The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) was closed on July 31, 2011. This website is an archive of the official website upon its closure and is strictly for research archival purposes.
The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism
Newsletter
Volume 3 No. 9
20 November 2008
YIISA LECTURE
Thursday, December 4th @ 4:15pm
“The Jew as a Bloodthirsty Butcher: Laws Banning Ritual Slaughter (Shechita)”
Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High Street, Room 101
Speaker: Brigitte Sion, Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, Program in Religious Studies and Department of Journalism, NYU
YIISA SPECIAL EVENT
YIISA Director, Dr. Charles Small, will engage in a conversation with Wall Street Journal writer and editor, Bret Stephens.
Monday, December 1st @ 8:15pm
Buttenwieser Hall, Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, New York City
“Radical Islam and the Nuclear Bomb: Understanding Contemporary Genocidal Antisemitism”
Location: 92Y, Manhattan – Please click here for more information.
LECTURES OF INTEREST
Monday, December 1st @ 11:30am
“A Conversation with Abebe Zegeye”
34 Hillhouse Avenue, Luce Hall, Room 202
Please RSVP by noon on November 23rd to reserve your lunch.
Speaker: Professor Abebe Zegeye, YIISA Visiting Professor; Primedia Chair of Holocaust & Genocide Studies in the Graduate School, University of South Africa
Sponsor: The Council on African Studies, The MacMillan Center
Contact: ngeta.kabiri@yale.edu – Please click here for more information
Tuesday, December 2nd @ 12:00pm
“The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change”
8 Prospect Place, Room 119
Lunch will be provided.
Speaker: Daniel H. Nexon, Georgetown University
Sponsor: International Affairs, MacMillan/Religion, Politics and Society, The MacMillan Center
Contact: sigrun.kahl@yale.edu – Please click here for more information.
Wednesday, December 3rd @ 6:00pm
“Wealth and Warfare: Accounting for the Onset of Terrorism”
8 Prospect Place, Room 119
Speaker: Luis de la Calle, OCV Fellow, European University, Institute Florence
Sponsor: The Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence, Yale University
Contact: stathis.kalyvas@yale.edu – Click here for more information
CALL FOR LECTURE PROPOSALS
The International Affairs Council Student-Hosted Speaker Series, Gladdis Smith Seminar Series, invites Yale undergraduate, graduate and professional school students to submit proposals for guest speakers, panels or a series during the spring of 2009. Topics must be related to International Affairs, especially regarding issues of international security, international relations, international economic development, international human rights, or international political economy.
Contact: Cheryl Doss (cheryl.doss@yale.edu) or Nancy Phillips (nancy.a.phillips@yale.edu) for more information and application
Deadline: November 21 for speakers for spring 2009
May 1, 2009 for speakers for academic year 2009-10
REPORTS
The Sejil: A New Iranian Missile
(INSS) On Wednesday, November 12, the Iranian media reported the test launch of a new missile called the Sejil. According to Iranian defense minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, the missile is two-staged, with both stages powered by solid fuel and a range “close to 2,000 kilometers.” Iran’s state-sponsored television stations accompanied the report with pictures of the test.
The Money Trail: Finding, Following, and Freezing Terrorist Finance
(Washington Institute) U.S. and international efforts to combat the financing of terrorism are an underappreciated and little-understood aspect of the global counterterrorism campaign. But since terrorist attacks are often inexpensive to mount — the September 11 attacks were staged for less than $500,000 — why should governments devote so much attention to tracking and severing the money trail for terrorism?
ARTICLES OF INTEREST
IRAN
Iran Said to Have Nuclear Fuel for One Weapon
(NY Times) Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors. The figures detailing Iran’s progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz.
Talks yield no new sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program
(LA Times) World powers this week failed to come up with a unified strategy to press Iran on halting controversial elements of its nuclear program, as a report emerged suggesting the country had made progress in advancing a little-examined feature of its atomic infrastructure.
Iranians train Syrians to fight Sunnis
(Jerusalem Post) Iranian officers affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have in the past four months established intelligence cells in Lebanon, comprised of Syrian agents and Hizbullah members, whose aim is to track down and annihilate extreme Sunni armed cells, the Kuwaiti-based daily A-Siyasa reported.
Israel urges “greater force” vs Iran nuclear work
(Reuters) Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called on Sunday for a stronger international campaign against Iran’s nuclear programme to “thwart it with greater force.” “We must increase our measures to prevent Iran from achieving its devious goals,” Olmert said in a speech to Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. “Iran cannot become nuclear. Israel cannot afford it … the free world must not accept it.
