In JPost today Efraim Zuroff spoke his piece. Zuroff is the successor to Simon Wiesenthal as head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center whose mission remains hunting down and bringing to trial still living Nazis. Zuroff is clearly and I think rightly disturbed by the fact that this current president of the Bundesrepublic of Germany signed off in 2008 on the so-called Prague Declaration which equated Soviet brutality post-War with Nazi brutality, a comparison which in effect strips the Holocaust of its uniquely Jewish and crazy character.

This linkage has now become fashionable in certain European circles which also has the advantage of being able to smear the Jewish Communist oppressors, namely the traitorous Jews who became Communist big shots and did their evil deeds.

This is a view on a par with the perception of the Holocaust as one of numerous genocides, which view also strips it of its uniquely Jewish features. You know who thinks like this? Samantha Power, vizier to Emir Barack Hussein, she who was born in Ireland, emigrated to the US at age 9 and is now married to Cass Sunstein, another Jewish antiJew policy intellectual in the mold of LTF or Martin Indyk; a radical policy intellectual.

Samantha Power even wrote a book called Genocides in the plural which in effect stripped the Holocaust of its uniquely Jewish identity.

So Efraim Zuroff was right to alert people in Israel to this dangerous situation when the President of Germany thinks this way too.

As I’ve opined about the massacre of millions of Armenians: that is what it was: a massacre, but that it not a synonym for genocide. The word “genocide” was invented by Polish Jewish survivor Raphael Lemkin precisely because massacre and its synonyms would not do. The Holocaust was new and deserved a new term.

The Holocaust was the effort to find, hunt down and murder every Jew on Planet Earth. The Turks, by contrast, had no such desire vis-a-vis the Armenians. They just wanted the land the Armenians wanted and the Turks had no scruples about how to dispossess them of it. The Turks are barbarians and acted barbarically toward the Armenians, but they did not produce propaganda films likening Armenians to rats, or vermin or viruses; people possessed of an evil nature determined to rule the world and exterminate the people of Turkey. The Turks did not produce pseudo-intellectual theories about why the Armenians were inherently hateable and dangerous not only to Turks but all mankind.

Likewise anyone like Samantha Power who equates massive cases of massacres to the Holocaust is possibly a malicious enemy of the Jewish people, like Samantha Power, but one hopes not today’s president of Deutschland…

Ishmael was after all Avraham’s first-born son and should have inherited two times what was slated for his half-brother. Only Ishmael was such an incorrigible person, who the wise Sarah fingered for a potential murderer of her son, he and his mother were asked to leave.

At Yitzhak’s weaning party, when he was either two or three years old, which made his older half-brother either 16 or 17 years old, who made jokes about his kid brother, the center of attention; and the wise Sarah, the greatest Jewish mother in history, saw him and a shudder likely ran down her spine. She had watched Ishmael grow up from birth and just as the Torah recorded, he turned out to be into a wild ass of a kid. Sarah foresaw that when she and her husband were gone, Ishmael was the type of person capable of murdering her son Isaac. So she said to husband Abraham, “They gotta go.”

Avraham resisted. The kindest man in the world, this was still is first-born son who had his good attributes.

But G-d told him, “Listen to your wife.” In this matter she sees more clearly precisely because this was his first-born son.

So Ishmael and his Hamitic mother Hagar were banished from the tents of Avraham and that had to be for Ishmael like having acid thrown in his face.

And in his bitterness and just general wildness he was profligate with the water given the two of them for the journey. And when it was all gone, because Ishmael and his mother were careless with it, and he is dying of thirst, now his mother abandons him. Walks away, leaves him under a bush to die and walks away because she couldn’t bear to see him suffer. In other words, her feelings were more important to her than the feelings of her dying son.

In any case, poor Ishmael: kicked out of the house by his father, deprived of his inheritance, abandoned in his hour of need by his own mother, this is one angry boy capable of anything…

On the one hand, I am as irritated as anybody by these regulations, but on the other, if I were in charge, I am not sure I would do things differently.

When Moshiach comes, we will be able to re-build the Temple and I predict along with the reconstruction, the Ishmaelites will finally put on the yoke of civilization, confess their theft of our religion, ask for forgiveness for all their cruelty and injustice to us, and respectfully ask permission to be allowed to dismantle Al Aqsa Mosque and take the pieces away, maybe back to Mecca and re-build it there.

When Moshiach comes, maybe these violent Jew-haters will evolve into becoming peaceful sons of Ishmael who accept that this land is not Ishmael territory but Israel territory…

But getting back to the obtuseness of Israelis like Yigal Palmor when faced by such venomous hostility from in this case the government of South Africa, Israelis even like Benyamin ben Bentzion on this week’s cover of TIME Magazine need work. I haven’t seen the text of that piece, only the quotes in the Friday MSM here. It is reported to be more favorable than not, but nonetheless the author Richard Stengel could not be more politically correct in writing, “King Bibi has conquered Israel. But will Netanyahu now make peace or war? The world will find out if he is a builder or a general…the Israeli leader could finally make peace with the Palestinians or the one who launches a potentially disastrous unilateral attack on Iran.”

That’s twice in this quote expecting Bibi finally to make peace with the Ancient Ones as if it is in his power to do so; as if they are waiting with open arms desiring his offer of all of Judea and Samaria so they can make peace.

In Stengel’s shallow, slick magazine perception, Israel has to be the one to make peace with the passive other party waiting for the proper and generous offer. And if the status quo of no peace continues, well, then it’s Bibi’s fault for not making peace with the Balestinians as Stengel misperceives them. They are not Balestinians; they are Syrians. They are Arabs. They are Muslims. There is nothing, absolutely nothing Palestinian about these people, not their language, not their religion, not their food, not their clothing…

I myself have not been through south Tel-Aviv in ages but the reports are repetitive and consistent and believable. For every major horror like these rapes that have been making headlines, there surely have been oodles more that have not. In other words, I believe the reports that in south Tel-Aviv and other areas in Eilat and Arad there are swarms of these Africans who are not political refugees fleeing a dictatorship, each like a fictional Victor Lazlo in Casablanca, freedom fighter against tyranny. They are just guys without work back home looking for work. And not surprisingly, since there are thousands of them here now, statistically they just have to produce an intolerable number of evil ones who are making life in these Jewish communities unlivable.

Which is why Minister Eli Yishai burst out yesterday with his desire they all be rounded up and put in detention camps and shipped out of the country; which of course led to some of the Enlightened angrily protesting; those who relish sticking up for these men. Their own self-image as sisters of mercy is more important to them than the lives of their fellow Jews, often poor Jews now suffering from this unacceptable invasion.

Eli Yishai is now being sued because some idiot called one of these NGOs with threats to burn it down, as fire-bombs have recently been thrown at such do-gooder groups by people fed up with the miserable deterioration of the lives, preyed upon as they are by these violent goyim who have no legal right to be in Israel and certainly no moral right to embitter our lives here in our own country.

So Eli Yishai is being sued as an incendiary provocateur who stimulated this idiot to make this threatening phone call, if indeed that is what happened.

It is a miserable situation, with the Enlightened here paralyzed with fear that if Israel does what it should do – round up the men and drive them from the country – Israel will look bad in the eyes of the goyim; be seen as racists.

These modern-day post-Zionists like Ehud Barak and Bibi Netanyahu are so unlike their dedicated parents and grandparents who didn’t care what was said about them as they fought to build their homes on barren land and fought off this predatory nation of violent Ishmaelites whose whole history is that of thieves, burglars and barbaric highwaymen.

Israel has to gird its loins with belief in itself and its right to the life it wants to live…

…There was more in JPost on Sunday by their Oren Kessler interviewing Raymond Stock, translator of Egypt’s Nobel Prize laureate for Literature Naguib Mahfouz who passed away in 2006. We’ll put up the link. For my money it is as good a take on the situation in Egypt today as anything in the MSM and certainly better than anything written by the obnoxious and always ignorant Thomas L. Friedman, that jackass who reported from Tahrir Square last year on the glorious Arab Spring.

Raymond Stock spent 20 years in Egypt until deported two years ago – something Kessler did not mention in his last piece – for having written an article in Foreign Policy magazine about Farouk Hosni in 2009 when he was touted as a candidate to head up UNESCO; about his antisemitism really.

As I say this Kessler piece as good as any as analysis of Egypt’s last 12 months and the major players there: the army, Amr Moussa and Abol Fotouh, the two leading candidates in the upcoming presidential election. And as he reported three years ago in Foreign Policy, he focuses on the abysmal antisemitism in Egypt which seems to be the only thing that lights Egyptian passions. Not the miserable economy; not the corruption.

He also foresees the scenario I described some weeks back of the Egyptian army making no hostile moves toward Israel, but if and when the growing terrorist infestation in Sinai lad to something that forces a major Israeli counter-strike in self-defense, this will be enough to light that army’s fire.

