Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (513)	11/21/2001 8:21:13 PM
From: Scoobah	Respond to of 32591

Your knowledge of Zionism is surely not: Read on Len, read on. History's revenge By Avi Davis November 20, 2001 Amid Israeli reports of a new anthrax scare and Osama Bin Laden's videotaped confession, a small news item appeared in the Israeli press last week that should have made history. In a little noticed sidebar, Teddy Katz, a doctoral candidate at Haifa University was found guilty in a Tel Aviv District Court of making false accusations against the Alexandroni Brigade, a Haganah platoon from the 1948 War of Independence. The salient facts are these: On May 22, 1948, the Alexandroni Brigade under the command of Bentz Pridan, was ordered by the Haganah High Command to take the Arab village of Tantura, a vital link in the coastal supply route. The elders of the village wished to negotiate a truce but the younger men in the Arab town insisted on a fight. Bitter house-to-house combat followed, leaving 14 Israeli soldiers and 70 Arab villagers dead. The Arab wounded were evacuated and treated in Israeli hospitals. But Katz had deep suspicions about the official history. His analysis of events, drawn from first hand and supposedly unimpeachable sources, uncovered the slaughter of 200 defenseless Arabs in one of the worst depredations of the war. So confident was he of his thesis that he gave extensive interviews to the press and his story was syndicated by Reuters. The Brigade's survivors, infuriated by Katz's assertion that they had perpetrated a cold-blooded civilian massacre, filed suit to challenge his version. They claimed that Katz had made up the entire story, and that the brigade had conducted its military operations lawfully, appropriately and with honor. The Court agreed with the plaintiffs and found that not only had Katz fabricated the story, but that much of the Arab testimony he produced to defend his case, contradicted his claims. Cassettes of his interviews were handed to the prosecution who found that in response to questions about the massacre, his interview inquiries had been so leading as to collapse in self-mockery. The court demanded that Katz publicly apologize to the Brigade's survivors and awarded unspecified damages. This extraordinary case - one of the first in Israeli history in which an academic thesis was challenged in a court of law - is significant for another reason: it dealt a staggering blow to the cause of post-Zionism in whose name Katz and his mentor Dr. Ilan Pappe are significant stakeholders. For those in the Israeli academic and artistic elites, post-Zionism has, in less than a decade, transformed itself from an academic catchword into a sweeping social movement. Obeying Oscar Wilde's admonition that "an author's duty to history is to rewrite it" the post-Zionist historians, led by such luminaries as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim have attempted to re-interpret Israel's founding as driven by an aggressive, expansionist Zionist ideology. With such a reading, Israel is not only saddled with the blame for the deliberate dispossession and plunder of the indigenous Arab population, but bears responsibility for the Arab refugee crisis that resulted from the war that followed. There is little doubt that those historians who have adopted post-Zionism as an article of faith are not only dismissive of the moral foundations of the state but of Jewish nationalism itself. Pappe has been quoted as declaring Jews as possessing nothing more than a religion with no logical need for a state of their own. Shlaim, in his book The Iron Wall, lacerates Israel's founding fathers by describing them as ruthless, power-mad tyrants more intransigent than the Arabs. Under this relentless assault of self-loathing and self-recrimination one can almost hear the moral foundations of the state beginning to creak. Unsurprisingly, a social movement designed to address the wrongs of the past needed clothing and the Oslo peace process was a suit made to order. For these academics the word " peace" was just semantic camouflage for justice and restitution. The price - detachment of the territories and the creation of a Palestinian state, seemed relatively small when compared to the wrong committed. Yet Yasser Arafat's perfidy at Camp David in July 2000 and the subsequent explosion of Palestinian violence two months later roiled the Oslo vessel with gale-force intensity. Unprepared for the drama of Palestinian hatred and violence that followed, many in the post-Zionist claque recanted. Others, clinging to the wreckage, just hoped they would be able to ride out the storm. But the indiscretions of Teddy Katz have punctured a hole in this vessel that is not easily repaired. By revealing that its historiography is in fact ideology masquerading as serious academic inquiry, post-Zionism now reeks of the intellectual rot that in the 1930s made appeasement so fashionable. Indeed, with a rotting keel, this boat may well be sinking, taking with it the largely fabricated history that its ragged and bewildered crew have attempted to foist on Israel, the Jewish people and to its own discredit, the rest of the academic world.

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (513)	11/22/2001 10:06:05 AM
From: Scoobah	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32591

Hey Len, how would you like this to happen to your wife, as she read your children their bed time stories? No Let-up in Arab Terror Attacks Arab terrorist attacks continue. Last night, Arabs fired two mortar shells on Jewish homes along Israel’s southern Mediterranean coast. Rachel Asraf, a mother of 7 children, told Arutz Sheva Radio that she was reading in bed when, “I suddenly heard a shell launched, and a few seconds letter the loud boom. Our ears are trained to distinguish how far away the shells fall. This one landed very close by. I woke up my husband, and darted out to see what happened.” There were no injuries. In the same area this morning, an IDF patrol discovered a bomb and safely dismantled it. In the nearby Arab village of Khan Unis, Arabs say that an explosion there killed several youth. Israel says that its forces had nothing to do with the blast. Initial reports at this time indicate that Arabs shot and injured two people near Tul Karm, just east of Netanya.