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Rajab 28, 1433/June 18, 2012 # 26
We didn't invent this. It is unbelievable but true: The
Sugar Mama of anti-Muslim hate.
Thanks to Mark Glenn, a powerful voice coming out of Idaho,
we have this horrific uncovering of White Supremacist ideas
which have become one with Jewish-Israeli hatred of Muslims.
This is a must read and a wake up call. Can a Jew-Zionist be
the friend of Muslims? Find out for yourself.
Scroll down to end
for this shocker.
Egypt: Congratulations to Dr. Muhammad Morsi for winning the
presidential elections. Unfortunately the military is trying
to make him ineffective and has used a fake "court" to
"dissolve" the duly elected parliament which showed that the
Egyptian people elected Islamic candidates from the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Salafis. They are very friendly to the
US but are still not acceptable because they are not seen as
totally pliable. The people will have to confront the
military before the revolution is completed.
Syria: Who will help the Syrian people? The tyrant Assad is
on the rampage as the slight veil of decency provided by
outside observers is withdrawn. The US and Israel are
waiting for the "opportune" moment to pounce. It looks like
Bosnia where the western 'saviors" came in after the
populations had been slaughtered.
Our America:
Jewish-Zionist Support for Qadianis ["Ahmedis."]
A $900,000 Qadiani "mosque" is being set up in Pikesville,
the Jewish-Zionist stronghold on the outskirts of Baltimore.
In its May 31 issue, the Baltimore Sun, a Jewish-Zionist
daily, published a front page report, top left cover,
praising the "mosque." It also published a photo showing Dr.
Agha Khan, local "Ahmadi" leader praying.
This minority group is perceived by Muslims, especially
Pakistanis, as extremely subversive and supportive of the
enemies of Islam. The Jews probably know this and are giving
extraordinary support to the Qadianis. The Jews in Baltimore
are known for their special events in which they honored
Salman Rushdie, Medeleine Albright and General Musharraf at
their Symphony Hall
The Baltimore Sun notes that as far back as 1993, the
Baltimore City Council, heavily infested with Jews, passed a
resolution against Pakistan for its "repression of
Ahmeddis."
our America
Confronting CAIR: Don't be fooled by Collaborators with
Muslim Names
by Br. J. al-Rashid [The writer is a native of Detroit,
Michigan, and lives there.]
On June 8th during a conference at the Islamic House of
Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, I passed out the New
Trend Newsletter and stood up and warned the audience about
CAIR. One of CAIR's representatives was there.
I have my address tape recorded on digital video. I informed
the audience that ALL PEOPLE had to be worried about agent
provocateurs that are within the Muslims' Community. I
informed the audience that last year at the same conference
Dawud Walid of CAIR stated that he would inform on Muslims
turning them over to the United States government. Several
people who had attended the conference last year stated that
they remembered that.
The majority of the CAIR supporter Muslims left early, as it
seemed they only wanted to see or shake the hand of U.S.
Congressman John Conyers of Michigan.
When Chaplain Yee [of Gtmo fame] said that Muslims don't
care for political prisoners, I stood up and told him that
Jamaat al-Muslimeen has consistently supported political
prisoners way before anyone else, Muslim or non-Muslim.
Dr. Kifah's wife was in the audience.
More and more people are catching on to CAIR's activities
like an intelligence agency.
[Ed. note: Readers might remember that when Br. Rashid
confronted CAIR and ICNA's favorite Siraj Wahhaj about his
role in helping to put the Blind Shaikh, Dr. Omar Abdel
Rahman, in prison, Siraj Wahhaj supporter Mauri Saalakhan
claimed that it never happened! So this time. Br. Rashid has
it on video.]
Our America
Writer's Circle Shows Rich Talent for Islamic Intellect.
Poetry, analysis, commentary.
Keynote speech on Hadith and its opponents. Muslims are
easily misled on Hadith.
June 16: This was the most interesting writer's circle
meeting among a series organized by Nadrat Siddique in
Pasadena, Maryland. The audience was diverse, mostly young,
Muslim and non-Muslim, various races and nationalities and
schools of thought. . The presentations were brilliant,
intense poetry, thoughtful verse, intellectual commentary
mixed with questions and anwers. It was an evening not to be
missed.
