8 Reasons Leftists Should be Pro-Israel
by Alan Krinsky, The Huffington Post, July 20, 2010
Israel continues to be the demon poster-child of the Left. The prime example of a repressive regime and abuser of human rights. On the Left, people became outraged and agitated over Israel more than over any other cause. Israel's supposed villainy will bring out protestors on cold, rainy days in a way no other issue can. Many of these people are earnest, but perhaps misled.
In most ways, my own politics tend to be Liberal-Left: I support single-payer, universal healthcare, I opposed the war in Iraq and the Bush-Cheney "imperial presidency," I even voted twice for Ralph Nader. However, like French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, I differ on Israel and reject the demonization of Israel, whether at the United Nations, in the world media, or among American and European Leftists.
If my fellow Leftists or even Liberals think that the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement will help bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as peace to the Middle East and harmony to the community of nations, they are sadly mistaken. There is a difference between criticism and demonization, and the campaign against Israel is of the latter type. Criticism, and there is much of it within Israel's own healthy democracy, can result in positive change. But the focused attempt to demonize Israel, not undertaken against any other nation, is aimed at delegitimizing Israel and undermining its very existence, as if the problems of the world were the fault of the Israelis—the fault of the Jews—and if they would only go away, all would be better.
Not only is this a sorry illusion, but this concerted assault on Israel itself betrays the principles of the Left. Here, then, are 8 reasons Leftists should be Pro-Israel (or, at least, Pro-Peace rather than Anti-Israel):
1. Human Rights. The Left fights for human rights in the world. Even if one thinks Israel or its soldiers guilty of human rights violations (and I am not willing at the outset to grant this point), there is no international or historical comparison that could reasonably rank Israel among the worst criminals of the world or of history. Whether we look at the scale of the conflict, the numbers of lives lost, or the treatment of the press or of dissidents, there are far too many examples of bloodshed and persecution dwarfing anything done by Israel against the Palestinians over the last four decades since the Six Day War, when Israel was attacked by its neighbors. Even Arab treatment of Palestinians, such as in Jordan's Black September massacre, caused thousands of deaths, possibly more in 10 days than in four decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And how can we compare Israel to Mugabe's Zimbabwe, or the Chinese crackdown on Tibet and Tiananmen? Or the disappearances and death squads of Latin America Square or the killing fields of Pol Pot? Let alone the genocide pursued by Hitler or Stalin's murderous reign? Let us be clear: genocide is the attempt to exterminate an entire people and culture; this is not what has happened to the Palestinians, and it is not the goal of Israeli policy. By contrast, the explicit aim of Hamas is to eliminate Israel. So, if we support human rights and oppose persecution, ought we not first to focus our efforts on the places where we find the worst situations? Can anyone rationally claim that among these places, let alone the most horrendous of all, is a small nation on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea?
2. Internationalism. Leftists tend to support internationalism. One would think that the United Nations would be the world body most dedicated to furthering this aim. But how is it that Israel, this small nation, has become such a central concern? From 2003-2010, there have been more than 900 human rights actions against Israel at the U.N.; the next closest is Sudan at just under 400. Israel is the only member of the U.N. to be excluded from any of the five regional groups. And should not all on the Left oppose the absurdity of the so- called Human Rights Council, whose members include such paragons of humanitarianism as China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kyrgyzstan? How can Leftists stand silent when the Turkish Prime Minister denounces Israel for human rights crimes while then promising that the Kurds will "drown in their own blood," in a conflict with human rights abuses on both sides and tens of thousands individuals killed? If Gaza is not the ideal place to live, if the Gazans are suffering, nevertheless the photos in The New York Times and elsewhere and the testimony of reporters clearly demonstrate that Gazans are not starving, their store shelves are not empty, whether for food or consumer goods; as difficult as the situation may be, it is simply not the pinnacle of human rights disasters, and Israel is thus not deserving of international condemnation above all other nations in the world.
3. Peace. Leftists want peace. In the Middle East and elsewhere. The polls make clear that, overwhelmingly, Israelis desire peace with their neighbors; the difficult sacrifices, including the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza make this evident. Israelis are prepared for a secure, two-state solution, to live side-by-side in peace. Meanwhile, the stated goal of its enemies is to end its existence. A simple thought-experiment should make the matter starkly clear: If tomorrow Hamas and other Palestinian groups unilaterally put down their weapons, what would follow? Peace. If Israelis unilaterally put down their weapons, what would follow? Millions of dead or exiled Jews. Anyone on the Left who does not recognize this is living in denial. Leftists should support peace and not live in denial.
4. Anti-Authoritarianism. Leftists oppose authoritarianism and dictatorship and instead support popular, democratic rule. Israel maintains a vibrant, parliamentary democracy, with a broad range of views represented, much more so than in the United States, for example. Indeed, Arabs parties and Communists have long had representatives voted into the Israeli Knesset. Can we imagine such representation, as well as the freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in Israel's Arab neighbors? In the Gaza ruled by Hamas? In Egypt or Syria or Saudi Arabia? By opposing Israel and supporting groups like Hamas, the Left is not supporting a liberation struggle but rather the effort to replace the Middle East's only democracy with yet another repressive dictatorship. Do Leftists really desire such an outcome? How can the one major effort to boycott, divest, and sanction be aimed at a democratic nation like this? As Bernard Henri-Levy has written at the Huffington Post of the "Confusion of an era when we combat democracies as though they were dictatorships or fascist States. This maelstrom of hatred and madness is about Israel. But it also concerns, as we should be well aware, some of the most precious things established in the movement of ideas in the last thirty years, especially on the left, and these are thus imperiled."
5. Human Dignity and Equality. The Left fights for the values of dignity and equality. Are these traits exemplified more by Israel or its neighbors? Look at how much Israelis value the life of a single soldier, in the willingness to trade hundreds of prisoners for one soldier, and even to trade prisoners to recover their dead for proper burial. Look at the rules of engagement of the Israeli Defense Forces, at how the IDF calls and leaflets civilians to warn them; does any other military do such a thing? In terms of equality and human rights, compare the state of women's and gay and lesbian rights in Israel with that in the rest of the Middle East. And in terms of human dignity, do people on the Left think so little of Palestinian dignity that they are willing to claim Palestinians have "no choice" but to turn themselves into homicidal-suicidal bombers to kill Israeli children? Can we not expect more of people? Treating Palestinians like helpless victims does less than recognize their human dignity.
6. Anti-Discrimination. Leftists oppose sexism, racism, and any similar sort of discrimination. And so, Leftists do or ought to oppose anti-Semitism in the same way. And yet, Leftists too often give a pass to anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism or anti-Israel sentiment. The playwright David Mamet has written in the Huffington Post as follows: "Yet most of the Western Press, European and American, pictures Israel as, somehow the aggressor, and the Israelis as somehow inhuman, and delighting in blood." As Mamet has elaborated in his book The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews, this is nothing less than a reworking of the old Blood Libel against the Jews--except this time, instead of being accused of using non- Jewish blood to bake matzah, the Jews are accused of spilling blood for no reason other than gratuitous pleasure. Leftists ought to be vigilant in distinguishing between constructive criticism of Israel and dehumanizing caricatures of Jews.
7. Self-Defense. Only the most uncompromising pacifists oppose the right to self-defense, and certainly most Leftists uphold this right. At least when Palestinians are doing the defending. Why are Israelis exempt from this right? How many Leftists would sit idly by while rockets rained down on their towns and families, with their children traumatized? And if we said, oh, but people are only killed occasionally, would that minimize your commitment to protect your family? Only Jews are expected to lay down their weapons and offer their throats. How dare the Jews have the chutzpah to fight back?!
8. Progress. We want movement on Palestinian-Israeli and Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Yet, demonizing Israel, singling it out, as is done at the UN and on college campuses will do little to advance peace. We all know, have all known for decades the basic outlines of a peace settlement. The Israelis have been prepared for this and have prepared their citizens. The Left should be pressuring Palestinians to accept peace and to stop teaching their children that Jews are monsters after their blood. This sort of pressure might bring some progress.
It was long ago time for Leftists to tear down the poster that features Israel as the demon-child of human rights abuse and repression. It is time for Leftists to become outraged not over Israel, but over the distortions and demonization of Israel on college campuses and at the United Nations and throughout the media and politics. It is time for Leftists to reject the treatment of Israel as a pariah, or Jews as bloodthirsty murderers, and time instead to welcome Israel into the community of nations as a full member, subject to the same criticism and praise as any other nation.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Why the Mosque should not be built at Ground Zero
The Strongest Horse
By Dennis Hale
Why it will be good for Muslims if the Ground Zero Mosque is stopped.
The plan to build a mosque and Islamic center at the site of the 9/11 attacks is one of those rare events that is more important for what it portends than for what it does. To build a mosque on the spot where three thousand people died in the name of Islam would be deeply offensive; but what seems even more important about this event is what it teaches - about those who are building the center, about the non-Muslims who are supporting them. As President Obama might have put it, this is a "teaching moment." What can we learn?
Despite the fog that surrounds so many controversies these days, a number of things are clear enough by now that all whose eyes are open should be able to see them without difficulty.
The mosque is hugely unpopular, all over the country (by about 70 percent). It is unpopular not simply because it is a mosque at Ground Zero, but because the people who are building it are far too close to the ideology of al-Qaeda - a fact which they have demonstrated, over and over again, by their statements and by their associations. The public has noticed this, although their leaders have not. Certainly, the official media doesn't know (the New York Times, for example, claims that for his entire career, Rauf has been trying to "reconcile Islam with America and modernism", a truly preposterous claim), and it's apparently not known to the folks in the White House, either - but it manages to be true nonetheless.
Here is what the Times and the White House do not know about Imam Faisal Rauf and his partners, and about what they called, revealingly, their "Cordoba Initiative."
Imam Rauf, an Egyptian born in Kuwait, is the son of the founder of the Islamic Center of New York, whose leaders have consistently been telling their congregants that someone other than Muslims was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. (Rauf is on the Board of the ICNY, and has never interfered with this teaching.) The first candidate, naturally, was "the Jews." Then it was the United States government. Then it was just "someone" other than Muslims. Rauf himself has said that the United States was "to blame" for 9/11 - a statement just a shade more nuanced than blaming it on "the Jews". (It's also what bin Laden said.)
Rauf's father was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a friend of its founder, Hassan al-Banna, and Rauf's professional and political connections are all to the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas support network in the United States: the Council on American Islamic Relations; the Muslim American Society; the Islamic Society of North America; the International Institute of Islamic Thought. Three of these organizations were unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trial - which produced the now famous (in some circles) Brotherhood memo from 1993 describing their goal in America: "eliminating and destroying . . .Western civilization from within . . . so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious . . . ."
Accordingly, Rauf has always refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization, insisting that "terrorism is complicated." He eagerly promotes the imposition of shari'a law on American Muslims, and eventually on non-Muslims as well. He has spent a lot of time in Malaysia, getting an education in religious law from the lunatic anti-Semite who used to be the nation's prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad. Rauf's business partners have included agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where he says he might secure financing. He will also accept financing from Saudi Arabia, but he has refused so far to say where his actual pledges have come from, if any. It is unlikely that he could raise $100 million for this project anywhere else but the Gulf.
Just in case there might have been some room for doubt about their intentions, Rauf and his partners named the Ground Zero project after the Cordoba Mosque in Spain, which displaced the last Christian church in that city after the 8th century Muslim conquest. (There were still Christians; just no more churches.) It has long been an orthodox Muslim practice to build mosques where Allah's enemies have been defeated (e.g., the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus). The Cordoba Initiative is intended to be a monument to yet another famous Islamic victory. It is, in fact, a 9/11 Memorial, built by the enemy.
That's what the controversy teaches about the builders. What does the controversy tell us about their supporters?
First, they are a minority, and this is something of a surprise. The fault line in this controversy has broken considerably to the left of the political center, and the doubters must include many people who voted for Barack Obama. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, has joined the opposition (though not Alan Dershowitz, normally a partner of the ADL). The official guardians of morality in the mainline Protestant churches are all on board, but it is not at all clear how many of their congregants are with them.
Evangelical Christians are opposed, mostly, but so are many Democrats, who are usually at odds with the "Christian Right". Harry Reid opposes it, and so does Howard Dean, who even criticized fellow-Democrats for "demonizing" the center's critics.
Second, we have learned that there are many people in the leadership of the nation's religious, cultural, and political institutions who simply will not look at the evidence about Imam Rauf, or any other Muslim leader or organization, no matter how clear or damning that evidence is. This is a form of irresponsibility that borders on the criminal.
Included in this indictment, unfortunately, is the State Department, which is even now sending Rauf on a good-will tour to the Muslim world. The amply demonstrated fact that most of the major Muslim organizations in this country are Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas affiliates and apologists comes to many Americans, over and over again, as news - and then quickly disappears down the memory hole. For a certain kind of liberal, as for birds, the world is born again every morning.
A favorite argument of the Center's supporters is that if "Muslims can't build mosques, then we are no longer living in a free country." Yet the principle of religious freedom is embedded in the very Constitution Imam Rauf has promised to replace with the Quran, ASAP. There is a word for that; the word is "sedition," and if Imam Rauf is a naturalized American citizen, then he was lying when he took his oath of allegiance, and ought to be deported. And no critic of the Cordoba Initiative has argued that "Muslims" in general should not be able to build mosques. Their ire is directed at this group, and this project, at this particular place.
Given the fecklessness of America's elites, what must American Muslims, standing on the sidelines, be thinking? Supporters of the Center talk as if Muslims were united in its defense, but that is far from the case. "Make no mistake," said the courageous Dr. Zudi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, "this Islamic center is not a spiritual statement but a global political one in the name of Islam." Rahel Raza, one of the founders of the Canadian Muslim Council, testified against the plan at the Community Board hearings in New York - after which, she says, the Center's financial backer, Sharif Gamal, threatened her over the telephone. The director of Al-Arabiya TV, Abd Al-Rahman al-Rashid, said that he couldn't "imagine that Muslims want a mosque at this particular location, because it will become an arena for the promoters of hatred, and a monument to those who committed the crime."
Many American Muslims - how many we have no sure way of knowing - are alienated from the Muslim Brotherhood network that runs so many of the country's Muslim institutions. They have no desire to see this network score yet another victory. Yet other Muslim-Americans on the sidelines are undoubtedly more conflicted. They may have doubts about Faisal Rauf, but they may also be drawn by the power of orthodoxy, which has always appealed to those unimpressed by easy, half-way answers to life's most difficult questions. This group is much bigger, almost certainly, than the group determined to modernize Islamic practice and doctrine. They are not yet committed to the radicals, either, but are up for grabs - not just in America, but all over the world.
This group in particular needs to understand that support for shari'a is sedition in a liberal democratic republic, and that the movement to impose it in the West is a political and cultural dead end, a non-starter - a certain route to political isolation and irrelevance (if not deportation). We should work with real moderate Muslims to isolate and disable the fake moderates like Rauf and others from the Brotherhood front groups, in order to stop them from passing their ugly teachings to the next generation - and to set an example for those still on the sidelines.
Yet we are doing exactly the opposite. Imam Rauf is not the only Islamist with good connections inside the government, the press, the universities, and the churches. He has hundreds if not thousands of comrades, in the Defense Department, Homeland Security, the FBI, and in state and local law enforcement. This makes the pious moralizing of the mosque's defenders doubly dangerous: it enables the enemy, and demoralizes those American Muslims who hope for a different kind of life from the life lived by most Muslims abroad.
This means that the debate over what gets built at Ground Zero is not just a debate among Muslims, and neither is the larger debate about Muslim reform. True enough, there is a war going on inside the Muslim community, a struggle for the soul of Islam and for the future of American Muslims, and that war will have to be fought mostly by Muslims. But it is not a war between equals, and it is not a war in which Americans can be neutral. The Islamists have on their side money, influence, and a ruthless determination to get their way, no matter who has to be hurt. They have already taken over, with Saudi money, most of the mosques in America - one reason why so many American Muslims are "unmosqued" and worship in private. The radicals have also planted themselves inside the government, and have won the admiration and support of the political, religious, and media elites. We have essentially said to the true moderates: You are on your own, and out of luck; the bad guys are running the store.
Bid Laden once said that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will naturally prefer to ride with the strong horse. By caving in to the likes of Rauf and his triumphalist Cordoba cronies, we are letting Muslim Americans know who the strong horse is. And it ain't us.
They will not forget.
Dr. Dennis Hale is a professor of political science at Boston College and a lay eucharistic minister in the Episcopalian Church. He is a member of the APT's Board of Directors.
The Internal Revenue Service recognizes Americans for Peace and Tolerance as a 501c3 non-profit corporation. If you would like to donate to our cause, you may send a check to APT, 15 Main St. Suite 118, Watertown, MA 02472 or donate online:
By Dennis Hale
Why it will be good for Muslims if the Ground Zero Mosque is stopped.
The plan to build a mosque and Islamic center at the site of the 9/11 attacks is one of those rare events that is more important for what it portends than for what it does. To build a mosque on the spot where three thousand people died in the name of Islam would be deeply offensive; but what seems even more important about this event is what it teaches - about those who are building the center, about the non-Muslims who are supporting them. As President Obama might have put it, this is a "teaching moment." What can we learn?
Despite the fog that surrounds so many controversies these days, a number of things are clear enough by now that all whose eyes are open should be able to see them without difficulty.
The mosque is hugely unpopular, all over the country (by about 70 percent). It is unpopular not simply because it is a mosque at Ground Zero, but because the people who are building it are far too close to the ideology of al-Qaeda - a fact which they have demonstrated, over and over again, by their statements and by their associations. The public has noticed this, although their leaders have not. Certainly, the official media doesn't know (the New York Times, for example, claims that for his entire career, Rauf has been trying to "reconcile Islam with America and modernism", a truly preposterous claim), and it's apparently not known to the folks in the White House, either - but it manages to be true nonetheless.
Here is what the Times and the White House do not know about Imam Faisal Rauf and his partners, and about what they called, revealingly, their "Cordoba Initiative."
Imam Rauf, an Egyptian born in Kuwait, is the son of the founder of the Islamic Center of New York, whose leaders have consistently been telling their congregants that someone other than Muslims was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. (Rauf is on the Board of the ICNY, and has never interfered with this teaching.) The first candidate, naturally, was "the Jews." Then it was the United States government. Then it was just "someone" other than Muslims. Rauf himself has said that the United States was "to blame" for 9/11 - a statement just a shade more nuanced than blaming it on "the Jews". (It's also what bin Laden said.)
Rauf's father was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a friend of its founder, Hassan al-Banna, and Rauf's professional and political connections are all to the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas support network in the United States: the Council on American Islamic Relations; the Muslim American Society; the Islamic Society of North America; the International Institute of Islamic Thought. Three of these organizations were unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trial - which produced the now famous (in some circles) Brotherhood memo from 1993 describing their goal in America: "eliminating and destroying . . .Western civilization from within . . . so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious . . . ."
Accordingly, Rauf has always refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization, insisting that "terrorism is complicated." He eagerly promotes the imposition of shari'a law on American Muslims, and eventually on non-Muslims as well. He has spent a lot of time in Malaysia, getting an education in religious law from the lunatic anti-Semite who used to be the nation's prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad. Rauf's business partners have included agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where he says he might secure financing. He will also accept financing from Saudi Arabia, but he has refused so far to say where his actual pledges have come from, if any. It is unlikely that he could raise $100 million for this project anywhere else but the Gulf.
Just in case there might have been some room for doubt about their intentions, Rauf and his partners named the Ground Zero project after the Cordoba Mosque in Spain, which displaced the last Christian church in that city after the 8th century Muslim conquest. (There were still Christians; just no more churches.) It has long been an orthodox Muslim practice to build mosques where Allah's enemies have been defeated (e.g., the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus). The Cordoba Initiative is intended to be a monument to yet another famous Islamic victory. It is, in fact, a 9/11 Memorial, built by the enemy.
That's what the controversy teaches about the builders. What does the controversy tell us about their supporters?
First, they are a minority, and this is something of a surprise. The fault line in this controversy has broken considerably to the left of the political center, and the doubters must include many people who voted for Barack Obama. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, has joined the opposition (though not Alan Dershowitz, normally a partner of the ADL). The official guardians of morality in the mainline Protestant churches are all on board, but it is not at all clear how many of their congregants are with them.
Evangelical Christians are opposed, mostly, but so are many Democrats, who are usually at odds with the "Christian Right". Harry Reid opposes it, and so does Howard Dean, who even criticized fellow-Democrats for "demonizing" the center's critics.
Second, we have learned that there are many people in the leadership of the nation's religious, cultural, and political institutions who simply will not look at the evidence about Imam Rauf, or any other Muslim leader or organization, no matter how clear or damning that evidence is. This is a form of irresponsibility that borders on the criminal.
Included in this indictment, unfortunately, is the State Department, which is even now sending Rauf on a good-will tour to the Muslim world. The amply demonstrated fact that most of the major Muslim organizations in this country are Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas affiliates and apologists comes to many Americans, over and over again, as news - and then quickly disappears down the memory hole. For a certain kind of liberal, as for birds, the world is born again every morning.
A favorite argument of the Center's supporters is that if "Muslims can't build mosques, then we are no longer living in a free country." Yet the principle of religious freedom is embedded in the very Constitution Imam Rauf has promised to replace with the Quran, ASAP. There is a word for that; the word is "sedition," and if Imam Rauf is a naturalized American citizen, then he was lying when he took his oath of allegiance, and ought to be deported. And no critic of the Cordoba Initiative has argued that "Muslims" in general should not be able to build mosques. Their ire is directed at this group, and this project, at this particular place.
Given the fecklessness of America's elites, what must American Muslims, standing on the sidelines, be thinking? Supporters of the Center talk as if Muslims were united in its defense, but that is far from the case. "Make no mistake," said the courageous Dr. Zudi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, "this Islamic center is not a spiritual statement but a global political one in the name of Islam." Rahel Raza, one of the founders of the Canadian Muslim Council, testified against the plan at the Community Board hearings in New York - after which, she says, the Center's financial backer, Sharif Gamal, threatened her over the telephone. The director of Al-Arabiya TV, Abd Al-Rahman al-Rashid, said that he couldn't "imagine that Muslims want a mosque at this particular location, because it will become an arena for the promoters of hatred, and a monument to those who committed the crime."
Many American Muslims - how many we have no sure way of knowing - are alienated from the Muslim Brotherhood network that runs so many of the country's Muslim institutions. They have no desire to see this network score yet another victory. Yet other Muslim-Americans on the sidelines are undoubtedly more conflicted. They may have doubts about Faisal Rauf, but they may also be drawn by the power of orthodoxy, which has always appealed to those unimpressed by easy, half-way answers to life's most difficult questions. This group is much bigger, almost certainly, than the group determined to modernize Islamic practice and doctrine. They are not yet committed to the radicals, either, but are up for grabs - not just in America, but all over the world.
This group in particular needs to understand that support for shari'a is sedition in a liberal democratic republic, and that the movement to impose it in the West is a political and cultural dead end, a non-starter - a certain route to political isolation and irrelevance (if not deportation). We should work with real moderate Muslims to isolate and disable the fake moderates like Rauf and others from the Brotherhood front groups, in order to stop them from passing their ugly teachings to the next generation - and to set an example for those still on the sidelines.
Yet we are doing exactly the opposite. Imam Rauf is not the only Islamist with good connections inside the government, the press, the universities, and the churches. He has hundreds if not thousands of comrades, in the Defense Department, Homeland Security, the FBI, and in state and local law enforcement. This makes the pious moralizing of the mosque's defenders doubly dangerous: it enables the enemy, and demoralizes those American Muslims who hope for a different kind of life from the life lived by most Muslims abroad.
This means that the debate over what gets built at Ground Zero is not just a debate among Muslims, and neither is the larger debate about Muslim reform. True enough, there is a war going on inside the Muslim community, a struggle for the soul of Islam and for the future of American Muslims, and that war will have to be fought mostly by Muslims. But it is not a war between equals, and it is not a war in which Americans can be neutral. The Islamists have on their side money, influence, and a ruthless determination to get their way, no matter who has to be hurt. They have already taken over, with Saudi money, most of the mosques in America - one reason why so many American Muslims are "unmosqued" and worship in private. The radicals have also planted themselves inside the government, and have won the admiration and support of the political, religious, and media elites. We have essentially said to the true moderates: You are on your own, and out of luck; the bad guys are running the store.
Bid Laden once said that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they will naturally prefer to ride with the strong horse. By caving in to the likes of Rauf and his triumphalist Cordoba cronies, we are letting Muslim Americans know who the strong horse is. And it ain't us.
They will not forget.
Dr. Dennis Hale is a professor of political science at Boston College and a lay eucharistic minister in the Episcopalian Church. He is a member of the APT's Board of Directors.
The Internal Revenue Service recognizes Americans for Peace and Tolerance as a 501c3 non-profit corporation. If you would like to donate to our cause, you may send a check to APT, 15 Main St. Suite 118, Watertown, MA 02472 or donate online:
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Oliver Stone ---the Huge Anti-Semite
Home / Globe / Opinion / Op-ed Jeff Jacoby
Double standard
Why is it that Mel Gibson is ripped by the media for anti-Semitic statements, and Oliver Stone isn’t?
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / August 4, 2010
E-mail this article To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message:(80 character limit) Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address
Sending your articleYour article has been sent. E-mail| Print| Reprints| Comments (217)Text size – + LATE IN July, a Hollywood honcho uncorks a blast of anti-Semitic bile, the sort of malignant stereotype about Jews one might expect from David Duke or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Is that newsworthy?
Tweet 6 people Tweeted thisSubmit to DiggdiggYahoo! Buzz ShareThis It certainly was in 2006, when Mel Gibson, arrested in Malibu for drunken driving, demanded to know whether the arresting deputy was Jewish, and then launched into an anti-Semitic rant: “[Expletive] Jews,’’ he raged. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’’
What followed was a Category 4 media hurricane.
Within a week, according to the Nexis news database, the number of articles mentioning “Mel Gibson’’ and “Jews’’ had soared to 1,077. The New York Times reported the incident in a Page 1 story on July 30, and followed it up with much longer stories on Aug. 1 and 2. The coverage in the Los Angeles Times was even more extensive, with three front-page stories and another half-dozen inside. Numerous other papers gave heavy play to Gibson’s tirade and its aftermath. The network and cable news shows were all over the story, broadcasting scores of segments about it in that first week.
Pervading much of the media’s coverage and commentary was a tone of unforgiving revulsion.
“Let’s not cut Mel Gibson even the tiniest bit of slack,’’ began Eugene Robinson’s op-ed column in The Washington Post. Talent agent Ari Emanuel’s call for Gibson to be blacklisted was widely noted: “People in the entertainment business, whether Jew or gentile, need to demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him,’’ Emanuel wrote in an open letter on the Huffington Post.
On “The View,’’ Barbara Walters announced that she wouldn’t see any more of Gibson’s movies. Slate explained “How To Boycott Mel Gibson.’’ CNN’s Brooke Anderson, co-host of “Showbiz Tonight,’’ described “a sudden explosion of outrage with some of the most influential people in Hollywood now saying they will never work with Mel Gibson again.’’ As if to confirm the point, ABC cancelled a Holocaust-themed mini-series it had been developing with Gibson.
But when, almost exactly four years later, another Hollywood bigfoot uttered an anti-Semitic rant, the reaction couldn’t have been more different.
In a July 25 interview with the Times of London, filmmaker Oliver Stone complained that “Jewish domination of the media’’ focuses too much attention on the Holocaust, and prevents Americans from understanding Hitler (and Stalin) “in context’’ — a wrong he intends to right in a documentary he is making for Showtime. Stone described these media-controlling Jews as “the most powerful lobby in Washington’’ — “hard workers’’ who “stay on top of every comment,’’ and are responsible for the fact that “Israel has [expletive]-up United States foreign policy for years.’’
Like Gibson blaming Jews for the planet’s wars, Stone’s lament about Jewish control of the media is classic anti-Semitism, straight out of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’’ and Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.’’ Unlike Gibson, however, Stone gave vent to his bigotry while perfectly sober.
Yet far from triggering a media storm, Stone’s anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering barely stirred a breeze.
Seven days after his words first appeared, Nexis had logged fewer than 150 items mentioning Stone’s toxic rhetoric. On ABC, CBS, and NBC, the news shows completely ignored the story. The New York Times restricted its coverage to two short items in its “Arts, Briefly’’ section — and few other papers ran even that much.
Media mogul Haim Saban did urge Showtime to cancel Stone’s documentary, and posted an online message calling on Hollywood to give Stone “a vigorous shove into the land of forced retirement.’’ But few if any media voices seconded the motion — not a word from Slate, for example — and some went out of their way to pooh-pooh it: Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein pronounced the idea “not so different’’ from “the infamous 1950s Hollywood blacklist.’’
Gibson and Stone are both guilty of indulging in rank anti-Semitism (for which both promptly “apologized’’), but only Gibson was buried under a newsroom avalanche of outrage and disgust. What explains that glaring difference? Surely the media don’t think Jew-baiting is intolerable only when it comes from a right-wing Christian like Gibson. Surely they wouldn’t overlook Stone’s noxious rant just because he is a pluperfect left-wing activist.
Surely that can’t be the explanation for so disgraceful a double standard.
Can it?
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010
Double standard
Why is it that Mel Gibson is ripped by the media for anti-Semitic statements, and Oliver Stone isn’t?
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / August 4, 2010
E-mail this article To: Invalid E-mail address Add a personal message:(80 character limit) Your E-mail: Invalid E-mail address
Sending your articleYour article has been sent. E-mail| Print| Reprints| Comments (217)Text size – + LATE IN July, a Hollywood honcho uncorks a blast of anti-Semitic bile, the sort of malignant stereotype about Jews one might expect from David Duke or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Is that newsworthy?
Tweet 6 people Tweeted thisSubmit to DiggdiggYahoo! Buzz ShareThis It certainly was in 2006, when Mel Gibson, arrested in Malibu for drunken driving, demanded to know whether the arresting deputy was Jewish, and then launched into an anti-Semitic rant: “[Expletive] Jews,’’ he raged. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.’’
What followed was a Category 4 media hurricane.
Within a week, according to the Nexis news database, the number of articles mentioning “Mel Gibson’’ and “Jews’’ had soared to 1,077. The New York Times reported the incident in a Page 1 story on July 30, and followed it up with much longer stories on Aug. 1 and 2. The coverage in the Los Angeles Times was even more extensive, with three front-page stories and another half-dozen inside. Numerous other papers gave heavy play to Gibson’s tirade and its aftermath. The network and cable news shows were all over the story, broadcasting scores of segments about it in that first week.
Pervading much of the media’s coverage and commentary was a tone of unforgiving revulsion.
“Let’s not cut Mel Gibson even the tiniest bit of slack,’’ began Eugene Robinson’s op-ed column in The Washington Post. Talent agent Ari Emanuel’s call for Gibson to be blacklisted was widely noted: “People in the entertainment business, whether Jew or gentile, need to demonstrate that they understand how much is at stake in this by professionally shunning Mel Gibson and refusing to work with him,’’ Emanuel wrote in an open letter on the Huffington Post.
On “The View,’’ Barbara Walters announced that she wouldn’t see any more of Gibson’s movies. Slate explained “How To Boycott Mel Gibson.’’ CNN’s Brooke Anderson, co-host of “Showbiz Tonight,’’ described “a sudden explosion of outrage with some of the most influential people in Hollywood now saying they will never work with Mel Gibson again.’’ As if to confirm the point, ABC cancelled a Holocaust-themed mini-series it had been developing with Gibson.
But when, almost exactly four years later, another Hollywood bigfoot uttered an anti-Semitic rant, the reaction couldn’t have been more different.
In a July 25 interview with the Times of London, filmmaker Oliver Stone complained that “Jewish domination of the media’’ focuses too much attention on the Holocaust, and prevents Americans from understanding Hitler (and Stalin) “in context’’ — a wrong he intends to right in a documentary he is making for Showtime. Stone described these media-controlling Jews as “the most powerful lobby in Washington’’ — “hard workers’’ who “stay on top of every comment,’’ and are responsible for the fact that “Israel has [expletive]-up United States foreign policy for years.’’
Like Gibson blaming Jews for the planet’s wars, Stone’s lament about Jewish control of the media is classic anti-Semitism, straight out of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’’ and Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.’’ Unlike Gibson, however, Stone gave vent to his bigotry while perfectly sober.
Yet far from triggering a media storm, Stone’s anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering barely stirred a breeze.
Seven days after his words first appeared, Nexis had logged fewer than 150 items mentioning Stone’s toxic rhetoric. On ABC, CBS, and NBC, the news shows completely ignored the story. The New York Times restricted its coverage to two short items in its “Arts, Briefly’’ section — and few other papers ran even that much.
Media mogul Haim Saban did urge Showtime to cancel Stone’s documentary, and posted an online message calling on Hollywood to give Stone “a vigorous shove into the land of forced retirement.’’ But few if any media voices seconded the motion — not a word from Slate, for example — and some went out of their way to pooh-pooh it: Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein pronounced the idea “not so different’’ from “the infamous 1950s Hollywood blacklist.’’
Gibson and Stone are both guilty of indulging in rank anti-Semitism (for which both promptly “apologized’’), but only Gibson was buried under a newsroom avalanche of outrage and disgust. What explains that glaring difference? Surely the media don’t think Jew-baiting is intolerable only when it comes from a right-wing Christian like Gibson. Surely they wouldn’t overlook Stone’s noxious rant just because he is a pluperfect left-wing activist.
Surely that can’t be the explanation for so disgraceful a double standard.
Can it?
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Caroline Glick on the anti-semitic Oliver Stone
Jewish World Jewish Society See No Evil
Oliver Stone joins Thomas, Gibson in ranks of out-of-closet Jew-haters.
by Caroline Glick It’s springtime for Jew-haters. This week Oscar winning conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone joined Helen Thomas and Mel Gibson in the swelling ranks of out-of-the-closet celebrity Jew-haters. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Stone said that Adolf Hitler had been given a bum rap and that through “Jewish domination of the media,” the Jews have inflated the importance of the Holocaust and wrecked US foreign policy.
In the wake of criticism in Jewish circles, on Wednesday Stone’s publicist issued a mealy-mouthed clarification.
Stone failed to retract or amend his statement that “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has ----- up United States foreign policy for years.”
He also did not retract his view that Jews use the Holocaust to control American foreign policy.
Stone simply referred to his claim that Jews make too much of the Holocaust because the Germans killed more Russians than Jews as “clumsy.”
He then broadened his initial allegation that Jews make too much of the Holocaust by allowing that we are joined in our efforts by non-Jews.
And since non-Jews are involved also, he was wrong to criticize us.
As Stone put it, “The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity.”
Stone still believes that the rounding up and exterminating of three-quarters of Europe’s Jews is really not as notable or morally troubling as high Russian wartime casualties, but it’s not solely Jews’ fault that people don’t share Stone’s views.
Even more despicable than Stone’s display of Jew-hatred was the thunderous silence of the media and the insistent attempts to justify his statements.Arguably even more despicable than Stone’s display of Jew-hatred was the manner in which it was received. On the one hand, there was the thunderous silence of the media. And on the other hand there were the insistent, repeated attempts to justify his statements.
Readers’ talkbacks to write-ups of his remarks were rife with assertions that Stone’s statements were not bigoted. Many agreed that Jews dominate the media, and since they believe this is true, they argued that saying so is not a bigoted act. Others claimed that while Stone’s statements were inaccurate, there is no evidence that he hates Jews and therefore, his statements weren’t bigoted. At any rate, Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times and many others have argued, it would be wrong for Stone to be discredited for his attacks against Jews.
It is difficult to imagine that if someone trafficked in ethnic stereotypes about groups like blacks, and claimed that they wreck US foreign policy to serve their own nefarious aims, Goldstein and the talk-backers would defend him.
But then anti-Jewish bigotry has different rules than other hatreds.
Stone and his defenders are not alone in either their attitude towards Jews or their denial of their attitude towards Jews. Indeed, they are part of a worldwide trend.
Take the situation in Malmo, Sweden. Last Friday, Jew-haters set off firecrackers outside a synagogue in Malmo. The blasts came a day after Jew-haters posted a bomb threat on the wall of the synagogue for the second time in two weeks.
Malmo is a hotbed of anti-Jewish violence and the Jews of the city are fleeing in droves.
Yet in the face of all this, Malmo’s non-Jews cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that there is a problem with anti-Semitism in their city.
Even those who are supposed to be responsible for combating anti-Semitism refuse to acknowledge that Jews in Malmo are being attacked because they are Jews.
Bjorn Lagerback is the man in Malmo who is supposed to care about anti-Semitic violence.
Lagerback serves as the coordinator of the local forum in the city charged with combating hate crimes. In an interview with Malmo’s The Local cited by the World Jewish Congress, Lagerback tried to impress on the world that the bombing was serious. Not because it was violence aimed at Jews, of course.
No, according to Lagerback, this bombing is serious because it might hurt non-Jews. He said.
“We condemn this completely. Such an event is not just directed against the synagogue, but also at other targets that could be described as ethnic or religious.”
The acceptance of anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions.Forget about the fact that only Malmo’s synagogues, and not its churches and mosques, require around the clock security. If no other ethnic or religious groups were targeted, would bombing synagogues no longer warrant condemnation? The acceptance of anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions.
In Amsterdam, anti-Semites are making the mundane act of walking around outside in broad daylight a dangerous prospect for Jews.
Jews are regularly attacked verbally and physically by anti-Semites as they walk on the streets of the Dutch capital.
In an attempt to catch and punish anti-Semitic thugs, the Amsterdam police force has dispatched policemen dressed as Jews to pound the pavement. The hope is that these decoys will be able to draw out the offenders and arrest them.
Apparently, some Dutch have a problem with punishing anti-Semitic attackers. As Paul Belien reported in the Brussels Journal, “Evelien van Roemburg, an Amsterdam counselor of the Green Left Party, says that using a decoy by the police amounts to [entrapment], which is itself a criminal offence under Dutch law.”
In other words, Van Roemburg thinks that people who walk around while appearing to be Jewish are asking for it.
Van Roemburg no doubt also believes that women in mini-skirts deserve to be raped.
All of this brings us to a discussion of the most endemic form of contemporary anti-Semitism: Anti-Zionism. There is no reason for anyone to be surprised that anti-Semites deny that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. After all, they deny that every other form of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. Why should anti-Zionism receive special treatment? It is self-evident that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Zionism after all is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. To say that Jews – uniquely among all the nations – have no right to freedom and self-determination is obviously anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semites give a variety of excuses to justify their rejection of the Jewish people’s right to freedom and sovereignty in our homeland. Sometimes they say they have no problem with Jewish nationalism per se. They are simply anti-nationalist generally. But remarkably, these anti-nationalist anti-Zionists invariably just happen to be outspoken supporters of Palestinian nationalism.
Moreover, it is curious that universalist anti-nationalists only have a special term to describe their opposition to Jewish nationalism. No one ever mentions being anti-Irishist, for instance.
When someone says they oppose Irish nationalism, the obvious conclusion is that they don’t like Irish people. Just so, people who are anti-French tend not to like French people. And yet, the anti-Zionists would have us believe that their opposition to the Jewish state has nothing to do with their feelings about Jews.
Beyond their nonsensical attempts to deny the fact that anti-Zionism is a specific rejection of a specific – that is Jewish – type of nationalism, there is the fact that anti-Zionists tend inevitably to drink from other anti-Jewish sewers as well.
Take former British parliamentarian Clare Short for example.
During her just ended career in the British Parliament, Short became known as an outspoken anti-Zionist. Short rejected Israel’s right to exist and castigated it for its “bloody, brutal and systematic annexation of land, destruction of homes and the deliberate creation of an apartheid system.”
But Short’s Israel kick didn’t end with her frequent condemnations of imaginary but lurid Israeli crimes. As time went by, Short began channeling centuries of British Jew-hatred. Like her forefathers who blamed Jews for rain, drought, plague and fire, Shore blamed Israel for global warming.
As she put it in a speech at the European Parliament three years ago, Israel “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”
As Short saw it, European leaders are properly obsessed with attacking the Jewish state. But because Israel insists on existing and so requires Europeans to condemn it, Israel prevents the Europeans from attending to the threat of carbon that, if left unregulated, will “end the human race.”
So if the world boils over, the cauldron will be made in Israel.
One of the most prominent anti-Zionists today is Prof. Juan Cole from the University of Michigan.
Part of being a successful anti-Zionist involves claiming that Jews have no right to the land of Israel. So to be a good anti-Zionist, one needs to deny Jewish history.
To this end, in March Cole published a piece of historical fiction in the Salon online magazine.
Titled “Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel,” Cole mixed half truths with flagrant lies to justify his denial of Jewish history and belittlement of the Jewish rights.
Cole wrote, “Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent ‘Jewish people’ in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon.”
This assertion is so mendacious that it takes your breath away. As anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is all but impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city and not bump into relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE.
Cole’s allegation is the academic equivalent of Louis Farakhan’s claim that white people are devils planted on earth by aliens. As an anti-Zionist anti-Semite, it was just a matter of time until Cole traveled into the fetid swamp of denying the historical record to facilitate his false claim that Jews are not a people and therefore are bereft of rights as a nation to our national homeland.
Anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.And why shouldn’t he cover himself in anti-Semitic muck? So far, the stench has brought him great success. The very fact that I felt compelled to write an essay explaining why anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism and why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is depressing proof that anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.
What makes contemporary anti-Semitism unique is its purveyors’ great efforts to hide its very existence. Their motivation is clear. Outside the openly genocidal anti-Semitic Muslim world, most anti-Semites are self-described liberals who claim to oppose bigotry. For these people, pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.
And so the likes of Oliver Stone publish clarifications.
And Cole invents history. And the Europeans blame Jews and Israel and Zionism when Jews inside and outside Israel are assaulted and killed.
And I am sorry I wrote this column.
Because an audience that demands an explanation of why evil is evil is an audience that has already sided with evil.
This article originally appeared on the Jerusalem Post.
Published: Saturday, July 31, 2010
Hear related audio on this topic.
Like this article? Help us create more. Aish.com exists
only through the support of our readers.
Visitor Comments: 23
(23) Doron, August 2, 2010
Evil is Showing its Ugly Face
When we step back, it is plain to see that evil in the world is becoming bolder and bolder. Why? Because, we let it...
(22) compugraphd, August 2, 2010
As Usual, Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head
As usual, Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head. Thanks for continuing to write, Caroline. I also write about Israel on my blog at http://israelanditsplaceintheworld.blogspot.com/
(21) yehudit levy, August 2, 2010
I am also sorry....
I am also sorry you had to write this article, brilliant as it is. I often wonder to mysef what would happen if we ourselves remained "thunderously silent" in the press after a vicious slander? Would the outspoken offender be forced to put tail between legs and miss out on a much needed publicity boost? perhaps. As we often tell children, "He/she just does it to get a reaction. If you ignore it, he will get bored and stop" I guess dreaming that anti-semitic outbursts are like a mutant form of sibling rivalry is perhaps a little too much wishful thinking....
(20) DINA.HOROVITZ, August 2, 2010
wake up world
wake up world,.hope there are no more there kind of creatures,Mell Gobson andOliver Stone.Mell is a christian church man I can't beleave how antesimt he is and Oliver Stone has to be ashamed even to think about what he said.These people have a mjor problem ,unfortunately no body can help them'DROGS AND DRINK.I fell sorry for them
(19) Linda Bellamy, August 2, 2010
Choosen
Oliver Stone is crazy to say those thing's about the Jewish people I will never watch another of his movies. If his grandmother or sister, father or brother had been in one of those gas camber's I'm sure he would have a very differant view of our history.
(
Oliver Stone joins Thomas, Gibson in ranks of out-of-closet Jew-haters.
by Caroline Glick It’s springtime for Jew-haters. This week Oscar winning conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone joined Helen Thomas and Mel Gibson in the swelling ranks of out-of-the-closet celebrity Jew-haters. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Stone said that Adolf Hitler had been given a bum rap and that through “Jewish domination of the media,” the Jews have inflated the importance of the Holocaust and wrecked US foreign policy.
In the wake of criticism in Jewish circles, on Wednesday Stone’s publicist issued a mealy-mouthed clarification.
Stone failed to retract or amend his statement that “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has ----- up United States foreign policy for years.”
He also did not retract his view that Jews use the Holocaust to control American foreign policy.
Stone simply referred to his claim that Jews make too much of the Holocaust because the Germans killed more Russians than Jews as “clumsy.”
He then broadened his initial allegation that Jews make too much of the Holocaust by allowing that we are joined in our efforts by non-Jews.
And since non-Jews are involved also, he was wrong to criticize us.
As Stone put it, “The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity.”
Stone still believes that the rounding up and exterminating of three-quarters of Europe’s Jews is really not as notable or morally troubling as high Russian wartime casualties, but it’s not solely Jews’ fault that people don’t share Stone’s views.
Even more despicable than Stone’s display of Jew-hatred was the thunderous silence of the media and the insistent attempts to justify his statements.Arguably even more despicable than Stone’s display of Jew-hatred was the manner in which it was received. On the one hand, there was the thunderous silence of the media. And on the other hand there were the insistent, repeated attempts to justify his statements.
Readers’ talkbacks to write-ups of his remarks were rife with assertions that Stone’s statements were not bigoted. Many agreed that Jews dominate the media, and since they believe this is true, they argued that saying so is not a bigoted act. Others claimed that while Stone’s statements were inaccurate, there is no evidence that he hates Jews and therefore, his statements weren’t bigoted. At any rate, Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times and many others have argued, it would be wrong for Stone to be discredited for his attacks against Jews.
It is difficult to imagine that if someone trafficked in ethnic stereotypes about groups like blacks, and claimed that they wreck US foreign policy to serve their own nefarious aims, Goldstein and the talk-backers would defend him.
But then anti-Jewish bigotry has different rules than other hatreds.
Stone and his defenders are not alone in either their attitude towards Jews or their denial of their attitude towards Jews. Indeed, they are part of a worldwide trend.
Take the situation in Malmo, Sweden. Last Friday, Jew-haters set off firecrackers outside a synagogue in Malmo. The blasts came a day after Jew-haters posted a bomb threat on the wall of the synagogue for the second time in two weeks.
Malmo is a hotbed of anti-Jewish violence and the Jews of the city are fleeing in droves.
Yet in the face of all this, Malmo’s non-Jews cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that there is a problem with anti-Semitism in their city.
Even those who are supposed to be responsible for combating anti-Semitism refuse to acknowledge that Jews in Malmo are being attacked because they are Jews.
Bjorn Lagerback is the man in Malmo who is supposed to care about anti-Semitic violence.
Lagerback serves as the coordinator of the local forum in the city charged with combating hate crimes. In an interview with Malmo’s The Local cited by the World Jewish Congress, Lagerback tried to impress on the world that the bombing was serious. Not because it was violence aimed at Jews, of course.
No, according to Lagerback, this bombing is serious because it might hurt non-Jews. He said.
“We condemn this completely. Such an event is not just directed against the synagogue, but also at other targets that could be described as ethnic or religious.”
The acceptance of anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions.Forget about the fact that only Malmo’s synagogues, and not its churches and mosques, require around the clock security. If no other ethnic or religious groups were targeted, would bombing synagogues no longer warrant condemnation? The acceptance of anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions.
In Amsterdam, anti-Semites are making the mundane act of walking around outside in broad daylight a dangerous prospect for Jews.
Jews are regularly attacked verbally and physically by anti-Semites as they walk on the streets of the Dutch capital.
In an attempt to catch and punish anti-Semitic thugs, the Amsterdam police force has dispatched policemen dressed as Jews to pound the pavement. The hope is that these decoys will be able to draw out the offenders and arrest them.
Apparently, some Dutch have a problem with punishing anti-Semitic attackers. As Paul Belien reported in the Brussels Journal, “Evelien van Roemburg, an Amsterdam counselor of the Green Left Party, says that using a decoy by the police amounts to [entrapment], which is itself a criminal offence under Dutch law.”
In other words, Van Roemburg thinks that people who walk around while appearing to be Jewish are asking for it.
Van Roemburg no doubt also believes that women in mini-skirts deserve to be raped.
All of this brings us to a discussion of the most endemic form of contemporary anti-Semitism: Anti-Zionism. There is no reason for anyone to be surprised that anti-Semites deny that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. After all, they deny that every other form of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. Why should anti-Zionism receive special treatment? It is self-evident that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Zionism after all is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. To say that Jews – uniquely among all the nations – have no right to freedom and self-determination is obviously anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semites give a variety of excuses to justify their rejection of the Jewish people’s right to freedom and sovereignty in our homeland. Sometimes they say they have no problem with Jewish nationalism per se. They are simply anti-nationalist generally. But remarkably, these anti-nationalist anti-Zionists invariably just happen to be outspoken supporters of Palestinian nationalism.
Moreover, it is curious that universalist anti-nationalists only have a special term to describe their opposition to Jewish nationalism. No one ever mentions being anti-Irishist, for instance.
When someone says they oppose Irish nationalism, the obvious conclusion is that they don’t like Irish people. Just so, people who are anti-French tend not to like French people. And yet, the anti-Zionists would have us believe that their opposition to the Jewish state has nothing to do with their feelings about Jews.
Beyond their nonsensical attempts to deny the fact that anti-Zionism is a specific rejection of a specific – that is Jewish – type of nationalism, there is the fact that anti-Zionists tend inevitably to drink from other anti-Jewish sewers as well.
Take former British parliamentarian Clare Short for example.
During her just ended career in the British Parliament, Short became known as an outspoken anti-Zionist. Short rejected Israel’s right to exist and castigated it for its “bloody, brutal and systematic annexation of land, destruction of homes and the deliberate creation of an apartheid system.”
But Short’s Israel kick didn’t end with her frequent condemnations of imaginary but lurid Israeli crimes. As time went by, Short began channeling centuries of British Jew-hatred. Like her forefathers who blamed Jews for rain, drought, plague and fire, Shore blamed Israel for global warming.
As she put it in a speech at the European Parliament three years ago, Israel “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”
As Short saw it, European leaders are properly obsessed with attacking the Jewish state. But because Israel insists on existing and so requires Europeans to condemn it, Israel prevents the Europeans from attending to the threat of carbon that, if left unregulated, will “end the human race.”
So if the world boils over, the cauldron will be made in Israel.
One of the most prominent anti-Zionists today is Prof. Juan Cole from the University of Michigan.
Part of being a successful anti-Zionist involves claiming that Jews have no right to the land of Israel. So to be a good anti-Zionist, one needs to deny Jewish history.
To this end, in March Cole published a piece of historical fiction in the Salon online magazine.
Titled “Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel,” Cole mixed half truths with flagrant lies to justify his denial of Jewish history and belittlement of the Jewish rights.
Cole wrote, “Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent ‘Jewish people’ in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon.”
This assertion is so mendacious that it takes your breath away. As anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is all but impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city and not bump into relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE.
Cole’s allegation is the academic equivalent of Louis Farakhan’s claim that white people are devils planted on earth by aliens. As an anti-Zionist anti-Semite, it was just a matter of time until Cole traveled into the fetid swamp of denying the historical record to facilitate his false claim that Jews are not a people and therefore are bereft of rights as a nation to our national homeland.
Anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.And why shouldn’t he cover himself in anti-Semitic muck? So far, the stench has brought him great success. The very fact that I felt compelled to write an essay explaining why anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism and why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is depressing proof that anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.
What makes contemporary anti-Semitism unique is its purveyors’ great efforts to hide its very existence. Their motivation is clear. Outside the openly genocidal anti-Semitic Muslim world, most anti-Semites are self-described liberals who claim to oppose bigotry. For these people, pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.
And so the likes of Oliver Stone publish clarifications.
And Cole invents history. And the Europeans blame Jews and Israel and Zionism when Jews inside and outside Israel are assaulted and killed.
And I am sorry I wrote this column.
Because an audience that demands an explanation of why evil is evil is an audience that has already sided with evil.
This article originally appeared on the Jerusalem Post.
Published: Saturday, July 31, 2010
Hear related audio on this topic.
Like this article? Help us create more. Aish.com exists
only through the support of our readers.
Visitor Comments: 23
(23) Doron, August 2, 2010
Evil is Showing its Ugly Face
When we step back, it is plain to see that evil in the world is becoming bolder and bolder. Why? Because, we let it...
(22) compugraphd, August 2, 2010
As Usual, Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head
As usual, Caroline Glick hits the nail on the head. Thanks for continuing to write, Caroline. I also write about Israel on my blog at http://israelanditsplaceintheworld.blogspot.com/
(21) yehudit levy, August 2, 2010
I am also sorry....
I am also sorry you had to write this article, brilliant as it is. I often wonder to mysef what would happen if we ourselves remained "thunderously silent" in the press after a vicious slander? Would the outspoken offender be forced to put tail between legs and miss out on a much needed publicity boost? perhaps. As we often tell children, "He/she just does it to get a reaction. If you ignore it, he will get bored and stop" I guess dreaming that anti-semitic outbursts are like a mutant form of sibling rivalry is perhaps a little too much wishful thinking....
(20) DINA.HOROVITZ, August 2, 2010
wake up world
wake up world,.hope there are no more there kind of creatures,Mell Gobson andOliver Stone.Mell is a christian church man I can't beleave how antesimt he is and Oliver Stone has to be ashamed even to think about what he said.These people have a mjor problem ,unfortunately no body can help them'DROGS AND DRINK.I fell sorry for them
(19) Linda Bellamy, August 2, 2010
Choosen
Oliver Stone is crazy to say those thing's about the Jewish people I will never watch another of his movies. If his grandmother or sister, father or brother had been in one of those gas camber's I'm sure he would have a very differant view of our history.
(
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