‘Israel Has Lost Its Right To Exist’

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

By: Jim Kirwan on: 29.12.2008 [11:42 ]

‘Israel Has Lost Its Right To Exist’

From Jim Kirwan
12-28-8

My thoughts as well – because no legitimate ‘state’ could consider remaining outside the community of nations, for over fifty years, while using the barbaric savagery that Zionist Israel has chosen to pursue, against the original occupants of the now blood-soaked nation that was once called Palestine. Zionist Isreal ‘must be dismantled’ to keep the world from coming apart.

---

From: World View News Service
Sent: Dec 24, 2008
To: wvns@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Israel has lost right to exist

Norway up in arms after author asserts Israel has lost right to exist

By Assaf Uni

Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/749493.html

An article in a leading Norwegian newspaper last weekend lambasted Israel and Judaism and said Israel has lost its right to exist in its present form.

Entitled “God’s chosen people,” the article by author Jostein Gaarder in Aftenposten is raising a storm in Norway. Gaarder, author of the book “Sophie’s World,” links the Israel Defense Forces’ acts in Lebanon to Jewish history and foresees the coming dismantling of the state as it exists today, with the Jews becoming refugees.

In an interview with Haaretz Gaarder said Thursday that he was misunderstood. “As John Kennedy declared in Germany ‘I am a Berliner’ ¬ I say now ‘I am a Jew,'” he said. Advertisement

The article compares Israel’s government, the Afghan Taliban regime and South African apartheid, and states, “We no longer recognize the State of Israel” and “the State of Israel in its current form is history.”

“We call child murderers ‘child murderers,’ and will never accept that they have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages,” Gaarder writes. “Shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hezbollah or the State of Israel!”

Gaarder repeatedly refers to the role Judaism plays in Israel’s territorial aspirations, writing, “We don’t believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this nation’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds.”

He writes, “It is the State of Israel that fails to recognize, respect or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God’s assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem.”

The article has triggered off thousands of comments and dozens of stormy debates in the Norwegian media. It also has sparked off a debate about Gaarder’s alleged anti-Semitic tendencies and the right to criticize Israel. The Jewish journalist and music critic Mona Levin spoke out in public against Gaarder and said she was shocked by the Norwegian government’s silence. She blasted the cabinet for not denouncing what she described as “the most appalling thing I’ve read since ‘Mein Kampf.'”

“We’re dealing with an ignorant man, a hate-filled man who derides Judaism,” she said in an interview from Oslo. Levin said it was unacceptable that a man of such international repute (26 million copies of his book have been sold) could attack an entire ethnic group and that politicians would remain silent.

“This is a classic anti-Semitic manifesto, which cannot even disguise itself as criticism of Israel,” said Professor Dina Porat, head of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti- Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University. “The writer does not address the conflict in its contemporary context but reaches back thousands of years to assert that the Jewish people have traits of cruelty that have remained unchanged and account for the current war,” she says.

Porat says that according to the European Union, denying Israel’s right to exist ¬ arguing that its existence is racist ¬ is an anti- Semitic statement. She also finds in Gaarder’s text the use of classic anti-Semitic symbols, like infanticide.

“I’ve been head of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti- Semitism for 15 years and it’s not every day that I get to read such a radical document, in terms of its content and rhetoric,” she said.

Gaarder writes, among other things, “We do not believe that Israel mourns 40 killed Lebanese children more than it has lamented for more than 3,000 years 40 years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as ‘fitting punishment’ for the people of Egypt.”

He writes that the first Zionist terrorists started operating in the days of Jesus.

Speaking to Haaretz on Tuesday, a day before he stopped talking to the media, Gaarder said he was misunderstood and emphasized that he is a friend of Israel and the Jews.

“I think what Hezbollah is doing is terrible,” he said, adding that he supports Israel’s right to exist as a national homeland for the Jews since 1948.

Gaarder said he does not question Israel’s right to exist, “but not as an apartheid state.” He said he could understand how his article could be interpreted as “anti-Jewish” and admitted that if he were to rewrite it, he would change a few things.

He is aware he has hurt the Jews in Norway, he said, adding that he would make sure the article is not translated into other languages. However, Gaarder refused to retract publicly his main theme.

Aftenposten’s political editor Harald Stanghelle said he saw no problem publishing Gaarder’s article.

