Love of the Land: What About The Arab Apartheid?

What About The Arab Apartheid?

Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson New York
16 March '10

How come the Lebanese students who recently talked about Israel's "war crimes" in the Gaza Strip during Israel Apartheid Week on many North American college campuses had nothing to say about the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been massacred in Lebanon over the past four decades?

Dozens of refugees were killed and hundreds wounded in the three-month offensive that also destroyed thousands of houses inside the refugee camp. Reporters said it was the worst internal violence in Lebanon since the civil war that hit the country between 1975-1990. And just three years ago, the Lebanese Army used heavy artillery to bomb the Nahr-al-Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon.

Yet who has ever heard of a United Nations resolution condemning Syria or Lebanon for committing horrific atrocities or discriminating against the Palestinians?

The Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian students and professors who took part in the anti-Israel events on campuses have clearly "forgotten" that their regimes probably have more Palestinian blood on their hands than Israel. In the early 1970s, the Jordanians slaughtered thousands of Palestinians in what has become known as Black September. Can somebody point to one United Nations resolution condemning that massacre?

And where was the United Nations when Kuwait and several Gulf countries expelled more than 400,000 Palestinians in one week? The exodus took place in March 1991, after Kuwait was liberated from Iraqi occupation. Ironically, the first week of March is being celebrated on university campuses as Israel Apartheid Week with no reference to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Gulf.

(Read full article)

Related: Let's launch 'Arab Apartheid Week'

Love of the Land: What About The Arab Apartheid?

Love of the Land: Let's launch 'Arab Apartheid Week'

Let's launch 'Arab Apartheid Week'

Michael Freund
Opinion/JPost
11 March '10

In nearly three dozen cities across the world, a coordinated series of events is being held this week with the express aim of demonizing Israel. Now in its sixth year, the annual hate-fest known as “Israel Apartheid Week” has sought to portray the Jewish state as a bastion of bigotry, inequality and discrimination.

The organizers do not mince words in describing their objectives, asserting on their Web site that they aim “to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns” against the Jewish state. This, they confidently declare, is a key part of “the battle to end Israeli apartheid,” whatever that means.

Naturally, behind the sloganeering stands a clear political platform, one which essentially seeks to dismantle the Jewish state by stripping it of territory and flooding the country with millions of Palestinian refugees through the so-called right of return.

The first step in this campaign, of course, is to equate Israel with the evils of apartheid-era South Africa, thereby laying the groundwork for increased diplomatic and economic pressure to make far-reaching concessions. And so, as usual, the only democracy in the Middle Eastonce again finds itself on the receiving end of yet another indefensible canard, accused of one of modernity’s greatest political sins without any basis or justification.

SIMPLY PUT, this slur cannot be allowed to stand. It is an insult to Israel and its democracy and dangerously analogous to asserting that Zionism is a form of racism. If allowed to take hold in the public’s consciousness, it could have far-reaching and extremely damaging effects on support for Israel in the near- and long-term. In the past, the typical response by pro-Israel activists to such charges has been to go on the defensive, responding to the slanders and explaining in great detail the myriad differences between democratic Israel and the racist regime that once ruled South Africa.

Well, I say the time has come to stop playing defense and to bring the offense out onto the field. We need to turn the tables and fight back against our opponents by taking the struggle toward their end-zone.

A good place to be start would be to organize an annual “Arab Apartheid Week,” which would highlight the decrepit state of human and political rights throughout the Arab world.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Let's launch 'Arab Apartheid Week'

Love of the Land: Getting Israel Right

Getting Israel Right

As the annual hate-circus known as “Israel Apartheid Week” pitches its tent again, it is incumbent on us once more to reconsider what Israel actually is.


