Canary In The Coal Mine

Pride Faces Fund Cuts Over 'Israeli Apartheid'

by Don Peat, City Hall Bureau  |  TorontoSun.com  |  April 13, 2011

 

Pride Toronto’s funding from the city will be on the line again next week over the term, “Israeli Apartheid”.

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti says he will ask his colleagues on the mayor’s executive committee to pull Pride Toronto’s funding unless it bans Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from the 2011 parade.

“Myself and what I would consider most of this city would not want this city spending tax dollars on racial slurs,” Mammoliti told reporters.

The vow from the chairman of the city’s community development and recreation committee came despite the fact civic officials ruled Wednesday the term “Israeli Apartheid” doesn’t violate the city’s anti-discrimination policy.

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam said the participation of one group shouldn’t justify cutting funding to all of Pride.

“It is almost like exerting collective punishment,” she said.

Councillor Doug Ford said, “we don’t support hate groups, that’s our view.”

“If they want to march in the parade then we won’t fund them,” Ford said.

Francisco Alvarez, co-chairman of Pride Toronto, told reporters there is now a system in place to handle complaints about specific groups in the parade.

Pride has asked for a $128,000 cultural grant from the city this year and receives around $250,000 worth of in-kind services like police and garbage removal.

[email protected]

 

Source:  http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2011/04/13/17985416.html

Islamic Barbarism: Video of Gays Burned Alive in Iraq

Posted by M A Khan to Islam-Watch.org on April 9, 2011

Three gay people poured with petrol and thrown into a fire pit:

 

 

 

Source:  http://www.islam-watch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=713:islamic-barbarism-gays-burned-alive-in-iraq

Gay Opposition Rises Against Israel Apartheid Week

by Benjamin Weinthal  |  JPost.com  |  March 27, 2011

 

Activists in favor and against Israel face off after a LGBT community center cancels "A Party to End Apartheid."

As the Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) events of March come to a close, a number of leading gay and non-gay activists have come out swinging to defend the Jewish state.

“When Israel is accused falsely of being an apartheid society, there is an agenda – and that is the delegitimization of the Jewish state. And that is anti-Semitic,” Stuart Appelbaum, the first international trade union leader to announce he was gay, wrote in an e-mail to The Jerusalem Post last week.  Photo by: Marc Israel Sellem

“When Israel is singled out and held to a different standard than so many countries where people are actually oppressed because of race, that is anti-Semitism, too,” added Appelbaum, who is president of the New York-based 100,000-member Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

Until late February, academics and activists, particularly gays and lesbians, who compare Israel with the former apartheid regime in South Africa might not have expected that action against their blasting of Israel was in the cards. Michael Lucas, a columnist for the gay US magazine The Advocate and a producer of adult entertainment films, was the game-changer. He launched a public relations and financial boycott campaign targeting New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center for its plan to host an IAW event entitled “A Party to End Apartheid” with the anti-Israel group Siege Busters. Siege Busters was also slated to fundraise at the center for a new flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

According to Gay City News, the leading US publication on LGBT, the center’s executive director, Glennda Testone, justified the denial of space to Siege Busters, saying at a charged public forum last week that the group’s activities were not “LGBT-focused” and that its planned IAW meeting was “an incredibly controversial and contentious event.”

While Lucas’s efforts garnered a rare victory in a battle arena where anti-Israel forces have gained traction over the years, he told the Post that “I think we still have not succeeded in getting across our key point. We are not fighting ‘criticism of Israel’... We are fighting the delegitimization of the State of Israel. The stated goal of these groups is a united, multiracial Palestine. That’s inevitably a Palestine with a growing Muslim majority and the end of the Jewish homeland.”

Appelbaum also stressed that free speech rights were being used as a phony argument.

“The Siege Busters and other groups opposing the center’s decision to prohibit the Israel Apartheid Week party were intellectually dishonest. This was not a question of free speech. This was hate speech. The center should not be used as a venue for racism, Islamophobia or anti-Semitism. Nor did they even care about free speech. The same groups have consistently sought to ban and prevent supporters of Israel from expressing their views.”

Asked what was driving a segment of the LGBT community to bash Israel, Dr. Phyllis Chesler, a professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at City University of New York and a leading expert on contemporary anti-Semitism, wrote to the Post that “over the years, the gay liberation movement, world-wide, has become increasingly Stalinized and ‘Palestinianized.’” She said that “to retain their place in the larger Left, feminist and gay movement, they have identified Palestinians as the most victimized of all, and to retain their own value as outcasts and victims, they, too, especially lesbian feminists and lesbian Jewish feminists, must toe this politically correct party line.”

According to Chesler, “the fact that Palestinians torment, torture and murder ‘queer’ Palestinians and that Israel grants them asylum does not matter.”

In a March letter to the LGBT Center in New York obtained by the Post, Yonatan Gher, the executive director of LGBT advocacy organization the Jerusalem House for Pride and Tolerance, wrote that the Jerusalem House was “a safe-haven unique to Jerusalem in its ability to be a home to Palestinians and Israelis, and Secular and Religious LGBTQ people from a wide political spectrum.”

He added that “Apartheid is a difficult word. As a peace activist myself, my experience is that the use of such terminology – despite injustices that undoubtably exist – is counter-productive to achieving the goal of promoting tolerance, acceptance and peace.

It is a term that serves to increase alienation, to push away mainstream Israeli society.”

Yet, in the latest issue of the New York-based liberal Jewish newspaper The Forward, Dr. Judith Butler of University of California, Berkeley, who has written extensively on gender theory, said it was “quite simplistic and false” to argue that Israelis are free from homophobia and Palestinians are plagued by bias against LGBT.

Butler, a fierce critic of Israel’s policies, signed a petition in support of Siege Busters and opposed the center’s cancelation of the IAW event. She noted in The Forward that in Israel, there were “modes of virulent homophobia among right-wing religious people” and “modes of living as queer” that take place “within Palestinian areas.”

What struck many LGBT observers – including Appelbaum – as bizarre was The Forward’s failure to mention that Butler had gone to great lengths to praise Hamas and Hezbollah as “progressive” and “leftist” forces. Butler has come under fire in Germany and in the United States for her defense of the two radical Islamic movements.

Last year, Jan Feddersen, a leading gay journalist with the liberal daily Tageszeitung, wrote in a commentary – with a sub-headline reading that Butler was “In bed with Hezbollah” – that she “favors, in a global perspective, alliances in which homosexuals cannot be interested. Hezbollah and Hamas, she recently decreed in a speech, should be positively rated from the leftist perspective [as] organizations that fight misery and poverty and oppose what she sees as the Zionist impertinence called Israel.”

While in Berlin last year, Butler helped promote an alternative Christopher Street Day gay parade in the Kreuzberg district, at which Israeli flags had previously been removed.

Lucas told the Post that “Butler’s comment is blatantly manipulative. She asserts that there are ‘ways of living as queer within Palestinian areas.’ Well, sure, there were also ‘ways of living as a Jew’ in Nazi-occupied territories. Just not very pleasant ones.

So what? And, sure, there is ‘virulent homophobia among right-wing religious people in Israel.’ That’s very sad. But equally true is that the few religious homophobes are kept in check by some of the most progressive pro-LGBT laws in the world and by a population which, in its vast majority, is not just LGBT-friendly but LGBT-welcoming.”

 

Source:  http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=213963

Gay Journalist Johann Hari Calls For Open Debate On ‘Muslim Homophobia’

 

by Staff Writer, PinkNews.co.uk  |  February 22, 2011

 

There should be an open discussion on homophobia amongst Muslims, gay journalist Johann Hari says.

The Independent columnist lives in east London, close to where anti-gay stickers were plastered around streets earlier this month.

In this month’s Attitude magazine, he wrote: “East London has seen the highest increase in homophobic attacks anywhere in Britain. Everybody knows why, and nobody wants to say it.

“It is because East London has the highest Muslim population in Britain, and we have allowed a fanatically intolerant attitude towards gay people to incubate there, in the name of ‘tolerance’.”

Referring to a recent Gallup poll, he wrote: “No, Muslims are not the only homophobes among us. But the gap between them and the rest is startling. It’s zero per cent of British Muslims vs 58 per cent of other Brits who say we are ‘acceptable’.”

Mr Hari suggested that “solidarity” and sympathy among LGBT people for another minority group had led to “silence” on the issue.

He wrote: “It is true that British Muslims are themselves frequently the victims of bigotry. They are often harassed by the police, denied jobs, and abused in the street, and they are forced to watch as our government senselessly incinerates many Muslims abroad. (I have written many articles detailing and deploring these ugly facts.)

“So gay people are naturally reluctant to pile in onto minority who are being oppressed. We are rightly sympathetic. We know what it is like to be treated like this. We instinctively respond with solidarity, not suspicion.”

He urged for the support and funding of Muslim groups which do advocate LGBT equality, such as Imaan and British Muslims for Secular Democracy

Schools in Muslim areas should also be forced to teach that homosexuality is natural and harmless, he wrote.

“They know that many parents will go crazy,” he wrote. “Tough. It should be a legal requirement, tightly policed by Ofsted, and any school that refuses should be shut down.”

The stickers around London’s East End were first reported by PinkNews.co.uk.

Following the report, the Muslim Council of Britain and the East London Mosque condemned them.

Dilwar Khan, director of the East London Mosque and the London Muslim Centre, said: “We stand together with our fellow citizens against all forms of hatred, including homophobia.

“We are committed to building strong and cohesive communities in Tower Hamlets, and our strength is that we will not let incidents of hate divide us.”

The Muslim Council of Britain said it “[stands] firm against discrimination and violence against any people”.

It added: “These stickers are wrong and not in keeping with our Islamic teaching to respect our neighbours.”

 

Source:  http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/02/25/gay-journalist-johann-hari-calls-for-open-debate-on-muslim-homophobia/

 

Group Seeks To Become United Voice For Jewish Gays

 

by Jessica Elgot  |  TheJC.com  |  February 24, 2011

 

A new gay rights group aims to highlight issues in the community affecting gay parents, elderly gay couples and children from same-sex relationships.

Keshet hopes to expand to become a national voice for Jewish gays, widening the debate in the community beyond marriage and civil partnership issues. It has close links to Jewish Gay and Lesbian Group, Gay Jews in London and Beit Klal Yisrael Synagogue in Notting Hill.

Founders include Rabbi David Mitchell of Radlett and Bushey Reform Synagogue, a vociferous advocate for equal rights for the LGBT community.

For example, it wants an assessment of the provision of Jewish social activities for elderly LGBT singles and couples and the Jewish schooling needs of children from LGBT households. It will develop campaigns for communal organisations, particularly schools, youth movements, care homes and synagogues.

Co-ordinator Daniel Lichman said Keshet was "committed to challenging the ongoing prejudice and discrimination within the Jewish community, including investigating the experiences of Orthodox Jews who may, or may not, feel able to come out.

"We've found most Jewish organisations want to be inclusive but they aren't sure how to go about it. We know that Jewish schools won't necessarily know how best to proceed if there is a child with gay parents. I wouldn't say we encounter a lot of prejudice, mainly people just don't know how to adapt."

Mr Lichman added that "like our name, which means rainbow, we hope that by coming together we will be more visible and vibrant.

"It is this invigorating spirit of community and collaboration that will enable us to work together towards achieving greater equality for every colour and shade of LGBT Jew in the UK."

 

Source:  http://www.thejc.com/community/community-life/45740/group-seeks-become-united-voice-jewish-gays

 

Is "Islamofascism" A Slur?

by Amil Imani  |  FamilySecurityMatters.org  |  February 14, 2011

A few years back,  President George W. Bush used the term “Islamic Fascism” in a speech. In no time at all, the Bush-bashers, Islamic propaganda organizations and the rabid left unleashed a campaign of assault on the President for insulting the Muslims and sullying the sanctified religion of Islam by linking its name with fascism.

