Human Rights and Democracy: What is the connection?

Here is a video of Rabbi Jonathon Sacks comparing "human rights" and "democracy".

In 5:35 minutes he manages to analyze the value and pitfalls of both, human rights and democracy.

"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority... the possession of unlimited power...corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs...The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free, is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities."

But he says it so much better in the video than I can.
Enjoy...
Rabbi Jonathon Sacks comparing "human rights" and "democracy".

Itamar: What Does it Mean

We are all in mourning for the savage murder of a family of two young parents and three children, the youngest three months old, in their beds in Itamar on the West Bank.

Many people all over the world failed to take note of the Nazi racist ideology demonizing  Jews, Gypseys, homosexuals, the disabled from 1933 on.  Islamo-fascists have borrowed the Nazi ideology and translated it against Israel, Jews, America, and Europe.

This video, The True Face of Terror, reveals the nature of this incitement against Jews, Israel and those who do not agree with the Islamo-fascists ideology

I believe this is the face of the enemy.
The True Face of Terror

As history clearly shows, appeasement  will get you nowhere in the face of such an ideology. We must be vigilant and clear about our own values and the front line is to expose this virulent evil ideology which has been  espoused by some Muslim governments since their alliance with Nazi Germany in world War Two,  and the fruits of which we see in the Itamar tragedy.

Yesterday I had a weird call from someone on Facebook who shared with me that the JDO (Jewish Defense Organization formerly the JDL)  in the New York area is getting an audience of two thousand at a synagogue lecture on Long Island, recently, in the face of overtly anti-semitic acts of violence towards Jews in the US.

Anti-semitism is again rearing its ugly head in many guises.

We must do everything in our power to expose and eliminate this pernicious ideology and those who practice it.
As the torah commands us and as the story of Purim entreats us
Zachhor et amalek...Al tishkach. Remember Amalek...Don't Forget."

Let's celebrate Purim, the victory of Jewish survival
and not forget to do what we have to do during the rest of the year.

Clemens Heni:

 Recently I attended a conference sponsored by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East on the subject of the last fifty years of the US/Israel relationship.


I listened to almost all the presentations and assisted with the videotaping.
(The conference will be publishing all of the proceedings.)

But just some personal impressions that I went away with here:

One of the things that arose after WorldWarTwo war was the joining of all Jewish communities, secular and relifious from left to right into AIPAC, thus  enabling Jewish organization to speak with one voice for the Jewish community. This has been a very important asset and this was not the case before and during the Second World War much to our detriment.

J-street threatens to fracture this alliance of various strands of the American Jewish religious and secular  communities by claiming that they have a Jewish following. However, Jews are a tiny fraction of the American public, and polls reveal that eighty per cent of American  support for Israel, which is close to sixty percent comes from non-Jews. Thank g-d for this since Jewsare such a tiny minority in the United States.

 Clemens Heni, a German scholar, gave a talk about the Mearsheimer book,  "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy." This book was promoted by Mearsheimer and has been adopted as text by many Middle Eastern Studies Departments in universities in the United States and elsewhere.

In this paper, Clemens Heni traces the antecedents of this book with direct quotes that are lifted from Nazi texts. And of course the whole idea of their being a "controlling and powerful Jewish lobby" comes straight from the fraudulent publication, the infamous book, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Here is the link to his article.

Fighting BDS Today

 I now see signs of hope that people are getting wise to the Israel/apartheid BDS GANG.


Chck out this video a Canadian public channel doing what the BDS movement never does.
Allowing an alternate voice to respond to their allegations.

Debating Israel Apartheid week on Power and Politics with Evan solomon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NRPshIbUek&NR=1


And people in parliament standing up to be counted.

