Playing fast and loose with the facts at NGO Monitor (UPDATED)
In the May 2009 digest of NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel watchdog group whose favorite targets are Arab-Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights groups that deal with Israel, executive director Gerald Steinberg keeps up his attacks against the New Israel Fund in a section titled "NIF-funded NGOs repeat calls for divestment, violating NIF’s own criteria." (For background on Steinberg's attacks against the NIF, see a 2007 story I wrote here).
There are a couple of disingenuous (read: inaccurate) elements in Steinberg's item.
As he has done in the past, Steinberg describes the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions as funded by the NIF, when it hasn't been for years. Steinberg surely knows this, so why does he keep repeating it?
He also describes Mossawa, an Arab-Israeli group that is funded by the NIF, as in violation of an NIF rule against supporting groups that call for divestment from Israel. But the NIF has no such rule.
Steinberg imputes the rule from a 2006 statement by NIF Communications Director Naomi Paiss. While Paiss' statement (at least the part Steinberg cites) expresses distaste with the idea of divestment and recalls the NIF's past disassociation from someone who had endorsed divestment it does not commit to any specific rule on the matter.
Not that there's anything right with that.
Here's the NIF line on divestment: "Calling for divestment is something we profoundly disagree with," Paiss told me Wednesday. But, she noted, "It’s not something that disqualifies all by itself a grantee from NIF support."
Isn't this in itself troubling enough for Steinberg and NGO Monitor's followers without Steinberg having to stretch the truth?
UPDATE: Steinberg tells JTA the NGO Monitor digest's phrasing was confusing and that it should have said more clearly that ICAHD is funded by the European Union, not by the NIF. He writes (late at night in Israel): "Thanks for pointing this out. Revision will be up in a few hour. The mistake here was syntax -- NIF funds enough members of this coalition -- no need to expand it to make the point."
0 Comments |
Share This
|
More feedback on Bibi’s speech
While Benjamin Netanyahu's speech on Sunday, in which he accepted the idea of a future demilitarized Palestinian state, seems to have gone over well in many quarters -- the Obama administration called it positive movement, and the major American Jewish religious movements endorsed it (see Eric Fingerhut's story on their reaction here) -- there were a few notable exceptions:
- The Palestinians uniformly condemned it.
- The Zionist Organization of America, which represents a viewpoint held by many on the right-wing, categorized it as a dangerous, one-sided concession.
- In Israel, while some left-leaning commentators and groups applauded Netanyahu's shift on Palestinian statehood, many called it too subtle and insufficient. In Ha'aretz, acclaimed novelist David Grossman said, "Netanyahu's message is there will be no peace." He writes:
Once again, most Israelis can snuggle up around what appears to be a daring and generous offer, but what is in fact, as usual, a compromise between the anxieties, the weakness and the self-righteousness of the center just-to-the-right and the center a-little-left...
Other than acceptance of the two-state principle, which was wrung out of Netanyahu under heavy pressure and sourly expressed, this speech contained no tangible step toward a real change of consciousness. Netanyahu did not speak "honestly and courageously" - as he had promised - about the destructive role of the settlements as an obstacle to peace. He did not look the settlers in the eye and tell them what he knows full well: that the map of the settlements contradicts the map of peace. That most of them will have to leave their homes.
He should have said it. He would not have lost points in future negotiations with the Palestinians; rather, he would have allowed these negotiations to begin.
- In the Washington Post, columnist Harold Meyerson called Netanyahu's idea of a Palestinian state little more than a collection of cantons:
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has at last acknowledged, with caveats, the need to establish a Palestinian state. Actually, Netanyahu's Palestine is primarily caveats, with a dash of state thrown in for appearances' sake.
In his speech last Sunday, the prime minister failed to address the continual growth of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank, where close to 300,000 Israeli settlers live. The Palestine that Netanyahu envisions must steadily shrink to accommodate the growing number of Israeli settlers in its midst. It would be a collection of barely contiguous cantons.
By refusing to address the growth of the settlements, Netanyahu has avoided a fight with the hard-right forces in his governing coalition. Yet he has asked the leaders of the Palestinian Authority to accept a state whose contours no Palestinian could willingly accept. He demands a Palestine with no army, yet also demands that the Palestinian Authority suppress Hamas as a precondition for negotiations with Israel -- something, as my American Prospect colleague Gershom Gorenberg has pointed out, that the very well-armed Israeli army has been unable to do.
