Israele Siamo Noi: Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor: Rael Jean Isaac

Keep Them Out: Hugh Fitzgerald

Appeasing Terror in Britain: Melanie Phillips

Bethel: Yedidya Atlas

A Communism for the 21st Century: Fjordman

Egyptian Hate: Nonie Darwish

40 Years Later, No Celebration: Ruth King

OUTPOST
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Herbert Zweibon, Ruth King

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Herbert Zweibon

Increasingly Israel looks for its defense abroad. In Lebanon it relies upon a UN force, in Gaza upon EU monitors. Olmert looks to the Americans to take care of Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel.

Even worse, Israel looks to the EU and the U.S. for moral approval. To recognize how absurd and self-defeating this is one need only read the fine interview the Jerusalem Post’s Ruthie Blum conducted with Italian journalist Fianna Nirenstein, author of a surprise best-seller entitled Israele Siamo Noi (Israel is Us). Nirenstein describes a Europe in which anti-Semitism is rampant. The theme of her book is that Europeans should make Israel their model so as to repair their own sick societies.

Nirenstein (who needs bodyguards when she travels in Italy) tells Blum about teaching a Mideast history class at Luiss University in Rome: “I turned to the students and asked them, ‘If you were threatened like Israel is, would you go into the army?’ And they all said no. Then I asked them if their brother or sister were being threatened, would they go into the army, and they said no.” Nirenstein contrasts this with the attitudes of Israeli young people: “When you speak to Israeli boys and girls – even during this time of the Winograd Committee finding about the failures of the government and upper echelons of the IDF – you realize how unique they are. None of this stops them from wanting to serve in the army…Israel is special for the fantastic men it has created, which is why I feel so bad whenever I see it despised and destroyed by Israelis themselves.”

And there’s the rub. Suffering from a terrible failure of political and intellectual leadership, Israel fails to recognize its own moral stature, fails to press its own rights, fails to act forthrightly in its own defense. On a recent visit to Israel the courageous Moslem dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it simply: “Israel first of all has to stand firm. A state’s primary responsibility is to guarantee the security of its citizens. If Israel doesn’t do that, its society is in danger.”

Israeli leaders once understood this obvious truth. Menahem Begin destroyed the nuclear reactor at Osirak despite universal condemnation. In 1976, with over 100 Israelis hijacked on an Air France plane, the Rabin-led government did not run to Western governments but launched the Entebbe raid. Now Israel does not even protect its own cities from missile assaults.

Instead Israel invites the contempt of friends and enemies alike by its relentless appeasement and apologies. In Cairo, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni groveled in an interview with Al Ahram, declaring that uprooting 7,000 Israelis from Gaza was intended to be a “message” concerning Israel’s love of peace, and that “in order to establish a Palestinian state we must withdraw from additional territories.” She pleads with the Egyptian public to understand how much Israel wants peace. In this issue we print an article by Nonie Darwish (yet another courageous Moslem woman) on a recent Egyptian film which she describes as “the vilest and most hateful example of Arab anti-Semitic propaganda I have ever seen.” Why did not Tzipi Livni use the Al Ahram interview to remind the Egyptian public that the 1977 treaty between Israel and Egypt called for an end to anti-Israel incitement in the media and that unless and until Egypt lived up to its promises, it should not expect Israel to seek more empty peace agreements with Arabs?

Israel’s enemies will not be moved by her self-abnegation and Israel will not be saved by a hostile “international community” itself in retreat before the Islamic tide. Benny Avni aptly notes in The New York Sun, “As for world opinion, it might not like Jewish power, but it will always back a winner.”

Rael Jean Isaac

From Satire Central

Who could make this stuff up? Zimbabwe has been elected to chair the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. Under the iron grip of Big Man Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe enjoys the world’s highest inflation rate (over 2000%), mass unemployment, famine, the routine arrest, beating (and often murder) of any who dare to protest (including the lawyers who dare defend them), a huge out-migration, four-hour-a-day rationing of electricity, collapse of infrastructure, destruction of agriculture and industry —Zimbabwe, in short, offers a superb model for how to de-develop a country.

As Claudia Rosett points out, Zimbabwe’s selection is no aberration but how the UN works, is designed to work, and will continue to work. The Commission on Sustainable Development, Rosett notes, boasts among its 53 members a collection of states, which specialize not in development, but “in policies ranging from off-the-charts corruption to systematic repression to genocide” for whom “the apparently bottomless pockets of American taxpayers translate into a sustainable free ride.”

Apologies, Anyone?

Apologies are the fashion du jour. Incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (among many others) wants the U.S. to apologize for slavery; Democrats want Hillary to apologize for her war vote on Iraq; Congress wants Turkey to apologize for the Armenian genocide. How about the plethora of Israel’s supposed hard-core supporters who favored the Gaza disengagement apologizing to AFSI (and the few other groups in this country, notably the ZOA, who spoke out against that insane policy)?

We aren’t holding our breath. Far from saying mea culpa, both Commentary and The New York Sun continue to publish Hillel Halkin as their Israel pundit, proof of how sadly adrift they continue to be. Halkin himself is ridiculous, a whirling dervish of opinions, who seems to suffer acute discomfort if he holds the same view for more than a week. One can only presume that this characteristic is the source of his appeal to the editors of these journals – stir in the mental sludge and you can find anything: Halkin’s for Oslo, he’s against Oslo, he’s for disengagement, he’s against disengagement. Whatever he advocates, it’s generally based on some idiosyncratic argument that no one else, for good reason, had ever advanced. Actually, after what passes for “reflection” in his jumpy mind, Halkin is always, in the end, for retreat.

