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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Edward Alexander</title>
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		<title>Anti-Zionism Arrives, in Disguise, at Indiana U.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/edward-alexander/anti-zionism-arrives-in-disguise-at-indiana-u/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=anti-zionism-arrives-in-disguise-at-indiana-u</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:42:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Alexander]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hatred]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indiana U.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jew-Hate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205724</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When hatred passes as "critique."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/anti-semitism.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205730" alt="anti-semitism" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/anti-semitism-450x304.jpg" width="315" height="213" /></a>Competition for the most licentious definition of the term “criticism of Israel” conceived by the mind of man has for many years been intense.  Given the number of academic scribblers with febrile imaginations who are profoundly troubled by having to share the globe with the state of Israel, this should come as no surprise.</p>
<p><em>Intifada II</em>, during which Palestinian Arab suicide bombers, pogromists, and lynch mobs slaughtered over a thousand people (most of them Israeli Jews) and wounded thousands more, was euphemistically described (in <i>Judaism </i>Magazine, no less) by a Vassar professor of Jewish Studies as “a critique of Zionism.”</p>
<p>A Panglossian sociologist writing in the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education </i>assured readers that “calls to destroy Israel, or to throw it into the Mediterranean Sea…are not evidence of hatred of Jews,” but merely “reflect a quarrel with the State of Israel.”</p>
<p>When questions were raised in November 2003 about the indecency of Harvard and Columbia honoring and playing host to Oxford poetaster Tom Paulin after he had urged that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead” and announced that he “never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all,” his apologists in Cambridge and Morningside Heights defended his right “to criticize Israeli policy.”</p>
<p>The learned Swedish Chancellor of Justice (Goran Lambertz) in 2006 ruled that repeated calls from the Grand Mosque of Stockholm to “kill the Jews” by dispatching suicide bombers to Israel were not unlawful racial incitement to murder. Rather, ruled this Swedish Solomon, they</p>
<blockquote><p>should be judged differently and therefore be regarded as permissible because, although highly critical of the Jews, they were used by one side in an ongoing…conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds it.</p></blockquote>
<p>But Shaul Magid of Indiana University has beaten all these redefiners of “criticism” to mean the advocacy of politicide (for Israel): he is ahead of the pack, and has no second in this race for obfuscation. Here is the official description of a course that  this “chaired” professor of Jewish Studies and Religion is at the moment planning  to offer in Bloomington. In happier times this great university was called “the Athens of Monroe County”;  if  Magid, a tribune of “post-Judaism,” makes further headway there, it may be renamed New Chelm:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Jewish Critics of Zionism (3 cr.)<br />
Shaul Magid</i></p>
<p><i>REL-A 430 Topics in the History of Judaism / REL-R 541 Studies in Jewish Tradition MW 5:30-7:30 2nd 8 weeks</i></p>
<p><i>In the past fifty years, Zionism has risen to become a central component of Judaism and anti-Zionism has been relegated to those considered the enemy of the State of Israel. Many do not know that some of the most vehement critiques of Zionism came not from the enemies of the state but from Zionists themselves. In this course we will read and examine the Jewish critics of Zionism from the early twentieth century to the present. We will read from the works of Kaufmann Kohler, rector of Hebrew Union College, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Bernard Lazare, Hans Kohn, Simon Rawidowicz, The American Council of [sic]  Judaism, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Jacqueline Rose, Peter Beinart, and Judith Butler. We will also read some of the recent Israeli post-Zionist debates. This course is intended to give the student a much more complex and multifaceted view of Zionism as an idea and as an ostensible solution to the Jewish question.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The description is so gross, flagrant, and blatant  in its willful deception as to be shocking even in these dark times. First of all, like his predecessors in this sordid enterprise, Magid forgets that “criticism” means (in Matthew Arnold’s classic definition) “the attempt to see the object as in itself it really is” and not to destroy the object. But he goes beyond them in identifying people who openly advocate politicide (and even genocide) where Israel is concerned not only as “Jewish critics of Zionism” but as “Zionists themselves.”</p>
