43 White racism cf Jewish Racism

White racism cf Jewish Racism

(1) Australia's races mix peacefully
(2) Too much immigration in densely-populated Britain leads to 'cold war'
(3) The fall of Racial Segregation in the US
(4) Jim Crow laws imposed racial segregation, even after US Civil War
(5) Israel Lobby criticizes US award to Mary Robinson, over her opposition to Israel's 'racist apartheid state'
(6) Mary Robinson accuses Jewish lobby of bullying tactics
(7) Israel Lobby wants to fence Palestinians out, rages at Obama

(1) Australia's races mix peacefully

http://www.smh.com.au/national/what-weve-got-is-a-great-big-melting-pot-20090807-ecz1.html

What we've got is a great big melting pot

Date: August 08 2009

Sharon Verghis

ON WEEKENDS, Sydney's Willoughby Park playground, in the city's north, becomes a bustling hub of parents and children. The faces arediverse.

Caucasians are in the majority - not a surprise on the historically white north shore - but what strikes the eye is the strong representation of mixed-race children - half-Chinese, half-Indian, half-Indonesian, half-African - on the swings and slides. Grandparents and parents dole out lunch, everything from cheese sandwiches to steaming serves of congee. The accents are equally diverse, from broad Australian and clipped Afrikaans, to singsong Mandarin.

North shore resident Cherie Penney, 31, says there have been some interesting changes in the area's cultural make-up in recent years. "There are heaps of Eurasian kids around now, Anglo-Indians kids as well.'' Penney's own heritage is an exotic one. Her birth mother was Chinese and her birth father was half-German and half-Hawaiian. Australian-born, she was adopted by an immigrant Indian couple from South Africa. She married Rob, a Caucasian Australian from country NSW. They have two children - sons Will, 20 months, and newborn Thomas. They don't look much like their parents, but no one, she says, gives the family a second look.

Penney's story is an increasingly familiar one. Australia has long prided itself on its multicultural immigration policy and the story of its diverse ethnic mosaic is not new. What is new is the surge in marriages between young Australians from non-English-speaking backgrounds and white Australians. Their children represent an increasingly large tribe in Australia, living testaments to a quiet - and very recent - revolution in the country's attitude towards racial integration. ''I find now, compared to 20 years ago, people's perceptions are quite different,'' Penney says. ''It's quite normal now to see mixed couples and mixed kids.''

April Murdoch, 38, and Sunil Badami, 35, of Rozelle , agree.

Sunil is of South Indian background, while April is fourth-generation Australian with a Danish, Scottish and English background. They have two children - Leela, 2, and Maya, 10 months.

Murdoch, a freelance publicist, said their families were unfazed by the couple's racial differences. ''Maybe it would have been [a concern] for my parents' generation … [and] I'm sure there are plenty of people who would experience that still.''

Murdoch's stepmother, Vivienne, also has a different background. She is of Chinese heritage.

Dr Siew-Ean Khoo, senior fellow at the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute at the Australian National University in Canberra, says there has been a striking rise in intermarriage rates from the first to the second to the third generation of Australians of various ethnic backgrounds. Of particular note is the finding that the majority of young Australians of non-English-speaking backgrounds in the third generation are now partnering with people of different ethnic origins, mainly Australian or Anglo-Celtic.

It's a dramatic shift when compared to their parents and grandparents, and a significant change from the country's historic structure of immigrant tribes living separately from each other and the dominant mainstream Anglo majority.

In her new paper, Intermarriage by Birthplace and Ancestry in Australia, published in People and Place, Dr Khoo, along with co-authors Bob Birrell and Genevieve Heard, found this new pattern was particularly striking in the third generation of those of Greek, Chinese and Lebanese ancestries, where two-thirds of men and women had partnered outside their ethnic group.

More than 50 per cent of those of Chinese origin and more than 40 per cent with Lebanese ancestry had partners of Australian or Anglo-Celtic ancestry.

In a previous study, Australians' Ancestries (2004), Dr Khoo found that the proportion of the population claiming more than one ancestry has almost doubled from 12 to 22 per cent between 1986 and 2001. The increase in multiple ancestries from the first to the third generation was ''quite spectacular'' among Hungarians, Polish, Chinese, Indians and Italians, among others.

She says the most rapidly growing group in Australian society is those of mixed ethnic origins - the result of increasing socialisation between groups, greater mobility, lessening of cultural ties, overseas travel and education. ''I think the marriage market is global, not local."

with Peter Hawkins

(2) Too much immigration in densely-populated Britain leads to 'cold war'

Trevor Phillips warns of immigration 'cold war'

From: norman clemo <normanclemo@telkomsa.net> Date: 07.08.2009 03:55 PM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/1896134/Trevor-Phillips-warns-of-immigration-cold-war.html

Trevor Phillips warns of immigration 'cold war'
{Phillips himself is black}

By Lewis Carter
Published: 2:05PM BST 20 Apr 2008

Mass immigration has led to a racial "cold war" among rival ethnic communities, the head of Britain's race relations watchdog has warned.

Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said failed immigration policy risked nurturing racism among millions of Britons.

The gloomy assessment is the latest controversial outburst by Mr Phillips on the subject of immigration, he has previously warned of racial "segregation" in Britain, as well as "white families" being "cheated out of their right to social housing by newly arrived migrants".

In an address to mark the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech, in which Powell warned of the dangerous consequences of the rising level of immigration, Mr Phillips said such predictions had not come true.

However, he warned that out of control immigration policy had sparked a "war" which was just as concerning.

Mr Phillips said: "Powell predicted 'hot' conflict and violence.

"However, we have seen the emergence of a kind of cold war in some parts of the country, where very separate communities exist side by side... with poor communication across racial or religious lines.

"In essence, Powell so discredited any talk of planning or control that it gave rise to a migration policy in which Government knew too little about what was going on.

"Ironically, Powellism and the weakening of control it engendered may have led Britain to admitting more immigrants than fewer."

Last week the Telegraph reported on a warning from an influential Lords committee that the number of immigrants entering Britain should be capped, amid fears it was putting too much pressure on public services and housing.

In the speech, delivered in the same Birmingham hotel where Mr Powell sparked public debate on immigration in 1968, Mr Phillips warned Government that it risked playing into the hands of parties such as the British National Party if it failed to address the concerns of the "settled" population.

He said: "For every professional woman who is able to go out to work because she has a Polish nanny, there is a young mother who watches her child struggle in a classroom where a harassed teacher faces too many children with too many languages between them.

"Wanting a better deal for her child doesn't make her anti-immigrant. But if we can't find a better answer to her despair then she soon will be.

"For every boss whose bacon is saved by the importation of skilled IT professionals or crafts-people or health professionals, there are a thousand people who wonder every morning why they have to put up with the misery of a packed railway carriage or bus - if they can get on in the first place.

"Wanting an infrastructure that doesn't make getting to work daily hell doesn't make someone a natural voter for an anti-immigrant party. But it soon will."

Mr Phillips' comments are the latest in a string of controversial remarks on immigration.

In November last year he sparked controversy by saying: "One area where this idea of unfairness is most frequently alleged is in housing allocation, specifically that white families are cheated out of their right to social housing by newly arrived migrants."

In 2005, when he was chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Mr Phillips warned of increased "segregation" between ethnic groups in Britain.

(3) The fall of Racial Segregation in the US

From: Charles Krafft <whodareswings@yahoo.com> Date:  06.08.2009 10:41 PM

The Fall of Anglo-America

30th, 2009 by Prozium

Homicide or Suicide?

http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2009/07/30/the-fall-of-anglo-america/

In the Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald engages Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, which is easily the second most important book (aside from The Culture of Critique) about White racial decline in the United States. A shorter review has been posted in VDARE. It doesn’t do justice to the breadth of the subject matter and isn’t worth bothering with.

The thrust of MacDonald’s review is that Kaufmann omits certain facts about the Jewish role in Anglo-American racial decline and glosses over others. Aside from that, MacDonald and Kaufmann are in broad agreement on most points of interest. Kaufmann doesn’t shy away from the fact that Jewish influence was a major cause in the reinterpretation of Americanism along cosmopolitan lines. The major difference from MacDonald’s viewpoint is that Kaufmann (correctly) pays more attention to the indigenous “liberal, cosmopolitan Anglo-Saxon tradition” as a cause of subversion from within.

