* Anti-Zionist Israeli lights torch in honor of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades to mark Israeli Independence Day
* “My belief in the righteousness of El Salvador’s cause knows no bounds”
* Baseball icon Sandy Koufax drafted by Israeli baseball league
CONTENTS
1. Anti-Israel ads on Washington subway
2. Anti-Zionist Israeli to direct movie for Israel’s 60th birthday
3. 148,000 new babies in Israel
4. Haifa railway station named after Katyusha victims
5. Haifa and al-Quds universities team up on learning disabilities
6. Healthier Coke arrives in Israel
7. CSKA Moscow’s anti-Semitic display
8. Baseball icon Sandy Koufax drafted by Israeli baseball league
9. “My belief in the righteousness of El Salvador’s cause knows no bounds”
10. “The middle of nowhere” (By Edward Luttwak, Prospect Magazine, May 2007)
11. “Israel’s army eyes female role in battle” (AP, April 29, 2007)
ANTI-ISRAEL ADS ON WASHINGTON SUBWAY
The subway system of America’s capital, Washington DC, is to be adorned with 20 poster ads filled with anti-Israel rhetoric.
The “U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation” are to place the ads showing “an imposing tank pointing its main firing turret at a child with a schoolbag walking along a dirt road.”
The posters state “Imagine if this were your child’s path to school. Palestinians don’t have to imagine,” before continuing to call for an end to U.S. aid due to “Israel’s brutal military occupation... paid for by U.S. taxpayers like you.”
According to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “CBS Outdoor, the New York-based firm that places in-station advertising for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), at first refused to consider the poster, but eventually relented to pressure from WMATA and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).”
Both the executive of CBS Outdoor, Jodi Senese, and ACLU’s Legal Director in Washington, Arthur Spitzer, are Jewish, yet apparently don’t see anything wrong with these ads although they are a flagrant distortion of the true picture of life today in the West Bank and Gaza.
ANTI-ZIONIST ISRAELI TO DIRECT MOVIE FOR ISRAEL’S 60TH BIRTHDAY
Eyal Sivan, a self-proclaimed “anti-Zionist” has been hired by Israeli television channel 8 to direct a film marking the 60th anniversary of the establishment of Israel next year.
Sivan will be given a grant of 650,000 shekels ($160,000), paid for by Israeli taxpayers, to direct a film for next year’s Israel Independence Day. The film will be part of the “Past and Present in Israel” project, meant to promote Israel’s “Jaffa” brand citrus fruit.
Sivan, who has lived in Paris for the past 15 years, directed the 1999 film “The Specialist,” which used footage from Adolf Eichmann’s trial to portray the architect of the Final Solution as just a Nazi party bureaucrat, Israel radio reported. The film also attempted to present Sivan’s view that Eichmann’s Jewish victims could have done more to prevent themselves from being murdered. In 2001, Sivan told the French newspaper “Le Monde,” that the UN’s 1947 partition plan, which called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was a “historical mistake.”
Sivan has also blamed Israel for the recent rise in French anti-Semitism. (Only last Thursday, a 22-year-old French woman, who was wearing a Star of David necklace, was attacked by youths at a Marseille railway station; they lifted up her shirt and carved a swastika on her stomach.)
During the fighting on the Lebanon-Israel and Gaza-Israel borders last summer, Sivan joined a group of Israeli filmmakers in signing a petition pledging support for the Lebanese and Palestinians. The petition read: “We the signatories are absolutely against the brutality and cruelty of the State of Israel as shown in the news from recent weeks.”
At an “alternative” Independence Day ceremony last week, another well-known anti-Israel Israeli, Tali Fahima, lit a torch in honor of Zakaria Zubeidi, the commander of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (Fatah’s terrorist wing). “I light this for my friend Zakaria Zubeidi, with whom I have demolished fortresses,” she said.
Both Sivan and Fahima have been widely denounced in Israel as self-loathing Jews, and Alan Finkelkraut, the leading French intellectual, called Sivan’s movie “incitement to murder”.
For a previous reference to Sivan, see the sixth note in the dispatch “Israeli Apartheid Week” kicks off around the world (Feb. 13, 2007).
148,000 NEW BABIES IN ISRAEL
Israel celebrated its 59th Independence Day last Tuesday. Figures published by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics before the annual celebration indicate that the current population of Israel is 7,150,000.
When the state was founded in 1948, there were 806,000 residents. A third of those still live in the country. Of the current population, 5,725,000 (or 80 percent) are Jewish, and most of the remainder are Arab.
In 1948, Tel Aviv was the only city with more than 100,000 residents. Today, Israel has five cities with over 200,000 inhabitants: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Rishon Lezion and Ashdod.
Since last Independence Day, 148,000 babies have been born in Israel. The Arab birthrate remains higher than the Jewish one.
HAIFA RAILWAY STATION NAMED AFTER KATYUSHA VICTIMS
Israel Railways have announced that the Haifa central train station will be renamed after the eight railway workers who were killed when a Hizbullah rocket hit it during last summer’s Lebanon-Israel War.
The dedication ceremony for the station, which will be renamed “Haifa Central – The Eight”, will take place on the anniversary of their deaths on July 16.
For more, see the sixth picture on this page.
This afternoon the Winograd Committee will present Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz with a draft report of its investigation into last summer’s war. The report is expected to be highly critical of their conduct and that of former chief of staff Dan Halutz. Halutz has already resigned and Olmert and Peretz are expected to come under intense pressure to do so.
The vast majority of the draft report will focus on the decision-making process that led to the war. The committee has limited itself in this report to analyzing the five first days of the war. The final report is due in the summer.
In further trouble for Olmert, his close ally Abraham Hirchson, Israel’s Finance Minister, who is suspected of theft, has decided to suspend himself until the end of a police investigation. Hirchson has recently been questioned on charges of embezzlement. He continues to deny the allegations.
HAIFA AND AL-QUDS UNIVERSITIES TEAM UP ON LEARNING DISABILITIES
Up until now diagnostic tests for learning disabilities in Israeli Arab schoolchildren have always been translated from Hebrew. As a result of cultural differences this has often produced inaccurate results, reports the Jerusalem Post.
This should now change following a $1.5 million U.S. government grant to finance a project to produce the test in three versions: for Jewish-Israelis, Arab- Israelis and Palestinians. The cooperative project is being conducted by the University of Haifa and al-Quds University in east Jerusalem.
Professor Zvia Breznitz, director of the University of Haifa’s Center for Brain Research and Learning Disabilities said: “We always talk about grandiose ideas of peace, justice, love, and we never make any progress… But if a connection starts with a specific, professional project, at the end of the day friendships are established. In my opinion, this is the recipe for coexistence.”
As a result of the project, a center for children at risk has been established at al-Quds University.
HEALTHIER COKE ARRIVES IN ISRAEL
Israel is among the first counties to successfully produce a much healthier version of Coca-Cola free of any preservatives or artificial coloring, while maintaining the drink’s taste, claim the manufacturers of the soft drink according to Israeli press reports.
Muhtar Kent, worldwide president of the Coca-Cola Company, has given his Israel branch the go-ahead to implement the advanced technological procedure, calling the breakthrough “a great achievement.”
The new formula, which is kosher, and will include both regular and diet Coke, will be on the market as of this week.
CSKA MOSCOW’S ANTI-SEMITIC DISPLAY
CSKA Moscow, the Russian basketball team, beat Maccabi Tel Aviv to progress to the Euroleague’s final-four stage in Athens.
Prior to their third and final confrontation at the Moscow stadium, Maccabi’s players and fans found themselves watching what many regarded as an anti-Semitic laser show aimed at livening up the local audience.
Macabbi Tel Aviv was presented at the laser show as an ultra-orthodox Jew wearing a traditional fur hat, being run over by a steam train, wearing the Moscow colors.
The heads of the Israeli team have filed an official complaint with their Moscow counterparts.
BASEBALL ICON SANDY KOUFAX DRAFTED BY ISRAELI BASEBALL LEAGUE
Forty-one years after he retired from baseball, Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax was the final player chosen in the draft for the six teams taking part in the inaugural season of the Israel Baseball League.
Koufax, 71, was picked by the Modi’in Miracle in the draft conducted last Thursday. “His selection is a tribute to the esteem with which he is held by everyone associated with this league,” said former big leaguer Art Shamsky, who will manage the Miracle.
In the 1965 World Series, Koufax refused to pitch Game 1 for Los Angeles because it fell on Yom Kippur, a day considered by Jews to be the holiest of the year. Koufax retired due to an arm injury after the 1966 season and was later voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Israeli league begins play June 24 with the six teams playing a 45-game schedule. Players from nine nations were drafted, with only a minority of the 120 players in the league expected to be Israeli citizens.
For more, see Israel to have its own baseball league (& Iran bars women from soccer matches) (May 19, 2006).
