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Lebanon according... |
Nevermind foreign... |
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This boycott is not just wrong, it’s anti-Semitic |
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The University and College Union on May 30 passed two boycott resolutions. Resolution 30 endorsed the call for an academic boycott of Israel by a Palestinian boycott group, PACBI. It also committed union funds to promoting it on campuses. But it did not commit the university teachers’ union itself to a boycott. Resolution 31 condemned the US and EU boycott of the Palestinian Authority (that is, the “suspension of aid”). Israel’s universities, which are liberal institutions, are to be shunned; the authority, which is governed by a party committed to the destruction of Israel, is to be embraced. |
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What happens when people are boycotted? The ordinary courtesies of life are no longer extended to them. They are not acknowledged in the street; their goods are not bought, their services are not employed. The boycott is an act of violence, though of a paradoxical kind – one of recoil and expulsion rather than assault. It announces a certain moral distaste; it is always self-congratulatory: “I am too fine a person to have anything to do with those people.” |
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All boycotts are problematic; academic boycotts especially so. They violate two important principles – the principle known as “the universality of science and learning” and freedom of expression. |
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Background: History of PA Shelling Against Israel |
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On Jan 31, 2001, for the first time in the Oslo War, Arabs shot a mortar shell into Netzarim, a Jewish town in central Gaza. The rocket hit and damaged a house, but no one was hurt. Two more mortar shells were fired at Netzarim over the next two weeks. |
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On March 18, Gaza Arabs fired three mortar shells at an IDF base near Kibbutz Nachal Oz in the Negev - the first such attack from Gaza at pre-1967 Israel. A reserve duty soldier on the base was lightly wounded by shrapnel. Minister of Defense Ben-Eliezer stated that Israel "will not accept the current situation and will deploy the necessary forces to protect its citizens." IDF commanders stated that the attack signals the crossing of yet another red line by terrorist forces. |
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On April 3, in only the 5th or 6th mortar attack on Gush Katif, toddler Ariel Yered was critically wounded by shrapnel to his head. Israel retaliated, the terrorists increased their fire, and mortar shells quickly became a commonplace occurrence and lost their shock value - but not their lethal punch. On Nov. 24, reserve soldier Barak Madmon, 26, was killed outside Kfar Darom when a mortar shell hit his IDF outpost. |
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The Islamic Reconquest of Palestine |
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Israel’s deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh stated recently that |
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Iran’s fingerprints were all over the recent escalation in Gaza. . . . “Everything is being organized by Iran.... All of the terrorist groups are supported directly by Iran, which pays for all of the military training and the weapons.”
Qassam rockets were first fired at Israel from Gaza in 2001—a total of 20 that year. According to data compiled by the Israel Police, the totals for subsequent years were:
2002—42
2003—159
2004—258
2005—236
2006—698
2007—as of Monday last week, 156 (dozens more since then)
Israel has reacted variously with limited military actions, periods of passive nonreaction, and in 2005 with a total withdrawal from Gaza that was widely praised as a wise and magnanimous gift to the Palestinians or a shrewd move that would box them in militarily. The huge increase, since that withdrawal, in Qassam fire on pre-1967 Israeli communities is even more dramatic considering that before then a large percentage of the rockets were fired at settlements within Gaza.
On Sunday morning Oshri Oz, a 35-year-old computer technician who worked in Sderot, was killed there when a Qassam landed near his car. The previous Monday it was Shir’el Friedman, a 32-year-old woman who lived in the town and whose car took a direct hit. Noting that she was (then) “Israel’s ninth fatal casualty of a Qassam rocket,” IsraelNationalNews.com detailed the rest.
The number of those wounded, traumatized, and living in daily terror includes, of course, all 20,000 residents of Sderot—a large proportion, possibly half, of whom have recently fled—and thousands of residents of other Gaza-belt communities.
At no time has this six-year assault been regarded by any official body—not even the Israeli government—as an emergency requiring whatever military measures are necessary to stop it. Indeed, Deputy Defense Minister Sneh went on to say that “Israel will need to consider escalating military operations in the Gaza Strip if rockets begin to fall in [towns further from Gaza such as] Netivot, Ashkelon or Kiryat Gat.” He did not explain why the fall of rockets on Sderot and the other places near Gaza was not already a reason for “escalating military operations in the Gaza Strip” beyond their current restricted scope.
Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 with strategic installations, has already been hit many times and was hit again last week. Its mayor has asked the government for “financial benefit packages including funding emergency medical equipment, an alternative generator for the municipality, budgets for increasing personnel, emergency vehicles and budgets for upgrading public bomb shelters.” As a Hamas official put it,
We call on our fighters to launch rockets attacks on the settlement of Ashkelon. . . . We will force the settlers to run away from Ashkelon as they have already done in the settlement of Sderot. We will continue to fight until the Jews leave all of Palestine.
Israel’s resumption of limited aerial strikes against terrorist targets in Gaza was said to be reducing the Qassams--but didn’t appear to be on Monday as ten more were fired. Yet top security officials like Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet directorYuval Diskin are concerned that Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Al Qaeda and other terror groups are by now so entrenched in the Strip that invading it may turn out to be an Iraq-style trap for Israel. Indeed, the groups vowed to turn the Gaza Strip into a “graveyard” for Israelis if IDF invaded. “We will make the Jews drip tears of blood,” said [a terrorist commander]. “We will never find comfort until we shed the blood of the sons of monkeys and pigs.”
But most of all, Israel fears that stronger military action in Gaza will result in Palestinian civilian casualties—and it knows that this, and not the six-year siege of Sderot, is the one thing the world will not tolerate.
It appears, then, that the Islamic reconquest of Palestine is under way and, as of this moment, succeeding. The driving force behind the reconquest is Iran, with Egypt helping by enabling a steady stream of terrorists and weaponry into Gaza, Syria by giving various forms of support, and Saudi Arabia by providing ideological and financial backing.
Israel, for its part, is on the verge of becoming a failed state part of whose territory is no longer under its control, unable to provide security to citizens there who are helplessly under attack and fleeing.
Iran and its friends are undoubtedly enjoying the spectacle. They are, after all, confronting the West—in the form of Israel and the other Western countries that supposedly sympathize with the fact that even its non-“occupying” civilians are under attack. This dhimmified West has internalized the principle that Palestinian life is the one thing that is sacred—that is, the lives of Palestinians in conflict with Israel; Palestinians in other places like Lebanon don’t count.
But rather than see Palestinians in the former category even endangered, the West’s learned reaction is to prefer to see Israel decline into mayhem. |
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Media bombs |
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Funny how small 26 percent sounds when it describes, for example, the number of American voters who support the Senate's mass-amnesty, goody-bag bill for illegal aliens. In this case, the one in four people polled by Rasmussen this week who hope the legislation pass comes off as a minority voice, especially when compared to the whopping 72 percent of voters who favor border enforcement and the reduction of illegal immigration. |
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But 26 percent looms large when it describes the number of American Muslims, ages 18-29, who support suicide bombings "in defense of Islam" -- one of the sensational, if sensationally under-reported, findings of a recent Pew poll. According to Pew, the total Muslim population in America is 2.35 million, 30 percent of whom are between 18 and 29. By my figuring, the suicide-bomb-approving cohort works out to 183,000 people. The poll also tells us that 69 percent of younger American Muslims say suicide bombings are never justified. While representing a majority almost as great as the percentage of American voters who favor border enforcement, 69 percent in this particular case is wholly inadequate; indeed, it is a strikingly poor showing. |
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Why? In the case of the immigration bill, the poll reflects public opinion pertaining to a political process, a no-holds-barred, expletive-laced, free-for-all that, loathsome as it may sometimes seem, remains democratically rooted in a non-violent contest of ideas, politics and flim-flam. In such a context, one-quarter of anything pales next to three-quarters of anything. |
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Hamas' latest conquest: The Walt Disney Co. |
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| Here is a great article from — surprise — the left-leaning Ha'aretz, shedding the much-needed light on Disney's shameful, cowardly refusal to take a single step against Hamas using an icon of kindness, the Mickey Mouse, to transform young children into jew-hating mass murderers. Read it all. |
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For decades, The Walt Disney Company was known for superhuman tenacity in fighting unauthorized use of its trademark characters. |
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It was a policy that bordered on the fanatical. To keep its bottomless inventory of universally familiar mice, ducks, dogs, dwarves, villains, sleeping princesses, singing mermaids, Lost Boys and others from endorsing any product or ideology lacking the explicit and prior consent of the Magic Kingdom, the company would go anywhere and do anything, it seemed, sparing no expense or effort. |
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Until now. Until Hamas. |
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Muslim Rape, Feminist Silence |
