RUTHFULLY YOURS

FROM SEPTEMBER MIDEAST OUTPOSThttp://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/a-sloppy-hit-on-israel-review-milton-viorst-zionism-the-birth-and-transformation-of-an-ideal-david-isaac.html

Go to a library and toss a coin at the Israel shelf. You’re almost certain to bounce it off a title critical of the Jewish state. The latest contribution to this death by a thousand books is by journalist Milton Viorst. At the heart of this book is the assumption that Israel is wholly to blame for the conflict between Jews and Arabs.

Though himself a Jew, Viorst veers into racist-sounding rhetoric when he asks whether “the Jewish DNA contains an immunity to peace.” Given Israel’s many attempts to achieve peace, the question isn’t whether Jews are immune to peace but whether they are immune to reality. Viorst clearly is. Otherwise he could not declare that Israel adheres to the “Begin doctrine,” a “diplomatic principle” that purportedly maintains that if a small state “offers concessions at a time of pressure, it only invites more pressure upon itself.”

The manifold problems with this theory begin with Menachem Begin himself, who gave up the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1978 in return for a peace treaty, few provisions of which Egypt honored. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin handed over large swaths of the West Bank to Yasser Arafat, the man known as the “founder of modern terror,” who showed his gratitude by launching a wave of suicide attacks. In 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak didn’t even bother getting an agreement before pulling Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon, paving the way for Hezbollah to turn it into a launching pad for rockets into northern Israel. Similarly, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted over 8,000 Israelis from their homes in the Gaza Strip, declaring “I am convinced in the depths of my soul and with my entire intellect that this disengagement … will win the support and appreciation of countries near and far… and will advance us on the path of peace with the Palestinians and our other neighbors.” It did neither, as “the world community” became ever more hostile and Gaza became another launching pad for rockets.

In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made Israel’s most far-reaching proposal, offering even to forgo sovereignty over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site. Olmert proposed that Israel keep 6.3 percent of the West Bank (areas close to the pre-1967 armistice borders now densely occupied by Jews) but compensate by giving the Palestinians an equal amount of land that had been within the borders of pre-1967 Israel. Mahmoud Abbas was not interested.

Viorst examines the lives of eight Zionist leaders, from Herzl to Netanyahu, to answer his own question: “How did Zionism, over the course of a century, evolve from the idealism of providing refuge for beleaguered Jews to a rationalization for the army’s occupation of powerless Palestinians?” This question is based on a false premise. Israel’s purpose was and remains what Herzl set forth in The Jewish State: “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes.” Zionism has not a glimmer of oppression in it, which explains the Jews’ many efforts to find a solution to the conflict. Those whom Viorst calls “powerless Palestinians” enjoy the support of all Muslim countries, as well as Europe, the U.N., and the world media. Many of them are determined to annihilate Israel, indoctrinating violence in their young people, who then go out and slaughter children in their sleep, gun down families on the road, and ax rabbis at prayer. Those who commit these crimes are hailed as martyrs, and their families are given stipends. When Palestinians hear of a successful attack against Israelis—or Americans for that matter, as on 9/11—they hand out candy to children. A far better question Viorst might have asked is: How is it that the Jews have managed to keep their humanity in the face of such inhumanity?

Matti Friedman, a journalist and writer who moved from Canada to Israel in his late teens in the late 1990s, has written a powerful little book, Pumpkin Flowers, that takes you deep into Israeli and Middle Eastern reality.

The Pumpkin was a hill in the southern-Lebanon security zone, which Israel set up in 1985 and withdrew from in 2000. “Flowers” was military code for casualties. In those years Hizballah was able to inflict a steady toll of “flowers” at the Pumpkin and other security-zone outposts. It was that—along with the 1997 helicopter disaster (a horrendous accident)—that swayed Israel into finally leaving the zone. As well as a hope—soon shattered—that doing so would lead to peace.

Pumpkin Flowers deals with the Pumpkin in three stages. The middle one is Friedman’s own service there. But first comes his account of Avi Ofner, a young Israeli who served at the Pumpkin before Friedman did. Friedman intensively “researched” Avi and succeeds to evoke him unforgettably.

Unconventional, deep-thinking, authority-mistrusting, and literarily talented, Avi—despite a veneer of disdain—served his full, difficult stint at the Pumpkin with devotion, even passing up possibilities of easier, safer jobs within Israel. As Friedman acutely observes, he and other young soldiers “wouldn’t have said it themselves because of a social code mandating self-deprecation and sarcasm and forbidding any credulous expression of ideals, so it needs to be said on their behalf: they believed they were doing the right thing.” On his last return to the Pumpkin, already planning his impending civilian life, Avi boarded an army helicopter—one of two involved in the midair collision that killed him and 72 others.

