Baird, who recently came into the post, that Canada is a “true friend of Israel.”

Israel's foreign minister added that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been correct in his reading of the situation to know that the 1967-1949 Armistice lines are incompatible with the demographic realities in the Jewish State – and are indefensible as borders.

Harper blocked the G8 from issuing statements with any mention of the recommendation, stated by U.S. President Barack Obama in his Middle Eastern policy speech a week prior.

Although G8 leaders called for peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the group's final communique issued Friday in Deauville, France, the “1967 lines” were not included.

A day later, the Arab League issued its own communique, stating it would support the Palestinian Authority's refusal to return to any negotiations.

Instead, the Arab League will back a bid by the PA to appeal directly to the United Nations for recognition of a new Arab country called “Palestine” in Gaza, Judea and Samaria with much of Jerusalem as its capital – including many areas where Jews currently live and work.

The “peace process follow up committee” at the Doha meeting in Qatar said it would request membership for the “State of Palestine” at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York in September. Qatar is set to chair that meeting, according to the current rotation.

As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu pointed out in his speech to the U.S. Congress last week, there are more than half a million Israelis, most of whom are Jewish, living in the areas claimed by the PA.

Peace Partners?

As the world is subjected to a hail of propaganda from Arabs regarding the 1948 “disaster” inflicted upon them by the creation of the state of Israel, Arab press watchdog MEMRI has released a video that places the Arab claims in perspective.
In the video, a 92-year-old Arab woman, originally from Hevron, glowingly recalls on Hamas-Gaza TV how the Arabs of Hevron, including her father, without provocation, massacred the peaceful Jewish neighbors they had lived beside for years in 1929 – almost 20 years before the 1948 War of Independence. Needless to say, there was no State of Israel then, no IDF, no "occupation" etc.



In an orgy of sadistic violence on August 24, 1929, 67 of Hevron's Jews were murdered. The Arabs murdered children in front of their parents, severed limbs, raped and burned people alive.

The British High Commissioner in the Land of Israel, Sir John Chancellor, published a statement following the massacre, saying,

I have learned with horror of the atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless and bloodthirsty evil-doers, of savage murders perpetrated upon defenseless members of the Jewish population regardless of age or sex, accompanied as at Hebron, by acts of unspeakable savagery, of the burning of farms and houses in town and country and of the looting and destruction of property.

These crimes have brought upon their authors the execration of all civilized peoples throughout the world.

IDF Spokesman, Capt. Avichai Adraee Interviewed on Hamas Rocket Fire

This interview, conducted during the 2008 Operation Cast Lead with IDF Spokesman Capt. Avichai Adraee on Al Jazeera News, rings just as true today as in 2008.
This is the way Israel needs to handle such situations and accusations. With firm conviction and with truth. And in the words of Caroline Glick - "It's time to stand up for yourself!!"

Wall Of Lies

Kassam Attacks, Air Force Retaliation Explode ‘Ceasefire’ Report

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu.

Three Kassam and Grad missile attacks, followed by Air Force retaliation, exploded another “ceasefire” report near noon Sunday, while Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu again threatened Hamas.

Following the Sunday morning rocket attacks, which did not cause injuries, the Israel Air Force struck terrorist targets in northern Gaza, according to Hamas. The Iron Dome system failed to intercept a Grad missile that was headed for Ashkelon, Army Radio reported. The missile apparently missed its mark and exploded in an open area.

In remarks before the weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday, the Prime Minister repeated warnings to Hamas that Israel will retaliate with “strong force” if the terrorist organization continues to attack Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Media in the Palestinian Authority reported that a ceasefire agreement was reached Saturday night through the mediation of a United Nations mediator, but none of the terrorist groups in Gaza officially announced a truce.

The Bethlehem-based Ma'an news agency reported that U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East Robert Serry “managed to reach a ceasefire agreement late Saturday between Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza.” Besides Hamas’ objection to Israel being allowed to prevent “ticking bomb” terrorist cells from firing rockets, the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization did not agree to the Hamas proposal.

According to a Hamas spokesman, a ceasefire specifically means that Israel cannot target terrorist cells preparing to launch rocket attacks on Israelis.

The “calm in return for calm” formula depends on Hamas stopping all attacks, but the Grad and Kassam missile attacks on Sunday made it clear that any truce is likely to fail or be short-lived, just as all other similar announcements were proven to be false.

Egypt revolution turns more Islamic, more anti-Israel

Sunday, April 10, 2011 | Ryan Jones


For those who thought the Egyptian revolution is done and past, think again. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak may be gone, but the country is currently being ruled by a temporary military regime, which means there are various forces still vying for future control of the Middle East’s largest military power.

And with the world’s attention now diverted elsewhere, the revolution in Cairo is starting to take on a more overtly Islamic and anti-Israel flavor.

Over the weekend, Cairo’s Tahrir Square again filled with angry demonstrators who are still waiting for their full list of demands to be met. Among them was the Muslim Brotherhood, which last week officially announced its intention to take part, as a group, in renewed anti-government protests.

As the demonstration turned increasingly hostile, Egyptian soldiers opened fire, reportedly killing two demonstrators and wounding another 15, according to Cairo hospital officials. The army denied firing live ammunition at the crowd.

Not content with protesting their own new government, the demonstrators also marched on the Israeli embassy in Cairo. Gathered at the gates of the Israeli mission, the angry mob demanded that Egypt cut all ties to the Jewish state and stop supplying Israel with natural gas. They also wanted the Israeli flag flying atop the embassy to be removed.

IRAN PRAISES MURDERERS

Iran and it's Palestinian proxy Hamas praised the savage terrorist attack on Itamar Friday night, while Ha'aretz concentrates on fearing “right-wing extremist” Jews, Peace Now remains silent, and the European Union, as usual, calls for peace talks.

Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency told Iranians that the attackers “managed to kill all the five Zionists who were in the house…. The Palestinian combatant has returned home safely after conducting his mission successfully."

“The operation was a natural response to the crimes of the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people.”

Hamas stated, “According to the international law, Palestinian resistance factions have the full right to resist any kind of occupation on the land of Palestine, as well as the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people in West Bank and Gaza grant the Palestinian resistance factions to use all tools and means of resistance against the Israeli occupation forces and the armed Israeli settlers.”

The de facto Hamas government in Gaza went so far as to suggest that Israelis may have murdered the Fogel family...

In light of the recently released film, 'Iranium', which focuses on the radical views and evil intentions of the current leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is there any wonder that such horrific and barbaric acts as the murder of innocent sleeping civilians are praised by such a regime? This is the world's problem, and not Israels alone.

If you have not already seen this film, you can watch it here:

Our World: Three Jewish children

Our World: Three Jewish children
By CAROLINE B. GLICK
03/14/2011 22:41

People are no longer ashamed to parade negative feelings toward Jews.


Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the Palestinian terrorists pounced on her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay in bed on Friday night in their home in Itamar.

The terrorists stabbed Ruth to death as she came out of the bathroom. With both parents and the newborn dead, they moved on to the other children, going into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi’s sons Yoav (11) and Elad (four) were sleeping. They stabbed them through their hearts and slit their throats.


