Falsely described by those on the Left as a compassionate humanitarian, radical labor leader Dolores Huerta has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. Huerta “has fought to give more people a seat at the table,” Obama said euphemistically.

The award is not all that surprising for an administration that kisses the ring of Al Sharpton.

In an acceptance statement Huerta pushed all the right politically correct buttons:

The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights.

Did Huerta leave any aggrieved interest group out? If she did, it must have been an innocent oversight because she’s far too wonderful and inspiring a leader to have deliberately slighted any gripe-laden, tax-eating constituency.

Huerta’s 501c3 community organizer-training nonprofit, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, receives funding from high-profile left-of-center philanthropies such as the (Bill and Hillary) Clinton Family Foundation ($100,000 in 2010), Women’s Foundation of California ($35,000 since 2009), and the (Norman) Lear Family Foundation ($10,000 since 2010).

Huerta will soon be portrayed by Rosario Dawson, a beautiful and glamorous movie star, in an upcoming film. And who knows what other tributes Hollywood will generate for the octogenarian socialist.

But despite all the hype, the oft-imprisoned Huerta is no angel. She is less the civil rights leader imagined by the mainstream media and more a champion of vulgar redistributionism. As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don’t teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors’ fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice.

“I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy,” according to Huerta. “Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.”

It doesn’t seem to matter to the Obama administration that Huerta is no role model. Like leftist radicals Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau she virtually abandoned her children in order to foment unrest as a union organizer. Huerta was arguably to the left even of her United Farm Workers colleague Cesar Chavez. Unlike Huerta, Chavez campaigned against illegal immigration and made an effort to work with Republican lawmakers in the California state legislature. Despite being a socialist, Chavez managed to earn respect on both the left and the right.

Huerta, however, hasn’t received much if any praise from conservatives and an examination of her career makes her an unlikely recipient of the nation’s highest civilian honor which in the past has gone to heroes and luminaries like former British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, actors John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, writers T. S. Eliot and William F. Buckley Jr., and singer Ella Fitzgerald.

The answer is easy. The Saudi ally gets the pass; the others get invaded. But “pass” is too mild a word, because after bombing Libya into submission, while preparing to do the same thing to Syria, the Obama administration has actually resumed arms sales to Bahrain. And the only real reason those arms sales were originally halted, was because of objections from Congress.

What’s the difference between Libya, Syria and Bahrain? Not all that much. All three had rulers widely hated by the people for being unrepresentative tyrants. All three responded to domestic protests with armed force. In Syria, there is a Sunni majority being ruled over by a Shiite splinter group minority, while in Bahrain, there is a Shiite majority being ruled over by a Sunni minority. Why pick one over the other? Because Saudi Arabia is the big brother of the Bahraini monarchy, and so a Sunni tyranny over a Shiite population is legitimized, while a Shiite tyranny over a Sunni population is delegitimized.

While the Obama administration is dancing around the edges of arming the Syrian rebels, it is also arming the Bahraini government. While the United States participates in the Friends of Syria group, whose goal is to overthrow the Syrian government and replace it with the Muslim Brotherhood, it has renewed security cooperation with Bahrain. While Syrian diplomats were being expelled from Washington, the Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa came to Washington and met with Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta—nearly every important foreign policy figure in the administration with the exception of Obama.

The optics of having Obama shake hands with a tyrant while handing out Medals of Freedom might have come off as a little tacky, even from an administration that jumps when the House of Saud tells it to, without asking how high. But while the Crown Prince may not have left with Obama’s fingerprints on his palm, he is leaving with Seahawk helicopters, AMRAAM missiles, F-16 parts, a frigate and an option on some armored personnel carriers, for the next time things get hot down in Manama.

What’s even more extraordinary is that the State Department’s press statement on the renewal of arms sales to Bahrain appeared to blame both protesters and Bahraini authorities for the violence, and even teetered on the brink of placing the weight of the blame on the protesters.

“We are concerned about excessive use of force and tear gas by police. At the same time, we are concerned by the almost daily use of violence by some protestors,” the statement reads. “We urge all sides to work together to end the violence and refrain from incitement of any kind, including attacks on peaceful protestors or on the Bahraini police.”

The statement could hardly have had more wriggle room or a softer condemnation of the regime, if it had actually been written by the Crown Prince or one of his flunkies. It is all the more startling to compare this to State Department bulletins on Libya and Syria, which lack any such moral ambiguity or strained refusal to take sides in the conflict between government and anti-government forces.

The deciding factor isn’t Bahrain’s reliability as a regional ally or base space. If that was the issue then Mubarak wouldn’t have been sold out to the Muslim Brotherhood and Yemen’s President Ali Saleh would have enjoyed the same backing as the Crown Prince of Bahrain. Not to mention lesser allies like Tunisia’s President Ben Ali, whom the Obama administration triumphantly jeered to the exit only to see him replaced by Islamist Al-Nahda terrorists. It’s not about how good an ally of America a given country is, but how good an ally of Saudi Arabia it is.

Reggie Littlejohn is a real warrior for women’s rights. The founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers (WRWF), she has spoken five times before the U.S. Congress, twice at the European Parliament, and at the British and Irish parliaments as well.  She has also briefed the White House, State Department and Vatican about blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng and One Child Policy issues.

Ms. Littlejohn has been advocating for the release of Chen, whom she calls “one of the human rights giants of the twenty-first century,” since 2008. Chen became a thorn in China’s side when he began challenging China’s coercive population control policy. He and his wife have been imprisoned and tortured as a result. (For more about Chen and his stand against forced abortion, check out the WRWF’s three-minute video, “Free Chen Guangcheng!”)

Reggie Littlejohn spoke last Saturday at the Commemoration of the 23^rd Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, hosted by the Visual Artists Guild of Los Angeles. At that event she received the “Spirit of Tiananmen” Award. In a presentation that was both disturbing and compelling, she pulled no punches in her condemnation of China’s totalitarian “family planning” cruelty:

The true spirit of the Chinese Communist Party is most clearly seen in the faces of the population control police as they drag women away, beat them, strap them down to tables, and force them to abort babies that they want, up to the ninth month of pregnancy.

In between that presentation and jetting off to Washington D.C., she found time to answer a few questions for FrontPage.

Mark Tapson: What inspired you to get involved in this issue and to establish Women’s Rights Without Frontiers?

Reggie Littlejohn: I’m an attorney and in the mid-’90s I represented Chinese refugees in their cases for political asylum in the United States. My first refugee was forcibly sterilized. A large group of family planning officials literally dragged her screaming and pleading out of her home, strapped her down to a table, and cut through her abdominal wall to tie her tubes without anesthesia. She said the pain was unimaginable. She got a serious infection and after that suffered from chronic abdominal pain, back aches, and migraines.

Professor Levinson believes that our Constitution itself is the source of what he characterizes as the “dysfunctional, even pathological” American political system. The learned professor would do away with our system of “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” altogether.  It’s just too darned difficult, he believes, to allow legislative and judicial interference to an omniscient president whose superior wisdom we should just learn to accept, unless of course a future president happens to be conservative.

Levinson would “permit each newly elected president to appoint 50 members of the House and 10 members of the Senate, all to serve four-year terms until the next presidential election.”  I wonder if Russian President Vladimir Putin is listening.

The Senate, according to Levinson, is too unrepresentative to be accorded equal weight with House of Representatives’ majority rule. The rights of the minority, be damned – unless it involves groups anointed with favored minority status by patronizing progressives.

Levinson also mentions the idea of having Congress override Supreme Court decisions it doesn’t like and requiring “seven of the nine Supreme Court justices…to overturn national legislation.”

Finally, Levinson complains that it is far too difficult to change the Constitution through the amendment process set forth in Article V. In another piece he wrote several years ago attacking the legitimacy of the Constitution, he claimed:

Because it is so difficult to amend the Constitution — it seems almost utopian to suggest the possibility, with regard to anything that is truly important — citizens are encouraged to believe that change is almost never desirable, let alone necessary.

Our Founding Fathers provided a framework for government that purposely made it difficult to allow the passions of the moment to override reasoned debate and prudent action. They tried to find a balance between an unchangeable document cast in stone for all time and an overly malleable document that could be sacrificed to transient whims.  As James Madison described the amendment process in Federalist 43:

It guards equally against that extreme facility, which would render the Constitution too mutable; and that extreme difficulty, which might perpetuate its discovered faults. It, moreover, equally enables the general and the State governments to originate the amendment of errors, as they may be pointed out by the experience on one side, or on the other.

There are currently twenty-seven amendments to the Constitution.  The first ten, the Bill of Rights, confirm the protection of our basic liberties.  Other amendments have expanded the reach of these liberties. However, if Professor Levinson had his way and constitutional amendments were as easy to pass as legislation, Obamacare would be a constitutional amendment enshrining the made-up “right” to universal health care on terms dictated by the government. Amnesty would be granted to all illegal immigrants in some sort of made-up open-borders human rights amendment. And so on.

Many devout Jews today don’t set foot on the Temple Mount, afraid that they may be stepping on the ground covering the ruins of the Holy of Holies, allowed only to the High Priest on Yom Kippur. That is enough to keep them away. But there are those who believe they have a right to pray on the grounds where the Temple stood, particularly on Tisha be’Av, the anniversary of its destruction (Maimonides too prayed there). Though many respected rabbis forbid praying on the Mount, other very important Jewish leaders permit it. And there is a growing and brave movement, led by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel and Professor Hillel Weiss, which is trying to build awareness among the Israeli public on the Temple Mount. They are leading a historic battle for the rights of the Jews in their most holy site.

In theory, Israel currently controls the Temple Mount. In reality, since 1967, when the Israeli army seized the “holy basin” from Jordanian forces, the Jewish State gave up religious freedom for the Jews. Immediately after the liberation of Jerusalem, then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan handed over the keys of the Temple Mount to the Waqf, the Muslim religious trust that serves as custodian of the site, which includes four Muslim minarets.

Historically it should be noted that only under Israeli rule was the site open for everyone, Muslims, Christians and Jews. The Islamic Waqf is now attempting to deliberately destroy all evidence of Jewish claims to this site, while using terror and intimidation to impose its exclusive claim to the sacred mountain. The Waqf has proceeded on two fronts: de-Judaize the Mount by archeological destruction and to Islamize it by preventing the Jews from praying there.

Freedom of worship for all religions, including free access to the holy places of all faiths, has always been a cardinal principle of Israel. And by and large, Israel has honored this principle, even under extremely difficult circumstances. It is ironic that Judaism’s holiest site should be the only place in Israel where this principle is violated.

Nothing justifies the infringement of religious rights to the Temple Mount. That infringement undermines respect for the rule of law in Israel by making a mockery of the law that guarantees freedom for all faiths. The Islamic Waqf has removed every sign of ancient Jewish presence at the site. At the entrance, an Arab sign says: “The Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard and everything in it is Islamic property.” Today, Jews are barred from praying on the Mount and are not even allowed to carry any holy articles with them. With Muslim clerics supervising visits, Israeli police have frequently arrested Jews for various violations, such as singing or reciting a prayer even in a whisper.

A few days ago Israeli police issued new draconian instructions for non-Muslims who ascend to the Mount. Non-Muslims are now not even permitted to close their eyes while on the Mount or do anything that could be interpreted as praying. Jewish women have been arrested following claims by police and Waqf officials that they were praying on Temple Mount.

Why is it a crime for a Jew to mention God’s name on Temple Mount? And why is the State of Israel complicit in enforcing this anti-Semitic rule?

In early May, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori was there at the UN in New York to join in the mournful gabfest over the ostensibly lamentable “Doctrine of Discovery.”  The international bureaucrats were focused on “Discovery’s” enduring “impact on indigenous peoples and the right to redress for past conquests.”  The main sin for which redress is apparently needed is Western Civilization’s global reach.

Evidently Bishop Schori could not deliver all her thoughts at the UN session, so she later issued her own “Pastoral Letter on the Doctrine of Discovery and Indigenous Peoples.”  Perhaps small numbers of elderly Episcopalians, if still awake in their pews, will listen to at least part of it.

