A willful blindness - Dershowitz and tragedy by Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick..
CarolineGlick.com..
03 May '13..

There are two main reasons that many leftists who are viscerally supportive of Israel have difficulty understanding and defending the Jewish state today. First, the storyline about Israel is deeply distorted.

For instance, this week, Freedom House released its annual report on press freedom around the world. Israel’s ranking was reduced from “free” to “partly free.”

Freedom House gave three reasons for downgrading Israel’s status: the prosecution of Haaretz reporter Uri Blau for holding stolen top-secret documents; Channel 10’s difficulties getting its broadcast license renewed; and the success of the Israel Hayom newspaper. As Jonathan Tobin at Commentary noted Wednesday, all of these reasons are fraudulent.

Uri Blau received thousands of top secret documents from Anat Kamm, who stole them from the office of OC Central Command at the end of her military service. The documents were not mere intelligence analyses. They were operational plans, unit information and other highly sensitive information.

Blau lied to investigators who asked him about the documents. He fled to London for months rather than speak to investigators or return the documents.

Yet because Israel prosecuted Blau for these acts – which are felonies – Freedom House decided that Israel constrains press freedom.

Then there is Channel 10. Channel 10 is a poorly managed, unsuccessful company that has gone broke. It owes NIS 110 million which it cannot pay back, including NIS 60m. to the state.

Due to its nonpayment of its debt to the state, the Knesset was set to vote down the renewal of its broadcast license – again, in accordance with the law. To protect themselves from market forces – Channel 10’s failed management and staff used their bully pulpit to deflect attention away from their failure and incompetence. They accused the Knesset of trying to silence free speech. Channel 10’s allies in the media and the political Left joined their anti-government bandwagon. The Knesset folded.

Channel 10’s license was renewed. And its debt to taxpayers remains unpaid.

As for Israel Hayom, Freedom House alleged that the free paper’s success in gaining market shares at the expense of other tabloids is part of a nefarious plot by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his friend and Israel Hayom owner Sheldon Adelson to establish a quasi-state-controlled media. Israel Hayom is the first mass circulation Israeli newspaper not aligned with the political Left.

Freedom House’s allegations against Adelson and Netanyahu and its championing of bankrupt Channel 10 are based on two guiding notions. First, non-leftist entities – the Knesset, Israel Hayom’s editorial board – are inherently opposed to press freedom while the motives of leftist institutions like Haaretz and Channel 10 are as pure as the driven snow.

Second, they imply that media in Israel can only be free if not subjected to market forces or the rule of law.

Clearly both of these underlying assumptions are absurd. Yet they form the basis of Freedom House’s damaging allegations against the government.

And that’s the thing of it.

Over the past generation, we have been inundated by disinformation from an unlimited number of seemingly credible organizations whose aim is to discredit any development related to Israel that does not advance the positions of the Left. And due to the ubiquity of this disinformation, among wider and wider circles today the belief has taken hold that there is something fundamentally illegitimate about non-leftist Israelis and non-leftist supporters of Israel.

Since most Israelis are not leftist, and since the most outspoken supporters of Israel are not leftists, there is a widening belief – particularly among liberals – that Israelis, Israeli institutions and Israel’s supporters are illegitimate.

Mad hatters, flat-earthers and two-staters

Martin Sherman..
Into the Fray/JPost..
19 July '12..




Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. – George Santayana, Life of Reason (1905)

The major issue is not [attaining] an agreement, but ensuring its actual implementation in practice. The number of agreements the Arabs have violated is no less than number which they have kept. – Shimon Peres, Tomorrow is Now (1978)

These excerpts aptly convey the fanatical fraudulence of two-state advocates – at least of those who claim to be pro-Israel Zionists. For in redoubling their efforts to reach their preferred mode of resolution of the Palestinian issue, they seem to have forgotten that the real aim is not an agreement on the establishment of a Palestinian state, but long-term stability and security for Israel.

Sherman - Square circles, aerodynamic pigs and two states

Martin Sherman..
Into the Fray/JPost..
29 March '12..

