Brian Lehrer’s legitimate question about pedophilia scandals, Why are you still a Catholic? could be asked about being Jewish in an era of Israeli massacres and being in the foreign policy establishment despite support for the Iraq war blunder. Oh but those questions are a little too close to home.
In the second coming of Ronald Lauder to the NYT op-ed page in five months, the Jewish leader concedes that Israel discriminates against the LGBT community — the exact opposite of Israel’s claims. The article shows that the newspaper aims to take on Netanyahu as a threat to Israel’s future. But Netanyahu doesn’t care.
Writer Reza Aslan reports on being interrogated and threatened with imprisonment at the Israeli border 2 weeks ago. “We can make it so you don’t see your kids for a long time.” “Why do you hate Israel?” “Stop lying!” “Who did your father work for in Iran?” Aslan says Israel is becoming a classic police state, and Americans should know about it.
The detention of Peter Beinart, an American Zionist writer, for an hour of political questioning at Israel’s main airport yesterday is causing alarm in Zionist circles about the country they love. “This is crazy,” writes a prominent neoconservative. J Street says the Beinart treatment is part of an Israeli government pattern of targeting American Jews, which is politically dangerous for Zionism. Of course Palestinians have experienced way worse for a long time.
VS Naipaul left Trinidad so as to find a wider field for his literary imagination, and in doing so left the joyful material of his first few books. He was a travel writer chronicling human viciousness, and gained influence as the world’s writer because of his brilliant style. Till his prejudices became predictable.
Israeli forces have shot more than 4000 Palestinians during the 4-1/2 months of protests on the Gaza border, killing 124, but the New York Times has run a barrage of op-eds by regular columnists justifying the massacre. It is impossible to imagine Tom Friedman, Bret Stephens, Shmuel Rosner and Matti Friedman doing that for any other country smashing non-violent protest.
Bret Stephens says there’s nothing alarming in new law giving Jews the exclusive right of self determination in Israel. But as David Bromwich points out, the law is very much like Stephen Douglas’s argument in debating Lincoln, that “this Government was made. . .by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.”
Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia has disappointed a lot of folks in the last day by siding with Israel over the latest exchange of fire between Israel and Gaza, and by essentially accusing British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of anti-semitism.
WNYC host Brian Lehrer rationalizes Israel’s nation-state law by saying that Israel under Netanyahu is in the same pickle as the U.S. under Trump. While guest Rabbi Farber says that the Israeli army is a “moral armed services… committed to preserving life.”
The new Israeli nation-state law makes racism “the national character,” foreign policy maven David Rothkopf says, and Israel is no longer in his heart. “American Jews have gone from a duty to support Israel to a duty to oppose Israel,” he writes.