| To: Carolyn who wrote (2954) | 8/28/2001 6:24:24 AM | | From: GUSTAVE JAEGER | | | | 'Real Jews'
By Peter Snowdon
It wasn't difficult to get in touch with the Betar. I'd imagined that any organisation which went round Paris shouting racist slogans and issuing communiques claiming responsibility for beating up Arabs must be relatively low profile, if not completely underground. Of course, the Front National do that kind of thing, and they're in the phone book. But they do it on behalf of the French people. The Betar do it on behalf of Eretz Israel.
[snip]
ahram.org.eg |
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| To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (2955) | 8/28/2001 12:16:04 PM | | From: Thomas M. | | | | Great Article!
He leaned back in his chair, and his girth loomed proudly towards the edge of the table, as if daring it to try and push him back within his negotiated limits.
ROFLMAO! That is the best line I have heard in a long time.
Fortunately, Nadine has reassured me that these kind of crazies aren't what Israel is about, they are just on the lunatic fringe. Well, except for the fact that Menachem Begin and Binyamin Netanyahu were PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL. -g-
Tom |
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| To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (2955) | 8/28/2001 2:09:16 PM | | From: LV | | | | | I found Moti to be a very sympathetic person. Snowdon comes from a different perspective – he has no painful experiences with anti-semitic thugs. You see, when you encounter those, a Bible or Das Capital or even a score sheet from Aida in your hands won’t do you much good. You need your baseball bat against their baseball bats. I have no problem whatsoever with Jewish thugs (I may use a different word to describe them, though) protecting Jewish neighborhoods or institutions against anti-semites, or black thugs confronting marching racists, or Arab thugs fighting marauding skinheads, just as I have no problem with armed community patrols in high crime neighborhoods. It may not be the perfect solution to some of the problems in the world, but it is a solution. As long as I see no Arab-baiting, or Jew-baiting, or racist crap, I find these people and their actions commendable indeed. |
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| To: LV who wrote (2930) | 8/28/2001 2:38:46 PM | | From: Nadine Carroll | | | | Interesting analysis of the dynamic at work in the current "intifada":
The Intifada behind the Al-Aqsa Intifada
by Gary C. Gambill
Members of the Tanzim at a demonstration in Gaza last month
[Reuters/Reinhard Krause]
The "Al-Aqsa Intifida" has witnessed the most intense fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in nearly two decades, with the death toll now approaching 200, mostly Palestinian, fatalities. According to the conventional wisdom, the uprising was triggered by the untimely visit of Israeli Likud leader Ariel Sharon, flanked by over 1,000 riot policemen, to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem on September 28. This event, it is said, sparked a familiar pattern of "spontaneous" Palestinian riots and Israeli reprisals--a self-propelling process whereby demonstrators are killed and injured, fueling public passions that result in further protests, and so forth. The uprising is attributed to the same dynamic that governed the 1987-1993 Intifada, and to a lesser extent the "tunnel riots" of 1996, with most of the debate centering around Yasser Arafat's willingness and capability to control the Palestinian "street."
But for all the destructive energy unleashed by the Al-Aqsa Intifida, the scope of popular participation has been surprisingly limited. Although large numbers of Palestinians have taken part in peaceful rallies and funeral processions, the crowds that have confronted Israeli troops with rocks and Molotov cocktails on a daily basis have been notably smaller than those that spontaneously arose during the first Intifada. What is new about the current uprising--the frequent use of firearms against Israeli soldiers and settlers--is mainly attributable to a relatively small number of Fatah activists, numbering perhaps a few hundred at most.
meib.org |
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| To: Carolyn who started this subject | 8/29/2001 1:30:37 AM | | From: Mani1 | | | | Powell Will Boycott U.N. Racism Conference
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) will not attend the U.N. conference on racism opening in South Africa this week because of language critical of Israel, the State Department said on Monday.
``It is clear to us now that the secretary (Powell) will not go to this conference. The secretary will not attend this conference. The exact nature and level of our representation, if any, is not clear,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a news briefing.
Boucher said all along, the United States had stated its opposition to several elements of the conference, including ''offensive'' language about Israel that singles it out as a ''racist'' occupying power.
It was possible the United States would boycott the conference altogether and not send a delegation at all, Boucher said.
``We'll have to look at the situation, about how this might evolve or change based on the efforts that various people are making, and ... decide on the nature and level of our participation, if any,'' he said.
Boucher said Powell had spoken on several occasions with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) over the weekend to tell him of his decision about the conference, set to start on Friday.
Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, welcomed Powell's decision to boycott the meeting, which he said had been ``hijacked'' by some participants with the specific aim of bashing Israel.
