Returning to little Zakkai for a
moment. The family has asked me to express gratitude to all those who
wrote to me to say they were praying, wished him well, etc. It matters to
them a great deal.
Then I was asked to post these
mitzvah opportunities in merit of good surgery and healing for Zakkai, for those
who would like to participate:
challah
baking: http://www.tziporahsnest.com/campaign.asp?id=164
25-hour tehillim
rally: http://tinyurl.com/aepl2x3
~~~~~~~~~~
Turning to our
world...
Barry Rubin has written a
particularly important article. Its title makes clear what he's talking
about: "Not a Mistake, Misunderstanding, or Well-Intended Criticism But a
Deliberate Campaign to Bash Israel." (Emphasis is
added)
"The first, most important thing
to understand about the Western and especially American debate on Israel is
this:
"Never before in history has there been such a
concerted, systematic and vicious campaign to discredit and demonize Israel,
especially seeking to undermine its support in the Jewish
community.
"Without comprehending this fact, the massive
attacks from academia, mass media, groups and even in mainstream political and
intellectual debate cannot be understood. We aren’t dealing with lots of
mistakes, but with the mass production of hate speech...
"Don't believe that they may have gotten it right this
particular time. Many of them aren't trying to get it right; most of them are
incapable of getting it right.
"These assaults cannot be taken in isolation and with
naiveté as if this time a wild accusation is accurate...
The craziest stuff is just the most incautious end of far
more apparently credible lies and distortions. And the key 'mistake' made is to
use the word 'Jews,' unacceptable, rather 'Israel,' 'Israelis,' or
'Zionists.'
In other words, 'The Jews want to take over the world.' No.
'Israel wants to take over the Middle East.' Okay. 'The Jews use children's
blood in Passover matzoh.' No. 'Israel deliberately murders Palestinian
children.' Okay.
Not all are aware, of course, of what they are doing,
especially those originating or spreading the more 'moderate' hate speech. There
are dupes as well as demonizers, though dupes often seem all too credulous to be
wholly innocent.
"...Once having been defined as the 'bad guy,' Israel can
be accused of anything, as in a film narrative in which the villain is, well,
always villainous.
"...there are so many lies—new ones appear each day--and so
many facts to counter them with that it is partly a waste of time to counter
each offensive in itself. What’s necessary is to understand that this is all
based on lies, ignorance, and conscious bad faith.
"The categories include, but are not limited to,
falsification of photographs and fabrication of events; distortion of history;
making up of quotes; publishing disproportionate numbers of anti-Israel books
and articles; indoctrination in schools; refusal to mainstream Israeli views and
overwhelming emphasis of radical, critical ones; excessive credibility to
hostile sources for outlandish tales (a worldwide story on an alleged, since
proven false massacre in Jenin based on a single mysterious informant is just
one example).
"...The main single issue is to try to portray
Israel as responsible for the lack of peace, just as Jews were
historically blamed by those hostile to them for anti-Semitism. Since the
experience of the 1993-2000 'peace process' era, the fact that the conflict
continues because of the intransigence of Israel’s enemies should have been
obvious. Yet this history has been forgotten and its impact on Israeli thinking
buried or censored.
"...Much of the new antagonism stems from Western
intelligentsias’ sharp turn to the left. The question, of course, is why Israel
is such a prominent issue among the many causes available to
them.
"...One thing comforting about this campaign is that its
activists so often have to resort to lies and exaggerations, showing how little
genuine material they possess.
"How much
effect is this all having in the real world? Ironically, it is less damaging to
Israel itself (attempts at economic boycotts, for example, have yielded no real
damage) than to Western Jews who live in the societies so affected. The growing
pressure will result in some running for cover—or even joining the
assailants—but far more will ultimately wake up.
"Yet again
this situation can no longer be dealt with as an ordinary, though rather
spirited and emotional, debate. It is a massive, often conscious and
deliberate campaign of defamation. No longer on the margins, this campaign has
penetrated into using the commanding heights of the Western mass media,
intellectual, and academic institutions.
"The reason for pointing this all out is that there
are millions of well-intentioned, honest people who would be shocked if they had
the paradigm shift from taking a good portion of this material as honest and
well-intentioned to understanding that they are being subjected to a concerted
propaganda campaign of lies. If they comprehend that, they are far more
likely to reject these lies as well as having their eyes opened to wider
disinformation campaigns going on today."
~~~~~~~~~~
Having
provided this perspective, I want to move to a situation of deliberate
misrepresentation about Israel that is masquerading as academic research.
A report
entitled "Portrayal of the 'other' in Israeli and Palestinian School Books,"
done by the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land (CRIHL), has
just been released. The study on which it was based -- lead by Professor Daniel
Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University and Sami Adwan of Bethlehem University -- was
funded by a grant from the US State Department and was commissioned by an NGO
called A Different Future, which had been founded by a Yale professor of
psychiatry, Bruce Wexler.
Bar-Tal,
as we are informed by Seth Frantzman, who wrote a piece on this for the
JPost, was "co-editor of the radical left Palestine-Israel Journal
from 2001 to 2005 (whose masthead shows the colors of the Palestinian flag
next to an Israeli flag that does not include a Star of David)."
