RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Tuesday the Organization of Islamic Cooperation held an “emergency,” “extraordinary” meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The OIC includes violence-wracked countries and failed states like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and others, as well as severely poor and dysfunctional countries like Burkina Faso, Somalia, Bangladesh, and others. Not a single one of the organization’s 57 countries is a frontrunner in terms of freedom and prosperity, and most are far below that level.

But the topic of Tuesday’s “emergency meeting” was that on April 17 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that: “Israel will never withdraw from the Golan Heights.”

The meeting’s final communiqué “Condemns strongly Israel, the occupying power, and its macabre acts to change the legal status, demographic composition, and institutional structure of the occupied Syrian Golan.” It also “expresses unconditional support for the legitimate right of the Syrian people to restore their full sovereignty on the occupied Syrian Golan.”

The Arab League—whose 22 member states make up a sizable chunk of the OIC—had already weighed in on Netanyahu’s words on April 21, calling for a special criminal court to be set up and put Israel on trial for the transgression.

The Golan was controlled by Syria from 1948 to 1967, during which time Syrian gunners often fired at the Israeli communities below and forced their residents to sleep in bomb shelters. Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War—and fortunately, since then, has kept it and developed it.

Today, with Syria devolved into Hobbesian war and fragmentation, the Heights are all the more strategically vital to Israel, and the idea of trading them for “peace” has—at least in the Israeli discourse—died a well-deserved death. The Golan, by the way, constitutes less than 1 percent of Syrian territory, and Syria’s loss of it almost 50 years ago is the least of its problems.

But there is further irony in the Arab League’s and the OIC’s reactions to Netanyahu’s words.

At the recent Stand With Us conference, it became obvious that the anti-BDS movement is becoming empowered. American Thinker interviewed those willing to combat BDS both on college campuses and with legislation.

California Assemblyman Travis Allen (R) has been on the forefront of pushing legislation to counter the BDS movement. First introduced in January he has since decided to co-author, in a bipartisan manner, another bill, AB 2844, to ensure its passing. In its current form the bill requires that California will not contract with any entity that officially boycotts the State of Israel, calling Israel a “vital ally and only democracy in the Middle East.” Every 180 days the list is updated.

California should join other states that have considered such legislation. Currently there are seven states that passed bills, seven pending, of which five of those are highly likely to pass. AB 2844 has been approved by two committees and will shortly be up before a third, after which it will go to the floor for a general vote. Unfortunately, as it moves through committees some will try to change the language from its original form. The Democrats do not have a good track record nationally, considering many did not see the Iran Nuclear Deal as a problem, so will this BDS bill be watered down?

Allen noted to American Thinker, “Republican support will be contingent on it remaining a strong bill with clear language. It is important that all members of the legislation need to work together to ensure the bill is not unduly complicated or watered downed through the process. The resulting law must be concise and effective.”

He wants to remind Californians, “Israel has a level of freedom not enjoyed by surrounding countries in the Middle East. When the proponents of boycotting Israel talk about freedom of equality and tolerance they should be asked if the same standard is applied to other countries around the world. I introduced the bill to show that California values its allies and our taxpayers do not want to support prejudice with their tax dollars. California has a closeness with Israel: over two billion dollars in trade, over 1500 companies do business in Israel, and Governor Brown signed a memorandum of understanding in 2014 to increase collaboration and trade with Israel.”

More and more opponents of BDS are putting the movement on the defensive. People are recognizing that one of the important battlefields is the terrain of college campuses.

Molly, a senior at Stanford University, is attempting to pass a resolution on campus against anti-Semitism. She sees herself as a student advocate and does not believe in a “tepid response. I did not have the support of the Hillel Director… She works in an organization that should help make the lives of Jewish students better. I was actually inspired by her response, because she forced me to stand up for what I believe. There is no strong leadership on campus that says anti-Semitism is not okay, so we need to stand up for ourselves. I warn my fellow students who are not Jewish, anti-Semitism, which is also anti-Zionism, is a canary in a coalmine. The first piece of discrimination starts with the Jewish people and goes forward to others.”

In 2016, Israel is a major contributor to – and a global co-leader with – the USA in the areas of research, development, manufacturing and launching of micro (100 kg), mini (300 kg) and medium (1,000 kg) size satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as well as joint space missions, space communications and space exploration sounding rocket and scientific balloon flights. According to NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, “Israel is known for its innovation. The October 15, 2015 joint agreement gives us the opportunity to cooperate with Israel on the journey to Mars, [highlighting Israel’s unique, extremely lightweight technologies, which conserve energy]….”

Academics like Noam Chomsky should be put out to pasture with Bernie Sanders before they destroy more minds.

