To everything there is a season….and we have decided to turn over all future publications of Mideast Outpost to the competent office staff of Americans for a Safe Israel.

For close to fifty years, Outpost has provided editorials and articles that evoke the Zionist spirit and mandate of AFSI–even when we stood alone and clung to Kipling’s words “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs…”

While others were swooning over Sadat, AFSI stood alone in exposing the content of his overture and in denouncing the Camp David Treaty. Apparently we were the only ones who listened to the actual words of his much-applauded speech in the Knesset. Yes, he had bravely broken Arab taboos in coming to Israel but this is what he said: “I hail the Israeli voices that called for the recognition of the Palestinian People’s rights to achieve and safeguard peace. Here I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that it is no use to refrain from recognizing the Palestinian People and their rights to statehood and rights of return.” These are precisely the demands Abbas makes (and Israel rightly rejects): a state and the right to return for the millions of those calling themselves refugees (there are actually only about 30,000 surviving Arab refugees from the 1948 war). Demanding the “right of return”, whether by Sadat or Abbas, is calling for Israel’s destruction as a Jewish state.

We were pioneers (before CAMERA came along to do an excellent job in this area) in exposing media bias against Israel. In our documentary NBC Goes to Lebanon we used footage from hundreds of broadcasts. We singled out NBC not because it was alone among the networks in its naked bias, but because its coverage of the Lebanon War was the worst. We denounced the fake journalism that produced fake history of the Arab/Israeli conflict long before these terms were in vogue.

Moreover, from the outset we opposed the Oslo Accords, which conceded Israel’s legal, historical and religious claims to Judea and Samaria, the heart of historic Israel. We were proven right when the infamous accords led to the longest and bloodiest spree of terrorism against Israeli civilians. That included babies in bundling, children in strollers, diners in cafes, celebrants at Passover Seders, shoppers in markets, all of tehm murdered and scandalously called “casualties of peace” by then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

We correctly warned that so called “tough love” criticism of Israel by Jews would only promote international anti-Semitism. Over the last forty years we have exposed the enemies of Israel from within (by those self-righteously posing as representatives of a higher ‘prophetic’ Jewish morality) from Breira and its successor the New Jewish Agenda to the more recent New Israel Fund, J Street and, worst of the lot, Jewish Voices for Peace.

While there is no joy in having been right, it is important that for all these years there has been a voice for sanity when, sadly, almost all well-meaning Jews (and Jewish organizations) have rushed to support one ill-thought out proposal after another that supposedly advanced peace but actually in the long run threatened Israel’s survival.

There remains much to celebrate. The Jewish people have survived millennia of persecution and genocide and here we are in the unbroken chain from Abraham and Sarah in Hebron.

AFSI has been a valuable link in that chain and we are proud of our participation.

To our readers and supporters we wish a happy and sweet Passover. And we wish a peaceful Easter to all Christians with particular concerns for those who suffer daily harassment, persecution and murder in the Arab nations.

The division over Israel’s plan, beginning in April, to gradually relocate a major portion of the 38,000 African economic migrants who infiltrated a porous Sinai border until it was walled off in 2012, has created an effluence of demagoguery, half-truths, distorted pieties and incendiary analogies reminiscent, however faintly, of the post-Rabin abandonment of civil discourse.

With high-pitched opponents of the decision accusing everybody else of forgetting that ”refugeedom is in our DNA and seeking asylum in our blood” and of casting aside “the history of the Jewish people from the Exodus to the Holocaust,” one hardly knows where to begin undoing this knot. Perhaps with the half truths. The most blatant of them, flogged by the Israeli far left and more or less subscribed to by the liberal ADL, HIAS, J Street, Truah and the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center, is that the African illegals would be at risk of discrimination, poverty, incarceration and possibly even death in voluntarily accepting Israel’s generous offer of $3,500 and a free air ticket to Rwanda or Uganda, which have agreed to accept them, or to their countries of origin. While the last would not be an option for the small percentage among the group from a still toxic Darfur, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is on record as declaring both Rwanda and Uganda safe havens for the African repatriates. Moreover, even Eritrea, from whence the majority of the migrants originate, has been declared beyond any threat to the lives of its returning nationals by the Administrative Court of Switzerland.

