SELF-HATERS AND MISLEADERS

Phyllis Chesler found the notorious professor Tony Judt mouthing hostility to Israel in the NY Times, and at the end of his op-ed, demanding that the US sever its ties with Israel. Chesler also notes an important thing about Judt:

Many will say: Judt himself is Jewish, thus his piece cannot be anti-Semitic.

Oh yes it can. If women can be sexists and we are, we are; we have internalized sexist values just as men have—read my book Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman to understand the phenomenon; if dark-skinned people can be racists and they can be; they, too have internalized preferences either for light-skinned or for dark-skinned people; then surely, Jews, an imperfect “perfect” people can internalize anti-Semitism/Judeophobia.

Just last night in New York City, a Jewish man, Brooklyn-born Adam Shapiro, who is the founder of Free Gaza and the co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement—the very man who, in 2002, stayed with Arafat in Ramallah when he was under seige, spoke in favor of the Turkish “Free Gaza” Flotilla movement; no, he did not factor in the Turkish terrorist mercenaries on board who planned to—and who did—violently and viciously attack the Israeli soldiers. Why would he? Shapiro favors a “violent resistance” to Israel and has written that the demolition of Palestinian homes and the closure of offices servicing Palestinians reminds him of Kristallnacht.

And today, I’ve just read that German Jews (yes, you’ve read that correctly) will be funding a flotilla-like ride to Gaza as well in order to break the Israeli blockade. The German Jews believe that Israel is withholding “candy and children’s food” from Palestinian children.

Well there you have it, if women can be inhuman to one another, and if dark-skinned people can be just as racist as light-skinned, than so too can Jews be bigoted against each other.

I too have found something most troubling, and it comes in the form of Conrad Black, who recently wrote a piece supporting division of Israel, in the New York Sun, alarmingly enough. (It was first published in the National Post in Canada, but still...) The headline asks "should Turkey be expelled from NATO?" but the effectiveness stops there with a screeching halt. First, he blows it by saying:

We have the Europeans to thank for driving Turkey back into Asia with racial and religious slurs resonating in its ears, and the 90-year legacy of Kemalist secularism and western emulation in tatters. But this too is an opportunity. If Ankara goes cock-a-hoop for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, we should close up support for Egypt and other states on the firing line with the Turks’ new proteges, and Turkey should be expelled from NATO and its citizens barred from migrating into the European Union.

Okay, what's going on here? I'm afraid he's just implied that the Europeans victimized the Turks and turned them to evil by supposedly being racist to them, not the other way around. And I guess that's the same summary with many other Muslims in Europe, right? As a result, the impact of arguing that Turkey should be expelled from NATO - which is correct - is sadly nullified.

And here's more where Black bombs:

Several weeks ago in the National Post, several writers including me were asked to outline an Israeli-Arab settlement. The key points I mentioned were the right of Palestinian return to the West Bank, a wider Israel along the Mediterranean than in 1967 and a deeper Gaza, with adjoining Jerusalems, and a special regime for the holy places of all faiths in both Israel and Palestine. Tactically, the West Bank should be assisted into prosperity and statehood as long as it accepts the legitimacy of Israel, and Gaza should be economically strangled as long as it does not. And crypto-terrorist, meddling poseurs such as this Turkish flotilla cannot be tolerated.

Okay, what's going on here too? Pay careful attention here, but Black is advocating the division of Jerusalem, and perpetuating the myth of "palestine". And, he's even legitimizing Fatah with the statehood bit. Just what is Black trying to prove here? Moral equations, maybe? No wonder he's just drowned out my ability to appreciate what he says about the Turkish flotilla.

If people like Black are going to legitimize propaganda and even separate between Fatah and Hamas when in truth, there are no genuine differences, then they are only making themselves look stupid and disgraceful. If that's how it's going to be, then Black is no friend of Israel's any more than Professor Judt.