Morocco’s Berbers and Israel
Bruce Maddy-Weitzman:
In recent years, small groups of Moroccan Berber activists, particularly younger people, have challenged the enforced silence regarding Israel, expressing an interest in both the state of Israel and Jewish history, including the Holocaust. They even linked this interest to the alleged historic connections between Jews and Berbers in ancient times, including the initial resistance to Arab conquerors by the Kahina, a supposedly Jewish-Berber queen, and the multilayered, more recent relations existing until the mass departure of Jews for Israel in the 1950s and 1960s from Berber villages and towns. …
Continue reading Morocco’s Berbers and Israel…
The Margrave’s Duty
The village of Awata deserved whatever it got from Israel
by Bill Levinson
Israel’s current condition is similar to that of the Anglo-Scottish border, the Wild Lands between Poland and Tartary, or the American West before the institution of rule of law. Its problem is that it lacks voyevodes, margraves, and march-wardens: hard men with hard hands cased in steel to put down lawlessness, chaos, and banditry.
We posted this last year in response to the murder of four Israelis by Palestinians from a certain village. In light of the village of Awata’s complicity in the massacre of the Fogel family, we are glad to see that Israel’s soldiers dragged about two dozen men from their homes and were accused of “trashing” other homes.
It is important however to distinguish between “collective punishment,” in which punishment is inflicted on innocent people for merely living in the same town as a crime’s perpetrator, and punishment of...
King Blew It
By Pamela Geller, AMERICAN THINKER
Investor’s Business Daily editorialized Monday that Congressman Peter King (R-NY) “blew it” in his hearings on “Muslim radicalization,” and that he “didn’t even come close to delivering what he advertised with his investigation.” IBD criticized King for calling as a witness Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), a “close ally” of the Hamas-linked Islamic supremacist hate group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Ellison, says the IBD editorial, “stole the show when he broke into tears while retelling the story of a Muslim paramedic who died in the World Trade Center. Ellison used the victim as an example of the “witch hunt” against Muslims in America by claiming he was falsely accused of involvement in the 9/11 plot.”
It gives me no pleasure to be right, again. But I wrote on January 18 that King was over his head. I criticized King for...
Setting the Palin Record Straight
By Jedediah Bila, HUMAN EVENTS
It’s truly astonishing the lengths that some will go to in order to try to discredit Sarah Palin. Sure, the left-wing media loons are a given, but what about the folks on the Right who relentlessly brand her as unelectable, unintelligent, unpresidential, and/or unqualified? What is their basis for those assessments? And if she is so darn unelectable—why the need to consistently, near-obsessively attempt to tear her down?
What’s most interesting about the repeated attacks on Palin – from the Left and the Right – is that they are routinely empty. They are often featured in online hit pieces that are void of any reference to her record and/or her contributions over the past two years to discussions of national and international significance. They focus on absurd criticism of her TLC series, which so many elitists deemed anti-intellectual and so many regular Americans deemed relatable. They call her a “quitter” because she resigned from the...
Canada blasts Israel Apartheid Week
There is a growing Canadian backlash against Israeli Apartheid Week, the on-campus campaign to delegitimize Israel.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney issued a strongly worded statement Friday, asking students to think twice before joining activities tied to the week, taking place across Canada and internationally this month.
The events, which seek to promote Palestinian human rights, are frequently “accompanied by anti-Semitic harassment, intimidation and bullying,” Mr. Kenney said, and are at times planned and promoted with disregard for the safety of Jewish students, professors and others on campus.
“These activities can cultivate an atmosphere exactly the opposite of one that is open to the free exchange of ideas and the development of the mind with the aid of facts and logic,”
Repeatedly singling out and condemning Israel year after year creates a “hateful environment” that “offends not only our sense of fairness, but also our core...
Sarah Palin to visit Israel next week
Potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin is expected to arrive in Israel for a visit next week, Army Radio reported on Thursday.
The former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential candidate follows several other prominent republicans who have visited Israel recently, including Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour.
According to the report, Palin’s visit will be private, but she will meet with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other members of Israel’s right-wing, including Likud MK Danny Danon.
Netanyahu is toughening up
By Ted Belman
In David Barak’s article, Quartet ‘giving up hope’ he reports on Netanyahu’s toughened positions.
Since then, the Prime Minister’s Office and Netanyahu in particular have changed their tone on the Palestinian issue, their remarks becoming markedly more militant.
Ever since the attack, Netanyahu has refrained from speaking publicly or privately about the need to advance the peace process or about his intention to make a major policy speech of the kind he delivered at Bar-Ilan University in 2009. On the other hand, he has begun to underline the issue of Palestinian incitement, as well as security concerns, as one that must be addressed in future negotiations.
Its about time. But he also took “extreme displeasure” with Barak’s tsunami.
Netanyahu also reacted with extreme displeasure to a speech delivered by Defense Minster Ehud Barak this week, in which Barak warned of a diplomatic...
Quartet ‘giving up hope’ of renewing Israeli-Palestinian talks
Growing pessimism about the prospects of a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations is prompting new international calls for the unilateral establishment of a Palestinian state.
Representatives of the Middle East Quartet – the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations – who attended talks held in Tel Aviv and Ramallah last week with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators emerged without much hope for the resumption of peace negotiations in the near future, according to senior Israeli officials and European diplomats. The representatives said that the differences between the two sides were far too wide to get negotiations back on track.
On Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said recognition of a Palestinian state by the European Union is a “possibility that should be kept in mind.” Speaking at the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, the newly appointed minister said:...
Mainline Churches silent on Massacre of Foglers
by Dexter Van Zile, Christian media Analyst, CAMERA -boston
New English Review
Is there something about Muslim expressions of hostility toward Jews in the Middle East that echoes in the minds of Israel’s Christian critics in the U.S.?
Is there something about Muslim anti-Semitism that dovetails with Christian anti-Semitism?
Is that why they find anti-Semitic incitement so unremarkable? Is that why they have remained bystanders to the problem of anti-Semitism in the Middle East and Europe?
It has been approximately five days since five Israelis, including a three-month old baby, were murdered in their homes in Itamar. No one has any real doubts that the attack was perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists despite a denial from Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki who, according to Haaretz…
said no Palestinian had ever murdered an infant or civilians in such a manner, either for nationalist causes or in revenge, “which raises doubts regarding...
Obama fiddles while the world burns
Jack Golburt comments on President Obama’s Trivial Pursuits.
It is not inconsistent at all but one has to identify the unifying factor. Obama dithers when action is called for against an Islamic crazy regime, such as Iran in the matter of acquiring nuclear capability. He has held the world at bay while he “engaged” the Iranians, attempted sanctions and then attempted more serious sanctions and passed “deadline” after deadline, each time shredding American credibility, of course. Ghaddafi is an Islamic crazy and not only that, but he is someone who is admired and honored by Obama’s “spiritual mentor,” the very Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and in turn, his spiritual clone, Louis Farrakhan.
The Mubarak regime in Egypt, on the contrary, was not Islamist but pragmatic and moving quickly to elections might well result in an Islamic crazy regime under the Muslim Brotherhood, for whom the Obama administration is assiduously running political interference. The fall...
Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel
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