Evidently Wits University can have antisemitism and support for terrorists - but a female Ethiopian Israeli reservist is not acceptable - by Elder of Ziyon

...Look how upset these people are at a proud, black Jewish Zionist woman. This anger in the video has nothing to do with "justice" or supporting Palestinians - it is pure hate that someone who passes all the intersectionality victimhood rules disagrees with them.

Elder of Ziyon..
09 April '19..

The Wits (University) Vuvuzela reports:

A guest speaker for the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) at the Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) was escorted off the Wits University campus on Thursday, April 4, after it was found that she is a soldier.

Ashager Araro, a well-known Israeli-Ethiopian Zionist and reserve soldier of the Israeli Defence Forces left the campus surrounded by private security after supporters of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC) confronted her about her military role.

PSC and SAUJS supporters found themselves in a heated and tense exchange over Araro as both groups of students converged on the piazza in front of the Chamber of Mines building.

“You guys are letting soldiers on to our campus now, we’ll note this,” said a Palestinian supporter to Jabu Mashinini, senior programme adviser for student governance, in reference to Araro.

Apparently, both the Jewish/Zionist students and the Israel haters had informally agreed that no military personnel would be allowed to participate.

But explicitly supporting terrorist is perfectly fine.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Welcome once again to the annual “Israel Apartheid Week,” carnival of hatred - by Amit Deri

Our activists are not affiliated with any political party, nor do we have any political agenda. We are united on one issue: we cannot abandon the campuses around the world to the propaganda, lies and spreading of hatred all aimed to delegitimize the very existence of the State of Israel. We are there and will continue to be there to expose the truth.

Amit Deri..
Opinion/JPost..
19 March '18..
Link: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Carnival-of-hatred-545506

Today begins the official “Israel Apartheid Week,” to be held at universities across the US and Canada. The name of course references South Africa, the country where actual apartheid policies were instituted several decades ago.

“Apartheid Week” has never been more than more than a smokescreen for an antisemitic hate fest, cynically marketed as a human rights campaign. Hundreds of academics, amazingly including Israelis and Jews, will be partners in this hateful annual project.

It will be a carnival including “art exhibits” throughout campuses. It will be a week in which sanctimonious but actually clueless people – people with no idea who they are attacking and who they are protecting – will shout empty slogans and blame Israel for all the evil in the world.

It will be a week where anyone who dares to speak up and anyone who decides to expose these lies will be shouted down, just like what we saw happen last week at the University of Virginia, and the week before that at the University of Georgia.


Reservists On Duty

Let’s be clear: we need to fight for human rights, especially in the human catastrophe known as Syria. And there are countless other atrocities happening all around the world. However, this is not what happens during “Apartheid Week.”

Why you can't "colonize" Palestine - by Daniel Greenfield

...The existence of Israel not only means the decolonization of Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh’s imaginary colonial fantasies of “Palestine,” but inspires resistance in peoples struggling against Islamic colonialism throughout the region, from the Copts to the Berbers to secular intellectuals fighting for freedom. Islamic colonialism has always been defeated, whether at the Gates of Vienna or in the Sinai Desert. Its colonial fantasies are false and will be defeated as many times as it takes, whether in the form of Palestine or ISIS.

Daniel Greenfield..
Frontpagemag.com..
05 April '16..

At Israeli Apartheid Week, campus haters claim to be fighting “colonialism” by fighting Jews. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, dedicated to a country that doesn’t exist and which has produced nothing worth studying except terrorism, features diatribes such as Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh’s Palestine Re-Covered: Reading a Settler Colonial Landscape”. This word salad is a toxic stew of historical revisionism being used to justify the Muslim settler colonization of the indigenous Jewish population.

Colonialism is CPS’ favorite word. When Israeli social workers remove abused children from Muslim homes, that’s colonialism. Israeli farms are a form of environmental “colonialism”. When non-profits aren’t representative enough, it’s the fault of the “Israeli settler-colonial regime.” If it rains on Thursday, it’s caused by “colonialism,” preferably of the “Israeli Zionist colonial settler regime” variety.

But you can’t colonize colonizers. The Muslim population in Israel is a foreign colonist population. The indigenous Jewish population can resettle its own country, but it can’t colonize it.

Not even if you accuse Jews of being a “super-double-secret settler colonial regime.”

