Why one never thinks of the 870,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries

Source: Contra a corrente blog

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", George Santayana

"The 870,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries in the 1940s and 1950s similarly settled quietly in the United States, Europe and Israel. They aren’t out there blowing up Iraqi, Moroccan and Algerian embassies or airplanes, which is why you probably never think about them.

The list of people who were displaced by the events of World War II and decolonization is endless. The only group that anyone pays attention to is the Palestinians. If the Palestinians were to stop blowing up airplanes and pizza shops people would stop paying attention.

Arab leaders don’t care about non-violent Palestinians. As noted earlier, if you were an Arab leader there is no reason to care about your own subjects, much less members of very distant tribes. The only Arab nation that has offered Palestinians citizenship is Jordan; a Palestinian family that has lived in Egypt or Saudi Arabia for several generations will still be aliens with no right to permanent residence. Thus there are more than 4 million people officially classified as Palestinians refugees despite the fact that the final British census before the 1948 war found only about one million people of all religions living in Palestine. The primary agency for these stateless souls is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). If you visit their web site, you’ll see that the United States and European nations provide almost all of the funding. Historically in fact the western nations provided 100 percent of the funding for UNRWA, but in recent years Saudi Arabia has been shamed into chipping in. For 2002 the Saudis contributed $5.8 million, compared to a U.S. contribution of $120 million and Britain’s $30 million. Most Arab countries contribute less than the cost of a new Mercedes automobile.

Violent Palestinians, by contrast, have no trouble getting support from fellow Arabs. In April 2002 the Saudi state television network ran a telethon that raised more than $100 million to aid the families of the Palestinians suicide bombers. Iraqi, which contributes nothing to UNRWA, has been donating roughly $10 million per year to the families of suicide bombers. Iran, another state that contributes nothing to UNRWA, sends weapons and money to anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah and Yasser Arafat’s army, most notably a 50-ton shipment of rockets and plastic explosives in January 2002 (notable because it was in violation of the agreements that Arafat had signed and because it was discovered and intercepted by the Israel Navy)."

From Philip Greenspun's essay "Israel" in Those Who Forget The Past by Ron Rosenbaum (Random House 2004)

Newspaper article on Beslan ignores Maalot school massacre

Source: UPJF
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Another illuminating example of slipshod journalism and short memories..

A reader of the French daily Directsoir complained that an article (Sept. 3) on the 2004 Beslan school massacre wrongly claimed that it was the first in history involving children being taken hostage and killed by terrorists. In fact, there was a precedent which the article does not mention : the Maalot school massacre perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists thirty years before.

The Beslan school massacre - 2004.

334 dead, including 186 children.

"It was the first day of classes. (...) That all changed when a group of armed Chechen separatists and Islamic fundamentalists took more than 1,200 school children and adults hostage on September 1, 2004, at School Number One (SNO) in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania. Little did the children and parents know what the next 56 hours would bring... " Read more here.
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The Maalot school massacre - 1974

"The Ma'alot massacre was a school massacre in Ma'alot, Israel, that occurred on May 15, 1974.

On this date, the 26th anniversary of Israeli independence, three Arabs subsequently identified as members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a faction affiliated with the PLO, broke into the high school in Ma'alot, a community in northern Israel, where a group of 100 14-16 year olds were sleeping on the floor after a day spent hiking.

The Arabs had infiltrated into Israel from Lebanon dressed as Israeli soldiers. They first attacked a van bringing Arab women home from work, killing two women and wounding one. They then infiltrated the town of Ma'alot and took over a local school, immediately killing a security guard, a student, and one other person. Some students managed to escape by jumping out of a window, but 90 or so students and some teachers were held as hostages.

The hostage-takers presented their demands the next morning: release 23 Arab militants from Israeli prisons, or they would kill the students. The deadline was set at 6:00 p.m. the same day.

The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, met in an emergency session, and by 3:00 p.m. a decision was reached to negotiate, but the terrorists refused a request for more time.

At 5:45 p.m., a unit of the elite Golani Brigade stormed the building. The hostage-takers were killed in the assault, along with 20 students and one Israeli soldier. Reports vary as to the exact circumstances of the killings. Some reports say that the hostage-takers detonated their grenades and shot the children. All told, 26 victims were killed and 71 were wounded.

The names of the 21 students who died during the assault: Ilana Turgeman, Rachel Aputa, Yocheved Mazoz, Sarah Ben-Shim'on, Yona Sabag, Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen, Michal Sitrok, Malka Amrosy, Aviva Saada, Yocheved Diyi, Yaakov Levi, Yaakov Kabla, Rina Cohen, Ilana Ne'eman, Sarah Madar, Tamar Dahan, Sarah Soper, Lili Morad, David Madar, Yehudit Madar."

