Underhanded Democrats

As a recent example of the new mainstreaming of Jew-hatred under the mantle of anti-Zionism, I bring you the blog Evenhanded Democrats, newly launched, contributed to by a “Who’s Who” of Israel-haters on Daily Kos. The front page greets you with the post, “The End of Zionism?”, which I already mentioned twice. It can be considered the epitome of the problem with those Kossacks’ “evenhandedness”. Right off the bat, there are two overarching errors behind this particular initiative and the general phenomenon it embodies: it is based on false information, selectively chosen, and it is, despite being driven by that false information, not the isolationism expected from it.

Look at the byline, titled, “Why Evenhanded?”:

We are Democrats who want a change in the Democratic Party Platform regarding the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, so that our country may be perceived as a fair broker. (Emphasis mine. —ZY)

Draw a straight line from that statement to events back in time. Where will your line end? At 9/11, that’s where. The thoughts going on at the aftermath of 9/11 led quickly to the mainstreaming of the idea that the USA’s “one-sided support of Israel” was bringing upon it the enmity of the entire Muslim world. That thought had existed before 9/11, but now it could be voiced with acceptability.

What is the basis for this thought? The shocking answer is: no more and no less than the words of the terrorist leaders. Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahri said so. They said so, therefore the anti-Zionists believe it to be true.

The question is not if they are lying (that is a valid question, but outside the scope of this post); the question is if they could be lying, because that question has very far-reaching ramifications not only for Israeli but also for American, Western, even non-Muslim politics in general. The West-hating Left has already made up its collective mind that President George W. Bush is capable of lying. Whenever he delivers a speech, a Leftist fisking showing “his cynical ploys”, sometimes even to the level of a single word, soon follows. It started from right after 9/11, when Leftist commentators derided his saying of the terrorists, “They hate our freedom”.

Are Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahri capable of lying? My answer, after the Lebanon War of Summer 2006, is an unequivocal “Yes”. During that war, the Muslim enemy staged the news and faked the photos. These aren’t the plotting-in-the-dark, Dolchstosslegende kind of lies that can still be disputed even after centuries, these are flat-out lies laid out in plain sight, in broad daylight. Positive proof: the Muslim enemy is capable of lying in order to manipulate public opinion.

So when the good doctor Al-Zawahri says, in his broadcast to the American people, that “the oppression of the Palestinians” is behind the Muslims’ hatred for the USA, there is at least potential for him to be doctoring the truth in order to pit non-Muslim against non-Muslim. This is still not proof that he is actually doing so (again, that’ll have to be for another post), but it does mean the American listeners should approach his words with at least the same suspicion as they do their president’s. That they do not do so, instead opting to regard every word of Al-Zawahri’s as if engraved in gold, speaks volumes… but don’t question their patriotism.

Upon this uncritically-imbibed hypothesis, then, the many and constantly growing voices on the Democrat Party base their call for foreign policy change with regard to Israel: to be “evenhanded” in this conflict, in order to be perceived as honest brokers, for the ultimate purpose that we may not incur again the wrath justly visited upon us by the legitimately grievanced on 9/11. Chamberlain, Lindbergh, America First Committee, and what’s old is new again. Or as commenter Eric S puts it on the Daily Kos thread where the new blog is introduced:

In the context of IP [Israel/“Palestine” —ZY] debate, the word "evenhanded" has been robbed of any real meaning, becoming a dishonest codeword for "give less support to Israel," and nothing more. If that is what you really want to say, just say it, instead of couching it in loaded weasel words.

Precisely. And with such a post there as, “The End of Zionism?”, it is all too transparent that the blog owners aren’t even interested in putting an effort to keep the mask. Which brings me to the 1930’s, Charles Lindbergh and American isolationism again.

Charles Lindbergh was, like many of the Kossacks, quite vocal about “America First”. He, like Chamberlain, was “a man of peace”; like Chamberlain, he had no interest in having his country go to war because of a people far away, engaged in a conflict irrelevant to his country. And, like Walt and Mearsheimer, like Jimmy Carter, like Wesley Clark, he warned of the Jewish control of the media and America’s foreign policy, and addressed the Jews, telling them they would be the first to pay the price for war (just like the anti-settler Leftists are now wont to say: “The right-wing Likkud/AIPAC policies are harming Israel, Israel should abandon them for the sake of its own future”).

However, the comparison ends here. Lindbergh was truly an isolationist. The likes of the proprietors of the “Evenhanded Democrats” blog are not. They certainly are about “America First”, but they are not isolationists—they support active intervention in the policies of another state in order to appease the aggressor. In that, they are like Chamberlain, not like Lindbergh.

Supposing I believed in the hypothesis of the Israel/“Palestine” conflict being the basis for Muslim hatred of America and wanted to remedy it by isolationism. What would I suggest? Isolationism means what it says on the label: total non-intervention, withdrawal not only of all military forces (as the Democrats demand for Iraq) but also of all diplomatic efforts. A “Let them sort themselves out” policy, in other words.

But that is not what those “evenhanded Democrats” are proposing for the Israel/“Palestine” conflict. Quite the opposite: they demand that the government of the USA exert great diplomatic and economic pressure upon Israel to reach a “peace treaty” with the “Palestinians”—or, in truth, to force Israel to concede its lands (Judea and Samaria as appetizers, more for the main course) to the fictional nation under which the Israel Chapter of the Global Islamic Jihad is dressed. Isolationism? Don’t make me laugh. Plain appeasement, more blood for the Audrey II of religions in hopes of averting one’s own consumption by it.

The shameful episode of the 1938 Munich Agreement is called, “The Western Betrayal”. It is so called, and not merely “The Western Negligence” or “The Western Oversight”, because it was interventionist, not isolationist. It was a blatant intervention by Britain and France in the politics of Czechoslovakia to force it to concede the Sudetenland (of whose Germans the Nazi propaganda machine had been claiming for months that the Czechoslovakian state was oppressing them) to Hitler in order to thwart any cause for him to attack them. That’s what the “evenhanded Democrats” want to be done here, in the Israel/“Palestine” conflict.

I address all those underhanded Democrats:

We will not allow you to appease the Muslims on our expense.

And I address the Democrat-voting Jews of America:

Please consider jumping ship. Your party has become a den of Jew-hating terrorism-supporters. Franklin Delano Roosevelt no longer heads it, not even in spirit, except for a few holdovers and revivalists. A former president belonging to that party is now priming the world to accept a second Holocaust (G-d forbid) as justice done, and has gained the praise of Muslim terrorists, white supremacists and rank and file Democrats for it. The Left worldwide is firmly with its lips working on the Muslims’ ambulatory organs in hopes of placating them, and is only too willing to throw the Jews under the bus as part of the conciliatory package. Say what you want about the Republicans, but they’ve left those things behind (Buchanan and Baker are Old Right holdovers—exceptions demonstrating the fact that the Left and the Right have switched sides).

No doubt that paragraph will be seized upon by those who wish to show how “neo-con” and “Jew” are synonyms, how the USA under Bush is a Zionist-Occupied Government, yadda yadda. But think about it: if I were to leave it unposted, would those accusations vanish? Were the answer, “Yes”, then I would not have to write this whole post—scratch that: my whole blog. Anti-Zionism is the acceptable form of anti-Semitism in our age. That is the terrible truth, and it’s time Jews acknowledged that.

The Two Hatreds

In the aftermath of the suicide bombing in Eilat, the kumbayista community (not to mention the Israel-haters) have spared no effort to say how “there is hatred on both sides”, hatred that needs to stop if there is to be any chance of peace. Presumably, drumming and chants and other tried-and-true tactics of the 1960's can “heal the rift between the Israelis and the Palestinians” and make the conflict history. But enough of ranting about the hopelessly naïve, and on to refuting their main thesis.

First off, it’s actually true there is hatred on both sides; but—and that’s the crucial, oft-overlooked point—it’s not the same kind of hatred. I hate the Muslims (not “Palestinians”) for what they perpetrate against us, and the latest event only fuels my hatred, but it must not be overlooked that if the hostilities against us were to cease, I would cease hating them. That’s a very important difference between Israeli Jews’ hatred toward their enemies and the converse.

Case in point: Anwar Sadat. The late president of Egypt had, on October 1973, inflicted an initial military blow to Israel the likes of which his predecessor, Nasser, could only have dreamed of. In the aftermath of that war, Sadat was hated, reviled and burned in effigy by the masses of Israeli Jews. He then came and signed the peace treaty with Israel, complete with a speech in the Knesset. Right after that, the raging hatred against him died out. Of course the families of those killed in the Yom Kippur war could not forget, and their grief could not be assuaged by the peace treaty, but the masses of Israeli Jews stopped their hatefest around Sadat. All because of the peace treaty.

We Jews do not turn the other cheek; we are commanded to hate our enemies. But we are to cease hating them once they have repented, and we are not to hate sons for the deeds of their fathers. In this area, the rule for G-d is certainly different than the rule for humans: He keeps hatred and wreaks revenge, whereas we are not allowed to do so. That is because He is always objective and righteous, while we are bound to fall into errors of judgment.

Thus, we cease hating Sadat once he has signed a peace treaty with us; and had Arafat not opted to continue hostilities toward us after the Oslo Accords of 1993, we would have ceased hating him as well. On my travels in Germany, I do not burn in hatred at the sight of every German, for, even if his grandfather was an SS man, he himself is not so. Jewish hatred, then, is cause-based.

As for the other side’s hatred—what is there to say? I would think it sufficient to bring a small example from the last Hajj (from the thread Hatred in a Holy City on LGF):

“The prayers of all Muslims when they cast their stones at the devil must be directed at (U.S. President George) Bush and his devilish allies in America and the Arab world.”

Ahmed al-Dosary from Kuwait agreed. “I prayed for myself, my family and for the end of the main evil, the United States.” (Emphasis mine. —ZY)

“From Kuwait”. Kuwait, the same country that the first George Bush liberated from Saddam’s occupation at their request. A hatred that continues to burn even after a good deed has been done to them.

The Muslims of the West (Europe and Israel, for example) have standards of living there that their brethren in the Middle East hell-holes can only dream of. Do they, then, live normally? (I’m not talking about showing gratitude—that’s really too much to expect.) Not a chance. Not in Britain, not in Australia, not anywhere. Wherever they live, far from integrating to their host society, they do everything to lower it to their 7th-century level. And they hate, hate, hate their non-Muslim hosts, not because of any “legitimate grievance”, but because they believe they are to dominate and not to be dominated. Their religion commands them to harbor and show everlasting hatred toward the other, no matter the circumstances. Greater a contrast between two types of hatred there could not be.

With this truth in mind, I can now review the latest moral-equivalence-fest on Daily Kos. A left-leaning Jew, once again, sees how his beloved platformed has turned into a place where “the wish for the end of the Jewish State is a laudable goal” (to quote D. Honig’s cry of distress on the “The End of Zionism?” diary I mentioned two posts ago). Eyal Rosenberg ponders the raw Jew-hatred on which “Palestinian” children are raised, and even though he posts a disclaimer saying he believes the “occupation” must end, this is a sober moment in which realizes that “no withdrawal will suffice, as the goal is All Of Palestine”. (The link is from the original quote. —ZY)

The reactions from some of the commenters? “Israel started it all”. And moral equivalence aplenty. Commenter “weasel” says:

Additionally, I must ask the eternal question of the I-P debate. If it is hate's triumph when Palestinians kill Israeli civilians, what is it when Israelis kill Palestinian civilians? Was that hatred not worthy of a denunciation as well?

Eyal Rosenberg answered the way I would:

Palestinians carry out large number of acts out of hate. From the heart. Wrathful, active against civilians and soldiers. "Collateral damage" intentional.

Israelis carry out very large number of acts out of calculation. From the head. Mechanic, reactive against perceived enemies. "Collateral Damage" unintentional.

Both cause death, but are carried out with different intent. Which is worse? Judge for yourself.

“Weasel” has no problem brushing it all off:

This is pure projection, and it makes you one more defender of the occupation you claim to oppose.

Wow. Manichean dualism from a guy who would lambaste President Bush for his post-9/11 “either with us or against us” comment. Continues:

The fact is you know nothing about what was in that young man's heart. You know nothing about what was in his head. You know nothing about what was in his history or education.

He knows nothing… yet you do know it was caused by “the occupation”. And, of course, there is nothing, simply nothing that could give us a clue as to the education given to “Palestinian” children. Continues:

The "hate and only hate" motif is simply a way of ignoring the realities of Palestine under Occupation. What drove this man? Hate is possible. At least as likely is rage at the suffering of friends and family. Perhaps a relative was one of the countless civilians murdered by Israeli "Defense" Forces. Perhaps what was driving him was hopelessness.

I’ve had a relative killed by “Palestinians”. Why don’t I feel like going into the middle of one of their towns and killing randomly there? As Eyal Rosenberg replies:

The fact is that:

1. I have lost a classmate, three friends and a family member and still do not want to blow myself up in Ramallah.
2. My Grandparent's families were exterminated in the Holocaust, and I still do not want to blow myself up in Berlin. (Nor has any other Jew for that matter).

The reply from “weasel”? Can you say, “deaf ears”? I knew you could:

Or maybe you are not faced with your country being occupied for 40 years in the past and an unknown length into the future. Maybe, those in Ramallah have not strangled your country, preventing you from having any job, or often food, health care, transportation, or decent housing. Maybe those in Ramallah have never denied you a simple passport or citizenship in any country on earth. Maybe, and I'm just speculating here, the Palestinian Occupation of Israel has been somewhat less overwhelming than the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.

And, of course, maybe this young man would have preferred to kill Israelis in the proper and civilized manner, with an Apache attack helicopter. Maybe he simply could not get his hands on one, and so resorted to his hateful means.

There’s a lot more I could bring here, but the post is getting long enough as it is, so I’ll wrap this up with a comment from “dmsarad”. Commenter “dmsarad” is among those who I have seen showing distress at the direction of Daily Kos ever since the last Lebanon War, and has a few diaries trying to remedy it (listed on his user page, if you’re interested). But in this case he makes an absolutely kumbayistic comment, titled, “1 thing you forgot”:

Abject poverty. Give a guy a job, 3 meals a day, and a solid middle class existence and he is far more unlikely to blow himself up.

This, after counter-terrorism experts have reached the conclusion that poverty is not the usual drive for terrorists. This, after 9/11, whose 19 perpetrators were all wealthy Saudi citizens.

Poverty, the “occupation” and all that. Yes, it is everyone’s right to raise hypotheses, but then it is their duty to provide falsifiers for them. Poverty and occupation (a real one, suffered by a real people!) is what the people of Tibet have been going through for decades, courtesy of a truly oppressive regime that, unlike Israel, doesn’t give a fig for the niceties of international law and human rights (but does, however, capitulate to the Muslims). So where, where, just where are the Tibetan suicide bombers blowing themselves up in the malls, markets and bakeries of Shanghai?! Does any kumbayista have an answer for that?

And where do we find suicide terrorism, apart from Israel? There was 9/11 in America and 7/7 in Britain as one-time events. There are, as day-to-day events, suicide bombings in Kashmir (Indian territory) and in the south of Thailand. Those things are, upon investigation, found wherever there is a sizable Muslim population—and nowhere else. No other people, no matter how long their list of grievances toward an oppressor is, engage in suicide terrorism. It’s a Muslim-only thing. Only Jews keep the Sabbath, only Christians believe Jesus atoned for mankind’s sins, and only Muslims kill themselves together with their enemies for divine reward.

They hate us for what we are, not for what we do. They are commanded to hate us. We are commanded to hate them to the extent of our self-defense, and no more. If they repent, we are to cease hating them; if they do not, it is up to us to defend ourselves, and it is up to HaShem alone to close the account. There is simply no equivalence between the two hatreds.

Tip: Haveil Havalim #104

Another tip to the Jewish blog carnival Haveil Havalim, featuring the posts I liked best. From issue #104, January 28, 2007, hosted on The Life of Rubin:

• Jameel at the Muqata tops the list with a post doing sanegoria of Am Yisrael: Despite Olmert, Katzav, Halutz them all, ISRAEL IS AMAZING., January 25, 2007.
• Martin Solomon, of Solomonia, posts about life for Jews as dhimmis in Muslim Yemen: Being a Minority in an Islamic State, from January 23, 2007. Let it be very clear that, should the “Right of Return” for the “Palestinians” be carried out, that’s how life for Jews in Israel would look like (G-d forbid)—Herzl’s vision unmade.
• Ocean Guy, on his blog, posts the piece Tell me Again...., from January 25, 2007, showing with two maps from the early 1920’s how far back the attempt to divide the land goes. Finding out why it failed even in that period is left as an exercise to the reader.
• Jack’s Shack, of “Random thoughts- Do they have meaning?”, quotes Daniel Gordis at length in The Future Of Israel/Judaism, from January 24, 2007. Even if you don’t agree with it all, it’s very thought-provoking.

The post of mine featured on this issue of Haveil Havalim is On a Few Comments on DKos, from January 23, 2007.

A Reason To Trust

In this post I bring a scan from Yediot Achronot, one of Israel’s two leading newspapers, and then my translation of the scan, and then commentary on it. The scan is from the issue of January 8, 2007.

Scan in screen resolution. Click image to view full size.

(Title) The students study in the dark because the school is connected to the electricity in Gaza

(Subtitle) Not only are the children of Kibbutz Sa’ad forced to study in armored rooms because of the Kassams (the Kassam rockets fired from Gaza onto Israeli inhabitations within the 1949 Armistice Line ever since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip in August 2005. —ZY), now they do not have light in the classrooms because of the power cuts in Gaza

(Author) by Matan Tzuri

(Lead) The students of the school Da’at in Kibbutz Sa’ad, which has suffered years from the firing of Kassams, have gotten used to studying in armored classrooms. But now they are forced to get used to studying in dark classrooms as well. The reason: the school receives its electricity from the Gaza Strip power grid, and every time the systems in Gaza break down, the students stay without light, without heating and without a mood.

(Body) For long years the power grid of Gaza and of the Israeli inhabitations encompassing Gaza was shared. A few years ago it was decided to put an end to that. The inhabitations encompassing Gaza were disconnected, connected directly to the local power stations, and, unrelatedly, Israel continued supplying power to Gaza (Emphasis mine. —ZY) However, for some reason, there have remained buildings that are still connected in the same grid with Gaza, among them the elementary school Da’at in Sa’ad.

In the last days, following the stormy weather and high power consumption, the power systems in Gaza are breaking down under pressure, and together with them the power in the school Da’at. The result: tens of power cuts during the studies, up to [the point of] their total disruption.

“It’s unbearable”, relates one of the teachers in the school. “The children can’t study in such a way. The armored classrooms are dark enough as they are, and now the students are really forced to be in darkness. It also heightens the anxiety in them”.

