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Pro-'surge' group is almost all Jewish

Pro-'surge' group is almost all Jewish
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Published: 08/24/2007

Four of five members of the board of a campaign promoting President Bush's policies in the Iraq war are Republican Jews.

The board of "Freedom's Watch" includes Ari Fleischer, Bush's former press secretary; Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition; Bradley Blakeman, a senior White House staffer in Bush's first term; and Mel Sembler, a longtime RJC leader and former ambassador to Rome.

Brooks told JTA that the fifth member, William Weidner, a casino operator in Las Vegas, is not Jewish. However, Weidner's wife, Lynn, is Jewish and is active in that city's federation. Blakeman is the group's president.

Brooks said it would be a mistake to regard the group as having a Jewish direction.

"It's a coincidence that several of the board members are Jewish," he said, noting that half of the donors contributing to the group's first $15 million ad campaign are not Jewish.

The ad blitz will promote Bush's "surge" policy in Iraq ahead of September, when Congress is set to assess the success of the influx of additional U.S. troops into Iraq.

Brooks said the aim ultimately is to build a grassroots organization that would promote Republican domestic and foreign policies and would replicate similar groups backing Democrats.

"This is a clear message to conservatives and Republicans and others who see what has happened on the left to let them know with Freedom's Watch that the cavalry is coming," Brooks said.

Of eight donors named Thursday in Politico, a political newspaper, four are Jewish: Sembler; Richard Fox, the chairman of the Jewish Policy Center, an RJC-affiliated think tank; Ed Snider, the founder of the Philadelphia Flyers ice hockey franchise who has been elected to several Jewish Sports Halls of Fame; and Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino operator who recently launched a giveaway newspaper venture in Israel.

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/103795.html

israel and refugees

Israel bars Darfur refugees
19/08/2007 22:01 - (SA)








A Sudanese boy stands at a private home where he and others are being housed after crossing from Egypt into Israel. (Ariel Schalit, AP)




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Holocaust survivor gets refund

Syria doesn't want Israel war

Heavy fighting resumes in Sudan






Jerusalem - Israel said on Sunday it would shut its doors to refugees from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, touching off hot debate over whether the Jewish state, founded after the Nazi genocide, has a duty to take in people fleeing persecution.

Israel has been grappling for months with how to deal with a swelling flow of Africans, including some from Darfur, who have infiltrated through its porous southern border with Egypt's Sinai desert. Overnight, Israel returned 48 African infiltrators to Egypt.

Israeli government spokesperson David Baker said he didn't know if any were from Darfur, but noted Darfurians wouldn't be immune from Israel's ban on unauthorised migrants.

"The policy of returning back anyone who enters Israel illegally will pertain to everyone, including those from Darfur," he said.

Egyptian police said Darfurians were among the 48 - and would be expelled from Egypt to Sudan.

Pledge to absorb refugees

The decision to turn back asylum-seekers from Darfur contradicts Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's pledge earlier this summer to absorb them. Baker said those already in Israel would be allowed to stay, and that the turnback policy applied to new arrivals.

Fighting between pro-government militias and rebels in Darfur has killed more than 200 000 people and displaced 2.5 million since February 2003. Most of the displaced people remain in Darfur, but the UN estimates 236 000 have fled across the border to neighbouring Chad, where they live in camps.

Israel's response to the unexpected arrivals has been incoherent and contradictory. Threats to expel them have clashed with humanitarian sentiments inspired by the memory of Jews vainly seeking sanctuary from the Nazis.

Eytan Schwartz, an advocate for Darfur refugees in Israel, said about 400 have entered Israel in recent years. Baker said they would be allowed to live in Israel, and that the ban applied to new arrivals.

Schwartz objected to any such ban. "The state of Israel has to show compassion for refugees after the Jewish people was subject to persecution throughout its history," he said.

But Ephraim Zuroff of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center said the Jewish people could not be expected to right every wrong just because of its past.

"Israel can't throw open the gates and allow unlimited access for people who are basically economic refugees," Zuroff said.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2167348,00.html

Survery on Israel

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Herb Keinon, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 21, 2007

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A survey by a respected journal showing that 15 of 108 foreign policy elites in the US believe Israel does not serve US national security interests has raised eyebrows in Jerusalem. It precedes the publication in early September of a book by two US professors slamming the Israel-US alliance.

