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2016

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Latin American, Caribbean Lawmakers Sign Pro-Israel, Anti-BDS Resolution

By on March 18th, 2016

JNS.org – Parliamentarians from 13 Latin American and Caribbean nations have signed a resolution in support of Israel and against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The lawmakers met last week in Miami for the the Israel Allies Foundation’s Second Annual Latin America Summit on Israel, according to a document obtained by the Jerusalem Post.

The resolution, written in Spanish, states that the signatories “unequivocally declare, personally, our support for the Jewish people to live in peace, safety and security in the Land of Israel” and that “strong relations between the Western Hemisphere and Israel are crucial to the spread of freedom, democracy and justice around the world.”

“Boycotts and sanctions against the State of Israel and its products contribute to an antisemitic attitude inspired by antisemitism and opposition to the Jewish State…[and] are detrimental to a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and must be rejected by all actors that seek peace,” it also states.

The resolution also affirms that “the eventual existence of countries with nuclear weapons in the Middle East poses and existential threat to Israel and for peace around the world.”

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Is Hollywood Preparing to Use Theodore Herzl Biopic to Denigrate Israel? Max Elstein Keisler

By on March 18th, 2016

Many biopics tend to cast their subjects in a very positive light.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley, a 2006 film about the Irish War of Independence against the British, presents an unequivocally pro-IRA viewpoint. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Spike Lee’s 1992 Malcolm X, a hagiography of the admittedly complicated but undoubtedly antisemitic figure, is in the United States National Film Registry as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film.” That’s fair. Although the film glosses over Malcolm X’s antisemitism and conspiracy theories, that’s not its job. The Oscar-winning 1982 biopic of Mohandas Gandhi ignores many of the more unsavory aspects of Gandhi’s life. That’s how these kind of films are. They’re on the side of their protagonists.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read in Variety that H2O Motion Pictures is making a biopic of Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism.

That they would make a movie about Herzl is in itself nothing remarkable — Herzl certainly led an interesting life, from his years as a struggling playwright, to his manic travels across Europe to meet with whichever national leaders would see him, to his unusual and arguably tragic family life.

What surprised me is that Sidney Blumenthal is attached to the project, both as an executive producer and as a member of an advisory board to “ensure [their] approach to the story [is] as well balanced as possible.” Frankly, this is appalling.

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Antisemitic anti-Zionism and the scandal of Oxford University Labour Club Alex Chalmers

By on March 17th, 2016

Alex Chalmers was co-Chair of Oxford University Labour Club until he resigned in February, alleging that a ‘large proportion’ of club members had ‘some kind of problem with Jews’, while many used the slur ‘Zio’ and voiced support for Hamas. A controversy erupted and the Labour Party is now conducting an enquiry into antisemitism at the club. Chalmers argues here that the root problem is the poisonous ideology of antisemitic anti-Zionism which is bad for Diaspora Jews, bad for the Left, bad for Israelis and bad for Palestinians.

At the Labour Party Conference back in September 2015, the Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn addressed receptions held by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East (LFPME) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). At both events he delivered relatively similar speeches in which he talked about the psychological toll that the conflict takes on both Israeli and Palestinian children and the need for both sides to compromise and negotiate. LFI received the speech enthusiastically, but at the LFPME event there was outrage. One attendee shouted ‘this isn’t about peace; this is about justice’, to enthusiastic applause from a large proportion of the room. When Benn tried to respond, he was heckled by people calling him a ‘disgrace’ and saying that he should not be Shadow Foreign Secretary.

This attitude of ‘justice’ over ‘peace’ is a damaging trend that has come to characterise much pro-Palestinian activism. That is to say, the demands of Western activists living in relative comfort have become progressively more detached from the aspirations of the actual people whom they claim to be defending. Whilst support for a two-state solution amongst Palestinians is lower than it has been historically, in the last 12 months, polling conducted by the Palestine Survey and Research Group has found that it is still the preferred outcome of between 45 and 51 per cent of Palestinians. Contrast this with the logo of the UK’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign which features the entirety of ‘historic’ Palestine with no mention of Israel.

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LELA GILBERT: THE HIDDEN COST OF TERROR IN JERUSALEM

By on March 17th, 2016

A few days ago, a visiting friend and I walked through Jerusalem’s Mamilla Mall, up some steep stairs and through the Old City’s Jaffa Gate. We both had some gift shopping to do, and we had decided to pick up some pottery and other items in the Christian Quarter’s shops.

Of course, thanks to the present wave of stabbings, we thought twice about our destination. But we went anyway.

One of the first things we noticed was the rather thin array of tourists and the unusually quiet walk along the usually bustling David Street. There were few hucksters, and several shops were shuttered.

We turned left on Christian Quarter Road and went into a couple of shops that we’d been to before; both of the shopkeepers are longtime friends of the woman who was shopping with me. And their stories were rather heartbreaking.

Although neither of them had faced a terrorist’s knife directly, the ripple effect of the stabbings – and particularly those in and around the Old City – had deeply wounded each of them.

