Drawing on pain to bare her soul
In Adam Salky’s harrowing new film, “I Smile Back,” based on Amy Koppelman’s searing 2008 novel of the same name, Laney Brooks (played by comic Sarah Silverman, in her first dramatic role) is an affluent housewife with an adoring husband, two sweet, young children, and a sparkling McMansion in Short Hills, N.J. But just beneath the surface, Laney remains severely damaged by childhood demons. Her father left her family when she was 9 and she continues to be terrified by the prospect of abandonment, as well as the worry that she will irrevocably harm her children because of her “bad genes.”
Early in the film, she reveals that she has gone off of the lithium she had been taking to control her bipolar disorder and severe depression. And so she spirals downward into self-destructive behavior, attempting to curb her pain by guzzling alcohol, snorting cocaine and sleeping with a friend’s husband as well as random strangers.
“Laney can’t deal with the knowledge that everyone she loves is going to die or leave her in one way or another,” Koppelman, 45, who also co-wrote the screenplay, said in a telephone interview from her Manhattan home. “She’s stuck in the anxiety of that ‘what if’ cycle. And so she is pre-emptively striking back; she will leave her loved ones before they have a chance to leave her. She thinks, on some level, that that would be somehow less painful.
Josh Charles and Shayne Coleman in the film “I Smile Back.”
“Yet I don’t think that her father’s leaving is any excuse for her behavior,” added Koppelman, who herself has suffered from decades of depression but is now stabilized. “Laney’s not right, and she should be taking the proper steps to make herself right. She should take her medicine and do what she needs to do to get better. A person can put themselves back together, but you have to really have the desire to want to live. To a certain extent, you have to bury your own ego. I know, for me, for a long time it was just, like, the small victory of being able to get up and make a cup of coffee in the morning.”
In Koppelman’s childhood home, her parents’ marriage was fraught and, “My father is very, very similar to the Laney character,” she said. “He had none of her specific addictions, but even though he says he was not bipolar, he just had very erratic behavior and it affected everything.”
Perhaps as a result, Koppelman suffered from depression beginning in the third grade, “when it was as if a gauze came down around me, like a sluggish sadness.”
Fast-forward to 1994, when Koppelman was in her early 20s and had already married her husband, filmmaker Brian Koppelman, who is a producer on “I Smile Back.”
“I had a very bad breakdown,” she said. “I had been a very highly functioning bulimic, but once I moved in with [Brian], I knew that he loved me, and I couldn’t do that in his house. When my parents divorced soon after that, I didn’t have any mechanism with which I could deal with everything that was swirling around me, so I finally fell apart. I was also in a place that was safe enough to do that because I knew my husband loved me.”
Koppelman would wait until her spouse left home in the morning, “and then I would get in bed, turn off the lights and not leave until I knew he was getting back from work,” she said. “Then I would get dressed and ready, and for those couple of hours I would try my best to be like a normal person. But I would get terrible anxiety attacks and terrible stomachaches. Yet I didn’t want to destroy him by killing myself. And I had enough self-preservation that I never descended into addictions like Laney.”
When rock star Kurt Cobain committed suicide, not longer thereafter, Koppelman began seeing a psychiatrist and eventually started taking antidepressants. “I now pray to the God of Zoloft,” she quipped.
Along the way, Koppelman also began hanging out in the office of her rabbi, Peter Rubinstein of Central Synagogue: “He was the one who really told me that I should be a writer, and he made me go and take a continuing education class at Columbia University,” she said. “I started writing on this blue typewriter in my dining room as a way to express feelings in order to get better. My writing makes me able to be a better mom and a better person, but my characters aren’t so lucky in that they get all the sadness.”
Koppelman’s first published story, a snapshot of Laney and her affair with a cowboy, appeared in the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith in the summer of 2002.
When Koppelman went off of her antidepressants in order to get pregnant with her second child, in the late 1990s, “I spent nine months staring at the bottle of Zoloft, waiting to go back on the drug,” she said. It was during this difficult pregnancy that she continued writing her debut novel, “A Mouthful of Air,” about a mother suffering from acute postpartum depression, with tragic results.
