The famous “Three D’s” of the Netanyahu Witch Hunt - by Victor Rosenthal

Netanyahu has been Prime Minister since 2009, and his opposition is frustrated to the point of hysteria. They have been unable to defeat him by the normal political processes, so it seems that they have chosen to tie him down with multiple legal threads, as the Lilliputians did to Gulliver, and stone him to death with innuendos. Bibi claims, and I think he is essentially correct in this, that pressure from media and the legal establishment – groups that are largely opposed to him – forced the hand of the Attorney General in deciding to move forward toward indictment...Will they succeed? We’ll find out after the 9th of April.

Victor Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
03 March '19..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2019/03/the-netanyahu-witch-hunt/

Demonization, double standard, and delegitimization: the famous “Three D’s” proposed by Natan Sharansky in 2004 have proven to be a powerful tool to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel, and “new antisemitism,” in which the Jewish state replaces the individual Jew as a target.

What these criteria do is reveal the irrational basis of the exaggerated charges against Israel, and help show how they are part of an emotional propaganda attack aimed at creating a strong antipathy in the listener which is not justified by facts.

These same propaganda techniques can be deployed in other venues for other purposes, such as in an attempt to damage a democratically elected political leader and influence an election. In a situation like this, the Three D’s can help us distinguish between legitimate criticism of policies and behavior – even alleged criminal behavior – and a witch hunt.

Of course I am talking about the witch hunt against PM Binyamin Netanyahu.

***

The major complaint against Netanyahu today is that he is corrupt, as is charged in the three cases in which the Attorney General has said he will attempt to indict Netanyahu: accepting gifts of cigars and champagne in return for political favors, conspiring to obtain positive coverage from a newspaper in return for suppressing a competitor, and – most damaging – promoting regulatory actions that provided financial benefits for a media mogul in return for positive coverage on a website he controlled.

There are some serious problems for the prosecution in these cases. The first case is both trivial and vague (how many cigars is too many?) In the second, Netanyahu is supposed to have traded support for legislation to ban the free distribution of newspapers – a bill aimed at Israel Hayom – for positive coverage from the publisher of its competitor, Yediot Aharonot. But Netanyahu opposed the legislation, and Yediot didn’t support him anyway. In the third, the website that allegedly provided positive coverage did publish several favorable articles, but overall did not change its slant.

In addition, all three accusations are based to some extent on the testimony of state’s witnesses – people who have been given immunity from prosecution for their own illegal actions in return for their testimony against the Prime Minister. Testify the way we want, they are told, or you will go to jail! Could there be a greater conflict of interest?

But what I find the most egregious is the way the media – with the cooperation of the police and the prosecutor’s office – has been trying Netanyahu in public for at least the last three or four years, in order to demonize and delegitimize him as Prime Minister. Netanyahu has been interrogated by the police at least twelve times for hours at a time in various cases, and each time there were sensational leaks that were gleefully reported on the evening TV news or in the next days’ papers. Naturally, the reports stressed the most incriminating material. As far as I know, no one has been disciplined for these leaks.

How Zionism left them behind - by Vic Rosenthal

...You say that you’ve left Zionism behind, and that’s fine – as long as you don’t adopt anti-Zionism in its place, and don’t assist those who want to wipe us out. Much as it irritates the hell out of you, Israel will be here if you need her.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
04 August '16..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2016/08/how-zionism-left-them-behind/



Hasia Diner and Marjorie N. Feld, two academics, intellectuals and Jews, recently published a manifesto of sorts, entitled “We’re American Jewish historians. This is why we’ve left Zionism behind.”

The existence of yet another two Jewish intellectuals who despise the Jewish state is not news. Their justifications for it and for the “repulsion” (Diner’s word) they feel for Israel are thoroughly eviscerated here by Richard Landes, who points out that instead of actual arguments, all they have are “Palestinian myths – which they have allowed to colonize their minds, and which they regurgitate without any critical thinking at all.” And see Elder of Ziyon’s comments here.

