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This is just the same old leftist crap coming around full circle. Cannoli Send a noteboard - 06/05/2016 06:16:31 AM

The European Left is struggling to combat anti-Semitism in its midst. If history is any guide, it may be a long time before their solidarity extends to Jews and Israelis.

Anti-semitism should not be considered a thing of either party or end of the political spectrum, as it tends to be more of a cultural issue. The Nazis, contrary to the left's tendency (inherited from, or developed in parallel with, Stalin's penchant for labeling all his enemies, from Trotsky to the Pope as right wingers) to apply a conservative label to every concept on which there is a consensus about its evil, were at least as much of a left-wing development as right-wing. Fascism and Nazism were no more made right-wing by their attacks on communists & communism than Martin Luther and John Calvin were rendered anti-Christian or pagan by virtue of their attacks on Catholicism. Much of Hitler's & Mussolini's platforms were purely socialistic. The only arguments made for their conservatism are "because evil=conservative" dogma or else references to nationalism, which the left has frequently managed to conflate with patriotism. Hitler himself drew a distinction between the two concepts, while traditionalist & conservative GK Chesterton expressed frequent disgust with jingoistic nationalism, comparing the "My country, right or wrong" idea with saying "My mother, drunk or sober". Chesterton criticized Rudyard Kipling's militarism and nationalism by pointing out that while his views were driven by a love of his country, if his prescriptions were followed, it would no longer be the country Kipling loved. This has always been the view of the right. Patriotism is a loyalty to, and preference for, one's own country (if not necessarily the state itself) which does not preclude criticism or opposition. The line between disloyalty at the worst time, and loyal opposition has always been a complex question that does not easily place such behavior on a right-left spectrum. On the other hand, nationalism is pro-state, and of necessity, pro-militaristic and dangerous to civil liberties at best, hostile at worst. The natural mistrust of conservatism toward the most recent enemies of the West, Soviet Communism & Islamic terrorism, has made it easy to portray militarism and support for strong national defense as a conservative issue, and even confused many conservatives, but has little in common with conservative principles and thought. Hard-core conservatives have always been skeptical at best, and often opposed to American military adventures, including leaders like Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul. By contrast, John McCain's conservatism is barely regarded, he is infamous for breaking with the GOP on all sorts of issues, and criticizing the right, but the one issue on which he has been consistent in his support for the Republican party line has always been the militaristic issues. Prior to Iraq, every significant US military conflict of the 20th century was initiated by a left-wing Democratic president, and Bush 1, the most militarily active of Republican presidents, was among the most liberal GOP presidents as well (and indeed, faced an almost unheard-of primary challenge from the right in his re-election year).

The point, which I got a little away from, is that Hitler's jingoism has little or nothing to do with conservative principles, and his outright contempt for Christianity and Christian values (which put him at odds with the Vatican back when progressive Westerners were hailing him as the coming thing), along with his embrace of socialistic positions in economic and labor spheres make him far more plausible as a left-winger.


Alex Chalmers, the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, resigned on February 17, citing widespread anti-Semitism and hostility to Jews among its members. His statement and a subsequent press release by the Oxford University Jewish Society make for sobering reading, not least because this is not an isolated case.
It never has been. University students and professors have hardly been a bastion of conservatism or traditionalism, but were among Hitler's most enthusiastic supporters, with student demonstrators who would be familiar to any observers of the "Occupy..." movements. Book burning was more often a past-time of such groups than the Nazi administration itself, and men like Heidegger not only embraced Nazism in purging their Jewish colleagues, but took pains to offer intellectual justifications for it, and give Hitler's ideology an illusion of academic & intellectual legitimacy.
unwilling to take the matter of rising anti-Semitism seriously, preferring instead to dismiss it as a consequence of Israeli policies or a censorious attempt to close down discussion of the same.

Hahahaha! Welcome to the world of being an anti-liberal! That's not anti-Semitism, that's how they treat EVERYone with whom they disagree or of whom they disapprove. It was actually kind of funny watching Hilary Clinton get the GOP treatment in the 2008 primaries, subjected to the sort of contentious policy grilling traditionally reserved for Republican candidates, while the guy whose victory would make a better story got the softballs about his feelings and pride.
The horror with which many Jews greeted the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party was outstripped only by the realization that his supporters felt that his fondness for the company of anti-Semites was unworthy of their concern.
It seems like European Jews are their equivalent of American blacks. In both cases, the left doesn't really care about them, but finds them useful human shields to advance leftist policies, while denouncing right-wing opposition as bigotry.

Jews and Europeans drew different lessons about nationalism from the experience of World War II. On a continent disfigured by the mayhem of conquest, occupation, collaboration, and genocide, Nazism and fascism were perceived to have been nationalism’s logical endgame. As chauvinism and self-glorification gave way to introspection and self-doubt, a new universalism and internationalism emerged from the rubble—the establishment of the United Nations, the adoption by its General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a rise in anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist feeling that eventually led Western democracies to dismantle their empires.
I would contend that the left never learned any lessons about World War Two, they just realized that they could not get away with certain tactics, which horrified people when taken to their logical extreme.

Moreover, nationalism had stopped being useful to the left. Before & between the World Wars, it was a weapon against traditional mores and interests. Afterwards, with Soviet expansionism at its peak, and no longer something that could fly under the radar, anti-nationalism, globalism and international cooperation were now ways to derail opposition to the Soviet empire bloc.

Don't forget, nobody "learned" that ethnic cleansing and national self-determination was a bad thing in the aftermath of World War Two, as the de-Germanizing of Eastern Europe demonstrates, as well as the forced repatriation of Soviet emigres. Plainly, to the victors of the war, the principles were not nearly as important as to whom they were applying them.


But for European Jews, nationalism, in this case Zionism, was now a matter of liberation and a guarantor of survival.
And for the Soviets, hence the death-marching of German communities out of countries where they had existed, generally peacefully, since before Anglo-Saxons had lived in the New World.
So they moved in the opposite direction. Before the war, the Zionist question had been controversial. Disproportionately radical, many Jews preferred to commit themselves to the international struggle for world socialism. Many more preferred to assimilate as loyal members of their societies. The war changed all that. Jewish communists had already been betrayed by the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which created the temporary alliance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Temporary in the sense that the Germans were the ones to end it. A number of German officials involved in hammering out the terms of, and executing their alliance found the Soviet officials to be kindred spirits, and their meetings to be more like internal party affairs, than political negotiations.
The pact required bewildered communists to defend an agreement with genocidal anti-Semites. Neutral countries blocked Jewish immigration and turned away refugees. Neither the capitalist West nor the Soviet Union took steps to target the infrastructure of the Final Solution once word of it reached them.

