Thank you J Street for misleading Congress members into signing racist letter on Israel - by Stephen M. Flatow

The signatories, except for a few diehard Israel-haters such as Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, are unaware of the reality on the ground in Judea and Samaria. They are unaware because J Street misled them.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
17 March '20..

Did you hear the shocking news? Sixty Congress members just signed a letter demanding that the federal government stop dismantling illegally built homes belonging to whites, though they didn’t object to the dismantling of illegal homes built by African-Americans.

Oops, wait! Sorry, I got that mixed up.

The 60 Congress members demanded that the Israeli government stop dismantling any illegally built homes that have been built by Arabs. But they did not object to Israel’s continuing policy of dismantling of illegally built Jewish homes.

Who would have thought that in this day and age, members of Congress would stoop so low as to make policy recommendations based on the idea that one specific ethnic group should be targeted?

We were supposed to have given up the old practice of making policies based on the color of people’s skin, rather than the content of their character. Images of George Wallace standing in that schoolhouse door were supposed to be just a bad memory. Yet here we are, in 2020, with 60 Democrats signing a letter that echoes the attitudes of those dark times.

J Street played a major role in organizing the congressional letter.

(Continue to Full Column)

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism,” now available on Kindle.

Talking With The Terrorist That J Street Won't Invite - by Daniel Greenfield

‘Shabeh’ in Arabic means ghost. It’s a torture recently made famous by ISIS. But it’s also used by the PA. And these days, Muhammad is a ghost. He can’t go back home. And J Street and other anti-Israel groups which claim to care about human rights would rather listen to the lies of his torturers than to him.

Daniel Greenfield..
Sultan Knish..
09 November '19..

“You are partners in everything that is being done to us, you are collaborating in the suffering of the Palestinian people,” the crackling Arabic-accented voice on the phone says. “You think that you are working for peace, but you are actually supporting the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority.”

He pauses as he ponders the events going on thousands of miles away in Washington D.C.
“You are not working for peace, but for murder.”

That’s Muhammad’s message to J Street. The anti-Israel organization claims that it wants to listen to ‘Palestinians.’ But the man I’m on the phone with is one Palestinian they don’t want to hear from.

While Senator Elizabeth Warren and other 2020 Democrats bemoaned President Trump’s eviction of the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic delegation from Washington D.C., he’s all for it.

“We don’t want them. If the Democrats want them,” Muhammad says. “They can take and keep them.”

While I’m on the phone with Muhammad, and Amit Deri of Reservists on Duty, a pro-Israel campus group getting the real story out there, in D.C., Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar, and other 2020 Democrats are partying with the biggest anti-Israel group in America.
Reservists on Duty, a group of former Israeli soldiers, whose Shillman Fellow activists come to American college campuses to tell the truth about Israel, have a fraction of J Street’s massive budget.

None of the 2020 Democrats come to visit their events. Instead, Amit and other Reservists are in touch with Arabs like Muhammad who are telling the stories that J Street doesn’t want its members to hear.

Muhammad had spent 7 years in an Israeli prison fighting for a Palestinian state. And when he got out of prison, he learned the hard way the ugly reality of what he had really been fighting for.

(Continue to Full Post)

The new knavery: J Street’s foul formula - by David M. Weinberg

The organization’s new knavery: cutting US military aid to coerce Israel into withdrawals. J Street is now less protective of Israeli security than Obama was.

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
01 November '19..
Link: https://www.davidmweinberg.com/2019/11/01/j-streets-foul-formula/

When it was founded some ten years ago, J Street claimed to be a “pro-Israel and pro-peace” organization. That was taken to mean partnering with the mainstream Israeli political left to build support in Washington for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

Since then J Street has morphed into an anti-Israel mutant. The organization spends its time and money besmirching Israel, smearing AIPAC and other leading American Jewish organizations, boosting President Obama’s dangerous deal with Iran (and now trying to bring it back), and supporting political candidates for whom BDS is a badge of honor.

Its campus arm, J Street U, has become a primary vehicle for conveying the most poisonous messages about Israel to students, acting to block student participation in Birthright, and actively campaigning against support for Israel at American universities.

J Street also believes that it has the “moral responsibility” to get America to force Israel to change its policies on the Palestinian issue. Why? Because J Street knows what’s best for Israel. It knows better even than the Israeli political left – which generally doesn’t share J Street’s radical positions on unilateral withdrawals and mass settlement eradication.

J Street knows how to bring peace to the Mideast: Israel needs to be pressured. As if Israel is the party unwilling to compromise. As if Israel hasn’t already offered the Palestinians at Oslo, Camp David, Taba and Annapolis just about everything they want of post-67 Israel. As if the Palestinians have compromised on their demands one wit since the great handshake on the White House lawn. As if the Palestinians are currently willing to enter peace talks with Israel unconditionally.

Nevertheless, it is Israel that needs to be pressured and shamed, say the J Street moral oracles.

Sen. Chuck Schumer’s shocking reversal on J Street - by Stephen M. Flatow

Why has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has called himself “a guardian of Israel,” agreed to be a featured speaker for perhaps the most effective pro-Palestinian lobbying group in Washington?

