Book Calls Jewish People an ‘Invention’

Despite the fragmented and incomplete historical record, experts pretty much agree that some popular beliefs about Jewish history simply don’t hold up: there was no sudden expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 70, for instance. What’s more, modern Jews owe their ancestry as much to converts from the first millennium and early Middle Ages as to the Jews of antiquity.

Other theories, like the notion that many of today’s Palestinians can legitimately claim to be descended from the ancient Jews, are familiar and serious subjects of study, even if no definitive answer yet exists.

But while these ideas are commonplace among historians, they still manage to provoke controversy each time they surface in public, beyond the scholarly world. The latest example is the book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” which spent months on the best-seller list in Israel and is now available in English. Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts. The translated version of his polemic has sparked a new wave of coverage in Britain and has provoked spirited debates online and in seminar rooms.

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.

The vehement response to these familiar arguments — both the reasonable and the outrageous — highlights the challenge of disentangling historical fact from the sticky web of religious and political myth and memory.

Consider, for instance, Professor Sand’s assertion that Palestinian Arab villagers are descended from the original Jewish farmers. Nearly a century ago, early Zionists and Arab nationalists touted the blood relationship as the basis of a potential alliance in their respective struggles for independence. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s longest-serving president, made this very argument in a book they wrote together in 1918. The next year, Emir Feisal, who organized the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire and tried to create a united Arab nation, signed a cooperation agreement with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that declared the two were “mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people.”

Both sides later dropped the subject when they realized it was not furthering their political goals.

(Though no final consensus has emerged on the ancestral link between Palestinians and Jews, Harry Ostrer, director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University Langone Medical Center, who has been studying the genetic organization of Jews, said, “The assumption of lineal descent seems reasonable.”)

Books challenging biblical and conventional history continually pop up, but what distinguishes the dispute over origins from debates about, say, the reality of the exodus from Egypt or the historical Jesus, is that it is so enmeshed in geopolitics. The Israeli Declaration of Independence states: “After being forcibly exiled from their Land, the People kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it.” The idea of unjust exile and rightful return undergirds both the Jews’ and the Palestinians’ conviction that each is entitled to the land.

Since Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory, he is keen to show that their ancestry lines do not lead back to ancient Palestine. He resurrects a theory first raised by 19th-century historians, that the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, to whom 90 percent of American Jews trace their roots, are descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who apparently converted to Judaism and created an empire in the Caucasus in the eighth century. This idea has long intrigued writers and historians. In 1976, Arthur Koestler wrote “The Thirteenth Tribe” in the hopes it would combat anti-Semitism; if contemporary Jews were descended from the Khazars, he argued, they could not be held responsible for Jesus’ Crucifixion.

By now, experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory, concluding that the shards of evidence are inconclusive or misleading, said Michael Terry, the chief librarian of the Jewish division of the New York Public Library. Dr. Ostrer said the genetics also did not support the Khazar theory.

That does not negate that conversion played a critical role in Jewish history — a proposition that many find surprising given that today’s Jews tend to discourage conversion and make it a difficult process. Lawrence H. Schiffman, chairman of the Skirball department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, said most historians agree that over a period of centuries, Middle Eastern Jews — merchants, slaves and captives, religious and economic refugees — spread around the world. Many intermarried with people from local populations, who then converted.

There is also evidence that in antiquity and the first millennium Judaism was a proselytizing religion that even used force on occasion. From the genetic research so far, Dr. Ostrer said, “It’s pretty clear that most Jewish groups have Semitic ancestry, that they originated in the Middle East, and that they’re more closely related to each other than to non-Jewish groups.” But he added that it was also clear that many Jews are of mixed descent.

“The ancient admixed ancestry explains the blond hair and blue eyes of Ashkenazi Jews whose grandparents and great-grandparents all lived in shtetls two and three generations ago,” Dr. Ostrer said. They brought the genes for coloration with them to Eastern Europe. These genes were probably not contributed by their Cossack neighbors.”

What accounts for the grasp that some misconceptions maintain on popular consciousness, or the inability of historical truths to gain acceptance? Sometimes myths persist despite clear contradictory evidence because people feel the story embodies a deeper truth than the facts. Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” but the fictional statement captured the sense of a regime that showed disdain for the public’s welfare.

A mingling of myth, memory, truth and aspiration similarly envelopes Jewish history, which is, to begin with, based on scarce and confusing archaeological and archival records.

Experts dismiss the popular notion that the Jews were expelled from Palestine in one fell swoop in A.D. 70. Yet while the destruction of Jerusalem and Second Temple by the Romans did not create the Diaspora, it caused a momentous change in the Jews’ sense of themselves and their position in the world. For later generations it encapsulates the essential truth about the Jews being an exiled and persecuted people for much of their history.

Professor Sand accuses Zionist historians from the 19th century onward — the very same scholars on whose work he bases his case — of hiding the truth and creating a myth of shared roots to strengthen their nationalist agenda. He explains that he has uncovered no new information, but has “organized the knowledge differently.” In other words, he is doing precisely what he accuses the Zionists of — shaping the material to fit a narrative. continues here

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BNP 'will take its first council' at next election

The British National Party is poised to win control of its first council in Britain to add to its success in the European elections earlier this year.

The Labour Party high command has been told that activists in east London believe Barking and Dagenham Council may well fall to the neo-fascist party in local elections next year.

The BNP’s leader has already announced he will stand against Labour minister Margaret Hodge in next year’s general election, and senior party figures now fear a “double-whammy” in the BNP’s heartland. It won 17 per cent of the vote in the 2005 general election.

The party, which has a long history of antisemitism, already holds 12 of the council’s 51 seats but only fielded 13 candidates at the last local elections. Labour, which controls the council, fears that a full slate of candidates could sweep the board and benefit from the carnival surrounding Nick Griffin.

BNP councillors in Barking include Richard Barnbrook, who also represents the party in the London Assembly.

Mrs Hodge, the daughter of Jewish refugees, is already raising money for a war chest to fight off the threat. Such is the parlous state of Labour finances that funds for staff for the campaign will have to be raised privately. Her supporters estimate she will need at least £100,000 to build a team that includes an experienced campaign manager and a dedicated press officer. The Minister for Culture and Tourism is likely to be making a direct appeal to high-value donors from the Jewish community.

She is likely to run a campaign based on her own high profile locally, recognising that the party and Gordon Brown are unpopular in Barking. Local activists will look to shore up her support by concentrating on the anti-BNP vote rather than attempting to win back Labour voters who have defected to the BNP. She will also have to deal with the fact that six per cent of BNP voters in her constituency are non-white.

One source close to the Labour MP said: “In the general election we will be selling the Margaret Hodge brand, but there could well be a BNP-controlled council.”

In 2006, Mrs Hodge said that 80 per cent of her constituents were tempted to vote BNP. She was criticised for boosting the extremist vote when the party became the largest after Labour in council elections later that year.

She said: “I have spent my life fighting racism and that’s as a result of experiencing antisemitism as a child as a first generation immigrant and the daughter of Jewish refugees. But I never thought I would have to take on the leader of a fascist party.

“I have spent three years exposing the true nature of BNP councillors in Barking and I am determined to expel them. continues here

Editorial : So there you have it ladies and gentlemen, proof positive of Semitic interference in parliamentary democracy, of course for me and indeed others, we recognised long ago now that the democracy lauded in the owned press and crowed about by duplicitous politicians, as our sons and daughters march with guns in other peoples lands, was not democracy at all, but simply a charade, a sham. Today of course, much of what passes for nationalism champions the party political system, champions it even as it knows it for the very fraud it is, many espouse electioneering as the be all and end all, which of course is perhaps the biggest lie.

