What does Trump's recognition of Jerusalem tell Israelis about their place in the world?

President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital has done more than upend 70 years of American policy. It has underlined how far the Jews still are from international acceptance on their own terms, rather than as others would have them. It indicates that this lack of acceptance is still fundamental to how the world relates to the Jews.

There has been a raging argument between archeologists these past 30 years about how much historical truth there is in the Biblical stories. A consensus has slowly emerged that King David was a historical figure and that he lived in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago; the argument still rages around the question if his Jerusalem was a small and insignificant village or perhaps something much grander. Some historians insist the Jews emerged as a real nation with their own culture only once their elite had been exiled to Babylon, where they collected, collated and edited the Biblical stories for the first time: those would be the people who claimed "By the rivers of Babylon/there we sat down/there we wept/as we remembered Zion" – Zion being one of the names of Jerusalem. There is no way to make sense of the New Testament unless one accepts that Jesus was preaching and died in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jews. In the 2^nd century Hadrian ploughed Jerusalem and built a Roman town in its stead precisely because he assumed that would put an end to the pesky Jews.

Yet at no point in the past 2,000 years of history did any significant political power ever see the real city of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital. In one of history's remarkable twists, British forces conquered Jerusalem exactly a century ago this week. At the time a majority of Jerusalemites were Jews, and had been for at least 40 years if not 80, yet the British carefully gerrymandered all municipal elections to ensure there'd never be a Jewish mayor.  During 30 years of British rule there were a number of proposals to partition the land; none of them ever suggested Jewish control over Jerusalem. The partition plan eventually adopted by the UN 70 years ago last week invented an unprecedented departure from the universal principle of sovereignty, the Corpus Separatum, to ensure the Jews – still a majority of the city's population – would not control Jerusalem.  Deliberations on implementing this oddity went on at the UN years after Israel and Jordan had divided the city between them.

After the Six Day War Israel's leaders assumed the Christian world, which the West could still have been considered to be, would refuse to accept Jewish control of the city. They were talking about religion and its expression in Western civilization, not about international laws.

The near-universal rejection of President Trump's recognition of the plain fact that Jerusalem is Israel's capital looks far more sinister than a mere disagreement over the best way to promote a notional peace agreement. This is reinforced by the blatant flimsiness of the reasons for the rejection and their distance from reality. It looks to this Israeli as a continuation of an ancient insistence that the Jews must be what the others say, and that for them to be accepted they must behave as the others demand. It can't be that Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish State, because that would mean that the Jews really have returned to national normality, and that they are a nation and state as all the other 200 states are.

The louder the howls are, the more pervasive the condemnations, the more it seems to many regular, middle of the road Israelis that our place among the nations is still not yet finally accepted nor sincere.

Postscript: the cool response of some American Jews to the recognition is also a worthy theme for analysis. Not today, however.

Mondoweiss: A Vipers' Nest of Antisemites

While not blogging anymore, I still do dabble in some of the old observation of the online pro-and-con Israel scene. Mondoweiss has been of particular interest. Set up about 8 years ago by two American Jews, Philip Wiess and Adam Horowitz, to object to the policies of the Bush Administration, it has transformed over time to one of the main homes of the stridently anti-Israel camp.

By my lights, the Jews have the right (like everyone else) to define themselves and their needs, and they've defined themselves as a nation with the need for a nation-state in Israel. Not all Jews, of course, but a very large majority, and that's enough. Ergo, anyone who rejects the Jews' rights to define themselves and to insist on having a nation-state, is antisemitic (though I'm willing to quibble about the possibility of the Palestinians rejecting Israel without being antisemitic - but only they). Seen that way, Mondoweiss is clearly antisemitic, since its tone and over-arching theme is rejection of Zionism and Israel. The more one looks, however, the worse the picture becomes. Someday, a century or two from now, when someone sits down to write the history of Jew-hatred in the early 21st century, Mondoweiss will be a fine case study, worthy of a full section.

The site offers six or ten posts a day. Weiss writes often, Horowitz rarely (he apparently runs their Twitter account which I don't follow). There's a clutch of other regular writers, and a larger group of people who will appear there occasionally; some of them run their own sites or publish elsewhere and are cross-posted at Mondoweiss. The total number of people who have ever posted there is probably a few hundred. There are many dozens of active commenters. Interestingly, many of those who've offered any information about themselves are retirees; the number of students seems much smaller than you'd expect. There are some Canadians Germans and Aussies, but most commenters seem to be Americans. Ah, and then there are the Israelis: some anarchists and extreme far-left ones, and some mainstream Israelis who try to argue with the locals. The latter tend not to stay too long, since their mission is wholly futile: no-one is in the Mondoweiss community to discuss. Their goal is quite different.

