President Tump attacks Syria with cruise missiles in reaction to ''Syrian chemical bombardment''

The United States has for the first time interved directly in Syria in the seven years that the conflict is running in that country.  On Friday it fired 59 cruise missiles at a government-controlled airbase in Syria, in retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town that killed scores of civilians.
The Pentagon said the Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from two warships in the Mediterranean at the Shayrat airfield, targeting the base from where US officials believe Tuesday's attack in Khan Sheikhoun had been launched. At least six people were killed in the early morning strike, according to the Syrian army, which denounced the US "aggression" as a violation of international law.
US President Donald Trump said in a televised statement after the strike: "There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the chemical weapons convention and ignored the urging of the UN Security Council."

Survey among Jews in Europe: One third considers non-Jews who criticize Israel an anti-Semite

Nearly a third of respondents to a survey on anti-Semitism in Europe said they “seriously considered emigrating” because of perceived anti-Semitism.
 In the survey among 5,847 Jews from nine European Union member states, 29 percent of all respondents said that they considered emigrating in recent years because they did “not feel safe” living in their countries as Jews, according to Morten Kjaerum, the director of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights which conducted the research among Jews from Sweden, France, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania and Latvia. 
 The figure for Jews contemplating emigration was particularly high in Hungary, France and Belgium with 48, 46 and 40 percent respectively, according to the report which Kjaerum presented Friday at a press conference in Vilnius.
However, asked about their definition of an anti-Semite, 34 percent of all respondents indicated that it applied to “a non-Jewish person if he or she criticizes Israel.” In Sweden, only 21 percent of 703 respondents said non-Jewish critics of Israel were anti-Semitic compared to 42 percent of 1,137 French respondents. Nearly 90 percent of respondents said that people who did not consider Jewish citizens of their country as compatriots were anti-Semitic.

Al-Jazeera takes down Israel-critical article by Joseph Massad

Al Jazeera-English has taken the unusual step of taking an article from its site shortly after its appearance. In it Joseph Massad describes the parallels between zionism and anti-semitism and the cooperation that (occasionally?) took place bewteen zionists and nazis. The article surely was controversial and - as so often when something critical is said about zionism or Israel - it was called ´antisemitic´ and worse by the pro-Israeli ´hasbara-claque´. Luckily it was copied and pasted by the site Jews Without Frontiers, from which is took the following paragraphs. Massad, who often ruffles feathers here and there, teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

Joseph Massad

 

 

The last of the Semites

Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of what gentile Europeans called the "Jewish Question". What galled anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the "solution" to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would solidify through their discovery of the family of "Semitic" languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as "Semites". The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a giant one. 

Basing themselves on the connections made by anti-Jewish Protestant Millenarians, secular European figures saw the political potential of "restoring" Jews to Palestine abounded in the 19th century. Less interested in expediting the second coming of Christ as were the Millenarians, these secular politicians, from Napoleon Bonaparte to British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (1785-1865) to Ernest Laharanne, the private secretary of Napoleon III in the 1860s, sought to expel the Jews of Europe to Palestine in order to set them up as agents of European imperialism in Asia. Their call would be espoused by many "anti-Semites", a new label chosen by European anti-Jewish racists after its invention in 1879 by a minor Viennese journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who issued a political programme titled The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. Marr was careful to decouple anti-Semitism from the history of Christian hatred of Jews on the basis of religion, emphasising, in line with Semitic philology and racial theories of the 19th century, that the distinction to be made between Jews and Aryans was strictly racial.

The whole article can be found here.


Al-Jazeera rectified its decision after lots of criticism, anmong them Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian. His artcile is interestingan can be found here.   
Massad's article, now republished by Al-Jazeera accopmpanied by an editorial nota, can be found here. 

Shame on Yale

I used to have this idea that Yale University was to be revered as a temple of knowledge and wisdom, but this perception has been shaken since I read that the 'Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antismetism' (YIISA) held a conference under the fancy title . 

'Global Antisemitism: a Crisis of Modernity'

The conference lasted from 23 - 25 August and is over by now. (I know I'm late with this news, but that's due to an automated machine of Google, the owner of the servers that host this blog, which took my pages for spam and temporarily deleted them). The conference should have been given more attention than it got, because of its odd character. What about a gathering that pretends to be scientific but hosts the following two keynote speakers:  
 
 Keynote: Professor Menahem Milson, Hebrew University and Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI): Video Clips from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI

Keynote: Itamar Marcus, Director, Palestinian Media Watch: “The Central Role of Palestinian Antisemitism in Creating the Palestinian Identity

One, a former head of the Civil Administration of the Occupied territories at the time Ariel Sharon was minister of Defense, the other a settler. Both of them speaking on behalf of  organizations, MEMRI and Palestine Media Watch, which are as biased and anti-Arab as any organisation can be. But if that's not enough to put the scientific value in question, we also see the name of Anne Herzberg, of the Israeli 'NGO Monitor' watchdog which keeps relentlessly repeating that NGO's like B'tselem, Breaking the Silence, the Association for Civil Right in Israel (ACRI) and others, are out - and being funded by outside sources - with the sole purpose of causing harm to Israel. And indeed, Ms Herzberg figures in a cluster about  
  Lawfare, Human Rights Organizations and the Demonization of Israel
and yes, she talks about the new antisemitism of NGO's:
• Anne Herzberg, NGO Monitor “NGOs and the New Antisemitism”
 together with 
• Professor Ed Morgan, University of Toronto: “The Metastasizing of Anti-Israel Lawfare”
• Elisabeth Kübler, University of Vienna: “Durban II: Antisemitism in Cosmopolitan Global Democracy”
• Michelle Sieff, YIISA: “Human Rights Criticisms of Israel and Anti-Zionism”

The colour of the conference can already be deduced from these contributions alone. There were some speakers who talked about historical aspects or christian antisemitism as well, but the emphasis laid heavily on arabic/muslim antsiemitism together with what the organizers of the conference prefered to call the 'new antisemitism' or 'deligitimization' of  Israel. And oh,  I almost forgot , there was paid attention to  "Jewish self-hatred' as well. Here we go: 

Plenary: Self Hatred and Contemporary Antisemitism
• Professor Doron Ben-Atar, Fordham University: “Without Ahavath Yisrael: Thoughts on Radical Anti-Zionism at Brandeis”
• Professor Richard Landes, Boston University: “Scourges and Their Audiences: What Drives Jews to Loathe Israel Publicly and What To Do About It?”
• Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, Indiana University: “Beyond Criticism and Dissent: On Jewish Contributions to the Delegitimation of Israel”

And what to make of :

Professor Dina Porat, Tel Aviv University: “Are Events in the Middle East indeed the Source of Global New Antisemitism?”

The full programma is to be found here. 

I don't know how it works. Maybe it has to do with a certain type of sponsors who want value for their money. But one thing is for sure: This thing caused harm to the reputation of Yale. The university should be ashamed.

Swiss have learned nothing since 1940

The Swiss will never learn. This Sunday they voted 57,5% for a ban on further minarets in their country, on top of the four they already have (the picture is of one of them, in the place Wangen, near Olten). The vote was inspird by the ultra right Swiss Peoples party (Schweitzerische Volkspartei). A happy party represenative in the Swiss parliament,  told afterwards that it was not against muslims or theur right to practice their relegion, bot only against th minaret, which he called ' a political symbol for introducing the sharia step by step. Forced marriages and cemetaries separating the pure and the impure, things we never had in Switzerland'.
Of course nobody believes that the minaret is anything but a symbol for a mosque, just like a clocktower is for a church. So the vote is really against the spread of mosques, and a clear expression of xenophobia and racism, something the Swiss have always been good at. It is worth remembering the so called 'Bergier Commission', which in 1999 looked into Switzerland's behavior during the Second World War vis a vis the Jews. It concluded that Switzerland without any outside pressure in 1938 followed the example of nazi-Germany of making a difference between Jews and others by introducing a special stamp in their passports. Also it closed the borders as off 1940 for Jewish refugees, which meant the death of 24.000 of them. Said the report. It is well possible that the number of people that could have been saved was in fact higher.

The vote drew lots of angry reactions from moslim personalities and organisations all over the world. In the Netherlands the local racist Geert Wilders and his followers announced that they will ask the Dutch Government to hold a similar referendum. Once more Wilders, who is a fan of Israeli far rightists like Avigdor Lieberman, showed his real face. Would he realize from what kind of pool he draws his followers? The Israeli blogger Noam Sheizaff (The Promised Land) wrote that he could imagine the Israeli far right celebrating this vote, as once more proof that they are not alone in their fight againts Palestinians and Arabs, which they perceive as a fight aginst islam and a 'clash of civilizations'. But, writes Sheizaf, The historical irony, of course, is that our allies in this cultural war to the joy of the Israeli Right. are the same political forces – if not the same people – that used to persecute our grandparents just a few decades ago. Since there aren’t that many Jews today in Europe, the xenophobes of the Old World decided to pick the Blacks and the Muslims as their current enemies, much