The Syrian revolutionary anthem -- Get out, Bashar

And here is the NYT article that gives the background

The Brouhaha about the Anti-Boycott Law in Israel

Two days ago two events took place in Israel: 1) the Israeli Knesset passed a law that provides for civil penalties for those who organize boycotts against Israel, and 2), at about the same time, Hamas resumed the firing of Qasam missiles into Israel. And guess what: all the self-described friends of peace in the Middle East -- the New Israel Fund, the Americans for Peace Now, and their allies -- are outraged, absolutely outraged at event number one, but considerably less so at event number two. In fact, these great friends of peace, to judge by their websites, have not at all noticed event number two. Peace, to these peaceniks, is not at all endangered by Hamas bombardments.

(It seems that Jewish organizations across the political spectrum have expressed criticism of the the anti-boycott law, but the hysteria about it is restricted to the self-styled Left. NGO Monitor has published a very good analysis of the law, including an English translation of its text.)

It may very well be, as NGO Monitor maintains, that this new law is objectionable on a number of grounds, and it also may very well be that it will be overturned by the courts. But in the meantime here are some factors that got lost in the brouhaha:

1) Israel finds itself in an existential crisis. The loftiest of advice is of questionable value when it comes from people far away, who, moreover, do not have to face the consequences of their admonitions. A beau mentir qui vient de loin.

2) Freedom of expression is a vacuous formulation if considered without context. For example, there is no jurisdiction on earth, or imaginable, without limitations to freedom. There are the obvious prohibitions about shouting "fire" in a crowded theater; about libel and slander; about false advertising; and many others. What the limits should be in a given circumstance can only be determined by a close consideration of its particulars. In the case of the anti-boycott law, it is important to recognize the evil to which this law is addressed: the agitation by a number of well financed groups, with the bulk of the money coming from abroad, to delegitemize the state of Israel. That is a problem to which the Knesset obviously had to react. Perhaps the law in this first version is overreaching or otherwise inappropriate, and it seems that amendments to it are under consideration. But to criticize the law without at all recognizing the underlying problem is mindless.

3) The right to organize boycotts, pace the opinion of the hysterics who are discussing this law from afar, is not one of those rock-bottom democratic rights like freedom of the press. It is not a tool of rational discussion but rather a tool of coercion: do as I say or I will try to take away your livelihood. In the United States there are limits to the right to organize boycotts. Unions may boycott employers with whom they have a dispute, but they cannot engage in "secondary boycotts," i.e. boycott those who do business with these employers. And it is also illegal, in the United States, to collude in boycotts organized by foreign governments. It is similarly illegal to orchestrate boycotts against racial or religious groups where public accommodations are in play. In brief, public policy recognizes that the freedom to engage in public actions must stop where the freedom of others is encroached.

4) The left-leaning groups who are so enraged at what they think is an unjustifiable limitation of freedom here never criticized the Knesset, as far as I can remember, when it banned Kahane's Kach party in 1988. It seems that these great defenders of absolute freedom are quite happy when it is their opponents who are banned.

In the end, many people in this world, including many diaspora Jews and not only those on the Left, are quite eager to see a mote in Israel's eye while missing the beam elsewhere.

Excising the Context, Killing the Truth

How the contextomists (those who would cut out the context) see a Mafia without crime, a Hiroshima without World War II, and Israel's defensive actions without the Arab terror. Read my new posting

The rooster clucks defiant ....

As advocate, a lawyer zealously asserts the client's position under the rules of the adversary system. As negotiator, a lawyer seeks a result advantageous to the client but consistent with requirements of honest dealings with others. American Bar Association

The rooster clucks defiant, the lawyer ....s the client. Disputed legal maxim

In my life of 85 years I only rarely had occasion to engage a lawyer. All of the instances in which I did involved either real estate transactions or preparation of a will. Most of these transactions went smoothly enough, but there were exceptions. Too many of these, IMHO.

One case of malfeasance can be described simply enough. Some fifteen years ago I had a neighborhood attorney, whom I shall call Mr. A., prepare wills for Rita and me. Upon completion of this task, A. told us that he would keep the originals in his files, at no charge, so that they could always be found. Some thirteen years later we felt it necessary to revise these wills and tried to get hold of the originals. But A., who was still listed as a member of the NY bar, was nowhere to be found. He had no listed telephone, nor had he bothered to inform Appellate Division of the NY Supreme Court of his whereabouts, as by law he was obligated to do. After about a week of phoning people who had the same last name as he, I located a relative who gave me his then-current address. It took another week or ten days before I could finally wrench our wills out of him. I reported the incident to the legal disciplinary body, which, months later, administered the slightest tap on A's wrist that it could find.

