A moment of silence

 . . . an extended moment that will last until next Sunday.

(Nothing new will be posted here until then; and comments won't be moderated.  I should have some interesting new stuff after that.)

Bachmann's "Choot-spa"

You say "choot-spa"; I say "chutzpa". Let's call the whole thing off.

About the Leiby Kletzky murder

Fred Mogul, a reporter for WNYC, gave a brilliant report on the Leiby Kletzky murder this morning. If you have 6:24 minutes to spare, give it a listen.

An article on the subject has been posted at the WNYC website here: Borough Park Reels at News of Boy's Death.

The blog Failed Messiah has been posting reports from the local news media concerning very troubling details about the confessed killer, Levi Aron. Those reports indicate that many of those who knew him considered him to be mentally ill, and that his behavior had raised fears among his neighbors that he might harm a child. Those reports, which should not be read by everyone, can  be found here. (Failed Messiah, which is written by a disillusioned former Lubavitcher hasid named Shmarya Rosenberg, provides unvarnished, if sometimes opinionated, reporting about aspects of the haredi community that haredi news sources do not cover.)

Amateur video of Leiby Kletzky's funeral can be viewed below.

That this will be my last post about this subject.

Remains of Leibby Kletzky, Borough Park boy, found; Murder suspect in custody

This story is simply too horrible and upsetting.  For those who know these neighborhoods, it hits especially hard.  Similarly, for parents who trust their children to school buses, summer camps and to fate, this story is especially hard to take.

from NY1:

A 38-year-old Brooklyn man is in police custody after authorities say he allegedly made statements implicating himself in the gruesome murder of nine-year-old Leibby Kletzky.

Police say the man, who has not been identified, was nabbed at his attic apartment in the Kensington section of Brooklyn, where authorities say they found a refrigerator containing human remains.

Other suspected parts of the Borough Park boy's body were discovered this morning in a dumpster in Sunset Park, wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag inside a suitcase.

Detectives had seen the suspect on surveillance video entering a dentist's office, but they did not know who he was. They later went to the office and got his address there.

Investigators say other surveillance video shows the boy with an unidentified man and possibly getting into the man's car.

The massive search for Leibby began late Monday afternoon, when the boy did not return to his family from Boyan Day Camp on 44th Street and 12th Avenue in Borough Park.

He was seen on another surveillance video at 44th Street and 15th Avenue, off course from where his mother says they had planned to meet.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who helped head up the search for Leibby, said it is hard to comprehend what happened.  "It's something that I, like every school parent would think today, how could something like this happen? How is it possible that someone could take a nine-year-old, a little boy, an innocent little boy, and do what he did to this little child?" Hikind said on a phone interview with NY1. "People are out here in the streets where the family is. I met with the family many times yesterday and just tried to give them strength and hope that things will turn out well. Oh my god, oh my god."

from the Daily News:

Leiby Kletzky, 8, went missing after leaving his day camp.

The body parts of an 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who vanished while walking home alone from camp were found Wednesday in a refrigerator of a man being questioned in his disappearance, police sources said.
The discovery of Leiby Kletzky early Wednesday morning capped a frantic two-day search for the child.

The Orthodox Jewish boy's apparent body parts - including his severed feet - were in the refrigerator of a 35-year-old man, who lives in a third-floor attic apartment on E. Second St. in Kensington, one of the sources said.

Other pieces of the boy were found in a suitcase wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag in a dumpster on 20th St. in Greenwood Heights, between Fourth and Fifth Aves., said the NYPD's top spokesman Paul Browne.

The suspect, who has no prior arrests on record, was taken into custody at 2:40 a.m. at his apartment, which is around the corner from P.S. 17. He made statements implicating himself in Leiby's death, Browne said.
"He has no excuse," a source said. "He doesn't know why he did it."

Mondoweiss covers up fraudulent fundraising by deleting document record

I wrote over the weekend that the blog Mondoweiss had published a fundraising pitch which falsely reported that the blog needed readers to contribute funds because it was "under Israeli attack". (Read here.)  Since that fraudulent fundraising pitch was revealed here, the editors of Mondoweiss have deleted from their website pages documenting both the initial fraud and subsequent admissions by one of the editors that their attack report was false.   Despite those apparent cover-up efforts, a cached version of one of the scrubbed webpages can still be read here; a text-only version is available here.