Says
Frantzman, "Bar-Tal's views should have led to concern about the potential
for bias in the CRIHL study..." With regard to Israel's actions in Gaza
during Cast Lead in 2009, Bar-Tal wrote that the war "derived from the
continuous dehumanization of the Hamas organization."
"A
university professor who...argues that [Hamas] is a victim of dehumanization by
Israel...was supposed to provide an unbiased opinion on Israeli textbooks?
One is left with the conclusion that there is overwhelming evidence of
pre-existing bias on the part of the authors." (Emphasis
added)
~~~~~~~~~~
It is not
surprising, then, that the study provides a perspective of moral equivalency,
concluding that, "Both Israeli and Palestinian books present exclusive
unilateral national narratives that present a wealth of information about
the other as enemy."
The
Education Ministry of Israel has slammed this report as "biased, unprofessional
and profoundly non-objective."
One of the
problems with the methodology of the research is that negative statements about
Palestinian Arabs in Israeli books that were simple statements of historical
fact were classified as representing "negative" portrayals of the
"other."
Among
statements listed as "negative" portrayals of the Palestinian Arabs
were:
"Ever
since 1964, the year the PLO was founded, Palestinian terrorists gangs
penetrated [into Israel]." And, [In Iraq] on the holiday of Shavuot, Arabs
attacked Jews, and murdered them, including women and children."
The
authors considered such statements to be parallel to such statements in PA books
as:
"[The
British facilitated] Jewish migration into Palestine to turn it into a Jewish
state after evacuating or exterminating its people."
You see
Frantzman's full piece here:
~~~~~~~~~~
We might
feel inclined to laugh off this severely biased study, except for the fact
that it will do real damage. Palestinian Arabs and their supporters are crowing
that the charges that PA textbooks are inciteful and anti-Israel have now been
discredited.
"The results show that there's
almost no stereotypes, there is no hate speech, there's no inciting for violence
in the Palestinian textbooks," Dr. Sami Adwan, associate professor of education
at Bethlehem University, said.
As someone
who has worked with this subject, and written about it, for years, I will
state unequivocally that the incitement and bias do exist in those PA
books.
One of
those whom I've worked with and interviewed is Dr. Arnon Groiss, former head
translator/researcher with IMPACT -- The Institute for Monitoring Peace and
Cultural Tolerance in School Education. I've read Groiss's translations of
PA texts, with hair-raising praise for blood flowing in martyrdom and a great
deal more.
You can
see a major IMPACT study of PA textbooks here:
~~~~~~~~~~
Groiss was
actually a (nominal) adviser for this project, but says that the advisers were
not allowed to really be involved.
"They don't combine the specific items to create the full
picture...I don't
know why -- they didn't put [into the study] about 40 items, significant
anti-Israel items in the Palestinian books," Groiss said. "They said, 'Well we
have enough quotations. We don't have to put them all.'"
He's being
diplomatic, when he says he doesn't know why.
~~~~~~~~~~
"We
educate teachers to love," Israel Ministry of Education Director General Dalit
Stauber told CBN News.
"The first word learned by a pupil
who is joining the Israeli education system in the first grade is "shalom." We
give him a pigeon with an olive branch to start his first day in school.
We teach for peace. We do not teach for hatred."
Stauber was particularly
annoyed by the charge in the study that putting the 1972 Olympic
Massacre in Israeli history books casts Palestinians in a negative light,
because the terrorists who killed the 11 Israeli athletes were Palestinian.
"If facts included in history books
in Israel...are presented as if Israeli books present Palestinians in a negative
way, what else do we need in order to prove that this is a libel against the
Ministry of Education, against professional work done by the Ministry of
Education?" Stauber said.
Said General Yossi
Kuperwasser, Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry Director, "This comparison,
something is wrong and distorted.
"This attempt to compare Israeli
textbooks that deal entirely with the question of how you promote peace, how you
promote the culture of peace, with the Palestinian textbooks that deal with
exactly the opposite, how do you promote a culture of confrontation, how do you
promote the readiness of people to carry out martyrdom attacks."
Kuperwasser is concerned that a
report such as this exempts the PA from tackling the major problems in its
schoolbooks:
"And this is the ongoing
Palestinian incitement for hatred, incitement for violence, for terror and the
ongoing denial of the Palestinians of the rights of the other and the existence
of the other, which is the Israelis and the Jews in this piece of
land."
~~~~~~~~~~
Well, Ayatollah Khameinei, who has
the last word on issues of negotiations, has nixed direct talks with the US,
saying he won't condone such talks while the US is "pointing a gun at
Iran." He says such talks "would not solve any problems."
And Obama's next step?
White House Press Secretary
Jay Carney says, "We expect Iran and Syria to be the main topics" during Obama's
visit to Jerusalem.
The president will have his hands
full if he expects much traction with regard to the "peace process": In
Cairo, Abbas has just met with Ahmadinejad in Cairo during an Islamic
Summit, and has now invited him to come to Ramallah. No word on whether
the invitation was accepted. But PLO officials have already indicated they don't
have high hopes for progress with Obama's visit.
~~~~~~~~~~
©
Arlene Kushner. This material is produced by Arlene Kushner,
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