Entries Tagged 'Jew hatred' ↓

Michael Oren notes [$$ ?] that Israelis are feeling both stumped and betrayed by Bush’s mystifying new “policy” toward the Israelis and the Palestinians:

No wonder Israelis are stumped. While the old George Bush deemed the end of terror as imperative for peace and the containment of Iran as the prerequisite for eliminating terror, the new George Bush focuses on Israeli settlement-building and hesitates to confront Tehran. It is uncertain which of the two is visiting Israel today and what policies he may pursue. …

Presidential visits are always characterized as “historic,” but Mr. Bush’s trip to the Jewish state is marked by a lack of momentousness. Cross-signals and contradictory policies have clouded a celebration for one of Israel’s firmest friends. Israelis will greet Mr. Bush exuberantly, but his departure may leave them grappling with terror largely on their own.

Meanwhile, Walt and Mearsheimer are still pissing all over Israel and its American “false friends” who (conspiratorially, through the media and the power of money) insist that America support Israel without qualifications. This time they’ve added to the conspiracy Jewish voters, who are heavily represented in states with many electoral votes [e.a.].

Such pandering [by all presidential contenders] is hardly surprising, because contenders for high office routinely court special interest groups, and Israel’s staunchest supporters — the Israel lobby, as we have termed it — expect it. Politicians do not want to offend Jewish Americans or “Christian Zionists,” two groups that are deeply engaged in the political process. Candidates fear, with some justification, that even well-intentioned criticism of Israel’s policies may lead these groups to turn against them and back their opponents instead.

If this happened, trouble would arise on many fronts. Israel’s friends in the media would take aim at the candidate, and campaign contributions from pro-Israel individuals and political action committees would go elsewhere. Moreover, most Jewish voters live in states with many electoral votes, which increases their weight in close elections (remember Florida in 2000?), and a candidate seen as insufficiently committed to Israel would lose some of their support. And no Republican would want to alienate the pro-Israel subset of the Christian evangelical movement, which is a significant part of the GOP base.

What would Walt and Mearsheimer suggest as a solution to the vexing problem of the sinister influence of Israel, Zionism, and American Jews on the American voter, citizen, and imagination? Allow only a certain number of Jewish voters into polling places, perhaps? Or none at all?

The Forward notes that in Cairo, Illinois, 55 African American recently converted to Judaism:

A rural community described as “far away from everywhere,” Cairo, Ill., boasts 40 churches, 40 blocks and fewer than 4,000 people - and as of earlier this month, it also has 55 brand-new Jews. …

[The conversion] was the culmination of an 18-month spiritual journey that has brought a number of Reform and Conservative Jews into common cause with a group of spiritual seekers from a town that is predominantly black and poor.

“It was incredible. Who would have thought that rabbis in St. Louis and Memphis would increase the number of Jews of color in America appreciably?” said Rabbi Micah Greenstein, who attended the conversion ceremonies and serves as the spiritual leader of Temple Israel, a Reform congregation in Memphis. “Judaism saved my life,” one of the converts told Greenstein. “That’s the first time in 100 converts that I’ve ever heard that,” the rabbi said.

It all began with Phillip Matthews, a disaffected Baptist. Here’s what he appreciates about Judaism:

In Matthews’s view, rising to meet challenges is part of the essential message of Judaism.

“When you read the Bible, when you read the Old Testament, and you see all the things that the ancestors of old endured, you see what it is to have endured,” Matthews said.

Yes, that’s true. I’ve long wondered whether, if we just changed the name of “the Jews” to “the Survivors,” whether Jew hatred, which refuses to die out even in the hyper-politically correct world we live in, would dissipate somewhat.

After all, the Jews’ skill at survival against the odds is what’s so mysterious about them: how stubbornly they’ve managed to survive as a self-identified collective, so to speak, despite their many travails all over the globe for thousands of years, how resistant they are even to extreme privation and to efficiently planned attempts to exterminate and eradicate them.

Der Spiegel features recently discovered photos of Auschwitz employees enjoying their off-hours:

Twelve SS auxiliaries sit happily on a fence railing eating blueberries given to them by an SS officer. The photo was taken in 1944 in Solahütte, a recreation home located near Auschwitz for the SS team in charge of running the concentration camp. …

The photos were taken between May and December 1944, and they show the officers and guards relaxing and enjoying themselves — as countless people were being murdered and cremated at the nearby death camp.

Spiegel reports that Germans were “shocked” to see these photographs. Why? Did they not understand that their forebears’ continued to live their lives through the war years—falling in love, getting married, having children, having affairs, working, doing whatever it is that people do— while their nation (and in many cases these same forebears) created unimaginable suffering for The Other?

A gift especially for you, from the New York Times:

I wonder how much “they” paid for the ad, and who “they” are.

On the 50th 59th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, one Israeli has some novel advice for the Palestinians: Let them beat their Qassams into computers.

Knesset Speaker and Acting President Dalia Itzik called Thursday on Israel’s enemies to abandon the path of violence and seek the well being of their own societies.“Our advice to you is replace your Katyushas and Qassams with computers and loving education, the smile of a boy that has a future, and neighborliness,” Itzik said. …

“We hear the sharpening of swords and voices of war from near and afar. In distant Iran, in nearby Syria, in the Palestinian Authority at out doorstep, there still reside fiery zealots of hate-ridden leaders that believe in their ability to harm the state of Israel,” Itzik said in her speech, adding that “the citizens of Iran, Syria and the Palestinian Authority should think twice about why they are so thirsty for battles and blood.“Isn’t the blood that you have already spilled enough?” she asked.