The murderers apparently missed another bedroom where the Fogels’ other sons, eight-year-old Ro’i and two-year-old Yishai were asleep because they left them alive. The boys were found by their big sister, 12-year-old Tamar, when she returned home from a friend’s house two hours after her family was massacred.

Tamar found Yishai standing over his parents’ bodies screaming for them to wake up.

In his eulogy at the family’s funeral on Sunday, former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau told Tamar that her job from now on is to be her surviving brothers’ mommy.

In a rare move, the Prime Minister’s Office released photos of the Fogel family’s blood-drenched corpses.

They are shown as they were found by security forces.

There was Hadas, dead on her parents’ bed, next to her dead father Udi.

There was Elad, lying on a small throw rug wearing socks. His little hands were clenched into fists. What was a four-year-old to do against two grown men with knives? He clenched his fists. So did his big brother.

Maybe the Prime Minister’s Office thought the pictures would shock the world. Maybe Binyamin Netanyahu thought the massacre of three little children would move someone to rethink their hatred of Israel.

That was the theme of his address to the nation Saturday night.

Netanyahu directed most of his words to the hostile world. He spoke to the leaders who rush to condemn Israel at the UN Security Council every time we assert our right to this land by permitting Jews to build homes. He demanded that they condemn the murder of Jewish children with the same enthusiasm and speed.

He shouldn’t have bothered.

The government released the photos on Saturday night. Within hours, the social activism website My Israel posted a short video of the photographs on YouTube along with the names and ages of the victims.

Within two hours YouTube removed the video.

What was Netanyahu thinking? Didn’t he get the memo that photos of murdered Jewish children are unacceptable? If they’re published, someone might start thinking about the nature of Palestinian society.

Someone might consider the fact that in the Palestinian Authority, anti-Jewish propaganda is so ubiquitous and so murderous that killing the Fogel babies was an act of heroism. The baby killers knew that by murdering Udi, Ruth, Hadas, Yoav and Elad they would enter the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. They can expect to have a sports stadium or school in Ramallah or Hebron built for them by the Palestinian Authority and underwritten by American or European taxpayers.

And indeed, the murder of the Fogel children and their parents was greeted with jubilation in Gaza.

Carnivals were held in the streets as Hamas members handed out sweets.

Obviously YouTube managers are not interested in being held responsible for someone noticing that genocidal Jew hatred defines Palestinian society – and the Arab world as a whole. But they really have no reason to be concerned. Even if they had allowed the video to be posted for more than an hour, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

The enlightened peoples of Europe, and growing numbers of Americans, have no interest in hearing or seeing anything that depicts Jews as good people, or even just as regular people. It is not that the cultured, intellectual A-listers in Europe and America share the Palestinians’ genocidal hatred of the Jewish people.

The powerful newspaper editors, television commentators, playwrights, fashion designers, filmmakers and professors don’t spend time thinking about how to prepare the next slaughter. They don’t teach their children from the time they are Hadas and Elad Fogel’s ages that they should strive to become mass murderers. They would never dream of doing these things. They know there is a division of labor in contemporary anti-Semitism.

The job of the intellectual luminaries in Western high society today is to hate Jews the old-fashioned way, the way their greatgrandparents hated Jews back in the days of the early 20th century before that villain Adolf Hitler gave Jewhating a bad name.

Much has been made of the confluence of anti-Semitic bile pouring out of the chattering classes. From Mel Gibson to Julian Assange to Charlie Sheen to John Galliano, it seems like a day doesn’t go by without some new celebrity exposing himself as a Jew hater.

It isn’t that the beautiful people and their followers suddenly decided that Jews are not their cup of tea (or rail of cocaine). It’s just that we have reached the point where people no longer feel embarrassed to parade negative feelings towards Jews.

A DECADE ago, the revelation that French ambassador to Britain Daniel Bernard referred to Israel as “that shi**y little country,” was shocking. Now it is standard fare. Everyone who is anyone will compare Israel to Nazi Germany without even realizing this is nothing but Holocaust denial.

The post-Holocaust dam reining in anti-Semitism burst in 2002. As Jewish children and parents like the Fogels were being murdered in their beds, on the streets, in discotheques, cafés and supermarkets throughout Israel, fashionable anti-Semites rejoiced at the opportunity to hate Jews in public again.

The collective Jew, Israel was accused of everything from genocide to infanticide to just plain nastiness.

Israel’s leaders were caricatured as Fagin, Shylock, Pontius Pilate and Hitler on the front pages of newspapers throughout Europe. IDF soldiers were portrayed as Nazis, and Israeli families were dehumanized.

No longer civilians with an inherent right to live, in universities throughout the US and Europe, Israeli innocents were castigated as “extremist-Zionists” or “settlers” who basically deserved to be killed.

Professors whose “academic” achievements involved publishing sanitized postmodern versions of anti-Jewish Palestinian propaganda were granted tenure and rewarded with lucrative book contracts.

Today, when properly modulated, Jew hatred is a career maker. Take playwright Caryl Churchill’s 1,300- word anti-Semitic monologue Seven Jewish Children.

The script accuses the entire population of Israel of mass murders which were never committed.

For her efforts, Churchill became an international celebrity. The Royal Court Theater produced her anti- Jewish agitprop. The Guardian featured it on its home page. When Jewish groups demanded that The Guardian remove the blood libel from its website, the paper refused. Instead, it left the anti-Semitic propaganda on its homepage, but in a gesture of openmindedness, hosted a debate about whether or not Seven Jewish Children is anti-Semitic.

From London, Seven Jewish Children went on tour in Europe and the US. In a bid to show how tolerant of dissent they are, Jewish communities in America hosted showings of the play, which portrays Jewish parents as monsters who train their children to become mass murderers.

Seven Jewish Children’s success was repeated by the Turkish anti-Semitic action film Valley of the Wolves- Palestine, which premiered on January 28 – International Holocaust Memorial Day. The hero of that film is a Turkish James Bond character who comes to Israel to avenge his brothers, who were killed by IDF forces on the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara last May.

No doubt owing to the success of Seven Jewish Children and Valley of the Wolves-Palestine and other such initiatives, anti-Semitic art and entertainment is a growth sector in Europe.

Last month Britain struck again. Channel 4 produced a new piece of anti-Semitic bile – a four-part prime-time miniseries called The Promise. It presents itself as an historical drama about Israel and the Palestinians, but its relationship with actual history begins and ends with the wardrobes. In what has become the meme of all European and international left-liberal salons, the only good Jews in the mini-series are the ones who died in the Holocaust. From the show’s perspective, every Jew who took up arms to liberate Israel from the British and defend it from the Arabs is a Nazi.

WHAT ALL this shows is that Netanyahu was wasting his time calling on world leaders to condemn the murder of the Fogel family. What does a condemnation mean? France and Britain condemned the massacre, along with the US. Does that exculpate the French and British for their embrace of anti-Semitism? Does it make them friends of the Jewish state? And say a British playwright sees the YouTubecensored photographs. No self-respecting British playwright will write a play called Three Jewish Children telling the story of how Palestinian parents do in fact teach their children to become mass murderers of Jews. And if a playwright were to write such a play, The Royal Court Theater wouldn’t produce it. The Guardian wouldn’t post it on its website. Liberal Jewish community centers in America wouldn’t show it, nor would university student organizations in Europe or America.