The journal, Foreign Policy, on Monday published its "terrorism index," asking a bipartisan group of former "secretaries of state, national security advisors, senior White House aides, top commanders in the US military, seasoned intelligence professionals, and distinguished academics" a variety of questions having to do with US national security issues.

When given a list of US allies and asked to choose the one country that least serves US national security interests, 14 percent of the respondents picked Israel. Russia led the list, with 34% saying it least served US interests, followed by 22% who said Pakistan, 17% who selected Saudi Arabia, and 5% each for Egypt and Mexico.

The journal billed the respondents, whose names were not supplied, as America's "top foreign-policy experts." Forty-five of the respondents described themselves as Democrats, 24 as Republicans, and the rest as Independents.

One diplomatic official in Jerusalem, while acknowledging that 14% is a considerable minority, said he was still worried by the trend.

"Considering the closeness and importance of our ties with Washington, this is something we need to watch," he said.

The official said that while in the past the notion that the US alliance with Israel harmed US interests was a belief relegated to individuals on the far right, such as Pat Buchanan, and the far left, like Noam Chomsky, this survey indicated that the idea was gaining prominence among the elites.

This idea is starting to make it into the mainstream, the official said, citing as an example a paper published last year by University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer and Harvard University's Stephen Walt arguing that the US was willing to "set aside its own security" to advance Israel's interests because of AIPAC and the Israel lobby.

The official expressed concern that this trend will likely pick up steam with the scheduled release early next month of a book by the two, which, according to press reports, argues that with the end of the Cold War, "Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States."

The official also expressed concern that more US policy elites were buying into the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the source of Islamic terrorism and anti-Americanism around the world.

The Foreign Policy survey bore this out, with 51% of the respondents saying that creating peace between Israel and the Palestinians would be "very important" to "addressing the threat of Islamist terrorism worldwide." Another 24% said solving the conflict with the Palestinians would be "somewhat important," and only 25% said it would have little or no impact on Islamic terrorism worldwide.

Regarding Hamas, a majority of the respondents came out against the current US policy of isolating Hamas, with 53% saying that engaging moderates inside Hams would be in the US's best interests, and only 17% backing the current Bush administration policy of isolation.

The respondents' replies to a question about what Iran would do with a nuclear capability were also somewhat surprising. Sixty-seven percent said it was either "somewhat unlikely" or "very unlikely" that Iran would build weapons to "wipe Israel off the map."

Even as Foreign Policy published its survey on Monday, the Financial Times released a poll that showed Israel was no longer viewed in large parts of Europe, and in the US, as a threat to global security.

Less than half a percent of the respondents in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany and the US listed Israel when asked, "Which one, if any, of the following countries do you think is the greatest threat to global stability?" These results contrasted mightily to a controversial poll carried out in 2003 by the European Commission, in which more than half of those asked said Israel posed the "biggest threat to world peace."

In Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany, the US - according to the Financial Times survey - led the list of countries threatening global stability. In the US that distinction was shared by Iran and North Korea.

The poll was conducted by Harris Interactive among 6,398 people between August 1 and 13.•

Bigotry In the Jewish Community

http://www.lookstein.org/articles/bigotry.htm

Bigotry In the Jewish Communtee

Communications

AMONG STRANGERS

This article originally appeared in Tradition 28, 1994. Reprinted here with permission.

To the Editor:

The Editor's Notebook has used everyday observations to draw conclusions about life among Orthodox Jews. In that spirit, I share with the readers of Tradition some experiences I have had since becoming such a Jew myself. The occasion of the following anecdote was Passover last year. I was sitting at the seder table of a family on New York's Upper West Side, next to another guest, a man in his mid thirties. He wore a black hat and, reading out loud the annotations from a Lubavitch Haggada, this gentleman would quote every few minutes from the lubavitcher rebbe--"shliita," he carefully added each time. In between, he made "schwartze" jokes.

Each joke was a little more witless than the one before, with the progression culminating in this: "So I'm walking down the street the other day," the man announced shortly after the afikoman had been found under a couch. "And there's this schwartze passed out on a pile of garbage": A pause here for comic effect. "And I said to myself 'What a waste. Someone's thrown out a perfectly good schwartze!'" He then looked around the table triumphantly, as if expecting applause.

