Israel Matzav

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Jewish lives don't matter

A good read (and unfortunately the criticism of the ADL is in place) from Seth Mandel.

Labels: ADL, anti-Israel media bias, Leftist anti-Semitism

Sunday, May 01, 2016

The Left: Where anti-Semitism is in style

A good week and a good summer to all of you.

You'd have to be living in a cave not to have heard how the British Labor Party has been overrun by anti-Semitism, and how that's come to a head in the last week or two.

But Britain is not the only place that's happened. Anti-Semitism, politely described as anti-Zionism, has become synonymous with the Left in every Western country.

Two important weekend pieces look at this phenomenon. The first is Stephen Pollard in the London Telegraph. Pollard concentrates on what's going on in his home country, Britain, and says that he's scared of what he sees. He also sees that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

But on another, more visceral level, it chills me to the bone. And it’s not the terrorists. They threaten me, of course, as they threaten us all. Yet to me, the real chill comes from their fellow travelers – the useful idiots of the terrorists and Jew-murderers who say they do not have a racist bone in their body, but when it comes to Jews, a blind spot emerges.

The likes, to be blunt, of the now suspended Ken Livingstone, who claims never to have come across a single example of Anti-semitism in the Labour Party. He clearly has never looked in the mirror. Much has been written – especially by the brilliant Nick Cohen – on the "Red/Green Alliance"; the phenomenon by which a swathe of the Left has linked up with radical Islam, leading to the bizarre spectacle of Leftist feminists supporting Islamists who would cut off the hands of women who read books.

With "anti-Western-imperialism" as part of the glue binding the alliance, everything else falls into place. So Hamas and Hezbollah might have as their defining goal the elimination of an entire people from the face of the earth, but that unfortunate consequence for Jews is by the by, because Hamas and Hezbollah are freedom fighters.

And because Israel is part of the Western imperium, as well as a key target for Islamists, it is also enemy number one for progressives. So an obsessive preoccupation with the Jewish state becomes the default position of the Left. China, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia – pah! The focus must be on Israel and Israel alone. From that springs an entire worldview that encompasses "Zionist" control of the media, of business, of everything. And we can’t be accused of targeting Jews because we don’t use the word. We say Zionist, not Jew.

So deep does this warping of what it means to be Left and progressive now run that it is almost prosaic to assert Zionist control. But now, to cap it, we have a Labour leader whose entire political career has been in this milieu – feeding it, growing it and pushing it.

...

Should I admit that I am afraid? Because I am. I don’t go about my life in fear. I wouldn’t be writing this or doing my job if I did. But how, quite rationally, can I not be afraid when Jews are being murdered on the streets of Europe simply for being Jews; when anti-Semitic tropes and discourse is becoming part of the mainstream of political debate; and when one of our main political parties is led by a man who does not merely let this fester, but actually describes representatives of terrorist groups as "friends"?

If this is the level we have reached today, I fear not just for myself but far more for my children. History shows that when anti-Semitism takes hold it does not wither; it grows. Yes, Britain is a wonderful home to Jews, as it is to all minorities. Yes, we have the full backing of the law and the authorities. But yes, I do look over my shoulder. Wouldn’t you?

Read the whole thing.

Over at the National Review Online, Kevin Williamson has a more American and universal perspective.

In the United States, the Harvard Law Record went to some lengths to conceal the identity of a law student who attacked a visiting Israeli dignitary as — in the classic anti-Semitic formulation — “smelly.” That student was Husam El-Qoulaq, a Palestinian leftist. The campus Left has, to no one’s surprise, rallied to his defense. Among those defending him were a number of Jewish law students, who insisted that El-Qoulaq couldn’t possibly have known the anti-Semitic history of “smelly Jew” rhetoric, in spite of his having been reared at the world center of such nonsense.

Others insisted that the Harvard case and the Labour cases are — this, too, will be familiar — not at all about anti-Semitism but about anti-Zionism.

