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Friday, October 29, 2010

Synagogues in Chicago targeted

@Daroff: Obama: Terror explosives found, bound for US, addressed to #Jewish organizations http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/29/AR2010102903088.html via @washingtonpost


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Yemen packages destined for synagogues in Chicago

CNN: In the last 24 hours, security officials received a tip from an unnamed ally that packages coming from Yemen were destined for synagogues in Chicago, Illinois, according to information given to CNN contributor Fran Townsend.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Emerson: There is a difference between Islam and Islamism

 ‎"There is a difference between Islam and Islamism -- between people's practice of a faith and attempts to mix that faith with a radical political agenda." -- Steven Emerson, expert on terrorism.

 I support that important distinction. There are different interpretations of Islam. Even conservative, fundamental interpretations of Islam do not have to support Islamism and its often violent extremism. Mark Finkelstein

Monday, October 25, 2010

Feith: Can Israel be Jewish and democratic?

Can Israel Be Jewish and Democratic?

Many nations have laws and practices that recognize their majority group's history, language or religion while also protecting the rights of minorities.

By DOUGLAS J. FEITH , Wall Street Journal,  10/25/2010

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently asked Palestinian peace negotiators to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state. Some critics have called this move cynical, because Palestinian leaders are unlikely to offer such an acknowledgment. But others oppose it for a more basic reason: They claim it is antidemocratic.

Israel, so the argument goes, affronts its non-Jewish citizens by identifying itself as a Jewish state and by using traditional religious emblems as official national symbols—for example, the Star of David on its flag.

Along the same lines, various Israeli intellectuals have proposed dropping "Hatikvah" (The Hope) as their country's national anthem, because it refers to the Jewish soul's millenial yearnings for a return to Zion. A few have urged repeal of Israel's longstanding law of return, which gives Jews from any country a right to immigrate and become citizens.

Some Israeli Arabs have advocated that Israel should become a state identified with no particular ethnic or religious group but rather a state of all of its individual citizens. Israelis commonly view this liberal ideal with suspicion, for it has no relation whatever to the political practices of any countries in the Middle East. Also, Azmi Bishara, the principal Israeli Arab proponent of "a state of all of its citizens" and a former member of parliament, outraged many Israelis by supporting Hezbollah against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war.

Israeli law respects the voting, property, religious and other rights of its Arab citizens (most of them Muslims) who constitute some 20% of the population. Nevertheless, the ongoing conflict over Palestine has created bitterness between many of them and their fellow Jewish citizens. Many Israeli Jews resent what they see as disloyalty on the part of Israeli Arabs. Many of the latter resent what they see as their second-class status.

But the larger question of Israel's identity as a Jewish state does not hinge on the particulars of its Arab citizens' current status. Rather, it is whether democratic principles are necessarily violated when Israel asserts a Jewish identity based on the ethnic and religious heritage of its majority group. That is a matter of interest to everyone who thinks seriously about self-government.

Israel is by no means unique among democracies in considering itself the embodiment of the national existence of a specific people. In fact, most democracies see themselves that way. Most have laws and practices that specially recognize a particular people's history, language, culture, religion and group symbols, even though they also have minorities from other groups.

The United States is unusual in this regard. It is among the most liberal of democracies, in the sense that it is committed to the principle that laws should, in general, ignore group identities (ethnic, religious or regional) and treat citizens equally as individuals. Canada, Australia and New Zealand—likewise lands of new settlement—are among the other countries on this liberal end of the democratic spectrum.

The democracies of Europe and East Asia and those in the former republics of the Soviet Union, meanwhile, tend to cluster on the ethnic side of the spectrum. Numerous laws and institutions in those nations favor a country's principal ethnic group but are nevertheless accepted as compatible with democratic principles. Christian crosses adorn the flags of Switzerland, Sweden, Greece and Finland, among other model democracies, and the United Kingdom's flag boasts two kinds of crosses.

