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| Britain |
| British rag likens IDF youth programs to jihad camps |
| 2007-09-05 |
| A British current affairs magazine has compared the Marva and Gadna IDF youth summer programs to Islamic Jihad "summer camps," and questioned what the difference would be if the participants were British Muslims. In the latest edition of New Statesman, journalist Matthew Holehouse begins his article, entitled "The British children who train to fight in Israel," by stating that Israel denounced the Islamic Jihad summer camps in Gaza, which trained Palestinian adolescents to become suicide bombers, after hearing about them in 2001. However, he continues, "what went unreported was that at a purpose-built barracks in the Negev desert, every summer, hundreds of Jewish teenagers from Europe, Mexico and America pay to spend nine weeks saluting, marching, firing guns and otherwise pretending to be soldiers." Holehouse then asks what would happen if these were young British Muslims who had trained in Yemen or Pakistan. "There's not much to be won in games of moral equivalence and assertions as to which side's indiscriminate attacks on civilians are the more reprehensible," he says. "But ask yourself this question: If these were British Muslim 19-year-olds firing machine guns and running assault courses in Pakistan or Yemen, would we not have them all arrested at the airport?" Holehouse says the increasing number of Jewish youth signing up to the program is due to the "security situation improving" and notes that they were facilitated by Jewish youth organizations such as the Federation of Zionist Youth (FZY) and the Reform Synagogue Youth (RSY). He adds that "one half [of the participants] are girls, and large numbers come from public schools in Manchester and North London." Michael Freeman, director of FZY in Israel, said in a statement released Tuesday that his group was "appalled" by Holehouse's article. "The outrageous, unsubstantiated and unconnected headline, introduction and conclusion reflect a poorly researched piece of journalism. ... FZY is rightly proud of our year program and the work that it does to foster understanding and our aim to see peace in the region." He continued: "Mr. Holehouse attempts to make the spurious connection between a terrorist training camp - designed to indoctrinate children with hate and encourage them to become suicide bombers whose aim is to kill and maim innocent civilians - with a program that aims to allow youth from abroad to understand the Israel army's role in society and meet their Israeli peers, who are all conscripted at 18 due to the existential threat that Israel faces." FZY is also considering legal action, Freeman said. In the article, Holehouse calls FZY "one of the largest and most hard-line organizers" of post-high school programs, and quoting their Web site, which says that "FZY feels that you cannot truly understand Israel and the people living there if you do not understand the army," he says, "And that, for many Jews, must be rather depressing." Holehouse adds that Marva "demonstrates how some Zionists have inadvertently come to mimic their opponents in defining Israel solely by its militarism." In his response, Freeman said: "For FZY to be described as 'hard-line' in an article that talks of suicide bombers and Islamic Jihad is outrageous. In light of this, FZY is currently taking advice and considering its legal position." In response to discussions on the New Statesman Web site, Holehouse said, "The article makes it quite clear that the Israeli army does not intend to use its Marva recruits as soldiers and does not regard them as such ... My understanding of it is ... that this is a case of teenagers 'playing at soldiers' and that Marva aims to give people a 'fun taste' of the IDF." He continues, "Given the statistics available on injuries and deaths sustained by children as a result of suicide bombings and IDF operations ... I think I can be forgiven for finding such a 'summer camp' a rather depressing and inglorious project." |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #19 All those nice young Chinese men will be the better for a few months marching about in all that Chinese fresh air and sunshine. With the way the market for Chinese goods is going, that may be as close as they get to real soldiering. Apologies, trailing wife, but your phrasing was a bit too demure for my tastes. That, Zenster dear, is because you have spent time with advertising and marketing, whereas I never got closer than some brief exercises in technical support before I retired. Please enjoy your book with the thought that my mother was in class with Anne's sister Margot in Amsterdam, before the Jewish children were expelled from the schools. Perfesser, you might want to do a bit more research on your second reference in post #11. While it reviews the same book as your final, to me quite interesting, cite, the PPU describes itself as The Peace Pledge Union came into being in a climate of growing anxiety about the likelihood of another major war. Following a huge response to a letter published in the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian) by Dick Sheppard in 1934 a mass meeting in the Albert Hall of the people who responded