Thursday, November 30, 2023
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: Even now, the threat to British Jews is not being taken seriously
Melanie Phillips: Even now, the threat to British Jews is not being taken seriously
Classical antisemitism isn’t just prejudice or hatred. It’s based upon defaming Jewish people with the murderous lie that they are the source of all evil in the world.Howard Jacobson: Jews don’t need the cult of woke – it doesn’t care for us
If Israel (as implied by Cameron and Blinken) recklessly and needlessly kills huge numbers of Palestinian innocents, its behaviour is so abhorrent it doesn’t deserve to exist. If the Jewish state doesn’t deserve to exist, then Jews don’t deserve to exist. So there’s a direct line between defamation of Israel and attacks on Jews.
Moreover, this war against the Jews has been facilitated by the fantasies of western governments. The US and Britain deny the truth of the Palestinians’ war of extermination against Israel, because such a war requires not a “two-state solution” but the defeat of the Palestinians whom they refuse to acknowledge as aggressors. Similarly, the US and Britain have catastrophically appeased Iran in the inane belief that it could be tamed by extending the hand of friendship. Denying that Islamic extremism is rooted in an interpretation of Islam currently dominant in the Muslim world, the British government still refuses to outlaw Hizb ut-Tahrir, seen on the streets of London these past few weeks screaming for jihad, or ban the seditious and insurrectionary Muslim Brotherhood.
The more the Palestinians and the Iranian regime have waged war and terrorism again Israel, the more America and Britain have pressured Israel to compromise its security. The more extreme the violence perpetrated by Islamists against the west, the more the west fell over backwards to avoid any challenge to the Muslim world.
The result has been 100 years of Arab war against Israel, the empowerment of genocidal Iran, the progressive Islamisation of the west, the re-emergence of violent antisemitism and, exacerbated by Israel’s own catastrophic errors of judgment, the Hamas pogrom of October 7.
Those (of whom I am one) who have warned for years about these trends have been ignored, demonised and vilified as “right-wing,” “extremist” and “Islamophobic”, by Britain’s Jewish leadership no less than the wider establishment. And they still don’t get it.
The result is what we are now seeing playing out in front of our horrified eyes.
Students of my work – supposing there to be any – will not, until today, have found a single reference to the phenomenon of “woke”. It’s not a word I care to use and the arguments it has incited are not such as I have wanted to join. Woke is the Softer Side of Radical Left Politics for Dummies and so all too easy to mock. Of course Gender Neutral Lavatories are nonsensical, especially when you’re in a hurry. Of course we snort when we get an email from someone advising us of his/her/their pronouns of choice. And of course we cannot contain our contempt when some fragile Bristolian tells us that having to pass a statue of a colonist make her/him/them cry. Try being a Jew having to negotiate a dozen churches every day, each a memorial to your infamy, each reminding you of who you were reported to have killed and what the consequences still are. But do we ask for them to be pulled down?Stephen L. Miller: Chuck Schumer—Name the Antisemites in Your Party or Sit Down
There’s a further compelling reason for Jews to shy away from woke. We don’t need to be given lessons in how to treat the poor, the repressed, the alien, the easily wounded, the neglected and the incoherent. Moses handed us a comprehensive ethical code we call the Ten Commandments, hot from the mouth of God, several thousand years ago. And we were given a sense of humour a thousand or so years before that. When a full-woke Minnesota librarian says we should stop teaching Shakespeare because his ‘works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir,’ we laugh not only because what makes writers problematic is precisely what we read them for, but because of the way woke invariably spirals into grievances most of us have never heard of. Misogynoir! What does Moses have to say about hating black women? Ask the black woman he married.
So why am I invoking what we neither need nor respect? Because woke doesn’t respect us. Because woke will trammel us in its nets if we are not careful.
Only think of the sorrow for Israelis and rage against Hamas we expected after October 7. Weren’t the woke so many snowflakes who fainted if someone made a cutting remark in their presence and didn’t dare go to the theatre for fear someone might die on stage? How would they survive the images of Hamas murdering babies? Well, here’s a surprise. They not only loved them, they called for more.
So while I applaud Schumer's speech, he is approaching antisemitism as though it is a Never Ending Story-style black cloud of nothingness, driven by mysterious, unseen forces, and happening in random odd places. It is not. It is being driven and funded by the Democratic Party apparatus in this country—in government, activism, media and academia. It's being driven by people whose names Chuck Schumer well knows.Seth Mandel: U.S. Support for Israel Is Based on the Facts
Dark money groups of his own party sponsoring activists like disgraced Women's March Director Linda Sarsour as well as Democratic House Members like Ilhan Omar, who has been admonished in the past for her antisemitic remarks, went nameless in Schumer's remarks. So did Congresswoman Tlaib. Even as Schumer made specific references to incidents like the Jewish teacher in Queens who was forced to hide from her own students, Schumer neglected to accept responsibility that this is happening in his own state. Queens, New York is not MAGA Country.
Until Schumer is willing to call out these elements stemming from his own state and jurisdiction and members of his own donor base and Democratic colleagues, he cannot simply be praised for doing the bare minimum. The closest Schumer came to admonishing his own party for their role in promoting and endorsing antisemitism was a passive reference to "people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers."
Without standing up and naming names for fear of intra-party backlash and a "Dems in Disarray" media news cycle, Schumer's words, while eloquent, remain politically hollow.
Jewish Americans deserve real leadership
Public opinion on Israel’s conduct in its war with Gaza is split in ways both encouraging and dispiriting. But easily the most underappreciated is that Americans clearly support Israel when considering the category of information we’ll call Things We Know Are True.
Here’s what I mean. Overall, Americans support Israel over the Palestinians (in this case, Hamas). As David Leonhardt, who analyzed the various polls on this issue, notes this morning, “This finding holds across polls.” A Marist poll has Israel with double the support of the Palestinians; YouGov finds Israel with triple the support; and an NBC poll had Israel’s approval near 50 percent and Hamas’s at 1 percent.
Here’s part of the reason why: “Most people blame Hamas for starting the war — that is, they see the Oct. 7 killing and kidnapping of Israelis as the central cause.… In a Quinnipiac poll that asked Americans who was ‘more responsible for the outbreak of violence,’ 69 percent chose Hamas and 15 percent chose Israel.”
What we know about Oct. 7, we know. We don’t suspect, or feel, or assume, or hypothesize. We know. It’s on video. After a Senate screening of footage from the Hamas attacks, some of which Hamas filmed and publicized themselves, JTA’s Ron Kampeas found the U.S. senators “barely able to shape their mouths into a single word.” The most common response reporters got was to be waved away by senators with tears in their eyes.
Americans also know Hamas’s intentions. This is not mind-reading. Hamas’s charter calls for wiping Israel off the map, and its officials reiterate that goal whenever and wherever they can find a microphone and camera. During the course of the war itself, Hamas officials have been clear about this: Their aim is to kill all the Jews. It’s not complicated.
Where things get murkier, public opinion stutters a bit. Leonhardt points out that the Ipsos poll finds 76 percent agreeing with the sentence: “Israel is doing what any country would do in response to a terror attack and the taking of civilian hostages.” The same poll finds 68 percent support for the following: “Israel should call a cease-fire and try to negotiate.”
Leonhardt says readers should “avoid the temptation to focus on only one of these two patterns — the support for a cease-fire or for Israel’s military actions — and to ignore the other one.”
