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Regarding those Jews…..

by Mojambo ( 187 Comments › )
Filed under Ahmadinejad, Anti-semitism, Iran, Israel, Media, Palestinians at July 3rd, 2012 - 11:30 am

From 1939 to 1945, The New York Times (America’s so-called “paper of record”) deliberately downplayed, under-reported, and misrepresented the murders of Jews which the Germans and their allies were conducting on such an unprecedented scale. This was due to several factors amongst which was the Sulzberger family, particularly publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, did not want The New York Times to be known as a “Jewish ” newspaper, their ambivalent (to say the least) feelings about Zionism, and their belief that Judaism was a religion and not a people and to label victims as Jews would be playing into the notion of Jewish peoplehood. Therefore Jews killed in Poland were “Polish victims” and not (or oftentimes not) referred to as Jews. In 2005, Laurel Leff wrote an excellent book on this subject called “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper“. today, not only The New York Times but virtually the entire main stream media has covered up the blatant, in your face, anti-Semitism and calls for genocide emanating from Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and virtually the entire Islamic world, as well from the Left with it’s call for boycott’s of the Jews of Israel.

by Caroline Glick

So it works out that Iran’s vice president really hates Jews. In fact, he hates Jews so much that even The New York Times reported it. On Tuesday, the Times published an account of Iranian Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi’s speech before a UN forum on fighting drug addiction in Tehran.

Rahimi claimed that Jews control the illegal drug trade. We sell drugs, he said, in order to fulfill what he said is a Talmudic writ to “destroy everyone who opposes the Jews.”

He said that our conspiracy is obvious since, he claimed, there are no Jewish drug addicts.

He went so far as to promise to pay anyone who can find a Jewish drug addict.

[……]

Oops, sorry, he doesn’t hate Jews. He hates Zionists.

Some of his best friends are Jews.

At least that is what the Times would have us believe. As reporter Thomas Erdbrink put it, “‘Zionists’ is Iran’s ideological term for Jews who support the state of Israel.”

He also helpfully noted, “More than 25,000 Jews live in Iran, and they are recognized as a religious minority, with a representative in Parliament.”

Aside from that, just so we don’t get the wrong impression about the Iranian government, Erdbrink calmed us down by noting, therapeutically, “Several Iranian ministers gave politically neutral briefings on the impact of the drug trade on the country.”

So aside from the fact that its vice president is a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semite, the Iranian regime is perfectly respectable. Nothing to see here folks, move on.

Except, of course, that this is not the case.

Iran’s “Supreme Leader” routinely refers to Israel as a cancer. For instance, in a sermon before thousands of Muslim worshipers in February, Ali Khamenei said, “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.”

Then, of course, there’s Rahimi’s direct boss, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who can’t ask what the weather is like without calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people.

But then he too usually calls us Jews “Zionists,” (which most of us are), so his calls for the genocide of Jewry is really just a political statement and not proof that what moves him when he wakes up in the morning and goes to bed at night is a passionate, obsessive desire to murder an entire people.

Many commentators seized on Erdbrink’s write-up of Rahimi’s diatribe as further proof that the civilized world cannot permit Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. And that is fair enough.

Of course Iran cannot be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons. They are religious fanatics who rule under a deranged banner of messianic genocide.
[……]

BUT THE real issue here is that these commentators felt it necessary to seize on the Times’ write-up of Rahimi’s speech to make this obvious point. That is, the real issue here isn’t the Iranians. The real issue is the Western media. From the New York Times to the BBC to the European media, Jew-hatred is the most under-reported – and arguably most important story – of our times.

No issue unites the Muslim world more than venomous, murderous hatred of Jews.

No single issue informs their foreign policies more than hatred of Jews. And yet, reporting – even biased, misleadingly understated reporting – of this massive, strategically pivotal phenomenon is almost nonexistent in most major media outlets. As a consequence, it is a major event when the Times finally publishes an anemic report about it. And again, even that report hides the real story.

