Islam & Jerusalem: Fact & Fable

It's not brand new, this talk by the eminent Israeli scholar of Islam Dr. Mordechai Kedar: "Jerusalem as a Muslim holy city is the oldest Fake News in history"

But the video's one for all seasons, and for those who haven't seen it, it's well worth watching. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hah5067AwF4

The eminent British scholar of Islam Professor Denis MacEoin observed of it:

"Kedar is spot on. One thing he does not mention is that by the time Muhammad and his followers went to Medina (in 622, the start of the Islamic calendar), Muslims were instructed to pray towards Jerusalem. But about 18 months later, a revelation came down from God, ordering them to turn about 180 degrees to pray towards Mecca, which they have done since then. In other words, Jerusalem lost its significance as the qibla (direction of prayer) and also as a site for pilgrimage. The Qur'an does not even mention Jerusalem or al-Quds, not even in the verses about the night journey to the 'furthest mosque' (masjid al-aqsa). As for the flying horse etc., that is mainly later legend. It's time these facts were presented in international fora (e.g. UNESCO) and that this and other Muslim claims (e.g. calling the Maarat Ha-Mechpela in Hebron 'Abraham's mosque', as if a mosque existed anywhere in the time of the patriarchs." [Emphasis added]

Hat tip: Vlad Tepes blog

Islam Exported: an Israeli journalist on the Muslim Brotherhood (video)

An interview by Yaron London with Zvi Yehezkeli on Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman and the Muslim Brotherhood.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSc1xOafwgU

Read more here

It will be noted that the eminent British scholar of Islam Professor Denis MacEoin has commented as follows beneath the video on Youtube: 

"I advise caution here. Many of the statements made by Muhammad ibn Salman in his Atlantic interview struck me as attempts to pull the wool over many people's eyes. For example, in the early section, he declared that 'Islam means peace' and that this was, in fact, a correct translation. As a fluent Arab speaker and reader, he knows perfectly well that 'Islam', which is the fourth form of the verb (aslama) means 'submission'. `'Peace' (from the same root) is 'salam'.

 He said a lot of other things (which I can't recall now) designed to present a positive image of Islam. But the interviewee is right to point out that 'din wa dawla' go together. Islam has always been a perfect combination of religion and state. You can't, for example, remove jihad from shari'a law without removing it from the Qur'an, the ahadith, and the lives of the prophet and his successors. Ditto for the Islamic views of all nonbelievers or specifically Jews and Christians. There are many eminent would-be reformers in Islam, yet none of them has succeeded in creating a true overhaul of the faith. The only true answer to Islamic radicalism would be for total secularism. But would-be secularisers such as Ataturk or Reza Shah failed in the end – look at Turkey under Erdogan or Iran under the post-1979 regime.  

In the mid-fifties, when the Baha'i leader Shoghi Effendi Rabbani was writing about the fate of Islam, he considered it a dead letter and wrote about its institutions, clergy, etc as being in total collapse. Today, it is stronger in many ways than it was in the 19th century. If ibn Salman tries to overhaul the Wahhabi state, he will be assassinated. I would like to think he will achieve great things, but I would exercise caution about him and other would-be reformers."  [Emphasis added]

Professorial Truths Regarding Palestinian Propaganda (updated: relevant video)

Well said, that wag!

In July this year, in a predictably vain attempt to dissuade the ALP (Australian Labor Party) conference from adopting such a motion, the ABC's Religion and Ethics website carried this article by Professor Alan Johnson of BICOM arguing against unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.

Among the professor's many excellent points were these simple truthes:

'The inconvenient truth is that Israel accepted the case for Palestinian statehood long ago, but it refuses to commit national suicide. So it insists on negotiating three things with the Palestinians:

 genuine mutual recognition - the deal must create two states for two peoples, with Israel recognised as the homeland of the Jewish people, and Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people;

security guarantees - so the West Bank does not become a launching pad for a continued terror war on Israel; and

a commitment by the Palestinians that the deal is a final status agreement, or what is called the "end of conflict."

