International Analyst Network
06 August '11
http://www.analyst-network.com/article.php?art_id=3826
The entire Western world has suffered from a lack of moral authority for decades. Today, we in the West are reluctant to use our full military power or seek victory in war lest we appear imperialistic. We hesitate to enforce our borders lest we appear racist. We are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants (especially in Europe) lest we appear xenophobic. We are pained to give Western civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we appear supremacist. In short, today the West is on the defensive, because the very legitimacy of our modern societies requires constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past - racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on. And, in the process, we’ve lost the ability to discern right from wrong, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the demonization, de-legitimization and the double standard applied against Israel in the international arena.
So, why the hypocrisy?
In the aftermath of World War II, with the revelation that 2/3 of European Jews had been systematically exterminated by the Nazis, anti-Semitism became unfashionable. But that is no longer the case. As a British lord told journalist Penelope Wyatt a decade or so ago, “Thank G-d, we can once again say what we want about the Jews.” Today, haters of Israel feel less and less constrained not to express themselves in explicitly anti-Semitic terms. As the memory of the Holocaust fades into history, as we continue to transfer petro-wealth to our enemies; as Europe morphs into Eurabia; as dictators, despots and Islamists take control over the UN and other international bodies; as the Arab Spring evolves into an Arab Winter, and as our universities become hotbeds for virulent anti-Israel teachings and rhetoric - logic fades, facts and fictions become interchangeable, democracies become indistinguishable from dictatorships, history becomes irrelevant, and anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism become indistinguishable.
Sharansky noted several years ago, that there is a 3D test we should use to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism – de-legitimization, demonization and the double standard. Taking these three factors into account, one can discern that the new anti-Semitism manifests itself in many different forms and in many different forums – through divestment campaigns, international boycotts of Israeli products, boycotts of Israeli or even pro-Israel academics (like Alan Dershowitz) by Norwegian universities, holding Israel to standards no other nations in the world is required to meet, and through “Israel Apartheid Week” on Canadian and American college campuses where Israel is assigned the role of “Jew” among the nations of the world to be singled-out, cursed, harassed and defamed.
Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post: “Google "Israel and apartheid" and you will see that the two are linked in cyberspace” despite the fact that Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of Israel’s population, have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews, and even sit in the Knesset.” Think about this. Israel's Ambassador to Finland in the late 1990s was an Israeli Arab. Israel’s Deputy Consul General in Philadelphia, Raslan Abu Rukun, is an Israeli Druze Arab. In May 2004, Salim Jubran, an Israeli Arab, was appointed to the Israeli Supreme Court, and Arabic is an official language in Israel and is posted on all road signs. In 1948 there was only one Arab high school in Israel. Today, there are hundreds.
In fact, Israeli Arabs enjoy greater rights and privileges in Israel than do Palestinian Arabs in any Arab country in the Middle East where, as a matter of national policy, they are denied citizenship, forced to live in refugee camps, and denied access to many professions – as was the case under apartheid in South Africa.
Moreover, during the course of Israeli administrative control over the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian life expectancy increased 50% - from 48 to 72, while infant mortality declined 75% - from 60 per 1,000 live births to 15. Israel built seven universities in the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinian illiteracy dropped to 14%, as compared to 69% in Egypt and 44% in Syria. Palestinian GNP rose tenfold between 1967 and the beginning of the Oslo process in the early 1990s, and the West Bank has the fourth fastest growing economy in the world. As Jonathan Rosenblum points out in the Jewish World Review: “By any standard, a genocide in which the victim population’s life expectancy increases 50% over the course of three decades is a very peculiar sort of genocide.”
The Arab world has successfully used “the Palestinian refugee issue” for over sixty years to divert attention from its own incompetence, repressiveness, and corruption. But when supposedly learned Western anti-Israeli boycott campaigners on our campuses attack Israel as an apartheid state, we see not only their absolute ignorance of what apartheid was in South Africa, but we are led to question why they do not propose boycotts of states that truly merit international disgust like Syria, Sudan and Iran.
The reason is simple. These protests aren’t just against Israel. They are also against the Jewish People. Israel’s Operation Cast Lead at the close of 2008 – a legitimate act of self-defense by any and all international standards - evoked universal resentment and hatred. Around the world, synagogues and Jewish graves were desecrated and anti-Semitic chants were shouted at protests. In April 2009, a swastika was found painted on a Jewish fraternity house at the University of Florida and on American campuses, and comparisons continue to be made between Israelis and Nazis, and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz.