Schori gloomily recalled centuries of brutal global conquest by Europeans professing to be Christian.  Armed with “religious warrants, papal bulls which permitted and even encouraged the subjugation and permanent enslavement of any non-Christian peoples they encountered,” these savage conquerors achieved “wholesale slaughter, rape, and enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas, as well as in Africa, Asia, and the islands of the Pacific, and the African slave trade was based on these same principles.”  In their wake followed “death, dispossession, and enslavement,” then “rapid depopulation [from]…epidemic disease.”

Of course, neither Bishop Schori nor the United Nations bureaucrats are interested in merely a history lesson.  They want justice and redress. After all, the “ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples” results from oppressive “legal systems” in the “’developed world,’” as Bishop Schori carefully put in quotations, that base land ownership on “religious warrants for colonial occupation from half a millennium ago.”

So essentially, Bishop Schori would like to undo the last 500 years of land ownership and wealth accumulation in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere tainted by Western imperialism. After all, the “dispossession of First Peoples continues to wreak havoc on basic human dignity.” These mystical First Peoples are still “grieving their loss of identity, lifeways, and territory.”  And “all humanity should be grieving” with them. Without irony, Schori cited Old Testament prophetic justice, which came from the ancient Hebrew conquerors of the Canaanites and other “First Peoples.”

Of course, Schori focused on grievous sins against the First Peoples of the United States, emphasizing the Episcopal Church’s long solidarity with them, while briefly citing her predecessor’s apology in 1997 for the “enormities that began with the colony in Jamestown.”  She emphasized:  “Today our understanding of mission has changed.”  Indeed. Unlike the old missionaries, today’s Episcopal elites stress “healing” among people, and with the earth, while “reversing structural and systemic injustice,” of which there is so much.  She even cited Episcopal Church support for the “Violence Against Women Act” currently before Congress.

Part I

Part II

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But the standard intellectual inquiry, for some reason, does not apply to the long, intimate relationship between Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who called himself a “second father” to young Barack.

Sen. Obama described his 20-year relationship with his pastor this way: “What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.” Indeed, Obama describes a relationship that is closer, far closer than the relationship that many sons have with their fathers.

Leftist New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd confidently places the actions, policies and decisions of George W. Bush at the feet of his father. Dowd insists, for example, that George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was Dad-driven. She called the Iraq War “a Freudian tango” that provided a “chance for W. to complete his transformation from the screwup son to the son who fixed his father’s screwups.” None of that fear of chemical or biological attack in the wake of 9/11 national security stuff for Dowd. No, it’s all about Dad.

In a recent column comparing blue-blooded “patricians” Bush-41 and Mitt Romney, Dowd writes, “Their political philosophies were not shaped by a passion for ideas as much as a desire to serve and an ambition to climb higher than their revered fathers. Pragmatism trumps ideology; survival trumps conviction. Both men, to the manner born in Greenwich and Bloomfield Hills, adapted uncomfortably to the fundamentalist tent meeting mood of the modern GOP, knowing their futures depended on Faustian deals with the right.”

But Obama and Wright’s relationship tells us nothing.

In a column about presidential aspirants and their fathers, Dowd puts the Bush and Romney quartet on the couch: “American politics bristles with Oedipal drama. Sons struggling to live up to fathers. Sons striving to outdo fathers. Sons scheming to avenge fathers. Sons burning to one-up fathers. Sons yearning to impress fathers who vanished early on.

Sons leaning on fathers. Sons using fathers as reverse-play books. …”It’s daunting, so soon after ‘Junior’ Bush crashed the Bush family station wagon into the globe in an effort to both avenge and outshine his dad, to gear up for another Republican presidential candidate (Mitt Romney) whose resume copies his famous Republican father and whose relationship with dad sculpts his outlook.”

But Obama and Wright’s relationship tells us nothing.

