Not too long ago, I asked a Hillel rabbi if I could forward his listserv comments comparing the "hatefulness" of Ann Coulter and Dr. Norman Finkelstein to Dr. Finkelstein and allow them to be published on his web site. He declined both requests. I asked him if he would care to have lunch sometime to discuss those areas where we disagree. He didn't even bother to reply. He once accused me of being a believer in "the protocols" because I was outraged by Israel's most recent bombing of Beirut (he had sent around an email proclaiming that the doctored smoke photos prove just how maligned Israel is). He told me I'd be more comfortable at a PLO terrorist website or one of white supremacists. I learned later that his approach was straight out of the Hasbara propaganda manual put out by the WUJS.

Some prominent public defenders of the Zionist cause have maneuvered themselves into an untenable position by maintaining that protests against Israeli deeds on the basis of anti–racism and a concern for human rights are basically just inspired by anti-semitism.

So, for instance, maintained Professor Robert Wistrich, Director of the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Hebrew University. At a conference on “Anti Semitism and Prejudice in the contemporary media”, held at the Centre on 18th February 2003, he gave the keynote address.

In it he harked back at some things he had written during the first Lebanon War in 1982, declaring that he wouldn’t have to change a word today.
Well, what did he think in 1982 that had such enduring value? He thought then that there was a deliberate political campaign behind the unfavorable global publicity around this war, a campaign that had as its major aim the delegitimation of the state of Israel. The fact that it was this war during which the notorious Sabra and Shatila massacre took place (a massacre for which afterwards the Israeli Kahan Commission allocated personal responsibility to Sharon) counted apparently for nothing.

The hatred of Israel, so declared Professor Wittrich, expresses itself today in the name of the wretched of the earth. The pretext of the critics of Israel is that they are only against imperialism, colonialism and racism. But, so says the Professor in a logical jump of breathtaking audacity, the fact that this is merely an alibi is clear from the attacks on synagogues in Europe. The Professor probably deemed it a minor question whether the vandals that attacked synagogues were the same people who had voiced their criticism of Israel on the basis of human rights in a more civilized way.

Once he got going he couldn’t stop. This terrorism, the Professor exclaimed, threatens Western democracies as much as Israel. Antizionism subliminally legitimizes terrorism.

Yes, subliminally quite a lot can happen.

Behind this perverse line of reasoning there seems to be one axiom, the unshakable conviction that all gentiles everywhere have a primordial and inexplicable hatred of Jews. One finds the same conviction behind the statements of two other prominent public intellectuals, the Columbia historian Professor Simon Schama and the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut of the Ecole Polytechnique. Finkielkraut is not very well known in the US but in France he ranks among some of the most visible ‘media’ intellectuals.

Both professors were interviewed in the same year that Wistrich came with his allegations, on May 13 2003 by NPR. There Professor Schama declared that you can even find anti-semitism without Jews, and as examples he gave Japanese anti-semitism and, for many hundreds of years, that in Spain. Apparently it is wired somewhere in the gentile brain.

At this occasion Finkielkraut came up with the same line of reasoning as Wistrich. Today anti-semitism dresses itself up in the garb of anti-racism.

Today, he said, “we have to deal with new demons, and we have to be careful not to lug them into all debates, because the new anti-Semitism, the anti-Semitism of today, speaks the idiom of anti-racism. The Jews are not accused of being a dangerous race. They are accused of being racist, especially because of what they are supposed to do or to approve in Israel, and that's a very difficult task for us because we know how to deal with incitement to racial hatred, but (not) how to deal with incitement to anti-racist hatred, and that's what's happening every day in words and deeds.”

A few years after Finkielkraut caused quite a lot of controversy in France by an interview he gave to Haaretz a propos of the riots in the suburbs of Paris in which the migrants from the Maghreb were deemed to be the main guilty party. This interview was translated from the original Hebrew by Michele Sibony, president of the French Jewish Association for peace (“Union juive francaise pour la paix”) and Michel Warschawsky, president of the “Alternative Information Centre of Jerusalem”. Haaretz itself had also come up with an English translation but according to Sibony and Warschawsky that was sanitized, some of the most scandalous statements had been removed.

What caused a furor in leftist circles in France was that Finkielkraut, this erstwhile prominent spokesman for the left, came up with statements here that one would rather expect from an adherent of the National Front.

I have read this interview and since I have never known Finkielkraut as a spokesman for the left (in the same way as I have never known Dershowitz as a defender of human rights) I didn’t find it particularly surprising. It goes nowhere above the level of pub talk. But one statement that doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention seems to me the clue to the whole story.

This is what Finkielkraut said:

“But I think that the lofty idea of `the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century. A source of violence. Today, Jews are attacked in the name of anti-racist discourse: the separation fence, `Zionism is racism.’
It’s the same thing in France. One must be wary of the `anti-racist’ ideology. Of course, there is a problem of discrimination. There’s a xenophobic reflex, that’s true, but the portrayal of events as a response to French racism is totally false. Totally false.”

Anti-racism is bad because it is bad for Israel and bad for Jews. Can Jewish egotism go any further?

P.S. Phil, you change your posts so often that hardly has one prepared a reaction to one or you are already on to a new subject. Give yourself a break.

Whether we know it or not, both the United States and Israel have already been defeated morally. We promote and excuse torture;we are comfortable with genocide and apartheid; we are uncomfortable with free speech and do not bother to disagee by offering valid arguments but by personal attacks on the speaker;we are abandoned Habeas Corpus and the other protections in The Bill of Rights, and we are now a elected dictatorship. No invader aould have accomplished this.

http://www.zarinas.com

Start some kind of colonial project, with the hope of establishing a sovereign, armed state composed of people from a competing culture. You'll be amazed at the ethical and moral depths you'll plumb.
And it's a sure bet your religion, even if it's Judaism, won't save you. You'll find yourself deep in the "mud and the blood and the beer" (As Johnny Cash put it in "A Boy Named Sue)!