HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH’S FOUNDER ATTACKS HRW FOR ITS CONTINUOUS ISRAEL-BASHING

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

This dispatch concerns the New York-based Human Rights Watch, a political lobby group masquerading as a human rights organization, and the key role it has played in promoting the Goldstone report, which threatens to put Israel on trial for crimes against humanity. The group has done this first by encouraging the creation of the Goldstone report, and then by strongly lobbying on its behalf.

This follows previous dispatches on HRW, including Israel criticizes Human Rights Watch for its fundraising from Saudi regime (Aug. 17, 2009). In that dispatch I pointed out that at the very time a genuine female Saudi human rights’ campaigner was bravely saying that “We live in the world’s largest women’s prison,” HRW was soliciting funds from persons close to the Saudi regime at a fundraising dinner in Riyadh during which it bashed Israel.

***

This first item below originally appeared last Tuesday morning on National Review Online (one of the two most read opinion websites in America) and on the website of The National Post, one of Canada’s highest circulation newspapers. I sent it to some subscribers to this list then.

***

Human Rights Watch’s founder attacks HRW for becoming Israel-demonizing organization
By Tom Gross
National Review / National Post
October 20, 2009

There is an important op-ed in today’s New York Times by Robert L. Bernstein, the founder and for 20 years the chairman of Human Rights Watch – an organization which should be one of the world’s leading human rights groups but which in recent years has become a stooge for third world dictatorships as it bashes democratic countries, and in particular Israel.

He writes:

“As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

“… Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world – many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.”

[Tom Gross continues:] HRW’s influence in demonizing Israel goes beyond the NGO world. One of HRW’s directors is Judge Richard Goldstone who, according to the leading watchdog NGO Monitor, did “a cut and paste job,” using HRW’s tainted material to write a recently-released U.N. report distorting the facts and falsely accusing Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

The advisory board of NGO Monitor (of which I am a member) wrote a letter to The New York Times earlier this month which the Times declined to publish. We are resubmitting it to them today with an additional introductory sentence. Based on past experience, they are unlikely to run it, so here it is for the benefit of National Review and National Post readers:

We wholeheartedly share the concerns expressed by Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch (comment, New York Times, October 20, 2009) about the direction that HRW – which should have been one of the world’s leading human rights groups – has taken.

HRW was founded over 30 years ago with the admirable aim of protecting dissidents from oppressive regimes, but today its leaders have lost sight of its original ethos. Nowhere is this more so than in regard to the Middle East.

In a region dominated by regimes that violate human rights in horrendous ways, HRW has instead chosen to single out Israel for condemnation, often using highly unreliable witnesses to do so. Not only have they failed to allocate proper resources to monitoring the dictatorships that are rife throughout the region but senior HRW officials even recently went to Riyadh to raise funds from people associated with the Saudi regime, emphasizing HRW’s work demonizing Israel while doing so.

It has also been revealed that HRW’s Mideast Division Deputy Director Joe Stork made comments sympathetic to the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes, and HRW’s “Senior military analyst” for the Mideast and author of HRW’s most recent report defaming Israel, Marc Garlasco, is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia which he referred to as “so cool”.

In order that HRW can once again fulfill the role for which it was created, we call upon HRW’s board members to institute a full independent review of the organization for which they are responsible.

Signed by NGO Monitor International Advisory Board members:

Elie Wiesel – Nobel Peace Prize winner
Prof Alan Dershowitz – Harvard University
R. James Woolsey – Former Director, CIA
Elliott Abrams – Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor
Tom Gross – International affairs commentator
Prof Judea Pearl – President, Daniel Pearl Foundation
Douglas Murray – Centre for Social Cohesion

 

UPDATE

The New York Times did print the above letter (which I helped draft on behalf of the group with their agreement) the following day, albeit in a slightly shortened form.

But the letter The New York Times chose to publish ahead of it, from the present chairwoman of HRW, not only misrepresented what Bernstein said but refused to confront the issues about staff conduct and HRW’s fundraising in Saudi Arabia.

Robert Bernstein’s full piece is below in the “full articles” section.

 

HRW SENIOR STAFF COMPARE ISRAELI CONDUCT TO THE 3.5 MILLION DEAD AND RAPED IN CONGO

HRW Mideast North Africa program director Sarah Leah Whitson and HRW “Emergencies Senior Researcher” Fred Abrahams both continue to make outrageous accusations comparing Israeli actions with “violations in places like Sudan and Congo”.

(At least 300,000 people have been murdered in Sudan in recent years, and 3.5 million in Congo, where systematic mass rapes also continue on a daily basis -- TG.)

Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian justice minister and attorney for Nelson Mandela (and subscriber to this email list), said last week that “HRW executive director Ken Roth writes not like a lawyer – let alone a human rights lawyer – but as a propagandist.” (Roth has recently written attacks on Israel in several major media, including The Economist.)

 

HRW’S PR BLITZ ON BEHALF OF ITS CLOSE FRIEND JUDGE RICHARD GOLDSTONE

In an article for The Jerusalem Post, lawyer Anne Herzberg writes:

HRW has been in overdrive lobbying for the one-sided, and widely criticized Goldstone report. Since Richard Goldstone’s appointment in April, HRW has launched a PR blitz releasing almost 30 statements supporting his mission and the report.

… Not coincidentally, Goldstone was a member of HRW’s board until the conflict of interest was exposed shortly after his appointment [earlier this year]. [But the close links don’t appear to have ended.] Goldstone’s September 17 New York Times op-ed so closely mirrors HRW’s September 16 press release backing his report that it appears the two collaborated on the timing and content of the piece.

It is certainly in HRW’s interest to bolster the report aside from personal connections with Goldstone – HRW is cited by Goldstone more than 36 times and the credibility of the organization is directly tied to the report’s acceptance.

Rejection of Goldstone’s substance calls into question HRW’s own findings regarding the Gaza conflict. Manufacturing PR for Goldstone also diverts attention from the growing criticism HRW has faced regarding its employment of staunch anti-Israel activists in the Mideast department and the Nazi memorabilia penchant of its “senior military expert,” Marc Garlasco (author of many harsh reports on Israel)…

(Herzberg’s full article is below. For background on the Goldstone report, please see recent past dispatches on this list.)

 

“YOU WOULD EXPECT AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND HRW TO HAVE ZERO TOLERANCE FOR ANYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH NAZISM. NOT SO, IT SEEMS.”

The third piece below is by Mark Gardner, originally from Scotland, and also a subscriber to this email list.

He writes:

Groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are the guardians of society’s universal human rights, their mission anchored upon the horrors of Nazism. So you would expect them to have zero tolerance for anything associated with Nazism. Not so, it seems.

When Marc Garlasco, HRW’s “battlefield analyst”, was shown by pro-Israel lobby groups to be an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia; a wearer of Iron Cross sweatshirts; the author of a book sold by www. ironcross1939.com; and to use “flak88” [88 representing Heil* Hitler ] as his Internet pseudonym and car number plate, HRW’s first reaction was to shoot the messenger and refuse even to question Garlasco’s behaviour.

Their response was: “This accusation is demonstrably false and fits into a campaign” – the alleged campaign being one to protect Israel from HRW scrutiny. “To imply that Garlasco’s collection is evidence of Nazi sympathies”, the HRW added, “is not only absurd but an attempt to deflect attention from his deeply felt efforts to uphold the laws of war [against Israel]”.

… Meanwhile, on the Amnesty website, an Amnesty press officer blogged, “After HRW, is Amnesty International next?”

… This is part of a wider trend, visible across the spectrum of the political left and its media; the slippery slope that leads from anti-Israel antipathy to an instinctive suspicion and rejection of mainstream Jewish sensibilities…

 

HRW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR KENNETH ROTH: JUDAISM AND ITS BIBLE ARE “PRIMITIVE”

In the fourth and final piece below, The New York Sun (which is now an occasional web-only paper) editorializes:

The real service that the founding chairman of Human Rights Watch is smoking out the views of the organization’s leaders by eliciting from them a public response.

… Current chairwoman Jane Olson, and a past chairman, Jonathan Fanton [reveal] a departure from Human Rights Watch’s stated policy that it does not take sides or make judgments about whether particular wars are right or wrong, the organization’s claim that it merely calls on both sides to observe international law in conducting wars.

… Here at The New York Sun we are familiar with this pattern of eliciting, with criticism of Human Rights Watch, even more illuminating responses. Our favorite example was back in 2006, when the organization’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, responded to criticism of his group’s Israel coverage by sending us a letter accusing Judaism and its Bible of being examples of “primitive” morality.

(I attach four articles below.)

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

UNHRC ENDORSES GOLDSTONE’S GAZA REPORT BY LARGE MAJORITY

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

Following yesterday’s UN vote, I attach further items connected to the aftermath of the Goldstone report, which is largely based on utterly false testimony and fabricated evidence, and threatens to make it impossible for Israel to defend herself in future against potentially existential threats.

Please see these four previous dispatches on this list for background on this issue:

* Even B’Tselem now criticizes Goldstone (& Saudi Arabia’s interfaith Nazi)
* “Goldstone’s crime against human rights” (& a mental patient at the UN)
* Transcript: CNN grills Netanyahu on Israeli “war crimes” (& other items)
* Dachau survivor asks Goldstone: How dare you? (& Peres: Goldstone “legitimized terrorism”)

 

ISRAEL ALMOST ALONE

Despite intense Israeli lobbying (but not such intense lobbying by the Obama administration), the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday endorsed the Goldstone report by 25-6, passing it on to the UN Security Council with the request that the matter be forwarded to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, so that Israelis could be put on trial there as war criminals.

The two countries that submitted yesterday’s resolution were Egypt, Israel’s supposed ally, and Pakistan. Only yesterday, prominent Hamas member Yusef Abu Zuhri was tortured to death in Cairo by the Egyptian regime, which also continues to block aid into Gaza. Meanwhile Pakistan this morning launched massive bombing raids and sent 30,000 troops into south Waziristan, killing an unknown number of civilians.

(The lack of media sensationalism over this operation compared to the slightest act by Israel is startling. Earlier this year, the Pakistani army created one of the biggest refugee movements of modern times, forcing over two million people to flee their homes, and killing thousands of civilians.)

EMERGENCY?

Yesterday’s UN resolution also condemned alleged Israeli human rights violations in Jerusalem, a matter not mentioned in the Goldstone report. And although the Goldstone report also accuses Hamas of war crimes, yesterday’s five-page UN resolution makes no mention of this.

In fact, yesterday’s “emergency” UN Human Rights Council meeting had nothing to do with human rights. And the only emergency was for these despicable regimes to cover up the crimes they perpetrate on a daily basis against their own people, and in many cases against other countries or peoples too.

 

INDIA, BRITAIN, FRANCE: PARTICULARLY DISAPPOINTING VOTES

The resolution passed 25-6, with the U.S. and five European countries opposing. Eleven mostly European and African countries abstained, while Britain, France and three other members of the 47-nation body took the most cowardly course of all and declined to vote.

That India, which has employed far more deadly tactics to crush terrorism than Israel has, and is supposedly an increasingly close ally of Israel, should have voted in favor of having Israel tried for war crimes, is particularly disappointing.

Even more hypocritical were the “yes” votes of Russia, China, Pakistan and Indonesia – all of whom have been far, far more brutal than Israel has ever been. (If only Chechens were as lucky as the Palestinians, one Chechen dissident told me at a conference in Prague last year. The same could be said by Tibetans or Uighurs about the Chinese.)

France and Britain’s refusal to vote “no” is also disappointing. What will happen when Britain is put on trial for crimes against humanity in Iraq, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, the Falklands and elsewhere?

And so much for Israel’s supposed allies Jordan and Egypt, both of whom voted “yes”.