Comment: lawyers who keep your will for safekeeping do you no favor. It is a common practice whose sole purpose seems to be to ensure more legal business for the lawyer years hence. In the state of New York, the Surrogate Court will file a will for safekeeping; that, IMHO, is the logical course of action to take.

We were victims of an earlier, more complex case of attorney malfeasance twenty years ago.

The matter arose in connection with the sale of our house in Vancouver in 1991. The incident was very painful to me at the time but I cannot say that it caused me actual damage. So, as far as I am personally involved, you might say that the matter is moot. But I think that there remain issues of public concern, and it is for that reason that I am spending time on it now.

I retired from teaching at the University of British Columbia some years before, and Rita and I decided to leave Vancouver to return to New York. We sold our house in the West Point Grey section of Vancouver in March of 1991 in preparation for our return to New York on April 15. We were represented in this sale by a solo-practice neighborhood attorney (Mr. B) with whom we were acquainted because he was a "friend of a friend" (red flag !). The buyer was a member of a very prominent Canadian family and was represented by one of the most prestigious law firms in Canada (firm C.). B. is no longer listed as a member of the British Columbia bar; firm C. seems to have become even more powerful and more prominent in the intervening years, many QC's serving among its partners (QC, Queens Counsel, is a distinction bestowed by the government upon the most prominent lawyers in Canada). I have now written to the Chair of firm C.; his reply was gracious (he had been a student of mine, it turns out), but he professed ignorance of the case.

The possession date in our transaction was March 31, 1991. On March 25, B. presented us, for the first time, with a Vendors' Statement that included the following as Note 4:

All parties agree that the representations regarding the sale and purchase of the subject property are not merged in the formal completion of this transaction and survive the execution of the closing documents.

When I questioned B. about the meaning of this provision, he explained that I had represented the house as free from Urea-Formaldehyde Insulation (UFFI) in the pre-purchase stage of the transaction, and that this warranty of freedom from UFFI would ordinarily expire with the formal completion of the sale under the doctrine of merger. Now, B. explained, the "other side" wanted me to sign a waiver of merger so that I would continue to be liable for any UFFI found in the future, apparently in perpetuity.

I explained to B. my position as follows: 1) I had not participated in his negotiation that resulted in the drafting of this waiver, and I do not agree to it; 2) my representation regarding UFFI was made in good faith, according to the best of my knowledge and belief; 3) the buyer had inspected the house in the pre-purchase period, and had not, presumably, found any UFFI. Thereupon B. explained that if I were to demand the deletion of this Note 4, the buyer would interpret that as a sign of guilty knowledge and would back out of the deal. He also said that Note 4 was the fair thing to do. Fair to whom, I asked. I explained to him that it was his obligation to represent my interests, and, in any case, to consult me about making concessions. Nevertheless, he pressed me to sign.

My situation was as follows: my family had packed its belongings and was ready to leave Vancouver within days. To have the buyer back out of the deal at that stage would have been very inconvenient, to say the least. So I did sign, but I also wrote a letter to B. that expressed my great displeasure at his disloyal behavior. I considered it malpractice, and I also wrote to him that, in the unlikely event that his negligence result in damages to us, I would hold him responsible for these.

As it turned out, there never were any subsequent claims about UFFI at this residence, at least not as far as I was informed.

Now here are my conclusions about this affair. Points 1) and 2) are critical of my lawyer, Mr. B.; Point 3) is critical of the law firm that represented the buyer, firm C. Point 4) is critical of both. Point 5) is the most important, and relates to the problem of inequality in legal representation.

1) An attorney should not agree to concessions on behalf of a client without consulting the client.

2) An attorney should not agree to concessions which, once made by this attorney, turn out to be irreversible, even before the client is ever made aware of them.

3) The party adverse in a case like this should be mindful of the behavior of the attorney with whom it is negotiating. It should be careful not to collude with an attorney who appears to violate obligations to his own client.

4) The legitimate concerns of a buyer over possible hidden defects should be met in ways other than binding the seller in perpetuity. I understand, for instance, that it is possible to buy insurance to cover such contingency.