[……]

What both Erdbrink and his European interlocutor failed to acknowledge is that Rahimi won’t be punished for his views. He was promoted because of his views. Helping Iran fight drugs doesn’t encourage non-genocidal Iranian politicians. It legitimizes the regime that promoted Rahimi and Ahmadinejad and Khamenei and every other powerful politician and military commander because of their hatred of Jews.

The Western media has two basic approaches to their non-reporting of Islamic Jew-hatred and its significance for international security. The first approach is to ignore the issue because it is ideologically inconvenient.

The New York Times, like every other major Western media outlet except The Wall Street Journal, is of the opinion that the Islamic world should be appeased. The Muslim Brotherhood and Iran should be accommodated.

If they gave Islamic Jew-hatred coverage commensurate with its actual significance, they would be undermining their ideological agenda. In light of their ubiquitous and vituperative obsession with Jewish people, it is obvious that it is impossible to appease the Muslim world.

The second approach to contending with Islamic Jew-hatred is to justify it by claiming that Israel has earned all the hate coming its way. It’s “political” they say. The Islamic demonization of Jews is understandable given the Palestinians and all that.

Obviously, both of these approaches to the story of Islamic Jew-hatred are appalling. The former approach involves a breach of the very concept of objective journalism. After all, the purpose of journalism is to report on the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

[……]

AND IF Rahimi’s hatred had been directed against any other people, race, creed, state or color, no one would support cooperation with “these people.”

No one would support the Palestinian national movement if its inherent, overwhelming hatred was directed, say, against the black state rather than the Jewish state.

Demonizing and delegitimizing Israel is the core goal of the Palestinian national movement.

To this end the Palestinian Authority’s Information Ministry published a style guide to instruct Palestinians what terms they should use to avoid legitimizing Israel.

According to Palestinian Media Watch’s report about the style guide, language must be chosen that will avoid presenting Israel’s existence as “natural.” As the book’s introduction explains, using Israeli terminology “turns the essence of the Zionist endeavor (i.e., Israeli statehood) from a racist, colonialist endeavor into an endeavor of self-definition and independence for the Jewish People.”

[……]

But a central goal of Palestinian propaganda, and advanced by all relevant sectors of Palestinian society, is to rewrite history and erase the Jews from the history of the Land of Israel.

And rather than call them on this intellectual crime of literally biblical proportions, the Western media collaborates with them. For instance, on Tuesday, the New York Times published an article about the efforts of the Palestinians from Battir, an Arab village southwest of Jerusalem, to have their ancient terraced irrigation system recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They claim the designation is necessary and urgent because if they don’t get it, Israel may build a portion of the security barrier through the village and harm the irrigation system.

Isabel Kershner, the Times’ reporter, referred to the irrigation system as “a Roman-era irrigation system.”

But as the bloggers Yisrael Medad and Elli Fischer pointed out, it is a Jewish irrigation system from the Second Temple period. And while Battir is a reasonable candidate for World Heritage Site status, it is first and foremost a Jewish heritage site. Battir is the Arab name for the ancient Jewish village Betar, the site of Bar- Kochba’s last stand against the Roman Empire.

It is the last place where Jews were sovereign until the establishment of the State of Israel.

But Kershner didn’t mention any of that.

[…….]
On the face of it, it can be argued that the Western media’s willful blindness towards Islamic Jew-hatred and its influence on world affairs are part and parcel of the Western elite’s collective refusal to recognize and contend with the implications of the phenomenon.

But this is too forgiving.

Policy-makers who ignore Islamic Jew-hatred are doing so because they are trying to sell their policies. What’s the New York Times’ excuse? The media are supposed to report facts, not shape perceptions. The facts, not the perceptions are supposed to inform policy.

That is, they are not supposed to collaborate with policy-makers, they are supposed to inform policy-makers and the general public.

