Rael Jean Isaac

The New Israel Fund

Prof. Gerald Steinberg, who heads Bar Ilan University’s Program on Conflict Management (one of the many nonexistent disciplines so popular in today’s academy) has written an article in The Canadian Jewish News “It’s Time for a Debate on the New Israel Fund,” which, he points out, has become one of the most wealthy and powerful institutions in Israel and the diaspora.

Steinberg notes that the NIF empowers “the most radical Israeli Arab voices” with one third of its annual budget going to over 20 organizations that “use the money to demonize and delegitimize the concept of Jewish sovereignty and equality among the nations.” Some, Steinberg complains, call Zionism racism and distribute an alternative constitution for Israel that would abolish the concept of a Jewish state. Steinberg wants to discuss the problem with the heads of the NIF “to realize our shared goals.”

Hello? Does Steinberg really think those who run the NIF are innocent of any knowledge of the nature of the outfits they fund? On the contrary, the less obnoxious recipients are simply cover for what has always been the core of NIF’s work—funding Israel’s enemies.

Seventeen years ago we at AFSI “told you so.” In 1990 we published a 37 page pamphlet The New Israel Fund: A Fund for Israel’s Enemies that pointed out that the largest single beneficiary of NIF funds was the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which engaged in relentless legal crusades on behalf of PLO terrorists. We described the background of NIF’s board of directors, noting that it was “an organization directed and staffed primarily by individuals with long histories of attacking Israel, who regard the New Israel Fund as a convenient vehicle for furthering their radical agenda.” We said the only difference between the NIF and other far left Jewish groups was that the NIF strove to conceal its political orientation to attract donors.

When our pamphlet appeared virtually every Jewish establishment organization virulently attacked us for supposedly defaming this fine charity. If early in NIF’s history Jewish organizations had condemned the organization (rather than the messenger), this poisonous outfit (many of whose chief donors are politically mindless rich Jews who donate because their friends do) could have been stopped in its tracks and at the very least, had its funding sharply reduced.

A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn

New Yorkers and indeed the entire country are in debt to Pamela Hall and the group of 150 activists in the Stop the Madrassa Community Coalition.

In a major stroke of multi-cultural folly Mayor Bloomberg (demonstrating his unfitness to be mayor let alone President) and school chancellor Joel Klein laid the groundwork for a deceptively packaged Islamist public school, to open for sixth graders this fall. The deception begins with the soothing name, the Khalil Gibran International Academy. Gibran was a Lebanese Christian poet, an exponent of tolerance who would have hated everything about the school.

That starts with the woman Klein chose as school principal, Yemeni-born Dhabah (Debbie) Almontaser, whose Islamist associations and views only became public thanks to the efforts of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition. The mayor and the chancellor turned a determined blind eye to the Coalition’s findings, including Almontaser’s links to the Hamas-tied CAIR (which even gave her an award) and her statements that “our foreign policy is racist; in the ‘war against terror’ people of color are the target.” But Almontaser did herself in after Pam Hall photographed T-shirts with the words “Intifada NYC” being sold at an Arab street fair by Arab Women Active in Arts and Media, an outfit that shares office space in Brooklyn with the Saba Association of American Yemenis of which, Daniel Pipes points out, Almontaser is board member and spokeswoman. Asked by The New York Post about the T-shirts, Almontaser said Intifada simply means “shaking off” and the shirts were “an opportunity for girls to express that they are part of New York City society…and shaking off oppression.” This was too much for Almontaser’s erstwhile advocates, including United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, and she was forced to resign.

Even here, the Department of Education refused to release the text of Almontaser’s letter of resignation until its hand was forced. No surprise here, for the letter reinforced the claims of her critics: portraying herself as victim, Almontaser wrote that “a small group of highly misguided individuals has launched a relentless attack on me because of my religion.” In a cynical ploy to undercut criticism Joel Klein has now appointed a left-wing Orthodox Jewish woman who does not even know Arabic as interim principal.
The Coalition continues its efforts to shut the madrassa down. Forced to fight the secretive Board of Education every step of the way, the Coalition used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the “Executive Summary” of the school’s program. As the Coalition noted, the summary was “actually a manual for creating an Islamist vocational school, one in which every activity is planned around creating social activists with an Arab supremacist mindset.” A change of principal will do nothing about this – the teachers, the curriculum have all been set in place by Almontaser.

At this writing the mayor and chancellor are still intent on opening the school. If they succeed they will be establishing a terrible precedent for publicly funded madrassas throughout the country.

So kudos to Pam Hall and the Coalition and a dunce hat not only to the mayor and school chancellor but to the ADL and the American Jewish Committee which have supported the school.

