Posted on 03/04/2009 10:31:41 AM PST by SJackson
Two urban legends about the yellow star are commonly told. In one, French Vichy officials during World War II gave Moroccan authorities yellow stars for the Jews of Morocco to wear. King Mohammad V asked for a dozen more, explaining that he wanted them so that he and his family could wear them.
In another, the Nazi German occupying forces in Denmark issued a decree that all Danish Jews must wear a yellow armband with the star of David. King Christian in response answered that he would wear the first star of David and expected every other Dane to do the same.
Both leaders did support their Jewish communities, but not necessarily in the way the stories depict. The first story is contested. The second story is false. But both are constantly retold because they state a fundamental truth, the importance of leadership in combating prejudice.
If only global leaders in World War II everywhere had protected their Jewish citizens like the stories portray the kings of Denmark and Morocco doing, the Holocaust would not have happened. Many would like to think, knowing what we know now, that state leaders would act today the way these stories portray the Kings of Denmark and Morocco as acting.
TODAY THE JEWISH star is blue, not yellow. Israel has become the Jew amongst nations, demonized, delegitimized, scorned. Yesterday, the world took aim at Jews as individuals. Today, the world takes aim at Jews as a people.
Terrorists target Israel merely because it exists, and Israel defends itself. The defense is decontextualized and made to seem like arbitrary cruelty. Israeli self-defence becomes an excuse for unending indictments, spurred by anti-Zionists with an avowed agenda of destruction of the State of Israel. These indictments criminalize the Jewish state and the Jewish people as presumed supporters of this criminal Jewish state.
Hate crime statistics in one country after another show Jews to be the number one victims by far. Antisemitic hate crime fests under the title "Israel anti-apartheid week" are springing up on university campuses globally. Graffiti equating the Jewish star with the Nazi swastika are everywhere. Iran at one and the same time threatens Israel with genocide and develops a nuclear capacity to realize the threat. In the international arena, resolution after resolution, session after session, conference after conference, focuses on the Jewish state alone.
In the face of this obsession, who today stands with the Jewish people? Who amongst the leaders of today is prepared to wear the Jewish star? At the UN Human Rights Council, there is one state which votes consistently against the anti-Zionists - Canada. To take an example, the Human Rights Council in January 2009, at one of its many special sessions directed against Israel, passed a typical Israel bashing resolution, this time about Gaza. The vote was 33 in favour, 13 abstentions, and only one opposed. That one was Canada.
The World Conference against Racism held in Durban South Africa in September 2001 in a concluding document which was supposed to be about racism instead criticised one country alone, Israel. The Durban review conference, scheduled for April this year in Geneva, bears all the hallmarks of repeating that travesty. There are only two states besides Israel which have pulled out of the Review conference to avoid participating in and legitimizing that echo of Durban 2001, Canada and the United States. Canada left first, in February 2008, even before Israel did. The United States just announced it was pulling out a few days ago.
THIS CANADIAN record has drawn the attention of the world's anti-Zionist states. When the Canadian human rights record came up for consideration at a Human Rights Council working group in February under the Universal Periodic Review, Algeria, Syria and Iran tore into Canada for its refusal to kowtow to the anti-Zionist agenda.
The Canadian behaviour is exemplary, the heroism of today when heroism is needed. But it is not sufficient. It is as isolated as was the leadership of Denmark and Morocco during World War II which the yellow star stories reflect, if not report.
As a result, in the lifetime of survivors of the Holocaust, the Jewish people again drift towards grave danger, as friendless as before. To stop the drift, more than just Canada must wear the blue star, must stand with Israel, must vote against anti-Zionism in the international arena.
And the danger is not just in the international arena. Here in Canada, the anti-Israel forces are gathering, on campuses, in the union movement, and on the street. Now is the time for friends of the Jewish State and of freedom and democracy to come forward and let their voice be heard.
The writer is a lawyer in Winnipeg and senior legal counsel to B'nai Brith Canada.
If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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The US abstained reluctantly in January with the following statement. I wouldn't hold my breath for any improvement under Obama
this resolution, the text of which we support, the goals of which we support, and the objectives that we fully support, should indeed be allowed to go forward
Condaleeza "two terms is enough" Rice
Shame On Bush And Condi,
http://www.eyeontheun.org/editor.asp?p=727&b=1
Betrayal. No other word describes the reversal of American foreign policy that took place on the night of Jan. 8 when the U.S. refused to veto the Security Council resolution on Gaza.
[ CONTINUED ... ]
A president whose friendship and alliance with Israel once appeared honest, perceptive and unshakable, decided two weeks before leaving office to throw Israel to the wolves. The resolution calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and does not even mention the word "Hamas."
There will no longer be a need for an Obama transition team on foreign policy. The outgoing president and secretary of State have done it all. Yesterday's resolution, along with another Condoleezza Rice-inspired resolution from mid-December, draws Israel into a Security Council spider web that U.N. enthusiasts have been weaving for decades.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can simply step into George W. Bush and Condi Rice's shoes, label themselves new-age multilateralists and let the chips--in this case, remnants of Israel--fall where they may.
