Canary In The Coal Mine

‘Color Purple’ Author Censors Herself to Punish Israel

by Mark Tapson | FrontPageMag.com | June 27, 2012

In a move that Alan Dershowitz correctly calls “bigotry and censorship,” writer Alice Walker (Pictured below) has said she would not allow the translation of her novel The Color Purple into Hebrew because “Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.” She also said that South Africans have assured her Israel’s policies are worse than apartheid.

Walker intends to bring this evil, repressive Israeli regime to its knees by denying Hebrew-only readers access to her 30-year-old novel about black women burdened by sexism, racism, and poverty. This is the same Israel that allows its Arab citizens full rights, the only country in the Middle East that respects women’s rights, gay rights, and human rights for that matter.

No word on whether Walker will also deny her book to Palestinians until 1) the Hamas leadership repudiates the goal stated in its charter of utterly destroying the Jewish state, 2) stops indoctrinating Palestinian children to become suicide bombers, and 3) stops honoring the murderers of Jewish children.

Walker, an editor for Ms. magazine in the 70s, is best-known for the 1982 book, which won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award, and which was made into an Oscar-winning film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover. In publicity photos Walker perpetually displays a smug, beatific smile that seems to say, “I’m a wise, loving, multicultural womanist at Oneness with That Which is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving.” (I’m not kidding – she writes like that; check out her short preface to the 10th anniversary edition of The Color Purple).

How much moral authority does Walker have to chastise Israel? Less than zero, if I may allude to another 80s novel. Let us count the ways in which she de-legitimizes herself as a champion of good over evil:

Predictably, she is a longtime admirer of murderous dictator Fidel Castro and of “a teacher of mine,” radical historian Howard Zinn, who has turned the hearts and minds of at least a generation or two against America.

Also predictably, Walker is a very vocal opponent of war – or more precisely, she’s an opponent of America during wartime. She protested the bombing of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 and participated, in March 2003, in an anti-war demonstration organized by Code Pink, the rabid far-left activists who never met an American enemy they didn’t embrace.

She had planned to challenge Israel’s Gaza blockade with the (aborted) Freedom Flotilla last year in a boat that would have been called “The Audacity of Hope,” after Barack Obama’s book. Naturally, Walker is an Obama supporter. In her pretentious literary voice full of faux-poetic stylings that border on the hilarious, she once described candidate Obama as
a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like [Martin Luther] King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

Obama makes us “glad to be of our species”? So until he came along, were we humans envious of crustaceans or fungi instead? As for the notion that America cares about no one other than our “white selves,” that is a ludicrous but typical fantasy of racist womanists (her neologism) like Walker, who see the warmongering white male patriarchy – especially the American and Christian variety – as the fount of all evil throughout history, destroying the innocence of pure, peaceful, matriarchal indigenous peoples with such brutal methods as the “missionary” sexual position. (As usual with Western feminists, she is silent about Islamic misogyny.)

Unsurprisingly, Walker is also a staunch opponent of capital punishment, specifically the execution of black cop-killers. A supporter of celebrity darling Mumia Abu-Jamal, whom she describes as “beautiful” and “compassionate,” she says he reminds her of Nelson Mandela and has no doubt he was framed. She supports amnesty for domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army leader (and the step-aunt of murdered hip hop icon Tupac Shakur).

Assata Shakur was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in a maximum-security prison for a 1973 shootout that left a state patrolman dead. She escaped from prison in 1979 and lived underground until 1986, when she was given political asylum in Cuba, where she has lived ever since. Walker takes Shakur’s word that she is innocent, and believes that attempting to punish her any further is “demonic.” “I firmly believe that the only punishment that works is love,” pontificates Walker.

Actually, she believes even more firmly in punishing people by denying them love. Walker’s daughter Rebecca painted a devastating portrait of her mother’s cruel hypocrisy in a tragic article exposing the emotional damage caused by the heartless woman revered the world over as a feminist icon:

I came very low down in her priorities – after work, political integrity, self-fulfillment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel…

My mother’s feminist principles colored every aspect of my life… It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her…

Rebecca describes a life of near-abandonment by the famous writer who champions sisterhood while scorning motherhood, and who showed her own child not love and affection but resentment or, at best, indifference. When the adult Rebecca finally chose not to repress her maternal instincts any longer and became pregnant, Walker disowned her: “I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant,” says Rebecca. “She has never seen my son – her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.”

And that betrayal is unforgivable to leftist ideologues like Alice Walker. As her daughter learned the hard way, her ideology supersedes family and even humanity.

For the cold, hypocritical, racist, sexist, America-blaming radical Walker to claim the moral high ground over Israel while remaining silent in the face of Muslim atrocities is typical of the left’s delusional self-righteousness and of their collusion with Islamic totalitarians. For Walker to expect that her anti-Israel gesture will have any efficacy is typical of her overinflated self-opinion. It doesn’t occur to her that by refusing to allow her overrated novel to be translated into Hebrew, she is actually doing Israeli readers a favor.

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/27/color-purple-author-censors-herself-to-punish-israel/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b6f75ddbb7-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag

The Evils of the Muslim Brotherhood: Evidence Keeps Mounting

by Raymond Ibrahim*, Special to IPT News | www.InvestigativeProject.org | June 25, 2012

 

 

Egypt's longtime banned Muslim Brotherhood—the parent organization of nearly every subsequent Islamist movement, including al-Qaeda—has just won the nation's presidency, in the name of its candidate, Muhammad Morsi. That apathy reigns in the international community, when once such news would have been deemed devastating, is due to the successful efforts of subversive Muslim apologists in the West who portray the Brotherhood as "moderate Islamists"—forgetting that such a formulation is oxymoronic, since to be "Islamist," to be a supporter of draconian Sharia, is by definition to be immoderate. Obama administration officials naturally took it a step further, portraying the Brotherhood as "largely secular" and "pluralistic."

Back in the real world, evidence that the Brotherhood is just another hostile Islamist group bent on achieving world domination through any means possible is overwhelming. Here are just three examples that recently surfaced, all missed by the Western media, and all exposing the Brotherhood as hostile to "infidels" (non-Muslims) in general, hostile to the Christians in their midst (the Copts) in particular, and on record calling on Muslims to lie and cheat during elections to empower Sharia:

Anti-Infidel: At a major conference supporting Muhammad Morsi—standing on a platform with a big picture of Morsi smiling behind him and with any number of leading Brotherhood figures, including Khairat el-Shater, sitting alongside—a sheikh went on a harangue, quoting Koran 9:12, a favorite of all jihadis, and calling all those Egyptians who do not vote for Morsi—the other half of Egypt, the secularists and Copts who voted for Shafiq—"resisters of the Sharia of Allah," and "infidel leaders" whom true Muslims must "fight" and subjugate.

