Teaching the Little Tykes About Anti-Israel Protesters

So the JTA recently posted an article about how kids apparently have trouble dealing with anti-Israel protesters. Time for the Zionist Lapdog primer!

A burst of black balloons ascended toward the gray sky as thousands of area Jews marched down the Philadelphia boulevard waving their blue-and-white flags in support of Israel. . . . "I don't get it," a 9-year-old said to his parents as they tried to explain that these balloons were not meant as symbols of celebration.

Simple, kid. There are people out there that hate Israel. And they will continue to hate Israel, regardless of what Israel does or tries to do to make them happy. So don't bother trying to make them happy or to hate you less. Do stand up for what you believe is right.

With Israel and its supporters marking the nation's 60th anniversary with festivities around the world, pro-Palestinian groups have been unusually assertive in pressing their case that Israel's birth marked a "nakba," or catastrophe, for the Palestinian people.

Message for 9 year-olds: In wars, there are almost always winners and losers. And the losers are usually pretty pissed off that they were not able to vanquish the winners. That does not mean the winners should not be celebrating like there was on tomorrow that they stopped the losers from driving them into the sea.

The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition that includes many anti-Israel organizations, is launching an advertising campaign in New York in advance of the city's June 1 tribute to Israel, which is likely to be the largest celebration of Israel outside the Jewish homeland itself.

I can't wait. Incidentally, the name of that organization is a flat-out lie. It's not a campaign just "to end the Israeli Occupation" (whatever that ultimately means). Rather, this organization favors the so-called "Right of Return." This means they want to flood Israel with millions of Arab "refugees", most of whom have never spent a minute of their lives in the Holy Land, so that the
Arabs can overwhelm the Jews demographically and ultimately take over the country.
Indeed, according to their FAQ, if you're just for "ending the Israeli Occupation" but don't favor this large scale Arab invasion of Israel, "then this would become grounds to review [your] membership with the Campaign." Ain't that sweet?

While debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is commonplace among adults, for children it can be unsettling to see large signs and graffiti denigrating the very state they are celebrating.

I don't really see the big deal here. Kids see unsettling things every day. That's why adults are around to explain things to them as best they can.

In Philadelphia, the parade marchers persevered down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the city's grand boulevard. Spontaneous singing erupted with songs of peace and hope -- "Oseh Shalom," "Hatikvah," "Lo Yisa Goy el Goy Cherev."

The conversations between parents and children were heard everywhere, as the adults sought to explain why protesters were raining on their parade.

Because they hate Israel and have no desire to allow Jews to have their own country.

For some it was an opportunity to educate, to explain and in some instances re-explain that Israelis and Palestinians both claim the land of Israel, that Israel has sought to make peace with the Palestinians but that many Palestinians have opposed it -- some violently -- and that people have the right to express their opinions as long as they do so peacefully.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Not about people being able to express opinions peacefully -- that's fine. But you don't say that "Israelis and Palestinians both claim the land of Israel" as if each has an equally legitimate claim. That is simply not true whether one looks at the Bible, the secular historical record, or international law.

You explain that Jews have the legitimate right to settle and have sovereignty over the land of Israel and that the Arabs have actively and violently opposed this for over a century. They have oppressed Jews in their own Arab lands and have sought and continue to seek to destroy Israel. The fact that the Arabs have failed to do this and are lamenting over their "Nahkba" is exactly why you are celebrating so joyfully.

For others it was more black and white. "Some people want to destroy Israel; we want it to live," one mother was overheard telling her children.

Praise the Lord!

At Israel parades and celebration events nationwide, this confusion has increased with organized anti-Israel activity. From an educational symposium in San Francisco to parades in Sacramento, Milwaukee and beyond, pro-Palestinian activists have been a forceful presence this year.

Nakba events have made a "strong showing this year," said Josh Ruebner, the director of national advocacy for End the Occupation.

"It is very important to put across an alternative message," Ruebner said. Pro-Palestinian groups believe that "the overwhelming discourse about Israel minimizes or ignores the fact that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948."

Okay, we dealt with this issue in the last posting. So I won't rehash my arguments here. Just read the last paragraph for my response to this attempt to put forth an "alaternative message." I don't think there's any obligation to mourn the suffering of the losers who tried to destroy you or to disseminate their propoganda while you celebrate your victory. But I'm, like an extremist and stuff.

Like many of the anti-Israel protesters at several of the demonstrations, Ruebner is Jewish.

"As a Jewish person, I don't believe we should be celebrating at the expense of another people," he said." This is profoundly opposed to Jewish traditions."

That's a profoundly ignorant statement. What do we celebrate on Passover? The destruction of the Egyptain army as we were freed from slavery. On Purim? The killing of Haman and his 75,000 followers who tried to destroy us. On Chanukah? The victory of the Jews over the Syrian-Greeks. And that's just a sampling.

There are few things more central to Jewish history and traditions than the celebrations of our victories over those who attempted to kill us. And the Arabs are no exception to that.

At the JCC of San Francisco, during a May 8 educational symposium in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary, anti-Zionist activists staged the largest anti-Israel protest ever to take place in the building, according to a JCC official. Twenty of these protesters were escorted out by the San Francisco Police Department, which was well equipped to deal with the situation due to intense security preparations for the event.

According to Doug Kahn, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco, the protest was loud and there was much chanting.

But since the Bay Area is known as a hotbed of action on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian fence, “there was a smooth and effective response," Kahn said.

So apparently they trespassed and attempted to disrupt and educational event by heckling it down. Good to know that such people are so in favor of freedom of expression.

The rest of the article basically deals with parents explaining to their kids that protesters are free to protest under the First Amendment. That's undoubtedly true, but it's not an adequate response or explanation. You have to explain to children why these people are protesting, and why they're wrong.

Israel, The Refugees and the Lebanon War

Counterpunch is a pretty radical Left Wing newsletter that, for whatever reason, devotes a highly disproportionate amount of its time and bandwidth to Israel-bashing. A piece written a couple of days ago by Kathleen M. Barry was no exception. The article is styled as an "open letter" to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi protesting Pelosi's celebration of Israel's 60th anniversary (can there be a greater war crime?).

The first sentence of this screed lectures the Speaker of the House to "[c]heck your history books." Since I am now anticipating an authoritative lecture on the history of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, I naturally skim to the bottom of the article to investigate the author's qualifications to give such a lecture:

Kathleen Barry is Professor Emerita of Penn State University. A feminist and sociologist, she is the author of Female Sexual Slavery, Prostitution of Sexuality: Global Exploitation of Women, and Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist and is now completing Expendable Lives, a new book on masculinity and war.

Nothing there indicates that Barry possesses any level of expertise on the Middle East or that she has read or written even a single sentence about the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Of course, this alone does not discredit her arguments (after all, facts are facts, regardless of who presents them), but it does provide some explanation and context for the silly and completely unsubstantiated arguments that are to follow.

Celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel is celebration of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine, the celebration of the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs who generations later still people the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordon [sic], who still mourn their families slaughtered by Zionists as they completely destroyed Arab villages in Palestine, who still hold keys to their homes that were seized by the new Israeli state in 1948.

There are so many mistakes here that it's just laughable. First, her 750,000 figure is inflated. As explained by Middle East scholar Dr. Mitchell Bard in his exhaustively-researched book debunking numerous myths surrounding the Arab/Israeli Conflict:

Many Arabs claim that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1947-49. The last census was taken by the British in 1945. It found approximately 1.2 million permanent Arab residents in all of Palestine. A 1949 Government of Israel census counted 160,000 Arabs living in the country after the war. In 1947, a total of 809,100 Arabs lived in the same area.¹This meant no more than 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become refugees. A report by the UN Mediator on Palestine arrived at an even lower figure — 472,000, and calculated that only about 360,000 Arab refugees required aid. (emphasis added) (citations omitted)

Second, there was no "ethnic cleansing" in Palestine, at least by any rational definition of that term. After the 1948 War of Independence, about 160,000 Arabs remained as citizens of Israel, and that figure has grown to over 1 million today, which comprises roughly 20% of Israel's population. If one counts the Arab population in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the total Arab population in what the Arabs consider to be "Palestine" is nearly equal to the Jewish population. So if Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing, they're, like, really bad at it and stuff.

