WHAT IF ISLAMISTS OVERTHREW THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT?

By Howard Rotberg

Dear me, I worry so much about the future of our freedoms in the West, as so many begin to “submit” to the values and demands of Radical Islam, or what is called “Islamism”.

The other day, I began to worry what would happen if the Islamists took over the American government and placed one of their own in the White House.

I started to think about the agenda that an Islamist President would fulfill.   Here are some of my thoughts:

1. He would make it clear that the American Constitution and the history of American freedoms were no more exemplary than the history of Islam.   He would argue that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.   Instead, he would say, they overlap and share common principles.  He would be clear in his moral equivalence between America and the totalitarian Islamic regimes.   He might go so far as to say the “common principles” were justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. And if he got away with comparing the American Justice system and the tolerance of most Americans with the totalitarian justice systems of the Islamic states and with comparing American tolerance to the intolerance of peoples who riot and kill if they think political cartoons are offensive, then he would go further: He would assure everyone that it is Islam that has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibility of religious tolerance and racial equality.   If the American people were too stupid to know about the persecution of Christians and Jews in Muslim countries (including the often-ignored fact of nearly a million Jews being expelled from Arab countries in the ‘40s and ‘50s), then that would just make his task all the easier.
2. He would as quickly as possible give out important awards, like the Medal of Freedom to those complicit with the goals of Radical Islam, who head NGOs and United Nations bodies that support the notion that the Israelis are the new Nazis and the Palestinians are the new Jews.   And he would announce such awards on a date of symbolic significance to the Jews – Tisha B’Av, the historic day of mourning for the loss of the Jewish temples and the occurrence of other national tragedies, so that the Jews knew that he was putting them in their place, for the sooner they got the message, the better.
3. He would make a quick symbolic snub to Eastern Europe so as to emphasize that the quid pro quo for Russian support of Islamists (outside the former U.S.S.R only of course) would be the removal of defensive missiles from Poland.   He would drive home the point by not informing the Poles very much ahead of the announcement and would make the announcement on September 17, 2009, which everyone in Central Europe knew was the 60th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, followed by the annexation of eastern Poland to the USSR. This would be another important symbolic act to show how in the future the world would be divided between Radical Islam, Russia and China.

4.     To further the goals of Radical Islam, the U.S. must be dramatically weakened from the inside, including its once strong and proud economy.  He would have to create unheard of budget deficits.  He would make a budget that spends more than any other in history, creates the largest deficits in history and imposes the largest tax increases in history.  He would spend over a trillion dollars more each year than he took in, and would project a cumulative deficit within ten years of $14.29 trillion – more than the country’s GNP.  That way, the U.S. would end up being owned by China and other foreign lenders and the American people would be so preoccupied with their economic woes, there would be little regard paid to the increasing rate of Islamification of its culture and freedoms.

5.     Any captured terrorists would be given civilian trials, with the same constitutional rights as American citizens, rather than giving them military trials like enemy soldiers receive. This would show that Islamic terrorists are really the same as American citizens and would make it difficult to secure convictions.  It would also make it difficult to keep anti-terrorist measures secret, because they would be subject to pre-trial discovery of civilian trials.

6.     He would change many of the terms that are meant to suggest American values are superior to Islamic values.  He would downplay any sense that America is at war with radical Islam.  In fact, he would avoid using the term "Global War on Terror" [GWOT] and instead use "Overseas Contingency Operation.”

7.     He would refer to any terrorists that kill dozens of Americans on American soil not as “terrorists” or “murderers” or “agents of Islamism” but as mere “extremists” – making such killers no more evil than, say, right-wing Republicans.   He would not do anything to stop Islamists infiltrating the American military.

8.     He would assure Americans that acts of terrorism that obviously should be caught by American authorities, were in fact business as usual, and if he was on vacation during such incidents, he would not bother to return to work.  That would show that not only were the terrorists winning but that was entirely normal.

9.     He would make it clear that Iran should be able to acquire nuclear weapons, which its leaders have been threatening to use against Israel since Rafsanjani in the late ‘90s.   He would promise to “engage” and talk and talk, even if the Iranians heaped scorn on his tactics and even when military intelligence made it clear that the nuclear program was absolutely for military and not just civilian purposes.  

10.  He would make it clear that Israel would be on its own (at least up until an Iranian first strike nuclear attack killed an estimated 200,000 Israelis) and he would delay the delivery of “bunker busting” bombs promised to be sold to Israel.  He would also delay delivery of helicopters and other military hardware so as to pressure Israel to do nothing in the face of a threatened nuclear war.

11.  He would make Israel the object of his demands, and demand nothing from Arab countries or the Palestinians.  He would try to stop all Israeli settlement even within established cities, if they were on “disputed” lands.    He would thus create a situation where the Palestinians had no interest in compromise, since all demands were only made on the Israelis.

12.  He would befriend radical Islamist professors and Americans with records of terrorist violence against American institutions, so young Americans would know who he deemed worthy of the respect inherent in friendship, and they would understand the way of the future.

13.  He would make it clear that the only “radical” part of Islam is Al Qaeda, and therefore there is no threat to America from any other Muslims, who after all, as pointed out in point one above, are tolerant and followers of justice just like all Americans.

Oh, dear.  I think we have a problem.

Howard Rotberg is a Canadian writer.  His latest book is TOLERism:  The Ideology Revealed.

I shall try to behave myself.

The Michael Coren Show - Week of Jan. 25, 2009

Cable 36 (channel 9 in Toronto), ExpressVu - 651/Star Choice - 355/Look - 19.

The Michael Coren Show airs every evening at 6:00 PM and is repeated the following day at 12:30 PM.

MONDAY, Jan 25 - Start the Week. National Post editor John Turley Ewart, activist Andrea Calver and columnist Lorne Gunter.
TUESDAY, Jan 26 - On The Hill. Federal politics.
WEDNESDAY, Jan 27 - This Week panel. Columnist Marianne Meed Ward, journalist David Menzies and debut guest Howard Rotberg.

Here is a report from Debkafile which updates the horrible game the Obama fools are playing.

Obama finally forswears tough sanctions on Iran. Jerusalem says nothing

DEBKAfile Special Report

January 6, 2010, 12:14 AM (GMT+02:00)

Letting Iran off the US hook

Taking advantage of the ado surrounding the failed airliner bombing and the new prominence of the al Qaeda peril, the Obama administration has finally given up its sanctions strategy for averting the rise of a nuclear-armed Iran. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was tasked with the public announcement: "The Obama administration wants to keep the door to dialogue open with Iran," she said Jan. 4, then added a remark which let Iran off completely of the American hook: "…although the United States has avoided using the term deadline, it cannot wait indefinitely to hear form Iran."

Her words explicitly backtracked on statements by other senior administration officials, including National Security Adviser James Jones, in recent interviews that Tehran's deadline for responding to international proposals expired on Dec. 31. DEBKAfile's Iranian sources report that Tehran sees Washington as so eager to reach the negotiating table that it is falling back from effective penalties step by step, including an embargo on refined oils and benzene, and even willing to forgive Iran's failure to meet a highly publicized international deadline.

"Our goal is to pressure the Iranian government, particularly the Revolutionary Guards elements without contributing to the suffering of Iranians," Clinton explained.

Threatening Iran's Revolutionary Guards instead of its regime is nothing but a feeble face-saver, our Iranian sources maintain, since the IRGC, whose financial operations and its management of Iran's nuclear program subsist on alternative "black market" economic mechanisms is hardly vulnerable to international sanctions.

The Guards command a world network of thousands of straw companies, which defy investigation - even by American experts. Their funds are not moved through banks but around the illegal channels of international crime and drug cartels in countries outside US scrutiny. The IRGC is therefore not afraid of the fading US threat of sanctions.

In Jerusalem, the Netanyahu government persists in clinging to the Obama administration's coattails on the Iranian nuclear menace, keeping up the pretence that sanctions are still a viable option. On Jan. 2, a senior Israeli diplomat in Washington was quoted as saying that in back-channel conversations “Obama has convinced us that it’s worth trying the sanctions, at least for a few months.”

Another official, deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, predicted confidently to an interviewer: "The US will impose sanctions against Iran within a month."

Two days later, the Clinton statement showed Israeli officials to be woefully lagging behind the times with regard to decision-making in Washington. There, the Iran crisis has been taken back a whole year to square one. Obama administration wasted this year in barren diplomatic engagement against Tehran's iron resistance to any changes in its nuclear objectives, while the Netanyahu-Barak government frittered the year away by playing follow-the-US leader and keeping Israel on the sidelines of any initiative against an avowed enemy.

By contrast, Iran spent the year celebrating another leap forward in developing its nuclear weaponry and missiles, the while binding its ally Syria and proxies Hizballah and Hamas to mutual defense pacts should the US or Israel conjure up the temerity to strike its nuclear facilities after all.

Middle East & Israel Breaking News » Israel » Article

Dec 10, 2009 1:18 | Updated Dec 10, 2009 2:16

Hamas preparing advanced rockets and 'offensive' tunnels

By YAAKOV KATZ

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Israel is likely to face advanced Iranian weaponry, long-range rockets, large missile silos and dozens of kilometers of underground tunnels connecting open fields with urban centers in the event of a future conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to the latest Israeli assessments.

A Kassam rocket crew in Gaza [file].
Photo: Channel 2 [file]

SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region  |  World

Since Operation Cast Lead ended almost a year ago, Hamas has increased its weapons smuggling and today operates hundreds of tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor. It has smuggled in dozens of long-range Iranian-made rockets that can reach Tel Aviv as well as advanced anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank missiles.

Hamas is believed to have a significant number of shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles and 9M113 Konkurs, which have a range of four kilometers and are capable of penetrating heavy armor.

In addition, Hamas is believed to have today a few thousand rockets, including several hundred with a range of 40 kilometers and several dozen with a range of between 60 and 80 km. Intelligence assessments are that Hamas smuggled the missiles into theGaza Strip through tunnels, possibly in several components.

Iran already supplies Hamas with 122mm Katyusha rockets that are smuggled into Gaza in several pieces and then assembled by Hamas engineers.

One of the main lessons Hamas learned from Cast Lead was the need to reinforce its defenses and as a result has invested efforts in digging additional tunnels, which connect open fields with homes belonging to key operatives as well as command centers.

The idea is to enable freedom of movement for the operatives between different battlefields, which it found difficult during Israel's ground offensive inGaza earlier this year.

Hamas has also increased its use of civilian infrastructure, particularly mosques, which the terror group already used quite extensively for storage and launching rockets during the operation. Hamas is believed to have taken control of almost 80 percent of the mosques inGaza, using them to store weapons and set up command-and-control centers.

Hamas, is "padding" itself as well by setting up its command centers in large apartment buildings. This way, it believes, the IDF will not attack them by air, and will need to send ground forces deep into the population centers, where it will lose its technological advantage.

In addition, Hamas is hoping to increase the effectiveness of its rocket capability during a future conflict and has created large missile silos.

Hamas has also recently increased its efforts to dig what the IDF calls "offensive tunnels" close to the border with Israel, which the terror group could use to infiltrate into Israel and kidnap soldiers.

These tunnels are believed to be of strategic value for Hamas, which would only use them for large-scale attacks and high-value targets.

It is quite awful to know what is coming ahead of time, and then be ignored by the mainstream when you try to tell them.

In 2003, I released a novel where the main character, a professor, was writing a book called the Second Holocaust where he claims that a Second Holocaust has started which will culminate in Iranian nuclear attacks against the almost 6 million Jews of Israel. I am not saying that Iran will be successful against the Israeli IDF, but the concern that occupied my  mind when I wrote the book has become a lot more concrete and worrisome.

Furthermore I had the professor in the book get in trouble for some politically incorrect language at a lecture;  then after the book came out, I got in trouble, not for what I said, but for what an 18 year old part time book clerk and member of the Muslim Students Association fabricated that i said.

My book, The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel about a Book and its Author was banned by Chapters in Canada and was never picked up in the U.S., despite good reviews.

Last week, Mantua Books released my new book, TOLERism:  The Ideology Revealed, in which I warn that politically correct tolerance has morphed into the ideology of Tolerism, and that Obama is one of the main symptons, where tolerance towards the illiberals has become excessive and tolerance has become more important than justice.  Again, I was too prescient,  As we know, last week, an Islamist who was still a psychiatrist in the U.S. army despite all kinds of talk about how the Muslims in the U.S. should support Muslim countries rather than America, how America in responding to 9/11 was warring against all of Islam, rather than fighting terrorist groups, and who had worshipped in mosques led by two radical Islamists, killed twelve fellow soldiers and injured 33 more.

Yelling the traditional chant of Jihadists, "Allahu Akhbar" as he opened fire in a pre-meditated attack, the media and Obama the Dunce reacted in typical politically correct, morally relativistic terms.

The first Washington Post article took 11 paragraphs to even mention that the attacker was Muslim!

President Obama, put in a couple of disgraceful performances wherein he shows why he is one of the last people in the U.S. who should be President in a time of war against the West by Radical Islam:   Even on Saturday, by which time more information had come out about the Islamist ideology of the attacker (who should always be described as a "terrorist" - except that the politically correct, morally infantile Obama has abolished the word - Obama unbelievable declined to mention that this attack was by an Islamist, or was caused by the Islamists who indoctrinated the terrorist.

Instead Obama said, (and I am not joking):  "We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing." This has got to go down as one of the most ridiculous statements by an American president in history.   We KNOW already what Islamist hatred causes their people to do.   Where has Obama been?   Of course he knows it too, but feels the need to downplay the fact.  That is why some Americans are belatedly worrying about the Islamic background and the spirtual mentors who influenced this smooth talking, no action, poseur.

Incidentally, it took me 5 minutes from hearing the initial report to find out:

Hasan attended the mosque in Silver Spring Maryland where the imam was at the time Faisal Khan.   Faisal Khan was a supporter of the demonstrations in Washington by Muslims who wanted Sami Al-Arian released from jail.   Sami Al-Arian is the disgraced professor from Florida who pled guilty to one count of conspiracy (other counts were dropped as part of a plea bargain) to assist a terrorist entity, namely the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  Al-Arian refused to comply with a subpoena to come to a Grand Jury to testify against an alleged co-conspirator and was convicted of contempt of court, in addition to the original charge, which really bothered some of the activists in the Washington area Muslim community.

Then,  it was discovered that the Islamist doctor had attended a mosque in Virginia headed by an Islamist imam, which was also attended (at the same time) by two of the World Trade Centre terrorists.    There is no evidence of direct link, but this shows what kind of crowd and imams he associated with.

But if the American people were not concerned that their future Commander in Chief hung out with the America-hating Rev. Wright and the ex-terrorist Bill Ayers, and with other anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic ideologues, I guess they don't see anything wrong with radical Islamists who hate America serving in the armed forces.

Again, my book is prescient and again I watch the inevitable results of what I warn against.  I derive no pleasure, none at all, from being right.

Then last week I made a post about the danger that our current cultural relativists will soon attack the moral foundations of Remembrance Day.  I sent a copy of the essay to a number of newspapers who of course declined it, without even bothering to write back, as they must consider me some kind of flake.

But yesterday, I found that what my essay warns against has already started.  Of course, it has started in Britain first.   Which is par for the course.  I am going to reprint the article from the website from one of these left wing pacifist British Christian churches, who seem happy to cheer on the Islamification of their country which, based on other areas of the world where Muslims are in control, will inevitably mean that the Christian churches, left wing or not, will not be tolerated.   Toleration as I have argued in my new book is only a one way street.

Here is the report;  I have emphasized certain ridiculous points by adding bold face type.   Mark my words, this is the next frontier in the Left's assault on decency, morality and our historic accomplishments as liberal democracies:

from http://ekklesia.co.uk/node/10504:

We need a more inclusive Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day, 2009:   What are we Remembering?

By Howard Rotberg

In our current world of cultural and moral relativism where we are supposed to believe that we should tolerate and respect every culture and every belief system equally, Remembrance Day is more and more the last bastion of traditional patriotism.

When we remember the soldiers who gave up their lives, or were disabled, for the maintenance of our way of life, our liberal democracies and our freedoms, we necessarily hold that our way of life is superior to those whose totalitarian illiberal governments forced the necessity of war upon us.

Cultural relativists would have us believe that Tolerance is the new primary value, and that if all peoples are equally deserving of respect, pacifism is so obviously more moral than war, since if everybody is like us, who would bother to attack us, and even if they did, submission to their values would, according to the relativists, be a lesser evil than fighting them.

In my new book, Tolerism:  The Ideology Revealed (Mantua Books), I suggest that adherence to a tolerant worldview has now passed beyond mere respect for the idea of diversity – and become an ideology that holds that we must have, not only a sympathy but an indulgence, that is an excessive leniency, for beliefs or practices conflicting with our own. At times, I contend that this ideology contains not only an undue tolerance of the illiberals, but a disturbing element of self-hatred, cultural masochism, and delusions about the difference between social tolerance and political tolerance.   I explore the issue of what limitations should be placed on Tolerance and whether Tolerance should be trumped by Justice.

To understand the full dimensions of what Remembrance Day must be in 21^st century Canada, it is necessary to canvas some other commemorations that have sprung up in our increasingly international culture.

