Notice the Saudi offering a blood offering to the Jewish Golden Calf, and the last cartoon says "Hypnosis Jewish," not "Zionist."
But Iranians insist that they aren't antisemitic,and Roger Cohen agrees, so that's that.
(h/t Gidon Shaviv)
“Whatever Politician is in Charge of Britain’s Middle East Policy, the Foreign Office is Unbeatable” (Daphne Anson)
“Yesterday we heard the Leader of the [Labour] Opposition [Harold Wilson], its spokesman on foreign affairs, and the leader of the Liberal Party [Jeremy Thorpe] urging our government [prime minister Edward Heath’s Conservative one] to supply arms to Israel, when the Israeli Army is fighting 125 miles inside Egypt and over 20 miles inside Syria,” R.G. Cookson, FRS, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southampton – apparently an ideological antecedent to today’s monstrous regiment of anti-Israel academics – wrote from his Winchester home to The Times newspaper in October 1973 during the Yom Kippur War. “When will they think Israel has conquered enough territory – or do they support the Zionist ideal of a state stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile?”
At the London headquarters of the very proper and rather patrician Anglo-Jewish Association, a body steeped historically in anti-Zionist or at least non-Zionist sentiment, its Council, anxious to avoid the accusation of “dual loyalties,” chose its words carefully in arguing the opposing view in the same venerable publication. The eleven men and one woman settled upon the following text:
“We … express our distress at the violation of the ceasefire by Egypt and Syria.
With our sympathy for Israel reinforced by a shared historical experience, we believe that this onslaught sustained by Soviet equipment must inevitably damage the strategic interests of Britain, the country of our allegiance.
We therefore call on His Majesty’s Government not to persist in an embargo on arms for Israel which will inevitably and unfairly injure Israel in her struggle to survive.”
It bore the signatures of Victor Lucas (businessman and multi-faceted communal heavyweight), (Sir) Leon Bagrit (industrialist), (Sir) Isaiah Berlin (political philosopher), Maurice Edelman (MP, Labour), (Sir) Louis Gluckstein (ex-MP, Conservative), Toby Jessel (MP, Conservative), David Kessler (Jewish Chronicle proprietor), Ewen Montagu (judge and famous wartime intelligence officer), Frances Rubens (wife of prominent Judaica expert Alfred Rubens), Neville Sandelson (MP, Labour), Harold Sebag-Montefiore (Greater London Council official and judge), and Harold Soref (MP, Conservative).
Although derided in less squeamishly and more overtly pro-Israel quarters as fustily cautious in its wording, the AJA’s statement was a welcome addition to the robust Jewish communal protest against the Heath government’s embargo – which although imposed upon all combatants in the war was in practice disadvantageous only to Israel, and extended even to a ban on supplying spare parts for that country’s British-made Centurion tanks.
Meanwhile the usual anti-Israel propaganda was at work on other fronts, for example in an obnoxious letter to The Times (19 October) by Sir Kennedy Trevaskis (1915-90), a Foreign Office Arabist who, as his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography regarding the Aden phase of his diplomatic career notes, “was back in an environment, essentially Muslim, where his experience, personal qualities, and sympathies were at home”. In short, a typical member of the Foreign Office “Camel Corps” that is still going strong today: consider Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Sir Oliver Miles, Sir Vincent Fearn, Frances Guy, James Watt, and many others.
Trevaskis’s jaundiced claptrap, with, among other points, its nasty reference to “immigrants from Europe” displacing the “indigenous” inhabitants, was ably refuted by D. M. (David Malcolm) Lewis of Christ Church, Oxford, whose letter appeared in The Times of 22 October. Lewis – subsequently Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, and well versed in Jewish, Persian and Greek antiquity – wrote, inter alia:
“I must say that Sir Kennedy Trevaskis does not inspire much confidence in the command of the facts enjoyed by British Arabists. I can attach very little precise meaning to his assertion that nine-tenths of the indigenous population of Israel has been expelled from its home …. Apart from the Israeli-born Jewish population, the total of Jewish immigrants to Israel from Asia and Africa between 1948 and 1970 was 723,073. The vast majority of these came from Arab lands, leaving their homes and possessions of centuries behind them. No doubt this fact would be more clearly recognised if they had been left in refugee camps.”
He added:
“I certainly have sympathy for Palestinians, but we should nevertheless realise that part of what has gone on in the Middle East in the past 25 years has been a massive exchange of populations. If philhellenes were still agitating for the return of the Greek population of Asia Minor, they would universally be regarded as stupid and dangerous.”
