1. It's nothing less than an attempt to revive the old canard that Israel stands athwart U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond. “As Americans, we worry about the impact of Israeli policies on vital U.S. interests in the Middle East and around the world”
2. Ben-Ami is so intent on driving a sharp wedge between Israeli and U.S. interests that he totally ignores multi-layered security ties that bind Washington and Jerusalem -- from missile defense to intelligence sharing to thwarting terrorist threats from Hezb'allah and Hamas.
3. As the far-left voice of J Street, Ben-Ami takes dead aim at Netanyahu's government, even though its diplomatic and security agenda does not differ materially from that of the previous centrist-led Kadima government of Ehud Olmert.
4. Not content to peddle a fictional incompatibility between U.S. and Israeli interests, Ben-Ami then goes on to depict Israel as a threat to "the health and vitality" of the U.S. Jewish community. This is nothing but another attempt to revive baseless fears that, if Israel exercises its right to self-defense, American Jews will be at risk.
5. If Israel were to deviate from its current path and shape its security according to J Street and world opinion, Israel definitely would be a goner.
6. J Street's agenda thus is to turn Israel into a state in which Jews might find a home -- leaving plenty of room for a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees and a bi-national state that dare not identify itself as Jewish.
7. How far left is J Street? President Obama has no trouble describing Israel as Jewish state. J Street does.
8. The Israeli ambassador to the United States blasted J Street, saying the organization was "fooling around with the lives of 7 million people." Among the policies Oren pointed to as problematic were J Street's criticism of Israel's attack on Gaza last winter, its refusal to reject the Goldstone report
9. Why is J Street conspiring with an organization run by an Iranian national -- an organization that Congress has asked AG Holder to investigate for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and lobbying disclosure laws -- to kill that legislation? Parsi was invited to speak at J Street's conference. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the unofficial spokesman for Iran's Green Movement. "I think Trita Parsi does not belong to the Green Movement. I feel his lobbying has secretly been more for the Islamic Republic," Makhmalbaf said. It seems J Street isn't just redefining "pro-Israel" -- they're redefining "pro-Iran" as well.
10. This is the reality- Obama brought J-Street into the center of the Israeli Palestinian issue, appointing their people to his Administration, and allowing J-Street a place at the table. Put simply, Obama is the face of J-Street. And J-Street is not pro-Israel.
11. One member of the J Street Philly Host Committee “compared Israel's treatment of Gaza with the genocide in Sudan.
12. "Another Host Committee member is involved with ICAHD, a radical group which interferes with Israeli efforts to stop terrorism and which advocates "Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.”
13. Ruined Israel Arab negotiations :Obama took the great advice of “progressive” geniuses like Rashid Khalidi and J Street. J Street, when not bad-mouthing AIPAC behind closed doors, spent much of the year openly bragging about their White House influence. According to Time, here are the results. Nothing pushed Israel and the Palestinians further away from negotiations than Obama doing what J Street suggested: making harsh demands on Israel, insisting on a total freeze on ‘natural growth,’ treating even Jerusalem as if it was a hilltop settlement, demanding that Israel give in on just about everything prior to negotiations. (Why even negotiate? Obama made all his dictates – exactly as J Street advised — in lieu of Israel and the Palestinians actually negotiating these things themselves.) Obama once pretended to be an “honest broker” only to expose himself as a Jimmy Carter-type advocate for the bad guys. And he did it in record time. Good job, J Street. Maybe that’s what “J” stands for: Jimmy.
14, Raising money for Congrespeople who blast Israel from the Arabist New Day: J Street Raises $15,000 for Donna Edwards in 240 Minutes | TPMCafe By Issandr El Amrani New Day: J Street Raises $15,000 for Donna Edwards in 240 Minutes | TPMCafe Donna Edwards, another African-American representative who did not endorse Israel's Gaza brutalities, now defended by J Street.
15. According to the US Federal Election Commission, donors to J Street’s political action committee hail from forums aligned against Israel. J Street’s donors are affiliated with the National Iranian American Council, “Stop the Occupation”, AMIDEAST, the US State Department and the Arab American Institute -establishments not exactly known for pro-Israel views. Among the many private Jewish and Christian donors to J Street, there are also a number of Islamic and pro-Iranian activists, as well as Palestinian and Arab American businesspeople. One such example is Zahi Khouri, a major Palestinian businessman with a Coke franchise in the West Bank. Khouri actually decried Israel’s attempts towards economic peace with the Palestinians in an article he wrote in the New York Times on September 9.
16. J Street Refused to accept Israel’s right of self-defense in Gaza
In regard to the recent Gaza conflict, it is J Street’s address of Israel’s side that truly casts some doubt on its “pro-Israel” stance. J Street’s website features a section titled “J Street’s Response to the Gaza Crisis” (note, the word, crisis). The organization lists a number of statements and articles condemning Israel’s military response to the rocket attacks, calling it “disproportional,” “counterproductive” and “deepening the cycle of violence.” No such criticism exists for Hamas’ rocket warfare and even more disturbing is the website’s lack of information about the destructive impact of the Gaza rockets on Israeli civilians. It appears that for J Street, the issue of the Gaza conflict is not even about Gaza but Israel’s military response to Palestinian rocket terrorism. Not once does J Street point out that Palestinians who commit terror acts against Israel adhere to a radical Islamic ideology that teaches them to do so, nor that key players, like Iran and Syria, are heavily involved in supporting the terror war against Israel. Of course, J Street also refrains from mentioning that Hamas’ charter calls for the complete destruction of Israel.
17. Wrong on ceasefires -J Street asserts that ceasefires are “positive first steps in the long road to a lasting two-state solution.” The organization deliberately overlooks that three ceasefires between Hamas and Israel have all contributed to the strengthening of the Islamic government regime in Gaza, since Hamas came to power in 2006.
17. Distort the Middle East reality to fit their left-wing agenda.
18. J Street is a very non-pacific front organization for Arab designs on Israel. It has issued a call for "forceful" opposition to Israel. Here's their language “J Street Calls for Stronger American Engagement to Stop Provocative Actions in Jerusalem. ...J Street urges the U.S. government to forcefully oppose provocative, unilateral actions …J Street condemns .....We urge the United States and American political leaders to seek an end to actions
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
anti-semitism czar exacerbates anti-semitism
State Dept. backs its anti-Semitism envoy
January 4, 2010
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The U.S. State Department expressed its "complete support" for its anti-Semitism envoy and encouraged "broad dialogue" toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.
A statement Monday from the State Department said it would not add comment to a controversy that erupted in the last weeks of December when Hannah Rosenthal criticized Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador, for snubbing the dovish lobbying group J Street.
