Last Word in Anti-Semitism: The epithet is hurled at Israel in a bid to make hatred of Jews respectable

Walter Reich, Los Angeles Times, May 28, 2004

Genocidal mass murder continues to foul the world. So do large-scale massacres of civilians and brutal executions.

Yet the foulest epithet in any language — "Nazi" — is hurled not against any of the perpetrators of those crimes but, uniquely and systematically, against Israel.

It's not as if the real horrors are hard to find. To see a state-sponsored genocidal campaign, go to Sudan, where troops of the Muslim Arab government in Khartoum, and the Arab militias supplied by that government, are systematically targeting black tribes. Thousands have been murdered and a million driven from their homes by a program of bombing villages, shooting men, women and children, widespread rape and forced thirst and starvation. Yet the word "Nazi" isn't commonly used against the Sudanese authorities, whether by Arab countries or any others, just as it wasn't used against the Rwandan authorities who organized the genocide of about 800,000 Tutsis.

Deliberate massacres of civilians are even easier to find. During the last three years in the streets of Israel, numerous city buses, cafes and restaurants have been turned into bomb chambers by Palestinian organizations whose stated goal is to eradicate Israel and make the area free of Jews. In this way, they've systematically killed a dozen Israelis here, two dozen there, spraying arms, legs, lungs, livers, brains and strips of skin and muscle all over that country's streets. And at the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, as many innocents were murdered as during a day's gassing in Auschwitz. All of these actions, though they don't justify the term "Nazi," have been deliberate exterminations of civilians by organizations with clearly stated agendas of mass murder. Yet the epithet "Nazi" hasn't been commonly used against the organizers of these or other massacres around the world.

The word "Nazi" is, however, regularly thrown at Israel, even though that country's policy is to avoid killing Palestinian civilians. It's hurled, first of all, by Palestinians and their Arab and other Muslim allies. And it's hurled by European critics of Israel. "What is happening in Ramallah," Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago said in 2002, "is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz." Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the Oxford poet Tom Paulin said a year later, "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." That same year, the Irish writer Tom McGurk approved of the comparison between Israel's assault on Jenin with the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. "How extraordinary," he wrote, "that so many in the liberal democratic West should feel so strangely muted, so emotionally strangled in the face of Nazi-style barbarism toward the Palestinians by the state of Israel."

Why the Palestinians call Israelis "Nazis" isn't hard to understand. It's an effective accusation to make against a country that itself rose out of the ashes of the Holocaust and that received its legitimacy from the world in 1948 in part because of it. If the word "Nazi" could be successfully attached to that country, then its right to exist could be brought into question.

Why non-Palestinians direct the accusation at Israel rather than at other targets is more complex. Some are simply trying to use the most damaging and effective verbal ammunition possible in the war against the Jewish state. But some are anti-Semites who have finally found a way to free themselves of the strictures that have been in place for 60 years. After all, for six decades after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was seen as having led to the worst genocide in human history. It wasn't possible to be an anti-Semite in polite company. As the years passed, some anti-Semites tried to break free of this taboo by saying the Holocaust had never happened — after all, if it never happened, or was exaggerated, then anti-Semitism was falsely accused of having been a genocidal ideology and could once again enter the arena of acceptable discourse. Yet Holocaust denial could never achieve widespread credibility in the West, given the mountain of evidence.

But if the public could be convinced that Israel is no better than Nazi Germany, then the anti-Semites could again be back in business. In fact, if the public came to see Israel as having engaged in Nazi-like behavior, it might conclude that the Jewish state is even worse than Nazi Germany. When we hear the epithet "Nazi" aimed at Israelis, we should understand its purpose. And we should understand that — whether the term is part of a verbal war or of an effort to make anti-Semitism once again respectable — it will continue to be aimed at Israel rather than at countries and groups that engage in genocide and mass murder.

Walter Reich, a psychiatrist and professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, was director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 1998.
 

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The Holocaust's significant difference

Amnon Rubinstein, Haaretz, April 18, 2004

If an epidemic had broken out in Europe in the late 1930s and, for genetic reasons, had afflicted only Jews and had obliterated most of European Jewry, this would have been a terrible tragedy, a holocaust. The murder of European Jewry - which continues to plague our memories 65 years later - is a terrible holocaust, the loss of a complete civilization, of more than a million Jewish children, of a great culture than enriched both the Jewish and non-Jewish world. But its significance goes beyond this because it created a trauma that would not have existed had its victims been killed by a deadly disease.

