FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

As I write, news reports indicate that hundreds are dead and injured in Mumbai. Indian commandos are about to storm the Chabad house there, where it appears that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife Rivka and an uncertain number of others are being held hostage by terrorists (their small son was reportedly rescued early on).  It’s painful but impossible to stop trying to keep up with events as this horrible but familiar story unfolds.

I’m sure when it’s over the ‘mujahideen’ that perpetrated this atrocity will explain that they had important ‘political’ motives. What political imperative made them include the Chabad house as a target? Is Chabad someow a representative of the Zionist entity that is denying ‘human rights’ to Palestinians, who are themselves no strangers to this kind of ‘political’ activity?

No, let’s face it, we know why the Chabad house was attacked.

It would be good if the various camps among Israelis and Jews everywhere would pay attention and understand that after all this time they are not a ‘normal’ people in the eyes of the world. This is why there needs to be a state of Israel that can defend itself and indeed, defend the Jewish people.

Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg

Technorati Tags: Mumbai, Chabad

On May 10, 1933, books from university libraries all over Germany were burned by Nazi students and officials. Books were chosen to be burned because of their ‘un-German’ content or Jewish authorship:

In a symbolic act of ominous significance, on May 10, 1933 the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of “un-German” books, presaging an era of state censorship and control of culture. On the night of May 10, in most university towns, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades “against the un-German spirit.” The scripted rituals called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged and unwanted books into the bonfires with great joyous ceremony, band-playing, songs, “fire oaths,” and incantations. — Wikipedia

Frederick William University in Berlin — now called Humboldt University — held a major book-burning that evening in the Platz am Opernhaus (today called the Bebelplatz) that is next to the University. Here is how it looked that evening in 1933:

Nazi bookburning at Platz Am Opernhaus (Bebelplatz), May 10, 1933

Today’s young Germans seem to have lost little of their anti-Semitic enthusiasm. On Sunday, Germans observed the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which many consider the official Nazi expulsion of the Jewish people from the human race.  On Wednesday an Exhibit in the Humboldt University lobby called “Betrayed and Sold” about the looting of Jewish businesses by the Nazis was destroyed by rioting high school students and left-wing activists.

Although the protest was supposedly about such things as class size, matriculation exams and school staffing, the students nevertheless expressed themselves about other issues:

[University President] Christoph Markschies told The Jerusalem Post that one of the protesters in the lobby of the university said “Damn Israel” when asked by another student to “stop” vandalizing the exhibit…

“Friendship with Israel is part of the HU’s identity,” said Markschies, adding that “no one can tell me that the exhibit was damaged because it was a mistake”…

Niklas Wuchenauer, a pupil in Berlin and spokesperson for the protest group “Tear down the educational barriers,” told the Post that “we regret that the exhibit was damaged or destroyed.”

When asked about the “Damn Israel” statement, Wuchenauer said the statement is not anti-Semitic and simply means it “would it have been more meaningful if the UN had not created two states in 1947 and had integrated the Jews into one state.” — Jerusalem Post

I see. A German destroys an exhibit about the persecution of Jews by Germans in the 1930’s, before there was a state of Israel, in order to suggest that there should not be a state of Israel. One could not possibly ask for a clearer example of the relationship between extreme hatred of Israel and anti-Semitism.

Here is how the Bebelplatz looked this week, 75 years and 6 months after the bookburning. Same idea, different year.

Technorati Tags: Germany, anti-Semitism, Israel

News item:

Jerusalem is holy to two religions - Islam and Christianity, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayad said at the UN-organized interfaith peace conference on Wednesday night. Fayad failed to mention the importance of Israel’s capital to the Jewish people, Israel Radio reported.

I suddenly understand. They are absolutely eaten up with jealousy because they believe that in fact the Jews really do have a covenant with Hashem and they don’t. It just annoys the hell out of Muslims that we got there first. So they build mosques on top of our holy places and then, like Yasser Arafat, argue that there never was a Jewish temple there.

And not just Muslims. How else can you explain the historical anger of Christians when faced with stiff-necked Jews who balk at taking the next ‘logical’ step and accepting the Savior? Doesn’t it just make you want to burn someone at the stake when he punctures your pretenses? You are nothing more than a wannabe, the Jew seems to say.

In fact, this applies to secular anti-Semites too, although they would never admit to a feeling of spiritual inferiority. But what else motivates someone like Shlomo Zand to (incompetently) try to prove that today’s Jews are not descended from the biblical inhabitants of the land of Israel? Face it, Shlomo, you feel inferior, incomplete, so you need to try to take away what the others have and you don’t.

Assimilationists say that Jews would be better off hiding their smug stubbornness. Why make everyone mad by running around claiming to have an exclusive relationship to God? The problem with this approach is that after a while you forget that this relationship exists.

I see this as the key to understanding how the Jewish people will (or will not) survive, and how there can be something that unites Jews of all degrees and kinds of observance.