In a conversation shortly after Netanyahu took office, one of the prime minister's senior advisers told me that Netanyahu favored the creation of a Palestinian entity but didn't want to use the word "state" because that implies all sorts of things to which Israel will not agree -- such as a military, control of the electromagnetic spectrum, unfettered borders, etc. The English language and international community, he said, simply didn't have a term for the quasi-state entity Netanyahu favored creating for the Palestinians.
If that's true, then Netanyahu's speech Sunday was a shift in language, not policy.
But in the Middle East, where language matters, even a linguistic shift may be enough to spark some sort of movement.
2 Comments |
Share This
|
Jailhouse rabbi resigns, faces criminal investigation
The nearly week-long saga of the prison rabbi who presided over a lavish jailhouse bar-mitzvah may be coming to a close. Last week the New York Post broke the story of the bar-mitzvah soiree and the subsequent suspension of Rabbi Leib Glanz, the prison chaplain who signed off on the affair. Today, the Post reports that Glanz, a prominent Satmar hasid, has resigned along with Peter Curcio, a department of corrections chief.
In case you missed it, the story in brief is this: Tuvia Stern, a financial scam artist who spent two decades as a fugitive, was permitted to host a six-hour bar-mitzvah party in the jail gymnasium, including the use of an outside kosher caterer. Guests dined on fine china and danced the hora, according to reports. The event was such a success that months later, Stern held another party in the jail, this time an engagemet party for his daughter.
A number of interesting details have emerged in the course of the media frenzy that followed the Post's initial revelation. The Times reported that Glanz was known to use his influence to have Jewish inmates transferred to more hospitable quarters, and once there, invited them to his office for kosher treats and the use of his telephone. The Times also found that Glanz met several times in late 2008 with Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, who is in charge of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's political operation, though the reasons for the meetings are not entirely clear. Glanz is also under investigation for possible criminal conduct relating to the bar-mitzvah, in particular whether or not department officials were paid off.
But perhaps the juiciest nugget in the pile is this: ultimate responsibility for the bar-mitzvah appears to lie with a Muslim chaplain, Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, who has his own checkered history. In 2006, he was suspended for two weeks after he made a speech in which he said "the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House," and referred to "Zionists of the media."
So if there's a silver lining in all this, perhaps it's that the anti-Zionist imam and the anti-Zionist rabbi can at least agree that a Jewish convict deserves to celebrate his son's bar-mitzvah in high-style -- even if it's in the city lockup.
0 Comments |
Share This
|
Maybe we can all get along (at least in S.F.)
From the J. (the Bay Area's Jewish newspaper):
Imagine: Jewish and Muslim teenagers laughing together, walking arm in arm, making plans to hang out in the summer.
They seem like unlikely scenarios -- but thanks to the Unity Program, a project of the S.F.-based nonprofit Abraham’s Vision, they’re a reality. The program graduated its first class of Bay Area students May 31.
“I felt an invisible wall between me and the Jewish community, and now I feel this wall has been completely demolished,” said Shakeera Shoukat, 17, during the graduation ceremony.
Twenty-nine Jewish and Muslim students graduated from the program this year. Students at Berkeley Midrasha worked with students from the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California in Oakland, and students from Peninsula Havurah High in Los Altos Hills worked with the Muslim American Society in Santa Clara. About 100 parents and friends attended the commencement ceremony....
Throughout the school year, Unity Program participants met weekly, in separate Jewish and Muslim groups, for classes that were co-taught by a Jewish and a Muslim educator -- Samantha Witman and Yasmeen Peer. The teachers also led monthly discussions and field trips that brought together the Jewish and Muslim students. ...
In their classes, students learned about each other’s religious traditions, the history of the Middle East and the current challenges facing Israel and the Palestinian territories.
They visited places representing both of their faith and cultural traditions -- a synagogue and a mosque, the Contemp-orary Jewish Museum and the Asian Art Museum. ...
Aaron Hahn Tapper, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of San Francisco, created the program when he lived in New York. He expanded the program upon moving to the Bay Area in 2007. To date, 134 students have graduated from the Unity Program.
His organization reflects the unity he aims to inspire in American teen-agers. His co-director is a Palestinian woman, Huda Abu Arquob. They both spoke at the graduation ceremony before the teens addressed the audience.
“We refuse to believe future generations will not live in a world that is better than this one,” Hahn Tapper said.
Read the full article.
0 Comments |
Share This
|
Not registered? Sign up now. It's fast and it's free.
Recent Comments
Blog Roll