In addition, the murder of European Jewry was also a unique event when compared to other cases of genocide. Horrible incidents of murder have accompanied humankind since the day Cain murdered Abel. Anyone who heard the testimony of Rwandan residents who survived genocide was filled with shock, anger and desire for revenge. But the Jews of Europe were not murdered in an outburst of intercommunal violence or in the rage of battle, but rather in a planned and systematic way, by the government of one of the most cultured nations in the world. And the murder did not happen by chance; it was the almost inevitable culmination of ancient Jew hatred. This explains the magnitude of the trauma, which is independent and separate from the tragedy of the loss.

The feeling that it was practically a case of murder that could have been predicted is reinforced by the fact that the entire civilized world stood by and was unwilling to lend a hand to save the Jews during the years when this was still possible. From this perspective, the Evian conference - which convened on the eve of the Holocaust to try to find a solution for Jewish refugees who were fleeing for their lives and ended with a decision to do nothing - has an historic significance for the fate of the Jews that is no less important than Auschwitz. The same is true for the decision to send the St. Louis ship, carrying Jewish refugees, from the safety of U.S. shores back to the Nazi inferno.

At the Evian conference, a conscious decision was made by the democratic states not to provide refuge to people who could have contributed much to these countries, some of which were urgently in need of immigrants. The refusal to receive the refugees was based only on the fact that they were Jews. To be more precise, many of them - at this stage the refugees were mainly from Germany and Austria - were not Jewish in their way of life or belief, only by birth. Stefan Zewig, prior to committing suicide in Brazil, described in his book "World of Yesterday" the shock experienced by assimilated Jews like himself, who came to realize that the fact they had abandoned the faith of their fathers and immersed themselves enthusiastically and successfully in German culture did not save them from persecution.

This is the trauma that is not included in the word "Holocaust." This is what makes the murder of the Jews unique and makes it significantly different than other acts of mass murder. After all, there is no moral distinction between one murder and another. Murder is murder in any place and at any time - at Babi Yar, in Cambodia or Rwanda. The fact that this ancient hatred refuses to die out, even after nearly all of the Jews of Europe were murdered, also underlines its uniqueness. This is also true for the fact that Jews have no refuge from this hatred - neither by changing their religion nor establishing a Jewish state.

The magnitude of this uniqueness is what explains why Holocaust Day refuses to disappear from the Jewish-Israeli consciousness, in complete contradiction to the fears of Abba Kovner during the 1950s. It also explains why an important writer and intellectual like A. B. Yehoshua tries to bravely search for a universal explanation for anti-Semitism and finds that it is their loss of national identity and their blurring of borders between religion and peoplehood that explains why the Jews drive other peoples crazy. Such a far-reaching explanation, as controversial as it might be, is evidence of the strength of the Jewish trauma.

It's true there are also universal lessons from the Holocaust: The Nazis are incontrovertible proof that crimes like genocide can only occur in a dictatorial regime that suppresses human rights. Democracy provides protection for human rights. Another lesson is that someone who begins denigrating another due to his race or origin is liable to slip down the steep path leading to holocaust. This is the universal significance of the Holocaust that influences European public opinion today - as the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut explains in the latest edition of "Tchelet" - and leads it to turn against Israel. The expression "never again" is interpreted as a determined decision to act against the humiliation of "the other." This lesson should also serve as a guideline for the Jews in their behavior toward others. But the expression "never again" also has another meaning for the Jews: Never again will we be dependent on the mercy of others.

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Memories Are Short, Hatred Is Forever

By Omer Bartov, Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2004

East Galicia was once the site of a rich Jewish civilization dating back several centuries. But last March, when I visited what is now West Ukraine, the snow-swept streets and squares were silent. Ancient cemeteries had become marketplaces, ruined synagogues were garbage dumps, mass graves were unmarked and forgotten. The Nazis murdered the Jews; in the years that followed, the local population erased their memory.

But not quite. The local Ternopil newspaper carried a headline: "Jewish Pogrom." The Jews, the article claimed, were again trying to take over Ukraine. It was as if the 500,000 murdered Jews of Galicia were going to rise from the mass graves and crematory ashes and reclaim their space (and stolen property) in this ethnically cleansed province.

