He Said, She Said: The good, the bad, & the perplexing of the year that was

As we enter the UN-declared Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, here's a brief round-up in snippet form of some items  I didn't have time to mention before.

Some are good, some bad, and two of the latter type are perplexing.

I list them under the names of the chief actors,  in alphabetical order, naturellement.

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Woody Allen, publicly getting it at long last:

"I do feel there are many people that disguise their negative feelings toward Jews, disguise it as anti-Israel criticism, political criticism, when in fact what they really mean is that they don’t like Jews."

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Bill Anderson, non-Jewish Aussie academic, in a letter to The Australian (20 December 2013) concerning anti-Israel Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon:

'.... Rhiannon and other extremists in the Greens have frequently indulged in intemperate and ill-informed attacks on Israel. The NSW Greens conference in 2011 passed a proposal to "boycott Israeli goods, trading and military arrangements, and sporting, cultural and economic events as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel's occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory, the siege of Gaza and the imprisonment of 1.5 million people and Israel's institution of a system of apartheid".

This radical anti-Israel policy is at odds with the policies of both main parties in Australia and the majority of the Australians. It is also at odds with the federal Greens, which voted against a similarly worded proposal.

The NSW Greens policy is so one-sided and extreme that it could have been written by Hamas. Given that Hamas is recognised and listed by most democratic governments as a terrorist organisation, one can hardly be surprised that this position of the NSW Greens would cause concern.'

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Association of American Universities (quoted here) regarding the reprehensible Academic Boycott:

 "The Executive Committee of the Association of American Universities strongly opposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.... Any such boycott of academic institutions directly violates academic freedom, which is a fundamental principle of AAU universities and of American higher education in general.

Academic freedom is the freedom of university faculty responsibly to produce and disseminate knowledge through research, teaching, and service, without undue constraint. It is a principle that should not be abridged by political considerations. American colleges and universities, as well as like institutions elsewhere, must stand as the first line of defense against attacks on academic freedom.

Efforts to address political issues, or to address restrictions on academic freedom, should not themselves infringe upon academic freedom. Restrictions imposed on the ability of scholars of any particular country to work with their fellow academics in other countries, participate in meetings and organizations, or otherwise carry out their scholarly activities violate academic freedom. The boycott of Israeli academic institutions therefore clearly violates the academic freedom not only of Israeli scholars but also of American scholars who might be pressured to comply with it. We urge American scholars and scholars around the world who believe in academic freedom to oppose this and other such academic boycotts."

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Frank Baigel, who sits on the Jewish Leadership Council as president of the Manchester Jewish Representative Council, responding here to JLC chairman Mick Davis's latest cheap shot at Israel, an article in Haaretz here:

“As Israel continues to be under continuous existential threat, I always — as all diaspora Jews should — support Israel, whichever party is in power. Until I go to live in Israel myself, I will not publicly express any reservations about the government’s policies.”

(Image at right: a cheap shot from Mick in 2010)
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Martin Bright, the Jewish Chronicle's first non-Jewish political editor, on leaving the paper to take up another appointment:

"I have learnt much over the past few years. I have begun to understand the umbilical relationship between many British Jews and Israel, and their visceral reaction when it is attacked. I have grown to appreciate the many subtle and ingenious ways that antisemitism can express itself."

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Pat Condell, with a chilling warning about the astonishing state-sponsored appeasement of Islamism in Sweden and all it portends for Jews (and for women); this video has had many thousands of hits, so chances are you've already seen it:

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Paul Charney, chairman of the Zionist Federation, commenting here on Mick Davis's latest cheap shot at Israel:

“While everyone has the right to criticise Israel, the ZF believes that the primary role of community organisations should be to counter the falsehood that Israel doesn’t want peace, rather than inadvertently promoting it.”

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Nick Cohen, British columnist, on the skewed preoccupations of the liberal-left:

As things stand, the world remains upside down. The left rather than the right defends reactionary religion, as long as the reactionaries do not have a white skin. You should never tire of pointing out that they are complicit in an enormous betrayal of progressive principles. Women, gays, secularists, liberals and socialists from ethnic minorities ought to be able to turn to British liberals and leftists for support against the patriarchal men, who seek to control them. Rather than fraternal greetings, they find indifference and hostility. The mainstream of liberal-left opinion in the universities, media, civil service, and Labour and Liberal Democrat parties has convinced itself that it is culturally imperialist to demand that members of minorities should enjoy the same freedoms as the rest of us.

