By Andrew L. Jaffee

… Not surprisingly, though citing his [Hitler’s] victories and ‘bitter’ fall in great detail, the Holocaust is not mentioned… This is consistent with Palestinian education in general which erases the Holocaust from history. …

This from Israel’s “partner” for peace, the Palestinian Authority, which “was part of the official Palestinian Authority-run radio’s Ramadan quiz - rebroadcast this past week…” From IsraelNN.com:

A Palestinian Authority radio contest featured a laudatory biography of Adolf Hitler replete with his military victories, heroism and no mention of the Holocaust.

“His golden year was 1940, when his armies invaded Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Holland, and Belgium and defeated France…By mid 1942, his country controlled the largest land area in Europe…He refused to surrender and continued to fight for two more years, but, his bitter end came in the spring of 1945 when he took his own life…Who is he?” was the question broadcast as a Voice of Palestine radio contest on November 27. …

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By Fern Sidman

On Thursday evening, November 29th, the University of Toronto hosted a lecture by former De Paul University assistant professor of political science, Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein, 53, is a controversial figure in the academic community, as he has assumed the position of chief apologist for Palestinian terrorism while espousing a hard line anti-Israel viewpoint, mixed with vociferous attacks on the legacy of the Holocaust, its victims and survivors. In June of 2007, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University and charged with “unprofessional attacks”. He was then placed on administrative leave for the 2007-2008 academic year, his single course having been cancelled. On September 5, 2007 he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on undisclosed terms.

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by Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Spyer*

For Israelis the United Nations is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are fully aware of the anti-Israel sentiment that the United Nations perpetuates, but on the other hand they want to be part of it and to have their voices heard. This stance is understandable. But it produces positions which sometimes directly contradict Israel’s clear interest.

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By Phyllis Chesler

This year, summer eerily, languorously, lingered on. We enjoyed balmy days in New York City clear through November. Even now, the trees outside my window remain in full, green leaf. But winter is also here and the days are becoming bitterly cold and windy.

This is the first time in seven years that I have remained silent about so-called “peace” initiatives in the Middle East. What can I possibly add to what has already been said about the meeting in Annapolis? Or, for that matter, about the witch-hunt against AIPAC and the continued, ghastly imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard?

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By Andrew Whitehead

Once again, it’s “Blame the Jew Day” at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The United States government has invited the Israeli government and a representative of the Palestinians to a meeting at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, USA. The meeting, which may be attended by representatives of up to 40 countries, is the latest attempt by President Bush to jump start the Middle East peace process.

In an article titled “CAIR: Peace Burden on Israel at Annapolis Conference”, CAIR goes to great lengths to put the onus on the Israelis by saying that the Israelis must get serious about promoting justice for the Palestinian people.

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By Phyllis Chesler

I once worked at the United Nations and have vowed that someday I will write about what a soul-scorching experience it was—especially for someone who was and still is a white Jewish-American feminist and Zionist. I had to absorb the most virulent, almost surreal hatred because of who I am and for the views that I hold. This happened long before I was perceived to have crossed any political aisle.

At the time, when I tried to tell people about this, few wanted to understand. The UN diplomat’s dining room was so elegant, the parties and social circles so colorful and so career-building that even radical feminists did not want to understand that the tyrants and mediocrities that dominated the UN would never, ever police themselves and that sexism, racism, poverty, and even genocide would remain unchecked by this corrupt international body.

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By Fern Sidman

Today, a most important conference entitled, “Hijacking Human Rights: The Demonization of Israel by the United Nations” was held at the UN Millennium Plaza Hotel in midtown Manhattan. The nine hour conference, sponsored by Touro Law School, the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank and the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists featured a veritable cornucopia of speakers representing a broad spectrum of political, religious and academic life.

The credit for spearheading and organizing this conference goes to Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, Director of the Touro Insitute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, and editor of www.EYEontheUN.org, as well as www.bayefsky.com, a major human rights website. Professor Bayefsky has served on various delegations to the UN for over twenty years, including the Canadian delegation to the UN General Assembly and Commission on Human Rights, as well as various delegations to the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women and the infamous 2001 Durban Racism Conference. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto and Oxford University, and is a barrister and solicitor of the Ontario Bar.

