ANTI-ISRAEL CAMPAIGN REACHING CANADIANS: PROFESSOR
Janice Arnold
Canadian Jewish News, November 17, 2011
When her mother’s hairdresser in Winnipeg started talking about the way the Palestinians are being treated, historian Catherine Chatterley realized that propaganda against Israel is having an impact on the “average non-Jewish Canadian.” Neither Chatterley nor her mother is Jewish, but the former is the founding director since last year of the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (CISA) at the University of Manitoba.
The “insidious” campaign accusing Israel of being an apartheid or racist, even Nazi, state is succeeding among ordinary people with no personal stake in the Arab-Israeli conflict and who are not haters, she indicated. “As a non-Jew, I say, with respect, that I do not think the Jewish community is prepared for what’s happening,” Chatterley said at a daylong conference on “Combating the Delegitimation of Israel,” organized by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR), with support from Federation CJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and the U.S.-based Middle East Forum.
“Much that is being said about Jews on campuses and in the media is libelous, and some of it is by respected people,” she said. When she entered university in 1987, it was extremely difficult to access antisemitic material, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “Today, it is on the Internet and everywhere,” she said.
Chatterley teaches a year-long course on Antisemitism and the Holocaust, but even non-Jewish students interested in the subject “know nothing about Israel or Zionism, little about the Holocaust or Jewish history, but they do know about Hitler and fascism and it fascinates them.” The Jewish community, she thinks, should be concerned with educating non-Jewish youth, as well as their own, because “allies are key” in the fight against the undermining of the Jewish state and antisemitism.
Throughout the day, the 200 conference participants heard from speakers from Canada, the United States and Israel who believe Israel’s ideological enemies are gaining ground. The overall tone was that the Jewish community and Israel itself should more vigorously defend the Jewish state. “We cannot allow any posthumous victories for Hitler,” said CIJR founding director, Concordia University professor Frederick Krantz.
The threat is not only coming from the Arab world or the left wing.
Sally Zerker, York University professor emeritus and a pioneer in Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East, deplored the apparently increasing number of Jews who publicly denounce Israel. She accused them of playing into the “old canard of Jews damning other Jews, making themselves ‘good Jews’ in the eyes of the gentile world.” Zerker also thinks the American political action group J Street, that describes itself as pro-Israel, is actually damaging Israel, including by their support of President Barack Obama, who she does not believe is a friend of Israel.
Jewish professors who oppose Israel should be “exposed for who they are and what their true motives are,” she said. Zerker is especially enraged by Israeli professors she calls “fifth columnists” and “traitors,” terms she doesn’t hesitate to use because “Israel is at war, delegitimation is war, which means the Jewish people is at war as well.”
Fellow panelist National Post columnist Barbara Kay concurred, but instead of getting angry she finds Israeli academics and intellectuals who denounce Israel ludicrous. She cited several examples, singling out Tel Aviv University as “the epicentre of the phenomenon. They’ll never see another dollar from me.”
Charles Small sees the political left and radical Islam, especially when they combine forces, as the most cause for worry. The Montreal native was founding director of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YISA), which was shut down by the university this summer after five years. He believes university officials caved in to the “red-green alliance,” liberals and Muslim groups that did not like YISA’s speaking out against the “genocidal” antisemitism of radical Islam, in which Small includes Hamas.
The owners of Boutique Le Marcheur, Yves Archambault and his wife, Ginette Auger, were honoured at the conference lunch for their courage in resisting for more than a year a boycott campaign by Palestinian and Jewish Unity. The store’s stock includes a small percentage of Israeli shoes.
Archambault said his determination not to acquiesce is motivated by principle, not politics. Quebec, he said, is a democracy, and that includes commercial freedom and the right to be free from intimidation. Archambault thanked the Jewish community and other Quebecers for their solidarity and friendship.
The conference concluded with the adoption of a resolution calling on “all Jewish organizations that claim to represent us to do everything in their power” to combat the delegitimation of Israel wherever it occurs.… A videotape of the conference [is now] posted on CIJR’s website.
LET MY HUSBAND GO!
Esther Pollard
Jerusalem Post, November 17, 2011
Dear President Obama,
It is reported that on or about November 24 you will be pardoning this year’s American National Thanksgiving turkey, thereby sparing its life.
