ISRAEL RECLAIMING THE NARRATIVE

AuthorHouse

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.....................................................................................vPREFACE..............................................................................................9IF YOU'RE GOING TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL DO IT PROPERLY!....................................................15TURNING THE TRUTH ON ITS HEAD........................................................................31ARAFAT AND THE MEDIA – DRIVING NAILS IN ISRAEL'S COFFIN........................................46MY LETTER TO A PRO-PALESTINIAN HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST.................................................59ISRAELI HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD – A GUIDE FOR ISRAEL'S CRITICS.....................................81I WAS LEFT. NOW I'M RIGHT............................................................................86NATIONALISM IS A GOOD THING..........................................................................108THE PALESTINIAN NARRATIVE – DEFYING COMMON SENSE AND REASON....................................131IT'S NOT THE JEWISH STATE OF ISRAEL THEY ARE DENYING – IT'S ISRAEL ITSELF!.....................152PALESTINIAN REFUGEES. WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY?..........................................................170PALESTINIAN FUNDING. OBSCENE, INSANE, IMMORAL!.......................................................187THE BATTLE FOR JERUSALEM.............................................................................193RAGE.................................................................................................208MY MEETING WITH SHAKEEL IN NETANYA...................................................................230CAMERON'S INCREDIBLY STUPID SPEECH IN TURKEY.........................................................235A PALESTINE QUIZ.....................................................................................240REPLACEMENT THEOLOGY IS BEHIND THE HATE ISRAEL CAMPAIGN 2............................................41HAVE FAITH - SUPPORT ISRAEL..........................................................................252INSPIRING SPEECHES...................................................................................259CONCLUSION...........................................................................................311RECOMMENDED READING..................................................................................315WEBSITE REFERENCES...................................................................................316

Chapter One

OK. I understand that you have an issue with Israel and you are in love with the Palestinians.

That's OK, but I understand that, because of this, you want to boycott Israel?

As an Israeli I'll be sorry to miss you but, if you are going to do it, do it properly.

It's easy to tell people to picket stores selling Israeli products, but don't you think you ought to set a personal example?

Don't you think it's wrong for you to be telling others to stop using Israeli products when you yourself are using them? That would be hypocritical, don't you think?

So look around you. Let's see what you have. Together, we can make sure you are holding true to your cause.

I had thought of sending you this letter by email but that would have compromised your principles and we wouldn't want to do that, would we?

Most Windows operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel. The Pentium NMX chip technology was designed by Intel in Israel. Both the Pentium microprocessor and the Centrium processor were entirely designed, developed, and produced in Israel.

Voice mail technology was developed in Israel. The technology for AOL's Instant Messenger ICQ was developed in 1996 by four Israeli whiz kids. That, I guess, cuts out all your voice and text messaging to me and your friends and supporters.

Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R&D facilities outside the United-States in Israel.

So, sorry! You have to throw away your computer.

Your bad news does not end there. Get rid of your cellular phone! Cell phone technology was also developed in Israel by Motorola. Motorola has its biggest development centre in Israel. Most of the latest technology in your mobile phone was developed by Israeli scientists and technicians.

If you are thinking of selling your computer and IPhone on eBay, forget it! Their shopping technology is Israeli. Deal Time.com was founded in Israel in 1998 by Dr. Nahum Sharfman and Amir Ashkenazi. It became Shopping.com and was acquired by eBay in 2005. Since then it operates the Pay Pal payment system.

So now you are computerless, and unable to communicate by mobile phone. Pity!

You will miss the new Altair chipset that is at the heart of the 4g cellular revolution. It will enable people to do things you can do at home on your IPhone such as play interactive games, download mp3 and video files. You'll miss it, but that shouldn't bother you because Altair is an Israeli company.

By the way, I know you stored your data in your diskonkey. I have to take it off you. Yes, you've guessed it. Diskonkey is an Israeli invention.

Feeling unsettled, nervous of your future? You should be. Part of your personal security rests with Israeli inventiveness. This is borne out of our urgent need to protect and defend our lives against the terrorists that you support. A phone can remotely activate a terrorist's bomb, or it can be used for tactical communications by terrorists, bank robbers, or hostage takers. It is vital that official security and law enforcement authorities have access to cellular jamming and detection solutions. This is where Israel's network communications technologies, with its security expertise, helps in the fight against global terror.

Not feeling secure? Sorry to hear that your health is breaking down. However, before you reach out for your pills, watch out! All the generic brands for your heartburn derive from Israeli laboratories. In fact, check the labels in your medicine cabinet. Make sure you don't have any tablets, drops, lotions marked Teva, or Abic. They are the Israeli pharmaceutical companies that are world leaders in prescription drugs.

It may mean you will suffer from colds and flu this winter but, hey, that's a small price to pay in your personal crusade against Israel, wouldn't you say?