First of all, are we in Remembrance Day mourning all soldiers of every state, or only those who proudly represented liberal democracies against such forces as Nazi Germany?

I used to live in Kitchener-Waterloo.  Some years ago, the remains of Nazi soldiers who had died in POW camps in Canada were disinterred and transferred to one cemetery in Kitchener, which has a sizeable German population.   And so, a few days after Remembrance Day, there takes place a gathering of some 400 to 500 people, at this cemetery of Nazi soldiers, where the German Remembrance Day, called Volkstrauertag, takes place.   In 2006, the German Ambassador to Canada decided to include in his speech there, a substantial remembrance of the Holocaust.   This so bothered the local German organizations that the Cooperative Council of German Canadian Clubs of Waterloo Region felt it necessary to write an Open Letter to the German ambassador noting that his talk “certainly fit into the theme of holocaust (sic) education”, but expressing their “community’s extreme disappointment that its focus created the impression of a political demonstration of ‘Vergangenheitsbewaltigung’  (meaning “"struggle to come to terms with the past").

The Kitchener Germans protested that this speech “missed its mark” because in their view the ceremony was for the purpose of remembering all victims of war and political persecution anywhere “and our compatriots in particular”. (emphasis added)

And so, a ceremony attended every year by local mayors, members of the legislature and parliament is meant by its organizers to remember and honour Nazi soldiers.   Are we comfortable with this?    Are we comfortable that nearly as many people attend this remembrance ceremony as attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at the cenotaph in downtown Kitchener?

Then, since 1995, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization has sponsored a Day of Tolerance on November 16^th each year, again an interesting counterpoint to Remembrance Day on November 11^th. On the UNESCO website is stated that the day “affirms that tolerance is neither indulgence nor indifference. It is respect and appreciation of the rich variety of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. Tolerance recognizes the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of others. People are naturally diverse; only tolerance can ensure the survival of mixed communities in every region of the globe.”

It sounds so nice. But why must we in the liberal democracies “tolerate” beliefs and cultures that rob individuals, women, gays, or minority religions from all human rights.  Shouldn’t we be encouraged to speak out against such human rights abuses, rather than tolerate them?  I do not suggest we militarily free every oppressed group in the totalitarian parts of the world, but why is there a day to celebrate the rich variety of oppressive regimes?

UNESCO, by the way just elected a new president.   A Bulgarian parliamentarian overtook a large lead by the frontrunner, Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni.   Just to give an understanding of the absurdity of UNESCO-sponsored days of Tolerance, Hosni, who was the favorite to win, is a well-known supporter of cultural repression.   As stated by Mona Eltahawy in the Washington Post, Hosni “has alienated many Egyptians by suffocating cultural and intellectual freedom while giving a leg up to religious zealotry.”  She cites numerous examples of his preventing freedom of expression.  Then, in May 2008, he stated that he would “burn Israeli books” himself if he found any in Egyptian libraries.

Mr. Hosni tried his best to satisfy international concerns.  He wrote an article in the French newspaper Le Monde, where he apologized for the comments and said he would be willing to deal with Israel if he were elected to be UNESCO’s chief.

And yet, this modest apology led to a backlash among Egyptian intellectuals, who argued the culture minister was not abiding by the cultural limitations established by Egyptian institutions concerning normalization with Israel.   You see, while the world thinks Egypt is at peace with Israel, this country, which airs the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion on its television, actually bars cultural organizations and media from any dealings with Israeli officials and artists. 

So, this resulted in 15 prominent Egyptian intellectuals, including professors of literature, history, and international law, and prominent journalists, to write an open letter opposing Mr. Hosni’s election to head UNESCO. His apology for his book burning remarks and his willingness to deal with Israel in the course of his duties, caused these intellectuals to write:  “It is needless to emphasize that this character with such dreadful history is not fit for such great position that requires high levels of morality and integrity, as well as unrelenting support for human dignity and ethical transparency.”    And so, the chances of Mr. Hosni being the first Arab to head UNESCO were scuttled as much by hardliners in his own country as by western concerns.   But in the end, Hosni, as is usual in the Arab Middle East, blamed the Jews.  An article by Hadil al-Shalchi in The Huffington Post states that Hosni blamed a conspiracy "cooked up in New York" by the world's Jews for keeping him from becoming the next head of the U.N.'s agency for culture and education.

The point is that commemorations of Tolerance headed by intolerant people, or commemoration of Nazi war dead by people who get upset that the Holocaust be mentioned are all commemorations that are meaningless, in any positive sense.   As Canada takes in more immigrants, will these immigrants share in a Remembrance Day to remember why our soldiers die, or will they want their own remembrance days, commemorating values that may be very different than those of a liberal democracy?

One more example of the relativist undermining of remembrance will suffice:  Canadian Professor Anne Bayefsky, writing on January 27,  2005 in National Review Online points out that the United Nations commemoration of the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz made sure that there were no actual Resolutions coming out of the ceremony, so as not to offend the Arab states, which boycotted the event (the auditorium was half empty).  Of the 41 speakers at the event, only 5 dared to mention the word, "Israel" in their speeches, and such word was not mentioned in the speeches by the U.S., Canada, the European Union and Australia. Then, most amazing of all, at the ceremony that took place at Auschwitz, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfovitz stated:  "We have agreed to set aside contemporary political issues, in order to reflect on those events of 60 years ago in a spirit of unanimity."   The price, however, for unanimity is to abandon the notion that the Holocaust contains lessons for contemporary politics.  To concede as Wolfovitz did, that European leftists and the Muslims are offended by the lessons to be drawn, is to render the Holocaust into a meaningless symbol.

Bayefsky notes the irony of the constant repetition of the mantra "Never Again" when we fail to give primacy to discussions of what that means in the contemporary situation for the Jewish state: "Jews everywhere are indebted to the willingness and ability of Israelis to live and breathe self-determination.  When contemporary political issues are set aside and an affirmation of the centrality of the Jewish state's well-being is not key to a commemoration of the Holocaust, 'never again' is an empty phrase."

And so we return to Remembrance Day, 2009 in Canada.   Let us, as part of the education we give to our students, emphasize that we are remembering those who gave their lives for the maintenance of liberties in a liberal democratic state.   Let us not mistake multiculturalism (that is, the acceptance of diversity as long as the constituent parts all respect our main liberal democratic values) for cultural relativism, that leads to the position that all beliefs and cultures are equal.   Let us remember, but let us first put some context to that remembrance. And that context is that in Canada we remember with pride those who did not just die, but died for the purpose of maintaining a free and democratic country, which, while always capable of improvement, represents a political system and a cultural milieu of which we can be proud.

Howard Rotberg is the author of The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel about a Book and its Author (Mantua Books) and Exploring Vancouverism:  The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land (CanadianValuesPress).  His new book, TOLERism:  The Ideology Revealed, (Mantua Books) will be launched in Toronto on November 22^nd.

Mantua Books is releasing my new book later this week.

It is already available through Amazon.com or by email from the publisher at:

mantua2003@hotmail.com.

I will post more information on the book in the next few days.

Mantua is also releasing at the same time the impressive collection of essays by distinguished Canadian author David Solway, entitled Hear, O Israel!

TISHA B’AV 2009: 

A Jew looks at America’s Scandalous Award to Mary Robinson

By Howard Rotberg

Tisha B'Av, the Fast of the Ninth of the Jewish month of Av, is a Jewish day of mourning to commemorate the many tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people, many of which coincidentally have occurred on the ninth of Av.   This year it fell on July 30^th.

Tisha B'Av primarily commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, both of which were destroyed on the ninth of Av (the first by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and the second by the Romans in 70 C.E.)   The Western Wall around the Temple, Judaism’s holiest place is the remains of the wall around the Temple. Arab revisionist history holds that there never was a Jewish Temple, all archeological verifications notwithstanding. Israel, since Jerusalem was reunified in 1967 tolerates Palestinian prohibitions against Jews wishing to visit the Temple Mount, now the site of an Arab mosque.

Although this holy day is primarily meant to commemorate the destruction of the Temple, it also the many other tragedies of the Jewish people, many of which occurred on this day, most notably the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

Traditional Jews who follow the Torah learn that when the twelve scouts sent by Moses to observe the land of Canaan returned from their mission, the majority spoke disparagingly about the land which caused the Children of Israel to panic and despair of ever entering the "Promised Land". For this, the Torah states that they were punished by God that their generation would not enter the land.  Moreover, because of the Israelites' lack of faith, God decreed that for all generations this date would become one of crying and misfortune for their descendants, the Jewish people.

Here is the list of calamities that happened to the Jewish people on Tisha B’av through the ages:

1. The First Temple built by King Solomon and the Kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians led by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and the Judeans were sent into the Babylonian exile.

2. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, scattering the people of Judea and commencing the Jewish exile from the Holy Land.

3. Bar Kokhba's revolt against Rome failed in 135 CE. Simon bar Kokhba was killed, and the city of Betar was destroyed.

4. Following the Roman siege of Jerusalem, the razing of Jerusalem occurred the next year. A Temple was built in its stead to an idol.

5. During the First Crusade, 10,000 Jews were murdered on Tisha B’Av (1095)

6. In 1290, Jews were expelled from England on Tisha B’Av.

7. The Alhambra Decree of 1492, expelling the Jews from Spain, took effect on the 7th of Av, just two days before Tisha B'Av.

8. On the eve of Tisha B'Av 1942, the mass deportation began of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, en route to Treblinka concentration camp.

9. The deadly bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires occurred on Tisha B’Av (1994).

10. The Second Lebanon War took place in the three weeks leading up to Tisha B'Av in 2006.

And now, on Tisha B’Av in the Hebrew year of 5769, being July 30^th 2009, a major catastrophe has again fallen on the Jewish people.   The actual event of which I am speaking may seem to be relatively unimportant – President Obama has awarded the Medal of Freedom to Irishwoman Mary Robinson.   Robinson presided over the United Nations Commission on Human Rights as it transformed itself to the almost single concern of vilifying Israel, and presided over the infamous Durban Conference.  The honour itself, however, is indicative of something much more important and ominous – the transition of the United States from being the leader of the free world and (on balance) a force for justice and freedom in the world to becoming a European-like rationalizer of injustice by emphasizing the supposed value of “tolerance” and “multi-lateralism” in a world of evil nations and transnational terrorists.   The giving of an honour to the woman who most epitomizes the evil of the Durban conference and the preoccupation with characterizing Israel as the new Nazis and the Palestinians as the new Jews, could unfortunately symbolize a turning point in American and world history.

Previously, the terrorism utilized by Palestinians with the support of Muslim nations, and the tolerance and funding of European nations, seemed to at least face a line in the sand with the United States. Jews thought they could depend on the liberal democrats of the United States to understand that terrorism is caused, not by the failure to give terrorists what they want, but by allowing and tolerating, even nourishing the climates of hate in which terrorists thrive.

And so, in the infamous Durban Conference of 2001, the United States under the leadership of Secretary of State Colin Powell drew a line in the sand, beyond which the Americans were not prepared to allow the conference to proceed (with American participation) – that an international conference on Racism, could not be hijacked to deal only with one political dispute in the world, given that this was a dispute over land boundaries (and no other political disputes were being discussed).  Moreover,  that it was in fact a racist agenda that it had been adopted by the Durban pre-conference (held in Iran!) to criticize Israeli counter-terrorism - in the absence of criticism of the terrorism itself – and to equate the six million deaths of  Jews in the Holocaust with Israeli self-defense against hostile militant neighbours and terrorist organizations, and to criticize Israel as being guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid”.   The American leadership withdrew from the conference.

The anti-intellectualism, the anti-liberalism, the anti-westernism, and indeed the anti-Semitism of the Arab and Muslim world joined with self-hating members of western Non-Governmental Organizations, were exposed in Durban as a major threat to Western civilization.  For those, who didn’t get the message from this conference, which ended on September 7^th, 2001, a mere four days later militant Islam attacked New York’s World Trade Towers.   President Bush took up the challenge and vowed to stop terrorism in the United States, and despite other weaknesses in his administration, he, for the main part kept this vow.   To Jews, the travesty of Durban followed so closely by the horrors of 9/11 indicated that once again the Jews were the canaries in the mine, and how the world views anti-Semitic persecution of Jews is a harbinger for the prospects for freedom and peace in the so-called civilized world.

In my novel, The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel about a Book and its Author (Mantua Books), the fictional author of the book-within-the-book argues that the Durban Conference in today’s war against the Jews is equivalent to the Wansee Conference in the Nazi war on the Jews.

But now the Americans have embraced a candidate of change.   Despite ominous past associations with a rogues’ gallery of anti-Israel and anti-American types (including, most importantly, having as a pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose message was not so much Christian as anti-American and anti-Israel), Americans, including an astounding 75% of American Jews, voted for Obama as President.

His very first acts on the international stage were promises to “engage” with the terrorist-sponsoring and genocidal nuclear-arming Iranians, and to bow to Saudis and to create an American “submission” to Islam by fabricating a view of history - by stating that “the truth (is) that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings … Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

By making “tolerance” the supreme American value as opposed to “Justice”, and then to equate America’s sense of tolerance with whatever that word means in Islamic countries, Obama prostituted centuries of American notions of freedom and justice to what only can be termed a first step in the “submission” to Islam.

And his promises of “engagement” with Iran were put on the back burner, as America watched impotently as the Iranian mullahs and their evil hit-man Ahmadinejad violently put down protests over election fraud and the restriction of liberties for the Iranian people.

In this, Obama seeks to bring America closer to the submissionist ideologies and practices of countries like Britain and France, which allow parallel systems of sharia law that deny Muslim women the great individual protections of Western human rights law, and which have altered both domestic and foreign policies to placate their growing Islamic populations.

And so, on Tisha B’Av, July 30^th, 2009, Obama made an even more shocking symbolic submission to foreign values, when he awarded a medal of freedom to Ireland’s Mary Robinson, the infamous former head of the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the founder and chief organizer of 2001’s Durban Conference.  This award must surely be viewed with horror for those who hold out a future for our children of peace, freedom and the continuation of western standards of individual and human rights. This award to Jews must surely be seen as yet another catastrophe in a long list of catastrophes that have happened on Tisha B’Av throughout Jewish history.

Before turning to an examination of the abhorrent views and actions of Ms. Robinson, it is important to examine President Obama’s views in more detail. 

As I have just returned from three weeks in Israel at the time of writing this (July 31, 2009), I can perhaps give a view of how Israelis, in my recent discussions with them, are viewing Obama’s America.   Of course, this exercise is largely subjective, because Israelis, living in a liberal democracy hold a vast array of different opinions, but certain trends are discernable.

Israelis can be excused for wondering just who Barack Hussein Obama really is and what does he stand for.  Is he Black or white, Muslim or Christian, friend of domestic terrorists or mainstreamers, confidant of Edward Said or establishment Jews, brilliant writer of two autobiographies or purveyor of unacknowledged ghost written material, supporter of Arabs or Israel, lawyer attuned to human rights or community organizer attuned to collective rights, follower of Christian values or liberation theology positioned between Reverend Wright and Louis Farakhan, proud of American historical values or apologetic to the terrorists in accepting the responsibility of America and Israel for the “root causes”?

Obama, it must be conceded, is in fact a product of contemporary American culture, and it is that culture of cultural relativism and moral equivalency, which has been a concern of many Israelis for the last 10 years or so.   For even though George Bush was perceived as a friend of Israel, the political class in America has been inching back to the State Department’s philo-Arabism as opposed to the traditional liberal respect for the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.  When the New York Times publishes anti-Israel Jews like Tony Judt, and the Hollywood establishment did not understand the moral travesty that Steven Spielberg created from a script by anti-Israel Jewish writer Tony Kushner, in Munich, it can be argued that Obama is the result of what the American liberal culture has become, not the cause of it.

As someone interested in cultural history (the history of ideologies and values), and the author of three books on the subject, I try to visit Israel often.  I share the view (often ascribed to the “right”) that Israel is the front line in Huntington’s clash of civilizations or, to put it another, yet similar, way, is among the most important fronts in the War Against Radical Islam (called by those who haven’t the moral fiber to speak the truth, the War on Terror). 

And so, having been travelling around Israel for the last few of weeks, and listening to an assortment of Israelis and Israeli media, I have noticed an interesting reaction to what America is becoming under the President whose values and background are so inscrutable.  From an initial positive attitude towards someone who advanced so rapidly to the Presidency, only 6% of Israelis now view Obama as “pro”-Israel.   In no particular order here are some things they are thinking about:

In my travels around Israel, I see the huge accomplishment of a country that has an open immigration policy for every ethnicity of Jew who wants or needs sanctuary in a Jewish state where he or she can be free from prejudice or persecution.  From the light brown Sephardic Jews driven out of Arab countries, to the darker brown Jews of India, to the black Jews of Ethiopia, all, no matter their education or suitability to contribute to the country, are accepted.   Within a generation their children are (in reasonable numbers) successfully assimilated to the modern, western, technological society and culture of Israel.  

The politics of race here results in some odd voting blocks and coalitions, but there is very much an underlying consensus that every Israeli is who he is and does not pretend to be something else.  This holds true for the hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs living in peace with their Jewish neighbours, having representation in the parliament, an ambassadorship, a place on the Supreme Court, and in the case of the Druze Arabs, service in the army.   Unlike their cousins, who now call themselves Palestinians, the Muslims who stayed put, know who they are, and did not have to invent an identity.

