Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
There sure do have on outsized voice in my morning rag.
You can't really blame them; they are only $erving their ever-dwindling readership.
Page A1:
"Congregation joins Judaism with nature" by Lisa Wangsness | Globe Staff, December 02, 2013
BOYLSTON — Rabbi Katy Z. Allen and her tiny congregation make their way through the woods on a windy autumn morning, stopping now and then to sing and pray portions of the Shabbat service.
They reach the Wachusett Reservoir and spread out along the water’s edge to collect wild cranberries, slowly filling their buckets. A meditative quiet settles in.
“You can think of your picking as part of your prayer today,” Allen tells the group as they begin. “As we prepare to harvest the bounty of the earth, let’s take a moment to feel the earth beneath our feet, and enjoy the warmth of the sun on our faces and our backs.”
Many congregations from across the religious spectrum hold the occasional outdoor service, but Allen’s gathering of Jewish environmentalists and nature lovers almost always worships outside.
Allen calls her congregation “Ma’yan Tikvah,” or “a wellspring of hope” in Hebrew. In May, she organizes a bicycle Shabbat, with stops for prayer and picnicking. In August, she holds a potluck Shabbat dinner, then everyone heads outside to watch the Perseid meteor showers. High Holiday services happen in the woods.
Praying outdoors adds another dimension to just being outdoors, Allen says, and being outside adds another dimension to the prayer.
********************************
The group is more a gathering than a formal congregation; its size and makeup fluctuates. On this day there are just eight people, but High Holiday services can draw as many as 50. Some people come regularly, others just once a year — but that, Allen notes, is no different from any synagogue. She tries to keep in touch now and then with those who drift in and out.
“I like the small group, I like that I’m with friends every weekend when I pray,” says Robyn Bernstein of Bolton, who attends most of the group’s two or three outings a month. “It’s an entirely different experience than being in a building. Of course, in the winter I miss the heat a little bit. But we dress warm and we pray faster.”
If Ma’yan Tikvah is a little unconventional, so is Allen, 62, who also works as a chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
She grew up in Wisconsin, in a family that loved being outside. Her father was a botanist who grew up on a farm, and her mother’s undergraduate degree was in biology. They camped and hiked together, and spent summer vacations in rustic cabins in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Love of nature, Allen says, “was in the air.”
But she had little experience with religion, except for a couple of years during middle school when she attended a Unitarian Universalist church. Allen remembers having intense conversations with the minister’s daughter — who later became a Lutheran pastor — about whether God existed.
She put aside spirituality as a young adult. She married, taught high school biology and general science outside Boston, had children. When her son began asking questions about God, she began searching for ways to help answer them.
Her then-husband was Jewish, so they began with a havurah — a Jewish group that meets for prayer, learning, and celebration of holidays. Later, they brought their children to the Sunday School for Jewish Studies in Newton, a Hebrew school for children and families that meets Sunday mornings. A turning point in Allen’s spiritual life came during a High Holiday service at the school.
As the congregation prayed together, she recalls, she realized that “I’m not the only one searching here, and trying to find meaning.”
They joined a reform synagogue. When Allen and her husband divorced, she moved to a conservative congregation in Wayland. She loved the Hebrew portions of the service, even though her comprehension was limited.
“There is a power in the ancient language,” she says. “Sometimes, understanding can get in the way of the experience. It becomes this intellectual thing, rather than opening your heart and letting it flow through.”
Still, she wanted to learn more. She was working in educational publishing, writing, and Jewish education, but as the years passed, she had a nagging feeling that did not go away: She wanted to become a rabbi.
In 1999, 11 years after she converted, she began attending rabbinical school part time at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York. When she finished in 2005, she worked at a synagogue in Winthrop, but it was not the right fit.
Allen’s current partner, Gabi Mezger, asked her what she would do if she could do anything she wanted.
“I said, ‘I would pray outside,’ ” Allen says. “ ‘She said, ‘Go for it.’ ”
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It is the Zionist Jew Agenda all over my paper!
That one was three-fer!
A page B1 congregation:
"Leaders of many faiths gather at Temple Israel" by Lisa Wangsness | Globe Staff, January 18, 2014
Imam William Suhaib Webb, guest speaker at Temple Israel’s annual Shabbat Tzedek (Sabbath of Justice) honoring the life and vision of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is the first imam to formally speak at Temple Israel, which was founded in 1854 and has a long tradition of social justice work.
Related: Crowning Today With This Post
I would like to crown Israel. I guess that is where Dr. King and I part.
His appearance offered fresh evidence of strengthening ties between Jews and Muslims in Boston. Relations between the communities sometimes broke down in the last decade….
And that is where the final phrase has been rewritten for my paper says "over the extremist ties of some involved in the parent group of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center and over the charges lodged against Muslim leaders by a small number of Jewish critics."
The web version continues thusly:
during the construction of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury, which critics charged was backed by extremists.
Do I even need to note what was omitted, readers?
Bonds among many of Boston’s religious leaders grew stronger in the days and weeks after the Marathon bombings, but even before the bombings, a group of interreligious clergy had begun meeting monthly to get to know one another better….
More benefits to the agenda regarding that staged and scripted hoax and limited hangout of a false flag. Make Muslims own up to and admit terrorism in the name of unity and togetherness. Just don't ask the butchering Zionist Jew settlers of Israhell for such a thing.
The vast sanctuary was packed Friday night, and the congregation was extraordinarily diverse: There were men in yarmulkes, women wearing headscarves, some in suits and dresses, and others in jeans. The Boston Children’s Chorus sang U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love),” later joining the Temple Israel Youth Choir in Shir Shalom (A Song for Peace).
That is so interesting coming from a mouthpiece for the 21st-century apartheid state.
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I should have just passed over this article.
Also see: Alan Dershowitz stepping down at Harvard Law
Dershowitz, 75, spoke by phone Friday from Israel, where he was speaking at a conference. He said his trip has included dinners with the country’s prime minister and a former student, actress Natalie Portman.
Amidala turned to the dark side!
Back to page A1:
"Former Hebrew tutor inspires off-Broadway song" by Christopher Wallenberg | Globe Correspondent, December 09, 2013
An unexpected reunion with a former Hebrew student....
That pupil’s name? Andy Cohen, now the ubiquitous face of the Bravo network and host of its popular late-night talk show, “Watch What Happens Live.”
Thanks to Yitz Magence’s reconnection with Cohen, 33 years after he tutored him for his bar mitzvah, it’s been a whirlwind few weeks for the 58-year-old lawyer from Newton. He and several friends flew to New York City for the first performance of “Stars of David” to hear the cast belt out the show’s comical opening number, “Yitzy Magence,” based on a story Cohen told to the show’s co-creator, Abigail Pogrebin. A week later, Magence popped up on Cohen’s show, where he chatted up fellow guests Meredith Vieira and Jesse Tyler Ferguson….