It all sounds reminiscent of what my own many years of reading of Araby taught me and what I saw first-hand in traveling in Arab lands. For centuries visitors from the West have repeatedly used the word “fatalism” to describe Muslim life. In Turkish the word is kismet – the name of a famous Broadway musical based on the Arabian Nights. Broadly translated, it means “fate,” or one’s lot in life against which one can only shrug. It is an attitude that does not lead to a desire for revolutionary change. One traveler in centuries passed described seeing a father watch his son run over in the street by a runway horse and killed, which elicited from the man only a shrug.

In other words, for all the poverty and miserable relations between people in Egypt, there is this fatalism, this surrender to the way things are. In other words, don’t look for, as the moron LTF thought he saw, a fire in the belly among social reformers striving for a better tomorrow. The drive to depose Mubarak was not a drive for a revolutionary new system but just a common, generational rebellion against the current corrupt despot.

And if this Kessler piece on Raymond Stock has a subtext, it is that the only thing that incites the passions of the Egyptians is their hatred of Al-Yahud, the perennial agent of the Shaitan, of Satan.

I’ve said it before: Islam needs a reformation on the magnitude of the Protestant Reformation against Rome, though there is nothing on the horizon to hint that this is in the offering.

Which is why our best hope is praying as we do, three times daily, for Moshiach…

Fiamma Nirenstein, for those who don’t know her, is an Italian daughter of a Jewish father who identifies as a Jew and lived in Israel for many years writing for the Italian press. She speaks fluent Hebrew and has been a fierce defender of Israel since she returned to Italy a few years ago and entered politics. She is a contemporary of mine, a child of the 1960s. She, though, unlike me, was a full-blown Communist in those days but like, say, David Horowitz, she woke up to the nonsense of the Left and especially its antisemitism expressed in its vicious hatred of Israel. Hence the caricature of her.

Ironically, the journalist fined may even still be a Communist for all I know. He writes for the rival newspaper “L’Unita of the Communist Party, but at least he appears to be, if still a Communist, a sober one who knows an antisemite when he sees one, as he did in this cartoonist and evidently ridiculed him in print, which led to this fine.

The Italian Jewish community is outraged. Abe Foxman has been on the case since 2008 when the cartoon first appeared – and one can only wish that Israeli politicians, starting with our prime minister, joined the fight.

But Israelis like him almost never do. For them, antisemitism abroad is something they turn away from in part because their secular Zionist doctrine sees antisemitism has a problem for Jews in the Diaspora which plays no role in Israel’s life.

In other words, we are back to where we started this evening: the inability of Israelis to see the world-wide consensus that we Jews have no right to Judea and Samaria, ergo, we must not challenge the world; challenge the US, the Europeans when it comes their adamant rejection of the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria; to keep Judea and Samaria.

Hence, the cabinet decision today when Bibi & Co. made it known they want no trouble and are willing to bow down to the dictates of the world which dictate no permanent Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria.

Not even an Israeli prime minister opening his mouth to declare that the “Palestinian’ claim is bogus, an antisemitic lie, and our claim the just, authentic, and legal one…

Two, it has been blessedly quiet lately on war front with not only our immediate savage neighbors but their backers world-wide among the goyim, the nations of the world.

But I cannot let the day go by without some response to the extraordinary, historic milestone in Washington, DC yesterday when the President of the United States of America came out in support of holy matrimony for Sodomites. Only time will tell, if at all, of the weird connection in his mind of the loss the day before in North Carolina of a referendum on this – what the Bible calls abomination – and the vote against what he just came out in support of. Now 32 states, I believe, have voted against this craziness, thank G-d, but Emir Barack Hussein is now in favor? What could he be thinking? Or has HaShem guided his mind in this direction to bring him down in November?

Some seven years ago the ultra-Orthodox Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, who lives in Netanya, I think, penned a memorable column in JPost, an educational one in this regard. Citing the Midrash on Genesis, she pointed out that the Midrash there teaches that even though same-sex unions were widespread in the generation of the Great Flood, that generation was not blotted out from the world until people wrote marriage contracts for males and males, males and animals, thus legalizing such practices. Said the Midrash, “The Lord G-d is long-suffering for everything except for such behavior.”

In other words, long-suffering even for same-sex unions. It was when people made them legal people stepped over the line.

She also pointed to another Midrash in Vayikra/Leviticus which “differentiates conceptually between non-normative behavior itself and the more severe step of legalizing the non-normative behavior, with a reference to Leviticus 18:3 which prohibits the Jews from following the laws of the Canaanites in such matters as males marrying males.

Indeed, there is a vast conceptual chasm between rejecting sodomy and tolerating it on the one hand, and legalizing it on the other.

The Lord God is long suffering, even forgiving of those suffering powerful, non-normative urges to which they surrender, so long as these non-normative desires and behaviors remained non-normative.

