Forward.com

"Influenced by her Soviet upbringing with its emphasis on “patriotism” and “loyalty,” and its view of Judaism as a nationality, Michaeli doesn’t distinguish between being a good Jew and an Israeli patriot. “Judaism is at the basis of why we have this country to begin with. It’s not just a religion,” she said."

I am not conservative nor am I religious, but she is right about that.

Last I heard Jews returned to Israel to live free as Jews, meaning in their own language and Jewish social traditions (plural).

So Lieberman is making Israel more like the Soviet Union.

We all should be proud and supportive of Anastasia! I just want her to know that there are still non-orthodox, highkly educated, and patriotic American Jews left who do not share the new J-Steet/Forward 'party line' and strongly believe that US is heading, no, rolling down full-speed sacrificing Israel along the way. Apparently, history does not teach us anything. Once prosperity hits Jewish brain, nothing else penetrates it. Do you remember what you grandmothers tried so hard to pass on to you? It is obvious that the majority of American Jews lost common sense en masse! But we all are going to pay the price. Alas! Good luck, Anastasia!

She is worth more than a million members of J Street, Israel Policy Borum, Piece Now, and Sabeel

Per Gross in this article:

referring in seemingly negative racial terms to contestant Liel Kolet, a Jewish pop singer then contending for a Eurovision spot. Israel, Michaeli said, according to Ynet, shouldn’t be represented by a singer who “looks Arab.”

This brings back the race wars in Israel between the Ashkanazis and Mizrahis going back to the baby theft scandal and Glda Meir's statement that the only real Jew is the one who speaks Yiddish. All this only proves my point that most Israelis are East Europeans who didn't like the way their fellow East European treated them so they moved to Palestine in order to treat Semites there much as they were treated in East Europe. It is not hard for converts to shift to Zionism and be racist chauvenists, just as they were as "goyim." Afterall, this is how thought most of the fighters that abused helpless Palestinians-- murdering, pillaging and raping-- during the 1948 war. A "Jew" was a victim in war time East Europe but in the Middle East he is the "New Jew" that Jabotinsky spoke of, modeled after the very people Jews were escaping in the era of the Holocaust, getting even with people whom they never met. So the Nakba was tragic for both sides as the polarized hate goes on ad infinitum. Mizrahis must have really purked up their ears upon hearing Mrs. Samuelson-- the perfect shikta, converted of course-- describin Leil Kolet as looking "too Arab." Ironically, in East Europe, Jews are still "discovered" because they look too much like Arabs!!!!

I recall that Jewish leaders were not angry with Jimmy Carter for portraying Israel as apartheid but for his accounts that suggest that Israelis do not follow the Torah and are mainly athesist. That, they feared, removes Israelis' "chosen status" in the eyes of the Christian Zionists, hence the effort to discredit Carter. But Mrs. Samuelson is a clear demonstration of how racist Zionism is interchangable with the 'Godless Communist" forces under which she was raised to think as she does and which, thinking in exactly her racist fashion, brought the horrors of the Holocaust on East European Jews.

Most American Jews that I spoke to visiting in Israel and in the Diaspora from the 1970s to now seem to feel that Israelis are "facists." And, in turn, Israelis deem them to be "small animals" who run in fear with no sense of direction. A point that is always made in disdain is that Diaspora Jews would only visit Israel, not live in it, hence their "dollar Zionism" packaged with criticisms of Israel galore. For me, the *for show* hasbara of Liberman and Samuelson are rather familiar East Euro bravura. But the fact is that if the engorged umbelical cord from the great American $ placenta were pinched, the right wingers and settler who today stand firm for the Iron Wall would leave for better business prospects. Already in a poll, 30% of these "brave hearts" announced that if Iran gets an atomic bomb they would leave Israel. Israel is a 60y/o fetus on an American placenta because a lot of today's Israelis expect their fetus Peter Pan status as militant expansionists with business interests in "Eurabia," to go on forever while they play their nationalist hedonia. But what will happen when the dollar flow from a now broke America ceases? Will Mrs. Samuelson utter the same slogans and send her kids to the IDF, except then in utter poverty, or will she leave for GREEN-er pastures?

You never know when it comes to people who don't have to be what they are.

1. She's not that good looking. 2. I do not hear her addressing the issues except to say thay should be expunged; like Stalin toward the Baltic states.

Avigdor Lieberman does not represent a a point of view. It is the 21st Century!

Along with those, such as Dick Cheney, the concept of proactive agression is a perversion, not a philosophy.

I am not amused; Journalists, take note!

'She's not that good looking'

The Forward tries to appeal to gay men and heterosexual women and the above comment is the result.

It is the horrible philosophy of political showmanship, of which the current Italian Prime Minister is a (darkly) shining example. With people like these, tyranny puts up a smiling face.

Krisztina Morvai, the Jobbik leader in Hungary is hotter!

Richard: So it's the 21st Century, is it? And anti-Semitism is no longer a potent force in the world? Israel has been accepted by its Arab neighbors and no longer has to struggle for its survival, right? And, the UN is an international organization representing what is good and moral in the world, isn't that right. Richard? If all of your answers to the above questions (except for #1) are yes, you are an idiot.

are the 300,000 migrants not considered jews, are they israeli citizens.

Anastasia was born a Slav, not a drop of Semitic blood in her veins, yet, in the eyes of Israel, she has a claim to a land from which the natives were expulsed. Living next door in a refugee camp, a Palestinian has no right to even visit his homeland, while this renegade can travel from far-off Russia just because she has joined an exclusive religious club based on a mythical real-estate giveaway by a Bronze Age deity. Now she despises people of a darker color because they look Middle-Eastern and should not represent the Israelis. Aren't the Israelis supposed to be Middle-Eastern, descended from the Semitic tribe that came from Ur of the Chaldees to take over Canaan? Is this blonde, pale Slav a representative of the typical Israeli? Shame on you, Anastasia, for renouncing your roots. How can anyone trust or respect such an opportunist?

Rusalka, you are an ignorant racist.

Anastasia Michaeli Samuelson has a right to become an Israeli just as you have a right to become an American even though as a racist slav you hate Jews.

Judaism is not about blood" it'a about faith and culture.

Well said, Ash.

How does ruslaka know how many "drops of semitic blood" she has?

Perhaps one or more of her grnadparents was Jewish?

Not being Jewish means that her mother wasn't Jewish. It doesn't mean that she didn't have a grandparent who was Jewish.

Re your drivebys about Sarah Palin, There has been a lot of misinformation about various political positions of hers; if you are going to use her as a foil in an article about someone else, at least make it fact-based: She has many times stated explicitly that she is a feminist. When she was nominated for VP, she thanked Geraldine Ferraro for paving the way. Ferraro says that is the first time any woman in national politics in the US thanked her or remembered her. Palin gave props to Hillary for breaking the glass ceiling to be the first female POTUS nominee of a major party. Palin has praised Title IX for making her career as a high-school athlete possible.

Ruslaka, as a convert, I found your racist comment very offensive. How can you say I'm not a "real" Jew just because I have diverse ancestry?

Ash, thank you for speaking up on behalf of converts.

It seem to me that DE Teodoru comments on Thu. Jul 16, 2009 implies that you have an axe to grind. Respect is paid to the ole addage that 'it takes many to make a world' but your hieroglyphic (hard to decipher; hard to read) comments alone sends an eerie (uncanny, so as to inspire superstitious fear). I say congratulations & kudos (a statement of praise or approval; accolade; compliment) to Mrs. Anastasia Michaeli Samuelson.

All you converts, kudos is due to you for having found your "true" faith, leaving the "untrue faith" (Christianity or whatever other faith of your birth you abandoned), which to millions of others is still the "true" faith. But since you are convinced that your faith is right and that mine is wrong, there is obviously no sense in arguing about that. That is why I prefer to keep my original faith since no one knows which is the "true" faith. As a Sufi saying observes, "There are as many paths to God as there are human souls in the world." Read my post again, there is no racism against anyone involved, you are just too trigger happy to attack "racist Slavs," knowing nothing about me. Read it again. My post attacks racism, not glorifies it. Firstly, Jews claim ownership of Palestine because they are DESCENDED from the inhabitants of the land, many of whom left c. AD134. Hence the word "antisemitic," as Jews are supposed to have Semitic genes. On the other hand, Judaism is also a religion, so anyone who convers, Chinese, Estonian, Khazar, etc. is just as Jewish as someone with actual Hebrew genes (related to the inhabitants of the ancient area, with the exception of the Hittites and Philistines). How can conversion to a religion grant a human different ethnicity? If I convert to Roman Catholicism, am I then an Italian entitled to live in Italy as my birthright? That is the point. That woman, who now pops out children to be "soldiers" to kill the natives of the stolen land to which she has no right, being a Slav who never had connections to the Semitic peoples of Palestine, is an opportunist who has rejected her own birthright. La mona vestida de seda mona queda. The leopard can change his places but never his spots. As long as this non-Semite is entitled to live in a land to which the original natives are forbidden re-entry, as long as she derides the Mizrahis, who are the true Semitic Jews, she is the virulent racist. Finally, I give not a tinker's dam about conversions--good for Anastasia if she had converted to the faith alone, truly convinced that Christ is not God, fine, but she is using her renegade religion to deride the natives of Palestine and lord it over them. Shame.

People have a right to choose whatver faith they want to.

As long as no one forces you to adopt a certain religion it's up to the individual to decide.

Religion isn't science and no single religion has the whole truth.

The comparison of the proposed loyalty oath to the U.S. requirements for citizenship is imperfect; the U.S. requirements pertain to those who wish to become citizens, while Yisrael Beitenu wishes to strip of citizenship those who do not take its proposed loyalty oath. Also, Michaeli's comments about granting citizenship and National Insurance Institute benefits to those "who educate their children to kill us" clearly single out Arabs. When Arabs are citizens of Israel, however, they deserve equal treatment, i.e., not to be singled out. That is what it means for Israel to be a democracy.

Such strange reactions to a rational discussions. Leave off the ad hominem attacks, please, you know nothing about me, what you haters and curers do post are febrile hallucinations born of your prejudice against a certain group, the Slavs. Firstly, why do you say that I am "pious," Ash, and what have I ever done to you to compel you to want to "screw" me? That sounds so hostile and irrational. Calm down, Ash, or you will become an ash literally from your burning hatred. I merely stated that no one knows which is the true religion. I am what I was born because I can never be sure which religion God prefers that I be. I believe in a deity, but not an exclusive one who chooses a certain group (sect or ethnicity) to have special privileges. The Old Testament often defines the "chosen people" as clean and holy, while the gentiles are unclean, they shall be "hewers of wood" and "carriers of water" (read Isaiah, please) for the children of Israel (I assume that reinforces the idea of pure Semitic genes carried by a certain group--now that is racist). Deuteronomy has God telling Joshua and his gang to take all the possessions of the Canaanites and then to kill every LIVING BEING. Why? This is theft and murder, but it is not breaking the ten commandments, so recently given to the Israelites, since the acts are committed against gentiles, the natives of that land. I also abhorr the religious teachings of such personages as Hagee, who calls the Roman Catholic church a false sect, "the whore of Babylon," etc. All who do not accept Christ as Hagee does are doomed to burn in hell. Other religions preach the same ideology--if you are not one of us, you are garbage and you will not be saved. Tsk, tsk. So I am not all "pious" in the sense of believing like a zombie in whatever any one religions says, I believe that we are all children of God, loved equally. You can be any religion you want, since that is the way that the world is structured, but keep it to yourself, don't try to convert me, don't hate or mistrust others because they believe differently. As I stated, Anastasia can be whatever she wants, but she is still Russian, not a Semite just because she converted. You cannot have it both ways, you cannot be Anastasia (the Greek name refers to Christ's ressurection, by the way, not a very fitting name for a pious Jewess) and Michal. At any rate, the woman has chosen a racist path by upholding the plan to strip Arabs, the original natives, of citizenship. They take away the land, then they try to mess with their minds, forcing them to spit upon their heritage. Mind control. And Ash, if you are wondering what my "game" is, I am sickened by reformed Zionism, by the fulfillment of Jabotinsky's prophecy of the Iron Wall. I am against all forms of racism, I contribute to charities that help the true "Americans," the natives of this continent that have been abused and massacred by the white Europeans. I am sickened by colonialism's existence in this 21st century. Great Britain had no right to give away what was not theirs. The Palestinians have been greatly wronged, I have Palestinian in-laws, have had many Palestinian friends over the past fifty years, feel compassion because my family and I were refugees, forced out by Soviets and Nazis--by the way, some of my Russian "friends" slaughtered all the priests in my mother's family, they slit their throats, or is it worse to slit a Jewish woman's belly? Hmmm. Both are wrong, all acts of violence are wrong, religion has caused the worst horrors in history. My aim is to keep speaking out for the latest victims of racism and religious insanity, today, Palestinians stand out the most.

Estefan, you are 100% right, that is what I say, there is no scientific way to prove which religion is right, just be a good person, love others, in my case, take it all cum grano salis.

Brad, bless you for pointing out that a democracy, as Israel claims to be, cannot discriminate against any group of its citizens. I guess that Lieberman's strategy is to take away their citizenship and then give them more hell than they are getting now. There's another immigrant wacko, a native of Moldova, who thinks that he owns the Holy Land.

Toby, that is so cute about my worshipping trees. Many ancients venerated nature, the sky, planets, stars, wind, rain, water, stones, the Hebrews worshipped Baalim, the mother goddess, had idols (remember the narratives in Genesis about idols--Terah used to make them in Ur, Rachel stole her father Laban's images, the Israelites demanded a god to worship in the desert, the golden calf sculpted by Aaron; later, in Kings, Solomon lets his thousands of wives worship all their gods). So? Should the Jews go back to worshipping idols just because the Hebrews worshipped them? That comment has nothing to do with the discussion on racism and religious exclusivity that promotes genocide and dispossession of another's land because s/he is not of the same religion. By the way, maybe it would be better if we worshipped trees, the earth is in grave danger because of overpopulation, overbuilding, humans first, damn everything else mentality, which in the end will destroy humanity along with everything else. I have great reverence for nature, that is another of the reasons why I am so disgusted by the colonisation of Palestine, so much of the natural beauty has been destroyed, the olive trees uprooted, orange groves vandalised so that immigrants from all over the world can have their housing and luxuries while the natives are abused, humiliated, robbed. FILASTEEN FOREVER!

