ALGEMEINER
by Edward Alexander
August 28, 2014
The Jewish enemies of Israel, if they are sufficiently profligate in the expenditure of claptrap, often come to the aid of her defenders. Early this summer (2014) I wrote the following paragraph in the prologue to a book (entitled Jews Against Themselves) that I was sending off to my publisher: “
I have not attempted a systematic taxonomy of all the species of Jews arrayed under the genus ‘enemies of Israel,’ a monumental task that would require an Encyclopedia to include the following: Jewish Progressives against Israel; Jewish Queers against Israel; Haredimagainst Israel; Holocaust Survivors against Israel; Children of Holocaust Survivors against Israel; Jewish Voice for Peace; Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors against Israel; Survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto against Israel; J Street; Jewish Postmodernists against Israel; Jewish Berkeley Professors against Israel; Post-Zionists against Israel; Jewish Members of MESA [Middle East Studies Association] against Israel; Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (JBIG, also called, seasonally, London’s Jewish Christmas Carolers against Israel); and so on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Despite this, there will always be readers who express astonishment that there are Jews who question the Jewish right to live as a natural right, or hate Israel and are ashamed to have a state. Surely they are as rare as singing mice or card-playing pigs? Alas, no.”
I felt more or less content with that Swiftian list, yet also sensed that something was missing from it. The recent publication, first in Britain’s Guardian on August 15, and then in The New York Times on August 23, of an ad accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and calling for “full economic, cultural, and academic boycott of Israel” told me what it was. The ad was placed by “Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors” and also “friends of survivors,” “friend of many survivors,” “cousins of survivors,” “cousins of victims of Nazis in Ukraine,” “the great niece of an uncle who shot himself,” “spouse of hidden child,” and “relative of victims.” Where defamation of Israel is concerned, imagination cannot keep pace with the fantastic moral coarseness of the defamers.
According to the 327 (mostly unknown) signatories of this fiery, vitriolic, and obscene assault on the state of Israel as the one true inheritor of Nazism, and on Elie Wiesel (who dares to say that Jews have done enough dying), the death factories and outdoor killing centers and vast machinery of murder of the Germans and their allies were, for those who managed to survive them, schools of moral instruction and intellectual acumen. These gifts have enabled them to pass judgment on the latest Hamas-Israel conflict and come down unreservedly on the side of Hamas, the Islamist version of Nazism whose declared purpose is to destroy Israel and “to kill Jews wherever you find them.”…..
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