The point of Mondoweiss is to get rid of Israel. The site is of course an avid supporter of BDS. While occasional lip-service is given to the two-state solution as a way to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, any regular reader will understand this is not something to strive for, as it won't resolve the basic injustice of Israel's existence. Moreover, the conceit of the blog is that it is actively promoting its goal, by spreading the truth about Israel, and slowly chipping away at the stranglehold the Zionists have on the media and public discourse. Weiss writes regularly with considerable excitement about how the public discourse is changing; he's always on the outlook for new converts to his positions or anything near them, and to read him you'd think there's a sea-change underway so that soon Israel will lose its support in America, and soon thereafter, shorn of its only ally, it will crumble away. The Israelis, aware of the precariousness of their enterprise, are eternally bolstering their control of the discourse, because without it they're lost; but they're losing it anyway because the only decent way to understand the Middle East is to hate Israel and this decency is already proving itself more powerful than the Zionist tricks to keep it at bay.

You recognize the old-fashioned antisemitic trope about the Jews who pull the strings behind the facade which hides reality. Even as I write this Weiss has posted about the 35-year friendship between Mitt Romney and Binyamin Netanyahu; I don't see how his piece can be read except as part of a conspiracy theory. Truly frightening, those Zionists, surrounding a future potential American president with their agents when he was only in his 20s.

Being against the existence of Israel isn't particularly exceptional. One of the interesting things about Mondoweiss is the tremendous amount of work they invest in their animosity. I happen to think the Saudi regime is ghastly, but I'd never spend hours every day digging up dirt on it. The Mondoweiss people do that, first by avidly seeking any remotely negative story about Israel, then by seeking the ones which aren't true, then by damning anyone who casts doubt with terms such as hasbarists, Ziobots (I assume these are part Zionists and part robots), and of course genocidists. In order to collect all that dirt they've got to pass by the occasional positive story too, but these never get linked to or even alluded to unless to demonstrate how yet another journalist has succumbed to the threat of Zionist censorship. The result is a depiction of reality which has at best a glancing relationship with the real world, but these folks aren't interested in the real world. In their world, Zionists are easily the worst group of humans, they purportedly hate all Palestinians, they enforce the most cruel policies possibly on them, they steal from-, degrade and kill Palestinians, on a daily basis. You read Mondoweiss regularly and the force of hatred towards Zionists becomes overpowering: no normal decent person could have anything but the deepest contempt for such a gang of deceitful violent criminals. As a commentor named "American" recently wrote:

The thing about the zionist is they attack even those who help them. They turned on England, calling it “worse than Hitler’ because England tried to uphold the immigration quotas agreed to. They demonize the UN that created their state for them.
Everyone, without exception, who has ever had anything to do them has regretted it….the US will too in the end. They are vipers who need to be decapitated.

Comments at Mondoweiss are moderated, so that one could have been deleted - but wasn't. And why would it be? It merely states what is obvious to the locals. Any attempt to argue with them will either be blocked by the same moderators, or derisively laughed off the screen. If a sane commenter has made a reasonable point which gets past the moderators, the locals will dig up a dozen spurious links to disprove it: the value of links being not their veracity, or the trustworthiness of their sources, but their usefulness to the party line. Links which are not useful - you guessed it: they're written off as hasbara lies.

Interestingly, the Mondoweiss community not only has no interest in the lives of real Israelis, it also has no interest in the lives of real Palestinians. Their point is to hate Israel and damn it, no matter what; the possibility that there are Palestinians who live alongside Israelis, interact with them, and even could imagine living with them in peace, is a thought never contemplated. I have Palestinian staff members, colleagues and friends; none of them could remotely fit into the Mondoweiss world. The methodology also has the odd result that according to Mondoweiss, Israelis and Palestinians are all boring cardboard figures, with none of the complexities, complications, shades of grey, frustrations and successes of real people. The very parts of the human story which make it worth following are all dropped, to be replaced by detestation (towards Israelis) and patronizing pity (towards Palestinians).

I'll complete this very partial list of malicious methodology with two links from the Resources page of the website, the part where the editors have collected the basics about their topic. Obviously, they've got a paragraph about the so-called Dalet Plan, which in the mythology of Israel's enemies was the 1948 plan to expel the Palestinians, and which serious scholarship has long since demonstrated was a limited tactical military move formulated in March 1948 in response to developments in an ongoing war which the Arabs had launched:

Khalidi, Walid, "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies p14.
Drafted by members of the Haganah under the guidance of David Ben-Gurion, and carried out by Israeli para-military groups during 1947-8, Plan Dalet is a military blueprint for the Palestinian Nakba. The document emphasizes the need to secure territory both inside and outside of the 1947 Partition Plan, and provides detailed instructions for the forcible transfer of the Palestinian population, establishing the conditions for a Jewish national state.

You'd expect a resource section explaining a basic Israeli document to link, you know, to an Israeli document, but if you follow the link behind that explanation you'll reach an Arab website with an English version; I searched in vain for anything at all about the Dalet Plan, dishonest or honest.

Then there's an item on their list of resources called "Creating 'unrecognized' villages and home demolitions":

Planning and Building Law 1965, 5725—1965." Knesset 14 July 1965.
The 1965 Planning and Building Law is a set of codes, including legal restrictions to Palestinians on building permits, and land use. The law allows for the Israeli government to transfer privately owned Palestinian land to the state, and requires any unpermitted building to be demolished at the owners’ expense.   All current home demolitions in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories are carried out under the tenets of this law.

This paragraph actually does have a link to an (English version) of an Israeli law, so it looks convincing. Unless you actually look at the law, as I did. It's 67 pages long, and never remotely says what Mondoweiss says it does. As a matter of fact, the very word Palestinian never appears, nor does the word Arab, nor Minority (terms the sneaky Israeli legislators might have used to hide their true intentions). The word Palestine appears only in the footnotes, citing some British laws from before 1948.

Summary: There may be tens of thousands of loyal Mondoweiss readers - an unimportant demographic, but an interesting sociological and historical group. There is no possibility for discourse between them and us, only invective from their side, and head-shaking from ours. Yet they fit comfortably into ancient traditions of Jew-hatred, and thus their potential significance shouldn't be shrugged off. It's important to keep in mind that the free and pluralistic society of the West also harbors such ugly forms of thought.

Antisemitism among British Academics

Eve Garrard, writing on Normblog, says it's time for union members to recognize their passivity equals complicity with the antisemitism of their union's leadership. The trigger of her piece is the attempt by the UCU to redefine antisemitism so that their actions aren't it; by the current definitions, they certainly are.

Colonel Kemp and the Antisemitic Scots

Here's a fine speech by Colonel Richard Kemp against the slanderers of Israel, which starts from an unusual point of departure, but then turns to the depressing intensity of the hate regularly spewed at Israel. Then, as if on cue, here's an example he doesn't give: public libraries in Scotland are banning books by Israelis.

In a recent discussion I had we were looking at antisemitism in Western civilization. I posited that hatred of the Jews is hardwired into it - this doesn't mean that all westerners are Jew-haters, rather that the potential is there and needs to be fought off. One of the other discussants asked if I was also saying that hatred of Jews is in the DNA of Western civilization, and it occurred to me that the two metaphors are actually instructive. DNA can't be changed, at least in the present stage of technology, so saying that antisemitism is in the DNA of Western civilization would mean there's no hope for change, but also no responsibility to try. DNA is what we're born with, and we can't choose it or control it. Hard wiring, on the other hand, can be changed by the engineers, at the very least, so the moral requirement is there: will people make the effort to re-engineer the wiring, or won't they? Because if they won't, that's their decision. Some people and societies are quite advanced in re-wiring. Lot's of folks, in Scotland and elsewhere, haven't even begun.

Thwarting Sanctions against Iran

The Iranians just had a big shindig about selling oil:

The largest contingent came from China, which has an extensive record of dealings with Iran and indifference to sanctions. So does U.S. ally Germany, and more than 40 German companies were in Tehran this week. Austrian companies were also well-represented, and the Spanish government sent an official delegation. Also present were India's Essar Group and Norway's Statoil, two firms that previously announced they were cutting ties with Iran—and thereby earned recognition from U.S. officials as examples of successful international pressure. So much for that.

 Norway. Might that be this Norway? (h/t Barry M)

Antisemitism is Invisible

The Economist has a column on the spate of celebrities who have recently been caught making antisemitic comments. The columnist makes no pretense the comments weren't antisemitic, and of course has no patience for their content, nor any empathy for the people who made them. However, he (she? You never know with the Economist) then goes looking for explanations, mostly economic explanations, for the stupid utterances of some cultural celebrities, and for the swift responses of their employers who fire them. It's an interesting column, and there's no particular reason to argue with any of what it says.

I do have a problem with what it doesn't say. Or rather, with the question it doesn't pose, and then the answer it doesn't give.The un-posed question is of course, why are there so many people with the need to make antisemitic statements? And the answer which is not investigated has to do with the possibility that they're not only spoiled brats, these celebrities, they also truly don't like Jews.

I'm not seeing antisemites under every rock. On the contrary, the swiftness with which these ranters get punished is admirable, sometimes even too swift - after all, in a democracy one should be allowed to say ugly things. Yet I can't help but notice that the Economist can't entertain the concept that hatred of Jews can be a very real thing, an extremely deep-seated urge.

In the long run, this inability to imagine authentic hatred of Jews is a problem.

Ernest Sternberg: Purifying the World

Today has been an offline day for me. However, I did find time to have a peek at a link suggested by Y.Ben David, who mentioned an article by Ernest Sternberg titled "Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For". I haven't yet had time to read it carefully, but at first glance Sternberg may have succeeded in tying together the many disparate strands of general nastiness that emanate these days from various parts of what we rather incorrectly call the "far Left". Whether they're Left or not, what they've got in common is a yearning for a pure, post-history world. Predictably, the two main enemies are the United States and Israel (previously known as the Big Satan and the Little Satan, if you remember your Iranian mythology).