Those like Fayad are not just trying to take the land of Israel away from the Jews and ‘occupy’ it. They are trying to break the connection between the Jews, God, and the land. If they are successful, the Jewish people will not simply be dispersed yet again, they will disappear.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Judaism, Salam Fayad

Antony Lerman writes (”Jews attacking Jews“),

When I first started professionally monitoring and studying anti-Semitism almost 30 years ago, there was, broadly speaking, a shared understanding of what it was…

We Jews knew who the enemy was. Since Jews do not cause anti-Semitism, we fought those who peddled theories of the world Jewish conspiracy, Holocaust denial, blood libels. Except at the very margins, we didn’t fight Jews.

How things have changed. Today, bitter arguments rage about what constitutes anti-Semitism. When Jew-hatred is identified, it’s mostly in the form of what many call the “new anti-Semitism” — essentially, anti-Zionism. Others (this writer included) fundamentally dispute that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are synonymous.

But whatever position you take, it’s clear that a revolutionary change in the discourse about anti-Semitism has occurred: Practically no discussion about current anti-Semitism now takes place without Israel and Zionism being at its center.

Lerman goes on to decry the phenomenon of Jews bitterly attacking other Jews as ‘anti-Semitic’ simply because they may be anti-Israel:

The attacks are often vitriolic, ad hominem and indiscriminate. Aspersions are cast on the Jewishness of individuals whom the attacker cannot possibly know. The charge of Jewish “self-hatred” — another way of calling someone a Jewish anti-Semite — is used ever more frequently, despite mounting evidence that it’s an entirely bogus concept.

Of course he’s right that “Jew vs. Jew” is not helpful to the cause of preserving the Jewish people. But there really is a sense in which anti-Semitism has changed, especially since 1967.

Let’s go back to Germany in 1938. There was no problem in defining anti-Semitism — it was when Brownshirts wrecked your store and beat you up. In the US after the war it took a more subtle form, that of ‘restrictions’ on where Jews could live, ‘quotas’ on where they could study, etc.

As time went by American society became less suffused with manifestations of various forms of racial and ethnic prejudice, and anti-Semitism was primarily the province of the extreme and marginal Right — neo-Nazis like George Lincoln Rockwell (1918-67), and racists like David Duke. It goes without saying that neither Hitler’s SA, Rockwell’s American Nazi Party or Duke’s KKK attracted many Jewish recruits.

In the mid-1960’s Yasser Arafat — with Soviet guidance — turned the Palestinian public relations strategy around. David Meir-Levy wrote (History Upside Down, pp. 28-29),

Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success in mobilizing left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation.

Ho’s chief strategist, General Giap, made it clear to Arafat and his lieutenants that in order to succeed, they too needed to redefine the terms of their struggle. Giap’s counsel was simple but profound: the PLO needed to work in a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave the appearance of moderation:

Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.

At the same time that he was getting advice from General Giap, Arafat was also being tutored by Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments (1958-1962):

Wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab states, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead, present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression …that in the struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.

The new approach was wildly successful, especially with the moderate Left, which had generally supported the somewhat socialist state of Israel. At the 2001 UN Durban Conference on Racism, this approach was refined, focused and amplified. Now Israel was presented as not only denying Palestinians their rights, but as doing so out of an essential racism. The false analogy with South African apartheid was pushed and similar remedies were proposed: delegitimization, boycotts, divestment, etc.

Thus in addition to the power of the anticolonialist theme, the potent element of racism was added. Especially in the US, where in recent decades the full horror of our own racist history had been coming to the surface in white society — along with powerful feelings of guilt — it was not difficult for Israel’s enemies to make anti-Zionism almost a religion on the Left, especially on college campuses.

Israel’s Arab opponents — especially Egypt and Syria, which absorbed numerous former Nazis who busied themselves with such projects as developing chemical weapons — had started adopting traditional European anti-Semitic themes almost immediately after the founding of the state. And the Palestinian Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had been an admirer of Hitler since the 1930’s, injected the same ideas into the Palestinian movement.

It wouldn’t be unfair to say that many Palestinians and other Arabs took to it like ducks to water. For one thing, the massive power of international Zionism serves as an explanation for the otherwise ‘inexplicable’ humbling of the Arabs at the hands of the numerically inferior Jews in 1948 and 1967. In addition, hatred of Jews is easier to develop and sustain than liking for Palestinians, something that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has found effective to exploit.

As a result we find that Jew-hatred is inextricably bound up with the anti-Zionism of the Palestinians, the Arab nations, and the Iranians. And as anti-Semitism has been compared to a virus, is it surprising that it has also affected many of the Western supporters of the Middle Eastern anti-Zionist cause?

So while Lerman is correct that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism don’t mean the same thing, many anti-Zionists are as a matter of fact also anti-Semites — and this includes some Jews.

In addition, there is a form of extreme anti-Zionism that can only be understood as a form of anti-Semitism itself (see my discussion of “Anti-Zionism and antisemitism“). And it is this extreme manifestation that characterizes many of the Jews that Lerman admits are “at the forefront of the growing number of anti-Israel or anti-Zionist groups”.

These anti-Zionists are fond of saying that “any criticism of Israel is branded as anti-Semitism”, and that therefore they are being ‘muzzled’, prevented from expressing their legitimate political views. But in some cases the shoe may fit quite well.

Technorati Tags: Jews, anti-Semitism, antisemitism, Israel, anti-Zionism, Antony Lerman

Kick not against the pricks, lest sore pain come — Aeschylus

In a recent article, Jeffrey Goldberg writes about ‘blowback’, the idea that Israeli actions can endanger Diaspora Jews.

The impact of Israeli strategic decision-making on the physical safety of Diaspora Jewry is one of those borderline-taboo topics in American Jewish life. For obvious reasons, Israelis, and their Jewish supporters abroad, don’t want to have undermining thoughts about a theoretically negative consequence of Zionism, a movement that is meant to make Jews safer, not more threatened.

 The problem is simple: Muslim extremists often conflate Israel and the Diaspora. They do this for two reasons: One, they are anti-Semites, and so tend to see all Jews, and not merely “Zionists,” as their enemies; the second is a practical one — it is easy to strike at soft Jewish targets outside of Israel, easier, certainly, than executing mass terror attacks against Israeli targets these days. And so what you have, on occasion, is an attack like the one directed against the AMIA Jewish center in Argentina in 1994, in which eighty-five people were murdered.

Get it? Zionism is a bad idea because it might piss off the antisemites. And then they would really start killing Jews, and not just the ones in Israel. So better to withdraw support from Israel, and then…what? Maybe they will leave us alone?

I can’t even state the argument without its utter absurdity becoming evident. And to be fair to Goldberg, he doesn’t exactly agree with it. He writes,

I would never argue that Israel hasn’t strengthened, in particular, the American Jewish community, giving it both backbone and meaning. And I wouldn’t argue that Israel should refrain from acting as a rescuer of persecuted Jews worldwide simply because it blurs the line between the interests of the Diaspora and the interests of the Jewish state.

But he does suggest that Israel shouldn’t bomb Iran because it will annoy Hezbollah:

…the existence of groups like Hezbollah means that Israel should weigh, among other factors, the potential impact of a strike on Iran on Diaspora Jewish institutions. Already, I’ve been told, Jewish institutions across South America are on alert for a “revenge” attack because of the assassination of Imad Mugniyeh. Jewish institutions in North America are another story. Outside of New York, in particular, most institutions are fairly oblivious to some very obvious threats, and most Jewish leaders don’t realize that Iran, or Hezbollah, or for that matter, al Qaeda, think about their institutions as legitimate targets for terrorist attack.

In the end, he pulls back from the abyss and suggests that

The only thing that can be done is for Jewish institutions to prepare themselves for attacks that would almost certainly be launched in the wake of an Israeli strike. And, as of right now, the American Jewish community is not prepared at all.

I can’t disagree with that. In particular there is even an attitude of contempt that is displayed, especially by liberal Jews, when the question of security for Jewish institutions comes up, as if to say “how dare you suggest that we aren’t totally safe here in America?” Interestingly, these are the same people who start getting nervous when anyone threatens to anger the antisemites.

In Israel (at least until recently) it was generally thought that it doesn’t pay to worry about irritating antisemites, because they either are already enraged or will find a pretext to become so. It was generally thought that preparedness and sometimes preemption is the best response to threats against security.

Israel gives more than abstract “backbone” or “meaning” to Diaspora Jewish communities. I’m convinced that the original Zionist conception of Israel as a source of physical security for world Jewry is still valid. During WWII, even when the end of the Nazi regime was only weeks away, the British and Americans could not allocate the resources to bomb the gas chambers. Before the war, Jewish refugees were turned away all around the world. What would a well-armed Jewish state have done then? What would Israel do today in similar circumstances? Antisemitism is not dead and indeed is becoming more prevalent.

One of the driving forces of the original Zionists was the realization that nobody, not the ‘enlightened’ nations of Europe and certainly not the ‘tolerant’ authorities of the Ottoman Empire, was going to lift a finger to protect Jews. And this was before the 1903 Kishniev Pogrom and long before the Holocaust. This hasn’t changed.

Antisemites, including Iranian President Ahmadinejad, insist that Israel is bad for the Jews, that in fact it will make it easier to kill them if they are all in one place. A poor argument: which is better, to be in one place and possess nuclear weapons or to be scattered among many nations and be powerless as in 1940?

I’m afraid that Goldberg and others (like the remarkably craven M. J. Rosenberg) have fallen precisely into the trap set for them by Ahmadinejad et. al. Here’s Rosenberg:

The whole question of whether Israel’s actions can jeopardize us here is fraught with troubling questions. But they have to be raised.

An Israeli attack on Iran — absent an imminent threat of attack from Iran — is a terrible idea for many reasons. It would not succeed in eliminating Iran’s nuclear program but would almost surely prompt Iran to both opt out of the international inspection regime and redouble its efforts to produce a bomb. It would unite Arabs and Muslims against the US (they know that Israel could not attack Iran without implicit or explicit US approval). It would have a disastrous effect on the American effort next door in Iraq, eliminating recently made gains and endangering 130,000 American troops (this is why Defense Secretary Robert Gates so vehemently opposes an Israeli attack). And it would end the Arab-Israeli peace process, even putting the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan at risk. And, no small thing, an attack would lead to a deadly Hizbullah missile onslaught against Israel, joined no doubt by Hamas in the south.