 

Opportunistic Democrats were just too happy to lead the attack on the President. An aspirant for presidency, to the left of the [left] Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, was so indignant by this “horrific” slander of the President smearing the stainless name of Islam that he found it his solemn duty to write a letter to the President lecturing him on his unacceptable use of the terms. Did the President indeed slander Islam, or are people like Feingold Bush-bashers who for their own reasons would never miss an opportunity to berate President Bush as well as those who support him? Let the facts decide.

 

“Fascism is a radical political ideology that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, anti-anarchism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism.”      

 

--Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia

 

Let us examine each characteristic of fascism, one at a time, and see if the President was justified or did he indeed misspeak.

 

Radical:  Islam is so radical that even the term “radical” does not adequately depict its true character. The founder of Islam, Muhammad, behaved in extreme ways whenever he could. Early on, in Mecca, among his tribe of Quraysh, he was ridiculed as a Crazed Poet. Ordinary residents of Mecca scorned him in their habitual way of treating the mentally deranged. What did Muhammad do? He personified meekness itself. He put up with extreme indignities, did not fight back and suffered abuses.

 

Time was on Muhammad’s side. Before long, he attracted followers, some of whom were men of power and influence, such as Omar, Osman and Abu Bakr. Then the pendulum swung. The long-suffering meek became the tyrannical avenger. He ordered all the idols in the idolatry of Mecca destroyed, including the one called Allah. Yet, he selected the same name for a non-corporeal deity who commissioned him as his messenger.  Then Allah’s messenger Muhammad set out to systematically exterminate people he perceived as his tormentors and enemies—Jews of Medina, among others.

 

As for teachings of Islam, “radical” is the most fitting term. The Quran is full of black and white, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. Men who didn’t convert to Islam were labeled infidels and slaughtered; their women and children were taken along with all their belongings as booty. It was either Islam’s-way or the high way. This radicalism is very much in action today.

 

Political Ideology: Islam is and has always been political, in the form of Imamate, Caliphate or by proxy where Islam through religious divines controlled the state. Saudi Arabia, for instance, does not even have a constitution. The Quran is the constitution. The country has a king. Yet, the king is the supreme enforcer of the laws dictated by Islam.

 

In another Islamic country, Iran, where the mullahs rule, the constitution is squarely based on the Quran. Many laws are strictly drawn from the Shariah. The mosque is the state and no other competing political ideology is permitted.

 

Authoritarianism: Islam is theocracy, the rule of the clerics. The authoritarianism runs from the top to the bottom in a strict hierarchy with Allah at the top, to his Prophet, to the Caliphs or the Imams, to the lesser men of cloth along the chain of command. No one is allowed to contest or dispute the word and actions of the authorities. Islam and democracy, therefore, are inherently irreconcilable. In some Islamic circles Muslims speak of Islamic Democracy—an oxymoron.

 

Nationalism: To Islam there is only one world-wide nation, the Islamic Ummeh. To Islam the earth is Allah’s, political boundaries are arbitrary and there is only one legitimate nation—the nation of Islam. The idea of one world, one nation, is not new with Islam. A number of secular rules, rulers and movements had aimed for the same objective. Alexander the Great, for instance, strived toward this goal, so did Communism, and the World Federalists still hold the vision of world unification.

The festival of Ashura, where Shia Muslims commemorate the death of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Mohammed, in the Battle of Karbala.

Militarism: Jihadists are the army of Allah. The use of violence as an instrument of policy has been and continues to be central to Islam. Muslims war under the firmly-believed and widely-cherished set of ideas that are rabidly militaristic. “No matter which side is killed, Islam is the victor,” “You kill them, you go to paradise; you get killed, you go to paradise,” are two examples of exhortation to jihadism and war.