Below is a screen shot of an exchange of comments between a reader and Mondoweiss editor Adam Horowitz from a cached version recovered after Mondoweiss deleted the original earlier today.

The concerned reader, writing under the screen name "seafoid", asks for more information concerning the blog's June 27 report that it needed assistance because it was under "Israeli attack".  Horowitz admits without explanation that the report was false, and that the fundraising pitch had been edited to reflect that fact.  Since the time that exchanged was posted, the blog has offered no other comment on or explanation of the fraudulent fundraiser.  In fact, instead of addressing the serious ethical questions raised by their use of a false news report in soliciting donations from readers, they seem instead to have chosen a more Nixonian approach, simply deleting, first, the initial false report and, subsequently, the editor's admission that the report was false.  The blogs editors have failed to reveal who wrote the false report and how it came to be published on their blog.

To refresh your memory, below is a screen shot of the fraudulent fundraising pitch which I found in a cached version after Mondoweiss had deleted the original from their website.

That false report was signed by Mondoweiss editors Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, and was posted by Mondoweiss blogger Alec Kinnear.  While they have deleted the original version, that webpage is still available in cached version here.  A subsequent version without the claim of Israeli attack is available in cached version here.

Rather than address the ethical questions raised by the revelation that they published a false news report in order to solicit funds, Mondoweiss has chosen instead to simply wipe clean the record of both the initial report and their subsequent admission that it was false.  This pattern of repeatedly covering up the facts concerning this matter raises further, extremely serious, questions about Mondoweiss' ethical standards.  Can journalists be considered journalists at all when they file false news reports to raise funds, then cover it up?  

Mondoweiss' fundraising hoax

As reported here yesterday, the blog Mondoweiss first published, then rescinded without explanation, a fundraising plea falsely claiming the blog needed help because it was "under Israeli attack".  When a regular reader who had seen the original version posted a sympathetic comment asking what form the Israeli attack on Mondoweiss had taken, an editor of the blog was forced to admit that the charge had been false, but failed to explain how it came to be published.  The headline was changed to something innocuous  and the fraud was forgotten.  (Read here.)

At the suggestion of someone who read my initial post about this, I went back and found a cached version of the original post with the fraudulent headline.  Here's a screen shot of it:

Mondoweiss fundraiser with fraudulent headline

That fundraising pitch, while signed by the blog's co-editors Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, was posted by a Mondoweiss blogger by the name of Alec Kinnear (read here).  The Vienna-based Kinnear not only blogs on Mondoweiss, he also maintains his own blogs.  From one of them, we learn that Kinnear believes that 9/11 was "probably" done by the Mossad under the direction of Dick Cheney (read here), and that Rachel Corrie was murdered on the direct orders of Ariel Sharon in order to gauge the American reaction (read here).  On another blog he maintains, we learn that Kinnear was an admirer of the late neo-fascist Austrian politician Jörg Haider (read here), although, oddly, he fails to mention Haider's troubling politics.

It is impossible to know for certain which of these three Mondoweiss bloggers, Weiss, Horowitz or Kinnear, wrote the fraudulent fundraising headline which falsely claimed that the blog needed help because it was "under Israeli attack".  That question has not been addressed on the blog.  We do know that Kinnear has made no secret of his bizarre political opinions -- in fact, he has expressed them on the Mondoweiss website, where he writes that he literally worries that Israel will stage a covert op to disrupt a benefit for the blog (read here).  That a person with such views has unsupervised blogging privileges at Mondoweiss, and that the blog entrusts its fundraising to him and lets him post as true completely false reports which they then delete without explanation, raise serious questions about Mondoweiss and its editors -- questions about journalistic ethics and judgement which the blog should address.

If any readers of this post think these concerns inflated, consider the following.   If a blog publishes a false report in order to raise funds, would you consider that an attempted fraud?  At the very least, having been caught soliciting money from their readers based on a falsehood, wouldn't that blog owe their readers a full accounting of how this happened and an offer to return any funds raised via deception?

Moreover, doesn't Mondoweiss owe its readers an explanation of their lapse in judgement in granting Alec Kinnear unsupervised blogging privileges on their website?  After all, his bizarre political views are on the public record.