“MY BELIEF IN THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF EL SALVADOR’S CAUSE KNOWS NO BOUNDS”
I attach an article below, by Edward Luttwak, a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Robbie Millen, a writer on the Times of London’s blog, “Comment Central,” had this to say about the piece:
“I’m sure that like me you’ve got strong views on the rights and wrongs of the ‘Soccer War’ of 1969. Honduras’s treatment of El Salvador and its noble people is an enduring international shame; the Peace Treaty of 1980 was a sham which robbed the victimised Salvadoreans of their land. I am still very diligent in boycotting Honduran produce; I will never, despite numerous invitations, attend a lecture given by a Honduran academic; naturally, I have disinvested my large stake in the Honduran economy. My belief in the righteousness of El Salvador’s cause knows no bounds.
“You would think me mad, a stranger to that region, if I held such strong views about a tiny sliver of land in Central America. But it’s no madder than Brits who get overexcited about a tiny sliver of land in the Middle East and join the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, organise boycotts of Israeli universities and demand that British companies not do business in Israel. I’ve never understood why the Israel-Palestine conflict gets so much coverage (many more people die in African border wars but they only make the news-in-brief columns) or why Western statesmen think that they should get involved in pointless summiteering there.
“Do we have any strategic interests there? Not really. Maybe it’s the frontline in a clash of civilisations, and we need to bolster Israel against the forces of Islamofascism? Well, given that Osama bin Laden seems to be as upset that Spain pushed out the Moors as any perceived injustice against the Palestinians, I’m not sure that a peace deal between Israel and Palestine will stop al-Qaeda lunatics trying to blow us up. Sure, if I had to choose, I would rather be an Arab living in Israel than in any of the neighbouring Arab kleptocracies and failed states, but still I don’t feel like I have a dog in that fight.
“So am I mistaken? Am I missing something fundamental? Edward Luttwak in a brilliant article for Prospect reassures me that the Middle East is really quite irrelevant (unless you happen to be a Middle Easterner).”
The second article below looks at the role of women in the Israeli army as an “army-appointed commission of academics and officers is studying whether to integrate the army’s last all-male preserve: infantry, armor and special forces.”
-- Tom Gross
“THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT HAS BEEN ALMOST IRRELEVANT SINCE THE END OF THE COLD WAR”
The middle of nowhere
Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it
By Edward Luttwak
Prospect Magazine
May 2007
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9302
Why are middle east experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson of history is that men never learn from history, but middle east experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them.
The first mistake is “five minutes to midnight” catastrophism. The late King Hussein of Jordan was the undisputed master of this genre. Wearing his gravest aspect, he would warn us that with patience finally exhausted the Arab-Israeli conflict was about to explode, that all past conflicts would be dwarfed by what was about to happen unless, unless… And then came the remedy – usually something rather tame when compared with the immense catastrophe predicted, such as resuming this or that stalled negotiation, or getting an American envoy to the scene to make the usual promises to the Palestinians and apply the usual pressures on Israel. We read versions of the standard King Hussein speech in countless newspaper columns, hear identical invocations in the grindingly repetitive radio and television appearances of the usual middle east experts, and are now faced with Hussein’s son Abdullah periodically repeating his father’s speech almost verbatim.
What actually happens at each of these “moments of truth” – and we may be approaching another one – is nothing much; only the same old cyclical conflict which always restarts when peace is about to break out, and always dampens down when the violence becomes intense enough. The ease of filming and reporting out of safe and comfortable Israeli hotels inflates the media coverage of every minor affray. But humanitarians should note that the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000 – about as many as are killed in a season of conflict in Darfur.
Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the “oil weapon” was wielded. For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies. In any case, the relationship between turmoil in the middle east and oil prices is far from straightforward. As Philip Auerswald recently noted in the American Interest, between 1981 and 1999 – a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged – oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world’s crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975, and President Bush used his 2006 state of the union address to announce his intention of cutting US oil imports from the middle east by three quarters by 2025.
Yes, it would be nice if Israelis and Palestinians could settle their differences, but it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the middle east from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shia, nor would it assuage the perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west that relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries.
Arab-Israeli catastrophism is wrong twice over, first because the conflict is contained within rather narrow boundaries, and second because the Levant is just not that important any more.
The second repeated mistake is the Mussolini syndrome. Contemporary documents prove beyond any doubt what is now hard to credit: serious people, including British and French military chiefs, accepted Mussolini’s claims to great power status because they believed that he had serious armed forces at his command. His army divisions, battleships and air squadrons were dutifully counted to assess Italian military power, making some allowance for their lack of the most modern weapons but not for their more fundamental refusal to fight in earnest. Having conceded Ethiopia to win over Mussolini, only to lose him to Hitler as soon as the fighting started, the British discovered that the Italian forces quickly crumbled in combat. It could not be otherwise, because most Italian soldiers were unwilling conscripts from the one-mule peasantry of the south or the almost equally miserable sharecropping villages of the north.
Exactly the same mistake keeps being made by the fraternity of middle east experts. They persistently attribute real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.
In the 1960s, it was Nasser’s Egypt that was mistaken for a real military power just because it had received many aircraft, tanks and guns from the Soviet Union, and had many army divisions and air squadrons. In May 1967, on the eve of war, many agreed with the prediction of Field Marshal Montgomery, then revisiting the El Alamein battlefield, that the Egyptians would defeat the Israelis forthwith; even the more cautious never anticipated that the former would be utterly defeated by the latter in just a few days. In 1973, with much more drama, it still took only three weeks to reach the same outcome.
In 1990 it was the turn of Iraq to be hugely overestimated as a military power. Saddam Hussein had more equipment than Nasser ever accumulated, and could boast of having defeated much more populous Iran after eight years of war. In the months before the Gulf war, there was much anxious speculation about the size of the Iraqi army – again, the divisions and regiments were dutifully counted as if they were German divisions on the eve of D-day, with a separate count of the “elite” Republican Guards, not to mention the “super-elite” Special Republican Guards – and it was feared that Iraq’s bombproof aircraft shelters and deep bunkers would survive any air attack.
That much of this was believed at some level we know from the magnitude of the coalition armies that were laboriously assembled, including 575,000 US troops, 43,000 British, 14,663 French and 4,500 Canadian, and which incidentally constituted the sacrilegious infidel presence on Arabian soil that set off Osama bin Laden on his quest for revenge. In the event, two weeks of precision bombing were enough to paralyse Saddam’s entire war machine, which scarcely tried to resist the ponderous ground offensive when it came. At no point did the Iraqi air force try to fight, and all those tanks that were painstakingly counted served mostly for target practice. A real army would have continued to resist for weeks or months in the dug-in positions in Kuwait, even without air cover, but Saddam’s army was the usual middle eastern façade without fighting substance.
Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran’s warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as “elite,” who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who have actually fought only one – against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran’s claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year’s affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.
Then there is the new light cavalry of Iranian terrorism that is invoked to frighten us if all else fails. The usual middle east experts now explain that if we annoy the ayatollahs, they will unleash terrorists who will devastate our lives, even though 30 years of “death to America” invocations and vast sums spent on maintaining a special international terrorism department have produced only one major bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, and two in the most permissive environment of Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994, along with some assassinations of exiles in Europe.
It is true enough that if Iran’s nuclear installations are bombed in some overnight raid, there is likely to be some retaliation, but we live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about – and Iran’s added contribution is not likely to leave much of an impression. There may be good reasons for not attacking Iran’s nuclear sites – including the very slow and uncertain progress of its uranium enrichment effort – but its ability to strike back is not one of them. Even the seemingly fragile tanker traffic down the Gulf and through the straits of Hormuz is not as vulnerable as it seems – Iran and Iraq have both tried to attack it many times without much success, and this time the US navy stands ready to destroy any airstrip or jetty from which attacks are launched.
As for the claim that the “Iranians” are united in patriotic support for the nuclear programme, no such nationality even exists. Out of Iran’s population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks (“Azeris” is the regime’s term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran’s 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards. If some 40 per cent of the British population were engaged in separatist struggles of varying intensity, nobody would claim that it was firmly united around the London government. On top of this, many of the Persian majority oppose the theocratic regime, either because they have become post-Islamic in reaction to its many prohibitions, or because they are Sufis, whom the regime now persecutes almost as much as the small Baha’i minority. So let us have no more reports from Tehran stressing the country’s national unity. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. In our times, multinational states either decentralise or break up more or less violently; Iran is not decentralising, so its future seems highly predictable, while in the present not much cohesion under attack is to be expected.
The third and greatest error repeated by middle east experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and by Iranists, is also the simplest to define. It is the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence (“the Arabs only understand force”) compliance will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen non-cooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behaviour.
Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.
The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they recognised that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history – the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.
That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts – excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world’s population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia’s 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.
Saudi Arabia has a good excuse, for it was a land of oasis hand-farmers and Bedouin pastoralists who cannot be expected to become captains of industry in a mere 50 years. Much more striking is the oil parasitism of once much more accomplished Iran. It exports only 2.5m barrels a day as compared to Saudi Arabia’s 8m, yet oil still accounts for 80 per cent of Iran’s exports because its agriculture and industry have become so unproductive.