Having read both books, I came away with the impression that they complemented each other. Each provides certain windows into White racial decline that the other lacks. For example, Kaufmann’s book draws attention to Felix Adler and the Ethical Culture movement, an angle on the Jewish Question and the rise of secular humanism which I don’t recall MacDonald addressing before. Similarly, MacDonald’s account contains a much more in depth treatment of Boasian anthropology and the New York Intellectuals.

It is a sad testament to the decrepit state of American intellectual life that all of two books have been written about the most important subject in American history: the decline of its indigenous White majority. Even taken together, MacDonald and Kaufmann have barely scratched the surface of the subject. In contrast, hundreds (if not thousands) of articles and volumes have been written about the Holocaust and can be easily accessed in any decent college library, an event which didn’t even take place on American soil. This fact alone speaks volumes about ethnic constitution of America’s ruling class and their priorities.

A future scholar will one day have to write a separate book entitled The Fall of the Jim Crow South. There wasn’t a singular Anglo-America or White America that declined on account of Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, the New York Intellectuals, and the Frankfurt School. Until the 1970s, Dixie was another country in its racial policies and cultural attitudes. Neither Kaufmann or MacDonald has adequately addressed this.

The cause of the South’s racial decline is plain enough to discern: the federal government forced the national racial consensus on the region through Smith v. Allwright, Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, Shelly v. Kramer, Sweatt, McLaurin, Gayle, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration Act of 1965, Loving v. Virginia, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and direct military intervention in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. There was little popular support for integration in the region. In the South, traditional racial attitudes remained strong from the elites to the common man, and were stoked to new heights during the Civil Rights Movement, whereas they collapsed elsewhere. Integration sparked the massive resistance movement, the citizen’s councils, and a revival of the Klan — why not in Chicago, Boston, and New York City?

In the Senate, Southerners led by Richard Russell filibustered and bitterly resisted the new federal civil rights laws, but were frustrated and defeated time and again by a lopsided coalition of Northern Democrats and Republicans. They deserted Lyndon Johnson at the polls for Barry Goldwater and George Wallace. Beyond the 1960s, Southerners defeated the Equal Rights Amendment and voted against Ronald Reagan’s IRCA amnesty of illegal aliens, the Immigration Act of 1990, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. They also led the opposition to the MLK holiday in Congress and the George W. Bush amnesties.

If the Confederacy had won its independence, there is little reason to believe that cosmopolitanism and anti-racism would have emerged victorious in the American South in the twentieth century. These were not indigenous social movements. Indeed, the only reason that White America held out as long as it did is because the South transformed itself into a one-party state under Jim Crow to defeat integration in Congress. Northern Republicans didn’t stop pushing for civil rights legislation until a Depression overwhelmed the Harrison administration in the 1890’s.

As I have stressed elsewhere, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s wasn’t the first time America had flirted with racial egalitarianism. The same laws were proposed and ratified during Reconstruction. They were supported in the North; opposed in the South. The bloodiest war in American history was fought to liberate the negro and impose racial equality on the country. An insurrection was carried on for three decades in the South to reverse the verdict of the Civil War. In the North, it was never reversed, and de jure integration became the order of the day from the 1880’s forward.

If the South was assassinated, the North committed suicide.

From the earliest days of the Revolution, racialism established only a tenuous hold in North. Pennsylvania was saturated in Quaker egalitarianism and repealed its anti-miscegenation law before the Constitution was signed. In the North, Thomas Jefferson’s racial theories were met with fierce opposition by the first abolitionist movement; denial of racial differences were commonplace in anti-slavery circles. Benjamin Franklin thought that negroes were “not deficient in natural understanding.” Alexander Hamilton remarked that “their natural faculties are perhaps probably as good as ours.” Samuel Stanhope Smith, the president of Princeton University, wrote several influential environmentalist tracts; anti-racism only went into eclipse after 1805.

Several Northern states never adopted Southern-style anti-miscegenation laws (Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey) or Jim Crow-style segregation. In New York, an anti-miscegenation law was rejected by the state senate on libertarian grounds. In Massachusetts, the capital of “natural rights” rhetoric, the state anti-miscegenation law was repealed in the 1830’s for similar reasons. National Expansion and Indian Removal were never popular causes in New England and the Jackson administration was widely criticized for both. James Fenimore Cooper lionized the Noble Savage in The Last of the Mohicans (1826). The annexation of Texas was delayed for years by Northern Whig opposition. The Mexican War was deeply unpopular in New England.

