Israellycool

Former Jerusalem Post executive editor and pioneer in exposing and combating media bias toward Israel, David Bar-Illan, has died at the age of 73.

Sincere condolences to his family. He will be sorely missed.

Former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger is optimistic about the chance of peace between Israel and the PLO Arabs.

“There are ways to get out of the deadlock, and I am actually quite optimistic,” Kissinger said in an interview with Israel Radio.

“Some positions will have to be changed, especially on the Arab side, about the survival of Israel, but I think that we are at a phase where progress will be made.”

You mean like acknowledging Israel’s existence and ceasing all attempts to wipe us off the face of the earth? Simple!

Israellycool is about to move to Moveable Type. I am currently testing for bugs and trying to make the transition as painless as possible.

In case you had not heard, the Sydney Peace Foundation’s decision to award Hanan Ashrawi this year’s Sydney Peace Prize has generated a huge amount of controversy in Australia. Members of Australia’s Jewish community have come out against the choice of Ashrawi, as have prominent politicians and members of the general community, including Prime Minister John Howard, Health Minister Tony Abbott, Sydney Lord Mayor Lucy Turnbull, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Colonel Mike Kelly, a senior adviser to the coalition forces in Iraq. However, New South Wales Premier Bob Carr supports the decision.

What is more worrying than Carr’s decision, though, are the sentiments expressed in this op-ed by Elisabeth Wynhausen.

“Jews are the new Nazis” reads the perfectly stencilled graffiti appearing on walls across Sydney in recent months.

Colin Rubenstein’s response to such an offensive message is surprisingly mild. “That’s rather worrying, isn’t it,” says the Melbourne-based executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council who has led the charge against the decision to award the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize to Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi.

This is the sixth annual peace prize awarded by the Sydney Peace Foundation at the University of Sydney. Previous recipients include former UN commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao. But with the exception of a few media queries about Gusmao’s time as a guerilla, no one took much notice, says foundation director Stuart Rees.

The selection of Ashrawi changed that when representatives of the Jewish community declared her unworthy. And the controversy has remained in the headlines since Sydney Lord Mayor Lucy Turnbull told Rees that the City Council, a sometime sponsor of the peace prize, would boycott the presentation and the lecture given by Ashrawi - a backflip some cynics related to the fact that Turnbull’s husband, Malcolm, is seeking preselection for the seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

In the NSW parliament, after discussing it with Rubenstein, whom he says he talks to all the time, Liberal member for Vaucluse Peter Debnam asked Premier Bob Carr not to present the prize to Ashrawi.

Taking the principled stand, conveniently also the politically astute one, Carr has refused to buckle. “That section of the Jewish community that has chosen to campaign has to think: ‘Are these the best tactics?’” he says.

Now even community leaders who appealed to Carr not to present the prize appear to be repositioning themselves. “The actions taken by some members of the community have blown up in the community’s face,” says barrister Stephen Rothman SC, president of the Jewish Board of Deputies and a moderate. “The approaches that have caused the fuss have predominantly come out of Melbourne.”

Walter Secord, a spokesman for Carr, is more specific. “The international petition against awarding the peace prize originated in Jerusalem. But the second signature on it is from Dr Colin Rubenstein, of Melbourne.”

Rubenstein denies his tactics have backfired. “The tactics are simply to expose Dr Hanan Ashrawi,” he says. “This notion that there’s a division in the community is frankly scaremongering.”

Others point to divisions that run along party lines. While the past three presidents of the board of deputies have been identified with the Labor Party, the Melbourne-based AIJAC, a private think-tank, is identified with the Liberal Party.

Online magazine crikey.com.au reveals that after federal Health Minister Tony Abbott gave a speech at the annual general meeting of the State Zionist Council last week, he joked about the fact that Rubenstein had vetted it, saying: “Did I get anything wrong? Colin, you better correct it so I get the script right.”

Abbott told The Australian that he “asked Colin to have a look at the speech on the Middle East because he’s an expert in a way I’m not”.

Whatever Rubenstein’s influence, however, some suggest that he and his fellow hardliners have overplayed their hand.

“It would have been a one-day wonder,” says former federal Labor minister Barry Cohen. Although opposed to giving Ashrawi the peace prize, Cohen has no doubt that the furore about it has been damaging, creating an “opportunity for all the Israel-haters to come out of the woodwork”.

The whole thing “has spun out of control”, agrees Vic Alhadeff, editor of the Australian Jewish News. “The Jewish community has become the focus of this issue rather than whether or not Dr Ashrawi is a worthy recipient. It looks like the Jewish community is anti-free speech when the reverse is true.”

Australia’s 84,000 Jews make up about 0.5 per cent of the population, or less than one-third of the number of those of Arabic-speaking descent. Only one or two electorates in Australia can be swayed by the Jewish vote. So why do a handful of representatives of a tiny section of the population have so much political influence? To answer money, or political donations, often gets you labelled as anti-Semitic.
Indeed, after a couple of federal Labor backbenchers criticised the Israeli Government, Opposition Leader Simon Crean hastened to reassure the Jewish community that he was a staunch supporter of Israel.