This is why there has not been one prosecution for female genital mutilation. This is why, when 15-year-old white schoolgirl runs off to France with a teacher, the story leads the news, but when the parents of a Pakistani girl pull their daughter from class and force her to marry an old man —that is, when they organise her abduction and rape— liberal society stays silent. I should not need to add that multiculturalists who deny rights to people on the grounds of their ethnicity are every bit as racist as the white supremacists they profess to oppose.'

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Finian Cunningham, Irish political activist and Press TV hack, with the refrain to his song for Palestine:

"Someday, brother, we're go-nah come"

(What's that all about, then? A hope-springs-eternal chant for gentlemen with erectile difficulties?)
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Edgar Davidson, British pro-Israel blogger, making a fundamental point in model fashion in reply to a letter from his MP:

'I note you said you were "a supporter of Israel's right to exist". This is a statement used by many MPs, which has always struck me as rather curious and I know many Israelis are offended by it.  To have one's very existence even considered as open to debate is something that is applied to no other country in the world (many of which were created AFTER the modern day state of Israel,  and many of which were the result of either war, arbitrary colonial land demarcations or a mixture of both).' 

(To his credit, the unnamed MP replied:

'I take your point. I should have probably said that I believe in Israel's right to defend itself rather than its right to exist. The reason behind using the phrase I did was that sometimes I get the impression some criticism which is supposedly directed at the Israeli government - any government should be subject to criticism - is actually a cover for deep-rooted anti-semitism which of course is completely unacceptable, or should be.') 

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Chris Doyle, director of CAABU (Council for Arab-British Understanding), cheerleading for an increased Arab political presence in the UK; see  here and here:

'One of the things that sometimes holds Arab communities back from lobbying is actually the belief in some of the conspiracy theories that somehow the Israel lobby is all-powerful, never makes any mistakes, and you can’t challenge it… This is not true....

The crucial thing is, in the United States, in Britain, in France, in these other countries, that those citizens of Arab origin in one way or another, have the faith and the belief to get more politically active. In Britain we have never had, despite having quite a large British-Arab community, we've never had a Member of Parliament elected, there's never been an Arab member of the House of Lords, or even a British-Arab Member of the European Parliament. They are not joining political parties, etcetera. Then from within that framework, if they were to do so, and I'm sure they will; a new generation is coming forward, lots of talent and brilliant people, then they can start making a difference and also become that strategic bridge to the Arab world where the British-Arab community becomes the point of call for Arab government to use, to connect with in order to effect decision making in London and Brussels and Washington....'

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 Dr Oscar Embon, director of the Sieff Hospital in Tzfat on treating patients from Syria:

"Some beautiful relationships have started between the staff at the hospital and the people that we treat. Most of them express their gratitude and their wish for peace between the two countries ....

I don't expect them to become lovers of Israel and ambassadors for what we do here, but in the interim I expect they will reflect on what was their experience here and that they will reflect differently on what the regime tells them about Israelis and Syrians being enemies." (Kudos to Kevin Connolly of the BBC for reporting on what the BBC, like the rest of the leftist media, usually ignores.)

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Jonathan Freedland, well-known British journalist, here:

'....So much as mention antisemitism and someone will pop up to tell you that Arabs are semites too so why do Jews insist on hogging, as it were, all the antisemitism for themselves. But the word was not a Jewish invention. It was popularised by a 19th-century German Jew-hater called Wilhelm Marr, keen to put his loathing on a pseudo-scientific basis: he used "semites" to mean Jews and, partly because "anti-Jewish racism" is a mouthful, the word has stuck.

Despite the name, it is not a phenomenon safely buried in the past. Just because hatred of Jews reached a murderous climax in the 1940s does not mean it ended with the war in 1945. It is alive and well even in 2013. Whether it's on Twitter or in the cartoons that routinely appear in much of today's Middle Eastern press, crude slurs and hideous caricatures of Jews – hook-nosed and money-grabbing – endure.

