Bloodthirsty Liberal

France:

Anti-Semitic acts almost doubled in France in 2009

According to the head of the French Jewish community, the rise showed ‘the totally unacceptable import into France of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.’

Venezuela:

About 30 Jewish families in Venezuela will immigrate to Colombia in 2010 because of concern about the policies of President Hugo Chavez and also because of the energetic and economic crisis which affects the country, a Jewish leader in Bogota said.

(How bad must Venezuela be if the Jews there see greener—and more potent—grass in Colombia?)

And then there’s the always-reliable Middle East:

A regional war may well be approaching. The actions and statements of Iran and its Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian proxies over the past week or so indicate that this is what Israel’s enemies are gunning for.

Come on, Aggie, admit it: Britain looks pretty good now, doesn’t it?

He’s getting older now, but he was so handsome. I’m sorry he’s such an unrepentant jerk.

- Aggie

I think this Dutch bitch misunderstands the nuanced meaning of “Never Again”.

It doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk about it anymore.

“Holland’s powerful Jewish lobby is playing on the country’s sense of guilt over the Holocaust,” a prominent Dutch activist said last week, triggering angry reactions and accusation of anti-Semitism from pro-Israel Dutch Jews.

Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of the first president of the European Central Bank and a friend of the Queen of the Netherlands, said in an interview for Islam Online that “the Jewish lobby in Holland, like in the United States, is very strong and powerful, and it is still playing on our guilt feelings although it is 63 years since the Holocaust.”

Duisenberg, a leading pro-Palestinian activist and well-known member of Holland’s high society, added that “whenever you have something against the Jewish people in Holland, they call you an anti-Semite.”

Can’t imagine why.

[T]he interview does contain a quote by Duisenberg saying that “Holland’s right-wing government is Christian radical, and the radical people within the Jewish people have very strong feelings toward Israel, and they dominate our government.”

Duisenberg once said she wants to collect six million signatures for a pro-Palestinian petition. In a 2005 television discussion, she said: “I hope the Jews realize they can’t take over the south of Amsterdam the same way they took over the West Bank.”

“The Jews”: shouldn’t you hear an alarm when you use those words?

Jews should:

[I]n 2009, the number of anti-Semite incidents in Amsterdam doubled compared to 2008, when 14 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in the Dutch capital. Jews in Amsterdam feel increasingly “besieged” as they are exposed to a growing barrage of name-calling, hate mail, firecrackers in their mailboxes, graffiti and - occasionally - physical abuse, CIDI said.

Well, if they just stopped banging on about the Holocaust all the time, maybe they’d have less name-calling and fewer firecrackers.

PS: I don’t want to mention the H-word, but how can she fix her mouth to say the words “Holland’s powerful Jewish lobby” after… well, I said I wouldn’t say it, but it rhymes with The Diary of Stan Flank?

Just found out about this, but a new (as in 65-year-old) Chagall crucifixion has returned to the art world:

[W]hen David Glasser, one of the museum’s chairmen, was perusing a Paris auction catalog a few months ago, he found it hard to believe what he saw: a previously unknown 1945 gouache by Marc Chagall. It was one of a small group of images Chagall made in direct response to the Holocaust, after he and his wife had fled France in 1941, after the German occupation and after he had begun to learn the details of the Nazi atrocities.

The gouache on heavy paper, which Chagall signed and titled himself lightly with a pencil in Russian — “Apocalypse in Lilac, Capriccio” — employs one of his familiar motifs, an image of a crucified Jesus, which he used as a metaphor for persecuted Jewry. But this crucifixion, painted in New York, where Chagall settled for several years, is one of the most brutal and disturbing ever created by an artist primarily known for his brightly colored folkloric visions.

“Apocalypse” shows a naked Christ screaming at a Nazi storm trooper below the cross, who has a backwards swastika on his arm, a Hitler-like mustache and a serpentine tail. Another small figure can be seen crucified and a second being hanged, and a man appears to be poised to stab a child. A damaged, upside-down clock falls from the sky. The darkness and directness of the work may have been a response not only to the war but also to the death of Chagall’s wife, Bella, a year earlier from a viral infection that might have been treated if not for wartime medicine shortages.

As the article mentions, Chagall adopted the theme of the crucifixion (lower case) as central to his work.

