"A Legacy of Pride, Strength & Peoplehood" (videos)

A couple of recent videos from StandWithUs:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMZDkU1tSr8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjwuhzXSsTI

"Your Future is Our Future": Bibi to the Arab citizens of Israel (plus more)

Meanwhile:

And, outside the Democratic National Convention, hate-filled ratbags screaming wretched slogans set the Israeli flag ablaze.

This must vex them:

"The World Has Hallucinated A Sabre-Toothed Tiger": Maureen Lipman on Israel-hatred

Here's the warm, witty and wonderful British actress Maureen Lipman speaking succinctly about the need for Jews to speak up on behalf of the traduced and heroic little nation that the BDSers love to hate:

And here's the eloquent Israeli Arab diplomat George Deek, speaking for half an hour before a pro-Israel London audience last week:

(StandWithUs videos)

"[BDSers] Don't Care For My People – They Just Hate Jews ... We Should Respect & Support Israel's Sovereignty ... as a Jewish State" (video)

Want a nice way to start the week?  Well, here's a video lasting about 38 minutes that really must be viewed, or at least listened to, from beginning to end. 

"I came to this part of Stockholm, where Israel is hated, at considerable risk to my life, to tell the truth," the exiled leader of the Palestinian Jordanians, Mudar Zahran, declares. ".... There have always been Jews in that Holy Land, for thousands of years ..."

A practising Muslim, the personable Mr Zahran has kind things to say about Jews and Israel, and harsh things to say about the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic terrorism, the Jordanian monarch, Arab dictatorships, and the BDS movement.

Snippets:

 "I have one word for them: 'shmucks'.  They don't care for my people – they just hate Jews" he says of the Boycott Israel brigade, for whom he has this message: "We are against you and we don't need you, because you are only hurting us and not the Israelis..."

"Israel has served as the airbag for the West... If they did not have Israel to fight, they would be fighting you.  We should respect and support Israel's sovereignty over all its land, as a Jewish State ..."

"Sooner or later, the weak King of Jordan is going to fall ... As a result we are going to have a Palestinian State for the first time ..."

Usurped Palestinian Sovereignty: "The Li[n]e Of Division"

"Palestine was the cradle of the most ancient cultures and civilisations.  Its Arab people were engaged in farming and building, spreading culture throughout the land for thousands of years," Yasser Arafat, applying several layers of gilding to the lily, told the UN General Assembly in his major address on 13 November 1974 denouncing Zionism and the Zionist Entity.

Subsequently, by themselves abandoning the term "Palestinian Arabs" in favour of "The Palestinians," Israelis handed Arafat a major public relations victory.  For they appear to concede that there was indeed a sovereign people by the latter name and accordingly reinforce a brilliant propagandistic makeover on the PLO's part that is a tool for Israel's delegitimisation.

Of course, despite the impression created by Arafat and his successors, there was never a sovereign people called "the Palestinians" and there was never a sovereign state called Palestine.

But try telling that to the myriad youths who, too ignorant of history to recognise the lie for what it is, have been conditioned to believe that there was, and add themselves to the ranks of the Palestine Solitary Campaign and comparable organisations.

And try telling that to their anti-Israel elders who should certainly know that when the First World War broke out, and for several centuries beforehand, Palestine was a backwater province of the Ottoman Empire ...

George Galloway, for example, in ranting and raving last month about British foreign policy in the Middle East, began with an attack on Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt and proceeded with the charge that Britain committed "the original sin" of "wiping their [the Palestinians'] country off the map," the only "country" in the Middle East to suffer such a fate.

And so it is that a rather nasty little video, featuring some well-known names among others, and recently translated into French for the benefit of gallic and francophone Israel-haters, was recently made by BDSers in Australia regarding what one participant contemptuously dubs "the so-called state of Israel" towards the  "indigenous people" of Palestine.  (It ends with references to "the line of division": hence my post title.)

The uploader of the video on YouTube notes:

"This video was made on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose sovereignty never ceded."

A way of emphasising (the lie of) usurped Palestinian sovereignty, presumably.

The video's dramatis personae (in order of appearance):

Mutulu "M1" Olugbala (of American rap duo Dead Prez);
Peter Manning (a former executive producer of the ABC current affairs programme Four Corners); Milan Ring;
Kareem Denis (British rapper Lowkey);
Tuva El-Shaikh;
Kerrie McGrath;
Fatima Mawas;
Awate Suleiman;
Antony Loewenstein (well, what a surprise!);
Anika Moeen;
Aamer Rahman

A perusal of the comments beneath the video on YouTube reveals more woeful mischievous ignorance, and the presence of this video will do little to halt the spread of such misconceptions among the young and impressionable.

