CIJR GALA SPEAKERS, PROSOR & PHILLIPS, CRITIQUE UN/WEST ON SYRIAN GENOCIDE, IRANIAN HOLOCAUST

CIJR’S 24^TH ANNIVERSARY
CELEBRATES A BANNER YEAR!
Frederick Krantz

 

The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research’s twenty-fourth anniversary marks a banner year of solid achievements, enabling us to look forward to an even more significant quarter-century celebration in 2013.

For openers, we have increased our Canada-wide reach by instituting an active Toronto Chapter, co-chaired by noted community leader David Freeman and distinguished academic (York U.) Prof. Sally Zerker. And paralleling our reinforced Canadian framework is a really key new departure, establishment of an independent sister-institution, the American Institute for Jewish Research, a recently approved non-profit educational foundation enabling us, finally, to give tax receipts to American, as well as Canadian, donors. And we have just concluded a cooperative agreement with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, one of Israel’s leading think-tanks, headed by Dore Gold, former Israeli Ambassador to the US, and Alan Baker, former Israeli Ambassador to Canada.

The Toronto chapter issues from an excellent National Conference, on Israel’s Security, held in Toronto and given by four CIJR Academic Fellows (Profs. Hal Waller [McGill], Aurel Braun [Toronto], Sally Zerker [York], Norrin Ripsman [Concordia] and yours truly [Concordia]). This Conference, in turn, grew out of a major all-day Conference held in Montreal, at Congregation Chevra Kadisha, in November, on “Combatting The Delegitimation Of Israel”, at which no less than nine CIJR academics (including Daniel Pipes, Richard Landes, Efraim Karsh, and Asaf Romirowsky, inter alia) gave papers. (The DVD version of the November Conference will be available shortly.)

Video clips from both Conferences are available on our really superb new website (www.isranet.org) created by our friends at EntrepreneurWeb.com, as are back numbers of all CIJR Publications: the Daily Isranet Briefing, ISRAFAX, ISRAZINE web-magazine, the weekly French Communiqué Isranet, and our students’ excellent Dateline: Middle East journal. And the Institute’s vast repository of op-ed and other materials, the Israel & Middle East DataBank, is now directly accessible, free of charge, via the website.

Our unique Student Israel Advocacy Program, a set of carefully-designed and inter-related seminars given by CIJR’s respected academic Fellows across the academic year, was focused on preparing students for anti-Israel propaganda on campus. Work in Jewish and Zionist history and politics, and on the so-called “Arab-Israeli Conflict”, is complemented by seminars in writing, speaking and debating, as well as in organizational techniques. Issues-oriented Colloquia and a documentary film series supplement the SIAP core seminars.

And this year’s 24^th Anniversary Gala promises to be a glittering affair, with superb speakers—Ron Prosor, Israel’s UN Ambassador, and the brilliant British writer Melanie Phillips, as well as a special Lion of Judah presentation honouring our Research Chairman and resident tzaddik Baruch Cohen (92). We will also be holding special Insiders’ Receptions for Amb. Prosor, at Marlene and Joel King’s home, and for Melanie Phillips (at Barbara and Ronnie Kay’s), whose stimulating and insightful new book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power, will be available for signing at the Gala.

All of the above activity was made possible by our committed, creative, and small, staff: Yvonne Margo is our ever-resourceful Executive Assistant, Charles Bybelezer is our superb Publications Chairman, and Baruch Cohen our vastly knowledgeable Research Chairman. Our talented Student Israel Interns include Sandro De Thomasis, Sabrina Mezzacappa, Alex Enescu and Charles Daoust, and Julius Dunton is our trilingual Archivist.

So CIJR looks forward confidently to a really active 2012-13, with program planning already underway in Montreal and Toronto: a day-long “Delegitimation” Conference aimed at adults, and a retrospective on “The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim”. Further website development is in store, production of videos is being ramped up, and of course enhanced activity in the US, including building initial AIJR chapters in several initial urban centers (New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC).

As we begin to make our plans for our 25^th anniversary (including a possible Jerusalem Gala), we must of course always bear in mind the overwhelmingly important existential issues facing Israel and the Jewish people: the failed “Arab Spring”, Syria, above all, the genocidal Iranians’ nuclear threat. Unfortunately, this last, over-riding situation seems no closer to resolution than a year ago, its uncertainties complicated now by the approaching American election: CIJR will, as ever, analyze this situation clearly, and be ready to play its role of informing, and rallying, the community if and when push turns to shove in the Middle East.

(Dr. Krantz, Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research,
is also Professor of History at Liberal Arts College, Concordia U.)