Pogrebin, who was developing the musical based on her best-selling 2005 book “Stars of David,” in which prominent Jewish cultural figures intimately discuss their identity and faith….
In “Yitzy Magence,” (pronounced “YIT-zee Ma-GEN-see”), Cohen develops a strategy “to keep poor Yitzy from teaching me” by placing “props” all around his room — like baseball cards or electronic hand-held games — that could distract them from the task at hand....
Other Jewish luminaries whose tales are immortalized in the show’s song-cycle include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Joan Rivers, Tony Kushner, Gloria Steinem, Aaron Sorkin, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Boston-bred Leonard Nimoy.
Mr. Spock speaks Yiddish? He must have to mind meld with Steinem.
Some had spoken to Pogrebin for the book; others, like Cohen, were interviewed specifically for the show….
I don't want to watch anymore of this.
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"5 years later, life brighter for victims of Madoff" by Beth Healy | Globe Staff, December 11, 2013
Bianca Kostinden, a Swampscott High School junior, says she felt history’s whispers everywhere on her visit to Israel last summer, calling it the best 12 days of her young life. That she traveled there at all was a victory in itself.
The well-known nonprofit that sponsored her trip, the Robert I. Lappin Youth to Israel program, had been one of the early casualties of Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion investment swindle, which destroyed paper fortunes and leveled charities nationwide.
Now, five years later, many of those institutions have risen from the ashes, the Lappin program among them. “I think this trip is almost a complete slap in the face to Bernie Madoff,’’ said Kostinden. “Because this entire community, this program, we rose above it.’’
Related: Charitable Po$t
Which is strange because the wealthiest philanthropists did not give as much in 2013 as they gave before the Great Recession, even as a "strong stock market and better business climate have continued to concentrate American wealth in the top 1 percent of earners."
I suppose it's all funny to some.
It’s a survival tale that has played out many times over since that surreal day in December 2008, when retired grandmothers and sophisticated global bankers all learned at once that their reliable Madoff profits were a fraud.
That so many people would ultimately rise above the scandal and the financial losses seemed improbable at the time. Madoff’s stunning confession came on Dec. 11, 2008, revealing that he and his staff had been faking investment returns for years. The scheme had imploded amid the global financial crisis then unfolding.
There was no money left, no real profits. The billions of dollars his legions of clients had counted on to fund retirements and mortgages, human rights campaigns and hospital wings simply did not exist. Some private investors never recovered from both the loss of their savings and their loss of financial security.
The ordeal had a special sting in Boston, home to a host of victims, villains, and beneficiaries of Madoff’s massive theft. Philanthropist Carl Shapiro, who invested with Madoff longer than almost anyone, had to repay $625 million of his profits to regulators.
Related: Looting Jew Gets Tax Rebate
Probably one of the reasons no one reads the Globe anymore.
He lived to see his 100th birthday, but the prominent family foundation he ran with his late wife — once one of the biggest benefactors of health care and the arts in greater Boston — is a fraction of its former size.
Shapiro’s son-in-law, Robert Jaffe, was covered in the family’s agreement with regulators. The Securities and Exchange Commission had filed civil charges alleging that he directed more than $1 billion of investor funds to Madoff. Both Jaffe and Shapiro have maintained they did not know Madoff was stealing from some clients to pay others.
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Boston University professor, lost millions in his Foundation for Humanity but received a flood of donations that replenished the fund. A Holocaust survivor who told Oprah he has “seen worse” than Madoff, Wiesel has since been through cardiac surgery and written a new book called “Open Heart.’’
The whining worked, and Oprah sure likes fiction.
Irving Picard, the Madoff bankruptcy trustee in charge of recouping money for investors, found 116 client accounts in Massachusetts worth $296 million that qualified for reimbursements of losses, according to his spokeswoman, Amanda Remus. So far those investors have received $168 million, she said.
But investors will never get all the money they thought existed in their accounts — a source of deep frustration to many. Picard determined that investors could claim only the money they originally invested, not the balances reflected on their fake account statements.
Of roughly $17 billion invested, he has recovered nearly $10 billion. Some of that money came from agreements reached with big Madoff investors like Shapiro, who allegedly received hundreds of millions of dollars in other people’s money over the years.
So all that "charity" was stolen loot, huh?
One of the largest settlements was reached with Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., which paid $1 billion into the fund after Picard sued the Springfield company because its Tremont Group Holdings Inc. hedge fund unit had ignored “obvious warning signs’’ of fraud and handed $3 billion of customer money to Madoff.
Related: Mutual In$urance
I wonder how much tax loot they took down.
The fraud hurt investors from Boston to Palm Beach, Fla., where Robert Lappin, of the foundation that funds students’ trips to Israel, spends winters in the same oceanfront resort where Madoff once rented cabanas.
“I would bump into him occasionally,’’ said Lappin, now 91, who also saw Madoff’s brother Peter. “They seemed like nice people,’’ he recalled thinking.
Deborah Coltin, executive director of the Lappin Foundation, remembers the shock of the news when they learned that Robert Lappin had lost $83 million across five business and charitable accounts he entrusted to Madoff.
“On December 12th, we closed — there was no money left,’’ she said. “Everybody lost their jobs, and we closed. Everything just stopped.’’
But they never skipped a year of the Israel excursion. Lappin personally covered his employees’ retirement funds lost to Madoff, and a man anonymously gave the foundation $100,000 to continue its mission of teaching kids about Israel. Now the group raises $500,000 a year for the youth trip, and Robert Lappin pays the rest, about $150,000, he said.
It's the agenda-pu$hing and indoctrinating charity of inculcation.
Lappin himself faces the prospect of having to repay $2.7 million to the Madoff trustee, past investment gains that allegedly belong to other people. But Lappin said he doesn’t worry about it much: “I think we turned a very sad and ugly experience into something that’s good.’’
Harry Markopolos, the famous Madoff whistle-blower from Whitman who was ignored by regulators for years, has made a business of scoping out fraud. He’s testified before Congress, written a book, and been the subject of a documentary.
Oh, he's made a bu$ine$$ out of it, huh?
I'm so sick of this $orry $hit $will called Jewi$h journali$m.
Markopolos has mellowed but is still amazed that, “No one at the big banks has gone to jail.’’
I'm not amazed. Do slave puppets incarcerate their string-pulling masters?
Indeed, while Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, and his associates face jail terms, none of the sophisticated investors, bankers, and hedge fund managers who reaped his strangely large returns for years have faced criminal charges.
Bernie went to jail because he stole from his own and not stooped goyim.
Said Markopolos, “The big banks obviously have a get-out-of-jail-free card.’’
Given to them by Eric Holder.
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I've got an Idea:
"Donor-advised funds: Where charity goes to wait; $45 billion of American philanthropic money has been given—but not received" by Leon Neyfakh | Globe Staff, December 01, 2013
When Americans think about donating money to charity around the holidays, they tend to think of the organizations whose names have become practically synonymous with philanthropy: the United Way, the Salvation Army, Feed the Children.
But on a list of the top money-raising charities in the country, the name at number two is one most people have never heard: Fidelity Charitable, the philanthropic arm of the giant Boston-based asset management firm. In 2012, Fidelity Charitable collected $3.6 billion—more than the American Cancer Society, or the Boys and Girls Club, or the American Red Cross.
Like those better-known institutions, Fidelity Charitable generates an immediate tax deduction for its donors. But the resemblance ends there. The fund—actually an aggregation of about 58,000 personal accounts opened by Fidelity’s clients—is one of several massive entities that have sprouted over the past two decades under the auspices of financial services companies like Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Vanguard, and Goldman Sachs. Though legally public charities, they are more like holding tanks that let would-be philanthropists deposit money, collect the tax benefits up front, and then decide later which causes they actually want to give to. Legally, there’s no limit to how long the money can sit there.
So the benevolent and warm-hearted "charity" from our wealthy ma$ters is actually to themselves and their tax bill while the banks hold onto the money and do what banks do with money!!
Such accounts, known as donor-advised funds, have attracted an ever-larger chunk of American donations since the 1990s. One recent estimate put the total amount of money now sitting in donor-advised funds at $45 billion—more than the endowment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“They’re growing faster than anything else in the nonprofit world,” said Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, which compiles the list of top charities. “Astonishing amounts of money are being put into these things.”
With much of America still suffering from the effects of the Great Recession, the sheer amount of money piling up in tax-exempt investment accounts has begun to rankle some experts on charity. Though it is impossible to draw a direct line that shows these accounts are diverting money from working charities, critics point out that while Americans have been giving away the same percentage of their disposable income for decades, these funds have been growing at a rapid clip. According to a report by the National Philanthropic Trust, one of the biggest donor-advised fund programs in the country, donor-advised funds took in a total of $13.7 billion in contributions last year—almost 40 percent more than in 2007—but paid out only $8.6 billion in grants, a difference of just over $5 billion.
“There’s every reason to think that that money would otherwise be going directly to working charities,” said Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School who has been pressing for more aggressive regulation of donor-advised funds.
Any relation to you know jwho?
The rise of this new form of charitable giving is not a simple story of good vs. greed: By law, all the money in donor-advised funds does ultimately have to go to charity, and proponents say it doesn’t matter when. The funds, they say, may even attract money that might not otherwise be donated and make it possible for people who aren’t wealthy enough to start private foundations to engage in long-term giving. But for critics, it’s part of a worrying shift in philanthropy, away from direct individual giving to investment in huge endowment-style accounts that amass money faster than it is spent, while money managers collect fees along the way. There’s something wrong with a system, they say, in which today’s America pays all the freight—in the form of billions of dollars in tax deductions each year—but the benefits are only a promise to the future.
***
Donor-advised funds might sound like a financial novelty, but technically they’ve existed since the 1930s, when they started being offered by community-focused fund-raising organizations.
But such accounts were just a blip on the American philanthropic landscape until the 1990s, when Fidelity introduced its Charitable Gift Fund, opening the door to other commercial money managers to do the same. At firms like Schwab and Vanguard, the new service allowed investors to deposit money into a special giving account, name it after themselves if they wanted to, and then make grants when they felt like it: granting big lump sums when the desire struck them, or dribbling money out over time. Best of all, it made philanthropy into a user-friendly tax planning vehicle for clients: A person who was selling a business in December—and thus facing a steep tax bill at year’s end—could quickly donate a large sum of money and get a tax deduction without having to decide until later what causes to support.
When financial firms started marketing donor-advised funds, the nonprofit world was initially worried. “Charity is being sold as a way to lock up tax breaks and to control your money,” a director of the Humane Society complained to Barron’s in 1998. In the same article, the national development officer for the Salvation Army was quoted as saying that Fidelity’s Gift Fund “sure seems different from the rest of us who work for a cause we ask the public to support.” The Internal Revenue Service was concerned, too, especially when Fidelity’s competitors in the financial services industry started offering similar funds of their own. “No one quite knew...exactly what the full nature of the financial relationship was between the donor advised funds and the financial institutions that created them,” said Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer who at the time served as the director of exempt organizations division at the IRS. “It was a fairly new phenomenon, and the IRS was grappling with basic legal questions about whether [the money deposited into these funds] was a completed gift or not.”
Ultimately no regulatory action was taken until 2006, when a new law introduced some restrictions meant to prevent donors from self-dealing, and started requiring organizations like Fidelity Charitable to disclose how much money, in aggregate, their clients were contributing and giving out every year. Since then, more charitable dollars have stacked up in these accounts with every passing year. In terms of total assets, according to the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics, Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard now rank among the nation’s wealthiest 100 nonprofits, a list otherwise populated with richly endowed hospital networks and Ivy League universities
In response to this dizzying growth, a small group of critics, mostly from academia and the nonprofit world, have started pointing out the unintended ways that donor-advised funds are distorting American philanthropy.
One concern is that, even if you agree donor-advised funds are a good thing, having them managed by financial firms changes the landscape of philanthropy significantly. Someone who opens a donor-advised fund at a community-based nonprofit like the Boston Foundation, for instance, can count on getting philanthropic advice from the foundation, which offers its expertise on local needs to help donors disburse their money most usefully. Such foundations also serve as an “open window” to which local nonprofits can appeal in search of funding, said Boston Foundation president Paul Grogan. Programs like Fidelity Charitable, on the other hand, make a point of not endorsing or promoting specific charities. And because the individual account-holders can essentially operate behind a veil of anonymity, nonprofits have no way of getting their message out to a huge swath of potential donors.
“One of the great frustrations for nonprofits is that there’s no transparency regarding donor-advised funds,” said Aaron Dorfman, executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group. “You might see that a grant went from Fidelity to an organization like yours, but you have no idea whose fund at Fidelity recommended that grant, so, you don’t really know who to approach.”
The critics’ more systemic complaint is that the funds undermine the basic bargain of the charitable deduction, one of the biggest tax breaks the US government offers. Essentially, the government forgoes billions of dollars of revenue every year, as long as the money flows into charity. With donor-advised funds, there’s simply no legal requirement that the money flow at all. “They’re getting the same deduction as if they had given the money to a soup kitchen,” said Alan Cantor, a New Hampshire-based consultant who works with nonprofits. “We as taxpayers [should be able to] force them to meet the needs of society by getting the money out, where it’ll do some good.”