Violence explained in Palestinians' own words

Source: Contra a corrente blog
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", George Santayana

"It may be a mistake to look too deep into Palestinian poverty for the roots of Palestinian violence. For most violent Palestinians we need not conjecture as to the motivation for their violence because they’ve explained it in their own words. Here is an excerpt from the Palestinian National Charter, July 1-17, 1968:

"Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit. [Note that this would include the present-day country Jordan, 70 percent of the land of the original British Palestine, split off and handed to Emir Abdullah in 1923.]

Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.

Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war.

The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations; particularly the right to self-determination."

Hamas has a web site where they explain their goals:

"Hamas is a Jihadi movement in the broad sense of the word Jihad. It is part of the Islamic awakening movement and upholds that this awakening is the road which will lead to the liberation of Palestine form the river to the sea.

[Settlement with the State of Israel] should not be allowed to happen because the land of the Palestine is a blessed Islamic land that has been usurped by the Zionists; and Jihad has become a duty for Muslims to restore it and expel their occupiers out of their land."

Hezbollah also has a web site where they explain their objectives:

"Because Hezbollah’s ideological ideals sees no legitimacy for the existence of "Israel" a matter that elevates the contradictions to the level of existence. And the conflict becomes one of legitimacy that is based on religious ideals… And that is why we also find the slogan of the liberation of Jerusalem rooted deeply in the ideals of Hezbollah. Another of its ideals is the establishment of an Islamic Government…

Hezbollah also used one of its own special types of resistance against the Zionist enemy that is the suicide attacks. These attacks dealt great losses to the enemy on all thinkable levels such as militarily and mentally. The attacks also raised the moral across the whole Islamic nation…

Hezbollah also sees itself committed in introducing the true picture of Islam, the Islam that is logical. Committed to introduce the civilized Islam to humanity."

Note that if we take seriously the words of the Palestinian fighters, we can ignore 99 percent of the journalism and punditry to which we are exposed. The guys with the guns have explained very clearly why they are fighting and under what conditions they will lay down their arms. Their reasons for fighting and their conditions for peace have nothing to do with day-to-day events."

From Philip Greenspun's essay "Israel" in Those Who Forget The Past by Ron Rosenbaum (Random House 2004)

Oh Mon Dieu - It’s Dieudonné ... in Brussels

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, the Varia Theatre in Brussels has invited Dieudonné to perform his latest one man show "Dieudonné et son best of" from 2 to 11 October.

JTA has this on Dieudonné :

"A Paris appeals court upheld charges against a French comedian for making anti-Semitic remarks.

The court on Thursday fined Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala, known as Dieudonné, nearly $11,000 [€ 7,000] for referring to Holocaust remembrance as "memorial pornography" at a news conference following a performance in Algeria in February 2005.

At the same conference, he spoke of the "Zionist lobby, which cultivates the uniqueness of suffering" to the detriment of others.

Dieudonné has long been the center of controversy in France for his repeated anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish statements and stand-up shows.

The comedian has been quoted as saying that "Zionism is the AIDS of Judaism," and in a 2004 interview he said that "those Jews who criticize me are all former slave merchants who now control the media and the banks.""

He is also reported, among other things, as having said:

"Racism was created by Abraham. The 'Chosen People' [is] the beginning of racism. Muslims today are just answering back." "

"Anti-Semitism does not exist because the Jews do not exist.... In my opinion, the Jews are a sect, a rip-off."

"Sanitary cordon" and double-standards

Dieudonné has links with France's far right National Front (FN), and has developed a close friendship with its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen ... who is also his daughter's godfather.

The theatre's choice is dismaying because Belgian French-speaking élites have been operating for several years a strict "sanitary cordon" policy against far right parties and their associates (mainly directed against the Vlaams Belang): no TV or radio time, no interviews, no political or cultural contacts.

Blurring and crossing the lines

But it now turns out that there is at one notable exception to this virtuous rule: Dieudonné. He will be performing at a main Brussels theatre that relies on government subsidies and receives national lottery money ...

To add insult to injury, the blurb (on page 8) refers to Dieudonné as being unfairly treated by the French "media and political establishment" (maybe Le Pen can explain that one) for having performed a TV sketch, and alarmingly assuming that every Belgian is familiar with the sketch and disapproves, as the theatre does, of the totally justified outrage it caused in France. It does neither bother to mention the details nor that it was highly offensive towards Jews (by the way the word Jew that looms large in his work is nowhere to be seen). Dieudonné came on the live TV show dressed as an orthodox Jew wearing a swastika, and saying: "I urge all of you to convert like me [to Judaism]. Join the axis of Good, the American-Zionist axis." He gave a Nazi salute and cried "Isra-Heil".

"He is controversial, boycotted, condemned, and pilloried by the media and political establishment in the neighbouring hexagonal country [a mocking reference to France] ; he was banned from the airwaves after performing a dubious sketch at a TV talk-show as if he had committed a serious fault (...)"

- Dieudonné’s daughter’s godfather: guess who?
- French comic's growing anti-semitism is no joke
- Mon Dieu - It’s Dieudonne
- French comic tries to justify criticism of Holocaust `pornography'
- Laugh Riots, The French star who became a demagogue
- Extremes touch

Alter Jews: What is a Jew in Germany Permitted to Say Against a Jew in Germany?

Alter(native) Jews, from the French "Alterjuifs", i.e. self-hating, self-important, media hungry, hyper-critical of Israel etc. Jews.

Article by John Rosenthal @ World Politics Review

"Now, as so happens, "anti-Zionist anti-Semitism" is a commonly used term in German debates: including in academic debates. In the academic discussions, "Anti-Zionist anti-Semitism" is treated as a variant of so-called "new" German anti-Semitism. The basic idea is that since the direct expression of anti-Semitism is for obvious reasons highly taboo in Germany, abiding anti-Semitic resentments largely get expressed indirectly: the safest and most socially-acceptable form of expression being the in any case ubiquitous "criticism of Israel." "Anti-Zionist anti-Semitism" often goes hand-in-hand with so-called "secondary" anti-Semitism: i.e. a form of resentment of Jews precisely because of the Holocaust and the stigma that it represents for Germans and Germany. (For more on the subject, see here on World Politics Review.)

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The clearest symptom that one is dealing not with ordinary "criticism of Israel" but rather with a resentment-laden obsession is the drawing of flagrantly overblown and spurious comparisons between Israel and precisely Nazi Germany. Thus, a 2004 survey conducted by a research group at the University of Bielefeld famously found that some 51% of German respondents agreed that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is "no different than what the Nazis did to the Jews in the Third Reich." Fully 68% agreed that Israel is conducting a "war of extermination" [Vernichtungskrieg] against the Palestinians. Given its close association with the campaigns of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front in the Second World War, the expression "war of extermination" again clearly invites comparison to Nazi Germany.

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Now, also as so happens, Hecht-Galinski has not only defended the legitimacy of such comparisons, but indeed made them herself. Thus in March 2007, Hecht-Galinski gave an interview to the German public radio Deutschlandfunk. Shortly before, two German bishops on a trip to the Middle East had compared the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank to that of Jews in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. Hecht-Galinski not only defended the bishops, but she added:
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"What's happening there [in the Middle East] can only end in an absolute catastrophe [ein absolutes Unglück], because you cannot oppress a people eternally and really -- I have to venture these comparisons -- we have ourselves experienced what happened in the Second World War and what is happening today. That can't simply be talked away. And one has to draw certain comparisons. Unfortunately, one has to say so, even if this is not politically correct in Germany."

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Despite the tumultuous syntax of Hecht-Galinski's remarks, German listeners will not have failed to hear in her reference to an impending "absolute catastrophe" for Israel yet another Nazi analogy: namely to the "catastrophe" that is supposed to have befallen Germany at the end of WWII. Hecht-Galinski's allusion to the Israeli "propaganda ministry" on "Hallo Ü-Wagen" is, incidentally, yet another remark of the same sort."

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continue reading here

Cover of "Les Alterjuifs", Controverses magazine, February 2004

Anti-Semitism: Anatomy of an Obsession

The Day After the Auto-da-Fé, by Francisco Duarte Azevedo

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Sources: TJP, an article by Haviv Rettig, and Rua da Judiaria

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"Being special is never easy. According to Dr. Avi Beker, an expert on international relations and former secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, the idea that the Jews are special, are "chosen," has been the source of the greatest troubles they have faced across history.

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Yet, at the same time, it is "the key defining concept of Judaism," and an important factor in the development of the other major monotheistic religions. It is also one of the Jewish people's most controversial ideas both within and without the Jewish fold.

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In his new book, The Chosen: The History of an Idea, and the Anatomy of an Obsession, Beker attempts to explain the strange life and complex repercussions of this stubborn idea throughout Jewish history.

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Perhaps the key claim of the book is that the idea of chosenness has brought the Jewish people its greatest enemies and its most faithful friends.

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"The concept of chosenness has been and still is the driving force behind Jewish-Gentile relations," Beker writes. (...)