Now Passover, of course, is the festival when a Jew is required to imagine that he himself-not merely an obscure ancestor-was a slave in Egypt. This yearly appeal to collective memory seeks to remind us, as we are told in Exodus, that "you know the heart of a stranger, seeing that you were strangers in the land of Egypt." For halakhic purposes, we may take the term "ger," or "stranger," to mean a convert to Judaism. But in Egypt we were strangers, wretched and despised, in a more general sense. So, I wonder, why is it that one meets Orthodox Jews, of all Jews, who can muster only the shallowest sympathy for the heart of those dark-skinned strangers in our own midst?

It is possible that my political affiliation sets some men and women at ease, encouraging them to voice their least attractive opinions. On being introduced to people in synagogues and at Shabbat and Yom Tov tables, I am invariably asked what I do for a living. I say that I work for National Review, which is the conservative opinion magazine owned by William F. Buckley Jr. "So," goes the next question, "you're a conservative?" Some polite conversation follows. And then, not infrequently, my new acquaintance will proceed to drop remarks about "schwartzes"-- pronounced, by the sort of person who use words like this, in the same tone of contempt as when pronouncing "guuy", the Yiddish appropriation of the more neutral Hebrew "goy". I am expected to join in the smirking, given that after all I am a conservative.

And so after telling the joke I mention above, the humorist at that seder turned to me, grinning wryly. "You're not offended, are you?" he asked. "I thought you were a conservative."

I had been waiting for this question. I had intended to adopt a look of pain-stricken dignity and tell him that there is a difference, sir, between a conservative and a bigot or something like that. But I lost my nerve, as I have before when the subject of "schwartzes" came up, and probably will the next time I'm given the opportunity. Instead I offered him a polite smile, and he turned away. Ah, the joy of Yiddish. While formidably expressive, the mother tongue of Eastern European Jews is not a beautiful language; and even among its ugliest words, the noun "schwartze" stands out for distastefulness. In part this is because one hears it so often in observant circles. Indeed, while many things have surprised me about the Orthodox world, nothing has surprised me more than the unapologetic bigotry of more than a few Orthodox Jews. At a Shabbat table recently a black-hatted man discussed which kosher establishments on the Upper West Side did and did not meet his standards. He then joked that in the 1960s he had been politically very liberal. "Yeah, I was almost a freedom rider," he said, "but I couldn't stand it to sit next to a schwartze on the bus. It would make me nauseous."

A woman at the opposite end of the table found that this accorded with her experience and added that, in her opinion, blacks have an identifiable odor. "I don't know what it is," she told us. "I just find it offensive." Another Friday night, a pretty young woman put it to me frankly. "I just hate Puerto Ricans.. period," she said. Puerto Ricans.. you see, are honorary schwartzes.

As are the Arabs. One Shabbat morning at a wealthy Manhattan synagogue, the rabbi noted in his sermon that a West Bank settler was to be tried in Israel for killing a Palestinian. After stabbing a Jew, not fatally, the Palestinian had been disarmed and tied up. A settler had then walked up to the prisoner and shot him to death. As we walked out of the sanctuary, an acquaintance of mine argued that, under such arcumstances and if they could get away with it, Jewish settlers were right to execute Palestinians. "Violence. That's all the Arabs understand," he said. "When in China, do like the Chinese."

Put aside the question of what happens to a Jewish state when its citizens, in particular those citizens identified as among its most strictly observant, begin behaving like their Arab rivals. (Does Israel become, in effect, an Arab state?) I don't mean to make an issue of bigotry among the Israelis. The Jews of Israel are, after all, surrounded by enemy states. To live in Israel has become nearly as frightening as to live in Washington, D.C. Resentment must be expected. Does the same go for Americans? A rabbi of the Talmud declared, "Kill the best of the gentiles! Crush the heads of the best of the snakes!" But Simeon ben Yohai had seen Rabbi Akiva burned alive by the soldiers of the Emperor Hadrian. He had a reason to curse. In 1994, we American Jews, I would say, do not.

I make this claim notwithstanding the view of a prominent Lubavitch rabbi, Schmuel Butman, who at a synagogue meeting I attended compared present day New York to Berlin and Warsaw in the years preceding the Holocaust. Nazis in New York? Perhaps you will agree that the ludicrousness of the idea need not be asserted. Still, a resident of Crown Heights, like an Israeli, may in part be excused for expressing extreme opinions about his gentile neighbors. Context counts, and the Lubavitchers have had it harder than the rest of us. However, the bigotry I've heard comes not from Brooklyn, but from Jews living in the far less threatening borough of Manhattan. I've heard it elsewhere too--for example in Washington, where I lived until a couple of years ago--though with much less frequency.