David Solway
Pajamasmedia.com
10 March '10

Any open-minded person who has either visited Israel, kept apace of the documentary evidence, or honestly examined the tainted “bona fides” of Israel’s accusers would realize that Israel has been set up as the target for what is nothing less than an illegitimate campaign of delegitimation. Orwell’s Hate Week has escaped the boundaries of the novel, whose “Enemy of the People” is someone with the surname — what else? — Goldstein. (Oddly, the enemy of the Jewish people is someone with the surname Goldstone.) And as Orwell writes about the Two Minutes Hate period instituted by the Party, “Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.”

Watch the YouTube video of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren addressing a group of students at UC Irvine for real-world confirmation.

A triple alliance comprising leftist ideology, Islamic anti-Semitism, and vast commercial interests has coalesced into an aggressive bloc of anti-Zionist calumniators and malevolent defamers of the one genuine democracy in the Middle East. The international left sees Israel as a colonial outpost of the detested United States and a resolute defender of the national patriotic spirit which the left believes is obsolete. Islam continues to prosecute its 1400-year war against the Jews. And powerful economic interests are concerned with opening export markets and preserving and expanding their ties with the oil-rich Muslim states — it truly is all about oil: “Arab oil is thicker than Jewish blood,” Robin Shepherd pointedly writes in his important new book, A State Beyond the Pale.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Getting Israel Right

Love of the Land: For Israel's Arabs It Is Not Apartheid

For Israel's Arabs It Is Not Apartheid

Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson New York
09 March '10

(As usual, number of good points.)

An Arab member of the Knesset who goes all the way to the US and Canada to tell university students and professors that Israel is an apartheid state is not only a hypocrite and a liar, but is also causing huge damage to the interests of his own Arab voters and constituents.

If Israel were an apartheid state, what is this Arab doing in the Knesset? Doesn't apartheid mean that someone like this Knesset member would not, in the first place, even be permitted to run in an election?

Fortunately, Arab citizens can go to the same beaches, restaurants and shopping malls as Jews in this "apartheid" state. Moreover, they can run in any election and even have a minister in the government [Ghaleb Majadlah] for the first time.

In this "apartheid" state, the Arab community has a free media that many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip envy. Ironically, an Arab newspaper in Nazareth or Haifa that is licensed by Israel enjoys more freedom than the media controlled by Hamas and Fatah, as well as most corrupt Arab dictatorships.

Ironically, this Knesset member who is complaining about apartheid enjoys more privileges than most Jews and Arabs in Israel. As a parliamentarian, he is entitled to do many things that an ordinary citizen cannot do, thanks largely to the immunity he enjoys as an elected official.

His parliamentary immunity allows him to enter areas that ordinary Jewish and Arab citizens do not have access to. This Knesset member, for example, travels to the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories which, for many years, have been off-limits to ordinary Israeli citizens.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: For Israel's Arabs It Is Not Apartheid

Love of the Land: A beginner's guide to Israel Apartheid Week

A beginner's guide to Israel Apartheid Week

Based on the realities of the situation, it is clear that the apartheid label cannot be justified by the conditions faced by Arab citizens of Israel.


Jon Hollander
Columbia Spectator
07 March '10

Last Monday marked the beginning of what has become a yearly tradition on Western college campuses: Israeli Apartheid Week. If you have walked by the competing pro- and anti-Israel protests on College Walk, you can appreciate that labeling Israel as an apartheid state is a hotly contested issue. Who is right here? The only way to properly address this question is to look at the facts that underlie claims of Israeli apartheid, and to judge both their validity, and whether or not the apartheid label constitutes an unfair demonization of the Jewish State of Israel.

Before examining the claim that Israel is an apartheid state, it is important to make the critical distinction between Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians. In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt the U.N. Partition Plan for the former British Mandate of Palestine, dividing the land into two states–one Jewish and the other Arab. The Jewish Agency (the de facto government for Jews in Palestine) accepted the plan, while the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq rejected the proposal and invaded Israel. By 1949, Israel had managed to defeat the Arab armies and signed an armistice that set the borders of what are today the West Bank and Gaza. Those territories that Israel conquered, other than the West Bank and Gaza, have been incorporated into the internationally accepted boundaries of Israel. The Arabs who resided in these areas are known as Israeli-Arabs.

