Anti-Zionists claim to be completely different to anti-Semites. But there’s one key thing they have in common. By Brendan O’Neill. The Telegraph, July 19, 2013.
O’Neill:
Nick
Clegg’s withdrawal of the party whip from his Bradford East MP David Ward will
reignite the debate over whether there’s a difference between anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism. In January this year, Mr Ward found himself at the centre of a
media storm when, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, he lambasted “the Jews”
for their cruelty towards the Palestinians. But it is for his more recent comments about Zionism that Mr Ward has had his knuckles rapped by Clegg. Mr
Ward tweeted on Saturday night: “Am I wrong or am I right? At long last the
#Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the #apartheid State of #Israel
last?” Some argue that criticising Zionism or Israel is an entirely legitimate
thing to do and is not remotely comparable to expressing disdain or disgust for
“the Jews”, and so if Mr Ward was to be punished for anything it should have
been for his earlier, very dodgy comments about “the Jews,” not for his
blathering about Zionism.
I have
some sympathy with this viewpoint – but not nearly as much as I might have had
in the past. I think the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is getting
thinner all the time. These two worldviews are, if obviously not the exact same
thing, then at least very close cousins. There is one inescapable thing that
they share in common: a tendency to trace all global problems and instabilities
back to the behaviour and beliefs of a Jewish thing, whether the Jewish people
or the Jewish State. Modern-day anti-Zionism, particularly as practised by
left-leaning, trendy Europeans, among whom it is highly fashionable, is the
heir to old-style anti-Semitism in one very important way: it has a scary habit
of treating Jewish stuff or Jewish people as the source of the world’s ills.
What is
most striking about modern-day Israel-bashers is their conviction that Israel
is not only a state that sometimes fights wars, like, say, America and Britain
does, but more importantly is a state which corrupts global politics. It is
commonplace to hear radical leftists argue that Israel is the secret instigator
of most of the wars in the world, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan,
which, we’re told, were launched by Washington and London at Israel’s behest.
In the words of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,
if it wasn’t for the insidious influence of Israel’s agents in the US capital,
“America would not be in Iraq today.” Anti-Zionists always talk about an
“Israel lobby,” which apparently didn’t only spearhead the entire War on Terror
but is now “cowboying up for war with Iran.” So widespread is the idea that
Israel is to blame for everything rotten in the world that a few years ago a
poll of Europeans found that a majority think Israel is “the greatest threat to world peace.” Arabs also believe Israel is the greatest threat to world peace.
Israel is now regularly referred to as a “rogue,” “criminal” or “insane” state
which is becoming “dangerously erratic,” threatening both more regional war and
also global tensions. It’s treated as the well of global poison.
The
obsessive Israel-bashers will say: “Ah, but we are criticising a state, not a
people. We’re attacking the Zionist entity, not the Jews.” Fine. Except that
their criticisms of Zionism have eerie echoes of earlier expressions of hatred
for Jews in the sense that both are about finding one thing, normally a Jewish
thing, which can be blamed for all sorts of very complex global problems. In
modern public debate, “Zionism” seems simply to have replaced “the Jews” as the
thing we can point at and say: “It’s their fault.” That is why modern-day
depictions of Israel often closely resemble old-world depictions of the Jews,
such as when the Guardian recently
caricatured Israeli leaders as the puppetmasters of global affairs. In the late
19th and early 20th centuries in particular, some Europeans who felt threatened
or thrown by the rapid pace of change and instability in emerging capitalist
society visited their fury upon the Jews, irrationally treating them as the
source of these modernising trends. “The Jews” became the catch-all explanation
for bad or weird things that people couldn’t find other explanations for. A
German Marxist referred to this as “the socialism of fools.” Today, by the same
token, the laying of blame for every global conflict and problem at the feet of
Zionism or Israel is the anti-imperialism of fools.
Machiavellian plot. The Daily Star (Lebanon), July 29, 2013.
Martin Indyk and Moral Equivalency. By Paul Eidelberg. Arutz Sheva 7, July 28, 2013.
What Should We Expect From Martin Indyk? By Rachel Cohen. The Daily Beast, July 24, 2013.
Eidelberg:
How much hard work and stamina, how much
self-sacrifice and heroism, are required in each generation to defend
civilization against its enemies.
Former
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton once said that the American
State Department is dominated by “moral equivalency” which applies especially
to Foggy Bottom's morally neutral policy toward Israel and the Palestinian
Authority. This means that the State Department, consistent with the academic
doctrine of cultural relativism, makes no significant distinction between good
and evil regimes. American foreign policy thus tends to be morally neutral or
value-free.
Carry
the logic a step further. The State Department’s foreign policy requires its
envoys or diplomats to be morally neutral or value-free. But to be morally
neutral or value–free is to be shameless! This, inescapably, is the logical
implication of the State Department mind-set. Hence, it’s reasonable to assume
that this will be the mind-set of Martin Indyk: the Envoy chosen to mediate
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Three
years ago I wrote a review of Martin Indyk. Indyk was born in England 1951 but
grew up and was educated in Australia.
He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1972 and received a PhD in
international relations from the Australian National University in 1977. He
immigrated to the United States and later gained American citizenship in 1993.
Indyk
has taught at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and at the Moshe
Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He
served two stints as U.S. Ambassador to Israel, from April 1995 to September
1997 and from January 2000 to July 2001.
On
April 19, 2010, Indyk wrote an op ed in the New York Times blaming Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the rift with the Obama administration. He went so far as to say “Israel has to
adjust its policy to the interests of the United States.”
Like
his Washington handlers, and consistent with the moral equivalency that
permeated his university education, Indyk has long advocated a Palestinian
state. He should have no problem on that issue with Mr. Netanyahu, who in
effect manifested the same moral equivalency on June 14, 2009 when he endorsed
the “two state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
One
does not require military expertise to arrive at a former U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff conclusion that a Palestinian a state would endanger Israel’s existence.
This is why Netanyahu insists that a Palestinian state must be demilitarized
and barred from forming alliances with any Arab regime—a non-sequitur in
international law.
Be that
as it may, since no Palestinian leader would survive a day if he accepted such
limitations, and since Prime Minister Netanyahu has the flexible spine required
by the American State Department’s policy of moral equivalency, we should
expect the PM to flex his spine more than his muscles vis-à-vis Martin Indyk.
We
certainly can’t expect Indyk to be holier than the Pope. After all, Netanyahu,
like the American State Department, behaves as if ignorant of, or indifferent
to, the murderous and mendacious character of Arab-Islamic culture. It matters
neither to him nor to the State Department that Egyptian-born scholar, the
intrepid Bat Ye’or, has called Islam a “culture of hate.” Likewise, it matters
neither to him nor the State Department that another intrepid woman,
Syrian-born psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, is so contemptuous of Islam that, unlike
Bibi, she doesn’t deem Islam worthy of being called a “civilization.”
So what
is to be expected of a diplomat like Martin Indyk whose university education
has imbued him—as it has the American State Department as a whole—with the
shameless doctrine of moral equivalency?
By the
way, the intellectual and moral level of Indyk’s academic credentials and
diplomatic posts reminds me of George Orwell’s assessment of British academics
of the 1930s who held diplomatic posts in the Chamberlain government. Orwell
saw that Britain’s intelligentsia was steeped in moral relativism, and that
this pernicious doctrine had enfeebled Chamberlain’s foreign policy.
The
same decadence is evident in the moral equivalency that Ambassador Bolton saw
in the America State Department. No wonder: The State Department has more PhDs
than any other department of American government. Let me spell this out in the
clearest terms, which requires a candid but unpublicized view of higher
education in the democratic world, the education of the university graduates
that shape the foreign policies of the secular democratic state.
Inasmuch
these graduates, who have been virtually indoctrinated in moral equivalency and
cultural relativism, are now pursuing a career in the cynical domain of
international politics where power and economic interests predominate, do not
expect them to take evil seriously. This means that the State Department
diplomats referred to by John Bolton tend to behave like children who take
civilization for granted!
Thanks
to their morally neutral education, they are abysmally ignorant of what is
required to preserve civilization. Smug and steeped in the moral equivalency,
which they do not even recognize as shameless, they are oblivious of how much
hard work and stamina, how much self-sacrifice and heroism, are required in
each generation to defend civilization against its enemies.
Think
of how much it cost in blood and treasure for America to save Europe from
barbarism in the last century—the same barbarism threatening Israel today from
Arabs animated by the genocidal charter of the Palestinian Authority.
But
what does this matter to Martin Indyk and Benjamin Netanyahu, neither of whom
has the spine of intrepid women like Bat Ye’or and Wafa Sultan?
Obama Is Bad News for Blacks. By Richard Rahn. Washington Times, July 26, 2013.
Rahn:
If you
knew nothing else about President Obama other than looking at the data, you
might conclude that he was insensitive to blacks, given that they have done far
worse economically under his administration than Hispanics or whites. What is
striking is that the president and his advisers still seem to be clueless about
which economic policies work and which don't work. Despite his (at least for
this week) emphasis on the economy, he persists in being the anti-Reagan, with
anti-growth policies. In his speech Wednesday in Illinois, the president came
up with no new pro-growth proposals, just more of what has not worked.