<p>Indiscriminately lumped together are people like Scholem, Buber, Kohn, who were cultural more than political Zionists and favored bi-nationalism, but discovered the Arabs had no interest in co-existence; Arendt, who grudgingly acknowledged, in 1951, that Zionism was “the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism,”  but harbored what Marie Syrkin called “blinding animus” toward  those vulgar Israelis and vast ignorance of their country;  Lazare, who briefly associated with formal Zionism in reaction to the Dreyfus affair; Leibowitz, who said Yehuda Halevi, Israel&#8217;s national poet, was a “racist” and contributed the Israeli-Nazi analogy (which made redundant the declaration that Israel has “no right to exist”) to Europe’s semi-educated intellectuals whose predecessors had already resolved to their satisfaction the question of whether Jews had “the right to live&#8221;; the stridently anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism; that worldwide industry called “Peter Beinart,” the highly-publicized prophet of  Zionists against Israel;  and (culminating the outrage) Rose and Butler, whose hatred of Zionism as well as of  Israel borders on the pathological.</p>
<p>Jacqueline Rose aspires to be the psychoanalyst of Zionism. This star in Magid’s galaxy of “critical” Jewish Zionists is so eager to “expose”  Zionism’s birth in sin as the new Nazism that, in her book <i>The Question of Zion</i> (a title emulating  Edward Said’s <i>The Question of Palestine</i>) she actually conjures up a scene in which Theodor Herzl and Adolf Hitler find themselves seated at the same Parisian performance of Wagner. “According to one story,” she excitedly reports, “it was the same performance of Wagner…that inspired Herzl to write <i>Der Judenstaat</i> [<i>The Jewish State</i>] and Hitler <i>Mein Kampf.” </i> (Apparently Princeton University Press, which published her book, cannot afford to hire readers who know that Hitler did not arrive in Paris until 1940, and that Herzl died in 1904.)</p>
<p>In the same book, much of it a regurgitation of the phobias of the late Tony Judt, Rose declared that “Jewish nationalism will come into being only if it abolishes itself.” She is “appalled at what the Israel nation perpetrated in my name” and, wishing to live “in a world in which we did not have to be ashamed of shame,” hopes to cure her shame-sickness by destroying its cause: Israel and Zionism.</p>
<p>Judith Butler, a literary theorist famous for prose of stupefying opacity, was, prior to the autumn of 2003, somebody who defined her “Jewishness” (not exactly Judaism) in opposition to the state of Israel. A very busy signer of petitions harshly attacking Israel, she was one of 3700 American Jews opposed to “occupation” who signed an Open Letter urging the American government to cut off financial aid to Israel. Later  (<i>London Review of Books</i>, August 21, 2003) she expressed misgiving about having signed that particular petition because  it “was not nearly strong enough…it did not call for the end of Zionism.” (A strange remark to come from one of Magid’s contemporary “Zionists themselves.”) She looked into the history of Zionism and discovered that there had been “debates among Jews throughout the 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries about whether Zionism ought to become the basis of a state.”</p>
<p>From this abstruse research she swiftly concluded that demanding an end to Zionism in 2003, i.e., calling for politicide (and the massive bloodshed it would entail), was no different from taking a debater’s position against Zionism decades before the state was born. She played an important role in the campaign to hound Lawrence Summers out of the presidency of Harvard after he labeled as antisemitic the movement (for which she played the trumpet) “to single out,” in Summers’ words, “Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of [Harvard’s] endowment to be invested.” She has become a matinee idol in Europe, where she helps to encourage the burgeoning feeling that the Holocaust gave antisemitism a bad name.  “Butler’s unspoken assumption,” Cynthia Ozick observes,  “is that consonance, or collusion, with those who would wish away the Jewish state will earn one a standing in the European, if not the global, anti-Zionist world club.”</p>
<p>It goes without saying that Magid’s course description also implies that there is no difference between articulating, 80 or 100 years ago, a Zionism that was cultural rather than political, or advocating a binational state, or even espousing “Jewish” anti-Zionism, and today’s agitprop of those calling for the erasure of a living society. Israel’s current population of eight million, including six million Jews, live under constant threat of nuclear destruction by the genocidal fanatics of Iran and unrelenting siege by Iran’s proxies: Hizbollah to the north and Hamas to the south.</p>
<p>I would not wish to suggest that people like Beinart, Butler, Rose and scores like them have no strong connection to Zionism. On the contrary, without Israel most of them would no longer be Jews. In “The Sermon,” a famous Hebrew short story of 1942 by Haim Hazaz, a character named Yudka declares that “[w]hen a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist”; nowadays, it would be truer to say that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.”</p>
<p>One wonders whether, in the course of feeding his students such generous helpings from the works of non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, and post-Zionist Jews bent upon the end of Zionism and often of Israel itself, Magid poses this question: Do the Beinarts and Butlers and Roses ever pause, in their frenzied, apocalyptic demonization of  the Jewish state, to consider the old Yiddish saying &#8211;</p>
<div>
<p>“<i>Come for your inheritance, and you may have to pay for the funeral.” </i></p>
<p><b>Edward Alexander’s most recent book is <i>The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal </i>(Transaction Publishers,  2012).</b></p>
</div>
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		<title>Alice Walker and the Ghost of Irving Howe</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/edward-alexander/alice-walker-and-the-ghost-of-irving-howe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=alice-walker-and-the-ghost-of-irving-howe</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jun 2012 04:12:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Alexander]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alice Walker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hebrew]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Irving Howe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Translation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=135660</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Left's "language of non-thought" killed literary studies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/image-4.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-135662" title="image-(4)" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/image-4.gif" alt="" width="375" height="259" /></a>The voice of Irving Howe is little heard these days in the corridors of university English departments or the pages of the literary journals. This would not have been a great surprise to him. After he gave a series of lectures in Seattle in 1977 entitled “Modern Jewish Literature,” the University of Washington Press (and I) tried to persuade him to publish them as a book. But he doggedly resisted, claiming there was no point in publishing a book that wasn’t really a book. Finally, he put an end to our efforts by writing an imaginary review of an imaginary book called <em>A Few Jewish Voices</em>, signed by the imaginary critic “Northrop Kazin.” It reads as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>This very thin collection of essays by a writer whose most recent book [<em>World of Our Fathers</em>] is anything but thin, leaves one with a mild sense of depression….There is little to be said against the individual pieces, about as little as there is to be said for the book as a whole….what we have here, in short, is a non-book, even if a rather good one….We all know the temptation of writers who achieve a bit of fame to feel that every word they have ever put to print must be immortalized in books….But one would have thought that a man of Mr. Howe’s good sense would have resisted the temptation.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is full of Howe’s ineffable charm, moral poise, and security of values, all of which the present literary world sadly lacks.</p>
<p>Take, for example, the recent blast of fire and vitriol emanating from Alice Walker. Long a cheerleader for the genocidal Hamas organization, she decided to broaden her anti-Israel activity by publicly refusing to have her works translated into Hebrew by an Israeli publisher (who denies having made the offer). She eschews Hebrew altogether because she believes that Israel is a racist society, worse than the segregated Old South, worse than apartheid South Africa, a place akin to Gehenna and the pit of hell. She seems unaware that the Puritans once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as America’s national language, and that Harvard and Yale once required its study. Also, emulation often breeds competition: since Walker has always emulated novelist Toni Morrison in all things (bad writing included), she had to do something that would be similar to, yet more spectacular than, Morrison’s refusal to accept royalties from sales in Israel; and so she decided to prohibit Hebrew translation of her work altogether. She has not yet come up with an expression of Holocaust envy to equal Morrison’s spiteful dedication of <em>Beloved </em>to the memory of “Sixty Million or More.” (How dare the Jews, with their paltry six million dead, monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering in which other groups would very much like to share?)</p>
<p>Walker’s unwillingness to bear the taint of Hebrew reminds me of an anecdote Saul Bellow liked to recount. He was visiting “the dean of Hebrew writers, S. J. Agnon,”  in his house in Jerusalem.  Agnon unnerved Bellow by asking if any of his books had been translated into Hebrew, and warned that, if he wanted his works to be “safe,” he had better get them translated into the eternal language.  Walker, of course, is supremely confident that her every word will be immortalized without the help of Hebrew, and has spurned this form of insurance against the ravages of time.</p>
<p>The episode also reminded me of a long-ago correspondence between Howe and the philosopher Sidney Hook touching on, among other things, the significance  of Alice Walker’s replacement of John Keats in the American literary curriculum.  In December 1988, Stanford University was in the midst of a curricular battle. The university’s radicals wanted to transform the traditional curriculum to make it more “relevant,” more conducive to the self-esteem of minority groups, less tainted by prejudices of gender, class, and race. Howe, a lifelong socialist, but a socialist tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, saw in all this a total betrayal of the socialist ideal of making the classical heritage of mankind, so long denied to the working classes, their own.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Other Anti-Semitic Guru</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/edward-alexander/obamas-other-anti-semitic-guru/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-other-anti-semitic-guru</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Oct 2010 04:28:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Alexander]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=74229</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why does the president praise a man who compares Jews to Hitler and Stalin?   ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/g1_u57402_Obama_Tutu.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-74248" title="g1_u57402_Obama_Tutu" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/g1_u57402_Obama_Tutu.gif" alt="" width="375" height="314" /></a></p>
<p>The disclosure, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that Barack Obama had for two decades sat contentedly (perhaps with his cerebral hearing aid turned off) listening to the tirades of his pastor Rev. Jeremiah (“God Damn America”) Wright against “them Jews” caused him some brief embarrassment but no harm at the polls, certainly not among Jewish voters. No attention whatever was paid to the possible link between Obama’s moral tone-deafness in the presence of clergyman Wright and his intense admiration of another, more unctuous, political clergyman with even less charity toward Jews than Wright: namely, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.</p>
<p>Obama and Tutu have long admired each other. They first met in 2006 when then-Senator Obama visited Tutu in South Africa. In August 2009, Obama awarded Tutu the Congressional Medal of Freedom. Earlier this month, on the occasion of the Anglican clergyman’s 79<sup>th</sup> birthday, the president lauded him as “a moral titan—a voice of principle, an unrelenting champion of justice, and a dedicated peacemaker.”</p>
<p>In recent months, Tutu has demonstrated his dedication to peace, justice, and principle in the Middle East, in particular, by speaking up for Hamas and supporting the “Freedom Flotilla” of Islamist jihadists and “internationalist” do-gooders (people who confuse doing good with feeling good about what they are doing) who, in the spring, tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. He has also repeatedly endorsed the activities of the BDS (Boycott/Divest/Sanction) movement. This reincarnation of the Nazis’ “Kauf nicht beim Juden” campaign of the 1930s constantly invokes Tutu’s “authoritative” condemnation of Israel (where Arabs and Jews use the same buses, beaches, clinics, cafes, and soccer fields, and attend the same universities) as an “apartheid” state.</p>
<p>But his fulminations against Jews have a long history. They are so well-documented that one wonders if President Obama can possibly be ignorant of them, especially now that he has a “Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism” named Hannah Rosenthal, who has shown herself adept at spotting that evanescent phenomenon called “Islamophobia” at a distance of ten miles away. Here are just a few examples of Tutu’s “moral titanism” on the Jewish question, chosen from the same period in which Obama was attending the sermons of Jeremiah Wright.</p>
<p>On the day after Christmas, 1989, Tutu, standing before the memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis, prayed for the murderers and scolded the descendants of their victims. “We pray for those who made it happen, help us to forgive them and help us so that we in our turn will not make others suffer.”<sup>1</sup> This, he said, was his “message” to the Israeli children and grandchildren of the dead.</p>
<p>Moral obtuseness, mean spite, and monstrous arrogance do not make for sound ethics and theology. Neither Tutu nor the Israelis he lectured can “forgive”  the Nazi murderers. Representatives of an injured group are not licensed (even by the most sanctimonious of preachers) to forgive on behalf of the whole group. In fact, forgiveness issues from God alone. The forgiveness Tutu offers the Nazis is truly pitiless because it forgets the victims, blurs over suffering, and obliterates the past.</p>
<p>Tutu is always far less moved by the actuality of what the Nazis did (“the gas chambers,” he once said, “made for a neater death” than apartheid resettlement policies <sup>2)</sup> than by the hypothetical potentiality of what, in his jaundiced view, Israelis <em>might</em> do. His speeches against apartheid returned obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the former South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern. “The Jews,” Tutu declared in 1984, “thought they had a monopoly on God” and “Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings.”<sup>3</sup></p>
<p>Tutu has been an avid supporter of the Goebbels-like equation of Zionism with racism. He has alleged that “Jews…think they have cornered the market on suffering”<sup>4</sup> and that Jews are “quick to yell ‘Anti-Semitism’” because of “an arrogance of power—because Jews have such a strong lobby in the United States.” <sup>5</sup> Jewish power in America is, in fact, a favorite  Tutu theme. In late April 2002, he praised his own courage in resisting it. “People are scared in [America] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, <em>very</em> powerful. Well, so what? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.” <sup>6</sup></p>
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		<title>Dissent or Destruction?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/edward-alexander/israels-critics-and-israels-enemies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israels-critics-and-israels-enemies</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:00:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Alexander]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=66203</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Israel’s "critics" are really its enemies.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/anoam_chomsky.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-66207" title="anoam_chomsky" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/anoam_chomsky.gif" alt="" width="375" height="294" /></a></p>