In France, according to French Ministry of Home Affairs data, 832 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in France in 2010, as compared with 474 such incidents in 2009 - a 75% increase, most of which was attributed to the country’s rising Islamic population and fallout from Israel’s counter-terrorism operation (Operation Cast Lead) in Gaza. This parallels a similar finding in Canada where a B’nai B’rith study recently confirmed an 11.4% jump in anti-Semitic incidents in 2009 over 2008 including 32 violent attacks, 348 cases of vandalism, and 884 reports of harassment mostly in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
In all this, it is quite clear that distinctions between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are increasingly blurred. Taken in its totality, Israel not only has no right to defend itself in response to terrorist attacks, but has no right to exist - which suggests that missile attacks on Israel’s civilian population are not only justified, but even desirable.
The lies perpetrated by otherwise respectable international religious, educational, humanitarian and political bodies against the only democracy in the Middle East are most notable in the double standards that are applied to Israel as opposed to states that have slaughtered their own peoples for decades with absolute immunity from international censure. In an excellent article published in the Jewish World Review, Jonathan Rosenblum notes that the UN General Assembly passes more resolutions against Israel annually than against all the rest of the nations of the world combined.
Seventy per cent of the country specific resolutions passed by the UN Human Relations Council are against Israel. Only Israeli policies are a permanent agenda item; only Israel has its own Special Rapporteur to report on its human rights violations. Meanwhile China, North Korea, Iran, and a host of brutal Arab dictatorships escape censure nearly completely. Until very recently, Libya headed the UNHRC, and was given a favorable report for its human rights record. (The report has now been quietly tabled.) And Saudi Arabia was recently praised by the UNHRC for its treatment of women. Women, incidentally, are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia.
It is true, of course, that criticizing Israel does not make one an anti-Semite anymore than criticizing the government of France makes one anti-French. But it's one thing to criticize France, and something else to declare the French nation illegitimate and to advocate its destruction. Martin Luther King, Jr. once referred to Israel as "one of great outposts of democracy in the world," with an "incontestable right to exist”, but that is no longer the case.
Funny how these campus activists never seem to mention the Syrian de jure occupation of Lebanon, or Saudi funding of global jihad, or the treatment of Saudi women, or the crushing of all democratic dissent in Egypt, Iran and Syria. They have no difficulty bemoaning capital punishment in the United States, but say nothing when the Palestinians routinely execute suspected Israeli collaborators including the mothers of young children, make selling property to Jews a capital offense, or when Hamas throws Fatah supporters to their deaths off 15-story buildings. It is shameful that pro-Palestinian professors and students in America and Europe pretend that the only reason for the problems in the Middle East is because of Israeli obstinacy as if it is the fault of the Israelis and not the rejectionist Arab world that cannot stand the thought of a sovereign Jewish state in its midst.
Not only has every Israeli concession and every act of goodwill and compassion not changed the way Israel is portrayed - but each concession, each accommodation, each withdrawal first from Lebanon, then from Gaza has only fed the furious hatred that Islam and the international community feels for it. Today, even as Israel absorbs missiles fired indiscriminately at its civilian population in southern Israel by terrorists - one continues to hear the hatred voiced about "The Wall" particularly those “innocent” suicide bombers who are being kept from their religious duty of self-detonating amid crowds of Jews.
Borders have nothing to do with peace in the Middle East. It is the existence of Israel as a Jewish state that offends the Arabs and their supporters. It is the history of Jews in that land stretching back over 4,000 years that offends them which accounts for their threats against Israel when it declares its intention to make the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb national historic sites with the aim of restoring them and opening them to the world. The fact that all religions will have freedom of access to such sites is irrelevant to the Palestinians who have spent millions of dollars destroying ancient artifacts and historic sites in Jerusalem that substantiate Jewish claims to the city and the Land, and who teach their children that Jews really came to Israel as usurpers less than a century ago, and that Abraham was a Muslim! Israel could grant its enemies ever possible concession (and has), but that would not bring peace. Nothing short of Israel’s destruction will suffice.
Truth is anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism when it reaches a certain pitch, and singling out Israel for condemnation and international sanction - out of all proportion to any other parties in the Middle East - is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is intellectually dishonest.