Nonetheless, an attack is not out of the question because there are forces in Israel and here that believe that anything, no matter how dangerous, is better than either negotiating with Iran or relying on sanctions.

No, if it happens it will be because Israel believes that anything, no matter how dangerous, is better than a nuclear weapon in the hands of Ahmadinejad. Any Israeli leadership will be quite aware of the danger from Hezbollah, Hamas, and even Syria, and there will not be an attack unless there was no alternative.

Regarding the Arab response to such an attack: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan would absolutely love it if Israel eliminated the Iranian nuclear capability. They would denounce Israel to the skies, but they would even help Israel if they thought it could be done in absolute secrecy.

As far as the US is concerned, we need to understand that we will not get Israel to sit still while Iran builds bombs, because Israel views this as an existential issue. Indeed US policies that attempt to stop Israel by witholding equipment, etc., can not prevent an attack, they can only make it less effective — which is exactly what we do not want.

Indeed, with the apparent impossibility of applying sanctions strong enough to deter Iran, and the apparent decision here that the US will not take military action, then the only deterrent left is Iran’s fear of an Israeli attack.

Therefore, if we see an Iranian bomb as opposed to our interests — and we must — the US should do all in its power to strengthen Israel, rather than trying to keep her on a leash.

Technorati Tags: Zionism, Israel, Iran, Jeffrey Goldberg, M J Rosenberg

My wife left our car with its pro-Israel bumper stickers outside a big local  bookstore today, and she found the following note on the windshield when she returned:

“ZIONISM”

IS

Seperatism

&

Rasic Racism

The good news is that the person who left this note was apparently capable of recognizing that he/she had spelled “racism” incorrectly the first time, although “seperatism” seems to have slipped by.

Our correspondent doesn’t seem to know what ’separatism’ is (here’s an example). Even Jimmy Carter didn’t accuse us of that. Probably he or she meant ‘apartheid’, but got tired just thinking about spelling it.

One of the things which characterizes grass-roots anti-Israel people is their complete ignorance of the actual issues and of history (our friend is even ignorant of the actual slogans).

The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has nothing to do with race  — how can it when it is impossible to tell an Israeli from a Palestinian by their appearance? But antisemites of the Right and Left (for example, Shlomo Zand) will go on and on about the Khazars, about how Ashkenazis are not actually Jews, etc. Their obsession with race is indeed racist, but is not shared by average Israeli, who is concerned about Palestinian terrorism, not Arab or Jewish genetics.

It’s true that anti-Israel Arabs have adopted a lot of the trappings of European racist antisemitism in order to stir up hatred. But Israeli Jews have always had more concrete reasons to dislike Arabs, such as the history of murderous attacks, from pogroms in the 1800’s, through the ‘riots’ of the 1920’s and -30’s and the terror attacks of the Arafat period, to the Qassam rockets of today. Who needs racial antagonism when friends and relatives are murdered?

Despite all this, Israel has not exterminated the Palestinians or ethnically cleansed territories captured in wars started by the Arab nations — Israel has not behaved like Jordan, for example, which one way or another eliminated every last Jew in the areas it occupied in 1948.

One might well ask who in the Middle East is actually racist. Egypt, where Mein Kampf is a runaway best seller and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was a hit TV series; Hamas, whose charter calls for the killing of Jews and repeats silly antisemitic cliches — it would be funny if they didn’t actually murder people — or Saudi Arabia, whose official website until very recently carried a statement that “Jewish persons” would not be allowed into the Kingdom? What about Sudan, where an Arab government is committing genocide against three non-Arab ethnic groups, because of their color or religion or both?

If you search for ‘Zionism’ on YouTube, you will find numerous videos in which neo-Nazis, ordinary antisemites, and Iranian TV personalities explain how Zionism is a racist doctrine that holds that Jews are superior to non-Jews and that Jews must strive for world domination (or even the extermination of non-Jews). All of this is false.

Zionism simply states that the Jewish people has a right to self-determination, like any other people. Zionists believe that the State of Israel was legitimately established and has a right to exist as a Jewish State (see: “Zionism — What it is and isn’t“).

Our note writer needs to study history as well as spelling.

Technorati Tags: Zionism, Israel 

News item:

Samir Kuntar and four Lebanese prisoners captured in the Second Lebanon War will receive an official state welcoming when they are released by Israel on Wednesday as part of the prisoner swap with Hizbullah.

The five men will be greeted at Beirut’s airport by Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and President Michel Suleiman…

In Kuntar’s home in Abey, streets are decorated with banners welcoming the return of the former member of the radical Palestine Liberation Front. “Samir Kuntar is the conscience of Lebanon, Palestine and the Arab nation. Abey welcomes the hero, prisoner Samir Kuntar,” reads one sign. [my emphasis]

Incredible. They are simply psychotic with hatred. Smashing the heads of children is national policy. Only the Nazis compare.

Meanwhile,  the President of the State of Israel illustrates that he has no understanding of what this is about:

“We do not want murderers to go free,” [President Shimon Peres] said, “but we have a moral obligation to bring home soldiers whom we sent to defend their country”, and as painful as it is for Nina Keren the mother and grandmother of Danny Haran and his daughter Einat who were killed in Nahariya by Samir Kuntar in 1982 [sic], he also had to consider the families of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev who had done so much and had been waiting for two years to have their boys come home. — Jerusalem Post

Peres  has never been more wrong. It is not about balancing the interests of the Haran, Goldwasser and Regev families. Not at all.