The Palestinians have so far refused to negotiate recognition. They will not accept that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people. They demand the full and untrammelled "right of return" for millions of Palestinian refugees, and their children and later descendants ad infinitum, which would mean the end of Israel and the creation of yet another Arab state, in which the Jews would have to take their chances as a minority. This is not an especially attractive prospect given the treatment of minorities throughout the Middle East.

Nor have the Palestinians negotiated Israel's legitimate security needs. Instead, the Palestinian Authority has entered a unity agreement with an unreformed and fascistic Hamas, which is committed to Israel's destruction. It is not enough to agree to demilitarization, as the proposers argue. In a collapsing Middle East, with Islamic State taking over in failed states, the ongoing security of the West Bank - the high ground that sits above Israel's population centres - is what must be negotiated.'

In response, the longtime Palestinian lobbyist in Australia, Ali Kazak, wrote this outrageous screed.

Its tone and thrust is exemplified by this despicable allegation: "[T]he aim of Zionism has been to colonise all of Palestine and parts of the neighbouring Arab states, and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people".

Now, another pro-Israel professor, the peerless Denis MacEoin, has written in characteristic fashion a masterly piece which demolishes Ali Kazak's structure to its very foundations.  Inter alia, he notes:

'As far back as 1906, the young Ben Gurion wrote that "The Jewish settlement is not designed to undermine the position of the Arab community; on the contrary, it will salvage it from its economic misery, lift it from its social decline, and rescue it from physical and moral degeneration. Our renaissance in Palestine will come through the country's regeneration, that is: the renaissance of its Arab inhabitants."

Throughout his life, Ben Gurion made many such comments, constantly pleading with the Arabs to live and work alongside the Jews to create a flourishing state. Why does Kazak mention none of these, but substitutes a falsified, mistranslated, and deceitful quotation to "prove" that the Jews were intent from the beginning on expelling the Arabs?

Written while a civil war launched by the Arabs still raged, and as five Arab nations prepared to invade the new state, Israel's Declaration of Independence reads in part:

We appeal - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East. 

.... In truth, there has been and still is a tiny minority of Zionists who cling to the fantasy of a Jewish state embracing the Biblical region from eastern Egypt to northern Arabia. But to present this as evidence that Zionists as a whole hold such views is deeply misleading. When I say "a minority," I really mean it. After 1967, a movement and political party named The Movement for Greater Israel emerged, and in 1969 it stood in a general election. It received 0.6% of the vote, below the electoral threshold of 1%, and collapsed.

Kazak weaves a fiction of malign Zionist aims to take over territories beyond the borders of Israel, when all the Jewish people as a whole ever wanted to do was have a state of their own.

By 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made the country's position clear when speaking to his cabinet: "Greater Israel is over. There is no such thing. Anyone who talks that way is deluding themselves." It is not hard to conclude that Ali Kazak is one of the deluded.

Kazak's fantasy about a Greater Israel is false, yet he does not so much as breathe a word about the most popular slogan used by Palestinians and their supporters abroad: "Palestine will be free From the river to the Sea." All Palestinian maps show this same thing: a Palestine stretching from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. The slogan and the maps show one thing: no Israel. To call for the extinction of a people and country is a threat of genocide, something the Jews of all people have never called for and will never urge.

The notion that all Zionists and Jews want to build a Greater Israel has disturbing echoes of one of the hoariest and most frequently dismissed myths of anti-Semitism: that the Jews control everything and have taken over everything from banking to the film industry, to all the wars and revolutions, even entire governments. This was an evil conspiracy theory constructed by the Russian secret police to justify their pogroms and later promulgated by the Nazis to explain their extermination of six million human beings. It is shameful even to hint at it.'

Update: This video of raucous Israel-haters outside the Egyptian Embassy in London yesterday deliciously proves the professor's point about the true aims of the "Free Palestine" crowd:

See what I mean?

Video credit: Seymour Alexander

Read Denis MacEoin's entire article here

Hat tip: Ian G.

Meanwhile, in Australia more pro-Palestinian state recognition propaganda afoot. Better have the corn plasters ready.

An absent-minded dictionary?

In London, Pro-Israel Voices Talk Back To The Demonisers (video)

Please don't miss David Singer's latest article (the post before this), regarding BDS and a Harvard student who went to Israel with the intention of hating that country but instead, once there, had the scales fall from his eyes.

And don't miss Professor Denis MacEoin's marvellous indictment of student BDS and the topsy turvy outlook and breath-taking hypocrisy that surrounds it, as exemplified by the attitude of the National Union of Students in Britain.

http://www.touristisrael.com/pharrell-williams-in-tel-aviv-israel/15835/

To quote the professor, inter alia:

'The world you live in us upside down: you claim to act in defense of human rights, but your motions do not reflect this. You give free passage to the worst abusers of human rights -- countries that persecute religious minorities, suppress and kill women, throw homosexuals from high roofs, execute hundreds of dissidents every year, and imprison, torture and slaughter -- without rebuke. Yet you fulminate against Israel, which does none of these things. It does not use torture; it does not execute anyone -- not even Palestinian terrorists who have committed mass murder against innocent civilians and children.

Neither the great many supporters of Israel whom I know personally nor I want anything but the best possible future for the Palestinians.

 No one I know hates the Palestinians. What we do hate are the organizations that exploit and dominate the Palestinian people, that deny them the right to vote for new governments, the culture of hatred in Palestinian mosques, schools, and political speeches, and the acts of terror and war that have been directed at Jewish, Muslim and Christian Arab Israelis for many decades.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4666914,00.html

 It is the hatred and the violence we deplore, knowing as we do that this hurts not only Israelis, but that, since 1948, it has been blocking Palestinians from achieving their true potential.

We believe sincerely that boycotting, sanctioning and divesting from Israel will not bring peace so long as the Palestinian leaderships in Gaza and the West Bank insist that they intend to destroy Israel and take control of its entire territory.....'

Meanwhile, in London, here's the ubiquitous Sandra at the mike.

Great to see that she and the other anti-Israel demonstrators in London on Thursday outside the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), protesting against BAFTA's  decision to host the Israeli-funded Seret film festival, encountered some backtalk from a number of, er, Zionists:

More videos of the anti-Israel protesters here and here

"The Demonization Of Israel Through False Or Simplistic Images Of The Struggle For Israel's Independence Has Penetrated Right To The Heart Of The pro-Palestinian Soul"

Wrong at a rally (today): where did this Sydney kid learn that fashion?!

Lapping up Lies (I use the capital L advisedly) is, whether through naive ignorance and gullibility or sheer malice, a widespread characteristic of the West's leftist Israel-haters, whether it be on the origins of the Jewish People, on the Israeli response to sustained aggression on its borders, or on the origins of the Jewish State.

 The words in my header are those of that great Irish friend of Israel, Professor Denis MacEoin, who writes, inter alia:

'Anti-Israel propaganda has been driven from the start by lies distortions and a massive rewriting of history. Blame for everything is piled on the Jews, while the crimes of the Arabs, including the Palestinians, are exonerated.

The American Vice-Consul, along with British officers and the British High Commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, stated at the time that the Arabs were encouraging flight while the Jews were doing all in their power to prevent it.

The Hagana's behavior was the exact opposite of "ethnic cleansing." Once order was restored, Arabs were appointed to key posts and part of the supplies originally earmarked for the Jewish inhabitants were given freely to the Arabs.....

Anti-Israel rhetoric in Ireland is commonplace, and the press regularly prints diatribes against the Jewish state. A particularly galling example of this occurred when the Irish Examiner, a newspaper with a long history and a claimed readership of 189,000 per day (but a circulation of about 37,000), published an op-ed piece on July 31 by a little-known journalist, Victoria White, the wife of Eamonn Ryan, leader of the Green Party in the Irish parliament, the Dáil.

Entitled, "We are washing our hands of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians", this piece was an uncompromising diatribe, a spittle-flecked assault on Israel that dragged out the usual false claims of "ethnic cleansing" during Israel's War of Independence in 1947 and 1948.

Ms. White seems either to have stumbled on or been given an infamous and widely discredited book by an anti-Israel Israeli "historian," Ilan Pappé. His book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), has long been castigated as a non-history in which facts are distorted, important information disregarded, and only one side of the story told. There is no space here to write a review of Pappé's fiction, but it is the sort of book, like the equally discredited, totally fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," that poorly educated pro-Palestinian activists revel in without setting eyes on other histories by far better historians than Pappé.

It is obvious that White has not read anything else. She does not quote even once from any of the major historical studies of this crucial period, such as Efraim Karsh's deeply-researched Palestine Betrayed (2010) or Benny Morris's archive-based re-evaluation, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War. White thinks she knows all the answers. She does not.Now, an op-ed like White's in a small Irish newspaper may be small enough beer in itself, yet it is important to comment on what it stands for. White may be taken to stand for that vast brood of anti-Israel writers, journalists, and hacks who cobble together a warped narrative out of one or two books and a couple of pamphlets by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, while quite happily dismissing professional historians who work on archival material from across a mountain of sources.

Riight at a rally (one of Mudar's current tweets)

The demonization of Israel through false or simplistic images of the struggle for Israel's independence has penetrated right to the heart of the pro-Palestinian soul. Like most amateurs, White never checks or cross-checks her sources. She takes sides without any mastery of the facts, and fetishizes Palestinian victimhood as if it were the golden standard by which all moral issues must be judged. So her diatribe merits a rational, historical refutation....

Anti-Israel propaganda has been driven from the start by lies, distortions, and a massive re-writing of history. Blame for everything is piled on the Jews, while the crimes of the Arabs, including the Palestinians, are exonerated. Israel was and is a legally established state, and the 1947-48 war was initiated, sustained, and fought as a jihad by Arabs in an attempt to kill as many Jews as possible two years after the end of the Holocaust.

The charges against Israel — just like those being made today over Gaza — must be refuted one by one through the judicious use of accurate historical facts, an emphasis on the morality of Israel's struggle to survive, an equal stress on the immorality of those who seek to wipe the tiny nation out, and a firm refutation of charges brought by the ignorant and the gullible.'

Read all of the professor's fine article here

As for "Apartheid" ...  Spot a familiar face in this Palestinian wedding crowd?

Time For The Vicar To Hang His Head in Shame?

Photo: Richard Millett

On my penultimate post (which concerns the heinous replica "Apartheid Wall" outside St James's Church, Piccadilly, which according to a church steward cost 30,000 quid !!!; they must hate Jews, mustn't they, to deprive the deserving poor of such funds, which came from private donors including the sponsoring charities!), a Christian reader, Colin, has left the following comment:

"As a Christian this just so disgusts and sickens me!! Are they evil or ignorant, and if ignorant, why dont they have the humility to listen and learn?! Do you know if this church has replied to any of the excellent e-mails etc sent to them? Profoundly, profoundly disgusted."

One of the many condemnations of the church's behaviour (in collusion with Interpal and other Israel-demonising bodies) comes in the form of an Open Letter from a distinguished British scholar, Professor Denis MacEoin, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, proving his doughty pro-Israel credentials yet again:

"....Throughout the Middle East, Christians are dwindling rapidly in numbers, mainly because extremist Islamic groups drive them out. Israel is the only country in the region where Christian numbers have been growing steadily since 1948. It goes without saying that Israel is the only country across the Islamic world where Jews can live safely, after almost a million were killed or driven out of Arab lands in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those few Jews who live in Iran live on a knife-edge.

 ... [Y]our church has constructed a mendacious wall on its premises in order to make an ignominious political point, something I would not have believed your church capable of.

It is mendacious because it pretends the entire separation is a wall, when the wall covers about 1%. It is mendacious because it does not mention the 30 or so security walls and fences that have been built by other countries, many much longer than Israel’s.

It is mendacious because it carries no message to explain why it is there, when it is explicitly there to deter violent attacks from the West Bank into Israel.

 It is mendacious because it carries no statement alerting onlookers to the fact that the barrier has already saved thousands of lives.

 Or does saving lives really not matter to Christians. Or are Jewish lives not as important as the lives of suicide bombers and other terrorists? If you seek fairness ­ and I suspect you do in a muddled way ­why did you not contact the Israeli embassy, who could have loaned you something apposite: a bus, on board which passengers died when a suicide bomber detonated himself?

 From the moment Israel was established, the Palestinians and their neighbours tried again and again to fight wars and to inflict wounds on Israeli civilians. The Palestinians were offered a state of their own but rejected it and turned to 65 years of violence. Why is this not made clear?

 Sadly, large numbers of people on the far political left, aided and abetted by a surprising and disappointing force of Christians, have become fiercely one-sided. I have attended a Christian conference where much of the discourse verged on anti-Semitism. These people will not engage in open debate, they stamp their feet and shout, to drown out pro-Israel speakers, they lumber into a controversy about which they know little or nothing.... [My emphasis]

 In an age when anti-Semitism is growing daily, when Jews are fleeing European countries, when calls to exterminate the Jews are easily found on the Internet, what on earth are you thinking, to dice so freely with the very forces you might otherwise despise. Why do terrorists win your sympathy more readily than Jewish children murdered in their beds? The Palestinians still freely quote the words of the 1967 Khartoum Declaration, ‘No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel (as a Jewish state)’. Doesn’t that tell you how hard it has been for Israel to make a peace agreement? Why don’t you publicize that? It is Palestinian refusal that has blocked peace, not Israeli aggression. Why don’t you say so? Surely you believe in the truth and the virtue of speaking the truth. Why should well-meaning Christians let themselves be guided by hardline communists and anti-Semites? It seems altogether confused to me...."

Professor MacEoin notes:

"An Anglican priest, Stephen Sizer, who was responsible for your wall, is a fanatic whom all Jews I know consider to be an anti-Semite, bringing back to modern churches a theology that we thought had been discarded. Supercessionism is just another way of saying that Christians are superior to Jews, that Jews have denied God and are destined to go to Hell. It is not a pleasant doctrine, and it shocks me that you make room for it." [My emphasis]

Colin, in his comment quoted above, asked me:

"Do you know if this church has replied to any of the excellent e-mails etc sent to them?" 

At the time of writing I do not.

But I do know (hat tip: reader P) that Stephen Sizer has been receiving emails from people linking to articles supportive of Israel.

And does he reply to them?  I've no idea, but from what reader P has sent to me it doesn't seem like it.

For what has this man of the cloth, Stephen Sizer, done with emails received from "Zionists"?

He's posted them to his Facebook page like badges of honour, where they can be read by followers who express sentiments such as this:

This:

 And, as we saw earlier, this:

Here are screenshots of what two of these "Zionists" linked to; the emailers are, respectively, a man and a woman.

 

On Facebook, Stephen Sizer has also posted the email addresses of the people who've thus contacted him.

Surely he has not done so without the permission of the "Zionists" concerned?

Surely he does not hope his followers will contact those "Zionists", to harass them a bit?

Ah, but Stephen Sizer is an ordained minister of the Church of England.

And that wouldn't be Christian behaviour, would it?

After all, Jesus told his followers to "turn the other cheek".

"An International Ghetto Bench": Boycott's just another word for picking on the Jews

Courtesy: http://edgar1981.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/apartheid-israel.html

Coffee-splutteringly shocking, eh, this photo of apartheid in Jerusalem taken recently by British blogger Edgar Davidson?

No wonder Israel's compared to South Africa in the bad old days.

Thus, in a recent interview, the leftwing British film director Ken Loach explains why he's such an inveterate foe of Israel and so staunch a supporter of BDS:

"It began some years ago when I was involved in putting on a play called ‘Perdition’. It was a play about Zionism in the Second World War and the deal that was done between some Zionists and the Nazis. It shed a whole new light on the creation of Israel and the politics of Zionism. I became aware then, and gradually in the following years, that the foundation of Israel was based on a crime against the Palestinians.Other crimes have followed since then....

There is oppression all around the world but what makes the Israel-Palestine conflict special is a number of things. First of all, Israel presents itself to the world as a democracy. A country just like every Western state. It presents itself in this way while it is in fact committing crimes against humanity. It has produced a State which is divided along racial lines, like apartheid South Africa. It is also supported militarily and financially by Europe and the US. So there is a massive hypocrisy going on; we are supporting a country that claims to be a democracy, we’re supporting it in every way, and yet, it is involved in these crimes against humanity.

.... When you are confronted by such crimes you have to respond as a human being, regardless of if you are an artist, a VIP or whatever. First of all you have to respond and do what you can to bring this to people’s attention. A boycott is a tactic. It is effective against Israel because Israel presents itself as a cultural beacon. It is therefore very susceptible to cultural boycott. We should not have anything to do with projects that are supported by the State of Israel....  We target it because you cannot just stand by and watch people live their lives in refugee camps forever...."

That argument has as many holes as as a slattern's stockings, of course (and conveniently sidesteps the fact that in contrast to Israel, which although cash-strapped and overwhelmed with the task of integrating Holocaust survivors also successfully integrated the Jewish refugees from the Arab world  following the War of Independence, that same Arab world despite its riches failed to attempt to integrate the Palestinian refugees, deliberately using them ever since as  pawns) but is being widely applauded and touted by the usual suspects.

Here, incidentally, is a great graphic regarding those Jewish refugees and the consequent judenrein nature of the Arab Middle East (hat tip: reader Ian, citing its appearance on the Point of No Return blog here):

And what's the significance of Israel-bashers citing time and again the plight of the Palestinians in their refugee camps?

To demand, of course, their so-called "right of return" which would, as those Israel-bashers well know, mean the elimination of Israel by demographic means, just as the "secular" (sic) "democratic" (sic) single state that more and more Israel-bashers are openly demanding would.

That's why, in recognition of a noble common cause, Zionists of all stripes should applaud the prominent leftwing Aussie Zionist Philip Mendes when, breaking ranks with his fellow political Leftists and attracting obloquy from them as a result, he unequivocally and persistently points out:

".... there is little doubt that a Greater Palestine is the ultimate political objective of the international Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel...."

The logo of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, for one, and no less than Fatah's, bears that assertion out.

What other nation state in the world, other than the sliver of a sovereign country that the Jews get to call their own, is subject to similar attempts at delegitimisation and eradication, eradication not merely of its current regime but of its very existence?

Quite so.

As to what the Palestinians themselves really really want, here's what the noted Israeli Arabist Dr Mordechai Kedar has to say on the matter (the video opens with familiar footage, but stay with it):

Not for nothing did Christian scholar Dexter Van Zile, in his recent admirable rebuke to the BDS-obsessed UK Methodists liken boycotting Israel to "an international ghetto bench" (such as found at universities in pre-war Poland); not for nothing did he observe that

"The violence endured by Christians and other religious minorities in Muslim-majority the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia... might shed some light as to why Jews are so persistent in the defense of their state. Jews know better than many Christians (at least those in the West) what happens to defenseless minorities in Muslim-majority settings."

\

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/boycott-israel-pass-me-your-apple-mac-please/

Then there's 9/11 truther and Jewish antisemite Richard Falk's visit this week to King's College London.

"In essence, it boils down to that obsession with Israel which permeates nearly every academic institution. A pathological infatuation which latches onto any crank so long as he has something bad to say about Israel. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Holocaust denier like Israel Shamir – the House of Lords will warmly receive him. Nobody cares if it’s someone as offensive as George Galloway – the Oxford Union will still invite him. Who gives a damn if they’re an apologist for suicide bombers? Azzam Tamimi continues to hop from campus to campus spouting hatred.

But what should we learn from all this? Well KCL, I have some advice for you. When you plan similar events in the future, invite some real academics.

Nutters, racists and conspiracy theorists are not the kind of people you should associate with. If you want real debate about the Middle East, let’s hear two narratives. It’s time for a change in how we discuss Israel. Get a critic of Israel to discuss a contentious topic with a well-known defender of Israel. That would go down well. That’s real debate. Not the rubbish about Mossad death rays which you get from Richard and his friends."

So says Oxford undergraduate Jonathan Hunter, who as we saw here flummoxed George Galloway by having an Israeli flag up his jumper, and is UK campus director of StandWithUs International.

And of course the Israel-demonising Left never acknowledge Israel's humanitarian endeavours including this...

But let the last word go to Professor Denis MacEoin, an avowed liberal who has made many excellent blogposts regarding the hypocrisy and aims of the anti-Israel movement.

On academic boycott, he has observed:

"Left-wing academics call for a boycott of Israeli universities, despite the fact that Israeli universities operate a policy that allows entry to all races and religions, do not accept government censorship, encourage open debate, and are not used as centres for Zionist propaganda. They do not seek to boycott Arab universities that forbid entry to Jews, or Iranian universities that are closed to the Baha'is, the country's largest religious minority, Egyptian universities that are (according to a report by Human Rights Watch) drowning in censorship, Muslim universities in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere where the very idea of open debate is anathema, Chinese universities that control what students can and cannot learn and what teachers can and cannot teach, or any of the genuine human rights abuses affecting higher education worldwide. Only Israel. Only Israeli institutions. Only Israeli academics who refuse to condemn their own country.

....But it seems that sympathy for nationalist aspirations ends when it comes to the Jews. Only the Jews, it seems, have no right to build a nation state on their ancestral and religious homeland. Only the Jews are to be condemned to wander the earth for ever, persecuted, driven from land to land as the mood takes one territory or another. Hooray for the IRA and their bold struggle for a united Ireland, hooray for ETA and the claims of the Basques, hooray for the Tamil Tigers and the Tamil people, above all, hooray for Hamas and Hizbullah and their noble endeavours to take back all the lands that ever belonged to them, historically or mythically, it doesn't matter which. But to oblivion with the Jews for even daring to create a national home where they might be safe from persecution. Let's march with banners that say 'We're all Hizbullah now', condemning Zionism as the greatest evil that ever walked the earth.

So everyone is allowed to have a state except the Jews. If you will take care to read their literature, you will see that the Palestinians do not just want a state of their own. They want the Jews out. Every last one of them, from every inch of Israel. If the Jews won't leave, they will kill them. They will leave no trace of them, their synagogues, their kibbutzim, their hopes, their aspirations, their love for their Holy Land. And all those people-supporting left-wingers and liberals out there shake hands with that aspiration, saying Israel has no right to exist, denouncing the very idea of Zionism as fascist and evil, endorsing the idea that the Jews are behind every conspiracy, that Zionists control the media, tell the US how to frame its foreign policy, and are the masterminds behind the global economy.

If you think that, or half of that, or a quarter, let me explain something to you, very calmly, very quietly, and in short words. You may think you are a liberal, but you are not. You may think you are an internationalist, but you are not. You may think you are a socialist, but you are not. You are an anti-Semite. Think it through. How much of your anti-Israel rhetoric would Adolf Hitler have found hard to stomach? How would the notion that Jews alone of all the earth's peoples have no right to govern themselves or to protect themselves from those who seek to kill them run in the far reaches of the far right? How would the Palestinian aspiration to commit a second Holocaust play in the degenerate middens of totalitarian fascism?"  

The Marvellous Professor MacEoin

He's the British academic about whom I blogged the other day: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/04/british-academics-splendid-refutation.html
What a marvellous man he is, a beacon in dark times.

Here's part of an open letter he addressed to the orphaned 12-year-old Tamar Fogel, whose parents and siblings were slaughtered by Arab terrorists at Itamar.

"We have never met, nor are we likely to. I am not a Jew nor an Israeli, though for many years I have defended both Jews and Israelis from the physical and political attacks that are made on them....

The most important for you is to be sure that the only guilty parties were the terrorists who carried out the slaughter. And I need not tell you that these were not the first Palestinian terrorists to take out their hate, their resentment, and their jealousy on helpless Jews living on Jewish land.

.... After the Shoah, many rabbis tackled the question of hester panim, asking why HaShem had seemed to turn his face away from his people. I am not a Jew, and I cannot provide easy answers to those questions. You must seek your own answers from your rabbis and in your scriptures. One answer may be found in a short sound recording that was made in Belsen shortly after its liberation by British forces. It was made by the BBC and contains at the end description of a Shabbat service held by a British rabbi, at the end of which the survivors stand and sing HaTikva. They are weak, they are out of tune, some of them will still die: but they are singing in open defiance of the very great Nazi evil that had overwhelmed them and their families. Three years after that, the state of Israel was established.