Why would they? Traditional mores including basic humanity and morality, as well as acknowledgment of a common humanity, were no longer in vogue, considered mere outdated sentiment that had to take a backseat to the primacy of the state. None of the actions of the warring powers gave much indication of any value on human life or individual rights. Even the USA conscripted its citizens, confiscated property, suppressed even peaceful opposition, demonized the enemy, interned groups based solely on suspicions or commonality with the enemy, and targeted the enemy's war-making capabilities regardless of the potential for civilian casualties. The Prime Minister of the UK had been the naval minister responsible for imposing a starvation blockade against a surrendered enemy nation at the end of the Great War
And when the war ended, the proletariat failed to rise up and Sovietize Western Europe as Stalin had foretold.
Don't they mean Marx & Engels? The messianic character of socialism and communism was undoubtedly one of the reasons why so many Jews gravitated towards those movements.
Instead, a wave of pogroms swept the occupied East.
Against everyone, not just the Jews, starting with the Germans, and in continuation with policies against other minorities, such as the Holodomor. After the war, it was a little too much to get the Poles out of Poland or the Germans out of East Germany or the Romanians out of Romania, and so on, but the intellectual and social leadership of the nations behind the Iron Curtain were definitely targeted for elimination.
Concluding that neither Western assimilation nor Soviet utopianism offered much in the way of security or salvation, Europe’s forsaken threw in their lot with Zionism.

In spite of the horrors of the Shoah, the Zionist question divided the post-war British Left. Unlike the Nazi-occupied countries on the European continent, Britain did not have a legacy of collaboration to contend with. As the ruler of Mandatory Palestine, however, Britain was responsible for the 1939 White Paper that restricted Jewish immigration at the behest of the Arab nationalist leadership, thus consigning countless Jews to deaths they might otherwise have escaped.


Wait, a government acted in the interests of its subjects? How awful! What foreign people did to the Jews was not the fault of the British government or people. They were under no moral obligation to alleviate ethnic tensions in Europe, by creating new sources of discord in the Levant. Can anyone say that the Arabs were wrong in anticipating problems for their people arising from a massive influx of Jews?



"We warn all Jewish people that Zionism, which seeks to make Palestine or part of Palestine a Jewish state as an ally of the imperialist powers and their base in the Middle East, diverts Jewish people from the real solution of the problem of anti-Semitism, which is along the lines of democratic development and full equality of rights within the countries where they live."
He wasn't wrong. More to the point, it was not in the interests of people who had certain beliefs to make exceptions for what certain others claimed was a special circumstance.
In response to sentiments such as these, Moshe Sneh, a member of the Knesset from the Israeli Communist Party, later reflected,

"Every Jew who remained alive knows and feels that he is alive only by chance – either because he was outside the Third Reich or because there wasn’t enough time to put him into a gas chamber and furnace.…To come to this people now and advise them: “Assimilate please, forget that you are Jews, free yourself from your Jewishness so that you will be free”—can anything more cynical and cruel be imagined?"

The record of Nazis' success against the Jews does not mean they are or were the only people to ever be in the position of being hated or targeted for suppression or elimination. All sorts of people are told the exact same thing by the left, who today enshrine feelings over objective facts for their own supporters who frequent tend to come from privileged positions. It was hard for well-to-do white people to keep claiming persecuted status in order to head off their opposition's arguments, so newer ways to parse down persecution and suffering were invented. If a member of an unfashionable group claims to have suffered discrimination or persecution, they leap to put it into perspective against the worse sufferings of others, but if you point out that in the grand scheme of things, a fashionable victim group has not had it all that bad, then all that matters is the FACT of oppression or marginalization, and how the victims feels about being singled out or having his or her feelings hurt. Having all the white people on the bus give you a long look when you board is not remotely in the category of what Rosa Parks endured, but you'd never know it, to hear a well-to-do black liberal complain nowadays. But by the same token, whites are not permitted to complain about any sort of racial victimization, because it doesn't compare to a couple centuries of slavery.

For the left's group identity policies, there is no consistent principle, it is and always has been a political weapon to preempt criticism and opposition, when not outright pandering for support.


For many on the Left today, the Holocaust is a curiously uncomfortable topic.
Which has nothing to do with the Holocaust or Jews, and everything to do with the shortcomings of the left's embrace of moral relativism. The right has no need to grapple with where to place an issue on such a scale, because of traditional morality which states that killing people is wrong, and you are only responsible for your own actions. By contrast, the left depends on group identity to claim solidarity with, and by extension, support from, groups who hold a degree of perceived moral high ground due to their mistreatment, as well, as seeking to have that moral high ground rub off on themselves. When something doesn't easily or neatly fit into their flawed narrative, as in the Jews and Israel, for which the Holocaust was a crucial prologue, they don't have anywhere to turn, and may be uncomfortable if a concept that threatens their world view or at least operational handbook. Not all persecuted minorities fit into easily visualized categories, and thus retard their attempts to compose simplistic slogans and images to stir emotion. Not that the typical liberal believes in killing people, but on the whole, the short history of the modern, socialist-leaning left, as started in 1789, has an extensive history of broken eggs.

The idea that group which more closely fits the PC definition of privileged suffered mistreatment comparable to, or arguably worse than, almost any of the left's favored poster children, undermines their preferred battle lines of Them and Us. The subsequent "nationalistic" & "colonialist" behavior against more traditional "victims" is a dangerous example to anyone who gives serious thought to the left's claims of a happy outcome from empowering other victims. Israel is the only victim, of what the left admits or claims are group crimes, to make good, and their subsequent success does not fit the leftwing promise of harmony and happy endings, when the victims get recompense.


The late political theorist Norman Geras argued that this was like telling a woman who has just smacked her child on the legs that she is no better than the father who repeatedly beat and raped her.
But that's only true because the left insists on treating the one experience as relevant to the other behavior. The right would say "your father was wrong to rape you." They would also say "You are wrong to hit your kid (if in fact she was)". The left are the ones who would take the rape into consideration when addressing the child abuse. The only way a traditionalist would take that into account would be to note a correlation with the behavior of a victim once in a position of power. And that, as I alluded above, is not something the left wants to spread around. Not content with simply pitying or excusing misbehaving victims on account of their past victimization, the left is interested in political power, for which they needs must call for the empowerment of said victims. A beaten dog should be pitied for the treatment that brought about its tendency to viciousness, but no sane person would leave such a dog alone with a child. If victimization is the cause of misbehavior, it stands to reason that victims MUST be disenfranchised to break the cycle.