President
Reagan reduced the maximum tax rate on job creators by 60 percent; Mr. Obama
increased the maximum tax rate on job creators by 17 percent. Reagan cut
non-defense, discretionary, federal government spending by a third as a
percentage of gross domestic product; Mr. Obama has increased it. Reagan cut
government regulations while Mr. Obama has greatly increased them.
The
results are:
Under
Reagan, adult black unemployment fell by 20 percent, but under Mr. Obama, it
has increased by 42 percent.
Black
teenage unemployment fell by 16 percent under Reagan, but has risen by 56
percent under Mr. Obama.
The
increase in unemployment rates has been far worse for blacks under Mr. Obama
than for whites and Hispanics.
Inflation-adjusted
real incomes are slightly higher for Hispanics and whites than they were in
2008, but are lower for blacks.
The
labor force participation rate has fallen for all groups, but remains far lower
for blacks than for whites and Hispanics.
Most
people, when confronted with the evidence presented above, probably would
realize that they had been mistaken and then try a set of policies that were
successful in the past. Not Mr. Obama. Given the tenor of his most recent
talks, he seems to be intent on doubling down on his own failed policies.
It was
true until the Industrial Revolution of two centuries ago, in a world of little
economic growth, that for any individual to become better off, others would
have to become worse off. Adam Smith was one of the first to understand that as
a result of new technologies and better political and business institutions and
organizations — and, most important, the rule of law and proper incentives —
everyone could become better off without taking anything from anyone else.
Despite the empirical evidence of the past 200 years that Smith and all of the
clear and rational thinkers who followed him were right about economic growth,
there is still the widespread belief that for one person to prosper someone
else needs to suffer. It is this mindset that serves as the basic rationale for
socialism and the state as an instrument of income redistribution. One would
think that only the uneducated still would have this mindset, but it is most
prevalent in universities.
Perhaps
a major reason that professors and other educators are so dense when it comes
to productivity increases and the resulting economic growth and real rise in
living standards is that most classrooms are not much more productive than they
were when Aristotle was speaking to a dozen or so students 2,500 years ago. By
contrast, entrepreneurs see better ways of producing more for less and
visualize and create things that never existed (i.e., the automobile, the
airplane, the iPad, etc.) — and they create wealth and jobs. Mr. Obama comes
from the government/academic class rather than the entrepreneurial class and
has a much more static view of the world.
Reagan
thought like an entrepreneur, and thus intuitively understood that economic
growth creates opportunities for everyone — most important, for those who have
the least. Mr. Obama has fewer senior advisers and top officials in his
administration who have had significant private-sector experience than any
previous president; hence, like all too many of the European statists and
socialists, they think in static terms.
The
unfortunate irony is that America’s first black president seems bent on
continuing a set of policies that can lead only to continued slow growth or
stagnation. The ones who are and will suffer the most from these policies are
those who have the least. Mr. Obama no doubt has real compassion for the poor,
but until he can begin to understand the destructive second-order effects of
his policies and see that getting the foot of government off the forces of
economic growth is the only real way to make life better for most of them, all
too many will continue to suffer unnecessarily.
Reza Aslan Misrepresents His Scholarly Credentials. By Matthew J. Franck. First Things, July 29, 2013.
Muslim Author Reza Aslan: I Knew “What I Was Getting Into” By Going on Fox News. By Matt Wilstein. Mediaite, July 29, 2013.
Is Muslim Academic Reza Aslan More Biased Than a Christian Scholar? By David A. Graham. The Atlantic, July 29, 2013.
Reza Aslan and the Fox News Zealot. By Zaki Hasan. The Huffington Post, July 29, 2013.
Why the Fox News Scandal Is Good News for Reza Aslan. By Connor Simpson. The Atlantic, July 28, 2013.
Reza Aslan Feels “Kind of Bad” for His Fox News Interrogator. By Dan Amira. New York Magazine, July 29, 2013.
Reza Aslan To Fox News: Yes I “Happen ToBe A Muslim,” But Wrote “Zealot” Because I Am An Expert. The Huffington Post, July 27, 2013.
The Most Damning Part of That Reza Aslan Fox News Interview You’ve Been Hearing About. By Asawin Suebsaeng. Mother Jones, July 28, 2013.
Reza Aslan Interviewed by Fox News Anchor Lauren Green. Video. Breaking News Today!!!, July 28, 2013. YouTube. Also here. Also at BuzzFeed.
Reza Aslan: I Knew What I Was Getting Into Going On Fox News. Video. SamSeder, July 29, 2013. YouTube.