An additional serious problem that the undesirable connection to Gaza creates is that the long power cuts also paralyze the “Red Color” warning system, which warns against rocket fire. “It’s mortal danger”, (Emphasis mine. —ZY) says the security officer of regional authority Sdot Negev, Rafi Babiyan. “The Electricity Company subscribed the management of the school without the management knowing what the consequences were. The rest of the kibbutz isn’t connected to the shared grid, and life there looks totally different.”

From the Electricity Company was replied: “The school turned of its own accord to the Electricity Company and asked to disconnect from the power line of the kibbutz. The Electricity Company suggested building a new line in a few months, but the school asked to connect to another line supplying power to the Strip too.” (Emphasis mine. —ZY)

So…

This “racist, apartheid state”, this “[expletive] little country responsible for all the turmoil in the world right now”, is supplying electricity to the very region where the people have elected to power a movement that is bent on destroying it (G-d forbid), and from which rockets are fired onto its borders, and have been so ever since the total ending of all the “occupation” cited as the reason for the hostilities.

What if Israel did the sane thing, the thing expected from any rational state standing for its interests of self-preservation, and stopped supplying any power to the Gaza Strip pending the cessation of all hostilities? We already know the answer: the left-leaning “human rights organizations” and “peace movements” and their Mainstream Media lapdogs would be screaming about the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza, caused by Israel’s callousness, proving its intent to do ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians”. It is because we know this reaction that our weak, pusillanimous, dhimmi leaders have chosen to keep things the way they are, even at the cost of (see the emphasis on the rocket warning system) the lives of their own citizens.

From a recent Daily Kos diary, The End of Zionism?, quoting the New York Times:

''(Their life) impressed me as somehow truncated. . . . Their experience was not open-ended, expansive, and adventurous. . . . Their present seemed devoid of the vitality that I associate with leading a fulfilling life. . . . In waiting, the present is always secondary to the future. . . . The world in its immediacy slips away; it is derealized. It is without elan, vitality, creative force. It is numb, muted, dead.''

That’s about South Africa (the state to which it has become very fashionable to compare Israel nowadays) in 1985. The diary writer, “litho”, follows with his own words:

I wonder if Israelis might not be in a similar state: waiting, waiting for something external to happen, to bring their country's multiple crises to a final resolution. In the end, of course, white South Africans were forced to take the future into their own hands, to cede power willingly and on their own to the country's black majority (If you find any document by the blacks of South Africa stating as their goal the expulsion or extermination of all the whites of South Africa, give me a call. —ZY). Eventually, the tension of living a truncated existence became too great, and they accepted their own capacity to take control of their lives by acknowledging the great lie they all were living.

You wonder, you anti-Zionist Jew-hater? You can wonder, since you don’t live in Israel. And I, as one who does, can carry you beyond your unfounded assumptions and tell you what the State of the Nation in Israel really is:

The Jews of Israel, far from feeling drained, far from doubting the whole Zionist project, are in a flurry of doubting their self-doubt and rethinking the real great lie, the lie of post-Zionism, of negotiated peace, that held sway during the 1990’s.

Yes, we are frustrated—but it is not with ourselves that we are frustrated, but with our cowardly, incompetent leadership, a leadership that insists on not learning from its mistakes, and is so lost in its consideration of, “What will the world say?” that it takes steps that value the lives of the enemy over the lives of their own citizens.

We, the Jews of Israel, had through the 1990’s given full berth to the idea that we had to take steps to build the “Palestinians’” trust of us. Whether by letting a terrorist leader back into our country from Tunis in 1993, or by Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer in 2000, which the aforementioned terrorist leader turned down with a new Intifada, or by the attempt to remove all reason for hostilities by making the Gaza Strip judenrein in August 2005, or by this continued madness of supplying electricity to the same region to this day, we had tried, and tried, and tried, again and again, to gain their trust, as though it had been proved beyond a shadow of doubt that we were the ones who couldn’t be trusted and therefore had to correct that image.

But, in this civil year 2007, after the Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000, after the firing of Kassam rockets ever since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip, and after the war with Hizbullah in the summer of 2006, in the same Lebanon from which Barak had withdrawn to end all pretexts for hostility on Hizbullah’s part, many of us Israeli Jews have made the move into a radically new thought: how about that other side doing something to gain our trust for a change?

The moonbats keep telling us Zionists, “Peace is a two-way street, you know?” Yes, I know; but if it’s a two-way street as you say, then how come only we are being asked to make concessions? Why is it that we are asked to pay in the real cash of lands and settlements, while the other side is asked of naught but that airy, nebulous, fuzzy, easily-broken thing called, “cessation of hostilities”?

You both, moonbats and Muslims, tax our patience. Your only saving grace is our clueless leaders, who are still beholden to world opinion and who are still basking in the delusion that Islam has nothing to do with it. But the people are shaking free of the delusion, the real great lie, in droves. The nature of the enemy is becoming clear to all:

“The tests proved that she was a virgin,” the pathologist said. The girl returned home only after her father signed a statement promising not to harm her, he added.

The father shot the girl four times in the head on Tuesday. On Wednesday, an autopsy was performed that again showed “she was still a virgin,” the pathologist said.

That’s from the LGF thread Honor Killing in Jordan, from January 25, 2007. My comment (#68 on that thread): “Thus much are peace treaties with Muslims worth. As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm.”

So far, the other side has given us no reason to believe this is not true. I speak for a growing portion of Israeli Jews in saying, “We don’t trust them”. It is not up to the girl to prove her virginity, time after time; it is up to her psycho father to be locked up in jail until he either reforms or dies. “…When they love their children more than they hate us”, as a former Prime Minister said. She had more of that manly stuff than the wimp we currently have on that seat. Let them stop bringing up their children on the heritage of suicide bombing, and then maybe they’ll be worthy of receiving electricity from Israel.

Iran between Cyrus and Haman

So, we’re back again to having a madman in a position of power in Persia seeking to destroy all the Jews (G-d forbid) (Esther 3:6). Jewish history has that way of maintaining its relevance for us all times, rather than staying “old tales of things that happened to other people”. Once again, we will have to brace ourselves for intensive prayer, Torah study, repentance, almsgiving and fasting for the month on which our Purim and the Persians’ Nouruz fall. Here I wish to comment, however, on the predicament from Iran’s side.

On that very chapter, in the first verse, Haman is described as being, “the son of Hammedatha the Agagite”. A minor biographical detail, but if we keep in mind that the Tanach as a whole is conservative in its descriptions, then every detail counts, and this is no exception.

“Agagite”. Agag was the Amalekite king whose life Saul spared and was punished for that. The Amalekites, no longer extant as a nation, but still existing as a power and symbol for Israel’s struggle against doubt and unbelief in G-d, were among the spawn of Esau, who was, of course, a Semite, being the brother of Jacob. The Persians, in contrast, are the spawn of Japheth—an Indo-European people, the same as the English.

Haman, it follows, was no native Iranian. And indeed Iran, unlike the spawn of Esau or Ishmael, is not a natural enemy of the Jews. It had been just a little before the events in the book of Esther that a Persian king, Cyrus, ended the Babylonian Exile of the Jews, and got the distinction of being counted a messiah, that is, anointed by G-d. This makes the events of the book of Esther and today even more saddening.

Cyrus’ empire was one of the best-remembered in history: in contrast to the empires of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, which were maintained through fear and horrible punishments for the slightest transgression, Cyrus gave every conquered people autonomy under his empire. There were a few regresses throughout the two centuries of the Achaemenid Empire, for example during the reign of Cyrus’ son, Cambyses, but the norm for that empire was a multicultural coexistence foreshadowing that of the Greco-Buddhist kingdom of Gandhara. Such was Iran’s glory, as well as its friendship with the Jews, in the days when it voiced its own nationality instead of serving as a vessel for Jew-hating foreigners.

Of Ahmadinejad’s ancestry I do not pretend to know; it is pertinent, however, to consider that his name means (my thanks to an Iranian Jewish friend for that information), “[Of the] Root of Ahmad”, where “Ahmad” is a name given to prophet Mohammad, the founder of Islam. Going by that name alone, Ahmadinejad represents the hijacking of Iran to Ishmael’s interests just as Haman did to Amalek’s interests.

I wrote (Ishmael’s Spiritual Spawn, December 13, 2006) that Islam, although it claims to be a universal religion, is strongly tied to Arab cultural heritage. Again, this is not to say Arab culture is bad—I can never emphasize the point enough that my blog is about the fascistic global ideology of Islam and not about Arab people, language or culture—but the Islamization of Iran from the 7th century to our today constitutes cultural imperialism of the kind that, if perpetrated by a Western, Christian nation, would send the post-colonial Left hopping mad. This nation, once as proud and tolerant and prosperous as the Hindus, now stands facing Mecca five times a day, persecutes other religions inside it (the Zoroastrians and the Baha’is, for example) and is marching senselessly toward nuclear catastrophe, all because of adherence to a foreign ideology that uses Iran as a disposable vessel. To quote the father of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (hat tip: Solomonia):

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah…I say, let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant…

Thus much of a future does Islam have in store for Iran. Iran is being kept Islamic by the belief of Islam’s universality, as well as the provision of a faint echo of Zoroastrian messianism by the Shi’a Mahdi myth, but make no mistake: even if Iran were to be the sharpest sword of Islam, the Iranians would still have to face a cube in the Arabian desert, and the Caliph would still have to be a descendant of that 7th-century Arab merchant.

That conquest, in the 7th century, a few years after Mohammad’s death, was and still is a great blow to Iran’s pride. The medieval Persian poets, though Muslim, do not cease lamenting the subjugation of the Sassanid kingdom to a band of desert nomads. The Persian poetry of that time extols the delight of wine-drinking as if the Islamic conquest had never taken place. Ahmadinejad, in his speeches, tries to pander to Iranian nationalism, but I think any Iranian who is not Islamintoxicated knows the truth: he is leading the Iranian people to a needless war, a war serving the interests not of Iran but of Islam. The good relations Iran had with Israel during the time of the Shah were broken for no pragmatic reason, only because of Islamic fanaticism, because of the subservience of Iran to Islamic interests.

It is worthy to note, in addition, Saudi Arabia’s attempts to obstruct Iran. Both are Islamic theocracies. People might say it has to do with the Sunni–Shi’a split, but the Sunni and the Shi’a are known to unite when expedient (witness Sunni Hamas and Shi’a Hizbullah). The truth is, Saudi Arabia does not want those non-Arabs taking over the Islamic ummah. Similar to apostate Isaac Schrödinger’s descriptions of how Pakistani Muslims are ill-treated by Arab Muslims in Saudi Arabia, or to the outright massacre of black Muslims by Arab Muslims in Sudan, the religion of Islam, for all its claimed universality, will not relinquish the hegemony of its Arab patricians to the non-Arab plebeians lightly. Under Islam, the Iranian nation is looked down upon by the very nomads from the Arabian desert who conquered it more than thirteen centuries ago.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 is a warning for the whole world, for it was enabled by the same mix of Western dhimmitude, Leftist useful idiotry and Islamic manipulation of them both as we find in the West today. US president Jimmy Carter enabled the revolution by ordering the Shah to soften his glove on the revolutionaries; he bears a huge part of the responsibility to that revolution, and the fact that he still pontificates on US foreign policy issues today, after that colossal failure, is nothing short of a scandal. The Communists of Iran, deeming the Shah a “tool of American capitalism”, joined forces with Khomeini to topple him. Whether they believed they would share in the rule of Iran with him or they planned to oust him once the Shah was toppled, the actual outcome was the takeover and purge of Iran by Khomeini. The Marxist useful idiots were, in the course of the 1980’s, imprisoned and executed by the thousands. Such is the end of the Left-Islam demonic convergence.

If this mortal threat toward Israel came from Saudi Arabia, I’d brush it off as, “Well, that’s Ishmael trying to kill his brother Isaac again, it’s only natural”; but coming from Iran, it is much more pitiful, for, as in the days of Esther, it does not come from the will of the Persian nation, but through the machinations of a non-Iranian man or a non-Iranian ideology using Iran as their tool. To the people of Iran, I say, paraphrasing a deceased Zoroastrian: you were the champions, my friends, and there’s no reason why you can’t be today, if only you shake off the invading ideology that is now intent on (see that Khomeini quote above) using your body to the death. It is my sincere wish for relations between us to return to what they were during the days of King Cyrus and the days of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

What is Kumbayism?

Kumbayism is the system of thought according to which the word “Peace” has the same meaning to all humans.

Kumbayism is centered on the belief of common dreams for all humanity—dreams of self-determination on their own lands, their ancestral lands, living there in happiness and prosperity, undisturbed by invaders from the outside.

Kumbayism purports to “embrace diversity”, while in reality denying the fundamental differences of thoughts and values among human beings.

Kumbayism denies ideological imperialism; it holds frugality to be the natural desire of all humans, and explains global supremacism away through the profit motive (“Iraqi oil” and so forth). That people should have a non-materialistic drive to subjugate the whole world constitutes kumbayological heresy.

Kumbayism is, therefore, to believe all conflicts to be solvable through negotiations and material concessions; to believe all conflicts are rooted in “legitimate grievances”; and to believe hip-hop dances could hold the key to permanent peace.

Kumbayism is to regard every word from the President of the USA as a cynical move toward reaching his goal of “stealing foreign oil”, while not even giving consideration to the idea that Osama bin Laden’s references to the “oppression of the Palestinians” as the source of his grievances with the USA might be nothing more than a cynical move on his part. Because OBL is a frugal resistance fighter living in a cave, hiding away from the money-driven Western imperialists.

Kumbayism is to exalt Mohandas Gandhi’s non-violent resistance against British rule in India, while putting him next to Hassan Nasrallah, who gladly sent his own son to die on a suicide mission, and who derides the other side’s “love of life and hatred of death” (his words), just because both are deemed by the kumbayistas to be resistance fighters against money-driven Western colonialism.

Resistance fighters, both the non-violent and the non-non-violent kind, side by side. From Zombietime.

The opposite of Kumbayism is Jingoism, which the former decry as “leading the world to the brink”, while not considering that, in certain situations, it is kumbayism that is doing just that, and also while completely ignoring the jingoism of the other side, or explaining it away as “resistance to Western colonialism”.

Kumbayism is advertised as a “reality-based view”, supposedly free of irrationality and magical thinking, yet its adherents display extraordinary faith in the magical capability of pieces of paper (those of signed peace treaties) to restrain their signers from violating them.

Kumbayism is advertised as a New Paradigm for our age, free of the shackles of Oldthink, yet its adherents think the 19th- and 20th-century concepts of race struggle and class warfare are still relevant to our age. The sight of almond-eyed Muslims murdering almond-eyed Buddhists in Thailand is no more welcome in their eyes than the sight of Jupiter’s moons through Galileo’s telescope was to the geocentrists of his day.

Kumbayism involves decrying war as the most horrible thing possible, while harboring sympathy, if not outrightly giving support, to the most jingoistic ideologies ever known to man. To quote George Orwell (hat tip: commenter Peacekeeper on LGF):

I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism.

Kumbayism demands the expunging of the word, “Evil” from the dictionary, claiming everything can be explained through rational, scientific, material causes; yet they do not even begin to attempt to explain such things as a whole society having a norm of raising children on a culture of death, or the sheer diabolical enthusiasm of the same to kill the women and children of the enemy (G-d forbid).

Kumbayism, even if its adherents are given the benefit of doubt as to their sincerity, undermines the prospect of world peace by failing to consider all the facts—especially the facts about human nature. With such enemies as confront us today, the best result of the application of kumbayism could be a ten-year truce. For lasting peace, a different approach is necessary.

What is Moralism?

Moralism is the use of the language of morality to immoral ends.

Moralism is to confine the requirement of moral behavior to only one of the sides, exempting the other.

Moralism is to require justification before one can defend oneself, and therefore to condemn any pre-emptive action outright, no matter even the explicitly stated intentions of the other side. It means, for example, editing a scene from Star Wars: A New Hope to make Greedo shoot at Han Solo first, in order to give Han the “moral right” to shoot back, even though it is quite clear Greedo is a hired hand for his crime lord, and that the chance of him missing Han from such a distance is as great as that of a seasoned gunman missing an elephant in an alley from a range of one meter.

Han Shot First—because he knew he’d be dead if he let Greedo do it instead.

Moralism is to regard religion as the cause of all wars, yet to use religious language (such as, “America’s sins”) to condemn the defensive actions of democratic, non-theocratic, states; all while exempting true theocratic movements, foremostly Islam, from such criticism.

Moralism is to declare oneself to be against racism, while diluting the term so as to become meaningless (or: please tell me what race are Muslims again?), so that true cases of racism, such as the massacre of blacks by Arabs in Darfur, are blithely brushed under the carpet. Moralism also means to confine anti-racism to a particular race and to exempt another.

Moralism is to accord full rights to perpetrators, and none to their victims. It means school bullies are never even verbally chastised, lest that hurt their “delicate souls”, never mind the injuries those bullies inflict upon the bodies and souls of schoolkids in their vicinity. It means soldiers, guardsmen and land owners everywhere fear defending themselves because of legal prosecution, while the wrongdoers can count on the West’s same “legal system” to wash their crimes white.

Morality is to stand up for those who have been wronged. Moralism is to have declared, in advance, that the weak have been wronged, without probing into the matter. It is to set a different standard for the weak and the strong, no matter the facts. In more mundane areas, it means Apple and Microsoft can employ the same predatory corporate tactics, but, while Microsoft will be decried as an “Evil Empire”, Apple will stay the “hip underdog” and be defended for exercising its right to maximize profits. In less mundane areas, it means the United States of America can have 3,000 civilians murdered on its soil in an instant yet still be considered the oppressor of the world, and that act excused as “payback for America’s imperalistic past”. It means suicide bombers entering civilian areas in Israel in order to murder as many women and children as possible (G-d forbid) can be considered, “legitimate resistance” and “freedom fighters having only their bodies as means of countering imperialism”, while a misfired Israeli shell is seized as proof of Israel’s fundamental orientation toward ethnic cleansing.

Moralism is to cloak the breaking of every taboo, including bestiality and pedophilia, under the mantle of, “freedom of expression”, no matter the harm it could cause to society; all while adhering to a careful, respectful, considerate stance of “not rocking the boat” concerning the taboos of the “other”, such as criticism of the founder of a certain religion.

Moralism is to decry the loss of every life, except those of American “mercenaries” in Iraq. It is to say, vehemently, that all people are equal, and no murder is justified, but then, in the next breath, to rejoice, to gloat, over the murder of those “war profiteers”, for it is, of course, justified.

Moralism is to decry anti-terrorism measures as being an American president’s bid to do away with democracy, while turning a blind eye toward a Venezuelan president having done exactly that, with no terrorism-related issue ever raised as justification.

Moralism is to display such a compassionate heart toward those detained in the five-star American prison of Guantánamo, while revealing its stony side regarding the Cuban prisons on that same state.

To use linguistic terminology from one of the greatest proponents of moralism today: the surface structure of morality more often than not reveals, upon investigation, the deep structure of moralism. Let us not be fooled.

On a Few Comments on DKos

This diary by litho, Israel: Rethinking 1948, quotes Jewish quisling Ilan Pappe’s book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine to show how the state of Israel was born in “original sin” (the very words of commenter “jimsexton” below—religious language coming from the so-called “reality-based community”) and is morally obliged to make it right (“At the very least, Israel needs to take seriously its obligations to the descendants of those expelled from the country during the War of Independence.”). I don’t have Pappe’s book with me right now, nor the necessary free time to do a comprehensive refutation of it even if I had. In this post I just want to say a few words on an exchange of three comments, by three different commenters, on that thread, a very revealing exchange which might give us Zionists pause to consider our reactions.

Commenter “Florida Democrat”, in his comment, titled “Good Summary of Pappe”, says:

but I can guarantee you, people don't want to hear it. It's quite natural actually. This is to Israel what the ruthless, inhuman and systematic genocide of native Americans is to the US. And just like here, no one enjoys dirty laundry from the past, questioning the heroic epic that is the foundation of one's country. So most either ignores it or find a way to attack the messenger (mark my words!).

But truth is absolutely essential. There can be no justice without it.

Commenter Keith Moon, who should be noted for his many attempts to remedy the sliding anti-Israel bias of Daily Kos and its growing consonance of opinion with Ahmadinejad, titled his reply, “huh”, and said:

This is to Israel what the ruthless, inhuman and systematic genocide of native Americans is to the US.

no it's not

jews were there in palestine and the region - one difference

it's the jews ancestral home - second difference

what is the truth here? there are 14 different versions - this is one, go read the other 13

you're not buying this dairy line r u ?

To which commenter “mickT”, in his comment, titled “So”, replies:

Should the citizens of Tampa Bay be thrown out of their homes to give the Seminole Indians their ancestral homes back? We know for 100% certainty it was their land.

Just curious.

Or does might make right.

Or does having something written in the 'approved' bible mean more than other unapproved documents uncovered about history of the 'sacred lands'.

Does myth make right?

Does strong lobby make right?

I kind of thought that if a family had lived on a land for generations, that might stand for just some small shred above myths/ancient history/brute force. Oh well.

But I guess this is the 21st century. If you have a strong military, you decide.

Let’s see the points we can glean from this exchange. When I thought about it, I was quite startled.

First: “Florida Democrat” compares us Jews to the American newcomers from the Old World, and the “Palestinians” to the Native Americans. The condensed version: Jews are colonial occupiers just as the cowboys were, and the “Palestinians” the indigenous people of the land just like the Native Americans. Yet, judging by his very handle, “Florida Democrat”, he is one of those European immigrants occupying Native American land. He has no problem calling for the “injustice toward the Palestinians” to be addressed, yet it looks as if he is in no hurry to make his own contribution to addressing the injustice toward the Native Americans, in the form of evacuating their land and going back to the European motherland.

Second: Keith Moon, in saying, “It’s the Jews’ ancestral home”, reframes it just as I would, putting the Jews as the indigenous people of the land (whether he believes the “Palestinians” to be indigenous also is irrelevant right now, and anyway, it’s as good as you can get on DKos). The Jews, according to that narrative, are the Native Americans returning to their land.

Third: “mickT” asks if the current citizens of Tampa Bay (Florida), namely the descendants of immigrants from the Old World, should evacuate their homes to give the original inhabitants, the Native Americans from the Seminole tribe, their land back.

So, things work like this:

The “Palestinians” have had their lands stolen by Jewish colonial invaders just like the Native Americans had theirs by the cowboys. The Jewish colonialist invaders should therefore evacuate their colonial settlements for the “Palestinians” to return to them, for the sake of justice. But descendants of the cowboys can stay where they are right now, justice be damned. And if you say the Jews are the indigenous people of the land, rightfully returning to it, then you get the reply that evacuating the existing people to make room for them would be a grave injustice, just as it would not be right to evacuate Florida to make room for its indigenous people, the Seminoles.

Note, note well, that I have not strayed here one tiny bit outside the realm of the post-colonial discourse. All those three comments, and my commentary on them, are within the bounds of discourse about indigenous peoples, colonialist invaders, land rights and justice. Yet even within this tightly confined sandbox, the double standard is here for all to see: the ship is steered toward the destination of expelling Jews from the Land of Israel (G-d forbid), and no other goal; if the Jews are colonialist invaders, it doesn’t follow other colonialist invaders (like that Democrat occupying Seminole land) should be required to follow the same standard, and if the Jews are the indigenous people, then suddenly all the compassion toward indigenous peoples, all the callings for their cause to be addressed, goes out the window.

What do I, and I think all of us Zionists should, conclude from this exchange and its insights? That we should stop giving credit to the post-colonial arguments leveled against Israel. We can see that those who make those arguments are hypocritical in that regard, not following them to full consistency, using them to suit an agenda and not as an absolute moral ruling; why, then, should we give those arguments a better treatment than their originators give them? To all those detractors of Zionism on post-colonial grounds, the reply should be: “Put up or shut up”.

Brief Technical Break

I’m about to do a computer overhaul, with G-d’s help. This normally takes me two days, but those things can be as unpredictable as the humans who use them, so it may take a little longer than that. All my regular readers, please stay tuned.

The only expansion of the abbreviation, “PC” I have no problem with.

Response to “Being Anti-Zionist is Not Anti-Semitic” on Daily Kos

Because responding to that kind of writing is, essentially, what my blog is for.

There’s no guarantee this diary will stay on Daily Kos (again, such diaries, although they represent the unspoken opinion of the majority of Daily Kos members, are often deleted because of the fear they could yank Jewish votes away from the Democratic Party), so here’s a screenshot:

The diary is “Being Anti-Zionist is Not Anti-Semitic”, by Vincent Amato, at
www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/1/20/155658/866.

"Joe Lieberman should register as the agent of a foreign government." At one point I wrote this quip in one of my blogs, and one friend liked it so much he started using it as a tag line in his email.

That kind of thing was taboo just a few years ago. It was not absent from the hearts and minds, just waiting for an opportunity to justify it. As Daniel Finkelstein of The Times puts it:

[…] I explain that for most people the dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians is like that between the Cypriots. It’s a complicated row between two sets of foreigners making competing claims that are hard for anyone except an expert or a participant to evaluate.

For years that didn’t matter much. A few overexcited people (mark me down as one) arguing about a country the size of a pocket handkerchief somewhere miles away. Israel, Shmisrael. Who cares?

But now things are different. A few days after 9/11 I watched a television reporter wandering through a street in the Israeli capital. He was telling viewers: “I am here in Jerusalem where it all began and where it will all have to end.” That remark, hotly though I might dispute it (9/11 did not start there and won’t end there), has become the consensus — the road to peace in the world runs through Jerusalem.

I bring this tidbit here as a first refutation of Vicent Amato’s argument. The one prominent hallmark of Jew-hatred (anti-Semitism) is that it evolves to fit each age, finds a new justification for itself whenever a former justification has gotten old-fashioned. Anti-Zionism is our age’s justification.

Continuing with the diary:

At one point I wrote this quip in one of my blogs, and one friend liked it so much he started using it as a tag line in his email. The more I think about it however, the more I wonder if there is not some literal truth in the line. Last night, I watched an interview with Hilary, and she, too, sounded as if she had taken a public relations job with the Israeli government.

Those words aren’t surprising any longer, but what I’m still wondering is: when David Duke speaks of the “Zionist Owned Government”, people (rightly) condemn him, but when Vincent Amato here, taking a cue from Walt and Mearsheimer, phrases it as, “Joe Lieberman should register as the agent of a foreign government” and “Hilary, […] too, sounded as if she had taken a public relations job with the Israeli government”, it’s acceptable, although those are just two different ways of expressing the same sentiment: the insinuation that the government of the United States of America is acting in the interests of Israel rather than its own.

During the Israeli debacle in Lebanon last year, few if any voices in Congress were raised against Israel’s precipitous behavior in Gaza and the ensuing battle in Lebanon.

Not all people regard air strikes on a country harboring terrorists as “disproportionate response” and a “war crime”. A pity, all these people in the world still knowing the difference between good and evil, I know, but that’s life…

Is it premature to ask for a Congressional inquiry into Israel’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy decisions?

Wait a minute. When American congressmen refuse to condemn Israel for its retaliatory strikes on Hizbullah, that means Israel’s involved in US foreign policy decisions? And there was me thinking Bush’s and Condoleezza’s pressure on Olmert to accept the UN ceasefire agreement was US involvement in Israel’s foreign policy decisions.

What have we come to today, that refusal to condemn a state’s defending itself is proof that it is involved in the foreign policy decisions of those who refuse…

Now we come out of the particulars and into the heart of it:

At no point during the cold war did anyone ever equate anti-Communism with anti-Russianism.

At no point during its history was Communism a Russian nationalist movement.

Even during the hot war fought in the 1940s, most people refused to see being anti-Nazi or anti-Fascist as the equivalent of hating all Germans or Italians.

That’s because, by the 1940’s, it was evident to anyone with half a brain that Nazism and Fascism weren’t merely about the survival and well-being of the Germans and the Italians, but about their aspirations for world domination. The same cannot be said of Zionism, which even in its most expansionist version doesn’t set it sights on any more than a modest-sized area on the east coast of the Mediterranean; while it can (and should) be said about Islam.

