Scarlett Johansson Rocks!!!

For more about Soda Stream, see my post from last year here, along with a really good video.

But this post is just for Scarlett!

PS -- She is stepping away from Oxfam, too.

What a lovely partner for peace!

Don't you think?

Yes, I am being facetious.

Designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on March 27, 2002, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (AAMB) is composed of an unknown number of small cells of Fatah-affiliated activists.

Fatah is headed by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Fatah publicizes threats to bomb Tel Aviv on its official Facebook page



Perhaps it's time to realize that peace is not the object, but the destruction of Israel is.

Thanks to Palestinian Media Watch for exposing this atrocity from Israel's designated peace partner.

The full video is eight minutes long and shows footage of masked men in military training, arsenals of weapons, missiles being launched, as well as footage of Israelis running for shelter during missile attacks.

Hopefully, more people will come to see that they are being duped, that those they enable, if capable, will treat them no better than what they intend for Tel Aviv.
 

Speaking about the United Nations (with an Update)

Recently, in the context of a discussion about indigenous rights and whether Jews are an indigenous people in Israel, I stood up for the notion of the UN, and international law, having positive effects in areas that people can easily overlook.

But not to be misconstrued, the UN has a very dark side.

The most recent example is the cancellation, days before opening, by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, of a landmark exhibit at its Paris headquarters this Monday on “The 3,500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel,” curated together with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

According to UN Watch, whose blog is one worth following:

The surprise here isn’t that UNESCO chief Irina Bokova surrendered to the Arab League’s protest, rudely cancelling an event for which invitations were already sent out, and which involved painstaking work over two years by renowned Hebrew University scholar Robert Wistrich.

***

For anyone who knows anything about UNESCO — the first UN body, in November 2011, to deem “Palestine” a state — surrender to Arab pressure on this matter was inevitable.

When it comes to UNESCO:

Despite the repeated claims of the Obama Administration that UNESCO is God’s gift to the Jews, and to humanity, the opposite is true: it is arguably the most anti-Jewish body in the entire United Nations.

If the notorious UN Human Rights Council dedicates a full 50 percent of its resolutions to demonizing the Jewish state, at UNESCO the numbers are 100 percent.

That’s right: all of UNESCO's condemnatory resolutions are against Israel.

Check out the complete post. And for those who may feel surprise by the behavior of UNESCO described by UN Watch, learn more about the situation at UNESCO, an intergovernmental UN organization that by all appearances has strayed far from its mandate defined by education, science, and culture, and traveled down the road of politics and abuse that many sensible and peace loving people plainly see. And they see right!

UPDATE: Here is a link to the letter from UNESCO to the Wiesenthal Center concerning the cancellation.

The Humanitarian Racist has a Cousin (with an Update)

Recall the humanitarian racists, largely brought to attention by Manfred Gerstenfeld.

Humanitarian racists believe that non-white, oppressed people cannot be held to laws of humanity and requirements of the public conscience recognized in international law long ago. These "victims" are simply not advanced enough. As such, there must be a scapegoat to account for their actions because they cannot even be racist. Contemporary problems caused by the colonialism and imperialism of the Western developed world excuse the victims from any responsibility for their acts and allow humanitarian racists to look away as often as possible, even to the commission of major crimes.

Richard Cravatts is the creator and founding director of Boston University's Program in Publishing at BU's Center for Professional Education and current president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, an organization with over 40,000 academic members on more than 3200 campuses worldwide.

Cravatts references another breed, a cousin of the humanitarian racist, the moral narcissist. His recent essay, "Moral narcissism and the MLA’s obsession with Israel," is definitely worth reading.

Moral narcissism is based, not according to actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how moral narcissists feel about themselves by committing to a particular cause or movement. They live in self-approval bubbles where mutually agreed moral gestures and self congratulation constitutes a perfect and sufficient engagement with an imperfect world.

Cravatts refers to Jay Gaskill, a California lawyer who served as the Seventh Alameda County Public Defender from 1989 to 1999 who chose to devote more time to his writing projects.

Gaskill says that moral narcissists adopt a camouflage strategy to escape the moral disapproval of others by cloaking their narcissism in the trappings of ‘social justice positioning’.

These are members of “club narcissist” who live in an unspoken social compact, the first tenet of which is “We are not narcissists because we care”.  The second tenet consists of a commitment to sign onto a shifting list of approved ‘humanitarian’ positions and stances with the unspoken understanding that these will require little more than gestures - bargain basement humanitarianism, of you will.

Thus the moral narcissists create an artificial a moral universe where ‘standing for’ is the equivalent of ‘doing for’.

***

Moral narcissists are easily controlled and manipulated by political elites, ideologues, and corrupt political predators.  Moral narcissists are immune from the teaching effects of authentic dialogue.  Moral narcissism is the disease of the modern mind. 

