December 6, 2015 Why Is AIPAC Silent on Syrian Refugees? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Why Is AIPAC Silent on Syrian Refugees?

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

Like much of America, Jewish organizations have become increasingly inward and tribal over the past 40 years.

Many American Jewish groups balance the Holocaust’s tribal and universal lessons. The most powerful one doesn’t even try.

The last two weeks have brought a festival of American ugliness. Since the attacks in Paris, virtually every Republican governor has declared their state off-limits to Syrian refugees. GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz has called for allowing in Syrians only if they’re Christian. Donald Trump has mused about registering American Muslims and falsely accused them of celebrating 9/11. The bigotry and cowardice are jaw dropping. France, which lost 130 lives on November 13, has nonetheless committed to accepting 30,000 desperate Syrians. Barack Obama wants to accept 10,000 and the Republican Party has erupted in nativist hysteria.

In this dark time, the organized American Jewish community has been a source of light. In 2011, during another spasm of Islamophobia, the Anti-Defamation League shamed itself by opposing the building of an Islamic Center near the site of the World Trade Center. This time, by contrast, it has joined with nine other American Jewish groups to pen a letter to Congress declaring that, “To turn our back on refugees would be to betray our nation’s core values.” Even the right-leaning Orthodox Union has declared that, “While security concerns must be paramount, our focus as a nation should be on ‘getting to yes’” and accepting Syrian refugees.

Why is an American Jewish establishment so untroubled by the denial of Palestinian rights in Israel so concerned about America’s treatment of Syrian refugees? Because human beings think analogically. When new events arise we scan our brains for similar events in the past and then use the lessons of those past events to determine how to respond. If the last time you ate carrot cake you got sick, you’re unlikely to eat anything that looks like carrot cake again.

For American Jewish leaders, the most powerful analogy is the Holocaust. But it contains two, radically different, lessons. Lesson number one is to be on the lookout for Nazis. Thus, when Iranian leaders call for the elimination of Israel, American Jewish leaders assume that, like Adolf Hitler, they will use any weapons at their disposal, no matter the risk, to murder Jews. Lesson number two is that anyone suffering a Holocaust—or some lesser persecution–deserves help, as long as they are not Nazis themselves.

The first lesson is tribal; the second is universal. The first inclines Jewish organizations to take a hard line against Iranian’s nuclear program and Palestinian nationalism. The second inclines them toward empathy for Syrians fleeing persecution and gays and lesbians who want the right to marry.

This summer, during the Iran fight, most American Jewish organizations activated the right sides of their brain. Now, this fall, during the Syrian refugee controversy, they’re activating their left. And in the process, they’re showing compassion when it’s needed most.

But there’s a problem. While the organizations that petitioned Congress on behalf of Syrian refugees respond to both halves of the Holocaust analogy, they don’t wield much power in Washington. They’re far less influential than AIPAC, which focuses only on the first. AIPAC leaders invoke the Holocaust constantly, but only to imply that Israel’s enemies are Nazis, never to suggest that non-Jews suffering oppression deserve help. That’s why AIPAC won’t weigh in on Syrian refugees. It’s also why AIPAC has repeatedly hosted the Reverend John Hagee, even though he’s said Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans because the city was hosting a gay pride rally. For AIPAC, that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Hagee supports Benjamin Netanyahu against Israel’s Nazi-like foes.

People in the American Jewish community take this for granted. But they shouldn’t. In the mid-twentieth century, the idea that American Jewry’s most powerful communal institution would ignore everything except Israel would have struck Jewish leaders as perverse. Back then, before AIPAC became the powerhouse it is today, America’s most influential Jewish groups cared about Israel. But they cared about civil rights and civil liberties inside the United States even more. J.J. Goldberg notes in his book, Jewish Power, that in the 1940s American Jewish Congress employed more lawyers fighting racial segregation than either the NAACP or the Department of Justice.

In the 1950s, before it even opened an office in Israel, the American Jewish Committee funded the research by psychologist Kenneth Clark that helped sway the Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education.

American Jewry’s values haven’t changed much since then. That’s why American Jews voted overwhelmingly, twice, for Barack Obama. But American Jewry’s distribution of power has changed. The “war on terror,” the rise of the mega-donor, the assimilation of liberal Jews, the growing influence of the Orthodox and the prime ministership of Benjamin Netanyahu have all tipped the balance in favor of a tribal interpretation of the Holocaust analogy.

