For better and for worse, the terrorist attacks on the United States have changed public attitudes toward Israel. Certain anti-Semites on the intellectual left have been forced into the open; others have been driven into their closets. Posted on 12/26/2001 9:55:03 AM PST by TopQuark
Suzanne Fields (archive)
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December 24, 2001
Tilting, reluctantly, toward Israel
For better and for worse, the terrorist attacks on the United States have changed public attitudes toward Israel. Certain anti-Semites on the intellectual left have been forced into the open; others have been driven into their closets.
Those who contribute to "for worse" are whining and dining in some of the chic salons of London.
"Since Sept. 11, anti-Semitism and its open expression has become respectable at London dinner parties," writes a columnist in the (London) Spectator. The ambassador of a major European Union nation tells Barbara Amiel of London's Daily Telegraph that the problems of the world could be blamed on "that s----- little country, Israel."
When the hostess of one little salon was greeted with silence when she expressed her contempt for Jews, she denounced her friends' "hypocrisy." "Oh, come on," she said. "You all feel like that."
The English, of course, have a tradition of anti-Semitism, but despite these outbursts the terrorists have tilted a lot of others in a different direction. The intifada, Yasser Arafat's weakness and complicity in those attacks and the mounting toll of Israeli civilians, including many children, have identified the Palestinians as more the victimizers than victims.
The rhetoric of moral equivalence is silenced. President Bush and Colin Powell have used strong language to tell Arafat to end the terrorism; there's a growing awareness that if he really wanted to do something about it he could. The European Union has pledged to speak "with one voice" on the Middle East and this means focusing international pressure on Yasser Arafat.
The editor of a major British newspaper that consistently blames Israel for obstructing the "peace process" was asked the other day how he could expect the Israelis to negotiate when "Arafat does not believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state"? The eminent editor admitted, with a certain rue: "You have put your finger on the weak point in our argument."
Despite Arafat's protests, the evidence suggests that he is the same old terrorist he was before Oslo. Last week, at a high-level conference of leading security experts, the Israeli military chief of staff charged that the Palestinian leader was working with the radical terrorist groups known to be responsible for the attacks. The lines between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Arafat's own security forces "have become blurred."
It's difficult to see any difference between al-Qaida, the destroyers of the World Trade Center and 3,000 human lives, and the terrorists who are blowing up Israel piece by piece. Only the most blinded ideologue any longer calls the Palestinian terrorists "freedom fighters." President Bush got it right when he called the suicide bombings that killed 27 men, women and children on a Saturday night in Tel Aviv "unconscionable acts of murder." The most outspoken Arabists in our own State Department didn't even try to contradict him.
World sympathy for the survivors of the Holocaust, together with hard-headed strategic realities, created the state of Israel in 1947. But in later years, that first blush of enthusiasm, especially on the Western intellectual left, dissolved. The tough, efficient Israeli soldiers in the Six-Day War of 1967 overturned the image of Jews as victims. Jews who were once perceived to be sheep led to slaughter in the concentration camps were suddenly hardened soldiers fighting back against those trying to kill them. This destroyed a stereotype precious to certain intellectuals, including some Jews.
But Sept. 11 brought back the Holocaust image in new ways, illuminating starkly the deadly threat to Israel's continued existence. The Islamist terrorists have been compared to Nazis, and the analogy works. The Nazis sought to eliminate Jews. So do the Islamists of the Middle East. Caricatures of Jews, drawn with heads with hooked noses on the bodies of insects and vermin in the newspapers of the Third Reich, have reappeared in textbooks and newspapers of Arabia.
Hamas is "considering" halting "martyrdom operations," but calling the suicide bombers martyrs is something like calling Adolf Eichmann's crematoria the "solution to the Jewish problem." Evil wears many disguises, but the face behind the veil has not changed.
I literally can not understand, at any level, that anyone today can even pretend to explain justification for support of the "Palestinians" having a valid claim to the existence of Israel.
And it should be plain that there is no doubt that that is precisely the reason for the "Palestinians" to exist at all.
Well, one weak point.
Oslo was an asinine delusion from the outset. In reality, the "peace process" has been an attempt to reward Arafat's terrorism with a second "Palestinian" state in what used to be called Transjordan.
Why is there no penalty for a terrorist culture which has never respected Israel's borders?
After all of their murders, after all of their wars, why do the "Palestinians" get yet another chance to be something other than genocidal? When they keep attacking Israel from a particular piece of land, Israel has the right to defend herself by siezing that piece of land.
Isn't there a reasonable point at which Israel can say, "Enough?"
For me, that would be June of 1967.
Stay well - stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Before 1993, I was staunchly pro-Israel. But afterwards I admitted to some doubts about the ultimate justice of the fate that had befallen the Palestinians. It seemed indisputable that they were suffering under a harsh military occupation and that their prospects for a better life were severely circumscribed by their occupiers. Fifty years of conflict and oppression seemed too heavy a burden for any people to bear.
Worries about anti-Semitism and the Arabs rang hollow in my ear since I had witnessed firsthand here in the United States widespread acceptance and affection for Jews, and, quite astonishingly thanks to Seinfeld et al., even a certain cachet attached to being Jewish, certainly a novel development in the West. It seemed to me that raw and destructive anti-Semitism was dead, rotting next to Hitler's corpse in a grave from which it would never rise.
Then 911 happened. A depraved sneak attack was inflicted on the United States carried out by all-too-familiar fanatics. That is to say, the archetype is familiar, only the texts they cite have changed. And low and behold, what do we see rising swiftly from its grave along with these fanatical jihadis? We see the same kind of blood libels emerge that have been hurled against the "perfidious" Jews since the Age of Constantine.
If my Jewish friends will forgive my use of the term, I have gone through an epiphany regarding Israel since 911. It's been a connect-the-dots type thing where a whole network of moral imperatives jumped out in stark relief once I looked closely at the aims and goals of the Islamicists, and once I got a clear idea in my head about the mentality that propels them.
That mentality relies first and foremost on ignorance. It's a deep ignorance combined with the worst kind of xenophobia, the kind of xenophobia that cannot be tolerated and indulged. Perhaps I should more modestly say that in the kind of world that I want to leave to my children, at least I hope the Islamicist brand of xenophobia and dogmatism will never be indulged. And if the signal that the United States needs to send to the world to make sure that such race and ethnic hatred cannot prosper takes the form of unwavering support for and alliance with Israel for the rest of the 21st century and beyond, then by all means let us send it.
There are some nagging questions about Israeli policy that bother me. And questions of justice may still be raised regarding the desperate living conditions of the Palestinians. But on the bedrock matter of the existence of the State of Israel, for me the question is settled. After a period of re-assessing that turns out to have been quite wrongheaded, for what it's worth (arguably not much, I know), Israel now again has my unfettered support to exist as a free and sovereign state in the Levant.
"Arafat does not believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state"? The eminent editor admitted, with a certain rue: "You have put your finger on the weak point in our argument."
Great! Now let's put a bullet through it.
But Sept. 11 brought back the Holocaust image in new ways, illuminating starkly the deadly threat to Israel's continued existence. The Islamist terrorists have been compared to Nazis, and the analogy works. The Nazis sought to eliminate Jews. So do the Islamists of the Middle East.
Bump.
Also - related:
Q&A: Islamic fundamentalism
( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/597064/posts )
And not just Jews. They've killed millions of Hindus, over a million people in Sudan.....they've even killed thousands of Sunni Muslim Kurds who want a homeland but the Arabs won't let them have one. Apparently it's okay for Saddam Hussein to spray Muslims with chemicals including children as long as he's a Muslim himself.
Just because they sign something, that doesn't insure they will follow it. Arab dishonesty is a widely known trait. Arafat is the embodiment of this ethnic/religious character defect.
Interesting that someone with the word "Inquisition" in his or her name would be so hasty to stop reading. The blood libel, actually, was invented on the English soil. Some more details:
1144 Blood libel at Norwich (England); first record, blood libel.
1190 Anti-Jewish riots in England: massacre at York,and other cities.
1215 Fourth Lateran Council introduces the Jewish Badge.
1255 Blood libel at Lincoln, England.
1290 Expulsion of the Jews from England, the first of the great general expulsions of the Middle Ages.
1306 Expulsion of Jews from France.
The Jews have not entered England again until 17th-18th century, I believe. The realm was judenrein for four centuries --- perhaps, this is why there are no further statistics. Also please read a little about the Nazi sympathes in England in the pre-war years.
Have said all this, let me hasten to add that there is no question that in modern history the English-speaking people have been more tolerant than most of the Europeans. This is also true even during the Inquisition years, at which time the number of persons in England subjected to auto da fe was by a factor of hundreds, if not a thousand, smaller than that on the continent.
Further what they say to the West versus what they say to the Palestinians has not been consistent.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
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