However, the statement went on, "Special Envoy Rosenthal has the complete support of the department. As a matter of longstanding policy the United States has supported a peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To that end the U.S. government encourages broad dialogue among responsible partners for peace."
The controversy started last month when Oren told a group of Conservative synagogue leaders that J Street was “fooling around with the lives of 7 million people." Other dovish groups and then Rosenthal criticized Oren. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Rosenthal described Oren's comments as "most unfortunate."
Some Jewish groups then slammed Rosenthal for criticizing an Israeli ambassador -- and doing so on a topic that they considered to be unrelated to her portfolio. And Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary of state who runs Middle East policy, issued a statement defending Oren's overall performance.
In an interview last week with JTA, Rosenthal, who had served on J Street's advisory panel before her appointment, refused to retract her criticism of Oren and said she had done nothing wrong.
Separately, Rosenthal's predecessor, Gregg Rickman, has slammed her for her remarks about Oren.
"Ms. Rosenthal's criticisms of Ambassador Oren strike a chord particularly because this is not her policy portfolio to advocate," said Rickman, who served in the Bush adminsitration, in an opinion piece on The Cutting Edge News Web site. "She is supposed to fight anti-Semitism, not defend J-Street, an organization on whose Advisory Board she formally sat before her appointment to the State Department."
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=11888&pageid=16&pagename=Opinion
The Obama Edge
A Restaurant in Tel Aviv and Hannah Rosenthal
Gregg Rickman
January 4th 2010
Cutting Edge commentator
In December, in a Tel Aviv restaurant, while I sat casually discussing my successor at the State Department with my dinner companions, I mentioned Hannah Rosenthal's J-Street affiliation, suggesting that this affiliation concerned me. Nearby sat a former US Foreign Service officer who upon the conclusion of her meal took it upon herself to—quite rudely—interrupt our meal to inform me in front of several other people, that in her opinion, J-Street was “a friend of Israel, not an enemy.” She then ran off out of the restaurant in a huff, shooting me a dirty look as she left. As publicly offensive as this woman proved to be, her rude declaration seemed to suggest a bothersome arrogance. Worse was the very public repetition of this effrontery by Ms. Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism when she publicly criticized and insulted Israel's Ambassador to the United States for purely political reasons.
Ms. Rosenthal suggested that Ambassador Oren “could have learned something” by attending the recent J-Street conference, which he refused to attend due to his differences over policy with the group. She attacked him in an Israeli newspaper in her official capacity, a position which dictates that she fights anti-Semitism, not breed it by openly picking a fight with Israel's Ambassador to the United States, thereby aiding and abetting anti-Semites around the world.
This episode only reinforced my early fears about her views. Her failure to see that today's anti-Semitism is so heavily dominated by anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism. Ms. Rosenthal entirely misses the point that by attacking Israel's Ambassador, for such reasons, suggests that criticism of Israel as the “Jew among the nations,” or as the collective Jew, is not off limits. If the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism can do it, then why can't anyone else?
In my term as the Special Envoy, I found the issue of Israel overwhelming in nearly every meeting. Wherever I went, denials of anti-Semitism were abundant from those I encountered. Yet, these same parties were all too willing to easily slide into denunciations of Israel to my face and then proceed to blame Jews collectively for Israel's actions next. For example, in 2008 in Jakarta, Indonesia, I met with several members of the Ulama (Muslim religious council). My hosts immediately denounced Israel and for good measure, mocked the Torah, calling it “illegitimate.” They then asked that “no more Jews come to Indonesia.” In Egypt, a journalist admitted to me Egyptians see all Jews as Israelis as did Muslim leaders in Argentina, France, Holland, the UAE, and professors and my translator in Saudi Arabia. In Venezuela, I met with members of the Jewish community who expressed great fears of Hugo Chavez's and his Foreign Minister's anti-Zionist declarations of “Israeli genocide” and of the existence in Venezuela of a “Zionist lobby” as well as claims that Jews were “Christ-killers.” In short, I found anti-Zionism to be the new anti-Semitism.
To this point, I recommend that Ms. Rosenthal read the 2008 State Department report on “Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism,” (PDF) which explains the relationship between Israel and anti-Semitism very well. The 2004 EUMC Working Definition of Anti-Semitism was included, thereby enshrining it US policy. Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
Ms. Rosenthal would do well to study these points to gain an understanding of the problem that will predominate her portfolio. Today, individual Jews around the world are blamed for Israel's actions and Israel is denounced for genocide and Nazi-like actions. There is hounding by the UN system, which cynically and routinely subjects Israel to double standards of criticism and denunciation to the near absolute exclusion of serial human rights offenders such as Sudan, China, and others; and there are calls for boycott and divestment on university campuses around the world by Muslim student groups who also harass and attack Jewish students, blaming them for supporting Israel's actions.
Ms. Rosenthal's criticisms of Ambassador Oren strike a chord particularly because this is not her policy portfolio to advocate. She is supposed to fight anti-Semitism, not defend J-Street, an organization on whose Advisory Board she formally sat before her appointment to the State Department.
Ms. Rosenthal and that unnamed former Foreign Service Officer share something in common: a public effrontery that was both inexcusable and unfortunate. I fear that that former official I met in Tel Aviv is beyond help. Equally I fear that Ms. Rosenthal will now be colored by her remarks and has done irreparable damage to her position fighting anti-Semitism. She will be compromised before those she seeks to persuade to curb anti-Semitism. If Ms. Rosenthal cannot figure out the borders and limits of her portfolio, perhaps then she should seek another position to avoid further embarrassment.
Cutting Edge commentator Gregg J. Rickman served as the first U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism from 2006–2009. He is a Senior Fellow for the Study and Combat of Anti-Semitism at the Institute on Religion and Policy in Washington, DC; a Visiting Fellow at The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; and a Research Scholar at the Initiative on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco.
January 4, 2010
WASHINGTON (JTA) -- The U.S. State Department expressed its "complete support" for its anti-Semitism envoy and encouraged "broad dialogue" toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.
A statement Monday from the State Department said it would not add comment to a controversy that erupted in the last weeks of December when Hannah Rosenthal criticized Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador, for snubbing the dovish lobbying group J Street.
However, the statement went on, "Special Envoy Rosenthal has the complete support of the department. As a matter of longstanding policy the United States has supported a peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To that end the U.S. government encourages broad dialogue among responsible partners for peace."
The controversy started last month when Oren told a group of Conservative synagogue leaders that J Street was “fooling around with the lives of 7 million people." Other dovish groups and then Rosenthal criticized Oren. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Rosenthal described Oren's comments as "most unfortunate."
Some Jewish groups then slammed Rosenthal for criticizing an Israeli ambassador -- and doing so on a topic that they considered to be unrelated to her portfolio. And Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary of state who runs Middle East policy, issued a statement defending Oren's overall performance.
