Ed. note: The writer worked as a journalist throughout Palestine-Israel for decades.
The unspoken war of terror on the Israelis
No one who has been in a war would like to recite the experiences. And who would want to hear? That might explain why so many Iraq vets are now destitute. But, back to the Israelis…
Israel’s purpose is to be the saviour of the Jews. It has attracted the support of wealthy and powerful Jews everywhere. And we all currently bear witness to the brutality waged on the Palestinians.
But there is also a wider war going on: To maintain the Jewish nation, and that is something larger than the Israeli state. Jews in the Diaspora help Israel, and Israelis return the help for the Jews outside of Israel.
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* 9 October 2008
Short Cuts
Adam Shatz
If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. ‘The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,’ the sleeve announces. ‘It’s our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed vote in November.’ The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls.
The Clarion Fund is a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure groups. It has an office, or at least an address, in Manhattan at Grace Corporate Park Executive Suites, which rents out ‘virtual office identity packages’ for $75 a month. Its website, clarionfund.org, provides neither a list of staff nor a board of directors, and the group still hasn’t disclosed where it gets its money, as required by the IRS. Who paid to make ‘Obsession’ isn’t clear – it cost $400,000. According to Rabbi Raphael Shore, the film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger (whatever it is) hasn’t stopped Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work.
The 60-minute film was first released in 2006 and shown during the mid-term elections on Fox News. Since then it has received top billing at ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness’ week on American campuses, at Christian-Zionist conferences and at events organised by Republican politicians in Florida. It has found a powerful backer in the real estate magnate Sheldon Adelson, who describes himself as ‘the world’s richest Jew’. The Endowment for Middle East Truth, a neoconservative think tank in Washington DC which recently hosted a series of seminars named after Adelson and his wife, arranged distribution of ‘Obsession’, at a cost in the tens of millions.
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Graffiti and Israel
By Marc Sapir
Thursday October 02, 2008
Riya Bhattachargjee’s Sept. 25 article “Anti-Israel Graffiti Found Near Campus” is poor journalism. The title is fine, but the article leads with an erroneous use of the term “anti-Semitism,” which then serves as a justification for the outrage of Birgeneau and various Zionist student organizations. The UC chancellor seems to know that the graffiti was “hurtful to…members of the Jewish community.” That’s a half truth (many will agree with him of course) because many Jews, myself included, find nothing hurtful in this act aimed at countering deceptive Zionist propaganda.
In July, I spent 17 days inside Israel-Palestine. If you visit both sides of the green line extensively, there’s no way around the fact that Zionism has established a state that is fundamentally racist and that Israel today is a segregated and segregationist society, every bit as vicious as the Deep South before 1960. Israel intends to stay that way. Though many Israelis profess to differ, most do absolutely nothing about it. That there are some examples of incorporation of Palestinians into Israeli Jewish society and social life, such as the use of the soccer star Sowan Abbas, should not be surprising. I do not need to remind fellow Jews that the Nazi’s had their model Jews—eg the model Jewish community in Aushwitz Birkenau, symphony orchestras in most death camps and the people portrayed in the movie the Counterfeiters—who they used to advantage either as a propaganda screen to conceal what was going on or for other purposes.
“Israel is very progressive when it comes to things like gay rights, women and the environment…,” said Pini Altman of Blue StarPR the public relations firm that is promoting Israel’s positive image. This too is interesting to me because it is true that Israel is progressive on gay rights and women’s rights (we met with an ethnically integrated LGBT group who told us it is much more dangerous to be a Palestinian Arab in Israel than it is to be gay). However, much of the blather about the environment has been used as a cover to drive Palestinians from their own lands (both within the 1948 borders and in the 1967 conquered-occupied areas) under a pretense of reforestation and reclamation. After a while the seized land is usually given over to settlement cities and Israeli farmers and business concerns, by the thousands and thousands of acres.
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Met chief Blair quits amid discord with Boris Johnson
25 minutes ago
LONDON (AFP) - Britain's top policeman announced his resignation Thursday after long-running criticism over racism and a mistaken shooting and open discord with London's new mayor.
Metropolitan Police chief Ian Blair, who took office shortly before suicide bombings in London in July 2005, said he had lost the backing of the London mayor Boris Johnson, who took office in May.