<p>A recent addition to the ever-burgeoning genre of books instructing Israel on the most suitable method of ceasing to exist (one-state solution, no-state solution, final solution) is adorned by the following from Noam Chomsky:</p>
<blockquote><p>Constance Hilliard raises very critical issues…and unless those who call themselves ‘supporters of Israel’ are willing to face these moral and geopolitical realities, they may in reality be supporters of Israel’s moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.</p></blockquote>
<p>It is commonplace that moral passions are far more imperious and impatient than self-seeking ones, and who could have a stronger sense of his own moral rectitude than a man who has been an apologist for Pol Pot in Cambodia, a collaborator with neo-Nazi Holocaust-deniers in France, and a cohort to anti-Semitism-deniers everywhere?</p>
<p>“Anti-Semitism,” Chomsky has declared, “is  no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control; That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue…” Beautiful and touching words, but words by no means unusual in the parlance of those who deem Israel uniquely evil  and, with help from its “supporters,” responsible for every misery on the planet with the (possible) exception of global warming.  (Here reality outpaces my rhetorical flourishes: Clare Short, a member of  Tony Blair’s cabinet until 2003, charged that Israel is “much worse than the original apartheid state” because  it “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”)</p>
<p>Chomsky is generally and mistakenly identified as “a critic of Israel.” But he is by no means the only beneficiary of the flagrantly euphemistic redefinition of “criticism” where Israel and its numerous enemies are concerned. Examples, in fact, abound. A Vassar professor (writing in <em>Judaism </em>Magazine, no less) referred to the second Intifada, during which Palestinian Arab suicide bombers, pogromists, and lynch mobs slaughtered a thousand people (most of them Israeli Jews) and wounded thousands more, as “a critique of Zionism.” A Panglossian writer in the <em>Chronicle of Higher Education</em> assures readers that “calls to destroy Israel, or to throw it into the Mediterranean Sea…are not evidence of hatred of Jews,” but merely “reflect a quarrel with the State of Israel.” Some critique, some quarrel. When questions were raised in November 2003 about the indecency of Harvard and Columbia honoring and playing host to the Oxford poetaster, blood libel subscriber, and <em>London Review of Books</em> regular Tom Paulin after he had urged that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead” and announced that he “never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all,” his apologists in Cambridge and Morningside Heights defended his right “to criticize Israeli policy.” But the prize for redefinition of the term “criticism” should probably go to the Swedish Chancellor of Justice Goran Lambertz who, in 2006, ruled that repeated calls from the Grand Mosque of Stockholm to “Kill the Jews” by dispatching suicide bombers to Israel and other Jewish population centers, was not racial incitement to murder. Rather, ruled this Solomon, they:</p>
<blockquote><p>Should be judged differently and therefore be regarded as permissible because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict.</p></blockquote>
<p>Just what, then, does “criticism” mean? The Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold defined criticism (by which he did not mean merely literary criticism) as “the attempt to see the object as in itself it really is.”  Writing in 1865, he believed he was still living in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, but also in the new age of science. He wanted criticism to model itself on the disinterested observation of  science and not the fierce political partisanship that derived from the Revolution. Like science, criticism should espouse no party and no cause except the cause of truth. Its proper aim is to see the object as it really is, not to destroy the object. Dickens, a few years earlier in <em>Tale of Two Cities </em>(1859), had encapsulated the murderous aspect of French politicide by mocking its two favorite slogans: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—or Death” and (Chamfort’s version) “Sois Mon Frere, ou Je Te Tue.” (Be my brother, or I’ll kill you.)</p>
<p>The “critics of Israel,” who deny its right to exist and threaten it with destruction if it fails to dance to their tune, may be dishonest, despicable, consumed with blood-lust, but let us not deny them their triumph. In the war of ideas, they have beaten us at almost every turn &#8212; and by “us” I mean those for whom the foundation of Israel was one of the few redeeming acts of a blood-soaked and shameful century. A widely-publicized 2007 BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries shows Israel as the “least-liked” country in the entire world. Among Europeans polled, Israel was most disliked in Germany.  Yes, in the very country where the Jews’ “right to live” was once a popular topic, Israel-haters outpolled Israel-admirers by 77% to 10%. And still greater triumphs than those in the war for public opinion may yet await these “critics.” Their threats to Israel are not idle ones. On their own, the Chomskys, Paulins, Norman Finkelsteins, Tony Judts and Alexander Cockburns of this world cannot visit upon Israel the terrible fate they think it deserves. But they know they have a powerful ally named Iran, which is under the leadership of someone bent not merely, on politicide (like the “critics”) but on genocide; someone who daily promises to “remove Israel from the map” and watches with glee as the international noose tightens around Israel’s throat and the umbrellas go up in Europe and Washington.</p>