It is not even about the State of Israel. It is about the Jewish People and the need to show the world that murdering Jews because they are Jews will not be tolerated or excused.

Hizbullah’s commander in south Lebanon, Sheik Nabil Kaouk, said Tuesday that Wednesday’s prisoner exchange showed Israel’s “humiliating failure in confronting the resistance militarily and politically.”

He is right and Peres is wrong. Kuntar should have been executed in 1979, but there’s still time to correct the error.

Update [16 Jul 1025 PDT]: Corrected the date of the Haran murders to 1979.

Kuntar is free. Read a devastating analysis of Israel’s policy of trading prisoners with terror organizations here.

Update [16 Jul 1040 PDT]:  News item:

Abbas congratulates family of Samir Kuntar

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday sent his regards to the families of Samir Kuntar and the other four Lebanese prisoners scheduled to be transferred to Hizbullah.

Abbas praised the prisoner swap and congratulated the Kuntar family.

Israel should immediately terminate negotiations and break relations with the Palestinian Authority, which has showed itself to be a terrorist entity.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Kuntar, Lebanon, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority

Yesterday was exactly 40 years since Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan — a Palestinian terrorist. Kennedy was a strong supporter of Israel and so a natural target.

Sirhan, an Arab Christian born in East Jerusalem in 1944 and an immigrant to the US in 1956, was a passionate antisemite and Arab nationalist (see “Why Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy“). There is no question that Sirhan, while obviously unbalanced, knew what he was doing and did it for his cause:

During Sirhan’s trial his mother related how the intense feelings of the Palestinians remained with the family even though they had been far removed from the conflict when they immigrated to America. She told of how her family had lived in Jerusalem for “thousands of years” and she spoke of the bitterness and hatred of the Israelis who had “taken their land.” Mary Sirhan believed her son had killed Robert Kennedy because of his Arab nationalism. She said, “What he did, he did for his country…”

Following his arrest Sirhan told one of the court-appointed psychiatrists, George Y. Abe, about his political philosophy. Sirhan told him he was solidly anti-Zionist and disgusted at the way Jews in America had such a strong influence within the American political system. Sirhan said he believed Robert Kennedy listened to the Jews and he saw the senator as having sold out to them.

Sirhan’s lawyers downplayed the political reasons for the murder:

From the beginning both Sirhan’s lawyers and the U.S. media sought to portray the assassination of Robert Kennedy as the act of a deranged individual bent on seeking fame and notoriety.

The New York lawyer Emile Zola Berman, a Jew, became one of Sirhan’s lawyers and was praised for defending a Palestinian. However, he may well have been used by the defense team to prevent the political aspects of the crime from being addressed. It was Berman who advocated Sirhan’s defense be built around the plea of “diminished capacity,” to prove that Sirhan had been mentally ill. Sirhan protested and told his lawyers, “Have you ever heard the Arab side of the story?…I mean on the TV, the radio, in the mass media?…That’s what bugs me! There’s no Arab voice in America, and goddamn it, I’m gonna show ‘em in that courtroom. I’m gonna really give’em hell about it.” During the trial, Sirhan repeatedly voiced his political motives but his lawyers went ahead with their trial strategy.

This parallels another, more recent case. The trial of Naveed Haq, who shot one woman to death and injured five others when he invaded Seattle’s Jewish Federation in July 2006, ended in a hung jury this week. Haq, a Muslim of Pakistani descent, was clear about his motives as well:

He spewed anti-Israel and anti-Jewish slurs during the attack while decrying the Iraq war and Israel’s 2006 conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Haq made similar comments on a video shown in the courtroom prior to the trial’s start.

According to a court memorandum, Haq told a 911 operator during his shooting rampage, “I’m not upset at the people, I’m upset at your foreign policy. These are Jews. I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East.” — JTA

But apparently one juror was convinced by defense arguments that Haq was legally insane.

These acts are irrational in the context of our society — who knows if Robert Kennedy’s death advanced the Arab cause? — but in the Middle East, where martyrdom is admired and compromise is considered emasculation, it’s another story.

Technorati Tags: Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, Naveed Haq

“What I like about the Catholic Church is that it is one of the few institutions left that still believes that some propositions are true” — Patterson Brown, c. 1964

Recently I was asked to appear on a show on a Catholic TV station to present the Jewish point of view about the controversial Good Friday Latin prayer adopted by Pope Benedict XVI (I’ve written about it here and here).

What I wanted to say was that I wasn’t bothered at all by the prayer, which asks that God may “illumine their hearts that they might acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Savior of all”.

This is because Pope Paul VI, in a declaration issued in 1965 called Nostra Aetate, made the following points quite clear:

1. The Church believes that its doctrine is true and universal for all people
2. Nevertheless, one must be respectful and tolerant of other religions

Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism are mentioned, and antisemitism is categorically singled out for condemnation. Arguments like “the Jews are guilty of the death of Jesus” are specifically refuted.

