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Iyar 20, 5767, 5/8/2007

Creating Our Future Leadership

by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

It is banal to say that Israel is facing a major crisis in leadership these days. Elections alone cannot resolve it. An investigative commission of our political and security leaders - no matter how thorough in its recommendations - cannot resolve it. Mass resignations cannot resolve it (although I'd personally settle for that as a temporary salve).

To truly be a leader means to bring out the best in those being led, to motivate, to
"We ignite the spark in each of them to fulfill their innate potential."
empower and to strengthen. It means to be an example of perseverance, honor, discipline and integrity.

But who leads the leaders? How are they created, if they can be created?

Recently, I was privileged to learn of a place where leaders are being created. Perhaps not leaders in the sense of politicians rising to the top in a game of influence, money and pull, but true leaders - people who lead by example; those very people of perseverance, honor, discipline and integrity that Israel needs.

The Mechina Program of the Northern Negev is a unique post-high-school, military preparatory academy that set as its goal the realization of the full potential of young Jews from Israel's underclass to become positive, contributing members of Israeli society. Focusing on youths from troubled or impoverished backgrounds, the Mechina seeks to transform low self-esteem, limited ambition and underachievement into motivation, self-respect, success and authentic leadership.
Mechina of the Northern Negev

According to the English-language website of this important, all-blue-and-white program, the Mechina gives its students "an intense year of quality Jewish education, an opportunity to move from risk to success, and most importantly, we ignite the spark in each of them to fulfill their innate potential, in a religious Zionist framework.

"Without the Mechina program, these students would have little hope of excelling in the Israeli military, or getting a higher education, or ultimately assuming leadership roles in their communities."

And the Mechina, established only five years ago, has already proven itself. 12 of the program's graduates received outstanding soldier awards, four became officers and one was granted the President of Israel's Award for Excellence in Service. And that is just
12 of the program's graduates received outstanding soldier awards.
what they have accomplished in the IDF - just wait until these young adults spread their wings and really begin to fly.

According to a 2006 UJA study, the Northern Negev Mechina graduates report increased motivation, strengthened values, greater self-assurance and a deeper commitment to their community and their Jewish identity.

The Mechina and programs like it, I believe, are doing more to bring about a positive change in national leadership than all 200,000 people who demonstrated against the government last week in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square. It may be the "long way," but it is the right way. And it's the only way that will last beyond next week's newspaper headlines - because it is based on a foundation that is older than last week's newspaper headlines.

To offer your help in transforming Israel for the better, contact Executive Director Naftali Kandler at naftali@mechina.org.il or 972-52-4239740. Donations can be sent to the PEF Israel Endowment Fund, Inc. at 317 Madison Avenue, Suite 607, New York, NY 10017. In Israel, donate to "Mechina Kiryat Malachi" at the Mechina Program, POB 57, Kiryat Malachi, or by way of direct deposit to account no. 209396 at the Kiryat Malachi branch (450) of Bank Mizrachi (20).



Iyar 19, 5767, 5/7/2007

How Self-Hatred in Israel differs from the Diaspora

by Steven Plaut

Please see this review of the excellent new book "Jewish Divide over Israel" by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, Transaction Books, 2006, reviewed by moi.

As part of the review, here is an observation on the difference between Israeli leftist Jewish self-hatred and assimilationist self-hatred in the Diaspora:

By and large, for such secularized assimilated Jews in the Diaspora, Jewish "self-hatred" was less a form of anti-Semitism than it was an expression of indifference to their own Jewish roots and origins.  Most "self-hating" assimilationist Jews in the Diaspora are simply non-Jewish Jews, people with no interest in belonging to the Jewish community or in practicing any form of Judaism.  By and large they do not actively wish other Jews harm and most have no sympathy at all for anti-Semites....

