RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gloria Steinem has landed… in Pyongyang. From there she plans to head south and on Sunday lead a group of women’s rights activists in a peace march — pardon me, an “historic” peace march [1](have you noticed that everything done these days in the name of peace is dubbed “historic”?) — across the Demilitarized Zone, from North to South Korea.

Organized by a group called Women Demilitarize the Zone, this march is meant to help end the unresolved Korean War, reunify the peninsula, reunite divided families and nudge North and South toward peace.

As a self-serving publicity stunt, this exercise has already been something of a success. It has netted the 81-year-old Steinem more news coverage [2] than she usually gets these days (though not quite as much as Dennis Rodman enjoyed during his Pyongyang phase). And I think we can safely assume that for the participants in the march, it will be a gratifying tour of some fascinating parts of the Korean peninsula, including the DMZ — during which they can congratulate themselves that they are not only serving the cause of peace, but providing a feminist counterpoint to all those armed men facing off across the Zone. The governments of both North and South Korea have agreed to permit the march; peace events are planned on both sides of the DMZ, and presumably the historic peace marchers will cross the DMZ along a carefully selected route that will be misleadingly free of land mines.

Why send money to the Kremlin when three U.S. companies can do the job and protect national security?

The U.S. is hooked on Russian rocket engines for space launches. It is a dependence that sits awkwardly with America’s national-security launch program, which includes systems for reconnaissance satellites and the early detection of missile and nuclear launches. A commercial arrangement with the Russian engine’s manufacturer has also undermined sanctions against Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine while pampering President Vladimir Putin’s cronies.

With U.S.-Russian relations going from ‘‘reset” to rubbish in the past few years, why does the U.S. still rely on these engines, known as RD-180s, to power the rockets it uses?

‘Be courageous and appreciate courage in others who take action in the face of fear.’
On Saturday I attended my first commencement program in 61 years. The speaker drew me there: Ryan Pitts, addressing the University of New Hampshire’s class of 2015.

In an era when speakers are routinely disinvited from American colleges for the sin of challenging academic orthodoxy, I wanted to see how my alma mater would welcome a man who joined the U.S. Army out of high school, who twice deployed to war, and who in July 2008 was the last man alive in an observation post named Topside, above the village of Wanat in the Hindu Kush mountains of northeastern Afghanistan.

GOP free-for-all is better politics than the Democrats’ coronation of Hillary Clinton.
Estimates vary about how many Republicans are after the party’s presidential nomination, but the number 19 keeps coming up. Nothing in nature comes in sets of 19. The only “19” in my memory is the Rolling Stones singing about someone’s 19th nervous breakdown. Welcome to the world of GOP party officials, many on the verge of multiple nervous breakdowns over the flood tide of candidates.

The litany of anxieties is endless.

None of the 19 is standing out. Jeb is rustier than they expected. The debates will be a nightmare. Nineteen on one stage??!! There’s talk of making a debate cut to 10, but how? Dropping Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina is a nonstarter. Maybe we ditch the Ricks—Santorum and Perry; they had their shot.

A GOP donor told me recently, “Having 19 candidates is unseemly.” Politics? Unseemly?

In a post yesterday, I related that the presiding judge in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit over former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s e-mails had rejected the State Department’s plan to delay disclosure of the e-mails for eight months — i.e., until January 15, 2016. Pursuant to Judge Rudolph Contreras’s order, there will be a “rolling production” of the e-mails. State has been directed to propose a schedule within the next few days. Kudos to the court for refusing to tolerate State’s ridiculous proposal. Nevertheless, a litigator friend points out to me that even Judge Contreras is being extraordinarily deferential to the government and, derivatively, Mrs. Clinton.

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.