RUTHFULLY YOURS

Those who oppose the national identity of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael, Jewish sovereignty, Zionism, oppose the “life equation” that defines Israel’s mission and its existence.The most famous mathematical equation is E=mc2 because it is associated with the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Put simply, Einstein described a law in physics: mass (m) is another form of energy (E); and, when mass is multiplied by the speed of light (c) times itself, the result will produce tremendous energy.

Einstein showed that the increased relativistic mass of a body comes from the energy of motion of the body – that is, its kinetic energy (E) – divided by the speed of light squared (c2).

In another context, however, the equation could be used as a symbolic metaphor to explain something about modern Jewish history: The energy of the Jewish people, expressed in its return en masse to its homeland, Eretz Yisrael, will illuminate the world with Jewish values and ideals.

BACK TO 1933?

How the Academic Boycott Began*

On April 6, 2002, 123 university academics and researchers (their number -would later rise to 250) from across Europe signed an open letter, published in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, calling for a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel until the Israeli government abided by (unspecified) UN resolutions and returned yet again to negotiations with Yasser Arafat to be conducted in accordance with the principles laid down in the latest Saudi peace plan. The petition was organized and published at the very time Israelis were being butchered on a daily basis, mainly by brainwashed teenage suicide bombers, Arab versions of the Hitler Youth. It declared, in high Pecksniffian style, that since the Israeli government was “impervious to moral appeals from world leaders” Israel’s cultural and research institutions should be denied further funding from the European Union and the European Science Foundation. It neglected to recommend that the European Union suspend its very generous financing of Yasser Arafat or that Chinese scholars be boycotted until China withdraws from Tibet. The petition was the brainchild of Steven Rose, director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at Gresham College, London, and the great majority of its signatories were British. But it included academics from a host of European countries, a number sufficient to give it the appearance of a pan-European campaign against the Jews. It even had the obligatory display Israeli, one Eva Jablonka of Tel Aviv University. (Nine other Israeli leftists added their names as soon as they found out about this opportunity for international renown.)

In June, Mona Baker, director of the Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) decided to practice what the all-European petitioners had preached: She dismissed from the boards of the two journals she owns and edits two Israelis, Miriam Shlesinger of Bar-Ilan University and Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University. She also added that she would no longer accept articles from Israeli researchers, and it was later revealed that she would not “allow” books originating from her private publishing house (St. Jerome) to be purchased by Israeli institutions. One paradox of the firing, which would be repeated often in later stages of the boycott, was that Shlesinger was a member in good standing of the Israeli Left, former chairman of Amnesty International’s Israeli chapter, and ever at the ready with “criticism of Israeli policies in the West Bank…” Toury, for his part, opposed taking any retaliatory action against Baker — this had been proposed by an American teaching fellow at Leeds named Michael Weingrad — because “a boycott is a boycott is a boycott.” A small contingent of Toury’s (mostly British) friends in linguistics issued a statement objecting to his dismissal because: “We agree with Noam Chomsky’s view that one does not boycott people or their cultural institutions as an expression of political protest.”

Israeli Arab Christian diplomat George Deek made very interesting comments on Israel as the Middle East’s one hopeful island of diversity this past October.
Israeli diplomat George Deek has often described himself as an “orthodox Christian within the Arab minority in the Jewish State in the Muslim Middle East.” During an Oct. 29 Hudson Institute presentation, he explained that although such diversity in Israel may be complex, it offers one of the few hopes in the Middle East for mutually beneficial coexistence among vastly different groups.

Israel is a national home for a Jewish people truly indigenous to the Middle East, Deek said, pointing out that Israel’s Arab neighbors have repeatedly failed to destroy (through various military and political means) what they have wrongly viewed as a foreign colonial entity. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000, particularly the latter, drew inspiration from the idea that “Jews have an alternative; they have a place to go. If we scare them enough, then they will just get up and leave.”

Hear no Islam! See no Islam! Speak no Islam!

A typical modern critic was as likely to grasp or report the substance of a book – good or bad, and whether or not he liked it or approved of it – as it was that a chimpanzee would appreciate a thermometer. He’d worry it, nibble on it, look through it, try to clean his ears with it, or use it to fish for maggots.
Private Detective Chess Hanrahan, in Honors Due (2011)

In October 2014, Mark Tapson published on FrontPage a review of an online document which qualifies as an enemy’s threat doctrine. It was reprinted on The Counter Jihad Report.

In the spring of 2004 a strategist who called himself Abu Bakr Naji published online The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Ummah Will Pass (later translated from the Arabic by William McCants, a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center). The book – what the Washington Post calls the Mein Kampf of jihad – aimed to provide a strategy for al-Qaeda and other jihadists. “The ideal of this movement,” wrote Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, “as its theorists saw it, was the establishment of a caliphate that would lead to the purification of the Muslim world.”