Good question. I’m sure it won’t be welcome from the Zionist enemy.

Oh well.

we remember

People pass through the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ ,’work makes one free’, gate at Auschwitz, in the annual March of the Living, a trek between two former Nazi-run death camps to mourn victims of the Holocaust and celebrate the existence of the Jewish state, in Oswiecim, Poland, Monday, April 16, 2007. The march starts at the smaller Auschwitz site and leads to the sprawling Birkenau death camp, which housed the main gas chambers. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Remembrance in Poland following dedication of the Belzec memorial, June 2004.

Jimmy won’t debate him, so Alan Dershowitz goes on the attack:

Listen carefully to what Carter says about the media: the plight of the Palestinians is “not something that has been acknowledged or even discussed in this country.” …

He then goes on to say that the only reason his book–which has been universally savaged by reviewers–is receiving such negative reviews is because they are all being written by “representatives of Jewish organizations” (demonstrably false!).  So much for the media.

Now here is what he says about politicians:

“It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians.” …

Each of these claims is demonstrably false, as I have shown in detail elsewhere. …

[T]he big story that the media and political figures in America have missed is how grievously they, themselves have been insulted and disrespected by our self-righteous former president.  Carter is lecturing The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and the major networks about how they are incapable of reporting the news objectively because they are beholden to some Jewish cabal.  He is telling Pulitzer Prize winning writers such as Tom Friedman and Samatha Power that they did not deserve their prizes.  He is telling George Will that his reporting is controlled by his Jewish bosses (sound a little bit like Judith Regan?).  And he is denying that Anderson Cooper is capable of filing an honest report from the West Bank. 

As far as our legislators are concerned, he is accusing Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Patrick Leahy of being bought and paid for by the Israeli lobby. 

At the bottom, Carter is saying that no objective journalist or politician could actually believe that America’s support for Israel is based on moral and strategic considerations and not on their own financial self-interest.  Such a charge is so insulting to every honest legislator and journalist in this country that I am amazed that Carter has been let off the hook so easily. 

Dershowitz may be surprised. I certainly am not. It’s this same premise that’s at the foundation of Walt and Mearsheimer’s “Israel Lobby” paper too, as I have said before.

Back then, I quoted David Verbeeten’s detailed study of the power of AIPAC, which I urge anyone with an interest in this matter to read. He acknowledges the influence of AIPAC, but says that it’s the pro-Israel sympathies of the American people that drive politicians to allow that influence:

Groups such as AIPAC may not be able to determine executive policy, but they are at times able to constrain or modify it, especially through those institutions sensitive to the pulse of the American people—such as the U.S. Congress, which controls federal allocations. Knowing that for four decades, a plurality if not majority of Americans sympathized with Israel (Table 3), congressmen and senators are inclined to back the Jewish state.

Verbeeten elaborates on the American people’s natural sympathy for Israelis:

Support for Israel is the expression of an emotional and ideological attachment to the Jewish state on the part of diverse segments of the American people. It is a reflection of “a widespread fund of goodwill toward Israel that is not restricted to the Jewish community.”[30] In the words of scholar William Quandt:

The bond between the United States and Israel is unquestionably strengthened because of the congruence of values between the two nations. Americans can identify with Israel’s national style … in a way that has no parallel on the Arab side. Neither the ideal of the well-ordered Muslim community nor that of a modernizing autocracy evokes much sympathy among Americans. Consequently, a predisposition no doubt exists in American political culture that works to the advantage of the Israelis.[31]

This is what’s so pernicious about Jimmy Carter (and also the reason he will fail to gain converts to his cause). In a What’s the Matter with Kansas?-type attack, he is trying to persuade the American people that they’ve got the totally wrong idea about Israel.

Only, Carter is not only willing but eager to use the nastiest anti-Semitic canards to gain attention for his foul accusations, and he’s doing it with Saudi money, says Dershowitz:

It now turns out that the shoe is precisely on the other foot.  Recent disclosures prove that it is Carter who has been bought and paid for by anti-Israel Arab and Islamic money.

Journalist Jacob Laksin has documented the tens of millions of dollars that the Carter Center has accepted from Saudi Arabian royalty and assorted other Middle Eastern sultans, who, in return, Carter dutifully praised as peaceful and tolerant (no matter how despotic the regime). And these are only the confirmed, public donations. 

Judgment is coming for James Earl Carter, Jr., and I hope he gets his on earth.*** He will certainly have deserved it.

————–

*** I noted with the appropriate amount of Schadenfreude that Carter was totally marginalized during the Washington, D.C., part of the pomp and circumstance surrounding Gerald Ford’s death. Even Tom Brokaw got to speak at the National Cathedral, but not Jimmy Carter. He got to give a euolgy in Michigan, I hear. If there were cameras there, I’m not aware of it.

(updated with a new link, and a quote, and an important clarification)

In light of the Gaza murder, via drive-by shooting of a Fatah-linked intelligence officer,

In the attack, the gunmen pumped dozens of bullets into a car carrying the children of intelligence officer Baha Balousheh, a loyalist of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. …

The children were aged six, seven, and eight. ***

I hope our uber-Christian former president is very proud of his unqualified support for “the Palestinians.”

