RUTHFULLY YOURS

Trapped By The Axis Of Anti-Semitism:  Left, Right And Islam

Rael Jean Isaac and Ruth King

 

         The Jewish people are in danger of being entrapped in a pincer movement of anti-Semitic hatred from left and right, often thinly masked as “anti-Zionism,” with moral cover provided by haters of Israel within the Jewish community.  Europe is in the lead but there are ominous developments in this country (and Canada) as well.

           In the recent period hostility from the left has been dominant, even though, precisely because Jews overwhelmingly identify with this end of the political spectrum, many remain in denial.   In The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism, British philosophy professor Bernard Harrison reminds us of the enormity of what has occurred: “[S]urely  few of the most cynical observers of human affairs would have predicted that anti-Semitism would be flourishing in Western Europe within little more than fifty years of the destruction of the Nazi regime—and what is more, establishing its base within the self-proclaimed ‘progressive, anti-racist’ left in universities, journalism and political life.”

             Harrison’s book was published in 2005 and it is a mark of the rapid deterioration of the situation in the last few years that anti-Semitic calumnies are being disseminated that even he felt were unthinkable..  Thus Harrison writes that while left-wing progressive thinkers would never dream of invoking the blood libel, they do not hesitate to make false and vile charges.  Far from being unthinkable, the blood libel, in the form of charges that the Israeli army was killing Palestinian teenagers to harvest their organs, was featured in the popular left-wing Swedish daily Aftonbladet.  In Britain, CounterPunch, edited by radical leftist Alexander Cockburn, printed an article using medieval blood libels against Jews as evidence for the Aftonbladet charges. Daniel Greenfield (who blogs as Sultan Knish) points out that CounterPunch  uses a modern blood libel to revive and legitimize medieval ones!

            

  In Germany the left has put the Jewish community in a double bind. Historian Suzanne Urban reports that groups on the left embrace Jews as valued allies against neo-Nazi Holocaust denial, even as these same groups defame Israel and her supporters.  As German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder observed in a hearing by the Interior Committee of the Bundesrepublik: “The modern anti-Semite condemns ordinary anti-Semitism, but he names himself without hesitation anti-Zionist.  He is grateful for having his chance to show his resentments in a politically correct way.  The anti-Zionist has the same attitude toward Israel as anti-Semites carry toward Jews.” Making the situation of Jews even more uncomfortable, the left demands that as victims of the Holocaust, they publicly identify with Moslems, their chief tormentors.  Writes Urban: “The former victims should be alert and help the actual victims—it is seen as their duty to warn against anti-Islamic attitudes.”

              

 While the situation is not as bad on this side of the Atlantic, here too the anti-Semitic virus is spreading, especially in those institutions viewed as the pillars of enlightened thought: universities and the mainline churches.  Campus anti-Semitism has been especially virulent in Canada.  Canadian poet and essayist David Solway notes that Jewish students at York University had to be locked inside a building to protect them from an anti-Semitic mob and security guards warned visiting lecturer Daniel Pipes not to inflame his audience (when it was the audience that should have been policed). 

 As far back as 2002 a riot at Concordia College in Montreal (known locally as Gaza U.) forced the cancellation of a speech by now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Professor Alain Goldschlager of the University of Western Ontario, who has monitored growing anti-Semitism on Canadian campuses, writes: “Jewish students feel more and more under siege.” Israel Apartheid Week, an annual week-long hate-fest against Israel, was pioneered at the University of Toronto in 2004 and has spread to other Canadian, U.S. and British institutions.

           One of those institutions is the University of California at Irvine, a hot-bed of anti-Semitic intimidation, to the point that members of the local Jewish community in 2008 issued a detailed report and recommended Jewish students avoid the university.  Elite colleges from Harvard on down have spawned petitions and proposals for boycotts and divestment of funds from companies that do business in Israel.  So much for the old ADL mantra that education is the key to combating anti-Semitism—it has become key to its dissemination.

            As for the churches, Solway points out that every major convention of the United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant confession, includes motions to divest from companies providing “products, services or technology” to Israel and anti-Israel boycott resolutions.  In the U.S., the Presbyterian Church actually passed a divestment resolution in 2004 (watered down in 2006).  Similar proposals continue to surface at the annual conventions of mainline churches which also repeatedly pass resolutions on the Arab-Israel conflict sharply skewed against Israel.  Church publications foster hostility to Israel.  Indeed, a recent 225 page report on the Arab-Israel conflict  by the Women’s Division of the Methodist church referred to the creation of Israel as “the original sin.”

