In 1948 nearly one million Jews lived in Arab lands. But In barely twenty years, they have become forgotten fugitives, expelled from their native lands, forgotten by history and where the victims themselves have hidden their fate under a cloak of silence.
A people whom legend have always associated with "wandering" many of these Jews from Arab lands had lived there for thousands of years and accepted their fate, through good times and bad times.
But 1948, the beginning of their exodus, also saw the birth of the State of Israel.
And, while the Arab armies were preparing to invade the young refugee-country, the survivors of the Shoah were piling up in rickety boats. Meanwhile a few hundred thousand Arabs from Palestine were getting ready to flee their homes, convinced that they would return as winners and conquerors.
Soon - by a terrible twist of fate they, as well, began to fill up refugee camps and passed on their refugee status to new generations.
The Jews, however, did not receive refugee status.
They had just rediscovered the land of their birthright.
And if they came from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq or from Yemen, if they had lost everything, even their relatives and their cemeteries, they were ready to rebuild their lives in the West and for many - in Israel - and try to forget their past.
Without ever asking for compensation or the right of return, or even wishing that their story be told...
(My thanks to LatterDays for posting this in his blog)
Since the destruction of the Second Temple until very recently, the masses of the Jewish people did not dwell in the Land of Israel. For 2000 years. the majority of Jews dwelled in the Diaspora, among non-Jews. Jews were dispersed in far flung places such as Poland, Morocco, Iran, Ethiopia and even China. They spoke different languages, like Yiddish, Ladino or the local tongue, and differed very much in customs, cuisine and clothing from other Jews in other exiles. Yet, despite intense persecution, massacres, pogroms, suffering and poverty, the Jewish nation survived intact, the many generation since Sinai until the today. Through the force of their dedication and commitment to Judaism, they were able to withstand the most brutal and horrible of circumstances.
Generally, the second or third generation of immigrants assimilates quite fully into the host culture. The only reminder of their origins may be the occasional family cultural celebration, a grandparent with a heavy accent or maybe a trip back to their home country. It is incredible that Jews, dispersed and separated for 2000 years, did not assimilate but always maintained their own identity. Away from their land, with no country to go back to, Jews were able to survive.
Within the span of several generations, a new and frightening trend has emerged. All Jews, until a hundred or so years ago, were religiously observant, fully and wholly committed to Judaism. Because of this, Jews were able to survive the harsh Diaspora. However, today assimilation is taking a frightening toll on Jewish communities in the United States, Canada, Russia and Western Europe.
Consider the following statistics*:
Jewish identity is declining sharply.
Of 5.6 million Jews, 2 million American Jews live in households identified as non-Jewish
60% of Jews below 40 years of age live in households identified as non-Jewish
20% of Jews over 60 years of age live in households identified as non-Jewish
Intermarriage rates are increasing dramatically.
Before 1965, 10% of Jews who married, did so outside the faith.
Since 1985, 52% of Jews who married have done so outside the faith.
Children are being raised as non-Jews.
1 million, or 54% of all American Jewish children under the age of 18 are being raised as non-Jews or with no religion.
Fertility Rates are not high enough to replenish the religion.
The average fertility rate of American Jewish women is 1.4 children per household. The replacement level is 2.1 children.
Less emphasis is being placed on a Jewish education.
In 1962, 540,000 Jewish children were attending afternoon weekend schools, and 60,000 were enrolled in day schools. By 1990, fewer than 240,000 Jewish children attended afternoon /weekend schools and 140,000 attended day schools.
NET LOSS -- 220,000 Jewish children.
Traditional Shabbat observance is extremely low.
Only 36% of Jewish households light the Shabbat Candles.
Of the population that consists of people who were born Jewish and are Jewish by choice, only 11% attend synagogue weekly.
* All Statistics taken from Council of Jewish Federations' 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. This is the most comprehensive source of American Jewish data available
The Jewish population worldwide is sharply decreasing, ravaged by the scourges of intermarriage and assimilation. A census taken before Rosh HaShana 5769 found that the Jewish population worldwide increased by 70 000, only due to natural increase in Israel. A very shocking study found that within 3 generations, 97% of non-Orthodox Jewry in the United States will be extinct.
This is a tragedy of epic proportions. The nation that stood at Sinai and received G-d's Torah barely knows about Purim and Shavuot. The Chosen People eat cheeseburgers, not even knowing that they might be unkosher! Taught by the Jewish Establishment Organizers that "thou shalt melt", Jewish parents sent their kids to public schools, creating a generation of Jewish illiterates who know little more that Fiddler on the Roof, gefilte fish and a Yiddish expression or two. This is the most pressing threat facing the Jewish people today. The apathy of young Jews and their total disconnect and alienation from Judaism should frighten and worry every single Jews who is committed to the future of his people.
During Israel's recent operation in Gaza, Jewish leaders were extremely concerned over the alarming increase in anti-Israel around the world. Not to deny the seriousness of these anti-semitic attacks, the biggest danger threatening the Jewish today comes not from anti-semitism but from assimilation and intermarriage. There is a silent Holocaust going on in the Diaspora as young Jews marry outside of the faith, their Jewishness completely irrelevant to them, a mere accident of birth. Yet, the Jewish leaders are completely silent, doing nothing to try and reach out to our brothers and sisters who are slowly drowning in goyishkeit. If these current rates continue, the future does not bode well for Jewish continuity.
Raised in completely secular environments devoid of spirituality, young Jews look for meaning in other paths and belief systems. They travel to India and live in ashrams, or become Buddhists or Zen followers. These alienated Jews make easy prey for missionary groups like Jews for Jesus who thrive on Jewish illiteracy and ignorance. Most have only the faintest inklings of Jewish rituals, a quick show at "temple" on the high holidays, boring and irrelevant classes at Hebrew School, or a family seder. They have never been exposed to the incredible spirituality in Judaism and are often amazed when they discover that Judaism has a deep spiritual legacy. Intermarriage is only the last step in complete assimilation, finalizing the irrevocable break with the tradition and lineage that extends to Sinai and before, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For generations of Jews, the question of "why be Jewish?" is unimportant. They were sent to public schools, encouraged to interfaith and integrate with non-Jews and now their own Jewish identities are nil.
To any Jew who is reading this article, I beg them please to seriously consider their own Judaism. Their ancestors gave their lives in order that they should live as Jews. Imagine their great-great grandfathers in the shtetls of Ukraine or the juderias of Spain, and how much it would pain them to know that they overcame pogroms and Inquisitions, Crusades and Auschwitz, only for their children to willingly give up their Judaism. Please, I beg you to return home, to your roots and to your people.
May HaShem merit that all of His children should come home very soon
For the second time in less than a week, a packed Brooklyn, New York, synagogue has been the target of threats of violence by intruders.
On Monday, according to Yeshiva World News, an Arab man in his mid-30s entered Boro Park's 'Sephardish Shul' and began making proclamations of jihad. Members of a Jewish volunteer security organization, the Shomrim, apprehended the threatening individual. They held him until police officers arrived at the scene, arresting the suspect. Detectives spoke with the "Middle Eastern man" at a station house near the synagogue....
Just two days earlier, a man wielding a butcher's knife burst into a Kerestir Chassidic synagogue in Williamsburg. He initially turned up unarmed and began throwing soda cans at the gathered worshipers, which hit one of them, and returned shortly thereafter with the bladed weapon.The attacker was prevented from using the butcher's knife on anyone by a young man, described as a "friend" of the knife-wielding intruder, who then fled together with him.
The recent attacks come just over a month after Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn was targeted in a series of English-language jihadist videos posted on the Internet. The videos and accompanying texts singled out "770," but also intimated that all Orthodox Jewish organizations were equally worthy of attack by Muslims. The threatening material included images of the 770 synagogue and study house, pictures of the police van out front, and indications of which parts of the building are crowded at what times.
The source of the thinly-veiled threats, a group called Revolution Muslim, is domestic to the United States.
We are extremely distressed that we did not succeed in freeing you.
You are surely also extremely distressed. We are distressed for you.
We are distressed for the Nation of Israel. We are distressed for truth and justice.
But nothing has changed. We continue to fight for you.
The United States did not reject the request. It is still open.
Nothing has changed, it is just more difficult.
But this is our obligation, our eternal ethical obligation,
Our eternal national obligation and our eternal communal obligation.
Pollard is not just a person. He is also a banner and an ideal,
And we will struggle until we are victorious.
All of our efforts were not for naught.
We are grateful for all of the toil, all of the prayers and all of the phone calls.
The senior American officials support a pardon based on humanitarian reasons.
If so, why didn't we succeed? It has been clarified that we lacked one thing:
The support of the Israeli Government, a request from the Israeli Government.
The President therefore did not see why he should free him.
We are now working on various fronts:
We continue to pray for our brother who is in distress and captivity.
We talk about Jonathan at every opportunity to galvanize the Nation and the Government will follow the Nation. We demand that the Government definitively and clearly work for his release: by including his name among those in captivity and making an official request to the US that he is an Israeli citizen and was an Israeli spy.
The current Government contains many high-ranking officials who support his release.
Please turn to the Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
His fax in the Knesset: 02-649-6659. His office in the Likud: 03-538-7165.
Please write to Jonathan with encouragement, support and love.
It is physically and emotionally difficult for him after he saw his freedom before his eyes.
Our letters give him oxygen.
When he sees that the Nation is with him, this is what gives him strength to hold fast.
Yes, we the Nation of Israel has not forgotten him.
This post will have no links because I've only got a few moments.
The other day I went on record for not caring about this Chas Freeman character, one way or the other. In the meantime he has been forced not to take the job in the intelligence community he was hoping to have. Predictably, this is sending his fans ballistic (go look at Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan for starters). Their thesis is that the case proves (once again, I might add) that public discussion of Israel is censored in the United States, with large swathes of discourse being forbidden by the awesomely powerful Israelis and their stooges.
There is of course nothing new to this claim; it's been around for centuries (well, the power of the Jews. The United States as a target, that's newer). I admit to being puzzled by their line of reasoning, because for the life of me I can't imagine what might be verboten (Greenwald's word) to say? That Israel's policies are all wrong? That Israel commits war crimes and worse? That Israel is forcing the Palestinians into slavery? That Israel's behaviour is the source of the Islamic ire at America? That Israel muzzles free discussion and thought? That Israel shouldn't exist?
All of these ideas are broadcast widely and continuously not only in Arab World, nor in the Guardian, but also in the American public arena. If Israel were so good at blocking discussion, how come it's so bad at it? Andrew, Glenn, Juan and many others say these things with regularity, and no-one blocks them? True, the Freeman fellow, after being onthe Saudi payroll, was deemed unsuitable for that job, but that hardly proves the point. The entire case proves the opposite, it seems to me.
On Purim we read the Book of Esther. There's a program to kill all the Jews of the Persian Empire, backed by the emperor himself. Mordechai is trying to thwart the plan with a counter plan of his own, based on the position of his cousin and adopted daughter, Esther, the queen. Esther hesitates, given the mortal danger she'll need to put herself into. To which Mordechai responds (Chapter 4, 13-14):
13 And Mordecai told them to answer Esther: “Do not think in your heart that you will escape in the king’s palace any more than all the other Jews. 14 For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
It's an interesting statement. The world's greatest power has decided to murder the Jews, but Mordechai is supremely confident they won't be destroyed; this confidence, however, doesn't prevent him from taking any measure to thwart the program, no matter how high the personal danger.
once upon a time in a shtetl in russia there were no eligible men, and 2 women who had reached marrying age. after much deliberation, the rabbi decided to write to his brother who was a rabbi in a distant village, described the situation and asked for his help. and luckily, in the brother's village there were 2 young men with no potential wives, and the solution was obvious. the 2 young men set off and the young spinsters' village was all agog with excitement. unfortunately the road was long, the winter was cold and one of the young men died on the way. so after some months, it was only one young man who walked into the village, to be welcomed by 2 mothers of prospective wives. needless to say, the 2 mothers started arguing, each claiming that the young man was destined for her daughter. no one knew how to deal with this dilemma, and the rabbi, who had made the match, was called in to mediate. he listened to the argument for a while and then declared: the young man must be cut up, a half for each bride. 'no no' said one mother 'let the other one have him! he is such a nice boy, it will be a crime to cut him up!' said the other 'are you crazy? of course he must be cut up, half each! we were both promised a son in law, its both or neither!'and they carried on along this vein. 'that settles it' said the rabbi 'now i know'. the entire village stood in silence, waiting for his verdict. what will the rabbi say? how will he decide? very quietly he pointed and said 'that one, who wants to cut him up, she wins. without any doubt, she is the real mother in law....' and a happy purim to all
In July 2008, we caught the BBC's shocking first response to a Palestinian bulldozer attack in Jerusalem. Offering a glimpse into the BBC's warped journalism, the initial headline read "Israel bulldozer driver shot dead".