In the North, the Amistad case was a cause célèbre, and starred former president John Quincy Adams who was an inveterate foe of the so-called “Slave Power.” In the 1830s, the second abolitionist movement was born and was even more committed to anti-racism and human rights than the first. William Lloyd Garrison and his followers denounced the Constitution as a pact with the Devil and burned it in the streets. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin went on to become the all time bestseller of the nineteenth century. John Brown was lauded as a martyr after his murderous invasion of Virginia. Frederick Douglass was a respected intellectual. The Northern states passed personal liberty laws that violated the Constitution in order to harbor runaway negro slaves. The Dred Scott decision, which affirmed that only Whites could be U.S. citizens, was widely denounced in the North.

The trajectory of the North could not have been more different from the South. In the Antebellum era, a new generation of Southerners came of age and explicitly rejected the egalitarian heritage of the American Revolution. George Fitzhugh attacked capitalism, democracy, and the pernicious egalitarianism of Thomas Jefferson. Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz pioneered new theories of racial differences. Sir Walter Scott novels were all the rage; the Middle Ages and aristocratic ideals came roaring back in style. In his famous cornerstone speech, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens stated that the Confederacy was the first nation in the world to be founded on the principle of racial inequality. The Civil War was fought over these ideals: aristocratic republicanism or egalitarian democracy, slave-based feudalism or free market capitalism, federalism or national consolidation, racialism or anti-racism. The victory of the North in that conflict determined the future disastrous course of America.

During Reconstruction, fanatics like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner wrote anti-racism into the Constitution in the form of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Over the next fifty years, as the South retreated into Jim Crow, the North would steadily move towards full blown integration. Fatally, the churning of the Northern capitalist economy would bring wave after wave of European immigrants into the the Midwest and New England, eventually swamping the indigenous Yankee population in most Northern states. After thirty years of struggle, the damage was finally mitigated by the Immigration Act of 1924, but not before millions of indigestible German and Eastern European Jews had settled in the United States.

These Jews quickly established ethnic defense organizations, penetrated Ivy League universities, founded the motion picture industry, bought up newspapers, inserted themselves into the national political debate, and amassed huge fortunes by beating the indigenous Yankees at their own capitalist game. Their “freedom” and “equality” gave them every right to do so. As Kaufmann persuasively argues, Jews found receptive allies in the treacherous Northern Anglo-Protestant cosmopolitan milieu, which was the lineal descendant of the pre-Civil War abolitionist Left. If the Jewish nationwreckers succeeded at propagating Boasian anthropology, Freudianism, multiculturalism, and modernist cosmopolitanism, it was only because they found in the American North a region which by history, tradition, and inclination was already ripe for a fall and receptive to idealistic social engineering crusades. They travelled down the same road to fame and fortune that
 Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Carnegie had blazed before them.

By the 1930s, white racial attitudes in the American North were so fragile that they were shaken to pieces by the wartime propaganda against the Third Reich. In stark contrast, Southerners emerged from the Second World War even more committed to segregation and white supremacy than they had been before. Northern WASPs were so crippled by their own effete liberalism that they allowed Jews to take over institution after institution rather than be impolite and “make a fuss” about their own precipitous dispossession. A revolution was effected without so much as a shot being fired.

In the end, Northern WASPs didn’t put up a fight. Unlike Germans under the Third Reich, they rolled over and died. It wasn’t exactly suicide, but it might as well have been. Like generations of Yankees before them, they were so used to worshiping money and conforming to public opinion that they allowed their culture to be stolen right out from under them once a new elite was thrown up by capitalism. Their tragic unraveling is an understudied subject. It is full of lessons for those of us who don’t want to see history repeat itself. ==

(4) Jim Crow laws imposed racial segregation, even after US Civil War

http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/jimcrowlaw1/a/creationjimcrow.htm

Segregation in the South

By Jessica McElrath, About.com

Jim Crow laws were laws that imposed racial segregation. They existed mainly in the South and originated from the Black Codes that were enforced from 1865 to 1866 and from prewar segregation on railroad cars in northern cities. The laws sprouted up in the late nineteenth century after Reconstruction and lasted until the 1960s.

