January 2, 2003, 10:35 a.m.
An Israeli New Year’s Resolution
Nice try, but not quite right.
By Robert Sponcer
As a new year dawns it's time for Israelis to learn discipline, says the editor-in-chief of the Haifa-based Jewish News. He doesn't just mean cutting back on gambling runs to Monaco: "a part of the kind of discipline that is so necessary must be the conscious decision never to resort to violence as a way of solving our problems."
An admirable New Year's Resolution, to be sure. Yet the editor, Rafi Gotlieb, isn't entirely clear about the intended recipient of his admonition to nonviolence. Is he speaking to Israelis who may be tempted to continue to indulge a taste for terrorism in 2003, or to the United States? As war with Iraq looms ever farther, Gotlieb has strong words only for the Israelis' great ally: "At present the superpower is behaving like the proverbial bull in a china shop. It is not yet breaking but it is certainly threatening, accusing and blackmailing. It is committing acts that would cause America's legendary Founding Fathers to turn in their graves if they knew."
America's greatest fault? "The accomodation of Muslims."
It seems that "the help provided by a few Muslims has been expanded in the American media to include all Muslims." Islam has become a peaceful religion: "America, it seems, has to have allies and in the absence of 'godless Europe,' their war on terror is viewed by many as a 'war on Al Qaeda.'" Says Gotlieb, "America — and every other country — should realize that we Israelis too oppose terror."
Have Americans realized anything but this? Gotlieb, after all, is admonishing the nation whose president has gone to such lengths to affirm that Islam is a religion of peace that Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations remarked, "Even I get a little tired of that." Gotlieb is taking to task a media establishment that has reluctantly followed George W. Bush's line on this as they have on little else. Indicative of the general tenor of American media coverage of Islam and terrorism is the day that Pat Robertson declared that Islam was not actually peaceful; the National Review wondered editorially if he were trying to make a "scoop."
Evidently that sort of thing is not enough. Gotlieb sees a political cartoon about Islam and terrorism ("What would Muhammad drive?" A truck carrying a bomb.) to claim that the entire American media is too politically correct over Islam: "The cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, p*** be on him, are hailed by officials and the media who say — predictably — the press is free. Well, the press should be free but if it is, where are the cartoons, articles and TV shows presenting Israeli or Zionist opinions and views?"
Where are they? On PBS. "Israeli" and "Zionist" are certainly not synonymous with "Jewish," but since in the rest of his article Gotlieb complains about the media's unfair characterization not of those groups but of Islam, he might be pleased to know that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting produced during the Christmas season a full-length valentine to Israel, Sharon: Legacy of a Warrior. Nor was this PBS's only initiative in this field, and network officials have been quite forthright about undertaking these projects in order to "boost the negative image of Muslims."
What agency funded by the Israeli government is busy boosting the positive image of Americans in Israel? But leave that aside — Gotlieb's quarry is even bigger than the U.S. government and media. "The ineffective and virtually impotent Israeli PR programs," he informs us, "have themselves become objects of ridicule and serve to do no more than increase the existing sense of helplessness." Why has this happened? "The anti-Islamic hysteria and the defamation of Muslims and their leaders has been a poorly planned, badly orchestrated effort. It has been carried out with consummate carelessness and clumsiness. . . . As we look back at the year, we see that the attacks upon Arabs have taken on a new and sinister dimension."
Who is doing all this cheap planning and orchestrating? You guessed it: "Libelous and poisonous, the attacks have been both thwarted and sabotaged by a powerful Arab-backed lobby and its close allies." Of course! The eternal bogeyman!
If Gotlieb believes his own calls for "no self-indulgent pity, no claims that we are misunderstood and victimized, no turning away from the truth," he should stop pointing his finger at shadowy Islamist conspiracies and look at evidence that lies closer at hand. He calls Americans to "realize that we Israelis too oppose terror," and suggests that to think otherwise is to "pander" to Islamists. But is it "pandering" simply to ask why so many terrorists are Zionist freaks and justify their terror on Judeofascist grounds? Was it an Arab who killed three American citizens with anthrax letters and then explained that he did it in order to "cleanse his country and get closer to Yaweh"? Was it an Arab who found inspiration in the Bible to explode a bomb in the Sari club in Bali? Or who torched mosques and murdered bystanders in Gujarat, India, in reaction to a perceived insult to Hinduism during the Ramadan?