While the BBC later amended its headline, this example offered evidence of the BBC's mindset - the initial instinct to portray Israel as an aggressor and a Palestinian as a victim even if that Palestinian was actively involved in a terrorist attack against innocent civilians.
Less than three weeks later, another Palestinian bulldozer attack took place. This time, in a virtual repetition of the first incident, the BBC's initial response the second time was a headline questioning whether an attack had taken place at all. The headlines on the BBC's web page went from "New Vehicle 'Attack' in Jerusalem" to "New Digger 'Attack' in Jerusalem," then finally settled on "Israel Hit By New Digger Attack."
Fast forward to March 5, 2009 - yet another bulldozer terror attack took place as a Jerusalem Arab rammed a bulldozer into a police car in the capital, wounding two officers before being shot dead. How would the BBC report this?
True to form, as the news broke, the BBC's initial headline read: "Tractor driver shot in Jerusalem". We watched as the headline evolved over the course of the next few hours. Bizarrely, in a semantic change, the next update read "Digger driver shot in Jerusalem".
A short time later, the BBC finally acknowledged that an actual attack had taken place as the headline was amended to "'New digger rampage' in Jerusalem" before finally settling on "'New digger attack' in Jerusalem". But why the quotation marks?
Evidently, somebody was sitting behind a computer giving some thought to the headlines and how to update the breaking news story. But once again, the BBC has demonstrated a clear trend that reflects negatively against Israel even when Israelis are the victims of a terror attack.
Headlines are important because they set the basis for the whole story, are the first thing the reader sees and the last message left in the reader's mind.
Typical BBC headlines we found in HonestReporting's past analysis of the BBC were: "Israelis kill militants in Gaza" (The "militants" had been firing rockets into Israel), "Children killed in Israeli strike" (the children were playing next to a rocket launcher), and "Israeli strike kills four in Gaza."
On the other hand, in actions carried out by Palestinians, the headlines took the responsibility for the attacks away from those who instigated them. Rockets, explosions,and clashes became the culprits in typical headlines such as: "Rocket injures dozens in Israel,""Gaza explosion kills two children", "Two killed in clash in Gaza Strip," and "West Bank clash leaves three dead."
Once again, in this latest bulldozer attack, the culprit is not the Palestinian who carried it out but the vehicle itself. While "Israel" or "Israelis" regularly feature in BBC headlines, the same cannot be said for "Palestinians" or "Arabs" who carry out terror attacks.
There's this story going on about Chas Freeman, who has been appointed to some highfalutin advisory position somewhere within the Obama Administration. Lot's of people are cheering, others are groaning and kvetching. I haven't been following it too closely. My understanding is that it's not an executive position, nor is it top-tier. If here and there in the Administration there are people with nutty viewpoints, the United States of America is a big enough place to contain them. If the fellow challenges any potential groupthink, that can't be bad, either.
One of the advantages in being deeply and fundamentally right is that you can afford to be questioned by skeptics, contrarians, fools and snakes, all. So long as the the decision makers themselves are rational, there isn't much to be fearful of. In the long run, the skeptics may make some legitimate criticisms here and there, but they won't be able to cast serious doubt on a position that's fundamentally correct.
So far so good. Now you might want to cast a glance at Glenn Greeenwald's thoughts on the matter. They're long and wordy: Greenwald's like that. My understanding is that the central objective problem with Freeman is that he has been in the pay of the Saudis, who have a record of knowing why they pay nice sums to former American diplomats. In spite of everything Greenwald and others will imply, the vocal friends of Israel in Washington haven't been on Israel's payroll. They've made up their minds for whatever nefarious reasons, but being paid for them wasn't one. Greenwald, however, has this revealing comment to make:
There is, by design, definitely a chilling effect to these smear campaigns. Freeman is being dragged through the mud by the standard cast of accusatory Israel-centric neocons (Marty Peretz, Jon Chait, Jeffrey Goldberg, Commentary, The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, etc. etc., etc.), subjected to every standard, baseless smear, as a warning to others who think about challenging U.S. policy towards Israel in a similar way...
Ultimately, the greatest weapon to defeat these campaigns is to highlight the identity and behavior of their perpetrators. Just consider who is behind the attack on Freeman; how ugly and discredited are their tactics and ideology; and, most importantly, how absurd it is, given their disgraceful history, that they -- of all people -- would parade around as arbiters of "ideological extremism" and, more audaciously still, as credible judges of intelligence assessment.
The argument, in other words, must be resolved by "highlighting the identity" of the discussants saying things we don't like. Not "let's refute their claims", but "let's paint them in garish colors".
PS. And no, I hope I don't do the same. Follow the tags and you'll see that when the Guardian or Juan Cole (rarely) say thoughtful or valuable things, I've taken note. They don't do it often, true, but it can happen. What's wrong with them is how they use their cognitive facilities, not the fact that they are who they are.
Roger Cohen, a columnist at the New York Times, has a political agenda. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, of course. I've got a political agenda; most people who care about the unfolding story of humanity do. Being open about it is important, of course; holding up your positions and sources to scrutiny is even better.