"Brad, bless you for pointing out that a democracy, as Israel claims to be, cannot discriminate against any group of its citizens. I guess that Lieberman's strategy is to take away their citizenship and then give them more hell than they are getting now. There's another immigrant wacko, a native of Moldova, who thinks that he owns the Holy Land."

rusalka, you are still an idiot. Lieberman can't take away anyones' citizenships. And Israel is more of a democracy than your bigoted country of Russia.

Asa Russian you should be posting on Chechnya and not lies about Israel.

I don't believe in your concern for the Palestinians. You are just using them to bait Jews. This is your whole game.

You are a hundred percent bitch.

"The Old Testament often defines the "chosen people" as clean and holy, while the gentiles are unclean,..."

bulshit rusanka, you are an ignorant asshole.

The idea of chosennes is a burden and not a frienge benefit.

Moreover the bible does not define "gentiles" as unclean.

It's antisemites like you who define Jews as unclean.

Blackston, it is true that being chosen by God, as is claimed (the Israelites are not the only people who think that "God" loves them best), implies a responsibility to adhere to the covenant. However, do not tell me that this is not a "perk" statement: "And I will bless him that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee." (Genesis 12:13) So God will curse you if you do not like his "chosen people." Sounds like a threat. Somehow the expression "bavait eno," the "pupil of God's eye" (Zechariah 2:8) smacks of favoritism. How come no one else gets to be "bavait eno?" And the chosen got free houses, goods, cisterns, olive groves and vineyards that they did not labour to build or dig (read Deuteronomy 2), and then they are to exterminate all those filthy Canaanites who did all the work because they had stayed behind and waited out the famine while the Israelites migrated to Egypt (historically unsubstantiated). This idea of being preferred over others also inspired the Romans to go out and beat up all the other nations and take their territory. I guess that is one reason why they were so cruel to the Jews, they did not want any competition in being the "chosen race." The Christians also took this stance, with all the conquests of the Americas, Asia, Africa, the Pacific islands. They were led by Manifest Destiny, they were of the true religion, they had to bear the White Man's Burden, they were chosen to civilise the benighted nations. An Old Testament ideology. A bad ideology. I hate it.

As for the unclean Gentile, the Old Testament, besides its genocidal narratives of Canaanites and Amalekites, has passages of great respect and tolerance for Gentiles, excellent, that is how it should be and that is the greatness found in the Torah. However, the New Testament reveals a contempt and hatred for non-Jews. In John 18:28, the Jewish delegation will not enter the Praetorium "so that they might not be defiled." Gentile property is unclean, is that not what the passage tells? In Acts 10:28, Saint Peter defies the Jewish law after a vision and enters into the home of Cornelius of Caesarea, a Gentile who has invited him: "You know that it is unlawful for a Jewish man to associate with or visit a Gentile, but God has shown me that I should not call any person profane or unclean." That is how it should be. The Bible teaches us that the idea of considering other nations "unclean," as did the Jews of the time, is loathsome. God revealed the truth to Peter.

So how can you imagine that I think that anyone is unclean, reading how I feel about the idiotic ideas of ethnic and religious purity? There are many today who hold to this ideology, there are Orthodox Jews who feel defiled if anyone wearing sleeveless garb or shorts comes into their territory, they would never eat off plates used by Gentiles.

Before you comment on anyone's posts, read carefully, come prepared with documentation and, above all, refrain from ad hominem attacks.

rusalka "Blackston, it is true that being chosen by God, as is claimed (the Israelites are not the only people who think that "God" loves them best), implies a responsibility to adhere to the covenant. However, do not tell me that this is not a "perk" statement: "And I will bless him that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee." (Genesis 12:13)"

Give it a rest.

Jews have been blessed with exile and holocausts and pogroms, etc.

Stop posting nonsense you get from the Russian forgery "The Protocols of of the Elder of Zion."

rusalka "Blackston, it is true that being chosen by God, as is claimed (the Israelites are not the only people who think that "God" loves them best), implies a responsibility to adhere to the covenant. However, do not tell me that this is not a "perk" statement: "And I will bless him that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee." (Genesis 12:13)"

If rusalka you really believe that Jews have an advantage over non Jews why don't you become a Jew like Anastasia?

Neither Toby nor Blackston has answered any of the points with documentation. Nor can either read correctly. Each has to resort to posting nonsense with insults or nonsequiturs. I have replied to each of your strange statements, but have received no rational response, just bizarre allegations either that I am Russian (?) or that I have read the "Protocols," why would I even waste my time on undocumented propaganda? I have my information from the original texts (Scriptures, Talmud), scores of history texts, reading world news every day, documentaries, lectures, talking to the persons who have experienced events in the Palestinian territories, like having their property seized, being detained at airports for no reason other than their being non-Jewish, etc.

Calling BLACKSTON: I showed you the passage where Lieberman and Yisrael Beitenu propose the oath that would, if not taken, cause loss of citizenship. So what is your answer? Is it still a "lie?" Why can you not stick to the point? Why can you not comment on the fact that there is an ethnic cleanising campaign which has been in progress against the Palestinians since the inception of Jabotinsky's Zionism? You have refuted nothing of the truth.

Calling TOBY: What makes you surmise that I "really believe that Jews have an advantage over non Jews?" Where do I say that? You have simply taken a quote out of context. I am pointing out some passages which refute Blacksotn's statement that there are no "freinge [fringe]" benefits to being the "chosen people." I do not believe in chosen people. If I convert to Judaism, it will be because I no longer believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God. It will never be for marriage or for my personal gain. Right now, I have no proof of whether Jesus is not the son of God, so I shall just continue with my religion, it suits me fine, as I hope that all your religiolns suit you and as I hope that your religions teach you not to insult others and spin lies.

Desperate "Rusalka","Calling BLACKSTON: I showed you the passage where Lieberman and Yisrael Beitenu propose the oath that would, if not taken, cause loss of citizenship."

You have proven nothing, you make wild and recycle antisemitic assertions,that is all.

You sound like Joachim Martillo the nazi who posts here under different names.

rusalka/martillo I don't need to prove anything.

You are the one with and antisemitic ax to grind.

Problem is your ax is as dull as on old bar of soap.

Recycling old antisemitic comments taken from Nazi websites isn't proof of anything.

BLAKSTON: You constantly write to "rusalka," but I have no idea whose posts you are reading. Your comments have nothing to do with what is written in the "rusalka" posts. Just to make it clear to you, I shall try to reiterate the discussion: It is totally illogical that Anastasia Michaeli Samuelson (Russian, Slavic, non-Semite) and Avigdor Lieberman (Moldovan, Khazar, non-Semite), recent immigrants to a land to which they have no past ties, are trying to make the natives, who to not wish to give up their rights, disappear by instituting the swearing to of a loyalty oath which would strip those who decline to subscribe to an exclusively religious (Jewish) state by stripping them of their citizenship: "...any Israeli who refused to take it would lose citizenship, voting rights and the right to hold elective office."

Now, pretend that you are on the Geraldo Rivera show:

GERALDO: Mr. Blackton, is the above quoted policy racist? Yes or no? If you say "no," please explain.

I hope that this clarifies the nature of the discussion for you. There is nothing against Jews here, especially since Anastasia and Avigdor are from Russia and Moldova. This deals with human righs and the principles of democracy. If you believe that the policy is democratic and non-racist, that is, of course, your prerogative. But try to be civilised and rational.

What a cute fascist!

I don't care if she is jewish or not, cute or not. She is russian and I don't trust russians. Look what Russia is doing now: collaborating with Achmadinejad and selling nuclear weapons to Iran. That's betrayal against Israel of the worst kind!

"BLAKSTON: You constantly write to "rusalka," but I have no idea whose posts you are reading."

Really, you are not that hard to decipher.

You are a miserable and lonely Russian fascistic antisemite.

"Your comments have nothing to do with what is written in the "rusalka" posts."

Like hell they don't. Your posts are all the same, same lies, same antisemitic nonsense and same insanity.

"Just to make it clear to you, I shall try to reiterate the discussion: It is totally illogical that Anastasia Michaeli Samuelson (Russian, Slavic, non-Semite) and Avigdor Lieberman (Moldovan, Khazar, non-Semite),"

You have made nothing clear, you have just repeated bigoted nonsense you posted before.

First Anastasia is an Israeli citizen as is Lieberman the rest is your addition. You have no idea what a "slavs" or a "semites" are. These are linguistic groups and not racial ones. But you are too stupid to know the difference.

"recent immigrants to a land to which they have no past ties,"

Do you have any ties to the US? How many Americass do have "past ties" to this country. You too are a recent immigrant maybe we should send you back to the land of the cossacks.

"are trying to make the natives,"

What the fuck is a native? Natives are people born in a certain country Citizens are people who become naturalized in the country they move to. Who are you to tell naturalized citizens that they have no rights?

"who to not wish to give up their rights, disappear by instituting the swearing to of a loyalty oath"

Neither Lieberman nor anastasia have the power to make anyone disappear. It's all foolish nonsense.

"which would strip those who decline to subscribe to an exclusively religious (Jewish) state by stripping them of their citizenship"

Oh you mean like what the Russians did to the Jews be forcing them to live in the Pale? I doubt this will happen in Israel.

"...any Israeli who refused to take it would lose citizenship, voting rights and the right to hold elective office."

NO such law exists and no such law was proposed. You are just posting antisemitic nonsense, repeatedly.

Rusalka is a boring Cossack. I wish she or he would disappear.

Alex, get a grip. She is not Russian and does not support Ahamdinejad.

Rusalka tell me about the Chechnyans your Slavis Russians have been murdering?

Rusalka's horror

"Genocide in Chechnya" http://amina.com/article/genocidin_chech.html

"In Grozny, ISCA representatives visited one of four major Russian concentration camps used for detaining Chechens during the war. Just outside of the city is one of the most infamous camps established by the Russians during the war. Known as PAP-1 (the Passenger Automobile Plant, or Passazhirskoe Avtomobilnii Predpriatie in Russian), the detention camp is the site of a former bus repair facility.

Torture chamber. Coverted bus garage, this cell, like all the others, was lined with steel grates, preventing the prisoners from touching the walls.

The camp held civilians as well as Chechen soldiers. Many parts of the main bus repair plant used for torturing Chechens detainees remain in place. Blood stained walls adorn the former holding cells where Chechens were held for interrogation. Chechen officials estimate that PAP-1, as well as three other camps, held at least tens of thousands of Chechens during the war, the majority of whom were civilians, not military combatants. Aside from PAP-1, one of the largest concentration camps used for detaining Chechens was located at the Russian military base at Mozdok. The average length of time for Chechens to be held at the camp was approximately one week. If, during the course of interrogation, it was learned that the detainees were important military prisoners, then they were transported by helicopter to the Russian detention camp at Mozdok for further interrogation. There are unconfirmed reports that the American, Fred Cuny, may have been transferred to Mozdok from PAP-1, where he may have been detained before being moved to the other camp.

To the naked eye it is difficult to know that PAP-1 was a major detention center used for interrogation and torture. Most Chechens are not eager to advertise the location of the camp and the members of the elite Presidential Guard did so only with great reluctance. With their martial traits and deep sense of pride, Chechens are remarkably embarrassed by what happened at PAP-1 and believe that it is a source of weakness to show the camp to foreigners. A sign near the entrance to the detention center states that the former detention camp is a Museum to the Victims of the War, but no displays or signs are visible inside, only the grisly remnants of Russian interrogation cells. When in operation, PAP-1 was a heavily guarded facility holding as many as 1,500 Chechens, many of whom disappeared altogether after being imprisoned at the camp.

Ostensibly PAP-1’s major purpose was to serve as a center for filtering civilians and soldiers captured during the fighting. By the end of the war, PAP-1 was one of the biggest concentration camps in operation in Chechnya. In an effort to release Chechens imprisoned at the compound Chechen special-forces units frequently fought to overrun the camp and in a rare instance of failure on the battlefield proved unable to break through the impregnable walls of PAP-1. Today the facility has a deathly silence as the proud members of the elite Presidential Guard seethe with emotions of anger and silence. They retell the history of PAP-1 and argue that this is the second instance in this century of Russian-orchestrated genocide against the Chechen people. The first instance, they note, was in 1944, when Stalin deported millions of Chechens by boxcars to remote areas of the Soviet Union where they languished in Siberian and Central Asian prison camps.

Electric torture chair, used in last war to torture Chechen prisoners, nearly all of whom were civilians. Other atrocities included nailing prisoners by their tongues to the table, electric shock and burning the bodies of the dead in huge vats.

A majority of the detainees held at PAP-1 were male Chechens. Approximately 68% of the prisoners held at the camp were civilians. It also included many innocent women and children who were used as hostages by the Russian military units that operated the facility. The Russian soldiers sought to supplement their poor salaries by asking huge ransom fees for the prisoners held at the facility. Chechen detainees were sometimes freed in exchange for ransoms paid by Chechen families; most often they languished until they died during interrogation. The fortunate Chechen families managed to win the release of their relatives by offering a couple of bottles of vodka or even sheep.

At PAP-1, ISCA representatives were met by a grieving mother who ran to the camp upon hearing that westerners had come to inspect the detention center. Overcome with emotion, she wept as she retold the story of how her eight-year old son was arrested upon coming to the facility to deliver food to an older brother held inside. Both sons, she said, disappeared and she never found any trace of their bodies after the Russian troops left the facility.

Inside the camp the instruments of torture largely remain intact. Burned out buses, which formed a series of makeshift cells for Chechen detainees, line the inner courtyard of the detention camp. The buses, it seems, served as temporary cells before Chechens were separated and sent into the main bus garage for serious interrogation. The main garage is where Chechens suffered the incessant beatings and torture by their Russian captors. An elderly Chechen man who works at the camp as a custodian escorted members of the ISCA delegation throughout the building. Before entering the holding cells, he showed two Spanish journalists who accompanied our group two portable steel dumpsters which remain on display in the central building. These steel coffins, he said, had been used to transport the bodies of Chechens killed during Russian interrogation. The mobile dumpsters could be moved to an interior room in the building where a makeshift incinerator was in place with two smokestacks connected to the outside roof of the building. The old man retold that as many as four to five bodies could be placed in a dumpster at one time. This Auschwitz style setting quickly eradicated any doubts among us that genocide had been committed against the Chechens in a remote corner of Grozny.

Unfortunately Chechen officials proved to be ill equipped for genocide-watching and lacked any official data or officials statistics on the exact number of Chechens who disappeared at the camp.