***

Here is the vote breakdown:

25 Yes, 11 Abstain, 6 No. Five countries declined to vote.

NO:

Hungary
Italy
Netherlands
Slovakia
Ukraine
USA

ABSTAIN:

Belgium
Bosnia
Burkina Faso
Cameroon
Gabon
Japan
Mexico
Norway
Korea
Slovenia
Uruguay

COUNTRIES THAT DID NOT VOTE:

Angola
France
Kyrgyzstan
Madagascar
United Kingdom

YES:

Argentina
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Bolivia
Brazil
Chile
China
Cuba
Djibouti
Egypt
Ghana
India
Indonesia
Jordan
Mauritius
Nicaragua
Nigeria
Pakistan
Philippines
Qatar
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
South Africa
Zambia

***

The media have also played a role in this despicable charade, with supposedly responsible outlets like the Associated Press and The Washington Post printing inflated figures about the number of Palestinian dead without mentioning that these figures were Hamas claims.

What would the reaction be if, for example, the same media greatly reduced the numbers who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks? But then AP would likely do some fact-checking in that case.

And why does the BBC continue to employ such biased reporters as Middle East correspondent Katya Adler? She is a specialist at withholding important information from viewers, such as the fact that Egypt has imposed a blockade on Gaza.

In fact, Israel’s blockade is best described as partial, since it continues to supply electricity, water, food and medical supplies to what is virtually an enemy state, the government of which, Hamas (as not mentioned by Adler and her colleagues) is even now continuing to fire rockets into Israel, while Egypt’s blockade is much tighter.

***

As not reported by the BBC or CNN, yesterday’s UN resolution starts off with a purely anti-Semitic section that would bar Jews from visiting their holiest places in Jerusalem as well as from building synagogues in the Old City.

***

In response to yesterday’s vote, the Israeli government said: “Israel will continue to exercise its right to self-defense, and take action to protect the lives of its citizens.”

 

EVEN GOLDSTONE HIMSELF NOW CRITICIZES UN

Even Judge Richard Goldstone himself, who was in Bern for a conference yesterday, criticized the UN Human Rights Council resolution for targeting only Israel and failing to include Hamas.

Yesterday’s UN resolution is peppered with references to “recent Israeli violations of human rights in occupied east Jerusalem” (which are not mentioned in the Goldstone report) but failed to mention Hamas even once.

“This draft resolution saddens me as it includes only allegations against Israel. There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report. I hope that the council can modify the text,” Goldstone said in remarks published in the Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

***

See also the important article which I have placed at the end of this dispatch, “Goldstone backs away from report: The two faces of an international poseur” by Alan Dershowitz. I suggest you read it in full.

Dershowitz discusses Goldstone’s extraordinary interview last week with the liberal American Jewish newspaper, The Forward, in which Goldstone now says his report contained no actual “evidence” of wrongdoing by Israel and he “wouldn’t consider it in any way embarrassing if many of the allegations turn out to be disproved.”

“If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven,” Goldstone now says. (Of course, it is too late, Judge Goldstone. The damage is done.)

If Goldstone is now telling the truth, it seems that he didn’t even properly read the final version of his own committee’s 575-page report.

 

CAMPAIGN AGAINST ISRAEL BY EUROPEAN POLITICIANS LAUNCHED ON BASIS OF GOLDSTONE REPORT

An email (that has been leaked to me) sent out yesterday from the “Palestinian General Delegation” makes it clear that British politician Claire Short is shortly to lead a group of European parliamentarians in a fresh assault on Israel. On the basis of the Goldstone report and the UN vote, the email says the European politicians are contemplating legal action against the European Union.

It says “Claims of clear violations of international law by Israel are now supported by the conclusions of another investigation headed by the respected international judge Richard Goldstone. In light of the mounting evidence the European Community has clear obligations under the Association Agreement to take punitive steps against Israel.”

 

FORMER AFGHAN/BOSNIA COMMANDER: “ISRAELI SELF-DEFENSE IS NOT A WAR CRIME”

Colonel Richard Kemp made a statement to the UN Human Rights Council “12th Special Session” on Israel yesterday.

He said: “I am the former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan. I served with NATO and the United Nations; commanded troops in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Macedonia; and participated in the Gulf War. I spent considerable time in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and worked on international terrorism for the UK Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee.

“Mr. President, based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

“Hamas, like Hizbullah, are expert at driving the media agenda. Both will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents.”

(His full testimony is posted further down this dispatch, or you an watch it in this video.)

 

HA’ARETZ: “IS THE ‘OBAMA EFFECT’ TURNING THE WORLD AGAINST ISRAEL?”

As I have argued before, with the Bush White House no longer around to actively lobby other countries not to leave Israel to hang out to dry, the so-called international community has Israel in its sights more than ever.

This phenomenon has now been noticed by the Obama-supporting left-wing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. The headline for this weekend’s piece by Yoel Marcus, the lead columnist for Ha’aretz’s weekend edition, is “Is the ‘Obama effect’ turning the world against Israel?”

Marcus writes:

“Over the past year, Israel has found itself having to fight for its honor and reputation, and has become the world’s doormat. As if Israel’s history of wars (about one every six years), two intifadas and many terror attacks on its civilian population were not enough for Israelis to suffer, Hamas rained Qassam rockets and mortar shells on the communities in the south of the country for eight years.

“No one spoke out against this, and no one’s conscience was pricked, not that of [Turkish PM] Erdogan or of any other bleeding hearts, wherever they may be. Moreover, Hamas fighters carried out a massacre of Fatah supporters in Gaza and the entire world watched as the functionaries of Fatah were tossed to their deaths from the rooftops. Not one Islamic country demanded Hamas stop the massacre.

“How is it that no Goldstone panels were set up to examine the destruction Hamas sowed in Gaza or the murderous attacks that the terrorist organizations perpetrated on women and children in the heart of Israel?

“… Now Israel finds itself having to defend its honor and reputation. What has happened? Is the whole world really against us once again? In my opinion, only one thing has changed. It is the emergence of the ‘Obama effect,’ similar to the theory that when a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil it can cause a tornado in Texas.

“In the eyes of Israel’s enemies, the election of Barack Obama has turned what was considered the unwavering American support of Israel into something that is not taken for granted any more. And when the nuclear-producing Ahmadinejad calls the Holocaust a lie, it is clear whom he is threatening.

“… Netanyahu took a giant step forward when he proposed two states for two peoples. But that is not enough for them and they want more and more. To be more accurate, they themselves do not know what they want. Gaza will be just Gaza? And the West Bank will be just the West Bank? And will there be no union between them?

“… Go to Washington, Bibi was advised time and again. He went and he came back; he went and came back and offered them what he had proposed during his speech at Bar-Ilan University. Mahmoud Abbas is acting out of anger. The more we [Israel] help the West Bank to flourish and to take care of its security, the more he bad-mouths us, and the same holds true of what he has done in the wake of the Goldstone report.”

 

SOUTH AFRICAN CHIEF RABBI MAKES SCATHING ATTACK ON GOLDSTONE

Warren Goldstein, who is the chief rabbi of South Africa and also has a PhD. in human rights law, slams his fellow South African Jew, Judge Richard Goldstone.

He writes:

Much has been written and said about the inaccuracies, shortcomings and the moral inversion of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Mission presided over by Judge Richard Goldstone and his three fellow members. Most critics have understandably addressed the political and military issues involved. It is important, however, also to deconstruct the Goldstone Mission’s Report from a legal point of view.

This is so because the report uses the veneer of respectability that comes with legal methodology, and with the presence of an internationally respected judge, to gain credibility. Law is a very powerful weapon to give respectability to contemptible actions and opinions. The South African Apartheid Government was very legalistic in its approach to racial oppression, and was punctilious about promulgating proper laws, and about maintaining a fully functioning judiciary to give the façade of respectability to its repugnant policies.

The United Nations, through its various organs, but particularly through its Human Rights Commission, uses the superficial veneer of law and legal methodology to give credence and credibility to its anti-Israel agenda. The Goldstone Mission is a case in point. Careful analysis reveals that the legalities utilized are merely a cover for a political strategy of delegitimizing Israel.

… Any civilized legal system requires that justice be done on two levels: procedural and substantive. The Goldstone Mission is replete with procedural and substantive injustices. From a procedural point of view, there are four main areas of injustice.

… The second procedural injustice is that the members of the Mission publicly expressed beforehand their opinions on this conflict. The most explicit in this regard, Professor Christine Chinkin, was one of the signatories to a letter published in the Sunday Times of London which stated that “Israel’s actions amount to aggression, not self-defense, not least because its assault on Gaza was unnecessary.” The letter is published under the heading “Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is not self-defense – it’s a war crime.”The other three members, Judge Richard Goldstone, Hina Jilani and Desmond Travers, all signed a letter initiated by Amnesty International stating: “Events in Gaza have shocked us to the core.” Thus, all four members of the Mission, including Goldstone himself, expressed public opinions concerning the Gaza conflict before they began their work.

… Any lawyer with even limited experience knows that there was just not sufficient time for the Mission to have properly considered and prepared its report. One murder trial often takes many months of evidence and argument to enable a judge to make a decision with integrity. To assess even one day of battle in Gaza with the factual complexities involved would have required a substantial period of intensive examination. According to the Mission’s Report, the Mission convened for a total of 12 days.

They say that they considered a huge volume of written and visual material running into thousands of pages; they conducted three field trips; there were only four days of public hearings; and yet in a relatively short space of time the members of the Mission agreed to about 500 pages of detailed material and findings with not one dissenting opinion throughout.

They made no less than 69 findings, mostly of fact, but some of law and within those 69 there were often numerous sub-findings. All of this was quite simply physically impossible if the job had been done with integrity and care.

… The Goldstone Mission is a disgrace to the most basic notions of justice, equality and the rule of law. And it is dangerous. Injustice will only lead to more death and destruction…

(Chief Rabbi Goldstein’s full article, which is well worth reading, is below.)

 

WALL STREET JOURNAL: “BRITAIN’S MORAL DISGRACE ON GAZA”

In an editorial yesterday, titled “Britain’s Terror Double Take: Help on Afghanistan, a moral disgrace on Gaza,” The Wall Street Journal slams Britain for not standing by Israel.

The paper writes: “British Prime Minister Gordon Brown this week made the politically hard call, no more than eight months before a national election, to send more British troops to Afghanistan…

“So it’s especially unfortunate to see Mr. Brown’s government take a different side in another front of this global war on terror. Today at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, the U.K. plans to abstain in a vote on Israel.

“… The U.K. says the report ‘raised serious issues’ and ‘is perfectly valid,’ though it allows that the report fails to give a full account of Hamas’s behavior or properly acknowledge Israel’s right to self defense. Otherwise Britain may have voted in favor. Bringing Goldstone to the Security Council serves Hamas’s purposes to a tee and damages the ability of Western democracies to defend themselves against all such terrorist groups that don’t fight by accepted rules of war.”

The Wall Street Journal concludes by saying that Winston Churchill may have been charged with war crimes, and so might the current British Prime Minister.

***

Tom Gross adds: 42 countries have troops in Afghanistan. All of them are now potential defendants in war crime trials. Of course not having endured wave upon wave of suicide bombing, as Israel has, they will have more trouble claiming self-defense.

 

NEW YORK POST: A “UN SHOW TRIAL” FOR THE JEWS

In an editorial titled “A UN Show Trial,” The New York Post slams the “misnamed UN Human Rights Council” and the “infamous Goldstone report” for their “blatantly biased assault on Israel.”

It calls on the White House to “move fast to squash this anti-Israel ploy, before U.S. soldiers become the UN’s next ‘war crimes’ target.”

It adds: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns Israel itself won’t ‘take risks for peace if it can’t defend itself.’ And who could blame it? The sooner Team Obama squashes this dangerous UN move, the better the chances for peace all around.”