Kinnear, in fairness, has written in his own defense that he can't be an anti-Semite because, he says, "I have many Jewish friends and colleagues".  Yet, in the column that elicited that familiar defense (read here), he predicted the following for Jews:

Logically the quandary is thus posed:

--the state policies of Israel are totally unacceptable to civilised man
--it is our duty as a state to oppose these Israeli policies
--many Jews support these policies and other Jews support these policies clandestinely, indeed Jewish advisors led America into this preposterous war
--thus no Jew can be trusted in government any longer, as he may be working against his own state to support the inhuman policies in Palestine

In the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews would convert superficially to Catholicism but continue to practice their faith, until discovered. At that point, the unfortunate Jew (and others) would suffer persecution if not death, until finally the Jews were driven from that country. A similar unwelcome fate awaits Jews around the world if this madness cannot be stopped.

Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz recently published a column which used neo-Nazi leader David Duke's term to define Zionism and opposition to anti-Semitism: "Jewish supremacism".  (Read here.)  Now they have turned over some of their blog's fundraising to someone who admires Jörg Haider and predicts a reprise of the Spanish Inquisition.   In spite of all this, they claim that their blog represents a "progressive Jewish" point of view.  (Read here.)  Can a legitimately progressive and Jewish point of view include common ground with the opinions of David Duke,  Jörg Haider and Torquemada?  At what point will Mondoweiss' sponsors and readership look at this madness and say "enough"?


[NOTE (7/11/11): In the hours since this was published, Mondoweiss editors have scrubbed some of the webpages discussed in this post from their website in an apparent attempt to cover up the fraud.  A cached version of the revised fundraising pitch and the attached comment by an editor indicating that the initial report was false is available in cached version here.  A report about Mondoweiss' cover-up featuring screen shots of the some of the deleted documents can be read here.]

Below, screen shot of Alec Kinnear's column entitled "Farewell Jörg | Abschiedsbrief Jörg Haider", which eulogized far-right politician Jörg Haider:

Mondoweiss fraudulent fundraising blamed financial woes on "Israeli attack"

The anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss has attempted to raise funds by fraudulently claiming that they've been "under Israeli attack". When a sympathetic reader commented to ask specifically what form the Israeli attack took, Mondoweiss co-editor Adam Horowitz was forced to respond with the following:

Yeah, I’ve changed that, it was the wrong choice of words. We are not “under attack”, but we certainly need the support of our readers to keep the site going.

The headline on the donation pitch has since been changed to the innocuous "Help Mondoweiss stay afloat with a voluntary subscription", but the URL preserves the original header: "http://mondoweiss.net/2011/06/help-mondoweiss-stay-afloat-under-israeli-attack.html".

The blogs editors have failed to explain how this fraudulent fundraising pitch came to be posted on their blog.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Readers (those who have been approved by the editors to post comments to the blog) have been  suggesting ways for the blog can raise money other than by falsely claiming that they're victims of an Israeli black op.  A Mondoweiss reader and frequent commenter named Alec Kinnear writes in response to a suggestion that a benefit be staged:

Throwing a Mondoweiss fundraising party would be a great idea (except that the Mossad would probably bomb it via the Dubai 11 and then try to pin it on Hamas) . . . 

That odd fear isn't all that surprising considering that Kinnear has written on his blog that he believes that the Mossad "probably" did 9/11 (read here), and that he believes Rachel Corrie to have died in a murder plotted by the Israeli government as a "test to see how large the reaction to an American death would be" (read here).  Kinnear wrote of the latter post

I have a feeling that the article sharon’s eastern front | next exile of the jews | Q & A will have me tarred as an antisemite. This is not a fair charge. I have many Jewish friends and colleagues. I both have employed Jews and have been employed by Jews.

That's convincing.  In that post, Kinnear goes on to compare Israel to Nazi Germany and to praise the Naturei Karta as the good kind of Jew.  Kinnear also seems to have been rather fond of the Austrian far-right politician Jörg Hader (read here).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The post containing fraudulent, paranoid charges against Israel and the gratuitously bigoted comments posted to it are consistent with the overall tone of Mondoweiss.   Phil Weiss and Adam Horowitz subtitle their blog "The War of Ideas in the Middle East", but it more often seems like an argument among Americans about the best reasons to hate Israel.  The tactics they use in their "war of ideas" now include falsely reporting as true imaginary Israeli attacks on his blog to convince his readers to contribute money, then retreating when asked for specifics about those purported attacks.  The troubled Middle East deserves better ideas than those provided by Mondoweiss.