But what makes good scholars, which I am assured that Diner and Feld are, incapable of critical thinking in their own discipline?

For Feld and others like her (but not Diner), the answer is simple: their cowardice in the face of pressure from their friends and colleagues has paralyzed them, causing them to put aside their analytical abilities in favor of joining the herd. When faced with the need for a fight-or-flight response, they choose to fly.

Feld’s own words explicitly describe her terror at being perceived as a political outlier:

From non-Jews I met in liberal and left organizations in college, I first heard strong critiques of Zionism as Western colonialism, as a militarist project, as racism. Very smart friends of mine were articulating these critiques, and they made me terrifically uncomfortable.

A feminist scholar I met at a conference asked me directly if I considered myself a Zionist, and I gave an indirect answer. Her anger became palpable. She nearly shouted: “You’ve read Chomsky, haven’t you?” I had not yet read Noam Chomsky’s writings on Israel, I confessed. As I recall she turned away and didn’t speak to me again that evening. That might be hyperbole, or more likely my own sense of shame. [my emphasis]

She responded by volunteering for re-education, like a good Stalinist:

I reeducated myself, stopping to look at all of the facts that I had bumped up against for years. The 1947 radio broadcast of the votes at the UN that declared the Jewish people had a home and would never face genocide again: I had listened to this recording and this interpretation dozens of times in the sites of my Jewish education. Now I interpreted it anew. The founding of Israel was the Nakba, the great catastrophe, for Palestinians, with ethnic cleansing, destruction, and no right of return.

The utter irrationality of her conversion is shown by the way this historian ignores the fact that the 1947 partition resolution called for a Jewish and an Arab state, which the Arabs rejected, and that the nakba followed the invasion of Palestine by Arab armies.

Diner’s motivations are something else entirely. Her remarks in this short manifesto tell us only that she had “read too much about colonialism and racism to maintain what I now see as a naïve view…” Her romantic vision from summer camp in 1958 of Israel as a socialist paradise was dispelled not only by the acquisition of territory in 1967, but by her belief that Israel has been a colonialist and racist enterprise from its founding. There is no doubt that Diner read Chomsky, early and often. Unlike Feld, she has not been terrorized: she is more likely to be the one who terrorizes.

A slop-over that is inevitable, toxic, and violent toward the Jewish people

...They want to remain true to their radical roots, but at the same time they want inclusivity and multiculturalism to define their academic culture. The problem is that the radical Left today, and there are few more radically-left universities in the United States than SFSU, is exceedingly hostile toward Israel and, thus, necessarily, hostile toward Jews, in general. This does not create inclusivity. On the contrary, it socially constructs hatred. They will insist otherwise, but the slop-over is inevitable, toxic, and violent toward the Jewish people as it undermines the well-being of both the Jewish people and the Jewish state, as well as, via BDS, and the economic well-being of Israeli-Arabs, particularly in Judea and Samaria.

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
05 March '16..





{Also published at the Elder of Zyion.}

Cinnamon Stillwell - the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a graduate of San Francisco State University, and a contributor for numerous outlets, including The San Francisco Chronicle, and those as diverse from one another as Front Page Magazine is from National Public Radio (NPR) - in a recent piece entitled SFSU's Defeaning Silence on Partnership with Palestinian University, reminds us that San Francisco State University is among the most racist universities on the planet.

She writes:

Late last year, during the ongoing frenzy of violence directed at Israelis known as the “stabbing intifada,” 20-year-old Maram Hassoneh was killed in her second attempted knife attack on IDF soldiers manning a checkpoint. Hassoneh, a devout Muslim, was a top English student at An-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus. Described by Hamas as “greenhouse for martyrs,” An-Najah may very well be San Francisco State University (SFSU)’s first academic partner in the Arab and Muslim world.

Under the leadership of Rabab Abdulhadi, director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, SFSU reportedly established a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with An-Najah in 2014. Though there is no official corroboration of the relationship other than a recommendation in the All-University Committee on International Programs annual report (which Abdulhadi touted on Facebook), An-Najah claimed in a statement at its website last year that the MOU was signed on September 10, 2014, while a 2015 Xpress Magazine interview with Abdulhadi presented it as a fait accompli.

I wrote about this in a piece from April of last year entitled, San Francisco State Partners with Violently Anti-Jewish Arab University. An-Najah is perhaps the most viciously racist college campus in the world and this is who SFSU chooses to partner with?

It is a disgrace and an insult to every Jew on that campus and any Jewish person, or friend of Jewish people, who ever gave a dime in donations to that school.

Here is a little tid-bit that Stillwell was kind enough to SFSU to leave out of her piece. The grotesque shrine "celebrating" the Sbarro massacre at An-Najah University.



This 2001 video is only about a minute and a half long, but if you watch it you will see where people entering the exhibit wiped their feet on the Israeli and American flags. There is also an image of Ariel Sharon with blood dripping from his mouth. Whatever else this video might demonstrate it is certainly not a memorial for the innocent dead.

It is the glorification of the spilling of Jewish blood and the destruction of Jewish lives.

Post-Zionists and Impossible Lies

...The post-Zionist rejected this argument, saying it was false. Jews can enter Area A and she has done so many times. She has friends in Jenin and Ramallah whom she visits, and she was never murdered. At this point even the audience understood that she was totally twisting reality. They, too, remembered the widows of the two Israeli murdered by a lynch mob in Ramallah, and all those families in which the husband just “popped out to get his car fixed in the Palestinian Authority” and never came back.

Karni Eldad..
i24 News..
20 May '14..

Several weeks ago I traveled to London to take part in a panel discussion. The event was sponsored by the Jewish Agency and the local Jewish community and focused on the issue of two states for two people. I went for less than a day, but the impression the trip left me with hasn't even begun to dissipate. Two additional women joined me on the podium: one left-winger, who spent her childhood in picnics with Arabs (meaning she was an activist, an ideologue, not just a left wing sympathizer who hates Arabs and wants to be rid of them). The other was truly left wing. Post-Zionist. Undoubtedly a balanced panel.

I was forced to sit at the table and hear my beloved land called “Israel-Palestine,” to understand that there are Jews who think the State of Israel should be completed annulled.

Whereas the leftist was suggesting all sorts of illogical and unrealistic solutions, given that a day before the debate, Tzipi Livni’s negotiations ended in a resounding crash, the post-Zionist simply lied. With the leftist I could deal: she spoke of two states for two people, although reality has shown that neither side agrees with this concept. I disagreed with her views, but at least she spoke with dignified coherence.

The lies sounded by the radical leftie confused and delighted me. It was the only ray of sun on the trip (except for the shopping and the fact that the audience was surprisingly supportive of my views). They confused me because I had prepared myself to deal with facts, not with lies. The audience, nurtured on media which by and large leans to the left, cannot differentiate between facts and lies. It was my word against hers, regardless of what those words were based on.

Why did her lies delight me? Because ideology is useless, or so I hope, if it is not based on reality. If the post-Zionists are forced to invent and twist facts in order to buttress their view of the world - they are bound to fail.

I'll give you an example. I said: There are large red signs at the entrance to Area A (the part of the West Bank under full Palestinian control) which forbid Israelis from entering, for fear they will be murdered. On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping the Arabs from entering any place in Israel. That is - an Arab from Bethlehem can enter a settlement, and many Bethlehem residents do so, working and trading with us, whereas a resident of the very same settlement cannot enter Bethlehem for fear he will pay with his life.

Dear "anti-Zionists" - Some questions needing answers

...Please tell us why Jews can not live where 'Palestinian' Dictator Mahmoud Abbas, currently ruling in the ninth year of his four-year term, does not want us to live.

JayinPhiladelphia..
Israel Thrives..
09 November '13..

Earlier this evening I was visited by an old friend from the 'progressive' hate site Daily Kos, who apparently felt the overwhelming urge to troll Jews tonight.

Well, I feel I must ask him some questions in return.

Here they are -

Please do for us what even the people you purportedly claim to stand for cannot do - define for us what exactly is a 'Palestinian,' and what makes them a specific people aside from a hardcore drive to kill Jews.

Please define for us what exactly is 'Palestinian land,' and please tell us why you only claim that Israel's stake to Judea and Samaria, the undisputed historical homeland of the Jewish people, for thousands of years, is 'illegal,' while at the same time you seemingly completely accept a random 19-year period of illegal Jordanian military occupation as solid, if your actual problem is not, in fact, merely a simple hatred of Jews?

Please tell us why Jews can not live where Mahmoud Abbas thinks we can not live.

Please tell us how literal Nazi-style Judenrein states, as for example a future 'Palestine,' are progressive, in your definition of same. Please expand upon this, and show us how and why you are not a supporter of racist, apartheid policies.

Please, if you can, inform us once and for all that the criminal terror organizations which claim to represent the 'Palestinian' people are not direct descendants of the WWII-era Nazi Germans. Provide evidence for claims to the contrary.

Clear that up for us.

Just Banging Away - The Anti-Zionist Civil War on the Left

...Yet Blumenthal’s book was so appalling that Alterman took it apart in the magazine that spawned it. Calling it “The ‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook,” Alterman scored it for its frequent comparisons of the Jews with the Nazis and its complete absence of any acknowledgement of the Muslim and Arab war to destroy Israel. As Alterman wrote in a subsequent blog post, “It is no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).”

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
04 November '13..

Some in the pro-Israel community are having a good chuckle at the feud that has erupted between Jewish left-wingers in the past couple of weeks. But rather than laughing, those who care not only about Israel but also the direction of the conversation about Israel in the post-Oslo era and what it portends for the future should be concerned.

The exchange between the anti-Zionist Max Blumenthal and his antagonists among the ranks of left-wingers who are often critical of Israel but defend its existence shows how pointless much of the debate that has been carried on between the left and the right about borders and settlements has been. As risible as the arguments put forward by Blumenthal trashing Israelis as “non-indigenous” interlopers in the Arab world who must be made to surrender their sovereignty, culture, and homes may be, they represent the cutting edge of left-wing thought that has come to dominate European discussions of the Middle East.

The dustup centers on Goliath, a new anti-Israel screed by Blumenthal, the son of Clinton administration figure Sidney Blumenthal, published by Nation Books. But to Blumenthal’s chagrin, the magazine (which is no stranger to anti-Zionist articles) allowed columnist Eric Alterman to write about it in The Nation. Alterman is himself a fierce and often obnoxious critic of Israel and defenders of Israel, and has been a major promoter of the myth that the pro-Israel community has been seeking to silence the Jewish state’s critics. Yet Blumenthal’s book was so appalling that Alterman took it apart in the magazine that spawned it. Calling it “The ‘I Hate Israel’ Handbook,” Alterman scored it for its frequent comparisons of the Jews with the Nazis and its complete absence of any acknowledgement of the Muslim and Arab war to destroy Israel. As Alterman wrote in a subsequent blog post, “It is no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).”

To give you a taste of how outrageous this book is, Blumenthal even has the nerve to recount a conversation with Israeli author David Grossman who has been an important figure in the peace movement in which he lectured the Israeli about the need for the state to be dismantled and for its citizens to make their peace with the need to rejoin the Diaspora rather than to cling to their homes. Grossman responds to Blumenthal by walking out and telling him to tear up his phone number. Blumenthal attributes Grossman’s reaction to Israeli myopia.