Today I suffered two clever email attacks attempting to steal information from me for no-doubt nefarious ends. And I received a notification that the Quakers have embarked on a new nefarious project to complete Hitler’s final solution, nefariously disguised as a noble endeavor to help jailed children who tried to kill others - the Quakers nefariously leave that last important fact out of their deceptive message because it might detract from the motions they hope to trigger to further this nefarious cause. Yep, I repeated the word “nefarious” several times. I want to refocus this discussion on the disguise the Quakers and their various terrorist allies utilize which purports to accomplish one thing but which is actually conceived to accomplish something quite different. The email scams and the Quaker scam are two sides of the same slick coin. Nefarious villainy, disguised as something else.

While the thieves are only trying to steal my money, the Quakers are stealing something far more valuable by adopting and amplifying the misleading narrative of long-term terrorist cultures. They are stealing reality, and in the process threatening the lives of the innocent Israelis who have in fact been the victims of Mohammedan aggressor culture in this long-running conflict, but who have been recast as villains by a clever, fabricated marketing campaign conducted by the Palestinian millionaires who have been stealing the non-Islamic-sourced aid the world has been sending their population ever since they first refused to make peace with Israel.

Some will resent my depiction of Arab culture as terrorist. If so, they need to pay just a tad more attention to the fact that throughout the terrorist world there are summer camps to teach kids terrorism from as early as they can crawl; there are schools whose principal lessons include important terrorist values as soon as the kids can comprehend, religious institutions which preach terror and dominance theology to everyone, adult and child. Streets and stadia are named for honored terrorists, payments not stolen by PLO and other terrorist leaders nor diverted to works of violence are passed on as permanent tribute to the families of “martyred” terrorists, and the news and entertainment media have been seduced (or threatened - same outcome even if a different dynamic) to slant their reports in every way to misrepresent the history and the ongoing source of incentive of this conflict. Fauxtography is rampant. Over and over again, falsified pictures purporting to reveal Israeli abuse are shown to be phony, yet people keep lapping that deception up. Indeed, obvious Photoshopped pictures and other misrepresentative displays of photos remain posted all over the internet even after being clearly shown to be false, manipulated, context altered, and generally just plain lies.

Why would the Quakers, well known for their otherwise quite noble moral stance, be so determined to help kill the Jews? Interesting question. Why would anybody? Quakers have no monopoly on righteousness. Or on self-righteousness, when it comes to that. Nor on ignorance, either. ISIL claims to be saving the world as they run about beheading anyone who suits their convictions. And the history of Western righteousness includes two millenia of antisemitic violence, spasms of self-righteousness by Christians who seem to have missed Jesus' most fundamental teachings. Almost birds of a feather when it comes to morality, even if Quakers will leave the execution (very appropriate verb here) of the consequences of their misdeeds to others.

 Injustice has many fathers. But, as the old Yiddish saying goes, "It's a wise child who knows his own father." Clever misdirection and sly deception can and does easily lead the uninformed to misattribute cause when the effects are bad. Very simple current example: the baby found face down on the beach "fleeing oppression" turns out to have been repositioned there by his father for a better photo opportunity. And the father turns out to have been the captain of the illegal refugee vessel rather than the heroic innocent victim. And he was fleeing from Turkey, as it turns out, not directly from Syria, as was reported. He needed dental work, and was reported to be carrying thousands of dollars as a result of his actions. The kid was just another victim of the need for graphic martyrs, though I don't begin to suggest that this was deliberate murder. It just was the opportunistic restructuring of the narrative to ensure greatest benefit from least truth. We are predominantly emotional, not rational creatures, so certain kinds of pain are intensely productive. Conversely, there are lots of times when real evil goes unnoticed, even admired. The world is not a fair place (UN anyone?), and we Jews need to recognize that it is unlikely to change for the better any time soon. While we aren’t the only people to be abused by reality, we certainly have more reason than most to be wary of it.

 TR's lesson doesn't apply to us. Speak loudly, repeatedly, effectively, and carry a very big stick.

