dirt on dirt

An excellent impassioned article on current anti-Semitism in the form of anti-Zionism or Israel bashing:

In a critical passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James associates evil with the concept of “dirt.” Evil, he says, is “an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten.” It is “diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff,” which can only be considered “so much irrelevance and accident — so much ‘dirt,’ as it were, and matter out of place.”

[...]

The final irony, however, is that if dirt, generally speaking, is matter out of place, then modern Israel, founded in its ancestral homeland where it historically and legitimately belongs, is exactly in the right place, the place where it is meant to be.[...]

The fact is that Israel’s cadastral address is also its ordered and ritually authentic locus between the river and the sea. To use James’ terms, it will not “be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten.” The “evil” lies elsewhere. The “dirt” on Israel is shoveled from the European and Islamic rubbish heap. For despite the calumny and dishonesty to which it is regularly subjected, Israel is the one place where Jews are truly not out of place.

from David Solway: Treating Israel like Dirt
.

talkin bout G0d

Jews standing up for Jerusalem:

"We're not here because of grace of world, but by the grace of G0d," he said in a Monitor interview in August 2010. "When we slap G0d in the face and say we don't want this land, we're willing to share this land … then we see the Oslo calamity."

from Christa Case Bryant: Shrewd development deal likely to preclude possibility of creating Palestinian state

a prophetess of biblical statue

An amazing summing up of where the West is at, by modern-day prophetess, Melanie Phillips:

You cannot resist or overcome a threat unless you first understand its nature.

The first thing to say is that this phenomenon is characteristic not just of the media animosity or economic or academic boycotts. It goes across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes.

In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonization and delegitimization of Israel.

The scale of this phenomenon is nothing short of a multi-layered civilizational crisis.

The west is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and reason. A society's thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed and assumes to be true.

In routine, everyday discourse history is turned on its head; logic is suspended; and an entirely false narrative of the conflict is now widely accepted as unchallengeable fact, from which fundamental error has been spun a global web of potentially catastrophic false conclusions.

This has led to a kind of dialogue of the demented in which rational discussion is simply not possible because there is no shared understanding of the meaning of language. So victim and victimizer, truth and lies, justice and injustice turn into their precise opposite.

This madness is being promulgated through a global alliance between state and non-state actors — diplomats and journalists, politicians and NGOs and websites. Many of these are waging war not just against Israel but against the west.

[...]

In other words, both Israel and diaspora Jews have to stop playing defense and go onto the offence. Israel has nothing to be defensive about or for which it needs to apologize. It is the enemies of Israel who are promoting injustice and the denial of international law and human rights. Playing defense intrinsically cedes ground to the enemy.

It is time for Israel and its defenders to stop conniving with that smokescreen for the war of annihilation being waged against Israel — the claim that the Middle East impasse would be solved by establishing a state of Palestine to which the settlements, and thus by extension Israel, are the obstacle. It is time for them to stop agreeing that the Jews are to blame for their own predicament.

Israel and its defenders need to make the argument from justice and reclaim that moral high ground from the enemies of Israel and the west, both at home — including within Israel — and abroad. It is those enemies who deny truth, justice and human rights. It is those enemies who should be in the dock. It is time to take the gloves off and put them there.

In short, Israel and its defenders must understand that the tsunami of bigotry against Israel sweeping the west is intimately related to Israel's seriously flawed diplomatic strategy.

For years, Israel has been playing a defensive diplomatic game, which suggests inescapably that it has a case to answer. Such diplomatic cringing has badly undermined it and hugely strengthened its enemies, who are taking advantage of such weakness over and over again.

It's time for Israel to realize that military campaigns against its enemies are not enough. It has to call time on its false friends too, and start fighting both these and its more obvious enemies on the battleground of the mind.

from Melanie Phillips: Israel's supporters better wake up!

It's good to see a fighting spirit emerging from among the Jewish writers. Caroline Glick also writes like this. It's quite ironic that it is the Jewish women who are showing the most balls. Good for them, I applaud them both.
.

Hornik on Spyer

A review of what sounds like a very interesting book:

The “new Israeliness,” Spyer suggests, “is steeped in a comfortable [though] not particularly rigorous attachment to the symbols of Jewish tradition,” including “the Temple Mount, the Hebrew language,” and “the Jewish festivals[.]” This “immensely powerful complex of images and ideas” forms a “bedrock” of strength, ultimately more solid than the latest wave of humiliated rage, known as Islamism, coming from the other side.

from David Hornik: Israel’s Stand Against Islamism Holds, a review of Jonathan Spyer: Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict
.

new blog

I've been writing and collecting more and more material about Israel and following especially the vision and viewpoint of Caroline Glick. I thought it about time I devoted a blog to that and thereby keep my political concerns separate from the rest. The new blog is called glick4israel.

I am part of the worldwide

Zionist Conspiracy,

and I'm not even Jewish.

sickening

The more money is poured into the Palestinian Authority, the more money is diverted to terrorism and the more murders of Israelis and Palestinians result. It is sickening to think that this is where our money goes and our leaders are so blind to it.

More details here.

Shahar downs Dinara

From the Wimbledon site:

Congratulations to Shahar Peer for her win over Dinara Safina.

a natural tragedy

Through no fault of their own, the Regev, Goldwasser and Schalit families have become the mouthpieces of Hizbullah and Hamas. This is as natural as it is tragic.

The moment their sons were abducted, the Schalit, Regev and Goldwasser families also became prisoners. In constant agony over the fate of their sons, these families are incapable of acknowledging the cruel and devastating fact that the safety of three soldiers cannot be placed above Israel's national security. In their unmitigated suffering, they cannot come to terms with this horrible fact because for them the country, and indeed the world, is made up of their loved ones. This is the natural human condition. Each person's world is defined by the presence and absence of his loved ones. For the Goldwassers, Regevs and Schalits, Israel is a meaningless, cold, dark place when it doesn't include their sons Ehud, Eldad and Gilad.

And it is precisely for this reason that they cannot be allowed to dictate policy. It is precisely for this reason that the only ones who can responsibly weigh Israel's options for releasing them are those who are not personally affected by their plight.

Caroline Glick: Not a personal affair

a shameful prayer

From comments at the Dry Bones post on the anti-Israel Presbyterian Conference:

eidel said...
My mother (of blessed memory) always warned me;"scratch a goy and you'll find an anti-Semite."
I poo pooed her but life has shown me she was right.

avi said...
Just proves that despite supposedly enlightened policies and minds of the goyim, the only ones we Jews can rely on is god and other Jews. We truly are alone in this world.

Arizona said...
What eidel and avi posted above, above goys being unreliable as allies, is quite untrue on an *individual basis*. I'm a post-Christian goy (even a neo-gnostic) and I'm 100% behind Israel. I would lay down my life for Israel if I thought it would really help. However, what eidel and avi have said is sadly quite true on a *group basis*. The major non-Jewish groups that could be and should be defending Israel are just not doing it. They include the UN and the EU but also the US. Bush, I think, remains personally loyal but Rice has sold out and the polls indicate that the US people at large will vote in Obama who will surely not defend Israel.

I was moved to tears when I recently read Hillel Halkin's "Israel's Lonely Last Resort", moved because I just know he's not exaggerating. In political terms, Israel is alone and I can but pray that she has the strength to get through all this alone. It is not a hopeless prayer but it is a deeply shameful one.

...but somebody has to do it

The post title is the Jerusalem Post title of the following NY Sun article by Hillel Halkin [my emphasis]:

So now it's official. The Israeli air force is in an advanced stage of training to attack Iranian nuclear installations. If the massive overflight of the eastern Mediterranean by Israeli jets earlier this month was indeed the "dress rehearsal" for such an attack that it has been called, it was a rehearsal to which the public was invited - or at least, the intelligence agencies of the countries that tracked the operation on their radar screens.

You don't, of course, conduct such an operation when you have already decided to strike; at that point, the more secrecy, the better. You conduct it when you don't want to strike and think your only hope of avoiding it is to convince the world that you will do it unless you are given a good reason not to. This month's air maneuvers, it might be said, were Israel's plea to the world to be shown that such a reason exists.

But the world is not going to oblige. The same countries that were too short-sighted and greedy to do anything significant about stopping the Iranian nuclear-bomb program ten, five, or two years ago, when oil prices were low and Iran were vulnerable to economic and diplomatic pressures, are not about to lift a finger now. Even a year ago, when climbing oil prices had already ruled out the economic feasibility of an embargo on Iranian oil, a sudden freeze on Iran's assets and funds by Western governments could have caused the Iranian leadership to think twice. Now, while these governments have predictably wasted yet another year by jawing toothlessly away about the need for sanctions, Iran has reportedly transferred most of those assets and funds elsewhere.

NOR IS President Bush likely to leave the White House in a blaze of penetration bombs by ordering a last-minute American attack on Iran. The Republican Party wants to win the November election, and the president knows that Americans fighting in another Middle-Eastern country and $200-or-more-a-barrel oil is not going to help. Bush has talked more bravely about stopping the Iranians than any other Western leader, but what he has not done until now will not be done before his term is over - unless, that is, he chooses to do it between the elections and his successor's inauguration in January, which would be a historically unprecedented use of lame-duck power that is hard to imagine.

And John McCain? If elected, he might be Israel's last chance of not having to go it alone. But McCain himself doesn't know at this stage what he would do, and he is currently behind in the polls. Barack Obama would be only slightly more likely to attack Iran than Vladimir Putin. He has already made it clear that he would rather talk to the Iranians than fight them, and they will be delighted to discuss with him any subject he chooses while the centrifuges go on spinning in Natanz.

Of course, even a President Obama, let alone a President McCain, might be supportive of an Israeli attack should it take place. In general, as evidenced by the muted international response to the Israeli air exercise, the list of countries that might not mind seeing Israel stick it to the Iranians is a long one. Besides the US, it might include quite a few European states and even some Arab ones. As long as they themselves don't have to run the risk of a) military failure, b) retaliatory Iranian missile and terror attacks, and c) being blamed for astronomical oil prices, plenty of governments would permit themselves a hidden smile of satisfaction while voting to condemn an Israeli attack at the United Nations.

ISRAELIS HAVE every right to feel anger at such hypocrisy. True, a nuclear Iran would be more of a menace to them than to others, but it would be a menace to nearly everyone. There is something genuinely revolting about a world that preaches the need for peacefully dissuading the Iranians from developing atomic weapons while knowingly practicing a policy that in the end leaves Israel no choice but to send its planes into the air.

Israelis also have the right to feel fear. A lot could go wrong with an attack on Iran. Iranian targets could be missed or insufficiently damaged; dummy objectives could be hit while the real ones are kept secret in the earth; Israeli planes could be shot down and Israeli pilots taken hostage; Israeli towns and cities could come under heavy missile and rocket fire not just from Iran, but from Lebanon, Gaza, and even Syria; Israeli casualties could run into the many thousands.

Anyone who thinks that Israel is straining at the leash to get at the Iranians has not the slightest conception of its society. Israelis are good and scared of attacking Iran, as they should be. They are just even more scared of an Iran that could annihilate them, as Iranian leaders have repeatedly said they would love to do.

But Israelis also have the right to feel pride - pride not only that they have one of the few air forces in the world with the military capability to stop Iran, but also that history has chosen them, even if they would rather it had chosen someone else, to be in the front ranks of the campaign.

Even now, it is not too late for them to hope that they will have partners. And if it is not a hope that has much to lean on, at least this time Jews can lean on themselves.

Hillel Halkin: Israel's Lonely Last Resort

litmus test

Acceptance of Israel is an excellent litmus test but ... what to do with all of those non-Muslim mostly Leftist anti-Semites who don't pass the test either?

It's bad that most of the Muslim world is anti-Israel but it's even worse that so many in our midst are allied with them on this point. Perhaps "Islamism" is not a full enough description of the enemy after all.

For me, as a non-Jewish (and lapsed Christian) Zionist, Israel is the thing that should define us all. It is the great moral issue of our time and the great test that God (however understood) has set us. We stand or fall as a decent humanity on how we view Israel and on how much or how little we are prepared to tolerate the existential threats to her, whether they come from a mad Iranian president or a mad Jew-hater closer at hand.

source

a prayer for victory

These are terrible times for world Jewry. Islamic Jew-hatred is genocidal. The international Left has betrayed us. Our leaders are weak. Our friends are few and far between.

If we wish to persevere in this environment we must embrace those who support us while eschewing those - even in our own ranks - who tell us that support for Israel is conditional. Now is not the time to quibble over Christian theology. Now is the time to stand united with our friends against our common enemies.

from Caroline Glick: Jews united for Israel's friends

As one of the "few and far between", I pray that the Jews of the world will listen to this lady. May she gain victory over those ideologues, especially those Jewish ideologues, who would sacrifice Israel to anything short of the Very Ultimate.