Move away from the gutter, however, and antisemitism is rarely so obvious. It is communicated through nods and winks, hinted at rather than spoken. In Britain especially, prejudice against Jews has long been of the latent, rather than overt, variety. Even the words Jew or Jewish are often avoided: spotting the euphemisms – "flamboyant North London businessman" – is a pastime in its own right....

Instead, there are familiar tunes, some centuries old, which are played again and again. An especially hoary trope is the notion of divided allegiances or plain disloyalty, as if, whatever their outward pretence, Jews really serve another master besides their country. Under Stalin, Jews, especially Jewish intellectuals, were condemned as "rootless cosmopolitans" (another euphemism) lacking in sufficient patriotism....

In the antisemitic imagination, Jews are constantly working for some other, hidden goal. In this, antisemitism stands apart from other racisms, which tend to view the hated as straightforwardly inferior. Antisemitism is instead a conspiracy theory of power, believing that the Jews – always operating as a collective – are bent on some grand plan of world domination. Which is why images of Jews as puppet masters, or of having the world in their "financial grips", as Baroness Jenny Tonge so memorably put it, always hit a nerve.

In the last century, antisemites of left and right diverged on exactly how the Jews planned to enslave the human race. Jew-haters of the left believed capitalism was the preferred method, while antisemites of the right reckoned communism was the Jews' chosen tool, with Marx and Trotsky the fathers of an imagined "Judeo-Bolshevism"....

And always on hand for the antisemite is some reference to Jews' religious practice, real or imagined. For centuries, those who hate Jews would throw the phrase "chosen people" back in their faces, falsely interpreting it as a mandate for Jewish supremacism. Others would claim that Jews feasted on the blood of Christian children as part of their Passover ritual, the lethal "blood libel" that prompted anti-Jewish pogroms and cost Jewish lives for centuries. It might be a reminder that Jews were still chained to the Old Testament alone, unenlightened by the gentler, more forgiving teachings of Jesus....'

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Alan Hart, risible ex-BBC broadcaster reduced to appearances on Iran's Press TV (in an article for which he called Zionists "The New Nazis), a 9/11 truther, here:

'As I write I am recalling what former President Carter said to my wife and I when we met with him and Rosalyn, words I quote in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews and which bear repeating. “Any American president has only two windows of opportunity to take on the Zionist lobby – in the first nine months of his first term and the last year of his second term if he has one.”....

Also in my mind as I write are the words of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he was denouncing and rejecting the interim agreement with Iran. “Today the world became a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has made a significant step in obtaining the most dangerous weapons in the world.” This, about a country which does not possess nuclear weapons and doesn’t want them, from the man whose state possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads and tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. No, Mr. Netanyahu, while it is led by you and/or your kind, Israel has the most dangerous regime in the world.

I remain puzzled by what Netanyahu really is. Does he believe all the nonsense he talks about Iranian and Arab and other Muslim military threats to Israel’s existence, in which case he has become the victim of his own propaganda and is deluded to the point of clinical madness; or does he know he is spouting propaganda nonsense every time he opens his mouth? (When making a judgement keep in mind the Mossad’s motto – “By way of deception thou shall do war.”)

In any event, if there was a Nobel Prize for Nonsense, it would have to be awarded to Netanyahu. He’s light years ahead of any other contender. If Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, was still alive, I imagine he’d say in private, “Netanyahu makes me look like an amateur.”....'

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Samuel Hayek, Chairman of JNF UK, commenting here about Mick Davis's latest cheap shot at Israel: 

“Pointing fingers and accusing the leaders of Israel for their peace negotiations approach, particularly when Israel has made many concessions to enable peace to take place — including the recent release of murderers who were heralded as heroes by the Palestinian Authority — is uninspired and certainly absurd. This is not a representative view of our community, who wholeheartedly supports Israel’s efforts to achieve peace.”

