Don Krausz to The Star: RE: EU decision to label settlement goods does not go far enough – Diane Butto.

The Letters Editor.

The Star.

Dear Sir,

RE: EU decision to label settlement goods does not go far enough – Diane Butto.

Ah, the déjà vu, the nostalgia. Not since I used to read the top Nazi paper, the Volkischer Beobachter, have I come across so much distortion, such drivel, to be polite. Diana Butto – an apt name. The Diana air rifle used compressed air, this one hot air, while her reasoning could be coming from her but.

Is she aware that Jewish history is recorded in the Bible? It tells us that what is today named the West Bank was Jewish territory called Judea and Samaria. It explains the term Jew, from Judea. But Diana Butto says Israel stole it, and she is an honourable woman…

Palestinians are on record for attacking and murdering Jews since long before 1948 when the State of Israel was proclaimed as authorised by the UN. (Didn’t the UN know that the land had been stolen?) That allocation of land had been advocated by the British Peel Commission. The Jews accepted, despite the fact that 60% of their territory consisted of the Negev Desert. (They knew that they would have it blooming in no time.)

The Arabs rejected for two reasons: a.) They did not know how to grow flowers, and b). they wanted it all for them selves, the greedy sods.

So what they could not gain by negotiation might accrue to them through war. The Palestinians and five neighbouring states attacked the newly established State of Israel with its 600,000 +/- Jews, killing 6,000 and wounding 30,000. And even then they were not very good at fighting for Israel won. (Don’t believe me? Look at page 142 of the British Encyclopaedia.)

Now no pro-Palestinian thumbsucker (I’m being polite.) ever admits to this loss to Israel of one percent of its total 1948 Jewish population. That is because they lacked Diana Buttu. Since her appearance, if one Palestinian in a hospital collects a stray bullet, poor chap, the whole world has to know about it.

Israel really is remiss in ignoring the International Community’s condemnation of shooting to kill. Perhaps it was not emphasised in Hebrew. But is it not very strange that when these poor, unassuming, peaceful, persecuted, deprived and besieged Palestinians found the wherewithal to acquire more than 14,000 rockets and mortars and shoot them into civilian inhabited areas of Israel proper (proper according to the Bible and the UN, you understand), there was virtually no mention thereof in the non-Jewish press? Every single one of those missiles was launched with the intention to maim and kill.

Lady Butto is missing out, amongst other things, on International Law (IL). Israel was attacked in 1948, 1956, (the blocking of Eilat), 1967 and 1973. According to IL if an attacked country counter attacks and occupies previously held enemy territory, it can retain such real estate until the enemy signs a peace treaty. Hence the return of the Sinai with its Suez Canal and oil fields to Egypt. Or the détente with Jordan. The Palestinians have been massacring Jews since the murders in Hebron in 1929.

To this day they are proclaiming mayhem and bloodshed, even from their pulpits.

Just where is this illegal and stolen land that Ms. Butto and her fellow brainwashed fanatics are complaining about?

Don Krausz to The Citizen: RE: ISRAEL MUST CONDEMN ATROCITIES by Bongani Dunywa

The Letters Editor,

THE CITIZEN.

 

Dear Sir/Madam,

 

RE: ISRAEL MUST CONDEMN ATROCITIES by Bongani Dunywa, 25/11/2015.

 

I fully agree with Dunywa; not only Israel but all countries and people of conscience must condemn atrocities. That is why it is so disgusting to find the Palestinian Authority and Hamas lauding and venerating murderers of civilians, perpetuating their names by naming places and events after them and teaching little children in schools to hate and kill.

 

Never do the Palestinians and Arabs make the slightest mention of their killing of 6,000 and wounding of 30,000 Jews out of a population of 600,000 during their totally unprovoked attack on Israel in 1948. They only bewail their own losses during the so-called Naqbah

 

Where have you seen them draw attention to the fact that Palestinian and Arab terrorists murdered 3817 and wounded 25,000 Israeli men, women and children since 1948 in attacks on busses, in synagogues, at religious services, in discotheques and restaurants, using suicide bombers, drive-by shooting, breaking into private homes and lately in the streets of the Holy City of Jerusalem, using cars, knives and axes?

 

Where was their condemnation and horror when a family of five was knifed to death in the Ittamar settlement, including a three-month old baby having his throat cut?

The culprit was caught and showed no remorse.

