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Posts Tagged ‘conference-of-presidents-of-major-jewish-organizations’

Conference of Presidents Creates Anti-Iran Front Group

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

The Conference of Presidents organized a Common Call by American spiritual leaders from all nine main denominations, which urges rabbis to deliver anti-Iran sermons this High Holiday season. One of the interesting elements of the Call is the announcement of a UN rally on September 24th to coincide with Mahmoud Ahmedinehad’s speech to the General Assembly. The protest is being organized by a new coalition called Stand for Freedom in Iran. The group has a website which announces these political demands:

Freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and freedom of the press

Immediate cessation of human rights abuses, the release of demonstrators from prisons and protection for minority communities

Prosecution of those responsible for the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan and the many other victims engaged in the recent protests

Full compliance and cooperation by Iran with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Security Council resolutions including an end to all uranium enrichment in Iran

End to incitement to genocide and support for terrorism

These sound like entirely reasonable demands and at first glance it appears that Stand for Freedom is nothing more than a pro-reformist group advocating Iranian democracy. The list does not refer to regime change or the danger of Islamist extremism. It does not warn that Iran seeks a nuclear holocaust against Israel as do many pro-Israel groups (including the Conference itself). But this is most assuredly a group which does NOT support a reformed Iranian regime. Rather, it supports, to the extent it has any clearly defined agenda, far more radical goals.

As with all things related to Iran or Israel, you have to delve a little deeper to discover who the sponsoring organizations are:

Progressive American Iranian Committee
Jewish Community Relations Council of New York
NAACP – New York Conference
Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union
American Federation of Teachers
UJA-Federation of New York
National Interagency Taskforce on Iran

What’s interesting about this list is the fairly mainstream (but solidly pro-Israel) groups like the UJA Federation and JCRC alongside labor unions and civil rights/minority organizations. The Iranian group, according to the leader of a national Iranian-American organization I consulted, is a hawkish neo-con group that favors regime change and a secular Iran. One of the other Iranian groups is a front for the People’s Mujahadeen, an anti-regime radical sect that is listed by the U.S. Treasury as a terrorist organization. All of this is a deliberate strategy of the Conference and the Israeli foreign ministry to transform the Iran-Israel conflict in the minds of Americans from a messy distant bilateral confrontation between two extreme Middle Eastern countries into a multilateral campaign by gay rights, feminists, labor activists and minorities opposed to Iran’s extreme Islamist regime. It’s a fairly clever strategy though quite transparent on deeper inspection.

Finally, a word about the last group on the list. The Conference of Presidents, perhaps knowing of its ideologically partisan pro-Israel reputation has disguised its involvement behind the newly minted National Interagency Taskforce on Iran. It is essentially a front for the Conference, though it may actually be composed of some agencies and organizations affiliated with it, for all I know.

Those with a memory of last year’s anti-Iran demonstration at the UN will recall that the Conference and its director, Malcolm Hoenlein invited Sarah Palin, in the midst of a presidential election campaign, to keynote that event. Democrats and liberal Jews raised such a stink that Hoenlein attempted to salvage the event by inviting Hillary Clinton. But she wisely demurred and Hoenlein then withdrew Palin’s invitation as well. This year, the Conference is wisely attempting a different, but no less suspect, organizing strategy.

Among the partnering organizations are the usual hardline pro-Israel advocacy groups including StandWithUs, the ADL, American Jewish Committee, Republican Jewish Coalition, Young Israel, National Jewish Democratic Council, the David Project, and ZOA.

Therefore, Stand With Freedom, both the group and the event, are a bought and paid for creation of the Conference of Presidents which, in turn, is doing the bidding of the Israeli government in ratcheting up pressure on the Iranian regime. The ultimate goal, as I’ve written consistently here, is to lay the groundwork for a potential Israeli attack on Iran.

So my main warning about this event and its sponsoring group is that it is a front in Israel’s effort to demonize Iran and turn it into a potential target for military action. To any supporting group that is now involved in the scheduled rally or considers becoming involved, know what you’re getting yourself into. Caveat emptor.