to the letter agreed to form an organisation to be known as the Peace Pledge Union. Its membership grew quickly – tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands by the start of the Second World War. Not, I'm certain, your usual sort of source. Oh, and I do apologise. On going back through the thread, I wasn't clear: Mama and her parents had visas to the U.S., not to England. I assume they'd originally planned to join my mother's older sister, who by then had passed through England on her way to the States shortly before the others escaped from Germany to Holland. An English translation of the tale, as told from my grandmother's perspective, is archived in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and in Yad Vashem, along with copies of the original letters in German. Lots of appendices, too; Mama retains yet the habits of a lifetime in the ivory tower. ;-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-09-05 23:41 |
| #18 Joe, they have a huge excess of young males, courtesy of the one child policy. It's predicable as rain during the monsoon season that they would direct them into the Army and start getting aggressive. |
| Posted by: lotp 2007-09-05 21:07 |
| #17 OTOH, LUCIANNE/WORLDNEWS > Milyuhns and Zilyuhns, or at least scores of 0,000's, of Chinese youths attended PLA Youth camps this year. Are taught to be friends of USA = World by being told China will have to war agz USA one day. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-09-05 21:00 |
| #16 Both the US State Department and the British Foreign Service were rampant with anti-Semites, and deserve every ounce of condemnation that can be mustered against them. So do those who fail to understand that the same situation exists today. The British actions to keep Jews out of Palestine following WWII should be considered attrocities. The failure to allow more Jews into the United States during WWII and the immediate aftermath should be strongly denounced, as well. The failure of anyone who refuses to acknowledge or denounce evil is in itself evil, regardless of who does it. Both Britain and the US are filled with such people, not all on the left. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-09-05 17:10 |
| #15 the only reason they were able to come over in 1946 was because so many other HORRIBLY MURDERED European Jews Apologies, trailing wife, but your phrasing was a bit too demure for my tastes. I bought a copy of Anne Frank's Diary yesterday and this hits home just a little too much. Matthew Holehouse's contemptible moral equivalency is emblematic of those who simply refuse to comprehend—or far worse, wilfully ignore—Islam's threat. This sort of relativism symbolizes a new form of Holocaust denial by painting the Jews as Nazis. Israel has not declared an avowed goal of killing all Arab Muslims. They have not included genocide as an element of their nation's charter. By electing Hamas, the Palestinians have done so such that comparing the two represents the very lowest form of intellectual dishonesty and moral bankruptcy. In light of Islamic aggression, Holocaust denial has taken on a much more ominous aspect than it might have retained were it only perpetuated by benighted neo-Nazis. Works like Anne Frank's Diary are now being portrayed as Jewish propaganda for the sole purpose of falsely substatianting or exaggerating the Holocaust's dimensions. Islam uses this corrupt and vile revisionism to paint Israeli remembrance of the Holocaust as a Zionist plot aimed at giving Jews undue sympathy and allowing them to serve as a pole in humanity's moral compass. Several years before his death, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was sitting in an Austrian cafe and overheard some anti-Semitic young men repeating to each other this lie about Anne Frank. He vowed to refute such horrible revisionist filth and proceeded to spend a few years tracking down Gestapo officer Karl Silberbauer who had personally arrested Anne Frank in her Amsterdam hideout. Thanks to their tireless efforts, the lives of heroic individuals like Simon Wiesenthall and Ellie Wiesel will forever shine as beacons to guide humanity away from any forgetting or forgiving of such monstrous crimes against humanity. Once again, we are confronted by those who seek to plumb the showers and relight the ovens. Only a slight change of names from Hitler to Allah has been required. Smarmy liberal assholes like Holehouse stand at the forefront of enabling Islamic scum to go unquestioned regarding their true intent. They gleefully facilitate Islam's genocidal agenda under the guise of moral relativism. The man should be horsewhipped for it, repeatedly. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-09-05 16:30 |
| #14 We call it "research." |
| Posted by: Perfesser 2007-09-05 15:53 |
| #13 I'd stop digging. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2007-09-05 14:43 |
| #12 My final word on this subject: Have a look at this review article for a lot of sources. |
| Posted by: Perfesser 2007-09-05 14:37 |
| #11 (Sorry if previous post was duplicated.) I will admit that Britain did admit a fair number of refugees, if only temporarily. It is hardly surprising that Britain admitted more refugees than the U.S. -- transportation costs must have been far lower. So it's a complicated story. |
| Posted by: Perfesser 2007-09-05 14:30 |
| #10 "One can certainly understand why many of us hold England partly accountable for the mass slaughter of Jews in the 1940s. Not a finger lifted to help, and refugees turned away." Perfesser, that's the most outrageous load of bullshit I've read in a long while. I'll let Wikipedia do the talking: In 1939 a Roper poll found that only thirty-nine percent of Americans felt that Jews should be treated like other people. Fifty-three percent believed that "Jews are different and should be restricted" and ten percent believed that Jews should be deported. [13] The United StatesÂ’ tight immigration policies were not lifted during the Holocaust, news of which began to reach the United States in 1941 and 1942 and it has been estimated that 190 000 - 200 000 Jews could have been saved during the Second World War had it not been for bureaucratic obstacles to immigration deliberately created by Breckinridge Long and others.[14] Rescue of the European Jewish population was not a priority for the US during the war, and the American Jewish community did not realize the severity of the Holocaust until late in the conflict. Despite strong public and political sentiment to the contrary, however, there were some who encouraged the U.S. government to help victims of Nazi genocide. In 1943, just before Yom Kippur, 400 rabbis marched in Washington, D.C. to draw attention to the plight of Holocaust victims. (See "The Day the Rabbis Marched.") A week later, Senator William Warren Barbour (R; New Jersey), one of a handful of politicians who met with the rabbis on the steps of the U.S.Capitol, proposed legislation that would have allowed as many as 100,000 victims of the Holocaust to emigrate temporarily to the United States. Barbour died six weeks after introducing the bill, and it was not passed. A parallel bill was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D; New York). This also failed to pass. [7] Even after the Holocaust, the US did not change its immigration policies until 1948. I can't find a reference online, but I'm sure the UK admitted more Jews during the Nazi period that the USA did: does that mean that we can all hold the USA partly accountable for the mass slaughter of Jews in the 1940s? Does that make good sense? That's before pointing out that Britain declared war on, and was doing all she could to defeat, the Nazis for over two years before the USA was declared war on by Germany. Everything the Guardian, a low-circulation left-wing paper, prints does not reflect British mainstream public opinion. Only an ignoramus or an idiot would think as much. |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2007-09-05 14:06 |
| #9 Antisemitism has so permeated the fabric of British culture, it has become invisible. True, PD, and what makes it so much the more astonishing is that it's driven by support of a fictitious nation. |
| Posted by: mcsegeek1 2007-09-05 12:40 |
| #8 The Soviets tried the same thing. I remember when the Russians would argue that the Boy Scouts were a paramilitary organization.... |
| Posted by: Mark E. 2007-09-05 12:34 |
| #7 FDR's America was just as bad, Perfesser. Recall the voyage of the St. Louis. More personally, mother and her parents went into hiding in Holland during the war because their visa number wouldn't come up for ten years -- the only reason they were able to come over in 1946 was because so many other European Jews neglected to claim their places. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-09-05 12:16 |
| #6 It's the same self loathing and hatred of one's own nation and culture that permits SCOUTS Justice Kennedy to equate those clearly operating outside of the requirements specifically detailed in the Geneva Convention with legitimate compliant military personnel entitled to GC protections. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-09-05 10:27 |
| #5 One can certainly understand why many of us hold England partly accountable for the mass slaughter of Jews in the 1940s. Not a finger lifted to help, and refugees turned away. |
| Posted by: Perfesser 2007-09-05 10:20 |
| #4 "But ask yourself this question: If these were British Muslim 19-year-olds firing machine guns and running assault courses in Pakistan or Yemen, would we not have them all arrested at the airport?" If only. And if young Israelis carried out multiple suicide bombings against the British public I imagine the security services would be expected to keep an eye on them too. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2007-09-05 09:19 |
| #3 And we don't have probably hundreds of schools with Combined Cadet Force cadres attached? Matthew Holehouse you have a very apt name. The distinction is that Jewish teenagers like British teenagers in CCF are not exposed to a murderous, hateful ideology like political Islam. |
| Posted by: Howard UK 2007-09-05 08:36 |
| #2 Antisemitism has so permeated the fabric of British culture, it has become invisible. |
| Posted by: PlanetDan 2007-09-05 08:29 |
| #1 questioned what the difference would be if the participants were British Muslims. Bloodlust, raving imams, weapons training, chanting death to name just a few |
| Posted by: Boss Craising2882 2007-09-05 08:23 |