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Aug 18, 2010

Einstein Controversy / Liz Taylor's Jewishness

 



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It's all relative: You say Einstein is 'Jewish science,' I say 'liberal conspiracy'

Nazis and Holocaust revisionists have long dismissed Albert Einstein's groundbreaking theories. Now, the legendary physicist is facing a new wave of attacks - this time from conservative bloggers who say that his theory of relativity and its iconic formula, E=mc2, are part of a "liberal conspiracy." Read more »

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From Ground Zero to the mosque

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Palestinian leaders must foster hope, not hate

Only when Palestinian leaders foster a culture of hope rather than hate will there be lasting peace for the Palestinians and Israelis, the president of The Israel Project writes in JTA.

Parties wrestle over pro-Israel label in Australian campaign

As the two major parties in Australia's federal election vie for the title of Israel's most ardent backer, most Jewish leaders believe that Australia's longstanding, strong bilateral support for the Jewish state will not be jeopardized regardless of the outcome, writes Dan Goldberg in JTA.

Tony Judt's Jewishness

The late Tony Judt was an independent thinker, not a self-hating Jew, writes Tel Aviv University psychology professor Carlo Strenger on The Huffington Post.

Record number Israeli expats return

Statistics released this week show a record 12,000 Israeli expatriates returned to Israel in 2009, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Russians in Israel silent on conversion bill

Non-Jewish Russians in Israel are strangely silent about the conversion bill that has American and Israeli Jews up in arms, reports Nathan Jeffay in the Forward.

Elizabeth Taylor's Jewish side

The L.A. Jewish Journal's Hollywood Jew blog takes a look at Elizabeth Taylor's Jewish side.

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CORRECTION: Major Donor [Gelbaum] Says Finances Forced Cuts

 



 

Correction: Gelbaum


Begin forwarded message:



Is this the guy [Gelbaum] who bribed the Sierra Club to ignore immigration?

Yes.

=====

[abstract]

Strom, Stephanie

"Major Donor Says Finances Forced Cuts", in New York Times, December 10, 2009. p. A23.

David Gelbaum, a "clean energy investor", who has given $380 million in donations over the last four years to the ACLU ($93.6 million), Sierra Club ($47.7 million), the Iraq-Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund (IADIF) ($246.8 million) of the California Community Foundation and two other unnamed groups will slash his contributions because he is in a "highly illiquid" position. As a result, he will immediately cancel his planned $20 million contribution to the ACLU for 2010.



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American Thinker - Comments

 

http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/654520/page-2.html

Peace.
Michael Santomauro @ 917-974-6367

What sort of Truth is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

Let's End Thought Crimes in the Twenty-first Century. -- to separate historical fact from propaganda…peace is patriotic!

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American Thinker: Just How Smart is Obama?

 

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/just_how_smart_is_obama_1.html

Peace.
Michael Santomauro @ 917-974-6367

What sort of Truth is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

Let's End Thought Crimes in the Twenty-first Century. -- to separate historical fact from propaganda…peace is patriotic!

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Jews Should Learn from African Americans and Move On

 


Martin Varsavsky

Martin Varsavsky

Posted January 19, 2009 | 07:38 AM (EST)
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Pipes on "Immanuel Kant vs. Israel" in NRO

 




Daniel
Pipes

August 17, 2010
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Immanuel Kant vs. Israel

by Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
August 17, 2010

http://www.danielpipes.org/8771/immanuel-kant-vs-israel

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As someone who deeply appreciates what Western civilization, for all its faults, has achieved, I puzzle over the hostility many Westerners harbor toward their way of life. If democracy, free markets, and the rule of law have created an unprecedented stability, affluence, and decency; how come so many beneficiaries, fail to see this?

Why, for example, does the United States, which has so much for human welfare, inspire such hostility? And tiny Israel, the symbol of rejuvenation for a perpetually oppressed people – why does it engender such passionate hatred that otherwise decent people desire to eliminate this state?

Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center, Jerusalem.
Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem offers an explanation for this antagonism in a profound and implication-rich essay, "Israel Through European Eyes."

He begins with the notion of "paradigm shift" developed by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This influential concept holds that scientists see their subject from within a specific framework, a "paradigm." Paradigms are frameworks that underpin an understanding of reality. Facts that do not fit the paradigm are overlooked or dismissed. Kuhn reviews the history of science and shows how, in a series of scientific revolutions, paradigms shifted, as from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.

Paradigms also frame politics and Hazony applies this theory to Israel's delegitimization in the West. Israel's standing has deteriorated for decades, he argues, "not because of this or that set of facts, but because the paradigm through which educated Westerners are looking at Israel has shifted." Responding to the vilification of Israel by offering corrective facts – about Israel's military morality or its medical breakthroughs – "won't have any real impact on the overall trajectory of Israel's standing among educated people in the West." Instead, the latest paradigm must be recognized and fought.