The Security Council resolution makes a mockery of Israel's right of self-defense. In fact, it makes no mention of a right of self-defense at all. Eight thousand mortars have rained down on Israel from the Gaza Strip over a period of eight years. Israel withdrew every Israeli man, woman and child from Gaza three and a half years ago. Yet the United Nations draws an equivalence between a terrorist organization whose very modus operandi is to target civilians and a state whose aim is to protect civilians, Israeli and Palestinian.
Arab states could scarcely contain their glee. The U.K. went out in front and accepted the idea of a much stronger resolution instead of a Security Council presidential statement, and Secretary of State Rice rolled over and played dead within minutes.
Veto-wielding powers had reportedly given undertakings to Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that they would not permit a resolution. These promises were ignored in the face of allegedly enormous pressure from undemocratic thugs, state sponsors of terrorism and weak democracies cowering at the prospect of unhappy Muslim constituencies or a dent in their bank accounts from belligerent Arab sheiks. What, moaned U.S. officials, was poor Condi to do?
Here is what she did:
1. The resolution she supported makes no mention whatsoever of Israel's right of self-defense.
2. The resolution calls for a ceasefire while Israel is still under fire, thus gutting the right of self-defense.
3. The resolution puts a right of "all" states "to live in peace"--though Israel is the only state under fire--in its preamble instead of in the operative section of the resolution, where it would have carried substantive weight.
4. The resolution expresses grave concern only about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. No concern is expressed over the humanitarian crisis in Israel that has forced half a million people into underground holes for eight years and left Jewish children growing up with the trauma of fleeing and hiding throughout their young lives.
5. The resolution makes no mention of any need to return Hamas kidnap-victim and Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. It does not even demand that Hamas or the Palestinian Authority abide by the humanitarian requirement under international law to permit a single visit to Shalit from the International Red Cross or any other international agency.
6. The resolution calls for "unimpeded" provision and distribution throughout Gaza of myriad forms of humanitarian assistance--which obviously makes the conduct of war against Hamas terrorists impossible.
7. The resolution condemns "all acts of terrorism"--without mentioning the identity of the terrorist--leaving Islamic countries to claim that Israel is the state terrorist and that the condemnation has nothing to do with Hamas.
8. The resolution places no mandatory responsibility on Egypt to stop the trafficking of weapons into the terrorist-controlled Gaza strip. It merely "calls for member states to intensify efforts" to stop the trafficking.
9. The resolution promotes further international intervention in the Arab-Israeli conflict, rather than a negotiated settlement between the two parties, by "welcoming...an international meeting in Moscow in 2009." Code language for shoving U.N. terms and conditions down Israel's throat.
10. The kicker is that the Security Council "decides to remain seized of the matter." This means Israel's failure to abide by any of the points in the resolution is grounds for more and more Security Council meetings designed to thwart Israel's right to defend itself against the terrorism that threatens all civilized societies.
When it was over, Secretary of State Rice "abstained" with the following words: "this resolution, the text of which we support, the goals of which we support, and the objectives that we fully support, should indeed be allowed to go forward." These words led other ambassadors to point out that the resolution had, in effect, been adopted by consensus.
For over half a century, the state of Israel and its tiny population has been on the front lines of a war against an evil that plagues every decent human being on earth. Israel has time and again sacrificed its children in freedom's cause.
In leaving Israel to fend for itself in an international arena controlled by the enemies of decency and good, President Bush walks shamefully off the international stage, leaving in shambles everything he has stood for since Sept. 11, 2001.
Israel's prime minister reacted to the resolution today by pointing to the obvious: It "will not be honored in actual fact by the Palestinian murder organizations." And though UN actors wish it were otherwise, "The State of Israel has never agreed that any outside body would determine its right to defend the security of its citizens."
This is a universal principle with which every American--and the U.N. Charter--would agree.
This article first appeared in Forbes.
UN = United Nithings
Nithing is a Scandinavian word that means a subhuman monster that is motivated by nith (malice, hatred, and destruction), and is in fact an enemy of all Civilization. Loki’s murder of Baldur for his own malicious entertainment was probably an example of nith. It was the worst possible thing you could call someone, and could well be the most dehumanizing and insulting word ever invented. Someone who was proven to be a nithing became a literal unperson, an outlaw who had no human rights whatsoever.
To call somebody a nithing is the legal and nonviolent equivalent of slashing him across the face with a riding whip, as the gentry was prone to do to the dregs of society 200 or so years ago. To call someone a nithing is the moral equivalent of a boot heel in the face, and it is the best we can do because a boot heel in the face of a UN delegate (or anybody else) is neither legal nor socially acceptable today.
UN = United Nithings. Remember it.
I wish Israel and the USA would withdraw from the UN. No chance of that happening under Zer0, though.
My sig says it all. Always has.
As A Canadian ex pat, I thought you would enjoy this article. PING!
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