Brandeis's latest defeat

I am mystified by the absence of even a hint of speculation regarding the possibility of sinister forces which could have been the undisclosed but animating incentive for the sudden swerve of Brandeis’s President Lawrence & his disinvitation of Hirsi Ali. For all the distractions which have passed for explanation, none is convincing or even very plausible, since each excuse brings with it numerous contradictions in the form of honors bestowed upon other controversial public figures who elicited similar protests but whose indignant critics were ineffective in altering the commitment of Brandeis to bestow the honor being protested. Though to be fair, Political Correctness does seem to expunge consistency and reason in the elevated precincts of academia.

So let’s hypothesize for a minute. What might possibly occur in the prevailing universe of current world discourse that could so rapidly & powerfully inhibit Brandeis’s leaders, yet require them to dissemble rather than admit such actual motivator? Well, one thing that comes to mind is Mohammedan Jihad. Think 9/11, The Marathon Bombings, the murder of Theo Van Gogh (Hirsi Ali’s colleague), repeated murderous attacks on the Danish Mohammed cartoonists, credible death threats against Salman Rushdie, death threats against South Park and their resultant submission (that’s what “Islam” means, by the way, though not exactly in this context), Yale’s sudden reversal regarding publication of a potentially Islamically-controversial book. And how about the death threats against Molly Norris and her consequent name change and flight into hiding at the encouragement of the FBI. Or Al Qaeda's “Inspire” magazine, featuring 12 individuals in a pictorial spread entitled "Wanted: Dead or Alive for Crimes Against Islam," and captioned, "Yes We Can: A Bullet A Day Keeps the Infidel Away." Such constant, chronic, and very credible threats to violently punish anyone who even contemplates criticism of Islam or who merely engages in humor or creates fiction with Mohammedan reference suggests that there is much more going on in education-land than the camouflaged tripe which has been reported.

Impassioned threats generally trump reasoned discourse. Therefore sincere and well-reasoned protests against the likes of Kushner’s honor by Brandeis were ignored since they had no likelihood of violent enforcement.  But direct or even merely implied threats by the Mohammedan community, due to their strong credibility, would elicit prompt compliance  and meek, unconvincing apologias so as to not appear to be the capitulation which they really represent.

It is fascinating, though dismaying, to notice that when angry Jews spray paint their vengeance on walls, they are christened (islamed?) “Islamophobic Jewish terrorists” by a media with little sense of proportion and no self-consciousness of the contextual irony. Yet when Mohammedans stab, shoot, and blow up Jews qua Jews, the press views the murderers as “freedom fighters”, sympathizes with them, yet refuses to identify their religious affiliation, identity, motivation, or any of those other factors with which the press has no reluctance to tarnish Jews engaged in far less violent acts of rage. Mohammedan murderers are freedom fighters? Freedom from what? Freedom from accepting modern values such as the sanctity of human life? Or perhaps from freedom of religion? Of speech? Or gender bias? Freedom to kill anyone with whom your Imam says you should disagree?

It has to be considered that the same threats which have altered the behavior of Yale and  so many others have provided substantial incentive, driving Lawrence to submit. Of course, if that is the case, then we are all poorer because each individual victory for Mohammedan fundamentalism over Western emancipation represents a retreat to 8'th Century cultural values, surrendering the Enlightenment and granting  additional dominance to Mohammedan troglodytes in their unceasing quest for the imposition of retrograde Shari’a dominance over the entire world. This should be unacceptable to all. Yet the substantial damage represented by this social transformation seems to have escaped most public comment. We now live with the Politically Correct notion that we can discuss and even joke about other religions, but any hint of critique regarding Mohammedanism is de facto Islamophobia. Madre del Dios, Gott in Himmel, Praise be to Allah, we are complicit in our own self-abnegation.

New Media, Same Old Bias

I'm finding that one of the factors in the negative projection of Israel in the media is the editing ineptitude of those fora which screen comments. Perhaps ineptitude does injustice to the practice, since some of the screening is clearly agenda driven.

