RUTHFULLY YOURS

The controversial – because so ardently pro-Israel – nominee to become the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday morning.

The contentious hearing on Friedman’s nomination took place back in mid-February. Since then, Friedman and his supporters have been biting their nails, waiting for the committee to vote on the nomination.
In the month between the committee hearing and Thursday’s vote, many U.S. organizations which deal with Israel worked actively to encourage Senators to vote in accordance with those organization’s values.

J Street, the prog-elite organization highly critical of Israel and especially Israel’s security efforts, worked overtime in an effort to derail Friedman’s nomination.

Firmly pro-Israel organizations such as Americans for a Safe Israel, EMET, Iron Dome Alliance, Jews Choose Trump, ZOA, COPMA and JCC Watch hand-delivered a letter to all members of the SFRC urging them to vote in favor of the nomination.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) did not take a position on Friedman’s nomination.

The vote in favor of Friedman went almost strictly along party lines. Almost, because Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez (NJ) once again voted his conscience and refused to be intimidated by party leadership. Menendez voted “aye” when his name was announced during the roll call vote on Thursday morning. The New Jersey Senator had also voted against approving the Nuclear Iran Deal which had become a highly partisan issue.

Committee member chair Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) spoke briefly before the vote. His endorsement was read without emotion from a prepared statement. Next to speak was the ranking committee member Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), who had already announced that he was going to vote against the nomination.

Cardin said the words Friedman had used in various op-eds which were extremely negative suggested to him that Friedman would not prove to be the “unifying force” needed in the region. The Maryland Senator was also critical of Friedman’s statements in opposition to the “Two State Solution.”

Senators Tom Udall (D-NM) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) also spoke against Friedman’s nomination. Both Senators took umbrage at Friedman’s past written criticisms of far left organizations and members of the U.S. government, including former President Barack Obama.

The four brief statements were then followed by a roll call which resulted in the voting out, with approval, of Friedman’s nomination.

The nomination now awaits a vote by the full Senate.

There is no shortage of Palestinian and Arab news websites that publish hoaxes, propaganda, lies and disinformation disguised as real news. This garbage is accepted as factual by many Palestinians and other Arabs.

This is a form of incitement to which the West is deaf, largely because journalists working for Western mainstream media do not wish to understand what is being reported in Arabic, or even in English.

Blood libels against Jews were once thought to be part of the dark past. They are not. What do such stories accomplish? Excuses for the murder of Jews.

Another “new” old blood libel that Palestinians have been spreading against Israel claims that Israelis are flooding Palestinian communities with narcotics in order to spread moral corruption and destroy the health of Palestinians. This lie helps Palestinians avoid responsibility for the smuggling of drugs (by Palestinians) into the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt.

That leaves us with some questions: Where is the international community’s exposure of the lies that fuel the Palestinian murder of Jews? And: Will the international community once again in history fail to speak the truth about the murder of Jews?

One after another, young Palestinians continue to carry out terrorist attacks against Jews. Why? We might start at the beginning: the campaign of incitement, indoctrination and lies that Palestinian media outlets wage against Israel. This campaign has poisoned the hearts and minds of millions of Arabs and Muslims. It ought to be no surprise, then, when the poisoned Palestinian youths grab a weapon and set out to do the death-work they are taught to cherish.

The anti-Israel incitement can even be quite subtle. Those injecting the venom do not always issue a direct call for Palestinians to go out and kill Jews. It is enough, for example, to tell Palestinians that Jews are “defiling with their filthy feet” Islamic holy sites, to drive a Palestinian to go out and stab a Jew.

http://www.jpost.com/Blogs/My-Nation-Lives/This-Week-in-Israeli-History-Joseph-Trumpeldor-and-the-Battle-of-Tel-Hai-446621

Joseph Trumpeldor was born in Russia in 1880. After hearing news of the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the teenage Trumpeldor became entranced with the Zionist idea and even opened up a local Zionist club. In 1902 he was drafted to the Russian Army upon the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. During the fighting Trumpeldor lost his left hand to shrapnel, but still insisted on returning to the front lines, reasoning “but I still have my other arm…” He re-entered the war and fell into Japanese captivity after the Russian Army surrendered at Port Arthur. Upon his release, he received four decorations for bravery, making him the highest decorated Jewish soldier in Russia and the first Jew to receive an officer’s commission in the Russian Army.

