Kol Hakavod Danny Lamm

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Kol Hakavod Danny Lamm…..published in today’s “The Age”. Not only does Danny address the complexities of solving the Palestinian/Israeli dispute in terms that that paper’s readership can understand, but he also takes on and successfully discredits Lowenstein/Slezak and others from our own community who do Israel so much damage. In doing so, Danny has done our community a real service. G

Danny Lamm
April 7, 2008

THE path to peace in the Middle East is a tortuous one. Israel and the Palestinian Authority are working together with great difficulty to establish an Israel and a Palestine living side by side together in peace, as envisaged more than six decades ago by United Nations Security Council resolution 181 and in line with the “road map” for peace proposed by a quartet of international entities: the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
Reaching a fair and just two-state solution to this long-standing conflict has the support of the majority of the world’s democracies and was reiterated in the Australian Parliament last month by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson in support of a bipartisan resolution commemorating Israel’s 60th anniversary of independence.
This solution, however, has its opponents, particularly those groups led by Iran and its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and terrorist movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah which reject the peace process and maintain a fanatical commitment to destroy the state of Israel.
This would deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and cause a catastrophic upheaval that would add to the suffering of both sides in this war-ravaged part of the world. Nevertheless, the radical Islamist rejectionists have gathered support from fringe groups on the extreme right and left of the political spectrum and ironically, given Hamas’ anti-Semitic charter, even from a tiny minority of Jews.
These include the remnants of the Independent Australian Jewish Voices, whose leadership lost the support of many rank-and-file members last month for seeking to align the group with a one-sided advertisement promoted by Palestinian groups condemning Israel alone for all the troubles of the region.
IAJV founders Antony Loewenstein and Peter Slezak have been in damage control ever since, and their article “Self-defence or brutal occupation?” published on this page on March 31 unsurprisingly (given their lack of credentials and expertise in this area) demonstrates their lack of understanding of the complexities of the conflict.
They rely principally on the discredited work of Americans John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt to support the historically inaccurate proposition that it was the Arabs and not Israel who were the Davids confronted by a Goliath when five Arab armies attacked a severely outnumbered nascent Jewish State in May 1948 and threatened its inhabitants with a “momentous massacre”.
Loewenstein and Slezak also cite out of context Benny Morris, who they describe as a “leading Israeli historian”, to support their outrageous claims about the history of the conflict. They are apparently unaware that the same Benny Morris has demolished the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis and indeed, took their argument apart piece by piece in an article titled “The ignorance at the heart of an innuendo. And now for some facts”.
Morris was scathing in his assessment of their thesis, describing it as a “nasty piece of work” and concluding that “what these distinguished professors have produced is otherwise depressing to anyone who values intellectual integrity”. Morris said in the Irish Times in February that “the demonisation of Israel is largely based on lies — much as the demonisation of the Jews during the past 2000 years has been based on lies”.
This lack of intellectual integrity is carried over in the works of many who seek to revise the history of the region in their quest to reject the notion of two states to resolve the conflict. The most problematic claim made by Loewenstein and Slezak is that Israel is “not the state of its citizens but only of the Jewish people” and that it discriminates against its Arab population.
In this aspect, as in many others, they deny the fact that Israeli Arabs are recognised on an equal footing as citizens of Israel. Arabic is one of the country’s official languages, along with Hebrew and English, and the Arab population has grown significantly (so much for supposed “ethnic cleansing”), as have the numbers in employment and schooling. Arabs are also well represented in Israel’s parliament and it has an Arab minister in its government. By contrast, the stated aim of Hamas and other Arab political entities is to categorically and violently rid the region of Jews.
Israel may not be perfect, but it is a vibrant democracy surrounded by Arab dictatorships and theocracies. The only hope for peace in the region remains the creation of an independent Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, rather than instead of Israel.
For this to occur, the Palestinian leadership must immediately cease all violence and terror, financial support for terror and incitement, and more importantly, re-educate Palestinians that this is the only option to move forward. Only then can the world give its wholehearted support to the process taking place between Israel and the Palestinian Authority which seeks to bring reconciliation, peace and prosperity to the two peoples.
Dr Danny Lamm is the president of the State Zionist Council of Victoria.