Obama, from the Israeli viewpoint, is a mystery.   He somehow appears a post-racial poseur akin to Michael Jackson, bending race to the requirements of art and public adulation.  Is he his father’s son (an already married upper class Kenyan student who tired of Barack’s mother and went home) or his mother’s son (a naïve and largely expatriate academic from the Midwest)?  How can the son of a Kenyan and a white woman whose parents were from Kansas, and who availed himself of the fruits of the American affirmative action program, wrap himself in the mantle of oppressed black American males whose cultural impotency stems directly from the slave experience and a failed assimilation to American values?  The very notion that his blackness links him automatically to the black mainstream is, in this viewpoint, a fundamentally racist construct.  Skin colour matters less to Americans today than cultural values. In other words, the typical educated American would rather have a black lawyer or ball player as a neighbour than a white Appalachian.    The remaining prejudice towards blacks is not a function of skin colour as it is a reaction to perceived difference in cultural values.

Obama’s grandparents (who grew up in Kansas) took the main burden of raising him.   Where is Kansas and what was it named after?   That would be of interest to Israelis, but apparently not so much to American journalists.   Kansas after all was named after the Kansa Native American tribe who along with most Native Tribes were basically ethnically cleansed by white settlers with governmental and military backing. Before Obama apologizes to Muslims, perhaps he should apologize to American natives.

Or is Obama, like most young Americans who today fail to seriously study history, entitled to divorce himself entirely from ancestral deeds and heritage?   Have we post-moderns dismissed the traditional notion of examining someone’s family to understand their bearings?   Why then, does Obama obsess over the historical details of Israeli settlement policy and not the settlement policy of his ancestors in Kansas and Oklahoma?

Does Obama know that Mary Robinson’s appeasement of the derailing of the Durban Conference on Racism was not only to turn it into an anti-Israel hatefest, but also to extinguish the original hope to have the conference deal with the historical wrongs of slavery and colonialism, and obtain for African countries some measure of apology?  In fact, the first Black American President, in his eagerness to reward Mary Robinson’s conduct at Durban, also has created a slap in the face for the African countries who had such great hope at Durban.   Of course, not sharing a background in slavery like most other American blacks, and not wanting his white ancestors’ benefits from Aboriginal ethnic cleansing in Kansas and Oklahoma to see the light of the media, Obama neither understands nor empathizes with the hopes for redress that were dashed by Robinson.

Obama, in his few pronouncements about Israel, seems to lack any serious historical context.   This is not surprising to Israelis because there is far less justification for what the white American settlers did (including Obama’s great grandparents who owned property in Oklahoma, where some of the most serious injustices to Natives happened), than what Israeli settlers have done, which is to reclaim land which historically was Jewish for thousands of years, after a defensive war.   So when Obama hectors Israelis on their settlements, he is viewed as transparent and hypocritical.

Or is the American problem one of handing the complexities of American foreign policy - in an age of aggressive fundamentalist Islam’s attempt to seize control of massive areas of the world - over to a Georgia peanut farmer or an undistinguished Texas governor, or, as we have now, a public relations and internet savy “community activist”?

Israelis are rankled by Obama’s blatent double standards:

He is loath to “interfere” by seizing a historic opportunity to reverse Iranian Islamofascist tyranny in Iran and export of terrorism through Hizbollah and Hamas:  "It's not productive given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling," he stated.  The fact that it was another inexperienced American Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, who projected American weakness, was instrumental in encouraging the Mullah’s Islamic revolution in Iran, is lost on the Obama crowd.  But, when it comes to Israel, Obama meddles in the greatest detail – demanding, contrary to previous commitments to Israel (as substantiated by Elliot Abrams), that no Israeli settlement be allowed even one inch of growth to accommodate new family formation.   To Jews who are attuned to the demographic realities of the Middle East, this is perceived ominously like an American proscription against Jewish births, and ties Obama to historical fascist oppression of Jews.

Moreover, Israelis who lived through the almost daily suicide bombings of 2001 -2002, the Hizbollah rockets on Northern Israel in 2006, and the 7 years of rockets from Gaza against Israeli towns like Sderot and Ashkelon, are saddened to hear a one-sided concern from Obama.   Waxing eloquent about Palestinian suffering (which is perceived by most Israelis to stem in main from their own leaders’ rejection of Israeli peace offers including Camp David  in 2000 and Olmert’s offer in 2008), Israelis are irked that his sympathies do not extend to their suffering, too.   Israelis who are trying to explain to their children why hundreds of millions of hostile Arabs periodically attack their country, sponsor terrorist attacks, and now are joined by the Islamofascist state of Iran which (all the way back to Rafsanjani in the 1990s) has been promising to attain nuclear weapons and use them on the Jews.   And how do they explain that despite three thousand years of Jewish presence in Israel, the Palestinians reject the Israeli offer of an independent state, because they cannot also have their people return to the one small Jewish state (their rejection is based on the misleadingly named “right” of return.)

Perhaps the most obscene double standard of all, from the point of view of women, anyway, is that in a Muslim world that tolerates “honour” killings, Obama does not seem to notice.  A so-called liberal embraced by American women praises Islam for tolerance, when that tolerance includes the obscenity of honour killings and rapes.   Just check out the writings of the great American feminist Phyllis Chesler (now shunned by mainstream feminism) on the extent of honour killings and abuse of women in Islamic culture.

The cultural relativists have so fallen in love with Islam that they accept Islam’s right to abuse women and children.   They also seem to accept in this bizarre moral relativism Hamas’ right to make women and children into human shields.   They reserve their indignation for Israel’s self defense that targets rocket launching sites, after telephone calls to the civilians to evacuate, and when they do not and suffer casualities, Israel is held to be solely responsible.  

For Israelis, whether or not they are Torah observant, know that the Torah values justice more than anything.   The United States used to agree.  Now under Obama it appears that Tolerance is the new value of choice, and that tolerance leads to horrible double standards, and it is that underlying divergence of values that will separate Israel and the United States more than anything else.  The Democrats will portray their policy choices as reflecting “balance” and national interest;  in fact the Americans are following the Europeans towards a crisis in traditional values of Western civilization, wherein tolerance is seen to be at least as important as Justice.   One cannot emphasize too greatly that when Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg portrayed the Israelis as vengeful in Munich, they were reflecting a sad cultural decline:  Rather than emphasizing  Justice, Spielberg reflected an adoption of Tolerance to the sad failures of the German authorities to bring the murderers at the Munich Olympics to justice, and to the distorted values of the terrorists themselves and the people who sent them on their dastardly mission.

By choosing to portray the victims as Shylock-like in their vengeance, Spielberg and his fans have made clear how much anti-Israelism depends on anti-Semitism.   Obama is the perfect president for a nation without values. When Michele Obama stated that with her husband’s election, she could finally be proud of America, that seems to me to say that at last America will change its values to approach the European Leftist abrogation of Justice and away from traditional American values which have been rejected as Right-wing and non-tolerant.   Formerly the “canary in the mine” with respect to injustice in the world, Israelis sense that they have been replaced by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, dominated by Islamic dictatorships.   If the conscience of America is now Jimmy Carter, rather than Eli Wiesel, the Israelis feel that a Second Holocaust will be permitted by America.

The worry for an educated Jew, however, is that while a Canary in a coal mine was valued by the miners for detecting dangerous gases, the Jews of Israel will not be appreciated for criticizing moral values, especially when Israelis themselves are so far from perfect;  in fact, it can be argued, that anti-Semitism is in large part based on the resentment towards those preaching justice and goodness by those intent on injustice and murder.   Hitler’s policies of course breached most of the Ten Commandments.   American Jews who stand up for the values of Justice against the values of Tolerance are in danger of falling into Walt and Mearsheimer’s dastardly Jewish lobby.   Israelis with a perfect sense of the history of anti-Semitism, know the potential problem that Obama creates for the Jewish people.

Israelis are viewing Obama’s Cairo speech in a very different light than Obama’s young (and apparently historically ignorant) base in the Democratic party who equate eloquence with intelligence. To the Israelis, as recently pointed out by Sarah Honig, in the Jerusalem Post, Obama is making the mistake of using American prestige to in fact support democracy’s most rabid enemies, while being nasty to an embattled liberal democracy (whose “crime” seems to be what policies they have adopted after three wars against it by the Arab states, and numerous terrorist campaigns.)

As Honig puts it:  “As pro-democracy demonstrators are killed in Teheran and as its ayatollahs further their designs to arm themselves with nukes, the leader of the free world harps on Israeli settlements.  You can almost understand where he’s coming from.  Iran is a tough customer and crazy too.  It’s tempting not to rile it and to deflect criticism by focusing on some lonely remote outposts in the middle of Judea and Samaria’s barren moonscape.”   For Israel, unlike the Arabs or Iran, according to Honig, will “broadmindedly collaborate in an effort to appease its detractors.”

Americans with their wide-open spaces and huge country, have a hard time understanding a tiny sliver of a country, which under the non-lamented ’67 borders was a little as 9.5 miles wide, and which now finds itself surrounded on the north and the south-west by Iranian terrorist proxies, and which is being asked to add a state to its east, which in all likelihood will become, like Gaza, ruled by terrorist Hamas. Israel indeed has a love-hate relationship with America.

While American fans of Obama might accept his argument of equivalency between one of history’s greatest liberal democracies on the one hand, and a series of regimes that grant few if any individual rights and often promote abuse of women, torture and have abysmal justice systems, on the other, Israelis react to this claim with shock and horror.   Obama stated at Cairo that America and the Muslim world “share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”   To most Israelis, the man is either a lunatic or attempting the most disgraceful appeasement since Neville Chamberlain refused to react to the Nazi threat.   To Israelis, who, particularly in Haifa and the Galilee live near, and sometimes work with, moderate Muslim Arabs, there is a knowledge that individual Muslims, free of indoctrination and brainwashing by Muslim governments, can be good neighbours.  But they know Obama is wrong when he whitewashes the corrupted leaders of the “Muslim world”, for Israelis know better than anyone how those leaders have cast the Jewish State as the source of all blame for everything wrong in the world.

To Israelis, appeasement of evil today, means a bloodier and longer war tomorrow.   To America, its golden tongued orator will talk radical Islam into giving up all of its goals.  Leaning on Israel will, this line of thinking goes, lead Islamists to come to their senses. To Israelis, who actually have a long history of dealing with the Arab rejection of any compromise in their belief that every descendent of every Palestinian should be allowed to move to Tel Aviv, Obama projects nothing more than weakness and ignorance.  The Israelis have learned or ought to have learned by now – depending which politician one is viewing – that making concessions to Islamists is only viewed by them as weakness leading to more concessions.  Israelis believe that the Palestinians have a very different time frame than do leftist Americans and Europeans:  Palestinians are prepared to wait for 50 or 100 years, if necessary, for the resolve of the enemy to break.  Such is the purpose of terrorism – to break the will, to force submission, to make popular the idea of appeasement.

As young Americans leave organized religion in droves, many no longer accept the traditional concepts of good and evil.    They believe, like Obama, that the evil just need some more concessions.  America is in danger of losing the ability to understand how the “evil” of a Hitler or an Ahmadinejad compromises the ability of freedom loving countries to defend against mortal threats to Western civilization. To that portion of the Israeli population that accepts religious values, it is sad that the supposedly Christian leader of the world’s leading democracy was given his religious guidance by a minister as anti-American as Reverend Wright.   It is even sadder to see him deeply bow to the Saudi King and preach about the moral equivalency of Christianity and Islam.

To Israelis, even though Bush together with his Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, were less than successful, at least they acknowledged that the U.S. was in a War with radical Islam, including Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.   It is sad to see that Obama has submitted to Muslim arguments that such Islamist organizations are on the periphery, instead of contaminating the mainstream.   Israelis have been reading recently how Al Jazeera, the dominant network for Muslims world-wide, in fact was set up by the emir of Qatar, to promote the ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood, which threatens the stability of Egypt, as well as being the dominant influence on Hamas.   Do Americans know this, and if so, do they care?   Do they believe a speech by Obama can compete with the hours of anti-U.S. and anti-Israel programming consumed daily by millions of Muslims?    As Zvi Mazel, formerly Israeli ambassador to Egypt, has recently written, “Al Jazeera leads an all-out war against Israel in which there is no room for true reporting. The purpose is to bring all Arabs to support the Palestinians and, more specifically Hamas, which is, after all, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.  No efforts are spared to present the Palestinians as the ultimate victims.  Hamas representatives are warmly received by news anchors and commentators and they receive far more air time than the Palestinian Authority”.

One would think the media-savy American president, who relied so much on media support to win the election, would understand the power of Al-Jazeera and challenge its subversion of journalistic standards;  instead he is too busy “apologizing” and attributing the tension between America and the Muslim world to a “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations”.   Perhaps if Obama watched Arab media, read Arab textbooks, and listened to the sermons of certain imams, he would come up with another explanation of the tension between America and the Muslim world.

But alas, he appears to read less than he writes.   In an internet world of short newsclips and symbolic acts, be they of terrorists, or the symbols adopted by Obama himself, the symbolic significance of awarding a medal to Mary Robinson is, quite simply, to tell the liberal Jews of America that they have no future as liberal American Jews, reflective of Biblical values of Justice and human rights, but only as “tolerant” Americans.  That itself, given the contributions of Jews to American society and culture is a tragedy of the highest magnitude, equivalent to other tragedies that took place on Tisha B’Av.   What it says about the security of almost six million Jews to be free of another Holocaust, this time in our ancestral homeland, is too scary to think about.   When Obama says the champion of freedom is Mary Robinson, that is a tragedy for all Jews.

The Medal of Freedom is designed to recognize individuals who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors." It is a very significant award.

The best source on the evil represented by Mary Robinson is the first-person account of the late American Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos, himself a victim of the Holocaust.  At the time, he was the ranking Democratic member of the International Relations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.  Lantos, remember, was like most Jews, a loyal Democrat, and in fact was a strong opponent of perceived American unilateralism under Bush, right after 9/11, and a promoter of working through coalitions that later developed.  Lantos was appointed the leader of the American delegation to the Durban Conference, and, as such, was closely involved with the American’s attempted negotiations with Robinson that were unsuccessful in getting her to change the course of the conference.

In an essay in the Winter/Spring 2002 issue of the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs (of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University), Lantos published his account of the Durban Conference as “The Durban Debacle:  An Insider’s View of the World Racism Conference at Durban”.   It is most important to read this “insider’s” view of the woman who Obama has awarded a Medal of Freedom.

Lantos writes that "much of the responsibility for the debacle rests on the shoulders" of Robinson, who "in her role as secretary general of the conference, failed to provide the leadership needed to keep the conference on track."   Lantos also faults the Islamic states, and moreover argues that a failure by the U.S. to show leadership at the United Nations and its various organizations, created a resentment against American unilateralism (of course Bush later tried the multi-lateral route, without great success in that) which made it harder to control what happened at Durban.

Interestingly, for those who support Obama’s appeasement and embracement of cultural relativism and American apologies as the modus operandus of dealing with the enemies and their supporters in the War against Militant Islam, Lantos had some interesting points to make, which Obama should well study.   Lantos, the Holocaust survivor, argues in his essay, “The Durban Debacle”, that “(t)he international mechanisms that we have helped build to support a liberal international system, including the UN, require U.S. leadership to stay on track.  When we fail to lead, rogue regimes and hostile forces are quick to step into the breach to appropriate these mechanisms for their own propaganda and political purposes.  If we want to win our war against terrorism, we will have to stay engaged in the UN and elsewhere, promote American interests and values abroad and transform our coalition against terrorism into a new international order that supports pluralism, democracy and human rights.”  

Of course, the late Mr. Lantos is no longer around to see his Democratic party resolve to have America “lead” less and “submit” more to regimes that prohibit pluralism, democracy and human rights, by negating the fundamental differences the West has with the Islamist model.  

Even before the convening of the full conference in Durban, there were signs that Robinson lacked an understanding of, and sympathy for, the rejection of anti-Semitic acts of hostile Muslim states. There were a number of preparatory regional conferences, including one for Asian countries in Tehran.  Despite her assurances to the contrary, the Iranians were able to exclude Jewish NGOs and Israelis and other holders of Israeli passports from attending.   This Muslim racism made a mockery of the process to hold a conference against Racism.    In fact, Australia and New Zealand were also barred from attending the Tehran meeting because they were seen to be too supportive of Israel.

While Robinson was forceful in the regional pre-conference meetings in South America and Europe, speaking eloquently of the need for every country to confront its own racism, at Tehran she took the opposite approach.  Lantos notes that she spoke not a word about anti-Semitic textbooks and curricula in Arab schools, no appeal for the rights of non-Muslim minorities, no appeal to improve the horrible lot of imported domestic workers in Arab sheikdoms, no condemnation of the Taliban’s destruction of ancient Buddhist artifacts, and no plea for an elevation for the status of women in Muslim societies.  Said Lantos: “To many of us following these early developments, her silence was deafening.”