The fear of Jewish return is one element in the new anti-Semitism spreading in many parts of the world. Two-thirds of European Jewry was murdered by the Nazis in World War II. For Adolf Hitler, the Jews represented ultimate evil. They polluted the German race and culture, brought pernicious modernity and capitalism, promoted internationalism, caused and profited from wars, became parasites on the labors of others and plotted to take over the world. This was a potent mix of anti-Jewish Christian prejudice and newfangled "scientific" racism.

Hitler's beliefs should not have come as any surprise to the world. In 1925 he wrote in "Mein Kampf" that World War I would have ended differently had several thousand Jews been gassed. In 1928 he declared in his "second book" that Nazism had taken up the fight against the "execrable crime against humanity" represented by Jewish existence. In January 1939 he "prophesied" to the entire world that if a war were to break out, it would result in the extermination of the Jews. Yet it was difficult to believe that such rhetoric would be translated into policy. It was thought that Hitler would be constrained by the realities of diplomacy, the limits of Germany's power, the national interests of the Reich and the political partners with whom he had to make policy. And when it was discovered that Hitler had almost fulfilled his "prophecy," it was too late.

Europe then vowed "Never again!" And, for a while, anti-Semitism became a bad word. But memories are short and vows tend to be broken, whereas deeply embedded cultural and religious prejudices are hard to eradicate.

Europe's anti-Semitism did not vanish. It was banished to the fringes of society; it was buried in the recesses of people's consciousness; it was transformed into philo-Semitism and fads for things Jewish; it seeped back in as self-righteous indignation against Israel; and it was exported into the Muslim world. Now that it is back, we can see where it was hiding all these years.

The new anti-Semitism employs images strikingly similar to Hitler's. It condemns the Jews as controlling the world's only superpower and seeking to take over the rest of the world, as promoting a destructive policy of globalization, as supporting the allegedly criminal and illegitimate Nazi-like state of Israel. It is obsessed with fantasies of secret cabals, visions of bloody upheaval and apocalyptic devastation. Like its Nazi predecessor, it promises to do to the Jews what they are supposedly doing to the world. It is inherently, then, genocidal.

But rather than being the policy of one state, this new anti-Semitism is the domain of very different cultures, political ideologies and religious teachings. Its more soft-core manifestations can be found in the European left, camouflaged as anti-Americanism and an anti-Zionism that denies Israel's right to exist. Right-wing anti-Semitism has also come out of the shadows, as was most clearly seen when the German Christian Democratic parliamentarian Martin Hohmann publicly described the Jews as a "people of perpetrators."

The effect on public opinion is tremendous. A majority of Europeans see Israel as the most dangerous country in the world. Although criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policies is both legitimate and necessary, denying the right of Israeli citizens to live in peace in their own country is unjust.

But the new anti-Semitism has found its most lethal incarnation in the Muslim world, where it has become a prevalent subculture, a focus of identity, a rallying cry for the masses, a tool to divert attention from the real reasons for poverty and despair, and a cause for militant mobilization and destructive urges. Ranging from the speech of Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to the charter of the Palestinian organization Hamas, this rhetoric is infused with the same terrifying images of Jews that were haunting Hitler. And we know where Hitler's obsession led.

In Mel Gibson's nauseating film "The Passion of the Christ," the Jews are not satisfied with the tortured body of Jesus and scream over and over again, "Crucify him!" While Pontius Pilate washes his hands, they cry (without English subtitles), "His blood is on us."

We must not wash our hands of the scourge of genocidal anti-Semitism. For the power of the word resides both in rhetoric and in silence. Prophesies of destruction must be taken seriously, and silence facilitates their realization.

Even after the deed, silence ensures its recurrence, for it erases the memory of what has been destroyed and obscures the guilt of the murderers. It allows us to forget that when some people say they want to kill you, they mean what they say.

We should not wait until it is too late. We must not repeat the fatal misunderstanding of the 1930s and ignore the lesson that Hitler taught us: that some people, some regimes, some ideologies, and, yes, some religious groups, must be taken at their word.

Omer Bartov is professor of history at Brown University.
 

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P.A. Leader Negates Israel´s Right To Live
Arutz Sheva, February 16, 2004

U.S. President George Bush has long talked of his vision for "two states living side by side," and Prime Minister Sharon has given his assent as well - but the question is whether the Palestinian Authority agrees. A recent interview with a top Palestinian Authority official shows that Israel has still not earned the PA's respect for its right to exist.

