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Self-Inflicted Ignorance Is Suicide
The Freeman Center Is A Defense Against Ignorance
The International Women's Commission is yet another of those bash-Israel NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that pretend to be pursuing peace neutrally, whereas in reality they are promoting the agenda of Palestinian genocidal terrorists. It is different from the countless other groups because it consists of women. Naturally, it wants to achieve a peace that involves creation of a new state of "Palestine" and naturally it refuses to acknowledge any right at all by Israel to defend its own civilians from Islamofascist barbarism and Palestinian terror, not even its right to protect Israeli women. Its "narrative" of the Arab-Israeli conflict can be read here . http://www.iwc-peace.org/ - and is identical to that of the Hamas, except when it comes to proclamations about how important and nice women are.
What is noteworthy is what took place at a recent mahjong klatch of these gyno-racists. Even more significant is the fact that the goings on there were exposed and implicitly criticized by none other than Akiva Eldar in Haaretz on May 12, 2009. Eldar is a far-leftist anti-Israel fanatic and the only good thing ordinarily that can be said about him is that he is less openly anti-Semitic and less openly advocating Israel's annihilation than his two Haaretz colleagues: Gideon Levy and Amira Hass. (Unrelated to this story here, even Gideon Levy had a rare nanosecond of coherence and sanity a couple of weeks ago when he ran a column attacking the yahoos and louts of Ramat Aviv for their bigotry and violence against the Orthodox Jews living and moving into Ramat Aviv!)
The story that is of interest here is this. On international women's day, the IWC held a convocation of its gyno-terrorists and their fellowette travelers. The main topic was Israel's recent "Cast Lead" campaign against Hamas terrorism in the Gaza Strip. The "steering committee" to discuss the Gaza events included as members Prof. Galia Golan, a founder of Peace Now, a radical leftist, and a faculty member at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in "government" . see her web page here: http://www.idc.ac.il/eng/faculty/details.asp?sid=7930&letter=G&school=&displayStatus= (the IDC is Israel's private-sector university).
Also on the committee was Naomi Chazan, a retired prof from the Hebrew University (also political science) and a one-time Knesset backbencher from Meretz. Chazan spoke in Ben Gurion University's rally against academic freedom last week, organized by the politics department there, where she denounced people who dare to criticize anti-Israel "academic" fanatics. Denouncing Israel as a Nazi apartheid terrorist entity is fine, she insisted, but criticizing the people who DO that is McCarthyism and must be censored! A few other Israeli ultra-leftist feminizts also participated. Most of the Israeli contingent willingly signed the conference's proclamation asserting that Israel had just carried out massacres in Gaza and calling for the international community to crack down on Israeli sovereignty and its exercise of its right of defense.
But all was not peaceful and unified in the IWC's Nuremberg Rally against Jews. A bit to my own surprise, Collette Avital, a Labor Party politician and ex-Knesset Member (she ran in the last election but was too far down on the Labor slate to get a seat), refused to sign! She protested the fact that the IWC Declaration was one-sided and that it never even bothered to mention that Israel's operations were in response to years of Hamas rocket attacks and other forms of terror. Collette has her own track record of silliness, such as getting hysterical over magazine ads of women in bathing suits. But the naked anti-Semitism of the IWC was too much for her. She was joined by an ex-Knesset Member from the Shinui party, Etti Livni, who also expressed her disgust at the bias.
The Palestinian women who had been sent by their menfolk to the IWC to sit and smile and mouth anti-Israel slogans announced that they would not sit with any Israeli feminists who justified Israel's exercising self-defense. Golan and Chazan tried to nag the Israeli dissidents into abandoning their position that any IWC statement should denounce ALL acts of violence, even those directed against Jews. But Avital and Livni refused to capitulate to the gyno-terror. Avital resigned and walked out, while Livni stayed in to try to argue from within.
The rest of the Israeli delegation supported the one-sided denunciation of Israel and the endorsement of the "right" of the Palestinians to murder Jews. The Islamists of Hamas and the Taliban continue to serve as their role models of feminist liberation and enlightenment.
2. Speaking of Philistinism north of Tel Aviv, Makor Rishon May 22, 2009 had an interesting news story about bigotry and intolerance in the wealthy Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya. It seems that one student at the secularist elite high school, the Herzliya Gymnasium, upset the local powers that be and offended their delicate sensitivities by showing up at school wearing a yarmulke, a kipa. Even worse, he convinced some of his friends also to wear a kipa during class.
This was an intolerable provocation, insisted the principal of the school. He suspended the felon in question for wearing his yarmulke. After all, Israel is a pluralistic democracy and so such things cannot be tolerated with equanimity! In response, the fiend's pals threatened to come to school the next week actually wearing tefillin.
We are trying to find out if the principal plans to arm the staff with automatic rifles and stun grenades to protect his school building from infiltration by students wearing yarmulkes..