RUTHFULLY YOURS

When, in the early 2000s, Arab activists called for a boycott of the Jewish state, it wasn’t especially high on the Israeli agenda. After all, Israel was busy subduing the second Intifada, constructing a security barrier to stop terrorists from getting into Israeli towns and cities, and preparing to pull civilians and the military out of the Gaza Strip. Fast-forward to today, however, and a significant proportion of Israeli diplomacy and pro-Israel advocacy around the world is dedicated to battling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. BDS is a diffuse movement — mostly confined to Europe, North America and South Africa — that advocates boycotting Israelis and their nation’s institutions, urges states to sanction Israel, and pressures corporations to divest from the country. Meanwhile, opposition to BDS unites Jews and Zionists, regardless of differences of opinion over Israel’s foreign policy, more than most other issues. Whence, then, did BDS arise, and why? Has it been successful, and what does it say about its supporters? Does it justify the attention Israel and others afford it and, crucially, can it be defeated?

BDS is often dated back to July 2005, when more than a hundred Arab organisations, principally in the West Bank and Gaza, called for a boycott of Israel. But that declaration was in fact the culmination of several years of agitation. Omar Barghouti — widely considered to be the founder and face of BDS — was among several Arab activists to call for such a boycott a year earlier in Ramallah. Earlier still, in April 2002, a letter was published in the Guardian that called for an academic boycott of Israel. It garnered more than 700 signatures (although a counter-petition on the internet boasted more than a thousand), and by October 2002 divestment petitions were circulating on more than 50 campuses in the United States and elsewhere.

After the massacres in Paris on November 13, the US Secretary of State John Kerry made a statement so disgraceful you had to read it, rub your eyes, and read it again to comprehend the extent of his folly: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry began in the laboured English of an over-promoted middle manager.

“There was a sort of particularised focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorise people.”

The staff of “Charlie Hebdo” in 2006: The cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Honoré (first, second, fourth and fifth from left) were all killed in the 2015 attack, and Riss, third from left, was wounded. Meurisse, second from right, happened to be out of the office (© Joel Saget/AFP/ Getty Images)

Did you get that? Then allow me to translate. Kerry believes the satirists Islamist gunmen killed at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on January 5 had it coming. It is not that they deserved to die. John Kerry is a New England liberal, after all, and does not endorse the death penalty for journalists. But liberalism is a two-faced creed. It can mean that you believe in individual freedom and abhor every variety of prejudice, including the prejudice that allows men to shoot journalists dead for producing a magazine they disapprove of. Or it can mean that you go to such lengths to take account of your enemy’s opinions you become indistinguishable from him.

There is a convention in British journalism that whenever the House of Commons holds a long debate on a matter of war, it is said to have “risen to the occasion”. MPs are then ordinarily reported to have shown the depth, breadth and “considerable experience” of the House. But the day-long debate in December over whether British planes should join the multinational coalition against Islamic State in Syria showed no such thing. It showed a deracinated, easily distracted and strikingly fearful chamber — in other words a chamber that perfectly reflected the nation at large.

Not the least of the bad signs was how self-absorbed the House had become. Rather than debating the serious issue of international terrorism or putting British pilots in harm’s way over Syria, opposition parties repeatedly complained about a reported remark of the Prime Minister’s on the eve of the debate when he was said to have described those opposed to Britain joining air strikes against IS in Syria as “terrorist sympathisers”. Given that the Labour party is now led by two men who have spent decades supporting, honouring and hosting terrorist groups ranging from the IRA to Hamas and Hezbollah this description was not such an outrageous fiction as Labour MPs among others portrayed it to be. Nevertheless, each took it in turns to express their hurt over the nomenclature.