No, if someone wanted to use the photographs of Yoav’s and Elad’s mangled corpses and clenched fists as inspiration to write a play or feature film about the fact that the Palestinians have no national identity outside their quest to annihilate the Jewish state, he would find no mass market.

The headlines describing the attack make all this clear.

From the BBC to CNN the Fogels were not described as Israelis. They were a “settler family.” Their murderers were “alleged terrorists.”

As far as the opinion makers of Europe and much of America are concerned, the Yoavs and Hadases and Elads of Israel have no right to live if they live in “a settlement.”

So too, they believe that Palestinians have a right to murder Israelis who serve in the IDF and who believe that Jews should be able to live freely wherever we want because this land belongs to us.

Until these genteel Jew haters learn to think otherwise, Israel should neither seek nor care if they condemn this or any other act of Palestinian genocide. We shouldn’t care about them at all.

"Jew Hatred Week"

By Howard Rotberg

My father, now 90 years old, living in a retirement home, is a survivor of Auschwitz, where his parents and then 8 year old sister were exterminated in the gas chambers.

Dad has told me of growing up in Lodz Poland, a textile city of some 600,000 population pre-War, of whom some 180,000 were Jewish, mostly working class. Most were rounded up into the notorious Lodz ghetto from which they were shipped, squeezed into cattle cars, to Auschwitz or other concentration/death camps.

The worst time of the year for Jews in Lodz was Easter week. The then anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priests would sermonize about the vile People who killed, even tortured, the Lord, Jesus Christ, their Saviour. That, on top of the long standing anti-Semitism of the Eastern European and Russian masses, resulted in increased anti-Semitic incidents, including violence, for the week around Easter. Allegations ranged from the Jews using the blood of Christian children to bake the ceremonial matzah crackers for the spring Passover holiday to allegations that it was the Jews rather than the Romans who crucified Jesus.

Fortunately, the Roman Catholic Church has made it perfectly clear now that it does not hold the Jews in any way, historically or theologically at fault in any way. However Hollywood, by embracing the work of anti-Semite Mel Gibson, tolerates the movie, The Passion, which I have shown in my book, TOLERism, is a very anti-Semitic movie.

My father loves Canada. Although Canada refused to take Jewish refugees during the War, after the War, he was accepted here, married my mother who lived in a small Ontario city, built a successful business, and learned how welcoming and fundamentally decent were the Christian businessman and neighbours who he encountered in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

Neither he nor I ever expected that within his lifetime, in Canada, there would arise an officially sanctioned Jew-Hatred Week. Alas, it is true, and it has been so successful, this year it has even been extended to two weeks. It goes by the name of Israel Apartheid Week, but it is not at all a serious and balanced conference discussing intelligently different points of view.

Like the children of so many Jewish immigrants, I was strongly encouraged to avail myself of educational opportunities that were not available to my parents. I became completely focused on studying the history of ideologies and values, so that I could better understand how Germany, with all its history of High Culture, and elements of democracy, could turn itself into an industrial-type killing machine of Jewish civilians, and how it was that the other democracies showed less than a 100% commitment to saving the lives of an eventual 6 million lives lost in a genocide, which was done under cover of war, but was not a result of war.

Aside from playing some intramural hockey, I spent almost all my time in the library learning to understand the role of ideology and cultural values in debasing human dignity – to allow for the unimpeded genocide by educated and supposedly cultured people.

I stood first in the History Department in my third year, but decided against being an academic. For Jews who read the Bible, the Torah, we are told over and over again that the most important value of all is Justice, both individual justice and human rights, as well as social justice. It is no accident that my People are over-represented in Law, Medicine, Social Work, academia and all elements of social justice organizations and charities. So, naturally, I followed my study of History with a degree in Law, both from the University of Toronto, because everyone told me that U of T was the best school in Canada.

Twenty years of practicing law was followed by eight years of developing affordable rental housing for low income working people in converted heritage buildings. Something was still missing in my life. I could not ignore the very disturbing trends in the traditional Arab war against the homeland of the Jewish people, Israel, a tiny slip of land dwarfed by Arab countries with 650 times the land mass and 50 times the population. And so, I wrote a 2003 novel called The Second Catastrophe where the lead character was a professor grappling with the suicide bombings against Jews in Israel, Argentina and elsewhere and the delegitimization of Israel by “NGO’s” with shadowy financing and governance – culminating in the Durban Conference where hatred of Israel enabled the PR coup of having the world take seriously the rant that the Jews are now the new Nazis and the Palestinians are the new Jews.

My protagonist was obsessed that a new Holocaust was underway, and also obsessed that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons to lead the attack on the Jewish state, which soon will have, coincidentally, a Jewish population of 6 million. There have been ample promises to wipe Israel off the map by Iran, its proxy terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose star is rising as secular authoritarian governments fall in the Middle east. The Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist and Islamist organization, has managed to finance Muslim student organizations and mosques across North America, with little concern on the part of mainstream media and politicians and universities.

I continued to write books and articles and soon found that many great writers in the West are now shunned by publishers who do not wish to publish “politically incorrect” material or material which may result in those publishers being bombed or otherwise attacked by the aggressive Islamist lawfare and PR machine. So, I founded a publishing house, Mantua Books, which now publishes such great writers as Jamie Glazov, David Solway and Pamela Peled.

What I recognized when I wrote my first novel is that the threat of a renewed genocide against my people does not come from a bunch of skinhead neo-Nazis who never have attained any kind of critical mass or influence. Instead, it comes from radical Islam which has now a massive influence in academia, mainstream media, the United Nations and its pathetic organizations such as its Human Rights Council (formerly chaired by Gaddafi’s Libya and other Muslim countries. These Muslim counties have expelled some 800,000 Jews from their ancestral homes in Muslim countries and are now in the process of terrorizing and expelling their Christian populations.)

But even mainstream Jewish organizations were so much the prisoner of their liberal relativistic wishful thinking, that they continued to advocate putting resources into fighting neo-Nazis, and would not raise any red flags about the immigration to our countries of people who had been brainwashed, and still believed in, the most vile anti-Semitic nonsense. Funding of university chairs and student groups and NGOs by seriously anti-Semitic organizations or countries was simply ignored even by Jewish organizations. As I have written in my book, TOLERism, Jews started adopting the irreligious western liberal value of “tolerance” as the most important value, instead of “justice”. Because of that ideological confusion, it was considered “intolerant” to even inquire whether new immigrants from Muslim countries were trying to get away from the anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-liberal and pro-Sharia Muslim countries (in which case they should be welcomed) or whether they were immigrating to help spread Jihad and Sharia Law in connection with the goal of a global Caliphate, in which case our immigration officials should say “no thanks”.

Imagine how it feels to watch the country you love import people who have been trained to hate you.

With what is perceived by too many confused people as a relentless march of Islam to primacy in much of the world, there is a disturbing trend for our intellectual elites to not just appease Islamist hatred and terrorism, but to in fact embrace it. Radical feminist organizations have turned their backs on such intellectual and moral leaders as the great Phyllis Chesler in their rush to support countries that oppress women as wives, and daughters, who practice genital mutilation, honour killings and a culture of rape. Gays who are more about hatred than gay rights are running out of targets in the West that is fast accepting their equal rights, and so they make common cause with Islamists who torture gays as they promote violence against the one country in the Middle East that respects and honours gays (where they have been allowed to serve openly as gays when most Western armies forbade it, or like America, had a “don’t ask, don’t tell policy.”

