Machpelah House and Israeli democracy
Machpelah House (Photo: Lowshot.com)
A standard trope of Israel’s enemies is that her democratic nature (if it ever existed) is disintegrating under the weight of the disputed status of the West Bank. She is a rogue state, the argument goes. She is an anti-democratic pariah – an apartheid nation – where the Arab minority enjoys, at best, only second-class citizenship. The fact that members of that minority serve in Israel’s parliament, serve in the diplomatic corps, enjoy equal rights, and even sit on her Supreme Court…well…that’s merely a façade painted by the Zionists to distract.
If that’s true, it’s a really convincing façade. (more…)
Comments (2) »Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 at 10:59 AM | Stand for Israel
Simon Deng, a former Sudanese slave, comments on the Durban Conference
The following excerpts are from an amazing speech given by former Sudanese slave Simon Deng. They are his thoughts about the notoriously anti-Israel Durban Conference, which took place last fall in New York.
Deng sought to convey to the attendees of The Perils of Global Intolerance: the United Nations & “Durban III” counter-conference what suffering under racism really looks like. He began:
By exaggerating Palestinian suffering, and by blaming the Jews for it, the UN has muffled the cries of those who suffer on a far larger scale. For over fifty years the indigenous black population of Sudan — Christians and Muslims alike — have been the victims of the brutal, racist Arab Muslim regimes in Khartoum.
In South Sudan, my homeland, about 4 million innocent men, women and children were slaughtered from 1955 to 2005. Seven million were ethnically cleansed and they became the largest refugee group since World War II.
The raw statistics of the ethnic cleansing in south Sudan give the lie to claims that Israel is a racist, apartheid state. Deng continued:
Comments (10) »In Israel, black Sudanese, Christian and Muslim were welcomed and treated like human beings. Just go and ask them, like I have done. They told me that compared to the situation in Egypt, Israel is “heaven.”
Is Israel a racist state? To my people, the people who know racism – the answer is absolutely not. Israel is a state of people who are the colors of the rainbow. Jews themselves come in all colors, even black. I met with Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Beautiful black Jews.
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012 at 3:44 PM | Stand for Israel
PLO honors Helen Thomas
Photo by: Reuters
Former White House correspondent and Anti-Israel Hall of Shame inductee Helen Thomas has been bestowed with high honors by … the Palestinian Liberation Organization:
Thomas was presented with an award, recognizing her career in journalism and writing, at the home of Ambassador Maen Rashid Ereikat, President of the Commission General of the PLO in Washington.
The ceremony was attended by a group of ambassadors, diplomats, journalists, “human rights” activists and American Arab leaders in the United States.
The PLO charter states, among other things, that “The liberation of Palestine, from an Arab viewpoint, is a national duty and it attempts to repel the Zionist and imperialist aggression against the Arab homeland, and aims at the elimination of Zionism in Palestine.” Thomas, who believes that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine,” is in appropriate company.
Comments (21) »
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012 at 7:06 AM | Stand for Israel
“Global March to Jerusalem” turns violent
Well-intentioned Westerners often assume that all movements claiming to be interested in political self-determination look something like Richard Attenborough’s cinematic masterpiece “Gandhi.” Not the real Mohandas K. Gandhi, mind you, but the movie made by the anti-colonialist British guy. Non-violent. Absorbing the blows of the oppressor in order to rouse the conscience of the world. It works really well when your opponent is the British Empire or, as with the fight against Jim Crow, the United States. It works less well when your opponent is Communist China (ask the folks in Tiananmen Square) or Iran (ask the folks from the Green Revolution). Some people, however, don’t seem to understand that.
So when something calling itself the Global March to Jerusalem presents itself in this manner: “The Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ) is a groundbreaking new initiative that is organising non-violent civil resistance on 30th March 2012 in Palestine and the four neighbouring countries: Egypt, Lebanon Jordan and Syria,” we can, perhaps, forgive the hearts of those same well-intentioned Westerners for fluttering.
Psychologists have a term for this: “cognitive egocentrism.” It means the tendency to project one’s own mentality or values onto another person or people. The argument goes something like this: 1) I believe that peaceful coexistence is of paramount importance in defining relationships between people. 2) Everyone is pretty much like me. 3) Therefore, everyone believes that peaceful coexistence yada yada yada…
The problem, of course, is 2. Not everyone is pretty much like a well-intentioned Westerner.
Take for example, the GMJ folks. What they said they were going to do was hold massive and peaceful (note the use of that key word) “marches towards Jerusalem, or to the nearest point possible according to the circumstances of each country, in Palestine (the 1948 seizures, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and the four neighbouring countries: Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Internationals will participate in land caravans or fly directly to one of the main sites for the march. In addition, mass protests will be organised in front of Israeli embassies in the capitals of different…
Read More » Comments (4) »Friday, March 30th, 2012 at 9:04 AM | Rabbi Jonathan Greenberg
“Global March to Jerusalem” a global distraction
A 2011 rally in support of the establishment of a Palestinian state and a divided Jerusalem (Photo: Isranet).
This Friday, “activists” in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan plan on breaching Israel’s borders as part of an event dubbed the Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ). Organizers claim the GMJ is necessary to raise world awareness of “the Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and Judaisation policies affecting the people, land and sanctity of Jerusalem.”
The outcome of the march will likely end up only deflecting international public attention away from serious global issues, such as Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and Syrian’s daily massacre of its own population – nearly 10,000 killed in recent months – rather than demonstrating Israeli “apartheid,” Palestinian statehood, or anything else. (more…)
Comments (26) »Thursday, March 29th, 2012 at 9:31 AM | Amichai Farkas
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