<p><strong><em>Edward Alexander is the co-author, with Paul Bogdanor, of <span style="font-style: normal;">The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and Defender</span>s<span style="font-style: normal;"> (Transaction Publishers).</span></em></strong></p>
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		<title>The White House War Against Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/edward-alexander/the-white-house-war-against-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-white-house-war-against-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:06:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Alexander]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[In the administration’s rage against the Jewish state, an anti-Semitic trope emerges.]]></description>
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<p>The decision of the Obama White House to pick a public fight with Israel over its interior ministry’s fairly routine announcement of progress towards approval of the construction (some years from now) of apartments in northeast Jerusalem has by now been subjected to sharp and justified criticism for its disproportionality; its bad faith in reneging on signed agreements with Israel; its mean-spirited spitefulness; its dogged attachment to the exploded assumption that “settlements” are the cause of Arab intransigence; its desire to keep intact the possibility of an apartheid state of Palestine that would not accommodate a single Jew; and its entire indifference to the violence that its reckless statements could (and did) incite in Jerusalem.</p>
<p>But there is a more sinister aspect to the relentless expressions of “insult” and “offense” coming from Vice-President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and White House advisor David Axelrod. It is the invocation, undoubtedly originating in the Oval Office itself, of a long-recognized trope of anti-Semitism, a lethal mixture of the ancient blood libel and the modern conspiracy libel.</p>
<p>Already in July 2009, long before the current ruckus, President Obama told Jewish leaders at a White House meeting that he wanted to “change the way the Arabs see us” by putting “space” between the U. S. and Israel. More recently Biden, according to several reports, told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that</p>
<blockquote><p>“What you’re doing here [i.e., building houses for Jews in “settlements”] undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In other words, Biden was accusing Israel of being responsible for the shedding of American blood, the loss of American lives. And as recently as March 16, General Petraeus testified that</p>
<blockquote><p>“The conflict [between Israel and the Palestinians] foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.  S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U. S. partnerships with regimes in the Arab world….The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbollah and Hamas.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Stripped of its euphemistic diplomatic language Petraeus’s statement, too, echoes the White House’s bold new offensive against Israel and its supporters: American diplomacy is crippled, the religion of perpetual outrage is being outraged, and American soldiers are at greater risk, mortal risk, because Israel is making Arabs angry. The language of Walt and Mearsheimer and the Anti-Israel Lobby now comes from Obama and his diplomats and generals.</p>
<p>Among the critiques of Obama’s new strategy, only that of Martin Peretz in <em>The New Republic</em> has suggested its unsavory provenance: “Someone at breakfast this morning suggested to me that Obama is like Colonel Lindbergh.” But this is far too vague, and Peretz does not amplify it. Lindbergh made very few public statements against Jews, and even his diaries say little more than that “We must limit…the Jewish influence.” Peretz’s breakfast companion would have provided this once ardent Obama supporter a far better precedent for Obama’s view of Israel and American Jewry in Lindbergh’s good friend Henry Ford, who never tired of arguing that Jews manipulate diplomacy to cause wars in which Christians die to enrich Jews. Or perhaps Patrick Buchanan, who in September 1990 began to argue that “there are only two groups…beating the drums for war in the Middle East: the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the U. W.”</p>
<p>Better yet, given the passionate Europhilia of President Obama, might have been to liken the White House’s unsavory new strategy against Israel to that of English anti-Semites who during the Boer War always asked why the British government was fighting a “war of gold” against the Boers on behalf of Jewish magnates, and during World War I declared (in 1916) that “If Lord Kitchener is dead, the Unseen Hand [then shorthand for the Jewish Conspiracy] killed him,” and in 1939 insisted that “the Jews” (in Germany and England) were to blame for the anticipated war.</p>
<p>Those 1939 accusers of the Jews were, of course, the most ardent supporters of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler. That policy could not have been far from the minds of Israelis who heard Biden’s ludicrous March 11 boast (as little believed in Jerusalem as in New York) that “The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period.” Now that the umbrellas are again going up, this time in Washington, the expedient of blaming Jews for the violence that has been and will be unleashed against them has moved from the streets of London into the Oval office.</p>
<p><em>Edward Alexander’s most recent book is </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lionel-Trilling-Irving-Howe-Friendship/dp/1412810140">Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: A Literary Friendship.</a></p>
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