Traveling, reading open thread

I'm going on a business trip to Florida, so blogging may be a little sporadic this week.

I will say that I am reading Tuvia Tenenbom's Catch the Jew, and so far it is fantastic. While no one of any religion or origin in Israel is spared from his acerbic wit, he does an amazing job hilariously documenting how EU governments and NGOs are paying millions of euros to Palestinian Arab projects whose only purpose is to instill hate of Jews. (Tenenbom is the one who documented that a B'tselem researcher denied the Holocaust to him.)

Tenenbom, who grew up haredi and since rejected religion, is skilled at gaining the trust of his subjects, by pretending to be a German or Arab or Austrian. Once Arabs and European do-gooders and self-hating Jews in "Palestine" trust him, they reveal the ugliness within them, all with smiles.

Britain, 1973: That Was the Support That Was (Daphne Anson)

---

In previous columns I’ve touched upon hostility shown at certain times by British administrators towards Zionism and Israel. In this, a continuation of last week’s column concerning the Conservative Heath government’s arms embargo during the Yom Kippur War, I want in fairness to offer a small taste of the pro-Israel sentiment that was the other side of the coin.

I was in London at the time, and attended the Zionist Federation’s huge pro-Israel rally in Trafalgar Square on a crisp autumnal Sunday afternoon, 14 October, at which speakers denounced the Heath government, the Foreign Office, the Arab aggressors, and the United Nations. The throng – which included well-known stars of stage and screen, including such non-Jews as Donald Pleasance – was estimated by The Times (15 October 1973) as 10,000 strong, but the Jewish Chronicle (19 October 1973) put the figure at 20,000. Speakers included the Israeli ambassador, Michael Comay, the Federation’s president (life peer Lord, formerly Sir Barnett, Janner), the president of the Board of Deputies (Sir Samuel Fisher), a former president of the Liberal Party (life peer Lady [Nancy] Seear), Conservative MP Hugh Fraser, and Labour MP Peter Shore. Chief Rabbi Lord Jakobovits recited a prayer. Lending support by their presence were the 89-year-old Jewish Labour life peer Lord (Manny) Shinwell, and the 89-year-old non-Jewish Conservative peer Lord Barnby. I can see the latter clearly in my mind’s eye: standing proud and erect in a tan-coloured overcoat, this right-wing aristocrat who spoke up for Israel in the House of Lords that week; to my disgust, the Jewish Chronicle failed to record his presence, even after I wrote to remind them of it.

To cheers, Hugh Fraser expressed his abhorrence of the fact that the government “should at this time be sending arms for a parade of independence in Dubai and denying to Israel, fighting for its life, spare parts for Centurion tanks”. Peter Shore condemned the deafening silence from the nations of the world regarding the Arabs’ premeditated attack on Israel on Judaism’s holiest day, and observed that it was extraordinary that at a time when the Soviet Union was pouring armaments into Arab countries British Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home had nothing better to offer than a unilateral arms embargo which would tilt the balance against Israel.

The rally passed a resolution calling on the Heath government and the UN to condemn Egypt and Syria and to assist in the promotion of a just and peaceful settlement, negotiated between Israel and the Arabs. As soon as the rally was over, the resolution, addressed to Edward Heath, was taken to 10 Downing Street.

When the arms embargo issue was voted upon in the House of Commons (the government carried the day 251: 175 with over 100 MPs abstaining or absenting themselves from the Chamber), seventeen Conservative MPs defied a two-line whip to vote against their own side. These rebels included all but two of the party’s nine Jewish MPs (one of the two was Robert Adley – real name Adler – for whom Jewishness was clearly a burden and who ended up as an Anglican): the remainder were Andrew Bowden, Hugh Fraser, Philip Goodhart (son of a Jewish father, Oxford jurist Professor A. L Goodhart), John Gorst, Tom Iremonger, Sir Stephen McAdden, John Maginnis, Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell, Ernie Money (yes, that really was his name; he sat for Ipswich), and Dudley Stewart-Smith. In addition, the Reverend Ian Paisley, the Ulster Unionist MP, flew from Belfast to London especially to vote against the embargo.