Several of these democracies have monarchs—and in the U.K., Norway and Denmark, the monarchs head national churches. France famously protects the integrity of the French language and the interests of French speakers, as do pro-French forces in Canada.

Ireland has a law that allows applicants of "Irish descent or Irish associations" to be exempted from ordinary naturalization rules. Poland, Croatia and Japan have similar laws of return favoring members of their own respective ethnic majorities. Many other examples exist.

Israel was founded as a national home for the Jews, recognized as a nationality and not just a religious group. After Allied forces conquered Palestine from the Ottomans in World War I, Britain, France, Italy and other leading powers of the day supported the idea that the Jewish people, long shamefully abused as exiles throughout the diaspora, should be offered the opportunity to reconstitute a Jewish-majority state in their ancient homeland of Palestine.

Those powers planned that the Arabs, whose nationalist leaders from across the Middle East insisted that they were a single, indivisible people, would exercise national self-determination over time in Syria, Lebanon, Mesopotamia (now Iraq), Arabia and elsewhere. Britain soon decided to put the 78% of Palestine east of the Jordan River under exclusive Arab administration, barring Jewish settlement there.

The British government's wartime Balfour Declaration in favor of a Jewish national home in Palestine—incorporated verbatim in the Palestine Mandate, which received League of Nations confirmation in 1922—made a crucial distinction between the collective rights of the Jewish people in Palestine and the individual civil and religious rights of the country's non-Jewish residents. The point was that all such rights, collective and individual, should be honored.

After World War I, numerous ethnic groups achieved statehood. It was not considered antidemocratic that the Hungarians or Poles, for example, should establish nations to embody and sustain their particular cultures.

All democratic countries have minority populations. Such countries do not believe that they have to shed their national ethnic identities in order to respect the civil, property and other basic human rights of their minority citizens. The distinction between majority collective rights to a national home and the individual rights of all citizens remains important in Israel and in all ethnically-based democracies.

So democracies vary in the degree to which their laws take account of ethnicity. Their common practices provide an answer to our question: It is not antidemocratic for Israel to protect its status as a Jewish state in ways similar to those used by the French, Swiss, British, Germans, Italians, Lithuanians, Japanese and others to protect the status of their countries as national homelands.

Mr. Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, served as under secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005. He is the author of "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" (Harper 2008).

 

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Pearl on future of American Judaisim

On the future of American #Judaism, Judea Pearl tells @MomentMagazine symposium: "#Israel is not the problem, it is the solution"
(Tweeted by @Daroff)

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Abu Toameh: Radicals threatening to kill moderates who seek to make peace with Israel


" The major obstacle to peace is Iran and radical Muslims who want to destroy Israel, and not make peace with it. They are the biggest threat to peace now because they are also threatening to kill any moderate Arab or Muslim who seeks to make peace with Israel." --Khaled Abu Toameh, 10/22/10

source:
http://www.hudson-ny.org/1622/settlements-obstacle-to-peace

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Israel marks 15th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination

 

Monday, October 18, 2010

Netanyahu wants loyalty oath bill to include Jews as well




Israeli PM Netanyahu instructs Justice Minister to draft a bill extending the loyalty oath, in which non-Jews are required to pledge allegiance to 'the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,' to Jewish immigrants as well.

Source:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/netanyahu-wants-loyalty-oath-bill-to-include-jews-as-well-1.319864

AJC Poll: 95% of American Jews say peace with the Palestinians requires recognition of Israel as a Jewish state

The American Jewish Committee's Fall survey, released October 12, 2010 reports that
 
"American Jews remain nearly unanimous – 95 percent – in supporting the proposal requiring the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in a final peace agreement. In March and in 2009, the figure was 94 percent. "
 
 

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Jeff_Jacoby: recognize Israel as the Jewish state and democracy

@Jeff_Jacoby: Israel's Jewishness could hardly be more self-evident. But to Israel's enemies, Jewish sovereignty is intolerable. http://bit.ly/ag9Ce8