That analogy regarding criticism of Israel makes perfect sense, but is only a condemnation of the left, because of the left's own illogical insanity.


It is seen not as the realization of a stateless people’s national rights,
Rightly, because those are not a real thing. A "stateless people" has no more "national rights" than a fictional character has civil rights.
but as a project of European atonement, magnanimity, and compassion. And because the creation of Israel is perceived as a consequence of European generosity, Israel’s legitimacy will always be conditional on European approval. He summarized the prevailing attitude:

"Just like I showed compassion to you, you have to show compassion towards others. And if you fail to show compassion—or what I perceive to be compassion—towards others, then I will not be obliged to show any more compassion towards you and then your right to be there or to behave in a certain way is taken away from you."

But that is a logical extrapolation of the politics of compassion, and the lack of a mechanism to compel adherence is another problem with the end-game vision promised by the left. They demand groups surrender certain advantages or advantageous positions by positing a zero sum equation, and can only offer the promise that other groups will not take undue advantage. A white person might logically ask why he should put himself and his group at the mercy of a group which has good reason, if not moral justification to resent or hate them, but the only answer offered (when offered at all; such a question is much more likely to be begged with demonization and accusations of bigotry or whatever PC-sins are convenient to apply), is that other groups won't do that. No means of ensuring such compliance is offered, nor any proof that they will not behave in such fashion. For example, affirmative action is only giving preference and advantages to blacks, until their group achieves parity with white people. How we are to determine the point at which such parity is achieved, and thus know to halt the practice of preferring blacks, is never explained, nor is any answer given to the question of why blacks would surrender an advantage, or how they will be made to. Traditional morality suggests all human beings, black or white, will be inclined to act in accordance with their material well-being or emotional satisfaction, neither of which suggests the wisdom of giving out undue advantages or privileges. Experience also shows that giving such advantages to victims, whose material well-being has become inextricably linked to preventing a recurrence of victimization, and whose emotional well-being is served in payback, is imprudent.

The left, however, rejects tradition in both morality, and acceptance of past experience as a guiding factor or predictor of future outcomes. The left's vision is centered on a superior future outcome not previously experienced, and their actions are, in the most charitable interpretation, the means they believe will take us through uncharted territory to their hypothesized destination.

The demand that Israel pay forward the compassion and sympathy for minority/victim groups that allowed its existence in the first place, springs entirely from the leftist vision, and is completely counter-indicated by human experience. Expecting Israel to assume the Palestinians will stop at a degree Israel can live with, without being stopped, is akin to asking a rape victim to expect a man entering her personal space will not move on to physical contact, that a hand on her knee will not slide upward, or that uninvited physical advances will simply cease when so demanded. It's insane.

But liberals want to, metaphorically speaking, hand such women a gun, pointed at people who share characteristics with the rapists.


There was one major exception to the far-Left’s historical opposition to Zionism: The Soviet vote in favor of partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. But Stalin’s capricious reversal of Soviet policy had nothing whatever to do with communist ideology or concern for Jewish welfare. It was pure realpolitik,
Nothing Stalin ever did had anything to do with communist ideology. It was a useful means for a thug to seize power, and his entire history of wielding power was one of turning one group of his supporters or subordinates against another, to prevent any concentration of power that could be used against him.
This experiment in philo-Semitism did not last. Instead of gratefully surrendering itself to Soviet control, Israel opted for a cautious policy of non-alignment. More importantly, Stalin failed to anticipate the electrifying effect that Israel’s victory in its War of Independence would have on Soviet Jewry...That was Stalin’s impression as well, only he was altogether less thrilled. He saw this spontaneous expression of joy and pride as the disloyalty of “bourgeois nationalists” whom he believed to be agents of an imperialist fifth column.
He called them that, because it was a useful excuse to squash them. Jews were pretty far down the list of concentrations of power in the USSR, but once those more prominent were whittled down, it would inevitably be their turn.
In fact, Stalin’s turn against the Jews had already begun. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, had been murdered by the Soviet secret police in Minsk.
See?
Thousands of Jews had fought for the Russian motherland and the Soviet government in World War II. But now, the regime under which they lived turned against them.

"Gratitude is a disease of dogs."
In November 1948, the surviving members of the JAFC were arrested for supposedly conspiring with American intelligence to establish a Jewish republic in the Crimea. In January of the following year, the Soviet state media began a major campaign against the supposed threat of Jewish “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Yiddish theaters, schools, libraries, and printing presses were shut down, and large numbers of Jews were arrested and tortured before being shot or carted off to the gulags...State-controlled media in Eastern European countries, which during the war had been swamped by Nazi anti-Semitism, was now swamped by its Soviet equivalent.
This was not unique treatment. Many other groups, real or artificially defined by Stalin himself, had been subjected to the exact same treatment. This is like noticing that a serial killer's 23rd victim is black, and claiming as a result that he is a racist. Not that such claims are atypical of the left, rather, they are highly likely to use such an occasion to demand special measures be taken to ensure the black community never again be subjected to such treatment...
This was the case even though anti-Semitism was, theoretically, contrary to Soviet internationalist doctrine. In 1931, Stalin himself had referred to it as “the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism” and “Under USSR law active antisemites are liable to the death penalty.”

Because at the time, Jews were an extremely useful group of allies, whether in Soviet Russia, where they were so prominent among the Bolshevik leadership that the best substitute Stalin could find to replace his Jewish foreign minister for negotiations with Nazi Germany, as Molotov, who had a Jewish wife, or in the west, where they were disproportionate participants in the socialist movements, unions and parties. In 1931, the USSR was a pariah nation, who desperately needed all the good will and ideologically-based sympathy it could muster.
This contradiction was addressed by simply conflating Jews and Zionists. In 1952, Stalin declared, “Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service.”
Again, this is nothing new in the Soviet playbook.
That same year saw further persecutions, such as the Night of the Murdered Poets, the Slansky Trial in Czechoslovakia, and the Doctors Plot—show trials in which the vast majority of defendants were allegedly treasonous Jews. The historian Colin Shindler has written that, “In terms of overt anti-Semitism, the Slansky Trial far exceeded the show trials of the 1930s.

