A Time To Speak

Vol. III:11 (No. 35)

November 2003 - Heshvan-Kislev 5764

MAKING MISCHIEF

One can only speculate on the situation of Israel and its neighbors today had the inhabitants been left to make their own history without meddling by foreign mischief-makers.

For example: If Great Britain had not created the "Palestine Problem" by its bungling and treachery on its Mandate, and/or had not encouraged and supported the Arab attempts to destroy Israel in 1948, even supplying the military equipment, commander and officers for Jordan's offensive.

For example: If the late Soviet Union had not instigated and arranged the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, and the creation and expansion of terrorist organizations.

For example: If the United Nations had not denied Israel its most elementary rights as a member state, and if it had refrained from bestowing its blessing on Arab aggression and terrorism against Israel.

For example: If all outside parties and combinations thereof had restrained themselves from enshrining their own notions and ambitions in a string of peace plans and trying to impose them.

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"Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews

for their own destruction."

             --  Melanie Phillips, British journalist, 20 November 2003

After 2,000 years of tormenting the Jews and trying to crush them, and almost 56 years after the rebirth of Israel, Europe cannot free itself of some compulsive need to force failure and defeat upon an independent Jewish nation. That tiny Israel, despite all perils and problems, has surged far ahead of Europe in its accomplishments only exacerbates the ancient animus.

1] The European Union [EU] has adopted, encouraged and financed the PLO. According to EU Commissioner Sir Christopher Patten this is perfectly proper because there is no evidence that the PLO is involved in terrorism.

[Comment: There are many peoples whose genuine grievances and valid aspirations fail to win the solicitude of Europe. By coincidence, their causes are not inimical to the Jews.]

2] The EU will extend its largesse to selected Israelis, provided that those beneficiaries agitate from within Israel on behalf of the EU goal of Israel's self-destructive surrender to Arab demands. [See further Issue No. 26]

This is foreign interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state that violates all normal protocol. The EU's lack of inhibition on that score suggests that it has failed to accept the reality that Israel and its Jews really do have sovereign rights free of outside control.

Europe's Cause-of-the-Season has been the sponsorship of the "Geneva Initiative" for an Israel-Arab settlement on terms concocted by a few individuals from Israel who enjoy no mandate, hold no official positions, have no standing, no authority to negotiate anything with anyone, and are acting illegally against the elected government of their own country.

This stunt is named in honor of the government of Switzerland that initiated and paid for it through its Geneva Center for Humanitarian Dialogue. The Swiss even offer to subsidize airfare to lure journalists to attend the initiation of the initiative.

Among Switzerland's special credentials for meddling in the fate of Israel:

A] During the Holocaust, its diligently rounded up Jews trying to flee from the Nazis and turned them over to German troops. This may have helped cement the close financial relationship between Switzerland and Nazi Germany.

B] After the Holocaust, it expropriated for itself the funds that Jews around Europe had entrusted to Swiss banks. Claims by survivors and their heirs for the return of their property were rejected. After half a century, American Jewish lawyers obtained partial restitution for the rightful owners, and thereby brought on an official Swiss threat that the Jews were thereby creating anti-Semitism in Switzerland.

There was no direct threat to revive the medieval Swiss habit of murdering Jews to whom Swiss owed money.

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Junk Mail From Junk Males

"A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority.

What it abominates most is the dissent of the majority."

                                                                               --- Eric Hoffer

The Geneva Initiative is an exercise in egomania by a Trio perhaps ambitious to upstage the Quartet.

The composer-conductor is Yossi Beilin, a one-time member of a cabinet now long out of office. His illegal secret negotiations with the PLO produced -- with the complicity of Norway -- the lethal Oslo Accord. Soon after that was perpetrated, Beilin explained his method of operation: If you want to do something that you know the public will reject, you must do it in secret. Then it is a fait accompli and the public has to swallow it.

This exemplar of democracy has since failed in every attempt to win a seat in the Knesset [Israel's parliament], and holds no public office either elective or appointed. Instead, he is the paid employee of the EU, whose job is to deliver the EU funds donated to the PLO.

The two second fiddles are: (a) Avraham Burg, who failed in his ambition to be selected head of his political party and therefore has taken to maligning and slandering Israel to foreign audiences. (b) Amram Mitzna, very briefly head of a political party during which tenure he led it to the most massive defeat in any Israeli election.

These three, unable to forward their notions in their own country by persuasion or argument, use foreign parties to impose them by outside coercion. Those foreign parties use the Trio and their antics to forward their own political-economic-psychological goals in contempt of Israel's rights as a sovereign state and a free people.