Newspapers with complete freedom of the press advocated on behalf of movements that will not tolerate such freedom and university professors in the thousands obsess against real or imagined slights by Israel, as it fights against the eternal aggression of much of the world. These professors have no sympathies with Israel’s free media, parliament, and universities as they debate where or in fact whether some freedoms must be limited in times of security threats. (The United States, even under Obama, differentiates between the rights of enemy combatants and citizens, and Canada, in the face of minor violence by Quebec Separatists, suspended freedoms in its War Measure Act, but the Western academics focus only on Israel, a land so small that from higher elevations you can see right across the width of the country.)

Alas, all of these confused people advocate unrestricted tolerance for everyone except the state that must continuously fight for its very existence and for whom Islamists and their leftist sycophants still challenge its very right to exist.

It has been left to those who have experienced the totalitarianism of the left in Communist Russia like Natan Scharansky (or those whose parents were leading Soviet dissidents, like Jamie Glazov) to explain the facts of life to those who have only known freedom and who are willing to sacrifice freedom to twisted notions of tolerance. I have written that this tolerance may in fact be based on a type of Cultural Stockholm Syndrome, or a feeling that liberals cannot win this fight (partly because of the significant amount of self-hatred in our elites) and that we have fallen in love with our tormenters.

Israelis have found that it is terrible to be facing endless existential concerns, where the international community through the pathetic United Nations spends most of its time passing resolutions against just one country, while ignoring active genocides by Islamists (Darfur, Kurdistan, against Coptic Christians in Egypt and Orthodox Christians in Iraq and even the genocides against Christians in Indonesia – another Muslim country bizarrely praised by Obama recently for being tolerant and respecting diversity).

Israel’s politics can be brutal, and I have hypothesized that the reason is that when you are facing eternal threats, every policy has existential ramifications, leading the parties to allege that its opponents are not just wrong, but are endangering the existence of the country and the very lives of its citizens. Might the never before seen levels of acrimony between the Left and the Right in the United States be attributed to this same worry – that the existence of the U.S. as the historical beacon of freedom and liberal justice in the world is giving way to a mushy Obamaistic worship of “tolerance” and cultural relativism, and the notion that radical Islam may ultimately become a stronger force in the future of the world?

Scharansky has patiently and completely answered those who seek to differentiate their “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Israelism” from “anti-Semitism”. He has famously written that the criticisms of the Jewish homeland transition from political or cultural criticism to outright anti-Semitism by the measure of his “3D Test”. Such criticisms, says Scharansky, pass into anti-Semitism when they are based on one of the following D’s:

1. The remarks demonize Israel, by saying, for example, that the Israelis are “Nazis” or “Nazi-like” in response to the constant terrorism and states of war against it.

2. The remarks delegitimize Israel by saying, like most Muslim majority countries do, that it has “no right to exist” or should be “wiped off the earth”.

3. The remarks apply a double standard to Israel that is applied to no other country.

And so we live in a world that praises Islamist backed revolutions in the Middle East where democracy is confused by our media with liberal democracy (with which radical Islam is incompatible and with which any Islamic government has yet to comply). Our media fails to report on anti-Semitic chants and posters on the streets of Cairo, and many failed to mention that when non-Jewish CBS reporter Lara Logan was gang raped by supposedly pro-freedom demonstrators, they taunted her with the words, “Jew, Jew” as they attacked her, to show their utter contempt.

This world advocates helping revolutionaries in Egypt or Libya, regardless of their positions on liberal and human rights, women’s rights, Christian or Jewish rights, or rights for gays. But this world does not want to “meddle” when anti-Islamist revolutions arise in Iran. (Such was Obama’s excuse for not helping Iran’s green movement in its attempt to cast off the Islamofascist government of the mullahs fronted by the nasty Ahmadinejad.)

Now, back to Jew-Hatred Week. A coalition of Islamist student groups and radical Leftists a few years ago came up with the brilliant idea of creating an Israel Apartheid Week. No matter that Apartheid is a completely inappropriate term when applied to Israeli matters. Gender apartheid, religious apartheid, sexual orientation apartheid are of course attributes of Arab or Islamist governments, not Israel. We all know that often the bigger the lie, the more easily it is believed.

Israel had to put up a big wall separating some Arab towns from the rest of Israel, but that of course was the result of two years of suicide bombing by Arab young people walking across where there was no wall, killing women and children, and remembered by their proud parents, and promised “72 Virgins in Heaven”. So that wall is not symptomatic of Apartheid, just a security barrier which has vastly decreased the number of suicide bombings. Imagine being hated for protecting your citizens with a wall that you never wanted to build, but which was forced upon you.

Then, there is the allegation that Israel is guilty of Apartheid because Jews can automatically move to Israel and acquire citizenship but the millions of Arabs who want to come and turn Israel into more Muslim territory cannot. Never mind that there are 22 Arab countries and never mind that the Jews, probably the most persecuted people in history, and who lived historically in Israel, need to have a safe haven, thanks to the very types of intellectuals, religious figures and professors who are leading the charge against Jewish rights today.

But thanks to Noam Chomsky and a handful of self-hating Jews like the failed academic Norman Finkelstein, words today are unashamedly bastardized to stand for the opposite of what they should mean. Orwell’s predictions have come true.

Radical leftists like the hateful Canadian mother-daughter team of Bonnie and Naomi Klein obsess about Israel. Naomi (whose Jewish husband now reports for the very illiberal Al-Jazeera) says in fact Israel “profits” from terrorism because it has had to develop expertise in anti-terrorism measures and its sells such expertise and consulting around the world). Bonnie was recently quoted in the Vancouver Sun saying that the leftist feminist organization Code Pink is a new and delightful approach that is both “powerful and hilarious.” An organization which in any other era would be indicted for treason by supporting America’s enemies in the War on Terror (sic) is termed by Mother Klein to be delightful and hilarious.

While Code Pink escapes the consequences of its fundamentally treasonous character, a Jewish American named Jonathan Pollard who passed military secrets to Israel, which American presidents keep referring to as an American ally, has been rotting away in jail with a life sentence for a crime whose average jail term was theretofore 2.5 years.

Palestinians and their leftist supporters continue to make allegations that are untrue and that have been well studied and proven to be untrue: for example, the allegations that Arabs cannot buy land in Israel, that there was a massacre of Palestinian civilians in Jenin, and the various staged videos that are fictional attempts to show Israel attacking civilians, when Israel goes further than any other country when it comes to avoiding civilian casualties, even to the point of jeopardizing the lives of their own soldiers.

Last year, I realized that the very first Israel Apartheid Week (it has now spread to 55 campuses) took place at my alma mater, the University of Toronto. I checked on the internet, and I saw that David Naylor, the University of Toronto President, was defending his university’s hosting of this event, by citing freedom of expression and respect for diversity. This was not only offensive to me, but I thought this was puerile (even accounting for the fact that Naylor’s background is in science and medicine rather than the social sciences or the humanities.)

I wrote a protest letter that the issue was academic standards, not freedom of expression. I argued that the university would hardly agree to host a conference claiming that all professors are fascists and the reason for that would not be restricting freedom of expression but restricting the university’s facilities to those whose agenda met certain standards of intellectual honesty, fairness and respect. Alas, I could have been talking to the wall. It was not a dialogue he wished to enter.

And so, I returned both of my degrees to the University, stating that I was ashamed to have them on my wall, indicating my affiliation with the first university in the world to host Israel Apartheid Week.

This year’s Israel Apartheid Week has just started. It has even spread to a small satellite campus of Waterloo’s Wilfrid Laurier University situated in Brantford Ontario, where I do some of my affordable housing and other development. Brantford is also home to one Mahmoud Issa Mohammad, who in the 1970s was part of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine squad that hijacked an El Al Israel airlines plane in Athens and killed a passenger. He was jailed temporarily in Greece, until some of his colleagues in turn hijacked a Greek Olympic Airways jet and threatened to blow it up, unless he and the others were released, which of course Greece did.

He illegally entered Canada, and one of my law school classmates acts as his lawyer and has successfully tied up our Government in court for 17 years delaying his extradition from Canada.

It is strange to label Israel “Apartheid” when:

1. Omar Barghouti, a leading advocate of boycotting Israel and a resident of Ramallah is also a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University.

2. Haifa University is 25% Arab and the Hebrew University is 10% Arab, and yes, they attend the same classes and use the same washrooms.

3. Arabs vote and have representation in the Israeli parliament and there are Arab Israeli diplomats and an Arab member of the Israeli Supreme Court.

4. An Israeli Arab is captain of the HaPoel Tel Aviv soccer team.

5. Tens of thousands of Black Jews from Ethiopia and Brown Jews from India have all been welcomed into Israel.

6. An Arab Israeli young woman singer represented Israel at the 2009 Eurovision song contest.

7. Rona Raslan, an Arab, is the former “Miss Israel”.

8. Druze Arabs (who support the state of Israel) have served as ambassadors, army officers, even as Deputy Prime Minister.

9. Thousands of non-Jewish black African refugees make a long trek through Egypt on foot and try to immigrate to the Jewish state because they would rather live there than in Africa.

10. There are discriminatory laws against Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan and few Israeli Arabs would want to trade Israeli citizenship for Jordanian or Egyptian.

11. The Palestinian Authority has said that any Arabs who sell land to Jews should be put to death, (and have in fact put some to death), but when a far-right wing Israeli Rabbi told his followers not to sell land to Arabs, there was a national outcry and wave of condemnation against him.

12. Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority has said that no Israeli Jew should be allowed to live in a future Palestinian State on the West Bank, but he will not sign a peace treaty unless Israel accepts about a million Palestinians.

As I walk through Brantford and Toronto this week, I definitely feel the cold chill of Israel Apartheid Week, which for both my father and I, is really Jew-Hatred Week. Are we in Canada and the U.S. far off from the situation in France and some other European countries where it is unsafe for identifiable Jews to walk near Muslim neighbourhoods?

And so the circle extends from 1930s Lodz Poland to 2011 University of Toronto and 54 other universities around the world. To those who hate me, my 90 year old father, my one year old grand-daughter and all the rest of my People, we see right through your stupid Israel Apartheid Week; we know it is another Jew-Hatred Week. You are not at all original; you are just the latest in a long line of immoral people who seek to escape their own responsibility to improve the world by scapegoating the world’s most consistent champions of Justice and making us the most consistent objects of hatred.

Op-Ed: Pharaoh is Dead, Long Live Pharaoh!

by Prof. Phyllis Chesler

The historical ground trembles beneath our feet.

Tunisia has risen (or fallen); and now, Egypt, the historically stabilizing force in the Arab world is on fire, in chaos. Stealthily, almost invisibly, the Muslim Brotherhood is gathering its power in Suez, Alexandria, and Cairo. Wealthy Egyptians have already chartered private planes and flown to safety. President Mubarak has reportedly sent his wife and heir out to London many days ago. Some wealthy Egyptians refuse to leave. They are personally guarding their gated Cairo homes from looters. I heard such a man’s voice on television last night. It was hoarse with anguish and anger, trembling with fatigue. “This land belongs to the Egyptian people not to Mubarak. This home belongs to me, I own it, I will not flee. I will guard it with my life.” [More...]

As I write, the Egyptian police are still fighting the protesters. Armed groups have freed prisoners and jailed Muslim militants. Looting is widespread.

Will Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran’s Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Gaza’s Hamas, soon proclaim an Arab Caliphate and further launch World War Four, this time with their hands on the levers of power in five or six states? Will Mubarak actually manage to hold onto power?

At this precise and critical moment, our Presidential Speechifier has still not risen to the task. He is walking a “careful line,” and waiting to see what develops. Well, what else can he really do? Send in the troops? Nah—he campaigned on his opposition to the troops we already have in Iraq and Afghanistan—and, bogged down though we might be, even Obama was forced to understand that America’s other options might be even worse.

Shamefully, Obama did not even stand rhetorically with the demonstrating and bloodied democrats on the streets of Tehran and he is now only tepidly standing with their counterparts on the streets of Cairo. Yes, America has always supported the Arab “Strong Horse,” the brutal dictator whose reign has been justified as a means of ensuring regional stability. Karzai is our man on the ground, as is Mubarak. Secretary of State Clinton has called for “an orderly transition.” She opposes “violence.” The Pentagon has called for “restraint.”

I have no idea what they mean. Do you?

Tyrannical as Mubarak has been, if he goes, the Muslim Brotherhood and possibly Al-Qaeda will zoom to power. And, believe it or not, they will be worse, ever so much worse, both to their own people and to the West.

The barefoot Egyptian protesters, the suffering and impoverished people, are simply not organized ideologically, politically, economically, or militarily. They will have no way of holding their own against such dark and purposeful forces. They have not read Saul Alinsky’s guidebook and have no charismatic and well-connected leader. One wonders whether the Egyptians finally rose up because they saw Tunisians doing so—and successfully—on the internet, on Al-Jazeera.

Is this an era of cellphone revolutions? Will all that bright technology only end up ushering in a new Dark Age?

I dare not mention Israel, or the West, whose fates are intimately entwined with this Cairo uprising. I dare not spell out the possible implications for Israel, the only democracy in the region, of an Islamist take over, not only in Iran and Gaza, but in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. If Islamists win the day, what will happen to Israel’s “cold” peace with Egypt, and to Egypt’s American-financed military? Will Iran neatly step in? [Next page...]

Will Saudi Arabia—the funder of Islamism, the fount of religious and gender apartheid—actually turn to Israel and America as allies--to do the heavy lifting for them against Iran?

At this precise and critical moment, the New York Times Magazine has published a very long cover story which both exonerates and congratulates itself on how it handled the Wikileaks revelations. Executive Editor Bill Keller smoothly comes off as his own hero—sage, prudent, responsible, objective, as he depicts Julian Assange as the weirdo, geeky villain—manipulative, bullying, irresponsible, dangerous, certainly no journalist.

The Times portrays itself as the soul of responsible journalism: objective, unbiased, (is he kidding?) virtuous—Hell, Keller’s crafted persona strikes one as God-like. He wants us to know that, unlike Assange, the Paper of Record carefully redacted names and identities so that the blood of pro-American Afghans or Iraqis will certainly not be on the Gray Lady’s hands; Keller also tells us that they checked with the White House (!) before publishing and that yes, they took some suggestions to heart.

They are the Good Guys.

The scary thing is that if I hadn’t personally, intellectually, seen incredibly high-handed, wildly biased, and highly distorted coverage in their pages, I would believe every word Keller writes. Most of his loyal readers will do just that. Maybe he’ll ever get a Pulitzer Prize for how nobly he handled the Assange material.

One wonders why he feels the need to distance himself from Assange at this point. What else does he know that he’s not telling us?

No need to worry: Assange will Tell All in his own book.

http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/01/30/pharoah-is-dead-long-live-pharoah/
(IsraelNationalNews.com)

Speaker Melanie Phillips on Israeli TV

The World Turned Upside Down

The challenge of public diplomacy vis-a-vis the delegitimisation of Israel
By Melanie Phillips

As we all know by now, Israel has lost the battle for public opinion in the west. Even the Israel government is now acknowledging this fact. Israel and its defenders have been outclassed and outmanoeuvred in a war of the mind being waged on a battleground it never even acknowledged it was on.

Calls for more and better hasbara, however, are meaningless if the message or narrative promoted by Israel and its defenders misses the point of the attack being waged upon it. And it does miss that point, by a mile.

You cannot resist or overcome a threat unless you first understand its nature.

The first thing to say is that this phenomenon is characteristic not just of the media animosity or economic or academic boycotts. It goes across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes.

In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel.

The scale of this phenomenon is nothing short of a multi-layered civilisational crisis.

The west is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and reason. A society’s thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed and assumes to be true.

In routine, everyday discourse history is turned on its head; logic is suspended; and an entirely false narrative of the conflict is now widely accepted as unchallengeable fact, from which fundamental error has been spun a global web of potentially catastrophic false conclusions.

This has led to a kind of dialogue of the demented in which rational discussion is simply not possible because there is no shared understanding of the meaning of language. So victim and victimiser, truth and lies, justice and injustice turn into their precise opposite.

This madness is being promulgated through a global alliance between state and non-state actors – diplomats and journalists, politicians and NGOs and websites. Many of these are waging war not just against Israel but against the west.

There are two preconditions for an effective fightback. First is to form effective structures of resistance. Those structures, however, depend in turn on a correct understanding of the nature and scale of what we are up against.

So far, the structures are not in place, and more important still, what Israel is up against is grossly — and fatally — underestimated and misunderstood.

The problem is that we are dealing with a pathology — to which we nevertheless respond as if it were rational behaviour.

What’s happened is a pattern of thinking in the west which turns reality upside down. Remarkably, this in turn echoes a very similar inversion of reality within the Islamic world, where such inversion has a theological base.

Because Islam is considered perfect, its adherents can never do wrong. All their aggression is therefore represented as self-defence, while western/Israeli self-defence is said to be aggression.

So in this Orwellian universe the enslavement of Muslim women is said to represent their liberation; democracy is a means of enslavement from which the west must be freed; and the murder of Israelis is the purest form of justice.

Furthermore, this is overlaid by the phenomenon of ‘psychological projection’ in which the Islamic world not only denies its own misdeeds but ascribes them instead to its victims.

So while Muslims deny the Holocaust, they claim that Israel is carrying out a holocaust in Gaza. Antisemitism is central to Jewish experience in Europe; Muslims claim that ‘Islamophobia’ is rife throughout Europe.

Israel gives all Jews the ‘right of return’ to Israel on account of the unique reality of global Jewish persecution; the Muslims claim a ‘right of return’ – not to their own putative state of Palestine, but to Israel. They even claim that the Palestinians are the world’s ‘new Jews’.

These and many other examples are used within the Islamic world to negate Jewish experience and appropriate it for itself to obtain what Muslims want in terms of status, power and conquest.

What is remarkable is that instead of treating this as a pathological deformity of thinking, the western progressive intelligentsia has largely embraced it as rational and true. And to a large extent this is because that same western intelligentsia has itself supplanted rationality by ideology – or the dogma of a particular idea.

Objectivity, evidence and truth have been ditched for ideologies such as moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, transnationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism.

Across a wide range of such issues, it’s no longer possible to have a rational discussion with the progressive intelligentsia, as on each issue there’s only one story for them which brooks no dissent.

This is because, rather than arriving at a conclusion from the evidence, ideology inescapably wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea. So ideology of any kind is fundamentally anti-reason and truth. And if there’s no truth, there can be no lies either; truth and lies become merely ‘alternative narratives’.

Moral and cultural relativism – the belief that subjective experience trumps moral authority and any notion of objectivity or truth – has turned right and wrong on their heads.

Because of the dominant belief in multiculturalism, victim culture and minority rights, self-designated victim groups — those without power — can never do wrong while majority groups can never do right. And Jews are not considered a minority because – in the hateful discourse of today – Jews are held to be all-powerful as they ‘control’ the media, Wall Street and America.

So the Muslim world cannot be held responsible for blowing people up as they are the third world victims of the west; so any atrocities they commit must be the fault of their victims; and so the US had it coming to it on 9/11. And in similar fashion, Israel can never be the victim of the Arab world; the murder of Israelis by the Arab world must be Israel’s own fault.

So the way has been opened for mass credulity towards propaganda and fabrication. The custodians of reason have thus turned into destroyers of reason – centred in the crucible of reason, the university.

All these different ideologies are utopian; in their different ways, they all posit the creation of the perfect society. That is why they are considered ‘progressive’, and people on the progressive wing of politics sign up to them. That helps explain the distressing fact that so many Jews on the left also sign up to Israel-hatred, since they too sign up to such utopian ideologies.

But when utopias fail, as they always do, their adherents invariably select scapegoats on whom they turn to express their rage over the thwarting of the establishment of that perfect society. And since utopia is all about realising the perfect society, these scapegoats become enemies of humanity.

For Greens, such enemies of humanity are capitalists; for anti imperialists, America; for militant atheists, religious believers. Anti-Zionists turn on Israel for thwarting the end to the ‘Jewish question’: the redemption of western guilt for the persecution of the Jews — a guilt which can never be redeemed as long as the wretched Jews continue to make themselves the targets of attack.

In short, therefore, the west cannot defend itself against the Islamic jihad because it can’t itself even think straight any more.
But this lethal muddle in the minds of the intelligentsia must be viewed in turn in the context of a global diplomatic process which itself embodies upside-down thinking, which fans the flames of bigotry and defeatism – and in which Israel itself has been tragically, and suicidally, complicit.

It cannot be stressed enough that the reason why those promoting genocidal bigotry are winning is that the western world has not sought to defeat them but instead has appeased them from the very start.

In Palestine under the British Mandate, when the Arabs used terrorist violence to frustrate the will of the League of Nations in restoring the Jewish home, Britain rewarded them by offering them part of the Jews’ legal and moral entitlement. When the Arabs started hijacking planes, the west’s response was to invite them to the UN to plead their cause.

And despite the Arabs’ repeated refused to accept the two state solution, offered in the 1930s, in 2000 and under Ehud Olmert and their current refusal to negotiate at all, America punishes Israel for not making enough concessions to them — while giving a free pass to those who still refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist.