 

Anti-anarchism: Islam does not even tolerate the basic rudiments of liberty. Anarchism can be considered as liberty gone amuck. So, Islam is anti-anarchist as a matter of course. Furthermore, the very name of Islam means “submission.” And anarchism is 180 degrees from submission—Islam is the rule of the absolute—anarchism is the rule of no rules.

 

Anti-communism: Islam is based on the belief in a supreme being, Allah. This fundamental precept makes it incompatible with any materialistic philosophy, including communism. Islam, furthermore, places great importance on the rewards and punishment of the next life and denigrates the value of material existence—ideals disharmonious with the main tenets of materialistic Communism.

 

Anti-liberalism: Islam contends that it has the perfect divine prescription of life, brought to mankind as its eternal charter. Hence, human interventions and inventions are not only unacceptable; they are detrimental to the implementation of the perfect edicts. Liberal ideas trigger change. To Islam, any change from the perfect design of Allah, necessarily is in error and must not be allowed.

 

Islam fully meets each of the eight distinctive features of fascism. “If the shoe fits, wear it,” as the saying goes. Islam is fascist. Muslims and their apologists are guilty of denial and dishonesty. They have no ground at all for objecting to the contention that Islam is fascism. President George W. Bush did not misspeak.

 

If Muslims find fascism repugnant, then they should reconsider being Muslims.

 

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Amil Imani is an Iranian-born American citizen and a pro-democracy activist residing in the United States of America. Imani is a columnist, literary translator, novelist and essayist who has been writing and speaking out for the struggling people of his native land, Iran. He maintains a website at www.amilimani.com. Amil Imani is the author of the smashing book Obama Meets Ahmadinejad.

Source:  http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.8713/pub_detail.asp

Former CIA Chief Warns: U.S. 'At War' With Shariah

by Les Kinsolving  |  WND.com  |  February 13, 2011

Tells CPAC it's not 'Islamophobic' to resist spread of Muslim law.

Robert James Woolsey (Pictured), former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a break-out session of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., that America needs to stop being so politically correct and realize it is "at war" with those who would spread Islamic, or Shariah, law.

"We have to understand that we are in a war here – certainly with the terrorists; certainly with Al Qaida; certainly with Hamas and Hezbollah," Woolsey said. "We're also at war, with no choice of our own, with those who want to, over the long run, impose Shariah [Islamic law] upon us.

"And it is one of the toughest fights we have ever had or will have," he continued, "because Americans are used to religious liberty and not criticizing one another's religions."

Robert James Woolsey, was director of the CIA from February 1993 to January 1995. A native of Tulsa, Okla., he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford. He also earned an M.A. from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and an L.L.B. from Yale Law School.

Yet as CIA director, never once was he able to have a one-on-one meeting with President Clinton. He was quoted by Paula Kaufman of "Insight on the News" as saying: "Remember the guy who in 1994 crashed his plane onto the White House lawn? That was me trying to get an appointment to see President Clinton!"

Woolsey addressed a small crowd as one of three panelists at CPAC over the weekend.

Among other things, Dr. Woolsey declared there is currently:

• "The establishing of a world-wide caliphate-theocratic dictatorship of the world; entirely imposed to democracy … terribly oppressive to women in every possible way, from sanctioning their being beaten by their husbands to girls being killed by their fathers if they walk on the street with a neighbor boy who is not a member of the family; death to homosexuals and apostates and on and on and on. And ultimately, that is the goal of Shariah. And it is the goal for the Muslim Brotherhood, which is doing its best to implement that over the long run."


• "The Brotherhood practices takia, or lying to infidels with grace and ease."


• "A so-called explanatory memorandum by Mohamed Akram, the senior Hamas and Brotherhood leader in 1991 in the United States. He explained that what they are doing is a so-called 'settlement process' to establish themselves inside the U.S. Once established to undertake a 'grand jihad' characterized as a 'civilization jihad,' and specifically, the settlement process is to 'eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within and sabotage its miserable house by their hands and hands of believers so that it is eliminated.'"