That argument does not stand up to two seconds’ scrutiny, and never has. One of the fundamental stories of history is that people move around and bump into each other. It is true that most of the current Jewish population of Israel descends from people who were not precisely sons of the soil they now inhabit. But then, neither are the so-called Palestinians, who are Arabs. Arabs famously come from Arabia, but they are located all over the world. No one talks about the need to get the Arabs out of Egypt or Libya — or Palestine, for that matter — any more than anybody seriously thinks about returning the Americas to the descendants of the aboriginal population, which, of course, wasn’t aboriginal, either, but merely the first to emigrate. The Irish are descended of people not native to Ireland, as indeed ultimately is every population in the world, including those in the African cradle of humanity.

And it isn’t because the establishment of Israel is, relatively speaking, fresh in the historical memory, and therefore an open wound. Before the end of World War II, there was no Pakistan, and to the extent that there was an “India,” it was a geographical rather than a political term, much like “Palestine.” There was no independent Ireland until the 1920s and no Republic of Ireland until 1948. There was no People’s Republic of China until 1949. There was no Zimbabwe until 1980, no Czech Republic until 1993, and no modern Democratic Republic of the Congo until 1997. Israel is an ancient state compared with geopolitical newcomers such as the 30-odd countries created since 1990.

...

For those who learned at the feet of that old fraud Edward Said, the Jews are the colonialists, the European modernists inflicting capitalism and technology upon the noble savages of their imaginations. The Israeli Jews commit the double crime of insisting upon being Jews and refusing to be sacrificial victims. They were okay, in the Left’s estimate, for about five minutes, back when Israel’s future was assumed to be one of low-impact kibbutz socialism. History went in a different direction, and today Israel has one of the world’s most sophisticated economies.

For the Jew-hater, this is maddening: Throw the Jews out of Spain, and they thrive abroad. Send them to the poorest slums in New York, and those slums stop being slums. Keep them out of the Ivy League and watch NYU become a world-class institution inspired by men such as Jonas Salk, son of largely uneducated Polish immigrants. Put the Jewish state in a desert wasteland and watch it bloom, first with produce and then with technology. Israel today has more companies listed on NASDAQ than any other country except the United States and China. The economy under Palestinian management? Olives and handicrafts, and a GDP per capita that barely exceeds that of Sudan.

The Arab–Israeli conflict is a bitter and ugly one. My own view of it is that the Palestinian Arabs have some legitimate grievances, and that I stopped caring about them when they started blowing up children in pizza shops. You can thank the courageous heroes of the Battle of Sbarro for that. Israel isn’t my country, but it is my country’s ally, and it is impossible for a liberty-loving American to fail to admire what the Jewish state has done.

And that, of course, is why the Left wants to see the Jewish state exterminated.

Read the whole thing.

I've written about the Red-Green Alliance many times before. You may want to start here and here.

Labels: anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, British anti-Semitism, British Labour party, Edward Said, European anti-Semitism, Leftist anti-Semitism, Leftist Jews, Red-Green alliance

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Maybe she's on to something... but not for the reasons she thinks: SUNY Plattsburgh prof compares 'Israeli apartheid' to campus rape

An Israeli-born professor (link in Hebrew) of Gender and Women's Studies at the State University of Plattsburgh has compared 'Israeli apartheid' to campus rape in an interview with the online publication Alternet.

The Professor's name is Simona (Sima) Sharoni. Her academic credentials are here. This is from the second of the three links above.

Sharoni, a professor at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in the Gender and Women's Studies Department, said that both the conflict and campus sexual assault feature institutionalized disparity of power as a linchpin.

Sharoni articulated that the pro-Israel narrative embraces a victim-blaming narrative akin to "she was asking for it" allegations common in rape culture. "The assumption that Palestinians bring the violence on themselves...it's similar to telling a survivor that it's what she was wearing," Sharoni said.

Additionally, she asserted that supporters of Israel engage in a behavior analogous to discrediting rape victims in their repudiation of Palestinian claims.

"Palestinians are not believed, which is the same with survivors [of sexual assault]. It's very similar to saying, 'No, he's actually a nice guy,' about a man accused of rape," Aharoni remarked.

The professor concluded her interview by explaining that drawing parallels between campus rape and the "Israeli apartheid" is strategically advantageous for both the BDS movement as well as sexual assault survivors groups because it serves as "a means to an end...to create a just and equal society."