I’ll continue this issue of British reactions to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in my next column, but right now I want to draw attention to what the British Labour MP Richard Crossman, a staunch and enduring friend of Israel, had to say regarding the issue of the arms embargo. For in so doing so he made a withering indictment of Foreign Office Arabism which appears as relevant today as it did then. His op-ed in The Times (17 October 1973), under the heading “Arabists hold all the cards at the FO” – which had prompted Trevaskis’s sour little outburst commending the Arabist outlook – commenced:
‘The official British attitude to the Arab-Israeli War is odious – but not more odious than usual. Ever since in the mid-1920s the Foreign Office discovered that in backing Zionism, Lloyd George had acquired not a Jewish goldmine but a political liability, the Foreign Office has been politely anti-Zionist. Every time an Arab-Jewish crisis breaks out, the officials concerned work out a policy which can be shown in legal terms to be strictly fair to the Jewish side but which also provides some undercover material advantage to “our friends the Arabs”.
It was absurd to hope that in this crisis the Foreign Office would suddenly acquire a genuine impartiality between Jew and Arab, and a sense that a commitment to the Jews should be honoured even when it pays to get rid of it. No – the policy which evolved within a matter of hours was one which in legal terms would be strictly fair but in military terms would be of enormous benefit to the Arabs.’
In order to achieve that aim, he continued, the Foreign Office had advised Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home that three things were necessary. First, that Sir Alec “should send a telegram to [Britain’s] representative at the [UN] Security Council making sure that at the very first session he should propose a ceasefire though there was not the slightest chance of anybody paying attention”. Second, that Sir Alec should state publicly, as he duly did, that “as the proponent of a ceasefire, Britain must impose on herself a quite unusually severe form of neutrality”. Third, that “having made this statement, he should coolly assert that this new and severe neutrality required a total embargo on arms to both sides”.
The effect, Crossman went on, “is to deny to the six Arab states we have been supplying with arms a small amount of the superfluity of ultramodern weapons systems they have been acquiring from us, among others. For many months they will not feel it, and if they do the Russians will fill the gap”. In sharp contrast, however,
“The arms embargo we have imposed on Israel is of an entirely different dimension. For many years we have divided with the Americans the responsibility for providing a very large part of the armaments used by the Israeli army. The navy has come to rely on us for certain kinds of vessels – submarines, frigates, torpedo boats. Even more important, we have become a main purveyor to the army of a vast amount of military hardware – a huge list with, right at the top, artillery, armoured cars, and tanks plus spares and ammunition.
Quite deliberately, the Americans left this side of the job to us. As a result, when the Russians began to pour arms into the Arab side and the Americans began to redress the balance, our high-minded statement that in pursuance of our policy of trying to obtain a truce we must at once embargo all kinds of British arms exports to Israel meant that the deadly imbalance as regards this aspect of the war would not be rectified. The spare parts and ammunition for the armoured divisions in the desert are not to be sent: Sir Alec Douglas-Home, with the strict impartiality which has inspired British foreign policy in the Middle East for 50 years, has imposed an arms embargo which leaves the Arabs almost unaffected while it stabs the Jews in the back.”
Not that Sir Alec had acted very differently from a Labour Foreign Secretary in the circumstances, conceded Crossman, although more of an objection would have been made had Michael Stewart, let alone George Brown, held that portfolio. “Whatever politician is in charge of Britain’s Middle East policy, the Foreign Office is unbeatable.”
“We have had real Foreign Secretaries whose presence in that august office made a real difference to British policy in other parts of the world,” Crossman observed.
‘But in this one area, a tight little group composed of the officials at home and the ambassadors abroad, has always managed to impose its will on the politicians. These, of course, are the “Arabists” who monopolize the Middle Eastern department and regard the Middle Eastern embassies as theirs by right. Lesser mortals can be sent to an area where the language is new. An Arabist can hope that once he has been through his special linguistic training and established his special pro-Arab reliability, he can spend a lifetime either sitting at an Arab desk in the Foreign Office or sitting in a British Embassy in an Arab state.’
Crossman recalled that, when he was a minister in Harold Wilson’s government, he had witnessed “the Arabists’ techniques”. Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defence, Crossman explained,
“was going into business in a big way as an arms merchant trying to cut his ministry’s cost by upping its sales. It was the time when the Chieftain tank was being developed. The Centurion was marketed as the best tank in the world and the Chieftain as one better. The Arabs were biting and the Israelis began to show an interest. So a long dialogue took place in the course of which two prototypes were sent out for testing and development by the Israeli army, which had had much more battle experience than ours.