Having no payout requirements on donor-advised funds not only bottles up money that society has already subsidized, but creates potential conflicts of interest for the for-profit money managers who invest the money in the accounts. “All of the relevant parties—the sponsoring organizations, the commercial bank they’re related to, and the financial adviser for the donor—are all better off if the money stays in the fund and doesn’t go to a charity,” said Madoff. “If it goes out to the Salvation Army, all those parties lose their fees.”
Another problem is that private foundations, which are required by law to donate at least 5 percent of their assets per year, have started using donor-advised funds as a way to satisfy their payout requirements: According to a report by Giving USA, Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard reported that private foundations contributed a total of $92 million to their donor-advised programs in 2011—a significant chunk of which might have otherwise been put to work.
“Eventually all the money has to go to charity—that’s absolutely true and that’s a good thing....But how much do we want funds to just sit there and be warehoused?” says Dorfman.
Madoff has argued that the money deposited in donor-advised funds should be pushed out of the account within seven years, while Cantor suggests donors should be required to pay out 20 percent annually. “I think it’s more important to feed hungry people now...than to put money into an account that may or may not at some point in the future be used to help them,” Cantor said. “That may sound melodramatic, but that’s the choice people are making.”
***
For proponents of donor-advised funds—not just the ones overseen by commercial companies, but the hundreds operated by community foundations as well—these arguments in support of more regulation sound academic at best, and disconnected from reality at worst. Even though there’s no payout requirement on individual accounts, they say, the money flows fairly generously.
According to the National Philanthropic Trust, which produces an annual report on the donor-advised fund sector, the national payout rate in 2012 for all American donor-advised funds combined was 16 percent. In a phone interview with Ideas, Fidelity Charitable senior vice president Amy Danforth pointed out that those figures are much higher than what is typical of private foundations, which usually don’t pay out more than the 5 percent that is legally required of them.
“Regulation usually follows a problem,” Danforth said. “And from our vantage point, we simply don’t see a problem with the volume of grant-making out of the donor-advised fund space.”
Danforth said that Fidelity monitors its account activity and considers an account “inactive” if a client hasn’t made a grant for seven years. “Less than 1 percent of our accounts in any given year fall into the inactive donor camp,” she said. Dormant accounts are also rare at the National Philanthropic Trust, according to its president and CEO Eileen Heisman. “There’s some idea that’s been put forth that we’re sitting on all these assets,” said Heisman. But, she added, “We’ve actually given away half our assets in 17 years of being in existence.”
But on a donor-by-donor basis, it’s simply impossible to know whether the money is going to work. The Congressional Research Service pointed out in a report last year that an organization that sponsors a large number of donor-advised funds can achieve a 16 percent payout rate if 20 percent of its accounts pay out an average of 80 percent, while the rest pay out nothing at all. As long as the law allows accounts to sit dormant, or nearly so, that means organizations like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army may be losing out.
When donor-assisted funds were obscure and little used, this didn’t matter as much. But as they claim a growing percentage of America’s charitable dollars, the imbalance of benefits and obligations starts to matter more. It makes sense, critics say, to ensure—even if it’s just a backstop—that the money being donated is being spent on the public good at a time when we need it.
“The charitable deduction is expensive for the federal government....So we need to see, what are we getting for this investment of resources?” said Madoff. “And the problem with donor-advised funds is we don’t know what we’re getting.”
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At least you are learning something:
"Brandeis faculty urges renewal of ties with Palestinian school" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff, December 14, 2013
The student rally at Al-Quds University was expected to include a ceremony to honor the best students at the Palestinian campus near Jerusalem, as well as Islamic music and a dramatization about student life. Instead, what occurred on Nov. 5 stunned officials at Brandeis University, prompting them to suspend the Waltham college’s long academic partnership with Al-Quds.
The Al-Quds students, clad in black, military-style uniforms and black masks, raised their arms in what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Banners with images of dead suicide bombers hung in the campus square.
This crap is becoming so convoluted, with all the agendas being thrown into the pot by my Zionist Jew chefs of the pre$$, that I'm full up.
A Brandeis University team that visited the Palestinian campus after the demonstration is asking Brandeis president Frederick M. Lawrence to reestablish ties with Al-Quds, saying that the Arab school’s leadership acted quickly and appropriately after the demonstration.
“Our clear impression from the five days we spent at Al-Quds University was of a leadership that was angry and appalled,” said the report, issued this week by three members of the Brandeis faculty who have long ties to the partnership, which has included faculty and student exchanges and academic development.
“Al-Quds University is playing a courageous front-line role in working for peace by engaging those minority factions in its midst that hold extreme attitudes,” the report said. “We call on Brandeis University to resume and indeed redouble its commitment to this scholarly partnership.”
Ellen de Graffenreid, a spokeswoman for Brandeis, stressed that the suspension does not mean the relationship has been terminated. Lawrence, she said, “has been in contact with the administration at Al-Quds and is having discussions about what the next steps would be.”
The final catalyst for the suspension of the partnership appears to have been a Nov. 17 letter by Al-Quds president Sari Nusseibeh to his university community, which Brandeis had hoped would be an unequivocal condemnation of the rally staged by a student group affiliated with the Islamic Jihad political party.
Nusseibeh, who has a record of peace efforts in the region, opened the letter by saying that “the university is often subjected to vilification campaigns by Jewish extremists with the purpose of discrediting its reputation.”
Except they are not extremists anymore.
Palestinians Exact Price Tag From Israeli Settlers
Israel's Tea Party
At least you are learning something:
"Brandeis faculty urges renewal of ties with Palestinian school" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff, December 14, 2013
The student rally at Al-Quds University was expected to include a ceremony to honor the best students at the Palestinian campus near Jerusalem, as well as Islamic music and a dramatization about student life. Instead, what occurred on Nov. 5 stunned officials at Brandeis University, prompting them to suspend the Waltham college’s long academic partnership with Al-Quds.
The Al-Quds students, clad in black, military-style uniforms and black masks, raised their arms in what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Banners with images of dead suicide bombers hung in the campus square.
This crap is becoming so convoluted, with all the agendas being thrown into the pot by my Zionist Jew chefs of the pre$$, that I'm full up.
A Brandeis University team that visited the Palestinian campus after the demonstration is asking Brandeis president Frederick M. Lawrence to reestablish ties with Al-Quds, saying that the Arab school’s leadership acted quickly and appropriately after the demonstration.