Hillary, the Dangerous Revisionist

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Israeli citizens will have to fasten their seatbelts if Hillary Clinton, the latest historical revisionist, wins the presidency. She has the chutzpah and the hide to claim that her husband’s Oslo initiative engendered regional stability when it is an established fact that Oslo was a boon for the Palestinian terrorist leadership and resulted in the deaths of many innocent Israeli civilians. With friends like these, who love us to death, who needs enemies? Caroline Glick’s analysis of the implications to Israel and the region of another Clinton in the White House is well worth a read. Like many initiatives we see from the Left, reliance is placed on grand promises and statements (in this case by the Palestinian leadership) rather than judging leaders by how they actually behave. Glick plausibly explains the apparent inconsistency between Egypt’s and Saudi Arabia’s fear of Iran and their support for its proxy, Hamas (in short, they hate Jews more than they fear Iran) and how Clinton’s Middle East policy is frightening (as is the somewhat similar policy presently being peddled in the region by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice). G

Our World: America’s coalition confusion
By CAROLINE GLICK

A core question arises from last weekend’s Arab League summit in Damascus. Boycotted by half the league’s members, the conference demonstrated the depth of Egyptian and Saudi opposition to Iran’s rise to prominence in the Arab world. So too, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki’s ostentatious participation at the summit showed the strength of Iran’s strategic ties with Syria.

The question that arises from the summit is if Egypt and Saudi Arabia are willing to discard even the semblance of Arab unity in order to make clear their opposition to Iran, why do they support Hamas?
Hamas is an Iranian proxy. It receives its arms, training and orders from Teheran. Its leaders reside in Syria. Given their open opposition to Iran, and their increasingly open opposition to Syria as Iran’s client, wouldn’t it make more sense - from their perspective - to boycott Hamas?
The reason that Egypt and Saudi Arabia support Hamas in spite of its client relationship with Teheran is that for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, support for Palestinian terrorists trumps opposition to Iran. If they are forced to choose between fighting Iran and collaborating with Iran in support of Palestinian terrorists, they will always choose the latter. This is why they are spearheading negotiations between Fatah and Hamas towards the reestablishment of a Fatah-Hamas unity government. This is why Egypt enables Hamas and Iran to use its territory as their weapons supply route.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia think supporting the Palestinians is more important than fighting Iran because the Palestinians fight Israel. As the heads of the so-called “moderate Arab” camp, Egypt and Saudi Arabia hate the Jews more than they fear the Iranians.
The central question then for policymakers in Washington who are trying to deploy a successful strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and asserting regional predominance is how can the Palestinian war with Israel be defused so that the ‘moderate’ Arab states will be forced to join them in confronting Iran?
THE CONSENSUS answer that the US has come up with is to pressure Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians. It is argued that such concessions will appease not just the Palestinians, but more importantly, they will appease the US’s “moderate” Arab supporters in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. As this thinking goes, if Israel can be forced to cough up big enough concessions quickly enough, then the Palestinians will quiet down and the Egyptians and Saudis will be sufficiently satisfied with the “progress” being made to direct their attentions to confronting Iran.
This argument was elucidated this week by Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in an interview with the Jewish Exponent. Clinton claimed that the Oslo negotiating process between the PLO and Israel which her husband embraced as his central Middle East policy from 1993 through 2000 brought levels of violence down between Israel and the Palestinians and so engendered regional stability.
In her words, “I think what we did in the ’90s was beneficial in a strategic way and led to a period where, at times, there were no attacks being made, no suicide bombings and no deaths.” She then went on to criticize the Bush administration which during its first term in office did not pressure Israel to restart negotiations towards Palestinian statehood with the PLO. Clinton added that she would consider opening negotiations with Hamas if she is elected president. Continue reading ‘Hillary, the Dangerous Revisionist’

Mesmerised by the siren call of Lennon’s piano

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The Age

Letters & emails

Date: 24/04/2007
Words: 2096
Source: AGE

   

 

   

Publication: The Age
Section: News
Page: 10

SOCIETY

Mesmerised by the siren call of Lennon’s piano

THE piano on which John Lennon composed the song Imagine is touring the world bringing a message of peace and the brotherhood of man (”Imagine touring the world for a song”, Opinion, 21/4). The tour is promoted as a celebration of the human spirit. Imagine has become the universal anthem of those striving to make this a better world. Yet is this noble objective assisted or undermined by the song’s seductive lyrics and evocative melody?

We are living in a world in which moral and ethical societal values are in decay. In 1940, in answer to a nationwide questionnaire, US high-school teachers listed the worst problems encountered in the classroom. These included such things as speaking out of turn, chewing gum and, perish the thought, dropping litter. The identical questionnaire in 2005 yielded responses including drug abuse, guns, assault, sexual harassment and robbery.