Correction

Frequent AFSI contributor Roger Gerber sends in a correction to an article in the July-August Outpost “A Ship that Changed the Middle East:”

“Victor Sharpe errs when he writes: ‘Geographical Palestine, the only portion set aside for a Jewish National Home by Great Britain in the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, covered a mere 10,000 square miles. That area was further reduced through subsequent political decisions by the British Colonial Office.’

“The boundaries of Palestine were not specified in the Balfour Declaration. I know of no authority for claiming that the Balfour Declaration restricted the Jewish National Home to only 10,000 square miles. Bernard Lewis has written that the geographical term ‘Palestine’ has no meaning other than that contained in the British Mandate for Palestine. In fact, British Mandatory Palestine comprised over 46,000 square miles of which the present Kingdom of Jordan, which until 1946 formed part of Mandatory Palestine, consisted of 35,367 miles, or 77% of Mandatory Palestine.

“Mr. Sharpe’s reference to ‘a mere 10,000 square miles’ presumably refers only to the area encompassed by Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip and Israel within the green line (totaling about 10,400 square miles). Presumably it is the 1922 suspension of the Jewish National Home provisions of the Mandate in the Transjordan province of Palestine (not in Judea and Samaria) that is the ‘subsequent political decision by the British Colonial Office’ to which Mr. Sharpe refers.”

The College of Judea and Samaria

It gives us great pleasure to report that scientists in Israel’s fledgling College of Judea and Samaria, located in the community of Ariel in Samaria, have made significant progress in a promising new treatment for leukemia that would force cancer cells to shine, activating light-sensitive drugs that would then kill them without damaging healthy tissue nearby.

Three “I” Words

There has been a striking contrast between the Republican and Democratic candidate debates. While the Republicans have all talked of the danger of Islamic terrorism, the scrupulously politically correct Democrats have studiously avoided the “I” word. But what in the debates was universal was the absence of the word “Israel” and “Intifada.” In previous Presidential debates it was routine for candidates to express support for Israel – even Dhimmi Carter. This is yet another troubling sign of the way Israel has sunk in estimation even in this country.

JNF Funds Arabs

The Israeli attorney general has ruled that the Israel Lands Authority, which administers land owned by the Jewish National Fund, must make JNF land available to Arabs as well as Jews. Never mind that the charter of the Jewish National Fund says that the purpose of the corporation is “to be devoted to and expended in the purchase of land in Palestine for the settlement of Jews thereon.”

Hadassah Marcus points out that if the JNF wants to raise funds in the U.S. it will run into difficulty. In a decision in a case she had helped bring against the JNF (this one for its failure to fund projects in Judea and Samaria, despite its ads which showed Israel in its entirety, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan), the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court ruled: “Certainly a donor to a charity should be fully informed with respect to the use to which the contribution is being put and should not be misled into believing that the funds will be applied for one purpose when, in reality, they are being utilized somewhere else.”

Even some of the New Israel Fund’s donors might balk at their donations buying land for Israel’s hostile Arab minority. Perhaps the Israeli authorities will turn to Saudi Arabia to raise JNF funds.

Peres Forever

Over the years Roger Gerber and your editor have compiled several collections (still available from AFSI) of the babble of Israel’s shameful choice for President, Shimon Peres. We have said repeatedly that Israeli comedians failed to take advantage of the rich mine of material offered by this “holy cow.” Now, belatedly, this may be changing. In Haaretz Doron Rosenblum offers an imaginary dialogue between two Israelis about their new President. Here’s a small excerpt. One of them asks what Peres, given his age, can possibly do in the President’s office. The response:

“My friend, you’re forgetting with whom we’re dealing here. This is someone who, if you tossed him into the middle of the desert, all alone, wearing nothing but a loincloth and equipped with nothing more than a small canteen – within a month, you’d hear that in that location was built the Intercontinental Conveyor Belt for Forestation and Urbanization with branches in Los Angeles, Lichtenstein and San Remo…If I were UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon or whatever his name is, from this day on I’d be looking over my shoulder every morning. In fact, I also wouldn’t be complacent if I were Yo-Yo Ma.

“The cellist?

“The cellist, the trumpeter, the NATO secretary-general, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, the director of NASA, the King of Sweden, Philip Roth, Henry Kissinger, Stephen Hawking, Stephen King, Dr. Ruth Westheimer—God himself. All of them are going to be hearing very soon from the honorable national-global President Shimon Peres and hearing big-time. And that’s nothing. They say that President Bush awoke as if bitten by a snake and rushed to give his Middle East speech already this week for one reason alone: out of the fear that Peres would beat him to it with a vision for the Notaricon Valley or maybe it’s the Silidot.com Valley.”

If only Israeli newspapers and TV had kept up a steady diet of this sort of thing earlier Peres would have been laughed off the national stage (to Israel’s enormous benefit) many years ago.