Some one million copies of the terms of the Geneva Initiative have been printed in a brochure of 47 shabby pages, and placed in everyone mailbox in Israel. It has been reported that France and Belgium paid $7 million for the printing and distribution. It is doubtful that any foreign country helped pay the cost of hauling away the copies that recipients dumped into Israel's trash bins.

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Mischief-makers worldwide are becoming ever more shrill and more open about their intents. Whatever the slogans they brandish, they are driven by some compulsion to exorcise their own unease, resentments and fears, by directing them outward against the traditional target . . .

This condition is examined in excerpts from "Those Pesky Jews", Victor Davis Hansen, National Review Online, 31 October 2003:

There are certain predictable symptoms to watch when a widespread amorality begins to infect a postmodern society: cultural relativism, atheism, socialism, utopian pacifism. Another sign, of course, is fashionable anti-Semitism among the educated, or the idea that some imaginary cabal, or some stealthy agenda - certainly not our own weakness - is conspiring to threaten our good life.

Well apart from the spooky placards (stars of David juxtaposed with swastikas, posters calling for the West Bank to be expanded to 'the sea') that we are accustomed to seeing at the marches of the supposedly ethical antiwar movement, we have also heard some examples of Jew-baiting and hissing in the last two weeks that had nothing to do with the old crazies. Indeed, such is the nature of the new anti-Semitism that everyone can now play at it -- as long as it is cloaked in third-world chauvinism, progressive thinking, and identity politics.

The latest lunatic rantings from Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad are nothing new, and we should not be surprised by his mindless blabbering about Jews and his fourth-grade understanding of World War II and the present Middle East. But what was fascinating was the reaction to his madness: silence from the Arab intelligentsia, praise from Middle Eastern leaders ('A brilliant speech,' gushed Iran's 'president' Mohammad Khatami), and worry from France and Greece about an EU proclamation against the slander. [. . . . ]

[British university don] Tony Judt, writing in The New York Review of Books, has published one of the most valuable and revealing articles about the Middle East to appear in the last 20 years. There has always been the suspicion that European intellectuals favored the dismantling of Israel as we know it through the merging of this uniquely democratic and liberal state with West Bank neighbors who have a horrific record of human-rights abuses, autocracy, and mass murder. After all, for all too many Europeans, how else but with the end of present-day Israel will the messy Middle East and its attendant problems - oil, terrorism, anti-Semitism, worries over unassimilated Muslim populations in Europe, anti-Americanism, and postcolonial guilt - become less bothersome? Moreover, who now knows or cares much about what happened to Jews residing under Arab governments - the over half-million or so who, in the last half-century, have been ethnically cleansed from (and sometimes murdered in) Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and almost every Jewish community in the Arab Middle East?

And what is the value of the only democratic government in a sea of autocracy if its existence butts up against notions of third-world victimhood and causes so much difficulty for the Western intelligentsia? Still, few intellectuals were silly enough to dress up that insane idea under the pretext of a serious argument (an unhinged Vidal, Chomsky, or Said does not count). Judt did, and now he has confirmed what most of us knew for years - namely, that there is an entrenched and ever-bolder school of European thought that favors the de facto elimination of what is now a democratic Jewish state.

What links all these people - a Muslim head of state, a rude crowd in Michigan, an experienced magazine contributor, and a European public intellectual - besides their having articulated a spreading anger against the 'Jews'? Perhaps a growing unease with hard questions that won't go away and thus beg for easy, cheap answers.

A Malaysian official and his apologists must realize that gender apartheid, statism, tribalism, and the anti-democratic tendencies of the Middle East cause its poverty and frustration despite a plethora of natural resources (far more impressive assets than the non-petroleum-bearing rocks beneath parched Israel). But why call for introspection when the one-syllable slur 'Jews' suffices instead?

And why would an Arab-American audience - itself composed of many who fled the tyranny and economic stagnation of Arab societies for the freedom and opportunity of a liberal United States - wish to hear a reasoned explanation of the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian war when it was so much easier to hiss and moan, especially when mainstream observers would ignore their anti-Semitism . . . .

[. . . . ] How could a Tony Judt write a reasoned and balanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when to do so would either alienate or bore the literati?

So they all, whether by design or laxity, take the easier way out - especially when slurring 'Israel' or 'the Jews' involves none of the risks of incurring progressive odium that similarly clumsy attacks against blacks, women, Palestinians, or homosexuals might draw, requires no real thinking, and seems to find an increasingly receptive audience.

