August 25, 2008: One of the worst hate-sites on the Internet is Jewish

By Michael Regenstreif

Much has been made in recent years about efforts to stop the spread of hatred on the Internet. We’ve had articles in the Bulletin, for example, about Richard Warman, an Ottawa-based lawyer and activist who has been successful in having a number of antisemitic hate-sites on the World Wide Web shut down.

One of the vilest hate-filled sites I’ve come across recently is actually a Jewish site located at masada2000.org. The site, which refers to all Arabs as “a cancer” who should be removed from Israel and from the territories – which it considers to be part of Israel – is run by followers of the late Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn rabbi who founded the extremist Jewish Defense League in New York in 1968 before moving to Israel where he formed the Kach political party.

Kahane ran for election to the Knesset as leader of Kach in 1976 and 1980, but failed to win enough votes for even one seat. In the 1984 election, Kach finally garnered enough votes for that single seat and Kahane became an MK. Over the next four years, Kahane’s racist rhetoric so offended most Israelis that he was banned from running in the 1988 election and Kach was outlawed. Kahane, who was jailed several times in both the United States and Israel for his activities, met his end in 1990 when he was murdered in New York City following a speech.

Although Kahane was killed, his movement has survived on the fringes of Israeli and Diaspora societies. Baruch Goldstein, the American-born doctor who massacred Muslims praying at a mosque in Hebron in 1994, was a follower of Kahane. So, too, was Yigal Amir, the Israeli assassin of Yitzhak Rabin. Both Goldstein and Amir are regarded as heroes by Kahane’s followers. Since the mid-1990s, both Kach and its offshoot, Kahane Chai, have been designated by both Israel and the United States as terrorist organizations.

One of the most despicable sections of masada2000 is something called the Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening List. You can figure out the acronym the site likes to use for itself from the capitalized letters in its name.

The list, more than 7,000 names in length, is McCarthyesque in the way it designates “self-hating” Jews. Virtually every leftist you’ve ever heard of is on the list. Names you’d expect like Norman G. Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky. But one need not be anti-Zionist like Finkelstein or Chomsky to be on the list. It overflows with the names of prominent Zionist Jews, including many North American rabbis and Israeli politicians, who are listed because they have advocated peacemaking with the Arabs. Shimon Peres, the president of Israel and a former prime minister is on the list. So is Ehud Olmert, the current prime minister. Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff, a former deputy minister of defence and the daughter of Yitzhak Rabin, is there. So is Yuval Rabin, her brother.

Thomas Friedman, the astute New York Times op-ed columnist is on the list along with several Canadians including Rabbi Dow Marmur, rabbi emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, and Victor Goldbloom, the first Jewish cabinet minister in Quebec, a former federal commissioner of official languages and the current Quebec regional president of Canadian Jewish Congress.

And if it weren’t enough to be slandered as a self-hating Jew just by having one’s name on the list, many of the entries are annotated with disgustingly racist and/or homophobic commentaries.

The whole masada2000 site is shameful. What it truly exposes is the Kahanists themselves. They are Jews with a philosophy as ugly as the Ku Klux Klan’s.

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I’m very excited about Mira Sucharov’s new column – Values, Ethics, Community – making its debut in this issue of the Bulletin. Mira, an associate professor of political science at Carleton University, has lately been one of our book reviewers and was assigned to review a collection of essays for this issue called Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice. Her review – which is on page 28 – gives us much to think about as a community, as segments of the community, and as individuals. I invited Mira to use the review as a starting point for a new Bulletin column. She accepted and her initial column appears opposite the review.

There is no one way to respond to most, if not all, of the issues, questions and concerns that Mira raises, and will raise, in this and future editions of the Bulletin. While we’re always open to letters about anything that appears in our pages, we’re particularly interested in your response to the issues Mira will be raising. E-mail is the best way to send your letters. My address is mregenstreif@ ottawajewishbulletin.com.

Another new feature we’re beginning in this issue of the Bulletin is a series of community volunteer profiles being written by Benita Siemiatycki of the Jewish Ottawa InfoCentre.

