The New York Times has a new op-ed contributor named Marwan Barghouti. His op-ed “Why We Are on Hunger Strike in Israel’s Prisons”– is a screed to make Thomas Friedman proud.
The Times described Barghouti as a “Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.”
Oops! The Times somehow forgot to mention that Marwan Barghouti is a terrorist serial killer whose savagery earned him five life sentences. It’s like describing Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer, as a “culinary innovator.”
The New York Times must like the name Barghouti. Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS movement and author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights is also a favored contributor. In a January 2014 op-ed he explained “Why Israel Fears the Boycott” listing the usual litany of lies and accusations. In May 2015 he wrote an op-ed “Israeli Extremism Will Encourage Global Boycott” quoting a poll by J Street to bolster his bias. On March 16th, 2017 in a letter to the editor, he compares BDS to the civil rights movement, quotes a questionable Brookings Institute poll on American support for sanctions against Israel, and spells out the agenda of BDS:
“Since its inception in 2005 by the Palestinian grass-roots civil society coalition, B.D.S. has consistently called for ending Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem; granting full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are discriminated against by dozens of laws; and recognizing the United Nations-stipulated right of Palestinian refugees to return to lands from which they were forcibly displaced during Israel’s establishment in 1948.” He could have said it in one sentence: BDS calls for the end of Israel….period! And has anyone told him that Gaza is not “occupied” since 2005?
Other mainstream papers contribute to anti-Israel bias by ignoring relevant stories.
To paraphrase George Berkeley about a tree falling in the woods, if the media doesn’t report it, did it happen?
In France, on April 3, an Orthodox Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, a doctor aged 66, was thrown out of a window to her death by an African neighbor who shouted “Allahu akbar!” The mainstream media ignored it.
On April 21 a speeding car driven by an Arab rammed into a bus stop at the Gush Etzion bus stop injuring an elderly man. The Gush Etzion spokesperson said the incident marks the second such attack in the last month. Earlier this month, Sgt. Elchai Teharlev was killed in a car ramming attack while guarding a bus stop just outside the West Bank settlement of Ofra.
The mainstream media ignored these events. Maybe they did not happen? CONTINUE AT SITE
On Sunday night I was up late writing, and so on Monday I slept right up until the moment I was awakened, sometime around midday, by the blaring sound of a marching band in the street. I didn’t need to look out the window to know what was going on. The music was The Internationale. The date was May 1. In the small Norwegian town where I live, the May Day parade was passing by.
The New York Times commemorated the Communist holiday in its own way – with an essay by Vivian Gornick, now eighty-one, a card-carrying member of the old New York intellectual crowd and author of a 2011 biography of anarchist heroine Emma Goldman. The piece – entitled “When Communism Inspired Americans” – is the latest example of what has long since become a genre all its own: the fond look back at American Stalinism.
The essay isn’t Gornick’s first contribution to the genre. Her 1977 book The Romance of American Communism, a collection of interviews with old Party members, was described by Commentary reviewer Marion Magid as an “adoring account” that depicts their perfidy “as a romantic episode in American history.” In the book, Gornick portrayed these old Communists as “the golden children called to Marxism” and claimed that they “feared, hungered, and cared more” than other people and possessed a “wisdom passion alone can purchase.” Noting that most of Gornick’s interviewees were Jews, Magid quite rightly challenged the idea that there was any “wisdom” in their “slavish support of the Soviet Union throughout the long period of Stalinist treachery and the calculated destruction of Soviet Jewish life.”
Nor was there anything “golden” about their ability to keep their Communism intact despite (this is Magid’s list) “The Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Doctors’ Plot, the takeover in Czechoslovakia, the Slansky Trial, the murdered writers, the labor camps, and all the rest.” Not only did American Communists accept all these abominations, noted Magid, “they justified it, those wonderful couples, ‘hungry for justice,’ rushing off to protest meetings and ‘peace’ rallies and picket lines while supper cooled on the stove at home and bullets met their mark in the cellars of the Lubianka. To read this book along with, say, the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam is to become almost physically ill. The romance of Communism, indeed. It is an apology that is required—not an elegy.”
One can understand Magid’s disgust. Back when it was first published, The Romance of American Communism was part of a new wave of books, movies, articles, and other material that treated that subject with sympathy. In The Cause that Failed: Communism in American Public Life (1991), Guenter Lewy cited Gornick’s book, along with films like The Front and Lillian Hellman’s memoir Scoundrel Time (both 1976), as part of a “new attitude” and “revisionist history” that represented American Communists “as persecuted defenders of American democracy.” Lewy quoted historian William O’Neill: “One would not know from seeing such films as The Front or reading books like The Romance of American Communism…that the heroes in them were apologists for Stalin’s death machine.”