Fast on the heels of publishing “And the World Was Made Right” (Rule of Reason, April 23), which has had an incredible and positive response from many quarters, I happened to read Cliff Kincaid’s review of Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West on AIM’s site (Accuracy in Media). The review is titled “Defunding the Marxist Madrassas.”

Kincaid’s review of the Walsh book opens with some richly deserved swipes at Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor of everything under the sun. For decades, the name, “Noam Chomsky,” for me, at least, has evoked the image of a leftist college professor instructing his student victims to “thoroughly chew” his latest theory – say, of Cognitive closure, or of Psychological nativism, or ofRecursion in language — until they can memorize it and recite it back to him verbatim (preferably in a choral mode). That is, after all, the nature of an Islamic madrassa – to memorize – not to understand or critique the Koran and other Islamic texts – until one’s mind is completely subverted by masses of illogic and non sequiturs and one is no longer able to think. Once one has memorized by rote every little comma, simile, and metaphor of the Koran, one is ready to join the Taliban (Islamic students) to kill and terrorize.

And that is, more or less, what American students of Chomsky (and students of his ilk elsewhere in academia) to go out and do: become activists for Socialism, Social Justice, to Occupy Wall Street, occupy your home, occupy your business, and become the snowflakes for “safe places” and the hoarse hollerers for women’s restrooms being open to transgenders and LGBTs of every stripe. And also become advocates and demonstrators for Muslim immigration and trigger-warning sensitive freshmen.

Noam Chomsky, a Marxist professor who says he has been at MIT for 65 years,maintains that we need a new economic system. He has endorsed something called “the next system,” which is supposed to replace free enterprise capitalism. My counter-proposal is for a “next system” to replace Chomsky and other Marxists in academia. My old friend, “Jimmy from Brooklyn,” a legendary anti-communist, says what we need is the defunding of the “Marxist Madrassas,” otherwise known as college and universities.

The American presidency has accumulated a number of traditions that anyone holding the office is expected to perpetuate. Examples include delivering the State of the Union address to Congress, lighting the national Christmas tree, and presiding over the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. The next president will no doubt continue all three. If he or she follows the pattern established by the most recent incumbents, however, the result of the peace process will be failure. Indeed, the continuation of the peace process as it has been practiced will not simply be futile: It will be positively harmful. The conduct of the peace process has made peace less likely. If it is to continue at all, a fundamental change in the American approach is needed.

Successive administrations have failed at the peace process because they have not understood—or not admitted to themselves—the nature of the conflict they have been trying to resolve. In the eyes of the American officials engaged in this long-running endeavor, making peace has been akin to a labor negotiation. Each side, they have believed, has desired a resolution, and the task of the United States has been to find a happy medium, a set of arrangements that both sides could accept. In fact, each side has wanted the conflict to end, but in radically different and indeed incompatible ways that have made a settlement impossible: The Israelis have wanted peace; the Palestinians have wanted the destruction of Israel.

At the core of the conflict, standing out like a skyscraper in a desert to anyone who cared to notice, is the Palestinian refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. This attitude has existed for at least a century, since the Arab rejection of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. While much has changed in the region over those 10 decades, the conflict’s fundamental cause has not. The Palestinians’ position is expressed in their devotion to what has come to be called incitement: incessant derogatory propaganda about Jews and Israel, the denial of any historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem and its environs, and the insistence that all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belongs to the Arabs, making the Jews living there, in the Palestinian view, contemptible interlopers to be killed or evicted. The Palestinians’ attitude has expressed itself, as well, in their negotiators’ refusal either to accept any proposal for terminating the conflict or to offer any counterproposals of their own. The goal of eliminating Israel also lies behind Palestinian officials’ glorification as “martyrs” of those who murder Israeli civilians, giving their families financial rewards to encourage such killings.

American officials have either ignored or downplayed all of this. They have never emphasized its centrality to the conflict, instead focusing on Israeli control of the West Bank of the Jordan River, which the Israeli army captured from Jordan in the 1967 War and on which Israel has built towns, villages, and settlements. American officials have regarded the “occupation,” as the international community has chosen to call it, of the West Bank as the cause of the ongoing conflict. In fact, the reverse is true. It is the persistence of the conflict that keeps Israel in the West Bank. A majority of Israelis believes that retaining control of all of the territory brings high costs but that turning it over entirely to Palestinian control, given the virulent Palestinian hostility to their very existence, would incur even higher costs. A withdrawal, they have every reason to believe, would create a vacuum that anti-Israel terrorist groups would fill. Ample precedent supports this view: When Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon and Gaza, two terrorist organizations—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza—took control of the vacated territories and proceeded to launch attacks against the Jewish state.