             

 Anti-Semitism suffuses human rights organizations, the very sort of “progressive” outfits with which Jews eagerly identify, indeed often took a prominent role in founding (and funding).   True to form, on October 27 Amnesty International issued another of its unfounded attacks on Israel, this one accusing Israel of “denying water to Palestinians.”  Robin Shepherd, author of a fine new book Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, points out that the United Kingdom branch of Amnesty road-showed this latest “report” at a meeting featuring  Ben White, promoting his new book Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide.

                The other major international moral arbiter, Human Rights Watch, is even more egregious, debased into a Johnny one-note denouncing Israel.  Key staff members belong in a Human Rights Hall of Infamy.  Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North African division (and thus moral arbiter on Israel), was a founder of MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project), a far left propaganda mill which cast its assault on Israel in the language of Marxist anti-imperialist analysis. MERIP even applauded the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In 1976 Stork traveled to Iraq to present a paper at Saddam’s conference on Zionism and Racism. Stork opposed any political settlement on the grounds this would spoil the chance for creating a revolutionary movement to destroy Israel.

             Robert Bernstein, a founder of Human Rights Watch, and its chairman for twenty years, went public with his criticism in an October 20 New York Times op-ed. Human Rights Watch had lost all critical perspective, ignoring “brutal, closed and autocratic” Arab and Iranian regimes, while singling out Israel for far more condemnations than any other country in the region.  Yet Israel was an open society, Bernstein noted,  home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently ruled against the government, a politically active academia and multiple political parties.

                The reaction of Human Rights Watch was to dig deeper down. Tom Porteus, director of London’s Human Rights Watch, rejected Bernstein’s “obvious double standard. Any credible human rights organization must apply the same human rights standard to all countries.”  That Human Rights Watch agreed there had to be a single standard but was oblivious to its failure to maintain one (indeed could claim that it was Bernstein who advocated a double standard!) strongly suggested its leaders were blinded by their obsessive hatred.

 Human Rights Watch went on to add ten members to the advisory board of the Middle East division, four of them well known as radical anti-Israel activists. How extreme they are can be gleaned from the rhetoric of one of the new members, currently on the board of MERIP, who slammed the Palestinian Authority for being a “discredited quisling government that was mandated to provide security for its master, Israel.”  Clearly, far from returning to its roots as a genuine human rights organization (as Helsinki Watch it played a distinguished role in democratizing the Soviet Union and its satellites), Human Rights Watch is bent more than ever on turning Israel into a pariah state.

                   

  The anti-Semitic left enjoys moral cover provided by an assortment of  Jewish  organizations and individuals. Some, like J Street and the New Israel Fund, pretend to be concerned for Israel’s welfare, a stance that fools only the terminally foolish. Tellingly, its campus component has dropped “pro-Israel” from J Street’s slogan “pro-Israel, pro-peace” because, as the secretary of J Street U’s student board said candidly,  “people feel connected to Palestine.” (J Street and a number of other anti-Israel Jewish outfits are funded by George Soros.)

                    The anti-Semitic left especially values Israelis and former Israelis who echo its attacks on Israel, people like Daniel Machover, Ilan  Pappe, and Shlomo Sand. Machover, a British lawyer born in Israel, co-founded Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights and prepares legal ambushes for Israeli military and civilian leaders who visit Europe, hoping to obtain their arrest and prosecution for war crimes. Pappe, formerly a professor at Haifa University, now at Exeter University in England, made his mark by publishing charges of Israeli massacres (historian Benny Morris called them “complete fabrications”) and championing an academic boycott of Israeli universities. Shlomo Sand, currently a professor at Tel Aviv University, is the anti-Semite’s flavor of the month for his recent book The Invention of the Jewish People which argues that the Jews have no link or claim to Palestine at all.

               Machover, Pappe and Sand are only a few of the appallingly large number of Israelis and Jews in the diaspora who aid and abet their enemies. Professor Michael Neumann of Trent University in Ontario is another of this breed.  The son of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Neumann’s book The Case Against Israel (designed to counter Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel) was published by Alexander Cockburn’s CounterPunch press.  An email from Neumann quoted by  Goldschlager  provides insight into the mindset of these people. Affirming that his sole concern was to “help the Palestinians,” Neumann continued: “I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose…If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care.  If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still don’t care.” No wonder famed historian Jacob Talmon concluded such enemies were motivated by “morbid masochism.”

