ARTICLES

“REMEMBER THE REGGAE STAR MATISYAHU THE NEXT TIME ANTI-ISRAEL PROPONENTS INSIST THEIR AIM IS TO PROMOTE PALESTINIAN RIGHTS, NOT ANTI-JEWISH BIGOTRY”

That Anti-Israel Reggae Beat
Remember the reggae star Matisyahu the next time anti-Israel proponents insist their aim is to promote Palestinian rights, not anti-Jewish bigotry.

Wall Street Journal editorial
August 19, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/that-anti-israel-reggae-beat-1439937739

Rototom Sunsplash is an annual arts-and-music festival going on this week near Valencia, Spain. Showcasing “the cream of reggae’s crop,” Rototom Sunplash according to its organizers also aims to promote a culture of “peace, equality, human rights and social justice.” Unless you’re Jewish, that is.

This year Rototom Sunsplash disinvited Matthew Miller, a Jewish-American reggae star who performs under the name Matisyahu, because he wouldn’t publicly endorse a Palestinian state. The organizers said they cancelled Mr. Miller’s appearance after having “repeatedly sought dialogue in the face of the artist’s unavailability to give a clear statement against war and on the right of the Palestinian people to their own state.”

Mr. Miller was the only participant asked to engage in such political “dialogue.” Micah Shemaiah, Andrae Jay Sutherland and other Jamaican artists weren’t asked to disavow antigay violence in their country. Sudanese journalist and festival presenter Sami al-Hajj, a former Guantanamo detainee, wasn’t required to publicly denounce the Khartoum regime’s human-rights abuses.

“It was appalling and offensive,” Mr. Miller wrote of the incident, “that as the one publicly Jewish-American artist scheduled for the festival they were trying to coerce me into political statements.” Even the virulently anti-Israel Spanish press has denounced the move.

Many European cultural and intellectual elites still don’t see the connection between singling out the world’s sole Jewish state for opprobrium and the explosion of anti-Semitic sentiment on the Continent. Remember the Matisyahu affair the next time proponents of the anti-Israel boycott, divest and sanction movement insist their aim is to promote Palestinian rights, not anti-Jewish bigotry.

“HE HAD A FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE ON A KIBBUTZ AND SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE DUBBED HIM THE ‘OLD JEW’.”

Where does Bernie Sanders, the Jewish candidate for president, stand on Israel?
By Ron Kampeas
Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)
August 17, 2015

http://www.jta.org/2015/08/17/news-opinion/politics/where-does-bernie-sanders-the-jewish-candidate-for-president-stand-on-Israel

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Bernie Sanders’ best friend is a Zionist who teaches Jewish philosophy, he had a formative experience on a kibbutz and “Saturday Night Live” dubbed him the “old Jew.”

Still, Sanders can’t get away from the inevitable “But where is he on Israel?” question, especially now that the Democratic presidential contender, an Independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, has pulled ahead of Hillary Rodham Clinton in New Hampshire, the first primary state.

“Do you view yourself as a Zionist?” the left-leaning online magazine Vox asked Sanders in a July 28 interview.

It’s a funny question for Sanders, who if there were an “out and proud” metric for Jews in politics would score high.

Sanders, 73, is best friends with Richard Sugarman, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the University of Vermont who champions Zionism to his left-leaning students. His other best friend – and former chief of staff – is Huck Gutman, a University of Vermont professor of literature who is a passionate aficionado of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai.

When the comedian Sarah Silverman introduced Sanders at an Aug. 10 rally in Los Angeles, she shunted aside for a moment her caustic Jewish shtick.

“His moral compass and sense of values inspires me,” she said. “He always seems to be on the right side of history.”

Silverman ticked off a list of Sanders’ qualifications that align him with positions that polls show American Jews overwhelmingly favor: for same-sex marriage, for civil rights, against the Iraq war. She might have added favoring universally available health care.

“He is a man of the people,” Silverman said. “He has to be; his name is Bernie.”

Fresh out of the University of Chicago and already deeply involved in left-wing activism, Sanders spent several months in the mid-1960s on a kibbutz. The Brooklyn-born and accented Sanders has been shaped by the murder of his father’s extended family in the Holocaust.

“As everyone in this room knows, I am a Jew, an old Jew,” actor Fred Armisen said while playing Sanders in a 2013 “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

Sanders’ well-known pique surfaced in June when Diane Rehm, the NPR talk show host, declaratively told him he had dual U.S.-Israel citizenship, citing an anti-Semitic meme circulating on the Internet.

“Well, no, I do not have dual citizenship with Israel,” Sanders said. “I’m an American. I don’t know where that question came from. I am an American citizen, and I have visited Israel on a couple of occasions. No, I’m an American citizen, period.”

So where does Bernie Sanders stand on Israel? Here’s a review.

He backs Israel, but he believes in spending less on defense assistance to Israel and more on economic assistance in the Middle East.

Is Sanders a Zionist? Here’s what he told Vox’s Ezra Klein:

“A Zionist? What does that mean? Want to define what the word is? Do I think Israel has the right to exist? Yeah, I do. Do I believe that the United States should be playing an even-handed role in terms of its dealings with the Palestinian community in Israel? Absolutely I do.

“Again, I think that you have volatile regions in the world, the Middle East is one of them, and the United States has got to work with other countries around the world to fight for Israel’s security and existence at the same time as we fight for a Palestinian state where the people in that country can enjoy a decent standard of living, which is certainly not the case right now. My long-term hope is that instead of pouring so much military aid into Israel, into Egypt, we can provide more economic aid to help improve the standard of living of the people in that area.”

He will defend Israel to a hostile crowd, but will also fault Israel – and will shout down hecklers.

At a town hall in Cabot, Vermont, during last summer’s Gaza war, a constituent commended Sanders for not signing onto a Senate resolution that solely blamed Hamas for the conflict, but wondered if he would “go further.”

“Has Israel overreacted? Have they bombed U.N. facilities? The answer is yes, and that is terribly, terribly wrong,” Sanders said.

“On the other hand – and there is another hand – you have a situation where Hamas is sending missiles into Israel – a fact – and you know where some of those missiles are coming from. They’re coming from populated areas; that’s a fact. Hamas is using money that came into Gaza for construction purposes – and God knows they need roads and all the things that they need – and used some of that money to build these very sophisticated tunnels into Israel for military purposes.”

Hecklers interrupted, some shouting epithets.

“Excuse me, shut up, you don’t have the microphone,” Sanders said. “You asked the question, I’m answering it. This is called democracy. I am answering a question and I do not want to be disturbed.”

His critical but supportive posture on Israel has been consistent and has included using assistance as leverage.

As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1988, Sanders was asked if he backed then-candidate for president Jesse Jackson’s support for the Palestinians during the first intifada. Sanders excoriated what he depicted as Israeli brutality as well as Arab extremism.

“What is going on in the Middle East right now is obviously a tragedy, there’s no question about it. The sight of Israeli soldiers breaking the arms and legs of Arabs is reprehensible. The idea of Israel closing down towns and sealing them off is unacceptable,” he said at a news conference, according to video unearthed by Alternet writer Zaid Jilani. “You have had a crisis there for 30 years, you have had people at war for 30 years, you have a situation with some Arab countries where there are still some Arab leadership calling for the destruction of the State of Israel and the murder of Israeli citizens.”

Sanders said the United States should exercise the prerogative it has as an economic power.

“We are pouring billions of dollars in arms into Arab countries. We have the clout to demand they and Israel, who we’re also heavily financing, to begin to sit down and work out a sensible solution to the problem which would guarantee the existence of the State of Israel and which would also protect Palestinian rights,” he said.

He doesn’t think the Iran nuclear deal is perfect, but he backs it.

