Anti-Semitism

Why Are We Still Arguing About This?

Today the European court made an important ruling against the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools, saying that “the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and education freedoms.” Right. But the Vatican doesn’t see it that way. In fact, they (and most Italian politicians who either believe this hooey or don’t have the balls to stick up for their country against the bishops) are even trying to twist the crucifix into a universal, non-denominational “cultural” symbol. As Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini puts it:

”In our country nobody wants to impose the Catholic religion, let alone with a crucifix, but it is not by eliminating the traditions of individual countries that a united Europe is built.”

The Bishops’ Conference added:

”The multiple significance of the crucifix, which is not just a religious symbol but a cultural sign, has been either ignored or overlooked.”

Don’t be fooled. Europe is no more united by the crucifix than the United States are by the Ten Commandments. In fact, if anything unites the countries of the Euopean Union, it is a collective desire to get beyond the stifling, warring factionalism of inter-Christian warfare. The Catholic church imposed itself on Europe (and much of the rest of the Christianized world) largely through religious war and political domination, extirpating all other religious denominations except for Judaism, which was left to suffer beneath the heel of the Church as a “living witness” to Christ. Ghettoized, expelled, forced to convert, stripped of their rights and property, they were prepared for the slaughter of crusades, pogroms and – given enough time – the unprecedented carnage of the Shoah. This is the legacy of the Christianization of Europe and the universal values of the Catholic church.

It’s time Europe left them behind for good, making Christianity just another one of the many competing religious and non-religious identities on the continent. Everyone has the right to choose a religion and practice it, believe in it and love it. But no one has the right to impose that religion (yes, Christianity is a religion) on anyone else. Italy is a secular country, born in strict opposition to the totalitarian dogma of the late 19th century church (infallibility, et al). Under Mussolini, the church was given new life as a de facto state religion. The Italian constitution has upheld these agreements to this day.

The time has come for them to be abrogated in the name of humanism and a pluralistic, secular Italian state with freedom of religion for all and privilege for none.

T.S. Eliot and his Enemies

T.S. Eliot’s reputation has undergone a thorough reassessment over the last sixty years or so. He was, at mid-century, the prevailing protagonist of orthodox English literature. As both poet and critic, he was worshipped in the academies and by struggling young poets alike. Hart Crane’s admiration from Eliot was so extreme that his long epic The Bridge was conceived as an answer to The Wasteland.

In 1951 the Anglo-Jewish poet Emanuel Litvinoff read a poem that he had written, “To T.S. Eliot.” It was something of a game-changer, as it brought into the open the most uncomfortable aspect of Eliot’s poetry–his anti-Semitism. Amazingly, Eliot was in the audience that evening and is quoted as saying, “It is a good poem, it is a very good poem.”

None of this is news, however. In 1995 Cambridge University Press published a book-length study of Eliot’s controversial poetry, “T.S. Eliot, anti-Semitism and Literary Form” by Anthony Julius. A few years later, Julius would represent Deborah Lipstadt in court against David Irving. Lipstadt was defending herself against a charge of libel. She had written that Irving was a Holocaust-denier. He pressed charges, and the court found him giuilty. Lipstadt’s account can be read in History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.”

But what is so extraordinary about T.S. Eliot, you ask? Everyone, arguably, was anti-Semitic in those days. Except, of course, those who weren’t. And Jews themselves, who paid a hefty price for this durable brand of bigotry. Litvinoff was horrified not only that Eliot had written these poems in the first place as far back as the 1920s, or even earlier. Litvinoff was horrified by the fact that Eliot had them reprinted in his 1948 Selected Poems. Considering that Eliot had barred his embarrassing early book, After Strange Gods, from ever being reprinted, one must ask the question: Why did he allow his Der Sturmeresque characterizations of Jews (or “jews” as Eliot himself wrote it) to be reprinted immediately following the Nazi carnage? Could this have been an oversight on the part of the great poet? If so, then why was After Strange Gods, with its ranting on about perilious “freethinking Jews” (p.20) and the utopian dream of a “Christian society” (p.21), not similarly overlooked?

