Mondoweiss Marches On To Its Own Beat

This is a guest blog by Professor William D. Rubinstein.  His previous guest blogs are here, here, here, here, here, and here.  The last two links refer to Mondoweiss.

He writes:

I have contributed a couple of previous guest posts to this site about Mondoweiss, the online extreme anti-Zionist site.  After a period of ignoring it, the time has come to look once more at that execrable, albeit well-produced, and apparently well-financed, site.

What is the main conclusion one can draw from Israel's recent Gaza incursion?  In my view, the most important conclusion is that there was virtually no erosion in mainstream support for Israel.  I will go further, and say that there was no significant erosion in mainstream support for Israel, despite the near-universal one-sided and deeply hostile media depictions of its military activities in Gaza, normally without any account of the thousands of Hamas rockets fired at Israeli civilians.

(The normal formula for criticism was that Israel's response was "disproportionate".  During World War Two, the United States dropped millions of tons of bombs on Nazi Germany.  Germany dropped zero bombs on the United States.  No doubt this was also "disproportionate".)

No mainstream political figure of any significance deserted Israel, certainly not in the English-speaking world, with every conservative and liberal/social democratic figure affirming their support for Israel.  All of them has had the sense to realize that Israel's immediate neighbors are not Denmark, Sweden and Canada, but extremist and dictatorial regimes which would make peace with Israel only reluctantly and, in the case of Hamas, not at all.

Mondoweiss has, time and again, tried to pretend that there is a groundswell of hostility against Israel in places high and low, that will result in a cataclysmic reorientation of Western, especially American, attitudes on the Israel/Palestine question.  This is sheer fantasy, and, in the absence of real evidence, Mondoweiss highlights every piece of criticism of Israel from any American source, regardless of how obscure, trivial, or wholly predictable.  Most of these critics have actually condemned Israel many times before, and would certainly condemn Israel regardless of what it did, apart from committing suicide.

Virtually all are components of the extreme left, usually of what Paul Johnson has termed the "fascist left", for whom Israel occupies a central position in their demonology, generally to the exclusion of everything else, remarkably similar to the position of Jews in Hitler's worldview.

Most of Mondoweiss in fact consists of the highlighting of trivial examples of anti-Israel agitation or demonstrations by students, political activists, already-committed leftists, and the like.

Occasionally, though, Mondoweiss goes so far over the top that the story in question deserves wider publicity.  Some prime examples:

Steve Kloppman: "Judaism's Hijacking By Zionists Drives 70% of Secular Jews To Marry Non-Jews" (August 31, 2014).  

I kid you not  –  this was actually a Mondoweiss posting.

"Hillary Clinton Just Lost The White House in Gaza – Same Way She Lost It in Iraq the Last Time" (August 23, 2014).

 At first, I thought I had misread this story, and that Hillary Clinton had lost the nomination by not supporting Israel – but I got it right the first time: Hillary will lose the nomination by supporting Israel.  "Yes, I know I'm going out on a limb", says its author.

"Chomsky and the BDS" (July 6, 2014). 

Noam Chomsky, the ultra-left guru known for his vituperative criticism of Israel over the past thirty or forty years does not support the BDS movement.  The article consists of bucketing poor Noam for his residual Zionism – seems he's a neo-conservative in drag, as it were.

Mondoweiss has also highlighted many times the so-called Russell Tribunal on Palestine, most recently in

"Russell Tribunal Finds Evidence of Incitement to Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza" (September 25, 2014).

 The "Russell Tribunal" (named for Bertrand Russell, the famous phiosopher who, in his nineties, became an anti-Vietnam War activist but in 1949 –  I'm not joking –  recommended bombing Moscow if Stalin didn't give up the atom bomb) is a self-appointed group of ultra-leftist activists whose verdicts on Israel are just as impartial as were the trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and the others sentenced to death at Stalin's show trials.  Of the Russell Tribunal, Richard Goldstone (yes, the South African jurist whose anti-Israel eponymous Report, later retracted by him, received so much publicity a few years ago) wrote:

"It is not a 'tribunal'.  The evidence is going to be one-sided and the members of the 'jury' are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well-known.  In Israel, there is no apartheid.  Nothing comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute."

Nor, obviously, are the recent bombings of Gaza, to destroy Hamas's structure of rockets and weapons, an example of "genocide".

Mondoweiss gives maximum publicity to kangaroo courts like this for one reason: it takes one to know one.

The Mother of all Intifadas (video)

Keffiyeh Chic Still Rules OK?

They're a strange lot, aren't they, women (and men for that matter) who demonise Israel, yet ignore the true demonic regimes of this world, including those Islamic ones that persecute women, regard them as inherently inferior to men, and treat them like chattels. 

Regimes such as Iran's, which stones or hangs women for sexual misconduct, and beats them for transgressing the draconian dress code, and societies such as Pakistan's where wife-beating is rampant, and routine for the "crime" of failing to give birth to male children.  Wow! Is some basic instruction in human biology and genetics overdue in that benighted corner of the world!

Like this Iranian girl (the video's long, but you only need to see the first few minutes):

Are the West's anti-Israel women, who jump on the bandwagon of every anti-Zionist initiative going, the successors to all those giddy women who used to fantasise about seduction by Rudolf Valentino in the guise of a sheikh?

It's as bizarre as it is baffling.

Following the Itamar massacre and the Jerusalem bomb outrage will they still wear their keffiyehs, the chic  left-liberal chicks of the Western world, including gilded youth and bourgeois elements, to express their solidarity with the perceived victims of the "Israel-Palestine Conflict".

Will they and their equally fixated menfolk continue to flaunt their partisanship, despite (dare I suggest in some cases "because of"?) the antisemitism that pervades much of Palestinian society.

Protesting Ahava in London: courtesy Richard Millett

What will it take to stop them being as side-blinded as a carthorse wearing blinkers on his eyes, owing to that willful refusal of theirs to direct their gaze anywhere but on Israel?

For, as the Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer has observed this week, in the aftermath of the Itamar atrocity:

'There is a widespread culture calling for death to the Jews – and official support for that culture – rampant in Palestinian society as evidenced by the following:.

• Abbas – in January – allowed a presentation of $2000 to be awarded to the relatives of a Palestinian terrorist – reported as follows in Al-Hayat Al Jadida on 25 January:

“The governor of the Jenin district, Kadura Musa, has awarded a presidential grant to the family of the Shahid (Martyr), Khaldoun Najib Samoudy, during a visit that took place yesterday in the village of Al-Yamoun. The governor noted that the grant is financial aid in the amount of $2000 that the President [Mahmoud Abbas] is awarding to the relatives of the Shahid, who was recently killed as a Martyr at the Hamra checkpoint by the Israeli occupation forces”

• Abbas was the President who did nothing to prevent the indiscriminate firing of thousands of rockets, shells and mortars into Israeli civilian population centres from Gaza and the smuggling of weapons into Gaza prior to being deposed there by Hamas in 2007. Hamas continues to maintain its threat to rid the Middle East of Israel – ostensibly as the democratically elected leader of the Palestinian people.