• "We are, with the Muslim Brotherhood and the drive for jihad, looking at something that is roughly parallel to the efforts of the communists in the 1950s and '60s."

Woolsey further addressed the common refrain that criticism Shariah in the U.S. is based on an irrational fear of Islam, sometimes called "Islamophobia":

"When a totalitarian government grows out of a religion as, let's say the Spanish Inquisition grew out of one aspect of Catholicism, you are not being a 'Christianphobe' if you criticize burning Jews and Muslims and dissident Christians at the stake," Woolsey explained. "And if you're opposed to Shariah and the beating of women and killing of apostates, you are not an 'Islamophobe.'"

Source:  http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=263381

ADL Lauds German Scholar For Study On Anti-Semitism

by Benjamin Weinthal  |  JPost.com  |  February 14, 2011

The Hamburg researcher shows link between anti-Semitism of Nazis and today’s Iranian regime.   

Photo by: Courtesy

BERLIN – Dr. Matthias Küntzel (Pictured), a Hamburg-based author and political scientist who is currently a research associate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was honored last week by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League for his work exposing the interplay between Nazi ideology and modern Iranian anti-Semitism.

“In his writing on the anti- Semitism of the Iranian regime, which he terms the ‘stepchild of German National Socialism,’ Dr. Küntzel lays bare the genocidal intent of those who are striving for nuclear weapons,” Abraham H. Foxman, ADL national director, said while presenting the ADL Paul Ehrlich-Gunther K. Schwerin Human Rights Award to Küntzel at the ADL executive committee meeting in Palm Beach, Florida.

“He makes clear that the link between the anti-Semitism of the Nazis and of the Iranian regime is not just an analogy,” Foxman said.

“Matthias Küntzel has a long and distinguished record in speaking out against anti-Semitism and warning his readers in his native Germany and elsewhere about the dangers posed by this age-old virus that has no known cure. His work has been sorely underappreciated in this country. With this recognition, we hope to acknowledge his ongoing efforts and also let the American public know of the implications of this disturbing trend,” Foxman said.

Küntzel, speaking at the ceremony in Florida, said, “Today’s events in Tunisia and Egypt mark a watershed in the development of the Middle East. And it is precisely at such a time – a time of new beginnings – that it becomes more important than ever to publicly raise the issues of the roots and potential consequences of anti-Semitism in the Middle East.”

“Islamist movements – especially the Muslim Brotherhood – are a headline issue right now. I do of course strongly support the people’s fight in Tunisia and Egypt for freedom of opinion and freedom of assembly. But I am at the same time concerned about the tendency of Western governments and media to downplay the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. While anti-Semitism from the far Right occasions justified outrage in the USA and elsewhere, the very same anti-Semitism is again and again downplayed and minimized when expressed by Muslims,” he said.

Küntzel continued, “Many are inclined to excuse these diatribes as a side effect of the Middle East conflict, and blame Israel for the anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Others – such as the London-based Prof. Gilbert Achcar [at the School of Oriental and African Studies] – even try to excuse the denial of the Holocaust.

To quote Prof. Achcar: “‘Are all forms of Holocaust denial the same? Should such denial when it comes from oppressors, not be distinguished from denial in the mouths of the oppressed, as the racism of ruling whites is distinguished from that of subjugated blacks?’” Küntzel is an external research associate at the Vidal Sassoon Centre for The Study of Anti- Semitism at the Hebrew University.

He teaches political science at a technical college in Hamburg and co-founded the German chapter of Scholars For Peace in the Middle East.

He has focused his recent academic work, including Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, on contemporary genocidal anti-Semitism in Iran, and Europe’s, particularly Germany’s, response to threats from the Islamic Republic to obliterate Israel.

Küntzel argues that Iran is the first country since Nazi Germany to make lethal anti-Semitism — a second Holocaust targeting the Jewish state – a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

Küntzel, an impassioned essayist and author of groundbreaking books on modern anti-Semitism , has over the years sharply criticized the Merkel administration and the Bundestag for failing to take a tough posture against genocidal Iranian anti- Semitism and Germany’s 4 billion euro annual trade relationship with the Islamic Republic.