``There's a need to discuss racism but not in a conference which already has been hijacked,'' Foxman said in an interview on the PBS program ``Newshour With Jim Lehrer.'' Powell's presence would give the conference ``a certain status and prestige'' it does not deserve, Foxman said.
The United States repeatedly threatened to skip the U.N. conference unless Arab states drop demands that the conference texts single out Israel.
President Bush (news - web sites) said on Friday the United States would not go to the conference in Durban at all if the participants ''picked on'' or denigrated Israel.
ZIONISM RESOLUTIONS
Boucher said by attending the conference at Cabinet level, the United States would have put out the wrong signal that it agreed with this kind of language describing Israel.
``The level tends to imply a certain association that we may not -- certainly don't want with this kind of language,'' he said.
Boucher said the United States had spent years trying to ''eradicate some of these ideas'' about Israel from U.N. documents and now was not the time to revive them.
The U.N. General Assembly equated Zionism -- the modern movement promoting the return of Jews to the biblical land of Israel -- with racism in resolutions adopted annually from 1975 to 1991. They were dropped after the landmark 1991 Madrid Middle East peace conference.
The Bush administration had also objected to language in conference documents supporting reparations for slavery but Boucher said the key issue was Israel and not language on reparations.
Also appearing on PBS, Hugh Price, National Urban League president, said while he agrees that a discussion of Zionism has no place at the Durban meeting, to skip it because of that leaves unaddressed all the other issues that do belong on the agenda.
``The United States has more to teach the rest of the world on how to manage diversity and create opportunity than any other society on Earth and we could use our presence there to try to do that,'' Price said. ``I think the presence of Secretary Powell would have accomplished that, so we're deeply disappointed that he's not going.''
Rep. Tom Lantos (news - bio - voting record), a California Democrat and ranking minority member on the House International Relations Committee, applauded Powell's decision not to go to Durban.
``By allowing a conference against racism to become a conference against Israel, the United Nations (news - web sites) -- urged by the Arab states -- has missed an historic opportunity to take a positive step toward eradicating the scourge of racism.
``As a world leader in this fight, the United States must not dignify this anti-Israel lynching with its high-level participation.'' he said in a statement.
dailynews.yahoo.com |
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| To: LV who wrote (2957) | 8/29/2001 5:12:00 AM | | From: GUSTAVE JAEGER | | | | NAAA-ADC Panel: Middle East Peace-Making in a Post Clinton Era
"The Centrality of Jerusalem to an End of Conflict Agreement"
Rashid Khalidi
President, American Committee on Jerusalem
Director, Center for International Studies, University of Chicago
acj.org
Excerpt:
During the Clinton administration, when in my view opportunities for real progress in peace-making were allowed to slip away, U.S. diplomatic activity in the Middle East was essentially circumscribed not by vital U.S. interests, nor by the interests of all the regional parties, but rather by the preferences of one party: Israel.
Throughout those eight years, the ceiling of the negotiations brokered by the U.S. was what American policy-makers - often mistakenly - claimed were the outer limits of what Israel would accept. Thus, they argued that Israel would never negotiate with the PLO, would never accept the idea of a Palestinian state, would never withdraw from Lebanon, would never accept a complete withdrawal from the Golan Heights, and would never accept Palestinian sovereignty over parts of East Jerusalem. They therefore tried to keep negotiations under these very low ceilings. Over time, of course, the past three Israeli governments - those of Rabin, Netanyahu and Barak - came to accept the possibility, and in some cases the reality, of all of these options that American "experts" claimed were unthinkable to Israel.
Beyond this, there was limited attention by American policy-makers during the Clinton era to what Arab parties could accept. The Palestinians in particular complained bitterly about disdainful treatment by American policy-makers, who seemed to ignore that there were limits to the concessions they could make, given the strength of Palestinian opinion on crucial issues. Instead, there appeared to be an almost unlimited American willingness to squeeze the Palestinians, always in the name of "realism." And there seemed to be little concern for the impact of such an Israel-based policy on the broader interests of the U.S. in the Middle East.
I would suggest strongly that at the end of the Clinton era, and under the ongoing impact of the "al-Aqsa intifada," whose daily scenes of brutality by Israeli troops using American weapons are broadcast throughout the region by a plethora of satellite TV stations beyond the control of any Arab regime, U.S. interests in the Arab world are in more jeopardy today than they have been for decades. This is largely a result of U.S. policy-makers ignoring the clearly expressed views of the Palestinians and other Arab parties for eight long years.
