Wednesday, February 21, 2007

I Agree with Edward Alexander

Edward Alexander is a co-author, with Paul Bogdanor, of "The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders."



He published today in the NY Post a great oped entitled, "Leftist Jews' Hateful Obsession.

Excerpts:-

Too many writers and pundits today are obsessed, almost pathologically, by the conviction that Israel is the most evil country that ever has existed, and that its removal from the family of nations is a precondition of world peace.

Such lethally utopian dreams are not strictly the playground of anti-Semites, but also the common coin of much liberal Jewish writing and speechifying about Israel.

...Of course the hoary cliché about equating "criticism of Israel" with anti-Semitism has been invoked ad nauseam...To my knowledge, no one has ever been identified who really made this equation. On the other hand, countless liberal-left Jews have applied the euphemism "criticism of Israel" to all the following: demonization of that country as the center of the world's evil; calls for its destruction; economic and academic boycotts of its citizens.

...When the BBC's Tom Paulin recommended that Jews living in the West Bank "should be shot dead," his Jewish defenders at Harvard and Columbia called his remarks "criticism of Israel" and "not over the line."

Vassar professor Andrew Bush called the second Palestinian intifada, during which Arab suicide bombers and lynch mobs killed 1,000 people and wounded 10,000 more, "a critique of Zionism."

...When people like NYU's Tony Judt, the most vociferous and self-righteous of Rosenfeld's critics, issue their monthly calls for politicide in Israel, which they demonize as the sole "anachronistic" state in an otherwise progressive multicultural world, don't they sense, even subconsciously, a potential kinship with the genocidally inclined (and not-at-all progressive) president of Iran? In law, such kinship is called "accessory to murder."

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