The video of this sheikh was shown on the talk show of Egyptian commentator Hala Sarhan, who proceeded to exclaim "This is unbelievable! How is this talk related to the campaign of Morsi?!" A guest on her show correctly elaborated: "Note his [the sheikh's] use of the word 'fight'—'fight the infidel leaders' [Koran 9:12]; this is open incitement to commit violence against anyone who disagrees with them…. how can such a radical sheikh speak such words, even as [Brotherhood leaders like] Khairat el-Shater just sits there?" Nor did the Brotherhood denounce or distance itself from this sheikh's calls to jihad.

Anti-Christian: It is precisely because of these sporadic outbursts of anti-infidel rhetoric that it is not farfetched to believe that Morsi himself, as some maintain, earlier boasted that he would "achieve the Islamic conquest (fath) of Egypt for the second time, and make all Christians convert to Islam, or else pay the jizya."

Speaking of Christians, specifically the minority Copts of Egypt, in an article titled "The Muslim Brotherhood Asks Why Christians Fear Them?!" secularist writer Khaled Montasser, examining the Brotherhood's own official documents and fatwas, shows exactly why. According to Montasser, in the Brotherhood publication "The Call [da'wa]," issue #56 published in December 1980, prominent Brotherhood figure Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah al-Khatib decreed several anti-Christian measures, including the destruction of churches and the prevention of burying unclean Christian "infidels" anywhere near Muslim graves. Once again, this view was never retracted by the Brotherhood. As Montasser concludes, "After such fatwas, Dr. Morsi and his Brotherhood colleagues ask and wonder—"Why are the Copts afraid?!"

Lying, Stealing, and Cheating to Victory: In a recent article titled "The Islamist Group's Hidden Intentions," appearing in Watani, the author Youssef Sidhom exposes a document "which carries the logos of both the Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party." Written by the Deputy to the Supreme Guide, Khairat el-Shater and addressed "to all the Brotherhood branches in the governorates," the memo calls on Muslims to cheat, block votes, and "resort to any method that can change the vote" to ensure that Morsi wins, which, of course, he just did—amidst many accusations of electoral fraud. El-Shater concluded his memo by saying, "You must understand, brothers, that our interest lies wherever there is the Sharia of Allah, and this can only be by preserving the [MB] group and preserving Islam."

In short, the Muslim Brotherhood has not changed; only Western opinion of it has. As it was since its founding in 1928, the group is committed to empowering and spreading Sharia law—a law that preaches hate for non-Muslim "infidels," especially Islam's historic nemesis, Christianity, and allows anything, from lying to cheating, to make Islam supreme. Now that the Brotherhood has finally achieved power, the world can prepare to see such aspects on a grand scale.

*Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/3641/the-evils-of-the-muslim-brotherhood-evidence

Congressman Calls for Hearings on ‘Radicalization’ of White Christian Women

by Raymond Ibrahim | www.FrontPageMag.com | June 25, 2012

During a Homeland Security committee hearing last week on the “Radicalization of Muslim-Americans,” Texas Congressman Al Green (D) (Pictured below) criticized the hearings as biased and unfair to Muslims, suggesting that the only way to justify such hearings is if Congress would also conduct a “hearing on the radicalization of Christians.”

Though his position may seem plausible and balanced, in fact, it reveals a dangerous mix of irrationality, moral relativism, and emotionalism—all disastrous traits in a U.S. Congressman. Consider some of Green’s assertions:

I don’t think that most people oppose hearings on radicalization. I do not, not — N-O-T — oppose hearings on radicalization. I do oppose hearings that don’t focus on the entirety of radicalization…. [W]hy not have a hearing on the radicalization of Christians?… People who see the hearings and never hear about the hearing on the radicalization of Christianity have to ask themselves, “Why is this missing?”

Fair question—“Why not have a hearing on the radicalization of Christians?” Before responding, we must acknowledge that the word “radicalization” simply means “to go to the root or origin of something,” in this case, religion: a Muslim radical goes to the root teachings of Islam; a Christian radical goes to the root teachings of Christianity. Accordingly, there are certainly “Christian radicals” in America. The question is, do they pose the same risks to America as Muslim radicals?

Green and all moral relativists naturally do not want to pursue such a question, pretending that any form of “radicalization”—regardless of the “root teachings”—is evil. They are certainly not interested in determining the root teachings of Christianity and Islam, and whether they are equally prone to violence, terrorism, conquest, etc. While this is not the place to contrast modern Christianity’s apolitical and largely passive nature with modern Islam’s political and largely aggressive nature—a theme elaboratedhere—suffice it to say that, while thousands of modern-day Muslim leaders are on record quoting Islamic scriptures to justify violence and hate, one is hard pressed to find examples of Christian leaders preaching violence and hate—and justifying it through scripture.

The Saudi Grand Mufti, the highest religious official of Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest nation, called on the destruction of all regional churches, quoting Islamic texts. Can Green find an example of an equally authoritative Christian leader calling for the destruction of mosques—and supporting it through the Bible?

Green went on to ask “Why don’t we go to the next step and ask, how is that a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white female in the United States of America can become radicalized to the point of wanting to do harm to this country? We don’t have that type of hearing. That’s the problem.”

Thus, not only does the Congressman irrationally conflate the teachings of all religions together, he also conflates religion with race and gender, implying that the only reason there are hearings on Muslim radicalization is because Muslims are not white, whereas those “equally-dangerous” blue-eyed, blond-haired female Christian “radicals” apparently get a free pass to terrorize America.

This logic is flawed on many levels. Islam is not a race; there are Muslims of all colors, just like there are Christians of all colors. Moreover, there are indeed “blue-eyed, blond-haired” terrorists in the world, including females—yet these, too, are overwhelmingly Muslim. It is dishonest for Green to try to take the focus off of Islamic radicalization and pin it on that all-purpose bogeyman, “racism.”

Regardless, this argument that Islam is a race is popular and was, for example, used by Congresswoman Jackie Speier, who also called these hearings “racist.” Likewise, a former American soldier discussing the Fort Hood shootings lamented that “When a white guy shoots up a post office, they call that going postal. But when a Muslim [namely, Nidal Hasan] does it, they call it jihad.”

