BREAKING NEWS:
“The Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court has just invalidated the parliamentary election there. The parliament, 75 percent of whose members were Islamists, is being dissolved. The military junta has taken over total authority. The presidential election is still scheduled for a few dozen hours from now.
In short, everything is confused and everything is a mess. All calculations are thrown to the wind. What this appears to be is a new military coup. What is the underlying theme? The armed forces concluded that an Islamist takeover was so dangerous for Egypt and for its own interests that it is better to risk civil war, a bloodbath, and tremendous unpopularity than to remain passive and turn over power. I believe this decision was made very reluctantly and not out of some lust for power by the generals. They have decided that they had no choice.
Yes, it is under legal cover, but nobody is going to see it as a group of judges—appointed by former President Hosni Mubarak, remember—looking deep into the law books and coming up with a carefully reasoned decision based on precedent. In theory, this will be seen by every Islamist—whether Salafi or Muslim Brotherhood—and by most of the liberals—who feel closer to the Islamists than to the government—as if the 2011 revolution has just been reversed. In preparation, the army prepared a new regulation allowing itself arrest anyone.
Prediction: massive violence.…”—Barry Rubin, in “Court Dissolves Egyptian Parliament; Army Takes Over; Civil War?” [For the full article click HERE.—Ed.]
The following is excerpted from Israeli President Shimon Peres’ acceptance speech
after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the US’ highest civilian honor,
from Barack Obama in Washington on June 13, 2012.
President Obama,
I was profoundly moved by your decision to award me the Presidential Medal of Freedom. To receive it is an honor.… It is a testament to the historic friendship between our two nations.
When I was really young, the founder of the State of Israel, David Ben Gurion, called me to work with him. For sixty-five years, inspired by his leadership, I gathered strength for my country, pursued peace for my people.…
I receive this honor today on behalf of the people of Israel. They are the true recipients of this honor. With this moving gesture, you are paying tribute to generations upon generations of Jews who dreamed of, and fought for, a state of their own. A state that would give them shelter. A state that they could defend.
Mr. President,
You are honoring the pioneers who built homes on barren mountains, on shifting sands, fighters who sacrificed their lives for their country. On their behalf, I thank America for days of concern, for sleepless nights, caring for our safety, for our future.… Israel admires the United States, for being a land of the free, a home of the brave, a nation of generosity.…
When the Liberty Bell rang in Philadelphia, it resonated throughout the world. A tired world was surprised to witness, contrary to its experience, a great nation growing greater by giving, not by taking.… You introduced a constitution, based on balance, not on force. Liberty is the soul of the Jewish heritage. We didn’t give up our values, even when facing furnaces and gas chambers. We lived as Jews, we died as Jews, and rose again as free Jews.
Israel did not survive merely to be a passing shadow in history, but as a new Genesis, a start-up nation.… When we discovered that we were short of land and water, we realized that we had a priceless resource: The courageous, undefeatable human spirit. We invested in knowledge and turned our attention to the ever-growing promise of science. Unlike land and water, science cannot be conquered by armies or won by wars.…
Science provided Israel with unexpected economic growth. In the last twenty years our economy grew two hundred and seventy percent. Science has enabled us to build an agriculture based on technology, that yields ten times more than the norm. It has enabled us to build an effective defense against armies ten-times larger. Brave soldiers and sophisticated tools brought us victory. But, we remained the people of the book.
Yes, my friends, Israel is the living proof that democracy means progress. Science means growth. Literature and arts means enrichment. Israel today is an innovative, pluralistic society, where Christians, Arabs, Jews, Bedouins and Druse live together in peace. It is not yet perfect, but it is an example of what can be.
My Friends,
We are now witnessing the departure of one age and the arrival of a new one. The agricultural age lasted 10,000 years. The scientific age is still fresh. Yet in the last fifty years, the scientific age has achieved more than in the previous 10,000 years. This new age has brought new challenges, and new dangers.…
The danger is today concentrated in Iran. The Iranian people are not our enemy. It is the present leadership that became a threat. It turned Iran into a danger to world peace. It is a leadership that aims to rule the Middle East, spreading terror all over the world. They are trying to build a nuclear bomb. They bring darkness to a world longing for light.