“Germany wants a special relationship with both Israel and Iran. And that’s is impossible.

Germany can’t have it both ways,” he told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review on Jihad and Jew Hatred, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic magazine’s correspondent and Israel expert, said, “The German scholar Matthias Küntzel... takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed. His bracing, even startling, book, Jihad and Jew-Hatred (translated by Colin Meade), reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed.”

According to Goldberg, “Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: The dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism... Küntzel is right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East, and he is right to be shocked.”

Source:  http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=208094

Netherlands Parliament Move Affirms Israel As Jewish State

by Benjamin Weinthal  |  JPost.com  |  February 14, 2011

Large majority of Dutch MPs also urge EU not to recognize unilaterally declared Palestinian statehood.

BERLIN – Members of the Dutch parliament reinforced the Jewish character of Israel during a session earlier this month, with a parliamentary decision that termed it a “democratic Jewish state.”  

Photo by: Associated Press
The pro-Israel vote resulted in 113 of the 150 parliament members affirming Israel’s existence as a Jewish, democratic state and urging the EU not to recognize a unilaterally declared Palestinian state.

According to the parliamentary measure, “the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state will not bring closer a lasting peace, and therefore the Dutch government asks to advance a European (EU) policy that rejects the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state and means a European call to the Palestinian leaders to resume direct negotiations with Israel.

Furthermore the Palestinians should work toward a lasting solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that takes into consideration the Palestinian problem and includes the explicit recognition of a democratic Jewish State of Israel.”

The Reformed Political Party, SGP, which is a small Protestant party, initiated the resolution. The measure was co-sponsored by the Christian Democratic Appeal party and the Christian Union, a separate Protestant party. The governing liberal party, VVD, and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom supported the resolution.

Surprisingly, the Dutch Labor party (PvdA) also threw its weight behind the vote. Traditionally, the Labor party has vehemently opposed Dutch legislation favoring Israel and seeking to combat radical Islamic terror.

“This is another sign that the Dutch finally begin to understand what is at the core of the Arab Israeli conflict,” Yochanan Visser, an expert on Dutch- Israeli relations, told The Jerusalem Post by e-mail on Sunday.

“This motion is encouraging and should be translated in a different policy towards the peace negotiations,” he wrote. “If the Dutch government understands that peace can only come after the Palestinians (and the Arab world in general) finally recognize Israel as a Jewish state, it should start working to make EU funding of the PA conditional on this recognition.”

Visser, who made aliya from the Netherlands in 2000, is the head of the organization Missing Peace.

In late 2009, the Dutch parliament voted to place Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps on the European Union terror list.

In that vote, the bloc of left-wing parties – the Labor party, the left-wing liberal party (as opposed to the VVD), the Greens, the Socialist Party and the Party for Animals – rejected the designation of the Revolutionary Guard as a terror organization. The Netherlands is only the EU country to have passed a resolution promoting an EU ban of the Revolutionary Guard.

Over the years, Holland has consistently reaffirmed Israel’s Jewish character, as well as the threat of a one-state solution altering Israel’s Jewish nature.

Former Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen, now deputy prime minister, said at the 2008 Herzliya Conference that “60 years on, Israel is a modern democracy, founded on the rule of law. Yours is the only country in the Middle East that can genuinely make such a claim.”

He added, “Achieving a breakthrough is first and foremost in Israel’s own national interest. If things continue the way they are, the two-state solution will slowly but surely render itself irrelevant.

Israel would then risk the prospect of one state for two peoples, with a Jewish minority. This, as [former] prime minister [Ehud] Olmert has rightly noted, would compromise the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.”

Source:  http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=208099

Video: David Horowitz's Keynote at CPAC 2011

From the dhfcenter channel on YouTube.com

David Horowitz speaking on education reform and the Muslim Brotherhood and its connections.