THE FURTHER CORRESPONDENCES OF MARC SUSSELMAN PART 15

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12 December 2023

MS said:

An article about Leonard Bernstein, the making of the movie Maestro, and his connection to Ann Arbor.

"https://ums.org/2023/12/07/maestro-at-michigan-remembering-leonard-bernstein-in-ann-arbor/"

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MS said:

The Texas Supreme Court is composed of 6 men, and 3 women. The Court ruled that Ms. Cox’s medical condition, which her doctor advised threatened her life and her ability to reproduce in the future, did not qualify as an exception under the Texas abortion law. What can one say of 3 women who do not support a woman’s right to choose? Do they qualify as self-hating women?

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MS said:

The article linked below, written by an Israeli-American, chronicles the complete history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, starting in 1920. It demonstrates, beyond dispute, that the Palestinians do not want peace with Israel, and have never wanted peace with Israel. It chronicles the persistent Jew-hatred of the Palestinians and rebuts the liberal sophistry which is being promulgated on Prof. Wolff’s blog by the liberal apologists for the Palestinians. I have included the article in its entirety below, and have highlighted key passages. People who do not want to know the truth, like wallerstein, Zimmerman, Eric, aaall, etc., will continue to turn a blind eye to the truth, but their anti-Israel bias will not change the truth.

"https://www.commentary.org/articles/sol-stern/century-of-palestinian-jew-hatred/"

It’s Not the ‘Occupation,’ Stupid

It’s a century of Palestinian Jew-hatred
by Sol Stern

On the morning of October 7, waves of Hamas death squads entered Israel for the sole purpose of murdering defenseless Jews. The leaders of the Islamist terrorist movement were so confident they were on the right side of history that they boasted about their atrocities, released graphic videos of butchered Jewish mothers and babies, and then promised to do it again. Unfortunately, they weren’t entirely wrong in their assessment of the likely world reaction. At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council two weeks after the massacre, Secretary General Antonio Guterres opined that the “attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Guterres also repeated the 56-year-old UN mantra that “the only realistic foundation for a true peace and stability [is] a two-state solution.” Too bad the secretary general didn’t identify the party to the conflict that is doctrinally opposed (through its founding charter) to any statehood at all for the Jewish people.

It means little that Guterres later tried to walk his comments back somewhat. The widely circulated statement by the head of the world body represented a previously unimaginable propaganda victory for Hamas and the other Palestinian terror groups. And since the “occupation” is not likely to end soon, it surely encourages more Nazi-style death squads.

Credit for Hamas’s achievement belongs as well to the international, pro-Palestinian united front that includes five members of the U.S. House of Representatives known as “the squad.” For the past several decades, this well-organized advocacy network has been arduously promoting the big lie that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, plus the absence of a “two-state solution,” leaves the Palestinians with no recourse other than continued armed resistance, including the killing of innocent civilians. That twin falsehood, now endorsed by the UN chief, was repeated over and over again at the massive pro-Hamas demonstrations in the Western democracies. It is also echoed in parts of the mainstream media.

What’s most astonishing (and depressing) about the durability of this particular libel is not merely that there are mountains of historical evidence debunking it, but that Palestinian leaders themselves have repeatedly acknowledged there is no connection at all between Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the war they have chosen to wage against the Jewish state. Palestinian terrorists were sent to slaughter Jews during the years when there was an occupation, and they murdered innocent Jews when there was no occupation at all.

In the century since the British army liberated the Palestinian people from four centuries of brutal Ottoman occupation, they have had three preeminent political leaders: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Yasser Arafat, and Mahmoud Abbas. At several points during their varied careers, each had to make a fateful choice for their people between two separate historical paths. The first path would have led to an end of foreign occupation (either British or Israeli) and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. But it would also have required the Palestinians to end their war against the Jews and give up the dream of exclusive sovereignty throughout the land. The second path was to persist in trying to eradicate Zionism or (later) the Jewish state, but at the price of continued occupation. On four separate occasions—in 1937, 1947, 2000, and 2008—those leaders chose the second path, meaning more killing of Jews and more occupation, and more misery for their own people.

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A foretaste of the ruin to come occurred in Jerusalem on April 4, 1920, during the traditional Muslim procession known as Nebi Musa. As a result of the British military victory in the recent Great War, Palestinian Arabs enjoyed significant political rights for the first time in their history. At that moment there was no Zionist occupation anywhere in the land. Nevertheless, Palestinian leaders were not inclined to use politics and public diplomacy to press for their goal of ending Jewish immigration. At the procession, Muslim notables harangued Arab mobs to storm into the Jewish Quarter in an orgy of killings, looting, and rape. The victims were mostly pious Jews who had lived in the Holy City for generations and cared not at all about political Zionism. Because the Palestinian Arabs didn’t yet have guns or bombs, the casualty figures were low by contemporary standards: Only six Jews were murdered, 200 injured, and two Jewish women raped.

