RUTHFULLY YOURS

During several sleepless nights, watching loops of 24-hour news broadcasts devoted to the U.S. presidential race, I noticed certain themes that otherwise might have escaped my attention. One was the claim that first-time voters are “too young to remember” the scandals surrounding former president Bill Clinton and wife Hillary’s behavior during the period that the couple occupied the White House.

This assertion was like a hidden key to unlocking another phenomenon related to Americans in the age group under discussion and the surrounding culture’s attitude toward them. I am talking about the latest “radical chic” on campuses across the country — fever-pitched anti-Israel activism.

At both Ivy League and state schools, accusing the Jewish state of war crimes against the “oppressed Palestinian people” is the current ticket to peer acceptance. Campaigning for boycott, divestment and sanctions against “Israeli apartheid” is so popular that anything from complaints about high tuition and student loans to criticism of professors and guest lecturers has become part and parcel of the movement.

The response of university administrators and faculty has been to cower and hold meetings with student-body representatives to discuss free speech. So rampant has this scenario become that alumni are starting to wake up and take measures, among them threats to cease donating money to their alma maters.

I raised one that has long been bothering me – whether Western secular values were undermining the ability of the Jewish people to survive.
At Jewish Book Week in London a few days ago, I took part in a panel discussion about the most pressing questions facing Jews today.

I raised one that has long been bothering me – whether Western secular values were undermining the ability of the Jewish people to survive.

Across the West, there has been a terrifying rise in anti-Jewish feeling. This is fueled by an unprecedented campaign of lies and libels against Israel aimed at destroying it through delegitimization.

This campaign displays the same signature motifs of classic Jew-hatred that go back through the centuries.

A Connecticut College professor has told colleagues that his school has grown so hostile toward Jews that he can no longer recommend Jewish students or professors study or teach at the college.

“In my opinion, this harassment of Jews on campus in the name of fighting for social justice should end; immediately,” wrote Spencer J. Pack, an economics professor, in a faculty-wide email.
His comments were triggered by the smear campaign that pro-Palestinian students successfully waged against a pro-Israel professor, resulting in his indefinite leave from campus, and a more recent push to malign Birthright (a program enabling student travel to Israel) by plastering the campus with posters. The posters reportedly intimidated Jewish or pro-Israel students and faculty, while attempting to poison the minds of uninformed students and faculty with vicious falsehoods about Israel. The posters were put up by Conn Students in Solidarity with Palestine (CSSP), whose faculty adviser, Eileen Kane, runs the school’s Global Islamic Studies program.

Kane’s Global Islamic Studies program also invited Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi to speak at Connecticut College on April 12. Kanazi, who is scheduled to give a “poetry performance,” is on the organizing committee of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and listed among its endorsers. His strategy has been to connect anti-Israel politics with popular urban struggles.

Israel’s highest-ranking Muslim soldier has described how he endeavours to make his service a source of pride to his father, despite many treating him as a traitor.

Growing up in the village of Reineh in the Galilee – where many believe he has betrayed Arab-Israelis – Major Alaa Waheeb said he never imagined he would be part of the Israeli Defence Forces, let alone go on to become its most-decorated Muslim.

The major was speaking while in Britain for a tour of communities organised by the grassroots group Zionist Federation.

But the soldier, who has served as a platoon commander and was an operations officer in the Gaza brigade during the disengagement in 2005, could not even speak Hebrew until he was 18.

At his high school, he was told that “serving in the IDF is not the way of the Muslim religion”. He said it was only the intervention of his father which caused him to perform “a 180-degree change from where I was,” and join the army.

“If there’s one thing that I want to say, it’s that my dad was the one who wanted me to join the IDF. My dad always told me to be a soldier.

“He was born in Syria and brought to Israel as a small child. He and his family lived in Yavne’el, a small town with many religious Jews. That’s why he had so many Jewish friends, why he then joined the Israeli police, and why he told me to join the army.

“I was wondering, ‘what does he want from me?’ and I told him: ‘I have nothing to look for in the IDF’.”

But eventually, at the age of 18, Major Waheeb was convinced. Nearly two decades later, he said his decision was still unpopular with some.