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Sarah Honig, blogging here (with photos) about antisemitism and anti-Zionism in Ireland, on an encounter in the little town of Cahersiveen:

'One would assume that there, near ["The Liberator" Daniel] O’Connell’s birthplace, we’d find sympathy for a far more ancient nation that won its independence from Britain, after a struggle no less bitter. Moreover, our underground fighters – foremost the IZL (the Irgun), whose leadership included Tzipi’s own father, Eitan Livni – patterned itself openly and proudly on the Irish Republican Army. The late prime minister Yitzhak Shamir’s nom de guerre in the LHI underground (a.k.a. the Stern Group) was Michael, his homage to Michael Collins – the revolutionary Fine Gael leader, who headed Ireland’s provisional government in 1922.

.... There were no hints of affection there for us. On the town’s main thoroughfare, Church Street, I was buttonholed by three boisterous teenagers in Santa hats, carrying a collection box and big signs reading “Free Palestine.” They solicited my contribution.

 I asked: “Free Palestine from whom?”

The cheery trio’s swift answer was unambiguous: “The Jews.”

I pressed on: “Do you know where your money would go? “

The boys: “To plant olive trees.”

“Are you sure,” I continued, as kindly-looking little old ladies generously opened their purses and dropped coins and bills in the collection box, “that this money wouldn’t fund terrorists and murderers?” Their retort threw me for a loop: “What do you have against Palestinians? What have they done to you? They are only against Jews. Jews are evil.”

I pried more. I asked what they know about the conflict. It was nothing except that Israel is the horrid ogre and the oppressed Palestinians are unquestionably worthy of compassion. Indeed the boys never stopped to question any of this.

I inquired who gave them these ideas and who sent them out to seek contributions in the town center. It turned out that it was a school-organized affair and that their teacher brought them all out, as a group, on a school day, during school hours, to do a pre-Christmas Christian good deed by “collecting donations for Palestine.”....

The teacher, who unsuspectingly volunteered his name to me, said he took out his pupils, all from the town’s single secondary school, as part of a class project “to further a humanitarian goal.” The goal was to collect money to enable the Palestinians to replace olive trees because “Jews stole their lands.”

All around him the cheery kids hoisted “Save Palestine” placards. There was a lot of hilarity. It was a lark. A good time was had. Outdoor frolic on a mild winter’s morning sure beats lessons in a dreary classroom.

I asked if this was a sanctioned school event and was solemnly assured that it was, all part of inculcating in the children a commitment to charitable work. I wondered aloud if something else wasn’t being inculcated. The teacher remained remarkably unperturbed when I repeated to him what the three boys said earlier about Jews “always being villains,” along with one youngster’s aside that “they crucified our Lord.” In fact, the teacher nodded in agreement, without a solitary word of objection.

“Isn’t there another side to this story?” I asked. I was shown a handwritten poster that boasted the Palestinian flag and proclaimed: “There’s a conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians that began in the early 20th century.” That was the one simplistic token to seeming objectivity.But it was meaningless and ended there. Another homemade placard read: “Together we’ll get rights for Palestine.”....'

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A Jewish Chronicle editorial (22 November) regarding the unconscionable leniency of the Lib Dems towards antisemitism in the party, following another whiff of judeophobia by yet another of its parliamentarians, David Ward:

'....The real issue here is not his antisemitism. It is his party’s reaction to it. To say the LibDems have a track record of excusing antisemitism barely comes close to the reality. It took years for the party to remove Baroness Tonge, despite her form of antisemitic Tourette’s. But its treatment of Mr Ward takes its acquiescence in race hate to another level.

When the LibDems finally decided to act against the Bradford East MP they suspended him over the summer recess, then swiftly readmitted him in time for the party conference. It was a ‘non-punishment punishment’ and implied the party did not believe any serious action was really necessary. That impression has now been confirmed by the LibDems’ refusal to utter even a word of criticism against Mr Ward for his latest outpouring of hate, despite it being a clear restatement of the most basic antisemitic theme of all — that wealthy Jews buy up power.'

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Jill,  the indefatigable poster-wielding heroine from Sussex Friends of Israel, in her customary sock-it-to-'em-with-a-smile pose:

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Sir Tom Jones, on completing a concert tour of Israel (where he memorably sang "My Yiddishe Momma"):

“I was in Israel ... where a lot of singers won’t go. I don’t agree with that. I think entertainers should enter­tain. They should go wherever – there shouldn’t be any restrictions. I did two shows in Tel Aviv, and it was fantastic....

