Augean Stables | Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you. (William Blake,-www.theaugeanstables.com

Augean Stables | Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you. (William Blake,

Time 2021-09-18 14:24:39

Web Name: Augean Stables | Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you. (William Blake,

WebSite: http://www.theaugeanstables.com

ID:196046

Keywords:

speak,to,mind,

Description:

A few days ago, the NYT (#surprise) ran an op-ed by Bennet Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, entitled: We re Ben and Jerry. Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle. It is hard to exaggerate the self-deluding, self-important, content that the title only hints at. (Benjamin Kerstein calls it hilariously onanistic (which for those who don t know is risible climactic narcissism.) If it weren t for the widespread circulation of the kind of deep moral disorientation expressed in this piece, I d have much better uses of my time than fisking this piece. But, here goes.We are the founders of Ben Jerry’s. We are also proud Jews. It’s part of who we are and how we’ve identified ourselves for our whole lives. As our company began to expand internationally, Israel was one of our first overseas markets. We were then, and remain today, supporters of the State of Israel.Now we get to the beginning of the folly. The majority of the international community, really means the Human Rights NGOs the progressive journalists, and the folks at the United Nations (to which the pair apparently give great respect). This vast consensus has repeated without any critical acumen the position of Israel s most devotedly implacable enemies for at least two decades now. As for the notion that the territories in question are occupied, that they (already do or should) belong to the Palestinian people (in the original statement from B J it was Palestinian Occupied Territories ), is a classic misreading. The 1949-67 borders were never recognized by the Arabs (or the Palestinians); they make Israel dangerously vulnerable to Arab attack (Abba Eban called them Auschwitz Borders); they give the entire Jewish quarter of the Old City to the Arabs (who, when they seized it in 1948, ethnically cleansed Jews who had been living there for millennia and destroyed all the synagogues); and they deserve, in any decent, fair discussion of what should be done with the territories in question, to be considered disputed until that dispute is resolved. To resolve it in advance by calling it occupied is to give the Palestinians lands they have no serious claim to, and indeed, have no business claiming as theirs.While we no longer have any operational control of the company we founded in 1978, we’re proud of its action and believe it is on the right side of history. In our view, ending the sales of ice cream in the occupied territories is one of the most important decisions the company has made in its 43-year history. It was especially brave of the company. Even though it undoubtedly knew that the response would be swift and powerful, Ben Jerry’s took the step to align its business and operations with its progressive values.This is a good example of what Kerstein considers hilarious. First: the right side of history?!?! You re siding with a liberation movement that has, from the outset claimed it wants to eliminate the state of Israel (the only Jewish state), and never in Arabic retracted that claim. They have called on the world to boycott Israel as part of this effort. Whether B J think they can separate their occupied territory boycott from the larger effort to stigmatize Israel, the reality on the ground is that they cannot. Their move was a huge shot in the arm to the forces of darkness. Their self-congratulatory characterization of what they did as brave only underlines how clueless they are.In my own field of medieval history, for example, the Roman Empire didn’t fall, it transitioned, and the invading Germanic tribes were mere Roman wannabe’s who may have accidentally broken the civilization they wanted to govern.[1] And even for those willing to acknowledge a problem, it was unthinkable that one might “other” the ?Germanic tribal warriors by blaming them for their wanton destruction of the very civilization they coveted.As a historian of the Roman Empire, I’d like to suggest there’s really no need for alarm. One of the most well-known moments in history, the “Fall of Rome,” is not a historical event. It’s not even a series of unfortunate mistakes. It’s more akin to a theological idea, and the time has come to stop screwing up the way we talk about it.Again, note the dismissive, sneering tone. The matter is decided for the grand publique, no matter what puddles of scholarly disagreement remain.And if there is a link between Rome and today, then, as with the Roman imperial ignorance about their neighbors, it’s the West’s fault if Jihadis don t like us. In the immediate aftermath of 9-11 Morris Berman wrote in the Guardian:The response of the empire is to regard the attackers as the ultimate Other… In the main, the Romans had no understanding of non civilisation: of different values, nomadic ways of life. Similarly, America views Islamic terrorism as completely irrational; there is no understanding of the political context of this activity, a context of American military attack on, or crippling economic sanctions against, a host of Arab nations with unilateral support for Israel constituting the central, running sore.[4].Note how for Boin we need to understand religion better, while for Berman, Westsplaining Jihad, it’s not about millennial religious imperialism, but the West’s fault).[5] Neither the misunderstood Germans nor the Caliphators are at fault in anyway. They re empty ciphers for the Other whom we should embrace. So even as Berman deplores Roman imperial ignorance, he contributes to our lethal ignorance.[1] Goffart, “Rome’s Final Conquest: The Barbarians,” History Compass 6.3 (2008): 855–883; et multa alia. Brian Ward-Perkins led the resistance: The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Cambridge: 2006).In composing an article (which I shall post after its publication) that includes a section on the Brandeis controversy about granting Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, I found that the link I had to the faculty petition did not work any more, and that the original did not contain the names of the signers. So I publish here the full text and signatories of the Faculty Petition. [Italics mine.]Out of respect for those who have already signed this letter, PLEASE DO NOT ALTER THIS LETTER IN ANY WAY. IF YOU WISH TO SIGN IT, PLEASE ADD YOUR NAME AT THE BOTTOM OF THE TEXT.April 6, 2014Dear President Lawrence,We are writing to urge you to rescind immediately the invitation to Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali for an honorary doctorate, a decision about which we are shocked and dismayed, owing to her virulently anti-Muslim public statements.We further urge you to reinstitute the past practice of a faculty committee that vets potential honorary degree recipients. Such a committee would surely have warned you about the horrible message that this sends to the Muslim and non-Muslim communities at Brandeis and beyond.A few of many examples will suffice. David Cohen quotes Ms. Hirsi Ali as saying: Violence is inherent in Islam – it s a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder. The police may foil plots and freeze bank accounts in the short term, but the battle against terrorism will ultimately be lost unless we realise that it s not just with extremist elements within Islam, but the ideology of Islam itself .Islam is the new fascism (London Evening Standard, 2-7-07). Rogier van Bakel quotes her as follows: Jews should be proselytizing about a God that you can quarrel with. Catholics should be proselytizing about a God who is love .Those are lovely concepts of God. They can’t compare to the fire-breathing Allah who inspires jihadism and totalitarianism. Van Bakel notes religions ability to bring about change for good: Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes? Ms. Hirsi Ali responds, Only if Islam is defeated. Van Bakel asks, Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam? To that she responds, No. Islam, period. (Reason, 11-07)We are filled with shame at the suggestion that the above-quoted sentiments express Brandeis s values.The University bestows honorary degrees, in part, to “identify the University with the values expressed through the work and accomplishments of the honoree” and “draw positive attention to the University as an institution that respects and encourages such values and the manner in which those values are expressed.”We are saddened that Brandeis would choose to honor such a divisive individual at commencement, a moment of unity for the Brandeis community. Her presence threatens to bring unnecessary controversy to an event that should rightly be about celebrating Brandeis’ graduates and their families.Please know that, like Ms. Hirsi Ali, we fully recognize the harm of forced marriages; of female genital cutting, which can cause, among other public health problems, increased maternal and infant mortality; and of honor killings. These phenomena are not, however, exclusive to Islam.The selection of Ms. Hirsi Ali further suggests to the public that violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World, thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus. It also obscures the hard work on the ground by committed Muslim feminist and other progressive Muslim activists and scholars, who find support for gender and other equality within the Muslim tradition and are effective at achieving it. We cannot accept Ms. Hirsi Ali s triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.We call upon you to act immediately and to select another individual who is deserving of an honorary degree from Brandeis, someone who truly meets the standards and upholds the values of this university.Sincerely,1. Karen Hansen, SOC, WGS2. Dian Fox, ROMS, WGS3. Daniel Bergstresser, IBS4. James Mandrell, ROMS5. ChaeRan Freeze, NEJS, WGS6. Bernadette J. Brooten, NEJS, WGS, PRS, CLAS, SQS7. Mary Baine Campbell, ENG, COML; Assoc. Faculty WGS8. Jytte Klausen, POL9. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, ENG, AAAS, Affil. WGS10. H. Michael Coiner, ECON11. Nader Habibi, ECON, CROWN, IBS12. Sue Lanser, COML, ENG, WGS, MACH, Affil. HOID, ROMS13. Gary Jefferson, ECON, IBS14. Catherine L. Mann, IBS, ECON15. Ulka Anjaria, ENG, SAS16. Jens Hilscher, IBS17. David Powelstock, GRALL, COML, HOID18. Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, CLAS, ANTH, FA, Italian Studies, WGS19. Jane Kamensky, HIST, WGS20. Harry Mairson, CS21. Sarah Lamb, ANTH, WGS, HSSP, SAS, PRS22. Mitra Shavarini, WGS, SOC23. Ellen Schattschneider, ANTH, WGS, PRS, EAS, IGS24. Wendy Cadge, SOC, WGS, PRS25. Marion Smiley, PHIL, WGS26. Richard J. Parmentier, ANTH, GS27. Eric Chasalow, MUS, FTIM28. Guy Antebi, NEJS29. Laura J. Miller, SOC30. Bulbul Chakraborty, PHYS31. Javier Urcid, ANTH32. Elizabeth Brainerd, ECON, WGS, IBS33. Janet McIntosh, ANTH, AAAS34. Caren Irr, ENG, FTIM, ENVS35. Jordan Pollack, Computer Science36. Sabine von Mering, GRALL, WMGS37. Jonathan Anjaria, ANTH, SAS38. Dawn Skorczewski, ENG39. Adrianne Krstansky, THA40. Chad Williams, AAAS41. Govind Sreenivasan, HIST42. Jane Hale, ROMS43. Peter Conrad, SOC, HSSP44. Rasha Azoni-Hannigan45. Joseph Lumbard, NEJS, IMES, HOID, PRS46. Gordon Fellman, SOC, PAX, IMES, Ethics Center47. Leslie Zebrowitz, PSYC48. David Cunningham, SOC, SJSP, Affil. HS49. Paul Monsky, MATH50. Edward K. Kaplan, ROMS, PRS, Affil. NEJS51. Matthew Fraleigh, GRALL, COML, EAS52. Ellen Kellman, NEJS53. Paul Morrison, ENG54. Jennifer Cleary, THA55. Carl El-Tobgui, NEJS, IMES56. George Ross, Hillquit Professor Emeritus, Soc, Pol, Global Studies57. Debarshi Nandy, IBS58. Robert Sekuler, PSYC, NEUR59. Sara Shostak, SOC, HSSP60. Harleen Singh, GRALL, WGS, SAS61. Donald Hindley, POL, EAS, LALS62. Kanan Makiya, NEJS, Crown Center63. Ana Villalobos, SOC64. Thomas King, ENG, SQS, WGS65. Paul Jankowski, History66. Gregory L. Freeze, History, IGS67. Lenny Muellner, Classical Studies68. Matthew Headrick, PHYS69. Aparna Baskaran, PHYS70. Albion Lawrence, PHYS71. John Wardle, PHYS72. Gabriella Sciolla, PHYS73. Raymond Knight, PSYC74. Sophia Malamud, Linguistics, COSI75. David H. Roberts, PHYS76. Christine M. Thomas, CHEM77. Allan Keiler, MUS78. Marya Levenson, Education Studies79. Kelley Ready, SID80. Nina (Cornelia) Kammerer, Heller PhD Program81. Robert Meyer, PHYS, emeritus82. Wellington Nyangoni, AAAS83. Talinn Grigor, FA, SAS, GS84. David Sherman, ENG85. Richard Gaskins, AMST, LGLS86. David Karjala, NEJS, IMES87. Patricia A. Johnston, Classical StudiesIt was supposed to be my 50th graduation anniversary this June. We were asked to write for the yearbook. I just received an email from a classmate who saw my remarks in response to the question: What do you consider your most important accomplishment in life thus far? He asked permission to send it to some friends. It occurred to me that it s worth posting at my blog, hence So far, I d say my life, despite its many high points, including three independent children and a wonderful wife (I m not complaining in any way), has been a failure. I m an historian of 2000+ years of Western history, trained in an age when it was still possible to acknowledge reality i.e., the West is exceptional, especially when it comes to human rights and freedom. I have a deep appreciation for the generosity and humanity that inspires the best of the West, and which, without the West, would wither in the cold. And I am witness to a generation that is literally throwing it away, in the very name of the values that make it so exceptional.My specialty is apocalyptic millennialism, that is movements that think they on the verge of introducing a golden age of felicity and peace on earth. Over the last 20 years, I ve witnessed a global clash between one of the most ruthless, imperial of such movements, seeking global dominion, and Western civilization, which has created and still presides over the new global community. The West, in my reading, is the most successful carrier of demotic millennialism egalitarian, dignity-culture that prized productive labor and our institutions are hot-beds of rare progressive flowers that would wither in the cold air of prime-divider societies.And among the rare flowers in these hotbeds we call universities, we have a progressive millennialism that takes the very self-criticism that is the lifeblood of any always-improving society, gets turned against itself. We (i.e. the civilization we grew up in, created by white supremacists ) are the enemy, not them, the medieval holy warriors. The marriage of pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism.In the process of adopting this millennial logic, woke Westerners have made it literally impossible to discuss the real enemy, the Caliphators, whose power politics and genocidal desires are actually very close to Hitler s, whom they openly admire, whose sacred task they want to finish. But say so, and the cries of Islamophobia come crashing down. So for years and decades, no one wanted to even mention this terrifying dimension of Arab-Muslim hatred for Israel, even as progressives adopted whole-heartedly the cause of one of the worst (and best documented) promoters of this Arab-Muslim neo-Nazism, the Palestinians.In the 90s I warned about a possible wave of antisemitism after the passage of 2000. (I thought it would come from the Christian right, not the progressive left.) When not dismissed, I got laughed at; and when it hit hard in 2002, I got sidelined from the public discussion by the very people who had dismissed me earlier.Granted my thought has developed over time, but for the last 20 years I ve been warning about the catastrophically self-defeating behavior of Western elites, especially PoMo-PoCo professors with dogmatic post-colonial narratives, and the lethal journalists, who pass on Palestinian war propaganda as news, and stay silent about their Nazi-like genocidal ideology.What I saw in the 21st century, was that the â€œclash of civilizationsâ€ predicted by Huntington in 1995, and resoundingly confirmed by both the assault on Israel and the USA in 2000/2001, got internalized into a war between left and right in the West, in which, for the left, the evil on the right makes an alliance with the Caliphators legitimate, the very deed that convinced the still tribal right, that the left was betraying them. And here, I ve got to side with the deplorables. They re right, their alleged leaders and information professionals, were selling them a bill of goods. And however crude they might be to the progressive palette, these Americans, conservative, suspicious of the latte liberals, distrustful of the media, members of the productive classes, are far closer in values and commitments to the woke, than the progressive alliance of Caliphators and revolutionaries like BLM.It looks more and more every day that the West cannot control the catastrophic concessions its woke millennialists made over the course of the last two decades in the name of progressive values.* the fake news first and foremost, and on a massive scale in both consensus and duration about Israel; now, just when we need a reliable professional information elite to understand Corona, we re stuck in a terrible corruption (politicization) of the entire information profession.* the imposition of a politically correct critical theory dogma, deviation from which entails loss of job, reputation, platform, the heavy chill in discussion, and the creation of a generation of scholars with little skill or will to think out of woke parameters. Campus today is not the electric open place it was when we went.* the tribalization of politics, so one side views the others as deplorably tribal, while the other views the first as deplorably universalistic and traitors to our side. This loops back to the fake news, distorted to push a cause.Trump s stunning victory turned up the volume ten times the already loud cacophony, and Floyd s killing has made the woke paradigm dominant, a new catechism. Now I m watching the slow-motion train wreck of the 2020 elections from afar in Israel, but fully aware of the stakes for the global community. In part, I m privy to the highly intelligent ecumenical tribe on our class listserv, think their way into the war against their fellow citizens.At this point, it s so involved, evolved and devolved that it s hard to articulate a sane path. When I studied apocalyptic in the Middle Ages I ran across the expression saniores mentis, those of sounder mind, who resisted the apocalyptic madness of their day. At the time, I identified with the demotic millennialists and not the sane Church, but now I have a sense of the importance of sound minds guiding us, which in this election means nobody in sight.And basically, I ve failed to communicate this effectively. I definitely feel like Cassandra.A friend said, It s not entirely their fault [i.e., those progressives who are helping our civilization commit suicide], we still haven t found the right way to say it. I certainly have not figured it out, and my upcoming book, tentatively (today) titled: Losing the Western Front: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and the Global Caliphate in the Third Millennium, will testify to over a decade of trying to say it and failing. It s not that this triumphalist imperialist Islam will take over the world in the new, global millennium. It s that, as with all apocalyptic millennial movements, although they re wrong, that doesn t mean they re inconsequential. But certainly the appalling way we Western thought leaders have dealt with them, makes the potential damage all the greater.It may be that I m angry. Indeed I am.I am full of gratitude for the life I ve lived, the people I ve met, worked with, argued with, and loved, my children, my wife, my parents (may their memory be a blessing), my family, my friends and colleagues, my many opportunities, those I took and those I did not. I m only sorry that I ve failed to communicate my understanding to people at a time when it really matters to see clearly.Early on in the latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, an organization claiming to speak as scholars issued a strong statement calling for public commitment. Despite its decidedly unscholarly tone and content, it got picked up by faculty and scholarly associations all over the US at the very highest levels. None of the signers apparently feel any concern that the statement they endorse is the exact opposite of scholarship, pushing a jargon-laden, weaponized take on the conflict, whose overlap with a Palestinian totalizing narrative (i.e., war propaganda) was close to complete. As often happens with war incitement literature, the description of the situation with which the scholar s statement opens, offers a lobotomized account where all aggression, all oppression, comes from the Israeli side while the Palestinians are innocent victims defending themselves. This involves not merely one-sided accounts, but, in this case at least, a systemic projection of deeply immoral, dehumanizing, even genocidal attitudes among Palestinians onto the Israelis.In what follows, then I will offer counter-statements that use their language and phrasing as a starting point for describing other important data and ways to frame the discussion. I m enough of a post-modernist not to think that the perspectives I bring are the sole truth, but I do claim they are precisely that aspect of empirical and cognitive reality that the critical theorists do not want to reach the attention the audiences before whom they perform. I offer these comments to the independent thinkers who wish to make informed judgments with integrity. As scholars, we affirm the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous liberation movement confronting a settler colonial state.As scholars, we adhere to Soviet cognitive warfare propaganda ploy to package a triumphalist Islamic Jihad on infidels who have invaded Dar al Islam, as a secular, national liberation movement that seeks an alliance with other Western liberation movements. We will systematically suppress any evidence that Palestinians resistors are actually religious imperialists, any evidence that Israelis are a national liberation movement resisting this religious imperialism, which has grown genocidal in its frustrated rage. Palestinians: the victims to be saved; Jews: interlopers and land-thieves to be driven out.The pitched battle in Sheikh Jarrah is the most recent flashpoint in the ongoing Nakba that is the Palestinian condition. We will ram every event into the procrustean narrative of Palestinian victimhood the Nakba as bad as the Holocaust and the Israelis as the ongoing Nazis. The tensions in Sheikh Jarrah arise from a complex legal contest carried out in the only egalitarian courts of justice in the Middle East today over a period of 40 years, which Palestinians, for whom justice is always-already politicized, have turned into a cogwar flashpoint in the campaign to eliminate their neighbors.Israel has expanded and entrenched its settler sovereignty through warfare, expulsion, tenuous residency rights, and discriminatory planning policies. The ostensible peace process has perpetuated its land grabs and violent displacement under the fictions of temporality and military necessity. The admitted war process (Land for War) has perpetrated a death cult in Palestinian controlled areas, and the invasion of a totalizing narrative into international bodies whose foundational principles call for humane and reciprocal relations, honesty and fair judgment (UN, ICC, Academia, journalism).Together these policies constituteapartheid,bolstered by a brute force that enshrines territorial theft and the racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals. And now, as has been the case for over a century, Palestinians continue to resist their removal and erasure.The month of May 2021 has taught us Israelis many unfortunate things, things we hoped were not true (and continue to hope are not true) about the sad straits of Israeli democracy, the relentlessly authoritarian nature of Palestinian, or for that matter Arab and Muslim, political culture the troubled relationship between Israelis and Arabs in Israel, the rising strength of religious hatred in the region and the world, and, at least for me, the most senseless yet persistent phenomenon that crops up every time open conflict between Israelis and Arabs breaks out, namely the own-goal, lethal, war journalism of the western media and the wave of hatred it predictably unleashes around the world.A brief preliminary discussion about the three types of unethical forms of war journalism. Patriotic war journalism: reporting as news your own side s war propaganda; Lethal war journalism: reporting as news a foreign belligerent s war propaganda; Own Goal war journalism: reporting your enemy s war propaganda as news.Modern, professional journalism considers patriotic war journalism as unethical, a prostitution of its high calling. Reporters, however, sometimes sympathize with one side in a foreign war, but Lethal war journalists systematically give credence to one belligerent s lethal narratives depicting the other side as an atrocious enemy. As for the third category of war journalism, it seems wholly improbable: why would anyone do something that stupid?And yet, in the 21st century, the land between the River and the Sea has given birth to a peculiarly virulent case of both lethal and own-goal journalism among Western news providers. From 2000-2002, a wave of the most ferocious and provocative lethal journalism in the history of modern, professional journalism came from Western journalists who ran the most dishonest Palestinian claims about Israeli evil-doing (targeting kids, massacring civilians) and ran them as news. When disproven, as they all were, these news outlets did nothing to correct their errors. In the Spring of 2002, when lethal journalists filled the global public sphere with reports of Israeli massacres in Jenin (just like the Nazis in Poland), progressives in Europe protested by wearing mock suicide belts in solidarity with an enemy about to attack theirs. Own-goal journalism scored a massive blow for an enemy whose viciousness was embodied in those very suicide belts these demonstrators, inebriated with virtue, wore so proudly.(NB: In 2021, just before the outbreak of the hostilities in Gaza, the Guardian did a review of its major errors over its 150-year history. While it did not list its appalling and unrepentant Jenin massacre coverage, it did list the editorial approval of the Balfour Declaration. In other words, it covered up its journalistic error about the news, and reversed a moral judgment call from 1917, on the basis of a view of Israel, inspired by that uncorrected lethal journalism.)Since then, western media have continued to practice this lethal and own-goal war journalism where Israel is concerned and beyond (e.g. the dismissal/banning of the Chinese Lab conspiracy theory origin to Covid). Here in the Middle East, it runs like this: run Palestinian (Hamas) propaganda lethal narratives about evil Israel as news; treat Israeli denials as propaganda; when proven wrong, move onto the next lethal narrative. This seemingly unbreakable pattern of press behavior in the 21st century, has given birth to one of the most grotesque (and profoundly inhumane) war strategies in the history of asymmetrical war: provoke the enemy to attack so as to maximize your own civilian casualties, exploiting the compassion of outsiders to get outsiders to hate your enemy as badly as you do.This cannibalistic strategy of inflicting damage on your own people to win a propaganda war against your enemy can only work if the outside media tell the story as you want it told: highlight your suffering, use your statistics, blame the enemy for disproportionate response, accuse them of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. This means that the foreign media must not report how you fire from the very midst of civilians, including the foreign media, not report when your stray bombs kill your own people, not report on the genocidal hatreds with which you stoke the conflict, and of course, since it takes considerable intimidation to get journalists to behave so unprofessionally, to deny categorically as nonsense that they are intimidated. The Arab and Middle East Journalists Association issued a similar set of guidelines for Arabs working for Western news outlets.One might have thought that the lessons learned around Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 might have produced some changes. The cooked statistics from the Ministry of Health, all corresponding to Hamas protocols for the news media; Hamas extensive intimidation of the media, domestic and foreign, and the categorical denials of the upper echelons of the Western media; the reports blaming Israel for Hamas killing children, and the violence those headlines engendered; demonstrations themed on Holocaust inversion the Israelis are the Nazis!“ the widespread hatred towards Jews all over Europe, including hours of mobs shouting death to the Jews! from European capitals. After that, one might have thought journalists would think twice before running Palestinian incitement as news.But instead, when the fighting broke out in mid-May 2021, the press immediately regressed to the lethal, own-goal pattern. As soon as the first strike occurred, Hamas published a casualty report which highlighted civilian and child casualties and the media ran with it: Israeli airstrikes on Gaza kill 24 people, including nine children, Palestinian officials say ran the headline in the Washington Post, with Reuters producing Pallywood B-Roll in the hospital to illustrate the claims. Not one mention that of these 24, 17 including six children, were killed by a stray Hamas rocket, information available at a pro-Palestinian website. According to the Meir Amit Center, whose statistics have proven far more accurate than the Gaza Health Ministry, in the first two days, Israel killed 58 people, of which 42 were identified combatants, a 3:1 ratio unheard of in urban warfare. More significantly, Hamas rockets killed over a fifth of the civilian dead in Gaza.Instead, people seized on the Health Ministry s statistics to denounce Israel s cruelty, from twitter to the finest news outlets, to the halls of congress. Ilhan Omar used an early Gaza Health Ministry statistic about 20 dead to accuse Israel of terrorism and call anyone who doesn t condemn these attacks during the week of Eid, unconscionable. (Imagine here the depressing effect on all this outrage of a headline that read: Hamas, trying to target Israeli civilians during Eid, hits its own: 16 dead, 8 children.) Instead, major news outlets like the BBC and CNN have been using journalists who thought #HitlerWasRight, to cover the conflict.And so it went: journalists using statistics from the â€œHealth Ministry,â€ obeying Hamas rules to inflate civilian and minimize combatant deaths as much as possible, offering headlines blaring Palestinian claims as if they were reliable. Any effort to be more precise and say Hamas-run Ministry of Health, ran into rapid opposition. All the lessons learned in 2014 about the dubious credibility of Hamas statistics reduced to the ambiguous tag line, Palestinians say. Human Rights NGOs hammered away with false statistics and distortions of international law to frame Israel as an apartheid state. Comedians ranted about how Israelis (who use bomb-shelters for civilians and rockets to shield them) suffered disproportionately less than Gazans, whose rulers use bomb-shelters for bombs and civilians as shields. Eight children in one strike, ranted John Oliver unaware that six were killed by Hamas rockets. Formerly first rate newspapers published cartoons hammering home the message, and Twitter suspended Faith Quintero s account for objecting. Google s Jewish employees signed a document calling on the information giant to use Palestinian terminology, and not to censor any criticism of Israel as hate-speech. YouTube blocked videos defending Israel and gave a green light to anti-Israel tirades, while Facebook shut down a page dedicated to prayers for Israel while giving free play to the politically correct version of antisemitism anti-Israel delirium. It was a massive and coordinated display of the Cult of the Occupation, in which the Israel s occupation is a unique evil (unlike say, the Chinese occupation of Tibet or Hong Kong, or their treatment of the Uyghurs), that demands immediate redress for the sake of world peace.Thus, even as â€œHuman Rights NGOsâ€, academics, and those supporting the Palestinians, waxed indignant over the terrible damage, Israelâ€™s 11-day Operation actually had a remarkably low number of deaths (10% of the 2014 seven-week totals), and a very high proportion of combatant deaths, of 3:1 (urban warfare norm, 1:3). When UNRWAâ€™s director admitted it on Israeli TV, he got mobbed by Palestinian propaganda channels, and