Victor Gordon – A tale of two Pollards

JEWISH REPORT

OP-ED TO THE EDITOR

 

 

A Tale of Two Pollards

 

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …’   For Handre’ Pollard, the 21 year-old rugby  whizz-kid, the best of times has arrived with every likelihood that even better times will follow. An athlete endowered with a unique “rugby brain”, Pollard is every fan’s golden boy – innovative, dependable, versatile, confident and a natural leader. The girls swoon while their parents live in hope that this handsome lad next door just might ring their door bell and date their daughter.

Indeed, the world is Handre’s oyster where even his few transgressions (like the odd poor kick) will be overlooked and put down to a forgivable lapse of concentration.

Then there is another Pollard;  Jonathan Jay, whose life for the past 30 years has been excruciatingly different. While the former Pollard has spent thousands of hours breathing in the intoxicating odours of fresh mown grass, crisp air and the sweat of rugby camaraderie, the latter Pollard’s experience of the outside world has for the past 3 decades been limited to supervised periods of exercise in a drab prison courtyard and the foul smells prevalent within the confines of any typical prison. To see green grass, let alone press your cheek against it would not have been part of his daily experience.

Neither man knows of the other. They occupy different planets. Their lives have taken vastly different directions and will, with certainty, never converge. Each man made a choice at approximately the same stage of his life – Handre’ to become a sporting hero; Jonathan to save his people – the Jews of the State of Israel. In this did he succeed?  We don’t know and probably never will.  Israel’s ultimate gains from Jonathan’s enormous sacrifice cannot be determined. Did he forfeit much of his life in trying to achieve it?  Undoubtedly. At 61, Jonathan’s best years are gone and even after serving an even longer term than that of Nelson Mandela, he still remains vilified by some and admired and appreciated by others.

Jonathan’s self-sacrifice in the interests of his fellow Jews, came at a terrible price. Yet having paid his debt to American society and having been granted his freedom, he still remains reminded by his former jailers that he has yet to be granted the ultimate freedom that he so desperately seeks.

The case of Jonathan Pollard has brought out the very worst of America; its soulless side – unforgiving, dishonest, untrustworthy, manipulative and heartless. Undoubtedly, Pollard’s passing American secrets to Israel, a close ally of the former, was a criminal act worthy of harsh retribution. But when courts turn their backs on confirmed plea-bargains; when senior state officials interfere with court proceedings; when the accused has no access to alleged incriminating ‘evidence’ and when Presidents (Bill Clinton) pardon convicted terrorists who have served a fraction of their sentences while refusing to do so for Pollard (who by then had served twice the years of any other spy convicted for the same offence – espionage), one has to ask an obvious question … Is it possibly because Pollard was Jewish and the benefactor the Jewish State?  Perish the thought.

Of everything suffered by Pollard, one incident stands out above all else. In 2013 Pollard’s father became desperately ill. It was obvious that he had a short time to live. Jonathan requested a final visit to his father’s bedside. The request was turned down.  Later, when his father passed away, his only son again requested sanction to attend his father’s funeral and recite Kaddish. Again, permission was withheld. Even intervention by Israel at the highest level had no effect.

Was Pollard a flight risk?  Of course not. He could have been well guarded and, if necessary, shackled.  Was this no less than emotional torture of a man who, at that time had already spent 27 years in a prison cell?  We’ll come to our own conclusions.

And now, with Jonathan Pollard finally released, not through the benevolence of Barak Obama but after a decision taken by the parole board, he is still restricted for a further 5 years from making aliyah to his beloved state of Israel for which he gave so much.

Handre’ and Jonathan –  the one still to realise his full potential while supported by adoring fans. The other to pick up the pieces of his life as they lie scattered before him. May they both succeed.

Don Krausz to The Star: RE: LETTERS BY SURAYA DADOO AND MUHAMMAD OMAR.

The Letters Editor,

THE STAR.

Dear Sir,

RE: LETTERS BY SURAYA DADOO AND MUHAMMAD OMAR.

No sane person approves the killing of innocents. The recent massacres in France and today’s murders in Israel, including in a synagogue, are signs of a plague of insanity.

If we could pinpoint the source then a cure may be found.

To say that these atrocities are caused by grievances is deceptive. Not all people react the same way to such things, many of which may be imagined and the product of indoctrination and misconception.

Muhammad Omar decries the killing of innocent civilians and describes the utterances of the murderers as “barbaric, senseless and sickening.” He writes that such attacks have nothing to do with Islam and condemns the glamourising of Jihad.

Then we have the article by Soraya Dadoo of the Media Review Network. No regrets or apologies from her, in fact the whole ghastly and world-shaking tragedy is ignored. Her preoccupation is something far more important: the amount of water allocated to Palestinians in Israel. Obviously she does not hold blood to be thicker than water and her article’s heading refers to drip-feeding. Not that she disapproves thereof, far from it, but she prefers to use hatred and dis-information, a drop at a time. That as we now know leads to what happened in Paris and is continually taking place in Israel.

I have before me a report by Monessa Shapiro on the present and pre-1967 water supplied to Palestinians in the West Bank. They totally contradict Ms. Dadoo. As to comparative standards of living between Palestinians and Israelis the following statistics are quoted:

According to the CIA World Factbook the poverty rate in Israel in 2012 was 21%, compared to the West Bank figure in 2011 of 18%. The 2015 life expectancy in the West Bank was 76 years. The world average is 70 years. In 2015 the infant mortality rate in the West Bank and Gaza was 13 per 1000 live births, compared to 27 per 1000 live births in other Arab states.

The New Economics Forum conducted a survey to measure happiness in 2012.

The Palestinian Authority was found to be the third happiest Arab region in the world, with 51.2, just behind Jordan with 51.7 and Algeria with 52.2. It was placed 30^th in the world.

How can this be explained? I guess that in those countries they don’t read Ms. Soraya Dadoo’s articles and therefore don’t realise how badly off they are.

Don Krausz to the Star:E: IQBAL JASSAT’S: FRANCE SHOULD DROP THE OPTION OF THE BOMB.

The Letters Editor,

THE STAR.

Dear Sir,

RE: IQBAL JASSAT’S: FRANCE SHOULD DROP THE OPTION OF THE BOMB.

20-11-2015.

The acts of terrorism perpetrated in Paris this week were ghastly! Iqbal Jassat of the Media Review Network hints at Moslem grievances. Perhaps. But rational people take their complaints to courts of law. Countries use the international courts for relief. Rational people do not solve their complaints through murder, maiming, acts such as 9/11, mass executions, terrorism of innocents, blowing passenger planes out of the sky, suicide bombings on trains, busses, discotheques or in restaurants or mass beheadings. The ones that do are aptly identified as terrorists and are disposed of accordingly.

Minor threats to society are dealt with by police forces and the courts. Major threats through Force Majeure, military action, bombs if necessary. Yes, France can be ruthless as any other country would be in these circumstances.

A court of law may feel obliged to permanently remove those that pose a threat to society through life imprisonment or judicial execution. Ruthless! When during WW2 the German Blitz of England killed at least 51,000 Britons, Churchill promised the English that he would return each bomb tenfold and he did.

Jassat involves Israel in this tragedy. Nothing new in that. Germany started World War 1, lost and suffered enormous losses. Hitler later blamed the Jews. When in 1929 the German economy collapsed Hitler blamed the Jews. When Hitler laid his plans for WW2, he blamed the Jews in advance. And when the tourist trade at Sharm el Sheik in the Sinai was disrupted by shark attacks there were those that said that Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, was involved.

Jassat complains that as a result of this Parisian horror Islamophobes “have crawled out of the woodwork.” Now whose fault is that according to him? Israel! I think that the man and many like him at the Media Review Network are paranoid.

To me the most horrible and striking thing in his whole article is the fact that nowhere, not once, does he express one word of regret or sympathy for those innocent victims of mindless hatred, and neither does ISIS.

Don Krausz to The Jewish Life

18 November 2015

 

The Editor,

Jewish Life.

 

I am a Shoah survivor and much of my reading material consists of Holocaust matter. I have experienced much that made me question

the role of divinity during events in our recent history as well as things that could be explained by Mind over Matter.

 

At present I am reading a book by Alex Kershaw called “to Save a People”, which deals with the devastating history of Hungarian Jews during WW2 as well as the incredible efforts made by the Swedish diplomat and Righteous Gentile Raoul Wallenberg and others.

 

The wartime history of Hungarian Jewry is one of the most heartbreaking of WW2, in that they were not touched until one year before the war’s end and then massacred within a few months. In 1941 the Jewish population numbered 825,000. The German army invaded in March 1944. By May 1945, 569,500 men, women and children had been murdered, i.e. 10,000 per day.