It’s wonderful that so many American Jewish groups are expressing solidarity with Syrian refugees. And it’s tragic that AIPAC remains more powerful than all of them put together.

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Why Russian-Jewish Refugees are Different From Syrian Refugees

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

Yuri Kruman writes:

In a recent op-ed entitled “I’m a Russian-born American Jew. My people’s rejection of Syrian refugees breaks my heart,” Ilya Lozovsky slanderously paints all Russian Jews as fascist hypocrites for failing to join his crusade to resettle Syrian refugees in America.

As a Russian-born American Jew, I beg to differ with his shallow smear campaign.

Let’s first be clear that as recent refugees ourselves, most Russian Jews in America know and remember well what it is like to be a refugee — not knowing where food or shelter may come from next, stuck in Austria or Italy on the way to the States or Israel. We get it like few others.

Humanitarian tragedies know no borders or nationalities, and deserve our help through the provision of food, temporary shelter, clothing, and medication.

But resettling refugees in the US is another matter altogether. The relevant policy questions to consider will have serious implications for our country. There is no place in this necessary and civilized argument for smears of racism and worse. Unfortunately, Mr. Lozovsky has stooped to this lowest of levels.

Do the proposed immigrants share our society’s values and respect the local rule of law? Given their average educational level, tolerance for other cultures and religions, as well as contributions to society back home, will they manage to integrate and succeed in America? Frankly, will they contribute significantly to the economy, civil society, and the preservation of democratic institutions? Lastly, do they have a core group of countrymen or co-religionists that will help them with integration, jobs and other big and little “logistics?”

With Russian Jews and with Syrians both, the situation was urgent and needed common-sense help immediately. We had only Israel as a challenging alternative. The Syrian refugees’ wealthy Gulf Arab brethren haven’t lifted a finger to help.

When it came to a community ready to help, Jewish organizations all over the country stood ready to help and indeed resettled hundreds of thousands of us successfully. We paid back our keep and much more by achieving high average educational level, high average salary, and strong participation in the economy and civil society. Syrian-Americans in Detroit, meanwhile, have remained reticent about accepting any Syrian refugees.

Do Russian Jews share American values? You bet.

Do Syrian refugees share our values? That’s a much more difficult question. Whether they’re rebels (Al-Nusra or Al-Qaeda), ISIS or just “regular folks,” they come from a society that’s deeply and universally misogynistic, intolerant of gays and other religions, profoundly anti-American and antisemitic, rife with conspiracy theories, etc. Every family’s case is different, but we must take their society of origin into account.

It’s true that most of this could well be said of Russian refugees, as well. However, Jews were long persecuted (and often killed) in the Soviet Union for religious practice, prevented from participation in civil society, filled the ranks of dissidents, and nevertheless managed high educational and scientific achievements despite state-sponsored antsemitism.

In short, as much as the Syrian refugees deserve our tactical help, they have other alternatives, don’t share our values to a large degree, and have little infrastructure ready to absorb them in the US. These are arguments that must be considered when debating the issue.

Posted in Immigration, Jews, Russia, Syria | Comments Off

Israel Shows Us How To Deal With Unwanted Refugees

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

Israel is a light unto the nations with its serious commitment to its survival. Part of that commitment means keeping out people who are incompatible with a Jewish state. Would that America was similarly pragmatic.

Black Africans are incompatible with a Jewish state. The influx of over 100,000 Ethiopians claiming to be Jewish has been a disaster.

From the Jerusalem Post:

NGOs lodge appeal over policy for migrants denied refugee status

The legal decision over how to handle the issue of around 45,000 African migrants who crossed into the country illegally, but claim refugee status, is somewhat up in the air.

…The Supreme Court also essentially validated the state’s goals of trying to deter future African migrants and shrink their current population size via detention and pressure to self-deport.

This paved the way for Beersheba District Court Judge Rachel Lavi-Barkai to uphold the part of the state’s policy that depended on giving certain migrants the choice to self-deport or be indefinitely detained…

Around 33,000 of the 45,000 migrants are Eritrean, and the state has recently taken the position that most Eritreans in Israel are not refugees.