In an interview last week with JTA, Rosenthal, who had served on J Street's advisory panel before her appointment, refused to retract her criticism of Oren and said she had done nothing wrong.
Separately, Rosenthal's predecessor, Gregg Rickman, has slammed her for her remarks about Oren.
"Ms. Rosenthal's criticisms of Ambassador Oren strike a chord particularly because this is not her policy portfolio to advocate," said Rickman, who served in the Bush adminsitration, in an opinion piece on The Cutting Edge News Web site. "She is supposed to fight anti-Semitism, not defend J-Street, an organization on whose Advisory Board she formally sat before her appointment to the State Department."
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=11888&pageid=16&pagename=Opinion
The Obama Edge
A Restaurant in Tel Aviv and Hannah Rosenthal
Gregg Rickman
January 4th 2010
Cutting Edge commentator
In December, in a Tel Aviv restaurant, while I sat casually discussing my successor at the State Department with my dinner companions, I mentioned Hannah Rosenthal's J-Street affiliation, suggesting that this affiliation concerned me. Nearby sat a former US Foreign Service officer who upon the conclusion of her meal took it upon herself to—quite rudely—interrupt our meal to inform me in front of several other people, that in her opinion, J-Street was “a friend of Israel, not an enemy.” She then ran off out of the restaurant in a huff, shooting me a dirty look as she left. As publicly offensive as this woman proved to be, her rude declaration seemed to suggest a bothersome arrogance. Worse was the very public repetition of this effrontery by Ms. Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism when she publicly criticized and insulted Israel's Ambassador to the United States for purely political reasons.
Ms. Rosenthal suggested that Ambassador Oren “could have learned something” by attending the recent J-Street conference, which he refused to attend due to his differences over policy with the group. She attacked him in an Israeli newspaper in her official capacity, a position which dictates that she fights anti-Semitism, not breed it by openly picking a fight with Israel's Ambassador to the United States, thereby aiding and abetting anti-Semites around the world.
This episode only reinforced my early fears about her views. Her failure to see that today's anti-Semitism is so heavily dominated by anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism. Ms. Rosenthal entirely misses the point that by attacking Israel's Ambassador, for such reasons, suggests that criticism of Israel as the “Jew among the nations,” or as the collective Jew, is not off limits. If the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism can do it, then why can't anyone else?
In my term as the Special Envoy, I found the issue of Israel overwhelming in nearly every meeting. Wherever I went, denials of anti-Semitism were abundant from those I encountered. Yet, these same parties were all too willing to easily slide into denunciations of Israel to my face and then proceed to blame Jews collectively for Israel's actions next. For example, in 2008 in Jakarta, Indonesia, I met with several members of the Ulama (Muslim religious council). My hosts immediately denounced Israel and for good measure, mocked the Torah, calling it “illegitimate.” They then asked that “no more Jews come to Indonesia.” In Egypt, a journalist admitted to me Egyptians see all Jews as Israelis as did Muslim leaders in Argentina, France, Holland, the UAE, and professors and my translator in Saudi Arabia. In Venezuela, I met with members of the Jewish community who expressed great fears of Hugo Chavez's and his Foreign Minister's anti-Zionist declarations of “Israeli genocide” and of the existence in Venezuela of a “Zionist lobby” as well as claims that Jews were “Christ-killers.” In short, I found anti-Zionism to be the new anti-Semitism.
To this point, I recommend that Ms. Rosenthal read the 2008 State Department report on “Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism,” (PDF) which explains the relationship between Israel and anti-Semitism very well. The 2004 EUMC Working Definition of Anti-Semitism was included, thereby enshrining it US policy. Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
Ms. Rosenthal would do well to study these points to gain an understanding of the problem that will predominate her portfolio. Today, individual Jews around the world are blamed for Israel's actions and Israel is denounced for genocide and Nazi-like actions. There is hounding by the UN system, which cynically and routinely subjects Israel to double standards of criticism and denunciation to the near absolute exclusion of serial human rights offenders such as Sudan, China, and others; and there are calls for boycott and divestment on university campuses around the world by Muslim student groups who also harass and attack Jewish students, blaming them for supporting Israel's actions.
Ms. Rosenthal's criticisms of Ambassador Oren strike a chord particularly because this is not her policy portfolio to advocate. She is supposed to fight anti-Semitism, not defend J-Street, an organization on whose Advisory Board she formally sat before her appointment to the State Department.
Ms. Rosenthal and that unnamed former Foreign Service Officer share something in common: a public effrontery that was both inexcusable and unfortunate. I fear that that former official I met in Tel Aviv is beyond help. Equally I fear that Ms. Rosenthal will now be colored by her remarks and has done irreparable damage to her position fighting anti-Semitism. She will be compromised before those she seeks to persuade to curb anti-Semitism. If Ms. Rosenthal cannot figure out the borders and limits of her portfolio, perhaps then she should seek another position to avoid further embarrassment.
Cutting Edge commentator Gregg J. Rickman served as the first U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism from 2006–2009. He is a Senior Fellow for the Study and Combat of Anti-Semitism at the Institute on Religion and Policy in Washington, DC; a Visiting Fellow at The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; and a Research Scholar at the Initiative on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Carter's apology
[http://www.ynetnews.com/images/whitespace.gif] [ht=
tp://www.ynetnews.com/images/whitespace.gif]
Carter: Grandson's race not reason for apology
Former US president denies apology to US Jews due solely to grandson's deci=
sion to launch political career
WASHINGTON - Former US President Jimmy Carter insists that his letter of ap=
ology addressed to US Jews published on Monday was not simply due to the fa=
ct that his grandson has decided to launch a political career and run for t=
he Georgia state senator.
The former president's grandson, Jason Carter, 34, an Atlanta-area lawyer, =
is considering a run to fill a seat covering suburban DeKalb County should =
the incumbent, David Adelman, be designated ambassador to Singapore.
Mea Culpa
Carter apologizes for 'stigmatizing Israel' / Yitzhak Benhorin
Former US president offers US Jewish community heartfelt apology for any co=
ntribution he may have had to Jewish nation's negative image
Full Story
News of the young Carter's political ambitions has led some to suspect the =
former president's motives behind his apology were insincere.
But Carter senior told the Jewish Telegraph Agency in an interview publishe=
d Tuesday that ethnic electoral considerations were not reason enough to re=
ach out to the Jewish community, although he did not outright deny that it =
was a factor.
"Jason has a district, the number of Jewish voters in it is only 2%," he sa=
id, chuckling.
The senior Carter, who is not a popular character in Israel, enraged the Am=
erican Jewish community in the past with various statements made in his boo=
k "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."
In the book, Carter blamed Israel for impeding the Middle East peace proces=
s via settlement construction, further claiming such a policy will lead to =
apartheid. The publication of the book caused 14 Jews to quit their jobs at=
the Carter Center in 2006.