“Our clear impression from the five days we spent at Al-Quds University was of a leadership that was angry and appalled,” said the report, issued this week by three members of the Brandeis faculty who have long ties to the partnership, which has included faculty and student exchanges and academic development.
“Al-Quds University is playing a courageous front-line role in working for peace by engaging those minority factions in its midst that hold extreme attitudes,” the report said. “We call on Brandeis University to resume and indeed redouble its commitment to this scholarly partnership.”
Ellen de Graffenreid, a spokeswoman for Brandeis, stressed that the suspension does not mean the relationship has been terminated. Lawrence, she said, “has been in contact with the administration at Al-Quds and is having discussions about what the next steps would be.”
The final catalyst for the suspension of the partnership appears to have been a Nov. 17 letter by Al-Quds president Sari Nusseibeh to his university community, which Brandeis had hoped would be an unequivocal condemnation of the rally staged by a student group affiliated with the Islamic Jihad political party.
Nusseibeh, who has a record of peace efforts in the region, opened the letter by saying that “the university is often subjected to vilification campaigns by Jewish extremists with the purpose of discrediting its reputation.”
Except they are not extremists anymore.
Palestinians Exact Price Tag From Israeli Settlers
Israel's Tea Party
Somehow they are not assholes like the ones we have here. Just well-meaning Jewish boys gone a little astray, huh?
He added, “These extreme elements spare no effort to exploit some rare but nonetheless damaging events or scenes which occur on the campus of Al-Quds University . . . to capitalize on events in ways that misrepresent the university as promoting inhumane, anti-Semitic, fascist, and Nazi ideologies.”
The next day, when Lawrence received an English translation of the letter, the partnership was suspended.
“While Brandeis has an unwavering commitment to open dialogue on difficult issues, we are also obliged to recognize intolerance when we see it, and we cannot — and will not — turn a blind eye to intolerance,” the nonsectarian university with deep roots in the Jewish community said....
I'm going to turn a blind eye to the rest of this Zionist slop.
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Some folks eyes are wide open:
"US academia split over boycott targeting Israel" by Marcella Bombardieri | Globe Staff, December 25, 2013
The decision last week by a US organization of scholars to boycott Israeli academic institutions has ignited debate on college campuses around New England and beyond about academic freedom, the role of politics in scholarly life, and US support for Israel.
The US government supports Israel; the American people do not.
The American Studies Association said its boycott was to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and what it described as the involvement of Israeli universities in supporting government policy.
Since the association announced the boycott Dec. 16, prominent academic leaders — including Boston University president Robert A. Brown, Harvard president Drew Faust, Yale president Peter Salovey, and Faust’s predecessor, Lawrence H. Summers — have condemned the move as a violation of academic freedom.
When shoe is on other foot the long-forgotten Ahmadinejad -- you know, the guy we were told was the next Hitler -- is banned from speaking at an AmeriKan university.
The American Studies program at Brandeis University is withdrawing from the national American Studies Association in protest, and Brandeis President Fred Lawrence on Tuesday issued a statement urging other universities to “follow our lead and disassociate from the ASA.”
Major academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Universities, have also decried the boycott.
“I just think it’s really wrongheaded,” Brown said. “Your hope is universities are places where you can have dialogue and discussion in a civil way on very complicated issues. Something like this just shuts it down and polarizes the community.”
What bubble have you been living in?
Like many other critics, Brown questioned the decision to single out Israel. “If you went around the world and decided all the groups you felt were discriminated against, either by their governments or by universities, it’s a long list,” he said.
I'm sick of the whining and no longer want to here (sic) it.
But two-thirds of the 1,252 ASA members who cast ballots favored the resolution, and several said they did so in support of academic freedom — the freedom of Palestinians whose ability to work and study is constrained by Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza.
They are the biggest outdoor prisons in existence on planet earth today.
“When diplomatic means fail, civil resistance is a peaceful means of trying to call attention to political problems,” said Eric Cheyfitz, an American Studies professor at Cornell University, who is Jewish and has a daughter and grandchildren living in Israel.
“This was used in South Africa, boycotts were used in our civil rights movement, they were used in the farm worker movement,” Cheyfitz added. “So the boycott is a time-honored, time-tested mode of civil disobedience in the face of the refusal of political entities to do social justice.”
Brought to you by the likes of Mr. Gandhi.
The ASA’s decision is a boost for the Palestinian Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, known as BDS, which in 2005 issued a call from more than 100 Palestinian organizations for sanctions against Israeli.
It's also raising a ruckus in Israel!
The Association for Asian American Studies joined the boycott movement earlier this year, and the leadership of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association did so last week. But the movement has been much more popular in Europe than in the United States.
The American Studies Association, a professional group of about 4,000 scholars who study American history and culture, said it has been debating a boycott since 2006. After its leadership endorsed the idea in early December, the organization put the matter to a vote.
Took them long enough.
The decision to boycott Israeli academic institutions, according to the group’s statement, “emerges from the context of US military and other support for Israel; Israel’s violation of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; [and] the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights.”
It is something that can no longer be hidden or ignored.
The association described its boycott as limited: a refusal to attend conferences officially sponsored by Israeli universities, or to enter into formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions.
It doesn’t have any such collaborations anyway, said Executive Director John Stephens.
It is not, the group said, a boycott of Israeli scholars, travel to Israel, or “ordinary academic exchange.”
A stream of criticism from a number of prominent university presidents followed the American Studies vote.
“Academic boycotts subvert the academic freedoms and values necessary to the free flow of ideas, which is the lifeblood of the worldwide community of scholars,” Faust said in a statement issued Friday.
Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last week that, as a Jew, he finds many policies of the current Israeli government abhorrent. Still, he questioned, “not in North Korea, not in Russia or Zimbabwe or China — one has to start with Israel. Really?”
Because Israel has received a pass for so long.
To answer that line of criticism, Cheyfitz cited the unique level of support the United States provides to the Israeli government, as well as the call for support from the BDS movement. “If we get a call from Egyptian society, if we get a call from Chinese civil society, if we get a call from Syrian civil society, we certainly will take a look at that call,” he said.
As Harvard president in 2002, Summers famously criticized professors who advocated divestment from Israel as “anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.”
Pfft!
That's a tired old card that has been so played. It is ISRAEL'S BEHAVIOR that is the problem. I couldn't care less what religion they are. They just happen to be Jewish.
In a recent interview on the “Charlie Rose” talk show, Summers said he hoped “responsible university leaders will become very reluctant to see their university’s funds used to finance faculty membership and faculty travel to an association that is showing itself not to be a scholarly association, but really more of a political tool.”
Says the man most responsible for the disintegration of the U.S. economy.