Hi Philadelphia it’s Glenn Beck and I want to invite you to join me for a very special luncheon. It’s this Thursday, May 31st at the Union League downtown. I’m gonna be there I’m gonna be speaking to support David Horowitz and the Philly Freedom Center. I have to tell ya, in this age of moral and economic decline David and his team at the Philadelphia Freedom Center need help to continue their mission of restoring the values and traditions that make this country great. David used to be a Marxist man, there’s nobody that knows these guys more than David Horowitz. He knows what they’re doing, he knows what they have done, he knows where they’re going and he knows more importantly how to stop them. He has helped me and advised me for several years now kind of behind the scenes and really never asked for anything. I want to be in Philadelphia to support him. This is important work. David’s work must go forward for our nation to go forward. Please, visit PhillyFreedom.org that’s PhillyFreedom.org and I’ll see you there Thursday.

The Voter Participation Center seeks to register at least a million unmarried women, 18-to-29-year-olds, and “people of color” to vote in November’s elections. Traditionally, each of these demographics vote heavily Democratic.

The Flame has been discovered in seven Middle Eastern countries, though the number of infections found in Iran is more than the rest combined with 189 instances. There have been 98 infections detected in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Sudan was hit with 32 infections, a country whose regime is increasingly Islamist and friendly towards Hamas. There have been 30 infections found in Syria, 18 in Lebanon, 10 in Saudi Arabia and 5 in Egypt.

It is not believed at this time that the Flame targeted a specific industry or program like Stuxnet did. Instead, it is meant to act as the “the ultimate spy,” copying hard drive data, logging instant messages and other online communications, recording keystrokes, taking screenshots and even secretly turning on computer microphones to record nearby conversations. There is also the potential for sabotage because it can potentially delete information and change settings on computer systems, opening up doors for attack.

Some cyber experts think it was deployed in February or March 2010, while others think it has been active as far back as five years ago. It is unknown who authored the Flame, but suspicion immediately fell on Israel, possibly with U.S. assistance. Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs encouraged such suspicion during an interview, saying, “Whoever sees the Iranian threat as a serious threat would be likely to take different steps, including these, in order to hurt them.” He hinted at his country’s involvement, saying, “Israel is blessed to be a nation possessing superior technology. These achievements of ours open up all kinds of possibilities for us.”

The latest known cyber attack on Iran happened in late April. Iran announced that its oil industry was being targeted by foreign hackers, specifically its Oil Ministry and its Kharg Island terminal where the majority of Iran’s oil is exported from. “Data related to some of the users have been compromised,” the Iranian regime said, though it denied that there was any serious damage.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UT Austin was planning to publish the book in honor of the late American scholar Elizabeth Fernea, a professor there whose life and work were focused on the Middle East.

At first, novelist Huzama Habayeb was delighted to contribute as one of fifteen Arab writers. But that turned to “horror,” as a Gulf News editorial put it, when she realized that the collection would also feature two Israeli women, Yehudit Hendel and Orly Castel-Bloom. Habayeb withdrew her manuscript, complaining to the Center that Israel is an “occupier” of her land “Palestine” – although she was born in Kuwait, raised in Jordan, lives in Dubai, and has never set foot in Israel.

The university accepted her withdrawal but moved forward with plans to publish. Taken aback by this, Habayeb determined to ban the book altogether. She urged other Arab contributors to withdraw their manuscripts. A friend, Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour who is married to a Palestinian poet, was the first to go along. Then others got onboard.

The Center shrugged and said the book was already at the printers and would be published as is. Habayeb wasn’t about to give up. “There are academic boycott movements around the world protesting the Israeli occupation,” she said, then incorrectly claimed that “the only two countries where they don’t exist are the United States and Israel.” She threatened to embarrass the university: “It doesn’t need a genius to figure out that the Texas center wanted to resolve the issue quickly and silently.”

According to Dr. Kamran Scot Aghaie, the Center’s director, twelve authors asked to withdraw their contributions from the volume, with one additional request from the translator of another submission. “All the Arab writers whom I managed to contact withdrew their contributions,” Habayeb exulted.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies refused to censor or discriminate against the Israelis, but the boycott led to enough withdrawals to make the book project no longer viable, so the publication was discontinued. Habayeb crowed to the Dubai-based website Gulf News,

I am so proud of having the book cancelled. I am a Palestinian and to achieve this, to be able to resist the illegal Israeli occupation of my homeland is something that I will cherish forever. It is my own victory in the struggle.

