Why do we tolerate giving money to schools that teach antisemitism?

The ‘David Dukes’ Of The Middle East

By Stephen M. Flatow

My column from the Jewish Press.

Imagine if David Duke or some other white supremacist leader opened his own private elementary school with a blatantly anti-Semitic curriculum, and a United States senator proposed giving Duke’s school a government grant. Naturally we would all be outraged.

So why isn’t there similar outrage when a senator proposes giving a government grant to Palestinian Arab schools that feature a blatantly anti-Semitic curriculum?

At a July 3 press conference, U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) spoke
about the importance of what he called “maintaining a constructive dialogue with the Palestinian Authority.”

As an example of something which harms America’s “ability to have that kind of discussion and dialogue,” Sen. Van Hollen said it was wrong for the U.S. to “cut off assistance” to the PA “for things like…schools.” Because, after all, who can object to helping schools? Is there a more innocent and deserving cause than educating little children?

The answer to that question can be found in a recent report by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) called “Palestinian Authority Education: A Recipe for Hate and Terror.” This is not the first report on the subject by PMW. On the contrary, it is just the latest of many such studies that PMW has published over the years. PMW spokesmen have even testified before Congress about the anti-Semitism in Palestinian Authority schools. Perhaps Senator Van Hollen was absent that day.

Here are the report’s main findings:

• “The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education, as well as PA-sponsored informal education…are actively ensuring that the conflict, terror and war will continue into the next generation.”
• “Palestinian education is indoctrinating Antisemitism. PA children are taught to see Jews as their enemy and the enemy of Allah. Jews are said to be cursed by Allah, descended from monkeys and pigs and ‘the most evil of creations.’ Children who recite these messages on children’s programs are applauded, not corrected.”
• “PA schoolbooks teach that Islam mandates that Muslims fight Israel and Jews, ‘until Resurrection.’”
• “The Palestinian Authority has named dozens of schools after terrorists, and honors them in ceremonies and events, guaranteeing that Palestinian children see terrorists who murdered Israelis as heroes and role models.”
• “Palestinian children are taught to reject Israel regardless of its policies, since Israel’s existence in itself is intolerable. All of Israel is said to be ‘Palestine’ and eventually Israel will be erased.”

This PMW report includes a foreword by the Association of Secondary School Teachers in Israel. Here’s what the association says:

Sadly, this report by the research institute Palestinian Media Watch shows that the Palestinian Authority leaders have not yet chosen this path. The PA teaches its children to reject Israel’s right to exist, encourages them to view Jews as evil and directs them to embrace terrorist murderers as role models.

This report exposes a world of demonization, incitement and hate that Palestinian children are urged to adopt. Children deserve to be brought up valuing peace, but Palestinian children are being deprived of a peaceful future and are victims of their own leaders.

So, let’s maintain one standard: No U.S. government funds for David Duke or other white supremacists, and no U.S. government funds for the David Dukes of the Middle East and their schools of hate.

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My book, A Father's Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror is available at Devon Square Press.

The fable of the frog in the cooking pot. Well, Israel is no frog.

How to squeeze Israel, gradually

David Makovsky is at it, again

Squeeze Israel more gradually!

That’s the advice a former U.S. Mideast emissary is offering Jared Kushner, courtesy of the op-ed page of Tuesday’s Washington Post.

David Makovsky, formerly the right-hand man to the Obama administration’s top Mideast envoy, Martin Indyk, was given the front-and-center spot on the Post’s op-ed page in order to tell Kushner what he’s doing wrong in his Mideast peace efforts.

There is more than a little irony in the fact that Makovsky presumes to lecture the current U.S. Mideast negotiators, after he and Indyk spent years at the exact same task and completely failed. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

According to Makovsky, Kushner’s big mistake is that he is trying to achieve too much, too soon. Kushner should seek “short-term gains” instead of “a grand peace deal.” What Makovsky has in mind is “incremental economic progress,” meaning that Israel should make one-sided economic concessions to the Palestinian Authority and the United States should start pouring money into the PA again.

Such economic “progress” would “create the political space to deal with tough policy issues later,” Makovsky claims, because it “would give Palestinian something to lose and would mitigate the chances of an explosion.”

Makovsky apparently wants us to forget that it’s all been tried before, with dismal results. From 1994 until last year, the U.S. donated a total over $10-billion to the Palestinian Arabs. Other countries around the world gave billions more. The Palestinians have had plenty “to lose,” yet they have continued to wage war against Israel anyway.

The notion that economic improvements will “mitigate the chances of an explosion” is an absurd fallacy that State Department Arabists have been promoting practically since time immemorial. Yet it has never proven true. Even at the peak of post-Oslo international largesse, the Palestinian Authority—not just Hamas, but the PA, too—actively sponsored suicide bombings, sniper attacks, stabbings, and the lynching of Jews.