Perhaps most famously (and certainly more recognizably Chagall) in “White Crucifixion”:

The White Crucifixion is enigmatic. To describe it, the roughly square painting depicts a slightly distorted crucified Christ clad, not in the traditional loin cloth, but a Jewish prayer shawl; the cross bathed in a blistering white beam of light from above while all around are elements of the Jewish unrest and persecution taking place in Germany and Russia at the time. A synagogue burns, homes are destroyed, the Red Army marches, no match for the impending holocaust. The white and grey tones of the overall painting make all the more disturbing the bursts of colour as refugees flee aboard a boat or on foot, attempting to rescue sacred scrolls, or merely themselves, from the onslaught of terror. This was Marc Chagall’s Guernica.

The crucifixion is the perfect symbol for European Jewry, reflecting bigotry and persecution, not to mention the fact that Jesus was born, lived, and even died a Jew.

Chagall went to that particular well often:

Even at the tender age of 25, under full Cubist influence:

But the recently rediscovered crucifixion differs from the others in some key respects. While the characters on the periphery are Chagallian, and the ladder and clock are familiar from previous depictions, the central crime is the Holocaust, the German extermination of the Jewish people, not Russian pogroms. No flying fish or floating cows, no rich colors, no scenes of shtetl life.

One of the commentaries above calls the White Crucufixion “Chagall’s Guernica”, which has a point (not least because it was painted shortly afterwards).

But Apocalypse is also inspired by Picasso’s masterpiece (one of many):

I don’t think I need to spell it out.

There are different ways to engage with great themes (evil, in this case). One can study history (Hilberg’s Destruction of European Jews), read first-person accounts (Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi), watch documentaries (Night and Fog, Shoah, Sorrow & Pity).

I think art can makes its case, too. It slips past our intellectual defenses and stabs us right through the heart. God damn it.

They are trying to get people to harass COSTCO because COSTCO carries Israeli products.

BUYcott Israel Alert: Support Costco

Please support Costco’s ongoing sale of Israeli goods. Costco stores in the United States have been targeted for anti-Israel action. Please visit your local Costco and - if available - purchase Israeli products, such as Israeli clementines and Ahava beauty products. Please consider contacting Costco to express your support for purchasing products from Israel.

Together we can make a difference!

Let’s go shopping, guys!

- Aggie

As the Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler of Bloodthirstan, I feel I owe you an apology from the core of my heart, from the depths of my soul, for not predicting this:

Following are excerpts from an address delivered by Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, member of the Iranian Assembly of Experts, which aired on Channel 1, Iranian TV, on January 22, 2010.

What emerges from the catastrophe [in Haiti] is its inhumane exploitation by the US. The US, under the pretext of humanitarian aid to the people of Haiti, deployed 18,000 troops to Haiti and officially occupied it.

Until last night, the US had prevented [the dispatching] of relief planes, which carried dozens of tons of food and medicine, as well as medical personnel, who wanted to provide humanitarian relief. It did not permit the arrival of urgent aid. If the US had allowed the planes to land, so many people under the rubble could have been rescued. Once again, the US is an accomplice to these crimes.

The US realizes that South America – which once was its backyard, and which the US believed was under its thumb… The US realizes that a wave of [South] American nationalism has begun, and its wants, by means of the occupation of Haiti, to uproot this movement.

But the US should know that what’s done is done, and with the grace of God, this century will witness the decline of the [powers of] arrogance.

[…]

There have been news reports that the Zionist regime, in the case of the catastrophe of Haiti, and under the pretext of providing relief to the people of Haiti, is stealing the organs of these wretched people.

Wow…

I mean, wow…

Can’t we bomb them just for that?

First of all, why would Israel fly across the globe for a few mangy Haitian organs (out of disease and malnutrition, I hasten to add, not racial inferiority) when they have a plentiful supply of Palestinian organs close by? Logic, dear boy, logic.

Maybe you don’t buy the he-who-saves-a-life-saves-the-world business, but you can’t just throw this kind of stuff out there and not expect to be challenged on it.

Well, in Iran you can, I guess.

And if the Israelis have no interest in their organs, what possible interest could we Americans have in the rest of the place? This my be news to Ayatollah Khatami-tune, but we’re not dancing in the streets here (as you all did after 9/11), chanting “We got Haiti! We got Haiti!”

It’s more like we’re holding a dripping mess and saying “What do we do with it?” Here, Iran, it’s yours. With our compliments.

But no, you’re just some dusty little anti-Semitic backwater, despised by everyone, especially fellow Muslims (who think you’re debased and deranged), and which hasn’t contributed anything to world culture beyond rugs, cats, and donuts in thousands of years.

Okay, we’ll give you Nazanin Boniadi:

But other than her, you have nothing to say to us. Nothing.

To commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz

I have reproduced the text in full.