Palestinian Media Watch (pmw.org.il) reports that Ahmad Nasser, Secretary of the Palestinian Legislative Council, insists, in an interview broadcast Feb. 6 on PATV, that Israel has no right to exist because it is "Satan's offspring." Nasser further asserts that Israel cannot exist "among human beings" because it was "founded on the basis of robbery, terror, killing, torture, assassination, death, stealing land and killing people."

"His comments," write PMW director Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, "reflect the PA's continuing campaign to challenge and deny Israel's right to exist."

Nasser goes so far as to use Israel's willingness to release 400 Arab terrorists and prisoners against the Jewish state: "We see that Israel is trying to delude the world," he told his interviewer, "and delude the Arabs and the Palestinians psychologically [by showing] that one Israeli will be exchanged for a thousand Palestinians. Meaning - Israel is interested in planting among the Palestinian, the Arab or the world the concept of value - the value of a Jew and the value of an Arab... By this, Israel is trying to put a value on an Arab and a value on an Israeli or Jew..."

 

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Powell Blames Arafat for Impasse in Israeli-Palestinian Peace Efforts
David Gollust, State Department, February 12,  2004, 21:12 UTC

Secretary of State Colin Powell Thursday put blame for the impasse in Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts squarely on Yasser Arafat, who he said is aware of those who are committing anti-Israel acts of terror but has failed to move against them. In Senate testimony, Mr. Powell insisted U.S. peace efforts are intensive.

Hyperlinks and emphasis added by PAC

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Where's the Arab Media's Sense of Outrage?

Mamoun Fandy, Washington Post, Sunday, July 4, 2004; Page B04

The apparent executions in Iraq last week of U.S. soldier Keith Maupin and U.S. Marine Wassef Ali Hassoun, and the confirmed beheadings a week earlier of South Korean Kim Sun Il in Iraq and of American Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia, left the media the world over horrified and uncertain about how much should be shown. Except in much of the Arab world, that is. As I scanned Arab satellite channels and Arabic newspapers, I found a lot of reporting on the brutal attacks, but very little condemnation and a widespread willingness to run the stomach-turning video and photos again and again.

Showing videotapes of people being shot, beheaded or held hostage with a curved sword aimed at their neck is largely new terrain for the Arab media. As a media critic whose focus is the Arab world, I have watched perhaps a dozen Arab channels and read countless newspapers in recent weeks. I found that few Arab commentators and journalists noted either that major shift or its significance. In particular, the Kim and Johnson beheadings generally have been reported as if they were quite ordinary. (Hassoun's death was announced only yesterday by a militant group promising to release a video soon of his claimed beheading -- undoubtedly to wide coverage again.)

I am aware of only a handful of columnists, most notably the Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed al-Rubai, who condemned the killings unequivocally. Some reporters and analysts intimated to me that they were afraid to denounce the beheadings; others provided distorted coverage that blurred the line between terrorism and Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation.

Take, for example, the video of Kim's beheading. Al-Jazeera and the Lebanese LBC presented the video, which al-Jazeera said it had received from a group linked to al Qaeda, as if the terrorists were part of the Iraqi resistance against the Americans and their allies. Al-Jazeera did not note what any person knowledgeable about the region's dialects would have known: that the terrorists who appeared in the video and read the "verdict" that justified Kim's killing were not Iraqi and therefore not part of the Iraqi resistance. They clearly spoke a dialect from the Saudi heartland of Najd.

Al-Jazeera is the same network that calls every Arab suicide bomber a shaheed, or martyr. And yet its anchors take care to refer to Abdul Aziz al-Maqrin, who claimed to have beheaded Johnson, as the "man who Saudi Arabia and Washington call a terrorist."

Furthermore, in a discussion of the violence in Saudi Arabia immediately after the slaying of Johnson, al-Jazeera anchor Abdul Samad Nasser adopted the language of Osama bin Laden and referred to Saudi Arabia as "Jazeerat al-Arab" (the Arabian Peninsula, a reference used in Arabic before the formation of the current Saudi state) as if the state never existed. Perhaps this can be justified in light of the tension between the Qatari government, which owns al-Jazeera, and Saudi Arabia, but it does not explain the distortion or the violent language of that network and other media, including its competitor, the Saudi-financed al-Arabiya satellite channel, which is based in Dubai.

In a search for answers about the Arab media's approach, I went directly to Abdul Rahman Rashed, the head of al-Arabiya, and asked him why most Arab commentators remain silent about these horrific acts of violence and why his channel and al-Jazeera give so much airtime to the terrorists.