 

Ambassador Ron Prosor

 

Ron Prosor, Israel’s dynamic Ambassador to the United Nations, is an Israeli diplomat and a respected commentator on Middle Eastern politics and Jewish world affairs. Educated in Israel, he holds a Master’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a prolific author, with articles inter alia in The London Times, the Daily Telegraph, The Jerusalem Post, and The Guardian.

A Major in the IDF Artillery Division, Ron Prosor went into the diplomatic service and served as Deputy Director of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Strategic Affairs, Counter-Terrorism, and Nuclear Disarmament in 2003. He was Chief of Staff to Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom from 2003-4, Political Director of the Ministry in 2004, and Director-General of the Foreign Ministry from 2004-07.

From 2007-11 Amb. Prosor was Israel’s representative to the Court of St. James, where he proved a remarkably resourceful and effective opponent of the anti-Israel delegitimation campaign in all its forms, but especially insofar as university campuses, students and academics were concerned. In June 2011, he became Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN, in time to lead the campaign against Mahmoud Abbas’ planned unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.

 

The following is excerpted from a June 7, 2012 address
by Israel’s UN Ambassador Ron Prosor to the General Assembly.

 

…Eli Wiesel once said, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” His words call to us at moments like this.

It doesn’t matter where you come from, or what politics you preach, or what faith you belong to—no decent human being can stay silent in the face of what is happening in Syria. The people of Syria are not the indiscriminate victims of a natural disaster. They are not the tragic fatalities of a famine. They are not the accidental casualties of war. They are the deliberate targets of a brutal regime that will commit any crime and cross any line to cling to power.

We hear the words spoken in today’s debate, but the appalling images and stories coming out of Syria are what stick in our minds. This morning I hear the cries of the infants massacred in Houla. I see the pleading eyes of the children of Homs, desperate and terrified beyond belief. I try to put myself into the shoes of the families whose loved ones have disappeared into [Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s torture chambers—and will never be heard from again.

Today I urge this Assembly to think of each man, woman, and child slaughtered by the Syrian Government in the past 15 months. It grows larger month by month, day by day, hour by hour. More than 4,000 have been killed since the General Assembly last discussed this issue. How many more innocents must die before the world acts?

The pictures coming out of Syria serve as a moral call to every person and every nation in the world. Nowhere is that call more clear than here at the United Nations, which was founded primarily to safeguard the principles of human rights, dignity and life.

Today, on behalf of the Israeli people and the Jewish people, I say directly to the Syrian people: we hear your cries. We are horrified by the crimes of the Assad regime. We extend our hand to you.…

Assad is not the only one with the blood of the Syrian people on his hands. Iran and Hizbullah sit on his advisory board, offering guidance on how to butcher the Syrian people more efficiently. They direct an army of mercenaries that work on his behalf. Today Iranian Revolutionary Guards are funneling weapons to his troops. Hezbollah operatives are firing at his people.

Before our eyes we see a trio of brutality. Assad, [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, and [Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan] Nasrallah are joined by an extremist and hateful ideology. The future of this trio of brutality depends on crushing the hopes and dreams of millions throughout the region. The international community cannot allow them to continue operating with impunity. The costs of further delay and division are clear. With each day that passes, the unbearable price for the Syrian people rises. The trio of brutality must be held to account.

I have said it before and I’ll say it again: Bashar Assad has no moral authority to govern. The international community must recognize that the hourglass of the Assad regime has run out—and seize this as an hour of action. It is high time for the voices of the victims in Syria to finally unite the voices of the world against the tyrant of Damascus. Our common humanity binds us to them. Their fate is in our hands.

 

The following is excerpted from Amb. Ron Prosor’s address to the UNGA
to mark this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

 

“I, Ron Prosor, stand before you today as the child of Uri Prosor, who fled Nazi Germany when a Jewish state was still a dream—and the father of Lior, Tomer and Oren Prosor, for whom that dream is a vivid reality.

I see many from my father’s generation here today, some who survived death camps and death marches; who saw the unimaginable and still had the hope to imagine a brighter future; who endured the unspeakable and still had the courage to speak out for others.…

I see some from my children’s generation here. Today is about you. It is to you, and your children, that we extend a sacred promise during this week of commemoration at the United Nations.

Today I hear the voice of a 12-year-old girl named Donia Rosen, who hid in the forests of Poland after the Nazis murdered her entire family. She wrote in her diary on June 23, 1943: ‘I ask you not to forget the dead. Establish a memorial to us…a statue not of marble and not of stone, but of good deeds.’