While the pardoning ceremony is light-hearted, the values it demonstrates are solemn and deeply cherished. As the president of the United States, your granting clemency to a lowly barnyard bird demonstrates to the world the great respect that the American people have for the values of justice, compassion and mercy. It is in this light that I write to bring to your attention once again to the plight of my husband, Jonathan Pollard.
On November 21, 2011—a scant three days before Thanksgiving—Jonathan Pollard enters his 27th year of a life sentence with no end in sight. I urge and implore you to include Jonathan in the list of holiday clemencies that are expected to be announced by the White House shortly, enabling those who are set free to get home in time for the holidays.
Mr. President, G-d has seen fit to elevate you to the position of the head of the mightiest nation in the world, the president of United States of America, and to invest in you powers of clemency second only to His own. Clearly these gifts were bestowed upon you as a man worthy and capable of fulfilling the biblical injunction which describes what G-d requires of man, namely: “to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your G-d.” (Micha 6:8)
Over the past year, since Jonathan submitted his clemency petition to you on October 15, 2010, there has been a burgeoning public awareness of the injustice in his sentence. Many senior American officials as well as high-ranking legal officials and elected representatives have appealed to you, both publicly and privately, to release Jonathan.
In their words, his release is a matter of simple justice because “his sentence is grossly disproportionate.” And it is appropriate on humanitarian grounds because his health is failing after more than a quarter of a century of affliction in American prisons.
Those who know the case best have been very clear in their publicly stated opinions and in their letters to you, indicating that keeping Jonathan in prison any longer is a travesty of justice. These include, among many others: former secretary of state George Shultz, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, White House legal counsel Bernard Nussbaum, former attorney-general Michael Mukasey, former deputy attorney-general Phillip Heymann, former assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb and former CIA director James Woolsey.
As well, in a historic display of bipartisanship, a group of 18 prominent former United States senators recently wrote to you, Mr. President, and asked that you commute Jonathan’s sentence to time served.
A number of the signatories served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, including senators Dennis DeConcini (D-Arizona), Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming), Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania), Birch Bayh (D-Indiana), Connie Mack (R-Florida) and David Durenberger (R-Minnesota). All of these individuals had access to the classified portions of Jonathan’s file, enabling them to know the full scope of the case.…
My husband, Jonathan Pollard, has now served more than six to eight times the usual sentence for the offense he committed. After enduring more than 25 years of the harshest afflictions in prison, including seven years in solitary confinement, it is time to release him, now, while he is still alive—before it is too late.…
Mr. President, if a lowly turkey is deserving of your compassion, how much more so is a man who has more than paid the price for the offense he committed and is now, after 26 years in prison, in danger of losing his life.… Mr. President, I implore you, set my husband free, and send him home to me in the Holy City of Jerusalem for the Holiday of Light—and G-d will surely bless!
Respectfully, Esther Pollard
QADDAFI’S HATRED OF JEWS TURNED ON HIM
Andrew Engel
Forward, November 18, 2011
Crossing the Ras Ajdir border into Libya from Tunisia on October 24 and 25 required two attempts and three hours, and culminated with an instructive initiation into a post-revolution reality.
The Libyan side felt like a scene from “Lord of the Flies”: gun-toting, barely uniformed teenagers attempting to enforce a semblance of authority; trucks roaming aimlessly, loaded with anti-aircraft guns; occasional tracers from random gunfire cutting across the sky. Entering at midnight only added to the surrealism.
Then, there was the Libyan guard booth at the crossing.
Among the first visuals to greet visitors, it was prominently graffitied with a large caricature of the ousted dictator Moammar Qaddafi, his wild hair sticking out from under a baseball cap. Emblazoned on the cap where a Yankees logo should have been was a large Star of David.
Later, after traversing the country as a freelance journalist, I would see this introduction to Libya as a supreme irony. Qaddafi, I came to understand, had spent decades conditioning his populace to hate Jews in a bid to build popular support for himself, as so many Arab dictators have done. And in the end, when his tyranny and misrule ultimately undid him, it was the hatred of Jews that he so successfully inculcated which was turned against him.
“Did you know that Qaddafi was a Jew?” the Libyan driver we hired to take us to Tripoli from Tunis smugly asked me somewhere on the road close to the Tunisian Island of Djerba, which still has a small Jewish population. “No,” I responded, though I had heard this claim before. “Yes, his mother was a Jew, and on his father’s side he was Italian,” the driver said matter-of-factly.
