EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE
INDEPENDENT
"Anti-Semitism
rising across West as result of 'populism and isolationism', Jewish leader to
warn Pope Francis”
I'd swear they were kidding, but I know better.
The Pope is being used as a photo-op or sound-bite
opportunity to create publicity for unwarranted charges.
How in the hell does isolationism cause anti-Semitism?
You might, with equal implausibility, say that staying at
home causes anti-Semitism.
And where does anyone see isolationism today? What I see are
raging wars and destruction in many places, ceaseless interference in the
affairs of others – all of it deliberately started and all serving no good
purpose.
And populism causes anti-Semitism? How about democratic
elections, do they cause anti-Semitism? Just utter nonsense.
And the assertion of rising anti-Semitism is question-begging.
Various Jewish groups do keep statistics on anti-Semitic events, but are those
statistics of any value when we see events and people regularly being characterized
as anti-Semitic which plainly are not?
Just a few examples demonstrate this with frightening
clarity. Jimmy Carter, the most decent man to serve as America’s President in a
century as well as a man of exceptionally keen intelligence and powers of
observation, was widely labelled as anti-Semitic for his words on the oppressive
situation in Israel and on the true nature of Hamas.
Jeremy Corbyn, another genuinely decent man, just after
being elected as leader of Britain’s Labour Party, faced a months-long
firestorm of false accusations over anti-Semitism from Britain’s corporate
press driven by a powerful insider group of Tony Blair loyalists in the party. Of
course, it just happens that Blair earned that support by having joined
America’s illegal and bloody invasion of Iraq, an invasion conducted almost
exclusively for Israel’s benefit, one pleaded for by Ariel Sharon many times.
While various Israeli politicians freely express themselves
in threatening or prejudiced or even violent terms almost without criticism,
anyone of prominence who criticizes what they see in Israel and advocates
peaceful measures, such as boycotts, to create pressure to change it is
typically called anti-Semitic. Among many efforts by Israel to lobby for protective
legislation in Western countries have been efforts for legislation literally equating
criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, a totally self-serving, repressive, and
anti-democratic idea.
So, when we hear that anti-Semitism is on the rise all over,
we really do have to question the validity of the claim, insulting claims about
anti-Semitism being so often used to cover Israel’s own dark acts and to attack
the credibility of those who question them.
How is it that among all the cases of injustice in the world,
we are effectively told that in the one case of Israel, observers are supposed to
suspend their usual ethical standards and that not doing so makes them guilty
of some nasty charge? Human nature is such that the basest human instincts are always
and everywhere working their way towards power over others. No group with power
over others can ever simply be blindly trusted to do the right thing and be
exempt from criticism - not prison guards, not police, and not armies of
occupation. There is no other way for an informed and ethical person to look at
things.
So, what are we to say of charges that anti-Semitism is on
the rise, especially, coming as they do, at a time when Israel feels free to
simply march in and destroy the homes of others? To build new homes of its own
on the property of others, violating time and time again that most basic
Western concept of the sanctity of people’s ownership of homes and farms? A
time when Israel’s Defense Minister is a former bar-room bouncer who makes outrageous
statements which, coming from someone in any other country, we would
immediately condemn as hate-filled and violent?
A time when Israel’s Prime Minister is a man who has raged
and made threats for years in all directions, someone past presidents of both France
and the United States are on record as having called a non-stop liar? A man who
killed 2,200 people with complete impunity, people living in what is
effectively a giant, open-air refugee camp surrounded by fences and machine-gun
towers? And a man who has left the victims and survivors of his savagery just
to rot in destroyed homes and public facilities by forbidding the import what
they need to rebuild? This is also a man who dropped a million cluster-bomb
bomblets in Southern Lebanon some years back, a violation of all international
norms and standards for these horrible weapons? A man whose intense drive to
start war with Iran was only blunted by Obama’s reportedly telling him that he
would shoot down the planes if sent?
Any honest and dispassionate observer would say there is no
anti-Semitism to speak of in Western society today. It has no significant
influence anywhere in the West. It has no official status anywhere in the West.
It is the position of no political party in the West. Its clear expression is
even a crime in many places.
However, Israel's ugly behavior naturally affects people and
what they say in response. It cannot be otherwise, and Israel’s unacceptable behavior
seems only to increase with time. Can anyone not understand how that would
incite both hatreds and behaviors which can be deliberately misinterpreted as
hatreds?
The question always remains unanswered, and indeed it is
never even asked in our press or by our governments, just what is it that
Israel sees itself as doing? In not making peace? In not returning to its own
previously-accepted borders? In maintaining an abusive occupation for more than
half a century? In marching out regularly and stealing homes?
The answer seems clear, even if all the details remain unclear
because Israel’s government always maintains the same kind of ambiguity on this
matter that it does on its illegal atomic weapons. Israel is creating what is
called Greater Israel, a vague, supposedly Biblically-based and religiously-charged
concept that simply should have no validity in today’s world of legal
boundaries, treaties and protocols and international standards.
It is conducting ethnic-cleansing in slow motion across an
extensive territory. By making the territory’s inhabitants miserable through
countless unfair laws and abusive acts and by, bit-by-bit, taking their land.
The intended fate for these millions is completely unclear,
whether they will be driven out entirely, as has been advocated by a number of prominent
Israelis, whether they will simply be reduced to an existence in South
African-style Bantustans under the perpetual authority of an Israel in which
they can never enjoy citizenship and rights, or whether they will be made so
miserable and hopeless that they will flee to other places?
What other places? Names like Jordan or the Sinai crop up, almost
as though they were reasonable suggestions, but what thinking person believes
any other state in the region would willing to take millions of refugees? They
won’t and they can’t, but no one in authority in Israel appears to care in the
least about this. We see in Europe the effects of vast numbers of refugees, and
it is not pleasant and its shock waves are affecting many parts of the world,
stirring anti-refugee sentiments.
And it is important to note that these terrible refugee
problems, stretching as they do from Turkey to Britain, problems which have
shaken the foundations of so staid an organization as the European Union, are
in fact the result of deliberate and violent American activities in the
Mideast.
And for whose benefit have those American activities been
taken? Clearly, “the birth of a new Middle East,” as American officials sitting
in armchairs casually term the destruction of whole countries, the killing of a
couple of millions of people, and the creation of millions of desperate
refugees, has a great deal to do with Israel. Its own leaders in the past – notably
the monstrous Ariel Sharon - openly advocated for it. The reduction of these
places leaves Israel, a land of alien European and American migrants, as the
dominant and unquestioned power in the region.
Although there is one other, unintended result of America’s
destructive work, as there so often is in dirty affairs, and that is the re-emergence
of Iran as a regional power. And that is why we are already hearing new calls
against this essentially peaceful country, new calls for sanctions, new calls
for military action. It is all very bleak.
I think these men who talked with the Pope know all or much of
that, but the charge of "anti-Semitism" is one of Israel’s main
weapons for deflecting attention from Israel's morally repulsive and violent
behavior.