Since then Carter has been trying to restore relations with the Jewish publ=
ic. He hoped to appear in synagogues or Jewish community centers to explain=
himself and apologize, but his efforts were rejected.
He therefore decided to publish his letter of apology in a Jewish news agen=
cy around the holiday season, in hopes of reaching the public.
In a statement following his grandfather's letter, Jason Carter said: "Whil=
e I was very happy to see my grandfather's letter, it was completely unrela=
ted to my campaign. The letter is a product of discussions with some of his=
friends in the Jewish community that have been going on for a long time. I=
, like many others, see this as a great step towards reconciliation."
tp://www.ynetnews.com/images/whitespace.gif]
Carter: Grandson's race not reason for apology
Former US president denies apology to US Jews due solely to grandson's deci=
sion to launch political career
WASHINGTON - Former US President Jimmy Carter insists that his letter of ap=
ology addressed to US Jews published on Monday was not simply due to the fa=
ct that his grandson has decided to launch a political career and run for t=
he Georgia state senator.
The former president's grandson, Jason Carter, 34, an Atlanta-area lawyer, =
is considering a run to fill a seat covering suburban DeKalb County should =
the incumbent, David Adelman, be designated ambassador to Singapore.
Mea Culpa
Carter apologizes for 'stigmatizing Israel' / Yitzhak Benhorin
Former US president offers US Jewish community heartfelt apology for any co=
ntribution he may have had to Jewish nation's negative image
Full Story
News of the young Carter's political ambitions has led some to suspect the =
former president's motives behind his apology were insincere.
But Carter senior told the Jewish Telegraph Agency in an interview publishe=
d Tuesday that ethnic electoral considerations were not reason enough to re=
ach out to the Jewish community, although he did not outright deny that it =
was a factor.
"Jason has a district, the number of Jewish voters in it is only 2%," he sa=
id, chuckling.
The senior Carter, who is not a popular character in Israel, enraged the Am=
erican Jewish community in the past with various statements made in his boo=
k "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."
In the book, Carter blamed Israel for impeding the Middle East peace proces=
s via settlement construction, further claiming such a policy will lead to =
apartheid. The publication of the book caused 14 Jews to quit their jobs at=
the Carter Center in 2006.
Since then Carter has been trying to restore relations with the Jewish publ=
ic. He hoped to appear in synagogues or Jewish community centers to explain=
himself and apologize, but his efforts were rejected.
He therefore decided to publish his letter of apology in a Jewish news agen=
cy around the holiday season, in hopes of reaching the public.
In a statement following his grandfather's letter, Jason Carter said: "Whil=
e I was very happy to see my grandfather's letter, it was completely unrela=
ted to my campaign. The letter is a product of discussions with some of his=
friends in the Jewish community that have been going on for a long time. I=
, like many others, see this as a great step towards reconciliation."
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
France
Bad news from France ...REAL BAD! for French Jews...
Once again, the real news in France is conveniently not being
reported as it should. To give you an idea of what's going on in that
country where there are now between 5 and 6 million Muslims and about
600,000 Jews, here is an E-mail that came from a Jew living in France .
Please read! "Will the world say nothing - again - as it did in
Hitler's time?" He writes: "I AM A JEW -- therefore I am forwarding
this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do
nothing. Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more
furiously than in France . In Lyon , a car was rammed into a synagogue
and set on fire. In Montpellier , the Jewish religious center was
firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourgand Marseilles ; so was a
Jewish school in Creteil - all recently.. A Jewish sports club in
Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails and on the statue of
Alfred Dreyfus, in Paris , the words 'Dirty Jew' were painted. In
Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks
and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in
Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12
anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days. Walls in Jewish
neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming 'Jews to the
gas chambers' and 'Death to the Jews.' A gunman opened fire on a
kosher butcher's shop (and, of course, the butcher) inToulouse, France
. A Jewish couple in their 20's were beaten up by five men in
Villeurbanne , France (the woman was pregnant) A Jewish school was
broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles , France . This was just in
the past week."
"So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a
person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from
depravity, to do - at least - these three simple things:
First, care enough to stay informed. Don't ever let yourself become
deluded into thinking that this is not your fight. I remind you of
what Pastor Neimoller said in World War II: 'First they came for the
Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then
they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was
a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.'
Second, boycott France and French products. Only the Arab countries
are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more
than just oil and hatred. So boycott their wines and their perfumes.
Boycott their clothes and their foodstuffs. Boycott their movies.
Definitely boycott their shores. If we are resolved we can exert
amazing pressure and, whatever else we may know about the French, we
most certainly know that they are like a cobweb in a hurricane in the
face of well-directed pressure.
Third, send this along to your family, your friends, and your
co-workers. Think of all of the people of good conscience that you
know and let them know that you - and the people that you care - about
need their help.
The number one bestselling book in France is....'September 11: The
Frightening Fraud' which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon!
Please Pass This On, Let's not let history repeat itself, thank-you
for your time and consideration."
Once again, the real news in France is conveniently not being
reported as it should. To give you an idea of what's going on in that
country where there are now between 5 and 6 million Muslims and about
600,000 Jews, here is an E-mail that came from a Jew living in France .
Please read! "Will the world say nothing - again - as it did in
Hitler's time?" He writes: "I AM A JEW -- therefore I am forwarding
this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do
nothing. Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more
furiously than in France . In Lyon , a car was rammed into a synagogue
and set on fire. In Montpellier , the Jewish religious center was
firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourgand Marseilles ; so was a
Jewish school in Creteil - all recently.. A Jewish sports club in
Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails and on the statue of
Alfred Dreyfus, in Paris , the words 'Dirty Jew' were painted. In
Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks
and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in
Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12
anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days. Walls in Jewish
neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming 'Jews to the
gas chambers' and 'Death to the Jews.' A gunman opened fire on a
kosher butcher's shop (and, of course, the butcher) inToulouse, France
. A Jewish couple in their 20's were beaten up by five men in
Villeurbanne , France (the woman was pregnant) A Jewish school was
broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles , France . This was just in
the past week."
"So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a
person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from
depravity, to do - at least - these three simple things:
First, care enough to stay informed. Don't ever let yourself become
deluded into thinking that this is not your fight. I remind you of
what Pastor Neimoller said in World War II: 'First they came for the
Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then
they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was
a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.'
Second, boycott France and French products. Only the Arab countries
are more toxically anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more
than just oil and hatred. So boycott their wines and their perfumes.
Boycott their clothes and their foodstuffs. Boycott their movies.
Definitely boycott their shores. If we are resolved we can exert
amazing pressure and, whatever else we may know about the French, we
most certainly know that they are like a cobweb in a hurricane in the
face of well-directed pressure.