The food showed the hospitality, generosity and taste of the
organizer.
The keynote speech was given by Dr. Kaukab Siddique with
reference to his new book Women in Hadith Narratives.
Some of his main points were:
-
Post 9.11, attacks on Hadith have been initiated by top
Think Tanks of the USA.
-
Muslims do not study hadith and so are easily misled.
-
Direct attacks on Prophet Muhammad, pbuh, create extreme
reactions in the Muslim world, so the Zionists used attacks
on Hadith to indirectly attack and diminish the respect for
Muhammad, pbuh, among Muslims.
-
Sectarianism is easily fed by misinfomation about Hadith.
For instance, the idea that Imam Bukhari was supporting
Ummayad kings is absurd. He was not even born during the
Ummayad era and he abhorred all rulers.
-
Shi'ites are deadly opposed to Abu Huraira, r.a., one of
the greatest narrators of Hadith. They don't know that Ali,
r.a., Hasan, r.a.,and Husain, r.a., did not oppose him. He
narrated Hadith honoring the ahlul bayt and was a great
mujahid.
-
There is no hadith from Prophet Muhammad, pbuh, which
says that Aisha, r.a,, was 6 or 9 years old when he married
her. Nor is there any hadith from him which says that
Muslims should marry girls of that age.
[Some DVDs of Dr. Siddique's speech on Hadith in Augusta,
Georgia, were given out.] .
War News: Saudi Arabia
Prince Nayef, Saudi Heir Apparent dies: Specialized in
Torture and Repression of Islamics
June 15: The Saudi heir apparent, Prince Nayef, who was
responsible for crushing the Islamic uprising in Arabia led
by Shaykh Osama has died. Under his directions, widespread
use of arbitrary arrests, torture and terrorism against
Muslim families led to the temporary defeat of the Islamics
led by Osama bin Laden. At this point, 55 political
prisoners are being "tried" in Saudi Arabia for affiliation
with al-Qaida.
Saudi Arabia spends more than $4 billion a year to repress
the Saudi people with US help. Several thousand US
"specialists" [some say 35,000] are stationed in Saudi
Arabia
War News: Yemen
Deadly blow Kills Top Yemeni Commander
Ansar al-Shari'a withdrew from 4 towns after Yemeni-US-Saudi
bombing.
On June 18, in Aden, a human bomber sent probably by
al-Qaida blew up the top commander of Yemeni forces, General
Qatan, who was organizing the military offensive against
Ansar al-Shar'ia.
In the previous week, the Islamic fighters withdrew from
Zinjibar and Jaar and two minor towns after steady series of
bombing raids by US, Yemeni and Saudi aircraft. The Ansar
suffered minor losses and withdrew in good order. The
province of Shabwa, one of the biggest in Yemen, remains in
their hands. The bombing raids destroyed most of Zanjibar
and the Ansar claim they with withdrew to save the civilian
population.
[New York Times and Dawn misreported the Ansar's withdrawal
as a victory for the Yemeni military but a Yemen Times
expert says, this was merely a guerrilla tactic. The Islamic
forces have suffered 25 killed and are largely intact,]
Barak Obama is not the first Black President but the first
President who is Black By Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III
NNPA Columnist
The debate continues. Professor Frederick Harris has
written in his Op Ed,Still Waiting for Our First Black
President, "Obama has pursued a racially defused electoral
and governing strategy, keeping issues of specific interest
to African Americans —off the national agenda." Michael
Nutter the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia replied to
Harris in the Huffington Post , "Barack Obama...has fought
every single day to improve the livelihood and well-being of
the African-American community...We have our first black
President, his name is President Barack Obama..."
Here's the reality that must be clearly understood.
President Obama is not the first Black President; he's the
first President who is Black. A Black President would have
come into office with a "Black Agenda." If he were the
first Black President he would be using his bully pulpit to
champion legislation targeting unemployment in urban areas,
poverty, income disparity, and other issues. This in no way
should be interpreted to challenge his "Blackness." It's
about the agenda not the man.