The fading paradigm sees nation-states as legitimate and positive, a means of protecting peoples and allowing them to flourish. The treaty of Westphalia (1648) was the key moment in which the sovereignty of nations was recognized. John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson endowed the nation-state ideal with global reach.

That paradigm, however, "has pretty much collapsed," Hazony asserts. The nation-state no longer appeals; many intellectuals and political figures in Europe see it "as a source of incalculable evil," a view that is fast spreading.

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, lived 1724-1804.
The new paradigm, based ultimately on Immanuel Kant's 1795 treatise Perpetual Peace, advocates the abolition of nation-states and the establishment of international government. Supra-national institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union represent its ideals and models.

Jews and the Holocaust play a strangely central role in the paradigm shift from nation-state to multinational state. The millennial persecution of Jews, culminating in the Nazi genocide, endowed Israel with special purpose and legitimacy according to the old paradigm. From the perspective of the new paradigm, however, the Holocaust represents the excesses of a nation-state, the German one, gone mad.

Under the old nation-state paradigm, the lesson of Auschwitz was "Never again," meaning that a strong Israel was needed to protect Jews. The new paradigm leads to a very different "Never again," one which insists that no government should have the means potentially to replicate the Nazi outrages. According to it, Israel isn't the answer to Auschwitz. The European Union is. That the old-style "Never again" inspires Israelis to pursue the Western world's most unabashed policy of self-defense makes their actions particularly appalling to New Paradigmers.

Need one point out the error of ascribing Nazi outrages to the nation-state? The Nazis wanted to eliminate nation-states. No less than Kant, they dreamed of a universal state,. New Paradigmers mangle history.

Israelis themselves are not immune to the new paradigm, as the case of Avraham Burg suggests. A former speaker of Israel's parliament and candidate for prime minister, he switched paradigms and wrote a book on the legacy of the Holocaust that compares Israel to Nazi Germany. He now wants Israelis to give up on Israel as defender of the Jewish people. No one, Burg's sad example suggests, is immune from the new paradigm disease.

Hazony's essay does not offer policy responses but in a letter to me he sketched three areas to address: building awareness of the new paradigm's existence, finding anomalies to invalidate it, and revitalizing the old paradigm by bringing it up to date.

His insights are profound and his counsel timely.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©2010 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.



Aug. 17, 2010 update: (1) I have gnawed away at the mystery of the Left over the past decade, writing on such varied topics as structural differences between the United States and Europe, poor Atlantic relations, opposed European and American "super-systems," the intensity of European guilt, the fear of a mythological "Empire," the mind-bending phenomenon of liberal fascism, the infatuation with international institutions, the legacy of World War I, the impact of President Kennedy's assassination, and the bias of university press publications. I have also published a small avalanche of analyses about the Left's soft spot for Islamism.

(2) Note that the new paradigm applies exclusively to Western states. Syria and Iran, to take prominent examples, get a free pass; it's quite fine for them to pursue national interests in as bellicose a fashion as possible, without invoking the Left's wrath.

Related Topics:  Conservatives & Liberals, Israel This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.


DanielPipes.org



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A Petition on behalf of Vincent Reynouard (again)

 




A Petition on behalf of Vincent Reynouard
NOTE: In our send yesterday the first of the three email links was broken. Here is the petition again with that link fixed.



Paul-Eric Blanrue, Founder of the research group Cercle Zététique, and author of Sarkozy, Israël et les Juif, is circulating the following petition on behalf of Vincent Reynouard


Those who wish to sign this communiqué along with me can send me their names and contact information at the address eugenie.blanrue@laposte.net. It is not a question of supporting Vincent Reynouard's religious, political or historical ideas but of defending his right to express them. To challenge them, an open, democratic, fair and honest debate will suffice.

In France, a writer, father of eight, is in prison for his historical research. And the so-called free press says nothing about it!

With a wife and eight children, the Frenchman Vincent Reynouard, aged 41, is a chemical engineer by training, a graduate of the ISMRA ("Institute of sciences of atomic matter and radiation") in Caen (Normandy). He readily presents himself as a traditionalist Catholic and does not hide his ultra-conservative political opinions. But, most important, he publicly disputes, in his DVDs and writings, the conventional version of Second World War history. He is one of those researchers who declare themselves to be "revisionists" and who are called "deniers" by others because they do not believe in the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the wartime German concentration camps.



Paul-Eric Blanrue


In 2005, Reynouard wrote and sent to numerous tourism offices, museums and town halls a 16-page brochure entitled "Holocaust? Here's what's kept hidden from you…", in which he took a view altogether opposite to that of academic history. French justice immediately pounced upon him.

