The Anti Defamation League calls for calm and for government action in wake of attacks on African refugees. The statement includes some racism of its own:
While we recognize the complexity involved in properly addressing this issue, and sympathize with Israeli citizens whose personal security has been compromised by the lawlessness and violence of some migrants, we are disturbed by inflammatory public statements made by certain Israeli officials, some of which has veered into racism. These statements are counterproductive and only serve to further inflame tensions.
But in “Police distort crime date, inciting violence against refugees,” Sigal Rozen at +972 quotes police statistics showing a low crime rate among the migrants:
Real police data, presented in a meeting held by the Knesset Committee on Foreign Workers on March 19, indicate that the crime rate among foreigners in Israel stood at 2.24 percent in 2011 (1,223 criminal cases out of a total of 54,497 foreigners).
The 2011 data on Israeli crime has not yet been published, but according to police data reported to the Knesset, the crime rate among the general population in Israel stood at 4.99 percent in 2010….
the general crime rate in Israel is more than double that of Africans in Israel.
Scant mention by Jeffrey Goldberg of the attacks; he diminishes the episode and leaves out the official encouragement of the riots:
Then came the disturbing news that in a poor neighborhood of Tel Aviv, Sudanese immigrants were set upon by Israeli hooligans. ‘Fascism’ might be a strong word, and of course Israel is judged by a double-standard (triple-standard, actually), but this is not what should be happening in a country that calls itself a Jewish state.
Great post by liberal Zionist Peter Beinart concludes with some implicit sympathy for the delegitimizers of Israel. Excerpt:
A reviled, powerless minority discussed in the language of war and disease? Where have my Jewish ears heard that before?
Last night, looking for a little moral outrage, I went to the Anti-Defamation League’s website, since they’ve done good work on anti-immigrant racism in Europe and the United States. Nothing doing. The top stories were on Holocaust denial in Greece, the Rutgers spying case and school bullying. I tried the American Jewish Committee, whose mission is to “advance human rights and democratic values in the United States and around the world.” Nada. Their featured stories were about Memorial Day, Iran and black-Jewish cooperation for civil rights (ah, the irony). How about AIPAC, which declares that America and Israel are natural allies because “both nations were founded by refugees seeking political and religious freedom… Both have absorbed waves of immigrants seeking political freedom and economic well-being.” Nope. Or the Presidents’ Conference, which aims to “enhance the security and dignity of Jews.” Sure seems like Jewish dignity could use a little enhancing right now in south Tel Aviv. Zilch.
Oh and this just in (thanks Susie Kneedler), from Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street. I’m removing his disclaimers to emphasize the positive aspects of his statement:
So, seeing pictures and reading first-hand reports of Wednesday night’s riot in which Jews targeted African refugees in Tel Aviv left me shocked and saddened. … what happened Wednesday is simply inexcusable…. What’s most distressing about Wednesday’s events is the role played by Members of Israel’s Knesset in inciting the crowd to violence. One is a disciple of Meir Kahane. Others are identified with extreme-right views on issues related to Palestinians and Arabs. It’s no surprise to see those who peddle hate against one group inciting a crowd to violence against another. This incident is part of a pattern of broader and disturbing actions by these MKs that put Israel’s democracy and the rule of law at risk. ….
the test for [all] nations is how they deal with their most extreme fringe. And there is a growing fringe in Israel whose values are out of sync with those of the Jewish community broadly and whose actions are undermining their country’s interests.
“the crime rate among the general population in Israel stood at 4.99 percent in 2010….”
Settlers are obviously not included in those numbers since settler crimes are never recorded.
“Israel is judged by a double-standard (triple-standard, actually), but this is not what should be happening in a country that calls itself a Jewish state.”
http://www.salon.com/2006/01/18/keillor_lie/
“But who tells the truth to the man who is driving straight into the setting sun and thinks he’s heading due east? His wife murmurs that, uh, maybe we should look at a map, and he accuses her of being a defeatist who tries to tear him down any way she can in order to conceal her own lack of ideas. The man is heading the wrong way and speeding and the idiot light is flashing —low oil pressure —and the idiot is trying to be manly and authoritative but everyone can see he’s faking it, hoping for G-d to rearrange the landscape for his convenience.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2011/01/11/amnon-dankner-im-ashamed-of-being-israeli/
“What adds to my sense of depression is the awareness that demographic processes are turning our society more and more religious, more and more racist and venomous, more and more withdrawn and violent.
For a man of my age who wasted serious parts of his life writing in newspapers about these issues, to see that I did all this out of great hope that has come to naught and was based on illusions and naiveté; what happens now is a particular type of bitterness and disillusion. To see Israeli society change its nature so quickly, becoming something you never thought you’d see outside of nightmares, it breaks your heart. To begin to feel ashamed at being Israeli, and to know with not a small amount of confidence that such a feeling will grow, it depresses you utterly.”
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_World_Order/TheyThoughtTheyWereFree.html
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘1943- Jewish swine/2012- The infiltrators are a national plague ,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. “Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).
You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”
“Israel is judged by a double-standard (triple-standard, actually), but this is not what should be happening in a country that calls itself a Jewish state.”
This is where the pathetic Israeli corporal gets it wrong. Israel is being judged by a statndard. That’s what he doesn’t like. If half of the population of Cambodia (to pick a random state) were Jewish, and held in exactly the same conditions the Israelis hold the Palestinians, is there anyone in the world who doesn’t believe that Goldberg wouldn’t be saying the exact same things against the Cambodians that we’re saying about the Israelis today??? His problem is that he wants his country exempt from judgment based on progressive/liberal/hell, any principles. As far as I’m concerned, he can go scratch.
From Arthur Hertzberg’s The Jews in America
“Very early in the story of Jews in America, those who wanted to exclude them had kept saying that admitting Jews meant opening the doors to such outlandish people as Turks and Muslims. The objectors were correct. Jews succeeded only when America became an untidy jumble of ethnic identities, ideological factions, and economic interests. The fight of Jews for total equality could not be won in confrontation with a solid majority; the victory could occur only when power was widely dispersed among many, very different ‘factions.'”
An interesting quote, no? Perhaps Jewish leaders and activists were into immigration more for themselves than for the immigrants per se.
That statement from the ADL reads EXACTLY like the statements from the Kohl government in Germany after re-unification in the 90’s, in which he blames the immigrants for the pogroms that attacked them. “Auslander Raus” eh, Abe?
The ADL is repugnant.