RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the three days since Israel passed a law mandating new reporting requirements for NGOs that are primarily funded by foreign governments, there’s one question I have yet to hear any of its critics answer. If, as they stridently claim, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with NGOs getting most of their funding from a foreign government, then why would simply being required to state this fact in all their publications exercise a “chilling effect” (the U.S. State Department) or “stigmatize” them (the New Israel Fund) or result in “constraining their activities” (the European Union)?

The obvious answer is that the critics know perfectly well it isn’t alright: An organization that gets most of its funding from a foreign government isn’t a “nongovernmental” organization at all, but an instrument of that government’s foreign policy. In fact, with regard to the EU, that’s explicit in itsfunding guidelines: For an Israeli organization that conducts activities in the territories to be eligible for EU funding, it must comply with EU foreign policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This, incidentally, also explains why 25 of the 27 organizations affected by the law are left-wing: The far-left is the only part of Israel’s political spectrum that shares Europe’s opinions on the conflict, and hence, that Europe is willing to fund.

Yet if an organization is an instrument of a foreign country’s foreign policy, it’s very hard to argue that it’s an objective “human rights organization,” as the organizations in question bill themselves. Rather, it’s an overtly political organization that seeks to pressure Israel into adopting the foreign government’s preferred policies. And making this known definitely could be “stigmatizing,” in the sense that Israelis might be less willing to trust an organization’s assertions once they realize it has a not-so-hidden policy agenda that could be influencing its reports.

That, however, is precisely why Israelis have a need and a right to know where these organizations’ funding is coming from–especially given this funding’s sheer scale. And it’s also why there’s nothing remotely undemocratic about the law, as explained in depth by legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich here.

Who is supplying Mohamed Dahlan with money? The United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is their cash that has enabled Palestinians in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to purchase weapons and buy loyalty for Dahlan in preparation for the post-Abbas era — especially disgruntled young Fatah activists in the West Bank who feel that Abbas and the PA leadership have turned their backs on them.

This power struggle will not end with the departure of Mahmoud Abbas. The next Palestinian president will surely be one of Abbas’s current loyalists. This in itself will drive Dahlan and his ilk to continue railing against the old guard.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas faces a real threat; its name is Mohamed Dahlan.

Abbas has become obsessed with Dahlan, according to insiders. The PA president, they report, spends hours each day discussing ways to deal with the man and his supporters. And, it is rumored, Abbas’s nights are not much better.

Backed by at least three Arab countries, Dahlan, a former Palestinian security commander from the Gaza Strip, seems to have unofficially joined the battle for succession in the PA.

The 54-year-old Dahlan, young enough to be Abbas’s son, continues to deny any ambition to succeed Mahmoud Abbas as president of the PA. Yet Dahlan’s continued efforts to establish bases of power in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip belie his claims.

In Pumpkin Flowers, Matti Friedman provides a brief, finely written account of an army outpost in Israel’s security zone in southern Lebanon in the 1990s and the men who served there. ‘Pumpkin’ was the outpost’s name, while ‘flowers’ was the Israeli army’s code word for wounded soldiers. The term, writes Friedman, reflects “a floral preoccupation in our military intended to bestow beauty on ugliness and to allow soldiers distance from the things they might have to describe.” The Pumpkin itself was far from poetic, a “rectangle of earthen embankments the size of a basketball court” where there was “nothing unnecessary to the purposes of allowing you to kill, preventing you from being killed, and keeping you from losing your mind in the meantime.”

Born and raised in Toronto, Friedman had only been in Israel a year and a half when, at the age of 19, he was stationed on that hill. While he tells a personal story, the parts of the book where he describes the endless waiting, the bursts of combat, and the yearning for home contain a universal message that applies to every soldier in every war on every battlefield. Friedman himself only enters the book about halfway through. In order to give a fuller account of life on the Pumpkin, he starts with the story of Avi, one of the soldiers he would eventually replace. Although Friedman did not know Avi, he was given access to his letters and discovered that the soldier wrote almost as well as he did.