Yet electioneering is important, important because it shows a nationalist face to the body politic, it presents to the people an alternative, an alternative that can never win of course but an alternative nonetheless. The BNP have endeavoured to embrace the Jewish community, even to the extent of advocating their pro-Zionist agenda, an agenda that breeds hate, kills with impunity civilians of all ages and leads to a very real threat upon our own streets, it is for this reason that nationalists like myself can never support the BNP, oh we can support certain actions, praise when praise is needed, yet on fundamental issues traditional nationalism can never agree and after all, the killing of civilians and the stealing of a nation state can never be condoned by true nationalists.

For many, the very experience of the multicultural experiment leads them down the road of only hate, so bitter have they become at the behaviour of non-whites that they cannot and indeed will not, address issues clearly; they simply cannot see the wood for the trees. I myself have faced assault and physical attack over the years, in one case knife wielding Muslims endeavoured to dispatch me from this world and of course, growing up amongst it all from an early age, I know only too well the range and indeed scope of attacks against my community. Yet understanding the motivation, does not mean I can condone the result, certainly it is somewhat difficult to campaign for justice for others, whose brethren do the very same thing within your own land, that is to say, colonise it and attack for religious or racial reasons the people within, it is this very resentment that pro-Zionist forces now channel, with the result ironically of shoring up the hatred.

Yet we must remember here that the firebrands within the Muslim community are indeed a minority and it would not come as much of a surprise, if in later times it was discovered that many such people worked for other masters, masters wholly unconnected with the cause they now espouse, in the middle-east such people are well-known and indeed even amongst the nationalist community such people have played out actions and it is believed still do. The fact is that Islam is a religion, nothing more nothing less, its practices grate against western sensibilities yet it is a child of the east and should of course reside there, the real issue is racial, cultural and demographical. It is not Islam per-se that is the threat but the sheer amount of non-whites permitted entrance, the loss of whole towns and soon cities to these people, it is not about the religion, Sikhs and Hindus have a similar effect upon our chances of survival, as indeed do Christian negroes from the West Indies, yet forces alien in themselves conspire to present it as an Islamic threat only, this then the split within nationalism, this then the divide defined.

Yet for all their pro-Zionist rhetoric, for all their support of Israel the Jewish community still attack them, crow about it openly in the press, yet pro-BNP websites and weblogs will still maintain the, Islam is evil and Jews are really quite nice nonsense, in point of fact there are good and bad in all races, many Jews are lovely people, have no desire to alter the west and seek to exist peacefully in co-existence, yet the same can be said for many Muslims, who wish also merely to live and co-exist, the issue for many is economic, in that the chances for a better life here far surpass that of their respective homelands, yet whilst understandable on a personal level, this in no way equates to a good enough reason, to literally stealThe Minister for Culture and Tourism is likely to be making a direct appeal to high-value donors from the Jewish community. a country and indeed a continent from an indigenous people, which is now the case. Another point to make here is that, it is the Jewish community in the main, that fund and maintain organisations that have been set up with the express purpose of beating down the voices of indigenous disapproval, it is the Jewish community that openly declare war upon nationalists, it beggars belief therefore the support they then receive from the anti-Islamic crank fringe that like to portray themselves as nationalist.

We can never know the absolute true facts of gentile, Jewish relations, all we have to go on is historical record that will in any event come down in favour of the community the writer hails from, yet if we are to take anything away from such testimony it is this, the Jewish community for whatever reason have consistently undermined and attacked the structure and traditions of the west, from every position. Today of course we live to all intents and purposes in a secular democracy and it would appear that thee only religion that still opposes from a spiritual standpoint is Islam, we may not like this truth however it is truth nonetheless. At one time Christianity acted as a buffer to all, even to Islam yet the attacks upon it which reached conclusions in the heady days of the sixties proved disastrous and now the church or much of it is collaborative in nature, assisting the rise of secular individualism rather than combating the many evils that beset us.

The very first way to undermine a belief system and indeed a life-system is to vilify it. to make of it an ostracized creed, further if one can literally split said belief system right down the middle, create a liberal and hard-line split, then the job is on the way to completion, the old maxim, divide and conquer rings ever true. Of course as I have written before, this was done originally against Christianity, a time now known as the reformation, yet it was the dissemination of reformist ideas that ushered in decline, not in fact the ideas behind them. Certainly Martin Luther recognised Semitic influence and indeed famously railed against it, yet it is the minor splits within that were augmented in Amsterdam that ended Christian unity and would help to crush its dominance sometime later.

Mrs Hodge, the daughter of Jewish refugees, is already raising money for a war chest to fight off the threat. We see to this day its effects, the fratricide amongst kindred peoples within Europe based upon that very split ,the rise of the lodge system ,the re-admittance of Jewry, the formation of the banking system and the eventual warring between the nation states of Europe. Certainly then, the aim was to remove power from Christianity and place power within an, at that time, powerful and naturally separate country, a country geographically challenging to invaders, that country our own. On the continent the lodge system had infiltrated Flanders, Christians were butchered, men women and children, priests tortured and hung, nuns raped repeatedly, tortured ,dismembered and an attack of such intensity directed against traditional Christianity as to be a holocaust, we hear much of the inquisition yet little of this. Much of the bloodshed was carried out by Jews, by individuals who had hidden their faith at first espousing the Protestant faith although later Calvinism, which is itself sometimes referred to as reformed.

Unsurprisingly Calvinism held out no opposition to usury espousing the charging of interest as being, not immoral nor indeed against gods teaching, this then set the stage for much debate, much killing and much chaos, certain elements thrive under chaos’s clock and indeed they did, the early reformers, influenced by the merchants of Amsterdam and Venice killed off Europe’s defence, rendered future peoples to supranational evil and heralded in our extinction, would they but know, it some did. Behind this of course Jewry ,oh some can dispute it, some can call it anti-Semitism however, it is all historical fact, all truth and nothing more, yet the attack upon the west, whether instigated out of fear or indeed out of loathing is an attack nonetheless and as such the Jewish community, merited and still do contestation. It is a lie, a dammed lie to even suggest that Jewry works for any other interest bar its own, yet there are those who would persist with this lie, further they disparage in this age the truth teller, the honest, call them a hater, just as those who would contest non-white colonisation are belittled as haters.

Recognising the hand of Jewry within anti-people movements in no way equates to hatred ,recognising that on the surface water appears weaker than stone in no way equates to a hatred of water, merely that one recognises that water has disproportionate power when contrasted with its appearance, the same to with the Jewish community. In this JC article it is stated that Mrs Hodge “is already raising money for a war chest” and that, “funds for staff for the campaign will have to be raised privately”, one can only imagine from what community such funds will come, is it not the case therefore that merely by this act parliamentary democracy as they tell us it is, is swayed by the moneymen ,that those who have the largest “war chest” ,win the battle, history tells us it is so.


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Brown moves Chanukah fete to appease Jews

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The British government moved its official Chanukah reception to the prime minister's residence in a bid to make amends with the country's Jewish community.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided to relocate the gathering to 10 Downing St. from its Foreign Office venue as a gesture to the community, the Jewish Chronicle reported. The community attacked his Labor government last week for abstaining during a United Nations vote on a resolution supporting the Goldstone report. continues here

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Autsralia orders extradition of alleged Nazi

SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) – In a landmark decision, the Australian government approved the extradition to Hungary of an alleged Nazi war criminal.

Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor said Thursday he was satisfied that 88-year-old Perth resident Charles (Karoly) Zentai could be surrendered to Hungarian authorities, who wish to question him about the murder of an 18-year-old Jew in 1944.

Zentai, who has been imprisoned in Perth since Oct. 22, is the first alleged Nazi war criminal Australia has agreed to extradite. He vehemently denies the accusation, saying he was not even in Budapest at the time of the murder of Peter Balazs, who was caught not wearing the yellow Star of David and later found dead in the Danube.