Well, Israel's treatment of 'Palestinians' does have something in common with campus rapes. It's widely exaggerated in the media, and the media reports about it (as well as the crimes themselves) are often based on lies by people who want to create abuse that doesn't exist. Often, both are based on fiction.

Labels: BDS, Israeli apartheid, Jewish anti-Semitism, Leftist anti-Semitism, rape

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Yale Professor: 'The Jooos had it coming'

Get a load of this from HuffPo. This is the first link.

There's plenty more at the second link.

PS Although I am sure that Deir Yassin didn't motive Tuesday's terrorists, Deir Yassin was actually located at the entrance to Har Nof - probably half a mile away (when I first moved to Israel the former homes of the residents who fled - they weren't expelled - still stood).

More on Dir Yassin here.

Labels: Deir Yassin, Leftist anti-Semitism, Palestinian terrorism, Yale University

Sunday, September 28, 2014

'We are all Leon Klinghoffer'

I hope they get far more than 100....

Labels: Leftist anti-Semitism, Leon Klinghoffer, Palestinian terrorism

Thursday, September 11, 2014

I am Leon Klinghoffer

This is Monday, September 22's stop in the war on terror.

I am Leon Klinghoffer @MetOpera-Stop Glorifying Terrorists Rally Sept 22 @LincolnCenter NYC @LoriLMarcus @cvaldary pic.twitter.com/ARa6MkoLsJ
— JCCWatch.org (@JCCWatch) September 11, 2014

If you're in New York City, please try to be there.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Jewish communal organizations, Leftist anti-Semitism, New York City, New York Times, Palestinian terrorism

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The New York Times and the Death of Klinghoffer

In an earlier post, I reported on the rally in New York against the Metropolitan Opera's Death of Klinghoffer, which is to take place on Monday.

It is well known that the New York Times was less than forthright (to put it kindly) in its reporting on the Holocaust 70 years ago, and that the Times has been very anti-Israel in its reporting for many years.

But here's something I didn't know, which I just found out by email from an anonymous source:

Peter Gelb, the head of the Met Opera is the son of Arthur Gelb, formerly publisher of the NYT.

And apparently they are quite proud of the connection.

Hmmm.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Jewish communal organizations, Leftist anti-Semitism, New York City, New York Times, Palestinian terrorism

Sunday, September 07, 2014

Rally against the most disgraceful, distasteful opera ever produced

Death of Klinghoffer rally ad

I urge any of you who are able to do so to attend the rally. The fact that this opera is being put on is disgraceful and distasteful... and anti-Semitic.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Jewish communal organizations, Leftist anti-Semitism, New York City, Palestinian terrorism

Monday, August 18, 2014

Bret Stephens v. Ari Shavit

Bret Stephens and Ari Shavit debate the current situation in Israel and the future of Zionism at Hadassah's 97th National Convention in Las Vegas with Prof. Gil Troy as moderator. This one is a bit long.

Let's go to the videotape.

I'm still watching this one and may have more comments later, so be sure to check back later.

The actual debate starts around the 45:00 mark.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Ari Shavit, Bret Stephens, Europe, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, isolationist, Leftist anti-Semitism, Operation Protective Edge, US-Israel relationship

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Washington Post publishes cartoon of Netanyahu punching infant

This reminds me of the infamous cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating babies.

The Washington Post has published a cartoon of Prime Minister Netanyahu punching an infant in the face. The cartoon is supposedly meant to show that both sides are equally to blame for the current fighting - a lie on its face.

Let's go to the videotape. More after the video.

American Jewish organizations are understandably outraged.

The caricature is aimed at apportioning blame equally between Israel and Hamas for the suffering of Gazan civilians. It was created by Ann Telnaes, one of the newspaper’s editorial cartoonists.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared its outrage over the cartoon. In a statement released to news agencies on Friday, the center’s associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said the clip was “disgusting.”

"It is disgusting that The Washington Post would present an animated cartoon that is so profoundly removed from the truth," said Cooper. "Millions of Israeli citizens—men, women, and children—have been forced into bomb shelters and saferooms by thousands of missiles and rockets targeted at them by Hamas terrorists, whose open and avowed goal is the destruction of the Jewish state."