“It’s so easy to be critical of an agreement which is not perfect,” he told CBS News on Aug. 7. “But the United States has to negotiate with, you know, other countries. We have to negotiate with Iran. And the alternative of not reaching an agreement, you know what it is? It’s war. Do we really want another war, a war with Iran? An asymmetrical warfare that will take place all over this world, threatening American troops? So I think we go as far as we possibly can in trying to give peace a chance, if you like. Trying to see if this agreement will work. And I will support it.”

ARTICLES

“EVEN IN PALESTINE, I HAVE NEVER WITNESSED THE KIND OF RAW HATRED AND SHEER UNREASONING AGGRESSION OF THE BDS SUPPORTERS”

The Palestinian case against BDS
By Bassem Eid
Fikra Forum
June 25, 2015

Whereas the movement’s spokespeople live in comfortable circumstances abroad, boycotts will result in increased economic hardships for actual Palestinians.

***

Everyone appears to have an opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As I learned on a recent trip, South Africans especially display an interest in solving the problem, even more, or so it seems to me, than the Israelis and Palestinians themselves. And others far away point to the South African history of apartheid as a warning to Israel about its occupation or alleged discrimination against Palestinians.

Unfortunately, almost all of those so ostensibly dedicated to finding a solution have their own agendas, and these may not be to the advantage of either Palestinians or Israelis. A prime case in point is the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. As a Palestinian dedicated to working for peace and reconciliation between my people and our Israeli neighbors, I do not believe that the BDS advocates are helping our cause. On the contrary, they are just creating more hatred, enmity, and polarization.

Recently, I was asked to talk at the University of Johannesburg. I criticized Israel for its settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) for its lack of leadership in helping the Palestinians, and then began to speak about the BDS movement. At this point, my talk was disrupted by students wearing BDS and other radical T-shirts. They interrupted me and did not allow me to continue speaking, and in the end the event had to be abandoned. As a campaigner for peace and a human rights activist, I am used to hostile reactions from those who disagree with my standpoint. However, even in my own country, I have never witnessed the kind of raw hatred and sheer unreasoning aggression that confronted me on this occasion.

There is no connection between the tactics and objectives of the BDS movement and the on-the-ground realities of the Middle East. Israelis continue to come to the West Bank to do business, and most Palestinians continue to buy Israeli goods. Indeed, if you ask Palestinians what they want, they’ll tell you they want jobs, secure education, and health. And the people who are failing them in this regard are their own leaders: Fatah in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza. The focus of PA leaders is on enriching themselves and their families, rather than serving the interests of the Palestinians. They are not a generation of leaders who are able to bring about a viable end to the conflict. Indeed, they are not even interested in uplifting their own people. Unfortunately, there is no immediate alternative to PA president Mahmoud Abbas, who finds continuous excuses not to hold elections.

As for Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, it was they who provoked last year’s destructive war with Israel to gain support among their own people. They then cynically used their own population as human shields during the fighting to generate sympathy for their cause when innocent lives were inevitably lost. As in the past, Hamas will inevitably try to use some of the money it receives from international donors to reconstruct the terrorist tunnels and replenish its missile arsenal. There is no hope in the near future to solve this mess – except perhaps among the ordinary people of Gaza, who may compel Hamas to hold its fire against Israel.

For the time being, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in any case receiving less international attention than before. Rather, the focus at the moment is on the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. This is indeed a more urgent threat to the region and beyond. It is most dangerous to Muslims themselves, as it challenges the authentic message of Islam. Many Muslims feel let down by their own leaders and want to take revenge on them. The so-called Islamic State provides the worst extremists among them with the pretext to do this.

The Palestinians are tired of the peace process. Both sides have learned to manage the conflict, rather than solve it. That is why there is only one way to bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and that is for both sides to have sufficient goodwill to negotiate their own peace deal. It cannot be imposed by outside diplomatic or economic pressure.

BDS spokespeople justify calling for boycotts that will result in increased economic hardships for the Palestinians by asserting that Palestinians are willing to suffer such deprivations in order to achieve their freedom. It goes without saying that they themselves live in comfortable circumstances elsewhere in the world and will not suffer any such hardship. It would seem, in fact, that the BDS movement in its determination to oppose Israel is prepared to fight to the last drop of Palestinian blood. As a Palestinian who actually lives in east Jerusalem and hopes to build a better life for his family and his community, this is the kind of “pro-Palestinian activism” we could well do without. For our own sake, we need to reconcile with our Israeli neighbors, not reject and revile them.

(Bassem Eid is a human rights activist, political analyst, and commentator on Palestinian domestic affairs.)

“THE BOYCOTT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT THE WAY TO END THE OCCUPATION. THE PEOPLE IN EUROPE AND THE U.S. DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT”

How the boycott hurts Palestinians
By Brett Kline
Haaretz
July 8, 2015

Thirty-four year old Samir is busy slicing wood on his ban saw for a kitchen cabinet he is building for neighbors in the Beitar Ilit settlement across the road.

The planks of wood were imported from Sweden and purchased in Israel. They are stacked in his carpentry workshop on the muddy main street in the village of Husan, in the Jerusalem hills near Bethlehem. “I have clients from Beitar and Gilo, and if I could make contacts in Efrat, I would,” he says in fluent Hebrew, referring to nearby Jewish settlements. “We trust each other. It is not about politics; it is about cooperation for survival.”

Outside, workshops, construction supply depots, garages and stores all have signs in Arabic and Hebrew, and they are relatively busy with contractor customers, both Israeli and Palestinian. A young, bearded Haredi man drives his van away from a gas station after filling up. Nobody looks twice.

The BDS movement in Europe and the United States, which includes activist groups and student unions, has been stepping up calls to cut off Israel in the fields of culture, business and education, in order to protest the occupation.

But why are they not calling on Palestinians in the West Bank to take part on a local level - to cut contacts with Israelis, and stop buying Israeli goods and services? It might sound like a logical move, but it is here, in the West Bank, that the boycott movement loses its logic.

The push by BDS leaders has made the boycott the most fashionable way for Europeans and Americans to protest against the Israeli occupation. But for Palestinians, this is a problem, to say the least.

How much contact do boycott proponents have with average Palestinians, not those who work in offices in Ramallah? If they were to come to Husan and dozens of other villages like it in the West Bank, the European and American activists would find that Palestinian entrepreneurs and workers want and need more contact with Israelis, not less.

“We small-time entrepreneurs in Palestine cannot survive without working with Israelis, and the benefits are mutual,” Samir states. “For us, the boycott, the moukata’a, is ridiculous. Nobody here likes the Israeli occupation, but cutting ties would be a death wish.”

It appears to many Palestinians - and to this journalist - that most BDS proponents in the West either have never been to Israel and Palestine, or do not know much about the ties between the two peoples that exist for better or worse. Or perhaps they care more about trying to damage Israel than they do about improving Palestinians’ lives.

In his busy building supply depot in Husan, Mahmoud Ibrahim al-Shushe, 51, sells materials and tools made in Hebron, Palestine’s industrial capital, as well as in Israel, Europe, China and India. Supplies are imported through Israel and Jordan.

“We have relationships and mutual interests with Israelis from Beitar and elsewhere,” he explains in careful English. “We must nurture these relationships and commercial exchanges. You know, the occupation is very difficult, and I wish it would end tomorrow. But even if it did, we would maintain and grow the same relationships. Our future is with Israelis - for me, my wife and my seven children.”

He adds with a trace of anger, “The boycott is absolutely not the way to end the occupation. The people in Europe and the U.S. don’t know what they are talking about.” I’m inclined to believe he’s right.

Two older men arrive - contractors from Gilo, I am told. They are clean-shaven, without skullcaps, and are not carrying pistols – not visibly, at least. Coffee is poured immediately, cigarettes lit, and conversation flows, all in fluent Arabic. The gestures are very clear: These Palestinians and native Arabic-speaking Israeli Jews are very comfortable with each other. I wonder what the boycott proponents would think of this little scene.