Notice the confusion; as if a “white guy” and a “Muslim” represent different races. Of course, if a person of any color goes on a random shooting spree, it would be racist to pin it on his race. But if a person of any color goes on a shooting spree—while waving the Koran, screaming the jihadi paean “Allahu Akbar!” or otherwise rationalizing his actions in Islamic terms, as did Nidal Hasan—then we are talking about a shooting spree motivated by a learned ideology or worldview that has nothing to do with the murderer’s race.

Finally, from beginning to end, Green—like his congressman colleague Keith Ellison, whose objection to these hearings culminated in ateary-eyed breakdown—relied on emotionalism to make his point: he opened his statement by offering the Islamic greeting assalama alikum to Muslims present, dreamily observing: “Isn’t it wonderful that the grandson of a Christian minister can sit on the Homeland Security Committee and say assalama alikum?”—a meaningless point that does not change the fact that in Islam, Muslims are only allowed to say “Peace upon you” to fellow Muslims, never to non-Muslim infidels.

Likewise, he concluded his sanctimonious attack by saying “I do know what it feels like to look like a Muslim in the minds of some people and to be demeaned in a public venue…. I look forward to the day that we’ll have that hearing that deals with the radicalization of Christians in America”—again, all meaningless race-related rhetoric and moral relativism, the sole value of which is to obfuscate the issue at hand: the “radicalization of Muslim-Americans.”

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/25/congressman-calls-for-hearings-on-‘radicalization’-of-white-christian-women/

The OTHER Eric Holder Scandal

by Ryan Mauro* | www.FamilySecurityMatters.org | June 25, 2012

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (Pictured below) is in the spotlight after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to hold him in contempt because he is refusing to provide documents related to the Fast and the Furious scandal. But there's another scandal you should know about. For over one year, he has refused to hand over documents about the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), vice chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, confronted Holder about the matter on Thursday, June 21. Rep. Gohmert wants Congress to have access to documents from the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history. Five Foundation officials were found guilty of funding Hamas and evidence introduced by the federal government shows it was set up by the Muslim Brotherhood's secret "Palestine Committee" in the U.S.

Three prominent Muslim-American organizations were labeled by the federal government as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the trial-the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The documents requested by Rep. Gohmert for the past year were provided to the Holy Land Foundation's defense team, yet are being denied to Congress.

"They are terrorists, and we wanted the documents you gave to the terrorists. We are a year later, and we still don't have them," complained Rep. Gohmert. Holder replied that he'd only provide what is already available publicly.

Rep. Gohmert is one of five members of Congress requesting investigations into the influence of Muslim Brotherhood-tied organizations and individuals in the U.S. government. As I reviewed here, this influence is far-reaching. It is very possible that the documents from the Holy Land trial would be embarrassing to many government officials, not to mention businesses and interfaith groups that have embraced Brotherhood entities. At the very least, they could provide further justification for the labeling of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT as "unindicted co-conspirators."

The documents were originally requested on April 27, 2011 after reporter Patrick Poole broke the blockbuster story at Pajamas Media that Justice Department political appointees blocked the prosecution of one CAIR co-founder and, according to his high-level Justice Department source, other groups and individuals listed as "unindicted co-conspirators."

Poole learned that Assistant Attorney General David Kris wrote a memo dated March 31, 2010 titled, "Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad," an individual who was present at a Muslim Brotherhood meeting in Philadelphia in 1993 to discuss how to support Hamas. The idea to create a new group was put forward at this meeting and Ahmad co-founded CAIR the next year. Ahmad was also personally listed as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the Holy Land trial. The given reason to drop the prosecution was potential jury nullification but the source is certain that it was a political decision.

According to Poole's source, "It was always the plan to initially go after the [HLF] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions." The original trial resulted in a mistrial, pushing back the planned prosecutions. The Obama Administration then came into office and they were stopped.

After the report broke, the Administration claimed that its predecessor had decided not to indict CAIR in 2004. Poole explains that this is true but it was because "They decided to get the bigger fish after they convicted the smaller fish." Rep. Peter King confirmed that FBI officials and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Texas, which prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation, were ready to begin the second round of prosecutions and were outraged at how the political appointees stopped them.

Congressional sources later told Poole that Assistant Attorney General David Kris also dropped the prosecution of several officials involved with the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Muslim Brotherhood front, and the SAAR Foundation/SAFA Group, which has disbanded since the federal government raided their offices. They were to be prosecuted on charges related to tax evasion and money laundering because Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader in the U.S., refused to testify and reveal their terrorist connections.

Poole reported that one of these protected officials is Jamal Barzinji. In October 2011, former Virginia Governor and current Democratic Senate candidate Tim Kaine spoke at an event honoring Barzinji. His ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas are very well-documented. FBI documents all the way back from 1987-1988 identify him as a Brotherhood operative. He is also a founder of the radical Dar al-Hijrah mosque, which Treasury Department records say "is a mosque operating as a front for Hamas operatives in the U.S."

Rep. Gohmert slammed Holder for not prosecuting these groups and individuals when there is a "mountain of evidence" against them. He further revealed that "at least one of which now says it is working inside your [Holder's] agency to help advise on the purge of counter-terrorism training materials."

The role of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has already been discovered. MPAC was founded by Brotherhood ideologues and works in tandem with the aforementioned groups, but was not labeled as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the Holy Land trial. Rep. Gohmert was apparently referring to CAIR, ISNA or NAIT.

On February 8, ISNA was part of an interfaith group that met with the FBI Director about the training materials. A FBI spokesperson said the agency would consider a proposal from the group to create a committee to review the materials. More recently, the White House's new Director for Community Partnerships, George Selim, said that "There is [sic] hundreds of examples of departments and agencies that meet with CAIR on a range of issues."

Fast and the Furious isn't the only controversy Holder is refusing to show documents about, but it's probably the only one you're hearing about.

This article was sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

*Ryan Mauro is Family Security Matters' national security analyst. He is a fellow with RadicalIslam.org, the founder of WorldThreats.com and a frequent national security analyst for Fox News Channel. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Source: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-other-eric-holder-scandal?f=must_reads

Peace Trains’ Jews Against Israel

by Giulio Meotti | www.FrontPageMag.com | June 25, 2012

Karl Marx died long before the State of Israel was created. But what made the founder of Communism an anti-Zionist before Zionism was his opposition to the very idea of a Jewish identity. The explanation can be found in his writings. In the second of his two early essays, together known by the title “On the Jewish Question,” Marx made many antisemitic assertions, such as: “Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist.” “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”

If one believes that mankind has to be emancipated (read it: liberated) from Judaism, one then insists that Jews be powerless and assimilated. That’s why the new Jewish Marxists have turned anti-Zionism into one of their very highest priorities.