Goals: Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence. Method: Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic… in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished.... Opposing any political solution offered as an alternative to demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine.
– Fatah Constitution

Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it…. Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…. The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight [kill] the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
– Hamas Charter

When somebody says they want to kill you, you should believe them.
– A Holocaust survivor

In his endeavor to rebut my recent column “Disputing Dershowitz,” Alan Dershowitz displays a regrettable tendency to embrace the self-contradictory and the disingenuous, rather than concede error.

Sherman - Disputing Dershowitz

Martin Sherman..
Into the Fray/JPost..
15 March '12..

It would be obnoxious for there to be a conference here [Harvard] on the subject of whether the Palestinians are a real people. They are, and so are the Israelis. The quest for a Palestinian state is a legitimate one, as is the need to preserve Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. – Alan Dershowitz, “Should Harvard Sponsor a One- Sided Conference Seeking the End of Israel?” (February 28)

Prof. Alan Dershowitz is a committed, articulate supporter of Israel. He has defended the Jewish state with eloquence and passion on numerous occasions, displaying commendable resolve and poise despite torrents of hostile reaction. The courageous, principled stance he has taken – regrettably rare among academics of his standing – should be greatly appreciated by Israelis across the political spectrum.

Ensnared by political correctness

However, in embracing several central precepts of politically correct but factually impaired conventional wisdom, Dershowitz has, along with many other well-meaning pro-Israeli figures, severely undermined the efficacy of his “Case for Israel.”

This is particularly true regarding his unquestioning endorsement of Palestinian claims for statehood within the two-state paradigm, which for Dershowitz has seemingly become the litmus test for admission to civilized debate.

Thus in February 2010, when Palestinian hecklers prevented Ambassador Michael Oren from addressing students at the University of California, Irvine, Dershowitz rightly denounced this as anti- Israel censorship. However, what appeared to make this action particularly egregious in Dershowitz’s eyes was the fact that Oren was “a moderate supporter of the two-state solution,” thus hinting – perhaps without meaning to – that had Oren opposed this policy, silencing him might have been more understandable.

Indeed, as the citation above demonstrates, Dershowitz would consider any challenge to the authenticity of Palestinian national claims “obnoxious.”

Anti-Semitic juries in the UK may start decriminalising crimes committed against Israeli interests

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
02 July '10

The eminent Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz frequently provides a useful analogy about Israel’s predicament in the tribunals of international law. It is analogous, he argues, to the position that black people faced in the American south of the 1930s. The legal system would work fine in judging a case between a white man and another white man. A black man facing another black man may get a lesser degree of justice due to the insouciance of the system, but a reasonable degree of fairness could still be expected. Put a white man against a black man, however, and the black man never stood a chance due to the weight of the prejudices against him.

Dershowitz’s analogy is powerful and striking. But a decision taken in a British court this week suggests that analogies with America in the 1930s are no longer necessary. Bigotry against the Jewish state is now so entrenched in contemporary British society that juries have begun to acquit criminals merely if they can show that they acted against Israeli interests. No other defence is necessary.

This extraordinary moment in modern British legal history took place this week in the southern English coastal city of Brighton — a city known for its strong affiliations with the Green Party and other leftist causes. It transpired in a case involving five defendants who had broken into the EDO MBM owned arms factory in January 2009 at the time of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

For a more detailed and disturbing article, Melanie Phillips:The hellish histrionics of Hove Propaganda Court

The five admitted breaking into the factory — which was exporting military equipment at the time to Israel — and causing £180,000 ($275,000) worth of damage. Despite actually admitting to an offence that would usually carry a substantial jail sentence, the jury acquitted them, accepting their defence that although they had committed a crime they were doing so in order to prevent the greater offence of Israeli “war crimes”.

(Read full post)

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Degenerate Israeli Academics on the Rampage

Isi Leibler
Candidly Speaking from Jerusalem
18 May '10

In the politically correct world of infantile leftism, words like sedition and disloyalty have effectively been erased from the political lexicon. Indeed, those daring to employ such terms are automatically smeared as “McCarthyite” or fascist.

But despite Israel being surrounded by Moslem nations whose primary objective is to eliminate Jewish sovereignty from the region, a growing minority of Israeli academics, funded by Israeli taxpayers and Diaspora Zionist philanthropists, exploit their universities as launching pads to undermine and delegitimize their own country. Some even promote global boycott, divestment and sanctions of the very institutions which provide their salaries. They teach their students that the state in which they live was born in sin, that Israelis behave like Nazis and morally justify the campaigns by our enemies to demonize and delegitimize us.