Finally, this edition of the Bulletin marks the final appearance of Saul Silverman’s Global Shtetl column. For the past eight years Saul’s column has explored the often-fascinating Jewish Internet. On behalf of everyone at the Bulletin, I’d like to express our deep appreciation to Saul for his columns and insights as we continue to learn our way around the global shtetl the Internet has turned our world into.

March 24, 2008: There can be no excuse for revenge terrorism

By Michael Regenstreif

The massacre, earlier this month, of eight students at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem was a heinous act. The students – all but one were just teenagers – were slaughtered as they studied Torah. The lone terrorist, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem, was killed on the scene by an off-duty Israeli soldier.

News reports from Israel after the massacre said the family of the murderer, Ala Abu Dhaim, claimed he was not a member of any terrorist organization. Hamas, the supposedly religious terrorist organization that controls Gaza, denied involvement in the attack, all the while celebrating the killings, just as they celebrate any attack on Jewish Israelis. There were parties in the streets of Gaza with celebratory gunfire and the passing out of sweet treats to children.

What a lesson to teach their children. Go out and kill some Jews and we’ll dance in the streets and eat some chocolate.

In the absence of late-breaking evidence that may have come out in the days between the deadline for writing this column and when you’ll have the opportunity to read it, it doesn’t appear that Hamas was directly involved in the attack.

While sickeningly overjoyed at the result of the act, Hamas probably wasn’t directly involved as they’ve never been particularly shy about claiming credit for the terrorist acts they have perpetrated over the years.

In fact, there have been no credible reports of any real terrorist group’s involvement in the terrible crime. Maybe he was just a delusional, hate-filled individual with a stockpile of guns.

When delusional, hate-filled individuals have access to guns, innocent people die. We’ve seen it time and again. Think of Baruch Goldstein, a delusional, Orthodox Jew who hated Arabs and murdered 29 of them and wounded 150 more as they prayed at a mosque in Hebron in 1994.

Closer to home, there was Mark Lepine, yet another hate-filled, delusional individual with a gun. Lepine hated women and killed 14 female engineering students in 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. How many other such senseless school shootings have we witnessed in recent years in Canada, in the United States? All committed by hate-filled, delusional individuals with access to guns.

Given the realities of the Middle East, we’re quick to assume that every attack against Israeli Jews is the work of an organized terrorist group. An assumption that comes easily because we know there have been so many terrorist attacks perpetrated by such groups.

But maybe this one was just the work of a delusional individual who lost it like Baruch Goldstein lost it, like Mark Lepine lost it, like so many others have lost it.

I fear that as long as hate-filled, delusional individuals have access to guns, we will see senseless massacres of innocent people.

I’m sure Dhaim’s attack was well-planned. There are reports that he had stockpiled weapons and had been to the yeshiva as part of his work as a delivery driver in Jerusalem. Whether he acted alone, or was following the orders of puppet masters, he was a terrorist.

Dhaim is dead. In the absence of any evidence that he was part of an organized terrorist group, there is no one to bring to justice for his terrible crime.

However, Israel’s Channel One television has reported on March 11 that three alumni of Mercaz Harav secretly met with an unnamed rabbi from the yeshiva who encouraged them to seek revenge. The report said two others rabbis endorsed the call to revenge as religiously sound.

A day later, leaflets signed by several rabbis were posted in Jerusalem that called on Jews to extract revenge for the murders at Mercaz Harav by matching them “measure for measure.” An Agence France-Presse report said one of the rabbis signing the leaflet was Uzi Sharvaf, “a rabbi who received a presidential pardon in 1985 after being convicted for a 1983 attack on a West Bank university that left three students dead.”

Vigilante Jewish terrorists, under the direction or blessing of rabbis, killing innocent Arabs in revenge for the killing of innocent Jews: the thought sickens.

Israel has a democratically-elected government, intelligence services, army, police force and justice system to deal with terrorism and terrorists. Given the magnitude of the constant threats, they do a remarkable job. Just as there is no excuse for terrorist attacks against Jews, there can be no excuse for terrorist attacks by Jews.