A is for Apartheid, S is for suffering. Both are verboten. Earlier this year Sue Dravis of Iowa elicited from Obama the S-word, "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people," and who suffered, he did! Been backtracking ever since.
The latest Republican Jewish Coalition ad (sorry no link) to try and smear Obama among Jews goes like this: Pat Buchanan says that "the Palestinian people have got a terrible deal over there and their suffering ought to be recognized," and Buchanan says that's Obama's position too on what the RJC calls these "critical" issues.
That's a smear? Palestinians are getting shot for protesting a wall that grabs their land, the home of a girl who has filmed the shootings is shot up by soldiers, her father eats dirt in front of the soldiers to show them the land belongs to him and is put in jail for a month. What has Zionism done to the American Jewish community?
This is a reminder re. the post earlier this week that over-emphasis on jewish suffering and underemphasis of arab suffering is indeed central to zionist thinking, including that of liberal zionists. It's a trope which comes in wondrous variety.
Really, we Americans should not merely be sympathizing with Palestinians. We should be treating the Nakba — I prefer Holoexaleipsis — as the archetypal genocide. See Answering Dan Fleshler in Realistic Dove.
Shouldn't we be talking about the American Jewish community as hosting centers of racist incitement? See Aish and Clarion Fund History. Why are there not demands in the media that the organized Jewish community dissociate itself from Aish haTorah, Honest Reporting, and The Clarion Fund?
Good points, Joachim. Unfortunately, many in the MSM would rather ponder Nazis and freedom rides than deal with Jewish/Zionist transgressions. I have to believe that there will be a price for ignoring such costly issues.
I agree, Todd. I'm finding that we are reaching a tipping point in all this. The economic crisis is adding to the acceleration. When small businesses can't get credit now here in the USA, and we send $10 billion annually to a country starving and punishing its neighbors because they wont say uncle or lobs rickety rockets or throws rocks in desperation, patience wears thin.
I've heard two people this week say I dont give a shit about Israel's security. I care about mine and my family's. I want my tax dollars spent here. We'll help them when we have something left over.
Obama cares about Palestinian suffereing? Can you say 'blood libel'? I know Abe Foxman can.
Vikash
As usual, Pat Buchanan is right on the money.
Again.
I can remember growing up in a community with a large Jewish population and hearing, over and over again, how we needed to look at the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust and how we all needed to pretend to be Anne Frank, etc. The saddest thing for me about this now, is that these efforts seems less about a universal message of morality and compassion for suffering victims, and more like part of an agenda of selectively applied guilt to advance one ethnic group at the expense of everyone else.
How can American Jews, in particular, be surprised when gentiles in the US express sympathy for the Palestinians – when it was they themselves who taught the gentiles to care about the victims in these kinds of situations? How can the Jews advance a universal morality and still assert a particularist agenda? The American Jewish community appears to me to be less invested in the kind of universal vision it once purported to advance, and more interested in its own ethnic chauvinism and nationalism. Was it ever really committed to truly broad values that applied to everyone? Or was this position merely the mask of another agenda?
Can we look at Jewish participation in leftist groups and ask the same questions? Did American Jews really believe in communism, or liberalism, as abstract ideologies – or did they only pursue these causes to advance their own particular group's interests? If I was an American Jew who really did believe in these causes, I would feel betrayed to watch the way they had been subverted to advance an ethnic chauvinism that is, at its core, the very opposite of what those positions really mean and meant.