Muslims invaded, conquered and settled Israel. They forced their language and laws on the population. That's the definition of colonialism. You can't colonize and then complain that you're being colonized when the natives take back the power that you stole from them.

There are Muslims in Israel for the same reason that there are Muslims in India. They are the remnants of a Muslim colonial regime that displaced and oppressed the indigenous non-Muslim population.

There are no serious historical arguments to be made against any of this.

The Muslim conquests and invasions are well-documented. The Muslim settlements fit every historical template of colonialism complete with importing a foreign population and social system that was imposed on the native population. Until they began losing wars to the indigenous Jewish population, the Muslim settlers were not ashamed of their colonial past, they gloried in it. Their historical legacy was based on seizing indigenous sites, appropriating them and renaming them after the new conquerors.

The only reason there’s a debate about the Temple Mount is because Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem and ordered a mosque built on a holy Jewish site. The only reason there’s a debate about East Jerusalem is because invading Muslim armies seized half the city in 1948, bombed synagogues and ethnically cleansed the Jewish population to achieve an artificial Muslim settler majority. The only Muslim claim to Jerusalem or to any other part of Israel is based purely on the enterprise of colonial violence.

There is no Muslim claim to Israel based on anything other than colonialism, invasion and settlement.

BDS, Israel and Jew Hatred. Fighting Back Cannot Be Optional - by Jonathan Tobin

...It might be more pleasant to opt out of this battle and to ignore the “Israel Apartheid” smears or accept BDS advocates as misguided but well-intentioned activists. But the ultimate cost of such acquiescence will be far higher than the inconvenience associated with fighting back. When Israel is delegitimized, so, too, will be Judaism eventually. American exceptionalism means that the rising tide of global anti-Semitism hasn’t taken hold on these shores the way it has in Europe or elsewhere. Yet if BDS movements are not labeled for what they are — expressions of anti-Semitic hate — then Americans will be taking a fearful step towards acceptance of the European disease that is making Jewish life increasingly untenable in Europe.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
17 March '16..

Earlier this month, pro-Israel students scored a public relations coup when they managed to steal a little of the public relations thunder from the organizers of an “Israel Apartheid Week” at Columbia University. In response to a faux “apartheid wall” that was supposed to be a representation of Israel’s West Bank security fence that was erected in front of the school’s iconic Low Library steps, members of Students Supporting Israel put up a 12-foot tall inflated Pinocchio to mock the lies of their opponents. However, in an act that was symbolic of the anti-Israel bias of many campuses but especially at Columbia, the student government demanded that Pinocchio be taken down. Yet this act of repression brought more attention to the counter-protest thus serving the purpose of the pro-Israel students.

Yet a JTA report about the battle over Israel at Columbia focused more on the fact that for the most part, Jewish students at the school were “laying low” during the week of protests. Even some Jewish activists on campus seem to think the best strategy in dealing with “Apartheid” week, which has become an annual event throughout academia in this country and elsewhere, is to just ignore it. One Hillel director from another school quoted in the story said the problem wasn’t just that it was impossible to have an elevated dialogue about the Middle East via demonstrations and other events. It’s that they fear that engaging in conflict with Israel-haters, even when they engage in anti-Semitic speech, is a turnoff for most Jewish students.

Most college students are conflict averse. College is such a fun place. When you make a space a conflict space, our fear is that people won’t want to come in.

These sentiments were echoed by Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt, who spoke on a panel with me at a conference on global anti-Semitism that was held last weekend at Kean University. Lipstadt is worried that too much of Jewish identity in America is bound up with Holocaust observances and fear of anti-Semitism. She thinks that if parents send their children off to school being told to be “on guard” against anti-Semitism that operates under a thin veil of anti-Zionism, they will simply go to ground and discard their Jewish identity.

Lipstadt is right about the way Americans have allowed the Holocaust to define Jewish identity, something that was aptly illustrated by Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. When asked about his Jewish identity in one of the Democratic debates, he responded that he was proud to be Jewish and that it “is an essential part of whom I am as a human being.” But the only example of anything Jewish the famously non-observant socialist would mention, as having meaning to him was the memory of the Holocaust. As Charles Krauthammer aptly observed about what Sanders said, it was the sort of response that summed up the views for all too many American Jews. While there is nothing wrong and indeed much that is important about remembering the Holocaust, the sole focus on that sad chapter of history gives short shrift to all of the myriad gifts and wonders that is the Jewish heritage of faith, religious studies, language, and the miracle of modern Israel. That failure to embrace a positive approach to Judaism is part and parcel of the demographic collapse of non-Orthodox Judaism that was laid bare in the 2013 Pew Survey on Jewish Americans.

