I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member
Groucho Marx
On the other hand, it is interesting to note what groups Judge Richard Goldstone is a member of. After all, we are constantly being reminded that Goldstone is Jewish and a Zionist--though considering the broad range of people who support the Goldstone Report, it would be interesting to note their differing interpretations of just what that term means.
In Arguments "Ad Hominem" and 'By Ethnic Identify" in Defense of Goldstone Report, Alan Dershowitz notes:
Even before the Goldstone Report was released, Richard Goldstone was arguing for its credibility by invoking his Jewishness, his Zionism, his daughter's residence in Israel and his connection to Hebrew University. It was the mirror image of the classic fallacy known as the argument ad hominem, which is defined as follows: A substantive argument should not be rejected solely because of who has offered it.
It follows of course from this fallacy that an argument should also not be accepted because of who offered it.
The dust has not yet settled on the issue of the funding provided by New Israel Fund (NIF) to many of the NGO's that testified against Israel to the Goldstone Commission. Check out Joe Settlers research in his post
Follow The Money.
The growing harshness of attacks by Israeli government officials on nongovernmental organizations poses a real threat to civil society in Israel, Human Rights Watch said today.
The most recent attacks center on the New Israel Fund (NIF), which supports a wide range of Israeli civil rights and social welfare organizations, including some that provided information to the United Nations fact-finding mission under Justice Richard Goldstone that investigated abuses by both sides in last year's Gaza conflict.
"What we're seeing in Israel is a greater official intolerance of dissent," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "One of Israel's outstanding strengths has been its vibrant civil society and its flourishing public debate, so these developments are particularly worrying."
..."The government's encouragement of attacks on NIF and Breaking the Silence should not be seen as aberrant or in isolation," said Whitson. "A clear pattern of official efforts to suppress voices critical of government policy is emerging."-
What makes the righteous indignation of Human Rights Watch particularly ironic is that the issue at stake here is the danger that the source of NGO funding can potentially lead to bias and loss of objectivity--a distinct possibility that is so well illustrated by Human Rights Watch itself.
The following is a report from NGO Monitor, which tracks the Palestinian and Israeli NGO's which critique Israel. The issue is not about criticizing Israel.
The question is: if you were an NGO that was receiving as much money from European countries as those listed in this document, how far would you go to satisfy your masters and keep receiving funds?
Remember how far Human Rights Watch went to get funds from Saudi Arabia?
Here is the NGO Monitor Report, which you can also download as a Word document:
True, we've already seen that the Obama Administration is not big on respecting the laws of other countries--it insisted that Zelaya was illegally ousted from Honduras by a coup, even though the Honduran Supreme Court backed his ouster from office. So it should not surprise anyone that Obama should be pushing Netanyahu to negotiate with a man who is no longer the leader of the people with whom Israel is supposed to be negotiating peace.
Abbas may be in office, but he is in office illegally.
I was glancing through Contentions and came across this item from Jennifer Rubin's Flotsam and Jetsam:
It seems as though “activists and liberal Mideast policy groups” don’t like the idea of Rep. Mark Kirk getting to the U.S. Senate, given his pro-Israel voting record.” You can understand that these groups wouldn’t want someone who was the “driving force behind a host of legislative efforts to sanction Iran (he’s the founder of of the Iran Working Group),” a vocal critic of the UN, and an opponent of Chas Freeman.
Following the first link takes you to Talking Points Memo--actually no, it takes you to
TPMMuckraker, to be precise:
It loses nothing in 'translation':
At Contentions, Noah Pollak notes the following video of Martin Kramer speaking at The 10th Annual Herziliyah Conference: The Balance of Israel's Security. In this 6 minute video, Kramer briefly outlines the prevalent opinions on the cause of radicalism in the Middle East. He then gives a different interpretation on the cause of radicalism and how to combat it.
Of course, "short history" should not imply that there is any history of moderation by Fatah, the Palestinian Authority or everybody's favorite--Mahmoud Abbas.
Arlene Kushner wrote about the alleged 'moderation' of Fatah during 2008:
From May of last year:
PA official: Abbas wants US to oust Netanyahu
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will not resume negotiations with Israel unless the Netanyahu government agrees to a complete settlement freeze and publicly accepts a two-state solution, Abbas has told The Washington Post in an interview.
Abbas meets with Obama in Washington; Israelis, Palestinians react to talks
And since he does not believe Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will lift his opposition on these issues, Abbas and his leadership expect American pressure to gradually force Netanyahu out of office, the paper reported on Friday. "It will take a couple of years," it quoted one of Abbas's officials as saying.
At this rate, it make take a good deal more than 2 years--not that Abbas hasn't tried.
Not that he tried by showing good faith. Heavens no! He tried the way he has tried in the past--
It is available online as a PDF document, and is embedded in this post, below.
Here is the summary of the report:
GAZA OPERATION INVESTIGATIONS: AN UPDATE
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. This Paper describes Israel’s process for investigating alleged violations of the Law of Armed Conflict. It focuses in particular on investigations, legal proceedings, and lessons learned in relation to the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza from 27 December 2008 through 18 January 2009 (the “Gaza Operation,” also known as “Operation Cast Lead”).