The essence of the Makovsky Plan is to gradually squeeze Israel. He knows it’s too hard to get Israel to surrender everything at once, so he counsels doing it step-by-step, slice-by-slice.

 Here are some of the other “small steps” he has previously recommended:

 — Allow the PA to build in areas that the Oslo accords do not give them the right to build. (Politico, 3-30-15)

 — Admit 100,000 workers from Gaza into Israel every day. (JNS, 7-3-15)

 — “Stop [Jewish] building in 92 percent” of Judea-Samaria, and stop building even in existing communities that are “on the edge of the security barrier.” (Wash. Post, 2-26-16)

 — A U.S. declaration that moving the American embassy did not mean that the U.S. recognizes the Old City of Jerusalem as part of Israel’s capital. (NYTimes, 1-22-17)

 — Immediate restoration of $200-million U.S. aid to the PA. (The Hill, 9-23-18)

 And where will all this lead? What does Makovsky have in mind when he says that the U.S. will “deal with tough policy issues later”?

We know the answer to that because we know the demands that Makovsky and Indyk were making of Israel during the Obama years. They wanted to establish an independent Palestinian Arab state alongside an Israel that would be nine miles wide at its mid-section.

We know that’s where the border will be, because that’s where the Palestinian Arab cities of Tulkarm and Qalqilya are located. They are two of the largest cities under PA rule. There’s no way they will ever revert to being ruled by Israel. Tulkarm and Qalqilya will sit on the western-most edge of Makovsky’s State of Palestine. And only nine miles of Israel will separate them from the Mediterranean Sea.

In the days leading up to the 1967 war, Israeli mothers living in the narrow coastal region kept their children home from school, because they feared that an Arab tank column would cut the country in half, and they didn’t want their children to be trapped on the other side. That’s the kind of precarious fate that will again await Israel if Makovsky’s Gradual Squeeze Plan is ever implemented.

For those who sit on the comfortable banks of the Potomac and pontificate about what Israel should do, it’s all a matter of semantics and clever arguments and theoretical lines drawn on theoretical maps. But for every citizen of Israel, it’s a matter of life and death.

This column appeared in Arutz7, Israel National News.  It, and other columns by me,  Stephen M. Flatow, can be read here.

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

No American weapons to anti-Semitic governments

By Stephen M. Flatow

At a time when violence against Jews is on the rise around the world, should the United States provide advanced weapons to a government that actively promotes anti-Semitism?

That’s the question we need to consider as the Senate debates Senate Joint Resolution 26, which would block the administration’s plan to provide Qatar with 24 attack helicopters, 2,500 Hellfire missiles and other sophisticated military hardware.

Qatar is the world’s leading financer of the Hamas terrorists. Qatari money pays for the missiles that Hamas fires at kindergartens in Sderot. It sponsors the flaming kites and incendiary balloons that have destroyed thousands of acres of Israeli forests and farm land in the nation’s south.

Qatar also assists other anti-American terrorist groups. According to The New York Times, Qatar provides groups such as ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban with “safe haven, diplomatic mediation, financial aid and, in certain instances, weapons.”

As a result, numerous Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, broke diplomatic relations with Qatar, as well as closed their air space and shipping lanes to Qatari air and sea traffic.

For those reasons alone, American Jewish organizations should be actively lobbying to prevent arms to Qatar. But it is also important to consider the fact that Qatar is one of the leading purveyors of anti-Semitism in the world today.

— The government of Qatar finances the Al Jazeera international media network. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Al Jazeera has “a troubling record of providing a platform to all manner of virulent anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic extremists and of serving as a propaganda tool against the State of Israel.”

— The recent international book fair in Qatar’s capital, Doha, featured books such as The Myth of the Nazi Gas Chambers and Lies Spread by the Jews, and an Arabic-language translation of Awakening to Jewish Influence in the United States of America by white-supremacist leader David Duke.

— According to the ADL, Qatari government-controlled media outlets regularly publish editorial cartoons that “blatantly demonize Jews” and “cross the line from legitimate criticism of Israel or its policies into overt anti-Semitism. … These cartoons draw on the worst kind of anti-Semitic themes and give them new life, including conspiracy theories of Jewish world domination; blood libels; the association of Zionism with Nazism; the demonization and dehumanization of Israel and Jews; the invocation of William Shakespeare’s Shylock; and the use of stereotypical medieval Jewish imagery.”

— A study by MEMRI found that the textbooks used in Qatari schools “feature anti-Semitic motifs, presenting Jews as treacherous, dishonest and crafty, and at the same time as weak, wretched and cowardly.”