 

One tiny episode that took place during the final days of the Russian onslaught on Budapest, which has been compared to the devastation ofStalingrad, made me stop in my reading and resolve to bring it to the attention of the Jewish public. Page 142.

 

By the end of the battle food was virtually unobtainable for the population of the city. In the maternity ward of one hospital motherless

babies began to starve to death. According to one account: “In despair, the nurses clutched the babies to their breasts so that the infants might benefit from the comfort of a warm human body before fading away. After a while, the nurses found themselves producing milk and the babies were saved from starving to death.”

Victor Gordon to the Pretoria News: Refers: “BDS decries attacks”

Refers:  “BDS decries attacks”

 

In concurring with the sympathy expressed by the spokesperson for BDS SA, Kwara Kekana, at the terrible suffering experienced in France, I strongly object to her ridiculous comment; “We condemn extremism and barbarity, be it the extremism and barbarity of Netanyahu and Israel, or that of Isis and Boko Haram”.

This is typical of the thinking within organizations such as BDS and others of its ilk. All have  succeeded in turning logic on its head and promoting what eminent British journalist, Melanie Phillips calls, “A World Upside Down”, where lies become the truth and truth becomes the lie.

How Israel can be accused of extremism when it not only fights for its very existence on a daily basis while nevertheless fulfilling almost all the tenets of true democracy in granting all its citizens, both Jews and Arabs equal rights under the most trying circumstances, is beyond rational understanding. But then rationality is not BDS’s strong point considering their willingness to openly chant “Shoot the Jew” (led by one of its chief executives) at a concert presented by an Israeli jazz group at Wits University. If this is not extremism, what is?

As for accusing the Jewish state of barbarity, one has to ignore the fact that the very foundations of morality and ethics which represent the backbone of Judeo-Christian precepts, were introduced to the world by the Jews through Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, the very corner stone of civilization as we know it. To have the audacity to speak of Israel and Isis/Boko Haram in the same breath, as if they share some moral equivalence, shows not only Kekana’s lack of understanding of the realities of these concepts, but her limited ability to grasp the differences.

I doubt that BDS would care to acknowledge the existence of a large Israeli field hospital that has operated within 100meters of the Israeli/Syrian border for the past 3 years, offering free medical care to Syrian civilians fleeing the slaughter in their own country. Undoubtedly, this would not sit comfortably with her accusation of Israeli barbarity.

While we are aware that BDS will use any opportunity to attack Israel, this shows them up for what they truly stand for – delegitimisation of the Jewish state at all costs, even to the point of sheer stupidity.

Don Krausz to the Mercury:RE: THOUGHTS DEVELOPED FROM FOUR YEARS IN A BLINDFOLD.

Dear Sir/Madam,

 

RE: THOUGHTS DEVELOPED FROM FOUR YEARS IN A BLINDFOLD.

by Robert Fisk.

 

I have a feeling that the man in the blindfold, Brian Keenan, conveyed far more to Fisk than the latter has revealed. This article does not reflect Fisk’s usual vituperation and bias against Israel, even if he is unable to omit it entirely. I have long believed that Fisk  also cannot see clearly and perhaps now his blindfold has been lifted a little.

 

Fisk states that “all those lost innocents, Lebanese, Russians and French, are equal as our brothers and sisters.” Very true, but note that Israelis are not mentioned and they are being butchered daily in the streets of the Holy Land.

 

Does that not reveal today’s problem, dehumanization of people, as Elie Wiesel has designated as the cause of the Holocaust of the Jews and a great many others? Fisk refers to Wiesel but in a different context, but then again I believe that Fisk also wears a blindfold.

 

It is significant that Keenan refers to walls. Walls are barriers and can symbolise resistance to feelings and concepts, to prevent the ‘other’ from coming too close. Keenan sees them as “damaging our ability to think, to being creative,” But to do all this we have to be alive and in the Middle East a wall can prevent suicide bombers from wreaking the havoc of Paris and in the case of Israel, saving one thousand civilian lives.

 

Keenan states that a country that is not built on a foundation of love will eventually wither away with the poison. Fisk feels that all this is a bit flippant under present circumstances, but what alternative does Fisk offer: bias, hatred and incessant criticism of victims of millennia of persecution and genocide?

