« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
This analogy with the Warsaw Ghetto demonstrates the motivation of some who advocate an academic boycott of Israel
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2007/08/the-warsaw-ghet.html
My grandmother was murdered by Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. One of her great-grand-daughters is an Israeli who has been trying to assist Palestinians in Gaza.
So where is the logic in the analogy?
And why?
The BBC has marked the birthday of Gilad Shalit:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6967230.stm
Although they do say that he was
'captured by militants'
rather than
'kidnapped by terrorists'.
Plus they do not make clear that he was kidnapped in Israel.
They have also publicised this item of news:
a former Chief Rabbi of Israel who seems to have gone off the rails somewhat!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6965607.stm
The BBC is to be praised for making it clear that many of those who serve in the Israeli army are religious and that the former Chief Rabbi's words are therefore insulting to them and their families.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1188128152487&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
I personally know several Orthodox families whose children and grandchildren have been killed or injured in the line of duty, as well as children from so-called 'secular' families.
Thank goodness Judaism does not hold with the creed of 'infalliblity' for rabbis, though some certainly seem to think that they have a hot-line to God! We have a name for that in Judaism: it's called 'idolatry'.
This brings up another question. This Telegraph blog discussed the same question and asked if it was antisemitic to bring it up. They also asked for Jewish input into the question. it's all here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ukcorrespondents/holysmoke/august2007/ultraorthodox.htm
So I posted my own view that in fact the Telegraph was doing us all a favour bringing up the question - certainly not antisemitic, then!
But blow me down, if someone hasn't quite got it and written in to censor me for accusing the blog of being antisemitic!
I mean, are Jews actually allowed to have views on subjects to do with Judaism, I wonder, or would some prefer that we just curled up in a hole and .....
Two timely articles on
Hizbut Tahrir:
and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/27/wpal127.xml
One wonders what it will take for the British Government to ban this group from Britain.
Hizb was the cause of a very large part of the extremist terror on university campuses in the not so distant past, disrupting peaceful student societies and also assaulting students.
At Manchester Unversity it got so bad that one of my students - actually a Catholic - asked me to stop the class I was teaching (ironically on the Balfour Declaration, if I recall) so they could all go out and help the police deal with the constant incitement and batterings experienced by Jewish students and others.
And that was in the year 2000, not 2001.
Please access this excellent piece by
Ruth Wisse
of
Harvard University
on what life is like for Jewish students on American campuses
http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=2785
And also a story of hope:
Tel Aviv University and Al - Quds University, East Jerusalem
in joint projects
Why is it that the President of Al-Quds can see sense and has always been against the academic boycott and yet British academics think they know better than people here on the ground..
Could it be a modern form of colonialism do you think, or maybe shades of the 'nanny' state?
All this care of
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
This is their website:
Please Access today's cover feature by
John Cornwell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cornwell_(writer)
in the
Catholic Tablet:
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/articles/10247/
POLAND"S SHAME
discusses rampant anti-semitism in contemporary Poland, spearheaded by a notorious Catholic priest and his bigoted radio station. Shades of the period between the two World Wars, when, according to my Polish-born mother (from Crakow, John Paul's home town), anti-Jewish pogroms were not that uncommon. Not to mention the Shoah, when HItler knew that the Polish population would assist him in his Final Solution, which ended with 90% of the Polish Jewish community exterminated.
Out of 30 million Poles, there were 3 million Jews (before the Holocaust), 10% of the entire population. Only 10% of these 3 million survived, including the two people who were to become my parents.
And today, there are barely enough Polish Jews to count on the fingers of one hand. So, what do you call this phenomenon? Anti-Semitism without Jews?
In order to make their point, the paper has used a stark image of a
Magen David
http://images.google.co.il/images?q=Magen+David&hl=iw&um=1&sa=X&oi=images&ct=title
being trampled by the anti-semitic Catholic priest.
This stark image illustrate both the growing anti-semitic crisis in Poland and The Tablet's own views on the matter.
In a rare instance of responsible journalism, they also contacted me beforehand to ask me if I thought that such an image, bearing in mind their hard-hitting story, would be 'sacrilegious'.
My answer was 'no', and I felt they should go ahead.
However, their query raises some interesting points. Let's go back a few years to 2002.