Kwame Kilpatrick says he's the victim of Jewish conspiracy

Kwame Kilpatrick, who disgraced himself by committing perjury while serving as mayor of Detroit, has published a memoir in which he tries to both restore his reputation both by claiming to have undergone a religious conversion and to cast blame for his problems on other people.  That these two goals contain intrinsic contradictions does not appear to matter to him.  Neither do the legal implications of the book's purported revelations.  He claims in his book that his guilty plea and the statements he made under oath in his plea colloquy were false.  By recanting his plea in this manner, Kilpatrick paradoxically would have his readers believe that he didn't commit a crime until he admitted to committing a crime.  He wants you to believe that his admission of perjury was perjury.

According to an AP report (read here):

"I stood before Judge David Groner, who requested my plea. `I lied under oath,' I said, `with the intent to mislead the court and jury and to impede and obstruct the fair administration of justice,'" Kilpatrick writes. "For the record, I lied when I made that statement. The real reason I lied under oath was because I didn't want my wife to know I cheated. But be clear. There was absolutely no justice to obstruct in the whistle-blowers' suit. The case was manufactured. I was just cornered."

Kilpatrick will be released from prison shortly, but his future seems to promise further troubles of his own manufacture.  He faces two years of probation and likely prosecution for 19 counts of tax fraud which could put him back in prison for decades.  (Read here.)

He's in a difficult position, considering that he has admitted lying under oath, then recanted that admission with another admission of lying under oath.  Both in his book and via leaks to friendly reporters, he now tries to smear whatever scapegoats are convenient.  That brings me to this.  Kirkpatrick now blames a conspiracy of Jews for his troubles.

According to the Michigan Citizen, Kilpatrick's extensive legal woes derive from his having cut municipal funding for an organization called Jewish Vocational Services.  After this, says the Michigan Citizen, Kilpatrick participated in a Nation of Islam ceremony honoring Louis Farrakhan.  Kilpatrick and his supporters at the Michigan Citizen seem to argue that these acts so angered the local franchise of the Elders of Zion, that they instructed law enforcement authorities to focus their attention on Kilpatrick.  If not for this Jewish conspiracy, he complains, he would have gotten away with the crimes he has admitted to having committed.

Here's how Zenobia Jeffries of the Michigan Citizen puts it (read here) :

There’s always been somewhat of an underlying question in the midst of the Kilpatrick scandal: Who the hell did he piss off to bring this level of scrutiny?

This question could be answered in Kilpatrick’s account of visits by Detroit attorney Reggie Turner on behalf of the area’s powerful Jewish community. Kilpatrick’s General Counsel Sharon McPhail angered many organizations when she set out to improve the placement rates for groups receiving Workforce Development funds. She required recipients to reapply for their funding and submit detailed strategies to improve placement rates.

The Jewish Vocational Services, who received $25 million from the city in workforce funds, had only a two percent placement rate. They were cut.

According to Kilpatrick, the February 2007 Savior’s Day, an important event for African Americans, at Ford Field with Nation of Islam national leader Louis Farrakhan was also an offense to the Jewish community.

As local reporter Jeff Watrick points out, the Michigan Citizen can hardly claim to report on Kilpatrick without bias. (Read here.)

Catherine Kelly, the Citizen’s publisher is married to former Kwame Kilpatrick aide and long-time Bernard Kilpatrick BFF Michael Tardif. Team Kilpatrick sticks together when it comes to “resurrecting” their golden child’s reputation.

As nauseating as all this is, it gets worse.  According to the Michigan Citizen, Kilpatrick's book documents his journey to redemption, implying that he has undergone a religious rebirth.

Kilpatrick's book also claims that his "enemies" had a broader agenda than what he cited to the Michigan Citizen, and that this presents an ongoing problem for Detroit.

"When I perjured myself, I gave my enemies a lane. And they turned that lane into a highway," Kilpatrick writes, according to an advance copy obtained by The Associated Press. "My intent entering office was to empower Detroiters, and my actions heading into my second term suggested that we had the ability to do it. And that threatened too many people's bottom line. Their bottom lines for me, then, became simple. Get rid of me. And they're not finished."