One of the ring leaders of the Nebi Musa riots was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the younger brother of the mayor of Jerusalem. Another was Aref al-Aref, the 27-year-old editor of the Palestinian Arab journal Southern Syria. The politically active journalist rode through the gathering crowd on horseback, chanting, “Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs.”

It took the British authorities several days to restore order. Haj Amin al-Husseini and Aref al-Aref were tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison by a British military court, but they escaped the city. After this first of many Palestinian pogroms, the British government appointed Herbert Samuel, a British Jew with alleged Zionist sympathies, as high commissioner of the mandate’s civil administration.

One of Samuel’s first official acts was to pardon al-Husseini and appoint the 26-year-old Islamist agitator as the grand mufti of Jerusalem, charged with overseeing the city’s Muslim holy places. Samuel also rubber-stamped al-Husseini’s election as president of the Supreme Muslim Council. With those titles, the former Nebi Musa rioter became the most powerful political and religious leader among the Palestinian Arabs.

Commissioner Samuel’s strategy, taken from the British imperial playbook, was to contain anti-colonial resistance by doling out political patronage to rebellious leaders of the native population. In the case of the Palestinian Arabs, the approach was doomed to failure. Palestinian Jew-hatred was already deeply entrenched and infused with Islamist religious doctrines. It could not be contained by political concessions then, or for the next hundred years.

In 1929, al-Husseini used his seat of power to instigate new atrocities against the Jews—the Palestinian version of Kristallnacht. There was still no “Zionist occupation” of Arab land, but the mufti spread the rumor that the Jews were plotting to take over the Haram al-Sharif (the Dome of the Rock) above the Western Wall. His followers responded by again attacking the defenseless Jewish Quarter, this time killing more than 130 innocents. A few days later, an Arab mob turned the Orthodox Jewish community in Hebron into a killing field. Sixty-seven Jews were murdered, women were raped, and several men were castrated.

Yet again, the British authorities sought to constrain the violence by offering political gifts to the perpetrators. A white paper issued by the British government declared that Jewish immigration would be limited, based on the country’s “economic absorptive capacity.” The Palestinians and their maximum leader, al-Husseini, were not pacified.

Al-Husseini was soon elected chairman of the eight-member Arab Higher Committee (AHC), which became the ruling political body for the Palestinian Arabs for the next 15 years. The AHC then initiated a full-scale rebellion against the British occupation. This time, the Palestinians had enough guns and bombs to launch hit-and-run guerrilla attacks against the overstretched British military forces. The declared aim of the revolt was the ouster of the mandatory regime and the elimination of the Yishuv, the name given to the organized Zionist community in Palestine.

In the middle of the revolt, the British government offered the Palestinians the biggest political prize yet. A royal commission of inquiry chaired by Lord William Peel investigated the causes of the unrest and, in 1937, recommended the first-ever “two-state solution”—the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. The Arabs would receive 90 percent of the territory for their state with the Jews allocated a tiny strip along the Mediterranean coast. The AHC, with chairman al-Husseini weighing in from exile in Lebanon, immediately rejected the offer and demanded Arab rule over the entire land of Palestine. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Yishuv, provisionally accepted the plan.

The debate over the Peel Commission’s recommendations became moot when the AHC resumed the military revolt. British forces didn’t fully succeed in crushing the uprising until the eve of World War II in Europe. In the meantime, al-Husseini had moved on to Iraq, where he participated in the abortive pro-Nazi revolt against the country’s British-backed government. Al-Husseini then fled to Germany, where he was welcomed by the Führer and hailed as a partner in the struggle against world Jewry.

The mufti never felt so appreciated as he did during his years in Berlin. He was provided with a large house and staff and invited to meetings with Heinrich Himmler to discuss the war against the Jews. He had the honor of reviewing troops of the Wehrmacht and directly helped the German war machine by recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen SS.

As an experienced propagandist, the mufti was put to work overseeing Arabic-language broadcasts promoting the affinities between Nazi ideology and Islamic Jew-hatred. At a private meeting in November 1941, Hitler informed al-Husseini about the coming extermination of the European Jews. In the German archives there is a summary memo of that fateful meeting in which the Führer also tells the mufti that his next objective would be “the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.”

The reason that the mufti allied himself with Germany was not that Germany was the enemy of his enemy, i.e., the British occupiers. Beginning in the mid-1930s, he came under the influence of Nazi racial doctrines and created a Palestinian organization modeled after the Hitler youth. He also sent Palestinian delegations to the Nazi Nuremberg rallies. According to the widely respected German historians Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, if Rommel’s Afrikacorps had won the battle at El Alamein and then conquered Palestine, the Mufti would have gone along to supervise another Final Solution for the Jews of Palestine.

After the German surrender, the mufti was captured by French military forces and placed under “house arrest” in a villa outside Paris. The Yugoslav government requested his extradition to face trial for the war crimes he had committed in the Balkans. But al-Husseini was shielded from prosecution by high-level government officials in the U.S. and France determined to protect Western influence in the Arab world.

