Tag Archives: anti-zionism

A Review of Israel Apartheid Week (IAW)

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IAW

 

by Alexander H. Joffe
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
March 24, 2013

The return of Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) makes it necessary to review some of the better and less well-known features of this annual, global event. By doing so, it will become possible better to understand the nature and scope of the problem and to improve our focus on potential responses.

The first and most important fact regarding IAW is its clearly stated goal of destroying Israel. This is sometimes glossed over by individual events and specific speakers. It may also be lost in the emotionalism that surrounds the agit-prop rhetoric and guerilla theatrics. But the “Basis of Unity for IAW International Coordination” makes the goals and methods of IAW and its local affiliates clear:

We are against the racist ideology of Zionism, which is the impetus for Israeli colonialism, because it inherently discriminates against those who are not Jewish. We are against all forms of discrimination, and believe that there can never be justice without the restoration of full rights for everyone, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Our demands are based upon the Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, issued on 9 July 2005 by over 170 Palestinian organizations, which states that:

Boycott, divestment and sanctions should be imposed and maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, dismantling the Wall and freeing all Palestinian and Arab political prisoners;

2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality;

3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN General Assembly resolution 194.

To be part of the Israeli Apartheid Week International Network, organizations should commit to:

a) the basis of unity above

b) coordination with the international network

c) building, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week activities, local BDS awareness and campaigns.

As will be noted below, the nature of these goals raise questions regarding responses from pro-Israel and pro-peace supporters.

Another obvious but unappreciated feature is that IAW is a highly professional, coordinated international effort with unknown sources of funding. It is not a series of loosely affiliated grassroots initiatives that happens to be taking place simultaneously in over 100 cities around the world. It is explicitly based on the “Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel” of 2005, which in turn was based on the “Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel” of 2004. But the roots of these efforts have been traced by IAW organizers back to at least 2000, who also make reference to two additional sources of legitimacy, international efforts that opposed apartheid in South Africa and, more ominously, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 1975 that declared “Zionism is Racism.”

Thus, in ideological and practical terms the IAW movement justifies itself in two ways. Firstly, that it promotes the will of Palestinian organizations that supported the first call. These are primarily professional, trade and labor organizations controlled by the Fatah movement and other members in the Palestine Liberation Organization, as well as non-governmental organizations in Israel and the Palestinian territories that receive American and European funding. Secondly, IAW sees itself as part of the anti-apartheid tradition endorsed by the international community. This is of course part of the movement’s name and a key element in its marketing. But the lineage back to Resolution 3379 is another indication of the IAW’s true origins and goals.

IAW is also an explicit structural as well as ideological component of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. The ideological and practical links between IAW and the BDS movement are seen in the regular use of the same speakers at events. Professional activists such as Omar Barghouti, and academics such as Ali Abunimah, Judith Butler, and Saree Makdisi are among the notable individuals who have appeared at IAW and BDS events recently. The rhetoric of IAW differs slightly from that of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which calls for the “right of return” and BDS activities but which also emphasizes Palestinian and broader Arabic culture as well as political lobbying in the United Kingdom.

Espousing the dissolution of Israel and the “right of return” in favor of single state explicitly denies Jews the right to political sovereignty. Since only Jews are denied this right, IAW and BDS are explicitly antisemitic. The lack of any clear political proposals on the part of IAW, in the form of the desired unitary state, such as “secular” and “democratic,” or any articulation of its political and legal systems, not least of all protections of minorities, is another indication of the IAW’s nature and goals. IAW is fundamentally antinomian, that is, it is more opposed to the existence of Israel than it is in favor of concrete and workable, much less fair, solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This, along with the explicit situation of BDS as part of anti-colonial, indigenous rights, and anti-globalization movements, speaks to BDS and IAW as heirs to the Soviet tradition of antisemitism in the guise of anti-Zionism, which reached a peak with Resolution 3379, and its current position firmly within the global left.

