On a trip to the U.S, the Rev. Dr. Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African Parliament, president of the African Christian Democratic Party and chairman of the South African Israel Allies Caucus, expressed his profound concern about the ad campaign on San Francisco’s Muni transportation system, urging for an end to U.S. support for Israel. A group of Christian, Jewish and Muslims has funded the ad campaign since 2010. [1]
Having lived as a black South African under apartheid and having visited Israel numerous times, he said there is no basis for those accusing Israel of being an apartheid state. Apartheid is a legal system of segregation based on color, with a white majority in control of the government. Under apartheid, people of color could not vote, hold office or travel freely in their own country.
Only segregated schools and sports arenas were available to them and they had to use segregated public restrooms and public transportation. Whites and blacks were prohibited to marry or have sexual relations. Different residential areas were built to ensure a forced physical separation between the races. Their hospitals, medical care and education were always inferior to those of the whites. Any white physicians willing to treat a black patient had to conduct the examination in private. [2]
Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court, who led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009, added that attacking Israel “is an unfair and inaccurate slander … calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations…. In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute.” [3]
He remembered “all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system …where blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no black’ ambulance to rush them to a black hospital. ‘White’ hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.”[4]
If we are speaking of Muslims, I would say no. Muslims would need to repudiate Islam or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran for leavers of the “faith.” I also base my conclusion on the record of crimes by jihadists who are first- or second-generation Muslims, a record compiled and documented by Clarion and numerous other sites that report on the rapes, murders, knifings, and suicide-bombings committed by Muslims who have resided in the West for any measurable time. The more barbarous the origins of these Muslims (Somalia comes to mind, and there is also a racist element in Somalian crimes against Westerners), repeatedly commit the most heinous crimes and plead ignorance of Western mores and standards of behavior. The authorities and the MSM jump on a “mental illness” explanation before a victim is taken away in an ambulance.
Islam does not prepare average Muslims for any degree of intellectual enquiry on any subject, especially when it comes to the multitude of contradictions and fallacies inherent in the “faith” which would leave Socrates or Aristotle massaging their heads. Islam is anti-mind to the core, and does not much tolerate Muslims who “want to know.” Islam is a mortal enemy of free minds. This will help to explain why Muslim populations in Western countries represent a “silent majority” reluctant to or will not condemn jihadist outrages, and this silence is to my mind tacit approval of the crimes, even when Muslims are collateral victims of terrorist attacks (as there were on 9/11, e.g.). This tacit sanctioning may be based on fear of reprisals or on an inbred indifference to the death and suffering caused by terrorism. Islam is, among other charges one may level against it, profoundly anti-life and anti-individual, and so I shall always remain “Islamophobic.”
‘The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel’ by Uri Bar-Joseph is a book that should be required reading—as a terrible warning—for everyone involved in intelligence. It is the tale of how an intelligence agency, despite having the best information imaginable, can still get it wrong. Bar-Joseph recounts how, prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when Israel suffered a near-fatal blow, Israel had been given detailed knowledge of Egypt’s plans thanks “to an exceptionally rare situation in the history of espionage: the direct assistant to the leader of a country preparing to launch an attack on its enemy was a secret agent on behalf of that enemy.”
That secret agent was Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a trusted confidante of his successor, Anwar Sadat. Bar-Joseph, a professor of political science at the University of Haifa, himself a veteran of the war, has the ideal background to write this book. His earlier effort, The Watchman Fell Asleep, took a broad view of the intelligence failures leading up to the Yom Kippur War; it is considered the most important study on the subject and won the Israeli Political Science Association Best Book Award in 2002. In The Angel, ably translated by David Hazony, Bar-Joseph focuses exclusively on the story of the spy central to the drama and the ossified thinking that prevented Israel from taking advantage of the secrets he provided.
In the summer of 1970, Marwan simply consulted the phone book and called the Israeli Embassy from a London telephone booth to offer his services. It took a second phone call five months later for Mossad agents to wake up to the fact that they were being offered what a former Mossad chief would call “the greatest source we have ever had.”
What was Marwan’s motivation? Bar-Joseph hazards some conjectures. Nasser, unusually for an Arab leader, was immune to financial corruption and had no intention of allowing his ambitious son-in-law to use his new family connections to enrich himself. He disliked Marwan and, when his daughter refused his order to divorce him, put him in a job with little pay or scope. But while the desire to get back at Nasser and improve his finances might explain his initial decision, as Bar-Joseph notes, it does not explain why Marwan spied for Israel after Nasser’s death. Marwan’s situation radically improved after he backed Sadat in the face of an attempted palace coup d’état; from then on he enjoyed a key role in Sadat’s inner circle. Bar-Joseph suggests instead that Marwan had a need to live dangerously and seek out risk, almost like an adrenaline junkie. Whatever his motives, writes Bar-Joseph, the cornucopia of information that poured forth from him, the most important concerning the Egyptian military, “went far beyond anything [the Israelis] had known. It was unprecedented in its quality.”
With the collapse of several artificial nation-states created by the victors of the First World War, the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf has entered a prolonged period of instability. The Syrian and Libyan states have ceased to exist; the Iraqi State is near collapse; the Lebanese state is hostage to Iran; the Turkish state has just survived a military coup and is descending into authoritarian rule; and Saudi Arabia will not be able to buy domestic peace much longer if oil prices remain low. Egypt survived a revolution and counterrevolution to return to the status quo of military rule, but depends on subsidies from the Gulf States.
Non-state actors now occupy the political and military space left vacant by the collapse or decline of nation-states. That is emphatically true in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and increasingly true in Turrkey. The most fanatical and determined of these actors play the decisive role—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria and the Iran-backed Shi’ite militias in Iraq, and ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. Ethnic and sectarian divisions that were contained by the region’s autocracies have turned into vehicles for existential war.
Terrorist attacks, assassinations of police, and the presidential campaigns have sidelined the biggest, and perhaps most consequential news story of recent months: Iran’s serial subversion of the fatally flawed deal Obama made last October with the mullahs regarding their nuclear weapons program. German intelligence reports that Iran is carrying out “illegal proliferation-sensitive procurement activities” at a “quantitatively high level.” More recently, an AP reporter revealed yet another secret “side deal” to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), as Obama’s agreement is known. This one allows Iran to replace its 5060 uranium centrifuges with more advanced models, doubling the rate of enrichment. Along with Iran’s already documented cheating on the deal, these concessions bring ever closer the day when a fanatical, genocidal regime possesses nuclear weapons.
The urgency of this threat makes Robert Spencer’s The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran a must-read. Spencer is director of the Freedom Center’s Jihad Watch and author of fifteen books on Islam. His new book gives readers everything they need to understand the nature of the regime, its hatred of the West, especially the United States, and its religiously inspired aims of global conquest, which nuclear armaments would serve.
Spencer’s book begins, in a chapter appropriately called “The Ultimate Screwing,” with a summary of the JCPA and its dangerous appeasement of Iran. He explodes the mendacious claims of Obama such as “every pathway to a nuclear weapon” had been blocked and “we have stopped the spread of nuclear weapons in the region.” Nor does he let John Kerry off the hook for his equally preposterous claims that “we are watching their centrifuge production with live television, taping the whole deal 24-7 for 20 years.” Subsequent revelations about the deal and Iran’s violations of its terms have shown that the Ayatollah Khamenei’s jubilant boast–– that the U.S. has been “forced to accept and stand the spinning of thousands of centrifuges and the continuation of research and development in Iran” –– is more accurate.
We must look at Israel not as foreign presence, which it is not, but as a unique and remarkable component of the Middle East that enriches the region.
The creation of such a Palestinian state under today’s conditions is likely to result in a Hamas-dominated state that is violently hostile towards Israel. The Palestinian Authority must be transitioned into a peaceful and stable entity before it can be expected to run a state.
Binyamin Netanyahu recently suggested an approach to make the peace initiative work, but Arab League Secretary-General Nabil al-Arabi rejected it out of hand. This is not how harmonious relationships between nations are built.
“We must all rise above all forms of fanaticism, self-deception and obsolete theories of superiority.” — Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, addressing Israel’s parliament on November 20, 1977.
This is part two of a two-part series. The first part examined the mistakes that we Arabs made in our interactions with Israel.