Tags: ahmadinejad speech september 24th, anti iran un rally, conference-of-presidents-of-major-jewish-organizations, malcolm-hoenlein, mujahadeen terrorist, regime change
Posted in Mideast Peace, Politics & Society | 15 Comments »

Hebron and Hoenlein: Silence of the Jewish Lamb

Friday, December 12th, 2008

The Forward notes in an article today that the largest U.S. Jewish umbrella group, the Conference of Presidents, refused to support the government’s eviction of extremist settlers from Hebron’s House of Contention. The Conference also tellingly refused to condemn the subsequent settler riots against Palestinians and Israeli police:

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella body of 51 Jewish groups, has not issued a statement about the evacuation of settlers and their supporters from a disputed house in the West Bank town December 4 followed by settler violence against Hebron’s Palestinian residents.

Moreover, Daily Alert, the Presidents Conference’s Internet newsletters of Middle East-related published articles, did not refer to the incidents at all during the week after they occurred. Daily Alert is sent via e-mail to tens of thousands of free subscribers and is displayed on Web site of the Presidents Conference.

…Calls seeking comment from the Presidents Conference’s executive vice president, Malcolm Hoenlein, and its chair, Harold Tanner, were not returned.

The Forward does not note that Aipac too has refused to issue any statement, though JTA earlier reported on Aipac’s silence by claiming the group generally doesn’t make public statements about internal Israeli policy (isn’t that a laugh, considering how aggressively interventionist their approach is regarding promoting Israeli interests within a U.S. political context). To my mind, even if this is true, it does not excuse its silence on such an important issue regarding Israeli democracy.

Through the Forward’s goading, the flagship Orthodox organization and ZOA both made “on the one hand-on the other hand” statements which basically cancelled out anything positive that might be gleaned from them:

On the right, the Zionist Organization of America, which had opened a symbolic office in the Hebron building to show support for the settlers, remained silent for a week before issuing a long statement December 10. The ZOA expressed regret that the Israeli authorities, especially Defense Minister and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, decided to forcibly expel the militants. The group, however, stressed that it did not condone the ensuing violence.

Though the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America did not issue a statement, it aired similar views. In an e-mail to the Forward, the union’s public policy director, Nathan Diament, stated that despite its feeling that the evacuation was unwarranted, and its objection to Olmert’s use of the word “pogrom,” the O.U. leadership “does not believe this justifies Israelis attacking IDF soldiers, and it certainly does not justify acts of harassment or violence against Palestinians.”

The article quotes a non-plussed Eric Yoffie wondering why the Conference doesn’t get up off its tush and say something since so many of its constituent groups have denounced the violence. To this I respond, why don’t the Reform movement and other liberal groups quit the group? If you wait for the Conference to reform itself so it truly represents American Jewry you’ll be waiting for the Messiah. And even then, Malcolm Hoenlein would find some reason to delay.

As I read The Forward’s overall coverage of the Hebron affair (with multiple stories covering seemingly every aspect of the incident) I was filled with admiration. Larry Cohler-Esses recently became the assistant managing editor and while it’s very possible the coverage might’ve been similar without him there–I believe his presence really “took it up a notch.” It went from very good previously to superb now.

One especially good story detailed the ideological leaders of the extremist settlers, focussing on Daniella Weiss. This statement from her was chilling:

“They [the settler rioters] are not afraid of prison, they are not afraid of trials, they just express loyalty to the land,” she told the Forward.

This perfectly reflects the political pathology of the extremist settlers. The state is something to be reviled. Laws are meaningless. All that matters is the mystical concept of “the land.” This is the irredeemable contradiction between such mystical theocratic mumbo-jumbo and the State of Israel as we know it. There can never be any commonality between the two. All that is possible is war.

The article goes on to quote another of the movement’s leading “thinkers,” Rabbi Dov Wolpe:

As far as Wolpe is concerned, the government comprises those who “sit here and represent the terrorists.” President Shimon Peres “is representing the position of the terrorists,” he said.

The third settler leader profiled, Baruch Marzel, explains the new “price tag” policy thus:

A government official who orders a settler evacuation, he said, “commits a crime against your people [and] they have to pay a price, and [with] a heavy price they will think twice about committing the crime.”

How is it possible to govern a country with such an attitude? Any action by said government that violates Marzel’s “conscience” becomes not just politically objectionable, but a crime.

Interestingly, Marzel twists the aspiration of liberal western democracy for tolerance and against racism into a concept that is useful to him:

Marzel argues it is the government that is racist for hampering Jewish settlement. The Hebron evacuation, he told the Forward, was “pure racism. It is…part of the move by the liberal leftist people of Israel against those loyal to the land.”

