As for the first article on the Haaretz, I do not deny the author's view, but at the same time I think it depends on the context and situation in Israel as to which angle you wish to look at the matter. (Lily)
1. Haaretz（http://www.haaretz.com）
Daniel Pipes' attack on Israeli Arabs is baseless and inflammatory, 11 April 2012
Pipes has written an aggressive and confused jumble of half-truths and misunderstandings about the Arabs citizens of Israel in an article published in the Washington Times.
by Carl Perkal
Middle East expert Daniel Pipes was in Israel recently and subsequently published an article entitled “Israel’s Arabs, living a paradox” in the Washington Times. I don’t know Dr. Pipes personally, but I feel compelled to call him to task for his baseless and inflammatory attack on the Arab citizens of Israel.
Pipes has written an aggressive and confused jumble of half-truths and misunderstandings about the Arabs citizens of Israel.
Pipes’s main point in the article is that as Israel overcomes “external threats,” the Arab citizens of Israel will become an “ever-greater concern” and will be the “ultimate obstacle to establishing the Jewish homeland…” (and I thought the Jewish homeland was established in 1948).
He claims that the Arab citizens of Israel are a threat to the existence of the State and bases this claim on an unsubstantiated accusation that “Israeli Arabs have increasingly resorted to violence against their Jewish co-nationals.”
This malicious statement is false and the facts are exactly the opposite. Based on all indicators, violence against Jews or other actions against the State by Arab citizens of Israel has decreased significantly in recent years.
I refer Pipes to a speech made by Yoram Cohen, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service in which he said, "…as a community, Arab Israelis are not a target of Shin Bet. They are not a fifth column and we do not view them as such…"
Cohen said that Israeli Arabs were involved in three attacks during the past year and that "The number of those involved in terrorism is not large. We arrested 20-30 Israeli Arabs during the past year…."
So, Dr. Pipes, your entire thesis that the Arab citizens of Israel are an ever more violent threat to the State crumbles.
But there is in Israel a frightening increase in violence when it comes to Arab citizens and this is well documented. And I mean Jewish attacks directed against Arab citizens. Sadly, Pipes neglects to weigh in on this.
These include terror attacks by lone Israeli Jews, such as in August 2005, when Natan Zada, an AWOL soldier, travelled by bus to the Arab town of Shfaram, shot and killed 4 Arab passengers, and was then killed by enraged local residents. More recently we have seen a frightening rise in attacks on mosques, cemeteries, and other Arab institutions and individuals. Few of the perpetrators have been identified or arrested.
Arabs are increasingly threatened and attacked by ruffians in the public space. Not too long ago Arab workers at the Jerusalem Malha Mall were attacked and beaten by Beitar Jerusalem football fans who rioted there after a football match in the nearby Teddy Stadium. One of the cleaners at the mall, Mohammed Yusuf, stated that "It was a mass lynching attempt."
A look at the 2011 report of the “Coalition Against Racism“, of which my organization Sikkuy is a member, presents a frightening picture of ever-increasing physical and verbal attacks by Jews on Arab citizens in 2011. There’s no room here to provide all the grim statistics, but you can access the full summary here.
Pipes cites Arab citizens of Israel who are prominent in public life such as Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran and labels them the “assimilated few” in contrast to the “discontented masses” whom he links to his false claim of increased violence by Arabs against Jews. The fact is that these so-called assimilated few are not the “Uncle Toms” that he seems to think they are and the “discontented” Arab citizens of Israel indeed show no signs of rising up against the state.
Rather, both the Arab leadership and the rank and file are increasingly vocal in their demand for the state to end its systematic discrimination against them in all areas of state funding, resource allocation, land distribution, hiring policy, language rights and so on. They demand fair representation in the various mechanisms of state decision making and consistently walk through every door that it is opened to them in Israeli society without forgoing their identity as Palestinian Arabs. And they do this using all the tools available to them in a democracy: demonstrations, civil society organizations, litigation, lobbying, etc.
For sure the Arab citizens of Israel, as an indigenous minority, continue to raise serious challenges to their status as second-class citizens in the Jewish State and have proposed a dialogue with the Jewish citizens in order to advance their concept of Israel as a “state of all of its citizens.” No framer of any of the “Vision” documents has suggested anything other than conducting a peaceful dialogue with the Jewish citizens of Israel toward the achievement of full equality for the Arab citizens of Israel.
This is not to say that there haven’t been violent protests by Arab citizens against the government. The “events of October 2000” were the last major outburst of anger and frustration by Arab citizens and in those events 13 Arab demonstrators were shot and killed by police snipers. And while the Or State Commission of Inquiry criticized the police for their unpreparedness and excessive use of force in quelling the protests, no police officers were ever held responsible or brought to trial for the killings. It should be pointed out that in Israel, when Jews protest violently (for instance, the ultra-Orthodox, Sephardic, settlers, etc.), use of lethal force is never sanctioned by the police as a tool of riot control.
Pipes seems to deliberately surround himself with like-minded people who are happy to confirm what he already believes and in so doing creates a totally distorted view of the facts on the ground.