But to acknowledge this problem does not excuse a willingness on the part of too many Jews as well as non-Jews to look the other way as a BDS (boycott, divest sanction) movement aimed at Israel establishes a beachhead for anti-Semitism on American campuses. It may not be “fun” to stand up for Israel or to oppose instances of anti-Semitism that are becoming endemic at all too many institutions of higher learning, but silence can’t be an option.

'Apartheid' State or Blessing to the Arabs? - by P. David Hornik

...It’s not only, though, that “apartheid” is a ludicrous lie to toss at Israel. It’s also that—as grim, hate-ridden Israel Apartheid Week plods on—Israel is increasingly a blessing not only to its Arab citizens but to the Arab world as a whole.

P. David Hornik..
PJ Media..
04 March '16..

It’s that time of year again—Israel Apartheid Week. This “week” starts in Europe in February and spreads to North America in March. It’s an arm of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel) movement, which is in turn an arm of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Israel Apartheid Week is essentially an invasion of Western universities by Middle Eastern terrorism. Its aim is to abet the destruction of a country, Israel, by poisoning the minds of a whole generation against it. Its cri de coeur is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In other words, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—no “two-state solution,” no compromise, no Israel.

One way to further that aim is to spread the “big lie” of Israeli “apartheid.” The Israel Apartheid Week activists know that it’s a lie, as does anyone—that is, anyone not blinded by ideological hatred—who has ever spent time in Israel. Here’s an Israeli Arab Supreme Court justice. Here’s an Israeli Arab brigadier general. Here’s an Israeli Arab leader of a parliamentary faction. Class, can you point to equivalents among blacks during apartheid South Africa?

It’s not only, though, that “apartheid” is a ludicrous lie to toss at Israel. It’s also that—as grim, hate-ridden Israel Apartheid Week plods on—Israel is increasingly a blessing not only to its Arab citizens but to the Arab world as a whole.

To start with the Israeli Arabs—as Evelyn Gordon notes, a poll in 2015 asked them:

“If you had the opportunity to become a citizen of the United States or any other Western country, would you prefer to move there or to remain in Israel?” Fully 83.4 percent said they would rather remain in Israel—virtually identical to the proportion among Israeli Jews (84.5 percent).

Israeli Arabs know, of course, that Israel gives them a level of freedom, democracy, and economic advancement that the surrounding Arab countries can hardly match. It’s very possible that if Israel had not become Israel, it would now be Southern Syria. The poll didn’t ask if Israel or Southern Syria would be a better place to live, but one can imagine where the responses would fall.

Coming soon to a campus near you. The annual anti-Israel apartheid fantasy week

As Israeli Apartheid Week organizers prepare a series of public events demonizing Israel, we examine whether anything they say is actually true. Either way, they'll probably be on your (or your children's) college campus within the month.

Daniel Pomerantz..
Honest Reporting..
23 February '16..




Honest Reporting

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfeJHt91cWw

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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The Millions of Real Victims of Israel Apartheid Week

...The real victims are the millions being massacred, displaced, and starved while the West ignores them, because it’s too busy obsessing over Israel.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
27 February '14..

On Tuesday, I discussed how Israel Apartheid Week, which is taking place this week and next, feeds off latent anti-Semitism. But it’s a truism that anti-Semitism never harms the Jews alone, and IAW is a classic example. To understand why, consider three news reports from the last two weeks.

Some 500,000 Syrian civilians, or perhaps even more, have fled Aleppo in response to the government’s aerial bombing campaign, “creating what aid workers say is one of the largest refugee flows of the entire civil war”–an impressive achievement for a war that’s already created 2.4 million refugees and caused 6.5 million to be internally displaced. Tens of thousands of Muslims are fleeing spiraling violence in the Central African Republic, “in what human rights groups and a top United Nations official characterized … as de facto ethnic cleansing.” And in South Sudan, where a fragile truce has broken down, almost 900,000 people have been displaced, while “millions could go hungry if fields remain unplowed before the coming rainy season.”

