'The Jewish Terrorist'

Here's just the first paragraph of the Reuters story on Jack Teitel:

A self-confessed killer dubbed 'The Jewish Terrorist' has shown how far settlers may go to stop Israel trading land for peace with Palestinians and the risks even lone attackers can pose to stability in a tinderbox region."

Is that The Jewish Terrorist?

Or is that The Jewish Terrorist?

Or is that The Jewish Terrorist?

Or is that The Jewish Terrorist?

I  am fed-up with all this accusatory scriptwriting by Reuters.

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What a month

The holiday season is over, but what a month.

The Goldstone Report. Upcoming J Street convention. Attempts to strike at Jewish communities through tax exemption status. Campaign to apply a political apartheid character to Israel. Obama's attempt at "freezing settlements." Temple Mount provocation by Islamic radicals. And much more.

It's difficult to gauge what's really important, and therefore what would interest readers of blogs.

In fact, I don't really know how many people read this blog. Many perhaps think that bloggers are narcissists. While that may be true, as for me, I prefer an inter-relationship - at least a minimal one. Was I clear enough? Did I note enough facts? Is my reasoning seemingly logical? Are the topics I deal with interesting? More religion? More sex? Less Israel?

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Deconstruction of a text

I find President Barack Obama's recent pronouncement on the question of Jewish residential communities in Judea and Samaria to be odd, awkward and and morally deficient.

On September 4, the White House Office of the Press Secretary released a statement that reads, in part:

Continued settlement activity is inconsistent with Israel's commitment under the Roadmap. As the President has said before, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop.... We do appreciate Israel's stated intent to place limits on settlement activity and will continue to discuss this with the Israelis as these limitations are defined."

The use of "legitimacy" bestirs my political sensors. Is "legitimacy" worse, or better, than "illegality"?

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How the double standard Is applied

The weekly Bilin fence protests have just picked up some major support.  Here's a quote taken from a quite sympathetic New York Times report:

The protesters chant and shout and, inevitably, a few throw stones. Then just as inevitably, the soldiers open fire with tear gas and water jets, lately including a putrid oil-based liquid that makes the entire area stink. It is one of the longest-running and best organized protest operations in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it has turned this once anonymous farming village into a symbol of Palestinian civil disobedience, a model that many supporters of the Palestinian cause would like to see spread and prosper."

I would take issue with that characterization.  Only "a few" throw stones? Need it be inevitable that stones be thrown? Why initiate such violence? Stone-throwing constitutes neither "peaceful protest" nor civil disobedience - stone-throwing is violence.

Does Monsieur Wettach think we're idiots?

In a letter to The Jerusalem Post on August 11, Pierre Wettach, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) head of delegation to Israel and places east, defends his organization against a critical article by Moshe Dann published on July 24 on how "settlements" became illegal. 

Wettach's defense consists of three points. First, that "the ICRC did not 'make up the law' which considers the settlements to be illegal."

But he obfuscates. What Dann meant, obviously, was that at the time the Red Cross ruled that Israel's actions violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, no formal court or international legal body had delivered any judicial decision on the matter. By adopting the position of "illegality" as regards Jewish communities, the ICRC was indeed making up the law.

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And where were you born? Pt. II

In my previous blog post, I pointed out what I consider to be the rather biased attitude in US State Department regulations regarding American citizens born in Jerusalem (their place of birth is basically a stateless one as Israel will not be included) and in Judea and Samaria ("West Bank," a fictitious term, and not Judea & Samaria, is used).

Perusing the Web site of the Consulate-General of the United States in Jerusalem, the one that reports back directly to Washington, not to Tel Aviv, I was struck by two more examples of what seems like bureaucratic discrimination.

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And where were you born?

The Jerusalem Post informed its readers on Tuesday that the US State Department considers Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem as included in the US demand that Israel halt "settlement" construction, including for natural growth purposes as State Department spokesman Ian Kelly admitted. And that is an appropriate introduction for me to expand on a matter of State Dept. deviousness.

As American citizens are aware, their children, if born in Jerusalem, whether west Jerusalem or east, I emphasize, are not recognized by the US State Department as being born in Israel. Their birth certificates and subsequently, their passports, will list the "place of birth" as simply "Jerusalem", a seemingly stateless location.

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Imagining Palestinian settlers

In a recent Jerusalem Post op-ed piece Imagine Palestinian settlers in Israel, the idea was suggested to Israelis and others who support a Jewish civilian presence in the areas of Judea and Samaria:

to imagine how you would feel if, instead of there being 300,000 Israelis who'd gone to live in the West Bank, there were 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who'd come to live in Israel. And imagine if they'd set themselves up over here the way Israelis have done over there."

Of course, did it not occur to the writer that many Israelis have actually not only imagined that but, especially over the past decade, truly feel that that is the situation with Israel's Arab minority. Why do you think Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beiteinu party achieved 15 seats in the Knesset?  It is no imagination that forests were burned down, that religious fanatics are copying the Mufti of Mandate times and claiming Jews are trying to destroy Al-Aqsa, that illegal construction is in the thousands of units, that aid and assistance to terrorists have been extended and that Arab MKs openly identify with the goals of the most radical Muslim nationalists and have been particularly foul-mouthed in the Knesset.

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A topsy-turvy world; at least for the Jews

I have spotted two additional linguistic oddities that confound me. 

As you have read at this blog previously, I prefer "revenant" rather than "settler", or, at the least, "resident".  I use "community" and not "settlement".  I live in Samaria and not in the "West Bank".

Well, it seems that language is fluid and different standards of semantics are being used.

For example, Israel is pilloried for supposedly being a "colonialist" power lording over "occupied territories."

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Getting lost in the Green Line

As a CAMERA alert informed me, one written by Tamar Sternthal, the papal trip of Benedictus XVI to Israel has confused the Los Angeles Times newspaper, which allowed some errors of fact about Israel to appear in its pages. One of them seems to been a stumble over the Green Line, as if it were a tripwire for political geographic correctness.

Duke Helfand, an LA Times reporter, erroneously states in one article that the Pope will arrive at:

the West Bank, where he'll visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and Jerusalem's Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site."

Ooops. Yad Vashem, for sure, is not in the "West Bank" and I would suggest that neither is the Western Wall. They are located in Jerusalem. And, if one wants to get nitpicky, Yad Vashem is actually in the western section and was under Israeli control prior to 1967, that watershed year when maps got redrawn, Biblical locations became rediscovered and the Green Line became, well, obsolete to a great extent.

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