RUTHFULLY YOURS

Supporters of overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad are truly rare among that country’s Christian minority, yet Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU) found one. Hartford Seminary Professor Najib George Awad’sSeptember 28 presentation (audio) before six people in ACMCU’s boardroom continued a longstanding, surreal ACMCU pattern of never locating Christians with any fears of Islam.

With ACMCU professor and fellow Syrian Christian expatriate Yvonne Haddad moderating, Awad drew upon his previous writing to recast minority in Syria’s context away from a numerical concept. Referencing French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Awad discussed “minoratization as a verb,” a process in which oppressive circumstances create for disfavored groups a status “qualitative in nature…something people transform into.” During decades of Syria’s Assad family dictatorship in particular, regime opponents endured “radical and merciless minoritization,” even though they were Syria’s “dominant majority” across ethnic and sectarian divisions. “In the Arab world today, secularism, democracy and liberalism are the real minority,” he wrote in 2014, including in Syria the “majority of the Syrian public rebelling against the systematic suppression and criminality of the regime.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity during his speech to the 37th World Zionist Congress, to speak from his Zionist heart to the hearts of Zionists everywhere.

Netanyahu used the occasion to rally supporters of Israel and to call upon them to spread the truth about Zionism and Israel. He spoke during the midst of a wave of terror in Israel unlike any in recent time. The stabbing, shooting, car-ramming attacks on Israeli citizens just during the month of October alone has unnerved many. Once again the media and the outside world uses moral equivalency or worse to condemn Israel for the terror unleashed against its citizens.

Netanyahu’s rock steady speech enlisted all supporters of Israel in the battalion of truth tellers about Israel. The physical attacks are being endured solely by Israelis, but the fight against the vilification of the Jewish State is something in which everyone can and must participate.

The ammunition Netanyahu provided the troops he enlisted consists solely of truth. The truths that can and will deflate the myths perpetuated by so many against the Jewish State.

In all, Netanyahu summarized into Ten Big Lies being told about Israel, and he provided answers to all of them. The entire speech can be found here.

In 1929, 86 years ago, for the Holiday of Shavuot-Pentecost, Levin Kipnis wrote the early Hebrew song ‘Baskets on our shoulders,’ an Israeli children’s song that is sung to date.

Yedidya Admon wrote the tune to the song and many artists recorded it, among them the singer Yaffa Yarkoni.

The poet’s song version is as follows:

Baskets on our heads,
Our heads are decorated,
From all corners of the land we arrived,
We brought the first fruits.
From Yehuda-Judea, Yehuda, from Shomron-Samaria,
From the valley, from the Gallil-Galilee –
Clear the road for us,
Our first fruits with us,
Bang, bang the drum and bang the flute!
About Levin Kipnis

Levin Kipnis, who lived between 1894-1990, was an Israeli children’s story writer and a poet, who wrote mostly in Hebrew and also in Yiddish, and in 1978 became Israel’s Prize Laureate for children’s literature.

It’s hard to find any silver lining in a situation where Palestinians are perpetrating multiple stabbing attacks against Jews every day, and most of the “international community” is siding with the perpetrators. Yet this dismal situation may finally have produced something Israel desperately needs: An Israeli Arab political leader who represents his community’s sane majority. The 65 percent who are proud to be Israeli, the 55 percent who identify with the Israeli flag, the ones who genuinely want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

For decades, Israeli Arab leadership at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster. The community’s current Knesset members, elected on a joint ticket called the Joint Arab List, span the gamut from the “moderate” Ayman Odeh to the “firebrand” Hanin Zoabi, to borrow the media’s favorite misnomers. The former merely refuses to condemn Palestinian terror, saying, “I cannot tell the nation how to struggle … I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.” The latter may face criminal investigation for actively inciting it, having allegedly told a Hamas publication that the current terror needs more “national support,” because “If individual attacks continue without national support, they will be extinguished within the next several days, and therefore hundreds of thousands are needed to start a real intifada.” In between are MKs who spew a wide variety of anti-Israel libels; my personal favorite was Ahmed Tibi’s 2014 op-ed in The Hill claiming that Israeli Arabs are subject to Jim Crow treatment – signed, without a trace of irony, by his then-title of deputy speaker of the Knesset.