David Horowitz's excellent news blog, NewsReal blog posted an article today, Congressional Group Comes to CAIR’s Defense which sheds light into the dishonesty and purpose of Congressional leftists to sell out America through subterfuge.
The short version is that some Republican Congressmen are concerned that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), with its history of supporting an agenda to Islamify America along with its agenda to support terrorists in their war against the west and Israel, (see more here) is advancing its cause in Congress through the auspices of Congressional interns and want an investigation into their activities. Well as the old saying goes, if you ain't done it you have nothing to worry about. In fact, if the parties under investigation are innocent, inviting a review of their activities would bring them additional credibility would it not?
Now for the subterfuge; Congressman Keith Ellison, (D,MN) America's Congressional voice for Islam is all in a huff over the idea along with allies from the Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, and Asian Caucus. In a fashion typical of Islam, which takes the truths of Torah and flips them on their head adding a uniquely Arabian twist to them (such as replacing Avraham and Yitzchak in the akeida narrative going to Har haMoriah, it is Ishmael going with Ibrahim to be bound and for which the Muslim holiday of Eid ul-Adha commemorates. The Torah of course, appeared well over one thousand years before the Koran, so go figure) Ellison uses an argument form which utilizes what is to be interpreted as value statements and positions them in support of his deceptive effort to defend what is indefensible. In contrast to Ellison's position, the logic pointed out above is a balanced approach to determine if the interests of CAIR's alleged and verified illegal activities are being represented in Congress.
Here is an example of Ellison's end run from the story:
If anything, we should be encouraging all Americans to engage in the U.S. political process; to take part in, and to contribute to, the great democratic experiment that is America.
Of course. Who would argue with this? Who would discourage participation in the political process in America? Now, this quote was the end of the statement. It was proceeded by:
The idea that we should investigate Muslim interns as spies is a blow to the very principle of religious freedom that our founding fathers cherished so dearly.”
Hm - I don't get it. Has someone suggested that Muslim interns are not allowed to practice their Islam? Has someone suggested that Muslims cannot be interns? Is anyone insinuating that all Muslims are spies? Would the Founding Fathers have ignored a threat of spying because the accusation of such would anger the accused or the coreligionists of the accused? Is CAIR so firmly and fully ingrained into Muslim America that suspecting CAIR of illegal activity is off-limits?
The other quotes can be found in the original article. Ellison is clearly mis-leading the listener/reader to defend against even a fair investigative review of certain individuals actions. There is no Constitutional right to be a Congressional intern nor is there a right to represent the interests of organizations which are supporting terrorism and advocating policies which are detrimental to the interests of the United States.
The term "Jewish activism" can pass as many things. The nature of English as a language permits a deceptively common string of otherwise disparate entities or events to define the core nature of both entities. Jewish activism is a good case study of this trick. One might assume that Jewish activism must be both Jewish and be activist to warrant this description. As most readers already know, most Jewish activism has little to do with Judaism and is usually only called such merely by virtue of the fact that it is activism of Jews or by Jews but without a Jewish soul.
Two recent articles however define in my opinion what real Jewish activism is. The first found at Shmais.com comes from the United Kingdom where chairman of the Rabbinical Council of United Synagogue(RCUS), Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet is going the distance in the UK court system to defend the halachic definition of "Who is a Jew". The court case involves a child of a non-Jewish mother and Jewish father who sought to enroll their son into a school in London which requires it's students to be Jewish. Where the common "Jewish activist" sentimentalism and raw emotionalism would call for a decision to be made in a non-traditional way, over-ruling halacha for the family's sake (in the mode of the US Federations who adopt non-traditional Jewish break-away definitions to keep the money pie as big as possible), the RCUS and Rabbi Schochet are standing firm. Bravo, kol hakavod. This is real Jewish activism.
The second story comes from Jpost in the form of an editorial by David Weinberg calling out JStreet for what I would refer to it as (although I doubt this is original), the Yevsektsiya of American leftist politics, serving its masters at the DNC and the White House.