Lantos noted that the declarations adopted by the Asian nations in the ‘discriminatory’ environment of Tehran, under Robinson’s watch, amounted to a statement of intent to use the Durban anti-racism conference as a tool of propaganda and hate against the world’s only Jewish state.  The text accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and implementing a system of ‘apartheid”, accusations well beyond the limits of previous anti-Israel discourse.   And Robinson?   In a statement that Lantos found “baffling” she did not criticize this hijacking of the agenda to create a non-political conference against racism and not against specific states.  Instead she congratulated the delegates for coming up with a “Consensus”!    According to Lantos, she characterized this preliminary hatefest as a “productive dialogue between civilizations”.   When asked why, despite all guidelines, the Asian pre-conference had centred out Israel as the only source of racism in the world, she stated:  “The situation in the Palestinian occupied territories was brought up at the meeting and it was reflected in the final declaration.” 

Note the comment by Lantos:

“These comments (by Robinson) represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the WCAR.   By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israel-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the world conference, she betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes.  From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.”

The world conferences on racism that were held in 1978 and 1983 were held when the world was showing a consensus against the Apartheid regime in South Africa.  It became clear that the Islamic states, with the appeasement of Robinson, were poised to win a propaganda war to shun, isolate and boycott a state, whose civilians at that very moment were being attacked by so-called suicide bombers, supported financially and morally by the complete Arab world.   By the use of the WCAR, the Islamic world hoped to portray the Israelis not as victims, but as the perpetrators and moreover wrap the Israelis up in the images of Nazis and South African racists.   And Mary Robinson helped them.

Prior to Durban, there were no substantial calls for boycotts against Israeli professors or the other university activism now sadly a part of the academic scene.   The fact that the United Nations oversaw such an event helped pave the way for illegitimate boycotts and one sided conferences now taking place at universities all over the world, including, sadly, universities in the United States and Canada.

The forgoing should be sufficient to disentitle Robinson from the award.  But the most important reasons are these:   First, according to Lantos, in discussions during the conference she "refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East.  Instead, she discussed "the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand and ... the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other."

The alleged moral equivalency between the Nazi final solution to the Jews and Jewish treatment of Palestinians is a morally corrupt position.  It is meant by many of its proponents to pave the way for a second “final solution” where the Jews of Israel are fair game for murder because of their alleged treatment of Palestinians.  Robinson not only permitted this nonsense to be spouted ad nauseum at Durban, the above quote from Lantos shows that she was a proponent of this ideological component of anti-Semitism.   If the Jews are as bad as the Nazis, then they too should be killed. Obama has no business giving the imprimatur of an American Medal of Freedom on one who subscribes to such views, and then uses her tenure at the head of a United Nations Human Rights Commission to popularize such views.

If Robinson is given a Medal of Freedom by Obama, it in effect legitimizes her abhorrent views that the lack of “freedom” of the Palestinians is an event comparable to the Holocaust of the Jews.  It must also mean that Obama finds nothing anti-Semitic in such a notion.   In fact that abominable position is a characteristic of modern anti-Semitism, just as surely as  the yellow badge that Hitler forced the Jews to wear was a characteristic of Nazi anti-Semitism.   Obama has in effect stated that anti-Semitic attitudes and actions are not a bar to receiving a Medal of Freedom;  it seems to me that such attitudes allowed to her to lead a very anti-Semitic organization, the UN Commission on Human Rights, dominated by anti-Semitic, in fact genocidal nations.  And thus her leadership of such nations whose idea of freedom involves the death of Jewish civilians constitutes a debasement of the idea of “freedom”.    American Jews, having witnessed numerous American professors argue that “terrorists” are really “freedom fighters”, now witness their President award a Medal of “Freedom” to one who accepts that the subjects of terrorism are really Nazis.

In fact the status of the organization that Robinson led became so problematic that it was reformulated and renamed the UN Human Rights Council.   After Robinson finally retired, others were at least embarrassed that a Human Rights commission should have as members Sudan (the Commission, after Robinson retired, refused to take action against Sudan regarding the genocide in Darfur in 2004, preferring instead to elect it as a member two years later), as well as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Cuba and Sri Lanka, all adjudging Israel (which was the subject of over one-third of country-specific resolutions).

Again, the attempt to vilify Israel is now complete, if Israel’s terrorist enemies are freedom fighters, and the American Medal of Freedom goes to the longtime head of a “human rights” commission which honours the abusers, and who helped establish the international principle that Israel is Nazi-like in its persecution of freedom fighters.

Surely, thoughtful American Jews must understand the Orwellian world that surrounds them.

Obama’s announcement on Tisha B’Av 2009 that Mary Robinson would get an American Medal of Freedom is in fact the third strike against American Jewry’s best hitter in the important game of whether anti-Semitism (in the guise of anti-Zionism) is to be unequivocably exempted from prohibited Racism. This strike comes contemporaneously with the growing acceptance by the culturally relativistic elites of a hands-off approach to Muslim Shariah Law allowing abuse of wifes and daughters. To American Jewish liberals, who have for generations understood American liberal values as most similar to Jewish values, the recognition that group rights of misogynistic religions can trump individual human rights, poses, to the thoughtful, almost an existential threat.    How many will allow their thoughfulness in this regards to challenge their financial and emotional comforts in the land where the streets were “paved with gold” is questionable.  You see, this third strike comes at a time when 75% of American Jews joined Obama’s team and thought he was on their side.

Would that American Jews have understood that the first black President should have been Colin Powell not Barack Obama and would that they have thrown their (supposedly) powerful lobby into getting Powell selected by the Republicans.   Yet the sad, if not outright pathetic, story of Obama’s manipulation of American Jews does nothing so much as disprove the meanspirited, perhaps anti-Semitic rantings of Professor Walt and Mearshimer, and other critics of the so-called lobby.

In fact the three strikes against American Jews (which are similar to what has happened already to British Jews) are as follows:

The first strike was academia (again a forum supposedly dominated by Jews) where the definition of “racism” was taken over by sociologists who imported into the concept a necessary prerequisite of the inequality of power and the use of words and action to perpetuate an imbalance of power, often to support a status quo. Therefore the weak can not be truly racist, as all words and actions are excused by the theory that they are seeking to end an unjustified inequality of power.   This sociological construct was then utilized by such philosophers as England’s John Honderich to somehow deduce that groups like the Palestinians were not only not racist to advocate killing of Jewish civilians but had a moral right to do so.

The second strike was the adoption of the post-modern concept of cultural relativism.  Jews and American non-Jews alike were to be disabused of the notion that their culture emphasizing individual human rights was the only legitimate culture in the world, and in fact it was racist to disrespect those other cultures who grant no individual rights but only tribal rights or the right not to be disrespected or humiliated.  Such cultures could no longer be seen as bringing on their own humiliation by failing to equip their young for technology and economic prosperity or to respect peace and non-violence.  It was America and certainly it was Israel, according to these theorists, that was the “root cause” of the humiliation, rather than the behaviours and misdeeds of the cultures themselves.

The third strike, thrown by Obama on Tisha B’Av last is to tie American notions of freedom and justice to the notions permitted, even supported, by Mary Robinson at Durban.  Durban was allowed to stand for the proposition that Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians (notwithstanding all of the efforts made in the Oslo process and other deals made which the Palestinians did not honour) amounted to a Nazi-like genocide against the Palestinians.

Tom Lantos’ account of the tragedy of  Mary Robinson and the Durban Conference should be studied.   He met repeatedly with Robinson to challenge her acceptance of the Organization of Islamic States attempt to use the Durban Conference to delegitimize the Jewish State, and, together with Colin Powell, he held to their position that the Conference was not to be hijacked into involvement in one specific political dispute.

Lantos says that Robinson “refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East.

Instead she discussed ‘the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and … the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.’”

Whether or not this language was reflected in the final conference draft, after the Americans and others had pulled out, this display of hateful power by the Islamic states and anti-American and anti-Israel NGOs, as appeased by Mary Robinson on behalf of the so-called United Nations, was a turning point in world history.   And the awarding of a medal for this conduct reflects a turning point (which we hope can be reversed in the future) in American history.   For Obama, the President whose moral judgments as a member of Reverend Wright’s congregation were called into question, has demonstrated the validity of all the concerns.   The misuse of history, the false equivalencies between the Holocaust and Israeli assumption of sovereignty after a defensive war where its very existence was at stake, the appeasement of totalitarians without a free media or academia to correct its Big Lies, all have been given an American stamp of approval. On Tisha B’Av.

When Obama spoke at Cairo, he exemplified the American submission to Islamic doctrines.   First, he had the nerve to equate all of the tolerance towards minorities, women, gays, and blacks – which were not achieved without great struggle in America, but are now supported by some very strong laws – and the great American Justice system with the non-tolerance of minority rights, women’s rights and the lack of Justice in Islamic countries today. While no one should expect a President to be unduly insulting to his hosts, the following words are reflective of a submission and an appeasement which will enable Muslim states to continue their unjust persecution of some of their peoples:   Obama stated that America and Islam “share common principles, principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

If so, would Obama the Christian and his wife the feminist feel as comfortable living in Saudi Arabia or Iran as they do in Chicago or Washington?

The third strike, by comparing the Palestinian suffering under what is called an Occupation, to Jewish suffering under the Holocaust, does more than create the problem of moral equivalency, a particularly noxious form of moral relativism;  it in fact compares not only the sufferers (who surely should not be compared) but also the alleged perpetrators.   The success for Islamists and anti-Semites of all varieties was that an international conference with all the legitimacy bestowed by the United Nations, made it permissible in the future to compare the Nazi perpetrators of the planned extinction of every Jew on earth with the new Nazis, the Israelis.    And so, a world that came together to finally kill the Nazis could come together again, under the submissive leadership of Brown in England, Sarkozy in France and Obama in America, to kill the new Nazis, the Israelis.   Or, more likely, feel nothing more than Tolerance, as the Arab world, now supported by the soon-to-be nuclear power of Iran handles the actual genocide.

Tolerism, that excessive leniency towards the views of our enemies, is the ideological mask hiding the three strikes against the Jews:  allegations of racism and Apartheid against the Jews of Israel and their Jewish supporters around world, imposition of standards of cultural relativism, and finally on Tisha B’Av, 2009, the message that Mary Robinson was right – the Jews are the new Nazis.  

The American Jews have lost the first game in the series, whether they understand it or not.   It is time to wake up and understand the rules of the game.   The first step is to understand just what tragedy befell the Jewish people on Tisha B’Av 2009.

Aha, just as I have started a new series on the myth that Europe is a positive force in world history, the Jerusalem Post's great columnist Caroline Glick writes a superb column on Europe's anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, and why Europhiles in Israel must re-assess their attitudes:

JPost.com » Opinion » Columnists » Article

May 14, 2009 21:31 | Updated May 15, 2009 16:48

Column One: The Europe of our dreams

By CAROLINE GLICK

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Israelis are wild about Europe. A poll carried out by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation last month showed that a whopping 69 percent of Israelis, and 76% of Israeli Jews, would like for Israel to join the European Union. Sixty percent of Israelis have a favorable view of the EU.

This poll's most obvious message is that as far as Europe is concerned, Israelis suffer from unrequited love. A 2003 Pew survey of 15 EU countries showed that 59% of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace. A poll taken in Germany the following year showed that 68% of Germans believe that Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians and 51% said that there is no difference in principle between Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

And it isn't simply Israel that they hate. They don't like Jews very much either. In an empirical study published in 2006, Professors Edward Kaplanand Charles Small of Yale University demonstrated a direct link between hatred for Jews and extreme anti-Israel positions. A recent poll bears out the fact that levels of hostility toward Israel rise with levels of anti-Semitism.

According to a 2008 Pew survey, anti-Semitic feelings in five EU countries - Spain, Britain, France, Germany and Poland - rose nearly 50% between 2005 and 2008. Whereas in 2005, some 21% of people polled acknowledged they harbor negative feelings toward Jews, by last year the proportion of self-proclaimed anti-Semites in these countries had risen to 30%. In Spain levels of anti-Semitism more than doubled, from 21% in 2005 to 46% in 2008.

Not surprisingly, increased hatred of Jews has been accompanied by increased violence against Jews. Just last week, for instance, three men assaulted Israel's ambassador in Spain Rafi Shotz as he and his wife walked home from a soccer game. They followed after him and called out, "dirty Jew," "Jew bastard," and "Jew murderer." A crowd witnessed the assault, but no one rose to their defense.

Shotz was lucky. As Israel's ambassador he had two policemen escorting him and so he was not physically threatened. The same was not the fate of Holocaust survivors who assembled at Mauthausen death camp in Austria last week to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the camp's liberation by American forces.

As Jewish survivors of the camp where 340,000 people were murdered mourned the dead, a gang of Austrian teenagers wearing masks taunted them, screaming "Heil Hitler," and "This way for the gas!" They opened fire with plastic rifles at French Jewish survivors, wounding one in the head and another in the neck.

And Austria is not alone. From Germany to France, Belgium, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and beyond, Jewish kindergartens and day schools, restaurants and groceries have been firebombed and vandalized. The desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues has become an almost routine occurrence. Jewish leaders from Norway to Germany to Britain to France have warned community members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public. Rabbis have been beaten all over the continent.

There is no state sanction for anti-Jewish violence in Europe. But in many places it is either brushed off as insignificant, or justified as a natural byproduct of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. In at least one case, the official downplaying of the significance of anti-Jewish sentiments and violence has had murderous consequences.

In January 2006 Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, was kidnapped by a gang of Muslim sadists. For an entire week, the police ignored the anti-Semitic nature of the attack - and hence the imminent danger to Halimi's life - in spite of the fact that his kidnappers made threatening phone calls to Halimi's parents where they recited verses from the Koran while Ilan was heard screaming in pain from his torture in the background.

In the end, Halimi was tortured continuously for 20 days before he was dumped at a railhead naked, with burns and cuts over 80% of his battered body and died of his wounds shortly after he was found.

SOME HAVE attributed the rise in European anti-Semitism to the rapid growth of Muslim minorities throughout the continent. This explanation has much to recommend it. Levels of anti-Semitism among most Muslim minority populations in Europe are exceedingly high. According to Kaplan and Small's study, European Muslims are eight times more likely than non-Muslims to be openly anti-Semitic. And Franco Frattini, the EU official responsible for combating anti-Semitism, told The Jerusalem Post last year that some 50% of anti-Jewish attacks in Europe are conducted by Muslims.

But while European Muslims are a major factor in the rise of anti-Jewish violence, they are a bit player when it comes to the overall prevalence of anti-Jewish attitudes. For example, with 46% of Spaniards negatively disposed toward Jews, and with Muslims making up only 3-5% of Spaniards, we learn that nearly half of Christian Spaniards are anti-Semitic. And as the 2008 Pew survey shows, European hatred of Jews is growing at a fast clip. Indeed, it is growing two and a half times faster than European hatred of Muslims.

In all likelihood, these negative trends for Jews are only going to escalate in the coming years. Politicians interested in being elected have already begun exploiting the rise in anti-Jewish sentiments to increase their electoral prospects. In the 2005 British elections, for instance, the Labor Party under Tony Blair depicted then Conservative Party leader Michael Howard as the hateful anti-Semitic icon Fagin from Oliver Twist in a campaign poster. Another Labor poster portrayed Howard and fellow politician Oliver Letwin as flying pigs.

This state of affairs bodes ill for Israel's future relations with Europe. In most cases, European politicians pander to the growing constituency of anti-Semites by adopting hostile policies toward Israel. These policies then serve to further justify anti-Semitic attitudes, and so the number of European anti-Semites continues to grow, and in turn, European hostility to Israel increases.

 

No doubt recognizing the political advantage to be garnered by attacking Israel, last year Spanish investigative magistrate Judge Fernando Andreu Merellesis decided to use a specious complaint submitted by the discredited Palestinian Center for Human Rights to launch a war crimes investigation against Israel's top political and military leaders. Against the stated will of Spain's state prosecution, Merellesis announced last week that he is proceeding with his investigation into claims that a dozen senior Israeli leaders committed a war crime when they approved the 2002 decision to target Hamas terror master Salah Shehadeh.

ALL OF this brings us back to Europhilic Israel. Due to the fact that the majority of Israelis have yet to get their way, and Israel continues not to be a member in the EU, EU courts lack the power to enforce their rulings against Israelis. Today the only thing Israelis need to worry about is that we will be arrested if we visit Europe. This is inconvenient, but not impossible to live with.

Were Israel to join the EU, however, EU laws would supersede Israeli laws. European courts could compel Israeli courts to enforce their rulings. Israel, in short, would find itself subsumed in a hostile political entity that could simply adjudicate and legislate it out of existence.

So what explains Israel's unrequited love affair with Europe?

There is no all-encompassing explanation for the EU's popularity in Israel. It is a function of a number of complementary causes. The most important among them is the abject failure of the Israeli media to examine European anti-Semitism and its implications for European policy toward Israel in any coherent fashion.

Rather than recognize that European anti-Semitism and its concomitant hostility toward Israel is the consequence of internal European dynamics, the Israeli media tend to cast both as a function of Israel's actions. Doing so certainly makes for neat, easily digestible news stories, but it also trivializes the situation. Moreover, by acting as though Israel's actual behavior is at all relevant to European treatment of Jews and the Jewish state, the local media effectively buy into cynical European moves to belittle the significance of anti-Jewish violence. They give credence to false European claims that the firebombing of synagogues is simply the regrettable consequence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Then there is the issue of Israel's constant quest to end its international isolation. For many Israelis, it is tantalizing to think that we can end our international isolation by joining the EU. The EU is seen as a club of rich and cultured countries with which Israel would benefit from merging. This view again is nurtured by the media, which have failed to report on the failure of the European welfare state model.