Recently, Cohen visited some Jews in Iran, and deduced all sorts of far-reaching things from his visit. Jeffery Goldberg facilitated a visit for him with a community of Jews from Iran, now in Los Angeles; one assumes the narrative he'll hear in LA will be mildly different than the one he heard in Teheran, and we hope Cohen will tell us about this in a reasonable manner. You can follow this story as it unfolds either at the New York Times or at Goldberg's place, whichever.
Yesterday, Cohen published what he called a "reality check" about things in the Mideast.
The United States should follow the British example. It should initiate diplomatic contacts with the political wing of Hezbollah. The Obama administration should also look carefully at how to reach moderate Hamas elements and engineer a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation.
A rapprochement between the two wings of the Palestinian movement was briefly achieved at Mecca in 2007. The best form of payback from America’s expensive and authoritarian allies — Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan — would be help in reconciling Gaza Palestinians loyal to Hamas with West Bank Palestinians loyal to the more moderate Fatah of Mahmoud Abbas.
Now, I'm going to surprise some of you, or perhaps not, by being in favor of talks with Hamas. I don't think enemies need to pretend they aren't there, and if they can find anything to talk about: by all means, why not. Perhaps they'll stop being enemies, which would be great. If not, there's always the possibility one can wrangle some practical benefit from talking. The Zionists wrung some interesting concessions from the Nazis in the mid-1930s Haavara agreement; in 1944 and 1945 there were some marginal things that could have been achieved from talking to the SS, and even were achieved in April 1945.
No talking to the Nazis, however, would have prevented the Shoah. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews because they wanted to, not because the Jews weren't talking to them or weren't being nice.
I've got some arguments with Cohen about his facts, but my real argument with him is about this:
Israel, from the time of Ben Gurion, built its state by creating facts on the ground, not through semantics. Many of its leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, have been on wondrous political odysseys from absolutist rejection of division of the land to acceptance of a two-state solution. Yet they try to paint Hamas as irrevocably absolutist. Why should Arabs be any less pragmatic than Jews? (my italics)
Why indeed? That's the fundemental question, indeed, one of the most important questions facing mankind in the early 21st century. Cohen believes the answer is that Arabs aren't any different from Jews (or Americans, or Brits, or even Chinese far that matter). Since they're just like us, yet some of them behave so nastily, it must be because we're doing things to them that make them nasty; since we're responsible, we need to be better.
I, on the other hand, am stuck with the question. Why is it, indeed, that Arabs (or at any rate, many of them, and many of their regimes), are less pragmatic than Jews (or Americans, or Brits, or even Chinese, for that matter)?
So, while I'm in favor of talking to whomever is willing to talk to us, I insist on keeping the big stick within easy reach. Some of the people we'll be willing to talk to, after all, won't be willing to talk back. With others, there's nothing we can talk about. What could the Cambodians with eyeglasses have talked about with their Khmer Rouge murderers? (Yes, wearing eyeglasses was a capital offense). What could the Armenians have talked about with their Turk murderers 90 years ago? What could millions of Ukrainians have talked about with their Soviet murderers 8 decades ago?
Speak softly, but carry a big stick, as Teddy said.
Yad Vashem, my erstwhile employer, is hosting a meeting of Vatican and Israeli historians. I'm not at Yad Vashem anymore, and I neither know the details nor am I asking. If anything good comes of the meeting, great. In the meantime, however, I'm holding back on gushing good feelings:
Israel has encouraged the Vatican to open its wartime archives to allow researchers to look for concrete examples of Pius' actions. But the Vatican has denied access to major parts of its archives, including wartime papers.
Shalev said Sunday he was pleased to learn that Benedict instructed the archive to speed up the process of cataloging the material and hoped it could now be completed in three to four years.
Yad Vashem said Shalev was informed of the development by Vatican archive officials and people who were in direct contact with the pope.
I've been in archives before, and know a thing or two about how they think. Blocking access to documents until the cataloging is completed is the archival corollary of a government setting up a committee. It could lead to something someday. Hypothetically. Maybe. Perhaps.
An archives that wants people to know what in its collections can always find plausible ways around the lack of a catalog.
Football (soccer) fans in Israeli stadiums famously have a vocabulary of five (Hebrew) words: The Umpire's a SOB, when things are going bad, and God Exists, when their team is winning.
Manchurian Candidate, Simply Overwhelmed, or Asleep at the Wheel?
According to Frank Gaffney, President Obama has allegedly slighted British Prime Minister Gordon Brown—and yet, in truth, Obama seems to be following in Britain’s very European pro-Arab and pro-Islamist footsteps.
According to the office of Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, Obama’s first call to a foreign head of (a non-existent) state was to him. The White House did not deny that this was so. Obama’s first interview in the foreign media was with Al-Arabiya. According to Daniel Pipes, (who is far from “shocked” by Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s various changes of mind vis a vis Israel), Clinton has insisted, (some say: “suggested”), that Israel speed up the release of funds for Gaza.
The Obama administration is also on record as committed to funding terrorist groups–Hamas–in Gaza, (all good intentions aside, that is what happens to the money that the international community pours into Gaza), and proudly on record as willing to conduct European-style “diplomacy” with states which sponsor terrorism both against Israel and against the West. Yes, I know, the hope is that evil ideologues may hesitate to bomb the countries of leaders who are making eye contact with them, who are employing reason, charm—maybe even music– in an effort to soothe the savage beast.
But Britain has still been at this longer and so far, is more Islamified and pro-Sharia than America. Indeed, Britain is about to hold a conference on March 25th, at the University of London’s School of Economics, in which known terrorists will be speaking about “political Islam.” Senior British civil servants and police officers will pony up at hefty fee (nearly two thousand pounds) to attend the event which is meant to “improve” their “understanding of radicalism.”
However, all is not lost. Heroes are increasingly standing up, heroes who are resisting the Islamification of the West, who are not rolling over and playing dead.
The indefatigable Ehrenfeld has been fighting for the rights of American authors to tell the truth—yes, even about Islam, without being sued into silence as has happened to many an author in London, which is known as the “libel tourist” capital of the world.
Karsenty stood up to the biggest blood libel of the Intifada of 2000, that concerning the alleged Israeli murder of Mohammed al-Dura in the arms of his father; after many years of a lonely struggle, Karsenty prevailed against France’s Channel Two in Paris.