From the 1970s, Israel’s universities and Western intellectual circles had become home to a new generation of Jewish intellectuals who demonize and boycott Israel, and ultimately undermine the survival of the Jewish people after the Holocaust.

More than 90% of the allegations of “Israeli war crimes” cited in the shameful Goldstone Report were provided by 16 NGOs who received close to $8 million from the New Israel Fund, an organization headed by former Meretz MK and neo-Marxist Professor Naomi Chazan.

The list of “deranged Jew-haters which, if listened to, will do nothing other than pave the way to the next calamity” (as the brave Caroline Glick once called them), is long and very rich. Steve Plaut has drawn up a thorough list of them for the Middle East Quarterly and in his Freedom Center pamphlet, Jewish Enablers of the War Against Israel.

Tel Aviv University students and professors recently commemorated the “Nakba,” the “catastrophe,” as the Arabs call the date of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Ayal Nir, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, in his Facebook page, called to “break the necks of right-wing activists.” Israeli Professor Shlomo Sand achieved celebrity status in Europe by publishing a book denying the existence of the Jewish people, while Professor Oren Yiftachel called Israel “a white… pure settlement colonial society.” Larry Derfner, a former senior staff writer for The Jerusalem Post, publicly stated that the killing of Israeli citizens was a justifiable weapon for Palestinians in order to overcome the “occupation.”

At the Ben-Gurion University, Neve Gordon accused the IDF of being “war criminals” and promoted the boycott of Israel in a Los Angeles Times editorial.
Two days after two Jewish boys were murdered near their homes in Tekoa, Professor Ze’ev Sternhell published an article entitled “Against the lunatic government,” in which he wrote: “If the Palestinians had more sense they would direct their struggle against the settlements. They would also avoid placing explosive charges on the western side of the green line.” In other words, Sternhell, one of the most famous symbols of the defeatism of the lunatic Israeli Left, permits bombs to be exploded against Jews on the eastern side.

The new Hebrew publication “Tachlit Re’uya” by Ruti Eisikowitch sheds light on this “de-humanization of the settlers” committed by Israeli figures. Moshe Zimmerman of Hebrew University said he regards Jewish children in Hebron as Hitlerjugend. After Arabs sadistically bashed the skulls of two “settler kids” in the Judean desert, Israeli psychiatrist Ruchama Marton declared that “the settlers raise little monsters.” Anat Matar of Tel Aviv University openly supported boycotts of her own university, while University of Haifa professor Ilan Pappe accused the Jewish State of “ethnic cleansing.” Ran Hacohen from Tel Aviv University described “Israel as fulfilling Hitler’s dream” and referred to the assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin as “a milestone in the process of the barbarization of mankind.” Lev Grinberg of Ben-Gurion University accused the Israeli government, in a Belgian media, of “state terrorism.”

In recent years, the most unremitting criticism of Israel in the Anglosphere has come from Jewish intellectuals. Every day, celebrated Jewish personalities – writers, artists, academics – are depicting Israel as a “racist,” “vicious” and “inhumane” entity that has to be dismantled. Many of them have assumed pivotal roles in the campaign to divest from the Jewish State. Their relentless attacks could well play out in ways that indeed puts an end to Israeli life.

George Steiner, who has been proclaimed “the most important literary critic in the world,” questioned whether Israel should have come into being at all. Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most famous living historians, supported the Second Intifada, endorsing the “the cause of liberation.” Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote letters to “Palestinian partisans” during the Intifada. The late historian Tony Judt had been outspoken in his rejection of Israel’s right to exist and offered Israelis the fate of other religious minorities in the Middle East. United Nations envoy Richard Falk is one of the most radical demonizers of the Jewish State. Historian Norman Finkelstein (Pictured below) is one of the staunchest Western supporters of Hezbollah. Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and film directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh have been the most famous anti-Israeli figures in the UK. The initiative for an anti-Israel boycott in London was taken by Stephen and Hilary Rose, two renowned Jewish academics. The linguist Noam Chomsky, “the intellectual godfather” of the US anti-Israel campaign, openly proclaims the abolition of the Jewish State. Jewish philosopher Judith Butler is leading the divestment from Israel. Michael Lerner’s magazine, Tikkun, is the most virulently anti-Israel screed ever published under Jewish auspices.

Along with Jewish speculators like George Soros, the worldwide patron of liberal activism believes that American foreign policy is guided by a “Zionist lobby” and its money goes to anti-Israel organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. You also find most of the influential Jewish intellectuals in the US who abandoned and attacked a modern Jewish hero like Jonathan Pollard, by calling him “a fanatic” (Robert Friedman of The Washington Post), “an aberration” (Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg), and “a viper” (Marty Peretz of the New Republic).

Like Karl Marx, these Jewish personalities gained fame by trashing their own people. They are the self-professed “better Jews” who set themselves apart from the Israeli masses and pusture as the possessors of greater cosmopolitan, liberal, humanistic and really Jewish wisdom. The more they attack other Jews, the more they prove that they are not defined by being Jewish. They are more dangerous than the proud anti-Semites. “Good Jews” who are trying to deliver Israel to what Hillel Weiss, evoking the wagons that carried Jews to Nazi concentration camps, superbly called “the peace trains.”

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/25/peace-trains-jews-against-israel/

Alice Walker and Israel

by Yvette Alt Miller | www. Aish.com | June 24, 2012

The Nobel Prize winner’s fanatical worldview has morphed into Jew-hatred.

I'll never forget the first time I watched the film version of Alice Walker's masterful 1982 novel The Color Purple. Both book and movie brilliantly depict the savagery and violence against blacks in the American South and in South Africa in the 1930s.

The story is about Celie, beaten and impregnated by her step-father; Celie's friend Sophia, unjustly jailed and horribly abused in prison; and Celie's sister Nettie, a missionary in South Africa, ministering to brutalized people denied civil and political rights. It's a depressing novel, but also an important one, stirring readers to fight injustice. For this, Alice Walker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

You'd think after writing about these abuses, author Alice Walker would enjoy visiting a country like Israel: a robust democracy in which conflicting views are forced to coexist. After all, Israel has an open and vibrant press. In Israel, the vote is extended to all, regardless of ethnicity or religion. Members of Israel's Arab minority serve at all levels of government, from Parliament to Supreme Court justices. The U.S. State Department describes Israel as a liberal democracy where minority rights are respected, and disputes are settled fairly without prejudice in the nation's courts.