In light of the media's refusal to tell the story of Europe's hostility toward Jews and the Jewish state, or the story of the EU's severe economic problems, it is not surprising that precious few Israeli politicians have a clear understanding of Europe. Successive foreign ministers - from Shimon Peres to Silvan Shalom to Tzipi Livni to Avigdor Lieberman - have all voiced varying degrees of support for Israeli membership in the EU. Their statements have never been challenged in debate.

Finally, there is the nostalgia that many Israelis feel toward the old pre-war Europe from their grandparents' stories. That long gone Europe, where young women and men would walk along the promenades in Berlin, Paris, Antwerp and Prague holding hands and eating ice cream, breathing in the air of Heinrich Heine and Franz Kafka, has been kept alive in the imaginations of generations of Israelis. Many of them work today as leading journalists, movie directors and actors. For many Israelis, then, the myth of Europe is more familiar than the real Europe.

Looking to a future of an increasingly Jew-hating Europe it is clear that Israel and Israelis must quickly divest ourselves of our delusions about Europe. For Israel to competently contend with Europe in the coming years, it will be essential that both our political leaders and society as a whole gain a firm grasp of where Europe stands in relation to both the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

With a burgeoning and deeply anti-Semitic Muslim minority, and with a Christian majority increasingly comfortable with flaunting traditional anti-Semitic attitudes, dispensing with anti-Jewish myths ranks low on the priority list for most European leaders. In contrast, for Israel, gazing at this unfolding European state of affairs, it is clear that abandoning our adoration for a mythological Europe is one of the most urgent items on our national agenda.

Well, this video says it all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU

Readers of my last two posts will understand that I am quite unimpressed with Europe and what it has supposedly accomplished.  You see my perspective, as the child of a European survivor of the Holocaust, is a little different than those who are impressed with European "culture" whether it is the art and literature, the cuisine, the architecture, or the pseudo-sophistication.

None of that means shit to me anymore.   A civilization that produced Auschwitz should be shunned for a thousand years.

Here is today's quote:

As Norman Podhoretz wrote in the June, 2007 issue of Commentary:

“Much of the world has greeted Ahmadinejad’s promise to wipe Israel off the map with something close to insouciance. In fact, it could almost be said of the Europeans that they have been more upset by Ahmadinejad’s denial that a Holocaust took place 60 years ago than by his determination to set off one of his own as soon as he acquires the means to do so. In a number of European countries, Holocaust denial is a crime, and the European Union only recently endorsed that position. Yet for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of Jews back then, the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.”

OK, so you wonder why the Rotberg Plan for Mid-East Peace is the only just plan out there, miles ahead of the Oslo plan, the Tenet plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Saudi Plan, etc. etc.

You see, some Palestinians left in 1948, just as the Arab states invaded because they did not like the UN approved partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

These Arab residents of what was to be given as a Jewish state, planned to come back, just as soon as the nascent Jewish state could be defeated, and the Jews sent packing back to Europe where the Palestinians were told that the Jews originated.  (i.e. they seem to be unaware that the Jews originated in Israel).

The Arab states tried to help them in wars of 1956, 1967 (which turned out to be a really bad idea for the attacking Arabs, because they ended up losing territory, and in 1973.

But you see the Arabs did not really do this to help the Palestinians.  That was just to be a by-product of their main goal which was to get rid of any Jewish presence in the Middle East that was not structured as a "dhimmi" or subservient relationship for non-Muslims in Muslim territory.

The proof of this is that between 1948 and 1967 the Arab states were in possession of lands where the Palestinian refugee camps were found.   There was no movement at all towards the idea that is now supposedly the cure-all, i.e. giving sovereignty to the Palestinians of this land.   If the Jews of Israel are supposedly occupiers now, well it seems to me that the Arabs of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon were occupiers up to 1967.

The Arab countries were so offended by this Jewish State, that they decided to expel in one way or another the Jews that had lived for generations among them, in particular in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.   Most of the Jews who left those Arab countries were forced to leave property behind.  Most of them fled to Israel, the Jewish homeland that constitutionally admits and re-settles any oppressed Jew.

So, one would think that the problem was simply that of a population exchange.   And that once the Jews from Arab countries were resettled at Israel's cost in Israel, that the world would tell these Arab states, that they were expected in return to take in the Palestinians.

But the problem with that was the encouragement mainly from Europeans towards the Palestinians that they could retake land in Israel, without showing any cultural tendencies toward peaceful conduct.   The Europeans were not bothered that generations of Palestinians were taught that all of the good things that can be accomplished in life should be put on hold until they returned to claim their now improved upon historical lands in Tel Aviv or Haifa.   The Europeans were not bothered that Palestinian children learned only hate and violence from the Arab and Palestinian media, education systems and the preaching in the mosques.

So the Norwegians could be proud of persuading the Israelis, so desperate for peace and normalcy for its highly educated population, which didn't want to have endless wars, to go with the Oslo plan.   This plan told the Israelis to give up partial sovereignty of Palestinian areas, and transfer powers and even pay for weapons for the so-called Palestinian authority under the lifetime rule of Yassr Arafat.

I really don't know why it has taken me so long to figure out this solution to the "plight" of the Palestinian "refugees".   Everybody in Western Europe figures that the Islamization of Western Europe will go better for him or her if Israel can somehow be "forced" to turn over more land (as per the not so successful Gaza model) to the Palestinians - who despite all the comments for the benefit of the West, have never stopped teaching their children that they shall once more return to Tel Aviv.   In Israel most Jews accept the basic proposition of two lands for two peoples, provided the Palestinians give up their goal of ejecting the Jews from their "awful" Jewish state (which just happens to give more rights to Arabs than any Arab state).

And we are expected to believe that life will be bearable for the Jews of Israel if they just give a "right" of return to people trained from an early age in their education system and by their media and by their imams that Jews are evil and must be eradicated, with help forthcoming from the soon to be perfected nuclear arms of Iran.

So the "solution" I have figured out is that we resettle the Palestinian refugees in the soon to be Islamic states of Western Europe.   Western Europe is gradually allowing separatist Sharia law, and Western Europeans have stopped producing enough children to replace themselves and keep their pension funds solvent.

So it is a perfect solution.   Since  the basis of the Palestinian claims is that, notwithstanding the Jewish presence in our Holy Land from Biblical times, the Palestinians lived there for some period of time, and that supposedly voids all Jewish rights.   By the same token, much of the world ignored the words of Osama bin Laden immediately after 9/11:  "Remember the Andalucia!" - which was a reference to the still fuming Islamist reaction to the battle in 12th century Spain where the marauding Muslims from the South were finally turned back by the Christians in their quest to conquer Europe.

Since the Europeans seem to be so favorable to the Arabs, and since they are voluntarily giving up such rights as free speech as they become "dhimmis" in a Muslim world, and since the Europeans are so interested (some would say "fixated") on the Palestinians...

THEN THE OBVIOUS SOLUTION IS TO RESETTLE THE PALESTINIANS IN WESTERN EUROPE, WHICH WILL BE MOST PLEASING TO MR. BIN LADEN OF AL QAEDA AND PERHAPS HE WILL BE "APPEASED" AND THEN LEAVE AMERICA ALONE.  THIS WILL HELP BARACK OBAMA, WITH HIS NEW FOUND TECHNIQUE OF "ENGAGING" THE TERRORISTS, AND HE CAN HELP THE AMERICAN PEOPLE INTO A SAFE ISOLATIONISM.

SO THE NEXT TIME YOU HEAR A WESTERN EUROPEAN TELLING ISRAEL OFF FOR OCCUPYING SUPPOSEDLY MUSLIM LANDS, YOU TELL THEM THAT ACCORDING TO MR. BIN LADEN, THE EUROPEANS ARE OCCUPYING MUSLIM LANDS TOO.   THEN AS EUROPE CONTINUES TO BE ISLAMIFIED, THEY WILL BE WILLING TO ALLOW IMMIGRATION OF THEIR DEAR PALESTINIAN BRETHERN. THE EUROPEANS WHO WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR MILLIONS AND MILLION OF DEATHS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WORLD WARS AND GENOCIDE OF THE JEWS, WITH THEIR STILL LATENT ANTI-SEMITISM WHICH ALLOWS FOR EXAMPLE MUSLIM ATTACKS ON JEWISH YOUTHS IN FRANCE, WILL GET WHAT THEY SECRETLY WISH FOR - THE REMOVAL OF ALL JEWS FROM EUROPE TO ISRAEL, AND THE FULFILLMENT OF THE EUROPEAN LUST FOR ARAB VALUES AND PETRODOLLARS.

PROBLEM SOLVED.  I DO APOLOGIZE FOR TAKING SO LONG TO THINK OF IT.

A RE-EVALUATION OF HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATIONS :      THE FIVE LESSONS THAT WE SHOULD HAVE LEARNED

By Howard Rotberg

April 21^st marks the 2009 Holocaust Commemoration Day, or, as it is called in Hebrew, Yom HaShoah, I suggest it is time for a re-evaluation of Holocaust Commemorations, Museums, and Education. We must re-consider what is the message we are trying to give, and re-consider the objective of our Holocaust teaching resources and the objective of our museums, ceremonies and other commemorations of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Centre of Toronto, for example, states in its Mandate that “It is our responsibility to educate the community at large to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust will be learned.”

In its statement of Purpose, the Toronto Holocaust Centre states:  “ As custodians of memory, we must dedicate ourselves to preserving the past and educating future generations. Only through education and remembrance can we safeguard the lessons of the Holocaust, for it is clear that they have not yet been learned.”

So, the question is:  what are the lessons of the Holocaust that our Holocaust commemoration centres are teaching?   The Toronto Holocaust Education website, which does not mention the word “Israel” even once, goes on to explain:   “It is in the ways in which we pay tribute to memory that we truly define ourselves, for it is in forgetfulness and indifference that hate and destruction triumph.”

Two comments will suffice at present:  Firstly, why do we assume the lessons are clear, and not openly discuss them? Secondly, this statement alleges that we “define ourselves” primarily in giving “tribute to memory” and then alleges that one lesson appears to be that it is in “forgetfulness and indifference that hate and destruction triumph”   While there is much truth to that, I would suggest that there are a host of other lessons that we better be imparting.    Surely, the antipathy to Israel and Jews worldwide today is not based on “forgetfulness and indifference” but something more ominous.

A good starting point for education programs on the Holocaust is the League for Human Rights of B’Nai Brith found at http://www.bnaibrith.ca/league/hh-teachers/educan04.html.  It contains a Review and Analysis of Curriculum, Policies, Programs and Teacher Training.   It makes a greater effort than most to try to articulate the purpose and lessons to be learned for Holocaust education.  But again, there is no reference anywhere to the State of Israel.

Many Holocaust educators follow curriculum ideas from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in its "Teaching About the Holocaust: A Resource for Educators, “(t)he Holocaust calls into question our most basic assumptions about human nature, modern society, social responsibility, and global citizenship.”    I certainly agree with that.   But then it goes on to state:

“The study of the Holocaust assists students in developing an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping in any society. It helps students develop an awareness of the value of pluralism, and encourages tolerance of diversity in a multicultural society.”    I am not happy, however, when I read that Holocaust Education now has a major objective of “promoting the value of pluralism, and …tolerance of diversity in a multicultural society.”   Let me explain why.

Recently, I watched a fine series on the Holocaust by the American network, Public Broadcasting System.  As part of the series, they assembled a group of high school students who not only watched the series’ episodes, but went on a trip to tour Auschwitz.  Then, at the end of the series, the students were filmed, discussing what they had learned. One young man, quite typical of the rest, was clear that he had learned that we must all be free of “discrimination” and “racism”, and he vowed to be more welcoming to Muslim immigrants.

So it was made clear to the viewer.  The Holocaust now stands for the principle of being tolerant and non-discriminatory. We, of course, are now entering the end-game of those who have quite successfully hijacked the moral of the Holocaust story.  In a world of moral and cultural relativism, where “tolerance” is the only enduring value, we Jews are participating in a fraudulent and reprehensible misuse of History – a misuse which results in the new villains being precisely those who adopt religious values to judge human behaviour, and seek to discriminate between good and evil, and the new heroes being Muslim victims of criticism.   Moreover, those who support the Jewish homeland in Israel are also cast as villains, since Israel (as viewed by the United Nations General Assembly et al.) is guilty of humiliating and offending Muslims everywhere by its lack of tolerance towards those who want to destroy it.

In fact, the Holocaust more appropriately stands for what the proponents of tolerance do not want to hear:   that there are some very evil people who periodically come to power and we must do everything possible to stop these evil people.    We must not “tolerate” these evil people;  we must take all necessary steps, including war, to stop them. We must not accept that all cultures and all ideologies are relative;  in fact, some cultures are evil, and some are good, and the good will not be able to stop the evil through “negotiations” or tolerance, but in fact will have to stop evil by force.   The Holocaust stands for the need to identify good and evil, and take action, no matter how inconvenient or  how politically incorrect that action may appear.

In a world that expresses more concerns about Israel erecting a security fence to protect civilians than about the intentional targeting of those civilians, and obscures the fact that there would be no checkpoints and no fences if the Palestinians would give up their fantasy of ejecting the Jewish state from the Middle East, we are faced with the need to examine what has gone wrong with our Holocaust commemoration. For it is my argument that Holocaust commemoration has been willingly subverted by well-meaning liberal Jews into a movement to deny Jewish values in favour of the new relativist and tolerant values that are weakening the Western World’s resolve to defend itself and its freedoms against the forces of Islamofascism.    In part, they are simply afraid to face arguments that they are “using” the memory of the Holocaust for contemporary ideological purposes – in this case, support of the state of Israel – but what they fail to understand is that all history is interpreted according to some current ideology, and the ideology of Tolerance is a problem for the cause of maintenance of our freedoms.

Before we examine my list of what we should really be learning from the Holocaust, let us examine some ideological bases for what will follow.   The reader will have already inferred that I see a distinction between Jewish values and the values existing today in the secular Western World. The fact that such a view is not shared by all Jews is, in my opinion, one of the tragedies of modern Jewish life. For most Jews view ourselves as the descendants of those who entered into a covenant with G-d at Mount Sinai to accept certain laws and moral values, sometimes summarized as ethical monotheism.     But unlike proselytizing religions like Christianity and Islam, we accepted certain laws as our obligation only, as a way to bring a Tikkun Olam, a repair of the universe, necessary after the fall of Adam and Eve.

Thus accepting a role to act as a “light unto the nations”, did not involve any moral superiority as such, but it did carry with it the moral judgment that we expected righteous non-Jews to live by the seven Noahite Laws – with respect to 1) idolatry; 2) blasphemy; 3) homicide; 4) incest and adultery; 5) robbery; 6) eating the flesh of a live creature; and 7) establishing a system of justice.

Note that “tolerance” and “respect for diversity” are nowhere found in this list.   And note, that the Nazis in the Holocaust quite clearly breached the Noahite laws pertaining to idolatry, blasphemy, homicide, robbery and a system of justice.   Accordingly, the very first lesson of the Holocaust is to judge adversely any people emulating the Nazi rejection of these fundamental Noahite principles.    Moral relativism, with its inherent minimization of such breaches among other peoples, is then a corruption, which a clear understanding of the moral lessons of the Holocaust should warn against.

Instead, we have one of our pre-eminent Holocaust museums named The Museum of Tolerance.  The fact that it ostensibly honours the great Simon Wiesenthal, who surely rejected tolerance in favour of Justice, is an unfortunate irony.

The Montreal Holocaust Museum is better than most, as I especially like its slogan that “we believe that remembrance is continuing the resistance.” However, its website states that its central mission is to “(encourage) visitors to take ownership of the absolute responsibility to fight intolerance in all its forms” and again makes “respect for diversity” one of its central values.

Just as the first lesson of the Holocaust involves understanding the notion of what values are inherent in our civilization, other lessons involve understanding the way in which the Nazi Holocaust differed in scope and result to numerous anti-Jewish pogroms, inquisitions, discriminations, prejudices, lynchings, and the like, which have occurred through history with depressing regularity. The Holocaust was successful in killing an astounding 6 million Jews, and numerous others, because firstly, it audaciously adopted the mission of destroying every single one of this demonized People, and secondly it applied industrial-like efficiencies and modern propaganda methods.

In its mission of killing an entire people, a Genocide, the Nazis discovered that the more civilians that they killed, and the greater the speed and the magnitude of the slaughter, the easier this would be accepted by the modern world.   This is related to the concept of the Big Lie, specifically that the bigger the lie, the more easily many people believe it.   So, the second lesson of the Holocaust is that the second Noahite law against homicide is easier to breach the more audacious and bizarre the magnitude of the slaughter, and the professed rationale for same.   It is easier for people to mourn the death of one person. There is an accepted protocol of going to a funeral and visitations that allow us a path towards mourning and acceptance.   But for the death of tens, hundreds, thousands or millions, we do not have such protocol;  it is too much for both our minds and our hearts, so we often do less to commemorate mass murder than the death of one individual.

