Credulous, likely-senile Jimmy Carter had tea with the terrorist group Hamas and now, according to MSNBC, Hamas is asking for a 10-year “truce” while refusing to recognize the State of Israel on the condition that said State of Israel return to the nearly-indefensible 1967 (read 1949) borders.
This is nothing new from Hamas, which would love to import offensive weaponry for the next 10 years while ruling both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Hamas’ terrorist attacks will simply be farmed out to (or conveniently blamed upon) Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Al-Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades etc…while Hamas claims to be at peace and that Israeli self-defense violates this ‘hudna’ (an Islamic temporary truce until victory can be attained over an unwary enemy).
Hamas had its chance to give up violence and become a constructive political organization when it won that so-called election. Hamas could have suppressed violence and dismantled the other terrorist groups (see above list) while working with Israel and the world community to ease the plight of its subjects. Did Hamas choose to grow up? No way! Hamas chose to blow its big chance and continue to bring misery to the Palestinian Arabs.
Only an ignorant, politically-correct, self-righteous moralizing fool would buy-into this nonsense.
I don’t have a ton of faith in this effort, but I don’t imagine it could be any worse than having members of my own synagogue intimate that I’m an anti-Semite because I don’t unequivocally support Israel.
The [Israel] Foreign Affairs Ministry has long since been exerting considerable efforts to bring the prominent writers for an extensive tour of the country, in recognizing the influence many of the writers wield and the fact some of them represent websites that are less-than-friendly towards the Israel.
While Israel enjoys relatively balanced coverage in American mainstream media, there are numerous blogs identifying with the liberal left who are unwaveringly critical of Israeli policies, often referring to Israel as an apartheid state which, among other things, is responsible for Washington’s decision to go to war in Iraq.
The unique tour was organized by the Solomon Project, which was founded in 1996 to “educate the American Jewish community about its rich history of civic involvement.”
The bloggers, along with leaders from various progressive organizatios, will meet with Israeli bloggers, journalists and Knesset officials. They will also be briefed on the security situation in the region and Israel’s civil society.
The group will be taken to view Sderot and Israel’s ‘narrow waistline’ by helicopter in an effort to convey the true meaning of a return to the borders of June 4th 1967. The guests are also scheduled to visit with the top negotiator for the Palestinian Authority, Saeb Erekat and may also meet Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni.
“We are looking forward to an informative and educational trip,” said National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) Executive Director Ira Forman, director of research for the Solomon Project Research.
“It is important that progressive bloggers and leaders of progressive organizations learn first-hand about the current situation in Israel. We also want to provide them with an eye-opening experience that will help them better understand the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
I haven’t written much about this, but I will be traveling to Israel for two weeks later this year. What saddens me is that the government of Israel thinks that a visit to Israel might be able to accomplish what none of us who have tried to be reasonable on sites such as Daily Kos about Israel have been able to accomplish.
On the other hand, I’ve often remarked to people who have never been there that you just cannot fully understand how gut-wrenching the conditions are there - throughout the country and the occupied territories, from a humanity level and from an anthropological level, unless you go there.
You also come away realizing why belief in and talk of refusal to recognize one’s existence has no place in a peace plan of any type for the Middle East.
Rep. Tom Lantos, 80, a California Democrat whose experience during the Holocaust shaped his concern for human rights and his staunch view in favor of U.S. military intervention abroad, died early this morning, a spokeswoman told the Associated Press. He had esophageal cancer and died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.
Lantos, born in Budapest to Hungarian Jews, served 14 terms in the House of Representatives. He is the only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress. His district included southwest San Francisco and much of San Mateo County, where he was known for supporting the socially liberal agenda of his constituents. Last year, he announced he would not seek reelection because of his cancer treatment.
Lantos was a powerful figure on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, where he had been the senior Democratic member since 2001 and its chairman since 2007.
For years, he sided with Republican neoconservatives who believe the United States should assert democracy abroad and use the military to intervene when a moral imperative or national interest is at stake.
In 2002, he supported the congressional resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Iraq and played a decisive role to gain Democratic support for the measure.
On the House floor at the time, he noted his own past as a Nazi-resistance fighter. “Had the United States and its allies confronted Hitler earlier, had we acted sooner to stymie his evil designs, the 51 million lives needlessly lost during that war could have been saved,” he said. “Just as leaders and diplomats who appeased Hitler at Munich in 1938 stand humiliated before history, so will we if we appease Saddam Hussein today.”
But after the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, Lantos became increasingly critical about the direction of the war and called for large withdrawals of American troops. He also held more than a dozen hearings on the situation.
Capitol Hill veterans describe Lantos - courtly, loquacious but tough - as a throwback to an earlier generation of lawmakers who were able to work across party and ideological lines.
The reaction from Jewish groups to the news was swift.
“For years people have looked to Congressman Tom Lantos as the conscience of the United States Congress,” said Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA). “Chairman Lantos was a leader on so many issues of concern to the Jewish community such as anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Israel.”
William Daroff, vice president for public policy of the United Jewish Communities (UJC), said Lantos “was a great friend of the Jewish community and the Jewish Federation system. As Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Lantos steered a steady ship during a particularly tumultuous time in American foreign policy.”
“We mourn the loss of Congressman Lantos,” said Nathan Diament, Washington director for the Orthodox Union. “He was a proud supporter of Israel and a proud Jew. His presence will be sorely missed.”
In announcing his expected retirement last month, Lantos said “It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family, and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a Member of Congress. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”
January 25th, 2008 by DAVID SCHRAUB, Assistant Editor
No immediate link to anything currently in the news, though it does remind me of my Dartmouth L.J. paper. I just wanted to save it for later:
The question of how Jews would fit in when cultural and linguistic identity became the basis of citizenship, and the Volksgeist was embodied in a Volksstaat, could be answered in only one of two ways. Either the Jews had to surrender their Jewishness and become good Germans or there would be no place for them. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a liberal assimilationist perspective was ascendant in German thought, but beneath it lurked a deep intolerance of the Jew who remained distinctive. In 1793, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who professed to be advocating that Jews be given “human rights,” put the choice before them in starkly brutal terms: “As for giving them [the Jews] civil rights, I see no remedy [*72] but that their heads should be cut off in one night and replaced with others not containing a single Jewish idea.”
George M. Fredrickson, Racism: An Introduction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002), 71-72.
Similar sentiments were expressed in France during this time period. And, of course, this theory of enlightenment universalism is the guiding force behind much of modern Western philosophy in America and Europe — including the “color-blind” theory of race relations and the doctrine of strict separation between Church and State.
Notice how obliterating Jewish distinctiveness was cast as being in accordance with securing human rights — Jews literally had to be destroyed in order to be saved. The evident Christian overtones accentuate the fact that this “liberal” revolution was hardly the break from the past that it used to be — it merely found new language to express its fear of Jewish difference and its desire for Jews to disappear. Given that the “universal” personhood Jews were expected to assimilate into was based on a Christian norm, even the desire for conversion is barely affected. All that changed was the removal of the few protections Jews had when their oppression was strictly theological: at least some Christians theologians had some need for some living Jews — the model expressed here explicitly wanted all Jews to disappear and pointedly chose a very violent metaphor to bring across its point.
It’s no wonder that many post-Holocaust theorists consider the Shoah to be the bastard child of the Enlightenment.
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said it is important to examine the Obama rumors in the broader context of today’s bitter, unrestrained political environment.
“I’ve said consistently that this campaign will turn out to be one of the dirtiest campaigns in American history, and the first few weeks prove it,” Sabato told The Jewish Week. “Obama has borne a disgusting burden so far — attacks on his race that are worthy of the 1950s, and complete lies about his supposed ‘Muslim religion.’”
Sabato put part of the blame on the “mainstream media [which] has not done nearly enough to root out the perpetrators.”
He said suspicions about Obama’s religion may compound a racial divide in the campaign in which many white Democrats are simply reluctant to vote for a black presidential candidate.
Here are some more-valid reasons to be concerned about Obama:
Daniel Pipes shows (HERE and HERE) that because Obama’s father and step-father were Muslim and Obama did attend mosque as a child, the Muslim world may see Obama as a Muslim apostate although he is clearly a Christian today. If the Muslim world sees Obama as an apostate, his election may antagonize some elements thereof who may wish to kill him.
UPDATE: Just noticed this Editorial, also in The Jewish Week.
There are legitimate reasons to question Obama’s candidacy on the issues — the same can be said for all his competitors, Democrats and Republicans alike — but outrageous charges about how his childhood years in Indonesia indelibly taint him as a Muslim sympathizer go far beyond the pale.
AND
Part of this reflects the corrosive victory-at-any-cost mentality that has turned “swift boating” into a verb. That is the motive behind “pollsters” who call voters, ostensibly to ask questions about issues but in reality to keep repeating Obama’s middle name — Hussein — as if that alone disqualifies him from the presidency. And in part, the fact these rumors are believed reflects a destructive, seemingly bottomless skepticism about our political leadership, fear and outright bigotry.
The insidious thing about such charges, as political scientist Gilbert Kahn noted in a recent Jewish Week blog, is that once spoken, “it is like you plant the seed in the mind of the jury even if the judge sustains the objection — it’s out there. The suspicion persists and has legs of its own.”
January 15th, 2008 by DAVID SCHRAUB, Assistant Editor
Co-blogger T-Steel already offered his take on this subject today, but I wanted to give my own musings on whether and what Obama needs to see regarding his pastor’s praise for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
I do want to briefly digress to note that I think T-Steel’s example of his ex-murderer friend is somewhat in-apt. I certainly agree that T should not be forced to throw his friend under a bus if he ran for office. After all, his friend has rehabilitated, paid his debts, and has reintegrated into society as a full and productive member. But it would be different if his friend were still out killing people, and the problem with Rev. Wright is that he still apparently believes, right now, that Farrakhan is a figure worthy of praise and respect. If Wright had abandoned this belief years ago and it were being dredged up now as an attack ad, I’d totally be on board. But unlike T-Steel’s friend, there is no “ex” in Wright’s problem, and that changes the calculus significantly.
January 13th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
There are charges that Hugo Chavez’s government in Venezuela is sponsoring blossoming antisemitism — concerns that are reflected in the gradual flight of Jews from Venezuela.
It fits with a long history of allegations that Chavez’s Venezuela is becoming a hotbed of antisemitism.
The latest comes via a Miami Herald article detailing the comments of journalist Sammy Eppel. It’s the latest in a piece of an ugly puzzle that has emerged regarding Chavez over the years.
Venezuelan Jews, long uneasy with the Chávez government’s alliances with Iran and other Middle Eastern countries that espouse anti-Israel views, are concerned that the government is sponsoring anti-Semitism in this hemisphere, a prominent journalist said Tuesday.
”The situation we have now in Venezuela is that for the first time in modern history we have government-sponsored anti-Semitism in a Western country,” said Sammy Eppel. “That is why this is very dangerous, not just for the Jewish community in Venezuela but for the Jewish community as a whole.”
Some examples he cites:
Venezuelan government intelligence services twice have raided the country’s most important Jewish center in a vague, ultimately unsuccessful search for weapons. [TMV Editor’s Note: One of these involved raiding a WEDDING.] Publications of the government’s cultural ministry run articles entitled ”the Jewish Question,” along with a Jewish star superimposed over a swastika.
Chavez, he noted, also has a strong alliance with Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a leader who is considered one of the most antisemitic on the world stage today.
One 2006 article in [the government-liked] El Diario de Caracas debates whether it will be necessary to ”expel [the Jews] from the country.” Another article in the [government-linked] Diario VEA accuses Jews of being involved in the murder of a government prosecutor.