relieved of his duties. Through the alchemy of online outrage, the better Israel performs in their atrocious battle with enemies who hide and fire from behind their own civilians, the more outraged the world becomes at the â€œslaughterâ€ that has to be worse than ever.Nor is this cost-free. As so often before in the last two decades, Western lethal journalism inspired a wave of hatred and violence. (Triumphalist Muslims in democracies are, in this, privileged; there are virtually no remaining Jews in the Arab world for Muslims there to attack.) In the early years, this happened mostly in Europe, starting with France, where on October 6, 2000, the cry of Death to the Jews! went up for the first time, followed by a wave of attacks on Jews, where already by 2002, the word was out to Jews, do not wear your kippah in public. By 2014, the genocidal cry had become banal in France and spread all over Europe.In places where the new pattern has been in place for two decades, like England, attacks on Jews quintupled, the vast majority (90%) of which specifically related to news from the Middle East, with the most dangerous aggressors British Muslims. And as in all the previous cases for the last two decades, the same media that eagerly report the lethal narratives, don t, or dramatically under-report, the aggressions they inspire, and promote the indifference with which a misinformed public respond to these aggressions. These attacks against Jews thatthis lethal war journalism against Israel inspires in Western democracies, reveal the own-goal nature of the enterprise. It literally gives followers of a cult of death permission to aggress. Those engaging in this demented anti-Israel invective, just like those cheering on Hamas in 2002, still donâ€™t seem to realize that the Jews are just the first victim of Jihadi hatreds. They don t realize that Free Palestine is a Jihadi war-cry and that, in the guise of liberation ideology, they ve invited Jihadi militias into their midst. Who could have imagined that 20 years after 9-11, Muslim gangs would roam the streets of the US, looking for Jews to beat up? And even as these gangs roam, the NYT splashes hate-inciting Palestinian propaganda across its front pages.If one steps back from this tale of Israeli settler-colonial evil victimizing innocent Palestinians and look at the Cult of the Occupation in action, a disturbing picture emerges. Hamas is also a cult, an organization dedicated to global Jihad, advocate of genocidal hatreds, theologizer of suicide terror, a literal cult of death. And true to its attitudes towards human life, it has developed a cannibalistic strategy where it turns its own people into sacrificial pawns in a propaganda war against its self-declared mortal enemy, Israel. It does this because the only way its leaders can survive attacking Israeli civilians (which they feel, periodically, compelled to do), is to have an outraged world intercede for a humanitarian cease fire, thereby saving them, strengthening the toxic masculinity in their political culture, and blackening Israel s face in the eyes of the world. They deem this victory well worth the price, in their long war of elimination. The more my people suffer, the better. If we kill our own children, that s fine as long as we can blame Israel. And yet, this terrible strategy can only work if the outside world does, indeed, blame Israel. Thus, the massive support that Westerners think they are showing for the poor Palestinian victims actually encourages their rulers to further victimize them. By not distinguishing between Palestinian rulers, who sacrifice their people for PR advantage on the one hand, and their sacrificial victims on the other, Western progressives become dupes who literally do the bidding of a movement that opposes everything they consider good. Lethal irony: those obsessed with ending the Israeli occupation have their minds colonized by a narrative that aims at their own destruction.Entomologists have identified a group of fungal and viral parasites that take over the brains of ants and force them to behave in ways that are at once self-destructive of the host, and highly beneficial to the reproduction of the parasite. In one viral case, cited by Daniel Dennett as an analogy for religion, it forces the ant up the blade of grass so a cow will eat it, and the virus reaches the stomach where it thrives. I think the better analogy here to human beliefs, is to certain apocalyptic, sacred memes (religious or secular), which literally â€œmountâ€ believers and ride them , drive them to deeds with no concern for the physical well-being of the zealots or their communities. In other words, both certain apocalyptic memes and certain physical parasites can colonize the minds of their hosts and, after it has served their purpose, dispose of that host.In this case, the progressive left seems to have ingested a key meme from the Jihadi death cult: the USA and Israel are the two Satans, apocalyptic enemies who must be destroyed for collective salvation. Western progressives seem unaware of the larger apocalyptic narrative of which this is a key element, the one that ends in Islamic world conquest and the annihilation of every value they hold sacred: empathy for the other, ecumenical diversity and toleration, equality and dignity for all, women s self-sovereignty, freedom from religious coercion, elimination of power-abuse.And yet, progressives and liberals seem powerless to resist this demon-meme as long as it expresses itself in the language of human rights. They are mesmerized by the imbalance of deaths. The honor brigades that pursue anyone who break ranks with the narrative (like the head of UNWRA), police the social media players the way the fungus exercises direct control over the ants muscles. Like the afflicted ants they resemble, these occupied minds clamp down with their mandibles on the subject of wicked Israel, waiting their moment to be devoured. Having repeated Jihadi propaganda, refrained from discussing Jihadi behavior and beliefs; hated the enemies that Jihadis hate, the people who are products of this discourse are utterly disarmed. They can literally hear moral madness and donate money to the cause. No matter how obvious the danger, they will not stop because they cannot even imagine that they might need to stop.And so, inexorably, we are drawn to our own destruction: Western and global institutions built by civil society, based on demotic principles of equality, dignity, and fairness â€“ courts, international assemblies, academia, journalism, our public sphere â€“ all corrupted by the colonizing meme, all, in widening gyres of dysfunctionality. The hatreds progressives so abhor take wing from within: Jew-hatred flourishes in their midst, driven by their Muslim progressive allies. Bullying online and in real life invades the public sphere; forces of order are paralyzed. The very national conversation becomes a clash of hatreds. People infected with the anti-Zionist meme, and the Holocaust inversion that feeds it, rise higher on their imaginary blade of grass by displaying their inflated moral indignation.In the case of one fungus, the parasite eventually grows into a bulbous capsule full of spores that rain down on the ants below, zombifying them in turn. In our case, what first invaded the Western press corps between the River and the Sea in 2000, has now, 20 years later, created a bulbous capsule of anti-Zionist spores that, in 2021, rains down all over the West, poisoning the paths of information with malevolent fake news, designed to exploit our compassion in order to spread hatred. And this suicidal, genocidal spore is carried by agents who claim to oppose hatred and love peace.The difference between us and the ants, is that we have choice, and our fungus is â€œjustâ€ a meme. We don t have to sacrifice ourselves to our stupidity. Thank you, Mark Ruffalo, for unlocking your moral mandibles. It s clearly not easy.Avant-hier j ai fait une conference zoom avec ELENET sur la guerre cognitive. Voici le video. Suit mon texte, plus long. J accepte de mes lecteurs dont le francais est superieure a la mienne, tout correction et suggestion.le théâtre de combat globale le moins réussit des démocraties aux 21e siècle.La guerre cognitive est le ressort des faibles dans une guerre asymétrique : comment convaincre celui qui est de loin le plus fort, de ne pas employer ses forces supérieures; elle est le verso de la propagande de guerre: d’un cote, comment inspirer ses propres guerriers à s’attaquer, à vouloir annihiler son ennemi; au verso, comment manipuler le plus fort pour qu’il permet au plus faible de se replacer, souvent au cœur de l’ennemi. La cheval de Troie est la première victoire attestée de guerre cognitive. Des Maccabées aux Viet Cong, la guerre cognitive était le but principal des guérillas: convaincre le vainqueur (impérialiste) de partir.La guerre cognitive la plus difficile, la plus audacieuse, et donc la plus complexe, est une guerre d’invasion de la part d’un petit groupe, plus primitif, d’envahir une société bien plus développée, en convaincant la culture plus sophistiquée de ne pas se défendre contre l’invasion.Au cours de la dernière génération, un mouvement apocalyptique que j’appelle «les Khalifators» a démarré une guerre extrêmement asymétrique de conquête de l’Occident. En 1980 (1400 depuis le Haj) une espérance millénariste a prit forme et corps en Islam: l’idée que dans ce nouveau siècle (1400-1500/1980-2076) le Khalifat Universelle, le but de l’Islam djihadist, sera etabli. Là où il y a le Dar al Harb (royaume de l’épée / la guerre, où les infidèles sont libres), il y aura le Dar al Islam (royaume de la soumission, de la Sharia)… cela voulait dire, surtout, la conquete de l’Occident. J’appelle ces adeptes d’une croyance qui, comme l’a dit le président des E-U Barak Obama, est «presque médiévale», des Khalifators.Pendant vingt ans, cette vision millénariste de la conquete du monde produit des mouvements de Khalifators, et parmi les Shi’ites (l’Iran de Khoumeini, le Hizbullah, l’armée du Mahdi) et parmi les Sunn’i (Ikwan, Hamas, Al Qaeda, Hizb-ut Tahrir). Nourrit par les visions d’un combat finale entre les bons (djihadis) et les mauvais (sionistes et croises), ces croyances se sont propagee au 20e siecle en adoptant les techniques de millenaristes apocalyptiques protestante aux E-U (pamphletes, enregistrement sur bande, exegese biblique), et au 21e siecle en exploitant les capacites exceptionnelles de l’internet. Parmi les plus avides de ce discours, le Hamas, était aussi les createurs de la nouvelle arme terrible du djihad moderne, un double blaspheme dans l’Islam traditionnel, mais un acte sacre dans le temps apocalyptique: les «operations martyre» mieux connu chez leurs victimes comme «terrorisme suicidaire».Recently the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem came out with a definition/declaration of antisemitism that challenged the now widely used definition/guidelines published ten years ago by IHRA. The original is perceived by many progressives as too restrictive of the right to criticize Israel, for some a blow to Palestinian rights to freedom of expression. it threatens free speech and academic freedom and constitutes an attack on both the Palestinian right to self-determination, and the struggle to democratise Israel.Van Leer, an institute that consistently supports the Palestinian narrative that the Nakbah of 1948 is comparable to the Holocaust of 1941-45, came out with a declaration they called the Jerusalem Declaration that attempted to redress the perceived restraints on legitimate criticism of Israel. (Out of lack of deference to their pretension, I will henceforth refer to it as the Van Leer Declaration.) The document was signed by over 200 scholars, many associated with some of the more extravagant forms of Holocaust inversion (the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews), but none quite so egregious as the 9-11 conspiracy friendly professor from Princeton, Richard Falk. Among the names of those well-known for the moral decency, we find Michael Walzer as a co-signer.Cary Nelson did a long and acute critique of the Van Leer Declaration, in which he cited Michael Walzer s presence among the signers as troubling, and Walzer responded. The following is a fisking of that response. I don t suppose it will convince Walzer to remove his name from the list, but at least, perhaps, steer clear of such initiatives in the future.Cary Nelson knows a lot more about antisemitism and about its various definitions than I do; many of the arguments I have made in print and in talks derive from his incisive critical workIsrael Denial. But I hope he is wrong to suggest that some people have signed on to the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) because I did. If not co-signed (most of the signers did not look like they needed coaxing), certainly, your name gives a level of respectability to the document that it dubiously deserves.As he says, JDA, like IHRA, can be misinterpreted. The couple of antisemitic signatories that he lists are our mis-interpreters; the organisers in Jerusalem should have rejected their signatures. But the rest of us, I assume, were working from our own experience and not from anyone elseâ€™s.But they did not reject their signatures. Have you inquired? Have you asked them to do so? Different experiences will produce different views on the three (not entirely different) definitions. We owe each other explanations for our own views; mutual engagement after that would be fine, but I hope that we can save our fiercer fire for the ongoing fights against Israel denial in universities, corporations, unions, and political parties here and abroad.I thought that JDA offered to create a little distance, nothing more, between antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine battles. I know that the two often overlap, and I am ready to call out attacks on Zionism and Israel that are substantively antisemitic. Alan Johnson s indictment of Labor Party antisemitism illustrated the overlap, and nothing in JDA would prevent me from recognising it. But antisemitism and Israel/Palestine donâ€™t always overlap, and there are strategic reasons for keeping a little distance between them. Nothing more there s the rub. For you, Michael, it s nothing more. For Richard Falk and others that little distance is actually a wedge through which to drive the very discourse we all find so troubling (what you refer to as Israel Denial, what I refer to as Holocaust Inversion). Here a relevant comment by Bari Weiss on the antisemitism denial of the French court of appeal (Cour de Cassation) that found that the murderer of an elderly Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, by a Muslim neighbor who chanted Qur anic verses as he tortured her (while the police stood outside her door, waiting for backup) could not be tried because he has smoked marijuana beforehand:We are suffering from a widespread social health epidemic and it is rooted in the cheapening of Jewish blood. If hatred of Jews can be justified as a misunderstanding or ignored as a mistake or played down as a slip of the tongue or waved away as just anti-Zionism, you can all but guarantee it will be. This is one of the main problems we need to address, if we are, today, to recognize and oppose the substantively antisemitic, namely, this widespread social health epidemic, the waving away of Jew hatred. To rephrase Weiss, you can be sure that nothing more than a little distance between anti-semitism and anti-zionism will have a truck (that s waiting in the wings) driven through it. Does this mean that there is no difference between the two? There certainly can be, just as there s a difference between the run-of the mill anti-judaism of supersessionist Christians and Muslims ( we re up because you Jews are down ), and the exterminationist, delirious, paranoid, exterminationist antisemitism of the Nazis and the Palestinian Jihadis. (In this sense, I think both definitions of antisemitism are way too vague and partake of one of the great lexical sins of the age, the conflation of racism and prejudice.)My activism is limited these days, but I have been involved in opposing BDS on several American university campuses and in one of the academic associations. I have found that very few of my opponents in these battles were antisemites â€” and calling them that was not a winning strategy. Addressing their arguments, defending the Zionist project: that was the way to win.That makes a lot of sense. If I understand, you are largely dealing with people who have been convinced by genuine antisemites