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:
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 jointhe 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 EdwardKaplanand 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, toldThe 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.
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.
Of course, Arafat had to explain quietly to his people (who had been told for years that they would get their maximalist aims
and never have to compromise), that they should not worry...he had not given up the so-called "right of return". In
case there was any question, Arafat arranged that the Palestinian reaction to this European-sponsored Oslo process, was a
spectacularly evil two year series of so-called Suicide Bombings (they should be referred to as Genocide Bombings, but the
actual term reflects where the European media had its sympathies.)
For good measure, the Palestinians found the Europeans to be sympathic to a new historical interpretation...that the Jewish
migration to Israel was NOT that of a group of people returning to their homeland, but was instead a way for the Europeans to
deal with the fallout of what they had allowed Hitler to do to the Jews.
That is why the Palestinians do everything they can to downplay Biblical references to historical Israel, do not accept the
archeological findings of Jewish settlements from the Biblical era, and to top everything off, decided that the Al-Aksa
mosque erected on top of the ruins of the great Jewish Temple, was a Muslim site only, and that there were no good arguments
that the Jewish Temple was there at all! And so, Jerusalem, previously a lesser Muslim city, not mentioned in the
Koran, became the focus of all Muslim theology and all Palestinian myth making that it was somehow a Palestinian city.
The really fascinating part of this, is that the Palestinians soon found that their anti-Zionist allies in European
universities, trade unions, and increasingly in the European parliaments, were actually receptive to their arguments that the
Holocaust, the single biggest blemish on European history, was actually exaggerated by those Jews to extort the world into
overlooking their crimes of settlement of what should be Muslim lands. (The Koran holds that once lands are ruled over,
even temporarily by Muslims, they must remain in Muslim hands forever.)
So the Europeans, who failed in their attempt to kill most of the world's Jews, could now feel better as they viewed the Jews
again as some horrible people who oppressed the poor Palestinians. So a European attempt to villify the Jews again,
this time to excuse the behaviour of their fathers and mothers during the 30s and 40s (and in fact for a history of
anti-Semitic oppression during the centuries of Jewish settlement in Europe) dovetailed nicely with the Arab/Palestinian
narrative that the Jews manipulated the legacy of the Holocaust, to the detriment of the poor Palestinians.
What really tickled the Europeans and the Palestinians was when some Jewish academics like Norman Finklestein and Noam
Chomsky started supporting this position. The defeat of the Jewish state was so close they could taste it. And
when the Iranians breached all norms of international law, by installing terrorist puppet regimes in Lebanon - the Hezbollah,
and in Gaza -Hamas, the Palestinians and the Europeans lost all inhibitions. They teamed up for Durban 1 and
Durban 2 and let the Muslim states, none of whom had liberal human rights in their own countries, to take over the UN Human
Rights Commission, all to make sure that the narrative of the international community was that the Jews are the racists and
not the Muslims, even though Muslims live in peace in Jewish Israel, and no Jews live in peace in Muslim states.
So that is the background to the Rotberg Peace Plan.
And that is why the Rotberg Peace Plan calls for
1. The resettlement of the Palestinians in Western Europe - because Europeans have clearly shown over the last few
centuries, that they prefer Muslims as neighbours to Jews as neighbours.
2. The payment for the resettlement of the Palestinians to be made by Arab countries, in the same proportion as the
number of Jews they expelled (and confiscated property) who then were resettled in Israel.
3. The payment for the resettlement of the remaining European Jews should be for the account of the European
countries....because that is the least they can do.
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.
By Howard Rotberg
By the time the provincial election in B.C. is held in May, British Columbians will have, in the course of seven months,
participated in federal, municipal and provincial elections. Notwithstanding recent reductions in housing prices in Greater
Vancouver, there still remains a crisis in affordability for both owned and rental housing. Current price declines and fewer
condo project starts may mean that this is the ideal time to investigate the development of affordable rental housing.
One would therefore assume that housing policy and housing affordability would have been major themes in all three elections.
Although there has been the usual promises of money for social housing, that is, housing for the most poverty stricken
residents, to address a growing and scandalous problem of homelessness, there has been a surprising lack of discussion of
housing policy in general, and programs to assist in affordability specifically.
It is our young people, those aged 35 and under, who have found themselves to be most disadvantaged in our present housing
system, yet few have the analytic tools to understand how the system is stacked against them, and why politicians from all
levels of government are mostly silent about an issue that is so important for their quality of life. The purpose of this
article is to explain to our young people the perverted priorities of our housing system as implemented by politicians at
every level.
Housing policy in Canada is a confused mix of jurisdictions with programs at times coming from every level of government. At
other times, each level of government excuses its inaction by suggesting that the real jurisdiction lies with another level
of government. In fact, both the federal and provincial governments have been exercising jurisdiction in various facets of
housing policy, and the municipalities have the limitation that they can only do what the province allows them to do.
However, in the event of strong municipal will, the province will be unlikely to erect roadblocks to municipal
programs.
The primary aspect of policy that is so misunderstood in the present environment is the extent to which various levels of
government give financial benefits to higher income owners of housing, rather than to lower income renters.
There is no good reason for this and such housing analysts as Professor David Halchinski (formerly of UBC and now of
University of Toronto) have argued the case for tenure neutrality in government benefits – between owners and renters.
Accordingly, to the extent that young people are over-represented in the rental market, and middle aged and older people are
over-represented in the owned housing sector, then our young people are losing out, and, in a democracy, should at least be
made aware of precisely how such programs operate to their detriment and to the benefit of older, wealthier landowners.
In my recent book, Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land
(CanadianValuesPress), I outlined a number of the ways that our municipality acts to keep up property values for the benefit
of the baby boomers owning houses and keep low the taxes on those houses. For the little known fact is that for a million
dollar house in Vancouver the property taxes are 40% less than the same value house in Toronto.
Local politicians have dutifully served their masters in Kitsilano, Dunbar, and Shaughnessy by obligating new developments
downtown and elsewhere to assume a whole array of costs – for planning studies, infrastructure, amenities such as libraries,
parks, and day care centres, and now “green” features – where the costs of these are added to the purchase price.
The existing residents are happy that this imposition of costs on the buyers of one bedroom condos not only helps keep their
property taxes low, but increases the value of their homes to keep pace with the elevated price per square foot of the new
condo units.
Provincial politicians, now asking for the votes of young people, should be asked why they give financial benefits to wealthy
older people without a means test, rather than help younger people.
I refer, firstly, to the provincial Seniors’ Property Tax Deferral Program, where anyone over 55, with no income limitation,
can defer their property taxes until death or sale of the house, with a nominal interest charge, and the province compensates
the municipality in the interim.
Surely, we can see the advisability of not forcing indigent seniors out of their homes, but, without a means test, we have
benefits flowing to seniors with million dollar incomes and five million dollar oceanfront homes.
In addition, the province has a Homeowners’ Tax Assistance Program, where homeowners, of any income level, who have homes
worth up to $1,050,000, are getting provincial benefits to offset cost of property taxes. Why aren’t these programs being
discussed?
The Provincial government collects a lot of money from property transfer taxes each time a home is purchased; but there is a
provincial First Time Home Buyers’ Program that exempts the tax from homes costing under $425,000.
Query whether this done to benefit young people getting into an inflated market, or rather to benefit large developers to
assist them in their sales. In Vancouver, the only homes under $425,000 are the one-bedroom condos that the developers have
been flogging.
Given the overall neglect of first time buyers, and given the size of the property transfer tax that kicks in above $425,000
(1% on the first $200,000 and 2% on the balance), I think that the benefit was intended more to give developers a sales
support, rather than help young people, since the whole amount of the tax kicks in, as soon as the price goes over the
$425,000 threshhold.
And what about the Federal Government?
Again, there is a history of benefiting homeowners more than renters. Firstly, there is the whole CMHC mortgage insurance
program, which makes it possible for home buyers to get a bank mortgage with less than 25% down.
Until recently, the government was so keen to induce young people into an inflated housing market, that CMHC was giving 40
year amortizations to people putting as little as 5% down on their properties. It was not only in the United States where
people who should have been renting were induced into buying at the top of the real estate bubble, but here in Canada as
well.
A lesson we should be learning from the American sub-prime fiasco is that there are some people who should be renting and
should not be induced to get in over their heads in pricey owned housing, where interest rate increases combined with
volatility in prices can result in financial tragedy.
Then there are a variety of federal programs, some lapsed, such as the Assisted Homeownership Program or the Home Ownership
Stimulation Plan, and some current such as the Home Buyers’ Plan, administered by the Canada Revenue Agency.
This allows each spouse to withdraw, tax free, up to $20,000 out of their Registered Retirement Savings Plans, to be used
towards the purchase of a home and repaid to the RRSP within 15 years. Of course, the last mentioned amounts to a tax subsidy
to home buyers by the general tax base, which of course includes renters.
In addition, the last federal budget gave homeowners a tax credit up to $1350 towards their cost of home renovations.
Moreover, the largest single federal government benefit bestowed on home owners as opposed to renters is the exemption from
income tax of the billions of dollars of capital gains tax that would be collected had not the government made the decision
to exempt principal residences from capital gains tax.
In the United States the tax system helps out with affordable housing – there is a system of affordable housing tax credits
issues to developers of affordable housing, which can be sold to high income individuals and thus generate funds to the
developers for early stage soft costs and construction costs.