It is astonishing that the west expects Israel to make any concessions to such attackers at all. After all, forcing a country which has endured more than six decades of existential siege to give any ground to its attackers amounts to forcing such a victim to surrender. This is expected by the civilised world of no other country.

Yet we are repeatedly told even by certain supporters of Israel that the Palestinians have a right to a state. Why? In any other conflict, such aggression forfeits any rights at all.

I am not saying that Israel should retain all the disputed territories; it may well be in its own interests to give some of them up. But the point is that Israel has made all the concessions over the years while the Arabs have made none – yet it is Israel, not the Arabs, that is under pressure from the west.

This is diplomacy as scripted by Franz Kafka.

The single greatest reason for the endless continuation of the Middle East impasse is that Britain, Europe and America have continuously rewarded the aggressor and either attacked the victim or left it twisting in the wind.

That’s what needs to be said by Israel and its defenders. But Israel and its defenders themselves have been crippled or cowed by the false analysis of the enemy’s narrative.

Even many of Israel’s friends spout the demonstrably absurd proposition that a Palestine state would solve the problem, that the impediment to a Palestine state is the ‘settlers’, but that Israel is not taking action to remove the ‘settlers’ — and so therefore they too inescapably agree that Israel is the problem.

Israel and its defenders have been fighting on the wrong battleground: the one that has been chosen by its enemies. The Arabs brilliantly reconfigured the Arab war of extermination against Israel as the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians.

That has transformed Israel from victim to aggressor — the reversal of reality which lies at the very heart of the western obsession with the ‘settlements’ and the territories.

Yet since Oslo, Israel has meekly gone along with this mad pressure. It has never said it is totally unconscionable. It has never put the all-important argument from justice on its own account. So it has allowed its enemies to appropriate this argument mendaciously as their own. But if Israel doesn’t make the case properly on its own behalf, how can anyone else do so?

To which Israel says realpolitik dictates it has to go along with the diplomatic game being played. But diplomatic realpolitik is what brought us all to this position — the brink of a terrible war with Iran which is treated by America with kid gloves while Israel is put under the cosh.

For the west to suck up to its enemies while bashing its friends like this is the diplomatic version of auto-immune disease. And eventually this disease will kill it.

What Israel has failed to recognise is that the battleground on which it is being forced to fight is not just military. It is also a battleground of the mind, and the strategy being used against it – and to which it needs to respond in kind — is psychological warfare.

The Arab and Muslim world long ago realised if it set the narrative in its own image, it would recruit millions of fanatics to its cause and also confuse and demoralise its victims. In this it has wildly succeeded.

There is therefore an overwhelming need for Israel to alter its strategy. Indeed, it needs to have a strategy.

And this brings us to perhaps the most difficult challenge in all of this – the fact that the role played by the Israel government is of critical importance. Unless it adopts the correct strategy, its defenders will remain crippled.

Yet any promising initiatives seem to fall victim to Israel’s chaotic political structure, which appears to prevent the Prime Minister from being master in his own house. Good ideas are habitually destroyed by rampaging egos and turf wars between Israeli Cabinet ministers.

This is no way to run a chip shop, let alone a country under existential siege.

The fact remains that both Israel and diaspora Jews have to rethink. They have to realise they must start fighting on the battleground where the attack is actually being mounted against them. And the goal has to be to seize and retake the moral high ground.

This strategy requires two different tactics: one for those who are capable of rational thought, and another for those who are not.

The first group comprises those who are not irrational but merely desperately ignorant. Much of the obsession with Israel’s behaviour is due to the widespread belief that its very existence is an aberration which, although understandable at the time it came into being, was a historic mistake.

People believe that Israel was created as a way of redeeming Holocaust guilt. Accordingly, they believe that European Jews with no previous connection to Palestine — which they believe was the historic homeland of Palestinian Muslims who had lived there since time immemorial — were transplanted there as foreign invaders, from where they drove out the indigenous Arabs into the West Bank and Gaza. These are territories which Israel is now occupying illegally oppressing the Palestinians and frustrating the creation of a state of Palestine which would end the conflict.

Of course every one of those assumptions is false. But from those false assumptions proceeds the understandable belief not just that Israel’s behaviour is unjust, illegal and oppressive but that it is unjust and oppressive by virtue of its very existence.

For these people there is an urgent need for a proactive educational approach. No-one has ever told them that these beliefs are false – and when they are told, the effect is often transformative.

There is a desperate and urgent need to educate such people in Jewish and Middle East history; to enlighten them about the shameful role played by Britain in Palestine in tearing up its treaty obligations; to tell them that under international law Israel is entitled to the disputed territories – land within which Britain undertook to settle the Jews ‘from the river to the sea’ because of their historic and unique rights to that land.

That’s all necessary for those who are still rational. For bigots, however, there is no point arguing with them. They are, by definition, beyond all reason. Their influence simply has to be destroyed. They have to be held to account for their lies and bigotry which should be forensically exposed.

So Israel and its defenders should be demanding of the world why it expects Israel alone to make compromises with people who have tried for nine decades to wipe out the Jewish presence in the land and are still firing rockets at it.

They should expose the pretence of Britain or European countries which claim to have Israel’s security needs at heart but forbid it from using military means to defend itself; and which – as did the British Government recently — turn Israeli self-defence against the jihadi lynch-mob on board the Turkish terror ship Mavi Marmara into an attack to be condemned, or demand the opening of the border with Gaza which would allow in arms to kill more Israelis.

Israel and its defenders should be asking why so-called friends in the west want a Palestine state, since once the IDF depart the disputed territories they will become in short order yet another Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist entity which will pose a further threat not just to Israel but to the west.

They should be asking why the EU is continuing to fund the genocidal incitement against Jews promoted by the Palestine Authority.

They should be asking so-called ‘progressives’ – including Jewish ‘progressives’ — why they support the racist ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a future state of Palestine.

They should be asking them why they are not marching against Hamas on account of its tyrannical oppression of Palestinians in Gaza. Why they are ignoring Arab and Muslim persecution of women and homosexuals.

Why they are not mounting a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Mahmoud Abbas’s PA and Hamas, on account of Abbas’s Holocaust denial and the clear evidence of continuation of Nazi Jew-hatred in a direct line of descent from predecessors who were Hitler’s supporters in Palestine.

As for western Israel-bashers, Israel and its defenders should accuse them not of Jew-hating motives that cannot be proved but of absurdities and contradictions and untruths they cannot deny. They should ridicule them, humiliate them, destroy their reputations; boycott them, not invite them to social gatherings, show them disapproval and contempt. Treat them as pariahs. Turn their own weapons against them.

They should be telling the Jews ‘own story of refugees and ethnic cleansing – the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab lands after 1948, and who now make up more than half of Israel’s population. It’s good to see that at last Israel is beginning to bring this to the world’s attention. In Britain virtually no-one knows about it. At a stroke it takes the ground from under the feet of those demanding the ‘right of return’ for Arabs.

They should be holding Arab and Islamic democracy weeks on campus, to expose the oppression and persecution within that world against women, homosexuals and others.

They should be singling out the Anglican church and the revival of ancient theological Jew-hatred being spread within the Anglican world by the Palestinian Christians of the Sabeel centre.