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
24 October '19..

The decision by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to serve as one of the featured speakers at the upcoming J Street conference should trouble every supporter of Israel. It’s both a boost for the Jewish critics of Israel and a disturbing sign of trends within the Democratic Party.

It was 10 years ago this week, in October 2009, that the New York senator announced that he would not be speaking at that year’s J Street conference in Washington, D.C., following reports that he had initially accepted its invitation to speak.

J Street is probably the most effective pro-Palestinian lobbying group in Washington. There are, of course, many groups operating in the nation’s capital with the word “Palestine” in their name. The secret of J Street’s success is precisely the fact that it does not contain the word.

Still, it uses its Jewish identity to create a veneer of credibility that masks the fact that its agenda is to pressure Israel to give in to Palestinian demands. The groups that openly brandish the “Palestine” label are too obvious; J Street’s more subtle approach is a much more effective way to advance the Palestinian agenda.

No wonder Schumer didn’t want to be associated with J Street. It represented the opposite of what he said he believes. Just a few months later, when he was interviewed on the Nachum Segal radio show in New York City on April 21, 2010, he said: “You have to show Israel that it’s not going to be forced to do things it doesn’t want to do and can’t do. At the same time, you have to show the Palestinians that they are not going to get their way by just sitting back and not giving in, and not recognizing that there is a State of Israel.”

As we all know, politicians spend a lot of time trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing. It’s the nature of their job to constantly worry about where their next votes and donations will be coming from. Back in 2009, Schumer and his staff evidently sized up J Street and decided (correctly) that it was a radical group on the margins of the Jewish community.

(Continue to Full Column)

What do you call peace activists who pretend that their desired outcome is the only possible outcome? - by Elder of Ziyon

They want peace! How can that be bad? But it can be, because they do not think through the potential downsides of what they call "peace." They pretend that their desired outcome is the only possible outcome, and if they are wrong, oh well - there are no consequences to them personally. This is why they are fools.

Elder of Ziyon..
18 September '19..

Last week I tweeted:

Hey, @jstreetdotorg and @peacenowisrael:

You claim, with great confidence, that if only there was a Palestinian state, then things would be much more peaceful in Israel..

What do you base that assumption on? What evidence is there are the result wouldn't be the opposite?

— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) September 12, 2019

Peace Now responded:

2ss would save our democracy by avoiding undemocratic 1-state rule first and foremost. And a peace with deterrence would has worked in both cases where we made peace with Arab neighbors. There are different circumstances, but then there are more aggressive security measures.

— Peace Now (@peacenowisrael) September 12, 2019

I find it interesting that Peace Now does not choose to use "peace" as its primary reason for a two state solution, but an appeal to democracy - "first and foremost." Maybe it should change its name to Democracy Now - oh, wait, that's already taken.

Of course, Israeli leftists said that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and from Areas A and B would not hurt security either because Israel could use deterrence - but new Gaza wars every few years indicates that deterrence is not all it is cracked up to be.

(Continue to Full Post)

The Magical Misery Tour? J Street's Program to Compete with Birthright Israel - by Abe Greenwald

Birthright, for the record, doesn’t ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It just operates with an understanding that Israel is more than its efforts to combat terrorism. And those efforts are overwhelmingly noble. The good news is that J Street has taken only 28 kids on a single trip. Put that against Birthright’s estimated 650,000. It will take a lot of David Halbfingers to make up the difference.

Abe Greenwald..
Commentary Magazine..
11 July '19..

A host of progressive organizations use their ostensible Jewishness as cover or sanction for their campaigns against Israel. J Street, which calls itself “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace,” is perhaps the best known among them. There’s no better example of how this works than J Street’s recent launch of a program to compete with Birthright Israel, the 20-year-old organization that’s provided free trips to Israel for more than 600,000 young Jews around the world.

According to J Street, “the omission and erasure of Palestinian perspectives and narratives on these [Birthright] trips creates a political environment that allows home demolitions, settlement expansion, and other destructive policies of occupation to continue unchallenged.” Instead, the group says, “organized educational trips for young American Jews must present a robust, nuanced and honest view of the current realities on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territory.”

The first such J Street trip, labeled the “Let Our People Know” tour, just concluded. Here, according to a miserable piece by the New York Times’s David Halbfinger, is the “nuanced” and “honest” take that was offered to the 28 American college students involved:

In the West Bank settlement of Har Gilo, they received a harsh history lesson from a veteran opponent of the occupation. Then they toured an impoverished, water-starved Palestinian village that Israeli settlers want to demolish, and visited the city of Hebron, where repeated outbreaks of violence have turned an entire Palestinian business district into a ghost town.

Not a word, either from the “opponent of occupation” or from Halbfinger on the murderous Palestinian anti-Semitic violence that necessitates Israel’s policing of such places in to begin with. Similarly, no mention of the kleptocratic Palestinian leadership that’s consigned generations of Palestinians to certain ruin. Finally, no mention of the fact that the Palestinians have, again and again—and again—refused to make peace with Israel when it was offered.

Here’s some more nuance, J Street style:

(Continue to Full Post)