In February 1997, only a month away from discharge, Avi died in a mid-air collision between two IDF helicopters ferrying troops to their outposts on the security zone. All 73 aboard the two helicopters were killed. Although Hezbollah would take credit for Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, it was this accident, Friedman says, that shifted Israeli attitudes against the occupation. People began to believe the security zone was killing more people than it was saving—that instead of being a solution to a problem, it was itself the problem.

Friedman, who went up to the Pumpkin in 1998, offers not a hint of braggadocio about his own experiences, although it is clear he acquitted himself well under fire. He writes that a simple message hung from the wall of every outpost: “The Mission: Protecting the Northern Communities.” By the time Friedman left, he admits he no longer believed the message. “[B]y this time, like many Israelis I had replaced one simple idea —‘the Mission: Protecting the Northern Communities’—with another, that ceding the security zone to our enemies would placate them.” Israel pulled out of Lebanon only a few months after Matti completed his service on May 24, 2000.

Confronting antisemitism and Israel hatred http://edgar1981.blogspot.com/

While today Israel enjoys wide support on both sides of the American political aisle, this was not always the case. Late in 1956 the eminent political theorist Leo Strauss took the unusual step of commenting on contemporary political affairs to come to Israel’s defense. Strauss was moved to write by attacks against the nascent Jewish state in the conservative National Review. In this letter to Willmoore Kendall, a professor of political philosophy, founding editor of National Review, and an admirer of Strauss, Strauss reflects on the Jewish state based on his observations as a visiting professor at Hebrew University. Israel is a modern Western country with a spirit nurtured by the Hebrew Bible, he explains. Claims that the state is racist are unfounded. Strauss reminds his readers that political Zionism aims to reconnect the Jewish people with their heritage and restore the inner freedom and dignity that was lost in the ambiguous results of European emancipation.

The original letter is reproduced in full below. It was later edited and republished as an official Letter to the Editor in the January 5, 1957 issue of National Review.

November 19, 1956
Professor Wilmoore Kendall
Department of Political Science
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Professor Kendall:

For some time I have been receiving The National Review. You will not be surprised to hear that I agree with many articles appearing in the journal, especially your own. There is, however, one feature of the journal which I completely fail to comprehend. It is incomprehensible to me that the authors who touch on that subject are so unqualifiedly opposed to the State of Israel. No reasons why that stand is taken are given; mere antipathies are voiced. For I cannot call reasons such arguments as are based on gross factual error, or on complete non-comprehension of the things which matter. I am, therefore, tempted to believe that the authors in question are driven by an anti-Jewish animus; but I have learned to resist temptations. I have been teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the whole academic year of 1954-1955, and what I am going to say is based exclusively on what I have seen with my own eyes.

The first thing which strikes one in Israel is that the country is a western country, which educates its many immigrants from the East in the ways of the West: Israel is the only country which as a country is an outpost of the West in the East. Furthermore, Israel is a country which is surrounded by mortal enemies of overwhelming numerical superiority, and in which a single book absolutely predominates in the instruction given in elementary schools and in high schools: the Hebrew bible. Whatever the failings of individuals may be, the spirit of the country as a whole can justly be described in these terms: heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity. A conservative, I take it, is a man who believes that “everything good is heritage.” I know of no country today in which this belief is stronger and less lethargic than in Israel.

But the country is poor, lacks oil and many other things which fetch much money; the venture on which the country rests may well appear to be quixotic; the University and the Government buildings are within easy range of Jordanian guns; the possibility of disastrous defeat or failure is obvious and always close. A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

I hear the argument that the country is run by labor unions. I believe that it is a gross exaggeration to say that the country is run by labor unions. But even if it were true, I would say that a conservative, I take it, is a man who knows that the same arrangement may have very different meanings in different circumstances. The men who are governing Israel at present came from Russia at the beginning of the century. They are much more properly described as pioneers than as labor unionists. They were the men who laid the foundations under hopelessly difficult conditions. They are justly looked up to by all non-doctrinaires as the natural aristocracy of the country, for the same reasons for which Americans look up to the Pilgrim fathers. They came from Russia, the country of Nicolai the Second and Rasputin; hence they could not have had any experience of constitutional life and of the true liberalism which is only the reverse side of conservatism; it is all the more admirable that they founded a constitutional democracy adorned by an exemplary judiciary.

