British Teacher & Teddy Bear

NY Times reports that Hundreds of demonstrators in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, poured into the streets on Friday demanding the execution of a British teacher who was convicted of insulting Islam because her class of 7-year-olds named a teddy bear Muhammad.

The reaction, however was very different from a Muslim group in the U.S. As reported in Political Mavens, the American Islamic Congress slammed the Sudanese government for jailing a British teacher over a teddy bear’s name and demanded her immediate release from prison.

“We denounce this fabricated outrage,” stated Nasser Weddady, the organization’s Civil Rights Outreach Director. “The Sudanese government’s ridiculous case trivializes the feelings of Muslims around the world.”

Teddy Tempest Was an Official Tactic

The Times article reports that United Nations officials have said that the Sudanese government was simply looking for ways to block or delay the deployment of an expanded peacekeeping force to Darfur. This week, United Nations officials said that unless the Sudanese government starts cooperating, the expanded mission may not be possible .

Map Makes a Mockery
Palestinian Media Watch reports that just a day after Annapolis “Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority continued to paint a picture for its people of a world without Israel.” Specifically, PMW reports that an information clip produced a while ago by the PA’s Central Bureau of Statistics was rebroadcast on Wednesday on Abbas-controlled PA television. The clip in which the Land of Israel is painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag, symbolizing the replacement of Israel by a Palestinian state. AlertToday thanks blog reader Cynthia Lebowitz for alerting us to this map that makes a mockery of the PA’s professed commitment to a two-state solution.

60th Anniversary of a Glorious Moment in Jewish History

The historic United Nations vote of November 29, 1947, which partitioned the Land of Israel into two states, Jewish and Arab, was dramatically reenacted in the city of Rishon LeTzion on Thursday, we learned from a report in Israel International News.com

From Sudanese Slavery to Defense of Israel

An inspiring and wise commentary from Simon Deng, a native of the Shiluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, an escaped jihad slave and a leading human rights activist.

Jewish Demographics

FYI: These 2006 stats from the Jewish Virtual Library on the Jewish World Population are a handy tool for discussions and research, and are rife with fascinating inferences to be drawn from these figures.

Arab NGO’s

We were not aware of the insidious role Arab NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) play in the Middle East until one of our readers, Joan Kahn, sent us a link to an article about pre-Annapolis NGO maneuvers, which introduced us to the Web site NGO Monitor, whose mission is to promote accountability, and advance a vigorous discussion on the reports and activities of humanitarian NGOs in the framework of the Arab-Israeli conflict. AlertToday will be monitoring this site from now on to bring you further information on its reports. Thank you, Joan.

After Annapolis

The post-Annapolis scenario is astutely analyzed on Rosner’s Blog (Shmuel Rosner is the Chief U.S. Correspondent of Haaretz) who predicts that “a new political reality will make life more difficult both for Olmert and for Abbas. Whether they can maintain their coalitions through a year of core issue negotiations is yet to be seen.”

By BERNARD LEWIS
November 26, 2007

Herewith some thoughts about tomorrow’s Annapolis peace conference, and the larger problem of how to approach the Israel-Palestine conflict. The first question (one might think it is obvious but apparently not) is, “What is the conflict about?” There are basically two possibilities: that it is about the size of Israel, or about its existence.

If the issue is about the size of Israel, then we have a straightforward border problem, like Alsace-Lorraine or Texas. That is to say, not easy, but possible to solve in the long run, and to live with in the meantime.

If, on the other hand, the issue is the existence of Israel, then clearly it is insoluble by negotiation. There is no compromise position between existing and not existing, and no conceivable government of Israel is going to negotiate on whether that country should or should not exist.

PLO and other Palestinian spokesmen have, from time to time, given formal indications of recognition of Israel in their diplomatic discourse in foreign languages. But that’s not the message delivered at home in Arabic, in everything from primary school textbooks to political speeches and religious sermons. Here the terms used in Arabic denote, not the end of hostilities, but an armistice or truce, until such time that the war against Israel can be resumed with better prospects for success. Without genuine acceptance of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State, as the more than 20 members of the Arab League exist as Arab States, or the much larger number of members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference exist as Islamic states, peace cannot be negotiated.

