"you fucking piece of shit jew and your stinking jew woman and inbred jew childrun and jew-lover traiter daughterinlaw deserve to torture die you filth jew liberil america hating jesus hating basterd Lord willing none of us will have to wait long america is too good for dirty jew scum of your family and your commie foundasion" - anonymous email, April 21, 2009
Mikey Weinstein is President and Founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. A Jew, a former Reagan Whitehouse attorney and an honors graduate of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, he spends his days fighting back against what has been called an "Evangelical coup" in the U.S. Military. (See Jesus Killed Mohammed 5/09.) Mikey writes letters, makes phone calls, lobbies and, when all else fails, files lawsuits on behalf of religious minorities and mainline Christians who are being subjected to relentless proselytizing from fundamentalist officers and peers. One routine part of the reaction is letters like the one he received above.
Liberal anti-Semitism is more sophisticated and subtle. Even at our worst, we don't talk about Jews, we talk about 9/11 conspiracies orchestrated by agents of Mossad. We talk, as our medieval Christian and Christian Nationalist predecessors did before us, about undue Jewish control of the monetary system. Mostly we talk about Zionists, and every Jew who has a more complex perspective on the Middle East than Amy Goodman is one.
I'm not a Jew. I am a psychologist. One of the things I learned as a therapist was to respond not just to surface words but also to the feelings and implications behind them. As a therapist, you listen to your body, your intuitive response to what is being said, and then you use your mind to sort things out. I can't say how many comments about the Israel-Palestine situation I've read on left-of-center blogs. What I can say is that the comment threads often make my stomach hurt--and not because of what is going on in Israel and Palestine. Here is the one that triggered this post.
Yes, the plight of the Palestinians is anguishing. And yes, Israel has violated international law and may well be guilty of war crimes. But at a visceral level I often have a hard time experiencing my own pain and moral sensibilities about the Middle East situation. I get so overwhelmed by the flood of thinly veiled Jew-loathing that I can't respond to anything else.
[Insertion: Let me state for the record: I categorically do not believe that criticizing Israel is inherently anti-semitic. There is plenty of reason to protest Israel's part in the seemingly endless Middle Eastern cycles of violence and suffering. What I am talking about is a certain quality of this conversation -- a distancing from Israelis explicitly or Jews more broadly as people, an exceptionalism that characterizes liberal American disgust at and demands of Jews, a pattern of silence toward some things and outrage toward others that suggest bias. And subtle or not-so-subtle versions of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes that escape criticism (except from offended Jews) on liberal blogs.]
Perhaps I am projecting my Seattle experiences onto the net. One sweet, progressive activist neighbor refused to come to a panel discussion I hosted because, along with an atheist, a Christian minister and a Sufi minister the panel included a rabbi. A friend equated the invasion of Gaza with the Holocaust. A political teammate couldn't see the difference between Obsession's bitter flow of misogynist verses and the forged conspiracies in the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (They do all love Amy Goodman.) So maybe my gut is wrong.
But besides gut feelings, there are other indicators that something more than compassion, fairness and yearning for a better world is at play in our reaction to the plight of the Palestinians. Several writers (e.g. here and here) have listed factors that in their minds differentiate legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. Here are some things that caught my attention:
1. The failure to focus on the log in our own eye. Two towers come down and 4000 people die, and the majority of our population (who suddenly feel unsafe) give their blessing to the destruction of 100,000 Iraqi citizens, their basic infrastructure, their museums and their schools. Yet we mock the Israelis' sense of threat and demand inhuman perfection in their reaction. Granted, American liberals have worked long and hard against war in Iraq, but we were more conflicted about Afghanistan. And in both cases the protests lacked the absolutism of our reactions to Israel. I hear the Israeli attack on Gaza described as genocide. I never hear the American attack on Iraq described that way.
2. Our silence when it comes to the role of the surrounding countries, who want the Palestinians to remain right where they are as pawns in a global power struggle. Palestinians don't have the option to leave because Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and others don't give them that option any more than we do. Israeli-Gaza border closures work only when Egypt keeps her border closed as well. Within any group of refugees there are those who don't want to sacrifice their children on the altar of their politics--who simply want to leave and start a better life. But they are denied resettlement rights elsewhere. The Palestinian people are bandilleras(lances) in the flanks of a Spanish bull--goads that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations.