The Emergence of Jim Crow Laws

Prior to the enactment of Jim Crow laws, African Americans enjoyed some of the rights granted during Reconstruction. Gains included the addition of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. However, rights dwindled after Reconstruction ended in 1877. By 1890, whites in the north and south became less supportive of civil rights and racial tension began to flare.

Additionally, several Supreme Court decisions overturned Reconstruction legislation by promoting racial segregation. The Supreme Court set the stage for Jim Crow laws by several of its decisions. The Court held that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional and ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prohibit individuals and private organizations from discriminating on the basis of race.

Plessy v. Ferguson Paves the Way for Segregation

However, it was the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that led the way to racial segregation. In 1890, Louisiana passed a law that required blacks to ride in separate railroad cars. Blacks protested and challenged the law. Homer Plessy, a carpenter in Louisiana who was seven-eighths Caucasian, was chosen to test the constitutionality of the law. On June 7, 1892, Plessy boarded a train and sat in a car reserved for whites. He refused to move and was arrested. A local judge ruled against Plessy, and in 1896 the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling. It held that "separate but equal" accommodations did not violate Plessy's rights and that the law did not stamp the "colored race with a badge of inferiority." The Court provided further support for separate accommodations when it ruled in Cumming v. County Board of Education (1899) that separate schools were valid even if comparable schools for blacks were not available.

Segregation Laws are Enacted in the South

With the Supreme Court's approval, the Plessy decision paved the way for racial segregation. Southern states passed laws that restricted African Americans access to schools, restaurants, hospitals, and public places. Signs that said "Whites Only" or "Colored" were posted at entrances and exits, water fountains, waiting rooms, and restrooms. Laws were enacted that restricted all aspects of life and varied from state to state. Georgia in 1905, passed a law requiring separate public parks, in 1909 Mobile, Alabama created a 10 p.m. curfew for blacks, and in 1915, South Carolina blacks and whites were restricted from working together in the same rooms of textile factories.

The Supreme Court Strikes Down Jim Crow Laws

By 1915, the strength of Jim Crow laws were slowly beginning to erode. The Supreme Court in Guinn v. United States (1915) ruled that an Oklahoma law that denied the right to vote to some citizens was unconstitutional. In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley the Court held that a Louisville, Kentucky law could not require residential segregation. Additionally, the decisions in Sweatt v. Painter (1949) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma (1950) helped break down the ruling in Plessy. But it was the Supreme Court’s decision in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that overturned the Court's decision in Plessy. It held that separate schools were unequal and its ruling helped dismantle racial segregation. The Court provided momentum for the growing civil rights movement that eventually led to the end of racial segregation.

(5) Israel Lobby criticizes US award to Mary Robinson, over her opposition to Israel's 'racist apartheid state'

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date:  07.08.2009 01:51 PM

Israel Lobby opposes honor for Mary Robinson

By Eric Fingerhut . August 4, 2009

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The White House is facing mounting criticism over its decision to give a prestigious award to the former United Nations official who presided over the infamous 2001 Durban conference and has a history of criticism of Israel.

The Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America were the latest to slam the pick of Mary Robinson, the former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, as one of 16 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the highest civilian honor in the United States.

On Monday, the two Jewish groups joined a spate of initial criticism from conservative pro-Israel blogs soon after Robinson's name was announced July 30.

The ADL in a statement called the pick "ill advised" and said Robinson was "undeserving of the honor" because of her "animus towards Israel." The ZOA in attacking the selection called Robinson "viciously critical" toward the Jewish state. ...

Robinson -- an honorary president of Oxfam International, chair of the Board of Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, and president of a New York-based initiative to put human rights concerns at the center of globalization -- called the criticism "totally without foundation" and pointed a finger at Jewish critics.

"There's a lot of bullying by certain elements of the Jewish community," Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said Sunday in an interview with RTE Radio One that was reported in Irish newspapers. "They bully people who try to address the severe situation in Gaza and the West Bank. Archbishop Desmond Tutu gets the same criticism."

Tutu, an anti-apartheid activist who the ZOA also called a "virulent critic" of the Jewish state, also is among the medal recipients.