A good example of how this problem affects negotiation is the much-discussed refugee question. During the fighting in 1947-1948, about three-fourths of a million Arabs fled or were driven (both are true in different places) from Israel and found refuge in the neighboring Arab countries. In the same period and after, a slightly greater number of Jews fled or were driven from Arab countries, first from the Arab-controlled part of mandatory Palestine (where not a single Jew was permitted to remain), then from the Arab countries where they and their ancestors had lived for centuries, or in some places for millennia. Most Jewish refugees found their way to Israel.

What happened was thus, in effect, an exchange of populations not unlike that which took place in the Indian subcontinent in the previous year, when British India was split into India and Pakistan. Millions of refugees fled or were driven both ways — Hindus and others from Pakistan to India, Muslims from India to Pakistan. Another example was Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, when the Soviets annexed a large piece of eastern Poland and compensated the Poles with a slice of eastern Germany. This too led to a massive refugee movement — Poles fled or were driven from the Soviet Union into Poland, Germans fled or were driven from Poland into Germany.

The Poles and the Germans, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, all were resettled in their new homes and accorded the normal rights of citizenship. More remarkably, this was done without international aid. The one exception was the Palestinian Arabs in neighboring Arab countries.

The government of Jordan granted Palestinian Arabs a form of citizenship, but kept them in refugee camps. In the other Arab countries, they were and remained stateless aliens without rights or opportunities, maintained by U.N. funding. Paradoxically, if a Palestinian fled to Britain or America, he was eligible for naturalization after five years, and his locally-born children were citizens by birth. If he went to Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, he and his descendants remained stateless, now entering the fourth or fifth generation.

The reason for this has been stated by various Arab spokesmen. It is the need to preserve the Palestinians as a separate entity until the time when they will return and reclaim the whole of Palestine; that is to say, all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. The demand for the “return” of the refugees, in other words, means the destruction of Israel. This is highly unlikely to be approved by any Israeli government.

There are signs of change in some Arab circles, of a willingness to accept Israel and even to see the possibility of a positive Israeli contribution to the public life of the region. But such opinions are only furtively expressed. Sometimes, those who dare to express them are jailed or worse. These opinions have as yet little or no impact on the leadership.

Which brings us back to the Annapolis summit. If the issue is not the size of Israel, but its existence, negotiations are foredoomed. And in light of the past record, it is clear that is and will remain the issue, until the Arab leadership either achieves or renounces its purpose — to destroy Israel. Both seem equally unlikely for the time being.

Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of “From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East” (Oxford University Press, 2004).

We want to bring to your attention two articles appearing in the New York Sun:

Owls Gather at Annapolis by Ibrahim Youssef and Israel’s Jewish Defamers by Adam Kirsch, the newspaper’s book critic. The Youssef article is a bold and brilliant depiction of the characters, ranging from sinister to hapless, who are headed for the Annapolis farce. The Kirsh piece is an insightful look at the history and current status of anti-Zionist Jews.

We wish you a good read from the ALERT vantage point on a misty November morning in the Rocky Mountains.

As on any day, Haaretz, the Israeli liberal daily packed with opinions that run the gamut of perspectives, is crackling with compelling features that offer something for every interest and political palate. Here is a sampling from today’s chewy fare of cultural commentary, new analysis and opinion.

Cultural Hybridity

An article intriguing titled Study: Young U.S. Jews most comfortable when surrounded by non-Jews reports on the findings of a pair of prominent social scientists, Steven M. Cohen and Ari Kelman, that, “Far from being indifferent to Jewish cultural life, young unaffiliated Jews are actually quite interested in attending Jewish events - provided they are being offered outside the walls of Jewish venues,” a conclusion that “has prompted some Jewish cultural programmers to rethink their outreach efforts, with many synagogues and Jewish community centers now looking to off-site bars and clubs in their quest to lure the young and unaffiliated.

“From our interviews with Jewish young adults,” Cohen and Kelman wrote last year, “we learned how engaged, but unaffiliated Jews seek cultural experiences that offer alternatives to an institutional world they see as bland, conformist, conservative and alien. Instead, they are drawn to events that promise to cross boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, Jews and Jews, Jewish space and non-Jewish space, and distinctively Jewish culture with putatively non-Jewish culture, effecting a cultural hybridity.”

Two institutions in San Francisco, home to a highly assimilated Jewish community, perfectly fit the profile that the Cohen-Kelman study indicates will attract the unaffiliated young Jews.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind and scheduled to open in June 2008, is described in the Haaretz article as “an ambitious new institution loudly proclaiming its Jewishness while at the same time trying to cater to both ambivalent Jews and the museum-going public as a whole.”

The four-year-old Jewish Community Center of San Francisco has, in the words of its executive director, “proven that a Jewish community organization can be both a vibrant hub of Jewish community life and be important to the community as a whole. And by being the latter, we can be even more successful as a Jewish organization.”

Two Takes on Annapolis Peace Conference

Today’s Haaretz presents a pair of diametrically opposed perspectives on the upcoming peace conference in Annapolis. Natan Sharansky argues that “Annapolis is doomed to failure not because we or the Palestinians have not made enough concessions - it is doomed to failure because it is built on distorted reasoning to the effect that it is possible to move ahead and make a deal with some leader and totally ignore what is really happening in Palestinian society. In this, to our regret, Annapolis has become another tragic-farcical Middle Eastern scene.”

The controversial Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist and author who reports from the West Bank where she lives, writes of the Annapolis conference from the other end of the Israeli political continuum on which Sharansky is situated, contending that the Palestinian Authority “should have set the bar higher at the outset.”

Sudanese Refugees in Israel

In a moving opinion piece titled “A Kinship in Genocide,” Haaretz hard-hitting eminently independent-minded columnist Bradley Burston argues eloquently of the moral imperative for Israel to welcome Sudanese refugees.

(Betty Scranton of Glenwood Springs, Colorado asks that any of our readers who are interested in sending letters and packages to soldiers from Colorado serving in Iraq contact her at sistersu@rof.net)

(The Wall Street Journal has published this editorial annually since 1961)

The Desolate Wilderness
Nathaniel Morton describes what he and other Pilgrims saw in 1620.

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.

When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them. One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other’s heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

Wall Street Journal

The Perils of Engagement
The U.S. can’t prevent the Palestinians and their Arab backers from making poor choices.

BY JEFF ROBBINS
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

In March 1999, a Democratic president of the United States was leading a military intervention in Kosovo. It was aimed at stopping the mass murder of a Muslim minority by Slobodan Milosevic, a bona fide war criminal. Our European allies ardently desired the U.S. to shoulder the burden of this effort–but wished to publicly distance themselves from it, in order to avoid the potential political fallout in their own countries that ineluctably follows an association with the U.S.

The European leaders were not simply imagining political risk where none existed: Tens of thousands of demonstrators packed the streets of European capitals in the spring of 1999, denouncing the U.S. for using military force to stop Milosevic from killing and persecuting Muslim Kosovars. At the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, where I was a U.S. delegate at the time, a middle-aged Greek woman accosted me angrily at a reception and smugly attributed U.S. efforts to stop Milosevic to an American desperation to “protect American markets.” I responded that I had not known that American exports to Kosovo were of a magnitude so critical to the American economy as to galvanize the U.S. military industrial complex into launching a major bombing campaign there.

It is increasingly de rigueur around the world and, for that matter, in certain segments of the Democratic Party, to place responsibility for all international crises on the U.S. government. Unsurprisingly, therefore, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, it has attained the level of high fashion to ascribe the persistent absence of peace to a lack of adequate U.S. “engagement” in resolving it.

If the Bush administration were truly “engaged,” the argument goes, the chances for Middle East peace would be greatly improved. Next week’s meeting in Annapolis, Md., between Israel and at least certain of its Arab interlocutors has the look and feel of more of the same. Yesterday the State Department sent out “formal invitations” to the event, but it remains unclear who will attend besides Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. If history is any guide, the meeting will yield unsatisfactory results, Israel will be blamed for failing to make the requisite concessions, and the Bush administration will be widely and sharply criticized for its “failure to engage.”

This analysis, simple and neat, and for so many so satisfying, would seem at odds with the historical record. The problem is that all too often, those who blame the U.S. for failing to deliver Mideast peace are some of the world’s most culpable enablers of Mideast violence–and those who are themselves actually responsible for erecting the fundamental roadblocks to a resolution of the conflict.

This is so obvious as to almost go without saying–except that the penchant for placing the blame on the U.S. is so widespread and so addictive that it goes largely unsaid. It was, of course, the Arab bloc, including the Palestinian leadership, that decided to reject the U.N.’s 1947 partition of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish, living side by side. Instead it invaded the nascent Jewish state rather than coexist with it, spawning the conflict that has so burdened the world for the last 60 years.

This was not a decision made by the U.S.

We are also not responsible for the Arab world’s choice not to create a Palestinian Arab state in East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, when it easily could have done so–before there were any Jewish settlements there to serve as the public object of Arab grievance.

It was not the U.S. whose leaders issued the largely unremembered “Three No’s” of the Arab conference in Khartoum in the summer of 1967–”no” to peace with Israel, to negotiation with Israel and to recognition of Israel–after the 1967 war backfired so badly on the Arab world. Nor can the U.S. government under President Clinton be criticized for failing to pursue Yasser Arafat with sufficient solicitude between 1993 and late 2000. The Clinton administration was, after all, the most ardent of suitors of the Palestinian leader–only to be forced to watch Arafat reject an independent Palestinian state in all of Gaza and virtually all of the West Bank.

It was the Palestinian leadership, not the U.S., that decided in the fall of 2000 that, rather than accept an independent Palestinian state, its wiser course was to launch a four-year bombing campaign against Israel’s civilian population. The result was not merely over 1,100 Israeli civilians killed, but several thousand Palestinians dead, as well as a shattered Palestinian economy and the decision by Israel to begin construction of a security barrier in July 2002.

President Clinton labeled this decision on the Palestinians’ part a “tragic mistake.” It is certainly inarguable that this particular decision, like others made by the Palestinian leadership over the past six decades, inflicted serious suffering on the Palestinian people. It has also resulted in suffering throughout the region, and instability beyond–but it was a course of action chosen and implemented by the Palestinians and publicly supported by Arab states, not by the U.S.

When Israel withdrew from all of Gaza in 2005, the Arab world had the opportunity for a fresh start there–to create a measure of hope for a population whose suffering long predated any Israeli presence. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity, the Hamas-dominated Palestinian leadership opted to begin and then intensify an aggressive missile-launching campaign against Israeli civilian centers.

This choice in turn has led to Hamas’s international isolation, and conditions in Gaza have grown steadily worse for Palestinians there. For its part, the Arab world has in essence stood by and permitted this to occur, and has once again remained unwilling to place the actual welfare of Palestinians ahead of its desire to stir opposition to Israel.

However significant the role of the U.S. is in nurturing political settlements of international disputes, it simply cannot prevent the Palestinian leadership and its Arab backers from making extraordinarily poor choices or, in President Clinton’s parlance, “tragic mistakes.” There is a marked tendency on the part of most of the world to cite the Bush administration’s lack of “engagement” as the principal stumbling block to peace. It isn’t. As for the Arab world, there is an even more pronounced habit of fingering the U.S. as the party which has the means at its disposal to bring about a Middle Eastern settlement, or at least conditions favorable to a settlement. If the past is any indication, the U.S. does not ultimately possess those means. The Arab world does.

Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, whose treasuries overflow with petrodollars, are in a position to invest heavily in the Gaza Strip, create economic opportunities for its destitute population, and dilute the toxin-filled atmosphere there. They have not done so.

The Egyptians are in a position to act decisively to stop the flow of rockets, bombs and other arms from Egypt into Gaza, where they are used to attack Israeli civilians. They have not done so.

Europe and Russia, whose lucrative contracts with Iran provide them with such enviable revenues, have been in a position to pressure Tehran into stopping the funding of Hezbollah, which assaults Israel from Lebanon, and Hamas, which assaults Israel from Gaza. They have not done so.

