Thursday, May 30, 2019
From Ian:
Anti-Zionism Worse than Anti-Semitism
Political Correctness Blinds Us To The Causes Of Anti-Semitism
Anti-Zionism Worse than Anti-Semitism
It is far from that. The BDS mission originates straight from the founding mission of the PLO in 1964, before any Jewish settlements existed, which was to eliminate what is still seen as the unacceptable and humiliating sovereign Jewish-Zionist presence in Arab-Muslim lands.
Jew hatred may fuel the Israel hatred behind BDS and other anti-Israel forces, but after that, Israel-hatred wreaks havoc on its own. This is why, in my eyes, anti-Zionism is more lethal than anti-Semitism: It carries the virus of elimination.
As author Gil Troy writes in an email from Jerusalem, “Thousands have been killed and maimed by modern anti-Zionism, which requires the ideological and rhetorical inflammation to get people to blow themselves up and kill innocents. As a result, not only have we absorbed the notion that Israel’s existence should be up for grabs, but our outrage has been dulled –— we accept attacks on Israel as normal.”
Underlying the whole assault on Israel, he adds, “is the rejection of us as a people — we are just supposed to be a ‘nice’ religion confined to our synagogues and JCC’s, not a people taking up real space in the international arena.”
In sum, it is hardly enough to argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. In at least one crucial way it’s worse than that. Anti-Semitism revolves around an emotion — hate. Anti-Zionism revolves around an action — destruction.
Anti-Zionism must be fought on its own terms. Demonizing Israel and singling it out for special condemnation is immoral and discriminatory regardless of any claims of anti-Semitism.
Israel doesn’t just have a right to exist. Like any other imperfect state, it has a right to thrive, whether you hate Jews or not.
Political Correctness Blinds Us To The Causes Of Anti-Semitism
One wonders, though, if the New York Times editorial writer sees any incongruity in demanding Israelis sit down with group of people who are virulently anti-Semitic and illiberal while wagging their finger at Israelis for being friendly with Hungary, a nation that protects its Jews and fights for Israel in the European Parliament.I was an expert witness against a teacher who taught students to question the Holocaust
Orban’s Hungary is far from perfect—although also far from the fascistic place his antagonists would have you believe. Yet its 100,000 Jews didn’t report a single physical attack against them in the past two years. It seems Jews are enjoying something of a renaissance in that country.
As Evelyn Gordon at Commentary noted not long ago, American Jews might believe that “rightist governments enable anti-Semitism” in Europe, but polls show that Jews feel safer, sometimes by a 20-point margin, in places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania—which, maybe not coincidentally, also have low numbers of Muslim immigrants—than they do in countries like France and Germany, where anti-Jewish violence is spiking.
According to the Times, though, Israel’s leaders also perpetuate anti-Semitism when they find common cause with the president of United States, who has angered anti-Semites worldwide by taking positions once widely supported by a majority of American Jews, like moving the American embassy to the capital of Jerusalem and pulling the United States out of the disastrous Iranian nuclear deal.
It’s gotten to the point where the left regularly lumps the elected leader of the Jewish state in with white supremacists because he’s shown more deference to Donald Trump than to Hamas, Fatah, or Iran. If Israel engenders anti-Semitism, a sentiment that supposedly has absolutely nothing to do with Israel, it’s only because people are predisposed to hating Jews.
Then again, maybe the Times doesn’t understand that it’s not Israel’s or America’s job to placate anti-Semitic thugs in Germany. One of the reasons Israel exists, actually, is so Jews would never again have to worry about such things.
My involvement in the case against Mr. Ali began in November 2017 when I got a phone call from a lawyer who was representing the Woodbridge Township School District. I had sent an email earlier in the year to the district about my study of how textbooks portray the Holocaust and officials there remembered my note.
Woodbridge officials had fired Mr. Ali, who was teaching students to question the Holocaust and who was also pushing 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mr. Ali was now suing the district for illegally firing him over his race and religion.
Mr. Ali had first made headlines in September 2016 after a news station discovered several 9/11 conspiracy links on his school webpage.
After speaking with the Woodbridge district lawyer, I was sent several hundred pages of depositions, student work and lesson plans to review. I was also asked if I would serve as an expert witness in the case.
One particularly memorable student paper in the documents was called “A Gas Chamber Full of Lies.”
“We have all been taught that the Holocaust was a time of hate, and that Hitler used the gifts he possessed for absolute evil, but is that really the case? … Is the death of the Jews completely justified? No, because nobody deserves to die, regardless what they’ve done. But are their deaths really completely unjustified either?” read an excerpt.
Another student stated that the Jews imprisoned in concentration camps “had a much easier and more enjoyable life in the camps” and that “even though they were not at home, they felt like they were.”
