The Progressive Left and Israel's Right to Exist
At bottom, the bien-pensant view is that (a) Israel is wrong because it's strong; (b) Israel has no right to exist because it is a European state in the Muslim Middle East; and (c) Palestinians and fellow Muslims are not responsible for their fate, or their crimes, because they are oppressed victims.MEMRI: In Eid Al-Adha Editorial, Qatari 'Al-Quds Al-Arabi' Daily Laments State Of Arab World: Muslims Are Slaughtering One Another, Export Nothing But Murder And Terror
The left hates Israel’s military strength and its willingness to use it for the same reasons it hates American power. As right-thinking cosmopolitans, they would never approve such brutality. Obama captured this perspective in a Freudian slip. “Whether we like it or not,” he explained, “we remain a dominant military superpower.” The left doesn’t like it. They don’t like it in America, and they don’t like it in Israel. As for Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea brandishing military threats, well, let’s not think about that. The threats may vanish from their minds, but they still threaten everybody else with working synapses.
Not only is Israel powerful, the left (like the Muslim world) sees Israel as a remnant of Europe's crimes: imperialism and the Holocaust. University faculties are preoccupied with imperialism and post-colonial legacies, which they blame for many of the world’s ills. They see Israel through that lens, as a colony of white settlers in an Arab-Muslim region. They blithely ignore the Jewish people’s age-old connection to the land, its continuous presence there, and its central religious significance. And they ignore how many Israelis were driven out of Arab countries, which have become virulently anti-Semitic.
The combination of Israel’s religious heritage, its nationalism, its prosperity, and its unapologetic self-defense combine virtually everything loathed by secular, cosmopolitan intellectuals. That’s why Obama's 2009 Cairo speech offered such a tepid “defense" of Israel's right to exist. Israel was needed, he said, because Jews needed somewhere to go after the Holocaust. That is the view of the average professor of French literature: Israel is the bastard child of Europe’s crimes.
In the left’s worldview, Palestinians and fellow Muslims are not seen as agents of their own history, for good or ill. They are righteous victims. This condescending view is grounded in Jean Jacques Rousseau's gauzy, romantic vision of "noble savages," not yet cursed by civilization. What can be expected of such people? Their crimes are merely "weapons of the weak.” And who are we, the oppressors, to criticize them? That would commit an unforgivable sin, blaming the victim.
For years, this coalition of anti-Zionists has marched across campuses shouting "Palestine, Palestine, must be free, from the Jordan [River] to the sea." The state they demand, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, means Israel should disappear completely. So, when Bernie Sanders says Israel has a right to exist, they sit on their hands. Their shameful silence says Israel's very existence is a no longer a "progressive position." (h/t Cliff)
The Eid Al-Adha (September 24, 2015) editorial of the London-based Qatari daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi discussed the current state of the Muslim world, and bemoaned how many Muslims are slaughtering their brethren in Arab and Islamic countries. It added that Muslims today are in the throes of an unprecedented catastrophe that surpasses even the loss of Andalusia and of Palestine.Is the Pope Ending Catholic Anti-Semitism?
The following are excerpts from the editorial:
"How sadly misleading is this picture, which does not reflect the true state of this nation: One million Muslims in simple white garb, symbolizing a state of abstinence and purity, equality and compassion, stand in a single place as one, praying and offering pleas to a single deity. Despite their differences in color, nationality, tongue, and cultural and political schools of thought, they help each other bear the effort of the pilgrimage to Mount Arafat at high noon...
"Are these pilgrims, these submissive believers, who praise Allah morning and night, among those Muslims who slaughter each other in more than one country, to the point that their lands are awash in blood and tens of thousands of them have been killed or wounded since the last Eid Al-Adha?...
"Have we reached a situation in which we must redefine the term 'Muslim'? Do we even remain an 'Islamic ummah'? And are we still 'the best nation established for mankind' [Koran: 3:110]? Or have we become 'a nation of refugees?' Are Muslims still 'a single body, in which if one organ complains the rest of them hasten to treat and protect it,' [as the hadith says]? Or have they become one body in which one organ kills another and conspires against it?
"Nostre Aetate," released in 1965, called for friendship and dialogue between Catholics and Jews, instead of the centuries-long repudiation of Jews by Catholics; St Joseph's University became the first to respond by establishing the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations. Is Pope Francis picking up where Pope Paul VI left off?
Can Pope Francis' hopes and dreams for reconciliation of Catholics and Jews override some unfortunate but pressing realities, such the Church's desire to placate the Palestinians?
If Pope Francis is serious about a "journey of friendship" with the Jewish people, perhaps he would not be so quick to approve President Obama's Iran nuclear deal in the name of a hoped-for peace that will most certainly ignite an unhoped-for war between Iran and Israel.
By assisting the UN in establishing the "sustainable development platform," the Pope is offering his permission to the UN -- one of the most anti-Semitic, anti-Israel bodies on the face of the earth -- to usurp power on behalf of a shared utopian agenda. Sustainable development notwithstanding, the UN should be encouraged to clean up its own house before it tries to clean up the world.