Liberal Anti-Semitism

Speaking for myself only…

“Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.”

Israel is right to attack Hamas in Gaza. The Palestinians are wrong to have elected Hamas as their leaders. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Gaza is being lead by an illegitimate terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel. This “government,” put in place by Palestinians, has repeatedly attacked Israel with hundreds of rockets, suicide bombers, and decades of unthinkable bloodshed and fear.

Israel is not trying to win a popularity contest on the world stage, and nightly news showing civilian causalities is heartbreaking and does nothing to endear the world to the Jewish state. But Israel is following the American model of toppling the Taliban: if you support and harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist. Hamas is aware of anti-Israel sentiment and they have a history of fabricating “atrocities” to inflame the world against Israel.

The American Left distrusts power, the military, and the use of force. As the bumper sticker says, they’re “already against the next war.” But I’ve noticed another disturbing trend: left wing anti-Semitism.

Before I point this out I want to make two points. First, I am not Jewish; my ancestry is English and Christian. Secondly, I understand that most people who oppose Israel’s current actions are not anti-Semitic.

However, there is a virulent strain of antisemitism on the American Left. I believe that the moral equivalence argument and analogy between the State of Israel and the Nazi regime is anti-Semitic. The atrocities committed by the Nazi clique, mass murder on an industrial scale (some camps murdering 20,000 souls per day), was an evil so grotesque and nearly beyond comprehension that special care must be taken when speaking about an event which cost so many innocents their lives.

Israel is a secular, multi-ethnic democracy who is defending herself against a terrorist organization. Hamas like Al-Qaeda, is an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by Canada, the European Union, Israel, Japan, and the United States, and is banned in Jordan, Australia, and the United Kingdom.”

The allegedly intelligent blogger, Joseph Cannon, has posted an image based on Nazi propaganda. The soldier’s Swastika has been replaced with a Star of David. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Cannon then uses select quotes from the Bible’s books Deuteronomy and Joshua to attack the secular Jewish State. This selective quoting of religious texts to attack a people is a familiar form of religious bigotry perpetrated on Muslims and Christians today and, historically, on Jews, as if Jews today have to answer for every word of a 5,000 year old religion. Cannon is engaged in Jew-baiting, and it’s despicable.

Additionally, Cannon uses the canard that Israel possess “stolen” land. He writes: “keep in mind that this story is about land theft, pure and simple. The Lord is here the ultimate fall guy, the original Nuremburg excuse: ‘Hey, we didn’t want to commit genocide; we were only following orders.’”

It’s unfortunate that Cannon uses the Nazi tribunals and religious text as a comparison to a secular democracy defending itself from terrorists’ attacks.

Cannon’s writing then veers close to Der Stürmer, the anti-Semitic rag of Nazism:

Too many Jews learned the wrong lesson from World War II. The victims of persecution came to equate strength with a willingness to persecute others. Like many other peoples in many other times and places, a large number of Jews were seduced into the false belief that the hardest heart beats longest.

But history teaches a very different lesson. Hitler’s Germany did not last. The Third Reich was destroyed for its evil. Germany was divided like an earthworm. Yet it recovered. Who can deny that — in the long run — the best thing ever to happen to Germany was the eradication of its government and its (temporary) loss of national sovereignty at the end of World War II?

~snip~

Israel must be destroyed, just as Hitler’s Germany was destroyed. All Jews throughout the world must forevermore rid themselves of the lunatic, racist dream of “Jewish state.” Jews living in Israel will either agree to live in a single multi-ethnic democracy in which everyone ruled (directly or indirectly) by the government has an equal vote — or they will die in their madness.

The madness of Cannon’s thesis is his shameful omission of Hamas’ terrorism, the numerous murders, suicide bombers, rockets launched at innocent Israeli citizens, and kidnapping of IDF soldiers. He deplores the establishment of a Jewish state, but ignores the goal of Hamas to establish an Islamic state. Nor does he mention that Israel does have non-Jewish citizens, including Muslims, Druze, and Christians. His rage is directed at the idea that a people can establish a homeland, but clearly he is uneducated at the plight of Jews in pre-World War Two Europe. He claims that “too many Jews learned the wrong lesson in World War Two,” but he fails to note that the assimilated Jews of Europe were nearly all murdered exactly because they had no where to turn when anti-Semitism reared its ugly head.

Cannon then goes on to say that the “Old Testament,” is evil:

In my explorations, I have never found any other “sacred” text dripping with the inexcusable bloodlust and hate one can find in the Old Testament. My sympathies now lie with the Gnostics, who considered much of that book evil

Cannon is referring to the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. His ignorance is profound. The Jewish Torah (as it’s called in Judaism) and the Old Testament are not identical. This shows his utter ignorance and bigotry. But of course Cannon is not alone.

In a similar vein, a commentator named Alibe on American Girl in Italy’s recent post writes:

The current war between Hamas and Israel is not war. This is the equivalent of The Germans clearing out the Warsaw Ghetto. Gaza has been a ghetto. Israel has treated the people of gaza as less than human. They have tried to control every aspect of life in Gaza. Just as the Nazis tried to control the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the Israelis have morphed into the Nazis and now use the same thinking the Nazis did.

Besides the author’s ahistorical understanding of the Holocaust, the analogy also falls apart when you point out that the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were not launching rockets at the civilian population of Poland nor did they have it as their charter to destroy the nation of Germany — although Germany’s anti-Semitic propaganda claimed they did.

As I wrote on the same post:

Land was not “taken away” from Palestinians. Jewish holocaust survivors [and others] fought the British who controlled a colony the British called Palestine, which was never a Palestinian state. In fact, there has never been a country called Palestine. There’s a democracy in that region, called Israel, which continues to be attacked by a terrorist government, called Hamas. Israel is now dismantling this terrorist organization, an organization — by the way — whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and who has killed thousands of Israelis.

Israel is open to criticism. And friends of Israel, like Larry Johnson, have been critical of this military action against Hamas in Gaza.

Liberal antisemitism is hateful and ubiquitous. A Daily Kos diarist, Susan Jumper, wrote that she’d like to “gas” the Jewish Sen. Joseph Lieberman, and others on her post compared Sen. Lieberman to a dog that should be killed.

Similarly, during an anti-Israel demonstration in Florida, protesters shouted:

“Did Israel take notes during the Holocaust? Happy Hanukkah.”

And:

To the dozen or so supporters of Israel gathered across the street, one demonstrator shouted: “Murderers! Go back to the ovens! You need a big oven.”

While it’s inflammatory to call someone a Nazi, I believe it’s anti-Semitic to call Israelis Nazis. Just as it’s correctly verboten for whites to use the N-word, it’s equally offensive to engage in this not so subtle form of Jew-baiting. Barely disguised anti-Semitism (or the outright murderous fantasies of Daily Kos’ Susan Jumper, Joseph Cannon, and the protesters in Florida) have become très chic in Europe and the United States. We can argue over matters of policy, but false comparisons, attacks based on religious texts, and code words have no place in our discourse. It’s important to point out that words have implications, and it’s clear that anti-Semitism is being implied.

As Israelis say about the Holocaust, Never Again. Never again.