In June 1946, French security forces guarding the house where al-Husseini was detained conveniently left the door open and he “escaped” to Egypt. The mufti was granted asylum and received a rapturous reception. In Cairo, he was greeted as a conquering hero by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna. The mufti, al-Banna declared, “challenged an empire and fought Zionism with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle.”

Within months, al-Husseini was reinstated as chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, now officially recognized in international forums as representing the Palestinian Arabs. With Great Britain winding down the Palestine mandate, the AHC vehemently opposed any discussion of partition, and al-Husseini’s armed gangs threatened and intimidated Palestinians who thought otherwise. After the passage of the UN partition resolution in November 1947, al-Banna and al-Husseini combined forces and sent thousands of fighters into Palestine to begin the first full-scale war against the Yishuv with the intent of aborting the Jewish state. It was the second time during the mufti’s tenure that he chose to continue the war against the Jews rather than accept a plan that would free his people from foreign occupation and allow them to establish an independent state in most of the homeland.

During that period, the American left understood that the emerging Jewish state was threatened by enemies steeped in Nazi doctrines of eliminationist anti-Semitism.

Before the UN

The theme that the Palestinians were led by Nazi collaborators was also stressed in the dispatches written by the legendary leftist reporter I.F. Stone. In This Is Israel, Stone’s book about the 1948 War of Independence, he refers to the Jewish state as a “tiny bridgehead” of 650,000 surrounded by 30 million Arabs. He quotes the head of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Azzam, declaring, “This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”

Stone blamed al-Husseini and the Arab Higher Committee for creating the Palestinian refugee crisis. The Palestinian leaders reminded him of the fascists he had fought with his pen since the Spanish Civil War, and he ticked off the names of Nazi veterans leading Palestinian military units attacking Jewish settlements. “German Nazis, Polish reactionaries, Yugoslav Chetniks, and Bosnian Moslems flocked [into Palestine] for the war against the Jews,” Stone reported.

The Jewish state won its war of independence, but 90 percent of the Palestinian people came under foreign occupation. The Kingdom of Jordan annexed the West Bank, Egypt took control of Gaza, yet there were no anti-occupation protests by the local population. The new arrangement was particularly rewarding for Aref al-Aref, veteran of the 1920 Nebi Musa riots. He became mayor of Arab Jerusalem and loyally served the kingdom of Jordan for the duration. He also had time to write a history of the Palestinian struggle, titled The Nakba of Jerusalem and the Lost Paradise.

During the period of Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, there were few opportunities for Palestinians to fight the war against the Jews directly. Instead, the legend of the Nakba was used to depict the creation of the Jewish state as a “catastrophe” for the land’s native people. So much so that Israel had to be erased by any means necessary. During this brief interregnum, the Nakba myth allowed the Palestinians to continue the struggle through historical narrative.

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It is true that after winning the 1967 war, Israel took over the West Bank and the occupation continued for the next 56 years. (The occupation of Gaza was ended unilaterally by Israel 18 years ago.) It is equally true that Israeli governments of both the left and right worked assiduously to end the occupation and allow the Palestinians to create their own independent state. Israel’s left-wing labor government initiated the Oslo process in early 1993. By September of that year, it culminated with the famous handshake on the White House lawn between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

At the time, Arafat was stranded in Tunis in a very precarious position. His PLO cadres were expelled from Jordan in 1970, thrown out of Beirut by Israel’s army in 1982, and then again kicked out of Tripoli, Lebanon, by the Syrians. Arafat’s reputation was in tatters among the Arab governments because of his impetuous decision to support Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Yet the Rabin government was so determined to end the occupation and achieve a two-state solution that it threw Yasser Arafat a lifeline and made him a serious negotiating partner. According to their signed agreement, Arafat would be brought back to the West Bank to preside over a fledgling Palestinian government. After a five-year interim period, the parties would negotiate a final-status arrangement that contemplated an independent Palestinian state living in peace with Israel.

In the spring of 1998, Arafat and his top lieutenants in the Palestinian Authority (PA) began conferring about the final-status negotiations due to begin shortly. It was at this point that Arafat announced the first commemoration of Nakba Day. To avoid delivering on the promises he had made five years earlier, Arafat chose to weaponize the Palestinian Nakba narrative into a declaration of permanent war against the Jewish state. The key element of his May 15 Nakba Day speech was the claim of 5 million Palestinian refugees who had a sacred “right of return” to their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and dozens of formerly Arab towns and villages in Israel. From his Ramallah headquarters, the PA president read out the marching orders for the day’s violent demonstrations over Palestinian radio stations and public loudspeakers:

The Nakba has thrown us out of our homes and dispersed us around the globe. Historians may search, but they will not find any nation subjugated to as much torture as ours. We are not asking for a lot. We are not asking for the moon. We are asking to close the chapter of Nakba once and for all, for the refugees to return and to build an independent Palestinian state on our land, our land, our land, just like other peoples. By “our land” Arafat included Israel, thus unilaterally ending the Oslo process.