You see, in our mixed-up world those Jewish are not a 'people of color.' [. . . .] not easily stereotyped as impoverished victims needing largesse or condescension, and much less are they eligible under any of the current myriad of rubrics that count for public support. Israel is a successful Western state, not a failed third-world despotism. Against terrible oppression and overt anti-Semitism, the Jewish community here and abroad found success - proof that hard work, character, education, and personal discipline can trump both natural and human adversity. In short, the story of American Jewry and Israel resonates not at all with the heartstrings of a modern therapeutic society, which is quick to show envy for the successful and cheap concern for the struggling.

This fashionable anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism - especially among purported intellectuals of the Left - reveals a deep-seated, scary pathology that is growing geometrically both in and outside the West. For a Europe that is disarmed, plagued by a demographic nightmare of negative population growth and unsustainable entitlements, filled with unassimilated immigrants, and deeply angry about the power and presence of the United States, the Jews and their Israel provide momentary relief on the cheap. So expect that more crazy thoughts of Israel's destruction dressed up as peace plans will be as common as gravestone and synagogue smashing.

For the Muslim world that must confront the power of the patriarch, mullah, tribe, and autocrat if it is ever to share the freedom and prosperity of the rest of the world, the Jews offer a much easier target. So expect even more raving madness as the misery of Islamic society grows and its state-run media hunker down amid widespread unrest. Anticipate, also, more sick posters at C-SPAN broadcast marches, more slips by reasonable writers, and more anti-Israeli denunciations from the 'liberals.' [. . . . ]

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"Don't Rely On The Facts"

Much of the international news media has long displayed a compulsive anti-Israel and pro-PLO bias [see Issue No. 13]. Some professional journalists actually act as mentors in the fabrication of anti-Israel propaganda. And, some of that propaganda is unwittingly supported by the U.S. taxpayers.

Excerpts from "Your Taxes for PLO Propaganda", by David Bedein, FrontPageMagazine.com,
29 October 2003:

[. . . . ]the U.S. government has finally acknowledged that the U.S. Aid For International Development (USAID) indeed funds the Palestine Academic Society For the Study of Academic Affairs (PASSIA), the PLO lobby group in Jerusalem which trains PLO media professionals in the art of transforming the image of the Arab-Israeli struggle into an Arab David against an Israeli Goliath."

PASSIA, in a booklet recording a conference on misuse of the media, passes along the professional advice of two newspersons:

[. . . . ] two Western journalists: Eric Weiner, of National Public Radio (NPR) -- another U.S. taxpayer funded enterprise -- and Lyse Doucete of the BBC. Readers are first told by Weiner that, 'being balanced, according to their mandate, can be frustrating' and urges the audience/reader 'to present your stories on a human level and not rely on the facts.' Present tear-jerkers in which Israelis '[have to justify their existence, which makes it easier to get through to us.'

Ms. Doucete, who refers to homicide bombers as 'honor' killers, believes 'her job is to translate' rather than simply report the news, because 'Israel is led by a Prime Minister who believes that it is not Israel's policy that is wrong, just that they have to explain it better.' And so she admonishes the Palestinians, 'if you want to beat the Israelis, you have to beat them at their own game.'

Thereupon follows eight pages of clear instruction on how the Palestinians can manipulate the press to their own advantage. Weiner again: 'The fact that you have 1,000,000 pounds from the British government is not particularly interesting. But, if you explain why it is going to make such a difference by saying, Did you know that since the closure was imposed we haven't been able to get paper through to Bethlehem? . . . we are far more likely to be interested.'

And still more from Doucete: 'You should also know how to pick your target. Always be smart about where you pitch your story, and pitch it at the right time . . . It is true that Israel is treated with kid gloves and not held to the same standards as Iraq when it comes to UN resolutions.'

The House of Representatives cannot get an accurate accounting of PASSIA's USAID funds, but it is the U.S. taxpayer who deserves an explanation: Why are his tax dollars being used to manipulate his own government in favor of suicide bombers?

[Comment: American NPR nor British BBC employ as newscasters people who pretend to be reporting facts to their audiences. By their own admission, they are instead distorting and slanting news to suit themselves. And these experts at mischievous deception are teaching their skills to forward the cause of killing Jews and destroying Israel. Neither company seems to have any problem with this.]

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Dearborn Revisited

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, was obsessively Judeophobic. His tirades in the newspaper Dearborn Independent, and his dissemination of the notorious 19th-century Russian forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" brought on a successful class action libel suit by American Jews. (The Protocols were recently dramatized on state-run television in Egypt without domestic protest.)

Out of the vast fortune earned with their vehicles, Henry Ford and his son Edsel richly endowed The Ford Foundation with funds that thereby became tax exempt. Its endowment today is estimated at $10 billion. A foundation so privileged is expected to use its money for philanthropic and humanitarian causes. The report "Funding Hate", written by Edwin Black for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reveals how The Ford Foundation likes to bestow its largesse. [For text of the report, see: www.jta.org/ford.asp.]

Ford has been especially partial to PLO and other Arab causes, and despite a US government requirement, does not ask for a pledge that its largesse will not be used to promote terrorism. A favorite cause is the Palestinian Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment -- called for short LAW (Land and Water). It admits its dependence on Ford Foundation dollars, though it also has donors in Canada, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Ford was a principal paymaster for the UN's World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, perpetrated in Durban, South Africa in September 2002. At that event, LAW led the campaign that turned the conference into an international Hate-Israel-and-Kill-the-Jews Jamboree. Its programs to protect the environment involves campaigns to spread boycotts of Israel, have its officials tried as war criminals, and define it as a racist state that must be cleansed of its Jewish identity. (The Ford Foundation has since given a grant of $60,000 to Khader Shkirat, then Executive Director of LAW, so he can "conduct human rights research at Harvard and complete English courses at Boston University".)

Along with like-minded Non-Governmental Organizations [NGOs] it created a scene where Jewish delegates were verbally and physically assaulted. As reported, there were "anti-Israel agitation, anti-Zionist propaganda and blatant anti-Semitism permeated the eight-day Durban affair. Posters displaying Nazi icons and Jewish caricatures, anti-Israel protest marches, organized jeering, inciting leaflets and anti-Jewish cartoons were everywhere, as was orchestrated anti-American agitation."

At the time, Ford's Executive Vice President Alexander Wilde stated that what the Conference was doing was "correct". He later stated in writing that "We have seen no indication that our grantees in Durban or elsewhere engaged in anti-Semitic speech or activities. The Foundation does not support hate speech of any kind."

The JTA report also reveals that: "The overwhelming majority of Ford's monies for the Middle East are granted to pro-Palestinian and Islamic rights groups." These include websites that promote boycotts of Israeli goods and of American companies that do business with Israel, among them IBM, Disney, The Limited, Nestle, Sara Lee, Starbucks, and Home Depot. Ford's Middle East offices are in Cairo and Beirut, and give money to "more than 350 Middle East organizations, almost entirely Arab, Islamic or Palestinian".

Ford has no programs in Israel, but has formed an association with the American New Israel Fund, whose humanitarian projects include campaigns to persuade Israeli soldiers to desert their duties. Like the EU, the New Israel Fund also subsidizes the Israeli-Arab "Adala", that specializes in a political agenda to undermine Israel under the guise of promoting "human rights". [See Issue No. 26]

The publication of "Funding Hate" invoked calls in Congress for an investigation of how Ford administers its vast treasury, and even possible inquiries by the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), that oversees the tax-exempt status of foundations. At that point, the Ford Foundation's President Susan Berresford professed to be shocked! to hear of "unacceptable behavior" at Durban, saying "We now recognize that we did not have a clear picture of the activities, organizations and people involved". This of an eight-day event long in the planning and attended by Ford's own Executive Vice President.

She promised that Ford will be more careful.

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Attacks on Jews, physical and verbal, have soared in Europe during the past few years. The EU itself and its member states, in government, academia and media, have not been reluctant to spur it on with hysterical abuse of Israel. It nevertheless commissioned a report on the fire it stoked, to be produced by its Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in Vienna.

The researchers did their work and delivered their report. Among their findings: Most of the perpetrators of violent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions were Muslim or pro-Palestinian. The EU management deemed this finding "inflammatory" and promptly made a political decision to suppress the report, fearing "that it would increase hostility toward Muslims". ["Inflammatory" here does not refer to arson perpetrated against Jewish property and institutions.]

This sequitur is defined Mark Steyn (www.steynonline.com) 21 November 2003:

Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims.

* * * * * * *

Through two years and 1300 assaults on Jews in France, Monsieur Le President Jacques Chirac maintained with certitude and indignation that there is no anti-Semitism in France. To make sure that there continues to be no anti-Semitism in France, he has now established a committee to study the subject. It is to meet once a month and he intends to attend in person.

Perhaps, discomfited by the findings of the EU's own Monitoring Centre, this committee can find some more tolerable explanation.

END