Such bigotry flourishes unmolested despite the obvious truth that American Jews enjoy a state of ease and convenience of a type our forefathers, through centuries of exile, never experienced. Our great-great-grandparents would be astonished at the way the surrounding society pets and caresses us, stepping gingerly around our delicate feelings on a diversity of subjects. At Passover in New York, the Republican mayoral candidate, Rudolph Giuliani, traveled from synagogue to synagogue making saccharin speeches about "this great night for the Jewish people." It should be a comfort that the absolute worst we have seen is the riot in Crown Heights--a disturbance that has been termed a "pogrom," if an exceedingly minor one by authentic pogrom standards, even a "massacre" (a "massacre" of one person) in a synagogue bulletin I received. In politics and on the street, we have rarely if ever been less threatened. Unlike the Israelis, we have no excuse.

I have made this point in conversations with other Jews, and have heard in reply that every religious group has its bigots, there are rotten apples in every basket, and so on. That's true enough. But what is most striking about the nasty remarks from ostensibly religious Jews is not really the words themselves. What's striking is the assumption that saying such things, in front of total strangers, requires the speaker neither to apologize afterward nor even to look vaguely sheepish. Orthodox bigots express themselves without the concern that anyone present will disagree enough to take offense.

One needn't even be in a private home. At a shul in Midtown Manhattan, I have heard astonishing comments about "schwartzes", comments pronounced in a small room loudly enough for all strangers to hear, while we waited for minha to begin. The kindly old rabbi looked passively on. During Hanuka, the same group of middle-aged men exited the shul after ma'ariv growling humorously, "Kill 'em! Kill 'em all!" This was a joke: they referred to the Greek soldiers who are the villains of Hanuka. Or did they? Listening to these men whose sense of humor I know too well, I wondered if long-dead Greeks stood in place of some other, contemporary "goyim".

Among such Orthodox Jews there is an assumption of bigotry among all Orthodox Jews. However inaccurate, that assumption is plausible to some, and that should worry us more than the mere fact that a minority of Jews tell ugly jokes. The man at our seder with the Lubavitch Haggada was not, by the way, a Lubavitcher. He is a successful Manhattan lawyer, a man who, it was made known at one point, wears only Hermes ties. He lives on the Upper West Side. If ever it was possible for people like him--like us--to appreciate the misery of certain groups of gentiles and be struck into sobriety, one would think it should be here and now. That observant Jews can grin without shame at the expense of the "schwartzes" makes a bad joke of the eternal lessons of Passover.

DAVID KLINGHOFFER
Literary Editor
National Review
New York City

Israel Rejects Christian Refugees

Clearly, one can reject refugees. But, given the amount of complaining various leading Jewish organizations do about past rejection of Jewish Refugee's this does strike as hypocritical, to say the least.

And obviously room would have been found for these refugee's if they were Jewish.

Offer to help Christian asylum seekers facing deportation from Israel
BEN LYNFIELD

A CHRISTIAN group has offered to relocate about 1,000 Christian Sudanese asylum seekers in Israel to the West to rescue them from planned expulsion to Egypt by the government.

Faced with a growing number of refugees and economic migrants crossing the border from Egypt, Israel has said it would allow 500 refugees from Darfur already inside Israel to remain in the country.

But it also made it clear that the southern Sudanese, who number twice as many, will be deported to Egypt. Human rights activists say they have previously faced racism and maltreatment in Egypt.

There are also fears Egypt will expel them onward to Sudan, where they would face life imprisonment or execution for entering Israel.

Charmaine Hedding, of the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, a pro-Israel group representing churches worldwide, said churches in North America and elsewhere have agreed to welcome Sudanese Christians now in Israel. "Let us relocate these people; 1,000 people is manageable," she said.

However, Mark Regev, of the Israeli foreign ministry, responded that it is Israel's right to expel the Sudanese. "People who cross into Israel illegally can be sent back. That is part of international law," he said.

Activists say Israel violated international law at the weekend by expelling about 50 Africans without hearings to determine if their lives were in danger or they faced persecution.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1329712007

No Justice No Peace?