Israeli-Arabs are citizens of Israel, and have full political rights. There are Arab political parties in Israel’s Parliament, high-ranking Arab bureaucrats and cabinet ministers, and Arab members of the Israeli Supreme Court. Moreover, Druze-Arabs are conscripted into the Israeli Defense Forces just like Israeli Jews, and several top IDF commanders are Druze-Arabs. More important than this small list of examples, however, is the fact that, unlike the blacks of South Africa, Israeli-Arabs are not denied basic political or economic rights. Economic, social, and political disparities between Arabs and Jews continue to exist in Israel, but these are more along the lines of those that exist here in the United States, not in pre-1994 South Africa.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: A beginner's guide to Israel Apartheid Week

Love of the Land: Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Barbara Kay
Pajamasmedia.com
04 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

In the aftermath of what emerged, against early predictions, as a wildly successful Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canadians are basking in an uncharacteristically bullish glow of national pride. With a stunning fourteen gold medals to the USA’s nine, Canadians are relishing their moment in the sun.

The road to this overflowing pot of Canadian gold was paved with a costly and therefore somewhat controversial “Own the Podium” funding program for athletes’ development and expenses. But $66 million of taxpayers’ money now seems a small price to pay for a formerly unassuming nation’s long-deferred sporting honor.

Hard on the winged heels of an inebriating Olympics that sought to ennoble the ideal, for two weeks anyway, of a mature global polity, with nation rivaling nation through positive, amicable achievement, there slouched into Canada (amongst other countries) a rough beast that shames the very idea of man as political animal: the annual eight-day immiseration known as Israel Apartheid Week (IAW).

IAW is something like a multi-site Olympiad itself, except that in this cheerless, failure-glorifying anti-Olympiad, the world does not come together. Instead, it is prised apart in a scapegoating orgy of thinly disguised Jew-hatred.

On this front, ironically without spending a cent, by dint of political courage and real leadership, Canadian politicians have begun in earnest to take ownership of a long-empty moral podium by addressing the escalating pathology of anti-Semitism fueling IAW and reaffirming Israel’s legitimacy — and more, Israel’s importance to Western interests.

Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) has for some years now been a well-oiled engine of hate belching toxic black smoke as it chugs in full-throated spate across a good part of the academic globe. It may have reached a tipping point of its own making in Canada (whose University of Toronto campus “boasts” the dubious distinction of having provided the venue for this continent’s first IAW).

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Love of the Land: The apartheid libel

The apartheid libel

JPost Editorial
02 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

Israeli Apartheid Week kicked off on Monday, promising Israel-bashing, mostly on college campuses.

The sixth international Israeli Apartheid Week kicked off on Monday, promising 14 days of Israel-bashing in about 40 cities around the world, mostly on college campuses. Organizers say the events will “educate” about Israel’s so-called “apartheid system” and encourage BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) against the Jewish state. Punishing Israel into submission will lead to the end of “colonization” of Arab land, the beginning of equal rights for Arab-Palestinians, the dismantling of the security barrier, and instituting the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

Naomi Klein, the Jewish anti-globalization savant who has in recent years branched out to include demonizing Israel in her repertoire, pointed out in the opening speech of last year’s extravaganza that “serious movements have serious enemies,” arguing that the fierce opposition to Israeli Apartheid Week proved its importance. According to that reasoning, perhaps it would be better to simply ignore the festivities and allow the whole thing to blow over.

Problem is, if left unchallenged, proponents of the apartheid analogy are liable to stifle free speech and trample open debate on campuses by using intimidation and bullying tactics. They recently prevented Ambassador Michael Oren from finishing a speech at UC Irvine, and on the same day in Cambridge they interrupted Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, allegedly shouting in Arabic, “Slaughter the Jews.” Meanwhile, Cambridge University’s Israel Society bowed to pressure from Muslim students to cancel a speech by historian Benny Morris.

