Rennert - A self-serving visit to Holocaust Museum

Leo Rennert..
American Thinker..
23 April '12..




Obama's come-uppance from Elie Wiesel during self-serving visit to Holocaust Museum

During the last three years, President Obama did not visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. But today, he did; and promptly gave a self-serving campaign speech for Jewish votes.

"I will always be there for Israel," he told the audience at a Holocaust Memorial Remembrance Day event. Invoking "Never Again" several times, he recalled how he also stood with survivors in the Warsaw Ghetto, then added:

"So when efforts are made to equate Zionism to racism, we reject them. When international forums single out Israel with unfair resolutions, we vote against them. When attempts are made to delegitimize the State of Israel, we oppose them. When faced with a regime that threatens global security and denies the Holocaust and threatens to destroy Israel, the United States will do everything in our power to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon."

Obama also had harsh words for Syria's President Assad and his ongoing atrocities, but generally seemed self-satisfied with his administration's record on both Iran and Syria. Ditto for seeking to prevent atrocities in Sudan, Ivory Coast, Central Africa and Libya. And he also claimed credit for "doing more to protect women and girls from the horror of wartime sexual violence."

Then, to top it off, he announced a new initiative: creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board to oversee all administration efforts to avert genocidal atrocities. With Obama, when in difficulty, create another government agency.

The president had with him as escort and introducer Elie Wiesel and lavishly praised the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor for his unrelenting campaign to keep the memory of the Holocaust front and center.

But Wiesel did not reciprocate. Instead, determined to tell truth to power, he admonished Obama for not doing nearly enough to confront Assad's atrocities in Syria and Iranian President Ahmadinejad's development of nuclear weapons and threats to wipe Israel off the map.

On Jerusalem, Wiesel: 1, DeKoven Ezrahi: 0

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA Media Analysis
25 April '10

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi of Jerusalem, an academic affiliated with the Hebrew University, penned a lengthy letter, published in the April 21 edition of the International Herald Tribune, indignantly condemning author and Nobel Prize Peace winner Elie Wiesel for his full-page ad "For Jerusalem" which appeared in that newspaper and elsewhere. In her letter, she poses a challenge to the celebrated author, and in doing so exposes herself as entirely ignorant of what she possessively calls "Jerusalem, my city," and its inhabitants.

Professing to speak for "real people who want to live together in peace," DeKoven Ezrahi disparages "Mr. Wiesel's sentimental claim over all of Jerusalem on behalf of some misty-eyed notion of three thousand years of Jewish 'belonging.'" Pointing out that Mr. Wiesel does not live in Jerusalem (and is thus presumably unqualified to comment on the capital), she rebukes him:

After representing to eloquently the victims of history's injustices in Nazi and then Soviet Europe, Mr. Wiesel would surely, we assumed, turn to the injustices perpetrated by his own people, and cry out against the tragic occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

And then comes DeKoven Ezrahi's defiant challenge (which was proudly reproduced by her husband Bernard Avishai on his blog):

Instead, Mr. Wiesel tells us, with no evidence on the ground, that "Jews, Christians and Muslims are allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city." I defy Mr. Wiesel to find three Muslim families in all of West Jerusalem.

In fact, it doesn't take a Jerusalem scholar, or even a Jerusalem resident, to track down Muslims living in Jewish neighborhoods of western Jerusalem. It took this CAMERA researcher, who, unlike DeKoven Ezrahi, neither lives nor works in Jerusalem but lives some 30 kilometers away, only minutes to track down the names of multiple Muslim families living in neighborhoods like Talbieh, Arnona, Ein Kerem, Kiryat Yovel, Kiryat Moshe, Ramat Denia and Katamon. These names were passed along to Serge Schmemann, the editor of the editorial page of the International Herald Tribune, but will not be published here out of respect for the residents' privacy.

According to the Jerusalem Yearbook published by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Affairs, 3,576 Muslims were living in western Jerusalem as of 2007 (Table III/11).

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RE: J Street Comes Clean

Noah Pollak
Contentions/Commentary
26 April "10

J Street’s position on Jerusalem, detailed by Jen Rubin, is a perfect example of why the proper way to understand the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization is as an export-import business. Bear with me for a moment.

There was a set of ideas about the Arab-Israeli conflict to which many people subscribed in the 80s and 90s. These ideas became the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords became an immense, catastrophic failure. Many people who were Oslo advocates, thus confronted with reality, changed their minds about the conflict (an obvious example is Benny Morris). Some Oslo advocates, however, did not, and adopted various theories to justify their continued membership in the peace-process-can-do-no-harm camp: the Israeli offers were never good enough, Sharon started the intifada, territorial withdrawal must come first, a conspiracy of neocons and AIPAC has always worked against peace, and so on. In 2000 in Lebanon and in 2005 in Gaza, territorial withdrawal was tried, and the results detonated a belief even deeper than Oslo, this one going all the way back to 1967 and perhaps even to 1948: the hope that land could be traded for peace and that the conflict is about borders, not Israel’s very existence.

These accumulated facts changed the attitude of Israelis in a dramatic way. The Oslo consensus disintegrated not only as an understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but as a political platform. In the early 90s, Labor and Meretz held a combined 56 Knesset seats. Today they have 16. Yet despite this political collapse in Israel, a few true believers still cling to the Oslo fantasy. How can these ideas survive their failure in the very place they’re supposed to be applied?