In a statement, O’Connor said: “My decision is not one of determining Mr. Zentai’s guilt or innocence. It was about deciding whether or not Mr. Zentai should be surrendered to Hungary in accordance with Australia’s extradition legislation and its international obligations.”

Zentai, who immigrated to Australia in 1950, will appeal the decision in the Federal Court, further extending the legal case that began in 2005 when Zentai was flushed out by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Operation Last Chance.

“It's important to remember that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the murderers in the Holocaust,” the Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff told The Associated Press. “The victims of the Nazis and their collaborators are just as worthy today that their killers be brought to justice as they were when the crimes were committed.” continues here

French comedian Dieudonné fined for antisemtic stunt

A far-right comedian who performed an antisemitic stunt which involved giving an award to a Holocaust denier has been fined €20, 000 by a French court.

Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, 43, had previously stood for the European Parliament as head of the Anti-Zionist Party, which he formed with Alain Soral, a former member of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme-right National Front.

This time, Paris judges fined Dieudonné €10,000 for "public anti-Semitic insults" and awarded €10,000 in legal costs to the eight organisations that sued him, including SOS Racisme, Union of Jewish Students in France and the J'Accuse association.

The comedian, orginally from Cameroon, was not in court to hear the verdict.

SOS Racisme said: "We are quite satisfied with this decision. This shows yet again that Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala is not a comedian but uses that label to express his hatred."

But lawyer Stephan Lilti, who represented the UEJF and J'Accuse said he was disappointed with the verdict. He told Paris Match: "Dieudonné has been convicted three times for the same reason in 2007 and 2008, and he has never paid his fines."

The groups' complaints stemmed from a stunt during a stand-up show where Dieudonné invited convicted Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson to receive an award from an actor dressed as a concentration camp victim.

He was previously fined €5, 000 in November 2007 for comparing Jews to “slave-traders”. Two months previously, he called Holocaust Memorial Day “memorial pornography”.

He said: “For them, if a child at school is called a ‘dirty Jew,’ they are up in arms. To me, Zionism is the AIDS of Judaism. The Zionists have claimed a monopoly on suffering.” continues here

ADL slams Honduras conspiracy theories

A Jewish civil rights organization is expressing alarm over conspiracy theories claiming Jews and Israel aided the ouster of the Honduran president and attempts to dislodge him from his refuge in the Brazilian Embassy.

The US-based Anti-Defamation League cited statements made by ousted President Manuel Zelaya as well as the news director of a radio station that was closed by the interim government in Honduras and by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, among others.

Most of the comments repeat widely circulated rumors that Israeli soldiers - or in some versions, mercenaries - worked with the troops backing interim President Roberto Micheletti, allegedly supplying some form of tear gas used at the embassy and providing other assistance.

The interim government, which came to power after the military arrested Zelaya and flew him to exile in Costa Rico on June 28, has denied receiving any Israeli help or using any tear gas at the embassy. Journalists who have covered the political crisis say they have not seen any sign of Israeli involvement.

The Jewish group also criticized Chavez for claiming at the United Nations that Israel is the only country to recognize the coup-installed government, something Micheletti's administration has denied.

The ADL also cited an interview with The Miami Herald in which Zelaya said that "Israeli mercenaries are torturing him with high-frequency radiation."



"We know from history that at times of turmoil and unrest, Jews are a convenient scapegoat," ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman, said in a statement released Sunday. "And that is happening now in Honduras, a country that has only a small Jewish minority."

The group estimates the Central American country is home to less than 100 families in a population of about 8 million.

Chavez, a Zelaya ally, has repeatedly criticized Israel, while insisting he is not anti-Semitic.

Zelaya was forced from office with the backing of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court for trying to hold a referendum on rewriting the constitution. His opponents charged he wanted to lift the charter's provision limiting presidents to a single term. He denied that.

With the backing of much of the international community, including the US government, Zelaya is seeking to be reinstated to serve out his term, which ends in January. He has been holed up in the Brazilian Embassy with dozens of supporters since slipping back into Honduras on Sept. 21.

Zelaya, responding to a copy of the ADL report sent to him in the embassy by The Associated Press, said he "profoundly respects people who practice other religions." He and noted he had been criticized by anti-Semites for including several Jews in his Cabinet.

"As a human being and president, I call on all Hondurans to abstain from making any anti-Semitic comments," Zelaya said in a statement.

Among the remarks criticized by the ADL is a statement by David Romero, news director of Radio Globo, which supports Zelaya.

On Sept. 25, commenting on the rumors alleging Israeli involvement in the crisis, Romero referred on air to the "famous Holocaust" and added that "I believe it should have been fair and valid to let Hitler finish his historic vision."

Romero apologized for the remarks Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press, saying that they were "stupid" statements made in the heat of the moment and that don't reflect his real views.

He said his grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia who came to Honduras to escape persecution in Europe.

"I apologize to the Jewish community here and throughout the world," Romero said.

Radio Globo was shut down and its equipment confiscated by security forces after Micheletti issued an emergency decree banning large-scale demonstrations and limiting civil liberties, including freedom of the press. The interim president, who has come under increasing pressure at home and abroad over the restrictions, is expected to decide Monday whether to lift the decree. continues here

Chicken twirlers make feathers fly

ANIMAL rights activists have urged Israel's chief rabbis to end the traditional pre-Yom Kippur practice of kapparot.

During the ritual, a chicken is swung around the head three times, symbolically transferring sins to the bird.

The chicken is then slaughtered and given to a needy family.

The Let the Animals Live organisation pleaded with Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger and Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar to instruct their followers to prevent the suffering of chickens.

The activists say money should be given to charity as a replacement for slaughtering the animals.

A letter to the rabbis said: "Every year we turn to the highest echelons of the religious leadership, but the abuse continues."

The animal rights group claimed that many chickens set aside for kapparot are kept for many long hours - sometimes even days - in boxes without being given any food or water. Many of them reportedly die from starvation and thirst before being brought to slaughter.

"We are turning to you to prevent animal suffering, to act with a measure of compassion and to grant God's creatures the minimum required in order to survive," the activists wrote to the rabbis.

"We recommend placing a dish with water and a little bit of food so that the kapparot chickens will not die from the harsh agony of starvation and thirst."

The letter noted that the legendary author of the Shulchan Aruch, Rabbi Yosef Karo, had ruled that "the custom must be prevented".

Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger's office says it intends to write a halachic ruling on the issue at the behest of Let the Animals Live.

A statement said: "The rabbi has already expressed his opinion countless times that one must have mercy on the chickens, especially during these days of compassion.

"In addition, the rabbi instructs the slaughterhouse rabbis to tighten oversight (of the slaughterhouses) on the eve of Yom Kippur."

In the religious area of Monsey, New York, Moshe Lefkowitz who has been conducting the kapparot ceremony for ultra-Orthodox Jews for more than 30 years, says he he can't understand what the fuss is about. continues here

Kosher slaughterhouse exec pleads guilty

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — The former chief financial officer for a kosher slaughterhouse in northeast Iowa has pleaded guilty to conspiring to make false statements to a bank.

Mitchel Meltzer is the latest executive of Agriprocessors Inc. to reach a deal with prosecutors.

Agriprocessors was the site of a May 2008 immigration raid that led to the arrest of 389 illegal workers and eventual charges against former executive Sholom Rubashkin and several managers.

Rubashkin is accused of lying about the value of the plant's collateral so it could get a lone.

Prosecutors say that Meltzer on Monday admitted conspiring with others to make false statements to a bank in connection with requests for advances on a loan. continues here

Talks follow Israel boycott motion

SEVERAL Labour Party members have met former MP - and Unison member - Eric Moonman following last week's Trade Union Congress meeting when an anti-Israel motion was passed.

