Aussie Flotilla/Flytilla BDS Fanatic Sylvia Hale Talks About Her Thwarted Trip To "Palestine" (video)

Popcorn ready?  Kleenex tissues out?  Right, now you're all set to watch former Greens New South Wales politician Sylvia Hale with an account of her thwarted flytilla/flotilla frolic.  She's speaking to fellow far lefty Israel-bashers associated with Green Left Weekly in Sydney.

And here's fellow-traveller Vivienne Porzsolt doing her stuff:

Jewish Delegate To UNHRC Slams "Forty Years Of Palestinianism" (video)

Recently, David G. Littman of the World Council for Progressive Judaism (who was rebuked by the president of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva for having the temerity to raise the issue Islam's oppression of women at the forum http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/07/women-oppressed-under-islam-show-some.html) also delivered some home truths regarding the unrepealed 1968 PLO Covenant, Arafat's description in 1983 of Jesus as "the first Palestinian martyr," Palestinian antisemitism, and the Palestinian claim to a Canaanite origin that predates and negates the Jewish People's claim to its ancestral homeland.  As long as the Fatah and Hamas Charters remain unchanged, he warned, peace will prove elusive.

And don't miss Steven J. Rosen's article in Foreign Affairs, which argues that the Palestinian state expected to be recognised by the UN next month will be no state at all: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/03/the_palestinians_imaginary_state

Ugly Hate-Filled Demo Against Israel In Melbourne (video)

This 15-minute video, which has to be seen to appreciate fully the extent of the hatred and defamatory lies against Israel by the intimidatory mob that marched from outside the State Library of Victoria to the Max Brenner premises on 29th July, opens with, and frequently repeats, the strains of the "Freedom For Palestine" song pimped by Lush UK.

Incitement-provoking slanders abound in hate-filled cacaphonous tones - "open air prison" ... "apartheid" ... "genocide" ... "colonial entity" ...

And as reported below, the Jewish communal leadership in Melbourne has not hesitated to describe the demonstration as antisemitic. 

J-Wire reports:

'The Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV) and Zionist Council of Victoria (ZCV) have expressed their concern at the continued attempts by BDS demonstrators in Melbourne CBD to target Jewish owned businesses.

The most recent event took place last Friday, 29th July, and followed on a demonstration four weeks earlier that saw 19 protesters arrested.

JCCV President John Searle said:

 “it was distressing to see yet another anti-Semitic BDS demonstration taking place on the streets of Melbourne last Friday evening. What we witnessed at both Melbourne Central and QV Centre was another example of intimidating, harassing and disruptive behaviour that caused distress to Melbourne’s shopping public, traders and shop employees.”

Searle note that

“you could see the look of discomfort on shoppers’ faces as they were confronted with the large crowd of rowdy protesters carrying placards and chanting anti- Semitic slogans.”

Amongst the demonstrators were some who had previously been arrested and who were apparently in breach of bail conditions that restricted their access to the site and their participation in anti-social behaviour of this type. Searle called upon the police

“to take appropriate action and arrest the offenders so they can be brought before the Courts. The people of Victoria do not expect the Law to be flouted in this way.”

ZCV President Sam Tatarka added that

“it was disturbing that management of the shopping centres – despite having affixed posters warning against trespassing – did not seek to have the police restrain the demonstrators from coming on to their property and acting in this totally unacceptable manner”.

Baying Down Alarms Against The "Apocalyptically-Inspired Enemy": The Illiberal Liberals of the West

In Front Page magazine David Solway has written a perceptive and timely article entitled "Islamophilia and Judeophobia," examining the Western liberal establishment's "venereal attachment to Islam and its tandem resilement of Israel and Jews," its "schmoozing with terrorists," and its "demonization of Israel" which, as he puts it,

"is a sign not only of collective bad faith, international hypocrisy, millennial prejudice and pure malevolence, but quite simply of massive intellectual derangement. It is facilitated by a refusal to sift the historical facts from the welter of lies and disinformation that deliberately cloud the historical and political context, the dismissal of the provisions of international law and, once again, the abandonment of reason."

Having pointed to the manifestations of this phenomenon in Norway, he concludes:

'What we are really witnessing in Europe, the U.S., and its outriders in Canada and Australia—the synoptic West—is the doleful spectacle of a civilization in denial, a myopic civilization that in most of its cultural and political centers will not recognize it is under attack and that seems haplessly incapable of mounting meaningful resistance, let alone launching a counter-attack against an apocalyptically-inspired enemy to ensure its own preservation—what Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism designates as “the self-absorbed delusions of the Eurocentric imagination” refusing to understand that “a liberal society must be, when challenged, a warlike society; or it will not endure.” The turn against Israel is merely another expression of the West’s complicity in its own demise, for Israel is not only the ancient home of the Jewish people to which it is legally and historically entitled, it is the fount of the West’s moral and cultural inheritance, and a tributary source of the West’s civilizing imperative.