Read more at Middle East Forum

Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian. He is currently a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow of the Middle East Forum

Must see —-> The Myth of Israeli Apartheid

New York Times Encourages Attacks Against Jews

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RETRO-ISRAEL-INTIFADA-PALESTINIANSBy :

The New York Times has crossed the line this weekend by encouraging Palestinian Arabs to embark upon a “third intifada” against Israel with an article by Ben Ehrenreich titled “If There is a Third Intifada, We Want to be the Ones who Started It.” This article is tantamount to calling upon the Arabs to kill Jews.  Against the backdrop of Thursday’s rock attack where a two-year-old Israeli was severely injured with brain injuries when the car she was in veered off the road as a direct results of Arab youth throwing rocks, one wonders where is the decency of the NYT? Rock attacks have caused deaths and serious injuries on Israel’s roads for decades.

The New York Times Magazine celebrated the people who consider their rock attacks “non-violent,” defining them as “peaceful protestors.” Rock-throwers aren’t “peaceful” – anywhere in the world. To even allow Ehrenreich to write an article, rather than an op-ed shows the inherent bias of this outlet.

Read more at Front Page

 

Exposing FAU: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Extremism

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images (28)A university in Boca Raton, Florida tolerates the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activities of a radical hate group.

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The Tyranny of Deceit: A Response to ‘Israel Apartheid Week’

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20130305_end_israeli_apartheid_360by MARK SILVERBERG:

In the aftermath of World War II, with the hideous revelation that two-thirds of European Jews had been systematically exterminated by the Nazis, anti-Semitism became unfashionable. But that is no longer the case. As the memory of the Holocaust fades into history, as we continue to transfer petro-wealth to our enemies; as Europe morphs into Eurabia; as Islamists take control over the UN and an increasing number of Middle East and North African countries, and as our universities become hotbeds for virulent anti-Israel teachings and rhetoric – logic fades, facts become confused with fictions, distinctions between democracies and tyrannies become irrelevant, history becomes unimportant, and anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism become indistinguishable.

Natan Sharansky uses what he terms “the 3D test” to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism, and he identifies the three categories as de-legitimization, demonization and the double standard. Taking these three factors into account, one can discern that the new anti-Semitism manifests itself in many different forms and in many different forums – through divestment campaigns, international boycotts of Israeli products and entertainers (as Norway has done recently), boycotts of Israeli academics by European universities, holding Israel to standards no other nations in the world are required to meet – not nearly, and through “Israel Apartheid Week” on Canadian and American college campuses where Israel is assigned the role of “Jew” among the nations of the world to be singled-out, cursed, harassed and defamed.

As Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post: “Google ‘Israel and Apartheid’, you will see that the two are linked in cyberspace despite the fact that Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of Israel’s population, have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews, and even sit in the Knesset.” Israel’s Ambassador to Greece is an Israeli Arab. In May 2004, Salim Jubran, an Israeli Arab was appointed to the Supreme Court of Israel. Arabic is an official language in Israel and is posted on all road signs. In 1948, there was only one Arab high school in Israel. Today there are hundreds. The fact that these anti-Israeli boycott campaigners on our campuses attack Israel as an apartheid state not only demonstrates their ignorance of what apartheid was in South Africa*, but raises the issue of why they do not propose boycotts of states that truly merit international disgust and censure.

These protests aren’t just against Israel. They are also against the Jewish People. Israel’s Operation Cast Lead at the close of 2008 – a legitimate act of self-defense by any and all international standards – evoked universal resentment and hatred. Around the world, synagogues and Jewish graves were desecrated and anti-Semitic chants were shouted at protests. In April 2009, a swastika was found painted on a Jewish fraternity house at the University of Florida and on American campuses, and comparisons continue to be made between Israelis and Nazis, and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz.

In all this, it is quite clear that distinctions between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are increasingly blurred. Taken in its totality, Israel not only has no right to defend itself in response to terrorist attacks, but it has no right to exist – which suggests that missile attacks on Israel’s civilian population are not only justified, but desirable.

The lies perpetrated by otherwise respectable international religious, educational and political bodies against the only democracy in the Middle East are most notable in the double standards that are applied to Israel as opposed to states that have slaughtered their own peoples for decades with absolute immunity from international censure.