By shamelessly promoting bigotry and by wrapping his hate speech in a cloak of religious redemption, Kwame Kilpatrick has done what few thought possible.  He has brought further, greater disgrace on himself.

Joel Klein and Viet Dinh to head News Corp. scandal response team

Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education under Mayor Bloomberg, has been chosen by Rupert Murdoch to head a team tasked with responding to the growing News Corp. voice mail hacking scandal. Klein was hired by News Corp. to head their educational publications division after stepping down as schools chancellor in 2010. (Read here.) Co-directing the special response team will be Viet Dinh, who served as Assistant Attorney General under George W. Bush and was chief author of the Patriot Act. (Read here.) Dinh currently works as a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center, and serves on the Board of Directors of News Corp.

Does the fact that Murdoch has chosen two American attorneys to lead News Corp's response team indicate that he expects the scandal to spread to his U.S. media outlets?

Mondoweiss hits new low in its defense of Salah with neo-Nazi term

The blog Mondoweiss has published a column defending Palestinian Islamist leader Raed Salah and blaming his arrest on excessive Jewish influence in the U.K. (Read here: The real preachers of hate: Britain arrests respected Palestinian leader.)  Written by free-lance journalist Jonathan Cook, the column not only fails to mention Salah's extensive history of anti-Jewish hate speech, it turns the facts on their head in a manner reminiscent of U.S. neo-Nazi leader David Duke.  Cook writes that the Israeli public "loathes" Salah not because of his bigotry and incitements of violence, but because his Islamic faith is "incompatible with the state ideology of Jewish supremacism".  The phrase "Jewish supremacism" was coined by David Duke to counter his being labeled a white supremacist.  Duke came up with the term in writing (with editorial assistance from David Irving) a book called "My Awakening", which described Duke's "Aryan vision for America".  (Read here.)

Now Mondoweiss has deployed that term to defend an advocate for precisely the sort of religious "supremacism" they purport to oppose.  In that, they are following the model of the originator of the term.  From David Duke they have learned that, when an anti-Jewish bigot is called out for having an extensive and indefensible record of hate speech, the best defense is to call the charge a manifestation of the intrinsic bigotry of any expression of Jewish political opinion.

Here's a longer quote from the piece which puts Cook's argument in broader context:

Most in Israel’s Jewish majority would not have been aware of Sheikh Salah’s supposed reputation as a Jew hater either, despite their hyper-vigilance for anything resembling anti-Semitism. True, he is generally loathed by Israeli Jews, but chiefly because they regard his brand of Islamic dogma as incompatible with the state ideology of Jewish supremacism. (Israelis) fear (Salah) as the leader of a local Islam that refuses to be tamed. Those Israelis who conclude that this qualifies him as an anti-Semite do so only because they class all pious Muslims in the same category.

Israeli officials detest Sheikh Salah as well, but again not for any alleged racism. His long-running campaign to prevent what he regards as an attempted Israeli takeover of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound – part of a wider “Judaisation” programme in the occupied areas of the city – has made him a thorn in their side.

Cook falsely claims that, in spite of Israeli "hyper-vigilance" concerning anti-Semitism, they have failed to detect any traces of that belief in Salah's utterances.  Cook may regret basing his argument on such an easily refutable misstatement of the facts.  It is one thing to reach an incorrect conclusion based on shoddy reasoning; it is another matter to ignore an extensive historic record of which at least some of his readers will be aware.  That's what brings such arguments into the realm of unintentional self-parody.  Such columns have a tendency to conveniently disappear after their distortions become evident even to those who want to believe them.

Let's take a look at Salah's views concerning Jews, the human rights of women and gays, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and on biblical history.  As you read Salah's words, remember that, according to Mondoweiss, if you oppose Salah's views, you too are a "Jewish supremacist" or one of their dupes.

“You Jews are criminal bombers of mosques,
Slaughterers of pregnant women and babies.
Robbers and germs in all times,
The Creator sentenced you to be loser monkeys,
Victory belongs to Muslims, from the Nile to the Euphrates"

[Source]

"We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children's blood. Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread . . . Great God, is this a religion?  Is this what God would want? God will deal with you yet for what you are doing."