 

SANITY CHECK, ANYONE?

Middle East expert Professor Barry Rubin sums up the Goldstone report in this email to me:

Regarding the debate on the Goldstone report discussion in the UN. Basically, what happened is that a radical, anti-Semitic terrorist group seized control of Gaza through violence (no international response); then attacked Israel through rockets, mortars, and cross-border raids (no international response); then broke a ceasefire and restarted the war (no international response).

Israel defended itself in the only way it could – especially given the lack of any international effort. Hamas used human shields, turned homes and mosques into firing positions, and put its military headquarters in a hospital. Then there was an international response: to send a commission many of whose members had already made up their minds to hear witnesses who were almost all Hamas supporters or at least people who sought Israel’s destruction. Without doing any independent investigation of its own, the commission then condemned Israel for “war crimes.”

This report has now gone to an international body [Barry Rubin is referring to the UN meeting two weeks ago] which is chaired by Libya and where the largest voting bloc is led by Sudan, and whose Human Rights Committee is run largely by countries like Iran, Russia, and Algeria. The charge to demonize Israel and put sanctions against it is led by the Palestinian Authority, its supposed negotiating partner for peace and the victim of Hamas’s murders and tortures which – by the way – is trying harder to make a deal with Hamas than with Israel.

Sanity check, anyone?

 

AL JAZEERA: ISRAEL THREATENS TO RELEASE TAPE OF PA URGING ISRAEL TO BE MORE FORCEFUL IN GAZA

Al Jazeera reports that Israel is threatening to release a tape recording of high-ranking Palestinian Authority officials urging Israel to be much more aggressive during the war in Gaza, and to wipe out Hamas even if it would mean thousands of dead Palestinians.

The recording is said to contain a conversation involving Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, his adviser Tayeb Abdel Rahim, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, and the former Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. Al Jazeera reports, quoting the Gaza website Al Shehab, that when Israel said it wouldn’t take such a course of action because thousands of Gazans might die, Abdel Rahim replies: “They all elected Hamas, and they have chosen their own destiny, not we.”

So Abbas and his Fatah group urged Israel to attack Gaza much more forcefully than it did, and now – for not doing so – Abbas (whose regime is funded by billions of dollars of American and European taxpayers’ money) is urging Israeli leaders to be put on trial for war crimes.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

ERDOGAN: LEARN FROM JEWS HOW TO MAKE MONEY

Turkey is a member of NATO and aspires to EU membership. But its popularly-elected Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, continues to make statements many would regard as anti-Semitic.

In his latest comments, he told Turkish students at the Yildiz Technical University that they should learn from Jews how to make money.

Erdogan said that during his term as Istanbul’s mayor, he “closely examined” the Jewish people. And these are the conclusions of the anthropological research he conducted: “Most Jews don’t buy property, but rent apartments in the best places in the city. This is because they believe the money disappears if you buy the property. We, on the other hand, waste every penny we have on buying a house.”

Erdogan is a harsh critic of Israel, and during the Israeli operation in Gaza he even suggested expelling the Jewish state from the United Nations. (At the same time that Israel was fighting Hamas in Gaza in January, Turkey was bombing Kurdish areas of Iraq, killing far more civilians than Israel did.)

Erdogan has stressed repeatedly that he is not an anti-Semite and that many of his friends are Jews.

(Among past dispatches reporting Erdogan’s harsh attacks on Israel, please see several items in this dispatch: “We didn’t run away. It was an orderly walk backwards”, Feb. 2, 2009)

 

TURKEY FREEZES ISRAEL OUT OF AIR FORCE DRILL

In another sign of continuing tensions between Ankara and Jerusalem, Israel has been disinvited from this week’s sixth annual joint air force exercise, which this year would have included American, Turkish, Italian and NATO forces. Israel radio reports that the United States pulled out when it learned Turkey was refusing to participate with Israel. Turkish media has been campaigning against the joint drill. Following the American withdrawal, the entire joint exercise has been shelved.

“The exercise was postponed due to a Turkish decision to change the composition of the participants and not allow the Israel Air Force to participate, a decision we were informed of only several days ago,” the IDF Spokesman’s Office said in a statement yesterday.

Anatolian Eagle was first held in 2001, with Turkish, Israeli and American participation. The drill lasted almost two weeks and included Israeli F-16s, helicopters and refueling tankers. Israel last participated in the exercise in September 2008, but has not been allowed to fly in Turkish air space since.

Israeli officials were reportedly stunned by Turkey’s decision to oust it from this year’s exercise. Turkey is an Islamic state, but a secular one, which in the past had enjoyed a good relationship with Israel. There is also concern about increasing rapprochement between Turkey and Iran.

As a result of the new Turkish policy, Israel is reportedly rethinking sales of advanced arms to Turkey.

THIS WOULD NOT BE THE FIRST TIME THAT…

An editorial in today’s Yediot Ahronot, Israel biggest-selling paper, suggests that the Turkish Islamist government’s “increasingly hostile line against Israel is a deliberate policy of disengagement that is also designed to hurt the status of the Turkish military, the Erdogan government’s main rival… Is Erdogan seeking to exploit the increasingly anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic tone of the Turkish street, stoked by the incitement of extremist religious officials close to his government, in order to deter the nationalist and secular forces that are loyal to Ataturk, and which fear that a religious ideology is taking over their country? This would not be the first time that a Middle Eastern government has rode a wave of Israel hatred in order to bolster its position at home and promote other interests.”

 

JOINT U.S.-ISRAEL MILITARY DRILL SIMULATES FIGHT AGAINST IRAN

Although the joint exercise with Turkey and NATO forces has been abandoned, Israel and the U.S. are to spend five days conducting joint drills in Operation Juniper Cobra: a biennial exercise that prepares the two countries to work together in the event of any confrontation with Iran. A spokesman for the American Embassy in Tel Aviv called the exercise “routine” but Israeli media say the exercise is anything but routine and intended to “send a message” following Iran’s recent test firing of long range missiles. Media note that the drills were due to be held next spring but were moved up six months. American troops and warships will coordinate with Israeli forces to counter simulated missile attacks from Iran, Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

Here is a video, from the Iranian government Press TV website, of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards test-firing missiles last week. Note the cries of “Allah Akbar” as they are launched. The message is clear that this is a divinely sanctioned missile to destroy the infidel, as Iranian Islamist ideology dictates.

 

U.S. MAY LEAVE PATRIOT 3 SYSTEMS IN ISRAEL

Israel and the U.S. are discussing the possibility that America will leave several Patriot 3 missile defense systems behind in Israel following the joint Juniper Cobra missile defense exercise that will begin shortly. (See item above.)

Ahead of the exercise, some 15 U.S. Navy ships have arrived in Israel, in addition to about a dozen transport planes that brought equipment to air force bases in the Negev. This year’s drill is being described as the largest joint exercise ever held by the countries. In the course of it they will test four ballistic missile defense systems – the Israeli Arrow 2, the ship-based Aegis, the high-altitude THAAD and the Patriot (PAC) 3 systems. This is the first time that all of these systems have been deployed in Israel.

The exercise spans several days and involves hundreds of Israeli and American soldiers and air force personnel.

 

1.67 BILLION MUSLIMS WORLDWIDE; GROWING NUMBERS IN EUROPE

A three-year effort by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life to compile census information from 232 countries shows a total global Muslim population of 1.67 billion, 20 percent of whom live in the Middle East and North Africa.

The report reveals that 300 million Muslims live in non-Muslim nations and that five percent of Europe’s total population is Muslim. In Germany, the Muslim population of over 4 million exceeds that of Lebanon; and Russia’s Muslim population is greater than the combined Muslim populations of Jordan and Libya.

India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt.

Between 87 and 90 percent of Muslims are Sunnis, and around 10 to 13 percent are Shia. One in three of the world’s Shia Muslims lives in Iran, which is one of only four countries with a Shia majority. The others are Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain.

The survey finds just under 2.5 million Muslims in America (0.8 percent of the population).

There are about 2.25 billion Christians, based on projections from the 2005 World Religions Database.

***

TOP 10 MUSLIM COUNTRIES, BY POPULATION

1. Indonesia: 202,867,000 (country is 88.2 percent Muslim)
2. Pakistan: 174,082,000 (country is 96.3 percent Muslim)
3. India: 160,945,000 (country is 13.4 percent Muslim)
4. Bangladesh: 145,312,000 (country is 89.6 percent Muslim)
5. Egypt: 78,513,000 (country is 94.6 percent Muslim)
6. Nigeria: 78,056,000 (country is 50.4 percent Muslim)
7. Iran: 73,777,000 (country is 99.4 percent Muslim)
8. Turkey: 73,619,000 (country is about 98 percent Muslim)
9. Algeria: 34,199,000 (country is 98 percent Muslim)
10. Morocco: 31,993,000 (country is about 99 percent Muslim)

 

MUSLIM GROUP CALLS FOR BURKA BAN IN CANADA

A Canadian Muslim group is calling on the government in Ottawa to ban the wearing of the burka in public, saying the argument that the right to wear it is protected by the Canadian Charter’s guarantee of freedom of religion is false.

“The burka has absolutely no place in Canada,” said Farzana Hassan, of the Muslim Canadian Congress. “In Canada we recognize the equality of men and women. We want to recognize gender equality as an absolute. The burka marginalizes women.”

She said many women who cover their face in public are being forced to do so by their husbands and family. As a result, she argued, these women are denied opportunities and cannot live freely as other women in society.

“The Koran exhorts Muslims toward modesty, which can be expressed in a number of different ways and it doesn’t have to be that you have to cover your face or you have to wear a virtual tent wherever you go. This is not a requirement of Islam or the Koran. We are saying this practice has become a political issue promoted by extremists and to counter this trend we are asking for a ban on the burka.”

Canadian Professor Amir Hussain added: “In Turkey, a secular society, it is illegal to wear the burka. In Iran you’ll be punished if you don’t wear it. Either way is imposing a belief on women.”

In France, religious headgear of any faith has already been banned in public schools.

But Wahida Valiante, chair of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said the right to wear a burka is “absolutely covered by the Canadian Charter and no one can dictate what constitutes proper religious practice.”

 

UNRWA PROPOSES TEACHING HOLOCAUST IN GAZA SCHOOLS AFTER ALL

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) will try and include education about the Holocaust in its new Gaza school curriculum after all, despite protests by Hamas. UNRWA says it is proposing a curriculum for secondary school students which will include basic information about the fate of the Jews in World War Two. However, it says it will first discuss the curriculum with local community leaders in Gaza, so the plan could yet be shelved.

Hamas, like its Iranian backers, regularly denies the Holocaust ever happened. Yunis al Astal, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said last week that teaching in schools about the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis would be “marketing a lie”. Those responsible for teaching the Holocaust would be committing a “war crime”, he added. (Judge Goldstone, take note!)

UNRWA, which provides aid to Palestinians in Gaza, says that teaching the Holocaust to local children will help them to understand that “anti-Semitism is not a good thing”.

Rumors about the proposed curriculum change resulted in controversy last month, as Palestinians protested when plans to teach students about the Holocaust were first aired. At the time, UN officials said the curriculum would not be introduced this year. (For background, please see the seventh item in the dispatch titled: Iran: “Einstein secretly converted to Shi’a Islam” (& Reuters “terrorist” journalist) , Sept. 6, 2009)

Currently, the Holocaust is not taught in UN-run schools in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, or in Palestinian schools in the West Bank and Gaza.

 

BUT IT WILL BE TWINNED WITH TEACHING OF THE NAKBA

John Ging, UNRWA’s director of operations in Gaza, who has a track record of making anti-Israeli remarks (as outlined in previous dispatches on this list), said: “No human-rights curriculum is complete without the inclusion of the facts of the Holocaust, and its lessons, and that should apply for Palestinian pupils too.”

But he added (playing into the hands of Holocaust revisionists) that it will only be a part of the lessons which touch on the apartheid regime in South Africa, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the “Nakba,” or Palestinian “day of catastrophe.”

“This is also part of the frustration here. There are so many global tragedies and travesties that are learned worldwide. Who learns about the Nakba?” Ging told The Independent newspaper of London.

Earlier this year, New Jersey Congressman Steve Rothman, a Democrat, introduced a resolution calling on UNRWA to improve its transparency by publishing educational materials and publicizing a list of its employees. “I’m encouraged that UNRWA is taking this step and is incorporating the Holocaust into its school curriculum, but we’ll reserve judgment until we see what the actual textbooks say,” Rothman said last week.

 

ISRAELIS DIVIDED OVER DACHAU AS SISTER CITY

The German city of Dachau and the central Israeli town of Rosh Hayiin (near Tel Aviv) are to become twin cities. The mayors of the towns have signed an accord calling for cultural and economic cooperation.

Located near Munich, Dachau was the site of the first concentration camp created by the Nazis in 1933. It served as a prototype for death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. When U.S. forces liberated Dachau in 1945, they made local residents come to see the emaciated prisoners and the gas chambers that had been operating downwind from them.

The Rosh Hayiin accord has prompted angry reactions in Israel, especially from Holocaust survivors. “I don’t understand how they could do something like this, because of the symbolism,” said Moshe Zanbar, an Israeli politician who was a teenage Dachau inmate. “A special agreement between Dachau and an Israeli town is too much for me.”

Noah Kliger, a historian and Holocaust survivor, said reaching out to receptive Germans is fine, but embracing Dachau is an “act of disturbing stupidity.”

Yet Rosh Hayiin’s mayor, Moshe Sinai is himself the son of a Dachau concentration camp survivor. Sinai says the German town shouldn’t be shunned for its past. “The majority of people in Dachau weren’t born when the Holocaust happened,” he said. “Besides the Nazis beat Jews and murdered Jews everywhere.”

Mayor Sinai said Dachau Mayor Peter Burgel suggested twinning their cities in an effort to bring young people from around the world to Dachau to study the Holocaust.

In New York, the director of the Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman (who is a subscriber to this email list) supported the decision. “I applaud the mayor,” he said. “I think it’s a positive sign of moving forward. I want the new generation of kids in Dachau to know there is a special relationship with Israel. That doesn’t mean you forget the past.”

Rosh Hayiin already has a twin cities accord with Birmingham, Alabama.

 

THE ONLY EXISTING FILM OF ANNE FRANK MADE PUBLIC

The Anne Frank House museum in the Netherlands has launched an official Anne Frank Channel on YouTube.

The channel has made public the only existing film footage of Anne Frank, taken during the wedding of her neighbor on 22 July, 1941. The girl next door is getting married and Anne is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom.

Anne and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam, where they lived after fleeing their native Germany. They were denounced and deported to Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Only her father, Otto, survived.

The YouTube channel will also feature a series of new interviews with people who knew Anne Frank personally. In another clip, Nelson Mandela talks about the strength he derived from Anne Frank’s diary during his imprisonment.

Among previous dispatches on this list mentioning Anne Frank please see:
* Does Oxford think it ok to honor a man who calls Anne Frank a “Holo-porn” star? (Jan. 21, 2008)
* Sharon and Hitler share space at Anne Frank house in Amsterdam (Jan. 29, 2004)
* “My mother remembers the day she saw through the camp wire that her school friend from Amsterdam, Anne Frank, had arrived” (April 20, 2009)

 

WARSAW GHETTO RESISTANCE LEADER MAREK EDELMAN DIES AT 90

Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, has died at the age of 90. Edelman was a commander of the Jewish resistance who fought against the Nazis in 1943 during their final attempt to liquidate the ghetto.

More than 450,000 Jews, about 30 percent of Warsaw’s population, were forced to live in an area less than eight square kilometers in size. By April 1943, just 50,000 Jews remained. Most of the others had been sent to the Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor death camps. When 2,000 German troops marched into the ghetto on April 19, 1943 (during Passover) to liquidate the survivors, they encountered heavy resistance from a group of starving but determined Jewish civilians with virtually no arms.

“We knew perfectly well that we would never win. We were 220 poorly armed boys against a powerful army,” Edelman said in 2007. The uprising took the Nazis by surprise and lasted an unlikely three weeks. Edelman took over command of the revolt when its leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, was killed. He later escaped through a sewer barely two feet high.

Despite the anti-Semitic policies of Poland’s Communist authorities after World War II, Edelman never left Poland. In contrast with many Jewish Poles who survived the war, Edelman decided to stay and settled in the central Polish city of Lodz, where he became a cardiologist. In an interview, he said his work as a doctor enabled him to save lives, which he had been unable to do in the ghetto.

Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity leader and Polish president, called Edelman “an upright, unequalled human being. There are no words to express the loss.”

 

COLUMBIA UNIV. PROF. MISUSES EDELMAN’S DEATH TO EQUATE ISRAELIS WITH NAZIS

The death of Marek Edelman has provided Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics at Columbia University in New York, with yet another opportunity to equate Israelis with Nazis.

In an article posted today on the website of the magazine Socialist Worker, Massad is quoted belittling the Holocaust, delegitimizing the state of Israel, and claiming that Israelis are to Palestinians what the Nazis were to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto.

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

KGB-STYLE, THE GUARDIAN REMOVES ISRAELIS FROM NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS LIST

[This item was first published on the websites of The National Post (Canada) and The National Review (America) on Saturday morning. It has since been picked up all over the world, and someone even translated it into French.)]

***

KGB-style, The Guardian removes Israelis from Nobel Prize winners list
By Tom Gross
National Review Online / The National Post
October 10, 2009

The British paper The Guardian – which one would be tempted to dismiss as an irrelevant left-wing rag, except that it is the overwhelming paper of choice for British teachers and for news staff at the BBC, the world’s largest broadcasting network, who are “inspired” by Guardian stories on a daily basis in their broadcasts – is no friend of Israel and the Jews, as I have noted before.

But now it has wiped Israel off the Nobel Prize map, much as Iranian despot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like to wipe Israel off the real map.

To accompany their story about Barack Obama winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, The Guardian posted on their website what they claimed was “every peace prize winner ever,” stating that the information came from the website Nobelprize.org. But guess whose names The Guardian took off the list, KGB-style, hoping no-one would notice? All three Israelis who have won the peace prize: Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

Following outrage in Britain, including online articles on the websites of the conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph and Spectator (why are most anti-Semites on the Left these days?), The Guardian slipped the Israeli names back on to their list.

The Guardian had no trouble keeping FW De Klerk, the last president of Apartheid South Africa, on their original list. It is only the Jews – and their achievements – which they tried to wipe off the map.

And this from a paper whose motto is “Facts are sacred”. Of course The Guardian – like several other prominent European papers – misleads readers about Israel on a regular basis by omitting crucial information that portrays Israelis in a positive light.

This time it was caught red-handed, as the (London) Jewish Chronicle and the Harry’s Place blog managed to upload The Guardian’s Israel-free Nobel list before The Guardian slipped the names back in.

Below, The Guardian omitted Israeli political leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, who won the peace prize jointly with Yasser Arafat in 1994. (Incidentally The Guardian forgot to remove the word “Israel” when removing the names of the Israeli winners):

Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were jointly awarded the 1978 peace prize for signing an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Only Sadat was listed by The Guardian:

 

MOST PEOPLE HAVE TO WAIT A YEAR…

[This item was first published on National Review Online on Friday within an hour of the announcement that Barack Obama had won the 2009 Nobel Peace prize.]

A Little Premature, Perhaps?
By Tom Gross
National Review Online
October 9, 2009

So we wake up to the news this morning that Barack Obama joins past illustrious winners of the Nobel Peace prize, such as Yasser Arafat (father of modern terrorism, including airline hijacking and suicide bombing) and Jimmy Carter (who ushered in Iran’s Islamic revolution, the effects of which the poor people of Iran and the rest of us are still living with).

Now Obama may yet go on to do great things for peace, but so far he has done absolutely nothing as far as I can see, apart from distancing the U.S. from peace campaigners and pro-peace dissidents such as the Dalai Lama, whom Obama refused to meet in Washington earlier this week. By contrast, every other president during the last 20 years has met the Dalai Lama and George W. Bush even bestowed the Congressional Gold medal on him at the Capitol in 2007.

But then the Norwegian mafia that run the Nobel peace prize wouldn’t dream of awarding it to a Republican. Heaven forbid that they thought to award it to Ronald Reagan whom even Russian liberals admit did more than any other person to end the Cold War and liberate half of Europe. Reagan should have made a movie that pleased the Norwegians like Al Gore did.

 

CONDEMN ISRAEL BY BOYCOTTING PROTEIN

Israel has won more Nobel Prizes per capita in science – by far – than any other country. This year was no exception as the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (for a discovery which sounds as though it has major medical implications) is shared between three winners, one in the U.S., one at Cambridge, England and the third – a woman – an Israeli, at the Weizmann Institute.

It ought to be a big story, not least because the question of how much women achieve at the highest levels in science is still a controversial one. (One recalls the Larry Summers row at Harvard.) But, perhaps because it tells one something important and positive about Israel, the media have virtually ignored this story.

Israeli Professor Ada Yonath is the first woman to win a chemistry Nobel since 1964. She won the award for her research on ribosome, a key component of the cellular machinery that translates DNA sequences into protein chains – the exact sort of protein chains that form the basis of life in all humans, including both Israelis and Palestinians of course.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said her work had been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotic cures for various diseases.

If valuable new drugs are developed as a result of her work, perhaps there will be a campaign to boycott them. Or perhaps only a third of them will be boycotted, or they will only be boycotted a third of the time!

 

ON THE SAME DAY…

… that yet another Israeli female scientist was winning a major award, Hamas further cracked down on the rights of Palestinian women, this time by banning females from riding motorcycles in the Gaza Strip.

The decree was issued by the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry, which is in charge of the movement’s security forces in Gaza. They said the ban was in keeping with “Arab traditions.”

This follows Hamas’s recent reported ban on women laughing in public. Public female laughing, they said, was “unIslamic”.

 

ISRAELI BUSINESSMAN LOOKS TO BUY AL-JAZEERA

Egyptian-born, California-based Israeli billionaire Haim Saban is negotiating with the emir of Qatar to purchase 50 percent of the Al-Jazeera television network, the independent Egyptian newspaper Al-Mesryoon reports.

This is the second time Saban has shown an interest in buying the network, and (according to the newspaper) the offer “was prompted by the network’s growing financial troubles, despite its immense global and particularly Middle Eastern popularity.”

Saban, who holds dual Israeli and American citizenship, was born in Egypt and moved to Israel in 1956 before later settling in the United States, where he made a fortune by holding the franchise for merchandizing Power Rangers.

Although the Egyptian news report is supposedly reliable, I have my doubts that Al-Jazeera needs to raise more capital, as the network is supported by the Qatari ruling family and is not dependent on income from advertising. The Qatari economy is based on natural gas, not oil, and has been more resilient to the effects of the global financial downturn than that of its oil-producing neighbors.

Saban has for years been one of Bill Clinton’s major backers in Hollywood. He was first reported to be negotiating the purchase of half the Doha-based Al-Jazeera network in 2004, after visiting the emirate with Clinton. In Israel, Saban owns a controlling stake in the Bezeq telephone company.

 

SABAN JOINED SEINFELD, SACHA BARON COHEN AND NATALIE PORTMAN IN STANDING UP FOR ISRAEL

Last month Saban blasted calls to boycott Israeli films at the Toronto film festival after the festival’s decision to showcase Tel Aviv. He called the boycotters “anti-Semites” and “Jew haters.”

“The world always had anti-Semites,” the Hollywood financier told The Los Angeles Times. “It has now and always will, but the people of Israel always have, and always will live and prosper. Sorry Jew haters. You lose.”

Among the 50 artists and filmmakers who signed the petition calling for a boycott of the festival’s “Tel Aviv Week” were Ken Loach, Julie Christie, Danny Glover, David Byrne, Naomi Klein and Eve Ensler. (For background on this, please see the last item in this dispatch.)

Meanwhile, a number of Hollywood’s Jewish stars, including Jerry Seinfeld, Sacha Baron Cohen, Natalie Portman, Jason Alexander and Lisa Kudrow (who plays Phoebe in “Friends’) issued a counter-statement attacking those who called for a boycott of Israeli film.

“Anyone who has actually seen recent Israeli cinema, movies that are political and personal, comic and tragic, often critical, knows they are in no way a propaganda arm for any government policy,” they wrote.

 

VANESSA REDGRAVE CONDEMNS FELLOW PRO-PALESTINIAN ACTIVISTS

British actress Vanessa Redgrave, long known for being a pro-Palestinian activist, has also now condemned the call to boycott Israeli films. In a letter to The New York Review of Books, she wrote, “We oppose the current Israeli government, but it was freely elected, and is not a dictatorship. Words are important.”

At the center of the recent controversy about the participation of Israeli artists at the Toronto Film Festival was the fact that the event highlighted the city of Tel Aviv’s centennial. To the signatories calling for a boycott, it was the notion of celebrating Tel Aviv that was the real problem. It seems that Tel Aviv is, to them, the biggest “Jewish settlement” of them all, and thus should be dismantled.

A Canadian Jewish leader said: “By calling into question the legitimacy of Tel Aviv, they are supporting a one-state solution, which means the destruction of the State of Israel. If every city in the Middle East would be as culturally diverse, as open to freedom of expression as Tel Aviv is, then peace would have come to the Middle East long ago.”

 

JON VOIGHT ACCUSES JANE FONDA OF “AIDING THOSE WHO SEEK THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL”

Jane Fonda has withdrawn her name from the list of film and TV personalities calling for a boycott of Israeli films, after swingeing criticism of her by Jon Voight, her co-star in the Oscar-winning anti-Vietnam war film Coming Home.

Voight, 71, who most recently starred in Season 7 of “24”, is one of Hollywood’s most vocal non-Jewish supporters of Israel. He accused Fonda of “aiding and abetting those who seek the destruction of Israel.”

“I signed the letter without reading it carefully enough, without asking myself if some of the wording wouldn’t exacerbate the situation rather than bring about constructive dialogue,” Fonda wrote on the Huffington Post website.

 

MORE MISREPORTING ON SKY NEWS

Dominic Waghorn, the lead Israel correspondent for the British-based international satellite broadcaster Sky News, has joined the breathless band of foreign reporters hailing bogus “exclusives” slamming Israel.

His claim (in an item broadcast repeatedly as lead world news by Sky) to be the first foreign correspondent inside the Jerusalem Jewish district of Maale Hazeitim for seven years will be news to the 30 reporters from Israel and abroad, including for example, the correspondent of Time magazine, who accompanied Mike Huckabee there two months ago, prompting another round of anti-Israel reports at the time.

“We were the first foreign journalists allowed into the controversial settlement of Maale Zeitim in Ras El Amud for seven years,” claims Waghorn in his on-air and online report, making Israel sound as if it restricts journalists’ freedom of movement in Jerusalem, which is ridiculous.

This is the kind of misreporting that characterizes so much Western news coverage of Israel. If these were genuine mistakes one would expect about half of them to work in Israel’s favor. Instead, the “mistakes” are made almost exclusively to the detriment of Israel.

 

TWO PAPERS IN ONE!

• “There is a lot of good news in the latest intelligence assessment about Iran. Tehran, we are now told, halted its secret nuclear weapons program in 2003, which means that President Bush has absolutely no excuse for going to war against Iran. We are also relieved that the intelligence community is now willing to question its own assumptions and challenge the White House’s fevered rhetoric.” – editorial, New York Times, Dec. 5, 2007.

• “Iran has a long history of lying and cheating about its nuclear program, so the news that it has been secretly building another plant to manufacture nuclear fuel is hardly a shock. But it provides one more compelling reason (are any more needed?) why the United States and other major powers must be ready to quickly adopt – and enforce – tough new sanctions if negotiations fail to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.” – editorial, New York Times, Sept. 26, 2009.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]

SUMMARIES

THE EXTENT OF ARAB-NAZI COLLABORATION EXPLAINS MANY OF TODAY’S MIDEAST PROBLEMS

Writing from Berlin for the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Schwammenthal notes that “Arab-Nazi collaboration is a taboo topic in the West” and to ignore it impedes our understanding of Arab attitudes to Jews today and how best to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute.

Schwammenthal writes:

One widespread myth about the Mideast conflict is that the Arabs are paying the price for Germany’s sins. The notion that the Palestinians are the “second victims” of the Holocaust contains two falsehoods: It suggests that without Auschwitz, there would be no justification for Israel, ignoring 3,000 years of Jewish history in the land. It also suggests Arab innocence in German crimes, ignoring especially the fascist past of Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini, who was not only Grand Mufti of Jerusalem but also Waffen SS recruiter and Nazi propagandist in Berlin. When a German journalist recently tried to shed some light on this history, he encountered the wrath of the Arab collaborators’ German apologists.

Karl Rössel’s exhibition “The Third World in the Second World War” was supposed to premier on Sept. 1 in the “Werkstatt der Kulturen,” a publicly funded multicultural center in Berlin. Outraged by the exhibition’s small section on Arab complicity in Nazi crimes, Philippa Ebéné, who runs the center, cancelled the event.

… The mufti orchestrated the 1920/1921 anti-Jewish riots in Palestine and the 1929 Arab pogroms that destroyed the ancient Jewish community of Hebron. An early admirer of Hitler, Husseini received Nazi funding – as did Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – for his 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt, during which his thugs killed hundreds of British soldiers, Jews and also Arabs who rejected his Islamo-Nazi agenda. After participating in a failed fascist coup in Iraq, he fled to Berlin in 1941 as Hitler’s personal guest. In the service of the Third Reich, the mufti recruited thousands of Muslims to the Waffen SS. He also conspired with the Nazis to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Rommel’s defeat in El Alamein spoiled these plans.

After canceling the exhibition, Ms. Ebéné clumsily tried to counter the impression that she had pre-emptively caved to Arab pressure. As a “non-white” person (her father is Cameroonian), she said, she didn’t have to fear Arabs, an explanation that indirectly suggested that ordinary, “white,” Germans might have reason to feel less safe speaking truth to Arabs.

… This episode is typical of how Western historians, Arabists and Islam scholars deny or downplay Arab-Nazi collaboration… In the Mideast, Nazis were not only popular during but also after the war – scores of them found refuge in the Arab world, including Eichman’s deputy, Alois Brunner, who escaped to Damascus. The German war criminals became trusted military and security advisers in the region, particularly of Nazi sympathizer Gamal Nasser, then Egypt’s president. The mufti himself escaped to Egypt in 1946. Far from being shunned for his Nazi past, he was elected president of the National Palestinian Council. The mufti was at the forefront of pushing the Arabs to reject the 1948 United Nations partition plan and to wage a “war of destruction” against the fledgling Jewish state. His great admirer, Yasser Arafat, would later succeed him as Palestinian leader… the mufti’s and his followers’ virulent anti-Semitism, which continues to poison the minds of many Muslims even today…

***

Tom Gross adds:

Of course you won’t hear any of this if you listen to the BBC or read The New York Times or Le Monde or The Guardian. As Robin Shepherd, author of an important new book on Western attitudes to Israel (A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem With Israel) put it: “The inconvenient truths about Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism must be denied even if this means providing a distorted picture of the Holocaust and its participants and collaborators.”

 

VIDEO: THE HISTORY THE BBC WON’T DARE TO MENTION

Below is a short German documentary (with English subtitles) about the close relations between the Arab and Nazi leaderships dating back to even the days before Hitler assumed power in Germany in 1933.

Among those interviewed are the respected historians Sir Martin Gilbert and Robert Wistrich, both of whom subscribe to this email list. There is also important wartime film footage. I would urge you to watch it in full. (It lasts a little over seven minutes.)

Jews celebrating the Jewish new year have been violently attacked at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in recent days after Palestinian nationalist leaders falsely claimed that the Jews were coming to “take over” Al Aqsa Mosque. The incitement of yesteryear continues today.

 

“PALESTINIAN DEMANDS ARE ROOTED IN A GRIEVANCE CULTURE OF VICTIMHOOD, NOT IN FACTS”

Emanuele Ottolenghi, writing in Ha’aretz, says:

Two weeks ago, Jonathan Freedland suggested on this page that “maybe Israel just needs to acknowledge Palestinian pain,” encouraging Israel to undertake a gesture that “may just unblock a peace effort which desperately needs unblocking.”

… For Freedland, recognizing the pain of the other would have a healing effect on all sides. He dismisses Israeli fears that recognition of responsibility for the refugee problem would open the floodgates to a mass return of Palestinian claimants, and bring an end to Israel as a Jewish state. His Palestinian interlocutors, he tells us, have assured him they are not after Israel’s demise, just an official apology.

Should Israel take Freedland’s advice? If Israel could unburden itself of the guilt Freedland and his Palestinian sources attribute to it and obtain peace in exchange, it might be a price worth paying. But a closer look at this argument shows a strange cocktail of naivete and misinformation.

First, Israelis have already acknowledged the pain. From school textbooks to official historiography, from academic works to popular film series, the sorrow and the pain, the tragedy and the truculence of the 1948 war are in the public domain. What Freedland does not know – or refuses to accept – is that the historical debate about facts and causal correlations is still far from over, and any serious scholar who’s escaped the facile temptations of propaganda will offer a very different picture from the one on which the demand for an apology rests.

… Freedland evokes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model of South Africa, only to claim that it is less important to discuss how things are done and more important to ensure that they are done. But how things are done does matter. If his premise is that the Palestinian narrative is beyond scrutiny, then such a commission will only succeed in working out the minutiae of introducing Palestinian propaganda into Israeli textbooks, and in coming up with elaborate ways to muzzle historians who may presume to question what the commission will define as truth, and what Palestinians consider a precondition for reconciliation. In short, Israel sacrifices truth and the Palestinians concede reconciliation.

Freedland incidentally omits that Israeli officialdom has already “acknowledged the pain.” In his speech at the Annapolis conference in November 2007, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did just that. When referring to the “pain and deprivation” suffered by refugees, he said: “We are not indifferent to this suffering.

… Apparently, Freedland wants an official apology, too, as a basis for negotiations… But this is naive. International law ensures that, once Israel’s government takes responsibility for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees, it will not escape a cascade of class-action suits intended to force Israel to repatriate refugees. An international community that castigates Israel for defending itself, as the Goldstone report just did, will surely bring Israel to an international tribunal, have it condemned and then isolate it until such a time that it complies. Such an admission will forever deny Israel’s veto right on the refugee issue and therefore doom any peace deal.

Freedland … only remembers to suggest, in passing, and at the very end of his column, that Palestinians too should engage in a similar act of contrition. But can they? Will they? Judging by the dearth of Palestinian scholarship even remotely resembling the Israeli self-flagellation inaugurated by the new historians in the 1980s, the lack of freedom and critical inquiry among Palestinian scholars, the militant devotion of its intellectuals to their national cause, and the glorification, among Palestinians at large, of terrorists past and present who have attacked civilians and killed innocents, it is hard to see how this could ever happen. And an Israeli endorsement of the Palestinian narrative will forever forestall the process of the introspection long overdue on the Palestinian side.