While sometimes acknowledging in private that it would not bring peace, American peace processers have in the past nonetheless justified continuing the peace process on the grounds that it served American interests by making it possible to have good relations with Arab governments while at the same time sustaining close ties with Israel. According to this rationale, the Americans could tell the Arab rulers, and those rulers could tell their fervently anti-Zionist publics, that the United States was, after all, working to address their grievances.

I am in awe of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. Author Dario Fernandez-Morera, a Northwestern University Professor and Harvard PhD, argues that elite scholars are peddling a myth – that Islamic Spain, c. 711 AD -1492 AD, was a paradise. Fernandez-Morera’s job is to expose historical realities. The main text is 240 pages. There are 95 pages of notes, a bibliography and an index. It was published in February, 2016 by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

This book is an intellectual boxing match. The author shreds not just one opponent, but a series of intellectual bigots, prostitutes and manipulators of the common man. Fernandez-Morera’s biceps gleam as his lightning footwork and peerless preparedness dazzle. Our hero risks much, from hate mail to non-person status.

The reader is plunged into vast landscapes, international intrigue, arcane customs, and timeless heroism. One envisions veiled women and bejeweled slave girls, the smoking ruins of churches, enslaved, whipped Christians forced to carry their cathedral bells to be melted down to embellish mosques, heartbreaking suffering and eventual victory.

Fernandez-Morera allows the propagandists enough rope to hang themselves. All he has to do is quote them. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, The University of Chicago, Boston University, Sarah Lawrence, Rutgers, Indiana University, Cambridge, Oxford, The University of London, NYU, Norton, Penguin, Routledge, Houghton Mifflin, the Pulitzer Committee, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Carly Fiorina, children’s textbooks, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, PBS, The New York Review of Books, First Things all are in the dock, tripped up in their own false testimony. The inclusion of First Things might surprise; it is a Catholic publication. In it Christian C. Sahner praises Muslims who “exhibited a surprising degree of religious flexibility” because they waited a few decades before razing the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Damascus, rather than destroying it immediately upon arrival. Really.

What is the propagandists’ motive?

Follow the money. See, for example, Giulio Meotti’s “Islam Buys Out Western Academia” See also the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University. Or the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge University. Or the Alwaleed Centre at Edinburgh University. Or the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale. Or the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown. The whorehouse cash register overflows with petrodollars.

Follow the pitchforks and torches. In 2008, Sylvain Gouguenheim, a French medievalist, published Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel, arguing that the West is not in debt to Islam for awareness of Ancient Greek texts; most of those texts were preserved, translated, passed on and used by Christians. For that rather modest claim, Gouguenheim was subjected to an “academic exorcism.”

Much has been written about the nefarious motives behind the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as well as its primary campus sponsor, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). An exhaustive and authoritative account tracing the movement’s history, its radical roots and maximalist goals was authored by Dan Diker for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and is a must read for anyone wishing to gain further insight into the inner workings of BDS.

Of perhaps greater concern however, is the terror link between BDS and the Hamas terrorist organization. As outlined by Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) at a Joint Hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the connections are deeply rooted and masked by a labyrinth of various entities and subgroups.

Particular interest centers on two pro-BDS groups, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and its fiscal sponsor, Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation (AJP). Though AMP is a not-for-profit corporation, it does not possess 501c3 tax-exempt status and is not required to file IRS form 990 thus shielding the organization from scrutiny. The AMP however receives tax-exempt contributions from the AJP, which is a 501c3. The two organizations share officers and maintain the same offices but under the law, they are deemed to be two separate and distinct entities.

If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is and those responsible for forming these entities were likely trying to circumvent transparency laws for reasons set forth below.

According to research conducted by the FDD, the AMP is extremely active on college campuses and one of the driving forces of the BDS movement. The organization provides training, funding and propaganda material for SJP campus groups across the United States. In 2014, the group spent $100,000 on campus activities, the bulk of which was channeled into anti-Israel, pro-BDS causes.

Even more disquieting is the fact that several current members of the AMP or individuals who are otherwise tied to the AMP were former members of groups that were shut down or held civilly liable by the United States for funneling money to the Hamas terrorist group. That figure includes three individuals who had previously belonged to the now defunct and notorious Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), the Hamas front group that according to the U.S. Treasury Department sent approximately $12.4 million overseas to fill the Hamas coffers.

The Obama administration did not characterize Monday’s brutal slaying of a USAID worker as terrorism on Tuesday despite al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent taking credit for the crime.

Xulhaz Mannan, 35, and Mahbub Tonoy, 25, were in their apartment in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Monday at about 5:30 p.m. when attackers posing as delivery couriers gained entry. They were attacked with machetes by men in their 20s who yelled “Allahu Akbar” on their way out the door.

