Posted on 10/20/2002 1:46:17 AM PDT by MadIvan
An article by a first-year student criticising what he regards as the anti-semitism tolerated at the United Nations appeared in last week’s Yale Daily News, the paper for the elite American university. If the article was typical fare the response to it was not. The author had touched a nerve and a torrent of anger was unleashed.
“I recently attended a forum focusing on the Israeli/Palestinian issue,” wrote one respondent. “Both sides made valid points but there was a heated exchange when the pro-Israel side initiated the ‘anti-semite’ slur. I am sick and tired of Jewish people always smearing those that merely disagree with their views as ‘evil’.
“I never thought I’d say this but a lot of what the so-called ‘white supremacists’ are saying (is) proving more accurate than I feel comfortable admitting.”
Then there was the recent Not In Our Name rally in Central Park, demonstrating against a potential war against Iraq. Around the edges of the rally copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the classic forged document of 19th-century anti-semitism, were being sold. According to the New York Sun, this peddling of anti-semitic tripe was not entirely accidental.
One protester said: “There are interest groups that want Israel to dominate Palestine. If Bush goes with them and is too critical, he might lose their support . . . the international financiers have their hooks in everything.” Ah, those international financiers. Remember them? America’s anti-war movement, still puny and struggling, is showing signs of being hijacked by one of the oldest and darkest prejudices there is. Perhaps it was inevitable. The conflict against Islamo-fascism obviously circles back to the question of Israel. Fanatical anti-semitism, as bad or even worse than Hitler’s, is now a cultural norm across much of the Middle East. It’s the acrid glue that unites Saddam, Arafat, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis.
And if you campaign against a war against that axis, you’re bound to attract people who share these prejudices. That’s not to say the large majority of anti-war campaigners are anti-semitic. But this strain of anti-semitism is worrying and dangerous.
Earlier this year there were calls for America’s universities to withdraw any investments in Israel. A petition at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard attracted hundreds of signatures, prompting Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, to say that “serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent”. He said views that were once the preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists were now supported in “progressive intellectual communities”.
Summers’s argument was simple: why has Israel alone been singled out as worthy of divestment? Critics cite its continued occupation of the West Bank. There’s no question that Israel’s policies there are ripe for criticism and that to equate such criticism with anti-semitism is absurd. Similarly, it’s perfectly possible to argue against Israel’s domestic policies without any hint of anti-semitism. But to argue that Israel is more deserving of sanction than any other regime right now is surely bizarre.
Israel is a multiracial democracy. Arab citizens of Israel proper can vote and freely enter society; there is freedom of religion and a free press. An openly gay man just won election to the Knesset. Compared with China, a ruthless dictatorship brutally occupying Tibet, Israel is a model of democratic governance. And unlike China’s occupation of Tibet, Israel’s annexation was a defensive action against an Arab military attack.
Compare Israel to any other Middle Eastern country — Syria’s satrapy in Lebanon, Mubarak’s police state, Iraq’s barbaric autocracy or Iran’s theocracy — and it’s a beacon of light. To single it out for attack is so self-evidently bizarre that it prompts an obvious question: what are these anti-Israel fanatics really obsessed about?
The answer, I think, lies in the nature of part of today’s left. It is fuelled above all by resentment of the success western countries, and their citizens, have achieved through freedom and hard work. Just look at Israel’s amazing achievements in comparison with its neighbours: a vibrant civil society, economic growth, technological skills, an agricultural miracle.
It is no surprise that the resentful left despises it. So, for obvious reasons, do Israel’s neighbours. The Arab states could have made peace decades ago and enriched themselves through trade and interaction. Instead, rather than emulate the Jewish state, they spent decades trying to destroy it. When they didn’t succeed, Arab dictators resorted to the easy distractions of envy, hatred and obsession.
Al-Qaeda is the most dangerous manifestation of this response; Hezbollah comes a close second. But milder versions are everywhere. And what do people who want to avoid examining their own failures do? They look for scapegoats. Jews are the perennial scapegoat.
This attitude isn’t restricted to the Middle East. In the West the left has seized on Israel as another emblem of what they hate. They’re happy to see Saddam re-elected with 100% of a terrified vote, happy to see him develop nerve gas and nuclear weapons to use against his own population and others. But over Israel’s occasional crimes in self-defence? They march in the streets.
Ask the average leftist what he is for, and you will not get a particularly eloquent response. Ask what he is against and the floodgates open. Similarly, ask the average anti-war activist what she thinks we should do about Iraq and the stammering begins. Do we leave Saddam alone? Send Jimmy Carter to sign the kind of deal he made with North Korea eight years ago?
Will pressurising Israel remove the nerve gas and potential nukes Saddam has? Will ceding the West Bank to people who cheered on September 11 help defang Al-Qaeda? They don’t say and don’t know. But they do know what they are against: American power, Israeli human rights abuses, British neo-imperialism, the “racist” war on Afghanistan and so on. Get them started on their hatreds, and the words pour out. No wonder they are selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Central Park.
Such negativism matters. When a movement is based on resentment, when your political style is as bitter as it is angry and your rhetoric focuses not on those murdering party-goers in Bali or workers in Manhattan but on the democratic powers trying to protect them, your fate is cast. A politics of resentment is a poisonous creature that slowly embitters itself. You should not be surprised if the most poisonous form of resentment that the world has ever known springs up, unbidden, in your midst.
You are a supporter of genocide, a failed policy and a coward armed to the hilt, attacking people with no equivalent weapons or means of response. Why do you encourage policies that lead to the death of Israelis and Palestinians when the idiocy of the method is well known and proven to all concerned?
The definition of insanity is to expect new results from the same technique. Your posting history indicates you are a prime candidate for the asylum.
Tell me how many times the Arab states took up arms against Israel for those poor "palestinians"? You know the latter ones led by a Nazi (the Grand Mufti Haj Husseini in the 20's-40's) and then Arafat, the terrorist par excellence. And neither would you think those poor souls were defenseless if they just blew apart your loved ones in a Pizza Parlor and the homocidal Jihadist's family paid in cold hard cash by Saddham.
Yes. Give the pals Gaza and slice up 95%+ of the West Bank and make it sovereign Israeli territory. Most of the palestinians live in cities. These can be isolated and made part of their own psycho pal state. If they don't like it then they can have a free ride to that vast Arab land which their Islamic brothers have. Maybe even part of a newly sliced up Iraq.
One way or the other having sympathy for these Jihad loving palestinians or trying to cast the issue in relativistic terms is wrong-headed and misguided.
From the very beginning I was driving at a very simple ascertainment: since Israel couldn't possibly benefit from a deliberate attack on her closest and most cherished ally, the incident was obviously a result of a tragic error, a screw-up, or of whatever else, but not of a hostile intention.
Anyway, this discussion strayed from it's real theme - Andrew Sullivan's article, became too long, boring, and very often non-sensical. Your efforts, I have to acknowledge, made very substantial contribution to this end.
Thus I proclaim you to be a disraptor, a very poor debater, a squawky wrangler... and just a profound bore. On this I put a thick full-stop to any further deliberations with you.
Get lost!
Frumpypants???
Anyway, an idiot by any other name is still an idiot :).
Where did I mention "camps"? Camps is what the other Arabs have placed the "palestinians" in (they are Arabs, as you know - thrown out of their respective countries to serve as an Arab weapon). They should take them back, rather than leave them doomed to a life in camps. Egypt, for example, should reclaim the fat butcher Arafat, and either give him some more medals or kill him. Either way would be fine, as long as he doesn't wander around the place initiating one genocide after another. Or they could just give him to certain people in what's left of Lebanon ;).
As for human, you really have to earn that distinction. If you look at "palestinian" mothers telling you proudly that they got pregnant so as to have a kid that could carry a bomb and blow him/herself up, you don't see anyone deserving to be called human. If you support that stance, you don't deserve to be called human yourself. Sorry, you failed.
Lurked for a while, huh? Under what multiple nicks, pray tell? Banned and back again as of 22.10, is that it?
A. Do the "palestinians" come from the neighbouring Arab states, or do they not? Where do Arafat come from?
B. Does someone who breeds for the express purpose (and this is according to many interviews with "palestinian" mothers, mind you) of having their sons and daughters explode in a mass of Jews, qualify as human? Do you support this? If so, do you think you are human?
Go back to Vanguard, kid :).
*plonk*
The Bali bombing was plotted by the US and Israel...
9/11 bombing in the US was organised by the US and Israel, too.
Is that what you mean, posting this:
Hitler:"Wherever in the world we read about attacks on Germany, Jews are the source"
Indeed. As in stubbornly trying to treat "palestinians" as human. Empirical data suggests that this also applies to any muslim group, across the range.
Are you suggesting these people are 'sub-human'? This thinking reminds me of an evil and tragic characterization of Jewish people by the Nazis in Germany.
All of history suggests only one thing: where there are no muslims/"palestinians", conditions are normal. Where there are muslims/"palestinians", murder and mayhem ensues. Move the "palestinians" back into the countries they came from, and fence the vermin in. In fact, set up a hundred-mile kill zone around all Arab countries, let them eat their oil, and wait for the camels to take over.
Could it be that you are actually posting vile statements supposedly in support of Israel to generate an opposite reaction? Is that you Osama?
Are you a muslim, by any chance? Even a "palestinian", perhaps? You do sound like one ;).
I'm an American raised in the Christian tradition, opposed to any further aid to any nation in the Middle East, particularly supply of weapons or support for one side against the other.
If he is not an anti-semite, then no one without blood on their hands is.
Pat Buchanan is not an anti-Semite. I certainly would not have debated for and voted for him if he were. However, he has and continues to brush the line with his comments on secret cabals and claims of dual-loyalty. Frankly i think that this hurts his arguements on foreign policy.
Charlie Reese is a hater of Israel. Virtually all such people are anti-Semites. However, I give people the benefit of the doubt and have yet to see him say anything overtly anti-semetic.
Your double standards are telling.
These people (listed Jewish spies against America)were Jews the same way Stalin was a Christian. Actually, that isn't fair. Stalin had been in training to be a Georgian Orthodox monk.
Poor analogy.
Stalin was a monster, true. But Stalin was no traitor selling out his country to another for monetary, religious, or philosphical gain as these Jews did.
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