But history shows us that Palestinian demands are rooted in a grievance culture of victimhood, not in facts. Israel should not apologize for an injustice it did not commit and for which it does not bear primary responsibility…

 

TIME FOR ISRAEL TO SAY SORRY

The piece which Ottolenghi critiques above is that by Jonathan Freedland, a leading columnist for the British daily The Guardian. Writing in Ha’aretz, Freedland says:

Many of Israel’s supporters around the world have spotted an alarming trend in the debate on Middle East peace. Call it the “Back to ‘48” approach, which argues that any attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is doomed unless it gets to the root of the problem, tackling not only the “1967 file” – ending the occupation, plus or minus a chunk of land here or there – but also the “1948 file,” consisting of the issues left outstanding by Israel’s birth.

These 1948 questions are even knottier and more sensitive than the 1967 ones: among them, whether Palestinians can at last come to terms with what was established in that fateful year, namely Israel as a Jewish state, and whether Israelis can at last acknowledge the impact of that event on Palestinians, including the creation of at least 700,000 Palestinian refugees.

Plenty of Jews and Israelis shy away from that latter question, even if they can see that the Oslo approach – focusing narrowly on clearing up the mess left by 1967 – has not exactly been a stellar success.

For one thing, many, perhaps even most, Israelis believe there is nothing to answer for. Sure, they argue, bad things happened, but that was the Arabs’ fault for making war on the nascent Jewish state; if Palestinians had only accepted the UN partition plan, all this heartache could have been avoided… But even if you blame the Arabs for starting the war, you can still see that by the end of it, 700,000 people were dispossessed.

… [Other] Jews and Israelis fret that any discussion of 1948 will, almost automatically, call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Why else would anyone want to discuss the circumstances of a state’s birth if not to undermine it?

Those diplomats and others currently arguing that the peace process, set to be revived by U.S. President Barack Obama later this month, needs to go back to 1948, have to tackle these fears head on. Which may not be as impossible as it sounds.

… Zionists, inside and outside Israel, should ask themselves if acknowledging the Palestinian plight in 1948 really is synonymous with full-scale return [of the 1948 refugees and their descendants], as the fearmongers argue.

Isn’t it possible to acknowledge someone’s pain without promising to turn back the clock and undo the events that led to it? Surely we know from our personal lives that sometimes it is simply the acknowledgment itself – the admission of responsibility – that has a healing effect.

Indeed, this might provide a clue as to why previous efforts have failed. It’s possible that, in this relationship, Israelis are from Mars and Palestinians from Venus; Israelis have been the man who interrupts a sobbing woman as she explains a problem, rushing to come up with the mechanics of a solution instead of just listening. Such a man won’t realize that what the woman wanted most was to be heard, for her sorrow to be acknowledged.

… Some will immediately ask – Martian-style – what form this acknowledgment would take. We might revive an idea floated at Taba, establishing a panel of historians from both peoples, or we might adapt South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process. But the precise form is less important than the idea: an honest reckoning with the events that led those refugees to leave rather than a legalistic focus on preventing their mass return. My own conversations with Palestinians in the diaspora suggest it is this reckoning, this acknowledgment, that they are after.

Would admitting the truth of 1948 instantly undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel? Only if you believe that Israel’s legitimacy was predicated on the notion that its birth would be bloodless. Israel’s advocates can argue that the creation of a Jewish national home in 1948 was so morally necessary it remained, and remains, just – even if it came at a tragically high price…

 

“NO, I WOULDN’T BE FLIPPANT IF THE ARABS WON THE WAR. I’D BE DEAD.”

Jonathan Freedland’s piece has evoked a particularly harsh range of comments from Ha’aretz readers, in addition to a few positive ones.

Among the comments by readers:

* Freedland forgot to say that most Arabs came after Israelis created jobs. Most Arabs came to “Palestine” to look for work, after the Jews started to arrive and create jobs and industries during the 1800s.

* Any acknowledgment of Palestinian pain has always let to more violence. Furthermore, the Arabs have never recognized the Jewish pain by evicting the same number of Jews.

* In 1948 there were 900,000 Jews living in the Arab world, second-rate citizens at best. Almost all of them left soon afterwards, 600,000 to Israel, 300,000 to the West. Why is this not mentioned in the article?

* 15 million Arabs and Turks have come to live in Western Europe in the last 40 years, but just like those that stayed at home they can’t accept that Jewish people returned to their homeland.

* In the knot of 1948 there is, unfortunately, also a big chunk of anti-Semitism. Because the main force behind the the denial of the creation of Israel was El-Husseini, an admirer of Hitler, a friend of Himmler and an officer of the SS between 1941 and 1945. The Hamas Charter shows that the ghost of El-Husseini is still around. So it’s trickier than Freedland’s article suggests, but I also like to dream of a world where people at least say sorry.

* Peace is now predicated on acknowledgement of Palestinian “pain”? What about the pain of all the oppressed majorities and minorities in every “state” in the Middle East? What about the pain of all those subject to Arab and/or Moslem regimes?

* No, I wouldn’t be flippant if the Arabs won the war. I’d be dead. Because they weren’t invading Israel with the intention of leaving any “refugees” behind.

* I think this is an excellent article. However, I think what would be most fruitful would be a mutual acknowledgement of pain on both sides.

* WW1 ended and many ethnic groups were left under the control of other groups which mistreated their minorities. This led to WW2. After WW2 ended, tens of millions of people were forcibly moved to new areas so that ethnic minorities were not left under the control of others. This is why there are no Germans now living in Silesia or East Prussia, among other areas. I don’t hear the Germans complaining about it. They have moved on and done quite well in my view. The same goes for the Japanese. Only the Palestinians believe that defeat in war entitles them to the victor’s spoils. They need to move on.

* For a “logical” Westerner admitting a mistake does not represent self-delegitimization. For most Arabs, it does. Particularly so if it comes without any reciprocal demand. Where is the Arab acceptance of their part of guilt in bringing about Jewish exodus from their countries? If we do not bring that up in the debate, any moral self flagellation will be just that – unnecessary pain with no positive effect.

SUMMARIES

NEWS ANALYSIS FROM THE NEAR-FUTURE

In a piece titled “How Israel was disarmed,” Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens presents some “News analysis from the near-future” – Jan. 20, 2010 (i.e. less than 15 weeks away).

He writes:

“NEW YORK – When American diplomats sat down for the first in a series of face-to-face talks with their Iranian counterparts last October in Geneva, few would have predicted that what began as a negotiation over Tehran’s nuclear programs would wind up in a stunning demand by the Security Council that Israel give up its atomic weapons.

Yet that’s just what the U.N. body did this morning, in a resolution that was as striking for the way member states voted as it was for its substance. All 10 nonpermanent members voted for the resolution, along with permanent members Russia, China and the United Kingdom. France and the United States abstained. By U.N. rules, that means the resolution passes.

The U.S. abstention is sending shock waves through the international community, which has long been accustomed to the U.S. acting as Israel’s de facto protector on the Council. It also appears to reverse a decades-old understanding between Washington and Tel Aviv that the U.S. would acquiesce in Israel’s nuclear arsenal as long as that arsenal remained undeclared.

… Tehran reacted positively to the U.S. abstention. “For a long time we have said about Mr. Obama that we see change but no improvement,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. “Now we can say there has been an improvement.” The resolution calls for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East.

… Netanyahu also provoked the administration’s ire after he was inadvertently caught on an open microphone calling Mr. Obama “worse than Chamberlain.” The comment followed the president’s historic Dec. 21 summit meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Geneva, the first time leaders of the two countries have met since the Carter administration.

… “The Iranians have a point,” said one senior administration official. “How can we tell Tehran that they’re better off without nukes if we won’t make the same point to our Israeli friends?”

… An Israeli diplomat observed bitterly that Jan. 20 was the 68th anniversary of the Wannsee conference, which historians believe is where Nazi Germany planned the extermination of European Jewry. An administration spokesman said the timing of the vote was “purely coincidental.”

 

NICOLAS SARKOZY AND GORDON BROWN QUIETLY SEETHE ABOUT OBAMA’S INEPT HANDLING OF IRAN

In a lead editorial, The Wall Street Journal writes:

President Obama wants a unified front against Iran, and to that end he stood together with Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown in Pittsburgh on Friday morning to reveal the news about Tehran’s secret facility to build bomb-grade fuel. But now we hear that the French and British leaders were quietly seething on stage, annoyed by America’s handling of the announcement.

Both countries wanted to confront Iran a day earlier at the United Nations. Obama was, after all, chairing a Security Council session devoted to nonproliferation. The latest evidence of Iran’s illegal moves toward acquiring a nuclear weapon was in hand. With the world’s leaders gathered in New York, the timing and venue would be a dramatic way to rally international opinion.

Sarkozy in particular pushed hard. He had been “frustrated” for months about Obama’s reluctance to confront Iran, a senior French government official said. But the Administration told the French that it didn’t want to “spoil the image of success” for Obama’s debut at the U.N. and his homily calling for a world without nuclear weapons, according to the Paris daily Le Monde.

… “We are right to talk about the future,” Sarkozy said, referring to the U.S. resolution on strengthening arms control treaties. “But the present comes before the future, and the present includes two major nuclear crises,” i.e., Iran and North Korea. “We live in the real world, not in a virtual one.” No prize for guessing into which world the Frenchman puts Obama.

Sarkozy went on: “President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council Resolutions…

“I support America’s ‘extended hand.’ But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges.”

We thought we’d never see the day when the President of France shows more resolve than America’s Commander in Chief for confronting one of the gravest challenges to global security. But here we are.

 

A RESPECTED AUSTRALIAN GENERAL WRITES

In the third article below, Jim Molan, a respected Australian general who commanded operations in Iraq, is very critical of the UN’s Goldstone report attacking Israel.

Writing in The Australian, he says:

Richard Goldstone, a prominent South African jurist, claims in The New York Times that he hesitatingly accepted his UN mandate to investigate the three-week December-January war between Hamas and Israel because he was taking on something “deeply charged and politically loaded”. … Goldstone was wise to hesitate, but he took the mission that will forever bear his name.

The Goldstone report was the product of the Gaza fact-finding mission, which could never have been a judicial mission, given the inclusion of publicly biased members… Goldstone’s mission reached the conclusion that Israel was guilty of directing its military operations, at least in part, “at the people of Gaza as a whole”. The reaction has been to drive all parties even further into their corners and has contributed very little clarity to the big issues.

… The way that Goldstone frames these statements in his article should lead us to question how he confidently reached a guilty verdict.

… We can all have an opinion on how just the Israeli attack on Hamas was, but it remains an opinion shaped by our prejudices. When I was involved in military operations in the second year of the Iraq war, working with the U.S. military, I found it useful to reduce the legal regime to several key concepts. Every offensive action I took had to be necessary for military reasons, not result in unnecessary suffering, was amenable to distinction between military and civil people and property, and did not cause destruction or suffering disproportionate to the expected military gain, even against legitimate military targets. I satisfied myself that I achieved these and I satisfied the system that scrutinised every action I took. I probably never will convince those who have on occasions publicly, ignorantly and incorrectly associated me with war crimes.

Our adversary in Iraq consistently ignored all humanitarian law as well as the laws of war, particularly the blatant abuse of medical facilities and places of worship. Our adversary’s major strategy was to blow the arms and legs off innocent women and children at times calculated to fit the need of the world’s media networks. This was an immorality of strategy that was breathtaking, exercised not just once or twice, but over years. Despite the nature of our enemy, we realised that our right to injure even our enemy was limited.