I would remind Jimmy “Keep Turning That Other Cheek Until Your Head is Severed from Your Body” Carter that, as Nick Cohen memorably said, political serious consists of saying which Palestinians you support [emphasis mine]:

Please don’t tell me that it helps the Palestinians to give the far right the time of day, or pretend that Palestinian liberals, socialists, women, gays, freethinkers and Christians (let alone Israeli Jews) would prosper in a Palestine ruled by Hamas. It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.

While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco,…

Read the whole thing.

——

***Abbas condemned this in the strongest terms:

“This was an ugly and inhuman crime, carried out by a gang of miscreants,” Abbas said. “We strongly condemn it.” 

Everybody’s blaming the Jews anyway—why not Sudan’s “leader”?

Sudan’s President Field Marshal Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir claimed Tuesday that reports in western newspapers of hundreds of thousands dead in his country’s brutal civil war are all part of an Israeli-led worldwide conspiracy. …

In statements that appeared to be more in keeping with 1920s anti-Semitism than statesmanship, Field Marshal al-Bashir added that Israeli influence was at the center of the conflict, and all the world’s disputes.

Not very effective, those Jews. Despite their best efforts, they only managed to get 9,000—not 400,000, as reported by the world press—killed in Darfur.

Read the rest of his appalling lies here.

This is the brilliant new strategy of the impudent, murderous thugs who were democratically elected to represent the Palestinian people—Israelis should leave the area (starting with Sderot and ending with ?) if they want peace:

The only way to stop the regular rocket fire on Sderot, an Israeli city of about 20,000 nearly three miles from the Gaza Strip border, is for the Jewish state to evacuate the entire city, Hamas announced in a statement Wednesday.“Only the departure of residents from Sderot will stop the rocket fire,” Abu Abaida, spokesman for Hamas’ so-called military wing, said in a statement to reporters.

“There are no limits on our rocket attacks and we will prove that in coming days. We advise residents of Sderot to evacuate,” the Hamas spokesman said.

…

…Abu Abaida said Hamas is seeking to impose “a new equation in which the Zionists understand that for every incursion into Gaza, we will use our rockets to bombard your towns and cities until more and more are forced to evacuate. Our rockets have already improved, as Sderot residents know. We keep working on (the rockets) to improve deadliness, force and distance.”

Unfortunately, Hamas’s rocket attacks are having the desired effect in Sderot: the life of the town has been totally disrupted, with children afraid to leave home to go to school. You can read all about it here.

Somehow, under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Israeli workers hurled stones and insults at Louise Arbour, the UN’s top “human rights” official, who was visiting the area. Rushed to the scene of an attack to see it firsthand, she said:

“Israel has a responsibility to defend its citizens, but has to do so only by legal means. …It has to do so in line with international law.”

Why? to make room for international law to “legally” annihilate Israel? I don’t think so, Ms. Arbour.

The Jews have been clever enough to survive your kind of “laws” for thousands of years, as even their most vicious enemies understand. For example, Mahathir Mohamed:

We are up against a people who think. They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.

Mahathir Mohamed, who implies that persecuting Jews is not wrong—that it just seems wrong and the Jews talked people out of it by coming up with clever world-changing ideas—spouts the essence of perverse anti-Semitism, which ascribes mystical powers to the Jews.

But we can’t ignore what he says: that the Jews have survived by thinking. So, Ms. Arbour, maybe you should start looking for another job. Because the clever Jews will soon have formulated yet another world-changing ideology to persuade you and your pals that persecuting the Israeli Jews is wrong.

In April 2002 he was screaming about an Israeli “massacre” of up to 500 people in Jenin.***

Now when he criticizes Israel, Palestinian negotiator (a lifetime position, apparently) Saeb Erekat is reduced to spouting diplomatic language worthy of Kofi Annan:

“I urge members of the international community to take the appropriate response to Israel’s crimes in Gaza,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. “Condemnation is the least one would expect.”

Yes, I consider his measured remarks progress.

So, I’m sorry to have to say, is this: there was no international media event in Gaza a couple of days ago after Israeli forces opened fire on armed and dangerous extremists hiding—literally—behind chador-clad women, who, at the urging of radio broadcasters, had gone to their aid and rescue at a mosque, where they were hiding out.

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza (Reuters) - Israeli troops shot and killed two Palestinian women acting as human shields between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen hiding in a Gaza mosque on Friday, witnesses said, before the gunmen escaped. The dramatic events came on the third day of an Israeli assault on the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, the largest operation it has conducted in the Gaza Strip in months

Then in today’s New York Times we read about the hideous neglect and mistreatment of women by Palestinians as a society.

Discriminatory laws, traditional practices and a severe shortage of emergency shelters combine to perpetuate violence against women by their family members and intimate partners in the Palestinian territories, according to a report to be issued on Tuesday by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based watchdog group. …

The offenses include domestic violence, rape, incest, child abuse and violent responses to so-called honor crimes, like adultery, that embarrass the clan, family or community.

Laws dating from Jordanian and Egyptian administration in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively do not fully protect the rights of women, the report says. It notes, for example, that the laws provide reduced penalties to men who kill or harm female relatives who are accused of adultery, allow only male relatives to file incest charges on behalf of minors and absolve from criminal prosecution rapists who agree to marry their victims and remain married for three years.