On 14th January 2002, the left-wing, anti-racist paper
The New Statesman
published an article by
John PIlger
entitled
A Kosher Conspiracy?
replete with Magen David piercing Union Jack.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/01/Forward180102.html
A month later, on February 11, the paper's then editor, no doubt responding to the mass outcry which followed,
wrote this piece by way of explanation
http://www.newstatesman.com/200202110006
To me, this 'explanation' seems utterly muddled and typical of Britain's complex attitude towards its tiny Jewish community.
Then, in January 2003, we had this prize-winning cartoon of Ariel Sharon devouring a Palestinian baby
http://backspin.typepad.com/backspin/2003/11/evolution_of_an.html
again from a left-wing, anti-racist paper:
The Independent (know as the Indy)
in my view, probably the most anti-semitic image to have graced British shores, certainly in the 20th century, (unless you include Rory Bremner's 2005 Channel 4 satire on Conservative Opposition Leader Michael Howard as a barber, slitting people's throats).
Although Huldah (see comment below) has just sent me this, from the
Guardian
This splendid blogger had a few words to say about that antisemitic cartoon:
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2006/07/anti-semitism-of-guardian.html
The Guardian later said that their target was Israel, and not the Jews. So that's OK then. Especially as half the world's Jewish population now lives in Israel. Talk about being in denial!
Then skip to 6 weeks ago and we have this on Channel 4:
The War on Britain's Jews?'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkCTH7LK7OU
and
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/talking_point_jews.html
Richard Littlejohn's
timely and understated documentary about what life is currently like for Britain's Jewish community, and what it has been like since 9/11.
He actually says
In Britain 2007, it's open season on the Jews
Do note the hunting terminology and also the question mark which seems to be a trade-mark feature of Britain and its Jews.
Because what it seems to say is:
Who on earth are these miserable people, and why don't they just go away?
But long as there are articles like those by John Cornwell today, then maybe there is a glimmer of hope left for the Jews of Europe - let's hope so in any case.
There are two responses to my article in last week's Church Times:
Why the roots of Zionism matter
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=43222
The first is erudite and gives a link to what Hamas is saying about their plans to annihilate us. What it is saying is that they do not only want to annihilate us, but exactly how they are going to do it.
http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1527.htm
The second letter, by a Mr. Dumper (how apt) starts off being sycophantic, possibly because the words of support for Israel are now coming from the Archbishop of Canterbury, and not just from the Jewish community, 'neo-fascists' every one of us, as I'm sure you're aware.
But the attempt at a sting (somewhat pathetic, at that), comes in the second part of his letter. So, what is Mr. Dumper's grand theory for the huge rise in world-wide anti-semitism, exactly? Why, he postulates a correlation between the way that the Israeli government is treating the Palestinian Arabs and the fact that my rabbi, for instance, was beaten up a couple of years ago in an affluent part of Prestwich, Bury. And seems to imply that that is all right then!
If only our friend, Mr. Dumper, knew of the behind-the-scenes assistance that Palestinians are given by Israelis, including myself, in their every-day lives, maybe he would come to his senses. Naturally, this cannot be advertised publicly, because of the Muslim threats so appositely described by the first letter-writer, Fran Waddams.
But maybe Mr. Dumper and his ilk wouldn't come to his senses in any case, because even if what he said about the Israeli government were true, which it isn't, does the Chinese treatment of Tibet and Burma warrant a huge increase in violence and demonisation of the world's Chinese population? Or how about Mugabe's treatment of Zimbabwe?
No, I thought not!
Truly then, not just a
'War against Britain's Jews'.
http://www.solomonia.com/blog/2007/07/richard_littlejohn_the_war_aga/
but against Jews, anywhere and everywhere they happen to be. This Mr. Dumper would dump us without further thought!!
Meanwhile, there's this from
Damien Thompson's Telegraph blog:
Holy Smoke
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ukcorrespondents/holysmoke/august2007/caliphate.htm
This video, sent in by the second poster, is definitely worth watching
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI5WoXpmPiM&eurl=
Although it's not even true to say that Islam was solely responsible for the introduction of science to the West. The Arab culture included Persians, Indians, Christians, Jews and pagans, who all did their bit and knew the languages in which science was written.