I wanted to go, because the Israeli people asked me. They would like me to sing, and I don’t see any problem in doing that. I don’t see why anyone would mix up the two things – entertainment and politics.”

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Isi Leibler, inveighing against the reckless Israeli leftist newpaper Haaretz, which in addition to its other despicable acts such as lending its columns to propagation of the most-Jews-are-Khazars myth has stooped so low as to print a contemptible article by Eli Gat belittling and vilifying the heroes and heroines of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising:

Against all odds: three doomed heroines

".... Haaretz’ unprofessionalism is simply inexcusable. In its zeal to undermine the core principles of Zionism, it has done irrevocable damage. The distortion of facts and outright lies have aided our enemies and confused our friends, including Jews living in the Diaspora with limited understanding of Jewish or Israeli history. The Gat article demonstrates to what depths Haaretz will sink, twisting the facts – even of Holocaust history – in order to provoke its readers and disallow them even the smallest measure of Jewish pride.

Freedom of the press allows Haaretz, like any newspaper in Israel, the right to publish what it deems fit. However, newspapers are dependent on readers and the rapidly diminishing number of Haaretz subscribers should do what is necessary and take the most effective steps to influence the publisher and editor to prevent the paper from serving as a launching pad for enemies of Israel and the Jewish people."

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Ego Leonard, Dutch "anonymous guerrilla artist and painter," with this extraordinarily misleading exhibit (deliberate propaganda or plain ignorance?) at the "Other Art Fair" in London's Brick Lane, showing Muslims as victims of Nazi concentration camps along with Jews and gays. (Edgar Davidson exposed this ultimate-in-Muslim-victimhood myth; see here ):

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Antony Loewenstein, l'enfant terrible of Australian Jewry, had not one, but two bloopers that The Guardian felt compelled to remove from a piece in that Israel-demonising rag!

CiFWatch reported the delicious facts here and here

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Jake Lynch, University of Sydney associate professor and committed BDSer, embroiled in controversy regarding an unsuccessful application for a research grant:

'Academic Jake Lynch has instigated a union investigation into whether his support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel influenced the Australian Research Council to reject a grant....

Professor Lynch's support for BDS became headline news last year when he boycotted Israeli academic Dan Avnon, refusing to help the Hebrew University academic with his application for a Sir Zelman Cowen fellowship.

This year Professor Lynch submitted an application to the federally funded ARC for $290,000 to study the work of journalists in South Africa, Nepal, Australia and Britain....

The ARC recently rejected his application....

Labor MP Michael Danby, a fierce opponent of BDS, said he found it ironic Professor Lynch was whinging about not getting a research grant when he had refused to help Professor Avnon get one. Rather than being the result of a "political conspiracy", Mr Danby said, the ARC would have made its decision based on academic rigour. "Jake Lynch is not a very highly regarded academic, he's just basically an ex-BBC journalist," he said....'

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Curtiz Marez, president of the BDS-supporting American Studies Association, on being asked why the Jewish State (not Cuba, North Korea or China) was singled out for a boycott: 

"One has to start somewhere."

(To quote Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, here:
'....The ASA has not gone on record against universities in any other country: not against those that enforce laws against homosexuality, not against those that have rejected freedom of speech, not against those that systematically restrict access to higher education by race, religion or gender. No, the ASA listens to civil society only when it speaks against Israel. As its scholarly president declared, "One has to start somewhere." Not in North Korea, not in Russia or Zimbabwe or China — one has to start with Israel. Really?....')

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Rupert Murdoch, owner of such pro-Israel newspapers as The Times and The Australian, reiterating his pro-Israeli position in November:

“[A]s Israel goes, so goes [...] our morality and our very existence as freedom loving citizens of the world.

This beleaguered nation and its people are beacons of hope and justice ...their enemies are our enemies, glorifiers of death, seeking to impose their bloody doctrine through violence.”