And those are just samples. Altogether, millions of people round the world are being killed, displaced, and/or facing starvation. Yet IAW activists are blanketing campuses throughout the West with a campaign aimed at persuading educated young people that the world’s biggest problem, the one they should focus on persuading their governments to solve, is a low-level conflict that isn’t generating mass slaughter, mass displacement, or mass starvation–one whose total casualties over 65 years are barely a tenth of those produced by Syria’s civil war in less than three. And because the miserable Syrians, Central Africans, and South Sudanese have no comparably well-funded and well-organized group to press their cases, a great many well-meaning Westerners have become convinced that Israel’s “oppression” of the Palestinians truly is the world’s most pressing problem, and are lobbying their governments to direct their efforts accordingly.

The Truth about "Israel Apartheid Week". Where's the Coverage?

...But as to the truth about so-called “Israel Apartheid Week”… In the mainstream media… Where’s the coverage?

Sarit Catz..
CAMERA Snapshots..
26 February '14..

On a number of college campuses, this week is “Israel Apartheid Week,” a week where anti-Israel activists try to fool students into believing Israel systematically and legally oppresses minorities. This is a particularly ironic accusation since Freedom House, an independent watchdog group dedicated to the expansion of freedom around the world, has rated Israel as the only free country in the Middle East.

If these activists were concerned with human rights, they would be sponsoring North Korea Apartheid Week, Iran Apartheid Week or Syria Kill-Over-One-Hundred-and-Forty-Thousand-Civilians Week. Activists could be marching against Saudi Arabia, where violations of human rights laws are enshrined in the Kingdom’s legal code, including the systemic discrimination against women and minorities, where citizens are subject to arbitrary arrest and detention, denial of fair and public trials, torture and abuse, restrictions on freedoms of speech, assembly, association, movement, severe restrictions on religious freedom, and where homosexual activity is punishable by flogging or death by stoning.

Want to see who is behind “Israel Apartheid Week”? Here are a few of the culprits:



Many of the “Israel Apartheid Week” organizers are part of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement, aimed not at ending human rights violations, but at damaging Israel. As CAMERA reported:

To the Organizers of ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ - An Open Letter

Victor Gordon..
Posted by Rolene Marks..
Media Team Israel..
12 March '13..

This week is devoted to one of sanity’s ignominious lapses – Israel Apartheid Week – an event that not only displays the startling ability of assumedly-thinking students to lose all sense of rationality, but to rather exist in a bubble of self delusion, fostered by the blatant lie that Israel is an apartheid state. The zeal with which these young people throw their weight behind this misguided “cause” is in itself revealing of a malaise, deeper than mere social altruism.

Ask the vast majority of the participants in this self-serving exercise in hypocrisy, ignorance and dishonesty, how they reconcile that Israel is guilty of apartheid and they will either mouth the clichéd, irrational platitudes that they have learned to repeat like a bunch of lemmings, or find themselves unable to offer any point of view that will remotely reflect any semblance of reality.

My challenge is simple: Just ask yourselves the following two questions and do your very best to provide sensible, logical and, above all, honest answers.

There is no question in any rational mind that Israel is anything but a true democracy. If you don’t believe me refer to the website of Freedom House, (www.freedomhouse.org) the authoritative and independent think tank formed in 1941 on the initiative of Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklyn D. Roosevelt. Non-political Freedom House rates Israel as a “Full Democracy” in every sense of the term, and the only one of that stature in the entire Middle East.

So now the question: How is it possible that a country that upholds the principles of democracy in every possible sense (and under the most demanding of circumstances) can also practise apartheid considering that apartheid demands the total absence of democracy in order to exist? The fact is, apartheid is anathema to democracy. Please explain.

Apartheid Week? The Arab States Win Hands Down

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
26 February '13..

Roll up, roll up for Israel Apartheid Week – a global, multimedia extravaganza devoted to cementing the comparison between the new international pariah, Israel, and the old racist regime in South Africa. And it’s coming to a campus near you.

Anyone who knows anything about Israel will tell you that the comparison is invidious and malicious. Israeli law does not discriminate against Arab citizens. Of course there is – there must be – plenty of room for improvement, but show me one liberal democracy where minorities do not claim to experience discrimination and prejudice.