Achieving a new (if predictable) low, in a May 15 New York Sun column Halkin announces Israel must re-divide Jerusalem and give the Arabs the Temple Mount because “though it is certainly a sacred Jewish site” it is “felt even more strongly about by religious Muslims than it is by religious Jews.” The real impact of turning the Temple Mount over to Hamas is summed up by Natan Sharansky: “One doesn’t have to be religious in order to understand that relinquishing the Temple Mount is a justification of the Palestinian argument. You have no right to exist in this country, you have no connection to it, get out of here. One doesn’t have to be religious in order to understand that relinquishing the Temple Mount is not only to relinquish the past, it is primarily relinquishing the future. The future of all us, here.”

There are first-class, incisive Israeli political analysts, people like Caroline Glick, Evelyn Gordon, Sarah Honig. You never read them in Commentary or The New York Sun.

“Disengagement” from Reality

In the May Outpost we published Roger Gerber’s “The Fruits of Disengagement.” In Frontpage David Hornik emphasizes yet another fruit of disengagement that not even opponents had foreseen: that “Israel would just give up and let Sderot and the surrounding area become a helpless shooting gallery.”

And yet, all this is small potatoes compared to the danger of national annihilation from Iran’s nuclear installations. Glick writes: “Can anyone believe that the same Olmert who was incapable of defending northern Israel from Hizbullah last summer, and who today is incapable of defending southern Israel from the Palestinians, will be able to defend central Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran?”

Misunderstanding Turkey

Congratulations to Barbara Lerner for pointing out the dangerous delusion of those (our State Department included) who believe that they support Turkish democracy in championing the supposedly “moderate” Islamist AKP against the supposedly power-hungry Turkish military officers who cling to a self-appointed role as guardians of the secular republic. Lerner points out this is to misunderstand both the AKP and the constitutional role of the military in Turkey.

The notion that the AKP is the Moslem equivalent of a Christian Democratic party in Western Europe overlooks that Islam is a complete, all-encompassing system of theocratic government. Understanding this about Islam, Ataturk made secularism the bedrock constitutional principle of the Turkish Republic. He recognized that otherwise there could be no democracy or liberty. Lerner reminds us that “the Turkish constitution tasks the military with a sworn duty to act as a necessary check on democratic excesses that violate the constitution—a check our Founding Fathers also deemed necessary in order to preserve constitutional democracy. The big difference is that our Constitution assigns this role to the Supreme Court; Turkey’s constitution assigns it to the military.”

U.S. Moslems Back Suicide Attacks

In this issue we publish Hugh Fitzgerald’s challenge to PC orthodoxy—his call to shut down Moslem immigration to this country. A recent poll underscores the importance of this step. The first nationwide survey of Moslem Americans, conducted by the Pew Center, found that 26% of those under 30 justified suicide bombings. Obviously, it takes a very small number of suicide bombers to wreak enormous havoc; these numbers reveal not only the potential for recruiting bombers here but potential support groups in which these fish can swim. Also significant, the survey found that only 40% of the American Moslem population would even admit Arabs were behind 9/11. (To be sure, Mark Steyn looks on the bright side: “I was heartened to discover that 40% of U.S. Muslims think there were no Arabs involved in 9/11. You couldn’t hold the number down that low if you polled American college faculties.”)

If we do not take heed of the ample warnings, we are as much in denial as our Moslem population. In 1968 the then much-execrated but prophetic Enoch Powell, warned of the dangers unrestricted immigration posed to England: “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”

Plus Ca Change...

The following is from an 1881 essay by Peretz Smolenskin “Let Us Search Our Ways.”

“Everyone must ask: Why were the Jews so blind as not to see the evil coming? Why were they so complacent when the sword was being brandished before their faces? But the fact is that for many years our ‘prophets’ so lulled us that we no longer saw reality and failed to anticipate the evil…

“Every charge made by the Jew-haters has thus been repeated without change by some of our own brethren. Is it any surprise, therefore, that these uncircumcised of heart did not attempt to prevent the disaster and were not aroused to come to the rescue of their people in its time of trouble? On the contrary, we can be sure that their ilk have been, and always will be, a stumbling block and plague to the whole House of Israel….

“It is useless to try to convince those Jews who hate Zion and Jerusalem, and whose sole wish is to make us forget the memory of our ancestors, our beliefs, and our sense of kinship. Having destroyed our traditions and mocked and derided the whole heritage of Israel, why should they spare the Land from their venom?”

Hugh Fitzgerald

They must not be allowed in. For the safety of our own citizens in the West, we can't take any more Muslims, and certainly not the most dangerous of all, the Shock Troops of the Lesser Jihad, the local Arabs who were carefully renamed the "Palestinians." They have proven to be at the center of many terrorist plots and schemes. And then they are suddenly identified demurely as having been "born in Jordan" or "born in Israel" -- and the word "Palestinian," so often emphasized, suddenly disappears.

They are a specific threat to Jews, even a mortal threat. Would the American government knowingly allow neo-Nazis into this country? No. Would it allow into this country, knowingly, the followers of Eugene Terre Blanche in South Africa, people who would bring in their mental baggage a desire to reduce the black population to a state of permanent economic, social, and political inferiority? Would they allow in such people when it was clear that their ideology was so ingrained that it could not be uprooted, and was passed on from generation to generation -- as is Islam?

And think of the Storm-Trooper tactics of "Palestinians" on North American campuses, as they shout down speakers, intimidate pro-Israel students, and crush much free speech, as they scare administrators into banning whatever Arab Muslims wish to have banned...or else. There have been examples from the University of San Francisco all the way to Concordia in Montreal. How much more evidence does one need of the effect of a large Muslim or especially "Palestinian" presence on free speech in the United States, Canada, or anywhere? Is there not a duty to limit this malevolence and this violence, threatened or actual?

Why should the Infidel nation-states of the Western world make things difficult for their own? Why should their ruling elites abandon their own people, out of ignorance and negligence and timidity (fear of offending Muslims, fear of finding out a little more about Islam or, upon finding it out, having to establish sensible policies based on what they have found out)?