At the same time, they should be focusing on their true friends within the Christian world, not just in America but also in Africa and Asia where there is an enormous reservoir of goodwill towards Israel which could be mobilised into a global fighting force.

They should be campaigning against the UN and the hijacking of international law and human rights by anti-western, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian ideologues.

They should be confronting head-on the false claim that bigotry is confined to the right. They should be pointing the finger at the ‘progressive’ left to show how it is actually supporting the mortal enemies not just of Israel but the west.

And they should be making this case to Israelis themselves, to counter the delegitimisation and ignorance in Israeli universities and to educate the Israeli young in their own national history.

In other words, both Israel and diaspora Jews have to stop playing defence and go onto the offence. Israel has nothing to be defensive about or for which it needs to apologise. It is the enemies of Israel who are promoting injustice and the denial of international law and human rights. Playing defence intrinsically cedes ground to the enemy.

It is time for Israel and its defenders to stop conniving with that smokescreen for the war of annihilation being waged against Israel – the claim that the Middle East impasse would be solved by establishing a state of Palestine to which the settlements, and thus by extension Israel, are the obstacle. It is time for them to stop agreeing that the Jews are to blame for their own predicament.

Israel and its defenders need to make the argument from justice and reclaim that moral high ground from the enemies of Israel and the west, both at home — including within Israel — and abroad. It is those enemies who deny truth, justice and human rights. It is those enemies who should be in the dock. It is time to take the gloves off and put them there.

In short, Israel and its defenders must understand that the tsunami of bigotry against Israel sweeping the west is intimately related to Israel’s seriously flawed diplomatic strategy.

For years, Israel has been playing a defensive diplomatic game, which suggests inescapably that it has a case to answer. Such diplomatic cringing has badly undermined it and hugely strengthened its enemies, who are taking advantage of such weakness over and over again.

It’s time for Israel to realise that military campaigns against its enemies are not enough. It has to call time on its false friends too, and start fighting both these and its more obvious enemies on the battleground of the mind.

How Can You Defend Israel?

By David Harris - Dec 31st, 2010

I was sitting in a lecture hall at a British university. Bored by the speaker, I began glancing around the hall. I noticed someone who looked quite familiar from an earlier academic incarnation. When the session ended, I introduced myself and wondered if, after years that could be counted in decades, he remembered me.

He said he did, at which point I commented that the years had been good to him. His response: “But you’ve changed a lot.”

“How so?” I asked with a degree of trepidation, knowing that, self-deception aside, being 60 isn’t quite the same as 30.

Looking me straight in the eye, he proclaimed, as others standing nearby listened in, “I read the things you write about Israel. I hate them. How can you defend that country? What happened to the good liberal boy I knew 30 years ago?”

I replied: “That good liberal boy hasn’t changed his view. Israel is a liberal cause, and I am proud to speak up for it.”

Yes, I’m proud to speak up for Israel. A recent trip once again reminded me why

Sometimes, it’s the seemingly small things, the things that many may not even notice, or just take for granted, or perhaps deliberately ignore, lest it spoil their airtight thinking.

It’s the driving lesson in Jerusalem, with the student behind the wheel a devout Muslim woman, and the teacher an Israeli with a skullcap. To judge from media reports about endless inter-communal conflict, such a scene should be impossible. Yet, it was so mundane that no one, it seemed, other than me gave it a passing glance. It goes without saying that the same woman would not have had the luxury of driving lessons, much less with an Orthodox Jewish teacher, had she been living in Saudi Arabia.

It’s the two gay men walking hand-in-hand along the Tel Aviv beachfront. No one looked at them, and no one questioned their right to display their affection. Try repeating the same scene in some neighboring countries.

It’s the Friday crowd at a mosque in Jaffa. Muslims are free to enter as they please, to pray, to affirm their faith. The scene is repeated throughout Israel. Meanwhile, Christians in Iraq are targeted for death; Copts in Egypt face daily marginalization; Saudi Arabia bans any public display of Christianity; and Jews have been largely driven out of the Arab Middle East.

It’s the central bus station in Tel Aviv. There’s a free health clinic set up for the thousands of Africans who have entered Israel, some legally, others illegally. They are from Sudan, Eritrea, and elsewhere. They are Christians, Muslims, and animists. Clearly, they know something that Israel’s detractors, who rant and rave about alleged “racism,” don’t. They know that, if they’re lucky, they can make a new start in Israel. That’s why they bypass Arab countries along the way, fearing imprisonment or persecution. And while tiny Israel wonders how many such refugees it can absorb, Israeli medical professionals volunteer their time in the clinic.

It’s Save a Child’s Heart, another Israeli institution that doesn’t make it into the international media all that much, although it deserves a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Here, children in need of advanced cardiac care come, often below the radar. They arrive from Iraq, the West Bank, Gaza, and other Arab places. They receive world-class treatment. It’s free, offered by doctors and nurses who wish to assert their commitment to coexistence. Yet, these very same individuals know that, in many cases, their work will go unacknowledged. The families are fearful of admitting they sought help in Israel, even as, thanks to Israelis, their children have been given a new lease on life.

It’s the vibrancy of the Israeli debate on just about everything, including, centrally, the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. The story goes that U.S. President Harry Truman met Israeli President Chaim Weizmann shortly after Israel’s establishment in 1948. They got into a discussion about who had the tougher job. Truman said: “With respect, I’m president of 140 million people.” Weizmann retorted: “True, but I’m president of one million presidents.”

Whether it’s the political parties, the Knesset, the media, civil society, or the street, Israelis are assertive, self-critical, and reflective of a wide range of viewpoints.

It’s the Israelis who are now planning the restoration of the Carmel Forest, after a deadly fire killed 44 people and destroyed 8,000 acres of exquisite nature. Israelis took an arid and barren land and, despite the unimaginably harsh conditions, lovingly planted one tree after another, so that Israel can justifiably claim today that it’s one of the few countries with more wooded land than it had a century ago.

It’s the Israelis who, with quiet resolve and courage, are determined to defend their small sliver of land against every conceivable threat – the growing Hamas arsenal in Gaza; the dangerous build-up of missiles by Hezbollah in Lebanon; nuclear-aspiring Iran’s calls for a world without Israel; Syria’s hospitality to Hamas leaders and transshipment of weapons to Hezbollah; and enemies that shamelessly use civilians as human shields. Or the global campaign to challenge Israel’s very legitimacy and right to self-defense; the bizarre anti-Zionist coalition between the radical left and Islamic extremists; the automatic numerical majority at the UN ready to endorse, at a moment’s notice, even the most far-fetched accusations against Israel; and those in the punditocracy unable – or unwilling – to grasp the immense strategic challenges facing Israel.

Yes, it’s those Israelis who, after burying 21 young people murdered by terrorists at a Tel Aviv discotheque, don the uniform of the Israeli armed forces to defend their country, and proclaim, in the next breath, that, “They won’t stop us from dancing, either.”

That’s the country I’m proud to stand up for. No, I’d never say Israel is perfect. It has its flaws and foibles. It’s made its share of mistakes. But, then again, so has every democratic, liberal and peace-seeking country I know, though few of them have faced existential challenges every day since their birth.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, it’s said. Israel is a good country. And seeing it up close, rather than through the filter of the BBC or The Guardian, never fails to remind me why.