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Senate Dems meet with Jewish leaders, talk Iran and refugees

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Senate Democrats meeting with Jewish organizational leaders pledged to police the Iran nuclear deal and applauded Jewish backing for resettling Syrian refugees…

The senators were moved by presentations on the refugee crisis by Mark Hetfield, the president of HIAS, the lead Jewish agency handling immigration issues, and Greg Rosenbaum, the chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council. The overwhelming majority of Jewish groups back Obama’s plan to settle 10,000 Syrian refugees in the United States over the next year, despite a swelling of GOP opposition to the program in recent weeks.

Other topics discussed included the boycott Israel movement. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., expressed alarm at its growth on California campuses.

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Social Justice

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

Letters to the Fort-Worth Star Telegram:

* Your Nov. 22 editorial (“Syrian refugees and terrorists are not the same”) said that “Jews must have cringed at the memory of times in their history … when they were required to wear badges signifying their faith.”

A core teaching of Judaism is social justice, mutual aid and tolerance. This teaching in ingrained in the fabric of all Jews, whether religious or secular.

The slogan “Never Again” means more than just the Holocaust. It means never again will we be silent in the face of injustice.

As Albert Einstein, a secular Jew, stated in 1938, the bond that unites Jews is “the democratic ideal of social justice coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men.”

This is why we speak out in a voice larger than our 2 percent of the U.S. population.

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ZOA Chief: Don’t Accept Syrian Refugees ‘Because They Hate Israel and Jews’

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

From Haaretz:

Annual gala of Zionist Organization of America, featuring Sheldon Adelson, breaks into wild applause over far-right views and the prospect of a Republican president.

NEW YORK – The United States should not accept any Syrian refugees, Zionist Organization of America president Mort Klein told attendees at a gala banquet here Sunday night, adding that many of them hate Jews and Israel. In addition, he said, parents and siblings of terrorists should be deported unless they publicly condemn, in Hebrew and Arabic, the acts of their family member. Klein was speaking to an audience of more than 1,000 people at the 2015 Justice Louis D. Brandeis Award Dinner, held at Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt hotel.
“Don’t bring these refugees here. Treat as pariahs all those who promote radical Islam. … We must crush radical Islam as we crushed Nazism,” Klein said.
Attendees greeted both of Klein’s proposals with wild applause. It was one of several moments of right-wing ideology met by popular — though perhaps, given the $700 per person ticket price, not populist — acclaim.
“I don’t even know the legalities of it,” Klein told Haaretz after the dinner, of the deportation proposal. “I am so frustrated by the horror, the terror almost every day. The streets of Israel are empty, stores are 80 percent down in sales, people aren’t going to the Kotel. This is terrible. We can’t allow them to destroy Israel’s society,” he said, adding that ZOA’s board had not yet approved his idea but he expected it to do so at a meeting later this week. “These are extraordinary times and we need extraordinary measures.”
At the event, which was billed as “ZOA’s Superstar Gala,” actor Jon Voight received the Dr. Miriam & Sheldon Adelson Defender of Israel Award and Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer was given the ZOA’s Dr. Bob Shillman Award for Outstanding Diplomacy.
Dermer, in his remarks, called on world governments to wage war against militant Islam and castigated them for not coming to Israel’s defense during the current round of terrorist attacks. “In the past few weeks, 19 Israelis have been killed and some 200 have been wounded in terror attacks. … But rather than support Israel … we hear outrageous statements about a cycle of violence and the need for both sides to act with restraint.”

Posted in Immigration, Islam, Syria | Comments Off

What Did Americans Say About Jewish Holocaust Refugees?

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

From Haaretz:

Back in the 1930s and ’40s, the fear was of Nazi and Communist infiltrators sneaking in along with the refugees rather than the ISIS militants or Mexican criminals that some fear today.

JTA – They were called “so-called” refugees, told they were alien to American culture and warned against as potential enemies of the United States.
This heated anti-refugee rhetoric in America was directed against Jews trying to flee Europe, not Mexicans or Syrians. Back in the 1930s and ’40s, the fear was of Nazi and Communist infiltrators sneaking in along with the refugees rather than the ISIS militants or Mexican criminals that some fear today.
Here’s a snapshot of what Americans were saying about Jews as they sought to escape Hitler’s Nazi vise for refuge in the United States.
‘Try to keep them out’
In 1938, when Hitler’s threat to Jews in Germany already was apparent, America still was emerging from the Great Depression, and xenophobia and anti-Semitism were commonplace. In a July 1938 poll, 67 percent of Americans told Fortune magazine that America should try to keep out altogether German, Austrian and other political refugees, and another 18 percent said America should allow them in but without increasing immigration quotas.
In another 1938 poll, cited in the book “Jews in the Mind of America,” some 75 percent of respondents said they opposed increasing the number of German Jews allowed to resettle in the United States.
In January 1939, 61 percent of Americans told Gallup they opposed the settlement of 10,000 refugee children, “most of them Jewish,” in the United States.
In May that year, 12 percent of Americans said they would support a widespread campaign against Jews in the United States and another 8 percent said they would be sympathetic to one, according to the book “FDR and the Jews.” By June 1944, the number had risen to 43 percent of Americans who said they would support a campaign against the Jews or would be sympathetic to one. Polls cited in “Jews in the Mind of America” showed 24 percent of Americans believed Jews were “a menace to America.”
At the same time, however, 70 percent of Americans said in an April 1944 poll commissioned by the White House that they supported creating temporary safe haven camps in the United States where war refugees could stay until the war’s end. Only one such camp was set up, at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York; 982 refugees were placed there in August 1944.
‘A Jewish empire’
Representative Jacob Thorkelson, a Montana Republican, said Jewish migrants are part of an “invisible government” tied to the “communistic Jew” and to “Jewish international financiers.”
Senator Robert Reynolds, a North Carolina Democrat, said Jews are “systematically building a Jewish empire in this country.”
“Let Europe take care of its own people,” he said. “We cannot care for our own, to say nothing of importing more to care for.”
Reynolds told Life magazine he merely wanted “our own fine boys and lovely girls to have all the jobs in this wonderful country,” according to TheIntercept.com.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself warned that Jewish refugees might be Nazi spies, coerced to do the Reich’s bidding with threats against relatives back home. At a news conference, Roosevelt explained how refugees – “especially Jewish refugees” – might be forced into service for the Nazis with the threat that if they declined, they would be told, “We are frightfully sorry, but your old father and mother will be taken out and shot.”
Similar warnings against Nazis disguised as refugees appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest and American Magazine, according to Reason.com.
The numbers
America did not take specific action to help Jewish refugees until January 1944, when Roosevelt, conceding to pressure from members of his own government and American Jews, established the War Refugee Board to help rescue Jews in Europe.
Until then, several thousand Jewish refugees had gained admittance into the United States under the German-Austrian quota from 1938 to 1941, which wasn’t limited to Jews. But for most of Roosevelt’s presidency, the U.S. quota for immigrants from Germany went less than 25 percent filled, according to the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. In all, more than 190,000 quota places from Germany and Axis-occupied countries sat unused during the Holocaust.
In 1938, just two weeks after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the U.S. interior secretary floated the idea of settling refugees in Alaska, and soon his office began researching the possibility. In March 1940, Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Frank Havenner of California proposed bills to resettle 10,000 war refugees in the remote territory who wouldn’t count toward America’s immigration quotas. But the idea ran into opponents in Congress who expressed concerns that “these foreigners cannot be assimilated in Alaska, and will constitute a threat to our American civilization.”
In one of the most infamous incidents involving Jewish refugees, the SS St. Louis, a ship loaded with Jews fleeing the Nazis, sailed to the waters off of Florida in 1939, its passengers begging Roosevelt to enter the country. But Roosevelt said no, and the ship – once close enough for passengers to see the lights of Miami – returned to Europe. Nearly half its passengers would perish at the hands of the Nazis.
Even after World War II, Jewish refugees and displaced persons who wanted to resettle to the United States faced tight restrictions. Overall immigration to the U.S. did not increase after the Holocaust, but in an effort to bypass congressional inaction and help war refugees, President Harry Truman ordered that existing immigration quotas be filled by displaced persons. Under the provisions of the Truman Directive, some 22,950 DPs came to the United States between late 1945 and 1947; two-thirds were Jewish.
In 1948, Congress loosened immigration restrictions to allow 400,000 DPs into the United States. Most of those spots went to Christians, however; only about 20 percent, or 80,000, were Jews.
In all, 137,450 Jewish refugees had settled in the United States by 1952, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
By comparison, more than four years into Syria’s civil war, America has accepted about 1,500 Syrian refugees.

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JTA: US rabbis urge leaders to welcome refugees

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

JTA: More than 1,000 US rabbis have signed a letter calling on elected officials to welcome refugees.

The letter, sponsored by HIAS, the lead Jewish body dealing with immigration issues, said the rabbis are “alarmed to see so many politicians declaring their opposition to welcoming refugees.”

Rabbis in 46 states as well as Washington, DC, are among the signers. A condensed version of the letter and the full list of rabbis who signed on to it will appear in the print editions of Politico and the daily Forward on Thursday.

“Since its founding, the United States has offered refuge and protection to the world’s most vulnerable,” the letter says. “Time and time again, those refugees were Jews. Whether they were fleeing pogroms in Tzarist Russia, the horrors of the Holocaust or persecution in Soviet Russia or Iran, our relatives and friends found safety on these shores.

“Last month’s heartbreaking attacks in Paris and Beirut are being cited as reasons to deny entry to people who are themselves victims of terror. And in those comments, we, as Jewish leaders, see one of the darker moments of our history repeating itself,” the letter continues, citing the US turning away the SS St. Louis in 1939, sending some 900 Jews back to Europe; many were killed by the Nazis.

The letter urges elected officials to support legislation to resettle refugees and oppose any measures that would “actually or effectively halt resettlement or prohibit or restrict funding for any groups of refugees.”

COMMENTS POSTED:

* Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg: I believe there is a big difference between European Jews before and during World War II — who were not just caught in a war zone, but were being actively persecuted — and Syrian-Muslims. These young Syrian Muslim men, who make up the vast majority of the would-be refugees, should be fighting for their country. These young men from Syria — and in many cases young women — should be trained to be the boots on the ground against, first, ISIS, and then Assad. They are caught in a war zone. They are not being persecuted for who they are.

The story of Syrian Christians (and, in fact, all Middle Eastern Christians) is quite different. Their plight is much more similar to that of the European Jews in World War II. These Christians are being actively persecuted and killed and would probably not be accepted into a Muslim army fighting ISIS and/or Assad. Middle Eastern Christians merit refugee status.

I think a strong argument could be made for forming a 21st century version of the Kindertransport for Syrian Muslim children under the age of 12. That way they could be given safe haven until they can be reunited with their parents in a (hopefully) safe and sane Syria.

On a similar note, discussion on immigration into the U.S. has, by and large, neglected a very important issue: demographics. The U.S. is not replacing its population. The birthrate is dropping precipitously. If this is to remain a Judeo-Christian country, we must strongly re-think any opposition to Latino immigration. These people from Central and South America are a strong Christian (predominantly Catholic) church-going community —and we need them and their children if the Judeo-Christian ethic in the U.S. is to be maintained.

To all my facebook friends and supporters:
I need your help. While Rabbis and clergy are busy supporting Syrian refugees coming in to America without assurances by the FBI that they are not threats, I am fighting them knowing in my heart that Americans will be killed if this is not done correctly. No one can tell me that there is no connections between what happened in California and Syrian indoctrination. IN addition I sent material re my being threatened by a former student at Rutgers. Nothing has been done by the university, the Jewish newspapers, or the local Rabbis

* Absolutely, or force Muslims countries to take them,they will be much happier where they share religion and language.

* These clowns and their handlers are trying to drive Jews away from Judaism.

* Hopefully the Rabbis who have spoken will lead and follow their words and take a refugee family into their own home and set an example of their belief in their words.

* Sooooo…..perhaps these 1000 rabbis want to check their history. The linkage and comparison between THESE refugees and those from WWII are different worlds altogether! The Jews etc were not bent on the destruction of their new host country. Here, we have already.seen the affects of terrorists coming in under the.guise of ”refugees.” Witness Paris…

* What is wrong with these rabbis? Have they gone all insane? Who are they? Does anyone have a list of names and denominations?

* Homicidal maniacs were not seeded throughout the population of Jews who went to the death camps. There is no comparison. Misplaced pity is a crime. There are scores of Muslim nations to send these people. Many filthy rich.

* For the sake of the rest of us Jews, gather up these crazy rabbis and ship them to Syria.

* These idiotic rabbis, most likely from Reform movements have a wish to turn American cities to the European cities where the Jews are no longer safe. HIAS is selling out for few dollars they can earn upon sponsoring the Muslim refugees.

* These rabbis are speaking only for the lost souls within the misguided American Jewish communities who live in the la la land.