Anti-Netanyahu electioneering by the Obama gang confirmed.

A Senate report — in spite of itself — tells all.

It turns out that back in 2013 the State Department donated $350,000 to an NGO called OneVoice. The supposed aim was to enable OneVoice’s Israeli and Palestinian branches “to support peace negotiations.”

Since that was not a partisan political aim, the State Department’s funding of the NGO was seemingly kosher. But things — as detailed in a report released Tuesday by a bipartisan Senate subcommittee — got tricky.

The State Department authorized OneVoice to use the grant for a 14-month period ending in November 2014. OneVoice, as noted by the Times of Israel, used the funds to create an “organizational infrastructure” — and then, when the 14 months expired, handed over that organizational infrastructure to another Israeli group, known as V15, that was partisan with a vengeance.

The V in V15 stands for victory. It so happened that, in December 2014, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the Knesset to dissolve itself, which it did, and new elections were held in March 2015. V15’s aim was, pure and simple, to defeat Netanyahu and replace him with a center-left candidate; their slogan was “Anyone but Bibi.”

As the report by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs describes it:

In service of V15, OneVoice deployed its social media platform, which more than doubled during the State Department grant period; used its database of voter contact information, including email addresses… and enlisted its network of trained activists, many of whom were recruited or trained under the grant, to support and recruit for V15.

On the 10th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War — another chapter in Israel’s long, painful, and unfinished conflict in Lebanon — an excerpt from the new book ‘Pumpkinflowers’ examines the impact of decades in Lebanon on the Israeli psyche.

Author and journalist Matti Friedman spent much of his IDF service in the late 1990s in South Lebanon at an isolated base called Outpost Pumpkin, an experience he details in his acclaimed new book,Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story. In this excerpt, published here to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, Friedman examines the effect that Israel’s Lebanon entanglements have had on its leaders and people. The years of the Lebanon “security zone,” he believes, taught Israelis that they cannot shape the Middle East to their will and that their fate is not entirely in their own hands. Instead of despairing, however, Israelis have found an admirable way of living with a profoundly troubling reality.

I was sitting not long ago along one of the boulevards in Tel Aviv. The Middle East had succumbed in recent years to chaos and butchery dwarfing our own conflict in one tiny corner of the region. But our country was relatively calm, at least for a time, thanks not to anyone’s goodwill but to the force of our arms.
The promenade was full of teenagers in tank tops, tattooed riders of old-fashioned bikes, men with women and men with men and women with women, speaking the language of the Bible and of Jewish prayer. There were old people sipping coffee outside a restaurant, and some music. The country was going about its improbably cheerful business on a weekday evening.

Beyond the city were the neighborhoods of middle-class apartments with parking lots of company Mazdas, the kinds of places where I found many veterans of Outpost Pumpkin when I went looking for them to write this book, most having first passed through Goa or the Andes for decompression before coming back to their families, finding work as programmers and accountants and settling down to watch their kids on the swings. All of this is more than our grandparents, the perpetual outsiders of the ghettos of Minsk and Fez, had any right to expect.
Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story

Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story

But it seemed for a moment — and this can happen to me in a cafe in my corner of Jerusalem, or picking up my children at school, anytime — that the buildings on either side of the boulevard were embankments, and the sky a concrete roof.

Even in the heat of summer, when the streets of downtown New Haven have emptied of students, Yale can’t escape the clutches of controversy.

The most recent incident in the long-running saga of Yale’s Calhoun College, named after the former South Carolina senator and vice president John C. Calhoun, comes at a time of national racial tensions that only heightens the sense of drama. Calhoun, who served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century, was famous in his day for his staunch advocacy of slavery. Months of student agitation to change the college’s name came to naught this spring when Yale refused to do so. Corey Menafee, a black man who worked as a dishwasher in Calhoun College, smashed a windowpane in the college’s dining hall that depicted two slaves carrying bales of cotton on their heads. According to his remarks in the New Haven Independent, he acted on an impulse and climbed up with a broomstick to smash the panel. He was promptly arrested and has now resigned from his job; he says that Yale agreed not to press charges if he resigned.