The middle east was once the world’s most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN’s 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa) at just 63 per cent. Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire middle east generated under 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006 – less than Germany.
Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia – places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.
ISRAEL’S ARMY EYES FEMALE ROLE IN BATTLE
Israel’s army eyes female role in battle
The Associated Press
April 29, 2007
When Alice Miller petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court in 1995 to let her become an air force pilot, the country’s president, himself a famous airman in his younger days, laughingly compared women flying planes to men darning socks.
But the court ruled in her favor, opening combat jobs to women for the first time. One of them was Keren Tendler, a flight technician killed last summer when her helicopter was shot down by Hezbollah guerrillas over Lebanon.
The fighting Israeli woman soldier may endure as a stereotype, but in reality, a female death in combat is extremely rare. Save for isolated cases in the Jewish state’s 1948 war for independence, women traditionally were confined to clerical and support jobs. But things have changed, and now an army-appointed commission of academics and officers is studying whether to integrate the army’s last all-male preserve: infantry, armor and special forces.
Commission member Naomi Chazan, a prominent feminist and a former lawmaker, says the focus will be on “increasing the equality” of women in uniform – and that means admitting them to tank and infantry formations.
The move is not crucial for the army, Chazan said, but for Israeli women. The army plays a central role in Israel, Chazan said, and “If the army consciously creates inequality on any basis, these values get into Israeli society.”
But Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general, says such principles cannot drive military policy in a country that feels its national survival is at stake.
“As we’ve seen in other armies, gender integration causes sexual tension and is detrimental to combat performance, and it’s just not worth it,” Amidror said. “It’s not coincidental that throughout human history, men have done the fighting.”
Feminists might call his views old-fashioned, but they face a question: Do Israeli women even want to be on the front lines?
Lt. Col. Liora Rubinstein, a women’s affairs adviser to the military chief of staff, acknowledges that few women volunteer for combat units. Many are turned off by having to sign on for an extra year to serve in most combat jobs.
“My son does soccer and judo, and my daughter does ballet. But then we tell her: ‘Go to the army, be equal to the men, go ahead.’ But of course it doesn’t work like that,” Rubinstein said.
Lt. Sivan Ben-Ezra, 21, commands a platoon in a mixed-gender “light infantry” unit, currently the closest women can get to front-line infantry. She isn’t surprised more women aren’t interested in jobs like hers.
“We have girls who come for the boots and the cool uniform. Those girls don’t last,” she said.
All Israelis except Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews are drafted – men for three years, women for two.
Ben-Ezra’s unit is 70 percent female, and its main duty is to patrol Israel’s peaceful borders with Egypt and Jordan. Another mixed unit operates remote cameras and sensors to police the more sensitive Syrian and Lebanese borders, and women also serve in the border police and checkpoint units that maintain the occupation of the West Bank.
During last summer’s Lebanon conflict, a small number of women soldiers fired artillery shells and cluster bombs, served on navy vessels and flew combat sorties as pilots and weapons system operators. All told, around 1,500 women serve in combat jobs – some 2.5 percent of female conscripts, according to army figures.
The turning point was Miller’s Supreme Court petition, which provoked then-president Ezer Weizman to belittle her in a phone conversation as a “maidele,” Yiddish for a young girl, and ask if she could imagine a man darning socks. He later said the comment was in jest.
Miller, then 23, failed the flight school entrance exams, but the court ruling forced the army to open all jobs to women or present a good reason not to.
Some Orthodox Jews protested that mixing the sexes was immodest, and other Israelis voiced concerns that the public would not tolerate women being killed or falling captive. But even the grim circumstances of Tendler’s death last summer – rescue forces spent a day and a half in enemy territory searching for her body, then carried it on a stretcher back to Israel – did not draw calls to reverse the policy, suggesting it has won broad acceptance.
The military has taken the precaution of making strict separation of barracks and bathrooms mandatory, and many commanders bar all physical contact save for shaking hands and patting shoulders.
The reformers are inspired by Canada and several European nations which have integrated infantry units, and from the apparent easing of the U.S. military’s ban on women in ground combat.
Lory Manning, a retired U.S. Navy captain at the Virginia-based Women’s Research and Education Institute, said women have been quietly serving with U.S. ground combat forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and over 70 have died there.
“The consensus is that the women serving with these troops are doing very well,” said Manning.
Says feminist Chazan: “People ask me, do you really want your daughter to serve in a unit like that? Well, I want my daughter to be able to decide, just like your son.”
CONTENTS
1. Coming out of the closet as political activists
2. Palestinian journalists launch a “Free Alan Johnston” web site
3. Ken Livingstone pleads for Johnston’s release on Arab TV, praises Johnston as “friend of the Palestinian cause”
4. UK doctors call for boycott of Israeli Medical Association
5. “Palestinians attend a demonstration against violence in Gaza, April 23, 2007”
6. There was a ceasefire?
7. Palestinian murder of children ignored by international media
8. New terrorist organization in Iraq named in honor of Hamas
COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET AS POLITICAL ACTIVISTS
Following the recent British National Union of Journalists’ decision, more and more “news reporters” are declaring themselves to be political activists.
Here, for example, is a letter to The Guardian yesterday signed by 20 CNN, BBC and other journalists, led by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the most overrated news reporter of our time:
www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,2064046,00.html
Letters
The Guardian
Tuesday April 24, 2007
The world needs a tough arms treaty
Ten years ago the treaty to ban landmines was signed in Ottawa, Canada. As journalists who have seen the devastating impact of conflict first-hand, we applauded the agreement.
Today a more ambitious treaty is being developed at the United Nations: a global arms trade treaty to regulate sales of all conventional arms. The challenge is to build a strong treaty to stop arms transfers that are likely to fuel serious human rights violations, conflict and poverty.
It is time that all governments took responsibility for the individual tragedies perpetrated with the weapons they supply: the woman raped at gunpoint, the young man crushed under the tracks of a battle tank, the child forced to become a soldier.
Currently, the UN secretary general is asking governments what they want the arms trade treaty to cover. We call on all governments to listen to the millions of people around the world who live in daily fear of armed violence, and build a treaty tough enough to protect them.
Christiane Amanpour CNN
Martin Bell ex-BBC correspondent
Sebastian Junger Vanity Fair
Jon Lee Anderson The New Yorker
Don McCullin freelance photographer
Paul Moreira Canal Plus
Jon Snow Channel 4 News
Charles Wheeler ex-BBC correspondent
and 12 others
PALESTINIAN JOURNALISTS LAUNCH A “FREE ALAN JOHNSTON” WEB SITE
Almost everyone (apart from the BBC itself who don’t want to admit their anti-Israeli bias, since as a publicly-funded entity they are under a British legal obligation to be impartial) recognizes that kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, like many of those the BBC chooses to hire as news journalists, was a “friend of the Palestinians.”
Now Palestinian journalists have launched a “Free Alan Johnston” web site.
Among the comments on it from Palestinian journalists:
* Mohammad El Gomasy: “The Palestinian People love Alan Johnston.”
* Emad Al-Masri: “Free Alan! he is our friend.”
Of course, the BBC have yet to understand that coddling up to terrorists doesn’t buy you immunity when the terrorists have run out of other people to kidnap.
Thankfully, Johnston is almost certainly still alive despite reports that his kidnappers had executed him. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has told BBC Director-General Mark Thompson that an intermediary from the Palestinian security forces asked his kidnappers the name of Johnston’s cat to prove he had not been killed. They came back with the correct answer – Mombasa.
KEN LIVINGSTONE PLEADS FOR JOHNSTON’S RELEASE ON ARAB TV, PRAISES JOHNSTON AS “FRIEND OF THE PALESTINIAN CAUSE”
London mayor Ken Livingstone appeared on the Arabic-language al-Hiwar TV station on Monday night to call for the release of Alan Johnston. Livingstone said the capture of the BBC journalist was a “catastrophic miscalculation”.
“If you wanted to find a person whose abduction could damage the Palestinian cause, you couldn’t find anyone better to do the job,” Livingstone said of Johnston.
For more on Livingstone, see London Mayor Ken Livingstone may be Jewish: “I could be a self-hater, couldn’t I?” (Nov. 30, 2005).
UK DOCTORS CALL FOR BOYCOTT OF ISRAELI MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
Given the incredible amount Israeli doctors and scientists have achieved for the world in the field of medicine, medical research and innovative life-saving techniques (including for the benefit of the Palestinians), the new call by some British doctors to boycott Israeli ones beggars belief.
This letter by Dr Derek Summerfield, Professor Colin Green, Dr Ghada Karmi, Dr David Halpin, Dr Pauline Cutting and 125 other doctors, published in The Guardian, is part of a new campaign to expel Israel from the World Medical Association. It is the second letter here. (There are so many lies crammed into it that it would take half my day to dissect them.)