If President Obama were the first Black President, the
prison at Guantanamo Bay would be closed. He would not have
signed the 2012 Defense Authorization Act (DAA) allowing for
US citizens to be indefinitely detained. His Black Attorney
General would not have made the case to assassinate US
citizens abroad without judicial review. If Obama were the
first Black President, he would not have supported the
assassination of Libyan President Gaddafi.
A Black President would have come into office with a
historical appreciation of the FBI's COINTELPRO program that
led to the attack on the civil liberties and civil rights of
many individuals involved in the Civil Rights movement as
well as the CIA's involvement in assassinating other African
leaders. A Black President would not want to repeat this
history by supporting the DAA, and assassination lists.
President Obama is the first President who is Black and as
such operates as a functionary of the United States
Government. A President who is Black focuses on the
so-called "war on terror" and "protecting American interests
abroad" with no other historical reference to guide him.
His primary focus has been on broader national policies such
as the Child Tax Credit, Small Business Jobs Act, and saving
the American auto industry. All of these (and other
policies) are policies from which African Americans have
benefitted but do not specifically target the ills impacting
the African American community.
This is not to infer that Professor Harris' premise is
wrong; he's correct. While campaigning for the presidency
Senator Obama did court the Black community for its vote.
He did discuss "...racial injustice in front of black
audiences" and he did support "targeted and universal
policies to address racial inequality." President Obama has
changed his focus because as Rev. Wright so adroitly
observed, "he's a politician."
Nutter is wrong to challenge Harris' assessment that
President Obama has pursued race neutral politics. President
Obama has, as stated by Harris, "pursued a racially defused
electoral and governing strategy..." According to the
Washington Post, "Lawmakers (CBC) have met with the
administration three times this year (2011) seeking support
for programs that specifically address the black community,
but President Obama has not backed their proposals... The
caucus chairman (Cleaver)...slammed the deal negotiated by
the administration to raise the national debt ceiling and
cut government spending as a "Satan sandwich" that unfairly
harms African Americans."
In theory, Nutter is correct when he writes, "Throughout the
past three years, President Obama has been focused on
building an economy that is built to last. And in spite of
the obstacles, the economy is making progress and each
month, more and more Americans, and African Americans are
getting back to work." The reality is that while the
unemployment rate for the country was 8.2 percent; the
national unemployment rate for African Americans is double
that at 16.6 percent. The President's efforts will not
address chronic income disparity or the wealth gap.
According to 2007 U.S. Census Data, White families made 62%
more than Black families. Based on data from the 2002 Survey
of Income and Program Participation, White median household
net worth was about $90,000, compared to a mere $6,000 for
the median Black household. As Dr. Ronald Walters explains
in White Nationalism Black Interests, these indicators of
greater social instability loom large for a substantial
portion of the Black community that has not benefitted from
the economic system.
What too many in the Black community refuse to accept is as
Harris wrote, "If he won't do it (support Black interests)
on his own, Obama will have to be pressured to act and to
keep the few promises he made to black America in 2008.
This is not a failure of Obama; it's the failure of the
community to move from the politics of personality to the
politics of policy. Obama's not the first Black President;
he's the first President who is Black.
WilmerLeonis the Producer/ Host of the nationally broadcast
call-in talk radio program "Inside the Issues with
WilmerLeon," and a Teaching Associate in the Department of
Political Science atHowardUniversityinWashington,D.C. Go to
www.wilmerleon.com or email: wjl3us@yahoo.com.
www.twitter.com/drwleon
© 2012 InfoWave Communications, LLC.
The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate
thenation.com
In late April, Geert Wilders arrived in New York City to
tell his quixotic tale to a rapt American audience. The
far-right Dutch Party of Freedom leader—perhaps the world's
most prominent anti-Muslim populist—was poised to release
Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me, a
memoir just out from Regnery, the right-wing US publishing
house, in which he recounts his courageous efforts to stop
the "Islamicization" of Europe. On his US tour, Wilders
proudly portrayed himself as a man on the run—a
round-the-clock security detail guarding him against radical
Muslims whose violent passions he had supposedly inflamed by
his truth-telling—and as a man on the rise: the exodus of
his party from the governing coalition had forced new
elections in the Netherlands, throwing the country's
ossified establishment into chaos.