While Palestinian society disintegrates before his very eyes, Ismail Haniyeh, resister par excellence, tries to play the masscre/slaughter card:

Haniyeh called on the international community to interfere and stop the Israeli operation. He expressed astonishment over the global silence over Israel’s military operations in the past three days.

“I call on everyone to carry the responsibility for the killing of women, children and elderly. I call on anyone who calls on us to make concessions to take a good look at what is happening here, to witness how Israel is daily massacring the Palestinian people,” he said.

Haniyeh declared that Israel’s actions would not manage to break or subdue the Palestinian people, and all of its cohorts in its scheme against the Palestinians will not achieve their goals. “This is not an escalation,” he said, “but a slaughter approved at the highest Israeli level, against everything Palestinian.”

Let’s see how this tactic works for him. Reportedly, Hamas and Fatah are close to a deal on a unity government, for the 672nd time. Wait: that was a couple of hours ago and I can’t fine a good link.

But it has been superseded by Mashaal’s threat to kidnap more Israelis, and his urging Palestinians never to accept the terms of the Quartet (chief among them, of course, the recognition of Israel’s right to exist—i.e., recognition of reality).:

Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal threatened on Tuesday that Hamas would kidnap more IDF soldiers if Israel does not free all Palestinian prisoners.

In an interview with Hamas radio station Voice of al Aksa, Mashaal added the kidnappers would stick to their demands until Israel “emptied them of their substance.”

The Hamas leader-in-exile also called for an establishment of a Palestinian Authority unity government on the basis of the prisoners’ document but stressed that such a government must not adhere to the demands of the international quartet.

Some progress, eh?

——–

*** Erekat’s defenders on the Internet are busy trying to “prove” that he didn’t call Jenin a massacre. Here’s a reprint from a CNN transcript on April 15, 2002, which proves that his defenders are liars. Erekat tells Bill Hemmer he stands by his original words (if not the numbers—i.e., he claims there was a “massacre”):

And I stand that there were crimes committed in this refugee camp. This was a flagrant violation of international law. And I stand by the term “massacres” were committed in the refugee camp. And I know for sure that witnesses told me that they dug graveyards and have buried a lot of people…

The so-called president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, is fond of saying that the Jews of Israel should go back to Europe, from whence they came.

Anti-Semitism in Europe has forced Jews to leave their countries of origin - but what they did instead was occupy a country which is not theirs but that of Palestinians,’ Ahmadinejad said in a press conference in Tehran.

The Farceur-in-Chief conveniently forgets to take notice not just of the continuous presence of Jews in the land of Israel for thousands of years but, more to the point for the sake of his argument, the fact that 52% of Israel’s current population is made up of Jews of Arab or North African origin—most of whose families ended up there after the expulsion of 700,000 to 900,000 (figures vary) Jews from Arab countries—Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lybia, etc.—around the time of, or shortly after, the establishment of the State of Israel.

This was the subject of an interesting piece by Joseph Braude earlier this year in TNR [$$], “Due Recognition: the Jewish Refugee Problem.”

Nine hundred thousand Jews have been forced to flee their homes in Arab countries and Iran since the years leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. (Most left in two waves–immediately before or after Israel’s independence, and during the years following the Six Day War.) Some were deported outright; others faced widespread campaigns of violence and intimidation so unbearable as to render their ancestral homelands unlivable.

Though a small number of Jews from Arab countries identified as Zionists in the early twentieth century, most had been thoroughly integrated into their societies and embodied the fondest hopes for a progressive, pluralist form of Arab nationalism. They had started no war, yet they came to be overwhelmingly stigmatized as traitors by the majority culture.

Braude writes of his own family’s history (his mother lived through the Farhud—a pogrom/Kristallnacht sort of event in Baghdad in 1941—and was eventually able to flee Iraq along with 120,000 other Jews in the early 1950s). He also notes that Bill Clinton mentioned Jewish refugee problem:

To his credit, Bill Clinton understood that the refugee problem was not one-sided. In July 2000, he told Israeli television that “Israel is full of people, Jewish people, who lived in predominantly Arab countries who came to Israel because they were made refugees in their own land.” He called for an “international fund [to be] set up for the refugees” to resolve the claims of “both sides.”

Well, now there’s a movement calling for recognition of the Jewish refugee problem as part of the larger Middle East refugee problem:

World Jewish groups began a global campaign on Sunday calling for recognition of Jews from Arab countries as refugees in the Middle East conflict.

“The world sees the plight of Palestinian refugees, and not withstanding their plight, there must be recognition that Jews from Arab countries are also victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Stanley Urman, executive director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC). JJAC, a U.S.-based coalition of Jewish organisations, is one of the groups coordinating the campaign which aims to record testimonies of Jews who fled in the face of persecution, list asset losses and lobby foreign governments on their behalf.

This campaign comes just in time, because Hamas seems to have adopted Ahmadinejad’s impudent rhetoric. Here’s Palestinian foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar in an interview with Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: But you reject a two state solution?

ZAHAR: We will never recognize Israel. The Zionists have occupied our land like the Nazis did with France during the Second World War. Israel is a foreign element in the Middle East. Why don’t the Jews establish their state in Europe?

The debate about the power of the Israel lobby was scheduled to take place tonight at Cooper Union. I just didn’t feel like going. I’ve posted about Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper more than about any other subject—or so it seems from the list below.

I put together the list for my own benefit: to see the arc of my thoughts on the subject. They haven’t change much. Following is a list of posts, in chronological order, that explain why I think Walt and Mearsheimer deserve nothing but contempt.
March 18

March 20

March 26

March 30

April 1

April 3

April 5

April 12

April 19

April 24

May 24

July 24

September 1

September 13

September 18

Sacha Baron Cohen is a genius. Better yet: he gets results.

He has taught Kazakhstan something about freedom of speech.

“We understand that the film exposes the hypocrisy that exists both here in the USA and in the UK and understand that Mr Cohen has a right to freedom of speech.

He has also taught them something about the value of projecting a positive image (even if you don’t have one: ah, the wonders of PR).

President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy “educational” TV spots and print advertisements about the “real Kazakhstan” in a bid to save the country’s reputation before the film is released in the US in November.President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy “educational” TV spots and print advertisements about the “real Kazakhstan” in a bid to save the country’s reputation before the film is released in the US in November.

He also drove them ape-shit by responding as Borat when initially they threatened to sue him for maligning Kazakhstan:

Baron Cohen responded to Ashykbayev in character by posting a video on the Official Borat website.

In the video, Borat said, “In response to Mr. Ashykbayev’s comments, I’d like to state I have no connection with Mr. Cohen and fully support my Government’s decision to sue this Jew.

“Since the 2003 Tuleyakiv reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world.

“Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats, and age of consent has been raised to eight years old.”

His blatant outpouring then prompted the Kazakh government to hire two public relations firms to counter the claims, and ran a four-page advertisement in The New York Times. [emphasis mine]

This is why I sing the praises of infotainment (pop culture by another name): because Cohen has actually brought the attention of ignorant Americans to a place outside their world: Kazakhstan, in this case, but think what other artists could do, if only they were as clever (and motivated) as Cohen.

And throughout this he’s still in character:

Cohen’s representatives refused to allow him or his alter ego to respond to the controversy because it’s not close enough to the film’s release date.

Bull Moose has had enough:

For months, the Moose has observed that if you seek anti-Semitic and anti-Israel filth on the internet, look to the left side. Comment threads and diariists regularly rant against Jews and the Jewish state. What is striking is the degree to which it is tolerated and the “respectability” these sites receive from the Democratic establishment.

He notes that the ADL has had enough too:

Well, there has been a significant development of awareness in the Jewish community about this rancid phenomena. The Anti-Defamation League has submitted a letter to MoveOn protesting the anti-Semitic hate that was found on their site.

Good move from the ADL, but not according to Matthew Yglesias, who wonders:

What can you say about a guy like the Bull Moose.

and then avoids the substance of the Bull Moose’s charge and goes off on a tear about purported Islamophobia on the right:

do any liberal hawks ever worry, does anyone on the “decent left” ever worry, that their foreign policy preferences derive large amounts of their electoral support from racist hatred of Arabs and bigoted prejudice against Muslims? Or do they deny that that’s the case? Do they think the precious comment threads of warmongering blogs, the call lists at rightwing talk radio, are blissfully free of such sentiments?

as if that makes leftist anti-Semitism, which he doesn’t acknowledge, okay, because now the Muslim-hatred is balanced out by Jew-hatred. It’s only fair!
Memo to Yglesias. What you say about a guy like Bull Moose is: You know, he’s right, and it’s extremely disappointing to see pathological hatred of the Jews spouted by “progressives.” It is stinky and unpleasant.

As Josh Marshall has done:

There’s a whole detailed and after a while sterile debate about what sort of criticism of Israel amonts to ‘anti-Semitism’ and what doesn’t. Suffice it to say that many of these emails have breathed a tone of hostility and double-standard toward Israel specifically and sometimes Jews generally that have left my head spinning. They range from wild conspiracy theories about the origins of this war to the blanket assumption that every civilian death in Lebanon was an intentional killing of civilians and a war crime. From there — where to begin? — we have debates over just when it was that Israel forfeited its right to exist — the murder of Rabin, through a rather inverted logic, seems to be a favorite — to where the Israelis should be deported to when the state is liquidated, and so on.

And as even Eric Alterman has done:

I receive quite similar attacks from the other side in letters to The Nation and places like Counterpunch. There was also quite a bit of disturbing leftish anti-Semitism in the comments section of a short post I did recently for the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” Web site.

But Yglesias travels with liberals, who, according to him, uniformly condemn “what Israel is doing” in Lebanon, because it is

certainly incompatible with the general liberal outlook on use of force questions. The Democrats aren’t expressing a mainstream liberal view of the situation, they bowing [sic] to pressure from the Lobby That Must Not Be Named.

So bring on the hostility to Israel from the left—it’s the left’s natural state, and so it’s okay.

Blech.

What other conclusion is to be drawn from this?

A number of European states are refusing to allow El Al cargo planes carrying Israel Defense Forces equipment from stopover landings in their airports.

The refusal came from states considered friendly with Israel, including Britain, Germany and Italy, according to Captain Etai Regev, the chairman of El Al’s pilots’ union. 

I am reminded of the Norwegian flaming anti-Semite Jostein Gaarder’s complaint about Israel’s “disgusting weapons” as well as his warning that Israel has forfeited its rights:

It was historically and morally necessary for the Jews to get their own home. However, the State of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flaunted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions and can no longer expect protection from the same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The Tribulation will soon be over. The State of Israel has seen its Soweto.