For instance, today I attempted to respond to a post on HuffPo. I was blocked. Why? I can only surmise. Everything I said was factual, referring to the Oslo accords & the misrepresentations of the poster I was responding to. I referred to the Obama administration as "dweebs", a pretty innocuous if derisory adjective. I can't imagine that I was blocked for citing the Oslo accords, so I must have been blocked for using a word that the editor is unfamiliar with. However, none of the horrid posts on that site were blocked for lying, misrepresentation, or other vile & defamatory practices. That suggests that both agenda & stupidity govern the practices of their post monitors.

I recently was engaged in a debate with a virulent anti-Israeli poster on the student paper at Oxford U. I was blocked. I wrote to the address on the site asking why my posts were being blocked, and received no reply whatsoever. Could this possibly be a mere reflection of the historic policies & practices of that great bastion nation of democracy & colonialism? One must wonder.

I was also blocked from a debate recently on Nation of Change. Again, I responded somewhat harshly, but factually, to a person who was rude to me in his efforts to smear Israel with fantasy horrors. His rudeness was permitted, mine rejected.

It seems pretty clear that accuracy is of no concern on these websites, but sarcasm, especially when used in support of Israel and truth is closely examined, highly suspect, and likely to be blocked. I've even had non-sarcastic, totally factual posts rejected. But I can never find out why.

No bias in these open media, eh?

To The Editor, Portsmouth (NH) Herald:

Robert Azzi wrote a compelling fictional narrative about the Arab-Israeli conflict last week in your Sunday pages . He intertwines incremental excrement with indisputable fact to give the illusion of rigorous righteousness. This is brainwashing, not analysis.

Azzi reports that “Palestinians see resistance as their only option...” but omits the very well documented and far more pertinent fact that Palestinians see resistance to the State of Israel’s mere existence as their underlying imperative. And he deliberately fails to note that long before there was an Israel, the Arabs of that region were killing Jews in fulfillment of the dominance theology by which they have spread their culture.  The notion of Israeli “occupation” as the source of Arab violence is an inversion of cause and effect. Such deceptions are intended to disguise historical, long-standing Arab aggression and to create an undue sympathy for the endless Arab efforts to destroy the Jews of Palestine - ignoring for the moment the coeval violent hostility of Muslims toward Copts & other Christians, Baha’is, Animists, etc.  Azzi deliberately distracts attention away from this fundamental theological animus which is the underlying cultural source of recent on-going Arab violence against the Jews of Palestine. That violence predates the establishment of Israel by almost seventy years, and predates the “occupation” by ninety. This is not “resistance” in any normal, meaningful application of that word. It represents the Arabs’ racist refusal to permit equal rights - or any rights, really - to any non-Muslims wherever they can impose their theological supremacy.

Since the western world has imbibed two millenia of antisemitism inspired by the Church and offspring churchettes, Muslims have recently found it practical and effective to play upon that latent hostility to brainwash the already antisemitic Western nations into assisting in the clearly articulated Islamic agenda to “...Kill the Jews, wherever you find them!”. This early Muslim injunction has reappeared in edicts of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (Hitler’s recruiter and ally) and is enshrined in the Hamas Charter. It has been enthusiastically acted upon by generations of Arab Muslims - who centuries ago invented the yellow badge to abuse Jews long before they passed that concept on to the Nazis.

There are so many deceptions in Azzi’s representations. I’ll address just a few:

Azzi reports that operation Cast Lead “...happened in part because of the failure to get Shalit released.” He omits mention of the more than 8,000 missiles launched against Israel - might that not have been an important trigger? Azzi’s resents that Israel takes necessary actions to halt these murderous assaults because the aggressors haven’t yet been able to kill an equal number of Israelis. If there is a fault to Israel’s response, it is that she has not acted strongly enough, for her citizens continue to be regularly killed and maimed by the aggressor Arabs.

Azzi refers to the PLO as “moderates”. Yet the PLO has repeatedly refused to negotiate with Israel, and their charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. The only difference between the PLO & Hamas is that Hamas is more honest and direct in the Western media.