* As a reform Jew from south I am disgusted with these rabbis wanting these muslim fanatics to settle in the u.s.a.they are all wolves in sheep’s clothes.

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SWC Statement on Release of Jonathan Pollard

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

From Wiesenthal.com: “The Simon Wiesenthal Center welcomes the release of Jonathan Pollard and wisheshim and his wife well as he spends his first Sabbath in freedom in three decades. We are sorry that Jonathan’s parents did not live to see this day. The SWC publicly supported the release of Mr. Pollard for many years, on humanitarian grounds, and Center officials met with him while he was incarcerated in Illinois and later in North Carolina. We wish him well and hope he will soon be able to go to Israel.”

The enemies of America include those who align themselves with its enemies.

Steve Sailer writes in 2014:

It’s testament to the power of insisting upon your version of The Narrative over and over that easily looked-up facts about the traitor Jonathan Pollard can simply be ignored.

For example, rather than being an ethno-patriotic altruist who gave Israel 3,600 cubic feet of secret American documents out of sheer idealism, Pollard is an all-around terrible person as countless incidents in his life attest. Always has been. From his Wikipedia article:

Pollard grew up with what he called a “racial obligation” to Israel,[15] and made his first trip to Israel in 1970, as part of a science program visiting the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. While there, he was hospitalized after a fight with another student. One Weizmann scientist remembered Pollard as leaving behind “a reputation of being an unstable troublemaker, the worst case of this kind in the history of the summer camp”.[16]
… After completing high school, Pollard attended Stanford University, where he completed a degree in political science in 1976.[14] While there, he is remembered by several of his acquaintances as boasting that he was a dual citizen of the United States and Israel and claiming to work for the Mossad and to have attained the rank of colonel in the Israel Defense Forces. None of these claims were true.[17][18][19]
Pollard was turned down for the CIA job after taking a polygraph test in which he admitted to prolific illegal drug usage between 1974 and 1978. …The Navy asked for but was denied information from the CIA regarding Pollard, including the results of their pre-employment polygraph test showing Pollard’s excessive drug use.[23] …
Two months after Pollard was hired, the technical director of NOSIC, Richard Haver, requested that he be terminated.[23] This came after a conversation with the new hire in which Pollard offered to start a back-channel operation with the South African intelligence service and lied about his father’s involvement with the CIA.[23] Instead of terminating Pollard, Haver’s boss reassigned him to a Navy human intelligence (HUMINT) operation, … In the vetting process for this position, Pollard, it was later discovered, lied repeatedly: he denied illegal drug use, claimed his father had been a CIA operative, misrepresented his language abilities and his educational achievements, and claimed to have applied for a commission as officer in the Naval Reserve.[23] …
While transferring to his new job at TF-168, Pollard again initiated a meeting with someone far up the chain of command, this time with Admiral Sumner Shapiro, Commander, Naval Intelligence Command (CNIC) about an idea he had for TF-168 and South Africa. (The TF-168 group had passed on his ideas.) After the meeting, Shapiro immediately ordered that Pollard’s security clearances be revoked and that he be reassigned to a non-sensitive position. According to The Washington Post, Shapiro dismissed Pollard as a “kook”, saying later, “I wish the hell I’d fired him.”[24]
Because of the job transfer, Shapiro’s order to remove Pollard’s security clearances slipped through the cracks. However, Shapiro’s office followed up with a request to TF-168 that Pollard’s trustworthiness be investigated by the CIA. The CIA found Pollard to be a risk and recommended that he not be used in any intelligence collection operation. A subsequent polygraph test was inconclusive, although it did prompt Pollard to admit to making false statements to his superiors, prior drug use, and having unauthorized contacts with representatives of foreign governments.[25] The special agent administering the test felt that Pollard, who at times “began shouting and shaking and making gagging sounds as if he were going to vomit”, was feigning illness to invalidate the test, and recommended that he not be granted access to highly classified information.[25] Pollard was also required to be evaluated by a psychiatrist.[25]
Pollard’s clearance was reduced to Secret.[25] Pollard subsequently filed a grievance and threatened lawsuits to recover his SCI clearance, and subsequently began receiving excellent performance reviews.[26] In 1982, after the psychiatrist concluded Pollard had no mental illness, Pollard’s clearance was upgraded to SCI once again. In October 1984, after some reorganization of the Navy’s intelligence departments, Pollard applied for and was accepted into a position as an analyst for the Naval Intelligence Command.[citation needed]
Shortly after Pollard began working at NIC/TF-168, he met Aviem Sella, a combat veteran of the Israeli Air Force, at the time on leave from his position as a colonel to gain a master’s degree in computer science as a graduate student at New York University. Pollard told Sella that he worked for U.S. naval intelligence, detailed to him specific incidents where U.S. intelligence was withholding information from Israel, and offered himself as a spy. Though Sella had wondered whether Pollard was part of an FBI sting operation to recruit an Israeli, he ended up believing him. … Within a few days, in June 1984, Pollard started passing classified information to Sella and received, in exchange, $10,000 cash and a very expensive diamond and sapphire ring, which Pollard later used to propose marriage to his girlfriend Anne. He also agreed to receive $1,500 per month for further espionage.[28]
Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigator Ronald Olive has alleged that Pollard passed classified information to South Africa,[29] and attempted, through a third party, to sell classified information to Pakistan on multiple occasions.[30] Pollard also stole classified documents related to China on behalf of his wife, who used the information to advance her personal business-interests and kept them around the house, where investigating authorities discovered them when Pollard’s espionage activity came to light.[31][32][33]
During Pollard’s trial, the US government’s memorandum in aid of sentencing challenged “defendant’s claim that he was motivated by altruism rather than greed”, asserting that Pollard had “disclosed classified information in anticipation of financial gain” in other instances:
The government’s investigation has revealed that defendant provided to certain of his acquaintances U.S. classified documents which defendant obtained through U.S. Navy sources. The classified documents which defendant disclosed to two such acquaintances, both of whom are professional investment advisers, contained classified economic and political analyses which defendant believed would help his acquaintances render investment advice to their clients… Defendant acknowledged that, although he was not paid for his unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the above-mentioned acquaintances, he hoped to be rewarded ultimately through business opportunities that these individuals could arrange for defendant when he eventually left his position with the U.S. Navy. In fact, defendant was involved in an ongoing business venture with two of these acquaintances at the time he provided the classified information to them…[34]
During the course of the Pollard trial, Australian authorities reported the disclosure of classified American documents by Pollard to one of their own agents, a Royal Australian Navy officer who had been engaged in a personnel-exchange naval-liaison program between the U.S. and Australia.[35] The Australian officer, alarmed by Pollard’s repeated disclosure to him of data caveated No Foreign Access Allowed, reported the indiscretions to his chain of command, which in turn recalled him from his position in the U.S., fearing that the disclosures might be part of a “CIA ruse”.

Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker in 1999:

Had Pollard’s case gone to trial, one of the government’s major witnesses would have been a journalist named Kurt Lohbeck, who had a checkered past. He had served seven months in prison after being convicted of passing a bad check in New Mexico in 1977, but by 1985 he was under contract to the CBS Evening News. Lohbeck, who now lives in Albuquerque — (he received a full pardon from the governor of New Mexico two years ago), acknowledged in a telephone interview that he was prepared to testify, if necessary, about his involvement in Pollard’s unsuccessful efforts in 1985 to broker arms sales for the rebels in the Afghan war. At one meeting with a foreign diplomat, Lohbeck said, Pollard posed as a high-level C.I.A. operative. Lohbeck, who was then CBS’s main battlefield correspondent in the Afghan war, told me that Pollard had provided him, and thus CBS, with a large number of classified American documents concerning the war. He also told me that Pollard had never discussed Israel with him or indicated any special feelings for the state. “I never heard anything political from Jay,” Lohbeck added, “other than that he tried to portray himself as a Reaganite. Not a word about Israel. Jay’s sole interest was in making a lot of money.”
Lohbeck went on to say that he had also been prepared to testify, if asked, about Pollard’s drug use. “Jay used cocaine heavily, and had no compunction about doing it in public. He’d just lay it in lines on the table.” In 1985, Lohbeck made similar statements, government officials said, to the F.B.I.
Pollard, told by me of Lohbeck’s assertions, sent a response from a jail cell in North Carolina: “My relationship with Lohbeck is extremely complicated. I was never indicted for anything I did with him. Remember that.” ‘

Pollard reminds me vaguely of lobbyist-felon Jack Abramoff, except Pollard was out of control on cocaine instead of steroids.

