Israel Matzav

The gray ponytails

I am sure that some of you who grew up in the '60's and '70's like I did watched that video of interviews from the J Street conference and wondered why so many of the people attending look so old. I grew up believing that young people are Leftists and Democrats, and that after growing older and getting mugged by reality they become conservatives and Republicans.

But when it comes to Israel, it seems that the generation from which most of the anti-Israel crowd is drawn is one that begins a few years older than I am and ends around retirement age. Let's call it the 60-70 crowd. Why is that? Hillel Stavis tries to explain.

You see them in every University town in America, the aging, angry and disaffected children of the ’60′s, grandchildren of Jewish socialism and communism of the ’30′s – in perpetual mourning for the Soviet Union, Cuba and all the other failed socialist experiments of the last 100 years. Like dinghys floating on the surface of the water waiting in vain for the mother ship that will never come back for them, they band together to find an enemy, the passion that will breathe life into them again, the resurrection of the unfinished revolution. And as we’ve seen for the past 20 years, the most convenient enemy and scapegoat is Israel and the Jews. The 1930′s was the Right’s turn, now the hatred spews from the Left.

This time, many of the Hamas support groupies are PWJN (Persons with Jewish Names), the “as-a-Jew” antisemites. You know them – from Berkeley to Madison to Ann Arbor – the ones who preface every Israel hating remark with statements like: “As a Jew I deplore and abhor what Israel is doing to that nation of Ghandis, the Palestinians…” They lend credibility and energy – by simple virtue of a last name – to the most inaccurate, mendacious and vicious campaigns against the Jewish people since the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930′s. I once asked one of the AAJ’s (as-a-Jew) what connection she had with her local Jewish community; did she regularly got to Synagogue, support local Jewish community groups, keep kosher, or was she knowledgeable about Jewish history? Stunned, she answered that she was an active fighter for “Social Justice.” Asked if that included the right of her Jewish brothers and sisters to exist in their own historical country, she abruptly turned on her heel and laughed, saying that she considered them “cousins” only. Of course, her real brothers and sisters sport keffiyahs (as did she) and followed the teachings of the Koran.

The latest chapter in the grey ponytails was recently written in Cambridge, MA, a “city of refuge” for any and all Jew hating Muslims and one of the mirror image cities that are associated with University PC culture. This time it involved an ADL initiative inviting police and fire department administrators to visit Israel to learn the latest counter terrorism tactics. Like El Al’s highly successful program to keep U.S. airports safe from Al Qaeda and its copycat would-be killers, the ADL should be commended in its efforts to lend Israeli expertise to the U.S.

Redefining chutzpah, this group, in the words of its leader, Cathy Hoffman, former director of The Cambridge Peace Commission (I kid you not-along with trash removal, the City aspires to remove war from the global landscape) characterized the Israeli invitation as further proof that the Jewish state opposes multiculturalism and is an example of Apartheid – ho hum.

Read and watch (lots of video here) the whole thing, and learn who the enemy really is.

By the way, to the best of my knowledge, the guy at the top of this post (who is pushing 58) was not at the J Street conference. Dan Rather wouldn't let him go.

Labels: ADL, anti-Semitism, Israel, leftists, Massachusetts, Stuxnet

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:46 PM