politics

Well, it’s the end of the week, which means the Jewish Sabbath is about to arrive. In honor of this weekly event, I’m going to explore a contemporary issue confronting today’s Jews: lying through their bloody teeth to justify racist, inhumane behavior.

This week Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told a conference of Orthodox Jews that, “The Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution. More do than before, but a majority still do not. ” Luckily Think Progress called him on it, noting that, “Recent polling has found that 74 percent of the Palestinian population wants to see a two-state solution with an Israeli and Palestinian state side by side. It is also the position of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and there is evidence that Gaza’s Hamas rulers may be compelled to support such a solution as well.”

So in other words, Senator Schumer, who believes that “they don’t believe in the Torah, in David” is factually correct (WRONG) and also evidence for why Palestinians should be denied human rights, is a complete and total, lying scumbag. And Think Progress has the data to back that statement up. Senator Schumer is one of the most respected (and liberal, good lord!) leaders and Jewish leaders in particular in the United States, which I guess says a lot about American leadership.

Unfortunately, it might also say a lot about Jewish leadership in the United States, which for too long has been dominated by Zionists who are willing to say anything to support their cause. And how easily they change the conversation in doing so!

Here’s another example. Roger Cohen, in an editorial about the atrocious Flotilla disaster and the Gaza human rights disaster that Israel is perpetration, calls Israel “a state that emerged from the ashes of European Jewry.” This statement is gross misrepresentation of historical truth. While many survivors of the Shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust) did eventually seek a home in Israel, the Zionist dream precedes the Nazi dream by several decades. I could go on about the details, but why I don’t I let Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion speak for himself:

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second — because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.”

Norman Finkelstein goes on to tell the following story:

And at the war’s end in 1945, Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership blocked plans to transfer thousands of child Holocaust survivors in frail health from the wretched camps for displaced persons to safe havens elsewhere in Europe, for fear that such resettlement “might weaken the struggle for free immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine.”

(ref: see page 117 of Beyond Chutzpah by child of Holocaust survivors Norman G. Finkelstein.)
Okay, so maybe Cohen was correct in a way: Israel was shamelessly built on the backs of the dead.

Of course, I have to mention the Flotilla Helen Thomas Incident. That’s right. Israeli commandos killed 9 activists on a ship carrying humanitarian aid, including a 19 year old Turkish-American who was shot four times in the head and once in the chest, and a week later Helen Thomas said something that didn’t sound right. Which one do you think the press is talking about this week? That’s right, Helen Thomas. And how they are talking about it! Writing for the Huffington Post, Sam Stein quotes one Lanny Davis:

“[H]er statement that Jews in Israel should leave Israel and go back to Poland or Germany is an ancient and well-known anti-Semitic stereotype of the Alien Jew not belonging in the ‘land of Israel’ — one that began 2,600 years ago with the first tragic and violent diaspora of the Jews at the hands of the Romans,” Davis’ statement read, in part. “If she had asked all blacks to go back to Africa, what would the White House Correspondents Association’s position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials — much less a privileged honorary seat?”

OK. There are a few things wrong with this:

• The Jews were under Roman thumbs just over 2000 years ago. Not 2600. Oh facts, why must you bother the man? He’s trying to make a point.
• And his point is that Zionists should be able to screw the Palestinians because once upon a time the Romans screwed the Jews. I guess this guy takes that “eye for an eye” thing pretty seriously. Maybe we should introduce him to Gandhi. Or 20th century human rights law. Or a sense of moral decency.
• This guy should be made to feel complete and total shame for comparing the Jewish choice to settle in Palestine with the kidnapping of approximately 60 million Africans for the purposes of forced labor for several generations. The fact of choice matters! And the scales of atrocity faced by these two peoples are incomparable. America’s Black and Indigenous slaves faced centuries of holocausts.

Okay, but why bother ranting about this? I rant because of my respect for those lost in the Shoah. I believe we are required to live with dignity so that we honor the tragedy of their loss. This means recognizing that Jews of all people know what it is like to have a wall built to keep a group ghettoized and should know better than to do it to another group, as has been done to the Palestinians. It means that Jews should be most vocal about protecting the sanctity of human rights everywhere, for everyone, including Palestinians, because we know what happens when a world silently watches.

The Zionists who do not understand this, who excuse Israel’s behavior and attack her critics in the name of the Holocaust, are spitting on 6 million we tragically lost to the blind, lying hatred of another nationalist movement: Nazism.

Shalom aleichem and asalaam alaykum! Peace be unto you, on this Shabbat and every day after.