Geert Wilders is now the most popular politician in Holland for his bold, sane exposure of Islamist violence, both in Holland and in the world today. As we know, he was also, and shamefully, recently deported from the UK because he came to show his film Fitna at the request of a member of the House of Lords. The film was seen as “hate speech” or as a film which would “incite hatred.”
Now, Douglas Murray, Director of the Center for Social Cohesion, joins their fabled ranks. The same country that deported a sitting member of the Dutch Parliament received, with open arms, Binyam Mohammed, lately of the Guantanamo Bay facilities. Britain has hosted many a sheik and mullah who, in their sermons and teachings, have incited enormous hatred and violence against Jews, Israel, and America and right on into the streets of Great Britain.
Now, the UK has invited Dr. Ibrahim Moussawi who is to speak at the London School of Economics. Dr Moussawi is a spokesman for the Lebanese-based militant group Hizbollah, whose military arm has been banned in Britain as a terrorist organization. Moussawi is no stranger to hate speech or to inciting hatred. He has allegedly called Jews “a lesion on the forehead of history” and said of Israel: “Pain is the only language that the enemy understands.”
Mr. Murray said that the Home Office would be “beyond hypocrisy” if it allowed Dr Ibrahim Moussawi into Britain just weeks after barring Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician, because of his alleged anti-Muslim views. Murray has written to Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, and informed her that he will have lawyers “seek an arrest warrant for Dr. Moussawi if he is allowed into the country.”
Mr Murray said: “This is the deepest hypocrisy, in fact, it is worse than hypocrisy on behalf of the British government… Britain is still a place where terrorists and terrorist supporters can come to incite and recruit.”
I hope that President Obama’s administration does not launch a drive to grant a visa to Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and very much his intellectual heir, who is nicely perched at…where else?
Military Intellience chief Amos Yadlin said Sunday at the weekly cabinet meeting that "Iran has crossed the technological threshold" in its quest for nuclear arms.
"Arrival at military nuclear capability is a matter of strategy," Yadlin said. "Iran is accumulating hundreds of kilograms of enriched uranium at a low level and hopes to utilize the dialogue with the West in order to gain time, which is required in order to achieve the capability to manufacture a nuclear bomb."
Yadlin stressed that the American government's new approach of dialogue with Iran is being treated with caution in the Middle East. "The moderate Arab states think this will come at their cost and will be used for negative purposes by Iran and Syria, who are dragging out time with the appearance of talks but are continuing to arm themselves and to support terrorism," Yadlin said. "The extremist axis hopes the U.S. will change its stance, but they suspect that it is a step that will only advance the formulation of a more efficient coalition against them."
Meanwhile, Iranian media reported on Sunday that Iran has test-fired a new air-to-surface missile, in the Islamic Republic's latest display of its military capability.
The missile test was carried out despite the offer by the administration of new U.S. President Barack Obama to engage Iran in direct talks if it "unclenches its fist".
Iran's Fars News Agency said the domestically produced missile had a range of 110 km (70 miles) and was designed for use by military aircraft against naval targets.
"Now these jet fighters have acquired a new capability in confronting threats," the semi-official news agency said. Iran's Press TV initially said a long-range missile had been tested, but later also used Fars' way of describing it.
Iran often stages war games or tests weapons to show its determination to counter any attack by foes including Israel and the United States, which accuse the Islamic Republic of seeking to develop nuclear bombs. Tehran denies the charge.
The U.S. State Department declined to comment on the Iranian press reports.
A top Iranian military commander last week said that Iranian missiles could now reach Israeli nuclear sites. Iran has often said it has missiles able to reach Israel but had not previously mentioned such specific targets.
I once had a discussion with a fellow from the Guardian (this must have been, oh, six or seven years ago at least), in which I pointed out that one way of knowing if the Guardian was being antisemitic or not would be to wait a few decades or a century, and then see if the books being written in 2080 about antisemitism in 2000 would dedicate chapters to the Guardian. The problem with this method, of course, being that one must defer the satisfaction of being proven right by a rather long time.
My interlocutor, of course, was of the opinion that I was over-reacting to criticism of Israel, and there was no antisemitism involved. What would you expect him to think?
Unfortunately we didn't need to wait three generations; we didn't even have to wait until the end of that very decade. Here's a totally random roundup of antisemitism culled from the online reports on this Sunday, March 8th, 2009, in about 10 minutes of online rambling: I didn't even go googling.
Students at Oxford (Britains' top university) throwing anti-Jewish parties. I'm not really into worrying too much about sophomoric students and their drunken antics, but when their drunken antics reflect the Zeitgeist it's time to take notice. Also, my youngest son is their age, and is actually quite able to take life-and-death responsibilities upon himself as these kids never will have to - as did his older siblings at the same age. Being 20 does not inevitably mean being asinine.
you are a little unlikely to be denied a high government post in the US because you once criticized Milosevic or Bashir. But if we leave aside the question of how many people, exactly, they have killed, and just examine the mindset and the shape of the policy they advocate, Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are also ultra-nationalists.
See that one? Some people are mass murderers, other merely talk nasty (assuming they really do, which is moot), but essentially they're all the same if we don't like them.
On September 7, 1995 Binyamin Netanyahu, candidate for Prime Minister, while visiting Hebron, issued the following statement:
The Jewish settlement will remain in Hebron permanently. If someone tries to take it away, my friends and I will be here, and they will have to take us away as well. It will be a fatal mistake to bring hundreds of armed Palestinian policemen here, and there will be a small area where the Jews can pass and where the police and IDF can operate. If there will be a conflict, the IDF will not be able to function and will quickly collide with the Palestinian forces. This is a prescription for tragedy. There is one body responsible, and that has to be the IDF".
On May 13, 1996 he declared "redeployment should be put off until the final settlement. Hebron is a very complicated problem. It is the oldest Jewish settlement in the world, and the Jewish community there is in great danger. We all remember what happened in 1929. It is preferable that such a complex matter be carefully considered at the final status talks."
