Rael Jean Isaac

The Lemming Plenum

Meeting In Atlanta in February, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella organization representing 14 national Jewish groups and 125 local Jewish Community Relations Councils affirmed its support for a Palestinian state. The vote was unanimous, with one “abstention” (by the Orthodox Union).

In the case of Jim Jones 913 people died when the Peoples Temple leader induced his flock to take cyanide laced Kool-Aid. In this case the entire organized Jewish community has volunteered Israel’s Jewish population for mass suicide.

Where there is no vision the people perish, and never were Jews so blind.

No Debate

Caroline Glick (Jerusalem Post, March 20) raises an important point. With “the surge,” President Bush changed U.S. strategy in Iraq, because the obvious failure of existing strategy had set off a passionate domestic debate. The Democratic victory in the Congressional elections was a warning sign that the most important decision he made as president was about to go up in flames.

Unfortunately, Glick writes, there has been no similar reevaluation of the equally obvious failure of Bush’s strategy of creating a Palestinian state that will live “peacefully” beside Israel, although it is obvious Abbas, no less than Hamas, anticipates a future without Israel. The Democratic-controlled Congress has approved a Bush administration request to give the PA $150 million, reflecting bipartisan support for the same old, same old. There is no political debate in the U.S. regarding the reasonableness of the policy of embracing the PLO as a “peace partner” and so year in and year out the U.S. promotes a policy with no chance of succeeding.

There is not even any debate in the Presidential campaign. On his recent trip to Israel Senator McCain professed support for a Palestinian state. As for Senators Obama and Clinton, their support is so obvious they don’t even bother mentioning the issue.

Sarkozy: Two Sides

Nicolas Sarkozy has exercised imaginative moral leadership. He is requiring all fifth grade students to learn the story of one of the 11,000 French Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. There can be no better way to bring home the reality of the Holocaust—and the extent of French complicity—than by personalizing it. The diaries of one young girl, Anne Frank, brought home the horror of the Holocaust as no numbing numbers could.

As law professor and novelist Thane Rosenbaum points out, this fine initiative has brought upon Sarkozy a flood of attacks: it is too traumatic for fifth graders; there is no reason to single out Jewish victims; the Arab population won’t like it. Writes Rosenbaum: “The attacks against Mr. Sarkozy are but another version of cultural protectionism, a cynical way to prevent the ghosts of Holocaust memory to penetrate the tight seal of French guilt….[H]is public gesture with respect to the Holocaust should be a source of national pride, not shame. If nothing else, it will remind the citizens of France that their remembrance of the Holocaust has been inadequate and long overdue, but, in the hands of French school children, perhaps it will not be too late.”

Unfortunately not all of Sarkozy’s initiatives are so admirable. Editor of the Brussels Journal Paul Belien notes that Sarkozy has used his large parliamentary majority to ratify a treaty which transfers substantial powers from Paris to the European Union, even though the French had rejected such a transfer in a 2005 referendum. Also, with Angela Merkel he has announced establishment of a “Mediterranean Union” to encompass the 27 EU states and all the countries on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Sarkozy wants France and Algeria (where many of the thugs that have turned areas of France into no-go zones come from) to form the axis of this union. Even more Moslem immigrants are likely to flood France under this scenario.

Happy Birthday Israel

These are words Brandeis University cannot bring itself to say. Never mind that it was established as a place where Jews, then still subject to quotas at elite universities, could receive a quality education and that one of its “four pillars,” listed on the school’s website, is “sponsorship by the Jewish community.”

Background: Five members of the Brandeis Student Union Senate proposed a resolution to wish Israel a happy 60th anniversary. One of them, Asher Tanenbaum, said that he wanted to show that “Israel is still an issue that people care about at Brandeis.” But the majority of student senate members found any expression of good will to Israel “controversial.” Said one: “This campus has very, very strong views on Israel both for and against, and it really shouldn’t be the (continued on page 11)
place of the Student Union to be commenting on Israel.” A number argued that a happy birthday vote “might unintentionally hurt some students’ feelings.”

Given that even the student senate of the University of California at Berkeley (scarcely a bastion of pro-Israel sentiment) passed the resolution Brandeis found too “controversial,” the depth to which Brandeis has sunk is notable. Donors, beware.

A Man for This Season

Ironically it is a man raised in Pakistan who has assumed the mantle of supporter of traditional Christianity in England. While the Archbishop of Canterbury looks forward to the “inevitable” adoption of “aspects” of sharia law, the Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, defying threats to his life and that of his family, warns that the Archbishop’s remarks could become a reality unless Britain regains belief in its Christian heritage. Says the Bishop: “If people are not given a fresh way of understanding what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a Christian-based society then something else may well take the place of all that we’re used to and that could be Islam.”

Israel’s New Guardians

In both the Galilee and the Negev, farmers and ranchers are beset by the lawlessness that in the early years of the Zionist enterprise led to the founding of the Hashomer volunteer guard forces. Then, as now, the problem lay in the unwillingness of the political authorities to defend Jews from Arab marauders.

What is shocking is that it is now a Jewish sovereign state that refuses to protect Jewish citizens as their livestock and crops are constantly plundered. Filing a complaint with police is an exercise in futility. Caroline Glick notes: “Fearing Arab riots or political condemnation by the Israeli Left, Arab leaders, the Islamic Movement and their allies abroad, the police and the state prosecutors have simply stopped enforcing the laws against the Galilee and Negev Arabs.” Farmers face the choice of doing nothing and seeing their lives’ work destroyed, paying protection money to Arab criminal gangs who then agree not to rob them, or abandoning agriculture altogether.

The good news is that the son of one Galilean farmer, a young soldier in an elite commando unit, has set up an organization of more than a hundred young volunteers which he calls Hashomer Hayisraeli Hahadash or the New Israeli Guardsmen. He says: “We’re not simply a security service. We see ourselves as a new movement. Our activities rest on three foundations: securing the land, expanding our operations throughout the Galilee and the Negev, and teaching Zionist and Jewish values to our members, our communities and the general public.”

These young Jews are surely a sign of hope. But how terrible it is that the state is in such decline that almost exactly 100 years after the founding of the first Hashomer, a second is needed.

A Dual Profile in Courage

At the Easter vigil at St Peter’s, Pope Benedict XVI baptized 55 year old Magdi Allam. An Egyptian born Moslem, Allam is not only an outspoken critic of Islam but a supporter of Israel who has been under police protection for five years following death threats against him over his criticism of suicide bombings.

Writing in Correre della Sera, of which he is deputy editor, Allam said his soul had been “liberated from the obscurantism of an ideology which legitimizes lies and dissimulation, violent death, which induces both murder and suicide and blind submission to tyranny.” Allam noted that the Pope, by baptizing him publicly, had “sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too cautious in the conversion of Muslims because of the fear of being unable to protect the converted, who are condemned to death for apostasy.” And indeed Moslem groups in Italy professed “amazement” at the “high profile” the Vatican had given the conversion.