 Members Statement Concerning Israel Apartheid Week - March 3, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8WzywcKWo&feature=related

MPP Shurman unites Ontario Legislature on Israeli Apartheid Week issue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td8h0O6meeg&NR=1




also I just received this e-mail:

Dissidents Gather for Geneva Rights Summit
UN Watch is one of 20 human rights groups sponsoring this special event tomorrow:
Internet link: http://www.genevasummit.org/media/43

500 Dissidents, Victims, Activists
from 40 Countries will appeal for action

Tomorrow I will attend and videotape a Yiddish Professor living in Vilna who willspeak on Holocaust denial in Poland. I plan to tape and post this talk. will keep you posted.

Abigail Hirsch, MSW

The arc of Nazism, Jihad, and the Global Left

 Yehuda Bauer and Caroline Glick

 

Recently I received a series of documentaries from the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The Museum of Tolerance was inspired by the work of Simon Wiesenthal, himself a survivor of Nazi death camps whose life work became bringing the Nazi murderers to justice.

I watched with my mother, herself a Hungarian survivor of the Budapest Arrow Cross/Nazi onslaught in Hungary.

Also I happened to catch a Youtube video of Yehuda Bauer speaking about  how and why the Second World War was launched. He frames the question this way. Who wanted this war and why? The answers are astounding and yet ring true and answer many questions.

Prof. Yehuda Bauer - Why Did World War II Break Out?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBXh5n9h3Bw

embed; 

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LBXh5n9h3Bw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar.

He points out how anti-semitism, genocide, as conceptualized by the Nazi ideology was the real driver for the Second World War.

It was totally non-pragmatic, totally destructive to the Germans, the Poles, the English, the French and many other groups including Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals  and all Nazi opponents.

In this article below published today Caroline Glick traces the infiltration of this Nazi ideology into the Middle East and Communist Russia since WorldWar 11 and till today and an ideology that has now been taken up by the leftist forces in Western Europe and Liberal US.

We are coming up to the the Jewish holiday of Purim in which we read Parshat Zachor. and are doubly enjoined both "to remember" Amalek and also "not to forget" to wipe Amalek off the face off the earth after Israel has acquired safety in the land of Canaan.

Below is a revealing article by Caroline Glick, the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0311/glick030111.php3

She traces the ideology of Nazism through Russian and Arab anti-Israel ideology and why that should concern all of us.

I have copied the article here in its entirety,

 I hope you read it.

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It was a stunning moment of moral clarity. As the South Vietnamese refugees clambered onto rickety boats in the South China Sea to escape the victorious Communists, the American Left that orchestrated the US defeat through a sustained campaign of propaganda and fake calls for peace stood silent.

As Pol Pot, the "progressive" dictator tortured and murdered a third of his people in Cambodia, the leftists "peace" activists in the US and Europe who never saw a US military operation that was justified, turned a blind eye.

The silence of the likes of Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky and their fellow travelers came to mind last week when the Western media and intellectual elites averted their gaze as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the long exiled spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood spoke before a crowd of millions at Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Qaradawi, who had been living in exile in Qatar during Hosni Mubarak's reign, became an international jihadist superstar thanks to Qatar's unelected potentate Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani who gave him his jihad indoctrination show on Al Jazeera. From his internationally televised soapbox, Qaradawi regularly preaches international jihad and genocide of Jewry to millions of fans worldwide.

Two important things happened during Qaradawi's appearance in Cairo. First, his handlers refused to allow Google's Egyptian Internet revolutionary Wael Ghonim to join the cleric on the dais. For anyone willing to notice, Qaradawi's message in spurning Ghonim was indisputable. As far as the jihadists are concerned, Ghonim and his fellow Internet activists are the present day equivalent of Lenin's useful idiots.

They did their job of convincing credulous Western liberals that the overthrow of Mubarak was all about sweetness and light.

And now they are no longer needed.

The second message was Qaradawi's call to destroy Israel. With millions of adoring fans crying out "Amen," and "Allahu Akhbar," Qaradawi called for a Muslim conquest of Jerusalem — that is, for the destruction of Israel. As a first step, he demanded that the Egyptian military open the Egyptian border with Gaza.