These are just some of the questions readers must ask themselves when they open Eliot and begin reading, “The rats are underneath the piles/ the jew is underneath the lot.”

Marxist, Fascist, Muslim Obama

Here is a revealing comment to my recent post about anti-Obama hate speech. In fact, it is so perfectly blind in its sheer disgust of him that I felt it deserved a place of its own in a post instead of getting lost in the comments.The author calls herself The Mad Jewess, and mad she is. At what, it’s hard to say.

“I stood up to the excrement on Youtube, and advised them to REPENT: Rabbis4Obama, Jews4Obama, the list is ENDLESS of the sheep that voted in the Marxist, Fascist, Muslim Usurper in Chief..but remember, we dont make up a whole heckuva lot of the populace, and those that did NOT vote for the pig, NEED to get blogs and head almost far right, with a little balance.

As much as people dont want to admit it, MADOFF got rid of the JINOs; ACLU, and MANY, believe you me.”

Elsewhere, she decries feminism, blacks, abortion, divorce, the anti-christ, racism (against “white people”), Latinos, gun control, Bolsheviks…an this is all on the first page of her blog! If this is any indication of the general attitudes of the anti-Obama hate-clans, it’s a lethal cocktail of far-right xenophobia and the inability to distinguish one thing from another in order to make a cesspool of one’s personal hatreds. These people are not out to debate policy, they are out to offend by any means necessary.

Israelis need all the friends they can get to combat prejudice. But are Jewish xenophobes who court right-wing American bigots (the Left Behind people) the answer to Islamist death squads and anti-Zionist xenophobia on the far left?

The propaganda is essentially the same all around. Change the names, or melt them all together into a Zionist-Muslim-Commie-Fascist-Abortion-loving-Negro-hugging-Feminist hatefest to suit your own personal woes. There is nothing constructive about any of this, however. And it remains a mystery exactly why they think Obama’s policy on Israeli settlements is so unique. It may be ‘displacement’, but is is not really divergent or particularly original.

And Madoff is their hero.

Message to the Obama Blasters

The real enemy?
The real enemy?

Some 70% of American Jews voted for Barack Obama in the last elections. Now, we find out we voted for Hitler? This is something I can’t quite digest, this pro-Israeli Obama-bashing. How did the conservatives hijack Zionism?

“The dhimmi in the White House” has increasingly become a sort of anti-Obama rallying cry. The scope is not to discuss or criticize Obama’s ideas on Israel (entirely debatable,as ever) but to dirty him with the dhimmi brush. He has been tarred and feathered as an enemy of Israel and the Jewish people and a lackey of Islamic rejectionism. As my blogger friend Jew With a View posted recently (quoting Joseph Farah):

I hope my Jewish friends remember this well. Many of them voted for Barack Obama. Many of them voted for Hillary Clinton. These are not your friends. These are the same kinds of people who turned away ships of Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1940s. These are the same kinds of people who appeased Adolf Hitler at Munich. These are the same kinds of people who made the reformation of the modern state of Israel so difficult.

We have gone from understandable criticism of Obama-administration pressure on Israel to stop existing settlement growth to a mischaracterization of Obama as–what? Hitler? Ahmadinejad? Appeasement incarnate, apparently. Farah goes so far as to call this “ethnic cleansing”, perhaps borrowing his human-rights jargon from the anti-Zionist hard left. My baloney detector is going haywire.

Is Barack Obama a cosmically-charged enemy of the Jewish people? Was he sent by God (or the Adversary) to beguile and destroy Jewish continuity in the guise of the president of the USA? Is he, as we are expected to believe, completely subservient to the Islamist lobby? Is he ransoming the State of Israel to appease the likes of Osama bin Laden and the Iranian regime? Does any of this sound familiar?? It sounds like the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis turned on its head. If only everything in politics were so black and white.