Between Islamophilia and Judeophobia falls the shadow.' [My emphasis]  http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/02/islamophilia-and-judeophobia/

One "liberal" of the type identified by Solway is former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland, Secretary-General of the Council of Europe.  He features in my recent blogpost on the toxic amount of antisemitism in Norway, much of it driven by the political left. http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/07/sad-song-of-norway-its-antisemitic.html

Immediately after Breivik's atrocities, the pro-Palestinian Jagland (whose own nation cares little about Jews' rights amid the multicultural mix that it's become, and who decried a Jew's appointment as Obama's chief of staff) told a British newspaper, The Observer, Sunday stable-mate to the odious anti-Israel Guardian (itself a classic exemplar of left-liberal Islamophilia) that is incumbent on western political leaders to beware of stoking far-right, anti-Muslim sentiment.  This is obviously a rebuke to David Cameron, who recently made an uncharacteristically tough speech regarding multiculturalism and the limits of tolerance: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/02/requiem-for-islamic-wolves-in-sheeps.html

Jagland added:

'We also need to stop using 'Islamic terrorism', which indicates that terrorism is about Islam. We should be saying that terrorism is terrorism and not linked to religion.' http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/30/david-cameron-far-right-nobel-warning

So presumably if Jagland (who wants to rebrand multiculturalism "diversity"), would have political leaders and all the rest of us turn a deaf ear to speeches such as this one, or at least a blind eye to who is doing the talking:

It's high time Jagland and his compatriots, especially the ruling leftist elite, took some advice themselves.  They could do no better than to heed Alan Dershowitz, who knows partly from firsthand experience what a rancid antisemitic country theirs is:

"The time is long overdue for Norwegians to do some deep soul searching about their sordid history of complicity with all forms of bigotry ranging from the anti-Semitic Nazis to the anti-Semitic Hamas. There seems to be a common thread"  http://www.hudson-ny.org/2310/terrorism-norway-israel

Inevitably, it's being claimed in some quarters, including Norwegian ones, that Breivik was in the pay of Mossad:

And almost as soon as Breivik's "Manifesto" became known, individuals whose writings he's mentioned were being blamed as if they'd somehow egged him on.

A post on a leftwing site in the United States typifies the depths to which a number of anti-conservatives will go to impugn their opponents and cajole them into silence.  It begins:

'As a writer, it sure sucks when someone murders a bunch of people based on your ideas. (I mean, I assume that sucks. Weirdly, it's never happened to me.) So you can understand why right-wing anti-Islam bloggers are all being kind of defensive, these days.

Anders Breivik, the anti-Islam terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway on July 22, read a lot of American anti-Islam bloggers, many of whom he cited in his lengthy manifesto. Breivik's favorites included Robert Spencer, a self-proclaimed expert on Islam whose "Jihad Watch" blog was quoted and cited in Breivik's manifesto, and Spencer's ally and collaborator Pam Geller, whose "Atlas Shrugs" was similarly recommended by the killer.' http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/08/01/pamela_geller_norway

Others at whom the finger has been pointed include the prominent British columnist Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post, and Australian Keith Windschuttle, editor of Quadrant magazine:
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/07/breivik-and-totalitarian-democ.php
http://melaniephillips.com/hatred-smears-and-liberals-bullying-us-into-silence
http://melaniephillips.com/a-weird-obsession

Writes Windschuttle:

".... Even though the stakes in the present conflict over multiculturalism in the West are very high -- with the concepts of free speech, the rule of law, equality of women and freedom of religion all open to debate -- most conservatives have respected the rules of evidence and the avoidance of ad hominem abuse.

Their left-wing opponents, however, as the Norwegian tragedy has demonstrated yet again, will resort to the lowest tactics to shut down debate they do not like and to kill off arguments they cannot refute by any other means." http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/07/charge-of-deadly-provocation-is-false

See also: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/08/the-myth-of-right-wing-terrorism

As one of the annotations to an edited video on the Vlad Tepes blog of a press conference by British Islamists notes, it's not certain that those featured will succeed in their stated aims, but it's not certain they'll fail, either.http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=36208

A British Ambassador On The Palestinian Arab Refugees

I decided to pay a call on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Middle East blogs, having neglected them for quite a while.

On a blog posted on 20 June to mark World Refugee Day, Britain's woman in Lebanon, our old friend Frances Guy (pictured, with a certain notorious Hezbollah cleric she admired, the late Sheikh Fadlallah), writes, inter alia:

"A timely reminder too this morning on the BBC that the world's biggest refugee problem is here in the Middle East; 5 million Palestinians, who technically don't yet have a home to return to. (A troubling thought and arguably unique in refugee situations, where refugees, however traumatised can dream of going home one day). The UNRWA spokesman argued vigorously that there can be no peace in the Middle East until the refugee situation is dealt with. There has been a tendancy [sic] to say that other issues need to be dealt with first. But these refugees deserve better. 

They also deserve better treatment in the interim, as I have argued before. I hope the new Lebanese government will take its responsibilities seriously and make a commitment to granting Palestinian residents in Lebanon full rights; including above all, access to work." [My emphasis] http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/guy/entry/refugees

 I assume Ambassador Guy, in the phrase "technically don't yet have a home to return to,"  is envisaging a future Palestinian state as the destination of these "refugees" and not hinting that Israel should take them in.
I recommend this post to her: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2010/09/in-contrast-to-palestine-partitions.html and remind her of all the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries.

Her post has attracted a lone comment, from a pro-Palestinian activist, who writes:

'Dear Ambassador

 I could not agree with you more. We need to find a solution to the 5,000,000 Palestinian refugees. How long have we being saying this? Why have we 5,000,000 Palestinian refugees? Where did they come from? Why are they not allowed to go home?

 It is good that you bring it to our intention but surely after 60 years we expect something better from the FCO. The FCO keep on saying that we need to support the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinains. We have not been honest brokers in these communications. We do not speak to all the representatives of the Palestinains [sic]. Moreover, we bend over backwards to support Israel. The Human Rights report in 2010 produced by the FCO demonstrates clearly that Israel is no friend of democracy and theferore [sic] should be no friend of the UK.. Israel treat their arab citizens terribly. They already run apartheid policies against there own citizens, never mind the millions they hold under occupation. 

Should we not agree that the 1948 UN agreement got it wrong. Why do we not go back to the drawing board and decide the correct solution for all the peo[p]le currently living in Palestine. Do we let a fanatical religious minority decide matters' [My emphasis]

It's disappointing that such a comment has been accepted for publication on the FCO website, with no attempt at rebuttal.

More disturbing is the fact that Frances Guy expresses with impunity her own views on foreign policy rather than doing what as an ambassador she ought to be doing - strictly reflecting the official views of the elected government of the day.

Sydney Israel-Haters Talk To Press TV (video)

O, the hypocrisy of it!  They rant and rave against Israel's supposed "atrocities" and violations against "human rights" yet think nothing of talking to a reporter from Press TV, the propaganda channel of the Ahmadinejad regime, which cracks down brutally on dissidents, hangs gays, and stones women.
 

An American Slave Of Arab Masters, 1812

The following historical snippet is not on a Jewish or Israeli theme, but it does concern a topic in which I know many people are interested - the enslavement of foreign captives (and of course there were Jews among them) in the Barbary States.

This extract comes from Vice-Admiral Sir William Henry Dillon's sparkling and informative  A Narrative of My Professional Adventures (1790-1839), published in two volumes by the Navy Records Society in 1956.

It is from vol. 2, pages 215-16, and concerns Dillon's visit to Oran in 1812 when HMS Leopard, of which he was then captain, was anchored in the Bay of Algiers.

The pitiful teenager who's the focus of the reminiscence was doubtless a crew member or passenger on an American merchant vessel taken by Barbary corsairs (or "Algerine" pirates, as they were also known), who scoured the Mediterranean capturing vulnerable vessels and enslaving those aboard, and even raided European coastal villages carrying off their inhabitants.

Whether the desperate boy whose heart-rending plight we glimpse here was ransomed or rescued or freed by some means (conversion to Islam?) at some future date, or spent his whole (short?) life in captivity, is unknown.

'During my leisure hours I had visited the grounds where the Christian slaves had to work.  It was a painful sight to behold those poor fellows under the lash of the Moor, watching all their actions and inflicting a cut with his whip if he noticed anyone idle.  Several spoke to me, and I could not give them any hopes.

Whilst listening to their misfortunes, a fine youth came and caught hold of the skirt of my coat.  At first, from his handsome and feminine appearance, I thought it was a female addressing me, but he soon undeceived me.  He was an American, a lad of about 17, most beautifully limbed: in other respects the most exquisite shape I have ever beheld.  Never had I seen such a lovely figure of the male sex.

However, painful as it was to refuse the supplications of this Adonis, his being subject of the United States, I explained to him, prevented my interference in his behalf, and I hurried away from the spot, regretting that I had been near it.

The next thing that deserved notice were the projecting iron hooks upon the outward walls of the bastion, upon which are hurled from the upper parts those victims who are sentenced to death.  The sight of this place filled my mind with horror, and I hastened away.  It was not considered safe for an officer of my rank to walk about in the town....'