At the Liverpool meeting, the Fire Brigades Union called for divestment from "companies associated with the occupation". And the TUC backed a boycott of Israel.

However, those at the meeting - led by Zionist Federation co-president Mr Moonman - are exploring the possibility of preparing a campaign in the Labour Party to ensure sympathetic support for Israel.continues here

Israel rejects UN's Gaza probe

Israel has described as "nauseating" a United Nations probe of last year's Gaza conflict.

Jerusalem says it created an unjust "equivalence of a democratic state with a terror organisation" and lacked the context of a decade of terrorist attacks by Hamas.

The Goldstone Commission Report concluded that both sides were guilty of committing war crimes, including the violation of human rights and international humanitarian law.

In a 575-page report, the fact-finding mission, headed by former South African Judge Richard Goldstone, himself Jewish, found that "Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity", during last year's Operation Cast Lead, which targeted Palestinian rocket squads in Gaza.

The report "concludes there is also evidence that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes, as well as possibly crimes against humanity", by firing rockets at cities in southern Israel, the UN said.

Appointed by the Human Rights Council in April, the mission was charged with investigating 36 specific incidents in Gaza and others in the West Bank and Israel.

In all, the mission conducted 188 interviews, reviewed 10,000 documents and viewed 12,000 photos and videos.

Goldstone said he has strong ties to Israel and noted his attempt to maintain objectivity during the probe.

The four-member investigative panel recommended that the UN Security Council require Israel to launch its own investigations, "that are independent and in conformity with international standards", into the Gaza operation and to appoint a committee of experts to oversee the "progress, effectiveness and genuineness" of these investigations.

If it failed to do so within three months, the report said, the Security Council should refer Israel's alleged war crimes to the International Criminal Court.

Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman Yossi Levy expressed "nausea and fury" over the report.

Israeli officials were particularly stunned that the document summarily rejected the legal worth of Israel's own judicial bodies.

In a country where the High Court of Justice can stop a battle in mid-stream, as happened in Jenin in 2002 until the facts of the alleged massacre were determined, it was difficult to understand the Goldstone panel's mistrust of the Israeli judiciary, officials said.

"Israel has examined itself in the light of day in innumerable investigations and a robust system of independent courts," said Levy.

"We have nothing to be ashamed of, and don't need lessons in morality from a committee established by Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Somalia."

He added: "The immediate message of this report is: Terror pays. It says that terrorists who attack Jews, unlike terrorists who attack Americans, Spaniards, or other Arabs, will earn the protection of the UN."

A Foreign Ministry statement noted that the IDF had examined more than 100 allegations regarding the conduct of its forces during the Gaza campaign, resulting in 23 outstanding criminal investigations.

Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli Edelstein said that "it hurts when people without morals pretend to be warriors for human rights".

Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Jerusalem made the right decision not to cooperate with the inquiry.

"The report only came out because of countries like Pakistan, Libya and Saudi Arabia, who are members of the UN Human Rights Council," Ayalon told Army Radio.

"The results just prove the correctness and legitimacy of the decision not to cooperate . . . the report was compiled without any connection to investigations on the ground."

"It completely ignores all Hamas terror activity that preceded the IDF operation," he continued, stressing that the main reason for Israel's boycott of the investigation "was the presence on the commission of those who insisted that the operation was not one of self-defence, but an Israeli aggressive action".

Israel's former ambassador to the UN Danny Gillerman said that the UN Human Rights Council report contained "blatant, one-sided, anti-Israel lies".

"Members of the UNHRC include countries like Zimbabwe and Libya that spend 90 per cent of their time on Israel and don't deal for example with the Darfur massacre," he declared.

He stressed that while soul searching was being done by Israel and would continue, Operation Cast Lead was conducted to protect a million residents of the south from rocket attacks.

"We went to lengths no other country would have gone to in order to avoid civilian casualties," he said.

The Palestinian Authority welcomed the findings and also the charges against Hamas, saying the movement was also responsible for "atrocities" against Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Judge Goldstone's daughter Nicole maintains that her father "is a Zionist and loves Israel".

Speaking from Toronto, where she now lives, Nicole said she had many conversations with her father when he was asked to head the UN inquiry.

She said: "I know better than anyone else that he thought that however hard it was to accept it, he was doing the best thing for everyone, including Israel." continues here

Israel

We notice that our “Cover Up” article has gone global, from the States to Youtube everyone’s reporting it, we even have Chaim Ben Pesach’s pro-Zionist group the Jewish Task Force citing our article aswell as urging their members to vote on our polls, so AAWR would like to reiterate, “We do not and never will support Israel, nor their actions against what is in the main a civilian population”, thank you, if you are a nationalist please vote on the below poll and lets show Zionism the door.

Do you consider Israel a rogue state and a violator of human rights?

Calling Jews 'Nazis' may be criminalised

Parliament will be asked to consider whether the use of Nazi symbols and terms in reference to Jews, Israel and Zionism is breaking the law on incitement to racial hatred.

A new report by the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (EISCA) has highlighted the increasing use of what it terms the “Nazi card” in antisemitic discourse and has called for a number of measures to try to combat its spread.

“Playing the Nazi card” has been defined in the report as the use of Nazi-related terms or symbols — for example intertwining the swastika with the Star of David — while negatively referring to Jews, Israel, Zionism or other aspects of what it calls the Jewish experience.

The report, which was jointly published by EISCA and the Department for Communities and Local Government, recommends that the Home Office, the Association of Chief Police officers (ACPO) and the Crown Prosecution Service should prepare new guidance for the police on whether this kind of terminology amounts to incitement.

The report says that universities and adult education colleges should be surveyed to establish how they deal with antisemitic discourse.

It also suggests that the University and College Union and the National Union of Journalists use the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s definition of antisemitism to improve their harassment policies.

Cohesion Minister Shahid Malik, who launched the report on Tuesday alongside EISCA chairman Denis MacShane MP, said: “It is vital to reiterate the significance which my government places on tackling this scourge which has blighted our world for centuries.

“Where antisemitic discourse flourishes unchecked, an atmosphere develops where Jews and other minorities — for it is certain that other minorities will also be targeted — feel isolated and vulnerable.
“Antisemitic discourse is not targeted at an identifiable victim but at Jews as a group.

“The tone in which issues affecting Jewish people are raised or addressed by politicians, the media, educators or the business world, affects the way in which Jewish people are perceived by the wider public.”

After the launch, Mr Malik said that the report’s proposals would be overseen by the cross-government working group set up as a result of the 2006 All-Party Parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism.

Also on Tuesday, the Community Security Trust published its second report on antisemitic discourse.

Author Mark Gardner, the CST’s communications director, said that while antisemitic discourse openly targeting Jews was “extremely rare” in mainstream British politics and media, “nevertheless, antisemitism is an important matter that must be better understood and challenged before it worsens any further”.

Contemporary antisemitic discourse, he argued, “is most often revealed in language and imagery that evokes the central antisemitic allegation of a powerful and hidden Jewish conspiracy against all non-Jews”. continues here

It seems that Jewry doesn’t like it when the boots on the other foot, it is perfectly okay to play the “Nazi card” against nationalists ,perfectly okay to invent a whole persona for those tagged Nazi, yet when Jewry acts in the self-same way or worse, then it must be outlawed. Can any, any right-thinking individual, really state with confidence that this community does not wield disproportionate power, certainly today should an individual endeavour to claim that they do not, then they appear quite, quite ludicrous.

Yet still even today, Jews are perceived as victims, victims, this a community that rides roughshod over the feelings of indigenous peoples, creates a bandit state, steals secrets ,commits war-crimes and indulges in all manner of clandestine evil. Perhaps after all we must refer once again to that old adage ,”there is no smoke without fire”, certainly if one were to look to just recent legislation, proposed or passed, then unmistakably there is the hand of the Jew, I must reiterate this for nu-nationalists, “it isn’t the Muslims” but will they listen, doubtful and so stupidity rules the day and we march to war, many unaware. In any event the report can be downloaded here by concerned individuals, stay strong out there, there are rough times ahead…

Rabbinate demands haredi control of conversion

Since conversion to Judaism can have a negative impact on the spiritual purity of the Jewish people, only the greatest halachic authorities of the haredi rabbinical establishment can decide on this, the Chief Rabbinate's High Rabbinical Court ruled recently.

"Any decisions by Rabbinical Conversion Courts or rabbinic marriage registrars that are not in accordance with the opinion of the greatest halachic authorities of the generation hurt the purity of Jewish people," wrote Rabbi Avraham Sherman, head of the High Rabbinical Court.

"There is a real danger that gentiles will be allowed to enter the Jewish community. Anyone who did not embrace an Orthodox lifestyle at the time of conversion is a gentile and if this person is female all of her children are gentiles as well," Sherman continued.

The High Court also ruled that the high proportion of potential converts to Judaism who are not sincere about embracing Orthodoxy was an insurmountable challenge that made it impossible to rely on any rabbinical conversion court - haredi or modern Orthodox - to perform a kosher conversion. "Any decisions by Rabbinical Conversion Courts or rabbinic marriage registrars that are not in accordance with the opinion of the greatest halachic authorities of the generation hurt the purity of Jewish people,"

Sherman stated explicitly that a conversion has no validity unless the convert proves he or she has embraced an Orthodox lifestyle. Anything less is unacceptable.

According to the decision, the Jewishness of converts can in theory be revoked at any time, no matter how long ago the conversion took place and no matter which Rabbinical Conversion Court performed the conversion.

Conversions can and must be revoked if, for instance, after the conversion process the convert admits that he or she did not adhere to the Orthodox halachic restrictions governing Shabbat, kashrut or other Jewish laws.

To preserve the purity of the Jewish people, every convert must be scrutinized on an individual basis by rabbinic marriage registrars and rabbinic courts before he or she is permitted to marry or divorce, Sherman wrote in a 34-page rabbinical opinion handed down within the framework of an appeal case on May 10.

Rabbi David Stav, a senior member of Tzohar Rabbis, an organization of moderate Orthodox Zionist rabbis, called Sherman's comments scandalous.

"Sherman is committing the biblical sin of insulting the convert," Stav, who is chief rabbi of Shoham, said on Tuesday. "A group of haredi functionaries are willing to place under suspicion thousands of converts just because they want to wage a political power struggle.

"When [former Chief Ashkenazi] Rabbi Shlomo Goren wanted to annul a conversion the haredi community attacked him, claiming it was impossible. Now they have changed their minds according to political interests."

Stav was referring to the Langer case in which Goren annulled the conversion of a woman's husband to prevent her children from being considered mamzerim (the result of an illicit sexual act which bars them from marrying a Jew).

Stav said haredi activists were using the conversion issue to shore up their rabbinical clout vis-à-vis the Orthodox Zionist establishment.

Stav, who serves as the Chief Rabbinate's marriage registrar in his town, said he accepts all converts converted by a legitimate Rabbinical Conversion Court.

"I do so whether the conversion was performed by the Chief Rabbinate or by a haredi conversion court, although I must say that converts who come out of haredi conversion courts are usually less serious than those converted by the Chief Rabbinate," he said.

A three-man panel of rabbinical judges made up of Sherman, Rabbi Hagai Izerer and Rabbi Zion Algrabli rejected the halachic principle that a rabbinic court decision, once handed down, was irreversible.

Sherman was responding to a Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court ruling in a divorce case that involved a woman who had converted to Judaism.

The Tel Aviv Rabbinical Court refused to accept claims by the husband that his wife's conversion was invalid, because, he claimed, the wife had paid a NIS 10,000 bribe to the court that performed her conversion.

The Tel Aviv court ruled instead that it did not have the power to overturn a decision - in this case a conversion - by another court since the underlying assumption is that rabbinical courts know what they are doing.

However, Sherman rejected the Tel Aviv court's argument despite the fact that it was based on an accepted halachic principle. He ruled that the Jewish status of the woman and her children must be lifted until the Tel Aviv court could ascertain whether the claims against the validity of her conversion could be refuted.

Sherman said in a telephone interview with The Jerusalem Post that there was nothing new in his decision and that he was basing himself on the opinions of this generation's greatest halachic scholars, both living and deceased. "There is a real danger that gentiles will be allowed to enter the Jewish community.

Sherman quoted from declarations published in recent decades by leading haredi halachic authorities such as Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, considered to be the single most important living halachic decisor for haredi Ashkenazi Jewry. Sherman also quoted deceased authorities such as Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Ohrbach, Rabbi Ya'acov Yisrael Kanyevsky and Rabbi Elazar Menachem Man Shach.

In one declaration, signed by Shach, Kanyevsky, Ohrbach and Elyashiv and dating from the summer of 1984, the rabbis warned that "since there has been a rise in the number of converts who have been accepted as Jews and that it has become known that a large percentage of them had no intention of accepting upon themselves the burden of the commandments at the time of conversion... We are warning that there is a prohibition to accept converts without first being sure that they are interested in accepting upon themselves all the commandments."

Sherman and the other rabbinical judges in May concluded from this declaration and others that every conversion must be considered suspect, "whether it was performed by the Edah Haredit or some other rabbinic court that is recognized more or recognized less, when a person presents a conversion certificate issued by a rabbinic court and that person's appearance is far from the appearance of an observant Jew or that person comes from a place that has no observant community."continues here

Virulent new strain of anti-Semitism rife in UK, says Chief Rabbi

Britain is in the grip of a “virulent” new strain of anti-Semitism, according to the Chief Rabbi. Sir Jonathan Sacks told The Times in an interview that in January the number of anti-Semitic incidents reached the highest level since records began.

Jews have been physically attacked, schools targeted and cemeteries desecrated.

“I was in the synagogue a few months ago when one of the members came in visibly shaken: somebody had just shouted at him, ‘It’s a pity Hitler didn’t finish the job’,” the Chief Rabbi said.

Although the new “mutation” was different from the anti-Semitism promoted by Hitler, it was dangerous because it was international, he said. “The internet means that we no longer have national cultures; we have global cultures and the new anti-Semitism is very much a phenomenon of the global culture.”

Whereas in the past, hatred was focused against Judaism as a religion or Jews as a race, the focus this time was on Jews as a nation. The rise in the number of attacks in January took place at the same time as Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza.

“It begins as anti-Zionism — but it is never merely anti-Zionism when it attacks synagogues or Jewish schools,” Sir Jonathan said. “In the post-Holocaust world the single greatest source of authority is human rights — therefore the new anti-Semitism is constructed in the language of human rights.”

In a new book, Future Tense, he describes a “virulent new strain of anti-Semitism”. A worrying alliance had developed between radical Islamists and anti-globalisation protesters, he said.

The UN had also fanned the flames. At the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001, he said, “Israel was accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights — racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and attempted genocide. So the old myths are recycled they are alive and well but they are done in a new kind of vocabulary.”

The media should also be more careful in coverage of the Middle East: “I do think too little of the history has been set out and people don’t really understand what’s at stake, so the Jewish community has felt quite vulnerable because of that.”

Asked whether he thought the BBC had shown anti-Israeli bias, he replied: “No comment.”continues here

Sssh don't say a word its anti-semitic...

Muslims snub drive against BNP

The Muslim Council of Britain has been criticised for not supporting a multi-faith initiative designed to formulate a co-ordinated response to the BNP.