• Both Abbas and Hamas leader – Ismail Haniyeh – head organizations whose Charters call for the elimination of the Jewish State and the denial of any right of statehood for Jews under the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

• A Palestinian Authority TV tribute to “Martyrs” just three weeks ago included the terrorist who killed three Israelis in a 2002 terror attack in the same West Bank town of Itamar where the Fogel family was murdered.

The video was in honor of the anniversary of the founding of the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and was broadcast on PA TV several times daily for four days. It featured a collage with photographs labeled “Martyrs (Shahids) of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Nablus.” It included the picture of terrorist Habash Hanani, who in May 2002 entered Itamar and murdered three students in the local high school.

• Abbas sanctioned the inauguration of a square in el-Bireh in March 2010 named after Dalal Maghreb - the Fatah woman who led the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in which 37 Israeli civilians and an American photographer were killed, and 71 were wounded,



PSC activist in UK

 Three days later the Palestinian Authority launched a four day seminar named after Maghreb – called the “Martyr Dalal Mughrabi Camp,” in Jericho under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority’s Military Science Academy. Its main goal was to discuss the legislative and local elections in the PA territories.'

Read all of Singer's article: http://www.jwire.com.au/featured-articles/obama-confronting-the-killing-culture-in-palestine/15787

Or, as that splendid journalist Khaled Abu Toameh asked recently, "Where is the Outcry against Arab Apartheid?"

He observed, inter alia, that in the last year alone 180,000 Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank sought medical attention in Israel, and that many could not afford treatment, yet received it anyway.

"In Israel,even a suicide bomber who is - only? - wounded while trying to kill Jews is entitled to the finest medical treatment.  And there have been many instances where Palestinians who were injured in attacks on Israel later ended up in sme of Israel's best hospitals."

By contrast, Palestinians, including an 11-year-old boy denied treatment in Lebanon, are being turned away from Arab hospitals if unable to meet the bills.

"It is disgraceful that while Israel admits Palestinian patients to its hospitals, Arab hospitals are denying them medical treatment for various reasons, including money. But then one is reminded that Arab dictators do not care about their own people, so why should they pay attention to an 11-year-old boy who is dying at the entrance to a hospital because his father was not carrying $1,500?

But as the death took place in an Arab country – and as the victim is an Arab – why should anyone care about him? Where is the outcry against Arab Apartheid?"

Read the rest: http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=212512

Arsen Ostrovsky, at the start of this year's annual excrescence known as Israel Apartheid Week, posed the pertinent question "Why Not an Arab Apartheid Week?"



Keffiyeh cool, USA

 He wrote, in part:

'The irony is that in Israel, despite problems in Israel as in any other country, Arabs enjoy more rights, freedoms and liberties than do their neighbours in any number of Middle East countries currently fighting for these very same privileges. As the Muslim Arab Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh repeatedly says (http://www.frumforum.com/abu-toameh-what-the-western-media-misses):

"Israel is not an apartheid state...Israel is a free and open democratic country. I enjoy living here and I would rather live as a second class citizen in Israel, even though I'm not, than a first class citizen in any Arab country."

The real apartheid today is in places such as Saudi Arabia, where the government totally forbids the public practice of non-Muslim religions, the presence of a Bible there, officially labels both Christians and Jews "unbelievers," and cautions in the Qu'ran Muslims not to befriend Christians or Jews:

"O you who believe! do not take the Jews and Christians for friends: they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people." (Qu'ran 5:51)

"You will see many of them befriending those who disbelieve; certainly evil is that which their souls have sent before for , that Allah became displeased with them and in chastisement shall they abide [ie: Muslim who befriend unbelievers will abide in hell.] " (Qu'ran 5:80}

"Let not the believers Take for friends or helpers Unbelievers rather than believers: if any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah," (Qu'ran 3:28)

"O you who believe! do not take for intimate friends from among other than your own people… they love what distresses you…." {Qu'ran 3:18)



Keffiyeh kid, Irish PSC

 "O ye who believe! Choose not your fathers nor your bretheren for friends if they take take pleasure in disbelief rather than faith." [ie: Even family members should not be friend if they do not submit to Islam.} (Qu'ran 9:23) *

Also in the Qu'ran, Muhammed curses the Jews and turns them into pigs and monkeys. (Suras 2:62-65, 5:59-60, and 7:166)

Iran routinely executes, tortures and persecutes Baha'is, Sunnis and Kurdish minorities.

Turkey continues to harass and persecute its Alevis, Kurds, Zoroastrians and other minorities. How many Christians or Jews, for example, are in its government?

In both Saudi Arabia and Iran, women and homosexuals are stripped of their rights as the United Nations grants Saudi Arabia a seat on the UN Human Rights Council and Iran with a seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

In Lebanon, Palestinians are banned from working in many professions.

Egypt continues to persecute its Coptic Christians and torch their churches.

Jordan last year revoked the citizenship of thousands of Jordanian Palestinians, and still denies citizenship to Jews.

Iraq continues to persecute and murder members of its Christian Assyrian population.

Yet Israel is the only country constantly to be singled out for opprobrium by groups such as the IAW. If its organizers were truly interested in human rights, going from worst to best, wouldn't a better starting point be to hold an Arab Apartheid Week?'

http://www.hudson-ny.org/1937/arab-apartheid-week

Yes, indeed.  Attack is the best form of defence.

Some Home Truths for Sydney's Boycott Derangement Syndrome Brigade

Sydneysider Shirlee Finn (pictured, who I'm proud to say is a frequent commenter on this blog and to whom I've often had occasion to tip my hat) gave the BDS fanatics of Sydney's Marrickville and Randwick councils a piece of her mind at a council meeting this week.  As the antipodean news service J-Wire reports ( http://www.jwire.com.au/news/silence-shirley-good-luck/15876#more-15876) “attempts by the Mayor to cut her back fell foul of Shirley's persistence and determination.... Randwick Council had voted against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions but the three Greens members who voted for it were seeking a rescission of the motion.”

Shirlee Finn told J-Wire: “I had to shout down Greens Mayor Murray Marson to be heard. In fact, there was a lot of heated arguments as to whether I should have been allowed to speak…and I am a ratepayer. He first interjected at line six of my speech but instead of making me nervous, it just inspired me. Half way through my speech he asked me how much longer I was going to take and I told him ‘for as long as it takes and for as long as you keep quiet’”.

The motion remained pass. Marrickville councillors Victor Macri and John Hanna who oppose the motion to implement BDS in the inner West municipality attended the Randwick meeting.

This is what Shirlee Finn had to say:

'I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, the Cadigal people and pay my respects to elders past and present

On December 14th 2010, the Greens-led Marrickville Council chose to support the BDS, a rapidly growing global organisation, whose basic agenda is the destruction of the State of Israel. Whose founder openly speaks of a Two State Solution as being “A Palestine next to a Palestine, rather than a Palestine next to an Israel”.

They showed their support by passing a Motion, to boycott all goods made in Israel, prohibit cultural exchanges, sporting and academic institutions. Which so far has taken many staff, countless hours to begin enforcing .

Surely, the money spent so far by Marrickville Council, in their attempted boycott of Israel, would have been better used within the Municipality .

Councillors Macri and Hanna, the two councillors who voted against the motion, are here with us this evening. I ‘d would like to personally thank you both very much for being here and for your steadfast support in opposing this motion and for your help, not only to me but to the Community also

In light of Marrickville’s motion, ouncillors at Randwick passed a Motion against them and in support of Israel, which passed by 9 votes to 3.

The three being the Greens, who in response chose to put in a Rescission Motion.

Marrickville Council, pushed by the NSW Greens agenda, and now followed by Randwick Greens, have chosen to support a group whose aim is the destruction of Israel,. and have done so in the run-up to an election, guaranteeing even more publicity for the foul antisemitic agenda of the BDS.,

That both Marrickville and Randwick Greens, would even consider making such an ill advised decision, when their own Federal party commits them to a policy of dialogue and reconciliation towards the Israeli-Palestinian situation, is a stunt of deplorable taste..even for them

Let’s remind ourselves that Israel is a small democratic state, occupying one sixth of 1% of the entire Middle East, it’s barely one third of the size of Tasmania.

Yet in spite of recent events, it remains the only beacon of democracy in the Middle East,.

It enshrines freedom of speech, a free press and a State whose citizens live under the rule of law.

It’s the only state in the Middle East, where people of all religions can practice their faith freely and openly.

It’s the only state in the Middle East, where homosexuals are free to live without fear of persecution, or indeed execution.

It’s a state, which only today, has been the first country to set up a field hospital in Japan.

In short, it’s the state in the Middle East which resembles our own values and with whom Australia has long stood side by side, as a friend and ally

Yet it’s the only state which the Marrickville and Randwick Greens, want to be shunned by our community.

It’s a case of irresponsible, student-style politics of the most opportunistic kind

Shame on you Greens.

The job of Local Government, is just that, taking care of local issues and maintaining much needed services in the local area for the community, regardless of race or religion."'

Shame on the Greens indeed, Shirlee.  But good on yer, girl!  You're a star!

A Partial Victory for Truth and Justice

Remember the bold-as-brass misleading travel ad about which I posted in January?  The one that claimed that Palestine extends from the river to the sea?  Reminder: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/01/travellers-tall-tale-palestine-lies.html

Well, the adjudication has finally been done by the Advertising Standards Authority, and a partial victory for truth and justice is the outcome.

To quote Honest Reporting:

'The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has finally issued its ruling following many complaints. While the ASA did not agree with all of the issues raised by us and a number of other organizations, it did, however, rule the advert to be misleading on the following grounds:

We considered, however, that the line “From the famous cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, and Gaza … Palestine lies between …” suggested that the situation and recognition of those cities as being part of Palestine was universally accepted. Because that was not the case, we concluded that the ad was misleading.

The ASA concluded:

The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Travel Palestine to ensure their ads did not suggest that it was universally accepted that locations were part of Palestine when that was not the case.

So it seems that the ASA is consistent in its view that while Jerusalem may not be part of Palestine, it is also not part of Israel. Unsurprising considering that the ASA previously, in an appalling decision, forced the Israel Government Tourist Office to withdraw an ad that featured Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, effectively banning Israel from including the Western Wall in any tourism advertising.'

Read more here: http://honestreporting.com/travel-palestine-ad-watchdog-rules-against/

Beware the Lies of March

It’s March, and a grotesque annual event known as Israel Apartheid Week will soon be upon us. Ever since the end of the white supremacist apartheid (Afrikaans for separateness) regime that existed in South Africa from 1948-93 the fascist left and its foolish cohorts have been gunning for Israel, singling out Israel, the State of the Jews, the culmination of Zionism, the liberation movement of the Jewish People, for obloquy and censure, unremittingly, obsessively, insanely, evilly – and racistly. The aim is to delegitimise the Jewish State – to make it a pariah among the nations – and to ensure its ultimate demise.

Bizarre, is it not? That a tiny country –  the size of Wales or Tasmania or New Jersey –  and occupying just one-sixth of one per cent of the land occupied by the Arab powers, a tiny country that is still the only true democracy in the Middle East, should be the focus of such relentless scrutiny and hostility?

Thus some of the most corrupt and inegalitarian countries in the world, including those which deny basic rights and freedoms to women, to foreign workers, and to members of minority faith, were responsible for the obscene United Nations resolution of 1975 that equated Zionism with racism.

And although that infamous resolution has since been rescinded (thanks in no small measure to the initiative of Australian Zionist leader Mark Leibler, brother of the great Isi Leibler who is so consistently a prophet for our time) the repellent characterization of Zionism as racism persists.

That zealous promoter of replacement theology and inveterate critic of Christian Zionism Stephen Sizer, an Anglican clergyman in Surrey, has been quoted as saying that Israel is “fundamentally an apartheid state because it is based on race” and “even worse than South Africa,” and that it too will hopefully be “brought to an end internally by the rising up of the people.”

What vile, shameful rot. In fact, it's so mendacious and so outrageous that I will go so far as to label it racist. South African apartheid was based upon the premise that white people by virtue of their genes are inherently superior to black people.  Yet in striking contrast to that twisted philosophy Israel consists of Jews of all skin colours. And whereas non-whites in South Africa were denied civil rights, in Israel non-Jews are equal before the law.

The Arab minority in Israel (20 percent of the country’s total population) enjoy all the rights of citizenship. One of the best-educated Arab populations in the Middle East, it, like the Druze, has representatives in the Knesset, and elsewhere in public life.

Israel, from the outset in 1948, became the first country in the Middle East in which Muslim women were entitled to vote. In vast swathes of the Middle East women are still treated almost as sub-human, yet for reasons best known to themselves Western women in their thousands ignore the plight of those women, and concentrate instead on vilifying Israel, where women are as free as any in the developed world.

The so-called “apartheid wall” is a favourite metaphorical target of their ire, in common with their anti-Israel menfolk. Yet, as I showed in a previous post, Israel’s wall (in reality mainly a fence) is a security barrier that has many counterparts in the world http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/11/which-wall-would-that-be.html.

Its purpose, which it has served admirably, is to prevent terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet it alone preoccupies the left and other critics of Israel, who evidently believe that Israelis are not entitled to defend themselves as other peoples are.

The scene above is apartheid.  So is the scene below.

You won't find discrimination against minority religions in Israel:

Nor against non-heterosexuals:

And as for Apartheid Week, how about this?

Or this?

Not even a squeak of protest out of the anti-apartheid crowd, eh?  Now isn't that strange!

Hen am levadad yishkon uvagoyim lo yitchashav ("Lo, it is a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations") declares the Torah (Numbers, 23:9).

Whatever interpretation religious commentators put on that phrase, politically, in our day, during these dark and troubling times through which we are passing, it has a familiar resonance.  It invokes the spectre of antisemitism, which we in the West had once so naively, so optimistically, yet so naturally assumed had been laid to rest by the Nazis' demonstration of the depths of degradation and depravity to which that unfathomable disease called Jew-hatred can lead.

How wrong – how unpredictably wrong – we were.

Make no mistake: as Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University has observed, “Labeling Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ is the embodiment of the new anti-Semitism that seeks to deny the Jewish people the right of equality and self-determination among the nations”.

See also: http://walloflies.org/
And, of course, h/t to Elder of Ziyon for most of the great posters I've reproduced here.

“Israel is under the most profound, even existential siege... We, the world’s civilians, are now all Israelis.”

Professor Emerita Phyllis Chesler, who’s a well-known op-ed columnist, gave an interview to Israel National News New York correspondent Fern Sidman on 16th February in Toronto, where Dr Chesler was attending the conference entitled “When Middle East Politics Invade Campus,” organised by Advocates for Civil Liberties. The conference focused on the continuing demonization of Israel on campus and in the media.

Here’s what Phyllis Chesler told Fern Sidman:

‘As I first wrote in 2001-2002, the new antisemitism also consists of a rather frightening, genocidal anti-Zionism. The global demonization of Israel has gathered such speed and force that it could, potentially – it is certainly meant to – delegitimize and destroy the Jewish state. In 2005, Iran’s Ahmadinejad said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” In 2006, he said that the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime” and that Israel would “soon be wiped out.” No one did anything.

Now, in 2011, signs and placards in Cairo, including the many effigies of Hosni Mubarak, bore Stars of David; Mubarak was accused of being a Zionist – the worst epithet imaginable. President Ahmadinejad congratulated the triumphant Egyptians. saying: “Despite all the West’s complicated and Satanic designs…a new Middle East is emerging without the Zionist regime and U.S. interference..."

Israel is under the most profound, even existential siege.

On February 13, 2011, the Israeli government urged Israelis to return home from the Sinai for fear “that the peninsula will become a launching pad for terror attacks as Egyptian police abandon their posts.” Thus, Israel is now surrounded by Hamas in Gaza, Iran’s Hizbullah in Lebanon, potentially the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the various Islamist and jihadist groups on the West Bank.

In addition, let’s not forget that in the early years of the Intifada, Israeli civilians were murdered and maimed in huge numbers. Had the equivalent happened in the United States it would have instantly launched World War IV.

Please remember that the women in Tahrir Square were mainly wearing serious hijab and even niqab. They are already pro-Islamist. According to a June 2010 Pew Research opinion survey of Egyptians, it stated that, “Fifty nine percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics….Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion."

What will it mean that such a population can vote? Will the vote be any different than the vote which elected Hamas in Gaza? Without the necessary precursors: the rule of law, a constitutional system of checks and balances, the separation of mosque and state, freedom of religion, a free press, education, women’s rights, human rights, a modern economic base, etc. the vote does not mean that democracy as we know it exists.

The [western] campuses have become increasingly and aggressively anti-Israel and pro-Islam. Today, anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism. “Brownshirt” behavior rules the day. Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents are met with menace, if they are invited to speak at all and pro-Israel truth tellers are not even invited to speak.

Israel is not an apartheid nation. Muslim countries persecute non-Muslim minorities, Israel doesn't persecute non-Jews. The Arab Middle East is “judenrein,” Arab Christians are under siege there. Say this on most campuses, as I have, and you will be jeered, booed, possibly physically menaced, certainly demonized afterwards as a “racist” and “Islamophobe.” You will lose your publishing contacts and your former feminist political world. You will not be invited to speak by Women’s Studies programs.

My work on Islamic gender apartheid has been attacked in these quarters. But Islamic gender apartheid is a human rights violation and cannot be justified in the name of cultural relativism, tolerance, anti-racism, diversity, or political correctness. The battle for women's rights is central to the battle for Europe and for Western values. Radical feminists prefer not to see it..

Based on an American population of approximately 310 million, the Israeli civilian death count [at the hands of radical Islamists] is the equivalent of 48,700 Americans killed by terrorists on our own soil, in pizza parlorus, on buses, at Passover sedorim, in our beds. According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, between 2001 and 2007, 8,342 Israelis were wounded by terrorist attacks, including 5,676 civilians.This is the equivalent of 340,000 wounded Americans.

The politically correct line is that Israel, tiny Israel, is the “Nazi, Apartheid state.” Only Orwell would understand this misuse of language, this reversal of logic, which is meant to confuse and brainwash people. Such brainwashing has worked. Sixty years of Soviet and Arab League activism and Saudi monies have accomplished the unbelievable. Israel is not only the “bad guy,” it is the “very worst bad guy” in the entire universe.

We, the world’s civilians, are now all Israelis. The same world which refused to stop the airplane hijackings and suicide killers which blew up countless Israeli civilians has now inherited this whirlwind. As they say: It may start with the Jews but it never ends there.’
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/news.aspx/142432

Western Wets and their Penchant for Palestine

I’ve remarked more than once that The Australian is the national newspaper Down Under that’s most consistently fair to Israel. For a start, it has the perspicacious, pro-Israel columnist Greg Sheridan, who’s been with the paper for many years. Now, it’s proved its credentials yet again with a superb article by Brendan O'Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, entitled “Palestine an obsession of radical West, not Arabs”.

Tearing into the execrable John Pilger (an Aussie, I regret to say), O’Neill goes on to observe that while there was a dearth of anti-Israel placards in Tahrir Square,

‘on the pro-Egypt demonstration in London on Saturday [I assume he means the one sponsored by Amnesty International – see the video below], there was a sea of Palestine placards. "Free Palestine", they said, and "End the Israeli occupation". The speakers had trouble getting the audience excited about events in Egypt, having to say on more than one occasion: "Come on London, you can shout louder than that!" Yet every mention of the word Palestine induced a kind of Pavlovian excitability among the attendees. They cheered when the P-word was uttered, chanting: "Free, free Palestine!"

This reveals [continues O'Neill] something important about the Palestine issue. In recent years it has moved from the realm of Arab radicalism, where Egyptians and other peoples frequently demanded the creation of a Palestinian state, and has instead become almost the exclusive property of Western middle-class radicals, such as Pilger.

Emptied of its nationalist vigour and militancy, the Palestine problem, it seems, is now of little immediate interest to protesting Arabs and is instead the ultimate cause célèbre for Western liberal campaigners who like nothing more than having a victimised people they can coo over.

The power and allure of Palestine in Western radical circles is extraordinary. Palestine is the only issue they get excited about. But there is nothing progressive in their pro-Palestine fervour. It is not driven by future-oriented demands for economic development in a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank or Gaza. Instead it is driven by a view of Palestinians as the ultimate victims, the hapless and pathetic children of the new world order, who need kindly, wizened Westerners to protect them from Big Bad Israel.....

For these historically ignorant campaigners, Israelis are the New Nazis and Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto. As the title of a recent talk in London put it: "A New Hitler for a New Age? The Rise of Israeli Terror."

Palestinian pitiers have no time to think about the inconvenient fact that Hamas is an intolerant political entity that has no time for gay rights or women's equality. Instead, everything gets reduced to a Narnia-style story of wicked witches v happy fauns, because this is ultimately about providing vacuous-feeling Westerners with some much-needed momentum in their lives, not about untangling a messy political reality.

It's very revealing that Palestine has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time. With the Palestinian people somewhat deflated, the Palestine issue can become perfect political fodder for the victim-oriented, fancy-dress radicals of the modern West.’

Read all of Brendan O’Neill’s article here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/palestine-an-obsession-of-radical-west-not-arabs/story-e6frg6zo-1226006572220

First the Bitter (More Campus Antisemitism) ... then the Sweet (videos)

Mike Prysner, an American war veteran, is becoming something of a celebrity on the anti-Iraq War and Israel-bashing lecture circuit. Recently, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day,  he was at Birmingham University in the UK –  where he told his hosts, the Friends of Palestine, that  Gaza is “quite literally [sic!] one massive concentration camp”, where Palestinians are “killed with impunity” just like Jews under Nazism:

Read more about Prysner's talk and the controversy it provoked here:
http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=207586

If you’d care for something sweet, after that repulsive taste of hyperbolic hate, "Almonds and Wine" might delight your tastebuds (hat tip: reader Shirlee):

'Where is the "J'Accuse"?': Binyamin Netanyahu's Yom HaShoah Speech in the Knesset

Here, in English translation, are Bibi's eloquent reflections this week on the Holocaust and its contemporary implications, especially as regards antisemitism and the Iranian nuclear threat (hat tip: Jonathan Hoffman http://www.thejc.com/blogpost/holocaust-memorial-day-bibis-speech-knesset)

'Have the lessons of the Holocaust been learned?

For us, the Jewish people, the answer is yes.

For the rest of the world, the answer is no, or at least not yet.

Today, 66 years after the horror, we are here, in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of our nation. We, the representatives of the Jewish nation, are holding a special ceremony to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The lesson that we have learned, first of all, is that we are here, in our sovereign country, in our capital city.

We have learned another important lesson, probably the most crucial lesson to be learned from the atrocity, from the chain of atrocities that brought about one much worse; this has continued for hundreds and thousands of years, since we lost our country and our sovereignty, and since we lost our capability to defend ourselves. The lesson learned was that we had to restore the capacity of the State and the army for self-defense.

This lesson was understood by Herzl even before the great atrocity took place. He foresaw it, and we implemented it.

But there is one other lesson. At the end of the Holocaust, there were 11 million Jews in the world. Before it, there were 18 million.

Even at a very slow rate of natural increase of the population, there should have been almost 30 million Jews in the world, but in fact, there are only 13.5 million; much less, half of what there should be. This did not happen by physical loss; it happened because of assimilation and the loss of identity.

The only place where the Jewish people has grown is here, in Eretz Yisrael, in the State of Israel. We have continuous substantial and blessed growth. There is no nation that could live on a demographic pin head. Therefore, while cultivating our country, we must continue to encourage aliyah, bringing Jewish people to Israel, and to prevent their assimilation abroad. All the projects that we operate - Birthright, Masa and also Moreshet - are aimed at our young adults and also young Jews abroad. They are essential elements in assuring our future.

Have we learned the lesson? The answer is yes. Has the world learned the lesson? Well, I think one thing is clear: the fact that global antisemitism is renewing and expanding is obvious. If anyone thought that antisemitism stopped after World War II and the Holocaust, it is now evident that it was only a hiatus. The same forces that you mentioned joining together, share a new/old antisemitism with the world, and so we must fight it, globally too. For that, I congratulate my friend Silvan Shalom, who, when serving as Foreign Minister, brought about an important United Nations resolution - marking this day, a resolution which was adopted by the UN.

This resolution is indeed implemented in many countries, which is an important achievement and in many ways also unique, at least in the ability to propose an Israeli draft resolution to this organization, which I am well familiar with, I spent a long time there. It was a milestone. But I still ask: does the world that condemns that antisemitism also condemn this antisemitism?

Every now and then, very feebly - it isn't just antisemitism; it is the regime - a member country of the UN, the regime of ayatollahs - stands up and knowingly and openly calls for the annihilation of at least another six million Jews, without even a hint of pretence. And nobody says a thing. Well, that's not exact. Here and there a comment might be heard, but where is the anger, the outrage? Where is the outcry? Where is the "J'accuse?" I'm not asking about us. We are here; we've learned our lessons. But where is the global uproar that should have risen from advanced communities around the world in response to explicit declarations of genocide, of exterminating a people, that same people! [My emphasis]

We must be honest with each other. Diplomacy is, first and foremost, identifying the situation as it is. If we want to change it, we must understand it. And we have a very disturbing historical phenomenon. I don't think that it is only hard for us, but for all civilized people, all civilized peoples, who allow such an affliction, such statements, such savagery, barbarism and primitivism to be uttered and spread. It is said; it spreads, becomes acceptable, commonplace, and always prepares the ground for the next action and also prevents those actions that will not take place.

I am aware that there are many leaders and good-hearted, conscientious people around the world. I know that they think what I think. I know that in their hearts, they tell themselves what I am saying today from this podium.

However, that will not suffice. Because in the face of this regime, that calls for our annihilation, and arms itself with weapons of mass destruction in order to fulfill its nefarious intentions, there should be a much stronger protest. This makes me somewhat disheartened, my friend Silvan.

I was in that institution, I served in it as the representative of Israel. One day I heard that there were rumours about a file about Waldheim, who was then President of Austria. It might have been the Secretary-General of the UN. The Secretary-General said he had a profile about a war criminal in some UN archive.

What was this archive? It turned out that there was a war criminal archive instituted by Churchill and the Allies during the war to collect material against Nazi criminals and their collaborators. They gathered the information, and listened and discussed and prepared the files and at the end of the war they took these files, brought them to the UN, and locked them in the basement, where they just lay for decades.

I asked if I could go in there, and they said "No." I asked why, and was told that I needed the consent of all the allied countries, 18 or 19 countries, I think, and there was no such approval. Well, it took me a year until I got the okay and was taken to the archive.

It wasn't exactly in the basement, it was on the first floor of a UN building somewhere in New York. I walk in and see boxes upon boxes; I go to 'W,' pull out the box: Waldheim, Kurt, and various notes. My hair stood on end (I had more hair then). Horrible things, lying there, hidden for dozens of years. I look at the next file (I didn't start taking boxes out, it was the same box): Birkenau 1944, records of exterminations, the death marches, trains, the SS, it's all documented. 1944, but I think I also saw files that referred to 1943.

My friends, these 18 countries, perhaps the best statesmen in history, distinguished men, truly great men - they knew. They knew in real time, and not from this particular testimony that I have just mentioned. There are plenty of testimonies: terrible things that are very hard to read. They knew, but they did not act.

Why did they not act? Because they were busy fighting the major battle against the Nazis, which was their main concern. But how hard would it have been to bomb the railway tracks leading to the death camps? When you go there, and many of you have been there - I was there with some of you, several times - you see they could have bombed the camps. They were already bombing that awful chemical plant only seconds away. They would only have needed to tilt the plane a bit and could also have bombed the ramp and two incinerators, and the tracks. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to their war effort. They knew and they did nothing.

Today they are very aware of it. They know, they hear, they see, they photograph. You don't need special intelligence, you only need to turn on the television, hear the news, read the newspaper. Will they act? Will they talk? Will they really talk? Will they attack? Will they condemn?

The Iranians say that it's against the Zionists, anti-Zionism. It was Martin Luther King who burst that bubble better than anyone else. He said, and I quote: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking antisemitism!"

Martin Luther King. That's right. So that's what the Iranians say. But this is the truth. It is not only a threat against us, because it always begins with the Jews but never ends with the Jews. The hatred of Jews kindles an overall fire, and I expect that on this day, when I applaud the world for marking the most heinous crime in world history and the history of our people which was perpetrated against our people - I hope others will also learn the lesson. We already have.

I expect the world to learn the lesson and start fighting in words and in deeds against the new antisemitism. That is what I expect and I am certain, my friends, that you expect the same.'

On the Wings of Ignorance about Israel

“Symbolic of the political problems that impact the environment is that when Israel sought to designate the Palestine sunbird (Cinnyris osea) as its national bird, it had to be pointed out that it was already the official bird of Palestine,” opines a travel writer on her blog (which I’m not going to link to on principle!).  “Both have issued stamps depicting this lovely little bird. It seems that Israel wants everything that would be Palestine’s: as much of its land as it can pepper with settlements, control of its water, control of the Palestinian people to move about their land  –  and now, their national bird.”

 The bird’s not flightless – its habitat is not confined to “Palestine”. In fact, it gets as far as Africa. Yet big bad Israel has stolen it. Go figure!

For me, that claim in the top paragraph is symbolic of the widespread ignorance about the history of the land the Romans dubbed “Palestine”, an ignorance that informs and propels the present-day trend towards the delegitimisation of Israel.

This was brought home to me yesterday morning, when a neighbour of mine – who is certainly not in the delegitimiser camp, but confesses to “sitting on the fence” owing to lack of knowledge about “who’s right and who’s wrong, Israel or the Palestinians” – told me that although she’d regularly attended Christian Sunday School, and had studied “Religious Instruction” for her A levels and remembered that there had been two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, she’s none too familiar with the history of the area after biblical times. She hadn’t realized, until I mentioned it, that the name Palestine came from Philistia, and was imposed on Judea by the Romans as a way of emphasizing to the Jews that their land was well and truly conquered.

If a person like that confesses to being confused and ignorant, I thought to myself, what hope for those who have hardly if ever opened a Bible in their lives.

Once upon a time, owing first to King Henry VIII’s policy of placing the Bible in English translation in every parish in England, and the Bible in Welsh in every parish in Wales, Englishmen and Welshmen grew up with a close acquaintanceship with the travails and triumphs of biblical Israel. This process intensified after the publication – 400 years ago this year – of the King James version, with the glorious inspirational language that has become part of Britain’s literary inheritance.

Foreign travellers and settlers – among them the Bohemian scholar Dr Abraham Benisch, an important figure in the nineteenth-century Jewish press in England, marvelled at the Bible’s centrality in the minds of ordinary English folk. I’ve said it before, and most likely I’ll say it again – the impact of the Bible influenced a philosemitic strand among the British, one that was not invariably tied up with missionary activity. We see it in the decision of Cromwell and the Puritans formally to admit Jews to England in 1656. We see it in the decision of Lloyd George and his Cabinet to promulgate the Balfour Declaration.

Today, the Christian faith is in crisis. School assemblies (compulsory for all children whose families adhered, at least nominally, to the Established Church) at which Christian hymns were sung and biblical passages read are a thing of Britain’s past. Many children have absolutely no knowledge of the history of the “Holy Land” whatsoever

Indeed, they have almost no knowledge of the history of their own country, without which they can hardly be expected to make informed decisions.  But their EU masters prefer things that way.

 And so, they’re ripe for indoctrination, learning as they do from dodgy media reports that (thanks to the infiltration of West-hating lefties imbued with pro-PLO propaganda) control the agenda, and in the post-Apartheid area in South Africa peddle Israel (that bastion of the Western values they so despise) as the world’s number one baddie.

Thus we have shrill-voiced youths barely out of short trousers chanting the obscenity that begins “From the River to the Sea ...” ignorant of the facts of the region and the conflict, screaming their support for genocidal antisemitic Hamas, and holding signs that they seem to think depict a once-sovereign country called Palestine that was snatched by those pesky "Zionists", but which were in reality designed by Jews in the Yishuv, not by the so-called “Palestinians” who back then were known, like their brethren outside the Mandate, as Arabs.

 And thus we have ads like this one that’s appeared in the London Daily Mail (a rightwing populist newspaper but no true friend to Israel), touting a tour of the “Holyland” it’s arranged, managing to omit the dread word “Israel” altogether, and using as the symbol of the land’s sanctity, not a Jewish or a Christian symbol but a Muslim one.

(Hat tip: http://zalmi.blogspot.com/2011/01/daily-mail-joins-boycott.html)

Cowardice? Malice? Ignorance? Who, in today’s climate, can know for sure?

Professor Dina Porat on anti-Israel rhetoric, Muslim propaganda and Antisemitism

Writes the blogger IsraeliGirl:

"Anti-Semitism is on the rise fueled by growing anti Israel rhetoric. Just a few weeks ago, a former European Commissioner and a prominent Dutch politician, Frits Bolkestein, called on orthodox Jews to leave Holland because of "the anti-Semitism among Dutchmen of Moroccan descent, whose numbers keep growing". Reading this statement propelled me to learn more about the state of Anti-Semitism in Europe and its connection to the efforts to de legitimize Israel's right to exist. I asked Professor Dina Porat, the founder and former head of the institute for the study of contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism in Tel Aviv University, for an interview to explore the connection between Anti-Israel rhetoric, Muslim propaganda and anti -Semitism."

To access this must-read interview with Professor Porat, and to see graphic examples of antisemitism, go to
http://israeligirl.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/01/anti-israel-rhetoric-muslim-propaganda-and-anti-semitism-interview-with-professor-porat.html
and for another example of Israel being written out of a travel ad in the United Kingdom see
http://zalmi.blogspot.com/2011/01/daily-mail-joins-boycott.html

A Traveller’s Tall Tale – “Palestine lies between the Mediterranean Coast and the Jordan River”. This false advertising should be protested

We’re becoming all too familiar with the fabrications that the so-called Palestinians (known as Arabs until Arafat’s clever rebranding of them) are the “indigenous people” of Israel, and that Jesus was a "Palestinian". We’re all too familiar, as well, with the impression spread by propagandists, be they deliberately malicious or naively ignorant, that Palestine (in truth a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire and then under a British Mandate) was an autonomous state snatched by Zionists.

And now another step in today’s ruthless campaign of undermining and delegitimising the sovereign state of Israel has been taken in the form of a mendacious advertisement from the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities that’s appeared in Traveler, an American magazine in the National Geographic stable.

This brazen distortion of reality misleads in several ways. It implies that Palestine is a sovereign country of which Jerusalem is an integral part, and that the country extends from the Jordan to the Mediterranean – from the river to the sea, to quote the notorious much-used Israel-delegitimising chant. It effectively dupes the unwary traveller by promoting sites and facilities that are not, in fact, in the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

In 2009, a poster (pictured below) for the Israeli Government Tourist Office appeared in London Underground Stations. Under the headline “Experience Israel” and superimposed on the image of a boy snorkelling near dolphins, was the text "Few countries pack so much variety into such a small space as Israel. The energy and excitement of Tel Aviv and the rich cultural experiences of the Dead Sea and Jerusalem with the sun and relaxation of Eilat make Israel the ideal multi-centre break".

Complaints swiftly followed the poster’s appearance – 600 to Transport for London and 444 (two of those from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jews for Justice for Palestinians) to the Advertising Standards Authority. The complainants objected to the advertisement’s implication that Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights were internationally recognised as part of Israel.

Their complaint was upheld, the Advertising Standards Authority banning the advertisement from being used again “in its current form” and stating: “We noted that the map showed border lines for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but we also noted that those border lines were faintly produced and difficult to distinguish on the map itself. We understood that the borders and status of the occupied territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights were the subject of much international dispute, and because we considered that the ad implied that those territories were part of the state of Israel, we concluded that the ad was misleading.”

Thanks in no small way to the PSC's briefing of its members, that poster was in fifth place in the Advertising Standards Authority’s list of Top 10 Most Complained About Ads of 2009. Only one other in the list had the complaints against it upheld.

What, I wonder, will be the fate of the false advertising in Traveler.

The Zionist Federation of the UK suggests that people complain here: http://www.asa.org.uk/Complaints/How-to-complain.aspx

For although Traveler is an American magazine, the Advertising Standards Authority is empowered to stop copies of foreign magazines in the UK from running advertisements against which it rules – irrespective of where the media’s proprietorship is based.

You can see a larger version of the offending ad here, by clicking on the image that appears:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm5wWaN1oW3PBYQJvvB380wuvjj-EMro6ZS1QOpc59gRnxWoeyUKDaEwZZK7sx-hE0SvT3rAjq8FqXIIXq91yNVWN6IGUwudPyINzmKsz7-Fy4ycD3SWneXvOmTYMOMlOv6OhgXhHrJwYJ/s1600/palestine-ad.jpg

Israel, Ignore at Own Risk: Melanie Phillips on How and Why Israel Must Win the Abdicated War for Public Opinion

In that searingly brilliant and courageous way of hers, Melanie Phillips, the renowned British columnist, broadcaster, and author of Londonistan and other trenchant analyses of the malaise and the challenges that the West faces today, gave an incisive and insightful address to the Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media on 30 December.

Entitled “The Challenge of Public Diplomacy vis-à-vis the Delegitimisation of Israel”, it identifies the “war of the mind being waged on a battleground [Israel] never even acknowledged it was on” – a war whose protagonists reach “across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes” as “nothing short of a multi-layered civilisational crisis”.

For example,

“In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel. ...

The west is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and reason. A society’s thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed and assumes to be true.”

Ms Phillips says, futher:

“Because of the dominant belief in multiculturalism, victim culture and minority rights, self-designated victim groups – those without power – can never do wrong while majority groups can never do right. And Jews are not considered a minority because – in the hateful discourse of today – Jews are held to be all-powerful as they ‘control’ the media, Wall Street and America.

So the Muslim world cannot be held responsible for blowing people up as they are the third world victims of the west; so any atrocities they commit must be the fault of their victims; and so the US had it coming to it on 9/11. And in similar fashion, Israel can never be the victim of the Arab world; the murder of Israelis by the Arab world must be Israel’s own fault."

And she warns:

"It cannot be stressed enough that the reason why those promoting genocidal bigotry are winning is that the western world has not sought to defeat them but instead has appeased them from the very start.

In Palestine under the British Mandate, when the Arabs used terrorist violence to frustrate the will of the League of Nations in restoring the Jewish home, Britain rewarded them by offering them part of the Jews’ legal and moral entitlement. When the Arabs started hijacking planes, the west’s response was to invite them to the UN to plead their cause.

And despite the Arabs’ repeated refused to accept the two state solution, offered in the 1930s, in 2000 and under Ehud Olmert and their current refusal to negotiate at all, America punishes Israel for not making enough concessions to them – while giving a free pass to those who still refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist.