There's a short online Sternberg lecture on the topic here.

Interestingly, Sternberg is a professor of geography, or urban planning, or something like that. You may remember that I wrote about his German predecessors of a century ago, just a few days ago. Apparently, some academic disciplines eventually redeem themselves totally.

Antisemitism in the UK, 2011

Normblog offers a description and demonstration of the Azzajew phenomenon.

One Toby Green - whom non-Brits have never heard of - has resigned from the Green Party - something else the non-Brits didn't know existed. His reason? The party has been taken over by Trotskyite antisemites. (Some of them commented on his post). Some of his explanation is too detailed and insider-ish for the rest of us to follow, but the general outlines are very clear, very convincing, and rather worrying. They can't do anything to Israel or the majority of Jews worldwide who support it, but rising antisemitism can't be a good thing.

"To Jerusalem we are heading, martyrs in the millions"

Mondoweiss has a story no-one else seems to be telling: the masses in Cairo have been yelling their willingness to die so as to liberate Jerusalem.

This may not be true. Mondowiess isn't scrupulously honest, after all, and that would explain why no sane media outlet has been carrying the story. But since it appears to be based on a YouTube film, it's possible Mondoweiss is telling the truth, and it's all the rest of the media which is lying. It wouldn't be the first time ever.

History has seen dramatic and exciting revolutions before. It has seen masses eager to rid the world of the Jews, too. There have even been cases when the two were juxtaposed. Offhand, however, I can't think of any case where the two phenomenon came together and there was a good ending to the story.

Qaradawi is Back (Yawn)

Yusuf al-Qaradawi has returned to Egypt from exile, and given the main speech at the large rally in a-Tahrir Square in Cairo today. If you're willing to accept the top media outlets as your guides to what's happening in the world, this isn't much of an event. Here's the BBC, one of the topmost media outlets anywhere:

Correspondents say there is a festive atmosphere, with a military band playing and people waving flags.
Leading Friday prayers at the square, a senior cleric called on Arab leaders to listen to their people...
Television pictures showed Tahrir Square full of people. People sang songs and chanted: "The army and people are united!"
Influential Egyptian Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi said the Arab world had changed and leaders should listen to their people.
He also called for the release of all political prisoners and for Egypt's new military leaders to form a new government.
"I call on the Egyptian army to liberate us from the government that Mubarak formed," Mr Qaradawi said.

That's it. The rest of the report is regurgitated verbiage from previous reports, and a very brief quotation from one of the demonstrators about how things need to get better.
CNN is another important and influential media organ. Here's their report, which is marginally better than that of the BBC:

Waving flags and beating drums, thousands gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square on Friday for a "Day of Victory" rally to celebrate the one-week anniversary of the ouster of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
In what was a symbol of the dramatic change taking hold across the society, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Muslim cleric banned from entering the country during the Mubarak years, delivered the Friday sermon to the throng and the startling appearance was broadcast on state television.
"O Egyptians, Coptic Christians and Muslims, this is your day, all of you. January 25 was your revolution," said Qaradawi, who has a program called "Shariah and Life" on the Al-Jazeera television network.
Qaradawi -- who returned to his Egyptian homeland on Thursday -- said the "youth of the revolution has lifted the head of this country and made us proud once again."
"They are the new partisans of God. These are the young people of Egypt. The revolution is not over yet. The revolution just began. We need to rebuild Egypt. Be aware of those who want to take it away from you," he said.
Qaradawi insisted that the money "stolen" by the Mubarak regime be returned to the Egyptian people and praised the "martyrs" who died in the upheaval and for the sake of the religion.

The New York Times, being a daily not a blog, hasn't reported on the matter yet; the Guardian has put up some pictures, including one that shows Qaradawi at the rally.

You'd expect top-notch news organizations to have someone in their editorial rooms who know something. Even if not, however, there's always Google, which might send one to this informative page about Qaradawi, as posted by the respectable Investigative Project on Terrorism. He has been banned from entering the United States, for example, and in the past two years alone he has publicly said all sorts of unsavory things. (For some reason I'm not managing to cut and paste, but you ought to read the whole thing anyway.)


Years ago I accepted that the media almost never gets its reports about Israel right. It's becoming increasingly clear that they have no particular interest in getting Egypt right, either, not the parts they might easily check, such as who this Qaradawi fellow is, not the parts that cry out to be explained, such as why he, of all possible religious people in Egypt is the main speaker at the event, and not the slightly deeper parts of the story, such as what cultural messages was he choosing when he chose those particular words; what his audience heard him say, rather than what CNN heard him say.

