By Fern Sidman

Since Friday morning, November 11th, Jews around the world and especially in the Orthodox enclaves of New York have been recoiling in horror over the overtly anti-Semitic vandalism that took place in the early morning hours near Ocean Parkway and Avenue I in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Three vehicles were torched and a gruesome array of hideous epithets as well as the perfunctory swastikas and KKK emblem were indiscriminately scrawled on cars and benches. As community outrage reached a fever pitch, it was duly noted that this attack was clearly planned to coincide with the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, (the night of broken glass), when on November 9-10 1938, as a pogrom of mammoth proportions erupted in Hitler’s Europe, almost 200 synagogues were destroyed, over 8,000 Jewish shops were sacked and looted, and tens of thousands of Jews were deported to concentration camps.

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By Fern Sidman

Mark Langfan, the American-Israel Security 3D-Map topographer, and this year’s co-recipient of the Justice Louis D. Brandeis Award at the upcoming Zionist Organization of America dinner along with his father William, has offered concrete evidence which conclusively debunks the litany of falsehoods and distortions found in the book “Israel Lobby” written by Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. The book, originally published in 2006 asserts that “Israel is no longer a vital military strategic ally of the United States.”

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by Cinnamon Stillwell*

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced last month that Walid Phares — a Lebanese-American Christian, adjunct professor of jihadist global strategies at the National Defense University, and former Middle East studies professor at Florida Atlantic University — would be a special adviser on the Middle East and North Africa, it elicited howls of fury from the usual suspects. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding case and the chief Islamist organ in the U.S. — sent a letter to the Romney campaign stating CAIR’s predictable objections, while publications such as the Daily Beast, Salon.com, and Mother Jones followed suit with error-filled hit pieces.

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By Fern Sidman

In the early morning hours of Friday November 11th, vandals set fire to several parked cars and scrawled anti-Semitic graffiti on nearby benches in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Midwood in Brooklyn in what the police said was a hate crime.

The arson took place along Ocean Parkway between Avenue I and Avenue J in what is commonly referred to as the Flatbush section, where three cars; a BMW, a Lexus and a Jaguar, were set ablaze. In addition, the epithet “KKK” was scrawled on the side of a red van, the police said, and swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs could be found on benches.

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By Gary Gerofsky

Richard Falk has no problem “put(ting) aside his ethnic identity,” because, in my opinion, he is a Jewish anti-Semite and he proudly carries out his maliciousness while the entire Middle East burns in the fires created by Islamic dictators and fascist religious fanatics.

The people “willing to confront the Zionist furies of Israel” as Falk puts it, are grounded in their vision of a world forced to suffer under terrorism, nuclear destruction, misogyny, oppression, honour killings, Koranic Jew-hate, and revisionist historical propaganda that distorts reality beyond recognition.

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by David Barnett and Efraim Karsh*

Of the countless threats of violence, made by Arab and Palestinian leaders in the run up to and in the wake of the November 29, 1947 partition resolution, none has resonated more widely than the warning by Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s first secretary-general, that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”

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by Steven Shamrak

Most people of this planet do not care or even know about Israel and Jews. Many of them receive glimpses of information about the Arab-Israel conflict from reports they accidentally hear on radio, see on TV, or read on newspaper headlines. Unfortunately, under bombardment from the modern media, some of them have adopted the main stream “understanding” of the issue, but still they do not care about the factual truth behind reports. Even many members of the Jewish tribe, who are still suffering from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) inflicted on Jewish people during two millennia of living in exile and persecution by Christians and Muslims, have become believers of these opinions continuously propagated by the world press and Western governments who are oblivious to the danger of Islamic expansion. Strangely, the fake opinions about the Arab-Israel conflict have not been refuted by the string of Israel’s governments or the Jewish leadership of the Diaspora.

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by Phyllis Chesler

I recently attended a Hebrew poetry class taught by a friend, Atara Fobar, who translates Hebrew poetry into English. Atara is a serious teacher and is the distinguished translator of Moshe Itzhaki. Every month, Atara teaches poetry to religious Jews of a certain age–to the kind of people whose delight in learning is almost child-like and which renders them ageless.

