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Adar 28, 5767, 3/18/2007
Thank You, Raleb Majadeleby Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
You see, our national anthem, HaTikvah ("The Hope"), expresses the idea that a Jewish State in the Land of Israel is the f
HaTikvah
As long as deep in the heart / The soul of a Jew yearns / And forward to the East / To Zion, an eye looks / Our hope will not be lost, / The hope of two thousand years, / To be a free nation in our land, / The land of Zion and Jerusalem.
ulfillment of a dream of 2,000 years. It is a most succinct encapsulation of what this Jewish, Zionist state of Israel is about, at least to a large degree. And so, representing the nation's founding and guiding motivations, the anthem speaks of the "heart of a Jew yearning" and the "hope of 2,000 years."
But Majadele is an Arab and a Muslim, and he refuses to sing those words. As Majadele put it on this morning's Voice of Israel Channel 2 "Another Matter" radio news-and-interviews program:
"[The anthem] is Jewish and Zionist. I am not a Jew, nor am I a Zionist. I may be a member of a Zionist party, but I am not a Zionist."
Zionism is, at the absolute very least, the position that Jews have a right to national self-determination just like every other people; it is Jewish patriotism. The State of Israel is, then, an expression of that self-determination. If Majadele is not a Zionist, then he would seem to be opposed to the existence of the very state for which he is a minister! Shall we laugh or cry?
How will Majadele's non-Zionist and Muslim loyalties play out when he is exposed to sensitive security information regarding a clearly Zionist goal, like protecting the Jews of Hevron from Muslim attack, or like supporting Jewish immigrants (olim) from, let's say, India, Venezuela, Iran or Ethiopia?
Majadele - who told Voice of Israel radio that he has verses from the Koran on his ministerial office walls - has been in the Knesset since 2004. Has no one among the leaders of the Labor party asked these questions before? Shouldn't they have?
And should anyone think that this is an issue for the Jewish State alone, the Voice of Israel interviewer, Dahlia Yairi, asked a very logical question of Minister Majadele: "Were you a member of the government of, say, England, would you sing the national anthem?"
Majadele didn't answer. After stuttering briefly, he launched into an (uninterrupted) monologue focused on Knesset Member Tzvi Hendel (National Union-NRP), who was interviewed beforehand.
Despite the security risks, which I hope our leaders are somehow mitigating, I am glad Majadele was nominated, I am glad he refused to sing HaTikvah, and I am glad he said what he did on the Voice of Israel. Now, with any luck, only the most self-destructive Jew will fail to understand the essence of the opposition to the State of Israel, from Raleb Majadele to Ismail Haniyeh. It has nothing to do with "occupation," and everything to do with our being "a free nation in our land."
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Adar 23, 5767, 3/13/2007
Lancing the Lies at The Lancetby Steven Plaut
The paper had “no scientific standing.” Did he rule out the possibility of fraud? “No.”'
 The Lancet is a British medical journal, considered the leading such journal in Britain. Unfortunately, instead of pursuing serious research in medicine, in recent years the Lancet has become one of the main organs of anti-Israel and anti-American leftism in the UK. Dr Richard Horton, editor of the The Lancet, is a leftist moonbat. Some other British medical journals are little better.
The Lancet has run at least 130 articles bewailing the health conditions of the poor Palestinians, yet never has denounced Palestinian terrorism as being the cause of those woes. It regularly denounces Israel for checking Palestinian ambulances, naturally never mentioning how often those ambulances carry bombs and murderers. CAMERA has exposed the anti-Israel bias prevalent in The Lancet. It regularly makes moral equivalence judgments about Palestinian mass murder of Jews and Israel defending its civilians. It falsely claims that Israel intentionally targets "innocent civilians" and makes countless political assertions that have nothing to do with health. The Israel Hasbara Committee has also attacked bias in The Lancet and other British medicial journals. Perhaps the most outrageous example of the Lancet junking its scholarly standards and research agenda in the name of promoting politically correct wackiness was its decision to publish an article claiming that 650,000 Iraqis, or 2.5% of the entire Iraqi population, died as a result of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. That article was "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey", by Burnham G, Lafta R, Doocy S, Roberts L. The Lancet - Vol. 368, Issue 9545, 21 October 2006, Pages 1421-1428. It immediately drew enormous criticism and was denounced as fraud and quackery all over the globe. The 650,000 number was pure "advocacy statistics", meaning advocacy lying with fraudulent statistics. Such advocacy statistic lies are familiar, from the 10% of the population being gay to the 600 billion Africans who died in the slave trade. Even leftist antiwar activist grouns, like "Iraqi Body Count", put the real number of dead Iraqis as no more than 50,000. Others have also come up with estimates nowhere near that in The Lancet, and some put them below 20,000. Michael Fumento, the leading science journalist in teh US, dismissed The Lancet piece as naked propaganda. And naturally, The Lancet had no interest in the number of Iraqi lives that the war SAVED! I counted 138,000 web pages that refer to fraud in The Lancet's article on Iraq. Now even the distinguished Times of London has joined the fray and denounced The Lancet's fraudulent claims. While the entire article is worth reading, here are some of the best points: 'Several academics have tried to find out how the Lancet study was conducted; none regards their queries as having been addressed satisfactorily. Researchers contacted by The Times talk of unreturned e-mails or phone calls, or of being sent information that raises fresh doubts.
'One critic is Professor Michael Spagat, an economist from Royal Holloway College, University of London...
'Professor Spagat says the Lancet paper contains misrepresentations of mortality figures suggested by other organisations, an inaccurate graph, the use of the word “casualties” to mean deaths rather than deaths plus injuries, and the perplexing finding that child deaths have fallen...
'“The authors ignore contrary evidence, cherry-pick and manipulate supporting evidence and evade inconvenient questions,” contends Professor Spagat, who believes the paper was poorly reviewed. “They published a sampling methodology that can overestimate deaths by a wide margin but respond to criticism by claiming that they did not actually follow the procedures that they stated.” The paper had “no scientific standing.” Did he rule out the possibility of fraud? “No.”'
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Adar 23, 5767, 3/13/2007
Upside Down and Inside Outby Nissan Ratzlav-Katz
The world continues in its upside-down and inside-out trajectory. You gotta love G-d's sense of humor.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, head of the ZAKA emergency response organization - and a former spokesman for the Eida Chareidit, that ultra-Orthodox group that promotes a distinctly anti- or non-Zionist religious stance - beat up one of the Neturei Karta members who was photographed kissing arch-anti-Semite Mahmoud Ahamdinejad during a Holocaust revisionist conference in Tehran.
On the other hand, someone thought to be an arch-Zionist (Ariel Sharon) and much of his Zionist party (Likud) was able to uproot Jews from their homes in Eretz Yisrael. A Jewish "intellectual" and professor (Prof. Toaff) published a book that has fueled speculation that medieval blood libels were true. Jews identified as "religious" consort with terrorist anti-Semites. And "liberal", "left-wing" students support groups that promote the most anti-liberal, fascist ideology on earth - Islamism - so long as those groups attack America and the nation of Israel, which bequeathed to them the values they claim to support. "Zionist" Meretz leaders attack their own country and the "Zionist" Knesset allows Arab MKs to openly consort with enemy organizations and individuals.
Oh man, give me the "ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist" ZAKA folks like Meshi-Zahav any day, over the so-called "Zionists" from the Israeli Left (and what was much of the Right, too).
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