So what does this all have to do with affordability? The answer is that government funds are not unlimited, and benefits
given to home owners mean there is insufficient money to subsidize the rental market.
In B.C., there is a Rental Assistance Program providing assistance up to $9200 a year for families making less than $35,000
per year, and a program called SAFER – Shelter Aid For Elderly Renters. But these programs help towards the cost of rent, but
do nothing for the acknowledged major problem in the rental market – the lack of construction of new purpose-built rental
units since the income tax changes in the early ‘70s. With the benefit of inducements on the cost side, developers can be
induced to build what young people including young families need – decent yet inexpensive rental housing.
To have affordable rental units, we need to have a healthy balance between supply and demand. The cost of owned housing is
prohibitive - recent studies peg the family income needed for an average house in Vancouver at $120,000 while the average
mean income is only $60,000. So, there is a problem for Vancouverites with an income under $100,000, and not just a problem
building social housing for the disabled and the homeless.
Politicians have for too long deferred taking any action on creating inducements for private sector and non-profit
construction of rental units by opting to create more “studies."
Vancouver witnessed a study costing $300,000 by consummate political insider Ken Dobell, which led to nothing. And last week,
Metro Vancouver paid for a report by McClanaghan and Associates called “Measures to Stimulate Private Rental
Investment.”
One really has to wonder about all the studies, when a 30 minute Google search of “Affordable Housing” can yield information
on the dozens of affordable housing inducement programs operating in the United States and in several other provinces in
Canada.
The United States has so many programs and private sector affordable housing developers that there is a magazine called
Affordable Housing Finance, updating its readers on the latest American programs.
I live in Vancouver but spend 7 to 10 days in Ontario each month where my private sector company has developed six affordable
rental properties in the last six years, utilizing a variety of Ontario programs.
Generally, we obtain a forgivable loan per unit constructed, forgivable over 15 years, provided we adhere to the terms of an
operating agreement, specifying the maximum rents per unit, and the maximum income of the tenants.
In my book, I canvas the variety of policies that can be implemented to create both affordable rental housing and affordable
owned workforce housing (with resale price restrictions).
There are numerous ways for a municipality to set up and finance Affordable Housing Funds. There should be a demolition tax
of $20,000 per unit demolished which can go into the Fund.
Like Victoria, the city should pay all of its GST refund into the Fund. The Province can rebate back part of the nearly $1
billion per year it gets from the Property Purchase Tax.
The City can institute preferential development charges and property tax rates on rental properties. There are numerous
models for programs called Brownfield Remediation Tax Assistance Programs, wherein the costs of environmental remediation of
a contaminated lot can be offset against the future property taxes.
I have written extensively about the Community Housing Trust model, where buyers buy town homes that have been subsidized by
government at a lower than market price with a resale price restriction registered on the deed that they have to sell at the
same percentage reduction from market value as they did when they purchased.
There are no shortage of model programs working well elsewhere. But there is a shortage of political will to help young
people with their real housing needs, which may for the short term, or even the long term, include renting, or buying in a
Community Housing Trust.
The fact that in our three recent election campaigns there has been very little talk about the issues raised here is a slap
in the face to younger voters. Perhaps, once they understand how the system has been operating to their detriment, our
younger voters will stand up and make their voices heard, and demand that politicians address these issues.
Howard Rotberg is a former development lawyer, who combines his writing with developing affordable rental
housing for low income working people across Southern Ontario, mainly in converted heritage buildings. His new book on
Vancouver looks at some of the cultural values and ideologies in Vancouver that have promoted greed over social justice.
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, OntarioN3T 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.
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.
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 militaryoptions, 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 isThe New York Timesbest-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).
Lost in the pathetic attempts of university Leftists and Islamofascists to paint Israel as an anti-Arab "Apartheid State" is
the lengths that the Jewish State goes to in order to protect against anti-Arab racism.
For example, the late Rabbi Kahane, an American immigrant to Israel, had his political party outlawed due to its supposedly
racist policies. In the article that follows, we see that it is against the law in Israel to have an anti-Arab bumper
sticker.
I think it is just another example of how Arabs in Israel have more rights than Arabs in Arab countries. By the
way, Israeli politician Avignor Lieberman, usually described as an "ultra-Nationalist" or "extremist", made clear today that he
too supports an independent Palestinian state.
And, given that it is not apparently against the law to call an author a "fucking Jew" in Canada, it means that an Israeli
Arab has more rights than a Canadian Jew.
But don't tell that to the Israel Apartheid Week hate activists. Their hate keeps getting in the way of their logic.
A Jerusalem court has convicted an Israeli right-wing activist for incitement to racism for driving a
car through the WestBank with abumper sticker that read "No Arabs - no terror attacks," court documents released Wednesday
show.
The bumper sticker that reads "No
Arabs, No terror."
The slogan, which was coined by right-wing activists at the start of the latest round of Palestinian violence, was
deemed racist by former attorney-general Elyakim Rubinstein in 2002.
The Jerusalem Magistrate's Court found Neria Ofan, 37, of the WestBanksettlement of Yitzhar, guilty of incitement to racism for driving through the WestBank with thebumper
sticker on his car in 2004.
"The call 'No Arabs - no terror' is tainted with racism because it connects the entire Arab population, without any
differentiation among its members, and the execution of heinous terror acts," Judge Shulamit Dotan wrote in her February 18
ruling. "It thus shows hostility and enmity toward an entire populace, only because of its national-ethnic origin."
"The slogan also suggests a solution to the 'problem' in the form of collective punishment of the Arab population by
making it disappear, either by expulsion of by other means, which the reader need only imagine, as long as the country
remains 'clean' of Arabs."
Ofen said Wednesday that the ruling was both "a bit illogical" and "a selective enforcement of the law."
Israeli far-right activist Itamar Ben-Gvir accused the police and the courts of a double standard when it came to
freedom of speech.
"We see that when the Arabs chant 'Death to the Jews' as they did recently in Umm el-Fahm, neither the police nor the
State Attorney's Office do anything," he said.
Ben-Gvir opined that the slogan in question did not constitute a direct call to violence.
Hebrew University law Professor Barak Medina said Wednesday that there was no uniform approach in such cases, which, he
said, were often influenced by both the public mood and the sensitivity of the period in question.
Medina added that more sensitivity is also shown by Israeli law enforcement officials when the remarks are directed against a minority.
Ofan is the second person to be convicted for using the slogan.
Fellow right-wing activist David Ha'ivri, of the WestBank settlement of
Kfar Tapuach, was previously sentenced to six months of community service for distributing T-shirts with the same slogan on
them.
The sentencing in the latest case will be handed down at a later date.
During the Bush presidency, the Radical Left split its anger, along with the anger in the Islamic world, between what the
Arab world called the "Big Satan" - the United States - and the "Little Satan" - Israel.
Barack Obama with his clever manipulation of the notion of "Change" without specifics, the termination of the terrorist
detention centre at Guantanomo, and vague hints that the U.S. will give more respect to the Islamic World, has managed to
deflect, at least temporarily, the anger of the Far Left away from the U.S.
The American mainstream of course is preoccupied, understandably with economic issues.
But now the Radicals have only one country in their sight - Israel. All of their energies, all of their educated
disinformation, will be directed to Israel. We are about to see a virtual hatefest, on many University campuses, called
(incredibly) Israel Apartheid Week.
The Left is preoccupied with one country alone. Think about it, and think about the illiberal actions of the majority
of the nations in the United Nations.
But to the Americans, including the American Jews, who think that Obama's election (American Jews voted over 70% in favour
of Obama) will free America of terrorism and the negative attention of Islamofascists, I say this: you are thinking that
you have bought "peace in our time"; you are really following the concept of appeasement.
And most of all I warn: after they are finished with the Jews in Israel, they will be coming for
you. You had better start making some plans.
In my opinion, Canada's David Solway is one of our very best writers, especially when it comes to critiquing the culture war
in which we find ourselves.
David is quite often featured in FrontPageMagazine.com and here is a recent article where he is nice enough to include me in
a list of authors whose
"current political writing adumbrate a set of themes that run
counter to the therapeutic instinct governing the political imagination of the West. It remains moot whether these writers, in
their struggle to take back the culture, can be regarded as the first of the neoLiberals or the last of the Mohicans, and
whether their orthopedic effort to correct the leftward tilt that cripples our cognitive gait will succeed. Still, they
represent one of the few encouraging signs that we, or some of us, may be beginning to rethink ourselves, installing a kind of
cultural V-chip to protect against the conceptual virus of the Left."
Yes David, most days I feel like I am one of the "last of the Mohicans", as we fight what he so astutely terms "the
thereapeutic instinct governing the political imagination of the West."
Maybe too many people are studying psychology and social work and not enough studying History.
By David Solway FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, February 24, 2009
There can be no doubt that most of today’s
journalists, politicos, academics and public intellectuals incline toward the Left, the predictable result of the
lenient and catering university policies of the Sixties which bred a generation of smug pseudo-revolutionaries and
delphic charlatans who have now passed the baton to their epigones.
Indeed, a facile samizdat consciousness, intent on
deprivileging the notions of patriotism, truth as the object of inquiry, transcultural morality, independence of
judgment and freedom of expression, and subject to what Bernard-Henri Levy in Left in Dark Times has called “the
totalitarian temptation,” has now become entrenched as a mainstream phenomenon.
