Tuesday, May 16, 2006

JEWS WHO AID JEW-HATERS

Jews Who Aid Those Who Hate Jews and America By Dennis Prager
Some recent news items about Jews aiding enemies of the Jews:

Last week, professor Noam Chomsky went to Lebanon to speak at the headquarters of Hezbollah. As described by the BBC, not a media friend of Israel, "Hezbollah's political rhetoric has centered on calls for the destruction of the state of Israel," and Hezbollah has been "synonymous with terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings." The terror group's views on the need to annihilate the Jewish state are identical to those of Hamas and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chomsky announced his support for Hezbollah and its need to be militarily strong.

Also last week, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi from Vienna, a member of a Jewish sect called Neturei Karta, went to Stockholm to meet with a Palestinian Hamas official to help raise funds for Hamas. Hamas is, of course, dedicated to annihilating Israel, as is Neturei Karta, an Orthodox Jewish fringe group that believes no Jewish state should exist unless founded by God. It therefore supports Palestinian and other Muslim groups that murder Jews in Israel.

In March, a group of five Neturei Karta rabbis from Britain and the United States went to Tehran to lend their support to the Iranian regime in its calls for the annihilation of Israel. The group said nothing about the Iranian regime's repeated denials that there was a Holocaust.

This week, the University of California at Irvine Muslim Student Union is sponsoring a series of lectures under the heading, "Holocaust in the Holy Land" and "Israel: The Fourth Reich." Featuring activists committed to Israel's destruction, its lead speaker is a Jew named Norman Finkelstein, a professor who devotes his life to attacking Jewish communities and Israel. Also appearing is Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss from the above-mentioned Neturei Karta.

Tony Judt, a widely published New York University professor, recently wrote that "Israel, in short, is an anachronism," and should therefore cease to exist. The Jews of Israel should live under Arab/Muslim rule. Note that of all the countries of the world, Judt -- who the Jewish newspaper The Forward identified as "raised in the heavily Jewish East End section of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis" -- has advocated the disappearance of one country, the Jewish one. Why, for example, does Judt not write that Pakistan, a Muslim state carved out of India, is an "anachronism"?

Jews siding with the Jews' enemies or even actually fomenting Jew-hatred has a history that long predates Chomsky, Finkelstein, leftist Jewish professors and the Neturei Karta. Karl Marx, though baptized a Christian, was the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis but wrote one of the most anti-Semitic tracts of the 19th century, "On the Jewish Question." In it he wrote, among other anti-Semitic charges, that "Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist."

How is one to explain these Jews who work to hurt Jews?

I think the primary explanations are psychological. As I wrote in a previous column, it is almost impossible to overstate the pathological effects of thousands of years of murder of Jews -- culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, when nearly all Jews on the European continent were murdered -- have had on most Jews.

It is not coincidental that Norman Finkelstein's parents went through the Holocaust or that Yisroel Dovid Weiss's grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. But even Jews who lost no relatives in the Holocaust fear another outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, and given the Nazi-like anti-Semitism in the Muslim world today, that is not exactly paranoia.

One way to deal with this is to side with the enemy. Consciously or not, the Jew who sides with those dedicated to murdering Jews feels that he will be spared. He becomes the "good Jew" in the anti-Semites' eyes. How else to explain the visit of a Jew named Noam Chomsky to Lebanon to support Hezbollah or the fact that Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust? How else to explain Norman Finkelstein telling cheering German audiences that the Jewish state is morally the same as the Nazis? How else to explain rabbis visiting Tehran to extol the Holocaust-denying regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran that seeks to exterminate Israel?

The other psychological explanation is related. The Jew -- specifically the radical Jew -- who sympathizes with Jew-haters wishes to announce to the world that he is not really like other Jews. While the other Jews are moored in provincial Jewish ethnic or religious identity, he is a world citizen who no more identifies with the Jews' fate than with the fate of Iroquois Indians.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How else to explain? How about looking at these acts as the honest attempt that they are to acknowledge a complex political reality, a peaceful resolution to which requires compromise on each side, something for which your us vs. them attitude is not very helpful.

-- A Lover of Humankind.

Anonymous said...

"LOVER OF HUMANKIND"'s message is ten days stale - but I just have to comment...

The 'peaceful resolution ' to which LoH refers is forbidden by Islam: a true Muslim must kill, subjugate (dhimmitize), or convert the kaffir who dares to reside on any land that was *ever* under Muslim authority. If Arabs pretend to be interested in peace be assured that they are simply dissembling until they are strong enough to triumph: that is, until they are able to totally destroy Israel . (LoH should learn a lttle about Islam before oferring such wise counsel...)

Further, discussion of 'compromise on each side' demonstrates an ignorance of recent history: Israel offered Arafat 98%
of the disputed territories - almost *everthing* he asked for - and he responded by starting the second Intifada...Intifada is the Arab word for 'compromise', don't you know...

Lastly, to associate 'honest attempt' with the likes of Chomsky and Finkelstein is comical to max: they are so brutally mendacious in their writings about the Jews that only an ignoramous could take them seriously. Which, alas, we must deem 'Lover of Humankind' to be.

(BTW - 'Lover of Humankind' is a really pretentious blog signature .
Sir - or madam - in a few short lines you have demonstrated yourself to be a rather silly twit.)

Anonymous said...

Chomsky is a well known trotskyite who is passionately (and articulately) opposed to what he considers the "establishment."
Israel is a free market bourgeois society
which is the key to its success and why the "civilized" world supports it and why the Chomskys of this world would like to see it "wiped off the map".In the view of the chomskys of our society a 7th century culture is preferable to a modern establishment.
As to Finkelstein & al. a charitable explanation is that by eliminating Israel the Second Coming can not happen
and thereby Armagedon is avoided.
This is a very charitable view a more realistic would be that the are opportunistic nuts.