Third, the implication here is that the refugee problem was somehow caused by the Zionists, who willfully and relentlessly dispossessed the Arab population. This is a complete distortion of the historical record. Historian Efraim Karsh has spent considerable amounts of ink debunking such ridiculous claims. As he wrote in an excellent essay:

The claim of premeditated dispossession is itself not only baseless, but the inverse of the truth. Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, the Palestinians were themselves the aggressors in the 1948-49 war, and it was they who attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to "cleanse" a neighbouring ethnic community. Had the Palestinians and the Arab world accepted the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947, calling for the establishment of two states in Palestine, and not sought to subvert it by force of arms, there would have been no refugee problem in the first place.

It is no coincidence that neither Arab propagandists nor Israeli "new historians" have ever produced any evidence of a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians during the 1948 war. For such a plan never existed. In accepting the UN partition resolution, the Jewish leadership in Palestine acquiesced in the principle of a two-state solution, and all subsequent deliberations were based on the assumption that Palestine’s Arabs would remain as equal citizens in the Jewish state. As David Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel’s first prime minister, told the leadership of his Labour (Mapai) party on December 3, 1947:

"In our state there will be non-Jews as well-and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well."

In line with this conception, committees laying the groundwork for the nascent Jewish state discussed in detail the establishment of an Arabic-language press, the improvement of health in the Arab sector, the incorporation of Arab officials in the government, the integration of Arabs within the police and the ministry of education, and Arab-Jewish cultural and intellectual interaction.

That's just a sampling. That whole essay is a must-read. Bard also further debunks the idea that it was the Zionists who forcibly expelled the Arabs. Of course, the fact that there are Arabs suffering in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and wherever else leads to the question of why those countries have allowed that situation to continue. But that is an issue that Barry never addresses. Instead, she writes:

I stand with Jews, with Palestinians, with every people who seek protection from persecution, but never with those who persecute others, who conduct well documented ethnic cleansing to gain their own protection which in six decades of Israeli wars has been no protection at all for Israelis.

Well, it's good to know that the so-called Palestinians don't persecute others. Israel could only dream of one day becoming the beacon of tolerance and pluralism that is the Palestinian Authority. And indeed, six decades of wars have provided no protection for Israel, other than to, like, ward off attempts to destroy it and stuff.

After criticizing Israel for its Original Sin of, um, existing, Barry then goes off on some weird tangent about the 2006 Lebanon War:

I expected George Bush to align himself with the war mongering far right wing government of Israel. He after all provided most of the millions of laser guided smart bombs Israel directed at apartment buildings and cluster bombs that still take lives in the south of Lebanon. Israel’s crimes against humanity in the 2006 Israeli war against Lebanon go unnoticed by you and your delegation as you are only concerned with Hezbollah’s threat to Israel, kidnapping of three soldiers. In that war, the Israeli Air Force launched more than 7,000 air attacks on about 7,000 targets in Lebanon between 12 July and 14 August, while the Navy conducted an additional 2,500 bombardments. Does that sound at all proportional to the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers? Neither are justified, but reason is required, although with your personal convictions override reason making you very dangerous in a position of leadership.

Are those the Israeli tags of kidnapped soldiers you carry from that war? Do you wonder at all about the families of the 1200 dead Lebanese while you worry for those soldiers? Check the details Nancy, Israel’s aggression of Lebanon’s borders has outnumbered Hezbollah’s.

Okay, you heard it here first, folks. The ruling Kadima party is the "war-mongering far right-wing government of Israel." As the link explains, the platform of these Kadima guys and gals is to achieve peace with the Arabs by making land concessions. Filthy war-mongerers!!

In any event, the object of this rant within a rant is to criticize Israel for acting disproportionately in response to the kidnapping of its two soldiers by the Hizbullah terror gang. I hope we can all agree that kidnapping soldiers is an act of war. When you fight a war, the object is to get the enemy to surrender. This is usually done by hitting him with more force than he is able to bring to bear against you -- i.e., by hitting him with disproportionate force. Barry's claim that Israel's aggression somehow "outnumbered" Hizbullah's (huh?) is especially odd given that Hizbullah's missile attacks forced Israel to effectively depopulate the northern portion of the country and make roughly 300,000 people homeless. If anything, the force employed by Israel was not disproportionate enough because those two soldiers unfortunately remain in captivity.

Bathing in self-congratulations on Israel’s 60th anniversary, without any acknowledgment of the Naqba, the disaster wrought upon the Palestinians by Zionist in what was then Palestine, you have told me and all Americans clearly that as Speaker and therefore head of the people’s house, you are not representing Americans. You are representing the current Israeli government without ever questioning, in fact, implicitly condoning their crimes against humanity.