              

 While anti-Semitism on the left still dominates, anti-Semitism on the right is gaining recruits, social respectability, self-confidence—and acceptance from the left.  While the left for many years rejected overtures by the far right seeking joint action against capitalism, anti-Semitism is proving the tie that binds, a common hatred strong enough to bring together what long seemed antithetical political poles.

                 Horst Mahler is an embodiment of this meeting of the extremes.  A former member of the notorious far-left Bader Meinhof terror gang, he trained in Jordan with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.  Caught and jailed, on his release he became a neo-Nazi and co-founder of the Society for the Rehabilitation of Those Persecuted for Refutation of the Holocaust.  Jailed again for Holocaust denial in February 2009, Mahler’s words are described as “an inspiration” by the fascist blogosphere: “In our day, the German who does not kowtow to the Jews will be relentlessly brought before the courts and deprived of his freedom, so that he will spend his life behind bars. I stand convicted of exposing Talmudic perfidiousness by ceaselessly calling the Auschwitz Lie by its name and confronting it with the truth.  I have been doing this for many years now, since I swore a sacred oath to my Volk never to relent in the struggle against the ‘Holocaust’ cult.”

           Laws against Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic invective in Germany (punishable by fines and in cases like that of Mahler, jail) were designed to prevent a resurgence of Nazism. But now they have the disconcerting effect of giving “victim” status to the culprits and of encouraging recrudescence of neo-Nazi organizations. The fastest growing (officially banned) neo-Nazi group is named Frontmann 24,” for the forerunner of the storm troopers set up in 1924.

 The integration of East Germany into the West seems to have encouraged anti-Semitism.   Anita  Kahane, writes in The Jerusalem Post (Nov. 10): “Neo-Nazis and the Left express extremist ideas that are becoming commonplace in general German society: a sometimes malignant anti-Zionism that is completely oblivious to the realities of the Middle East. Thus it is necessary to say that the fall of the wall and the accompanying euphoria have made something possible that would not have been possible 20 years ago. A run-of-the-mill social worker in Berlin may now tell the youths he works with, without causing concern: ‘Don’t say Jewish pig. Just say you are critiquing Israel’s policy.’”

           

  Cooperation between extremists of the left and right grows ever more common. In England the far left, anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Arab “Stop the War Coalition” welcomes the far-right British National Party.  On the right, hatred of Israel trumps hostility to Moslem immigration.  Thus Kristina Morvai, a professor at Budapest University  Law School, is a leader of the Jobbik neo-Nazi party.   Elected to the European Parliament, she joined France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the anti-Semitic National Front Party, and the British National Party’s Nick Griffin to form “The Alliance of European National Movements,” ostensibly to protest unfettered Moslem immigration.  Yet all three were scheduled to take part in the Palestine Return Center’s pro-Hamas rally in London on December 16.  (Despite her frequent appearances in a keffiyeh to demonstrate her solidarity with Arabs, Morvai has been disinvited because her Jobbik Party harasses gypsies—this disturbed some of the leftist British eminences scheduled to appear at the rally.)

             On November 22 Jobbik organized a mass rally and march through downtown Budapest, commemorating the rule of Admiral Miklos Horthy, who led Hungary under Hitler. The crowd, estimated at 5,000, heard a Jobbik member promise a new extermination of “vermin” in a forthcoming “cleansing” of the Hungarian nation (one presumes of gypsies and Jews).

                 In Switzerland Ahmed (aka Armand) Albert Friedrich Huber, a former socialist journalist and banker with close ties to both neo-Nazis and the Moslem Brotherhood, attempted to put together a conference of Holocaust deniers in Lebanon with the stated goal of creating a nexus for cooperation between Moslems and neo-Nazi groups.  Faced with an international outcry, the Lebanese government canceled the event but Huber has a large following as a result of his “eclectic” group of anti-Semitic supporters.            

 Anti-Semites of the left, the right and Moslem supporters, whether in Europe or on this continent, are animated by the conviction that Jews are engaged in a vast conspiracy to control the media, the financial system and the governments of the West. This of course is the thesis of the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which supposedly reveals a Jewish plot to take over the world and is still a bestseller in the Moslem world.  Flowers of Galilee by Swedish anti-Semite Joran Jermas, published by the Austrian left-wing Promedia, wins enthusiastic praise from the fascist general secretary of the Austro-Arab Friendship Society: “The Occupation Regime in Iraq was installed by the U.S. army in the interests of Zionists, and it may be rightly called ZOG, Zionist Occupation Government, if anything.  However, this ZOG is also a Zog, a servant of Darkness and Annihilation, for its first step was the destruction of Baghdad’s libraries and museums.” 

