RUTHFULLY YOURS

The University of Missouri has been the location of several anti-Semitic acts that the president, Tim Wolfe, appeared reluctant to address. The final vile act, which included the formation of a swastika, was enough to encourage thirty-six Jewish and civil rights organizations to demand the president’s resignation. Concurrently, Black graduate student, Jonathan Butler, heroically began a hunger strike, and within days, both the president and Chancellor Loftin stepped down from their positions.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who usually gets it right, this time said that Jewish students will likely find themselves facing an even more hostile, threatening and unsafe environment because administrators are either too busy or too scared to address anti-Semitism, thereby leaving Jewish students more vulnerable and unprotected. So, should the inmates continue running the asylum? Acts of bigotry are occurring throughout America’s campuses and worldwide, whether or not the students are outspoken. Anything can trigger another “moderate” to becoming an active aggressor, whether the bully is motivated by others’ acts of intolerance and violence or by the relatively unobtrusive prey. Being busy or scared is hardly an excuse for the head of a university to shirk his responsibilities.

Rossman-Benjamin suggested that a president may fear appearing to favor Jewish students. Does she think it’s wrong to favor any victimized students or just the Jewish students? What if there were a second group of victims? Would the administration feel more comfortable and legitimized if a non-Jewish group were imperiled along with the Jewish? In fact, is it not moral to protect and care for the students who are attacked? An administrator must display the attributes of both ethics and courage to govern such an institution, and use the event as a teaching strategy and warning.

During the course of last fall’s semester, swastikas were found at the posh Fieldston School in Riverdale and a sixth grade student drew one in art class, seemingly unaware of its significance. Additionally, a notebook appeared with the cover exclamation “Hitler Rocks.” In response to the protests of Jewish parents, the school convened a special meeting for the sixth grade to discuss these events but apparently stressed the original use of the swastika as a symbol of peace, stating it could also be a symbol of hate but failing to even mention the word Holocaust. To make a second round of amends after this egregious “oversight,” the school made arrangements for the Simon Wiesenthal Center to send its regional director, along with a Holocaust survivor to tell her story to the entire middle school.

Michael Cohen, the Wiesenthal representative, goes into great detail in an article in The Jewish Week (Jan about what short and long term goals the combined organizations developed to enlighten both students and faculty about the Holocaust and tolerance education. At a school whose tuition is $45,000/yr, one would expect this to be part of the regular curriculum in any class of World History, particularly in a city with the largest share of survivors and their descendants, in a school heavily populated with Jewish students. Surely it doesn’t require a visit from the NAACP for Fieldston students to learn about slavery and the Civil war..

Throughout Mr. Cohen’s account, whenever he mentions the Holocaust, he adds tolerance education, as though the phenomenon of the extermination of Europe’s Jews were not a sufficiently large topic in itself. When Black Lives Matter holds a protest, they don’t include qualifiers extending to other groups suffering from intolerance of persecution. When LGBT holds rallies, they similarly don’t include anti-Semitism or racism. Only Jews are forever minimizing their own causes and still trying to prove to mainstream society that what happened to them is important because it can also affect other groups. Intolerance and bullying are school-yard words that have no place in the same sentence as Holocaust. Once you’ve paired intolerance with lactose, it’s forever inappropriate for the industry of mass starvation, torture, medical atrocities, freezing, rape, shooting people into the pit they’ve had to dig or making them watch their babies’ heads bashed against a wall or thrown into the air as target practice.

On January 4, Iran’s Shiite Lebanese mercenary force, Hezbollah, detonated a large explosive device on the Lebanon-Israel border in the Mount Dov region. Their target was a pair of Israeli D-9 armored bulldozers clearing the area of brush and other obstructions. There were no Israeli casualties.

Israel had anticipated an attack from Hezbollah following its liquidation of Samir Kuntar – the notorious child-killer turned Hezbollah commander – and other senior pro-Assad mercenaries in a Damascus suburb on December 19, 2015. Israel’s Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot warned Hezbollah of “harsh” consequences if the group decided to initiate a terror attack to avenge Kuntar.

The attack itself accomplished nothing. The heavily armored D-9 bulldozers were able to withstand the blast. In an effort to bolster its image and play to a demoralized constituency, Hezbollah claimed that the attack targeted a senior Mossad official and wounded some Israelis. The claim of course was false but demonstrates Hezbollah’s desperation.