In the dismal tradition of its Vietnam-era teachers, today's international Left had nothing to say about Qaradawi's genocidal speech. In the New York Times' write-up of Qaradawi's triumphant return to Egypt for instance, the murder-inciting cleric was referred to as a champion of democracy and pluralism.

Leftist writers like Peter Beinart have spent the better part of the past month whitewashing and belittling the significance of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The same Muslim Brotherhood that was founded in 1928 and got its first boost from the Nazis who funded their anti-Jewish pogroms in Cairo and Alexandria in 1939 is seen as nothing to worry about. US President Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. This is the same Muslim Brotherhood whose motto is, "Allah is our objective; the prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; Dying in the path of Allah is our goal."

THE SAME Left who champions Qaradawi as a liberal is absolutely adamant that the revolutions now raging throughout the Muslim world are a mere sideshow to the region's chief drama. The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia are nothing. And the anti-regime protests in Iran have no strategic significance whatsoever to the West, which is mortally threatened by the mullocracy.

Who cares if the Arabs are ruled by tyrants, democrats, jihadists, or fascists? The only thing that matters is that "Palestine" is free of Israeli "occupation."

Part !!: The Palestine equation           

How can anyone get excited about the future of the oil-dependent global economy when Jews still reside in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem? The Left's essential indifference to the plight of hundreds of millions of Arabs and its significance for the West was exposed in a news analysis by Brendan O'Neill in The Australian on February 16. O'Neill noted that whereas the demonstrators in Cairo were fairly silent on the issue of the Palestinians, anti-Mubarak demonstrations throughout the West prominently featured anti-Israel slogans and chants of "Free, free Palestine!" O'Neill concluded that the contrasting messages, "reveals something important about the Palestine issue.... [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time."

Actually, it is important to Western leftists and jihadists, which is why the Palestinians only became a salient issue in Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood began taking control over the opposition movement with Qaradawi's sermon on February 18.

IN A groundbreaking study of the propaganda war against Israel entitled "The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel: From Inversion of Truth to Inversion of Reality," published in Jewish Political Studies Review in March 2007, Joel Fishman showed that the Muslim Brotherhood's propaganda war against Israel, like the Left's propaganda war against Israel, relied heavily on Nazi propaganda against Jews. The early partnership between the Brotherhood and the Nazis, brought together by Palestinian Arab leader and Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini imported European anti-Semitism to the Muslim world. Beginning in the early 1950s, Nazi war criminals immigrated to Egypt. There they recreated much of Josef Goebbels' anti-Semitic propaganda operation for Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Fishman also documented how in the aftermath of World War II, and particularly after Israel's victory in the Six Day War, the Soviets adapted Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda to demonize Israel as the new, collective Jew and in turn demonize the collective Jew as the new Nazi Germany.

Two sources fed the Soviet anti-Jewish/anti-Zionist propaganda machine: former Nazi propagandists in Egypt; and former Nazi propagandists employed by the East German Communist regime. According to Fishman, the messages developed by these ex-Nazi propagandists were the basis for the Soviet campaign to delegitimize Israel which began in earnest after 1967. The call to arms was published first in a Pravda editorial in October 1967. There, Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement was reviled as dedicated to "genocide, racism, treachery, aggression, and annexation...all characteristic attributes of fascists."

With both the Soviets and the Arabs spewing the same inverted message, it didn't take long for it to become the rage in Europe. Europe's adoption of the Nazi-inspired propaganda in which reality was inverted and Israel — the victim of Arab imperialist, genocidal aggression — became the imperialist, genocidal aggressor was facilitated by France's embrace of the Arab camp after its withdrawal from Algeria and effective withdrawal from NATO.

By 1975, with the UN General Assembly's adoption of the Soviet-Arab sponsored resolution 3379 defining Zionism as racism, most European governments had fallen in line with the Soviet-Arab propaganda war.

They in turn spent the next generation bringing their message to America.

