Some Interesting Links for You

At least I found them interesting, and informative, and even thought provoking. You should visit all of the links and read the complete articles. You don't have to do it right now, and you don't even have to do it in one sitting. But you should find some reading time.

This first one is by Melanie Phillips. Not only is it worth reading, but so is the commenter who challenges the Israel bashers with this challenge,

How do you explain the whole Arab world raising against dictators, sacrificing lives in thousands.. everywhere except PA and Israeli Arab sector? - ..these ones are supposed to be first victims of "Zionist genocide".

Here it is, an awful secret. Netanyahu doesn't need to make peace with Arabs because de-facto peace is already established. Israel is not at war with those, even yesterday enemies, who have stopped hostility.

Taking into account the schizophrenic nature of "Arab street" there, and meagre prespectives for political stability, the factual peace is the best available option. And Arabs quietly accept this.

Of course, you should read what Phillips wrote. She is one of the best commentators writing today. And here is more proof of that.

The Times (£) reports that half the board of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, which has received money from Libya among other Arab dictatorships, has called for a boycott of Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East.

It figures.

Now, apparently, there are some red faces:

The university has already been urged by its own dons to give up the £300,000 it received from a foundation headed by the son of Colonel Gaddafi. Howard Davies, the LSE director, is said to have told academics this week that he was ashamed of the institution’s links to the dictatorship.

Questions have been emerging about the LSE’s wider reliance on finance from authoritarian regimes. One of its lecture halls has been named in honour of a sheikh reputed to have promoted anti-Semitic material.

Hypocrisy on the Left? Who could have imagined that? I've always been assured that hypocrisy is an exclusive failure of conservatives, as are all failures.

As long as were talking about politically motivated willful blindness on Israel and the Middle East, here's a good one by Nick Cohen. He takes no prisoners and excuses nobody.

The Arab revolution is consigning skip-loads of articles, books and speeches about the Middle East to the dustbin of history. In a few months, readers will go through libraries or newspaper archives and wonder how so many who claimed expert knowledge could have turned their eyes from tyranny and its consequences.

To a generation of politically active if not morally consistent campaigners, the Middle East has meant Israel and only Israel. In theory, they should have been able to stick by universal principles and support a just settlement for the Palestinians while opposing the dictators who kept Arabs subjugated. Few, however, have been able to oppose oppression in all its forms consistently. The right has been no better than the liberal-left in its Jew obsessions. The briefest reading of Conservative newspapers shows that at all times their first concern about political changes in the Middle East is how they affect Israel. For both sides, the lives of hundreds of millions of Arabs, Berbers and Kurds who were not involved in the conflict could be forgotten.

If you doubt me, consider the stories that the Middle Eastern bureau chiefs missed until revolutions that had nothing to do with Palestine forced them to take notice.

What's really surprising is that this is from a British newspaper. I wonder how Cohen got away with this.

Next up is this piece by Alan Dershowitz, a member of that rare species of pro-Israel liberal, in which he exposes the ACLU's attempt at censorship.

The international campaign to prevent speakers from delivering pro-Israel talks at universities has been assisted by leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union—an organization that is supposed to protect freedom of speech for all. The method used to silence these speakers and preclude their audiences from hearing their message is exemplified by a now infamous event at the University of California at Irvine.

Michael Oren—a distinguished scholar and writer, a moderate supporter of the two-state solution, and now Israel's Ambassador to the United States—was invited to speak. The Muslim Student Union set out to prevent him from delivering his talk Here is the way Erwin Chemerinksy, Dean of the law school, described what the students did:

"The Muslim Student Union orchestrated a concerted effort to disrupt the speech. One student after another stood and shouted so that the ambassador could not be heard. Each student was taken away only to be replaced by another doing the same thing."

Oh well, since they're only censoring pro-Israel speech, maybe it's not really censorship. We'll have to await the ACLU ruling.

by Cowznofski