http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/92367/sec_id/92367
"Loitering". How spot on is that description?
On a serious note, Gordon has captured the basic issue in his article; the Olive Tree Initiative is a suspicious venture if viewed from the pro-Israel side. There is simply too much involvement of people from the International Solidarity Movement, people who support the BDS movement against Israel (Boycot, Divestment and Sanctions), an actual high level official of Hamas and people who proclaim to be pro-Israel or neutral, but who are anything but.
There are also a lot of questions regarding funding of OTI by the OC Jewish Federation, the Rose Project and members of the local Jewish community who think they are supporting something that may be vastly different.
Let it be remembered that in 2010, the OC Jewish Federation and Orange County Hillel were smearing a local Jewish woman who was raising questions about the involvement of the International Solidarity Movement and people like George Rishmawi. While the Federation was fighting that battle, they were actually aware of a 2009 OTI meeting in the West Bank with Aziz Duwaik, the highest-ranking member of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority. They wrote a letter to UC-Irvine chancellor Michael Drake complaining about it. The only thing they neglected to do was inform their community-even as they were fighting off allegations of contacts with the ISM. In addition, a local rabbi criticized the woman in the monthly OC Jewish Life for speaking out before discussing her concerns with the Federation-which she had, in fact done.
In a recent article in the Jerusalem Post, Federation officials justified the OTI by saying it gave Jewish students a chance to learn the opposing side's arguments in order to become more effective advocates for Israel, a ridiculously lame reason to begin with. That raises the question of whether some of the Jewish participants are, in fact, influenced by the Palestinian activists they meet in the West Bank. It is a fair question if you consider that some OTI students (not just Muslims) have joined the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on more than one UC campus. That may turn out to be the least of the problems in that respect.
3 comments:
Is something wrong with their grammar?
"Justice in Palestine" is exclusively for Muslo-nazis -- because the few Christians there are systematically persecuted while the synagogues that used to reside in the Gaza Strip were all burned down to the ground and the charters of both political parties call for the complete destruction of the state of Israel and allude to the genocidal verses in the Islamic holy hadeeths.
As usual Gary, you miss the chain of cause and effect because you only read the last line. It is not George Bush's FAULT that certain people turned out to be terrorists on his watch. If anything, it is Ronald Reagan's fault that he treated them, and funded them, as "freedom fighters." Reagan sowed the wind, and Bush reaped the whirlwind.
But it was more than Reagan. It had been CIA policy for years under many presidents. Like most government agencies, while the President can call them to heel, they mostly run on the way the career officers want to run on, and plenty that they want to keep doing can be done, low profile, no matter what the President says.
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