Rashed blames both contemporary Arab culture and the culture of Arab newsrooms. He offered two examples -- one from print and the other from TV -- to make his point. He told me that last year, when he was still chief editor of the pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat (for which I am a columnist), he caught one of his editors changing the caption of an AP photo from "an American soldier chatting with an Iraqi girl" to "an American soldier asking an Iraqi girl for sex." "If I had not caught him, it would have gone to print this way," he said.

Now, at al-Arabiya, he has received pictures of Johnson's beheading, but refuses to show them. Al-Jazeera aired the entire video, which Rashed equates with airing the full-length communiques of al Qaeda. Rashed, who took over al-Arabiya a few months ago, said that changing the channel's culture is "a huge challenge." Very few in the Arab media are as candid as Rashed.

I also talked with fellow Arab writers and journalists to seek further answers, and it became obvious that many were outraged over how the beheading stories had been handled and why so many Arab journalists are afraid to express their anger publicly or put it in writing. Considering the history of terrorist movements in the Arab world and the way in which they have targeted writers -- the killing of Egyptian writer Farag Fouda in broad daylight in Cairo in 1992 comes to mind, as does the stabbing of 90-year-old Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz two years later -- their fear is justified. Islamic radicals have killed writers in Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere whose work challenged the logic of martyrdom and "random jihad," or killing foreigners in the name of Islam. But the lack of condemnation of the beheadings, despite their barbarism, is a direct result of a broad and dangerous trend in Arab media and in Arab culture broadly. The Arab world today swims in a sea of linguistic violence that justifies terrorism and makes it acceptable, especially to the young.

One needs only to read the writings of the Syrian Baathist Buthaina Shaban, who is the minister for immigrant affairs but also a syndicated writer whose work appears in many Arab newspapers.

In an article entitled "Blood of Martyrs," published last September in Tishreen, a major state-owned Syrian newspaper, she wrote in response to a Palestinian suicide bombing: "The blood of martyrs inscribes a scroll that can be read only by those with faith in their peoples and in the future of the [Arab] nation, who are convinced that however great their [personal] accomplishments, they are but a single link in the life of the homelands and the peoples. Therefore, they are ready for giving, the utmost of all kinds of giving, so that the scattered drops [of blood] join together to form a stream, then a river, then a gushing torrent."

Articles like this, which glorify death and urge young people to be suicidal, are part of the steady diet that Arab youths are exposed to every day.

Another example: Faisal Qasim, al-Jazeera's most popular talk-show host, recently devoted his entire 90-minute show to berating those who condemn terrorism in the Arab world, whom he called "agents of Washington's neo-cons." He wrote an article that made the same point for the pro-bin Laden newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, whose editor in chief, Abdul Bari Atwan, is a regular guest on al-Qasim's show.

Last month I traveled to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Lebanon and saw for myself the effect on the young of the Arab media's tendency, particularly on satellite television, to portray terrorists as resistance fighters and to broadcast in their entirety the videotaped messages of al Qaeda.

One Egyptian student told me the Americans "deserve [killing] for their support to Israel and their occupation of Iraq." A Kuwaiti who recently graduated from a Pennsylvania university said of Americans, "Don't believe them when they say it is al Qaeda that is slaying Americans. It is Americans who are killing Americans to justify their presence in the Arab world and to control Arab oil."

In each country, I was struck that al Qaeda and its ideas are no longer perceived as extreme. Indeed, al Qaeda has become mainstream and being part of the movement is "cool" in the eyes of young people. Why? Arab culture is being corrupted by the media that glorify violence, but also by schoolbooks that present only one role model for Arab children: the Jihadists and those who excelled at battling non-Muslims.

This trend must be reversed -- and the responsibility for doing so lies not just with the media. Unless Arabs themselves muster the courage to speak out against these heinous acts and those who perpetrate them, very little success can be made in the war on terrorism.

The imam of the grand mosque in Mecca has condemned the beheadings, as has the sheik of Egypt's Azhar Mosque. These are important voices, but Arab heads of state must do the same. And if governments condemned these acts, the media would change.

Arabs should stop deceiving themselves by confusing the suffering of Arabs in Iraq and the occupied territories in Israel with the beheading of innocent people in Iraq and elsewhere. (And if al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya were really serious about covering atrocities around the world, they would regularly show footage of the genocidal killing in Darfour, Sudan. Or is that massacre ignored because it is Arabs who are doing the killing?) The Arab media should make it clear that they will not publish hate speech against Muslims or non-Muslims.