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Thursday, October 14, 2010

Oren: Why the Palestinians have to recognize Israel as the Jewish state

"The core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the refusal to recognize Jews as a people, indigenous to the region and endowed with the right to self-government." -- Israel's Ambassador to the U.S.,  Michael Oren
 
excerpts:

Affirmation of Israel’s Jewishness, however, is the very foundation of peace, its DNA. Just as Israel recognizes the existence of a Palestinian people with an inalienable right to self-determination in its homeland, so, too, must the Palestinians accede to the Jewish people’s 3,000-year connection to our homeland and our right to sovereignty there. This mutual acceptance is essential if both peoples are to live side by side in two states in genuine and lasting peace.

 Reconciling with the Jewish state means that the two-state solution is not a two-stage solution leading, as many Palestinians hope, to Israel’s dissolution.

Read the entire article at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/opinion/14oren.html?_r=1

Monday, October 11, 2010

Netanyahu: Willing to swap freeze for recognition

The Knesset opened its winter session on Monday, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that he would be willing to extend a construction freeze in West Bank settlements if the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

 

"Unfortunately up until now the Palestinians have not responded to this call and the United States are searching for different ways to continue the talks," he said.

 

"I made this message clear in quiet ways last month, and I am saying it here, now, in public: If the Palestinian leadership will say unequivocally to its people that it recognizes Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, I will be willing to gather my government and ask for another suspension of construction for a limited time," Netanyahu said.

 

"The US is making various suggestions and we are considering them seriously in relation to Israel's interests, first and foremost security and the promise of continued existence," Netanyahu said.

 

"The refusal to recognize the rights of the Jewish people and its historic connection to the place is the root of the conflict and without solving this, the conflict will never end. Regarding security, any peace agreement between ourselves and the Palestinians must be based on rigid security arrangements."

 

Immediately after the prime minister's speech, the Palestinian Authority issued a statement rejecting his demand. Nabil Abu Rdainah, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said a return to peace talks required a freeze on settlement building. "The issue of the Jewishness of the state has nothing to do with the matter," he told Reuters.   

 

TIP: Israeli Arabs' Rights Enshrined in Law as Israel Amends "Pledge of Allegiance"

From The Israel Project  www.theisraelproject.org

 

Israeli Arabs’ Rights Enshrined in Law as Israel Amends
“Pledge of Allegiance”

  • Israeli Arabs enjoy same rights as Israeli citizens
  • Ministers to consider further amendments
  • Move may pave way to Israel’s continuation of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks

JERUSALEM, Oct. 11, 2010 – Following a heated debate at their weekly cabinet meeting on Oct. 10, Israel’s government ministers approved an amendment to the country’s Law of Citizenship that would require all new non-Jewish citizens pledge allegiance to a Jewish and democratic state.

It has been widely suggested in the Israeli media that in return for agreeing to push forward this change in the statute, the conservative “Israel Beiteinu” (Israel Our Home) party won’t vote against an extension of the moratorium on construction in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Many countries, including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have similar pledges required in their countries.

For the full article by The Israel Project, see:

 

Gordis: Palestinians must accept Israel as the state of the Jewish people and the settlements are a metaphor

To build or not to build – why it is the question
By DANIEL GORDIS      08/10/2010
The freeze is a metaphor for the legitimacy of the idea of this state as the home of the Jews.
Summarizing the stalemate in the Israeli- Palestinian talks, a CNN anchor reported earlier this week that as soon as the settlement building freeze ended, “Israel sent in bulldozers to renew the building.”

The claim is patently false, of course, for “Israel” did no such thing. Groups of people, most of them living in the settlements, did begin building again, as the law permitted them to. So why did CNN portray the story that way? Most reasonable people understand that any eventual peace settlement will involve the creation of a Palestinian state on some significant portion of the West Bank. Some Israelis are in favor, some are desperately opposed and others are pained by the prospective loss of that land but have resigned themselves to the fact that there will be no alternative.