TODAY, THAT message has become the sum total of Europe's Middle East policy. From their massive global funding of anti-Israel NGOs, to their financing of anti-Zionist films, plays, art exhibitions and educational curricula throughout the world and their bankrolling of the Palestinian Authority, the Europeans have put their money where their mouths and well-washed brains are.

As Norway's plan to run the Israeli embassy out of Oslo because its security measures annoy its neighbors; to European authorities' refusal to provide police protection for their threatened Jewish communities; to initiatives like the Dutch Parliament's current bid to outlaw Jewish ritual slaughter all make clear, hatred of Israel runs seamlessly into outright governmental aggression against Jews.

So too, as The Guardian's recent onslaught against the PA for its leaders' willingness to make minor compromises with Israel in the framework of a peace treaty demonstrates, mainstream forces in Britain and throughout Europe now side openly with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in their annihilationist war against the Jewish state.

It is this obsessive campaign against Israel that explains the so-called Middle East Quartet's insistence that the most urgent item on the international agenda is coercing Israel to surrender land and rights to the PA.

Whereas the EU cannot figure out a coherent policy regarding Libya even as Muammar Gaddafi massacres his own citizens and sets fire to his oil fields, Europe's leaders are unified in their firm conviction that the so-called "peace process" must be reinvigorated.

So too, the Obama administration remains incapable of lifting a finger to prevent an Iranian proxy from taking over Bahrain or a consortium of al-Qaida terrorists from taking over Yemen. Obama refuses to take any action to help the Libyan people overthrow Gaddafi. As for Iran, Obama maintains his steadfast refusal to take any action to help the Iranian people overthrow their nuclear-proliferating, terror-supporting regime. But at the same time, the president and his advisors are absolutely committed to coercing Israel to block Jews from building homes in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and ensuring that everyone is clear that Jews have no legitimate right to our capital city and historic heartland.

As for the Left itself, as Ron Radosh reported in Pajamas Media this week, attendees at J Street's annual post-Zionist confab could barely muster polite applause for the mildly Zionist MKs from Kadima that spoke at the conference. But they broke into raucous applause when Arab and Jewish anti-Zionist speakers proclaimed that all progress in the region is tied to Israel ending its so-called "occupation."

AND THIS brings us back to 1975, to the boat people in the South China Sea, the killing fields in Cambodia, and the Left that couldn't care less about them. It could be argued that the Bill Ayres, Howard Zinns and Jean Paul Sartes of the world can be forgiven for their decision to side with the Soviets and their Third World proxies against the US and the Western alliance. After all, they had nothing personal at stake.

The Soviets were not threatening their freedom. And what did they owe to "unprogressive," "reactionary" people from Southeast Asia who agreed with America that Communism was evil and wished to be free? But the situation is different today. By waging its war against Israel through Palestinian proxies, the West threatens itself. The Nazi propaganda recycled by the Soviets which has enslaved the peoples of Europe and much of America's intellectual elite has not only turned them into willing participants in the new war against the Jews. It has turned them into instruments for their own destruction.

By focusing their attention entirely on Israel and its imaginary crimes, the Europeans and their American Left admirers ignore the fact that the Islamic war against Israel is itself a proxy war for global jihad.

That war, informed by the same Nazi propaganda, but refined through the prism of Islamic Jew hatred and totalitarian imperialism, does not see Israel's destruction as its ultimate aim. The jihadists, whom the West so happily ignores and whitewashes, have made it absolutely clear that destroying Israel is but the first skirmish in their great war. Their ultimate aim is the conquest of what remains of Western civilization.

I look forward to hearing your comments.

Abigail Hirsch

3/12/2011   Montreal

Prof. Yehuda Bauer - Why Did World War II Break Out?

Who Wanted the Second World War? The Real Threat of Racism

Recently I received a series of documentaries from the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The Museum of Tolerance was inspired by the work of Simon Wiesenthal, himself a survivor of Nazi death camps whose life work became bringing the Nazi murderers to justice.

I watched with my mother, herself a Hungarian survivor of the Budapest Arrow Cross/Nazi onslaught in Hungary.