As a result, our relation to the real world has grown so distorted and corrupt that even the articulation of
something that may well be the case but does not fit the prevalent ideological mold has begun to sound like pure whimsy
or merely one more conspiracy theory. But it is not illusory to suspect the encroaching domination of the socialist
welfare state, ever greater restrictions placed on free speech or the unholy compact the Left is busy cementing with an
Islam on the move.
Notwithstanding all the bad news, a small company of maverick thinkers may be our best hope toward the recovery of
the genuinely Liberal vision of individual autonomy mediated by communality, historical filiation, moral courage and
the rule of common sense. These stormy petrels of current political writing adumbrate a set of themes that run counter
to the therapeutic instinct governing the political imagination of the West. It remains moot whether these writers, in
their struggle to take back the culture, can be regarded as the first of the neoLiberals or the last of the Mohicans,
and whether their orthopedic effort to correct the leftward tilt that cripples our cognitive gait will succeed. Still,
they represent one of the few encouraging signs that we, or some of us, may be beginning to rethink ourselves,
installing a kind of cultural V-chip to protect against the conceptual virus of the Left.
I refer to books like Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, Oriana Fallaci’s The Force of Reason, John
Kekes’ A Case for Conservatism, Mark Steyn’s America Alone, Nick Cohen’s What’s Left: How Liberals
Lost Their Way, David Horowitz’s Radical Son, Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home, Robert Spencer’s
Stealth Jihad, Howard Rotberg’s The Second Catastrophe, Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West, Jonah
Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Richard Grenier’s Capturing the Culture, Kathy Shaidle’s The Tyranny of
Nice and Andrew C. McCarthy’s Willful Blindness. These are some of the writers who presently occupy the
Siege Perilous at the Round Table of international debate.
There are other, no less important writers, of course, but the trouble is that their works are essentially an
over-the-transom phenomenon. They cannot compare to the enormous bibliography and publishing power of those aligned on
the other side. Conservative authors and their confrères are vastly outnumbered by those who speak for the
liberal-left. Visit any bookstore and look at how the shelves are stocked.
I have done that only recently and found, on the “Books for Buzz” Politics table, a lone Mark Steyn surrounded by
Susan Faludi, Ronald Wright, Walt and Meersheimer, Scott McClellan, Tony Judt, Jane Mayer, Robert Fisk, Barack Obama,
Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, Jimmy Carter, Ron Suskind, Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. One
need only extrapolate, not only to the book publishing-and-distribution industry as a whole but to our university
lecture halls where conservative perspectives are formulaically suppressed and conservative speakers are routinely
shouted down, disrupted and often threatened.
Conservative voices may hopefully start making up for the disparity and increasingly attract both a discerning
readership and an attentive audience. But the effort to pin the fantasies of the Left to the corkboard of the real
world is an arduous project that will take considerable time. As Jonathan Swift remarked, “What a man has not been
reasoned into he cannot be reasoned out of.” Progress in this field can be made only by dint of timely and diligent
repetition inching toward acceptability and, no less saliently, by subliminal renderings of the issue.
This is why one book in particular may have a greater effect on the popular psyche than the most eloquent and
lapidary arguments. It is fascinating to see how the adversarial view of current affairs may express itself on an
unconscious level in popular fiction and as a cult phenomenon, operating where we might least expect to find it. The
controversy is waged not only in the forum of public encounter but in the barometric depths of cognitive reception.
I am thinking of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. One might posit a conflict between
Liberal Muggledom and Conservative Hogwarts. In this particular adventure, the flashpoint involves the smear campaign
waged in the magical realm by Judge Fudge and the Ministry of Magic against the Hogwarts wizard sodality which it
administers. The Ministry in its fearful and stubborn refusal to admit the return of the evil Lord Voldemort and his
designs for total dominion thus becomes his enabler and, in so doing, effectively assumes his identity. Adopting a
strategy of defamation, it proceeds by trying to ruin the reputation of Headmaster Dumbledore and his protégé Harry,
who are perfectly aware of an impending catastrophe and are determined to prevent it from happening.
Even the curriculum at Hogwarts is manipulated in such a way by the Ministry’s representative that students are
placed at a disadvantage in dealing with the creatures who emerge from the dark world. Instead of rising to the
preservation of its domain, the Ministry consorts with the enemy who wishes to destroy it and undermines the good name
of its loyal scholars and compatriots who are prepared to defend it. The analogy with the ideological conflict taking
place in the actual world in which we live is uncanny.
Perhaps with allies like Headmaster Dumbledore and young Harry Potter, which is to say, wisdom associated with
energy and steadfastness with courage, the Conservative camp may eventually spur a reappraisal on the Left and help
break its entente with the emboldened Voldemorts of the day.
David Solway is the award-winning author of over twenty-five books of poetry, criticism,
educational theory, and travel. He is a contributor to magazines as varied as the Atlantic, the Sewanee Review, Books
in Canada, and the Partisan Review. His most recent book is The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity.
I forecast all kinds of bad things from Obama's foreign policy, but even I am stunned by the rapidity of the institution of
a foreign policy based on "please like us", and the speed with which the Western World is being defeated by the forces of
Islamofascism.
Obama has been President for only one month and it is scary how many things he has done wrong in one month. I am
worried about the next 47 months.
Here is Barry Rubin, giving a warning that American should heed:
America: A freight train is heading your way and you're standing right on the tracks, looking in the wrong
direction.
Or perhaps it is like a horror film in which the killer sneaks up behind the hapless victim while the movie audience
yells: "Turn around! Turn around!" And then blood spatters the screen.
Unfortunately, in this case, it might be ourblood, and it won't be produced by a special effects department.
Today, US policy and the dominant thinking are not based on realpolitik but on international affairs as a popularity contest. Its motto might be, "The nice will inherit the
Earth," as the Obama administration tries to prove that it's not like that mean old Bush.
Before we get to the oncoming train, consider two small but indicative examples.
Scene 1: The UN committee planning the Durban-2 pro-racism - I mean "anti-racism" - conference. Libya chairs the committee, Iran is the vice-chair, Cuba, the rapporteur,
and Russia is presiding. The plan is designed to ensure that theconference limits free speech, bashes Israel and enshrines Muslims
as the world's only and perpetual victims.
The US representative stands to propose amendments. Is the speech a thunderous denunciation of dictatorship and a
defense of liberty? Not exactly. Here is the key sentence: "I hate to be the cause of unhappiness in the room... I have to
suggest [amendments] and I offer my sincere apologies."
How's that for speaking softly and carrying a big pillow? (US president Theodore Roosevelt a century ago famously
described diplomacy as "speaking softly and carrying a big stick.")
Scene 2: The camera pans and the screen fills with an invitation to a conferencebeing held by the Brookings Institution in Washington. The purpose is
defined as asking, "How should Europe engage Russia to
put relations between the West and Russia on a more
positive and sustainable basis?" There is no room for pressure, opposition or criticism as part of the package; no hint of
the need for flexibility to be accompanied by toughness.
Russia invaded Georgia, fought a surrogate
war against Azerbaijan, blackmailed Ukraine and Lithuania. It has opposed sanctions on Iran, sold huge amounts of arms to
Syria and committed real human rights' violations in Chechnya. It is the dawning of the age not of Aquarius (as the film
Hair once said of the utopia predicted in the 1960s) but of Aquarium, in which the sharks are put in charge.
US policy is putting the emphasis on conciliation with Iran and Syria, and a soft line toward Pakistan, despite its lack
of cooperation on fighting terrorism against India or in Afghanistan.
The only thing you can do with a strategy of carrots without sticks is to make carrot cake. Now consider what is
sneaking up on the US government as it hands out candy:
On March 29, local elections will be held in Turkey. If the current government wins these municipal races, especially in
Ankara and Istanbul, the country will be encouraged to go even further down the road toward Islamic extremism. Whatever
happens internally (where the nature of Turkish society forces it to go more slowly), Ankara's foreign policy is
increasingly aligned with that of the radicals in the region - not only Hamas but also Syria and Iran.
Turkey's many friends are hoping that moderation and its traditional political virtues win out. But what's happening
there may well be the most important political event in the Middle East since the Iranian revolution 30 years ago. Think of
what it means if, in whole or even in part, Turkey goes from the Western to the radical camp; clearly this is a
world-changing event.
Then on June 7 come the Lebanese elections. Given the vast amounts of money they have spent, their use of violent
intimidation and demoralization due to the Western abandonment of the moderates, it is likely that Iran's Syrian clients
will take over Lebanon's government. This does not mean domination by Hizbullah but by four allied forces: pro-Syrian Sunni
politicians; Michel Aoun's Christian forces; and the two Shi'ite groups, Hizbullah and Amal.
Already, Lebanon's president and former armed forces' commander Michel Suleiman is very close to the Iran-Syrian orbit.
This doesn't mean that Lebanon will be annexed or militarily reoccupied by Syria, or that Lebanon will become an Islamist
state internally. But it does mean that Lebanon will become a reliable ally of what Syrian President Bashar Assad
calls "the resistance front."
In the region, these two developments will be perceived as two big victories for Teheran, and a sign that the
Islamist-radical side is the wave of the future.
And what is the United States doing to fight, stop or manage this visible crisis?
Nothing.
