Posted on 03/20/2003 10:18:51 PM PST by FreeReporting
Want to make yourself really, really unpopular if you’re a Jew? Try saying that the world is witnessing a terrifying firestorm of hatred directed at Israel and the Jewish people, in which the British and Europeans are deeply implicated.
Since it is now a given in many circles that Israel is a threat to the world equal to North Korea, and that Ariel Sharon is a cross between Martin Bormann and Hendrik Verwoerd, you will find yourself accused of using the Holocaust to avoid any criticism of Israel’s behaviour. Because, well, you know, you Jews always stick together and are mighty quick to deal that persecution card.
‘Robin Cook, unfaithful yet again.’
Anyone who holds that view may as well skip what follows. More objective and fair-minded souls, however, might be deeply alarmed to learn of the evidence provided at a recent conference on anti-Semitism and the media at the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem.
This was scarcely a gathering of the Ariel Sharon fan club. Among academics and journalists from Israel, Europe, Britain and America were several left-wingers and liberals who were deeply hostile to Israel’s Likud government, believed that the settlements should be dismantled, and were troubled by the behaviour of some of Israel’s military. ‘There’s no doubt that Israel is committing human-rights violations on the West Bank,’ said Professor Yehuda Bauer, the distinguished Holocaust expert.
But there was equally no doubt, from what he and others said, that anti-Zionism is now being used to cloak a terrifying nexus between genocidal Arab and Islamist hatred of the Jews and deep-seated European prejudices.
Anti-Semitism is protean, mutating over the centuries into new forms. Now it has changed again, into a shape which requires a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary. The new anti-Semitism does not discriminate against Jews as individuals on account of their race. Instead, it is centred on Israel, and the denial to the Jewish people alone of the right of self-determination.
This is nothing to do with the settlements or the West Bank. Indeed, the language being used exposes as a cruel delusion the common belief that the Middle East crisis would be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state.
The key motif is a kind of Holocaust inversion, with the Israelis being demonised as Nazis and the Palestinians being regarded as the new Jews. Israel and the Jews are being systematically delegitimised and dehumanised — a necessary prelude to their destruction — with both Islamists and the Western media using anti-Zionism as a fig-leaf for prejudices rooted in both mediaeval Christian and Nazi demonology.
This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the Left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel in the media but also to mainstream articles discussing the malign power of the Jews over American and world policy.
The Jerusalem conference heard chilling presentations about a phenomenon barely discussed in Britain: the virulent Arab and Muslim hatred of the Jews. This goes far beyond even the desire to finish off Israel as a Jewish state. Anti-Jewish hatred plays a crucial role in the fanatical jihadism that now threatens all of us in the West, pouring out in television programmes, newspapers and religious sermons throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and amounting to a new warrant for genocide.
The dominant message is that Jewish power amounts to a conspiracy to destroy Islam and take over the whole world. Truly mad theories circulate on Islamist Internet sites which have now convinced untold numbers of Arabs and Muslims that the Jews were behind both 9/11 and the Columbia space-shuttle disaster. Egyptian television transmitted a 41-part series which presented the notorious Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — which purported to be a Jewish plot to control the world — as the truth. (This has prompted some Arab intellectuals to condemn such propaganda as both untrue and a tactical error, but these dissidents remain a small minority.) Meanwhile, Saudi media and religious sermons incite the murder of Jews.
According to the Arabic scholar Professor Menachem Milsom, this Arab and Islamist propaganda persistently dehumanised Jews by representing them as apes and pigs. A preacher at the totemic Haram mosque in Mecca said the Jews were ‘evil offspring’, the ‘destroyers of God’s word’, ‘priest murderers’ and the ‘scum of the human race’. The mediaeval Christian blood libel — the claim that the Jews kill children and drink their blood — has surfaced time and again in prestigious Arab newspapers.