The attack followed the pattern of AQIS attacks that began in February 2015 with the machete murder of an American citizen, writer Avijit Roy, on a Dhaka street. Roy ran a blog featuring atheist, humanist and nationalist writers.

AQIS, which formally launched in 2014 after al-Qaeda brought various militant groups from India to Bangladesh and Myanmar under its umbrella, has explicitly detailed why they’ve picked certain writers and activists as their targets — those they believe have insulted Islam and stand in the way of submission to Shariah law. ISIS has tried to adopt this method of ambushing intellectuals or atheists, though Bangladesh denies fighters allied to the Islamic State are active in the country.

Mannan was an LGBT activist before going to work at the U.S. Embassy as a protocol officer. He later worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and founded the magazine Roopbaan, which was going to hold a Rainbow Rally earlier this month that was canceled due to death threats.

On Sunday, April 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“Bibi”) convened a cabinet meeting on the Golan Heights stating that the “time has come for the international community to finally recognize that the Golan Heights will remain under Israel’s sovereignty permanently.” He spoke these words from Ma’aleh Gamla, next to the ruins of the historic Gamla, a Judean city to which the Romans laid siege in 67 CE during the Great Revolt (also known as the First Jewish/Roman War) (66-73 CE). In this battle, Roman soldiers slaughtered 4,000 Jews, while another 5,000 perished having “thrown themselves down” a ravine to their deaths in either an attempt to flee or in a mass suicide (Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 4:1:9:80).

Bibi’s statements at Gamla followed reports that the United States and Russia were working on a draft peace resolution to the Syrian Civil War that would label the entire Golan Heights as Syrian territory. On April 19, U.S. State Department John Kirby stated “The US position on the issue is unchanged…Those territories are not part of Israel and the status of those territories should be determined through negotiations.” The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Arab League, Syria, and Germany rejected Netanyahu’s comments.

Despite most of the world seemingly poised to throw Israel under the bus over this issue, Israel should continue to assert its sovereignty over the Golan. Israel has a stronger claim to the Golan than Syria does, the Golan is of essential strategic value to Israel and the free world, and given increased threats and development of the land, that value has only appreciated.

Israel has a Stronger Claim to the Golan than Syria

Israel gained control of two-thirds of the Golan Heights following Syria’s defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. (Israel later applied Israeli law to these territories in a de-facto annexation in 1981.) Syria gained independence in 1945. Before that, the Golan was part of the French Empire (1923-1945), jointly administered between the British and French Empires (1917-1923) and part of the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire for approximately 400 years preceding 1917. So, Syria had control of the Israeli-administered part of the Golan for 22 years (1945-1967), while Israel has had it for 49 years (1967 to the present). Israel has a stronger claim to the Israeli-controlled part of the Golan, given that it has been Israeli longer than it has been Syrian.

The Great Strategic Value of the Golan…

In the 20th century the American Jewish community was the world’s largest and strongest, and helped establish and protect the Jewish state. The 21st century will be different.

In late fall 1940, as World War II raged in Europe and despite the parlous situation of the Jews in British-Mandate Palestine, their leader David Ben-Gurion spent three and a half months in the United States, returning again in November 1941 for a far longer stay of more than nine months. The wartime route from Palestine to the U.S. was lengthy and dangerous, but Ben-Gurion keenly understood not only the prime importance of relations with America but also the fact that the American Jewish community had now become the center of world Jewry.

Indeed, soon enough—and for decades to come—that same Jewish community, the world’s largest and strongest, would play a critical role in the establishment and subsequent support and protection of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years.

But that was the 20th century; the 21st will be different. That is the conclusion of my essay in Mosaic, “If American Jews and Israel are Drifting Apart, What’s the Reason?”

I’m grateful to Daniel Gordis, Martin Kramer, and Jack Wertheimerfor their kind words about the essay itself and especially for their thoughtful comments on its thesis. Taken together, those comments affirm but also broaden and deepen my argument.

All three of my respondents note the remarkable change in the relationship between Israel and American Jewry since 1948, some of which is due to sheer demographics. At the time of Israel’s founding, as Martin Kramer explains, its Jewish population was one-ninth the size of American Jewry, and was also largely poor and needy. Today, the population ratio is one to one, Israel’s economic situation has improved immeasurably, and its population is growing—even as our numbers in America are being reduced by low birth rates and intermarriage.

As Daniel Gordis puts it, “Israeli Jews have worked out a successful survival strategy,” while, by contrast, the “American Jewish survival strategy is struggling.” The trend lines are clear—which is why I suggested in my essay that we American Jews may end up needing what amounts to foreign aid, with the Israelis trying to rescue us, or anyway some of us, as best they can.