Also I happened to catch a Youtube video of Yehuda Bauer speaking about  how and why the Second World War was launched.
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar.
He points out how the ideology of anti-semitism and genocide, as conceptualized by the Nazi ideologues, was the real driver for the Second World War.
And how this ideology was totally non-pragmatic, totally destructive to the Germans, the Poles, the English, the French and many other groups including Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals  and all Nazi opponents.

He frames the question this way. Who wanted this war and why? The answers are astounding and yet ring true and answer many questions.

Prof. Yehuda Bauer - Why Did World War II Break Out?Who Wanted the Second World War?

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LBXh5n9h3Bw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Info re: electronic intifada: Ali Abunimah

Facts about EI Electronic 

Intifada and Ali Abunimah

from  NGOmonitor.org

NGO Monitor is an organization that was started after Durban 1 to monitor NGO's their funding sources and ideological  commitments. You can easily research any NGO or person connected with it 
by typing the name of the person or organization that you are concerned about. 

Wednesday night Peter  and I attended the keynote lecture of the BDS Israel/apartheid week conference at McGill University. We listened and I audio-recorded a good bit of his talk.

In my recent post I give my general impressions of Ali Abunimah and his style and talk.


Here I post the information about Ali Abunimah and his Electronic Intifada which I copied from the NGOmoniotr site. I highlight some important aspects.  You can parse this for yourself. I hope you do.

 

• Website: http://electronicintifada.net
• Electronic Intifada (EI) is a major online media outlet active in promoting the Palestinian agenda with news articles and commentary.
• Founded in 2001 to counter Israel’s “orchestrated media campaign to spin news reports to its own advantage.”
• EI has an extensive BDS section, including academic, consumer, cultural, and church boycotts, commercial divestment, and government sanctions against Israel. Issues reports on developments and “victories” in BDS. Ali Abunimah is co-founder and executive director of EI.
• The funding sources for EI are not fully transparent.
• Between 2006 and 2009, €150,000 was provided by the Dutch government from ICCO, a Dutch inter-church development organization. (ICCO receives 95% [p. 135] of its annual budget from the Dutch government [89. 7%] and the EU [6.1%].) In 2010, ICCO provided another €50,000 in “support from private funds.”
• EI is a project of the Middle East Cultural and Charitable Society (MECCS). MECCS’ total revenue in 2009, including donations, was $383,843 (p.1); $183,760 was given to EI (p.2).
• Abunimah is a leading advocate of the one-state solution. To actualize this, he says “coercion is necessary,” and dismisses Jewish concerns of living under an Arab majority as “irrational, racist fears.”
• Labels PA President Mahmud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as “collaborators”, and PA participation in peace talks as “collaboration.” Collaboration is punishable by death in the PA and Gaza.
• Says Zionism “is one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today,” claiming that it “dehumanizes its victims, denies their history, and has a cult-like worship of ethnoracial purity” (Twitter; October 26, 2010). He also wrote “That is something Zionism shares with anti-Semitism, a disdain for actual Jewish culture and life as it existed.”
• Holocaust references appear frequently in his comments. He calls Gaza a “ghetto for surplus non-Jews,” compares the Israeli press to “Der Sturmer,” and claims “Supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.” He calls Gaza a “concentration camp” and repeated a claim that IDF statements are the words “of a Nazi.”
• In November 2010, EI reported that a Dutch pension fund “divested from almost all the Israeli companies in its portfolio,” calling it an “indicator for the success of the international [BDS] campaign.” A week later this was revealed to be a BDS hoax; investments were withdrawn from funds devoted to emerging markets because Israel had successfully joined the OECD.
• EI submissions use apartheid rhetoric, and accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing, Judaizing Jerusalem, and genocide.
• Laurie King-Irani, co-founder and contributing editor at EI, advocates using universal jurisdiction against Israeli officials in foreign courts. (In an updated version of the article she writes, “One day soon, they'll unplug that bastard Sharon, and flush.”)
• Nigel Parry, co-founder of EI, justifies Palestinian violence against Israeli settlers, and draws a moral equivalency between Israeli counter-terrorism operations and Palestinian attacks against civilians, calling the targeting of Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin “Israel’s version of a bus bombing.”
• Former Al-Haq worker and current managing editor of Electronic Intifada was subpoenaed in front of a Federal Grand Jury by the FBI in December 2010 relating to her activism in the Chicago branch of the Palestine Solidarity Group.