In July and August of 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a 33-day war. Hezbollah propagandists tried to spin the war as a Hezbollah victory but the reality on the ground was quite different and the war in fact, represented a major strategic victory for Israel. Hezbollah lost between 600 to 1,000 fighters and much of its infrastructure, painstakingly constructed with Iranian and North Korean assistance, was destroyed. Most importantly, the war established Israeli deterrence and imposed new rules on Hezbollah. The group could no longer rely on a predictable, measured Israeli response to border provocations. Instead, the new rules meant that Israel could and would respond with overwhelming force to any provocation.

The most telling account of the conflict came from none other than Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, who noted that he would have never initiated the terror attack that preceded the conflict had he known of the Israeli response beforehand. Indeed, since 2006 Israel’s Lebanon border experienced a quiet not witnessed since the early 1960s.

Former U.S. envoy to the Middle East Martin Indyk should title his next book “The Art of Defamation,” and dedicate it to the Palestinians and the Israeli Left.

On a PBS Frontline documentary about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that aired Tuesday evening, Indyk dropped a stink bomb, and the stench has not yet dissipated.

Reminiscing about times past — 20 years ago, to be precise — Indyk said, “Netanyahu sat next to me when I was ambassador in Israel at the time of [assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin’s funeral. I remember Netanyahu saying to me: ‘Look, look at this. He’s a hero now, but if he had not been assassinated, I would have beaten him in the elections, and then he would have gone down in history as a failed politician.'”

On Wednesday morning, Netanyahu’s office immediately issued a denial, asserting that the conversation Indyk recounted “never happened.”

By Wednesday afternoon, a video of the funeral was circulating on social media, showing Netanyahu, who was head of the opposition at the time, seated next to a number of people, but Indyk was not among them.

His lie now exposed, Indyk instantly took to Twitter to change his story. “The conversation with Bibi took place on Nov 5, 1995 when we sat together at the Knesset ceremony to receive Rabin’s coffin to lie in state,” he tweeted.

For the mainstream media and human rights organizations, human rights violations are news only when they come with a “made in Israel” sticker on them.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has used international aid funds to build prisons and detention centers in the West Bank where torture has become the norm.

Dr. Ammar Dwaik, Director General of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, a Palestinian group, revealed that his group received 782 complaints regarding torture — 168 in the West Bank and 614 in the Gaza Strip.

Both Hamas and the PA each fears that in a free election it could lose some of its power. Why hold an election if you are not sure about the results?

Needed desperately: scrutiny of Palestinian society by international media and human rights groups — beginning with Palestinian prisons. Anyone stepping up?

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are torturing Palestinians. Still.

The two Palestinian governments, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, are both major violators of human rights. Assaults on public freedoms and crackdowns on political rivals are just the first chapters of a very long story.

Most Jews and Israelis see Evangelical support for Israel as an American phenomenon • Dr. Jürgen Bühler, CEO of International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, explains that it is now a worldwide affair • From Africa to South America to Asia, Israel can now count on Evangelical communities all over the globe for sympathy and support.

As we enter 2016, there is good news for Israel. True, the country is facing a wave of terror at home, growing criticism from Europe, and attempts to expand the boycott and de-legitimization of Israel on American campuses. But at the same time there also is growing support for Zionism in non-aligned countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In countries like China, El Salvador, Brazil, the Philippines, Ghana, Nigeria and many other nations a real revolution is taking place, which not many Israelis are aware of it: an “Evangelical Revolution.”

The world has, according to estimates, more than half a billion evangelical Christians. In the past, this current has been linked mainly to the United States, but in the last two decades, the number of Evangelicals in the Southern Hemisphere has jumped dramatically.

For example, the Pew Institute’s research estimates that a fifth of evangelical Christians worldwide live in Asia – approximately 150 million people. This is a fact that the Israeli public ignores. For Israelis, evangelism is an American story, but the reality is completely different. One by one, residents of Asia, including millions in such hostile Islamic countries as Malaysia and Indonesia, adopt the evangelical Christian faith. Not only Asians are embracing evangelical Christianity: 14 percent of the residents of Africa – over 180 million people – and nearly 100 million people in Latin America are evangelical Christians. This revolution is sweeping the entire southern hemisphere.

“We were in a Jewish setting and you can only criticize Israel,” Tenenbom said of the Limmud Conference, “for me, that was the worst.” By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

“Yes, all voices are welcome, so long as they are critical of Israel,” is how Tuvia Tenenbom, journalist, dramatist and best-selling author, described the Limmud Conference in Birmingham, England on Dec. 27 – 31, 2015.

