Friday, August 29, 2014
From Ian:
Sarah Honig: Another tack: Genuinely knocked for a loop?
Sarah Honig: Another tack: Genuinely knocked for a loop?
The fact is that Britain had been exporting jihadist terror for years while pompously upholding its pluralist posture.A Pro-Hamas Left Emerges
Two British Muslims also paid a lethal visit to Israel in April, 2003. Asif Muhammad Hanif, the suicide-bomber who took three innocent lives at Mike’s Place on Tel Aviv’s sea front was a London lad. His absconded accomplice, Omar Khan Sharif, came from Derby, where he attended posh private schools and enjoyed all the best that the UK could offer.
But in their case, there was no British shock or shame. Atrocities against Israelis can always be explained away and even forgiven. The ultimate expression of this mindset was enunciated by Cherrie Blair, then-resident at 10 Downing Street, as Tony’s better half. Her husband keeps himself busy after his retirement from the premiership by serving as the Quartet’s special envoy to the Middle East and he serially churns out plans for peace and for Palestinian rights.
Mrs. Blair argued during the bloodiest days of the Second Intifada that suicide-bombers are driven by utter desperation. Israeli occupation, she intoned, had rendered the poor, hungry, direly oppressed Palestinian masses, straining piteously under Israel’s brutal yoke, so hopeless that they were ready to detonate themselves.
Cherrie had nothing to say about the bombers’ victims and she vehemently denied that she was making excuses for terror, stressing – with just the right tone of righteous indignation – that we need to examine what made young people despair so.
Efforts by the literary scholar Judith Butler several years ago to include Hamas in the camp of the global Left illustrated a lack of historical knowledge that is simply not acceptable among professional historians. But Procrustean distortion in the name of a cause is apt to overwhelm any fealty to professional standards among ideologues of all stripes. In every sense of the word, Hamas is an organization of the extreme Right and rejects all of the values that at one point defined leftist politics ever since the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and large parts of the secular Left of the 20th century. This summer, the "Hawblog" group statement has offered support to an organization that has attacked the values that used to define the Western Left and made hatred of the Jews as Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state its primary goals. If these scholars have any criticisms of Hamas at all, they did not voice them at a time when doing so mattered.Israeli Liberals’ Advice to Diaspora Jewish Counterparts: Grow Up
It was probably only a matter of time before seven decades of leftist antagonism to Israel would lead to waging political warfare in support of an organization known for terrorist attacks against civilians, religious fanaticism, and anti-Semitism of a most foul and familiar sort. In summer 2014, that moment has arrived.
While Strenger didn’t elaborate, another Israeli professor and dedicated leftist, Michael Gross, did exactly that in a guest column for Haaretz two days earlier. Rhetorically asking what standard Diaspora Jewish liberals use to evaluate Israel’s liberalism or lack thereof, he continued, “Do they mean a well-functioning public health care system, expansive reproductive rights, gun control, a ban on the death penalty or inexpensive higher education?”Would Beinart have supported the Klan in 1964?
Gross obviously knows the big issue for most liberal Diaspora Jews is “the occupation.” His point is that like any real country, Israel is multi-faceted. And if you examine the real Israel in all its complexity, rather than treating it as a cartoon character with no existence beyond the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, then on many trademark issues to which liberal Jews accord great weight in their own countries, Israel is actually closer to the liberal ideal than America is.
Essentially, both men were making the same argument: If liberal Diaspora Jews would look at Israel as a real country, rather than as a projection of their fantasies, they would see it was neither as perfectly good as they once imagined it nor as irredeemably evil as they imagine it today. Like any other country, it has real problems, and like any other country, it deals with some problems better than others, but its positive qualities are no less real than its flaws.
And if Diaspora Jewish liberals are incapable of seeing the real Israel through the cloud of their adolescent fantasies, then that isn’t Israel’s fault. It’s their own.
The ‘peaceful protests’ that Beinart refers to center around attempts to destroy the security barrier that protects Israel against the infiltration of terrorists, as occurred during the Second Intifada when hundreds of Israelis were murdered by suicide bombers. They have a secondary purpose of trying to provoke police and soldiers into responses that can be used as weapons in the propaganda and legal wars being waged against Israel.
The idea that the Palestinian national movement, whose objective is the destruction of Israel and the murder or expulsion of its Jewish residents, is anything like the US civil rights movements of the 1960s is not just entirely wrong but an obscene inversion of reality.
To Beinart’s rejoinder that I see Palestinians only as “haters and killers” and not as human beings, that is insultingly false. But the political movement and ideology that Beinart wants us to support is one of hating and killing.