Third, send this along to your family, your friends, and your
co-workers. Think of all of the people of good conscience that you
know and let them know that you - and the people that you care - about
need their help.
The number one bestselling book in France is....'September 11: The
Frightening Fraud' which argues that no plane ever hit the Pentagon!
Please Pass This On, Let's not let history repeat itself, thank-you
for your time and consideration."
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Sands book a lie
Home / Articles / Jewish Peoplehood Denied, While Israel’s Foes Applaud
Jewish Peoplehood Denied, While Israel’s Foes Applaud
Opinion
By Hillel Halkin
Published June 24, 2009, issue of July 03, 2009.
Print Email Share Author Archive Forward Forum
Although there is probably no book too foolish to go un-admired by someone, there are subjects for which the market for foolishness is especially large. Any list of these would have to include “Jews” and “Israel” near its top, as has once again been demonstrated by the granting of this year’s prestigious Aujourd’hui Award to the French translation of Israeli academic Shlomo Sand’s book “The Invention of the Jewish People.” (This is the title of the English edition, due to appear in September from left-wing publisher Verso.)
Sand’s book, which argues that there was no such thing as a Jewish people until one was “constructed” by Zionism and Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, would have attracted little notice had it been written by a professor of history at the University of Damascus. As the work of a supposed historian at the University of Tel Aviv, it is a scandal, a fashionably phrased political screed against Zionism that cherry-picks its data while pretending to be history. Alas, it will be accepted as history by many readers who are as dutifully impressed by its 568 footnotes, as were, it would seem, the French journalists on the Aujourd’hui panel.
Not that Sand gets everything wrong. His book is full of perfectly correct and quite unoriginal observations: some elaborating why today’s Jews are not all descendants of biblical Israelites and stem in part from ancestors who joined the Jewish people by religious conversion over the ages (although Sand’s treatment of the considerable genetic research on the subject is shockingly shoddy, he is not wholly wrong about the matter); some pointing out that Diaspora Jews never shared a single spoken language or material culture, let alone territory, as do most peoples; and some dwelling on the problematic nature of the State of Israel, which aspires to be Jewish, democratic and secular while denying non-Jews certain privileges extended to Jews and defining Jewishness in terms of traditional religious law. These are all issues worthy of discussion, and there is nothing wrong with raising them.
And yet to go from there to Sand’s absurd conclusions that the Jews, who considered themselves a distinct people from their early history, were “invented” as one in modern times; that their historical connection to Palestine is “imaginary,” because they are not descended in their entirety from ancient Palestinian Jewry; or that the idea of a Jewish state is therefore less acceptable than the idea of a French or Spanish state, demands a thoroughly dishonest manipulation of the facts. Indeed, if one is talking about the “construction” of national identities, an enterprise that numerous post-modernist historians of nationalism to whom Sand is indebted have written about, it is the French and Spanish who are the parvenus, having undertaken the task only in the late Middle Ages. And if you are looking for peoples who accomplished this even later, in the last two or three centuries, say, you might consider the Italians, the Germans, the Americans, the Brazilians, the Indians and a host of others (including those latest of latecomers, the Palestinians). You would never, unless you wanted to flaunt your ignorance, mention the Jews, who had a fully developed national consciousness at least 2,500 years ago.
But of course, no one would ever write a book challenging the idea of an Italian, German or Brazilian state, much less win any French prizes for it. It is only the Jews in regard to whom it is nowadays increasingly bon ton to argue that a country of their own is not for them. And should you have the bad manners to object that it is antisemitic to deny them a right that is granted to other peoples, you can now look forward to being answered: “Ah, my friend, the Jews have only imagined they are a people! If even a Jewish professor of history says so, it must be true.”
And yet the embarrassment of Jewishness has always made certain Jewish intellectuals not the last, but the first, to seek to discredit the idea of Jewish peoplehood. From the age of the French Revolution, a time at which few European gentiles doubted for a moment that the Jews were a separate people (and on the whole, a heartily disliked one), there were plenty of Jews who insisted that they were really just Frenchmen or Germans or Englishmen of “the Mosaic faith,” with no national ties to other Mosaicists living elsewhere. And by the same token, in the 1940s, when Hitler and his legions were confident that they were exterminating a people and not a mere religious profession, the so-called Canaanite movement, born in the bohemian cafés of Tel Aviv, made similar claims for the Jews of Palestine — who, it was said, were proud, sun-bronzed “Hebrews,” not to be confused with the pale-skinned juifs, Juden and zhidi of Europe then meekly trooping off to the gas chambers.
Shlomo Sand is in this tradition, a post-modernist Canaanite who need not, he thinks, suffer the indignity of belonging to the Jewish people because — what a relief! — no such people exists. No doubt, not a few of the thousands of Israelis who helped put Sand’s book on the best-seller list in Israel experienced a similar epiphany upon reading it. Even in a Jewish state, we now know, there will always be Jews who would rather be something else. You can, to paraphrase an old Zionist witticism, take the Jew out of the non-Jewish environment into which he dreams of assimilating, but you cannot take the assimilationist out of every Jew.
Unfortunately, there are even larger numbers of non-Jews who will be happy to believe Sand’s nonsense. Once upon a time, antisemitism consisted of the belief that the Jews were an incorrigible and pernicious people who could never be absorbed by other peoples. Today, it is trendy to hold that they are a non-people masquerading as a people in order to justify stealing another people’s homeland. Le plus ça change, le plus ça reste le même chose. As discouraging as it is to see Jewish intellectuals like Shlomo Sand aiding and abetting their people’s enemies, this too is not new under the sun.
Hillel Halkin is the author, most recently, of “A Strange Death: A Story Originating in Espionage, Betrayal, and Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine” (Public Affairs, 2005) and “Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002).
Jewish Peoplehood Denied, While Israel’s Foes Applaud
Opinion
By Hillel Halkin
Published June 24, 2009, issue of July 03, 2009.
Print Email Share Author Archive Forward Forum
Although there is probably no book too foolish to go un-admired by someone, there are subjects for which the market for foolishness is especially large. Any list of these would have to include “Jews” and “Israel” near its top, as has once again been demonstrated by the granting of this year’s prestigious Aujourd’hui Award to the French translation of Israeli academic Shlomo Sand’s book “The Invention of the Jewish People.” (This is the title of the English edition, due to appear in September from left-wing publisher Verso.)
Sand’s book, which argues that there was no such thing as a Jewish people until one was “constructed” by Zionism and Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, would have attracted little notice had it been written by a professor of history at the University of Damascus. As the work of a supposed historian at the University of Tel Aviv, it is a scandal, a fashionably phrased political screed against Zionism that cherry-picks its data while pretending to be history. Alas, it will be accepted as history by many readers who are as dutifully impressed by its 568 footnotes, as were, it would seem, the French journalists on the Aujourd’hui panel.
