Sharon Cobb posts a retort to those who suggest she lost her “liberal” credentials by choosing to support Israel.

I have found, through the years, a consistent intolerance from liberals about me being pro Israel and ignoring all of my liberal credentials.

…It’s like there is a litany test to pass before one can call herself a liberal, and if she is pro Israel, then all of her “liberal work” is negated….

…the question isn’t how can I be a liberal and pro Israel, but how can you call yourself a liberal and be pro Gaza?

Read her excellent post here.

On her blog, Sharon Cobb, former contributor to NBC Nightly News, explains why she, a “flaming liberal”, is pro-Israel and why she gets “more grief” about it from her liberal friends than from anyone else.

Yes, the Palestinians live in terrible conditions in Gaza. But why do you blame Israel?…

…I’ve posed this question before: If your next door neighbor repeatedly told you he is going to kill you, would you say “Okay,” or would you defend yourself and even take offensive measures to keep your family safe?..

… but it’s because of Hamas they live in poverty, not because of Israel or America. Hamas is too busy using the money we send for humanitarian aid for weapons to destroy Israel.

Read the whole thing.

She might want to add that it doesn’t help to have Hamas extremists going around vandalizing UN summer camps that compete with their militant message of Jew-hate. (See “Palestinian Extremists Accuse UN Camps of Corrupting Gazan Youth With ‘Human Rights’ Lessons“. )

Yediot Aharonot reports that Muslim extremists — believed to be from Hamas– have repeatedly vandalized a UN summer camp in Gaza because they believe the children are being “corrupted” with a summer program of “games, sports and human rights lessons.”

Indeed, learning about human rights can certainly corrupt the minds of children carefully educated to trample on human and religious rights and despise their Jewish neighbors as sons of pigs and monkeys.

Read the Ynet article here.

The anticipated Gaza “aid” ship from Lebanon, whose organizer’s sentiments about Jews echo those of Helen Thomas, would do well keeping its delivery closer to home. In Beirut yesterday, thousands of Palestinian activists demonstrated demanding more rights for Palestinians in squalid refugee camps:

People carry Palestinian flags and banners as they march during a protest in Beirut June 27, 2010. Thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese civil activists converged on central Beirut on Sunday, demanding more rights for Palestinians, many of whom live in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon. REUTERS/ Khalil Hassan

An interview with Lawrence Wright, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Looming Tower: al-Qaida and the Road to 9/11, on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air”, conducted by Terry Gross (June 22) highlighted tunnel activity between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. While much of the interview is accurate and balanced, it misled listeners on several key points.

Wright claimed that rocket attacks into Israel by Palestinian Terrorists had “essentially stopped” during the de facto truce in 2008, before Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Actually, during the six-month “truce,” 223 rockets and 139 mortars had been fired at Israel from Gaza. Even before Hamas declared it would not renew the “ceasefire,” more strikes had been launched. In all of 2008, Israel was hit with nearly 3,000 rockets and mortars before it responded with Operation Cast Lead.

Wright refers to smuggling tunnels from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula as the “the major part of the functioning economy” in Gaza and claims that, “the legitimate economy has been pretty much wiped out.” Describing the situation thus could leave listeners with the mis-impression that, as anti-Israel sources have claimed, there is a “humanitarian crisis” in the Strip.

Rather, the amount of aid transferred by Israel into Gaza, plus consumer commodities smuggled in, has been quite large. In the first quarter of 2010 alone, Israel allowed 94,500 tons of supplies in 3,676 trucks into the Gaza Strip through Israeli crossings. Included in this were 48,000 tons of food items and 1,068 tons of medical supplies

Write accurately describes the situation in the Gaza Strip in the 1990s, when the “poverty rate was almost equivalent to that of the United States” and “100,000 Gazans were going to work in Israel every day.” However, neither he nor Gross reminds listeners that the end of this prosperity was primarily due to eruption of the 2000-2004 Palestinian terror war against Israel known as the second Intifada.

These omissions marred an otherwise considered presentation by Wright that included pertinent Israeli perspectives. — Traci Siegel, Washington research intern

Conventional wisdom insists that the “core issues” of the Arab-Israeli conflict are borders, settlements, Jerusalem, and Palestinian Arab refugees. The Washington Post offered a slight variation in “Netanyahu aide questions peace effort, Iran sanctions” in its June 23 edition. Janine Zacharia, Post Jerusalem bureau chief, referred to “core issues such as borders, the future of Jerusalem, security arrangements and the fate of Palestinian refugees.”

Such formulations avoid recognition of the elephant in the room: If those are indeed the key matters to be resolved, why did Palestinian leadership reject Israeli-U.S. offers in 2000 and 2001 and an Israeli proposal in 2008 of peace in exchange for a West Bank and Gaza Strip state, with eastern Jerusalem as its capital? Why were the rejections complete, with no Palestinian counter-proposals on, say, resolution of refugee claims? Why were the 2000 and 2001 refusals supported by the terrorist war called the “al-Aqsa intifada”?