There is a sickness in Europe, and it is hurting the Israelis. Moreover, it is not helping the Palestinians—if this indeed is its aim.

Those are the words then-Harvard president Larry Summers used in the fall of 2002 to describe a new kind of anti-Semitism that he (and others) detected: anti-Semitism on the political left (a new-ish phenomenon in America and Western Europe perhaps but very old hat in the Soviet-bloc countries under Stalin and his successors, for whom Jews were anathema and disproportionately purged, punished, and otherwise persecuted—a fact that has been documented in thousands of books and which many on the American left seem not to have read…or understood).

The new strain of anti-Semitism sweeping the world—the violently anti-Semitic rhetoric and incitement in Muslim countries abetted by leftist organizations of the West that make common cause with Islamists and others who are reflexively anti-Zionist and hostile to Israel—is even more pronounced four years after Summers’s speech, especially in the wake of the Hezbollah-vs.-Israel war.

Now, Charlotte Knobloch, president of the German Jewish Council, comes closer than anyone else to explaining anti-Israelism has become indistinguishable from Jew hatred (anti-Semitism) in everyday life in Germany (emphasis mine):

SPIEGEL ONLINE: When you took office you said one of the main focuses of your work would be the struggle against right-wing extremism. Has the conflict in the Middle East worsened anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany?

Knobloch: It has, unfortunately. I see an absolutely hostile attitude towards Jews and Israel. Signs that read “Israel — Child Murderers” are being carried through the streets at demonstrations here, for example. The police don’t confiscate these placards. Persons that deal with the issue only marginally, or not at all, are influenced negatively. That’s the basis of this hostile attitude. You can find it everywhere. We’re currently organizing a fundraising concert, for example, and even there we get negative, anti-Semitic mail. No distinctions are made. We’re sucked into the current Middle East conflict one hundred percent, as Jewish citizens in Germany. And those politicians who latch onto this hostile mood with carefully prepared statements are of course doing better than ever.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Who do you mean?

Knobloch: Oskar Lafontaine, the leader of the Left Party, for example. Left Party parliamentarians aren’t particularly objective in their evaluation of the catastrophe in the Middle East. I’m also thinking of Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the Minister of Economic Aid and Development and member of the Social Democrat Party (SPD). These people encourage the hostile mood against Jews. I’ve never experienced anything quite like this. It’s on a new level. This hostile mood is now more noticeable in the German public than it used to be. It’s infiltrated every group and every level of society. I hope this development can be reversed by a joint effort on the part of all democratic forces. Otherwise all the positive images I have about Germany would be put into question. I unpacked my suitcase in this country. And I don’t want to have to repack it.

This is a trend that cannot have failed to escape the attention of serious political people by now. Few politicians outside Israel have mentioned this dangerous trend. Tony Blair is one of the rare birds to have alluded to it:

And most contemporaneously, and in some ways most perniciously, a very large and, I fear, growing part of our opinion looks at Israel, and thinks we pay too great a price for supporting it and sympathises with Muslim opinion that condemns it. Absent from so much of the coverage, is any understanding of the Israeli predicament.

I, and any halfway sentient human being, regards the loss of civilian life in Lebanon as unacceptable, grieves for that nation, is sickened by its plight and wants the war to stop now. But just for a moment, put yourself in Israel’s place. It has a crisis in Gaza, sparked by the kidnap of a solider by Hamas. Suddenly, without warning, Hizbollah who have been continuing to operate in Southern Lebanon for two years in defiance of UN Resolution 1559, cross the UN blue line, kill eight Israeli soldiers and kidnap two more. They then fire rockets indiscriminately at the civilian population in Northern Israel.

Hizbollah gets their weapons from Iran. Iran are now also financing militant elements in Hamas. Iran’s President has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”. And he’s trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. Just to complete the picture, Israel’s main neighbour along its eastern flank is Syria who support Hizbollah and house the hardline leaders of Hamas.

It’s not exactly a situation conducive to a feeling of security is it?

But the central point is this. In the end, even the issue of Israel is just part of the same, wider struggle for the soul of the region. If we recognised this struggle for what it truly is, we would be at least along the first steps of the path to winning it. But a vast part of the Western opinion is not remotely near this yet.

That last sentence is a gross understatement, judging by the hostility to Israel routinely expressed by many mainstream media outlets and commentators (sorry: too many to link to), particularly in Britain.

Though not exclusively. Witness the glee with which the harshly and morally self-righteous anti-Zionist professors Walt and Mearsheimer have come out of the closet as political advocates rather than the impartial “realist” scholars they claim to be (as noted by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post).

Why is it always left to Alan Dershowitz to make the case for Israel?

How long will snot-nosed Jewish commentators continue to refer to AIPAC as the Lobby That Must Not Be Named?

When will non-Jews start to step up?

When Jews defend themselves with weapons, the world doesn’t like it. When Jews send a clear message that they will not allow themselves to be threatened once again with extermination, the world punishes them. The world prefers to see Jews as powerless victims. If the world continues on its present path, perhaps they will get their wish.
The UN leads the campaign to punish Israel and make it a pariah nation:

The United Nations on Wednesday described as “shocking and immoral” the fact that Israel dropped well over 90 per cent of its cluster munitions in Lebanon during the last three days of the conflict – when it was already clear there would be a cessation of hostilities.

I’m still waiting for the UN, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas.