While we are on the subject of your Israeli boycott, and the medical contributions given to the world Israeli doctors and scientists, how about telling your friends to avoid the following:

An Israeli company has developed a simple blood test that distinguishes between mild and more severe cases of multiple sclerosis. So, if you know of anyone suffering from MS, tell them to ignore the Israeli patent that may, more accurately, diagnose their symptoms. Somehow I think they are going to ignore you.

An Israeli-made devise helps restore the use of paralyzed hands. This device electrically stimulates the hand muscles providing hope to millions of stroke sufferers and victims of spinal injuries some caused by terror attacks by the people you support. If you wish to remove this hope of a better quality of life from these people, go ahead and boycott Israel.

Young children with breathing problems will soon be sleeping more soundly thanks to a new Israeli device called the Child Hood. This innovation replaces the inhalation mask with an improved drug delivery system that provides relief for child and parents. Please tell anxious mothers that they shouldn't use this device due to your passionate cause.

Boycotts often affect research. A new research centre in Israel hopes to throw light on brain disorders such as depression and Alzheimer's disease. The Joseph Sangol Neuroscience Centre in the Sheba Medical Centre at Tel Hashomer Hospital aims to bring thousands of scientists and doctors to focus on brain research. But you would prefer depression and Alzheimer's disease to go unchallenged until they can be cured by non-Israeli scientists and researchers.

A new molecular-level imaging technology from Israel can detect diseases in cells and target cancer cells directly without harming healthy cells. This device can detect the process of cell death, known as apoptosis, at the earliest phase of a disease. In numerous clinical trials with patients being treated for brain tumors at the Rabin Medical Centre in Petach Tikva, Aposense diagnostic technology predicted the shrinkage of tumors with ninety percent accuracy. Founded in 1997 by Israeli neurologist, Ilan Ziv, and being developed by Teva Pharmaceuticals, Aposense is taking a two-pronged approach – both diagnostic and therapeutic - for the good of cancer sufferers.

Talking of human cells, two Israelis received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doctors Ciechanover and Hershko's research and discovery of one of the human cell's most important cyclical processes will lead the way to DNA repair, control of newly produced proteins, and immune defense systems.

Israel's Hadassah Medical Centre has successfully eliminated the physical manifestations of Parkinson's disease in a select group of patients with a deep brain stimulation technique.

For women who undergo hysterectomies each year for the treatment of uterine fibroids the development in Israel of the ExAblate 2000 system is a welcome breakthrough, offering a non-invasive alternative to surgery.

Making the desert bloom and providing better crops to deprived parts of the globe, reducing pollution, developing solar power.

These are just some of the leading Israeli research projects that will benefit the world. You can help stop with your Israeli boycott. Think of the massive contribution that Israel is giving to the world, including to the Palestinians and to you, in science, medicine, communications, security, environment. Pro rata of population, we are making a greater contribution than any other nation on earth. We can't be all bad....

What is bad, what is deceitful, is the so-called BDS Movement which purports to support a boycott on Israel as it applies to commercial and industrial activities in "the occupied territories." Let's be perfectly clear on this point. Occupied territory to them means the State of Israel.

The initials BDS, to them, means boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. To Israelis, these initials stand for blackmail, demonization, and slander.

To a large extend their campaigns are counter- productive. Their public actions, as when they campaign outside stores selling Israeli products, encourage anti- boycotters to support the stores even more. The boycotters, by highlighting the stores they intend to attack often promote extra business to those businesses as has happened to Marks & Spencers and the Ahava stores in London, the Dead Sea products stands in American shopping malls, and at the family-owned Le Marcheur shoe store in Montreal. There is a joke going around that, in many cases, people appreciate the BDS campaigns against stores selling Israeli products because, without their publicity, they wouldn't have known where to buy them.

The sinister truth is that the leading activists behind the BDS Movement do not advocate this policy to force Israel into a two-state solution through peaceful civil protest. Instead, their deep intention is for a one-state solution. This is frequently advocated by the likes of Omar Barghouti and more so by Ali Abunimah who pushes this agenda at any opportunity. He addressed a One State Solution Conference in Boston 2009 where he laid out his case eloquently in front of an adoring audience by using the usual emotional and deceptive expressions.

Omar Barghouti, a founder of the BDS Movement, argues that Palestinian Arabs have inalienable rights, something that is barred to Jews, even though the Jewish nation has received national legitimacy and recognition. His proposition introduces the principle of inequality for the Jews. It attempts to make the Palestinians more equal than the Jews. Historically, legally, this is wrong. Barghouti claims that the Palestinians and the Arabs have nothing to do with the Nazi persecution of the Jews. As such, he tries to smudge history hoping you won't notice the crimes against the Jews perpetrated by the Arabs and certain key Palestinian Arab leaders. He omits the Nazi support of the Arab revolt in Palestine in 1936, the Arab role in the introduction of the British White Paper of 1939 which effectively blocked a vital escape route for European Jewry during the Holocaust. He fails to mention the infamous Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who lodged himself in luxury in Berlin during the Second World War, met Hitler, toured Auschwitz, collaborated with the Nazis, formed a Muslim fascist militia, broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic, and called for a holy war against the Allies and the Jews.