This comment about British journalists by a columnist in the Washington Post yesterday can equally be applied to those British doctors:
“The British journalists, like the academics before them, dare to tread where an army of goons has gone before. If they do not recognize the ember of anti-Semitism still glowing within them, they ought to park themselves before a mirror and ask why, of all the nations, they single out Israel for reprimand and obloquy. This business of assigning to Jews a special burden, for seeing in them more of mankind’s bad qualities and less of its good, has a dark and ugly pedigree: the Chosen People, again – and again in the wrong way.”
“PALESTINIANS ATTEND A DEMONSTRATION AGAINST VIOLENCE IN GAZA, APRIL 23, 2007”
Much of what is wrong with the international media’s coverage of the Middle East stems from the two big news agencies, the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters. Almost every major news outlet in the world subscribes to one or both of these agencies and gets much of their information, photographs and video footage from them.
Both the Palestinian and non-Palestinian employees of these agencies have opinions that are heavily slanted against Israel and cloud their coverage.
Look, for example, at the caption Reuters gave to these photos by one of its Gaza photographers, Ibraheem Abu Mustafa.
The caption, “Palestinians attend a demonstration against violence in Gaza April 23, 2007,” was almost certainly written not by the Gaza photographer but by a Reuters employee at their main office dealing with the Mideast, which is in London. And that employee was likely a member of Britain’s 40,000 member National Union of Journalists, who finally went public with their view of Israel earlier this month.
As American blogger Charles Johnson, who has emerged as one of the most astute commentators in the post-9/11 era, observes: “And to supersize the irony, notice the Nike ‘Just Do It’ t-shirt.”
THERE WAS A CEASEFIRE?
Meanwhile, virtually the entire world media yesterday reiterated the AP and Reuters lies that the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority had somehow been observing a truce with Israel.
For example, Reuters Gaza correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi started his piece: “Hamas’s armed wing broke a five-month ceasefire on Tuesday by firing rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip.”
And the BBC story, headlined “Hamas fighters end Israel truce,” began: “The armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement has said it is ending its five-month truce with Israel. Earlier in the day the group launched a sustained barrage of rockets and mortars into Israel, the first such attack since November.”
HonestReporting.com points out that while the western media insist that the Palestinians have maintained a “cease-fire” against Israel for the past five months, the following incidents have taken place so far this month alone:
* Islamic Jihad terrorist captured near Tel Aviv after his bomb belt fails to detonate
* Palestinian bride arrested on suspicion of planning to carry out suicide bombing
* 3 Israelis injured in shooting attack near Modi’in
* Hamas calls for further kidnappings of Israeli soldiers
* Israeli cars shot at in West Bank
* Israeli civilian wounded in West Bank drive-by shooting
* Arrests prevent huge Hamas-planned car bomb in Tel Aviv
* Egypt arrests would-be Hamas suicide bomber near Israeli border
* Palestinian rockets hit Sderot home; several Israelis treated for shock
This website has been meticulous in documenting the ongoing rocket attacks into Israel during the supposed ceasefire.
Britain’s Sky News claimed in their headline this morning that “Hamas broke the ceasefire by firing rockets at Israeli settlements.” But the rockets were not fired at settlements, but at towns in southern Israel. For the benefit of Sky viewers, all Israeli settlements in Gaza have been removed.
For more on Reuters, see here.
PALESTINIAN MURDER OF CHILDREN IGNORED BY INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
At the same time, the media continue to ignore the ongoing violence inside Gaza, since Israel could not be blamed for it.
For example, on Monday night a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was killed as Palestinian gunmen traded fire with each other.
Also on Monday, in a separate incident, a 5-year-old girl suffered serious head wounds when she was hit by another stray bullet.
Also on Monday, in central Gaza, masked gunmen shot a pharmacist and his son, wounding them.
Three Palestinians were hurt in an explosion Monday at a Hamas terrorist’s home, near the Gaza beach. The explosion was triggered by the mishandling of explosives inside the home. Three of the man’s fingers were severed as a result of the misuse of explosives, notes the Palestinian-run Maan news agency: www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=21474
On Sunday night, another Palestinian boy was shot dead by his abductors in the northern Gaza Strip:
www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=21468
NEW TERRORIST ORGANIZATION IN IRAQ NAMED IN HONOR OF HAMAS
A new terrorist organization in Iraq has been named in honor of Hamas.
This Wikipedia entry mentions it, although it is not 100 percent accurate.
According to specialist sources researched exclusively for this website. Hamas of Iraq was in fact founded on March 26, 2007, to mark four years of “American occupation”: www.ikhwan.net/vb/showthread.php?t=30234
Their “military wing” provides information on its attacks and its philosophy here (www.kataeb20.net/index.php) and promises more clips and videos soon, such as an interview with the head of their “missile section”.
It is unclear from their statements whether they have any organizational contacts with Palestinian Hamas. Nevertheless they seem to adopt Hamas’s strategy and speak in admiration of Hamas’s “success” through terrorism.
-- Tom Gross
* Abbas hails Chirac as a “great man”
* Robert Redeker remains in hiding
CONTENTS
1. The French go to the polls
2. Ramallah to name street after outgoing President Chirac
3. “What was once unthinkable in France has already come to pass”
4. “The Redeker Affair” (Commentary magazine, Jan. 2007)
5. “France’s new surrender” (New York Sun, April 11, 2007)
The spate of anti-Semitic attacks France has witnessed during the Chirac years is also continuing. For example, on Wednesday a French rabbi, Elie Dahan, was attacked in a Paris train station, the Gare du Nord. Dahan needed brief hospital treatment for his injuries. The police have yet to make any arrests.
“WHAT WAS ONCE UNTHINKABLE IN FRANCE HAS ALREADY COME TO PASS”
I attach two articles below.
The first concerns the French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker, who remains in hiding with his wife and three children because of an article he wrote in Le Figaro last year critical of Islam. (Redeker’s article was linked to in the first note in this dispatch.)
Redeker and his family have had to move from city to city, from secret location to secret location at their own expense, under police protection.
In the piece below on the “Redeker Affair”, Christian Delacampagne, a professor of French literature and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, writes that: “Today in France, research on the most contested issues of race and religion is taboo unless one exhibits the ‘right’ politics.” As a result he concludes “things have changed. What was once unthinkable in France has already come to pass.”
He also writes that “the growing anti-Semitism one encounters in France, combined with the increasing tendency of the country’s elite to speak of Israel as a ‘temporary’ state, is not only dangerous in itself but bad for France.”
The second article is by Anthony Grant, an assistant Internet editor at “France 24,” the new French 24-hour news channel. Grant writes that neither the murder of Ilan Halimi nor the recent attack on a Jewish cemetery was covered on France 24.
“The Web site, France24.com, receives so many anti-Semitic hate mails that the editors have considered eliminating user reactions to news items altogether.”
-- Tom Gross
FRANCE’S NEW SURRENDER
France’s new surrender
By Anthony Grant
The New York Sun
April 11, 2007
www.nysun.com/article/52226?page_no=1
This time, it’s cultural.
Proud, cocky France has given up yet again, and on two fronts at once: an all-Arabic version of the cable news network that is mostly government-funded, France 24, launched this week, and the ink is barely dry on an agreement France signed with Abu Dhabi to open a branch of the Louvre in that desert emirate.
These developments are not unrelated. Which one underscores more the deep malaise affecting the French nation is debatable, but clearly France is in no mood to put up a fight for things taken rather more seriously in centuries past, such as preserving a sense of national identity.
The very launch of France 24, a 24-hour news network meant to rival CNN and hailed by some in France, albeit prematurely, as punching its equivalent in French weight, is indicative of a nation adrift.
After all, CNN has been broadcasting for a quarter century now, and while that network ushered in the era of news around the clock, the French resisted hopping on the headline highway until they realized just how irrelevant France was beginning to look in the mirror of a globalized society in the 21st century. Clinging to the notion that the French language towers above all others didn’t help either, but broadcasting France 24 in French as well as English and Arabic was supposed to help.
Maybe that’s laudable. After all, as the propaganda that passes for news on Al Jazeera gains in popularity around the world, wouldn’t it be better to know that Arabic audiences are getting their facts on, say, the Middle East peace process from a newsroom in Paris rather than Qatar?
On the other hand, will the millions of Muslims living in France tune in to the news in French and Arabic, or stick with what many of them already know best – Arabic news not from France? The former would only be bad – France’s Muslim communities are already largely cut off from mainstream French society, as the nationwide riots in 2005 so jarringly demonstrated.
The addition of France 24 in Arabic risks making things worse. The Muslims who speak French might watch both stations, but the majority of France does not speak Arabic and thus will not watch the Arabic version of the newscast. The editorial line-up for the network is supposed to be the same regardless of language, but where linguistic fault lines begin, societal fractures often follow.