And Zionism was equated with Nazism; just as the Nazis believed in the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race, so Zionists (sic) believed they were the chosen people, which justified their own military expansion. This equation was not confined to a marginal few. Abu Mazen, said Milsom, the Palestinian Authority intellectual who is being talked about as Yasser Arafat’s prime minister in a ‘reformed’ administration, wrote as much in his doctoral thesis — in which he also said that the Zionists gave the Nazis permission to treat the Jews as they wished so long as this guaranteed their immigration to Palestine.
These sick outpourings are not so much religious or even fundamentalist doctrines as rooted in a fanatical totalitarian ideology. As Professor Bauer observed, the driving aim is the Islamic dictatorship of the world. Realisation of this utopia necessitates the destruction of the foundation creeds of Western culture, Judaism and Christianity — and especially Israel, the supposed personification of Western global power-lust, which was planted as an incubus on Arab soil as a result of the Holocaust.
Holocaust denial is therefore central to Arab anti-Semitism, the prejudice which such historical falsehood has helped to forge a strategic alliance with Europe. For it absolves Europe of its guilt over the Jews, and replaces it with European guilt towards Arabs displaced as a result of the Holocaust.
Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, Europeans have eagerly embraced the Nazification of the Jews, a process which really got under way with Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This marked the beginning of the media’s systematic inversion of Israeli self-defence as aggression, along with double-standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to do with delegitimising the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its dismantling.
So the conference heard about German accusations that Israel was using Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of the Nazification of Israel in Sweden, where there were charges that the Israelis were exterminating the Palestinians, that the media were controlled by Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel, and that influential Jewish lobby groups were ‘spraying journalists with poison’.
It heard that in France Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate if they challenged the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) — which has been playing to packed houses in Paris — about the obsessive malevolence towards Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British media described Israel’s ‘death squads’, ‘killing fields’ and ‘executioners’ while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as ‘gentle’, ‘religious’ and ‘kind’. It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who is saying, ‘Surely they are not going to kill me again.’
And of course there was Jenin, the so-called ‘massacre’ or ‘genocide’ reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians died, of whom more than half were terrorists, while Israel sustained (for it) the huge loss of 45 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught Palestinian public was — on this and other occasions — whipped up by biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact, contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.
Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly genocidal programme. But an even more striking feature is that, while the old anti-Semitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political Left. So, as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more counterintuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the Left also subscribe to this analysis — and even to the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid — handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new anti-Semitism as Jewish paranoia or Islamophobia.
So what is the explanation for the Left’s position? Partly, it’s the old anti-imperialist and anti-West prejudice. Partly, it’s the view that only the powerless can be victims; so Third World people can never be murderers, and any self-defence by Western societies such as Israel must instead be aggression. Partly, it’s the post-modern destruction of objectivity and truth, which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the Left takes an axe to morality and self-restraint, it’s a golden opportunity to pulverise the very people who invented the damn rules in the first place.
A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the real point. The Left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the Left as a protection against the implosion of its whole ideological position.
So the evidence is being denied, and truth is being stood on its head. The result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction, and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face.
Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. Return to top of page
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The point I was trying to make is that there is no hierarchy or magisterium as such in the Judaic tradition. At the risk of stating it incorrectly, I'm under the impression that the priestly class (Cohen?) is no more and that Israel has been absent a place of worship ever since the destruction of the Temple and that synagogue (while incorporating and instilling the reality of God as literally adorable) are primarily the transmitters of faith and education in the faith rather than places of worship, per se.
In questioning the validity of a Knesset (as opposed to rabbinical) pronouncement on the relative merits of the different Jewish strains, I was asking for some insight on the nature of the State's authority in such matters.
Although Zionist Conspirator has kindly pointed out some differences between the State of Israel and what he or she believes would be a truly "Jewish" nation, I think the case can be made that the State of Israel has a great effect and may well enjoy a certain authority where the practice of Judaism is concerned. It appears that way for an outside looking in but I can't know for sure. That's why I ask questions.
In keeping with the strictest Catholic theology, is it theoretically possible for a member of the Catholic Church to be more Catholic than the Pope?
I think there are many Catholics who, understanding the reality inherent in all manner of rubrics, would never kiss the Koran and who, understanding the black and white nature of Canon Law, are still nonplussed by Blair's receiving the Eucharist when he is not a member of our closed communion.
Without a doubt, history shows that plenty of Popes were decadent, fallen or worldly men evidencing nowhere near the genuine piety, discipline or obedience to faith of their contemporary Catholic laity.
None of that diminishes the fact that the Bishop of Rome yet has a certain authority as the only who speaks ex cathedra. I think it's a testament to the enduring nature of the Church that this authority has not been abused in the past (to the detriment or adulterating of dogma) even as it's been eschewed in the present (where Popes have missed the opportunity to grant Humanae Vitae and other restatements of Catholic dogma the respect and full measure of authority they deserve).
It's exactly because of the hierarchy, Canon Law and Magisterium that indeed faithful Catholics do have grounds on which to decry and seek to amend what is inconsistent with Catholic teaching as evidenced by actions, ideologies and radical theology of their priests, bishops, cardinals and even the Pope himself.
Classic post, as a matter of fact ... I have always admired your ability to pepper your primary purpose here with the posting bona fides necessary to evidence your love of country even as you put Israel first always.
When you're ready to back up your more cursory comments about LF, I'll know by the way you post a thread on it rather than use it as some red herring to provoke folks with your more outlandish characterizations in an attempt to impugn with guilt by association.
Were Veronica to spend more time canvasing the place, she'd probably find that the subject often rivals the worst of Israeli threads for acrimony and endless navel-gazing contention.
I know it sounds as though I'm defending the System but, in fact, I'm one of its loudest critics as based primarily on its subjective nature and its utter incompatibility with the ancap and/or libertarian principles as I understand them.
Be that as it may ... it's still a free country, right? I think folks ought to roam as they please without fear of the Dossier-Builders looking over their shoulders.
I've always defended the right of any Owner -- be it Jim, Neil or John Deere -- to run their place as they see fit. I've just never been sure how it is a poster's alleged behavior elsewhere is grounds to censure them if they've respected the rules of the site on which they're posting.
Perhaps the internet is a stalking horse of sorts on the Right to Privacy and our sensibilities in this regard are begin degraded accordingly.
Thanks, regards and apologies. I have obviously misinterpreted 'As a Catholic familiar with the "more Catholic than the Pope concept" ... sometimes I wonder that the State of Israel doesn't consider itself somehow "more Jewish than the Practicing Jews".
They hate Israel because Israel is a friend of the United States, and becuse it is a democracy.
Perhaps one day you'll explain to me why Rhodesia and South Africa were supported uncritically by conservatives such as yourself who suddenly become very moral when it comes to Israel.
Anti-semitism is evil and a sin. But why is it permissible to slander Christianity and link it to Naziism? why is outright hatred of and libeling of Christianity permissible?
I want a stop to antisemitism - - AND to the bashing of Christianity.
All those crosses at Normandy testify to the blood of Christian soldiers shed in the fight against Naziis. So STOP DEFAMING CHRISTIANITY AS SOME KIND OF HANDMAID TO NAZIISM
This sounds like anti-Christian prejudice and venom - - which should be as impermissible as antisemitism. Do you know what was sung at the Atlantic Conference meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt, as they made their plans to counter the (anti-Christian) Hitler? "Onward Christian Soldiers" was the hymn that the assembled allied leaders sang. Normandy is covered with crosses - above the graves of Christian soldiers who died fighting Hitler's forces. If you mean to defame their faith, you should stop - because you're defaming those brave and good men. If you don't mean to do so, then you should be more careful with your words.
This is a bold assumption on your part. If you want to start a thread on that subject, perhaps you'll find out what my thoughts really are.
I was making no claim whatsoever to judge the degree of "Jewishness" of Israel. I was merely asking how it was that the State of Israel can claim a singularly Jewish identity without its actions being judged in light of Judaic tradition ... particularly where God's and Father Abraham's words and actions are concerned.
Again, I thank you for pointing out the fact that it may well be "Jewish" for Israel to judge others -- Jew, Muslim, Gentile alike -- and annihilate them as it pleases.
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that, but perhaps someone will weigh in with some further insight.
It's not I that have a problem with Nationalism, per se, but I think that any people who claim belief in and obedience to God would put his will before that of the State, that's all.
What's really strange about your bringing up the whole subject of Israel as instrument of God's will where the annihilation of others was concerned is that I was defending just this premise on Liberty Forum the other day where an atheist was questioning how a God who operated thus could possibly be a moral or forgiving entity rather than a Creator who not only permitted but created "evil" men and sanctioned the killing of innocents by Elect in some pragmatic or Calvinist effort to rectify his mistakes where Reprobates were concerned.
I'm still thinking about that one, actually. I stand by the defenses I offered -- pointing out that mercy was granted to some (the harlot who harbored Israel's spies and the folks who, swearing on the name of God, were made servants rather than eradicated) and that others brought on their own demise by specifically challenging Israel. Naturally, because I'm a Catholic, I also noted for the record that there are differences between the Old and the New Covenants.
But particularly given your reminder that even Jews could be subject to such annihilation should they forget their fear of the Lord, I guess it's back to the drawing board with me.
Blaming Christianity for Naziism is as vile as the antisemites who down the years have tried to blame Judaism for Bolshevism. I denounce those antisemites. If you want to be an effective spokesman against antisemitism, then you should stop cavalierly hurling statements that could be interpreted as anti-Christian.
Just for purposes of clarifying the Laws in question, are you Jewish?
(I do always identify myself as a Catholic ... primarily because it does -- or should -- underscore my indebtedness to, respect for yet differences with the Judaic tradition.)
I am a practicing Noachide, which is the true religion for all non-Jews (do a web search). It also makes me, according to "palaeoconservatives," a foot soldier for the "new world order."
Are you ever going to tell me why "true conservatives" are expected to condemn Israel for things they supported in Rhodesia and South Africa? If you refuse to answer this I will take your silence as a full explanation.
Well, my only real familiarity with this term comes from aspersions cast at Arator by others. I guess, given the ability to convert to Judaism (which I don't quite understand), I also don't understand why you aren't Jewish. I'll check it out but if you'd be so kind, I would appreciate any insight you've got on how or why you believe it the "one true religion" for non-Jews.
Because I've not defended in the least the lack of consistency by which "true conservatives" defend actions by some countries they condemn when perpetrated by others, I fail to see why you're asking that I do so now.
Further, I have a problem with the "conservative" label as such. I fail to see what is worth "conserving" in a profoundly leftist age.
I don't consider myself a "conservative" in the conventional sense. I'm a Catholic and -- consistently applying my Catholic sensibility -- am alternately viewed as a "conservative" or "liberal" depending upon the subject at hand.
I'm a "conservative" for staunchly defending the right to life but "liberal" where I extend that regard to the subject of capital punishment, for example.
Amen!
For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits, that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. (Rom.11:25)
As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes; but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers sakes. (Rom.11:28)
You might also find it interesting to read Barbara Tuchman's "Bible and Sword" where she explores the forces that led up to the Balfour and creation of Israel. Those forces were at work long before Hitler and the Holocaust
Amen! Thanks for the recommendation.
Very true.
True Christianity is never anti-Jewish (Rom.11:28.
It is only religious groups that go under the name of 'Christian' who think that they have replaced the Jew in God's Plan, who are indifferent to Jews being persecuted.
They are 'wise in their own conceits' (Rom.11:25)
True Christianity is never anti-Jewish (Rom.11:28.
It is only religious groups that go under the name of 'Christian' who think that they have replaced the Jew in God's Plan, who are indifferent to Jews being persecuted.
They are 'wise in their own conceits' (Rom.11:25)
Yes! (History)
Exodus 14:30-31
Exodus 15:21
Maranatha!
(Romans 10:17)
I'd like to know why Mr. Robinson permits anti-catholic diabtribes on this board. If someone wrote similarly about Rabbis, would the post be allowed? I would hope not. For what it's worth, I'm pressing the abuse button.
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