Hide the Twinkies

by Steven Plaut

YNET News reports that Oprah Winfrey (which probably should be spelled Wingfry) will be waddling into town. 

Oprah has a history of running Israel-bashing pro-Palestinian articles in a magazine she publishes: "O" Magazine.  She also has made insensitive and ignorant comments about the Holocaust.

Whenever the subject of terrorism is broached on her show, Oprah studiously avoids allowing anyone to link it to Palestinians or the Hizbollah. She interviewed mothers of suicide bombers who were distraught because their houses were bulldozed. There was no mention of Israeli babies and their mothers being blown up in buses, pizza parlours blown to smithereens, nor Jewish teens murdered while at the disco in Tel Aviv. Not even the Jews murdered when two guests of the International Solidarity Movement blew up Mike's Place in Tel Aviv. Debbie Schlussel has dubbed her the affable Joseph Goebbels of daytime talk TV. Columnist Naomi Ragen demolished Oprah for her politicized bias. The Anti-Defamation League has denounced her for bias, noting that 'Palestinian girls will be rescued when their leaders say "No" to the incitement, hate and violence that has permeated their political and cultural landscape for years now.'

O!!!

Maybe she can analyze the problems of self-esteem among suicide bombers and other terrorists.  Israel may need Doctor Phil to treat us after Oprah leaves town, to return to her bored overeating overspending housewives with the closet reorganization crises.
 

Let Them Unite

by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

According to our own Gil Ronen, Defense Minister Amir Peretz told Israel Radio that responding to Palestinian Authority artillery attacks on Sderot and other Negev towns by cutting off fuel, water, electricity and communications in Gaza, "would cause the entire Palestinian population to unite around Hamas."

I have four brief comments on this latest insane statement by our venerated and mustachioed leader:

1) Maybe I missed something, but wasn't Hamas freely elected in a landslide election by the PA Arabs? Haven't all polls shown that the PA Arabs deeply desire continued murderous attacks against Israeli Jews? The PA Arabs are already united around Hamas....

2) ...except for those united around PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah, which is, of course, much better. After all, Fatah members murder Jews while releasing communiques from the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades; whereas, Hamas members murder Jews while releasing communiques from the Izz A-Din Al-Kassam Brigades.

3) How long exactly would the PA Arabs be "united" around Hamas without water, electricity, fuel and communications? And what good does that "uniting" do for Hamas if the organization is crippled - without electricity for their rocket manufacturing, without fuel for their rocket-bearing vehicles, without water for their thirsty militiamen, and without phone
The PA can't continue to fire rockets at Israeli schoolchildren using their "unity."
service to order their minions around? Not to mention the justice of cutting off their continuing broadcasts of the Mickey Mouse Mullah.... In other words, the PA can't continue to fire rockets at Israeli schoolchildren using their "unity" - they need electricity, water, fuel and communications.

4) And why does Peretz think that Arab psychology works differently than in Israeli society? Has the ongoing siege of Sderot caused 'the entire Israeli population to unite around Olmert and Peretz,' or has the effect been exactly the opposite? Aderabeh, the Arabs unite around that force that proves (or boasts of being) effective in reaching their murderous goals. Deny them that victory.

I'd also like to point out what Peretz did not say in response to the suggestion that cutting off the Palestinian Authority's fuel and electricity would end the Kassam rocket barrages.

He never argued that it wouldn't work.

May 20-21 UPDATE:
In northern Lebanon, a faction operating in a "Palestinian refugee camp" clashed and attacked the Lebanese military. Guess what the Lebanese government and army did?

"The camp’s electricity, phone lines and water were cut off," reports the Beirut-based Daily Star. The army also started shelling the Nahar Al-Bard camp fairly indiscriminately, as far as I can tell.

What's the matter with those Lebanese? Don't they know that all that will "cause the entire Palestinian population to unite around [Fatah Al-Islam]"?

Maybe they do, but they don't care. The Lebanese people are out in the streets cheering.

Raise University Tuition!

by Steven Plaut

Israeli university students pay only $2500 per year tuition. Not per course, but per year.