(Read full article)

Related: Speaking of Apartheid and "Israel Apartheid" week

Love of the Land: The apartheid libel

Love of the Land: Israel Apartheid Week Comes to Town

Israel Apartheid Week Comes to Town

Honest Reporting
Media Critique
03 March '10

The insidious analogy returns to college campuses as part of the campaign to delegitimize Israel.

The false analogy between apartheid South Africa and Israel - particularly since the UN's racist 2001 Durban Conference - has played a key role in the campaign to delegitimize Israel and threaten its existence. The strategy of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) is based on convincing the public that Israel is no more legitimate than the apartheid regime in South Africa, and can be removed with enough public pressure.

Now, this insidious delegitimization campaign has returned to university campuses around the world, including the US, UK and Canada, as part of Israel Apartheid Week.

As the Jerusalem Post states:

Problem is, if left unchallenged, proponents of the apartheid analogy are liable to stifle free speech and trample open debate on campuses by using intimidation and bullying tactics. They recently prevented Ambassador Michael Oren from finishing a speech at UC Irvine, and on the same day in Cambridge they interrupted Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, allegedly shouting in Arabic, "Slaughter the Jews." Meanwhile, Cambridge University’s Israel Society bowed to pressure from Muslim students to cancel a speech by historian Benny Morris.

(Read full critique)

Love of the Land: Israel Apartheid Week Comes to Town

Love of the Land: Follow the Money

Follow the Money

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
04 March '10

This phrase, made famous by Deep Throat, should become the guiding principle for people concerned with the growing effectiveness of the NGO movement’s effort to convince the Western world that Israel is a uniquely guilty human-rights and international-law violator.

An important introductory guide to the largely unscrutinized world of NGO funding has been provided by Jonathan Rosenblum. I bet you didn’t know how large the annual budget of the New Israel Fund is: last year, it was $32 million. That’s an immense amount of money, and a great deal of it is doled out to NGOs with innocuous-sounding names, like The Coalition of Women for Peace, but that, in fact, support the boycott, divest, and sanction movement, the “right of return,” the branding of Israel as an “apartheid state,” and other causes antithetical to peace.

It might turn out that the Goldstone Report, despite all the damage it has done, will end up serving a worthy purpose: it is awakening the pro-Israel community to the reality that many organizations that traffic in the language of human rights and international law have no interest in either — their real goal is the crippling of one particular state, and they have merely discovered an effective vocabulary to employ that gives their ugly cause a patina of nobility. To understand how the NGO movement works, follow the money.

Love of the Land: Follow the Money

Love of the Land: Irwin Cotler: The real Apartheid? A Middle-East without Israel

Irwin Cotler: The real Apartheid? A Middle-East without Israel

Akiva
Hadar Israel
03 March '10

The real apartheid in the middle-east is the rejection of the legitimacy of a Jewish State, according to Irwin Cotler, the featured speaker at Hadar’s second public forum February 24 on Lawfare: Fighting False Legal Actions and Boycotts that Demonize Israel. Cotler, former Justice Minister of Canada, a Canadian MP and a renowned international human rights lawyer also told the packed hall at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center that groups like Hadar that mobilize citizen engagement are of vital importance in “delegitimizing the delegitimizers.”

The delegitimization of Israel – while not a new phenomenon - has been “laundered” under the banners of human rights, the UN, and the fight against racism, Cotler explained. The Palestinian narrative with its many falsifications has been adopted as the human rights narrative and Israel is portrayed as an international outlaw. In addition, the recent Goldstone commission was corrupt from its creation by the fundamentally biased UN Human Rights Council, Cotler said.

IDF Lieutenant Colonel (res.) David Benjamin, said that Israel exceeds international legal and moral standards in fighting terrorism, and minimizes civilian casualties. D.J Schneeweiss, Israel’s coordinator of anti-boycott strategy in Europe, said that Israel needs to change the rules of the game and apply a “full court press” in challenging delegitimization.