Koppelman began “I Smile Back” some years later, after realizing that “I had worked so hard to get better and make my own happy little family,” she said. “I was so lucky because I had their love, a great psychiatrist, as well as copious amounts of Wellbutrin and Zoloft. But I worried, ‘What if inside of me I inherited a destructive force that was bound to destroy it all?’ I was writing to the fear of what could have happened if I hadn’t gotten the help I had needed, as well as if I were inevitably going to destroy my family as part of my legacy of mood disorders.”
The author never intended to adapt “I Smile Back” into a screenplay until she chanced to hear Jewish comic Sarah Silverman talking about her own experience of depression on “The Howard Stern Show” five years ago. At the time, Silverman was promoting her memoir, “The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee,” which describes how she suffered panic attacks from the age of 13 and by 16 was taking 16 Xanax per day.
Koppelman had never seen Silverman’s stand-up comedy, but said, “There was just something about the quality of her voice where I thought she would really understand the character of Laney.”
When the author eventually met with Silverman to discuss a possible film, “Sarah looked at me funny and said, ‘Well, if it doesn’t suck.’ ”
And so Koppelman and her writing partner, Paige Dylan, penned their screenplay specifically with Silverman in mind.
Now Koppelman has written a new novel, “Hesitation Wounds,” about a psychiatrist who also is dealing with abandonment issues, which will hit bookstores on Nov. 3. “This character is really the most like me,” the author said, “because by the end of the story, she knows that while life is fragile and delicate and you can be hurt, in the end, it’s the only shot you have. So you may as well try to live it.”
Koppelman has dedicated her work to writing about women battling mental health issues. “In my tiny little way, if people recognize themselves in my characters and that leads them to go get help, perhaps I can do some good,” she said.
“I Smile Back” opens in theaters on Oct. 23.
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The Jewish Bernie Sanders who only Vermonters know
Bernie Sanders reads from the Passover Haggadah in Hebrew and jokes with his seder hosts about finding hametz, traces of leavening, after they have thoroughly cleaned the house in preparation for the holiday.
The presidential candidate, a socialist competing for the Democratic nomination, also follows Israeli politics close enough to understand the influence of the haredi Orthodox parties in government. And like many Jews of his generation, Sanders, 74, chafes at what he sees as disproportionate critical attention applied to Israel.
But little of this emerges in his public profile.
More has been written about the Judaism of his Brooklyn childhood than his interactions with the faith and community today.
“I know he’s Jewish and I know he has a good heart, but give us something, make us feel proud of you,” said Rabbi James Glazier of Temple Sinai, a Reform congregation in South Burlington. “I can’t tell him what to do — that’s not my business. He owns his own spiritual journey. But we need a Jewish hug from him every once in a while.”
As a politico, Sanders appears averse to hugs, Jewish or otherwise. Consider his awkward handshake with Hillary Rodham Clinton during the first Democratic presidential debate last week after he said her use of personal emails while in government shouldn’t be a campaign focus.
“It’s not like he’s embarrassed or ashamed of [his faith],” said Richard Sugarman, an Orthodox Jew who is among Sanders’ closest friends and a professor of philosophy. “He continues to be a universalist; he doesn’t focus on those issues.”
The Jewish Vermonters who know Sanders say his reluctance to make his Judaism central to his public persona is a function of his preference for the economic over the esoteric, as well as a libertarianism typical both of the state and its Jewish community – one that embraces expressions of faith and the lack of them.
Sanders, like many Jews who came here in the 1960s and 1970s, migrated to Vermont for reasons having little to do with his Judaism. He once told NPR that travel brochures he saw as a teenager depicting the state’s open spaces attracted him in the mid-’60s. Sanders, his first wife and his older brother bought 85 acres of land for $2,500. (Sanders has been married twice. His first wife is Jewish, his current spouse is not.)
Ben Scotch, a lawyer who for decades worked in the state attorney general’s office and for the American Civil Liberties Union, said he and Sanders were part of a generation of Jews who supplanted the state’s more conventional Jewish community.