5) As I reconstruct the events in this transaction, it would seem that the great inequality in power and prestige between the attorneys may well have been influential in the outcome. It seems that B. may have felt powerless to stand up to the high-prestige legal team on the other side, and may, for that reason, have agreed to terms that were injurious to his own client.

My Point 5) is of course conjecture. But it might be interesting to look into the problem by consulting other Vendor Statements. How often are there non-merger clauses when the seller is a client of a high-prestige firm, compared to when the seller is represented by low-ranking lawyers ?

Dear Jewish Sincere Friends of Peace: Have you Missed this little Detail ?

Poster of the (Israeli) Peace Now movement:
"Each flag needs a balcony"

Israeli public life has many very Sincere Friends of Peace. "Peace Now," the Meretz Party, many members of Labor, the most influential Israeli newspaper (HaAretz), and many smaller groups, all compete with one another, year in year out, demanding that the Israeli government make more concessions to the Arabs so as to achieve peace. And as for Jews in the diaspora -- the U.S., Britain, continental Europe -- well, it seems that currently the loudest voices (though not necessarily the most numerous or the most thoughtful) chime in: peace now, make more concessions, abandon the settlers on the West Bank -- peace now !

Even people like myself who are unaffiliated with such groups can rejoice in the colorful diversity that such organizations contribute to Israeli and Jewish society. Of course I do not rejoice in the ultras, those who work for the destruction of Israel, but, surely, those are a different kettle of fish altogether.

But to come back to the major "peace" groups. Anyone who has watched them for many decades, as I have, must have noticed a little detail that seems to have escaped them altogether. That detail consists of an absolute absence of any similar peace movement among the Arabs. Even allowing for the fact that there is very little of a functioning "civil society" in Arab societies that would allow for unofficial political movements, it is nevertheless true there is some variety among Arabs in their views concerning Israel. Insofar are we can judge from public opinion polls and expressions in Arab writings and speeches, this variety runs the gamut from the most extreme hostility (Hamas) to somewhat milder hostility.

But, whatever the details, the broad picture is evident. There is no "Peace Now" among Arabs. There is no "Arab Voice for Peace." There are no "Arabs for a Just Peace." There is no AStreet that would urge concessions to Israel. Nothing of the sort.

My dear Sincere Jewish Friends of Peace: can you detect a little problem here somewhere ?

Arab Attitudes toward Jews (WARNING: graphic images)

Yehoshafat Harkabi,author of Arab Attitudes to Israel,Jerusalem,1972
born 1921, died 1994

Anti-Jewish sentiments are almost universal in the three Arab nations surveyed - 95% or more in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt say they have an unfavorable opinion of Jews. 2008 Pew Report

In my previous posting I described the newest manifestations of Jew-hatred in the Egypt of today, and also the conspiracy of silence in the Western press when faced with this inconvenient set of facts. The deep-seated hatred of Jews among Arabs is not new and has often been documented. Perhaps the most thorough of these descriptions is that of Y.Harkabi ("Arab Attitudes to Israel," Jerusalem, 1972). Now almost forty years old, this classic, indispensable work consists of a content analysis of the Arab press and literature throughout the Middle East. When Harkabi first wrote the book as a dissertation at the Hebrew University in 1967, direct studies of Arab public opinion (opinion polls) were unavailable. Now that they are, for instance in the form of Pew poll data, we are faced with the sad realization that what Harkabi reported in the Arab literature of his day is still with us, and not only as written words, and that the details he gives are descriptive, by and large, of what goes on today.

Before we go to expressions of Arab opinion, much of it consisting of verbal violence, here is the Wikipedia report on an incident in which this verbal violence was acted out in deeds -- the lynching of Israeli soldiers during the 2000 Intifada. (And to those who say that Harkabi's work is so outdated: this incident took place thirty-three years after he wrote.)

The 2000 Ramallah lynching was a violent incident in October 2000 at the beginning of the Second Intifada in which a Palestinian mob lynched two Israel Defense Forces reservists, Vadim Nurzhitz (sometimes spelled as Norzhich) and Yossi Avrahami (or Yosef Avrahami),^[1] who had accidentally entered the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Ramallah in the West Bank. The brutality of the event, captured in a photo of a Palestinian rioter proudly waving his blood-stained hands to the crowd below, sparked international outrage and further intensified the ongoing conflict between Israeli and Palestinian forces.