 In Sweden the first “anti-Zionist party” has just been formed. The party leader openly welcomes neo-Nazis, radical Islamist and left-wing extremists.  And while this may be the first party based purely on hatred of Jews in post-Holocaust Europe, one suspects it will not be the last.

                

 Clearly the huge Moslem immigration into Europe has been crucial to these developments.  Moslems are the foot soldiers in the war against the Jews.  It is they who intimidate, who terrorize, who rampage, who engage in violence against ordinary Jews in schools, on the streets, in public transportation.  More broadly, the Moslem war against Israel is crucial for the anti-Semitic left, much of which, uncomfortable with naked anti-Semitism, relies on the mask of anti-Zionism.

 What is especially disconcerting is that it grows ever harder anywhere in Europe to find a rational middle bloc.  The first major warning of the extent to which the broad public had been influenced by relentless media pounding on Israel was in 2003 when a European Commission poll of 15 countries found that 59% of respondents considered Israel the greatest threat to world peace—far outstripping Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.  This November came another shock when England’s Channel 4 aired “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby,” purveying the notion of a Jewish conspiracy that had successfully manipulated the media and politicians to support Israel.

                  The documentary was silly. In the real world, British media, above all the influential BBC, rides a relentless anti-Israel hobby horse.  Yet it provoked, as Robin Shepherd has put it “a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4’s widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby’s ‘seditious behavior,’ its ‘disgusting attack on British democracy,’ ‘the hand of global Zionism at work,’ and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: ‘We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out.’”  In fact, what the documentary had flushed out was the extent of British anti-Semitism.

       

 The makers of Channel 4’s documentary have written that their inspiration came from John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” who have given a “scholarly” veneer to the conspiracy theory of Zionist control of U.S. policy, a central theme of anti-Semites of all stripes.               

 In the United States the extreme right has long operated on the societal fringe (e.g. the David Dukes, Liberty Lobby, Holocaust revisionists).  Conservatives have been far more supportive of Jews and Israel than their counterparts in the multi-culti left. But the exceptions grow. Paul Craig Roberts has a sterling mainstream conservative resume (assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute, etc.). He spouts conspiracy theories on V-Dare, a right-wing website hospitable to anti-Semites. “Why is the U.S. making itself impotent fighting wars that have nothing whatsoever to do with its security, wars that are, in fact, threatening its security? The answer is that the military-security lobby, the financial gangsters, and AIPAC rule.  The American people be damned.”  Similarly V-Dare editor Stephen Sailer, often cogent on other issues, accuses “neo-cons” [code word for Jews] of “furnishing the Republican Presidential candidates with a ready-made grand strategy: Invade the World/ Invite the World/ In Hock the World.”

                       Although National Review did dump anti-Semitic journalist Joe Sobran, there is a certain tone-deafness to anti-Semitism on the right.  Editors of Townhall, Human Events, as well as the conservative Fox News overlook the “sophisticated” Holocaust denial of Pat Buchanan—Sean Hannity is a great admirer. When Robert Novak died, a man who would gladly have blamed Katrina on Israel, the orgy of lament and praise was mind-numbing.

                      

 What can Jews (and their supporters) do to counter the pincer movement from left and right? In Europe, probably not much.  For one thing, massive Moslem immigration, combined with below-replacement birth rates by the native population, is fast bringing major European countries to a demographic tipping point.  But it goes beyond this. Robin Shepherd finds the roots of the new form of anti-Semitism centering on Israel “the most important Jewish project of our time” in a civilizational sickness, a lack of self-belief, ideological pathologies, relativism, a tendency to appease.  He warns that in Europe “hostility to Israel is nowhere near as striking at the peaks of the political landscape as in the subterranean caverns below.  But at some point, the tectonic movements of cultural change must inevitably push peaks, caverns and everything else together…forg[ing] anew the look and feel of political life.”

                In the United States, on the other hand, there is much Jews could do, although if past is prologue, they will fail to take the appropriate measures (indeed be shocked to hear them voiced). It is the huge, militant Moslem population that makes Europe so unlikely a prospect for positive change.  Jews should be working to severely restrict Moslem immigration to the United States, for the larger this population, the more the position of Jews—and political support for Israel—will be undercut.