In fact, what would Palestinian Authority officials say? My friend Nadal, who works in Ramallah, but is from the Husan/Gush Etzion area, says PA officials are in a very uncomfortable position.

“Because the boycott, the moukata’a, has become the focus of the fight against the occupation, the PA feels forced to support it, even though they know that so many Palestinians would starve without work with Israel,” he says. “They certainly cannot make statements against the boycott.”

How to solve this situation? Bring the boycott advocates to Palestine, to villages like Husan. Here, they could speak to hundreds of Palestinian contractors and workers, ordinary people who want an end to the occupation, yes, but who also want more access to work with Israelis.

Samir and his family, and others like them, would be hurt more than Israelis would by a boycott. Enabling their economic survival is more important than winning politically correct propaganda points for international media consumption. The international community has – or must find - other tools to pressure Israel to ease or end the military occupation of the West Bank. Focus on these other means, and let the boycott fade away.

DILEMMA FOR ISRAEL BOYCOTTERS AS SCIENTISTS MAKE HIV BREAKTHROUGH

Dilemma for Israel boycotters as scientists make HIV breakthrough
By Sarkis Zeronian
Breitbart News (UK)
August 12, 2015

Scientists in Israel have announced a breakthrough in HIV research, a development that will leave Israel boycotters with their latest ethical dilemma. The team from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev say their finding will result in a “revolutionary diagnosis and the key to the clinical solution that will prevent infection with HIV and will destroy the deadly virus.”

i24News reports that Dr Ran Taube of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics at the southern Israeli university said his team has discovered similarities between HIV (the virus that leads to AIDS) and leukemia. Conducted in collaboration with Dr. Uri Rubio of Soroka University Medical Center, the research aims both to stamp out AIDS and to slow the progress of a rare mixed-lineage leukemia mostly occurring in children.

http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/81715-150811-israeli-scientists-make-breakthrough-in-hiv-research

Despite the fact AIDS is now classed as a chronic disease treated with anti-retroviral drugs, to date there has been no treatment proven to prevent the spread of the HIV virus. The number of HIV-infected individuals still rises every year, so if this team of research scientists from Israel has made the breakthrough that leads directly or indirectly to the development of a workable vaccine they have done the world a great service.

Unfortunately a certain group of scientists from outside Israel will not be collaborating in this effort to develop a vaccine that would rid the world of HIV.

Since 2004 the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has called for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions on the grounds they are “deeply complicit” in the oppression of Palestinians. Those supporting the campaign, which include backers of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, believe in the “general overriding rule” that:

“…all Israeli academic institutions, unless proven otherwise, are subject to boycott because of their decades-old, deep and conscious complicity in maintaining the Israeli occupation and denial of basic Palestinian rights, whether through their silence, actual involvement in justifying, whitewashing or otherwise deliberately diverting attention from Israel’s violations of international law and human rights, or indeed through their direct collaboration with state agencies in the planning and implementation of projects that contravene international law and Palestinian rights. Accordingly, these institutions, all their activities, and all the activities they sponsor or support must be boycotted.”

Certain research and development activities violate this Palestinian academic boycott. According to the PACBI website, institutional cooperation agreements with Israeli universities or research institutes, such as those involved in the HIV breakthrough, are frowned upon. More specifically, agreements between international and Israeli academic institutions for “the conduct of joint research” are to be avoided.

We cannot rely on Israel boycotters to add their expertise to Dr Taube’s quest for the discovery of the HIV vaccine. Whether or not they will want to take advantage of the fruits of his labour if he does eventually find what he is looking for is another matter.

“IF THE ROTOTOM SUNSPLASH FESTIVAL WANTS TO TAKE PART IN THIS RACIST BDS FEVER THEN IT IS THEM – AND NOT JEWS – WHOM THE WORLD MUST MAKE INTO GLOBAL PARIAHS”

The New Racists: Jew Hate
By Douglas Murray
Gatestone Institute
August 17, 2015

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6355/spain-jew-hate

Are you a performer who wishes to appear in public at any point in the future? If so, you might have to bone up on geopolitical affairs – and then ensure that you have all the “correct” views. If you had thought that the only qualification you would need would be to excel at your chosen art form and then see if you can gather audiences, you were wrong. That is not enough anymore – certainly not if you are Jewish.

This week the news came in that a Spanish music festival had cancelled a planned performance by Matisyahu, an American reggae star. Matisyahu became famous as the “hassidic reggae star,” although he left Orthodox Judaism in 2011. He no longer has a beard of wears a skullcap, but he does remain proud of his Jewish identity. Next weekend, on August 22, he was due to perform at the Rototom Sunsplash festival in Benicassim, north of Valencia.

Unfortunately for anyone simply interested in music, a group of local Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists found out about Matisyahu’s upcoming performance. They claimed that Matisyahu is a supporter of “an apartheid state that practices ethnic cleansing,” and demanded that the festival cancel the performance.

Matisyahu is of course not the first Jew to suffer this type of pressure. In Europe, and increasingly in America too, any and all performers who come from Israel can be abused and vilified in the name of “progressive” values. In London, the Jerusalem String Quartet and Israel Philharmonic Orchestra have been the targets of attempts to cancel their performances. When the performances have gone ahead, they have had to suffer obscene and threatening performance interruptions by protesters. The same has happened to Israeli theatre companies such as Habima – whose performers were insulted and vilified while on stage at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, trying to perform “The Merchant of Venice.” None of the protesters seemed to see the irony of vilifying Jews on stage during that of all plays.

Jewish Israeli artists have become used to being targeted and vilified in this way. But the treatment of Matisyahu is something new. For Matisyahu is not an Israeli – he is an American. Yet after the intervention of the BDS protestors, the festival’s director tried what he presumably thought was a perfectly reasonable request: Filippo Giunta asked Matisyahu to produce a “signed statement or video” stating “in a very clear way” that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. This was made a precondition of performing. “If you sign these conditions, you can continue the performance,” the festival’s director told the artist.

Understandably, Matisyahu refused to respond to this ultimatum, and festival organisers cancelled his performance, which was due to be just one of a number of performance stops Matisyahu is making in Europe and America.

It is to be hoped that everybody who believes in artistic freedom and rejects political intimidation can now make for the nearest performance by Matisyahu, whether they like reggae or not. Personally, the actions of the Spanish festival organizers have created the only inclination I have ever felt to attend such a concert.

But perhaps we could also initiate some other geostrategic questions that might be demanded of all other performers in the future. Spain has its own border issues, as nearly every country in the world does. Perhaps Spanish performers in the classical and pop world should henceforth be quizzed about their political attitudes before they are allowed to perform abroad? The whole question of Catalonia, for instance, is deeply fraught and fought over in Spain, with exceedingly strong views over independence on all sides. Maybe the rest of the world should demand that all musicians from Spain sign a statement or make a video supporting Catalan independence if they are to be allowed to perform in public? We could go back and forth in our allegiances of course – and make the Spanish artistic community jump to our every whim and U-turn. Perhaps then we could decide that citizens of other countries could be made to jump through our whims on the Spanish border questions too?

Of course, such a course of action would be obscene, as it would be with any other country. But it is always instructive that only one country and one geopolitical question is addressed in this way. To my knowledge Turkish artists are nowhere in the world asked to condemn their country’s illegal occupation of Northern Cyprus – an occupation, lasting more than four decades, of half an EU member state. Such a demand would be far more appropriate in Spain or any other EU country. And it has certainly never been demanded of people of non-Turkish nationality that they call for the withdrawal of Turkish forces and Turkish people from Cypriot territory before they be allowed to perform in public.

Nor do demands on the tortuous Western Sahara question come up in this way. Both of these issues – to seize just two – are far closer to home for Spanish citizens. One lies only a few miles south, while the other involves a fellow EU member state. But to demand such an action or statement from an artist as a prerequisite to perform would be not just outrageous, it would be regarded as surreal. Why then is the BDS campaign able to normalize such a demand, and for a festival to cancel a performance based on non-compliance with such grotesque demands?