The third lesson is that homicide is not acceptable no matter what the propaganda-like justifications that are given, and that intentional targeting of civilians for whatever reason is simply wrong.   However, we must also not allow our people to be terrorized and murdered by a misuse of international law – that serves to protect civilian populations that have given over their homes to rocket launchers and hosting terrorist soldiers, and their children and religious faiths to the goal of eradicating other civilian populations.

The fourth lesson is that democratization of evil does not excuse it, and that democracy is not the important value – it is liberal democracy.  A Liberal Democracy is a democracy that functions according to a justice system, which will, when necessary, overturn the will of the majority when that majority acts in an illegal fashion.   The fact that the Nazis were initially voted in by the German people is analogous to the fact that the Palestinian people voted in Hamas.  Democratization is useless without a system of justice, and neither the Nazis nor the Palestinians have had a properly functioning Justice system.   To accord respect to societies that are run illegally and that trample on the fundamental inherent rights of human beings does not amount to being tolerant – it amounts to being intolerant to those who inevitably suffer at the hands of the crazies who elevate some ideology over the right to justice.

The fifth lesson is to me, the most tragic of all:   we must counter the morally corrupt position that mentioning the name of the Jewish Homeland, Israel, in the context of Holocaust commemorations is unnecessarily “controversial”, or is a form of using the Holocaust for some political agenda.    The extent to which some twisted notion of “political correctness” causes us to “cleanse” our commemorations of the mere mention of the importance of the Jewish state, is the extent to which we have given up our values and replaced them with the values of our enemy.   Hitler would surely be smiling if he knew that Iran and Syria, with their evil proxies, Hizbollah and Hamas, are publicly planning the destruction of Israel and the nearly 6 million Jews there.    He would laugh out loud if he knew that so much as mentioning that fact in a Holocaust Commemoration event, is enough to cause a huge controversy, and therefore many of our events are not Judenrein, but Israelrein.

Canadian Professor Anne Bayefsky, writing on January 27,  2005 in National Review Online points out that the United Nations commemoration of the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz made sure that there were no actual Resolutions coming out of the ceremony, so as not to offend the Arab states, which boycotted the event (the auditorium was half empty).  Of the 41 speakers at the event, only 5 dared to mention the word, "Israel" in their speeches, and such word was not mentioned in the speeches by the U.S., Canada, the European Union and Australia. Then, most amazing of all, at the ceremony that took place at Auschwitz, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfovitz stated:  "We have agreed to set aside contemporary political issues, in order to reflect on those events of 60 years ago in a spirit of unanimity."   The price, however, for unanimity is to abandon the notion that the Holocaust contains lessons for contemporary politics.  To concede as Wolfovitz did, that European leftists and the Muslims are offended by the lessons to be drawn, is to render the Holocaust into a meaningless symbol.

Bayefsky notes the irony of the constant repetition of the mantra "Never Again" when we fail to give primacy to discussions of what that means in the contemporary situation for the Jewish state: "Jews everywhere are indebted to the willingness and ability of Israelis to live and breathe self-determination.  When contemporary political issues are set aside and an affirmation of the centrality of the Jewish state's well-being is not key to a commemoration of the Holocaust, 'never again' is an empty phrase."

And so, I look at the mandate and mission statement of my local Holocaust education centre, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre; and I read on its website:

The Mandate is “(t)o combat prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism and genocide by educating the public, especially students and teachers, about the events and implications of the Holocaust.”    Certainly, educating about the events of the Holocaust is a mammoth task, and to teach history accurately is, by itself, an important and valuable mandate.   But when I searched the entire website, I could not find one mention of the word “Israel”, and I question how we can teach about the “implications of the Holocaust” without so much as mentioning  the Jewish homeland of Israel.

The mission of the Vancouver Holocaust Education centre is stated as follows:  “ The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre's programming links the study of the Holocaust to British Columbia's social studies, language arts and fine arts curriculum, and makes connections between the Holocaust, Canadian history and contemporary social justice issues.”   So why do we shy away from making “connections” to the problems of the Jewish state?   Why limit ourselves to contemporary social justice and not political justice and security of the Jews of Israel to be free of terrorism and murder?    What are we telling the many visitors to the Centre when we fail to associate ourselves in any way with our Homeland?  Part of the Mandate for the VHEC from its website is to educate on the “implications of the Holocaust”.   Again, are there no implications with respect to Israel and its current abuse by U.N. bodies and the double standards routinely applied against our Jewish state?

Moreover, we must recognize and stress publicly that the most relevant Holocaust denial as well as current threats to the Jewish people emanate from members of Radical Islam. 

Courtesy of the MEMRI organization, here are excerpts from a speech delivered by Dr. Walid Al-Rashudi, head of the Department of Islamic Studies at King Saud
University, Saudi Arabia, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on February 29, 2008.

Walid Al-Rashudi:  “ One of the important things that we must tell people
is that what is going on in Palestine today is a real holocaust. This
is the real holocaust. A holocaust is not the burning of 50-60 Jews in
Germany or Switzerland, but the Jews continue to call it the
Holocaust. In case you don't know, let me tell you that more than 90%
of the Muslims in the world do not know that the Jews receive
reparations from Germany and Switzerland for the so-called Holocaust
affair. We believe that there was indeed a holocaust, but how many
died? 50-60 people? Afterwards, they used it to blackmail these two
countries.

“So what are we supposed to say in the face of the Gaza holocaust?  What
compensation will satisfy us? By Allah, we will not be satisfied even
if all the Jews are killed.”

Nowhere in such a succinct fashion is there made the link between Holocaust denial and the promise to try to create a second Holocaust as in this speech by the head of the Islamic Studies Department of the one of the most important Muslim universities in the world.  The failure to make Israel the centerpiece of Holocaust commemoration means we give inadequate regard for this explicit threat to kill all the Jews of the State of Israel by an establishment Islamic scholar at the rich and powerful King Saud University. 

In a misguided attempt to avoid political “controversy”, we fail to emphasize strongly enough that the new “anti-Zionism” is, for the most part, based on anti-Semitic thinking. Holocaust education must not shy away from examining what the U.S. State Department, in its impressive new study of anti-Semitism, says is anti-Semitic criticism of Israel:

• • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination

• • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

• • Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

• • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

• • Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel by killing Jews all over the world

I argue that the entire attitude of Diaspora Jews towards the Shoah, and the lesson to be learned from it, is just naively optimistic.    Jeffrey Goldberg, in his book, Prisoners:  A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, discusses his changed awareness when he emigrated from America to Israel, enters the army and feels the empowerment of his first rifle:  “most of us having lived our lives in the company of quisling Jews who, for reasons inexplicable and bizarre, believed the main lesson of the Shoah was that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, instead of the actual lesson of the Shoah, which is that it is easy to kill a unilaterally disarmed Jew but much harder to kill one who is pointing a gun at your face.”

American and Canadian Jews naively assume that others are similar enough to ourselves that if we create good museums and books, they will overcome years of training to hate - whether that training comes in totalitarian Muslim states, in mosques in the West where imams reflect an Islamist ideology, or even in our universities. For our universities provide a steady diet of anti-Israelism  both in the classroom and outside, where obscene events like “Israel Apartheid Week” are sanctioned at the same time as Israeli speakers (like Ehud Barak at Montreal’s Concordia University) are banned, so as to not “offend” Muslim sensibilities.   What about Jewish sensibilities?   Fortunately we have now good organizations like Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, but our mainstream Jewish organizations have been ineffective for too long.

We must imbue our children with the understanding that Jewish values and American values, although many times compatible, are not identical. We must be clear that those values are close enough that support of Israel’s right to exist in peace and security should not attract the charge of “dual loyalty”.  But we must be realistic that acceptance of those promoting appeasement and tolerance of groups seeking to kill Jews is where American values and Jewish values diverge.  Then we must not be loathe to advocate on behalf of those politicians who espouse values closest to our own, and this implies that we and our children be educated sufficiently to understand just what those values are.

In particular, American Jews minimized the fact that Barack Obama chose a Pastor who  blamed 9-11 on America’s and Israel’s “state terrorism” and who associates with Louis Farrakhan, and who infamously stated that “God damn America”.  The movement led by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said to create a hatred of America by its own young is not negated by vague promises of “change”, but by education led by Holocaust educators understanding what are the real threats that could cause a Second Holocaust. I do not accept that such a course of education improperly “politicizes” the Holocaust.   It seems that simple allegations by our enemies that we are “mis-using” the Holocaust for “political” ends have paralyzed us with fear; instead, a free and strong people should be prepared to argue our case for the lessons we seek to draw.

Instead, what I find somewhat offensive, is that self-proclaimed guardians of the memory seek to divorce the lessons of the Holocaust from any reference to contemporary politics.  In their fear of controversy they render the lessons of the Holocaust, unteachable and undiscussable, except in the most general and inoffensive manner.  Professor Peter Novick in his great book, The Holocaust in American History argues that  "(i)n the United States, memory of the Holocaust is so banal, so inconsequential, not memory at all, precisely because it is uncontroversial, so unrelated to real divisions... so apolitical."

It is so apolitical because of a pathetic fear – a fear of allegations by the anti-Israel types that we are using the Holocaust for political ends.   It is high time to overcome this fear.  Why are we so deferential to anti-Semites who want to eradicate the State of Israel, that we are willing to have them dictate that Holocaust commemorations should be “Israelrein”?   It is time to be strong, and understand that the present situation uses the Holocaust too. Do we want the Holocaust to be used for the message that Tolerance is the only lesson?   Or are we strong enough and confident enough that we can link the Holocaust to other lessons, even if the anti-Semites object?

The problem is that left-liberal Jews and others want to take away from Holocaust commemoration the political and historical dimension and the analysis of what constitutes a Justice system, and instead raise the Holocaust to a theological event and the ultimate in competitions for "victimhood".   When groups divorce the Holocaust from historical comparisons, political analysis, and analyses of what constitutes a proper Justice system, while insisting on its "uniqueness", they pass into what Peter Novick calls "an intellectually empty enterprise".  He writes, "the notion of uniqueness is quite vacuous.  Every historical event, including the Holocaust, in some ways resembles events to which it might be compared and differs from them in some ways.  These resemblances and differences are a perfectly proper subject for discussion.  But to single out those aspects of the Holocaust that were distinctive (there certainly were such), and to ignore those aspects that it shares with other atrocities, and on the basis of this gerrymandering to declare the Holocaust unique, is intellectual sleight of hand.  The assertion that the Holocaust is unique - like the claim that it is singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable - is in practice, deeply offensive."

And so we learn to be confident in comparing and contrasting the Holocaust to other genocides.   We can confidently enter into debate with Muslim clerics who lecture that only 50 to 60 Jews were killed in the Holocaust and that the Israelis are the new Nazis, because we know they are not correct, and we must stand up for truth as a fixed truth and not just one “competing narrative” among equally valid multiple viewpoints.

After years of writing about these matters, having had a lecture shouted down and my books “banned”, without the civil liberties crowd speaking out for me, and having seen mainstream Jewish organizations refuse to advocate for the latest victims of anti-Semitic actions, when they are undertaken by Muslims, rather than neo-Nazi skinheads, I have come to some conclusions.    We are living in an age where the Public Library in my hometown of Vancouver, for “Freedom to Read Week” had the gall to invite a bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, Greg Felton, and provide him with the dignity that such a lecture would provide to his resume. The Canada-Israel Committee and the Canadian Jewish Congress wrote emails to members of the Jewish Community in Vancouver, assuring us that they were taking care of the matter privately, and that we should not “protest” and draw attention to the matter, or risk violence.   They of course are wrong.   They of course are reflecting a sadly outdated form of Jewish leadership, which was shown to be tragic during the days of American Jewish leader Rabbi Steven Wise’s neglect of the urgency of Jewish rescue in 1943 after he was made aware of the death camps.

The message we have to the world that fails to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,  when its religiously fanatic leaders, with an apocalyptic world-view,  promise to use them on the Jewish state, is simply:

This time we shall not go quietly.

This is the ultimate message of the Shoah, where so many Jews went like “sheep to the slaughter”.  

This time we shall not place a naïve faith in the international community, or in the Americans, or in anyone else, although we shall not give up on alliances.  This time we shall not quietly entrust our “sheep” to the corrupted shepherds of a United Nations that makes Libya chair of its Human Rights Commission.   This time we shall not entrust our sheep solely to the non-democratic Jewish organizations.   This time we shall not quietly entrust our sheep to the Labour Zionist elites who had so little to say about the murder of the Jewish sheep in 1941-1944, and who had so little to say about the rocket attacks on Sderot and Ashkelon, and the murders of Jewish civilians resulting from the ill-fated Oslo Process.  This time we shall realize that self-described “progressives” and “intellectuals” who spend their time on rationalizing Islamic violence against Jewish civilians, are not our friends, but our enemies.

Accordingly, the centerpiece of Holocaust commemoration on Yom Hashoah this April 21st, should be:  This time we shall not go quietly.

 
Howard Rotberg is a Canadian lawyer who authored the novel, The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel about a Book and its Author (Mantua Books- Canada only), and the book of essays, Second Generation Radical:   The Struggle against the Second Holocaust.   See www.howardrotberg.ca.   He also develops affordable rental housing for the working poor, and writes and lectures about affordable housing policy. 

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A RE-EVALUATION OF HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATIONS :      THE FIVE LESSONS THAT WE SHOULD HAVE LEARNED

By Howard Rotberg

April 21^st marks the 2009 Holocaust Commemoration Day, or, as it is called in Hebrew, Yom HaShoah, I suggest it is time for a re-evaluation of Holocaust Commemorations, Museums, and Education. We must re-consider what is the message we are trying to give, and re-consider the objective of our Holocaust teaching resources and the objective of our museums, ceremonies and other commemorations of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Centre of Toronto, for example, states in its Mandate that “It is our responsibility to educate the community at large to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust will be learned.”

In its statement of Purpose, the Toronto Holocaust Centre states:  “ As custodians of memory, we must dedicate ourselves to preserving the past and educating future generations. Only through education and remembrance can we safeguard the lessons of the Holocaust, for it is clear that they have not yet been learned.”

So, the question is:  what are the lessons of the Holocaust that our Holocaust commemoration centres are teaching?   The Toronto Holocaust Education website, which does not mention the word “Israel” even once, goes on to explain:   “It is in the ways in which we pay tribute to memory that we truly define ourselves, for it is in forgetfulness and indifference that hate and destruction triumph.”

Two comments will suffice at present:  Firstly, why do we assume the lessons are clear, and not openly discuss them? Secondly, this statement alleges that we “define ourselves” primarily in giving “tribute to memory” and then alleges that one lesson appears to be that it is in “forgetfulness and indifference that hate and destruction triumph”   While there is much truth to that, I would suggest that there are a host of other lessons that we better be imparting.    Surely, the antipathy to Israel and Jews worldwide today is not based on “forgetfulness and indifference” but something more ominous.

A good starting point for education programs on the Holocaust is the League for Human Rights of B’Nai Brith found at http://www.bnaibrith.ca/league/hh-teachers/educan04.html.  It contains a Review and Analysis of Curriculum, Policies, Programs and Teacher Training.   It makes a greater effort than most to try to articulate the purpose and lessons to be learned for Holocaust education.  But again, there is no reference anywhere to the State of Israel.

Many Holocaust educators follow curriculum ideas from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in its "Teaching About the Holocaust: A Resource for Educators, “(t)he Holocaust calls into question our most basic assumptions about human nature, modern society, social responsibility, and global citizenship.”    I certainly agree with that.   But then it goes on to state:

“The study of the Holocaust assists students in developing an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping in any society. It helps students develop an awareness of the value of pluralism, and encourages tolerance of diversity in a multicultural society.”    I am not happy, however, when I read that Holocaust Education now has a major objective of “promoting the value of pluralism, and …tolerance of diversity in a multicultural society.”   Let me explain why.

Recently, I watched a fine series on the Holocaust by the American network, Public Broadcasting System.  As part of the series, they assembled a group of high school students who not only watched the series’ episodes, but went on a trip to tour Auschwitz.  Then, at the end of the series, the students were filmed, discussing what they had learned. One young man, quite typical of the rest, was clear that he had learned that we must all be free of “discrimination” and “racism”, and he vowed to be more welcoming to Muslim immigrants.

So it was made clear to the viewer.  The Holocaust now stands for the principle of being tolerant and non-discriminatory. We, of course, are now entering the end-game of those who have quite successfully hijacked the moral of the Holocaust story.  In a world of moral and cultural relativism, where “tolerance” is the only enduring value, we Jews are participating in a fraudulent and reprehensible misuse of History – a misuse which results in the new villains being precisely those who adopt religious values to judge human behaviour, and seek to discriminate between good and evil, and the new heroes being Muslim victims of criticism.   Moreover, those who support the Jewish homeland in Israel are also cast as villains, since Israel (as viewed by the United Nations General Assembly et al.) is guilty of humiliating and offending Muslims everywhere by its lack of tolerance towards those who want to destroy it.

In fact, the Holocaust more appropriately stands for what the proponents of tolerance do not want to hear:   that there are some very evil people who periodically come to power and we must do everything possible to stop these evil people.    We must not “tolerate” these evil people;  we must take all necessary steps, including war, to stop them. We must not accept that all cultures and all ideologies are relative;  in fact, some cultures are evil, and some are good, and the good will not be able to stop the evil through “negotiations” or tolerance, but in fact will have to stop evil by force.   The Holocaust stands for the need to identify good and evil, and take action, no matter how inconvenient or  how politically incorrect that action may appear.