It is true, of course, that criticizing Israel does not make one an anti-Semite any more than criticizing the government of France makes one anti-French. But it’s one thing to criticize France, and something else to declare the French nation illegitimate and to advocate its destruction. Martin Luther King, Jr. once referred to Israel as “one of great outposts of democracy in the world,” with an “incontestable right to exist,” but that is no longer the case.

Funny how these campus activists never seem to mention the Syrian de jure occupation of Lebanon, or Saudi funding of global jihad, or the treatment of Saudi women, or the crushing of all democratic dissent in Egypt and Iran. They have no difficulty bemoaning capital punishment in the United States, but say nothing when the Palestinians routinely execute suspected Israeli collaborators including the mothers of young children, or when Hamas throws Fatah supporters to their deaths off 15-story buildings.

It is shameful that pro-Palestinian professors and students on American and European campuses pretend that the only reason for the problems in the Middle East is because of Israeli obstinacy as if it is the fault of the Israelis and not the rejectionist Arab world. Not only has every Israeli concession and every act of goodwill and compassion not changed the way Israel is portrayed – but each concession, each accommodation, each withdrawal first from Lebanon, then from Gaza has only fed the furious hatred that Islam and the international community feels for it.

Borders have nothing to do with peace in the Middle East. It is the existence of Israel as a Jewish state that offends the Arabs and their supporters. It is the history of Jews in that land stretching back over 4,000 years that offends them which accounts for their threats against Israel when it declares its intention to make the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb national historic sites with the aim of restoring them and opening them to the world. The fact that all religions will have freedom of access to such sites is irrelevant to the Palestinians who have spent millions of U.S. and European dollars teaching their children that Jews came to the Land as usurpers less than a century ago, and that Abraham was a Muslim albeit the fact that he lived almost three thousand years before Islam was born!

Israel could grant its enemies ever possible concession (and has), but that would not bring peace. Nothing short of Israel’s destruction will suffice.

Truth is – anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism when it reaches a certain pitch, and singling out Israel for condemnation and international sanction – out of all proportion to any other parties in the Middle East – is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is intellectually dishonest.

Read more: Family Security Matters 

 

 

 

 

Dutch Muslim Youths Praise Hitler, Claim Millions of Palestinians Are Being Killed

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FullBlownAntiSemEurope230x1

via Algemeiner:

A video that appeared on Dutch TV recently shows a roundtable of adults and children discussing Jews. The children, who are Muslim Turks, praise Hitler and his genocidal inclinations. One of the boys says, “on the one hand I am satisfied with what Hitler did with the Jews…” while another responds that Hitler was justified in killing millions of Jews because “now millions of Palestinians are being killed.”

The four young boys are joined in a roundtable by an older gentleman (identified as Mehmet Sahin, a researcher at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit) who repeatedly challenges their assertions. When one of the boys asks the interviewer if he hates Jews, they seem surprised when he responds in the negative.

Later, the same boy who originally praised Hitler, says, ” as far as I’m concerned Hitler should have killed all Jews, ” a remark that merited laughs from the group of boys.

The interviewer, who repeatedly expresses his indignation at the boys’ opinions, ask them where they got their hatred for the Jews from–”from friends” they answer, noting that the term “Jew” is used as a curse word and that nobody at their school likes Jews.

Later during the conversation the interviewer calls the boys “pathetic.”

A Dutch Jewish group has called on Holland’s government to probe anti-Semitism in high schools in response to the video.

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Will the Real Anna Baltzer Please Rise?

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Anna J. Piller, aka Anna Baltzer

Anna J. Piller, aka Anna Baltzer

By Lee Kaplan:

The individual known as Anna Baltzer, whose name remains questionable in terms of legal legitimacy, leads the US Campaign Against the Israeli Occupation and the Boycott and Divestment Movement (BDS) against Israel. Under that name, she has developed a sinecure traveling to churches and colleges worldwide regaling false tales of atrocities by Israel’s Jews against innocent Palestinians with slick presentations, somehow even grabbing a television appearance at Oxford University.

What’s in a Name?

Using the identity of Anna Baltzer, she claims to have appeared at over 500 venues spreading her revisionist history. Billing herself as the “grandchild of Polish-born Holocaust survivors” and a “Fulbright Scholar” to lend her legitimacy in college venues, Baltzer would appear to be the perfect foil to the Jewish state. But what appears to be emerging now is that the woman known as Anna Baltzer is not who she claims to bet While in the’ West Bank’, she routinely rubs elbows with known terrorists while citing her very questionable background.