Okay, here's the climax. The rest of the article is basically non-substantive filler so here we go. The whole basis of this article seems to be that it is somehow improper to celebrate Israel's independence without bowing your head to mourn the Nahkba, the tragedy of those who were, of course, dispossessed so the greedy Zionists could have their homeland. Shame on those like President Bush who recognize that, while neither side is perfect, there are good guys and bad guys here, and Israel is the side worthy of celebration. And people without neurotic guilt have no problem celebrating victory over the bad guys even when the bad guys suffered as a result of the war. This isn't really that radical a concept when you think about it. Every July 4, we celebrate this country's independence as a generally positive event. I have never once heard anybody claim on July 4 that we were somehow wrong to celebrate our freedom while ignoring the plight of the victimized Loyalists who opposed the Revolution and therefore were forced to flee the country after having their property confiscated. This happened to tens of thousands of people. Yet you would have trouble finding even one American who expresses a scintilla of guilt over that. As I have written before, I don't do guilt well when it comes to the Arab/Israeli Conflict.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone!

Obama on Israel

If anybody needs any proof that Barack Obama is pretty much an empty suit when it comes to certain issues, this article is a pretty nice read. Obama spoke to the Jewish Telegraph Agency and gave his views on the Middle East. Like a Newsday editorial, he came off as comically uninformed, repeating most of the politically correct platitudes regardless of the amount of cognitive dissonance required to reconcile some of them.

Consider the very first thing Obama says: "My belief is that Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East, one of our strongest allies anywhere in the world." Okay. But then:

"The U.S. role 'requires listening to both sides and talking to both sides," Obama said. "That requires that we don't dismiss out of hand the concerns of the Palestinians because there's no way we can move forward in those negotiations without at least understanding their perspective.'"

Sorry, Barack, this is nonsensical. If you're in an alliance with somebody, and that person has a dispute with a third party, you support your ally in that dispute. That's what being in an alliance involves. You don't "talk to both sides" and/or mediate. This is one thing the Arabs are absolutely right about. The US can't deem itself an "honest broker" or neutral mediator while at the same time lauding its strong alliance with Israel. That's trying to have it both ways, and the failure of most US politicians and diplomats to understand this basic concept has led us to the joke of a failure that has been the so-called "Peace Process."

Now, in fairness, it's been a long-held belief of mine that there's no such thing as an "honest broker" when it comes to this conflict. The Arab/Israeli conflict has emotional implications for the majority of the world. And those emotions undoubtedly inform the opinions people have (and of course this is especially true for somebody like me). Anybody who claims to be "neutral" or "objective", for the most part, is either deluded or lying. Even people who honestly try to be objective are ultimately picking one side or the other based purely on the vocabulary they use to describe the conflict, but THAT is a topic for another Note.

Of course, Barack Obama does not understand any of that. He's in the "common sense camp," you see. I always chuckle when I read things like that because of the immense amount of arrogance inherent in such statements. Obama's views are so obviously right (or "Wright", get it? Ha!!!) that anybody who disagrees with him is obviously not using common sense. I give my opinions and do my best to provide factual support for them. At the end of the day, you either agree or disagree. But if I say something as ludicrous as "I'm in the common sense camp," somebody please slap me. (I will, however, not waiver in my belief that anybody who thinks that what Israel does is equivalent to the Holocaust is clinically bonkers.)

Of course, Obama's statements seem to betray a lack of common sense, or at the very least, a lack of information.

"For a settlement to be reached, Obama said, Palestinians must make great strides in recognizing Israel's security needs and abandon the goal of an unfettered right of return for Palestinians that would undermine Israel's existence as a Jewish state."

As I have pointed out, Abbas EXPLICITLY stated that the Arabs would NEVER recognize Israel as a Jewish state. So what, exactly, is the point of negotiating with them and making concessions to them? In that same Note, I also touched on why the Arabs were unlikely to give up the so-called "Right of Return."

What Obama is implicitly recognizing when he says the above-quoted statement is that at present, the Arabs want to destroy Israel, or at least want to destroy Israel as it currently exists with Jews in the majority and in control of the government. Yet, he clearly makes no attempt to understand WHY that's the case and treats that desire as nothing more than a bargaining chip that can be traded away in a negotiation (like Israel dismantling outposts on hills).

