RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Sunday, Robert S. Wistrich – the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem – emailed the following column to ‘Jerusalem
Post’ Editor-in-Chief Steve Linde, asking that it be published in the coming week. Wistrich died suddenly on Tuesday. We dedicate his lastcolumn to perpetuating his memory. May his words live on.

“Today’s anti-Semitism is a product of a new civic religion that could be termed “Palestinianism.”

There are few topics of more pressing concern today to Jewish communities around the world than the current resurgence of anti-Semitism. Thus, there could have been no more appropriate time for the 5th Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism to meet than last week in Jerusalem. It was a large and impressive gathering of participants from all over the world, initiated by the Foreign Ministry, together with its Diaspora Affairs Department.

In my own remarks to the conference I emphasized the need to free ourselves from certain outdated myths. My first point was that even today, Jews in Israel and the Diaspora are fixated on the dangers of far-right traditional anti-Semitism – whether racist, religious or nationalist. While neo-fascism has not altogether disappeared, it is in most cases a secondary threat.

Second, there is an illusory belief that more Holocaust education and memorialization can serve as an effective antidote to contemporary anti-Semitism. This notion, shared by many governments and well-meaning liberal gentiles, is quite unfounded. On the contrary, today “Holocaust inversion” (the perverse transformation of Jews into Nazis and Muslims into victimized “Jews”) all-too-often becomes a weapon with which to pillory Israel and denigrate the Jewish people. Hence the approach to this entire subject requires considerable rethinking, updating and fine-tuning.

Third, we must recognize much more clearly than before that since 1975 (with the passing of the scandalous UN resolution condemning Zionism as racism) hatred of Israel has increasingly mutated into the chief vector for the “new” anti-Semitism.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/anti-semitism-scholar-robert-s-wistrich-dies-at-70/

Prolific author, who often warned of resurgent hatred of Jews in Europe, suffers a heart attack in Rome

Robert S. Wistrich, one of the world’s foremost scholars of anti-Semitism, died late Tuesday evening after suffering a heart attack in Rome, where he was due to address the Italian Senate about rising anti-Semitism in Europe.

Wistrich, 70, was the Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the head of the University’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

Over the course of his career, Wistrich edited and published dozens of books about the fate of Jews and their treatment by other nations.

Among his notable works was the 1989 book “The Jews of Vienna in the age of Franz Joseph,” which won the Austrian State Prize in History. Two years later he published “Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred,” which later served as the basis for a three-hour British-American television documentary on anti-Semitism.

His book “A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism — From Antiquity to the Global Jihad,” published in 2010, was awarded the Best Book of the Year Prize by the New-York based Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.

In 2014, Wistrich authored an exhibition titled “The 3,500 year relationship of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel,” which was scheduled for display at UNESCO headquarters in Paris but was canceled amid pressure from Arab nations.

At the time, Wistrich said that the cancellation “completely destroyed any claim that UNESCO could possibly have to be representing the universal values of toleration, mutual understanding, respect for the other and narratives that are different, engaging with civil society organizations and the importance of education. Because there’s one standard for Jews, and there’s another standard for non-Jews, especially if they’re Arabs, but not only.”

The exhibit eventually reopened six months later after the phrase “Land of Israel” in the title was replaced with “Holy Land.”
Robert Wistrich (photo credit: courtesy)

Robert Wistrich (photo credit: courtesy)

In July 2014 Wistrich was invited to address an emergency Knesset meeting on rising violent anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activities in Europe, during which he warned that “we have entered a new, very difficult era in all of Europe.”

Wistrich was born in Lenger, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, on April 7, 1945. His parents had fled anti-Semitism in Poland a few years early but were met with similar animosity in the Soviet Union, where his father was twice arrested by the secret police.

After World War II ended, the family returned to Poland but found the lingering hatred of Jews unbearable and so relocated to France and from there to England. At the age of 17 Wistrich won an open scholarship in history to Queens’ College, Cambridge, eventually earning his masters degree in 1969, followed by a doctorate at the University of London in 1974. During his university years he founded a literary and arts magazine.

Between 1974 and 1980, he worked as director of research at the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library and was then appointed a research fellow of the British Academy. In 1982 he was given tenure at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The silence of leaders of Palestine solidarity activists is in many ways confirmation that their movement is motivated primarily by detestation of Israel’s existence, rather than advocating for Palestinians wherever they may be.
When the history of the Syrian Civil War is written, the assault on the Palestinian refugee camp in Yarmouk will be noted as one of its most shameful chapters. So why was the international pro-Palestinian community silent?

Nearly one year after the war in Gaza, another, far bloodier Palestinian tragedy has been taking place elsewhere in the Middle East—not quite outside of the news media’s gaze, but not quite receiving its frenzied attentions either.
The Islamic State’s recent conquest of Yarmouk—a once thriving Palestinian suburb with the formal status of a refugee camp that lies on the outskirts of Damascus—provides far more than just insight into which aspects of the Palestinian plight get editorial privilege and which do not. Since the strangulation of Yarmouk began in 2012, the fate of its people has offered a bald reminder that within the Arab world, Palestinians still encounter an ambivalence that can spill into open contempt. Just as instructive, and certainly more novel, is the realization that the global Palestinian solidarity movement, by not holding mass demonstrations highlighting the slaughter and starvation in Yarmouk, has become complicit with the dictator Bashar al-Assad and the beheaders of IS.

During the fall of 2005—my sophomore year at Columbia—I took a lecture course on the history of the Middle East taught by a then untenured professor named Joseph Massad. One of my classmates, whom I’d met the previous year in a freshman literature seminar, was a Californian and a genuine Valley girl—naturally blonde and thin, but without the attendant ditziness. On one of my frequent weekend forays downtown, I ran into her in the subway. She had gotten to know me fairly well in that small freshman seminar, but now she confessed she had a question. You’re a reasonable, good person, she said. So how can you be a Zionist?

Her question was entirely sincere. The farthest thing from an activist or rabble-rouser, she was simply curious how I, certainly no obvious racist, could support the last bastion of white, racist colonialism in the Middle East—which was what she was now learning about Israel. We certainly heard nothing from Massad himself to suggest that, contrary to the infamous 1975 resolution of the UN General Assembly, Zionism was not racism. Nor did we encounter any text to that effect. Our one assigned book on the Jewish state was Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? by the French Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson. Suffice it to say that the question mark in the title was superfluous.

In his 2004 book, The Case for Democracy, the Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician Natan Sharansky argues that the West can win the long struggle with the Middle East’s authoritarian and Islamist states by promoting liberalism and freedom in the region’s closed societies. Sharansky and co-author Ron Dermer, now Israel’s ambassador to the United States, also address the role Israel plays in this conflict and the accusations and claims against the Jewish state that are intended to turn Western opinion against it. Sharansky and Dermer argue that the United States and Europe cannot help open up the “fear societies” of the Mideast if they accede to the warped and anti-Semitic claims they make about Israel, a fellow Western country. These claims constitute a significant part of the pathologies that consign those societies to violence and failure. Because some Western liberals have a tendency to give credence to these claims, and because their credence sows much moral and political confusion in the West, identifying and rejecting anti-Semitic attacks on Israel should be a central test of the larger struggle, argue Sharansky and Dermer.

They point out that “whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people and Jewish religion, the new anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish state.” Since this new anti-Semitism “is much more difficult to expose,” they propose a test. They call it the 3D test—the three D’s being demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. If a criticism of Israel checks all three boxes, it’s safe to say that it is anti-Semitic.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is adapted from one that ran in the June 1, 2015, issue of National Review.

We live in a legal culture besotted by the myth of judicial supremacy. According to this myth, the Constitution means whatever five Supreme Court justices claim it means, and all other governmental actors are duty-bound to abide by that supposed meaning.

This mistaken concept of judicial supremacy is often confused with the power of judicial review — the ability of courts to review the constitutionality of laws and regulations that they are asked to apply. It is one thing for the Supreme Court to decline to apply a law that it deems to be unconstitutional; it is quite another for it to maintain that presidents, members of Congress, and state officials must likewise regard the law as unconstitutional and, further, must accept and follow the rationale of the Court’s decision.

Thus, Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, famously defended his rejection of the Dred Scott ruling: “If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” Lincoln’s actions as president were faithful to his words. In defiance of the dual holdings of Dred Scott, he signed into law a bill that outlawed slavery in the federal territories, and he instructed the State Department to issue passports to free blacks (thus recognizing them as citizens). Lincoln also refused to obey Chief Justice Taney’s order, in Ex parte Merryman, to release a prisoner from military custody.

By now everyone has had their say about Jeb Bush’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. The consensus is that Bush misheard Megyn Kelly’s “knowing what we know now” question about the Iraq War. I’m not convinced.

Politicians routinely answer the question they wish they were asked rather than the question they were actually asked. Indeed, those are the only kinds of questions some politicians — particularly ones with the last name Clinton — ever answer. The question Fox News’ Kelly asked is the tougher one, at least for Bush, so perhaps he opted to answer in a way that let him take a shot at Hillary Clinton, who also supported the war?

The international community and the media often ignore the fact that Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah has a number of armed groups. Their fight is to destroy Israel, eliminate the “Zionist entity” and achieve the “right of return” for millions of descendants of refugees.

The Palestinian Authority leadership has never distanced itself from the rhetoric and actions of these groups. Fatah’s militias will be the first to reject any peace agreement that includes the slightest concession to Israel.

Several Fatah leaders, in fact, often speak in English about the need for reviving the peace process, while in Arabic they praise and endorse the Fatah gunmen.

Many in the international community often refer to the Palestinian Fatah faction, which is headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, as a “moderate” group which believes in Israel’s right to exist and the two-state solution.

Senator Lindsey Graham says really dumb things from time to time, but when I read this profile of the apparently soon-to-be GOP presidential candidate by the Federalist’s Ben Domenech, I assumed that he must have been misquoted. Sure enough, though, Mr. Domenech provides a supporting link to a Washington Post news account which reports that, this past weekend, Senator Graham asserted:

If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL [Islamic State], I’m not gonna call a judge. I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you.

Even for those of us who recognize the government’s necessary national security powers, the question of killing Americans is an excruciatingly difficult one. It is not fit for bombast.

This month the left lost its mind over Ayelet Shaked [2]. The daughter of an Iraqi Jewish immigrant, Ayelet Shaked was an infantry instructor who worked for Israel’s elite Golani Brigade and a computer scientist who worked for Texas Instruments. Now she’s a mother of two married to a former fighter pilot.

She’s also Israel’s new Justice Minister.

The New York Times compared her to Michele Bachmann and had her quoting Ayn Rand. The Financial Times compared her to Sarah Palin. So did Italian, Spanish and Norwegian media outlets.

These analogies are not based on anything except the gender and politics of all three women. They are shorthand signals, telling liberal readers to hate Ayelet Shaked just as they hated Palin and Bachmann.