But instead of finding in Israel a common liberal sensibility, Walker recently announced that she won't let The Color Purple be translated furthermore into Hebrew. (A previous Hebrew version came out in 1984.)

Why? Because, according to Walker, life in Israel today is "worse” than the segregation she suffered as a youth in the Jim Crow South, and also "worse" than South African Apartheid.

Perhaps Walker's criticisms say more about her than they do about Israel.

Walker's parents were impoverished sharecroppers. Calling Israel "worse" than the Jim Crow South in which they lived cheapens their history and the histories of millions of African Americans who for years couldn't vote (a right extended to all in Israel) and who couldn't even to sit on busses and in restaurants with white people.

No such barriers exist in Israel, where people of all religions and ethnicities mingle in public and private places.

And to call Israel - with its universal suffrage, internationally-recognized judicial system, and rainbow society of immigrants (including thousands of political refugees from African and Arab countries) - "worse" than a regime like apartheid South Africa is just plain wrong. Again, it cheapens the history of those who suffered and died under apartheid.

At the Core

What lies behind this irrational hatred for the Jews?

Alice Walker's daughter, Rebecca Walker, offers some insight with a searing description of her unusual childhood.

For starters, Rebecca was fathered by Mel Leventhal, a Jewish lawyer and the son of Holocaust survivors. A mixture of guilt and disdain may have played some role here.

Yet more – ideology was always more important to Alice than people, and she espoused the radical view that childhood enslaved women. Walker ignored and neglected Rebecca for years. Resentful of the chain of motherhood, she essentially left Rebecca to fend for herself from age 13.

Ultimately, Alice took the radical step of severing their relationship: “saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother.” (London Daily Mail: “How My Mother's Fanatical Views Tore Us Apart”)

With Walker's latest salvo against Israel, her family's personal tragedy has lately become a tragedy for the entire Jewish community, as well. Alice Walker has turned her naïve, one-dimensional view of the world away from the crucible of her family and onto the world stage, bringing the same warped view to bear.

The Oldest Hatred

Anti-Semitism has been called the world’s oldest hatred. Through the years, it has provided people with an easy scapegoat for the world's suffering: if only there weren't Jews, everything would be great.

In modern times, this hatred is often redirected to Israel, painting the country and its citizens as uniquely evil and sinister on the world stage.

Sadly, Walker isn't the only famous person to tarnish her reputation and legacy by spurious attacks on the Jewish state.

In recent years, Nobel Prize-winning Archbishop Desmond Tutu has become known less for his struggle against South African Apartheid, and more and more for his obsession with Israel and Jews: saying it's time to forgive Hitler; talking about sinister Jewish lobbies; and repeating other bizarre anti-Semitic and anti-Israel tropes.

Plenty others allow their legacy to rot into anti-Israel rhetoric. Mairead Corrigan Maguire won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for her work to end violence between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, but lately she's been squandering her moral capital bashing Israel obsessively, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and embracing radical anti-Israel campaigns. José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, was better known in the last years for lurid statements comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. Tom Paulin was once known as one of Britain's greatest living poets: an Oxford professor and frequent fixture on British television and radio programs. Until lately, that is, when he's compromised his considerable legacy by questioning Israel’s very right to exist and calling on some Israelis to be "shot dead."

In all these cases hostility toward Israel begins to spill over into hostility toward Jews. Alice Walker's opposition to people reading her books in Hebrew is a move against the language of the entire Jewish people. To target the language in this way is to move vilification out of the political realm and make it personal.

What can we do in the face of such anti-Israel mania, especially on the part of well-respected cultural figures?

On one hand, we can and must educate ourselves to counter factual inaccuracies. There is no shortage of pro-Israel websites; the Jewish Virtual Library contains a treasure trove of information.

On a deeper level, perhaps the most effective way to counter anti-Israeli hatred is to recognize it for what it often is, a poisonous world view that hurts its host as much as its object. It appeals to those looking for a simplistic answer to complex questions; to those to whom the world is either black or white, good or evil; to people who lack the will to explore more complex understandings.

Sadly, Alice Walker's extreme views on Israel indicate a pervasive problem with fanaticism that, according to her daughter, has distorted her entire life. The danger for the rest of us is that her statements create an atmosphere in which ever more virulent rhetoric about Israel becomes the norm.

Source: http://www.aish.com/jw/s/Alice_Walker__Israel.html

Dreamy Foreign Policies

by Carolyn Glick | FrontPageMag.com | June 18, 2012

With her unbridled hostility towards Israel, the EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton provides us with an abject lesson in what happens when a government places its emotional aspirations above its national interests.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, many of Israel’s elite have aspired to be embraced by Europe. In recent years, nearly every government has voiced the hope of one day seeing Israel join the EU.

To a significant degree, Israel’s decision to recognize the PLO in 1993 and negotiate with Yasser Arafat and his deputies was an attempt by Israel’s political class to win acceptance from the likes of Ashton and her continental comrades. For years the EU had criticized Israel for refusing to recognize the PLO.

Until 1993, Israel’s leaders defied Europe because they could tell the difference between a national interest and an emotional aspiration and preferred the former over the latter. And now, Israel’s reward for preferring European love to our national interest and embracing our sworn enemy is Catherine Ashton.

To put it mildly, Ashton is not a friend of Israel. Indeed, she is so ill-disposed against Israel that she seems unable to focus for long on anything other than bashing it. Her obsession was prominently displayed in March when she was unable to give an unqualified condemnation of the massacre of French Jewish children by a French Muslim. Ashton simply had to use her condemnation as yet another opportunity to bash Israel.

Her preoccupation with Israel was again on display on Tuesday. During a boilerplate, vacuous speech about President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his fellow Syrians, apropos of nothing the baroness launched into an unhinged, impassioned, and deeply dishonest frontal assault against Israel.

The woman US President Barack Obama has empowered to lead the West’s negotiations with Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program stood at the podium in the European Parliament and threw an anti-Israel temper tantrum.