This is happening in a climate of ambient anti-Semitism and political correctness that permits attacks against Jews to be carried out with more frequency than any nation that collaborated with the Nazis and claims to have atoned for it. There was the brutal torture and murder last year of Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian singled out because he was Jewish. He was reburied earlier this year in Israel. On March 31, another Jewish cemetery was desecrated, this time in the northern city of Lille. Neither event – the Halimi reburial or cemetery attack – was covered on France 24, in any language. How do I know that? I work there. The Web site, France24.com, receives so many anti-Semitic hate mails that the editors have considered eliminating user reactions to news items altogether.
In the meantime, thanks to an agreement signed last month between France’s minister of culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and the authorities in Abu Dhabi, that emirate will now be able to borrow the name “Louvre” for their new branch of it in exchange for about a billion euro. It will also be able to borrow hundreds of works of art, which will find their way into a huge orb-shaped satellite of the Louvre Museum branch that is to be built soon on an artificial island in Abu Dhabi.
This would be much less interesting were the Louvre a private museum like the Guggenheim, which has plans for an Abu Dhabi satellite as well. But the Louvre is publicly funded, and arguably more emblematic of Paris and France than the Eiffel Tower. Mr. De Vabres, unsurprisingly, has hailed the deal as a bridging of cultures, but only a fool could believe him.
Economic indicators looking dicey? Who needs hard work and market reform? Just sell off the Louvre.
In a very real sense it’s a fait accompli. And assuming that cultural bridges like other bridges go both ways, France can look forward to any number of cultural contributions from a country that doesn’t hold elections for any public office, where migrant workers – the kind who’ll be building the Louvre-by-the-bay – are confined to labor camps, and dissent of any kind is silenced effectively.
And of course, France can look forward to all those euro, some of which may even find their way into the subsidies that underwrite France 24 and its latest mission to reach out to the Arab world.
This might all sound bizarre, but this isn’t the first time France has cozied up to folks most everyone else seems to have rightly assessed as enemies or those who might too readily sympathize with the enemy. In the past, such behavior has only left France weaker on the world stage, and perhaps less obviously, weaker from within.
* “Israeli melons have AIDS”
* BBC postpones its “Weddings and Beheadings” “comedy”
* Hate-filled UK journalist: Israel probably murdered Alan Johnston
CONTENTS
1. Israeli Holocaust survivor named as hero of Va. Tech shootings
2. Guardian editor condemns UK journalists’ call to boycott Israel
3. Published on The New York Times letters page
4. 200,000 Turks call for secular state guarantee
5. Israeli photographer wins Pulitzer Prize for picture of settler
6. BBC: “Weddings and Beheadings” postponed
7. Hate-filled UK journalist: Israel probably murdered Alan Johnston
8. Reporter’s captors want $5m. ransom
9. Obsession with Alan Johnston: what about Parnaz Azima?
10. “Death to America” on the BBC
11. Holland says no to Hamas
12. Israelis shot: almost no reporting outside Israel
13. Palestinian guards beat journalists
14. Christian bookstore, Internet cafes bombed in Gaza
15. “Israeli melons have AIDS”
16. DiCaprio to be daddy-o
17. “Guardian editor condemns U.K. journalists’ call to boycott Israel” (Ha’aretz, April 18, 2007)
18. “UK reporters in Israel ignore boycott” (Jerusalem Post, April 17, 2007)
19. “Brothers and sisters, I’m off” (By Michael Gove, UK Times, April 18, 2007)
ISRAELI HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR NAMED AS HERO OF VA. TECH SHOOTINGS
A Romanian-born Holocaust survivor has been widely praised for his heroic role during the massacre at Virginia Tech university on Monday, when South Korean-born native Cho Seung-hui shot 32 people dead.
Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, an Israeli who taught engineering at Virginia Tech, used his body to block the door, allowing himself to be repeatedly shot while giving time for other students to escape by opening windows and jumping out.
Many of Librescu’s students have sent thankful e-mails to his wife, and to his son in Israel, explaining how he gave his life to save their lives. By coincidence, he was murdered on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
His body is being returned to Israel for burial. Even papers usually hostile to anything Israeli have praised Librescu. For example, the front page of the Independent of London (the paper of Robert Fisk) says today: “The Hero: Brilliant professor who escaped Holocaust died saving his students.”
GUARDIAN EDITOR CONDEMNS UK JOURNALISTS’ CALL TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL
This is a follow-up to: For first time, British journalists officially vote to boycott Israeli goods (April 14, 2007).
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the (London) Guardian, has condemned the British journalists’ resolution. “The Guardian disapproves of these kinds of boycotts and does not think they serve a useful purpose. It was a misguided motion,” he said.
For more on Rusbridger, and his comparisons between Israel and “apartheid,” see “New Prejudices for Old”.
Another “senior British journalist” told Ha’aretz that the motion was “an embarrassment for us all.” For more, see the first article attached below.
The second article below, from the Jerusalem Post, reports that the motion is “being ignored by Israel-based UK journalists.” The Sky News Jerusalem bureau chief told the Post: “I can speak for everyone working for Sky News [here] and none of us will be boycotting any time in the near future.” I am among the journalists quoted in this article.
The third article below is by celebrated British commentator Michael Gove, a founder member of this email list seven years ago, who says today in the London Times that he will now quit the journalists’ union.
The union has a membership of nearly 40,000 British journalists, who work in all the leading media outlets in the UK. The last time they made such a politically controversial move was in 1986, when its delegate conference sent a “telegram of condolence” to Colonel Muammar Gadhafi after the U.S. bombing of Libya.
PUBLISHED ON THE NEW YORK TIMES LETTERS PAGE
This is a rare occasion when The New York Times publishes a letter that hits the nail on the head:
New York Times
April 12, 2007
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
David Brooks reports that “moderate Arab reformers” have traced the problems in Iraq, Iran and other Middle East hot spots to a country roughly the size of Massachusetts that dominates the affairs of its Arab neighbors and operates a puppet government in Washington as well.
O.K., but what do the hard-liners think?
Michael Smith
Cynthiana, Ky.
200,000 TURKS CALL FOR SECULAR STATE GUARANTEE
There are of course moderates in the Middle East, notably in Turkey and Iran. On Saturday, over 200,000 Turks gathered in the country’s capital, Ankara, to voice their opposition to the possibility that the ruling Justice and Development Party will select Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to be its candidate for president. The protestors said they feared Erdogan’s Muslim background and the Islamist nature of his party could push modern Turkey away from its secular origins if he is elected. Modern Turkey was established a century ago as a secular state by its founding father Kamal Ataturk.
ISRAELI PHOTOGRAPHER WINS PULITZER PRIZE FOR PICTURE OF SETTLER
Oded Balilty, an Israeli photographer working for the Associated Press, won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography on Monday. Balilty’s prize-winning photo shows a lone Jewish settler trying to resist eviction from the West Bank settlement outpost of Amona by Israeli security forces on Feb. 1, 2006. About 200 Jewish settlers were wounded during the demolition of nine Jewish homes at the site.
The photo can be viewed here.
BBC: “WEDDINGS AND BEHEADINGS” POSTPONED
Has the BBC been mugged by reality? With claims by Palestinian Islamic terrorists in Gaza that they have executed BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, the BBC appears to be toughening up on its usual almost sympathetic attitude to Muslim terrorism.
BBC radio was planning to broadcast tomorrow what the BBC had described as a comedy, titled “Weddings and Beheadings,” about an Iraqi cameraman who earns his income filming the beheadings of hostages.
Apparently now that one of their own has possibly been beheaded, the BBC no longer finds the subject funny, and the BBC Radio web site now says the “broadcast has been postponed.” (See: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_reading.shtml)
But will this sudden reality check prove merely temporary, as a similar reality check did after the London transport bombings of 2005? (See: www.tomgrossmedia.com/BBCDiscoversTerrorism.html)
(For more on “Weddings and Beheadings” see: www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7916)
HATE-FILLED UK JOURNALIST: ISRAEL PROBABLY MURDERED ALAN JOHNSTON
This is an update to previous mentions on this list of kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston.
Johnston, 44, was abducted by gunmen in Gaza City on March 12 and has not been seen or heard from since then. On Sunday, a Palestinian Islamist group, “The Brigades of Tawheed and Jihad,” said it had killed Johnston to support demands for the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. But Palestinian officials have said they could not confirm the claim.
Now Alan Hart, a former reporter for ITN and BBC in the UK, has been the first of the anti-Israeli British media to make the incredible allegation that Israel killed Johnston. Hart writes on his blog:
“Alan was not only the BBC’s man… he was the best and most informed provider of news about the Palestinian side of the story; a story which, in many of its details, is an embarrassment to Israel and those governments, most notably the Bush and Blair regimes, which support Israel’s efforts to break the will of the Palestinians to continue their struggle.
“... There is a case for saying (repeat a case) that the party with most to gain from Alan Johnston’s permanent disappearance was Israel… If Alan Johnston is dead, it’s my hope that the BBC at executive management level will rise above its fear of offending Zionism too much and allow its reporters (Frank Gardner and Jeremy Bowen are second to none) to make a full, thorough and honest investigation.”