And this leads us back to the well-meaning commentators who seized on Erdbrink’s report about how Iran’s vice president believes that Jews – sorry Zionists – are monsters, and used it as proof that Iran cannot be permitted to get the bomb. Yes, of course, they are right that it is worth re-quoting his vile remarks to make the point. But by quoting the Times, they may be scoring a couple of tactical points today, but they are losing a long-term strategic battle. They are giving respectability to a media organ that is consummately unworthy of our respect. They are giving respectability to a news organ with an institutional policy of denying, underreporting, and misleadingly reporting about themost important issue that shapes events in the Middle East today: Islamic hatred of Jews.

Read the rest – About those Jews………….

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Ahmadinejad, Anti-semitism, Iran, Israel, Media, Palestinians | 187 Comments »

The Muslim Brotherhood’s useful idiots

by Mojambo ( 73 Comments › )
Filed under Egypt, IDF, Islam, Islamists, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia (Islamic Law), Turkey at June 25th, 2012 - 8:00 am

Just as we were always told that killers such as Mao and Stalin were really “agrarian reformers” -= we are being fed the myth of a moderate, pragmatic Muslim Brotherhood. Somewhere in journalist hell, Walter Duranty is smiling.

by Caroline Glick

You have to hand it to the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. They know how to play power politics. They know how to acquire power. And they know how to use power.

Last Friday, the day before voters by most accounts elected the Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsy to serve as Egypt’s next president, The Wall Street Journal published a riveting account by Charles Levinson and Matt Bradley of how the Brotherhood outmaneuvered the secular revolutionaries to take control of the country’s political space.

The Brotherhood kept a very low profile in the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square in January and February 2011 that led to the overthrow of then-president Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood’s absence from Tahrir Square at that time is what enabled Westerners to fall in love with the Egyptian revolution.

Those demonstrations led to the impression, widespread in the US, that Mubarak’s successors would be secular Facebook democrats. The role that Google’s young Egyptian executive Wael Gonim played in organizing the demonstrations was reported expansively.

His participation in the anti-regime protests – as well as his brief incarceration – was seen as proof that the next Egyptian regime would be indistinguishable from Generation X and Y Americans and Europeans.

In their report, Levinson and Bradley showed how the Brotherhood used the secularists to overthrow the regime, and to provide them with a fig leaf of moderation through March 2011, when the public voted on the sequencing of Egypt’s post-Mubarak transformation from a military dictatorship into a populist regime. The overwhelming majority of the public voted to first hold parliamentary elections and to empower the newly elected parliament to select members of the constitutional assembly that would write Egypt’s new constitution.

As Egypt’s largest social force, the Brotherhood knew it would win the majority of the seats in the new parliament. The March 2011 vote ensured its control over writing the new Egyptian constitution.

In July 2011, the Brotherhood decided to celebrate its domination of the new Egypt with a mass rally at Tahrir Square. Levinson and Bradley explained how in the lead-up to that event Egypt’s secular revolutionaries were completely outmaneuvered.

According to their account, the Brotherhood decided to call the demonstration “Shari’a Friday.” Failing to understand that the game was over, the secularists tried to regain what they thought was the unity of the anti-regime ranks from earlier in the year.

“Islamists and revolutionary leaders spent three days negotiating principles they could all support at the coming Friday demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. They reached an agreement and the revolution seemed back on track.”

One secularist leader, Rabab el-Mahdi, referred to the agreement as “The perfect moment. A huge achievement.” But then came the double cross.

“Hours before the demonstration, hard-line Salafi Islamists began adorning the square with black-andwhite flags of jihad and banners calling for the implementation of Islamic law. Ms. Mahdi made frantic calls to Brotherhood leaders, who told her there was little they could do.” Checkmate.

THE DIFFERENCE between the Brotherhood and the secularists is a fundamental one. The Brotherhood has always had a vision of the Egypt it wants to create. It has always used all the tools at its disposal to advance the goal of creating an Islamic state in Egypt.

For their part, the secularists have no ideological unity and so share no common vision of a future Egypt. They just oppose the repression of the military.