Iranian blogger who visited Israel arrested in Tehran
(YNet) Iranian website says famous blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who visited Israel twice in recent years, detained in Tehran shortly after returning to country from Canada. Site claims blogger admitted to spying for Israel.
MIDDLE EAST
Livni: Israel not going to Durban II
(Jewish Telegraphic Agency) Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni announced that Israel will not participate in the Durban II anti-racism conference during an address Wednesday to the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities of North America. The Durban Review Conference scheduled for Geneva in 2009 is a follow-up to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban in September 2001. The Durban I conference degenerated into a forum attacking Israel and called Zionism a form of racism.
Israel says it will boycott UN anti-racism meet
(America Free Press) Israel will stay away from an international anti-racism conference next year, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said. “Israel will not participate and will not legitimise the (Durban) Review Conference, which will be used as a platform for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity,” Livni told a conference of North American Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.
Watchdog says bombed Syria site resembled atom plant
(Reuters) A Syrian complex bombed by Israel bore features resembling those of an undeclared nuclear reactor and Syria must cooperate more with U.N. inspectors. The International Atomic Energy Agency report said “significant” amounts of uranium particles were found at the site by inspectors in June but it was not enough to prove a reactor was there and further investigation was needed.
Syria and the Iranian path
(Haaretz) The discovery of enriched uranium at the Syrian military site that Israel bombed last year may be the first step toward revealing Syria’s smoking gun. This week, International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohamed ElBaradei will submit a report to the organization’s Board of Governors on Syria’s nuclear program. The report will state that IAEA inspectors discovered traces of enriched uranium at the site on the bank of the Euphrates River.
Britain re-establishes high-level intelligence links with Syria
(Times) Britain re-established high-level intelligence links with the Syrian authorities as David Miliband made his landmark visit to Damascus yesterday, according to senior Syrian officials. The move, first raised earlier this year at a meeting in New York between the Foreign Secretary and his Syrian counterpart, Walid Moualem, was a key objective of the Syrian visit.
EUROPE
Economy spurring European antisemitism
(UPI) Jewish leaders say the global economic downtown is fostering antisemitic behavior in Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe. A double-digit percentage increase in anti-Semitic incidents has been recorded in Germany, up to 800 since the beginning of the year, and Israel’s ambassador to Hungary says there has been a similar rise in that country, which has been particularly hard-hit by the financial crisis.
Wave of attacks on rabbis hits Europe
(YNet) In just two weeks three rabbis in three different cities were harassed by locals. The first incident took place in Berlin, Germany, when 36-year-old Rabbi Yehuda Teichtel was driving eight of his students in a minivan. Local police reported that two unknown persons in a Mercedes passed the van and blocked it from proceeding, crying insults of an anti-Semitic nature.
An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany
(TELOS) In this paper, Jeffrey Hef investigates the actions and legacy of Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, hereafter the RAF). He writes, “To understand the impact of the RAF, we need to expand our focus in time and space. The periodization of West German terrorism was not limited to the German fall of 1977. The RAF began in 1970 and did not dissolve until 1998.”
German kids, activists destroy anti-Nazi exhibit
(Jerusalem Post) Roughly 1,000 pupils and left-wing activists who unlawfully occupied Humboldt University (HU) and some of whom destroyed an anti-Nazi exhibition on Wednesday were reacting to the university’s close ties to Israel, the university president has said.
Merkel at Kristallnacht rite decries anti-Semitism
(Jewish Telegraphic Agency) German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned all forms of anti-Semitism at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Speaking Sunday at the historic Rykestrasse Synagogue in the former East Berlin, Merkel said tolerance is not a neutral term but one linked with values. One cannot remain neutral and tolerant, she said, when Iran and Hezbollah call for the destruction of Israel, a form of anti-Semitism.
Germany Condemns Swinish Acts of Antisemitic Vandalism
(Deutsche Welle) Authorities announced on Tuesday, November 18 that unknown persons had desecrated a pair of Jewish cemeteries near the Eastern German city of Erfurt. Unfortunately, some people never learn from history.
Croatia‘s Jewish Community to Sue Iranian Cultural Centre for “Antisemitism”
(Combined Jewish Philanthropies) The president of the Jewish religious community Beth Israel, Ivo Goldstein, said on Wednesday that the community had prepared materials for the Chief Prosecutor’s Office which would be requested to launch an investigation into the Iranian Cultural Centre for disseminating antisemitic literature – the book “International Jew” by Henry Ford at the recent Zagreb Interliber book fair.
New effort launched to fight antisemitism
(AP) Every few months in Austria, vandals topple tombstones in a Jewish cemetery and spray swastikas on the headstones. But it’s not just happening here, officials warned Monday, as Europe’s top human rights body joined forces with a global Holocaust education task force to fight what they denounced as a “scourge of antisemitism” across the Continent.
Austria: Remembrance without remembering
(Jerusalem Post) In an op-ed, Simone Dinah Hartmann and Heibert Schiedel write, “For Austria as well as Israel, 2008 is a year of commemoration: here of the Anschluss 70 years ago, there the founding of the state 60 years ago. But almost nobody in this country seems interested that these events are linked. In particular the refusal on the part of almost all of Austria’s important politicians to acknowledge the extent of the current Iranian threat to Israel and to act accordingly, beyond lip service, amounts to a disgrace.
Oxford students in ‘bring a fit Jew’ party row
(Guardian) Oxford University is investigating after students allegedly held a party at which they were told to arrive dressed as Orthodox Jews carrying bags of money. The party, at a curry house on Wednesday, has been condemned by the Jewish community as “at best insensitive and ignorant: at worst blatantly antisemitic”.
Lord Levy’s rabbi angered by Hare’s ‘antisemitic’ play
(Telegraph) Sir David Hare’s protestations that the central character in his new play, Gethsemane, has nothing whatever to do with Lord Levy have cut little ice with the former Labour fundraiser’s rabbi, Yitzchak Schochet. What is more, he believes that Stanley Townsend’s performance as the character is overtly antisemitic.
NORTH AMERICA
Understanding bigotry
(Ottawa Citizen) A citizen writes regarding Nov. 10’s article, “Canadians’ Holocaust knowledge lacking: poll,” – “I was shocked that seven per cent of Canadian respondents, 12 per cent of francophones and 23 per cent of Canadians with only elementary education have never heard about the Holocaust.”
BOOK REVIEW
The new antisemitism?
(Times) Christopher Hitchens, who published God Is Not Great: The case against religion earlier this year, reviews Denis Macshane’s Globalising Hatred – “Labour MP Denis MacShane, who chaired an all-party commission of inquiry into the subject, argues that this most ancient and fierce of hatreds is undergoing a worldwide recrudescence.The disease, it seems, can present as religious, social, political, racist, secondary or anti-Zionist, and of course these symptoms are not mutually exclusive and may often be found in clusters.
Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism by Denis MacShane
(Telegraph) Alasdair Palmer writes in response to MacShane’s book, “It is easy to portray fears about antisemitism as overblown. British officialdom has excelled in that activity, starting with the civil servant who, in 1942, condemned the evidence that Nazi Germany was systematically exterminating the Jewish population of Europe with the calm assertion that nothing of the kind was happening. It was all down to the hysteria of ‘those wailing Jews’”.
Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Representing Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture
(Blackwell) This book of essays offers a significant reappraisal of discussions of antisemitism and philosemitism, shedding light on the historical and cultural meanings of philosemitism, a topic too often ignored. An outstanding group of contributors demonstrates that analysis of philosemitic attitudes is as crucial to the history of representations of Jews and Jewish culture as are investigations of antisemitism.