JStreet is holding its first ever "hug-in" as Weinberg calls it this week to discuss how to better re-define support for Israel by opposing Israel and to justify this opposition by calling it a Jewish thing to do. Weinberg says:
J Street is a new form of Jewish apostasy. Its adherents hasten to embrace their Jewishness (even if they don't really know much about authentic Jewish tradition and morality) in order to besmirch Israel and the mainstream Jewish community. They earnestly declare how "profoundly" Jewish they are, in order to engender a distancing in US-Israel relations.
Indeed, David Weinberg scores a full body blow in this editorial. And again, this is real Jewish activism, no apologies, no ill-will, just telling the truth, doing the right thing for the right reason, not looking back.
Both Rabbi Schochet and David Weinberg should be an example for American Jewry. We will never overcome the problems that endanger the survival of our community until we are willing to tell the truth about what ails us and speak up to defend our Torah, tradition and our Holy Land. Our common destiny awaits.
Children's Poetry Booklet Recalled After Arabs Complain (Israeli censorship kowtows to Arabs. When Will We Tell The Truth Without Fear)
(IsraelNN.com 7 Sivan 5768/June 10, '08) Ynet's web site and Arab complaints against a ten-year-old boy's poem about terrorists has resulted in the recall of all of the Nes Ziona municipality's children's poetry booklets.
Ynet boasts that its coverage of the poem resulted in its being recalled.
The text of the poem (Ynet's translation):
Ahmed's bunker has surprises galore: Grenades, rifles are hung on the wall. Ahmed is planning another bombing!What a bunker Ahmed has, who causes daily harm.Ahmed knows how to make a bomb. Ahmed is Ahmed, that's who he is, so don't forget to be careful of him.We get blasted while they have a blast!Ahmed and his friends could be wealthy and sunny, if only they wouldn't buy rockets with all their money.
Poetry competition director Marika Berkowitz, who published the booklet, was surprised at the protests and told Ynet: "This is the boy's creation and this is what he wanted to express. Of course there should be a limit, but I think the there is no racism here. 'Ahmed' is a general term for the enemy. These are the murmurings of an innocent child."
The Education Ministry told Ynet: "The local authority that published the booklet should have guided the students in a more correct manner through the schools. The district will investigate the issue with the local authorities."
The Bare Basic Facts of the History of Palestine. Louis Rene Beres - Feb 21, 2009 The Jewish Press President Barack Obama has already placed the Middle East at the very top of his foreign policy agenda. There is nothing inherently wrong with this - quite the contrary. The problem, however, is that the new administration's ambitious negotiations remain structured upon altogether erroneous assumptions. In this connection, the gravest continuing misrepresentation of all is that there are Arab lands under an Israeli occupation.
Today, as always, words matter. Over the years, a notably durable Arab patience in building Palestine upon whole mountains of Jewish corpses has drawn directly upon a prior linguistic victory. Yet, the still generally unchallenged language referring provocatively to an Israeli occupation always overlooks the pertinent and logically incontestable history of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria) and Gaza.
Perhaps the most evident omission still concerns the precise and unwitting manner in which these Territories fell into Israel's hands in the first place. Here it is simply and widely disregarded that occupation followed the multi-state Arab state aggression of 1967. Egypt Syria or Jordan, of course, never disguised this aggression.
A sovereign state of Palestine did not exist before 1967 or 1948. Nor, did UN Security Council Resolution 242 ever promise a state of Palestine. Contrary to popular understanding, a state of Palestine has never existed. Never. Even as a non-state legal entity Palestine ceased to exist m 1948 when Great Britain relinquished its League of Nations mandate. During the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence (a war of survival fought because the entire Arab world had rejected the authoritative United Nations resolution creating a Jewish State), the West Bank and Gaza came under flagrantly illegal control of Jordan and Egypt, respectively. These Arab conquests did not put an end to an already-existing state or to an ongoing trust territory. What these aggressions did accomplish was the effective prevention, sui generis, (Being the only example of its kind; unique) of a state of Palestine.