Opposing repression is not a political program. It is a political act. It can destroy. It cannot rule.

So when the question arose of how to transform the protests that caused the US to abandon Mubarak and sealed the fate of his regime into a new regime, the secularists had no answer. All they could do was keep protesting military repression.

The Brotherhood has been the most popular force in Egypt for decades. Its leaders recognized that to take over the country, all they needed was the power to participate in the elections and the authority to ensure that the election results mattered – that is, control over writing the constitution. And so, once the secularists fomented Mubarak’s overthrow, their goal was to ensure their ability to participate in the elections and to ensure that the parliament would control the constitution-writing process.

To achieve these goals, they were equally willing to collaborate with the secularists against the military and with the military against the secularists. To achieve their goals they were willing – as they did before Shari’a Friday last July – to negotiate in bad faith.

While instructive, the Journal’s article fell short because the reporters failed to recognize that the Brotherhood outmaneuvered the military junta in the same way that it outmaneuvered the secularists. The article starts with the premise that the military’s decision to stage an effective coup d’etat last week spelled an end to the Egyptian revolution and the country’s reversion to the military dictatorship that has ruled the state since the 1950s.

Levinson and Bradley claim, “Following the rulings by the high court this week [which canceled the results of the parliamentary elections and ensured continued military control over the country regardless of the results of the presidential elections], the Brotherhood’s strategy of cooperation with the military seems failed.”

But actually, that is not the case. By permitting the Brotherhood to participate in the elections for parliament and the presidency, the military signed the death warrant of its regime. The Brotherhood will rule Egypt. The only thing left to be determined is whether its takeover will happen quickly or slowly.

To understand why this is the case, it is important to notice what happened in Turkey. When the Islamist AKP party won the 2002 elections, the Turkish military was constitutionally authorized to control the country. As the guardians of Turkey’s secular state, Turkey’s military was constitutionally empowered to overthrow democratically elected governments.

Ten years later, Turkey is a populist, authoritarian, Islamic state. Half the general officer corps is in prison, held without charge or on trumped up charges. Turkey’s judiciary and civil service are controlled by Islamists. The AKP is filling the military’s officer corps with its loyalists.

When you know what you want, you use all the tools at your disposal to achieve your goals. When you don’t know what you want, no matter what tools you hold, you will fail to achieve your goals.

The Egyptian military today is far weaker than the Turkish military was in 2002. And it has already been outmaneuvered by the Brotherhood. The only way for it to secure its hold on power is through brute force. And the generals have already shown they are unwilling to use sufficient force to repress the Brotherhood.

[…]

THE INEVITABILITY of the Islamic takeover of Egypt means that the peace between Israel and Egypt is meaningless. Confrontation is coming. The only questions that remain are how long it will take and what form it will come in. If it happens slowly, it will be characterized by a gradual escalation of cross-border attacks from Sinai by Hamas and other jihadist groups. Hamas’s sudden eagerness to take responsibility for the mortar attacks against southern Israel as well as Monday morning’s murderous cross-border attack are signs of things to come.

[…]

However the Egyptian election results pan out, the die has been cast. We must prepare for what is coming.

Read the rest: The Brotherhood’s useful idiots

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Egypt, IDF, Islam, Islamists, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia (Islamic Law), Turkey | 73 Comments »

Chimerical foreign policies

by Mojambo ( 80 Comments › )
Filed under Hamas, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey at June 18th, 2012 - 8:00 am

We (and Israel) need to recognize world leaders as they are, not as we imagine or would like them to be. Case in point one odious creature named Catherine Ashton, the EU “foreign minister”.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton [file]

Catherine Ashton

by Caroline Glick

With her unbridled hostility towards Israel, the EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton provides us with an abject lesson in what happens when a government places its emotional aspirations above its national interests.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, many of Israel’s elite have aspired to be embraced by Europe. In recent years, nearly every government has voiced the hope of one day seeing Israel join the EU.

