The Origins of Jew Hatred

Seraphic Secret provides detail:

Egyptian cleric sheik Ahmad Al-Johainy soberly instructs his audience that if you want to learn how to properly and vigorously hate Jews, well, just study the Koran. It is the authoritative text.

Unlike others who claim that modern day Muslim Jew-hatred is derived from Nazi ideology, Seraphic Secret maintains that normative Islam is the source of Arab Muslim Jew-hatred. Nazi propaganda is just the icing on the cake.

The video is quite refreshing. The imam does not even try and pretend that he's “merely anti-Zionist.” He's wonderfully candid and proud of his Jew-hatred.

And make no mistake about it, the hatred of Jews has nothing to do with so-called occupation or so-called settlements, just as the Arab-Israeli conflict has nothing to do with national boundaries. It's codified Islamist intolerance that goes back to the times of Mohammed, a doctrine that sees the annihilation of the Jewish people as a religious duty.

Ironically, Egypt is considered a moderate Muslim country. If this is the face of moderation imagine the barbarism of Gaza, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Sudan, and Iran.

The racist views of this genocidal yearning imam are the norm in the Arab Muslim world. Arab TV is saturated in this kind of filth.

Finally, the so-called peace process is and will remain a dangerous delusion until the Arab Muslim world frees itself from the malignancy of Jew-hatred.

We must enlighten the younger generation about our cruel enemy. We must show them who the enemies are, who the Jews are.

Palestinians Have Ceased to Exist for Jews

Palestinians Have Ceased to Exist for Jews

There is nothing interesting or new in the depiction of Palestinians -- they have no names, they don't speak, they are anonymous. But they are not simply faceless victims. Instead, the victims in the story that Waltz with Bashir tells are Israeli soldiers. Their anguish, their questioning, their confusion, their pain

Few Israelis talk to Palestinians. They rarely visit a Palestinian home except in uniform with a flack jacket and an assault rifle. With the wall we announced we didn't want visitors from the territories. Day laborers, ambulance drivers and freedom fighters were forbidden. If the wall ran in the middle of the street separating an Arab family, they had to walk a kilometer to a check point. After they passed security, they had to hike another kilometer to reach the relative's home just across the barrier.

Then, there was always the danger of losing your papers or answering the security guard's questions in an evasive or contradicting way. This could earn a night's stay in the lock-up adjacent to the check point. If the Police had a file on you, it could lead to an indefinite prison stay sometimes including investigation under torture.

This is an insult and a gross violation of human rights.

Moreover, the wall is 25 feet high reaching 40 in places. The Jew can pass a lifetime never seeing a Palestinian home or garden. If he avoids the center of the radio dial, he will never hear a word of Arabic. He thinks that humus, falafel and egg plant salad are Jewish dishes.

Ralph Ellison author of "The Invisible Man" could have written the following movie review.

"To say that Palestinians are absent in Waltz with Bashir, to say that it is a film that deals not with Palestinians but with Israelis who served in Lebanon, only barely begins to describe the violence that this film commits against Palestinians. There is nothing interesting or new in the depiction of Palestinians -- they have no names, they don't speak, they are anonymous. But they are not simply faceless victims. Instead, the victims in the story that Waltz with Bashir tells are Israeli soldiers. Their anguish, their questioning, their confusion, their pain -- it is this that is intended to pull us. The rotoscope animation is beautifully done, the facial expressions so engaging, subtle and torn, we find ourselves grimacing and gasping at the trials and tribulations of the young Israeli soldiers and their older agonizing selves. We don't see Palestinian facial expressions; only a lingering on dead, anonymous faces. So while Palestinians are never fully human, Israelis are, and indeed are humanized through the course of the film."

Naira Antoun, The Electronic Intifada, 19 February 2009

Psychic Pain Is a Symptom of Evil and not Evil Itself

Currently, the Arab World ignores the Palestinians fit only for lip service. Blockaded, they are cut off from the world. Israelis and Hamas won't sit at the same table.

The sides have endured 61 years of acrimony and strife. Do they have anything left to say?

Sanity Through Indifference

A graduate student 1967 through 1969, I saw my country go mad. Yet, I was the only one in my graduate school seminars who had shot a rifle in anger and who had made out an Income Tax Form.

Years later I met a former professor who looked back on those years as the best of his life. After Vietnam, he felt the loss of excitement, riots and burning buildings. My parents recalled the glories of summer, 1941. Rather than dread of the coming war, they danced to Artie Shaw's "Summit Ridge Drive" and Benny Goodman's 'Memories of You." People gathered to hear lectures and to listen to favorite radio shows. They spoke with interest and passion. They lived!