The answer is the fever of our time. For a while, only Israeli Jews were made pariahs among the nations because of an unresolved border dispute involving their country. Now it is Jews born anywhere else in the world who can be targeted in the same way. They are singling out Jews – Jews and only Jews. And their singling out of Jews, wherever they are from, makes their racist motivation abundantly clear. If the Rototom Sunsplash festival wants to take part in this racist BDS fever then it is them – and not Jews – whom the world must make into global pariahs.

ISRAEL: IT’S NOT WHAT THE ARAB AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA TOLD US

My graduation speech at Tel Aviv University
By Haisam Hassanein
August 2015

Good evening. It is my pleasure to speak to you on this evening that represents the end of one chapter in our lives, and the start of another. I’d like to invite you all to take a moment to reflect about the beginning of your adventure in Israel. Do you remember receiving your acceptance letter? You were probably excited to come to Israel.

Then, you started telling people you were coming to Israel, and maybe you started to get a little nervous.

Everybody is in this room has had a friend or a family member who warned him not to come to Israel.

There’s war there! Aren’t you afraid of being blown up? Do they even have water there? Do Jews speak English? If you think you heard a million reasons why not to come to Israel, I heard a million and a half. Growing up in Egypt, my entire country had opinions about Israel, and none of them were positive. All we knew was that we had fought bloody wars, and they were not like us.

My exposure to Israel was through music and television. On the radio, there were anthems about the destruction Israel had caused. In the movies, Israelis were spies and thieves, and in spite of the fact that our countries struck a famous peace accord in 1979, the Israelis, I was told, were our worst enemies.

A recent Egyptian action film called Cousins, a box-office hit, told the story of an Israeli spy who married an Egyptian woman and had a family with her, only to kidnap her and her children to Israel. When I told my mom I was coming to study in Israel, she was understandably terrified that I would get a girlfriend.

I arrived to Israel knowing only what I had learned in the movies and in the media. So, at the airport, when the security official asked why I decided to come here, I half-joked, “I always heard the Jews are bad people, and I came to see this for myself.”

I expected to find that people here were unfriendly, and especially unhappy to meet Egyptians. I was pleasantly surprised to find just the opposite. I was invited everywhere, from Shabbat dinner, to Ramadan Iftar meals, to plays and even to political gatherings. And the diversity I found here was as surprising as the warmth of the people.

On my very first day here at the university, I saw men in kippot and women in headscarfs and hijabs. I saw soldiers walking peacefully among crowds of lively students. I learned there were people of every kind on campus, and that the university had a space for all of them – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druse, Beduin and even international students.

I discovered that the diversity of the Tel Aviv University campus was reflected in Tel Aviv too.

How fascinating is it to be in a country where you can to go a beach and see a Muslim woman, a gay couple kissing, and a Hassid sharing the same small space? Where else can you find a Christian Arab whose apartment is decorated in posters of Mao and Lenin? Where else can you see a Beduin IDF soldier reading the Koran on the train during Ramadan? Where else can you see Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews arguing about whether or not Ashkenazi families had kidnapped Yemenite babies in the 1950s? To be sure, my experience here has been defined by the unexpected.

While traveling beyond Tel Aviv, one can not help but notice the proximity of kibbutzim to Arab villages, and the easy relationship they seem to share with each other.

Perhaps the greatest revelation of my being here was that in spite of all the conflicting histories and identities, people are still able to live their daily lives in a spirit of cooperation.

One particular instance stands out for me when I think of this paradox that plays out in Israel on a day to day basis. In my first weeks here, I had a conversation with a nice Arab-Israeli student, wherein she lectured me on the importance of Arab nations boycotting Israel. As our conversation came to a close, a Jewish boy, about eight years old, skipped up to us, excited to see her. It turns out she was his teacher. She gave him a big hug, and a kiss on his cheek – their affection looked like an exchange between a brother and sister.

I could see how much she truly loved the boy, and how that boy loved her too. No matter how deeply rooted the conflicts, the human side always prevails.

I often reflect on the strangeness of coming to this country, where the people I was taught to think of as enemies were transformed into my teachers, classmates, vendors, doctors and guidance counselors. When Israelis ask me, how does it feel for you to be in this country, I have to be honest. I tell them, before I knew you, I didn’t like you. But I never considered that my “enemies” would accept me to their school, to their country, and moreover into their society.

Interestingly, at the end of my experience, one of the biggest surprises came not from Israel, but from Egypt.

Each year, during Ramadan, there is a special series of soap operas which families all over the Arab world gather to watch after breaking the fast. This year’s soap opera was called Haret el-Yahoud, “The Jewish Quarter,” and it told the story of Egyptian Jews in the wake of Israel’s establishment.

The series deals with questions of identity and politics, and features a cast of Jewish and Muslim characters, and there is even an inter-religious love affair.

As a student of history, I can’t say that the series was perfect, but the depiction of Jews for the first time as human beings, as people with a love of family and country, rather than mortal enemies is nothing short of extraordinary. And while Egypt has a ways to go before accepting Israel as a friend, perhaps this series will inspire more Egyptians to at least be willing to rethink “the enemy.”

After a year of countless surprises, I came to realize that there is a lesson in all this, one that I think we call can use. Moreover, I think it is something we MA students, who strive to understand things more precisely, uniquely understand: we must always question our assumptions. Being here in Israel has taught me that life is full of paradoxes and complexities – that nothing is straightforward, and that things are often not as they are made to seem. No matter how much education and life experience we acquire, we must always dig deeper.

So, today, as we celebrate the end of a great year, let’s also remember to go forward with a sense of renewed curiosity, knowing the only thing one should truly expect in life, is for life to defy your expectations.

Thank you.

ARTICLES

MARRIED BY A WOMAN IN RAMALLAH

Married by a woman: A quiet Palestinian revolution
AFP
August 9, 2015

https://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=766932

RAMALLAH (AFP) -- Holding the young couple’s identity cards in one hand and the Koran in the other, the Palestinian justice of the peace pronounces Thaer and Rawan man and wife.

It’s an everyday scene at the Islamic sharia law court in the West Bank city of Ramallah except for one glaring difference -- the justice is a woman, the first in the occupied Palestinian territories licensed to perform Muslim marriages.

Wearing a long black robe decorated with the Palestinian flag and with a keffiyeh scarf draped over her shoulder, Tahrir Hamad, 33, is leading a quiet revolution in Palestinian society.

On July 29, she became the first, and so far the only, woman appointed as a “mazouna” -- a Muslim official authorized to carry out marriage and divorce.

Until now in the Arab world only Egypt and Abu Dhabi have appointed women to the post.

The reason there are not more, she says smiling, is cultural rather than theological.
“The only obstacle comes from our patriarchal society, because there is no religious or legal reason that prevents women from filling this post.”

Her conviction has been forged during 10 years of Islamic studies, culminating in a master’s degree in Islamic law.

She explains it to couples planning their weddings so they can decide whether to let her officiate or use one of the four male justices at the Ramallah court.

NO REASON TO OBJECT

In the week since she began, she has performed eight marriages and had two categorical refusals.

One of those who objected, she says, “could not give a reason. He just said, ‘I don’t want a woman performing my marriage and that’s it!’“

Such an attitude, she says, is the exception rather than the rule.

“People come to get their wedding contract signed and leave when they have what they want. Whether the signature is that of a man or a woman is not a problem for them.”

Some, like newlyweds Thaer and Rawan Schuman, are proud to have been married by a woman.

Of Palestinian descent but living in the United States, they have come for the summer to marry in their ancestral homeland.

“This is amazing. I’m totally defending the rights of women and this is great,” says Rawan, 24.

“It furthers the cause of women in Palestine.”

Her Brazilian-born dentist husband Thaer, 26, is also enthusiastic.