J Street, working with various Meretz has-beens in Israel, imports the ideas to America and tries to revive them here, where Jews are far less aware of their abysmal record of failure. J Street pushes them to the Obama administration, which is favorably disposed to them anyway. Here is where the exporting happens: Obama now seeks to impose them on an unreceptive Israel.

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J Street Comes Clean: It Wants to Divide the Old City

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
26 April '10

The J Street Education Fund has taken out an ad that takes issue with Elie Wiesel’s criticism of Obama on building in Jerusalem. But J Street doesn’t merely call for a housing freeze or for outlying Arab neighborhoods to be ceded to a Palestinian state. Using the mouthpiece of former Knesset member Yossi Sarid, the J Streeters want to divide the Old City. Oh, yes:

Barack Obama appears well aware of his obligations to try to resolve the world’s ills, particularly ours here. Why then undercut him and tie his hands? On the contrary, let’s allow him to use his clout to save us from ourselves, to help both bruised and battered nations and free them from their prison. Then he can push both sides to divide the city into two capitals — to give Jewish areas to the Jews and Arab areas to the Arabs – and assign the Holy Basin to an agreed on international authority.

As an alarmed reader e-mails: “They specifically want to remove Israeli sovereignty over the Old City. I mean, they want the Western Wall NOT to be in Israeli hands. Wow.”

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Does Obama Really Think He Can Micromanage American Jews?

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
22 April '10

There are signs that he thinks he can. Barak Ravid reports in yesterday’s Ha’aretz that a high-level but unnamed U.S. official has complained about American Jews speaking up about how they feel and what they think about U.S. policy towards Jerusalem. I don’t particularly agree with what I’ve discerned as Ravid’s political views. But he is certainly a reliable journalist. He did not make this up.

It’s one thing, however unbecoming, for the Obami to lecture Israel about its capital. Still, truth be told, the U.S. not only is apoplectic about the 180-odd thousands of Jews who live (and have lived) in areas of the city beyond the temporary armistice lines of 1949, it has never recognized anything specifically Israeli in even western Jerusalem. If an American baby is born, for example, in Kiryat Yovel, an old Jewish neighborhood in the “new city” (or the “western sector,” as it used to be called), of Jerusalem, his or her place of birth will be registered by the American consulate not as “Jerusalem, Israel” but just as plain “Jerusalem.” How is that for the U.S. sticking its head in the sand? And, even though the Congress has legislated transferring the ambassadorial mission from shabby Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, several presidents have simply refused.

Look up “U.S. Consulate, Jerusalem.” It is eerie how unresponsive and indifferent to historical realities the site is. It’s almost as if Israel does not exist there at all.

In any case, the churlish American factotum cited above was upset that prominent American Jews had made their views known about Obama’s obvious hostility to Jewish Jerusalem in general. In fact, the president has never, NEVER acknowledged the special role of Jerusalem in Jewish history, in Jewish religion, in the Jewish present. Believe me: this is not an oversight. I wrote about this twice during Passover.

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Is the Obama Administration Trying to Silence Critics of its Middle East Policy?

Ron Radosh
pajamasmedia.com
21 April '10

As readers of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal know, last week Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and World Jewish Congress head Ronald S. Lauder purchased full page ads challenging President Obama’s policies on the Middle East and Israel.

Lauder’s ad appeared on April 15th. “We are concerned,” Lauder began, “about the nuclear ambitions of an Iranian regime that brags about its genocidal intentions against Israel. We are concerned that the Jewish state is being isolated and delegitimized.” He continued:

Our concern grows to alarm as we consider some disturbing questions. Why does the thrust of this Administration’s Middle East rhetoric seem to blame Israel for the lack of movement on peace talks? After all, it is the Palestinians, not Israel, who refuse to negotiate.

Israel has made unprecedented concessions. It has enacted the most far reaching West Bank settlement moratorium in Israeli history.

Israel has publicly declared support for a two-state solution. Conversely, many Palestinians continue their refusal to even acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

The conflict’s root cause has always been the Palestinian refusal to accept Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. Every American President who has tried to broker a peace agreement has collided with that Palestinian intransigence, sooner or later. Recall President Clinton’s anguish when his peace proposals were bluntly rejected by the Palestinians in 2000. Settlements were not the key issue then.

They are not the key issue now.

“Appeasement,” Lauder wrote the President, “does not work.” The real threat was not Israeli settlements, but “a nuclear armed Iran.”

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Obama Picked the Wrong Issue

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
17 April '10

At the time, many of us who have been highly critical of Obama’s Israel policy noted that it was a bad idea for him to make Jerusalem housing permits the focus of his ire (at least for now). There is no issue so emotional and no aspect of the conflict with the Palestinians that so unites Jews as the historic capital of the Jewish people. And today, the depth of his misjudgment is laid bare by Elie Wiesel, who takes out full page ads in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal to object to the assault on what he calls “the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul.”

(For full text of ad click here)

He doesn’t mention Obama by name but his point could not be clearer: forget it, Mr. President. He writes, in part:

For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture — and not a single time in the Koran. Its presence in Jewish history is overwhelming. There is no more moving prayer in Jewish history than the one expressing our yearning to return to Jerusalem. To many theologians, is IS Jewish history, to many poets, a source of inspiration. It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city, it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming. The first song I heard was my mother’s lullaby about and for Jerusalem. Its sadness and joy are part of our collective memory.

He continues with a historical review of the city dating back to King David. And then he brings us up to date:

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