"Was that the wrong thing for me to say?"
Posted on 05/20/2014 5:25:00 AM PDT by SJackson
Secretary of State John F. Kerry raised the ire of Israel and its supporters with his assertion that if Israel didn’t make a deal with the Palestinians, it could turn into an apartheid state. Unfortunately, too few supporters of Israel explained why the slur was so destructive and so wrong. Arabic "catastrophe" in reference to the birth of the state of Israel 66-years-ago in British-mandate Palestine, which led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who either fled or were driven out of their homes during the 1948 war over Israel's creation.
Fortunately, historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren lays it out in terms even the Obama administration should be able to understand. Oren explains:
Translated from Afrikaans, apartheid means “apart-hood.” It stemmed from the deeply held racist beliefs of South African whites who, in the half-century after World War II, imposed strict legal barriers between themselves and all black people. The segregation was total: separate restaurants, separate toilets and drinking fountains, separate houses, hospitals and schools. Blacks were denied the right to vote. The system resembled the American South under Jim Crow and outlived it by several decades. Thereafter, “apartheid” remained synonymous with undiluted racism, second only in hatefulness to Nazism.
Today, the word “apartheid” is wielded by Israel’s enemies to delegitimize the Jewish state. . . . They do so not to achieve a better peace arrangement with Israel but to isolate it internationally and to eliminate it through sanctions. We Jews remember how each attempt to obliterate us, whether in the Inquisition or during the Holocaust, was preceded by a campaign to delegitimize us. People who practice apartheid are easily considered illegitimate.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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"Was that the wrong thing for me to say?"
Secretary of State John F. Kerry raised the ire of Israel and its supporters...
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Just a temporary irritation that will disappear when the next election comes around and then its right back to supporting the Democrats and business as usual.
One word to describe Kerry. Idiot!!!
The commentary at WP is astoundingly leftist and fascist.
When it comes to Kerry and Jews, it would appear that John-Boy is conflicted with his past. He has Jewish roots. The family changed their surname and became Catholics to cover it up.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/10/12/ten-years-later-revelation-john-kerry-ancestry-has-new-chapter/89pyoQEfOJs8PqvazCYqHO/story.html
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