“The Palestinian people are smart people, respectful people, educated and it’s a great thing that they are progressing and I support it,” he said.

In the traditionally closed male world of the secular courts, three women have already made a breach and are serving as judges in civil law cases.

In approving marriage contracts, Tahrir Hamad is also helping ensure the future rights of the bride.

The document prepared for Tayssir Hamad and Faten al-Deik stipulates that after marriage the bride will continue her doctoral studies, then go to work.

Any decision to quit at a later stage will be bride Faten’s alone, it states.

HOW A 14-YEAR-OLD ISRAELI BECAME THE NEW FACE OF CHRISTIAN DIOR

How a 14-year-old Israeli became the new face of Christian Dior
By Ruth Eglash
Washington Post
July 12, 2015

JERUSALEM – Its a classic rags to riches story that’s almost too much of a cliché to be true, but last week an Israeli teenager with no previous modeling experience strode down the catwalk at Paris fashion week -- as the leading model of fashion house Christian Dior.

According to a report by Israel’s Channel 2 on Friday, Sofia Mechetner, 14, described by her Israeli agent as a young Claudia Schiffer, was catapulted from her modest apartment in a depressed high-rise apartment house in the town of Holon, near Tel Aviv, to fashion world stardom by an incredible coincidence.

Used to sleeping on a broken bed, sharing a bedroom with her two younger siblings, sweeping the floor and folding laundry to help out her single, three-job mom, the 5-foot-11 blond-haired, blue-eyed teen thought she might try modeling after being asked one too many times if she’d ever considered it.

She turned to a Tel Aviv modeling agency called Roberto, which saw her potential and sent her images to the exclusive Viva modeling agency in Paris. Initially, Viva expressed interest, but when Mechetner arrived in Paris with her Israeli chaperon last month, the agency decided she was much too young.

With free time on their hands, the two Israelis decided to check out a Dior store in central Paris. Once inside, the Tel Aviv chaperon spotted chief Dior designer Raf Simons near the counter and decided to ask for him a selfie. After posing, she introduced Mechetner to the fashion leader, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In the 20-minute news feature broadcast by the Israeli channel, an unnamed Viva agent described receiving the phone call from a Dior assistant that would change Mechetner’s life:

“‘You have a young girl called Sofia, from Israel … she was in a Dior shop, and I don’t know for what reason, but Raf Simons was in the same Dior shop, and he met her and he wants her.’ And I said: ‘What? What is that?’ I have never heard a story like this, never. It’s amazing,” said the rep from the Viva agency.

Mechetner, who last week signed a $265,000 contract with Dior, is already featured on the company’s Web site.

In an interview with Channel 2 after the show in Paris, the teenager, who is young even for an industry that is all about youth and beauty, seemed overwhelmed by her newfound fame but said she knew exactly what she would do with the money: “move house and hopefully get a room of my own.”

HOW A HITLER YOUTH MEMBER BECAME AN ISRAELI STAGE LEGEND

How a Hitler Youth Member Became an Israeli Stage Legend
By Benjamin Ivry
The Forward
August 7, 2015

Orna Porat, the Israeli actress who died on August 6 at age 91, showed that a sense of betrayal can inspire an exuberant creative career. Born Irene Klein in Cologne, Germany, to Catholic and Protestant parents, as a young girl she joined the Hitler Youth movement, attracted by the pageantry and songs, despite parental disapproval. From ages ten to fourteen, she slowly became aware of what was happening around her. During an interview with the Gestapo, she was asked to inform on fellow members of her former Hitler Youth theatre group, but she played dumb and burbled on instead about backstage flirtations between actors and actresses. The Gestapo agent concluded she was too stupid to be a useful informant, and left her alone after that. Listening to BBC broadcasts in secret was a further education, as was clandestine reading of banned books by Jewish novelists such as Franz Werfel and Jakob Wassermann. In the early 1940s, Porat heard reports by the husband of a theater employee who returned home after a nervous breakdown. He had been a guard at Bergen-Belsen, and wept as he recounted details of what he had seen. The teenaged Porat listened to the “most shocking details,” as she told interviewer Dan Lachman in 2006 and responded: “I thought it was not possible, is not normal. But nevertheless, I realized something was wrong. And if this was the case, I cannot stay in Germany.”

Her resolve was enforced after the war by meeting Joseph Proter, an officer from the British Mandate of Palestine in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. He invited her to attend interrogations of former concentration camp workers, including, as she told Lachman: a “young blonde woman, a farmer, emotionlessly telling everything they did, with accurate details about how gas was used. It was then I realized fully what really happened.” Burdened with a sense of “collective guilt,” she eventually settled in Tel Aviv, where she joined the Cameri Theater, adopting the more Hebrew-sounding name of Porat. During her first year with the company, times were so tough that she retained a day job as charwoman.

Her career blossomed as a form of personal reparations for her own childish seduction by specious pageantry of the Hitler youth movement, and her nation’s more maturely considered betrayal of humanistic ideals. Ever-aware thereafter of iniquities behind grandiose displays, Porat’s stage incarnations could be vehement and even venomous, unlike standard-issue heroines. Seething with passionate energy and vitality, her performances filled theaters with elemental force, and were only partly captured on film in a scattered and inadequate onscreen legacy. It was as if her dynamism was so volatile, it could scarcely be captured by the camera lens. Unlike her exultant colleague Hanna Maron (1923-2014), who enjoyed a personal triumph in an Israeli revival of the upbeat musical “Hello, Dolly!,” Porat relished grimmer stage incarnations. A compact bundle of ferocity, Porat was more suited to raucous singing in Bertolt Brecht plays such as “The Good Person of Szechwan,” where agony and cynicism are snarled in song. Other standout roles were Joan of Arc, featuring heart-rending guttural cries in Hebrew, and Schiller’s Mary Stuart suffused with rage. Among the remarkable successes of her later years was Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” and Fernando Arrabal’s autobiographical “Love Letter (Like a Chinese Torture),” as a monstrous mother who may have betrayed her husband, the playwright’s father, to Franco’s troops.

Porat’s limited film career began expressing chilly suspicion in “Ir Ha’Ohelim,” a 1951 Israeli film short directed by Leopold Lahola, as a German Jewish mother who must unwillingly share her family’s tent with another family of refugees. In 1957, Porat converted to Judaism in order to adopt two Israeli children. Probably her major film role was in 1975, as Stefania Wilczynska, Janusz Korczak’s assistant who was murdered with him at Treblinka in 1942, in “You are Free, Dr. Korczak,” a biopic directed by the Polish Jewish filmmaker Aleksandr Ford (born Mosze Lifszyc) and starring the British Jewish actor Leo Genn. Porat’s final two films were released in 2010, a one-two punch of pitiless reactions to life’s horrors. In Ori Noam’s “Ruth: Ending” she played a Holocaust survivor in a nursing home where her clear mind evaluates her own failing body. Ruth allows a much-impaired roommate to suffocate during a health crisis rather than call for intrusive medical help to prolong her life. In “Naomi,” a feature film directed by Eitan Tzur, a comparably ferocious choice is made by Porat’s character when she decides to aid and abet her son, an aging astrophysicist with a young wife, who impulsively kills a love rival. Despite such savage emotions expressed in her acting, Porat’s heartfelt commitment was to the future of the arts in Israel, which is why she felt that her lasting legacy would be the Orna Porat Theater for Children and Youth which she founded in 1970.

Dreaming is hard work, as she sang in a retrospective song about this theater, adding that a “higher power” named Yigal Allon (1918-1980), the Israeli politician and acting Prime Minister of Israel, made it possible. Among other high-ranking fans of Porat’s artistry was no less than David Ben Gurion. Yet more than political movers and shakers, Porat’s ongoing humane contributions to Israeli life were due to her own finely honed talents and resolve born of the historical tragedy she emerged from.