We inspected several of the holding cells inside the building and found at least 20 of these large metal cages that could contain as many as 20 Chechens at a time. Our escorts said that approximately 200 Chechens would be imprisoned inside the main building at one time. A central torture room inside the building still remains much as it was during the war, with a large metal rack with blood stained spikes and steel cables hanging from the walls. On one wall, it is still visible where a Chechen under detention wrote his name in blood. Blood stains on the floors and walls are highly visible throughout the facility.

The two Spanish journalists traveling with our group, one of whom covered the war in Algeria for three years for the newspaper La Stampeda, were astounded to learn of what happened at PAP-1 and wondered why none of the Moscow-based journalists had ever written a story about the camp. In all the years of covering the war in Algeria, one of the journalists said that he has never witnessed anything like PAP-1. The failure of western journalists to cover what occurred at PAP-1 greatly disturbed everyone who visited the camp. The one journalist remarked that it is only after the end of a war that this sort of grisly evidence is found. Today PAP-1 remains a visible monument to the Bosnia-like atrocities that occurred in Chechnya during the war and which continue to go unnoticed by the western media."

Yes, estephan if one wants to find facsict regimes one need look no further than rusika's native land. It's the land of pogroms, nazis, and genocidal murderers.

Itamar "What a cute fascist!"

Yes, you are an anitsmeitic fascist, Itamar, but not cute.

Ephraim,

You sound like an Yisrael Beiteinu member who - when not advocating for the ethnic cleansing and murder of the Palestinian natives- can be counted on to shout "Anti-Semite... Anti-Semite" from the rooftops.

Itamar, you sound like a supporter of Hamas who when not advocating for the ethnic cleansing and murder of the Jews - can be counted on to shout "Jews go back to Auschwits from the rooftops."

Itamar's friends:

"Jews, go back to the oven!"

"Take a look at the video below, of a pro-Hamas demonstration earlier this week. Note the woman shouting, "Nuke, nuke Israel!", at about the 2 minute mark, and "Go back to the oven! You need a big oven, that's what you need!" (about 3:30). If you watch on till around the 7 minute mark, you'll see the pro-Hamas crowd spilling out into the streets into traffic screaming "Allahu akbar!," despite the police ordering them back to the sidewalk."

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/01/jews-go-back-to-the-oven.html

Here is more:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=jews+go+back+to+the+ovens&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=notmSvvoD8aTtge_vLGyAg&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4#q=jews+go+back+to+the+ovens&hl=en&emb=0

Itamar, Israel Beiteinu is not a fascist organization.

But you friends in the so called peace movement are fascists as well as antisemites.

Ephraim may not, but you bet I'll shout Itamat is an antisemite from any rooftop in the world.

Itamar thinks that antisemitism is a joke, that it's not real, just as he thinks that the Holocaust was a myth used by Jews for political ends.

The reality is that the Arab Israeli conflict is small potatoes in tersm of people affected and casualties.

The Congo, Sudan, Chechnya, Tibet, etc. with it's millions killed is a thousands times worse. But for antisemites like Itmar they are of no account.

Even in civil wars like that in Algeria recently killed more Arabs than died in all the Arab Israeli wars combined.

For Itamar non of that matter, if it's not Jews it's no news, to him

He is a first calls hypocritical bastard and Jew hater.

"Neo-Nazis against ‘Zionist wars’"

Edmund Standing,

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/07/22/neo-nazis-against-zionist-wars/

The psychopathology of the PA:

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/07/17/speaking-of-paranoia-and-forgeries-try-out-this-one-from-the-pa/

Blackston, you have not answered anything--just hysterical paranoia about antisemitism. And I am not Russian, has that not been made clear? Soviets (Russian) killed the priests in my mother's family and took all the property, then Nazis forced my father to flee, he also lost everything. I am totally in sympathy with any country that is occupied, including Chechnya--Russians, go home! I am against all imperialism. I am against any occupation--Tibet, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Basque country, Catalonia, Brittany, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Palestine. Your very bizarre "Russian" accusations are totally unapplicable. They just show your racism against Russians, which is odd, since so many Jews are Russian and proud of it, the food, the music, the language. Anastasia is Russian. You like her, no? She is very beautiful and a good mother, too bad that she is anti-Arab, that is racist. I also do not hate Russians, in spite of what they did to my ancestors. I have many Russian friends, we get together because we are fellow Slavs (yes, we are an ethnic group, not just linguistic). How many times do I have to repeat this? Blackston, I shall not disappear, I read many news stories every day. Also, your idea of "native" is totally illusory. A "native," from Latin NATUS (born), is a person who is born in a cerain place, so Albert Camus was a native of Oran, Algeria, but he was not an Algerian aborigene (not even Arabs are North African aborigenes, the latter are Kabyl, Berber, Riff, etc.), he was French by ethnicity. So Golda Mabovitch was a native of Kiev but could not claim to be really Ukrainian since she preferred to think of herself as Jewish first (Khazar genes, Turkic, according to DNA). I have friends who were born in the USA but consider themselves Arab, Italian, Polish, etc., according to the DNA of their parents. The only real Americans are Cherokee, Sioux, Dakota, Lakota, etc. That is why there are such terms as African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Italian-American, etc. Get that through your skull. There have even been DNA tests on Jewish people to prove a connection with Palestine, but of course some Jewish people (not Anastasia or Elizabeth Taylor) have the same DNA as Palestinian Arabs since they are descended from Middle Eastern Jews, who mainly settled in North Africa, Iberia, the Balkans. Ashkenazi have Turkic genes and are related to Kurds. Check out the reports online. It is a fascinating tapestry. That is why it is so dismaying to see some Jewish people like Lieberman trying to expulse the Arabs. There are also plans to move the Arab population out of Israel by certain rightist groups. You are obviously not aware of this. You say that Lieberman has no power to strip anyone of citizenship. But besides these plans, which show the racist face of Zionism, there are already laws in place to keep as many natives out of occupied territory as possible. The refugees cannot return, their villages have been destroyed, Israeli settlements built over them, the family homes now occupied by immigrants, while the owners still have the keys and the deeds but are not even allowed to visit. There is a great sadness and sense of sin over the entire Zionist enterprise. The new president of the United States is aware of this and has pointed out that Palestinians have the same importance as Israelis. He is the child who cried: "But the emperor is naked!" No good will ever come of depriving a people of their land to make up for the horrors committed against Jews in Europe by their Christian neighbors. The Europeans should be paying for the Holocaust, not the Arabs. Believe me, the Europeans are breathing a sigh of relief that they got away scot free for centuries of persecution. Now quit calling me a Russian cossack, I am neither, besides, that has no importance since what I post is totally objective and non-partisan, I could be a Tibetan lama, just heed the lessons of history. See what is happening now vis-a-vis the settlements. What goes up must come down, the wheel turns, Yahweh punished his people many times for their disobedience, the time is coming when the Lord shall pronounce his judgment.

estephan, your post on the Chechnya horrors is very interesting and I commend you for so strongly advocating the Chechnyans, but I have nothing to do with the horrors in Chechnya. I am not Russian and even if I were, I would be antiwar. My heart goes out to any people persecuted by imperialist bullies. You should see a beautiful film about a Russian babunya visiting her grandson who is stationed in Chechnya, it is called "Alexandra." The best moments are when Alexandra and some Chechyan women who befriend her form a beautiful bond which makes one wish that all people could come together in brotherhood and sisterhood.

Blackston to rusalka: "You have no idea what a "slavs" or a "semites" are. These are linguistic groups and not racial ones. But you are too stupid to know the difference." Oh, this is too good to be true! You really, really wrote that, for the whole world to see? Oh my God, holy shmata, I do not believe it!

So everything that is written, that I have learned in anthropology and history classes is not true, according to you. How dare you say that I am "stupid" when nothing of what I have posted has been fabricated by me? Look up "Slav" and "Semite" in the simplest reference, like the Encyclopedia Britannica or even a dictionary, never mind the academic texts which you are probably not capable of reading, and you will find that both are defined as not only linguistic groups but as ethnic groups. Slavs are, in the Britannica, an "ethnic and linguistic body of people." ETHNIC. Modern science defines a population's common physical descent through GENETIC RESEARCH--that has nothing to do with linguistics but the racial makeup, got it? An analysis of Semitic -speaking groups suggests that they have some common ancestry. Haven't you noticed how alike they look? Arabs do not have, as a rule, blond hair and blue eyes and pale complexion, unless there was a Swede or French person or Slav in the family tree. They tend to have the same features, especially as they tend to intermarry. Slavs do not have black skin or slit eyes (although there are some Tatar genes, I have some, and they make for some cute features). Of course there is intermarriage, but the genes are all there, if they are predominant, then that person is Slav, Mediterranean, Germanic, Latin, Maori, etc. Hello! Have you never heard of the Y-chromosomal links between Arabs, Assyrians and Mizrahi Jews? Why don't you do some reading, or do you so love the taste of your foot? And stop the name-calling, that is so uncultured and really makes you look unwholesome and unsure of yourself.

"Itamar thinks that antisemitism is a joke, that it's not real, just as he thinks that the Holocaust was a myth used by Jews for political ends." --- Ephraim

Not true. I simply believe that attempting to smear people with antisemitism for daring to shed a light on Israel's atrocities is immoral (as well as no longer effective). Keep in mind that Israel's atrocities ARE SADLY VIEWED BY MANY AROUND THE WORLD AS BEING COMMITTED IN THE NAME OF THE JEWS thus fueling antisemitism. Ephraim seems to be in a state of total denial.

"The reality is that the Arab Israeli conflict is small potatoes in tersm of people affected and casualties." --- Ephraim

Incorrect again. The Palestinian death toll from operation Cast Lead - which is but the latest episode in this bloody conflict- was 1,017, of whom 322 were children. More than 4,600 were wounded, of whom 1,600 were children http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/jan/14/news/chi-gaza-toll_for_webjan15 There are also over 4 million Palestinian refugees whose ancestors were ethnically cleansed when Israel was created. This is hardly "small potatoes" (unless you live in the parallel universe where Ephraim seems to spend most of his time).

"Blackston, you have not answered anything--just hysterical paranoia about antisemitism. And I am not Russian, has that not been made clear?"

Rusalka, paranoia and hysteria is what you traffci in.

You can list all the ills in the world but the point is that you attack Jews like an antisemite. There is very little you say abhout Jews that can't be found on a neonazi webs ite.

There is therefore no need to answer any of you hesterical and lying assertions about Jews.

btw:

Go fuck yourself whatever you are and I don't believe that you are not a Slac or a Russian since all your posts suggests that you are. YOu sheer hatred of Anastasia because she stopped being a Russian Orthodox has a personal motive.

You also change your life story to suit your arguments.

Go post on David Duke's web site.

"ETHNIC. Modern science defines a population's common physical descent through GENETIC RESEARCH--that has nothing to do with linguistics but the racial makeup, got it? An analysis of Semitic -speaking groups suggests that they have some common ancestry. Haven't you noticed how alike they look? Arabs do not have, as a rule, blond hair and blue eyes and pale complexion, unless there was a Swede or French person or Slav in the family tree. They tend to have the same features, especially as they tend to intermarry."

What nonsense, you know nothing about ethnicity, Arabs, or Slavs even though you are one. In any case, above you used the terms race to describe Semites and Slavs.

Some Arabs do have blond here, Arfat's wife for example had blond hair. Also some the late Musfit of Jerusalem Hitler's friend had blue eyes and the Nazis considered the Arabs "honorary arayans."

Moreover Slavs do not belong to a single ethnicity and certainly not a race. The rulers of Russian were all descendants of Vikings which is why there are so many blond people Russia. 9Read a history of Russia if you know how to read.

In any case, and this is my last point, since you are to stupid to learn,

Race is a fixed category, ethnicity is not.

Ethnicity is not a fixed category: Slavs in the 5th century are not the same people they are today because of different admixtures. The same is true for all ethnicities, Arabs included. Among the French most families say that they have more than one family member who is not originally French. Does that make them and illegitimate nation?

Jews as a matter of fact because they were isolated in Europe for many centuries are less mixed than other ethnicities, though this is changing. I am not going to go into detail with an antisemite like you but genetically European Jews are closer to Palestinians and to Kurds than to other peoples. But scientific evidence is lost on you.

Moreover Jews in Israel are intermarrying and in a couple of generations there will be little distinction between Ashkenazi, Spharadi, and Misrachi Jews. THat is to say ethncity changes but the culture, the language and the relgion stays pretty much the same.

Now go fuck off, miserable Jew hater that you are. The daughter or son of Jew killers.

"Not true. I simply believe that attempting to smear people with antisemitism for daring to shed a light on Israel's atrocities is immoral (as well as no longer effective)."

Whether its effective or not is not the issue. People like you who try to smear Israel and bring up blood libel charges are not different than the sriters of the Protocols of the Elder of Zion if you even know what that is.

You and most anti Zionists are antisemites working towards another Genocide of Jews.

"Keep in mind that Israel's atrocities ARE SADLY VIEWED BY MANY AROUND THE WORLD AS BEING COMMITTED IN THE NAME OF THE JEWS thus fueling antisemitism. Ephraim seems to be in a state of total denial"

You can't hav eit both ways either the people hating Israel are antisemitic or not. It doesn't matter what esxcuse they give.

There were over five million people in the Congo murdered in recent wars yet is that an excuse for hating all black Africans? The same with Darfur, etc.

""The reality is that the Arab Israeli conflict is small potatoes in tersm of people affected and casualties." --- Ephraim

Incorrect again. The Palestinian death toll from operation Cast Lead - which is but the latest episode in this bloody conflict- was 1,017, of whom 322 were children. More than 4,600 were wounded, of whom 1,600 were children"

These numbers are bogus. HOWEVER, even if they were true they don't even begin to compare with the tens of thousands of people muredred elsewhere at the same time in places like the Sudan and elsewhere.

Antisemites are always selective the only victims that matter are those killed by Jews in self defense, nothing else matters.

"There are also over 4 million Palestinian refugees whose ancestors were ethnically cleansed when Israel was created."

In the same decade, Six million Jews were murdered, half a million Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arab lands, not to mention the tens of millions of HIndus and Muslims that were cleansed in India. Besides there were millions more cleansed from European countries that were not allowed to return.

Only the small number of Arabs who chose to leave in order to give Arab armies a free hand to murder Jews in are still refugees.

"This is hardly "small potatoes"

This is small potatoes, and your corocodile tears only convince antisemites. All others know that what you are saying is bigoted nonsense.