My Israeli friends were proud of the new example of Anglo-Israeli cooperation and certain they would get the contract. I was sure they wouldn’t, and tried to show them that Britain is not the right place to buy military hardware, since in any Jewish-Arab crisis, when the Arab pressure was applied we would let Israel down whatever promises we had made.”
He attempted to persuade the Israelis to buy their artillery from Sweden. He warned them that in reality they stood no chance of obtaining Chieftain tanks, since as soon as news leaked that such a deal with Britain was in the offing, the UK’s Arabist diplomats would unleash their mischief on the government, claiming that British embassies in the Middle East were in danger of being torched by angry demonstrators – and, consequently, the Israelis would be out of the running.
“Of course, I was right,” his op-ed concluded.
“But what I did not foresee was this total arms embargo in the first week of a war. But I should have known. One of the rules of the unique kind of strip poker they play is that a British Arabist is entitled to have an extra ace up his sleeve.”
Daphne Anson is an Australian who under her real name has authored and co-authored several books and many articles on historical topics including Jewish ones. She blogs under an alias in order to separate her professional identity from her blogging one.
Britain's tough sanctions against Syria
From the BBC:
The Foreign Office says the invitation for the Syrian ambassador in London has been withdrawn following reports that up to 400 pro-democracy protesters have been killed in Syria by security forces in recent weeks.Bashir Assad must be quaking in his boots in the face of such strong Western opposition to his murdering hundreds of civilians.
A Foreign Office statement said: "Buckingham Palace shares the view of the Foreign Office that it is not considered appropriate for the Syrian ambassador to attend the wedding."
PA TV says Jews control banks, media.. Will CNN consider it newsworthy?
From Palestinian Media Watch:
The one thing it won't do is report on this pervasive antisemitism in the "moderate" Palestinian Authority media. That topic is kryptonite for the mainstream media.
Another expression of Palestinian Authority Antisemitism appeared on government-controlled PA TV earlier this month. The host of a weekly program on Islam, Imad Hamato, who is also a professor of Quranic Studies at the University of Palestine in Gaza, stated that Jews engage in profiteering and control "the money, the press and the resources."
Hamato also stated that Israel, which he calls "a cancerous tumor," is trying to "Judaize" everything and influence the mind of "the Arab intellectual" so that he will accept Israel as "an entity that has a right to live":
Israel has worked hard to Judaize the land, [but] it did not stop at that. [Israel] worked to realize something else: the Judaization of culture, [so that] the Arab intellectual embraces the idea of acceptance of Israel as a recognized body and as an entity that has a right to live. Israel, the invading country, the cancerous tumor - which we have already called a cancerous tumor in the past - many intellectuals today talk about coexistence and offering our hands in peace, and [say] Israel is part of the region. The noblest Arabs in terms of their Arabness were those who spoke up and said: 'Israel does not exist!' Those who did not say that were ostracized. Now, whoever says that Israel should exist is met with approval... They [the Jews] are usurers. See, the usury money and usurer banks, those who control the money in the world can be counted on one hand - a few individuals - and all of them belong to the Jewish world. They control the media, the money, the press, the resources, the plans.
If CNN feels that it is newsworthy to quote absurd stories from PA media about "settlers" chopping down and seizing 800 olive trees without any comment on the veracity of the source, then perhaps it will quote this Imad Hamoto as a source as well of Jewish world domination.[Official PA TV, May 1, 2015]
The one thing it won't do is report on this pervasive antisemitism in the "moderate" Palestinian Authority media. That topic is kryptonite for the mainstream media.
Tel Aviv protests are a win-win for Israel haters
PreOccupied Territory has been making a series of flowcharts showing how anything Israel does can be spun against it.
The recent demonstrations in Tel Aviv seem to be a similar situation:
The Arab media has been enthusiastically reporting on the protests, happily using them s evidence that Israel is racist. (Al Jazeera, ironically, refers to the Ethiopians by the derogatory name "Falashas" while self-righteously reporting on Israeli racism.)
Funny, the only African people in Gulf countries seem to be servants.
The Jewish Press reports that the violence seems to have been instigated from outsiders who want to paint Israel as racist, and want to help it along when the police don't cooperate.
Of course not. Police have used water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas against haredi Jewish protesters in Israel.
So surely Israeli police are just violent in general, using tear gas at the drop of a hat?
Tell the British, who used tear gas only last week at a protest against gentrification of neighborhoods.