So why are the Palestinians (in whose footsteps CNN is following) so focused on settlement building? After all, in the disengagement from Gaza, citizens were moved, homes and synagogues were bulldozed, entire towns and small cities were leveled. Regardless of what any of us thinks of what happened in the summer of 2005, the disengagement did at least prove that when Israeli governments decide to cede land, the presence of towns or citizens on that land is not an insurmountable impediment.

Why, therefore, does Mahmoud Abbas not simply say to himself, “I’ll make a deal, I’ll get a state and that land will be ours eventually, anyway.

So let the Israelis waste their time and money on roads and buildings in the West Bank. They’ll bulldoze them, or I’ll inherit them. Either way, I win.”

ABBAS’S WEAKNESS and his desire to avoid real compromise are only part of the picture. More important is the fact that he understands, infinitely better than do many Jews, that the fundamental impetus at the core of Israeli society is building. More than a country, the Jewish state is a project – of nation-building, of ingathering, of Jewish revitalization. Absent those, this enterprise has no point.

This is the state of the “watchtower and stockade,” those desperate attempts to build small outposts that were the beginnings of Jewish resettlement of the Land of Israel. This is the country of the defiant immigrants who braved their way past British soldiers patrolling the shores, seeking refuge when no other country would provide it.

Operation Flying Carpet, which saved the Jews of Yemen, and Operation Solomon, which whisked the Jews of Ethiopia out of a war zone and back to their homeland, were all part of this.

These historical moments sound like romantic evocations of the past, but they are not.

They are a reminder of what this country still is at its core. As I was in synagogue on Simhat Torah last week and listened as the verses of Ata Horeita Lada’at were assigned and sung aloud, I was reminded of this once again. The last five or six verses, each sung by a different person, were a perfect collage of who we are. There was an elderly sabra. The next person sang with a distinctly French accent, another was American, one was clearly Russian and one was from somewhere in North Africa.

I turned to my son, who was also listening to all this, and said to him, “Did you hear all those different accents? It’s the perfect reminder that at the end of the day, the ingathering of the exiles, is what this place is all about.”

In our national narrative, building towns and rebuilding a people are virtually synonymous.

Israelis are divided as to the wisdom of building in the settlements, of course. But those who “get it” understand that specific policies at this moment aside, building and rebuilding are the very oxygen of this society. End the ethos of rebuilding, and you have rendered this country devoid of its fundamental purpose.

Unlike many Jews, the Palestinians understand this perfectly. That is why Abbas has said, even recently and in no uncertain terms, that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

The fact that the Palestinian Charter declares that Palestine will be a Muslim state doesn’t bother him. For Abbas is motivated not by shame, but by strategy.

Deny Israel the right to call itself a Jewish state, and there’s no justification for the Law of Return.

Deny the Jewishness of this country, and there’s no morally justifiable basis for not admitting tens of thousands – or many more – Palestinian refugees from Lebanon, ultimately making Jews a minority here. Make Israel a Hebrew-speaking but ethnically neutral country, and you have eviscerated it. There would be no point to the state, no power to its narratives, no passion left to sustain those of us committed to (re)building it.

ABBAS’S INSISTENCE on the freeze, even in places like Gush Etzion, Ariel and other blocs which are clearly not going to be returned, is not about roads or houses, but is but the first shot across the bow. The freeze is a metaphor for the legitimacy of the idea of this as the home of the Jews. The issue, he knows, is not borders, or even security. Most of us know approximately how those will eventually be settled.

The real issue is whether the world will acknowledge, almost a century after the Balfour Declaration, that the Jews, like other peoples, have a right to a homeland. Sadly, on that issue, there is much less international consensus than there used to be. We are in much worse shape than we were a decade or two ago. And given the direction in which matters are moving, time is not on our side.

Abbas, the Palestinians and even CNN get all of this. The question that matters, however, is whether we do – and what we will do to ensure that Jews, and others across the world who might sympathize with us, come to understand what is truly at stake.