Close off the possibility of these people entering this country, further endangering all of us. Close off those who will have to be monitored, with all the attendant expense. Close off this country to those who bring with them a Belief-System that tells them that they cannot be loyal to an Infidel nation-state, for their sole loyalty is to Islam and the umma. Too many Moslems accept this view of things. Some may say they reject it. But even among those who say they reject it, they cannot offer a coherent explanation of why, nor can one be sure if that rejection is real ("war is deception" said Muhammad). Or if real, one still cannot be sure that it will last for the lifetime of the man who still calls himself a Muslim, or if there may be a "return to Islam" by that same person. Or -- as is obviously happening in Great Britain, Germany and elsewhere -- the later generations become more, not less Muslim, as they perceive that Islam does not have its "rightful place," i.e., it does not dominate in the Lands of the Infidels, and this comes to enrage them, and they work to subvert the legal, political, and social institutions of the Lands of the Infidels. As, by their lights, is only right, is only just, only makes perfect sense.

Intelligent people in government (there are some) will wish to limit the size of the danger, the expense of the monitoring, the increase in the unsettlement and unpleasantness of life.

The political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Muslim societies, including that of Gaza, should be taken as the lessons that they are. Yet in Gaza, a limiting of the tens of billions of dollars that the "Palestinians" have received since UNRWA was established, and supplemented by the billions received from Infidel -- never Arab lands-- in the last decades, is called absurdly an "economic boycott" or "embargo." Yes, because the billions in aid extorted from Infidel taxpayers by their own governments and given to the "Palestinians," and then siphoned off in fantastic acts of wholesale corruption, with much of what is left over spent on weaponry to keep attacking Israel, is treated by the "Palestinians" as theirs by right. Thus the denial of it as an "embargo." Meanwhile, these "poor Palestinians" with their Internet Cafes and DVD stores in those places described as "refugee camps," and even their interior decorators -- one was recently quoted in the newspaper -- don't know how to overcome their own inshallah-fatalism, their own aggression now turned in upon themselves, and some want out.

But Islam? Don't Leave Home Without It, say the imams. And they won't. They can't. Many even of the "Palestinian" Islamochristians cannot free themselves from the Jihad ideology and attitudes they have so deeply internalized.

Keep them out. There are 22 Arab countries. Let them choose among them.

Hugh Fitzgerald is a frequent contributor to Outpost. This article appeared in jihadwatch on May 16, 2007.

Melanie Phiillips

The ending of the Al Qaeda fertilizer bomb plot trial has posed crucial questions about the competence of MI5. In particular, the assurances we were given after the 7/7 bombings, that the perpetrators had been unknown to the security service, have been shown to be utterly false.

Disturbing as that is by itself, the case also raises yet more pressing questions about whether Britain is even now acting effectively enough against the threat to this country from Islamist terrorism.

The fact is that Al Qaeda now sees Britain as both its principal target and its principal recruiting ground. By its own admission, MI5 is monitoring no fewer than 200 terrorist networks, 1,600 identified individual terrorists and 30 known terrorist plots. It says British Muslims are being indoctrinated with horrifying speed, and more terrorists are being recruited every day.

In truth, as our leading counter-terrorist police officer Peter Clarke said last week, this country is facing a terrorist threat of a nature and scale it has simply never seen before. This terrorism is part of a global holy war and the dreadful thing is that it is recruiting British-born boys as its foot-soldiers against their own fellow citizens.

When my book Londonistan was published a year ago, my claim that we were in a state of denial about the unprecedented emergency we were facing from home-grown terrorism and extremism was dismissed in some quarters as unwarranted alarmism.

Since then, public opinion has shifted. Many have realised that what I wrote was, if anything, an understatement of the true position. But our official class is still failing to take the action that is necessary to defeat this threat to our whole way of life.

Certainly, it is now aware of the enormous scale of the terror threat. But it is still fighting it with both hands tied behind its back. In particular, the Human Rights Act continues to make effective anti-terror policy almost impossible.

Only last week, the Government was prevented from deporting two Libyan terrorist suspects, even though they came here illegally and are deemed to pose a serious threat to our lives, because our judges have said no one can be sent anywhere that might not uphold their human rights.

The Government was originally begged by our security services not to pass the Human Rights Act precisely because of the danger it would pose to national security by tying us in such knots. Ministers dismissed their concerns.

Now the same security services face the nightmare that Islamist terrorists will obtain a nuclear or other dirty bomb to use against Britain, with a human rights law that makes it more difficult to thwart such a terrible outcome.

Even worse than this, ministers seem to have no idea about the need to attack the ideology driving all this. It is simply not enough to flush out the terrorist cells, vital though that clearly is. We have to defeat the ideas driving some British Muslims to commit these acts in the first place.

The Government has started paying lip service to this. It has spoken against the extremism of the Muslim Council of Britain, and is encouraging a wider range of truly moderate Muslims to speak up. And a few more extremists are being arrested. But at the same time, it is still appeasing radicalism.

It has become a cliché to say that most British Muslims are moderate. Certainly, most of them undoubtedly would have no truck with terrorism or violence and encouragingly, a growing number are speaking out against Islamist extremism.

But extremist views are not confined to a few rogue elements. Opinion polls suggest that more than 100,000 of our Muslim citizens think the July 2005 attacks in London were justified. A report by the Policy Exchange think-tank revealed that around one third of British Muslims thought that if Muslims left the faith, they should be killed; and 37 per cent of 16-to-24-year- olds wanted to live in Britain under sharia rather than English law.

These numbers subscribing to such extremist views are deeply disturbing. They swell the sea in which terrorism swims.

If this tide is to be held back, Islamist extremism in Britain must be stopped and British values reasserted and stoutly upheld. To defeat such extremism, we have to make it abundantly clear that we will not give an inch to those who want to destroy our values.