Well, yes. They were after Jews in this trial, so it makes sense they'd be more overtly anti-Semitic. This sort of thing is why the antipathy between philo-Semites and liberal is so amusing to outsiders - they use the same tactics, and are outraged when the same principles are used to target themselves. Somehow, the evil of an act comes into focus when done to the Jews.
Even non-Jews were being accused of ‘Jewishness,’ since they were entrapped, according to investigators, through their Jewish wives.…They were accused of ‘Zionism,’ of being in contact with the Israeli embassy, causing harm to the state, and being part of a worldwide conspiratorial network.”
Wait, is the author claiming that somehow, people were subjected to spurious and false accusations under Stalin's justice system? I suppose every wrecker and saboteur arrested, tried and shot as such in the 30s was actually guilty, and this level of guilt by association was only invented when it was the Jews' turn in the hole.
And in 1975, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be “a form of racism.”

It is actually consistent with how broadly and conveniently liberals apply and interpret that label.
But in the democratic West, Soviet anti-Semitism was diligently and uncritically reproduced in the communist press and thus made its way into the ideological bloodstream of the Left. Writers for L’Humanité in France, Öesterreichische Volkstimme in Austria, Drapeau Rouge in Belgium, Vorwärts in Switzerland, L’Unità in Italy, and the Daily Worker in Britain repeated sedition charges against Soviet Jews.

So now the left is on record as agreeing that the left wing in the West was strongly influenced by the Soviet party line, and took direction from the USSR? Because that's pretty much the exact opposite of their position whenever conservative or merely security conscious Westerners objected to membership in left-wing organizations or affiliations with such groups. According to Jamie Palmer, the USSR was responsible for turning Western liberals anti-Semitic, so why was Joseph McCarthy wrong to object to subscribers of such periodicals and members of far-left organizations, having access to critical or classified information. Contrary to leftist mythology, McCarthy was not trying to round up communists or even punish them in any way. He was simply trying to address the issue that people with such suspect connections, were allowed to occupy highly sensitive positions in government, and especially the national security apparatus. It's also worth mentioning that quite a bit of bigotry was involved in opposition to him. Annie Moss fell back on disgusting stereotypical expectations of blacks to evade his questioning of her communist associations, and it was liberals who accepted her "ignorant n****r" defense, heaping scorn on the idea that she was smart enough to read the Communist periodicals she got in the mail. Smearing McCarthy for his association with the gay Jewish lawyer(s) on his staff was another liberal tactic elided from the historical record.


Anyone on the Left who objected was attacked and defamed as a Zionist shill. And a series of claims about Zionism and the true nature of the State of Israel began their slow, patient journey from the radical fringe to the mainstream.
Say, now who's conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism? This article started out complaining about anti-Semitism, but the substance seems to be opposition to Zionism at this point. Is Palmer saying that any opposition to the actions of the state of Israel is automatically anti-Semitic? Earlier Soviet support for it was referred to as philosemitism, so it would seem to be the case. That, BTW, is another favorite task of the left, to offer a false choice of two extremes. Pro-Israel or Pro-Holocaust! One or the other! The ballot or the bullet! If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem!
They are the poisonous legacy of Soviet anti-Semitism, appropriated wholesale by those who seek to destroy a flourishing UN member state.

That's a whole lot of unexamined assumptions or at least oversimplifications. There are lots of flourishing UN member states that the world would be better off without, so the implication that there is something wrong with hostility toward any state which meets that criteria is flawed right off the bat, but they also have to throw in the gross oversimplification that Soviet Union is the root of anti-Semitism, based solely on a pattern of behavior more consistent with Soviet treatment of anyone who was not a slavishly obedient puppet of Joseph Stalin than it is an indicator of anything more than pragmatic hostility to a potential threat to unity.
Perhaps most telling of all is the survival of a rhetorical move that the academic David Hirsh has termed the Livingstone Formulation, named for the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who claimed that accusations of anti-Semitism are used to silence criticism of Israel and Zionism. This claim is deeply rooted in Soviet anti-Semitism. During his show trial for treason, for example, Rudolf Slansky “confessed” to enforcing a conspiracy of silence:

"I deliberately shielded Zionism by publicly speaking out against the people who pointed to the hostile activities of Zionists and by describing these people as antisemites so that these people were in the end prosecuted and persecuted. I thus created an atmosphere in which people were afraid to oppose Zionism."

The example of Slansky does not disprove the claims of Livingstone. This article would appear to be confirming those claims. Just because someone was made to make a false confession does not mean the crime never happened. The fact that the Soviets forced Slansky to make that statement shows that the concept, at least, was not alien to them. Perhaps they found it plausible, because it was a tactic they had trained the Western left to use in advancing all sort of social agendas, with blacks or women, instead of Jews.
When the conflict began, Israel was mostly perceived as a vulnerable and threatened nation. Six days later, it was an occupying power.
"We have always been at war with Eatasia."

This development coincided with the growing popularity of Third Worldism on the European Left. Third Worldism was a loosely conceived ideology based on a combination of Marxist anti-imperialism and a paternalistic romantic primitivism—the tendency to sentimentalize man’s natural state and denigrate modernity, industrialization, and progress as responsible for the corruption of man’s Edenic innocence and the vandalism of the planet.
It was merely the shape the anti-Western movement of the left happened to take because it was convenient. In the Cold War, the Third World was no threat to the USSR & its satellites, so idealizing it at the expense of the West served the aims of the Left for victims on whose behalf they could demonize the West, which was superior to the Soviet bloc by any objective or traditional standard. Likewise, it served to retard and constrict any Western activity involving such states, which gave the Soviets an advantage in spreading their own influence. It's not that the Third World possessed qualities that made it appealing to the left, it's that the same leftist sensibilities, so manipulated by the USSR in the case of anti-Semitism, as the author claims above, found excuses to idolize the Third World to the strategic benefit of their Soviet masters. Anti-colonialism served to weaken the major Western powers, and with a significant portion of Western academics and journalists ready to accept the Soviet narrative at face value, colonialism on the part of the USSR could easily be labeled something else, and ignored by anti-colonialists. Had a different ideological movement better fit Soviet interests, the Third World would not have been nearly so romanticized.
The convergence of these ideas exerted a huge influence on radical thought during the post-war era
Soviet strategic needs, exerted the only significant influence on radical thought during the post-war era
of anti-colonial agitation and protest. Frantz Fanon’s 1961 polemic The Wretched of the Earth was seized upon by the European New Left’s middle-class revolutionaries for its strident justification of violent resistance to colonial oppression. Later, Edward W. Said’s postcolonial writing, in particular his turgid 1978 monograph Orientalism, sought to ascribe a necessarily racist, cynical, and duplicitous character to whatever the West did with respect to the East. But the book’s thesis, Said later revealed, was really about Palestine.
And Palestine was really about the USSR. It's not a coincidence that all sorts of anti-Western terrorist groups, including various Western European factions, obtained arms and funding from the Soviets and their puppets, as well as training from Soviet instructors in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.
Against the backdrop of the Algerian war for independence, the escalation of American involvement in Southeast Asia, and the proliferation of revolutionary Marxist insurgencies across Latin America, Third Worldism helped to embed a number of ideas in the thinking and discourse of the European Left, of which Palestinians would later be the most significant beneficiaries:
I would call the much more successful Communist takeovers in such places as Indochina, much more significant, and the beneficiaries of those events were the Communist world, in their prevention of another significant portion of the Pacific Rim from modernizing and Westernizing. There is no reason why Vietnam could not have followed the path of recovery and industrial success of South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, and thus further contribute to the encirclement and isolation of the Communist East.

But I supposed if you are a completely blinkered Jewish partisan possessed of left-wing habits of thought, the sympathy of effete Western academics, celebrities, journalists and self-appointed intellectuals IS a bigger win.


• The uncritical valorization of any indigenous movement that positioned itself as hostile to Western aims and interests;

"Ho ho ho Chi Minh is gonna win!"
• A corresponding determination to impute the most reprehensible motives to whatever the West did (or did not do);
Like the publicizing of the South Vietnamese execution photo, or the burning of Thich Quang Duc, or the emphasis on the My Lai incident...
• Indulgence in the vicarious pleasures afforded by the glorification of transgressive revolutionary violence, even—or, perversely, especially—when it was used to target civilians. In other words, support for terrorism.
"Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate's belly. Wild!" - Bernardine Dohrn, leftwing radical, Communist sympathizer, Obama supporter, born Bernardine Ohrnstein.
Having seen the French successfully ejected from Algeria and the Americans humiliated in Vietnam, the New Left turned its attention to Palestine and the PLO. Yasser Arafat became Che Guevara in a keffiyeh.
That's not an inaccurate comparison, though the author seems to be implying that Guevara holds some sort of moral superiority or legitimacy that Arafat does not deserve, when in fact, there is little to no distinction between the two men, save in superficial cultural differences.
Throughout the 1970s, the PLO galvanized radical European supporters and terrified their governments with a campaign of assassination, terrorism, and air piracy, mostly targeting Jews and Israeli citizens and interests. Meanwhile, Radical New Left groups like Germany’s Red Army Faction not only applauded such acts of terror, they received training with Palestinian militants in the Middle East and actively participated in terrorism.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, especially when we are both catspaws of our enemy's arch foe!
What were the motivating beliefs of Algeria’s FLN? What was the attitude of the Sandinistas to democracy? What did the PLO actually have to say about Jews? Such questions were a matter of studied indifference.
Except the right was asking them, and being sneered at, in terms often suggesting uncritical acceptance of ideas, and lack of receptiveness to challenging notions was a significant and exclusive feature of the right.
Third Worldist and postcolonial theorists helped solidify the Soviet claim that Israel is a Western neocolonial project of which the Palestinians are the victims.

First they applied their invented condemnations to the right wingers. I was not a right winger, so I said nothing. Then they applied them to Asian governments targeted by communists. I was not an Asian nation targeted by communists, so I said nothing. Then they applied them to Western attempts to keep third world tribes from machete-killing one another. I was not a third world tribe looking to machete-kill my neighbors so I said nothing. Now they are coming for us Jews, and there is no one to speak for us...
Europeans are held morally responsible for Israel’s existence. Americans are held morally responsible for their country’s ongoing support of Israel. Israelis are held morally responsible for being instruments and agents of oppression. But as the oppressed party, Palestinians are believed to be incapable of moral responsibility.

Writers on the Left have spilled an ocean of ink in support of the Palestinian cause, but it is striking just how little of it bothers to concern itself with Palestinian ideology and politics. Israeli crimes are picked over obsessively (not least in Israel’s own press), but Palestinian corruption, oppression, and rejectionism are either blamed on the Israelis or—more frequently—simply ignored.

Aaaaaand? As with the Soviet Jewish purge, this is simply how they operate! This is exactly how the left behaves toward other groups around the world. The alleged crimes, corruption and democratic short-comings of every anti-communist regime of the 20th century are constantly harped on, from Franco, to Chiang, to Batista, to Diem, while the communist propaganda about agrarian reformers is accepted at face value, and promulgated by whatever NY Times reporter happens to be on the scene, whether Walter Duranty, Herbert Mathews or David Halberstam. They even do the same thing domestically, with blacks in the US, for example.
The degree to which this myopic perspective on the conflict has become received wisdom on the Left was demonstrated by the European reaction to and media coverage of the 2014 Gaza war. Accusations of Israeli war crimes and the deliberate targeting of children were made by normally-respected news outlets and NGOs; celebrities advertised their virtue by tweeting in support of Gaza; grotesque cartoons depicting the supposed bloodlust of Israeli soldiers and politicians circulated on social media;

This is exactly the way the media reports on EVERYTHING. A made-up crisis takes place, if one of the parties involved is of a PC-protected class, and the incident can be construed, however sketchily as a manifestation of hate or prejudice, that's how the story is written. The other parties are presumed guilty and subjected to vicious criticism, and their every action and minute datum about their pasts subjected to scrutiny, celebrities chime in expressing solidarity, and anything that reflects poorly on the celebrated victims is ignored, suppressed or used as proof of bigotry on the part of anyone who brings it up. Whatever wrong-doing is falsely attributed to Israel at a given moment, it probably doesn't compare on a relative scale to the experiences of the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of assaulting a stripper with a criminal past and future, or the fraternity falsely accused of hosting a party in which a student was raped, or the prosecutor falsely accused of kidnapping Tawana Brawley, or the various police officers who confronted violent criminals like Michael Brown or Rodney King, in the commission of crimes, with overwhelming probable cause, and who lost their jobs and were subject to criminal prosecution, for successfully resisting said criminal's attempt to attack them. Israel is still a going concern after all, and has brighter future prospects than the cop whose gun Michael Brown tried to grab.
reports of anti-Semitism spiked; protestors on European streets filled the air with eliminationist slogans and calls for the gassing of Jews; a French demonstration turned into an impromptu pogrom.
And who on the Left spoke up for the right of a democracy to defend its citizens from terrorism and rockets fired by genocidal anti-Semites?
Who on the left spoke for an end to the riots in response to deaths of violent criminals, who happened to have a particular skin color?
Not many.