The Jewish Chronicle (16 November 1973) revealed that during the Yom Kippur War thousands of British non-Jews had offered to help Israel. The Israeli Embassy experienced jammed switchboards in the first week of the war owing to the numbers of Gentiles phoning to offer assistance or merely good wishes. The Embassy received 1,500 supportive letters during the conflict and several hundreds more in its immediate aftermath. “Unlike previous poignant occasions – such as the Munich massacre of Olympic athletes last year – there was not a single abusive and derogatory letter or one with even a hint of antisemitism.” Those offering material help included several British servicemen: for example, a former Royal Navy officer offered his motor launch to the Israeli navy, and when the offer was politely refused begged to be allowed to take it to Israel himself; two soldiers from County Durham who wrote “It would give us pleasure and honour to serve in your country against your oppressors”; a merchant seaman from Leicester who wrote of his preparedness “to adapt myself to any circumstances to fight for the Jewish cause” and to pay his own fare to Israel to do so. Six individuals offered their own private planes, complete with pilots, for Israeli reconnaissance flights. Then there were people such as the young Scotsman who turned up at the Embassy with rucksack packed, ready to fight for Israel; there were the Londoners who answered the call to give blood at the Marble Arch Synagogue for Israel’s war wounded; there were those who sent unsolicited gifts of money, even jewellery, to help Israel’s war effort.

There was the army major who, in a letter to The Times (30 October 1973) recalled that serving under General Sir Horatius Murray in Palestine during 1948 was “the period of my army service of which I am least proud”. Murray, in a letter to the same newspaper (26 October 1973) had written that back then he was “forced to shell Tel Aviv with 25-pounders and to attack with tanks” and that “this action proved successful”. “So it should!” observed the major sarcastically. “We found that to a large extent Tel Aviv was defended by women, children, and old men, and the sight of their sacrificed bodies sickened the most hardened British troops. The Jews have always paid the full price in blood for their tiny promised portion of the earth’s surface.”

A widespread perception abounded that churchmen had not been as outspoken as they ought regarding the Arabs’ attack and its timing. I haven’t looked into this issue enough to make an informed comment, but certainly that was the view of the rabbi of Manchester’s Reform Synagogue. Certainly, too, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, in a letter to one Zionist body wrote that his church, “which has a deep affection for the Jewish people, shares in the revulsion that hostilities should begin against Israel on the Day of Atonement, when the Jewish people were at prayer.” (It is, by the way, interesting to note that in a column entitled “Friends like these” [Jewish Chronicle, 15 October 1973], the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, now almost 85, one of the most outrageous Israel-baiters in the House of Commons, decried the attitude of most of the British media, which, it seemed to him, appeared to rejoice in the chastening effect the war had so far wrought on Israel.)

One of the well-known personalities at the pro-Israel London rally mentioned above was the author Lynne Reid Banks, perhaps best known for her novel The L-Shaped Room. She read out score upon core of messages of solidarity from notable people unable to attend in person. I remember reading a stirring newspaper article during that war in which Ms Banks wrote (I believe I quote her correctly from a distance of 42 years) that the Jews of Israel – “their tiny sliver of a country” – deserved support from non-Jews “for all that we let them suffer in Europe”. It was a beautiful article and most welcome. More recently, however, Ms Reid Banks, although observing on her website that she is not a Jew, has, like her Jewish husband, Israeli ex-pat sculptor Chaim Stephenson, signed statements critical of Israel under the auspices of “Independent Jewish Voices”. IJA is an organisation which would appear to include a number of persons who are Jewish only by some accidental quirk of ancestry or other tenuous association. I wonder whether, were he alive now, Robert Adley would sign that body’s statements criticising Israel. There are certainly Jews who do so for whom such activity under those auspices is their only association with matters Jewish.

It seems to me that at the root of much of the pro-Israel sentiment that was being voiced at the time might have been rooted, to a greater or lesser extent, consciously or subconsciously, in an identification of modern Israel’s struggles against the Arabs with ancient Israel’s struggles against Pharoah, a remembrance of school scripture lessons. There were, of course, other factors at work: support for Israel in remorse for Jewish suffering down the centuries culminating in the Holocaust, and admiration for the Jews and what they had achieved not only in exile but in Israel too; the perception of Israel as an ally of the West, which contrasted with older perceptions that an independent Jewish State would be a tool of the Soviet Union. I’d like to discuss these matters more fully in later columns, but for now I’ll conclude on this note: traditionally taught “religious knowledge” is no longer on the British school curriculum, and comparatively few children imbibe the scriptures at home or at Sunday school. Therefore fewer and fewer have the opportunity to identify the trials and tribulations of modern-day Israel with the trials of ancient Israel or to perceive an organic historical link between the old Israel and its miraculous modern successor. It’s a problem, especially at a time of encroachments by so-called “Chrislam,” another topic that must await a later column.