"I have today offered my resignation as commissioner to the Home Secretary which she has reluctantly but graciously accepted," he told a hastily arranged press conference, adding that he would stand down on December 1.
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We stole their right to education
ELANA MARYLES SZTOKMAN , THE JERUSALEM POST
There are moments when I find myself truly ashamed to be part of Israeli society. I had a moment like that recently as I stood outside the Supreme Court with women from Ahoti, a Sephardi feminist organization, waiting for a ruling on the religious girls' school in Emanuel where racism is so entrenched that parents will do all it takes to keep antiquated Jim Crow-like separations in place.
What is happening in the Beit Ya'acov school is nothing less than the formalization of racism. Here the school implements a policy in which Sephardi girls are not allowed to be in a class with Ashkenazi or hassidic girls, and they have different teachers, different classes and even different recess times and a fence between their yards just to ensure that the two groups do not mingle during the breaks.
It's not just Emanuel, but in other religious girls' schools around the country, such as Elad, where parents protested to ensure that a Sephardi girl would not be allowed in to the class. Protested! There have been reports from around the country of girls being rejected or ejected from schools because of the color of their skin or their last name. And even though the High Court ruled last week that the apartheid has to end, the school and parents are refusing to comply, thus rejecting civil as well as moral obligations. This is not the post-Civil War South, but Israel of 2008, where I would have expected more people to be outraged by this blatant racism.
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September 24, 2008
In an interview with CNN's Larry King airing tonight, Bill Clinton offered a slightly unusual reason for postponing his campaigning for Obama: The Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which he's not known to observe.
"When [the Clinton Global Initiative] is over, and after the Jewish holidays, which follow close on it, I intend to go to Florida, to Ohio, to northeast Pennsylvania, and to Nevada at a minimum," he said. "I may do events in Arkansas depending on what the Democratic Party does down there. And I've agreed to do some fundraising for them in California and New York."
"Are you kind of feeling Jewish that you're waiting until after the Jewish holidays?" King asked, according to a CNN transcript.
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Added: September 18, 2008
Racism, Propaganda, and The Palestinian Right to Return
| Freedom Rider: Boycott Israel | | | |
| Wednesday, 17 September 2008 | |
To call attention to Israel's apartheid policies is to ask for immediate labeling as an "anti-Semite." Just ask former president Jimmy Carter. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performer Abdur-Rahim Jackson was separated from the troupe and made to dance for Israeli airport security - twice - to prove he wasn't a danger to the Jewish State, based on his name. "Israel's dismal human rights record has created numerous calls for economic boycotts of that nation," and cultural boycotts, as well. "The Israelis at the airport acted like Jim Crow segregationists of old, never forsaking an opportunity to publicly humiliate black people." Israel acts like the U.S. "did in its own apartheid era." Freedom Rider: Boycott Israelby BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley "The Israelis at the airport acted like Jim Crow segregationists of old." When Zionism is legitimately called racist, the howls of protest are predictable and immediate. Critics of Israel are vilified by charges of anti-Semitism and disparaged or ignored by the press. The American media include criticism of Israel among the many subjects that are taken off the table and disappeared from the list of permitted subjects of discourse. Yet there are times when Israel's racism becomes obvious in a way that cannot be ignored. Recently the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performed in Israel as part of an international tour. When one of the dancers, Abdur-Rahim Jackson, went through security at Jerusalem's Ben Gurion airport he was taken aside by Israeli security where he was asked to dance, not once but twice. "To be greeted like this because of my name, it took me back a little bit," said Mr. Jackson. Jackson attempted to explain that he was a dancer when the security officer told him to perform. "I stood up. I asked what type of dance? He said, ‘Just do anything.' I just moved around." Jackson was interrogated a second time and was again asked to dance. |
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberleymparent7777+Macaca
GOP Rally Reaches Out To Minorities
By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 17, 2008; B01
Northern Virginia Republicans, realizing they need to improve their appeal among the region's large ethnic population, will stage a "unity" rally Saturday that they say will draw 1,000 people.
Organizers said the annual rally, which has grown in recent years, is particularly significant this year because ethnic minorities represent an increasingly powerful voting bloc that will help decide which presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain, wins the state Nov. 4.
***Hyland said he expects as many as 1,000 supporters to turn out for the event at Edison High School, where former senator George Allen and Reps. Tom Davis and Frank R. Wolf are expected to speak. Former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III is planning to attend, as is a widely known surrogate from McCain's campaign, organizers said.