Then Azzi so touchingly refers to “few hands which don’t have blood on them...”. Such an even-handed appraisal of aggressor and victim.  It’s as though the Allies & the Axis were equally culpable in the massive casualties of WWII. Azzi would have us believe that Arabs unjustifiably attacking and killing Jews (and Christians, and even their co-religionists) are somehow less guilty than those Jews and others defending themselves against such attacks. That might be true if we were in the 7'th Century, when different social values prevailed. But the world’s moral codes have been inching ever forward against acceptance of murder as a method of dispute resolution. Except in the Middle East.

Azzi says “Negotiate with Palestinians as neighbors and equals...” Isn’t that what Israel tried to do even before she was established? Didn’t the UN urge Britain to create “two nations, one Jewish and one Arab” because the Arabs wouldn’t stop killing the Jews? Didn’t the Arabs murder Arab leaders who tried working with nascent Israel? Didn’t the Khartoum conference - still unrepealed - insist on the “Three No’s” which continue to dictate Arab policy regarding Israel? And didn’t Israel make increasingly generous, indeed unprecedented offers to the PLO on separate formal occasions only to have Arafat refuse to even respond, much less to counteroffer? And hasn't Abbas been the one who refuses to merely meet with Israeli leaders, even after Israeli concessions have been made? Azzi has the problem backwards. It’s the Palestinians who refuse to negotiate, much less negotiate as neighbors and equals.

Azzi cleverly inverts reality to make the aggressor Arabs appear to be sympathetic victims, and to mis-characterize desperate Israeli defense of her citizens as unjustified violence. This is a burgeoning and successful new front in the Arab war against Infidels and modernity. Israel is merely the most visible point of engagement. Nothing has changed since the Arab conquests which led to the Crusades, save that some Arab aggressors now wear business suits and tunnel within Western societies with clever persiflage. The results will be just as bloody, however, unless Westerners abandon their odd prejudices and react with prudent self-interest in support of Israel and ultimately for the salvation of all modern society. Failing that, our grandchildren will all be facing Mecca and bowing to Allah five times a day.

Response to hostile Egyptian's criticism

I never claimed that Israel was perfect - unlike Egypt, I suppose? As to massacres - it's pretty easy to itemize the couple of Israeli actions likely to be seen as massacres, while the Arab attacks on children, women, and doctors is so lengthy that nobody could make a list. This is a question of moral balance, not moral perfection. On balance, Israel has been a far more ethical, moral, humanistic, and compassionate nation than have any of the Arab/Persian aggressors. It is the trend that matters, not the deceptions which roll so readily from the tongues of the long-lived aggressor Muslims who have never accepted modern morality and still hold values which have not evolved since the 12'th Century. "The rest of the world" is only the Christian west, brainwashed by the barbarism of Christianity, from which Islam derives. "Christ is peace" was the mantra of Christian warfare throughout Europe and the Middle East. After Arabs attacked Europe and the Christians responded with the Crusades, the Christians taught Islam the motto "conversion or the sword". And Islam has never forgotten that vile notion, though much of Christianity has moved on to more compassionate and tolerant viewpoints. So, yes, much of the west - but nowhere else - is hostile to Judaism and therefore to Israel, not for cogent reasons, but due to the latent antisemitism of 2100 years of Church antisemitic dogma. And of course there is also the huge anti-Israel apparatus of 1.3 billion Muslims, all hostile to Israel because Islamic troglodytes are willing to blow themselves up to capture Israel and retake Andalusia. THAT is where the violence originates, and that is why is is spread. A few regrettable incidents over 130 years of Jews defending themselves - and those incidents deplored by all Jews - hardly compares to the endless travesties of Muslims killing everyone around them, and their Muftis not only refusing to condemn those violent and unjustifiable acts, but actually praising them and often encouraging them - like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem leading mobs to kill Jews during the 1920's & '30's - THAT is unconscionable. But only if you live in the 20'th century. Or even the 21'st. With much of Islam still glorying in the conquest mentality of the 12'th century, it's easy to see that one wouldn't want to acknowledge the truth. When you MUST believe something or be killed, that's pretty strong encouragement to believe the lies of your society. If you lived in a free, modern society, then you'd be free to examine reality and understand and accept alternative explanations of history which are considerably more accurate than your present perceptions.

I regret, though, that you are probably right. Humans are mostly dumb. There's no question that vile, vicious, and wildly selfish leaders are more likely to arise in the Middle East, and that such people will kill many in their pursuit of their own power and profit. That bodes ill for Israel and for all liberal, modern democracies. There must be a reason that democracy has not ever taken root in the Middle East, despite the system having evolved geographically so close, in Greece. There is something in the culture that prizes greed, violence, and selfishness more than warmth, hospitality, and compassion. While it's a horrible tragedy, sometimes people have to recognize that certain realities are inevitable.

I suppose you could get the UN to repeal the Law of Gravity, just as they continue to pass other messages of idiocy. The hostility of the West, as you put it, largely reflects a basic failure of society - people are dumb, dumb, dumb. That, coupled with the native flaw in democracy - that 57 Muslim nations can always outvote Israel in the UN, whether they are right or wrong, and they are always wrong - leads to a strong and totally unjustified bias in public opinion. The illusion that the UN is a rational and fair institution is achieved because it is democratic. But that perception is horribly flawed, though it does produce the result you love - lots of people blame Israel for Muslim aggressions. An awful lot of people are extremely dumb, like I said.

Helen Thomas, Template of Ignorance

If you want your faith in the basic goodness, tolerance, and understanding of humankind shaken, check out the emails Rabbi Nesenoff received (linked below) after his interview with Helen Thomas went viral. And for an interesting take on the affair and some of its consequences, click on the "click here and read" link on that same page.

Thomas said what many, many people believe. The key here is "believe". Education is not the principal factor in attitude formation. (If it were, a lot of major corporations would be wasting their money on their glitzy ads aimed at appealing to emotions, not reason.) In fact, people seem to selectively seek and absorb facts which supplement their preconceptions. So Thomas apparently remained ignorant of much of the historical and religious impetus for the present imbroglio in the Middle East, even as she remains naive about "going back where they came from". There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are refugees or recent descendants of refugees. Most of them can no longer go back even were they to be welcome. Some would be killed if they returned - like the Jews going back to Arab lands (which Thomas is obviously ignorant of, or perhaps just oblivious to.) Some are offspring of divergent other lands, with each parent or grandparent from a different country. Where should they go back to, and how would they function without the language skills and personal connections, unmotivated by any desire to emigrate, into an unknown or unwelcoming culture?

The Arabs have created a uniquely dangerous and effective weapon in retaining refugees in camps paid for by us for the past 6 decades: These are readily identifiable individuals who really can go back - just as soon as all the Jews are killed. While the other 100 million refugees of the 20'th century were resettled and then resumed their lives, only this small fraction of individuals (perhaps 3/4 million) has been kept prisoner by their own brethren as a weapon aimed for the intended hegemony of the Islamic religious movement seeking world domination. Not only has the West been foolishly paying for this sly aggression. We have in this and other ways been supportive of the deliberate Arab oppression of this Arab population for all this time, keeping them hostage to their own brethren neighbors' imperialist goals. Yet we assist in the resettlement and acculturation of all other displaced populations (except, of course, the 3/4 million Jews who fled Arab atrocities for safety in Israel). We even help Christians flee their Arab persecutors from the very territories the deceptive narratives claim are unfairly "under oppressive Israeli occupation." The UN, using our funds, further encourages the Jihad-by-pathos by sustaining a separate agency whose sole function is to support the Islamic population in the Territories. This completely removes them from the real UN refugee agency which assists all other populations, and further facilitates the war against Israel.  We are subsidizing and supporting the Arab/Farsi war against Israel under the guise of humanitarian aid. These "refugees" exist in a craftily executed phony status, largely self-imposed and callously sustained by their own coreligionists. They perform a mass theatrical act designed to extract the world's ignorant sympathy. And an ignorant world has reacted as planned.

It's way past time to disband the notion of Arab refugees and get on with the acceptance of living. But the skewed politics of Arab Jihad, aided by oil and abetted by ignorance, make rational accommodation impossible, so there will be much further pain all around. There's still plenty of deliberate ignorance to support it. Helen Thomas is the archetypal case in point.

http://www.rabbilive.com/RabbiLIVE/Home.html

Ira Chernus - Boob Extraordinaire

I have been repeatedly pointed to articles on TruthOut - a site devoted to a torrent of great, Progressive viewpoints except when it comes to Israel, where they reverse course and excoriate the victim Israelis and  plead deceptively for support of the violent, depraved, aggressor Muslim terrorists. One of many of their pundits is - naturally - a Jew (I use this word in its most pejorative sense, as befits one who should be scorned and vilified, just like the Church has taught for many centuries) named Ira Chernus.

Chernus claims to have been a "Jewish peace activist for over 30 years..." Yet in all that time he's apparently learned nothing. Most of us favor peace. But when push comes to shove (to reference the vernacular of his formative years) pacifism becomes suicide. And for Chernus to advocate Jewish suicide is either disingenuous or stupid.

When I was a kid, there were a couple of bullies in town whom the rest of us tried to avoid. Occasionally I would get trapped by one or two of them (they often traveled in pairs), and my only choices were to outrun them, or if that was not possible, to outsmart and/or outfight them. I returned home bloodied a few times when my pacifism and negotiating skills were of no avail. This is a regrettable microcosm of human experience. On a larger scale, humans have been attacking other humans for as long as human life has existed. Wishing away human aggression has not worked, as the Jews of Europe learned to their loss. 

It's not just in football that the best defense is a strong offense. Chernus's notion is that we can avoid aggression by submitting to it, capitulating to every hostile demand, submitting to every aggressive imposition. That is repugnant and obviously an invalid application of the goal of pacifism, which is to create peace through the goodwill and voluntary agreement of all parties to create a set of circumstances which fairly addresses the needs and desires of all. In the absence of universal agreement that peace is the goal, we have a situation where one party can continue aggression and force the other to either capitulate or to defend. There is no little bit pregnant. You are either a victim, or you protect yourself. Chernus turns this reality on its head, apparently basing his virulent criticism of Israel on his own irrational premise: "I want peace & peace is good.  Therefore if Israel just capitulates to the violent Muslim aggressors, All of Persia & Arabia will suddenly convert to pacifism & subordinate their violence to my wishes." Get real!!!

One of Chernus' biggest problems is that he is apparently incapable of discriminating between cause and effect. In a recent article, he talks about Land Day and Passover as though the difference between them was the 'ongoing tragedy' of the Palestinians versus the emancipation of the Jews. That scenario is only a mere consequence of the real source issue. And that first cause was that the Israelites were enslaved by the autocratic actions of an external Egyptian tyranny which was forced upon the Israelites through no fault of their own, while the Palestinians have imposed their own isolation upon themselves by refusing to halt the violent, aggressive attacks they have been engaged in against the Jews of Palestine since the 1880's. That antisemitic ethnic targeting precedes the founding of Israel by almost 70 years. It's a typical practice among antisemitic pundits to employ deceptive anachronism to make their irrational case sound very reasonable, since many readers are unaware of the real timelines and history.

Chernus is deeply invested with a claque of Arab apologists who twist reality to suit their own dishonorable ends. That they get away with it so often is a sad commentary on the level of debate and deception in the public arena, and the tragic inadequacy of our education and our public information systems. In his piece, Chernus talks about the "43 years of Israeli occupaton", completely ignoring the fact that the Palestinians had been occupied since the proposed establishment of that new state in 1948 until they were liberated by Israel in 1967. The vital piece of information, which Chernus would have the gullible ignore, is that Palestine was occupied by Egyptian (again!) and Jordanian invaders upon its establishment by the UN. The neighboring Arab occupation was much harsher than the Israeli. But since it was a mere extension of the ongoing orgy of Islamic antisemitism that had been the original cause for the establishment of Israel and termination of the faltering British Mandate, it is a non-issue for Israel's critics. Worse, acknowledgment of such reality would contradict Chernus's goal of fabricating a narrative which transfers blames to Israel for all the evils foisted upon the world and upon themselves by a violent and intolerant Persian/Arab-Islamic chauvinism.

