Sunday, January 3, 2010

The Jews are the Worst

Last week some of us debated the existence of Rabbi Tony Jutner, a person who leaves extreme anti-Israeli comments at The Forward. The general feeling was that he's "too bad to be true", so to speak. No real person could be so totally idiotic in their single-minded rejection of Israel. (That, and the fact that Google couldn't find any trace of the fellow's existence).

I introduce you to Alex Kane, a 20-year-old student in New York, who writes regularly for The Indypendent; I came across him at Mondoweiss.
The question was like an electric shock to the six or so Palestine solidarity activists, including myself, as we were standing inside a classroom at a school in Gaza City.“Why the Palestinians? Why are we the only ones suffering?” asked a Palestinian girl who was probably about nine or ten-years-old. And then the enormity of what the people of Gaza go through every day hit me...

Although I didn’t have this reaction to the question of “why the Palestinians” right away, and I wouldn’t have said it out loud in front of a classroom of young Palestinian girls, I thought back to a story a professor at school told me. He is a Holocaust survivor, and was teaching a course I took on the culture and politics of Nazi Germany. One story that remains with me from that professor is when he described a scene in Hungary, where an Austrian friend, who came to stay with his family in Hungary after the Nazi invasion in 1938, repeatedly asked, “What have we done?” And someone in my professor’s family responded, “Your only crime is that you were born a Jew.”

The only reason why these innocent girls, and all the innocent children and people of Palestine are suffering, is because they committed the “crime” of being born Palestinian. Had they been born Israeli, or in the United States, the crippling siege on Gaza would not be a reality for them. But it is. The Zionist movement had looked to Palestine as a place where Jews could create an state where only Jews would reside, and the children of Gaza continue to live with the indescribable effects of occupation, war, and death that came as a direct result of the Zionist move to establish a state in Palestine.

I've been around long enough to recognize that college students need the opportunity to take positions they'll later reject. I even did it myself, briefly. Yet this tolerance isn't open-ended. Saying that the Jews purposefully and intentionally have persecuted anyone to an extent without equal anywhere else is beyond the pale in my book. Kane lives in a democracy so he may say whatever he wishes, but the rest of us need to brand him for what he says. What he chooses to write, beyond being a simple pack of lies, is also stark hatred of Jews.

Hosted on a site owned by two Jews.

12 comments:

Barry Meislin said...

And proud at that of their ignorance and hatred of Jews.

They call it "humanism".

Anonymous said...

no excuses for this guy

but if one of their gurus starts by introducing them to the dilemma of why children or preferably even toddlers have to suffer because either their society wasn't resilient enough to keep a mad/evil one from power or to keep a greedy one from invading he has them hooked to a real problem and that provides a smoke screen under which he can distribute any venom he likes.

i.e. I would like to look for possibilities of how to build resilience against this seductive rhetorical trick, because once somebody has established that emotional bond with preferably exotic looking children the empathy hormones are running wild and clear thinking is not available. (Insurance sellers are taught that they should ask their first questions in a way that the reasonable answer is yes, because it has been shown that somebody who has said at the beginning 3 or 5 times yes is less likely to say no when it comes to signing).

I am pretty sure that in my own country in a test there would be more resources available to help foreign kids than to do something for our in-country ones. BTW I am not sure whether it is the foreign look that matters more or that they are far away. That after this kind of base emotion has been established "they" love to concentrate on Jews or nowadays on Israelis has baffled me all my life and I still don't get it because it seems so plain weird.

- While still working I always knew and/or worked with Jews and could never find them anymore special or different than any other British or French or Indian or Catholics or Protestants or Muslims or blondes or brunettes.

rgds,
Silke

NormanF said...

The Palestinians' suffering is entirely self-inflicted. Its what they choose to do to themselves that shows they wouldn't be in the straits they are in if they stopped trying to punish Israel for their own extremism. Every human being is accountable before G-d and decent people don't shift the responsibility for the consequences of their choices onto others.

Lee Ratner said...

You know I really think that the so-called Pro-Palestinian activists are more concerned with hurting Israel than helping the Palestinians. Nearly all of their activities revolve around at least trying to sully Israel's image in the world rather than doing anything constructive for the Palestinians, like establishing and running schools that don't emphasize Jew-hatred, a word I think that is in serious need of resurrection. It describes the ugliness of a lot of people perfectly.

BTW, Yaacov I really liked you book. I read it when it came out. It was very powerful and concise defense of Israel and Zionism.

Empress Trudy said...

It's not a sin to be retarded.

Anonymous said...

This is Hell

That was the comment of the decade (so far).

Asaf

Jon said...

To be fair, I didn't see where he said that the Jews did anything "without equal anywhere else."

Anonymous said...

"What he chooses to write, beyond being a simple pack of lies, is also stark hatred of Jews.'


True, but what he says is supported by the antisemitic views of web site owners.

"Hosted on a site owned by two Jews."


Weiss has on many occasions said that he didn't consider himself Jewish.

Lee Ratner said...

I often wonder why we Jews are cursed with such an abundance of self-hating members. The two Jews behind Mondoweiss, Norman Finkelstein and plenty of others are easily identifiable as self-hating Jews. Jews completely antipathetic to their own people to the extent that the seek to aid anti-Semites in hurting us. One struggles to think of an African-American equivalent or the equivalent in any other minority group.

Anonymous said...

Re Lee's comment - We're just too iconoclastic for our own good sometimes. A society that produced Marx, Einstein, and Freud is also going to produce a lot of people who take self-criticism way too far.

Lisa

Jinpa77 said...

That guy Alex Kane is quite the faux deep-thinker, isn't he? I bet if you went through and quizzed him on the last 140 years of the history of Israel, he would be 100% clueless. He is so ignorant that he doesn't even seek out the facts, he just starts his thinking at the present, completely ignoring the fact that the Jews came in peace, and started creating economic opportunities that even led large numbers of Arabs to migrate into the land. They didn't just start persecuting Arabs - the Arabs soon began persecuting the Jews, which created the whole situation! He thinks he is doing himself and society a favor by taking an "unpopular/countercultural viewpoint." If anyone ever introduces him to the study of history, we can only hope that the scales will fall from his eyes.

sammy said...

Lost of antisemitic comments here. Shameful, really.