Not only is the Israel Apartheid campaign a monumental lie of gobsmacking chutzpah, but the boot is on the Arab foot. You only have to witness the way that Arab host countries treat their Palestinians, who are denied citizenship. And not only Palestinians - Kuwait has 300,000 Bedouin residents denied citizenship and the right to vote. Thousands of children born in Arab countries are deprived of citizenship merely because their parents were not citizens. Immigrants from South Asia with no rights whatsoever help keep countries like Dubai, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates running.

Those who berate the West for its orientalism towards the Third World, quoting the late Edward Said‘s eponymous book, ignore the fact that much of society under Muslim domination was built on the exploitation of women, Jews (and Christians) and blacks. Not only are all Arab countries strong contenders in the Apartheid Oscars, but Saudi Arabia would win hands down. At the bottom of its obscene pecking order are women, non-Muslims and slaves.

Steinberg - Slandering the Jewish state

Dr. Gerald M. Steinberg..
Israel Opinion/Ynet..
12 March '12..

Over the past few weeks "Israeli apartheid week" events have occurred at a number of campuses throughout North America and Europe. This year’s timing is especially unfortunate: while this political warfare, accompanied by BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign is happening, the Syrian regime is massacring its own people.

In light of this, it is especially sad that people who call themselves human rights activists waste their time and energy attacking Israel. It is clear that the campaign explicitly targets the existence of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. In the words of Professor Irwin Cotler, former Canadian attorney general, "Let there be no mistake about it: to indict Israel as an Apartheid State is prologue and justification for the dismantling of the Jewish State, for the criminalization of its supporters, and for the consequential silencing of their speech."

This campaign immorally exploits the suffering of the real victims of apartheid and racism, and transforms a complex political dispute between the Palestinians and Israel into a racial conflict. The comparison was categorically rejected and denounced by Judge Richard Goldstone in The New York Times. Goldstone, who is a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court, wrote that, "In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute…"

Goldstone added that "while 'apartheid' can have broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations."

Many others who had experienced the real apartheid expressed similar views. Benjamin Pogrund, who was a journalist in South Africa, wrote, "Use of the apartheid label is at best ignorant and naive and at worst cynical and manipulative."

Gordon - Why Do Arabs and Muslims Keep Trying to Move to the “Apartheid State”?

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
07 March '12..

As Israel Apartheid Week circumnavigates the globe this month, a Jordan-based Palestinian journalist has offered an eloquent rebuttal that every Israel supporter should memorize and quote. If Israel is really an “apartheid state,” asks Ramzi Abu Hadid, “Why has it become the dream of many Arab Christians and Muslims to emigrate to the ‘apartheid state’? Is it possible that all these people are uninformed? Or do they really know the truth about Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East?”

Specifically, he noted, “thousands of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip … try to infiltrate into Israel every morning in search of work and a better life,” while “tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims have put their lives at risk by crossing the border into Israel from Egypt, where border guards often open fire at women and children.” In addition, “many Christian families from Bethlehem and even the Gaza Strip have moved to live in Israel because they feel safer in the ‘apartheid state’ than they do among their Muslim ‘brothers.’”

Abu Hadid doesn’t provide hard numbers, but the data amply prove his claims. During the first 11 months of last year alone, for instance, 13,851 illegal migrants entered Israel from Sinai; the biggest contingents were Muslim refugees from Sudan and Eritrea. And the risk of being shot by Egyptian guards is just one of the dangers they braved to reach “the apartheid state”: Migrants also face horrific abuse from the Sinai Bedouin who smuggle them over the border.

Sherman - Israel’s Pearl Harbor?

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


Anti-Israel hatred on campus crests each year during an event called “Israel Apartheid Week.” With this ominous name and programs that thrive on ignorance and blind disregard for the facts, tens of thousands of college students are urged to rise up against Israel
– Dore Gold, February 23, 2012


Israel is completely outclassed and outmaneuvered on a battleground it doesn’t even understand it is on
– Melanie Phillips, January 9, 2011

Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) is once again upon us. Described on its official website as “an annual international series of events held in cities and campuses across the globe,” its aim is “to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement.”

Traditionally, IAW includes events (lectures, films, rallies, poetry readings, art exhibitions and so on) spanning anything from 60 to 90 cities from Albuquerque to Zurich.