[Speech at the February 16, 2007 protest in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. Source.]

On 9/11:

“(T)he manifests of the two airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines, whose planes crashed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center, included not a single Arab…. Yet three days later the FBI released the names of 19 Arab passengers, claiming that they were the hijackers of the four planes.”

“A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.”

“Is it true that the American administration arrested five Israelis with European citizenship on suspicion of involvement in the incident[?] They worked for a Jew in a moving company, with forged visas, and were severely tortured during their interrogation so that they would give details about the incident…”

[Source]

Interviewer: What is your opinion of homosexuality?
Salah: It is a crime. A great crime. Such phenomena signal the start of the collapse of every society. Those who believe in Allah know that behavior of that kind brings his wrath and is liable to cause the worst things to happen. There is no solution for this, unless the individual’s faith is strengthened.

Interviewer: What is your opinion of the legislation now being discussed in the Knesset, which would grant Muslim women rights similar to those of Jewish women in matters of personal status?
Salah: That bill is tantamount to a war on Islam. It is an attempt to dictate different, foreign values that are neither Muslim nor Palestinian values.

Interviewer: What do you think of murder to save the family honor?

Salah: "There is no such concept and we do not recognize this concept. There is no such thing as `losing the family honor' or of committing murder `for the sake of family honor.' These are contradictions. We have the family and the family has its honor, which has to be preserved. We have to ask those who talk about murder for the sake of the family honor - mainly feminist organizations - what they did to prevent the murder of family honor itself. Unfortunately, nothing at all has been done in this regard. On the contrary: Some of the people who invented this concept are encouraging anarchy in the society, because they don't know how to handle the matter.

"All those who claim that women have the right to do with their bodies as they please are implanting anarchy in the society. If we say that a woman's body is hers and that no one may harm it, that is correct. But the danger is that some people interpret this to mean that a woman can do whatever she likes with her body, without taking into consideration the Islamic and Arab values. As such, they are helping put the woman to death while she is still alive."

The Al-Buraq Wall [the Islamic name for the Western Wall] is not the western wall of the Temple. Unfortunately, Jewish extremists, in the name of religion, are exploiting feelings of Jews on this subject and trying to sell them lies.

[Haaretz; Interview conducted by Jalal Bana; 10/24/2001 Primary Source;  Secondary Source ]

According to Mondoweiss, opposition to Salah's hateful views reflects Jewish disdain for the rest of humanity.  They've learned their lesson well.  That's exactly what David Duke says about opposition to his "Aryan vision for America".

Should have seen this one coming

Berlusconi allies busted for bear meat party

Salon falsely reports that Israel has attacked Gaza flotilla

Salon is posting their coverage of the Gaza flotilla under the bizarre topic headline "Israel Flotilla Attack". Did I miss something, or are the editors of Salon wishing for an attack and reporting that it has happened before it has?

from Gaza flotilla plots next move - Israel Flotilla Attack | Gaza Flotilla Attack - Salon.com

Anti-Israel riot at Melbourne chocolate shop. Anti-chocolate intifada begins.

from Anti-Israel protesters arrested in Melbourne | JTA - Jewish & Israel News

SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) – A clash erupted between police and anti-Israeli protesters outside a Max Brenner chocolate shop in Melbourne.

Nineteen protesters were arrested and three police were injured in the July 2 fracas, the Herald Sun reported.

Sixteen of the activists were charged for various offenses including assaulting police, riotous behavior, besetting premises and trespassing, the paper reported.

The downtown protest, organized by leftist groups, accused Israel of "ongoing ethnic cleansing" and targeted Max Brenner because its Israeli parent company, the Strauss Group, supports the Israel Defense Forces, organizers claimed.

But federal Labor lawmaker Michael Danby, who was in Israel last week, accused the “prejudiced extremists” of hypocrisy.

"While 1500 people are murdered in Syria, they launch their own sad little attack on a chocolate shop because it also has stores in Israel," he was quoted as saying.

from Ynet:

Salem Nasser, one of the organizers of the protest, belongs to a group called Socialist Alternative. He [sic] commented on its website that the protest had been against "Palestinian oppression" and "ethnic cleansing".