The Robinson award comes as the Obama administration is already facing increasing criticism from several Jewish groups over a Middle East strategy that they see as placing disproportionate pressure on Israel compared to the Palestinians and Arab states. The president reportedly plans to embark on a campaign of media interviews with reporters from Israel and Arab countries in order to better explain the policy.

The growing controversy over Robinson could potentially complicate such efforts to win over the Israeli  public, since the former U.N. human rights chief is slated to visit the region just a couple weeks after the Aug. 12 White House medal ceremony.

Robinson is expected to join Tutu and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a longtime Israel critic, on a mission to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza as part of an international group of statesman and dignitaries that calls itself The Elders. Any anti-Israel rebuke from Robinson or the group is likely to prompt a new round of criticism and questions about Obama's decision to honor her.

The controversy is fueling speculation over whether the controversy is an example of poor vetting or a conscious decision to push ahead despite the predictable complaints from some sectors of the Jewish community. So far, the White House is refusing to discuss the deliberations that led to the selection of Robinson.

Tevi Troy, a former Jewish liaison and domestic policy adviser in the George W. Bush administration, said he was surprised that such a controversial honoree could pass what should be an extensive vetting process in the White House.

Troy said that when he worked in the Bush administration, one person had the job of researching every person selected for an honor or scheduled to meet with the president to make sure the person had nothing in his or her past that might reflect badly on the president -- from a controversial public statement to a tax lien.

Finally, Troy said, any major award would have to "get clearance" from senior staff, which in this case would likely include top adviser David Axelrod and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Troy, who in a column for the New York Post praised Robinson's "noble commitment to human rights" even while criticizing her selection, speculated that the administration either "didn't really check her out" sufficiently, or did know she would be controversial but didn't mind because Jews have been such strong backers of Obama.

Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director, doubted that this was a case of anything more than "sloppy research."

"I don't think this is consciously" an act "against the Jewish community or Israel," he said. "Somebody didn't do their due diligence." ...

(6) Mary Robinson accuses Jewish lobby of bullying tactics

From:  Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date:  07.08.2009 01:51 PM

Former Irish president Mary Robinson 'bullied' by pro-Israel lobbyists

Monday, 3 August 2009

belfasttelegraph.co.uk

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/former-irish-president-mary-robinson-bullied-by-proisrael-lobbyists-14441753.html

http://jta.org/trackback/1007006/

Former Irish president Mary Robinson accused "certain elements" of the Jewish community of bullying after a number of pro-Israel lobby groups   voiced concerns over her being awarded the top US civilian honour.

US President Barack Obama has come under fire from a number of pro- Israeli online sources for honouring Ms Robinson with the Presidential   Medal of Freedom.

But Ms Robinson hit back yesterday at what she described as   allegations "totally without foundation" of her condoning anti-Semitic   behaviour at the Durban World Conference Against Racism in 2001.

"It's totally without foundation but when stuff is out on the   internet, I'm not quite sure what you can do," Ms Robinson told RTE   Radio One yesterday.

Ms Robinson insisted that she never supported any anti-Semitism and   cited her decision at the conference to reject a civil society   document which she deemed racist.

"There's a lot of bullying by certain elements of the Jewish   community. They bully people who try to address the severe situation   in Gaza and the West Bank. Archbishop Desmond Tutu gets the same   criticism."

Ms Robinson said she was "very honoured" to be awarded the   Presidential Medal of Freedom.

(7) Israel Lobby wants to fence Palestinians out, rages at Obama

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date:  07.08.2009 01:51 PM

On Obama and Israel, Rage Without Reason

Good Fences {ie Good Fences make Good Neighbours}

By J.J. Goldberg, http://forward.com/articles/111011/

July 29, 2009, The Forward

Alarm bells have been ringing around the neighborhood pretty much nonstop since July 13, when President Obama sat down to talk Middle East policy at the White House with a pack of leaders from a dozen American Jewish organizations.

The meeting was supposed to help buff up Obama's relationship with the Jewish community, which is bubbling lately with resentment at the president's aggressive peace-processing. By reaching out to the community's customary spokesmen, he hoped to build rapport and perhaps recruit a few backers for his policies. Instead he unleashed a whirlwind of attacks against himself, his administration and the Jews who met with him.