Based on my investigation, it would appear that she is enough of an embarrassment to some of her family that she allegedly fabricated the name Anna Baltzer – or otherwise associated herself with that name without undergoing any obvious legal means allowing her to do so, to conceal her true identity. Research found that she has at least three aliases, including the identity as Anna Baltzer under which she personally collects money while rewriting history and spreading disinformation about the Jews

Fulbright Exaggerations & Damage Control

As a journalist I first ran afoul of reporting about Anna Baltzer, when I wrote a series of articles for the Gatestone Institute about her. In those articles I reported that there was no Anna Baltzer on record as being a Fulbright Scholar; that no one with the name Baltzer was on record as a Holocaust survivor from the death camps of Poland, and that no record existed of an Anna Baltzer ever going on a Birthright Tour to Israel. The Birthright Tour is of critical importance to her saga as it is during this event that Baltzer claimed she had been falsely indoctrinated into a pro-Israel position and that it inspired her to research the truth about the Palestinian plight.

When my first investigative article was published, a self-described Jewish anarchist named Daniel Sieradski  began tweeting about her at Oxford.. Sieradski, having the same objectives to eliminate Israel, writes all manner of cynical “Jewish” materials, and continually defends anti-Semites and blames Jews for anti-Semitism.

He then contacted Gatestone with false accusations of sloppy journalism, contending the inaccuracy of my information about Baltzer despite the authenticated data contained in my report. For his evidence, Sieradski merely sent a computer screenshot from the Fulbright website that listed Baltzer’s real name, Anna J. Piller, suggesting that my initial information was incorrect.

Inspection of his “evidence” determined that the page he proclaimed as evidence that Baltzer, known as Anna Piller, was indeed a Fulbright Scholar was quickly dismissed. The “evidence” Sieradski offered was nothing more than a page devoted to students hired as teaching assistants by Fulbright, and not a list of actual Fulbright scholars. That page merely proved that Baltzer, under the surname Piller, was hired as a teaching assistant to teach English at an English language program in Turkey – an Islamic country. A separate list of legitimate Fulbright scholars dating back to 1990 showed no entries or listings under her legal name or alias. At best, she exaggerated her academic qualifications to gain entry to the university speaking circuit. Yet, Sieradski suggested that as a Jew, he felt I owed Anna Baltzer an apology.

Fellow activists from the ISM and Sieradski, who also encourages boycotting of Israel like Anna Baltzer does, flew into action and changed biographical data on the  Wikipedia site to reflect now that her real name was Piller, explaining that this surname was the reason that Baltzer did not appear on the Fulbright Scholarshipwebsite. Such revisions were done after and in likely response to the findings from my initial investigative report.

Roseanne Barr bakes and more names for Baltzer appear

It is important to note that Sieradski is a Jew who is part of the in-house staff and writes for the anarchist magazine, Heeb. The word Heeb is considered a racial slur for Jews. The cover of that magazine once featured the notoriously anti-Israel Roseanne Barr, sporting a Hitler moustache and placing cookies shaped as Jewish people into an oven.

Gatestone removed my articles. Undeterred, I moved my investigative report to to a more heavily trafficked site. I decided to increase the scope of my investigation of the individual using the name Anna Baltzer. There was indeed more to be found.

Most important was her claim of being the grandchild of “Polish-born holocaust survivors”. Today, she is against the existence of Israel as the Jewish national homeland and not only a vindicator of the Palestinian goal to replace the Jewish state with an Arab one, but even of the violence that is practiced by Palestinian terrorists against Jews and other Israelis.

Read more at Arutz Sheva

Allen West interviews investigative journalist and Israeli activist Lee Kaplan about anti-Semitism at American universities. Why is this happening? What can be done about it? And is the political left uniting with the Islamists on campus? Find out in this interesting conversation.