I do not object to Catholics hoping that I will ultimately see the light, as long as they have stopped inciting pogroms because of my refusal to do so. If it makes them feel better, they should hope.

What I would have said on the TV program was that yes, there is a long history of antisemitism based directly on Church dogma and in many cases incited by officials of the Church, going back to the first century. The stubbornness of Jews in refusing to see the ‘truth’ as propounded by Christianity was an excuse for many massacres, the Inquisition’s burning of ‘judaizing’ converts, and even the pogroms that drove my grandparents out of Czarist Russia.

But in 1965, the Church resigned from the ranks of the antisemites. Maybe it was because of the Holocaust, and one can wish that it had happened years earlier, but in any event it happened. Catholicism did not give up its insistence on the truth of its doctrines, but began to insist that correct belief be accompanied by tolerance.

Now the story — both my personal story and the historical one about antisemitism — gets interesting. Did antisemitism start to die out when the Church dumped it?

No. Actually, there was a resurgence of antisemitism which started in the 1960’s, and which came from an entirely different place. Instead of Christian dogma, it stemmed primarily from the radical anti-Zionism of the Arab nations, abetted by the Left (which took its cue from the Soviets, who had taken the Arab side in the Mideast conflict and who still had plenty of traditional Russian Zhid-hatred in their blood).

Arab and Persian Muslims found support in the Quran and other writings for their antisemitism — Muhammad had several conflicts with Jewish tribes in his conquest of Arabia and wasn’t shy about expressing his feelings. And Islam did not have a Vatican II to distinguish between a doctrinal disagreement and a casus belli. Making things worse, Muslim antisemites adopted the tried and true themes of European Jew-hatred such as the blood libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and so forth.

So now you can hear in one place that Zionist, colonialist Jews are sons of apes and pigs who drain the blood of non-Jewish children to make matzah and commit genocide against the Palestinians while undermining the foundations of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

This rejuvenated anti-Jewish incitement now plays exactly the same role as it did for the Nazis, setting the Jewish people apart, blaming them for their own persecution, and developing conditions under which they can be destroyed.

I wanted to contrast the attitude of today’s Church with that of the Islamic fundamentalists of Iran and Hamas. I wanted to say that I would far rather have someone praying for the veil to be removed from my eyes (as an earlier Good Friday prayer said) than the head from my neck.

Unfortunately, the TV producer told me that I was expressly forbidden to use the words ‘Muslim’ or ‘Iran’ on the program, and that the only antisemitism that could be discussed was that of the Catholic Church.

I wasn’t prepared to talk about antisemitism without mentioning the elephant in the living-room, the incitement from the Arab nations and Iran. And I couldn’t talk about the Holocaust and leave out the likelihood of another one within the next two years. So I won’t be on the program.

I think the producer would have preferred for me to say that the new Pope’s prayer was a step backward, because it states that we Jews are incorrect in our beliefs. But I don’t think that the Church ever accepted the radical view that all religions are equally true.

What I would have liked to emphasize was the other part of Nostra Aetate: the part that is clearly not accepted by so many Muslims, the part that says that you must respect and tolerate the religious beliefs of others, even if you think they are wrong.

Technorati Tags: antisemitism, Good Friday Prayer, Catholic Church, Jews, Muslims, Nostra Aetate

Antisemitism has taken many forms throughout its long career. It’s a frustrating rejoinder to those who believe that there is such a thing as social progress analogous to technological development.

Many of us think of Christian antisemitism, forged in the struggle of the early Christians with the Roman Empire, as the seminal form from which later Jew-hatreds sprang. There’s some truth to this.

The recent film (from the book by James Carroll) “Constantine’s Sword” comes down quite hard on the Catholic Church:

In Carroll’s telling, Catholic hostility to Jews goes back at least to the fourth century, when the emperor Constantine conquered Rome, carrying a sword fashioned as a cross. At the time, he says in the film, there were roughly the same number of Jews as Christians in the world.

In subsequent centuries, the Church’s attitudes toward Jews ranged from cold tolerance to frenzied orgies of religiously inspired mass murder. Among the highlights of this tortured history is the total destruction of centers of Jewish life situated along the Rhine river in 1096. As the Crusaders journeyed to the Holy Land to make war on the Muslims — armed with shields bearing signs of the cross and with priests in the lead — they warmed up for the battles to come by wiping out the Jewish settlements in their path. — Ben Harris (JTA)

There is no question that it was bad for Jews in the Christian world long after the middle ages. Discrimination, pogroms, even mass expulsions were their lot in Europe for hundreds of years. My own grandparents fled the Pale of Settlement almost exactly 100 years ago to escape violent persecution by the locals, who used Christianity as an excuse for their actions.

In the mid-20th century the anti-Christian Nazis and the atheist Stalin cynically used Christian themes to buttress their own antisemitic programs, and the Jews suffered mightily. And there were also Catholic voices raised against the Jews, even here in America (see Charles Coughlin). But a funny thing happened, in part as a reaction to the massive evil of this time:

The Church grew up.