Recently, Kumail Nanjiani, the star of HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” complained to Chelsea Handler on her Netflix talk show about the supposed negative image of Muslims in American popular culture. A Pakistani-American and Muslim, Nanjiani asked Handler what she sees in her head when she thinks of Muslims and Handler answered that she envisions “serious people” and “…not like …fun.” Nanjiani interjected “there’s a beard” as she was speaking and she agreed and repeated “beard”.
Handler’s answer, apparently, revealed the horrific bigotry of America and its culture — and Nanjiani explained what a big scandal it all represents. This is why, he told Handler, his wife wants to start a Tumblr called, ‘Muslims Having Fun.’ Because, you see, as Nanjiani whined, one never sees Muslims having fun in American popular culture.
Handler got very excited about all of this and subsequently tweeted out in moral indignation: “Why don’t we get to see any fun Muslims?”
Oh, the injustice of it all.
What Nanjiani won’t tell us, of course, and what Handler would never dare say, let alone fathom, is that maybe we see “serious-minded” Muslim men with beards, and we don’t regularly see any Muslims having fun, is because . . . well . . . it may all have something to do with Islam. There is a great value, you see, placed on the wearing of beards in Islamic texts (i.e. Sahih al-Bukhari 7:72:780) and Muslims are required to emulate the example of the Prophet, who is believed to have sported a beard.
In terms of having fun, if Nanjiani and Handler were even remotely interested in, or honest about, Islam, they would know that Islam mandates the polar opposite of the Declaration of Independence’s emphasis on the right of humans to pursue happiness. It is a fundamental difference between Islam and the Judeo-Christian tradition, which my book, United in Hate, argues is at the heart of Jihad’s war on the West.
Nanjiani and Handler might do well to focus on why Ayatollah Khomeini stated:
Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.
In my interview on the Nanjiani-Handler comedy fest with Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), he had this to say:
This episode reflects the general tendency of the Leftist intelligentsia to claim that people are suspicious of Islam or Muslims in the U.S. today because of the ‘media,’ which is supposedly ‘Islamophobic.’ The idea that the establishment media, which so assiduously covers for Islam by obscuring in any possible way the Islamic identity and motives of jihad murderers, is ‘Islamophobic’ is laughable, but it nonetheless prevails.
We don’t see Muslims having fun because, you see, ‘Islamophobes’ control the entertainment industry (which gave us, a few years back, the Canadian sitcom ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie,’ a forced exercise in Muslims Having Fun.
Discussion of the Arab/Israeli situation is often unilluminating because so much of it is based on groundless assumptions and stubborn fictions. Perhaps the most pervasive one today afflicting the international political class is the notion that Palestinian Arabs primarily desire a state of their own, living peacefully alongside Israel.
Some recent examples:
December 2016, then-Secretary of State John Kerry: “polls of Israelis and Palestinians show there is still strong support for the two-state solution.”
July 2016, the Middle East Quartet (US, EU, UN and Russia): “the majority of people on both sides . . . express their support for the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security.”
December 2014, then-Vice-President Joe Biden: “a two-state solution … the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians, they think that it is the right way to go.”
May 2014, then-envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Martin Indyk: “Consistently over the last decade, polling on both sides reveals majority support for the two-state solution.”
Go back a decade, and one can easily produce essentially identical quotations from President George W. Bush, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and so on.
However, the idea that Palestinians prioritize peace, statehood and prosperity flies in the face of reality. Consistent polling of Palestinians tells a diametrically opposite story.
For example, a June 2016 joint poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) found that 58% of West Bank Palestinians oppose a Palestinian state involving mutual recognition between Israel and the envisaged Palestinian state and an end of claims.
For another, the June 2015 Palestine Center for Public Opinion poll found that, for the near term (the next five years), 49% of Palestinians support “reclaiming all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea,” while only 22% favored “a two-state solution” as the “main Palestinian national goal.”
Indeed, Daniel Polisar of Jerusalem’s Shalem College, in a recent examination of literally hundreds of Palestinian surveys, established that majorities of Palestinians reject Palestinian statehood alongside Israel by an average of more than 3 to 1.
It takes only a moment’s checking of the Palestinian scene to see that the idea of peaceful statehood and acceptance of Israel that would be its prerequisite has yet to emerge.
In the past month, official Palestinian Authority (PA) TV joined the family of a jailed Palestinian terrorist, As’ad Zo’rob, who murdered an Israeli who had given him a ride, lauding him as a “heroic prisoner” and a source of “pride for …. all of Palestine.”