Much like the KKK, Marzel deliberately seeks to create racist provocation within Israel. Here he comments on why he will march with his followers in an Israeli Arab village:

“We have a cancer in our body capable of destroying the State of Israel: people who support terrorism, Hamas, the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], and these people are in the heart of Israel, a force capable of destroying Israel from the inside. I am going [in order] to tell these people — the Land of Israel is ours.”

If Olmert, Barak or Livni think these people can be dealt with or finessed or ignored, they are sadly mistaken. There will, at some point, have to be a showdown. The State must supersede them and impose itself on them or there will be disaster.

And let them call it by whatever names they wish. Those who reject Israeli democracy must never be allowed to realize the Jewish ayatollah-riddled state with which they would replace it.

Tags: anti-palestinian, baruch marzel, conference-of-presidents-of-major-jewish-organizations, daniella weiss, dov wolpe, Orthodox Jews attack House of Contention eviction, racist, silence on hebron riots, zoa criticizes israeli government for evicting settlers
Posted in Jews & Judaism, Mideast Peace | 11 Comments »

Hoenlein Disses Obama

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Malcolm Hoenlein is the paragon of Jewish communal apparatchiks. He’s one of the chief pro-Israel enforcers among the leadership–sort of the like our very own J. Edgar Hoover. He runs the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and so has his own bully pulpit with the emphasis on “bully.”

Barack Obama has come out on the short end of Hoenlein’s stick in a recent Haaretz story which fretted that the candidate’s thirst for change could bode ill for Israel:

“All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be, is an opening for all kind of mischief,” Hoenlein said at a press conference in Jerusalem…

Indeed. The fact that Obama might want to change U.S. policy toward Israel and might soften U.S. support for the Occupation. That an Obama administration might actually pressure Israel to withdraw from West Bank settlements and engage in final status negotiations. That would frighten a true believer like Hoenlein.

Hoenlein was careful to stress, “It’s not the candidates themselves we are concerned about,” pointing out that Obama, like the other major candidates, has signed on to found a national committee to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary in the U.S.

“Of course Obama has plenty of Jewish supporters and there are many Jews around him,” Hoenlein said. “But there is a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign.”

He also cited the fact that Obama has criticized his rival, Democratic candidate Senator Hillary Clinton, for her vote in favor of including the Iranian Republican Guards in the list of terror organizations.

Again, Obama is dangerous because he isn’t sufficiently bellicose toward Iran. I mean, my God, he’s even in favor of negotiating with the Iranians before bombing them to Kingdom Come. Have you ever heard of anything so audacious and threatening to Israeli interests?!

The U.S. Jewish leader warned the American presidential campaign could signal a shift toward declining U.S. support for Israel.

“Support for Israel is at an all-time high, [but] our polling suggests that as broad as the support is, it is also thin, and most Americans see Israel as a dark and militaristic place,” he said.

Now, where would they ever have picked up that wild idea?

He termed the current election season “transitional” and said that it “could bring about a shift in the political life.”

Hoenlein said that Israel’s supporters should be worried by “the heightening of the bar and the greater tolerance of anti-Israel statements that wouldn’t have been allowed in the past.”

He singled out the book by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on the Israel lobby, which “has become a bestseller and a college textbook,” and said that there “is a steady poisoning of the elites, mainly on campuses, that could trickle down.”

Now, that’s a new anti-Walt/Mearsheimer slogan…The Israel Lobby and the Poisoning of the Elites! Maybe it could be the title of Abe Foxman’s next book attacking the two learned professors. Have you ever heard of rhetoric so overblown? Hoenlein is our very own Chicken Little crying: “the sky is falling” and gnashing his teeth when a presidential candidate shows the least amount of independent judgment regarding the I-P conflict.

Tags: conference-of-presidents-of-major-jewish-organizations, Hoenlein-Obamas-spirit-of-change-could-harm-Israel, u.s.-foreign-relations
Posted in Mideast Peace, Politics & Society | 2 Comments »

Pro-Israel Jewish Groups to the Ramparts Against Palestinian Prisoner’s Document

Monday, June 26th, 2006

Ori Nir reports in The Forward that pro-Israel neocon, Malcolm Hoenlein and his Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations “umbrella” group have entered the fray against the Palestinian Prisoner’s Document which seeks Hamas’ acceptance of a two-state solution and an end to terror attacks outside of the Green Line (among other things). Many Palestinians, Israelis and Mideast analysts have welcomed this initiative as a possible breakthrough that might eventually lead to Israeli-Palestinian final status peace negotiations. In this blog, I have attempted to address the Prisoner’s Document cautiously but optimistically as have a number of stories in the Israeli press. I don’t think any of us is oblivious to the difficult road ahead if the Document is to be turned into a long-range plan leading to peace negotiations. There is oh so much that can go wrong. Just look at the events of the last two days as a perfect example of an attempt to derail the Document.