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Melanie Phillips, telling Canadian broadcaster Michael Coren of how her "unconventional wisdom" that involves "saying the unsayable" has cost her dear in a Britain dominated by a culture that has demonised the political centre by dubbing it "the Right," has gone to absurd lengths to abase itself before Islam, and by a complicit media which "starts with a conclusion and wrenches the evidence to fit":

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 Denis Prager, Middle East commentator, castigating  the Church of Scotland's odious report "The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land'" (issued in May):

'The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence “promised land” is in quotation marks in the report’s title – because there is no promised land....

Even during the worst excesses of Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that any normative Christian body declared that “Israel,” “the temple,” “Jerusalem” and “the land” no longer meant or were ever intended to mean what those words represent.

This claim is not only profoundly anti-Semitic. It is an act of theological forgery; it makes a mockery of the Bible as a coherent document and renders Christianity inherently anti-Semitic....

I have never equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the Church of Scotland report is not about criticism of Israel; it is about invalidating the Jewish people and invalidating the Jews’ historically incontestable claims to the land upon which the only independent states that ever existed were Jewish.

 It asserts that justice and the existence of a Jewish state are mutually exclusive: “There is a direct conflict of interest between wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the land.”

It asserts that the Jews’ return to Israel has no biblical basis.

It asserts that the notion that the Jews have or ever had a special relationship with God – one of the most oft repeated ideas in the Hebrew Bible – is negated in that very same Bible: “That exclusivist tradition implied Jews had a special, privileged position in relation to God. But the prophetic tradition stood against this.” The Chosen People is not chosen, in other words.

 It asserts that God’s promise of the land to Abraham has nothing to do with the Jews; it is only about Jesus: “The promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people.”

 It asserts that even Jesus – that proud, religious Jew – did not believe in any special relationship between God and the Jews: “Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness. … “

At the same time, this truly immoral document does not devote a word to why there were Palestinian refugees: While the Jews accepted the 1947-48 partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, all the neighboring Arab states rejected the partition and invaded the Jews in order to annihilate Israel at birth.

Nor does the report devote a single sentence to how Israel’s occupation of the West Bank came about: In 1967, Israel’s neighbors sought to exterminate Israel just as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and most Palestinians and other Muslims in the Middle East wish to now. And that only because of that war, won by Israel, did Israel come to occupy the West Bank of Jordan.

Nor is a word devoted to Palestinian national honoring of their numerous terrorists, or to the exterminationist and anti-Semitic propaganda that saturates Middle East media or to the widespread Palestinian support for terrorism (according to the just-released Pew Forum poll of Muslims, 40 percent of Palestinians support suicide terror).

And the Church of Scotland did not think it important to even hint at what happened in Gaza after the Israelis gave the whole of Gaza to the Palestinians: The Palestinians converted it into a terror-state that regularly launches rockets into Israel to kill as many Israelis as possible.

And, most vile of all, the Church of Scotland never once notes, let alone condemns, the Muslim countries and organizations that seek to annihilate Israel, an existential threat that no other country or people in the world face....

.... The report is a combination of medieval Christian anti-Judaism and contemporary leftist anti-Zionism. For Jews and Israel, that’s a lethal combination.'

(Another fine indictment of the Church of Scotland here)

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Jonathan S. Tobin in a powerful indictment here of the the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's backing of the despicable Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel:

'.... That another group of campus radicals with doctorates in subjects that are geared toward furthering left-wing theories would join the boycott of Israel is no surprise. That they don’t boycott China in sympathy with Tibet or any number of Arab and Muslim countries for their oppression of minorities is just the usual hypocrisy to be found on campus these days....

Academics in the West Bank are not suppressed. Quite the contrary, they work, publish, and pontificate in public while working in the many Palestinian institutions of higher education that were all founded after Israel took control of the area in 1967. Far from censoring activity at those schools, Israel has no input or ability to influence them whatsoever. All Palestinian colleges exist as hotbeds of support for terror and the delegitimization of Israel. The Palestinian media, especially that run by the Palestinian Authority which governs the daily lives of Palestinians in almost all of the West Bank, is similarly unrestrained by Israel and, as Palestine Media Watch reports on a regular basis, is a steady source of incitement to hatred against Israel and Jews. Nor are there any restrictions on the right of assembly for academics as the kerfuffle over the student body-supported Islamic Jihad fascist-style military parade at Al Quds University in Jerusalem proved. As for freedom of movement, it is true that Palestinians must deal with some Israeli army checkpoints that make travel difficult at times. But that doesn’t prevent them from moving about as they please .... 