"People were making speeches about the daily attacks that Palestinians endure ... and scores who are killed every month at the hands of the IDF," the Herald Sun cited him [sic] as saying . . .

Nasser (who, contrary to the pronouns used in the news accounts above, is female) is an architecture student and member of "Architects for Peace". (Read here.)

According to the Socialist Alternative website, that group takes credit for "demonstrations that successfully shut down the Israeli-owned Jericho/Black Pearl cosmetics company" located in the same Melbourne shopping mall. (Read here.) Socialist Alternative advocates what it calls a "Third Intifada". (Read here.) The group takes credit for a similar incident which took place outside a chocolate shop near Sydney two weeks ago. (Read here.)

Michael Scheuer Predicts "Fighting In Our Streets" Due To Obama's Afghanistan Policy

Michael Scheuer, one of Ron Paul's key foreign policy advisors, has predicted in an interview televised on Fox News that the fighting in Afghanistan will worsen and spread to the United States.

SOURCE: Fox Regular Scheuer Predicts "Fighting In Our Streets" Due To Obama's Afghanistan Policy | Media Matters for America

The real road to Palestinian statehood?

BBC News - Palestinians play first World Cup qualifier at home

Reporters quit flotilla over concerns about Hamas involvement, dictatorial atmosphere

from Elder of Ziyon: Every Dutch reporter has now quit the [Hamas] flotilla:

I quoted a Radio Netherlands reporter Eric Beauchemin describing why he could not go on the flotilla voyage, as the Dutch leaders of the voyage refused to answer questions.


Now every Dutch reporter on the flotilla has bailed out for the same reasons. And they are also upset over how the flotilla is hiding the involvement of at least one known Hamas leader.


From De Telegraaf:

Enraged at the paranoia, the dictatorial atmosphere, mutual distrust and outright opposition on board, all Dutch journalists to leave the ship which the Dutch activists seek confrontation with Israeli marines in the Gaza Strip.


According to the four reporters who left, they were censored by the activists, who did not respond to any critical questions, such as the financing of the ship. The money was scraped together by collections in Dutch mosques, as this newspaper revealed earlier.


Vara editor Hasna El Maroudi decided to leave because the organization does not want to say that there were other participants: "I was not surprised by the presence of figures or organizations that I want nothing to do with. Also it remained unclear how the financing of the boat was done. I have repeatedly asked, but the answer was hidden in a web of vague foundations and umbrella organizations." Hasna El Maroudi is a former columnist for NRC.


Now it appears that the infamous Dutch Hamas leader Amin Abou Rashed was also present in recent days in the training of the crew in Greece. El Maroudi: "Amin was present on the day the Dutch delegation, part of the non-violence training followed. Wilfred van de Poll, journalist for de Trouw, just spoke with Amin about his presence and his role within the organization. "The brain behind the fleet" had arranged the purchase of the boat. He also provided a lion's share of funding."


El Maroudi: "During the dinner Anne de Jong (one of the driving forces behind the fleet, ed) raved that it is all lies and that Amin was a terribly nice man, who with incredible love and commitment to the Palestinians. Perhaps in her blue eyes she believes this, but I can not, simply because his involvement in the fleet been kept secret until his arrival in Greece. Not only from the outside world, but also from the passengers. "




Trouw reporter Wilfred van de Poll also withdrew from sailing because he no longer trusted the organization. He said that the organization suffers from utter paranoia, especially about possible leaks to The Guardian. The de Trouw journalist speaks of "childish insinuations" and an "atmosphere of suspicion" that the journalists received.


[Radio Netherlands] Worldwide reporter Eric Beauchemin also noted: "After one week in Greece, I lost all confidence in the responsible Foundation Netherlands Gaza. At our first meeting on the island of Corfu it was all wrong. One of the organizers was furious because Dutch journalist information was leaked to The Guardian. I've worked 25 years as a journalist, but I've never seen such a closed organization. I wanted a video report of the mandatory two-day training, to show how the activists were being prepared. But the organization banned the access to many parts of this training. "


Prior to the trip, he attended mandatory meetings in the Netherlands and was screened. "When the organizers me I was 'chosen', I felt obliged to be happy. In retrospect it seems all deception: there was no select group, and no Dutch celebrities. Instead of 32 Dutch participants, the organization has barely ten. "


Bud Wichers, a freelance reporter, also dropped out, as he reported to EénVandaag: "The facts were always at odds with what we had promised. The breach of trust was at some point irreversible. "


Martijn Dekker, spokesman for the Gaza-Netherlands Foundation, is deeply embarrassed at the collective departure of the journalists. Dekker, a PhD in Political Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, says the feud between activists and reporters was "shocking": "Four journalists who consistently tell the same story, you can not ignore. That closeness, that is the opposite of what we claim to be, namely open and transparent."