There is much that we can do to improve our relationship with Israel — if we want to — and there is good reason to think that it would be in both our short- and long-term interest if we did. The most critical change is in approach. Changing that would start to repair the foundation of the relationship and would provide a basis for mutual respect and trust, without which any solution would remain fragile.
Understand Israel
We must see the real Israel rather than the monstrosity that Arabs have been brainwashed to see. We are so afraid to call Israel by its real name that we refer to it as the “Zionist entity”. The name is “Israel”; as written in Haaretz, “Israel has been the name of an ethnic group in the Levant going back at least 3200 years”.
The standard Arab narrative about Israel is that it is the result of Western colonialism. This language has also been adopted by many, who claim that “settler colonialism that began with the Nakba … in 1948”, implying that all of Israel is a colony. This claim is not true, and no healthy relationship can be built while one side keeps repeating lies about the other.
Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, a people with a long and complex history on that land. Attempts to kill them and exile them came from many sources over the centuries, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans and the Crusaders. These are historical facts.
Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1973, “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs — we have no place to go”. No matter how much pressure Arabs put on Jews to leave, they are not going anywhere; in fact, that pressure only hardens their resolve. Israel is their home.
We must look at Israel not as foreign presence, which it is not, but as a unique and remarkable component of the Middle East that enriches the region.
Not our enemy
We must stop calling Israel our enemy. We deliberately chose to make Israel our enemy when we attacked it, rather than accept the existence of a tiny Jewish state in our midst.
Israel (including the annexed Golan Heights and East Jerusalem) is only 19% of British Mandate Palestine (which included Jordan), on which Britain promised in 1924 to build a “Jewish National Home”. Israel is so small that it would have to be duplicated 595 times to cover the entire Arab world.
We made self-defeating decisions in our relationship with Israel, based on the belief that it is our enemy and that we can only deal with it though force — but the tiny state of Israel is not a threat to the Arab world.
Every year, Palestinians hold rallies, often violent ones, to commemorate the Nakba (“catastrophe”) , which is they give ton to the Arab loss in the war of 1948/49. They carry keys, symbolizing the keys to homes that their ancestors fled during that war. This commemoration, like much of the Arab rhetoric about Israel, is a one-sided view that demonizes Israel while it absolves Arabs of all responsibility for starting and continuing a conflict that resulted in decades of violence as well as displacements of both Arabs and Jews.
The State Department’s latest assault on Israel is further proof of the Obama administration’s deep conviction that “more distancing between itself and Jerusalem is a good thing for the United States,” a top adviser to former US President George W. Bush told The Algemeiner on Monday.
“Its obsession with housing construction by Israeli Jews is certainly not shared by any Arab government, but it is apparently held by everyone working in the Near East Bureau,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the New York- and Washington, DC-based Council on Foreign Relations.
Abrams, who served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the “Bush 43” administration, was referring back to his own counter-offensive against what he called the State Department’s “remarkable assault on Israel” last week, which, “both in tone and content, marks a new hostility – and plenty of sheer ignorance.”
In his blog “Pressure Points” on Thursday, Abrams blasted the American administration, after State Department spokesman John Kirby released a statement accusing the Israeli government of “systematically undermining the prospects for a two-state solution,” by engaging in “settlement activity, which is corrosive to the cause of peace.”
As far as the timing of the statement is concerned, coinciding as it did with the Democratic National Convention, Abrams said he doesn’t believe it is linked to the presidential race. “What’s in it for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama administration? For Hillary, nothing,” he said. “The Sanders people will presumably like the attack on Israel, but they will credit Obama for it and it won’t make them more likely to vote for her. For Obama, what is ever in it for him and his team, for bashing Israel? What do they ever gain from such actions? I don’t think they do it to help the Left in Israel, or for other narrowly political reasons. They do it out of conviction — the conviction that they have only a few more months to enlarge that famous ‘daylight’ between the US and Israel.”
Asked about the State Department’s having been so harsh on the eve of the visit of IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, and a few days later, Israeli National Security Council head Yaakov Nagel, to the United States – reportedly to discuss defense cooperation between the two countries and the new US aid package to Israel – Abrams said, “It is suspicious, but not conclusive.”