But we appear instead to be doing nothing to stop the spread of radical Islamism. Indeed, in a myriad different ways we are giving out the lethal message that we have neither the will nor the courage to defend our way of life.

British Muslims are being recruited in large numbers to terror because next to nothing is being done to stop it. Last January, a Channel Four television Dispatches programme revealed that at certain mosques which were assumed to be moderate and which were even prominent in talking to other faiths, material was being preached and disseminated advocating such horrors as the murder of homosexuals, the beating of women and hatred of Christians and Jews.

Despite the Prime Minister’s promise to outlaw the radical group Hizb ut Tahrir (which believes that Britain should be an Islamic state), the Government refuses to do so. Yet Ed Husain, an extremely brave former radical who has recanted, chillingly documents in his new book The Islamist the enormous influence of this group in telling countless British Muslims it’s their duty to wage holy war, and that Muslims have a corresponding duty “to be prepared to launch attacks on Britain from within.”

Not only are we failing to halt the spread of such lethally extremist views, we are also failing to hold the line for our own values. Above all else, we should absolutely refuse to countenance the spread of sharia law, which is not only inimical to our own deepest principles but aims to supplant our own laws.

Yet we are turning a blind eye to the steady sharia-isation of our country. We have ignored the development of informal parallel sharia jurisdictions, enforced by sharia courts, in areas heavily populated by Muslims.

We have not only turned a blind eye to the polygamous marriages they sanction in Britain, but give extra welfare benefits to husbands settling here with multiple wives even though bigamy is a crime.

Despite the fact that thousands of Muslim women are terrorised by the threat of ‘honour killings’, only a few of these horrific cases result in prosecutions because our police are terrified of being accused of ‘racism’ if they pursue them.

Now Gordon Brown has said Britain should become the centre of global Islamic banking. But this is heavily backed by Saudi Arabia which will use it to further its objective of Islamising the West and may even provide a cover for the financing of further terror.

This craven appeasement of extremism gives Islamists the unmistakable message that Britain is theirs for the taking. Thus truly moderate Muslims are betrayed, and all of us are put in infinitely greater danger not just from terrorism, but from our own culture that still seems to be sleepwalking to oblivion.

Melanie Phillips is the author of Londonistan. This article first appeared in MelaniePhillips.com.

Yedidya Atlas
(Editors note: this is the third in a series on Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria)

When my youngest son pedals off on his bicycle to school and I leave my suburban home, with its attractive garden, to drive to a business meeting in the city, I could be describing a suburban scene in dozens of communities from Teaneck to the Five Towns to New Rochelle….. except I’m not. I live ten miles north of Jerusalem in the Judean hills and when I look out my car window I see the hills where my ancestors dwelled, the land promised by God to their descendants, including my wife and myself, our children and grandchildren, and their children not yet born.

For me, and those who feel as I do, building a new community involves more than developing a pleasant environment in which to raise children. It also means continuation of a mission to carry out God’s Promise in the heart of our national homeland, paving the way for the ingathering of the Exiles.

Beit El, in the King James Bible “Beth-el” (the “House of God”) is known, of course, as a city in ancient Israel. Abraham made an altar to God in the area (Genesis 12, 8), giving the name Beit El to the city previously called Luz. It is where Jacob had his dream of a ladder ascending to heaven with angels ascending and descending upon it (Genesis 28, 13-14). It is in Beit El where Jacob (like Abraham and Isaac before him) received God’s promise that the Land of Israel would belong to their descendents.

Beit El was a favorite place of worship. In troubled times the Children of Israel went to Beit El to ask counsel of God (Judges 20:18, 31; 21:2). Here the Ark of the Covenant was kept for a long time under the care of Pinchas, the grandson of Aaron (20:26-28). Here also Samuel held in rotation his court of justice (Samuel I, 7:16). When Israel was divided, Beit El was included in the northern kingdom. Jeroboam made Beit El the chief sanctuary of the northern kingdom, setting up the golden calf there (Kings I, 12:28-33; 13:1). Hence, the prophet Hosea (Hosea 4:15; 5:8; 10:5, 8) calls the city in contempt Beit-Aven, i.e., "house of iniquity." The city was also the centre for the prophetic ministry of Amos. When the northern kingdom fell, Beit El apparently escaped destruction by the Assyrians, remaining an abode of priests (Kings II, 17:28, 29) and it was later occupied by Josiah, king of the still-independent southern kingdom.

When the first Jews returned to Israel from the Babylonian Exile, several hundred of them rebuilt Beit El. Subsequently, during the Hasmonean revolt, Judah Maccabee and his men found refuge in the hills of Beit El, going forth from there to do battle against their Syrian Greek enemies. With the fall of the Second Temple, the Jewish community of Beit El was also destroyed. It remained neglected and unproductive until it was reestablished on the Jewish autumn holiday of Sukkoth 1978, just a decade after Israeli forces had assumed control of the area in the Six Day War. Beginning with a handful of young pioneering families in hilltop caravans, Beit El today consists of approximately 1,000 families in private and semi-detached homes raising thousands of children.

Today’s Beit El is a town of orthodox Jews with its own mayor and municipal council situated in the heart of the Binyamin region, just to the east of Arab Ramallah. Its Pisgat Ya'acov (“Jacob’s Heights”, named after the patriarch Jacob) neighborhood has a hilltop observatory with a commanding view—as far east as the mountains of Jordan, as far west as Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea, south to Jerusalem, and on clear days, as far as Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights. It has a higher elevation than Jerusalem and summer nights are cool. Occasionally, we have snow in winter.