But Israeli Jewish anti-Semites are a completely different kettle of fish.  They are not posturing against Israel and against Jews because they are a small persecuted ethnic minority in some gentile country of residence.  It is true that there is an element of seeking social acceptance for them, attacking Jews and Israel in order to court favor among overseas anti-Semites, especially among Israeli leftists.  There is also clearly a repudiation of all attachment to Jews and Jewishness among such people, where "Canaanism" in the form of post-Jewish Israeliness is almost universal among Israeli anti-Semites.  But that is clearly not the same as Diaspora assimilationism.  Israeli anti-Semites may posture as "Jewish Palestinians", but none of them are seriously trying to learn Arabic or dress and live as Arabs.  

If Diaspora "self-hating" Jews are by and large simply indifferent to their Jewishness, Israeli Jewish anti-Semites quite openly hate their own people and country.  They invariably identify with and endorse the enemies of their country.  Tali Fahima and Udi Adiv differ from other Israeli anti-Semites only in the degree of their actual treason.  Israeli Jewish anti-Semites are not seeking social and cultural acceptance as much as they are seeking the destruction of their own people and the annihilation of their own country.  They resemble far more Lord Haw-Haw or Taliban John than they do the assimilated suburban American Jew.  

As such, Israeli Jewish anti-Semites increasingly resemble the candidly treasonous fringes of the American and European Left.  Just like the American Left is essentially little more than a movement of anti-Americanism and can be counted on to endorse every enemy of the United States and oppose American interests in everything, so the Israeli Left is motivated by an acute desire to see its own country harmed.  The difference of course is that the anti-American Left in the United States is harmless and an amusing distraction, whereas the radical self-hating Israeli Left is actively collaborating with the enemies of its own country during time of war and when the goal of those enemies is the annihilation of Israel.




Iyar 14, 5767, 5/2/2007

The New Bishara Treason Chic

by Steven Plaut


The Left joins Bishara Treason Chic

Invitation to a hanging?

 

Well, the peek-a-boo game is over and the press in Israel have at last been allowed to print the charges against Knesset Member Azmi Bishara.  Bishara is an Anti-Semitic pro-terror Arab fascist, so naturally he is beloved by the Israeli far Left.  An ad was run in Haaretz this week declaring "Azmi Bishara you are our Brother," and signed by a handful of Israeli anti-Israel leftists and communist moonbats, including Anat Biletzki, professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University.  Because Bishara is so openly a traitor, he is also being celebrated by Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion University, who previously cheered and celebrated such people as nuclear spy Mordecai Vanunu (Gordon declared he deeply admires him and thinks Vanunu was a patriot) and terrorist collaborator Tali Fahima.

 

The charges against Bishara are described here reporting that Bishara

'received several hundred thousand dollars from Hizbullah for delivering intelligence information during the Second War in Lebanon last summer. He was also in touch with intelligence agents from other unnamed countries.  Bishara is accused of handing over information about strategic locations to enable Hizbullah to strike at them during the war. He is also suspected of stealing millions of shekels from Arab aid organizations, laundering the money through eastern Jerusalem money-changers, one of whom has reportedly turned state’s witness. Bishara allegedly received envelopes full of cash, with one such envelope containing $50,000 in cash which he deposited in a Jordanian bank. Officials did not reveal from which country the money came.'

The Jerusalem Post reports that Bishara was helping the Hizbollah choose targets to attack.

When Bishara was elected to the Knesset as head of an Arab fascist party, Israel's moonbats were demanding that he sit on the Knesset intelligence committee.  I guess they wanted to make it easier for him to spy for his terrorist friends.  Instead, he was put on the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee and the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Wiretapping (I guess whoever assigned him had a sense of humor).

Bishara is a longtime Stalinist.  That is probably why the anti-Israel Van Leer Institute in Jerualem recruited him for their board.  The New Israel Fund in the US tried to bring Bishara to the Smithsonian as the official representative of Israel for Israel's 50th independence events in 1998.  Bishara represents the kind of "New Israel" that the New Israel Fund seeks to create.

Bishara is a walking advertisement for why Israel should have capital punishment for treason, for both Jewish and Arab traitors.  The only problem with the idea is that there would be such a long line of those waiting their turns for its application. 

 




Iyar 12, 5767, 4/30/2007

Middle East Translator

by Steven Plaut

We propose installing an automatic online Middle East translator chip on your machines to help you read the mainstream media news.

Here are some examples of how it would work:

Israeli Racism - Translation: When Israel builds a fence or barriers to keep suicide bombers and other terrorists from murdering Jewish children and civilians

Fighting against Racism - Translation: When Palestinians randomly murder hundreds of Jewish civilians

Crimes against Humanity  - Translation: Defending the Lives of Jews

"Zionist Racism" - Translation: Any attempt at Preventing Arabs from murdering Jewish children

Unilateral Action -  Israel deciding unilaterally to protect Jewish children from being murdered, without getting approval from the UN 

Illegal Settlement - Translation: Anywhere Jews live

Obstacle to Peace - Translation: Israel defending its children

Terrorists - Translation: People who kill Americans in Pakistan

Militants and Activists - Translation: People who murder Jews

Anti-Racism - Translation: Ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East

Patriotism - Translation: Israeli Leftists fomenting mutiny in the Israeli army

Peace Seeking - Translation: Israeli Leftists urging people around the world to embargo and boycott Israel and Jews

Moderation - Translation: Agreeing with Arab extremists and fascists

Free Speech - Translation: Protecting the Right of Azmi Bishara to demand openly that Israel be destroyed and all the Jews murdered while denying free speech to rightwing dissidents

Criminal Incitement - Translation: Any sentence with which Israel’s Extreme Left disagrees

Equality - Translation: Exempting Arabs from Israeli military conscription or national service




Iyar 8, 5767, 4/26/2007

Capital Punishment Wins another Round of Argument

by Steven Plaut

Whenever the issue of the death penalty arises, including in Israel, its opponents start screaming about all the "wrongfully convicted and executed" people.  The urban myth of wrongfully executed innocents is one of the most common in the media.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal this week,  judge Morris B. Hoffman (Colorado district court judge and an adjunct 

professor of law at the University of Colorado) takes a serious look at that claim.  It is complete nonsense.

Hoffman observes:

'One of the earliest and most oft-cited works on wrongful convictions was a 1987 study done by Hugo Bedau and Michael Radelet, claiming that 23 of the 350 capital defendants whose cases they examined (including Sacco and Vanzetti) were executed despite their factual innocence. Yet the method by which Mr. Bedau (a philosopher) and Mr. Radelet (a sociologist) determined whether the executed defendants were actually innocent was to reconstruct from the trial record, and contemporaneous newspaper reports, a one-sided narrative from which some doubt about factual guilt might plausibly be argued.  Scholars immediately criticized this methodology, and challenged Messrs. Bedau and Radelet to come up with a single case of a demonstrably innocent person executed in America in the modern era. Messrs. Bedau and Radelet have not only been unable to do so. One of them has recently admitted that their label "innocent" was really just a way of saying there were errors in the trial, that guilt seemed to them to be a "close call," and that some of those close calls must surely, as a statistical matter, have involved some factually innocent people....It is a giant leap from an erroneous trial ruling to reversible error, and another giant leap from reversible error to actual innocence.'

Hoffman goes on to calculate the wrongful post-trial conviction rate in the US as only 0.013%. But since only 5% of cases go to court trial in the US, the overall wrongful conviction rate is around 0.00065%.  And there is no evidence that any wrongfully convicted person was ever executed in the US.

So instead of trying to deal with terrorism through capitulation and appeasement, maybe Israel should try capital punishment!   The entire country was forced into the Oslo debacle under the slogan "Let's give it a try."   So regarding capital punishment, why not give 'Old Sparky' a try?
 



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