The critics accuse Obama of unfairly singling out Israel by demanding a unilateral settlement freeze, without requiring reciprocal Palestinian concessions, and disregarding past American promises to permit some construction. They say he is trying to curry favor with the Arab world, breaking a long-standing presidential tradition of siding automatically with Israel. Some say he is threatening the important legacy of George W. Bush. I didn't make that one up.

Martin Peretz, the editor-in-chief of The New Republic, wrote on his blog that he was "sick and tired" of Obama's "hectoring" of Israel. He was particularly offended by the president's condescending advice to Israel, "via some 15 American Jewish leaders," to "engage in some serious self-reflection." Heaven spare us.

Even the politically correct New York Times Op-Ed page carried a jab at Obama — its sole commentary on the July 13 meeting — by Aluf Benn of the dovish Israeli daily Haaretz, no less. Benn accused Obama of mistakenly talking to American Jews rather than the Israelis he should be wooing. After all, why would an American president care what American Jews think?

Sneering at American Jews appears, in fact, to be one of the unifying themes in the backlash. Numerous critics say Obama is using — or being used by — a pair of turncoat Jewish aides, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, whose goals are "to suppress the American Jewish community" and to change Israel's agenda from stopping Iran "to ‘peace in our time' in Palestine," as Israeli journalist Amnon Lord wrote on the Web site Bitter Lemons.

Another frequent complaint is that the president or his buddies deliberately skewed the Jewish delegation by inviting Americans for Peace Now and J Street, "Israel-bashing groups" whose very "Raison d'être is to force Israel to make additional unilateral concessions," or so former World Jewish Congress firebrand Isi Leibler wrote in The Jerusalem Post.

But the problem with American Jews may run deeper than a few strays, columnist Caroline Glick warned in The Jerusalem Post. Israelis are wondering, she wrote, whether American Jews have already "abandoned Israel in favor of President Obama." A Jerusalem Post survey in June found that only 6% of Israelis "view Obama as pro-Israel," while a May Gallup tracking poll found that 79% of American Jews "support the president."

Actually, given those numbers, Obama's critics might want to take a second look at suppressing the American Jewish community.

Indeed, more than a few commentators have flatly accused Jewish organizational leaders — or American Jews at large — of betraying Israel and toadying to Obama the way they toadied to Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Holocaust. That's right, folks: Nazi collaborators in the Roosevelt Room. What better place for a president to court Jews?

These are troubling charges. That is, they would be, if there were anything serious behind them. But there isn't much there. Mostly they are just one-liners deployed to buy time for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while he figures out how to placate Obama without breaking up his government coalition. At best the charges fall apart upon scrutiny. The rest should be handled with rubber gloves.

The most repellent of these is the sliming of Axelrod and Emanuel. It's not a new tactic; it was used by former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir against Jewish officials under the first President Bush, Dennis Ross, Aaron Miller and Dan Kurtzer, to the point where Kurtzer, an Orthodox Jew, couldn't go to synagogue without being harassed. The same sort of dreck was thrown at Jewish aides to the second President Bush, including Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz. It was vile then, and it's vile now.

The truth is that every president hires whom he wants, meets with whom he chooses and, if he's responsible, seeks a balanced foreign policy. Israelis and their friends got spoiled by the last president's reckless unilateralism and contempt for world opinion. Obama is trying to walk it back, and so he must.

If there is a substantive argument in all this, it's the claim that Israel is being pressured for concessions while the Arab side is not. Obama himself conceded the point at that meeting. He's now pressing Arab states for gestures to help Israelis get the medicine down. But freezing settlements doesn't depend on that. Jerusalem is already committed to "freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)." It's written in black and white in President Bush's road map, which Israel signed in 2003 — and which Avigdor Lieberman reaffirmed this past April 1 in his maiden Knesset speech as foreign minister. Israel was able to put off the freeze because the Palestinian Authority wasn't honoring its commitment to crack down on terrorists. Now the Palestinians are cracking down, and Netanyahu is making up excuses.

As for Obama being the new Roosevelt, we should live so long. FDR, if memory serves, was the guy who defeated Hitler and saved the world, after the Japanese air force convinced congressional Republicans to let us join the war. If Obama has any tricks like that up his sleeve, bring 'em on..