We have a solemn responsibility to our own people, to our friends throughout the world, to posterity. The Iranian threat must be stopped. It cannot be delayed. Mr. President, you worked hard to build a world coalition to meet this immediate threat. You started, rightly, with economic sanctions. You made it clear, rightly again, that all options are on the table. Clearly, we support it.…
Friends,
The majority of people are tired of war. In many homes, families still mourn the loss of their loved ones.… I remember that 19 years ago, on the lawn outside the [White House], President Clinton helped us initiate the peace process. Since then, Israelis and Palestinians have come a long way together, but still, hard work remains ahead.…
My vision is an Israel living in full, genuine peace, joining with all the people of the Middle East, former enemies and new friends alike.… My vision is an Israel whose moral call is old as the Ten Commandments tablets and whose imagination is as new as a digital tablet. Together, our ancient and modern vision can help bring Tikkun Olam.…
My greatest hope is that a dawn will rise where every man and woman, Israeli or Palestinian, Syrian or Lebanese, young people, wherever they are, will wake up and be able to say to themselves: “I am free to be free.” Amen.
THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: PRISONERS ARRIVE AT AUSCHWITZ
Michael Omer-Man
Jerusalem Post, June 10, 2012
“Young and healthy people don’t live longer than three months here. Priests one month, Jews two weeks. There is only one way out—through the crematorium chimneys.” That was the message delivered to the 728 prisoners who arrived in the first mass transport to Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, as later recalled by survivor Kazimierz Albi.
The first group the Nazis sent to Auschwitz, which later became one of the most notorious institutions of murder in human history, was made up of Polish political prisoners. They arrived at the compound two years before it became a camp for the extermination of Jews, but the message delivered to that first group by a Nazi captain made clear that this was never an ordinary prison.
The Polish prisoners, who were transported by train from Tarnow, were mostly Poles accused of belonging to resistance movements and included a number of Jews. As they descended from the train that day, each was assigned a prison number between 31 and 758. Prisoners 1 through 30, common German criminals, had been sent to the camp a month earlier.
“My brother was ahead of me. He got number 116; and Troop Captain Stachowicz was given number 117. I got number 118. The list for our transport started with Stanislav Ryniak, number 31, and ended with Ignacy Plachta, number 758.,” Albi recalled of those first minutes in the camp. “After those formalities, the Kapos drove us…to the roll-call ground, where we had to line up in 5 rows.”
For the next two years, the Nazis continued sending Polish political prisoners to the concentration camp at the intersection of the Vistula and Sola rivers. In 1942, however, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime devised the “Final Solution” to rid Europe of its Jews, a plan in which Auschwitz would play a central role. On January 25 of that year, Heinrich Himmler gave an order to camp authorities to prepare for the arrival of 150,000 German Jews.
The first transport composed of Jews arrived some three weeks later from Bytom, a German-annexed area of Poland. That year, some 175,000 Jews were brought to the extermination camp. In the coming months and years, the deportations to Auschwitz increased in speed, frequency and size.
When the Soviet Red Army finally arrived at Auschwitz to liberate it in 1945, one major-general described “the horrible villainies of the German fiends in the camp Auschwitz, which surpass all the atrocities known to us.” But even after its liberation, the full scope of the atrocities the Nazis carried out took months and years to be told.
By the end of World War Two, when the camp was liberated, 1.1 million Jews had been sent to Auschwitz; 90 percent of them were exterminated by the genocidal Nazi killing machine established and first populated five years earlier.…
CANADA ON ‘72 MUNICH OLYMPICS
This week, Canada’s Parliament became the first in the world to adopt a motion officially supporting Israel’s call for a moment of silence at the upcoming London Olympics to mark the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Games. According to Member of Parliament, and former Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, “civil society groups and political leaders around the world have been calling on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to hold a moment of silence at the opening ceremony of the London Games…[as] part of our responsibility to remember the victims of this terrorist assault 40 years ago—le devoir de mémoir (the duty of memory).” Nevertheless, the IOC, forty years later, remains steadfast in its refusal publicly to commemorate the Israeli victims.—Ed.
BEFORE EURO 2012, THERE WAS ‘THE THERESIENSTADT LEAGUE’
Shira Rubin
Times of Israel, June 8, 2012
Contending European football teams traveled to Poland [last] week for the UEFA Euro 2012 opening games, re-tracing the routes traversed by millions of Jews…bound for the Nazi concentration camps.