For Brandeis’s American Studies program, it was an easy — if sad — decision to withdraw from the ASA, said the program’s chair, Thomas Doherty.
Doherty said he was most upset about the impact of the boycott on PhD students and young, untenured scholars who disagree with the decision, because they may now feel unwelcome within the group. Yet they depend on the imprimatur of the ASA — in invitations to speak at conferences or publication in the group’s journal — to establish their careers.
He also sees it as an harmful distraction for an entire academic discipline.
“This is our brand now, thanks to this vote,” he said. “We’re known for a political position on the state of Israel. We’re not known for doing good scholarly work in the field of Puritan studies or African-American history.”
It was founded on politics so how can the position be divorced from that (like Israel divorcing Palestinians from their land)?
--more--"
Related:
"MIT’s president, L. Rafael Reif, has added his voice in opposition to the recent decision by a US organization of scholars to boycott Israeli academic institutions."
M.I.T. is very prominent in my paper.
"US professors’ group backs Israel college boycott; US professors target treatment of Palestinians" by Richard Pérez-Peña | New York Times, December 17, 2013
NEW YORK — An association of American professors with almost 5,000 members has voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities, the group announced Monday, making it the largest academic group in the United States to back a growing movement to isolate Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.
Blackmail, threats, and subterfuge can only cow a people so long.
The group, the American Studies Association, said its members approved the boycott resolution by 2-to-1 in online balloting that concluded Sunday night, with about a quarter of the members voting.
“The resolution is in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and it aspires to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians,” the American Studies Association said in a statement released Monday.
The statement cited “Israel’s violations of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights,” and other factors.
Boycott supporters concede that resolutions by professors’ groups are primarily symbolic, as long as no American college or university supports such an action.
The boycott called on American schools and academic groups to ban collaboration with Israeli institutions, but individual Israeli scholars would still be able to attend conferences, lecture at American universities, or do research with American colleagues, as long as they did not officially represent Israeli universities or the government.
Still, attempts in the West to isolate Israel have received close attention in that country. The greatest danger to Israel may lie in calls for an economic boycott — an idea that has gained much more traction in Europe, where Israel has close trade ties — which resulted last week in a Dutch company, Vitens, announcing that it would no longer do business with Israel’s national water company.
Hit them where it hurts!
Related: Israel's Waterworld
Also see: Boston Globe article on water partnership gets the story wrong in Massachusetts and Israel/Palestine
What else is new? They get everything wrong!
The national council of the American Studies Association voted unanimously on Dec. 4 in favor of a boycott resolution and then put the issue to its members.
The group’s stance has pitted scholars and organizations against one another in a heated debate about the ethics of academic boycotts, the motives behind the campaign, and whether Israel is being singled out unfairly.
Wah, wah, wah.
The movement to cut off relations with Israeli academic and cultural institutions dates back a decade, but organizers say it was not until April that an American academic group of any size, the Association for Asian American Studies, endorsed a boycott.
The Modern Language Association’s annual meeting next month will include a discussion session on academic boycotts, and it will consider a motion critical of Israel for restricting professors’ freedom to visit Palestinian universities.
The American Studies Association has never before called for an academic boycott of any nation’s universities, said Curtis Marez, the group’s president and an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego.
He did not dispute that many nations, including many of Israel’s neighbors, are generally judged to have human rights records that are worse than Israel’s or comparable, but he said, “one has to start somewhere.”
I think it is the length in this case.
The singular focus on Israel has become the most pointed part of the boycott debate, with opponents seeing signs of anti-Semitism — which supporters vehemently deny — and arguing that the real aim of boycott backers is not to change Israel’s behavior, but to eliminate the state.
Related: Memory Hole: Future Vision of Israel
Whatever will be will be.
On the Charlie Rose show on PBS last week, Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard University president and former Treasury secretary, disparaged “the idea that of all the countries in the world that might be thought to have human rights abuses, that might be thought to have inappropriate foreign policies, that might be thought to be doing things wrong, the idea that there’s only one that is worthy of boycott, and that is Israel.”
He called for a kind of reverse boycott, saying that universities should reconsider paying for faculty members to belong to the American Studies Association or to participate in its events.
Meeting out retribution for speaking out is going to backfire, you crypto-Jew $hit.
--more--"
"Brandeis unit cuts ties with group over boycott of Israeli schools
A Brandeis University program has cut ties with a US scholarly association that has joined a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as a form of protest against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The American Studies Program at Brandeis, a nonsectarian, Jewish-sponsored university, announced on its website that it will end its relationship with the American Studies Association. “We view the recent vote by the membership to affirm an academic boycott of Israel as a politicization of the discipline and a rebuke to the kind of open inquiry that a scholarly association should foster,” the program said. The American Studies Association, which says it has 5,000 individual members and 2,200 institutional subscribers, announced Monday that it had voted to join the boycott."
Related: A culture of anti-Semitic poison at Al-Quds University
Brandeis looks to resume ties with Palestinian university
Money a more $en$itive i$$ue I gue$$.
"Israeli government officials have either dismissed the boycott campaign as ineffective or portrayed it as an attempt with strong anti-Semitic overtones to delegitimize the Jewish state. Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, denounced the boycott decision of the US scholars as a ‘‘travesty,’’ saying this week that ‘‘singling out of the Jewish state for boycott is no different than the many attempts throughout history to single out Jews and hold them to a different standard.’’ While talk of boycott has unleashed strong emotions in Israel, government officials have been watching Europe’s more strident stance on Israeli settlements with greater concern."
They delegitimize themselves with the hypocrisy and chutzpah!
As for different standards, take a look at AmeriKan ju$tice!
Related: Israel and the myopic BDS movement
Some folks eyes are wide open:
"US academia split over boycott targeting Israel" by Marcella Bombardieri | Globe Staff, December 25, 2013
The decision last week by a US organization of scholars to boycott Israeli academic institutions has ignited debate on college campuses around New England and beyond about academic freedom, the role of politics in scholarly life, and US support for Israel.
The US government supports Israel; the American people do not.
The American Studies Association said its boycott was to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and what it described as the involvement of Israeli universities in supporting government policy.
Since the association announced the boycott Dec. 16, prominent academic leaders — including Boston University president Robert A. Brown, Harvard president Drew Faust, Yale president Peter Salovey, and Faust’s predecessor, Lawrence H. Summers — have condemned the move as a violation of academic freedom.
When shoe is on other foot the long-forgotten Ahmadinejad -- you know, the guy we were told was the next Hitler -- is banned from speaking at an AmeriKan university.
The American Studies program at Brandeis University is withdrawing from the national American Studies Association in protest, and Brandeis President Fred Lawrence on Tuesday issued a statement urging other universities to “follow our lead and disassociate from the ASA.”