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"I don't accept classic theories of anti-Semitism that state that it's a hatred of the other, of the rich, of the different," Beker told The Jerusalem Post in an interview last week. "There's something deeper here, an obsession. You can't describe anti-Semitism as hatred of the type directed at Roma [Gypsies]."

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While the expressions of hatred can be similar - "there are other genocides" - anti-Semitism remains "the deepest, the oldest, and it doesn't change its characteristics across time and place. The Roma may be denigrated and dehumanized, but this isn't combined with conspiracies of world domination. If Henry Ford could write The International Jew, an irrational and counterfactual American version of the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion], then there's something obsessive going on here."

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In the book he asks starkly, "How have the Jews, of all people, come to represent at once the epitome of both the good and the odious? The priestly and the pariah? A source of envy and of enmity?"

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The question is not theoretical, he believes, because this tension "still informs new expressions of anti-Semitism and has a major impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict."

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In pinning Christian anti-Semitism on the doctrine of supersession, the ancient idea that Christianity is the "New Israel," Beker does not break new ground. But he offers a new perspective on even the Christian context when he places it alongside the Muslim doctrine of supersessionism that continues to this day.

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This widespread Islamic idea, a denial of Jewish legitimacy from koranic days to the present, is "one of the deep, serious stumbling blocks on the way to peace" between Muslims and Jews, Beker believes. It is rife throughout Islamic discourse, from the koranic view that Jews should remain in a state of humility to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's war against a "Zionist-dominated" world.

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Indeed, following a discussion of Muslim religious figures and the public discourse in Islamic countries, Beker concludes that the Muslim problem with Zionism is more theology than politics.
"The Jews are supposed to be humbled, scattered. Theologically, they're not supposed to win wars in the place that is part of their narrative of chosenness."

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Yet the idea of Jewish chosenness is also the intellectual wellspring for some of the most ardent supporters of Jews and Israel, groups such as Christian Zionists in America and elsewhere.

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Beker never explicitly offers his own view of "chosenness," instead focusing on the religious, social and political influences of the idea. In this, he cannot escape dealing with the often-tortured Jewish reflections on this idea.

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The Jews themselves, he believes, do not understand the root of the obsession with them. He quotes author A.B. Yehoshua's grave misgivings about the Jews' "ambiguous identity":

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"I have a fear because of the partial identity of the Jews. With their ability to penetrate the life of others. To live without borders, without taking responsibility... It is about time we should understand that our ambiguous identity is causing individuals and groups who suffer a chaos of identity to cast on us awesome implications."

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Yehoshua is "perplexed," Beker writes, because he is unready to recognize that it is "the religious dependency of millions of people" on the idea of chosenness that leads to obsessive anti-Semitism. (...)"

UN Durban II pre-meeting confirms fears of anti-Semitic agenda

Source: StandWithUs

www.eyeontheun.org

"Preparations for the UN Durban II racism conference are confirming the worst fears about the conference's anti-Israel and anti-democratic agenda, EYEontheUN reports. At the African regional meeting on Durban II in Abuja, Nigeria, which ended yesterday, UN member states "employed the old tactics of singling out Israel, ignoring egregious human rights violations such as genocide, and challenging fundamental democratic freedoms," said Anne Bayefsky, Senior Editor of EYEontheUN.org.

The Abuja Declaration adopted by the regional meeting "reiterates its [the UN's] concern about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupations." No other country-specific victims are identified. The Declaration also calls on states "to avoid inflexibly clinging to free speech...with absolute disregard for religious feeling."

"The obvious result of mentioning only the Palestinians as victims of racism is to demonize the Jewish state," noted Bayefsky.

UN member states gathered in Nigeria projected a clear commitment to democratic principles, calling on states to codify "permissible limitations on the exercise of the right to freedom of expression" and to elaborate "a voluntary ethical code of conduct...to address racism in the media and other modern information and communication technologies while taking into account fundamental issues, such as the right to freedom of expression..."

The Abuja Declaration also gives Islam special preference by calling on states to "pay attention to the serious nature of incitement to religious hatred such as anti-semitism, Christianophobia and more particularly, Islamophobia." (...)

The Abuja meeting is part of ongoing preparation for the Durban II conference, slated to take place in Geneva in 2009. The African conference is the second regional preparatory gathering, and the Abuja Declaration will be used to prepare the final outcome document of the Durban II conference itself. Canada, the United States, and Israel have been boycotting the meetings associated with the Durban II conference, recognizing that the forum has been hijacked by human rights violators to the detriment of human rights victims everywhere. "The Abuja Declaration indicates that continued participation by democratic nations in the Durban II process sends precisely the wrong signals to rights-abusing states and their victims," Bayefsky warned."

Boycott Durban II, by Pascal Bruckner