To a significant degree, Israel’s decision to recognize the PLO in 1993 and negotiate with Yasser Arafat and his deputies was an attempt by Israel’s political class to win acceptance from the likes of Ashton and her continental comrades. For years the EU had criticized Israel for refusing to recognize the PLO.

[…]

And now, Israel’s reward for preferring European love to our national interest and embracing our sworn enemy is Catherine Ashton.

To put it mildly, Ashton is not a friend of Israel. Indeed, she is so ill-disposed against Israel that she seems unable to focus for long on anything other than bashing it. Her obsession was prominently displayed in March when she was unable to give an unqualified condemnation of the massacre of French Jewish children by a French Muslim. Ashton simply had to use her condemnation as yet another opportunity to bash Israel.

Her preoccupation with Israel was again on display on Tuesday. During a boilerplate, vacuous speech about President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his fellow Syrians, apropos of nothing the baroness launched into an unhinged, impassioned, and deeply dishonest frontal assault against Israel.

The woman US President Barack Obama has empowered to lead the West’s negotiations with Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program stood at the podium in the European Parliament and threw an anti-Israel temper tantrum.

The same woman who couldn’t be bothered to finish her speech about Assad’s massacre of children, the same woman who is so excited about her Iranian negotiating partners’ body language that she doesn’t think it is necessary to give them an ultimatum about ending their quest for a nuclear bomb, seemed to lack a sufficiently harsh vocabulary to express her revulsion with Jewish “settlers.”

As she put it, “We are also seriously concerned by recent and increasing incidents of settler violence which we all condemn.”

It’s not clear what “recent and increasing incidents of settler violence” she was referring to. But in all likelihood, she didn’t have a specific incident in mind. She probably just figured that those sneaky Jews are always up to no good.

[…]

Aside from its jaw-dropping animosity towards Israel, what is notable about the EU’s position is that it is actually far more hostile to Israel than the Palestinians’ position towards Israel as that position was revealed in the agreements that the Palestinians signed with Israel in the past. In those agreements, the Palestinians accepted continued sole Israeli control over Area C. They did not require Israel to end the construction of Jewish communities outside the 1949 armistice lines. The peace process ended when the Palestinians moved closer to the EU’s position.

The EU’s antipathy towards Israel as personified in Ashton’s behavior teaches us two important lessons. First, it is often hard to tell our friends from our foes. Israelis – particularly those born to families that emigrated from Europe – have traditionally viewed Europe as the last word in enlightened democracy and sophistication and style. We wanted to be like them. We wanted to be accepted by them.

Indeed we were so swept away by the thought that they might one day love us back that we adopted policies that were inimical to our national interest and so weakened us tremendously.

It never occurred to us that the fact that Europe insisted that we adopt policies that undercut our national survival meant that the Europeans wished us ill.

[…]

The second thing we learn from Ashton’s anti-Israel mania is that when we engage in foreign policy, we need to base our judgments about our ability to influence the behavior of our foreign counterparts on a sober-minded assessment of two separate things: our interlocutor’s ideology and his interests. In Ashton’s case, both parameters make clear that there is no way to win her over to Israel’s side. She is ideologically opposed to Israel. And the citizens of Europe are becoming more and more hostile to Israel and to Jews.

[…]

Obama is not the only American leader that has been seduced into believing that Erdogan and his Islamist AKP Party are trustworthy strategic partners for the US. Many key members of Congress share this delusional view.

According to a senior congressional source, Turkey’s success in winning over the US Congress is the result of a massive Turkish lobbying effort. Through two or three front groups, the Turkish government has become one of the most active lobbying bodies in Washington. It brings US lawmakers and their aides on luxury trips to Turkey and hosts glittering, glamorous receptions and parties in Washington on a regular basis. And these efforts have paid off.

Turkey’s bellicosity towards Israel as well as Greece and Cyprus has caused it no harm in Washington. Its request to purchase a hundred F-35 Joint Strike Fighters faced little serious opposition. The US continues to bow to its demands to disinvite Israel from international forum after international forum – most recently the upcoming US-hosted counter-terrorism summit in Istanbul.