The same woman who couldn’t be bothered to finish her speech about Assad’s massacre of children, the same woman who is so excited about her Iranian negotiating partners’ body language that she doesn’t think it is necessary to give them an ultimatum about ending their quest for a nuclear bomb, seemed to lack a sufficiently harsh vocabulary to express her revulsion with Jewish “settlers.”

As she put it, “We are also seriously concerned by recent and increasing incidents of settler violence which we all condemn.”

It’s not clear what “recent and increasing incidents of settler violence” she was referring to. But in all likelihood, she didn’t have a specific incident in mind. She probably just figured that those sneaky Jews are always up to no good.

ASIDE FROM condemning imaginary Israeli crimes more emphatically than real Syrian crimes, Ashton’s speech involved a presentation of the EU’s policy on Israel and the Palestinians.

That policy is based on three premises: The EU falsely claims that all Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal.

It rejects Israel’s legal right to assert its authority over Area C – the area of Judea and Samaria that is empty of Palestinian population centers.

And it will only soften its anti-Israel positions if the Palestinians do so first.

Aside from its jaw-dropping animosity towards Israel, what is notable about the EU’s position is that it is actually far more hostile to Israel than the Palestinians’ position towards Israel as that position was revealed in the agreements that the Palestinians signed with Israel in the past. In those agreements, the Palestinians accepted continued sole Israeli control over Area C. They did not require Israel to end the construction of Jewish communities outside the 1949 armistice lines. The peace process ended when the Palestinians moved closer to the EU’s position.

The EU’s antipathy towards Israel as personified in Ashton’s behavior teaches us two important lessons. First, it is often hard to tell our friends from our foes. Israelis – particularly those born to families that emigrated from Europe – have traditionally viewed Europe as the last word in enlightened democracy and sophistication and style. We wanted to be like them. We wanted to be accepted by them.

Indeed we were so swept away by the thought that they might one day love us back that we adopted policies that were inimical to our national interest and so weakened us tremendously.

It never occurred to us that the fact that Europe insisted that we adopt policies that undercut our national survival meant that the Europeans wished us ill.

They seemed so nice.

The second thing we learn from Ashton’s anti-Israel mania is that when we engage in foreign policy, we need to base our judgments about our ability to influence the behavior of our foreign counterparts on a sober-minded assessment of two separate things: our interlocutor’s ideology and his interests. In Ashton’s case, both parameters make clear that there is no way to win her over to Israel’s side. She is ideologically opposed to Israel. And the citizens of Europe are becoming more and more hostile to Israel and to Jews.

These twin parameters for judging foreign leaders and representatives came to mind on Wednesday with the publication of State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss’s critical report on the government’s handling of the Turkish-government supported, pro-Hamas flotilla in May 2010. Perhaps the most remarkable revelation in the report is that up until a week before the flotilla set sail, led by the infamous Mavi Marmara, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was under the impression that he had reached a deal with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Netanyahu believed that through third parties, including the US government and then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, he had convinced Erdogan to cancel the flotilla. He had a deal.

The fact that Netanyahu thought he had a deal with Erdogan is startling and unnerving. It means that Netanyahu was willing to ignore the basic facts of Erdogan’s nature and the way that Erdogan perceives his interests, in favor of a fiction.

By May 2010 it was abundantly clear that Erdogan was not a friend of Israel. He had been in power for eight years. He had already ended Turkey’s strategic alliance with Israel. In 2006, Erdogan was the first major international leader and NATO member to host Hamas terror chief Ismail Haniyeh. His embrace of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood made clear that he was Israel’s enemy. It is a simple fact that you cannot be allied with Israel and with the Muslim Brotherhood at the same time. The same year he allowed Iran to use Turkish territory to transfer weaponry to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War.

In 2008, Erdogan openly sided with Hamas against Israel in Operation Cast Lead. In 2009, he called President Shimon Peres a murderer to his face.

By the time the flotilla was organized, Erdogan had used Turkey’s position as a NATO member to effectively end the US-led alliance’s cooperative relationship with Israel, by refusing to participate in military exercises with Israel.

THE NATURE OF the flotilla organizers was also known in the months ahead of its departure for Gaza. The IHH’s ties to al-Qaida had been documented. Netanyahu’s staff knew that the IHH was so extreme that the previous Turkish government had barred its operatives from participating in humanitarian relief efforts after the devastating 1999 earthquake. They feared the group would use its relief efforts to radicalize the local population.

In and of itself, the fact that Erdogan was openly supporting IHH’s leading role in the flotilla told Israel everything it needed to know about the Turkish leader’s intentions. And yet, up until a week before the flotilla set sail, Netanyahu was operating under the impression that he had struck a deal with Erdogan.

It is likely that Netanyahu was led to believe that a deal had been crafted by the Americans.

Obama is not the only American leader that has been seduced into believing that Erdogan and his Islamist AKP Party are trustworthy strategic partners for the US. Many key members of Congress share this delusional view.

According to a senior congressional source, Turkey’s success in winning over the US Congress is the result of a massive Turkish lobbying effort. Through two or three front groups, the Turkish government has become one of the most active lobbying bodies in Washington. It brings US lawmakers and their aides on luxury trips to Turkey and hosts glittering, glamorous receptions and parties in Washington on a regular basis. And these efforts have paid off.

Turkey’s bellicosity towards Israel as well as Greece and Cyprus has caused it no harm in Washington. Its request to purchase a hundred F-35 Joint Strike Fighters faced little serious opposition. The US continues to bow to its demands to disinvite Israel from international forum after international forum – most recently the upcoming US-hosted counter-terrorism summit in Istanbul.

Certainly Turkey’s strategic transformation under Erdogan’s leadership from a pro-Western democracy into an anti-Western Islamist police state has dire implications for American national interests. And the Americans would be well-served to look beyond the silken invitations to Turkish formal events at five-star hotels and see what is actually happening in the sole Muslim NATO member-state. But whether the US comes to its senses or not is its business.

Israel had no business buying into the fiction in 2010 that Erdogan could be reasoned with.

True, today no one in Israel operates under that delusion anymore. But the basic phenomenon of our leaders failing to distinguish between what they want to happen and what can happen continues to exist.

Ours is a dangerous world and an even more dangerous neighborhood. Everywhere we look we see cauldrons of radicalism and sophisticated weaponry waiting to explode. The threat environment Israel faces today is unprecedented.

At this time we cannot afford to be seduced by our dreams that things were different than they are. They are what they are.

We do have options in this contest. To maximize those options we need to ground our actions and assessments in clear-headed analyses and judgments of the people we are faced with. Their actions will be determined by their beliefs and their perception of their interests – not by our pretty face.

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/18/dreamy-foreign-policies/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=82753f8311-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag

The Nazi-Palestinian War on Jesus

by Giulio Meotti | FrontPageMag.com | June 15, 2012

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Under intense pressure by the PLO and its Western allies, the upcoming meeting of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, to be held in St. Petersburg, Russia from June 24 to July 6, is expected to recognize the “Birthplace of Jesus: the Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage route, Bethlehem” as the Palestinian first world heritage site. The Vatican has capitulated to the Palestinian propaganda and the Holy Land’s Custodian, Fr. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, has asked for recognition to be given to the city of Bethlehem as a whole as a heritage site and not just to the Basilica. “Given this history of Palestinian mistreatment of the Church of the Nativity, isn’t it odd that the Vatican is silent as Unesco plans to put the Palestinians officially in charge of the church?”asks the well known Jewish blogger Israelmatzav.

When in 1995 Israel turned over Bethlehem to the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, a Muslim, proclaimed: “This is the birthplace of our Lord the Messiah, the Palestinian.” The Vatican authorities bear a tragic responsability in the Palestinian war on Bethlehem. In 1989, Jerusalem’s Roman Catholic patriarch Michel Sabbah supported the Palestinian Intifada as he celebrated a Christmas midnight Mass at Jesus’ birthplace. “Despite all that is happening to you, you will win, in the end you will win,” declared Patriarch Sabbah, appointed by Pope John Paul II. Off Manger Square, a group of Muslims chanted: “The Zionist is God’s enemy!” and “Jews, Mohammed is coming back!”

If UNESCO’s Palestinian bid won’t be stopped on time, the Arabs will go further in their Palestinization and de-Judaization of the holy land. Jesus will become an honorary member of the PLO, with the corollary of an Islamicized Christianity. According to Omar Awadallah, who heads the UN department in the PA Foreign Ministry, “Jesus is the Palestinian prince of hope and peace”.

The odious invention of a “Palestinian Jesus” persecuted by the Jews is central to the multifaceted Arab campaign that includes boycott and terrorism, the so-called “right of return” and diplomatic attempts to isolate Israel internationally. According to this Palestinian propaganda, Jesus was not born a Jew but a Christian, and Bethlehem was not a Jewish town in Judea, but a Muslim-Arab one. The former Arab League spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, who is also the PLO’s propagandist, declared: “I am a Christian, Jesus was born in the Muslim town of Bethlehem.” The Palestinian cynical assault on history is more political than theological. But if the Arab gangsters will successfully delegitimize Jews and Judaism at the United Nations, they will have advanced their goals of ideological criminals.

Palestinians have already been efficient in turning the global arena against the Jews. In 2010, UNESCO already decided that Rachel’s Tomb and Hevron’s Jewish tombs are officially “Muslim mosques.” To understand why the Palestinians feel they have a winning strategy about the Jewish holy sites, one has to look at the members of the “International Committee for the preservation and the promotion of the Old City of Hevron.” You will find Boutros Boutros-Ghali, former Secretary-General of the United Nations and Federico Mayor, former Director of UNESCO. In recent years, UNESCO also increased its collaboration with ISECO, the cultural body of the Organization of the Islamic Conference which is supporting the Palestinian efforts.

To understand the importance of the Palestinian campaign one must remind that there has been another manipulation of Jesus: the “Aryan Jesus” of Adolf Hitler. The pro-Nazis Christian Movement’s recasted Jesus as an Aryan fighting against the Jews. According to the Hitler’s theologians, Jesus was not a Jew, but a Galilean opponent of Judaism. The Christian Bible was stripped of all “Jewish influence.” As the Aryan Jesus was the Christian legitimization of the Nazi Holocaust, the Arabized and Islamicized Jesus under the Palestinian warfare is a tool in the Jihad against the State of Israel and its Jews.

Under the PLO’s dictatorship, the Jewish history has already become “Palestinian Arab history” and the Jewish nation (“Am Yisrael”) that ruled in the Holy Land for a thousand years and developed a world-shaking culture never existed. The brave Jewish historian Bat Ye’or in the pivotal book “Dhimmitude” called it “Arabization of Jesus” and “de-Judaization of the Bible,” which are both serving the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinian Authority’s television aired a program asserting that the tales of the Bible took place in what is today Yemen, not in the modern State of Israel. A PA-TV show also argued that Palestinians are “the true descendants of the biblical Israelites.” Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus and the most ancient synagogue in Jericho, two cities transferred by Israel to Palestinian control in suicidal agreements, are among the sacred Jewish places destroyed by Arabs, in eerily similar attempts to the Taliban’s deplorable annihilation of ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan. Abdallah al-Hourani, the former Palestinian minister for refugee affairs, told the newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jedidah: “The Crusaders lived in our land for 242 years, until the liberation of their last outposts, and Israel is like a tree that has flowered on land not belonging to it. No matter how much it is fertilized, it cannot put down roots, and when the fertilizer stops, it will die”.

The Palestinian lies are lethal. Alex Grobman’s wonderful book “License to Murder” (Balfour) details that Arafat carried the Arabic copy of the “Protocols of Elders of Zion” wherever he went, regularly quoting from it to impress upon his visitors the perfidy of Zionism. Like Hitler, Arafat used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews. The PA still consistently cites the book while their strictly controlled media continually runs stories about Jewish “conspiracies” and “plots.” In his welcoming speech to Jericho in July 1994, Arafat “borrowed” from the Protocols. According to the scholar Grobman, “the Protocols provided the PA with the ‘academic’ credibility and authenticity it needed to portray Jews and Israelis as evil, and thus making ‘fighting and killing Jews a natural response’”.

After Hitler’s Holocaust which tried to destroy the body of the Jewish people and Stalin’s Holocaust which tried to destroy the heart of the Jewish people, it’s now the turn of the Palestinian ideological Holocaust seeking to destroy the history of the Jewish people. The 20th century of Joseph Goebbels has taught all of us that a lie starts as a small one, but if it is not corrected it festers like a cancer destroying truth, justice and finally human beings.

The world community must not embrace the sinister Palestinian lies. In case UNESCO takes, again, the side of the Arabs, the State of Israel should suspend any cooperation with the UN’s cultural body. This is an historical battle that Israel can win with the support of Westerners who still care about the fate of their civilization.