"(unless you live in the parallel universe where Ephraim seems to spend most of his time)."

I live in this world, you live in an antisemitic anti Jewish world.

Enjoy you hateful life there, asshole.

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/01/22/1610/print/

"Jenin Redux: Casualty Figures Reconsidered

Posted By Richard Landes On 22nd January 2009 @ 08:50 In Arab-Israeli Conflict, Are We Waking Up Yet?, Pallywood | 26 Comments

In a piece I meant to comment on, [1] Stephanie Gutmann warned against taking the figures of casualties provided by Hamas at face value. Now we have an anonymous comment by a doctor from Shiffa hospital that confirms her (widely ignored) cautionary advice. (H/T: Harris)

[2] Gazan doctor says death toll inflated Physician at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital tells Italian newspaper number of dead in Israeli offensive ’stands at no more than 500 or 600, most of them youths recruited to Hamas’ ranks’ Nir Magal"

"What really is behind the numbers reported on the number of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip? Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera reported Thursday that a doctor working in Gaza’s Shifa Hospital claimed that Hamas has intentionally inflated the number of casualties resulting from Israel’s Operation Cast Lead.

“The number of deceased stands at no more than 500 to 600. Most of them are youths between the ages of 17 to 23 who were recruited to the ranks of Hamas, who sent them to the slaughter,” according to the newspaper article.

The doctor wished to remain unidentified, out of fear for his life.

A senior Palestinian Health Ministry official later denied the claims, and the IDF estimate on the number of casualties in Gaza has also remained unchanged.

A Tal al-Hawa resident told the newspaper’s reporter, “Armed Hamas men sought out a good position for provoking the Israelis. There were mostly teenagers, aged 16 or 17, and armed. They couldn’t do a thing against a tank or a jet. They knew they are much weaker, but they fired at our houses so that they could blame Israel for war crimes.”

The reporter for the Italian newspaper also quoted reporters in the Strip who told of Hamas’ exaggerated figures, “We have already said to Hamas commanders – why do you insist on inflating the number of victims?”

These same reporters mentioned that the truth that will come out is likely to be similar to what occurred in Operation Defensive Shield in Jenin. “Then, there was first talk of 1,500 deaths. But then it turned out that there were only 54, 45 of which were armed men,” the Palestinian reporters told the Italian newspaper.

These new figures must be treated with caution especially in light of the fact that various official sources in the Gaza Strip, including United Nations and Red Cross officials, have reported that more than 1,300 people were killed and some 5,000 wounded during the three weeks of fighting in the coastal strip. Palestinian sources claim that three-quarters of the dead were unarmed civilians.

This is a strange formulation that can only be made by people still operating under the [3] “halo effect” of Human Rights NGOs, as if the UN and the Red Cross, as it operates in the Gaza Strip, are independent organizations when it comes to such figures.

Hamas, while boasting on having Israeli soldiers by the dozens, a number that has proven to be exaggerated, claimed that no more than 48 of its members were killed during the Israeli offensive. According to IDF figures, Hamas lost hundreds of fighters from its ranks.

The UN’s humanitarian chief began a tour of the Gaza Strip on Thursday to examine the extent of the devastation left behind by the Israeli offensive.

John Holmes said the number of casualties is “extremely shocking.” He also urged Israel to conduct a thorough investigation into shelling attacks that damaged UN buildings in Gaza.

Holmes said he was thinking about immediate humanitarian needs and longer-term reconstruction. He said the biggest concerns are providing clean water, sanitation, electricity and shelter.

Holmes added that Gaza’s border crossings would have to be opened to allow reconstruction materials into the area.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Nothing will stop the self-appointed guardians of public morality from the appointed rounds. Perhaps, before anyone tours Gaza, they should make a mandatory visit to Congo, or Sudan, to have a reality check on what is “extremely shocking.”

The implications of this disparity — including the willingness of Israelis to use Hamas-supplied statistics — are immense. Most of the moral outrage was generated precisely by those figures. Apologies anyone?"

URL to article: http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/01/22/1610/

URLs in this post: [1] Stephanie Gutmann warned against taking the figures of casualties: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODY1NjNiMmQyMThlN2ZhZDhjYmYwYWM4M2ZlOTk4MDE= [2] Gazan doctor says death toll inflated: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3660423,00.html [3] “halo effect”: http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article.php?id=2235

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/01/22/the-palestinians-worst-enemy-the-poisoned-gift-of-european-anti-semitism/print/

“The Palestinians’ Worst Enemy: The Poisoned Gift of European Anti-Semitism”

By Richard Landes

“I had a conversation with a remarkable Palestinian advocate of human rights several years ago when I tried to show him the material I had on Pallywood. As we discussed the problem, and his helplessness to even address it, it became clear to me that the single most insidious enemy of the Palestinians is the European loathing of an independent Jewish nation. What seemed to Palestinians like a gift — Europeans’ hostility to Israel — has ended up strengthening the worst aspects of Palestinian culture, its irredentism, its preference for suffering Palestinians, its thirst for hatred.

And this is nowhere more evident than when Palestinians try and go sober, try and kick their addiction to hatred, try to turn from gnawing on old wounds to growing new life. Then they run into their most fearful demon, the sympathetic hater in the West: the old fashioned European anti-semite at last released from his post-Holocaust prison of politically incorrect, the radical, the revolutionary, [1] the morally superior/envious progressive, both Christian and post-Christian, even [2] Jewish. For these people, like those [3] Arab leaders who have treated them so abominably for so long, the moral and symbolic value of the Palestinians lies in their suffering, not in their recovery. The forces that have driven on the astounding, unprecedented, otherwise inexplicable 60-year refugee status for Arabs who fled Israel in 1948, will not be cheated of their most precious possession: a people victim of the Jews. Indeed, I would argue, the [4] media footprint of Jewish misdeeds — true and invented — are the very image of this corrosive need.

For those progressives with enough remaining integrity to look at[5] the current madness over Israel and wonder what’s wrong, I invite them to the following meditation. The behavior of Hamas described below in Belmont Club’s discussion, the deeds of that very same Hamas whose flags German’s successfully petitioned their courts for permission to wave at their anti-war demonstrations, is the karmic product of sixty years of proxy hatreds, now reaching new temperatures. Under a terrifying assault by neighbors driven mad by their own leaders’ mad policies, the Gazans find themselves literally crucified by a reign of terror.”

“[6] The Grand Inquisitors

Up to a hundred Palestinians in Gaza who have defied house arrest orders have been tortured in children’s hospitals and schools converted into interrogation centers. People have been shot in the legs or had their hands broken. The campaign has been described as a “new massacre”. One victim had his eyes put out. No one was safe from the torturers, not even those attending funerals. When is will the UN act to put a stop to this horror? Won’t President Obama intervene to stop these barbaric acts? Aren’t international human rights monitors going to put a stop to this? When will War Crimes charges be preferred against the perpetrators?

Never.

Why? Because Hamas is in charge of the torture and their victims are simply Fatah members. If it were Israel who had done these things, well then … But since it’s Hamas, the same Hamas for whom thousands have been marching in ’solidarity’, it’s a non-story. The Jersualem Post cites reports from Fatah members describing the events.

Of course, that’s [7] Khaled abu Toameh, who, without going to Gaza, [8] tells us more than all the brave Ben Wedemans in their flak jackets or Taghreed el-Khodarys, with their anti-Israel talking points. And yet, many journalists dismiss Toameh because he works for the Jerusalem Post. “He’s not fully reliable, you know,” they say “with a sad wink and a nudge.”

The argument is not without its ironies. After all, imagine an Israeli reporter, reporting dirt on Israel to the readers of Al Jazeera. One can hardly imagine our MSM journalists dismissing his or her information. Come to think of it… that’s more or less the function of Gideon Levy and Amira Hass in the internet, English Ha-Aretz. When’s the last time a journalist airily dismissed their testimony?

The eyewitnesses said that a children’s hospital and a mental health center in Gaza City, as well as a number of school buildings in Khan Yunis and Rafah, were among the places that Hamas had turned into “torture centers.”

A Fatah activist in Gaza City claimed that as many as 80 members of his faction were either shot in the legs or had their hands broken for allegedly defying Hamas’s house-arrest orders. ”What’s happening in the Gaza Strip is a new massacre that is being carried out by Hamas against Fatah,” he said. “Where were these [Hamas] cowards when the Israeli army was here?”

There was a chorus of folks — headed by Jimmy Carter — who assured us that Hamas, now democratically elected, would turn towards moderation. And when some tried to point out that it was more likely a case of “one man, one vote, one time…” they were dismissed. “You aren’t comparing Hamas to the Nazis, are you?”

But this doesn’t have to be about the Nazis. It’s [9] Politics 101 — Plato, Aristotle, anyone whose understands the fragility of the nascent democratic process and the terrors that lurk in failures. And now we have it, up close: what becomes of a failed/betrayed democracy? Tyranny 101.

Why, waiting for the ceasefire, of course.

Waiting for the cease-fire that they knew would come. Because Hamas knew that the world would never allow the Israelis to come in and root out this enemy. So all they had to do, was retreat, let their own people suffer (if not add to it), and then, when the Israelis retreat, make sure they still dominated, made sure that anyone who might accuse them of these calamaties, did not have a voice. Time for terror against domestic enemies.

That turns out to have its own costs, even though they are not widely recognized. But when the cost-benefit of leaving Hamas in posession of Gaza was calculated, was the price of reprisal included in the bill? Did anyone take into account how many people, who might otherwise have been open to negotiating peace, have now decided it will never be worth the risk. In other words, is it possible that ceasefires which leave the aggressor in possession of the field may have the effect of undermining genuine peace rather than promoting it?

Goethe once described the peasant as lying between the land and the aristocracy as between anvil and hammer. The Palestinians lie between Israel’s determination to live and their rulers’ death cult, as between the land and a consuming fire. And no one — not the European leaders so threatened by the same, not the policy thinkers who so desperately want the problem to be economic, or Israel’s fault — will seek to douse that hatred.

In another strategic world, the Israeli incursion into Gaza could have created an opportunity for peace akin to those which sprang into existence in the latter parts of the Second World War. The recent movie Valkyrie is a reminder that the defeat of extremists — like Hitler — could empower the real moderate elements. The Strategy Page believes that Hamas was sorely wounded in the last attacks, mostly in the initial sorties.

And that would, in fact, be possible, if the MSM and the strategic thinkers in the West could think sanely. No people should have to tolerate enemies like this. No other nation in history has. It’s good for everyone… except the haters.

And yet, for too many people, Hamas is heroic.

You can’t get rid of Hamas! We like Hamas! The Palestinian people like Hamas! We need Hamas...."

URL to article: http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/01/22/1610/

URLs in this post: [1] Stephanie Gutmann warned against taking the figures of casualties: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODY1NjNiMmQyMThlN2ZhZDhjYmYwYWM4M2ZlOTk4MDE= [2] Gazan doctor says death toll inflated: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3660423,00.html [3] “halo effect”: http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article.php?id=2235

January 21, 2009: Hamas thought they were invulnerable to Israeli attack. By placing so many of their military and government facilities in densely populated residential neighborhoods, they believed any Israeli bombing or shelling would cause high, and politically unacceptable, civilian losses. But the Israelis used surprise, more precision than expected, and innovations like calling civilians in the target area and telling them to get out before the bombs hit nearby. As a result, most of the 1,300 Palestinian dead were Hamas personnel, and nearly all the damaged structures were those used by Hamas.

This should have provided a golden opportunity not only to remove the main roadblock to a negotiated settlement, but to lift the yoke of oppression and hardship from the Palestinians. The defeat of Hamas would have made it easier to open the border with Egypt; easier to solve the terrible dilemma of curtailing Iranian arms shipments while allowing the free passage of supplies for civilian use.

However it now seems likely that Hamas will not only be saved from destruction, but given vast monies for reconstruction, funds which are most likely to be used to torture its opponents and prepare for the next war. This is the peace process, Middle Eastern style.

Well this last part is a long way from certain; and the European Union did say, at least initially, that [10] there would be no reconstruction as long as there was Hamas. It’s never too late to start acting sanely.”

Antisemitism today:

http://blog.z-word.com/2009/07/seeking-justice-for-ilan-halimi/

Seeking Justice for Ilan Halimi

Published by Ben Cohen

“Reacting to the sentencing of more than twenty gang members convicted for the kidnapping, torture and murder of her 23 year-old son, Ilan, Ruth Halimi declared herself to be “frightened” at the relatively lenient terms received by all the defendants other than the ringleader. The trial of Ilan’s murderers was not public, she noted, because two of the defendants were minors when the crime was committed. As a result, French society was denied a vital insight into the violent, delinquent antisemitism which festers in its banlieues. Had the horrific details of Ilan’s ordeal been recounted in the public eye, these prison terms, one as light as six months suspended, would have been much tougher.

As of this afternoon, the French Justice Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, apparently agrees with Ruth Halimi. Fourteen members of the gang, known as “The Barbarians,” now face a retrial, on the grounds that their original sentences were too lenient.

Mme. Alliot-Marie has done the right thing. Her decision should be welcomed by anyone who understands the depths to which human beings can sink when they are poisoned by racism.

Every so often, you come across a hate crime possessed of the most breathtaking depravity. Just recently, there was the murder of Egyptian immigrant Marwa El Sherbini in a German courtroom, at the moment that she was giving evidence against a man who had verbally abused her for the offense of being a Muslim. Three months pregnant, she was stabbed 18 times by the very man whom she was testifying against, while her three year-old son watched helplessly. Her husband, who tried to intervene, was himself shot by the court security guards.

Or remember the case of Matthew Shepard. In October 1998, Shepard, a young gay man, accepted the offer of a lift home from two men he met in a bar near Laramie, Wyoming. Eighteen hours later, he was found, barely alive, tied to a fence in a remote rural area, having been pistol-whipped and tortured. The man who discovered Shepard initially thought he’d come across a scarecrow.

Ilan Halimi belongs in that category of hate crime victims whose stories leave you wrecked by anger and sorrow. Like Matthew Shepard, Halimi was alive - just - when his body was discovered. And like Shepard, Halimi died a few hours later, having suffered more than three weeks of the most gruesome torture at the hands of the gang that kidnapped him. Suffering, moreover, that was rooted in one simple, immutable fact. Ilan Halimi was a Jew.