And also, it's sad that the speaker brackets all religions together. This is the way it is going. Fundamentalist Islam is helping atheism to take over, and then Christians, Jews, Druze, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Bahais and others who don't threaten anyone will suffer as well.
Is it really worth it, simply to appease people who an expert historian has compared to Hitler,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or_CQJxqktA
to find that your own peaceful religion will go the way of all flesh?
I certainly hope not!
But appeasement is never the way, Mr. Dumper, and neither is scapegoating of Jews!
Last night, I booked a four-day holiday in
Metulla
directly on the Lebanese border
http://www.zimmer.co.il/moran/bigframe_en.htm
It felt like climbing Mount Everest. Why? the B and B owner appeared to be talking in non-sequiturs most of the time, till I eventually cottoned on. There were three of us in the conversation: somewhere in the background was the wife.
This is how it went (in Hebrew):
It will be 500 shekels a night and could you bring the chicken the day before'
and
Now, don't forget, the taxi from Kiryat Shemona is only 35 NIS. Don't let them pull a fast one, and could you turn off the radio, as I can't really hear her!
You get the picture!
The place we shall be staying looks out onto their Lebanese neighbour's field. And knowing we shall be directly on the border led me to think of Israel's missing soldiers
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=5c2a8a16-d1e5-4bb7-8073-f9dc0d720581&k=25019
Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.
I have met and spoken to members of Ehud's family and what comes over is a fierce and very dignified stoicism.
But what really hurts is this from the
European Coalition for Israel:
"As we file this report we are preparing ourselves to meet the leadership of the International Red Cross in Geneva on Tuesday 14 August concerning the fate of the three kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Some 30 .000 people have already responded to our appeal to sign a petition in support of the abducted soldiers and more names are still coming in. This issue was also raised with national Red Cross representatives across Europe on the anniversary of the abduction of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. The same day a co-ed article was published in the Finnish daily Hufvudstadsbladet in Helsinki by Tomas pointing to the fact that Hamas had just managed to get the BBC journalist Alan Johnston released but that they also have an obligation to free Gilad Shalit.
When we met the families of the abducted soldiers in Tel Aviv in early May they were highly disappointed by the fact that the fate of their loved ones had not been raised by any non-Jewish NGO’s. On the contrary, letters which they had written to prominent human rights NGO’s such as Amnesty International and Doctors without Borders had never even been answered.
“This only shows that the world does not care about our children”, said one of the parents. In response to this information the Coalition decided to write these organizations to raise this same issue. To our surprise the Chairman of the Doctors without Frontiers replied within weeks expressing his concern about the situation and pledging to work together for their release.
As the news of Hamas atrocities against members of Fatah emerged with all the gory details, NGOs for Human Rights nevertheless felt the moment was opportune for highlighting Israel’s human rights’ abuses.
A special meeting was called to discuss this issue; clearly an example of the terribly anti-Israel atmosphere and mind set of possibly most of existing human rights NGOs. This is dangerous mainly because under the guise of objective reporting anti-Israel propaganda is openly brought into the parliament, which based on this information will try and call the EU Commission for action against Israel.
ECI-Hearing of the kidnapped soldiers makes the CNN news
The most important items for the European Coalition was certainly a hearing on the three kidnapped Israeli soldiers. It was held at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, on July 10, 2007. The event was hosted by Polish Socialist MEP Józef Pinior (PSE), who is also Vice-Chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Rights. This was very important since the issue needs to be seen as a humanitarian issue rather than a political Israeli issue. Time-wise the hearing coincided with the anniversary of the kidnappings of the Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser, Eldad Regev and Gilad Shalit.
MEP Józef Pinior started the proceedings by presenting the human face of the case including the soldiers' families and hobbies. He emphasized that this was an opportunity to see what the Parliament could do to help, as so many MEPs of many different political groups were in attendance. Afterwards family members Mr. Shlomo Goldwasser, Mr. Benni Regev, Mr. Omri Avni and Mr. Roi Barak presented their perspectives and feelings on being unable to know the fate of their sons, sons-in-law and brothers for so long asking for European help in the case because of its humanitarian nature.
Following the hearing, many MEPs signed a Europe-wide petition on behalf of the soldiers insisting that the Red Cross visit them. CNN documented parts of the hearing and interviews with family members to its World Report program. "
End of quote from ECI document.
