The title quote of this post is from this video, at about 19:30. The rest of it is long, boring, and typical sophomoric “analysis” by college students of what is wrong with Zionists and Zionism, filled with words like “oppression” and “people of color”. It was taken during the “occupation” of a building on the UC Davis campus. The Forward questions and downplays whether Jewish students were harassed, but at least reports that the anti-Israel students carried “Death to Zionism” signs. (A quick aside: Imagine what would happen to protesters that carried “Death to Islamism” signs.)
Anti-Semitism keeps rising, country by country. And yet, prominent Jews (and others) keep denying that it is a problem. And that most of the perpetrators just happen to be Muslim.
Barry Rubin has written one of his most important articles about the massive assault on Israel in a concerted, world-wide attack from the Israel-haters and the Western “intelligentsia,” which includes anti-Israel academics poisoning young minds against the Jewish state. He points out that nearly all of the major attacks on Israel are either lies or stories that get blown so far out of proportion to their actual facts as to be ridiculously anti-Israel. And that the assault is working.
Yet again this situation can no longer be dealt with as an ordinary, though rather spirited and emotional, debate. It is a massive, often conscious and deliberate, campaign of defamation. No longer on the margins, this campaign has penetrated into using the commanding heights of the Western mass media, intellectual, and academic institutions.
The defamation of Israel on college campuses is ubiquitous, so much so that Jewish groups charged some universities with violating their civil rights. And lost. But the constant drumbeat of anti-Jewish propaganda continues.
Some details of interest:
–This campaign’s intensity and one-sidedness has relatively little effect on the actual Middle East situation or on Western government policies.
–The main single issue is to try to portray Israel as responsible for the lack of peace, just as Jews were historically blamed by those hostile to them for antisemitism. Since the experience of the 1993-2000 “peace process” era, the fact that the conflict continues because of the intransigence of Israel’s enemies should have been obvious. Yet this history has been forgotten and its impact on Israeli thinking buried or censored.
–Much of the new antagonism stems from Western intelligentsias’ sharp turn to the left. The question, of course, is why Israel is such a prominent issue among the many causes available to them.
–What is important is not so much to define specific things as “antisemitic”—which generates distracting debates—but to explicate the creation of a situation equivalent in effect to pre-1945 antisemitism. Since about 40 percent of the world’s Jews live in Israel and most of the rest support Israel, the resulting slander and demonization is also a slur and hatred against the vast majority of Jews. The irrationality, obsession, intimidation, and slander is quite equivalent to what Jews suffered under historic antisemitism.
–Israel, Israelis, and their supporters are portrayed—as in classical antisemitism–as irrational creatures involved in incomprehensible behavior. Removing from public consciousness their experiences, attitudes, and sufferings leaves the conclusion that their behavior is evil, racist, bloodthirsty and seeking total power.
Read the whole thing. And spread the link far and wide.