But the defender also has obligations. He cannot exploit these laws by deliberately commingling his fighters with civilians, as Hamas admits it did. This violates the most basic principle of the law of war.

With experience of having to tread through this legal and moral minefield while acting as an agent of the statesman who has an obligation to act, I was looking forward to how Goldstone was going to react to questions such as: How much discrimination is enough? How much of the inevitable killing of innocents is too much? How do we equate our complex war aims with the use of military force against a terrorist organisation that flouts the rule of law? How do you assess in legal terms the proportionality of a war between a terrorist force and one of the world’s most advanced militaries? If one side uses backyard rockets is the other side not allowed to use precision-guided missiles? Given the legal regime recognises the difficulty of military decision-making amid the fog of war, and thus obligates planners and commanders to base decisions on information reasonably available at the time, how did the report handle this issue?

On these and many other questions, the Goldstone report is strangely silent, a luxury that I did not have in Iraq, and a luxury that the Israeli commanders probably did not have in Gaza.

The Goldstone report is an opinion by one group of people putting forward their judgments, with limited access to the facts, and reflecting their own prejudices. The difference in tone and attitude in the report when discussing Israeli and Hamas actions is surprising.

… Goldstone seems to pass off his prejudices in a report that cannot be based on fact, and uses judicial language and credibility to do so. It comes down to equality of scepticism: if you refuse to believe anything the Israelis say, then you have no right to unquestioningly accept what Hamas says.

… As George Walden recently wrote in Britain’s The Times, “Morality minus practicality is pious grandstanding, something best left to pop stars and theatre folk.” And perhaps to the UN.

(For background on the Goldstone report, please see the last four dispatches.)

 

THEY HAVE ABSOLUTELY ZERO INTEREST IN HUMAN RIGHTS

In the final article on this part of the dispatch, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz writes:

Last week, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak – the former Dovish Prime Minister who offered the Palestinians a state on all of the Gaza Strip, 95% of the West Bank and a capital in East Jerusalem – was arrested when he set foot in Great Britain. (He was quickly released on grounds of diplomatic immunity because he was an official visitor.) And now Moshe Yaalon, an Israeli government minister and former Army Chief of Staff, was forced to cancel a trip he was scheduled to make in London on behalf of a charity, for fear that he too would be arrested. The charges against these two distinguished public officials are that they committed war crimes

… The British government and British prosecutors have not supported the arrest of Barak and Yaalon. Those demanding the arrest of these Israelis are hard-left political activists who are seeking to invoke so-called “universal jurisdiction” against those who they consider guilty of war crimes and genocide. They have absolutely zero interest in human rights, in the laws of war, or in preventing genocide. Indeed, many of them supported the Cambodian genocide and have refused to condemn the Rwanda and Darfur genocides. They would never dream of demanding the arrest of Hamas murderers who target Israeli schoolchildren for suicide bombings or rocket attacks. They are willfully misusing these concepts – human rights, universal jurisdiction – to serve their anti-Israel and anti-Western ideology. What they are doing undercuts the neutrality and value of these protections.

If they were at all interested in human rights they would be going after the worst first – those who murder innocent civilians as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing or genocide. But they are interested in Israel and Israel alone. That’s why they demand boycotts and divestment only from the Jewish state and not from real human rights violators. Indeed, most of them would fervently object to sanctions against Iran, North Korea, Libya, Venezuela, China, Zimbabwe, Syria or Saudi Arabia.

… The time has come for Israel to confront this issue directly and to take legal action to prevent radical Israel-haters from misusing decent laws to achieve indecent results. Just imagine what a trial would look like, if it were conducted fairly and objectively.

The Israelis would be able to prove that their campaign of targeted assassinations of terrorists has worked effectively to reduce terrorism against Israeli citizens and others. Israel has inadvertently killed some civilians, but the ratio of deaths has been reduced to 1 civilian for every 28 terrorists. This is the best ratio of any country in the world that is fighting asymmetrical warfare against terrorists who hide behind civilians. It is far better than the ratio achieved by Great Britain and the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan, where both nations employ targeted killings of terrorist leaders.

Recall that it was Great Britain that implemented a policy during the Second World War of targeting civilians in cities such as Dresden and that it was the United States that implemented the same policy in its firebombing of Tokyo. Indeed, it is fair to say that no country in modern history has ever been more protective of enemy civilians than Israel has been during its 75 year fight against terrorism…

(For background on the attempt last week to arrest Ehud Barak in Britain, please see items 5 and 6 in this dispatch.)

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

OLMERT AGAIN OUTLINES PALESTINIAN REJECTION OF HIS OFFER TO CREATE A PALESTINIAN STATE

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, in an interview on the BBC, again said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas turned down his offer last year to create an independent Palestinian state.

Olmert offered Abbas 94 percent of the West Bank and another 6 percent of land inside the internationally-recognized borders of Israel to compensate for the 6 percent of the West Bank Israel would keep. He also proposed dividing Jerusalem so that the Jewish neighborhoods would remain part of Israel and the Palestinian ones would form the capital of a Palestinian state. The so-called “holy basin” – including the Temple Mount – would be under the joint administration of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinians, the United States and Israel.

Olmert’s successor as prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has made it clear that he is not committed to these positions.

 

LATEST SAUDI-SPONSORED INTERFAITH CONFERENCE “INCLUDES A NEO-NAZI”

Among those taking part in the latest Saudi-sponsored interfaith conference is William Baker, whom Wikipedia describes as a neo-Nazi.

Arab News writes: Delegates from 35 countries are taking part in the conference, which opened Wednesday. They include William Baker, president of Christians and Muslims for Peace in the U.S.; David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee; Pramjeet Singh Sarna, president of Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Rakab Ganj Sahib; Kuniaki Kuni, president of the Association of Shinto Temples in Japan; and Xue Cheng, vice chairman of the Buddhist Association of China.

Wikipedia: William Baker ... was expelled from Robert H. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral mission after exposure of his affiliations with extremist far-right racist, anti-Semitic and Neo-Nazi groups, including his chairmanship of the Neo-Nazi Populist Party.

 

EVEN ISRAELI HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS NOW CRITICIZE UN AND GOLDSTONE

Even B’Tselem, the far-left Israeli group cited regularly by The Guardian, The New York Times and others about how terrible Israel is, has voiced criticism of the UN’s Goldstone report.

The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday:

The UN Human Rights Council and the Goldstone Report are either biased or mistaken in some of their fundamental accusations against Israel, according to B’Tselem human rights group director Jessica Montell. She said the council was wrong in its gravest accusations against Israel. These include the claim that Israel intentionally targeted the civilian population rather than Hamas, and the “weak, hesitant way that the report mentions Hamas’s strategy of using civilians [in combat].”

***

The full article from The Jerusalem Post (in which I am quoted) is at the end of this dispatch. For more background on the UN report, please see: “Goldstone’s crime against human rights”.

***

Following publication of her comments to The Jerusalem Post, B’Tselem director Jessica Montell has been attacked by non-Israeli human rights groups as having become “a vehement Zionist and apologist for war crimes”. As a result, she has sought to distance herself from the interview she had given the day before, by reverting to her customary attacks on Israel (though still distancing herself from Goldstone) in an op-ed in today’s Jerusalem Post.

***

Goldstone himself continues to make grotesque and totally untrue allegations against Israel in TV interviews. And in one such interview, with Christiane Amanpour on CNN earlier today, he even suggested to viewers that Hamas has a reliable court system.

This is the Hamas court system in action as described by The New York Times:

On Monday, Dr. Ashour was not the only official in charge. Armed Hamas militants in civilian clothes roamed the hospital halls. Asked their function, they said it was to provide security. But there was internal bloodletting under way.

In the fourth-floor orthopedic section, a woman in her late 20s asked a militant to let her see Saleh Hajoj, her 32-year-old husband. She was turned away and left the hospital. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Hajoj was carried out by young men pretending to transfer him to another ward. As he lay on the stretcher, he was shot in the left side of the head.

Mr. Hajoj, like five others killed at the hospital this way in 24 hours, was accused of collaboration with Israel. He had been in the central prison awaiting trial by Hamas judges; when Israel destroyed the prison on Sunday he and the others were transferred to the hospital. But their trials were short-circuited.

(Tom Gross adds: Mr. Hajoj, and the five others murdered by Hamas in the Gaza hospital, together with many other Palestinians killed by Hamas, have had their names included in lists drawn up by “human rights” groups suggesting they were Palestinian civilians that Israel had killed. Not that Goldstone and the UN care about this.)

 

NETANYAHU: IF TOMORROW’S UN VOTE FAVORS GOLDSTONE, IT WILL BE DISASTROUS FOR THE PEACE PROCESS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the following remarks today:

“In the next 24 hours, a vote will take place in Geneva by the United Nations Human Rights Council. I remind you that in recent years, this council has made more decisions against Israel than against all other counties in the world combined.

Today, if it should decide to forward what is known as the Goldstone report, it will strike a severe blow to three things:

First of all, it will strike a severe blow to the war against terrorism since it will afford total legitimization to terrorists who fire upon civilians and who hide behind civilians.

Secondly, it will strike a mortal blow to the stature of the United Nations. It will return it to its darkest days, in which it could make the most absurd decisions, which would empty it of all substance and significance.

Thirdly, and perhaps the most immediate and obvious of all, forwarding the decision of what is known as the Goldstone report, would deal a fatal blow to the peace process. Because Israel will no longer be able to take additional steps and take risks for peace if its right to self-defense is denied.”

 

UPDATE (Oct. 2): ABRUPT PALESTINIAN ABOUT TURN ON GOLDSTONE

Following what was described as “massive American pressure,” the Palestinian delegation to the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday night abruptly delayed its efforts to forward the Goldstone report to the Security Council. The Palestinians said they would withdraw their draft resolution on the Goldstone report prior to voting today at the UN Human Rights Council.

The position of the U.S. since the Goldstone report was released has been that the Human Rights Council alone should deal with it and it should not be referred to the UN Security Council or to the International Criminal Court. But in a compromise, the body is expected to pass a resolution today (Friday, October 2) presented by the bloc of Arab and Muslim states that any action will be delayed until their next meeting in March.

“There was a tremendous amount of pressure on all members by the Americans,” said an Arab diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity to The New York Times. “The Americans wanted something to finish it; the compromise is to defer it, which means it is still alive.”

With the matter still hanging over Israel until March, it will be difficult for Israel to continue with full confidence in the peace process for the reasons outlined by Benjamin Netanyahu in the item above.

***

The latest person to criticize the Goldstone report is retired Australian Major General Jim Molan who was chief of operations of the multinational force in Iraq, in this article in today’s Australian.

 

BRITISH LAWYERS SEEK ARREST OF VISITING ISRAELI DEFENSE MINISTER EHUD BARAK

(This item was first published on National Review Online earlier this week.)

British lawyers seek arrest of visiting Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak
By Tom Gross
National Review Online
Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Now that the Bush administration isn’t there to actively lobby for Israel, the situation for the Jewish state at the hands of the assorted Israel bashers and anti-Semites of the world is growing more and more grave.

Currently, the top-of-the-page headline on the home page of the influential left-wing British newspaper The Guardian is “Lawyers seek arrest of Israeli defence minister in UK for alleged war crimes”.

Ehud Barak, who is the leader of Israel’s Labor Party, is due to speak at a meeting at the British Labour party conference in the Southern English town of Brighton today. Barak is also scheduled to meet British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and David Miliband, the foreign secretary, for talks on the Middle East and Iran.

The Guardian notes that “The accusations against Barak are based, in part, on a United Nations investigation conducted by the former South African judge Richard Goldstone. It concluded earlier this month that Israel had committed war crimes.”