MEET THE KURDISH COUPLE WHO SPENT THEIR WEDDING DAY FEEDING 4,000 SYRIAN REFUGEES

(Tom Gross adds: What the Daily Telegraph does not tell readers is that this is actually a Kurdish couple – a significant fact for understanding the story.)

Meet the Turkish couple who spent their wedding day feeding 4,000 Syrian refugees
The couple who tied the knot in the Turkish province of Kilis in the Syrian border and invited 4,000 Syrian refugees to celebrate with them
By Raziye Akkoc
Daily Telegraph (London)
Aug 4, 2015

A Turkish bride and groom decided to share their joy on their wedding day by inviting 4,000 Syrian refugees to eat with them and celebrate in the southern Turkish city of Kilis.

Fethullah Üzümcüoğlu and Esra Polat, who got married in the province which is near the Syrian border last week, invited some of those refugees who have fled the country since the civil war which began four years ago.

Turkey has welcomed nearly two million Syrian refugees and in Kilis, there are 4,000 refugees that Kimse Yok Mu (Is Anybody There?), a Turkish charity which provides help to millions across the world, is responsible for providing food to.

In total, there are four million Syrian refugees who had fled the country in what the UN described as the worst crisis of its kind in a generation. Almost eight million people are displaced within the country, the UN said last month.

The idea for sharing their special day with those less fortunate was that of the groom’s father, Ali Üzümcüoğlu. He told Serhat Kilis newspaper that he hoped others would do the same and share their wedding celebrations with their Syrian brothers and sisters.

“We thought that on such a happy day, we would share the wedding party with our Syrian brothers and sisters. We thought this was best done with Kimse Yok Mu who could provide a truck. God willing, this will lead to others doing the same and giving food to our Syrian brothers and sisters. For us, it was an interesting wedding dinner.”

The father also said he was glad that the couple began a new life “with such a selfless action”. Wedding guests shared food using trucks and those providing meals included the bride and groom themselves.

Hatice Avci, a spokesman for Kimse Yok Mu, told i100.co.uk that on Thursday, the couple pooled the money they had received from their families to host a party with the refugees who live in and around the city.

Kimse Yok Mu is affiliated with the Gülen movement, also known as the Hizmet (Service) movement, which is inspired by the teachings of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic preacher in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.

The bride, Mrs Polat, told i100 what a wonderful experience it was and how happy she was to share the meal with those in need.

“I was shocked when Fethullah first told me about the idea but afterwards I was won over by it. It was such a wonderful experience. I’m happy that we had the opportunity to share our wedding meal with the people who are in real need,” she said.

According to local media, local singer Reşit Muhtar also helped out and provided food to the special guests.

The groom, Mr Üzümcüoğlu, said it was a great feeling to make others happy. “Seeing the happiness in the eyes of the Syrian refugee children is just priceless. We started our journey to happiness with making others happy and that’s a great feeling,” he said.

And his father just might have got his wish. His son said that his friends were so inspired, they hoped to do the same during their wedding celebrations.

WHEN IT COMES TO JEWISH TIES, NO GOP CANDIDATE TRUMPS TRUMP

When it comes to Jewish ties, no GOP candidate trumps Trump
By Uriel Heilman
JTA
August 8, 2015

NEW YORK (JTA) — Among the expansive field of Republican presidential candidates on display in the party’s first debates Thursday night, Donald Trump may be the most closely connected to the Jewish people.

Trump is from New York, works in professions saturated with Jews and long has been a vocal supporter of Israel. His daughter and two grandchildren are Jewish, the executive vice president of his organization is Jewish — and Trump certainly has chutzpah.

But if you expect to find Jewish donors of influence in Trump’s network of associates, you’ll be disappointed: The billionaire’s campaign is self-financed, not donor-funded. Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at about $4 billion; Trump says he’s worth $10 billion.

As the main attraction of the Republican debate, Trump’s trademark chutzpah was on sharp display. When asked about past references to women he dislikes as “fat pigs,” “slobs” and “disgusting animals,” Trump said he has no time for political correctness. He bragged about how Hillary Clinton dared not miss his most recent wedding because he donated to her campaign. And he refused to rule out running as a third-party candidate should someone else win the Republican nomination.

Given his myriad Jewish associations, Trump is not an unfamiliar face in Jewish circles. He has served as a grand marshal at New York’s annual Salute to Israel Parade. After Hurricane Katrina, he was among a group of celebrities who decorated Jewish federation tzedakah boxes to be auctioned off to support hurricane disaster relief. And in February, he was honored with an award at the annual gala for the Algemeiner, a right-wing Jewish news organization.

“I have a Jewish daughter. This wasn’t in the plan, but I’m very glad it happened,” Trump said at the event, held in Manhattan. On Israel, he said, “We love Israel. We will fight for Israel 100 percent, 1,000 percent. It will be there forever.”

Before the 2013 Israeli election, Trump recorded a video message endorsing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“You truly have a great prime minister in Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s a winner, he’s highly respected, he’s highly thought of by all,” Trump said in the 30-second spot. “Vote for Benjamin — terrific guy, terrific leader, great for Israel.”

By the same token, Trump has made clear he believes President Barack Obama is bad for Israel and has questioned how American Jews could support the president.

“I have many Jewish friends that support Obama and I say, ‘Why?’ and they can’t explain why. They support him, they give him money, they give him campaign contributions,” Trump told radio host Michael Savage in February. “This is the worst enemy of Israel.”

Trump at times has dabbled in Israeli real estate. About a decade ago, he bought a site in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area with plans to build Israel’s tallest building, to be called Trump Plaza Tower. He later sold the Ramat Gan property to an Israeli firm before its development. In 2012, Trump met with Israel’s tourism minister to discuss possible investments in real estate and tourism, according to the Israeli news website Ynet.

Trump’s closest Jewish association is with his daughter Ivanka’s family. Ivanka Trump, a fashion designer and celebrity in her own right, converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner, the son of New York Jewish real estate mogul Charles Kushner.

She studied for her Orthodox conversion with Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Manhattan’s Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue and the Ramaz School, and Lookstein officiated at her wedding. Trump and Kushner are members of Lookstein’s Orthodox synagogue and are Shabbat observant. They have two children.

Donald Trump is Presbyterian. He has said he goes to church on Christmas, Easter and special occasions.

When it comes to The Trump Organization, Trump’s right-hand man is a Jewish lawyer, Michael Cohen, who also serves as a top campaign aide. Cohen ignited controversy last week by suggesting that spousal rape doesn’t count as rape. He later apologized, saying his remarks were “inarticulate.”

Trump, of course, doesn’t shy away from controversy himself. Just since announcing his candidacy in June, he has called illegal Mexican immigrants rapists, disparaged Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), for getting captured in the Vietnam War and publicly disclosed Sen. Lindsey Graham’s private mobile phone number at a campaign rally.

Then there was Thursday night’s Republican debate. Following his verbal fireworks on stage, he doubled down on Twitter, saying, “I really enjoyed the debate tonight even though the @FoxNews trio, especially @megynkelly, was not very good or professional!” He was apparently referring to Kelly’s question about Trump’s comments on women.

Trump’s record suggests he’s far from a Republican ideologue. He has given money both to Democratic and Republican candidates, including Republican primary rivals and Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee for president. Trump at varying times has supported liberal policies like abortion rights as well as Tea Party causes like strict immigration restrictions. In the debate, he stood by his past support for single-payer health care, saying that he thought it worked well in Canada and could have worked in the past in the United States.

Overall, Trump doesn’t appear to have very many fixed policy positions. Unlike the other Republican candidates, he has no policy section on his campaign website.

When Ivanka Trump introduced her father at the Algemeiner dinner six months ago, she said, “He has used his voice often and loudly in support of Israel, in support of developments within Israel, in support of security for Israel and in support of the idea of the Israeli democracy.”

One thing is certain of Donald Trump: As long as he stays in this campaign, he will continue to use his voice often and loudly.

