Friends of Israel Innitiative

By Ted Belman

At the WJC meeting yesterday, I was thrilled to meet Fiamma Nirenstein who is now a Senator in the Italian Parliament. She is a author of many books and a noted journalist. She gave a very upbeat talk at the conference (I will link to it when I find it) and advised that many people in Europe are beginning to accept that Israel has been and continues to be unfairly treated. She is also a member of the Friends of Israel Innitiative of which Irwin Cotler is a founder. Hose Maria Azner, Spain, who is also founder, delivered the Keynote address, Defending Israel to Defend Ourselves

Israel today is nothing less than essential to us, not only because the Jewish state is located in the very region where the strategic tectonic plates collide, but because Israel is one of the few nations willing to pay a price for its survival.

Here is an article, The real terrorism is the lie against Israel, written by Fiamma Nirenstein on, June 3, 2010

It really is a shock, as said Ban Ki Moon, as said the governments who recalled their ambassadors, Turkey, Sweden, Greece, Jordan. It is a shock, oh yes, as said Hillary Clinton and as Tony Blair declared. It is a horror as the EU Foreign Minister Lady Ashton said… it is a big scandal: but we’re not talking about the battle undertaken and which, unfortunately, caused nine deaths, between the armed activists of the Marmara ship and the Israeli forces, who tried to lead the convoy loaded with unidentified goods and people to Ashdod, so as to avoid handing over potential explosive to Hamas, letting it continuing the launch of six thousand missiles into Israeli territory, as far as Tel Aviv.

No, the greatest scandal, the real horror is linked to the enthusiasm with which, from wall to wall, the entire international community was quick to wave the banner of anti-Israelism without taking into account the truth, not giving a damn about the videos in which one sees how the Israeli soldiers who wanted to inspect the contents of the convoy were welcomed with iron hammers, knives, hand grenades and gunfire. An examination of the aggressive origin and the declared intentions of the pro-Hamas suicide terrorist organizations on board the Marmara don’t matter to Clinton or Ashton. Also, the international context was not taken into account – that of a Turkey linked to Iran, a supplier of weapons to Hamas, and which is increasingly determined to find its place in the sun of radical Islam.

The scandal that we warn of is about the lack of the world’s morality, integrity, and civilization, which immediately declared Israel the criminal; it’s about the UN Security Council and the Human Rights Council, as well as the race of many different countries to declare their disapproval of Israel. This, yes, is a huge scandal and the wave of hatred on behalf of the European and American ruling classes, the “main stream,” of the international press with its headlines on numerous pages that repeat similar condemnations without appeal, the satisfied hate of academics and of student movements: it is like a pile of straw that waits only for the match to be struck, burst into flames and then wretchedly finishes by threatening the Jews of the Roman Ghetto. Indeed this is the proof of a theorem that the sociologist Renato Mannheimer often explains: we are talking about anti-Semitism when charges against Israel fall upon all Jews. And, in reverse, we add: we are talking about anti-Semitism when Israel alone is loaded with charges that are not directed against any other country; and when the accusations are based on lies; when anti-Jewish stereotypes like blood libel is used, depicting Israeli soldiers who really intended to kill poor pacifists, or – as it was the case of the article published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in August 2009 – Israeli soldiers that rip out the organs of Palestinians in order to sell them. Greedy and bloodthirsty, as must be Jews.

It’s too unfair that while Hillary Clinton, together with her government, abandons Israel to the “non-aligned countries”, all ignore the news that an American drone killed along with the Al Qaeda leader Mustafa Abu al Yazid, his wife and three sons. We have not heard that this, and many similar incidents, have been brought to the attention of either the Security Council or the Human Rights Council. The Turks have killed in southeastern Anatolia and in northern Iraq something like 32 thousand Kurds. Where is the shock? In Darfur there has been talk of 300 thousand deaths and over two million displaced persons. Oh yeah? So what? In Sri Lanka, right when, in 2009, Israel was trying to stop the firing of missiles upon its civilian population (not even one resolution on behalf of the UN), there were 6500 civilian casualties in two months. In China, on July 2009, the violent repression of the Uyghurs in Urumqi led the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights – while the Human Rights Council condemned Israel 27 times out of a total of 33 – to chirp that there was an “extraordinary number of people killed and injured in less than a day of rioting”. It neither appears that China is under investigation, nor is Iran, for all those it hanged, persecuted or killed.

On Israel, the moralizing obsession instead builds a myth that designs the unworthiness of Israel to exist. The lies are obsessive: the Jews, said Arafat and since then it has been continuously repeated, have never been in Jerusalem, the Temple never existed. A gross lie, functional to the techniques of de-legitimization that feeds upon the alleged cruelty of Israel: Israel intentionally killed the child Mohammed Al Dura, who instead probably died from a Palestinian bullet in a shootout; Israel committed a huge massacre in Jenin, where instead it has been revealed that the dead – almost equal in number – fell in a battle in which the Palestinians were well prepared; the Durban Conference in 2001 and then in 2009, made of Israel, along with the chorus of the world, an “apartheid state” – a lie repeated nonstop. The verdicts of condemnation on the defense barrier by the International Court of Justice of The Hague in 2004, and the Goldstone report against Israel in 2009, have simply forbidden Israel to defend itself.

Why should it, if it doesn’t have the right to exist? European elites, as we unfortunately read also yesterday in an article by a writer as Alessandro Piperno in the Corriere della Sera, variously repeated this ominous prophecy, an expression of nihilism that portrays the savage vitality of Ahmadinejad. But Israel is fine. It’s said by its magnificent writers, as well as demonstrated in its booming economy, medical sciences, music, cinema and children, who are capable of sacrifice and a complex life between war and their love for peace. On its side there is life; and in life the enemies exist, and they are sometimes frightening and dangerous.

In all this, we are proud that Italy voted against the request by the UN for an international investigation into the Israeli blitz.