My good friend Soccer Dad had a fine post up last week entitled Zionist on the defense' in which he discusses the veritable orgy of attacks on Israel's legitimacy, and some of the responses to the various charges levied.
They're all fine as far as that goes....but they mostly have little effect on the heart of the problem, the way I see it.
The reason for that, of course, is that when it comes to the anti-Zionist, these are essentially attacks on Israel's very right to exist. And for some reason, Jews continue to take these attacks and treat them as legitimate, intellectual propositions that can be refuted logically.
To put it simply, scratch an `anti-Zionist' and you almost never have to delve too deeply to find a Jew hater. And such people almost never respond well to logic, no matter how flawlessly delivered.
This situation is unfortunately complicated by self-hating Jews who are more than willing to provide cover for `anti-Zionists' by attacking their fellow Jews to show what liberal, understanding people they are. That dishonorable tradition goes back in history to the `anti-Zionists' who took the side of the Seleucid Greeks and Romans against their own people and paved the way for the ancient conquests of Israel. It continues with the Tony Judts, Uri Averneys of today.
So, what's the best way to deal with `anti-Zionism'? Simple - you don't `refute' it, since that kind of racism isn't something that can be `refuted' - you simply confront it head on, forcefully so that people that endorse this kind of tacit racism realize that while they certainly have the freedom to express any cockamamie ideas they might have, there are personal consequences not only for espousing these beliefs, but for enabling them in the name of `academic freedom' or political correctness or a `free exchange of ideas'.
One good example of this was the article I wrote a while back about the successful campaign that got Whole Foods to stop supporting Pacifica's `Radio Intifada' program. Whole Foods finally understood, to their credit, that they were funding jihad and racism and made a commendable decision to change their ways.
Here's another not so good case in point. During this same time period, the Muslim Student's Union, with the connivance of the administration staged a week long `anti-Zionist' hate fest, with kinky side orders of Holocaust denial on the campus of UC Irvine. What's more, the doings at UC Irvine are just one in a long string of such events nationwide. Penn State, Rutgers and plenty of other universities have hosted similar events.
There are plenty of Jewish students at these universities, and organizations like Hillel, and the normal response from them is to put up neat little card tables with leaflets and maybe give a few speeches. Well and good...but it not only does nothing to stop this racist behavior, it enables it, which is why such events keep on being repeated.
So, let's look at this from the other end of the telescope. Have you ever noticed that people like Daniel Pipes, Walid Shoebat, Steve Emerson, Nonie Darwish, Brigitte Gabriel or Robert Spencer rarely if ever appear at America's universities?
Aside from the fact that there's a fair amount of faculty at America's institutions of higher learning that have disdain for their views, here's what's happened whenever any of the above have responded to an invitation to speak on campus - rather than bothering with card tables, leaflets and debate, the Muslims and their allies gathered in howling mobs, shouting down the speakers, refusing to let them continue and in general creating a huge ruckus that disrupted the events and intimidated the university silly enough to allow them to appear on campus.
In other words, almost every time any of them has appeared on campus, the Muslim students and their Angry Left allies have created a totally threatening atmosphere of intimidation and created such expensive and intense security problems, as well as potential liability for the universities that none of them would even dare allow speakers like that to ever return.
Beginning to get the picture?
I'll make it simpler - how do you think Black students would react to an on-Campus, university sanctioned event by the Aryan nation or the Klu Klux Clan?
My father of blessed memory provided me with a clear example of how this works at a very young age, when the City of Los Angeles gave the Nazis a permit to march downtown. Needless to say, when my dad found out about this, I remember him being on the phone for quite some time and making a lot of phone calls.
When the Nazis arrive for their march, they found a fairly sizable group of Jewish war veterans and assorted nogoodniks waiting for them, ready to have a frank debate on their views at street level, as it were.
And when the wanna-be brownshirts got a good look at what was waiting for them, they decided that they weren't quite ready for Valhalla just then and there and departed the scene.
My father's generation of Jews was a little closer in history to the Holocaust, and definitely a bit less tolerant of people who wanted to repeat it.
The Jews weren't finished quite yet. They staged an impromptu rally of their own, tied up traffic and only dispersed after a local rabbi arrived on the scene and appealed to them to leave.
As for the City of Los Angeles, it cost them a fortune in police overtime, as well as a lot of good will. And they never again even thought about giving the Nazis a permit to march.
That, in a nutshell is how you cure `anti-Zionism' - by refusing to tolerate it, by treating it like the blatant bigotry it is, and by responding appropriately....whether it's via a lawsuit, a boycott, or a little guerrilla street theater. And by making it a lot more trouble than it's worth for it's enablers to give it a pass.
Jabotinsky was right.