One of the assignments in the books requires students “to compare the Jews’ attitude toward the Muslims in the time of Muhammad and their attitude toward the Muslims today, in light of the material learned in the lesson. The students are apparently expected to infer that the traits ascribed to the Jews in the chapter—treachery, cowardice, etc.—are also applicable to the Jews today.”

At a time when the murders in Pittsburgh and Poway are still fresh in our memories, when Jews are being violently assaulted in the streets of Brooklyn, N.Y., and when hate groups are on the rise at home and abroad, what kind of message will it send if the United States provides weapons to a government that actively promotes anti-Semitism?

I am troubled that American Jewish and Zionist organizations have not spoken out against the proposed arms sales to Qatar. I hope their silence has nothing to do with the visits that some leaders of Jewish organizations made to Qatar not long ago or the hefty donations that Qatar has made in and off the Beltway.

This is not a time for Jewish silence. The Jewish community needs to unite around the principle of “No Weapons for Anti-Semites!”

(This article first appeared at jns.org.)

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My book, “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror”, is available with free shipping from the publisher Devon Square Press.

Naming a chess tournament in honor of a terrorist; My column on Israel National News

Naming a chess tournament in honor of a terrorist

In most parts of the world, chess tournaments are named after sponsors or stars of the sport.

• The Capablanca Memorial chess tournament, held each year in Cuba, honors a 1920s Cuban chess master named Jose Raul Capablanca y Graupera
• The Sinquefield Cup, a chess tournament in St. Louis, is named after Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield, the founders of the city’s chess club as well as the World Chess Hall of Fame.
• The Tata Steel Chess Tournament, in the Netherlands, bears the name of its corporate sponsor.

Only in the Palestinian Authority (PA) can one find a chess tournament named after one of the most notorious terrorists in modern times.

Leave it to the PA to name its new chess tournament after someone who had no connection to the sport, but whom it simply admires: Khalil Al-Wazir, better known as Abu Jihad.

Al-Wazir was a co-founder, along with Yasir Arafat, of the terrorist Fatah movement in 1965. PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas is the current leader of Fatah.

According to the PA’s own calculation, al-Wazir masterminded numerous terrorist attacks, in which 125 people were killed. He was responsible for, among others, the murder of American diplomats in Khartoum (Sudan) in 1973, and the Tel Aviv Highway Massacre in 1978, in which 36 Israelis and nature photographer Gail Rubin, the niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, were murdered.

In commemoration of the anniversary of al-Wazir’s death last month, the PA inaugurated a “Martyr Khalil Al-Wazir Abu Jihad Individual Chess Tournament of the Palestine Northern Districts.” It will operate under the auspices of the PA’s Palestinian Chess Federation and will be financed by the Jenin branch of Chairman Abbas’s Fatah movement.

Chess is not the only local sport through which the Palestinian commemorate their hero, Abu Jihad. The Ansar Al-Quds soccer club, near Jerusalem, holds an Abu Jihad Tournament. As do the Palestinian Judo Association, the Palestinian Table-Tennis Association, and the Palestinian Boxing Association.

The chess honor was just one of several public displays of adoration for Abu Jihad in recent weeks. On the campus of Al-Istiqlal University, in PA-controlled Jericho, Abbas also inaugurated a new “Martyr Khalil Al-Wazi Abu Jihad Faculty for Administration and Military Sciences.” And a festival honoring Abu Jihad was held at the PA’s Al-Quds Open University, near Jerusalem.

Just a few weeks earlier, the PA renamed a school in Al-Yamun, near Jenin, “The Martyr Abu Jihad School for Boys.” That event also included the unveiling  of a huge mural of the arch-terrorist on a wall of the school. Senior PA officials, and Abu Jihad’s wife, were on hand to take part.

That celebration of terror caught the eye of U.S. Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt, who tweeted: "Despicable glorification of violence and terrorism displayed at a Palestinian school w/ a painting of Abu Jihad (Khalil Al-Wazir). Palestinian students deserve to learn about respectable accomplishments of their community not this."

The official PA daily newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, replied to Greenblatt by hailing Abu Jihad as “the Prince of Martyrs and one of the greatest symbols of our people and our modern revolution…He is the First Bullet and the First Stone. He is present among us like a light that is not extinguished.”

There were additional articles in the PA newspaper deriding Greenblatt as “this Zionized American” and calling his criticism “a racist, extremist, Zionist and hostile attack against a national symbol.” (Translations courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.)

Like every regime in the world, the PA sometimes bases its policy decisions in part on its perception of how the international community will respond. As a result, strong condemnations and penalties can have an impact.

So, it will be interesting to see whether the World Chess Federation recognizes the Abu Jihad Tournament—and how the Federation’s American affiliate, the United States Chess Federation, relates to a tournament named in honor of a murderer of American citizens. 

It’s their move.

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

This article can be read on-line here.