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By Jamie Glazov |
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Unveiled women who get raped deserve it. |
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That’s the pedagogy preached by the Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, who recently sparked an international stir by pronouncing that women who do not veil themselves, and allow themselves to be “uncovered meat”, are at fault if they are raped. |
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Being Nice Will Get Us Killed |
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| A surprisingly clear-eyed article from, of all places, CBS News. |
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From the Vatican to the Pentagon, goodwill gestures offered to the Muslim world too often blow up in the West's collective face. The nicer we are to them, the harsher they are to us. |
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The olive branch Pope Benedict XVI extended to Muslims is obscured by the smoke that has billowed since his address at Bavaria's Regensburg University. The pope cited a conversation between "an educated Persian" and the 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus. They discussed, the pope said Sept. 7, "the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both." He then quoted Paleologus who said: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." |
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The pope described this comment's "startling brusqueness" and later recommended a "genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today." He added: "we invite our partners" into such discourse. |
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Norman Spector on the hipocrisy of PM Harper’s critics |
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Pollsters are also telling us that 16 per cent of Canadians want our country to support Israel, but that the overwhelming majority want us to remain neutral. But neutrality in this conflict would only have been possible had the Prime Minister bitten his tongue and kept it firmly bitten until the firing ceases. |
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In any case, that’s not what Mr. Harper’s critics have been demanding. Since Day 1 of the conflict, they’ve wanted him to criticize Israel and adopt a pro-Hezbollah position by calling for an immediate ceasefire. Interestingly, not even the amendment presented to a House of Commons committee last week by Conservative MP Peter Van Loan, proposing that Canada adopt the freshly approved wording of the European Union calling for "an immediate end to hostilities to be followed by a sustainable ceasefire," was acceptable to the opposition parties. |
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Judging from what’s been written and said in recent weeks, it does not seem to matter to these and other critics of the Prime Minister’s "pro-Israel" position that Hezbollah was placed on Canada’s terrorist list while Mr. Harper was in opposition. Or that, like its Iranian sponsors, the organization is not interested in a Palestinian state that lives side by side with Israel but in an Islamic state that takes the place of Israel. Nor is Hezbollah in the business of resisting occupation, since, according to the United Nations, there is no occupation to resist on the Lebanese border. |
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Hezbollah's Nazi roots |
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This is the first Middle East war in which the main threat to Israel comes, not from secular Arab nationalism, but from Islamism. |
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Both Hezbollah and Hamas draw their main inspiration, armaments and funding from Islamist sources, ranging from the Sunni ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Shiite demagogues of Iran. What unites them all is a fanatical dedication to the destruction of Israel. |
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Sounding like a modern-day Hitler, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week repeated his call for the "elimination" of Israel, home to six million Jews. Hezbollah, Iran's proxy army in Lebanon, shares that objective. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has urged the world's Jews to collect in Israel in order to facilitate the task of exterminating them. |
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Hold Damascus Responsible |
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"There will be an international force [in Lebanon], because all the key players want it," an American official asserted recently. He appears to be right, as even the Israeli government has embraced the plan, announcing it "would agree to consider stationing a battle-tested force composed of soldiers from European Union member states." |
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The key players might "want it," but such a force will certainly fail, just as it did once before, in 1982-84. |
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That was when American, French, and Italian troops were deployed in Lebanon to buffer Israel from Lebanon's anarchy and terrorism. The "Multinational Force" collapsed back then when Hezbollah attacked MNF soldiers, embassies, and other installations, prompting the MNF's ignominious flight from Lebanon. The same pattern will no doubt recur. Back then, Americans and others did not regard Hezbollah as their enemy, and this remains the case today, notwithstanding the war on terror; in a recent Gallup poll, 65% of Americans said their government should not take sides in the current Israel-Hezbollah fighting. |
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