CONTENTS

1. “If you hate the migrants in Calais, you hate yourself” (By Nick Cohen, The Observer, August 2, 2015)
2. “I will always remember where I was when Cecil The Lion was killed” (By “Mohammed,” a Syrian war refugee, August 3, 2015)
3. “Boko Haram outraged by murder of innocent African”

“I WONDERED HOW HE WOULD BE REMEMBERED IF HE DIED TRYING TO REACH THE SHORES OF ENGLAND TONIGHT”

If you hate the migrants in Calais, you hate yourself
Over the centuries, we offered succour and shelter to the persecuted. Now it’s Fortress Britain
By Nick Cohen
The Observer
August 2, 2015

I looked at Salah Mohammed Ali and wondered how he would be remembered if he died trying to reach the shores of England tonight. It was not a fanciful speculation.

Since 1 June, 10 refugees have died on the roads around Calais, at the port or inside the Channel tunnel. Their number included an Eritrean woman hit by a car last week on Calais’s urban motorway. A few days before, a Sudanese man had tried to jump on to the Eurostar. He misjudged the distance and the train smashed his head open. Worst of all was Samir, an Eritrean baby, who lived and died within the space of an hour. Her young mother fell from a truck heading to Dover. The fall triggered a premature birth and that was Samir’s life over before it had begun.

It is a scant consolation, but at least Samir’s name is remembered. Even the many good French men and women and African volunteers, who are trying to bring basic services to the Calais camp, do not know who most of the dead are. They are nameless people, whose crushed and suffocated bodies are left in unvisited graves.

Despite all the risks, Salah is determined to reach Britain. He has escaped from Darfur, scene of a genocide the “international community” did nothing to stop, and is not going to abandon his dream of a new life when he can see England from the water’s edge. He’s broad and strong and will make it across or die in the attempt.

The best he could once have hoped for from the bellicose British if he fell at the last barrier was to be remembered as the cause of traffic jams that held up the flow of consumer goods to superstores. Or perhaps as a reason for holiday-makers to vent their righteous anger, if he delayed their “well-earned breaks” by selfishly dying on a tourist route, and at the start of the school holidays at that.

Now we learn that migrants do not just menace the weekly shop and annual holiday. They are “swarming” towards us, as if they are a host of mosquitos that must be drenched with pesticide, or a plague of locusts destroying everything in its path. The inhuman comparison is not from some newspaper columnist, who is paid to pull faces to order like a grotesque in a freak show, but from David Cameron, our expensively educated and supposedly civilised prime minister.

Even if you think the Twitter storms about political “misspeaks” and “gaffes” are fatuous, consider what you did not hear after the PM’s outburst last week. No one, not Cameron, not the opposition – what’s left of it – not the talking heads on the media thought of saying that while Britain reserves the right to keep out economic migrants, it welcomes genuine refugees, including genuine refugees now stranded at the Channel.

From the 1990s through to the early 2000s, all politicians except rightwing extremists made that crucial distinction. Britain will root out “abuse of the asylum system, but give a place to genuine refugees”, said Tony Blair when he was prime minister in 2005.

Everyone who wanted to be considered respectable said the same. Economic migrants could be kept out. But Britain was a liberal country – “a tolerant decent nation”, as Blair put it – which was proud to have provided a home to the Huguenots fleeing Louis XIV, the Jews fleeing tsarism and Nazism, the Poles and Hungarians fleeing communism and the Ugandan Asians fleeing Idi Amin.

I am putting it as kindly as I can when I say Blair’s fine words barely constituted a half-truth. The visa and travel restrictions the previous generation of politicians enforced kept out many a genuine refugee. But for all their hypocrisy, it mattered that Britain’s leaders felt obliged to pretend that Britain was a better place than it was. Politicians believed the British or, rather, a significant segment of the population, wanted the country to be Blair’s tolerant, decent nation. They would damn politicians who boasted that they would to stop genuine as well as bogus asylum seekers.

Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays virtue, in politics as in so much else. The need of politicians for liberal opinion to think well of them had benign consequences. Even John Major’s Conservative government of the early 1990s felt morally obliged to offer homes in Britain to some 14,000 Bosnian Muslims fleeing Serb death squads.

Return to the present and you see David Cameron does not even bother to pretend that Britain is a sanctuary any more. He has no need to lie and offer pious platitudes. Which only goes to show that you should never trust a politician who doesn’t lie to you.

Far from being refreshing, Cameron’s ugly honesty has had calamitous consequences, nowhere more so than in the Middle East. Britain has provided refuge for just a few hundred of the 4 million Syrians displaced by the rival barbarisms of Assad’s Ba’athist tyranny and Islamic State’s religious tyranny. Cameron can get away with the pathetic dereliction of duty because while anti-immigrant sentiment runs riot, liberals have fallen silent.

Until today, the Church of England has uttered the odd lament but mounted no insistent campaign for Britain to offer sanctuary to at least some of the Christians that Islamists are driving from Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, Labour politicians sound the modern equivalent of the Victorian moralists who shrieked at the mention of sex in polite drawing rooms while ignoring the backstreet brothels. Their successors tut at Cameron’s talk of swarms. Then they say, as Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the home affairs committee and the unblushing child of an immigrant family himself, said last week, that the French must deport refugees back to where they came from.

As so often in the 21st century, any cruelty or stupidity is permissible as long as it is cloaked in “appropriate” language. You only have to talk to the men and women at Calais, a task apparently beyond our leaders, to know that Labour politicians’ cries of “get back to where you came from” are both.

At first glance, their camp looks like a desperate place for desperate people. But go in and you are shown a makeshift church and mosque, along with tiny shops and a cafe. Refugee leaders have organised volunteers from schools in the Pas de Calais to come and teach French in a shanty classroom. Camp inmates want to learn because they are not all determined to reach Folkestone. Many are, but others have decided to try to stay where they are. Despite the self-pitying myth that Britain is a soft touch, it is equally hard to get asylum in France and Britain or indeed anywhere in northern Europe. The delays when you can’t earn a living are just as long. The determination of officials to push you back to another country down your transit route is just as great. The rejection rate is just as high.

For some, being out of Africa is enough. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to kill anyone,” a Sudanese man told me. He had fled soldiers trying to force men into militias all around him. He was happy to stay in the camp indefinitely. “No guns. No killing here,” he explained with a shell-shocked smile. He looked to me as if he could make a strong case that he was a genuine refugee. As did many others. François Guennol, a cheerful pensioner who joined the charity Auberge des Migrants because “I could see suffering humanity”, estimated that about half the migrants in and around Calais were refugees running from Sudan, Ethiopia and the prison state of Eritrea. The rest were Afghans, Pakistanis and west Africans. The only people who were not obvious refugees were the Pakistanis.

I don’t want to prettify or romanticise the Calais “jungle”. For all the attempts at self-help and solidarity, women sleep in a separate enclosure because they fear being raped, and everyone got to northern France with the help of criminal gangs. Not that people-traffickers are in evidence in Calais. You don’t pay the smugglers’ going rate of €5,000 for a Channel crossing just so they can tell you to throw yourself at a moving train. Workers for international relief agencies say that the TV crews never see the real smugglers and their cargoes. They operate from remote French and Belgium towns and quietly arrange for transport to Britain without anyone noticing.

Instead of concentrating on them, public hatred is focused on the most visible and vulnerable migrants. When I arrived at the Calais camp, I could sort of see why. You feel you are in an African slum when you get here. I confess that I was grateful to be with a group of reporters rather than on my own. But my trepidation did not last. I realised my fears were silly as soon as I started talking to the polite and serious refugees around me.

Most people in Britain will never have that chance, of course, and you could say that the hysteria about Calais is the fear of foreigners, or racism in extreme cases. But hostility to strangers is hardly a new emotion and it cannot begin to explain the panic in officialdom and popular anger we see today.