The American media also have a role to play. They could make it easier for Arabs unequivocally to condemn beheadings and other acts of barbarism by talking to a broader range of commentators in the region.

If Arab moderates were to become prominent in the West, they would certainly become prominent at home. Instead, the BBC has been treating us to Atwan -- bin Laden's mouthpiece and the main cheerleader of suicide bombers on al-Jazeera -- as its main commentator on Arab affairs. Western media should tip the balance in favor of those who condemn terrorism but so far have been afraid to do so publicly.

The American media should also stop replaying images of violence from al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, because when the Arab media air these gruesome images, they animate the logic of terror. They export fear to America. If the Americans did not import these pictures, the Arab media would stop manufacturing them. That could be a first step toward defeating the terrorists who kill not just for Allah and jihad, but for airtime.

Author's e-mail:fandy@fandy.us

Mamoun Fandy is a columnist for two daily newspapers, Asharq al-Awsat in London and al-Ahram in Cairo. He is a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and author of "Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent" (Palgrave MacMillan).

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JERUSALEM DIARIST, Anniversary Present
Martin Peretz, The New Republic,  07.09.04

The founder of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, died at the age of 44 on July 3, exactly a century ago. It is not a date marked ostentatiously in Israel. After all, his achievement is taken for granted by most Israelis, and it would be odd if it were not--given that the Jewish state has turned out to be almost precisely the secular success Herzl envisioned. But many Europeans still can't absorb this reality. In fact, it rather sticks in their craw. A few weeks ago, for example, Michel Rocard, a former prime minister of France, pronounced the very creation of Israel a "mistake," although he apparently doesn't think that of any of the piteously failed states surrounding it. And, perhaps from the French perspective, Israel has indeed been a mistake--it has certainly been an impediment to French neocolonial interests among the Arabs.

Great Britain was, for a time, Zionism's essential partner, through the Balfour Declaration, which was confirmed by the League of Nations, and in the early years of the Mandate, conferred on the United Kingdom by the League. But, long before the Brits started appeasing the Nazis, they were already appeasing the most intransigent Arabs. (The Arabs didn't yet term--or even imagine--themselves Palestinians until 1967, when they fell under Israeli rule, which explains why Jordan was able to rule the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip almost without indigenous Arab challenge during the 18 years before they lost the Six Day War. By contrast, the Palestinian nomenclature was used by and about the Jews until they achieved independence in 1948. An old ditty from my childhood went: "If you like salami, join the Jewish army; fight, fight, fight for Palestine.")

Now, many Brits feign concern that Israel is not really the Zionist utopia some Jews--but certainly not they--hoped it would be. It is especially odd to read, on the centenary of Herzl's death, a lament for the eroded utopian vision of Labor and kibbutz Zionism (a dream Herzl did not share) in an article by Harvey Morris in the July 3 edition of the echt capitalist, ergo non-Edenic Financial Times of London. After all, a quintessential lesson of the modern era is that utopianism is, itself, a mortal danger to the good society. In his essay, Morris is struck not by the normal variety of life in Israel, but by three extreme representations: a politically alienated leftish painter, a messianic West Bank settler, and an idiosyncratic workman who calls himself a Palestinian Jew. Altogether, these may represent 5 percent of the Israeli population, probably less. He also writes about the usual "social tensions--between rich and poor, secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Sephardi," which he says are expressions of the "follies" of Zionism rather than instances of quotidian differences everywhere. But the greatest folly of the Zionists, according to Morris, is "the failure to recognize the rights of the other nation that exists in their midst."

This stands history on its head. From 1922 onward, the Zionists accepted every partition plan for Palestine put to them by any party (save the 1930 White Paper authored by Lord Passfield, the Stalinist apologist Sidney Webb, that would virtually have halted Jewish immigration); the Arabs rejected each. In 2000, Yasir Arafat declined Bill Clinton's proposals, which Ehud Barak had accepted, reestablishing, with minor compensating adjustments, the cease-fire lines of 1949, without even submitting a counter-proposal. Who, then, failed "to recognize the rights of the other nation"?

