What's Actually Needed and Long Overdue? "Islamist Apartheid Week"

...What these dictators and tyrants evidently calculate, is that if Israel can just be made to go away, their own people will no longer be able to compare the restrictions at home to the limitless opportunities they can see so temptingly in the oasis next door. The UN, which allows voting from countries that do not even allow their own people to vote, has, year after year, been calling for the destruction of -- not those tyrannies calling for genocide -- but the one country in the region with equal justice under law, which keeps reminding the rest of us of what we cannot get.

Uzay Bulut..
Gatestone Institute..
22 March '15..

Grave human rights violations against religious and ethnic minorities have become increasingly commonplace in the Muslim world. Not only Jews are targeted, but, as the world has seen, Christians, Hindus, Baha'i, Alevis, Shi'as, Sunnis -- and anyone who does not conform to some self-appointed person's vision of Islam. Muslims are burned alive, Christians' heads are cut off on a beach, a Christian couple in Pakistan is thrown alive onto a burning kiln, churches and Bibles are not allowed in Saudi Arabia, and there are sign-posted roads and turn-offs for anyone not Muslim. It is hard to get more "apartheid" than that.

Meanwhile, as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists are busy bashing Israel, Yezidi children and women are raped by Islamic State (IS) terrorists, Iranian Kurds under torture are awaiting their executions, and Christians are sold into slavery or beheaded. Being persecuted has become an integral part of the daily lives of Christians all around the Muslim world. Yet where, from the groups that are always quick to condemn Israel, are the rallies, marches, flotillas or boycotts against these regimes and terrorists?

Women and girls in Nigeria and Iraq, some as young as 12, are sold into sexual enslavement, forced to convert, raped and tortured in a jihadist ethnic cleansing campaign by Islamic State militants and Boko Haram. Iran daily continues to persecute, torture, and hang its Kurdish citizens. And Christians in the Muslim world face genocide en masse; they are kidnapped, murdered, or forced to convert.

While all this persecution takes place in the Muslim world, there are actually activists busy organizing hysterical Jew-bashing events called Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) during February and March of this year.

Its website describes IAW as "an international series of events that seeks to raise awareness about Israel's apartheid policies towards the Palestinians and to build support for the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign." The events, they say, take place almost all around the world from the UK, US, Canada, Europe, to South Africa and South America.

In other words, while millions of people worldwide are suffering real and extreme persecution at the hands of Islamists, it is Israel, the Middle East's only democracy -- where no one is above the law, where citizens all have equal rights and no one is murdered for expressing his political views -- that is targeted and bullied by these so-called "human rights activists" and academics. Deaf and blind to the real sufferers all around the world, these Jew-haters seem in reality just brainwashed, misinformed neo-anti-Semites.

Why is there is no Arab Apartheid Week on American campuses?

Charles Jacobs..
frontpagemag.com..
01 April '13..

Israel Apartheid Week has come and gone this year on many American campuses. It was, of course, a hoax: However much Arabs in Israel suffer, and whoever is to blame for it, there is no apartheid in Israel.

Meanwhile, however, in Sudan and Mauritania, racist Arab societies enslave blacks. Today. Most of the slaves are African Muslims. Yet there is no Arab Apartheid Week on American campuses. Why not?

One might think American student activists would be upset about Mauritania, the West African country with the largest population of black slaves in the world – estimates range from 100,000 to more than a half-million. In Mauritania, slaves are used for labor, sex and breeding. The wholly owned property of their masters, they are passed down through generations, given as wedding gifts or exchanged for camels, trucks, guns or money.

Surely, life is not so good in a Palestinian refugee camp – no matter who is to blame, but it’s undeniably a whole lot worse for Mauritanian slaves. According to a Human Rights Watch/Africa report, routine punishments for slaves in Mauritania – for the slightest fault – include beatings, denial of food and prolonged exposure to the sun, with hands and feet tied together. More serious infringement of the master’s rule (in American slave-owning parlance, “getting uppity”) can lead to prolonged tortures known as “the camel treatment,” in which the slave’s body is slowly torn apart; the “insect treatment,” in which tiny desert insects are inserted and sealed into the ear canal until the slave is driven mad; and “burning coals,” a torture not fit to describe in a family newspaper.

Perhaps the reason for silence on campuses about these things is that the story of black slaves and their Arab masters remains unknown there. It would, of course, be a sensitive topic: slavery has existed in Mauritania since the 12th century, when Arab tribes from the Arabian Peninsula invaded and conquered North Africa. Raiders then stormed African villages to the south, pillaging, enslaving and converting the indigenous peoples to Islam. While the Koran forbids the enslavement of fellow Muslims, just as in the West, in North Africa racism trumped religious doctrine. The descendants of those Arab invaders are today’s slave owners. The descendants of those captured as slaves in jihad raids are in human bondage today. These are, then, black Muslim slaves – who, for racist reasons, aren’t allowed to touch the Koran with their black hands, who can’t marry without their owners’ permission, and whose children belong to the master.

The Middle East’s Real Apartheid and It's Not Israel

History has shown that gross and systemic discrimination is a threat not just to the oppressed minorities, but also to the political health of the societies that oppress them. Only when Arab and Muslim societies treat the “other” as equal will the Middle East, and the rest of the Islamic world, be able to transcend its malaise and look forward to a real political and social spring.

Efraim Karsh..
Op-Ed/JPost..
08 March '13..

