Wednesday, August 21, 2019
From Ian:
Noah Rothman: The Case Against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib
Noah Rothman: The Case Against Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib
Despite the backlash, neither Omar nor Tlaib have shown any willingness to pare back their anti-Semitic agitation. When Israel made the arguably ill-advised decision to invoke the country’s new anti-BDS law to bar the congresswomen from visiting the Jewish state, Jerusalem did so on the unassailable legal grounds that the organization sponsoring their trip was viciously anti-Semitic. That organization, Miftah, accused Jews of consuming “the blood of Christians,” has published neo-Nazi screeds, and has celebrated murderous terrorist attacks targeting children. To protest their treatment by the Israeli government, the two congresswomen shared a cartoon drawn by Carlos Latuff, a draughtsman who placed in Iran’s 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Contest. The two congresswomen have regularly claimed that Israel’s character as a Jewish state is incompatible with representative democratic governance, likened Israel to Nazi Germany, and compared the Hamas-linked BDS movement to the Boston Tea Party.At The Risk Of Further Upsetting Ms. Tlaib
Through it all, Omar and Tlaib were described in the press not as outliers but leading indicators of a sea change in the Democratic Party’s outlook toward Israel. They are the vanguard of a generation challenging old Democratic nostrums along the “uncomfortable intersection of race, gender, and religion.” They are “changing the conversation” about America’s relationship with Israel, igniting a hostile response “in particular from Republicans eager to exploit divisions in the Democratic Party.” Such a pronouncement is akin to suggesting that Rep. Steve King is “changing the conversation” around America’s relationship with white nationalism when his racist claims generate only censure and opprobrium from conscientious custodians of American national comity.
The only thing that saves Reps. Omar Tlaib and Rashida Tlaib from the universal reproach they are due is the plausibility of the claim that their displays of anti-Semitism are unconscious. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that they know exactly what they are saying and why. Those who continue to defend them probably do, too.
It thus seems fair to note that while not one Jordanian was killed by a terrorist Palestinian to liberate “Palestine” from the Jordanian government in the 19 years of occupation, 2,143 Israelis have been killed and nearly 10,000 wounded by Palestinians in deliberate attacks. It seems fair also to emphasize the word “deliberate.” Dead Jews were the goal. Fair, too, to remind her that 19 of the dead and 172 of the wounded were victims of a massacre during a Passover Seder; Nava Applebaum and her father David were murdered sitting in a café the night before her wedding; Kobi Mandell and Yosef Ishran, two 13-year-old boys, had their heads smashed against rocks; 3-month-old Hadas, 4-year-old Elad, 11-year-old Yoav, and parents Ruth and Udi Fogel were murdered in their beds. Eighteen people, including Americans Malki Roth and Shoshana Yehudit Greenbaum, were killed in a Sbarro pizza parlor (their killers received an estimated $910,823 in “salary” from the Palestinian Authority).The Land Waited for the Jews
There are 2,132 others to be named and remembered.
Israelis live not only with checkpoints, but with intrusive security in airports, schools, shopping centers, concert halls, and other places because all have been attacked by people — Palestinians, not Costa Ricans or Laotians or Nepalese — intent on killing them.
And yet, Israel is here, strong, vibrant, growing, democratic, and tolerant of everyone except those openly dedicated to its destruction.
If that further upsets Ms. Tlaib, so be it. (h/t messy57)
In 1867, the journalist Samuel Clemens visited the Land of Israel with a group of American pilgrims; he described what he saw there in The Innocents Abroad, published two years later. The place described as so lush in the Hebrew Bible appeared to him to be barren and dispiriting. The nearer he and his fellow travelers came to Jerusalem, “the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became.” As Meir Soloveichik notes, the exiled Spanish rabbi Moses Naḥmanides formed a strikingly similar impression when he arrived there 600 years prior. But with a difference:
Naḥmanides describes the barrenness of the land of Israel as ordained by God with the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews by the Romans. . . . “From the moment we left” into exile, he writes, the abundance of the land has failed to show itself. Throughout the generations, “all seek to settle it,” yet the land resists cultivation. It mourns just as its people mourn. He, too, notes what Twain had sensed as a paradox: that the earth grows more barren as one approaches Jerusalem. “The general principle,” he wrote to his son, is that “the holier the land is, the more desolate it remains.” After all, the Holy Land yearns for the Jews; the holier a speck of soil may be, the more it refuses to provide its fruits until the Jews return.
Naḥmanides saw in 1267 what Twain in 1867 had failed to see. Clemens could never have imagined that exactly 100 years after he visited the Temple Mount in 1867, Jewish soldiers would stand there to claim it as their capital of a flourishing land. Yet credit for this wondrous event can in some sense be linked to Naḥmanides, whose own arrival in Jerusalem exactly 700 years before the Six-Day War marked the beginning of a seven-century Jewish presence in the sacred city. To this day, there is a synagogue in Jerusalem founded by this exiled rabbi—a man who believed that if Jews would return to Jerusalem, Jerusalem would one day return to the Jews.