The chief rabbi of Beit-El is Zalman Melamed who is also the Rosh Yeshiva, or dean, of the Beit El Yeshiva Center which includes eight educational institutions: a boys high school; post-high school Yeshiva and post-graduate Kollel; a college for teachers; two high schools for girls; a Hesder Yeshiva, combining religious study with military service and a pre-military preparatory academy. Perhaps best known is the Arutz Sheva internet communications network comprising INN (IsraelNationalNews.com with its multi-media websites in English, Hebrew, French and Russian) and its affiliated “virtual multi-media yeshiva” the www.yeshiva.org.il site, both of which operate out of studios in Beit El (except for INN-TV and the weekly newspaper B’Sheva, Israel’s fourth most widely read paper, which operates out of Petah Tikva).

Arutz Sheva, often called “Free Israel Radio” because it is the only independent news network in the Middle East, was established in Beit El as an internet network when the Israeli authorities succeeded in taking the station off the Israeli airwaves after fifteen years of efforts to ban it. When the Israeli government refused in the 1980s to grant it a license, Arutz Sheva broadcast from a ship in the Mediterranean. In February 1999, while Netanyahu was Prime Minister, the Knesset finally passed a law legalizing Arutz Sheva and absolving it from charges of earlier illegal broadcasting. Left-wing opponents of the station appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court, which, not surprising in view of its own strong left-wing bias, overturned the Knesset law in March 2002. And in October 2003 ten employees of Arutz Sheva were actually convicted of operating an illegal radio station from inside Israeli territorial waters.

Beit El also has locally owned and operated industries including a tefillin factory, paper carton factory, aluminum factory, jewelry workshop, graphics and publishing enterprises, book stores, supermarkets, and more.

The thousands of children growing up in Beit El, the third generation since its reestablishment, are inculcated with strong Jewish-Zionist values to carry on the mission of building the Land and State of Israel for the Jewish people. Like their parents and compatriots in the other Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria, Beit El’s children serve in elite army units and many return to establish new neighborhoods and communities in the area. One such satellite settlement/neighborhood of Beit El is Givat Assaf, situated between Beit El and Ofra, but within the Beit El municipality. It was established in honor of Assaf Hershkowitz of Ofra, murdered by terrorists six years ago. Hershkowitz, thirty years old, the father of two young children, aged five and three, was the oldest son of Arye Hershkowitz who had been killed in a terrorist shooting attack only three months before his son. Young couples from Beit El made the fitting Zionist response by establishing the new community adjacent to the key junction where Assaf was murdered. Today Givat Assaf has 18 young families with their own synagogue, mikveh, and nursery/kindergarten serving their more than 30 small children.

Beit El is known for its absorption of new immigrants, not only from western countries but also from the former USSR, Ethiopia and even northern India (the Bnei Menashe tribe). Beit El aims to reach a population of over ten thousand by the end of this decade in the spirit of the Biblical injunction: “Arise and go up to Beit El and dwell there…” (Genesis 35, 1).

Yedidya Atlas is a commentator for Arutz 7 and a long time resident of Beit El.

Fjordman

I’ve received some criticism for trying to figure out the ideological and historical roots of Multiculturalism. On one hand, we’re supposed to “celebrate” our differences at the same time as it is racist and taboo to recognize that any differences between groups of people exist at all. We are told to treat cultural and historical identities as fashion accessories, shirts we can wear and change at will. The Multicultural society is “colorful,” an adjective normally attached to furniture or curtains. Cultures are window decorations of little or no consequence, and one might as well have one as the other.

I have heard individuals state point blank that even if Muslims become the majority in our countries in the future, this doesn’t matter because all people are equal and all cultures are just a mix of everything else, anyway. And since religions are just fairy-tales, replacing one fairy-tale, Christianity, with another fairy-tale, Islam, won’t make a big difference. All religions basically say the same things in different ways. However, not one of these individuals would dream of saying that all political ideologies “basically mean the same thing.” They simply don’t view religious or cultural ideas as significant, and thus won’t spend time on studying the largely unimportant details of each specific creed. This is Marxist materialism.

The unstated premise behind this is that the age of distinct cultures is over. Nation states which create their own laws and uphold their own borders practice “discrimination” and constitute an obstacle to this new Utopia. They will gradually have to be dismantled, starting with Western nations of course, replaced by a world where everybody has the right to move wherever they want to and where international legislation and human rights resolutions define the law, upheld by an elite of—supposedly well-meaning —transnational bureaucrats managing our lives.

Since “we” are socially constructed, we can presumably also be socially deconstructed. The Marxist “counter-culture” of the 1960s and 70s has been remarkably effective at attacking the pillars of Western civilization. It is, frankly, scary to notice how much damage just one generation can inflict upon a society. Our countries have become so damaged that people feel there is nothing left fighting for, which no doubt was the intention. Our children leave school as disoriented wrecks and ideological cripples with no sense of identity, and are met with a roar of outrage if they demonstrate the slightest inkling of a spine.

Codie Stott, a white English teenage schoolgirl, was arrested on suspicion of committing a section five racial public order offense after refusing to sit with a group of South Asian students because some of them did not speak English. She was taken to Swinton police station, had her fingerprints taken and was thrown into a cell before being released. Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said: “A lot of these arrests don’t result in prosecutions – the aim is to frighten us into self-censorship until we watch everything we say.”

Bryan Cork of Carlisle, Cumbria in the Lake District, was sentenced to six months in jail for standing outside a mosque shouting, “Proud to be British,” and “Go back to where you came from.” This happened while Muslims were instituting sharia laws in British cities and were obtaining state sponsorship for having several wives.

Antifascistisk Aktion [AFA] in Sweden, a group that supposedly fights against “racists,” openly brags about numerous physical attacks against persons, with their full name and address published on its website. According to AFA, this is done in order to fight against global capitalism and for a classless society. AFA subscribes to an ideology that killed one hundred million people during a few generations, and claims to be the good guys. Those who object to being turned into a minority in their own country through mass immigration are the bad guys.

Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt has said: “Belgium is the laboratory of European unification.” What kind of confidence does it inspire in citizens that their supposed leader talks about their country as a laboratory? Are their children guinea pigs? Apparently, yes.