Indoctrinating Children: ‘Palestine Solidarity’ in the Classroom

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bookBy Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene

Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman is an anti-Israel activist and English professor who has taught at Boise State University, al-Quds University, the American University of Beirut, and other universities in the Middle East. In The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans: Addressing Pedagogical Strategies (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), she has assembled a guidebook for American high school teachers on how to teach the Arab-Israeli conflict. (While writing it she transitioned from university to high school teaching herself.) The book’s documentation, though substantial, is extremely biased, as all of her quotes and references are part of a closed loop in which Palestinians are presented as innocent victims and Israelis as evil-doers. Her entire bibliography and a “What You Can Do” section are geared toward fomenting anti-Israel activism.

Inaccuracies abound, including the author’s historical account of the term “anti-Semitism.” Although the word has referred solely to hostility toward Jews since its coinage in the late nineteenth-century, Knopf-Newman politicizes it by distorting its etymology:

After World War II, anti-Semitism began to connote not racism directed at Semitic people (based on language groupings of Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian or Hebrew) in general, but rather only to Jews, most of whom are of European origin and do not speak any Semitic language.

She attributes the motive behind this imaginary trend to “shift[ing] the discourse away from Palestine,” demonstrating that for Knopf-Newman, even the concept of anti-Semitism is a tool of censorship to suppress discussion of “Palestine.”

The author did not always hold such views. Raised in Los Angeles with what she describes as a Zionist education, she attended Hebrew day schools and participated in pro-Israel activities during high school. Growing up, she heard the well-known phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem,” which Jews have said for thousands of years at Passover Seders. This historical fact is omitted in the book’s preface, where she likens the phrase to a Zionist “cultural commemoration” serving “to foster unquestioned support of Israel.”

Knopf-Newman’s encounters with her Palestinian peers (who, she admonishes, are never to be called “Arabs,” only “Palestinians”) as an impressionable undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati spawned her adoption of a virulently anti-Israel narrative. As a teacher at Boise State she spent three years engaged in research in a Palestinian refugee camp, during which time she recalls cheering with her Palestinian friends after hearing about a successful Hezb’allah missile attack on an Israeli ship. That four IDF sailors were killed doesn’t warrant a mention.

In order to deconstruct how Zionism is taught in America, based in part on her own sense of betrayal, Knopf-Newman revisited her old Los Angeles Hebrew school and examined its teaching materials. She concluded that the curriculum shifted from its original emphasis on Judaism to stress Zionism in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Her objective in writing the guidebook is “to explore how and what I learned as well as think about ways to disrupt the Zionist narrative altogether by teaching American youth about Palestine.”

To achieve this goal, Knopf-Newman advocates using the classroom as a bully pulpit, a place to correct social imbalances in which only the designated victim’s narrative is discussed. She exhibits no awareness of the differences between a teacher and an activist. Teaching “critical thinking” means indoctrinating students to believe that Palestinians are always right — and Israelis are always wrong.

In a chapter titled “Hip-Hop Education and Palestine Solidarity,” Knopf-Newman advocates using hip-hop, or rap, music because it has short, easy-to-remember segments that prove conducive to incorporating political material. Using her book as a guide, high school students can now rap, dance, or sing their way to anti-Zionism. Lesson plans include how to organize street theater with “apartheid walls” and “tunnels of oppression” that connect to other “sites of oppression.” Such agitprop can be adopted, she helpfully suggests, by teachers of literature, social studies, theater, music, and many other subjects. She particularly admires content that connects genocide, imprisonment, slavery, indigenous people, the “prison-industrial complex,” and even Hurricane Katrina with the delegitimization of Israel in the malleable minds of her students.

The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans is replete with false analogies to so-called “global colonialism,” such as Mexicans and Latin-Americans trying to cross the Arizona border illegally, South African blacks under apartheid, African-Americans under slavery, and Native-Americans. Knopf-Newman makes it a point to claim “indigenous” status for Native-Americans, yet ignores the widely accepted presence of Jews in Jerusalem and the West Bank for thousands of years to insist that “indigenous” cannot possibly refer to Jews in Israel. In the lexicon she reveres, “indigenous” equals “good”  and can refer only to Jews who, like herself, have “un-learned Zionism.”

Read more at American Thinker

Berkeley resident Rima Greene co-wrote this book review with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the
Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.

US government funding radical Israeli NGOs’ information operations

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pro-Israel%20demo%20embassy%20Tel%20Aviv-thumb-470x293-3087By Caroline Glick:

Earlier this month NGO Monitor released its report on foreign government funding of radical political Israeli NGOs which work to undermine Israel’s international standing and subvert Israeli society. Along with the usual European suspects who give millions of shekels (or Euros or pounds) to Israeli groups like this, it works out that the US government is also funding extremely radical organizations, courtesy of American taxpayers. Notably, the three groups that reported receiving funding from the US are all in the business of waging political warfare campaigns directed at the Israeli public.

According to the report, in accordance with the NGO Transparency Law which requires NGOs to report on donations received from foreign governments, three Israeli NGOs received funding from the US.
Keshev, a radical leftist “media watchdog” group run by some of Israel’s most outspoken, and radical journalists and writers received NIS 492,452 in direct aid from the US government. To understand how subversive Keshev is, it suffices to note that they criticized the Israeli media for rushing to judgment about Fatah’s unity deal with Hamas. That is, the group the US supports believes we should not criticize Fatah for joining forces with a genocidal jihadist movement committed to the obliteration of Israel that is in cahoots with the Iranians.
Through Catholic Relief Services,the US also gave NIS 220,304 to the anti-Israel pressure group B’Tselem. The money was used to fund B’Tselem’s video project. B’tselem’s video project involves the distribution of video cameras to Palestinians to film snuff films that portry Israelis as aggressive bullies who seek to harm the Palestinians for no reason.
Numerous examples have already been reported of how those film clips have falsely portrayed events.
Finally, the US government donated NIS 15,474 through the Foundation for Middle East Peace to the far left internet outlet Social TV. To a certain degree, Social TV can be — and has been — portrayed as the anti-Zionist answer to Latma, the Hebrew-language media criticism site that I run. But Latma is wholly funded by private contributors and foundations.

Exposing the Palestinians’ Anna Baltzer

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Anna Baltzer — apparently neither a Fulbright Scholar, nor a descendant of Holocaust survivors, nor an alumna of the Birthright Program — appears to be just a fraud and a fabulist. So why is Oxford having her speak January 31st?

Anna Baltzer

Anna Baltzer

by Lee Kaplan:

Anna Baltzer, a pretty lady who heads the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (USCEIO) in Washington, DC., has developed a platform for herself going about the world lecturing as a Jew who once supported the State of Israel, but who had an epiphany and discovered that Israel and “Zionists” were exploiting and abusing the Palestinian people. The USCEIO is, in fact, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) renamed for the purpose of lobbying Congress in Washington. It was created by Huwaida Arraf, one of the co-founders of the ISM who also serves on the group’s steering committee.

Placing Anna Baltzer as the titular head of the Campaign was intended to convince both Jews and non-Jews that opposition to Israel’s existence is fine because even Jews such as her believe in the necessity of destroying the Jewish state, especially through boycotts and divestment. Anna Baltzer is a modern day Tokyo Rose for the ISM against Israel: she speaks at anti-Israel events and promotes boycott and divestment campaigns against Israel, in support of terrorist groups such as Hamas in its plans to destroy Israel any way it can. She has participated or helped at demonstations staged by Code Pink, Global Exchange, the Gaza Flotilla, Viva Palestina and other anti-Israel groups that make up the ISM.

USCEIO has been frantically sending out fundraising email blasts and announcing on its website that Ms. Baltzer will appear in a debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be presented by the distinguished Oxford Union in England on January 31st. According to the Oxford Union’s website, “The Union is the world’s most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. It has been established for 189 years, aiming to promote debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.”

The Oxford Union has delivered these debates by distinguished academic, religious and national leaders from ex-President Ronald Reagan to the Dali Lama. The purpose of the debates is the furtherance of education and knowledge. The subject of this debate will be: “This House Believes That Israel is a Force for Good in the Middle East.”

The announcement of the three debaters for the anti-Israel point of view, however, disturbingly advertises propagandists and fabulists such as Ilan Pappe, Ghada Karmi and most importantly, Anna Baltzer, who is billed on the Oxford Union’s website as head of the USCEIO and who will apparently speak in opposition to Israel’s right to exist.