As the national teams from Germany, Italy, England and Holland somberly crossed the “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets One Free) gate into the former Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, players and coaches paid tribute to the victims, while warning against prejudice and violence on today’s field.…
What these teams might not have known, however, is that football was played in the Holocaust, functioning as one of the many paradoxes of ghetto culture.
Joyful, leisurely, gloriously melodramatic: Not words generally associated with a concentration camp, yet they are the emotions apparent on the faces of a thoroughly enthralled crowd at a Theresienstadt football game in September, 1944, played on a field within walking distance to a crematorium at its apogee of productivity (up to 190 corpses per day).
In response to increasing international suspicion of mass exterminations, the Nazi propaganda film “Theresienstadt: A Jewish Community” pointed to the camp’s large population of intellectual and cultural Jewish figures from Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria, as evidence of a vigorous Jewish colony.
Promised to be saved by SS officer Hans Gunther, the popular Jewish German actor/director Kurt Gerron directed the film and gave an on-screen appearance testifying to the camp’s humane conditions. After shooting was completed, Gerron, and the Theresientadt jazz band “Ghetto Swingers,” were transported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
The film’s football scene was intentionally elongated, as “the SS realized (the game) was so well liked around the world, and so would make the acceptance of the film easier,” says Nazi propaganda analyst Karl Margry. Within weeks of shooting, most of those in the film were dead.
The uncle of Israeli filmmaker Oded Breda, Pavel Breda, was one of the players featured in the film’s gripping game scene. Four weeks after the film’s shooting, he was sent to Auschwitz, where he died of Typhus before the war’s end.
The quest to unravel both his own family’s history, and that of the sport, have become the subject of Breda’s documentary, Liga Theresienstadt.… The film brings on a flood of intense memory for many of the 4,000 Theresienstadt survivors, like Honza Burka, one of the team’s all-star players at left back position, who says playing football was the only time he was “living” during the dark years in the camp. This visual evidence, he says, validates a seemingly surreal past, which he has been unable to translate into post-Holocaust life.
“We didn’t try to explain, because nobody would understand us,” he recalls. “I’m very lucky that in this film, I see myself playing football. [This means] that everything was true, not a story I was telling to somebody.”
“Football was a matter of pleasure. We needed some pleasure in our desperate times, our desperate lives,” says Toman Brod, today a historian, who was in his teenage years a die-hard Liga Terezin enthusiast. “Many things were crazy, but they were reality, and so it was very important not to lose our sense of human dignity.”
For the first time since his return from Theresienstadt 70 years ago, to what is now the Czech Republic, Brod attends a Sparta-Liverpool football match at the Sparta Prague Stadium. Among the crowds of frenzied fans, Brod stands warily, grabbing often at his Sparta scarf for balance. “I am afraid,” he says. In the stadium parking lot, the walls are grafittied with “Jude Slavie,” [“Jewish Slavie,” Slavie being Sparta’s biggest soccer rival]. “Jude,” says Brod, because in this area it is still synonymous with “evil.…”
READING THE TALMUD IN AMMAN
Aryeh Tuchman
Jerusalem Post, June 11, 2012
University libraries in Israel and across the Jewish world have recently been abuzz over word that a group of Arab and Muslim scholars have published the first ever translation into Arabic of the entire Babylonian Talmud—a 1,500-year-old collection of ancient rabbinic discussions of Jewish law, theology and folklore. The huge project was organized by the Middle East Studies Center in Amman, Jordan, and involved almost 100 scholars working for six years.
News reports state that many libraries in the Arab world are obtaining copies.
What are we to make of this effort? Unfortunately, the center’s director, Jawad Ahmad, refuses to talk to the Israeli press, so all we have to go on is the printed introduction and the posts on the center’s website.
That is where the trouble begins. The project features a very lengthy introduction to the Talmud by Dr. Amir al Hafi, a professor of religious studies at the University of Al al-Bayt, Jordan. Dr. Al Hafi’s introduction draws heavily on the writings of three notorious anti-Semites: Rev. I.B. Pranaitis, Israel Shahak and Hasan Zaza; and repeats many classic anti-Semitic allegations made in connection with the Talmud and other Jewish texts.
If his essay is characteristic of the mindset of the Arabic Talmud’s translators or intended users, as I believe it is, this new translation can only harm Jews and set back any efforts to promote interfaith understanding.
Although Dr. Al Hafi cites a handful of humanistic passages in the Talmud, the vast majority of his introduction describes the Talmud as a racist document that encapsulates a Jewish spirit of ethnic supremacism. He claims that Jews desire “superiority and domination of all peoples”; that modern Jews have a Talmudic mindset of racism and contempt toward non-Jews; and that the Talmud encourages Jews to lie to and steal from others. He explicitly links these Talmudic attitudes to the State of Israel.
In his view, the Talmud has created Jewish hatred toward Palestinians, and has led Jews to violate Palestinians’ rights and dispossess them of their property. Dr. Al Hafi alleges that when Jews in the Diaspora give support to Israel, they do so as a result of these same Talmudic influences. He also alleges that the Talmud issues a “clear prohibition on withdrawing from the West Bank,” and prohibits Jews from adhering to peace agreements. He concludes his essay with the hope that this newly translated Talmud will allow students in Arab and Muslim universities to begin their studies and understand the “Jewish spirit” and Jewish national identity.
How important is Dr. Al Hafi’s essay?… It tells you about the cultural environment in which this new field of academic Talmud studies in the Muslim world will take place: one in which a Professor of Religious Studies in Jordan accepts the claims of avowed anti-Semites about Jewish civilization, and feels no shame in citing them in his writing; in which Jews are believed to be racist, supremacist, deceitful and hateful people; and in which the actions of the Israeli government are thought to be motivated by an ideological or religious hatred of Arabs rather than geopolitical and security concerns.…
Arab polemicists have cited the Talmud in their attacks on Jews for a thousand years. Partly on the basis of passages in the Talmud, the 11th-century theologian Ibn Hazm described Jews as “the most imbecilic, impious, lying people in the world.” A steady stream of anti-Jewish propaganda based on Jewish texts has circulated through the Arab world ever since.…
If Muslim scholars are interested in learning about and understanding modern Jews, let them start by talking to us.… Only then will we be able to guide each other through our evolving literary traditions.
(Aryeh Tuchman is a PhD student in Jewish history at Yeshiva University.)
ISRAEL AND THE BOAT PEOPLE
Shoshana Bryen
Times of Israel, June 6, 2012
[Last] Sunday mark[ed] 35 years since 66 Vietnamese refugees, fleeing the communist takeover of their homeland on a small, leaky boat, found deliverance. They were without food and water, and ships from Panama, Norway and Japan had ignored their distress signals. They despaired of rescue.
Captain Meir Tadmor of the Israeli cargo ship Yuvali was on his way to Japan when he saw them on 10 June 1977.… After receiving permission from the Israeli government to find them refuge, Capt. Tadmor made an unscheduled stop in Hong Kong, which refused to allow the ship to dock. He sailed on to Taiwan, where the refugees were refused because they had no citizenship. That would be fixed.
In his first official act, newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin made the Vietnamese citizens of Israel. The Taiwan government then allowed the former refugees to enter the country, receive assistance and be taken to the airport for their trip to Israel.…
At the ceremony to welcome them, Israeli Minister of Immigrant Absorption David Levy chastised those who had ignored the leaky, dangerous boats and ignored their hungry, sick and desperate passengers: “Let them do as we have. May they lend a hand to save women and children who are in the heart of the sea without a homeland, and lead them to safe shores.”
Israel understood boat people because Jews in living memory had been boat people. Prime Minister Begin told President Carter: “We never have forgotten the boat with 900 Jews, the St. Louis, having left Germany in the last weeks before the Second World War…traveling from harbor to harbor, from country to country, crying out for refuge. They were refused.… Therefore it was natural…to give [the Vietnamese refugees] a haven in the Land of Israel.”
There was the St. Louis, and there were other boats. More than 100,000 Jews tried to reach Palestine by sea between 1934 and 1948 on 120 ships making 142 voyages. Only a few thousand made it to Israel that way. More than 1,600 drowned. More than 1,000 were killed on the SS Struma (768 dead, one survivor) and the Mefkura (345 dead, five survivors), both sunk by Soviet torpedoes. The British interned as many as 50,000 in Cyprus, or back in Germany, including the passengers of the Exodus in 1947. The Hannah Senesh docked; the Enzo Sereni didn’t. The Salvador and the Europa were wrecked in storms.
The experience of Jewish refugees and the hopelessness of statelessness made Israel sensitive to the hopelessness of people from another place, another culture, another war, giving the Vietnamese a place to start over.…