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by Bill Levinson

The Anti-Defamation League has done many questionable things in the past, such as whitewashing MoveOn.org’s propagation of anti-Semitic and other forms of hate speech. There is no conceivable excuse for its recent legitimization and empowerment of one of the United States’ most vicious racists and anti-Semites: Al Sharpton of the National Action Network

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By Phyllis Chesler

Is Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite? Even some of his critics concede that his biased views about Israel might not necessarily rise to the level of Jew-hatred. Surely, one can be critical of the Jewish state without necessarily being a Jew-hater, right?

Well—not exactly. Seven years ago I began writing about the ways in which anti-Zionism is indeed today’s “new anti-Semitism” and about how left-liberal progressives in the west were increasingly, perhaps unwittingly, allied with Islamist propagandists and terrorists in their joint betrayal of both the truth and the Jews.

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By Phyllis Chesler

Shades of Harvard’s Larry Summers! Columbia’s President, Lee Bollinger, has just come under faculty-fire for having mistreated Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, and in so doing, having “sullied the reputation of the University with (his) strident tone.” Bollinger has also been castigated by seventy faculty members for having “allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq” and for taking “partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East.”

This is no parody. This is a seventy-gun opening salvo and the unmistakable sound of a bloody drumroll; the French Revolution has returned to Columbia’s campus.

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By Phyllis Chesler

Professor Norman Simms was born in 1940 and grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn (my home town). He studied at Machzike Talmud Torah, Styuvesant High School, Alfred University, and received his Ph.D from Washington University in English Literature. He protested the War in Vietnam, moved to Canada to teach at the University of Manitoba, and from there to the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand where he has been ever since.

He has increasingly devoted himself to Jewish studies and to the phenomenon of “crypto-Jews” as “secret agents” of rabbinic wisdom. He has published 15 books, including “Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience” (Peter Lang, 2005) and “Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice” (Sussco, 2007) and hundreds of articles. He also edits and publishes the inter-disciplinary journal, Mentalities/Mentalities.

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By Phyllis Chesler

So, here I am, sipping my morning coffee and reading my first twenty (yes, twenty) hardcopy and online newspapers (I read double that amount by the end of the day—doesn’t everyone?) when I read the brief New York Sun editorial titled “Colonizing Barnard”. And HERE is the Columbia Spectator coverage.

Apparently, over the weekend, Barnard quietly (very quietly) granted tenure to Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. There! Take that you Pushy Jews!

Abu El-Haj is the professor who allegedly claims that Jews and therefore Israel have no or little historical or archaeological ties to the land of Israel or to the Temple Mount. I am not familiar with her work. Perhaps she does not make this claim. Perhaps this false claim constitutes only a teensy weensy part of her work which members of the all-powerful Jewish Lobby have seized upon to defame an ideologically true daughter of the late but very far from great Professor Edward Said, also Columbia’s own.

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by Dan Pine*

Daniel Pipes loves Arab cuisine, Arab literature and the Arabic language. When working in his Philadelphia office, he often plays Arab music in the background.

That’s about as far as he goes.

Otherwise, the soft-spoken Harvard Ph.D. and Middle East pundit is hard-pressed to speak well of the Arab world, at least when it comes to politics. Israel, he says, is at war with Arab enemies and “when a war takes place, you should try to win. Wars are resolved not through negotiations, but with one side giving up.”

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By Barry Rubin

If you want to understand the Middle East’s path over the last decade and why the area is stagnating at best or entering an era of radical Islamist upheaval at worst, consider the tale of Egypt’s Kifaya movement. This is the kind of thing Western politicians, officials, academics, and journalists must comprehend to know how things really work.

There are two bad ideas at the core of misunderstanding the Middle East. First, when people try to graft Western history onto the region to think the advance of progress unstoppable; second, accepting radical Arab nationalist and Islamist doctrine that everything wrong is the fault of the West and Israel. Put them together and what do you get: The progress expected doesn’t happen due to bad Western policy and Israel’s existence.

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By Phyllis Chesler

NEWSFLASH! A CORRECTION.
I have just been told that the New York Times described this incident in their online edition today—not at length, not in any depth, but the swastika has definitely made it onto their radar screen. My informant happens to be my son—and therefore we both agreed that it would be safer and wiser if he sent it to me for a final, maternal inspection. What can I say? I am relieved, my faith redeemed, etc. I look forward to their in-depth hardcopy coverage of the many ways in which Israel and Jews have been demonized on American college campuses.
END CORRECTION

Just when I think I’ve seen it all—there is always more to see.

I am talking about my favorite newspaper: The even-handed, totally objective, fair-minded, high-stepping Grey Lady aka The New York Times and their unwritten policy about the Jews and Israel.

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