“The children of Jewish families that settled here generations ago frequently looked at Vermont and said, ‘What are we doing here, this is no place to identify as Jews, the real Jewish centers are in the cities,’ and they doffed their hats,” said Scotch, who lives in Montpelier, the state capital, and knows Sanders through his dealings with government.
“One generation was heading south on the interstate to New York, and meanwhile heading north on the interstate are children of city-bound Jews, saying ‘enough of my parents’ materialistic values, I don’t want to be in the undershirt business for the rest of my life.'”
Eventually, many of the new Jewish migrants found Jewish community, albeit one that worked with Vermont’s counterculture. Montpelier today is home to four female rabbis, three Reconstructionists and one who identifies as Orthodox, having attended a transdenominational rabbinical school.
The Orthodox-identifying rabbi, Tobie Weisman, said she has encountered an abundance of stories like Scotch’s through her group, Yearning for Learning, which organizes Jewish programming throughout the state.
For example, she asked the owner of a local gelato shop what ingredients he used to ascertain whether the desserts would be suitable for the kosher-observant, only to find out that the man’s mother was Jewish. Several months later, the shop owner was seeking advice on how to make horseradish-flavored gelato for a seder.
“Being a rabbi, I find Jews,” Weisman said, noting that when she speaks to people with children, about one in three times she’ll find a Jewish connection.
Susan Leff, who founded Jewish Communities of Vermont two years ago to coordinate Jewish activities in the state, said counting Jews in Vermont is a challenge, precisely because the Jews who arrived in the ’60s value the state’s nonconformist ethos and resist organization.
Before launching her start-up, Leff asked around at Jewish congregations about setting up an affiliate of the Jewish Federations of North America, but it was a nonstarter.
“People would say, ‘why send our money to New York?’” she recalled.
Leff said her mailing list suggests that there are more than 20,000 Jews among the state’s 600,000 residents. That’s four times the 5,000 Jews that appear on outdated databases. From three functioning synagogues in 1975, when she arrived in the state to study at Bennington College, there are now 14 with rabbis, along with an array of lay-led prayer communities, or havurot. Of the 10,000 students at the University of Vermont, where Leff served as Hillel director for a decade, she estimates 2,000 are Jewish. The campus has a kosher kitchen.
David Fried, Weisman’s husband — a New York native who is a farmer and a jam maker — described his own trajectory from secular Jew to observance.
Checking trees ripe with produce on a cool autumn day, he remembered being nervous the first time he shut down his farm, Elmore Roots, on Shabbat. Fried said he discovered quickly that his clients and neighboring farmers respected his observance.
Alan Steinweis, who heads the University of Vermont’s Center for Holocaust Studies, said the state’s libertarian traditions created a convivial environment for diverse Jewish expression.
“It’s a comfortable place for Jews to move to,” he said.
Steinweis noted that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, or BDS, had failed in its bids to gain a foothold at the university, despite its reputation for being among the most liberal in the United States.
“It’s traditional Yankee libertarianism,” he said. “It’s OK to criticize, but don’t censor.”
Sanders’ fraught encounter with BDS supporters who challenged his defense of Israel at a town hall meeting in Cabot last year was captured on YouTube. Sugarman said he was not surprised that his friend stood up to the hecklers, telling them to “shut up.”
“Many of us were gratified, not amazed, that Bernard had the ‘beitsim’ to stand up against these nihilists,” said Sugarman, using the Hebrew colloquialism for “balls.” (Most Vermonters call Sanders “Bernie”; Sugarman prefers “Bernard.”)
Sugarman has known Sanders since they met on a slow train home to Vermont in 1976. Sugarman was returning from defending his doctorate at Yale, Sanders from a family reunion in Brooklyn — “events that were traumatic for both of us,” Sugarman said.
They spoke all night, and Sanders moved in with Sugarman for a while following the breakup of Sanders’ first marriage — and kept a kosher kitchen in deference to his friend. (Sugarman, who roomed with former Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., at Yale, may be the only person to have lived with both serious Jewish contenders for the U.S. presidency.) Sugarman encouraged Sanders, who had run several hopeless third-party bids for statewide office in the ’70s, to run as an independent for Burlington mayor in 1981; Sanders defeated the Democratic incumbent by just 12 votes.