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/15/the-nazi-palestinian-war-on-jesus/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7cc15e608c-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag

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Jew-Hatred in Norway

by Bruce Bawer | FrontPageMag.com | June 14, 2012

On Wednesday, June 13, during an Internet search, I ran across a left-wing Norwegian blog with which I was previously unfamiliar. The posting I stumbled upon dated back to February and was concerned with what it described as my many lies about Norway. Chief among these lies, apparently, is my claim that “there is strong antisemitism in Norway’s ‘elite.’” The blogger claimed to find this claim outrageous. “Does he not know the labour party [sic] has historical strong ties with Israel? That a recent prime minister was a devoted friend of Israel?”

Less than an hour later, I followed a link in my inbox to a just-posted Jerusalem Post article by Benjamin Weinthal headlined “Norwegian student in Oslo burns Jewish pupil.” The story, which was originally reported on June 12 by a Norwegian Jewish blog, Med Israel for Fred (With Israel for Peace) – MIFF for short – was straightforward enough: on June 11, at an Oslo secondary school barbecue, an ethnic Norwegian student had burned a Jewish classmate with a red-hot coin, leaving “a very visible burn on the boy’s neck.” In a letter to Norway’s Minister of Justice, Grete Faremo, the Simon Wiesenthal Center complained that “this child has been the subject of anti-Semitic bullying and violence for the past two years, reportedly, because his father is Israeli,” but that “there has been no reaction by the school, the police or governmental authorities.” The Wiesenthal Center complained that “the silence of the school, the police and your government is too reminiscent of another Norway, under the WWII Nazi collaborator, Quisling.”

Vebjørn Dysvik, Norway’s chargé d’affaires in Tel Aviv, told the Post in an e-mail that he knew nothing more about the case than what had already been reported and insisted that “the Norwegian government has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to bullying in schools.” But Dysvik didn’t leave it at that. He also took the occasion to complain that the letter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center “contains several extreme statements that lack any foundation in reality. We take exception to the attempt of painting a picture of Norway and Norwegian society as being anti-Semitic. This is a gross distortion of facts for which the Center must bear responsibility.”

The very fact that Dysvik felt comfortable slapping back at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in this snotty manner reflects the Norwegian government’s exceedingly different way of responding to charges of anti-Semitism, which is a very real and escalating problem in Norway, and to charges of “Islamophobia,” that invention of the Muslim Brotherhood which, in Norway as elsewhere, is employed by the usual suspects to manipulate nervous multiculturalists. Clearly, while Norwegian officials like Dysvik are terrified of offending Muslims, they are not terribly worried about offending Jews.

But the main point here is that Dysvik’s glib rejection of the Wiesenthal Center’s charges is an offense against reality. As Weinthal writes, “Norway’s school system has permitted an increasingly hostile climate for Jewish pupils….Critics say Jewish students have been subject to assaults in Norway’s schools, and teachers have simply looked the other way.” A recent report on anti-Semitism in Norway by the Norwegian Holocaust Center explicitly states something that any halfway conscious person in the country already knows – namely, that the Norwegian media play a major role in disseminating and reinforcing anti-Semitism. (In this context, it’s worth noting that, immediately after reading Weinthal’s article, I carried out a series of Google searches in an attempt to discover whether the barbecue incident had been covered by any Norwegian media other than the MIFF blog. Only one item turned up: a story that had been posted an hour earlier on the website of Vårt Land, a small, Christian, Israel-friendly daily newspaper.)

Also helping fan the flames of Jew-hate, as the Holocaust Center report acknowledged, is Norway’s political left. A third factor, I might add, is the hatred for Jews that is a prominent feature of the Islamic holy books and, consequently, a major attribute of the Norwegian Muslim community. I say “I might add” because the Holocaust Center itself chose not to include this on its list of leading causes of anti-Semitism in Norway. On the contrary, far from acknowledging that a disproportionate number of anti-Semitic acts in Norway are committed by Muslims and that the fierce Jew-hatred inculcated in Muslim children from infancy has contributed in no small way to a general atmosphere of anti-Semitism in Norwegian schools, where a rapidly growing percentage of the students are Muslim (in 2009, 39 percent of primary-school students in Oslo had immigrant backgrounds), the Holocaust Center – predictably – turned its anti-Semitism report, in large part, into a report on prejudice against both Jews and Muslims. This is par for the course in Norway: it’s rare to hear any discussion of anti-Semitism that doesn’t turn, sooner or later, into a bout of hand-wringing about “Islamophobia.” The unwritten rule is clear: Muslims must always be depicted as the #1 victims of prejudice, no matter what the facts may be; they must always be cast as objects of bigotry, never as bigots themselves.

In fact, though the Holocaust Center suggests that anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim prejudice go hand in hand in Norway (and in some cases this is undoubtedly true), there is another fact from which the Holocaust Center, again, preferred to look away – namely, that the growing anti-Semitism of many ethnic Norwegians, especially those belonging to the nation’s cultural elite, is intimately related to their pathetic eagerness to demonstrate their own Islamophilia. As I put it in an interview with Weinthal last year: “Multiculturalism has taught Norway’s cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multiculturalist elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.” And though it is a major explanation as to why Norwegian anti-Semitism is on the rise, it is an explanation that official and semi-official agencies like the Holocaust Center dare not look at very closely.

I have mentioned that within an hour of running across that blog entry on June 13 about my alleged exaggerations about Norwegian anti-Semitism, I was reading Weinthal’s piece on the anti-Semitic incident at that school barbecue. Within that same hour, I happened across another news article, also just posted. Norway’s Center Party, it reported, had just proposed a law against male circumcision. On being informed of this proposal, Ervin Kohn, head of the country’s Jewish community, noted that if Norway introduced such a ban, “we would be the first country in the world to do so. It’s like re-introducing the second clause of the 1814 constitution.” Kohn was referring to the notorious “Jewish clause” of Norway’s constitution, which, until its repeal in 1851, excluded Jews from the kingdom. Alas, the treatment of Jews in today’s Norway brings to mind all kinds of parallels from the country’s history – none of them, needless to say, at all pleasant.

How To Read the Koran in Context

June 8, 2012

"This is a brilliant and educational video, well worth 28 minutes of your time. It will help you understand how to "read the Koran in context" as the Moslem apologists never tire telling us we should do. The knowledge you will get from this video by David Wood will help you enlighten others with the truth about Islam. Just click on the link:"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHmsL0p6jnI&feature=g-vrec

Source: ACT for America Arizona Chapter