After I made Aliyah in 1983, I wondered how people could keep their sanity after 35 years of continuous war. Five months later I had enough Hebrew to understand Yom Shoah [Holocaust Day] 24 hours of movies, dramas and pictorials relating to that terrible era. The mental torment became physical pain, but I remained glued to the TV. I came to realize that many of us had gone at least a little bit mad. It's like being a doctor who has become de-sensitized to patient suffering and death. At some point every combat soldier thinks he will come home in a box. He accepts death and that is the moment he begins to live.

A human being only begins to live when he comes to grips with the inevitability of death. Then, he is free to go forward in life.

We don't hate the Palestinians. Essentially, we are indifferent to them. Our way of dealing with 61 years of war is to ignore the experience and the people who fought us.

Anymore, Israel doesn't stop dead for Holocaust Day. We are moving on to a new phase.

If the Palestinians insist on reliving the perpetual war years mired in blood and hatred, let them. We are neither our brother's keeper nor his slave. We have more important things to do.

I published an Electronic Intifada review of "Waltz with Bashir" that criticizes the director's ignoring the Palestinian characters. Naira Antoun is upset that he has nothing to do with them.

She will get used to it.

FILM REVIEW: "WALTZ WITH BASHIR"
By Naira Antoun, The Electronic Intifada, 19 February 2009

To say that Palestinians are absent in Waltz with Bashir,
to say that it is a film that deals not with Palestinians
but with Israelis who served in Lebanon, only barely
begins to describe the violence that this film commits
against Palestinians. There is nothing interesting or new
in the depiction of Palestinians -- they have no names,
they don't speak, they are anonymous. But they are not
simply faceless victims. Instead, the victims in the story
that Waltz with Bashir tells are Israeli soldiers. Naira
Antoun reviews the film for The Electronic Intifada.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10322.shtml

Palestinians Have Ceased to Exist for Israelis

Ms Naira Antoun has a right to be outraged. The Jews are not fit to be occupiers. Ehud Barak has often said, if he were a Palestinian he would have become a terrorist. Indeed, in the 1940's many Jews not serving in the British Eighth Army were terrorists.

The 1967 War marked a big change. The Israelis should have dropped the newly conquered territories like a hot rock. Those who did want to dump the territories needed at least a recognition of Israeli's right to exist. When this was not forthcoming

If I am not for Myself, Who am I For?

If I am not for Myself

It’s okay to be anti-Zionist and Jewish. But will it ever really catch on, asks Ben du Preez, FirstPost.co.uk

In a week in which the writer Mike Marqusee released his much anticipated memoir, If I am Not for Myself, in time for the 60th anniversary, a spate of media commentary has brought Jewish anti-Zionism out of the shadows and onto blogs, feature articles and the radio.

Marqusee's assertion that it is 'okay' to be Jewish and anti-Zionist in 2008 has been liberating: there have been calls for the formation of an officially recognised mouthpiece to represent this section of Anglo-Jewry, and fight the atrocities being carried out in Palestine in their name.

Sadly, history suggests that such an organisation is doomed to fail. On February 5, 2007, the IJV (Independent Jewish Voices), a group of 150 prominent British Jews, including the likes of Harold Pinter and Eric Hobsbawm, announced their arrival in Jewish discourse with a much-trumpeted media inauguration.

Keen to refute "the widespread misconception that British Jews speak with one voice", they sought to create a media impression of Jewish dissidence and Jewish liberal pluralism. As a political entity they folded soon after; their latest online newsletter is embarrassingly dated February 19, 2007.

It is easy to see why such a group failed. Journalist Seth Freedman has criticised the IJV's approach as "vague and indistinct" while in November 2007 one of its leading members, Rabbi David Goldberg, resigned from the group, citing its "lack of direction".

Adding to the problem is the fact that anti-Zionism - attacking a Jewish state whose crimes are committed in the name of the Jewish people - forces the Jewish anti-Zionist to ask, 'What is Judaism? What is Jewishness?' The answers are very different depending on whether people see themselves as cultural Jews, biological Jews, religious Jews or ethnical Jews. There is, and will be, no homogenous response.

Zionism in comparison has been gloriously consistent. Like a bullet from a gun, it has one straight and dynamic aim. It is just unfortunate that in the process it has hit quite a few others in the leg.