It's immensely comical that somebody who prides himself on being so willing to "listen[] to both sides" has so little understanding of where the Arabs are coming from and what motivates them.

So yeah, empty suit. But, hey, it's all about "Hope" and "Change", right?

Israel Demonstrates Testicular Fortitude

I'm as surprised as anybody, given that Richard Falk is exactly the trendy Leftist type that Israelis try to woo all the time under the highly mistaken impression that making concessions to the enemy will get such people to like them.

Falk, who compared Israel's treatment of the Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to to the Holocaust, is the new "United Nations official appointed to investigate Israeli-Palestinian human rights." Sounds like the right man for the job, right?

Well, Falk stood by his Holocaust comments, and Israel, for once, actually took a stand, refusing to allow this degenerate to enter the country. While I fully support this, I have to say that I found the the responsive comments from Israel rather tame:

"The Foreign Ministry spokesperson called Falk's comments 'unacceptable and, in fact, a little strange.'

'To compare Israel to the Nazis is not just a total falsehood, it's also a personal insult to everybody," he said, adding that the choice of Falk is indicative of the Human Rights Council's negative attitude toward Israel. "Of all the people to be able to appoint, to find somebody who compares Israel to the Nazis is very bizarre and outrageous,' he said."

Well, yes, all that is true, but I think you need to go further. Quite frankly, if Falk really believes that what Israel does is in any way comparable to Germany's mass genocide of World Jewry during the Holocaust, he's not just wrong and being insulting. He's freaking insane. This man is not mentally competent enough to head a party planning committee, much less play a leading role in a major international organization (though, in fairness, the UN Human Rights Council is one of the most ridiculous organizations on the planet, so maybe it is a good fit). As Steinbrenner said to George on Seinfeld, "You're non copus mentus! You got some bats in the belfry!"

And this is not the only issue either. This dude at least strongly suspects that, um, "the Neoconservatives" (not just particular neoconservatives?) caused 9/11.

In fact, perhaps Israel is taking the wrong action here. Perhaps the wisest course would be to let Faulk into the country and then commit him to a mental institution. That way he's not a threat to himself or anybody else.

The fact that Falk used to teach International Law at Princeton is downright scary.

Israel's Media Problems

Pro-Israel friends often ask me why the media is so "biased" against Israel. My response is usually that Israel does such an inadequate job of advocating its case to the world that really, who could blame the media? In most situations, Israel allows the terms of the debate to be framed in such a manner that it's almost impossible to logically lead to a pro-Israel viewpoint.

The pathetic and wrong-headed Israeli response to a recent resolution passed by the Human Rights Commission is a perfect example of this. That resolution "demands the lifting of the blockade on Gaza and calls for international action to protect Palestinian civilians."

Instead of defending its blockade as a legitimate weapon of war against a terror gang hell-bent on its destruction, Israel "was busy lobbying UNSC member countries to amend the draft presidential statement to include condemnation of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, which the original neglects to mention."

So in effect, what we have is one side saying "Israel is taking illegal, illegitimate actions," and the other side, rather than defending the actions it is taking, meekly responds "you must condemn both sides." This is almost always the Israeli response to UN resolutions -- yeah, we may have done something wrong, but condemn both sides, please. Is it any wonder that so many people come out of such a discussion with an anti-Israel viewpoint?

Hamas and its fellow terror gangs have been firing rockets into Israel from Gaza for years. They established full control over Gaza earlier this year and have said on numerous occasions that they will continue their attacks in one form or another until Israel is destroyed. This is war. And the effects of that war have been felt dramatically in Sderot, which even apart from physical casualties, has been completely crippled economically (though both the media and the UN have largely ignored THAT humanitarian crisis).

Israel is in a war right now, and a blockade has always been accepted as a legitimate way of fighting a war -- cutting off the enemy's access to resources and supplies until he agrees to stop fighting -- even if civilians suffer the effects. One of the primary weapons the Union used against the Confederacy during the Civil War was a blockade, and Confederate cities were often besieged and cut off until they surrendered. I daresay that the residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1863 would probably scoff at the fabricated "humanitarian crisis" that Gaza purports to face today.

But nothing like that ever comes out of the mouths of Israeli diplomats.