---

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.

UNRWA spokesman pathetically trolls for compliments (update)

I missed this bizarre tweet from UNRWA PR flack Chris Gunness:

He is trying to pretend he has a sense of humor about his crying on air last year and by making that bad Photoshop* from an old TV show, but his desire to have people tell him that they like him is real. 

And pathetic.

But if Gunness really wants to insert himself in a TV show, here's one that might work:

UPDATE: Gunness didn't make the first poster above; it was done at Israellycool.

Australian party's BDS costs its political leadership

Last week I mentioned that the Sydney, Australia suburb Marrickville intended to boycott Israel - at the cost of nearly $4 million.

It looks like this foray of a left wing party into world politics has cost it dearly:

NOW we know that the meddling ideological extremism of the Greens cost them the inner-city seat of Marrickville in the NSW election last month.

What should have been a shoo-in in one of the most barmy left electorates in the country resulted in more than one-in-three voters rejecting the Greens because of Marrickville Council's Israel boycott, according to a poll by a Jewish group.

This is a boycott that, by the Green-controlled council's own figures, will cost it as much as $4 million to stop using Israeli-linked products such as Hewlett-Packard computers (apparently used at Israeli checkpoints) and Motorola telephones.

The voters were first to show some backbone, after abiding years of Green dabbling in Middle East politics. But last week Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd slammed the boycott as "nuts" and NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell threatened to sack the council if it doesn't reverse its stance.

Sensing the end of his dream run, even the Greens' supreme leader, Bob Brown, rejected the boycott and distanced himself from his failed state candidate, Marrickville mayor Fiona Byrne, although he can't help offloading blame onto what he calls the "hate media" for costing his party the seat.

But he should look a little closer to home for the culprit.

Jake, a 55-year-old Jewish health professional with friends in Marrickville, was so incensed by the council's Israel boycott that he took three weeks off work to wage a guerrilla campaign against the Greens, plastering the suburb with posters late at night, accusing them of homophobia for boycotting gay-friendly Israel.

"I felt so angry," says Jake, who wants to remain anonymous. "I couldn't sleep at night, so I organised the posters, hired some utes and ladders" and enlisted the help of his son and his friends. Greens supporters harassed them, ripped down the posters, called police, and tried to intimidate Jake's young helpers, posting footage of them on YouTube.

On election day, Jake and his son organised 10 friends wearing T-shirts with "Boycott the Greens" logos to visit polling booths, prompting "Zionist pigs" abuse from greenies.

The Greens lost to Labor by fewer than 700 votes, in a seat they were favourites to snare.

The backlash was quite a shock to the Greens, whose extremist ideological baggage is at last costing them votes.
...
The Middle East conflict is not a game. Yet it has somehow become a vehicle for moral preening half a world way and a badge of belonging for lazy leftists whose talents are best suited to fixing potholes, which, by the way, abound in Marrickville.

Another BDS epic FAIL.

(h/t Zvi)

Officials downplay anti-semitic attack in Rochester

From WHEC, Rochester NY:

Brighton police are calling it a young person's prank in poor taste.

Officers say two young men soaked toilet paper in gasoline and lit it on fire in the middle of the street--in the shape of a swastika.

It happened just after 11 o’clock Saturday night in front of 30 Edgemere Drive. That's in between Southern Parkway and Eastland Avenue.

Police are not calling this a hate crime, but say two 17-year-old boys were apprehended last night and charged with aggravated harassment and arson. Their names are not being released at this time, as police believe they will be charged as youthful offenders. We do know that one young man is from Rochester, the other from Rush.

Investigators do not think the crime was directly targeting any person in the area.

Brighton residents we spoke to today commented on the timing of the crime occurring on the day of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Brighton Police say that based on their investigation, they have no information that makes them believe the crime was committed because of today's commemoration.

Callie (h/t) tells me that this was in a mostly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood and across from a synagogue.

But I'm sure that this was just a coincidence that the "prank" occurred in a religious Jewish neighborhood.

Real Breaking the Silence 2: Another IDF soldier speaks

(Part 1 here)

Shachar Eilenberg, an IDF soldier who fought in Gaza, wrote down some of his experiences on Facebook in response to the "Breaking the Silence" release of anonymous "testimonies."