Let us return to an earlier history. From the Biblical Period (ca 1350 BCE to 586 BCE) to the British Mandate (1918 - 1948), the land, named by the Romans after the ancient Philistines was controlled only by non-Palestinian elements. Significantly, however, a continuous chain of Jewish possession of the land was legally recognized after World War I at the San Remo Peace Conference of April 1920. There, a binding treaty was signed in which Great Britain was given mandatory authority over Palestine (the area had been ruled by the Ottoman Turks since 1516) to prepare it to become the national home for the Jewish People. Palestine, according to the Treaty comprised territories encompassing what are now the Jordan and Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza.
Present day Israel comprises only 22 percent of Palestine as defined and ratified at the San Remo Peace Conference. In 1922, Great Britain unilaterally and without any lawful authority split off 78 percent of the lands promised to the Jews - all of Palestine east of the Jordan - and gave it to Abdullah, the non-Palestinian son of the Sharif of Mecca. Eastern-Palestine now took the name Transjordan, which it retained until April 1949, when it was renamed as Jordan. From the moment of its creation, Transjordan was closed to all Jewish migration and settlement - a clear betrayal of the British promise in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and a patent contravention of its Mandatory obligations under international law.
On July 20, 1951, a Palestinian Arab assassinated King Abdullah for the latter's hostility to Palestinian aspirations and concerns. Regarding these aspirations, Jordan's moderate King Hussein - 19 years later, during September 1970 - brutally murdered thousands of defenseless Palestinians under his jurisdiction. In 1947, several years prior to Abdullah's killing, the newly-formed United Nations, rather than designate the entire land west of the Jordan River as the long-promised Jewish national homeland, enacted a second partition. Curiously, because this second fission again gave complete advantage to Arab interests, Jewish leaders accepted the painful judgment.
As readers of The Jewish Press already know all too well, the Arab states did not. On May 15, 1948, exactly 24 hours after the State of Israel came into existence, Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, declared to a tiny new country founded upon the ashes of the Holocaust: This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre. This unambiguous declaration of genocide has been at the core of all subsequent Arab orientations toward Imoderate' Fatah. Even, by the strict legal standards of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Arab actions and attitudes toward the microscopic Jewish state in their midst, has remained patently devoted to the annhilation of Israel. For some reason, this persistence has repeatedly been made to appear benign. However, President Obama and Senator Mitchell now have a clear obligation to look behind these propagandistic appearances.
In 1967, almost 20 years alter Israel's entry into the community of states, the Jewish state, as a result of its unexpected military victory over Arab aggressor states, gained unintended control over West Bank and Gaza. Although the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war is properly codified in the UN Charter, there existed no authoritative sovereign to whom the Territories could be returned. Israel could hardly have been expected to transfer them back to Jordan and Egypt, which had exercised unauthorized and terribly cruel control since the Arab-initiated war of extermination in 1948-49. Moreover, the idea of Palestinian self-determination had only just begun to emerge after the Six-Day War, and, significantly, had not even been included in UN Security Council Resolution 242 which was adopted on November 22, 1967.
For their part, the Arab states convened a summit in Khartoum in August 1967, concluding "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed three years earlier, in 1964, before there were any Israeli Occupied Territories. Exactly what was it, therefore that the PLO sought to liberate between 1964 and 1967? This critical question should now be considered by Barack Obama's special envoy to the region, Senator George Mitchell.
This has been a very brief account of essential historic reasons why the so-called Palestinian Territories are not occupied by Israel. Several other equally valid reasons stem from Israel's intrinsic legal right to security and self-defense. As I have said so often in this column, international law is not a suicide pact. Because a Palestinian state would severely threaten the very existence of Israel- a fact that remains altogether unhidden even in the Arab media and governments - the Jewish State is under no binding obligation to-end a falsely alleged occupation. No state, not even a Jewish one, can ever be required to accept complicity in its own dismemberment.
No doubt, both President Obama and Senator Mitchell want to be fair and evenhanded in their developing plans for the Middle East. To meet this obligation, however, it is essential that they first build all pertinent negotiations upon a firm foundation of historical accuracy and ethical truth. This means, at a minimum, the aspiring US peacemakers must familiarize themselves with correct history, and not simply allow themselves to be swallowed up with their many predecessors in ritualistic dogma and empty platitudes.
LOUIS RENE BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph D, 1971) and is a long-time expert in international relations and international law.
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