The forum’s moderator was David Horovitz, Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post.



The main problem Israel faces in its battle for legitimacy, according to Cotler, is the laundering of delegitimization through internationally respected agencies such as the UN and its various arms, international legal conventions and NGOs.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Irwin Cotler: The real Apartheid? A Middle-East without Israel

Love of the Land: Anti-Israel Bigotry Week

Anti-Israel Bigotry Week

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
02 March '10

This afternoon, I attended a reception at the House of Commons given by the All-Party Parliamentary Committee against Antisemitism. As its splendid and doughty chairman the Labour MP John Mann observed, it is heartening to find MPs from all political parties taking a lead in fighting the re-emergence of this disgusting prejudice. This week provides evidence of why such a defence is tragically so necessary with Anti-Israel Bigotry Week (aka Israel Apartheid Week), a global campus hate-fest whose message, that Israel is fundamentally illegitimate, is in effect a call for Israel’s destruction and is therefore an incitement to genocide.

In Canada, the fact that the University of Toronto is hosting this odious travesty has caused one of its alumni, Howard Rotberg, to return the degrees he obtained there. He wrote to the President of his old university thus:

We have now reached a stage where Jewish students and others identifiably Jewish fear for their safety at various universities in North America and Europe, and where various Jewish speakers are denied permission to speak because of Islamist intimidation. We have now reached a situation where various student groups, such as the Muslim Students Association are being funded by radical Islamist groups, and where various University departments across the ‘free world’ are becoming beholden to radical Islam due to financial funding from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

I am sure you have read how young Muslim students are being ‘radicalized’ at universities in England, and such was the case with the attempted terror attacker on the Delta airlines jet on Christmas Day.

The situation at English universities and even at York University has gotten out of hand. To the extent that your views are infused with cultural and moral relativism, I suggest that the University of Toronto is poised to eventually join those institutions where Jewish students will be viewed as ‘offensive’ per se to Muslim students and other illiberal antagonists who apply double standards and factually incorrect legal and historical judgments against the Jewish State, and interpret Islam as holding Jews and Christians to be second class citizens, which is the real apartheid that your University will not allow to be discussed. Moral equivalency is not appropriate between liberal democrats and terror supporting illiberals.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Anti-Israel Bigotry Week

Love of the Land: Franchising “Apartheid”: Why South Africans Push the Analogy

Franchising “Apartheid”: Why South Africans Push the Analogy

Rhoda Kadalie & Julia Bertelsmann
Z-Word Blog
Originally Posted March '08

ON A COLD NIGHT IN Johannesburg last year, a bus pulled up outside the American consulate. It was the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War in the Middle East-June being a winter month in South Africa-and several dozen activists planned to mark the occasion by protesting U.S. support for "Apartheid Israel." The protest was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Committee and most of the demonstrators were South African Muslims.[1] Among their number, however, were black South Africans who shared the organizers' hostility to Israel.

Or so it seemed. A reporter discovered that some of the black demonstrators "were not pro-Palestinian activists, but homeless people bused in from the surrounding townships," he told Ha'aretz. "[M]ost of them refused to protest, opting to sit on the warm bus. The organizers refused to allow it. When I asked one black 'protester' if he was for Palestine, he replied: ‘I am for nobody.'" The organizers soon ejected the reporter. [2]

Like the ‘protester' on the bus, most South Africans feel indifferent towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a study conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2007. Of those with clear opinions on the matter, the majority sympathized more with Israel: 28 per cent of South Africans overall sided with Israel compared to only 19 per cent with the Palestinians. [3]

Nevertheless, South Africa has increasingly become the flash point of virulently anti-Israel demonstrations. Many of the country's leaders routinely compare the State of Israel to the apartheid regime that governed South Africa from 1948 to 1994 and imposed an oppressive system of segregation and discrimination on grounds of race. "End Israeli Apartheid" rallies are usually organized by radical Muslim organizations, but some black South Africans have also entered the fray.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Franchising “Apartheid”: Why South Africans Push the Analogy

Love of the Land: Apartheid Week - Hypocrisy at its Best

Apartheid Week - Hypocrisy at its Best

Jonathan Dahoah Haevi
Shalomlife.com
02 March '10

Five hundred artists from Montreal have recently signed a statement “to support the international campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israeli apartheid.” The Canadian artists blame Israel for intentionally harassing and bringing disaster to the peaceful Palestinian people during more than 60 years and fail to mention the word “terrorism” even once.

Their account of the historical events as they appear in the statement is to say the least distorted. One paragraph within the long list of “crimes” accuses Israel of deliberately oppressing the Palestinian cultural activity as follows:

“During the first and second intifadas, Israel invaded, ransacked, and even closed down cinemas, theatres and cultural centers in the occupied territories. These deliberate attempts to stifle the Palestinian cultural voice have failed and will continue to fail.” [1]

The five hundred Canadian artists virtually portray Israel as a pinnacle of human evil and their basic premise assumes, as it may be understood, that without Israeli “crimes,” the pluralist and liberal Palestinian culture in the Gaza Strip would be flourishing with cinemas, theatres and cultural centres.

This thesis has one little weakness. Not a single cinema house exists in the Gaza Strip and Hamas – NOT Israel – is responsible for "stifling the Palestinian cultural voice". Saud Abu Ramadan, a Palestinian reporter working for the Chinese newswire Xinhua, published an article on July 26, 2009 reviewing the history of cinemas in the Gaza Strip while interviewing 57-year old Adnan Abu Beid, who used to run the most famous and biggest movie house in downtown Gaza city called al-Nasser, and today makes his living as a greengrocer. [2]

Abu Ramadan notes that “after Israel signed Oslo accords with the Palestinians, when the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was established after the Israeli army withdrew from Gaza city, al-Nasser movie house was reopened for a few months, but later it was burned and destroyed by angry Islamic Hamas demonstrators in 1995.” Abu Beid told Xinhua that after al-Nasser movie house was burned and destroyed, “I hid my film archives and decided to become a vegetable vendor.” He added that his archives "are the only that remained after all the movie houses had either shut down, or been destroyed by Hamas activists during demonstrations in Gaza city in 1995."

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Apartheid Week - Hypocrisy at its Best

Love of the Land: So You Want to Boycott Israel

So You Want to Boycott Israel

(As this has been declared to be "Israel Apartheid Week" I didn't want to feel left out.This is truly an oldie but goodie! Y.)

Get the secret tips you won't find anywhere else! Guaranteed to end the occupation now!



Maker's note: This vido was originally posted by me in Spring of 2008. After over 170000 views and well over a thousand comments, it was deleted for being offensive. Whether the whistle-blower was a Palestinian who got the joke or an Israeli who didn't, I don't know. Therefore I must break character and say the following: IT'S A SATIRE! It's all sarcastic! IDFco12

Excellent resource: Divest This!

Love of the Land: So You Want to Boycott Israel

Love of the Land: Palestine: the Real Apartheid State In the Making

Palestine: the Real Apartheid State In the Making

David Bedein
Israel Behind the News
02 March '10

"Palestine" is an apartheid state in the making.

"Israel Apartheid" Week is the time to publicize that fact.

During Israel Apartheid Week, orchestrated on campuses around the globe, the time has come to put the shoe on the other foot.

In 1948, Apartheid laws institutionalized racial discrimination in South Africa & denied human rights to 25 million Black citizens of South Africa.

In 1948, the Arab League of Nations applied the Apartheid model to Palestine, and declared that Jews must be denied rights as citizens of Israel, while declaring a total state of war to eradicate the new Jewish entity, a war that continues today.

In 1948, at the directive of the Arab League of Nations, Jordan devastated the vestiges of Jewish life from Judea and Samaria, and burned all synagogues in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem.

In 1948, member states of the Arab League of Nations began to strip the human rights of Jews and to expel entire Jewish communities who had resided in their midst for centuries

In the mid 1960's, The Arab League of Nations spawned the PLO to organize local residents to continue the war to deny Jewish rights the right to live as free citizens in the land of Israel - well before Israel took over Judea, Samaria, and the Old City of Jerusalem in the defensive war waged by Israel in 1967.

And since its inception in 1994, the newly constituted Palestinian Authority, created by the PLO, has prepared the rudiments of a Palestinian State, modeled on the rules of Apartheid and institutionalized discrimination:

1. The right of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents to return to Arab villages lost in 1948 will be protected by the new Palestinian state.

2. While 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arabs, not one Jew will be allowed to live in a Palestinian State

3. Anyone who sells land to a Jew will be liable to the death penalty in the Palestinian State

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Palestine: the Real Apartheid State In the Making

Love of the Land: “Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

“Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
02 March '10

This week saw the start of the annual festival of bigotry known as “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW). In the UK, universities from the London School of Economics, University College London (alma mater of the would be Detroit panty bomber) to Oxford join forces with places of “learning” in more than 40 cities across the world. The aim is to deligitimise Israel with a view to the Jewish state’s eventual destruction.

But it is not all going according to plan. In Canada, there are signs that the organisers may already have run into some embarrassing problems. As the National Post reports in a scathing editorial which rightly describes the event as “an odious and bigoted annual ritual” a motion denouncing Israeli Apartheid Week has been unanimously passed (even leftist members of parliament supported it) in the Ontario provincial parliament. This is a serious blow since Canada has been one of the worst offenders in the Western world in terms of anti-Israeli bigotry and has traditionally been at the forefront of IAW campaigning.

While it is still early days, what is going on in Canada should serve as an inspiration to those opposed to anti-Israeli extremism worldwide. Careful and consistent campaigning in favour of reason and decency over Israel can pay off, leaving the opposing camp looking isolated and obsessive.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: “Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

Love of the Land: Ontario Defies Israel Apartheid Week

Ontario Defies Israel Apartheid Week

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
01 March '10

This week is Israel Apartheid Week on college campuses worldwide — an annual hatefest devoted to demonizing Israel and mobilizing support for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), made even more grotesque by the numerous Israelis serving as featured speakers. But this year, pushback came from a surprising direction: the provincial legislature of Ontario, Canada, voted unanimously to condemn this extravaganza, because it “serves to incite hatred against Israel, a democratic state that respects the rule of law and human rights, and … diminishes the suffering of those who were victims of a true apartheid regime in South Africa.”

Two things make this decision remarkable. One is that Ontario has long been a hotbed of anti-Israel activity. For instance, its largest labor union, the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, enthusiastically promotes BDS; in 2006, the chapter voted to boycott Israel until it accepts a Palestinian “right of return,” otherwise known as committing demographic suicide. Thus Ontario legislators defied a powerhouse vote machine over an issue with little political traction, just because they thought it was right.

The second is that not long ago, Canada’s foreign policy was hostile to Israel. In October 2000, for instance, days after the intifada erupted, Canada voted for a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for the violence, without a word of blame for the Palestinians. And that vote was typical, not exceptional. Thus the Ontario decision represents a sharp turnabout in a fairly short period of time.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Ontario Defies Israel Apartheid Week

Love of the Land: Speaking of Apartheid

Speaking of Apartheid

Jon Haber
Divest This!
01 March '10

Given that the organizers of this week's so-called "Israel Apartheid Week" (actually two weeks - they can't even tell the truth when saying the word "week") has dedicated itself to my obsession, BDS, I thought I'd cross-post something from my pal Sol's site here. So, without further ado...

Speaking of Apartheid

Students who will be exposed this week to the so-called "Israel Apartheid Week" need to understand that the entire framework behind the Israel-Apartheid accusation is based on a cover up.

