US State Department Withholds a Study on Saudi Incitement

From FDD Press, 24th March 2014, by David Andrew Weinberg:

Textbook Diplomacy

With President Obama poised to visit Saudi Arabia at the end of this month, America’s relations are strained with the Kingdom. The Saudis do not trust America’s nuclear deal with Iran, and Washington worries that the Kingdom’s jihadist clients in Syria could exacerbate terrorism worldwide.
But underneath the immediate security challenges receiving top billing on the President’s trip, there is another looming counterterrorism problem: Saudi Arabia’s ongoing sponsorship of religious hatred in its public education system. And in what might be seen as a disservice to American national interests, the State Department appears to be withholding a government-commissioned textbooks study on the subject.
In 2011, Foggy Bottom signed a contract with a local non-profit called the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD) to conduct a comprehensive study on Saudi Arabia’s government-published textbooks, which are widely distributed both inside the country and abroad. However, when the results of this study were ready for release in 2012, U.S. government officials decided not to publish its findings. Nor did the Department release this study in 2013...

ICRD’s leadership insists that their study was withheld from the public because it showed the Saudis are making progress on textbook revisions. Thus, the State Department did not want to upset further progress by highlighting a few remaining areas of disagreement.
However, current and former officials contest this characterization, asserting that ICRD’s study was withheld because of how bad it makes the Saudis look.
Passages continue to dehumanize Jews and Christians, promote the murder of perceived deviants such as homosexuals, and sanction violence against Muslims who do not follow the Wahhabi brand of Islam that is sponsored by the Saudi state.
Download the full report here (PDF).

Who do these western European bigots think they’re fooling?

From Newsmax, 11 Mar 2014, by Alan M. Dershowitz, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School:

When President Barack Obama warned of "international fallout" if Israel fails to embrace the latest U.S. Middle East peace proposal, Newsmax asked noted author and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz to comment on the growing talk of a European boycott against Israel. 

Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews? 

Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in western Europe? 

To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators. 

False. 

The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans — by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and other Europeans, both Western and Eastern. 

If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims. 

In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout western Europe toward Israel should surprise no one. 

"Oh no," we hear from European apologists. "This is different. We don’t hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We’re left-wing, so we can’t be anti-Semites." 

Nonsense. 

The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire, to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurisson, to today’s hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler. 

The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red — victims of extremism whether it be the ultra-nationalism of Khmelnitsky to the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.

"But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can’t be anti-Semites."

Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo. Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite. 

He denies that the Holocaust is historically proved but he believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. And he thinks it's "rational" to burn down synagogues. 

Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber! 

"But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians," the European apologists insist, "and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog."

No, you’re not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime? 

Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups.

Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt? 

Oh, wait! The Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan. Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September, when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don’t remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns -- because there weren’t any. 

When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda company that employs hundreds of Palestinians. 

Keep in mind that Oxfam has provided "aid and material support" to two anti-Israel terrorist groups, according to the Tel Aviv-based Israeli Law Group. 

The hypocrisy of so many hard-left western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable based on the sordid history of Western Europe’s treatment of the Jews. 

Even England, which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939, which prevented the Jews of Europe for seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine. And Ireland, which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric. 

The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves. 

Theodore Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe’s Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and return to their original homeland, which is now the state of Israel. 

None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, must less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups — including the Palestinians. 

Nor is this to deny that many western European individuals and some western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their forbearers were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors.

As author Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents' Europe were covered with graffiti saying, "Jews, go to Palestine." Now they say, "Jews, get out of Palestine" — by which is meant Israel. 

Who do these western European bigots think they’re fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents' old biases. 

Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people. Many doing so are the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. 

For shame!

J Street should be called "P Street" or "I Street"

From Washington Free Beacon March 21, 2014:

J Street Endorses Palestinian Refusal to Recognize Israel as Jewish State

Activist for Palestinian & Iranian positions, Jeremy Ben-Ami / duke.edu

... the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy group J Street has declared its support for the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. 

In a statement posted on the group’s website, executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami says that to “keep moving forward, both [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] now need to give a little.”