Yet, there are many among the supporters of Israel who treat the term anti-Zionist as just code language for the term anti-Semitic.

Zionism is about the Jews having a homeland of their own, in their historical motherland. The extent of that homeland can be debated, but if you say you’re an anti-Zionist then you’ve as good as said you oppose the idea that Jews should have a homeland of their own in their historical birthplace. It’s that simple, so why do people find it so hard to understand?

To say that being anti-Zionist is not tantamount to being anti-Semitic doesn’t quite put enough psychological distance between the two terms. Certainly, saying that one is anti- the policies of Israel doesn’t get one past a prejudicial linguistic tinge. Thus there is a chilling of debate built into the very language available to us. This linguistic phenomenon contributes to making virtually all criticism of Israel taboo here in the United States.

I don’t get it: why is it so difficult for people to say, “I have issues with some policies of Israel”? And then to say which of the policies they oppose? You speak of debate being hindered by language, but you fail to see how you do that very thing yourself by taking the generic label, “Anti-Zionist” instead of saying you just oppose some policies of Israel and then which of them.

Informally, many will acknowledge that for any U.S. politician to criticize Israel’s policies is to commit political suicide. That is certainly the case here in New York. Just consider the aftermath of Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.

It is good that you bring Carter as an example of criticizing Israel’s policies, for that illustrates the very problem. Carter does not criticize any specific policy; he has incendiarily titled his book to compare Israel to South Africa. Then, when called upon it, he has given the reply that his criticism of Israel is only upon its actions toward “the Palestinians in the occupied territories”, not upon the state of Israel itself; meaning, in effect, that he considers the territories taken in 1967 to be occupied (at best; “stolen” is becoming the more fashionable word nowadays) land.

Ask just about anyone outside of the Bush inner circle, and you will find a basic consensus about the major cause of the rift between the Islamic world and the U.S. and its Western allies, namely, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. (Emphasis original. —ZY)

How nicely this dovetails with the quote from Daniel Finkelstein’s article above! As with the previous DKos diary, by James Risser, we see how the mask of morality falls to reveal the real reason behind it all: appeasement. Take, then, Mr. Amato, another answer as to why anti-Zionism constitutes Jew-hatred: your willingness to win yourself a few more moments of peace by sacrificing (G-d forbid) the one and only Jewish state in the world.

Nevertheless, this issue is currently relegated to ancillary status in public dialogue.

Hardly. The left-leaning Mainstream Media has been bringing this issue to everyone’s lounge for at least five years now.

And while this is the case, it is clear that Israel uses the diversion of the spotlight as an opportunity to commit one outrage after another.

The outrage of defending itself from terrorists, yeah… The outrage of Jews actually inhabiting their own lands… But Mr. Amato, you forget yourself: it was just two sentences ago you were talking about “the rift between the Islamic world and the U.S. and its Western allies”; why, then, do you come back to questions of morality (or should that be: moralism) when the real reason for your concern about Israel’s actions is known?

It is fairly clear that from Israel’s perspective the only happy solution to the war in Iraq or the "problem" of nations like Syria and Iran being outside of the fold is either conquest or the kind of neo-colonization that has evolved among our Islamic client states in the area.

The irony here is that, in the matter of “All we’re saying is… give peace a chance”, that’s what we Israelis are after. Israel isn’t a world power, even if certain people think it is. Such sorts of plays aren’t in our interest, precisely because we know we don’t have the muscle to carry them through. We Jews don’t dream big (physically, I mean; spiritually, we dream bigger than everyone else has ever imagined, because that’s what G-d set us for); if it’s the big geopolitical dreamers you’re after, take a look at Russia, China, Venezuela and Iran. Then as now, one of the hallmarks of anti-Semitism is to attribute to Jews much greater power than they could have even theoretically.

Converting Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and even Pakistan into a terrestrial twenty-first century version of the Philippine archipelago might be nice for Israel, and the twenty-first century may look a lot like to the nineteenth to some, but it ain’t.

I agree the twenty-first century isn’t like the nineteenth. But I don’t see things now like it’s 1972 (Vietnam), which is how you lefties see things. The world is right now looking like a hellish amalgam of World War II and the Middle Ages: the destructive capacity of World War II (and then some), together with the religion-driven machinations of the Middle Ages. You won’t be able to appease yourself out of this, I’m afraid.

If Israel is truly interested in being a respected member of the international community, […]

It would give us a good feeling. But there are more pressing matters than such warm, fuzzy feelings. Like, you know, living without missile threats on our borders, for example. I think we can manage without being a respected member of the “international community” (assuming such exists at all…) for the time being until we have sorted those more urgent things out.

[…] it will stop acting like a roaring mouse, […]

“A roaring mouse”? You implicated, just a little back, the state of Israel in engineering spectacular geopolitical changes and foreign policy decisions. This from nothing but a mouse?! How about making up your mind, Mr. Amato? Then again, it was the 19th century founders of Secular Zionism said the mark of the anti-Semites was to lay contradictory claims upon the Jews (such as being both capitalists and communists back then). Chalk up another one for refuting Mr. Amato’s main thesis.

[…] give up its illegal nuclear arsenal, […]

Us first? You want us to beat our swords to plowshares when all the others in the region are doing the opposite? And in a region where, unlike in your soft humanist-socialist utopia, life and death are dependent on the sword or at least the perception of it? Your naiveté is bound to get you killed one day (by the Muslims); we’re not going to let it get us killed if we can help it.

[…] forfeit its claims to a free pass on the playing board […]

This isn’t a playing board, fella. Yeah, I know you meant it metaphorically, but it isn’t one even metaphorically. You’re talking here about our land (if you’re talking about the Israel/“Palestine” conflict) and about the battle between freedom and tyranny. This is no game, it’s about your lifestyle. For instance, it’s about whether the stadium you go to watch football games in will stay that way or be a place for watching beheadings and amputations instead. Even if the dismantling of the entire state of Israel (G-d forbid) really did succeed in putting out the fires of violent jihad (a very, very counterfactual “if”), that wouldn’t make so much as a dent in the demographic jihad Mark Steyn depicts so extensively in his book America Alone.

[…] and find its appropriate niche under the protection of the great powers.

Wow. So, after 2,000 years of Jews in the Diaspora seeking the protection of their non-Jewish hosts, effectively being at their mercies, you propose that the sovereign state of the Jews reinvent itself into one big shtetl seeking the protection of the non-Jewish great powers? How can we possibly refuse such an offer?

Thanks, but no thanks. It’s a sovereign state and a strong army for us, and the only Great Power whose protection we seek is the Power Who Rules Over All Powers. Rather than us needing to be “respected members of the international community”, it’s the “international community” that needs to be in the good graces of G-d.

To conclude, Mr. Vincent Amato: Your diary is a feat reminiscent of that of Balaam, in that it has succeeded in establishing the exact thesis you meant to refute. To date, never have I seen such a concentrated mass of hallmarks of Jew-hatred as in your diary. May G-d open your eyes to the right beliefs.

World Music Never Right In The First Place

On January 8, 2007, LGF had a post named, “World Music Gone Horribly Wrong”, featuring a music album on the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage titled, “Palestine Lives!: Songs from the Struggle of the People of Palestine”. Among the tracks are, “The Testament of a Martyr” (“martyr” is Islamspeak for suicide-bomber), “The Road of Dignity” (once again, honor is shown to be of utmost important to them, more important even than the lives of their children) and “I am Enduring” (enduring self-inflicted suffering, if anything). I have already written of this “indigenous freedom fighter chic” (on December 5, 2006 and on November 17, 2006). But Charles’ title, “World Music Gone Horribly Wrong”, sent my thoughts darting in far-flung directions just as surely as Leto Atreides’ words, “The women are beautiful at this time of the year” sent Stilgar’s thoughts to faraway places in Children of Dune. This is about the phenomenon of World Music as a reflection of the relations between the “colonials” and the “indigenous”.

For the purpose of this post I have used the magazine Masa Acher, the Israeli equivalent of National Geographic. Geographic magazines, and this I realized quite from my beginning of reading them, a lot of years ago, are supposed to bring information about strange peoples and places, but in most cases fall very, very easily into the trap of value-judgments, usually the trap of Reverse Discrimination, in which they try to make up for past bias against the non-Western natives by heaping gory details of Western colonialist oppression of them. This is issue 90, from March 1999. It may seem too old to be useful, and indeed I had that thought as one of my first upon recalling it, but on second thoughts its being from pre-9/11 days makes it even more useful than if it were a recent issue, because that shows how deeply ingrained the PC (post-colonial or politically correct) attitudes are.

National Geographic does a feature on a new species of ape in Iran.

“World Music” means non-Western native music. The term is effectively the musical equivalent of Affirmative Action, since it seeks to redress the situation (whether true or false) that Eurocentrism is blocking any chance of non-Western music gaining the same high profile as Western music. The term proves problematic from the very start, as Masa Acher makes clear (pp. 18–19):

Many oppose the term, arguing that it puts world-encompassing music in a ghetto of sorts. It is also argued that the term is meaningless, because so many sorts of traditions, rhythms and instruments are concealed in it, such that it is too small to contain them all.

In other words: the push to remedy Eurocentrism has succeeded only too well in perpetuating it! Which needs to kept in mind when we come to next accusation upon “World Music” (p. 19):

And there are those who argue World Music is a Western invention, a new kind of colonialism (and on that [see] the following).