But even this did not exemplify the self-absorption of the House so much as its preening wordplay over what to call the enemy. Not three weeks after IS’s men had slaughtered 130 people and wounded many more in Paris, the House of Commons seemed less concerned over how to avenge our friends in France (or our own citizens slaughtered by IS months earlier on a beach in Tunisia) than they were about avoiding offence. This was personified in the form of a new and otherwise obscure Conservative MP called Rehman Chishti. In response to the rise of IS this young member has been trying to make his name by petitioning politicians, the media and especially the BBC, to call IS “Daesh”. The fact that “Daesh” simply means IS in Arabic makes it a fatuous demand. The claim that IS dislike being called Daesh because it sounds like something rude in Arabic makes it pathetic. Perhaps Chishti and Co think we can “bait” IS into submission?

See, that wasn’t so difficult. Get a bunch of diplomats and bureaucrats under the one roof, add expense accounts, room service and photo ops and — Presto! — peace is commanded to break out in Syria, not to mention making nice with a grateful Gaia
Boy, isn’t global diplomacy on a roll at the moment? Hot on the heels of the ‘historic’ climate change agreement negotiated in Paris, we now receive the joyous tidings, beautifully timed for a sectarian festive season, that ‘the UN Security Council has unanimously adopted a resolution outlining a peace process in Syria’. BBC News tells us:

The resolution endorses talks between the Syrian government and opposition in early January, as well as a ceasefire.

Well, that ought to do it. Obviously, the idea of talks and a ceasefire was beyond the wit of the Syrian factions until it received the imprimatur of the Security Council. The smacking of foreheads and rueful grimaces in Damascus must be deafening!

Borrowing from the COP21 rhetoric and imparting irresistible momentum to the initiative, US Secretary of State John Kerry, announced that the resolution sent:

…a clear message to all concerned that the time is now to stop the killing in Syria. The resolution we just reached is a milestone, because it sets specific goals and specific timeframes.

Far be it for me to rain on their parade, but a couple of minor sticking points remain:

the position of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad in such negotiations remains unresolved (Russia wants him in, the US wants him out), and
the role of ISIS and other like-minded organisations in this eminently reasonable proposal is problematical despite the fact that the resolution specifically excludes them.

The “General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina” was negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. It ended the Bosnian war and provided for a decentralized state comprised of two entities of roughly equal size: the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska, RS). The General Framework Agreement, including 11 annexes, was formally signed in Paris on December 14, 1995. Annex 4 of the Agreement is still Bosnia and Herzegovina’s de facto constitution, the basis for its territorial-political divisions and its complex government structure.
For all its shortcomings, and in spite of many attempts to revise or reverse it, the Dayton Agreement has provided a platform for peace among close to four million Bosniaks (i.e. Muslims, 48%), Serbs (33%), and Croats (14%). Bosnia’s relative stability may soon be threatened by political forces in Washington intent on altering the delicate balance achieved at Dayton. Already during her 2009 confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton declared she was committed to wrapping up what she called “the unfinished business in the Balkans,” and she still believes that the U.S. needs to revise Dayton in the direction of greater centralization of Bosnia at the expense of the autonomy of the two entities – which in reality would adversely affect only one of them, the Serb Republic. It is to be feared that the push for Bosnia’s “constitutional reform” will be relaunched if Mrs. Clinton becomes president. To her, “Bosnia” is an obsession which has generated outright lies over the years.

Poland offered Jews some of the best conditions they ever experienced in exile—until it didn’t. How are Poles dealing with that history today?

Poland! It’s one of those words capable of causing a rift between otherwise perfectly compatible Jewish minds. When I mention an upcoming trip to Warsaw, a friend says: “How can you be going there?! I would never set foot in that place!” On my return, reporting on the country’s warming attitudes toward Jews to another friend who was born and spent her childhood there, she stops me: “I don’t want to hear any more.” I had forgotten for a moment that Polish neighbors had killed her father.

There is no way of simplifying or ironing out the relation of Jews to Poland, Poland to Jews, each to their common history. It is a fact that Poland offered Jews some of the best conditions they ever experienced in exile. Even if one discounts the saying, “Poland was heaven for the nobles, hell for the peasants, and paradise for the Jews,” it is plain that the last-named did enjoy unusual opportunities in the country—until they didn’t. A Failed Brotherhood is how the scholars Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal titled their book on Poles’and Jews’ perceptions of each other, leaving open the question of which of the two words deserves greater emphasis.

