A high school friend of my wife’s tells the following hilarious story on her Facebook page. She was sitting in her living room watching Sarah Palin’s Tea Party speech and when the latter got to the part of her speech where she said: “My plan is quite simple.” The high school friend’s 85 year-old mother said, without skipping a beat: “It would have to be.”
I couldn’t stop laughing.
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Love that kosher sushi--that makes it worth the trip
Tomorrow, J Street will be celebrating its merger with Brit Tzedek and the launch of its local grassroots initiative with meetings all over the U.S. The main event will be held at Penn Hillel and will be videocast all over the country to the other gatherings. It will feature J Street director, Jeremy Ben Ami. For the loony Israel lobby right, it’s too much to bear. Not only is J Street going from strength to strength, a university Hillel is hosting the traitors.
That mobilized the forces of ZOA and Z Street (what dya think the “Z” stands for?) into a full bore stalking expedition. Not to be outdone, they’re scheduling not one, but TWO counter meetings at Penn Hillel which are deliberately timed to compete (that’s called stalking). It’s going to be something like biur chometz in which they’ll go through the building with a fine-tooth comb ridding it of any bit of J Street defilement. Maybe they’ll even host an exorcism if they feel the building has been mortally compromised.
Penn Hillel has been under such assault that it felt compelled to release a statement explaining its decision to offer a rental space to J Street.
You can see the graphic for the Z Street event displayed here, which will feature former Aipac hack, Mitchell Bard, author of the Jewish Virtual Pro-Israel Library. Bard also directs the ACE program which funds pro-Israel academic positions on willing campuses thanks to the help of the Schusterman Foundation, which also pays Mitch a cool 125G’s for his trouble.
The ZOA has brought one of its staff hit men to conduct a full bore witch hunt entitled, Is J Street Bad for Israel? The question mark seems superfluous. This event is co-sponsored by Hillel while the J Street event is not. But the mere idea of J Street inside a Jewish building seems to have the loony right in fits of apoplexy.
Many Jewish peace activists chuckle at the antics of lunatics like Mort Klein who has been shrying about left wing Jewish perfidy for decades. But the truth is that Klein and ZOA have the support of the cream of the Jewish fat-cat funding world. If you review this press release you’ll see that no less than Ronald Lauder, Mort Zuckerman and James Tisch will headline this year’s fundraising dinner. Itamar Marcus, former Israeli intelligence officer and current director of the Palestinian media smear outfit, Palestine Media Watch, will also be honored with an award actually named after Ben Hecht (!) for his hatchet work.
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Pipes' pipe dream of Iran war will save Obama presidency
Dan Pipes really really cares about Barack Obama. The proof is in the helpful advice he proffered to “save” Obama’s presidency: bomb Iran. In the blog world we call people like this “concern trolls,” people who offer advice out of faux concern for your reputation, but who really hate your guts.
As proof that the National Review must’ve had a very slow news and commentary day, they actually published this. I’m not sure whether Pipes was drunk or on performance enhancing drugs when he wrote this fever dream of a column, How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran:
[Obama] needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.
Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapon capacity.
…By eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama protects the homeland and sends a message to American’s friends and enemies.
…If the U.S.limited its strike to taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities and did not attempt any regime change, it would require few “boots on the ground” and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack more politically palatable.
…Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, and make the netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon.
Slim Pickens: Dan Pipes in a cowboy hat
Not a word here about the price the U.S. would have to pay for such monumental lunacy. For the Pipes of the world there’s never a price, only the pipes dream of what could be if only we had the courage of our convictions. This is Donny Rumsfeld devoid of any practical responsibility for outcomes or results. It’s as if Pipes plays out all these fantasies in a computer simulation divorced from reality as we know it.
Love that 9/11 line: so all a failing president (not so fast Dan, Obama may fool you yet) has to do is orchestrate his very own 9/11. But of course an Obama 9/11 in Iran would be a real 9/11 for Iran in terms of the suffering it would cause. And that would be followed by another 9/11 here brought about by Iran’s thirst for revenge. Then we’d have 9/11’s all around. This starts to remind me of Nero fiddling as Rome burned or Slim Pickens riding down that thermonuclear warhead as if it was a rodeo bronco in Dr. Strangelove. This man is a ghoul. Even his picture makes him look damn scary.
Thanks to the intrepid Matt Duss for digging up this nugget.