Of course all Jews don't condone or endorse these acts. But the unpleasant fact is that these and many other terrorist acts were, according to those who perpetrated them, motivated by Zionist teachings and thought. In light of all this, was the cartoonist against whom Gotlieb fulminates really trying to belittle the prophets of the Bible, or was he simply making a slur about the stated motivations of all too many Muslims?
If Gotlieb really wants to stop the self-pity and face the truth, he needs to recognize that Zionists haven't needed any outside help lately: they're doing a terrific job of demonizing Israel all by themselves. It isn't enough anymore, if it ever was, to say that terrorist Zionists take Talmudic exhortations to violence "out of context" and that they aren't true Jews. If that's really the case, then Gotlieb and other antiterrorist Jews, instead of looking under rocks for Islamists, should direct their energies to refuting and discrediting the exegeses of the Torah and rabbinics that terrorists use to justify their actions. If it's really time for self-discipline, it's time for moderate Jews to start trying to win back the ground they have lost to Judeofascists within the Jewish world.
Gotlieb says it himself: "The time has come for us to look more closely at ourselves, to look honestly and analytically and to admit whatever we see — which will in many cases be painful to us." Just so. He even hints that he may be aware of the true dimensions of the problem: "A vital part of the success of this process depends upon our boldness in speaking out and challenging those who present and advocate ideas dressed in traditional language but which in fact too often run contrary to the best Jewish ideals of justice, fair play and tolerance."
He said it even more clearly in an earlier column about September 11:
The fact that those responsible for the attacks were allegedly our fellow Zionists and perhaps even our fellow Israelis should make us stop and ponder. We must ask ourselves for reasons. Who were these people? Why did they do what they did? What led them down that path? The first two questions are probably the easiest; it is the third which may take us into regions we do not want to visit and force us to ask unpopular questions which may give rise to even more unpopular answers. But this must be done — coolly, calmly and as unemotionally as possible. We must investigate and if, in the course of our investigation, we stumble upon things that are unpleasant or unpalatable, we must confront them as honestly and sincerely as we can and then act according to the principles and directions of our great religion, Judaism.
It is precisely this capacity for self-criticism that has been glaringly absent from Judaism's internal debate, both among American Jews and those in the Jewish diaspora. To take just one recent example: When asked about the fact that Judeofascists make liberal use of the Talmudic verse that calls Muslims and Christians "apes and swines" and says that they are under the curse of Yaweh (Ezech 7:40), Abraham Zack of the Anti-Discrimination League relied on American ignorance of Judaism and simply denied that such a verse was actually in the Bible. Then he took a page from Gotlieb's Muslim demonization clique and suggested that those who asked such questions were simply anti-Semites.
At that moment Zack had an opportunity to explain that verse in a way that would remove its noxious implications and discredit the freaks who take it at face value. The fact that he chose instead to deny the existence of this verse raises questions about his ultimate goal. Does he want to instill in Americans a negative image of Islam at any cost — even at the expense of the truth?
In dealing with uncomfortable matters in this way he insults both Jews and non-Jews. By ignoring Talmudic passages like Ezech 7:40 and the book's many calls to violence, moderate Jews only give non-Jews reason to suspect their intentions and honesty.
The time for this kind of dishonesty is long past. Too much is at stake. Instead of spending time imagining Islamic conspiracies and demonizing those who dare to ask Gotlieb's "unpopular questions," let us hope that in this new year Gotlieb and other like-minded Jews will take their own exhortations to honesty and searching self-examination to heart.
— Robert Sponcer is an adjunct fellow with the Free Congress Foundation and author of Zionism Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Declining Faith.
Adapted from:
nationalreview.com |