Abrams was not alone in his criticism of the State Department’s recent reprimand of Israel.
On August 1, Professor Hasia Diner of NYU and Professor Marjorie Feld of Babson College in Massachusetts took to the pages of Ha’aretz to denounce the world’s only Jewish state for being racist, colonialist, reactionary, aggressive, and – this above all – Jewish. Vilification of Israel has long been de rigueur in that newspaper. “When it comes to defaming Jews,” says a character in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, “the Palestinians are pisherkes [small fry] next to Ha’aretz.”
On August 2, the same publication (perhaps as a result of some internal dissent) printed a powerful rebuttal by historian Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis. Jeffrey Goldberg of Atlantic Monthly declared that he was “getting ready to leave Ha’aretz behind.” Later he added: “when neo-Nazis are e-mailing me links to Ha’aretz op-eds declaring Israel to be evil, I’m going to take a break.”
Both Feld and Diner tell what might be called unconversion tales, from Zionism to Israelophobia, raw hatred of Israel, of its people, and, still more, of Diaspora Jews who recognize that securing Israel is the moral duty of this generation. Feld hints that she was awakened from her Zionist “delusions” by the outpourings of Noam Chomsky, a writer who would be rendered virtually speechless on the subject of Israel if he stopped equating the Jewish nation with Nazi Germany. His loathing of American Jewry was expressed as follows in 1988: “The Jewish community here is deeply totalitarian. They do not want democracy, they do not want freedom.” Beautiful and touching words! Are they also music to the ears of disillusioned history professors?
Diner, more than Feld, has ideas all her own, some of which may surpass Chomsky’s ravings. For example, she contends that “the death of vast numbers of Jewish communities as a result of Zionist activity has impoverished the Jewish people.” Was it “Zionist activity” and not the Third Reich and its collaborators that annihilated European Jewry? Was it “Zionist activity” and not Arab dictatorships that expelled one Jewish population after another from countries they had inhabited for over a thousand years? And was it “Zionist activity” and not the devastation left by communism that prompted more than a million Jews to leave Russia?
Diner complains that “the singular insistence on Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state” forced her to renounce her Zionist views. “Does Jewish constitute a race or ethnicity?,” she asks. “Does a Jewish state mean a racial state?” This from a teacher of Jewish history? Doesn’t she know that Jewish people are found in all races, and that anyone can become Jewish? Did none of Diner’s colleagues at NYU tell her that the “racial state” of Israel is the only country in history to have sought out and brought to its shores tens of thousands of Africans as free and equal citizens?
“The Law of Return,” Diner avers, “can no longer look to me as anything other than racism.” Yet other free countries have their own Laws of Return, occasioning no protest from the principled professor. The Armenian constitution, for instance, permits individuals “of Armenian origin” to acquire citizenship through “a simplified procedure.” The Lithuanian constitution proclaims: “Everyone who is ethnically Lithuanian has the right to settle in Lithuania.” The Polish and Ukrainian constitutions have identical provisions.
Non-Muslim Syrian refugees have been virtually locked out by the Obama administration, according to current data from the State Department.
According to the Refugee Processing Center, of the 6,877 Syrian refugees that have arrived in 2016 through July 31st, 6,834 of those are identified as Sunni, Shia, or generic Muslim. Only 43 (0.7 percent of total) refugees admitted have been non-Muslim.
That 0.7 percent of refugees arriving this year represents a statistically insignificant fraction of the more than 2.6 million Catholic, Syriac, Assyrian, and Greek Orthodox Christians, as well as Yazidis, other religions, and atheists living in Syria.
Yet all of these groups are being targeted by Islamic extremists — indeed, Secretary of State John Kerry himself has claimed these groups are facing a genocide.
Just yesterday, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he is opposed to any religious test for entering the United States:
Despite Ryan’s rejection, the State Department’s own numbers reveal active discrimination targeting non-Muslim Syrian refugees.
According to The Gulf/2000 Project at Columbia University, the religious breakdown of the Syrian population 2008-2009 shows that 15.98 million are Sunnis (73 percent of the population) while 3.29 million are Shiites (14.7 percent of the population). Christians account for 2.04 million people, or 9.3 percent of the population, while other religions account for 590,000 people, or 2.7 percent of the population.
