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Contents:
The Shofar’s Call: Yom Kippur, 5775: Baruch Cohen, CIJR, Oct. 1, 2014— The shofar, New Year’s symbol…
Duplicitous Abbas Comes Out of the Closet: Isi Leibler, Candidly Speaking, Oct. 1, 2014 — Even the few delusional apologists who maintain that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is a genuine partner for peace must have been stunned by his obscene and demagogic address on Rosh Hashana at the United Nations General Assembly.
Democracy Requires a Patriotic Education: Donald Kagan, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26, 2014— What is an education for? It is a question seldom investigated thoroughly.
Fasting on Yom Kippur: Dry Bones Blog, Oct. 2, 2014
Betrayal: FDR and the Jews: Jerold S. Auerbach, Algemeiner, Sept. 23, 2014
Terrorist Threat Alert: John Cleese (Reportedly), Snopes, Aug. 23, 2014
Chloe Valdary: Christian, Black and a Rising Star of Pro-Israel Campus Activism: Anthony Weiss and Miriam Moster, JTA, Sept. 8, 2014
THE SHOFAR’S CALL: YOM KIPPUR, 5775
Baruch Cohen
CIJR, Oct. 1, 2014
In Loving Memory of Malca z”l
The shofar, New Year’s symbol, sounds
The long-drawn call for all humanity!
A call for peace that’s yet to be
Addressed to all humanity.
Within the little synagogue the lights are dim
We hear the shofar
blow–
Piercing a silence that seems
To pray, for you and me, its call
A prayer for us.
A call for a peace yet to be,
A long-drawn note to all humanity:
The tone resounds,
And mankind
knows
It is the call for love,
For a humanness yet to be…
All around the air is hushed!
We hear the shofar’s blast redound:
From my heart, may peace abound!
(Baruch Cohen, CIJR’s Research Chairman,
will soon be celebrating his 95th birthday)
DUPLICITOUS ABBAS COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET
Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking, Oct. 1, 2014
Even the few delusional apologists who maintain that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is a genuine partner for peace must have been stunned by his obscene and demagogic address on Rosh Hashana at the United Nations General Assembly. Abbas, whose 1982 doctoral thesis promoted Holocaust denial, accused Israel of engaging in genocide, terrorism and apartheid. He condemned “the racist occupying state” of having “chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.” He stated that “the devastation caused by this recent aggression is unmatched in modern times” and that “in the name of Palestine and its people, I affirm here today: We will not forget and we will not forgive, and we will not allow war criminals to escape punishment.”
Significantly, he even reverted to the pre-Oslo Accords jargon of the radical rejectionists by referring to Israel as the “colonial occupying power” and other derogatory terms. He promised to “maintain the traditions of our national struggle established by the Palestinian fedayeen … in early 1965” — an unequivocal endorsement of terror. The speech was clearly a calculated appeal to the Palestinian street to demonstrate that his hatred of Israel matched that of Hamas. He was probably also desperate to refocus attention on the Palestinian issue which had been relegated to the sidelines because the world, including Arab countries, is obsessed with the threat of ISIS. President Barack Obama’s address at the General Assembly even contradicted his previous rigid stance by conceding that “Iraq, Syria and Libya should cure… the illusion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main source of problems in the region”.
None of this should shock us. From the outset, Abbas has consistently followed the policy of his predecessor. Like Yasser Arafat with Ehud Barak at Camp David, Abbas rejected the offers of Ehud Olmert in 2008, which would have enabled the creation of a Palestinian state on 94 percent of the territories formerly occupied by Jordan. Abbas intensified the demonic hatred of Israel promoted in Palestinian schools, mosques and the media. His brainwashing bred a criminal society suffused with hatred, to the point at which proud mothers on Palestinian state television would exuberantly thank Allah for enabling their children to become martyrs by murdering the Jews while praying that their remaining offspring would follow the same path. Only last week, the PA referred to the murderers of the three Israeli teenagers as “shahids” — martyrs. Abbas has diverted vast sums of money toward massive salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons and provided state pensions for families of suicide bombers and generous endowments for released mass murderers who are sanctified as heroes. He has honored perpetrators of the most dastardly suicide bombings and acts of terrorism by establishing city squares, football clubs and institutions in their names.
