Rats In The Cellar - When Jews Turn On Their Own

Ever wonder about whether people calling themselves Jews could actually be anti-Semites? Of course they can.

As I've mentioned before, the dinosaur media has a common tactic when it comes to attacking Israel - they'll find some self-hating leftard Jew to do the pick and shovel work for them, to fend off accusations of anti-Semitism.

This stuff typically runs in cycles. Earlier in the week it was the New York Time's own Jewish anti-Semite Roger Cohen. And now the Los Angeles Sunday Times has weighed in with a piece by one Ben Ehrenreich, who weighs in and writes that Zionism is the problem behind peace in the Middle East:

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

What Ehrenreich is telling you here is that he is a 'red diaper baby', someone raised by communists in a brand new religion that substituted for Judaism, no matter what other innocuous sounding names it might be called. This is an important sidebar. Let's go on...

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism

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There's a real quandary here. There's so much ignorance, bigotry and selective revisionism here that even to parse it feels like a waste of time and energy.

However, for the swing votes, those who may not know any better...

Zionism per se came into existence when another highly assimilated Jew, Theodore Herzl, covered the Dreyfuss trials as a journalist and watched mobs in Paris screaming death to the Jews, almost a century after Napoleon tore down the ghetto walls and allowed French Jews to freely assimilate in French society.What Dreyfuss realized is that the experiment of Jewish assimilation in Europe was a failure, and that the way for Jews to survive in freedom and dignity was not to ride the tides of fortune as a more or less tolerated minority but to have their own country.

It was because there was no Israel that 6 million Jews ended up in the ovens, and because Israel exists that similar orgies of death and slavery were not visited on the Jews of Ethiopia, Yemen, the former Soviet Union, and the Arab world.It was Aushwitz survivor Elie Wiesel who wrote that to him, the holiest spot in Israel was not the Kotel but the little booth at Lod Airport where a Jew was stamping entry visas.

Useful idiots like Ehrenreich simply don't understand that or willfully refuse to admit it because it doesn't jibe with their politics.

Ehrenreich also parrots the nonsense that Israel is an apartheid state ('founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity') , when in fact Israel is the most diverse and pluralistic state in the Middle East. it was, after all, not Israel that ethnically cleansed it's Arab minority after 1948...it was the Arabs who did that to the Jews. In Israel, Arabic is the country's second official language, Arab citizens have full political and legal rights and and Arabs can be found in every walk of Israeli life, including in the IDF and in Israel's Parliament, the Knesset. This is even more remarkable when one considers that Israel has been attacked by its Arab neighbors consistently since its founding.

Of course, to Ehrenreich, the very fact that Israel exists at all as a predominantly Jewish State is an affront to his leftist beliefs.

If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly 1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.

Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.

I would absolutely love to see Ehrenreich's reaction if his tony West L.A. digs were under missile attack from Hamas. He'd be flailing his wrists and screaming like a wounded peahen for somebody to do something about it, yet he has no compunction in demonizing Israel for doing what it needed to do to protect its citizens under attack...which makes him a flaming hypocrite of the first order.

And I've got news for him...it wasn't Israeli policies that stopped the Palestinians from have a second Arab Palestinian state. Israel, in case anyone has forgotten, is the only country in the Middle East to give the Palestinians so much as a square dunam of land for their own and allow them to plot their own destinies. After Oslo, the Palestinians could have elected to fulfill Oslo to the letter, forswearing terrorist violence, educating their people for peace and taking the steps to form an economic and political closeness with Israel, which is the only thing that could have actually led to the success of the Oslo venture.

Instead, Arafat did what he intended to do all along, from the moment the Oslo agreements were signed. He stole the aid money gullible western idiots gave him 'for the Palestinian people' created a terrorist enclave in Gaza and the Palestinian occupied areas of Judea and Samaria ( AKA the West Bank), built an army and when he felt the time was right, launched a brutal war against Israel's civilians.

The checkpoints, the security barrier, the so-called 'occupation' and yes, Israeli military ops like Defensive Shield and Cast Lead stem from Palestinian violence against Israel's civilians and nothing else.

And the violence itself stems not from a Palestinian desire for coexistence, but from a desire to annihilate every Jew in the Middle East- which is why the Palestinians support Hamas by a vast majority.And why Ehrenreich's idiotic call for a single Arab dominated state ( because that's exactly what it would be ) is a fantasy..but one that would be paid for by other people's blood, not his if it was ever implemented.

Needless to say, that won't ever happen unless the Israelis decide to commit national suicide. But the funny thing is that if Israel ever were to disappear as a Jewish state, the only thing to change in the Middle East would be the targets..which would then ultimately end up as Ehrenreich and people that think like he does.

He really ought to read the Hamas charter sometime and see what it says about Jews not only in Israel, but worldwide.

And yes, I have absolutely no trouble whatsoever in dubbing him a Jew hater...whether he realizes it or not.

Oh, and by the way, should you care to let him know how you feel about the matter, his MySpace page can be found here