people who want to wipe out any trace of Jewish sovereignty From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free! but are a) not themselves desirous of such a goal (think this is a [deprivation of Palestinian] human rights issue), and b) are unaware of the actual implications of the demopathic language in which the demand to destroy Jewish sovereignty has been framed. Your arguments win because they can clear that up, without offending and alienating those with whom you argue by calling them antisemites. Sound advice that, I think, many who signed the IHRA would agree with. Consider the argument for â€˜one state for all its citizensâ€™. That means the end of the Jewish state â€” an antisemitic position, right? But on the campuses I know, it isnâ€™t that. It is supported by a growing number of Jewishly committed students, responding to the sharp right turn of Israeli politics. And for American kids, a state for all its citizens is exactly what America is supposed to be. So the right question is not: Are we dealing with antisemites here? but rather, Why doesn t this argument apply to Israel/Palestine? It seems to me that the IHRA definition, for all its qualifications and conditional verbs, pushes us toward the wrong question.This again makes perfect sense. For cognitive egocentrist liberals, who can t imagine a world different from their own, the demopathic argument about Palestinian rights makes sense. For someone with the basic rudiments of both historical memory (what the diaspora was like before the advent of modern liberal societies/civic polities) and an awareness of how hard it is for some cultures to adopt and sustain the rules of these civic polities (e.g. the pervasive failure so far of any Arab or Muslim nation to do so), the argument is transparently antisemitic.But arguing that successfully depends on helping people understand that the sharp right turn of Israeli politics is a response to precisely the factors they ignore (or can t see), and similarly, that the source of the argument they are adopting comes from precisely the forces (Palestinian irredentism) that are turning Israeli voters to (what they perceive as) the right. (More on this below.)Some anti-Zionists may have signed on to the JDA because of their experience of being called antisemitic when they are sure that the label doesnâ€™t accurately describe their views. They have every right to contest the label, which is sometimes applied with due care and sometimes not. At the same time, the JDA leaves me plenty of room to condemn their anti-Zionism as the wrongheaded politics it often is, without looking too deeply into their motives or their feelings. As the first Queen Elizabeth wrote, I would not make a window into men s souls, to pinch them there. This is an admirable exegetical modesty on your part, but perhaps a bit too generous. We live, I m sure you agree, in an age when hypocrisy is rampant, when demopaths systematically use language human rights, equality, justice for all to which they have no commitment in principle, and use only in the pursuit of using democracy to destroy democracy . (This holds true for both those on the right and the left.) Since the Holocaust (lo! these 75 years), it has become taboo, politically incorrect, to openly embrace antisemitism, to which Hitler gave a very bad name. But since 2000 (lo! these 20 years), anti-Zionism has become a popular substitute (a post-Holocaust avatar of) antisemitism, and the extensive denial of that phenomenon what David Hirsh calls the Livingstone Formulation in which any complaint about anti-Zionism (comparison with Nazis, demonization, use of classic memes like blood libels) gets airily dismissed as trying to silence legitimate criticism of Israel) has played a deeply corrosive role in debasing current public discourse and funneling waves of vicious Jew-hatred into the mainstream. Your renunciation of concern with motives (which, when it comes to generously accepting the protestations of interlocutors, you don t renounce) actually deprives you and those who follow you of critical analytic tools.Denying the Jewish right to political self-determination is an old Jewish position, defended within historical memory by Orthodox and Reform Jews. That, of course, was before the Holocaust, whose historic shadow casts grave doubt on those positions. As the saying about European Jews in the late 1930s goes: the pessimists went to Palestine, the optimists to Auschwitz. There are today Jewish defenders of the Diaspora, who believe that the centuries of statelessness have been a kind of moral education â€” and that we are now a post-Westphalian people, too good to manage the brutalities that sovereignty requires (or certain to manage them badly). We should therefore settle for something less than sovereignty in the Middle East, which would actually be, from a moral standpoint, something better. You present this as a serious moral position. Presumably when confronted with it, you point out the moral perfectionism involved, the deeply contemptuous attitude towards gentiles (sovereignty with all its dirtiness is for goyim), the folly of being a post-Westphalian in a neighborhood where the neighbors are pre-Westphalian (indeed are in their own thirty years war right now). If Jews want to adopt such positions in search of their purity, presumably they wouldn t dream of demanding such disarmament from fellow Jews who do not share their suicidal tendencies. I know some non-Jews who have adopted this position, perhaps not entirely in good faith â€” but who knows? Yes who knows? But who doesn t probe to find out? It s not like the underlying motives are so buried that they can t be detected. I m not saying we should put every anti-Zionist before an inquisitorial process and declare them antisemites when they fail the test. (See below)So far as I know, none of these positions has found a place in the debates about the meaning of antisemitism which they would surely complicate. I think that diasporism derives from a radical misunderstanding of Jewish history. Talking about antisemitism or its Jewish version, self-hate, wouldn t be helpful.The complications brought on by these positions do not strike me as either impossible to resolve (on a case by case basis), nor impossible to address substantively (something, as you point out, Cary Nelson has done exceptionally thoroughly and well). The issue of the radical misunderstanding if Jewish history embodied in (say Judith Butler s) diasporism we never had it so good is intimately related to the question of Jew hatred. Obviously, many well-intentioned progressives shouldn t be accused of either antisemitism of self-hatred just because they are naive. But at the same time and here I think the IHRA definition is more helpful they need to be confronted with the dangerous and troubling overlap between their well-intended moral perfectionism and the toxic Jew-hatred of those driving the goal of eliminating Jewish sovereignty (BDS).Obviously, it is inappropriate to accuse Jews of self-hatred because of their moral aspirations and question their sincerity. But, as my father (z l) used to say, sincerity is the cheapest of virtues. And if we don t want to confront those who aggressively pursue their moral aspirations and vigorously denounce Jews who dare to defend themselves, at least shouldn t we ask them how much of their motivation comes from shame, how much their moral perfectionism reflects a moral narcissism more concerned with how their actions make them look in their own eyes and those of their honor-group, rather than the consequences of those actions on those for whom one is allegedly concerned and on whose behalf one claims to act.Nothing in the IHRA definition demands that such progressives, however aggressive they are in their naivete, be accused of antisemitism. But it does permit one to ask why they are in bed with them. After all, they are in favor of introspection and self criticism, no? Or is that only for thee and not for me?The current debate also hasn t focused on forms of antisemitism that have nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. In the US today, the greatest threat to Jewish life and limb comes from the advocates of replacement theory which holds that the Jews, through the agency of HIAS, are bringing Mexicans and Muslims into the country in order to replace, or displace, White Christian Americans. This theory inspired the Charlestown marchers and the murderous attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue, and it now has a foothold in the Republican Party. We would all agree that this is antisemitism, but because we are so focused on the arguments about when and whether anti-Zionism crosses the line, it hasn t gotten the attention it deserves.1) The idea that the marchers in Charlestown and the murderer in Pittsburgh represent the major threat to Jews when such discourse is at the very margins of the public sphere, when, on the contrary, the anti-Zionists of BDS quality play prominent roles in our campus discussions, college and school curricula, mainstream media outlets, policy discussions, and now in the democratic party, strikes me as a very strange claim.2) We need to distinguish between the replacement theory of which you speak, with its violent paranoid forms on the one hand, and people who disagree with progressive Democrats who openly embrace the ambition of bringing in enough immigrants to tip the balance against what they view as systemically racist whites. If by distance you mean not jumping on people as antisemites before sounding them out I could not agree more. If, as the Van Leer declaration does, you mean allowing the kind of vicious demonizing of Israel under the guise of human rights (apartheid accusations from people who aspire to install an apartheid regime, accusations of moral depravity from people who embrace suicide terror), then I couldn t disagree more.Note: For more of an argument along these lines, please see my article Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Fathom.The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) will hold its next conference, as usual at the Keystone Marriot just over the river from Georgetown DC, this coming year on November 13-15. Hopefully it will be live.ÂASMEA was created in 2007 as a counter to MESA s (Middle East Studies Association) increasing politicization . To ASMEA s chagrin, MESA s politicized scholarship has dominated the area-studies to this day (certainly as measured in control of research resources and access to the public), as well as fed the culture wars on campus and beyond in the form of Apartheid Weeks and BDS.As such, the anti-Orientalism of post-colonial studies has played an important role in the 21st century response of Western thought leaders to the challenges from the regions involved, not least, to Global Jihad.Now, more than a decade after the activist takeover of MESA, it seems useful to make MESA itself the topic of study, and assess the impact of post-colonial studies on policy thinking, and thereby on global dynamics. In this meta-MENA, we look at the studies themselves as a phenomenon to be studied.Post-colonialism s impact on area and policy studiesAdvocacy and Narrative Journalism in the Middle EastPeace Studies and Spoilers: Oslo and AfterHuman Rights discourse in Lawfare and other forms of cognitive warfareÂAcademic vs. Think-TankJihad studiesNaming the War on Terror: post-colonial disorientationsCancel Culture and the Middle-Easternization of Western AcademiaBDS: importing to the West the Arab war on IsraelJihadi Cognitive WarfareHolocaust Inversion Narratives, Intersectionality and Critical Race TheoryThe New (post 2000) AntisemitismÂActivist Academics contribution to the corpus of knowledgeEt ceteraThe ASMEA Conference 2021 presents an alternative voice to that of MESA with an opportunity to contribute to this field of research. We suggest focusing, at least initially, on some of the more egregious cases of a failure to adequately inform the larger Western culture to which it owed reliable information, about the dynamics of the region that was MESA s professional topic.This could be an important contribution to sound thinking in the post-corona era. Please send abstract and a CV to [email protected]. If someone wants to apply, the deadline for the grants is earlier than the call for general proposals (April 30).The Jerusalem Post published an oped of mine on the Al Durah affair. Here it is, unedited, with links:Today is the 20th anniversary of the most disastrous event to occur in the year 2000, an event which has cast a long shadow over the unhappy early decades of a troubled new millennium. On this day twenty years ago, a Palestinian cameraman clumsily filmed what he claimed was footage of a boy under fire and killed by Israelis, and a French-Israeli journalist edited the brief fragments (cutting the last contradictory scene) and broadcast the accompanying narrative on France2. The image of Muhammad al Durah under fire, via the narrative that the IDF had targeted him, became the global symbol of Palestinian suffering at the hand of Israeli cruelty. It rapidly became an â€œicon of hatred,â€ that has had a greater immediate and long-term effect on the new century/millennium than any other such vehicle of incitement.A cry arose in the Umma, for some of pain, for some of rage, but for all, a clear sign that the Infidel, led by the twin Satans Israel and USA, were making war on Muslims. Indeed, no single event so far, has done more to arouse the spirit of Jihad against the West than this footage, which, as Bin Laden quickly pointed out in his recruiting video for global Jihad, demanded vengeance against al Yahood and their allies. Vengeance justified suicide attacks on civilians (two previously â€œforbiddenâ€ practices). The sentiment so resonated, that even â€œconservativeâ€ al Azhar had to yield before the sanctification of their combination â€“ martyrdom operations. While itself not apocalyptic, the al Durah icon fed an apocalyptic Jihadi narrative: to #GenerationCaliphate Israel was the Dajjal (Antichrist).The West followed suit. Lethal journalists like Robert Fisk quickly affirmed the charge of deliberate murder. Where before such comparisons were considered ugly if not worse, now comparing Israel to the Nazis became common. A prominent French news anchor, speaking for many, declared that al Durah â€œerased, replaced the image of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto.â€ It was a new, post-modern â€œreplacement narrative.â€ Instead of Christians or Muslims replacing Israel as the true chosen people, it was the former chosen people replacing the Nazis, and the poor Palestinian victim, suffering the fate of the Jews. The progressive refrain: â€œIsrael has lost the moral high ground.â€ Nobel Peace Prize winners, politicians, diplomats, award-winning playwrites and journalists, prominent academics, UN officials, Jews and non-Jews, all joined in the chorus, aligning with the Jihadi apocalyptic narrative: Israel the new Nazi was the secular Antichrist.Any effort to resist, for example to argue that the France2 footage of al Durah was staged, indeed a cheap fake, was cruel indifference to Palestinian suffering, â€œblaming the victim,â€ undermining a â€œhigher truth.â€ Israeli journalists like Bet Michaeli insisted â€œ100% the Israelis killed him,â€ and Larry Derfner mocked those who objected as conspiracy theorists. Even James Fallows, who affirmed that the Israelis did not shoot the father and son, could not believe that it was staged, since surely someone would have blown the whistle. Israeli spokespeople spurned anyone who believed such a ridiculous conspiracy. The Kuperwasser commissionâ€™s 2013 study, like so many other attempts to draw attention to the most tragic aspect of the affair, it failedâ€¦ even among most Israeli journalists.Al Durah justified terror attacks on Israel in the minds of both Muslims and non-Jews, especially Europeans. â€œWhat choice do they have?â€ progressives responded when Palestinians targeted Israel civilians. They were merely resisting, and the violence of their desperate protests â€“ blowing up pizzerias filled with schoolkids and their grandparents in downtown Jerusalem for example â€“ was taken as â€œa measure of Israel guilt.â€ At the height of the suicide terror campaign, siding with the Palestinians was a â€œlitmus test of liberal credentials.