Voltaire - anti-Semite that he was - should be alive today to mock the hypocrisy of the new high priests calling anathema on the heads of Jews in Israel.
So says Denis Macshane in a searing op-ed which marks “Buycott Israel” day. For what it’s worth, my personal view is that you should buy Israeli goods because they are worth buying - but as long as there’s a BDS campaign, initiatives like this one can play a valuable role. If you’re in the United States, visit here for shopping tips.
One of the few merits of the Wikileaks project is that it puts the obvious and already well-known on the front pages. Take Iran and its nuclear program, for example. Everybody who takes an interest in such matters and is not blinded by hatred of Jews running their own affairs knows that most Arab states are far more worried about the nuclear ambitions of the ayatollahs than they are about Israel and would be quietly pleased if the US and/or Israel put an end to them using whatever means necessary.
Continue reading ‘Wikileaks: Shock Revelations! Bomb Iran Now Say Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Bahrain’
Do you believe in an ideology? Putting it slightly more strongly, are you a follower of an ideology? I guess for most people the answer is “no” to both. Ideologies are generally felt to be bad, false and deceptive and those who follow them to be fanatics of some kind, unable to see things as they really are and act accordingly, in a calm manner and with their minds unclouded by mysterious and undisprovable notions.
Writing a few days ago for the indispensable Jewish Ideas Daily about UNESCO’s decision to approve Muslim denial of any Jewish connection to biblical sites in Israel by classifying Rachel’s Tomb, near Bethlehem, as a mosque, Alex Joffe mentioned the critically important work of the Israeli scholar, Yitzhak Reiter, in documenting “…the modern Islamic tradition according to which Jerusalem was never associated with the Jews.”
Author and journalist Stefan Frank has conducted an extensive interview with Professor Reiter, who teaches at Ashkelon Academic College and is a senior fellow of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, which we are pleased to publish here.
Continue reading ‘Rachel’s Tomb: An Interview with Professor Yitzhak Reiter’
Last week the Philadelphia BDS movement claimed a small victory by apparently pressuring Strauss, the Israel-based co-owners of Sabra hummus, to remove from their English language website their statement of support for the IDF’s Golani Brigade.
I was ready to attack Strauss for this apparently shameful act, but today the support is back up.
Now if only they would bring back their spicy pickles.
Z Word contributor Karl Pfeifer draws my attention to this important article by Yale Professor Eva S. Balogh. It’s about a demonstration organized by neo-fascist Jobbik Party at the Budapest statue of Count Mihály Károlyi, the democratically-elected leader of Hungary after World War One, and a much-detested figure on the far right.
Over at The Propagandist, Jonathon Narvey confronts a brand new, and decidedly stinky, conspiracy theory: that those shadowy Zionists, and not Islamist terrorists, were behind the shocking massacre of 58 Iraqi Christian worshippers at the Sayedat al-Najat Cathedral in Baghdad on October 31. Writes Jonathon: “This is a useful example of a larger phenomenon that makes brokering peace between Islamic states and Western ones, or dealing with Islamist terror, state-sanctioned or otherwise, so much more difficult. A broad swathe of humanity throughout the Islamic world, particularly their political leaders and intellectual class, believes in blood-curdling fairy tales. And they project the worst aspects of Islamism’s brutalities upon its victims.”
Here’s my latest piece on The Huffington Post.
When I read this report on the Electronic Intifada website claiming that the largest pension fund in The Netherlands had divested from the Israeli companies in its portfolio, it struck me that the campaign to subject Israel to a regime of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions - BDS for short - had hit a milestone. No longer, I said to myself, is this a matter of campus gesture politics. The long-awaited South Africa effect is finally manifesting.
Then it occurred to me that the story might not be true. I contacted the fund’s managers, the Dutch company PGGM, and they confirmed my suspicions.
Solomonia rightly draws attention to this remarkable lecture by Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch. Bernstein, you’ll remember, published an op-ed in the New York Times in October 2009 in which he eviscerated HRW for “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”
Continue reading ‘Robert Bernstein on Human Rights in the Middle East’
This is a sensitive time of the year for Spanish fascists. Their two biggest heroes both died on the 20th of November. José Antonio Primo de Rivera (say “José Antonio” in any discussion about modern Spain and everyone will know who you are talking about), the founder of the Spanish Falange, was executed by firing squad on November 20th 1936 after having been found guilty of insurrection and conspiracy against the Republic. Francisco Franco Bahamonde died of old age on the 20th of November, 1975 after having ruled Spain with unsurpassed brutality and cunning since 1939.
Is Iran’s government sponsoring an Internet site that extols the German Nazis, their history and achievements, including the antisemitism that the current Iranian regime also supports? Or is it merely permitting one to operate in a highly censored communications’ system?Here are the facts. There is a discussion group site entitled IranNazi that has an Iranian internet URL. It is written in Persian and seems to have begun on August 24. All the material on the site is pro-Nazi and features pictures of Adolph Hitler, the swastika, and goose-stepping German soldiers. There is an English-language part as well.
Read more from Barry Rubin here.
Curious about the whois details? Here they are:
This one has been doing the email rounds rather feverishly today, and now Jeff Goldberg has run with it:
Well, this is certainly disconcerting: The New Israel Fund, a left-leaning organization I admire (it funds all sorts of civil liberties groups in Israel), states that, on the one hand, the anti-Israel boycott movement (the BDS movement, for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) is pursuing a counterproductive and inflammatory strategy, but on the other, it will continue to fund groups that support BDS, so long as they don’t support BDS too much. Here are the weasel words, so you can judge NIF’s position for yourself:
In earlier posts we’ve established that the Catholic Kingdom of Spain can never be a state for all its citizens and must immediately become the subject of a campaign of boycott, disinvestment and sanctions until it agrees to dissolve itself and be replaced by a multi-religious, multi-cultural Federation of Iberian Regions.
Over at Engage, with an astonishing degree of patience, they are giving space to an individual called Greenstein from South Africa. He wants an academic boycott of Israel, and only Israel and now says the following:
Continue reading ‘Greenstein Again: Arguing With The Morally Impollute’
Western Sahara is a former Spanish colony the bulk of which has been illegally occupied by Morocco since 1975. The Saharaui people have sought independence in a long struggle against the Moroccan authorities. In recent days there have been fresh outbreaks of violence by the Moroccan security forces against Saharauis in El Aaiún, the territory’s capital and this has led to protests by Saharaui exiles in Spain. Lluís Bassets is a senior journalist at El País and this is what he has to say about the situation today:
Subscribe to the Z Word blog via RSS - click on the orange button below. For more information on using RSS, please read this helpful guide.
RSS