1. I think the most fascinating aspect of the new Azmi Bashara Affair is the connection with the New Israel Fund.

   Azmi Bashara is a Knesset Member from one of the Arab Stalinist Fascist parties in Israel. Bashara has a long history of calling for Israel to be annihilated and for supporting escalated terrorist activity against Jews. That of course is all protected free speech in post-Rabin Israel. Bashara has also been paying regular homage to Syria and its Hizbullah surrogate forces. He has never been prosecuted for treason, unlike Oswald Mosley in Britain during the 1940s. (Mosley was the head of the pro-Nazi British fascists. See http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/pages/t052/t05207.html) Mosley, unlike Bashara, spent the war in prison. Put there by Churchill. (Of course Israel has been ruled by a series of Chamberlain’s.)

   When Yitzhak Rabin died, Bashara denounced him as a "mass murderer". The Attorney General did nothing, preferring instead to throw into jail all those Jews who said "Got his comeuppance" about Rabin. In any case, as you probably know, Bashara was in Syria yesterday for the one-year anniversary of the death of Hafez al-Asad. Sitting fang-to-fang with the head of Hizbollah and with Ahmed Jibril, Bashara gave a speech calling for all Arabs to unite to eliminate Israel.

   Now you may recall that three years back the New Israel Fund adopted Bashara as its official mascot. The New Israel Fund is a leftist Tikkunesque fund in the US that raises money for politically correct causes in Israel. It funds gay groups, religious "pluralism" groups, but its main contribution is to funnel money into the countless tiny Marxist or communist-front "peace" groups, which would not exist without the New Israel Fund, things like Uri Avnery and the Women in Black and "Bat Shalom", and so on. The "New Israel" that the New Israel Fund seeks to fund is in fact Palestine.

   Three years ago, the New Israel Fund managed to hornswaggle the Smithsonian Institute into letting IT organize festivities to mark Israel’s 50th year, and who do you think the NIF decided should represent Israel? None other than Azmi Bashara, of course!! Just a typical sabra, kova tembel and all, eating felafel and melon!!

   Of course Bashara is as representative of Israel as is the NIF of US Jewry. The New Israel Fund in fact planned to invite several others to stage one of those familiar Jewish-Arab unity events in which Jewish leftists join Arab fascists in calling for Israel to be destroyed.

   At the time, the valiant Americans for a Safe Israel (www.afsi.org) had a word in the ear of the Smithsonian, which - once it discovered who and what the New Israel Fund actually was - cancelled the taxpayer-funded jihad. The Tikkunies of the New Israel Fund then went on a rampage and screamed about "McCarthyism" and suppression.

   Meanwhile, the Attorney General in Israel says he will look into Bashara’s speech yesterday, but rest assured: In post-survivalist Israel, Arab fascists are NEVER prosecuted for calling for violence or for treason. You know, unlike those street folks whisked off to jail for throwing rocks at the Tel Aviv mosque after the 20 schoolchildren were blown up by the PLO last week.

   Of course, the Attorney General is looking - as usual - under the wrong streetlight. He should be instead prosecuting those morons who let Bashara go to Syria in the first place, and - even more so - those greater morons who let him come back in.

   Speaking of whining Tikkunies screaming oppression, you may have noticed that Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, and Arthur Waskow, his Allen Ginzberg guru, have been taking to the US Jewish press to moan that Lerner is the victim of violent threats. This on the basis of Lerner having received "threatening" emails. And how do we know that Lerner got threatening emails? Well, he says so! Just see his recent column in the Los Angeles Times!

   Now do we have any reason NOT to take Lerner’s claims that he got threatening emails at face value? Yes we have plenty. Lerner is a liar. The Philadelphia Inquirer already exposed him for having fabricated letters to the editor of Tikkun agreeing with himself. Lerner has claimed for years to be a Rabbi, when he has no Rabbinic training nor ordination whatsoever, other than three other hippies laying their hands on his head and saying, "May the Force be With You." And Lerner and Waskow have been moaning that they are the victims of persecution by a conservative Republican US Jewish establishment ever since the 1960s, waving about their stigmata for all progressives to see. Even Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post got in on Lerner’s charade and ran the story about his getting "threats".

   The web site that Lerner claims inspired the "threats" he got is masada2000.org, which is worth a visit to decide for yourself.

2. Subject: are you a boring, polite, scared heterosexual?

   Israeli Army Weekly Missing for Actions Press: It is ordered closed after a cover story on a colonel who became a gay-rights activist. Other controversial topics also rankled brass.

   By TRACY WILKINSON, Times Staff Writer (Sunday, June 10, 2001)

   JERUSALEM--As if the Israeli military didn’t have enough to worry about these days, a scandal is brewing in the offices of the army’s weekly magazine.

   Senior officers ordered the Bamahane newsmagazine closed after a cover story showcased a now-retired gay colonel who had come out of the closet during his military service and went on to become an activist in the gay-rights movement.

   The shutdown is part of a tug of war over how the publication can best reflect the identity of Israel’s fighting forces. In the backdrop is the conflict between the seemingly mutually exclusive worlds of press freedom and the military.

   Until about a year ago, Bamahane (which means "In the Camp") had to submit all of its stories to the army spokesman’s office for screening and "editing" before publication. Since then, pressure to toe a certain line remains, but the editors have been given more license and they have been eagerly testing the limits, with varying degrees of success.

   In Israel, almost all Jewish citizens are drafted and obliged to perform reserve duty for many years after their mandatory service is completed. Consequently, this "people’s army" expects publications that are more relevant and grass-roots than institutional. Many of the country’s professional journalists fulfill their reserve duty at Bamahane or other army media.

   In addition to the gay colonel feature, articles published in Bamahane have recently addressed alcoholism among the troops; dissent over controversial operations in Lebanon; the repeated blunders of state intelligence; and the neglect of female soldiers injured in the line of duty, in contrast to the preferential treatment afforded their male colleagues.

   Another recent cover featured the photograph of a shirtless paratrooper-turned-male-model, complete with chiseled body and come-hither pose. To boot, he was a former ultra-Orthodox yeshiva boy who had defected from the religious life. He was quoted as saying that he’d rather be starring on the catwalk than patrolling Arab villages.

   This is not your father’s Stars and Stripes.

   Bamahane won praise in many circles for having broken out of the staid, officious world of army-speak and for addressing sensitive, once-taboo topics.

   But the stories irritated some officers in the army’s upper echelon who believed that the more titillating reports simply went too far. And the gay colonel, one army insider said, was "the last straw."

   Brig. Gen. Elazar Stern, the chief education officer who oversees military publications, ordered the weekly closed until further notice because of material that "depicts the army in a negative light."

   Neither Stern nor anyone else in the army public information office would comment for the record on this case, and Bamahane’s editor, Rami Keidar, was forbidden to talk to the media.

   Past writers at the paper blame Stern for continuing to try to impose censorship. Stern has earned attention in the mainstream press, mostly for several less-than-progressive statements. He was quoted in March, for example, as suggesting that non-Jews make inferior soldiers. Others put forward that Bamahane had indeed gone a little overboard, reflecting a yuppie, Tel Aviv-centric personality seen as elitist and out of touch with many of the troops.

   Bamahane will probably be allowed to resume publication in a matter of weeks or months, officials said. But its tone then is anyone’s guess. "It will bid farewell to an editor or two, and then will revert to what it has always been," complained political activist Orna Oshri, writing last month in the Haaretz newspaper. "A boring, polite and squeaky-clean rag, the Pravda of a scared, heterosexual, narrow-minded army. It will then be necessary to find out who needs such a wretched product anyway."

   best

   Gershon

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission