RUTHFULLY YOURS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2001 IN AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL REVIEW

Last month, a singular event in Israeli cultural history occurred. The music of Richard Wagner (1813-83) was played at a concert of the Israel Festival by Argentinean-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. Tempered flared and some Israeli public figures called for boycotting Barenboim in future musical events. These developments have renewed controversy over the logic and consistency inherent in such a ban.

Why the ban on Wagner? Ironically, Wagner was played at the first concert of the then Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936 when Arturo Toscanini showed his solidarity with Jews by undertaking the journey to Tel Aviv in the middle of the Arab Revolt to lead the newly-formed orchestra of émigrés from Nazi Germany.

This changed, however, with the advent of the Nazi genocide; Wagner occupied a pre-eminent place in Hitler’s personal Valhalla and in the political and cultural life of the Nazi regime – and thus in the memories of many of its survivors. Additionally, as Wagner’s own great-grandson Gottfried – a personal friend, I should note – has indicated, Wagner’s compendious political writings consistently urge Nazi elimination of Jews from German life and it does not take a detective to find antisemitic stereotypes and encoded political messages in his operas instantly recognisable to Wagner’s contemporaries.

On December 14th, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper published an interview with Bjorn Soder, vice speaker of the Parliament and member of the Swedish Democrat Party. Maybe some of you have heard of it, or at least seen the international headlines that said “Speaker of Swedish Parliament says Jews have to abandon their faith in order to be Swedish “or perhaps the more popular “Jews not Swedish, according to Swedish politician”?

Well, let’s just take a step back and look at what Mr. Soder actually said:

There are examples of people that belong to the Sami or Jewish Nation living in Sweden. I believe that most people with Jewish heritage that become Swedish leave their Jewish identity. But if they don’t it does not have to be a problem. One has to make a distinction between peoplehood and citizenship; they can still be Swedish citizens and live in Sweden. The Sami and The Jews have lived in Sweden for a very long time.

So what Mr. Soder is saying in this statement and throughout the interview is that he does not believe that one can be both a Jew and a part of the Swedish nation, but one can be a citizen and enjoy all the benefits and responsibilities of any other citizen. That distinction — and an important distinction it is — seems to have been lost on the frantic readers.

Within hours after this article was published, the avalanche of criticism came rolling down the medial mountain, and Jews and non-Jews alike were calling racism on the top of their lungs.

I read the article over and over again but was unable to find the source of this national upheaval. Instead I found that Bjorn Soder was saying pretty much exactly what I have always said, albeit with some eloquence left to be desired.

You see, I am not Swedish. I’m Jewish. I am a part of the Jewish people who happens to be a citizen of Sweden. I pay my taxes and I follow the laws, but that does not make me Swedish. Nor do I have any desire to ever claim that title. Instead I value and protect my Jewish identity and it is with pride that I affirm that through action, faith and tradition.

So why the upheaval?

Israel rights group, Shurat Hadin, has announced its intentions to file complaints against three officials of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO, Fatah) at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Complaints will be filed against Jibril Rajoub, Majed Faraj, and Rami Hamdallah for war crimes and human rights violations in the Palestinian Authority.

Attorney for the NGO, Nitzana Darshan-Leitner said, “Abbas and his friends in the terrorist organizations think that the law can only be used as a weapon against Israel, but that they not be held accountable for crimes against Israel or their own people. The PLO and Hamas need to understand that the International Criminal Court is a double-edged sword.”

Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) has filed three more war crimes suit against Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague.

The NGO says that while the Palestinian leadership can be indicted for terror acts carried out from 2002 onward, Israel can only be indicted for deeds done from the day the PLO joined the Rome Statute – the request to join was signed last week.

The most senior U.S. delegation in decades will soon be in Havana to engage a declared enemy of the United States in discussions about “normalizing” relations. Covering much more subject matter than routine migration issues, these meetings stem in large measure from the December 17 return of spies to Cuba who are responsible for American deaths.

Obama sent three Cuban spies back to the island, trading them for the release of American Alan Gross. Mr. Gross had been held hostage for five years for the “crime” of teaching Jewish Cubans how to connect to the Internet. As part of this lopsided deal, the Obama administration also declared American policy a failure and offered a large basket of potential economic and diplomatic benefits.

The experts there are getting the change they believed in — and just listen to them howl.

Obamacare has come to Harvard, and the faculty is in a state of shock and dismay.

In what has to be considered an early contender for the most hilarious and enjoyable news story of the year, the New York Times recounts the tumult over Obamacare in Cambridge.

“For years,” the Times writes, “Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.”

For even the most heinous crimes, juries are very reluctant to impose the death penalty.

Unless the federal court indulges last-ditch efforts by the defense for further delay, the least interesting aspect of the case against accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will begin this week: the determination of guilt or innocence.

That is the backwards nature of a capital case. In ordinary trials, a jury is there only to decide the question of guilt. When the death penalty is involved, though, the jury also imposes the sentence, usually the task of the trial judge. A death-penalty case is thus a bifurcated trial, and it is the later sentencing phase that really matters.

Despite the partnership between the terrorist organizations Hamas and Fatah (the new name for Arafat’s PLO), some Europeans nations are demanding that Israel immediately accede to Hamas/Fatah demands or they will proceed in the UN to declare a Palestinian State. The U.N. will impose on Israel conditions that will not only strip her of her capital, Jerusalem, but place Israelis in instant jeopardy from rockets launched against her from this newly-declared state abutting Israel. Like Gaza before, this newest Arab Palestinian state will become a terrorist state and a proxy of Iran.

Knowing that Fatah and Hamas will get a better deal pushing for a Palestinian state unilaterally declared by the U.N. rather than sitting for serious negotiation with Israel, Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah and a well-known denier of the Holocaust, has deliberately made negotiations impossible and dangerous for Israel by setting pre-conditions that are suicidal to Israel, conditions to which no sane Israeli government concerned about survival can yield.

Thus, Israel has been placed in a no-win situation. If it agrees to Abbas’s negotiation demands it has to (1) relinquish historic Jerusalem, (2) uproot almost 500,000 of its citizens from neighborhoods the Arabs demand be Juderein (free

Daniel Greenfield on “The Top Stories of 2014 and Predictions for 2015″ — on The Glazov Gang
The good, the bad and the ugly.
http://jamieglazov.com/2015/01/05/daniel-greenfield-on-the-top-stories-of-2014-and-predictions-for-2015-on-the-glazov-gang/

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a people in economic straights will search for a scapegoat. With Europe – six years after the financial crisis – still mired in economic difficulties, the rise of extremism is a consequence of that behavior. And there is little question that the fringe that represents extremism is broadening.

Even though a dozen European countries have communist parties, it is telling that when one Googles ‘European extreme political parties,’ the only ones that show up are those on the right. It reflects the media bias, and that those on the left fear only right-wing autocracies. Conservatives, on the other hand, dislike ‘big’ government in any form; thus are concerned about totalitarianism no matter whether it emerges from the right or the left.

It was interesting that Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a New Year’s Day speech, denounced Europe’s far-right parties, slamming the organizers of recent anti-Islam protests in Germany. She described them as having “hearts often full of prejudice, and even hate.” Her attack on right-wing populism was echoed by France’s François Hollande and Italy’s retiring president, the 89-year old Giorgio Napolitano. While xenophobia in any form is to be reviled, it is curious that all three ignored the anti-Semitism that has been emerging from, among other places, Europe’s elite (generally Leftist in their political philosophy), but perhaps most frightening, from Muslim communities – the fastest growing segment of Europe’s population. The speeches ignored left-wing populism, which are every bit as ubiquitous and virulent as that from the right. Evil knows no political bounds. If Hitler was Beelzebub, Stalin was Mephistopheles. It would appear that ignoring anti-Semitism is politically acceptable in Europe, while denouncing Islamophobia is politically correct.

“The government, which has Tomahawk missiles and Apache and Lakota helicopters, used the code name ‘Geronimo’ in the attack that killed bin Laden but objects to the name of the Washington Redskins.” – George Will