3. Our indifference to Jewish post traumatic dynamics and conditions that reactivate trauma. In Israel, men who spent their teenage years dragging bodies out of gas chambers and burying them in trenches are only just dying off. To make matters worse, threats of annihilation are ongoing. When a woman who has been molested has someone hit on her, she often gets triggered, under or over reacting because she is re-experiencing the earlier trauma. When people who have been the targets of genocide hear surrounding leaders pledge their extinction, I might imagine they would get triggered, too. If we Liberals are willing to assume that it takes a people generations to recover from slavery, can we not assume the same of genocide? I grieve at Israeli reactivity just as I grieve when African American young people say that success is White. But grieving and demanding that they be over it are two different things.
4. A double standard for Middle Eastern Countries. When Arabs or Muslims engage in mass political extermination, we say little. The same with smaller cruelties. Yet we hold the Israelis to a higher standard. Why is this? Why do we scream about Israeli rockets and yet we're mum when Hamas and Fatah are murdering each other? How about the slaughter of the Kurds or on a smaller scale, the execution of female teachers in Afghanistan. Sometimes I wonder if it is actually a form of racism against Arabs and Muslims, like when we assume that a kid is fated to be a low-achiever and we write them off. But consider: How would we react if the Israelis treated their women like Saudis do? If they treated their Hindu servants like Omanis do? If they treated their religious minorities like the Iraqis do? If they pledged the extermination of Palestinians the way that Hamas pledges itself to the extermination of Jews?
5. Our lack of comparable passion about other suffering in the world. How come the Palestinian plight taps deep feelings for so many liberals, and yet brutalities in Sudan or Sri Lanka don't have the same power to arouse us? To draw an analogy from my anti-fundamentalism work, when Evangelicals cite Leviticus to justify their attitudes toward homosexuals but then ignore the rest of Mosaic Law, something other than biblical literalism is at play. When the suffering of the Palestinian people arouses venom that seeps through in Liberal rants while other suffering leaves us cold, something other than compassion is at play.
I loathe the kind of ignorant rant that kicked off this article. But the subtle bigotry of some fellow liberals feels worse. It violates the very humanitarian rhetoric that gives it cover. As a progressive, it shames me. And it makes me scared.
Christians and their cultural descendants have been finding reasons to single out Jews since the time of Paul. Always there is some social issue that makes the antipathy seem justified to many people in the short run. And always to date anti-Semitism seems obvious in retrospect.
We humans are probably hard-wired for tribalism, and we need little excuse to see the "other" as disgusting or evil. But we also are capable of thinking more complexly. One who suffered much, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had this to say: "If only it were all so simple, if only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." Maybe in addition to looking at the dividing lines in the Middle East we could be looking more at the dividing lines in our own hearts.
2) We have even less leverage with those countries than with Israel. Why don't you propose a way to work with those neighbors, rather than whining that we haven't yet.
3) PTSD? Definitely experienced by Israelis. Also by Palestinians.
4 & 5) Redundant. And you'll notice that historically, we don't care if genocide is domestic. Start killing your neighbors? That might be an issue. And I think a lot of the sympathy for the Palestinians is based on two things: Israel has better weapons, and we've been beholden to Israeli rhetoric for years. When has a major US leader really gotten tough on the Israelis? Members of the public are a little fed up with seeing that we side completely with Israel in public stance and provide military aid no matter what's going on.
You name unrelated global dynamics as "proof" of anti-semitism. You're extremely one-sided in your concerns. And I have to say I take issue with your characterization of this as "liberal" anti-semitism. It's not something endemic to liberals. Call it what it is: "subtle anti-semitism". Like how racism isn't overt as much as it used to be. Although you pull out a handful of (personally saddening) examples of overt anti-semitism, as if those prove your point about this category of subtle prejudice. You don't make very good arguments, which is a shame, because it's a commendable and legitimate concern.
Jew hating or any hating in name of religion is just distasteful and not cool...but when criticism is done for Zionists or Al-Qaeda it does not mean you are targeting Jews or Muslims....
A bad seed will be called a bad seed...there are no excuses period....
There is one nation that has occupied a peoples for over 60 years. During these sixty years said occupier's territory has expand by means of illegal settlements and appropriation. All the while, evoking the most extreme rhetoric from the Islamic world as a means to continue the slaughter and theft.
Once again, you operate from the vantage point as if Jews have been the ONLY victims of genocide, and thus the plight of the Chinese, Zairans, indigenous peoples of North and South America, Turks, and Ukranians avail any sense of monopoly on the subject. Yet, regardless of what they've been through, we don't expect personal emotions and prospective "triggers" to avail them of their obligations to act rationally in the global spectrum.
As much as you feign objectivity in your writing, none of your attempts to bully readers into submission with about 500,000 utterances of the term "anti-semitism" will justify your own belief that personal trauma translates into a free hand to indulge in globally reckless behavior, to fail to handle prospective "Threats" in proportion to their likelihood and severity, and to only indulge in diplomacy when it "feels right", and thus accusing anyone who expects anything within a semblance of rational behavior of imposing "unreasonable standards" of "inhuman perfection".
Yes, other people have dealt with comperable if not worse plights, and they too have managed to cope in the face of a modern world without demanding special standards to assuage any mistakes they continue to make. And it's not anti-semitic for expecting Israel to do the same.
If you truly are a therapist, your license probably needs re-evaluation.
You said " The Palestinian people are bandilleras(lances) in the flanks of a Spanish bull--goads that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations." And what does one do with a lance in the leg? Pull it out at any cost, of course
It violates just about every tenet you laid out in your quest to tone done "tacit" bigotry.
You are delegitimizing ALL Palestinians claim to their OWN land and calling ALL of them pawns or, as you put it, LANCES in the flanks of a bull.
The Jewish People are bandilleras(lances) in the........ God, it sounds REALLY anti Semitic , doesn't it?
Please retract this statement and apologize for the ridiculous assertion you claim that it supports.
I am still waiting for you to retract your statement (whether you took it from else where or not is unclear) that "The Palestinian people are bandilleras(lances) in the flanks of a Spanish bull--goads that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations."
The statement starts with what your own "source" , Alan Dershowitz, suggests is a clear sign of politics crossing over into simple bigotry, in that it starts with a global statement, "the Palestinian people", and makes no distinctions between the intent or political beliefs of various individuals and subgroups,as though you and only you understand something about an entire culture and people that is equally true about all of them, and that therefore you are qualified to condemn all of them for it.
What is so shocking in this case is that you 1) clearly know very little the Israeli Palestinian conflict. 2) despite your lack of knowledge, you presume to castigate others who speak passionately against Israels settlements and Occupation of another peoples land (in east Jerusalem and the West Bank)
And 3) (most importantly) you own understanding is so skewed that you appear to be unaware that YOU YOURSELF are making BLATANTLY BIGOTED statements about the Palestinians that violate the very rules of behavior that your own supposed sources laid down in the articles that you referenced.
Please retract this statement, and the rationale for Palestinian illegitimacy in their own land, that you claim that that it describes.
Every comment she made, is either an obvious defence or a thinly veiled one. I'm sure she has compassion for the human beings of Palestine, but like most people "programmed" in the Jewish mindset, she firmly believes the Israeli's are the one's with the most "right" on their side..
I made the suggestion (as you have) that she really doesn't know much about the subject, especially from the Arab side. I again suggest, you attempt to break your programming and take a holiday in Gaza and the West Bank.
Live with a family under seige. Real seige. The seige is still going on. Bombs still drop. Planes still strafe. Boats are still sunk. Farmers, guarded by ISM workers are still shot at...injured and killed. Be hungry. Have dysentery. Dodge bullets. Try to get medical care.
Comfort children who have lost one or both parents. Be cold. Sleep in the open. Be wet. Be booted out of your house in the middle of the night. Come back to a home with feces in the appliances. Come back with racist obscenties scrawled on the walls. Try to find your friends...pieces of friends. Try to dream...of a future. Then, come back to us and write of anti-Semitism. I think you will find it has taken on a broader meaning.
I am reading AMAZON'S new book: DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton
Let`s start out with the premise, all humans are flawed creatures. Let`s also agree the driving force behind most if not all human endeavors is self-interest. When will Jews EVER reflect on what it means to steal a homeland from another people? Forget about nationalism and all the trappings of statehood but just the simple fact a family or hundreds of thousands of families lost their homes, their identities, their dignity and their livelihood?
There needs to be serious reflection and understanding the route Zionism has taken and where it`s going. The only narrative that Zionists will accept today is one that ignores any responsibility of what has happened back in 1948 or what is happening today. It`s an amazing experiment, make no mistake, Israel remains an experiment at best, and to see the level of brainwashing taking place is astonishing. The unyielding rigid Zionist ideology permeates every corner of Israeli and American society. No place is too sacred, including Yad Vashem.
Peace.
Michael
You said , "The Palestinian people are bandilleras(lances) in the flanks of a Spanish bull--goads that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations."
If I say (and I would not) The Jewish people are bandilleras(lances) in the flanks of Germany, that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations, I sound JUST LIKE ADOLF HITLER.
If I say " (and I would not) The Jewish people are bandilleras(lances) in the flanks of the United States, that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations, I sound JUST LIKE DAVID DUKE or HENRY FORD (who was a rabid anti semite)
And if I say "The Palestinian people are bandilleras(lances) in the flanks of a Spanish bull--goads that feed the pain and rage needed to sustain a battle of civilizations." I sound just like you, admonishing me and every other potential critic of Israeli, to be careful that we do not engage in a sort of tacit anti semitism when we criticize a nation that runs the worlds only violently enforced colonial settler movement against the "knife" that you reference here.
I am challenging you to admit that this quote and the entire line of thought (that Palestinians presence in their own land is part of a plot and they should just leave) that follows it are inherently racist and I am asking you to retract the statement and everything that it implies.
You compare African-American experience of slavery and institutionalized racism with the Jews experience of the Holocaust and wonder how we can understand African-American feelings after that experience and not do the same for the Jewish people. You forget one important thing, slavery and racism against Blacks went on for centuries from generation to generation of Blacks and it was institutionalized, not only in the Americas, but across the entire Western world. I am not sure you can say the same about anti-Semitism or the Holocaust.
Let me ask you a simple question, in mainstream America today, between a Black, a Hispanic, a Jew and an Asian, who is better regarded and accepted in the society at large?
And it is beside the point as well. Do you really want to go through history point by point and figure out who has had it worse-African Americans or Jews? Because racism against Jews has been institutionalized quite a bit longer than African Americans were enslaved in the US and Europe.
I don't say this to take away from the experience of African Americans. I think what they went through is absolutely appalling and what's worse, the US has been complicit in so many crimes that help destabilize Africa itself. We should all work to make amends for that-which is why I volunteer in Africa.
However, even in mainstream America, yes, some people would possibly pick a Jew but if they cared enough that they were Jewish, odds are they'd pick them for the wrong reasons.
My second point is that the same newscaster you criticize for not showing a balance, Amy Goodman, is one of the few voices in America who keeps talking about these other atrocities. The US MSM will always go where the popular stories are. It doesn't help that there are powerful lobbying groups here making sure that the issue is on the news and the reporting skewed in their favor. Those like Amy Goodman have their hands full just reporting what's left out in the popular media, including Sudan and Sri Lanka.
I come from a culture where the majority are more inclined to lean towards Israel's policies, in light of the terrorist threat we face from radical Islamic groups. India has a long tradition of being Israel's strategic partner in arms trade, agro-business and energy. I only heard great things about Israel, all till I was 20. I had read everything Leon Uris wrote by the time I was 14. There is so much good that Israel has to offer the world, but I cannot ignore the vast difference in scale. Just look at the stats objectively.
Years later, I went back and read his stuff again.
I suggest doing so.
A great novel, but light years away from reality.
Unfortunately, his books formed a lasting opinion that most people are unable to re-evaluate.
I presume you're talking about Exodus. If so, irrespective of the accuracy/inaccuracy of the political reality expressed in it, you cannot deny the amazing achievements of the early Zionists who built a technologically advanced modern civilization out in an inhospitable desert. That was all I was referring to. I was too young to evaluate the books from a socio-political perspective. But you're never too young to acknowledge achievement. The books did indeed form a lasting opinion, but it was not in the area of politics. My political opinions are more balanced.
There is something to say about the assertion that anyone who criticizes Israel in an unbalanced fashion does not have a nuanced perspective (and may be antisemitic). But there is one thing that you're leaving out, the question of scale. Most political issues, in reality, are about scale. Dismissing Amy Goodman as not having a nuanced position is disingenuous. PRI's agenda is to offer alternative news, not to offer a balanced perspective. It's news that you don't hear about in the MSM. Noam Chomsky is asked this question a lot- "Why do you only criticize Israel and not the Arab terrorists who attack her?" The answer he gives is simple- its a question of scale. In the American media the difference in scale is buried (as it is in your article). In left-leaning Israeli newspapers the criticism of Israel is often greater than it is among liberals here. We cannot chalk that up to antisemitism, can we? Or maybe we can.