Upon Wilders's arrival in New York, a little-known think
tank called the Gatestone Institute rolled out the red
carpet for him. On April 30, before a select crowd that
according to Gatestone's website had paid $10,000 a head, he
held forth on the persecution he had endured during his
recent trial for incitement to hatred and discrimination.
"This charade that happened in the Netherlands for the last
few years could not have happened in your great country,"
Wilders said in his speech. Then he cut to the heart of his
appeal: "Islam is primarily a dangerous ideology rather than
a religion. This is the truth. This violent ideology wants
to impose Islamic Sharia law on the whole world, including
us—the Kafirs, the non-Muslims.... Islam is the largest
threat to freedom which the world is currently facing."
Some Dutch liberals have branded him a demagogue who summons
the ghosts of Europe's dark past, but Wilders counters the
accusation by assiduously cultivating Jewish support. He
quotes Zionist forefather Theodor Herzl and boasts of his
more than forty trips to Israel, where he once toiled on a
rural kibbutz. Wilders, in fact, has made a special friend
of right-wing Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. In
Wilders's world, the Jewish state represents Fort Apache on
the frontiers of the war against the barbarians threatening
Western civilization. "Mothers in the West can sleep safely
because Israeli mothers at night worry about their sons in
the army," he told the Gatestone Institute. "Their fight is
our fight. We should support it."
At the April event, Wilders's seamless fusion of anti-Muslim
bombast and pro-Israel cant was gratefully received by the
Gatestone Institute's founder and director, Nina Rosenwald,
whom he acknowledged at the top of his jeremiad as another
of his good friends. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck
fortune, Rosenwald spreads her millions through the William
Rosenwald Family Fund, a nonprofit foundation named for her
father, a famed Jewish philanthropist who created the United
Jewish Appeal in 1939. His daughter's focus is more
explicitly political. According to a report by the Center
for American Progress titled "Fear Inc.," Rosenwald and her
sister Elizabeth Varet, who also directs the family
foundation, have donated more than $2.8 million since 2000
to "organizations that fan the flames of Islamophobia."
Besides funding a Who's Who of anti-Muslim outfits,
Rosenwald has served on the board of AIPAC, the central arm
of America's Israel lobby, and holds leadership roles in a
host of mainstream pro-Israel organizations. As groups like
AIPAC lead the charge for a US military strike on the
Islamic Republic of Iran, threatening to turn apocalyptic
visions of civilizational warfare into catastrophic reality,
Rosenwald's wealth has fueled a rapidly emerging alliance
between the pro-Israel mainstream and the Islamophobic
fringe. (In 2003 alone the Rosenwald Family Fund donated
well over half of its $1.6 million in total contributions to
pro-Israel and Islamophobic organizations.) This alliance
serves to sanitize and legitimize professional anti-Muslim
bigots like Wilders, allowing their ideas to mingle easily
with those of neoconservative foreign policy heavyweights
intent on promoting the appearance of a convergence between
US and Israeli interests by invoking the specter of a common
"Islamofascist" enemy. With Gatestone—which publicizes the
writings of figures ranging from pro-Israel super-lawyer
Alan Dershowitz to "counter-jihad" propagandist Robert
Spencer, and boasts Harold Rhode, a neoconservative former
Pentagon official credited, as a senior fellow, with helping
to try to push the Bush administration to invade
Iraq—Rosenwald has attempted to shift the alliance into
overdrive.