During the 1980s when the Apartheid government of South Africa needed 15 million tons of oil to fuel its military and its economy of repression, virtually all of that oil was imported to Apartheid South Africa from the Middle East. South Africa paid a premium – in gold mined by black slave labor – for that oil, the lifeblood of their racist regime. As the Kenya Daily Nation said at the time "Arabs are buying South African gold like hotcakes, thus helping to sustain that country’s abominable policy of Apartheid."

It was during this period that the accusation that Israel was an "Apartheid State" was born, an accusation designed to throw the unknowing off the track as to who was truly oiling the wheels of Apartheid.

Flash forward to today when organizations like Hamas regularly incite genocidal hatred, yet simultaneously accuse Israelis of doing what they openly advocate (at least in Arabic). For these organizations, the legal segregation of Jews from the rest of the world (their own version of global Apartheid best exemplified by their so-called "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions" or BDS program) is of less interest than outright extermination.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Speaking of Apartheid

Love of the Land: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Something's seriously wrong at York University

David Frum
National Post
27 February '10

Next week, York University will once again open its halls and classrooms to “Israel Apartheid Week,” so-called. This year as every year, militants and activists will use the taxpayer-funded facilities of York to vilify the Jewish state. Well, that’s free speech, isn’t? Everybody gets to express his or her point of view, no matter how obnoxious, right?

No, not right. Not at York. At York, speech is free — better than free, subsidized — for anti-Israel haters. But for those who would defend Israel, York sets very different rules.

In advance of York’s annual hate-Israel week, the campus group Christians United for Israel applied to use university space to host a program of pro-Israel speakers. The university replied that this program could only proceed on certain conditions. It insisted on heavy security, including both campus and Toronto police — all of those costs to be paid by the program organizers. The organizers would also have to provide an advance list of all program attendees and advance summaries of all the speeches. No advertising for the program would be permitted — not on the York campus, not on any of the other campuses participating by remote video.

These are radically different and much harsher terms than anything required from the hate-Israel program. The hate-Israel program is not required to pay for its own security. It is free to advertise. Its speakers are not pre-screened by the university.

The pro-Israel event, scheduled for this past Monday, Feb. 22, was cancelled when the organizers declined to comply with the terms. A university spokesman told the Jewish Tribune that it insisted on the more stringent requirements on pro-Israel groups “due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.”

The logic is impressively brazen: Since the anti-Israel people might use violence, the speech of the pro-Israel people must be limited. On the other hand, since the pro-Israel people do not use violence, the speech of the anti-Israel people can proceed without restraint.

(Read full story)

Love of the Land: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Love of the Land: Countering Canadian Campus Media Bias Against Israel

Countering Canadian Campus Media Bias Against Israel

Mike Fegelman
Honest Reporting Canada
12 February '10

On March 1, Canadian university and college campuses will host the anti-Israel week odiously known as Israel Apartheid Week (IAW).

IAW leave Jews and pro-Israel supporters on campus feeling isolated and intimidated, all while demonizing Israel and fuelling anti-Semitic animus. As a possible precursor to these festivities, it's already been reported that two Jewish students at Toronto's York University were assaulted on February 1 during a pro-Israel activity. A matter which is now being investigated by the school's administration. In the U.S., eleven people were arrested at the University of California, Irvine on February 8, as Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, was repeatedly interrupted during his address to the school.

HonestReporting Canada will be keeping a close eye on Canadian campus media to ensure that Israel is fairly and accurately represented before and after IAW.

In our most recent communique, we alerted you to a CKUT radio program called "Under the Olive Tree," a self-described "Canada-wide Palestinian community radio show" based in Montreal at McGill University, which lent credence to bizarre claims of Israeli culpability for the notorious 2004 Iraqi prisoner abuse atrocities at Abu Ghraib.

(Read full communique)

Love of the Land: Countering Canadian Campus Media Bias Against Israel