 


The pampered university students in Israel continue to strike because they do not want to pay tuition. Paying any tuition at all would mean, according to the student spokesmen, that "college education is only for the rich." Paying for any other good or service though does not make it "only for the rich."

Israeli university students pay only $2500 per year tuition. Not per course, but per year. A three year BA degree costs less than the cars owned by the students, cars in such great numbers that they choke the entrances into campuses.

Providing a year of college costs the system between 15 and 20 thousand dollars to provide. The students pay only 2.5 thousand. The students whine that tuition in Israel should be based only on what students pay in certain EU countries, where tuition is free. Since when is the price of something in Europe the proper basis for setting its price in Israel? It certainly is NOT when it comes to professors' salaries! But why shouldn't Israeli professors work for free so that students need not pay tuition?  What happened to the "C" word - costs?

The REAL issue is who should pick up the cost of those expenditures of at least 12.5 thousand dollars per year that college students are not paying now in tuition? The government wants the students to pony up an additional 1.5 thousand dollars per year as their share. The students want the low-income taxpayers, the welfare mothers, the impoverished old people, the Ethiopian immigrants, the workers in factory jobs and living in development towns, and similar people to cover the costs for them instead, as a sort of gratuity to the students. The students, who will almost all be joining the middle and upper classes upon graduation, want Israeli taxpayers, three quarters of whom never attend college and so make far less income than college graduates, to cover the costs of producing their nice degrees.

A far better proposal would be to make all college students pay for at least 60% of the actual costs of providing them with an education and degree. Speaking of comparisons with overseas countries, for those students short on funds, other than suggesting to them that they sell their nice cars, let's tell them that they can borrow the money in student loans and pay it back after graduation!  Like students do in lots of other countries!

Bias at the "Association for Civil Rights in Israel"

by Steven Plaut

INN today carries a news report on yet another one-sided biased "report" coming out of the misnamed Association for Civil Rights in Israel or ACRI. The "Association" is for Civil Rights for everyone except Jews. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) is an anti-democratic extremist group that does not endorse free speech. ACRI, like B'tselem, Physicians for Human Rights and many other assorted splinter far-left, anti-Israel, pro-PLO groups in Israel, pretends it is nothing more than a neutral human rights watchdog but this is an Orwellian lie. (B'tselem by the way distributed a special brochure this week via Haaretz in which it claims to prove that Gaza is still "occupied" by Israel because Israel refuses to let the Hamas import weapons freely at the entrance points into the Gaza Strip.  Importing explosives - now THERE is a human right B'tselem can get all indignant over.)  Its latest "report" is a one-sided attack on the Jews in Hebron. As usual. the ACRI just can't seem to locate any acts of violence against Jews by Arabs. And self-defense is definitely not a civil right of Jews in the eyes of ACRI.

ACRI is an extremist anti-Israel group that only cares about "human rights" when "defending them" is part of delegitimizing Israel (such as in this case). It has never heard of a human right for Jews not to be murdered by terrorists.

Think I am exaggerating? The president of ACRI, Sami Michael, best known for romanticizing communism, was cited in Haaretz (Oct 21, 2004) as justifying Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish Israelis. Here are his words as quoted by Haaretz: 

Michael understands the Hamas members who are fighting these Jews, who stuck a wedge down their throats. In an interview published in the latest issue of New Horizons, a monthly on society and the state published by the Berl Katznelson Foundation, Michael rejects the definition of Hamas fighters as "terrorists."
"Imagine the feeling if I woke up tomorrow and saw this neighborhood, which we inhabit, forcibly conquered by the Syrians, and they established settlements here, and in order to go to the bus station, I needed permission from the Syrian army. How would I feel?" the author from Haifa asked. "If I fight them, I will be considered a terrorist. Why am I a terrorist? Why do we call Hezbollah or Hamasniks terrorists? Why? Because he fights on his own territory? Suddenly, aliens, occupiers, land on him and tell him: "Your house is ours. It's his land, he and his forefathers were born here, and the settlers say: We will never leave ... How would you respond to this?"

