The crazy response to the Marwan Barghouti op-ed in the New York Times — Michael Oren called it a “journalistic terror attack” — reflects a growing insecurity on the part of Israel’s leaders about the country’s reputation.
The coverage of the Palestinian issue in the New York Times is getting better, as reflected by the Marwan Barghouti op-ed calling Israel a “moral failure,” and new Jerusalem bureau chief Ian Fisher’s straightforward reports. Yes the Times hired neocon crank Bret Stephens; but the paper of record is in play.
Bill Kristol touts the old neoconservative nostrum, “regime change,” in four countries, Syria, Iran, Russia and North Korea. The leader of Never Trump suddenly likes Trump’s “normal” foreign policy.
Obama “assented” to a “holocaust war” in Syria, says Marty Peretz; while Shmuley Boteach says “Trump is in danger of becoming a great man.” And Mort Klein says “Everyone knows that blacks are on average better dancers than other people.” Ever wonder why Zionism has become a dirty word?
The New York Times has hired Bret Stephens as a columnist, elevating an Islamophobic neoconservative who regularly pronounces on the “disease of the Arab mind” and the “communal psychosis” of Palestinians, while Israel is blameless.
Matt Katz of WNYC extols a Haggadah that defies Trump over refugees’ rights without mentioning Israel’s treatment of Palestinian refugees. The double standard is obvious, and damaging.
In the last week there have been four momentous events in the Jewish political world, two of them soul-crushing, two of them uplifting. The events signal a major change in Jewish political culture that is likely to leave many of us speechless in months and years to come, and signal that a revolution in Jewish community definition is coming. The radicalization of liberals by Trump is accelerated inside the Jewish community by Israel’s failures, supported by the Jewish establishment.
There is no middle ground; you’re either with Israel or against it these days, as J Street, the liberal Zionist group, found out yesterday. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street says it was shocking when the Jewish establishment allowed a speaker to call his group “anti-Semitic” at a UN summit against BDS. But the same event smeared Bassem Tamimi, the leader of nonviolent resistance in Nabi Saleh in occupied Palestine, without protest from J Street.
A 55-year old Palestinian-American instructor at a community college in North Carolina was brutally beaten by members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) while walking by the AIPAC conference in Washington DC on Sunday, according to a video and statement released by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU). The man was identified as Kamal Nayfeh. The JDL affiliates “punched and kicked him and hit him in the face with flag poles, leaving him with cuts and bruises all over his face and body,” said the IMEU statement. Photos were taken of Nayfeh after the and beatings show his face bloodied and bruised.
VP Mike Pence was introduced at AIPAC as an enemy of BDS and told the group that Trump is seriously considering moving embassy to Jerusalem. Meanwhile,, young Jewish protesters outside call the occupation a moral crisis in the Jewish community.