Israel’s war on dissent

Any negativity is now considered anti-Semitism

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

11/5/03

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/imagine.htm

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a Boston Red Sox fan. Yes, it’s a painful thought, but it will stick in your head for a while. Now imagine you are at Yankee Stadium, and it’s the bottom of the ninth, the Sox are leading 5-4, and your ace reliever has just taken the mound to face the top of the Yankee batting order.

You, being a red-blooded Bosox fan, start shouting things like "Go Red Sox!" and "Easy out! Easy out!"

Then you shout, "New York sucks!" at which point stadium security arrests you, turns you over to the NYPD, whereupon you are hauled off to jail and charged with a hate crime for shouting "New York sucks!"

It seems that New York has determined that any criticism of their team, especially in regard to how they play the Red Sox, is racism and should be treated as a hate crime.

That sounds pretty loony, doesn’t it?

The government of the state of Israel, which is considerably less likeable than the New York Yankees, has decided that this is how it will handle any and all criticism of its policies, particularly in regard to how it treats the Palestinians.

A case in point was made over the weekend, when news of a poll conducted by the Observer (what the London Guardian calls itself on Sundays) was leaked that stated that a large majority of Europeans regarded Israel as a threat to peace.

Now, I admit the poll results surprised me a bit. I would have considered America and Russia greater threats to world peace. (In case nobody has noticed, Russia appears to be in the early stages of another communist revolution. Revolutions in countries that have thousands of nuclear weapons are always a little disquieting.) I would have put Israel third.

But Israel came in first, being named the greatest danger to world peace by 59% of the respondents, 7,500 distributed equally among the 15 European Union nations.

That makes for a fairly good statistical universe. Assuming the methodology of the poll wasn’t too screwy, it’s safe to assume that the Sharon regime worries 3 out of 5 Europeans more than does the Putsch regime in America, or the Putin regime in Russia, or the instability in their respective victims: Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan (we gang-raped Afghanistan, a rare instance of US/Russian cooperation). North Korea is on the list, and it’s my personal belief that any crackpot with a haircut like that one who has nuclear weapons SHOULD be regarded as a threat to world peace.

But Israel immediately started a huge uproar over the poll, claiming that the EU staged it in order to foment anti-Semitism. Which was pretty ridiculous, but the EU immediately condemned the poll itself. Israel further demanded that the EU be excluded from all further negotiations which was even more ridiculous.

The thing about the poll is that while Israel was selected by 59% of respondents when asked if they were regarded as a threat to world peace, 56% selected the US, Iran, and North Korea. So it wasn’t like Israel was singled out as the heavy; they just happened to get picked slightly more often than those other three countries.

I don’t know, off hand, how great a percentage of the population of Europe is anti-Semitic. Certainly 3% are. Probably more than 10%. In places like Poland, it might be 50% of the population.

There are probably enough anti-Semites to give Israel a boost to become the nation of greatest concern. If I had been a respondent in that poll, I probably would have picked America, Pakistan, Russia and India as being the most likely to endanger world peace, but Israel would have made the list of those that are a threat. That’s one way in which the poll wasn’t really a popularity contest: respondents were free to pick none, one, some or all of the 15 countries listed.

Israel finished three percent ahead of everyone else, and it probably did reflect some anti-Semitism, along with disgust at the Sharon regime.

But it almost certainly reflected world concern over the thousands of Palestinians killed, the bulldozing of homes, the illegal settlements, the 410 mile wall (which Israel, in a truly Goebbelsesque moment, calls a "fence"), the strength of its military and its willingness to use it, and the attacks in Syria and Lebanon are all good reasons to consider Israel a threat to world peace.

Certainly it’s more of a threat than Afghanistan, which has nothing to threaten the world with but rocks and rubble, and exists mostly as a shattered collection of fiefdoms surrounding small American colonies in Kabul and Mosul. It’s more of a threat than Somalia, which hasn’t had a government in 15 years, let alone a military.

Israel is on a list of threats to world peace because, like the US, like North Korea, like India and Pakistan with their deadly nuclear dance, and like Iran, it belongs there.

Incidently, there are a lot of people who hate the inhabitants of India and Pakistan just as much as some people hate Jews. Hitler’s plans for the subcontinent made the Holocaust look like just a pre-season warmup game. He planned on killing hundreds of millions of people in India once he invaded that region.

However, does condemning the policies of Musharraf and Vajpayee equate to hatred of the Indian and Pakistani peoples? It does not.

To try to blame that purely on anti-Semitism is idiotic. It’s also dishonest, self-serving, and nothing more than trading in on residual guilt from the Holocaust to try and cow people into not criticizing Israel.

I referred to Sharon as a nazi a few weeks back – Sharon alone, mind you. A woman wrote and upbraided me for it, saying that it was a particular insult to call any Jew a Nazi. She then said that I had insulted every Jewish person in the world. To me, that was like saying that by opposing Putsch and calling him a neo-fascist, I was insulting every English-speaking person in the world. It didn’t follow.

The Israelis demanded that the EU be excluded from any negotiations between Israel and Palestine because this poll had taken place in Europe. That would be like banning America from the Olympics because a poll showed that most Americans didn’t think Greece should develop a nuclear arsenal. It doesn’t make any sense.

The EU knuckled under to an extent, agreeing that the poll "revealed anti-Semitism" but not, quite noticeably, repudiating the findings themselves.

Israel is unpopular primarily because it has a blood-thirsty and vicious regime that is committing atrocities. To try to blame it on anti-Semitism alone is dishonest and disingenuous.

Now watch: I’ll get mail accusing me of being a Holocaust denier as a result of this essay.