“Even Israel's enemies have recognized that Israel's military countermeasures against Hamas have included phone and text warnings as well as leaflets urging innocent civilians in Gaza to vacate the targeted areas," Cooper said. "It is the Hamas leadership that openly uses the people of Gaza to act as human shields to protect their weapons of mass destruction."

"Israelis are saddened by the deaths of four Palestinian children on a Gaza beach yesterday, but the blood of these innocent children is on the hands of Hamas leaders, not Binyamin Netanyahu," Rabbi Cooper also said.

It is indeed disgusting.

Labels: anti-Israel media bias, Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Netanyahu, Leftist anti-Semitism, Operation Protective Edge, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Washington Post

Thursday, March 06, 2014

Boo Hoo

Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin posts a rant after she is deported from Egypt to Turkey instead of being allowed into Gaza for - get this - International Women's Day. Meanwhile, her fellow travelers, pictured above, remain at Cairo airport.

Just the other day I hopped on a plane to Egypt, eager to join the international delegation of 100 women headed to Gaza for International Women’s Day. Little did I know I would be stopped at the Cairo airport, detained, held overnight in a cell, then in the morning brutally assaulted by Egyptian authorities. They threw me to the ground, stomped on my back, handcuffed me so tightly they dislocated my shoulder, and then deported me to Turkey.

Now the Egyptian authorities are blocking most of the remaining delegates from entering Egypt and traveling to Gaza. It has been frustrating and disappointing for us, but we cannot forget that almost two million Palestinians remained trapped in Gaza while the Egyptian Rafah border remains closed or tightly controlled

What happened to me was traumatizing, but is minor compared to what Egyptian activists are going through, including women. Thousands of peaceful Egyptian demonstrators have been killed or jailed by the Military Junta since the July 2013 military coup.

And just how does this moron think that Hamas is treating 'Palestinian' women in Gaza? Here's an example.

There's only one country in the Middle East which strives to treat its women like human beings. But Benjamin and her ilk cannot even acknowledges that country's existence. Jew hatred takes precedence over women's rights for these self-proclaimed women's rights activists.

Labels: Arab treatment of women, Cairo, Code Pink, Egypt, Egyptian treatment of women, Gaza, Hamas, Leftist anti-Semitism, Muslim treatment of women, women

Thursday, January 23, 2014

A disgusting cartoon

My friends at Power Line publish an open letter from Allen Wiener in response to the cartoon above, which ran in the Montreal Gazette on Tuesday. This is from the first link.

This is to inform you that I have cancelled my subscription to the Montreal Gazette in protest of that disgusting cartoon your paper has chosen to publish of Prime Minister Stephen Harper dated January 21, 2014.

In a time when the Muslim world is exploding into war, mass slaughter, mayhem, fratricide, suicide bombings, persecution of Christians and gays, incitement to hatred being taught in schools, the export of terror and the spreading of fanatic Islamic ideology, your “newspaper” has chosen to seize the opportunity to denigrate our Prime Minister for his support of the State of Israel, a nation that reflects Canada’s social principles and values.

This so-called “cartoon” is vulgar in so many ways, it should be banished to the trash can of ignorance and veiled anti-Semitisim.

It portrays Israel (and the Jews as a whole) as being in control of Canada’s policies (this which is echoed and chirped by Jew haters of every stripe).

It portrays Prime Minister Harper as a passive lackey of Israel, bending to the wishes of the Jewish State.

I don’t recall seeing a similar portrayal of Barack Obama after his famous love-in speech given to the Muslim world in Cairo, back in 2009. No way would your left wing publication print such a vile representation of a statesman who quoted the wonderful contributions Islam has bestowed upon America.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Leftist anti-Semitism, Stephen Harper

Thursday, September 12, 2013

NYU Law School [National Lawyer's Guild*] holding thinly disguised BDS conference

*Please note the comment below regarding the post's title.

New York University Law School, from which yours truly holds a degree, is holding what looks and smells like an evening to promote BDS - the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. In the typical Leftist style of promoting 'free speech,' the event is being held next Wednesday night, the first night of the Jewish holiday of Succot, ensuring that many opponents of BDS just won't show up.

NLG-NYU presents: Free Speech, the Law, and the Palestinian Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

Wednesday, September 18, 2013 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Vanderbilt Hall, Smart Classroom 214 map

**Note: Panel discussion begins at 7pm**

How has the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement affected discourse surrounding Israel, Zionism, and the Occupation on U.S. campuses, and what is the role and importance of the academic boycott in this context? Join NLG civil rights attorneys Barbara Harvey and Rima Najjar Kapitan for a discussion in support of this movement.

The panel, moderated by NLG civil rights lawyer Abdeen Jabara, will cover the history, rationale, and current landscape of the BDS movement on university campuses and in local communities in the U.S., with a particular focus on academic boycott.

Endorsed by: Jewish Voice for Peace-NYC, Adalah-NY, Center for Constitutional Rights, New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (NYACT)

I'm surprised they actually refer to Israel and not to the 'Zionist entity.' And you wonder why my four years at NYU (JD/MBA) made me politically conservative?

Labels: BDS, Leftist anti-Semitism

Friday, April 05, 2013

Stupid Jews: Carodozo law school journal giving award to Jimmy Carter

Why are some Jews so dumb?

Yeshiva University's Cardozo law school is giving a 'peace award' to one of this generation's greatest anti-Semites: Jimmy the Dhimmi Carter.

The Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution is honored to present President Jimmy Carter with its annual International Advocate for Peace Award. President Carter will speak on "America as Global Mediator." Jimmy Carter served as president from 1977 to 1981. During his time in office, he oversaw significant foreign policy accomplishments, including the Panama Canal treaties, the Camp David Accords, the treaty of peace between Egypt and Israel, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, and the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China.

In 1982, President Carter and his wife Rosalynn reinvented the American "post-presidency" by founding the Carter Center. Actively guided by President Carter, the nonpartisan and nonprofit Center addresses national and international issues of public policy. Specifically, the center works to resolve conflict, promote democracy, protect human rights, and prevent disease and other afflictions. President Carter and the Carter Center have engaged in conflict mediation in countless areas around the world, including Ethiopia and Eritrea (1989), Bosnia (1994), the Great Lakes region of Africa (1995-96), Sudan and Uganda (1999), Venezuela (2002-2003), Nepal (2004-2008), and Ecuador and Colombia (2008).

President Carter's post-presidential peace-building efforts were recognized in 2002 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." He is the only American president to receive the Nobel Prize for work done primarily after his time in office.

Oy.... Elder of Ziyon has a list of some of Carter's 'achievements - read the whole thing.

A law professor at another university wrote to me that the university and even the law school likely have little control over this, and cannot stop the journal in question (known as the 'Cardozo Journal of International Conflict Resolution') from doing whatever they please. I disagree. They're using campus facilities and they can be stopped by the university from using campus facilities for such invidious purposes.

Would they give an award to Ahmadinejad? Oh wait, another university in New York did just that....

And yes, I know, not everyone at Cardozo is Jewish (as one of my friends put it, Cardozo represents Yeshiva about as much as Notre Dame represents the Catholic Church). Well, here's the Editor in Chief of the 'Journal of International Conflict Resolution.' Decide for yourselves.

Labels: anti-Semitism, Jimmy Carter, Leftist anti-Semitism, Leftist Jews, Yeshiva University

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Do burqas come in pink?

Do burqas come in pink?

Does a bear defecate in the woods?

Does Code Pink try to disrupt AIPAC conventions?

Watch the video here.

Labels: AIPAC, Code Pink, Leftist anti-Semitism

Sunday, January 20, 2013

A mamzer in more ways than one

Israel's Ambassador to Germany Yaakov Hadas-Handelsman has slammed the Leftist anti-Semitism represented by Jakob Ausgstein (pictured above), a columnist for Germany's Der Spiegel.

"That is shameful,"said Hadas-Handelsman of Augstein's comparison between the Gaza Strip and a concentration camp. The Israeli ambassador gave a wide-ranging interview on Saturday to the daily Rheinische Post, a regional paper in Düsseldorf.