There can be little doubt that there is a correlation between this decay and the progressive secularisation of Western society over the same 65 years. The 1960s were revolutionary in many ways and the popular songs of the day both reflected and influenced attitudinal changes, especially in the young. But the baby boomers who lived through that decade and who were most influenced by it had a solid foundation. They were nurtured by and stood on the shoulders of previous generations who had forged fundamentally decent societies founded on timeless Judeo-Christian values. But their children and subsequent generations do not have that foundation thanks to the radical secularist obsession of purging society of every vestige of its religious heritage in the name of separating church and state.

Turning then to the lyrics of the song that superficially describe a utopia but carry powerful subliminal messages: “No Heaven” (no divine reward for living an honourable life); “No Hell below us” (there is no personal responsibility for our behaviour); “Living for today” (look for instant gratification, there is no need to work on relationships or plan for the future); “Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too” (associating religion with death and destruction).

It is hardly surprising that the building blocks of a decent society - taking personal responsibility; having the freedom to do what is right, not simply what one wants; respect for the heritage bequeathed by and the traditions of previous generations - are being undermined. Doing away with an absolute moral code in favour of the absurd humanist belief that man inherently understands what is right and moral, has contributed to the decline of contemporary culture as reflected by what appears on prime time television, in video games and on the internet.

No, I do not turn off the radio when I hear Imagine played. I am mesmerised and captivated by it. But I take a reality check and remind myself that the kind of vacuous dreaming and imagining Lennon urged us to do is antithetical to our best interests. The piano tour is likely to do more harm than good.

Geoff Bloch, Melbourne

The Shame Of It All

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It is unarguable that the State of Israel, man’s greatest achievement of the 20th century, was founded primarily by secular Zionists - by men and women who did not necessarily follow Jewish law to the letter but who were proud of their Jewishness and of their ancestry. Can Israel have the one without the other? What happens when secularism flourishes but Jewish pride fades from the collective national memory as time marches on? As we approach the modern state’s 60th birthday it is important that all who will be celebrating it reflect with the benefit of hindsight on just what it is that, on the one hand, has created a vibrant society but on the other hand, represents an existential threat.Rabbi Daniel Gordis presents one of the most powerful, painful and well argued articles I have read in years. His analysis of Israel’s current political and sociological condition is well worth the few minutes it takes to read it. G

The Shame Of It All
March 7, 2008
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There were days, and they were not that long ago, when Zionism was about something different. Days when Zionists could articulate what the purpose of Jewish Statehood was, days when Israelis understood that having a state was about changing the existential condition of the Jew. Not anymore.

Hayyim Nachman Bialik, writing in 1905 shortly after the slaughter in Kishinev, understood that the very essence of Jewish existence had to change. What else could he possibly have been saying in his epic poem, “The City of Slaughter” (scroll down to the two paragraphs that begin with the lines “Descend then, to the cellars of the town”), when he describes the mass rape scene in which Jewish women are helpless victims and Jewish men are powerless to intervene? In fact, for Bialik, the villains of the scene are not the Cossacks; rape and murder are simply what Cossacks do. The problem with what happened in Kishinev, Bialik intimates with his bitter irony, rests with the Jewish men. It’s bad enough that they were too weak to intervene, to defend their wives, their sisters, their mothers and their daughters, though that is clearly lamentable. But worse than that, they were too frightened to even try. And even worse than that, Bialik says, is that when the slaughter and the butchery were over, these men looked down at the broken bodies of the women that they had supposedly once loved, and instead of holding them, instead of telling them that they still loved them, instead of assuring them that they would take care of them no matter what, they gazed at these violated, half-dead women, and saw a halakhic question. “Is my wife,” the Kohanim in Bialik’s poem want to know, “still permitted to me?”

It makes no difference whether or not anyone in Kishinev really asked that question, or thought to. Bialik is not a journalist in this poem. He’s a diagnostician, describing the human (or no longer human) condition of the Jew. And what he wants us to know is that what is wrong with the Jews is that they have come to accept their victimization as part of nature. They’re no longer shocked by what is done to them, no longer infuriated by their own powerlessness. These Jewish men, their humanity too eroded by years of religious escapism and yeshiva study for them to see the broken women they should have loved as anything other than halakhic questions, aren’t people anymore. Real people, Bialik suggests, simply don’t stand by and watch their family members get raped and slaughtered and do nothing about it. Even if you’ll get killed in the process, you try to defend the people you love. When you no longer defend your family, he intimates, you’re not human, you’re sick. The Jews are sick, he says, their souls eroded by passivity, by weakness, by fear. And the cure, we know not from this poem but from much of what he writes, is a Jewish homeland.
Continue reading ‘The Shame Of It All’