Skip to main content

Israel’s Scarred Back

 

Nadler

U.S. representative for New York's 12th congressional district Jerry Nadler, proudly Jewish, recently spoke against a congressional resolution because it identified anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

“This resolution,” Nadler said, “does nothing to counter the scourge of anti-Semitism.” The Congressman did not on this occasion share with his fellow comrades measures that would be successful in countering the scourge of anti-Semitism at, among other places, Harvard, Yale and New York’s own Columbia and Cornell universities.

“The resolution, said Nadler, “states that all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. That is either intellectually disingenuous or factually wrong… While most anti-Semitism is indeed anti-Semitic, the authors [of the resolution] if they are at all familiar with Jewish history and culture, should know that Jewish anti-Zionism was and is expressly not anti-Semitic. This resolution ignores the fact that even today certain orthodox and Hassidic communities, the Satmars in New York and others, as well as others of the pre-state Jewish labor movement, have held views that are at odds with the modern Zionists conception. According to the Jewish encyclopedia, quote, ‘The anti-Zionist world view of the ultra-orthodox groups like the Satmars perceives Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel as an anti-messianic act.’ That is to say, these ultra-orthodox Hassidic Jews believe that only the messiah can bring about the true Israel. And I assure you, the Satmar Hasidic Jews [and other orthodox Hassidic sects] are certainly not anti-Semitic.”

All this is true, and the distinction drawn by Nadler is an important one. The anti-Semite likely will also be anti-Zionist, but the anti-Zionist need not be anti-Semitic. Those who quarrel with the Jewish state, Israel, should not be forced to wear on their chests a false badge of anti-Semitism.

U.S. Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders, a quarrelsome socialist who votes in lockstep with the Democrat machine in Washington D.C., has during his time in the U.S. Senate picked a few bones with President of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. Neither the Israeli president nor Sanders, Jewish like Nadler, are anti-Semitic.

The so called Hamas “militants” in Gaza are both anti-Semitic and anti-Zionists. They wish to “push Israel into the sea” – i.e, destroy the state of Israel, and the Zionist idea itself – not because they, like Satmar Hasidic Jews, believe that Zionism offends Jewish theological principles, but rather because they, like the Nazis of old, are opposed to Jews and a Jewish presence in the world.

There are, to be sure, Hamas “militants” (AKA terrorists), and we have seen their handiwork in Israel on October 7, though few moderns – reporters and editors of many newspapers, academics in “safe spot” Ivy League universities, stupid students made stupid by stupid professors, anti-Semites the world over, committed ideologues and so called leaders of the feminist movement in the United States, which has not yet fulsomely denounced the rape, torture and mutilation of innocent women and children in Israel – can bring themselves to watch the videos proudly displayed as recruitment devices by the terrorists.

In the meanwhile, the most important question hovering over the Middle East war between Israeli and Hamas-Iran has not sufficiently been addressed by Democrats and Republicans who bravely profess a politically dangerous “friendship” with Israel.

That question is: Who decides battleground issues? Who decides, in other words, which of the contestants shall win the war – and the peace that inevitably follows wars that have been decisively won?

Should important decisions that undoubtedly will affect not only the war in the Middle East but also the peace that usually descends upon countries at war’s end be decided by Israel, Hamas, Iran’s proxy terrorist instruments of destruction elsewhere in the Middle East, a United Nations teetering on the edge of both anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, fake Washington DC political generals, the editorial boards of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Iran’s IRNA and Tehran Times, or the state of Israel?

Prominent Jewish legislators in DC – i.e. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senate leader from New York, Chuck Schumer, among others – should seriously, often, and unambiguously, provide answers to the to the questions presented above.

And the President of the United States, Joe Biden, who has vowed many times that he has Israel’s back, though he has boasted in a recent highly staged political event that he scrawled on a picture of Netanyahu and himself “I disagree with you about everything” – as did former President Barack Obama – might just borrow some courage from Democrat President Harry Truman, the first notable Western leader of a free nation to recognize the state of Israel days after it had been formed.

Biden most recently claimed at a Hanukkah reception at the White House that he too was a Zionist -- like Truman, the earliest American presidential Zionist. Truman stood quite alone at the time he formally recognized Israel as a state, a solid eminence among cowering politicians both at home and abroad.  But then, Truman knew that the coward-crouch was the usual posture of the usual flaccid, vote seeking American politician.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."