Paris

SIXTY-FIVE years ago this week, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, while the Americans were approaching Dachau. For a survivor of these two infernos to still be alive and well, with a new family that has resurrected for me the one I had lost, seems almost unreal. When I entered Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele’s gruesome universe at the age of 13, I measured my life expectancy in days, weeks at the most.

In the early winter of 1944, World War II was coming to an end. But we in the camps knew nothing. We wondered: What is happening in the world outside? Where is God? Where is the pope? Does anyone out there know what is happening here to us? Does anyone even care?

Russia was devastated. Britain had its back against the wall. And America? It was so far away, so divided. How could it be expected to save civilization from the seemingly invincible forces of darkness?

It took a long time for the news of the American-led invasion of Normandy to slip into Auschwitz. There were also rumors that the Red Army was advancing quickly on the eastern front. With the ground shrinking under their feet, the Nazis were becoming palpably nervous. The gas chambers spewed fire and smoke as never before.

One gray, frosty morning, our guards ordered those of us still capable of slave labor to line up and marched us out of the camp. We were to be shunted westward, from Poland into Germany. I was beside myself with excitement — and dread. Salvation somehow seemed closer — yet we also knew that we could be killed at any moment. The goal was to hang on a little longer. I was almost 16 now, and I wanted to live.

We marched from camp to camp, day and night, until we and our torturers began to hear distant explosions that sounded like artillery fire. One afternoon we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes that mistook our column for Wehrmacht troops. As the Germans hit the dirt, their machine guns blazing in all directions, someone near me yelled, “Run for it!” I kicked off my wooden clogs and sprinted into the forest. There I hid, hungry and cold, for weeks, until I was discovered by a group of American soldiers. The boys who brought me life were not much older than I. They fed me, clothed me, made me a mascot of their regiment and gave me my first real taste of freedom.

Today, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one. Soon, history will speak about Auschwitz with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists at best, and at worst in the malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers who call the Nazi Final Solution a myth. This process has already begun.

And it is why those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to humankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too. The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.

After so much death, a groundswell of compassion and solidarity for victims — all victims, whether from natural disasters, racial hatred, religious intolerance or terrorism — occasionally manifests itself, as it has in recent days.

These actions stand in contrast to those moments when we have failed to act; they remind us, on this dark anniversary, of how often we remain divided and confused, how in the face of horror we hesitate, vacillate, like sleepwalkers at the edge of the abyss. Of course, they remind us, too, that we have managed to stave off the irrevocable; that our chances for living in harmony are, thankfully, still intact.

Samuel Pisar, a lawyer, is the author of “Of Blood and Hope.”

- Aggie

Mayor of Malmo equates anti-Semitism with Zionism

News flash to all concerned: Zionism is the Human Liberation Movement of the Jewish People. When you think Zionism, think Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. The early Zionists and founders of the State of Israel, and the modern Zionists today, represent the hope of the Jewish people to live together, in peace and dignity, in our homeland.

Anyone who believes that Zionism is a dirty word is at best misguided, but if they are over twenty years old, more likely a hater.

On to the Swedes:

Swedish Jews are upset about comments made this week by the mayor of Malmo, who said anti-Semitism and Zionism were both forms of “unacceptable extremism,” and urged local Jews to disassociate themselves from Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.

“These statements and other events in Malmo are making the Jewish community feel very uncomfortable and some people, especially the young, are leaving the city,” George Braun, the president of the Jewish community in Gothenburg, about 250 kilometers from Malmo, told Haaretz. Ilmar Reepalu, mayor of Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city, spoke in an interview published in a Swedish newspaper on Wednesday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “We accept neither Zionism nor anti-Semitism,” Reepalu said. “They are extremes who put themselves above other groups, seeing others as something lesser.”

He said it was “terrible” that Jews felt so insecure in Malmo that they felt compelled to leave, but that a recent city-center demonstration in solidarity with Israel by local Jews stirred up feelings against them

“I wish the Jewish Community would distance itself from Israel’s violations of the rights of the civilian population in Gaza,” he said. I wish that representatives of Muslims in Malmo would clearly say that the Jews in Malmo shouldn’t be mixed up in the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

Malmo’s Jewish community has complained about harassment by extreme left-wing and right-wing activists, but mostly by radical elements from the city’s Muslims, who make up about 15 percent of the population of 250,000.

Malmo drew international attention last March when the city council barred spectators from a Davis Cup tennis match in which Israelis were competing, citing public order concerns because of planned anti-Israel protests.

The problem isn’t with the Jews; it is with the haters who deny us freedom of speech or assembly outside of Israel, and who create propaganda about what Israel is. Israel is a normal nation surrounded by abnormal amounts of hatred and hostility. This hatred, sadly, has plagued the Jewish people for centuries.

