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.
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.
Just watch. Then vomit in your shoe. Thanks to Rachel for the heads up.
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.
“One can hardly overestimate the disastrous effects of this exaggerated goodwill on the newly Westernized, educated Jews and the impact it had on their social and psychological position. Not only were they faced with the demoralizing demand that they be an exception to their own people, recognize “the sharp difference between them and others” and ask that such “separation…be also legalized” by the governments, they were expected to become exceptional specimens of humanity. And since this, and not Heine’s conversion, constitutes the ticket of admission into cultured European society, what else could these and future generations of Jews do but try desperately not to disappoint anybody?”
This is Hannah Arendt writing about the illusion of Jewish emancipation in Europe. Of course, in those days the difference was between Jewish Jews (you know, the ones with the full beards and yarmulkas) and cultured, Europeanized Jews. The latter, Arendt is saying, in order to be admitted into the bosom of European society, were expected to distance themselves from their brethren in the East (Russia, Poland), i.e. to become non-Jewish Jews.
I bookmark this page from The Origins of Totalitarianism in order to draw a quick parallel. In today’s Europe, “good Jews” are still asked–perhaps more than ever–to distance themselves from their brethren in the East, namely Israel. Of course, not only in Old-New Europe, but even in brand new North America this is true. Jews everywhere are told that they must choose between their troublemaking brethren in the East or the goodwill of their non-Jewish neighbors.
Marc Di Martino 