But Hoenlein, apparently fearing that the Document might take on a life of its own in world opinion has taken to the ramparts to do battle against it:

American Jewish organizations are strongly criticizing the document guiding national unity talks between Hamas and Fatah officials…

For Palestinians, observers said, the purpose of hammering out a unified platform is not to trigger talks with Israel. Instead, the negotiations surrounding the document appear aimed at preventing an internal civil war and breaking the financial siege that the international community has imposed on the Palestinian Authority…

“This is not a platform for negotiations with Israel, but for negotiations between Palestinians,” Haim Malka said. Malka is a Middle East expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank…

Several Jewish groups — including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the 52-member umbrella group widely seen as the Jewish community’s main united voice on Middle Eastern affairs — are complaining that the Palestinian document driving the Hamas-Fatah talks has wrongly been described in the media as a “peace plan.”

“Not only is this not a peace plan, but it expresses positions that are much more hard line than the ones believed to be Fatah’s position on issues such as the right of return [of Palestinian refugees] and what they call the right of resistance” to Israel, said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Presidents Conference.

The document, Hoenlein told the Forward, could only hinder future negotiations with Palestinian moderates, because it would blur distinctions between them and militants tied to Hamas and to other terrorist groups. “What this would say is that Hamas and Fatah of Abbas have now become the same thing,” Hoenlein said.

Any reasonable observer will note the inanity of much of this poppycock which passes for “analysis.” First, the Prisoner’s Document is clearly meant to lead eventually to “triggering talks with Israel.” Merely stating that the Document is not intended to lead to negotiation is what passes for well-reasoned political argument in the pro-Israel community. Those who suggest there is no intent to lead to negotiation are little more than propagandists and utter fools to boot.

This doesn’t mean that the Document isn’t also meant to break the PA’s international isolation as the above passage indicates. Those two objectives are by no means in conflict nor does one preclude the other. Second, the Document clearly IS a peace plan. Yes, it does contain different provisions than ones previously endorsed by Fatah. But the problem with the Hoenlein view is that it neglects to take into account that Fatah is no longer in power. Hamas for now holds the reins and until now Hamas has not endorsed any of the provisions in the Document.

Further, Hoenlein conveniently neglects to mention a key provision of the Document calling on Hamas to accept previously negotiated agreements (like Oslo) adopted by the PLO. If Hamas signs on to this provision then it will in effect be endorsing precisely those positions which Fatah has endorsed (recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence, etc.). There goes Hoenlein’s argument out the window!

In other words, the Prisoner’s Document is a complex one which must not be reduced to a few propaganda sound bytes. Those who do, like Hoenlein, will convince no one but their own acolytes of the rightness of their analysis.

One small piece of carping about Nir’s coverage. Certainly, Malcolm Hoenlein and CPMJO’s views on the Prisoner’s Document are important and worth covering. But could he not find any other commentator to provide an alternate view? By not doing so, Nir in effect cedes the field to the mainstream pro-Israel groups allowing readers to believe that the Jewish community speaks with one voice on this issue. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, I’m willing to bet that if you polled American Jews providing them with the basic provisions of the Prisoner’s Document and asked whether it was a worthwhile proposal which deserved consideration by Israel–that a majority of us Jews would agree with the proposition. The fact that a majority of the American Jewish fatcat pro-Israel leadership does not, merely indicates how much they exist in their own isolation chamber, a place that is divorced not only from the majority of American Jewry but from Israeli interests as well.

There are Israeli commentators and this blog as well which espouse an alternate view of the Document. Could one of us have not been cited by Nir so as to provide some balance to the article? I’ve written to Nir about this–we’ll see what, if anything, is his response.

Tags: conference-of-presidents-of-major-jewish-organizations, fatah, hamas, malcolm-hoenlein, opposition-to-palestinian-prisoners-document, ori-nir, the-forward
Posted in Mideast Peace | 2 Comments »