Sam Harris vs. Reza Aslan, January 25, 2007. Full Unedited Video. AllSamHarrisContent, May 27, 2012. YouTube.
George Will On ABC: “Cultural Collapse,” “Unwed Mothers,” “Voting For Incompetents” Bankrupted Detroit. By Evan McMurry. Mediaite, July 28, 2013. Video at YouTube.
George Will: Detroit doesn’t have a fiscal problem, but a “cultural collapse.” By Jeff Poor. The Daily Caller, July 28, 2013.
The Left’s Evolving Blame Game on Detroit. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, July 29, 2013.
Note to Paul Krugman: It Took More Than Markets to Ruin Detroit. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 23, 2013.
This Week Transcript. ABC News, July 28, 2013.
GEORGE WILL:
You can’t solve their problems, because their problems are cultural. You have a
city, 139 square miles, you can graze cattle in vast portions of it, dangerous
herds of feral dogs roam in there. 3 percent of fourth graders reading at the
national math standards, 47 percent of Detroit residents are functionally
illiterate, 79 percent of Detroit children are born to unmarried mothers. They
don’t have a fiscal problem, Steve, they have a cultural collapse.
KATRINA
VANDEN HEUVEL: I find that really insulting to the people of Detroit. I think
there is a serious discussion about the future of cities in a time of
deindustrialization. But in many ways, Detroit has been a victim of market
forces, and I think that what Steve said is so critical, that retirees and
workers should not bear this. And this story should not be hijacked as one of
about greedy, fiscal, public unions.
WILL:
But Steve said he . . .
VANDEN
HEUVEL: And fiscally responsibility.
WILL:
But Steve said in his op-ed was the people of Detroit are no more to blame than
the victims of Hurricane Sandy, because apart from voting, he said. Well, what
did they vote for, for 60 years of incompetence, malcontents, and in some cases
criminals.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS:
OK, let’s (inaudible) get the last word.
STEVE RATTNER:
So that’s fine. And so what do you want to do, do you want to leave them
sitting in exactly the situation you just described, or in the spirit of
America trying to help people who are less fortunate, whether their victims of
natural disasters or their own ignorance or whatever, do you want to reach out
and try to help them and try to reinvent Detroit for not a lot of money. We’re
talking about a couple billion dollars here, this is small potatoes in the
great scheme of life, or else you have your scenario, just leave them all sit
with feral dogs for the rest of their lives.
VANDEN
HEUVEL: Hobbesian anarchy.
Perspectives on Arab-Israeli Diplomacy. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, June 23, 2013.
The
current efforts of the Obama administration to renew Israeli-Palestinian peace
talks come after years in which the two sides have not been engaged in any
negotiations. This diplomatic hiatus has had an impact on the public discourse
about the questions involved. Many observers in academia, government, and journalism
are frequently not familiar with all the nuances that will be raised. The list
of studies presented (at link) is intended to fill that vacuum by providing key
background papers on the most critical issues that will be on the negotiating
table. The authors of these works are former senior diplomats, military
officers, and governmental advisors, thus providing the reader an insider’s
perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the options to be
considered for its resolution.
America Can’t Escape the Middle East. By Zachary C. Shirkey. The National Interest, July 29, 2013.
92 Professors Go After Mitch Daniels. By Ronald Radosh. History News Network, July 25, 2013. Also at Minding the Campus.
Talks About Talks Set to Resume. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 29, 2013.
Mead:
With
Israel’s cabinet having voted to release 104 Palestinian prisoners, the
headlines this morning are particularly optimistic about prospects for
Israeli-Palestinian talks. The NY Times: “Israel and Palestinians Set to Resume
Peace Talks, U.S. Announces”. The Washington Post: “Peace talks set to begin
after Israel agrees to free 104 Palestinian prisoners”.
These
are all a little misleading: Israelis and Palesitinians aren’t yet ready for
actual talks about peace. What has happened is that they have moved from
indirect talks about talks about peace to direct talks about talks about peace.
We’ll
see; neither side really thinks the negotiations will work, but neither side
wants to get blamed for failure. That gives Secretary Kerry something to work
with. Since this is about the only good news coming out of the Middle East
these days, we will cherish it and hope for the best. The Times story in
particular suggests that Martin Indyk will be named by Kerry to represent the
United States at these talks (about talks). This is even more reason to be
hopeful. Indyk is an experienced diplomat and is unlikely to get deeply
involved unless he thinks there is a real chance for significant progress.
And
even if Kerry can’t, as most observers still think, get real peace, there might
still be some ways that more people on both sides could go about their daily
business without interference or threat. Given the way things have been going
for the past decade or so, that would be an achievement.