 

Love in opposition to blind hatred and resulting massacre may seem farfetched. But it envisages understanding the other, his fears and agonies. I don’t think that Fisk wore a blindfold in his interview with Keenan, but when he refers to the Naqba, the defeat of the Palestinians and Arabs during their totally unprovoked attack on Israel in 1948 in which one percent of Israeli Jewry was killed and 30,000 wounded, and only mentions the Palestinian losses, I believe that hearing aids may have been useful.

Monessa Shapiro to the Sunday Times

It is a well-known fact that both Fatah and Hamas say one thing in English for the international community and another in Arabic, for their own constituency.  Obviously however this fact has been lost on Zizi Kodwa and his compatriots at the ANC.

While Khaled Mishaal was busy sprouting forth on his visions for an egalitarian Palestinian state his henchmen in Gaza were saying something quite to the contrary.  On the 10 October 2015 on Al Aqsa TV (the official Hamas TV station) the Imam and TV commentator, Sheikh Iyad Abu Funum, called for a Quran and swore on it: “that not a single Jew will remain on this land.  We will not leave a single one of you, alive or dead on this land.  By Allah, we will dig up your bones from your graves and get them out of this country.”

Kodwa, likens the ANC to Hamas.  In so doing he needs to consider the question honestly as to how many ‘enemy’ men, women and children ANC cadres stabbed?   At the height of Apartheid, in the darkest days, how many civilians were ever purposely targeted?   To equate the two is to totally denigrate the ANC and everything it stood for.

The ANC’s struggle was that of good people wanting only good for themselves and their fellow-countrymen.  It is tragic indeed that they have allowed a man with so much blood on his hands to hoodwink them into believing that he stands as tall as they.

Monessa Shapiro on Paris

We woke to a traumatised France on Saturday morning.   We woke to a frightened and shaken Europe.    For as easily as it happened in Paris, so too could it happen anywhere in this topsy -turvy world of ours.   We are all targets of a madness that has been allowed to creep insidiously into our lives.  One hundred and thirty two innocent people were barbarically mowed down in the name of ISIS.  Hundreds more were injured.  And we all mourn.  We are broken-hearted for the loss of innocent lives.   But we mourn too for the loss of a safe and secure world in which to grow the next generation.

And as a Jew, my mourning is tainted by both anger and perplexity.     I am angry that for the past two months Jewish children in Israel have not been able to walk to school for fear of being stabbed.  Their fathers have not been able to queue at bus-stops for fear of being rammed by cars.  Their mothers have not been able to drink coffee at side-walk cafes or shop for groceries for fear of having a machete thrust into their backs.   Fourteen Israelis have been brutally murdered in the last two months,  scores more lie injured in hospital, many of them critical.  And I am perplexed by the world’s response to this barbarism.  Not only are we told, ‘it’s the settlements’, ‘it’s the occupation,’ ‘it’s the houses you are building for Jews,’ but the Israeli government is condemned for protecting her citizens with too much force.  We are warned of  ‘ a cycle of violence,’ that must at all costs be stopped. 

Where are the settlements in France?  Where is the occupation?  Or perhaps too many French citizens are being allowed to build houses?   Absurd questions indeed, but equally absurd to blame the violence Israel faces on any one of her policies.  For when Moslems want to create an Islamic caliphate it has nothing to do with settlements or occupation, and has everything to do with the religious calling to take over land that they believe is rightfully theirs and to establish on it an Islamic state governed by Sharia law.  They want Israel.  They have made that quite clear, not just the West Bank and not just Gaza.   And while they are murdering and butchering for Israel they are worming their way quietly into the rest of the countries of the world, to cause havoc and wreak destruction.  Eventually to take them over.  Melanie Phillips warned of this in her book ‘Londonistan,’ as did Mark Steyn in ‘America Alone.’   Both these books were published almost ten years ago.

Moslem children are being indoctrinated from birth to despise the ‘infidel’, and to scorn western culture.  Social media are packed with examples of Imams preaching hatred and violence to their congregants, of television programmes enthusing their child-audiences with the glory of martyrdom, and of late, of fathers teaching their two year olds how to stab Jews.   As long as this is allowed to continue, terrorist organisations such as ISIS and Hamas (to name but two) will have instant, willing fodder for their gruesome operations.   Our world leaders must be made to understand this.  In addition they must be made to recognise that fundamental Islamic terrorism has no cause other than some skewed religious ideology, manifesting itself in blind and savage hatred, not in Tel-Aviv nor in Paris.  But as importantly they must be made to understand that the murder of an innocent is as much terrorism in Jerusalem as it is in Paris.