That takes us to the elaboration on pages 21–22. Here is the meat of that issue (p. 21):

This cultural colonialism expresses itself also in thefts of music from the Third World, the “primitive” [world]. White man comes with sophisticated recording instruments, and records a bunch of monks in Tibet or a tribe of pygmies in equatorial Africa, comes back to his sophisticated studio in Berlin, in Paris or in London and samples that primal music into a new hit which he sells for millions. And what about copyright? The original creators of the music are not aware of the theft, and of course not of their rights.

This single paragraph opens a whole can of worms. The only undisputed thing is the fact of Western people making money of music they did not originally create. But the argument against this practice is presented in the framework of Western copyright law. How does the writer of this article (Dubi Lenz) know Western copyright law would even be desirable to the original creators? Judging from numerous statements of spokesmen standing for the rights of indigenous peoples (the most prominent exemplar being the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality), the original creators will have nothing to do with Western copyright law—they don’t want anyone to profit from their music, and that includes themselves, for they do not see music, or indeed cultural artifacts in general, as something to reap monetary gains from.

Needless to say, not all indigenous peoples think the same way as the authors of the Lakota Declaration of War. Some are quite for standing up for their right to be the only ones who profit from their music. However, whether the original creators are against all profit from their culture or just against foreigners profiting from it, the fact today is that both employ Western copyright law to their favor. And this, for anyone who at this point may already have come to ask what this subject has to do with the current global conflict, is the heart of the matter.

Globalization, more than it is expressed through a McDonald’s in every corner, and more than it appears in the uniformity of housing and TV shows, shows itself in the ubiquity of the PC discourse. It shows itself in the readiness of many “fronts for indigenous peoples” to use Western tools, especially the courts, in order to reap gains, some of which are far beyond the requirements of “redressing past wrongs”. As Mark Steyn puts it in America Alone (p. 84):

When they want to, Islamists can assimilate at impressive speed. So we have fire-breathing Imams milking Euro-welfare and litigious lobby groups with high-rent legal teams. Neither of these are features of Arab life. Rather, they illustrate how adept Islam is at picking and choosing what aspects of Westernization are useful to it. Whatever the arguments are for and against “gay marriage,” there are never going to be many takers for it. But the justifications for same-sex marriage are already being used to advance the cause of polygamy, and there are far more takers for that. It’s already practiced de facto if not de jure in France, Ontario, and many other Western jurisdictions, and government agencies, such as the United Kingdom’s pensions ministry, have already begun according polygamy piecemeal recognition for the purposes of inheritance law. Neither feminists nor homosexuals seem obvious allies for Islam, but lobby groups have effortlessly mastered the lingo, techniques, and pseudo-grievances of each.

Islam compared to a fast food chain. Will the Islamophobia never end?

Whether you want to “keep your music unsullied by capitalistic greed” or to “exercise your rights to it as original creator”, you have the benefit of Western courts, together with a public climate now sympathetic to it, at your disposal. And whether you want to equalize the rights of same-sex couples to those of other-sex couples or to legalize the right of a man to marry four women, you have those same courts and that same friendly climate at your disposal, again. Impalement by one’s own sword of a guilty conscience for past wrongs.

Where to now? Any attempt to cut this state of affairs short, to go cold turkey on this rampant Affirmative Action and resultant Reverse Discrimination, would send the cries of, “Neocolonialism! Racism! Cultural imperialism! Apartheid!” going through the roof, with stymieing through pressure groups soon to follow. It’s a Gordian knot: letting that very category, “World Music”, stand fuels the charges of colonialism, but banning it would raise the same charges. Honor-killings, if permitted under the guise of non-interventionism (or “multiculturalism”, as it is now dressed), fuel the charge that “Westerners think the lives of immigrant girls are worth less than the lives of their own girls”, whereas if they are prohibited, the charge that “Westerners fail to show sensitivity and respect toward other cultures” is levied. How do we get out of that?

My proposal is fiendishly simple, though it requires undoing the PC-wrought total self-skepticism in order to carry out: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Join ’em by declaring, as British colonialist governor Sir Charles Napier did, that you too have a culture that needs to be shown sensitivity and respect. That you too have a heritage, and that that heritage deserves to be acknowledged and defended at least on its homeland, if not more so. We should say that it is part of our culture for a woman to show her face, and insist on visitors and immigrants respecting that, just as female tourists to Saudi Arabia are required to cover themselves up. We should say that the churches in Europe (as are the temples in India—again, it’s not about “East vs. West”; I’m using this Leftist anachronism because that’s the dominant discourse nowadays) are part of Europe’s heritage, and mosques do not belong in Europe any more than churches do in Saudi Arabia. If the West’s post-colonial guilt can be turned against it, then so can multiculturalism and indigenism be turned against those who use it to nefarious purposes.

Of course, the problem is the loss of cultural consciousness in the West. It used to be Christianity; for the purpose of cultural consciousness it doesn’t have to be Christianity, old European heritages like those of the Celts and Greeks could be just as good for that job, but the fact is “post-Christian Europe” doesn’t mean a Europe come back to its pre-Christian heritage, it means a Europe with nothing. Nothing to resist being killed or live for, in a tragic inversion of the words from John Lennon’s pathological song. Years upon years of, “We have been evil, we have done wrong, we are trash, we are nothing” have taken their toll.

“World Music” was never right in the first place—born in the sin of Western self-flagellation. It forms a vicious circle in providing a basis for continued accusation of “Western colonialism” and, subsequently, further allotment of time and space for that same “World Music”. The only way out of this circle is to declare Western music to be yet another form of World Music, and from there, to insist on its being played even to the ears of those who consider its enjoyment to be the beginning of treason.

I enjoy various kinds of music, including Arab music (as I said so many times: my writings are not against Arabs, they’re against Islam), and it is with deep regret that I have to use this topic as a springboard toward political commentary. However, I have only politicized an already politicized subject, and it is my hope this sad state of affairs will soon be put behind us by taking corrective steps. And, of course, the big picture is more important than the small sample of it, which is there only for the purpose of increasing clarity and understanding.

Response to “An Open Letter To The People Of…” on Daily Kos

The diary is “An Open Letter To The People Of Iran, Iraq, Israel, The US, The Troops, And President Bush”, on Daily Kos, from January 15, 2007, at
www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/1/15/141756/848.

This diary crossed my path on my regular trawling of DKos for anti-Israel matter, but it’s an amazing diary even from the global point of view—amazing in being such a concise form of what’s putting the non-Muslim world in peril. I wish to refute the part where the diarist addresses Israel, but first let me just quote a few paragraphs highlighting the global problem:

To the people of the United States: are you afraid?

I am. Not of Al-Qaeda, not of Sunni or Shia militias, not of insurgents, not of so-called "Islamofascist", not of dirty bombs, not of having to "fight them here", not of a nuclear Iran, not of planes blowing up, not of anthrax in the mail, not of Guantánamo, not of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), or of terrorist cells in my backyard.

I am not afraid of any of the things that our government has worked so hard to scare me into believing is at my doorstep. Instead, I am afraid of our government. Can we forget about the lies that we were told over and over again by our leaders? Can we forget about the atrocities committed in our name? Can we forget the way the rest of the world sees this great nation now?

Is there any better proof that we need to win the internal war over narratives first if we are to have any hope of victory over the external enemy? All people in the non-Muslim world saw the two towers fall on 9/11, and most of them accept it was a terrorist attack launched by the Islamic organization Al-Qaeda, but the interpretation of that event cleaves non-Muslims in two: those who say it was only one form of “indigenous resistance” to “Western colonialist aggression”, and those who say it was Islam’s first declaration of intent to subjugate the whole world to its rule by means of jihad. Only one of those two views can be right, and acting upon the wrong view will have disastrous consequences.

But back to the regional stage. The diarist addresses the people of Israel, and I’m ready to oblige.

To the people of Israel I'd like to say we understand.

You think you understand. If you only get your view from what Al-Reuters, the Backstabbing Brutus Corporation and Uri Avneri say, then I don’t blame you, but you ought to listen to someone both closer to the scene and saner than them.

We recognize your struggles in the world.

That’s your first mistake—the word, “struggles”. We Jews aren’t into that Radical Sixties thing. Yes, we did put up a fight against the Brits when they took steps hindering the inhabitation of our land (hmmm… so what else is new?), but even during that time, we expended most of our efforts in building our state-to-be, and we continued with that after gaining independence. “Struggles”, on the other hand, are for those who have nothing less than a total goal: the Nazis had that, the Communists had that, the Muslims have that now. There were so many chances for a state for the “Palestinians”, backed up with readiness on the part of the Israeli Jews; but this isn’t about a state for them, it’s about a struggle. That’s the difference between us and them: we set up a state for the sake of life and culture; they set up a state for the sake of justice and revenge.

We understand that for many years you were persecuted. However, that does not give you the right to do to others what has been done to you.

“The Palestinians are the new Jews, and the old Jews the new Nazis”. There you have it. Not explicit, but the implication is nearly impossible to escape.

And just what are we doing to others that has been done to us? The Greeks in the days of Antiochus and the Romans in the days of Hadrian forbade us to practice our religion, but the Muslims of Jerusalem get a Jew-free Temple Mount every time “sensitive circumstances” demand it. We were forbidden to hold official positions of power in Christian and Islamic lands, but the Israeli Parliament has long had Arab (Christian and Muslim) members, and just now an Arab Muslim minister. We were systematically exterminated in death camps, but the Arab population of the territories taken in 1967, despite our alleged operations of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide”, has grown from 1.1 million in 1967 to 3.5 million in 2002. The other things the accusers of Israel can think of, such as the security fence (the “Apartheid Wall”) and the checkpoints, are seen for what they are when taken in the context of attempts of suicide bombings in public places (G-d forbid) within Israel’s 1949 borders.