Briton suffers with Arabs under Israeli demolition law

By Jennie Matthew
Agence France-Presse

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Six months pregnant and exhausted, British mother Jessica Barhoum is still shocked that Israeli authorities ordered her, her husband and their baby out of bed at daybreak and pulverised their home.

“I can’t believe that it’s lawful, that this law exists. I’m from England. Do you know what I mean?” said Jessica, 32, who grew up in the southern city of Salisbury but moved to Israel after marrying Musa, her Arab Israeli husband.

“You can’t believe a country like this would make a law against its own citizens,” she said.

For the last four decades, Israeli legislation has permitted the demolition of homes built without a construction permit, the case for the Barhoums’ home in the village of Ein Rafa, west of Jerusalem, although a permit was pending.

Critics say the law is disproportionately used against Arab Israelis rather than Jewish Israelis. Permits can take years to acquire, particularly for Palestinians wanting to build in Israeli-occupied and annexed East Jerusalem.

Jessica, a landscape gardener who also holds Swiss nationality, converted to Islam before marrying and moving to her husband’s village, giving birth to their daughter Sara and learning to speak nearly fluent Arabic and Hebrew.

Last week, she watched in disbelief as two bulldozers with pneumatic drills implemented an 18-month-old demolition order against their home, which Musa spent eight years building on land owned by his family.

Armed Israeli security forces woke them up at 5:00am. Jessica said she was given five minutes to get out. Her daughter screamed and her husband was arrested as clearers stuffed some of their possessions into plastic bags before the bulldozers pulverised the two-bedroom house and vegetable patch into rubble.

“It did feel like a war zone,” she said, pale under her pastel-coloured headscarf. The adjoining apartment where her newly married sister-in-law lived was also smashed.

Her sister-in-law, a hairdresser to the Israeli elite at the luxury King David Hotel in nearby Jerusalem, went into hysterics and then to hospital.

The demolition law has been in force since 1968, allowing “illegal” houses to be razed even if permits are pending in the bureaucratic pipeline.

In 2005, Musa was given legal notice he had 18 months to finalise the permit or have his house bulldozed. When the deadline ran out, the permit was still not ready.

Jessica said a woman at the local council led them to believe everything would be alright. They did not consult a lawyer. They now feel they were naive.

The pile of rubble took two days to clear. The Barhoums lost their bed and a handmade cupboard. Sara’s cot was broken, her soft toys and little shoes were found littered among the ruins.

Hundreds of Arabs in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories each year face the same trauma of watching bulldozers tearing their homes to dust.

Meir Margalit, field coordinator for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), said the interior ministry alone demolished 850 structures in “Israel” last year, most of them in the Arab sector.

And since 1967, 18,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished in the territories, including East Jerusalem, according to ICAHD figures.

Margalit said Jewish Israeli homes are never demolished on the permit pretext under the 1968 law. Although the interior ministry was asked to comment, a spokesman did not return AFP’s call.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied territories are classified as illegal because Israel is an “occupier.” But such demolitions within Israel are legal.

“My husband’s cousin’s just been in a state of shock because he’s like, ‘we pay our taxes, we abide by the law, we’re Israeli citizens’.

“We all want to live together, but the people who are making the laws don’t. They know that they weren’t just knocking our house down, they know that they were breeding hatred and anger within our community,” Jessica charged.

When the bulldozers arrived, two Jewish Israeli friends drove down to the village to stand in support with Jessica. Another quietly paid 1,000 pounds ($2,029, 1,487 euros) into her bank account. The Barhoums are determined to begin rebuilding as soon as possible and enlist legal help to halt any further demolition orders while they finalise arrangements for the construction permit.

“I’m having a baby in November. We need something that’s winter proof and summer proof because we’re not quite sure how long it’s going us to take to get our house back to a liveable state,” Jessica said.

Theirs is the only home in the village to be razed so far, but the case has fuelled concern from lawyers and human rights activists that further properties could be destroyed since most lack finalised permits.

Margalit fears the authorities have their eye on confiscating land in Ein Rafa.

Commercial lawyer Sami Rashid is also worried. “It’s a bit strange that they just picked this house because there are many houses without a permit. It may be that the interior ministry may want to demolish houses in Ein Rafa.” The village representative on the regional council told AFP that 200 homes in Ein Rafa and a neighbouring village could be liable for demolition, saying the demolition of the Barhoums’ home had “destroyed” efforts to build bridges between local Arab and Jewish youth.

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