It is to be hoped that with the Clinton era behind us, the new Bush administration will pay due regard to the interests of all parties, not just Israel, and in particular to the constraints on the actions of all. Hopefully, the new administration will also free itself from an excessive preoccupation with domestic considerations which overwhelmingly favor Israel, and will pay much overdue attention to U.S. interests in the Middle East, and how they have been affected by eight years of blatant bias in favor of Israel.
This brings me back to Jerusalem. This is an issue, more than any other, with deep resonance for all the parties. There exists a school of thought - I should call it a line of argument rather than dignifying it by calling it a school of thought - that Jerusalem is only really important to one religious tradition, the Jewish one; and that it is only really important to one people, the Israelis. This intolerant and ignorant thesis is essentially aimed at keeping treatment of the Jerusalem issue in U.S. policy where it has been for the past eight years: it means considering that the only important question regarding Jerusalem is what Israel will accept.
But peace in the Middle East does not have to be made -- as some appear to believe -- between Israel's Likud and Labor parties. It has to be made between Palestinians and Israelis, and between Arabs and Israelis, and it must take into account the concerns of Muslims, Christians and Jews everywhere. Indeed, where Jerusalem is concerned, the need to consider the concerns of a broad range of constituencies is more urgent than with any other issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict, because of Jerusalem's profound resonance for so many people.
[...] |
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| To: Thomas M. who wrote (2956) | 8/29/2001 11:23:46 AM | | From: GUSTAVE JAEGER | | | | As Hawkmoon would put it, only the ugly Palestinians don't flinch from sending their fanaticized kids to the front line....
August 24, 2001
COLUMN ONE
Rabbis Take Aim at Women in Ranks
Israeli women can now join combat units. But Orthodox Jews say religious laws may keep observant men from serving with them.
By MARY CURTIUS, TIMES STAFF WRITER
PETAH TIKVA, Israel -- Less than a month after a Palestinian gunman shot her in the face as she patrolled Israel's border with the West Bank, Cpl. Hani Abramov, 19, is itching to get back to her front-line unit.
Lying in a hospital bed, Abramov is a disturbing sight. Her face still is grotesquely swollen and badly bruised. Her shattered jaw distorts her speech. But the message she muttered to an Israel Television interviewer was clear: "I'm going to be back," she vowed. "And I'm going to be crawling on my knees, carrying my faithful gun on my back."
[snip]
latimes.com
BTW, how come we, in the West, don't watch these footages of Israeli kids psyched up to get back in the action?? Too bad for Israel's image?? |
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| To: Tom Clarke who wrote (2945) | 8/29/2001 11:46:22 AM | | From: GUSTAVE JAEGER | | | | Charley, I bet your Jewish inlaws too don't plan to relocate in Israel, now do they??
Wednesday August 29, 2001 Elul 10, 5761
Israel Time: 06:55 (GMT+3)
Wanted immigrants from Argentina, France and S. Africa
By Yair Sheleg
haaretzdaily.com
Excerpt:
he Kiryat Bialik model seems to have worked. There are already 150 Argentinian families, totally some 700 people, in the town. And other towns, like Kiryat Gat, Upper Nazareth, Ashkelon and others have followed suit, sending their mayors to Argentina to meet with prospective immigrants, offering them housing and employment.
For the Jewish Agency, the project is part of a larger scheme to try increasing immigration from the West, because of the assumption that the reservoir of potential
immigrants in the former Soviet Union is shrinking rapidly.
Two other countries are on the Jewish Agency's radar: France, where the 600,000
mostly North African Jews, the largest Diaspora community outside of the U.S., have
been encountering a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents and the Agency is counting
on their sense of isolation in a country with 6 million Muslims; and South Africa,
where the country has seen a drastic drop in the standard of living due to declining
foreign investment, as well as a steep rise in crime.
France has potential, say Jewish Agency officials like Mike Rosenberg, the current
Immigration Department chief, because of the strong links between the community
and Israel. But agency officials admit that French Jewry meanwhile regards the
upsurge in anti-Semitism as a temporary affair resulting from the impact of the
intifada.
In South Africa, Jews are ready to pack up and leave, but 80 percent of those who do are choosing other destinations, with Canada and Australia topping the list.
[snip]
____________
What a load of rubbish! Of course French Jews don't feel like moving in Israel! They quietly run half of France already.... How could they feel "isolated" or threatened in a country where most of the media/showbiz is run by them? The largest French advertising firm, Publicis, is run by Maurice Levy and owned by Bleustein-Blanchet heirs (Elisabeth Badinter whose husband was Chief Justice with France's Supreme Court). France's top car maker Renault is run by CEO Schweitzer and its Japanese subsidiary Nissan by another French Jew, Carlos Ghosn... The current Jospin administration is notoriously pro-Israel and harbors a dozen Jewish Ministers and high civil servants... As for France's 5 million Muslim worshippers, they're nowhere in the power chain.... they can't even build a mosque --they're barely allowed to pray in filthy, disused warehouses... Disgusting!