Major academic organizations, including the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Universities, have also decried the boycott.
“I just think it’s really wrongheaded,” Brown said. “Your hope is universities are places where you can have dialogue and discussion in a civil way on very complicated issues. Something like this just shuts it down and polarizes the community.”
What bubble have you been living in?
Like many other critics, Brown questioned the decision to single out Israel. “If you went around the world and decided all the groups you felt were discriminated against, either by their governments or by universities, it’s a long list,” he said.
I'm sick of the whining and no longer want to here (sic) it.
But two-thirds of the 1,252 ASA members who cast ballots favored the resolution, and several said they did so in support of academic freedom — the freedom of Palestinians whose ability to work and study is constrained by Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza.
They are the biggest outdoor prisons in existence on planet earth today.
“When diplomatic means fail, civil resistance is a peaceful means of trying to call attention to political problems,” said Eric Cheyfitz, an American Studies professor at Cornell University, who is Jewish and has a daughter and grandchildren living in Israel.
“This was used in South Africa, boycotts were used in our civil rights movement, they were used in the farm worker movement,” Cheyfitz added. “So the boycott is a time-honored, time-tested mode of civil disobedience in the face of the refusal of political entities to do social justice.”
Brought to you by the likes of Mr. Gandhi.
The ASA’s decision is a boost for the Palestinian Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, known as BDS, which in 2005 issued a call from more than 100 Palestinian organizations for sanctions against Israeli.
It's also raising a ruckus in Israel!
The Association for Asian American Studies joined the boycott movement earlier this year, and the leadership of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association did so last week. But the movement has been much more popular in Europe than in the United States.
The American Studies Association, a professional group of about 4,000 scholars who study American history and culture, said it has been debating a boycott since 2006. After its leadership endorsed the idea in early December, the organization put the matter to a vote.
Took them long enough.
The decision to boycott Israeli academic institutions, according to the group’s statement, “emerges from the context of US military and other support for Israel; Israel’s violation of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; [and] the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights.”
It is something that can no longer be hidden or ignored.
The association described its boycott as limited: a refusal to attend conferences officially sponsored by Israeli universities, or to enter into formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions.
It doesn’t have any such collaborations anyway, said Executive Director John Stephens.
It is not, the group said, a boycott of Israeli scholars, travel to Israel, or “ordinary academic exchange.”
A stream of criticism from a number of prominent university presidents followed the American Studies vote.
“Academic boycotts subvert the academic freedoms and values necessary to the free flow of ideas, which is the lifeblood of the worldwide community of scholars,” Faust said in a statement issued Friday.
Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last week that, as a Jew, he finds many policies of the current Israeli government abhorrent. Still, he questioned, “not in North Korea, not in Russia or Zimbabwe or China — one has to start with Israel. Really?”
Because Israel has received a pass for so long.
To answer that line of criticism, Cheyfitz cited the unique level of support the United States provides to the Israeli government, as well as the call for support from the BDS movement. “If we get a call from Egyptian society, if we get a call from Chinese civil society, if we get a call from Syrian civil society, we certainly will take a look at that call,” he said.
As Harvard president in 2002, Summers famously criticized professors who advocated divestment from Israel as “anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent.”
Pfft!
That's a tired old card that has been so played. It is ISRAEL'S BEHAVIOR that is the problem. I couldn't care less what religion they are. They just happen to be Jewish.
In a recent interview on the “Charlie Rose” talk show, Summers said he hoped “responsible university leaders will become very reluctant to see their university’s funds used to finance faculty membership and faculty travel to an association that is showing itself not to be a scholarly association, but really more of a political tool.”
Says the man most responsible for the disintegration of the U.S. economy.
For Brandeis’s American Studies program, it was an easy — if sad — decision to withdraw from the ASA, said the program’s chair, Thomas Doherty.
Doherty said he was most upset about the impact of the boycott on PhD students and young, untenured scholars who disagree with the decision, because they may now feel unwelcome within the group. Yet they depend on the imprimatur of the ASA — in invitations to speak at conferences or publication in the group’s journal — to establish their careers.
He also sees it as an harmful distraction for an entire academic discipline.
“This is our brand now, thanks to this vote,” he said. “We’re known for a political position on the state of Israel. We’re not known for doing good scholarly work in the field of Puritan studies or African-American history.”
It was founded on politics so how can the position be divorced from that (like Israel divorcing Palestinians from their land)?
--more--"
Related:
"MIT’s president, L. Rafael Reif, has added his voice in opposition to the recent decision by a US organization of scholars to boycott Israeli academic institutions."
M.I.T. is very prominent in my paper.
"US professors’ group backs Israel college boycott; US professors target treatment of Palestinians" by Richard Pérez-Peña | New York Times, December 17, 2013
NEW YORK — An association of American professors with almost 5,000 members has voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities, the group announced Monday, making it the largest academic group in the United States to back a growing movement to isolate Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.
Blackmail, threats, and subterfuge can only cow a people so long.
The group, the American Studies Association, said its members approved the boycott resolution by 2-to-1 in online balloting that concluded Sunday night, with about a quarter of the members voting.
“The resolution is in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and it aspires to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians,” the American Studies Association said in a statement released Monday.
The statement cited “Israel’s violations of international law and UN resolutions; the documented impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights,” and other factors.
Boycott supporters concede that resolutions by professors’ groups are primarily symbolic, as long as no American college or university supports such an action.
The boycott called on American schools and academic groups to ban collaboration with Israeli institutions, but individual Israeli scholars would still be able to attend conferences, lecture at American universities, or do research with American colleagues, as long as they did not officially represent Israeli universities or the government.
Still, attempts in the West to isolate Israel have received close attention in that country. The greatest danger to Israel may lie in calls for an economic boycott — an idea that has gained much more traction in Europe, where Israel has close trade ties — which resulted last week in a Dutch company, Vitens, announcing that it would no longer do business with Israel’s national water company.
Hit them where it hurts!
Related: Israel's Waterworld
Also see: Boston Globe article on water partnership gets the story wrong in Massachusetts and Israel/Palestine
What else is new? They get everything wrong!
The national council of the American Studies Association voted unanimously on Dec. 4 in favor of a boycott resolution and then put the issue to its members.
The group’s stance has pitted scholars and organizations against one another in a heated debate about the ethics of academic boycotts, the motives behind the campaign, and whether Israel is being singled out unfairly.
Wah, wah, wah.
The movement to cut off relations with Israeli academic and cultural institutions dates back a decade, but organizers say it was not until April that an American academic group of any size, the Association for Asian American Studies, endorsed a boycott.
The Modern Language Association’s annual meeting next month will include a discussion session on academic boycotts, and it will consider a motion critical of Israel for restricting professors’ freedom to visit Palestinian universities.