Yet, in early 1997, during a press conference dealing with the Hebron Accords, Netanyahu proclaimed: "the ideological concepts he grew up believing are "not all within reach anymore," necessitating "hard decisions and generating a "meeting ground between vision and reality. This is leadership."
On January 14, 1997, Prime Minister Netanyahu, together with Yassar Arafat, signed the Hebron Accords, which were implemented six days later. Those accords divided Hebron into two sections, leaving over 80% of the city under the security control of the Palestinian Authority. Amongst the land abandoned were the Abu-Sneneh Hills, overlooking Hebron's Jewish community to the south, and Harat a-Shech, to the north. It was from these hills that Arafat's gunman terrorized Hebron for over two and a half years, shooting day and night, into people's apartments, cars and walking on the street. Abu Sneneh became infamous following the murder of ten month old Shalhevet Pass, exactly eight years ago.
The Jewish Community of Hebron continues to come under attack on numerous fronts. Only a few months ago outgoing Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the forced expulsion of families from Beit HaShalom, despite letters signed by some 50 Knesset members, both to him and to Attorney General Mazuz, demanding postponement of the eviction pending the elections and examination of new evidence.
The Israeli Supreme Court continues to allow extreme left-wing organizations, such as Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence) and Bnei Avraham to incite Hebron's Arabs against the Jewish community under the guise of 'guided tours.' This, at tremendous cost to the state. In the words of attorney Sherman, representing the state, such 'tours' demand apportioning of large numbers of police and army forces to provide security during the 'tours.' However, he refrained from pointing out to the court that the police themselves define these events as blatant provocations which have led to an increase in unrest and violence in Hebron.
These 'tours' are conducted at the cost of Hebron residents' civil liberties. Police routinely close streets in Hebron to Jewish traffic because of the left-wing visits to the city. A Hebron resident was stopped by police and not allowed to reach his Tel Rumeida home because of the extremist's visiting an Arab family in the neighborhood.
Concurrently, ninety seven percent of Hebron is closed to Jews, and Jewish groups are prevented by the police from similar visits in cities such as Um-el-Fachem.
Arab violence in Hebron is on the rise. Almost daily rocks are hurled at Israeli automobiles driving between Hebron and Kiryat Arba, injuring drivers and passangers and causing damage to the cars. Two months ago two Jewish girls were physically attacked by Arabs on this road. Additionally, Arab terrorists armed with knives are apprehended weekly near the Tomb of the Patriarchs. During questioning they admit that their goal was to stab and kill Israelis. A few months ago a woman terrorist nearly killed a high-ranking police officer near Ma'arat HaMachpela.
At the same time, Hebron and Kiryat Arba leaders have been informed by the IDF central command that 'Tzir Tzion,' the Zion Road, beginning about a kilometer north of the entrance to Kiryat Arba, and continuing into Hebron, will soon be opened to Arab vehicular traffic. The last time the roadblocks on this road were removed and Arab traffic allowed free travel on it, two Israelis were killed in the space of 12 hours: Contractor David Cohen and Kiryat Arba Councilman Hezzy Mualem. This is the only road bridging Hebron to Kiryat Arba and is used hundreds of times a day by Jews traveling from Hebron to Kiryat Arba and from there to Jerusalem, and vice-versa. Unfortunately, Israel has, in the past year, witnessed a new type of terror, utilizing moving vehicles. Reopening this road is a sure recipe for continued terror aimed at Hebron-Kiryat Arba residents and the hundreds of thousands of visitors who tour the city annually.
How will incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu react to these threats? What will be his attitude towards the Jewish Community of Hebron?
The cabinet decision approving the Hebron Accords in 1997 included the following statement: "The Government will act to maintain all the conditions and requirements necessary for the existence, security and consolidation of the Jewish community in Hebron." Will Netanyahu keep his promise? Will he provide full security for Hebron? Will he approve permits allowing Jews to build on Jewish property? Will he issue permits allowing Jews to legally purchase property from Arabs desiring to sell?
Not too long ago President Shimon Peres, speaking about the destruction of Gush Katif, told visiting American Jewish leaders: "I was for leaving Gaza.
I feel myself as one of the persons mistaken…Whatever will happen in the future, we shall not repeat the mistakes we made in leaving Gaza."What could be more appropriate than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu standing on the stairs leading to Ma'arat HaMachpela, conceding that the Hebron Accords, dividing Hebron, were an error on his part, guaranteeing never again to enact policies endangering the existence of Hebron's Jewish community, while promising concrete measures fulfilling his past government's commitment to provide maximum security and strengthen the first Jewish city in the land of Israel!
The jihad against Israel rages not just in Gaza, but worldwide, including on the Internet -- and even on Facebook, as a 14-year-old American Jew named Todd Snider recently discovered. In July 2008, Snider started a Facebook group called “I Wonder How Quickly I Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Support Israel.” This group quickly grew to become the largest pro-Israel group on Facebook, with over 180,000 members. But then, unexpectedly, this group gave this enterprising and dedicated young man a lesson in jihadist intimidation and thuggery -- including an unpleasant taste of how Western bureaucrats abet that thuggery, whether out of indifference or complicity.
On February 15, 2009, Snider recounts, “my inbox was suddenly flooded with messages.” His pro-Israel Facebook group had been hacked and destroyed by a pro-Hizballah group calling itself “Lebanese Shee’a Hackers.” The hackers completely erased the original site content and replaced it with pro-jihad, anti-Israel propaganda – while Facebook authorities stood by and let it all happen, answering Snider’s repeated entreaties for help with bland form letters.
The hackers gained administrative privileges to the “I Wonder How Quickly I Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Support Israel” group through the account of a co-administrator who had fallen for an illegal Internet phishing scheme, in which she was prompted to enter her account information and did so. They changed the group picture to one of Hassan Nasrallah and wrote the following obscene message in the Group Description section:
WELCOME TO BINT JBEIL, SOUTH LEBANON!
WELCOME TO BINT JBEIL, SOUTH LEBANON!
WELCOME TO BINT JBEIL, SOUTH LEBANON!