FINALLY, ON June 12, presidential elections will take place in Iran itself. The likelihood is the reelection of
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, either fairly or through manipulation of the ballot. The Iranian ruling establishment, which
might have been persuaded to endorse a less extreme candidate if there had been enough Western pressure to make the
incumbent look bad, has backed an openly aggressive anti-Semite.
Even though Ahmadinejad is not the real ruler of Iran, he and his allies are working to make him so. And of course his
reelection means not only that Iran is waging a campaign to get nuclear weapons, it will mean that it is moving at the
fastest possible speed, with the least likelihood of compromising and the most probability of using such a weapon (or
forcing Israel to act militarily to stop the process). By years' end, or shortly after, Iran might have an atom bomb.
In short, 2009 is looking like a year of massive defeat for the US and its friends in the Middle East. Meanwhile,
Washington is blind to this trend, pursuing a futile attempt to conciliate its enemies, losing time and not adopting the
policies desperately needed.
Instead, the US should make itself leader of a broad coalition of Arab and European states, along with Israel, to resist
Islamism and Iranian ambitions.
Alas, the new administration is fooling around while the region burns.
Turn around! Turn around!
While most
Americans were busy celebrating Valentine's Day, last Saturday the Obama
administration announced that it would send a delegation to Geneva to
participate in planning the UN's so-called Durban II conference, scheduled to
take place in late April. Although largely overlooked in the US, the
announcement sent shock waves through Jerusalem.
The Durban
II conference was announced in the summer of 2007. Its stated purpose is to
review the implementation of the declaration adopted at the UN's anti-Israel
hate-fest that took place in Durban, South Africa, the week before the September
11, 2001, attacks against America.
At Durban,
both the UN-sponsored NGO conclave and the UN's governmental conference passed
declarations denouncing Israel as a racist state. The NGO conference called for
a coordinated international campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel and the
right of the Jewish people to self-determination, and belittling the Holocaust.
The NGO
conference also called for curbs on freedom of expression throughout the world
in order to prevent critical discussion of Islam. As far as the world's leading
NGOs - including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch - were concerned,
critical discussions of Islam are inherently racist.
In
defending US participation in the Durban II planning sessions, Gordon Duguid,
the State Department's spokesman, argued, "If you are not engaged, you don't
have a voice."
He
continued, "We wanted to put forward our view and see if there is some way we
can make the document [which sets the agenda and dictates the outcome of the
Durban II conference] a better document than it appears it is going to be."
WHILE THIS
seems like a noble goal, both the State Department and the Obama White House
ought to know that there is absolutely no chance that they can accomplish it.
This is the case for two reasons.
First,
since the stated purpose of the Durban II conference is to oversee the
implementation of the first Durban conference's decisions, and since those
decisions include the anti-Israel assertion that Israel is a racist state, it is
clear that the Durban II conference is inherently, and necessarily, anti-Israel.
The second
reason that both the State Department and the White House must realize that they
are powerless to affect the conference's agenda is because that agenda was
already set in previous planning sessions chaired by the likes of Libya, Cuba,
Iran and Pakistan. And that agenda includes multiple assertions of the basic
illegitimacy of the Jewish people's right to self-determination. The conference
agenda also largely adopted the language of the 2001 NGO conference that called
for the criminalization of critical discussion of Islam as a form of hate speech
and racism. That is, the 2009 conference's agenda is not only openly
anti-Israel, it is also openly pro-tyranny, and so seemingly antithetical to US
interests.
Beyond all
that, assuming that the Obama administration truly wishes to change the agenda,
the fact is that the US is powerless to do so. As was the case in 2001, so too,
today, the Islamic bloc, supported by the Third World bloc, has an automatic
voting majority. Beyond chipping away at the margins, the US has no ability
whatsoever to change the conference's agenda or expected outcome.
SINCE IT
came into office a month ago, every single Middle East policy the Obama
administration has announced has been antithetical to Israel's national security
interests. From President Barack Obama's intense desire to appease Iran's
mullahs in open discussions; to his stated commitment to establish a Palestinian
state as quickly as possible despite the Palestinians' open rejection of
Israel's right to exist and support for terrorism; to his expressed support for
the so-called Saudi peace plan, which would require Israel to commit national
suicide by contracting to within indefensible borders and accepting millions of
hostile, foreign-born Arabs as citizens and residents of the rump Jewish state;
to his decision to end US sanctions against Syria and return the US ambassador
to Damascus; to his plan to withdraw US forces from Iraq and so give Iran an arc
of uninterrupted control extending from Iran to Lebanon, every single concrete
policy Obama has enunciated harms Israel.
At the
same time, none of the policies that Obama has adopted can be construed as
directed against Israel. In and of themselves, none can be viewed as expressing
specific hostility toward Israel. Rather, they are expressions of naiveté, or
ignorance, or - at worst - deliberate denial of the nature of the problems of
the Arab and Islamic world on the part of Obama and his advisers.
The same
cannot be said of the administration's decision to send its delegation to
the Durban II planning session this past week in Geneva. Unlike every other
Obama policy, this is a hostile act against Israel. This is true first of all
because the decision was announced in the face of repeated Israeli requests that
the US join Israel and Canada in boycotting the Durban II conference.
Some could
chalk up the US's rejection of Israel's urgent entreaties as an honest
difference of opinion. But what lies behind Israel's requests for a US boycott
is not a partisan agenda, but a clearheaded acknowledgement that the Durban II
conference is inherently devoted to the delegitimization and destruction of the
Jewish state. And by joining in the planning sessions, the US has become a full
participant in legitimizing and so advancing this overtly anti-Jewish agenda.
On
Thursday, Prof. Anne Bayefsky, the senior editor of the EyeontheUN Web site,
demonstrated that by participating in the planning sessions the US is accepting
the conference's anti-Israel agenda. Bayefsky reported that at the planning
session in Geneva on Thursday, the Palestinian delegation proposed that a
paragraph be added to the conference's agenda. Their draft "calls for
implementation of... the advisory opinion of the ICJ [International Court of
Justice] on the wall, [i.e., Israel's security fence], and the international
protection of Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory."
The
American delegation raised no objection to the Palestinian draft.
Issued in
2004, the ICJ's advisory opinion on the security fence claimed that Israel has
no right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. At the time, both the US
and Israel rejected the ICJ's authority to issue an opinion on the subject.
On
Thursday, by not objecting to this Palestinian draft, not only did the US
effectively accept the ICJ's authority, for practical purposes it granted the
anti-Israel claim that Jews may be murdered with impunity.
This
assertion aligns naturally with the language already in the Durban II agenda,
which calls Israel's Law of Return racist. This law, which grants automatic
citizenship to any Jew who wishes to live here, is the embodiment of Jewish
peoplehood and the vehicle through which the Jewish people has built our
nation-state. In alleging that the Law of Return is racist, the Durban II
conference asserts that the Jews are not a people and we have no right to
self-determination in our homeland. And Thursday, by participating in the
process of demonizing Israel and its people, the US lent its own credibility to
this bigoted campaign.
OBAMA'S
SPOKESMEN and defenders claim that by participating in the planning sessions in
Geneva, the administration is doing nothing more than attempting to prevent the
conference from being the anti-Jewish diplomatic pogrom it was in 2001. If they
are unsuccessful, they will boycott the conference. No harm done.
But this
claim rings hollow.
As
Bayefsky and others argued this week, by entering into the Durban preparatory
process, the US has done two things. First, it has made it all but impossible
for European states like France, Britain, the Czech Republic and the
Netherlands, which were all considering boycotting the conference, to do so.
They cannot afford to be seen as more opposed to its anti-Israel and
anti-freedom agenda than Israel's closest ally and the world's greatest
democracy. So just by participating in the planning sessions the US has
legitimized a clearly bigoted, morally illegitimate process, making it
impossible for Europe to disengage.
Second,
through its behavior at the Geneva planning sessions this week, the US has
demonstrated that State Department protestations aside, the administration has
no interest in changing the agenda in any serious way. The US delegation's
decision not to object to the Palestinian draft, as well its silence in the face
of Iran's rejection of a clause in the conference declaration that mentioned the
Holocaust, show the US did not join the planning session to change the tenor of
the conference. The US is participating in the planning sessions because it
wishes to participate in the conference.
The Durban
II conference, like its predecessor, is part and parcel of a campaign to
coordinate the diplomatic and legal war against the Jewish state. By walking out
of the 2001 Durban conference, and refusing to participate, support or finance
any aspect of this UN-sponsored campaign until last Saturday, for seven years
the US made clear that it opposed this war and believed its aim of destroying
Israel is unacceptable.
By
embracing the Durban campaign now, it is possible that the Obama administration
will water down some of the most noxious language in conference's draft
declaration. But this doesn't balance out the harm US participation will cause
to Israel, or to the Jewish people. By participating in the conference, the US
today is effectively giving American support to the war against the Jewish
state.
The open
hostility toward Israel expressed by the Obama administration's decision to
participate in the Durban process should be a red flag for both the Israeli
government and for Israel's supporters in the US. Both Israel and its Jewish and
non-Jewish supporters must openly condemn the administration's move and
demand that it reverse its decision immediately.
FOR THE
past two years, the American Jewish Committee has been instrumental in
convincing the American Jewish community to reject repeated Israeli requests
that they call for a US boycott of Durban II. To secure US participation over
Israel's objections, the AJC even went so far as to sign a letter to Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton asking her not to boycott the conference.