Looking at moral narcissists in the context of anti-Israel activity, Cravatts says:

The lure of Palestinianism has proven to be positivity irresistible to left-leaning humanists and literary scholars who burrow into Western thought to uncover the dark underpinnings of imperialism, militarism, colonialism, oppression, racism, and, as a result of one of the MLA’s notorious past presidents, Edward Said, the theory of “Orientalism,” a mode of thought which claimed to reveal the inherent racism and imperialism imbedded in Western scholarship and politics. The fascination with Third-world victimism, identity politics, and multiculturalism, coupled with harsh critiques of both the U.S. and its proxy in the Middle East, Israel, have all led academics like those in the ASA and the MLA—whose fields are, in a normal world, unrelated to these issues—to involve themselves aggressively in answering calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions solely against the Jewish state.

Activists like those in the MLA and ASA, and too many others of the academic left, believe their worldview is the correct one simply because it seeks to create a world in which social justice will be realized against the forces of the imperialistic, racist, militaristic oppressors.

Cravatts provides examples to show MLA lack concern for the welfare of oppressed, such as students and women, revealing a double standard. He concludes:

Of course, the MLA’s Radical Caucus is silent on all of these obstacles to education and the free exchange of ideas, both in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and the wider world of Israel’s neighbors. It is easy to demonize Israel, and certainly it requires no bravery in academia, where moral narcissists console each other in an echo chamber of good intentions, willing to sacrifice academic integrity, true scholarship, and vigorous, honest debate in the process.

What is also tragic is that these "intellects" cannot see that their blatant singling out of the sole Jewish state is an exercise in antisemitism, irrespective of how they try to justify the discrimination they practice, reckless and oblivious to the effect. As they are quick to tell the rest of us, only they care about humankind.

UPDATE: The MLA just concluded its 2014 Convention, with mixed results regarding the anti-Israel efforts. A watered down non-binding resolution was adopted, arguably to save face. An attempt to pass an “Emergency” Resolution to denounce supposed attacks on supporters of the American Studies Association boycott resolution was soundly rejected. See here and here, as reported at the blog Legal Insurrection by Professor Jacobson and others.

One might argue that civil and political communities are showing signs of awakening, as it becomes clear how extreme and activist the humanitarian racists and moral narcissists have become, caring not at all about the stated missions of their associations, but their political agendas and contorted views of social justice.

Opportunty in Israel's Neighborhood

Is the Arab-Israel conflict changing? A column by Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post suggests so, and it's worth thinking about.

Is Israel's strategic challenge of contending with pan-Arabism, which was invented at the same time that the nations of the world embraced modern Zionism, no longer central in a  new era where people from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula have gone back to identifying themselves by tribe, religion, ethnicity, and non-Arab national identity?

Intra-Arab fighting these days has nothing much to do with Israel, except if a scapegoat is necessary to incite hate and create diversion. Arabic speaking minorities in Israel, even Muslims, cannot be blind to the opportunities inside Israel to live a good life, particularly compared to record the rest of the neighborhood.

In her column, Glick refers to Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox priest from Nazareth who calls for Israeli Christian youth to serve in the IDF, as a symbol of what is taking place, a movement where some Christians identify more as Israelis than members of the Palestinian Arab nation.

It is because they see what is happening to their co-religionists in the post-pan-Arab Middle East that more and more Israeli Christians realize they will lead safer, more prosperous and more fulfilling lives as Christian citizens in the Middle East’s only democracy than as pan-Arabs battling the Zionist menace.

Much of the argument made by Glick is based on an article by Ofir Haivry, vice president of the Herzl Institute, in Mosaic online magazine, entitled, Israel in the Eye of the Hurricane, and should be read in its entirety by anyone interested in a more in depth analysis.

If Glick is correct,

The post-pan-Arab Middle East exposes the truth that has been obscured for a century. The Jews and their Jewish state are a natural component of our diverse neighborhood, just like the Kurds, the Christians, the Druse, the various Muslim sects, and the Arabs. The demise of pan-Arabism is our great opportunity, at home and regionally, to build the alliances we need to survive and prosper.

Perhaps the Arab-Israeli conflict as we know it is ready for a paradigm shift. Glick is surely advocating the Israeli government should change its orientation toward the Arab world away from powers based on Pan-Arab structures in favor of natural alliances based on mutual interests, the kind that most often stand the test of time.

45 Seconds of Enlightenment

Courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch, this video is for those that claim that all Palestinian Arab refugees, including descendants, have a human right to return to Israel because they were ethnically cleansed from their homes by Jews.



For more enlightenment, see here or here.

To those that make such claims, behind a mask of morality, we should ask: Why should anyone listen to pontifications of people who act as if they know all, but know hardly at all?