This year, however, a new condiment has been added to spice up the noxious brew of deceit, distortion, and disinformation on the IAW menu.

Ramzi Abu Hadid - The "Apartheid State" That Minorities Keep Struggling To Get Into

Ramzi Abu Hadid..
Stonegate Institute..
01 March '12..

Prominent PLO spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi is demanding that the international community declare Israel an "Apartheid State." Her demand was included in a statement she published in Ramallah this week: she accused Israel of incitement against Arabs and of violating international laws.

How come she never mentions the incitement of Palestinians against Israelis in the Palestinian government-issued textbooks, or in the schools and summer camps named after terrorists, or in the government-controlled TV stations which just last week again glorified terrorists with video celebrations again and again of the tenth aniversary of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group that over the years has ikilled dozens of Israelis, including many children?


How come Asrawi never mentions that in Saudi Arabia there is not only gender apartheid -- in which women have virtually no rights and are kept as virtual prisoners, unable to travel without the permission of a male guardian or relative, even if he is a child or retarded or mentally defective -- but also that there are separate roads marked for Muslims to drive on and for non-Muslims to drive on? You are not even allowed to bring a Bible nto the country. How come those acts are not "Apartheid"?


How come Ashrawi never mentions that here in Jordan the government has been trying to strip thousands of us Palestinans of our Jordanian citizenship -- a move Israel never made against its Christians and Muslims.

As an Arab Christian, Ashrawi would have done better if she had chosen to focus on the plight of her fellow Christians in the Palestinian territories, many of whom continue to complain about persecution and harassment from Muslims.

Has Ashrawi, the self-declared human right rights advocate, never heard of thousands of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who try to infiltrate into Israel every morning in search of work and a better life?

Why has it become the dream of many Arab Christians and Muslims to emigrate to the "Apartheid State"? Is it possible that all these people are uninformed? Or do they really know the truth about Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East? In Egypt, Syria, and Iran, for example, government officials put journalists in jail, but Israel is the only country in the region where one small journalist nobody has ever heard of can put a government official in jail.

In the past few decades, many Christian families from Bethlehem and even the Gaza Strip have moved to live in Israel because they feel safer in the "Apartheid State" than they do among their Muslim "brothers".

Has Ashrawi ever asked herself how come dozens of Christians and Muslims from neighboring Arab countries and Africa try to infiltrate the border into Israel every day, or how come so many of her fellow Christians want to live in the "Apartheid State"?

Is Ashrawi aware of the fact that while Christians are being persecuted and slaughtered in the Arab world and Africa, the Jewish state remains the safest place for them to live? Is she aware that the Christian population in Israel is on the rise while in the Arab and Islamic world it is dwindling -- and even faster in places such as Nigeria, Egypt and the Sudan where Muslims are slaughtering Christians?

What has Ashrawi done to promote the rights of women and freedom of speech under Hamas and Fatah?

On the same day that she issued her appeal to the international community, a Palestinian court in the West Bank sentenced a man to only five years in prison for murdering his sister. And on the same day also, Palestinian policemen raided a university campus near Ramallah and threatened peaceful protesters and reporters.

Tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims have put their lives at risk by crossing the border into Israel from Egypt, where border guards often open fire at women and children.

Does Hannan Ashrawi really care about Palestinians, or is she just being paid by Europeans and Western NGOs to keep bashing the region's only democratic country, which, though admittedly not perfect, still tries harder than any other to treat all of its people with decency and equality?

Link: http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2903/apartheid-state

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
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Wisse: Harvard's Latest Assault on Israel

Promoting the Jewish State's destruction at a school dedicated to 'democratic governance.'

Ruth Wisse..
Wall Street Journal..
28 February '12..





In 1948, when the Arab League declared war on Israel, no one imagined that six decades later American universities would become its overseas agency. Yet campus incitement against Israel has been growing from California to the New York Island. A conference at Harvard next week called "Israel/Palestine and the One-State Solution" is but the latest aggression in an escalating campaign against the Jewish state.