#Fatah #PalestinianAuthority

A Review of A Father's Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror written by Stephen M. Flatow

In new memoir, father seeks justice from terrorists who killed his daughter

jpost.com/Magazine/Fighting-back-576170

By Gil TroyJanuary 1, 2019

In April 1995, a Palestinian terrorist murdered Alisa Flatow, a 20-year-old American.

Beyond further illustrating Palestinians’ obsession with killing Jews and not building Palestine, this crime showed that six months before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Palestinian terrorists were already sabotaging the Oslo Peace Process.

This tragedy also mobilized Stephen Flatow against the terror infrastructure that murdered his daughter. Flatow’s determination created a new tool against terrorism – lawfare; drained billions from the networks bankrolling terrorism; and pushed back creatively against Iran, the world’s great terror-paymaster.

His battle was one “I’d win, but one which could never compensate me for what I had lost,” Flatow writes in his new book, A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.

That subtle, tear-stained sentence captures the nightmare haunting his life – and both sides of his remarkable memoir. It’s a compelling legal-political thriller, and a searing tribute to a missing daughter.

The first dimension is a real-life Hollywood thriller. A regular guy – a real-estate lawyer from New Jersey – seeking justice, punishes evil, confronts hypocrisy and inspires millions. Flatow wanted to sue the Iranians for financing Alisa’s murderer. He assumed the discovery process would embarrass them, exposing the mullahocracy’s evils. But – surprise! The court quickly awarded his family $250 million.

Then the real drama began.

As Flatow explained to me recently in Jerusalem, the American government “was caught flat-footed by the judgment, too.” Then-president Bill Clinton feared this decision might unleash many Lone American Rangers against foreign governments – making a mess of American foreign policy. Less explicable was Clinton’s softness toward Iran – which Barack Obama mimicked. That’s “what still frustrates me the most,” Flatow says. “I could never quite understand what his goal was.”

Thanks to Flatow’s superhuman persistence – lobbying, cajoling, button-holing, speechifying, op-eding – the Flatows eventually received about one-tenth of the award. Today, the money funds good causes, especially the kind of year-in-Israel programs Alisa was enjoying when she was killed.

Unfortunately, they were double-crossed.

Flatow refused to take “one cent” from the American taxpayer. The Clintonites implied the funds came from $400 million in seized Iranian assets. Only in 2016, when the Obama administration inexplicably paid Iran the $400 million – plus $1.3 billion in interest – did Flatow realize he’d been snookered.

What makes the book most memorable is the emotional journey Flatow shares with the reader as the international intrigue is playing out.

Alisa was a vivacious kid who, like all kids, wasn’t perfect, and wondered why things went wrong when they did. Once, when she broke her foot, Flatow explained to Alisa: “Things happen. We just don’t understand why. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

FLATOW WRITES movingly about his excruciating last-minute flight to Israel, with his daughter on life-support, to authorize ending her life – and sharing her organs with others. It will be a challenge for readers – seeing how he’s shepherded with love along the way – to get through the book without getting misty-eyed.

At the funeral, after calmly recounting the Israeli and American love that enveloped them, Flatow said: “What breaks my heart the most is this. There’s one family mourning the loss of a child. And there’s a family dancing with glee that their son killed himself – and my daughter.”

Later, he recalls being cross-examined by his lawyer, Tom Fay, who asked: “Mr. Flatow, you were the father of Alisa Flatow?”
Flatow responded: “No.”

Fay “looked lost.” Flatow explained: “I’m still her father.”

Fay teared up. The judge swiveled away, trying to hide his emotions. Flatow realized then that he just might win.

Today, Flatow tells Orthodox students: “You must learn how to stand up for yourself as a person and a Jew. History has taught us if we don’t stand up for ourselves no one else will. But we do it in a civil way.” He tells non-religious Jews: “Israel is our home. We can always look toward Israel for our strength and our inspiration.” Then he adds, “Please, understand that people there are under tremendous pressure and they deserve our support.”

Flatow has lived a full life, with a loving wife, four surviving children and 16 grandchildren. He has full days, often waking up at 5 a.m. But, he says, “Eventually, every night, you run out of steam. You never quite recover.” 

This Jewish hero, this American hero, this extraordinary human being, ends his love poem to his daughter, to Judaism, Israel, Zionism and humanity, with the wrenching words: “I can only hope that I will find my right place.”

We hope so, too, while imagining how many lives he – and Alisa by extension – saved by pursuing the terrorists and their enablers, putting them on the defensive for a change.

The writer is the author of the newly-released The Zionist Ideas, an update and expansion of Arthur Hertzberg’s classic anthology,The Zionist Idea, published by the Jewish Publication Society. A distinguished scholar of North American History at McGill University, he is the author of 10 books on American history, including The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s.