Editor’s note: The University of California-Berkeley is the latest school to be named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” It joins the campuses of Brooklyn College (CUNY), Tufts University, Brandeis University, UCLA, and Vassar College on the list. These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech exposing the truth about Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.
The Berkeley administration has shown great hostility to speech critical of Hamas and SJP. When the Freedom Center previously placed posters on the Berkeley campus exposing the links between Hamas and SJP, Berkeley Associate Chancellor Nils Gilman labeled them “a tactic of harassment and intimidation.” Last night, the Freedom Center again placed posters critical of Hamas and SJP on the Berkeley campus. These posters disrupt the anti-Israel narrative that dominates on campus and serve as a challenge to the Berkeley administration to uphold its constitutional obligation to honor the First Amendment on campus.
University of California-Berkeley: Nils Gilman, Associate Chancellor
The University of California-Berkeley has a well-deserved reputation for stigmatizing ideas which don’t fit the extreme left-wing, anti-Israel campus culture. Berkeley Associate Chancellor Nils Gilman has epitomized this double-standard by failing to condemn outright calls for terrorism and genocide against the Jews from campus anti-Israel groups while denouncing posters putting forth factual information about Students for Justice in Palestine and its links to Hamas.
In a letter sent to the entire campus community in April 2016, Gilman denounced anti-SJP posters hung on campus by the David Horowitz Freedom Center as “a tactic of harassment and intimidation.” He claimed that UC Berkeley “remains committed to combating all forms of bias and discrimination” and asked the campus community to “use this opportunity to reinforce our values as a campus, and to report any further incidents”—in other words, urging Berkeley’s students and faculty to report any speech that challenges the leftist thought control enforced at Berkeley.
When the Freedom Center again hung posters exposing the truth about SJP at Berkeley in October of 2016, Gilman issued another letter stating that the language in the posters “violates our Principles of Community” and ordered them to be taken down.
The UC-Berkeley Principles of Community which he references state, in part, “We affirm the dignity of all individuals and strive to uphold a just community in which discrimination and hate are not tolerated” and “We are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue that elicits the full spectrum of views held by our varied communities.”
But by failing to uphold free speech and intellectual diversity, Gilman’s comments in his letters to the Berkeley community violate these Principles. They also degrade the spirit of open discourse and the exploration of all sides of crucial issues which lie at the heart of the mission of the modern liberal arts university.
Last Tuesday, eight Yale graduate students began an indefinite hunger strike on Beinecke Plaza, just a stone’s throw away from the university’s administrative offices. The graduate students’ union, Local 33, which organized this “protest fast,” said in a statement that they would not leave until Yale initiates contract negotiations with the union.
Or until they start to feel light-headed.
According to the New Haven Independent, “if not eating endangers a student’s health, that individual will sub out and another union member will assume their place in renouncing meals.” And should low blood sugar cloud the strikers’ judgment, a team of medical professionals is standing by to monitor the fast’s progress. Such safeguards were of little comfort to Robin Canavan, who compared the physical toll of the strike to that ghastly feeling of “exhaustion after pulling an all-nighter.” An all-nighter without any coffee.
But even this crippling fatigue won’t deter Local 33 chairman Aaron Greenberg, a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s political-science department and a self-styled civil-rights activist. In his recent op-ed in the New Haven Independent, Greenberg invoked the words of Martin Luther King to condemn Yale’s abhorrent treatment of its graduate students:
King explained that his campaign sought “to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” This is what we did yesterday in Local 33 when we began our fast.
He goes on:
So let’s not have any mistakes about what Yale means when they say they “respect the process” of the law. . . . It’s the dynamic Dr. King described when he wrote, “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”
Yale should up its admissions standards. Greenberg’s civil-rights analogy displays an astonishing level of historical amnesia, which trivializes the struggles of King and other black leaders. But more than that, it reflects a new and worrying trend: the corporatization of higher education.
To characterize Yale’s unwillingness to begin contract negotiations as an assault on human dignity is to reduce the relationship of students and administrators to that of employers and employees. On this view, Yale’s obligations to its graduate students are just like a company’s obligations to its workers. In forestalling collective bargaining and, by extension, in opposing Local 33, the administration functions as an oppressive corporate entity, more than willing to sacrifice the welfare of its employees to maximize profit. Indeed, the concept of graduate unionization makes sense only when it is presented as a response to precisely this sort of dynamic — the proletariat against the plutocrat.
