On Sunday November 14th, 2010, Jewish Voice for Peace a left wing activist group lead a protest in downtown Chicago against Israel and the United States. Some members of the organized protest did not even know how to explain the message of their signs, one of whom simply resorting to calling me a racist. Others accuse Israel of falsifying the video footage of weapons aboard the supposed humanitarian Gaza Flotila. One member of the group even voices a strong opposition to Israel’s right to exist and uses profane sexual slurs against Mrs. Netanyahu the wife of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli PM. After further investigation into the group’s activities, they are also organizing an event to support another activist group known as Anarchists Against the Wall, and Socialist activist Noam Chomsky is a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace’s Advisory Board.Now that you see what the Jewish Voice for Peace is really about, you can look at the nonsensical statement from their new initiative, called "Young, Jewish and Proud."It starts this way:
I. we exist.
We exist. We are everywhere. We speak and love and dream in every language. We pray three times a day or only during the high holidays or when we feel like we really need to or not at all. We are punks and students and parents and janitors and Rabbis and freedom fighters. We are your children, your nieces and nephews, your grandchildren. We embrace diaspora, even when it causes us a great deal of pain. We are the rubble of tangled fear, the deliverance of values. We are human. We are born perfect. We assimilate, or we do not. We are not apathetic. We know and name persecution when we see it. Occupation has constricted our throats and fattened our tongues. We are feeding each other new words. We have family, we build family, we are family. We re-negotiate. We atone. We re-draw the map every single day. We travel between worlds. This is not our birthright, it is our necessity.
I think "we have no clear ideas except for the fact that we hate Israel" would sum it up a little better, but Divest This has a masterful parody of their statement. Like all good parodies, it contains more truth than what it is making fun of:
I. we interrupt.Read the whole thing.
We shout, we yell, we interrupt when other people are speaking. Publically. We wear necklaces made of olives and have slightly creepy smiles. One of our grandparents was Jewish. Or not. You must take us seriously. We are. We be. We do. Do-be-do-be-do. We post photos of ourselves misbehaving on our Facebook pages. And thus, we exist. We are everywhere. And nowhere. Although we are mostly in Northern California, with about a dozen of us in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Including that doofus who tried picking me up at the last Jewish Voice for Peace square dance (yuck!). We speak in sentence fragments and mix our metaphors, fattening our tongues on the rubble of your nephews. We must do what we do. For if we didn’t tweet after we act naughty in front of grown ups, we would cease to be.
(h/t My Right Word and Barry via emails)