The pressure to toe the party line is even stronger within the Jewish community because it feels perpetually besieged. Some relate this to the high proportion of Holocaust survivors among Australian Jews. In reality, a small, unrepresentative group of hardliners from AIJAC and the Zionist organisations have hijacked most debates, outflanking the moderates and positioning themselves as the voice of the Jewish community in Australia. Dissenters are often stifled.

“We are very quickly disowned by the community if we speak out,” says union organiser Angela Budai ofJews Against the Occupation. “If we don’t support everything the Israeli Government does, we’re labelled as self-hating Jews or anti-Semites.”

The issue of the right of the worldwide Diaspora to dissent from the official line blew up several months ago when Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote to US President George W. Bush asking him to put pressure on Israel over the construction of the so-called security fence - the 8m-high steel and concrete wall enclosing Gaza and the West Bank. Its construction involves a de facto annexation of tens of thousands of hectares of Palestinian land, and The Guardian Weekly reveals that the Israeli military ordered thousands of Palestinians living near the wall to obtain special permits to stay in their homes. Nonetheless, Bronfman was quickly attacked by his own deputy Isi Liebler, formerly of Melbourne, whose brother Mark is a principal of AIJAC.

In this instance, the cudgels were taken up by the Zionist Federation of Australia, which claimed there was a “longstanding understanding within the Jewish community (that) responsible leaders in the Diaspora” did not comment on Israeli security issues.

Those who do so may be subject to a frenzy of emails, letters and phone calls. This brutalising use of free speech to inhibit free speech is a tactic perfected by the Christian Right in the US.
Sources in the Jewish community say this electronic barrage comes from individuals apparently inspired by the Zionist organisations.
Bombarded with messages after she called Israel a rogue state - a remark she says she now regrets - federal Labor backbencher Tanya Plibersek recently launched a book about Israeli politics with the initial declaration that she opposed suicide bombings, believed in Israel’s right to exist and deplored racism. “It seems bizarre to have to say this,” she says. “For me, it’s like starting a speech: ‘I must just put on the record that I am not a pedophile (or) a swindler.’ But I have found, to my dismay, that anyone who criticises Israel is labelled either anti-Semitic or an apologist for suicide bombers.”

Says the Sydney Peace Foundation’s Rees: “(However many times) I try to explain why we made the award to Ashrawi, our critics come back with the same questions: Am I an apologist for Palestine? Am I against the Jewish community? I’ve taken stands on issues before and got some static, but not this onslaught, bullying and intimidation.”

The message of the op-ed is clear - zionist members of the Jewish community are trying to inhibit free speech by intimidating “moderate” critics of Israel, who are invariably leftist, anti-Zionist groups such as Jews Against the Occupation. In other words, a moderate is someone who opposes the existence of the state of Israel, while believing in Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people renders you an extremist against free speech.

Based on these sentiments, I am inclined to call Wynhausen’s views “anti-Semitic”. But those would just be the intimidatory words of a zionist fanatic trying to suppress free speech, wouldn’t they?

As Australia moves to ban Hamas, Totally Jewish reports that a Hamas magazine is being openly distributed in England.

A hate-filled Hamas magazine glorifying suicide bombing is being openly peddled on the Edgware Road and being distributed worldwide from London, TJ can reveal.

The publication, Filisteen Almuslima - Muslim Palestine - which can be obtained from an NW2 PO box, regularly carries full -page posters commemorating “shaheeds”, or martyrs.

The September issue exalts the bomber who carried out the attack on a Jerusalem bus the previous month, killing 23 people, including many children. Praising terrorist Raid Misk as “a noble knight”, it applauds his “great act of martyrdom”.

Each month, the issues contain pictures and praise of suicide bombers, encouragement for children to follow their example, and brutal diatribes against Israel.

But unlike the Australian government, perhaps Britons see Hamas as capable of eliminating the biggest threat to world peace?

This next news story says alot about the cause of the PLO Arabs.

Palestinians on Sunday marked the 86th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration by demanding an apology from Britain for promising “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip marched in the streets and held rallies to condemn the role Britain played in the establishment of Israel.

For decades the Palestinians and the Arab world have been marking the “notorious” anniversary of the Balfour Declaration - a reference to foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s support in 1917 for a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine - by protests and rallies.

Statements issued by different Palestinian factions, organizations, and officials demanded an apology from Britain, saying it is morally and legally responsible for the creation of Israel.

As I have said all along. The PLO Arabs are against Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state. Talk of settlements after 1967 are a smokescreen. They do not want to live in a state alongside Israel. They want to live in a state replacing Israel.

In the wake of the news that almost 60% of Europeans see Israel as posing the biggest threat to world peace, I have a message for Europe. Just look up in the sky….

Arab World News has run an editorial from the Lebanese paper The Daily Star which asks the question Child poverty in the Jewish state: How did it happen?, including a picture of a somber looking child.