In one of the most important documents of the modern Church, Nostra Aetate (1965 - read it!), Pope Paul VI does not dilute what he sees as the fundamental principle of Christianity — that there is only one way to salvation — but calls upon Catholics to understand and appreciate the truths (albeit partial, in his view) found in other religions. Most importantly, he demands that the Church treat adherents of other religions with respect and tolerance, specifically denouncing antisemitism.

Unfortunately, at just about the same time that the traditional host of the antisemitism virus began to reject it, a new one appeared. During the 1960’s, the Arab-Israeli conflict had taken the form of a proxy struggle between the US and the Soviet Union, with the Soviets taking the side of the Arabs. This led to such absurdities as fascist Arab regimes like that of Syria declaring themselves to be ’socialists’, but also to the international Left — which if not pro-Soviet was at least anti-American — taking a strong anti-Israel position as well.

Although not all anti-Zionism is antisemitic, there is a natural progression which has been followed here, and today the extreme Left has outstripped the neo-Nazi Right as a reservoir of antisemitic expression.

But the greatest outpouring of Jew-hatred today comes from the Muslim world:

Muslim anti-Semitism is growing in scope and extremism, to the point that it has become a credible strategic threat for Israel, according to a 180-page report produced for Israeli policymakers by the semi-official Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC)…

Among the report’s most worrying findings is the growth over the past three decades of uniquely Muslim roots to older European versions of anti-Semitism. Without discounting classical Christian Europe’s canards regarding secret Jewish conspiracies, the ritual slaughter of non-Jewish children and other allegations of Jewish evil, anti-Semitism in the Muslim world increasingly finds its own, Islamic reasons for anti-Jewish hatred through new interpretations of Islamic history and scripture.

From the Koranic story of a Jewess who poisoned Muhammad, to the troubled relations between Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of Arabia, radical Islamist groups and thinkers have been using extreme anti-Semitic rhetoric that has grown increasingly popular with the Muslim public, particularly in Iran and the Arab states. Using well-known Koranic texts, these groups have been mapping out the Jews’ “innate negative attributes” and teaching a paradigm of permanent struggle between Muslims and Jews.

The goal of this “Islamified” anti-Semitism, according to the report, is to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a national territorial contest which could be resolved through compromise to a “historic, cultural and existential struggle for the supremacy of Islam.” — Jerusalem Post

The report goes on to describe how — instead of European antisemitic literature being imported to the Middle East, it is now exported to Europe, where it influences Muslim segments of the population there. And in the Middle East, antisemitism has government approval in many countries which are allegedly at peace with Israel — like Egypt, where you can buy Arabic translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on many street corners.

The most worrisome thing in the report is that antisemitism as an instrument of national policy, last seen in Nazi Germany, has returned:

At the heart of this surge in Muslim anti-Semitism lies Iran, with the regime’s support for Holocaust denial and hosting of anti-Semites from around the world, along with formal calls for Israel’s destruction by many of the country’s leaders.

“Iran is the first example of its kind since Nazi Germany in which a state officially adopts an active policy of anti-Semitism as a means to further its national interests,” the report notes.

It goes on to say that while Iran does not deny that Jews were massacred during WWII, the current regime seeks to minimize the scale of the Holocaust in order to reduce support for Israel’s very existence in the West, which it believes comes from feelings of guilt over the world’s inaction while Jews were murdered during WWII.

So one can understand, in the face of all this, my unconcern about Pope Benedict XVI’s promulgation of a Latin Good Friday prayer that calls for Catholics to pray for the Jews to accept Jesus as savior — something which does not contradict Nostra Aetate, although it is perhaps uncomfortable for some Jews, and although liberal Catholics may wish that the Church had moved further along the road to ecumenicism than it actually did.

Nevertheless, it’s unfortunate that other organizations, like the UN, have not followed the lead of the Church in this area. If the world has learned anything from the history of the mid-20th century one would expect firm condemnations — and real sanctions — of governments like those of Egypt and especially Iran, which today exemplify the racist philosophy that should have been buried with Adolf Hitler.

Technorati Tags: antisemitism, anti-Semitism, Catholic Church, Pope, Nostra Aetate, Muslim antisemitism, Iran

One of the favorite themes of Neo-Nazis is that today’s Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Jews, that is, descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea, but rather descended from the Khazars, Caucasian nomads that converted to Judaism around the 7th century (some of them converted to Christianity and Islam too, but never mind).

Now an Israeli scholar, Shlomo Zand (or Sand) claims that Sephardic Jews aren’t Jews either, but descended from various North African tribes.

Zand is not a neo-Nazi, and he even admits that his ‘findings’ don’t reflect on the legitimacy of the State of Israel. However, since he believes that “the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way”, and also that “the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendants”, one can see that he is happy to provide ammunition to those who want an ideological foundation for their hoped-for destruction of Israel.

Zand, a historian who has heretofore written about 20th-century France, based his work on modern “studies that present unorthodox views of the origins of the Jews” (I can imagine). For a taste of the absurdity of his argument, here’s how the Jewish People was ‘invented’:

At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people “retrospectively,” out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.

Of course the literature of the Jewish People goes back to long before this period. So Zand is apparently saying that at some point an influx of foreign DNA made the Jewish People not the the Jewish People, and therefore — knowing that they had been adulterated and therefore lost their birthright — they conspired to pretend that they were.

