Category Archives: UN

Historical Identity Theft

Barack Obama, History, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Palestinian Authority, UN

THE PLIGHT THAT DOESN’T SHUT UP. The Palestinians are throwing rocks again and threatening a religious war, for a change. This time, because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had the audacity to place “the second holiest place for the Jewish people, after Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” “on a list of 150 national heritage sites.”

The Cave of the Machpelah, or the Tomb of the Patriarchs, “and the adjoining field were purchased—at full market price—by Abraham some 3700 years ago. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are all later buried in the same Cave of Machpelah. These are considered the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people. The only one who is missing is Rachel, who was buried near Bethlehem where she died in childbirth.” [Jewish Virtual Library]

CNSNews.com:

Although a predominantly Arab city today, Hebron’s importance to Jews goes back to the foundation of their faith. According to the Old Testament (Genesis 49), Abraham bought a cave known as Machpela at the site to bury his wife, Sarah and was himself also buried there, along with Isaac and Jacob, as well as Isaac’s wife Rebecca, and Jacob’s first wife, Leah.

The Old Testament also records that Hebron was the capital of the kingdom of Israel for seven years before King David moved to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5). Rabbis consider the Cave of the Patriarchs the second holiest site in Judaism, after the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Hebron as a city is also one of Judaism’s four holy cities, the others being Jerusalem, Tiberias and Tzfat.

Historians say Hebron had a small, almost continuous Jewish presence for thousands of years until 1929, when it ended abruptly after 67 members of the then 800-strong Jewish community were killed during three days of Arab riots.

The Obama Administration and the UN have condemned Israel. Scum all.

Muslims have no historical claim to this site except that they have conducted a kind of theological and historical Jihad—or national identity theft—claiming Jewish and Christian formative biblical figures and sites as their own.

This from my “The Final Solution to the Jewish State” touches on the grand Muslim scheme to appropriate the annals of the Jews as their own:

“This Palestinian theology … strips away Jesus’ Jewishness and turns him into a sui generis Arab-Palestinian Jesus, a twin of the Muslim Jesus. Christianity, thus liberated from its Jewish roots, can be transplanted in Arab-Islamism. This would place Palestine, and not Israel, at the origin of Christianity, making Israelis usurpers of the Islamic-Christian-Palestinian homeland. This theory denies the historical continuity between modern Israel and its biblical ancestor, the locus of nascent Christianity.”

So when proponents of the increasingly popular Palestinian replacement theology … speak of the existence of Israel as a sin, and then smuggle in the concept of the Palestinian Jesus—know that they’re pirating ancient Jewish history by superimposing Palestinian fiction on it.

Know that these archetype Amalekites are engaged in the ultimate identity theft so as to bring about the end of the Jewish state as we know it.”

RELATED READING: “‘Jerusalem Is Not a Settlement,’ Netanyahu Reminds Obama Administration.”

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Updated: The Golem* Goldstone Goes To Gaza

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Just War, Law, Palestinian Authority, South-Africa, UN

From my new WND column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza”:

“When introducing Judge Goldstone, Fareed Zakaria described the judge as having made his name, among other acts of greatness, in pursuing an end to the political violence that came with apartheid in his home country of South Africa.

Ostracized for his convictions, this writer’s father – Rabbi Ben Isaacson – was a leading anti-apartheid activist. Goldstone had no such history of protest, father assures me. The roaming judge attached himself like a limpet mine to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

Goldstone’s Wiki biography corroborates father’s recollection. The judge joined the cause du jour in ‘the latter years of apartheid in South Africa.’ Goldstone’s “courageous” judicial decisions in the cause of freedom, moreover, comported with what South Africa’s Western system of Dutch-Roman law provided – a system currently being replaced, by the African National Congress, with a blend of tribal and totalitarian laws.

To this expatriate South African, the most anodyne assertion Goldstone made to zombie Zakaria was this one…”

Read the complete column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (Jan. 9): A few readers, some via my WND mail box, have told me I’ve erred as far as the meaning of Golem goes. I’m relatively confident that my commonplace use of the term is accurate (if perhaps not true to the original meaning), so I’ve left it. Usually, I hurry to correct blatant errors.

So why am I comfortable with the column’s usage?

I’m an ex-Israeli. My first language is Hebrew. Although I once spoke and wrote a sharp Hebrew (much like my English), slang has since (as in the US and the UK) changed older, popular usage. As old-timers like myself are in the habit of saying, no one speaks Yerushalmic Hebrew on the news any longer as the wonderful Haim Yavin used to. Yavin was the most elegant anchorman in looks and language.

Back to the topic. “Golem” in popular, modern usage is a derogatory term. Call an Israeli of my age group (still way younger than Yavin, of course) a Golem, and, while you’ve not wounded him mortally, you have, in good humor, berated him.

Even Peres Thinks Goldstone's Bonkers

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, South-Africa, Terrorism, UN

Shimon Peres of the Labor Party is Israel’s president (Bibi is Prime Minister). Now even the leftist Peres has disavowed Richard Goldstone’s report for the U.N., the culmination of the South African justice’s “investigation” into the Israeli offensive in “Gaza from December 27 to January 18.” “The supremely smug Richard Goldstone” accused Israel of committing “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity.”

To which Peres responded:

“Out of the 26 suggestions that the [Goldstone] Commission made, none deal with how to fight terrorism.” … “The Goldstone Commission Report says that the Palestinians have the right ‘to forceful resistance based on the right of self-determination.’ What is ‘the right to forceful resistance?’ To fire on civilians?”

Some days back I reminded readers of Godstone’s proud pedigree: “He began his career by helping to demote a lesser evil (the National Party) and promote the quintessential evil (Mandela’s African National Congress).