Israel’s Ministry of Tourism continues to report only a slightly decreased number of tourists in the country, but that wasn’t what we heard from these two men. And their lack of customers underscored their plight.

“I’ve been using the free time to do some remodeling of my shop,” an elderly Arab Christian merchant told us.

Granted, with so few people around, it was easier for him to tear out shelves and make some long-delayed repairs. “But it’s so expensive and there’s no income to offset the costs,” he lamented.

This man was born and raised in the Jerusalem’s Old City Christian community. He has seen his share of wars and terrorism. And he is infuriated by the present attacks.

His voice rose as he described an incident. “A 50-year-old woman tried to stab a policeman this morning. Fifty years old! How ridiculous is that?”

By then, he was almost shouting, and he furtively glanced out the door of his shop to see if anyone was listening.

“The police shot her dead,” he concluded more quietly. “What else could they do?”

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ISIS Genocide against ‘People of the Book’ — How Long Will Kerry Continue to Talk around It? By Nina Shea

By on March 17th, 2016

For five months, the State Department has indicated that Iraq’s Yazidi community should be declared a target of ISIS genocide but meanwhile has been less sure about ISIS’s intentions toward Middle East Christians. Tomorrow is Secretary John Kerry’s congressional deadline for officially determining whether Christians, along with the Yazidis and possibly others, face genocide by ISIS. Insisting that department lawyers need a little more time to struggle with the evidence, Kerry promises his decision soon, if not this week.

This shouldn’t be a hard case. Few groups have publicized their brutality toward Christians in real time and in technicolor as ISIS has. Christians, among others, have been declared genocide victims by Pope Francis, the EU Parliament, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and the U.S. House of Representatives, in a bipartisan, unanimous vote on March 14, in the heat of election season.

All along, the State Department has demonstrated that it is not just being abundantly cautious and slow in ruling that the atrocities against Christians is genocide but that it is simply unwilling to use that designation specifically for Christians. Rather than carefully reviewing the evidence, as it claims, it has ignored it.

For months, State officials claimed they lacked facts about the Christians and then did nothing about it. Rather than follow the precedent of Secretary Colin Powell, who collected evidence for determining genocide in Darfur, Kerry refrained from dispatching fact finders in the case of the Middle Eastern Christians. When some 30 Christian leaders wrote on December 4 to request an opportunity to brief Kerry, he failed to answer. With only a month remaining until its March deadline, State Department officials asked the Knights of Columbus, which had been running TV spots on the Christian genocide, to prepare a written report of the facts. Before it was even completed, those same officials, meeting with Iraqi Chaldean Catholic leaders, told them that a genocide determination for Iraqi Christians was not in the offing. State suggested that terms such as “persecution,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “crimes against humanity” — terms that carry less moral and legal weight — be used instead.

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U.S. Presidents and Cuban Dictators Will President Obama’s visit to Havana lead to a freer Cuba? By Mike Gonzalez

By on March 17th, 2016

There seems to be something about Eastertime that makes liberal American presidents want to indulge Cuba’s atheist dictators. Perhaps it’s the hope of redemption and resurrection, which are, after all, at the center of the Easter story. The facts, however, weigh heavily against that idea.

Take President Obama’s plans to visit Cuba on Monday of Holy Week. One can’t help remembering that wretched Good Friday 16 years ago when President Clinton pried Elián González out of a closet in Miami and sent him away from freedom and into Fidel Castro’s arms.

Did that make Castro any less anti-American? No. If anything, it made him more obdurate. He redoubled his efforts to nurture a hard-core crop of Latin American dictators determined to thwart the U.S. in the hemisphere and around the world. At the height of that effort, the group included the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Nicaragua; at times, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were also involved.

President Obama’s two-day Havana journey will do no more to redeem Fidel’s little brother, Raúl, who took the reins of power from the ailing Fidel in 2008, or to resurrect civic and economic life on the island of Cuba.

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Merrick Garland’s ‘Moderation’ The question isn’t one of degree. By Kevin D. Williamson

By on March 17th, 2016

Merrick Garland, the appellate judge whom President Barack Obama has nominated to the Supreme Court, is a “moderate.” Of that we are assured by all the best people writing in all the usual venues: USA Today, Politico, the Los Angeles Times.

A moderate what?

The question may be in this instance a purely intellectual one. Garland could be the second coming of Solomon, and Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues would be looking to leave him locked up in the Senate basement until after the presidential elections, after which President Cruz might choose a better candidate; President Clinton, a much worse one (which would probably result in the lame-duck Senate working to confirm Garland); or President Trump, the devil knows what. The immediate case against advancing Garland’s nomination has nothing to do with Garland and everything to do with the Senate rousing itself to do its constitutional duty and check President Obama’s executive imperialism with such tools as it has at its disposal.

Carrie Severino and others have argued here that Garland is no judicial moderate, that he is a quiet left-wing activist well disposed to political efforts to undermine the Second Amendment. On that question, I defer judgment to our experts. But there is another question we ought to consider, which is whether there is any such thing as a judicial moderate.

If the expanse of your political imagination is roughly the dimensions of the New York Times, that may seem an absurd question. We hear all the time about “moderates” and “extremists” in the nation’s courts. A great deal of huffing and puffing, which no doubt dishevels the pages of a nearby copy of The Economist, insists upon the virtue and the needfulness of such moderation.

But the fundamental question that we must ask about Supreme Court nominees — all nominees to all benches, in fact — is not one of degree, which is the sort of question that the criterion of “moderateness” would apply. Instead, it is an either/or question: Does the law say what it means and mean what it says, or are judges empowered to graft private notions of justice from their own souls onto the law and the Constitution?

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Why Israeli Jews are Conservative and American Jews are Leftist The Left lost in Israel, but still rules over American Jews. Daniel Greenfield

By on March 17th, 2016

The Israeli left as a democratic political movement is dead. That piece of bad news was delivered by a recent survey which shows that only 8% of Israeli Jews identify with the left, 55% with the center and 37% with the right.

In the last election, the establishment Labor Party had to dress up as a wolf in Zionist centrist clothing by renaming itself the Zionist Camp (it still lost). The left had to create two other fake centrist parties to stop Netanyahu, but just ended up having to roll them into his center-right coalition.

The Israeli left still controls the usual undemocratic elitist outposts of the Deep State, media, academia, popular culture and the judiciary, but it can no longer even call itself the left and still hope to win. All it can do is undermine the will of the people and sabotage the country out of selfishness and spite.

The situation in Israel stands in sharp contrast to the United States where 49 percent of Jews lean to the left, 29 percent tend to the center and only 19 percent identify as conservative.

It’s a popular and simplistic conclusion on both the left and the right to attribute this split to terrorism. But if Muslim terrorism made people move to the right, New Yorkers would all be Republicans. And until the latest Knife Jihad, the Israeli right’s policies had ended Islamic terrorism as an everyday problem.

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Sanctuary Cities: Anatomy of a Disaster A look at the origins and consequences of a policy rooted in phony “compassion.” John Perazzo

By on March 17th, 2016

The late Kathryn Steinle, an innocent young woman who was gunned down and killed on a San Francisco street by an illegal alien with seven felonies and five deportations already on his resumé, is just one of many Americans who are lying in their graves today as a direct result of the “sanctuary” policies that have turned hundreds of U.S. cities into safe havens not only for lone-wolf sociopaths, but also for organized members of Latin American drug cartels, violent criminal gangs, and Islamic terrorist cells. Moreover, countless additional victims have had their psyches forever scarred, their bodies permanently damaged, and their lives all but destroyed for precisely the same senseless reason. The numbers are ugly: Of the 9,295 deportable aliens who were released after their arrest by sanctuary jurisdictions during the first eight months of 2014 alone, some 2,320 were subsequently re-arrested, on new criminal charges, soon thereafter. And before their initial release, 58% of those 9,295 aliens already had felony charges or convictions on their records, while another 37% had serious prior misdemeanor charges.

Sanctuary policies bar police and other public-sector employees in many U.S. cities from notifying the federal government about the presence of illegal aliens residing in their communities. As such, these policies defiantly give the proverbial middle finger to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA ) that Congress passed twenty years ago to require that local governments cooperate with U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). More than 200 cities nationwide currently observe formal sanctuary policies that are written as resolutions, ordinances, or executive orders. Numerous other cities, meanwhile, have implemented similar policies on an informal basis, meaning that they are unwritten but nevertheless authorized by local government leaders and obeyed by city workers. All told, approximately 340 U.S. cities administer either formal or informal sanctuary policies today.

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Israeli Prof. Defeats Campus Hate Mob At the University of Texas, playing the victim card backfires on rabble-rousing leftists. David Paulin

By on March 17th, 2016

Leftist students with an authoritarian streak have repeatedly gotten their way on college campuses during the Obama years — shutting down free speech at the University of California in Berkeley to the University of Missouri to Yale University.

But not at the University of Texas in Austin. Recently, one of the campus’ leftist mobs was defeated. The bullies were defeated and apparently now face disciplinary action – all thanks to professors and administrators who stood up to the mob. By following the rule of law, university officials demonstrated how to defeat leftist bullies claiming to promote social justice.

As usual, social media made the incident go viral at Texas’ flagship university. Four months ago, members of a pro-Palestinian group at the school falsely accused Israeli-born professor Ami Pedahzur of defamation and assault – all after they had disrupted a conference he was hosting that brought together a small gathering of scholars. The incident occurred just as Stanford University historian Gil-li Vardi was introduced. Suddenly, the boisterous students stood up and unfurled a Palestinian flag. They spewed the usual venomous statements regarding the state of Israel; and went on to exchange heated words with Pedahzur and other attendees who were unwilling to meekly let the students take over the event. Pedahzur, for his part, repeatedly asked told the students to “Sit down and listen, sit down and learn” – but to no avail. They quickly began to chant: “Free, free Palestinian!” and “Long Live the Intifada!” And perhaps most venomous of all, they chanted: “We want the 48; we don’t want 2 states!” – with 48 being a reference to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

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