In the combined first-wave Arab invasion of Palestine and Israel by seven Arab armies in 1948, one percent of the Jewish population were killed. KILLED! That is a huge proportion! Think of the US for a scaled comparison: 3.6 million human beings!! That the Israelis carried on was due only to the fact that they had no alternative, having been driven out of Europe, where they'd resided off and on for a thousand years, and from Arab countries, where they'd lived for 2600 years. We refused the Jews safe haven during the Nazi slaughters, ensuring their entry to the charnel houses of the Nazis and their antisemitic European allies (The Japanese were considerably more civilized!). The few remaining wretched refugees fled wherever they could go. Palestine was an option that appealed for historico-religious reasons and offered hope of finally re-establishing Jewish self-determination and allowing freedom from the past 2000 years of antisemitic tyranny imposed by the tolerant, pacifist, Jesus-loving Christians whose principal messages were "love, peace, and kill the Jews."  (and of course for a brief period, 'kill the Muslim infidels and recapture the Holy Land', the land of milk and blood. That hostility was brief - but antisemitism is forever.)

Chernus continues his depredations with a deceptive reference to blood-letting and with a deliberate misrepresentation of Israel's reaction to aggressive attacks by terrorists as a continuation of the bloody Biblical narrative of Passover slaughter. Confounding truth with fiction, cause with effect, victim with aggressor is Chernus's stock in trade. That doesn't make his viewpoint correct. But it helps misinform a lot of people.

Perhaps Chernus's worst deception is the Jerusalem illusion, the notion that there is a rationale to justify forcing Israel to cede their holy city to those very Arab aggressors who have repeatedly attacked them and in previous years prevented Jews from even visiting, much less living in their ancestral homeland capital. There is no possible equitable justification for such cession! His boast of his pacifist bona fides is totally irrelevant to such a faux revanchist notion, and that is itself based upon aggressive and violent intentions of conquest and ethnic cleansing of Jews.

Upon establishing Israel & Palestine, the UN envisioned Jerusalem as an open city. With the combined Arab attack and the resulting Jordanian conquest of Jerusalem in 1948, all synagogues within their grasp were destroyed. Jewish headstones were ripped up and used for building materials. Almost all traces of 3,000 years of Jewish presence were obliterated in a deliberate Arab attempt to alter history. It is only after the Arab's third formal attempt to wipe out the Jews that Israel successfully entered Jerusalem, and for the first time since the original Arab attacks, Jerusalem was finally reopened to all. Chernus employs his deceptive preachments in support of Islamic aggressions. This is pacifism? The reality is the opposite of what he claims, and peace will not be encouraged by defending those whose violent history and recourse to aggression has been well documented for a much longer period than there has been an Israel.

The overall truth about this conflict is much simpler than Chernus comprehends: the irredentist Muslim hordes are continuing a religious tradition birthed in the 7'th Century and pursued rigorously ever since. Underlying all else is a bloodthirsty religious intolerance. One sect of Islam blows up another when they're not busy enslaving or slaughtering infidels or beating or killing their women.  While Islam has not yet conquered the world, that is their clear and publicly avowed goal, and they've made substantial progress at cowing public figures and institutions throughout the West as a first step in achieving this conquest. Only in Israel is the Muslim agenda and the violent action Islam subscribes to so fully observable. Yet people like Chernus have managed to completely invert truth and fabrication on behalf of the aggressor Muslims. The Muslims attack Israel - it's got to be Israeli aggression. The Arabs kill Jews for 130 years - it's because Israelis assert control over parts of Palestine for 40 years, after repeated Arab attacks upon Israel. The Arabs demand Jerusalem - it's because they are entitled, since they conquered it in their first attack, then initiated four more wars of aggression, engaged in several informal wars, and thus in some bizarre, perverse, pacifist perspective they deserve it. Chernus and his ilk should be medicated or muzzled. His distorted perceptions do not derive from any factual history of the Middle-East conflict, and certainly are not pacifist in nature. They merely feign a false justification for the repeated, inexcusable efforts of Muslims to obliterate Israel and kill the Jews. Where have we heard that theme before? Shades of history, that was Hitler's line, and he was no pacifist!