Scottish Boycott Latest!

Remember SNP Councillor Jonathan McColl, the West Dunbartonshire Council bigwig who, as I posted a few days ago, labelled anti-Boycott protesters "extremists"?
Well, he's digging his heels in.

The misguided laddie has a personal blog, on which he has posted a personal statement denying the Boycott is antisemitic.

He also states, inter alia:

"West Dunbartonshire Council remains committed to our boycott of Israeli goods and our resolve has been strenthened by the torrent of vile abuse [and] threats of violence to our families that has come from people who claim to be peace loving people."

And he's also made an appearance on video... [Update: You can view it on my final blog for May, along with another video about the SNP Boycott!]
See http://www.cllrjmccoll.info/israel
(Hat tip: Emet)

Someone really should make a video for the West Dunbartonshire Council along the lines of this one, made for Marrickville Council in Sydney:

Britain's Trades Union Congress and the BDS Movement

The following article, entitled “The British Trade Union Movement, Israel, and Boycotts”, is by Ronnie Fraser, and has been issued by the Institute of Global Jewish Affairs. Ronnie Fraser is Director of the Academic Friends of Israel, which he founded in 2002. He is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway College in London, where his research focuses on the attitudes and policies of the British trade unions and the TUC toward Israel from 1945 to 1982. His essays include "Trade Union and Other Boycotts of Israel in Great Britain and Ireland" (2009), published online by the Institute of Global Jewish Affairs; "The Academic Boycott of Israel: Why Britain?" in Manfred Gerstenfeld, ed., Academics against Israel and the Jews (Jerusalem: JCPA, 2007); and "Understanding Trade Union Hostility towards Israel and Its Consequences for Anglo-Jewry," in Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmin, eds., A New Anti-Semitism? (London: JPR, 2003).

Writes Mr Fraser:

Over the past thirty years the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and member unions have regularly adopted resolutions containing anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian rhetoric. A whole generation of British left-wing trade union activists has been raised on a diet of conference motions whose only mention of Israel is in connection with its "brutality" and "oppression" of the Palestinian people. The current political position held by the leaders of Britain's working class reflects a historical bias and amnesia concerning the state of Israel.

At its 2010 Congress the TUC decided to strengthen ties with the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) and reinforce its BDS campaign against Israel. One outcome is that the TUC, which once encouraged peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, can no longer be considered a friend of Israel's trade union movement, the Histadrut.

The majority of the motions on Palestine that are submitted to annual union conferences in the UK tend not to represent the views of the general membership, but instead the political positions of the activists who are usually socialist and left-wing ideologues. This left-wing minority has made sure that in 2011 most of the major trade unions and the TUC have resolutions on their books supporting the BDS campaign against Israel as well as being affiliated to the PSC. //It is not clear whether the TUC will be as actively anti-Israeli as its PSC colleagues want it to be, especially in the current economic climate. The labor movement's priority for the foreseeable future is to concentrate on trying to save jobs and pensions especially in the UK public sector. Much will also depend on developments in the Middle East, and particularly the Israeli-Palestinian dynamics.

On the eve of the San Remo Conference in 1920, which formally recognized Britain as the mandatory authority for Palestine, the Labour Party and the TUC (Trades Union Congress), the representative body for the British trade union movement, signed a letter urging British prime minister David Lloyd George to accept the Palestine mandate and thereby make possible a Jewish national home.[1] Yet ninety years later, the TUC not only finds itself advocating sanctions against the Jewish state but is also on the brink of severing links with its fellow socialists in the Israeli labor movement and calling for the delegitimization of the state of Israel. The key moment in the changeover from support for the Jewish state to support for the Palestinian Arabs came in 1982 at the time of the First Lebanon War.

It is, however, abundantly clear that from the very beginning the TUC has given priority to British interests in the Middle East over its friendship with the Histadrut, the Israeli trade union movement. Over the past thirty years the TUC and the unions have regularly adopted resolutions containing anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian rhetoric, and a whole generation of British left-wing trade union activists has been raised on a diet of conference motions whose only mention of Israel is in connection with its "brutality" and "oppression" of the Palestinian people.