Yale is keeping its part of the bargain, but that probably doesn’t matter to Menafee right now, because the state is doing what Yale refused to do. Despite Yale’s stance, Connecticut is charging Menafee with a felony and a misdemeanor, leading to a progressive outcry over the incident. Charging Menafee with a felony might seem harsh (convicted felons lose voting rights), but it is in compliance with the letter of the law: In Connecticut, first-degree criminal mischief, the felony with which Menafee is charged, involves property damage in excess of $1,500 (which, if you ask me, seems rather low for a felony charge, but the law is the law. The window he smashed was worth at least that much). Yale’s administration, ever the butt of criticism from student activists, does not support the criminal charges, is not seeking restitution, and seems content to sever ties with Menafee. Yale is also removing from the common room other stained-glass windows that depict scenes from the life of Calhoun.

None of that, of course, has stopped the usual brigade of progressive crusaders from defending Menafee, to the point of demanding that he be rehired by the university whose property he destroyed. “Thank you for taking down racist imagery,” read one sign hoisted by demonstrators outside the New Haven courthouse where Menafee appeared earlier today. According to another protester, Yale must also “stop exposing workers to racism,” whatever that means and however one might go about it. John Lugo, a frequent activist in New Haven, has said that Yale should rehire Menafee. In a statement reported in the New Haven Independent, Lugo asked, “What is more valuable to Yale: a stained glassed window of enslaved people picking cotton, or the humanity of the African American people who work at Yale?”

The war Israel fought in the summer of 2006 against Hezbollah was not the same as the war Israel fought against the PLO in 1982. The war of 2006 was not a Lebanese war. It was an Iranian war.

July 12, 2006 was the first day of what has become known as the Second Lebanon War. The name of the war, like most of the lessons taken from it, is off.

It was the first Iran war.

Hezbollah, acting as Iran’s foreign legion, initiated the war with a massive mortar and rocket assault on communities in northern Israel. Under mortar cover, a Hezbollah unit crossed the border and attacked an IDF convoy traveling close to Kibbutz Zarit.

Five soldiers were killed in the missile attack. Members of the Hezbollah squad stole the bodies of two of the dead, IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and spirited them to Lebanon.

A rescue mission to bring them back failed, after the tank, tasked with the job was hit by a land mine. Five more soldiers were killed.

Hezbollah’s assault was not the opening salvo of the war. That happened two and a half weeks earlier along the border with Gaza. The July 12 attack was a carbon copy of Hamas’s June 25 assault.

At dawn that day, Hamas forces opened a salvo of mortar fire on IDF positions along the border with Gaza. Under cover of the fire, a Hamas cell penetrated Israel through an underground tunnel. The terrorists attacked a tank, killing two soldiers and abducting IDF corporal Gilad Shalit.

Following the opening assault, Hamas maintained its mortar, missile and rocket offensive against Israel for weeks.

In 2006, Hamas acted as a wholly-owned and operated Iranian proxy. Iran began massively funding the Muslim Brotherhood group in 2005. Hamas operatives, like their Hezbollah counterparts and colleagues from the Muslim Brotherhood in Sinai, were brought to Iran for training. Iran smuggled massive quantities of weaponry to Gaza, through Egypt.

In other words, the misnamed Second Lebanon War was a two-front war. It was a coordinated assault on Israel by two Iranian controlled terror armies. They operated with a near identical doctrine and operations guide, albeit, with different capabilities.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8459/gangster-islam-europe “Gangster Islam,” a crime wave packing prisons and overtaking Europe, is a problem the mainstream media will not report. Ordinary Europeans — for fear of being called “racist” or even being imprisoned for “hate speech” — are afraid even to talk about it. Timon Dias, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, discusses the […]