Certainly Turkey’s strategic transformation under Erdogan’s leadership from a pro-Western democracy into an anti-Western Islamist police state has dire implications for American national interests. And the Americans would be well-served to look beyond the silken invitations to Turkish formal events at five-star hotels and see what is actually happening in the sole Muslim NATO member-state. But whether the US comes to its senses or not is its business.

[…]

True, today no one in Israel operates under that delusion anymore. But the basic phenomenon of our leaders failing to distinguish between what they want to happen and what can happen continues to exist.

Ours is a dangerous world and an even more dangerous neighborhood. Everywhere we look we see cauldrons of radicalism and sophisticated weaponry waiting to explode. The threat environment Israel faces today is unprecedented.

At this time we cannot afford to be seduced by our dreams that things were different than they are. They are what they are.

We do have options in this contest. To maximize those options we need to ground our actions and assessments in clear-headed analyses and judgments of the people we are faced with. Their actions will be determined by their beliefs and their perception of their interests – not by our pretty face

Read the rest: Dreamy foreign policies

Tags: Caroline Glick, Catherine Ashton, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Posted in Hamas, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey | 80 Comments »

Confronting the Jewish Alinskyites

by Mojambo ( 64 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Progressives at June 11th, 2012 - 8:00 am

Caroline Glick feels that “[T]he time has come for the majority of American and Israeli Jews to stop being cowed and confused by destructive manipulations.”

by Caroline Glick

Saul Alinsky, the godfather of subversive radical political action, had a very clear strategy for undermining and destroying his enemies: Infiltrate, divide and destroy.

Since his disciple Barack Obama was elected US president in 2008, Alinsky’s impact on Obama has received a fair amount of attention.

Less noticed has been the adoption of Alinsky’s methods by radical leftist Jews in the US and Israel for the purpose of undermining the American Jewish community on the one hand, and Israel’s nationalist camp on the other. This week we saw the impact of both campaigns.

The striking weakness of the American Jewish community was exposed on Tuesday with the Democratic primary defeat of Rep. Steve Rothman in New Jersey. In Israel we saw the impact of the campaign to undermine and destroy the nationalist camp with the defeat of the proposed legislation aimed at saving the doomed Givat Haulpana neighborhood in Bet El.

Ahead of the 2008 US presidential elections, the anti-Israel pressure group J Street made a sudden appearance. Claiming to be pro-Israel, the anti-Israel lobby set about neutralizing the power of the American Jewish community by undermining community solidarity. And it has succeeded brilliantly.

Rothman is Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel. His defeat at the polls in New Jersey by Rep. Bill Pascrell owed in large part to openly anti-Semitic activism by Pascrell’s Muslim supporters.

According to an investigative report of the primary campaign by the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, in February Pascrell’s Muslim supporters began castigating Rothman and his supporters as disloyal Americans beholden only to Israel.

Aref Assaf, president of the New Jersey-based American Arab Forum, published a column in the Newark Star Ledger titled, “Rothman is Israel’s Man in District 9.” He wrote, “As total and blind support becomes the only reason for choosing Rothman, voters who do not view the elections in this prism will need to take notice. Loyalty to a foreign flag is not loyalty to America’s [flag].”

These deeply bigoted allegations against Rothman and his supporters were not challenged by Pascrell. Pascrell also did not challenge Arabic-language campaign posters produced by his supporters enjoining the “Arab diaspora community” to elect Pascrell, “the friend of the Arabs.” The poster touted the race as “the most important election in the history of the [Arab American] community.”

Rather than challenge these anti-Semitic attacks, Pascrell enthusiastically courted the Muslim vote in his district.