In return
for the AJC's labors, its senior operative Felice Gaer is now a member of the US
delegation in Geneva. Happily ensconced in the Swiss conference room where the
Holocaust is denied, the Jewish people's right to self-determination is reviled,
and Israel's right to defend itself is rejected, Gaer now sits silently, all the
while using the fact of her membership in the US delegation as proof that the
Obama administration is serious about protecting Israel at Durban II.
Whatever
the AJC may have gained for its support for Durban II, Israel and its supporters
have clearly been harmed.
Some might
argue that no Israeli interest is served by openly condemning the White House.
But when the White House is participating in a process that legitimizes and so
advances the war against the Jewish state, such condemnation is not only richly
deserved but required. It is the administration, not Israel that threw down the
gauntlet. If Israel and its supporters refrain from vigorously criticizing this
move, we guarantee its repetition.
Here is my essay from the website of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. (SPME).
SPME is an important academic organization composed of thousands of professors who are devoted to correcting the hatred and anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism of some professors and pro-Palestinian groups that are wreaking havoc on the education of young people, or seeking academic boycotts of Israeli professors. I am trying to raise some money for them, by asking for donations for SPME when people read chapters of my online book, Second Generation Radical, which is at www.howardrotberg.ca.
For 7 years, the Palestinians in Gaza sent a constant battery of
rockets against the Israeli civilians of Sderot and Ashkelon. The
bombing had only intensified when Israel pulled out of Gaza, turning it
over to the Palestinians. Finally, after 7 years and constant requests
from the residents under attack, Israel attacked Hamas in Gaza.
One of the targets of air attacks was the Islamic University in
Gaza, which had very close ties to Hamas. Hamas, although
democratically elected in Gaza, soon consolidated power by killing or
arresting members of its rival, Fatah, and thus established a
totalitarian regime.
According to Israel, two laboratories in the university were
targeted because they served as research and development centres for
Hamas's military wing. It was stated by Israeli intelligence that the
development of explosives was done under the auspices of university
professors.
University buildings were also used for meetings of senior
Hamas officials. Hamas is classified by most Western countries as a
“Terrorist Organization”.
The Israel Defence Forces said rockets and explosives were stored in the buildings.
Israel, being a liberal democracy, has a flourishing free press,
and opposition parties, (including Arab parties) and anyone from the
media or the political opposition, can find it career-enhancing to find
any false statements from the government. Like journalists and
opposition parties here, there is plenty of fact checking for
government allegations, and a journalist who proves a politician lying
can find that digging up the facts for that purpose can make his or her
career.
That is to say, in Israel itself, there is an inherent protection against false allegations. So, what I read in the Jerusalem Post or Ha’aretz (both online in English), I tend to believe.
Nothwithstanding the conversion of a university into a weapons
laboratory to be used against Israeli civilians in Southern Israel,
some Canadian university students are up in arms about the fact that
Israel bombed a university.
Most provocatively, the student council at York University,
Canada (the York Federation of Students) at a meeting that was supposed
to deal with the almost 12 week strike at York, deferred that topic to
unanimously adopt an anti-Israel set of resolutions.
One of the recitals to the resolutions stated that “on Monday
December 29 an F-16 fighter plane bombed the Science Laboratory and
Library of the Islamic University in Gaza, just a few hours before some
of its 20,000 students were to enter the campus to conduct exams.”
One of the resolutions stated: “RESOLVED THAT the York
Federation of Students show support and solidarity with the people of
Gaza by calling upon the Canadian government to pressure the government
of Israel to adhere to its' international legal obligations to end
attacks on civilian infrastructure and to allow unimpeded access for
all Palestinians to their educational institutions”.
One wonders about this kind of selective concern. Where were the
York students when Israeli civilians were the target of Hamas sponsored
bombing of Israeli universities, restaurants, cafes, buses and other
targets where Israeli civilians gathered?
Also, don’t the York students know that the fact that Israel
bombed the university lab “hours before some of its 20,000 students
were to arrive”, is an essential difference between Israeli military
who are commanded to take all necessary steps to minimize civilian deaths, and Hamas terrorists whose very purpose is to maximize civilian deaths?
Let us take a look at just one of the horrible incidents that
took place in Israel during what became known as the “Second Intifada”
in 2001 and 2002. I was in Israel during that period, writing my book, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author (Mantua Books).
On July 31, 2002, nine people - four Israelis and five foreign
nationals - were killed and 85 injured, 14 of them seriously, when a
bomb exploded in the crowded Frank Sinatra cafeteria on the Hebrew
University Mt. Scopus campus during its lunchtime. Hamas claimed
responsibility for the attack.
The bomber left the bomb in an innocent looking bag packed with
shrapnel in the cafeteria. The purpose of the shrapnel was to kill or
maim the maximum number of people.
Though classes were not in session, students were taking exams
at the time of the blast, and the cafeteria was crowded with diners.
There were also numerous students in the building registering for
classes for the coming school year.
The cafeteria is also near the Rothberg International School,
where about 80 pupils from the US and other Western countries had
arrived to prepare for the fall semester.
Most of the injured were between the ages of 18 and 30. The
explosion gutted the cafeteria. The dead and injured included Jews and
Arabs, Israeli nationals and foreign students.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has some 23,000 student, 5000 of them being Arabs.
According to Fox News, Hamas, which carried out the largest
number of Palestinian bombings during the Second Intifada, claimed
responsibility for the bombing during a rally in Gaza City that drew
some 10,000 supporters into the streets following evening prayers in
the mosques.
"This operation today is a part of a series of operations we
will launch from everywhere in Palestine," said a masked Hamas
militant, dressed in a green military uniform.
At the request of the masked Hamas speaker, the entire crowd
knelt to pray that future Hamas attacks "would succeed against the
enemy of God."
If one checks the internet, there are photographs of wildly
cheering Palestinians waiving Hamas flags and flashing victory signs,
as they celebrated some kind of victory over a student cafeteria.
In addition, how many readers know that in February, 2008, a
Hamas rocket (one of 40 launched that day!) landed at Sapir College in
Sderot, killing 47 year old student, Roni Yihye, who was survived by
four children, and injuring a pregnant Bedouin student? How many
newspapers in the West even bothered to report it? Did the students at
York even bother to research these facts before they make Israeli
actions the single most important issue in their agenda, even more
important than a resolution of the strike preventing students from
attending classes?
Israeli government officials delayed a substantial military
intervention in Gaza during 7 years of Hamas rockets against towns like
Sderot, where studies indicate that due to the frequent rockets and
sirens requiring refuge in bomb shelters, some 75% of the children are
suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
But, once it finally acted, the Israeli government and its
public took no joy in the Gaza operation. They only took joy when their
reservist children returned from service in the War, because Israelis
worship life just as surely as the residents of Gaza, with Hamas
turning them into human shields or suicide bombers, worship death. It
is just one of the distinctions that the student council at York
University seems not to grasp.
Howard Rotberg is the author of, the novel, The Second
Catastrophe, and two books of non-fiction, his most recent being
Exploring Vancouverism: The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land.
His literary website is www.howardrotberg.ca and his blog is http://secondgenerationradical.blogmatrix.com/
From the murders in the Mumbai Chabad House, to the Jewish Centre bombing
in Buenos Aires, to the suicide bombings and terrorist rockets in Israel, to
the fear and beatings of French and even British Jews, to Iran's planned
nuclear genocide,..
.....it is time to march.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am not for others, what am I?
And if not now, when?”
- Rabbi Hillel Jewish scholar & theologian (30
BC - 9 AD)
“Da’at” in Hebrew is Knowledge, the
bridge between the intellect and emotion.The Da’at in Kabbalah is the mystical state of unity of the 10
Sephiroth, also called the Tree of Life
D.A.A.T.
is also the Day Against Anti-Semitism and Terrorism
We shall march.
We shall be non-violent.
We are taking action to help
knowledge and goodness prevail over ignorance and hate.
Da'at is the bridge between intellect
and emotion.
In your mind and in your heart,
you know it is time to march against anti-Semitism and Terrorism. North
American Jews and their friends must not repeat the inaction of the Shoah.This time, we shall march and shout, “Never
Again”.Every perpetrator and victim of
anti-Semitism will hear our shout, and we hope that good people everywhere will say "enough!".
April 19, 2009 at 2:00 p.m. We are
seeking organizing volunteers in your area.
As we organize for DAAT, here is an article by the wonderful Melanie Phillips about what has happened in Britain.
WE CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN HERE. HELP US ORGANIZE THE APRIL 19 DAAT MARCHES.
The jihad against Britain's Jews
Friday, 6th February 2009
Melanie Phillips
I am hearing ever more alarming accounts of the deepening
attrition against British Jews in the wake of the incitement against Israel
provoked by the war in Gaza. In addition to the record number of attacks upon
Jewish individuals and institutions and murderous incitement displayed on the
anti-Israel demonstrations and riots as reported by the Community Security
Trust, Jewish parents report that their children – some as young as eight – are
now running a gauntlet of attack from their Muslim classmates at school who
accuse them of ‘killing Palestinian children’. Comments by adults about ‘Jews
controlling all the money/the media/the BBC’ (yes, really! All because it
allowed Israel’s spokesman to put the case for Israel from time to time)
are now commonplace in both private and public discourse. Today’s Jewish Chronicle reports that a 12 year-old Birmingham
schoolgirl was terrorised by a mob of 20 youths chanting ‘Kill all Jews’ and
‘Death to Jews’ on her way home from school last week:
She said: ‘One of my friends said an Asian girl from the year above
asked her why she was talking to me because I am Jewish. I asked the girl in a
friendly manner if she had a problem with me being Jewish. She said “yeah, I
do”. I managed to punch her before she hit me but then she grabbed me by the
hair and swung me around shouting “f****** Jews, I hate Jews”. But then another
Asian girl rounded up a whole gang. They were all in school uniform and they
came running towards me shouting “death to Jews” and “kill all
Jews.”’
A reader has sent me the following account of what happened
to him when, travelling on the Tube in London, he started to read a copy of
The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz:
After a time, I became aware that a man sitting diagonally in front
of me near the doors at the end of the carriage was looking a bit agitated and
had a disgruntled expression on his face. However, he didn't meet my eye, so I
thought nothing more of it and continued reading as before...When the train
reached St Paul's, the man I had noticed stood up to get off. But instead of
leaving by the end doors, he made to pass me. In the process of doing so, he
deliberately shoved into me and made to crush me against the side of the
carriage and the passengers sitting behind me. Despite already knowing exactly
what had actuated this behaviour, I asked the question anyway - and received the
following response: ‘You shouldn't be reading that, you f***ing
[indecipherable].’...The whole confrontation had taken place in the time it took
for the tube doors to wheeze open and shut.
Other than in the Jewish press, such incidents are barely
being reported. Last week, for example, there was virtually no coverage of the
violent demonstration organised by the Stop the War coalition which prevented
the deputy commander of Israel’s Gaza operation from speaking at London’s Jewish
student centre, Hillel House, when a crowd of about 60-80 students attempted to
storm the building.
One of the most troubling developments is the way in which
the universities have become an extension of the Middle East conflict, with a
simulacrum of the aggression, intimidation and violence from which Israel is
under attack by the Arabs being directed at Jewish students on British campuses,
who now routinely run a gauntlet of intimidation and abuse from Arab and Muslim
students. But even more worryingly, some universities are spinelessly choosing
to give in to such bullying.
Throughout last week, after the cease-fire was declared in
Gaza, there was a series of anti-Israel sit-ins and demonstrations organised by
the STWC at some 17 universities: in London at the School of Oriental and
African Studies, the London School of Economics, Queen Mary College and King’s
College, as well as at Bradford, Sheffield Hallam, Warwick, Leeds, Oxford,
Cambridge, Sussex, Essex, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Manchester
Metropolitan and Strathclyde. Some of these protests led to criminal damage and
forced the universities to pay thousands of pounds to deal with the disruption,
rearrange lectures, hire extra security guards and repair the
damage.
The demonstrators took control of lecture halls and made a
series of demands: that the universities should issue a statement condemning
Israel’s actions in Gaza; offer scholarships to Palestinian students; send
surplus educational materials to help rebuild Gaza (presumably its Islamic
University, said by Israel to be a fount of terror); dedicate some of their time
to fund-raising for Gaza; and take no action against the
demonstrators.
Some of these universities responded robustly to such
disorder and intimidation. Manchester Metropolitan, Birmingham, Nottingham and,
after some delay, Leeds and Cambridge reportedly refused to accept any of these
demands. At Nottingham and Sheffield Hallam, the demonstrators were forcibly
evicted.
But the LSE, King’s College London, SOAS, Bradford,
Strathclyde and Oxford reportedly gave in to some or all of these demands.
According to the JC, the LSE agreed to waive application fees for Gaza and West
Bank students ‘directly affected by the conflict’, while
Bradford
agreed to investigate the ‘ethical background’ of food and drink
served on campus, and promised to ‘explore the feasibility of a twinning link
with the Islamic University of Gaza’.
Strathclyde agreed among other things to cancel a contract
with an Israeli water-cooler company. Oxford – which fined each demonstrator
the princely sum of £20 – nevertheless started negotiations with them with
indecent haste, and a mere few hours later had agreed to pretty well everything.
In a craven letter to colleagues the Vice-Chancellor, John Hood, having
stated that
unlawful action of this kind cannot be condoned
proceeded to reward it by giving the perpetrators what they
had demanded.
The Oxford demonstrators also demanded that the title of the
series of lectures on ‘world peace’ at Balliol, recently inaugurated by Israeli
President Shimon Peres and named in his honour, be changed; the Senior Proctor,
Professor Donald Fraser -- who oversees disciplinary matters and who recommended
‘a relatively lenient course of action against the demonstrators ‘-- duly wrote
to Balliol drawing its attention to the students’
concerns.
Thus the trahison des clercs as they crumble in the
face of criminality, violence and intimidation.
And so now at British universities --which should be the
most protected of all environments for free discourse and inquiry -- British
Jews no longer feel safe. At Nottingham, one such student
said:
The sit-in has created an atmosphere where we do not feel comfortable
going into shared buildings on campus.
At King’s, another Jewish student
said:
Someone from my course wrote ‘kill the Jews’ on my Facebook profile.
Later he said he didn’t know I was Jewish. In public someone said to me, ‘I
think all the Israelis are crazy and so are the f***ing
Jews’.
One University Reader reportedly told a meeting that ‘within five
years, Oxford will be a Jew-free zone’
and a student wrote to Professor Fraser warning
that
for Jewish students, the university and the city have developed a
toxic atmosphere in which I and many others feel increasingly alienated and
unwelcome.
Meanwhile, of course, as Sky’s Tim Marshall pointed out the other day on his blog, the
government of Sri Lanka is also attempting to eradicate terrorism by a military
campaign in which, according to the UN, ‘many civilians are being killed’,
thousands made homeless, hundreds of thousands trapped, and to which, as food
shortages grow, the government refuses to allow access to journalists. Yet there
are no sit-ins on campus against the Sri Lankans, no violent riots outside its
High Commission, no calls to boycott Orange Pekoe tea. As Marshall
observed:
And yet somehow the lives of the 1,300 Palestinians killed by the
Israelis causes far more outrage, in certain quarters, than the 2 million dead
in Congo, the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Sunni and Shia terrorists,
or the growing number of Sri Lankan dead to add to the 70,000 killed over the
past 25 years (far more than the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed in
the same period).
Of course – because the protests in Britain have nothing to
do with humanitarian concerns for the innocent. They are part of the jihad
against the Jews – and those in the universities and other parts of the
establishment who are capitulating to or even endorsing this are accomplices to
a great evil that is now consuming British public life.
Preliminary plans call for marches in the major cities of the United States and Canada.
This will depend in part on finding committed organizers in each city who can establish the local organization with the help
of our senior organizers.
At this time we are hoping to have marches in the following cities:
Canada -
Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver
United States -
Washington, New York, Chicago, South Florida, Los Angeles
This is our minimum goal, and hope to add further locations if possible. We are still studying the idea of doing
marches in Europe. Our fear is that it may be too late to do peaceful protests in Europe as the number of people hostile
to Jews and attracted to terrorism and Islamofascism may prevent marches there being peaceful.
We are now seeking nominations for local organizing chairpeople for those locations. Advertisements will soon appear
in local publications to seek such people.
This is a broad-based grassroots protest march and is not beholden to any one organization. There are so many people
who want to express their opposition to terrorism and anti-Semitism and the ideological confusion that is sweeping the West as
to how to deal with these evils. It is time that we call them "evils" and it is time to hit the streets.
This incident is from last year. It is one of the reasons we have to take to the streets on April
19th. A world that is not terribly bothered by Hamas inciting and praising this type of incident, but reserves all
its condemnation for the IDF when it, despite enormous measures to the contrary, kills Hamas supporting civilians, is clearly
immoral.
Bradley Burston writes for Israel's left wing newspaper Ha'aretz. Left wing and right wing are agreed on this.
JERUSALEM - What, exactly, is a decent person supposed to think?
On a quiet and clear morning in Jerusalem, a woman is driving toward the heart of the city, her infant with her in the
car. There is nothing to fear.
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It is not a military area, it is not a sector of occupation, it is not a settlement - Jews
have lived and worked here for more than a century. Jewish doctors and nurses were treating Arab infants, women, the
elderly and the infirm here as early as 1902, when Shaare Tzedek Hospital opened across the street.
There is nothing to fear.
Except for the man behind the wheel of a bulldozer, who has taken it upon himself to kill Jews. Not Israeli security
force personnel, not occupation troops, not the Shin Bet. Jews. Women and children and the elderly and the infirm. Jews
who may be in favor of an independent Palestinian state. Jews who have nothing against Arabs. Jews who may work to end
the occupation. Jews.
When the killing starts, the woman behind the wheel does what Jews have learned to do since the Holocaust, and for
2,000 years before that: Save your child. Whatever it takes.
She manages to throw her infant out the side window and clear of the car before the Hero of Palestine steers the
massive earth mover toward her car for a second time and crushes it flat.
It doesn't take long, after the he has finished overturning buses full of Jews - and Arabs as well - and driving over
other cars, even backing up to crush one twice, before the public relations and marketing department of Hamas had
formulated its praise for the attack.
"We consider it as a natural reaction to the daily aggression and crimes committed against our people in the West Bank
and all over the occupied lands," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told the press.
Natural. Only natural.
The Islamic Jihad's armed wing could not have agreed more."The Jerusalem Brigades bless the heroic operation in
Jerusalem as the natural reaction to the crimes of the occupation," it announced.