Under the circumstances, one might imagine that those in a position to dramatically improve the situation in the Middle East–but who have chosen by their inaction to worsen it–might feel sheepish about placing the onus for the absence of Middle East peace on the U.S. The only thing in shorter supply than sheepishness when it comes to the Middle East, however, is helpfulness. As far as helpfulness is concerned, it is past time for those who complain most about the lack of American “engagement” to begin providing some.

Mr. Robbins was a U.S. Delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission during the Clinton administration. He is a partner at the law firm Mintz, Levin in Boston.

The Web site of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs links to filmed footage taken by IDF aircraft on Monday, October 29, 2007 at approximately 9:00 am, showing a terrorist cell launching mortar shells from an UNRWA-run elementary school for boys in the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. UN Secy-Gen Ban Ki-moon on Nov 8 condemned the attack. Israel refrained from responding while the launching cell was in the school, in order to avoid civilian causalities. This documented attack is characteristic of how Hamas-controlled organizations use Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields.

We thank Cynthia Lebowitz of Grand Junction Colorado for bringing to our attention this footage, and in so doing introducing us to a valuable Web site.

You can read about how the IDF has reprioritized its acquisition schedule on another informative Web site, that of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) to which we have been introduced by another of our regular readers, Ruth Slawson of Asheville, North Carolina.

Ruth has also introduced us to the Web site LetsSayThanks where you can pick out a thank you card that Xerox will print, and then it will be mailed to a soldier currently serving in Iraq.

Each of two articles appearing a few days apart in the New York Sun resonate with us. Considering them separately, we recognized an interesting connection between the two which will be of interest to those curious about the connections between Jewish talent and anti-Semitism, and between Israelis and innovation.

Foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead in an article titled Jews and Wasps explores the historic roots of the following quote from Osama bin Laden: “One side is the global Crusader alliance with the Zionist Jews, led by America, Britain, and Israel, and the other side is the Islamic world.”

“On this point,” Mean explains, “our enemies are less original than they suppose. A common hatred of Britain, America, Jews, and liberal capitalist modernity emerged in the 19th century and played a major role in the history and culture of the last 100 years.”

What follows is a fascinating account of the connection between the entrepreneurial spirit that sparked the rise of capitalism, Jewish cultural proclivities, and how the two flourished in Britain and the United States where Jews gained a level of acceptance never achieved on the Continent, exemplified in Victorian England by statesman and literary figure Benjamin Disraeli.

The same ingenuity of which Mead speaks in a historic context can be seen in current Israeli innovation. Reading about “… the revolutionary plan of hi-tech entrepreneur Shai Agassi to turn Israel into a pilot project for phasing out the gasoline-powered automobile,” it is easy to see the connection between Israel’s technological talent and the innovative capacity characteristic of capitalism.

“ProZion” on “Plains”

“A Man from Plains” is a newly released documentary about Jimmy Carter that has prompted concern in some pro-Israel quarters but has received little media attention.

“The film is a total, unadulterated anti-Israel diatribe,” claims a blog titled “ProZion.” We’ll let you know more responses to this film as they pop up in cyberspace.

Security Concerns

The ability of a Lebanese nationalist with terrorist ties to conceal her past from the F.B.I and the C.I.A. raises new concerns about their vulnerability to infiltration.

Faux Comparison

The autumn issue of Azure contains a fascinating essay by Uriya Shavit, a historian of the Middle East researching Islam in Europe, on the comparison being made in certain European circles between the new “Islamaphobia” and the old anti-Semitism. Below is a quote from the beginning of Shavit’s analysis followed by one from its ending. Following the author’s train of thought through to its conclusion, you will see where the analogy falls apart and the significance of its limitations.

This comparison between “Islamophobia” and classic anti-Semitism is much favored among European politicians, intellectuals, and human rights workers who are trying to prevent, or at least mitigate, the “culture war” that is being waged on the continent.

Today, Europe is once again witness to the growing power of an ideology that despises territorial borders, undermines the liberal political system, and rejects Western concepts of human rights.