The facts of what happened bear recalling. On the evening of 20 January 2006, Halimi met up with an attractive girl in her late teens, known as “Yalda,” who’d first approached him in the cellular phone shop where he worked. She lured him into the clutches of The Barbarians, who kidnapped and imprisoned him. The following day, Halimi’s family received a note demanding a ransom of more than half a million dollars.

No matter that the Halimis were a family who lived modestly, on a small income, alongside other working class Jewish and Muslim families in their suburban Paris neighborhood. The Barbarians kidnapped a Jew because, they were certain, all Jews are rich. Youssef Fofana, an Ivorian Muslim in his late 20s and the gang’s leader, told Halimi’s family that if they couldn’t afford the ransom, they should “go and get it from the synagogue.”

Out of all the defendants, Fofana is the only one to have received the maximum sentence under French law: life, with no prospect of parole for 22 years. That is a fitting sentence for a man who directed and participated in the beating of Halimi, who burned him with cigarettes and acid, who photographed him, his face and hands bound with masking tape, in a Daniel Pearl pose, and who dumped him after twenty-four days outside a Parisian train station with - said the police - 80 per cent of his body butchered.

But what about those who played an enabling role, like “Yalda,” aka Sorour Arbabzadeh, who received nine years for her role as honey-trap? What about the acquittal of two of Fofana’s accomplices? There is good cause to believe, as Minister Alliot-Marie says, that these verdicts are too lenient. France’s legal system must now define what punishment, in a case as grotesque and as disturbing as this one, actually means.

The French courts also now have an opportunity to right another wrong: the refusal, despite persistent pleas from Ruth Halimi, to hold the trial in public. There are difficult, painful questions to be asked about, for example, the relationship between the tropes of antisemitism and the furious, bestial cruelty they unleashed in this case; about the prevalence of casual antisemitism among young people in France, many of them - but, like the Barbarians themselves, by no means all - Muslims; about the way in which Fofana portrayed his irredeemably reactionary crime as an act of resistance, in language that conjures up the image of a clenched fist (”Mon nom, c’est ARABS, Africain révolte armée barbare salafiste;”) about much else besides. And they should be asked in public.

Above all, those on the left and the right who insist that Israel’s actions are responsible for today’s antisemitic outrages would do well to reflect that Ilan Halimi - the victim of toxic notions about Jews which predate the existence of a Jewish state - is finally at peace in the country where, had he lived there, he would now still be alive. One day soon, perhaps, Ilan’s relatives will be able to recite Kaddish for him in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul cemetery in the knowledge that justice has at last been served.”

Thanks Mark for the posts.

"...the Israelis used surprise, more precision than expected, and innovations like calling civilians in the target area and telling them to get out before the bombs hit nearby..." --- Mark S.

Is this why a third of those murdered in Gaza were children? Some of whom left to die of hunger next to their dead mothers as brave IDF soldiers stood nearby for days and prevented Red Cross ambulances from helping them

"The Red Cross described the Zeitoun killings as "a shocking incident" and recounted how its staff found children too weak to stand and sitting by the dead bodies of their mothers. It was "unacceptable," it said, that the military prevented earlier access by ambulances." --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/gaza-zeitoun-attack-deaths

Mark S., you are getting your account straight from the IDF propagandists. Don't forget: These murders are being committed in the name of Jews. All Jews have a responsibility to stand up and declare "we will not allow these atrocities to take place in our name". Mark, Do you have the courage to do this? (or will you fall back to the usual propaganda?)

"Michaeli was born in Leningrad in the Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg in Russia). She became Miss St. Petersburg in 1995 and holds a second degree in electrical engineering and communications from the Saint Petersburg University of Telecommunications. Michaeli decided to convert to Judaism after she met Yosef Samuelson while in Russia. They married and made aliyah to Israel in 1997."

"Mark S., you are getting your account straight from the IDF propagandists. Don't forget: These murders are being committed in the name of Jews."

Bullshit, you are getting your information from the antisemitc and pro Hamas, Guardian.

Landes is a professor at BU University and you are a malicious fool.

"All Jews have a responsibility to stand up and declare "we will not allow these atrocities to take place in our name". Mark, Do you have the courage to do this?"

There were no atrocities only self defense action. Hamas is respobsible for the murder of young Palestinians. Are you prepared to admit this?

Itamar all pro Hamas have responsibility for spreading anti Jewish hatred. Are you prepared to stand up and say I support Hamas and I support their aim at extermiating the Jewish people, coward?

Or will you fall back to the usual propaganda?

The Guardian: “Anti-Semitic – whatever the intentions”

The Guardian letters page has in recent days carried a number of letters praising its editorial of last weekend, titled "A new anti-semitism? Not to be confused with anti-Sharonism." Below, by contrast, is one of the letters that criticizes the editorial, followed by the editorial itself.

-- Tom Gross

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000492.html

ANTI-SEMITIC – WHATEVER THE INTENTIONS

Anti-semitic – whatever the intentions The Guardian Letters Page January 30, 2002

Your leader (A new anti-semitism? January 26) illustrates why so many British Jews are increasingly disturbed by the left-liberal media. The premise that our representative bodies routinely condemn media coverage of Israel as anti-semitic is a gross and oft-repeated misrepresentation of the community's position.

Many British Jews reacted with incredulity when sections of the left-liberal media started using Israel as an excuse for Bin Laden's terrorism. This crass scapegoating, combined with biased anti-Israel reportage, formed the backdrop for the second and third worst months of physical anti-semitic attacks ever recorded - attacks that took encouragement from the dubious legitimacy conferred by media demonisation of Israel and its supporters. The link between systematic anti-Israel bias and anti-semitic attacks is well proven, and drives Jewish community concerns at the scale and nature of left-liberal media coverage of Israel.

Your editorial concludes that anti-semitism should be "unreservedly" condemned. This is a fine sentiment, but the Jewish community will not leave the definition of anti-semitism to the Guardian. This, after all, is a newspaper that regularly features Faisal Bodi ("Israel has no right to exist"); and last year published, on the inauguration of Holocaust Memorial Day, an advert comparing Israel with Nazi Germany.

Guardian writers and readers can pontificate on whether or not these actions are in themselves anti-semitic, but they should not doubt that their appearance in the paper means that their effect is anti-semitic, regardless of the publisher's intention.

Neville Nagler Director general, Board of Deputies of British Jews"

"Gaza Casualties: Civilian or Combatant?

UPDATE, March 27: The IDF has released its official accounting of Gaza fatalities. According to the report, 709 out of 1004 fatalities whose status is known have been identified as militants. The other 295 who have been identified consisted of 89 children under the age of 16, 49 women and 157 civilian adult males. A further 162 fatalities are unclassified. These figures are sharply at odds with those provided by PCHR and other Palestinian sources. As CAMERA noted in an earlier piece on the controversy over the Al-Fakhura school shelling incident, Israeli casualty claims and Palestinian casualty claims are incompatible. The media has tended to unquestioningly accept the Palestinian figures even though there has been no independent confirmation of them. The media's willingness to report as fact claims made by organizations operating in an environment controlled by a terrorist group requires explanation. An article in Haaretz on the IDF report discusses several instances where known terrorists had been misidentified in Palestinian sources as children. CAMERA's own analysis of the PCHR data also uncovered examples of misidentification. For example, PCHR described Mohammed 'Abed Hassan Brbakh as a 16 year old civilian who was killed in his home with his family on Jan. 4, but West Bank-based Maan News Agency identified him as a commander of the DFLP in Gaza and reported his age as 22. The question of how to account for the differences in fatality claims is of great relevance to impending discussions of war crimes accusations. How many of the civilian death claims by Palestinian sources were coincidental natural deaths during the same time period as the fighting ? What proportion of these fatalities were victims of the widely reported retribution by Hamas against its internal opponents? A third possibility is that many of the civilians were inadvertent victims of explosives planted by Hamas in residential areas."

Read the rest here:

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_print=1&x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1603

Itamar to you all Jews who defend themselves are guilty of spreading antisemitism.

This has been an age old antisemitic canard.

You are supporting Hamas an oganization that sends children to blow themselves up and kill Israeli families including children.

No sensible person would trust anything Hamas says.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Landes

"Richard A. Landes is an American historian and author, specializing in Millennialism. He currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Boston University. Landes is the director of the Center for Millennial Studies."

"He was trained as a medievalist and wrote his first book on a series of forgeries that had fooled historians for centuries, even after a scholar in the 1920s had shown decisively that the texts were fiction. In addition to working on medieval peace movements and the relations between elites and commoners in 11th century France, he focuses on millennial and apocalyptic movements. In addition to courses on medieval history, he offers courses in "Communications Revolutions from Language to Cyberspace", "Europe and the Millennium," and "Honor-Shame Cultures, Middle Ages, Modern World." He is completing a book entitled Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience.

Pallywood

"Landes is also notable for views on the use of film footage related to conflicts in Israel, in particular his use of the term Pallywood (Palestinian Hollywood), which is described by Ruthie Blum, writing in the Jerusalem Post, as a term coined by Landes to refer to "productions staged by the Palestinians, in front of (and often with cooperation from) Western camera crews, for the purpose of promoting anti-Israel propaganda by disguising it as news." Landes himself describes Pallywood as "a term I coined... to describe staged material disguised as news." Landes cites the film of the shooting of Muhammad al-Durrah, the Gaza beach blast and Hamas's alleged exploitation of electricity shortages during the 2007–2008 Israel-Gaza conflict, as incidents of Pallywood."

"He maintains two web sites: Second Draft depicts the perceived pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli bias in some media reports from the Middle East. Augean Stables includes more in-depth articles about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and related issues"

Books

Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes (989-1034) (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)

Naissance d'Apôtre: Les origines de la Vita prolixior de Saint Martial de Limoges au XIe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991) with K. Paupert, trans. of the Vita prolixior."

"HRW and Saudi Arabian “citizens”: How badly can one misunderstand the problem?

Posted By Richard Landes On 22nd July 2009 @ 04:44 In Arab-Israeli Conflict, Human Rights Complex, human rights, saudi arabia | 6 Comments

Recently Human Rights Watch [1] got criticism for raising money [2] in Saudi Arabia for, of all things (it shouldn’t be a surprise actually, but anyway) human rights. In their defense to their board, Ken Roth, speaking for the organization in the royal “we”, [3] made the following point. We were talking not to the Saudi government (although they did admit there was at least one government official present at one of their meetings), but to individuals, in particular, “people who were interested in Human Rights Watch.” (Note, not interested in human rights, but in “us”.) After insisting on how scrupulous they were about not accepting money from any government, they then made the following remark:

We reject the idea that an individual’s nationality, ethnicity or religion can be taken as a proxy for their political or ideological beliefs or that the backgrounds of our supporters influence our coverage. By the same token, no assumption should ever be made that a Saudi citizen’s support for human rights reflects or is captive of Saudi government policy. Human Rights Watch is eager and delighted to find supporters of the human rights ideal – financial or otherwise – in any and all countries of the world. To draw such communities into an active, international network is an important part of our mission and does not impair our political neutrality. It threatens no-one but the human rights violators we seek to expose.

Now here’s where we get to the hub of the problem, one which, I think, sheds much light on the operating assumptions of Western human rights organizations, and that produces at least some of the unconscious patterns that result in the formuation of Charles Jacobs’ [4] Human Rights Complex.

Before fisking this remarkable paragraph in detail, let’s take a short detour via an article by a real Saudi reformer, a woman who, I suspect was not a participant in the fundraising tour of HRW. (She does not appear, either in a search of the HRW website, or a search of the HRW report on this very issue — women’s legal tutelage to men — Perpetual Minors (about which, more, anon).

[5] Saudi Arabia – The World’s Largest Women’s Prison

In an article on the liberal website [6] Minbar Al-Hiwar Wal-’Ibra, reformist Saudi journalist and human rights activist Wajeha Al-Huweidar described Saudi Arabia as “the world’s largest women’s prison.” She added that unlike real prisoners, Saudi women have no prospect of ever being released, since throughout their life, they are under the control of a male guardian - their husband, father, grandfather, brother or son.

Huweidar and other women activists recently launched a campaign against the Saudi [7] Mahram Law, which forbids women to leave their home without a male guardian. She told the Kuwaiti daily Awan that the campaign, whose slogan is “treat us like adult citizens or we leave the country,” was officially launched at the King Fahd Bridge, connecting Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, where the women demanded to cross the border without a guardian."

Read it all here:

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/07/22/hrw-and-saudi-arabian-citizens-how-badly-can-one-misunderstand-the-problem/print/

Blackston, all that you have said about ethnicity and race is a fiasco of highly unsuccessful information absorption. There is some screen which prevents you from comprehending what little you have read. What you post is purely your misinterpretation of facts.

You neglected to read the parts in my post where I spoke of mixing of genes, but there is still a basic genetic makeup of most human types, that is why there are references to these different groups. Of course some Varyagi settled in Rus, "Ingvar" became "Igor," "Helga" became "Olga," but they did not get rid of the entire Slavic population and replace it with Germanic folk. Slavs are still basically Slavs. You totally ignored the DNA testing information. Today, there is much mixed marrying and who knows, one day there will be a majority of "mixed race" individuals. But this is not true as yet. Many are still marrying within one's group, hence the predominance of genetically identifiable traits. I would like you to cite one reference to support your strange statements.

And if you do not believe in separate genetic groups, why do you keep screaming about what I might be? I already mentioned that I have Tatar genes, but I am still basically the genetic result of Slavs, maybe I have a Varyag gene, maybe a Khazar gene, who knows? DNA testing, sir.

Also, you should judge a person by his or her character. I have no idea about any ancestral Jew-killing nor do you, so cut the insults. It would be just as stupid for descendants of Edomites to get after Jews because John Hyrcanes slaughtered so many of them and forced them to convert to Judaism. Or how about that comedy program where Sarah Silverstein sues Mongolia because she is convinced that Mongols raped one of her ancestresses in the 13th c. since her sister has Mongol features?

Also, I do not get my information from any websites, I do not even know the ones that you mention. I am too busy with books and news articles. There is a fascinating recent book by Shlomo Zand, it is in Hebrew, about the myth of the Jewish people. He is a great Jewish scholar, but has been attacked because so many want to keep the idea that Jews are a racial group. How about that? I do read both Ha'aretz and al-Jazeera to have a balanced view. Actually, I have checked out Masada 2000, now there is a hate site, some of my personal friends are targeted on there. From your cussing and ranting, I would hate for you to know who I am, you might come after me. Be very careful about your threats and name-calling. You will not conceal the truth with such silly bluster and you could find yourself in big trouble.

