How Israeli's see the "Arab Spring

True or false?
Alisa Flatow terrorism Islamist
Stephen M. Flatow

Arab Lawyers Honor Terrorist - only in the Middle East

A story from the JPost.com website caught my eye last night.  "Arab Lawyers Union honors Palestinian Suicide bomber" the headline read.

The Arab Lawyers Union on Friday awarded its highest decoration to the Palestinian woman who carried out the 2003 suicide bombing at Maxim’s Restaurant in Haifa, which killed 21 and wounded 51. The Cairo-based union, which represents lawyers from 15 Arab countries, dispatched a delegation to the home of suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat in Jenin to present her family with the award.

Abu Eisheh, a lawyer who visited the family, said the Arab lawyers were proud of what Jaradat did “in defense of Palestine and the Arab nation.”
 

Turns out the ALU is a UNESCO NGO.  Among its goals is

Promote and protect human rights, basic freedoms and the primacy of law; and

Participate in the decolonization of the Arab Countries, to their liberation and the establishment of social justice

 

Of course, honoring a terrorist promotes human rights, and just what Arab countries are colonized?

You cannot make up this stuff.  It also reinforces the belief that UNESCO is worthless if they count folks like these among its NGOs.

Read the full report.

Stephen M. Flatow

Dearborn, Michigan - a fitting place it seems for hatred

Sarah Honig is a columnist who writes predominantly in the Jerusalem Post through her column, Another Tack.  On October 4, 2012 she examined the state of affairs in Dearborn, Michigan.

Dearborn, Michigan, may have started off as a no-account aggregate of farms and modest homesteads but it would evolve into a singular omen. This once-quintessential emblem of old-time Americana would stand out as a powerful indication of important things to come. Dearborn encapsulates within itself something akin to an ever-unfolding prophesy of America’s future.

It’s perhaps no quirk of fate that the latest episode in Dearborn’s annals is about protecting the honor of a prophet via anti-blasphemy laws – the draconian sort which proliferate in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other centers of Islamic enlightenment. It’s all along the lines of the international ban on anti-Islam speech proposed at the UN General Assembly by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and darling of America’s own elected leader, Barack Obama.

Obama's recognition of Muslim grievances gives rise to something dangerous to the American way of life.

This perception of righteous resentment, accentuated by their own favorite president, brought Dearborn’s Muslims out for an extraordinary rally to urge that legal prohibitions be legislated against free speech, if that speech is deemed hurtful to “the religious feelings of Muslims.”

Not the feelings of Jews or Hindus, mind you, just Muslims.

Yet, we should not necessarily be surprised because Dearborn, home of the assembly line, was also the operational headquarters for Henry Ford.  Ford, no friend of the Jews, in fact he blamed them for every ill in the world, was an idol of one Adolf Hitler.

Read Ms. Honig's full column here.

Wall Street Journal - Call a terrorist a savage? How uncivilized

Worth setting forth in full, a column on the ads now appearing in New York City subways equating terrorists with savages.  The column appeared in the Wall Street Journal and is written by William McGurn.

Call a Terrorist a 'Savage'? How Uncivilized

An anti-jihad message is 'hate speech' by today's topsy-turvy standards.

By WILLIAM MCGURN

"In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."

So reads an advertisement that went up a week ago in New York City subway stations. Sponsored by Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative, the ads were meant to provoke, and they did. Denunciations poured in, activists plastered "racist" and "hate speech" stickers over the ads, and an Egyptian-American activist even got herself arrested after spray-painting one poster pink.

Establishment opinion quickly rallied to a consensus. As the Washington Post put it, while the words could be read as "hateful," "an offensive ad" nonetheless has the "right to offend." A rabbi summed up the media orthodoxy in the headline over her column for CNN: "A right to hate speech, a duty to condemn."

Certainly that's one way to read this ad. Then again, most Americans probably read it the way it is written: Israel is a civilized nation under attack from people who do savage things in the name of jihad. Whatever the agenda of those behind this ad might be, the question remains: What part of that statement is not true?

Ah, but the use of the word "jihad" inherently indicts all Muslims, say the critics. There are millions of peaceful Muslims for whom jihad means only a spiritual quest. So why do so many people associate jihad with murder and brutality?

Might it be because violence is so often the jihadist's calling card? Might it be that some of these killers even incorporate the word jihad into the name of their terror organizations, e.g., Palestinian Islamic Jihad? [Ed. Note -  the group that murdered Alisa Flatow] That may not be the exclusive meaning of jihad, but surely it is one meaning—and the one that New York subway riders are most likely to bring to the word.

The same goes for "savage." Exhibit A is Oxford's online dictionary, which defines a savage as "a brutal or vicious person." There are innumerable Exhibit Bs, but let me invoke one of the most powerful.

This is a Reuters photo that ran on the New York Times front page for Sept. 1, 2004. It shows an Israeli bus after it had been blown up by a suicide bomber. Neither bloody nor gory, the photo is nonetheless deeply disturbing, because it shows the lifeless body of a young woman hanging out a window.

The Times news story added this detail about the reaction to that attack. "In Gaza," ran the report, "thousands of supporters of Hamas celebrated in the streets, and the Associated Press reported that one of the bombers' widows hailed the attack as 'heroic' and said her husband's soul was 'happy in heaven.' " What part of any of this is not savage?

Two years ago, Time magazine ran a cover photo of an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears had been cut off by the Taliban. This weekend, an al Qaeda-affiliated jihadist group in Kenya threw grenades into an Anglican church, killing a 9-year-old boy attending Sunday school. In light of these atrocities, "savage" seems profoundly inadequate.

The point is that what makes someone a savage is not the religion he professes. It's the actions he takes. Notwithstanding the many Jews and Christians who have been attacked, those bearing the brunt of this savagery are innocent Muslims who find themselves targeted—at their mosques, in their markets, at a wedding reception—simply because they belong to the wrong political party or religious tradition.

The people of Libya appear to understand this better than the president of the United States. The Libyans know that a civilized society is one where the strong protect the weak. In July they voted for such a future when they rejected Islamic radicals in their first free elections since toppling the dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The Libyans' problem is that the extremists are better armed and better organized than their elected government, which leaves the strong free to prey upon the weak.

Back home in America, amid all the gooey indignation about how the subway ads are hate speech but must be defended, the idea seems to have taken hold that the beauty of the First Amendment is that we get to insult each other's religions. Certainly that's sometimes the price of the First Amendment. Its glory, however, is as the cornerstone for a self-governing, free society whose citizens know that someone saying something disgusting about your faith is no excuse for murder.

What a curiosity our new political correctness has made of our public spaces. Let your sex tape loose on the Internet and be rewarded with your own TV show; photograph a crucifix in a jar of urine and our museums will vie to exhibit it; occupy someone else's property and you will be hailed by the president for your keen social conscience.

But call people who blow up, behead and mutilate "savage"—and polite society will find you offensive.

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I couldn't agree more. Thanks Mr. McGurn.

 

Stephen M. Flatow