In 1960, 7.3% of the population of Belgium’s capital Brussels was foreign. Today the figure is 56.5%. Jan Hertogen, a Marxist sociologist, can hardly hide his excitement over this great experiment in social engineering, and believes this population replacement “is an impressive and unique development from a European, or even a world perspective.” Yes, it is probably the first time in human history that a nation demographically has handed over its capital city to outsiders without firing a single shot, but judging from trends in the rest of Europe, it won’t be the last. The European Union and the local, multicultural elites will see to that.

The Dutch writer Margriet de Moor provides another example of why Multiculturalism is a massive experiment in social engineering, every bit as radical and dangerous as Communism. Ms. de Moor lives in some kind of alternate reality where “Europe’s affluence and free speech” will create an Islamic Reformation. But Muslim immigration constitutes a massive drain on the former, and is slowly, but surely destroying the latter:

We are told that Arabs triggered the Renaissance in Europe. Michelangelo was commissioned by the Pope to paint the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel within the Vatican. He painted God creating Adam. Did any of the Caliphs or Sultans ever commission an artist to paint the image of Allah in Mecca? Why not, if all cultures are one and the same? Likewise, the political works of the ancient Greeks were never translated into Arabic, as they presented systems such as democracy where men ruled themselves according to their own laws. This was considered blasphemous to Muslims. The same texts were studied with great interest in the West.

Far from being irrelevant, culture is a massively important factor in shaping a society. Islam’s hostility to free speech is why Muslims never had any Scientific or Industrial Revolution, for instance.

British PM Tony Blair is stepping down after having ruined his country more in one decade than arguably any other leader has done before him. He ran on the platform of New Labour, but as it turned out, his party was still wed to the same old ideas of international Socialism.

According to the writer Melanie Phillips, “He is driven by a universalist world view which minimises the profound nature of the conflicts that divide people. He thinks that such divisions belong essentially to a primitive past. (...) Hence his closely-related obsession with ‘universal’ human rights law. Hence also his belief that national borders no longer matter, that mass immigration is a good thing and that Britain’s unique identity must give way to multiculturalism. This is the way, he thinks, to eradicate conflict, prejudice and war, and create a global utopia. What a profound misjudgment. It is, instead, the way to destroy democracy and the independent nations that create and sustain it.”

Marie Simonsen, the political editor of the Norwegian left-wing newspaper Dagbladet, wrote in March 2007 that it should be considered a universal human right for all people everywhere to migrate wherever they want to. This statement came just after a UN report had predicted a global population growth of several billion people by 2050.

It doesn’t take much skill to calculate that unlimited migration will spell certain death for a tiny Scandinavian nation — not in a matter of generations, but theoretically even within a few weeks. Ms. Simonsen is thus endorsing the eradication of her own people, and she does so almost as an afterthought. Her comments received no opposition from anyone in the media establishment, which could indicate that most of them share her views, or at least have resigned themselves to the fact that our death as a people is already inevitable.

Karl Marx has defined the essence of Socialism as abolishing private property. Let’s assume for a moment that a country can be treated as the “property” of its citizens. Its inhabitants are responsible for creating its infrastructure. They have built its roads and communications, its schools, universities and medical facilities. They have created its political institutions and instilled in its people the mental capacities needed for upholding them. Is it then wrong for the citizens of this country to want to enjoy the benefits of what they have themselves created?

According to Marxist logic, yes.

Imagine you have two houses next to each other. In House A, the inhabitants have over a period of generations created a tidy and functioning household. They have limited their number of children because they wanted to give all of them a proper education. In House B, the inhabitants live in a dysfunctional household with too many children who have received little higher education. One day they decide to move to their neighbors’ house. Many of the inhabitants of House A are protesting, but some of them think this might be a good idea. There is room for more people in House A, they say. In addition to this, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others claim that it is “racist” and “against international law” for the inhabitants of House A to expel the intruders. Pretty soon, House A has been turned into an overpopulated and dysfunctional household just like House B.

This is what is happening to the West today. Europe itself could become a failed continent by importing the problems of Africa and the Islamic world. The notion that everybody should be free to move anywhere they want to, and that preventing them from moving into your country is “racism, xenophobia and bigotry,” is the Communism of the 21st century. And it will probably lead to immense human suffering.

One of the really big mistakes we made after the Cold War ended was to declare that Socialism was now dead, and thus no longer anything to worry about. Here we are, nearly a generation later, discovering that Marxist thinking has penetrated every single stratum of our society, from the universities to the media. While the “hard” Marxism of the Soviet Union may have collapsed, at least for now, the “soft” Marxism of the Western Left has actually grown stronger, in part because we mistakenly deemed it to be less threatening.
Ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse. By hiding behind labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship they could never have achieved had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.

Alexander Boot, a Russian by birth, left for the West in the 1970s, only to discover that the West he was seeking was no longer there. This led him to write How the West Was Lost. Boot believes that democracy, or in the words of Abraham Lincoln, the government of the people, by the people and for the people, has been replaced by glossocracy, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.

In a culture where language is power and words are used as weapons, those who control the most fearsome of these weapons control society. In the West, where equality in all walks of life is the highest virtue and “discrimination” is a mortal sin, the “racist” is the worst of creatures. Those who control the definition of “racist,” the nuclear bomb of glossocracy, have a powerful weapon they can utilize to intimidate opponents. The mere utterance of the word can destroy careers and ruin lives, with no trial and no possibility of appeal.

Currently, the power of definition largely rests in the hands of a cartel of anti-racist organizations dominated by the extreme Left, often in cooperation with Muslims. By silencing all opposition to mass immigration as “racism,” they can stage a transformation of society every bit as massive as that of Communism, yet virtually shut down debate about it.

The former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovksy, who has warned that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union, thinks that while the West won the Cold War in a military sense, we lost it in the context of ideas: “Communism might have been dead, but the communists remained in power in most of the former Warsaw bloc countries, while their Western collaborators came to power all over the world (in Europe in particular). This is nothing short of a miracle: the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 quite logically brought a shift to the Left in world politics, while a defeat of communism in 1991 brought again a shift to the Left, this time quite illogically.”

Bukovksy is right: We never had a thorough de-Marxification process after the Cold War, similar to de-Nazification after World War II, and we are now paying the price. Many Marxist ideas have been allowed to endure and mutate, such as the notion that culture is unimportant or that it is OK to stage massive social experiments on hundreds of millions of people. .

Ideas matter. Individuals matter. Cultures matter. Truth matters, and truth exists. We used to know that. It’s time we get to know it again, and reject false ideas about the irrelevance of culture. We are not racists for desiring to pass on our heritage to future generations, nor are we evil for resisting treatment as lab rats in social experiments on a horrific scale. We must nip the ideology of transnational Multiculturalism and unlimited mass migration in the bud by exposing it for what it is: A Communism for the 21st century.

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in Brussels Journal on May 17.

Nonie Darwish

The anti-Semitism of the Arab news media is a well-documented phenomenon. Less well known in the West is the extreme hatred of Jews that saturates much of the Arab entertainment world. Consider the Egyptian film, A Girl from Israel (Fataah Min Israeel in Arabic), which was shown earlier this month on Arab television. Featuring a cast of Egyptian movie stars, it is one of the vilest and most hateful examples of Arab anti-Semitic propaganda I have ever seen.

A jumble of anti-Semitic tropes, the film revolves around a conspiratorial plotline: A Jewish family vacationing in the Sinai hides the fact that they are Israeli, while at the same time conspiring against Egyptians. Each of the family members plays a sinister role. Thus, the sexually promiscuous daughter seduces “good” Egyptian young men, while the son rapes the fiancé of an Egyptian. The father, who is made to look like a pimp, works to further Israel’s interests.

Opposite the Israeli family is an Egyptian family. Where the Jewish family is constantly scheming against Egyptians, the devout Egyptian family represents all that is good. The Egyptian father and mother are conservative Muslims trying to protect their children from the immoral Jews, who, they claim, are “all liars, untrustworthy and [who] infiltrate good Egyptian families to cause divisions and friction.”

The theme that the Israelis are evil foreigners who do not belong recurs throughout. The Egyptian parents constantly refer to the Sinai as “our land,” and the mere presence of Israelis in Egypt, even as tourists, is portrayed as a form of invasion or occupation. When one of the Egyptian girls discovers that her Egyptian boyfriend has befriended the Israeli young man, she confronts the latter. “Are you Israeli?” she demands. When he answers that he is, she shoves him, telling him to “get lost.” Similarly, the Egyptian mother and father slap their adult children in the face for making friends with Jews. When an Egyptian businessman attempts to do business with the Israeli father, the outraged Muslim mother voices her disapproval. Business with Jews, she says, is “treason.”

The Muslim father is particularly disgusted by the Israelis. In the film’s most dramatic scene the Egyptian family discovers the true origins of the Israelis. As a sinister, “Jaws”-like theme plays, the Egyptian father washes his hands in the bathroom. Previously, he had shaken hands with one of the Israelis, and he now imagines they are dripping with blood. On another occasion, the Egyptian father confronts his Israeli counterpart. “Jews have no honor, are sexually permissive, distrustful, conspirators and want to control us,” he says.

In keeping with the film’s theme that Jews are not to be trusted, the Israeli father is shown trying to shake hands with Egyptians, while talking about peace and the normalization of relations. The Egyptians, however, regard him with utter disgust, rejecting his extended hand. In this way, the Israeli father is understood to be insincere in his quest for peace. In a final act of Jewish treachery, the film ends with the killing of the Egyptian young man, the only character to befriend Jews, at the hands of his Israeli friend! The message of the movie could not be clearer: Those who befriend and trust Jews end up getting killed by their Jewish friends.

Tasteless as such anti-Jewish propaganda is, it cannot be dismissed as insignificant or unusual. With even Israeli tourists portrayed as enemies of Arabs and Muslims, it is no wonder that terrorist attacks target Israeli visitors in the Sinai, and that Arab anti-Semitism, aided by today’s technology, is rapidly spreading. Equally worrisome is that such anti-Semitic fare is now offered, through Arab satellite channels, right here in America.

Many laughed at the hilarious movie “Borat,” which portrays the outrageous exploits of a fictional anti-Semite from Kazakhstan. But, as A Girl from Israel reminds us, real anti-Semitism is no laughing matter.

Nonie Darwish, daughter of a shaheed, is the Arab-American author of Now They Call Me Infidel; Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror. This appeared on Frontpage on May 22.

Ruth King

June 5th,2007 will be the 40th anniversary of Israel’s lightning war against the combined forces of Syria, Egypt, Jordan, the PLO and Iraq. On that day The New York Times reported “Israeli-Egyptian battle erupts; planes and tanks are in action; Cairo reports attacks from air.” There was scant mention of the provocations which forced Israel’s hand.

In May 1967 Syria had stepped up its shelling of Israel’s northern towns from the Golan Heights; on May 20 and 21 Egypt deployed several army divisions along the Israeli border and demanded the removal of UN peacekeeping troops in the Sinai, which had been placed there as one of the terms for Israel’s withdrawal in 1956; on May 22 the PLO announced plans to step up attacks within Israel, Cairo called up 10,000 additional reserves and declared a blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba and Iraq announced that it would be sending aid and personnel to battle Israel. Three days later Jordan pledged itself to the battle and offered to admit Saudi and Iraqi forces into its country to do battle with Israel.

Prime Minister Levi Eshkol repeatedly sought to reassure the Arabs. On May 15th Eshkol said: “Israel wants to make it clear to the government of Egypt that it has no aggressive intentions whatsoever against any Arab state at all.”