---

friendly welcome to Israeli tennis star

©Getty Images
Doha, Qatar (February 18): Player Welcome Ceremony
Shahar Peer reacted to applause as she was introduced to the stadium crowd.
@ wta

Update: In a ynet report, Peer becomes first Israeli to play in Persian Gulf region, I learned that Peer was actually prevented by Israeli authorities from previously playing in this Muslim country. That is, she was not directly barred from playing by Qatar itself:

Peer was barred from playing in Doha for two years when she underwent military training in the IDF, as the Israeli government prevented her from competing in countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

Rumi on Jews

Sometimes Rumi comes across as a "good Muslim", complete with the arrogance and ignorance we've become used to; sometimes he transcends that partisanship and heads toward his mystic universalism. Either way, his characterization of Jews is telling.

In the first passage below [my emphasis], from the Mathnawi, Rumi portrays the Jew as the archetypal non-Muslim: infidel, undiscerning, in the wrong, like a base coin, in the dark, with dust in his eyes, a hater of the light, and so on. The Jew is the Evil Guy or Baddy, the dark side of existence where all ugliness, deceit, folly, and blindness reside. This is just how most mainstream Muslims view modern Israelis (with the ever loyal exception of Salim Mansur). In the second passage below [my emphasis], Rumi emphasizes the One God that Muslims, Jews and Christians share and affirms the mystic union of the three.

Why the prophets were sent.


God sent the prophets for this purpose,

Namely, to sever infidelity from faith.

God sent the prophets to mankind

That they might gather the pure grain on their tray.

Infidel and faithful, Mosalman and Jew,

Before the prophets came, seemed all as one.

Before they came we were all alike,

No one knew whether he was right or wrong.

Genuine coin and base coin were current alike;

The world was a night, and we travelers in the dark,

Till the sun of the prophets arose, and cried,

"Begone. O slumber; welcome, O pure light!"

Now the eye sees how to distinguish colors,

It sees the difference between rubies and pebbles.

The eye distinguishes jewels from dust,

Hence it is dust makes the eyes smart.

Makers of base coin hate the daylight,

Coins of pure gold love the daylight,

Because daylight is the mirror that reflects them,

So that they see their own perfect beauty.

Rumi: Mathnawi Book II, Story I, trans Whinfield

Everywhere the secret of God is coming -
see how the people are coming uncontrollably;
From him for whom all souls are athirst,
to the thirsty the cry of the water carrier is coming.
They are milk drinkers of divine generosity,
and are on the watch to see from whence the mother is coming.
They are in separation, and all are waiting
to see whence union and encounter are coming.
From Moslems, Jews, and Christians alike
every dawn the sound of prayer is coming;
Blessed is that intelligence into whose heart's ear
from heaven the sound of "come hither" is coming.
Keep your ear clean of scum,
for a voice is coming from heaven;
The defiled ear hears not that sound -
only the deserving gets his deserts.
Defile not your eye with human cheek and mole,
for that Emperor of eternal life is coming;
And if it has become defiled, wash it with tears,
for the cure comes from those tears.
A caravan of sugar has arrived from Egypt;
the sound of footfall and bells is coming.
Ha, be silent, for to complete the ode
our speaking King is coming.

Rumi: Ghazal (Ode) 637, trans Arberry via Sunlight

two passions unite

Two of my passions - tennis and Israel - have come together in this news item from Australian Jewish News: Israeli tennis stars to create history. I'm delighted to read that the fairness of the tennis world is invading a couple of the more modern Muslim states in the Persian Gulf: UAE (United Arab Emirates) hosting tournaments in Dubai and Qatar hosting a tournament in Doha.

The player and tournament details are as follows:

WTA - commencing 18feb08 - Doha, Qatar - Shahar Peer
WTA - commencing 25feb08 - Dubai, UAE - Tzipora (Tzipi) Obziler
ATP - commencing 3mar08 - Dubai, UAE - men's double Jonathan (Yoni) Erlich and Andy Ram *

* recent winners at the Australian Open

** Dudi Sela is also a promising ATP player. Will he also try for Dubai?

My best wishes to all of these brave and talented players.

Celebration time: Jonathan Erlich leaps into the arms of Andy Ram
after their straight sets win. © Getty Images

getting down to the bone of things

Arab recognition of Israel's Jewish nature must have top diplomatic priority. Until the Palestinians formally accept Zionism, then follow up by ceasing all their various strategies to eliminate Israel, negotiations should be halted and not restarted. Until then, there is nothing to talk about.

from Daniel Pipes: Accept Israel as the Jewish State?

source