Donia’s words echo in these halls of the United Nations, which were built in the wake of the Holocaust. On this day of commemoration, I say to my UN colleagues and to all the distinguished people gathered here: the commitment of ‘Never Again’ must be universal. It extends to each and every one of you. And ladies and gentleman, we have much work to do.

In our world today, state-sponsored anti-Semitism persists, hate fills children’s textbooks, and spiritual and religious leaders incite violence and racism.… In this hall of the General Assembly—at the very podium where I stand today—Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stands every year and shamelessly denies the Holocaust, while his government threatens to carry out another one.

Our duty is clear. It is not enough to be good. We must know what to do when we face evil. It is not enough to know what we stand for, we must know what we stand against. It is not enough to educate our own children about tolerance. We must lift the crippling burden of hate from all children in the world.…

Today I ask you to think of all the works of art that were never made, all the ideas that were never known, and all the cures that were never found. The scale of destruction [of the Holocaust] is incomprehensible. Look at one child, and multiply by a million and a half. Look at a member of your own family and multiply by six million. Just try to imagine!

Yet, there is something even greater than that unbearable loss: the Jewish people’s determination to endure and rebuild. We are a nation of survivors. The State of Israel is a living, breathing symbol of survival.… And on this day of commemoration, as a representative of the Jewish state among the nations of the world, I am so proud to say: Am Yisrael Chai! The People of Israel will live on.”

 

Melanie Phillips

 

The internationally famous British author and journalist Melanie Phillips, awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996, is best known for her controversial Daily Mail column on political and social issues.

Melanie Phillips has been an immensely influential, and controversial, social and political critic in Great Britain’s culture wars. Her study, All Must Have Prizes, was a critique of Britain’s educational and moral crisis, followed in 2006 by the acclaimed Londonistan, a biting analysis of the growing cultural and political influence of Islam and Islamists in Britain.

Her latest book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power (Encounter, 2010) follows earlier works on The Sex-Change Society, America’s Social Revolution, and The Ascent of Woman. Often accused of being a “conservative”, Melanie Phillips thinks of herself as a classical liberal defending Western culture against attempts to destroy it from within.

 

The following is excerpted from Melanie Phillips’
June 4, 2012 “A Jewish Pathology.”

 

One of the most shocking aspects of the campaign to demonize and delegitimize the state of Israel is the part played in this diabolical endeavour by Jewish and Israeli academics on the political left. We’re not talking here about people who are merely critical of Israeli policies. We’re talking about people who lend their names and academic credentials to lies, libels, distortions, fabrications, misrepresentations and other malicious fantasies in order to demonize and delegitimize Israel, treatment they afford to no other country.

Why do they do this? Why, especially since they themselves are Jews and Israelis? Many reasons suggest themselves, ranging from the craven desire for access to a fashionable society itself riddled with this prejudice, through naivety, ignorance of Judaism and history not to mention sheer benighted stupidity, by way of a bitterly warped psychopathology all the way to the closed ideological thought system of the left for which Israel is doubly damned—as a western nation and a Jewish western nation.

The part played by these Jews in the global bullying of Israel, and the tacit or explicit support they are thus lending to those whose aim is the extermination of the Jewish state, cannot be overstated. For those in the wider world who want Israel destroyed not only use the bogus arguments of these Jewish Israel-bashers but also use their Jewishness as a human shield, to insulate themselves against the charge of Jew-hatred.

How can there be anything bigoted about these arguments, they say, if Jews and Israelis are themselves using them? Very easily, actually; throughout the long centuries of Jewish persecution, the terrible fact is that Jews themselves have always been prominent in such murderous campaigns. The Judeophobic malice of today’s left, indeed, which can be traced back to the French Revolution, was supplied with rocket fuel by Karl Marx whose own Jewish ancestry managed to morph into virulent hatred of Judaism and the Jewish people.

Within Israel itself, the demonization of their own country by Israeli academics has to be seen to be believed—not least for the free rein they are usually given to debauch the role of a university and substitute lies and propaganda for facts and knowledge. If anyone challenges them, they start screaming that they are being demonized.…

The IsraCampus website is doing sterling work recording this systematic corruption of the academy by Jewish academics both within Israel and abroad. It is a deeply tragic and unique phenomenon. As Professor Steven Plaut has written on that site:

“Among the most malicious and venomous of all bigots, the Jewish antisemites are at the forefront of each and every smear campaign against Israel and other Jews. Jews today are leaders in the campaigns to boycott and divest from Israel, including the Solidarity with Terrorists groups. They make pilgrimage to the terrorist camps of the Hamas and the HezbAllah, cheering on terrorist atrocities against Jews. They pioneered the smear campaign to paint Israel as an apartheid regime and denouncing Israel as equivalent to Nazi Germany is their favorite pastime.

“…The creation of Israel was supposed to turn Jews into a normal people. But the psychosis of Jewish antisemitism has no comparable analogue among the nations, making the Jews a therapist’s sui generis. The disease of Jewish antisemitism not only illustrates the absence of normality among 21^st century Jewry, it threatens the very survival of Israel and of Jewish communities around the world.”

Bizarre? Grotesque? Suicidal? Sure. Yet astonishingly, all but ignored by Jews in Israel and elsewhere, who choose to pretend this is not happening.… [Some are] fighting back. Where are all the rest?

 

The following is excerpted from Melanie Phillips’ Daily Mail article
titled, “Why Iran Will Not ‘Come To Its Senses’”

 

War with Iran is a truly fearsome prospect.

Its likely consequences would include attacks on US air bases from thousands of Iranian missiles, the unleashing of terrorist attacks within the US and Europe, the rocketing of Israeli towns from the tens of thousands of missiles trained on Israel from Lebanon, the closing of the Straits of Hormuz thus paralyzing western oil supplies, and doubtless other horrors.

But however fearsome this prospect, that of a nuclear-armed Iran is worse. The consequences are simply insupportable.

A regime which has seen itself at war with the west ever since it came to power in 1979, and which has been involved in arguably every major terrorist atrocity against it, will be equipped with nuclear weapons to bring the west to its knees. Working as it does through puppet rogue regimes and terror organizations, it could perpetrate acts of nuclear terrorism—or threaten to do so.

It could mount its long-threatened attempt to wipe Israel off the map, thus provoking a nuclear response to prevent a second genocide of the Jews. Last but by no means least, it will spark a nuclear arms race throughout the region, thus ensuring that nuclear weapons come under the control of some of the most unstable and belligerent regimes on earth.…

This is a nightmare to which the west seems to have woken up only very recently, with the hands on Iran’s nuclear clock fast approaching midnight. Now it has sprung into action.… To which there are three points to make.

First, this is all far, far too late. Tough sanctions that would really hurt Iran were being urged years ago, when some of us started warning that Iran’s nuclear programme simply had to be stopped before the situation became dangerously out of control—and were derided as ‘neo-con war-mongers’ for our efforts.

Nothing was done; the UK and EU vaguely wrung their hands and shook the occasional fist; while for his part, [President Barack] Obama advertised US weakness by extending his hand in friendship to the Iranian regime which at the time was busy blowing up American and coalition soldiers in Iraq. Obama’s catastrophic strategy gave the Iranian regime the one thing it needed above all else—time to bring its infernal nuclear programme to fruition.…

Second, even tougher sanctions are likely to be ineffective as they will be circumnavigated by Russia, China and others. And in any event, what exactly is the outcome the west hopes that sanctions will bring about? That Iran shuts down its centrifuges, locks the doors on its nuclear plants and promises it won’t open them ever again and that the IAEA inspectors can set up monitoring stations at Fordow, Natanz and all the other secret nuclear locations which it will now make available for international inspection? Does anyone seriously believe that’s a realistic proposition?…

But third, the deeper problem is the west’s assumption that the Iranian regime is capable of ‘coming to its senses’—its assumption that these are rational actors who ultimately will act in their own interest. Few in the west understand that, on the contrary, the Iranian regime is impervious to reason. Educated, intelligent and cunning they may be—but they are religious fanatics driven by an entirely different set of considerations. That’s what makes this situation so terrifying.…

From the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei downwards the Iranian regime is dominated by people (adherents of a sect called the ‘Twelvers’) who believe that the Shia messiah, the Mahdi, will return to earth either as result of or to bring about the apocalyptic end of days. It is that apocalypse that they are intent upon facilitating. That is why the argument that ‘they wouldn’t dare launch a nuclear attack because they know half of Iran would be obliterated as a result’ is so fatuous.…

What really threatens to bring the west to its knees is its own cultural hubris. Refracting everything in the world through the prism of its unshakeable faith in universal reason, it is incapable of recognizing or understanding religious fanaticism—and insists instead upon treating the fanatic as a rational actor. Ironically, it is this belief in reason which has led the west to behave so irrationally in refusing to acknowledge the evidence of the mortal threat to itself posed by Iran—and that there is no alternative to force if it is to be stopped. And now, alas, we’re about to discover the consequences.