The duplicitous Abbas shares precisely the same goal as Hamas — the destruction of Israel. Like Arafat, who denied the existence of the Jewish Temple, he too refutes Jewish links to Israel. But he was savvy enough to realize that he could tactically achieve far more by theoretically disavowing violence and employing diplomatic pressure to seek to undo Jewish sovereignty in stages. The world is willfully blind to his corruption and unperturbed by the PA’s siphoning of billions of dollars of international funds designated to improve the living conditions of Palestinians. Abbas also suspended elections for four years, aware that the majority of his constituents were likely to support Hamas because of the rampant corruption. Until now, Abbas spoke with a forked tongue, speaking softly and depicting himself as a man of peace to the West, particularly to America, while simultaneously inciting his people to vicious hatred. Alas, due to a combination of naiveté and U.S. pressure, Israel engaged in an Alice in Wonderland charade of lip service to Abbas as a “moderate” and “peace partner” instead of exposing him as a corrupt autocrat of a criminal society…
However, the bellicose Abbas address enabled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak at the U.N. in an uninhibited manner for the first time, without recourse to the mindless mantras expressing hopes for cooperation with our “peace partner.” Even the U.S. State Department, in rare criticism, condemned Abbas’ speech, saying it “included offensive characterizations that were deeply disappointing and which we reject” and are “counterproductive and undermined efforts to create a positive atmosphere and restore trust between the parties.” It did, however, dissociate the U.S. from Netanyahu’s equation of Hamas and ISIS as both representing “branches of the same poisonous tree.” We should be under no illusions. Abbas has brought the phony American orchestrated peace process to an end. He has effectively rejected any future negotiations based on providing Israel with security. Aside from his incendiary libel, by suggesting that Israel must accept the “right of return” of Arab refugees, he is blatantly promoting eliminationism.
He will now seek to galvanize the majority of nations — Islamic countries, Third World countries and rogue states — to intensify efforts toward delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. This will lead to an active campaign to criminalize the IDF at the International Criminal Court, and to impose global sanctions on Israel. But that will only become a real threat if Abbas obtains the support — or even the abstention of — the United States and the major European countries. To retain our relationship with Western countries, Netanyahu must go further than exposing the criminal nature of Palestinian society, which he did so belatedly but articulately in his address at the U.N. General Assembly. Implementing a two-state solution is currently inconceivable. Even setting aside the fanatical hatred of the PA, a Palestinian state today would effectively transform the West Bank into Hamastan. Nor, in light of the repeated total ineptitude of U.N. peacekeeping forces, can Israel be expected to delegate security to international parties.
But the overwhelming majority of Israelis do not wish to annex territories that will ultimately result in millions of additional Arabs having voting rights and the ability to transform Israel into a binational state. The government must therefore announce that there is no intention of annexing Palestinian territories other than the major settlement blocs — less than 5 percent of the formerly Jordanian-occupied West Bank — based on demographic changes. U.S. recognition of the settlement blocs as part of Israel would be consistent with the commitment that President George W. Bush gave to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 to encourage the disengagement from Gaza. The Israeli government should freeze construction other than for natural growth in areas that are located outside the settlement blocs.
Today we need Western support on a number of critical issues: preventing the rearming of Hamas; avoiding sanctions; combating the intensified efforts to demonize and delegitimize Israel; and above all building a coalition to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power. Even though it could generate domestic problems among far right-wing elements, the government must speak with one voice and commit itself to a separation from the Palestinians if and when there shall be a genuine peace partner. In the interim, it will seek to improve the living standards of Palestinians on the West Bank. Netanyahu must convey the unequivocal message that Israel’s objective is to live in peace with its neighbors, and it is only legitimate security concerns and a lack of a peace partner that prevent us from moving forward immediately with a separation. If that can be communicated to the U.S. and Western countries, the defamatory outburst by Abbas at the General Assembly could prove to have well served our cause.
DEMOCRACY REQUIRES A PATRIOTIC EDUCATION
Donald Kagan
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26, 2014
What is an education for? It is a question seldom investigated thoroughly. The ancient philosophers had little doubt: They lived in a city-state whose success and very existence depended on the willingness of citizens to overcome the human tendency to seek their individual, self-interested goals and to make the sacrifices needed for the community's well-being. Their idea of education, therefore, was moral and civic, not merely instrumental. They reasoned that if a state or community is to be good, its citizens must be good, so they aimed at an education that would produce virtuous people and good citizens.
Some two thousand years later, from the 16th through the 18th centuries, a different group of philosophers in Italy, England and France introduced a powerful new idea. Their world was dominated by ambitious princes and kings who were rapidly asserting ever greater authority over the lives of their people and trampling on the traditional expectations of individuals and communities. In the philosophers' view, every human being was naturally endowed with three essential rights: to defend his life, liberty and lawfully acquired property. The responsibility of the state, therefore, was limited and largely negative: to protect the people from external enemies and not to interfere with the rights of individual citizens. Suspicious of the claims of church and state to inculcate virtue as mere devices to serve the selfish interests of their rulers, most philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that moral and civic instruction was not the business of the state.