Barghouti tries to claim that the Palestinian movement, for which he represents the radical BDS Movement, does not harbor anti-Semitic sentiment. He should begin by quoting al-Husseini's speech on Balfour Day on 2 November 1943 when he said, "Germany recognized the Jews exactly and decided to find a final solution to the danger that came from the Jews which will end their mischief in this world."

If Barghouti would be honest with himself and the world, something that is unlikely to happen any day soon, he would admit that he shares the Mufti's thought that the wonderful Jewish State of Israel is, for him, mischief in this world. On a more threatening note, Barghouti is, like the Palestinian inspiration whose identity he hides, seeking a final solution to the Jewish problem in the Middle East and working toward that goal.

The BDS venom is exclusively aimed at Israel. If the principles that it applies solely against Israel were honest why are they not aimed at Turkey, for example? Here is a country that is guilty of genocide against the Armenians and is carrying out a war of oppression and genocide against the Kurds. If occupation is a cause for a boycott then why isn't the BDS Movement boycotting Turkey for their occupation, not only of Kurdish territory, but also in northern Cyprus? If building an illegal wall is reason for a boycott why isn't the BDS Movement boycotting Turkey for the illegal divide between their occupied part of Cyprus and the rest of the island? If ethnic cleansing is a reason for a boycott why isn't the BDS Movement boycotting Turkey for the ethnic cleansing of the Greek Cypriots that they murdered or drove out of their homes in the occupied north of Cyprus? If it is legitimate to boycott Israel for being racist by calling themselves a Jewish state why isn't the BDS boycotting the forty member states of the United Nations that consider themselves "Muslim" or "Islamic"? Why is it the one and only Jewish state that is the victim of denigration? It is worth mentioning the Methodist, Protestant, and Anglican churches. Why are they not divesting from Turkey, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority for that matter who are killing and tormenting their fellow Christians and desecrating their churches?

The Methodist Church in Britain, with seventy million members worldwide, has accepted the inaccuracies of the BDS claims. Its leaders, hooked on the replacement theology that insults Jewish history and Israel's policies, have engaged with forces that have them in their sights for future targeting. Who was it that once said "there are none so blind as those who cannot see."? He clearly had misguided church leaders in mind. See my chapter on Replacement Theology.

Bigotry against the Jewish state is so entrenched in contemporary British society that juries have begun to acquit criminals merely if they can show that they acted against Israeli interests, No other defense is necessary. So said Robin Shepherd, the director of European affairs at the Henry Jackson Society in London, and author of "A State Beyond the Pale." He was referring to a case in which a group of anti-Israel activists admitted vandalizing a Brighton company that supplied Israel with military spare parts. Despite their admitted guilt their judge directed the jury to find them not guilty.

Judge George Bathurst-Norman was later formally reprimanded by the office for Judicial Complaints when a small number of individuals led a campaign to appeal his dubious summation.

Britain's largest higher education union was prevented, by British anti-discrimination laws, from passing a resolution to boycott Israeli academics. This is not, however, stop them from supporting the BDS campaign against Israel and sever ties with the Histadrut, Israel's national labor union. They have maintained ties with every other union in the world, including those in repressive regimes that support their leaders.

War in Want, on their website, depicted Israel as having a policy of "ethnic cleansing," committing "slow genocide" by building an "apartheid wall," imposing "collective punishment", and being guilty of violations of international law. This charity is indifferent to the truth that their demonizing of Israel are totally at odds with the facts on the ground.

The battle rages. For every pop idol that embraces the bias against Israel there are others that refuse to be cowed. Elton John ignored the boycott pressures and played to a sell-out crowd in Tel Aviv. Referring to artists such as Elvis Costello, who cancelled his Israeli gig, Elton John said, "Musicians spread love and peace, and bring people together. We don't cherry-pick our conscience."

Ronnie Fraser, the founder of Academic Friends of Israel, exposed the fact that Britain has embraced academic, cultural, trade union, media, medical, religious, and architectural boycotts of Israel more than any other country. It is clear that the Palestinian activists have forged effective ties with the far left, on the university campuses, and in the trades unions. They have also recruited certain key media outlets. Their ideas are eagerly adopted by organs such as The Guardian newspaper which has become the mouthpiece for left wing causes and the mailbox for open letters calling for actions against Israel.

All is not lost, however, with British left wing activists. John Pike and David Hirsh founded the Engage Movement. They have an effective website, and they hold events in their fight back against the boycotters. They have become an intellectual clarion call for debate and activism in opposition to the BDS Movement.

The BDS has to be seen in the right perspective. They make a lot of noise and attract media coverage, especially from the channels that support their cause. Their cost effectiveness is, however, dubious. Their public displays, outside certain stores or inside some supermarkets are more an irritant and street theatre rather than a cause of real financial damage to Israel. What they do, as seen in all their actions is intimidation and violence. As such they frighten off open minded and reasonable people.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from ISRAEL RECLAIMING THE NARRATIVE by Barry Shaw Copyright © 2011 by Barry Shaw. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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