‘No education toward 2 states in Palestinian textbooks,’ report finds

Israel is routinely left off maps, Israeli cities are said to be in Palestine, martyrdom is celebrated, and there is not a single mention of the Holocaust in more than 70 official Palestinian Authority textbooks, Israel Radio reported Tuesday.

The state radio’s Palestinian affairs correspondent, Gal Berger, said he looked over textbooks for grades 1-12 with a diverse range of subjects, including history, geography and Islamic studies, and found what he indicated was a systematic blurring out of Israel’s existence.

“In the textbooks of the Palestinian Authority,” he said, “there is no education towards two states or a Palestinian state [alongside Israel] within ’67 lines.”

In the Palestinian history books for grades 10-12, there are full chapters dedicated to World War II but no mention of the Holocaust, Berger reported. “For a student in this [Palestinian education] system,” said Berger, “it is as if the Holocaust never happened.”

In his examination of the Islamic studies textbooks, Berger found excerpts that celebrated martyrdom, including a fourth grade textbook that invites the children to write about a Palestinian martyr of their choice.

The messages from Washington ahead of Vice President Joe Biden’s arrival in Israel next week show President Barack Obama’s hostile policies toward Israel will maintained until he leaves office.

In recent weeks, the administration has warned various government ministers that any construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem will be viewed with hostility by the administration. In contrast, the administration is pressuring Israel to permit construction of homes for Arabs in its capital city and harshly opposes all moves by the government to destroy illegal construction in Arab neighborhoods and in Judea and Samaria.

In other words, it is the Obama administration’s policy to deny Jews our civil and property rights while it demands that Israel not assert its sovereignty over non-Jews.

Whether or not Obama’s anti-Israel policies will survive his tenure in office depends on who succeeds him. If Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is elected to serve as the next president, there is no question that they will survive him.

During her four years as Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton was a full partner in Obama’s hostile policies toward Israel. Moreover, as her internal emails have shown, all of Clinton’s close advisers are hostile to Israel. The good news for Israel is that Clinton’s chances of election are not as great as they seem from the polls.

First of all, there is every reason to believe that in the coming weeks, the Republicans will unite.

Either party leaders will back front-runner Donald Trump, or his main competitors, Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, will join forces and win the nomination.

The latter alternative, which is gaining traction among Republican leaders and political commentators, involves Cruz, who is more popular with the party’s rank in file than Rubio, and has secured primary victories in four states whereas Rubio finished first only in Minnesota, leading a joint ticket.

But even if the GOP remains fractured, Clinton may still be too weak to win the White House in November. This is first and foremost the case because of the FBI investigation of her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

U.S.-Israeli relations reached a low point one year ago yesterday as the White House scolded Congress over allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak directly to the American people through an address to a joint session. Nevertheless, from the well of the U.S. House of Representatives last March, the Prime Minister delivered his speech about the perils of the Iran nuclear deal, and now a recent poll suggests the message was received.

A Gallup poll released last month finds 30% of Americans approve, while 57% disapprove of the Iran nuclear deal. Along party lines, the difference is far more drastic, as a meager 9% of Republicans approve of the agreement compared to a slight majority of 51% of Democrats. Also telling is that only 30% of Independents support it. Gallup concludes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s disapproval may have helped “shape the sour national mood on this issue.”

Yes it is sour; a word defined in this context as “harsh in spirit, or temper.” But it was not Mr. Netanyahu who was sour, because at the beginning of his remarks the Prime Minister recounted longstanding ties between the two countries, citing specific instances where President Obama assisted Israel in recent years. It was U.S. politicians who shaped the sour national mood.

President Obama, who refused to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu while he was in Washington at that crucial moment, also made sure the world knew he wasn’t planning on watching the speech, dismissing it altogether afterwards. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said she was “moved to tears” during Netanyahu’s address because the speech took place without the Obama Administration’s blessing, and nearly 60 Democrats in Congress refused to attend.

Group blames Israel for cave-in, the seventh in recent months, amid redoubled efforts to dig across the border.