And indeed the UN is meeting in Geneva today to discuss Goldstone’s report. Reuters reports from the hearings in Geneva that: “The United States called on its close ally Israel on Tuesday to conduct credible investigations into allegations of war crimes committed by its forces in Gaza, saying it would help the Middle East peace process.”

Is the Obama administration saying that Israel’s very thorough investigations up until now have not been credible? Previous American presidents would not have played the UN’s “Lets beat up on Israel” game, but would have walked out (which is what countries like Canada and Australia have done).

I had been hoping we might be seeing a wiser Obama foreign policy after the president’s fairly tough press conference on Iran last week. But it seems not.

 

(This item was first published on National Review Online earlier this week.)

FORD FOUNDATION, EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS AMONG THOSE FUNDING ORGANIZATION SEEKING BARAK’S ARREST

Ford Foundation, European governments among those funding organization seeking to arrest Israeli Defense minister
By Tom Gross
National Review Online
Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Following up my earlier item, Westminster Magistrates court in central London on Tuesday evening rejected a petition to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the grounds that he committed “war crimes” by defending Israel from Hamas attack. The British government intervened on Barak’s behalf, submitting legal briefs to the court, and thus avoiding what would have been the most serious clash between Britain and Israel since 1948.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Al Mezan is the organization behind the British arrest efforts. Al Mezan had instructed expensive London law firms to carry them out.

As noted by NGO Monitor, Al Mezan is funded by Sweden (1.1 million SEK), Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the Ford Foundation, the International Commission of Jurists, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Netherlands Representative Office, the International Human Rights Funders Group/co Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Medico International and the European Commission, among others.

It seems that these NGOs and European governments are responsible for this latest attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel and to aid those who would seek to destroy it.

 

“ISRAEL WON’T SEE POINT OF TAKING EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES TO PROTECT CIVILIANS, AS IT DID IN PAST”

Political commentator Yossi Klein Halevi, a subscriber to this email list, adds:

If a large part of the international community endorses the Goldstone report’s conclusions and opts to put Israel on trial – symbolically or literally – the clear message to Israel will be the rescinding of its right to self-defense against Hizbullah and Hamas, both of which are embedded in civilian populations. That will require a basic rethinking of Israel’s current strategic policy of containing the terrorist enclaves on its northern and southern borders.

In the decades following the Six Day War, Israeli policy, upheld by successive Labor and Likud governments, was to deny terrorists a foothold along any Israeli border. That was, in part, the rationale behind Moshe Dayan’s open bridges policy between Israel and Jordan in the 1970s, as well as Ariel Sharon’s West Bank settlement drive and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When that war soured, so did the appeal of the policy that inspired it.

Israel’s two unilateral withdrawals – from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 – both resulted in the creation of terror enclaves on its borders, negating long-standing strategy. The policy of prevention was replaced by a policy of containment.

… The Goldstone report may well mark the end of Israel’s limited wars against terrorist groups. Israel cannot afford to continue to be drawn into mini-wars against terrorists hiding behind their own civilians to attack Israeli civilians, given that each such conflict inexorably draws the Jewish state one step closer toward pariah status. Limited victories on the battlefield are being turned into major defeats in the arena of world opinion.

That untenable situation may well leave Israel no choice but to return to the post-1967 policy of preventing altogether the presence of terror enclaves on its borders. Better, Israelis will argue, to deal decisively with the terror threat and brace for temporary international outrage than subject our legitimacy to constant attrition, even as the terrorist threat remains intact.

Israelis will be keenly watching the pace of Qassam rocket fire from Gaza for signs of an emboldened Hamas. If attacks do intensify – as they have in recent days – and the quiet achieved by the Gaza offensive is forfeited, the Israeli public will blame the Goldstone report. And Israelis’ operative conclusions will likely lead to a less restrained response next time – the opposite result Judge Richard Goldstone sought to achieve in his attempt to deny Israel the right to self-defense.

 

ISRAEL TO FREE PALESTINIAN SECURITY PRISONERS TO OBTAIN VIDEO OF ISRAELI HOSTAGE

Israel is to release 20 Palestinian women imprisoned for security and terrorism offenses, in exchange for a two-minute videotape of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit proving that he is alive.

Shalit, then a teenager, was seized while he slept in a cross-border raid into Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian groups in 2006, and then taken into Gaza.

Israeli and Palestinian officials said the exchange was expected to take place tomorrow, although one of the women has already been released today.

“Israel will receive updated and unequivocal proof of Gilad Shalit’s well-being and status,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, but the negotiations for his release were “still expected to be long and arduous.”

Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader, said the prisoners included four from Hamas, five from Fatah, three from Islamic Jihad, and one from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He said the others were not affiliated with any group. Only one of the women is from Gaza; the rest are from the West Bank.

All are prisoners held on security or terrorist-related offenses, but none have been convicted of murder.

Shalit, now 23, was last seen being dragged alive into Gaza in 2006. A year later, Hamas released an audiotape of him believed to be authentic; his family has also received two letters written in what family members said was his handwriting. A videotape would be the first sign of life in over a year.

German intelligence officials are believed to have negotiated the deal. German experts also played a role in the exchange of Lebanese and Palestinian terrorists for the bodies of the two Israeli soldiers killed by Hizbullah in the attack which triggered the 2006 Lebanon war.

Gilad’s father, Noam Shalit, has repeatedly but vainly called for the Red Cross to be allowed access to his son.

Among past dispatches on this subject, please see: While Hamas terrorists celebrate their 100th Israeli university degree, how many degrees does Gilad Shalit have?

 

ISRAEL PRISON SERVICE’S LIST OF FEMALE SECURITY PRISONERS TO BE RELEASED

The Israel Prison Service has provided the following list of those to be released here.

Attached below are the date each was originally schedule for release (where known) and the crimes for which they were sentenced.

In my view there is something very unsettling, to say the least, about the early release of convicted terrorists, who might again turn to violence, in return for a video of a hostage.

18.11.09 Attempt to cause death
09.06.11 Attempt to cause death, conspiracy to carry out a crime
13.11.09 Member in and provision of help to illegal group
04.03.11 Attempt to cause death
15.12.09 Violence towards soldier, possession of knife for improper purpose
Detained Attempt to cause death, possession of knife for improper purpose
24.05.10 Attempt to cause death, possession of knife for improper purpose
01.11.09 Attempt to cause death, attack police fulfilling his duty
31.10.10 Attempt to cause death
Detained Attempt to cause death, illegal military training, possession of weapons
04.01.10 Attempt to cause death
02.07.10 Violence towards soldiers
08.09.10 Attempt to cause death, weapons carrying
04.04.10 Attempt to cause death
05.08.10 Attempt to cause death, possession of knife for improper purpose
19.11.10 Attempt to cause death, conspiracy, member in legal group
12.05.11 Attempt to cause death
07.05.10 Member in and holding a position in illegal group
Detained Violence towards soldiers, possession of knife for improper purpose
Detained Member in and holding a position in illegal group, violations against the public order

 

HAMAS WEBSITE: “BREAKTHROUGH IN PRISONER EXCHANGE”

The following is from the official Hamas website:

30-09-2009, 11:38
www.qassam.ps/news-1882-A_breakthrough_in_prisoners_exchange_deal.html

Al Qassam Website - Ezzedeen Al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas, confirmed that in the framework of the Egyptian & the German efforts to release the Palestinian prisoners from all the Palestinian factions, an agreement was done to release 20 Palestinian female prisoners from the Zionist jails in the next few days in exchange to clarify the status of Shalit.

The Brigades indicated at a press conference for Abu Obeida, the spokesman of Al Qassam Brigades, on Wednesday in the courtyard of the Unknown Soldier in Gaza City that the prisoners will be as the following:

Four prisoners from Hamas
Five prisoners from Fatah
Three prisoners from the Islamic Jihad
One prisoner of the Popular Front

According to the geographical distribution, they are:
Three prisoners from Hebron
Eight prisoners from Nablus
Four prisoners from Ramallah
Three prisoners from Bethlehem
A captive from Jenin
Seven independent prisoners
A captive and her child from the Gaza Strip

Abu Obaida said “The Palestinian factions which completed this step is confirming the steadfastness of its position and its commitment to make its best effort to complete the deal to release our prisoners from the Zionist jails.”

“Al Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian factions captured the Zionist soldier Gilad Shalit almost three years ago in an operation as a response to the Zionist aggression on the Palestinian civilians in Gaza strip and the West Bank.”

 

ISRAEL SUPPORTS QATARI PLAN FOR ADDITIONAL GAZA HOSPITAL

Israel has approved a French request to allow Qatar to build a new hospital in the Gaza Strip, government officials said yesterday.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy made the request when he met with Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly last week in New York. The two leaders spoke again by phone on Tuesday, and Netanyahu said he would instruct the IDF to approve the construction, which would entail allowing concrete and other building materials into the Strip, something Israel has been hesitant to do, fearing the material would be used to make weapons, as has been the case in the past.

 

ISRAELI PATENTS TO BE AUTOMATICALLY ACCEPTED WORLDWIDE

The World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN-sponsored organization ensuring order in the intellectual property sphere, has named Israel as one of only 15 countries issuing patents that are automatically recognized and accepted by all countries around the world. Israeli officials said the decision was recognition of “Israel’s technological prowess and capabilities in innovation and invention.”

 

MICROSOFT’S NEW FREE ANTIVIRUS DEVELOPED IN ISRAEL

The latest Microsoft product set to sweep the world was (like so much technology connected with the internet, mobile phones, and computers in the last two decades), developed in Israel.

The development of “Microsoft Security Essentials” began in the Israeli coastal town of Herzliya Pituach. The software will be free to download for registered Microsoft customers.

However, British academics, Egyptian journalists, and others boycotting Israel had better not use it. They should also stop using their Apple iphones and iPods since part of the technology behind those was also developed in Israel.

 

MUBARAK-CONTROLLED MEDIA GROUP AGREES ON “TOTAL ISRAEL BOYCOTT”

The board of directors of the powerful Egyptian media group Al-Ahram have decided to boycott Israel and “all Israelis”, Arab media report.

The Al-Ahram group is the most powerful media body in Egypt. Al-Ahram, whose head is appointed directly by Egyptian President Mubarak, publishes newspapers considered to be the official mouthpiece of the Egyptian regime.

The boycott includes a ban on meeting with and interviewing Israelis, and a ban on participation in seminars, conferences and lectures in which Israelis are taking part.

It was also announced that disciplinary action would be taken against Dr. Hala Moustafa, the editor of Al-Ahram’s Democracy magazine, after her recent meeting with Israeli ambassador Shalom Cohen. An investigation against her will begin on Tuesday. Moustafa said that she will defend her stance and argue that Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty and as such, a meeting with Israel’s ambassador is not a violation of Egyptian law.

Commentators said the move by Al-Ahram was linked to the failure of Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosny to be elected head of UNESCO last week. Bulgarian diplomat Irina Bokova was elected UNESCO chair by a narrow margin.

Following his defeat, Hosny blamed “the world’s Jews” for his failure to win. In spite of his “blaming the Jews” argument, many Jews had publically voiced support for Hosny to become head of what is supposed to be the world’s top cultural post. For example, the anti-Israeli Roger Cohen, former foreign editor of The New York Times and now a New York Times columnist, had written last month that Hosny should be appointed, even though Hosny had said he would personally burn any Israeli book he found in Egypt’s famed Library of Alexandria. After his failure to win the post, Hosny said “I swear I will settle accounts with the Jews.” The Al-Ahram move appears to be part of this revenge against his imagined enemy.

As I mentioned in a previous dispatch, Hosny also admitted recently that when he was the Egyptian cultural attaché in Rome, he helped to organize the escape from Italy in 1985 of the hijackers of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. In that hijacking, a retired American Jewish tourist in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, was shot and pushed into the sea where he drowned.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]