The response from the Arab states was a barrage of crude threats. On one day alone, May 17th:

“Every one of the hundred million Arabs has been living for the past nineteen years on one hope– to live to see the day Israel is liquidated…There is no life, no peace nor hope for the gangs of Zionism to remain in the occupied land.” (Cairo Radio’s Voice of the Arabs broadcast)

“….Jordanian artillery, coordinated with the forces of Egypt and Syria, is in a position to cut Israel in two at Qalqilya, where Israeli territory between the Jordan armistice line and the Mediterranean Sea is only 12 kilometres wide.” (Al Akhbar, Cairo's daily newspaper)

“Brethren and sons, this is the day of the battle to avenge our martyred brethren who fell in 1948. It is the day to wash away the stigma. We shall, Allah willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa.” (Radio broadcast by Iraqi President Abdel Rahman Aref)

“The Syrian army is united. I believe that the time has come to begin a battle of annihilation.” (Syria’s Defence Minister Hafez, later to become president of Syria and father to Bashar Assad, Syria’s present dictator)

Until the end of May, U Thant, then UN Secretary General, engaged in shuttle diplomacy, concluding on May 26th that the situation in the Middle East was “disturbing.” How Kofiesque.

In six days of war Israel destroyed the well armed armies of its enemies, rolled on to the Jordan River, pushed Syria’s army from the Golan Heights, took control of Gaza and the Sinai, and most symbolic for international Jewry, made Jerusalem a united Jewish city.

Yoske Schwartz a veteran of Israel’s 1948 war and one of the paratroopers of the fierce battle for Jerusalem recently wrote: "I'll never forget it. Forty years have passed and I still haven't forgotten it. I remember suddenly tens of thousands of Jews—young, old, men and women, were all running to the Western Wall, crying and hugging us and calling us heroes. We didn't feel like heroes, but we cried and prayed with them. On the one hand, so many of my friends had been killed. But on the other hand, sitting in front of the Western Wall, I felt Jerusalem. I always say that I had once thought, 'Who are these people with streimels and payot? I'm not like them, I'm a new Israeli man.' But when I got to the Kotel I understood that I was just a Jew. It was an amazing feeling."

The war was not without severe losses for Israel. Eight hundred soldiers died in the fighting, 183 in the battle for Jerusalem. Out of 1,200 paratroopers who began the battle for Jerusalem, there were only 400 left fighting by the end, some of them badly wounded.

Unfortunately, in the immediate aftermath of victory, Israel’s parliament (including Menachem Begin) unanimously proposed ceding every inch of the conquered land for “peace and recognition of its right to exist” by its Arab enemies. The response of the leaders of the Arab League who met in Khartoum, Sudan to “negotiate” the terms of the final cease-fire was to reject peace, negotiations, and recognition. (Khartoum has moved on to other matters such as genocide of the non Arabs of Darfur.)

By making the offer to the Arabs, Israel launched the mantra of successive American and Israeli legislators, namely, give them land and they will recognize your right to exist (until they kill you).

Please note that murderous Arab anti-Israel rhetoric has been only faintly air-brushed for the Western media. The real difference today is that in great part due to Israel’s complacency, the world empathizes with Arab “grievances” and “frustrations” and Israel’s legitimate rights are off the radar screen.

Why did Israel not press its advantage after 1967? Thousands of miles of borders were changed in the years after World War II. Why did Israel persist in using the terms "West Bank," “administered” or “occupied” territories? The same people who have blithely accepted the term “Beijing” instead of Peking or Myanmar instead of Burma cannot bring themselves to say Judea and Samaria, the historic names for these lands. Why did Defense Minister Moshe Dayan order the Israeli flag to be removed from the shrine of the Patriarchs in Hebron and insist that all visitors entering the building remove their shoes "because it's a mosque"?

Why did Israel not promote its case against Jordan’s desecration of Jewish and Christian shrines? Why did they not emphasize that Judea and Samaria were the core of the historical Land of Israel, part of the Mandate to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, and that Jordan’s illegal occupation was recognized only by Britain and Pakistan? How could Israel give its blessing to the identity theft by which the name “Palestinian” and all its relevant history belonged only to the Arabs?

Instead, much was made of silly UN Resolution 242. The victorious allies in World War II would have laughed at the terms of 242. But Israel made them sacrosanct.

In spite of serious warnings from the consecutive commanders of the “administered” territories since 1967 Israel took pride in building so-called Arab universities which became training centers for hatred of Jews and jihad.

Israel pointed proudly to the freedoms accorded to the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, among them freedom to promote sedition and calls for terror. Israel acquiesced in the perpetuation of the “refugee camps” whose self imposed filth and squalor concealed the buildup of terrorist cells throughout Judea and Samaria.

Even the Golan and Jerusalem, which Israel legally annexed, are now on the table. All this is the bitter fruit of Israel’s failure to implement Jewish rights in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Golan after 1967.

Instead Israel foolishly offers to abrogate its hard won victory for “recognition of a right to exist.” Even dedicated appeaser Abba Eban noted how ludicrous that concept is in an article published in The New York Times on November 18th, 1981:

“Nobody does Israel any service by proclaiming its 'right to exist.' Israel's right to exist, like that of the United States, Saudi Arabia and 152 other states, is axiomatic and unreserved. Israel's legitimacy is not suspended in midair awaiting acknowledgement....There is certainly no other state, big or small, young or old, that would consider mere recognition of its 'right to exist' a favor, or a negotiable concession.”

However, Israel’s legitimacy does remain suspended in mid air, thanks to the retreat that started with the 1967 victory and the concept of “land for peace” which has been implemented by successive Israeli administrations.

Israel and its supporters will proudly hail the state's many achievements in science, economy and technology. But these are hollow accomplishments when her leaders propel the Jewish state toward a two-state dissolution.

It is a bitter anniversary, with no cause for celebration.