Israel’s National Insurance Institute has just completed its annual study on poverty, and the results are startling. The report finds that almost one-third of Israeli children are growing up poor and that the number of under-privileged families has risen by 31,000 in the past year alone. According to the authors of the study, the Jewish state “is on the way to becoming the country with the highest poverty rate in the Western world.”

Could this be a sympathetic piece on Israel? This question is answered clearly in the very next paragraph.

Some will reflexively blame this alarming information on the intifada and note that in both relative and absolute terms, the suffering of Palestinian children is even worse. Such arguments are at least partly correct, but they are also entirely irrelevant. The pertinent issue is how the world’s most prolific recipient of foreign aid (approximately $500 a year for every man, woman and child) has managed to get itself in such a bind.

So according the editorial, what is the reason for child poverty in Israel?

So where is the money that might have kept more Israeli children from going hungry? Much of it has been used on subsidies to ensure that more Israeli children live in colonies on occupied Arab land. Where are the funds that might have provided better schools and more equitable access thereto? They are locked up in a grotesque wall ostensibly designed to protect Jews but actually situated to oppress Arabs. Where are the resources and activism of a state whose founders fancied themselves socialists? They are monopolized by a military establishment that squanders Israeli energy and creativity as thoughtlessly as it tramples Arabs rights and property.

So according to the editorial, arab terrorism is not relevant when analyzing Israel’s dire economic predicament, while Israel’s necessary responses to terrorism are all that’s relevant.

It makes me wonder why many Arabs are so keen to get to paradise when they clearly already live in la-la land.

Well, this quote is actually over a week old.

“I came to offer solidarity with Syria in wake of the recent Israeli attack.”

- Israeli Arab MK Azmi Bashara, after meeting with Syrian President and terrorist sponsor Bashar Assad in Qatar on October 24.

In most other countries, this is called treason.

Yesterday, the PA condemned the US for offering a reward of up to $5 million for people providing information about the attack on American convoy in the Gaza Strip on October 15. And why did they condemn it?

Col. Rashid Abu Shabak, commander of the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security Service in the Gaza Strip, lashed out at the US for making the offer, saying the PA was continuing its investigation into the case. “We strongly condemn this decision,” he said. “This is an insulting announcement because it deals with a people whose mouth does not water in the face of financial temptations.”

Baloney! Their mouths not only water in the face of financial temptations, but also water when spilling the blood of innocent people. And in the case of their leader, AFatRat, his lips also shake uncontrollably.

It is also interesting to note how the PA very easily condemns the US for offering the reward. But try getting them to condemn a terrorist attack on moral grounds.

After months of blogging, I have decided to change my policy of referring to the Arabs who claim to be “Palestinians” as “palestinians”.

Where possible, I shall now refer to them as “PLO Arabs.”

I strongly encourage all other right-wing bloggers to follow suit, since even the word “palestinian”, with no capital letter, somehow aknowledges their claim that they were a distinct national group living in what was then known as Palestine. But the more I learn about the history of the time, the more I realize that the only group referred to as “Palestinians” were the Jews living there at the time.

As Alan Dershowitz (by no means politically right-wing) states in his excellent book The Case for Israel:

..the small and decreasing Arab-Muslim population of the area was also a transient and migratory population, as contrasted with the more stable, if smaller, Jewish population. The myth of a stable and settled Palestinian-Arab-Muslim population that had lived in villages and worked the land for centuries, only to be displaced by the Zionist invaders, is simply inconsistent with the recorded demographic data gathered not by the Jews or Zionists but rather by the local authorities themselves.

Syria is backing away from threats made against Israel by foreign minister Faruq al-Shara.

The Sunday Telegraph quoted Al-Shara as saying Syria has “many cards that we have not played.
Don’t forget there are many Israeli settlements in the Golan. I am not exaggerating, but I am describing things as they might happen.”

Now Information Minister al-Hassan has clarified that the Syrian people, rather than the government, may retaliate.

Al-Hassan said al-Shara had actually told the London paper that Syrian people themselves may attack Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, a strategic border plateau seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War. Thousands of Israelis have since settled in the Golan, which Israel formally annexed in 1981.

“The Syrian people, after being provoked by the Israeli attack on its territory, are asking the government to retaliate,” al-Hassan quoted al-Shara as telling The Sunday Telegraph.

“It is difficult to restrain the people’s reactions, especially as there are Israeli settlements in the Golan within a short distance of Syrian territory.

“A group of people might shell these settlements,” he quoted al-Shara as saying. He did not elaborate.

The Syrian “we-have-no control-over-the-determined-masses” argument..where have I heard something similar?

Faruq al-Shara also told the London-based Sunday Telegraph that Syria could not control its entire border and had failed to stop Palestinians, Iraqis and Syrians crossing to fight United States forces in Iraq.

“They are very determined and many of them dream of seeing an American tank,” he said.

“We are doing everything we can. We have tightened our checkpoints and are turning people back. But the border is long and we cannot cover it all.”

Let them try and attack. Those Israeli missiles have a mind of their own….