During the course of my six days hopscotching over the 1,000-mile-wide country, I had the opportunity to listen to scores of Libyans express themselves freely for the first time in 42 years, whether in person or through other media, such as music and graffiti. What I found, unfortunately, along with freedom of expression, was a virulent and ubiquitous anti-Semitism that looks likely to outlast the ruler who promoted it.
The presence of Jews in Libya dates back to the third century BCE, long predating the Arab conquest of Libya in the seventh century. But most of Libya’s 38,000 Jews fled in the wake of anti-Jewish riots after the creation of the State of Israel, in 1948. The remaining 4,000 to 7,000 Jews fled following the 1967 Six Day War. To ensure that they stayed out, Qaddafi, who came to power in 1969, canceled all debts owed to Jews. He also forbade the departed Jews from returning and confiscated their properties. Jewish cemeteries were bulldozed as if to show that even a dead Jew had no place in Libya.
To be sure, widespread incitement against Libyan Jews pre-dated Qaddafi. But the young dictator successfully channeled prevalent anti-Semitism to effectively make Libya Judenrein, cleansed of Jews, for the first time since Greco-Roman era.…
With a new driver in Tripoli, as I desperately sought a hotel at daybreak, came a new CD titled “Rap of the Libyan Revolution.” The first track, “Khalas ya Qaddafi” (“Finished, oh Qaddafi”), rapped in English: “Thank you Obama, thank you Jazeera, thank you Sarkozy for everything you’ve done to me.” It then moved into Arabic: “I’m sorry for Algeria because their leader is Bouteflika, who supports every Jew with his soldiers and weapons. Leave, oh Qaddafi. Every day people die, every day people suffer, every day mothers become widows, every day children fear their house will be destroyed, their toys will be broken, that they will become orphans in their youth, Go out, you Jew!…”
Many of the Libyans I met reminded me of missionaries committed to spreading the word that Qaddafi was and always would be alien to Libyan soil. It was almost as if the taxi driver, Mohammed and the brigade commander—by invoking two of the Arab world’s greatest evils, Zionism and colonialism (by the hands of the Italians)—had accomplished an amazing feat of disassociation between themselves and the man who ruled them for most of their lives, as if they were saying: “You know, Qaddafi was not one of us. A Libyan could not have done what he did.” It was a refusal to come to terms with Libya’s own past. Even a dictator, after all, requires popular support from some segments of society to rule for more than four decades.…
[In Benghazi] opposite the courthouse, on a building belonging to the February 17 Revolution Coalition, as the alliance that converged against Qaddafi is known, was considerable graffiti related to the ousted dictator, with Stars of David and swastikas abounding. One drawing depicted him stealing the people’s money. Just as Kwaafy was explaining that Libyans had no problem with Jews, only with Zionism, I glanced at a wall that was sprayed with the words “Moammar ibn Yehudia,” “Moammar is the son of Judaism.” Anti-Semitism, widely recognized as politically incorrect and morally untenable, is often replaced with anti-Zionism for cover, but the writing on the wall was clear.
When I raised the unsuccessful return of Libyan Jew David Gerbi, Kwaafy said: “Right, I’ve heard about him. I think he was a crazy Tunisian Jew or something.” In fact, Gerbi’s family fled Libya following the 1967 War. Gerbi, who was 12 at the time, eventually settled in Italy with his family. But he never forgot his native land. When the rebellion broke out, Gerbi, a Jungian psychologist, lobbied on the rebels’ behalf with South Africa, which had a frosty view of the rebellion and a rotating seat on the United Nations Security Council that made its view important. South Africa eventually voted for the resolution passed by the Security Council authorizing NATO to protect citizens in Libya. Later, Gerbi treated rebels suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in a Benghazi hospital.
In October, Gerbi returned to Tripoli to reopen the historic Dar Bishi Synagogue. In response he was nearly lynched while praying there. Hundreds of Libyans protested his presence in Tripoli and Benghazi on the eve of Yom Kippur, with placards that read, “There is no place for Jews in Libya.” His endeavor ended under threat of death and with a return flight to Rome on an Italian military plane.
“It’s easy to get rid of Qaddafi the person, but much more difficult to get rid of the Qaddafi within,” Gerbi told The Jerusalem Post.…
Libyans today may find it convenient to participate in an act of collective scapegoating and denial, a refusal to admit that one of their own could rise to such power only to demean and dominate his own people. But a country unable to come to terms with its history may find itself incapable of building the successful, inclusive democracy it has promised the world. While Libyan interim government officials have said that Gerbi’s timing was too soon, a simple cross-country trip tells me that, at least in my generation, there never will be an appropriate time for Libyan Jews.