A few thoughts:
Why is Amnesty International so seemingly indifferent to injustices experienced by Israeli citizens, who constitute half of the world's Jewish population?
In the 90s, I was Chair of the Liverpool Burma Support Group. I was invited to the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and treated like a VIP.
On return to Britain I must have given fifty talks about the situation in Burma to Amnesty groups around the country and received a most positive reception. In the 60s and 70s I actually worked for Amnest for a while.
So this is a question for Amnesty and also for the BBC: please could you let us know when you intend to do something on Israel's missing soldiers?
News from 'apartheid Fascist' Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/896220.html
Yes, our awful country, the pariah of the world, is actually funding these lessons in Arabic language and culture for all children: Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze, Bahai, agnostic, moonie etc
I look forward to Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank PA Authority reciprocating by implementing Hebrew in all their primary schools, instead of the hate lessons currently on offer regarding their neighbour, Israel.
This reminds me of a response received by the Catholic Tablet on my January article,
Why I emigrated to Haifa
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/issues/1000030
The guy, Tim Llewellyn (formerly BBC Middle East correspondent) told a number of porkies about people living in
Wadi Nisnas.
No doubt, he hadn't heard of the annual Christmas-time
Festival of Festivals
held there by the Mayor's office to celebrate Christianity, Islam and (a poor third) Judaism!
I shall be sending this to the BBC's current Middle East correspondent,
Jeremy Bowen
http://news.bbc.co.uk/aboutbbcnews/hi/profiles/newsid_3224000/3224044.stm
who has invited me to meet him in the near future.
I note he is Welsh. That puts him in my good books already!
Today there was a minor miracle: at 8.30 am I went out on the terrace to work as usual and what did I see, but
DEW
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dew
on the table.
My goodness, this must be the first sight of any watery substance (other than the hose) since May!!
Is this autumn by any chance?
I set to on how Freud's wrestlings (yes, that is the Hebrew word) and proneness to seeing every side of the coin were then set in stone by some of his followers, especially in the USA, who even thought that bringing up children was nothing more than physiology and/or biology at best.
That's what happen when geniuses have followers, of course. Followers tend to want to instigate limitations and see things through their own lenses.
And then down to
Rosh restaurant to celebrate a friend's special birthday in the company of 11 others (if this is beginning to sound like a familiar religious story, it is quite unintentional).
Having reached the venue - 3rd floor of the local shopping centre - no Rosh, which means 'head' or 'first', as in
In the beginning
http://bible.ort.org/books/torahd5.asp
and
Rosh ha-Shanah
http://holidays.net/highholydays/rosh.htm
No such place though. All an illusion, it seemed. But the third person I asked looked me up and down and could see I was a bit new. 'You mean
Nosh
she said.
Nosh Plus in fact!
Well how could the humble N be replaced by an R on the computer, when they are nowhere near each other and necessitate different hands?
But Nosh it was, and nosh we certainly did, on the four or five course meal which came to about a fiver each!
And then, on return, I found this by the ghost of
Archbishop Cranmer
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/
and I don't know about you, but nosh or no nosh, the first posting on this blog just make you want to gnash
as in this:
http://www.middletownbiblechurch.org/doctrine/hodgesgn.htm
But then you thank God for blogs which talk sense and probably do more good than theology and history lessons some of the time.
Whilst immersed in a translation of the philosophical underpinnings of Freudian psychoanalysis (talk about Jewish stereotypes here!), dealing with such gems as
the symbolism of the elbow'.
'the theory of ego autonomy'
and
awareness of inner experience in child abuse and neglect'
I decided to pop out to the letter box and see if the post had arrived.
To my great delight, both the
Church Times
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Times
The Tablet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tablet
had arrived together - and not a bill in sight! Surely this was symbolic of progress in religious dialogue, I thought. Because Britain still has that
Act of Settlement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Settlement_1701
which bars an heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic (but not a Jew, Hindu, Muslim, moonie or atheist).
There was my own article in the Church Times, entitled
Why the Roots of Zionism Matter
http://irenelancaster.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/08/why-the-root-of.html
with a caption from the paper itself underneath the photo of the Archbishop of Canterbury flanked by the two Chief Rabbis of Israel: 'Speaking candidly'.
No-one could accuse the
Church Times
of being pro Israel, but .... You never know, greater miracles have happened before. And the professionalism of the particular editor who deals with me is a miracle in itself. She is almost saintly in her patience!