"You neglected to read the parts in my post where I spoke of mixing of genes, but there is still a basic genetic makeup of most human types, that is why there are references to these different groups. Of course some Varyagi settled in Rus, "Ingvar" became "Igor," "Helga" became "Olga," but they did not get rid of the entire Slavic population and replace it with Germanic folk."

You are talking more nonsense, Rusalka.

What you say about the "basic" slavs, your people, applies also to all other ethnic groups.

YOur friend Shlomo Zand's theory is just that a unproven theory which no reputbale scholar has accepted as true:

http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Seth%20Frantzman%20-%20Shlomo%20Sand.htm

Shlomo Zan is not a genetecist, he is not even a scientist. He is just another communist historian with a hatred for Judaism.

"Sand graduated with a BA in History from Tel Aviv University. From 1975 to 1985, after winning a scholarship, he studied and later taught in Paris, receiving an MA in French History and a PhD for his thesis[5] on "George Sorel and Marxism". Since 1982, Sand has taught at Tel Aviv University as well as at the University of California, Berkeley and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris."

Given rusalka's posts, she or, rather her ancestors who came to this country are most likely from one of the former Soviet Baltic republics. Thus her putrid hatred and venomous denial of being a Russian, with references of occupation, etc,. We should question her family ties to fascist Germany. I guarantee 100% that they provied material, and probaly a more physical support to the cause. Also, at soe point of her miserable life she probably ended up in Israel, either married to a Jewish man, or as a contract worker. Something did not work out, left her angry and bitter. Marriage to a Palestnian obviously did not help - just exasperated her nationalistic tendencies and hatred of all humane to the point of histrionics she throws on this website spewing saliva and making up stories about Arabs being the original people of the Canaan. This is truly a histerical lie! What a character! I wonder why she picked up the name 'rusalka' = 'mermaid'... Is there a reference here? Or a threat?

Mark S.,

In your "response", You failed to comment on the incidents of Palestinian children left to die of hunger next to their dead mothers in Gaza as brave IDF soldiers stood nearby for days and prevented Red Cross ambulances from helping them. The only thing you could come up with was to pathetically accuse the Guardian of antisemitism (but you forgot to accuse the International Red Cross of antisemitism as well even though the Guardian simply reported what the IRC said!!!)

"The Red Cross described the Zeitoun killings as "a shocking incident" and recounted how its staff found children too weak to stand and sitting by the dead bodies of their mothers. It was "unacceptable," it said, that the military prevented earlier access by ambulances." --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/gaza-zeitoun-attack-deaths

You didn't also address my question as to why a third of those murdered in Gaza were children as reported consistently by human rights organizations? This is not about Hamas (of course I would mistrust any unconfirmed report coming from them as I would mistrust the IDF's account).

Itamar "In your "response", You failed to comment on the incidents of Palestinian children left to die of hunger next to their dead mothers in Gaza as brave IDF soldiers stood nearby for days and prevented Red Cross ambulances from helping them."

This never happened. The whole Guardian article is based on hearsay.

You are repeating antisemitic propaganda.

Show me a news account that is not based on hearsay!

"Itamar" is and antisemitic nazi like poster.

"Columnist criticizes U.N. treatment of Israel Washington Post deputy editorial page editor and columnist Jackson Diehl answered his own question, "where does the global human rights movement stand?," this way:

“Western governments and advocates stand by as the U.N. Human Rights Council bashes Israel”

"If the first year of the United Nations Human Rights Council is any indication, it's grown sick and cynical" (A Shadow on the Human Rights Movement," June 25). Chief example? The council's all-consuming anti-Israel activities.

"While ending the scrutiny of those [Cuba and Belarus] dictatorships, the council chose to establish one permanent and special agenda item: the 'human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.' In other words, Israel (or 'Palestine,' in the council's terminology), alone among the nations of the world, will be subjected to continual and open-ended examination. That's in keeping with the record of the council's first year: Eleven resolutions were directed at the Jewish state. None criticized any other government."

Sudan, China, Zimbabwe, Burma, Syria, Russia, as well Cuba, Belarus and Arab terrorist movements, all real, recurrent and large-scale human rights oppressors, escaped the U.N. council's attention. But Israel, the one country in the Middle East in which human rights are routinely respected, received repeated censure. And Western self-proclaimed rights watchdogs, like Human Rights Watch, accept the travesty, Diehl points out.

George Orwell famously observed that "sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." In "A Shadow on the Human Rights Movement," Diehl fulfills that duty."

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2007/06/columnist_criticizes_un_treatm.html#comments

"The Hideous Face of Hamas Rule in Gaza" http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/04/22/the-hideous-face-of-hamas-rule-in-gaza/

“You can only imagine what would happen if Israel dealt with its internal political enemies or dissenters in such a fashion,” writes Richard Cohen of a new Human Rights Watch report detailing the appalling abuses of human rights entailed by the continuing rule of Hamas in Gaza.

“Of particular concern is the widespread practice of maiming people by shooting them in the legs, which Hamas first used in June 2007, when it seized control inside Gaza from Fatah,” says the HRW report. And there’s this too: “Abductions and severe beatings are another major concern. According to ICHR, unidentified perpetrators physically abused 73 Gazan men from December 28 to January 31, causing broken legs and arms. Human Rights Watch documented three such cases of Fatah supporters assaulted during and after the Israeli offensive, as well as one case of what appeared to be a politically motivated house arrest.”

This particularly harrowing story does not, thusfar, appear to have inspired any demonstrations from the “We Are All Hamas” crowd who took to the streets to protest Israel’s invasion of Gaza earlier this year:

In the case resulting in death, at around 6 p.m. on January 4, 2009, members of the al-Najjar family were sitting outside their home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City when four men wearing masks and carrying AK-47 assault rifles approached the house. Two family members who were present told Human Rights Watch that the gunmen wore unmarked black uniforms and ammunition vests, but the family did not identify them as Hamas. When the gunmen ordered everyone to stand up and raise their hands, the head of the household, Hisham al-Najjar, age 55, protested, the two witnesses said. An argument ensued and one of the gunmen fired a shot, hitting no one. At least five women inside the house came rushing out, and in the chaos the gunmen opened fire, killing Hisham al-Najjar and wounding ten members of the family and a family friend. The victims ranged in age from a 12-year old girl, Ahlam Hisham al-Najjar, who was shot in the leg, to Zakkia al-Najjar, 70, Ahlam’s grandmother, who was shot in both legs. Human Rights Watch observed the bandages on both her legs.

“After the gunmen left, I saw a sea of blood,” said Amar Hisham al-Najjar, 25. He told Human Rights Watch that the gunmen shot his father Hisham in the chest, the abdomen, and the legs.”There was no electricity and no ambulances because of the war, so we tried to stop the bleeding and got our friends to drive the wounded to al-Shifa hospital, where my father died,” he said. “The Hamas police at the hospital questioned me about what happened, and they said they’d get back to me, but there’s been nothing. I’m not accusing anyone, but we demand a real investigation.”

Human Rights Watch is hardly regarded as a friend of Israel. Many Israel advocates view them as a foe, pure and simple. I’ve always thought that take is too crude. Of course, HRW’s reports should not, a priori, be regarded as beyond challenge or reproach. But to portray them as a mere cog in the Israel demonization machine is, as this new report demonstrates, deeply unfair. What’s really interesting here is whether HRW’s documentation of the hideous character of Hamas rule will compel at least some of those who regard the Islamists as a resistance movement to think again."

Antisemites and antisemitic countries will believe anything about Jews:

"JTA EXCLUSIVE: Greek telethon for Gaza hospital a scam By Jean Cohen · July 12, 2009

ATHENS (JTA) -- A campaign in Greece to raise money to rebuild a Chrisian Palestinian hospital in Gaza allegedly destroyed by Israel appears to be a scam, JTA has learned.

The hospital that was the focus of a campaign, which included the participation of Greece’s president and foreign minister, never actually existed.

For nearly a week in February, Greece’s official state television network inundated viewers with news about a telethon that would take place Feb. 9 to raise money to “rebuild the Christian hospital in Gaza that Israelis destroyed with their bombs” during the Israeli army's operation there in January.

In its announcements, the network made clear that it was referring to a specific Christian hospital destroyed by Israel.

The telethon included recorded video messages by Greek President Carolos Papoulias and Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyianni, along with a parade of Greek politicians, singers, public personalities and trade unionists. Many used the telethon to cast broadsides at Israel.

The campaign raised $1.67 million, according to telethon organizers, who said little Greek children had gone so far as to break their piggy banks to offer $14 to Palestinians in need.

A JTA investigation revealed, however, that no Christian hospital was on the list assembled by the United Nations and the Red Crescent Society of structures in Gaza damaged and destroyed as a consequence of the Israel-Hamas war in January.

JTA spoke to two Palestinians living in Gaza who are active in or former members of nongovernmental organizations there, both of whom looked into the issue independently. Both reported that the only Christian hospital in Gaza, Al Ahli, was used during the war and did not receive a scratch. Al Ahli, which was started by the Church of England, is owned and operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, a diocese of the Anglican Communion.

Outside the city there is also small medical center supported in part by the Near East Council of Churches that was destroyed during the war.

One of the Palestinians demanded to know where the money from the Greek telethon went.

Asked who decided that the telethon money should go to a hospital that turned out to be fictitious, the president of ERT/NET, the TV station that broadcast the program, Vangelis Panagopoulos, told JTA that “ERT does not organize these things but simply provides the time slot. The event was organized by the General Confederation of Greek Workers” -- Greece’s main trade union organization -- “and the Foreign Ministry.”

Reached by JTA, a spokesman for the General Confederation of Greek Workers said, “Ask the Greek Foreign Ministry and [Foreign Minister] Bakoyianni -- they know.”

During the telethon, the union of engineers in Greece, known as TEE, announced that it would rebuild the hospital for free. Yet in a phone conversation with JTA, TEE said it participated in the telethon under the impression that if there were a project to build, the union would build it. No “Christian hospital” was mentioned, the union said.

But a statement released by the TV station the day after the telethon specifically said that “The [Christian] hospital, which will be designed from the start by the engineers of the TEE, will provide its services to people in the area.”

Asked about the subject in a chance meeting with JTA, Greece’s ambassador to Israel, Nikos Zafiropoulos, denied knowing anything about the matter and said the Greek Consulate in Jerusalem handled all matters in the West Bank and Gaza.

Five days later a Greek financial newspaper, Kerdos, published a small item requesting proposals for a project to be funded by $1.67 million raised in the telethon.

It was the first public acknowledgement that the Christian hospital claim had been a lie.

“A project is being sought in Gaza to be financed by the money raised from the Solidarity Telethon organized last February by the Technical Chamber of Greece and another nine trade union organizations in cooperation with Greek Public Television,” the item read. “A delegation of the bodies involved will visit the area in the near future in order to decide where the 1.2 million Euros raised for a project that will provide substantial services to all the area’s residents will be allocated.”

No one was taking responsibility for the situation.

The spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry, Gregory Delavekouras, said, “Along with the Ministry of Health, it was our intention to raise money for the restoration of schools and hospitals, and more specifically for the medical center,” he said. Delavekouras could not say how the “medical center” morphed into “the Christian Hospital of Gaza” on TV.

One thing is certain: In a six-hour telethon loaded with Israel bashing, the Greek public was deceived that money contributed would go to rebuild a Christian hospital destroyed by the army of the Jewish state.

What remains unclear is whether organizers deliberately perpetrated the fraud or the telethon had fallen into the deception by accident."

"Don't forget: These murders are being committed in the name of Jews."

Itamar antisemites alwats manufacture excuses to hate Jews. "Accusing Jews falsely of murder" is an old old story.

I am proud to say that I approve of Jews defending themsleves. AFter the HOlocaust no Jew should ever stand by and allowe himself or herself to be attacked without defending themselves.

If you are Jew are you brave enought to stand up and defend yourseld against antisemites?

Mark S.: the cited critique of Sand's opus states that Jews had to "enter through special gates and live in segregated ghettos, locked at night..." Horrible conditions for anyone to endure. But now they are getting their revenge, bwahahaha. Now the Palestinians have to enter through special gates (checkpoints) and live in segregated ghettos (Arabs are not permitted to live in Jewish communities as a rule, that has been a subject of much contention), like Gaza, besieged and locked out, no pasta allowed to get through as it might be a "weapon," in revenge for the dismantlement of a Jewish settlement. Oops! Wait a minute, the Palestinians never made Jews "enter through special gates and live in segregated ghettos." Weren't those the European Christians? How come they aren't getting the treatment that they deserve for having harmed the Jews over so many centuries? Why do Palestinians have to pay? What gives?

"But now they are getting their revenge, bwahahaha. Now the Palestinians have to enter through special gates (checkpoints) and live in segregated ghettos (Arabs are not permitted to live in Jewish communities as a rule...."

More lying nonsense from the resident Aryan Jew hater.

Arabs have 20 or 21 countries (depending on how you count them) in which Jews are not allowed to live and in which Jews lived in Ghettos fro centuries.

This was at a time when Jews were not allowed to own any weapons and were not a threat to anyone either in these Arab countries or in Europe.

The Arabs that live on the West Bank and Gaza have been making war on the Jews since the 19th century. They have been massacring Jews and murdering women and children.

Of course there are check points. When the Arabs agree to stop killing Jews and decide to make peace there will be no more check points and in time Arabs and Jews within Israel proper will be able to live in the same communities in peace.

Finally, I don’t believe that rusalka cares on bit for the Arabs she cares about hating Jews and because the Arabs and Jews are at war she decided to take the side of the Arabs. In the 1930’s she would have taken the side of the Germans just as her family did.

She is a loser and a Jew hating bigot, period and no matter her denial this is one incontestable fact about her life. Her Jew hatred keeps her up nights typing for hours here.

She is jealous of Anastasia’s success in life and the fact that she became Jewish has driven this ruslaka over the edge.

great come back Mark.

People should repost your post anytime rusalka post again since it will save time and it says all that needs to be said about her.

