Vintage Pilar Rahola: Jews of Six Arms

Mario M
Portal of Ideas
3 January '10

As I have done before, I am reprinting here a speech given by Pilar Rahola at the Conference in the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism. For those of you not familiar with Dr. Rahola, she is a Spanish Catalan journalist, writer, and former politician and Member of Parliament.

Pilar Rahola has published several books in Spanish and Catalan and is a columnist in La Vanguardia, Spain; La Nación, Argentina; and Diario de América, USA. Rahola appears frequently on television and has taken part in several university lectures. From 1987 to 1990, she was director of the Catalan publishing house Pòrtic, and as a journalist, she covered the Eritrean-Ethiopian War, the Balkan Wars, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a politician, Rahola was the only member of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in the Spanish Congress of Deputies in 5th and 6th Spanish legislatures. She also served as vice-mayor of Barcelona. Rahola also participated in several committees of investigation, especially those related to political corruption such as the comisión Roldán. In 1996, she left Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya to join Àngel Colom and Joan Laporta in a new political group, the "Partit per la Independència", but after this failed, she concentrated on journalism and writing. Her areas of interest include women's rights, international human rights, and animal rights. In recent years she has attracted controversy in Spain for her critical support of Israel and Zionism.

Jews of Six Arms, speech by Pilar Rahola

A meeting in Barcelona with a hundred lawyers and judges a month ago.

They have come together to hear my opinions on the Middle-Eastern conflict. They know that I am a heterodoxal vessel, in the shipwreck of “single thinking” regarding Israel, which rules in my country. They want to listen to me, because they ask themselves why, if Pilar is a serious journalist, does she risk losing her credibility by defending the bad guys, the guilty? I answer provocatively – You all believe that you are experts in international politics when you talk about Israel, but you really know nothing. Would you dare talk about the conflict in Rwanda, in Kashmir? In Chechnya? – No.

They are jurists, their turf is not geopolitics. But against Israel they dare, as does everybody else. Why? Because Israel is permanently under the media magnifying glass and the distorted image pollutes the world’s brains. And because it is part of what is politically correct, it seems part of solidarity, because talking against Israel is free. And so, cultured people when they read about Israel, are ready to believe that Jews have six arms, in the same way that during the Middle Ages people believed all sorts of outrageous things.

The first question, then, is why so many intelligent people, when talking about Israel, suddenly become idiots. The problem that those of us, who do not demonize Israel have, is that there exists no debate on the conflict. All that exists is the banner; there’s no exchange of ideas. We throw slogans at each other; we don’t have serious information, we suffer from the “burger journalism” syndrome, full of prejudices, propaganda and simplification. Intellectual thinkers and international journalists have given up on Israel. It doesn't exist exist. That is why, when someone tries to go beyond the “single thought” of criticizing Israel, he becomes suspect and unfaithful, and is immediately segregated. Why?

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