â€ Suggesting this heinous violence was genocidal aspiration, not state-deprived desperation was a ticket to cancelation.When the Western legacy media spread the meme of the â€œJenin massacreâ€ in April 2002, everything the Palestinians had claimed about al Durah â€“ IDF intentionally murders children â€“ buttressed new and equally dishonest claims of mass executions of hundreds and thousands. For weeks, even after given access to the camp, a credulous legacy media published these claims as news. Angry protests in the West accused Israel of genocide and a large plurality of Europeans believed it. â€œPoliticians like Livingstone, Gallaway and Corbyn, pacifist academics like Judith Butler, openly sided with Hamas despite its openly espousing genocide. As Irwin Cotler noted that Israel is the only country that is at once the object of threats of genocide and accused of committing it.Intentionally or not, by conveying the al Durah lethal narrative and its derivatives, by correcting itself only by falling silent about past mistakes, by continuing to trust the voices of those who first made the accusations, by rejecting Israeli objections as propaganda, by promoting the images of Palestinian suffering every time the IDF clashed with Jihadis, by not or belatedly reporting the repeated cases where Hamas rockets killed Gazan children, nor the genocidal, Nazi-like propaganda of Hamas and the PA, the Western legacy media constituted, one of the most potent weapons in the cognitive war Caliphaters waged against the West. It was a matter of faith in the West not to talk about â€œradical Islamâ€ because it might affirm the Jihadi recruiting narrative of a â€œclash of civilizations.â€ But that was nothing compared to the way the the al Durah footage, and all the subsequent lethal narratives of the Israelis constantly killing innocent Muslims inflamed that â€œnarrative.â€The al Durah icon was the first successful blood libel in the West since the Nazis rode their ecumenical Jew-hatred to mega-death for all in 1930s and 40s. Unlike earlier versions, this was spread by a Jew and carried by the professional news media, and its primary impact was on progressive, leftist circles, giving birth to a â€œnew antisemitismâ€ in its 21st century avatar, eliminationist â€œanti-Zionism.â€ Todayâ€™s rising tide of Jew-hatred from all directions, right, left, Muslim, Christian, secular, knowing, unknowing, starts on September 30, 2000.I was 11 when I first watched the footage. Mohamed Dura shielded by his dad from Israeli bullets. One moment they were pleading for their lives, the next they were dead. He was 12, we belonged to the same generation. The horror in his eyes still shakes me to my core 20 yrs later.Others have never heard of it thanks to a news media which, when confronted with their errors about Israel, prefers to drop the story. Whether we know it or not, those of us entering this very grim-looking third decade of the 21st century, are the inheritors of this al-Durah-triggered new wave of Jew-hatred and its accompaniments â€“ fake news, conspiracy theory, and violence.While many consider this episode history, it has a particularly sharp meaning in 2020, year of the first Abrahamic accords. While the al Durah libel did terrible damage to both Israelâ€™s reputation, and to a morally disoriented West, by far its greatest victim was the Arab and Muslim world, who were driven by their newsmediaâ€™s constant replaying of this horrendous libel into the arms of the suicidal jihadis. For those moderates today, realizing that Israel is not their enemy but potentially an ally in making life better for their people, reconsidering the al Durah affair offers a particularly valuable lead. As some honest Arab journalists point out, #FakeNews is something of an Arab specialty, and for far too long, public opinion has been manipulated by dishonest and malevolent actors masquerading as journalists. In the spirit of self-criticism, reappraising this incident could contribute immensely, both to Arab-Israeli relations, and to Arab journalistic integrity. Who knows, maybe all those Westerner journalists who think itâ€™s a silly conspiracy theory, will learn from their Arab colleagues.Richard Landes is an historian living in Jerusalem. Author of Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, and editor of a book on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Paranoid Apocalypse, he is currently preparing for publication his book on the disastrous opening years of the 21st century: Stupidity Matters: A Medievalist Guide to the 21st Century. He blogs at The Augean Stables, tweets at @richard_landes, and can be reached at [email protected]On the 20th anniversary of the day Charles Enderlin poisoned the world with the first blood libel to succeed in the West since the Nazis, here is a reading of the first chapter of my book, Stupidity Matters: A Medievalist Guide to the 21st Century (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021)Levinas: hospitality is the deconstruction of the self to embrace the other.Fukuyama writes about the shift from a culture lacking in empathy to one in which empathy breaks down class and caste barriers, and the development of democracy:Tocqueville, noting the rise of compassion already when writing Democracy in America in the 1830s, quotes a letter written in 1675 by Mme. de SÃ©vignÃ© to her daughter, in which she calmly describes watching a fiddler broken on a wheel for stealing some paper, and then being quartered after death (i.e., his body cut into four pieces) with his limbs exposed at the four corners of the city. Tocqueville, amazed that she speaks of this as lightly as she discusses the weather, attributes the softening of customs that had occurred since then to the rise of equality. Democracy breaks down the walls that had earlier divided social classes, walls which prevented educated and sensitive people like Mme. de SÃ©vignÃ© from even recognizing the fiddler as a fellow human being. Today, our compassion extends not only to lower classes of human beings, but to the higher animals as well. (The End of History, p. 261)In To Kill a Mockingbird when the lawyer gets people to flip the identity of the victim, he did it along a racial line. Hari Krisna did it on a cosmic plane in which not only tribal but even individual identities dissolve in the oceanic feeling of oneness. John Lennon was channeling that when he composed Imagine.This radical act of empathy, throws into complete turmoil the certainties of the us-them world that have informed human calculations for millennia if not hundreds of millennia. Their pleasure our sorrow (envy), their suffering our joy (Schadenfreude), and the political axiom: rule or be ruled.But with the woke, this senseless world of zero-sum competition yields to the positive-sum embrace: everyone s a winner. Not: I can only win if you lose , but: We can both, all win! At its core, this sense of cosmic solidarity with all humans, indeed with all creatures, is existentially a religious experience that turns the suspected hostile other into an unimpeded extension of the self. It is so compelling that people will sacrifice a great deal of their mimetic desires and even their survival instincts, in order to cleave to it. This was certainly a central feature of the 1960s, especially the American combination of Woodstock, Communes, Eastern religions, sex, drugs and rock and roll. The empathic revolution. We all win when we are all one. To paraphrase Pogo, the woke says: We have met the enemy, and it is the guys among us who say â€œus,â€ and calculate victories on the back of others.The following is from my book ms: They re so Smart cause we re so Stupid: A Medievalist s Guide to the 21st Century. It is part of a chapter on the Jenin Massacre and concerns the self-justification of Janine de Giovanni to documentary-maker Martin Himmel (Jenin: Massacring the Truth) for her claim about that what she saw in Jenin â€œRarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.â€ When it became clear that no massacre had occurred at Jenin, some papers and individual journalists, like Phil Reeves, ran apologies for the errors of their coverage after the UN came out with its report of fifty plus dead.[1] Others, often the most egregious offenders, like the Guardian, refused outright to acknowledge the error, even a decade later.[2] Martin Himmel, with one of the soldiers from Jenin, tried to track down some of the British pressâ€™s most lethal journalists, and found himself either refused audience, or, when granted interviews, dismissed with more misinformation.[3] The prize for dishonest response to being caught engaging in lethal journalism goes to Janine di Giovanni, whose claim to fame was writing in the London Times (possibly Britainâ€™s most high-minded paper), â€œRarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.â€[6] Note how both remarks involve attributing (malevolent) motive: â€œdeliberateâ€¦ disrespect.â€ Given the massive and savage destruction of Bosnia, Chechnya et al., where massacres of civilians and mass rape of women ran into the thousands and tens of thousands, where whole cities were devastated, as compared to five square blocks of a refugee camp, it is hard to imagine a more dishonest, personal â€œtestimony.â€ And anyone among her readers who wanted to put Israel, that nation of sovereign Jews, in the gutter of Nazi-like behavior, could avail themselves readily of her false â€œwitnessâ€ as a journalist. Unlike A.N. Wilson of â€œgenocideâ€ fame at theEvening Standard,[7]and the Guardianâ€™s team (Susannne Goldenberg, Peter Beaumont, Seumas Milne,Brian Whitacker, and Chris McGreal), all of whom declined to be interviewed byHimmel, Janine, completely unrepentant, had the immodesty to think she coulddefend herself. In so doing, she gives us a striking profile of a lethaljournalist â€“ how one thinks about his or her work, subjects, critics, evenselfâ€¦ None of it is particularly attractive, much of it very damaging to aprofession with alleged ethical standards. â€œWeâ€™re not naÃ¯ve,â€ Di Giovanni insists, notrealizing that the alternative to naÃ¯ve in this case, is maliciously dishonest.â€œWell into 15 years of covering war, we [I and my colleagues] were horrified,really horrified. The level of destruction was quite unnecessary, to level it,to make it look like a football pitch was shocking,â€ she explained, as if sheknew the military issues that made the IDFâ€™s choices â€œunnecessary,â€ and as ifso tightly contained an area of destruction were worse than the vast,indiscriminate, destruction she had been seeing for 15 years. â€œThey were hidingsomething,â€ she asserts confidently, clinging to the massacre-meme that theIsraelis had buried the bodies of those they had executed.[8]â€œWhat happened at Jenin was an outrage and a violation of all human rights,â€she asserts, though she did admit that the Israelis had not committed amassacre. Asked how she felt about apologizing for herown coverage, she responds authoritatively, â€œI would never do that. I standcompletely by what I write.â€ Whether this is meant as a normative statement (myimpression), or specifically about Jenin, it bespeaks a remarkable attitudetoward self-criticism on the part of an alleged journalist. Not only is itobvious to her that she has done nothing wrong, it is equally obvious thatIsrael has committed heinous war crimes. For her, the only significantdifference between the Serbs, the Hutus, and the Israelis is that when it cameto the first two, war criminals were condemned, but â€œthe Israelis never are,â€as if everyone knows theyâ€™re guilty but they always get away with it. Asked to explain how 56 dead in three weeks ofurban warfare can be worse than Chechnia and Bosnia, where a third of amillion, primarily civilians, died, Di Giovanni first takes refuge behind herpersonal experience â€“ â€œHave you been to Chechnya?â€ â€“ then resorts to thestunningly naÃ¯ve: Was it [my comparison] disproportionate? Well Iâ€™ve been to all those places, and Iâ€™ve been to Jenin, and I donâ€™tâ€¦ I still really believe that one human life is one human lifeâ€¦ so I think in a senseâ€¦ [discusses the thousands and thousands massacred by the Hutu]â€¦ horror is horror, injustice is injustice, human rights abuse is human rights abuse.[9]This is not the seasoned voice of a serious warcorrespondent, who understands the terrible truth of triage, of a journalistwho â€œbears [honest] witnessâ€ to her time. Rather, it is the sophomoric voice ofthe â€œevery life is preciousâ€ meme, of the most empathic of progressives livingin a civil society bubble of non-violence and safe-spaces. Having thusundermined her repeatedly invoked â€œIâ€™ve been around and let me tell youâ€¦â€claim, Di Giovanni then switches to a â€œridiculousâ€ moral equivalence, in whichpainfully avoided collateral damage is equated with deliberate genocide because in both cases, people died.[10]As Martin Sieff comments to Himmel, â€œWhere were these people coming from? Whatdid they see and what did they imagine they were seeing?â€Time and time again Sharon has been excused for massive human rights violationsâ€¦ I could go on and on, and itâ€™s not just that theyâ€™re excused from it, but itâ€™s very rarely accurately reportedâ€¦ in America, in North Americaâ€¦ [where] the Zionist Lobby is much stronger than in Europe.Consider this double imprint of the lethaljournalistâ€™s attitude. First, the target has been acquired: Sharon and the IDFare a priori guilty, as bad as the worst, and need to be brought beforejustice. Therefore, as a journalist, she is completely justified in comparingthe IDF to the Hutus and Serbs, in order to right that standing â€˜injustice.â€™Second, like those who attack the press for being too pro-Zionist,[11]she complains that not enough Palestinian claims get passed on as news, andthat American journalists, less willing to be lethal journalists and turn onIsrael, are less free.[12]How can we get Sharon and the IDF punished for their crimes, if not enough ofthese â€œmassive human rights violationsâ€ get reported?[13]But perhaps her most telling attitude wastowards the Israeli soldier who had come with Himmel. Asked to address her self-justificationto the soldier before her, she responded, â€œI donâ€™t want to talk to him. Infact, I donâ€™t even want him in the room when Iâ€™m talking.â€ Then turning toHimmel, she asks, â€œAre you Israeli? Are you Jewish?â€ In other words, the â€œhumanrightsâ€ advocacy journalist has so completely bought the Palestinian narrativethat she will not even consider interacting with an Israeli â€œwar criminal.â€[14]As she herself insists, there is no way that she might be wrong and he might beright. Pretty tribal for a progressive.In this, she sheds light on David Blairâ€™s falsememory that he would have reported it, had the Israelis made their case, andKuperwasserâ€™s observation: these journalists were not listening to Israelis(unless they confirmed their beliefs). They always-already considered themâ€œbeyond the pale.â€[15]The question about Himmelâ€™s Jewishness reflects, on the one hand, thewidespread attitude that â€œonly a Jew would defend Israel,â€[16]and on the other, a treatment of another human being that, were it addressed toany other group, would readily be called racism.[17]None of this hurt De Giovanniâ€™s career. Shewent on to positions in Newsweek and Vogue, where she hasrepeated her self-justification about Jenin.[18]She even gave a talk in which she advised aspiring journalists on how to do thejob professionally.[19]Here the lethal journalist has cleaned up her act (aside from warmlyrecommending Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as reliable sources).You have to be extremely careful and check stories, especially of massacresâ€¦ The reader will always be able to tell if you have biasâ€¦ footage is often not reliableâ€¦ Be very careful when interviewingâ€¦ you have to maintain distance without giving witnesses impression you donâ€™t trust themâ€¦ you need to be objective. I try not to be for one side of the other, but sometimes itâ€™s very hard when someone is the victim of state terrorâ€¦ Thereâ€™s no need to exaggerate, just tell the storyâ€¦ Youâ€™re not a prosecutorâ€¦ [but] an objective writer, above, trying to tell it.The only connection here to her Jenin lethal journalism is the semi-admission of bias â€œwhen someone is the victim of state terror.â€ In other words, in Jenin, for example, she sided against Israel which was, in her and Human Rights Watchâ€™s PoMo-PoCo victimology book, committing â€œstate terror,â€ the worst of all.[20] Otherwise, she advocates the kind of journalism that she decidedly did not practice at Jenin. No wonder the talk is so flat and lacking in conviction. Pretending to be an objective reporter, above it all, trying to tell it like it isâ€¦ is not Janineâ€™s passion.