When asked whether Augstein is an anti-Semite, Hadas-Handelsman said he could not delve into the psyche of anti-Israel authors and journalists like Guenther Grass and Augstein to determine if they are anti-Semites.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center included Augstein on its 2012 top-10 list of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slurs. Augstein termed Gaza a "camp" which evokes in a German language context a Nazi extermination camp. He also said, "Gaza is a place out of the end of times... 1.7 million people live there on 360 sq. kilometers. Israel incubates its own opponents there."

In this week's Spiegel magazine, which Augstein partly owns, he admitted, "With the word 'camp' I definitely went too far." However, he defended his criticisms of Israel for delivering marching orders to the US and German governments and as the country endangering world peace. He also attacked Israel in new terms during the interview by comparing the Jewish state to the former Apartheid regime in South Africa. He said he has never been to Israel and said he would not visit.

It's refreshing to see another Israeli diplomat who seems to 'get it.' So many others unfortunately don't and still believe anti-Semitism emanates mostly or entirely from the Right.

Read the whole thing.

It turns out that Augstein is a mamzer in more ways than one. See details here.

Labels: concentration camp, Gaza, Germany, Leftist anti-Semitism

Sunday, December 09, 2012

Is America the new Babylon?

Rabbi Berel Wein, for many years a pulpit rabbi in the United States, and one of the world's foremost experts on Jewish history, finds some disturbing parallels between the United States in 2012 and Babylon during the millennium leading up to the 1950's (Hat Tip: Dan F).

Finally, Babylonian Jewry was riven by internal disputes between its religious and temporal leaders. Disputes, especially disputes that touch on religious matters invariably lead to extremist views and unacceptable behavior – all under the guise of following the will of Heaven.

There is much extremism under display in American Jewry today. Ah, but you will counter, how about the extremism in the religious circles in Israel. But there is a fundamental difference between Israel and America. Here in Israel the extremism is mostly political in nature - the quest for patronage and budget allocations, and the personal ambitions of politicians for office and power.

With all of the trappings of piety surrounding them, the contests here are basically much more personal than ideological. The anti-Israel groupings in Israel have waned in numbers and influence while, unfortunately, they have increased in the American Jewish society. More and more, the hareidi society in Israel sees itself as part of the general apparatus of the state, and the nineteenth century battle over Zionism has ended here. It is a moot question.

Not so in American Jewish society where actual hatred of the State of Israel exists in many sections of that society, from the intellectual Left to the extremists in the religious world on the Right.

When Babylonia saw itself as the substitute for Jerusalem as a safe haven for all eternity, its decline immediately set in.

Read the whole thing.

By the way, no one on any side of the religious disputes here in Israel will admit that money or patronage plays a role in them. But it does.

Labels: anti-Israeli Israelis, Leftist anti-Semitism, Leftist Jews, Neturei Karta

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Interview with Prof. Wistrich on "prevalent shades of anti-Semitism" by Hansjörg Müller

In September, Prof. Robert Wistrich was interviewed about the most prevalent shades of anti-Semitism by Hansjörg Müller, the editor of the Baseler Zeitung, a popular German newspaper in Basel, Switzerland. The piece appeared in the September 12 edition of the paper. With Mr. Müller's permission, Prof. Wistrich translated the piece into English. It appears below.

Q:    In your encyclopedic work, A Lethal Obsession. Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, 2010), you present Islamist antisemitism as an existential danger to modern civilization. Could you explain?

A:    In my view, Islamic antisemitism is by far the most dynamic and threatening form of antisemitism existing at present in the contemporary world. It combines the scourge of Islamist terrorism, the spread of jihad, hatred of the West, Holocaust denial, and the genocidal “anti-Zionism” which is state-sanctioned in Iran. The dramatic triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the alarming growth of militant Salafist movements across the Arab Middle East have greatly increased the level of threat worldwide.

Q:    Is there a historic connection between European fascism and Islamism?

A:    The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, had a radical totalitarian vision of societal transformation, a leadership cult, and visceral hatred of Jews not so different from that of fascism and National Socialism. Moreover, the charismatic founder of the Palestinian Arab national movement, Haj Amin el-Husseini, was a fanatical genocidal anti-Semite who actively collaborated with Adolf Hitler during World War II. This “annihilationist” tradition of Jew-hatred has continued in the Palestinian Hamas movement (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) to this very day. Its Sacred Covenant is one of the most nakedly anti-Jewish texts of the entire post-Holocaust era.