The Swedes should be ashamed that only the Jewish population is uncomfortable with the Mayor’s remarks. They should all be upset.

- Aggie

Iran’s got a big scare. And it’s name is Shapiro:

Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei said that the region would soon witness annihilation of the Zionist regime, stressing that Muslim countries can make such a happening even more imminent.

“Certainly, the regional countries will witness the annihilation of the Zionist regime one day and its proximity in terms of time depends on the function of the Islamic countries and Muslim nations,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a meeting with Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz on Wednesday.

He further stressed that Mauritanian government’s severance of ties with Israel last year served a good model for certain Arab governments.

“The Zionist regime is a big danger to the Muslim world, which hatches plots every day to expand its infiltration and dominance in the region,” Ayatollah Khamenei warned.

It is?

Really?

Can you find Israel in there anywhere? You have to look hard and squint. It’s like “Where’s Waldstein?”

I can see the Zionist regime being a danger to Nepal, maybe, or Ghana—not enough Muslims there to fend off its “plots” and “infiltration” and “dominance”….

I’m sorry, I can’t go on. It’s kind of funny, but not really.

Especially when you think that the wacky ayatollah who thinks like this is about to have a picnic basket full of tactical nuclear weapons. Funny, but funny as a mushroom cloud.

PS: I wonder why the map shows Sudan and Somalia as a neutral color? Aren’t they largely Muslim? And why isn’t Iran ticked of at Uganda and Georgia and Cyprus, and other states that spoil the uninterrupted map of Muslimity? Why is it only Israel that drives them crazier than they already are? I mean, I think I know, but I’m just posing the question.

God bless the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) for staying up to date on this crap—and God damn the BBC for the crap itself:

Narrator Jane Corbin takes viewers on a “walking tour” of “what is happening on the ground” in eastern Jerusalem, scurrying from one “stop” to another to report on Israel’s alleged misdeeds. Omitting essential facts and context that explain Israel’s position, she provides a one-sided perspective that establishes Israelis as the villains and the Palestinians as their innocent victims.

In his analysis of the program, Robin Shepherd, director of international affairs at a British think tank and former London Times bureau chief, correctly points out:

The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda.

…

Corbin’s bias is evident from the start as she introduces the “battlefield,” as she terms it. Those wielding “the weapons” are “the Israeli authorities,” while the victims are the Palestinians whose homes are being demolished.

Bulldozers are seen dismantling a structure as Arab women cry, and Corbin breathlessly informs viewers that “demolitions have been increasing in recent days.” She confides that she has gotten hold of “a list that shows there’s another forty to go before the end of the year” and absurdly suggests that the reason for this is that the Jerusalem municipality “has a budget it has to use up for demolitions.” Shockingly, she makes no mention of why these homes are being demolished, leaving viewers with the false impression that it is an official Israeli policy — complete with budget — to render Arabs homeless.

In fact, Jerusalem authorities demolish only structures that are built illegally — something Corbin does not bother to inform viewers until halfway through the program when she revisits the topic of home demolitions.

Of course, there is no arbitrary quota of houses to demolish or a “budget” that must be “used up.”

No, that money has been allocated to the Ministry of Harvesting Internal Organs of Palestinian Children.

I mean, come on.

I used to be scared of monsters in my closet, but I outgrew it. Evidently the British leftist media will never, ever, outgrow their fear of Jews in the Middle East.

Even when they admit it:

In March 2009, the BBC Trust shook the British journalistic establishment by ruling that BBC News Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen violated the broadcaster’s editorial guidelines. The ruling has been the focus of much attention in the UK press, and, according to one report in a British newspaper, “will cause great concern within the BBC newsroom.”

The findings are also causing serious concern among the many who have long felt the BBC’s news coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is biased against Israel, and who now have further reason to be skeptical of the broadcaster’s Mideast news. British journalist and author Chas Newkey-Burden, for example, wrote in response to the ruling that “it is extraordinary to think that the BBC entrusts a man such as Bowen with coverage of such a monumentally important issue.”

This is true not only because Bowen wrote such a problematic article, but also because of his disturbing refusal, after the article’s many shortcomings were brought to his attention, to take responsibility for any of those shortcomings. Instead of admitting error, Bowen and others in the BBC redoubled their commitment to the flawed article, spending their time (and British stakeholder resources) coming up with disingenuous defenses to the article’s distortions.

In short, the Middle East editor and those at the BBC who initially backed his piece were given a choice between defending journalistic ethics or defending an unethical journalist, and they opted for the latter.

As far as I can tell—and supported by corroborating evidence—Bowen still serves in this role.