At the time, only one exceptional Palestinian leader knew exactly what Arafat intended and was willing to say so. It was Sari Nusseibeh, the PA’s representative in Jerusalem. In his memoir, Once Upon a Country, Nusseibeh describes a meeting with Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas on the issue of the refugees’ right of return. He recounts the following exchange with Abbas:

Nusseibeh: You have to level with us. What is it you want, a state or the right of return? Abbas: Why do you say that? What do you mean by either/or? Nusseibeh: That’s what it boils down to. Either you want an independent state or a policy aimed at returning all the refugees to Israel. You can’t have it both ways.

The “right of return” for 5 million (now 7 million) alleged refugees was a deal-breaker not only for Israel, but also for the Clinton administration that brokered the Oslo Accords. Nevertheless, Arafat was dragooned by President Clinton to go to Camp David in 2000 for the final-status negotiations. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. The PA president stormed out of the meeting after turning down a generous offer for an independent state. Mark the year 2000, then, as the third occasion that a Palestinian leader chose to continue the war against the Jews, even if that also meant continuation of the occupation.

Yet another round of negotiations that might have ended the occupation took place eight years later, this time directly between Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and PA President Mahmoud Abbas. The two leaders held 35 one-on-one meetings in Jerusalem over a span of seven months. At the last session, on September 16, 2008, Olmert offered Abbas an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. He shared with Abbas a proposed map of the borders of the two states that, through territorial swaps, would give the Palestinians almost 100 percent of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza that the Arabs had held before the 1967 war.

Abbas took the map. He said he would consider the offer and return in a few days with his answer. But he never came back, and the negotiations abruptly ended. It was the fourth time in 70 years that the recognized political leader of the Palestinians made the choice to continue the war against the Jews, which also meant extending the Israeli occupation.

In a scoop, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz published the map that Olmert gave to Abbas. The PA president should have been embarrassed by the map’s release, since it made clear that he had missed the best chance in 56 years to end the Israeli occupation. Instead, Abbas claimed his hands were tied over the refugee issue because the Palestinian masses would settle for nothing less than the right of return.

The Olmert map remains an indispensable historical document, the most graphic proof yet that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not about the occupation. It should be displayed on posters and banners and waved in front of all UN officials and pro-Palestinian demonstrators who continue to claim, against all the evidence, that Hamas and its allied Islamic terrorist networks are merely resisting oppression.

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Like other days of infamy and horror, including December 7, 1941 and 9/11, October 7 should be remembered as a moment of illumination and clarity. Eighteen years after Israel unilaterally evacuated the Gaza Strip, Hamas sent its killing squads across the border to fight what the group believes is an “occupation.” For Hamas, though, the goal is to end the 75-year-old Zionist occupation of Tel Aviv and every other city and settlement in Israel today. Or, to put it more directly, the Jewish state is still fighting its war of independence.

Even the allegedly more moderate Palestinian Authority declares that the 1948 war is still ongoing every Nakba Day when it sends tens of thousands of violent demonstrators to the streets, chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The very same slogan is now also routinely chanted at college campuses and public squares all over the Unites States.

The mass-murder events of October 7 have understandably evoked memories of the Holocaust. In a phone call with President Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Hamas committed acts “as in Babyn Yar where Jews where machine-gunned in killing pits.” Although morally correct, the comparison is not quite precise enough. Babyn Yar occurred a thousand miles away from the Middle East; Haj Amin al-Hussein and Hassan al-Banna worked for a Final Solution for the Jews of Palestine.

It’s more appropriate now for Israelis to focus on the strictly local political and religious antecedents of the October 7 massacres. The Hamas shahids of today are the spiritual children of al-Husseini and al-Banna, and of the alliance between Islamic Jew-hatred and Nazi eliminationist anti-Semitism.

Hamas was created in 1987 as the Palestinian branch of the Egyptian Brotherhood. Its founding charter speaks of a sharia state similar to the Caliphate. Its religious slogan is “Islam is the solution.” But it is the legacy of al-Husseini and his embrace of Nazi Jew-hatred that drives Hamas’s political and military policies.

How dispiriting it is, then, to recall the many occasions over the past hundred years on which otherwise well-meaning British and Israeli officials fell into the trap of believing that this Islamist/Nazi ideological movement could be bribed into relative normalcy with political gifts and accommodations. Even the allegedly hardline Netanyahu governments of the past 15 years willfully ignored the lessons of history and complacently believed that Hamas had been deterred by bundles of cash.