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Intolerance thrives in Palin's Pacific Northwest
Catherine McNicol Stock is chair of the history department at Connecticut College and author of "Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain"
Despite her efforts to portray herself as an average, small-town, "folksy" American, Sarah Palin's political views - ardently pro-gun, pro-censorship, antichoice and antigay - make John McCain's conservative credentials pale in comparison. What few observers have said, however, is these beliefs are not just extreme - they are radical, and even bear a comparison with some of the most notorious "rural radicals" of our time.
It has been years since groups such as the Montana Militia, the Posse Comitatus and the Sagebrush Rebels, and individuals such as Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski have made us wonder why so many "angry white men" populated our rural regions. Many of us have forgotten the threat once posed by domestic terrorists and instead have turned our attention to foreign terrorists. But we should never forget that in the late 20th century, ultra-Christian, antistatist and white-supremacist groups flourished in the states of the Pacific Northwest - called by many the "Great White Northwest" - the very region that Sarah Palin and her family call home.
Demographics most basically define this geographic region. In the six states that make up the Pacific Northwest - Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Alaska - only six counties are more than 5 percent African American. Not by coincidence, each of these counties is also near an important military installation with many African American men and women. Even so, barely more than 3,000 blacks lived in all of Idaho in 2000.
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A Chicago teacher is under fire for singling out the only Muslim student in her class while talking about the Middle East.
Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:45:01 GMT
Shulamit Aloni
Former Israeli education minister Shulamit Aloni slams mistreatment of the Palestinians by Tel Aviv, accusing it of ethnocracy and racism.
The former education minister, who also served as minister of communication and minister of science and the arts, in her new book, lamented what she called a retrogression of democracy from Israel's primitive definition at the time of its formation.
She described the 1992 legislation of the so-called law of "Human Dignity and Liberty", which calls Israel a Jewish, democratic regime, in direct contradiction to the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948.
In her book published this week, Aloni condemns the domination of the apartheid system in the West Bank, the regime's constant refusal to a peace deal for decades and Israelis atrocities in the Palestinian territories.
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| Freedom Rider: Biden = Palin |  |  |  |
| Wednesday, 10 September 2008 | |
Joe "Foot-In-Mouth" Biden and Sarah "Abstinence-Only" Palin are perfect matches for the Twin Business Party campaigns for top executive power. Biden gruffly rejects the "liberal" label by reminding reporters he is from a former slave state. Palin appeals to "white America's reptilian brain." The schlock level at both camps gets thicker by the day. Barack Obama morphs politically into his 72-year-old opposite number, joining hands with John McCain as a new convert to the Iraq "surge" that has "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." Freedom Rider by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley "Biden advocated invading Iraq as early as 1998." Criticizing Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. The governor of Alaska is under investigation for using her office in an attempt to fire her former brother-in-law. This advocate of abstinence-only sex education has a pregnant teenage daughter. The self-proclaimed fiscal conservative left the small city of Wasilla, population 5,500, $20 million in debt after she left the mayoralty there. Palin's shortcomings are many, but are actually no worse than those of Joseph Biden, Barack Obama's running mate. Biden seems to have all the right credentials to run for Vice President. He has been a United States senator for more than 30 years and is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The political establishment and corporate media gave him unanimous approval, but a closer look reveals that Biden is no better than his Republican rival. |
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret KimberleyLast Updated: 11:28AM BST 10 Sep 2008
Shahar Zubari, 22, who won a bronze medal in windsurfing, showed little Olympic spirit towards his hosts in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth
When asked to describe the Chinese in one word he chose "shits".
"They are difficult," he said.
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UN Rights Chief Knocks West for Threatening Walk-Out of ‘Durban II Racism’ Conference, Wins Praise from Islamic States
NEW YORK, USA, September 9, 2008/African Press Organization (APO)/ — After new UN rights chief Navanethem Pillay addressed the 47-nation Human Rights Council for the first time today, independent human rights organization UN Watch praised her “inspiring life example as an anti-apartheid advocate,” yet expressed deep concern over her remarks praising the UN’s preparations for a follow-up to the troubled 2001 Durban world conference on racism. Her defense of the Durban process was immediately hailed in the plenary by Pakistan on behalf of the Islamic states, Egypt for the African bloc, Cuba for the Non-Aligned, Russia and South Africa.