The Court’s ruling was a follow-up to a report by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), a EU think tank, which noted that Eritreans were now ineligible for asylum or refugee status since they face no danger as repatriates. “Let’s be honest,” observes Douglas Altabee, chairman of the national Zionist NGO Im Tirtzu , “the idea that Africans returning to Africa puts them in mortal danger, is a classic example of the racism of low expectations.”

In step with that white plantation allusion is the largely uncorrected impression that all 38,000 of the migrants are ticketed for relocation. In fact, the program does not include some 5.000 children, their parents or guardians, anyone recognized as a victim of slavery or human trafficking or those who had requested asylum prior to the end of 2017. All of which “brings down the actual number of those subject to deportation,” Ha’aretz’s Ilan Lior notes, to “between 15.000 to 20,000.” While, as the reporter adds, the Population, Immigration and Border Authority and Interior Ministry charged with carrying out the relocation have offered no guarantees that current exceptions may not later be included in the program, pending more favorable conditions in Africa, the chances of that happening seem increasingly unlikely.

No less in need of correction is the claim of burgeoning Israeli support of sanctuary for the asylum seekers touted by, among others, Miklat Yisrael, a group organized by Rabbi Susan Silverman, the Israel-based sister of U.S. comedian Sarah Silverman. “We are exploding the myth that ordinary Israelis don’t want them,” Rabbi Nava Hefetz, one of the group’s leaders, told the New York Times. It is no myth. In the face of her assertion that Miklat’s volunteers were having trouble handling a flood of phone calls and emails from Israelis offering to adopt the migrants and even hide them in their homes, Israeli support for their relocation stood at 58 percent, versus 23 percent opposed and 19 percent with no opinion in a recent poll by Yisrael Hayom, the country’s most widely read Hebrew daily.

Are we looking at a case of Israeli hard-heartedness? Racism? Nativism? While no society can claim absolute immunity to such afflictions, the one that has singularly imbibed within its body politic over the past 70 years enough cultures, languages, colors and lifestyles to create a mini-United Nations of its own, hardly fits any of those descriptions. If the absorption of 125.000 (and counting) Ethiopian Jews – at the bottom of the ladder but rising fast – is insufficient testimony to a people free of racial distinctions, we’ll have to find a fresh definition of e pluribus unum.

Democrats Turn Guns on Israel

The turn of the Democratic Party against Israel has been going on for decades–blithely ignored by Jewish liberals. They may not find it possible to turn a blind eye much longer. In California, bellwether for the most foolish, destructive social and political trends that sweep the nation, the Democratic state party’s convention last month adopted planks in support of the Boycott, Divert and Sanctions Movement. It’s part of the party’s move to the “progressive left,” i.e. the fever swamps of moral imbecility.

Political Correctness, Polish Style

While Poland (like Hungary) is standing up to the political correctness that demands she show “solidarity” with the EU (following Germany) by taking in her “fair share” of Muslim migrants, Poland has adopted its own brand of falsifying reality. Its ruling Law and Justice Party is making it illegal to suggest that some Poles were complicit in Nazi crimes committed on Polish soil on penalty of being fined or serving up to three years in jail.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and the U.S. State Department have strongly protested the law, with Netanyahu calling it an attempt to “rewrite history.” The bill has also had the effect of exacerbating current Polish anti-Semitism, with Warsaw based political scientist Rafal Pankowksi saying “we’re seeing an explosion of that sentiment [anti-Semitism] in popular media mainstream.”