WEEKLY QUOTES
SOURCE: The Canadian Institute for Jewish Research
“You represent the opposite to honourable Black Americans like… Malcolm X… It is true about you and people like you…what Malcolm X said about the house negroes.”—Ayman Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda number two, insulting U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, as well as former secretary of state Colin Powell and the current secretary, Condoleezza Rice, and referred to them as “house negroes” the term used by the late Muslim black leader Malcolm X for slaves serving their white masters. The internet audio message released on Wednesday showed a portrait of Zawahiri wearing a white turban, next to Obama’s picture with a kippa praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Zawahiri scolded Obama for his support of Israel and warned him against sending more troops to Afghanistan. “You have chosen to stand in the ranks of the enemies of Muslims and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim that your mother is Christian,” Zawahiri said. “If you still want to be stubborn about America’s failure in Afghanistan, then remember the fate of (President George W.) Bush and (Pakistan’s ex-president) Pervez Musharraf, and the fate of the Soviets and British before them.”he added. (Agence France-Presse, Nov.19)
“It’s a matter of a couple [of] years, one to two years, not more than that, until Iran is capable of coming out with nuclear capability…. We can deter them, but we cannot be reconciled with them.”—Former chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya’alon, speaking to a gathering of North American Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and insisting that a three-pronged strategy of diplomatic isolation, increased economic sanctions and the threat of military action is the best way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat. According to Ya’alon this plan would create “internal change without direct involvement.” Ya’alon, a senior distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center’s Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem, decided on Monday to run for the Knesset with the Likud party. He has been touted as a possible future defense minister in a government led by Likud opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu. (Jerusalem Post, Nov. 15, 17)
SHORT TAKES
PA:“HAMAS STAGING GAZA BLACKOUTS”—(Ramallah) Palestinian Authority officials accused Hamas of staging the latest blackouts in the Gaza Strip in a bid to win international sympathy and incite the Palestinian public against Israel and the PA. The PA insists that, contrary to Hamas’s claim, there is no shortage of basic goods, medicine and fuel in the Gaza Strip, largely thanks to the many underground smuggling tunnels along the Egyptian border. The Gaza Electricity Company has also come forward and accused Hamas of hoarding fuel supplies intended for the power grid. (Jerusalem Post, Nov.19)
UN NUCLEAR WATCHDOG FINDS URANIUM AT SYRIAN SITE—(Jerusalem) Samples from the Syrian nuclear reactor site bombed by Israel in September, 2007, contained traces of uranium and other elements related to the processing of nuclear materials. IAEA diplomats are interested in conducting further investigations and would report their findings at the IAEA’s 35-nation annual board meeting starting November 24. Syria continues to deny that it was covertly building a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. (Ha’aretz, Nov. 11)
ISRAEL IN RANGE OF NEW IRANIAN SURFACE-TO-SURFACE MISSILE—(Teheran) Iran has claimed that it has successfully test fired a new generation of long-range surface-to-surface missiles. The Sajjil missile has a range of about 1,200 miles, putting Israel well within striking distance. Iran’s Defense Minister, Mostafa Mohammed Najjar, stated that the missile was a defensive weapon and designed “within the framework of a defensive, deterrent strategy…and specifically with defensive objectives.” (Ha’aretz, Nov. 12; New York Times, Nov.13)
IRAQI CABINET APPROVES SECURITY AGREEMENT WITH U.S.—(Baghdad) Iraq’s cabinet has voted 21-7 in favour of a security pact with the U.S. which allows American military forces to remain in the Middle Eastern country for another three years. The agreement is the result of months of prolonged negotiations and is considered a good compromise between Iraq’s desire for full sovereignty and control over security and its need for U.S. support and cooperation. Legal jurisdiction over U.S. troops remains an issue. Anti-American radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr called for armed resistance against any agreement that will allow U.S. forces to remain in Iraq. (New York Post, Nov. 17; NYT, Nov. 15)
EGYPT SEEKING TO BUY GERMAN SUBS—(Jerusalem) Egypt has opened talks with Berlin aimed at having its navy purchase several Dolphin-class submarines, regarded as one of the most advanced diesel-electric submarines in the world. The Israeli navy currently fields three Dolphin submarines, with two more to be delivered by 2010. Israeli officials are worried about this development as newer submarines would enable Egypt, whose navy is already larger than Israel’s, to better gather intelligence about Israel, as well as cut off Israel’s sea routes in time of war. (Jer. Post, Nov. 19)
OTTAWA MAN ARRESTED AS SUSPECT IN 1980 PARIS BOMB ATTACK—(Ottawa) An Ottawa university instructor has been arrested for his alleged participation the 1980 terror bombing of a Paris synagogue which left four dead and scores injured. Sociology professor Hassan Diab, 54, left his native Lebanon, earned a doctorate in the U.S. and later became a Canadian citizen. His lawyer insists that this is a case of mistaken identity. (Globe and Mail, Nov.14)
ECKSTEIN’S EFFORTS FINALLY RECOGNIZED—(Jerusalem) Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, has finally been given recognition by the United Jewish Communities General Assembly. Eckstein, who started the IFCJ 25 years ago, has raised some $500 million from Evangelical Christians to give to Jewish groups and Zionist causes. This has been the source of some contention between the IFCJ and other organizations in the past, which have not always been comfortable receiving money from Evangelical organizations. (Jer. Post, Nov.18)
ACID ATTACK BLINDS FEMALE STUDENT—(Kandahar) Eight girls were splashed with acid near a school in Kandahar Afghanistan in an attack by two men on a motorcycle, leaving one girl severely burned and blinded. Female students and teachers are frightened to return to school in a province where female education is scorned. Throwing acid has become a common means for Islamic fundamentalists to use terror to enforce gender roles in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and was used by the Taliban government in Afghanistan before its removal in 2001 by NATO forces. (Globe and Mail, Nov.13)