Among our country's founders, none was a more devoted son of the Enlightenment than Thomas Jefferson, yet as he considered the needs of the new democratic republic he had helped to establish, he came to very different conclusions. Like the ancient philosophers, Jefferson regarded education as essential to the establishment and maintenance of a good polity— Plato, in "The Republic," spends many pages on the nature of the citizens' education, as does Aristotle in "Politics." Jefferson regarded a proper educational system as so important that in the epitaph he wrote for himself, he did not mention that he had twice been elected president of the United States but proudly recorded that he was the "Father of the University of Virginia." Jefferson was convinced that there needed to be an education for all citizens if they and their new kind of popular government were to flourish. He understood that schools must provide "to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts, in writing." For Jefferson, though, the most important goals of education were civic and moral. In his "Preamble to the 1779 Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" he addresses the need for all students to have a political education through the study of the "forms of government," political history and foreign affairs. This was not meant to be a "value free" exercise; on the contrary, its purpose was to communicate the special virtues of republican representative democracy, the dangers that threatened it, and the responsibility of its citizens to esteem and protect it. This education was to be a common experience for all citizens, rich and poor, for every one of them had natural rights and powers, and every one had to understand and esteem the institutions, laws and traditions of his country if it was to succeed.
It is striking to notice the similarity between Jefferson's ideas and those of a leader of the last great democracy prior to Jefferson's fledgling democracy. In 431 B.C., Pericles of Athens described the character of the great democratic society he wished for his community: A city "governed by the many, not the few," where in the "matter of public honors each man is preferred not on the basis of his class but of his good reputation and merit. No one, moreover, if he has it in him to do some good for the city, is barred because of poverty or humble origins." Both great democratic leaders knew that democracy, properly understood, requires a careful balance between the political and constitutional rights of the individual, where absolute equality is the only acceptable principle, and the other aspects of life, where equality of opportunity and reward on the basis of merit are appropriate. They also agreed on the need for individuals to limit their desires and even to curtail their own rights, when necessary, to make sacrifices in the service of the community without whose protection those rights could not exist. In short, democracy and patriotism were inseparable.
These values have not disappeared, but in our own time they have been severely challenged. With the shock of the 9/11 terror attacks, most Americans reacted by clearly and powerfully supporting their government's determination to use military force to stop such attacks and to prevent future ones. Most Americans also expressed a new unity, an explicit patriotism and love of their country not seen among us for a very long time. That is not what we saw and heard from the faculties on most elite campuses in the country, and certainly not from the overwhelming majority of people designated as "intellectuals" who spoke up in public. They offered any and all explanations, so long as they indicated that the attackers were really victims, that the fault really rested with the United States. As most of us have come to know too well, the terrorists of al Qaeda and other jihadists regard America as "the great Satan" and hate the U.S. not only because its power stands in the way of the achievement of their Islamist vision, but also because its free, open, democratic, tolerant, liberal and prosperous society is a powerful competitor for the allegiance of millions of Muslims around the world. No change of American policy, no retreat from the world, no repentance or increase of modesty can change these things. Yet many members of the intelligentsia decried the outburst of patriotism that greeted the new assault on America. The critics were exemplified by author Katha Pollitt, who wrote in the Oct. 1, 2001, edition of the Nation about her daughter wanting to fly the American flag outside their window after 9/11. "Definitely not," Ms. Pollitt replied. "The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war."
Such ideas still have a wide currency, reflecting a serious flaw in American education that should especially concern those of us who take some part in it. The encouragement of patriotism is no longer a part of our public educational system, and the cost of that omission has made itself felt. This would have alarmed and dismayed the founders of our country. Jefferson meant American education to produce a necessary patriotism. Democracy—of all political systems, because it depends on the participation of its citizens in their own government and because it depends on their own free will to risk their lives in its defense—stands in the greatest need of an education that produces patriotism. I recognize that I have said something shocking. The past half-century has seen a sharp turn away from what had been traditional attitudes toward the purposes and functions of education. Our schools have retreated from the idea of moral education, except for some attempts at what is called "values clarification," which is generally a cloak for moral relativism verging on nihilism of the sort that asserts that whatever feels good is good. Even more vigorously have the schools fled from the idea of encouraging patriotism. In the intellectual climate of our time, the very suggestion brings contemptuous sneers or outrage, depending on the listener's mood. There is no end of quoting Samuel Johnson's famous remark that "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," but no recollection of Boswell's explanation that Johnson "did not mean a real and generous love for our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
“…Will anyone among reporters ask (be allowed to ask?) what is the difference between Hamas & the Muslim Brotherhood & IS/ISIS/IL et al? And, if there are none, no differences among them, that they're in fact all connected, and to some large extent all being funded through Qatar, etc., another question that might be asked is, "So, if they're all connected, why have we been the first to recognize the Fatah-PLO-Hamas "Unity Government", and when will this recognition be withdrawn or modified?" Also, why and how are US heavy weapons (including those captured in the overthrow of Khaddafi in Libya) left in possession of Qatar to assure they would not go into the hands of terrorists, IS, Taliban, etc., wound up in possession of IS/ISIS/ISIL fighting in Syria & Iraq? Lastly, for now, what is the connection between the major US Military Base(s) in Qatar and our influence on Qatari funding of these enemies of the United States (and Israel, our ally)? What connection do any of these have from funding and support from Iran of a major nature? Doesn't this warrant maintaining and increasing rather than reducing or removing sanctions on the Iranian regime?”