This past March, Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged at a State Department press conference that minority religious communities in Syria were being targeted for genocide:
My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians, and Shiite Muslims.
So why haven’t we heard Speaker Ryan’s outrage over active religious discrimination against non-Muslim minority Syrian refugees?
And why is Kerry overseeing the systematic religious discrimination of Syrian refugees in his own State Department?
I’ve witnessed this discrimination by the State Department against Mideast Christians first-hand. Two years ago, I was introduced to an Egyptian Coptic Christian man who had fled Egypt and made it to the U.S. after he was threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood following the July 2013 ouster of Mohamed Morsi. The introduction was made by my friend, Father Anthony Hanna of the St. Mary and St. Mina Coptic Church in Concord, California. In August 2013, he escorted me into Upper Egypt to survey the destruction of Egypt’s churches and monasteries carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood.
This man’s wife and children had been attacked in their village near Minya, where attacks against Christians continue to this day. They were in hiding with family members elsewhere in Egypt, and had hoped to visit their husband and father in the United States.
With the assistance of several members of Congress who had given the family members letters of support, the family applied to visas with the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.
And yet, the State Department denied their visa requests. CONTINUE AT SITE
August is festival month in Edinburgh. A massive celebration, delivered through a collective of independent arts and cultural festivals. Just one of these, the ‘Edinburgh Festival Fringe’, is the largest arts festival in the world.
At the ‘Fringe’ event this year, scheduled for August 17, is the ‘International Shalom Festival’. Described as a one-day celebration bringing together Jews, Arabs, Christians and other minorities, that all co-exist together peacefully in Israel. Yet once again, as Israeli artists perform inside Scotland, demonstrations are being arranged in protest.
Edinburgh protests
As far back as 1997, during the Oslo peace talks, antizionists attacked Israeli performers at the festival. In 2008 the Jerusalem Quartet concert was disrupted, in 2012 it was the turn of the Batsheva Dance Troupe. In 2014, anti-Israel activists called on the venue to cancel a show with Israeli performers, and local police forced the venue to incur additional security costs. In turn, the venue demanded additional funds from the performers.
So in 2015, Haaretz reported that for the first time in years, Israeli performances were not hosted at the festival at all. This silencing of the Israeli voice is celebrated as a victory by the anti-Israel activists. The voice that seeks dialogue and accommodation is being silenced.
The festival is not the only place in Scotland such opposition is seen, less than two years ago a worker at an Israeli cosmetics stall in Glasgow had a ‘burning liquid’ thrown at her. The university space is also rabid, with events being called off due to protests, and Jewish students at universities are “denying or hiding” their identity because of discrimination. These events, including the protests at Edinburgh, are all connected.
Yet here is a simple fact. Israel is by far the most diverse nation in the Middle East. Despite the accusations of the protesters, there is not a single nation in the region that is as free, as democratic, as liberal or as diverse as Israel. Not one. What else sets it apart from all of its neighbours though, is another simple fact. It is the only nation in the world that is Jewish.
According to the 2011 census, there are just under 6000 Jews currently living in Scotland and this year marks 200 years since the first Jewish congregation was founded, ironically in Edinburgh. But in reality, how welcome are the Jews in Scotland? When I use the word ‘welcome’, I don’t refer to the lack of a Hitlerite doctrine, or wish to gauge whether gangs of antisemites seek out symbols that adorn Jewish houses to begin targeting the inhabitants. I simply ask how free are Jewish people to celebrate their Jewish identity publicly?
Zionism
Which brings me back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The protesters suggest that Israeli money is funding the Shalom Festival and then embark on a sickening exercise to follow ‘Jewish money’, from the organisers back to the embassy of the only democratic nation in the Middle East.
So what is this protest, anti-Israel or anti-Jewish? Well primarily, it is clear that the protest is anti-peace. The essence of the Shalom Festival is co-operation, the diverse and inclusive nature of Israel. And support for dialogue, the underpinnings of the international position over a two state solution. What the protesters are standing against isn’t a settlement or Israeli army action, but rather a core element of Jewish belief – Zionism. The very existence of Israel.