What magnifies this obscenity is that university administrators feel obliged to maintain the continued tenure of such immoral and anti-social degenerates on the grounds of academic freedom. Can one conceivably visualize any other institution providing salaries to employees actively working towards its destruction?

Related article: 'TAU restricts freedom of speech'

The issue came to a head at the recent meeting of the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University when Marc Tanenbaum, a long-standing American donor and supporter, submitted a resolution calling on the University Senate to review conditions governing the status of academics indulging in “inappropriate behavior” such as promoting academic boycotts of Israeli universities, and recommending that academics be prohibited from listing their affiliation or academic titles whilst engaged in domestic or international forums of a political nature.

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US charity paid for Goldstone spadework

Fresnozionism
01 February '10

Alan Dershowitz begins his massive, detailed rebuttal of the Goldstone Report thus:

The Goldstone Report, when read in full and in context, is much worse than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe. It is far more accusatory of Israel, far less balanced in its criticism of Hamas, far less honest in its evaluation of the evidence, far less responsible in drawing its conclusion, far more biased against Israeli than Palestinian witnesses, and far more willing to draw adverse inferences of intentionality from Israeli conduct and statements than from comparable Palestinian conduct and statements. It is worse than any report previously prepared by any other United Nations agency or human rights group.

As I have mentioned before, the particularly evil aspect of the report is what Dershowitz calls the “inferences of intentionality”, that is, the conclusion drawn that Israel intentionally targeted civilian lives and property in order to inflict collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Dershowitz writes,

At bottom the report accuses the Jewish state of having implemented a policy in Gaza that borders on genocide. It blames the civilian deaths that occurred during Operation Cast Lead not on the fog of war, not on the use of human shields by Hamas, not on the inevitability of civilian casualties when rockets are fired from densely populated urban areas, not even on the use of “disproportionate force” by Israel. Instead it blames the Palestinian civilian deaths on an explicit policy devised at the highest levels of the Israeli government and military, of killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible. It concludes that Operation Cast Lead was not designed to stop the rocket attacks on Israel’s civilians—more than eight thousand over a nine year period. Instead, the rocket attacks merely served as an excuse for the Israeli military to achieve its real purpose: namely the killing of Palestinian civilians.

What can be called the ‘Goldstone project’ is a contrivance to delegitimize Israel and preempt international support from Israel’s future attempts to defend herself against certain-to-come attacks from the Iranian-supported Hamas and Hizballah. It is part of a strategy whose goal is to eliminate the Jewish state.

(Read full article)
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Praise for The Case For Israel

YG
CAMERA/Snapshots
26 January '10

Yair Lapid, a popular and influential Israeli journalist, praises The Case For Israel, a documentary with Alan Dershowitz, (DocEmet with co-producers from CAMERA). In his weekend column in the Yediot Achronot magazine "Shiva Yamim," he wrote:

I finally saw this week the movie “The Case for Israel”, about the famous American lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.
“I am pro-Israel,” opens Dershowitz the movie, “I am also pro-Palestinian. I support the two state solution but...”

Dershowitz isn’t a philosopher or a filmmaker; he’s not even from the political right. We got used to the fact that defense statements on Zionism come only from the right, but Dershowitz supports us precisely because he’s a left-wing law professor from Harvard, who deals with human rights.

(Read full post)
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Dershowitz, for the Opposition

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
28 November 09

A week and a half ago, Alan Dershowitz took the stage in a packed auditorium at Fordham Law School in Manhattan. He was supposed to debate Richard Goldstone, the author of the Goldstone Report. But the august international jurist refused, telling the organizers that Dershowitz had “demeaned” him. So Dershowitz stood a copy of the Goldstone Report on the table in the author’s place. And then he demolished the report and eviscerated its author with remarkable clarity, passion, and brilliance. A truly memorable performance.

And finally, the video is up. It’s listed as 93 minutes long, but a great deal of that is Q&A at the end. The presentation itself takes only 45 minutes.



This video plus much more can be found at IsraelActivism.com
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