Ethan Bronner of the New York Times has an excellent piece today on Hamas’s arms buildup in Gaza, based on a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

AJC’s Terrorism Expert Yehudit Barsky examines Hamas’s quest for legitimacy, and its quest for arms, in this AJC briefing:

The repercussions of Hamas’s border breach into Egypt in January have yet to be fully appreciated. The long-term impact on the security of both Israel and Egypt, as well as on the wider region, deserves international scrutiny so the threat of Hamas can be contained and defeated.

From Hamas’ perspective, destruction of the border wall broke the sanctions imposed by Israel and the international community on the Hamas government and brought Gaza back into the fold of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Hamas saw the action as another victory not just for itself, but for Islamist movements worldwide. Its first triumph was the July 2007 coup against the Palestinian Authority that resulted in its takeover of Gaza.

continue reading "The Hamas Offensive"

The New York Times published today a devastating report on Hamas’s increased incitement against Jews in Gaza:

“Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.” …

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Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated, on the model of Hezbollah and its television station Al Manar, in Lebanon.

A new AJC-Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education study, Palestinian Textbooks: From Arafat to Abbas and Hamas, focuses on hate in Palestinian texbooks used in school is Gaza and the West Bank.

David Bernstein

The internet has given rise to a powerful but precarious rumor mill. From claims that plastic wrap in microwave ovens causes cancer (untrue) to stories of finding a human finger in a bowl of chili (also untrue), misinformation spreads through the internet at viral speed and infects the public consciousness.

We Jews, unfortunately, seem especially susceptible to “e-missives”: we are inter-connected through a web of interlocking networks; we are highly educated users of the internet; and we sometimes feel unfairly targeted and, in the spirit of self-defense, are motivated to call our detractors on the carpet.

Some urban legends are told so many times by so many people that they harden into conventional wisdom. Because lies are often more compelling than truth, rarely does setting the record straight undo the damage. I still receive urban legends that were disproved more than five years ago.

That’s why it’s so imperative that people of good will do some fact checking before they hit the send button.

The presidential race has only poured fuel on the fire, spreading such falsehoods as “Barack Obama grew up a radical Muslim.”

continue reading "Just Say No to Jewish Urban Legends"

Our Executive Director David Harris, concerned about hateful emails mischaracterizing Senator Barack Obama’s religious beliefs and character, joined with heads of other national Jewish organizations in an open letter to the Jewish community:

As leaders of the Jewish community, none of whose organizations will endorse or oppose any candidate for President, we feel compelled to speak out against certain rhetoric and tactics in the current campaign that we find particularly abhorrent. Of particular concern, over the past several weeks, many in our community have received hateful emails that use falsehood and innuendo mischaracterizing Senator Barack Obama’s religious beliefs and who he is as a person.

These tactics attempt to drive a wedge between our community and a presidential candidate based on despicable and false attacks based on religion. We reject these efforts to manipulate members of our community into supporting or opposing candidates.

Attempts of this sort to mislead and inflame voters should not be part of our political discourse and should be rebuffed by all who believe in our democracy. Jewish voters, like all voters, should support whichever candidate they believe would make the best president. We urge everyone to make that decision based on the factual records of these candidates, and nothing less.

The story gained national attention through Richard Cohen’s Washington Post column , Michael Chabon’s Huffington Post response, The New York Times report , Politico’s coverage, JTA’s brief, and Shmuel Rosner’s Haaretz blog.

According to the New York Times article, “Challenging tradition, young Jews worship on their own terms,” as well as anecdotal evidence, religion appears to play a stronger role in connecting American Jews in their 20’s and 30’s to Judaism than in previous generations.

American Jews like me whose commitment to the Jewish people stems from a cultural/nationalistic/ethical affiliation are a dying breed. I am concerned that this trend will adversely affect secular Jewish organizations. Can any strategic action be taken to postpone, much less prevent, this inevitable shift, thereby preserving the tradition of Jewish political advocacy as an attractive affiliation option?

continue reading "That “Old-Time Religion”?"

Decades ago a criminal defense attorney offered a credo for the zealous defense of a client: “Contest everything, concede nothing, and when defeated allege fraud.”John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their new book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, go to similar lengths to defend their thesis that Israel is a strategic liability.

While The Israel Lobby is a more nuanced effort than their earlier London Review of Books article, the main problem is the same: Walt and Mearsheimer genuinely believe that U.S. interests in the Middle East are overwhelmingly tied to the Arab states, not to Israel. They are at a loss to understand why what seems obvious to them is lost on the majority of Americans, including those who make policy decisions.

continue reading "When All Else Fails: The Israel Lobby"

A few years ago an American Indian friend phoned me, absolutely perplexed. He could not reconcile two stories in his morning paper – one in the news section, the other in sports. Both were about major Florida universities.

The first story reported universal outrage at and severe sanctions on a fraternity which had hosted an event where participants dressed in blackface. The leadership of the university spoke in strong language about not tolerating racism, the hurt of stereotypes, the psychological impact of dehumanization, and the incompatibility of such offensive behavior with the standards of a university.

The second noted, without comment, that the leadership of another Florida university (which had an Indian mascot) was encouraging students to show up at a major sporting event in red face.

continue reading "Israel as the N-word"

It’s tempting to view the movement to boycott Israel as a peculiarly British affliction. The University and College Union vote marked the third time in three years that British academics have opted for a boycott policy. And that decision came barely a month after the British National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted, at its annual conference, for a boycott of Israeli goods.

The UCU boycott dents the prestige of British academia just as the NUJ boycott tars the British media. But none of that matters to the boycott activists.

They believe if they demonstrate concrete results by pushing Israelis off conference platforms and out of the pages of academic journals, other sectors with similar clout will follow. In that regard, they can point to the boycott calls issued by groups of British doctors and British architects, all of whom accuse their Israeli counterparts of, as the UCU would say, “complicity” in the supposed crimes committed by Israel.

continue reading "Britain is Not the Only Battleground"

Cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hamas this past week served as the latest occasion for the New York Times to cover, and cover some more, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

True to form, Friday May 25th’s front-page featured prominently, for the second time in a week, a color photo of an Israeli strike against a Hamas compound in Gaza. Inside the front section, a major article detailed Israel’s crackdown on Hamas, focusing on the arrest of 33 Hamas officials in the West Bank.

The latest Israeli-Palestinian violence, as well as the intra-Palestinian violence, is certainly newsworthy.

The Times’s extensive coverage, however, overshadowed an exceptionally significant development in Lebanon: intense fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam, an Islamic terrorist group.

continue reading "Some News Is Fit to Print"

Listen: [audio:101meeting/allam050407.mp3]
Magdi Allam, editor at Corriere Della Sera and commentator on Arab and Islamic affairs, was presented with the Mass Media Award on May 4, 2007 at AJC’s 101st Annual Meeting. Here he gives his acceptance speech.

continue reading "Audio: Magdi Allam Accepts Mass Media Award"