Pascrell was a signatory to what became known as the “Gaza-54 letter.” Spearheaded by J Street, the 2010 letter, signed by 54 Democratic congressmen, called on Obama to put pressure on Israel to end its “collective punishment” of residents of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Pascrell’s race was far from the only recent instance of anti-Semitism being employed by Democratic candidates to win their elections. In Connecticut’s 2006 Democratic Senate primary, anti-Semitic slurs and innuendos were prominent features of Ned Lamont’s successful race against Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Defeated in his party’s primary, Lieberman was forced to run as an Independent. He owed his reelection to Republican support.

LIBERMAN’S GENERAL election victory over Lamont did not force all of his fellow Democrats to rethink their use of anti-Semitism as a campaign strategy. At a candidate’s debate in this year’s Connecticut Democratic Senate primary race, candidate Lee Whitnum attacked her opponent Rep. Chris Murphy as a “whore who sells his soul to AIPAC.”

Given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans are supporters of the Democratic Party, it should have been assumed that they would have responded to Whitnum’s anti- Semitic slurs by seeking to get her expelled from their party. They also could have been expected to pour resources into defeating candidates like Pascrell who actively court the votes of open Jew-haters. But this didn’t happen.

Instead, due to J Street’s agitation, and the penetration of the Jewish organizational world by J Street fellow travelers, for the past three years, the American Jewish community has been fighting among itself about what it means to be pro-Israel. At a time when the US Jewish community’s party of choice is increasingly falling under the influence of radical leftists and Muslims who reject Israel’s right to exist, rather than standing tall, Jewish communities around the US are being neutralized by the solipsism of self-defeating, J-Street-invented issues like whether AIPAC is legitimate and whether Jewish anti-Zionists can be considered pro-Israel.

Equally horrible, if not worse, at a time when Israel is being threatened with annihilation by Iran, and Jewish communities in Europe and Latin America are under physical assault, the voice of the self-obsessed American Jewish community is coming through more and more weakly, with powerful voices questioning the very legitimacy of its collective voice.

In Israel, the success of local Alinskyites was on display this week as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu found himself squaring off against his party’s most committed constituency.

The 350,000 Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria and their massive support base inside the Likud, and indeed throughout Israeli society, suffered a tremendous defeat this week.

Netanyahu’s decision to torpedo a proposed law that would have prevented the implementation of the Supreme Court-ordered destruction of the Givat Haulpana neighborhood in Beit El has made these Likud members perceive themselves as isolated and in danger.

Just as the American Jewish community needs to recognize the J Street effect to contend with its current condition, so in Israel both sides of the divide in the nationalist camp need to understand how they came to find themselves on opposite sides of the fence.

Misreading what has happened, many are drawing false analogies between Givat Haulpana and the destruction of the Jewish communities in Gaza in 2005 and the destruction of homes in Amona in 2006. In both those previous cases, the destruction of the homes was the consequence of government policy. Then-premier Ariel Sharon wanted to destroy the Jewish communities of Gaza and northern Samaria. Their destruction was the centerpiece of his governing agenda. So, too, his successor Ehud Olmert wanted to destroy Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. He ran on a policy of destroying them in the 2006 elections.

This is not the case with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu can be faulted for not providing sufficient protection to Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria. He has not permitted Jews to build on state land to make up for the fact that they face market discrimination from the Palestinian Authority which has made it a capital crime to sell private land to Jews. And of course, he bowed to US pressure and instituted the deeply prejudicial temporary construction ban on Jews in 2009 and 2010.

But unlike Sharon and Olmert, Netanyahu has not made the destruction of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria a goal of his government.

To the contrary, he has enacted initiatives to strengthen the Jewish communities there and to raise the general public’s awareness of the centrality of Judea and Samaria to Jewish history and heritage.

Netanyahu is not the best friend of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. But he is more a friend than an enemy.

[…….]

The Alinsky strategy is brilliant in its cunning mendacity. And his followers in the American Jewish community and Israel have already succeeded in causing great harm. The stakes are high in both countries. The time has come for the majority of American Jews and Israelis to stop being cowed and confused by their destructive manipulations.