Pro-Israel Activist at London University Physically Attacked

I suppose it was only a matter of time, given the hate-ridden antisemitic atmosphere that prevails on some of Britain’s campuses, especially in London, and the lily-livered attitude of the university authorities.

The Jewish Chronicle reports that a pro-Israel activist was physically attacked and hospitalised during Israel Apartheid Week. He was one of a foursome from the organisation Stand With Us who went along to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University to observe a “Celebrate Palestine” event there.

One man reportedly told the group that “the best thing the Jews had done was to go to the gas chambers” and then another man, described as “of Middle East appearance”, bit one of the foursome on the cheek, causing the victim to be taken to the nearby University College Hospital.

To add insult to injury, the university authorities seem to be blaming the Stand With Us group for the assault on the grounds that their presence was provocative.

Read more: http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/46817/pro-israel-protester-attacked-soas
And see my next post for updated material.

And here's a taste of student opinion at SOAS, with George Galloway thrown in:

A Saudi Officer Reflects on What Might Have Been Had the Arabs Recognised Israel in 1948



Signatures on Israel's Declaration of Independence, 1948

 "What if Arabs had recognized the State of Israel in 1948?" asks retired Saudi commodore Abdulateef Al-Mulhim in a remarkable op-ed in Arab News.  He continues, inter alia:

"If Israel was recognized in 1948, then the Palestinians would have been able to free themselves from the hollow promises of some Arab dictators who kept telling them that the refugees would be back in their homes and all Arab lands will be liberated and Israel will be sent to the bottom of the sea. Some Arab leaders used the Palestinians for their own agenda to suppress their own people and to stay in power....

If Israel was recognized in 1948, then there would have been no need for a coup in Egypt against King Farouq in 1952 and there would have been no attack on Egypt in 1956 by The UK, France and Israel. Also there will be no war in June 1967 and the size of Israel will not be increased and we, the Arabs would not have the need for a UN resolution to beg Israel to go back to the pre-1967 borders. And no war of attrition between Egypt and Israel that caused more casualties on the Egyptian side than the Israeli side....

Now, the Palestinians are on their own.  Each Arab country is busy with its own crisis. From Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Somalia, Algeria, Lebanon and the Gulf states. For now, the Arab countries have put the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on hold."

Read the entire article: http://arabnews.com/opinion/columns/article322715.ece

A Stinker Out of Bedfordshire

The renowned British columnist Melanie Phillips recently wrote a humdinger of a book entitled The World Turned Upside Down.  Just how upside down that portion of the world known as Great (make that "formerly Great") Britain, aka Cloud Cuckoo Land, is has been freshly demonstrated by the fact that The Spectator, on whose site Ms Phillips's blog appears, is being investigated by, of all absurdities, the constabulary of Bedfordshire. 

Why?  Because someone living in that county has apparently referred to that force this post http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6779100/armchair-barbarism.thtml on which Ms Phillips wrote of the "barbarism" of the Arabs who killed the Fogel family in Itamar.

I'd call butchering a family while it slept, and in the process decapitating a tiny baby, barbarism. Wouldn't you?

And now it's up to the Bedfordshire plods to decide whether to prosecute.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Read more:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6796298/the-threat-to-a-british-liberty.thtml

Helen Thomas on Israel, Holocaust Memorialisation, and Jewish "Power" ...

Unless you read Playboy only for the articles, you may miss disgraced former White House reporter Helen Thomas speaking frankly.  Here's a taste:

On the situation in "Palestine":

"Everybody knows my feelings that the Palestinians have been shortchanged in every way. Sure, the Israelis have a right to exist – but where they were born, not to come and take someone else's home. I've had it up to here with the violations against the Palestinians…[The Palestinians] are incarcerated and living in an open prison. I say to the Israelis, 'Get out of people's homes!' It's unacceptable to have soldiers knocking on a door at three in the morning and saying, 'This is my home.' And forcing people out of homes they've lived in for centuries? What is this? How can anybody accept it? I mean, Jewish-only roads? [She later corrected herself to say Israeli-only roads.] Would anyone tolerate something like that in America? White-only roads?"

On Palestinian violence against the Israelis:

"Of course I don't condone any violence against anyone. But who wouldn't fight for their country? What would any American do if their land was being taken? Remember Pearl Harbor. The Palestinian violence is to protect what little remains of Palestine. The suicide bombers act out of despair and desperation. Three generations of Palestinians have been forced out of their homes – by Israelis – and into refugee camps."

On American support of Israel:

"We keep giving Israel everything. Our government bribes the Israelis by saying, 'Please come to the [negotiating] table and we'll give you this and we'll give you that'…Why do you have to bribe people to do the right thing? I don't want my government bribing anybody. I want them demanding. Stop all this aid to Israel when they're killing people!...Why do they send my American tax dollars to perpetuate it?"

On memorializing the Holocaust:

"There's nothing wrong with remembering it, but why do we have to constantly remember? We're not at fault. I mean, if they're going to put a Holocaust museum in every city in Germany, that's fine with me. But we didn't do this to the Jews. Why do we have to keep paying the price and why do they keep oppressing the Palestinians? Do the Jews ever look at themselves? Why are they always right? Because they have been oppressed throughout history, I know. And they have this persecution. That's true, but they shouldn't use that to dominate."