Yossi Klein Halevi laments Israel’s many losses in its recent war with Hezbollah:

This is a nation whose heart has been broken: by our failure to uproot the jihadist threat, which will return for another and far more deadly round; by the economic devastation of the Galilee and of a neighboring land we didn’t want to attack; by the heroism of our soldiers and the hesitations of our politicians; by the young men buried and crippled in a war we prevented ourselves from winning; by foreign journalists who can’t tell the difference between good and evil; by European leaders who equate an army that tries to avoid civilian causalities with a terrorist group that revels in them; by a United Nations that questions Israel’s right to defend itself; and by growing voices on the left who question Israel’s right to exist at all.

At least some of the disasters of the past weeks were self-inflicted. We forfeited the public relations battle that was, in part, Israel’s to lose. How is it possible that we failed to explain the justness of a war fought against a genocidal enemy who attacked us across our U.N.-sanctioned international border?

The justness of this war was questioned by Western liberals and leftists even before it began (see this post, “Israel and the ‘disproportionate’ fallacy,” which I wrote on June—yes June—30, and please remember that the conflict with Hezbollah, which Halevi is talking about, started in mid-July). See also this disgusting cartoon, which ran in the openly anti-Semitic British press and which conflates all Jews everywhere with Israelis,

and tell me again how

we [Israelis] began this war with the sympathy of a large part of the international community.

Let’s get this straight: Israel did not have the sympathy of the West, if the opinion writers of the West are any indication. Indeed, Israel is reviled by the elites of the West—including many Jewish elites. They revile Israel because they are embarrassed and ashamed of the very thing that has allowed Jews to survive through the millennia: their ferocious loyalty to and protection of one another and their equally ferocious determination to survive despite hatred and persecution.

This tendency to look inward, to assess our failings, and to try to change only our own behavior is not a problem for Jews and Israelis only. It is a problem for all the cowardly, defeatist, craven elites of the West who would do or say anything—include blame the Jews, everywhere—to preserve their lives of comfort and privilege.
Unless we stop blaming ourselves and start naming names—and we can begin by calling out the motherfucking Islamic fascists who are trying to destroy us—we will only prolong this nightmare we’re living in.

An enraged Sir Harold Evans, not known for his warm-heartedness toward Israel’s policies, thunders against demonstrators carrying signs that say “We Are All Hezbollah”:

Are we the violent hijackers of the state of Lebanon who started this war without provocation and without reference to the elected government? Are we the “democrats” who hold hostages for years and murder political opponents?

Are we the suicide bombers, Hizbullah’s contribution to civilization, randomly murdering innocents in the thousands - Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, for this cause or that, it makes no difference?

Are we Hassan Nasrullah, the latest pin up boy of terrorism, who competes with Iran’s mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the most dedicated to kill Jews? He makes no secret of Hizbullah’s genocidal ambitions. “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel,” he says, “it will save us the trouble of going after them on a world wide basis.” Big joke.
Are we the puppets of our paymasters in Iran?

Are we the cowards condemned as such by the UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, for hiding our fighters and rocket launchers among women and children?

Evans has been a consistent principled voice against the new totalitarianism and the new post-9/11 anti-Semitism—the latter trend detailed in Ron Rosenbaum’s anthology Those Who Forget the Past, to which Evans contributed a piece.

Check it out. It’s even more timely now than when it was published two years ago.

Here’s an excerpt from the Evans selection, taken from a talk he gave in September 2002. In two short paragraphs, Evans—a newsman by trade and by instinct—explains the shortcomings of media coverage of the Middle East. It is highly relevant in light of “Reutersgate” (which, I note, is picking up steam. See Tim Rutten’s excellent piece in the L.A. Times). Here’s Evans four years ago (emphasis added):

…much Middle East reporting falls into the impartiality trap. It gives equal weight to information from corrupt police states and proven liars as to information from a self-critical democracy. The pious but fatuous posture is that this is somehow fair, as if truth existed in a moral vacuum, something to be measured by the yard like calico. Five million Jews in Israel are a vulnerable minority surrounded by 300 million Muslims, who for the most part are governed by authoritarian regimes, quasi-police states, that in more than fifty years have never ceased trying to wipe it out by war and terrorism. They muzzle dissent and critical reporting, they run vengeful penal systems, they have failed in almost every measure of social and political justice from the rights of women to fair trials and freedom of the press, they deflect the frustrations of their streets to the scapegoat of Zionism, and they breed and finance international terrorism.

Yet it is Israel that is regarded with skepticism and sometimes hostility. Take the battle of Jenin. The Guardian was moved to write the editorial opinion that Israel’s attacks on Jenin were “every bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York on September 11. Every bit? Every bit as repellent? Did we miss something? Was there some American provocation of Osama comparable to the murder of nineteen Israelis at Passover? Was something going on in the World Trade Center as menacing as the making of bombs in Jenin, known to Palestinians as Suicide Capital?

(Those Who Forget the Past, pp. 45-46)

The protestations of executives from news organizations that they are beyond reproach—that they are shocked and stunned to have their professional credibility questioned—are ridiculous to those of us who have long been smelling the rotten corpse of American and British journalism in general and their coverage of the Middle East in particular.

The worst part is the implicit anti-Israeli prejudice of our journalists and their editors. Evans continues:

The presumption in the Jenin feeding frenzy in print and in hours and hours of television was that the Palestinian stories of 3,000 killed and buried in secret mass graves must be true, yet the main spokesman Saeb Erekat has been shown time and again to be a liar. Human Rights Watch now puts the death toll at a total of 54, and on their count 22 civilians—the Israelis say 3. Some Palestinian militants in fact claim Jenin as a victory in the killing of 23 Israeli soldiers.

Evans doesn’t mention Erekat running around screaming about the “massacre.” But I remember it well. So when the Qana “massacre” happened a couple of weeks ago, I was skeptical.

Maybe this technique will run its course soon. A bored media audience quickly tires of the word “massacre” when it is applied to something less than an actual massacre. And of course there is also the danger than if a real massacre should occur, the word will have lost its meaning. We may already have reached that point. That’s what happens when you use language solely as a tool of propaganda—your audience becomes desensitized.

The elites of the post-materialist West came down with a case of “Holocaust fatigue” some time back. The Israelis have a rather more complicated view of their history. As a nation, they are not Holocaust-obsessed—they don’t fetishize the event or its victims. Indeed, Zionism was a specific rejection of the European narrative of Jew-as-victim. And it is for that reason that Israelis are unapologetic about doing what it takes to secure their survival.

Writer Ben Kaspit, suggesting a text for Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to deliver, explains:

Today I am serving as the voice of six million bombarded Israeli citizens who serve as the voice of six million murdered Jews who were melted down to dust and ashes by savages in Europe. In both cases, those responsible for these evil acts were, and are, barbarians devoid of all humanity, who set themselves one simple goal: to wipe the Jewish race off the face of the earth, as Adolph Hitler said, or to wipe the State of Israel off the map, as Mahmoud Ahmedinjad proclaims.

And you - just as you did not take those words seriously then, you are ignoring them again now. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaders of the world, will not happen again. Never again will we wait for bombs that never came to hit the gas chambers. Never again will we wait for salvation that never arrives. Now we have our own air force. The Jewish people are now capable of standing up to those who seek their destruction - those people will no longer be able to hide behind women and children. They will no longer be able to evade their responsibility.

Every place from which a Katyusha is fired into the State of Israel will be a legitimate target for us to attack. This must be stated clearly and publicly, once and for all. You are welcome to judge us, to ostracize us, to boycott us and to vilify us. But to kill us? Absolutely not.

Read the whole thing.

And his spiritual children are alive and well in Norway, as we can see in this heartfelt editorial from one of the country’s most popular novelists:

ISRAEL IS HISTORY. We no longer recognize the State of Israel. There is no way back. The State of Israel has raped the world’s recognition and will not receive peace before it lays down its weapons …

NO WAY BACK … We don’t believe in the concept of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over their misdeeds. To present themselves as God’s chosen people is not just stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity.  We call it racism…

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Thanks to the energetic efforts of bloggers at the EU Referendum and Little Green Footballs, among others, the story about the possible staging of photographs at Qana, Lebanon (which I wrote about here), has moved into the MSM (here, in an editorial, and here with detailed allegations):

Two of the photos, one of which was transmitted by Reuters and the other by AP, show the same rescue worker and another, unidentified person holding the dead baby high above their shoulders so that photographers could get a good shot.

Asked about the charges included in these blogs, a Reuters spokesperson said, “We do not pose photos.” …

Meanwhile, Bana Sayeh, the spokeswoman who works from the east Jerusalem office of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said she had been unaware of the “staging” claims, but would ask the Lebanese Red Cross about the bodies, how long they had been dead, whether there had been blood, whether autopsies had been carried out and other such questions. She also said she would inform the ICRC in Geneva about the allegations. …

“We are an objective organization, and we want to find out the truth, which we will soon make public. All the information is already in our legal department in Geneva. Everything will be clear, very clear,” she said.

I’ll be waiting.

Now that Mel Gibson has issued an “unequivocal, world-class mea culpa”:

“There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark.”

“I am a public person, and when I say something, either articulated and thought out, or blurted out in a moment of insanity, my words carry weight in the public arena. As a result, I must assume personal responsibility for my words and apologize directly to those who have been hurt and offended by those words.”

“This is not about a film. Nor is it about artistic license. This is about real life and recognizing the consequences hurtful words can have. It’s about existing in harmony in a world that seems to have gone mad.”

Arianna has called off the lynch mob:

If these are truly Mel Gibson’s feelings, then let me be among the first to welcome him back to the land of the sane.

If they are the work of a publicist, I want his name and number. He’s the Shakespeare of spin, the Picasso of PR, the Camus of Contrition.

And, having urged on the mob just yesterday, she now claims credit for having had the right strategy—and thus helping bring about Gibson’s apology:

By taking an immediate and unambiguous stand on Sunday, Ari Emanuel showed that not everyone in town was willing to write off Gibson’s odious racism as the cost of doing business with a bankable hit maker. Others then followed suit, including Sony Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal, producers Arnon Milchan and Laura Ziskin, and manager Bernie Brillstein — earning themselves a plaque in the Backbone Hall of Fame.

Their reaction made it clear that Gibson was not going to be able to get away with his original statement that completely glossed over his anti-Semitic ravings.

Does anyone doubt that without the outrage expressed by Ari and the others, Gibson and his representatives would have gladly pulled the contrition plug following Sunday’s Jew-free, apology-lite press release?

Arianna Gabor Stassinopoulos Huffington, political operative,