So let's call it what it is for those who arrogantly hold Israel to a standard of conduct to which no other nation in this world is held. Eight hundred thousand Tutsi tribesmen are slaughtered by their machete-wielding Hutu neighbors in Rwanda in 1994 and there is silence. The Chinese annihilate Tibetan culture, and there is silence. Tens of thousands of civilians are slaughtered in Chechnya by the Russians and not one single student group in America calls for divestiture. Four hundred thousand black Muslims in Darfur are murdered by the Arab janjaweed with two million more left to starve to death in miserable refugee camps, and not one student demonstration takes place.
Why else would a Gaza-bound “freedom flotilla” with absolutely no humanitarian aid on board (as it turned out), funded by jihad money with jihadists on board result in the international condemnation of Israel when, in accordance with international maritime law, Israel exercised its right to search for weapons on ships entering an zone of conflict - as the British did in the Falkland Islands War in 1982, and as President Kennedy threatened to do against Soviet ships heading to Cuba with missiles during the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years earlier.
In his article, Rosenblum notes: “The world is obsessed with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. More Muslims have been killed by Muslims, Arabs by other Arabs, Shiite Muslims by Sunni Muslims, than the total number of Arab casualties in the Arab-Israel conflict since 1948: approximately 60,000. The total number of Palestinians killed over that same period is about 9,000, approximately the same number of Bosnian Muslims killed by Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica in 1995 alone. The total number of casualties in all the Arab-Israel wars and battles since 1948 ranks about 50th on the list of all major conflicts over the last sixty years, with twelve involving over a million casualties.”
Syria occupies Lebanon for a quarter century, chokes the life out of its democracy, assassinates its political leaders, effects a coup d'etat through its Hezbollah proxy, sends Islamic terrorists over its borders to kill Americans and Iraqis, and crushes whatever hope that country may have for a secure future, and not one single student organization on our campuses calls for divestiture from Syria.
Iran uses its paramilitary basij thugs to beat up student demonstrators in the streets of Tehran and squeezes the life out of that county’s embryonic democratic movement, and there is silence. Saudi Arabia denies its women the most basic human rights, and bans any other religion from being practiced publicly on its soil, and yet no student group in America calls for divestiture from Saudi Arabia. These human rights violations and tragedies dwarf anything done by the Israelis, yet they fail to elicit the same degree of moral outrage that Israel evokes among its campus critics.
Last year, Israel Ambassador to the UN Michael Oren was shouted down by Hamas supporters and radical Leftists, and forced to leave the podium at the University of California Irvine, but when the university pressed charges against the students, they argued that their right to free speech was being infringed. Apparently, an Israeli ambassador is not entitled to that right as well.
In Jenin, in April 2002, Israel was painted as the world's pariah: "Nazis", "butchers", "conducting war crimes", "surrounding the infant Jesus with Israeli tanks", claims of 3,000 Palestinians being massacred, claims that Israelis poisoned the Palestinian water supply, and claims that Israel dumped Palestinian corpses into secret mass graves. A bishop in Copenhagen compared former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to King Herod. The following year, Jose Saramago, a Portugese Nobel Laureate in Literature, signed a petition, along with various other literary figures, accusing Israel of seeking “the liquidation of the Palestinian nation and attributed Israel’s “sins” to the religion of its people. Jews, he wrote in 2002, are “contaminated by their monstrous certitude that there exists a People chosen by G-d. . . . The Jews endlessly scratch their wound, to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as a banner.” He compared Israel’s military campaign in Jenin to a contemporary Auschwitz. Newspapers across Europe, especially the BBC, "substantiated" these lies with reports of grisly deeds by Israeli soldiers. Palestinians went on international media networks with the active complicity of those networks in accusing Israel of murdering Palestinians for their body parts, lies later reinforced by respectable European newspapers, and even by a member of the British House of Lords in February 2010.
The problem with all this is that no massacre occurred in Jenin! Fifty-two armed terrorists were killed in Operation Defensive Shield, and almost as many Israeli soldiers were killed because they were ordered to go from house-to-house to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible. But that was of little consequence to those in the media and on our college campuses who condemned Israel for "unspeakable war crimes."
During the Second Lebanon War, Israel was condemned for violating Lebanese sovereignty with scant mention made of the thousands of Hezbollah missiles that fell onto Israel's civilian population centers, and Hezbollah's use of Lebanese civilians as human shields. Israel, however, saw a flood of false accusations against it of "war crimes," "indiscriminate and disproportionate" force, and "violations of international law." Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International issued over forty press releases, statements and pseudo fact-finding reports largely ignoring the war crimes committed by Hezbollah and instead focusing overwhelmingly and negatively on alleged Israeli crimes. A multi-year study of all the HRW and Amnesty allegations regarding the War subsequently revealed major contradictions as well as numerous unsupported charges, double standards and false or invented "evidence" of exaggerated Lebanese casualties and unfounded accusations against Israel.
The same hypocrisy held true in the conclusions reached by the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead which accepted the lies of Hamas as fact, disregarded Israeli commission findings, denied Israel’s right to defend itself, and condemned Israel for having conducted war crimes in Gaza. The Report made little mention of the 8,000 missiles fired at southern Israel, and minimized reports that Hamas had used civilians as human shields, and mosques and schools to conceal its weapons – not to mention the millions of leaflets dropped and cell phone calls made in Arabic by the Israeli military to provide warnings to Palestinians in targeted areas.
When the UN hosted the Third World Conference Against Racism in Durban, the nations of the world had an opportunity to address the hatred that afflicts hundreds of millions of people, but they only found time to dwell on Israel - accusing it of genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, and apartheid while the genocides in Bosnia and the Sudan were barely mentioned. In the name of "human rights" and "justice", these advocates and self-proclaimed "protectors of the Free World" decry any and every Israeli action and seek to punish it by conducting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel while Palestinian clerics call for the murder of Jews without eliciting any protest whatsoever.
The Saudi and Egyptian media report on Jewish conspiracies causing 9/11, and run TV programs on Ramadan alleging blood libels, but there is no outcry against them for an international boycott.
The bitter reality is that for Israel, international legal frameworks provide no protection and no hope for justice. Instead, these frameworks are used to exploit the rhetoric of human rights and morality to attack Israel. In that regard, I was asked in a recent lecture to explain why Israel was “ghettoizing” the Palestinians by constructing a security barrier in areas that served as transit points for terrorists entering the country. The questioner noted that, as a Jew, I should be more sensitive to the concept of a ghetto, and its dehumanizing effects on human beings.
I responded that the security barrier was neither built for reasons of discrimination nor motivated by racism, but as a deterrent to protect the lives of Israelis from Palestinian suicide bombers and, in fact, it continues to accomplish its purpose.
But the suggestion that Israel may have had racist motivations in constructing the barrier disturbed me because it is a recurring theme among major international bodies and on college campuses, so I asked the questioner why she had decided to sort Israel out for “special treatment?” After all, the security barrier that Israel has constructed to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of its country is not unlike the security barrier constructed by the Saudis to keep the Yemeni jihadists out of their country; or the one that India has constructed along its borders with Pakistan, Kashmir and Bangladesh for the same reason; or the one that the Thais have constructed to keep the Malaysian jihadists out of their country, or the one that the U.S. is constructing to keep Mexican illegals out of our country, although I couldn't recall the last time a Mexican self-detonated in Albuquerque, or fired missiles into Dallas or Houston.
Over the past decade, the North Korean regime has starved an estimated three million of its own people; established thousands of slave labor camps, developed nuclear weapons in violation of every agreement it has ever made, and is seeking to sell them to the highest bidder, the latest being Iran. It has lobbed ballistic missiles over Japan, threatened a nuclear war of annihilation against its southern neighbor and supports itself primarily by dealing in drugs and counterfeit currency. And yet, more than 60% of Europeans regard Israel as more threatening than either North Korea or Iran - the second largest funder of jihadism in the world next to Saudi Arabia. So, if ever there was proof that there was something sinister lying behind Europe’s constant harping on Israel, and its support of Israel’s enemies other than pure anti-Semitism, this poll now answers it.
Anti-Semitism has evolved from an irrational hatred or jealousy of Jews to an irrational hatred or jealousy of the Jewish State – Israel. Why is it that we don’t see demonstrations in London, Paris or Madrid against Islamic dictatorships? Why aren’t there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection? Why aren’t there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs by jihadists? Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of the Islamic dictatorship in Sudan? Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel? Why is there no outcry by the Europeans against jihadism? Why don’t they defend Israel’s right to exist? And finally, why are the Europeans so obsessed with the two most stable democracies on earth (the United States and Israel), rather than with the world’s worst dictatorships? So many stupid and irresponsible comments have been made and written about Israel, that there aren’t any more accusations left to level against her.
At the same time, the press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel; the indoctrination of children or the corruption of the Palestinian leadership and the millions of dollars in international foreign aid (mostly American, as it happens) that have been transferred by the Palestinians to terrorists in Israeli prisons, and into their own private bank accounts, as was exposed by a former Palestinian leader in February 2010. And when reporting about victims, why is every Palestinian casualty reported as a tragedy while every Israeli victim is reported with disdain, if at all?
This obsession with Israel represents a callous disregard for fundamental justice, and anti-Semitism cloaked as righteous indignation. For example, with the start of Ramadan (the Islamic month of fasting) in early September, Israeli forces manning West Bank check-points were instructed to avoid eating or smoking in front of Palestinians as a sign of respect, even as the Palestinians continue to use the Tomb of Joseph as a garbage dump and have urinated next to the Torah scrolls in the Cave of the Patriarchs.
Further, on any given day, Israeli prisons are hosting Red Cross representatives, journalists, lawyers, prisoners' advocates, as well as family members of convicted Palestinian prisoners, while Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas on Israeli soil, is being held in isolation and denied any and all visitation rights from lawyers, family and even the International Red Cross in violation of his human rights and international law. So, where is the international outcry for Shalit?
Israel is also constantly confronted with the demand that it must return the West Bank to the Palestinians and the Golan Heights to Syria - areas seized by Israel in a defensive war in 1967. Why then do we never hear that same argument being raised against other nations? After World War II, Poland annexed 10% of historic Germany (East Prussia); Morocco controls the Western Sahara; Armenia has controlled 15% of neighboring Azerbaijan since 1994; Turkey has controlled half of Cyprus since its 1974 invasion; Russia has controlled the Kurile Islands off northern Japan since the end of World War II, and China has occupied Tibet since 1950. So, where is the international outcry demanding that these countries return lands they seized in war? Why is it that only Israel's control over a small portion of Judea and Samaria merits international censure?
And what of the demand that the Palestinians be allowed a right of return to Israel proper or at least fair compensation for having been displaced as a result of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Some 750,000 Jews left behind $300 billion in assets when they were forced to flee for their lives from Arab and Persian countries after the birth of the state of Israel. So why are similar demands not being made of the Syrians, the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, and the Egyptians who displaced (or more specifically expelled) their Jews? Czechoslovakia expelled its Sudetenland Germans from their homes after World War II; the Poles expelled millions of Germans from East Prussia and absorbed that territory into Poland in 1945; 450,000 ethnic Chinese were expelled from Vietnam between 1978-1979; the Bangladeshis expelled over three million Hindus in 1974; 250,000 Georgians were displaced from Abkhazia between 1993 and 1998, not to mention more than 500,000 ethnic Russians in Chechnya who were displaced during the First Chechen War in 1994-1996, and more than 800,000 Kosovar Albanians were expelled from Kosovo during the Kosovo War in 1998-1999. Somehow, I must have missed offers of a right of return or any compensation package being offered to these millions upon millions of persons displaced by wars – except in the case of Israel. 1
And what of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza. Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of former British premier Tony Blair, entered Gaza aboard a protest boat and told Ynet News in Israel that Gaza was "the largest concentration camp in the world today" and a "humanitarian crisis on the scale of Darfur." She was later photographed at a seemingly well-stocked grocery store in the so-called "concentration camp." So, let’s consider how these Israeli “monsters” have behaved. Hamas has declared its intention to destroy Israel and murder every Jew living there, and has fired over 8,000 missiles at southern Israel. In return, Israel is providing 70% of Gaza’s electrical power and, each week sends tons of food, fuel and humanitarian aid to an enemy whose entire rationale for existence is the extermination or subjugation of every Jew in Israel. During World War II, the Allies firebombed Dresden, obliterated German cities, and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Talk about “proportional response.” Israel feeds its enemies!
And finally, Israel was condemned for retaliating against Hamas and Hezbollah for their missile attacks on Israel’s southern and northern civilian populations because, it was said, Israel was (and this is a direct quote from Human Rights Watch) “endangering non-combatants, using disproportionate force and committing crimes against humanity.” If Israel fired missiles into Gaza City, Sidon or Tyre, the world would have been enraged, the UN Security Council would have been called into Special Session, the US and EU would have threatened Jerusalem, and the media would have had a field-day.