I’m all for crticism where it is due, and Obama is no exception. I used to feel disgusted at the hatred against Dubya, though I’ve never felt close to the Republican party or kinship with American conservative causes. I even stood up to fellow liberals when they crossed the line from criticism to hate speech. And there was a lot of that back then. Now it’s back–with a vengeance.

Can’t we say shoyn genug* to conspiracy theories once and for all?

* “enough already!”

Curioser and…Just Plain Idiotic

Take a few weeks off from the world to get married and have a decent honeymoon, and when you get back the world will be a stranger place than you left it.  The guy to the center left is Danny DeVito. And to think I had promised myself I’d lay off the anti-Semites when I got back.

Get Shorty in a French remake?
"Get Shorty" in a French remake?

Glick, Umglick, Goldblog

My friend ‘Chick’ (that’s not his real name, but if you read Saul Bellow you might catch the reference) told me that Caroline Glick is a fear-mongering journalist, and he may have a point. I can’t read her without getting a knot in my stomach, perhaps because I voted for Barack Obama, towards whom she is particularly unloving. I’m used to it, though; I have a lot of friends like Ms. Glick, so she doesn’t faze me.

Researching Glick on the internet yielded this gem by Jeffrey Goldberg. Now, I read Goldberg’s blog fairly regularly, and I consider him to be a moderate (liberal, if you prefer) Zionist–a bit like myself. He even has credentials, which I don’t. He made aliyah, fought in the army, and wrote a book about his experiences called Prisoners. I haven’t read it, so I can’t tell you what he has to say.  But I’ll bet he emphasises the humanity of both sides, judging from what he has written in the past. That’s just an assumption, mind you.

Last year he wrote an article for the Atlantic on Israel’s future. Caroline Glick chimed in from her perch in the Jerusalem Post, saying things like

Goldberg’s decision to focus his analysis on [David] Grossman was a revealing one. While Grossman enjoys a pride of place among the radical leftist elite, he is a marginal figure in Israeli society.

Never mind that David Grossman is a world-famous novelist and writer and my friend Yoni, who grew up and lives in Tel Aviv, couldn’t place the name ‘Caroline Glick’ even when I hinted that she was a widely-read journalist for the Jerusalem Post. “Nobody here reads the Jerusalem Post,” was his reply. Perhaps Glick got carried away with her own hubris. Whether or not you agree with Grossman’s politics, or those of his colleagues among the Israeli literati, they can hardly be called “insignificant.” Even Jose Saramago’s anti-Semitic screed of some years ago cannot be rightly called “insignificant”–though it is surely rubbish, it is highly significant rubbish, in its fashion.

Which all brings me one step closer to the point: Jeffrey Goldberg is one of the most liberal-minded Zionists out there. Another is Paul Berman. So this hatchet-job, which is in the top slot if you YouTube ‘Jeffrey Goldberg’, is a bit of a surprise. Not that it is a meaningful surprise, but the surprise is that it comes from the Saramagoan left, not the Glickian right.

Of course, this little video is full of cherry-picked quotes that mean nothing at all out of context. The “context” is provided by the overly-careful narrator, who sets Goldberg up as a kind of Israel-lobby straw man, then sets him on fire for a negative review he wrote of Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid–a review of shocking length, 1600 words! Am I missing something? Oh, Carter is the Peace Messiah. To criticize him is like rejecting Christ, I suppose: grounds for character assassination.

The video portrays Goldberg as a “Zionist” (understood here as “embodiment of evil”), sampling this video, in which Goldberg speaks of his youthful obsession with Jewish power, which is the keyword of anti-Zionism. It goes on to tell his story for him, through an interview with a Ghassan Andoni, a Palestinian Christian who was incarcerated in the Israeli “concentration camp” where Goldberg was stationed while in the IDF. As a follow-up to the Carter swipe, emphasizing that this man is a “Christian” is a sly swipe at Goldberg’s Jewishness: the evil, power-hungry Jew and the unjustly accused, mistreated disciple of peace fighting their eternal war for the soul of the Holy Land. It plays on the viewers bias, who will automatically assume all Chrisitans must be innocent in the land of Jesus, and that Jeffrey Goldberg (who, by the information given in this video, had nothing at all to do with the treatment of Andoni) is Pharisee swine.

