Archive | 2022/11/15

Dla niego pokój oznacza zabijanie Żydów

Nov15

Kiedy prezydent Autonomii Palestyńskiej Mahmoud Abbas przemówi do Zgromadzenia Ogólnego ONZ w Nowym Jorku pod koniec tego miesiąca, nie powie swoim słuchaczom, że członkowie jego rządzącej frakcji Fatah szaleją na Zachodnim Brzegu, gdzie przeprowadzają codziennie ataki terrorystyczne przeciwko działaczom palestyńskim i dziennikarzom, a także Izraelczykom. Na zdjęciu: Abbas wygłasza przemówienie w ONZ 27 września 2018 r. w Nowym Jorku. (Zdjęcie: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)


Dla niego pokój oznacza zabijanie Żydów

Bassam Tawil
tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska

Gdy prezydent Autonomii Palestyńskiej Mahmoud Abbas przygotowuje się do wystąpienia na Zgromadzeniu Ogólnym ONZ w Nowym Jorku pod koniec tego miesiąca, pojawiają się coraz więcej sygnałów, że jego ludzie dokonują ataków terrorystycznych przeciwko Izraelowi.

Tak jak robił to w przeszłości, Abbas bez wątpienia ponownie wykorzysta podium ONZ, aby potwierdzić swoją gotowość do zawarcia pokoju z Izraelem i sprzeciw wobec terroryzmu i przemocy. Nie trzeba dodawać, że wykorzysta międzynarodową platformę do rzucenia kolejnych kłamstw i krwawych oszczerstw przeciwko Izraelowi i Żydom.

Jedno jest pewne. Abbas nie powie swoim słuchaczom w ONZ, że członkowie jego rządzącej frakcji Fatah szaleją na Zachodnim Brzegu, gdzie niemal codziennie przeprowadzają ataki terrorystyczne przeciwko palestyńskim działaczom i palestyńskim dziennikarzom, a także Izraelczykom. Ci terroryści, lojalni wobec Abbasa, działają na północnym Zachodnim Brzegu [tj. Judei i Samarii. MK], a konkretnie w palestyńskich miastach Dżanin i Nablus.

Terroryści Abbasa, uzbrojeni w różnego rodzaju broń i ładunki wybuchowe, przemierzają ulice obu miast i otwarcie deklarują swoje poparcie dla terroryzmu.

Terroryści są głównie powiązani z uzbrojoną grupą Fatahu, Brygadami Męczenników Aksa. Inna związana z Fatahem grupa, która niedawno pojawiła się na ulicach Nablusu, nazywa siebie Jaskinią Lwa.

W ciągu ostatnich kilku miesięcy terroryści Fatahu przeprowadzili wiele ataków zarówno na Palestyńczyków, jak i Izraelczyków. Wiadomo również, że wielu terrorystów współpracuje z wspieranymi przez Iran islamistycznymi grupami terrorystycznymi, Hamasem i Palestyńskim Islamskim Dżihadem (PIJ).

Terroryści Fatahu przeprowadzili ostatnio kilka zamachów na Żydów odwiedzających Grób Józefa w Nablusie.

Brygady Męczenników Aqsa wręcz chwaliły się atakami terrorystycznymi w pisemnym oświadczeniu. Grupa przysięgła również, że będzie kontynuować ataki terrorystyczne.

W zeszłym miesiącu armii izraelskiej udało się zlikwidować Ibrahima al-Nabulsiego, jednego z przywódców Brygad Męczenników Aksa w Nablusie, poszukiwanego za przeprowadzenie serii zamachów z bronią palną.

Po jego śmierci przywódcy Fatah zorganizowali konferencję nazwaną imieniem zabitego terrorysty w Ramallah, de facto stolicy Palestyńczyków. Był to gest ze strony Abbasa i jego współpracowników, by uczcić zabitego terrorystę. Abbas zadzwonił nawet do rodziców al-Nabulsiego i dwóch innych terrorystów z Fatah, aby złożyć kondolencje i wychwalać terrorystów jako “męczenników”.

W zeszłym tygodniu izraelscy policjanci aresztowali palestyńskiego terrorystę w mieście Jaffa, niedaleko Tel Awiwu. Terrorysta, który był w drodze do przeprowadzenia ataku, należał do powiązanej z Fatahem grupy terrorystycznej Jaskinia Lwa. Policja znalazła w samochodzie terrorysty pistolet maszynowy i bomby rurowe.

Ostatnio Palestyńczycy ogłosili, że Hamad Abu Jildeh, 24-letni mężczyzna z Dżaninu, zmarł z powodu ran odniesionych podczas starcia zbrojnego z izraelskimi żołnierzami kilka dni wcześniej. Palestyńczycy ujawnili, że Abu Dżildeh był jednym z dowódców Brygad Męczenników Al-Aksa Abbasa. Wideo, jakie pojawiło się na platformach społecznościowych, przedstawiało Abu Dżildeha, gdy strzelał do izraelskich żołnierzy w obozie dla uchodźców w Dżanin. Podczas jego pogrzebu członkowie Fatahu wezwali Palestyńczyków do przeprowadzania kolejnych ataków.

Abu Dżildeh i al-Nabulsi to dwaj spośród kilku terrorystów Fatahu zabitych lub zatrzymanych w ostatnich tygodniach. Terroryści ci należą do frakcji palestyńskiej, którą ludzie Zachodu często określają jako “umiarkowaną”. Dowódcą tych terrorystów jest nie kto inny jak Mahmoud Abbas, który oprócz pełnienia funkcji prezydenta Autonomii Palestyńskiej jest także przewodniczącym Fatahu.

Abbas i wyżsi przywódcy Fatah nie powiedzieli ani słowa przeciwko zaangażowaniu ich ludzi w terroryzm.

Abbas i przywódcy Fatahu nadal gloryfikują terrorystów. Ponadto Abbas odmówił powstrzymania lub rozbrojenia terrorystów. Zamiast tego Abbas i jego rzecznicy nadal, jak zwykle, obwiniają Izrael za ostatni wybuch przemocy na Zachodnim Brzegu. W rzeczywistości mówią, że Izrael nie ma prawa bronić się ani udaremniać ataków terrorystycznych planowanych i przeprowadzanych przez terrorystów, zwłaszcza należących do Fatahu.

Zdaniem Abbasa i innych przywódców palestyńskich, palestyńscy prawnicy, dziennikarze i aktywiści żądający wolności, a także Żydzi powinni po prostu akceptować codzienne ataki terrorystyczne przeciwko nim. Abbas krzyczy “terroryzm” tylko wtedy, gdy Izrael zabije lub aresztuje terrorystę.

To ten sam Abbas, który wkrótce pojawi się na Zgromadzeniu Ogólnym ONZ, aby ponownie odegrać rolę ofiary i oskarżyć Izrael o “ludobójstwo” i “czystki etniczne”. Od kiedy doszedł do władzy w 2005 roku, Abbas okłamuje ONZ i inne instytucje międzynarodowe.

Podążając śladami swojego poprzednika, Jasera Arafata, strategia Abbasa polega na oszukiwaniu świata przez szerzenie fałszywego twierdzenia, że Izrael jest odpowiedzialny za wszystkie nieszczęścia Palestyńczyków – posunięcie to jest próbą ukrycia własnego złego przywództwa.

Podobnie jak Arafat, Abbas będzie nadal mówił o pragnieniu pokoju Palestyńczyków, jednocześnie zachęcając swoich terrorystów z Fatahu do dalszego terroryzmu. Gdyby Abbas naprawdę chciał powstrzymać terrorystów, przynajmniej poinstruowałby swoje siły bezpieczeństwa, aby skonfiskowały nielegalną broń i aresztowały terrorystów.

Abbas jednak tego nie zrobi, ponieważ sam uważa terrorystów za bohaterów i męczenników. Co więcej, nie ma motywacji do rozprawienia się z terrorystami; w końcu nie stanowią zagrożenia dla jego reżimu.

Tymczasem Abbas doskonale wie, że jego podżeganie przeciwko Izraelowi było tak skuteczne, że gdyby kiedykolwiek zawarł pokój z Izraelem, jego własny lud dokonałby jego egzekucji za zdradę.

Abbas podczas swojego przemówienia w ONZ oczywiście nie wspomni o terrorystach Fatahu. Nie będzie też mówił o szerzącej się korupcji w jego rządzie i niewykonywaniu przez siły bezpieczeństwa Autonomii Palestyńskiej ich obowiązku egzekwowania prawa i porządku oraz zapobiegania terroryzmowi.

Państwa członkowskie ONZ powinny przygotować się na kolejną listę kłamstw i oszczerstw Abbasa, obarczające winą wszystkich oprócz niego samego za trwający rozlew krwi. Przydałoby się, gdyby chociaż jeden z przedstawicieli państw członkowskich przerwał litanię Abbasa, by zapytać o rolę jego ludzi w terroryzmie i o to, dlaczego nadal chwali terrorystów, twierdząc równocześnie, że Palestyńczycy rzekomo dążą do pokoju.

Bassam Tawil jest muzułmańskim badaczem i publicystą mieszkającym na Bliskim Wschodzie.

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Norah Vincent’s Gender Trouble

Nov15
Norah Vincent’s Gender Trouble


JAMES KIRCHICK

The late writer’s lessons on breaking the gender binary
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‘With the help of a new wardrobe, a shorter haircut, a layer of artificial stubble, an extremely tight sports bra, and a Juilliard voice coach, Vincent lived as “Ned” for 18 months’ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

When the late writer Norah Vincent decided to live as a man for the purposes of a journalistic experiment, she did so with the expectation that her life would be easier. Men, after all, enjoy many types of structural and social advantages in American society, advantages Vincent explored in her 2006 book chronicling that experiment, Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again. Much the way that other great immersive journalist, Barbara Ehrenreich, reported on the working poor by laboring in a series of minimum wage jobs (and who happened to die weeks after Vincent’s own death this past summer by suicide at the age of 53), Vincent undertook an investigation into how a more literal version of “the other half” lived.

With the help of a new wardrobe, a shorter haircut, a layer of artificial stubble, an extremely tight sports bra, and a Juilliard voice coach, Vincent lived as “Ned” for 18 months. Throughout her experiment, Vincent successfully passed in various male milieus, from a bowling league to a strip club to a high-powered sales firm straight out of Glengarry Glen Ross, earning the confidence of her many male interlocutors along the way. To her surprise, what she found made her more sympathetic to the plight of men, whom, she wrote, suffered as much or more from society’s gendered expectations than did women.

Vincent’s main takeaway from her time living as Ned was a deeper appreciation for “the toxicity of gender roles” that “had proved to be ungainly, suffocating, torpor-inducing or even nearly fatal to a lot more people than I’d thought, and for the simple reason that, man or woman, they didn’t let you be yourself.” For the male members of our species, this toxicity stems from anxiety over being perceived as feminine, “the result of men actively working to squelch any creeping womanly tendencies in themselves and their brothers.” Ultimately, it “wasn’t being found out as a woman that I was really worried about. It was being found out as less than a real man”—that is, a man who does not conform to stereotypically masculine gender norms. The English language has plenty of words for this type of man—pansy, sissy, fag, queer—all of which denote that class of human being who was, until very recently, among the most despised of minorities: the homosexual.

“The greatest fear of the American male is that he will be homosexual,” I write in my recent book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, and Vincent’s reporting confirmed this. The damaged men with whom she bowled, drank, and ogled women, “took refuge in machismo because they feared inappropriate intimacies between men. A feminized man is a gay man, or so the stereotype goes.” Living in a society that pressures them to exhibit traditionally masculine virtues (“hierarchy, strength, competition”) and smother feminine ones (“supplication, apology and need”), men go through life as if they are under constant surveillance, with dire penalties exacted for falling short. “The worst of this scrutiny,” Vincent wrote, “came from being perceived as an effeminate guy … most men were genuinely afraid, almost desperately afraid sometimes of the spectral fag in their midst.”

Vincent’s response to this social trauma was to advocate an escape from the “straitjacket” of gender, to expand the possibilities of what it means to be a man or a woman. As a proudly butch lesbian, she spoke from personal experience. “I have always lived as my truest self somewhere on the boundary between masculine and feminine,” Vincent wrote. Despite her refusal to fit into a binary box, Vincent was fiercely protective of her femininity, her lesbianism, and her womanhood. She saw no contradiction in her masculine gender presentation and her female sex. Standing nearly 6 feet tall and wearing 11.5 men’s size shoes, Vincent never felt herself “to be a man trapped in the wrong body. On the contrary,” she identified “deeply with both my femaleness and my femininity.”

In the years since Self-Made Man was published, so dramatically has our conversation about gender shifted, and so fearsome are the consequences for questioning the novel dogmas surrounding it, that the book reads like samizdat. While Vincent’s conclusion—that the oppressive conflation of sex and gender should be ruptured—was undoubtedly forward-thinking, today it would strike many progressives as retrograde. For those who fashion themselves insurgents on the newfangled cultural vanguard of the radical transgender movement, gender nonconformity no longer widens the broad spectrum of gender but narrows it by fusing gender expression with biological sex—defining effeminate men as women and masculine women as men.

In her book, Vincent barely addressed the transgender question, doing so only to deny that she identified as the opposite sex. “Am I a transsexual or a transvestite, and did I write this book as a means of coming out as such?” she asked, using words to describe those with a cross-sex identity (and, in the case of “transsexual,” those who had undergone a physical sex change) which have since been replaced with the much more expansive term “transgender.” While Vincent’s answer at the time was no—she “rarely enjoyed and never felt in any way fulfilled personally by being perceived and treated as a man”—today she would be deemed by many to be transgender or nonbinary, whether she liked it or not.

This new understanding of transgender as an internal, subjective feeling that may or may not correspond with one’s objective sex—a philosophy which emerged very recently yet has now been adopted by many American institutions—presents a challenge to homosexuality, a biological reality and facet of the human species that has existed since time immemorial. By their very nature as same sex-attracted persons, gays and lesbians have always been nonconforming in their gender expression and roles.

And as long as the vast majority of humanity is heterosexual, we always will. Because our same-sex attraction defies that which is “normal,” many gay people have been told, particularly at a young age, that we are actually members of the opposite sex trapped in the “wrong body.” This form of homophobia is particularly gruesome in Iran, where gay men are often forced to undergo sex changes in order to rectify their same-sex desires, as well as in certain parts of Africa, where lesbians confront the threat of “corrective rape” to “make” them heterosexual.

In the supposedly more enlightened West, a nonviolent but conceptually similar campaign of erasing homosexuality is afoot. If the oppressive gender norms Vincent critiqued were the product of conservative social conventions, today, in a strange development, those same conventions are being unwittingly reified by progressives under the influence of radical transgender ideology. Under this faddish new dispensation, gender nonconformity, a trait inherent to being homosexual, is being conflated with gender dysphoria, a medical condition. It is having a particularly deleterious effect on gender nonconforming young people—many of whom would otherwise grow up to be gay but who are increasingly being told that their defiance of gender norms is a likely indication that they are the opposite sex. As a result, homosexuality is being transmuted into transgender.

Much of this erasure is due to the linguistic hegemony of the word “transgender.” Until the 1990s, people with a cross-sex identity typically referred to themselves as “transsexuals,” a term that inferred one had undergone a physical sex change. “Transgender,” by contrast, defines a much broader spectrum of identity, encompassing not only those who identify as a member of the opposite sex but increasingly anyone who doesn’t conform to traditional gender roles. This has led to an explosion of young people identifying as transgender.

At increasingly younger ages and in ever larger numbers, masculine girls and effeminate boys are being encouraged not only to explore their gender variance—a perfectly healthy and welcome development—but to embrace a transgender or nonbinary existence. From there, it can be a straight path to irreversible medical interventions—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery—to “correct” their “sex assigned at birth.” Almost 50 years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, we have unintentionally achieved a new means of pathologizing it.

Almost 50 years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, we have unintentionally achieved a new means of pathologizing it.

Of course, none of this is to say that transgender identity isn’t real or legitimate. But the rapidity with which so many young people are declaring themselves transgender and nonbinary is worthy of skepticism. In 2020, almost 700,000 people in the United States under the age of 25 identified as transgender, nearly double the amount from just three years prior. According to Dutch doctors who have been researching adolescent gender dysphoria for decades, 80% to 95% of pre-pubertal adolescents will desist from their feelings of gender dysphoria by later adolescence, and the vast majority of them will grow up to be gay.

Vincent herself was just such a child. “Practically from birth,” she wrote, “I was the kind of hard-core tomboy that makes you think there must be a gay gene.” Had Vincent been born later, it’s entirely possible that well-intentioned educators, doctors, and other authority figures would have interpreted her gender nonconformity as a sign that she was transgender and encouraged her to transition. Testimonies from an increasing number of “detransitioners”—many of whom attribute their youthful decisions to transition as resulting from internalized homophobia—attest to this phenomenon.

The slow erasure of homosexuality and the concomitant ascendance of transgender in its place extends beyond individuals to the culture at large. The routinization of gender pronouns in email signatures, verbal greetings, and so many other areas of daily life has codified in humorless bureaucratese what had been, for gay men going back generations, a teasing form of endearment (referring to one’s friends as “she” or “her”). Over the past decade, activists, journalists, celebrities, and the New York City government have engaged in a revisionist campaign to rewrite one of the seminal moments in the history of gay liberation, the Stonewall Uprising, by concocting a false narrative that it was led not by gay men and lesbians but “trans women.”

Or consider last year’s remake of West Side Story. Discussing the film, then still in development, in a 2018 interview, Rita Moreno, a star of both the original and the updated version, addressed the evolution of the character Anybodys, a female tomboy whose desperate attempts to join the Jets are stymied due to her being a girl. In 1961, when the original film premiered, the motion picture industry’s infamous “Production Code” prohibited overt depictions of homosexuality. Half a century later, Moreno enthused, Anybodys’ authentic nature could finally be realized on screen. “Anybodys can be what she was always meant to be: a lesbian,” she said. “That’s really what she was and what she was meant to be, but at the time that was as far as they could go.” Upon the film’s release three years later, however, Anybodys had been converted into a transgender man.

One of the great, largely unheralded, accomplishments of the gay rights movement—and of gay people as individuals—was blurring an all-too-rigid gender binary. By expanding our notions of what it means to be a man or a woman, gay people didn’t just liberate themselves from constricting gender stereotypes. They liberated society. Thanks in large part to the courage of an earlier generation of gays and lesbians like Norah Vincent, heterosexual men can express affection for one another with less fear of having their manhood called into question, while heterosexual women face less pressure to conform to traditional (and ruthless) feminine beauty standards. The fear of being called “gay”—a word that, not so long ago, rolled off the tongues of American teenagers as easily as “retard” did decades before—no longer haunts us as it once did. And yet, just as we reached the point where we could celebrate this long overdue disruption of gender norms, a new movement, marching under the banner of “progress,” seeks to reimpose them.

James Kirchick is a Tablet columnist and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (Henry Holt, 2022). He tweets @jkirchick.

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Pro-Israel Politicians and PACs Thrive in Red Ripple Election

Nov15
Pro-Israel Politicians and PACs Thrive in Red Ripple Election

Andrew Bernard

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses a crowd at the US Embassy in Israel on May 28, 2019. Photo: Governor’s Press Office.

US Jewish organizations on Thursday celebrated the victories of pro-Israel Democratic and Republican candidates in the US midterm elections as a full-scale Republican ‘red wave’ failed to materialize in the House and the Senate remained too close to call.

Of the 365 candidates endorsed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 95 percent won their elections. The wins included a number of Democratic candidates in tight races that Republicans hoped to pick up in regions like South Texas and Virginia. AIPAC launched two political action committees to directly endorse and fund candidates for the first time last year, and said that it had spent $17 million in this year’s election backing pro-Israel Republican and Democratic candidates, including much of the incoming freshman Democratic class.

That spending often put it odds with J-Street, which describes itself as a pro-Israel, pro-peace organization and which endorsed its own slate of progressive candidates. In the closing weeks of the race, AIPAC spent about $1 million to defeat J-Street endorsed progressive Democrat Summer Lee, who is endorsed by the so-called “Squad” of progressive congressional representatives — comprised of Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Cori Bush of Missouri — and who has been critical of Israel.

Asked at a Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh forum event in April of this year if Israel was an apartheid state, Lee said: “I don’t necessarily know that I know the answer to that.” Lee also said at the event that US aid to Israel should be conditional.

Lee is predicted to win Pennsylvania’s 12th district, which would make her the only candidate opposed by AIPAC in both the primary and general election to win.

In gubernatorial races, New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul (D) held on against Congressman Lee Zeldin (R) in the closest governor’s race in nearly two decades. Despite endorsements from some Orthodox Jewish leaders for Hochul, Hasidic enclaves like New York City’s Borough Park and upstate Rockland County voted heavily for Zeldin, who is Jewish. New York City’s 48th Assembly District, which includes Borough Park, voted 88% for Zeldin, while Rockland County favored Zeldin by 12. Hochul carried the state overall by about 5%. Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, head of the Satmar Haredi community said on Wednesday that Trumpism had “brainwashed” the community and that his decision to endorse Hochul had been an “obvious one.”

“The future of democracy and abortion access were the top two issues driving the Jewish vote, and in key races, those issues delivered wins for Democrats,” said Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA), in a statement. “The election results indicate that the Jewish vote was a key factor behind Democratic wins in close races around the country.”

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is set to defeat former Governor Charlie Crist by almost 20 points thanks in part to shifts among Hispanic and Jewish voters in Miami-Dade county, which had not voted for a Republican since 2002. 

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