Tell it to Canadians, whose police recently used tear gas and rubber bullets against a student protest.
For some reason those didn't make world headlines. In fact, they didn't even make major headlines in their own countries.
But the desire to paint Israel as a racist society is irresistible to a large number of reporters.
The recent demonstrations in Tel Aviv seem to be a similar situation:
Funny, the only African people in Gulf countries seem to be servants.
The Jewish Press reports that the violence seems to have been instigated from outsiders who want to paint Israel as racist, and want to help it along when the police don't cooperate.
Police said Monday morning that anarchists incited protesters to violence in last night’s march in Tel Aviv against police brutality and racism undermined demonstrators’ objectives.So do Israeli police only use tear gas and stun grenades against blacks and Arabs?
Protesters were armed with rocks and metal objects that they hurled at police officers, 56 of whom were injured lightly. Police arrested 43 demonstrators and hurled stunned grenades in the middle of a crowd blocking a major artery at rush-hour in Tel Aviv.
Both a senior police official and “Elazar,” who made Aliyah to Ethiopia years before the massive airlift in Operation Shlomo, told Voice of Israel radio (Reshet Bet) that the protest turned violent partly because of anarchists.
Of course not. Police have used water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas against haredi Jewish protesters in Israel.
So surely Israeli police are just violent in general, using tear gas at the drop of a hat?
Tell the British, who used tear gas only last week at a protest against gentrification of neighborhoods.
Tell it to Canadians, whose police recently used tear gas and rubber bullets against a student protest.
For some reason those didn't make world headlines. In fact, they didn't even make major headlines in their own countries.
But the desire to paint Israel as a racist society is irresistible to a large number of reporters.
10,000 Muslim clerics: "Arab uprisings might be a Zionist plot"
From Arab News:
Anything going on in the world that you, personally, are uncomfortable with, is a Zionist plot.
Don't thank me, I'm glad to help.
KOTTAKKAL, Kerala: The ulema conference organized by the Samastha Kerala Jam’iyathul Ulema, a body of Islamic scholars, has warned against the possibility of the uprisings in Muslim nations into the hands of Zionists.It's difficult to find the pattern of Zionist plots, but I think I cracked the code:
“The Zionists and colonialists are doing everything at creating cracks in the unity of Ummah on the ethnic and nationalist lines. The Muslims should be cautious about this trap,” a resolution adopted by the three-day conference attended by more than 10,000 scholars said.
Anything going on in the world that you, personally, are uncomfortable with, is a Zionist plot.
Don't thank me, I'm glad to help.
Max Blumenthal trots out a lie (NewsRealBlog)
My latest post at NewsRealBlog, written by request:
Max Blumenthal uses the assassination of Osama Bin Laden as an excuse to push the ridiculous claim, advanced by Israel-haters for years, that Binyamin Netanyahu was overjoyed at the events of 9/11.Read the whole thing.
Blumenthal says that Netanyahu called the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon “very good.” But what he glosses over is the question he was answering....
The question was specifically about US-Israeli relations, not about what he thought of the terror attacks. Netanyahu answered accurately and then immediately realized that this obvious truth could be twisted by people with an agenda–like Blumenthal–so he clarified what he meant.
Blumenthal, like all Israel-bashers who suffer from terminal intellectual dishonesty, ignored the context of the comment.
Yet the truth is undeniable–9/11 did make Americans wake up and realize what Israel has gone through for decades. It caused previously complacent Americans to realize that there was a global threat from Islamist terror groups. It woke up the government to be less sanguine about what national security means in an era of jihadists deliberately targeting civilians.
Not only that, but the US has used Israel as the model on how to fight terror. We went on the offensive, forcing the enemy to fight trained soldiers rather than have the luxury of planning attacks on innocent civilians on our shores. We used unmanned armed drones, sophisticated electronics intelligence, and beefed up our more traditional human intelligence, just like Israel. We adopted Israel’s methods on how to fight in urban areas while minimizing casualties of civilians. We used Israeli technology and methodology to help treat battlefield injuries and to help defeat threats from IEDs and missiles.
Even at home, city police forces and hospitals took lessons from Israeli experts on how to deal with local threats.
Bibi was correct in that 9/11 helped US-Israeli relations, on many levels.