The slogan “never again” has historically referred to the catastrophe in Europe where defenseless Jews were led to the slaughter. It must now take on a second meaning in the Jewish homeland. Self-defense is not the issue there. The people, the ordinary citizens of Israel, have shown over and over again that they can come together as one, rise to the occasion and defend their communities. It is rather that Israel’s governments and politicians must now pledge, “Never again.” Meaning, never again will we be lulled into complacency or forget the brutal lesson of the past 100 years. When avowed enemies steeped in Nazi and Islamic Jew-hatred announce they want to kill us, we should take them seriously and prepare to kill them first. Finally, never again will we believe that such enemies can be bribed into decent human behavior.

Sol Stern, an American and Israeli citizen, is the author of A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred (Encounter Broadside).

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13 December 2023

MS said:

I had heard of I.F. Stone, the journalist referred to the article I quoted from in my prior email, “It’s Not the Occupation, Stupid,” but did not know much about him. So I checked out his biography on Wikipedia and learned the following interesting tidbits.

He founded a newspaper while a student in high school. He dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied philosophy. He changed his name, Isidore Feinstein Stone, on the advice of a colleague, to conceal his Jewish ethnicity. He stated later in life that he regretted the decision. During the 1930s, he was a member of the American Communist Party, but turned against the Party after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, about which he referred to Stalin as “the Moscow Machiavelli who suddenly found peace as divisible as the Polish plains and marshes.” His journalistic integrity was characterized by thoroughly studying original source materials, e.g., the Congressional Record, before he reached and published his opinions. He was black-listed during the McCarthy Red scare. As a consequence, he started his own publication, the I.F. Stone Weekly, in which he championed left-wing causes. He was a devout Zionist, writing:

“They have been kicked around as Jews, and now they want to live as Jews. Over and over I heard it said: 'We want to build a Jewish country ... We are tired of putting our sweat and blood into places where we are not welcome. ... ' These Jews want the right to live as a people, to build as a people, to make their contribution to the world as a people. Are their national aspirations any less worthy of respect than those of any other oppressed people?”

His brother-in-law was the prominent civil rights attorney Leonard Boudin, who defended Daniel Ellsberg during his prosecution related to the release of the Pentagon Papers. Boudin also represented the anti-Vietnam war activists Julian Bond, William Sloane Coffin, and Philip Berrigan. He was the uncle of Kathy Boudin, the daughter of Leonard Boudin, who was prosecuted for crimes she committed as a member of the Weathermen, and who became a controversial adjunct professor in the Sociology department at Columbia University after her release from prison. She was the inspiration for the main character in Philip Roth’s novel, “American Pastoral.”

After he retired as publisher of the I.F. Stone Weekly, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in classical languages. He learned ancient Greek and wrote the highly regarded book, “The Trial of Socrates,” in which he claimed that Socrates wanted to be sentenced to death in order to shame Athenian democracy, which he despised.

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MS said:

I have a question for the philosophers who comment on Prof. Wolff’s blog, including Prof. Wolff: What would Immanuel Kant say regarding the morality or immorality of Israel’s actions in Gaza? Would the categorical imperative, according to which the greatest sin is to engage in conduct which, if universalized, would conflict with rationality, and which thereby condemns as the primary sin the failure to keep one’s promises, condemn Israel’s conduct, or Hamas’s? Between the two, which can be accused of breaking more promises, of telling more lies? As between the two, which does Zimmerman’s meta-ethics tell us is the more moral or immoral? And if the only metric of morality is which side one chooses to be on, how does one’s decision to side with the Israelis vs. the Palestinians, or vice versa, demonstrate that it is the correct “moral” decision?

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MS said:

"https://jewishinsider.com/2023/12/antisemitism-cornell-law-school-course-menachem-rosensaft/"

As universities struggle to address antisemitism, Cornell teaches how to fight it in the courts

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15 December 2023

MS said:

More specious sophistry from Eric, ever the apologist for the Palestinians. He cites an interview with Rashid Khalidi, who states, “Hamas joined a coalition government that was open to negotiations. Why did they join? Why did they propose a 100-year truce? If they wanted to kill Jews, how could they kill them in a 100-year truce?” Mr. Khalidi does not elaborate on what the terms of the proposed truce were. The terms of the truce were as follows (see Israel Rejected Peace with Hamas on Five Occasions, "https://inkstickmedia.com/israel-rejected-peace-with-hamas-on-five-occasions/ ): “If Israel wanted peace, it had to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, release Palestinian detainees, restore Palestinian rights, and allow Palestinians to name their own representatives. Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, similarly agreed to negotiate with Israel if it first acknowledged the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and the right of return to their land.” (Emphasis added.) Hamas knew that the right of return was an unacceptable condition for Israel, which would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. This has always been the nonnegotiable demand which has scuttled every effort which Israel has made to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Yet Mr. Khalidi, and Eric, stealthily present this “truce” offer as evidence of Israel’s duplicity. It is evidence, rather, of Mr. Khalidi’s and Eric’s duplicity.

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16 December 2023

MS said:

The link below is to a video which shows how settlers are harassing and threatening Palestinians in the West Bank. It is disgraceful, and these so-called religious settlers are a disgrace to Judaism. The Netanyahu government which is encouraging and facilitating this abuse has got to go once the situation in Gaza is under control. Shame on Netanyahu and his fascist government.