[2] â€œTruth-Seekingin Jenin,â€ Guardian, August 2, 2002;on the ten-yearretrospective, see above n. 25. [3] Himmel, â€œChallenging the British Media,â€ Jenin:Massacring the Truth. [5] Conversation with (rtd) General YossiKuperwasser, 2006.[8] A theme that recurs in Palestinian testimonyover and again in Jenin, Jenin (see below).[9] Himmel, Jenin, â€œComparing Jenin withother Conflict,â€ *** [10] Compare this thinking with the technicalprevarication of the Human Rights Watch official explaining how what Israeldoes (collateral damage) is a war-crime but what Hamas does (suicide terror) isnot, despite the key factor being intent: â€œ***.â€[12] This is the complaint not only of theacademics who defend the lethal journalists (Falk and Philo), but of thePalestinians themselves: Abo Gali complains to Rehov that the information doesnot flow as it should (Route de Jenine, **:**).[13] On the political agenda of lethal journalists,see ibid, n. 47. For the example of a Harvard Student excoriating the US pressfor failing to report the massacre as luridly as the European press, see above,n. 27.[14] Just as the crowd of Israeli admirers of Muhammad Bakri considered David Zangen a war criminal when he tried to defend the IDF operation (below).[15] For an in-depth analysis of this syndrome, seeRobin Shepherd, A State Beyond the Pale,â€ [16] See French consulâ€™s remark to me; thejournalist to the French Jewish teacher I, 1, n. **.[17] See Richard Ingrams, a columnist for theObserver, who refuses to read letters from Jews about the Middle East, andwants that Jewish journalists to declare their racial origins when writing onIsrael. Julie Burchill, â€œGood,Bad and Ugly,â€ Guardian, November 29, 2003. Can one imaginesuch a demand from Muslims? Ha aretz Editorial Board Stupidity marches onEditorialHaâ€™aretz Nov. 10th The death of Mohammed al Dura, the 12-year-old boy who was caught with his father in cross fire between Palestinians and Israel Defense Forces soldiers at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip, was the event which epitomized the character of the conflict in the territories for many people: A confrontation between stone-throwing boys and armed soldiers who did not hesitate to use their weapons. In the course of these events, dozens of other boys have also been killed by IDF fire, and many have suffered head and chest wounds. One can accuse the Palestinians of failing to stop children from taking part in violent incidents. One can also be indignant over the use of child fighters and of the exploitation of their injuries and deaths for propaganda purposes. However, the IDF must take action to stop killing a high number of young people. Israel should not accept the use of lethal fire when it is not for self-defense purposes. The IDF, too, understands the impact on Israel s image of the list of those killed in the conflict. This is apparently the basis for the inquiry which Southern Commander Major General Yom Tov Samia ordered into the death of Mohammed al Dura. Anat Cygielman s investigative report (Ha aretz, November 7) reveals that the IDF has asked two civilians, physicist Nahum Shahaf and engineer Yosef Duriel, to try and reconstruct the incident. These people, who have volunteered their services, had their own preconceived ideas about the reason why al Dura was killed. In interviews to the media, Duriel contended that it was a premeditated incident staged by the Palestinians with the participation of the father, the television cameraman and Palestinian shooters. Shahaf admits that he shares Duriel s view, but is convinced Duriel made a tactical error in talking to the media. Duriel has been duly removed from the investigative committee, but Shahaf, who continues to serve on the committee, has not bothered to consult ballistics experts. Nor has he depended on the testimony of the soldiers or of the television crew. It is hard to describe in mild terms the stupidity of this bizarre investigation. The circumstances of al Dura s death raise questions that definitely require a response. The IDF was quick to apologize at the time, without conducting an investigation as to whether the youth was killed by IDF fire. No Israeli institution bothered to set up an independent, expert investigation when this was possible. Now it is clear that the chances of getting to the truth of who shot the youth have been lost. With it, the belief in an independent IDF investigation has also been lost. The fact that an organized body like the IDF, with its vast resources, undertook such an amateurish investigation almost a pirate endeavor on such a sensitive issue, is shocking and worrying. Is this the level of management of the head of the southern command? Where was the chief of staff? Why didn t the political echelons the defense minister, for example demand that a proper investigation be conducted? Even if the investigation of the death of al Dura has gone badly wrong, top brass in the IDF as well as the political echelon which oversees the army must take into account the mounting significance of the growing list of youthful victims on the Palestinian side. It is their duty to find a solution that will decrease or even prevent this phenomenon. Haaretz. November 7, 2000. Â After the demonstration by Shahaf and Duriel, proving that the fire that allegedly killed Muhammad al Durah could not have come from the Israeli camp, Haaretz cub reporter, with the encouragement of her boss, Shmuel Rosner, took apart the claims of the investigation. NB: At no point does the author let the reader know what the investigation s evidence for their minimal conclusion (ie IDF fire could not have a) killed the boy, and b) produced the bullet holes in the wall). Similar technique used by Bob Simon at CBS (to which she refers anonymously) and the Haaretz editorial board a couple of weeks later. IDF keeps shooting itself in the foot Army efforts to interest journalists in a dubious probe of the al Dura case backfires Anat CygielmanOn Monday, October 23 the IDF staged a re-enactment of the October 1 [sic] gun battle at Netzarim junction in which 12-year-old Mohammed al Dura was killed. Blocks were piled up at one of the army s firing ranges in the south, to simulate the wall where the boy and his father Jamal al Dura were pinned. A concrete barrel was brought in, to represent the one behind which the father and son crouched. Soldiers sent to the firing range by the IDF Southern Commander, Major General Yom Tov Samia, stood on top of a dirt embankment and fired shots at the wall and barrel, using a variety of different weapons. Two Israeli citizens took part in the re-enactment Nahum Shahaf, a physicist, and Yosef Duriel, an engineer. A film crew from the prestigious American news program 60 Minutes was there, having been given exclusive rights to film the replay of the Dura shooting. In the past two weeks a number of reports have circulated about new IDF findings in its investigation of the killing at Netzarim. These reports have stirred considerable interest in Israel and elsewhere, because for the Palestinians, the death of Mohammed al Dura captured by a French television crew has become the symbol of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The dramatic footage of his death has been seen in every corner of the world. Palestinian television runs an edited version pictures of an IDF soldier shooting have been spliced into the original footage. Poignant photographs of the father and son have been plastered along the sides of roads throughout the West Bank. The Cairo newspaper Akbar al Yom has reported that the city authorities have decided to name the street where the Israeli embassy is located after Mohammed al Dura. Shortly after the boy s death, the IDF acknowledged there was a high probability that IDF gunfire ended his young life and, speaking for the IDF, Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Ya alon expressed his sorrow over the tragedy. Assuming that the damage to Israel s reputation was irreversible, and knowing it faced the realities of more children dying, the IDF was inclined to put the al Dura matter to rest. However, senior officers in the Southern Command were bitter about Israel s hasty decision to accept responsibility for the death. As days passed, reports circulated that they were increasingly convinced IDF soldiers did not shoot and kill the boy. Shahaf and Duriel also believed the matter had been settled too quickly. Two days after the incident, Duriel wrote in Ha aretz: The IDF spokesman deserves a prize for stupidity Ten minutes after the incident a normal spokesman for a normal army would have released a categorically formulated statement saying that provocateurs opened fire against IDF soldiers, behind the back of a child, and made sure he would be killed in front of cameras; and after the boy, they killed the ambulance driver who tried to save him. All this was done to score propaganda points by depicting murderous behavior on the part of IDF soldiers. After Ha aretz published these remarks, Shahaf phoned Duriel and suggested they investigate whether it was necessarily true that IDF soldiers shot the boy. The two were acquainted they met when they jointly reviewed Shahaf s findings on an altogether different matter, the Rabin assassination. Shahaf claims to have in his possession dramatic photographs which change the picture with respect to Yigal Amir s involvement in the murder. Shahaf and Duriel discussed ways of disseminating these Rabin assassination materials. With regard to Mohammed al Dura, the pair studied the angle of the shots fired by IDF men and concluded that the claims of the boy being killed by Israeli army bullets are dubious. Shahaf, who says he is a reservist in an intelligence division that deals with visual material, left a number of messages for Southern Commander Samia, asking for a meeting. He made his initial call to the major general after learning from the media that the IDF planned to demolish structures around the Netzarim junction. He warned against erasing physical evidence at the site such as the wall and concrete barrel, key pieces of evidence he wanted preserved. He says that when Samia got back to him, it was too late to effect such evidence preservation measures. But anyway, the Southern Commander agreed to meet Shahaf and Duriel and this took place, Duriel says, on October 19. The two went over their calculations with the IDF major general and urged him to initiate a review. They offered their professional services, gratis. Shahaf emphasizes this was designed as an impartial inquiry. He says Samia accepted his terms as he put it to Samia, nobody in the army can intervene in my activity and analysis. Samia has administrative responsibility, and I have responsibility for carrying out the project. I do the tests, I decide who should be involved in them. The army only helps me when I need assistance. Shahaf adds that he agreed to one caveat on his independent authority: The IDF decides when to release the findings. The pair did not get a formal assignment from the army to carry out the task, because of legal complications, Shahaf adds. Five days after the meeting with Samia, the first re-enactment was staged at the IDF firing range. As the scene was re-enacted, Duriel gave an interview to the American television crew. He expounded his thesis in front of the 60 Minutes camera. Al-Dura s death was staged with the aim of producing an image which would become a symbol and besmirch Israel s reputation around the world. Actors in the staged incident included Palestinian gunmen, a French television cameraman (who received production instructions ), and the father Jamal al Dura ( who apparently didn t understand that the act would end in the murder of his son ). Duriel mentioned that the father can be seen gesturing to the photographer in the film. When Samia learned about Duriel s interview, he ordered that the engineer be removed from the inquiry. Shahaf says I supported Duriel, but I think he made a tactical error, because you have to prove whatever you allege. Shahaf prodded ahead with the investigation, without his estranged partner. More tests were arranged tests Shahaf stresses were done with exacting scientific rigor. All results will meet the standards of scientific inquiry, he says. He says that he already has final results in hand that are very interesting. Asked about the professional character of this al-Dura shooting investigation, and about the participants who have taken part in it, the IDF spokesman refused to comment.Shahaf says he has promised not to divulge details, neither about the results of the investigation, nor the testing procedures followed. Despite the physicist s reticence, the work methods seem puzzling. During the first re-enactment, the distance between the IDF position (the dirt embankment upon which the soldiers stood) and the replicated barrel was only half of that separating the real IDF position and the Duras at Netzarim. Duriel says additional re-enactments were staged to rectify this distance issue. Did ballistics experts take part in the tests? Shahaf concedes he is no authority on ballistics however, he says, as a physicist I read scientific material, both theoretical and experimental, and try to consult with several experts in this area, and so I have basically finished all the stages necessary in learning this topic. Yossi Almog, a retired senior police officer who specialized in evidence-gathering, says: I don t believe the IDF would release a conclusion revising a previous declaration without first conducting a thorough examination, using the best professionals in the security establishment. I wouldn t rely on an approach made by some anonymous person. I might welcome that person s initiative, but I certainly wouldn t accept his conclusions without conducting a systematic, orderly examination, under the best possible conditions. Anything less than that isn t serious. In Shahaf s view, the fact that the [investigation] committee is impartial and the IDF doesn t interfere in its work, is an advantage. When the need arises, I turn to all sorts of authorities to get feedback. Any decision about whom to consult is my own. Under the Manhattan Project which developed the atom bomb a scientist was used to lead the effort, and from the moment he was selected , he chose people to help as he saw fit. Choosing 20 people in advance to investigate the matter wouldn t be prudent. Somebody who has sufficient knowledge and scientific experience should be chosen at the outset, and then that person should select consultants as he sees fit. Shahaf continues: If you don t want the committee to make any headway, then you should appoint a hundred people instead of three. Among other consultants, Shahaf sought out Yitzhak Ramon, an engineer from Haifa who published a letter in Ha aretz claiming that the films provide evidence the bullets which struck the father and son weren t fired from the IDF post. Had the shots been fired by the IDF soldiers who were positioned to the side of the Duras, the bullet holes in the wall couldn t have been so circular and clean, Ramon contended. Charles Enderlin, director of France 2 s Israel bureau, raises additional questions concerning the methodology of the IDF inquiry. French television has original footage shot at Netzarim the film has been shown to Ha aretz, and it includes shots of what happened at the junction before and after al Dura s death, as well as photographs of the wall and the bullet-ridden concrete barrel taken after the incident, and an interview with the father from a Gaza hospital. This is evidence which is crucial in any investigation of the al Dura death. Shahaf asked Enderlin for permission to use the material, but he didn t mention that his intention was to conduct a professional investigation of the event. Instead, Shahaf presented himself as a media professional. In a fax to Enderlin, Shahaf wrote that he wanted the full, unedited version of the footage since the film would enhance the understanding of the background and atmosphere which preceded the killing of the Palestinian boy. Shahaf added in the fax that since the material is likely to be presented to professional media forums, including film schools, we need the full footage, including pictures that are hard to look at, including gunshot wounds and the like. Enderlin rejected Shahaf s request. Subsequently he was stunned to discover that Shahaf is affiliated with an IDF investigation. He says when the IDF spokesman later phoned and asked to receive the film materials, France 2 said they would be released only under formal court order. Duriel is angry with the IDF. He can t fathom why