The scramble to acquire weapons comes amid an indisputable nationwide spike in migrant-driven crime, including rapes of German women and girls on a shocking scale, as well as physical assaults, stabbings, home invasions, robberies and burglaries — in cities and towns throughout the country.

German authorities, however, are going to great lengths to argue that the German citizenry’s sudden interest in self-defense has nothing whatsoever to do with mass migration into the country, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

The spike in violent crimes committed by migrants has been corroborated by a leaked confidential police report, which reveals that a record-breaking 38,000 asylum seekers were accused of committing crimes in the country in 2014. Analysts believe this figure — which works out to more than 100 crimes a day — is only a fragment: many crimes are not reported.

“Anyone who asks for the reasons for the surge in weapons purchases encounters silence.” — Süddeutsche Zeitung

Germans, facing an influx of more than one million asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, are rushing to arm themselves.

Give rap superstar Nicki Minaj credit for having not a sliver of shame.

After human-rights activists begged her not to sing at a Christmas show in the brutal African dictatorship of Angola for a reported $2 million, she flaunted her dealings with its regime. She posted photos of herself boarding a Gulfstream jet for Angola, another of her arriving, one of her in a sheer bodysuit prepping for the show, and one of her in concert with the caption Angola has my heart. And, obviously, the fat paycheck has her heart as well.

Minaj claims an interest in bettering people’s lives, and she and her managers have joined up with the Black Lives Matter movement. She even spent time last year lamenting to Rolling Stone that black celebrities are slow to speak out against injustice.

But Thor Halvorssen, president of the Human Rights Foundation, notes the hypocrisy in Minaj’s stance: “Minaj’s payday is all the more jarring given that she and her managers joined the chorus of the Black Lives Matter movement. It appears that when those black lives happen to be in Angola, their lives matter less than a paycheck from a dictator.”

Halvorssen’s watchdog group has been a singularly effective at tracking celebrities who cash in on dictator gigs. He has blown the whistle on Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Hilary Swank for cavorting with criminal regimes, whether it’s Qaddafi’s Libya (Beyoncé), Turkmenistan (Lopez), or Chechnya (Swank). When shamed by the Human Rights Foundation, all three singers apologized, and Beyoncé donated her fee to a charity in Haiti.

Let’s indulge optimism and hope for the sake of Western civilisation and, not least, for the wellbeing of coming generations of people born into Muslim societies that Islam can and does undergo a revolution. But I won’t hold my breath
Malcolm Turnbull, ASIO head Duncan Lewis, Sydney Mayor Clover Moore and Assistant Multiculturalism Minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, among others, apparently believe that it is discordant, dangerous even, to be too critical of Islam. So here we have a diseased ideology which we have to tiptoe around lest its adherents become upset. What the heck is happening to our civilisation?

OK, am I going too far in calling it a diseased ideology? Well there must something of the like at work. How else is it possible to explain so much symptomatic violence, hateful preaching and sheer intolerance wherever there are Muslim populations? Surely large numbers of Muslims were not born that way. Of course they were not. They have been infected.

The fault does not lie with Muslims as people. It lies fairly and squarely with Islam, and we have to say so unashamedly, loudly and often. But what about the moderate Muslims, the hand-wringers whine, don’t we need them onside? Hmm! First a question: What do moderate Muslims believe?

My concise OED defines “moderate” as “not radical or excessively right or left-wing.” I therefore buy the siren cry that most Muslims are “moderate”. It does not alter the fact that they are moderate Muslims, a qualifier we never hear in regard to “moderate Christians” or “moderate Hindus”. The evidence is that there a world of difference. That is why we don’t hear about ‘Hinduophobia’. The difference goes to their belief systems.