Q:    You have described the impact of the Nazi legacy on radical Islam, but what about classical right-wing antisemitism in present-day Europe?

A:    Populist right-wing tendencies are especially strong in Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, parts of Scandinavia, and the Baltic States, in Eastern Europe, and even here in like Switzerland. Nor are France, Germany, or Italy immune. Against the background of an alarming world economic crisis, the possible collapse of the Euro-zone, the specter of globalization, and a massive migration from the poorer southern countries to Europe, these negative trends will probably grow. Antisemitism is part of this wider syndrome.

Q:    In your newest book, From Ambivalence to Betrayal. The Left, the Jews, and Israel (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), you are often severely critical of Western leftist attitudes to Israel and the so-called “Jewish Question.” How do you explain left-wing hostility?

A:    The Left is suffering from acute amnesia. It has forgotten, for example, that Egyptian president Nasser and his Arab allies openly threatened to throw the Jews into the sea in 1967. To this day, Hamas, the Hezbollah and their Iranian backers, not to mention other Arab states, constantly broadcast their intention to eradicate the Zionist “cancer” from the Middle East map. So I ask people on the Left — is that a “progressive” position? Hardly. The Left has also forgotten that there was an uninterrupted Jewish presence in the Holy Land long before the birth of Islam — and despite endless harassment, along with Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, and Muslim persecutions and massacres, this Jewish settlement continued until the emergence of the modern Zionist movement.

Q:    Why do you think so many leftists are pro-Islamist today?

A:    The Western Left and the Islamists both share the myth that Israel is a “white,” Western, and colonial intrusion in the Middle East. They both have embraced a radically distorted view of Palestinians as defenseless “Jews,” downtrodden, and ruthlessly abused by fascist Israelis. Behind this demonic imagery there is an antisemitic view of Israel and America as twin embodiments of capitalist-imperialist evil. Needless to say, this mythology is totally disconnected from empirical reality.

Q:    In light of your current trends, do you see any future for European Jewry? If you were living here, would you stay or go?

A:    I personally believe that the long-term future of European Jewry is bleak. I would not wish to decide for European Jews what future they should choose, but I am convinced that the land of Israel is the only possible spiritual and political homeland for the Jewish people. Let us also remember that it was in the city of Basel that Theodor Herzl first proclaimed to the wider Jewish and Gentile world in 1897 the birth of modern Zionism. In his diary he prophesied that within fifty years a Jewish State would inevitably arise. Many people at the time dismissed him as a charlatan or a dreamer. But his prophecy came true and for that we should be thankful.

Labels: anti-Semitism, European anti-Semitism, European Jews, Islamic anti-Semitism, Leftist anti-Semitism, Red-Green alliance

Is Peter Beinart a Jewish anti-Semite?

Caroline Glick demolishes Peter Beinart and J Street.

Beinart's attacks on Rupert Murdoch and others who criticize Jews who attack Israel have to be seen as a continuation of the J Street campaign against Israel's supporters in Washington.

Jonathan provided the following quote from Beinart's assault on Murdoch:

I don't think anti-Semitism is widespread on the American right, any more than it is widespread on the American left. But when expressed, it should be publicly condemned. Whether it masks itself as hostility to Israel or support for Israel should make no difference at all.

You see what he is doing here.

He is saying that there is no difference between those who support Israel and decry its critics and those who oppose Israel and decry its supporters.

This post-modern moral equivalence is absolutely necessary. If you want to make a completely false argument sound reasonable, the first thing you have to do is erase all distinction between good and evil. (See the film clips in my last blog post.)

We need to be aware of what Beinart and his allies are doing. In the coming months and years, we should expect more and more of Israel's supporters to be attacked as anti-Semites by leftist American Jews. The intention of people like Beinart and J Street is to demonize and discredit Israel's supporters just as Israel itself is being demonized and discredited.

In the face of this new initiative it is imperative that we continue to point out the real distinctions.