In a sane world, Israel and many of its American supporters would cite Pollard’s all-around awfulness as evidence that he’s an anomaly, he’s totally unrepresentative. They would downplay the arguments that he did it for Israel and play up the evidence that he was a cokehound with delusions of being an international man of mystery.

Instead, the opposite happens.

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Merkel: Refugees entering Germany must reject anti-Semitism

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Luke Ford

I think we should insist that all immigrants take pledges to reject anti-Semitism. In fact, make it mandatory for all citizens who want government benefits. In exchange, we’ll give them money, a kosher seal of approval (to help them get a good job) and a shot at appearing on American Idol and America’s Next Top Model or the equivalent.

Any Jew who praises Merkel for this declaration is a moron.

Times of Israel:

Chancellor is awarded Reform movement prize as ‘guarantor of basic democratic values and freedom of religion’

BERLIN — Refugees in Germany must unlearn the anti-Semitism fed to them in their home countries, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in accepting the German Reform movement’s top award.

Merkel on Wednesday was presented with the Abraham Geiger Prize, worth more than $10,000, for her commitment as “guarantor of basic democratic values and freedom of religion,” according to the award jury.

The German chancellor is donating the funds to the “Dialog Perspectives” program of the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk, a foundation for talented Jewish students.

At Wednesday’s ceremony at Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Merkel, 61, said she shared the Jewish community’s humanitarian concerns and worries, wanting to help refugees fleeing ISIS, but also wanting to protect democracy at home. An estimated 800,000 refugees, most of them Muslim, will have sought asylum in Germany by the end of this year.

In order to be integrated, the asylum seekers “must respect our culture and learn our language,” Merkel said. They also must adhere to laws that protect equal rights for women and gays, and that reject anti-Semitism, she emphasized.

Admitting that there might be differences on how best to achieve integration, Merkel told her hosts: “If you express concerns about anti-Semitism, I will always be listening.”

Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, thanked Merkel for her “open ear to the concerns of the Jewish population, who fear possible anti-Semitism within the refugee population.”

Schuster stressed that Jews in Germany have a special empathy for refugees, having accepted and integrated more than 140,000 former Soviet Jews over the past 25 years.

The keynote speaker at the event was José Casanova, a top scholar in the the sociology of religion. Other speakers were Jewish Museum Director Peter Schaefer and Josef Joffe, publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit. Presenting the award were Rabbi Walter Jacob of Pittsburgh, co-founder of the Abraham Geiger College rabbinical seminary in Potsdam, and the seminary’s rector, Rabbi Walter Homolka.

Three students supported by the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk also addressed Merkel briefly, thanking her for supporting Israel and Jewish life in Germany.

“We want to help shape the future of Germany,” said Olga Osadtschy, who immigrated to Germany from Kiev and studies in Basel, Switzerland.

Cantorial students and graduates from the Abraham Geiger College Jewish Institute of Cantorial Arts performed for the chancellor, who personally shook their hands, said a beaming Svetlana Kundish of Ukraine.

COMMENTS POSTED AT TOI:

* Good luck with that. More likely Antisemitsm will become much more mainstream as a result of her policies.

* One of the stupidest things Merkel has said and that’s saying a lot. Does she think refugees will actually admit being Antisemitic? If she wants to prevent Antisemitism perhaps she shouldn’t let Muslims and the rest of the Third World in.

* Be prepared to fight them in the streets Germany. An attack is imminent with a dumb phuck like this running the show.

* She is another stupid liberal that doesn’t get it. How do these idiots gain power?

* What does it mean, “refugees entering Germany must reject anti-Semitism”?

Germany is a free country. People who live in Germany can have their own opinions and don’t need anyone’s permission to form them.

If Germany lets in people with opinions Germany doesn’t like, too late. Once citizens of Germany they are free to believe in anything they want to. It was Germany’s time to think about it before granting them citizenship.

* Merkel lives in a bubble. She has no idea what she is bringing to Germany. It seems like the German people are letting her, like Obama, destroy their country from within.

* Thanks, Angela. Don’t tell it to the Jews. We already know.
What are you doing to tell this to the Muslims? What are you doing to educate Muslims and deprogram their anti-Semitism? Let’s hear your plans and programs.

* I have a much more straightforward idea. Germans must reject Merkel!

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Germany | Comments Off