Mark S., why do you say that my family had anything to do with Nazis. We were prisoners and wound up in refugee camps. You keep posting lies about me hoping that it will stick, just as hasbarah posts lies about Palestinians, hoping that if the lie is told often enough then it will be believed, and that obviously works on many of the posters here. They are desperate because the world is asking questions about the injustice of the founding of the state of Israel. The canard about "Arabs have so many states" is stale and makes no sense. The US has 50 states, should they give one up to Mexico or Canada? Duh. You cannot take land away from natives. The Arabs were not willing to have millions of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere pour in to change the demographics of their land. Remember that the population of Palestine was only 5% Jewish in 1900. As for "slaughter," please explain who blew up the King David hotel in 1946, those terrorists forced the British out, the Arabs were at the mercy of the fanatic, bloodthirsty settlers who saw no wrong in appropriating another's land. Remember Deir Yassin? Qalquilya?

Mark, again, your comeback is just another jumble of hallucinatory babble. All you do is write lies about someone whom you have never met, which is like a madman talking to an imaginary friend, you can invent anything you like. My posts contain damning facts that pierce the conscience. You and the other howlers are very, very frightened and against the wall. Your posts teach only that you are frustrated and so angry that you have lost all reason.

And I do not have to stay up nights, I write and think quite rapidly, the facts are at my fingertips, this is a great opportunity to teach the ignorant. Keep writing, you probably have to stay up four hours just to think up more insults that are not the same stale farts. Oh, I forget, your brilliant post has been recommended for reposting.

Rusalka got her information from pro palestinian antisemitic websites.

There was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem in 1900.

The rest of her selective Jew hating post is equally false.

rusalka/shekina

"Mark S., why do you say that my family had anything to do with Nazis. We were prisoners and wound up in refugee camps."

A lot of nazi collaborators took shelter in refugee camps claiming that they were persecuted when in fact they did the persecuting.

Rusalka's family was one of those. They denounced or killed Jews and the pretended that they were persecuted.

Many also ended up in Canada or the US like Demyanuk the Ukrainian beast.

Ukrainians were the worst Jews haters who tortured and killed Jews on the way to gas chambers.

"And I do not have to stay up nights, I write and think quite rapidly, the facts are at my fingertips..."

Sure she makes up the facts as she goes along.

Good thing you type fast because I'll keep you busy form now on.

Nothing is "made up" Jewposter except the comments about who I am. I still maintain the point that no one has the right to come to a country to which one has no previous, ancestral or property deed connection, like the immigrant fascists from Russia and Moldova of Yisrael Beteinu, and push the natives around, wishing their numbers to diminish by popping out more "soldiers" (a PC Final Solution?) or trying to pass legislation that would force them to swear loyalty to a religious state which is their occupier. That is the depths of humiliation and ehtnophobia. They are frightened of the Arabs, why then did they leave their own countries? There is plenty of room in Europe, why not let the Palestinians have their rightful state?

If Ms Michaeli has chosen Judaism as a religion, fine, she enjoys separating meat from milk and castigating herself for driving on Sunday. Religious observances are no problem as long as they do not harm others. Let Moslems pray five times a day, let Hindus venerate cows, let Catholics give up meat for Lent. But if she feels that being a member of a certain religion entitles her to dictate that Israel should be represented by Aryan types, such as herself, and not Arabic-looking persons, like Liel Kolet, then that is going far beyond religious observance into the realms of dictatorship. A Russian telling a Jewish woman that she cannot represent Israel! That is racism. And Lieberman has spat in the faces of all the persecuted Jews of Europe by choosing an uberAryan type, the daughter of Jew killers (=Russians, as so many of you have so fondly labelled Russians on your posts) as poster girl for his smelly, racist party.

"Nothing is "made up" Jewposter except the comments about who I am."

You make everything up, Rusalka.

You lie even about your views.

You said above that people should not change their religion, now you say you don't.

Which is it?

It doesn't matter what you say now, since you'll change your mind later on.

For example, above you said you had nothing against Germans or against Russian, now you say:

"And Lieberman has spat in the faces of all the persecuted Jews of Europe by choosing an uberAryan type, the daughter of Jew killers (=Russians, as so many of you have so fondly labelled Russians on your posts) as poster girl for his smelly, racist party."

So if it's ok for you not to hate Russians, why isn't it ok for some Jews not to hate Russians?

You make up arguments that you think will hurt Jews, that is all. You are aperverse piece of shit, Rusalka.

btw: Did anastasia's perents "kill any Jews?" Prove it, you piece of shit.

There is only one constant and that is your Jew hatred.

You are an Aryan Racist.

The racist Rusalka calling Jews fascists is like David Duke calling Obama a racist.

Get a life Rusalka.

No ne here cares what that lying ignorant bitch "rusalka" says."

However, for the record here is something people should know:

"Yehuda Ben-Meir wrote in the left-wing Haaretz that he did not and would not ever vote for Lieberman. He also criticized the delegitimizing and demonizing of both the right and the left:

'Lieberman is neither a racist nor a fascist, and depicting him as such does an injustice to his voters and harm to Israel. What's racist is denying the Jewish people a state of their own. Certain Arab Knesset members talk incessantly about the Palestinian people's rights, including their own state. But in the same breath they refuse to acknowledge Israel as the state of the Jewish people and deny the very existence of a Jewish people as a nation with national rights... Just as we must condemn right wingers' attempts to cast doubt over the patriotism of Yossi Beilin and his fellow subscribers to the Geneva Initiative - provocative as this plan might be to most Israelis - we must condemn the left's lamentable habit of denigrating Lieberman. The idea to change the state's borders in a peace agreement may not be practical or implementable in our circumstances, but we cannot deny its legitimacy and sense. And in any case, it has nothing to do with racism. Lieberman has said publicly that he supports the principle of establishing a Palestinian state.[25]'"

Yehuda Ben-Meir (26/04/2009). "Lieberman is no racist" Haaretz.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1081038.html

Anastasia Michaeli Samuelson is a great lady, she is my hero!

"United By Hate The uses of anti-Semitism in Chávez’s Venezuela Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez On January 30, 2009 fifteen heavily armed men stormed the Tiferet Israel synagogue in the Mariperez neighborhood of Caracas. They held down two guards, robbed the premises, and desecrated the temple, throwing the Torah and other religious paraphernalia to the floor and painting graffiti on the walls: “Out, Death to All”; “Damned Israel, Death”; “666” with a drawing of the devil; “Out Jews”; “We don’t want you, assassins”; a star of David, an equal sign, and a swastika.

The event, though shocking, was neither isolated nor unprecedented. Over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed anti-Semitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chávez himself: “The World has enough for everybody, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, and of those that expelled Bolívar from here and in their own way crucified him. . . . have taken control of the riches of the world.”

In late 2004 the police stormed Hebraica, a Jewish social, educational, and sports center, ostensibly to search for guns and explosives. No weapons were found. But finding them may never have been the purpose of the raid: it coincided with the beginning of Hugo Chávez’s official visit to Tehran. Thus, Sammy Eppel, director of the Human Rights Commission of the Venezuelan B’nai B’rith, poignantly interpreted the event: “Chávez was showing Iran: ‘This is how I deal with my Jews.’”

According to the World Conference against Anti-Semitism that took place in London in February 2009, the Chavista media became noticeably more aggressive between October and December of last year. Aporrea, the principal Chavista online journal, published 136 anti-Jewish texts; and since the start of the year, the Conference counted an average of 45 pieces per month. In the 30 days between December 28, 2008 and January 27, 2009, coinciding with the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the number of pieces increased to an average of more than five per day.

This kind of tally may blur the distinction between criticisms of Israeli policies and sheer anti-Semitism, but the prominence of classically anti-Semitic themes, tones, and sentiments is nonetheless staggering and undeniable. Indeed, since the 2006 war in Lebanon, anti-Semitic comments have become commonplace not only in Aporrea, but also in other media outlets either controlled by or ideologically close to the government—such as Vea and Cadena Venezolana de Televisión, especially its program La Hojilla—and publicly and community-owned radio stations. Mario Silva, the anchor of La Hojilla—the main television outlet of Chávez’s ideology, known as Chavismo—declared on November 28, 2007, at a time when a student movement against Chávez was consolidating, that the Cohen family, owners of the Sambil chain of malls

are financing all that is happening. I have said for a long time that those Jewish businessmen who are not in the conspiracy should publicly come forth. . . . And many of those in the student movement that is currently activated have a lot to do with that group.

Another egregious and symptomatic example is a January 20, 2009 article by Emilio Silva in Aporrea, titled “How to Support Palestine against the Artificial State of Israel,” in which Silva calls for measures to isolate the Jewish population inside Venezuela as well as its supposed allies, ultimately the Venezuelan opposition tout court. It also calls for the destruction of the state of Israel, and associates Judaism with “Euro-Gringo” imperial interests in such disparate places as Afghanistan, Congo, and Colombia.

Beyond the specifics of Emilio Silva’s political program, the idiom of the critique is baldly that of modern anti-Semitism. Thus, Silva characterizes the enemy as “those Zionist Hebrews [who] care more for their pocket-books than for anything else, including Jehova” and calls on his readers to “publicly demand that any Jew in any street, mall, square, etc., take a position [with respect to Israel] by yelling slogans in favor of Palestine and against the miscarried and disfigured state (estado-aborto) of Israel.”

Chávez himself has been at the forefront of an effort to equate Israel with Hitler, and then to retroject Jewish conspiracy onto the Venezuelan opposition. On August 25, 2006, while on a state visit to China, Chávez declared: “Israel criticizes Hitler a lot. So do we. But they have done something similar to what Hitler did, possibly worse, against half the world.” As recently as January 10 of this year, in the days leading up to the plebiscite to validate Chávez’s permanent reelection, the Venezuelan leader conflated the Jews, the empire (by which he mostly means the United States), and his internal opposition: “The owners of Israel, in other words, the Empire, are the owners of the opposition.”

The rhetoric crystallizes under the figure of the Jew, the internal and external enemy of Chavismo. Chávez may dislike Venezuela’s 12,000 or so Jews, but what is really at stake in his mobilization of anti-Semitic rhetoric is the characterization of his entire opposition as anti-national.

• • •

Anti-Semitism is close to the intellectual heart of Chavismo, best synthesized in the writings of Argentine ultra-nationalist and Holocaust-denier Norberto Ceresole.1 Ceresole, who died in 2003, had close links with nationalist and populist military elements throughout Latin America, most notably the Peruvian President Luis Velasco Alvarado, to whom he served as adviser, and the putschist faction of the Argentine army known as the carapintadas. Through the latter group, Chávez met Ceresole, who first appeared on the Venezuelan scene in 1994 as Chávez’s adviser. Ceresole was expelled from the country in June 1995 by Venezuelan intelligence as a propagandist for Chávez’s failed 1992 coup against then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez. He reappeared after Chávez came into power in 1999, and he enjoyed close relations with senior members of the government.

In 1999 Ceresole published Caudillo, Ejército, Pueblo: La Venezuela del Comandante Chávez (Caudillo, Army, People: The Venezuela of Commander Chávez), a book that matches Chávez’s political ideas and strategies much more closely than the writings of the Libertador, Simón Bolívar, whom commentators routinely cite as Chávez’s main intellectual influence. Chávez has repeatedly defended Ceresole, despite Ceresole’s controversial position within the Chavista movement, particularly among the more moderate wing, which rejects Ceresole not least on account of his anti-Semitism. On his weekly radio and TV program Aló Presidente in May 2006, Chávez referred to Ceresole as a “great friend” and an “intellectual deserving great respect.” Beyond such statements of deference, the imprint of Ceresole’s ideas can be found everywhere in Chávez’s policies, statements, and strategies.

Ceresole’s blueprint for Chavismo privileges a direct relationship between the leader and the people. Thus, Ceresole describes Chávez’s electoral triumph in the following terms: “The order that the people of Venezuela emitted on December 6, 1998 is clear and final. A physical person, and not an abstract idea or a generic party, was ‘delegated’ by that very people to exercise Power.” Ceresole differentiates Chavismo from fascism—which he disingenuously refers to as “the European nationalisms of the post-WWI period”—on the grounds that the former has no predominant party structure. Yet, in Chavismo the immediate relationship between the leader and the people has singular importance, with all other political structures serving merely as channels of transmission between them. Not surprisingly, Human Rights Watch recently declared:

[a] defining feature of the Chávez presidency has been an open disregard for the principle of separation of powers enshrined in the 1999 Constitution—and, specifically, the notion that an independent judiciary is indispensable for protecting fundamental rights.

In the Chavista corporealization of politics, any alternative becomes alien and monstrous, and must be expelled from the body of the nation and annihilated. The figure of the Jew comes in handy in this scheme, and indeed Ceresole indulges in traditional anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, attributing, for example, the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish Center, which killed 85 people, mostly Jews, to Jews themselves. It is no coincidence that the first heading in the introduction of Ceresole’s book on Chávez is “The Jewish Question and the State of Israel,” and Ceresole explains why clearly enough:

The first time that I perceived the ‘Jewish problem’ was when I discovered, empirically, that the so-called ‘terrorist attacks of Buenos Aires’ (1992 and 1994) . . . . corresponded with an internal crisis of the State of Israel and not with the action of a supposed ‘Islamic terrorism.’ From that time onward, the Jews erupted in my life. I suddenly discovered them not as I had known them until then, that is as individuals distinct from one another, but rather as elements for whom individuation is impossible, a group united by hatred, and, to use a term that they like, by ire.

Thus, in Ceresole’s view, “the Jews” act only as a conspiratorial body.

Chávez’s immediate reaction to the looting of the Tiferet Israel Synagogue reflects the same kind of conspiratorial outlook—he declared it an attack perpetrated by the opposition against his regime. Before beginning a formal inquest, Venezuela’s president had a theory about the identity of the culprits: “Like any police investigator, you have to ask yourself: who benefits from these violent acts? Not the government, not the people, not the Revolution. . . . It is they themselves who did it! This is what I say to the nation.” Just who “they” are is ambiguous—it may refer to the amorphous “oligarchy” that Chávez regularly decries, or the Jews themselves, or both. Similarly, Chávez has embraced the idea that the Bush government orchestrated the attacks of September 11 in order to blame Islamic militants and thereby justify the invasion of Iraq.

More generally, despite the romance between Chávez and a string of international leftist superstars (from the Italian Marxist Antonio Negri to the filmmaker Oliver Stone), Chavismo is less a coherent ideology than the sum of its leader and chief evangelist’s robust gestures and gesticulations. Chávez’s performances on Aló Presidente and his risky-but-calculated threats, insults, and other dramatic gestures keep the spotlight on him. In this regard, his media persona is consistent with the fascist strategy: casting aside all forms of protocol and substituting them with the excessive antics of the clown. Chávez is Venezuela’s Ubu Roi, constantly shifting the rules of the game to disorient his opponents. Ceresole himself wrote:

The Venezuelan model is not a theoretical construction—it springs directly from reality. It is the result of a convergence of factors that we could define as ‘physical,’ therefore, that have not been conceived beforehand (in opposition to the so-called ‘ideological’ factors).