Gus. |
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| To: alan w who wrote (2940) | 8/29/2001 12:49:53 PM | | From: GUSTAVE JAEGER | | | | Just a whiff of Neo-Fascist Europe....
Born in France, Reared in France, but Not 'French' / Questions of colour
June 11th 2000, Charles Trueheart, Washington Post Foreign Service
MARSEILLE, France -- It was always Ferid Gourar's dream to become a police officer. Now he's training at the French police academy here and is only a few months away from wearing a uniform. His immigrant parents back home on the outskirts of Nice are thrilled. But not all of his friends approve.
"They don't like the police. They've had troubles with the police. Some are just jealous," said Gourar, 24. "But to me as a North African, as a foreigner in France, this means I can have a job like any other French person. And it means France has a police force that represents everyone--black, blanc, beur." That is, black, white and the common shorthand here for North African.
Gourar was born in France. He holds French citizenship, speaks unaccented French and is about to become an official agent of the French state. But still, he calls himself a "foreigner."
To many French people, he is.
Throughout the 20th century, France was a magnet for immigrants. Generations of Spaniards, Poles, Italians and Portuguese flocked here in search of once abundant jobs and have long since been absorbed, culturally and economically, into French society.
But for people of color, who make up 10 to 15 percent of France's 60 million people, the path to Frenchness has been more problematic. Many of them feel like exceptions to France's professed commitment to human and individual rights, its cosmopolitan openness and its belief in egalitarianism and the power of the state to eliminate social inequality.
Racial discrimination, even racism itself, remains a persistent fact of life in France--and the French themselves admit it under the anonymity of a pollster's survey. According to a Louis Harris opinion poll released in March, only 29 percent of those surveyed declared themselves "not racist." More than 6 in 10 said there were too many people of "foreign origin" in France, and they were specific about it: 63 percent said there were too many Arabs, and 38 percent said there were too many blacks.
An estimated 4 million to 5 million black people live in France, most of whom trace their roots, if not their birthplaces, to former French colonies in Africa and the West Indies. The number of Muslims is between 5 million and 6 million, the vast majority of them from what is called the Maghreb--the three North African nations of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Such numbers are only educated guesses. Unlike the United States, which asks residents about their race and ethnicity at each census, counting by race is illegal under France's strict color-blind policies.
It is not just counting that the French object to. What Americans call affirmative action, the French reject as "positive discrimination," and they resist other deliberate efforts to propel disadvantaged minorities up the socioeconomic ladder. The French often cite the divisions created by busing and race-based gerrymandering in the United States as reasons to avoid such social experiments.
Such efforts, many French say, run against the traditions of the centralized French state and violate the melting-pot ideal that many Americans have abandoned. List-keeping, or ethnic branding, still carries the waft of France's ugliest modern period, Vichy, when French authorities under Nazi occupation assisted zealously in the identification and deportation of more than 70,000 French Jews who were made to wear Stars of David sewn to their clothing.
By adhering strictly to its color-blind policies, France has not violated its national creed of egalitarianism. But another consequence is that "France is 30 years behind the United States" in its efforts to become the multicultural, integrated, tolerant society that it claims to be, said prize-winning author Calixthe Beyala, an African immigrant who is known for her uncompromising views on institutionalized French racism and is active in the uphill fight here to promote affirmative action.
The government is showing new signs that it is determined to help root out racism; this month it opened its first anti-discrimination hot line to field complaints about hiring bias. But simultaneously, there are clear indications of how far France has to go: The French Senate last month blocked government legislation to give tax-paying immigrants the vote in municipal elections--a right that citizens of other European Union countries who live here enjoy automatically.
The distance France has to travel is visible. Garbage collectors, street cleaners and dishwashers come in all colors--but not usually white. Move up the economic scale, and the number of black and brown faces drops significantly.
There are few non-Caucasian workers visible in hotels, banks, restaurants or department stores frequented by mostly white clienteles. A retired Air France flight attendant, who is white, said few black or brown-skinned hostesses ever flew with her--and she said, matter-of-factly, that that had to do with their looks not being in conformity with the airline's appearance standards.
Among corporate executives, business leaders and government officials, a black or a brown face is still a novelty. A non-European diplomat said he has never met anyone at any level at the Quai d'Orsay, the French Foreign Affairs Ministry, who is not white.
Of France's 577 National Assembly members, there is only one nonwhite--a black man from a Brittany district--who does not represent one of France's overwhelmingly black overseas territories.