Aziz Salha, one of the lynchers, waving his blood-stained hands from the police station window. Salha was later arrested by Israel and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Harkabi devotes separate sections to various themes in the Arab treatment of Israel and the Jews. Here are a few of his section headings: the vileness of Zionism; Zionism and Nazism; the vileness of the Jews; Judaism as conspiracy for world domination; scurrility, absurdity, and falsehood in the Arab statements; the Islamization of Jew-hatred. He also notes the frequent use of the notorious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

One element of current Arab anti-Semitism that was not found in Harkaby's materials is Holocaust-denial. This aspect of Arab anti-Semitism is relatively new, reaching great prominence only in the 21st century. There is a good description of it in Robert Wistrich's very important recent A Lethal Obsession, pages 646-661.

Harkabi lists 182 Arab sources, all of which he analyzed in their original language. (Just wondering here: how many Arab books have been studied by Mr. Jimmy Carter, in their original language ? Or by the telling-Israel-what-to-do crowd at J Street ?) Here is a quotation from the Arab writer Nashashibi, who visited Jerusalem before the unification of 1967, and looked over the wall at the Jews of West Jerusalem:

.... a collection of the world's hooligans and its garbage .... Dogs, robbers, clear out to your own countries !

(We recently heard an echo of that one from Ms. Helen Thomas.) Nashashibi continues somewhat later:

an international dung-heap in which the squalor of the whole world has been collected.

And then there is a quotation from an academic publication, the Egyptian Political Science Review, by the author Fathi Uthman al-Mahlawi (Jan.-March, 1959), among many other such quotations in Harkabi's book:

And thus Britain wanted to exhaust the strength of the Arabs and divide them, and at one and the same time to get rid of the Zionist plague in her country; she assembled these thousands of vagabonds and aliens, blood-suckers and pimps, and said to them: Take for yourselves a national home called Israel. Thus the dregs of the nations were collected in the Holy Land.

It bears emphasis that these Arab writings, like everything else in Harkabi's book, date from before the 1967 war. The reason that this needs emphasis is that we hear so often from the חכמים (Wise Men) of J Street, etc., that if only Israel were to go back to its 1967 borders, the Arabs would make peace post-haste. Fat chance !

Current Arab anti-Semitism is regularly reported by Memri and Palestine Media Watch, and there is plenty to report, week in week out: Holocaust denial, description of Jews as descendants of pigs and dogs; allegations that Jews murder gentile children; description of Israel as being similar to Nazi Germany; incitement to hatred in Arab schools and mosques; etc. etc. What we cannot know from such reports is how typical they are of the Arab population. The Pew Report, cited above, is not reassuring in this respect. Moreover, of course, we do not know what the future will bring. Harkabi himself believed that anti-Semitism is not very deeply rooted in Arab culture, and he was cautiously optimistic about prospects for an eventual accommodation between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

But whatever the prospects for the future, we cannot afford to be in denial of the current deep, pervasive hatred of Jews in what is known as the "Arab street," among the Palestinians and among their brethren in all the neighboring countries.

Egypt's "Street" still hates the Jews

Israelmatzav: Anti-Semitism in the anti-Mubarak crowd

Here is a major scandal that involves The New York Times and other American main-line media: there has been an apparently deliberate suppression of the anti-Semitic incidents in their great, beloved, democratic revolution of Egypt. Al Jazeera reported that "many of the gangs who attack reporters shout 'Yehudi !' " (Feb. 13), but this is something the Times didn't find fit to print. The New York Post had an altogether credible account of the sexual gang assault on CBS's (non-Jewish) correspondent Lara Logan (Feb. 16), viz. that it was accompanied by shouts of "Jew, Jew." But our so very high-minded "quality" newspapers would have none of that. We also know of other anti-Semitic incidents, reported elsewhere, but not in the New York Times.

Now, to its great credit, the Jewish Week of February 25 publishes an impressively researched article by its associate editor Jonathan Mark, The Lara Logan Cover-Up ?, in which he gives details about the shameful Egypt-prettyfication campaign by the Times and other papers.

UPDATE May 1, 2011: Tonight's 60 Minutes has an interview with Lara Logan in which she confirms, though in a muted way, the anti-Semitic aspect of the incident. Will that be enough for the NY Times to break its conspiracy of silence ?