the army isn t publishing the truth. Each day that goes by, he says, increases the damage to Israel s name. He hints that the IDF has an interest in holding back the disclosure of the investigation s findings. He also suggests that the IDF has kept concealed from the public a crucial fact next to the father and son, he claims, there was a second site from which Palestinians fired at the IDF. On Duriel s calculations, the bullets which killed Mohammed al Dura had to have been fired from this second Palestinian position. Asked why the IDF is keeping secret crucial facts which would apparently exonerate its soldiers, Duriel is evasive. The answer is explosive, he says, refusing to elaborate. The IDF has to decide when and how it will release the investigation s results. The army tried to stir some interest among some American journalists in the findings, but the attempt backfired the professionals were not impressed by what they heard and decided not to use it. In choosing Shahaf and Duriel as partners in the al Dura inquiry, the IDF has again shot itself in the foot. Even if the investigation and its conclusions should pass muster on scientific and professional grounds, they simply won t be accepted by the public. That might make little scientific sense but it s a hard public-relations fact. Duriel s ill-conceived 60 Minutes interview was a case in point. The police officer, Yossi Almog, put it best: If you want to release some conclusion that carries weight, it is important that the investigation be carried out by the most professional staff the state can put together. Why, then, did the IDF decide to involve Shahaf in its professional review? The IDF spokesman just refuses to relate to questions of this sort. Published date 07/11/2000 rights reserved Ha aretz Â© ×¥×¨××” , ×ª×•×¨×•×ž×© ×ª×•×™×•×›×–×” ×œ×›After the demonstration by Shahaf and Duriel, attempting to prove that the fire that allegedly killed Muhammad al Durah could not have come from the Israeli camp, Haaretz cub reporter, with the encouragement of her boss, Shmuel Rosner, took apart the claims of the investigation. NB: At no point does the author let the reader know what the investigationâ€™s evidence for their minimal conclusion (ie IDF fire could not have a) killed the boy, and b) produced the bullet holes in the wall). Similar technique used byÂ Bob Simon at CBSÂ (to which she refers anonymously) and theÂ Haaretz editorial boardÂ a couple of weeks later.Army efforts to interest journalists in a dubious probe of the al Dura case backfiresOn Monday, October 23 the IDF staged a re-enactment of the October 1 [sic] gun battle at Netzarim junction in which 12-year-old Mohammed al Dura was killed. Blocks were piled up at one of the army s firing ranges in the south, to simulate the wall where the boy and his father Jamal al Dura were pinned. A concrete barrel was brought in, to represent the one behind which the father and son crouched. Soldiers sent to the firing range by the IDF Southern Commander, Major General Yom Tov Samia, stood on top of a dirt embankment and fired shots at the wall and barrel, using a variety of different weapons. Two Israeli citizens took part in the re-enactment Nahum Shahaf, a physicist, and Yosef Duriel, an engineer. A film crew from the prestigious American news program 60 Minutes was there, having been given exclusive rights to film the replay of the Dura shooting. In the past two weeks a number of reports have circulated about new IDF findings in its investigation of the killing at Netzarim. These reports have stirred considerable interest in Israel and elsewhere, because for the Palestinians, the death of Mohammed al Dura captured by a French television crew has become the symbol of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. The dramatic footage of his death has been seen in every corner of the world. Palestinian television runs an edited version pictures of an IDF soldier shooting have been spliced into the original footage. Poignant photographs of the father and son have been plastered along the sides of roads throughout the West Bank. The Cairo newspaper Akbar al Yom has reported that the city authorities have decided to name the street where the Israeli embassy is located after Mohammed al Dura. Shortly after the boy s death, the IDF acknowledged there was a high probability that IDF gunfire ended his young life and, speaking for the IDF, Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Ya alon expressed his sorrow over the tragedy. Assuming that the damage to Israel s reputation was irreversible, and knowing it faced the realities of more children dying, the IDF was inclined to put the al Dura matter to rest. However, senior officers in the Southern Command were bitter about Israel s hasty decision to accept responsibility for the death. As days passed, reports circulated that they were increasingly convinced IDF soldiers did not shoot and kill the boy. The following text is excerpted from my book (now) titled, Stupidity Matters: A Medievalist s Guide to the 21st Century. It discusses the alleged revision of the PLO Charter as demanded by the Oslo Accords. It was cut from an article published based on this material at the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs on the reasons for the failure of the Oslo Process and the disastrous misreading of that failure.The Hudaybiya episode also shed light on the international game at play in the Oslo Peace Process. When American journalists discussed the Hudaybiya speech (European presses tended not even to mention it; in the US, only the â€œright-wingâ€ press raised it), they immediately aroused the ire of Caliphater Daâ€™Ä«s. Daniel Pipes wrote repeatedly about the Johannesburg mosque speech, about the meaning of the Treaty of Hudaybiya, and the trouble any Westerner who mentioned it quickly encountered when they brought up the subject. Despite being studiously fair to the Muslim prophet on historical grounds, citing as plausible the Muslim apologetic version that the Meccans broke the treaty, and Muhammad never meant a deliberate deception, Pipes provoked furious condemnation and some of the earliest accusations of â€œIslamophobiaâ€ from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim â€˜civil rightsâ€™ organization with ties to the same Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is a branch.[1] The Muslim outcry essentially forbade infidel critics from examiningevidence relevant to their pressing concerns, a pattern that replicated itselfin academia, with Daniel Pipesâ€™ work being banned by some professors asâ€œIslamophobic.â€ Instead, peace enthusiasts viewed Arafat and the Palestinianleadership, as they themselves insisted they were while speaking English:full-fledged modern players who yearned for their own nation and freedom, andwhom one could trust to keep commitments to the â€˜peace of the brave.â€™ When theopportunity presented itself, they believed, Arafat would choose the imperfect,positive-sum, win-win, over the zero-sum, all-or-nothing, win-lose. Theyâ€˜believedâ€™ in the Palestinian leadership and rejected indignantly â€“ as racists!â€“ anyone who dared to suggest the Palestinians leadership was still in limbiccaptivity to atavistic revenge.Thus, when Arafat tried in 1995 to convene the PLOto rewrite their charter and eliminate calls for the destruction of Israel, asprescribed by the Oslo Peace Accords, he found the resistance too great. Even aâ€˜moderateâ€™ like Hanan Ashrawi opposed such a move, which, she claimed, echoingSaÃ¯d, â€œwill appear tobe a succumbing to Israeli dictate.â€ In other words, obligations to apositive-sum resolution took second seat to Palestinian concerns about theoptics of â€˜appearing to submit.â€™ So instead the Palestinians delayed any actualchanges in their charter, and gave it to a committee that promptly buried theinitiative to this very day over 20 years later.Peres,deep in an election campaign, nevertheless hailed the prevarication as â€œone ofthe most dramatic developments of the 20th Century,â€ And the media dideverything it could to cover for the Palestinians: â€œP.L.O. Ends Call forDestruction of Jewish State,â€ blared the NYT headline of the same article thatreported Ashrawiâ€™s no-vote.[2] Tothis day, the charter remains unchanged; and while Palestinians politicians andreligious figures continue to adhere to liberating Palestine â€˜from the River tothe Sea,â€™ their spokesmen insist in English that theyâ€™ve fulfilled all theirobligations. And the media, and their invited experts, rather than challengethem, repeat their talking points as if, â€œeveryone knows.â€[3] Tothis day, in Arabic, members of the PNC insist that the issue of recognizingIsrael is â€˜out of the question,â€™ and has â€˜never been raised at any PNCgathering.[4]Western journalists and policy experts not only failed (and continue tofail) to challenge such claims, they ignored the long and troubling list ofPalestinian violations of the accords, and pressured Israel, to stop harping onthe negative, lest they â€˜queerâ€™ the peace process.[5] Indiscussing the Hudaybiyya speeches, Buck notes: The speeches wereviolations of the spirit, if not the letter, of the accords, and, although theRabin-Peres Labor government rarely acknowledged it publicly, there were manyother violations as wellâ€¦ â€œWe had books and books filled with violations,â€ thisperson told me, and added, â€œI saw Rabin and Peres so angry at what they had toeat from the Palestinians.â€But of course, this was the price of peaceâ€¦ letting them violate theagreement without complaining, lest those who so complain, ruin the chances forpeace.[6]Thus, even as Jerusalem and Washington prepared for a grand finale tothe peace process at Camp David in the summer of 2000, even as Israelâ€™s mediaprepared their people for peace, Arafatâ€™s media prepared Palestinians for war. PalestinianTV featured horrendous and staged footage of Israeli troops murderingPalestinian children and raping their women â€“ the full panoply of lethalnarratives with which the PA incited its people to war.[7] And none of the key decision-makers paid anyattention.[1] DanielPipes, â€œLessonsfrom the Prophet Muhammadâ€™s Diplomacy,â€ Middle East Quarterly, Sept. 1999; idem, â€œArafat and the Treaty ofHudaybiya,â€ Sept. 10, 1999; idem, â€œHowDare You Defame Islam?â€œ Commentary,Nov. 1999; idem, â€œDoI Win a British â€˜Islamophobiaâ€™ Award?â€ Lionâ€™s Den, June 26, 2004,updated Mar. 28, 2016. Note Pipes was more generous than Arafat, who, onlyweeks later, repeated the analogy to another group of Muslims, this timespecifying that the â€œtreaty with the infidels was torn down two years laterâ€(Karsh, Arafatâ€™s War, 149).[3] Dennis Ross has an interesting account of asecond â€˜tryâ€™ at getting the Palestinians to revise their charter, in which thePalestinian maneuvering to give the impression of a change, in the presence ofthe visiting President Clinton, becomes clear, and, in the end, face-saving forall involved trumped any substantive change: The Missing Peace, pp.**-**. On the perpetuation of this narrative even to this day, see â€œEveryone Agrees,â€Second Draft, December 2016.[4] Fatah Central Committee member MuhammadShayyeh, â€œTothis moment Fatah does not recognize Israel,â€ Official PA TV,Topic of the Day, March 26, 2017.[5] The Prime Ministerâ€™s office prepared a whitepaper on Palestinian violations of the accord, which they only releasedNovember 24, 2000: â€œPalestinianAuthority and P.L.O. Non-Compliance with signed agreements and commitments: Arecord of bad faith and misconduct,â€ Barak Government White Paper,November 24, 2000. Even though this came almost two months after Arafat hadopened the Oslo Trojan Horse, it met with much criticism both within Israel andespecially abroad: Aluf Benn, â€œWhite Paper Tiger Unleashed,â€Haaretz, November 29, 2000.[6] Buckâ€™s source fingers the fear of publichumiliation that drove Peres and Rabin not to admit they were wrong aboutArafat. Add to that the enormous (messianic) pressure to get the peace tosucceed. See Golan Lahat, HapituiHameshihi: Aliyato Unefilato shel Hasmol Haisraeli (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 972series, 2004), chapter **, â€œThe Sacrifices for Peace.â€[7] Itamar Marcus, â€œRape,Murder, Violence, and War for Allah against the Jews: Summer 2000 onPalestinian Television,â€ Palestinian Media Watch, Jerusalem, Sept. 11, 2000.Last summer, I attended the annualÂ ISGAP conference on antisemitism in Oxford, where a wide range of people, from scholars to graduate students, gathered to learn about antisemitism and build curricula for teaching it as courses in various fields (social sciences, history, religion, literature, art). A number of speakers invoked the observation, â€œit only startswith the Jews.â€ In the long run, many, including the Jew-haters themselves,become victims of the hatreds they set in motion. How many fervent Christianswho believed that the Jews had secretly sent messages to the Antichrist todestroy the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (1009) and watched them slittheir own throats rather than convert, realized that within littleover a decade, their fellow Christians would facesimilar, unprecedented and terrifying choices of life or death at the hands of ecclesiastical androyal authorities (1022)? How many Germansat the Nuremberg rallies (1933-39) realized what a catastropheHitler would bring down upon their cheering heads? How many Westerners realizehow much they contribute to the collapse of their own, quite remarkable civilsocieties (and all the progressive movements they foster) with their indulgencein antisemitism in its 21stcentury avatar, anti-Zionism? One evening during the conference, I visited atwitter friend,the physicistDavid Deutsch,whoâ€™s writing a book about patterns of irrational thought that sabotage humancreativity and progress (a fine, positive-sum endeavor). He has a chapter onthe Jews in which he identifies what he calls it â€œthe Patternâ€ concerning theJews (He writes it with a capital P; Iâ€™ve given it the twitter handle #DeutschsPattern).The key to peopleâ€™s behavior in regard to Jews, he argues, is the need to preservethe legitimacy of hurting Jews, for being Jews. Maintaining this legitimacy,and making sure Jews know their condition, Deutsch insists, is much moreimportant than actually hurting Jews. (In what follows, I quote from adraft chapter Prof. Deutsch shared with me.)According to Deutsch, this is a powerful force that spanscivilizations and millennia; and, a mysterious and self-destructive one.No one yet knows what causes the need to legitimise hurting Jews. Butpeople who have it â€“ Jews and non-Jews â€“ are typically willing to pay a pricefor this: to suffer, and in many cultures even to die for it. And theyconfabulate for themselves the same explanations that they tell other people.Alongside Augustineâ€™s libido dominandi, a libido nocendi? The need to harm at all costs?The following are the journalists, in-house analysts, and invited guests from December 23-29, 2016 who participated in BBC Global and CNN International news. * =adherent of occupation paradigm (ie Israeli settlements main obstacle to peace)The following are relatively accurate transcriptions of the broadcasts of BBC Globe and CNN International from December 23-29, 2016. I have the recordings of all of these passages.Don Lemon: Unprecedented phone call stops UNSC s Israel vote. â€¦but unlike most other presidents in waiting, Trump has now jumped in with both feet into in to the most complicated difficult foreign policy issues for any president â€“ the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Trump has been working the phones calling world leaders to scuttle an anti Israel resolution at the UN, Elise Labott reports. â€¦Obama was prepared to let the resolution pass. Either by abstaining or voting in favor of it. the US has traditionally seen Jewish settlements in areas controlled by Palestinians, as an obstacle to a peace process, but has never gone so far in a UN vote. The move today would have been seen by many as a provocation. A parting shot at Israel s PM with whom Obama has strained ties. (rest same as previous) YES RLS very important TOLOunprecedented policy move, John Vause with Dave Jacobson (Dem. Strategist) John Thomas (Thomas Partners Strategists) Josh Lockman (USC GouldSchool of Law) Obama was prepared to let this resolution pass not use the vetoâ€¦ itsincredibly broad. If you look at the language being used, in some respects itwould have meant that parts of EJerusalem, including the Jewish quarter in the old city the Western Wallwere technically off limits to Israelis?