Greenberg’s views thus rest on a grave category error, in that they apply the framework of labor relations to what is fundamentally not a labor-relations issue. When Bernie Sanders said that American workers were burnt out, I somehow doubt that Yale graduate students were the people he had in mind.
When Bernie Sanders said that American workers were burnt out, I somehow doubt that Yale graduate students were the people he had in mind.
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority (PA) is scheduled to call this week on President Trump. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress is considering the Taylor Force Act, which would require Abbas to either dismantle his government’s system of rewards for terrorists or forfeit American financial aid. The proposed law is controversial largely because the PA presents a confusing picture of itself.
To much of the world, the PA represents hope for a consensual resolution of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Created by the 1993 Oslo peace accords, it is widely recognized as the Palestinians’ representative body. Its leader was popularly elected. President Obama and other leaders have described the PA as moderate, committed to peace, and opposed to anti-Israeli violence. What seems to confirm its reputation for moderation is its rivalry with Hamas, the extremist Islamist group that the U.S. government rightly designates as terrorists. The PA’s security forces cooperate with the Israeli Defense Forces against Hamas.
All of that is on the one hand. On the other, the PA is a nightmare of bad leadership.
It is anti-democratic. Its officials are notoriously corrupt. It’s a source of torrential anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda. Though it helps Israel fight those terrorists who oppose both Israel and the PA, it actively foments anti-Israel terrorism in its own domain through its formal legislative and bureaucratic system of professional and cash benefits for Palestinians who commit knifings, axe-murders, shootings, and car-rammings.
Abbas was elected to a four-year presidential term in 2005. Popular dissatisfaction with the PA’s pervasive corruption put his reelection in doubt, so no new elections were scheduled. He simply remains in power.
Abbas says that he supports peace, but the Israeli government offered him a generous deal in 2008. The Israelis had just handed all of Gaza over to the PA. They offered him virtually all the West Bank, with unprecedented concessions on Jerusalem. He nevertheless scorned the deal.
Abbas and his PA colleagues are bound and determined to perpetuate the conflict with Israel. Their personal interests require it. If the conflict ended, they would lose foreign aid, which makes their lucrative corruption possible. They would stop receiving invitations to the White House and other gratifying diplomatic attention. They would cease to be the leaders of a longstanding and proudly uncompromising national struggle, forfeiting their self-respect and prestige, especially in the Arab and Muslim worlds. For them, peace would be hell.
But peace could enormously benefit the Palestinian people. It could open a path to greater freedom and prosperity for them and save their children from the fatal lure of “martyrdom.” Those interests, alas, don’t influence PA policy.
The PA pays lump sums and lifetime salaries to terrorists and their families. The size of the payments correlates to the number of their victims and the severity of the harm inflicted on them.
As Abbas heads for Washington, U.S. officials should understand that at the heart of the Palestinian–Israeli problem is the conflict of interests between Palestinian leaders and their own people. That’s the context in which Congress should consider the Taylor Force Act.
Of all that’s wrong with the way the PA operates, nothing is more harmful than the elaborate apparatus it has created to push its people to become terrorists. It’s known as “pay for slay.” The PA has created two (two!) ministries specifically for this purpose, with combined budgets exceeding $330 million in 2016. The PA pays lump sums and lifetime salaries to terrorists and their families. The size of the payments correlates to the number of their victims and the severity of the harm inflicted on them. The payments dwarf the average monthly salaries of ordinary working inhabitants of the West Bank.
The United Nations publication “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem 1917-1988” (“Study”) has deliberately misrepresented the actual wording of General Assembly Resolution 181 passed on 29 November 1947 – deceiving many academics who have disseminated the Study’s false message.
The Study has been published by the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat for, and under the guidance of, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
The offending statement in the Study misleadingly declares:
“After investigating various alternatives the United Nations proposed the partitioning of Palestine into two independent States, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalized.”
The actual wording of Resolution 181 stated:
“Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence in Palestine….”
The Study omits to mention that 78 per cent of Palestine had already become an independent Arab State in 1946 and been renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan.
The Study’s claim that Resolution 181 called for an “independent Palestinian Arab State” was not accidental but deliberately done to deceive and mislead.
Resolution 181 had denied the existence of any distinctly identifiable Palestinian people in 1947.
The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine had also only spoken of the “existing non- Jewish communities in Palestine” in 1922.
“Palestinians” were first defined in the 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Charter to mean Arab citizens normally resident in Palestine in 1947 and their descendants. Jewish and non-Arab Christian residents were excluded under this racist and apartheid definition.