Conspiracies, Witch Hunts and "Moderate Muslims"
Over the past decade, Rosenwald's generosity has helped
sustain the pet projects of "Islamofascism Awareness Week"
organizer and Stalinist apostate David Horowitz. Her
largesse has also supported former Lebanese Maronite TV
anchor Brigitte Gabriel, who told an evangelical audience in
2006 that Muslims "have no souls—they are dead set on
killing and destruction." The Center for Security Policy
(CSP), a Washington-based think tank directed by
neoconservative former Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, has
also thrived as a result of Rosenwald's beneficence. The
$437,000 in donations Gaffney reaped from the Rosenwald
family enabled him to churn out conspiratorial pamphlets
like his 2010 "Shariah: The Threat to America," in which he
warned that American Muslims were engaged in a "stealth
jihad" to place the country under the control of Sharia, or
Islamic law. At the Conservative Political Action Conference
the following year, Gaffney sent his cadres to distribute
fliers accusing top Republican anti-tax activists Grover
Norquist and Suhail Khan of organizing a secret campaign
dedicated to "the replacement of our constitutional
republic...with a theocratic Islamic caliphate governing
according to Shari'ah." (David Steinmann, president of the
Fund, sits on the board of Gaffney's CSP.) Norquist is
married to an Arab-American, and Khan, a former Republican
Party official, is a fellow for Muslim-Christian
Understanding at the Institute for Global Engagement. The
American Conservative Union investigated Gaffney's charges
and declared them "reprehensible."
Rosenwald has also used her money to support a seemingly
sober set of self-proclaimed "dissident" Muslims who have
seized the post-9/11 media spotlight to defend pro-Israel
positions, Western military intervention in the Arab world
and police spying on Muslim Americans. These beneficiaries
include Irshad Manji, an openly gay Canadian TV personality
and self-described "Muslim refusenik" who argued in her 2005
book, The Trouble With Islam Today, that "desert Arabs" and
"Arab cultural imperialists" were imposing an
anti-democratic, sexist and endemically anti-Semitic mindset
on the rest of the world's Muslims. In 2007 Rosenwald
provided $10,000 in seed money for Manji's new nonprofit,
Project Ijtihad, which she founded to "help build the
world's most inclusive network of reform-minded Muslims and
non-Muslim allies."
Two years later Rosenwald pumped $10,000 into a similar but
markedly more aggressive venture called the American Islamic
Forum for Democracy. The group was founded by Zuhdi Jasser,
an Arizona physician hailed by Glenn Beck as "the one Muslim
we were all searching for after 9/11." Despite his lack of
academic or theological credentials, Jasser provided expert
testimony last year before the Congressional hearing on
Muslim American radicalization conducted by Representative
Peter King of New York, widely criticized as a witch hunt.
In early March, after the Associated Press exposed a secret
NYPD unit monitoring Muslims throughout New York City and
far beyond, Jasser issued a press release declaring, "We
thank God every day for the NYPD." That same day, he
surfaced at a pro-NYPD rally in New York with King by his
side. Then, only days later, over vehement objections from a
coalition of Muslim groups, Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell installed Jasser as a member of the Commission on
International Religious Freedom.
But no single anti-Muslim activist has benefited more from
his relationship with Rosenwald than Middle East Forum
founder Daniel Pipes, bankrolled to the tune of $2.3 million
over the past ten years by the Rosenwald family's
philanthropies. Pipes thanked Rosenwald for "[taking] on a
leadership role when the [Middle East] Forum was yet
fledgling, helping us through some tough spots." A former
scholar at the Rosenwald-backed pro-Israel Washington
Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Pipes has made a
career of advocating aggressive US and Israeli military
action in the Middle East, including the razing of entire
Palestinian villages. Expressing his solidarity with
Wilders, Pipes echoed the Dutch politician's racial views on
Muslim immigrants, describing them as "brown-skinned peoples
cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic
standards of hygiene."
Pipes occupies a central position at the nexus of the
pro-Israel lobby and the Islamophophic fringe. In 2001 he
neatly encapsulated the zero-sum mentality that defines his
view of the alliance, declaring, "I worry very much, from
the Jewish point of view, that the presence, and increased
stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American
Muslims, because they are so much led by an Islamist
leadership, that this will present true dangers to American
Jews."