Not that Sand gets everything wrong. His book is full of perfectly correct and quite unoriginal observations: some elaborating why today’s Jews are not all descendants of biblical Israelites and stem in part from ancestors who joined the Jewish people by religious conversion over the ages (although Sand’s treatment of the considerable genetic research on the subject is shockingly shoddy, he is not wholly wrong about the matter); some pointing out that Diaspora Jews never shared a single spoken language or material culture, let alone territory, as do most peoples; and some dwelling on the problematic nature of the State of Israel, which aspires to be Jewish, democratic and secular while denying non-Jews certain privileges extended to Jews and defining Jewishness in terms of traditional religious law. These are all issues worthy of discussion, and there is nothing wrong with raising them.
And yet to go from there to Sand’s absurd conclusions that the Jews, who considered themselves a distinct people from their early history, were “invented” as one in modern times; that their historical connection to Palestine is “imaginary,” because they are not descended in their entirety from ancient Palestinian Jewry; or that the idea of a Jewish state is therefore less acceptable than the idea of a French or Spanish state, demands a thoroughly dishonest manipulation of the facts. Indeed, if one is talking about the “construction” of national identities, an enterprise that numerous post-modernist historians of nationalism to whom Sand is indebted have written about, it is the French and Spanish who are the parvenus, having undertaken the task only in the late Middle Ages. And if you are looking for peoples who accomplished this even later, in the last two or three centuries, say, you might consider the Italians, the Germans, the Americans, the Brazilians, the Indians and a host of others (including those latest of latecomers, the Palestinians). You would never, unless you wanted to flaunt your ignorance, mention the Jews, who had a fully developed national consciousness at least 2,500 years ago.
But of course, no one would ever write a book challenging the idea of an Italian, German or Brazilian state, much less win any French prizes for it. It is only the Jews in regard to whom it is nowadays increasingly bon ton to argue that a country of their own is not for them. And should you have the bad manners to object that it is antisemitic to deny them a right that is granted to other peoples, you can now look forward to being answered: “Ah, my friend, the Jews have only imagined they are a people! If even a Jewish professor of history says so, it must be true.”
And yet the embarrassment of Jewishness has always made certain Jewish intellectuals not the last, but the first, to seek to discredit the idea of Jewish peoplehood. From the age of the French Revolution, a time at which few European gentiles doubted for a moment that the Jews were a separate people (and on the whole, a heartily disliked one), there were plenty of Jews who insisted that they were really just Frenchmen or Germans or Englishmen of “the Mosaic faith,” with no national ties to other Mosaicists living elsewhere. And by the same token, in the 1940s, when Hitler and his legions were confident that they were exterminating a people and not a mere religious profession, the so-called Canaanite movement, born in the bohemian cafés of Tel Aviv, made similar claims for the Jews of Palestine — who, it was said, were proud, sun-bronzed “Hebrews,” not to be confused with the pale-skinned juifs, Juden and zhidi of Europe then meekly trooping off to the gas chambers.
Shlomo Sand is in this tradition, a post-modernist Canaanite who need not, he thinks, suffer the indignity of belonging to the Jewish people because — what a relief! — no such people exists. No doubt, not a few of the thousands of Israelis who helped put Sand’s book on the best-seller list in Israel experienced a similar epiphany upon reading it. Even in a Jewish state, we now know, there will always be Jews who would rather be something else. You can, to paraphrase an old Zionist witticism, take the Jew out of the non-Jewish environment into which he dreams of assimilating, but you cannot take the assimilationist out of every Jew.
Unfortunately, there are even larger numbers of non-Jews who will be happy to believe Sand’s nonsense. Once upon a time, antisemitism consisted of the belief that the Jews were an incorrigible and pernicious people who could never be absorbed by other peoples. Today, it is trendy to hold that they are a non-people masquerading as a people in order to justify stealing another people’s homeland. Le plus ça change, le plus ça reste le même chose. As discouraging as it is to see Jewish intellectuals like Shlomo Sand aiding and abetting their people’s enemies, this too is not new under the sun.
Hillel Halkin is the author, most recently, of “A Strange Death: A Story Originating in Espionage, Betrayal, and Vengeance in a Village in Old Palestine” (Public Affairs, 2005) and “Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002).
Internet: The Hatred Super-Highway
Internet: The Hatred Super-Highway Forward Nov 2009
THE WEINSTEIN COMPANYPutting a Face to Hatred: Anonymity means unac- countability for many online posters.
By Jordana Horn
Published November 18, 2009, issue of November 27, 2009.
‘What’s the difference between Jews and Nazis? The Jews are guilty of the crimes they’re accused of.”
The boldfaced quotes are real. They were written within the past few months by people who believe they are true. They are quotes from hateful blogs and Web sites — some written in America, some abroad. Antisemitism pulses, alive and well, on the Internet.
Kurt Hoffman(click to zoom)As a freelance journalist, I wrote two pieces on Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Inglourious Basterds” (a fictional fantasy about American Jewish soldiers killing Nazis in German-occupied France). My Google Alerts, which finds Web sites that mention my name and sends them to my mailbox, showed me how my stories (one for the Forward, one for The Wall Street Journal) were used as jumping-off points for hate groups and white supremacists. Quotes from those sites, delivered like valentines to my inbox, are interspersed here. The movie is a fantasy. So is the idea that antisemitism and virulent hate are things of the past.
“It’s nice knowing none of it ever happened. Just like the phony Holoco$t.”
When I was about 10 years old, I first read Anne Frank, who famously said all people are good at heart. At the time, I believed that too. Her words were immortalized in pen and ink on the pages of a flimsy diary. As I hoped mine would be, her words were published, reaching an audience beyond any expectation. The thin journal and her words survived the war, while she, along with more than 1 million other murdered children, did not. The lesson: The world seems to have more affection for dead Jews than for live ones. And this: Words are more durable than people.
I watched countless Holocaust movies and read countless Holocaust books, as a good suburban American Jewish girl should. I was appropriately horrified. But as a fourth-generation Jew in the United States, I felt comfortably separated from the death camps by impenetrable buffers of oceans, time and circumstance.
Related Articles
■How, Why, Who Hates Us
■Antisemitism: Up, Down or Both?
■Antisemitism in 3-D
No member of my family would step on the grounds of Auschwitz until some 50 years after the Holocaust had ended. At that point, my parents paid to send my sister and me to Eastern Europe, to see the death camps.
So I walked through long-defunct gas chambers and, unsurprisingly, came out alive to return home. At home, I told my family how I had recited the Kaddish in front of a pile of human ashes two stories high at the death camp of Majdanek. A Polish man had watched me and my yarmulke-wearing, obviously Jewish teen group. With no expression on his face, he lit a cigarette and took a drag from it. He made sure we were watching him. Then he flicked the smoking butt onto the pile of human ash.