Meanwhile, over at the Economist, they've got this sentence in their Leader on the Arab uprisings, which explains why in spite of some obvious handicaps, liberal democracy may be about to bloom:

Society is suffused by contempt for the West and hatred of Israel.

Israel? Not the Jews, by any means? The hatred is merely of Israel? How does the Economist know this?

• Called on Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons "to terrorize their enemies."
• Called jihad an Islamic moral duty and said Muslims are permitted to kill Israeli women because they serve in the army.
• Affirmed his support for suicide bombings. "I supported martyrdom operations," he said, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). "This is a necessary thing, as I told them in London. Give the Palestinians tanks, airplanes, and missiles, and they won't carry out martyrdom operations. They are forced to turn themselves into human bombs, in order to defend their land, their honor, and their homeland."
• Called the Holocaust a divine punishment of Jews "for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers."
• Prayed for the opportunity to kill a Jew before his death. "The only thing that I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah's enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah."

This week, a Brotherhood official was among eight people named to a panel charged with recommending changes to Egypt's suspended constitution. As the IPT has noted, the Brotherhood's bylaws continue to call for it "to establish Allah's law in the land by achieving the spiritual goals of Islam and the true religion." That includes "the need to work on establishing the Islamic State, which seeks to effectively implement the provisions of Islam and its teachings."
Der Spiegel reports that Qaradawi envisions a "United Muslim Nations" as a contemporary form of the caliphate. In its statement on the Revolution, the International Union of Muslim Scholars advocated something much broader. It called for "all components of the Egyptian people, Muslims and Copts, alike to stand as one to reach a consultative democratic government which represents the Egyptian people and its values and principles."
Images of a triumphant Qaradawi in leading prayer at the spot that triggered Egypt's revolution might trigger memories of Ayatollah Khomeini's return to Iran months after the Shah fled. Though analysts at the time did not anticipate him seizing power, the Islamic Republic was born just two months later.
Analysts today say differences in Egypt's uprising and in the Brotherhood's following make a repeat unlikely. Qaradawi's following is nowhere near as deep or committed as was Khomeini's, said Ian Johnson, author of A Mosque in Munich, But his presence in Cairo complicates Egypt's fledgling move toward democracy. "Qaradawi has been a troubling specter in global Islam for the past couple of decades," Johnson said in an email. "He has taken some reformist positions but also advocates extremist, anti-democratic views. His injecting himself into the fragile Egyptian revolution cannot be helpful to that process."
In an interview on National Public Radio, Stanford University director of Iranian studies Abbas Milani also said the Brotherhood has no charismatic leader of Khomeini's stature. But he remained skeptical of the organization's claims that it is not interested in making Egypt's revolution into an Islamic one.
"Do you believe them?" asked Steve Inskeep. "No, I don't, to be honest with you," Milani said. "I think Muslim Brotherhood has an established record of wanting to create a government based on Sharia."

Read More: Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Hosni Mubarak, Ayatollah Khomeini, Der Spiegel

Reader comments on this item

who calls him a moderate

Submitted by lord garth, Feb 17, 2011 17:14

The article said some call him a moderate.
This should be more specific. I have found that religious scholar John Esposito and CAIR national director Nihad Awad have called him moderate. I suppose there are others.

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Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2603/qaradawi-ominous-return-to-egypt

This week, a Brotherhood official was among eight people named to a panel charged with recommending changes to Egypt's suspended constitution. As the IPT has noted, the Brotherhood's bylaws continue to call for it "to establish Allah's law in the land by achieving the spiritual goals of Islam and the true religion." That includes "the need to work on establishing the Islamic State,

Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2603/qaradawi-ominous-return-to-egyptPrayed for the opportunity to kill a Jew before his death. "The only thing that I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah's enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah."

Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2603/qaradawi-ominous-return-to-egypt

Called on Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons "to terrorize their enemies."

Called jihad an Islamic moral duty and said Muslims are permitted to kill Israeli women because they serve in the army.

Affirmed his support for suicide bombings. "I supported martyrdom operations," he said, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). "This is a necessary thing, as I told them in London. Give the Palestinians tanks, airplanes, and missiles, and they won't carry out martyrdom operations. They are forced to turn themselves into human bombs, in order to defend their land, their honor, and their homeland."

Called the Holocaust a divine punishment of Jews "for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers."

Prayed for the opportunity to kill a Jew before his death. "The only thing that I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah's enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah

Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2603/qaradawi-ominous-return-to-egypt

Called on Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons "to terrorize their enemies."

Called jihad an Islamic moral duty and said Muslims are permitted to kill Israeli women because they serve in the army.

Affirmed his support for suicide bombings. "I supported martyrdom operations," he said, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). "This is a necessary thing, as I told them in London. Give the Palestinians tanks, airplanes, and missiles, and they won't carry out martyrdom operations. They are forced to turn themselves into human bombs, in order to defend their land, their honor, and their homeland."