Was it really only two years ago to the day that I penned that other article for them:
Anglicans have betrayed the Jews
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/2005/08/anglicans_have.php
which aroused the fury of the
Council of Christians and Jews
who stated in a letter to the paper that I didn't know what I was talking about because I wasn't in the interfaith business.... Oh dear!
Which made
Ruth Gledhill
of
The Times
exclaim:
They damn themselves out of their own mouths, sometimes.
But that is, hopefully, all behind us, for the same person who attacked me for citing how the Jewish community really felt about the Church of England was now a member of the team which visited israel a month ago. It's all in the post, above.
OK, Friday's Church Times also had
Giles Fraser
Vicar of Putney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putney
(and therefore upper middle class at least) and lecturer in
Hegel
(not a nice man: have studied him in depth myself) at
Oxford University
(practically aristocratic then)
saying that HMG should be talking to Hamas. Dear Giles dismisses suicide bomb attacks against Israel as of very minor concern, because
'no peace will ever come without a willingness to sit around a table and talk'.
But this is exactly what Hamas has refused to do in the case of Israel. And, according to
Canon Andrew White
who knows a great deal more about the Middle East than Giles (who is a bit of an ivory-towered bruiser, to be honest), not only will Hamas not sit down with Israelis: they won't even sit down with anyone who is Jewish at all. Plus, their charter states that they want to wipe us off the face of the earth, and oh yes,
Sir Martin Gilbert
who is a proper academic - and historian to boot - has stated that
Hamas are like the Nazis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or_CQJxqktA
and should be dealt with accordingly.
But let Tony Blair sit down with them if he wants, and earn the reputation of Neville Chamberlain: do we really care?
So then to
The Tablet
to which I had just penned a letter, strongly supporting the Catholic stance on the Act of Settlement question. My main argument is that Catholics are not the enemy: on the contrary, just like the Jews of Britain, they continue to be maligned, quite unjustifiably, and have made a contribution quite out of proportion to their small numbers - and I say that, even though I do come from Liverpool!
But, blow me down, what did we have in The Tablet today:
Victoria Combe on her friend's spiritual journey to Islam ... with her husband in prison under Spain's draconian terrorism laws
My goodness, is The Tablet really taking a suspected terrorist's side against a government which has really suffered from all types of terrorism - what is going on here?
But there was more:
Terry Philpot
on a certain
Dawud Yaqub
who is the son of a Presbyterian elder, no less!
Apparently, Dawud
could not reconcile Christianity with its Abrahamic origins and what we know about the lifestyle of Jesus
Come on, out with it then: what you mean is that Jesus was Jewish and Christianity - well - isn't!
But, no: that's not what Dawud meant at all.
It didn't make sense that Christians have no dietary restrictions, don't observe circumcision, have no oral law or religious case law.
Good lad! Definitely some rabbinic input here, you might think! Couldn't define Judaism better myself!
But, wait for it:
He admires the fact that Muslims are able to discuss Palestine, Israel and Zionism without "the cringing fear of being labelled 'anti-Semitic'" that afflicts Westerners. Also, he says that in theory, at least, Muslims celebrate sexuality and place a great deal of responsiblity on the husband pleasing his wife, which for Yacub contrasts with the love/hate attitude of other-wordly Christianity towards sex.
So there we have it:
Jesus the Muslim
As for the second part of this paragraph, it is so infantile that my real work, the translation, seemed totally relevant, somehow.
I don't know about
'the symbolism of the elbow'
but I certainly know some who would want to give him the elbow.
As for
'the theory of ego autonomy',
I think that phrase speaks for itself. And finally, '
awareness of inner experience in child abuse and neglect':
This resonates, somehow. I wonder what type of childhood and adolescence he's had, poor thing. Because he may not realise it, but in the first part of the paragraph he has stated flatly and boldly, (and The Tablet has not thought to question it), that when Muslims are anti-Semitic, no-one dares say that to their face.
And this is probably one of the only true sentences in the whole entire anti-Christian and anti-Jewish diatribe, which for some reason The Catholic Tablet has seen fit to print in its pages.
For more Muslim thought,
see this:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ukcorrespondents/holysmoke/august2007/propaganda.htm
and this:
