Submitted Comments RSS Feed Comments by Evan Zuesse
Posted in: What folks are saying about Obama and Sarkozy's 'Liar'-gate
One last comment: why is it that we never hear about Mahmud Abbas (or for that matter Yasser Arafat) being called a "liar" by American and European leaders? Why is it, if those leaders think that Abbas and Erekat, etc., are in fact constantly lying (as they are), we never get "leaks" to the media of private conversations by political figures and diplomats that say so? For example, Abbas has said (echoing of course Yasser Arafat's claim, which is the official Palestinian position) that the Temple Mount was never a Jewish holy site, and the Temple never existed in Jerusalem -- it was always a mosque, even before the rise of Islam. Even the Western Wall, according to Abbas and co., is not an authentic Jewish holy site, and under Palestinian administration might well be made a Muslim shrine from which Jews would be permanently excluded, as has been Muslim policy on the Temple Mount itself, the Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron, and all other Jewish holy sites in "Palestine." Why do not Western leaders make "private comments" about that, that end up merely accidentally leaked to the media? Food for thought.
Posted in: What folks are saying about Obama and Sarkozy's 'Liar'-gate
In short, if you fearlessly tell the inconvenient truth to power, the powerful call you "Liar!" Netanyahu has shown up both Obama and Sarkozy too many times simply by standing up for Israel and telling it like it is. He becomes hard to bear for them: he is right, and they are wrong. We see it again in regard both to the Palestinian attempts to declare themselves a state unilaterally at the UN, which Netanyahu says directly and grossly violates and invalidates the Oslo Accords -- which is the truth -- and in regard to the need for Obama and Europe to end the palaver and actually to stop Iran's extremely dangerous nuclear program -- which is the truth. Obviously that rubs many leaders the wrong way. It is easier to blame Netanyahu than to face the truths he refuses to shut up about.
Posted in: What folks are saying about Obama and Sarkozy's 'Liar'-gate
Netanyahu addressed the UN and called it a dark place filled with lies - which is the truth. He stated plainly to Obama in a press conference that Israel would never return to the 67 borders and that those borders were indefensible, and rehearsed the real history behind Israel's struggle simply to survive in a genocidally oriented Middle East - which is the truth. He said that Israel has tried time and again to sit down to serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and it is they who refuse, and even try to impose conditions that require Israel's self-destruction - which is the truth. He said that Obama tried to force on Israel a freeze on "settlements" within Jerusalem that no previous administration had done, breaking previous commitments - which is the truth. All of these are truths that Obama, Sarkozy, the EU and the UN routinely deny, in Orwellian fashion. For some pointed further comment on the "Liar!" claim from Europeans who are systematically lying themselves into social and economic collapse, see David Spengler's amusing post "What does Sarkozy mean by the term 'liar'?" at http://pjmedia.com/spengler.
Posted in: The legal implications of dining at a Chinese restaurant on Christmas day
Ron Kampeas is "not at all sure why [Kagan's endorsement of retired Israeli Supreme Court Barak] is germane to how she will function as a judge." He even quite misleadingly phrases her praise of Barak's judicial activism as her "why I admire Israel" moment. The remarks have little to do with Israel per se. They relate instead to judicial philosophy. Such sneering misrepresentation boggles the mind, and at the least raises questions about Kampeas's possible bias or journalistic ethics. The praise of Barak's judicial activism is directly relevant to how Kagan herself will function as a judge. Many commentators have shown how and why this is so, at length. Certainly Robert Bork made no secret of how germane it is, and Kampeas has reported on Bork's remarks, even if rather dismissively one might add. Furthermore, and at the very least, comments from readers of earlier JTA articles on Kagan's attempt to justify rewriting the American Constitution as Barak has effectively written de novo an Israeli constitution, would have alerted Kampeas to the issues. See for example the comments on Ami Eden's article on Bork's comments, "Bork aims to Bork Barack's Kagan with Barak," June 24, on this Capital J blog, at politics/article/2010/06/24/2739764/bork-aims-to-bork-baracks-kagan-with-barak/ They are serious issues, directly germane to the confirmation hearings on Kagan, and indeed with bearing on what kind of country the U.S. is going to become in future decades under the rule of the Supreme Court. These are matters that Kampeas is obligated by professional ethics to report on honestly and fairly. His own apparent advocacy for a Barak-style rewriting of the Constitution, as Kagan appears to wish for, should not prevent him reporting properly on the implications of the various viewpoints for American democracy.