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Bill Alford, host of the Seattle community-access show, Moral Politics, invited me for my second session. We did a follow-up show on the Iran-Israel conference I organized here in Seattle last month. The themes were the danger of military attack by Israel or the U.S. against Iran; the nature of contemporary Zionism and the impact of Jacobtinsky; the impact of the Holocaust on Israel’s approach to conflicts with its Arab neighbors. We covered the Times of London story claiming Iran was developing a nuclear trigger and the report that the alleged Iranian document on which the report was based was a forgery (just as the Niger yellow cake report was proven to be fake).
I’m pretty self-critical generally, but I was really happy with how this interview came out and hope you’ll be able to spend a half-hour watching. I’d also appreciate your spreading the word about this video so that others will watch it as well.
My next show with Bill will deal with the Naveed Haq murder trial here in Seattle and the guilty verdict which will send him to prison for life.
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Six years after the Bush administration denied entry into this country to Muslim intellectual, Tariq Ramadan, the Obama administration has reversed course, thus righting an egregious wrong that stained America’s record throughout the Muslim world and elsewhere. In 2004, Notre Dame invited him to assume an academic chair and he had packed up and was ready to fly to the U.S. U.S. diplomats suddenly summoned him and told him his visa had been revoked. As in immigration situations like this, they did not have to give a reason and didn’t.
Later, after an outcry erupted from free speech advocates, the Bush administration revealed that Ramadan had contributed $1,200 to a Swiss Muslim charity which had been known to support Hamas social charity efforts. Because Hamas is now listed as a terrorist organization, the U.S. considered Ramadan an abettor of terrorism. At the time of these gifts, Hamas was NOT listed and of course Ramadan had no idea that such gifts could be considered in this way. He did not give to any Hamas-related charities after its designation.
Ramadan enlisted the legal help of the ACLU which has fought this case from the beginning. The other day the State Department finally did the right thing (though six years late) and announced they would no longer refuse a visa to the Muslim philosopher or another South African Muslim legal scholar it also had barred:
“I am very happy and hopeful that I will be able to visit the United States very soon and to once again engage in an open, critical and constructive dialogue with American scholars and intellectuals,” Professor Ramadan said in a statement.
I wrote about the injustice meted out to Tariq Ramadan from the beginning and I must say it is one of the few times I’ve done so and been able to write a blog post like this acknowledging that a small victory has been won in the battle for justice and civil liberties. I hope to one day be able to write such a post about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict though it may take a bit longer.
However frustrating the Obama Middle East policy may be I also have to credit the president and secretary of state for righting this wrong.
This is a bittersweet victory because Notre Dame no longer has an academic chair available for Prof. Ramadan. It is my hope that another comparable institution will recognize the value of his presence and accord him the honor he deserves.
It’s instructive of Tablet Magazine’s political proclivities that they’ve offered a pulpit to prominent Islamophobe, Paul Berman, who is writing a book which will expose Tariq Ramadan’s alleged Islamist perfidy for all the world to see. Tablet aptly titles this bit of puerility, Intellectual Jihad.
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Jared Malsin duped into vacating deporation order (Maan)
I knew something was fishy in the Malsin deportation case. Yesterday, an Israeli judge accepted a signed document allegedly from Jared Malsin, an American Jewish editor for the Palestinian Maan news agency, which purported to claim that Malsin wished to vacate his appeal of his deportation order. On the strength of what turns out to be a fraudulently conveyed document and without consulting the victim or victim’s attorney, the Israeli judge dismissed the appeal. Israel promptly turned around and expelled Malsin on the next flight to New York.
This is a terrible miscarriage of justice in which an Israeli judge was a willing participant. Here is what Malsin told Maan:
Upon landing in New York on Thursday, Ma’an News Agency’s Jared Malsin, a US citizen, said Interior Ministry staff pressured him into dropping a legal challenge against his deportation order just two hours after his lawyer left for the day.
After signing a hand-written letter that Malsin said he believed was a “formality,” ministry staff sent the paper to District Judge Kobi Vardi, who had presided over Malsin’s case, and the judge decided to lift the stay of deportation order…
“None of this was my decision,” he [Malsin] emphasized in a phone interview minutes after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport early Thursday morning local time, rejecting reports that he left Israel voluntarily. “There’s no such thing as a voluntary deportation. I was deported, period.”
Hours earlier, in an armored car en route to the plane, Malsin said he was unaware there were legal implications to the paper. “I had no idea I was waving anything, no clue,” he said, explaining how Interior Ministry officials coerced him into creating a legal document to withdraw his case without an attorney present, and offered a misleading explanation over what he was signing.
The document apparently indicated Malsin was leaving the facility “without personal coercion.” But Malsin said he was under the impression that the papers he signed would allow him to simply leave the airport while his case continued in Israel.
Unfortunately, Malsin does not know Hebrew (it’s a very good idea if you want to be an editor in Israel or the Territories that you learn some Hebrew) and even more unfortunately, he signed papers trusting what a Shin Bet official told him about them was the truth. A fatal mistake. Again one you’d think a seasoned reporter in the Territories would not make. But given that he was all of 25 and had suffered incarceration for eight days, perhaps an understandable one.
So Jared Malsin was deported. The Shin Bet lied and committed a miscarriage of justice and Judge Kobi Vardi was a willing participant in the legal charade. This isn’t even kangaroo justice. It’s monkey justice and makes a mockery of the word (justice). Congratulations Israel, you’ve done it again. Sullied your reputation when there was absolutely no need to do so. So much for Israel’s vaunted democratic values and appreciation for the right to a free press.
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boy wearing tefillin
There will be a whole lot of Jewish bloggers who will be outraged by the fact that an Orthodox Jewish teenager was accused of being a terrorist because he laid tefillin on a commuter flight this morning. I’m outraged too. But bemused because unlike all these Yankels-come-lately I’ve been against religious/ethnic profiling at airports from the beginning. Do you remember the imams praying on a Northwest flight on which a passenger thought they were planning to blow up the plane? Did I hear any uproar from the same Jews who are shreying about this incident? How ’bout the Israeli Palestinians routinely harrassed at by Israeli security officers at airports around the globe for having the chutzpah to fly while Arab? Documented here.
The whole fiasco occurred because a flight attendant thought a passenger had “wires strapped to his head and arm” that appeared to be a bomb. Yeah right. Couldn’t she have seen that either he was shuckling over a prayer book or else murmuring prayers to himself and that the straps were made of leather and not wire? Or couldn’t she have asked what he was doing before radioing the TSA which diverted the flight and met its arrival with a full contingent of anti-terrorist personnel? And how about the pilot who was told the boy was davening and still elected not to continue his flight as normal, but rather to divert to Philadelphia?
I understand we’re all afraid of terrorism these days. But can we at least appeal for some semblance of moderation and common sense? People, this is what an inordinate fear of terror does to us. We become a frightened cowering mob and lose our sense of proportion and ability to make reasonable decisions.
The Gothamist asks a probing question of anti-Muslim Jewish racist Dov Hikind, who announced he favors such profiling as long as it’s directed against anyone but his own tribe:
The only question now is whether or not this will change Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind’s position on the use of ethnic profiling to prevent acts of terrorism…
Here’s a response typical of the Jewish know-nothing Islamophobic blog world:
When are people in the US going to wake up to the fact that there are no Orthodox Jewish terrorists? In fact, there are no Jewish terrorists and no Christian terrorists and no atheist terrorists. Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all the terrorists are Muslims.
H/t to RM.
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SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles
I just love unsourced stories like this in the Israeli press: they can mean everything or nothing or something in between. Usually they’re garbage as likely in this case. But what’s interesting is the sheer effrontery of whoever the U.S. official is:
An American source says that Syria allowed Hezbollah operatives to train within its territory in the use of advanced SA2 anti-aircraft missile batteries, the Kuwaiti daily Al Rai reported Sunday. In an interview, the senior U.S. official warned that if Syria supplies Hezbollah with this type of missile, Israel will bomb Damascus and a war will likely ensue.
According to the official, Israel has warned Syria not to allow the transfer of the SA2 missiles into the hands of Hezbollah, and views the transfer of such missiles as the crossing of a red line. He added that he did not believe that a war would break out soon, unless one of the sides violated the undeclared agreement not to cross the red lines defined by both sides.
The phrase “senior U.S. official” has Dennis Ross written all over it. But I suppose there are other pro-Israel lackeys in the White House it could be. Imagine a U.S. official having the temerity of doing Israel’s bidding in its battles with its neighbors. Which government does he think he serves? Washington or Tel Aviv?
The idea that a defensive weapon like anti-aircraft batteries would be viewed by Israel as grounds for war against Syria is typical of the Israeli strategic mindset. In their view, anything that threatens their military dominance, even military weapons designed to defend a neighbor’s sovereign territory, is grounds for attack. All I can say is that the Middle East is changing and the Iron Fist no longer works in terms of Israeli deterrence. Israel can no longer bomb its way to victory. I suppose it may take another wasted Lebanon war or two before this lesson sinks in. But eventually it will. At least I hope so. If it doesn’t, then Israel is doomed.
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