Adolfo Fernandez Sainz

Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R – Fl 21st District) spoke for Cuban prisoner of conscience Adolfo Fernandez Sainz in the House of Representatives today.

“Mr. Speaker, we cannot allow Mr. Fernandez Sainz to languish in a gulag where he is abused and tortured. My Colleagues, we cannot allow Mr. Ferna´ndez Sainz to remain in a gulag with totalitarian thugs who want to murder him. We must demand the immediate release of Juan Adolfo Ferna´ndez Sainz and every prisoner of conscience languishing in the totalitarian gulags of the nightmare called the Castro regime.”

More on Mr. Fernandez Sainz at RSF.

Caroline Glick hammers Kadima

Caroline Glick on Kadima and the Israeli election, in the JPost. This column is a particularly hard-hitting one. Some choice bits that stood out for me:

“Although all the spinning in the world couldn’t convince the public to support Kadima’s planned unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, Kadima was able to salvage the gist of its defeatist strategy. By pretending that Israel hadn’t failed in Lebanon, and defending the view that victory isn’t an option, Kadima deftly replaced its unilateral surrender strategy with as strategy of surrendering land in the framework of a "peace process" with the pro-terror, corrupt, unpopular, and anti-Israel Fatah-led PA in Ramallah. That "peace process" in turn kept the land surrender policy on the table by asserting that the main obstacle to peace is Israel’s unwillingness to give its land to the Palestinians.”

and

“While last weekend’s bombing of yet another Israeli school was met with international indifference, international leaders lined up to have their photographs taken outside the UNRWA school in Gaza that the IDF attacked in January after Hamas combatants used the building as a missile launching pad against Israeli civilians.”

That says everything you need to know about “international leaders.”

EU nations fail to track anti-Semitism

The JPost has this AP report on the very mixed approach to tracking and studying anti-Semitic attacks and events in Europe.

UN idiot says nations should not boycott Durban II

There’s an old saying that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, and that certainly applies to UN hacks like Navanethem Pillay, the UN’s high commissioner for “human rights.” She urged countries such as Canada not to boycott the upcoming hate-the-Jews fest known as Durban II, saying that predictions of a repetition of “anti-Semitic outbursts” are unwarranted. Failure to attend, she says will have a negative effect on human rights around the world. Absolute nonsense – attending this conference, giving the ugly thugs and dictators who run it credibility by taking them seriously, will damage human rights. Boycotting the conference is one small step towards improving human rights, by beginning to identify the real human rights abusers – the countries organizing and running this charade.

It’s rich to hear one of these idiots talking about the dangers for human rights when they have enormous resources at their disposal to work for human rights and yet they do nothing – nothing about Sudan, nothing about North Korea, nothing about Iran, nothing about Zimbabwe, nothing about China, nothing about Saudi Arabia, nothing about Syria, nothing about Hamas or Hezbollah. Pillay is part of the problem. The UN is a part of the problem. A big part.

“[Liberal MP Irwin] Cotler said his memories of the Durban conference are clear.

“”Those of us who were there will not forget the festival of hate which became a metaphor for not just the singling out of a people or a state for discriminatory treatment, but really the assault upon the legitimacy of that state and people.””

Excellent Jonathan Kay column on anti-Semitism

Jonathan Kay nails it in a column inspired by the dreary anti-Semitism of “Israel Apartheid Week” on Canadian university campuses this week. This is the conclusion:

“Our entire human-rights establishment was built in the 1960s and 1970s on the assumption that anti-Semitism would always be a creature of the extreme right. And to this day, the dinosaurs who run the nation’s HRCs — along with their allies in the identity-politics industry — persist in the ridiculous notion that the main threat to Jews emanates from drunken old fossils like Ahenakew, or the eight unemployed hamburger-flippers who get together in Calgary every year to exchange badly rehearsed Hitler salutes.

They treasure this conceit for an obvious self-serving reason: Vilifying Nazis is easy. Taking on politically correct Muslims and campus lefties on parade is hard. Anti-Semitism thrives when lazy people look the other way. That much, at least, hasn’t changed.”

He’s absolutely right in what he says about the idiotic “human rights” commissions in Canada, too.

Increasing anti-Semitism in Turkey

For decades, secular Turkey as an ally of Israel, since both countries were beset by Islamist enemies of one kind or another. But with an Islamist government in place in Turkey and not coincidentally with anti-Semitism on the rise, those days seem to be over. YNet reports that “the honeymoon is over.”

“In recent years, anti-Semitism in Turkey reached unprecedented levels. The PEW’s polling center recently published shocking results on the rise of animosity towards Jews in traditionally tolerant Anatolian culture. According to the research, 76% of Turks hold negative views about Jews and do not wish to be their neighbors. In 2004, 49% expressed this view.”

Double-dealing by Obama on Durban?

Writing in Forbes, Anne Bayefsky suggests that our relief at the thought that the US would boycott the Durban II hate-the-Jews-fest was premature. It’s no longer clear what the official US position is.

Given that every statement by Obama comes with an expiry date and that he has just appointed a Saudi-financed apologist for dictators to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Israel appears to be in some danger.

Jews in Muslim lands face hostility

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald has an AP story with the sub-head “Anti-Israel protesters take out anger on tiny communities abroad,” those being communities of Jews. I think it is fair to conclude when ‘protesters’ take out their anger on Jews that the target of their hatred is Jews. AP may choose to call these people “anti-Israeli” but their actions demonstrate that they are, in fact, anti-Semitic. It’s a pity that this concept is too difficult for AP’s reporter to grasp.

Hillary Clinton names human rights advisor

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will nominate Michael Posner to be Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, JTA reports.

Posner is founder of Human Rights First.

“"Anti-Jewish bombings, arson, and personal assaults in Europe are proliferating in an environment of incitement to violence," Posner told a U.S. Senate hearing in April 2004. "Yet despite a continued high rate of antisemitic threats and attacks in large parts of Europe, only a handful of the fifteen governments of the European Union systematically monitor and report on these and other manifestations of racist violence."”

I don’t know anything about Posner’s organization, but Wikipedia says that it has been praised by NGO Monitor for its balanced reporting on the Israeli-Arab conflict. That’s a good sign.

Hogwash. Also whitewash. Which makes it white hogwash, I guess.

PBS and BBC have been roundly criticized for their clearly anti-Semitic portrait of the Jew Fagin in their recent co-production of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Now, the PBS ombudsman has weighed in with the usual media PR schtick – pretend to be very concerned, print a few angry letters, and then explain that everyone who watched just misunderstood the film-makers’ kind intentions. Robert J. Avrech called them on this here. The PBS ombudsman’s column is here. The latter includes comments from Rebecca Eaton, executive producer of Masterpiece Theatre, which are singularly unconvincing.

Given the alarming rise of anti-Semitism around the world, the BBC and PBS should have known better that to emphasize the Jewishness of their villain. Well, PBS should have known better. The BBC is incorrigible.