A tunnel being dug in Gaza under the aegis of the ruling Hamas group collapsed on Thursday, killing a member of the organization’s military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas said.

The dead man was named as Muhammad Musa al Astal from Khan Younis.

The tunnel caved in near the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades confirmed. It was the latest in a spate of such collapses. Only five days ago, another tunnel caved in near the Zeitoun neighborhood in the eastern part of the Strip, injuring five members of Hamas’s military wing.

Members of Hamas accused Israel of collapsing the tunnel, saying they had seen soldiers on the Gaza border using liquid explosives and “causing small earthquakes” to bring down tunnels dug by the group.

The past two months have seen seven tunnels collapse, most of them in the Khan Younis area, and two in Zeitoun.

Around a month ago, the 23-year-old nephew of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar was killed in a tunnel accident.

Just before that, a tunnel collapsed in the area of Jabalia, in the north of the Palestinian enclave, after heavy rain and floods, killing seven excavators and injuring others.

So Osama bin Laden was an environmentalist. In between plotting the mass murder of kaffirs and the destruction of the West, he penned teary-eyed missives about the dangers of “catastrophic climate change.” Coming off like an earnest member of Greenpeace who had read one too many Naomi Klein tracts, he wrote a letter in 2009 calling on Americans to do everything within their power to “save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny.” Released by the Obama administration this week, the letter says mankind is living in “the shadow of catastrophic climate conditions” and we need a “revolution” to make the planet cleaner. If you read the letter out at the next IPCC gathering, you’d probably get a rousing round of applause.

Some people seem freaked out to discover that OBL had green tendencies. How is it possible that this finger-wagging lunatic could have been as one with the West’s own respectable chattering classes on the issue of climate change? One columnist seems perturbed that bin Laden had what he describes as a more “progressive” take on climate change than the current GOP presidential candidates. But why the surprise? It makes perfect sense that this anti-Western, anti-modern medieval throwback should have warmed to green thinking. After all, bin Laden’s biggest beef in life was that the modern West was an overly cocky, supremely destructive entity that needed to be taken down a peg or two — which is exactly what environmentalists think, too.

Bin Laden’s 2009 letter, written to coincide with the coming to power of Obama, is not the first time he got moist-eyed about man-made planetary doom. In 2002 he attacked the U.S. for pursuing progress at the expense of poor, sad Mother Earth. “You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history,” he hectored, like an agitated hippie. Hilariously, he lambasted President George W. Bush for “refus[ing] to sign the Kyoto agreement” on climate-reduction targets. There’s something deliciously surreal about a terrorist outlaw who was then running from hideout to hideout lecturing the president of the United States for failing to sign on the dotted line of global treaties.

In 2007 he lectured the foul, greedy West again, claiming that “all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations.” He beat Occupy Wall Street to the punch by four years, slamming the “greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives.” Then, in the 2009 letter released this week, he outlined his solution to all this Western wickedness: “The world should put its efforts into attempting to reduce the release of gases.” In a nutshell, join Greenpeace. Take eco-action. Put pressure on corporations. Bin Laden basically had two feelings about the American people: that they should die or, failing that, become dutiful warriors against climate change

Sabeel’s theology distorts the Old Testament by denying Jews any ongoing connection with the land of their origin, and treating them as a people abandoned by God. There is also repeated disparagement of Judaism as “tribal,” “primitive,” and “exclusionary.”

Where most modern churches have left the anti-Semitism of the past behind and recognize that the Romans, not the Jews, crucified Jesus, this cult of what has been called “Christian Palestinianism” denies any historical or theological connection between the biblical Israel, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel.

Perhaps the gravest error made by Kairos, Sabeel, and other Christian groups who pursue a one-sided campaign is that they take away from the Palestinians any form of agency or self-reliance. If the Israelis are to blame for all that is wrong and the Palestinians are only victims, then Palestinians must be treated as children, without the will and power to act on their own behalf. Or who can act only through violence and hate.

Are these campaigns, replete with fraudulent charges, as in the Inquisition, really not about Palestinians at all, but just the latest incarnation of the old racist and religious hatred of Jews, and a clear expression of the “New Anti-Semitism”?