"https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/12/08/west-bank-hebron-settlers-idf-elbagir-pkg-intl-ldn-vpx.cnn"

On the question regarding the death of the three Israeli hostages, on the other hand, Eric continues to spew his nonsense that this demonstrates that the IDF is deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians. How was it, however, that these hostages were out in the open in civilian clothes to begin with? This was a deliberate tactic by Hamas to expose the hostages to danger, so that they could use it for propaganda, propaganda that Eric is all too willing to assist them with.

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MS said:

I just want to offer a comment regarding the absurdity, and unconstitutionality, of the decision by the Texas Supreme Court staying the lower court order allowing Ms. Cox to obtain an abortion. The issue regarding the right to obtain an abortion centers on the use of the word “person” in the 14th Amendment, which prohibits government from depriving a person of life. Anti-abortionists maintain that a fetus is a person, and therefore the government’s allowing a woman to obtain an abortion is depriving the fetus – a person – of life, in violation of the 14th Amendment. However, there is no consensus in the medical community as to when a fetus actually qualifies as a “person.” So the abortion debate reduces to a tension between the rights of the mother, who definitely does qualify as a person, and the rights of a fetus, which may or may not qualify as a person, depending on the stage of its development. There is no question that Ms. Cox qualified as a person, and was entitled to protection under the 14th Amendment. The fetus which Ms. Cox was carrying was diagnosed as suffering from trisomy 18, aka Edwards syndrome, which is due to an extra copy of chromosome 18 in one or more of the fetus’s cells. There are varying degrees of trisomy 18, depending on the number of cells which have the triplicate chromosome. But no matter how many cells have the triplicate chromosome, the fetus will be born with severe physical and cognitive defects, and will likely not live past the first month of birth. Carrying the fetus to term could have endangered Ms. Cox’s life, and even if she survived, could also prevent her from bearing children in the future. So the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the rights of Ms. Cox’s fetus, which was destined, if it survived birth at all, to be born with severe physical and neurological defects which, for as long as it lived, would condemn it to a life of suffering for as long as it lived, and would likely die within a month, surpassed Ms. Cox’s rights as a person under the 14th Amendment. This absurd decision violated Ms. Cox’s rights under the 14th Amendment.

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MS said:

Oh Lord. The NYT is reporting that the three hostages who were shot by the IDF were carrying white flags. If this turns out to be true, the IDF soldiers who killed them should be court-martialed, convicted and imprisoned.

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MS said:

“The only solution is an immediate and permanent ceasefire and real peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Israel has tried this multiple times, without success. Unless and until the Palestinians relinquish their demand that a condition for peace is the right of return for all of the so-called refugees, there can be no peace settlement. What makes you think that post the Hamas October 7th slaughter anything can be different?

And why do I call them “so called” refugees? For two reasons. In no other combat situation has the children and grand-children of original refugees also been regarded as refugees. The children and grand-children of the survivors of the Nazi death camps who were refugees after the end of WWII are not regarded as also refugees. Second, I was listening to a report on NPR the other night, which reported that several hundred thousand Palestinians who emigrated from Gaza to Jordan in past years have not been given citizenship by the Jordan government. The Jordan government refuses to do so because if they do, the Palestinians will no longer be regarded as refugees, which will in turn weaken the Palestinians’ demand for a right of return. Egypt has taken the same position regarding Palestinians admitted into Egypt from Gaza. Why should Israel give citizenship to Palestinian “refugees” when Jordan and Egypt refuse to do so?

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MS said:

The reports keep getting worse. It appears that the three Israeli hostages were not only waving white flags, but they were also crying Help in Hebrew. The IDF soldiers apparently thought this was a subterfuge and intended as a trap. They should, as I said, be court-martialed and imprisoned for their knee-jerk response. Nonetheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that the cause of all this was Hamas’s unlawful kidnapping of civilians to begin with, which constitutes a mitigating consideration for how the IDF soldiers behaved.

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MS said:

Prof. Wolff has offered what he believes should have been Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre which occurred on October 7, the implication being that Israel’s response by bombing Gaza and then invading it was ill-advised, counter-productive and unnecessarily brutal. Although he will never read this, I wish to respond to his simplistic and unrealistic recommendations.

The first point which Wolff makes is that the murder of the 1,400 Israelis and foreign nationals had no prospect of destroying Israel itself, just as the 9/11 attack did not threaten the survival of the U.S. The comparison is specious. First, the 9/11 attack was committed by citizens of Saudi Arabia, operating out of Afghanistan, not by terrorists living next door to the U.S. A better comparison would be a 9/11 type of attack by Mexican cartels on Texas, with the threat of repeated similar attacks in the future. The murder of the 1,400 Israelis represented .0001495 of the total Israeli population. The population of Texas is 19,530,000; a comparable death toll would be 4,415 Texans. It is preposterous to propose that if an attack by Mexican cartels on Texas killed 4,415 Texans, that the U.S. would not respond with an invasion of Mexico, dedicated to annihilating the cartels. In point of fact, since 9/11 was engineered by Al Queda operating out of Afghanistan, the U.S. proceeded to invade Afghanistan with the objective of destroying Al Queda. This was a justifiable response to the terror attack, even though the culprit existed overseas, not next door, as in the case of Hamas.