So Dr. Pipes, next time, please do your homework. If you do, I’m sure that you will discover that the real danger to the “Jewish homeland” is its ever-increasing slide down the slippery slope of violence and intimidation by the Jewish majority toward the Arab minority.
Let us not forget what Gandhi said: “A civilization will be judged by how it treats its minorities”.
・Carl Perkal lives in Israel, is documentary film producer and director of resource development for Sikkuy: The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality.
2. PJ Media (http://pjmedia.com)
(1) Obama’s Insult to American Jews, the Same Day as His ‘Gaffe’ on Poland, 31 May 2012
by Ron Radosh
The president’s Poland gaffe at the Medal of Freedom award ceremony has got the most attention, but one must also look at what transpired later the same day. After the president finished awarding the Medal of Freedom on Tuesday to various recipients, many of them Jewish, he met privately with a group of Conservative Jewish rabbis and Jewish community leaders. The Israeli paper Haaretz reported that after the president reiterated his concern for Israel’s security, he said the following:
There were some questions directed at the presidents concerning his thoughts on the role of religious leaders in a more civil political dialogue, which then lead to the inevitable question — how does he feels about Israel? Obama joked that Lew always warns him it will get to “the kishkes question.”
“Rather than describe how deeply I care about Israel, I want to be blunt about how we got here,” Obama said, reminding his guests that he had so many Jewish friends in Chicago at the beginning of his political career that he was accused of being a puppet of the Israel lobby.
The answer, as you pause to consider it, reveals the reality of Barack Obama’s world. Let us take the last sentence first. If anyone accused Obama of being “a puppet of the Israel lobby,” it was the same left-wing friends and black nationalists who supported him when they assumed once he got in office he would be an advocate for the Palestinians. We all know that his friend Rashid Khalidi had publicly expressed just such sentiments, and had stated that he was disappointed that the realities of politics had made Obama, once he became president, turn away from promises Khalidi said he had once made.
There is a reason, after all, why The Los Angeles Times, as Roger L. Simon has often reminded us, has not released the video of what Barack Obama said at the tribute going-away event for Khalidi as he left Chicago for New York City and his position at Columbia University. And of course, later Obama’s pastor in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, said that “the Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote, that’s controlling him, that would not let him send representation to the Darfur Review Conference, that’s talking this craziness on this trip, cause they’re Zionists, they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is.”
Now let us look at the first part of the president’s statement, about his claim that “he had so many Jewish friends in Chicago.” These “friends,” of course, were the kind of Jews that Peter Beinart praises for being the right kind of Jews who were critical of Israel, rather than the wrong kind that support Israel such as the members of AIPAC. They were Jews like the late very left-wing rabbi whom Obama befriended in Chicago, a man typical of all leftist Jews who support every “progressive” cause at home and save their criticism for the Jewish state they purport to care about — if only it takes steps that might endanger its security, but which the leftist Jews living in the United States believe it must take if it is to have their full support. And of course, his Jewish friends included the likes of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, the latter who himself came from a very left-wing Jewish milieu.
Finally, revealing the president’s arrogance and chutzpah, to use the old Yiddish word, he actually told the Conservative Jewish rabbis that “he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it — and wondered how come no one asks speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about their support to Israel.” No one asks them about it, although Obama did not pause to consider why no one does, because in their case there is no question about the solid commitment they have to Israel. The president’s record, on the other hand, has included many times at which he seemed to turn drastically away from any genuine concern for Israel’s security needs.
As John Podhoretz quickly pointed out, the president’s bragging is “transparently absurd.” Every single president until our modern age knew more about Judaism from the Old Testament. Harry Truman, to take one example I am most familiar with, quoted from its pages in his Farewell Address in which he reiterated his hopes for Israel’s success. Truman many times told people how familiar he was with the quest of Jews for a homeland from his reading of the Bible. Even Jimmy Carter, despite his current disdain for Israel as a supposed “apartheid state,” is, as Podhoretz writes, “more conversant in the lore of Biblical Judaism” than Barack Obama.
So in one day, President Obama managed to offend the entire Polish nation and the Conservative Jewish leaders he was meeting with. I can hardly wait to see what other people the president can insult before the election campaign officially starts after Labor Day.
(2) If Obama Doesn’t Understand European History He Can’t Get America’s Future History Right, 31 May 2012
by Barry Rubin
President Barack Obama’s mistaken reference to Nazi German death camps as “Polish death camps” is being ridiculed by critics as an example of incompetence. That misses the point. His defense is that he was just reading his teleprompter. That misses the point, too.
After all, you don’t need to be a historical genius to have caught that error even if it was on the teleprompter. I am not suggesting that Obama doesn’t know that the Nazi Germans operated the death camps, though, to recall another gaffe of his, he might think that those among them hailing from the country whose capital had been Vienna spoke “Austrian.”
Nevertheless, what this is really about is that Obama does not see himself as emerging from European history and, truth be told and despite his university degrees, doesn’t know much about it. He has no idea, for example, about how the Poles and other Central European people, or Europe itself, think or what they have gone through. And frankly he doesn’t care.