The sequence is by now familiar: Arab student groups and self-styled progressives organize a conference or event like "Israeli Apartheid Week," targeting Israel as the main problem of the Middle East. They frame the goals of these events in buzzwords of "expanding the range of academic debate." But since the roster of speakers and subjects makes their hostile agenda indisputable, university spokespersons scramble to dissociate their institutions from the events they are sponsoring. Jewish students and alums debate whether to ignore or protest the aggression, and newspapers fueling the story give equal credence to Israel's attackers and defenders.

A featured speaker at Harvard's conference is Ali Abunimah, creator of the website Electronic Intifada, who opposes the existence of a "Jewish State" as racist by virtue of being Jewish. A regular on this circuit, he also keynoted a recent University of Pennsylvania conference urging "Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions" (BDS) of, from and against Israel. Ostensibly dedicated to protecting Palestinian Arabs from Israeli oppression, BDS has by now achieved the status of an international "movement," some of whose branches exclude Israeli academics from their journals and conferences.

Kay - Israel’s worst enemies often come from within

Barbara Kay..
National Post..
28 February '12..




George Orwell once said, “England is the only great nation whose intellectuals are ashamed of their country.” Orwell never met Israeli intellectuals.

As the Post noted in its Saturday editorial, Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) is declining in vigour on North American campuses. But at Israel’s four secular universities — Hebrew University, University of Haifa, Tel Aviv University (TAU) and Ben Gurion University (BGU) — robust anti-Zionism continues to flourish, as it has for decades.

Since the 1967 Six-Day War, and with mounting stridency, the majority of Israel’s already leftist intelligentsia have identified themselves with enemies sworn to their nation’s annihilation.

Every day, anti-Zionist literature pours forth from Israel’s tenured radicals. Every week, an article condemning Israel as an apartheid nation appears. Every month, Israeli academics attend conferences expanding on the evils of the occupation and the moral bankruptcy of the Jewish state. Every year, Israeli historians make their annual pilgrimage to IAWs all over the world, including one at TAU.

(Video) Medad - Grandfathers/Grandmothers Against 'Apartheid' Attacks on Israel

Yisrael Medad..
My Right Way..
27 February '12..



Video here:



Note that these intellectually-oriented students have to read from notes to get their message out.

Story here:

A group of young leftist University of New Mexico students crashed a talk by pro-Israel Nonie Darwish on their campus Thursday night, but were surprised when older audience members got up out of their seats and pushed them out posthaste.

"Nonie Darwish speaks for Israeli apartheid! And genocide at the hands of the IDF," the leftists yelled. However, older audience members with a no-nonsense approach walked up to the students and began pushing them out. The leftist disturbance had barely lasted a minute by the time the rioters had all been pushed out the door.

The title of the talk was "Why the Arab Spring Is Failing."...

[Note: While news accounts across the board have referred to those disrupting as UNM students, the account below this particular Youtube included the STATEMENT FROM (Un)Occupy Albuquerque:...The protestors, some of whom are UNM students and affiliated with the (Un)Occupy Albuquerque movement,... not much of a surprise, but knowing that this disruption of an event on campus was by non-students, would have generated even more resentment. Yosef]

Link: http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2012/02/grandfathersgrandmothers-against.html


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Steinberg - Exploiting apartheid for political warfare

Gerald M. Steinberg..
bitterlemons.org..
23 February '12..

In September 2001, the participants in the Non-Government Organization Forum of the United Nations Conference on Racism and Discrimination in Durban, South Africa, welcomed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, distributed anti-Semitic literature, and adopted a declaration branding Israel as "a racist, apartheid state" practicing "a crime against humanity". This form of political warfare was led by the Palestinian leadership and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the text was written at a Tehran preparatory conference from which Israelis and Jews were excluded. The Durban NGO Forum marked the launch of another major round of political warfare against Israel, seeking to delegitimize Jewish national self-determination.

The use of the "apartheid" libel as the primary vehicle for de-legitimization is not directed against specific Israeli policies. The rhetoric and the campaigns on university campuses and in events such as "Israel apartheid week" explicitly target the existence of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The political warfare accompanied by BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaigns is a direct continuation of the Arab rejection of the November 1947 United Nations Partition plan (General Assembly Resolution 181). This strategy was also embodied in the infamous 1975 UN "Zionism is racism" resolution (General Assembly Resolution 3379, repealed in 1991). In the words of Irwin Cotler, former Canadian attorney general, "Let there be no mistake about it: to indict Israel as an Apartheid State is prologue and justification for the dismantling of the Jewish State, for the criminalization of its supporters, and for the consequential silencing of their speech."