Called the Holocaust a divine punishment of Jews "for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers."

Prayed for the opportunity to kill a Jew before his death. "The only thing that I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah's enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah

Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2603/qaradawi-ominous-return-to-egypt

Tariq Ramadan is a Liar

Barry Rubin carefully read Tariq Ramadan's op-ed about how benign the Muslim Brotherhood is (I wrote about this yesterday here), and says it's full of lies. Given Ramadan's intellectual stature, there's no chance he didn't know this.

Unless you can be intelligent, extremely well educated and an important public intellectual, and still not know when you're blatantly lying. Sadly, history teaches you actually can. Easily.

Mubarak is an American-Israeli Pawn (John Bradley)

A few hours ago Channel One of the Israeli television interrupted its program to show us a live speech of Barack Obama. We were told he was about to confirm the rumours that Egyptian  President Mubarak was resigning. Obama didn't quite say that, but given the framing, he did seem to be sayig something like it, talking about history happening before our eyes as the Egyptian people demands freedom, or something like that.

An hour or two later Mubarak announced he wasn't resigning.

The possibility that Egypt may have an antisemitic government sometime soon is unsettling. I'm beginning to fear, however, that the Americans have an inept government, quite over its head in international matters. To be honest, that frightens me more.

Anyway, we can still hope the Egyptian drama will end with a liberal democracy.

For the past hour or so I've been listening to Al-Jazeera in English. They're dumbfounded by the trun of events. OK, lots of people are. A few munites ago, however, they interviewed a fellow named John Bradly, who is the author of Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution. He had a clear explanation: the Americans and the Israelis are not willing to allow Mubarak, their puppet, to step down. He said this twice, so it wasn't a slip of tongue. He also expressed his outrage against the Israelis and the Americans for their behavior, noting that in terms of the numbers of participants in the demonstrations, the current Egyptian revolution stands next to the revolutions in Russia in 1917 and Iran in 1979, and how dare the Israelis and Americans try to stop history.

I haven't made up my mind if Bradley is barking mad, or right on the nail, or both. Probably both.

Jew Hatred in Egypt, Europe, and America

I continue not to know where Egypt is headed, just as President Obama and probably President Mubarak don't know. So I'm in fine company.

There's the story of Wael Ghonim, until this week an anonymous young man who has been catapulted to the front ranks of the revolution, if a revolution it is. History can do that sometimes to people: they get their 15 minutes of fame and are never heard of again, or they get their 15 minutes and stay at center stage for the rest of their lives and beyond. It's hard to know. Should Mr. Ghonim turn out to be representative of the revolution, the world may well end up a better place - or at least it would be plausible to hope. (The funny thing is that I am separated from this fellow by only 2, or at most 3, degrees of separation.)

On the other hand, John Rosenthal has been looking at pictures from A-Tahrir square, including pictures culled from mainstream Western media outlets, and is troubled by the antisemitic imagery which seems quite common there. (There's more here). We outsiders have no real way of knowing how representative this is, and how significant. What we can know is that the Western media is displaying some of these images with no comment, and seems to be editing out the more blatant ones, also without reporting that they're there. It's troubling.

Judith Miller is reporting from the Herzliya conference, day by day. It's quite interesting, and depressing: apparently the Israeli establishment really is worried by the potential for mischief in Egypt. On the other hand, as Jonathan Spyer pointed out so convincingly (see my review here), the type of Israelis who convene at such conferences are not particularly representative.

Finally, just to tie together the troubling news from Egypt with the troubling news from Europe (and America), here's Tariq Ramadan pontificating on the Muslim Brotherhood at the New York Times. Of course Ramadan is a scion of the Brotherhood, so to speak, but he's also a wildly popular European intellectual; the top of polite society, you might say.

The Muslim Brothers began in the 1930s as a legalist, anti-colonialist and nonviolent movement that claimed legitimacy for armed resistance in Palestine against Zionist expansionism during the period before World War II. The writings from between 1930 and 1945 of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Brotherhood, show that he opposed colonialism and strongly criticized the fascist governments in Germany and Italy. He rejected use of violence in Egypt, even though he considered it legitimate in Palestine, in resistance to the Zionist Stern and Irgun terror gangs. He believed that the British parliamentary model represented the kind closest to Islamic principles.

Pretty grim, isn't it.  The Zionist expansionism he so glibly castigates as being a worthy target of violence were, at the time, the small numbers of European Jews who were managing to escape, many of them destitute, as the Nazi boot ground their necks ever harder, and antisemites throughout the continent cheered them on and tried to emulate them, except in places like Poland where the local anti-Jewish policies were worse at that moment than in Germany. This was obvious at the time, and should be quite common knowledge since then, if there was ever any meaning to the refrain "never again". Yet Ramadan puts it on the pages of the New York times, and the editors encourage him to do so, as if history never happened.

