JERUSALEM NEWS
NEWS AND INFORMATION
Events, happenings, and Opinions Concerning
Israel, Israelites, Judah, and Everyone Else
Jerusalem News-795
Jerusalem News-795
7 Av 5768 8 August 2008
1. Arab Watch: recommended Site and
Newsletter
2. The Real Victims of Terror
3. Saudis Enraged by anti-Petroleum Use Ad and depiction of Angry Arabs
================================================
1. Arab Watch: Recommended Site and
Newsletter
Steven Shamrak <stevenshamrak.e@gmail.com>
has a regular newletter and web-site
http://www.shamrak.com/
We have quoted several times in the past from this source.
This source is Jewish Australian right-wing and may not be suitable for
everyone.
Neverheless he nearly always makes some very good points as well as quoting
snippets of information of much interest that otherwise may well have been
missed.
PS. Everyone can be criticized and so can we.
[In fact we want to hear criticism of us].
2. The Real Victims of Terror
URL:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1215331190732&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
TEXT:
The real victims are...
Aug. 4, 2008
SETH J. FRANTZMAN , THE JERUSALEM POST
A person grows up and believes there are perpetrators and victims. He sees
a person assaulted or hears about a rape or someone being abused, and he
believes that in each incident there is a person who perpetrates the crime
and a person who is the victim. Then one becomes more "enlightened" and
learns that the victim is not as interesting as the perpetrator. The
perpetrator's life story and mental state are deemed important in order to
understand "why" he or she committed the crime.
Then one grows even older and wiser and comes to learn that when there is
a crime, the actual victim is the perpetrator's ethnic or religious group,
which will be viewed negatively because of what he did. In the end, one
learns that the real victim in every crime is the wider society -
particularly the group the criminal came from. This is how one grows up in
modern Western society. In this world the "victims" of World War I, far
from being all the soldiers or civilians killed, were the Germans because,
as the aggressors, they were punished by the Versailles Treaty. The
victims of the Holocaust were not the Jews who died but the Palestinians
who saw the survivors sent to their homeland. The victims of the three
recent acts of terrorism by Muslims from east Jerusalem are not the 11
dead and 70 wounded Jews, but the Palestinian Arabs who might lose work
because of the actions of their countrymen.
I REMEMBER the first time I learned how this "true victimhood" works. I
was a college student in Tucson, Arizona. Along with everyone else, on
September 11 I awoke to news of the terrorist attacks. But a day later,
when I began to read the local papers, I was astonished to learn that the
true victims were not the 3,000 dead Americans but the nation's Muslims,
because after 9/11 they would face increased scrutiny and perhaps even
hate crimes.
There were soon marches in my city, not to condemn terror or support the
families of the victims, but to reassure Muslims. Muslim human rights
groups became wealthy off the notion that Muslims were victims.
As if to reinforce this notion, the BBC published a story on July 24 by
Heather Sharp entitled "Palestinian workers fear backlash." There was no
story about fears by Israelis of more bulldozer attacks; the only people
who were truly victimized, it seems, were Palestinians. The story relates
how Palestinian face "widespread discrimination" and how they "fear
revenge attacks. They say stones were thrown at them as they worked near a
right-wing neighborhood." (What exactly constitutes a "right-wing"
neighborhood, according to the BBC, is not clear.)
It turns out, according to the BBC, that "in both attacks using
construction vehicles, the motives of the attacker remain a mystery -
local press reports suggested that the attackers had previous involvement
with crime and drugs, and no links to militant groups have emerged."
There is no mention of the fact that both attacks were directed at Jews
and Jews only.
ONE IS reminded of the closing scene of the film A Time to Kill (1996),
when the white attorney of a black man accused of shooting three white
rapists of a black girl in the American South is giving his closing
statements. Realizing he cannot convince the white jury to acquit a black
man, the lawyer asks them to imagine the raped girl was white.
In the case of these Jerusalem attacks one must do the same. One must ask
viewers of the BBC to imagine that the drivers were settlers driving over
Arab children. Then one must ask oneself, would the media claim that
"settlers fear backlash"? After Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City, were
we told that the real victims were right-wing militias and Christian
conservatives who now feared a backlash?
The real victims of terror are the people who die and are injured. There
are no other victims. We must therefore steel ourselves against the
media's ever-present attempts to turn innocent Afghan children into the
"real" victims of 9/11. The real victims of 9/11 were those who died that
day.
Elizabeth Goren-Friedman, 54, Jean Relevy, 68, and Batsheva Unterman, 33,
were the victims of the bulldozer terror attacks in Jerusalem. They and
the 50 wounded. No one else.
The writer is completing his doctorate at Hebrew University.
3. Saudis Angered by anti-Petroleum Use
Ad and depiction of Angry Arabs
Saudia slams 'racist' Israeli Nissan ad
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1215331214518&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
By STEPHANIE RUBENSTEIN
Gulf states may boycott the Nissan Motor Company as a result of an Israeli TV
commercial that depicts Saudis angered by a fuel-efficient car, a Saudi official
has said.
The new campaign by Renault-Nissan caused an uproar in the Gulf when it showed a
group of Saudi oil barons screaming and attacking the Renault-Nissan vehicle.
The Saudis are shown leaving a hotel and encountering the new, fuel-efficient
vehicle. One man pounds his fists on the car and is then held back by his
companions as he shouts at it, "Hawks should peck at you day and night."
At the end of the commercial, the voice-over says, "It's clear the oil companies
won't like you."
Click on the play button to watch the clip
"It's my opinion that Nissan made a huge error by igniting these [racist]
instincts," official Hani al-Wafa told MBC TV, a Saudi-run station headquartered
in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. "We need to apply punishments... against these
things. In order for Nissan to keep its interests in the region, it must
apologize."
Israeli advertising and marketing agency Inbar Merhav Shaked, which developed
the Renault-Nissan campaign, declined to comment.
In January, Israel partnered with Project Better Place, a company that aims to
reduce petroleum dependency through the use of electric cars.
Through the government initiative, Israel hopes to mass-market electric vehicles
by 2011. Denmark is also investing in electric cars at a national level.
Project Better Place partnered with Renault-Nissan to provide the electric
vehicles featured in the new commercial.
"It's a humorous campaign that was loved by both the Jewish and Arab worlds,"
Daniella Ribenbach, the spokeswoman for Nissan in Israel, told The Jerusalem
Post on Wednesday. She declined to make any further comments on the matter.
Hadar Goldman, co-owner of the Zarmon Goldman advertising agency in Tel Aviv,
said he hoped Saudis would tolerate humorous and exaggerated commercials.
"If we have a sense of humor, I expect them to have one as well," he said.
Nissan's electric vehicle, introduced on Wednesday, is set to go on the market
in Japan and the United States in 2010, and globally by 2012.
The car was designed to provide more power than hybrid models, and emits zero
emissions.
During test runs, the car was quiet and produced no engine noise - a trademark
of electric vehicles. Details such as cruising range have yet to be determined,
Nissan officials said.
Having fallen behind rivals Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. in hybrids,
Nissan has made the electric vehicle the pillar of its green strategy.
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