Just to prove how tough things are for Jews these days, there is an extraordinary story in the Jerusalem Post about an Orthodox Jew who was removed from a Canadian flight last week for praying. Yes, a Jew with a beard praying was enough to intimidate his fellow passengers and, as a result, Air Canada Jazz officials kicked him off the plane.
Jews are being kicked off and ticked off everywhere for behaving badly.
It was only last week at the Melbourne Writers Festival the Palestinian Advocate Julian Burnside QC reportedly opened his talk with statement to the effect that he had received two death threats in his life and one of them came from a "Jew".
I'd don't know what sort of Jew he was talking about but I somehow doubt he was threatened by a Jew like his anti-Zionist friend Mr. Loewenstein. But then I also doubt that he was referring to one of the great majority of law abiding peace loving Jews of the world including the poor Hasidic fellow who missed his flight out of Montreal, or for that matter, even by a Yiddishe boobbe who might possibly have wanted to suffocate him by feeding him with an oversized matzoh ball.
But still, I'm curious as to why Burnside decided it was necessary for him to start proceedings in this way.
I say "curious" because one of the subjects for discussion was the State of Israel and its people who have throughout its history and, even before it was born as a nation, been the recipients (and victims) of some pretty serious death threats.
Where do you start with the list of death threats against these people?
Jews in the region were being threatened in the 1920's, a decade that ended with the massacre of more than 60 Jews in Hebron (1929). Then there was the spiritual leader of the Palestinians in the 30's and 40's, Haj Amin Husseini, who sat down with Adolph Hitler in Berlin to help plot his final solution for the Jews.
Later, on the day after the State of Israel declared itself an independent nation (14 May, 1948) and the troops of five Arab States attacked the nascent Jewish state, the head of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha uttered the following death threat:
"This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades".
Further death threats against Israel came from Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser when he warned of a war of extermination against the Jewish State in the prelude to the Six Day War of 1967, and in the Palestine National Covenant and the charters of the Palestinian terrorist groups which threaten to wipe out Israel.
Indeed, the flow of death threats against Israel and the Jews both within and without the country has continued unabated right through to recent statements from the Iranian leadership and those of their Hizbullah puppet in Lebanon. Nasrallah's language is very clear:-
"If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world wide."
The Hamas Charter is nothing more than a formal death threat against not only Israel but the Jewish people collectively. Article 7 of the Charter incorporates the words of the Prophet, Allah who said:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews. (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem). "
This is the constitution of the party elected in January to lead the Palestinian people who Burnside QC so vigorously defends and who finds it necessary to invoke a death threat from an anonymous "Jew" in order to do so.
What makes it all the more curious to me is that while Jews are thrown off passenger flights and other Jews are being accused of making death threats which are never carried out, people are meeting violent deaths in many places all over the globe and, as much as some would like to blame Israel and the Jews, they will have to look to others to find the real perpetrators of the killings.
Which is all so very unfortunate for Mr. Burnside QC, isn't it?
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4 comments:
Thanks for exposing Burnside for what he is Wilbur.
I was fuming when I read about his comments last week and I wondered why the others in the audience didn't simply boo the bastard off the stage.
Then I realised that the majority must have been kindred spirits of this oaf.
What is the fascination this so called "writer's festival" has with Israel's right to exist? Didn't they do this topic last year with another non-entity author?
Aren't there other issues the world needs to deal with a little more than denying Jews what almost every other nation on the face of this earth has right to take for granted?
What is the fascination this so called "writer's festival" has with Israel's right to exist?
The answer you seek is "Louise Adler" and her problem is detailed here.
Thus the Melbourne Writers' Festival event is shaping up to be another one-sided affair marked by a preponderant hostility towards Israel. In fact, it seems to be much like the Festival session organised last year by Ms. Adler for author Jacqueline Rose.
How peculiar that Ted Lapkin (linked to by "anonymous", above) should write this! The 2005 festival session involving Professor Rose was very far from one-sided, and even included a paper which Mr Lapkin had a hand in writing! Since his point of view was represented, one can only assume that what he objects to is the presence of other points of view - my own, for example.
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