Posted in: Bork aims to Bork Barack's Kagan with Barak
Robert Bork's analysis (see the link to the "lengthly attack on Barak in a 2007 piece" in the JTA article) is spot-on, and raises some fundamental questions about democracy versus judicial activism that most other posters here ignore and hope will just go away. The problems are real. As most authorities affirm, Israel has the most activist Supreme Court in the world, and many of its decisions are arguably not reflective even of Jewish ethics nor, incontestably, of Israeli views generally. They reflect only the very left-liberal views of the judges themselves, who by the way choose their successors so even the nominees to the Supreme Court do not go through a parliamentary vetting and are not in the slightest responsible to nor democratically subject to the Israeli people. Instead, the nominees are merely chosen to perpetuate the ideology, for we must call it that, of the present Supreme Court. There is no advise-and-consent here, nor check-and-balance between the various branches of government, and thus no democracy in any proper understanding of that term. Barak, as Bork points out, claims that extreme judicial rewriting of Israeli law constitutes "substantive democracy" as opposed to "formal democracy," as if elections, the checks and balances of branches of government, etc., are merely "formal democracy," not "substantive," while ideological decrees determined only by a judicial elite answerable to no-one are "substantive" REAL democracy. Shades of the "people's democracies" of North Korea, the USSR, China, and the like, I say. It is an entirely legitimate topic of concern that Ms. Kagan seems to endorse this sort of undemocratic judicial activism, rather than the duty of judges to sustain the explicit restrictions and limitations both on judicial power and on interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. To suppose, in addition, that international law as arrived at by the too-often kangaroo court of the U.N. is superior to and should have any bearing on American law is merely to travesty both U.S. constitutional obligations and, too often, morality itself. The U.N., with its highly authoritarian block of 57 Muslim nations that have not even been able to arrive at a clear definition of terrorism, and which has gotten the U.N. to rule that Islam is exempt from all democratic criticism, is no moral nor impressive legal authority, and should not set the pattern for American law. The U.N. Human Rights Council itself legitimates blatant and innumerable human rights violations around the world, while attacking chiefly Israel whose standard of human rights is far above most of the members on the HRC itself.
Posted in: Different reads on Shavuot
Shavuot is one of the most important Jewish festivals in the calendar, and the lack of knowledge about it is an index of how lost most overly assimilatedJews are from their own tradition. Its chief meaning is not as an archaic harvest festival (as many Christian and secular Jewish academics have liked to argue), but as the always-relevant celebration of the arrival of the Children of Israel and the Erev Rav, the other former slaves who escaped with the Children of Israel, at Mt. Sinai, where they all experienced the revelation at Mt. Sinai and together accepted the covenant with HaShem, all converting to Judaism which was first defined then, and only then really becoming the Jewish people. We are taught that that experience of God and Torah, and entry into the covenant which occurred then, was not limited to that generation, but every generation of Jews should regard themselves as having been present then, and Shavuot is therefore our portion in that epochal and ever-new experience. That we were all converted at Mt. Sinai to Torah and God, and that the Jewish people only became such through that conversion and through the covenant we entered into, makes us all a convert people. That is the biggest reason the Book of Ruth is what we read during Shavuot: her story is really our own and the story of the Sinai generation in nucleus. But of course Ruth was also the ancestress of King David, and therefore symbolically of the coming Messiah who will bring world peace and the communion of all peoples under God, so reading her story also points to the future, not just the past or present. As is laid down halakhically in regard to the conversion process, one begins with laying out only some of the commandments, explaining some of the most crucial and elemental ones, and also explaining some of the minor ones, so as to indicate the general nature of the Way of the Torah to the convert so there can be informed consent, while also stressing that there is more to learn. So it happened on the first Shavuot, at Mt. Sinai: Israel was informed about the Ten Commandments and other commandments both major and minor, and they accepted, saying "We will do and listen [further]!" The learning process that follows conversion had begun. Of course, our arrival 50 days after the Exodus from Egypt at