On the Jews' influence and power:

 "[The Jews are] using their power, and they have power in every direction…Power over the White House, power over Congress…Everybody is in the pocket of the Israeli lobbies, which are funded by wealthy supporters, including those from Hollywood. Same thing with the financial markets. There's total control…It isn't the two percent. It's real power when you own the White House, when you own these other places in terms of your political persuasion. Of course they have power. [To the interviewer, David Hochman] You don't deny that. You're Jewish, aren't you?"

 Read more: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/helen-thomas-is-playboys-april-interview-118184139.html and see also http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/03/before-she-was-in-playboy-jews-arent.html

Delegitimising Israel by Delegitimising Scripture

In 2002 the BBC’s execrably biased-against-Israel Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, though neither historian, theologian nor archaeologist, was trotted out to present an Al Beeb documentary on Moses,who of course was the great Lawgiver of the Jewish People.

Bowen was true to his and Al Beeb’s agenda-laden form.

He loftily pronounced the biblical account of Moses and the Exodus to be “a fanciful tale ... the stuff of fairy tales”.

“If the Hebrews were never in Egypt then perhaps the whole epic was fiction, made up to give the Jewish people a history and a destiny,” he declared. And he scoffingly dismissed what he called “the religious justification of the State of Israel” – Moses’ “burning bush” encounter with the Almighty.

As the London-based Israeli journalist Douglas Davis observes of that documentary, in an essay entitled “Hatred in the Air: The BBC, Israel and Antisemitism” that appears in the book A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st-Century Britain (2003):

“I have no problem with a documentary that suggests scientific explanations for seemingly miraculous events in the Jewish story, but I do object when I suspect that the purpose of the investigation is to delegitimize the basis of Judaism and to undermine the claim of the Jewish people to national expression in even a part of its ancestral home. ...[I]t is inconceivable that the BBC would devote an hour-long prime-time documentary to a critical investigation that served to delegitimize the Prophet Muhammed and undermine the basic tenets of Islam.”

Now, the BBC seems set on the delegitimising-Israel-through-undermining-Judaism course once again.

Aaqil Ahmed, a Muslim who to many Christians' astonishment and indeed consternation was appointed Head of BBC’s Religion and Ethics department a couple of years ago, commissioned Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou, an atheist university lecturer in theology and religion at Exeter University (for whom also see http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-bible-a-history/articles/abrahams-inheritance), to present a three-part series “that seeks to de-construct and sceptically critique the Holy Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity”.

Have a look at the presentation on King David, replete with much modern Israeli imagery, including a certain wall, beside which the presenter strides, and you’ll see what I mean: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8383956/Bibles-Buried-Secrets-BBC-Two-review.html

And please be sure to look at David Vance’s fine post on the Biased BBC website, which in discussing the Stavrakopoulou series shows how the BBC manages to decry the Bible as a fount of male chauvinism and to excoriate sexism in Christianity while treating the misogyny of the Quran and of Islam in a manner that I can only describe as respectful, if not reverential. http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2011/03/loving-religion-of-peace-loathing.html

The comment by Max on the following thread is of interest too: http://cifwatch.com/2011/03/15/in-the-arab-world-but-not-of-it-glaring-omission-underlines-the-anti-israel-bias-of-the-bbc/#comments

The Kindness of Strangers

Here's 19-year-old Corporal Haim Levin,  an IDF paramedic, holding a newborn baby girl, Jude.  She's come into the world at the very locality where relatives of the Fogel Family are mourning the murder victims. 

With news of the Fogels' massacre, fireworks and other signs of celebration were apparent from Palestinian villages nearby.

The birth of Jude has brought joy in the midst of grief, life amid death.

Without the help of the medical team of which Corporal Levin is part, Jude would have died, for the umbilical cord was strangling her.  Her mother was rushed to the locality in a van, and Corporal Levin was the first of the team to reach the distressed pair.

He recalls:

"I moved closer and saw the baby's head and upper body.  The umbilical cord was around the baby's neck; the baby was grey and didn't move.

I first removed the cord from the neck and at the same time asked paramedics to prepare the baby resuscitation kit. I pinched her to see if she's responding, and she started to cry."

Jude is a Palestinian baby, and her mother had been taken to the settlement because of its medical facilities, which has much experience in treating Palestinians. 

Jubilant at her birth, Palestinians from the nearby village of Nabi Salah gathered around the medical team.

Said Corporal Levin:

"They thanked us and told us they named the girl Jude.  I volunteered for Magen David Adom since age 15 and it's the first time I witnessed childbirth. It was an amazing feeling, to hold the girl that was just born in my arms, and to know that in this complex place we did something good."

Noted ambulance driver Orli Shlomo:

"It was touching, but I couldn't help but think that a few meters from there, people were sitting Shiva for another baby, who was murdered.  I was touched to see the face of the new baby, but I also thought about the face of the murdered baby."

Read more: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4043536,00.html

Proud to be Part of Israel's Democracy: a Bedouin Diplomat Speaks in Ottawa (video)

Here's Ishmael Khaldi, who was denied a hearing by totalitarian leftists when he attempted to address students at Edinburgh University, speaking a few days ago at Carleton University, Ottawa, about "the only democracy in the Middle East":

Hat tip: reader Shirlee

(See also: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/02/video-footage-of-bedouin-among.html
and http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/02/video-footage-of-bedouin-among.html )