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On one level, that is rather obvious. His father was Kenyan. But, of course, his mother was an American of European descent. Still, Obama has not chosen to focus on his simultaneously half-African/half-European parentage. He has identified himself as an African-American, and the word African here has to be taken literally, not just as a matter of ancestry from three centuries ago. The only exception to this stance, I believe, was a reference to Irish ancestry during a visit to that country and a feeble, rather insultingly stereotyped, attempt at an Irish accent.
Forget about this as a matter of race or skin color. Think of it as a matter of geographical choice. Obama draws heavily from Third World standpoints, something quite evident in his choice of church, for example. I cannot recall his ever quoting a European political philosopher. He has never to my knowledge made any reference publicly to Communism at all. In his books, the emphasis is on feelings, personal experiences, and ideas that come out of his head. But isn’t it also important to have someone who knows about how Africans think? Sure, and I don’t think Obama understands them either, but that’s not the subject of this article.
Obama has claimed that his grandfather was punished as an anti-British activist during the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. The prime minister at the time was Winston Churchill, and it is no coincidence that one of Obama’s first acts was to return a Churchill bust to Britain in a rude manner. Basically, Obama views himself as an anti-imperialist and sees America, along with Britain, as imperialist. But that, too, is a subject for another time.
It’s fine to have a president who doesn’t come from a European background personally or physically but not so good to have a president who doesn’t grasp the meaning of modern European history. That’s why they used to have those Western civilization courses required of every college student, a standard whose loss has been devastating in the production of credentialed ignoramuses.
And how is that narrative important? Here are three critical points:
–Historically, America has done better than Europe in terms of economic prosperity, a relatively classless society, and social development. If you don’t understand the basis of American exceptionalism — and Obama rejects that idea — you don’t understand what policies work and which don’t work. By the same token, there are certain elements of Western democratic civilization that are the highest points reached by human society. A number of non-European places — Singapore, Japan, and now China — have recognized those realities and have adapted such institutions and modes of thought. If you focus on the shortcomings of Western civilization and don’t understand its greatness, you are also unable to run a Western society effectively.
–Europe suffered greatly from leftist extremism. Communism was a disaster. The left as well as the right can be brutal, repressive, and an economic disaster. Not knowing this story means that Obama isn’t inoculated against some of the same mistakes. And Obama has never found anyone on the left to be an enemy; never found any leftist ideology to be mistaken.
–Twentieth-century European history showed twice — against Nazism and Communism — the need to stand up to dictators, to be tough, to show one’s credibility, to be ready to go to war, to understand that ideological extremists cannot be bought off or charmed into moderation.
The lack of real comprehension regarding European history thus underpins Obama’s three greatest failings: wrong ideas about society, economics, and foreign policy.
Nor is this the first example where he showed a callous indifference to the experience of Central Europe, where these lessons were most clearly drawn.
Everyone in Central Europe understood the significance of September 17, 2009. It was the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Baltic states, and other countries. For the Poles it was a commemoration of a tremendous tragedy, especially since the USSR was then in alliance with Nazi Germany, which 17 days earlier had seized the rest of Poland.
It was that date Obama chose to cancel the placement of U.S. defensive missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. Those two countries had taken considerable risks — Russia made threats — in agreeing to host the missiles. In cancelling them, Obama didn’t even consult the two countries. The Czech foreign minister said he was only informed of the decision in an early morning phone call that woke him up. The Poles didn’t even get a phone call.
When Obama became president, Central Europe’s most important leaders and most distinguished freedom fighters sent Obama an open letter. It’s worth reading today. They feared that Obama would not protect them from a resurgent Russia. Today, with Obama content to let Russia mediate Syria’s future and Russian leader Vladimir Putin contemptuous of a man he sees as foolish and weak, that danger is even greater.
As I pointed out three years ago:
If Obama had been president in the early 1990s, the letter hints rather subtly, “We would not be in NATO today and the idea of a Europe whole, free, and at peace would be a distant dream.” The United States would have put an emphasis on good relations with Russia rather than supporting the real liberty of the nations in the area.
A few months ago, a leading Czech intellectual told a cheering audience in Prague, “Americans proved they weren’t racist by electing Obama in 2008. Now they must prove they aren’t stupid by voting him out of office in 2012.”
Obama’s gaffe was not just an act of stupidity or incompetence but another sign that he doesn’t understand European history. And given the vital lessons that story has to tell for the management of American foreign and domestic issues, that’s very dangerous.
・This article is dedicated to the memory of Arthur Dub, born February 8, 1900, died in Trencin concentration camp; Jozef Dub, born July 17, 1901, murdered in Lublin concentration camp; Aranka Lowenbein Havas, born 1909, and her husband Miklos (born 1892) murdered in Auschwitz, May 17, 1944; and Richard Lowenbein, born June 29, 1894, murdered in Auschwitz, May 17, 1944. And to three Polish policemen–Vlodia Maslovsky, Takovitch, and Maletzko—who saved many lives at the risk of their own.
(End)