An opinion piece in the Gulf News gleefully reported that “Habayeb has a smile on her face this morning” and described her actions as “those of a resistance fighter.” It insisted that “academics the world over need to ensure that Israel is isolated for its immoral and illegal actions in occupying Palestine and repressing the Palestinian people.” (Dr. Aghaie offers another perspective on that: “The unfortunate reality is that in Middle Eastern Studies sometimes politics trumps academic ideals.”) The editorial closes by saying that “the pen is mightier than the sword” – an odd moral to draw from the censorship of nearly thirty writers.

The day was framed as a “teachable moment” with respect to an anti-bullying campaign. Yet once again, Diane Woods, a special-education teacher and the school’s anti-bullying coordinator, framed the incident in a manner that aligns itself, either inadvertently or by design, with a version of the confrontation that remain in dispute. She believes the incident would have ended differently if Zimmerman had walked away. “A child lost his life,” Woods said. “It may not be a racial thing here…And we see so much anger and aggression here…It starts with hitting now, and it leads to more deaths when they get older. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Apparently the school is also trying to avoid dealing with the possibility that Zimmerman did indeed walk away and was pursued by Martin regardless of his retreat. On March 26, the Orlando Sentinel published an account of the story where Zimmerman claimed he was walking away when Martin approached him from behind, and the two men exchanged words. Martin then allegedly punched Zimmerman in the nose, knocking him to the ground, got on top of Zimmerman and began beating him. “That is the account Zimmerman gave police, and much of it has been corroborated by witnesses, authorities say,” reported the Sentinel. “There have been no reports that a witness saw the initial punch Zimmerman told police about.”

An accurate account? It’s difficult to say for certain at this juncture, which is precisely the point. Thus, it is more than a little ironic that a Trayvon Martin Day to promote anti-bullying was named after the man who may turn out to have been the bully.

Such a possibility was apparently irrelevant for principal Coleman. “I wanted to do something in recognition of Trayvon Martin,” she said. “I wanted to capture this incident in order to bring about change…This wasn’t about…dealing with who’s right or who’s wrong” with regard to the incident. That’s nonsense. The implication of an “anti-bullying” event named Trayvon Martin Day is about as subtle as a sledgehammer: Martin is the victim, Zimmerman is the the bully, and his claim of self-defense is not credible.

Ms. Coleman and other school officials are certainly entitled to draw whatever conclusions they choose to draw from the incident. Yet foisting those conclusions on schools students–at the elementary level no less–constitutes nothing more than progressive activism masquerading itself as anti-bullying education.

The U.S. currently contributes annually about $250 million of the approximately $600 million budget of UNRWA, the UN agency that provides housing, education, and welfare to Palestinian “refugees.” The U.S. has funneled a total of $4.4 billion to UNRWA since it was founded in 1948.

Under the Kirk amendment, the funding to those no longer considered refugees would not necessarily end; they could be defined as poverty cases. But only the thirty thousand, instead of five million, would still be designated as refugees.

What explains the vast differential in numbers? Before and during Israel’s 1948-49 War for Independence, about 650,000 Palestinian Arabs (many of them very recent immigrants from other Arab countries) left the territories that became Israel. About thirty thousand of them are still alive today.

But in 1965 and 1982, UNRWA made decisions—unique in history, never applied to any other refugee population in the world—to define children and grandchildren, too, of displaced Palestinians as “refugees.” Hence the swelled numbers of today, with “refugees” kept in “camps” in Syria,Lebanon, Jordan, and even the Palestinian Authority. Jonathan Schanzer notes that, according to a study, if this situation persists their number will reach fifteen million by 2050.

Why define so many people as “refugees,” and why keep them in “camps” indefinitely? The answer, as Shoshana Bryen notes, was given in an interview to Lebanon’s Daily Star by the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah.

Abdullah told the Daily Star “unequivocally” that even if a Palestinian state were to be established in the West Bank and Gaza—that is, the much-vaunted “two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”—the Palestinian refugees “would not become citizens” of it. The reason is that “The state is the 1967 borders, but the refugees are not only from the 1967 borders. The refugees are from all over Palestine.”

American Jews are not alone in laying out the welcome mat for Beinart. Within the past week, the Jerusalem Post published an editorial welcoming Beinart into the “big tent” of “Zionism,” and commending his call for a boycott of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as “well-intentioned” and somehow different from similar calls by foreign governments. In an unprecedented move, the Jerusalem Post’s weekly columnist Isi Leibler was compelled to condemn his own newspaper’s editorial as “idiotic.”

Why are we Jews laying out the red carpet to this man? And why, in general, are we Jews so friendly and deferential to our worst enemies?

One reason is that, despite the efforts of our enemies through the ages to portray us as super-sophisticated criminal masterminds, we Jews are actually very simple-minded and naive, at least where our enemies are concerned.

Beinart professes at every opportunity to love Israel and to even be a “Zionist.” He boasts that he even has an Israeli flag displayed on the wall of his six-year-old son’s room. This seems to render his Jewish audiences oblivious to Beinart’s repetition and endorsement of nearly every element of the Arab world’s anti-Israel narrative and his overwhelmingly negative characterization of Israel as an “undemocratic” society.

Not that Beinart isn’t also a clever debater. His principal tactic is to make so many false or misleading statements all at once that it is impossible to reply to or even to keep track of them all. Inevitably, some of them will sink subliminally into the minds of his audience, if they are the least bit open to suggestion. Also in his arsenal of debating tactics are distortions by omission and false assumptions implied by his tone and the drift of his argument. These methods are especially insidious since they do not require the “lie direct” and make it difficult for the audience to examine the implied assumptions on which they are based.

All three of these tactics were much in evidence during Beinart’s debate with Daniel Gordis at Columbia University on May 2. Within the space of six minutes, Beinart informed his audience that Israel’s rule over the Palestinians is “undemocratic” and “South African”  in character (he avoids using the inflammatory word “apartheid” when speaking to Jews not yet fully indoctrinated in hostility to Israel); that “occupied” Palestinians are not allowed to vote, while Israeli Jewish “settlers” in the “occupied territories” are; that Palestinians are stopped at checkpoints while Jewish settlers are waived through them; that Israel is sponsoring “settlement growth” in the “remote” Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba and in Ariel, which is “thirteen miles inside” the Palestinian territories; that Israel is “paying” Israelis to move to the “occupied” territories; and that Israel’s government is the obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

The claim that Israel denies the Palestinian Arabs the right to vote is flat-out false. Palestinians have voted repeatedly in Palestinian elections without Israeli interference of any kind. The only reason they have not voted in the last few years is that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has refused to hold elections in open defiance of the Palestinians’ own constitution, and he has continued to rule his people without any legal mandate. That is Abbas’s own choice, not that of Israel or, for that matter, the Palestinian Arabs. The claim that Palestinians are forced to submit to searches at checkpoints while Israelis are automatically waived through is equally false. As Eli E. Hertz has pointed out, Israeli Jews are routinely subjected to searches at checkpoints whenever they go into a supermarket, restaurant or post office, or get on a bus—usually several times each day. In addition, they are frequently stopped at roadside checkpoints, just as Palestinian Arabs are.

Nor does Israel’s government pay anyone a single shekel as a reward for moving to a “settlement.” In fact, it issues so few permits for new houses in the so-called “settlements”—actually villages and suburban communities less than 15 miles from Israel’s 1949 armistice lines—that it is almost impossible for young Jewish couples with children to remain in them, much less for Israelis from within the “green line” to move to them.

Furthermore, there is no real similarity between Israel to apartheid-era South Africa. Israel has completely integrated public transportation, restaurants and markets, and has no legal restrictions on the right of the 1.2 million Arab citizens of Israel to live on or to own land anywhere in Israel. There are numerous integrated neighborhoods throughout the country, and Arabs serve as members of parliament, judges and government ministers. In fact, an Arab judge recently convicted former Israeli president Moshe Katzav of rape and sentenced him to prison. Could a black judge (of course there were none) have done that to a white president in apartheid South Africa?