TIME TO REHABILITATE PORTUGAL’S DREYFUS
Michael Freund
Jerusalem Post, November 16, 2011
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of an unsung Jewish hero, Captain Arthur Carlos de Barros Basto.
His exploits extended from the battlefields of World War I to the struggle to reclaim crypto-Jewish identity, but this intrepid figure met a cruel and unwarranted end at the hands of Portugal’s dictatorial regime. Despite the passage of so many decades, the injustice committed against him cries out for resolution. The time has come to give this man his due.
Barros Basto came from a family of Bnei Anusim (whom historians refer to by the derogatory term “Marranos”), descendants of Jews whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Catholicism in the 15th century.
Raised a Catholic, he went on to become a decorated soldier who commanded a Portuguese infantry company in World War I, where he fought in the trenches of Flanders and took part in the allied offensive to liberate Belgium.
After the war Barros Basto decided to re-embrace the faith of his forefathers. He studied Judaism intensively, then traveled to Spanish Morocco in December 1920 to undergo a formal return to the Jewish people before a rabbinical court.
Back in Portugal, Barros Basto settled in the northern city of Oporto, where he launched a public campaign to persuade other Bnei Anusim to return to their roots. Donning his military uniform and medals, he traveled among the towns and villages of Portugal’s interior, giving rousing speeches, conducting Jewish services and seeking to inspire others to follow his example. After centuries of hiding, thousands of Bnei Anusim answered his call and tentatively agreed to join his movement.
Barros Basto turned to world Jewry for help, and succeeded in raising the necessary funds to build the magnificent Mekor Haim synagogue, which still stands in Oporto. He opened a yeshiva that operated for nine years, where dozens of young Bnei Anusim learned about Jewish life and lore. He also single-handedly produced a Jewish newspaper, Halapid (the Torch), and was responsible for the publication of numerous books on Jewish history and law in Portuguese.
But his open identification with Judaism, and the thousands of people whom he touched, did not sit well with the government or with Church authorities. They sought to quell his nascent movement by bringing him up on charges connected to the practice of the Jewish religion. On June 12, 1937, the Superior Disciplinary Council of the Portuguese Army concluded that Barros Basto lacked the “moral capacity” to serve in its ranks.
And just what exactly was his “crime”? Incredibly, the military council declared that Barros Basto had “performed the operation of circumcision of several students pursuant to a precept of the Israelite religion he professes” and said that he was excessively affectionate toward his pupils. As a result, they summarily drummed him out of the armed forces, destroyed his career and sullied his name. This brought about an end to his efforts to reawaken Portugal’s Bnei Anusim, many of whom saw the treatment meted out to Barros Basto as a sign that the authorities would not tolerate their return to Judaism.
In 1961, he died, a broken man.… Unlike Dreyfus, Barros Basto has yet to receive the exoneration he deserves. Once Portugal began its transition to democracy in 1975, his family appealed to the authorities to rectify the situation, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. For the past decade, Shavei Israel, the organization I chair, has been involved in the Barros Basto case.
Over the years, we elicited support from American Jewish organizations such as the Conference of Presidents, the Orthodox Union and the Religious Zionists of America, all of whom have written to the Portuguese ambassador to Washington about the matter. Last month, on October 31, there was an important new development.
With the help of an attorney, the captain’s granddaughter, Isabel Maria de Barros Lopes, submitted a formal request to the president of the Portuguese parliament seeking her grandfather’s posthumous reinstatement into the military. Isabel told me that she is determined to see things through. Just like her grandfather, she is not afraid to fight for what is right.
But more pressure must be brought to bear on Portuguese officials. Contact your local Portuguese embassy or sign the petition to the leader of the Portuguese parliament online at: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/pardon-Capt-Barros-Basto/. We must garner as much international support as possible to bring closure to this painful chapter.…
The stain on this noble man’s name is also a stain on Portugal itself, and it is time for it to be removed, once and for all. Rehabilitate the Portuguese Dreyfus and let justice be done, so that his soul may finally rest in peace.
(Michael Freund is chairman of Shavei Israel, an organization that assists lost tribes
and hidden Jewish communities to return to the Jewish people.)