You have an extra "m" in there.
For example, Israeli attempts to draw attention to the Palestinians’ use of human shields, designed to maximize their own civilian casualties, were met with a bored shrug.
At least it wasn't the sort of outrage directed at people who dared to point out that Freguson police officers were issued a BOLO for a man of Michael Brown's description, who had robbed and assaulted a cashier shortly before (who was, in fact, Brown).
The aftermath of the 9/11 attacks showed that large sections of the Western Left have difficulty comprehending the sincerity of irrational doctrines. If the attacks could not be explained as a rational and desperate response to some kind of monstrous injustice, then they were just acts of mindless slaughter.

The only difficulty the Western Left has, after decades of isolating themselves in an echo chamber of leftist media and academia and left-slanted entertainment, is in grasping that the world in any way differs from their self-aggrandizing narrative. It's not that they don't understand that bad guys behave "irrationally" (actually, terrorist behave in a highly rational fashion, and this very article demonstrates that by showing how effectively said terrorists obtain and retain foreign sympathies), it's that they refuse to see anything other than "Two legs, bad; four legs, good!"
As a result, various explanations were offered for why terrorists might kill themselves and murder nearly 3,000 American civilians in a single morning, most of which concluded that America must have somehow brought this disaster on itself. For many, this was the only intelligible explanation for the atrocity.
Actually, for many, it was the only explanation that might avert the tendency of people to support their group/country in a time of crisis, so they spun that narrative to prevent their base from changing loyalties toward the Republicans who happened to be in power at the moment. A narrative that was easily accepted due to the aforementioned echo-chamber conditioning.
This was a profound failure of imagination on the part of people clinging to a belief that, deep down, everybody wants basically the same thing that broadminded Western liberals do. In the intervening years, observable reality has called this belief into serious question.

For over a hundred years, adherents of traditional values and morals have repeatedly questioned this belief, and been dismissed as absolutely as a religious fanatic dismissing a rational thinker in every turgid liberal fantasy (and very few historical instances).
The savageries released by the Arab Spring and the Islamist surge across the Middle East and Africa will no longer submit to the liberal demand for rationality.

Wanna bet? It was a similarly disillusioned liberal writer who gave us the term "memory hole" after all.


One might have expected that the escalation of regional barbarism would directly correlate with an increase in sympathy for Israel’s predicament. But curiously, antipathy toward Israel has only intensified. Boycotts are demanded and lurid condemnations continue to mount. The assumption seems to be that, as an open society, Israel must be judged like other open societies, such as those in Scandinavia, that do not find it necessary to occupy land or go to war every two or three years. But Israelis live in the Middle East, and the politicians they elect to protect them calibrate their threat assessments and behavior accordingly. This distinction manages to pass by some otherwise highly intelligent people.
Stipulating their inability to grasp such an elementary distinction, I would question either grounds on which they could be called intelligent, or the practical value of intelligence itself. I would also point out that the same sliding scale of appropriate behavior for police officers confronting likely criminals in high-risk locations, versus the average citizen encountering a neighbor of a different skin tone on the street is another distinction that escapes these same people.
A prominent example of this tendency appeared in 2003, when the late British historian Tony Judt took to the New York Review of Books to recommend a one-state outcome to the conflict. His essay, which was not terribly well-received at the time, has not dated well. The whole idea of a Jewish state, he sighed, is “an anachronism.” Judt would likely be untroubled by today’s alarming uptick in anti-Semitic violence that is causing European Jews to seek sanctuary in Israel in unprecedented numbers, since he claimed it was the hateful behavior of Israel, not Arab and Muslim pogromists, that was responsible for endangering the lives of Europe’s Jews.
Another false comparison by the author. The flight of European Jews from European threats does not vindicate Israel of bad behavior in the Middle East. For one, the flight could be inspired by guilt, or it could be guided by sympathies that preclude the fugitives from recognizing that their destinations' misbehavior is responsible for their predicament. Exacerbating tensions against their own group to strengthen group solidarity, and thus increase their own power, is a classic tactic of unscrupulous leaders, regardless of whether or not it is in the group's best interest. Note that I am not remotely claiming Israel is guilty of such tactics one way or the other, I am just saying that the author's contention that the one phenomenon disproves the other accusation, does not hold water.
But it was Judt’s apparent inability to imagine a reality different to the one he enjoyed in the West that was most astonishing. “What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome?” he mused. “Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. [Israel] has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law.”

Recent events in Brussels and Paris have provided a bloody reminder that European democracies are not the picture of happy multicultural harmony that Judt may have had in mind as an instructive template.

Actually, throughout the world, we are seeing cases of multiethnic and multicultural states experiencing characteristic early 20th century strife.
And open frontiers in the Middle East? Individual rights? International law? Were Judt alive today, would he be delivering this solemn lecture on the anachronism of nationalist aspirations to the Kurds of northern Iraq? Or might he wonder if he had not confused “the world” with the NYU campus outside his office window?
The way Palmer confuses common liberal bullshit for a unique form of attack on the Jews?
Nonetheless, since 2001 a substantial body of literature has accumulated demanding the replacement of Israel with another Arab-majority state that reunites the territory of British Mandatory Palestine. The most recent example of this dismal trend was Perry Anderson’s lengthy editorial in the November-December 2015 issue of the New Left Review. The idea that the Jews, uniquely among peoples, should be stripped of their national home and made to live at the sufferance of others in the most dangerous and anti-Semitic part of the world is intellectually unserious, unworkable, and morally reprehensible.

Not all that unique, though. I don't see how it's much different than expecting Arabs to suddenly live within a state under the rule of a group of trigger-happy Jews, conscious of the worst possible outcome of any expression of hostility toward themselves, and not inclined to give anyone else the slightest chance at repeating history.
That this has done little to diminish its popularity among academics and activists in the West, many of whom elevate such a plan to the status of a categorical imperative, is a telling indication of the Left’s attitude toward Jewish rights, interests, and security.
Why should "Jewish rights, interests, and security" be a concern of anyone but the Jews? The left's interest is, and always has been, their own glorification and power, and excuses to give themselves the power to rework the world to fit their visions, or else a reason to congratulate themselves on their moral and intellectual superiority. They thrive off resistance to their ideas, because it fuels their persecution fantasies, so the more decent people their ideas would inconvenience or endanger, the better, as decent people tend to object mildly, rather than respond with hair-trigger violence. The left much prefers to complain about their dark nights of oppression, when a handful of them were unable to sell subversive screenplays under their own names, to, say, what happened to Charlie Hebdo. Thus, it makes more sense to bash Arab terrorists' targets than the terrorists themselves.
A lot has been written in recent months about the unwelcome resurgence of political correctness and identity politics and the exasperating doctrines of the social justice Left. I will simply make the curt observation that the progressive stack—an organizing principle designed to foreground the voices of those deemed to be “marginalized”—has not been kind to Jews.
It was never supposed to be. It is a means to glorify the left as champions of the oppressed. It is the enemy of anyone who succeeds or accomplishes anything of significant worth outside leftwing channels, because such people do not serve the leftist agenda or fit their narrative.
This is partly because those in charge of arranging ethnicities into a hierarchy of oppression are still trying to decide whether or not Jews should to be considered “white” and therefore “privileged,” and, as such, undeserving of the social protections from racism afforded to other minority groups (as though it were within their rights to define the Jews in the first place).