But even history stood on its head has consequences. The four-year intifada of blood and fury launched by the Palestinians in response to the Barak-Clinton offer has fizzled, its new headmen fearful and in hiding, its foot rabble bewildered. Every cliché put forward by Israel's critics has been proved false. A favorite from Cambridge dinner parties: Each targeted assassination by Israel of terrorist leaders like Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi will result in ten more suicide bombers volunteering both to murder and to die. Even among the followers of Hamas, however, there is no infinite stream of killers eager to couple with virgins. When an Israeli rocket fired from an Apache takes out a Hamas chieftain riding a motorcycle through traffic, no other terrorist leader is safe. (Except in prison, where many of them reside.)

And, of course, there is the unfinished fence, which has already stemmed the flow of slaughterers into Israel. As for the fence's trajectory, Israel's Supreme Court has just ruled that it must be shifted to limit the damage to local Palestinians--whose needs sometimes outweigh considerations of defense. In the same week, then, the highest courts of our country and of Israel have limited what the executive may do in pursuit of security. How many other countries, having suffered what Israel and the United States have at the hands of terrorists, would have been so scrupulous?

An old friend of mine, a hero of the Yom Kippur War and a veteran of Israel's peace ranks, told me the other day that his movement was in utter disarray. "It is cognitively dissonant," he said, "to support Sharon, which we must do. After all, our experience with him is bitter. But he will get out of Gaza and he wants to withdraw from much of the West Bank. This is the lesson he has learned." What's more, my friend confided, "There is another lesson that we in the peace camp must learn. It comes from our experience of the last years with the Palestinians, that they take concessions for weakness. Every concession encourages more demands. Since there are limits to the concessions we can make, and these are less than the perilous ones we made in 2000 at Camp David and Taba, we have to give only what we can, and not what the Palestinians expect." And then, my friend added, "It may just be that negotiating with the Palestinians is a charade. But they do understand power. That is why the intifada is coming to an end. They know that they have been defeated. Israel never drew up the map with which it can live. That is what we are doing now. But it is also a map that allows for a contiguous Palestine. It is a mark of our victory, and you will see how many Arabs will struggle to be on the Israeli side of the border rather than on the Palestinian side." Some folly, this Zionist enterprise.

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Spanish anti-Semitism is alive in the Left

Pilar Rahola : Diario El Mundo. Madrid.

Spain has never fulfilled its responsibility with regards to anti-Semitism - neither in the past, nor in the present . As a result, the powerful accusation by Pat Cox, president of the European Parliament, made in the March 2004 report, is hardly surprising: Spain is considered, today, the main source of incitation against Jews in Europe. The report of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, speaking about media coverage of the Middle East conflict, states: "since the stereotypes found in that coverage are the same waived against the Jews during the 1930s (killing children, controlling the world, related to money, dark intentions…), it is impossible to affirm that the anti-Israeli wave that crosses Spain is independent of an anti-Semitic content in the news". These affirmations are supported by the results Gallup has presented to the Anti-defamation League, in a recent survey: 72% of Spanish people would deport the Jews from Israel; only 12% would accept having Jewish neighbours; 69% believes Jews are too powerful and 55% attribute "dark intentions" to them that cannot be summarized. To my sadness, the study states that Cataluña and the Basque Country both show the highest levels of Jewphobia.

These are recent data published by well-respected institutions. Yet, have they worried anyone? More to the point, have they been believed, read, or were they assumed? Not only have they become wet paper but global Spain maintains stereotypes that have caused alarm in Strasbourg. Convinced of the truth of these data, the accusation I make is the following: today, Spain, is anti-Semitic once again. But this time we are a nation that is Anti-Semitic Polish style, that is to say, in Paul Landvai's words, "anti-Semites without Jews". And I say anti-Semite knowing that most of my colleagues (especially from the Left) not only don't accept the term, but find it offensive, as if anti-Semitism was the extreme right's and fanatical Catholicism’s exclusive patrimony. We know, since Martin Luther King denounced it in his "Letter to my anti-Semitic friend", that many are the camouflages of anti-Semitism, and that anti-zionism and anti-Israelism are much more bearable for some sensitive skins. But they are fed by the same source of intolerance. Of course it is alright to be a critic of Israel, and it is true that every critic cannot be accused of anti-Semitism, but there are so many warning notes that we must analyze them if we do not want to destroy our society.


The first alarm: the systematic and heartless banalization of the tragedy of the Holocaust – a banalization which does not only take place in aberrant Nazi pamphlets of late, but also in articles and declarations written mainly by progressives and prestigious intellectuals. Still echoing are , for the shame of the millions who died, Saramago's scorn of the memory of the Shoa. Not only has the venerable Nobel trivialised the only industry of extermination in human history, but his attitude begins to reflect a collective grammar. Graphic humour with Israeli leaders depicted as Nazis, accusations of genocide and Hitler-like practices when reporting any Israeli action, simple comparisons between the Holocaust and any present violent contingency… Without going further, Lopez Agudín, in this very same newspaper, raised an aberrant parallelism between Auschwitz and the prisons in Iraq. That is to say, his rightful criticism of the tortures of Iraqi prisoners, became an excuse to reduce one incomparable monstrosity -"the death of the human soul", as Claude Lanzmann defined it in his Shoa - with a deplorable chapter on torture. To banalize the Holocaust is a double moral shame: shameful to the tragic memory of Europe, and to our historic responsibility. But nothing arises from nothing. We can banalize the Holocaust today only because educating our society about the Holocaust’s tragic meaning never worried us, to the point that we localised it to a simple German question. Auschwitz was the final stop of tens of centuries of persecution against European Jews, and Spain (Isabel la Católica in hand) was the motor of the anti-Semitic hatred that has always existed in Europe. All the good, in the fields of law, literature, science, medicine, all the good that has happened to us has to do with Jewish Europe. All the bad that has happened to us has to do with anti-Jewish Europe. Nevertheless, we neither learn, nor do we assume the moral responsibility that the tragic memory would demand. From forgetfulness, banalization and oblivion are born. From forgetfulness prejudice is reborn. And through prejudice, intolerance returns.

In perfect synergy with the banalization of the Holocaust, most of our Intelligentsia practices a furious anti-Israelism that goes beyond logical criticism of Israeli actions. Along the way, not only reality is manipulated, and turned into a match between good and bad, but Jewish fault is magnified and Palestinian fault is reduced, to the point of disappearing. The trivialization of Palestinian terrorism, the fundamental enemy to their very own Palestinian cause, is the most outrageous exercise of irresponsibility of Spanish leftist thought. It is as outrageous as the selective solidarity that only cries for Palestinian victims and ignores, to the deepest scorn, Jewish ones. This happens in every aspect of this complex conflict, and propaganda is the result.

In this context of misinformation, distortion, the banalization of the Shoa takes place. If the Holocaust is made comparable to any violent action, Europe rids itself of any blame. From there it is a small step to accuse the Prime Minister of Israel of "genocide" or "Nazism", and each day the accusations go a little further. This is in spite of it being especially immoral to add to the shipwreck of genocide, the accusation of Nazism. But it is an immorality that is used, comfortably, in the fine halls of politically correct leftist thought.

Intellectuals, leftist leaders, opinion makers, I ask you – do we not have a moral responsibility that we are harming? Do we not have the responsibility to teach tolerance, and not feed old demons? Let's remember that anti-Semitism is the original school of intolerance. Do we not have the responsibility to not betray Europe’s tragic memory? We must not forget the extreme evil of the Holocaust and its unique place of horror in its murder of millions. Whenever an intellectual plays frivolously with the memory of the Shoa, no matter how good his intentions are, he is killing the victims again. It is a subtle double death, the physical death, and the forgetting of death. The trivialisation of the Holocaust not only desprives the victims of their place in history, but sends an aberrant message to society that it is not necessary to be act to prevent the long journey of hatred that made the Holocaust possible. And, finally, we abuse the responsibility of analyzing reality in truthful and non emotional terms, giving elements that serve to objectify the problem, and not turning them into doctrinarian excuses. With regard to Israel, we have replaced ideas with slogans, debates with the placards, and thought with propaganda.

The result is an irrational hatred of Israel, an absolute indifference to the implication of terrorism, and exoneration, via martyrdom, of the horrors that Palestinian terrorism perpetrates. The result is not useful even to the Palestinians themselves.

I conclude sharing Pat Cox's alarm: we are creating a new anti-Semitic doctrinarian body. Is it parallel to the classic one? No. The new anti-Semitism is leftist, it is an anti-Semitism of the elite and it is unconscious. But it exists.

Source: Israpundit

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It has to be said ...

Michael Coren, Toronto Sun, Sat, August 21, 2004

THERE ARE things you are not supposed to say. Things that people pretend are not true. Things that get you into all sorts of trouble because we live in a dishonest world. Here goes...

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