To his shame, Pipes earned eighteen citations in the
manifesto of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, the
self-proclaimed "counter-jihadist" standing trial for the
murder of seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers. Drawing
heavily on sources like Pipes to justify his actions,
Breivik said he carried out the slaughter to punish Europe
for succumbing to "Islamicization" and multiculturalism.
Ranking just behind Pipes in Breivik's thought was the
Middle East Monitoring and Research Institute (MEMRI), with
sixteen citations from the right-wing terrorist. Founded by
a former Israeli intelligence officer to monitor and
selectively disseminate Arabic-language media, MEMRI has
become a key source for organizations in the Islamophobic
network. MEMRI provided much of the translated material in
the anti-Muslim Clarion Fund's mass-distributed propaganda
film Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West. The
Clarion Fund and MEMRI have received handsome donations from
the Rosenwald family, earning Nina Rosenwald her position as
chair of MEMRI's board of directors.
"We can give Nina Rosenwald the benefit of the doubt and say
that in the past she didn't know the poisonous ideological
agenda of her beneficiaries," Wajahat Ali, principal author
of the "Fear Inc." report, told me. "But at this point, she
has no excuse for ignoring their extreme activities. So the
question is why she continues to support them."
Birth of a Benefactor
Who is this benefactor of Islamophobia? According to those
familiar with Rosenwald, she is anything but a sophisticated
Machiavellian operator—"a babe in the woods," as one of her
longtime acquaintances described her to me. (Rosenwald did
not respond to interview requests sent to the Gatestone
Institute and her personal e-mail.) According to another
acquaintance, Rosenwald has a penchant for launching into
anti-Arab anti-Palestinian tirades at public forums, leaping
up like "a jack in the box" to denounce the evildoers.
Despite her zealotry, Rosenwald maintains a reputation as a
Manhattan socialite who travels in some of New York City's
most elite financial and political circles. Her wealthy
friends gather for salons at upscale restaurants and in the
living room of her Upper West Side apartment to meet major
league political personalities, including former Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger, neoconservative former UN
Ambassador John Bolton (an associate of the Gatestone
Institute) and the late right-wing media provocateur Andrew
Breitbart.
Rosenwald counts among her closest friends Norman Podhoretz,
the octogenarian neoconservative activist and former
Commentary magazine editor who argues that Jewish Democrats
are heretics betraying their religious duty to support the
Jewish state. Rosenwald, according to one friend, is also
close to Podhoretz's daughter, Ruthie Blum, a right-wing
columnist who lives in the illegal West Bank settlement of
Har Adar and writes a column for Israel Hayom, a newspaper
published by far-right billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a chief
financial supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benajamin
Netanyahu. Father and daughter echo the line of Likudnik
Greater Israel ideology and anti-Muslim fanaticism, with
Podhoretz urging the Western world to wage "World War IV"
(the title of his post-9/11 polemic) against what he and
Blum call "Islamofascism." Blum has called for an Israeli
war against Iran on the grounds that "Iran is soon to have
atomic bombs with which it will attempt to impose Shariah
law on the rest of the world—after wiping out the Jewish
state." Rosenwald has sustained Commentary (now edited by
Podhoretz's son John) with regular donations of up to
$15,000—a modest but important sum for a right-wing
Israel-centric magazine with an increasingly minuscule
readership.
Through her affiliation with the Washington-based Hudson
Institute, where Norman Podhoretz is an adjunct fellow,
Rosenwald established a branch of the think tank in New York
City. Operating under the Hudson banner, Rosenwald brought
Wilders to town in 2008 to warn against the Muslim plot to
"rule the world by the sword." Wilders's tirade during that
visit against the prophet Muhammad, whom he described as "a
warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile," was strident even by
the standards of the hawkish Hudson Institute. By 2011, well
before Wilders's return visit this year, Rosenwald separated
Hudson New York City from Hudson's national branch, changing
her organization's name to the Gatestone Institute. Today,
Rosenwald maintains a seat on Hudson's board of
directors.
