The Hour of the Hanging Judges: Demonizing Israel and Pretending It Is Ordinary Criticism

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
10 November '10

This is getting to be a pretty common kind of story. The mayor of Frankfurt invites a Jewish intellectual whose family left Germany in 1932 to speak on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The problem is that this man, Alfred Grosser, is a ferocious critic of Israel.

Grosser claims the Gaza Strip is a concentration camp (possibly true, but if so it is a concentration camp owned and run by Hamas); calls for ending Israel as a Jewish state; urges Germany to be more critical of Israel; and blames Israeli policies (rather than the deliberate lies about them) are responsible for increasing antisemitism (isn’t that what George Soros said?)

All of this is interpreted by the Christian Science Monitor, and many others, as merely rejecting:

“…the notion that criticism of Israel is synonymous with anti-Semitism. If Germans want to criticize the blockade of Gaza or treatment of Palestinians, they should be able to without guilt, many say.”

This is the usual absurd response.

But one can criticize Israel’s “blockade” of Gaza (I won’t explain here why it is needed and, no doubt, the people who criticize it have never read these reasons) without calling it a “concentration camp,” which implies deliberate mass murder.

But it is possible to criticize Israel without calling for its extinction—since that is, in fact, what abolishing the existence of a Jewish state means.

(Read full article)

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