Tom Gross adds: Even among the multitude of partisan journalists against Israel, Alan Hart, is one of the most hate-filled. A former correspondent for ITN’s News At Ten and the BBC’s Panorama program, he has never ceased to attack Israel. His latest book is “Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.”
Hart joins other conspiracy theorists who blame Israel and / or “the Jews” for everything from the Asian Tsunami, to starting the Second World War.
REPORTER’S CAPTORS WANT $5M RANSOM
Yesterday, the leading London-based Saudi-owned daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Alan Johnston’s captors are demanding $5 million for his release. (This fact has been known to me for over a month but I had been asked to refrain from making it public by British officials. It has now been widely reported this morning in the British and Israeli press.)
This renewed demand for ransom contradicts unconfirmed reports that he has been killed.
As reported previously on this email list / website, last year Fox news paid $2 million to obtain the release of its two kidnapped employees in Gaza. Fox news has vigorously denied paying any ransom, but the fact that $2 million in cash in a suitcase was taken by third parties acting on behalf of Fox news from Israel into Gaza in order to secure their release, has been confirmed to me by both Palestinian and Israeli officials.
OBSESSION WITH ALAN JOHNSTON: WHAT ABOUT PARNAZ AZIMA?
While we should all be concerned about Johnston’s well being, the enormous coverage granted to his plight on the BBC, CNN International, al Jazeera and Sky News, contrasts greatly with the almost complete lack of coverage by the BBC and others about an American journalist who is being held against her will in Teheran.
Radio Farda broadcaster Parnaz Azima, who has dual American and Iranian nationality, arrived in the Iranian capital on January 25th in order to visit a family member who is sick, and immediately had her passport confiscated.
Yesterday, Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi called upon the Iranian authorities to return Azima’s passport.
Azima is a broadcaster with Radio Farda, the Persian-language service run jointly by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Voice of America.
President Jeffrey Gedmin (who is a subscriber to this email list) has called on the Iranian authorities to allow Azima to leave “without further delay.”
“DEATH TO AMERICA” ON THE BBC
It is interesting to learn of the personal background of the kind of journalist that the BBC – which as a publicly funded institution is under a British legal requirement to broadcast balanced and impartial news coverage – employs as a leading foreign correspondent.
See, for example, the opening paragraphs here, of its new series “Death to America: Anti-Americanism examined”.
Needless to say, the BBC fails to mention its own central role in stoking anti-Americanism with its highly selective and one-sided reporting in dozens of languages throughout the world.
HOLLAND SAYS NO TO HAMAS
While other European Union countries are beginning to cooperate with the new Hamas-led Palestinian unity government, despite its extremist positions, the Dutch have announced that Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya will be refused entry to participate in a “Palestinians in Europe” conference in Rotterdam on May 5, 2007.
Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said Haniya should not bother to apply for a visa, since his application would be rejected. “We consider Hamas, to which Haniya is affiliated, a terrorist group,” he said.
The Dutch have significantly toughened up their position on Hamas, although the left-wing Dutch Labor Party, a member of the coalition, is urging a rethink of the policy of not speaking with Hamas.
The date chosen for the conference, Saturday 5th May, is particularly significant in Holland as it has been designated “Freedom Day”, marking the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of Holland from Nazi occupation.
ISRAELIS SHOT: ALMOST NO REPORTING OUTSIDE ISRAEL
Yesterday the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – a constituent part of “moderate” Palestinian President Abbas’s Fatah party – claimed responsibility for a shooting attack in the morning that injured four Israeli civilians in the West Bank, including a 30-year-old pregnant woman and another woman, 25, who were waiting at a hitchhiking post.
Barely any western media bothered to report this.
PALESTINIAN GUARDS BEAT JOURNALISTS
Yesterday security guards at the Palestinian parliament beat with rifle butts Palestinian journalists who were demonstrating in support of kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, pushing back reporters and beating at least two of them.
About 200 journalists had gathered outside the building, seeking information about Johnston. When journalists tried to enter parliament to talk to lawmakers about the case, the guards violently pushed them back and barred them from entering.
This was reported in places like America and China, for example here in the Miami Herald: “Palestinian Guards Beat Journalists,” (April 17, 2007); and here in the China People’s Daily: “Palestinian police repress BBC reporter solidarity rally,” (April 17, 2007).
But it was almost unreported in Europe. For example, neither the BBC nor the Guardian mentioned this development. No doubt they don’t want to paint the Palestinian Authority in a bad light.
CHRISTIAN BOOKSTORE, INTERNET CAFES BOMBED IN GAZA
Three explosions in Gaza City at around 3 a.m. on April 15, damaged two Internet cafes and a Christian bookstore. The “vice squad” of Muslim militants called “Swords of Truth,” are believed to be behind the attacks.
Many Christian bibles were burned in the explosion. Some 3,000 Christians live among 1.5 million Muslims in Gaza.
In recent months, about three dozen Internet cafes and shops selling pop music have been attacked in Gaza, with assailants detonating small bombs outside businesses at night, causing damage but no injuries.
“ISRAELI MELONS HAVE AIDS”
“Beware of Israeli melons infected with AIDS arriving in Saudi Arabia!” is the latest rumor being spread by SMS throughout Saudi Arabia.
The text message reads: “The Saudi Interior Ministry warns its citizens of a truck loaded with AIDS-infected melons that Israel brought into the country via a ‘ground corridor.’”
The Saudi Interior Ministry have denied making such an announcement, and the head of the center for chemicals and toxins in Mecca, Dr Ahmad Elias, also stressed that spreading the HIV virus via melons was a scientific impossibility.
Nevertheless, the rumor is continuing to spread like wildfire, according to sources in Saudi Arabia. It has also gained widespread attention in the Arab world and was on the front page of Asharq Al-Awsat, one of the leading Saudi and pan-Arab newspapers.
DICAPRIO TO BE DADDY-O
The UK’s second bestselling newspaper, The Mirror, reports that Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli are expecting a baby in the fall, preceded by June nuptials in Israel. Others have denied the report.
The two have been dating for 15 months, and recently sent the Israeli press into a frenzy when DiCaprio visited the quiet Tel Aviv suburb of Hod Hasharon to meet Rafaeli’s family. The Dan Accadia Herzliya Hotel has been contacted about staging the wedding, according to the Mirror.
* For the Mirror report, see: www.mirror.co.uk/showbiz/3am/tm_headline=caprio-to-be-a-daddio&method=full&objectid=18892315&siteid=89520-name_page.html
* For more on DiCaprio, see: the eleventh note in the dispatch Chirac “secretly urged Israel to topple Assad” (& 28% of Israeli Arabs say Holocaust is a myth) (March 19, 2007).
-- Tom Gross
GUARDIAN EDITOR: “IT WAS A MISGUIDED MOTION”
Guardian editor condemns U.K. journalists’ call to boycott Israel
By Charlotte Halle
Ha’aretz
April 18, 2007
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/849987.html
The editor of the London Guardian on Tuesday condemned as “misguided” a resolution passed by a British journalists’ union last week that called for a boycott of Israeli goods.
“The Guardian disapproves of these kinds of boycotts and does not think they serve a useful purpose. It was a misguided motion,” editor of the British daily Alan Rusbridger told Ha’aretz by telephone last night.
On Friday, at its annual meeting, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the UK voted for a boycott of Israeli goods in protest of last year’s Lebanon war and Israeli “aggression” in the territories.
The vote, which carried 66 to 54, read: “This ADM [annual delegate meeting] calls for a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions and the TUC [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions to be imposed on Israel by the British government,” according to reports in the British press. It followed an earlier motion, which was passed by a larger majority, condemning the “savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon by Israel” last year and the “slaughter of civilians by Israeli troops in Gaza and the IDF’s continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hezbollah.”
The union has a membership of nearly 40,000 British journalists, who work in all the leading media outlets in the UK.
“My guess is that the majority of working journalists would feel very uneasy and hostile to the motion which was published in their names,” one senior British journalist told Ha’aretz. “It’s just an embarrassment for us all,” said another.
Members of the Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel discussed Tuesday at their annual general meeting whether to submit a formal response to the NUJ, said the organization’s chairman Simon McGregor-Wood, of ABC News, who is British. “The resolutions seem to go against some of the core ethics of journalism that we are here to protect, such as balance and objectivity. I don’t think any representative body of journalists should be taking a side,” he said.
Much of Tuesday’s FPA meeting was devoted to discussing further demonstrations to protest the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, thought to have been forced from his Gaza apartment by masked men on March 12.
It is not the first time the NUJ has made political moves likely to be out of sync with its membership. In 1986 its delegate conference sent a “telegram of condolence” to Colonel Muammar Gadhafi after the U.S. bombing of Libya, a book about the 100-year-old union recalls.
The British journalists’ union boycott follows a short-lived academic boycott a year ago by Britain’s university lecturers’ union, which was overturned four days after it passed. The Church of England synod has also called for disinvestment from Israel.
Zvi Heifetz, Israel’s ambassador in London, commented on the NUJ motion to Ha’aretz: “It is a shame that an organization that represents journalists threatens to boycott goods from Israel only one day after worrying rumors surfaced about the fate of one of the union’s own members. The timing of this move is also peculiar in light of the recent bi-weekly meetings between PM Olmert and President Abbas and the attempts made by the Arab world and Israel to revive the peace process, based on the Saudi initiative.”
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said: “We obviously view such activity negatively, but I wouldn’t overstate the significance of this event.”
BRITISH REPORTERS IN ISRAEL SPEAK OUT ON BOYCOTT
UK reporters in Israel ignore boycott
By Yaniv Salama-Scheer
The Jerusalem Post
April 17, 2007
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1176152819433&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
A motion to boycott Israeli goods that was passed by Britain’s National Union of Journalists on Friday is being ignored by Israel-based UK journalists.
Most British correspondents working in Israel and the Palestinian Authority are not members of the NUJ. One who is, Donald Macintyre of The Independent, said he did not know anything about the union’s actions until he read it in the Israeli media.
“The job of the NUJ is to protect journalists and not adopt political postures, Right or Left,” Macintyre told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. “It certainly won’t affect my job or my professional outlook.”
“We are here to report on Israel as well as the Palestinians. If they [the NUJ] want to get involved in Middle East issues, they should join the brave campaign for [kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent] Alan Johnston by the brave Palestinian journalists supporting him,” he said.
The BBC’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Simon Wilson, said Johnston’s situation was far more important and pressing than the boycott call. “I have a missing journalist in Gaza,” he said. “I have no time for anything else. Besides, [the boycott] is not something we would comment on.”
British TV’s Sky News Jerusalem bureau chief, Yael Lavie, told the Post: “I can speak for everyone working for Sky News [here] and none of us will be boycotting any time in the near future.”
The boycott, approved in a 66-54 vote at the National Union of Journalists’ annual delegates meeting, is intended to protest Israel’s “military adventures” in the Gaza Strip and its “savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer.
Its language would appear to require that union members here be restricted to the PA territories so they do not contribute to the Israeli economy.
“If that is the case, the boycott is absolutely ridiculous, but I can’t even say if that’s what they are in fact calling for because I haven’t been sent a text of the motion,” a Jerusalem-based British journalist said.
The motion was stoutly defended by the NUJ’s public relations director, Tim Gopsill. He told the Post: “Who can condemn the NUJ’s boycott when the EU and USA are boycotting the Palestinians and leading to worse economic situations for those in the [PA] territories? Members’ sympathies lie with the people in Palestinian areas.”
Gopsill blamed the Palestinian economic situation for Johnston’s kidnapping. “Taking Alan Johnston [captive],” he said, “demonstrates the Palestinians’ desperate way of drawing attention to their problems.”
NUJ member Toby Harnden, the Daily Telegraph’s Washington reporter and a former Jerusalem correspondent, called the boycott “insulting to the intelligence,” adding, “This kind of thing is what gives British trade unions their loony Left image.”
Tom Gross, a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, said British trade unions had taken a fashionably left-turn in their views over the past few years, echoing the positions taken by the “international Left” in targeting Israel.
“With Britain as the base for influential international media such as the BBC, Financial Times, Economist magazine and Reuters news agency, British media lies about Israel have ramifications far beyond Britain,” he said. “If British journalists really want to boycott Israeli goods, they better give up their desktop and notebook computers and their mobile phones, all of which have components developed and manufactured in Israel.”
Opponents of the boycott have asked in various Web postings why Israel is being targeted by journalists who should be working without restrictions or preconception, and/or why other countries and regimes are not being similarly boycotted. Notably, some critics wrote, despite the Johnston kidnapping, there has been no move to boycott the PA.
Other Web postings, meanwhile, have endorsed the action, some praising it as similar to an NUJ boycott of apartheid-era South Africa.
MICHAEL GOVE QUITS NUJ
Brothers and sisters, I’m off
By Michael Gove
The Times (London)
April 18, 2007
I have been a member of a trade union for nearly 20 years now. The union to which I belong, the National Union of Journalists, kept me fed and watered when I was a young trainee and out on strike. I was grateful for the support and camaraderie of its members and appreciated the virtues of solidarity. As time has worn on I’ve kept faith with the union because it kept me going at a difficult time.
With the benefit of hindsight I realise that the strike for which I came out in support was mishandled. Better men and women than I, with much more to lose, lost it in a vain struggle. Yet they made those sacrifices in defence of a principle in which they believed, and they thought that their actions would protect younger journalists like me most. So it would have been more than churlish to fail to respect their sacrifice.
But now, reluctantly, I fear that I will have to part company with the union, even as I continue to respect the men and women who went out on strike, in its name, in Aberdeen nearly two decades ago. Because the NUJ recently passed a motion at its conference calling for a boycott.
This boycott is not of a repressive state that outlaws free expression (of which, sadly, there are still too many) but of one of the few states in the Middle East with a proper free press: Israel.
The NUJ exists to defend, among other virtues, freedom of speech. That virtue is better defended in Israel than in any other nation of the Middle East and it comes under assault daily from forces driven by fanaticism.
Now is a time, for all sorts of reasons, for showing solidarity with those defending democracy in that region, not for passing on the other side of the road. So, with no little sadness, I feel that I have to leave.
* Leading Arab-Israeli: “The Holocaust is the greatest crime in the history of the world”
* Controversially, Daniel Pearl honored with Holocaust victims in Miami
* British teachers drop the Holocaust “to avoid offending Muslims”
* Lawsuit to German government: Recognize 2nd generation as Holocaust victims. Children of survivors plan to file class action demanding German government recognize traumas caused by childhoods in shadow of the Holocaust
Israel is today holding its annual Holocaust memorial day. With Holocaust denial increasing around the world, especially by those in the Middle East and their supporters elsewhere who wish to cause another Holocaust, knowledge about the Holocaust and contemporary anti-Semitism form an important background to understanding Middle Eastern current affairs.
CONTENTS
1. Auschwitz death toll was higher, UK government archives reveal
2. Israel marks Holocaust Day
3. Leading Arab-Israeli: “The Holocaust is the greatest crime in the history of the world”
4. Vatican ambassador reverses decision to shun Holocaust remembrance
5. Daniel Pearl honored with Holocaust victims in Miami
6. Anti-Semitic attacks in Chicago, Lille and Montreal
7. Anti-Semitic incidents worldwide doubled in 2006
8. German town strips Hitler of honorary citizenship just before G8 summit
9. Seychelles restaurant displays Nazi bank notes
10. Anti-Semitic South Korean children’s book withdrawn
11. UK schools dropping the Holocaust from history lessons
12. DePaul University to honor Norman Finkelstein with tenure
13. David Irving, visiting Auschwitz, denies gas chambers
14. Cancer risk up to 9 times greater for Holocaust survivors
15. Lawsuit: Recognize 2nd generation as Holocaust victims
16. Irena Sendlerowa, 97, Kansas school kids and “Life in a Jar”
17. “Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims” (S. Mail, April 2, 2007)
18. “Saved from scraps, music of the camps” (S. Telegraph, April 1, 2007)
19. “I’m no hero, says woman who saved 2,500 ghetto children” (Guardian, March 15, 2007)
20. Poland to mark little-known Nazi camp (Associated Press, March 16, 2007)
AUSCHWITZ DEATH TOLL WAS HIGHER, UK GOVERNMENT ARCHIVES REVEAL
[Note by Tom Gross]
The release by the British government National Archives of a chilling, hand-written confession letter by Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss, strongly suggests that the death toll at Auschwitz was two million, not 1.5 million as previously thought, reports the (London) Jewish Chronicle in a front-page article.
Hoss’s letter was neatly written out and counter-signed by his British jailer. He matter of factly states that he “personally arranged on the instructions of Himmler in May 1941, the gassing of two million persons, between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943, during which time I was commandant of Auschwitz.”
In an accompanying note, British officials say that the confession was written entirely voluntarily. Hoss was later executed by the Polish authorities.
ISRAEL MARKS HOLOCAUST DAY
The State of Israel is today honoring the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis.
The ceremonies started last night, when six elderly Holocaust survivors living in Israel were asked to light the memorial torches in front of gathered dignitaries, including Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Acting President Dalia Itzik, scores of ambassadors from around the world, and hundreds of Holocaust survivors who were sitting in the front rows.
The stories of these six survivors can be viewed here.
This morning at 10 am, the whole of Israel came to a standstill for two minutes. All television and radio stations suspended broadcast and cars stopped in mid-travel while passengers got out to stand in the street in silence. All places of entertainment in Israel are closed today.
CNN International showed Israelis observing the two minutes silence without commentary live at 10 am Israel time. The BBC (unsurprisingly) ignored it.