But when they are called normal, a line has been crossed. And in the matter of sodomy, there is nothing in the Chumash/the Five Books to compare to what may have been a massive hydrogen-bomb explosion over Sodom and Gomorrah, which story sends a message about abusing the G-d-given and G-d-like capability of human procreation. Man is no more like G-d than in his ability to create more men, and he must never abuse it. Rather, he must certainly never legalize abusing it, for the consequences are potentially catastrophically dire.

Well as always, here’s Yosef Karduner.

Leila tov miEretz Yisrael…

…According to Maariv this morning, in the wake of the French election in which Nicholas Sarkozy lost to Francois Hollande, a convention in Paris on Sunday promoting aliyah was attended by 5,000 curious Jews as opposed to the same convention two years ago when only 2,000 showed up.

In other words, French Jewry is scared. It has been scared for the past decade as the Muslims have terrified Jews, murdering Ilan Halimi with the same frenzy of satanic cruelty as the Fogel family in Itamar was butchered; we saw the murders in Toulouse, and at its worst I think every day somewhere in France a Jew has been attacked by a Muslim.

And now French Jews see in the success of Marine Le Pen yet another symptom that makes them afraid.

Likewise Francois Hollande is reported to be no Jew-hater himself but he is, after all, a man of the Left and is expected to put in positions of power numerous Muslims.

A week ago in Norway on Mayday Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, head of the Labor Party said nothing about the anti-Israel and antisemitic banners at a Labor Party gathering that he attended that day.

And then of course in Greece, there were elections and that country is coming apart at the seams. And not surprisingly in bad times, out-and-out Nazis are on the rise.

And in London, Boris Johnson defeated Ken Livingstone for mayor but only by 4 percentage points, 51 to 48.

Welcome again to the 1930s redux…

By the same token, here was Benzion Netanyahu apparently cut off from the Sabbath that he had keep all his life as a duty to his father without ever understanding what it was all about.

Ergo, his oddball thesis which other scholars shake their heads at. His thesis was that religion was not a factor in the relationship between the Roman Catholic Spaniards and the Jews.

He rightly pointed to the material dimension of the inquisition and the motivations of the Church to burn Jews at the stake because the punishment for being a false Christian, being exposed as a Jew in secret, included the sheer, human, ugly greed of the Church; for in addition to being burnt at the stake, all the victim’s property was confiscated by the Church. The Inquisition brought Spaniards great wealth, as the Holocaust in Germany, besides being another mass burning of Jews, was also the theft of the money, the homes, the cars, the businesses, you name it, of the Six Million.

Bentzion Netanyahu was like a color-blind person who cannot see some or even all colors. In his own life religion did not exist, and so it is not surprising this is how he looked upon the Spanish Inquisition.

And this is root of his son’s identical deadness when it comes to Yiddishkeit, to the metaphysical and religious experience of the Jews.

In one of the voluminous commentaries over the weekend someone who knew Bentzion Netanyahu personally said the same thing. There was not a drop of Yiddishkeit in him. Like father like son. Like son, like father…

Maybe he wants to have an even stronger mandate from the people to attack Iran before the American elections in order to force the Muslim in the Oval Office to help out, provide back-up, political support at the UN, whatever is necessary.

Today the Israeli Navy, officers and Ministry of Defense officials were in Germany to formally take possession of Israel’s latest German-built submarine with a nuclear cruise missile capability, though it will be months of sea trials before it becomes operational.

Maybe this another part of the same story too.

Well, only the powers that be, Bibi and Ehud, know for sure.

Anyway, thank G-d for this quiet week. May they all be so quiet.

Leila tov veShabbat shalom miEretz Yisrael…

Today’s two top stories were of the kind I have nothing to say about. One was the passing of Bentzion Netanyahu, zal, the prime minister’s 102 year-old father, and the stirring of the domestic political pot of political parties, talking of election in a few months, more than a year before the law requires a new election.

For some reason, Israeli journalists love party politics and the wrestling for power and prominence within these parties. I don’t. To be it is boring. Because it has next to no connection to the citizens; because this is a self-proclaimed democracy in which its parliamentary representatives have no constituents and therefore represent no one. What they do represent is their party whose power – Soviet-style – lies in its Central Committee and its leaders. Israeli parliamentarians don’t know what it is to receive a phone call from an irate constituent because the parliamentarian has no constituents that he has to answer to.

One irony of the situation is that the worst fate for an Israeli is being a sucker, a frier, which all of them are without knowing it. They are all suckers of their politicians and at the same time they preen themselves on being the only democracy in the Middle East. Yes, such as it is, but that does not change the fact that it is also the worst democracy of the democracies…