2. The Paper supplements and updates a paper Israel released in July 2009, The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects, which addressed a range of factual and legal issues related to the Gaza Operation. The earlier paper included detailed accounts of Hamas’s incessant mortar and rocket attacks on Israel’s civilians (some 12,000 such attacks in the 8 years prior to the Operation) and the steadily increasing range of such attacks; Hamas’s suicide bomb attacks; and Hamas’s smuggling of weaponry and ammunition through tunnels under the Egyptian-Gaza border, as well as Israel’s attempts to address these threats through non-military means, including diplomatic overtures and urgent appeals to the United Nations.
Jeffrey Goldberg reacts to a post by Andrew Sullivan, who praises Daniel Larison ("treads where angels fear to") for bravely discussing the connection between US support for Israel and terrorism.
Writes Goldberg:
In Hamas finds itself innocent. What a surprise, Elder of Ziyon examines the Hamas response to the Goldstone Report--and dissects the lies behind the claims Hamas makes.
Of course, there is no reason for Hamas not to lie and manufacture evidence--after all, no one really assumes that the UN is actually going to follow up against Hamas with any real sanctions or measures to enforce, let alone that any report from Hamas actually be truthful.
Now, seeing how easy it is for Hamas to make up a response to the Goldstone Report, Abbas is going to try his hand at it at well:
Out of curiosity, I signed up for a feature from The New York Times where they send out lesson plans for Social Studies classes, based on source material from NYT and its website.
So I checked out The New York Times Learning Network for January 9, 2009--and here is a curriculum on how to teach about last year's Gaza war:
Overview of Lesson Plan: In this lesson, students consider the current conflict in Gaza and explore multiple perspectives on the conflict through an image- and document-based writing activity.
Exploring multiple perspectives--that sounds good.
Let's see just what resources The New York Times is suggesting in order to do that:
In other words--there are others...
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
News Release: January 26, 2010
For more information, contact:
rafaelmedoff@aol.com / 202-434-8994
Apologists for FDR Top List of 2009's
Ten Most Absurd Holocaust Statements
WASHINGTON - Authors claiming that President Franklin Roosevelt was helpless to rescue any Jews from the Holocaust topped the 2009 annual list of ten most absurd statements about the Allies' reaction to the Nazi genocide.
The annual list for 2009 was released this week by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in conjunction with International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is commemorated on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
"Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, some FDR apologists still claim there was nothing he could have done to rescue Jews from the Holocaust," said Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff. "Like the last Japanese soldier holding out on a remote island years after World War II ended, these diehards simply refuse to face the facts."
Medoff said the purpose of the annual list is to "expose the most severe misrepresentations of the Allies' response to the Holocaust, so that the public will have an accurate and balanced account of those crucial historical events."
The nominees were judged by a panel of scholars who have researched the Allies' response to the Holocaust: Prof. David S. Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews; Prof. Laurel Leff, author of Buried by 'The Times'; Dr. Racelle Weiman, founding director (emer.) of Hebrew Union College's Center for Holocaust and Humanity education; Prof. Bat-Ami Zucker, author of In Search of Refuge; Prof. Judith Baumel-Schwartz, author of Unfulfilled Promise; Dr. Alex Grobman, author of Denying History; and Wyman Institute director Medoff, author of Blowing the Whistle on Genocide.
The Ten Most Absurd Statements in 2009
About the Allies' Response to the Holocaust
1. "The only meaningful way to save the intended victims of HItler's murder machine was to win the war as quickly as possible."
(William J. Vanden Heuvel, longtime president of the Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, on NewYorkTimes.com, 5 October 2009.)
[COMMENT: There were, in fact, a variety of ways that Jews could have been saved before the war ended, such as using empty troop supply ships returning from Europe to bring refugees for temporary shelter to the United States; bombing the Nazi death camps or the railway lines leading to them; and pressing the British to open Palestine to Jewish refugees.]
The headline couldn't be clearer:
More bias in US against Muslims than other faiths
Americans are more than twice as likely to express prejudice against Muslims than they are against Christians, Jews or Buddhists, a new survey found. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they have little or no knowledge of Islam. Still, a majority dislike the faith.
According to The Media Line, this is the first time in 10 years that there has not be a single suicide attack in Israel.
Since the end of Operation Cast Lead, the three-week Israel military assault against Hamas in the Gaza Strip last January, one Israeli civilian was killed inside Israel by Palestinians and four in the West Bank. Ten Israelis, including five civilians, were killed during the Gaza operation.
The New York Times last week gave a preview of what to expect from Israel's rebuttal of the Goldstone Report.
The overall goal of Israel's response is to address the main overall claim of the report that Israel deliberately targeted civilians.
Among the particular charges that Israel will refute:
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Sorry for not posting the last few days. Have been busy with a project.
(I also promised my wife I would not blog for week)
Plan on blogging again on Sunday.
BTW, blog-withdrawal isn't all that bad--once you get past the hives and hallucinations.
Seed Newsvine