For political analyst and film-maker Inna Rogatchi what is most striking is what she calls “the crashing silence” of the rest of Europe. She notes that with the exception of France, whose foreign minister called the bill “ill advised,” “the European Union countries, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and the organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have been avoiding the controversy.” This is the more striking since Europe has been vocal in criticizing Poland ever since the Law and Justice Party took control in November 2015, claiming Warsaw has put “the rule of law and democracy” at risk. Rogatchi writes: “When it comes to the issue of Polish anti-Semitism, however, Europe is suddenly at a loss for words. This suggests that it is not merely ineptitude at work, but a far more worrisome trend. It is high time for the EU and its sister bodies to take a moral stand against anti-Semitism and the rewriting of history, lest Europe’s distasteful history repeat itself.”

Amir Taheri on Arab-Israel Peace

Amir Taheri, under the Shah editor of Iran’s major newspaper Kayhan, and currently chairman of the Gatestone Institute, Europe, has written an interesting article in Asharq Al Awsat, the international Arab paper published in London.

Taheri says that the basic problem the innumerable would be “solvers” of the Arab-Israel conflict have run into is that they “never managed to define it.” While Taheri is right, he fails to define it as well. Yet the definition is as simple as it is unwelcome to peace-processors. The Arab world (indeed much of the Muslim world) seeks to eliminate the Jewish state while Israel is determined to survive. It’s not a definition productive of a compromise “solution.”

But if Taheri fails to define the conflict, he is right when he says the best that can be achieved is a truce and Trump’s chance of coming up with a workable deal is “nil.” And Taheri offers a good suggestion. “There is one thing that Trump the deal-maker could do. He could ask the Israelis and the Palestinians to work on an agreement, each in their own camp, on what they exactly want, and report to him. My bet is that, at this moment, neither of the two sides would be able to shape any agreement in their own respective camp on what kind of a deal they might accept. And that, at least implicitly, means that both are happier with the status quo rather than the prolongation of ‘peace process’ which could never lead to peace and now is no longer even a process.”

Kudos to Fordham

FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has dubbed Fordham one of the “10 worst colleges for free speech” for the second year in a row. Its sin? Barring the application for club status of Students for Justice in Palestine.

That decision puts Fordham on AFSI’s “10 best colleges for free speech” given that the hallmark of Students for Justice in Palestine is shouting down and otherwise preventing anyone who is pro-Israel from speaking on campus..

For years, Israelis have been warned by “experts” that if they don’t give up Judea and Samaria they will be doomed by an Arab demographic time bomb. Whoops, never mind that. It’s now a Jewish time bomb demographers are warning about.

Israeli Jews are having too many children, says Prof. Alon Tal, chairman of Tel Aviv University’s department of public policy, at a recent academic conference. Israel’s population is growing by two million every 10 years, he notes, with an Israeli family numbering an average of 3.1 kids, much higher than the 1.7 children-per-family average in most Western countries.

“We are basically on a treadmill that is running faster and faster, and the gap between infrastructure and demand is getting bigger and bigger,” Tal said.

Prof. Tal comes at the problem from a sustainability perspective. He claims Israel will run out of resources. His prescription is more abortion, more birth control and fewer incentives for large families. Putting aside his predictions and prescriptions, that fact is that at the start of 2017 Israel’s Jewish fertility rate (3.16 births per woman) for the first time surpassed Israel’s Arab fertility rate (3.11).
This is, as noted, completely at odds with what Israeli demographers had been predicting for decades. Haifa University demographer Prof. Arnon Sofer was the loudest warning voice. In a 2008 paper, he described a “doomsday scenario” where Israel would be reduced to a post-Zionist “Tel-Aviv state” by 2020. “The demographic clock is ticking against the Jews of Israel at great speed,” he warned. We’re only two years from Sofer’s ‘end-times’ prediction, and lo and behold, he got it exactly wrong. It’s the Jews who are busting out all over.

The few voices that had spoken out against these Cassandra-like warnings were treated with contempt. Former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger was called “delusional” for analyzing the numbers and finding that all was not lost — the Palestinian Arabs were lying about their population numbers. (Sofer accepted Palestinian statistics at face value, a curious thing to do given their penchant for lying about, well, everything). Ettinger also argued that the Arab birthrate was changing. Indeed, the Arab birthrate has slowed — down from 9.5 births per Arab woman in 1960.