His trial in 2007 at the criminal court in Saverne (Alsace) resulted in a sentence of one year's imprisonment, a fine of 10,000 euros and an order to pay damages of 3,000 euros to the antiracist league "LICRA". In June 2008 the court of appeal in Colmar upheld the prison sentence and ordered him to pay a total of 60,000 euros (a 20,000 euro fine, damages, mandatory publication of the ruling and court fees). Severity as never seen before.

Since he resides in Belgium, France launched a European arrest warrant for Reynouard in order to make him serve the prison sentence ordered by the Colmar court. On July 9th he was imprisoned by the Belgian police, pending his extradition to France. All of which leads him to say: "When people can think of no other way but imprisonment to get rid of a verbal opponent, it's because they have no arguments."
Conclusion: A 41-year-old father of eight is currently in prison for his historical research, because of the Gayssot Act.

This Act of the French parliament ("article 24bis" of the law governing the press), having come into effect upon publication in the Journal Officiel on July 14th 1990, prohibits the "disputing (...) of the existence of one or more crimes against humanity as defined by Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal [known as the Nuremberg Tribunal] in annex to the London Agreement of August 8th, 1945. "

In my book Sarkozy, Israël et les Juifs (Oser Dire publishers, [Belgium], 2009), I recall that this freedom-killing law has been strongly criticized in the past by such personalities as the French academician Simone Veil; the Permanent Secretary of the French Academy, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse; the government ministers Jean Foyer, Jacques Toubon, Alain Peyrefitte; the historians Henri Amouroux, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Annie Kriegel, Francois Furet, Alain Besançon, Jacques Willequet and François Bédarida; the founder of the Hannah Arendt Research Institute, Chantal Delsol; the 1988 Nobel laureate for economics, Maurice Allais; the writers Michel Tournier, Louis Pauwels, Michel Houellebecq, Philip Murray, Jean Daniel, Vladimir Volkoff, Michel Rachline and Alain Robbe-Grillet; the judges Philippe Bilger, Alain Marsaud and Raoul Béteille; the legal scholars Olivier Duhamel, Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet, Emmanuelle Duverger, André Decoq and Guy Carcassonne; the lawyers Jacques Vergès and John Bastardi Daumont; the philosopher Paul Ricœur; the comedian Bruno Gaccio; defenders of the freedom of expression like the founder of Reporters Sans Frontières Robert Ménard (who denounces it as a "thought police") and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit; the journalists Dominique Jamet, Delfeil de Ton, Alain Rollat, Albert du Roy, Philippe Tesson, Jacques Julliard and Ivan Rioufol; also by the former president of the Ligue des droits de l'homme, historian Madeleine Rebérioux. Abroad, the American linguist Noam Chomsky has declared himself an absolute opponent of it. For the Belgian physicist and intellectual Jean Bricmont, "the Gayssot Act is a legal regression of several centuries". As for Presidents Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad, they have strongly condemned the repression resulting from this law.

Henceforth it falls to us to defend free expression in deed and not just in theory. Why is no one heard publically denouncing the present fate of Vincent Reynouard? What are Reporters Sans Frontières, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch doing? No organ of the media, either French or foreign, has informed public opinion of this case. Such silence is abnormal.

Personally, I have decided to act as a historian and as a citizen, and to make it known, through this press release, how appalled I am at the fact that, in our country, we have a man thrown into prison for his opinions, however unusual, shocking and controversial they may be. Such treatment is not worthy of France or her intellectual tradition. It is not for the law to say how historical truth is set down: in a free country, that is the task of historians. The Gayssot Act, which restricts the historian's freedom, is unworthy of a democratic State; it is a wicked law. I therefore ask for its immediate repeal.

I hope to be joined soon by dozens, hundreds, thousands of other people unable to remain indifferent in the face of a scandal that seriously harms the image of France and flouts the spirit of the Republic.

Those who wish to sign this communiqué along with me can send me their names and contact information at the address eugenie.blanrue@laposte.net. It is not a question of supporting Vincent Reynouard's religious, political or historical ideas but of defending his right to express them. To challenge them, an open, democratic, fair and honest debate will suffice.

We shall go over the results of this request for signatures towards the end of September. Meanwhile, thank you for circulating this text to the utmost extent.

Paul-Eric Blanrue, Historian,
Founder of the research group Cercle Zététique,
Author of Sarkozy, Israël et les Juifs (Oser Dire publishers, [Belgium], 2009)

To sign, please send a message to the author of this communiqué, Mr Paul-Eric BLANRUE:

eugenie.blanrue@laposte.net
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