Category — Anti-Zionism

Unfortunately, the Iranian president’s speech at Columbia is closed to the general public. However, if I were able to attend, I would ask him the following hard hitting questions on behalf of New York’s Jewish community.

1) According to what you have heard in your circles, what are some of the better Persian restaurants in the city?

2) Is Jewish-Persian food the same as regular Persian food? Because I didn’t like Jewish-Persian food all that much when I had it.

3) I find Persian women very attractive, but have heard they are often hairy. Is this true, or is it a Moroccan slander?

4) I have met Zoroastrians, and they seemed tolerant and quite interesting. Much more so than the run-of-the-mill monotheist (yawn). Do you ever think maybe you guys made a mistake becoming a Muslim nation? Why did you feel you needed to become more like the Arabs? Do you ever have buyer’s remorse?

5) What words of encouragement do you have for New York’s intactivist community?

Pictured: Some Jew protesting academic free speech, courtesy of NY1.

Cross-Currents has a great article deploring the behavior of Israeli teens in Poland. No, really.

Jonathan Rosenblum writes in “Negating the Past, Dishonoring the Present,�

The egregious behavior of secular Israeli high schools students in Poland – long a source of embarrassment – has now reached such a crescendo as to threaten Polish-Israeli relations. The May 25 Jerusalem Post quoted the Polish ambassador to Israel, “[H]igh level relations are not in danger, but the image of Israel in Poland is.� And the Israeli ambassador to Poland went even further saying, “the relationship between Israel and Poland is in danger.�

The latest in a long-line of scandals involving the behavior of Israeli teenagers on visits to Poland was triggered by a report in the Polish paper Prezekroj accusing Israeli teens of tearing apart their hotel rooms, playing soccer in the hallways of their hotels in the middle of the night, engaging in the lowest imaginable behaviors, and of humiliating the flight attendants on Lot Airlines, the Polish national carrier. The Prezekroj article was, unfortunately, not the first such report to surface in recent years.

The most charitable explanation for the behavior of the Israeli teens is that they were undergoing some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder after the jarring experience of visiting so many mass graves and concentration camps[...] That explanation, however, is too charitable by a considerable margin. At the very least, it would suggest that something is dramatically wrong with Holocaust education in Israel if what the Israeli high school students witnessed in Poland so shocked them that they lost all sense of boundaries.

Rosenblum offers an explanation for the Zionist teens abusive behavior from the greatest living Jewish writer, Ahron Appelfeld, who is not particularly appreciated by Israelis.

A few years back, Appelfeld accused Zionism of having followed the path of modern ideological movements in its negation of the past – in this case, the history of the Jewish Diaspora. The result, he said, is that many modern Israelis have “amputated their past� and left a “black hole of identity� in its place.

Appelfeld went so far as to accuse modern Israelis of having internalized the anti-Semites’ critique of the Diaspora Jew to the point that everything “that obliges them to remember that they are Jews makes them flinch [and] aroused disgust in them.�

Whatever the cause, this has to stop, and it has to stop now. We cannot have Zionist punks threatening international relations between nations and communities. This is as absurd as it is obscene.

American Conservative published an interesting article by Philip Weiss, who was pushed out of The Observer after it was purchased by Jared Kushner, a Chabad supporter.

Weiss writes,

My writing was becoming increasingly anti-Zionist. I visited Israel for the first time last summer, and in the West Bank, I met a South African who told me conditions were worse there than they had been under apartheid. When I got back, I posted a photograph of Arabs forced to worship outside the Damascus Gate to the Old City of Jerusalem because of heightened Israeli security, and a reader of my blog launched an “investigation� and called the photographer, evidently thinking I’d doctored the image.

I knew that Zionists were lobbying The Observer, writing to my editor and the new owner. Peter once said he got more e-mail about me than anything else in the paper. One of these e-mails, copied to me, said there was a “cancer on The Observer.â€? That was mild. Others commented as “Phil Weissâ€? and purported to confess my bitterness over bad book reviews I’d gotten or said they had loved having sex with my Christian mother-in-law. One wrote that he wanted to “cut off your head and s–t down your neck.â€?

One day Peter mentioned that the new owner had passed along one of these complaints and reminded him that the pro-Israel community was one he cared about. Peter said that he defended me, though he asked, “You’re not a Holocaust denier, are you?� “Of course not,� I said. “Good, I thought so.�

Ugly stuff, suspecting an anti-Zionist of Holocaust denial . But Weiss came late to this game, and has important gaps in his knowledge that are disturbing. He conflates Chabad with “the hassidim,� and presents their position on the West Bank as normative of Chassidim, when it is a minority Chassidic viewpoint.

Still, some of his ideas, while hardly original, are not expressed frequently, and are not popular public discussion points.

“The Jewish community had defined Jewishness as attachment to Israel, and it was not coming to grips with the effect of that attachment on the Arab world or the United States.�

Yeah, well…I worry about that also.

This is where it ends. This is its logical conclusion. Kissing your master before he blows your people to smithereens. Applauding him as he assures you your coreligionists will soon be destroyed in a new genocide. Because they are no longer your coreligionists. You truly no longer see them as Jews like you. You believe your insanity, that they are dibbuks and monsters. Part of a foreign element, a “great multitude,” or however you explain it.

Judaism’s fundamentalists are not just similar in some theoretical way to Islam’s fundamentalists. They are publicly making out. They can’t keep their hands off each other.

There is such a thing as too frum.

Unless it means something else. Something far more thought out and perhaps more chilling.

For those of us who are listening to Holocaust deniers carefully, and not just as an excuse to build yet another museum, we know that Holocaust denial is frequently not really a call for clearer documentation of the Holocaust, but rather, a call for another Holocaust. This is clearly Ahmadinejad’s message, as he seeks nuclear arms.

But he appears to be intentionally bundling his threat to the Jewish state today with an offer of peaceful dismantlement.

Iran Daily reports,

“We recommend the western countries to prepare the grounds for dismantling the Zionist regime as they themselves have established it,� he [Ahmadinejad] said.

Noting that the dismantling of the Zionist regime by the West will be beneficial for international peace, he expressed hope that supporters of the Zionist regime will eventually give a positive response to his proposal. Ahmadinejad pointed out that international problems can be resolved in a friendly and rational manner and in a tranquil manner. “We should help bring about real peace by adopting humanistic methods,“ he said.

Neturei Karta has long been rumored to have ties to the general, non-Zionist haredi community, and has been known to intercede on their behalf. Perhaps they are also seeking to strengthen ties to this regime because they see the writing on the wall, and hope when the time comes, they will be able to act as brokers, and preempt a nuclear destruction of the Jewish state with a peaceful dismantling of it, when Iran’s in a position to make such an ultimatum either directly or indirectly. Perhaps they don’t believe they will succeed, but at least want to attempt to do so, allowing more time to save lives through emigration by facilitating an Iranian attempt at a diplomatic solution before nuking the Jewish state.

I am trying to understand Neturei Karta’s thinking, and would like to believe they see this as something more than simply hatred in their unjustifiable collaboration with the enemy.

Photograph courtesy of Failed Messiah.