Operation Protective Edge - Khirbat Ikhza'a
In the early morning hours we identify two kids walking near a house we were staying in. Four combatants quickly accompany Company Commander Benaya Sarel as they go out to "pick" them, and bring them to us so we can interrogate and ask them what are they doing in an area that has been clear of civilians for the last week and a half, an area where fighting is taking place. After a quick interrogation by the Prisoner Interrogator and Benaya Sarel it becomes clear the kids came here looking for food and have no ties to Hamas. Benaya decides to give them some of our food and release them to their homes.

Operation Protective Edge - Khirbat Ikhza'a, the same house as the incident mentioned above.
We're in it for quite a long time and discover that due to a miscalculation of the amount of food we took, our team of 13 combatants is now left with just one Tuna [can]. In the kitchen of the house there's pasta that can feed the whole team. We explain this to the Company Commander and ask for permission to make the pasta. The reply we got was: "You made a mistake, you didn't take enough food, be strong and survive with what you've got. Eating from the the family's food is looting and we're not an army of looters".
And no, we didn't destroy the house after we left it.

Operation Protective Edge - the outskirts of Rafah.
1.8.14, 08:00, the humanitarian cease fire comes into effect.

Minutes after the the cease fire a biker emerges, we try to stop him, but because of the cease fire we can't - he manages to escape. Afterwards we realize the said biker is a Hamas operative sent to check our force's location and pass intelligence to Hamas.

A short while afterwards Benaya Sarel spots an unarmed "civilian" on the second floor of a nearby building. Again, just like in the first incident, Benaya decides to go "pick" the civilian and find out what's he doing in a combat zone, where for some two weeks and a half there are no civilians in sight.

The Command Squad, comprising of six combatants, goes out to bring the civilian to us for interrogation. When they reach the said civilian a strong explosion is heard and heavy fire is opened up on them. All this of course during the "humanitarian cease fire". From this incident Major Benaya Sarel, Lieutenant Hadar Goldin and First Sergeant Liel Gidoni did not return. Again, I emphasize, this was during a cease fire.

Who ever says our army is immoral and criminal is blind, and if the soldiers of such an army are criminals I'm a proud criminal.

(h/t K., Yoel)

Wikileaks and Goldstone (Dershowitz)

Nice Alan Dershowitz piece in Hudson-NY:

The Goldstone commission adamantly refused to accept testimony that would have shown that the Israeli army took greater care to reduce civilian deaths than any other armed forces fighting comparable wars. For example, they refused to hear the proffered testimony Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and a recognized expert on asymmetric warfare, who would have testified that:

"[F]rom my knowledge of the IDF and from the extent to which I have been following the current operation, I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.

The recently published book about Wiki Leaks strongly confirms Colonel Kemp's assessment.
The Guardian summarized one Wiki Leaks disclosure about Afghanistan as follows:

"We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported…."

And another:

"The logs disclosed a detailed incident-by-incident record of at least 66,081 violent deaths of civilians in Iraq since the invasion. This figure, dismaying in itself, was nevertheless only a statistical starting point. It is far too low. The database begins a year late in 2004, omitting the high casualties of the direct 2003 invasion period itself, and ends on 31 December 2009. Furthermore, the US figures are plainly unreliable in respect of the most sensitive issue—civilian deaths directly caused by their own military activities.
For example, the town of Falluja was the site of two major urban battles in 2004, which reduced the place to near-rubble. Yet no civilian deaths whatever are recorded by the army loggers, apparently on the grounds that they had previously ordered all the inhabitants to leave. Monitors from the unofficial Iraq Body Count group, on the other hand, managed to identify more than 1,200 civilians who died during the Falluja fighting."

...No "Goldstone Commissions" have ever been appointed to investigate the far greater number and proportion of civilian deaths caused by British, German and U.S. military actions—and the frequent lack of credible investigators.

Whenever efforts are made to put Israel's actions in a comparative context with other democracies, demonizers of Israel, who always impose a double standard on the Jewish state, respond by arguing "we're talking about Israel now; don't change the subject by talking about other democracies." That reminds me of a famous story about Harvard's notoriously anti-Semitic president, A. Lawrence Lowell, near the beginning of the 20th Century. In an effort to defend his decision to impose an anti-Jewish quota, he said, "Jews cheat." A distinguished Harvard alumnus, Judge Learned Hand, wrote President Lowell a letter saying that "Protestants also cheat," to which Lowell responded, "you're changing the subject; we're talking about Jews now."