To say that he therefore is happy about 9/11 is, however, pure slander. It would be similar to saying that CNN was considers 9/11 “very good” because its ratings soared as the only 24-hour news channel at the time, or that the head of the Department of Homeland Security is thrilled that 3,000 Americans died because their deaths gave him a high-profile job and budget. In short, Blumenthal’s charge that Netanyahu–and, by implication, all Zionists–are happy when Americans die is nothing short of obscene. It is a sick, transparent attempt on his part to drive a wedge between America and Israel.
To him and his friends on the far Left, the strong relationship between the US and Israel is the real evil that must be fought, not radical Islamists who want to see Blumenthal dead just as much as they want to kill all Jews and Americans.
Will Abu Amr replace Fayyad as PA prime minister?
Al Manar is reporting that Dr. Ziad Abu Amr, who lives in Gaza, is a frontrunner to replace Salam Fayyad in the new "unified" PA government.
Abu Amr is a former foreign minister for the PA. He is said to have good relations with both Hamas and Fatah as well as other terror groups. In fact, he wrote a book called "Islamic fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad" which looks, at first glance, to be fairly well done.
He received his masters' degree and doctorate from Georgetown.
Abu Amr is a former foreign minister for the PA. He is said to have good relations with both Hamas and Fatah as well as other terror groups. In fact, he wrote a book called "Islamic fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad" which looks, at first glance, to be fairly well done.
He received his masters' degree and doctorate from Georgetown.
US and EU don't look at maps, and that hurts the chances for real peace
Last week:Washington on Thursday called Israel’s approval of building 900 apartment units in a Jewish neighborhood of East Jerusalem “damaging and inconsistent” with its commitment to a two-state solution.Of course, the EU piled on:
The condemnation of the move by the State Department came less than a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the formation of a new governing coalition.
“This is a disappointing development, and we’re concerned about it just as a new Israeli government has been announced,” US State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said at a press briefing. “Israel’s leaders have asserted that they remain committed to a two-state solution, and we need to see that commitment in the actions of… the Israeli government.”
Rathke said that the US government would “continue to make our position clear that we view this as illegitimate.”
Israel's determination to continue its settlement policy despite the urging of the international community, not only threatens the viability of the two state solution but also seriously calls into question its commitment to a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians.A simple look at where the construction is planned shows that in no way, shape or form does building at Ramat Shlomo hurt the two state solution.
Here is Peace Now's map of the planned construction at Ramat Shlomo, in red, when 1500 units were planned:
Here is the same area from satellite:
The new construction is on the southern end of Ramat Shlomo, towards the Jewish neighborhoods of Sanhedria, Har Hotzvim and Ramat Eshkol - that are mostly within the Green Line.
In other words, there is no possible way that the land that is being built on would ever, in any universe, not remain in Israeli territory. Not under any peace plan ever promoted by any serious group. Never.
Even the far left Geneva Initiative, one of whose members was PA minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, included major Jewish neighborhoods much further to the north than Ramat Shlomo as remaining in Israel:
When the US and EU say that Israel cannot build anything at all for Jews in Jerusalem who live in areas that everyone agrees would be part of Israel forever, they are saying that Jerusalem must remain static and unchanging They are also saying that the rules for Israeli Jews are different than for Israeli Arabs, who have moved into Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem and whose additional construction approval do not get condemned by the EU or US.
This is not helpful to "peace." It just signals to Israel that it is alone, and that its opponents have bought the extreme anti-Israel positions of the Palestinians, and that their rules are particularly against Jews.
Which in turn makes Israel less likely to negotiate over other areas, since the third parties that want to be part of the solution have already signaled their extreme bias against any Jews - and only Jews - living in any part of Jerusalem that happen to live across what was meant to be a temporary armistice line.
Who wants to negotiate their own destruction? Who wants to negotiate under the friendly auspices of people who have loudly announced their bias against you?
Hamas has murdered another child
From JPost:
Daniel Raphael Viflic, the 16-year-old boy who was injured in the anti-tank missile attack on a school bus in the Negev by Hamas terrorists 10 days ago, died on Sunday after a steady decline to critical condition.When the bus sustained a direct hit by the missile, Viflic suffered severe head trauma and was artificially respirated at the scene. He was rushed to Soroka University Medical Center Hospital in Beersheba, where his family has been holding vigil for the past ten days. On April 12, the severity of his condition was upgraded to extremely critical and doctors expressed concern that he had suffered irreparable brain damage.
The missile hit the bus moments after most of the children got off, while it was traveling near Kibbutz Sa'ad, about 2.5 km. from the Gaza Strip. Just two people were on the bus when it was hit – the driver, who was lightly injured, and the boy, who was en route to visit his grandmother.
May his parents be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
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