Editor in chief Steve Linde and, before him, David Horovitz both said they hoped no one could tell what the politics of this paper were. With very great respect for each, who are they kidding? This is a right-wing paper, and without Derfner it is becoming implacably and monotonously far-right-wing.

It’s rapidly losing my interest and, I would assume, the interest of many other pro-Israel liberals.

One can see how few even bother to write in, realizing the implacability of the Likud stranglehold

Wed, Jun 1, 2011   28 Iyar, 5771

Reality and distortion

Sir, – Jeff Barak notes that “Netanyahu’s shriek of gevalt at the very mention of 1967 borders shows just how far he really is from any serious discussion with the Palestinians,” and that former prime minister Olmert “correctly argued that… Obama’s recent Middle East speeches did not represent any change in American policy.”  Prime Minister Netanyahu distorted for Obama the Clinton parameters. And more can be questioned:

• Why did Netanyahu demand foreign recognition of a “Jewish state” rather than a normal sovereign state? The terms for Israeli- Jordanian peace are that the two exist in “harmony” and “recognize and respect each other’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence.”

• Netanyahu told Congress we are “not interlopers” in the West Bank. This is another distortion.

In May 2003, The Jerusalem Post quoted then-prime minister Ariel Sharon telling the Likud: “Occupation is terrible. You may not like the word, but to maintain 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is terrible for Israel, the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy.”

JAMES ADLER

www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/letters-to-editor-1.361999

Haaretz

Tue, May 17, 2011 Iyyar 13, 5771 

Letters to Editor

Bin Laden didn’t surrender

In response to “An act of licensed gangsterism,” Week’s End, May 6

While I would have preferred Osama bin Laden been captured, nonetheless I find Haim Baram’s objections to the operation – and its aftermath – to be strikingly lacking in common sense.

No one was celebrating bin Laden’s death, but rather the news of the successful conclusion of a manhunt, which most people felt they would never see. It was about closure, not death, and the unexpected news of his capture would have evoked just as much of a spontaneous celebration.

Neither Baram or others seem willing to consider that the grandmaster of both mass-suicide bombing and the cult of martyrdom could easily have been lunging for a switch to blow up the entire mansion that contained both his family and associates, the computer files, and the Americans.

Nor have Baram or others been willing to consider the fact that bin Laden had years of voluntary confinement in which to contemplate how he would react to such an assault – whether or not to prepare a white flag or come up with other obvious ways to surrender unharmed. And yet his actions toward the Navy Seals ran opposite to the many ways which would have led to his peaceful capture.

James Adler

http://www.thejewishadvocate.com//news/2011-04-08/Letters/Boycotting_J_Street.html

The Jewish Advocate

                                                                                                                 April 8, 2011

Opinions & Commentary – Letters

Boycotting J Street

It is sad that we – whom Britain’s chief rabbi Jonathan Sachs has called the world’s ancient founders of democracy and whose state is the only democracy in the Middle East – have to endure opponents of free speech like Joshua Katzen (“BDS Movement infecting community from within,” March 25), who wants to boycott those fellow Jews with different opinions. Katzen declares his opposition to “any organization supporting any boycott of Jews,” but he himself wants to boycott the strongly pro-Israel Jews of J Street.

The deep agenda, then, is to exclude liberal Zionism from the Big Tent. This is an exclusion that doesn’t have anything to do with BDS. Sorrowfully, Katzen simply wants his rightist views imposed by coercion alone – by crushing the tradition of democratic dialogue at the heart of our prophetic, Talmudic and dialogue based Jewish tradition.

JAMES ADLER

http://www.thejewishadvocate.com/news/2011-05-13/Editorials/Hate_vs_criticism.html

The Jewish Advocate

May 13, 2011

Opinions & Commentary

Hate vs. criticism

Just as anti-Semites and the radical left fixate obsessively on hating Jews and Israel, Charles Jacobs, sadly, increasingly fixates on hating J Street (“The divisions get deeper,” May 6).

Intermittent disagreement differs from demonization. And this is precisely how we distinguish the irrational pathology of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel from legitimate criticism of particular policies.

Normal criticism differs from hatred: Hatred denies the dignity of self-characterization to the hated. To anti-Semites, our denying drinking the blood of Christian babies is only a “claim,” and irrelevant. To Jacobs, J Street’s emphatic affirmation of Israel, which everyone can see easily at www.jstreet.org, is also only a “claim” and equally irrelevant. It becomes as hard to answer what we may call the “Protocols of J Street” of Charles Jacobs, as the actual “Protocols” of anti- Semites. Evidence and logic just don’t count.

Compare Jacobs’ attitude with that of Bill Gabovitich and Alan Ronkin, president and interim executive director respectively of our JCRC. As they say in the April 1 Advocate: “We need to come together as a diverse community unified in its support of Israel rather than attacking one another.”

JAMES ADLER