The PLO also claimed that Palestine was the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people – even though Resolution 181 clearly did not.
That the Study deliberately changed the actual wording of Resolution 181 to advance these fictitious PLO claims – or perhaps others unknown – for spurious reasons – is scandalous.
Needless to say, none of this is true. Nowhere has Heather Mac Donald suggested that black people or any other type of person has “no right to exist”. The accusation is levelled without evidence. But as with all anti-free-speech activists today, the line is blurred not merely between actual words and violence, but between wholly imagined words and violence.
Every week in America brings another spate of defeats for freedom of speech. This past week it was Ann Coulter’s turn (yet again) to be banned from speaking at Berkeley for what the university authorities purport to be “health and safety” reasons — meaning the health and safety of the speaker.
Each time this happens, there are similar responses. Those who broadly agree with the views of the speaker complain about the loss of one of the fundamental rights which the Founding Fathers bestowed on the American people. Those who may be on the same political side but find the speaker somewhat distasteful find a way to be slightly muted or silent. Those who disagree with the speaker’s views applaud the banning as an appropriate response to apparently imminent incitement.
The problem throughout all of this is that the reasons why people should be supporting freedom of speech (to correct themselves where they are in error, and strengthen their arguments where they are not) are actually becoming lost in America. No greater demonstration of this muddle exists than a letter put together by a group of students at Claremont McKenna College earlier this month to protest the appearance on their campus of a speaker with whom they disagreed.
Heather Mac Donald is a conservative author, journalist and fellow of the Manhattan Institute in New York. Her work has appeared in some of the world’s most prestigious journals. Of course, none of that was enough to deter students at Claremont from libelling her as much as possible in advance of her speech and then preventing her speech from taking place. At Claremont McKenna College, where Mac Donald was due to speak about her recent book, The War on Cops, angry students surrounded the building, screamed obscene words and banged on the windows. Mac Donald ended up giving the speech to a mainly empty room via live video-streaming and then fleeing the university under the protection of campus security. As recent events, such as the hospitalisation of a professor at Charles Murray’s recent speech at Middlebury College have shown, intimidation and violence are clearly regarded by today’s North American students as legitimate means to stop people from speaking.
The result of this mess is that France as one country no longer exists.
People who voted for Le Pen seem to feel not only that they lost their jobs, but that they are becoming foreigners in their own country.
Macron, for many analysts, is the candidate of the status quo: Islamists are not a problem and reforming the job market will supposedly solve all France’s problems.
The French presidential race is the latest election to shake up establishment politics. The Parti Socialiste and Les Républicains, who have been calling the shots for the past forty years, were voted out of the race. The “remainers” are Emmanuel Macron, a clone of Canada’s Prime Minster Justin Trudeau; and Marine Le Pen, whom many believe will not win.
France is a fractured country. As in the US and the UK, the rift is not between the traditional left and right. Instead, it reflects divisions — cultural, social, and economic — that came with globalization and mass migration. A map released by the Ministry of the Interior after the first round of the presidential campaign illustrates the new political scenery.
Blue represents the parts of France where Le Pen heads the list; pink, the areas supporting Macron. The blue areas coincide with old industrial areas, deeply damaged by globalization and industrial relocation. Many blue-collar workers are on welfare; and the antagonism between Muslims and non-Muslims is high. People who voted for Le Pen seem to feel not only that they lost their jobs, but that they are becoming foreigners in their own country.
The areas in pink (Macron), represent the big cities and places where the better jobs are. It also represents the areas where the “upper classes can afford to raise invisible barriers between themselves and the ‘other’, immigrants or minorities,” explains Christophe Guilluy, geographer, and author of Le crépuscule de la France d’en haut (The Twilight of Elite France).
The result of this mess is that France as one country no longer exists. One half the population (in blue-collar areas, small towns and rural areas) is shut out by the other half of the population (white-collar workers) who live in the big cities.
Guilluy adds:
“The job market has become deeply polarized and mainly concentrated in big cities, squeezing out the middle classes. For the first time in history, working people no longer live in the places where jobs and wealth are created.”
…
“But social issues are not the only determinant of the populist vote. Identity is also essential, linked as it is to the emergence of a multicultural society, which feeds anxiety in working-class environments. At a time of fluctuating majorities and minorities, amid demographic instability, the fear of tipping into a minority is creating considerable cultural insecurity in developed countries. Unlike the upper classes, who can afford to raise invisible barriers between themselves and the ‘other’ (immigrants or minorities), the working classes want a powerful state apparatus to protect them, socially and culturally. So, the populist surge is re-activating a real class vote.”