By the time Friedman, a raw Canadian-Israeli recruit, found himself at the Pumpkin, it had a legacy of bloody battles, including the 1996 Falcon Incident that killed five soldiers and wounded eight in one night. But as Friedman notes, it was most of all the helicopter disaster—caused by human error, not Hizballah—that fostered a growing, intense, bitter debate in Israel about leaving the security zone altogether. Today Israelis do not miss the security zone, but know that Hizballah’s real target—like its patron Iran’s—was and remains Israel itself.

And it was not only Israel that would be learning about Islamist terror:

Within a few years elements of the security zone war would, in turn, appear elsewhere and become familiar to everyone in the West: Muslim guerrillas operating in a failed and chaotic state; small clashes in which the key actor is not the general but the lieutenant or private; the use of a democracy’s sensitivities, public opinion, and free press as weapons against it.

But in those days, Friedman and his comrades—gazing through thermal sights at the surrounding landscape, including the mainly-Shiite, Hizballah-ruled town of Nabatieh where they could make out a gas station, a hospital, a monastery, and even a woman with dyed blond hair who left her house for work every morning—still talked jokingly, half-jokingly, of being able to visit these places once peace set in. They were—beyond the defensive irony—expressing deep Israeli wishes of the 1990s. CONTINUE AT SITE

One of the largest police force’s in the UK was today mocked after saying it would consider letting Muslim officers wear burkas in an attempt to boost diversity.

West Midlands Police said it will discuss allowing the traditional Islamic dress – which covers the entirety of a woman’s face and body – to become part of Muslim female officers’ uniform.

At a recent meeting, Chief Constable David Thompson, said he would consider employing staff who wear a burka as he looks to increase black and minority ethnic (BME) officers in the region to 30 per cent.

But today, even the Muslim Council of Britain said they would be against female officers wearing full-face burkas or niqabs.

The organisation said they would find it ‘very surprising’ if the force allowed full-face coverings to be used.

A spokesman said: ‘In the media the term burka is used to describe the full face covering but the veil with the slit for the eyes is actually the niqab.

‘The burka is actually the full gown which goes from shoulder to ankle with the face remaining clear.

‘It would be very surprising if West Midlands Police were in favour of full-face coverings.

‘The actual percentage of women wearing a niqab is very, very small and the women who do would probably not want to be in the police.’

And a source at West Midlands Police even criticised the idea of female officers wearing full-face veils, adding it would be ‘mad’.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/09/08/honor-killing-your-own-sister-for-islam-anni-cyrus-unknown/

Channel 1’s report Wednesday that in 1983, current Palestinian Authority Chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas served as a KGB agent is hardly the story of the year, but it does remind us of certain half-forgotten facts about the Cold War that are becoming ever more relevant today.

The PLO’s close and servile relationship with the KGB was first exposed in a systematic way in 1987, with the publication of Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, the exposé of Soviet and Romanian Cold War operations written by former Romanian intelligence chief Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa. Pacepa, who defected to the US in 1978 after serving as the head of the DIE – Romania’s KGB – was the highest ranking intelligence officer from the Soviet bloc to ever defect.

In his book, Pacepa revealed that “the PLO was dreamt up by the KGB.”

Pacepa explained how Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, at the direction of Moscow, convinced Yasser Arafat to employ political warfare, centered on phony protestations that he had abandoned terrorism, to weaken the West’s resolve to defend itself and to cause Israel to doubt its own legitimacy.

Wednesday’s Channel 1 report on Abbas was based on new revelations from the Mitrokhin Archive. Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB who surreptitiously copied KGB documents for many years and hid his copies in his home. In 1991 Mitrokhin defected to Britain and took his archive of 25,000 copies of documents with him.

In 2004, the second volume of his edited archive was published. The volume, titled, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, focused on the KGB’s efforts to use the Third World as a strategic weapon in its battle against the West. The volume devotes two chapters to the KGB’s campaign against Israel.

Former Head of Central Command General Gadi Shamni said last week that Israel is the most occupying force in the world and is on its way to becoming a pariah state. “Israel must achieve separation from the Palestinians,” Shamni added.

We can assume that Shamni’s words reflect his worldview. In the IDF 2016, it is impossible to be a General or even a Lieutenant Colonel if you believe in a diplomatic solution to Israel’s conflict with the Arabs other than what is dictated by the Left. The Oslo Peace Industry cloned the entire Israeli elite – built from all those who toed the Oslo line and who run the State today – in its own image.

First and foremost, it cloned the military elite. Every officer from Major and up must undergo a (re)education series, taught by the left-leaning Harman and Binah institutes. (Both are supported by the New Israel Fund). The only commanding officer who testified in favor of Elor Azariah, the soldier accused of killing a terrorist, was a low-ranking officer who left the army after the Azariah incident. The rest of the IDF command does not want to be accused of Nazism, as Deputy Chief of Staff General Golan intimated. So all of them think the same way and talk the same way. And in any future war, they will all be defeated in the same way, just as they were defeated in all the recent rounds of fighting. (That is fine, though. The media will praise them as great victors and only the bereaved families will bear their grief in silence.)

Back to General Shamni. Regardless of the worldview from which his words emanated, Shamni is simply right. The ‘Occupation’ in Judea and Samaria cannot go on forever and it must be ended.

Our Zehut party printed t-shirts that say, ‘End the Occupation’. Of course, this is where any agreement with General Shamni ends. While he advocates another glorious Israel retreat that will bring not only missiles to Tel Aviv, but mortar fire to Kfar Saba, as well, Zehut advocates the end of the Occupation by the declaration of Israeli sovereignty on every grain of sand under the control of the IDF. In other words, the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Zehut also has a detailed plan to achieve this goal. The plan also provides a solution for the Arabs living in Israel, for dealing with international pressure, the implications of the move in terms of international law, safeguarding human rights and more.

The idea of ending the Occupation by running away (Oslo/Disengagement) has already exploded in our faces. Even the Left has despaired of it.

“Climate change” is a controversial subject. Some people believe that humans have been doing just about everything wrong and are causing the Earth to heat up to such a degree that we will wipe out civilization. Other people actually examine the evidence and think for themselves.

But the first group includes three professors from the University of Colorado, who have declared that on the subject of climate change, their students aren’t allowed to dissent with their views:

Three professors co-teaching an online course called “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age” at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs recently told their students via email that man-made climate change is not open for debate, and those who think otherwise have no place in their course.

“The point of departure for this course is based on the scientific premise that human induced climate change is valid and occurring. We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” states the email, a copy of which was provided to The College Fix by a student in the course.

Signed by the course’s professors Rebecca Laroche, Wendy Haggren and Eileen Skahill, it was sent after several students expressed concern for their success in the course after watching the first online lecture about the impacts of climate change.

“Opening up a debate that 98% of climate scientists unequivocally agree to be a non-debate would detract from the central concerns of environment and health addressed in this course,” the professors’ email continued.

The email also banned discussion on class message boards, and told students who have a problem with that to drop the class.

First, why is a Humanities course talking about climate change?

Oh, right: Everything must be used to advance the narrative, even if it has no place in the discussion.

While you might expect better from college professors, they either don’t know or don’t care that their “98 percent of climate scientists” argument has been debunked, junked, and ridiculed for a long time now, and not just by fly-by-night blogs no one has heard of, either.

Morton Schapiro is president of Northwestern University.

College presidents have always received a lot of mail. But these days we get more than ever. Much of it relates to student unrest, and most of the messages are unpleasant.

Our usual practice is to thank the sender for writing and leave it at that. The combination of receiving more than 100 emails and letters a day and recognizing that the purpose of many writers is to rebuke, rather than discuss, leaves us little choice about how to respond.

But that certainly doesn’t mean we don’t think long and hard about the issues being raised. Some writers ask why our campus is so focused on how “black lives matter.” Others express a mixture of curiosity and rage about microaggressions and trigger warnings. And finally, what about those oft-criticized “safe spaces”? On this last topic, here are two stories. The first was told to me privately by another institution’s president, and the second takes place at my institution, Northwestern University.

A group of black students were having lunch together in a campus dining hall. There were a couple of empty seats, and two white students asked if they could join them. One of the black students asked why, in light of empty tables nearby. The reply was that these students wanted to stretch themselves by engaging in the kind of uncomfortable learning the college encourages. The black students politely said no. Is this really so scandalous?

I find two aspects of this story to be of particular interest.

First, the familiar question is “Why do the black students eat together in the cafeteria?” I think I have some insight on this based on 16 years of living on or near a college campus: Many groups eat together in the cafeteria, but people seem to notice only when the students are black. Athletes often eat with athletes; fraternity and sorority members with their Greek brothers and sisters; a cappella group members with fellow singers; actors with actors; marching band members with marching band members; and so on.

And that brings me to the second aspect: We all deserve safe spaces. Those black students had every right to enjoy their lunches in peace. There are plenty of times and places to engage in uncomfortable learning, but that wasn’t one of them. The white students, while well-meaning, didn’t have the right to unilaterally decide when uncomfortable learning would take place.

Now for the story from Northwestern. For more than four decades, we have had a building on campus called the Black House, a space specifically meant to be a center for black student life. This summer some well-intentioned staff members suggested that we place one of our multicultural offices there. The pushback from students, and especially alumni, was immediate and powerful. It wasn’t until I attended a listening session that I fully understood why. One black alumna from the 1980s said that she and her peers had fought to keep a house of their own on campus. While the black community should always have an important voice in multicultural activities on campus, she said, we should put that office elsewhere, leaving a small house with a proud history as a safe space exclusively for blacks.

Christina Paxson is president of Brown University.

New students are entering colleges and universities at a time of fierce debate about whether institutions of higher education are becoming places that stifle speech in the interest of protecting students from ideas and perspectives they don’t want to hear. In the clash over freedom of expression and the supposed coddling of American college students, safe spaces and trigger warnings are held up as the poster children of overprotective universities.
In the setting of private institutions, this is not a First Amendment issue. Private colleges and universities could restrict the expression of ideas and beliefs within their campuses, if they chose to do so. But most private colleges and universities wisely do not make this choice. Instead, colleges and universities protect the rights of members of their communities to express a full range of ideas, however controversial.

That is because freedom of expression is an essential component of academic freedom, which protects the ability of universities to fulfill their core mission of advancing knowledge. Suppressing ideas at a university is akin to turning off the power at a factory. As scholars and students, our responsibility is to subject old truths to scrutiny and put forward new ideas to improve them.

At universities, we also advance understanding about issues of justice and fairness, and these discussions can be equally, if not more, difficult. From the earliest days of this country, college campuses have been the sites of fierce debates about slavery, war, women’s rights and racial justice. These discussions create rocky moments, and they should.

If we don’t have these debates — if we limit the flow of ideas — then in 50 years we will be no better than we are today.

I don’t share the view that American college students want to be protected from ideas that make them uncomfortable. Just the opposite. Over the past few years, our students have addressed topics that make many people very uncomfortable indeed — racism, sexual assault, religious persecution. These are some of the toughest problems facing society today, and we do not shy away from them.

As for “safe spaces” — the term is used in so many different ways that it is impossible to discuss it without being precise about its meaning. The term emerged from the women’s movement nearly 50 years ago to refer to forums where women’s rights issues were discussed. Then it was extended to denote spaces where violence and harassment against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community would not be tolerated, and then extended yet again to mean places where students from marginalized groups can come together to feel comfortable discussing their experiences and just being themselves.

If this is what a safe space means, then, yes, Brown has them. Proudly.

Gulmurod Khalimov, the new ISIS military commander whom the U.S. just days ago announced a $3 million bounty for, was trained by the State Department in an anti-terror program as recently as 2014 while serving in the security service of Tajikistan.

He replaces former ISIS commander Tarkhan Batirashvili, aka Umar al-Shishani, who was also trained by the United States as part of the Georgian army and who ISIS claimed was killed fighting in Iraq this past July.

The State Department confirmed Khalimov’s U.S.-provided training to CNN in May 2015:

“From 2003-2014 Colonel Khalimov participated in five counterterrorism training courses in the United States and in Tajikistan, through the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security/Anti-Terrorism Assistance program,” said spokeswoman Pooja Jhunjhunwala.

The program is intended to train candidates from participating countries in the latest counterterrorism tactics, so they can fight the very kind of militants that Khalimov has now joined.

A State Department official said Khalimov was trained in crisis response, tactical management of special events, tactical leadership training and related issues.

Unironically, the State Department spokeswoman said that Khalimov had been appropriately vetted:

“All appropriate Leahy vetting was undertaken in advance of this training,” said spokeswoman Jhunjhunwala.

At that time, Khalimov appeared in a video threatening the United States:

“Listen, you American pigs: I’ve been to America three times. I saw how you train soldiers to kill Muslims,” he says.

Then, he threatens, “we will find your towns, we will come to your homes, and we will kill you.”

Khalimov and Batirashvili are hardly the first terrorist leaders operating in Syria to have been trained by the United States.