Now we’ve come full circle. Yesterday, Prof. Tal went so far as to say, “Today Arabs are averaging roughly 40,000 births a year and the Jews are averaging over 100,000. So if there was a demographic battle, it’s over.”

That’s something to celebrate.

David Isaac is writer-director of the educational website ZionismU.

Maj. General Mohsen Rezai founded Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the early days of the revolution, upon the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini.

While he relinquished control of the IRGC in 1997, he remains one of the regime’s most influential leaders. A “principalist,” who is considered a revolutionary purist, Rezai has occasionally shown a more pragmatic bent.

He regularly boasts of the Iranian regime’s military power, and issues threats to all who would challenge the regime–which seem to get dismissed in the Western media.

Last week, when he vowed to “level Tel Aviv to the ground,” was no exception.

He was speaking in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned at the Munich Security Conference that Israel would “act against Iran itself” if Iran continued to invade Israeli air space, as they did when they sent a drone into Israel from an air base in Syria.

And yet, outside of the Israeli media, only the Daily Mail paid much attention to Rezai’s threats.

But make no mistake about it: General Rezai understands the cold calculus of nuclear deterrence, and he was not making an idle threat.

His message was crystal clear: Iran considers itself to be a nuclear weapons-capable state. And he speaks from direct, personal knowledge since he was himself in charge of Iran’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade.

I know this because his son defected to the United States at the age of 23 in 1999, and wound up staying with me for several months, learning English in my basement by watching Jackie Chan movies. Many of the stories he told me about his father I related in a 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

Here is just one of them, which explains why I am confident that General Rezai was not making an idle threat to Israel. It involves a January 1993 trip Rezai made to China and North Korea with a 50-man military delegation, as well as his then teenage son.

For nearly an entire week, the North Koreans escorted Rezai and his delegation to military bases all over the country. They split them into two groups. Rezai and the men who had already taken the tour plunged directly into negotiations. His deputy, Mohammad Baqr Zolqadr, the dark-skinned fanatic who had just come back from training Osama bin Laden’s terrorists in Sudan, led the second group, including his boss’s son.

Young Ahmad marveled when they were taken to a top secret airbase, carved out of the rock inside a mountain. As they entered, their North Korean hosts pointed out the thickness of the special blast doors, designed to withstand a direct nuclear hit. Deep inside the mountain they came to a huge cavern, where two dozen aircraft were parked like ducks in a row, nestled into each other’s wings. In separate store rooms carved out of the rock, the North Koreans had stockpiled missiles, fuel, and all the necessary maintenance equipment. They managed the entire complex from a modern control room, where flight officers surveyed the buried runway through a giant glass window, a bit like the control tower on an aircraft carrier. But most amazing of all was the underground runway, pitched at a steep upward slant. As the jets cycled up their engines, the jetwash was deflected by a blast wall and vented through a series of long tunnels to the surface to reduce the heat signature. The jets hurtled upwards using a catapult, similar to an aircraft carrier. At the end of the runway, doors opened onto the sky. The jets shot out, burner cans lit, like a missile emerging from a launch tube buried halfway up the mountainside.

One of the most astonishing misconceptions I have come across in the West is the habit that some people — especially many media outlets — have of attempting to trivialize radical Islamist chants such as “Death to America”, “Death to Israel”, and “Death to Britain”. Even government officials tend to reduce these outbursts of hatred from the threats they really are to common banter.

Some of the so-called leftists, as well as agents of the extremist Muslim groups in the West, or spokesmen for the Islamic Republic of Iran, try to explain that these chants do not mean what they say, and what most people probably assume they say. Some sympathizers with extremist Muslims even try to insist that these messages are merely examples of “cultural differences”. The purpose of these sympathizers is seemingly to mislead a vulnerable populace into thinking that they should not worry about those chants or about the open and passionate threats against their communities.