Even if we grant his genealogical point (which I don’t), certainly the ‘peoplehood’ of the Jews rests in culture and spirit and not physical DNA!

It’s argued that there is genetic evidence that links both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews to the Middle East. I’m not qualified to evaluate it, of course, but most importantly, even if many Jews were descended from converts, who cares?

I could similarly argue that many Palestinian Arabs are descended from Egyptians that came with Muhammad Ali in the early part of the 19th Century, or Syrians who migrated to Palestine when the end of Ottoman rule and Jewish development improved the regional economy. I could talk about how nobody ever heard of the ‘Palestinian people’ until 1967. But this, too, would be irrelevant.

What is relevant is that the legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel is not dependent on the presence of converts in the genealogy of the Jews. It is not dependent on Jewish provenance in biblical times, just as it is not justified by the Holocaust.

The Early Zionists purchased land legally, often paying exorbitant prices for poor land which they then improved by draining swamps and so forth. The yishuv (pre-state Jewish settlement) built all the institutions that would become the state.

The Jewish state received international sanction in 1947 and was kept through a series of defensive wars, which in fact are still ongoing. Israel is no less ‘legitimate’ than Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia which were created at about the same time — and possibly more so, due to the UN Partition Resolution, and the fact that Israel is a democracy.

Although religious Jews (and many Christians) believe that the Jews were given the Land as described in the Torah, there is a solid secular foundation for the state as well.

Zand’s work appears to be another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel, similar to the completely insane thesis that the IDF’s failure to rape Arab women is a racist phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Academia, antisemitism, Shlomo Zand, Shlomo Sand

From Reuters:

Jewish groups complained last year when the Pope issued a decree allowing wider use of the old-style Latin Mass and a missal, or prayer book, that was phased out after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965.

They protested against the re-introduction of the old prayer for conversion of the Jews and asked the Pope to change it.

The Vatican last month revised the contested Latin prayer used by a traditionalist minority on Good Friday, the day marking Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, removing a reference to Jewish “blindness” over Christ and deleting a phrase asking God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

Jews criticized the new version because it still says they should recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men. It asks that “all Israel may be saved” and Jews say it keeps an underlying call to conversion that they had wanted removed.

Vatican II changed the ancient Latin version of this prayer, removing the phrase ‘perfidious Jews’. But then it created a new collection of prayers in various local languages — the vernacular liturgy — which was supposed to replace the Latin one. The prayer which appears in the vernacular liturgy does not mention conversion, but the Latin version still did, although ‘perfidious’ was gone.

The Latin ritual did not totally disappear, however. Some conservative Catholics continued to use it, but were required to obtain permission from their bishop.

The present Pope, as mentioned in the article, is encouraging those Catholics who want to use the Latin ritual to do so, and has removed the requirement for approval. But some Jews and liberal Catholics wish that he had simply translated the vernacular prayer back into Latin. Instead, he chose to create a new prayer that took a middle course — but still mentioned conversion.

We can understand the concern, given the long history of Christian antisemitism based to a certain extent on the stiff-necked Jews’ refusal to see the light. And we can also understand the Pope — and many other Christians — for whom a primary part of their belief system is that it is universal.

I think, though, that the concern is misplaced in view of the nature of antisemitism today. Consider this:

Britain has become the epicenter for anti-Semitic trends in Europe as traditional, age-old anti-Semitism in a country whose literature and cultural tradition were “drenched” in anti-Semitism has developed into a contemporary mix of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, an Israeli historian said Monday.

The problem of anti-Semitism in Britain is exacerbated by a growing and increasingly radical Muslim population, the weak approach taken by a timid British Jewish leadership, and the detachment of the British from their Christian roots, said Hebrew University historian Prof. Robert S. Wistrich in a lecture on British anti-Semitism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. — Jerusalem Post [my emphasis]

Wistrich goes on to argue that the roots of antisemitism in Britain are ancient, and of course they are entangled with Christianity. But it seems to me that today the major sources of antisemitism throughout the world are not Christian, but rather

• Traditional right-wing Jew hatred (neo-Nazis, etc.)

• The extreme anti-Zionism of the Left

• Muslim antisemitism and extreme anti-Zionism

Indeed, the desire to see Jews converted to Christianity is dear to Evangelical Protestants here in the US, a group which is generally pro-Zionist and which does not express views common to contemporary antisemites, such as “the Jews are responsible for 9/11 (or the Iraq war, etc.)”, or “the Jewish lobby controls the US government”. Recent violent acts against Jews or Jewish property in the US have mostly been perpetrated by neo-Nazi or racist groups, and radical Muslims.

I am personally less bothered by Christian prayers for my conversion than, for example, Hamas’ interpretation of the Quran which calls for Muslims to kill Jews.

It should be noted that critics of the Pope are not required to go into hiding because of death threats from Catholic fundamentalists.

Possibly those of us who are particularly worried about Christian antisemitism today are like the generals who always prepare to fight the last war instead of the next one?

Technorati Tags: antisemitism, anti-Semitism, Pope Benedict, Catholic liturgy