Sanders went on to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990 and to the Senate in 2006.
He has chosen friends who complement his wonkishness: Sugarman, the philosopher, and Stanley “Huck” Gutman, a professor of poetry at the University of Vermont who has written about the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. In 2010, the Washington Post profiled Gutman, who for four years was Sanders’ chief of staff, because Gutman routinely sent Senate staffers favorite poems. Gutman acknowledged he got nowhere in talking poetry with his old friend and boss.
In his cluttered office Sugarman, whose expertise is Emmanuel Levinas, the Talmudist and philosopher, pulled out from a table tumbling with books on Levinas (and one kids’ book about Hanukkah) a compilation of speeches from a Levinas seminar he organized in 2000. He opened it to the welcome speech by Sanders, who mentioned Levinas only to jokingly wonder whether he was a candidate because his name cropped up on signs around town.
But Sugarman said the candidate’s Jewish identity is principally expressed in his understanding that elections make a difference, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.
“He once said that as a child in Brooklyn, he learned there was an election in Germany in 1932,” Sugarman recalled of Sanders, whose father lost family in Holocaust-era Poland and who is on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. “And although it was not decisive, it was quite important.”
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UNESCO votes to classify Rachel’s Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarchs as Muslim sites
UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency, condemned Israel for what it said are attempts to alter the status quo at the Temple Mount.
While the resolution approved Wednesday morning in Paris by the executive board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization dropped plans to label the Temple Mount a Muslim site, the organization recognized Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron as Muslim sites that are part of a Palestinian state. Both sites are holy to Jews and listed in the Bible as the burial places of the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs.
The vote was 26-6 in favor of the resolution, with 25 abstentions.
Before the vote, the six Arab countries that submitted the proposal on behalf of the Palestinians — Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates — removed from the proposal a statement declaring the Western Wall in Jerusalem part of the Al-Aqsa mosque complex and naming it part of the Muslim religious site. It also removed references to Jerusalem as “the occupied capital of Palestine” in order to garner support for the proposal.
The final text of the resolution included condemnation of the “aggression and illegal measures taken against the freedom of worship and access of Muslims to Al-Aqsa Mosque and Israel’s attempts to break the status quo since 1967.”
Israeli officials and American Jewish groups protested the resolution as a farce and outright lie.
On Tuesday, UNESCO head Irina Bokova said in a statement that she “deplores” the proposal and called on the board to “take decisions that do not further inflame tensions on the ground and that encourage respect for the sanctity of the Holy Sites.” She postponed the vote on the proposal from Tuesday to Wednesday.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center released a statement condemning UNESCO for “abetting the big lie spread by both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas denying the 3,500 year bond between the Jewish People and the Holy Land, but contribute to reframing the Arab-Israeli conflict into an ideological religious conflict.”
StandWithUs, a pro-Israel group based in Los Angeles, said UNESCO's reclassification “will only serve to distance any possibility of peace and exascerbate existing tensions on the ground.”
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The truth about Jerusalem’s grand mufti, Hitler and the Holocaust
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went too far in recent comments that Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem before and during World War II, played a “central role in fomenting the Final Solution” by trying to convince Hitler to destroy the Jews during a 1941 meeting in Berlin. But Netanyahu was right on when he emphasized the Mufti’s Holocaust complicity and activities before, during, and after the war when the Mufti lied about alleged Jewish intentions to expel Muslim and Islam from Jerusalem’s Temple Mount—the same lie that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas repeats today in support of the current “knife Intifada.”
Netanyahu was right to remind the world that the Grand Mufti was an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi Germany but it is not true that the Fuhrer needed the advice of Islam’s leading anti-Jewish fanatic to implement the Final Solution. That was his dream as far back as 1919 as a letter that he authored and signed now on display at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance documents.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has been accused of “a dangerous historical distortion” and even “Holocaust Denial” from the predictable political quarters who even dismiss the Grand Mufti as “a lightweight” inconsequential in the history of the Holocaust. This claim wrongly mitigates the Mufti’s mindset and crimes as one of the Hitler era’s leading anti-Jewish haters.