Where were your objections when they took it upon themselves to define ANYone else, which you tacitly acknowledge them doing, with these words?!

The author's only objection here is that it happens to be Jamie Palmer's ox being gored.


But there is a further problem with the way racism is conceived and understood as a structural problem by social justice activists.

It's always amazing how perceptive liberals become regarding flaws in liberal methods, when those methods are turned on them. That's why all the Trotskyites became neo-conservatives.
According to the precepts of critical race theory, racism only results from a combination of prejudice and power. Since anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about the malign influence of a powerful and mendacious world Jewry, it essentially holds that the Jews are experiencing hatred on account of the power they hold.

Remember a ways up when the author was bragging about how the Jews kicked ass and proved they don't need anyone's help? I'd say that categorizing them among the powerful is not inaccurate.

But that's only a problem if you subscribe to notions that equate morality with degrees of power. I.e., a liberal.



For most of this essay I have concentrated on the situation Jews face in Europe. But consider a recent Facebook status posted by a young Jewish alumna of Oberlin College —reproduced by David Bernstein for The Washington Post’s website— in which she details the attitudes toward Jews she routinely encountered amongst liberal people ostensibly committed to anti-racism.

But according to liberal doublethink, as explained one paragraph up, anti-racism does not include condemnation of anti-Semitism, because Jews are perps, not vics. At least liberals are being consistent in this.
Or take a look at the recent series of essays in Mosaic about the alarming rise of anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses.
Are they beating up any Hasidics they spot, or targeting yarmulke-wearers, or does a rise of anti-Semitism on campus only refer to demonstrations protesting Israel?
Support for Israel among the American public remains stable at around 70 percent — higher than anywhere else on Earth. But the striking similarities between the Oberlin post and the Oxford University statement with which I opened this essay are a worrying harbinger of things to come.

And in the liberal mentality, an unsourced, unsupported comment by a single alleged student, identifying with a group frequently perceived to be hypersensitive toward perceived discrimination, is the first step off the ledge of a plunge toward the next Holocaust.
The Left’s willingness to critique the assumed nobility of Western motives and actions, and point out the imperfections of its own societies, has been a valuable check on chauvinism and an engine of progressive domestic reform.
I'm sure Josef Stalin's willingness to send Russian soldiers to die in human waves against the soldiers of an anti-Semitic regime or to string along and then abandon Polish freedom fighters was also valuable to his Jewish fellow travelers, as was his liquidation of various elements in Eastern Europe who historically had few interests aligned with Jewish radicals. But how did that work out of Soviet Jewry down the road? The tactics of cultural iconoclasm and social leveling always seem appealing to those not at the pinnacle, but eventually, any group will end up in their sights, if they have any characteristics that stick out. For an article about the recent history of recurring threats, the author demonstrates an amazing inability to learn from the past.

This tribal reflex has sometimes prevented the Left from making the most important and elementary moral distinction of all, which is not between the political Right and Left, but between democrats and authoritarians.
No, that's another arbitrary preference! Democracy replacing dictatorship hasn't exactly drowned out the anti-Israel voices in their neighborhood, has it?
It has often given Left-wing dictators the benefit of the doubt while expressing furious indignation against those on the democratic Right who point out those dictators’ shortcomings. If the Right turns out to have been correct about something, then one frequently hears the objection that this is “for the wrong reasons.”
Two legs bad...
In early February of this year, however, Isaac Herzog, leader of the Left-wing Zionist Union party, sheepishly agreed and, a few grumbles notwithstanding, the reaction was one of widespread indifference.
...four legs good.
But if they think they can save themselves or win acceptance by feeding Likudniks and West Bank settlers to the anti-Zionist crocodile, then they have misunderstood the insatiable nature of its appetite.
As the author misunderstands the insatiable nature of the left's appetite for heroes and villains to congratulate themselves for supporting and demonizing, respectively.
This is a self-defeating strategy, and only makes it more difficult to distinguish legitimate opposition to Israeli policy from the anti-Zionism of the wider Left.
Maybe you should dispense with the liberal need to vilify opponents by calling them bigots, and content yourself with answering arguments on their merits, instead of wondering whose points you can dismiss unanswered as the ravings of a bigot.

In the immediate aftermath of the Oxford Labour Club row, the former president of the university’s Jewish society wrote an op-ed for The Guardian in which he stated, “I hate that my Jewishness and my progressive politics are currently incompatible.” So why can’t the European Left change in such a way that European Jewish socialists and social democratic Zionists are made to feel welcome again?
Just offhand, I'd say, because it does not serve their purposes to support a country founded on some rather regressive notions of self-defense and self-interest, when the general agenda of the left is transnational, globalist and internationalist. Israel is all about the very borders they are trying to eliminate.
A number of recommendations suggest themselves:
  1. Stop seeing the partition of Mandatory Palestine as some kind of act of paternalistic expiation for European sins rather than the realization of a persecuted people’s legitimate quest for self-determination.
Yeah, but it was both, depending on with whose eyes you're looking at it. The Jews sought their own state as an expression of their self-determination, but the Europeans allowed it, out of that paternalistic impulse of expiation, not because they recognized the Jewish perspective.
2. Banish the term “anti-Zionism” from the realm of permissible discourse and reframe criticism of Israel—no matter how vehement—in political and not existential terms.
Physician, heal thyself.
3. Respect the fact that for the vast majority of Jews, Israel represents an expression and final guarantor of Jewish security and identity.
How about accepting that for the vast majority of non-Jews, that's not a concept worth spending our blood treasure or political capital for, and that Jewish security and identity are solely a Jewish interest. Suck it up and take to heart the oft-spoken complaint that Israel is on it's own, and stop asking for anything.
4. Stigmatize anti-Semitism in the same way as any other kind of racism, including when it issues from the mouths and pens of other minority groups.
Yeah, that's not what anti-racism is for.
5. Stop treating Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular like children whose pathologies are to be patiently indulged.
6. Reject moral and cultural relativism, and hold all people to the same moral standards you would expect of yourself in the same circumstances.
But moral relativism is essential to the liberal mindset. Indeed, it is the sole basis of their claim to the title of "liberal" given that in every other aspect, they support and call for the loss of individual liberty in favor of state control. The only grounds on which the left is liberal, is in their moral permissiveness.