Without mentioning their names, Pillay criticized the current absence in the UN deliberations of Canada, the U.S. and Israel, as well as similar threats to walk out of the already controversial April 2009 conference made by the French, U.K. and Dutch governments.
“I do not believe that ‘all or nothing’ is the right approach to affirm one’s principles or to win an argument,” said Pillay. “Should differences be allowed to become pretexts for inaction, the hopes and aspirations of the many victims of intolerance would be dashed irreparably. For these reasons, I urge those governments that have expressed an intention not to participate to reconsider their position,” she said.
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JERUSALEM - A member of the renowned Alvin Ailey dance troupe says he was made to dance for Israeli airport security officers to convince them of his identity.
Abdur-Rahim Jackson told the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot that he was pulled aside when the black American ensemble arrived and asked to dance to prove he was a performer.
He told the paper he demonstrated a few dance steps and was released after another round of questioning.
An Israeli spokesman for the dance company said Tuesday that Jackson apparently got special attention because of his Muslim first name.
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Reporters Notebook: Bloody Marys flow for California delegates
California delegates to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul traveled to the Lafayette Club on the windy and rainy shores of Lake Minnetonka Tuesday for Bloody Marys and salmon and eggs. The Morongo Band of Mission Indians picked up the tab - even though its chair Robert Martin may end up voting for Barack Obama. Martin is a longtime Republican who says he tired of the party’s failure to reach out to minorities. He was a Clinton delegate to the Democratic Convention and now finds himself undecided. Martin says the tribe - which has lots of business in Sacramento - likes to remain friendly with both parties.
The Lafayette Club is one of the oldest country clubs in Minnesota - started in 1899. The golf course looked great but I neglected to bring my sticks.
Back to the brunch, which included an elephant made out of ice. Republican Pollster and author of “Words That Matter” Frank Luntz was the featured speaker. He openly spoke of the “BRADLEY EFFECT.” That refers to the 1982 California gubernatorial election when then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley was leading in the polls against George Deukmejian. Bradley lost the race. Analysts believe voters lied when they said they’d vote for Bradley, when in fact they were unwilling to vote for a black man. Luntz predicted the same thing would happen with Barack Obama. He told California delegates not to get discouraged if John McCain is trailing in the polls, because the Bradley effect will make up for some of that.
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New Building, Same Old Controversy for Brooklyn Arabic School
by Mary Frost (mfrost@brooklyneagle.net), published online 09-03-2008
DOE Disputes Charges by Group Trying To Bring Back Ex-Principal
By Mary Frost
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
FORT GREENE — To say that the Arabic-themed Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), a dual-language grade 6-12 public school in Brooklyn, had a bumpy first school year would be a massive understatement.
Founded with the aim of providing the city’s children with a foundation in Arabic language and culture, the little school and its students soon became a ping pong ball in a game played by forces beyond its control.
Attacks by conservative groups, multiple location changes accompanied by parent protests, the resignation of the founding principal, a continuing lawsuit, discipline problems and charges of inept handling by the city’s Department of Education (DOE) are just a few of the highlights of the school’s first year.
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The New York Times
September 6, 2008
L.P.G.A. Will Revise Its Policy on English
By BILL PENNINGTON
Bowing to a torrent of criticism, the L.P.G.A. Tour dropped plans on Friday to suspend players who were not conversant in English by 2009. The tour said it would announce a revised policy, with no playing penalties, by the end of this year.
Late last month, the L.P.G.A. revealed the policy, which would have required that tour players with two years of experience pass an oral exam in basic English by the end of 2009. Players who did not comply would face suspension of playing privileges for an undetermined period. The policy’s intent, L.P.G.A. officials said, was to enhance financial opportunities for the tour and its players, of whom about 120 are foreign-born. The L.P.G.A. wanted all its players to speak passable English at tournaments, pro-am events, sponsorship gatherings and post-tournament news conferences.
Friday’s reversal appeared to be a hurried admission that the L.P.G.A. had not thoroughly examined the ramifications of the policy, which many sensed was aimed at the sizable contingent of Asian players on the tour. Disapproval of the policy — believed to be the only one of its kind in a major sport — was swift when it was announced: from news media outlets, civil rights groups, some players and particularly California legislators, who were looking into whether the policy violated anti-discrimination laws.
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