Back to Basics

There’s a thin line between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism. That’s true of Muslims and the left, but it’s also true specifically of the Jewish left, whose hatred for Israel manifests itself in a general contempt for Jewish religion, culture and tradition.

Gilbert in the West Bank

Take the Jewbags case of Danielle Gilbert, a staffer for Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who had been appointed the DNC’s Jewish outreach liaison. In a social media mishap, Gilbert posed along with her friends in a photo that she captioned “JEWBAGS” and that a friend of hers captioned as “Jew cash money team.” This is the sort of incident that the hip crowd that thinks Heeb is a great name for a magazine and Jewcan Sam is hilarious will laugh off. But it’s hardly the most offensive thing about Gilbert from a Jewish perspective. It’s just a symptom of the problem.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has long been associated with J-Street, the Anti-Israel group, which has repeatedly worked to undermine Israel’s fight against terrorism through a campaign of deception. When a delegation from J Street arrived at Schultz’s office last year, they were received by Danielle Gilbert who posed with them for a photo. That wasn’t the limit of Gilbert’s involvement with J Street.

Danielle Gilbert’s twitter feed suggests that she attended the J Street conference and she retweeted a call from the Anti-Israel group to freeze “settlements”. Gilbert’s own Anti-Israel background isn’t casual. She attended the London School of Economics and Political Science and while there was part of the  Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism.

Even before going to Yale, Gilbert had volunteered at Givat Haviva, a leftist group dedicated to Muslim pro-terrorist activism. Givat Haviva had a presence at the J-Street conference and has its roots in Kibbutz Artzi, which was far enough to the left that it identified closely with the Soviet Union and its leader eulogized Stalin who had engaged in the mass murder of Jews. The roots of Givat Haviva lie with Artzi’s Arab Department whose goal was a one state solution.

Ilan Pappe founded and ran the Academic Institute for Peace in Givat Haviva. Pappe is a former member of Hadash, the Arab-Israeli Communist party, who supports the destruction of Israel via a One State Solution. An article on the Givat Haviva website features a photo of Danielle Gilbert with one of her friends, who writes about his support for the One State Solution.

Through Givat Haviva, Gilbert conducted interviews with the residents of the Muslim Bartaa village which straddles the Green Line and has become a cause celebre for the Anti-Israel left. Since then she has been a Jeremiah Fellow at Jews United for Justice, another left-wing group, which also participated in the J Street conference, and whose board members intersect with a number of Anti-Israel groups.

Gilbert with J Street members

In 2008, Gilbert wrote, “We cannot see Mumbai’s events as anything less than the gruesome epitome of systematic terror. However, such a tragedy rightly makes us question our unequal treatment of minority cultures within larger communities,” shifting easily to calling the brutal murder of the Holtzberg family and countless Indians by Muslims a “tragedy” that serves to call attention to Muslim suffering.

At Jerusalem Post, “The Anti-Semitic Disease“:

After an extended standoff, Mohamed Merah, the 24-year-old French-Algerian terrorist who murdered three Jewish children and a teacher in front of their school in Toulouse, is dead. Unfortunately, that inexplicable disease called anti-Semitism is very much alive.

The deadliest form of anti-Semitism today is the sort that inspired Merah, who, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), was indoctrinated in jihadi camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan and had ties to Fursan al-Izza (Knights of Glory), the French branch of al- Qaida.

Only the warped, anti-Semitic mind of a member of al- Qaida could justify the murder of Jews living in France, including a three-year-old child, to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children – as Merah did.

Unfortunately, however, Merah was not the only one to link the massacre in Toulouse with Israel’s war on terror in the Gaza Strip. European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton also claimed that the murder of French Jews in Toulouse was somehow connected to “what is happening in Gaza.” She later repudiated her remark.

“When we think of what happened in Toulouse today.

When we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and Sderot and in different parts of the world – we remember young people and children who lose their lives,” she said.