You can't just talk about Jews, or about the Jewish state when making accusations of war crimes or violation of international law. Comparison is everything, especially since international humanitarian law is expressly based on how democratic nations customarily behave in comparable situations.

According to the materials disclosed by Wikileaks, Israel shines in comparison to other democracies. It has a significantly better ratio of combatant to civilian deaths; it takes greater steps to avoid such casualties, and it does a better job investigating negligent and criminal behavior on the part of its soldiers. Moreover, it is seeking to protect its own civilians directly from ongoing cross-border rocket attacks and other terrorist acts, whereas the other democracies are fighting wars of choice many miles from its civilian areas.

This is not to suggest the need for "Goldstone Reports" against Great Britain and Germany and the United States. It is to demand that a single standard be applied to all democracies.

(h/t Zach N. via FB)

Here's an example of a "Breaking the Silence" testimony

Today, the leftist group Breaking the Silence released a report on how awful the IDF was during the Gaza war.

As usual, the stories have no context and no details, so it is difficult to know what exactly happened.

But I went to the BTS site to see testimonies from Gaza last year. Here was the first one I saw:

There were a few times where it was just too much and I had to say something. Because in two months of fighting, people make mistakes, mistakes happen. It’s our good fortune, and I mean both as a nation and as the IDF, that there are some people who know how to stand up and say, “Hang on, something bad is happening here.” I remember one incident in which there was permissiveness of sort on the part of the upper levels with regard to wanting to open fire, and it was fortunate that somebody stepped up and said something.

What was the story?
Some militant was being monitored, he had been incriminated, and he was on his way to a meeting with other militants, and on his way there he was joined by another person who started walked alongside him, and the moment their paths linked up – despite the fact that it was totally against regulations – the second guy got incriminated too, and nobody knew from where he had popped up. So you couldn’t incriminate him ‘dry.’ And in that case, there were people there who said, “Hang on, this is no good.” And in the end the strike wasn’t carried out, it wasn’t executed. What I’m trying to say is, that sometimes even the commanders up top make mistakes, and I was present during an incident where it was stopped. I can’t know if there were incidents in which it wasn’t stopped, but in my estimation there were cases in which incriminations were made against the regulations.

So someone walking next to a militant was almost accidentally killed and in the end he wasn't because someone spoke up.

Doesn't this show how horrible the IDF is?

Arguably, this shows that the IDF's rules of engagement are too permissive. Depending on the value of the target, according to the laws of armed conflict, the IDF could have killed both of them without the slightest worry about it being a war crime or even immoral.

Akiva Bigman at Mida last year looked at many more testimonies and was equally underwhelmed. Every story he read either didn't show anything very wrong, minor problems or issues that would happen any time you deal with human beings, or at worst, some problematic episodes that don't describe the context of the danger that the soldiers were in at the moment of decision.

I'm seeing other stories that are just as unimportant. But BTS and its sponsors know that most people wouldn't bother reading the stories themselves that often show the morality of the IDF, and will only read the most lurid ones that are cherry-picked for Haaretz.

If any other Western army had a similar initiative to BTS, chances are they would come out much worse.

Yet "Breaking the Silence," as with so many other NGOs, is funded by the EU with the intent to bash Israel and only Israel.

Because you've gotta start somewhere. And, apparently, when Israel is your target, you've gotta end at the same place you start.

(See also NGO-Monitor)

Another BTS post coming up next.

Gabriel Latner/UNWatch takes down the UNHRC

Remember Gabriel Latner, the Cambridge student who stunned the world with his defense of Israel at a debate? My transcript of the speech went viral with over 9000 hits.

He is now working at UN Watch, and here you can see him take on the UN Human Rights Council's hypocrisy.

The topic is a debate on racism and discrimination. When Latner mentions human rights abuses in Cuba and China, he is interrupted by those countries' representatives and the Council president warns him not to continue to bring up cases of council members!

Video: How Arabs Repress the Press (HonestReporting Canada)

An important video:


One of the best parts of Michael Totten's book was where he described exactly how Hezbollah tries to intimidate and threaten reporters - and how reporters are reluctant to report this story.

There are two reasons for this, Totten says. One is that the intimidation often works. The other, simpler reason is that editors will not allow journalists to be part of the story. (p. 157)

Even though readers need to know the context of how a journalist obtained his or her information, so we can evaluate how accurate it is likely to be, it is the rare journalist like Totten who actually explains the situation. So we see a very skewed view of the world in closed societies.