Muslim interfaith activist Fiyaz Mughal is upset at the non-attendance of MCB representatives at a meeting held under the aegis of Faith Matters at Westminster last Friday.

Mr Mughal — the Faith Matters director who was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours — had invited 25 “key figures” from ethnic and religious groups to discuss the way forward after the BNP had taken two seats in the European elections.

The absence of MCB delegates was “disappointing because this was an opportunity to learn from other communities about dealing with a common enemy,” he said.

“This includes creating strategic alliances with the Jewish community so we can form a united response.”

Among those who participated in a lengthy “brainstorming” session were officials from the Board of Deputies, the Three Faiths Forum, the Community Security Trust and the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. There were also representatives from the Polish, Sikh and Muslim communities.

Mr Mughal said that “an affiliation of individuals committed to fighting racism and the BNP” would be created to work with mainstream parties and educate voters about the BNP.

Phil Rosenberg, interfaith officer at the Board of Deputies, said: “There’s no room for parochialism. We need to send out a clear message that the BNP are a real threat to everyone. They work by feeding off existing tensions within a community, like worms in a hole.
“At present, our election campaigning focuses on the Jewish community.
“If we can lend our experience to help other groups carry the fight throughout the country, then that is positive for everyone.”continues here

Is it me or does becoming Jew friendly not work, I mean one only has to look at the BNP now, to see a constant effort at rapprochement in relation to the Jewish community, yet all for naught. It almost appears as if Jewry attacks from within and without, whilst nationalism is hollowed out from the core, one must always remember, that this community has been and still is the perpetual enemy of nationalism, be it here at home or elsewhere, we must never fool ourselves in this regard.

Jews ‘Very Concerned’ About Obama, Leader of Jewish Organizations Says

President Obama’s strongest supporters among Jewish leaders are deeply troubled by his recent Middle East initiatives, and some are questioning what he really believes, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview.

Though Hoenlein says he is only offering his personal views, the conference he represents is a political powerhouse that includes 50 major Jewish groups. Among them are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), B’nai B’rith International, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Zionist Organization of America, Hadassah, and the Anti-Defamation League. Hoenlein has been the professional head of the conference since 1986, overseeing its day-to-day activities as the coordinating body for American Jews on issues of concern in the U.S. and globally.

Jewish leaders "are expressing concern about what was said [in Obama’s Cairo speech]," Hoenlein says. "I’ve heard it from some of his strongest supporters. It’s expected from his detractors. Even people close to him have said to us that there were parts of the speech that bothered them."

Obama’s speech to a Muslim audience in Cairo in early June was his second effort early in his administration to re-define America’s posture toward the Arab world. In April, Obama traveled to Ankara, Turkey, to offer a similar outreach to the Muslim world.

But many in the Jewish community, including some of Obama’s most ardent supporters, are troubled by his comments in the Middle East, especially his remarks to his Cairo audience. Others are concerned that, facing a multitude of problems on the domestic front, Obama has traveled twice to the Middle East without visiting Israel, America’s stalwart ally in the region for more than a half-century.

"There’s a lot of questioning going on about what he really believes and what does he really stand for," Hoenlein says of Obama’s outreach.

Reaction to Obama’s speech has drawn a range of reaction from many Jewish leaders. On the right, some have condemned it as a revision of the long and close relationship between the U.S. and Israel. But many on the left who backed Obama were also surprised and dismayed over Obama’s speech. Such reactions from major Jewish leaders have largely remained beneath the surface, exchanged privately among them.

Hoenlein’s comments to Newsmax are his first detailed appraisal of Obama’s speech and represent the first time a major Jewish leader has spoken openly about the erosion of Jewish support for Obama.

According to the exit poll conducted by major press organizations during the 2008 election, Obama captured overwhelming support from American Jews, winning 78 percent of their vote. Despite the fact that Republicans are stronger on national security and the war on terror, Obama also won support from Jewish leaders who have been champions of Israel’s security, such as the former Democratic mayor of New York, Edward I. Koch. Koch crossed party lines in 2004 to back George W. Bush.

Reacting to Obama’s Cairo speech, Hoenlein tells Newsmax, "I have no problem with addressing the Muslim world. I’m in fact in favor of outreach, and we here at the conference have done it for about 12 or 15 years, visiting Muslim countries in Central Asia and the Middle East. But the question is, what is the message they get? It’s not so much what he says, but how do they perceive what he says?"

On the one hand, Hoenlein says, "His reference to Israel and the special relationship being unbreakable is important, and references to persecution and Holocaust denial were important, and some of his references to some human rights issues also were important."

But Hoenlein notes the speech included a number of troubling references and comparisons. He cites the fact that Obama claimed America has seven million Muslims. That is a figure "Arab propagandists have put out," he says. "In fact, they say only six million, when in fact there’s no study that shows even half of that."

In 2007, the Pew Research Center estimated the Muslim American population at 2.35 million.

Hoenlein is disturbed that Obama did not mention the Jewish people’s ancient connection with the land of Israel.

"There was no reference to the 3,000 years of Jewish connection to this land," Hoenlein says. "And that is again one of the propaganda lines that the Arabs have used: that the Jews are interlopers, that the two temples never existed, that there was never any Jewish history in the land of Israel. Even Yasser Arafat and others have used that argument because they’re trying to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state. I don’t believe that was the president’s intent, but not making those references I think is troubling."

Jews have claimed a connection to the land of their forefathers since 1400 B.C. Even after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. and the dispersal of many Jews throughout the Roman Empire, many Jews continued to reside in Jerusalem through the centuries, surviving various invasions. An Ottoman census of Jerusalem conducted in 1845 showed Jews outnumbered Muslim Arabs by almost to 2 to 1 and were the dominant ethnic group in the region.

Hoenlein believes that the most troubling aspect of Obama’s comments in his Cairo speech was his effort to equate the Nazi killing of more than six million Jews during the Holocaust with Israel’s struggle with the Palestinians over six decades and the suffering caused by the displacement of the Palestinians.

"There’s no comparison between the Holocaust, even if it was an indirect one, and what happened to Palestinians," Hoenlein declares.

In his speech, President Obama addressed the issue of the Holocaust head-on, saying "Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today."

But he quickly changed the subject, comparing Hitler’s genocide of the Jews to the Palestinian struggle.

"On the other hand," Obama said, as he transitioned from the Holocaust to the modern Middle East, "it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."

Hoenlein doesn’t buy Obama’s line of reasoning.

"The Palestinian refugee problem, or dislocation as he said, didn’t come about because of the creation of the Jewish state," Hoenlein says. "It came about because the Arab states declared war on Israel and warned the Arabs that they would suffer the same fate as the Jews if they didn’t get out. And then they kept them as political pawns."

Obama made no reference to the fact that "the reason the Palestinians don’t have a state is because their leaders rejected every offer for peace," Hoenlein says. "Whether it was in 1937 or 1947 or 1967, or later on, up until Ehud Olmert’s offer and Ehud Barak’s offer, they rejected everything, even when they were getting virtually everything they had asked for."

That is because, "The problem really is not what Israel does, it’s that Israel is," Hoenlein says. "And they’re not ready to accept the existence of the Jewish state."

In discussing the Palestinian refugee problem, Obama failed to mention the other refugee problem involving nearly a million Jews, Hoenlein says. At the time of the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, Jews populated all of the major Arab cities from Baghdad in the East to Casablanca in the West.

Hoenlein notes that after modern Israel saw its rebirth, Jews "were driven out of Arab countries penniless, and some of their families had lived there for a thousand years, and yet there was no reference to them." He adds, "This is not a question of tit for tat. It’s a question of the realities that are communicated to a vast audience in the Arab Muslim world."

As troubling as Obama’s references to Israel and the Palestinians were, Hoenlein found the president’s failure to mention the radical regime now running Tehran equally disturbing.

"What concerned us, concerned many people, was the message to Iran that we didn’t hear," Hoenlein says. continues here

Facebook urged to remove Holocaust-denial groups

(CNN) -- Part of the power of social networking is the ability to form communities with like-minded individuals.But what happens when those communities are offensive to others?

That issue is at the heart of attempts by a Dallas, Texas, attorney to have social-networking site Facebook remove pages for Holocaust deniers.

The Holocaust Denial movement seeks to deny or minimize the Holocaust, in which Nazis killed about six million European Jews during World War II.

Attorney Brian Cuban, brother of Dallas Mavericks team owner Mark Cuban, has been trying since last year to have the pages of groups with such names as "Holocaust: A Series of Lies," and "Holocaust is a Holohoax" removed from Facebook.

He pointed out that Facebook has removed groups based on complaints before and said the site is "setting the subjective standard on what they remove and what they don't."

"There is no First Amendment right to free speech in the private realm," Cuban said. "This isn't a freedom-of-speech issue. Facebook is free to set the standard that they wish."

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said his company is in agreement with Cuban that the Holocaust-denial pages are offensive and objectionable.

Where the two sides part, Schnitt said, is whether people have the right to discuss such ideas on Facebook.

"It's a difficult decision to make. We have a lot of internal debate and we bring in experts to talk about it," Schnitt said. "Just being offensive or objectionable doesn't get it taken off Facebook. We want it [the site] to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones."

Schnitt said Facebook has drawn the line with pages or groups that attack an individual or incite or threaten violence. Schnitt pointed to the recent removal of the "Isle of Man KKK" page, created by residents of the island off the coast of England.

Facebook interpreted the page's advocacy of "cleansing the island of foreigners" as threatening and inciting violence, he said.

Facebook receives lots of reports about such pages and actively polices the site, Schnitt said. Last year Facebook removed several pages posted by Italian neo-Nazis after complaints that they encouraged violence against gypsies.

Brian Cuban, who is of Russian Jewish descent, has written about his fight to have the Holocaust-denial pages removed on his site, The Cuban Revolution.

He said he contacted Facebook after a conversation with a friend who runs the Jewish Internet Defense Force, a group that monitors and tries to eradicate anti-Semitic online content.

The Jewish Internet Defense Force, which was successful in removing a Facebook page for the group "Israel Is Not A Country! Delist It From Facebook As A Country," is outspoken in its own right and sometimes guilty of sweeping generalizations of its own.

In an article on Brian Cuban's site published during the 2008 presidential campaign, a representative from the Jewish Internet Defense Force was quoted as saying that "99.9 percent of Muslims hate us."

The article went on to quote JIDF spokesman on the last Presidential campaign: "We hope to continue to highlight the issues surrounding [then-candidate Barack Obama's] terrorist connections as well as his racist and anti-Semitic church, which has supported Hamas and the Rev. Louis Farrakhan."

A Jewish Internet Defense Force spokesperson named David, who requested his last name be withheld because his group has received death threats, said Thursday he would rather people not focus on those specific quotes for several reasons, including the fact that it was an "informal interview" and Cuban "would not let us correct any of our statements after we quickly answered him to help him meet his deadline."

But on the matter of Facebook and Holocaust deniers, the Jewish Internet Defense Force has a clear stance.

"Facebook should not provide a platform for hatred, especially as it is against their TOS [terms of service]," David said. "Holocaust denial is illegal in 13 countries and represents a form of Jew hatred and hate speech in general."

Deborah Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and an expert on Holocaust denial. She said social-networking sites like Facebook are attractive to deniers.

"It allows people to find one another, both for good and for bad," she said. "People who are drawn to Holocaust denial tend to be fringe kind of people who might not otherwise be able to find a group, but this way they can find other like-minded people."

Deborah Lauter, director of Civil Rights for the Anti-Defamation League, said the issue of anti-Semitism and hate speech online is a growing one, partly because of the anonymity the Web offers.

Lauter pointed out that Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities says that users "will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence."

She said the Anti-Defamation League has worked with sites such as YouTube and MySpace to encourage them to be "socially responsible corporate citizens."
continues here

We back Israel 100pc, says America

US President Barack Obama called protecting Israel's security a "top priority" when welcoming Israel's President Shimon Peres to the White House on Tuesday.


Later, a delighted Peres said: "There is no space between us and the United States."

But in a sign of the differences between the views of the two new governments, in an earlier meeting with Vice-President Joseph Biden, Peres said ending natural growth in settlements was a non-starter.

"Israel cannot instruct settlers in existing settlements not to have children or get married," Peres added.

Biden had told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee earlier in the day that settlement expansion must stop and called on Palestinians and the Arab world to make "meaningful gestures" to advance peace.

” President Barack Obama called protecting Israel's security a "top priority"….”

Peres also rejected the idea of "linkage" between the Palestinian and Iranian issues - two topics the US administration has frequently mentioned together.

Before his meeting with Obama, Peres said Israel had not demanded that the US set a time limit on its negotiations with Iran.

"Israel doesn't give the US an ultimatum," he said after meeting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

He added that the US and Israel were "100 per cent" on the same page when it came to Iran but that the issue of a time frame was misleading.

He explained that it was impossible to "set a clock" because events were "fluid and volatile" and would dictate the pace.

But earlier, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman reportedly declared that action would need to be taken if three months of diplomacy elapsed with no results. continues here

Holocaust still an issue as Pope Benedict prepares to visit the Holy Land

• Many Israelis still angry over Vatican's war record
• Palestinians hoping for support for independence

Israel's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, is housed within an angular concrete corridor that leads visitors through appalling stories of persecution, suffering and death and out eventually to a calming view over the Jerusalem forests.

Halfway down the corridor in a room on the left are two black and white ­photographs of the wartime pope, Pius XII, with a few lines of text in English and Hebrew. It is one of hundreds of displays in the museum and easily overlooked, but it runs to the heart of Israel's often troubled relationship with the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI makes an official visit to the Holy Land next week and will attend Yad Vashem on Monday to lay a wreath, but he will not visit the museum or see the caption. The wording set off a diplomatic spat two years ago when the papal envoy to Jerusalem threatened to skip Israel's Holocaust day service and it remains contentious, symbolic of the troubled history between the Catholic church and the Jewish people.

For some, Pius XII was little more than "Hitler's pope" and the caption at Yad Vashem is accusatory. It claims Pius "shelved" a letter against racism and antisemitism prepared by his predecessor and says that when the Vatican received news of the murder of Jews "the pope did not protest either verbally or in writing".

In December 1942 he "abstained" from signing an allied declaration against the extermination of Jews, and when Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz "he did not intervene". "His silence and the absence of guidelines obliged churchmen throughout Europe to decide on their own how to react," it says.

Israeli academics, including researchers at Yad Vashem itself, have pressed the Vatican to open its wartime archives and shed light on documents that might explain in more detail how the Catholic church acted. Workshops and discussions on the Holocaust have been held between Yad Vashem staff and Catholic clergy.

Vatican officials have tried to smooth over the differences, although Pius remains on track for canonisation. Monsignor Antonio Franco, the papal envoy who threatened to stay away from the Holocaust service two years ago, said this week that the Vatican was making a "huge effort" to accelerate the opening of the archives. Perhaps within four or five years they might be revealed, he said. "It really demands a lot of work, a lot of investigation and things must be done in a very professional way," he said.

Pope Benedict was not coming to Israel to quarrel, Franco said, but at 82 he was an elderly man with a busy schedule and a visit to the museum had "never been on the agenda". This despite the fact that in 2000 his more charismatic predecessor, John Paul II, spent several hours at Yad Vashem listening to Holocaust survivors.