We are a bit like those Jews who continued to write and produce plays, newspapers, and musical evenings in Holocaust era ghettos, who so optimistically kept taking books out of libraries (and returning them) until they could no longer do so.

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By Gary Gerofsky

Peace Studies at McMaster University — non-violence, Gandhi peace events, love and peace — who could possibly take exception with such positive messages of global tolerance and efforts to make the world a peaceful place to live? Who would dare challenge this facade of eternal goodness and inclusion? Well, allow me to interject to explain why, in our Orwellian world, peace does not mean what it should and how a department has been hijacked by a monomaniacal agenda that concentrates on criticism of one democratic country and treats tyrants and terrorists as if they were angels. This is an agenda copied from what they do in the UN where peace has also been turned on its head to mean the enabling of: war, terrorism, historical revisionism, moral relativism, and support for groups that are anti-Western. This Peace Studies department must be viewed and scrutinized in the context of Israeli activist and sometimes-government-minister Natan Sharansky’s “3D test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double-Standards and Delegitimization.” Confronting free and law-abiding countries and ignoring real tyrants as if they do not exist is now acceptable behaviour to certain academics and administrators who hide behind the false banner of “peace” to convey their love of concepts of non-peace, war, hate and envy. The custodians of higher education at universities, if they have anything to say at all, which is rare, hide behind free speech and academic freedom to slough off criticism of the campaigns being waged under their willfully blind leadership.

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By Fern Sidman

Tensions flared between dozens of pro-Israel demonstrators and members of “Students for Justice in Palestine” on Sunday afternoon, October 16th outside of Columbia University on the third and final day of the 2011 National Students for Justice in Palestine “teach-in” organized by members to prepare for their upcoming Israel Apartheid Week events across college campuses throughout North America.

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by Steven Plaut*

Israel is under assault from within and not just from the usual suspects. Its legitimacy and, in many cases, its very existence are being attacked by a domestic academic fifth column. Hundreds of professors and lecturers, employed by Israel’s state-financed universities, are building careers as full-time activists working against the very country in which they live. And the problem is growing. Fortunately, the Israeli public has become aware of the problem and is increasingly demanding that something be done about it. A not inconsiderable part of the credit for this belongs to the Middle East Quarterly, probably the first serious journal to discuss the problem a decade ago, sparking a debate that continues to challenge the Israeli academy’s offensive against the Jewish state.

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by Phyllis Chesler

And now it seems as if I am standing still while the years quickly swirl round me like autumn leaves, like diamond snowflakes. As one ages, time seems to gather speed.

Paradoxically, this particular moment in history seems to be taking place in slow motion. It seems we have been here before — but really, it is always new, always happening as if for the first time.

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By Gary Gerofsky

A young woman, 22 years of age, in her final year at York University (in Toronto, Canada) was looking for a course to fill out her credit requirements at the beginning of the new fall session. Sarah is her name — a quiet and confident woman who just wanted to maintain her good grade average and complete her education. She had never imagined getting involved in any politics or controversies on the way home to the graduation finish line.

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By Fern Sidman

Autumn in New York City will never be the same. The traditional atmosphere that marks this time of the year such as cooler temperatures, changing leaves and post-season play for major league baseball have been abruptly usurped by the menacing tone of geo-political realities. As most of us are already aware, the United Nations General Assembly will be convening for its annual session. In addition to hosting a veritable rogues gallery of assorted miscreants such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and playing chief sponsor to yet another round of infamous Israel bashing as manifested in the Durban III conference, this year the international spotlight is on the unilateral Palestinian bid for statehood.

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It is now official: Palestinians want to create an apartheid state, according to the PLO ambassador to the U.S. All the hoo-hah about Israel being an “apartheid state” is a flat-out lie propagated by anti-Semitic hate-mongers. The ambassador also ruled out the notion of a “one-state” solution, promoted by hypocritical Palestinians and their supporters — a solution which was double-speak for, “Once we get the ‘one-state,’ we take over and kill all the Jews.” From USA Today:

The Palestine Liberation Organization’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews.

“After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated,” Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said…

Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official. …

Arabs make up 20.4% of Israel’s population, or 1,573,000 out of 7,695,000 citizens. Yes, citizens. In addition:

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