And liberals do hold Arabs & Palestinians to the same standards they expect of themselves - that they will adopt whatever tactic is in their best interests, portray themselves as the underdogs, regardless of the circumstances, while at the same time, claiming to speak for a disenfranchised or marginalized democratic majority. The only thing that matters for liberals is how they get their way. A president whose administration began with the dishing out of punishments for sexual harassment and workplace adultery, working out their issues from their failure to sabotage Clarence Thomas' nomination, ends up with credible accusations of the exact same sorts of misconduct and impropriety and when liberals are not shamelessly denying the results of DNA evidence, they are saying things like "I'd give Clinton a blowjob to thank him for keeping abortion legal." Liberals are not opposed to racial discrimination - stipulating the literal definition of the word "discrimination", that is the basis of their politics. No one would have voted for Barack Obama if we truly did not care about the color of a person's skin, nor Hilary Clinton if we did not care about her gender.


7. Understand that differences of opinion with most democrats, of whatever political persuasion, ought to fall within the boundaries of respectable disagreement.
As opposed to extremely long articles that fail to make any clear distinction between legitimate opposition to the state of Israel or to the extent to which one's home nation supports Israel, and anti-Semitism, much less degrees of anti-Semitism, ranging from distaste for observed or experienced typical group behaviors, to genocidal agendas?
8. Appreciate the value of liberal democracy and learn to take seriously the threats of those who declare their intention to destroy it.
Until the Arabs starting getting uppity, we could pretty much count on the Jews like Bernardine Orhnstein, Kathy Boudin, Lev Bronstein, Karl Marx and Maxim Litvinoff to be on the side of those threats.
But the reality is that the Left is in no mood to do much, if any, of the above. On the contrary, it is moving in exactly the opposite direction. In Britain, the Labour Party has elected Jeremy Corbyn as its leader—an unrepentant hard-Left anti-Zionist who has shared platforms with genocidal terrorists, blood libelers, and Holocaust deniers in order to supposedly demonstrate his solidarity with the oppressed denizens of Palestine, even as he signed petitions calling upon a centrist Israeli MK to be arrested on arrival in the UK.

The phrase "even as" generally implies some discrepancy or inconsistency in the concepts it is used to conjoin. These two actions would seem to me to be rather consistent with one another, no?
And before that, Stalin’s 1952 Doctors Plot, in which hundreds of Jewish doctors were accused of planning to murder top Soviet officials, forced previously ardent Stalinists to confront the painful fact that they had allowed themselves to be deceived into defending a murderous political pogrom.
The fact that they only caught on in the last wave of Stalin's homicidal activity says nothing good about them. That it took a threat to their fellow Jews to change their minds would be a point of condemnation if any other white group had supported such a monster up until he turned his usual antics against their own kind.

First they came for the Mensheviks...then they came for the kulaks...then they came for the Trotskyites...then they came for the wreckers...then they came for the Poles and Finns...then they came for the soldiers...now they are coming for the Jews, and there's no one left, etc, etc, etc....


But such moments are hard to come by these days. As the recent wave of stabbings and car-rammings have demonstrated, the Left is simply unmoved by Palestinian terror. Anti-Zionist Jews or (better still) those prepared to renounce every last vestige of their Jewish identity will of course continue to be warmly welcomed and invited to join the Left’s tireless struggle against the baleful power of the Zionist entity and Jewish capital.
I love the way the author just sticks that little bit in there, despite the whole article failing to provide any examples of hostility toward Jewish capital, but tarring anti-Zionism with the brush of the old pogroms.
These are positions informed by convictions so fundamental to the idea of what it means to be Left-wing that they are adopted with hardly a second thought.
Duh.
For this to change will require a stark reappraisal of what the Left values as well as what it despises, and the courage to interrogate some of its most sacred articles of faith. Regrettably, at present the appetite for this kind of painful self-criticism remains negligible.
Don't hold your breath. You don't have enough money or control enough votes to get them to reassess like that.



That the Holocaust proved to many Jews that they needed a state of their own to ensure their safety and protect their rights is clear

Is it? It seems kind of suspect to claim that because bad things happened in one historically aberrant state, Jews are not safe anywhere, not even in the states that shed blood to bring it down.

But "morally reprehensible" it is not, and there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic about the anti-Zionist goal of a one-state solution in which Judaism is only one religion among several.

We had that up until 1947, called "everywhere in the world." There might have been varying levels of discrimination, but that's just human nature, and most peoples endure it at one time or other. Why is it outrageous to suggest that the Jews give up essential aspects of their identity which expose them to hostility, in order to assimilate in their society, but perfectly acceptable to suggest the same about practicing Christians?

Cannoli
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*
Reply to message
The Holocaust, the Left and the Return of Hate - 04/05/2016 09:52:39 PM 1200 Views
The one state "solution" is either anti-Sematic or just very naive or uninformed - 05/05/2016 12:27:19 AM 654 Views
You realize those are two very different things. - 05/05/2016 07:26:48 PM 601 Views
Meh - 05/05/2016 06:32:13 PM 650 Views
Yeah - 05/05/2016 11:43:47 PM 615 Views
Uh. See, some of that, I would call anti-Semitic. - 06/05/2016 07:39:23 PM 561 Views
Don't care - 06/05/2016 09:48:23 PM 715 Views
I'm glad to hear you're not saying that. - 06/05/2016 10:20:25 PM 497 Views
Re: I'm glad to hear you're not saying that. - 07/05/2016 03:51:05 PM 598 Views
Care to expand? - 09/05/2016 01:46:01 PM 449 Views
Taking someone else's homeland for themselves - 12/05/2016 05:52:16 PM 467 Views
The Left seems perfectly fine letting in millions of refugees into Europe - 17/05/2016 09:44:20 AM 491 Views
When have I ever supported that? - 17/05/2016 12:20:53 PM 546 Views
I partially agree. - 17/05/2016 07:12:19 PM 465 Views
It was British land to do with as they pleased. The Ottomans lost WWI. - 19/05/2016 05:57:55 PM 544 Views
This is just the same old leftist crap coming around full circle. - 06/05/2016 06:16:31 AM 654 Views
Fine, let's try this another way - 07/05/2016 11:06:16 PM 817 Views
Agreed 100%. - 08/05/2016 05:59:02 PM 534 Views
Okay, that's a useful summary. - 08/05/2016 10:15:51 PM 509 Views

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