TAGS:speak to mind

<<< Thank you for your visit >>>

Websites to related :
The Catholic Geeks | We have a

　　I almost wish that The War Revealed came out this month. That way, I could have voted for it for the Dragon Awards this year. I m going to have to s

Duke Ladd Music is the best choi

　　Duke Ladd Music is the best choice for solo piano music, jazz band entertainment or ballroom dancing music for weddings, receptions, corporate or priv

toyemen Welcome to the Jewel of

　　We are operating limited tours to Socotra island, if you're interested, check out our page Island of Socotra

Home - Paxton Wood

　　THE PAXTON ADVANTAGESpeed, Quality, and Value Our modern equipment and experienced mill employees can create the custom products and services you requ

Home – Oro Valley | it's in our

　　K9 Vader has received donation of body armor Published on September 16, 2021 Oro Valley Police Department’s K9 Vader has received a bullet and stab p

Brewers Fayre | Family Friendly

　　Summer s not quite over yet so visit your local Brewers Fayre and enjoy the last of the summer with us. From the all you can eat breakfast for £9.50,

Peebles - The Royal Burgh : Visi

　　Nestled amongst the rolling Border hills in an area of outstanding natural beauty, the gorgeous Borders town of Peebles straddles the glorious River T

BAOS Bristol

　　We perform modern and classic musicals, as well as revue shows, and we strive to bring fresh direction to every performance and concept.BAOS prides it

Newark Sherwood District Counci

　　Access MyAccount - information for Council tenants From planting trees to improving the infrastructure to support electric vehicles and carbon neutra

Halifax Light Opera Society

　　Halifax amateur theatre society performing shows in Halifax since 1907 What’s OnOur upcoming productions and events. Next production: Legally Blonde

ads

Hot Websites

WHY YOU SHOULD Be listed

Matt Cutts, a software engineer and former head of the web spam team at Google, stated back in 2012 that "spammy directories" are disregarded while those who "excercise editorial discretion" worth it. Even though countless business directories litter the internet, they won't all offer a positive change. Don't take unneeded risks and suggest your website to one that Google loves!

Email: liunxqq$$$126.com ($$$=@) ie websites |