Kay - The return of the Israel Apartheid Week cult

Jonathan Kay..
National Post..
25 February '12..

In Syria, the Assad regime continues to rain artillery on rebel positions in the city of Homs, killing journalists and innocent civilians alike. Iran’s mullahs are set to execute a Canadian citizen for the crime of operating a web site they don’t like. The new Libyan regime is torturing Gaddafi loyalists. And Egypt’s rulers are prosecuting NGO leaders on trumped-up charges. And so next week, Canadian left-wing activists will congregate in Toronto to express their hatred of … you guessed it: Israel.

The events of March 5-9 will take place as part of the 8th annual Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), and will feature presentations such as “Cutting the Ties to Israeli Apartheid: Cultural and Academic Boycott,” and “Rhymes Of Resistance And The Sounds Of Existence — with poets Remi Kanazi, Red Slam and Chand-nee.” The IAW website is full of the usual rhetoric about Israel’s “criminal” actions. There is not a word of acknowledgement about how utterly ridiculous it is to run a week-long event vilifying Israel when right next door in Syria, the government has just exterminated more Arabs than were killed in both Intifidas, the 2008 Gaza conflict, and the 2006 Lebanon war combined.

The timing of IAW this year truly does represent something of a farce. The eyes of the entire world are focused on Syria and the Strait of Hormuz. Even West Bank Palestinians themselves now seem more concerned with building up their economy than with grand international gestures aimed at the Jewish state. And in the “occupied” Golan Heights, Druze Muslims have been stirring — not against Israel, but against the Assad regime that many once looked to for “liberation.” In the streets of Cairo, Sana’a and Tunis, no one is talking about Israel — only about when they will get the democracy they were promised. Only among cultish, single-minded anti-Israel activists has the news of the Arab Spring failed to circulate.

The word “cultish” is used here advisedly — because even some veteran anti-Israel activists are getting tired of the false mantras that circulate at IAW events. This includes no less an anti-Zionist than Norman Finkelstein (who has called Israel a “vandal state” that “relentlessly and brutally and inhumanly keeps these vicious, murderous wars”). Speaking to an interviewer earlier this month, he attacked the animating philosophy behind IAW — the movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel (BDS) — as a “cult,” and an unsuccessful one at that.

Fresnozionism - Ideas are one level, emotions another

Terje Carlsson films
on the Gaza beach

Fresnozionism.org..
13 February '12..

Did you know that it’s almost Israel Apartheid Week? It’s happening all around the world on slightly different dates in February and March. Although Fresno will not have an official event, we will be entertained by Historian of the Imagination (I invented the title) Ilan Pappé on February 23, thanks to our local university’s Middle East Studies program.

Here in this conservative, agricultural region, we are treated to anti-Israel events on a regular basis, sometimes almost every week. Last week I attended a showing of the film “Israel vs. Israel,” presented at a local church by the Fresno Center for Nonviolence. The Swedish director, Terje Carlsson, was there to answer questions.

There was nothing exceptional about the film, which was about Israeli Jews who oppose the Jewish presence in the territories. I found one scene instructive, in which Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), one of the film’s heroes, was talking to an Arab who was describing vandalism allegedly committed by “settlers.” To everything the Arab said, in a mixture of Arabic and Hebrew, Ascherman responded “aiwa” (yes). “Aiwa. Aiwa. Aiwa.” Everything he said was simply taken as given, which is the way the foreign-funded anti-state NGOs like RHR respond to all Arab accusations.

What struck me was the way Carlsson (in the film and in person) simply took certain things for granted, and expected his audience to do so also. For example, he said several times “…settlements, all of which are illegal under international law.”

He was clearly impatient when this was questioned, as though nothing could be more obvious. Nevertheless, he was unable to answer when I asked him why the 1929 pogrom and the 1948-67 Jordanian occupation of Hevron somehow rendered the Jewish presence there ‘illegal’. Although he said he had been in Israel for 10 years on and off, making this and other propaganda films — because this is what it was, without even a pretense of ‘balance’ — and was aware that Jews had lived in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem prior to 1948, this question had not occurred to him, nor did he seem to think that the question of international law in this respect was in the slightest bit controversial.