Antisemitism in Britain

Who knew? It turns out that the English journalist Nick Cohen, isn't actually Jewish. Apparently the last time there was a Jew in his family it was his grandfather, and he wasn't interested. In spite of that, Nick says that the growing antisemitism in Britain is making a Jew of him:

Today the old certainties have gone because there are two far-right movements: the white neo-Nazi parties that the Left still opposes; and the clerical fascists of radical Islam which, extraordinarily, the modern Left succours and indulges. I am not only talking about Ken Livingstone, George Galloway and their gruesome accomplices in the intelligentsia. Wider liberal society is almost as complicit. It does not applaud the Islamist far Right, but it will not condemn it either. From the broadcasters, through the liberal press, the Civil Service, the Metropolitan Police, the bench of bishops and the judiciary, antisemitism is no longer an unthinkable mental deformation. As long as the conspiracy theories of the counter-enlightenment come from ideologues with dark rather than white skins, nominally liberal men and women will not speak out.
Fight back and you become a Jew, whether you are or not. [...]

I would no longer protest that I wasn’t Jewish, and I don’t think Lawson should either. It is cowardly to stammer that you are not a Jew because you concede the racist’s main point — that there is something suspect about being Jewish — as you do it.
In any case, my experience of left-wing antisemitism has changed the way I think and made me, if you like, more Jewish.

I recommend reading the whole thing. Unless you're having a great day and don't want to be depressed, that is. In that case don't read it.

If British Jewry interests you, on the other hand, the JCPA has a new survey about them. Not surprisingly, the only large group among them which is really thriving are the Haredi. Or actually, until recently this would have been very surprising, but these days observers of Jews have got to admit that the Haredi are on a roll, wherever they are.

Blaming the Jews for Murder

The Iranians, Hisballah, and some Egyptians are all blaming the Jews for the mass murder of Copts in Alexandria. They seem all to believe it, too. Antisemites generally believe their lies; never underestimate them.

Jesus, the First Aryan Palestinian

The Nazis had a problem with Jesus. Though their movement was more pagan than Christian, many of the Germans it wished to attract were believing Christians, not to mention the many Christian cultural roots that fed into Nazism, most notably in some of its Jew hatred. Unsurprisingly, therefore, some Nazi apologists claimed that Jesus had been a blond Aryan, persecuted by the Jews of his day just as modern Germans were suffering from Jewish machinations.

That was then. The Nazis, fortunately, are gone. Yet the motivation to identify with Jesus even while hating the Jews and denying Jewish history is very much alive. So on this December 24th, as the Christians of the world prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, Palestine Media Watch documents how the Palestinians are busy turning Jesus into the earliest Palestinian shahid.

I wrote about a soft version of this trend, much acclaimed in Western literary circles, here.

Anyway, here's wishing a good Christmas to all my Christian readers.

Hatred and Destruction Can be Erotic

It's enough to skim over the stories about the Swedish police investigation against Julian Assange and his sexual antics to see that his aura of heroic campaigner for truth and justice serves as a potent aphrodisiac for some women who think that's what he is. It seems reasonable that women who think he's a megalomaniac hater of America may be less attracted to him.

It's not only Julian, however. Here's Annie, an impressionable woman who writes at Mondoweiss, rhapsodizing over Omar Barghouti, the Israeli Arab graduate student at Tel Aviv University who is a leading figure in the attempt to boycott Israeli universities now and dismantle Israel later on.

I first heard Omar speak at the End the Occupation Conference in Chicago last year. I sat in the very first row with Medea, Nancy and Ann. Spellbound, directly in front of the podium. Omar had just arrived from Palestine and informed us he hadn't slept. Helllooo, what difference did that make? This man who moves mountains, does he ever sleep? I simply do not have the skills to express my gratitude for the life he has blown into this honorable movement for freedom and equality in Palestine/Israel. This beautiful man is a Giant and the honor it gives me to announce he has offered to judge our entries, your entries...along with the amazing Susan Abulhawa and the rest out our outstanding panel of judges, excites me no end.

Should I mention Omar has an incredible biting dry wit? Of course you already know that if you've ever met him.

Can you feel the excitement? Is it conceivable there's any hypothetical set of facts, say, that would make Annie rethink her positions? She's not engaging in thoughtful analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She's operating on a totally different plane of existence, where activism towards abolishing the national state of the Jews engenders sexual appeal.

Destroying Israel as sexual foreplay.

Decision Makers Know Better

One of the interesting aspects about the Wikileaks revelations is how it demonstrates that in many areas, decision makers are a lot better informed than mere readers of newspapers (or blogs). Given how clueless much of the media and commentariat often is, this is mildly reassuring. Here are some random examples:

Al Jazeera isn't, actually, independent at all. It spouts what the Qataris want it to spout.