By attempting to portray the Palestinians as the “indigenous people” of the territory on which the State of Israel and the administered territories exist and the Jews as the colonial settlers, they are perpetrating the big lie of Palestinian history. Jews are not foreigners in Israel as Europeans were in Africa. They happen to be the indigenous people of their ancient homeland and efforts to deny this isn’t scholarship. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and those who would deny them the same rights accorded other peoples are practicing bias, not scholarship. As with Palestinian attempts to deny the Jewish connection with the country or with Jerusalem and ancient Jewish holy sites such as the Temple Mount or the Western Wall, attempts to cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one between foreign occupiers and natives is revisionist myth recast as left-wing politicized scholarship.

There can be honest disagreement and debate about Israel’s policies in the territories, settlements, and borders. But by extending their argument to all of pre-1967 Israel as well as by smearing the Jews as colonists in their own country, the Native American studies group forfeits its credibility. Rather than being seen as the cutting edge of enlightened opinion, their support for BDS should mark them as a pack of incorrigible haters who should be treated with the same disdain and isolation that they would like to dish out to Israelis.'

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Simon Schama, the historian, speaking recently in London:

 'Zionism is a complicated thing. It’s richly inculcated with fine Jewish values. My Zionism is a two-state Zionism, it always has been. It’s a Zionism of the necessity of refuge....

You don’t have to approve of every new settlement that’s stuck in the middle of the West Bank — God knows I don’t — in order to say "I’m an unapologetic Zionist".'

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 The [Curious Case of the] Vacillating Vicar:

First, our old chum the Anglican anti-Zionism crusader posted this:

j

A day or two later, to the dismay of certain followers, this:

A few days later, to the acclaim of certain followers, this:

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Elie Wiesel in an ad produced by This World: The Values Network (LOGO); Executive Director, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach; sponsored by Michael Steinhardt, Board of Governors, This World: The Values Network; co-founder Birthright Israel:

'Iran Must Not Be Allowed to Remain Nuclear

If there is one lesson I hope the world has learned from the past it is that regimes rooted in brutality must never be trusted. And the words and actions of the leadership of Iran leave no doubt as to their intentions.

Should the civilized nations of the world trust a regime whose supreme leader said yet again last month that Israel is “doomed to annihilation,” and referred to my fellow Jewish Zionists as “rabid dogs?”

Should we who believe in human rights, trust a regime which in the 21st century stones women and hangs homosexuals?

Should we who believe in freedom trust a regime which murdered its own citizens in the streets of Tehran when the people protested a stolen election in the Green Revolution of Summer, 2009?

Should we who believe in the United States trust a regime whose parliament last month erupted in “Death to America” chants as they commemorated the 34th anniversary of the storming of our Embassy in Tehran?

Should we who believe in life trust a regime whom our own State Department lists as one of the world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism?

America, too, defines itself by its words and actions. America adopted me, as it did so many others, and gave me a home after my people were exterminated in the camps of Europe. And from the time of the founding fathers America has always stood up to tyrants. Our nation is morally compromised when it contemplates allowing a country calling for the destruction of the State of Israel to remain within reach of nuclear weapons.

Sanctions have come at a terrible economic cost for the people of Iran. But, unfortunately, sanctions are what have brought the Iranian regime to the negotiating table.

 I appeal to President Obama and Congress to demand, as a condition of continued talks, the total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and the regime’s public and complete repudiation of all genocidal intent against Israel. And I appeal to the leaders of the United States Senate to go forward with their vote to strengthen sanctions against Iran until these conditions have been met.

I once wrote that history has taught us to trust the threats of our enemies more than the promises of our friends. Our enemies are making serious threats. It is time to take them seriously. It is time for our friends to keep their promises.'

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Geert Wilders speaking in Melbourne to the Q Society of Australia in February: newly uploaded video of the event here