Nowhere in the video does it mention the fact that Golberg wrote an entire book on his experiences as a prison guard. All he is quoted as “saying” in that the experience was “exotic” and “exciting.” The viewer is left to draw his or her own conclusions from the cunningly edited video. The coup de grace is the silent coda reading, “An If Americans Knew Production….dedicated to providing accurate information on topics that are misreported in the American media.” If Americans Knew is essentially an anti-Israel propaganda website disguised as a run-of -the-mill humanitarian one, run by Paul Findlay, an anti-Zionist pundit (and former member of Congress) who wrote the following:

“…once beloved worldwide, the U.S. government finds itself reviled in most countries because it provides unconditional support of Israeli violations of the United Nations Charter, international law, and the precepts of all major religious faiths.”

When I read this kind of stuff, I want to call Caroline Glick in the middle of the night and have a heart-to-heart.

French Supermarket Mullahs

Just watch. Then vomit in your shoe. Thanks to Rachel for the heads up.

Begging for Forgiveness

Tomorrow the Pope will begin his week-long trip to the Middle East. Alan Dershowitz has a worthy article highlighting why his trip might enthuse some people less than others.

As Pope Benedict makes his historic visit to Israel, several Cardinals, Bishops and priests continue to perpetuate the Church’s long history of anti-Semitism. Photographs recently surfaced of Father Angelo Idi wearing a swastika as he makes a hail-Hitler salute at a neo-Nazi rally. He belongs to the same group of Fascists that include Bishop Richard Williamson—who persists in denying the Holocaust. But the Church’s Jewish problem is not limited to marginal priests or excommunicated Bishops. At least two of the Church’s most influential Cardinals, including one who was in the running for Pope Benedict’s job and who remains a leading candidate to replace him, are overt anti-Semites and proud of it.

Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, who is the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has been telling anyone who is willing to listen that “the Jews” are to blame for the scandal surrounding the sexual misconduct of priests toward young parishioners! The Jews? How did Cardinal Rodriguez ever come up with this ridiculous idea? Here is his “logic.” He begins by asserting that the Vatican is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. It follows, therefore, that “the Jews” had to get even with the Catholic Church, while at the same time deflecting attention away from Israeli injustices against the Palestinians.

The Jews managed to do this by arranging for the media which they, of course, control to give disproportionate attention to the Vatican sex scandal. Listen to Rodriguez’s own words:

“It certainly makes me think that in a moment in which all the attention of the mass media was focused on the Middle East, all the many injustices done against the Palestinian people, the print media and the TV in the United States became obsessed with sexual scandals that happened 40 years ago, 30 years ago.  Why? I think it’s also for these motives: What is the church that has received Arafat the most times and has most often confirmed the necessity of the creation of a Palestinian state? What is the church that does not accept that Jerusalem should be the indivisible capital of the State of Israel, but that it should be the capital of the three great monotheistic religions?”

Rodriguez then goes on to compare the Jewish-controlled media with “Hitler,” because they are “protagonists of what I do not hesitate to define as a persecution against the Church.”

I know what you’re thinking: “Dude, you’re making this up!”

Anyone wondering what the Pope himself is thinking can read the words of his Sunday Angelus:

I will make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to ask the Lord, visiting the places sanctified by his passage on the earth, for his precious blessing of unity and peace for the Middle East and for all of mankind. I am counting on the spiritual support of all of you, and may God accompany me, support me and bless with his Grace all those who I meet on my way.

It’s beautiful poetry, really. I hope he succeeds in intervening with the Lord, blessing his flock, and all the stuff that popes do on visits to the Holy Land. I also hope he doesn’t forget that there are real people who live and die,  pay taxes and raise children, invent technology and fight endless wars, educate their young and bury their dead in that land.

And that, right about now, the Lord is the last guy on earth whose blessing he should be seeking.