In a world that expresses more concerns about Israel erecting a security fence to protect civilians than about the intentional targeting of those civilians, and obscures the fact that there would be no checkpoints and no fences if the Palestinians would give up their fantasy of ejecting the Jewish state from the Middle East, we are faced with the need to examine what has gone wrong with our Holocaust commemoration. For it is my argument that Holocaust commemoration has been willingly subverted by well-meaning liberal Jews into a movement to deny Jewish values in favour of the new relativist and tolerant values that are weakening the Western World’s resolve to defend itself and its freedoms against the forces of Islamofascism.    In part, they are simply afraid to face arguments that they are “using” the memory of the Holocaust for contemporary ideological purposes – in this case, support of the state of Israel – but what they fail to understand is that all history is interpreted according to some current ideology, and the ideology of Tolerance is a problem for the cause of maintenance of our freedoms.

Before we examine my list of what we should really be learning from the Holocaust, let us examine some ideological bases for what will follow.   The reader will have already inferred that I see a distinction between Jewish values and the values existing today in the secular Western World. The fact that such a view is not shared by all Jews is, in my opinion, one of the tragedies of modern Jewish life. For most Jews view ourselves as the descendants of those who entered into a covenant with G-d at Mount Sinai to accept certain laws and moral values, sometimes summarized as ethical monotheism.     But unlike proselytizing religions like Christianity and Islam, we accepted certain laws as our obligation only, as a way to bring a Tikkun Olam, a repair of the universe, necessary after the fall of Adam and Eve.

Thus accepting a role to act as a “light unto the nations”, did not involve any moral superiority as such, but it did carry with it the moral judgment that we expected righteous non-Jews to live by the seven Noahite Laws – with respect to 1) idolatry; 2) blasphemy; 3) homicide; 4) incest and adultery; 5) robbery; 6) eating the flesh of a live creature; and 7) establishing a system of justice.

Note that “tolerance” and “respect for diversity” are nowhere found in this list.   And note, that the Nazis in the Holocaust quite clearly breached the Noahite laws pertaining to idolatry, blasphemy, homicide, robbery and a system of justice.   Accordingly, the very first lesson of the Holocaust is to judge adversely any people emulating the Nazi rejection of these fundamental Noahite principles.    Moral relativism, with its inherent minimization of such breaches among other peoples, is then a corruption, which a clear understanding of the moral lessons of the Holocaust should warn against.

Instead, we have one of our pre-eminent Holocaust museums named The Museum of Tolerance.  The fact that it ostensibly honours the great Simon Wiesenthal, who surely rejected tolerance in favour of Justice, is an unfortunate irony.

The Montreal Holocaust Museum is better than most, as I especially like its slogan that “we believe that remembrance is continuing the resistance.” However, its website states that its central mission is to “(encourage) visitors to take ownership of the absolute responsibility to fight intolerance in all its forms” and again makes “respect for diversity” one of its central values.

Just as the first lesson of the Holocaust involves understanding the notion of what values are inherent in our civilization, other lessons involve understanding the way in which the Nazi Holocaust differed in scope and result to numerous anti-Jewish pogroms, inquisitions, discriminations, prejudices, lynchings, and the like, which have occurred through history with depressing regularity. The Holocaust was successful in killing an astounding 6 million Jews, and numerous others, because firstly, it audaciously adopted the mission of destroying every single one of this demonized People, and secondly it applied industrial-like efficiencies and modern propaganda methods.

In its mission of killing an entire people, a Genocide, the Nazis discovered that the more civilians that they killed, and the greater the speed and the magnitude of the slaughter, the easier this would be accepted by the modern world.   This is related to the concept of the Big Lie, specifically that the bigger the lie, the more easily many people believe it.   So, the second lesson of the Holocaust is that the second Noahite law against homicide is easier to breach the more audacious and bizarre the magnitude of the slaughter, and the professed rationale for same.   It is easier for people to mourn the death of one person. There is an accepted protocol of going to a funeral and visitations that allow us a path towards mourning and acceptance.   But for the death of tens, hundreds, thousands or millions, we do not have such protocol;  it is too much for both our minds and our hearts, so we often do less to commemorate mass murder than the death of one individual.

The third lesson is that homicide is not acceptable no matter what the propaganda-like justifications that are given, and that intentional targeting of civilians for whatever reason is simply wrong.   However, we must also not allow our people to be terrorized and murdered by a misuse of international law – that serves to protect civilian populations that have given over their homes to rocket launchers and hosting terrorist soldiers, and their children and religious faiths to the goal of eradicating other civilian populations.

The fourth lesson is that democratization of evil does not excuse it, and that democracy is not the important value – it is liberal democracy.  A Liberal Democracy is a democracy that functions according to a justice system, which will, when necessary, overturn the will of the majority when that majority acts in an illegal fashion.   The fact that the Nazis were initially voted in by the German people is analogous to the fact that the Palestinian people voted in Hamas.  Democratization is useless without a system of justice, and neither the Nazis nor the Palestinians have had a properly functioning Justice system.   To accord respect to societies that are run illegally and that trample on the fundamental inherent rights of human beings does not amount to being tolerant – it amounts to being intolerant to those who inevitably suffer at the hands of the crazies who elevate some ideology over the right to justice.

The fifth lesson is to me, the most tragic of all:   we must counter the morally corrupt position that mentioning the name of the Jewish Homeland, Israel, in the context of Holocaust commemorations is unnecessarily “controversial”, or is a form of using the Holocaust for some political agenda.    The extent to which some twisted notion of “political correctness” causes us to “cleanse” our commemorations of the mere mention of the importance of the Jewish state, is the extent to which we have given up our values and replaced them with the values of our enemy.   Hitler would surely be smiling if he knew that Iran and Syria, with their evil proxies, Hizbollah and Hamas, are publicly planning the destruction of Israel and the nearly 6 million Jews there.    He would laugh out loud if he knew that so much as mentioning that fact in a Holocaust Commemoration event, is enough to cause a huge controversy, and therefore many of our events are not Judenrein, but Israelrein.

Canadian Professor Anne Bayefsky, writing on January 27,  2005 in National Review Online points out that the United Nations commemoration of the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz made sure that there were no actual Resolutions coming out of the ceremony, so as not to offend the Arab states, which boycotted the event (the auditorium was half empty).  Of the 41 speakers at the event, only 5 dared to mention the word, "Israel" in their speeches, and such word was not mentioned in the speeches by the U.S., Canada, the European Union and Australia. Then, most amazing of all, at the ceremony that took place at Auschwitz, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfovitz stated:  "We have agreed to set aside contemporary political issues, in order to reflect on those events of 60 years ago in a spirit of unanimity."   The price, however, for unanimity is to abandon the notion that the Holocaust contains lessons for contemporary politics.  To concede as Wolfovitz did, that European leftists and the Muslims are offended by the lessons to be drawn, is to render the Holocaust into a meaningless symbol.

Bayefsky notes the irony of the constant repetition of the mantra "Never Again" when we fail to give primacy to discussions of what that means in the contemporary situation for the Jewish state: "Jews everywhere are indebted to the willingness and ability of Israelis to live and breathe self-determination.  When contemporary political issues are set aside and an affirmation of the centrality of the Jewish state's well-being is not key to a commemoration of the Holocaust, 'never again' is an empty phrase."

And so, I look at the mandate and mission statement of my local Holocaust education centre, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre; and I read on its website:

The Mandate is “(t)o combat prejudice, racism, anti-Semitism and genocide by educating the public, especially students and teachers, about the events and implications of the Holocaust.”    Certainly, educating about the events of the Holocaust is a mammoth task, and to teach history accurately is, by itself, an important and valuable mandate.   But when I searched the entire website, I could not find one mention of the word “Israel”, and I question how we can teach about the “implications of the Holocaust” without so much as mentioning  the Jewish homeland of Israel.

The mission of the Vancouver Holocaust Education centre is stated as follows:  “ The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre's programming links the study of the Holocaust to British Columbia's social studies, language arts and fine arts curriculum, and makes connections between the Holocaust, Canadian history and contemporary social justice issues.”   So why do we shy away from making “connections” to the problems of the Jewish state?   Why limit ourselves to contemporary social justice and not political justice and security of the Jews of Israel to be free of terrorism and murder?    What are we telling the many visitors to the Centre when we fail to associate ourselves in any way with our Homeland?  Part of the Mandate for the VHEC from its website is to educate on the “implications of the Holocaust”.   Again, are there no implications with respect to Israel and its current abuse by U.N. bodies and the double standards routinely applied against our Jewish state?

Moreover, we must recognize and stress publicly that the most relevant Holocaust denial as well as current threats to the Jewish people emanate from members of Radical Islam. 

Courtesy of the MEMRI organization, here are excerpts from a speech delivered by Dr. Walid Al-Rashudi, head of the Department of Islamic Studies at King Saud
University, Saudi Arabia, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on February 29, 2008.

Walid Al-Rashudi:  “ One of the important things that we must tell people
is that what is going on in Palestine today is a real holocaust. This
is the real holocaust. A holocaust is not the burning of 50-60 Jews in
Germany or Switzerland, but the Jews continue to call it the
Holocaust. In case you don't know, let me tell you that more than 90%
of the Muslims in the world do not know that the Jews receive
reparations from Germany and Switzerland for the so-called Holocaust
affair. We believe that there was indeed a holocaust, but how many
died? 50-60 people? Afterwards, they used it to blackmail these two
countries.

“So what are we supposed to say in the face of the Gaza holocaust?  What
compensation will satisfy us? By Allah, we will not be satisfied even
if all the Jews are killed.”

Nowhere in such a succinct fashion is there made the link between Holocaust denial and the promise to try to create a second Holocaust as in this speech by the head of the Islamic Studies Department of the one of the most important Muslim universities in the world.  The failure to make Israel the centerpiece of Holocaust commemoration means we give inadequate regard for this explicit threat to kill all the Jews of the State of Israel by an establishment Islamic scholar at the rich and powerful King Saud University. 

In a misguided attempt to avoid political “controversy”, we fail to emphasize strongly enough that the new “anti-Zionism” is, for the most part, based on anti-Semitic thinking. Holocaust education must not shy away from examining what the U.S. State Department, in its impressive new study of anti-Semitism, says is anti-Semitic criticism of Israel:

• • Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination

• • Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

• • Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

• • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

• • Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel by killing Jews all over the world

I argue that the entire attitude of Diaspora Jews towards the Shoah, and the lesson to be learned from it, is just naively optimistic.    Jeffrey Goldberg, in his book, Prisoners:  A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, discusses his changed awareness when he emigrated from America to Israel, enters the army and feels the empowerment of his first rifle:  “most of us having lived our lives in the company of quisling Jews who, for reasons inexplicable and bizarre, believed the main lesson of the Shoah was that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, instead of the actual lesson of the Shoah, which is that it is easy to kill a unilaterally disarmed Jew but much harder to kill one who is pointing a gun at your face.”

American and Canadian Jews naively assume that others are similar enough to ourselves that if we create good museums and books, they will overcome years of training to hate - whether that training comes in totalitarian Muslim states, in mosques in the West where imams reflect an Islamist ideology, or even in our universities. For our universities provide a steady diet of anti-Israelism  both in the classroom and outside, where obscene events like “Israel Apartheid Week” are sanctioned at the same time as Israeli speakers (like Ehud Barak at Montreal’s Concordia University) are banned, so as to not “offend” Muslim sensibilities.   What about Jewish sensibilities?   Fortunately we have now good organizations like Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, but our mainstream Jewish organizations have been ineffective for too long.

We must imbue our children with the understanding that Jewish values and American values, although many times compatible, are not identical. We must be clear that those values are close enough that support of Israel’s right to exist in peace and security should not attract the charge of “dual loyalty”.  But we must be realistic that acceptance of those promoting appeasement and tolerance of groups seeking to kill Jews is where American values and Jewish values diverge.  Then we must not be loathe to advocate on behalf of those politicians who espouse values closest to our own, and this implies that we and our children be educated sufficiently to understand just what those values are.

In particular, American Jews minimized the fact that Barack Obama chose a Pastor who  blamed 9-11 on America’s and Israel’s “state terrorism” and who associates with Louis Farrakhan, and who infamously stated that “God damn America”.  The movement led by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said to create a hatred of America by its own young is not negated by vague promises of “change”, but by education led by Holocaust educators understanding what are the real threats that could cause a Second Holocaust. I do not accept that such a course of education improperly “politicizes” the Holocaust.   It seems that simple allegations by our enemies that we are “mis-using” the Holocaust for “political” ends have paralyzed us with fear; instead, a free and strong people should be prepared to argue our case for the lessons we seek to draw.

Instead, what I find somewhat offensive, is that self-proclaimed guardians of the memory seek to divorce the lessons of the Holocaust from any reference to contemporary politics.  In their fear of controversy they render the lessons of the Holocaust, unteachable and undiscussable, except in the most general and inoffensive manner.  Professor Peter Novick in his great book, The Holocaust in American History argues that  "(i)n the United States, memory of the Holocaust is so banal, so inconsequential, not memory at all, precisely because it is uncontroversial, so unrelated to real divisions... so apolitical."

It is so apolitical because of a pathetic fear – a fear of allegations by the anti-Israel types that we are using the Holocaust for political ends.   It is high time to overcome this fear.  Why are we so deferential to anti-Semites who want to eradicate the State of Israel, that we are willing to have them dictate that Holocaust commemorations should be “Israelrein”?   It is time to be strong, and understand that the present situation uses the Holocaust too. Do we want the Holocaust to be used for the message that Tolerance is the only lesson?   Or are we strong enough and confident enough that we can link the Holocaust to other lessons, even if the anti-Semites object?

The problem is that left-liberal Jews and others want to take away from Holocaust commemoration the political and historical dimension and the analysis of what constitutes a Justice system, and instead raise the Holocaust to a theological event and the ultimate in competitions for "victimhood".   When groups divorce the Holocaust from historical comparisons, political analysis, and analyses of what constitutes a proper Justice system, while insisting on its "uniqueness", they pass into what Peter Novick calls "an intellectually empty enterprise".  He writes, "the notion of uniqueness is quite vacuous.  Every historical event, including the Holocaust, in some ways resembles events to which it might be compared and differs from them in some ways.  These resemblances and differences are a perfectly proper subject for discussion.  But to single out those aspects of the Holocaust that were distinctive (there certainly were such), and to ignore those aspects that it shares with other atrocities, and on the basis of this gerrymandering to declare the Holocaust unique, is intellectual sleight of hand.  The assertion that the Holocaust is unique - like the claim that it is singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable - is in practice, deeply offensive."

And so we learn to be confident in comparing and contrasting the Holocaust to other genocides.   We can confidently enter into debate with Muslim clerics who lecture that only 50 to 60 Jews were killed in the Holocaust and that the Israelis are the new Nazis, because we know they are not correct, and we must stand up for truth as a fixed truth and not just one “competing narrative” among equally valid multiple viewpoints.

After years of writing about these matters, having had a lecture shouted down and my books “banned”, without the civil liberties crowd speaking out for me, and having seen mainstream Jewish organizations refuse to advocate for the latest victims of anti-Semitic actions, when they are undertaken by Muslims, rather than neo-Nazi skinheads, I have come to some conclusions.    We are living in an age where the Public Library in my hometown of Vancouver, for “Freedom to Read Week” had the gall to invite a bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, Greg Felton, and provide him with the dignity that such a lecture would provide to his resume. The Canada-Israel Committee and the Canadian Jewish Congress wrote emails to members of the Jewish Community in Vancouver, assuring us that they were taking care of the matter privately, and that we should not “protest” and draw attention to the matter, or risk violence.   They of course are wrong.   They of course are reflecting a sadly outdated form of Jewish leadership, which was shown to be tragic during the days of American Jewish leader Rabbi Steven Wise’s neglect of the urgency of Jewish rescue in 1943 after he was made aware of the death camps.

The message we have to the world that fails to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,  when its religiously fanatic leaders, with an apocalyptic world-view,  promise to use them on the Jewish state, is simply:

This time we shall not go quietly.

This is the ultimate message of the Shoah, where so many Jews went like “sheep to the slaughter”.  

This time we shall not place a naïve faith in the international community, or in the Americans, or in anyone else, although we shall not give up on alliances.  This time we shall not quietly entrust our “sheep” to the corrupted shepherds of a United Nations that makes Libya chair of its Human Rights Commission.   This time we shall not entrust our sheep solely to the non-democratic Jewish organizations.   This time we shall not quietly entrust our sheep to the Labour Zionist elites who had so little to say about the murder of the Jewish sheep in 1941-1944, and who had so little to say about the rocket attacks on Sderot and Ashkelon, and the murders of Jewish civilians resulting from the ill-fated Oslo Process.  This time we shall realize that self-described “progressives” and “intellectuals” who spend their time on rationalizing Islamic violence against Jewish civilians, are not our friends, but our enemies.

Accordingly, the centerpiece of Holocaust commemoration on Yom Hashoah this April 21st, should be:  This time we shall not go quietly.