Tenenbom, author of “Catch the Jew,” sat through several days, but not all, of the recent conference. Tenenbom was supposed to be there for the entire conference, he was a speaker, but after being disinvited from the fourth session in which he was supposed to appear, and after enduring scathingly hostile verbal attacks from audience members and former Limmud officials, Tenenbom had enough.

That’s what Tenenbom says.

What Keith Kahn-Harris says is quite different and he’s the organizer and leader of the session from which Tenenbom was dropped, and he’s the one who told Tenenbom he was disinvited.

According to Kahn-Harris, it was his decision alone to drop Tenenbom from the final panel and it was “not an ideological decision from someone ideologically opposed to Tuvia Tenenbom.” Instead, Kahn-Harris said he dropped Tenenbom from the session because he had invited four participants but only really wanted three – and he “left it to the [time of the] conference” to decide whom to cut.

Two thirds of Israeli Arabs say that their Knesset representatives are not advancing their interests.
Last October, as the Palestinians began their latest round of terrorist war against Israel, lawmakers from the Joint Arab List participated in mass anti-Israel rallies in major Arab towns. One such rally in Nazareth in mid-October attracted some 2,500 participants. After it ended, some demonstrators started throwing rocks at Jews.

The next day, MK Ayman Odeh, who heads the Joint Arab List stood on a street in Nazareth and gave a live interview to Channel 2 news.

Just as the camera began filming, Nazareth Mayor Ali Salam drove down the street. Seeing Odeh, Salam stopped his car and began bellowing, “Get out of here! Enough of your interviews. Go ruin things somewhere else!” Odeh tried lamely to get the camera to stop filming. But Salam continued shouting.

“The Middle East is imploding in waves of violence whose impact has reached Israel.

To the north, radical Islamists in Syria linked to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are approaching Israel’s border on the Golan Heights and threatening Jordan as well. At the same time, Iran is sending thousands of rockets with increasingly accurate guidance systems to Hizbullah in Lebanon to again attack Israeli cities.

To the east, Israel faces an array of potential threats from hostile forces that include Iranian Revolutionary Guards, pro-Iranian Shi’ite militias, and radical Islamist terror armies.

To the south, the Islamic State is in Sinai, threatening both Israel and Egypt. At the same time, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza are working feverishly, with Iranian assistance, to rebuild their rocket capabilities to enable renewed attacks on Israel.

Israel must have defensible borders to protect itself against a broad range of current and future threats from radical Islamist forces.”

A compelling video from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, in which that doughty student of war and defender of Israel Colonel Richard Kemp features, inter alia:

The next phase in anti-Israel academic indoctrination is already here – at Hebrew schools across the country.

Eucation is important. What shapes our youth shapes the future, and so we need to craft our school curricula carefully. So it is worth carefully deconstructing the troubling new K-12 curriculum, Reframing Israel, produced by Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman. The curriculum was introduced at the beginning of the school year, and Zimmerman claims that more than 10 Hebrew schools have already adopted it. The stated goal of Reframing Israel is “teaching Jewish kids to think critically about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” But is this the actual impact of the curriculum?
The answer is no.
First, it is crucial to note that the main author and the majority of contributors to Reframing Israel are part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. This includes the writer of the curriculum’s “historical overview of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
This is deeply problematic, because while BDS sells itself as a movement for justice and human rights, its ultimate goal is the elimination of Israel and the violation of Jewish rights to self-determination. According to recent polls, only four percent of American Jews strongly support BDS, and the overwhelming majority see the denial of Israel’s right to exist as racism. Members of the Jewish community are of course free to support anything they choose, but responsible parents and educators should take BDS’s agenda into account when thinking about the goals and biases of Reframing Israel.
At first glance the curriculum appears well-balanced, filled with pride-building activities like learning Hebrew songs and creative exercises aimed at building understanding of both Israeli and Palestinian narratives. The educational method is also well thought out, encouraging students to actively engage with diverse points of view instead of expecting them to “passively accept the information.” These aspects of Reframing Israel could indeed help Jewish kids think critically about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It is therefore disturbing that when digging a little deeper into the material, the message becomes overwhelmingly anti-Israel and pro-BDS. This is particularly apparent in the “Historical Overview” and “Key Terms” sections, which guide the majority of the curriculum.