Wolff proposes that a better response would have been to exchange the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel for the 236 hostages unlawfully kidnapped by Hamas. The exchange ratio which has already occurred has been about 5 to 1, so Israel would have to release at least 1,200 prisoners in order to free the 236 hostages, assuming that Hamas would even have agreed to such an exchange. Although it has been claimed that some Palestinians have been jailed without a charge or trial, most Israeli prisoners have been charged and tried by a military court. Among the 1,200 released prisoners would undoubtedly be many actual terrorists, many of whom engaged in terrorist bombings in Israel. Releasing them to rejoin the terrorist ranks would both have reinforced the Palestinian anti-Israel effort and encouraged further hostage taking.

After the hostages were returned – which only would occur if Israel released convicted terrorists to rejoin Hamas’ war with Israel - Wolff claims that the next step would be to launch constant attacks on Hamas leaders in Gaza . He does not explain how Israel could have done it, what with Hamas’s use of tunnels, schools and hospitals within which to hide, without launching the aerial bombardment in order to flush them out that Israel has already engaged in, which he criticizes.

Finally, he states that Israel could have withdrawn some of the settlements in the West Bank and “created the genuine possibility of a real Palestinian state.” He ignores the fact that Israel has attempted multiple times over the last 75 years – even before the establishment and expansion of the settlements – to reach a peace accord with the Palestinians, which has been scuttled at every turn by the Palestinians’ demand for the right of return, which would end Israel being a Jewish majority state. There has been no sign that the Palestinians under Abbas have relinquished that demand.

It is easy enough to hypothesize all sorts of alternatives which Israel should have taken which would have seemed more palatable. Making them work in real life is far more challenging.

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17 December 2023

MS said:

DDA states: “Israel has deliberately painted itself into this impossible corner, but miscalculated what its desired steady state would look like. So now it's committed to the ethnic cleansing wing.”

It is ignorance such as this which compels me to resort to ad hominems – he is an asshole.

It was not the Jews who rejected the 1947 UN partition plan to divide Palestine into two states. Had the Arabs accepted the proposal, the Palestinians would have had their independent state 75 years ago. It was not the Israelis who threatened to drive the Arabs into the sea in 1967, resulting in Israel acquiring the West Bank, which had belonged to Jordan. It has not been the Israelis who have rejected every sensible peace proposal which has been offered, by insisting on a condition – the right of return – which Israel cannot accept. They did not “deliberately paint themselves into [an] impossible corner.” The Palestinians – who did not exist until Arafat created the PLO – do not want peace, have never wanted peace. They just cannot tolerate the idea of sharing Palestine with Jews. Under the Islamic doctrine of property ownership, once Muslims have lived in a geographic area - much of which they conquered by the sword – it must forever remain Muslim property, which the Koran tells them they possess as trustees for Allah. They didn’t mind it when the Muslim Turks owned Palestine and exploited them. That was OK because they were fellow Muslims. But the idea that a people of a different religion have a right to own the land, sickens and appalls them. So no, it is not the fault of the Israelis that there has not been peace in the Middle East. It is the fault of the Jew hating Arabs – and liberal Jews like wallerstein, Zimmerman and Wolff, who are so-called Jews only because their mothers were Jews, buy into their propaganda.

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MS said:

I emailed Wolff’s proposals regarding how Israel should have responded to the Hamas Oct. 7 attack to the history professor who teaches the course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Michigan and asked him what he thought. He knows a hell of a lot more about the Middle East generally, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, than Wolff does. His response – as proposals for how to deal with and neutralize Hamas, Wolff’s recommendations were “silly.”

Wolff should stick to harmless disciplines like philosophy, and leave international politics to adults who know what they are talking about.

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MS said:

Below is a critique of Wolff's analysis, which wallerstein found to be flawless, by someone more knowledgeable than me. It demonstrates the ignorance and naivete of both Wolff and wallerstein.

The commentator’s list seems simplistic and naïve and ignorant in many respects and insane in others.

First, what makes the commentator think Israel is not taking some of the suggested clandestine actions?

Second, it certainly is the case that Israel is over-tolerant of funding of its opponents, but in most respects it is so to accommodate the insanities of U.S. policy-makers—those who foolishly see Iran as counterbalancing Sunni and Israeli power in the region. The fact is that the Saudis and other Arab states see Israel as an ally in economic prosperity and stability in the region and an ally against Iran’s open and proxy wars against Sunni states, Israel, the U.S., and Western—i.e., infidel—civilization. The Abraham Accords came about in great part in reaction to the hostility and instability created by Iran (enabled by Biden and Obama State Department elites).