Though it would be an exaggeration to call Ashton’s remarks, made in Brussels before a crowd of “Palestinian refugee representatives,” blatantly anti-Semitic, her failure to draw distinctions – a crucial fault shared by many on the progressive Left – helps to set the stage for men such as Merah to be seen not as cold-blooded murderers motivated by irrational anti-Semitism, but as militants engaged in warfare.

Exactly.

Continue reading at the link.

And see Blazing Cat Fur, “Teacher Suspended: Asks Class To Remember ‘Victim’ Mohammed Merah.” That’s just one example.

by BurtPrelutsky

Recently, I had an exchange with my friend Alan Caruba, a fellow Jew who had written a piece in which he pointed out that in hard economic times anti-Semites have a greater tendency to crawl out from under their favorite rocks.

After acknowledging that he was right, I went on to state that as an American Jew, I was frankly surprised that there wasn’t more hatred of Jews than there is. And for once, I was being totally serious. If I weren’t Jewish, I could see how I, as a conservative, could be very antagonistic towards Jews. I mean, not being a total barbarian, I would try to be fair; I would attempt to balance things off by listing all of the Jewish contributions to medicine and science, literature and music, Hollywood and Broadway. I would think how much more unpleasant modern life would be without the efforts of Jonas Salk, George Gershwin, Albert Einstein, Richard Rodgers, Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Jerome Kern, Billy Wilder, Carl Sagan and Milton Friedman. And that’s just the tiny tip of a huge iceberg.

But the fact remains that Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Noam Chomsky and Saul Alinsky, also form a small portion of a fairly large toxic dump. It’s also true that the reason that people equate Jews with shady financial practices isn’t entirely due to the libelous charges planted in The Protocols of Zion, but to high-profile scoundrels named George Soros, Bernie Madoff, Michael Milken, Joshua Gould and Bernie Cornfeld. It doesn’t help that Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs could just as easily be the names of two kosher delis.

Speaking of which, why is it that it’s only beloved Jews who ever got around to changing their names? Why was it always the likes of Danny Kaye (nee David Kaminsky), Jack Benny (Benjamin Kubelsky), Mel Brooks (Mel Kaminsky), Woody Allen (Allen Konigsberg), George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum), Kirk Douglas (Issur Danielovitch), John Garfield (Jacob Julius Garfinkle), Eddie G. Robinson (Emanuel Goldenberg), Tony Curtis (Bernie Schwartz), Shelley Winters (Shirley Schrift), Lauren Bacall (Betty Joan Perske), Judy Holliday (Judith Tuvim) and Irving Berlin (Israel Isidore Baline), and never such national disasters as Henry Waxman, Michael Bloomberg, Barney Frank, Charles Schumer and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz?

Speaking of which, as a conservative, it pains me to have to acknowledge that while there are 31 members in the House and another 13 in the Senate who are Jewish, only one, Eric Cantor, is a Republican. When you realize that Jews represent less than three percent of the American population, the fact that they represent 13% of the Senate and nearly nine percent of the House, you get some idea of what a difference these people would make if only they used their power for good!

Fortunately, in spite of 80% of American Jews being so besotted with the Left that they would vote for Daffy Duck so long as he was running as a Democrat, we are not entirely insane and, with fewer and fewer exceptions, such as Jon Stewart (formerly Jonathan Leibowitz), we no longer feel we have to change our names in order to advance our careers.

Another devastating video, via Anne Bayefsky, at Big Peace, “The UN’s Anti-Semitism Agenda on Display in ‘Durban III’“:

PREVIOUSLY: “United Nations Bias Against Israel.”

Anti-Semitism has a very long history.

In June, Dr. Rivka Shpak Lissak, a Jewish historian, posted a section of her forthcoming book, noting that “The Roman Empire committed a genocide of the Jewish people under its occupation (63 BCE – 324 CE) of the land of Israel. From about 3,000,000 Jews in the first century CE (Common Era), about 200,000 survived until the 7th century, most of them killed or enslaved.”

How does this differ from the Arab agenda that has existed since the day that the modern state of Israel was resurrected and was immediately attacked by five Arab nations in 1948? Islam, from its beginning in 632 A.D. has always had the goal of killing or enslaving every Jew on planet Earth.

Islam’s exponents in Hamas and Hezbollah have always made it clear that the purpose of their existence is the destruction of Israel and both are instruments of Iran’s expressed intention to “wipe Israel from the map.”

The United Nations, despite its role in the recognition of Israel, is the epicenter of modern anti-Semitism and a facilitator of Jew-hatred.

It has provided a shameless platform for every virulent call for the destruction of Israel and the Jews. If for no other reason, the UN has no right to exist. The United States should not be a participant or party to this obscenity.

The UN’s role in the furtherance of global anti-Semitism is so manifest it is impossible to ignore. Its sponsorship of the Durban conferences, allegedly to oppose racism, has fostered the most egregious anti-Semitism. In September 2009, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the conference and repeated every tired lie about Judaism and Jews. Out of 192 UN members, only eleven got up and left. The United States and Israel had chosen not to attend.

In September 2010 Ahmadinejad used his UN invitation to New York to claim that that “segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the (9/11) attack” on behalf of “the Zionist regime”; only seven nations including the U.S. departed the General Assembly.

Simply not attending these events without a strong, vocal denunciation is a weak response.

The “tilt” of the Obama administration against Israel has only encouraged Arab states. In the two and a half years Obama has been in office, he has expressed support for a mosque within sight of Ground Zero, has openly insulted the Israeli Prime Minister on his first trip to Washington, and backed a UN investigation into the Turkish flotilla to Gaza, among other overt acts.

Most recently, the UN leadership endorsed the Iranian-sponsored “World Without Terrorism” conference on June 25-26. It was a confab attended by some of the leading actors when it comes to terrorism including Sudan and Pakistan, both of which were hosts to the late Osama bin Laden. By far the leading facilitator for terrorism is, of course, Iran. This Alice-in-Wonderland approach to the truth is typical of Arab and Persian Islamic deception and incitement.

In June, the UN General Assembly elected Iran as one of its vice presidents and Qatar as its president.

It’s easy to figure out why the various dictatorships in the Middle East have made a scapegoat of Israel. It allows the various imams and sheiks to keep their oppressed masses focused on a common enemy, lest they awaken and realize that it’s not the Jews who keep the men poor and powerless and keep the women ignorant and oppressed.

Trying to figure out why government leaders, universities and individuals, in so-called civilized nations choose to side with Arabs and Muslims, who not only out-number Israel’s Jewish population 300,000-1, but who represent the antithesis of everything Americans and Europeans allegedly hold dear is the real mystery.

A visitor from another planet would see on one side a people, Israelis, who are educated and accomplished, who believe in freedom of speech, religion and assembly, who defend a free press and who subscribe to the full equality of the sexes.

On the other side, he would see people who, in the 21st century, think, live and behave no differently than their ancestors did 1300 years ago. They stone to death adulterers, they behead their enemies, they perform female mutilations as part of their religion, they make martyrs of those who suicide-bomb school buses and pizza parlors, they rain missiles down on civilians and, proving that they nevertheless have a droll sense of humor, they refer to their religion as one of peace.

If you asked the alien which group a free and democratic people would favor, he would assume it was a trick question. When told that the majority of people in the western world favored the latter group, he would assume it was a trick answer.

His next order of business would be to get back to his space ship and get away from these lunatics as fast as he could.

The question as to why America’s leaders, academicians and young people, choose to hate Israelis, why they continue to believe the worst of them even when the photos and news stories purporting to show their villainy are proven to be clumsy attempts at propaganda, can only be explained by a deep-rooted anti-Semitism.

When Americans, who have experienced not only 9/11, but scores of other brutalities at the hands of Israel’s enemies over the past 30 years, continue siding with those same enemies, it’s impossible to explain except as rampant anti-Semitism.

When a nation that is rooted in Judeo-Christian values, whose Constitution and Declaration of Independence were based on those values, sides with those who despise liberty and freedom, the contradiction cannot be explained except as an anti-Semitism that is bred in the bone. And isn’t it odd that the very same people who go around insisting that “separation of church and state” actually exists in the Constitution have no problem at all defending Muslim theocracies?

No matter how many trains are blown up in Spain, no matter how many riots and murders are committed in France or England, Russia, Germany or Holland, the anti-Semites of Europe inevitably excuse the actual perpetrators, while holding the Jews accountable.

If not enough that 15 million Americans suffer unemployment and another seven million cannot find full time jobs—your U.S. Congress led by Senator Harry Reid, re-elected by the most unemployed per capita population of all 50 states, introduced the Dream Act once again after it suffered defeat every year since 2000. If 41.8 million Americans subsisting on food stamps doesn’t send a message to Harry Reid, I cannot for the life of me, understand how an intellectual imbecile like Reid enjoyed re-election from a brain-dead Nevada electorate. Same goes for the California ‘vacant brains’ that voted Nancy Pelosi back into office!

Both states’ congressional members fail miserably at serving their own citizens: California protects over 4.5 million illegal aliens while drowning in $25 billion in debts. Nevada suffers incredible destruction of their schools, hospitals and work force via hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.

After offering you director Roy Beck’s two educational five and 10 minute videos last week, I will offer them again at the end of this column. I hope you send those two videos out to every American across the Internet to educate them as to what we face as we allow our country to be invaded by legal and illegal immigration. Out of the projected 100 million people added to this country within 25 years, a full 70 million will be third world immigrants with third world cultures, educational levels equal to Haiti’s and cultural practices totally incompatible with our first world countries. We create an intractable ‘poverty class’ that will undermine our citizens, our children, our language and our culture. It’s already in full swing in all our immigrant-laden cities where welfare gives them everything off our backs: annual costs run $346 billion. (Source: http://www.thesocialcontract.com with Edwin Rubenstein Report)

In the second video, you will see where Beck shows our immigration-driven population more than triple by the end of the century as we head toward a billion persons from a line that grows by 1 billion every 13 years around the world. I cannot for the life of me understand how or why Congress or Americans think adding another 300 to 600 million more people to this country will make everything better, i.e., gridlock, air pollution, crowding, gas prices, food prices, species extinction, quality of life, climate destabilization and much more on multiple levels.

Do we enjoy national suicide of our culture, language and way of life? Answer: we must because that’s what we’re doing!

I talked to Roy Beck as to what we face:

“The DREAM ACT amnesty would be another nightmare for beleaguered and unemployed American workers,” said Beck. “Yet, so many national religious, media and political leaders are embarrassing themselves today, crying out for the Lame Duck Congress to pass the DREAM Act amnesty.

“While 22 million Americans who want a full-time job cannot find one, pro-amnesty cheerleaders are making a last-ditch effort to increase competition for jobs by giving millions of work permits to illegal aliens through the DREAM Act.

Once, years ago, I was in a Midwestern State talking with a farmer. I raised the question of how much pesticide he used on his crop to ward off or kill insect predators or, in the case of weeds, how much herbicide.

“Look, my family and I eat a part of what I grow,” he said. “Do you think I am going to put anything on the crop that would endanger them?” Good answer.

I thought about that encounter while reading a really extraordinary book by an organic crop inspector that just blows the whole scam about organic foods wide open. “Is It Organic?” is a 599-page book by Mischa Popoff that comes with a wonderful history of farming while revealing why the public is being conned into believing that organic foods are safer and better for them when all they are is more expensive.

The book is available from http://www.isitorganic.ca/. If you’re a consumer interested in environmentalism, the history and politics of organic foods, or you are involved in agriculture the price is worth it. If you like plain talk and honest outrage, every fact-filled page will prove far more educational than most of the literature about environmentalism, energy, socialism, and agriculture than you will find anywhere.

“I believed in the principle of producing top-quality food and letting the market decide if it was worth more. Still do in fact,” writes Popoff. “But I learned the organic industry abandoned living up to that principle long ago.”

The secret this multi-billion dollar industry doesn’t want anyone to know is that “there is no field testing on certified organic farms to ensure synthetic fertilizers and toxic chemicals are not being used and to ensure harmful pathogens from animal waste are safely eliminated. The excuse I was given is that field testing is too expensive; something I later learned is patently false.”

“Testing in the field goes straight to the heart of what organic farming always meant throughout its vibrant history, until it was ruined by political activists. You’ll hear talk of end-product testing, but it’s a BIG waste of time. Synthetic chemicals dissipate if you wait long enough.”

“Honest organic farmers want field testing and so do consumers; so why is it rejected in this multi-billion dollar industry at the same time as it’s talked about as if it was the routine?”

Popoff explains that, “Organic food sold from one end of this continent to the other, whether grown locally or overseas, becomes ‘certified’ based on paperwork refereed by activist private-sector bureaucrats who make money hand over fist by giving their stamp of approval.”

Like global warming, organic food is a scam and it is run by an “unscientific, undemocratic, radical socialist movement” that eclipses the organic farmer “and bilks consumers in order to underwrite a political revolution that is about to impact your ability to feed your family.”

Food Pornography

Popoff calls it “food pornography”, an industry that calls itself organic, “but which is really just pure marketing from start to finish, promising everything and delivering nothing.”

“The genius of claiming that private companies test organic food,” says Popoff, “before they accept it as truly organic and put their corporate brand on it lies in the fact that there’s no possible way to know if it’s true.”

This is a very refreshing book to read on many levels and it’s worth knowing the author did not grow up in some suburban enclave and lived a privileged life.

I spent yesterday evening in the company of a man whose grandfather spent much of the Holocaust dressed in a Nazi uniform. The difference between him and George Soros, is that he used that uniform as a disguise in order to find Jewish refugees and lead them to shelter. And that difference is a profound one. It is the difference between a perpetrator and a rescuer. Between a collaborator and a hero.

Soros did not wear a Nazi uniform, but he might as well have, because he aided in the persecution of the Jews of Europe, without compassion, without guilt and without regret. Various excuses have been made for his actions, and none of them hold the least bit of water.

Yes Soros was only a teenager at the time. So was my father, who nevertheless escaped to join the partisans, rather than accompanying a Nazi officer in his search for Jewish property he could loot. He had no choice? He certainly had a choice. Even in the worst of times, people still can and do make moral choices. And the choice for everyone, for Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Frenchmen and so on down the line– was to collaborate with evil, or to do the right thing.

George Soros made the wrong choice then. As he has made the wrong choice over and over again. And he has never regretted any of them. And the one thing that clearly emerges from that, is that he has no understanding that evil is wrong. That participating in the persecution and murder of Jews is wrong. He didn’t know it back then, while the Holocaust was going on. He doesn’t know it today, when he helps set up and fund organizations like J Street, whose sole purpose is to help the Muslim terrorists who are murdering Jews today.

The liberal media which is busy defending Soros as a victim of the Holocaust and a survivor should find the bare decency to remain silent for once. To call Soros a Holocaust survivor is an obscenity. Soros was not victimized by the Holocaust. He was never targeted by it. He was on the other side of the line. The side that was pulling the trigger, running the gas chambers and sorting the gold teeth. Soros was not a victim, he was a perpetrator. Yes, he was only a teenager, but we do jail teenagers as accomplices to crimes much milder than that of collaborating in genocide.

Liberal using charges of Anti-Semitism to silence critics of Soros is one of the most profoundly cynical exercises imaginable, by people who routinely mock the idea that their bias again Israel is in any way motivated by Anti-Semitism. It is all the more cynical, because Soros has described himself as growing up in a “Jewish, Anti-Semitic home” and suggested that Jewish behavior causes Anti-Semitism. Defending criticism of a billionaire Anti-Semite as Anti-Semitism is thoroughly surreal. It’s an inversion of the meaning of the word that punches a hole through reason and all the way over into the other side.