Following Ceresole’s blueprint, a decade of Chavista rule has undermined Venezuela’s democratic institutions, a process amply documented by Human Rights Watch, which reports, among many other things:

in 2004 Chávez signed legislation that made it possible for his supporters in the National Assembly to both pack and purge the Supreme Court. . . . Since this takeover occurred, the court’s response to government measures that threaten fundamental rights has typically been one of passivity and acquiescence.

Discrimination against opposition members in government hiring practices and use of government agencies as bases for political operations are rampant.

• • •

Instead of political parties, representative institutions, and, above all, ideologies, Chavismo manifests as a physical relationship between the people and Chávez, with, as Chávez himself describes, love as the potent glue connecting them.Thus during the recent campaign for the referendum to abolish presidential term limits, the widespread slogan, “Amor con amor se paga” (“love must with love be repaid”), which captures the notion that Chávez’s love for the people comes with a corresponding obligation.

The problem with substituting rights with a language of love is that dissent suggests lack of love, or ingratitude, or a sign of allegiance to a foreign enemy: capitalism, the “Euro-Gringo imperialism,” or even, for Chávez, Zionist-Fascist-Euro-Gringo Imperialism.

In Chavismo, politics and political life both represent a kind of hand-to-hand combat between the “people,” united by “love,” and its enemies, united by hatred—the “ire” that Ceresole imputes to Jews.

While Chávez’s political vocabulary often portrays Jews as inordinately influential and manipulative, he does not restrict himself to the trope of the Jew as master conspirator. Instead, he enacts the classic double move in anti-Semitism, used from the time of the Dreyfus Affair to Nazism and beyond: the powerful, exploitative Jew who is also inherently weak and contemptible. Chávez thus refers to his opponents as “escuálidos” (squalids), a Spanish term that connotes not only dirtiness and abjection, but also flimsiness, wimpiness, and scrawniness. Not surprisingly, figures conventionally associated with degradation are important in the imagery. Homophobia is a key element in that repertoire; although unlike Cuba (Castro is Chávez’s admired “father”), which bans homosexuality and persecutes homosexuals, Chavismo relies on homophobia as invective rather than state policy.

Most commonly, homophobic sentiments and images are mobilized around the figure of the escuálido. For instance, the Chavista theme in the so-called Battle of Santa Inés—the response to the opposition’s 2004 campaign to revoke Chávez’s mandate—was “Florentino y el Diablo,” a story about a handsome Creole cowboy who wins a duel with the devil. Florentino, Chávez’s stand-in, appeared in a series of posters, a masculine rider on a tall horse, lance in hand, threatening a squeamish, stereotypically gay devil—an escuálido. Florentino’s lance points to the devil’s bottom in a gesture of penetration that Chávez has himself enacted verbally. On La Hojilla sodomy was Chávez’s metaphor for dominating the opposition—vamos a jugar el juego del rojo . . . . tu te agachas y yo te cojo; a non-rhyming translation is “let’s play the game of red . . . . ‚ you bend down and I fuck you.” The game does not jeopardize Chávez’s gender identity; in much of Latin America the male sodomizer is not regarded as a homosexual.

Perhaps the worst and saddest example of official homophobic censure occurred after a skirmish with the Catholic Church, one of the main institutional opponents of the regime. After a prominent priest was murdered in a Caracas hotel room, Venezuela’s Attorney General sought to dispel criticisms of the government’s incapacity to combat crime by claiming that the priest “had participated in his own death” because “we found excrement and also injuries in his anus.” In another telling case, Mario Silva, after calling a gay social columnist who criticized the bad taste of a military parade “pato” (“queer”), jabbed:

You would probably want our armed forces to dress in pink or wear silk uniforms. I can picture you leading the parade all wrapped in feathers. I’m not homophobic, by the way. But each of us should accept his true nature. You have no right to talk about the army, the army is very foreign to what you are. You have to show respect.

Pronouncements such as these are often followed by proclamations of alleged love for gays, and a tender commitment to multiculturalism.

What Chavista opponents—be they escuálidos, patos, or Gringo-Zionist-Imperialists—have in common is shit. Chávez routinely calls his opponents “plastas” (“lumps of shit”). Thus, in an aggressive speech the day after a key 2007 referendum, Chávez, dressed in military garb and surrounded by the highest- ranking of his armed forces, referred to the opposition’s victory as a “victory of shit.” The army, described by Ceresole as the third point on the Chavista triangle of fundamental direct relationships, were publicly incarnated as the force of containment: the military brass were present at the speech to warn the opposition against getting overly enthusiastic about its victory of shit. The metaphor is perhaps symptomatic of Chavista hysteria with regard to the opposition. It is not easy to keep shit in its place.

As hard as Chávez tries to reduce all opposition to an internal oligarchy backed by imperialism, his “enemies” proliferate: workers’ unions, the student movement, the church, civil society organizations.

• • •

The sacking of the Tiferet Israel synagogue produced an outcry from the local and the international press. As criticism turned louder, Chávez’s initial position became untenable. Given his tendency to conflate opposition, imperialism, and the Jews, the possibility of a Jewish plot suggested itself. But, under pressure, Chávez backed away from that theory and instructed his minister to find the culprits, which he did within a week. The offenders were prosecuted, and Chávez insisted that freedom of religion was and would continue to be respected in Venezuela.

Reducing anti-Semitism to a form of religious intolerance, however, is a subterfuge. Chávez’s focus on religious pluralism drew attention away from his unrepentant attacks on Jews, and his regime’s use of the figure of the Jew as the supreme incarnation of abjection, a stand-in for any opposition. These are his real targets. Whether the perpetrators of the synagogue attack were following instructions from above or were merely vandals hiding behind the government’s anti-Semitic rhetoric is to a large degree irrelevant. As such gangs thrive, the state itself is increasingly responsible.

From the time of the Dreyfus Affair, modern anti-Semitism has been connected to anxieties related to national integrity—not to religious pluralism per se. Indeed, in Venezuela freedom of religion has never been an issue; there are too many Protestants, too many Catholics, and even enough Jews and Muslims to ensure that abolishing freedom of religion is politically inviable.

However, neither can it be said that religion is unimportant. In the war between “the people of love” and “the people of shit,” religious symbolism comes in handy. Consider this: to express solidarity with Palestinians during the recent war in Gaza, Venezuela’s foreign minister led an official delegation, all members donning a keffiyeh, to a Caracas mosque. Venezuelan leftist opposition leader and editor Teodoro Petkoff pointed out that Chávez has reduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a war of religion. Chávez identified the Palestinian cause with the cause of Islam (implicitly siding with Hamas over the Palestinian Authority), and identified the Venezuelan nation with Islam, just as he has identified Judaism with the Empire. Chavista graffiti ties the Star of David to the Swastika; it also proclaims that “Islam is our Patrimony.” Chávez’s anti-Semitism is about war, a religious war of sorts. This posture poisons the discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli question, inhibiting a just and productive argument from the left.

For Venezuela’s Jews, Bolivarian anti-Semitism casts doubt on their national belonging. After the synagogue attack, the Jewish community got the message, and protesters marched, showing their national identity cards. In recent years, the Jewish community in Venezuela has shrunk some 20 percent.

Presidential indulgence in a politics of denigration also erodes the promise of the Venezuelan progressive movement by making open discussion of the class and race issues that divide the country impossible. Like its distant cousin, Peronism, Chavismo’s reliance on confrontation and brinkmanship extinguishes the possibility of open dialogue on practically any delicate issue. Indeed, the costs of Bolivarian anti-Semitism are at least as heavy for the broader society as they are for the Jewish community; all oppositional discourse is banished to the terrain of the foreign and the treasonous.

Chavista anti-Semitism is a symptom of the weakness of the regime itself. From its inception, Chávez’s government has been unable either to bend the inherited state apparatus fully to its will, or to abolish it and replace it with its own revolutionary design. The “Bolivarian Revolution” has thus developed within the constraints of certain democratic practices, where the entitlements of consumers, labor unions, government bureaucracies, community organizations, and property owners must be taken into account, if not necessarily respected.

In classic Leninist theory, old regime structures and emerging revolutionary institutions were to coexist for a brief transitional period. In Chávez’s Venezuela, on the contrary, the duality has become endemic, compromising state accountability. Paramilitary groups, drug mafias, high crime rates, death squads, and corruption thrive.

This dual structure is the context that frames and explains Chávez’s politics of distraction—his verbal antics and his reliance on unpredictable and spectacular policy innovations. The direct connection that Chávez has tried to forge with (some of) the people further undermines structures of administrative mediation. Opposition and dissatisfaction are therefore constant threats to the presidency itself. In such a scenario, a rhetoric that reduces all political friction to a single cause, to a single common enemy, is useful indeed. However, if history is any guide, ideologies of this sort have an elective affinity with dictatorship rather than democracy. When a regime relies on populism, military uniforms, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, it is time to worry."

"Arableaders are responsible for refugee problem

by by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

July 23, 2009 http://www.palwatch.org/site/modules/print/preview.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=1102&section=all ""The radio stations of the Arab regimes kept repeating to us: 'Get away from the battle lines. It's a matter of ten days or two weeks at the most, and we'll bring you back to Ein-Kerem [near Jerusalem].' And we said to ourselves, 'That's a very long time. What is this? Two weeks? That's a lot!' That's what we thought [then]. And now 50 years have gone by." [PATV, July 7, 2009]

With these words an Arab resident of a refugee camp recounts the reason why his family left Israel in 1948, in an interview broadcast on PA TV this month.

In recent years, Palestinian leaders, writers and refugees have spoken out in the Palestinian media, blaming the Arab leadership for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. According to these accounts, and contrary to the Palestinian myth that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were deported by Israel in 1948, the vast majority of the Arab exodus from Israel was voluntary, and the result of orders by the Arab leadership.

Furthermore, the fact that this information has been openly discussed by public figures and refugees in the Palestinian Authority media itself suggests that awareness of this responsibility may be widespread - even though Palestinian leaders continue to blame Israel for "the expulsion" for propaganda purposes.

The following statements in the PA media shed significant light on the events of 1948 and counter the attempts by the Palestinian Authority to hide this part of history.

Click here to view the Palestinian testimonies

1. Arab resident of refugee camp: "This picture was taken a week before we left Ein-Kerem [near Jerusalem] in June 1948, in front of our house. The radio stations of the Arab regimes kept repeating to us: 'Get away from the battle lines. It's a matter of ten days or two weeks at the most, and we'll bring you back to Ein-Kerem.' And we said to ourselves, 'That's a very long time. What is this? Two weeks? That's a lot!' That's what we thought [then]. And now 50 years have gone by." [PATV, July 7, 2009]

2. Jawad Al-Bashiti, Palestinian journalist in Jordan:

"Remind me of one real cause from all the factors that have caused the 'Palestinian Catastrophe' [the establishment of Israel and the creation of the refugee problem], and I will remind you that it still exists... The reasons for the Palestinian Catastrophe are the same reasons that have produced and are still producing our Catastrophes today. During the Little Catastrophe, meaning the Palestinian Catastrophe, the following happened: the first war between Arabs and Israel had started and the 'Arab Salvation Army' came and told the Palestinians: 'We have come to you in order to liquidate the Zionists and their state. Leave your houses and villages, you will return to them in a few days safely. Leave them so we can fulfill our mission (destroy Israel) in the best way and so you won't be hurt.' It became clear already then, when it was too late, that the support of the Arab states (against Israel) was a big illusion. The Arabs fought as if intending to cause the 'Palestinian Catastrophe'." [Al-Ayyam, May 13, 2008]

3. Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Palestinian journalist in PA official daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida:

"The leaders and the elites promised us at the beginning of the 'Catastrophe' in 1948 that the duration of the exile would not be long, and that it would not last more than a few days or months, and afterwards the refugees would return to their homes, which most of them did not leave only until they put their trust in those "Orkubian" promises made by the leaders and the political elites. Afterwards, days passed, months, years and decades, and the promises were lost with the strain of the succession of events..." [The term "Orkubian" invokes Orkub, a figure from Arab tradition who was known for breaking his promises and for his lies.] [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 13, 2006]

4. Asmaa Jabir Balasimah, woman who fled Israel in 1948:

"We heard sounds of explosions and of gunfire at the beginning of the summer in the year of the 'Catastrophe' [1948]. They [Arab leaders] told us: The Jews attacked our region and it is better to evacuate the village and return after the battle is over. And indeed there were among us [those who fled Israel] those who left a fire burning under the pot, those who left their flock [of sheep] and those who left their money and gold behind, based on the assumption that we would return after a few hours." [Al-Ayyam, May 16, 2006]

5. Ibrahim Sarsur, Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel: An Arab viewer called Palestinian Authority TV and quoted his father, saying that in 1948 the Arab District Officer ordered all Arabs to leave Palestine or be labeled traitors. In response, Ibrahim Sarsur, now Arab Member of Israeli Parliament Knesset, then Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, cursed those Arab leaders, thus acknowledging Israel's historical record.

Viewer: "Mr. Ibrahim [Sarsur]: I address you as a Muslim. My father and grandfather told me that during the 'Catastrophe' [in 1948], our District Officer issued an order that whoever stays in Palestine and in Majdel [near Ashkelon - southern Israel] is a traitor, he is a traitor." Ibrahim Sarsur, now MK, then Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel: "The one who gave the order forbidding them to stay there bears guilt for this, in this life and the Afterlife throughout history until Resurrection Day." [PA TV April 30, 1999]

6. Fuad Abu Hajla, senior Palestinian journalist: Fuad Abu Hajla, then a regular columnist in the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote an article before an Arab Summit, criticizing Arab leaders. One of the failures he cited, in the name of a prisoner, was that an earlier generation of Arab leaders had "forced" them to leave Israel in 1948.

"I have received a letter from a prisoner in Acre prison, to the Arab summit:

To the [Arab and Muslim] Kings and Presidents: Poverty is killing us, the symptoms are exhausting us and the souls are leaving our body, yet you are still searching for the way to provide aid, like one who is looking for a needle in a haystack or like the armies of your predecessors in the year of 1948, who forced us to leave [Israel], on the pretext of clearing the battlefields of civilians... So what will your summit do now?""