Perhaps, as CAMERA’s public service advertisement in the June 10 edition of the Washington Jewish Week suggests, “borders, refugees, boundaries and Jerusalem [are] symptoms of the core issue — Arab denial of Jewish rights.” The elephant in the room remains Palestinian Arab denial of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, entwined with denial of the Jewish people’s profound, 3,000-year-old connection to Jerusalem.

In “Netanyahu aide questions peace effort, Iran sanctions,” The Post reports that Israeli national security adviser Uzi Arad “described the Palestinians as ‘major actors in the delegitimizaiton of Israel.’” The paper cites him as asking, “have you failed to notice that the more we lend legitimacy to a Palestinian state, the more it comes at the expense of our own?” If the core issues were borders, Jerusalem, settlements and refugees — matters for negotiation according to U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 — that would not be so. But if the core issue is rejection of Jewish sovereignty, it would.

Will Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV go the way of Hezbollah’s incendiary Al Manar TV — and be taken off the air in Europe? According to a June 15 AP story by Ibrahim Barzak, Al-Aqsa TV is to cease broadcasting by June 26 because it spreads incitement. He writes:

The Hamas station – best known for its children’s programs glorifying violence against Israel – is the centerpiece of a growing media operation of Gaza’s Islamic militant Hamas rulers. Losing the satellite provider will hamper the group’s attempts to spread its message and raise funds abroad.

As the Palestinian Maan News Agency’s June 24 report notes, the instruction to shut down Al-Aqsa in Europe came from a ruling by France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel. Maan reported Al-Aqsa’s claim:

“We do not incite hatred or anti-Semitism, and we have the right to defend the Palestinian struggle,”

MEMRI proves otherwise, with yet another example of bigoted ranting on the network, this time reiterating the long discredited, bogus claims regarding Benjamin Franklin and his alleged criticism of the Jews.

A Jewish dance group was recently attacked — with stones — by audience members during a show in Hanover, Germany.

Here are some details:

A Jewish dance group was attacked with stones by a group of children and teenagers during a performance at a street festival in the Germany city of Hannover, police said Thursday. One dancer suffered a leg injury and the group then canceled their performance.

The teenagers also used a megaphone to shout anti-Semitic slurs during the Saturday afternoon attack, Hannover police spokesman Thorsten Schiewe said.

Police said the incident is under investigation and that they do not have an exact number of attackers yet. Schiewe said there were several Muslim immigrant youths among the attackers.

By portraying Israel, the target of genocidal hostility from its neighbors, as a genocidal apartheid nation inhabited by extremists and governed by monsters, so-called peace activists in the West helped render Jews, wherever they may be, as legitimate targets for acts such as this.

It’s a pure coincidence, but the front cover of the June 18, 2010 issue of Commonweal is appropriate in light of the publication’s editorial (subscription only) condemning Israel for its response to the flotilla that tried to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip on May 31. The editorial lays virtually all of the blame for the nine deaths on board the Mavi Marmara on Israel despite ample evidence that the Turkish fighters on board the vessel were looking for a fight and were intent on achieving martyrdom or death at the hands of the Israelis.

On the magazine’s cover is an 1893 photo of Anne Sullivan lovingly touching the face of Helen Keller, who under Sullivan’s tutelage, became an important writer despite the fact that she was deaf and blind. In the photo, Sullivan leans toward Keller, touching her lips and cheeks with her left hand while peering intently into Keller’s eyes as she sits impassively, oblivious to everything but Sullivan’s efforts to connect with her.

The photo is a compelling expression of kenosis or self-emptying and offers an inadvertent but powerful critique of the editorial inside in which Commonweal’s editors portray themselves as trying to shake some sense into the head of the Israelis.

Instead they drag the Jewish state by the ear through a sculpture garden depicting events of recent history in an effort to finally get Israelis to understand what they are up against, as if somehow, the Israelis didn’t know what was going on in the region they live. Commonweal’s frustration at Israel’s alleged inability to master its own history is matched by a fundamental ignorance of a few obvious facts.
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Two scholars from Vanderbilt Divinity School, Ted A. Smith and Amy-Jill Levine have written an authoriative critique of “Breaking Down the Walls,” a report that will be on the agenda of the upcoming General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Smith, Assistant Professor of Ethics and Society, and Amy-Jill Levine, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt, had their piece, (“Habits of anti-Judaism“), published by Christian Century, the house organ for mainline Protestant churches in the U.S.

The two authors offer their qualifications to their readers as follows:

We write as a Presbyterian and a Jew, as colleagues on a divinity school faculty and as teachers who continue to see the habits of false witness in the work of even our most talented and committed students. We know firsthand how deep-seated habits can be and how quicky they outrun our best intentions. We do not seek to single out the Presbyterian report, but to illumine patterns that many forms of Christian witness.

The piece, which is worthy of a full read, begins with a particularly tough opening paragraph:
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