—Allan (Sept. 10, 2014)
“Recent events (pro-Palestine rallies/demonstrations etc) have acted to galvanize the more alert/activist oriented in our small community…Sad that current local & world events are turning more negative, yet, good to know there are those locally who will not be complacent, and, re CIJR, that there is a strong entity in Canada to take up the cause and provide strength to the Canadian Community…I've taken the liberty of passing CIJR info on to some of my Chevra, keen to assist our students, who likely will face strong reactions from the pro-Palestinian side & their associated Anti-Semites.”
—Israel (Aug. 26, 2014)
“I wanted to sincerely thank you again for your continuous support of Israel. It means a lot to us here. We do feel isolated and know that the world doesn't really care about our civilian suffering here. I felt the need to write to my own friends and family…A need for more Hasbara…Yesterday…our soldiers intercepted and thwarted terrorists who infiltrated into our territory (into another kibbutz community) with the sole intent of killing our women and children. No one in Canada, or anywhere else in the world, would ever endanger their own civilian populations. We here in Israel are being bombarded for 12 days now. Yes…there are casualties on our side and on the other side and that is the sad part of war, but we don't have a choice. And yes …the casualties on the Gaza side are much higher than on our side. The reason being that we have an anti-missile defense system and myself and all the other citizens follow strict instructions to run to our shelters. The other side does not have enough shelters and the Hamas terrorist groups are literally endangering their own civilian populations and using them as human shields…I want to remind the world that we here in Israel ask for nothing and we know we are alone and that the world follows their own hypocritical interests. Yes…the world is up in arms and demonstrating…But ask yourselves…please…why did the same demonstrators not get up in arms and demonstrate when thousands of innocent Syrian women and children were being killed and are still being killed? We will continue to dismantle the tunnels that are a threat to our civilians and the rocket launchers that are a threat to us. I personally am fed up with having to explain to my child that he has to run to the shelter…We don't live in a pleasant neighborhood, such as Canada. We have other countries posing the same threat. Wake up and look at what is happening in Iraq with ISIS…Let me remind you that we are the only democracy in the world. Yes…democracy! And for those who may be fooled to believe that we are an apartheid state….I invite them to come here. We are a free society with many opinions and allow for gay parades which you will not see in any Arab country. We even have Arab Israeli ministers in our parliament who are free to express their hate of their own country—Israel. Now…does that sound like apartheid?…To all my friends and family who can read this. You are all busy in your own lives and we here in Israel do not expect any support from anyone. We can and will defend ourselves. All we ask is that the world stop interfering. So…once again…I wanted to thank Fred and Baruch and the entire CIJR staff for your support…we here in Israel really do need to feel that there is someone in the world that supports us.”
—Esti (July 21, 2014)
CIJR Wishes all our Friends & Followers an Easy Fast, a Happy and Healthy New Year, & Shabbat Shalom!
Fasting on Yom Kippur: Dry Bones Blog, Oct. 2, 2014
Betrayal: FDR and the Jews: Jerold S. Auerbach, Algemeiner, Sept. 23, 2014—Like everyone else I knew in the Forest Hills of my boyhood, my parents were the American–born children of immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Terrorist Threat Alert: John Cleese (Reportedly), Snopes, Aug. 23, 2014 —The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved."
Chloe Valdary: Christian, Black and a Rising Star of Pro-Israel Campus Activism: Anthony Weiss and Miriam Moster, JTA, Sept. 8, 2014—Growing up in New Orleans, Chloe Valdary kept kosher, studied the Jewish Bible and celebrated Jewish holidays with festive meals.
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