If you read just those parts highlighted in red, you can see that this organization and its writings are akin to Hitler's Mein Kampf and Th Protocols of the Elders of Zion - extreme disinformation in the service of anti-Jew/Israel ideology.

BDS and Nazi ideology, The Academy Today

Last night I managed to catch Prof. Payam  Akhavan, a McGill law professor, and also Ali Abunimah, a Princeton University graduate, and Israel/apartheid activist, both of whom were speaking on the McGill University campus a stones' throw from each other.

Prof. Akhavan, was speaking about the original film that was created by the US, preparatory to the Nuremberg Trials, where the leaders of the Nazi genocide were tried as war criminals. As a law professor, he grappled with the issues of racism, Nazism,and history, i.e. the definition of war crimes, the Nuremberg tribunal, the judgement of history: He grappled with the issues of bombing of civilian cities and populations by both the allies and the Nazis during the war. Are these war crimes as well? And yet the systematic murder of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and members of the opposition of all races in death camps and elsewhere was premeditated and committed by Nazis, and their collaborators, alone. And this specific and planned murderous assault is what the Nuremberg trials were about. The complicity of the world via neglect, regarding the plight of the Jews facing this ideology, both before and during the war was also mentioned.

Prof. Akhavan pointed out the tremendous courage of Iranian students in our time standing up to the fascist state, today in Iran. (A person is hanged every eight hours by the secret police in Iran, according to Canadian member of parliament, Hon. Irvin Kotler who spoke last week. Nevertheless, Prof. Akhavan believes that change will come only through this kind of student civil discourse not through guns and violence. In short he shared his thoughts and ideas with integrity.

I cannot say the same about Ali Abunimah, who should be ashamed of himself.

Ali Abunimah, a Princeton graduate calls himself a journalist. Ali Abunimah, the keynote speaker for Israel/apartheid week is actually an ideologue promoting the idea that "Israel is a racist and apartheid state and therefore should be abolished and returned to the Palestinians". He totally denies the notion that Israel is the Jewish homeland created as a refuge for Jews in their ancestral homeland. As a matter of fact this is the basis of his claim that Israel is a "racist and apartheid state", namely, the fact that Israel accepts all Jews based on their history and proof that they are Jewish, and does not automatically accept Arabs or any other ethnic group. He totally denies the history of the last sixty-three years and also denies any attempts to dialogue or work toward peace on the part of the Israelis.

When I asked him about the over 800,000 Jewish refugees ethnically cleansed from Arab lands within the last sixty years, he had the gall to say that he hoped they would be welcomed back to their Arab countries of origin by the Arab countries that had expelled them. What world does he live in? I hesitate to ask...

Moreover, he totally denies any efforts on the part of Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, and only supports the total destruction of Israel, and the taking back of Israel by the "victimized" Palestinians. He speaks to an audience of the converted, with very little critique of his arguments.

He totally denies any positive intention on the part of Israel and the Palestinians to coexist in peace on the West Bank and Gaza, denying any positive intention of the Oslo accords or the Israel peace treaty with Egypt and Jordan, and even accuses the current Palestinian authority of "collaborating" with Israel" in the peace talks for having peace talks. In his world, Israel is "the "colonial power" who "dominates" the "second class citizens", the Palestinians against whom according to him "apartheid" is being practiced. Again, it is only apartheid if you believe that Israel has no right to exist because Israel "really belongs to the Palestinians." This is only true if you also believe that Canada really belongs to the Native aboriginal population. By the way this is another proposition put forth by the Israel/apartheid movement on an annual basis. They did the same this year.

A Palestinian, in the audience, took Abulimah to task for his claim that the Palestinian authorities are actually "Israeli collaborators". This Palestinian in the audience, was visibly upset by the comment, and reported that his own family members had been killed while in the Palestinian attacks against Israel, the intifadas etc. (the reason the wall was erected). And this person also also dared to say that only non-violent resistance could bring change in the current Palestinian situation, that the Palestinian wars of the last 60 years have not brought any fruits to Palestine, but only made things worse.Of course Ali Abunimah does not agree wit this. (I have this exchange recorded).

I believe and have evidence from visiting in the West Bank that the desire for peace and cooperation with Israel among the Palestinians living in the Israeli territories (those lands occupied since the 1967 attack on Israel) see that only peace and civil discourse with Israel brings fruits.

As other Palestinians have shared with me, both Egypt and Jordan have benefited over the last forty years from peace with Israel. And Israel, also, has taken advantage of the benefits of peace to become the economic and social power house that Israel has become. Palestine too could have become an oasis if the Palestinian leadership had chosen peace with Israel instead of conflict and war.

In terms of Gaza, Abulimah conveniently forgets that there are no more Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Gaza is currently ruled by Hamas, an Iranian proxy, and continues to lob missiles into Israel. I am reminded here of anonymous facebook posts by young Gazans inviting revolution against Hamas, the ruling authority Iranian sponsored government because Gaza has been using fascist tactics in terms of human rights there. (This was posted by an Arab journalist at the beginning of the recent Egyptian uprising and I posted it in one of previous posts.) Here is the link.

Ali Abunimah has a smooth tongue, and a British accent. He is a Princeton graduate and dangerous because in the worst tradition of propaganda he uses big lies and small lies to promote his thesis, and with a smile, never raising his voice, explains away any criticism and lobs any disagreements.

This is the seventh year of the Israel/apartheid boycott/divestment campaign on American and Canadian universities. Its interesting that although these talks take place at universities, no discussion or refutation of the theories takes place, since they have a single speaker or even several, all of whom support the same ideas.

Why is this important?

The veneer of the University is here used to preach an ideology of racism towards Israel and Jews. (1)
Prof. Akhavan quoted a Supreme Court Justice of Canada on free speech, that "the gas chambers of Auschwitz were initiated not by bricks and mortars but by words and intentions" and I might add many of those words originated, and were supported by academics in universities in Nazi Germany and elsewher. Let's not commit the same errors of supporting this fantastic racist theory regarding Israel, here in Canada, at our universities, through apathy and lazy thinking.

Thanks for your time.

(1) The Gaza incident which I quoted in my blog: "Scuttlebut on the Egyptian Crisis."

"But just to end on a more positive note I share an article by Irshad Manji on civil society in Gaza.

Earlier Discussion

Irshad Manji on democracy in the Arab world

Published Thursday, Feb. 03, 2011 11:52PM EST

Arab Awakening:a Light in the Palestinian Darkness:
Just a few lines from the article below:
"...Just before Tunisia and Egypt made headlines, an extraordinary statement issued forth from Gaza. Three women and five men – university students all – released a cyber plea for progress on behalf of young people, who make up 50 per cent of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents.
The Gaza Youth’s Manifesto for Change begins by blasting Hamas, which “has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behavior and aspirations.” Then the dissidents scorn Israel, the United Nations and the United States. Finally, their fury turns to Fatah, the secular Palestinian political party that competes with Hamas for credibility and clout. “Politics is bollocks, it is screwing our lives up,” vents one of the manifesto’s drafters.
So what exactly do he and his fellow activists want? Says their statement: “We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?”
For the moment, it might be. They’ve posted the manifesto anonymously because, in Gaza, “you can be thrown in jail at any time.” And you’d be endangering more than yourself. Authorities “will threaten you with ruining your family reputation and that would be it.”...

Complicated situations in which we all share and which impact all of us..."

Iran's Gender Apartheid - women without rights