I'm writing, first because I'm a writer and that's how I express my feelings best. But also because I want to convey just how many people's thoughts are with you. You have your grandparents and aunts or uncles, and after that you have your small and concerned community of I'tamar, but beyond that you have a world of people, Jews and non-Jews, who stand with you in your grief. We feel helpless, not knowing what we can or should do to help, yet longing to do so. How many people can say they truly love the murderers who came to your house that night? Some may hand out candies and dance in the streets, but how meaningful is that? They love themselves and their own dreams of glory, but who can truly love men of blood, people who kill infants in their cradles?....

You are in my thoughts and in the thoughts of millions of other people because the murder of your family has gone so deeply into so many people's hearts. The list of atrocities carried out on Jews, not just in Israel but beyond, is very long. As a result, it's easy to let them all blur together into one mass. But every so often one death or a group of deaths stands out and demands special attention. One day there will be a memorial to the sacrifice your family made. People from far away may come to visit it. Photographs of it will appear in the press. But the true memorial will be you, an ordinary girl, with a torn heart and a wounded soul, going to school, going to shul, making friends, baking bread, sewing, cooking, reading, blushing when a certain young man comes to speak to you, going to Kever Yosef to marry him, giving birth to your first child. I just mean to say that no-one expects from you heroic deeds, no-one wants you to have to shoulder resistance to all the evils you know better than most. It is your ordinary deeds, the day-to-day living of an ordinary life that are for the creators of horror the most painful thing of all, that Jews will continue to live on land sanctified by Jewish blood. At the end of that recording made in Belsen, someone calls out 'Am Yisrael Chai'. By living, the killers only bring eternal disgrace on themselves, their families, and everyone who shelters them. By living, you make clear to everyone that the People of Israel live, that their light will not be snuffed out, and that when your enemies have gone to dust and seen a darkness beyond measure engulf them, the light of the Jews will illuminate the nations. Grow and be happy and tell us what you see on your journey."

Read the rest: http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/04/open-letter-to-tamar-fogel.html
Hat tip: reader Shirlee

A British Academic's Splendid Refutation of the Libel that Israel is an "Apartheid State"

Below is a splendid riposte by Belfast-born Professor Denis M. MacEoin to the grotesque antisemitic canard, so evilly influential around the globe and among all age-groups, that Israel is an "apartheid state".  Professor MacEoin, a scholar of Islamic studies, is an expert on the development of radical Islam. He has written three reports for British think tanks, dealing with Islamic issues. These reports are The Hijacking of British Islam, written for Policy Exchange, examining hate literature found in British mosques and other institutions; Music, Chess and Other Sins, concerning Muslim schools in Britain, written for Civitas and published online; and the hard copy Sharia Law or 'One Law for All'?, also for Civitas. 

Professor MacEoin's remarks regarding Israel and the abominable "Apartheid State" libel, address students at Edinburgh University, too many of whom, as their vote in a debate on the issue has shown, have swallowed the libel hook, line, and sinker.  It will also be recalled that students at Edinburgh recently abused both Ishmael Khaldii (the Israeli Bedouin diplomat) and Ron Prosor (Israel's Ambassador in London) when they spoke there.

Here are MacEoin's remarks, with no further comment from me:

'… There has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. This is a fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves.

… I have the impression that those members of EUSA (Edinburgh University Student Association) who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I’m … speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a “Nazi” state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The Einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (and elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.

Likewise Apartheid. For Apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled things in South Africa under the Apartheid regime. … A weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is. That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be Israel’s 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world centre; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). In Iran, the Baha’is (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren’t your members boycotting Iran?

Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews – something no black could do in South Africa. Israeli hospitals, not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theaters.

In Israel, women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid. Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, because they may be killed at home. It seems bizarre to me that LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran, where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief. Intelligent students thinking it’s better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?

University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak. I do not object to well documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligent people single out the Jewish state above states that are horrific in their treatment of their own populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it’s clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens. Israeli citizens – Jews and Arabs alike – do not rebel (though they are free to protest).

Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world’s freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Baha’is. The imbalance is perceptible and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott.

I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli Embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen to more than one side. Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument. They are not at university to be propagandised. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into antisemitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state.

Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of antisemitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play.'