Thursday, October 29, 2015
Elder of Ziyon
Dr. Michael Harris, a member of StandWithUs, sees first hand the anti-Israel protests in the San Francisco Bay area. He brings years of experience to explain how to confront and make fools of the haters.
The book itself is relatively short, more a handbook than a reference work.
The focus of the book is not to explain everything about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is very specifically to show the audience of any public encounter between pro- and anti-Israel forces that the haters have no consistent position, except hate itself. So therefore he concentrates more on demolishing the actual types of people who mindlessly spout anti-Israel slogans, whom he calls PIDS (People with Israel Derangement Syndrome,)
That being said, there is a short history lesson so that those who want to defend Israel know the basics.
Most of the arguments would be familiar to readers of this blog. But this is not a book on how to fisk the more clever haters who write articles and books.
Harris is somewhat irreverent and brings a light tone to the book. He includes a humorous "Palestinese Lexicon" in one chapter, for example.
Harris shows how to make the haters admit that they really want to destroy Israel, which is enough to win the debate (in the US at least.) He points out hypocrisy in their arguments, and describes how the UN is biased, He smartly tries to stay away from explicitly accusing the haters of anti-semitism. There are chapters about BDS, the "one state solution" and he briefly shows how many of the more visible anti-Israel "intellectuals" are corrupt.
The book is clearly written to use liberal arguments for Israel, which is a good strategy in San Francisco. But it brings up one of its faults,, which is that Harris doesn't go after J-Street, making them look more misguided than evil. (I mentioned that to him and he replied that he agonized over that decision, but this way fit better with the aim of the book.)
I wish the book was better formatted and that it had an index to quickly look up the proper rebuttals to various points. But altogether, while is it a short read, it is a worthwhile book to get.
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