Ilan Pappe has already been proven to be bankrupt as a scholar after it was proven in court he was involved in fabricating a phony massacre by Israeli forces of the Arab village of Tantura in 1948. In a defamation and libel lawsuit brought by veterans of the Alexandroni Brigade in Israel, Pappe’s PhD student under his advice admitted on the witness stand that he fabricated the entire massacre with his supervisor’s knowledge and that he was paid $6,000 by the PLO to do so.

The other speaker alongside Anna Baltzer will be Ghada Kharmi, a Palestinian academic at the University of Exeter, Britain, and the author of Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. Her writings are merely polemics devoid of any history or facts with which to back them up. She claims, incredibly, for example, that Israel has never made a peace offer to the Palestinians, along with standard slanderous Palestinian propaganda and claims that masquerade as facts — such as that Israel violates “international law” by the building of settlements, which are completely legal per UN Resolution 242, and the stopping of the Gaza Flotillas that was completely legal by international maritime law. Karmi encourages war by proxy, such as writing in support of the British boycott of Israeli academics and Israeli universities.

What is Karmi’s intellectual solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which she also claims is the reason for al Qaeda? She says Israel must become one state called Palestine; must withdraw to the 1949 borders; must give the Palestinians half of Jerusalem, and then allow seven million Palestinians to move inside Israel, creating a flood of Muslims that would demographically overwhelm the current Jewish population there. As for terrorism, she glosses over it as the desperate actions of some extremists who are fighting “colonialism.” Her writings hardly reflect anything in the way of solid research or intellectual balance.

Stephen Stotsky of CAMERA.org has written an excellent exposé of Baltzer’s lies about Israel. However, new information has arisen about Baltzer’s background and history as a Jew.

Read more at Northeast Intelligence Network

January 31 Update: Anna Baltzer’s real name is Anna Piller, so apparently she even lies about her own name. More on this later…

Lee Kaplan is a dynamic, hard-hitting and well-known investigative journalist. He is adept at conducting covert surveillance, frequently infiltrating venues often restricted to the general public. Mr. Kaplan’s investigative reports have been published and widely disseminated within law enforcement. He is the founder of “DAFKA”, which stands for Defending America For Knowledgeable Action and Stop the ISM (International Solidarity Movement). He is also the current Communications Director for the Northeast Intelligence Network, and maintains his own blog at this link.

Meet Al Jazeera’s Holocaust-Denying Televangelist…Is This What We Can Expect on the New Current TV?

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stop al JazeeraBy

By now many have heard about Al Jazera’s recent acquisition of Current TV, Al Gore’s floundering television network that has, since its inception in 2005, displayed not only abysmal ratings but also blatant anti-Israel and anti-U.S. bias.

Ironically, The Blaze sought to purchase Current, but was rebuffed by its executives who stated that they could not in good conscience sell out to a network whose point of view was not aligned with theirs. Thus, the only reasonable step for Gore and company was to seal a multi-million dollar deal with Al Jazeera, because, according to Current co-founder Joel Hyatt, the Qatar-based network “was founded with the same goals we had for Current.”

So what, exactly, are those shared goals and values? And what might a revamped Al Jazeera-led lineup at the new (and likely not so improved) Current TV look like?

A glimpse at Al Jazeera’s highest-rated program to date might give us an inkling into what lies ahead and it is cringe-inducing (though not surprising) to say the least.

Current: Meet Muslim Brotherhood spiritual sherpa and Al Jazeera’s top performing Islamic televangelist Youssef al-Qaradawi, best known for repeatedly twisting the Holocaust into a mold that suits his Islamic agenda and for declaring that his greatest hope is simply to live long enough to “shoot dead Allah’s enemies, the Jews.” The prolific imam has also issued hundreds of fatwas on everything from homosexuality to music to the role of female suicide bombers in their noble pursuit of jihad.

In light of Hyatt’s disturbing statement concerning his network’s shared goals with Al Jazeera, it is perhaps prudent to review the latter’s star talent, who has graced the homes of some 60 million viewers for the past 15 years with his weekly program ”Shariah and Life.”