In light of Israel Apartheid Week, which hit cities and campuses throughout the world recently, supporters of the Jewish state find it difficult to agree on the best response to this hate fest. Some suggest emphasizing Israel’s peacemaking efforts, others propose rebranding the country by highlighting its numerous achievements and success stories. Still others advocate reminding the world of “what Zionism is – a movement of Jewish national liberation – and what it isn’t – racist.” Each of these approaches has its merits yet none will do the trick.

Peace seeking and/or prosperity are no proof of domestic benevolence and equality. The most brutal regimes have peacefully coexisted with their neighbors while repressing their own populations; the most prosperous societies have discriminated against vulnerable minorities. South Africa was hardly impoverished and technologically backward; the United States, probably the most successful and affluent nation in recent times was largely segregated not that long ago.

Nor for that matter is the apartheid libel driven by forgetfulness of Zionism’s true nature. It is driven by rejection of Israel’s very existence. No sooner had the dust settled on the Nazi extermination camps than the Arabs and their western champions equated the Jewish victims with their tormentors.

“To the Arabs, indeed Zionism seems as hideous as anything the Nazis conceived in the way of racial expansion at the expense of others,” read a 1945 pamphlet by the Arab League, the representative body of all Arab states. A pamphlet published by the PLO shortly after its creation in 1964 stated: “The Zionist concept of the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Arab problem’ in Palestine, and the Nazi concept of the ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ in Germany, consisted essentially of the same basic ingredient: the elimination of the unwanted human element in question.”

Indeed, it was the Palestinian terror organization that invented the apartheid canard in the mid-1960s, years before Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

This charge, of course, is not only completely false but the inverse of the truth. If apartheid is indeed a crime against humanity, Israel actually is the only apartheid-free state in the Middle East – a state whose Arab population enjoys full equality before the law and more prerogatives than most ethnic minorities in the free world, from the designation of Arabic as an official language to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal days of rest.

By contrast, apartheid has been an integral part of the Middle East for over a millennium, and its Arab and Muslim nations continue to legally, politically and socially enforce this discriminatory practice against their hapless minorities.

What About The Arab Apartheid?

Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson New York
16 March '10

How come the Lebanese students who recently talked about Israel's "war crimes" in the Gaza Strip during Israel Apartheid Week on many North American college campuses had nothing to say about the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been massacred in Lebanon over the past four decades?

Dozens of refugees were killed and hundreds wounded in the three-month offensive that also destroyed thousands of houses inside the refugee camp. Reporters said it was the worst internal violence in Lebanon since the civil war that hit the country between 1975-1990. And just three years ago, the Lebanese Army used heavy artillery to bomb the Nahr-al-Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon.

Yet who has ever heard of a United Nations resolution condemning Syria or Lebanon for committing horrific atrocities or discriminating against the Palestinians?

The Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian students and professors who took part in the anti-Israel events on campuses have clearly "forgotten" that their regimes probably have more Palestinian blood on their hands than Israel. In the early 1970s, the Jordanians slaughtered thousands of Palestinians in what has become known as Black September. Can somebody point to one United Nations resolution condemning that massacre?

And where was the United Nations when Kuwait and several Gulf countries expelled more than 400,000 Palestinians in one week? The exodus took place in March 1991, after Kuwait was liberated from Iraqi occupation. Ironically, the first week of March is being celebrated on university campuses as Israel Apartheid Week with no reference to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Gulf.

(Read full article)

Related: Let's launch 'Arab Apartheid Week'
.

Let's launch 'Arab Apartheid Week'

Michael Freund
Opinion/JPost
11 March '10

In nearly three dozen cities across the world, a coordinated series of events is being held this week with the express aim of demonizing Israel. Now in its sixth year, the annual hate-fest known as “Israel Apartheid Week” has sought to portray the Jewish state as a bastion of bigotry, inequality and discrimination.

The organizers do not mince words in describing their objectives, asserting on their Web site that they aim “to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns” against the Jewish state. This, they confidently declare, is a key part of “the battle to end Israeli apartheid,” whatever that means.

Naturally, behind the sloganeering stands a clear political platform, one which essentially seeks to dismantle the Jewish state by stripping it of territory and flooding the country with millions of Palestinian refugees through the so-called right of return.

The first step in this campaign, of course, is to equate Israel with the evils of apartheid-era South Africa, thereby laying the groundwork for increased diplomatic and economic pressure to make far-reaching concessions. And so, as usual, the only democracy in the Middle Eastonce again finds itself on the receiving end of yet another indefensible canard, accused of one of modernity’s greatest political sins without any basis or justification.

SIMPLY PUT, this slur cannot be allowed to stand. It is an insult to Israel and its democracy and dangerously analogous to asserting that Zionism is a form of racism. If allowed to take hold in the public’s consciousness, it could have far-reaching and extremely damaging effects on support for Israel in the near- and long-term. In the past, the typical response by pro-Israel activists to such charges has been to go on the defensive, responding to the slanders and explaining in great detail the myriad differences between democratic Israel and the racist regime that once ruled South Africa.

Well, I say the time has come to stop playing defense and to bring the offense out onto the field. We need to turn the tables and fight back against our opponents by taking the struggle toward their end-zone.

A good place to be start would be to organize an annual “Arab Apartheid Week,” which would highlight the decrepit state of human and political rights throughout the Arab world.

(Read full article)
.