A great historian, Michael Oren is also Israel’s ambassador to the US. In this interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, he discusses why Israel matters and the meaning of Jewish history. As articulate as he is in his writing, he can’t seem to quite find the words to express his sense of wonder at the longevity of the Jewish people and the existence of the State of Israel. But he wrote the book on the Six Day War.
Israel and the Middle East
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.
Meanwhile, These People Are Insane
From The Jerusalem Post:
Thousands of haredim took to the streets of Jerusalem on Saturday evening, in violent protests against the Karta parking lot in the capital opening on Shabbat to accommodate Old City tourists.
According to initial reports, rocks were thrown and policemen trying to disperse crowds were pushed and shoved. Crowds of haredim also tried to break into the parking lot.
The protesters, demonstrating in the main haredi neighborhood of Jerusalem, Mea She’arim, claim to be pained by the desecration of Shabbat. Many of the ultra-orthodox Jews were apparently chanting, “Shabbat desecrators will die,” and vowed to hold further demonstrations next week.
Eyewitnesses said that protesters had formed a human chain to prevent police from dispersing crowds, while police set up road blocks around the area.
In similar protests last weekend, 57 haredim were arrested for disturbing the peace, according to Jerusalem Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby. The detainees were taken to the city’s Russian Compound jail, where they were held overnight until their remand hearing the following day.
I hope God doesn’t read my blog. It’s still shabbos in Rome.
p.s. It’s hard to tell from the article if “Saturday evening” is still technically shabbos.The article was updated at 8:05 (Israeli time) this evening, which is less than one hour ago by my watch.It’s still light out in Rome. So weren’t the haredi themselves desecrating the sanctity of shabbat with their inane rock-throwing? Or did they find some talmudic loophole through which to crawl?
Message to the Obama Blasters
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!”
I’m Just Plugging Myself Here
Quick book plug (don’t worry, I don’t get a dime if you buy the damn thing):
In the last election, Fiamma Nirenstein, an Italian journalist who lives part time in Jerusalem, became one of two Jewish candidates elected to the parliament. Nirenstein is recognized globally as a charismatic and articulate champion for Israel, and she undoubtedly played an important role in helping to cement its relationship with Italy. Berlusconi told me that he has enormous admiration for Nirenstein’s contribution as a legislator to Italian politics. She has just written an inspiring book promoting the case for Israel which was published in English translation by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. (Jerusalem Post)
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.
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?
One-State Solution Is No Solution
Jeffrey Goldberg has posted his interview with Shimon Peres. An excerpt:
JG: You hear this more and more, people talking about the one-state solution. It used to be a radical idea to suggest a two-state solution, now we’re moving toward a discussion — at least on the left, obviously — of a one-state solution. Do you think that the Palestinians and their supporters would ever agree to an end of claims —
SP: There is not a one-state solution; there is only one-state conflict instead of two-people conflict. Look, you have a conflict in Iraq; it’s one state. You have a conflict in Lebanon; it’s one state. You have a conflict in Sudan; it’s one state. Who says that one state puts an end to the conflict? On the contrary, it makes it more dangerous. You have one state in Pakistan. You have one state in Afghanistan.
You can read the rest here.
A Free People in Our Land
Today is my favorite Jewish holiday, Israeli Independence Day. It’s the only one that’s still controversial in much of the world, and has the dubious honor of having spawned a counter-holiday–Nakba Day. Of course, they aren’t celebrated on the same day, or even the same calendar. Yom Ha’atzmaut (יום-העצמאות) falls on the fifth of the Hebrew month of Iyar, while Nakba Day ( يوم النكبة)falls on the more conventional Gregorian date of May 15. One celebrates renewal, the other loss. That both holidays could have celebrated national independence is an irony too tragic for words.
Another thing I appreciate about Yom Ha’atzmaut is that it is the only Jewish holiday besides Purim which makes no explicit reference to God, miracles (if you go back and read the megillah you’ll see for yourself), divine intervention or any hocus-pocus. It’s all ingenuity, courage and cunning: politics, in short. Of the people, by the people and for the people. In fact, it’s not even a Jewish holiday, but an Israeli holiday. It is not lost on me that there are Jews in the world who feel only a deep sense of shame and abandonment on this day. Shame on them, I say.
Holland and Australia Boycott Durban 2
According to today’s Jerusalem Post, Holland and Australia have announced that they will boycott Durban 2:
Hours after the US said it would boycott a UN conference on racism starting Monday in Geneva over objectionable language in the meeting’s final document that could single out Israel for criticism, Australia and Holland followed suit on Sunday morning, saying they were concerned the conference would be derailed by some countries to issues other than human rights.
So let’s see, that makes the US, Israel, Canada, Italy, Holland and Australia the only countries officially willing to admit that tomorow’s conference actually has nothing to do with racism or human rights? Where is the EU? According to JPost,
The European Union was still weighing its own participation.
Well, they still a few hours left to save themselves from embarrassment.
Marc Di Martino 