The attack came after the latest in a series of attempts by groups in the states, some of them atheist/anarchist, some
of them Muslim, some of them Jewish, to lobby Prostestant churches and respected universities to divest from
Caterpillar, because the IDF uses its bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes.
I would like to hear them now. Just once. I would like them to divest from terrorism. Not understand it as the natural
outgrowth of the crimes of occupation. For once, I would like my sisters and brothers on the left to be every bit as
hard on their comrades the Palestinians for taking a bulldozer and crushing Jews, as they are on Israel for bulldozing
homes.
Write a letter to Ismail Haniyeh, to Mahmoud Zahar, to Sami Anu Zuhri. Protest in your own communities, for once,
calling terrorism what it is. Intentional, brutal, premeditated, immoral. Murder.
What's a decent person supposed to think?
That it's all right to launch rockets against residential areas during a cease-fire, because the occupation is still
going on? That it's all right to crush Jewish civilians, because the occupation has not been halted and settlers
continue to build homes?
What's a decent person to think when Palestinian groups fall over one another trying to claim the bulldozer attack? And
when one of the groups is the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade?
What's a decent person to think when the man who drove the bulldozer was himself the father of two, a construction
worker from East Jerusalem, whose desire to kill Jews - and, in so doing, further soil and damage the cause and name of
Palestine - was greater than his feeling for the mother who had to throw her baby from a car to save it?
I, for one, would like to ask for proof of what it is that Palestinians really want. I no longer believe that it's as
simple as wanting statehood.
This is what I don't yet want to admit: that for all these years, in 2008 no less than in 1902, what a critical mass of
Palestinians want most, perhaps even more than statehood, may be as simple as the vile thrill of vengeance, as
straightforward as nothing more than seeing Jews dead and gone.
Thanks to Joan O. for drawing this to my attention.
I am posting it now before offending Islam becomes a criminal offense.
To my Muslim friends - do not be offended as I am not offended when someone challenges my religion of Judaism. Let
the ideas be their own advocates without violence and intimidation.
"I'm glad you asked":
Yashiko Sagamori at her best
In response to Peacemongers and
Jihadeers by Yashiko Sagamori ( a very exceptional Japanese writer), a sincere
Muslim wrote:
hello,i am rosli from Malaysia and i am a
muslim. i had read what you had writen in the thinkisrael.com webpage.i totally disaggre the way you mention about us muslim.
i think that you did not understand the true meaning of jihad. the best thing to describe islam is "islam is all about
peace". the word islam itself mean peace. i want to give you a suggestion if you want to know islam better you must try to
read the translation of the holy quran and observe it or you can log on to islamonline.net website to upgrade your knowledge about islam. ok may Allah give you
guidance.
Sagamori responds with respect:
Dear Rosli,
When someone wakes you up in the middle of the coldest, darkest night of the winter and complains how unbearable the heat of
the sun has become, he is either calling you from halfway across the world or he is blind and sitting dangerously close to a
blazing furnace.
When someone tells you in the year 2006 that Islam is all about peace, he can be one of many things. He can be a Jewish
liberal looking at the world and the approaching Holocaust through the pink glasses of political correctness. He can be
someone as ignorant and unwilling to learn as President Bush. He can be an unapologetic liar like Condoleezza Rice. He can be
a ridiculously apologetic coward like Tony Blair. He can be a schizophrenic, because schizophrenics live in an alternate
reality. And, last but not least, he can be a Muslim, because Dar el-Islam is an alternate reality.
If Islam is all about peace, then I would like you to explain to me why Sunni Iraqis and Shiite Iraqis,
instead of uniting against American invaders, are murdering each other to the tune of several dozens a
day.
If Israel is truly oppressing the so-called "Palestinians", why are they, instead of uniting against it, are
killing each other at a steadily accelerating rate?
Why did the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980's claimed more than a million lives without benefiting either side?
Why has the war between Turkish Kurds and "real" Turks, both Muslim people, killed more than 30,000? How could Abdullah
Ocalan, the Muslim leader of the Kurds, declare in 1992: "Even if 100,000 people die this year, our movement cannot be
disrupted," while knowing that every single one of that impressive number of people whose lives he so easily deemed
expendable was a Muslim?
How did the combined efforts of Islamic Salvation Army and Armed Islamic Group result in a civil war in Algeria that produced
150 to 200 thousand Muslim casualties between 1991 and 2002?
And look at Mecca, the holiest place of Islam, during the hajj, the holiest event of a Muslim's life. Here is a brief (and,
by far, incomplete) chronology of Muslims' peaceful piousness in the modern times:
1979 November 21: On the first day of the 15th Islamic century, a group of 300 students from the Theological
University of Medina take control over the Holy Mosque of Mecca. They keep control for two weeks, when 63 are captured
alive and the mosque is recovered. All occupants are executed.
1987 July 31: Riots by Iranian pilgrims. More than 400 people die.
1989 July 9: Two bombs kill 1 person. Shiites of Kuwait are accused, and 16 are executed.
1990 July 2: Stampede leads to 1402 people dead.
1994: A stampede kills 400 people.
1997 April 15: Fire kills 340 people.
2004 February 1: Stampede kills 244 people.
2006 January 13: More than 345 pilgrims die in a stampede near the Jamrat Complex in Mina.
I hope you noticed that I only listed a few of the most notorious cases of Muslim violence against Muslims.
Those are not isolated episodes. They are part of an ongoing process that has accompanied Islam throughout its entire
history. In fact, the absolute majority of Muslims who die a violent death are not killed by "infidels": they are slaughtered
by other Muslims. Therefore, if your definition of peace has anything at all in common with mine, Islam, contrary to your
opinion, is not about peace at all. If you disagree, I will be grateful if you share your definition of peace with me.
Maybe it is about deep personal beliefs? Let's see. Islam is the only religion in the modern world that accepts forced
conversions. Just a few months ago, two Western journalists were abducted in Gaza and held for ransom — also a uniquely
Islamic practice. While in captivity, they were given a simple choice: convert to Islam or die. They converted. Not a single
person of any authority in the entire Dar el-Islam has objected against that rape. And why would they? For 14 centuries
Mohammad's followers have spread Islam by the sword. For 14 centuries that worked for them. Why stop now?
I am no hero myself. I have to admit that if I were offered the same choice, I would, most probably, choose life and repeat
the shahadah after my tormentors. But how would those foreign sounds that are utterly meaningless to me, sounds that were
forced out of me by the gun at my temple or a knife at my throat, change the way I feel towards Islam and everything it
stands for? You can force someone to follow your rituals; you can even force someone to fight on your side. But can you force
a person to believe or not to believe something? No more than you can force an Islamic country into democracy, even if the
entire military might of the United States is at your disposal. No, dear Rosli, Islam has nothing to do with personal
beliefs.
Maybe, Islam is all about truth? I doubt that, too. You must know that Sharia expressly forbids non-Muslims to bear witness
against Muslims. This means that your religious courts, and, therefore, your religion, are not interested in truth but in the
Muslim domination over the "infidel".
Besides, the Koran itself contains, shall we say, inaccuracies. For example, in 2.135 we read:
They say: "Become Jews or Christians if ye would be guided (To salvation)."
In reality, unlike Christianity or Islam, Judaism does not declare salvation a monopoly of its followers. Jewish law
explicitly states that a gentile will go to heaven if he or she abstains from committing the seven mortal sins; a Jew, in
order to go to heaven, must follow 613 commandments, including the seven mandated for gentiles. That's why, when a person
approaches a rabbi asking for conversion, the rabbi's duty is to explain to the petitioner that the conversion will endanger
his chances for salvation. A person desiring to become a Jew must understand the responsibility and accept it willingly and
knowingly. This alone, as you can see, makes a forced conversion to Judaism even theoretically impossible.
Whether the quotation above was a deliberate lie or the result of ignorance of the man you mistook for a prophet, it
certainly prevents me from accepting the idea of divine inspiration behind the text.
Maybe, Islam is all about love? I don't think so either, because Islam is the only religion in the world whose followers
routinely practice "honor killings" of members of their own families. It is also the only religion in the world that does not
promise family members a reunion in the afterlife. Instead, it guarantees good Muslim men a free brothel for all eternity. It
does not spell out the reward for virtuous women, but does specify that dead Muslims will be segregated by gender in their
X-rated heaven. Wouldn't a loving husband prefer to spend eternity surrounded by his family rather than fornicating like a
priapic rabbit? He would, unless, of course, the loving husband in question is Muslim.
Maybe, Islam is about high moral standards? Not really. Even if you decide to disregard the overwhelming corruption reigning
in all Islamic countries, without a single exception, as a perversion of the true faith, you must know that wine, sexual
pleasures, and everything else Islam declares taboo in this life, is promised in abundance in the next one. But if something
is evil here, on our sinful earth, it must be even more evil in the pristine purity of heaven. Therefore, the wrongness of
the act is not the reason for the prohibitions. What is then? Here's my guess. If you forever prevent perfectly normal people
from having fun, from enjoying their lives, they will be easier to control, easier to turn into "martyrs". As you must know,
this works wonderfully well.
You must also know that in Muslim countries mullahs run prostitution rings by officiating temporary "marriages" between their
customers and the hookers in full compliance with Sharia. You must have heard about Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwas detailing
what a man should do to an infant he raped or to domestic animals subjected to a similar treatment.
Besides, even Mohammad himself didn't rely on the high moral standards of his followers. He is quoted as saying, "When a man
and a woman are in the same room together, the third person in that room is the devil." I do not guarantee the accuracy of
the quote (to the best of my knowledge, it is not found in either the Koran or Hadith), but I do know that it reflects the
customary Muslim attitude: a person who has an opportunity to do wrong is not expected to resist the temptation. Don't you
think that such an attitude alone makes the average Muslim enormously more immoral than the average Western teenager who
manages to spend a day of fun at the beach surrounded by half (or, rather, nine-tenth) naked females without ever being
tempted to rape anyone?
Maybe Islam is about charity? No, because all your charities support terrorism. After the devastating tsunami of 2004, Dar
el-Harb provided tens of times more aid to its mostly Muslim victims that Dar el-Islam did.
What is Islam about then? What has Mohammad brought into the world that was unknown before he declared himself a prophet?
Monotheism was discovered by the Jews millennia before Mohammad. Worshipping a mortal instead of God was practiced by
Christians centuries before Mohammad succeeded in turning himself into a bloodthirsty deity. What else is there?
Having read the Koran and the Hadith long before you suggested it to me, I must tell you that Muslim sacred texts are not the
best way for an outsider to acquire a practical understanding of your religion. If I wanted to help you understand Nazism or
Communism, I would never invite you to start with the Mein Kampf or, respectively, Das Kapital. Instead, I would ask you to
look at the Nazi atrocities during World War II or at the Communist atrocities wherever Communists came to power. And if,
having learned what Nazis and Communists do, you decided to learn how they justify their crimes, then reading their
propaganda materials might help you. Otherwise, you don't need to dive head first into the cesspool, no matter how curious
you are about the taste of its contents.
In order to understand Islam, one doesn't need to read the Koran. One only needs to take a careful, unprejudiced look at life
in Islamic countries. Or, even better, at the purest, least corrupted by Western influence implementation of Islam in modern
times. I think you would agree with me that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was exactly such an implementation of Islam.
Would you like to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Would you like to deprive the women in your family of all
opportunities to go to school, to pursue a career, to walk in the streets, to be able to see a doctor when they become ill?
Would you enjoy attending public executions? Would you like to take part in the stoning of an adulteress? Would you like to
be told what clothes to wear, what length beard? Would you like the government to deprive you of the last vestiges of your
privacy by insinuating itself into every aspect of your personal life?
As a Muslim, you probably would. But as a reasonable person you shouldn't expect people from other cultures to wish that upon
themselves.
My own initial acquaintance with Islam began not with its literature, but with the experience of living in a Muslim country.
I decided to read the Koran when I heard about the Islamic belief that God handed Moses not the Torah, but the Koran and that
later the evil Jews maliciously rewrote the holy book. I began reading the Koran out of curiosity. I wanted to see the other
vision of the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. I was curious if Muslims had an analogue of the Psalms or
the Song of Songs.
A few years before that, I was going through a period of fascination with Russian history and politics. Russia is the biggest
and, in terms of its natural resources, arguably the richest country in the world. I wanted to know how the Russians had
managed to turn themselves into one of the most miserable nations on the planet. I turned to Lenin for answers. I was hoping
to find in his writings a monumental vision of greatness and the clues of mistakes that had prevented that greatness from
happening. Instead, I found volumes of bickering with ideological opponents, minutiae of arguments that had ended decades
before I was born and could interest nobody today.
My experience with the Koran was similar to that. Instead of a different vision of the world I found fuming anger against
Jews and Christians and shallow syllogisms intending to prove that the Forefathers of the Jewish people were Muslims rather
than Jews. Allah in that book sounded like an insecure chieftain desperately trying to solidify his power over people who
were uncertain as to whether they should submit to his will — which is exactly the situation Mohammad was in when he undertok
the project of writing the Koran. The book is full of promises to his followers and threats to the rest of the human
race.
And here is the most important detail that sets the Koran aside from the Torah and the New Testament. Just as the Koran never
mentions Jerusalem, it doesn't contain a single reference to the Ten Commandments. All religions I am familiar with define
good and evil in terms of how the believer is expected to relate to other people, whether or not they belong to the same
religion. For Jews and Christians, the Ten Commandments provide the most fundamental guidance in distinguishing between good
and evil. What about the Muslims? Their only measure of good is the loyalty to their prophet.
Koran 3.110 states:
Ye are the best community that hath been raised up for mankind. Ye enjoin right conduct and forbid
indecency; and ye believe in Allah.
Since the right conduct is a lie and forbidding indecency is pure hypocrisy, what is left? What exactly makes
you "the best community that hath been raised up for mankind"? Has there ever been a Muslim Newton? Or a Muslim Shakespeare?
Or a Muslim Mozart? Or a Muslim Mother Teresa? A few Muslim names that you can name, like al-Khwarimi, could shine only in
the darkness of the Dark Ages. As soon as Dar el-Harb moved forward, Dar el-Islam found itself unable to produce even a
single person of any global significance, except for an enormous variety of Qaddafis, Saddams, bin Ladens, Arafats, and other
Hitlers of every imaginable magnitude.
One of the most respected Muslim leaders of modern times, the former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia, made a
remarkable admission in his farewell speech:
We need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defense. But because we are discouraged from
learning of science and mathematics as giving us no merit for the afterlife, today we have no capacity to produce our own
weapons for our defense. We have to buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies.
It is remarkable because it makes clear that one of the most respected Muslim leaders has no clue what motivates the people
of Dar el-Harb. He would never believe that our apocalyptic (and, due to the cowardice of our leaders, absolutely useless)
military might is nothing but a side effect of our insatiable curiosity about God's creation. He also inadvertently admitted
that his religion is nothing but a cult of death.
And this is why I keep urging everybody who will listen to read the Koran and the Hadith, so they can see for themselves that
Islam is not "just another religion" but an ideology of jihad, and jihad is not an internal strife of a Muslim for spiritual
perfection, but genocide that's been going on for 14 centuries in the name of a false prophet.
And, by the way, the Arabic world Islam does not mean peace; it means submission. Can you tell the difference between the
two?
Having said this all, I must add that I understand that your letter was sincere and inspired by good motives. Let me respond
with a sincere suggestion. Try reading the Torah. Don't be afraid; it won't make you a Jew, just as listening to Bach won't
make you a composer. But it might provide you with something you so desperately need: an alternative view of the
universe.
May you find good guidance wherever you seek it.
In The Matter of Palestine
By Yashiko Sagamori
If you are so sure that ' Palestine , the country, goes back through most
of recorded history,' I expect you to be able to answer a few basic
questions about that country of Palestine :
1.? When was it founded and by whom?
2.? What were its borders?
3.? What was its capital?
4.? What were its major cities?
5.? What constituted the basis of its economy?
6.? What was its form of government?
7.? Can you name at least one Palestinian leader before Arafat?
8.? Was Palestine ever recognized by a country whose existence, at that time
or now, leaves no room for interpretation?
9.? What was the language of the country of Palestine ?
10. What was the prevalent religion of the country of Palestine ?
11. What was the name of its currency? Choose any date in history and tell
what was the approximate exchange rate of the Palestinian monetary unit
against the US dollar, German mark, GB pound, Japanese yen, or Chinese yuan
on that date.
12. And, finally, since there is no such country today, what caused its
demise and when did it occur?
You are lamenting the 'low sinking' of a 'once proud' nation.
Please tell me, when exactly was that 'nation' proud and what was it so
proud of?
And here is the least sarcastic question of all: If the people you
mistakenly call 'Palestinians' are anything but generic Arabs collected from
all over -- or thrown out of -- the Arab world, if they really have a
genuine ethnic identity that gives them right for self-determination, why
did they never try to become independent until Arabs suffered their
devastating defeat in the Six Day War?
I hope you avoid the temptation to trace the modern day 'Palestinians' to
the Biblical Philistines: substituting etymology for history won't work
here.
The truth should be obvious to everyone who wants to know it. Arab countries
have never abandoned the dream of destroying Israel ; they still cherish it
today.
Having time and again failed to achieve their evil goal with military means,
they decided to fight Israel by proxy. For that purpose, they created a
terrorist organization, cynically called it 'the Palestinian people' and
installed it in Gaza , Judea, and Samaria . How else can you explain the
refusal by Jordan and Egypt to unconditionally accept back the 'West
Bank' and Gaza , respectively?
The fact is, Arabs populating Gaza , Judea, and Samaria have much less
claim to nationhood than that Indian tribe that successfully emerged in
Connecticut with the purpose of starting a tax-exempt casino: at least that
tribe had a constructive goal that motivated them.
The so-called 'Palestinians' have only one motivation: the destruction of
Israel , and in my book that is not sufficient to consider them a nation' --
or anything else except what they really are: a terrorist organization that
will one day be dismantled. In fact, there is only one way to achieve peace
in the Middle East .
Arab countries must acknowledge and accept their defeat in their war
against Israel and, as the losing side should, pay Israel reparations
for the more than 50 years of devastation they have visited on it.
The most appropriate form of such reparations would be the removal of their
terrorist organization from the land of Israel and accepting Israel 's
ancient sovereignty over Gaza , Judea, and Samaria . That will mark the
end of the Palestinian people. What are you saying again was its
beginning?
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