But the diarist will now probably prefer to sink back into the “moral clarity” provided by the BBC.

I'm not suggesting that you bare (sic) all of the responsibility for the struggles in the West Asia, […]

Awfully kind of you. May I ask, then, why you decided to address the people of Israel in the same platform where you address the Iranians, the Iraqis and the Americans? If we don’t bear all the responsibility for what goes on in our neck of the woods, then why do you think we bear responsibility for global affairs? Can you give me one good reason why you think solving the Israel/“Palestine” conflict would secure you from another 9/11? Other than taking Zawahri’s words for it, you can’t. Just look at you: you treat every word of your own president with skepticism (not an automatically bad thing per se), but you latch uncritically to every word of a Muslim cleric hiding in an Afghan cave.

[…] but you're not helping to solve it either.

What the…? Why are we supposed to help solve it? We’re not the ones raising hell all over the world. We’re inhabiting our land, and since we started coming back to it, in the late 19th century, we have done nothing but make the desolate land described by Mark Twain bloom. In contrast, the other side—Muslims, not “Palestinians”—are bent on stealing the whole world, and make a hell out of every place they settle in (for which see: no-go zones in London, Paris and Oslo, to name just a few examples).

Your fight is for property.

Yes. Our fight is for being able to inhabit our property, which is the entire land as promised to us by G-d in His book, the Torah. When you say any part of this land is not ours, that we have “stolen it from another people”, you automatically become an enemy of ours.

Your fight is for recognition.

Not really. It was in the not so far past, but more and more the Jews of Israel have come to realize there are more important things than recognition. We evacuated all of us out of Gush Katif for the sake of recognition, yet that didn’t stop us being hammered for our “disproportionate response” in Gaza and Lebanon almost a year afterward. Recognition is swell, but we now think survival is even more peachy.

Your fight is for peace.

Yes, that is peace, and not the truces and armistices that take that holy word for themselves. Peace is nothing if it isn’t guaranteed to be permanent; a truce buys you some respite from the carnage, but it also buys the enemy time to regroup and rearm for even more carnage. “Peace”, like “oppression” and “genocide” and many others, is among the words New Left radicalism has devalued through cynical use.

May I suggest to you that if after 60 years nothing has changed, maybe you're going about it the wrong way?

What hasn’t changed after 60 years is the refusal of the Muslims to accept a non-Muslim state in the Middle East. What do you suggest doing about it? Anything less than dismantling the Jewish state (G-d forbid) would never be acceptable to them—they might accept temporary recognition of Israel as a stage toward that goal, but to believe things could be settled here through diplomacy as if this were a trade dispute between Holland and Belgium is, to put it mildly, unrealistic.

We had been forced to go to war in every decade of Israel’s existence. We tried the diplomatic solution as an alternative in 1993, only to have it go up in the smoke and flames of bus bombs right from 1994, and finally of rockets ever since August 2005, when all the Jews of the Gaza Strip were coerced to leave it by their own government for the sake of peace. The great majority of Israeli Jewish adults of 1993 gladly accepted the Oslo Accords, as they had known at least two wars in their lifetimes; the children of today know of nothing but the diplomatic path taken in 1993 and its failure, so when they grow up, there’s going to be a majority of Israeli Jews who aren’t into taking that stuff anymore.

1993 was the “Palestinians’” best chance: a majority of Israeli Jews with a disposition toward diplomacy and land concessions, together with a world free from the considerations of the Cold War. They squandered it. Now the Israeli Jewish public is much less sympathetic toward negotiations, and the world is, post-9/11, veering toward instability once again. Once again Abba Eban’s words come to mind: they’ve never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

I know that you will illicit images of bombings and terror to reinforce your actions.

If, G-d forbid, you had to suffer suicide bombings and rocket attacks on your territory on a daily basis, how would you react to a suggestion from another country that you not “use the attacks as justification for retaliation”? Would you not disdainfully brush away those moralistic pontifications from those speaking from the comfort of their armchairs? That’s our shoes.

But please consider, violence in response to violence, only leads to more violence.

Yep, Winston Churchill had it all wrong. The failure of the 1938 Munich Agreement should have been responded to by a Polish extension to it, not by the declaration of war.

Today, you have no European state more appeasing toward the Muslims than France. They were among the first to cave in to the Muslim economic boycott of Israel, and they conscientiously refused to send troops to Iraq; yet Paris is now daily subjected to vandalism and even violence by Muslim immigrants (whom the West’s TreasonMedia dutifully calls, “youths”), often explained by their poverty, though never with explaining why no immigrants past in Paris ever engaged in such actions (the same problem as blaming 9/11 on poverty: there should have been a Haitian suicide terrorist attack on America long ago if that were true). Close to France in appeasement is Spain, which sheepishly withdrew all its troops from Iraq upon the Madrid Train Bombings; yet Spain too is regularly featured on Muslim preachers’ sermons as being “Al-Andalus”, an Islamic land that needs to be taken back to the rule of shariah law. Appeasement has bought those states no peace. It cannot, for the Islamic idea of peace is the total cessation of all resistance to the rule of Islamic law.

Also on the issue of, “violence in response to violence only leads to more violence”, it is pertinent to ask: Does it hold true only for us Israeli Jews? Ought not the “Palestinians” also to consider that idea—that their violence only begets more violence? For consistency, it should be demanded of both sides to stop the violence simultaneously, yet only Israel is ever presented with that demand. Why is that? Because Israel is the “strong, militarized state party” while the “Palestinians” are the “weak, stateless underdog”? I guess so. To the weak, every crime is permitted.

There must be a better solution.

I agree. But the ones within the limits of political correctness have all run out.

There is plenty of space to allow two separate and sovereign nations to exist.

Did you smug American Leftist even take a short look at the globe before making that claim? This piece of land is so small that the name, “Israel” has to be placed on the Mediterranean Sea. It’s only a little saner than saying there’s plenty of space to allow two separate and sovereign nations to be cut from Lichtenstein. Now, we were willing to give it a shot for the sake of peace and quiet, but then a few Independence Wars and Intifadas and Kassam rockets here and there got in the way, you know?

Israel and Palestine.

Israel. Israel. Israel! “Palestine” is Emperor Hadrian’s name, given to the region, hitherto Judea, after Bar Kochba’s revolt of 132–5 CE, for the purpose of blotting out the connection between the Jews and their land. He named it thus for the Philistines, who were invaders from other regions in the Mediterranean who made life stressful for the Israelites by launching periodic attacks on their towns. Nearly 3,000 years and almost nothing has changed!

I understand that there are more issues to discuss here, however, we have to start somewhere.

No, there is nothing more to discuss here. It’s not about the checkpoints, it’s not about the “Apartheid Wall”, it’s not about maps and treaties; it’s about the one and only question of whether this land belongs to the Jews or not. Either all of it belongs to us by right (by divine right), or none of it does. Either Ma’aleh Adumim is inhabited by Jews by right, or Tel-Aviv is stolen land. Both are of the Zionist project; to say one of them constitutes a “land-grab”, a “colonization of foreign lands”, is to accuse the Zionist project of being so. To accuse Zionism of being so is to deny the Jews the right to inhabit their land, which is anti-Jewish just as it is anti-Italian to say the Italians have no right to Naples and Palermo (Muslim, then Norman, then Spanish lands until relatively recently).

Do we really want to blame all the ills of life on "the other guys"?

We do not want to blame anyone. But we have to go by the truth: if we are really to blame, then there is room to consider blaming ourselves (I say “there is room to consider” because the situation is such that the world accepts our apologies not as sincere admissions of having done wrong but as proofs of the justice of us being murdered and our state being dismantled (G-d forbid)), but if it really is the fact that the other side is to blame, then blaming things on ourselves isn’t just stupid, it’s a sin against the truth.

As for this phrasing, “to blame all the ills of life”—how did you come to it? When ever did we Israeli Jews blame all the ills of life on the other side? If anything, it’s the other side that blames us for all the ills of their lives, and it’s you and your ilk who, by choosing to include Israel in your address, or by claiming the solution of the Israel/“Palestine” conflict would remove the threat of another 9/11, or by implicating the “Israel Lobby” to be the cause for all the current global turmoil, that engage in blaming us for all—or nearly all—the ills of life indeed. Take that plank out of your eye.

This sort of thinking is shortsighted and full of its own bigotry.

Only if it’s untrue. If it’s true, then your sort of thinking is shortsighted and woefully naïve. Just as “By jingo” can be either bigoted or true, so can “Kumbaya” be either true or naïve.

And please, before dismissing me as just another anti-Semite, look at my name (Bottom of the diary says, “Written by Brian Bloom”. —ZY) and understand that we share the same heritage.

I’m sorry, but the fact of your being a Jew does not give you absolute moral authority to speak on Jewish matters. If it did, then we could accept the Ahmadinejad-hugging NK’s as legitimate representatives of the Jewish people. You are to be scrutinized with the same yardstick as any non-Jew: if you believe any part of the Land of Israel does not belong to the Jewish people, then you are wrong. I’m not calling you a self-hating Jew; I’m quite sure you’re sincere in your beliefs as to what is good for the Jewish people. However, I make no bones in telling you the truth: your beliefs are wrong.

That, it is worthy to note, is the essence of your whole diary: it is entirely written out of wrong beliefs. I pray G-d may bring you to reject those beliefs and accept the right ones.