Who was Haj Amin al-Husseini and what was his historical significance? A relative of Yasser Arafat as well as ally of Hassan al-Banna, originator of Hamas’ parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Grand Mufti was a moving force behind Palestinian Jew hatred, from the riots of 1920 and 1929 through the 1936-1939 bloody Arab Uprising against the Holy Land’s Jewish community, long before his WWII support of Nazi Germany.
According to Historian Robert Wistrich’s Hitler and the Holocaust (2001), the Mufti escaped British scrutiny in Jerusalem after the war’s outbreak for the more friendly confines of Berlin, where, in November, 1941, he had tea with Hitler who asked him “to lock in the innermost depths of his heart” that he (Hitler) “would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist Empire in Europe.” In 1942, Fred Grobba wrote approvingly of the Mufti’s visit with members of the Nazi elite to “the concentration camp Oranienburg . . . . The visit lasted about two hours with very satisfying results . . . . the Jews aroused particular interest among the Arabs. . . . It [the visit] . . . made a very favorable impression on the Arabs.”
In 1943, the Mufti extended his relations with the German Foreign Office and Abwehr directly to the SS Main Office. Gottlob Berger arranged a meeting between al-Husayni and SS chief Heinrich Himmler on July 3, 1943. Al-Husayni sent Himmler birthday greetings on October 6, and expressed the hope that “the coming year would make our cooperation even closer and bring us closer to our common goals.” The Grand Mufti also helped organize a Muslim Waffen SS Battalion, known as the Hanjars, that slaughtered ninety percent of Bosnia’s Jews, and were dispatched to Croatia and Hungary. The Mufti also made broadcasts to the Middle East urging Arabs and Muslims to honor Allah by implementing their own Final Solution.
After the War, Great Britain, the U.S., and Yugoslavia indicted the Mufti as a war criminal, but Yugoslavia dropped its extradition request to France, and legal proceedings were abandoned so as not to upset the Arab world. Escaping back to the Middle East, Al-Husseini continued his genocidal exhortations and rejectionist demands that the Jewish presence be erased from Palestine continued unabated before and during the 1948 War by five Arab states against Israel. Only then, did his influence gradually decline. He died in 1974, not long after Arab armies almost succeeded in destroying Israel in an attack launched on Judaism’s holiest day, Yom Kippur.
Far from “a light weight,” the Grand Mufti will be remembered as one the twentieth century’s most virulent Jew haters and a key cheerleader for Hitler’s genocidal Final Solution.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Dr. Harold Brackman, a historian is a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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Netanyahu tones down claims about Jerusalem mufti and Holocaust
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped back from his earlier claim that the grand mufti of Jerusalem convinced Hitler to exterminate Jews.
At a news conference Wednesday in Germany with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Netanyahu modified comments made a day earlier in Jerusalem concerning Haj Amin al-Husseini, Haaretz reported.
Netanyahu emphasized that Hitler bore responsibility for the Holocaust, but stood by his previous assertion that the mufti encouraged Hitler to murder European Jewry. Al-Husseini, who served as grand mufti from 1921 to 1937, is considered to be one of the founders of Palestinian nationalism. He enjoyed warm relations with Nazi Germany and met with Hitler in December 1941.
Merkel, who spoke before Netanyahu, said that “Germany is clear on its responsibility for the Holocaust.” At the news conference, she also said that building Jewish settlements in the West Bank is “counterproductive,” and called on both Israel and the Palestinians to take steps to calm the current violence, according to Reuters.
She noted, however, that Israel has an “obligation” to protect its own citizens and said the Palestinians must condemn “everything constituting the support of terror,” according to The Associated Press.
Netanyahu and Merkel met prior to the news conference.
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Entire House Jewish caucus rips UNESCO on Temple Mount vote
All 19 Jewish House lawmakers slammed UNESCO for its vote charging Israel with changing the status quo at a Jerusalem holy site.
“The continued false allegations against Israel as having violated the status quo at the Temple Mount, which is under the custodianship of Jordan and the Wakf Muslim religious trust, and blaming Israel for the surge in violent attacks, must be condemned,” said the statement Wednesday signed by the 18 Jewish Democrats and one Jewish Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives.
UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural arm, on Wednesday approved a resolution saying that Israel is altering the status quo on the Temple Mount, also known as Haram al Sharif, which is holy to Muslims and Jews.
The “status quo,” in place since Israel captured the site in the 1967 Six-Day War, bans Jews from worship on the mount, but allows them to visit. Jews may pray at the adjacent Western Wall.
In recent weeks, violence has increased as reports circulated among Palestinians that Israel was set to allow Jewish worship on the mount, and even remove its mosques — charges that Israeli leaders vehemently deny.
“Such accusations have been perpetrated by the Palestinian leadership to incite continued violence, and the resulting attacks targeting Israeli civilians in recent weeks are an outrage,” the lawmakers’ statement said. “There is zero justification for such acts of terrorism, and the world cannot remain silent and certainly must not take actions that could add to the false and inflammatory incitement of violence.”
The statement notably united Jewish lawmakers on both sides of the bitter fight over the summer over the Iran nuclear deal. It included lawmakers with close ties to right-wing pro-Israel groups like Reps. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., and Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and those who have openly criticized Israel in recent years and are close to J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East lobby, like Reps. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and John Yarmuth, D-Ky.
UNESCO’s executive committee voted 26-6 on the resolution advanced by six Arab countries, with 25 abstentions, on behalf of the Palestinians. The United States led the dissenters. A proposal to label the Western Wall as a Muslim holy site was removed prior to the vote, which also designated Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron as Muslim sites to be part of a Palestinian state. Both sites are also holy to Jews.
“As Jewish Members of the United States House of Representatives, we believe strongly in respecting the religious history and protecting the religious freedoms of Muslims, Jews, and Christians,” the statement said.
“That means respecting the claims of both Jews and Muslims to holy sites which have significance for both religions,” it said. “Designating Rachel’s Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarchs as exclusively Muslim sites is dismissive of other religious traditions, and the continued refusal to show any respect or recognition for the legitimacy of Jewish existence in the ancient Jewish homeland once again demonstrates a central obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”
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Howard Jonas to host Rubio Fundraiser
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio is expected to return to New York in two weeks for a high-dollar fundraiser in Riverdale, New York.
The event is hosted by Howard Jonas, the founder of IDT Corp., and by NORPAC and costs $1,000 per person or $2,700 for a hosting role and photo opportunity, according to the invitation obtained by Jewish Insider.
Jonas is also the CEO of Genie Energy, a company that is now drilling gas on the Golan Heights in Israel. Earlier this year, he hosted Ted Cruz over for a Sabbath dinner, according to Politico.
Ben Heller, a philanthropist from Lawrence, NY, and Aliza and Michael Davis are listed as co-hosts.
Heller co-hosted a fundraiser last week at the offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in NYC. Almost 300 people, mostly Orthodox Jewish community members, attended the event.
Rubio is currently polling in 3rd place, behind Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
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Kosha Dillz raps your Back to the Future Day theme song
It's been 30 years since Back to the Future came out.
Today marks the day that the movie's main character, Marty McFly, traveled to the future in the 1989 “Back to the Future” sequel.
When we look back on today from the future, let's be proud of what we “give back” to our world to provide a better future.
For now, I've come up with a song that every geek needs in their future, or at least for today; October 21, 2015.
Check out the song below, along with a message from Doc brown himself.
Producer: Nate Greenberg
Sample: Huey Lewis and the News “Power of Love”
And a special message from Doc Brown!
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Official misconduct: How Mahmoud Abbas lies to incite violence
Mahmoud Abbas gave a speech on Oct. 14 — and it was all based on lies. And those lies continue to fan the flames of terror. The Palestinian president hopes that Europe and the West will believe him and apply pressure on Israel. More than that, he hopes that the rest of the world, especially the Muslim world, will be so up in arms by the lies that they will rise up and crush Israel and all of her supporters. Abbas said that Israel executed 13-year-old Ahmed Mansara, a Palestinian boy, and were “executing” Palestinian children. Subsequently, the official Palestinian Authority translation toned down the word “execution” and replaced it with “cold-blooded murder.” He held up the picture of the boy on the ground after having been shot, he said, by Israelis. This all took place in Pisgat Zeev, an area located between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
What Abbas neglected to mention is that the boy and his 15-year-old cousin Hassan had, moments before that picture was taken, stabbed two Israeli boys — one who had just jumped on his bicycle after buying candy in a local candy store. That boy, the Israeli boy, is critically wounded and fighting for his life.
[RELATED: What Bibi should have said at the United Nations]
What Abbas did not say is that Ahmed is alive, with no threat to his life. He is being treated at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. Abbas, the man who is supposed to be the partner in peace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knowingly and consciously lied. And it was a whopper.
In that same speech, Abbas also said that the Israelis are trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mount: “The Israeli attack against our people, our land, and the holy places threatens peace and stability. … We have said it clearly: We will not accept a change in the status quo at Al-Aqsa mosque that would damage its sanctity and its character. … It is our right to continue our peaceful struggle in order to achieve our independence, and our victory will come.”
“Our peaceful struggle.” Did he actually use those words?
If Abbas is successful in inciting violence through lies, there will be an uprising far bigger than simply another intifada.
Abbas used expressions such as “Israeli aggression” against the Palestinian people, their holy places and their homes. He spoke of the “executions of children like Ahmed Manasra.” He actually calls terrorists “victims and heroes.” And the Arabic media back him up.
Here are two Arabic media news headlines. The first one reads: “Palestinian Child Bleeds to Death While Israeli Police and Civilians Watch, Shouting Insults.” The second reads: “Teen Shot by Israelis Stomped On, Left to Bleed to Death.”
It’s all about incitement. And Abbas is one of its loudest, most authoritative voices. Israel has no interest in changing the status quo on the Temple Mount. They would like to stop the stone throwing from up there down onto worshippers at the Western Wall, but that’s it. The Israeli government is doing nothing that would even suggest they harbor thoughts about the holy site other than sifting through the refuse that the Waqf (the Muslim religious body responsible for the site) had dug out and dumped into a landfill. (Israel has found some remarkable archeological discoveries in that garbage pile.) The office of the Israeli prime minister released a statement saying: “Abbas’ speech tonight was filled with incitement and lies. The young boy he referred to is currently hospitalized at Hadassah after he stabbed an Israeli child who was riding his bike.”
Netanyahu’s office tried to counter the lies by saying: “While Israel protects the status quo on the Temple Mount, Abbas has used religion to incite more acts of terror.”
The real proof is in the videos. Surveillance videos on social media show footage of Ahmed and his cousin walking by an intersection and then running back with knives. Each boy is carrying a knife in his right hand and running.
Palestinian supporters, however, have posted only videos in which the police and Israelis look like killers. But when you look carefully, the video shows the police holding Ahmed’s knife. The hospital says that he suffered injuries but was not shot.
Hassan, the 15-year-old cousin, was shot to death. He is seen in the video, knife in raised hand, running across the street and lunging at the police as he is shot.
To achieve his goal of raising a global Muslim outcry against Israel, the Palestinian leader is exploiting sensitive chords that resound throughout the Muslim world. He is suggesting that Jews are taking over the Nobel Sanctuary, aka the Temple Mount, the third-holiest spot in Islam. And he is suggesting that Jews are executing children. Abbas is playing right into the ugliest and most dangerous stereotypes in Muslim culture.
If Abbas is successful, there will be an uprising far bigger than simply another intifada. If he is successful, not only Israel but the West, as well, will erupt and explode in a wave of anti-Western violence.
If this state of affairs continues, there will be no controls. It is highly doubtful that even Abbas, at this point, has the influence or ability to stifle the terror. He can rev it up but he cannot rein it in.
And in the end, this violence will occupy the West. It will probably consume Abbas and his cause as well.
Micah D. Halpern is a columnist and a social and political commentator. His latest book is “Thugs: How History’s Most Notorious Despots Transformed the World Through Terror, Tyranny, and Mass Murder” (Thomas Nelson). Reprinted with permission from Oberserver.com.
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