“The moral relativism of Jews is the same as that of the criminal — what they want (pleasure, money, power, sex) is more important than you or your life. Jews are the spiritual meta-criminals of the world. We are objectively the moral ones.”
I didn’t have to travel to the other side of the world to encounter hatred or ignorance. “Of course the Jews killed Jesus,” my New Jersey eighth grade English teacher said in class one day, with an exasperated sigh. “That was why they deserved the Holocaust.” That “they” that he was talking about, that he was so wrong about, I realized that day — that was me.
“[‘Inglourious Basterds’] could also be a metaphor of what they’re doing to us already with our economics and our banking system…. No guns… just behind desks wearing suits and ties.”
Holocaust deniers have been trumped by law, common sense and historians time and time again — and yet they keep coming back for more. Some attempt to hide. To avoid protests, longtime denier David Irving is conducting his current United States book tour in secret. Other forms of antisemitism are openly aired: Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are mixed into a nonsensical stew of hatred and anger (see Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, swiped with a Hitler moustache, in a poster held in Brazil that calls him “Shimon Hitler”).
Antisemitism is a relentless force defying reason and history, leaving its mark through pogroms, discrimination and ubiquitous cartoons. Caricatures of Bernard Madoff came almost directly from the Goebbels playbook. Other manifestations can be evocative yet more subtle, to the point where you’re not sure even if it’s really there. Rolling Stone called Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” evoking centuries of antisemitic bloodsucking imagery with impunity.
In a series of letters exchanged with Albert Einstein in 1932 about the nature of war, Sigmund Freud noted that people are driven by an inexorable aggressive impulse. Despite all evidence to the contrary, however, Freud was optimistic about human nature. He voiced the hope that Macht (might) would be trumped by Recht (right), and that law would serve as a mechanism to tame human violence. But in the context of the unaccountable Internet, both Macht and Recht can conveniently absent themselves.
“The real Holocaust? Jews had their stolen goods taken away and were forced to do real work for the first time in their lives.”
In one generation, the Internet has refashioned the world. Facilitating communication both fosters relationships and expedites idiocy. One hundred and forty characters of tripe or brilliance can appear instantly on the screens of thousands (or, in Ashton Kutcher’s case, millions). Thanks to Facebook, we have friends that we hardly know, who helpfully proclaim to the world that they hate Mondays. We have itchy e-mail and text trigger fingers. We disclose thoughts best kept to ourselves. Many of these thoughts are boring or mundane. Others are virulent.
As a writer, I know that words have worth and words have power. Our children will grow up in a world where words are ever easier to broadcast, but may seem to have no visible ramifications or consequences.
Hate is consequential and is readily accessible. It can be lucid or incoherent. It can be prosecuted or ignored. The constant waterfall of information over the Internet, however, doesn’t drown out the human quest for what is real. If anything, the excess of words makes finding what is true and worthwhile even harder.
Yes, words are more durable than people — but people determine which words are worth saving.
“All most of us on this forum are is [sic] ordinary people who can’t share their thoughts anywhere but here.”
Good.
Jordana Horn is a lawyer and writer at work on her first novel
THE WEINSTEIN COMPANYPutting a Face to Hatred: Anonymity means unac- countability for many online posters.
By Jordana Horn
Published November 18, 2009, issue of November 27, 2009.
‘What’s the difference between Jews and Nazis? The Jews are guilty of the crimes they’re accused of.”
The boldfaced quotes are real. They were written within the past few months by people who believe they are true. They are quotes from hateful blogs and Web sites — some written in America, some abroad. Antisemitism pulses, alive and well, on the Internet.
Kurt Hoffman(click to zoom)As a freelance journalist, I wrote two pieces on Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Inglourious Basterds” (a fictional fantasy about American Jewish soldiers killing Nazis in German-occupied France). My Google Alerts, which finds Web sites that mention my name and sends them to my mailbox, showed me how my stories (one for the Forward, one for The Wall Street Journal) were used as jumping-off points for hate groups and white supremacists. Quotes from those sites, delivered like valentines to my inbox, are interspersed here. The movie is a fantasy. So is the idea that antisemitism and virulent hate are things of the past.
“It’s nice knowing none of it ever happened. Just like the phony Holoco$t.”
When I was about 10 years old, I first read Anne Frank, who famously said all people are good at heart. At the time, I believed that too. Her words were immortalized in pen and ink on the pages of a flimsy diary. As I hoped mine would be, her words were published, reaching an audience beyond any expectation. The thin journal and her words survived the war, while she, along with more than 1 million other murdered children, did not. The lesson: The world seems to have more affection for dead Jews than for live ones. And this: Words are more durable than people.
I watched countless Holocaust movies and read countless Holocaust books, as a good suburban American Jewish girl should. I was appropriately horrified. But as a fourth-generation Jew in the United States, I felt comfortably separated from the death camps by impenetrable buffers of oceans, time and circumstance.
Related Articles
■How, Why, Who Hates Us
■Antisemitism: Up, Down or Both?
■Antisemitism in 3-D
No member of my family would step on the grounds of Auschwitz until some 50 years after the Holocaust had ended. At that point, my parents paid to send my sister and me to Eastern Europe, to see the death camps.
So I walked through long-defunct gas chambers and, unsurprisingly, came out alive to return home. At home, I told my family how I had recited the Kaddish in front of a pile of human ashes two stories high at the death camp of Majdanek. A Polish man had watched me and my yarmulke-wearing, obviously Jewish teen group. With no expression on his face, he lit a cigarette and took a drag from it. He made sure we were watching him. Then he flicked the smoking butt onto the pile of human ash.
“The moral relativism of Jews is the same as that of the criminal — what they want (pleasure, money, power, sex) is more important than you or your life. Jews are the spiritual meta-criminals of the world. We are objectively the moral ones.”
I didn’t have to travel to the other side of the world to encounter hatred or ignorance. “Of course the Jews killed Jesus,” my New Jersey eighth grade English teacher said in class one day, with an exasperated sigh. “That was why they deserved the Holocaust.” That “they” that he was talking about, that he was so wrong about, I realized that day — that was me.
“[‘Inglourious Basterds’] could also be a metaphor of what they’re doing to us already with our economics and our banking system…. No guns… just behind desks wearing suits and ties.”
Holocaust deniers have been trumped by law, common sense and historians time and time again — and yet they keep coming back for more. Some attempt to hide. To avoid protests, longtime denier David Irving is conducting his current United States book tour in secret. Other forms of antisemitism are openly aired: Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are mixed into a nonsensical stew of hatred and anger (see Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, swiped with a Hitler moustache, in a poster held in Brazil that calls him “Shimon Hitler”).