                 Unlike in Europe, in the United States Israel still has an important base of support in the Christian evangelical community and Jews should be cultivating these friends, going out of their way to cooperate with them in as many areas as possible.  Instead, while a few groups (like AFSI) have done so, major organizations like the Anti-Defamation League for decades have gone out of their way to antagonize and defame these chief friends of Israel (and if they would allow them, of Jews).

                 

 In the end, though, it is the state of Israel that can do most to sustain existing and mobilize potential supporters, the kinds of people Melanie Phillips describes as fading from the British scene: “[who] embodied decency and fairness and intelligence and a quiet but unyielding determination to stand up for right against wrong and face down the bullies and the bigots.” Sadly since the disastrous Oslo accords, Israel has been on a steady downward slide.  Once the pillar of resistance to terror (remember Entebbe?), it has become the model for appeasement of terror, releasing floods of terrorists for single Israelis, for the dead bodies of Israelis, for nothing at all—as empty gestures of goodwill. 

 Once an exemplar for boldly confronting its enemies, Israel now incessantly prattles of negotiations and “two-state solutions,” proffering suicidal concessions although the Arabs (not to mention Iran) make no bones that they have no intention of accepting a Jewish state in any borders. Israel has been so easily pushed around for so long it is no wonder Obama thought he could demand a complete building freeze, including in Jerusalem (what did it matter that Israel had formally annexed it?) and have Israel fall in line without objection. (And Netanyahu, after a struggle of some months, indeed seems to be falling in line.)

 In 1944, with Jews at their lowest ebb, screen-writer and staunch Zionist Ben Hecht, in Guide for the Bedeviled, laid out what Jews should not do. They should not go on the defensive—they should not proclaim their humanitarian virtues, they should not proclaim their distress, they should not try to contradict and disprove the anti-Semite. (Hecht writes disapprovingly, ”They feel only that anything an anti-Semite says must be contradicted and disproved”). Adds Hecht: “You would think that the Jews would wake up to this one fact about themselves—that their defensive position is the chief delight and arsenal of the anti-Semite.  But never comes such awakening.”

                 Prime Minister Netanyahu’s much praised speech at the UN in September of this year is further proof the awakening never comes, for it embodied every mistake Hecht outlined. Netanyahu started out by “disproving” Ahmadinejad’s holocaust denial.  He waved before the General Assembly the notes of the Wannsee meeting at which the Germans decided on the plan to exterminate Jews and copies of the construction plans for Auschwitz.  He went on to emphasize Israel’s humanitarian contributions to the world.  He proclaimed Israel’s “distress:” it had suffered an endless rain of rockets after it had left Gaza, even though it had destroyed Jewish communities in the search for peace.  He emphasized how badly Israel wanted peace, how much it would do for peace, that it believed in the two state solution with two free peoples living side by side. As Ben Hecht could have told him, the defensive speech only made Israel’s enemies smell her weakness.

                

 What speech might Netanyahu have made?  He could have said that the Jewish people were in Israel as of religious, historic and legal right, in the words of the Hatikva, to live as a free people in our land. From Israel’s inception, the Arabs had been—and continued to be–intent on destroying the state.  He could have acknowledged that Israel’s pursuit of peace when there was no peace had led it into terrible errors, most  recently the Oslo accords and the retreat from Gaza.  He could have said that the two state solution the whole world supported was a lie, a chimera.  He could have said that Israel had two non-negotiable preconditions for any negotiations: the Arabs must integrate the refugees into their countries, giving up “the right to return,” and they must openly acknowledge Israel as the legitimate state of the Jews.  Until such time, Israel was prepared to stand fast and do whatever it deemed necessary to maintain its security, defend itself against attack and utterly defeat those who attempted to destroy it.

                Such a speech would have caused an uproar (not least in Israel).  But it would have been a first step in changing the atmosphere, in instilling respect and fear in enemies, in strengthening friends tired of all the lies (including being told that Islam is a religion of peace). The greatest irony of all is that Israel is guilty of sins precisely the opposite of those of which it is accused. It can properly be faulted, but not for being a bully, an oppressor, a second coming of the Nazi Reich. Its real sin is failing to stand up to the bullies, the oppressors, the anti-Semites of the region and of the world.

            Ultimately it is Israel which is the chief target of the anti-Semites, the rallying point for their irrational hatreds, and it is Israel that has the potential, if it would stand firm, to break through the wall of hatred closing in on world Jewry.

 Absent that, the vice tightens.                         •