Hezbollah has an Iranian-built fiber-optic communications network of its own, that makes it even more independent of the rest of Lebanon than previously published. Lots of the player in the area don't like this.

The Americans operate spy planes over Lebanon. The British aren't happy about this, but don't get asked. Keep this in mind the next time you (inevitably) read about how pernicious the Israelis are for flying over Lebanon to keep updated.

Christopher Hitchens, meanwhile, explains how destructive Julian Assange is. Evelyn Gordon, following Henry Kissinger, explains that what decision makers know can be irrelevant, when their paradigm for understanding it is all wrong (h/t Barry). And an Egyptian official demonstrates that it's possible to blame the Jews (Israelis, in this case), when no conceivable facts exist to support one's silliness. Dutch officials will pay for the most repulsive anti-Israeli lies, if they're cloaked with some politically correct bauble-words.

Finally, an American tourist in Israel noticed an enormous opportunity the Israelis were inexplicably missing, so he set about rectifying, thereby probably becoming much richer, but also demonstrating that much of the chatter about and around Israel is less important than facts on the ground, so to speak (really, on the ground).

Cyber-harvest

Stuff I found here and there:

The British are moving towards ridding themselves of the idiotic law which means Israeli politicians can't travel to London. Apparently the Brits don't enjoy being out of the loop.

Someone in the Jerusalem municipality approved another stage in the process of building hundreds of apartments in East Jerusalem. In this case, Pisgat Zeev. Even according to the Geneva Initiative maps, they'll be built inside the Israeli line. So naturally, the usual suspects are all agog.

The Education Ministry would like to encourage young Arab Israelis to spend a year or two doing civil service in their communities at the age their Jewish counterparts are in the military. So they offered a higher salary to those of them who then turn to teaching. There's a public uproar, and the ministry may have to retract its decision: the Arab leadership sees this as a conspiracy against Israel's Arabs. I spoof you not.

The Turks are convinced the Wikileaks leak is an Israeli conspiracy. How else to explain that Israel isn't hurting, while the Turks are? (Hint: Israeli politicians tell American diplomats the same things they say in public).

Anne Herzberg tells how the ICC isn't good for Israel. At the bottom of her article you'll find a link to a valuable report on Lawfare. 80 pages, alas, but apparently important.

Norman has dug up an article from 1976 about the antisemitism of the Left. As the Good Book says, there's nothing new under the sun. Henryk Broder wrote a fine book about this in the mid-1980s, Der ewige Antisemit, which means The Eternal Antisemite. Alas, it doesn't seem to be in English, but if you're not Germanically-challenged, I recommend. The phenomenon did not start because of those apartments in Pisgat Zeev.

Spin, Wikileaks, Propaganda

Omri Ceren has been doing a spot of googling. His point of departure is the section of the new Wikileaks revelations that the Saudis and other Arab regimes have all along been beseeching the Americans to bomb Iran's nuclear capacity. Taking that documented fact, he then goes back to see what the various pundits have been saying about the matter all along. Predictably, they were reporting on an alternate universe, one in which the Saudis and others care deeply about the Palestinians, and not so much abut the Iranians.

Andrew Sullivan, in a sign of the changing times, never misses a beat: oops! The Saudis et al have been as strident as the Israelis in their calls for an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities? Well, remember, they're only Sunni Arab autocrats -  the implication, you understand, being that they're not really to be taken seriously if you're a moral person. Of course, the case can be made that Abu Mazen, Salam Fayyad, and all of the Hamas leadership are also Sunni Arab autocrats, but I rather think Andrew wouldn't use the term in their case.

Look, we all have our agendas; some of us even admit them openly (me, I'm a Zionist, and also mostly pro-American; Julian Assange of Wikileaks is anti-American and thinks he's God). Some of us try to write mostly about things we know about. Others: less so (Andrew knows none of the languages, and has no access to decision makers or any relevant players; he lives off website links). And then there are the professional propagandists, the people who have to know they're carefully tailoring their descriptions of reality so as to create a public opinion that will agree with their agenda. The BBC, for example: Robin Shepherd documents - once again, and again, and again - that their editorial decisions cannot possibly be portrayed as an honest attempt to inform the public, and can only be understood as conscious propaganda.

Or is it conscious? Read IsraelNurse's excellent analysis of the Guardian's Harriet Sherwood's first six months in Israel. Just look at the list of places she has reported from, almost all of them Palestinian (she's the correspondent to Israel but she never reports from Israel). On the one hand, she can't possibly be doing the traveling she's doing while telling herself she's reporting on Israel; there's no way she can be as biased as she is without knowing that's what she is. Yet is this truly so? It's a question I've been pondering for decades, and have never quite convinced myself either way: when antisemites frame reality to reinforce their animosities, do they do so in bad faith (i.e do they know they're lying or framing in a deceitful manner), or are they so carried away by their detestations that they lose track, and really begin to believe in their own sincerity? This is not an easy question to answer.