Antisemitism is a relentless force defying reason and history, leaving its mark through pogroms, discrimination and ubiquitous cartoons. Caricatures of Bernard Madoff came almost directly from the Goebbels playbook. Other manifestations can be evocative yet more subtle, to the point where you’re not sure even if it’s really there. Rolling Stone called Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” evoking centuries of antisemitic bloodsucking imagery with impunity.
In a series of letters exchanged with Albert Einstein in 1932 about the nature of war, Sigmund Freud noted that people are driven by an inexorable aggressive impulse. Despite all evidence to the contrary, however, Freud was optimistic about human nature. He voiced the hope that Macht (might) would be trumped by Recht (right), and that law would serve as a mechanism to tame human violence. But in the context of the unaccountable Internet, both Macht and Recht can conveniently absent themselves.
“The real Holocaust? Jews had their stolen goods taken away and were forced to do real work for the first time in their lives.”
In one generation, the Internet has refashioned the world. Facilitating communication both fosters relationships and expedites idiocy. One hundred and forty characters of tripe or brilliance can appear instantly on the screens of thousands (or, in Ashton Kutcher’s case, millions). Thanks to Facebook, we have friends that we hardly know, who helpfully proclaim to the world that they hate Mondays. We have itchy e-mail and text trigger fingers. We disclose thoughts best kept to ourselves. Many of these thoughts are boring or mundane. Others are virulent.
As a writer, I know that words have worth and words have power. Our children will grow up in a world where words are ever easier to broadcast, but may seem to have no visible ramifications or consequences.
Hate is consequential and is readily accessible. It can be lucid or incoherent. It can be prosecuted or ignored. The constant waterfall of information over the Internet, however, doesn’t drown out the human quest for what is real. If anything, the excess of words makes finding what is true and worthwhile even harder.
Yes, words are more durable than people — but people determine which words are worth saving.
“All most of us on this forum are is [sic] ordinary people who can’t share their thoughts anywhere but here.”
Good.
Jordana Horn is a lawyer and writer at work on her first novel
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Brazen British Bias and Bigotry
Another Vast Jewish Conspiracy
British media and society are gripped by lies about a "secret" Israel lobby controlling foreign policy.
*
By ROBIN SHEPHERD
Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.
The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide." The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.
In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper's flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group's virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a "Protocols of Zion"-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.
Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain.
Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark documentary, "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby," on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran's Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.
The makers of the documentary—top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors' own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power.
It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.
"The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza," they wrote. "We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it 'strives to protect innocent life.' This remark was not intended satirically."
Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.
If you think this all sounds familiar, you'd be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"—another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.
But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.
It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. One of them, Poju Zabludowicz, the billionaire funder of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is good friends with Madonna—not exactly the kind of company you'd choose if you were trying to hide behind a veil of obscurity.
Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment's reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.
Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4's widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby's "seditious behavior," its "disgusting attack on British democracy," "the hand of global Zionism at work," and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: "We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out."
If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.
Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel's defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.
Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel—already a small and diminishing group in Britain—will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the "Lobby."
Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.
Mr. Shepherd is director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His new book, "A State Beyond the Pale: Europe's Problem With Israel," has just been published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
British media and society are gripped by lies about a "secret" Israel lobby controlling foreign policy.
*
By ROBIN SHEPHERD
Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.
The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide." The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.
In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper's flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group's virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a "Protocols of Zion"-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.
Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain.
Such charges have been aired to mass critical acclaim this week in a landmark documentary, "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby," on Channel 4—the same outlet that offered Iran's Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an uninterrupted, seven-minute propaganda slot on Christmas Day last year.
The makers of the documentary—top Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne and TV journalist James Jones—have also written about their program in the Guardian. Both furiously deny that they are peddling conspiracy theories. But the mindset we are dealing with was neatly exposed by the authors' own explanation on how their suspicions were aroused that something sinister is at work in the corridors of British power.
It all transpired, they told readers ominously, during an address earlier this year by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a dinner hosted by the Conservative Friends of Israel.
"The dominant event of the previous 12 months had been the Israeli invasion of Gaza," they wrote. "We were shocked Cameron made no reference in his speech to the massive destruction it caused, or the 1,370 deaths that resulted, or for that matter the invasion itself. Indeed, our likely future prime minister went out of his way to praise Israel because it 'strives to protect innocent life.' This remark was not intended satirically."
Since it is inconceivable, the authors obviously believe, that anyone could honestly credit Israel with anything other than the most damnable motives it must therefore follow that those who do in fact praise the Jewish state must be being paid or bullied into doing so.
If you think this all sounds familiar, you'd be right. Messrs. Oborne and Jones produced an extensive pamphlet accompanying the documentary, which openly claimed inspiration from none other than John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"—another conspiracy theory alleging malign Zionist influence in the United States.
But if Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt at least felt the need to dress up their polemic in pseudo-academic wrapping paper, the sheer amateurishness of the British documentary they inspired is breathtaking. There was the endless superimposition of the Israeli Star of David on to the British flag, which, along with some absurdly melancholic background music, was presumably designed to prepare viewers for an astonishing series of revelations. But of course such revelations actually never materialized.
It turns out from the documentary itself that the allegedly secretive Jewish donors have been quite open in declaring their interests in accordance with the law. One of them, Poju Zabludowicz, the billionaire funder of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) is good friends with Madonna—not exactly the kind of company you'd choose if you were trying to hide behind a veil of obscurity.
Much is also made of the influence of Friends of Israel groupings in the British Parliament. Such allegations are, of course, rendered ridiculous with a moment's reflection on the countervailing influence of vast amounts of Arab oil money, not to mention the fact that membership in such groups for many parliamentarians is either purely formal or outright meaningless. Michael Ancram, for example, a former Northern Ireland minister and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel for more than 30 years, is famous for calling for talks with Hamas.
Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4's widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby's "seditious behavior," its "disgusting attack on British democracy," "the hand of global Zionism at work," and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: "We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out."
If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.
Jewish leadership organizations have long feared accusations of divided loyalty between Britain and Israel and, ironically given the charges now being made against them, are frequently criticized in their own communities for failing to be sufficiently robust in Israel's defense. The risk is that some may now be panicked into silence.
Non-Jews who call for a more reasoned discussion of Israel—already a small and diminishing group in Britain—will likely face additional slanders against their integrity: Since there is supposedly no reasonable case to be made in favor of the Jewish state, we must have sold out to the "Lobby."
Such calumnies cannot be allowed to stand. Now more than ever, the forces of reason and decency must continue the fight to be heard.
Mr. Shepherd is director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His new book, "A State Beyond the Pale: Europe's Problem With Israel," has just been published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
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