Then there’s this gem. With people like this making the case for God, who needs Christopher Hitchens?

Durban 2: An Imminent Fiasco

Days away from the Durban 2 conference in Geneva, and the only major coverage seems to be in the Israeli media. Which isn’t a big surprise, seeing as they have more to lose from the backlash than anyone. Today’s Jerusalem Post explains why Israelis are worried:

Already in advance of Durban II, a two-day anti-Israel NGO conference is scheduled to meet on April 18 and 19th, called “The Israel Review Conference.” An anti-Israel rally is also scheduled in Geneva for April 18.

Israel Review Conference can only mean one thing:

United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation, Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People

So this is the secret meaning of the Durban conference. It’s a kind of primer for the real event, when the hevyweights show up to do the big Israel-bashing.

Is there still anyone out there who cannot see this facade for what it is? It is thinly disguised Jew-hatred (oh, but there will be anti-Zionist Jews there doing the bashing–so don’t call them anti-Semites!) sanctioned by the UN–an organization which has completely lost its bearings. And everyone will be there–everyone except Israel, the US, Canada and–I never get tired of repeating this–Italy. The EU will be there “in good faith”, which is how things are officially done these days in Europe.

The UN High Commissionerfor Human Rights,  Navanethem Pillay, had this to say:

“The goals set out in the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action have not been achieved. This reality should prompt us to seek common grounds to move the struggle against racism forward. The tools and capacity for achieving the goals outlined in the Declaration and Programme of Action are within reach if we remain committed to those objectives.”

I take this to mean that Israel still exists, and it takes another doleful “conference” of racists, xenophobes, Holocaust deniers and their appeasers to strike another blow at the Jewish State and its supporters.

Tell me, a week from now, if I was wrong.



Italy Loves Israel!

Today’s Ynet Culture report has an edifying proclamation: “Italy loves us!”

Liron Bar Sadeh of the Israeli embassy in Rome said that Italy’s treatment of Israel was uniquely positive. “They love us and do a lot to strengthen the ties. It’s important to remember that Italy is the only country in Europe, and one of the only ones in the world, after the US and Canada, which withdrew from the Durban 2 anti-racism conference.

 “Italy said that it is appalled by the systematic discrimination of Israel and the fact it is branded a threat to the world, while other countries are not considered a threat despite their actions. Italy published positive statements and supported us throughout the war, during which the Italian media, unlike other news outlets in Europe, has been very balanced.”

None of this means that all Italians really love Israel, just that–perhaps from an Israeli perspective–things aren’t quite as bad here in Italy as in the rest of Europe. Italy has its fair share of naysayers, haters and all-around anti-Zionists, of course. Some of them even have television shows, newspapers and the like. But it’s nothing like England, one place in Europe no Israeli could exactly call chummy.

So what keeps Italy from devolving into a pit of anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic hatred–a sickness which is sucking Europe down into its vortex a mere sixty years after it nearly committed suicide? How come Italy is still the only European nation to have pulled out of the upcoming Durban 2 conference, allied only with the United States, Canada and Israel against the likes of the rest of the world. This is from yesterday’s Durban 2 draft negotiations, courtesy of UN Watch:

Syria “will never be party to a ceremonial or redundant activity,” which fails to address “the agony of millions of victims, especially within countries with a blatant, institutionalized basis of racism” (read: Israeli “racism” against Palestinians). It added, “We will never support the surviving apartheid regime.” It also railed against those who have threatened boycott of Durban II, arguing, “Threatening to boycott or walkout is no longer acceptable within the framework of international cooperation.”

No longer acceptable? What does Syria propose to do, kick them out on their behinds?

As long as freedom of speech–and freedom to criticize religion–are on the line, as well as explicit condemnation of Israel (but no other countries), the entire conference will be nothing but a farce. The fact that so few countries have had the balls to pull out is a telling sign. Will they sit still and listen when Israel is bashed to bits, as they did in 2001?

Italy, always fearful of lagging behind the rest of cultured Europe, for once is way ahead of the pack.