Nina Rosenwald's influence is based on the fortune her
grandfather Julius earned at the turn of the century as
co-owner of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Julius Rosenwald,
renowned for his liberal philanthropy, used his fortune to
nurture the careers of African-American leaders from Booker
T. Washington to W.E.B. Du Bois and writers Langston Hughes
and Claude McKay. Like many Reform Jews of his time,
Rosenwald kept a cautious distance from Zionism, which
organizations like the American Jewish Committee treated as
a potential threat to Jewish assimilation in America.
Julius's son, William, continued the philanthropic tradition
his father inaugurated. With rabbis Abba Hillel Silver and
Jonah Wise, two early leaders of the American Zionist
movement, William Rosenwald helped form the United Jewish
Appeal for Refugees and Overseas Needs to "fortify the Jews
of all countries against anti-Semitic onslaughts."
Rosenwald's efforts to resettle imperiled European Jews
vaulted him into a lifetime of leadership of major Jewish
organizations. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, when Israel
began its illegal military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza
Strip and Golan Heights, Rosenwald, like most Jewish
institutional leaders, intensified his commitment to the
cause of Zionism.
Following their father, Nina Rosenwald and her siblings
became active in the pro-Israel community. While her sister
Elizabeth has assumed a lower profile, there is hardly a
single major pro-Israel organization that does not provide
Rosenwald with a seat on its board of directors. Thanks to
her financial generosity, Rosenwald sits on the board of
influential neoconservative groups from WINEP and AIPAC as
well as Hudson. She is the vice president of the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs, which has provided
training to thousands of American law enforcement and
military officials from Israeli intelligence and police
officers.
While entrenched in the pro-Israel establishment in the
United States, Rosenwald has funneled hundreds of thousands
of dollars into some of the Jewish state's more
unpleasant—and legally dubious—ventures. The Rosenwald
Family Fund has provided at least $100,000, for example, to
the Golan Fund, an initiative of the Israel Land Fund that
aims to increase the "Jewish presence" in Israel's Galilee
region and the occupied Golan Heights by "obtain[ing] more
of that [Arab] land for agricultural use," according to its
website. Extending its influence across the Green Line, the
Rosenwald Family Fund has also provided financial support to
the College of Judea (now Ariel University Center of
Samaria) in the Israeli mega-settlement of Ariel; the Beit
El yeshiva, a religious nationalist school situated in a
West Bank settlement that instructs students to disobey
government orders to abandon illegal settlement outposts;
and to the Central Fund for Israel, a New York City-based
nonprofit that serves as a major funding artery between
American-based donors and the hardcore settlements of the
West Bank.
According to Henry Siegman, a former executive director of
the American Jewish Congress who serves as president of the
US/Middle East Project, the Rosenwald family's rightward
trajectory reflects a generational shift within the Jewish
American establishment. "The trend is not something that
just emerged recently," Siegman told me. "Over the last few
decades, the Jewish Federations and AIPAC have played a
significant role in shaping this reactionary move by
advancing the notion that we should support any government
in Israel and any policy that the government espouses. The
Jewish organizations that opposed this line and took the
opposite position were punished financially by the wealthy
donors AIPAC was able to put together."
As Islamophobia consumes broad sectors of America's
pro-Israel community, leading Israel advocacy groups are
dispatching anti-Muslim speakers to college campuses across
the country. Chief among them is StandWithUs, an
organization that Danny Ayalon, Israel's deputy foreign
minister, says his government uses to "amplify our power."
In May StandWithUs sent Rosenwald beneficiary Jasser to
appear beside a cast of neoconservative activists at a
University of California, San Diego, event dedicated to
condemning established human rights groups. Earlier in the
year, StandWithUs dispatched Nonie Darwish, an ex-Muslim
convert to evangelical Christianity who calls Islam "a
poison to our society," to speak at the University of New
Mexico.
According to Siegman, the Jewish establishment's loyalty to
an Israeli government drifting irrevocably toward the far
shores of the right has taken a terrible toll. "Islamophobia
has gained many followers in the Jewish establishment and at
this point has infected American Jewish life," he commented.
"The neocons are to a large extent responsible for that. And
they did this at the price of alienating the younger
generation, which is falling away.
2012-06-19 Tue 03:45:24 cdt
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