The current political position held by the leaders of Britain's working class unfortunately reflects a historical bias and amnesia concerning the state of Israel. They have disregarded the facts and are willing to boycott a country that was founded by socialist pioneers and was governed by a Labor Party for most of its history. They have forgotten that Israeli society has developed from one of the most successful socialist experiments in the world with its kibbutzim and cooperatives, as well as the strong part that the Histadrut played in the national economy. It was no wonder that in the 1950s and 1960s Israel was long seen as a role model for other newly independent, developing countries. What is clear is that it is political issues rather than trade union matters that have caused the current friction between the TUC and the Histadrut.

Britain's trade unions have always reflected the views of either the activists or the leadership. The consequence is that the majority of the motions on Palestine that are submitted to annual union conferences tend not to represent the views of the general membership, but instead the political positions of the activists who are usually socialist and left-wing ideologues. It is often these same activists who attend union conferences and vote on these motions, which decide the policy and future direction of the union.

Hence, this left-wing minority has made sure that in 2011 most of the major trade unions and the TUC have resolutions on their books supporting the global boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign directed at Israel as well as being affiliated to the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC). Hugh Lanning, PSC chairman and deputy General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, has said that:

 "The PSC is committed to not only building an effective campaign for boycotting settlement goods with the TUC, but also to work to take TUC policy further, together with individual unions, many of which already have policy supporting a full boycott."[2]

The PSC, as part of the global BDS campaign, supports the establishment of a Palestinian state and the right of return for all Palestinian refugees as well as campaigning for a full boycott of Israel, which includes an economic, academic, and cultural boycott until Israel "respects international law."[3] They also have called for full recognition of Hamas as the "democratic government of Palestine" and while not explicitly supporting Palestinian terrorism they refuse to oppose it, preferring instead to assert the right of the Palestinians to "resist occupation."

Israel, Zionism, and the Churches

This is an article by Professor Paul C. Merkley, an American academic who has authored several books on Christian attitudes to Jews. Written in 2005, and originally posted on the Israpundit blog, the article remains as timely today as it was then, in view of the complicity of some churches in the odious campaign of BDS against the Jewish State:

The present campaign of the churches is not about the wall nor about divestment: it is about Israel’s right-to-life.

At annual conventions of several of the major Christian denominations in the North America, Britain and Europe held during these last few months, statements have been written into the record calling upon Israel to dismantle her security barrier and declarations have been passed of intent to divest the denominations’ pension fund portfolios of investments in Israeli firms and other firms doing business with Israel.

Behind these many ostensibly disparate decisions is a well-organized campaign of contempt against Israel. In these past few weeks, and with these actions, the leadership of the major denominations has taken a coordinated step beyond hostility to a nation with a right to defend her good name to active engagement in the campaign to foreclose her right-to-life.

The present campaign first came to the surface with announcement by the Presbyterian Church (USA) at its General Assembly in July, 2004 of its intention "to have its Board of Pensions divest itself of investments in companies receiving one million dollars or more in profits per year from investments in Israel or that have invested more than one million dollars or more in Israel." Some truly prize-winning double talk was expended on that occasion by the Stated Clerk of the denomination in the effort to explain that this was really not as provocative as it sounded --that the divestment would be "phased and selective," unfolding by stages - as if that made a moral difference. In justification of its decision, the Presbyterians offered an efficient summation of the last half-century of history: "The occupation... has proven to be at the root of the evil acts committed against innocent people on both sides." Solution: "The occupation must end."

The Presbyterian Assembly (USA) is one of those denominations which our alert, group-thinking journalists still refer to as "mainstream" because they commanded the support of a majority of American Protestants half a century ago! Like the other "mainstreamers," the Presbyterians have suffered a steady decline in membership in our lifetime. The Presbyterian Church (USA), for example, had 5 million members in the 1920s - which made it the fifth-largest denomination, when the population of the United States was just over 100 million; it has around 3 million today - which makes it the tenth largest denomination when the population is around 300 million.) There are no doubt many reasons for this, but the one that screams out is that the leaders of these mainstream Protestant denominations have pursued courses of policy which do not have the support of their congregations. They have, in other words, succumbed to elitism: the leaders simply take their positions on public issues from academics in the universities and from the media elites, ignoring the views of their own parishioners.

For a while it seemed that there was sufficient unhappiness about this proposal of the Presbyterian leaders that it would be withdrawn quietly after a decent interval. Apart from everything else, divestment of healthy stocks at work in the ever-growing Israeli economy, could not be considered good financial stewardship -- especially since these very same denominations are losing members weekly (for quite other reasons, having to do with theology and moral philosophy) and consequently are suffering decline of the cash-flow upon which present salaries, not to mention future pensions, will depend. In the Universities (where they have Mathematics and Accounting Departments) the divestment mania crested and then declined, just about the time that the Churches got on board. But just since the beginning of this year the campaign has come back. This very month (August 2005) the Presbyterian Church (USA) announces that it will insist that four companies that it considers helpful to Israel in its occupation of Palestine stop doing business with Israel: millions of dollars of Church pension funds are said to be at stake. And now the United Church of Christ (USA) and the Episcopal Church (USA) have recently voted to consider actions along the same lines. These actions follow a declaration from the World Council of Churches (WCC) in February urging all member bodies to consider taking such actions. The Anglican Consultative Council, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Willams, voted unanimously in favour of divestment from Israel at their meeting in England June, 2005.

Episcopal Bishop Thomas Shaw of Massachusetts, who considers himself a supporter of Palestinian rights, has warned against these actions, on the ground that "the economics of Israel and Palestine are so closely intertwined that divestment is actually counterproductive for the Palestinian people." In the same vein, a group of Episcopal Bishops in New York, led by Bishop Mark S. Sisk, recently held a attended a press conference together with Rabbi Joseph Ptasnik, Executive Vice-President of the NY board of Rabbis, to express opposition to plan.

I have not dealt separately with the simultaneous campaign to compel Israel (through UN action) to dismantle her security wall. The two campaigns (dis and div) are different faces of the same project - which is to expose Israel to enemies whose weapons of choice, including recruitment of children as suicide-bombers, are exempted from criticism by the WCC and the many NGOs because they are considered the desperate feeble instruments of the disadvantaged. It is important, however, to recognize the manipulation involved in these two inter-locking campaigns.

Introduction of these resolutions is always preceded by the claim that the attention of these unbiased and non-political theologians has been drawn to these far-off issues by the workings of conscience. The denominational leaders who present themselves at their conventions as spokesmen for the Palestinian people inevitably have just returned from an all-expense-paid tour of the Palestinian churches - a tour which never includes briefing by Israeli political or military sources or (God forbid!) friendly visits to the pro-Zionist Christian organizations active in Jerusalem. The presenters at the conventions always speak of the sudden clarification of the moral issue which came upon them in the course of these intensive five-or-ten day tours to the front. (Doesn’t anyone remember the tours of the Vietnamese front by politicians in the 1960s?)

As soon as the opening speeches are made and the documents are introduced for discussion, a highly-effective cabal of despisers of Israel is already in place at the microphones as questions are now called from the floor. When a historian of the Twentieth Century reads the transcripts of the discussion taking place at these denominational conventions, he is reminded of the days of the Popular Front (the1930s), of those many emotion-charged conventions of the self-declared Friends of Peace where well-rehearsed single-issue zealots -- a small rudder directing a huge seagoing vessel --carried an agreed strategy to the floor while the rest of the delegates floated about asking each other what the issues were.

The full-time fomenters of this anti-Israel campaign are mainly associated with certain of the NGOs whose leadership is drawn in large part from Christian Arabs. Funding for these many NGOs comes from church groups in Europe and North America. Spearheading these efforts is the organization called Sabeel Liberation Theology Centre, Jerusalem, whose full-time director is the Rev. Naim Ateek, once Canon of St George’s Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem. Canon Ateek travels constantly. When I was researching my books and living in Jerusalem I tried repeatedly to secure interviews with him, but he has always either too busy or out-of-town -- in Cyprus, in Europe, in North America. Needless to say, costs of Canon Ateek’s heroic non-stop travels do not come out of Palestinian coffers but out of budgets of WCC and denominations who provide the settings for his anti-Israel conferences.

No pro-Israel speaker gets anywhere near the platform at a Friends of Sabeel Conference. I have proffered my credentials as a published academic scholar on the History of Zionism and of Christian attitudes towards Israel and have either been ignored, without the courtesy of acknowledgement, or given the stick-in- the-eye that the program is already filled, but thanks so much for your interest. I have undergone this humiliation locally, when the Anglican Church of Canada has sponsored its Friends of Sabeel meetings here in my home city of Ottawa.

Part of the problem is that nobody in the hierarchy of the denominations ever reads a book. The busy, always-traveling, always-at-meetings, always-talking leaders of the denominations do not seem to grasp the concept of a book as an extended argument, with sources and facts and ideas. For these technocrats, everything comes from brochures and goes directly into binders. In this company, pamphleteering is the beginning and the end of everything, scholarship counts for nothing.

Because they are not interested in books of history, they are not exposed to the complexities. Their repertoire comes from headlines, one-liners and slogans.