DEAR ADMINS,
DON’T WASTE MY AND YOUR TIME , LEAVE THIS GROUP ITS BETTER FOR BOTH THIS IS THE LAST TIME ILL EDIT YOU INFO , NEXT TIME
AND IN A COUPLE OF HOURS YOU WILL LOOSE EVERYTHING RELATED TO THIS GROUP.
IM TIRED NOW I WANT TO GO TO SLEEP AND ILL PUT THAT BANANA IN YOUR MOTHER’S ASS AND AGAIN I RECOMMEND YOU TO LEAVE THE GROUP TOMORROW I MAY ERASE EVRYTHING .
GOOD NIGHT ASSHOLES
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Leader of Hezbollah:
(2008)
‘O’ you Zionists!, O’ you murderers!, O’ you rapists!,
By God i swear, in the coming war,
we will confront you in a manner
you have never faced in your entire existence!’ “
(Bint Jbeil is the Lebanese city on the border with Israel that is known as the “Capital of Hizballah.”)
And in a classic example of projection, the hacked group page now claims that the Jewish Internet Defense Force “is attacking our groups and changing the Group Description and Recent News with threatening letters and offensive slurs especially during Ghaza [sic] war when many pro-arab group even the groups which donate help to children of Ghaza disappered [sic]. and now they are closing some nasrallah-hezbollah groups with silly reports.”
Shortly after their group page was destroyed, Snider and many of the original group members began to write to Facebook asking that they take action against the hackers. Snider says that Facebook received “hundreds of messages and complaints” from group members, “including some to high-ranking officials through connections.” However, “Facebook,” Snider notes, “seems entirely unaffected by this type of pressure, likely because many of its employees themselves are anti-Israel.” In response to this flood of complaints, Facebook staffers repeatedly sent back the same bland form letter:
Hi _____,
Thank you for reporting this potential abuse on our site. We will review the reported material and remove anything that violates our Terms of Use. If warranted, we will either warn or disable the user responsible.
In the future, please feel free to use the “Report” links located near most pieces of content on the site to report offensive material to Facebook. If you are not able to use the “Report” links for any reason, please write to us at privacy@facebook.com with a link to the material and a description of the problem. We will then review this material and take appropriate action based on our Terms of Use. Rest assured that these reports will be kept confidential.
Remember that you should also contact the authorities if you ever feel threatened by something you see on the site.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
________
User Operations
Facebook
Rather than acquiesce to Facebook’s indifference, Snider and others involved with the group began, he says, “to resort to hunting the ‘hackers’ ourselves.” Snider and his partners in the group began an elaborate game of chase with the hackers, deactivating their accounts only to find them returning under different names and resorting to complex stratagems to avoid detection and deletion. This required Snider to search through the accounts of all 180,000 members in order to find the hackers, and even then it wasn’t always obvious who they were; finally he decided instead to form a new group with the same name as the old one.
The new group went live on March 3, but so far has only 3,300 members. The old, hacked group retains 179,000 members – most of whom joined the pro-Israel group and are unaware of how it has been compromised. Snider has asked all members to leave the old group and join the new one, but it isn’t easy to reach all of them. “Unfortunately,” explains Snider, “it is impossible for me to message all of my members, and with the original group page being constantly changed and restored as a result of the ‘hackers,’ it will be very difficult to attain all of the old members in the new group.”
Todd Snider’s original goal was commendable. He began the “I Wonder How Quickly I Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Support Israel” group after he returned from an eleven-day trip to Israel for his Bar Mitzvah. “I was encouraged, as a Jew,” he explained, “to support our homeland and America’s best ally.” He noted that on Facebook, Israel and Jews had many detractors and few defenders; he started the group to show that pro-Israel and pro-Judaism voices did exist, and would not be silent.
Yet now Facebook is effectively allowing such voices to be silenced, including Todd Snider’s, by not moving energetically against the Internet jihadists who destroyed his group. Facebook officials should allow Snider to recoup the original group page and recover the group members who originally signed up to show their support for Israel.
To do anything less than this would not just be a disservice to Todd Snider and the 180,000 people who joined his group; it would be to acquiesce, in one corner of the Internet, to yet another small victory for the jihad.
Political Islam returned to the world stage with Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Iran, which became the most aggressive patron of Muslim radicals outside its borders, including Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Until very recently, an oil-price windfall gave the Iranian state ample resources to pursue its agenda at home and abroad. How, then, should we explain an eruption of social pathologies in Iran such as drug addiction and prostitution, on a scale much worse than anything observed in the West? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it appears that Islamic theocracy promotes rather than represses social decay.
Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran's birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran's population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy.
But quantifiable factors do not explain the sudden collapse of fertility. It seems that a spiritual decay has overcome Iran, despite best efforts of a totalitarian theocracy. Popular morale has deteriorated much faster than in the "decadent" West against which the Khomeini revolution was directed.
"Iran is dying for a fight," I wrote in 2007 (Please see Why Iran is dying for a fight, November 13, 2007.) in the literal sense that its decline is so visible that some of its leaders think that they have nothing to lose.
Their efforts to isolate Iran from the cultural degradation of the American "great Satan" have produced social pathologies worse than those in any Western country. With oil at barely one-fifth of its 2008 peak price, they will run out of money some time in late 2009 or early 2010. Game theory would predict that Iran's leaders will gamble on a strategic long shot. That is not a comforting thought for Iran's neighbors.
Two indicators of Iranian morale are worth citing.
First, prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women. On February 3, the Austrian daily Der Standard published the results of two investigations conducted by the Tehran police, suppressed by the Iranian media. [1]
"More than 90% of Tehran's prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam, according to the results of one study, and more than 30% of them are registered at a university or studying," reports Der Standard. "The study was assigned to the Tehran Police Department and the Ministry of Health, and when the results were tabulated in early January no local newspaper dared to so much as mention them."
The Austrian newspaper added, "Eighty percent of the Tehran sex workers maintained that they pursue this career voluntarily and temporarily. The educated ones are waiting for better jobs. Those with university qualifications intend to study later, and the ones who already are registered at university mention the high tuition [fees] as their motive for prostitution ... they are content with their occupation and do not consider it a sin according to Islamic law."
There is an extensive trade in poor Iranian women who are trafficked to the Gulf states in huge numbers, as well as to Europe and Japan. "A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women," I wrote in a 2006 study of Iranian prostitution, Jihads and whores.
Prostitution as a response to poverty and abuse is one thing, but the results of this new study reflect something quite different. The educated women of Tehran choose prostitution in pursuit of upward mobility, as a way of sharing in the oil-based potlatch that made Tehran the world's hottest real estate market during 2006 and 2007.
A country is beaten when it sells its women, but it is damned when its women sell themselves. The popular image of the Iranian sex trade portrays tearful teenagers abused and cast out by impoverished parents. Such victims doubtless abound, but the majority of Tehran's prostitutes are educated women seeking affluence.
Only in the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism in 1990 did educated women choose prostitution on a comparable scale, but under very different circumstances. Russians went hungry during the early 1990s as the Soviet economy dissolved and the currency collapsed. Today's Iranians suffer from shortages, but the data suggest that Tehran's prostitutes are not so much pushed into the trade by poverty as pulled into it by wealth.
A year ago I observed that prices for Tehran luxury apartments exceeded those in Paris, as Iran's kleptocracy distributed the oil windfall to tens of thousands of hangers-on of the revolution. $35 billion went missing from state oil funds, opposition newspapers charged at the time. Corruption evidently has made whores of Tehran's educated women. (Please see Worst of times for Iran, June 24, 2008.)
Second, according to a recent report from the US Council on Foreign Relations, "Iran serves as the major transport hub for opiates produced by [Afghanistan], and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates that Iran has as many as 1.7 million opiate addicts." That is, 5% of Iran's adult, non-elderly population of 35 million is addicted to opiates. That is an astonishing number, unseen since the peak of Chinese addiction during the 19th century. The closest American equivalent (from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health) found that 119,000 Americans reported using heroin within the prior month, or less than one-tenth of 1% of the non-elderly adult population.
Nineteenth-century China had comparable rates of opium addiction, after the British won two wars for the right to push the drug down China's throat. Post-communist Russia had comparable rates of prostitution, when people actually went hungry. Iran's startling rates of opium addiction and prostitution reflect popular demoralization, the implosion of an ancient culture in its encounter with the modern world. These pathologies arose not from poverty but wealth, or rather a sudden concentration of wealth in the hands of the political class. No other country in modern history has evinced this kind of demoralization.
For the majority of young Iranians, there is no way up, only a way out; 36% of Iran's youth aged 15 to 29 years want to emigrate, according to yet another unpublicized Iranian study, this time by the country's Education Ministry, Der Standard adds. Only 32% find the existing social norms acceptable, while 63% complain about unemployment, the social order or lack of money.
As I reported in the cited essay, the potlatch for the political class is balanced by widespread shortages for ordinary Iranians. This winter, widespread natural gas shortages left tens of thousands of households without heat.
The declining morale of the Iranian population helps make sense of its galloping demographic decline. Academic demographers have tried to explain collapsing fertility as a function of rising female literacy. The problem is that the Iranian regime lies about literacy data, and has admitted as much recently.
In a recent paper entitled "Education and the World's Most Raid Fertility Decline in Iran [2], American and Iranian demographers observe:
A first analysis of the Iran 2006 census results shows a sensationally low fertility level of 1.9 for the whole country and only 1.5 for the Tehran area (which has about 8 million people) ... A decline in the TFR [total fertility rate] of more than 5.0 in roughly two decades is a world record in fertility decline. This is even more surprising to many observers when one considers that it happened in one of the most Islamic societies. It forces the analyst to reconsider many of the usual stereotypes about religious fertility differentials.
The census points to a continued fall in fertility, even from today's extremely low levels, the paper maintains.
Most remarkable is the collapse of rural fertility in tandem with urban fertility, the paper adds:
The similarity of the transition in both urban and rural areas is one the main features of the fertility transition in Iran. There was a considerable gap between the fertility in rural and urban areas, but the TFR in both rural and urban areas continued to decline by the mid-1990s, and the gap has narrowed substantially. In 1980, the TFR in rural areas was 8.4 while that of urban areas was 5.6. In other words, there was a gap of 2.8 children between rural and urban areas. In 2006, the TFR in rural and urban areas was 2.1 and 1.8, respectively (a difference of only 0.3 children).
What the professors hoped to demonstrate is that as rural literacy levels in Iran caught up with urban literacy levels, the corresponding urban and rural fertility rates also converged. That is a perfectly reasonable conjecture whose only flaw is that the data on which it is founded were faked by the Iranian regime.
The Iranian government's official data claim literacy percentage levels in the high 90s for urban women and in the high 80s for rural women. That cannot be true, for Iran's Literacy Movement Organization admitted last year (according to an Agence-France Presse report of May 8, 2008) that 9,450,000 Iranians are illiterate of a population of 71 million (or an adult population of about 52 million). This suggests far higher rates of illiteracy than in the official data.
A better explanation of Iran's population implosion is that the country has undergone an existential crisis comparable to encounters of Amazon or Inuit tribes with modernity. Traditional society demands submission to the collective. Once the external constraints are removed, its members can shift from the most extreme forms of modesty to the other extreme of sexual license. Khomeini's revolution attempted to retard the disintegration of Persian society, but it appears to have accelerated the process.
Modernity implies choice, and the efforts of the Iranian mullahs to prolong the strictures of traditional society appear to have backfired. The cause of Iran's collapsing fertility is not literacy as such, but extreme pessimism about the future and an endemic materialism that leads educated Iranian women to turn their own sexuality into a salable commodity.
Theocracy subjects religion to a political test; it is hard for Iranians to repudiate the regime and remain pious, for religious piety and support for political Islam are inseparable, as a recent academic study documented from survey data [3].
As in the decline of communism, what follows on the breakdown of a state ideology is likely to be nihilism. Iran is a dying country, and it is very difficult to have a rational dialogue with a nation all of whose available choices terminate in oblivion.
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
(Robert A. Heinlein quotes)
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