Sinai, and Shavuot, was not the end of our Sinai experience. As the Torah tells us in detail, Moses then went up into the mountain for 40 days to learn all the details of the Covenant-Teaching (Torah means "Teaching"), and the Jews below became anxious and insecure, and finally had Aaron build a Golden Calf for them (on the Ninth of Av, midway through the 40 days) since Moses appeared to be gone forever and they needed some way to connect with HaShem. Moses descended on the 29th of Av with the Two Tablets, broke them and then ground the Golden Calf to dust, calling the people together on the first of Ellul with the blowing of ram's horns, and urging them to repent and prepare themselves for his return (hence the blowing of ram's horns and theme of self-purification and communal harmony through the month of Ellul, ever since). Moses then went up into the mountain a further 40 days, refashioning a second set of the Two Tablets, and returned on Yom Kippur to a completely repentant Israel. So this is the foundation meaning of Yom Kippur. And on Succot, all Israel celebrated the renewed presence of HaShem in their midst, the divine presence filling the whole world and giving new life to everything. So Succot takes its primal meaning from those events at Mt. Sinai, the culmination of the first six months following the Exodus. None of this is new information. It is all laid down in the Torah itself, and is described in the Book of Exodus. It is also established clearly in rabbinic writings, and for example in Rashi's comments on the Torah text, so there is nothing secret about it. The attempt of secular and Christian scholars to reduce Shavuot to a merely folklorist harvest festival taken from the Canaanites, and even to claim that it got its Sinai significance only in the Hellenistic period (!!) is a complete rewrite, serving their joint anti-Judaic or even in the case of the secularists anti-religious ends.
Posted in: Talking to Israel's critics
Avineri has a very short memory. Remember the extraordinarily hostile European reaction to Israel's acting in self-defense against thousands of Gaza rockets, during Israel's previous government led by the Labor and Kadimah parties? Remember the general lack of sympathy shown by Europe to Israel's self-defense Lebanon campaign against Hezbollah rockets and terrorism in 2007, when again Netanyahu was not Prime Minister? Remember the world's reception of Ariel Sharon, back in 2001, when he was blamed by Arafat for Arafat's instigation of the Intifada, and the world fell into line with Arafat again after having previously almost abandoned him for his torpedoing the Camp David peace offer of 2000? Remember the non-"genocidial massacre" of Jenin, in 2001, with Sharon portrayed even on the covers of The Guardian and The Economist as a Nazi child-eating fiend, all of this really a creation of leftist-Palestinian propaganda that again the world bought holus-bolus, until the alleged "massacre" was disproved by a U.N. investigative commission? For that matter, remember the long and consistent record of European cowering to Muslim extremist regimes and Palestinian demonizations of Israel, extending over decades? Remember the eager way leftists in Europe adopted rabid anti-Zionism after Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967, following the furious defamations unleased at the time in the U.N. and on the world stage by the Soviet Union? Where has the supposedly learned academic Avineri been over the past six decades? It is well-known that he is a leftist himself, and therefore unsympathetic to right-center political figures as such. Netanyahu is therefore being blamed by him in scapegoating fashion for things completely unrelated to him. The problem does not lie with Netanyahu, who has an overwhelming majority of Israel's population solidly behind him. If anything, the problem lies with the utter failure of the leftist peace opium-dreams of the past, and the intransigent refusal to accept peace or work towards it by the Palestinians and Muslims world-wide. But Avineri would never want to admit that, any more than Europe would. Pipe dreams lead to scapegoating and self-harming, blaming one's own side for the failures caused by the vicious other side. It is noticeable that Brith Shalom, the Yishuv-period ancestor to the current discredited Peace Now (with which Avineri is so associated), was a group of intellectuals who simply could not find any Arab intellectuals ready to sit down with them or join their group. Brith Shalom, adamantly unwilling to admit Arabs were to blame for any of their violence and intransigence, sought to ignore this inability to find Arab interlocutors, and instead blamed the Yishuv leadership for the ongoing terrorism and conflict. This has remained the strategy, if you can call it that, of Peace Now types up to this day. Abbas refuses even to sit down with Netanyahu in peace negotiations? It is due to Netanyahu's alleged intransigence and alleged refusal to accept a 2-state solution (both false claims), never Abba's. Etc.