It is astonishing that the west expects Israel to make any concessions to such attackers at all. After all, forcing a country which has endured more than six decades of existential siege to give any ground to its attackers amounts to forcing such a victim to surrender. This is expected by the civilised world of no other country."

While Ms Phillips does not discount the notion that giving back some land in the disputed territories might be in Israel's interests, she goes on to observe:

"But Israel and its defenders themselves have been crippled or cowed by the false analysis of the enemy’s narrative.

Even many of Israel’s friends spout the demonstrably absurd proposition that a Palestine state would solve the problem, that the impediment to a Palestine state is the ‘settlers’, but that Israel is not taking action to remove the ‘settlers’ – and so therefore they too inescapably agree that Israel is the problem.

Israel and its defenders have been fighting on the wrong battleground: the one that has been chosen by its enemies. The Arabs brilliantly reconfigured the Arab war of extermination against Israel as the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians.

That has transformed Israel from victim to aggressor – the reversal of reality which lies at the very heart of the western obsession with the ‘settlements’ and the territories.

Yet since Oslo, Israel has meekly gone along with this mad pressure. It has never said it is totally unconscionable. It has never put the all-important argument from justice on its own account. So it has allowed its enemies to appropriate this argument mendaciously as their own. But if Israel doesn’t make the case properly on its own behalf, how can anyone else do so?

To which Israel says realpolitik dictates it has to go along with the diplomatic game being played. But diplomatic realpolitik is what brought us all to this position – the brink of a terrible war with Iran which is treated by America with kid gloves while Israel is put under the cosh.

For the west to suck up to its enemies while bashing its friends like this is the diplomatic version of auto-immune disease. And eventually this disease will kill it.

What Israel has failed to recognise is that the battleground on which it is being forced to fight is not just military. It is also a battleground of the mind, and the strategy being used against it – and to which it needs to respond in kind – is psychological warfare.

The Arab and Muslim world long ago realised if it set the narrative in its own image, it would recruit millions of fanatics to its cause and also confuse and demoralise its victims. In this it has wildly succeeded.

There is therefore an overwhelming need for Israel to alter its strategy. Indeed, it needs to have a strategy.

And this brings us to perhaps the most difficult challenge in all of this – the fact that the role played by the Israel government is of critical importance. Unless it adopts the correct strategy, its defenders will remain crippled."

Ms Phillips prescribes the following, of which Israel and its supporters must take heed:

"So Israel and its defenders should be demanding of the world why it expects Israel alone to make compromises with people who have tried for nine decades to wipe out the Jewish presence in the land and are still firing rockets at it.

They should expose the pretence of Britain or European countries which claim to have Israel’s security needs at heart but forbid it from using military means to defend itself; and which – as did the British Government recently - turn Israeli self-defence against the jihadi lynch-mob on board the Turkish terror ship Mavi Marmara into an attack to be condemned, or demand the opening of the border with Gaza which would allow in arms to kill more Israelis.

Israel and its defenders should be asking why so-called friends in the west want a Palestine state, since once the IDF depart the disputed territories they will become in short order yet another Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist entity which will pose a further threat not just to Israel but to the west.

They should be asking why the EU is continuing to fund the genocidal incitement against Jews promoted by the Palestine Authority.

They should be asking so-called ‘progressives’ – including Jewish ‘progressives’ – why they support the racist ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a future state of Palestine.

They should be asking them why they are not marching against Hamas on account of its tyrannical oppression of Palestinians in Gaza. Why they are ignoring Arab and Muslim persecution of women and homosexuals.

Why they are not mounting a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Mahmoud Abbas’s PA and Hamas, on account of Abbas’s Holocaust denial and the clear evidence of continuation of Nazi Jew-hatred in a direct line of descent from predecessors who were Hitler’s supporters in Palestine.

As for western Israel-bashers, Israel and its defenders should accuse them not of Jew-hating motives that cannot be proved but of absurdities and contradictions and untruths they cannot deny. They should ridicule them, humiliate them, destroy their reputations; boycott them, not invite them to social gatherings, show them disapproval and contempt. Treat them as pariahs. Turn their own weapons against them.

They should be telling the Jews ‘own story of refugees and ethnic cleansing – the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab lands after 1948, and who now make up more than half of Israel’s population. It’s good to see that at last Israel is beginning to bring this to the world’s attention. In Britain virtually no-one knows about it. At a stroke it takes the ground from under the feet of those demanding the ‘right of return’ for Arabs.

They should be holding Arab and Islamic democracy weeks on campus, to expose the oppression and persecution within that world against women, homosexuals and others.

They should be singling out the Anglican church and the revival of ancient theological Jew-hatred being spread within the Anglican world by the Palestinian Christians of the Sabeel centre.

At the same time, they should be focusing on their true friends within the Christian world, not just in America but also in Africa and Asia where there is an enormous reservoir of goodwill towards Israel which could be mobilised into a global fighting force.

They should be campaigning against the UN and the hijacking of international law and human rights by anti-western, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian ideologues.

They should be confronting head-on the false claim that bigotry is confined to the right. They should be pointing the finger at the ‘progressive’ left to show how it is actually supporting the mortal enemies not just of Israel but the west.

And they should be making this case to Israelis themselves, to counter the delegitimisation and ignorance in Israeli universities and to educate the Israeli young in their own national history.

In other words, both Israel and diaspora Jews have to stop playing defence and go onto the offence. Israel has nothing to be defensive about or for which it needs to apologise. It is the enemies of Israel who are promoting injustice and the denial of international law and human rights. Playing defence intrinsically cedes ground to the enemy.

It is time for Israel and its defenders to stop conniving with that smokescreen for the war of annihilation being waged against Israel – the claim that the Middle East impasse would be solved by establishing a state of Palestine to which the settlements, and thus by extension Israel, are the obstacle. It is time for them to stop agreeing that the Jews are to blame for their own predicament.

Israel and its defenders need to make the argument from justice and reclaim that moral high ground from the enemies of Israel and the west, both at home – including within Israel – and abroad. It is those enemies who deny truth, justice and human rights. It is those enemies who should be in the dock. It is time to take the gloves off and put them there.

In short, Israel and its defenders must understand that the tsunami of bigotry against Israel sweeping the west is intimately related to Israel’s seriously flawed diplomatic strategy.

For years, Israel has been playing a defensive diplomatic game, which suggests inescapably that it has a case to answer. Such diplomatic cringing has badly undermined it and hugely strengthened its enemies, who are taking advantage of such weakness over and over again.

It’s time for Israel to realise that military campaigns against its enemies are not enough. It has to call time on its false friends too, and start fighting both these and its more obvious enemies on the battleground of the mind.”

Words of wisdom from a great lady! Read the entire address here: http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=789