Israel Matzav

Beinart's Israel obsession

It's been a while since I've written about Peter Beinart, but he's back in the news again.

Beinart has attacked Cory Booker, the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, the leading Democratic candidate to replace Frank Lautenberg as a US Senator from New Jersey. This particular internecine Democratic dispute shows Beinart's obsession with bashing Israel: He attacks Booker for his associations with the Chabad movement. Beinart bashes Chabad for being 'deeply, primitively racist.' That's a ridiculous charge, as Dovid Efune explains.

I wonder what the many Asian victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami who were the benefactors of Chabad’s color blind relief effort, would have to say about Beinart’s assessment. “When it comes to the aid, we have seen no lines in who we assist,” Yosef Zaklos, a Chabad rabbi involved in the relief efforts, told the Jerusalem Post at the time, “Just the other day, we gave aid to a Muslim family. It’s not Jewish-oriented aid, it’s humanitarian aid.”

Perhaps another point of call for Mr. Beinart in his efforts to research Chabad should have been the members of the largely African American community whose lives were devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “One of those rescued from New Orleans put it this way: In the days after Katrina hit, Chabad saved lives,” said President George W. Bush, singling out Chabad for praise.

Victims of Hurricane Sandy, the Japanese earthquake of 2011, the recent Oklahoma tornadoes and numerous other crises will tell you the same story. Perhaps Mr. Beinart, before trumpeting your wholesale slander of one of the most active and powerful Jewish humanitarian organizations the world has ever seen, you will provide one, just one example of an act of racial prejudice that has been perpetrated in the name of Chabad’s ideology.

But Beinart's real bone of contention with Chabad is the fact that its most recent Rebbe, Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson zt"l, was a staunch opponent of giving land in Israel to the 'Palestinian' Arabs. Efune says that Beinart's wrong about that too. 

But if Beinart actually made an effort to research Chabad’s position on the creation of a Palestinian Arab state he would come to understand that it is rooted in the ultimate justice: the preservation of human life.

“The only subject matter under discussion –at any rate, from my treatment of it – is the purely Halachic (Jewish legal) subject of the preservation of life as it affects the question of returning any part of the liberated areas,” wrote the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem  Schneerson, in correspondence with the late former Commonwealth Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits on the matter, between 1980 and 1982. “Now in regard to the liberated areas, all military experts both Jewish and non-Jewish agree that in the present situation giving up any part of them would create serious security dangers,” he explained.

Years later Schneerson’s concerns were affirmed when successive territorial compromises resulted almost directly in increased bloodshed.

Perhaps Beinart can explain why Palestinian Arab nationalism is so important a goal in his eyes that he does not even consider the concerns held by Chabad to be worthy of consideration.

Perhaps to Beinart, the preservation of human life isn't justified when the human lives in question are Jewish lives. Why Beinart has any credibility or influence in the Jewish community is simply beyond me. He's nothing but a self-hating Jew.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Jewish anti-Semitism, Peter Beinart, self-hating Jews

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:58 AM