Netanyahu, he says, must drop his insistence that Abbas recognize Israel as a Jewish State because “it is simply unrealistic and unreasonable to expect any Palestinian leader to consent” to such a demand.

Ben-Ami never goes on to say what Abbas “needs to give.”

J Street’s advocacy for the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state follows a nearly unbroken period of advocacy for Palestinian and Iranian interests since the group’s founding in 2008. 

• J Street took the Hamas position on Israel during Operation Cast Lead later that year, accusing the IDF of war crimes and promoting the discredited Goldstone Report. 
• It lobbied for the Iranian regime’s position against Iran sanctions. 
• It defended the terrorists who attacked IDF soldiers on the 2010 Gaza flotilla. 
• J Street also took the Palestinian and Arab League position on a UN Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements in 2011.

Abbas said NO, NO, NO to Obama

Rejecting Kerry framework, Palestinian leader says

• NO - he won’t recognize ‘Jewish Israel,’ 
• NO - he won’t abandon ‘right of return,’ and
• NO - he won’t commit to ‘end of conflict’

From Times of Israel* March 22, 2014:


Barack Obama, right, and Mahmoud Abbas hold a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, Monday, March 17, 2014 (photo credit: Saul Loeb/AFP)

On his trip to Washington this week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected US Secretary of State John Kerry’s framework document for continued peace talks with Israel, and issued “three no’s” on core issues, leaving the negotiations heading for an explosive collapse...

...Specifically...Abbas rejected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that he recognize Israel as a Jewish state. He also refused to abandon the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” for millions of Palestinians and their descendants — a demand that, if implemented, would drastically alter Israel’s demographic balance and which no conceivable Israeli government would accept. And finally, he refused to commit to an “end of conflict,” under which a peace deal would represent the termination of any further Palestinian demands of Israel.

Israel has indicated that it may not release a fourth and final group of Palestinian prisoners at the end of this month, as agreed to when the current talks began last July, if Abbas does not first agree to extend the talks beyond their scheduled cessation next month. Since Abbas rejected the Kerry framework for extending the talks... the negotiations were now heading for an “explosion.”

TRIUMPHANT REJECTIONIST, Mahmoud Abbas waves to his supporters following his trip to Washington, DC, on Thursday, March 20, 2014, in the West Bank city of Ramallah (photo credit: AFP/Abbas Nomani)

Abbas returned on Thursday from the US, having held talks with Obama on Monday, and was met at his Ramallah compound by hundreds of cheering supporters.

“We carried the deposit, and we are guarding the deposit,” Abbas told those supporters somewhat cryptically. “You know all the conditions and circumstances, and I say to you that capitulating is not a possibility.” Abbas did not specify what he meant by the “deposit.”

During Monday’s meeting in Washington, Obama told Abbas that he would have to make tough political decisions and take “risks” for peace, as would Netanyahu. Abbas, for his part, reiterated his rejection of Israel’s demand that its status as a Jewish state be enshrined in a future peace accord, asserting that previous Palestinian recognition of Israel was sufficient.

“Everyone understands the outlines of what a peace deal would look like,” Obama said, describing an agreement that reflected the pre-1967 lines with agreed land swaps. 

Sitting next to the president, Abbas spoke through a translator, thanking Obama for the opportunity to come to the White House and for the “economic and political support the US is extending to the Palestinian state so it can stand on its own feet.”

...On Thursday, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry notified Abbas that it is prepared to apply for full membership in international institutions if Israel fails to complete the fourth and final release of Palestinian prisoners jailed before the signing of the Oslo Accords, scheduled for March 29.

Israel agreed to release 104 such prisoners in four stages over the nine-month negotiating period, in return for a Palestinian commitment not to apply for membership in international bodies.

A number of Israeli cabinet members, including Economy Minister Naftali Bennett and Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon, have publicly opposed the final release, which the Palestinians want to include 14 Israeli citizens, something Israel has rejected.

*Lazar Berman, Elhanan Miller, Rebecca Shimoni Stoil and AP contributed to this report.