A few years back, I approached ACRI and offered them an opportunity to defend free speech in Israel and prove they support human rights for all, even for those who might disagree with their leftist extremist ideology. As you may know, I am being sued in a harassment SLAPP** "libel suit" by a leftist extremist lecturer at Ben-Gurion University because I dared to criticize his political opinions and his public political behavior. The lecturer in question (Neve Gordon) served, for example, as a human shield for Yasser Arafat while Arafat was hiding in his offices the murderers of an Israeli cabinet minister and other terrorists, all this in order to interfere illegally with an Israeli anti-terror military operation. The suit is clearly nothing more than an anti-democratic assault on free speech by a leftist extremist who thinks it is a crime to criticize him.

So, I contacted ACRI and asked them to take up my case and denounce the Ben-Gurion extremists' tactic of trying to use SLAPP litigation as a bludgeon to suppress free speech for non-leftists. There can be no clearer opportunity for those who value free speech as a human right to denounce such misuse of the courts as this case. I invited ACRI to help defeat this cynical move by the leftist extremist in question, Neve Gordon of the political science department at Ben-Gurion University. The liberal Prof. Alan Dershowitz that "Neve Gordon has gotten into bed with neo-Nazis, Holocaust justice deniers, and anti-Semites. He is a despicable example of a self-hating Jew and a self-hating Israeli."

In response, I got a peremptory refusal from a spokesperson for ACRI. They are not interested in defending free speech for Zionists.

** SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. SLAPP suits are anti-democratic libel suits designed to suppress the free speech of one's critics.

Still Playing: Mickey Mouse for Jihad

by Jack Engelhard


Isn’t this child abuse?

Corruption of the young has reached a new high, or rather a new low, with Mickey Mouse serving as a recruiter for hatred and murder.

Get them hating while they’re young. Apparently, that’s the curriculum.

That’s also copyright infringement. Straight from Gaza, Hamas borrowed the image of this lovable Disney character to lure young Palestinian Arabs into murder and martyrdom. News of this program, that features “Mickey Mouse” proclaiming that it’s politically correct, even mandatory, to kill Christians and Jews, reached us a few days ago, but it’s been airing on Arab television for some time, as have textbooks with the same message.

If you caught the footage on our own news networks, as I did on CNN and Fox, you were amazed as I was that perversion has no limits. But why the big surprise when Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat and their disciples taught us to be ready for the worst in people. But will our kids be ready? They’d better be, for soon they’ll be facing another generation of jihadists.

In a few years they’ll be graduating into suicide bombers, these kiddies who’d been fed all that poison. They’ve already been “educated” and prepped and measured for their suicide belts. Pity our children and grandchildren, and beware of an upcoming generation that’s been taught to say – “Oh Jerusalem we are coming. Oh Jerusalem it is the time of death.”

Yes, they are coming, and coming as well to “liberate” all Christian lands in favor of Islam. One of my editors pointed out that this Mickey Mouse clone (named Farfur in this Palestinian Authority telecast) mimes the body language of Adolph Hitler. Reports that this program has been yanked proved false. See Arutz Sheva’s “Hamas Lied About Taking ‘Jihad Mickey’ Off PA TV.” The same report (about the lie) appeared in The New York Times.

We’re well beyond politics when this sort of Mickey Mouse programming can be aimed at children. We’re into depravity that questions our superiority above the snake. This can’t be evolution when even a portion of humanity is capable of such vileness. We’re going backwards.

Egypt, some time ago, ran its own hate-fest by way of a mini-series that updated “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” These telecasts were beamed all across the Arab world to keep the multitudes conditioned, in case the people should forget to hate and lapse into tolerance.

But all that was mostly for grownups. “Mickey Mouse” as propagandist, that’s for the kindergarten set.

Around here and in Israel we keep chanting “give peace a chance.” All right, but tell them, not us. What chances have we got for world peace, now or later, when THEIR ten commandments begin with Thou SHALT Kill? Where do we hide our kids when THEIR kids are nourished animosity along with their pabulum?

Yet another group of mostly homegrown terrorists were gathered up just the other day in New Jersey – and we wonder why?

There’s no mystery to any of this. It begins at home and at school and doubled-up on TV. That’s where we’re taught right from wrong.

Though some get it all backwards.