 
Howard Rotberg is a Canadian lawyer who authored the novel, The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel about a Book and its Author (Mantua Books- Canada only), and the book of essays, Second Generation Radical:   The Struggle against the Second Holocaust.   See www.howardrotberg.ca.   He also develops affordable rental housing for the working poor, and writes and lectures about affordable housing policy. 

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Vancouver: No Housing? Let Them Eat Lotuses

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Howard Rotberg on his new book, Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land

by Howard Rotberg

I suppose I am a bit unique: after a first degree in the history of cultures and ideologies, I transferred to Law School and became an expert on real estate development law.

Then after practicing law for twenty years, I sold my practice to divide my time between developing affordable rental housing in Ontario for low income working people (under government inducement programs that exist in Ontario) and writing books, both fiction and non-fiction, on the theme of how ideologies and value systems affect our policy choices.

Four years ago I met a lady, now my wife, who is a Professor of Urban Planning at U.B.C., and she persuaded me to move to Vancouver. We decided that I could still commute to Ontario one week every month to continue my affordable housing development.

So, when I arrived here in Vancouver, I arrived with a set of interests, values and cultural understandings that are unique to my background, to my religious beliefs, to my upbringing in a small Ontario manufacturing city, and to all my education and experience.

Two things absolutely amazed me, when I arrived in Vancouver and took a look around: Firstly, there was no understanding of the need to have government inducement programs such as I have been involved in, which give financial incentives to private sector and non-profit developers to replenish the supply of affordable rental apartments, both for singles and for families.

Second, and this I found even more amazing, there was little understanding of how Vancouver has a unique culture that inhibited the development of social justice programs for workforce housing such as exist in huge numbers in the United States, and moderate numbers in the Rest of Canada.

Instead, I saw a self-absorption and a narcissism that focused more on our latest position on somebody’s list of most “livable” cities, than on ways to help disadvantaged poor people or even moderate income young families who are shut out of the housing market, in this, the most expensive city for housing in Canada.

How could people promote their province as the “Best Place on Earth” (an official provincial slogan) when thousands of mentally ill homeless people roam the streets picking up bottles and cans to redeem for seven to ten cents each, and still others are eating out of the garbage?

To me, the answer to why Vancouverites had such a different understanding than me was the concept of ideology. To me, Vancouver has its own ideology; to be sure there is diversity in Vancouver, and therefore many different cultures and ideologies, but there was one ideology that was affecting many of the policy areas in Vancouver and that ideology, I came to understand, was the ideology of Lotus Land.

But when I asked people if they knew what “Lotus Land” referred to, I was shocked that so few actually understood much about the concept and where it originated. Perhaps one person in ten knew that the concept had something to do with a “laid back” west coast lifestyle, or acceptance of soft drugs like marijuana, or emphasis on beauty and tranquility rather than other values. But, when it came to understanding the origins of the concept, I found fewer than one in a hundred who knew that it came from the great poem by the distinguished British poet, Alfred Tennyson, called “The Lotos Eaters” (he used the Greek spelling of “lotus”).

What can Tennyson’s poem teach us about the cultural “foundation” of Vancouver’s ideology, which I call Vancouverism?

The “Lotos Eaters” by Tennyson, is, for me, the central metaphor of Vancouver’s culture. Citizens of Canada, the United States and beyond, who literally or figuratively have tired of their “roaming”, have come to the shores of Lotos Land, with the freely available drug of the lotus leaves, the beauty and tranquility of the beaches, and a harvest of lumber, minerals or the modern day valuable commodity, real estate.

The mariners were fighting in Greece and are described first in Homer’s Odyssey. When they are swept overboard in a storm, and land in Lotus Land, Tennyson has the mariners happy to stay in their island paradise, and reject their previous lives by stating that they take “no pleasure” from a war against evil.

If Vancouver is just a lotus land, and just the geographic end of the line for those who would seek to roam, and for those in the rest of Canada who would seek to run away from their pasts, their families, and their memories, Vancouver is bound to fail at anything more worthy than the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of appearances.

In Vancouver the appearances are so deceiving: a beautiful city full of creative people hides a massive institutionalized system of criminality, (primarily in the drug trade and in so-called “white-collar” crime like investment and stock fraud), a system of shoddy workmanship in housing construction (the “leaky condo” fiasco), and a system of favours for the rich and powerful to the detriment of more modest income people - especially a system that protects the interests of wealthy older property owners to the detriment of the provision of affordable housing for younger people and our workforce.

In the poem, the mariners of Odysseus see a land "in which it seemed always afternoon" because of the calm and peaceful atmosphere. Coincidentally, this land has a gleaming river flowing to the sea, three snow-capped mountaintops, and shadowy pine growing in the vale. (Interestingly, Vancouver has a great river flowing to the sea – the Fraser River, and three snow-capped mountains – Grouse Mountain, Cypress Mountain, and Mount Seymour, and the lodgepole pine is the most widespread tree in the province!)

“Mild-eyed melancholy lotos-eaters” bring the flower and fruit of the lotos. The mariners who eat it feel as if they have fallen into a deep sleep, hardly hearing their fellow mariners speaking to them, hearing only the music of their own “beating heart(s)”.

Although they dream of returning to their families in Ithaca, the lotos makes them tired of their wandering, and they all say, “we will no longer roam.”

After their ingestion of the lotos, they now question why man is the only creature in nature who must toil. They state that everything else in nature is able to rest, but man is tossed from one sorrow to another. They argue that mankind’s “inner spirit sings, “There is no joy but calm”; in other words, that tranquility and calmness offer the only joy.

So, here in the land of the Lotos-Eaters, after imbibing the lotos, the great mariners of Ulysses negate all the great values of life, stating that the only joy comes from calmness.

Of course, Tennyson intends us to be somewhat shocked by this position. Tennyson, schooled in the stories of the Bible, was no doubt intending that this poem be linked to the story of Adam and Eve and their ejection from the Garden of Evil for eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. With Tennyson’s knowledge of Bible, he knew that biblical commentators held that this “life of toil” was for the purpose of rectifying the fallen universe, or as it is sometimes stated, to “repair the world”.

So, Tennyson’s mariners, in repudiating a “life of toil” and refusing to combat “evil”, by instead partaking of the fruit of the lotos, are in fact repudiating the Biblical essence of the human mission in history, which is to repair the world.

In Lotus Land, the centre of white collar crime and drug distribution and gangs, we, the ideological heirs of the mariners, cannot be bothered to “denounce” evil. Instead we revel in our ideology of “tolerance”.

For the young, the Lotos in Vancouver is represented, on the one hand, by the proverbial “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll”, and on the other hand, by Tennyson’s description of watching “the crisping ripples on the beach”. There is also, in common with youth elsewhere, something of a worship of “pagan” body art.

For the old, the Lotos in Vancouver is the way its moderate climate and natural beauty make it (along with Victoria and the cities of the Okanagan Valley) the ideal retirement destination for upper income Canadians. The large demographic group called Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) started turning 60 in 2006, and hence there will be a large group of new retirees looking at retirement to British Columbia in the next 15 years.

Thus, retirement to fancy condos, luxury yachts, and private golf clubs will give Lotos-toys to those who have earned them, so that the terrible thoughts of our meaningless existence can be held at bay.

Is it any wonder that the Vancouver Sun rarely has any international news or world issues on its front page? The front page is given over, almost exclusively, to local issues. In a
world in crisis, with culture wars and daily terrorist massacres, the denizens of Vancouver appear preoccupied with the local, preoccupied with the Lotos.

In this, they are closer than they believe to the young, who have a certain segment who are so obviously addicted to sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and the beaches. For the young, we may consider that it has been forever thus.

But the young in Vancouver face a very uncertain future in terms of secure employment and affordable housing. The Lotos can offer an escape, albeit temporary.

Again, Tennyson explains how Lotus Land contains an inherent disregard for the welfare of the next generation. The entire Vancouver Model has been so unwelcoming to all young people, not only those who wish to start families, and need bedroom space more than they need high end finishings, but also those just starting their careers who need something affordable somewhere close to where they work, and those who need quality, affordable daycare.

Tennyson’s mariners, while acknowledging that it is “sweet” to dream of child (and wife), quickly conclude, (while sitting eating the Lotos fruit, and taking in the Lotos beauty) that they will not return to Fatherland, wife or children. The mariners so quickly and without any pangs of conscience decide to abandon their children. They feel no obligations to their children; in fact, as narcissists, the only regard for their children, is the “sweetness” that thoughts of them give to the mariners themselves.

Abandoning all notions of good and evil, abandoning the notion of “toil” for the purpose of supporting a family, the mariners, self-centred druggies and esthetes that they are, see all of life through their Lotos-coloured glasses. Lacking empathy for even their own children they see no joy in anything but calm and beauty.

Believing not in an afterlife, believing that nothing they can do with their lives will have a lasting effect on the future, they conclude that all things are to be taken from them and simply become part of a “dreadful past”.

This is such a depressing view, compared to those who live to “toil”, live to create good in the world, live to create social justice, and live to repair the world and reestablish the paradise that was lost by Adam and Eve.

Instead of aspiring to the spiritual paradise of Adam and Eve, before their fall, the Lotos-Eaters accept a facsimile thereof. But the paradise of the Lotos is meant for slumber and calm only. Life is only viewed from the material viewpoint: after consumption of material things, such material things are gone, leaving only a dreadful past.

That other approach will say also that what lasts is what we create of lasting value. And one of the most important things we create is our own children. Teaching them well, and by instilling in them good values, gives each of us a little bit of control over, a little contribution to, the future well-being of the world. But to abandon them to better enjoy our own experiences of beauty and the other goals of the Lotos, is to demonstrate a moral failing of the highest degree.

So for our young people, I have written Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land. It is high time that someone with a knowledge of land development explains how the lack of affordable housing in Vancouver, and the lack of rental or owned housing for young people is the result of conscious policy decisions, not just market forces.

In the book, I explain in detail, how our local politicians, in cahoots with developers and local media, dependent on developers’ advertising dollars, have used Lotus Land culture to create a place stacked against young people and in favour of yuppie baby-boomers with their real estate wealth.

That is Lotus Land. And we need to care about it, in order to create social justice for our young people, our lower income working people, our disabled and our young families. It is time.

Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land (CanadianValuesPress) is available at Duthies, Book Warehouse and UBC Bookstore, or can be ordered at Mantua2003@Hotmail.com

We are a small Canadian publisher, interested in publishing manuscripts that the inbred, left-liberal publishing establishment in Canada will ignore.   We describe ourselves as being what used to be known as "compassionate conservatives";  that is, we have a strong interest in social justice, but we are unabashedly proud of our conservative values that promote traditional views of right and wrong, based on "Judeo-Christian" ethics, if that term is not too vague.

We think that Canada stands for more than multi-cultural moral and cultural relativism and moral equivalency.   It stands for a set of values that are based on something more than "tolerance".   We believe that Canadians have almost always sought a tolerant society, but only on a foundation of "peace, order and good government", and that sometimes, to defend the peace and the human rights of individuals, we must participate in war, and other "intolerant activities".

We think that Canada stands for a set of values, and it is this set of values that we wish to explore in publishing books.   Our name and contact information is:

CanadianValuesPress

an imprint of Mantua Books

Head Office – 14 – 111 Sherwood Drive

Brantford, Ontario N3T 6J9

Email: Mantua2003@Hotmail.com

• If you wish to discuss a book proposal, we ask that you email to us a two-page summary of the book, a one-page summary of your resume, and a one-page excerpt to demonstrate your writing style.  Please put everything in the body of the email so that we do not have to open attachments.
• we are seeking a wide variety of types of books, all with the common thread that they illuminate what it means to be a Canadian, and what it means to have Canadian Values.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Howard Rotberg B.A., LL.B, Founding President

Here is a useful article from Edwin Black, writing in Jerusalem Post.

It is amazing to me that the West continues to sleep walk while all this happens:

JPost.com » Opinion » Op-Ed Contributors » Article

Feb 26, 2009 8:45 | Updated Feb 26, 2009 19:45

The Iran-Israel nuclear endgame is now much closer

By EDWIN BLACK

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In recent days, four key developments have clicked in to edge Iran and Israel much closer to a military denouement with profound consequences for American oil that the nation is not prepared to meet.

Three F-16 jets during maneuvers. (Illustrative photo)
Photo: IDF

What has happened?

• First, Iran has proven it can successfully launch a satellite into outer space as it did on February 2. Teheran claimed, to the incredulity of Western governments, that the satellite was to monitor earthquakes and enhance communications. Few believe that, especially since America's own space program continuously launches unpublished military satellite missions. Teheran plans three more satellites this year, creating an easily weaponized space net that worries American military planners.
• Second, the International Atomic Energy Agency last week admitted that it had underestimated Iran's nuclear stockpile by about one-third. The watchdog group now confirms Iran possesses 2,227 lbs. of nuclear material, sufficient to create at least one nuclear bomb. That stockpile includes 1,010 kilograms of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride, or approximately 700 kilograms containing the vital uranium 235 isotope, the stuff needed to weaponize.
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• Third, Iran has ramped up its enrichment program with thousands of new homegrown, highly advanced centrifuges. As The Cutting Edge News reported in April 2008, Iran wants 6,000 centrifuges to speed the enrichment of weapons-grade material. The number of working centrifuges now exceeds 5,400, including 164 new ones believed to be the faster and more efficient IR-2 and IR-3 models made in Iran. These new Iranian centrifuges are at least as sophisticated as its recently imported P-2 models.

  American policymakers are now convinced that Iran, despite all protests and charades, is in a mad dash to create a deliverable nuclear weapon. The Obama administration has almost openly abandoned the assertions of the CIA's much-questioned 2008 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran was not pursuing nuclear weaponry for the simple reason that its atomic program and military programs were housed in separate buildings.

  
• Fourth, Binyamin Netanyahu has just become prime minister of Israel. He is determined to take action before - not after - Iran achieves its nuclear potential. This creates a volatile, hair-trigger situation that could explode at any moment. Hence, the endgame is now vastly closer than it was in mid-January, when many believed Israel might take action during the lame-duck interregnum.

  Israeli countermeasures to date have included a massive international covert program of equipment sabotage, assassination of key nuclear personnel and a vibrant diplomatic offensive. But all these efforts combined amount to nothing more than delaying tactics, as Iran is irrevocably determined to achieve a nuclear weapon as fast as possible. Many believe such a weapon will be used to fulfill its prediction that Israel will soon be wiped off the map.

  THE CONSEQUENCES for this confrontation are apocalyptic because Iran's full partner in this enterprise is Russia. The Russian company Atomstroiexport has provided most if not all of the nuclear material for the 1,000 megawatt Bushehr reactor, along with thousands of technicians to service and operate it.

  Following its invasion of Georgia, Moscow forged ahead with final delivery plans for the S-300 advanced air defense system which can track scores of IAF airborne intruders simultaneously, whether low-level drones or high-altitude missiles, and shoot them down. But the S-300, the linchpin of Iran's defense against Israel, will not be fully operational for several months, creating a narrow window for Israel to act. Indeed, Russia has just announced a pause in missile deliveries for the system in fear that it will accelerate an Israeli response.

  Iran, of course, has repeatedly threatened to counter any such attack by closing the Strait of Hormuz, as well as launching missiles against the Ras Tanura Gulf oil terminal and bombarding the indispensable Saudi oil facility at Abqaiq which is responsible for some 65 percent of Saudi production. Any one of these military options, let alone all three, would immediately shut off 40% of all seaborne oil, 18% of global oil, and some 20% of America's daily consumption.

  America's oil vulnerability has been back-burnered due to the economic crisis and the plunge in gasoline prices. However, the price of gasoline will not mitigate an interruption of oil flow. The price of oil does not impact its ability to flow through blocked or destroyed facilities. Indeed, an interruption would not restore prices to those of last summer - which Russian and Saudi oil officials say is needed - but probably zoom the pump cost to $20 per gallon.

  American oil vulnerability in recent months has escalated precisely because of oil's precipitous drop to $35 to $40 a barrel. At that price, America's number one supplier, Canada, which supplies some 2 million out of 20 million barrels of oil a day, cannot afford to produce. Canadian oil sand petroleum is not viable below $70 a barrel. Much of Canada's supply has already been cancelled or indefinitely postponed. America's strategic petroleum reserve can only keep that country moving for approximately 57 days.

  THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, like the Bush administration before it, has developed no plan or contingency legislation for an oil interruption, such as a surge in retrofitting America's 250 million gas guzzling cars and trucks - each with a 10-year life - or a stimulus of the alternate fuel production needed to rapidly get off oil. Ironically, Iran has undertaken such a crash program converting some 20% of its gasoline fleet yearly to compressed natural gas (CNG) as a countermeasure to Western nuclear sanctions against the Teheran regime that could completely block the flow of gasoline to Iran. Iran has no refining capability.

  The question of when and how this endgame will play out is not known by anyone. Israeli leaders wish to avoid military preemption at all costs if possible. But many feel the military moment must come; and when that moment does come, it will be swift, highly technologic and in the twinkling of an eye. But as one informed official quipped, "Those who know, don't talk. Those who talk, don't know."

  The writer is The New York Times best-selling investigative author of IBM and the Holocaust, Internal Combustion and the just released The Plan: How to Save America When the Oil Stops - or the Day Before (Dialog Press).

  www.edwinblack.com