Posted in: Foxman to Goldstone: Recant
As a matter of fact, though, Foxman ignores in his courteous letter to Goldstone the overwhelming evidence from the Goldstone Report itself, and as well from Goldstone's subsequent defenses of it, that Goldstone quite consciously and intentionally crafted the Report in a biased and dishonest manner, to demonize Israel and to slant the Report against Israel. It goes beyond the evidence, for example, to lay the charge that Israel intentionally sought civilian casualties, when there is overwhelming evidence that it did not (if it had, Israel could easily have wiped out hundreds of thousands of Gazans, not a few hundred.) The Report even misrepresents international law itself in its claims against Israel, and shows very sloppy legal investigative methodology in handling witnesses and other evidence. Goldstone knew, after all (as do we all), not only the heavy bias of the UN and HRC itself, which commissioned him, but also that of Hamas itself, an openly antisemitic terrorist organization which has boasted of its genocidal agenda against Jews. Even its charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He choose to trust evidence from such an organization and to dismiss as unreliable and dubious evidence from Israel and NGOs and individuals defending it. He continues to defend his indefensible Report, using dodgy answers. This goes far beyond naivety. So there will be no recantation coming from Richard Goldstone.
Posted in: Foxman to Goldstone: Recant
Not really, David. Foxman is merely stating the obvious, as any unbiased reader of his article can see. For a full analysis of what is wrong with the Goldstone Report, and the dishonesty of "Goldstone's" letter to Congress defending it (a letter not even written by Goldstone but by a founder and leader of J-Street, Mort Halperin), see my post at; http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/10/30/1008853/goldstone-v-ros-lehtinen-and-berman#comment_92224 There are links in that post to some of the chief detailed refutations of the Goldstone Report on the internet, showing the Report's hollowness in case after case.
RSS Feed Breaking News
Updated 02/09/12 @ 05:54PM EST
- A poll showed that nearly half of likely voters believed the United States should use military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
- Rabbi Gunther Plaut, a major figure in Reform Judaism, died in Toronto.
- The application for a proposed Hebrew-language charter school was accepted by the District of Columbia Public Charter School board.
- A truck driving calves from Eilat to the Golan Heights was hijacked into the West Bank.
- U.S. Rep. Howard Berman introduced legislation that would allow eligible Israeli nationals to receive non-immigrant investor visas in the United States.
- Poll: Half of U.S. voters back strike on nuclear Iran
- Reform leader Rabbi Gunther Plaut dies
- D.C. Hebrew-language charter school accepted for review
- Op-Ed: Kick the reaction addiction on campus
- Berman moves to grant investor visas to Israelis
- Holy cow! Calves hijacked into Palestinian territory
- Report: Israeli journalist also works for prime minister
- Larry Greenfield tapped to lead JINSA
Posted in: What folks are saying about Obama and Sarkozy's 'Liar'-gate
11/10/11 07:20 PM
What we have lacked in the reports of this "private exchange of views" between Obama and Sarkozy is precisely the larger context and other comments overheard, in media reports. It is a matter of course that reporters with their own well-established agendas will edit the remarks to suit their own preferences. We still do not know just what Sarkozy was commenting on with his "liar" accusation, but Seth's blog article begins to fill in the gaps, and it is reassuring. His "take" does help to redeem Obama a bit, and is a welcome corrective. (I don't think Seth is correct, though, to allege that "right-wing" supporters of Israel are pleased with the anti-Netanyahu comment of Obama. They are not so partisan as to wish ill for US-Israel relations. They deplore Obama's too often inept and unsympathetic initiatives and views, now shown up again despite Seth's persuasive caveats.) Any more information about the actual conversation and Sarkozy's own responses?