“Of course I don’t agree with what he says,” he said. “But an open debate on the issue is better than a covert one.

“Gaarder’s voice is important in the Norwegian discourse and it was right to publish the article,” he said.

Meanwhile, the furor over Gaarder’s article coincides with a series of anti-Semitic incidents in Norway, including the desecration of an Oslo Synagogue and cemeteries and the assault and battery of a skullcap-wearing youngster.

Quotes from article were taken from an unofficial translation

===

Norwegian ex-premier counters anti-Semitism accusations, slams Israel Haaretz Israel

http://whtt.org/index.php?news=2&id=2712

Ex-Norwegian prime minister Kåre Willoch spoke out Thursday against Israel and a group of Israeli scholars who earlier this week held a symposium in Jerusalem devoted to accusing the Scandinavian countries of racism, anti-Semitism and Israel-hatred.

“It’s a traditional deflection tactic aimed at diverting attention from the real problem, which is Israel’s well-documented and incontestable abuse of Palestinians,” Willoch, who presided as Norway’s prime minister in the 1980s, told a Norwegian daily.

Willoch, a long-time critic of Israel, was reacting to accusations leveled at an event hosted on Tuesday by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which, as reported by Haaretz, is described by the organizers as “probably Israel’s first comprehensive discussion into Scandinavia’s approach to the Jewish people and state.”

The English-language event attracted approximately 50 listeners, including at least five Scandinavian journalists, who later wrote about the event.

“Norway is the most anti-Semitic country in Scandinavia,” Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, a scholar of Western European anti-Semitism from the Center said at the symposium.

Gerstenfeld, a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Israel many years ago from Holland, projected cartoons he had found in Norwegian mainstream press over the past few years.

One cartoon, which appeared in Dagsavisen, the same paper which published the ex-premier’s reaction, showed an ultra-Orthodox Jew engraving “thou shall murder” into an alternative Decalogue. Another cartoon from the daily Dagbladet showed Ehud Olmert dressed up as a guard at a death camp, smiling and holding a rifle.

“These cartoons are one of many ugly anti-Semitic phenomena in Norway,” he said.

“There is something wrong with a society which is willing to accept these Nazi cartoons. With a Jewish population of only 1,300, Norway has led the pack in anti-Semitism before, during and after WWII.”

In his reaction, former premier Willoch said: “Anyone who accuses Norway of anti-Semitism is closing his eyes and ears.” Other Norwegian politicians were also quoted in the article in similar context.

Besides Gerstenfeld, the humble-sized event offered two more speakers: Zvi Mazel, a former ambassador to Sweden who spoke of a “deep-rooted” anti-Semitism in Sweden, and Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the U.S.-born director of the Wiesenthal Center in Israel – which co- sponsored the event – who addressed Norway and Sweden’s failure to prosecute Nazi war criminals.

Earlier this year, the three men contributed to a recently-published book entitled “Behind the Humanitarian Mask,” which served as the kernel for the symposium. The book accuses the Scandinavian countries of adhering to a form of “a white supremacist” approach, which views non-whites such as the Palestinians as eternal victims and aid- recipients who are not responsible for their actions.

The Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Danish ambassadors were invited to the event but did not come. However, five Scandinavian journalists were in attendance to counter some of the allegations.

“Why is criticism of Israel automatically considered anti-Semitism,” Louise Stigsgaard Nissen, Middle East Bureau chief for the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende, asked. “Why can’t one criticize Israel as one criticizes the U.S. without being called an anti-Semite?”

While Zuroff argued that Israelis generally accept harsh criticism when they do not suspect anti-Semitism, Gerstenfeld quoted the European Union’s definition of anti-Semitism as a double standard. “One cannot criticize Israel for things other countries also do while refraining from criticizing those countries,” he said.

Another Danish reporter said that by closing Gaza to reporters when international organizations speak of a humanitarian crisis there, Israel was “inevitably rendering itself suspect in human rights violations” and “inviting hostile treatment.”

Each such statement was received by the audience with disapproving mumbles, until the guests began to argue aloud with the Scandinavians – who argued right back. “It’s good to see some action around here,” one JCPA regular said. “Usually these lectures end with a few approving nods and hear-hears.”

http://www.rense.com/general84/lst.htm

===

-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW