Obama makes a bold statement in front of AIPAC. And then takes it back

(Daled Amos)Once again, Obama makes a bold statement in front of AIPAC. And then takes it back.

In case you missed Netanyahu at AIPAC

(Boker Tov)

Harvard Never Learns

(Stephen H. Norwood h/t Doc's) This past weekend Harvard hosted a One-State Solution Conference, designed to promote the dissolution of Israel. It is only the latest example of that university’s longstanding practice of facilitating the spread of anti-Semitism.
The virulently anti-Israel Harvard student organizations that sponsored the event, including the Palestine Solidarity Committee, Justice for Palestine, the Palestine Caucus, and the Arab Caucus, acknowledge in the program that the One-State Solution Conference would not have been possible without the support of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and funding from the Harvard Provost’s Office and the Center for International Affairs.

Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust and her administration did not express any concern over the conference’s heavily biased and non-scholarly nature. Not one of the speakers is known to be sympathetic to Israel, and many are prominently involved in the campaign to boycott Israel’s universities and to pressure American schools to divest any holdings in corporations that do business there.
Benny Morris, a leading scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, has described keynote speaker Ilan Pappé, a supporter of Israel’s minuscule Communist party, as “at best… one of the world’s sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest.”
Harvard Law School professor Duncan Kennedy, the opening speaker, has denied that Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction, even though the Hamas charter accuses Jews of plotting to take over the world, and claims they caused the two world wars and the French and Bolshevik revolutions.
Unfortunately, there is nothing new about Harvard’s tolerating and even assisting anti-Semitic propagandists. In 2000, Harvard’s Divinity School accepted funds from United Arab Emirates dictator Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan to endow a professorship in Islamic Religious Studies named for him. The dictator had already established a Zayed Centre in his own nation that condemned Israel’s existence and promoted Holocaust denial. Harvard planned faculty exchanges with the Zayed Centre.
No Harvard administrator or professor publicly criticized the university’s acceptance of the sheik’s funds. The endowed professorship was withdrawn only because a graduate student, Rachel Fish, mobilized public support against it.
By contrast, the Harvard administration refused to host an academic conference on American responses to the Holocaust that the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies proposed in 2004. Many of the world’s leading Holocaust scholars are affiliated with the Wyman Institute. The institute asked me to present the keynote lecture, on Harvard’s response to Nazism. As a courtesy, I sent then-Harvard president Larry Summers a detailed summary of my lecture. Summers’s office replied several months later that it would not host the conference. It emphasized that no Harvard administrator would attend if it were held elsewhere. Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies was delighted to serve as host.
My lecture focused on how Harvard and other elite universities forged friendly ties with Germany’s Nazified universities, helping the Hitler regime improve its image in the West. Harvard sent a delegate to Heidelberg University’s 550th anniversary celebration in 1936, a Nazi propaganda festival orchestrated by Josef Goebbels. This occurred after Germany’s universities expelled their Jewish faculty members and the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship. Heidelberg University promoted Nazi “racial science” and “Aryan Physics.”
Harvard warmly welcomed to its campus Hitler’s foreign press chief Ernst Hanfstaengl, a fanatical anti-Semite. Harvard president James Conant called anti-Nazi protesters who demonstrated against Hanfstaengl’s visit “ridiculous.” Harvard Law School dean Roscoe Pound accepted an honorary degree from Berlin University, personally presented by Nazi Germany’s ambassador, Hans Luther. Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter unsuccessfully pleaded with Conant not to allow the ceremony to be held on campus.
Sadly, there is consistency in Harvard’s complicity in helping Nazi Germany present itself as civilized during the 1930s; accepting funds from a Holocaust denier, Sheik Zayed; trying to suppress a scholarly conference on the Holocaust; and now serving as a platform to promote the destruction of the Jewish state.
Stephen H. Norwood is professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and author, most recently, of “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Hamas Rejects BBC Claims, Vows to Give Crushing Response to Israeli Aggression against Iran.

Obama's 'peacepartners' financed by the U.S. taxpayers, why wouldn't they laugh?
Hamas Rejects BBC Claims, Vows to Give Crushing Response to Israeli Aggression against Iran. (OTHER)(Fars).Tehran - Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior official of the Palestinian Hamas movement, strongly rejected a recent BBC report which quoted him as saying that Hamas would take no action in case of an Israeli invasion of Iran, and warned that any Israel or US attack on Iran will be reciprocated by Hamas's crushing response to the Zionists.
BBC Persian's website alleged in a report on Wednesday that the No. 2 Hamas official in the Gaza Strip has assured that his movement would not take any action in the face of an Israeli attack on Iran.
Al-Zahar strongly rejected the BBC claim as unfounded and a lie. "Retaliation with utmost power is the position of Hamas with regard to a Zionist war on Iran," Zahar told FNA on Wednesday afternoon.
Zahar rejected the possibility of any Israeli aggression against Iran, but meantime, reiterated that Hamas will give a crushing response to not only the Zionists but also to "whoever helping them" in such an attack.
Israel and its close ally the United States have recently intensified their war rhetoric against Iran. The two arch foes of the Islamic Republic accuse Iran of seeking a nuclear weapon, while they have never presented any corroborative document to substantiate their allegations. Both Washington and Tel Aviv possess advanced weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear warheads.
Iran vehemently denies the charges, insisting that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. Tehran stresses that the country has always pursued a civilian path to provide power to the growing number of Iranian population, whose fossil fuel would eventually run dry.
Iran has, in return, warned that it would target Israel and its worldwide interests in case it comes under attack by the Tel Aviv. Following the US and Israeli war rhetoric against Tehran, the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, said Tehran has an array of options for confronting the US pressures and sanctions.
Addressing millions of Friday Prayers worshippers on Tehran University Campus in February, Ayatollah Khamenei pointed to the US threats that 'all options are on the table', and underlined that the threat of war is harmful to the US interests and war can be ten times more harmful to that country.
"The US threats are sign of its failure in the face of Islamic Republic's discourse and indicates that they cannot create a logical response to Iran's reasoning," the Leader stated at the time.
"That's why it (the US) resorts to force; they do not have any logic except using force and have no way but bloodshed to go forward."
Ayatollah Khamenei further underlined that US and others must know and they know that Iran has threats too in face of oil sanctions and "we impose them whenever it is necessary".Read the full story here.