Opinion Editorials, May 2012

Absurdity of Equating Opposition to Israel with Anti-Semitism

By Khalid Amayreh

PIC, Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, May 15, 2012

In a shameless effort to criminalize criticisms of Israel, pro-Israeli circles in some western countries have been trying to equate criticisms of Israeli policies and actions with anti-Semitism. The brazen effort is ostensibly intended to intimidate and silence the increasing awareness, especially among younger generations on college campuses, that Israel is in fact a racist country par excellance that is disguised as a democracy.

In recent weeks, Israel firsters organized letter-writing campaigns and published advertisements in leading newspapers in North America lumping criticisms of Israel and anti-Semitism. The letters, targeting college administrations, demanded a stringent action against students and professors "bad mouthing Israel."

Unfortunately, some pusillanimous officials readily caved in to Zionist intimidation, an intimidation amounting to intellectual terrorism. Only those willing to confront the Zionist golem display steadfastness and refuse to budge.

I believe writers and intellectuals around the world have a moral responsibility to destroy, once and for all, the taboo of criticizing Israel in western countries, especially the United States, Canada, France and Germany. The recent criticisms of Israel by the German poet Gunter Grass are undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

Israel is a nation-state and ought to be treated like any other nation-state. That is to say, Israel must not be treated as above the laws and norms of humanity and should therefore be severely condemned when it indulged in actions and behavior deemed by the rest of mankind as criminal and nefarious. Needless to say, constant aggression, bellicosity and recalcitrance have always constituted Israel modus operandi.

Pro-Israeli circles often try to invent an anti-Semitic element behind every legitimate criticism of Israel.

But this is a cheap and increasingly exposed exploitation and manipulation of true anti-Semitism, a morbid form of racism that ought to be denounced.

However, the behaviors of the shipyard dogs of Zionism would have us believe that true anti-Semites are no longer those who hate Jews for being Jewish, but rather those Zionist fanatics criticize for criticizing Israel for being criminal, murderous and evil.

Well, we are supposed to be living in a moral universe where no people should have more rights than the rest of mankind.

Proceeding from this timeless basic logic, if criticizing Israel, including questioning the moral legitimacy of Israel's very existence, amounts to anti-Semitism, then humanity has a moral obligation to be anti-Semitic.

Opponents of Israel, it must be proclaimed loudly, don't hate Israel because Israel is Jewish; they hate Israel because Israel happens to be a gigantic crime against humanity, a virulent practitioner of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, which is committed to the national destruction of another people, the Palestinian people.

Yes, anti-Judaism is wrong and should be rejected. However, if Judaism, especially Jewishness, can not maintain a decent and peaceful existence outside the realm of racism, apartheid, and genocidal supremacy, then people will have second thoughts about Judaism.

More to the point, some of the most ardent critics of Zionism and Israel happen to be Jews, people such as Israel Shahak, Gilaad Atzmon, Norman Finkelstein and Alfred Lillienthal.

This alone should make us dismiss the claim that one can't be anti-Israeli without being anti-Semitic with the contempt it deserves.

Again, we live in a moral universe, and no people should be above the laws and norms of humanity.

Hence, if Jews think, behave and act like the Nazis thought, behaved and acted, then these Jews must be rejected with the same vigor and same determination employed against the Nazis.

This is so because there is no such a thing as a kosher genocide, or kosher lebensraum or kosher racism.

Israel may not yet be the full-fledged Nazi-Germany of the Middle East. However, with the Jewish state armed to the teeth and acquiring nuclear submarines, in addition to its formidable nuclear arsenal, expecting the unthinkable is not far-fetched.

The Israeli Jewish society continues to move, rather phenomenally and decidedly, toward a form of Jewish fascism and jingoism that is strikingly similar to the situation that prevailed in Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. We should remember that Hitler, too, came through elections.

As was the case in Germany several decades ago, when anti-Jewish laws were enacted, anti-Palestinian laws are being enacted in Israel with brazen indifference to human and civil rights.

More to the point, Israeli religious leaders are routinely invoking biblical genocides and morbid Talmudic edicts every time Israel's helpless victims cry out for freedom and justice. In short, Israeli violent racism stinks to the seventh heaven.

Indeed, with the gurus of Talmudic barbarianism now occupying the main centers of power in Israel, and with the Israeli army effectively becoming a Jewish version of the Wehrmacht, it would be somewhat reasonable to expect the worse in years to come especially as Israel continues to pursue a policy based on lebensraum, mass terror and ethnic cleansing.

Moreover, we have to keep in mind that the holocaust didn't begin with Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Treblinka or Mauthausen, for these things happened much later.

In fact, these concentration camps were ultimate "effects" of "causes" that happened years earlier, such as the Nuremberg laws of 1935. I am talking more or less about the venomous anti-Gentile racism that the entire Israeli society is now spewing against the unprotected Palestinian community.

Just take the daily thuggish acts against the Palestinians, carried out by genocidal Jewish settlers and compare these acts with the anti-Jewish activities carried out by the Hitler youth gangs.

Yes, the scope may not be identical in both cases. However, the maliciousness, the nefariousness and mental willingness to commit senseless murder are more or less the same.

But the more pressing question is whether we should or shouldn't learn from history.

Indeed, one might ask: Must Israel if allowed, thanks to international indifference, powerlessness and probably acquiescence, to annihilate millions of Palestinians so that the world would wake up to the liquidation by Israel of the national existence of the Palestinian people? Such a holocaust, which is no longer unthinkable, must be prevented at all costs.

In 1948, President Harry Truman was infuriated by Jewish terrorism, which was nothing in comparison to Israel's terror these days, angrily wrote in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt: "I fear very much that the Jews are being like all underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath."

Well, I am afraid Truman's prophecy has come true.

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