The American Studies Association has never before called for an academic boycott of any nation’s universities, said Curtis Marez, the group’s president and an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego.
He did not dispute that many nations, including many of Israel’s neighbors, are generally judged to have human rights records that are worse than Israel’s or comparable, but he said, “one has to start somewhere.”
I think it is the length in this case.
The singular focus on Israel has become the most pointed part of the boycott debate, with opponents seeing signs of anti-Semitism — which supporters vehemently deny — and arguing that the real aim of boycott backers is not to change Israel’s behavior, but to eliminate the state.
Related: Memory Hole: Future Vision of Israel
Whatever will be will be.
On the Charlie Rose show on PBS last week, Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard University president and former Treasury secretary, disparaged “the idea that of all the countries in the world that might be thought to have human rights abuses, that might be thought to have inappropriate foreign policies, that might be thought to be doing things wrong, the idea that there’s only one that is worthy of boycott, and that is Israel.”
He called for a kind of reverse boycott, saying that universities should reconsider paying for faculty members to belong to the American Studies Association or to participate in its events.
Meeting out retribution for speaking out is going to backfire, you crypto-Jew $hit.
--more--"
"Brandeis unit cuts ties with group over boycott of Israeli schools
A Brandeis University program has cut ties with a US scholarly association that has joined a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as a form of protest against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The American Studies Program at Brandeis, a nonsectarian, Jewish-sponsored university, announced on its website that it will end its relationship with the American Studies Association. “We view the recent vote by the membership to affirm an academic boycott of Israel as a politicization of the discipline and a rebuke to the kind of open inquiry that a scholarly association should foster,” the program said. The American Studies Association, which says it has 5,000 individual members and 2,200 institutional subscribers, announced Monday that it had voted to join the boycott."
Related: A culture of anti-Semitic poison at Al-Quds University
Brandeis looks to resume ties with Palestinian university
Money a more $en$itive i$$ue I gue$$.
"Israeli government officials have either dismissed the boycott campaign as ineffective or portrayed it as an attempt with strong anti-Semitic overtones to delegitimize the Jewish state. Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, denounced the boycott decision of the US scholars as a ‘‘travesty,’’ saying this week that ‘‘singling out of the Jewish state for boycott is no different than the many attempts throughout history to single out Jews and hold them to a different standard.’’ While talk of boycott has unleashed strong emotions in Israel, government officials have been watching Europe’s more strident stance on Israeli settlements with greater concern."
They delegitimize themselves with the hypocrisy and chutzpah!
As for different standards, take a look at AmeriKan ju$tice!
Related: Israel and the myopic BDS movement
Speaking of myopic:
"In Tel Aviv, gay Holocaust victims recalled" by Aron Heller | Associated Press, January 11, 2014
TEL AVIV — Israel’s cultural and financial capital unveiled a memorial on Friday honoring gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis, the first specific recognition in Israel for non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Tucked away in a Tel Aviv park, a concrete, triangle-shaped plaque details the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people under Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. It resembles the pink triangles Nazis forced gays to wear in concentration camps during World War II and states in English, Hebrew, and German: ‘‘In memory of those persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation and gender identity.’’
The landmark joins similar memorials in Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco, and Sydney dedicated to gay victims of the Holocaust. While Israel has scores of monuments for the genocide, the Tel Aviv memorial is the first that deals universally with Jewish and non-Jewish victims alike and highlights the Jewish state’s rise as one of the world’s most progressive countries for gay rights.
‘‘I think in Israel today it is very important to show that a human being is a human being is a human being,’’ Mayor Ron Huldai said at the dedication ceremony, where a rainbow flag waved alongside Israel’s blue-and-white flag. ‘‘It shows that we are not only caring for ourselves but for everybody who suffered. These are our values — to see everyone as a human being.’’
Israel was born out of the Holocaust and its 6 million Jewish victims remain seared in the nation’s psyche. Israel holds an annual memorial day where sirens stop traffic across the nation, it sends soldiers and youth on trips to concentration camp sites, and cites the Holocaust as justification for an independent Jewish state so Jews will ‘‘never again’’ be defenseless.
I'm really tired of the narrative, sorry.
But after 70 years, Tel Aviv councilman Eran Lev thought it was time to add a universal element to the commemoration.
‘‘The significance here is that we are recognizing that there were other victims of the Holocaust, not just Jews,’’ said Lev, who initiated the project in his term in office.
As part of their persecution of gays, the Nazis kept files on 100,000 people, mostly men. About 15,000 were sent to camps and at least half were killed.
Unlike their persecution of Jews, however, there was no grand Nazi plan to exterminate gays. Nazis viewed being gay as a ‘‘public health problem’’ since those German men did not produce children, said Deborah Dwork, director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester.
Nor Jews, nor did it happen the way we were told and "learned."
--more--"
Then we had the 90s version pushing Jewish supremacism and neuroticism -- and we laughed and laughed!
But on to more important matters:
"President Barack Obama intends to nominate Stanley Fischer, a former head of the Bank of Israel, to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, replacing Janet Yellen, who is ascending to the central bank’s chairmanship. Fischer, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, is considered a leading expert on monetary policy. He was a long-time professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Departing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was one of his students. Fischer served as chief economist at the World Bank and deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. He led the Bank of Israel from 2005 until 2013. Obama also is nominating Lael Brainard as a Fed governor. Brainard served as the undersecretary for international affairs at Treasury during Obama’s first term. She left the administration recently.
See: No More Brainards At Treasury
You can pick at that one for a while.
--more--"
So this dual national (can't serve two masters) was in the thick of all the crises and guided Israel through them, huh?
Also see: Tuesday's Tour: Walsh and the Weather
Time to stop yelling about the obvious.
Then we had the 90s version pushing Jewish supremacism and neuroticism -- and we laughed and laughed!
But on to more important matters:
"President Barack Obama intends to nominate Stanley Fischer, a former head of the Bank of Israel, to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, replacing Janet Yellen, who is ascending to the central bank’s chairmanship. Fischer, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, is considered a leading expert on monetary policy. He was a long-time professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Departing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was one of his students. Fischer served as chief economist at the World Bank and deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. He led the Bank of Israel from 2005 until 2013. Obama also is nominating Lael Brainard as a Fed governor. Brainard served as the undersecretary for international affairs at Treasury during Obama’s first term. She left the administration recently.
See: No More Brainards At Treasury
You can pick at that one for a while.
--more--"
So this dual national (can't serve two masters) was in the thick of all the crises and guided Israel through them, huh?
Also see: Tuesday's Tour: Walsh and the Weather
Time to stop yelling about the obvious.