 Qaradawi 3Qaradawi’s Anti-Semitism

Returning to Qaradawi’s long-harbored desire to live long enough so that Allah might grant him the singular opportunity of personally slaying Jewish people, the imam stated during a televised speech:

“I’d like to say that the only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds. Allah’s mercy and blessings upon you.”

According to Qaradawi, for their inherent ”evil,” Allah imposed upon the Jews a series of “punishments,” the last one led by Adolf Hitler “by means of all the things he did to them.”

“He [Hitler] managed to put them in their place.”

“This [the Holocaust] was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers,” Qaradawi stated proudly during a televised broadcast in 2009.

The imam openly praised the fuhrer for teaching the Jews “a divine lesson” while in the same breath minimizing the Holocaust by saying that the Jewish people have “exaggerated the issue.”

So, the imam uses the Shoah in a way that suits him, in a way that furthers his agenda, while at the same time denying the true extent of the carnage lest he engender any “undue” sympathy for the Jewish people.

Anti-Semitic diatribes such as the one featured above are just a small taste of what Qaradawi has offered on his weekly Sunday broadcasts.

So who is Qaradawi?

According to lore, Qaradawi is no ordinary imam or mufti, having allegedly memorized the entire Quran by age 10. He was born in Egypt in 1926, graduated from Al Azhar University in Cairo and by 1942 joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfather of all major militant Islamic groups including Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda.

The imam was arrested several times for the activities he carried out while with the Brotherhood and subsequently fled to Qatar in 1961, where he still resides. He has become the preeminent Muslim (or at least Sunni) “authority” on all things Islam, covering a range of topics from “mother’s milk banks” to the right of every Palestinian woman to offer herself up as a suicide-bombing martyr.

Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood

Qaradawi’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood stem back to his days as a student at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he met Brotherhood-founder (and not coincidentally, Hitler admirer) Hassan al-Banna. Banna was perhaps the first to offer Qaradawi a glimpse into alternative views on the handling of societies ills and “perversions.”

Despite living in exile in Qatar — something that is more than likely to change now that his progeny,

Mohammed Morsi is at the helm in Egypt — Qaradawi has the Brotherhood leader’s ear, acting as his key spiritual adviser. While the imam turned down an official position with the Brotherhood, allegedly because he felt his true calling was to evangelize Islam, he still greatly influences the grandfather of all jihadist groups to this day, and in no small way.

Consider that as recently as 2010 Morsi viciously referred to Israeli Jews as “blood-suckers” and  ”descendants of apes and pigs,” invoking age-old anti-Semitic slurs. Here, we see Hitler’s influence via al Banna and later, Qaradawi, weaving its web of hate and vitriol over today’s Islamic leaders.

Morsi called on Muslims “outside Palestine” to “support the resistance fighters and besiege the Zionist wherever they are.”

“None of the Arab or Muslim peoples and regimes should have dealings with them,” the Egyptian president went on to state. “Pressure should be exerted upon them. They must not be given any opportunity, and must not stand on any Arab or Islamic land. They must be driven out of our countries.”

So how does Qaradawi’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood relate to Al Jazeera and now by default, Current TV? According to David Reaboi, vice president for strategic communications at the Center for Security Policy, both network’s programing have shown some rather specific parallels concerning the Muslim Brotherhood from as early as the onset of the Arab Spring. In a statement to TheBlaze, Reaboi, noted that both Current and Al Jazeera, “presented the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover in Egypt as a democratic revolution.”

“Both networks pushed provably false narratives about the future of Egypt’s ‘democracy,’ it’s ideological makeup, and demonized those that correctly assessed the situation,” he continued.

“Qaradawi’s role in mobilizing public and nation-state support for the Islamic ascendancy, from Tunisia through Egypt, Libya, Syria and beyond, cannot be overstated. When Qaradawi declared Gadhafi and Assad ‘unIslamic,’ it was not just his estimated 60 million viewers that got the message.”

Reaboi added that Qaradawi’s fatwa indeed helped inform the Obama administration in its calculation about views from the “Arab Street” on such issues. Thus, the imam’s influence is indeed far-reaching and has the power to effect change in a negative way.

Read more at the Blaze

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