Andrew Sullivan has posted an attack on CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for blocking a politically motivated honorary degree that was to be given to the over-rated, crypto-communist and Israel-demonizing playwright Tony Kushner. Andrew’s intelligence is on display in the opening paragraph of his piece where he reiterates his clear-headed views of Kushner’s inflated literary reputation. Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning agitprop, Angels in America, is a puerile embarrassment and in recognizing this Andrew shows that he is capable of breaking out of the bubble of liberal derangement when it suits him. All the more reason that Andrew’s attack on Wiesenfeld is an instructive illustration of the unhinged attitudes of current “critics” of Israel, who are apologists for Hamas and their Gaza supporters.
The Palestinian case against Israel, as we noted in our ad in the New York Times is built on genocidal lies – lies which Andrew seems to have swallowed whole. Andrew wonders how apologists for Jew-hating Arab aggressors in the Middle East can be regarded as anything but reasonable critics. After all, Israel refuses “to give up land conquered in war.” Come again? Israel conquered nothing. Israel is the target of would-be conquerors whom it has managed to thwart through five or six (depending on how you count them) aggressive wars waged against the tiny Jewish state since 1948.
In 1948, the Arabs declared an unprovoked war on the Jews who had been given an internationally recognized mini-state on land previously possessed by the Turks for 400 years. That 1948 war – a racist war to expel a non-Arab people from the Middle East (and specifically Jews) – has continued unabated for 60 years. Determined to “push the Jews into the sea,” the Arab aggressors have refused to sign peace agreements in 1949, in 1967, in 1973 and after the first Intifada in 2000. When Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2006 absent a peace signed by the Arabs, Gaza became a terrorist state and fired 7000 rocket attacks into Israeli schoolyards and towns for more than a year until Israel struck back. Shame on Andrew for implying that this was not self-defense and for referring to Gaza as “conquered land,” implying that Israel was ever the aggressor. This is not reasonable criticism of Israel Andrew; it is apologetics for war criminals.
Andrew then accuses Israel of insisting on “populating that land with its own people.” Excuse me. We are still talking about the ruins of the Turkish (not Arab) empire – since the Palestinian Arabs have never come to terms with the postwar status quo – and about aggressors who have by all the recognized laws of war forfeited their right to the land by dint of their aggression. Remember whom the Jews are dealing with here, Andrew. Israel extricated 7000 law-abiding, productive Jews from Gaza in 2006 for the sole reason that without Israeli troops there they would be slaughtered by the Palestinians because they were Jews. These are Nazis Andrew, and that is why Kushner’s support for them is regarded with such distaste by people like Jeffrey Wiesenfeld and myself.
You refer to the “brutal bombardment” of Gaza. Excuse me, again, but no. What country would allow itself to be bombarded by 7000 rockets randomly shot into populated civilian areas without such a retaliation? And where was your outrage over these terrorist attacks, or over the fact that 100% of Palestinians support terrorist governments who have sworn the destruction of the only Jewish state on the planet?
And yes, despite your raised eyebrows over Wiesenfeld’s mild statement, the Palestinians have indeed earned themselves a special place in the annals of human depravity. In thousands of years of human suffering there has never been a people that has strapped bombs onto its own children, instructed them to blow up other children, and treated them as martyrs and national heroes when they did. This is a sick, evil culture – an unprecedented national death cult. The suffering of the Palestinians is self-inflicted and no one can release them from their suffering – as the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has demonstrated – but themselves.
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