Dekker: "We can quite open about eg the origin of the money that paid for the boat. We can see the books of the donating foundation Israa. It shows that all donations come from Dutch individuals, not from a shadowy sheik from abroad." Foundation Netherlands Gaza says the list of passengers to leave until after release, as still being pushed by the ship crew. The Dutch action ship left yesterday and arrived today at an agreed rendezvous site, which has three other ships awaiting action.

Amin Abou Rashed (left) with Yusuf Qaradawi

The foundation was forced to admit that Rashed was present in Greece, because of his involvement in the purchase of the ship. But the organization denies his involvement in training, selection and briefings.


Now emerges a unique picture, when the Dutch Hamas leader Sheikh Amin Abou Rashed supports Yusuf al Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. This Al Qaradawi is hoping to transform Egypt into a fundamentalist dictatorship. The Sheikh, a fierce anti-Semite and notorious for his inflammatory speeches, lived in exile in Qatar. After the revolt against Egyptian President Mubarak returned to Cairo. Al Qaradawi wants to stone gays and adulterers, would "dismantle" Israel, encourages suicide attacks inside Israel and believes that men should strike "rebellious" women.

Amin Rashed was on last year's flotilla and has been linked with Hamas and theHoly Land Foundation.

Prominent Ron Paul website promotes Farrakhan anti-Jewish speech

The Daily Paul, one of the most popular internet forums for supporters of Ron Paul, has published links to YouTube videos of Louis Farrakhan denouncing Jewish political power and expressing support for Muammar Qaddafi. (Read here: Farrakhan on Obama and Libya:"Zionists [bad Isrealis] dominate the government of the USA...." | Ron Paul 2012 | Sound Money, Peace and Liberty)

Judging by the comments for the post, it would seem that a nexus of support for Ron Paul and Louis Farrakhan has coalesced around conspiracy theories concerning Jewish political power and banks.  Among other artifacts of extremism found in the discussion attached to the post is a link to an article in the Nation of Islam's official newspaper, The Final Call, spinning a conspiracy theory blaming the popular uprising against Qaddafi not on an expression of Arab Spring revolutionary spirit, but (predictably) on a conspiracy of bankers upset about Qaddafi's monetary policies.  (Read here.)  The Final Call article fails to mention the Qaddafi regime's long history of violently suppressing political opposition -- suppression which rose to unprecedented levels of brutality in response to demonstrations in support of liberalizing Libya's political system.  Rather than citing revulsion at Qaddafi's massacre of peaceful Arab Spring demonstrators as the cause of the NATO intervention, the Final Call quotes Farrakhan as saying:

“I know why you are angry with him; because he never agreed with your policies when it came to sucking the resources of Third World peoples, and putting in place dictators that would be amenable to America's policies.”

It has long been known that some Ron Paul supporters share with Farrakhan a strong opposition to the central banking system, support for isolationist foreign policy, and a conspiratorial view of Israel and Jews which verges on paranoia.  Now we can add support for Muammar Qaddafi to that list.  Makes sense.

Below is the string of comments submitted by the Daily Paul forum members in response to the Farrakhan videos.  It is interesting to see them working out how to talk about these issues without sounding bigoted -- that whole "we're opposed to Zionists, not Jews" thing.  Only they get it a bit wrong.  One commenter seems to think the founder of Goldman Sachs is still alive as he argues that Goldman Sachs ins't bad because it's Jewish. "I don't consider Goldman a Jew I see him as being of Israeli descent big difference."  Another argues that his support for Naturei Karta  shows that he can't be an anti-Semite.

The main point of Farrakhan's speech, that international bankers and Zionists work together to control the world and punish those who resist that control, and that the Libya conflict results from that conspiracy, meets with broad approval among at least this group of Paul supporters.  I wonder what Ron Paul would say about it?