This dumbing-down is especially intriguing because the same people who attempt culturally to explain, justify or minimize the meaning of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” have never lived under Islamic rule or even studied those fundamentalist states. Yet they take it upon themselves to explain the meaning of these chants as if they know better than the people issuing them.

The objective of these sympathizers seems clear: to coax Westerners into a false sense of security and encourage them not to take these threats seriously. These sympathizers stress the importance of not being alarmed by these chants, and try to convince the public that being afraid is simply a sign of ignorance. Ultimately this conditioning of the Western culture allows the extremist Muslims to expand their agenda slowly and covertly, while those who raise the alarm are shoved to the edge of society and ostracized as “racists” or “Islamophobes”, while the public remains lulled into a slumbering state.

I grew up being taught every morning in school to raise my fist and chant loudly “Death to America”, “Death to Israel” and “Death to Britain”. There was no confusion as to the meaning of those chants. If I did not do so, I was severely punished. Unfortunately, “Death to” means exactly what it says.

Where I grew up, chants were, and still are, one of the most powerful brainwashing tools utilized by extremist Muslim leaders to coerce their followers to fulfill the leaders’ religious and political wishes. Chants and slogans served to mobilize, unite, and empower people in a way that almost no other tool has succeeded in doing.

“There appears to have developed in the United Nations the practice for a number of countries to combine for the purpose of doing something outrageous, and thereafter, the outrageous thing having been done, to profess themselves outraged by those who have the temerity to point it out, and subsequently to declare themselves innocent of any wrong-doing in consequence of its having been brought about wholly in reaction to the “insufferable” acts of those who pointed the wrong-doing out in the first place. Out of deference to these curious sensibilities, the United States chose not to speak in advance of this vote: we speak in its aftermath and in tones of the utmost concern.

The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.

Not three weeks ago, the United States Representative in the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee pleaded in measured and fully considered terms for the United Nations not to do this thing. It was, he said, “obscene.” It is something more today, for the furtiveness with which this obscenity first appeared among us has been replaced by a shameless openness.

There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-Semitism — as this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days ago — the abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty — and more — to the murderers of the six million European Jews. Evil enough in itself, but more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon us — the realization that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened.

As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number — not this time — and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost.

Outpost

Editor: Rael Jean Isaac

Editorial Board: Ruth King, Rita Kramer

Outpost is distributed free to Members of Americans for a Safe Israel

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Among the constants of Jewish life in Israel and the U.S.–the American Jewish electorate’s unalterable attachment to Democratic party nominees, from the White House to City Hall, the annual emanations of a triumphal return by former prime minister Ehud Barak to the Israeli political scene, to cite just two–nothing is more constant than the seemingly endless suffering of Jonathan Pollard.

The most recent issue of Torah Tidbits, a weekly compendium of religious events in Jerusalem–lectures, Bible studies, tours, concerts–published by the New York based Orthodox Union’s “Israel Center,” featured an ad reading “Jonathan Pollard 10,956+755 days imprisoned.” The larger figure represents the sum in days of the 30 years the now 62-year-old former U.S. Naval Intelligence analyst spent behind prison bars for espionage, specifically for having provided Israel with strategic information he deemed vital to its security. The additional 755 days relates to the punishment Pollard had, to date, endured under a 2015 parole regimen that requires him to wear a GPS-monitoring device at all times, including Shabbat, when it conflicts with his observance as an Orthodox Jew to the prohibition against carrying. He is additionally restricted from wandering beyond the door of his Manhattan apartment before 7 a.m. and after 7 p.m. and must, on demand, submit any computer he uses, including one supplied by an employer, for police or FBI inspection.

Could all of this be entirely predicated on the notion, however absurd, that the 30-year-old “secrets” Pollard may allegedly be harboring would be of serious interest to any participant in the black bag trade, or is there something else involved here? The average U.S. prison sentence for espionage on behalf of a friendly or non-belligerent power has been 4-5 years. The 750,000 classified documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts former Private First Class Bradley (now Chelsea Elizabeth) Manning in his capacity as a military intelligence analyst gifted to WikiLeaks and its fugitive founder Julian Assange did not go to “friendly” powers.