Over 200,000 Holocaust survivors are thought to be still living in Israel, about one-third of them in poverty, according to recent welfare reports. The insufficient help given to these impoverished survivors by the Israeli government and by the often wealthy official Jewish charities, particularly by the Claims Conference, has been disgraceful.
LEADING ARAB-ISRAELI: “THE HOLOCAUST IS THE GREATEST CRIME IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD”
This morning, Arab-Israeli Member of the Knesset Ahmed Tibi (who was previously viewed as an extremist when he served as chief advisor to Yasser Arafat) said that “the Holocaust is the greatest crime in the history of the world.” Those that deny or downplay the Holocaust, including in the Islamic world, must be condemned, he added.
For more on Arab-Israeli views of the Holocaust, see
* Chirac “secretly urged Israel to topple Assad” (& 28% of Israeli Arabs say Holocaust is a myth) (March 19, 2007)
* The Holocaust’s Arab heroes (& Polish righteous Gentile recommended for Nobel Prize) (Oct. 11, 2006).
VATICAN AMBASSADOR REVERSES DECISION TO SHUN HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE
The Vatican Ambassador to Israel, Monsignor Antonio Franco, at the last moment reversed a decision to boycott last night’s Holocaust memorial services in Jerusalem.
The decision to attend follows a ferocious row over the Vatican’s failure to acknowledge its passivity and the active role taken by some Roman Catholic leaders in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust memorial authorities at Yad Vashem said it would have marked the first time in which a foreign emissary deliberately skipped the ceremony, which was attended by many other ambassadors and foreign dignitaries.
There is growing controversy over the Vatican’s plans to beatify the wartime Pope Pius XII, who remained deliberately silent as Jews, including those of Rome, were being murdered in the Holocaust.
When he was elected pope in 1939, Pius XII shelved a letter against racism and anti-Semitism that his predecessor had prepared. In December 1942, he abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the pope watched passively.
In Croatia, Slovakia and elsewhere Roman Catholic priests actively participated with the Nazis in the slaughter of Jews.
Many in Israel are calling for the Jewish state to break off diplomatic relations with the Vatican if the Vatican makes Pope Pius XII a saint as it plans to later this year or next.
Franco, who took up his position in Jerusalem last year, said his previous decision not to attend yesterday evening’s official state ceremony was a “personal” one, and not made by his superiors at the Vatican.
DANIEL PEARL HONORED WITH HOLOCAUST VICTIMS IN MIAMI
Slain Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl was yesterday included on the Holocaust Memorial Wall in Miami Beach. His is the first name of 30,000 on the wall that was not killed in the Holocaust.
Pearl was forced to say “I am a Jew” before being decapitated by his killers, who included an upper-middle class British-born Muslim.
His father, Judea Pearl (who is a subscriber to this email list), said his son died for the same reasons as the six million Jews that were killed. “The forces of barbarity and evil are still active in our world. The Holocaust didn’t finish in 1945.”
Renowned violinist Ida Haendel, played during the ceremony in Miami yesterday. Pearl was a classically trained violinist.
A movie starring Angelina Jolie based on the memoirs of Pearl’s widow, Mariane, is scheduled to be released this year.
Holocaust victims and survivors were also honored during the ceremony. There are nearly 3,800 Holocaust survivors still alive in Miami-Dade County.
While mourning over his death, some think it highly inappropriate for a non-Holocaust victim like Daniel Pearl to be honored on a Holocaust memorial.
SYNAGOGUE IN CHICAGO VANDALIZED
Even though anti-Semitic acts in America are more uncommon than in most other countries, they continue to occur. On April 5, for example, Chicago police say a synagogue in Chicago was spray-painted with offensive language and derogatory messages and phrases including “Death to Israel.”
Some of the phrases were written in Arabic. The desecration was condemned by Islamic officials in Chicago, as well as Jewish ones.
53 JEWISH TOMBSTONES DAMAGED IN LILLE
53 Jewish tombstones have been damaged in an attack on a Jewish cemetery in the northern French city of Lille. The mayor’s office described it as a “hateful anti-Semitic act” and said it was “shocked” and “disgusted”.
The attack on the Lille Jewish cemetery (which includes memorial stones to Holocaust victims) comes only weeks after The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) reported a 45 percent increase in anti-Semitic attacks in France between 2005 and 2006.
Meanwhile, over 7,000 French Jews have sent a signed petition to the U.S. congress, asking for political asylum in the United States due to anti-Semitism in France. “We believe that the United States, known for its traditional welcome to those under threat in their native lands, must open its doors to us,” the petition says.
For an example of a particularly brutal act of anti-Semitism in France, see The barbarians of Europe, The brutal murder of Ilan Halimi.
French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen said yesterday that “Jacques Chirac shouldn’t have apologized for Jews’ deportation” in “the so-called Final Solution.” Over one out of eight French people say they will vote for Le Pen in the elections next Sunday.
BOMB EXPLODES OUTSIDE JEWISH CENTER IN MONTREAL
Also on April 3, a homemade bomb exploded outside a Jewish community center in Montreal. A fire resulted, but no one was injured, according to police spokeswoman Lynne Labelle.
The explosion came two days before the third anniversary of the firebombing of a Jewish elementary school in Montreal.
According to Canadian Jewish groups, there has been a 13 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Canada last year. The number of attacks has doubled compared to five years ago and is four times higher than 10 years ago. These include various firebombings and death threats made anonymously against Canadian Jews.
ANTI-SEMITIC INCIDENTS WORLDWIDE DOUBLED IN 2006
According to a report released yesterday at Tel Aviv University, last year witnessed a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents worldwide, and the highest total number since 2000.
The incidents are getting more violent too. The report stated that the number of physical assaults on Jews was twice as high as it was in 2005.
The countries with the greatest rise in anti-Semitism were Britain, Australia, France and Canada. Professor Dina Porat of Tel Aviv University said the two principle events that encouraged anti-Semitism were the efforts of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deny the Holocaust, and the way the Second Lebanon War was covered by media.
During the war, “even the world’s mainstream journalism portrayed the figure of the Jew as characterized by brutality,” Porat said.
For more, see: www.tomgrossmedia.com/Anti-IsraelCartoons2006.html.
GERMAN TOWN STRIPS HITLER OF HONORARY CITIZENSHIP JUST BEFORE G8 SUMMIT
The German Baltic Sea resort of Bad Doberan last week stripped Hitler of his honorary citizenship, only two months before the town hosts the Group of Eight Summit.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to host world leaders there in June.
The town of 12,000 had granted Hitler honorary citizenship in 1932. Hartmut Polzin, the town’s mayor, said he hoped the move would end a “not pretty and unnecessary” discussion, Deutsche Welle reported.
SEYCHELLES RESTAURANT DISPLAYS NAZI BANK NOTES
The Seychelles, usually known as a serene vacation destination, has become the subject of controversy after Jewish groups asked it to prevent the display of Nazi memorabilia.
Taking pride of place in the Seychelles La Scala restaurant is a large framed display of Nazi-period German banknotes.
The proprietor of the restaurant, Silvana Torsi, claimed that her husband was “a collector”. However, there are no bank notes displayed from any other country during the same period.
ANTI-SEMITIC SOUTH KOREAN CHILDREN’S BOOK WITHDRAWN
A South Korean publisher has agreed to withdraw a best-selling children’s book from stores after it was accused of spreading anti-Semitism.
The series of comic books, titled “Meon Nara, Yiwoot Nara,” or “Far Countries, Near Countries” and authored by visual arts professor Rhie Won-bok, claims to teach children about the world and has sold more than 10 million copies since the first volume was published in 1987.
One of three books on the U.S. published in 2004 contains a chapter claiming Jews were the driving force for the hatred that led to the September 11 attacks, that they exert control over all U.S. media and also prevent Korean-Americans from succeeding in the United States.
Korean-American groups joined Jewish-American groups in urging the publisher to stop selling the book.
UK SCHOOLS DROPPING THE HOLOCAUST FROM HISTORY LESSONS
The first article attached below reports that schools in the UK “are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.”
“Some teachers dropped the Holocaust completely from lessons because of fears that Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic reactions. One school also avoided teaching the Crusades because its ‘balanced’ handling of the topic would directly contradict what was taught in local mosques.”
British Jewish leaders have again largely been silent about this matter, as many were in the 1930s as Hitler initiated anti-Jewish measures. They might like to ponder why it takes a Lebanese Christian living in America to warn about the danger of British schools dropping teaching of the Holocaust and the Crusades. You can watch her warning here.
DEPAUL UNIVERSITY TO HONOR NORMAN FINKELSTEIN WITH TENURE
One of the leading contemporary Jewish anti-Semites (there were also some delusional Jews who expressed support for Hitler in 1930s Germany) is at the center of a row over the campaign by DePaul University (in Chicago) to grant him tenure.
Norman Finkelstein is widely regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous Holocaust revisionists, partly because he himself is Jewish and he hides behind the fact that his parents suffered under Hitler to claim that other Jews have lied about the Holocaust.
As the Ge