RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, the Obama Administration publicly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for incitement against Palestinians. What had he done? In a speech expounding the long history of Palestinian incitement and violence, predating Israel’s establishment by decades, Netanyahu had focused on the role of Haj Amin el-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Palestine Mandate, in urging Adolf Hitler to carry out the genocide of European Jewry.

Netanyahu’s point is undebatable: Husseini was not only a wartime Nazi ally, but, already in 1937, issued a seething, anti-Semitic declaration, calling upon Muslims everywhere to fight and kill the Jews, whom he described as the arch-enemies of Muslims and, indeed, mankind, and who were allegedly seeking to seize the Muslim and Christian holy places.

During the war, Husseini’s declaration was published by the Nazis as Islam und Judentum (Islam and Jewry).It was distributed to the mostly Muslim members of the SS Handschar Division he was involved in forming and which participated in war crimes against Jews, Serbs and other opponents of the Third Reich.”

Husseini’s role in the Nazi genocide and fanning Muslim anti-Semitism has been the subject of numerous scholarly books in recent years, including by Klaus Gensicke (2007), David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann (2008), Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers (2010), Andrew G. Bostom (2013), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz (2014) and David Motadel (2014).

Indeed, in his The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis, Gensicke writes that Husseini’s “hatred of Jews knew no mercy and he always intervened with particular zeal whenever he feared that some of the Jews could escape annihilation.”

It is not nice to be amused while Israelis are being stabbed, stoned and run over by frenzied young terrorists. But how can one keep a straight face when hearing the Palestinian Authority’s spin the situation?

With a little charisma-coaching, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas could be a stand-up comic; he’s already got an international audience applauding his primitive discourse. Imagine the gigs he would get if he polished his act.

One routine the terrorist-in-a-tie needs to hone is his song-and-dance about canceling the Oslo Accords — the 1993 agreement between his predecessor, PLO chief Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for which the two received the Nobel Peace Prize.

This was funny enough by itself, since peace was the one element of the treaty establishing the PA that eluded the whole process. Furthermore, only the Palestinian side benefited from it. Arafat received accolades, along with lots of land. Formerly a terrorist pariah, he was suddenly granted full-fledged legitimacy as a player on the world stage. Even the Second Intifada — the suicide-bombing war he launched after blowing up negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000 at Camp David — did not rob him of his ill-deserved peace prize.

The president’s quest for even-handedness is misguided and dangerous.
Speaking at Harvard University in October, Secretary of State John Kerry asserted that “a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years” has triggered “an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing.” In the effort to clarify Kerry’s remarks—since, in fact, the rate of construction has declined—State Department spokesman John Kirby advanced the old moral equivalence argument. “Frustration on both sides,” he said, has led to the current violence. To clarify his clarification, he added that “individuals on both sides” are “guilty of acts of terror.”
The Obama administration’s formulaic reactions to the recent outbreak of terror in Israel disguise the deeper causes of Palestinian attacks while obscuring the crucial long-term steps needed to build decent relations between Israel and the Palestinians. And they reflect the administration’s tendency to exaggerate Israel’s responsibility while underestimating that of the Arab world and Iran for the turmoil that has swept the region—a tendency that has helped worsen things all over the Middle East.

An adolescent high-school student with all the biological parts of a male and none of the biological parts of a female declares himself to be a girl, is called by his female name at school, is allowed to play on the girls’ athletic team and to change inside the girls’ locker room with the small proviso that this be done behind a curtain. This apparently is not sufficiently sensitive to the boy/girl’s needs – I can’t use a pronoun without knowing this person’s preference for that loaded word as pronouns are war zones at the moment. Despite the wholesale capitulation of the school to all the aforementioned demands of this student, the Office for Civil Rights of the Dept of Education has insisted that standing behind a curtain or showering separately is outright discrimination and a challenge to this student’s identity.Unless the Illinois school removes the curtain and allows total access to the girls’ facilities, it stands in danger of losing all of its Title IX funding.