As opposed to Manning’s unexplained release in May from the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas after serving a mere seven years of a 35-years sentence (commuted by President Obama) for what Reuters correspondent Karen Dillon described as the “largest breach of classified information in American history,” Jonathan Pollard’s ticket to Israel should have been a slam-dunk from the get-go of Donald Trump’s accession of the White House. Yet, 11 months into Israel’s “friendliest ever” U.S. Administration, that act of justice and compassion remains in limbo.

Israel Bars BDS Activists

In the December 2017 Outpost, we congratulated Israel for refusing to grant entry permits to a delegation of 20 members of the EU and French Parliaments who supported a boycott of Israel and planned to meet with convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti in prison. Israel, and specifically her Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan, was finally refusing to accept its hitherto passive role as a punching bag for phony “human rights” outfits (for more on them see the article “Human Rights Groups: The World’s Most Potent Evil Doers” in this issue).

Now the Algemeiner reports that Erdan has followed up with a list of twenty groups (20 seems to be a magic number) whose entry will be barred by the Interior Ministry. American groups on the list include the American Friends Service Committee (on which over twenty years ago AFSI published a pamphlet by sociologist David Kirk whose subtitle said it all—Good People and Dirty Work). Also on the list are Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, a viciously anti-Israel group funded in part by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Several of the European banned groups, like The Association France Palestine Solidarité, receive taxpayer support. The European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine coordinates over 40 BDS groups in Europe so the list really goes substantially beyond the official “twenty.”

The most over the top reaction has come from Rebecca Vilkomerson, who leads Jewish Voice for Peace in the U.S. In a version of the story of the man who murders his parents and claims victimhood as an orphan, Vilkomerson declares she is “personally feeling the pain of exclusion for the first time from a place that I am bound to by deep ties.”

It Happened Before

When feeling discouraged by the plethora of specifically Jewish groups undermining Israel, from Jewish Voice for Peace to the marginally less hostile J Street and New Israel Fund, it is well to remember that Jews have encountered this sort of thing before in the upbuilding of Palestine.

This hostility came dramatically to the fore in the wake of the Arab riots of 1929 in Palestine. While most Jews throughout the world were horrified, History of the Haganah (in Hebrew) reports that the declining Eastern European Jewish Bund, traditionally a foe of the Zionist enterprise, reacted with a joyful “I told you so” to the murder of Jews. “Hundreds of deaths, thousands of wounded” declared Prof. L. Hirsch, the theoretician of the Bund: “Moshavot went up in fire. Buildings raised in hope are in ruins…There isn’t any chance of an ingathering of the exiles and a Jewish state in Eretz Israel. Now after the events in Palestine, even the blind can see that.” The Central Committee of the Bund announced “The Zionists are guilty. They build their enterprise on a volcano….We Bundists warned that the Zionist enterprise will fail. We said ‘How can we join the English to oppress the Arabs?’”

Jewish Communists also celebrated. Immediately after the riots the communist Anti-Imperialist League of Berlin (with a large Jewish membership) issued a manifesto declaring “the Arab population in Palestine sees justly that the Zionist movement is the principal tool of British imperialistic exploitation of their land. With the help of the capitalistic and fascistic Zionist organization they expropriate Arab property and methodically impoverish the Arabs.” In New York. the Jewish Communist newspaper Morgen Freiheit initially reacted truthfully, calling the Arabs the aggressors. It was quickly forced to retract and with the blood of the pious Jews of Hebron and Jerusalem still fresh on the ground, Freiheit’s editor Joseph Olgin wrote “The editor of the morning issue was mistaken.” To atone, the paper started a vicious attack on the “Zionist imperialists and the crooked types of the Worker’s movement” that had joined the Second International “to organize systematically the pogrom of the Arabs in Palestine.” Topping it off, the Jewish Communists organized a major assembly and in its framework decided to establish a fund for the Arabs “hurt by the pogrom.”