Thursday, June 08, 2023
From Ian:
The hole in Biden’s antisemitism plan
The hole in Biden’s antisemitism plan
On May 25, the Biden administration published its much anticipated U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.America’s Most Israeli Politician
It was much anticipated, in large part because of the alarming and well-documented rise in antisemitic attacks against American Jews and Jewish institutions. To the administration’s credit, this rise in antisemitic attacks led to the White House investing considerable resources to shape and create its 60-page National Strategy.
Before the plan was released, practically every mainstream Jewish organization had urged the White House to use the most accepted definition of antisemitism, adopted by numerous democratic governments and Jewish institutions around the world—the IHRA definition.
After all, it’s common sense that before one can solve a problem, one has to define it. Albert Einstein supposedly once said that if he were given an hour to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and then five minutes solving it.
The reason the IHRA definition is so important is that it captures how antisemitism has evolved over the last 100 years to include not only irrational xenophobic hatred for the Jew as an individual, but also for the Jews as a nation—that is, hatred of Israel and Zionism.
The late U.K. Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks defined antisemitism as “Denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else. It takes different forms in different ages. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the 19th and early 20th century they were hated because of their race. Today, they are hated because of their nation state, the State of Israel. It takes different forms but it remains the same thing: The view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings.”
More importantly, Rabbi Sacks noted how the 21st century version of antisemitism has mutated in a way that allows haters to deny the hate: “The new antisemitism has mutated so that any practitioner of it can deny that he or she is an antisemite. After all, they’ll say, I’m not a racist. I have no problem with Jews or Judaism. I only have a problem with the State of Israel. But in a world of 56 Muslim nations and 103 Christian ones, there is only one Jewish state, Israel, which constitutes one-quarter of one per cent of the land mass of the Middle East. Israel is the only one of the 193 member nations of the United Nations that has its right to exist regularly challenged, with one state, Iran, and many, many other groups, committed to its destruction.”
[Ted] Cruz’s political faith was forged at the knee of his father, Rafael. The elder Cruz was born in Matanzas, a shore town about 50 miles east of Havana. The name means “massacre,” a testament to a 1510 rebellion involving local fishermen drowning Spanish conquistadors in the bay, and the spirit of uprising was alive and well in Cruz senior. As a teenaged boy in the late 1950s, he was militating against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was a follower of Fidel Castro along with Che Guevara— the future dorm room icon of the third worldist politics that Ted Cruz would spend his days skewering on Twitter, the elitist social media website to which the senator is firmly addicted.Manipulating Israeli Public Opinion
After a brief stint in jail, Rafael Cruz managed to obtain a student visa to study at the University of Texas. He came to America with $100 sewn into his underwear. He learned English from going to movies, which he could afford only by taking a string of dishwashing jobs. He also spoke passionately at every Rotary and Kiwanis club that would have him, convincing his new friends and neighbors to lend their ears and dollars to the Revolución. Later, he would make a point of revisiting all these same venues and apologizing, admitting that Castro’s regime was a hideous tyranny. The only way to oppose it, he now preached, was through faith and freedom, the twin pillars on which the United States of America was erected.
And not just the United States. Ted Cruz says he was kneeling in front of his TV set at the age of 5 when he saw the first reports of a daring raid halfway across the world: Israeli commandos had landed in Entebbe, Uganda, rescued 102 out of 106 civilians taken hostage by Palestinian and German terrorists, and eliminated all seven hijackers as well as more than 100 Ugandan soldiers assisting them before safely returning to Israel. The memory of the news bulletins he saw that day would stay with him for the rest of his life.
“To me, and this is a 5-year-old looking at it, what the Entebbe raid told me about Israel was that you may take Israeli citizens hostage, and if you do, those Israelis may lose their lives, but you’re gonna die,” the senator told me as we rolled down the highway together in the back of a pickup truck on a recent Sunday in his home state. “And to me, that was a very Texas foreign policy.”
As he grew up, Cruz maintained his passion for policy, conviction, and the ways they interact. He graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School—both times magna cum laude—and took off a few clerkship positions, including with Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In private practice, he was involved in preparing the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, and in the aftermath of the shambolic 2000 election, he helped assemble the Republican team to argue Bush v. Gore, for which he was rewarded with a handful of administration positions. In 2003, he became Texas’ solicitor general, and made national headlines for appearing before the Supreme Court and successfully defending the constitutionality of a monument depicting the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol.
The results of the survey indicate that the Israeli public has far greater trust in the Knesset -- by dozens of percentage points -- than it does in Israel's judiciary, from the Supreme Court down to the legal advisors and counselors who answer to the Supreme Court.
As almost always, the different answers are the result of differences built into the questions. The wording of the question posed in the Israel Democracy Institute survey referred to the "level of trust in the Knesset" while the "Direct Polls Trust Index" survey examined trust "in the members of the Knesset you elected."
[T]he purposefully phrased IDI survey was crafted to justify weakening the powers of the legislative branch and granting excessive powers to the judicial branch.
The way [the IDI's] question was worded regarding the public's trust in the Knesset ensured that the results would create the totally false impression that the public does not trust the members of the Knesset and favors the judges of the Supreme Court.
The relevant question, which is more closely reflected in the wording of the Direct Polls survey, is the level of the public's trust in the members of the Knesset chosen by them, and the results show that an absolute majority of the public trusts its elected representatives -- a fact that points to an extremely healthy parliamentary democracy.
These campaigns to undemocratically overturn the result of a free and fair election would surely have caught the eye of George Orwell -- especially as they were all conducted under the rallying cry of "protecting democracy."