You find their true source if you look at the collapse of British immigration policy. You will remember that the Tories came to power promising to reduce net migration into Britain to below 100,000 a year.

“No ifs, no buts,” said Cameron. The flow of people would be stemmed. But he could not stop EU citizens moving to the UK and business was and remains desperate for workers from the rest of the world too.

At the last count, net migration was running at 318,000 a year and government policy had been turned on its head.

Under Cameron, Britain is bringing in extraordinary numbers of economic migrants while closing the door to genuine refugees.

With his attempts to control economic migration in ruins, the only possible way Cameron can sustain his pose of the hard man is by refusing sanctuary to Syrians and Eritreans. They are the only people he can hurt. He knows it and I suspect the public knows it too. Not that the rest of Europe is behaving better. Those Africans who don’t drown in the Mediterranean arrive in Greece and Italy, countries whose economies have been wrecked by the EU’s single currency experiment. They cannot begin to cope.

Greece, which is in danger of becoming a failed state itself, had 63,000 arrive by boat between January and June, a figure that puts the mere 2,500 to 3000 in Calais into perspective.

France, which condemns Britain for leaving refugees to rot in Calais, does everything it can to stop them crossing its border with Italy. Everywhere, European politicians fear nativist backlashes or build their careers by inciting backlashes of their own.

If the British carry on like this, the Channel will become our Berlin Wall: a frontier guarded by paramilitary police and sniffer dogs, which innocent people die trying to cross. Britain’s common-law tradition that agents of the state have no right to demand you “produce your papers” without just cause will have to go too.

There are many reasons why refugees want to reach Britain. They can already speak English because it is the world’s second language. They want to join friends and members of extended families who are already there. They can find work in our low-wage, under-regulated economy. On one point refugees and aid workers agree – it is easier to live under the radar in Britain because we do not have ID cards. In France and every other European country with a Napoleonic code, you cannot access public services or find work without a card. In common-law England, you can just about muddle along.

The logic driving Cameron’s defence of England from “swarming” migrants leads to the destruction of England’s oldest liberty – the freedom to mind your own business.

The alternative to authoritarianism is to challenge ingrained attitudes. Democratic governments ought to stop accepting the indulgence of criminal regimes shown by the United Nations and World Bank. International aid should go nowhere near their thieving leaders.

Meanwhile – and I accept that this may be hard for readers to take – liberals ought to realise that the inability of the state to deport Islamist preachers and foreign criminals has made life immeasurably harder for refugees who threaten no one. In the past, there was no question that they could go. The 1951 UN Convention on Refugees states that a country could deport a refugee if “there are reasonable grounds for regarding [him] as a danger to security” or if a court found him guilty of “a particularly serious crime”.

Over the succeeding decades, judges and further treaties have watered down that unambiguous statement. They have often acted from the best of motives, to save people from torture most obviously.

But the road to hell is paved with human rights lawyers’ briefs, and the liberal attempt to stop the deportations of Islamists and common criminals has had the profoundly illiberal effect of destroying what public support there was for welcoming refugees.

Above all, we must accept that if Britain does not admit a fair quota of refugees they will come illegally. Africa’s population is exploding and the wars and sectarian persecutions of the Middle East look as if they will never stop. People will flee dictatorship, oppression and climate change now, as they always have in the past.

I write with feeling because my great grandparents were Jewish refugees from tsarist Russia, and if show-boating, gutless know-nothings in the Cameron mould had been in charge of Britain in the early 20th century the Nazis or the communists would have wiped my family out and I would never have been born.

But it is not just me or the millions of British people with Huguenot ancestors in their families. Human beings move. We are a restless species. If you have never moved to a new country to find work, your forebears certainly did. Go back far enough in your family, my family or any family on this planet and you will find that our common ancestors were migrants. In hating them, we hate ourselves.

A SYRIAN REFUGEE IS ALLOWED TO WRITE AN ARTICLE IN THE WEST (IF ONLY…)

I Will Always Remember Where I Was When Cecil The Lion Was Killed
August 3, 2015
Opinion

http://duffelblog.com/ydW07

The following is an op-ed written by “Mohammed,” a Syrian War Refugee.

***

I am sorry it is taking me so long to post my outrage over Cecil the Lion. My village has been without electricity for the last week after the Americans bombed our power plant. I had to walk for two days — hiding from ISIS along the way — before I found this Internet cafe. But my anger over the death of Cecil is still hot as the desert sands.

I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard what had happened.

It started off as a normal day for my town, with the Syrian Air Force dropping barrel bombs on several neighborhoods and a local school. As I dug the bodies of several women out of the rubble, one of the other rescue workers asked if I’d heard that Cecil the Lion was killed.

I froze in shock, dropping part of what I assume was once a human arm on the ground. “Not Cecil the Lion!” I exclaimed. “Not him! Truly, is there no innocence left in this world?” I cried harder than when we discovered my brother was gay and ISIS forced us to throw him off a building.

The rest of the day was a numb blur: watching my neighbor getting beheaded by Sharia enforcers, foraging for food in bombed-out buildings, burying my daughter after she died of cholera, and registering my outrage that rich Americans can fly anywhere in the world and kill whatever they want.

My entire family — the ones not gassed to death — are also in shock. My sister was beside herself with tears from the acid that was flung in her face, but I am sure her tears were meant for poor, majestic Cecil.

It is times like this I thank Allah that my wife was kidnapped into sexual slavery last year and was spared the horror of learning what happened to this beautiful and majestic creature.

I often wonder what is wrong with America. You do not hear stories like this in Syria, partly because we already killed all our lions but also because we killed all our dentists.

The hardest part was explaining to my eldest son why Cecil was killed. He asked if Cecil was a Kurd or a Christian, and I said no, sometimes people and animals are killed for totally unjustifiable reasons.

I must go now. The Shabiha have surrounded the building to either press gang us into the Army or execute us. No matter. If we die, we die knowing that the infidel dentist has been appropriately punished on Facebook.

Hopefully I will see Cecil in the afterlife, along with my grandparents who were murdered at the massacre in Hama.

HOW MANY COLUMN INCHES IN THE WEST ON BOKO HARAM’S DAILY MURDERS?

Boko Haram Outraged By Murder Of Innocent African
July 30, 2015

http://duffelblog.com/yBht9

SAMBISA FOREST, Nigeria — A spokesperson for the influential activist group Boko Haram has decried the murder of an innocent African citizen in Hwange National Park earlier this month, telling reporters that the tragedy was one of “the worst things to happen in African history.”

Cecil, the 13-year-old victim, was a cherished and well-respected member of the local community in Zimbabwe, according to numerous sources. He was killed by a foreign species, later identified by zoologists as a dēns Americanus peregrinatione, an invasive predatory animal derived from common American dentists which leaves its homeland and pays large sums of money to shoot things, so they can later be displayed in its den above the fireplace.

“Cecil will not be forgotten!” read a tweet by Boko Haram public affairs officer Jamaal Abu-Sayid, which is sure to rally the fervent support of thousands of people across the Internet, ensuring the longevity of his memory would last for at least 24 more hours.

“We don’t know what a dentist was doing this far outside of its natural habitat of Minnesota,” said Park Ranger Joe Ungule, who watched Cecil grow into adulthood. “What we do know is that if Cecil hadn’t been taken from us so soon, he probably would’ve died of natural causes next year or so.”

Although dentists are a rare sighting in the enchanted African continent, the fear that precedes their strange, unwelcome practices is well-known.

“Poor Cecil. The dentist probably cut off his penis and ground it into a powder and infused it with the blood of innocents for some unholy purpose,” said Abu-Sayid. “I mean, can you believe that? Genital mutilation?”

Abu-Sayid also announced that Boko Haram would slaughter 100 American dentists to raise awareness of the killing, though the group said it would settle for killing at least 100 of anything else that is alive within a five-mile radius.