What are these “settlements” in the disputed—not “occupied” territories—in Judea and Samaria, not the “West Bank”—referred to by the commentator, seemingly oblivious to the meaning of these terms? Land for peace and a “genuine” and “independent” Palestinian state in present circumstances is pie-in-the-sky. The Palestinians—so-named in the 1960s by Arafat—have rejected every state-creating peace deal offered by Israel since the 1940s. Gaza is a case study. The Palestinians destroyed the farms and infrastructure left in Gaza when all Israelis left (or were removed by Sharon) in 2005. Gaza could have prospered, but Palestinians hate Jews more than they love Palestinians. The Gazans “elected” Hamas in perpetuity in 2007, with its genocidal charter—the genocide directed not only at Israelis but at all Jews. Why don’t we believe them when they tell us they want to kill us, and then kill or convert all infidels until Islam reigns supreme in the world?

What does the commentator think a “Palestinian state” would look like—like Trans-Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Jordan with its generations of unassimilated “refugees”? Or like the Gaza terror-state which has been Judenrein since 2005? Or like the UN-supported PA “West Bank” welfare state, which pays bounties and pensions to Jew-killers and to the killer’s families? Or like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan? Or like ayatollah-ruled Iran? What do the pro-Hamas feminists and LGBTQ+ peace-loving “ceasefire” people think “free” Palestine from “the river to the sea” will look like for women, LGBTQ+ people and peace-loving Christian Arabs, Jews, Druse, and other infidels?

How does the commentator think should Israel have better “mobilized” its military and “legendary” intelligence services (that were unprepared for October 7)? As it is, Israel is suffering increased casualties to accommodate “global opinion” with little salutary impact on Israel critics and no impact on the “chair-force” of “can’t we all just get along” pundits. Consider the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII, followed by de-Nazification of Germany and the occupation of once-Imperial Japan. Self-defense and victory first, then ceasefires and peace processes.

How should Israel have recovered the hostages, the main Hamas weapon? Give up more imprisoned Palestinian criminals (many terrorists) on a 10 Palestinian to one Jew ratio, pay for more Hamas arms, send “humanitarian” aid to be stolen by Hamas terrorist-fighters in their tunnels, rely on the unheard pleas and the supposed good-will of the “global community, or what? ? The world calls for Israel to unilaterally cease combat operations—not for Hamas to immediately surrender the hostages, cease using human shields, stop firing rockets on civilians, end its genocidal threats, disavow murder, rape, sexual mutilation, killing babies, beheadings, etc. Israel cares—perhaps too much--for its “global reputation.” Hamas doesn’t care for the “rules of war” at all—its goal is terror and death, not a “genuine” state. We know this because Hamas and its supporters say so—“take the intifada global”; “death to the Jews,” the trees and rocks say “kill the Jews,” etc.

The idea that Israel will achieve peace and security with good-will and more unrequited and unreciprocated peace-talk and unilateral “proportionality” is reminiscent of Charlie Brown’s faith that this time Lucy won’t move the football. Except Charlie Brown faced momentary humiliation, while Israel faces destruction.

Biden and Obama policy propped up Iran, setting the stage for the current crisis. Just before Biden took office, Iran was under sanctions and was an economic basket case, with internal resistance building despite the totalitarian ayatollahs. Biden turned a cold shoulder to the Saudis, incompetently conducted the Afghanistan withdrawal, resuscitated the shameful Iran nuclear talks, and lifted the economic sanctions on Iran—allowing billions in oil money to save Iran’s economy and to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. Feckless and misguided U.S. policy created a new affinity between Iran and Russia and China—bad for Israel, bad for Ukraine and the Baltic states, bad for Taiwan and the Asian Pacific, and bad for the peace and stability of Western Civilization.

Enough said.

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19 December 2023

MS said:

The funeral ceremony for Sandra Day O'Connor is being held today at the National Cathedral. I refuse to mourn for her, or join in paying tribute to her. She had a catastrophic effect on world history by casting the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore, which stopped the vote recount in Florida, overturning Florida statutory law - an unprecedented rejection of stare decisis which had held that federal courts were required to defer to a State Supreme Court’s interpretation of its own statutes. She voted, for the first time in American history, to allow a federal court to appoint the President of the United States, with disastrous consequences for the world and for world climate. There is no question that Al Gore would have made a far better President than George W. Bush, and we are living with that disastrous ruling to this day, and for decades and centuries to come.

It has been reliably reported that at a New Year’s Eve celebration before the Supreme Court argument on the case, that she clearly indicated her opposition to Gore becoming President. By revealing her political preference at a party, and allowing that preference to determine how she would vote, she violated her oath of office to uphold the Constitution. She was a despicable person and a reprehensible jurist.

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The End.