A French insurance company investment manager who has worked in the Paris financial world for 30 years has to think hard to come up with someone in his profession who isn't white--not, he added with conviction, that his line of work is closed to a black or a beur with the right qualifications.
Abdelwahed Ben Hamida, a Tunisian-born professor of engineering at the University of Paris, is philosophical about such bias.
"I am French on paper. I try to be in my daily life too," he said. "But I can't feel exclusively French. . . . And I know the regard of many French people will be that I am Tunisian whatever I accomplish."
Ben Hamida, like many people from North Africa here, is not a practicing Muslim, but Islam is at least the nominal religion of most of the beurs in France. Islam is now
the second-largest religion in traditionally Catholic France, and its growth has posed an acute challenge to the French profession of religious tolerance.
Terrorist bombings in France linked to Algerian Muslim extremists traumatized France in the mid-1990s, and in the discourse on prejudice, the attacks often are equated with the practice of Islam itself.
The vast majority of France's Muslims have their roots in Algeria, which became part of France in 1830 and then home to white French settlers. From 1954 to 1962, France fought a bitter, costly war against pro-independence Algerian guerrillas that cost more than 15,000 French lives--and as many as a million Algerian ones.
France lost the war and was forced out of the country. A million long-established white settlers had to return to France, bringing with them a sense of betrayal and recrimination that continues to infect attitudes today. "The old ghosts are still around," said Michel Ponsard-Chareyne, a police school official.
The reception of black immigrants from other parts of Africa or the West Indies, where France had colonial empires, has been less chilly. Because France separated from its
black colonies peaceably, and in some economic and strategic respects has never let go, the baggage of history is somewhat lighter for these blacks.
But only somewhat. Dominique Tchimbakala, 23, who grew up in the Congo Republic, a former French colony, is studying in Nantes for a career in the media. Once, she
called a hotel manager about a front-desk position that needed to be filled quickly. He sounded thrilled by her personal qualities over the telephone, as well as her
qualifications and her availability to start immediately.
When she arrived for the interview an hour later, she said, she could tell right away the deal was off. "He looked embarrassed," Tchimbakala said. "He said he'd keep my
resume on file, that it wasn't his decision, et cetera, et cetera."
Lots of upwardly mobile young people, like Tchimbakala, reject the syndrome of victimization they see in some of their friends.
"They go for interviews. They get the door slammed in their face. They say, 'It's because I'm Arab.' I tell them, 'You know, a job doesn't fall from the sky. You have to
show what you're worth,' " Gourar said.
One of his fellow trainees, Nora Boussaidi, said she was determined to prove to her friends that "it's not because I'm called Boussaidi that I won't make it."
The government, however, is beginning to show an interest in promoting diversity, and the police academies are one example.
Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement is spearheading an initiative that seeks to diversify France's national police force by working with certain schools to identify
promising candidates, give them some pre-training and then steer them toward the strictly meritocratic police entrance examinations. Chevenement proudly cites the fact
that the top-ranked police academy graduate last year was of North African extraction.
Recruiting by ethnicity "is against the law of the Republic," said Georges Guillermou, a police training official in Marseille. "What we're doing is not exactly positive
discrimination. . . . We're just trying to offer conditions to those who wouldn't succeed without them."
This is not an ethnically or racially based program, police officials repeated in interviews, but an effort to attract trainees from "sensitive neighborhoods," "disadvantaged
neighborhoods" or "hot neighborhoods"--French euphemisms for the bleak housing projects that ring Paris and other major cities and whose residents are
disproportionately nonwhite, disproportionately unemployed and increasingly hostile toward the state.
The police academy in northern Marseille is located in such a neighborhood. One of the duties of the trainees here is to patrol the street outside the academy where they park
their cars. Without a policeman every 30 paces, one trainee said, the vehicles would be broken into and trashed in no time.
Such criminality, experts on ethnicity and immigration in France say, is not racially grounded but rather a manifestation of the rage that has grown over the years in the
housing projects--"quasi-insurrections, gratuitous destruction of property--not for money, not for fun, just to strike out against the state," police school official
Ponsard-Chareyne said. The hardships of life in the projects, the experts said, erase distinctions of color and build a class solidarity that transcends origins and has resulted in a racial integration of a sort, though not the kind idealized by the French.
For every generation of immigrants in France, as elsewhere, time is supposed to heal--time measured not in years but in decades or generations. "If I didn't have hope for my children," said Ben Hamida, "I'd pack up and take them somewhere else."
anglofrance.net
And after that, Goldsnow's gonna bore the pants off us with... soccer star Zidane! Give us a break!! |
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