The writer is senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and the author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End (Wiley), which won a 2009 National Jewish Book Award. He blogs at http://danielgordis.org.
 
Source:
 
 
 

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Bard: Arab lobby's agenda driven by Saudi Arabia


"The powerful part of the Arab lobby isn’t so concerned about the Palestinian issue, they’re concerned about the welfare of the Saudis. And fights between the Israel lobby and the Saudi lobby are rare − there hasn’t been one since the 1981 arms sales fight. As for the domestic Arab lobby, even they are less pro-Palestinian than they are anti-Israel. Almost everything is anti-Israel. For example, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s resolutions mostly target Israel and ignore discrimination against Arabs by anyone other than Israel or the United States. They don’t support independence for Lebanon. They rarely criticize terrorism. And so they have very little credibility with Congress. It shouldn’t be surprising if they are also unsuccessful." -- Mitchell Bard

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/culture/books/q-a-a-conversation-with-mitchell-bard-1.317965

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Whose border with Israel?

Ahmadinejad comes to Lebanon to visit "Iran's border with Israel"... http://fb.me/JGebl7JR


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Thursday, October 7, 2010

Temple Brotherhood Political Forum, October 24

Political Forum at Temple B'nai Jeshurun
Sponsored by the Temple Brotherhood
 
Sunday, October 24, 2010
8:45 AM  - Breakfast
9:15 AM to Noon - Forum
 
Moderator:  Dennis Goldford, Professor of Politics at Drake University and Political Analyst KCCI-TV

An opportunity to hear directly from the following candidates...

 
  • Chet Culver
  • Brad Zaun
  • Roxanne Conlin
  • Leonard Boswell
Each candidate will give a brief speech followed by a question and answer session.

Please RSVP to the Temple by calling 274-4679 no later than Tuesday, October 19th.

The Brotherhood extended an invitation to both Terry Branstad and Chuck Grassley
to participate in the Forum.  However, Terry Branstad declined the invitation due to
a scheduling conflict and Chuck Grassley never responded.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Settlers replace burnt Qur'ans

Ha'aretz: Settlers replace Korans burnt in West Bank mosque http://bit.ly/b6GfRH #israel


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Friday, October 1, 2010

Rubin: Sermon may be the most important American Jewish statement of our era


Friday, October 1, 2010
A Turning Point? A Rabbi's Sermon May Be The Most Important American Jewish Statement of Our Era
By Barry Rubin

You don't have to be Jewish to read the sermon given by Rabbi Shalom Lewis to his congregation in Marietta, Georgia, for the first day of Rosh Hashanah. It is the best example of an earthquake that's been shaking the American Jewish community, a reconsideration of things taken for granted for a very long time indeed.

Here is the link:  http://primerct.blogspot.com/2010/09/ehr-kumt.html

Lewis speaks frankly about things many are thinking about hard, even if they don't speak of them publicly: Isn't radical Islamism, not resurgent fascism, the biggest threat to Jews today? Why has the left become the main repository of antisemitism and hatred of Israel? Is President Barack Obama really good for the Jews, and for America or the world in general? Is Political Correctness and Multiculturalist ideology a disaster, and not a normal continuation of historic liberal thinking?

It is hard to overstate the importance of this sermon. Lewis's words have gone viral throughout the Internet because they express what many are pondering. And even if they would never say so in public, or even admit it to themselves, this is a powerful force for a new paradigm.

In a real sense, it isn't just Jewish either. For all of those who have considered themselves liberal and Democratic are facing the same paradoxes.  My view is that the far left has achieved today what it tried and failed to do in the 1930s: to masquerade as normative liberalism. Real liberals must form a united front with centrists and moderate conservatives to defeat these threats from Islamism and the far left, just as the World War Two generation had to do so against fascism and its successor had to do against Communism.

Again, if you haven't yet read Lewis's sermon, go and do so. Then, give serious thought to the implications.

Source: http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2010/10/turning-point-rabbis-sermon-may-be-most.html