After the war Trumepldor moved to the Holy Land and worked in agriculture. With the outbreak of World War I, he was expelled by the Ottoman authorities and sought refuge in Egypt where he met Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Together they advocated for the creation of a Jewish unit within the British Army that would assist in liberating the Land of Israel from Turkish rule.

The British were reluctant to accept their proposal and instead formed a transport unit called the Zion Mule Corps that consisted of 650 Jewish soldiers. With Trumpeldor as Deputy Commander, the Zion Mule Corps fought admirably in the Gallipoli Campaign. The Mule Corps’ Commanding Officer, John Henry Patterson, later said of Trumpeldor: “Many of the Zionists whom I thought somewhat lacking in courage showed themselves fearless to a degree when under heavy fire, while Captain Trumpeldor actually revelled in it, and the hotter it became the more he liked it …”

After the Mule Corps was disbanded, Trumpeldor and Jabotinsky travelled to London and successfully lobbied the British government to form the famed Jewish Legion.

At the conclusion of the war Trumepldor returned to British-ruled Mandatory Palestine and assisted in protecting Jewish settlements from marauding Arabs who would often attack and rob them of their day’s labor. One day Trumepldor received word from the village of Tel Hai requesting for backup due to the deteriorating security situation in the region. He immediately rushed to the village with a handful of others to help protect the villagers.

On March 1, 1920, several hundred Arabs arrived at Tel Hai, demanding to search the fort for fleeing French officers. A verbal dispute broke out and a battle ensued. Joseph Trumpledor was killed in the battle along with seven others. When the doctor arrived and asked Trumpeldor how he was feeling, he said his famous last words that were immortalized within the annals of Israeli history: “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.”

Kiryat Shmona (lit. Town of the Eight), one of the largest cities in northern Israel, is named after Joseph Trumpeldor and the seven mighty fighters that perished defending Tel Hai

Last fall, the art historian Victoria C. Gardner Coates published an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that the utopian multicultural paradise imagined by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heavenwas being used to promote a particular political position concerning the status of today’s Jerusalem. The exhibition functioned, in her words, “as a highbrow gloss on the movement to define Jerusalem as anything but Jewish, and so to undermine Israel’s sovereignty.”https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2017/03/not-your-city-everyones-city/

Coates’s article provoked a letter to the editor from Thomas P. Campbell, the Metropolitan’s director and chief executive officer (until his sudden resignation in late February). Objecting to Coates’s “extraordinarily narrow perspective,” Campbell assured readers of the Journal that, far from engaging in an anti-Israel “conspiracy”—his word, not hers—the museum’s purpose in mounting this “unprecedented gathering of masterpieces from the three Abrahamic faiths” was simply to “reveal the richly intertwined nature of these various aesthetic traditions at a fascinating moment in Jerusalem’s history.”

“If anyone has chosen to politicize the exhibition,” Campbell concluded, “it is Ms. Coates.”

I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Campbell’s belief in the innocence of his museum’s exhibition, a belief shared by almost all reviewers. On certain subjects, when historical facts and their implications threaten to disrupt one’s more heavenly and comforting visions, the tendentious aspects of such visions simply become invisible: beyond notice, and certainly beyond argument. All the more reason, then, for me to thank the three respondents to my essay—Robert Irwin, Steven Fine, and Maureen Mullarkey—for making even more palpable the weighty historical facts that prove the illusion, or delusion, in Thomas Campbell’s blithe conception of that “fascinating moment in Jerusalem’s history.”

The Met was intent on showing medieval Jerusalem to be, in Irwin’s words, “the capital of a culturally vibrant La La Land,” and no counter-evidence—abundant examples of which are provided by Irwin in his learned and lively response—was permitted to get in the way. Moreover, just as the show’s positive vision of a medieval paradise was open to serious question, so too was its vision of the age’s stock villains; Mullarkey’s acute points about the show’s notion of the singular evil of the Crusades and of Christian rule in the Holy Land provide fodder for a much more extended inquiry.

Perhaps most surprising is how thoroughly the Met ended up distorting not just a proper historical perspective but a proper aesthetic perspective as well. Given how few artifacts in the show were actually from Jerusalem, and given that fewer still could even remotely be considered “masterpieces” (Campbell’s inflated term), the Met cannot be said to have demonstrated, on its own terms, how great cultural glories arose out of this presumed multi-faith experiment in convivencia.