Vatican officials have also been at pains to describe the papal tour as a pilgrimage, not a political visit. But in reality it holds much more significance. It will be only the third visit of a pope to the Holy Land and comes at a time when hope of a genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians is ever more illusory.

More and more Christians are leaving the area, particularly the Palestinian territories, for several reasons, among them friction with the surrounding Muslim community and the suffocating and often deadly effect of Israel's four-decade military occupation.Only in 1993 did the Vatican sign an accord recognising the state of Israel, but the "fundamental agreement" between the two sides, with its 15 articles about property rights and hugely valuable tax exemptions, has still not been implemented. Negotiations continue.

There are other issues of dispute, some theological, others practical. Many Israelis were angered by the pope's decision in January to revoke the excommunication of the British bishop Richard Williamson, who denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers. Senior Jewish leaders said that decision threatened the reconciliation between the Catholic church and the Jewish people. In February, an Israeli TV show was forced to apologise after airing a sketch that ridiculed Jesus and Mary.

Some opinion polls have suggested these differences run deep. A poll of Jewish Israelis by the Jerusalem Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations last year found that 41% regarded Christianity as an idolatrous religion, and 46% did not believe Jerusalem was a central city for the Christian world. Some 40% believed the Catholic church had a very or largely negative attitude towards Judaism and Jews.

Hardliners have played on this, and on Benedict's own background growing up in wartime Germany. Michael Ben Ari, a far-right Israeli MP, said on Tuesday that the pope's visit would be an insult to the memory of Holocaust victims.

"A state welcome for the pope would be turning our backs on the millions of Jews who were killed in the shadow of the Christian religion of grace and mercy," he told a session of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. "This pope was a member of the Hitler Youth."

Among Palestinians, political expectations are high. They hope Benedict will speak out in support of Palestinian independence. After he says mass in Bethlehem on Wednesday he will visit Aida, a Palestinian refugee camp, where a stone stage has been built for him next to Israel's vast concrete West Bank barrier. Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, said the camp itself symbolised the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees who were forced out or fled from what is now Israel in the 1948 war.

However, it is far from clear whether Benedict will speak out on these political issues, and it now seems doubtful that he will even reach the stage in Aida camp.

Elsewhere there are more careful voices. Father William Shomali, rector of the Latin seminary in Beit Jala, next to Bethlehem, said there was little point hoping that the pope's visit might alter the reality of the conflict. "After hundreds of meetings between committees and sub-committees we are still negotiating how and with whom to negotiate," he said. "I don't want it to be a political visit or it will continue the frustration."

Instead, he hoped the pope would emphasise prayer, acknowledgement of the suffering of others, reconciliation and religious dialogue. "If everyone recognises his own guilt, reconciliation becomes easier," he said.

As for Pius XII and his wartime conduct, although it is true the Vatican has been slow to study the issue in detail, it also appears that Yad Vashem's verdict is not the last word.

Some historians, among them Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill's biographer, have come out in support of Pius as in fact an unsung hero of the war. He points out that the pope's 1942 Christmas message infuriated the Nazis because it defended the Jews, and notes that the pope organised rescues of Jews in Hungary and intervened to stop deportations in Slovakia. In 1943, Pius tried to disrupt implementation of the Final Solution throughout occupied Italy. continues here

Washington's elders of anti-Zion

AIPAC's annual conference opened this week to the auspicious news that the US Justice Department will drop its case against two former AIPAC employees on espionage-related charges based on a 90-year-old statute. But the original charges brought against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman left some friends of Israel uneasy over the calumny of American Jews' "dual loyalty." In recent weeks, the case escalated with accusations that Congresswoman Jane Harman, a strong congressional friend of Israel, attempted to influence the case.

In March the queasiness was widespread in the pro-Israel community after Charles "Chas" Freeman claimed that the Israel lobby torpedoed his appointment to head the US National Intelligence Council. "The aim of this lobby," Freeman told reporters, "is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views." One result, he continued, is "the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics."

Freeman's complaints echo the widely-criticized 2007 book, The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in which the authors claim that the Israel lobby's core consists of "American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend US foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests."

And all this came after former president Jimmy Carter published his anti-Israel screed, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid in 2006.

BY NO MEANS should anyone ignore or minimize the Washington leaks and attacks against AIPAC, the American Jewish community or Israel. But it should be understood that these actions are part of a historic, decades-long, beneath-the-surface low-intensity war in Washington to weaken US-Israel relations. Not much has changed since an Arab propagandist in the US, Muhammad Mehdi, proclaimed some 40 years ago, "The road to the liberation of Palestine leads through Washington."

In more than 35 years of my involvement in US-Israeli relations, I have seen the ebbs and surges of various anti-Israel campaigns. Once the anti-Israel crusade was led or conducted by senator J. William Fulbright and congressman Paul Findley, assisted by Jewish anti-Zionists like Elmer Berger and the apostate Alfred Lilienthal, and supported by Arab propagandists and oil interests. In the 1960s and '70s the legislators charged that American policy in the Middle East was too pro-Israel and that Congress was corrupted.

In 1962 Fulbright launched an investigation of foreign lobbyists in Washington, attempting to force AIPAC to register as an agent of Israel rather than a domestic American lobby. His chief investigator was a journalist named Walter Pincus. (Today, Pincus, The Washington Post's veteran national security reporter, helps cover the Jane Harman story and the Rosen-Weissman trial.)

"Israel controls the United States Senate," Fulbright told Face the Nation in 1973. "Around 80 percent are completely in support of Israel; anything Israel wants it gets. Jewish influence in the House of Representatives is even greater." (Years later, after retiring from the Senate, Fulbright registered as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia.)

Freeman, Walt, and Mearsheimer are but parrots of Fulbright and under secretary of state George Ball who wrote a 1977 Foreign Affairs article, "How to Save Israel in Spite of Itself." Ball declared more than 30 years ago, "How far should we go in continuing to subsidize a policy shaped to accommodate understandable Israeli compulsions which do not accord with the best interests - as we see it - either of Israel or the United States, but are a threat to world peace?... Because many articulate Americans are passionately committed to Israel, the slightest challenge to any aspect of current Israeli policy is likely to provoke a shrill ad hominem response. To suggest that America should take a stronger and more assertive line in the search for Middle East peace is to risk being attacked as a servant either of Arab interests or of the oil companies, or being denounced as anti-Israel, or, by a careless confusion of language, even condemned as anti-Semitic."

In the mid-1970s, secretary of state Henry Kissinger, frustrated by Israel's tough negotiating position and encouraged by Ball, pushed president Gerald Ford to conduct a "reassessment" of relations with Israel. After AIPAC rallied strong congressional opposition to the administration's proposed policy change, AIPAC was investigated by the Justice Department to see if it should register as a foreign agent of Israel. The investigators concluded, "There is not one shred of evidence that AIPAC should be registered as a foreign agent."

AS RONALD REAGAN's vice president, George H. Bush reportedly led the efforts to embargo F-16 aircraft shipments to Israel after the bombing of the Iraqi reactor in 1981. In 1991 as president, Bush went toe-to-toe with the American Jewish community when he sought to tie loan guarantees, which Israel needed to provide housing for the massive aliya of Soviet Jews, to restrictions on the building of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. When Jewish organizations went up to Capitol Hill to lobby for the aid, Bush went on national TV, pounded his fists and declared that he was "up against some powerful political forces... I heard today, there were something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little guy [the president] down here doing it."

Bush went on to chip away at public support for Israel by claiming that American soldiers had "risked their lives to defend Israelis" in the Gulf War and that "despite our own economic problems the United States provided Israel with more than $4 billion in economic and military aid, nearly $1,000 for every Israeli man, woman and child." continues here