So why is it that when the Palestinians and the Lebanese fire missiles at Israeli civilians as their primary target, it is barely mentioned in the media, but when Israel retaliates against those missile sites in targeted bombings, it’s considered “disproportionate force” - all which leads to the real issue lurking behind the scenes here - our enemies’ tactical use of human shields. Why is criticism never leveled at Hamas or Hezbollah who regularly use children as human shields to protect their leaders and their weapons?
In all the condemnation being heaped on Israel by the media and the Goldstone Report for Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Gaza, and before that in Lebanon during the Second Lebanon War (and indeed any future conflict), no one ever asks how any democracy can expect to win an asymmetric war without “endangering civilians” especially when the enemy uses human shields as a tactical weapon to insulate itself from military strikes? Are we not handing our enemies an enormous tactical advantage? How can any free nation ever hope to win a future war against enemies who use human shields if it is condemned for “endangering civilians”?
What “fair criticism” is not
It is this absence of balance, this flagrant unforgivable deceit, not the criticisms of Israel that are most troubling. For those who argue that their right to "fair criticism" is being infringed, let them understand what "fair criticism" is not.
It is not "fair criticism" to portray Israel's presence on the West Bank as an illegal occupation, yet never utter a word of objection about Chinese, Serbian, Syrian, Turkish or Russian ethnic cleansing.
It is not "fair criticism" to place the blame for Middle East violence at Israel's doorstep while ignoring fourteen centuries of Sunni-Shiite hatred, the damage done to Arab society through decades of misrule by dictators and despots, the Koranic-inspired hatred of a Jewish state existing in the midst of the Islamic umma, and the immense risks that Israel took in withdrawing from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 not to mention the sacrifices that it continues to make in its quest for peace with the Palestinians.
It is not "fair criticism" to accuse Israel of apartheid when it is the Arab world that preaches "Death to the Jews", spreads anti-Semitic hatred from its mosques, teaches "martyrdom" in its schools and summer camps, and dances in the streets when jihadists succeed in murdering Israelis in their homes, pizza parlors, marketplaces, during their Passover Seders, and most notably in celebration of the 9/11 attacks.
Demanding that good German Aryans boycott Jewish shops in Nazi Germany in 1935 is no different in its essence from demanding that good Western universities boycott the Jewish state in 2011. Injustice in any language is still injustice. It's all part of the same poison that feeds on the fabric of human decency. If a 5-year old child can understand that slaughtering innocent people is wrong, then why can't these campus student organizations, religious establishments, the UN, the international media, the Europeans, and the academics on American and British college campuses see it and voice their dissent?
If we cannot tell the difference between a democratic Israel and an apartheid South Africa, or a jihadist from a peacemaker, then we are all parties to the greatest moral failure of our time - the inability to distinguish between those who defend basic moral values and respect the sanctity of a single human life, and those who are the enemies of such values by justifying the murder of the innocent in the name of some religious or ideological cause.
We have every right to expect more from those who teach our children on the campuses of America or who preach to the faithful from their pews. Their positions of authority do not entitle them to foster anti-Semitism in the name of “justice” and “moral decency.” Until there is universal condemnation of the discriminatory double-standards applied to Israel, claims by self-righteous international organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN General Assembly, UNRWA, the European Union and the International Court of Justice are more than meaningless. They are offensive and deceitful.
Israel's willingness to make peace has made it into a target by an international community that blames Israel for Muslim violence around the world. As their thinking goes, if Israel would just do whatever it takes to make peace, then Muslim violence would stop not just in Israel, but in Paris, London, Malmo, Brussels, Manchester, Basra, Marseilles, Lyons, Mumbai and Kabul.
Anyone with any understanding of world events knows that this is delusional and beyond that, pure, unadulterated garbage. All of this can be summarized as follows - the most dangerous threat posed to the Western world is its inability or unwillingness to stand together against those who seek to destroy our way of life.
If we do not, as a collective, take a firm stand against these defamations; if we do not stand behind Israeli democracy in its just and moral struggle against expanding jihadism; if we do not prevent this widening witch-hunt, the international arrest warrants for Israeli diplomats, the indictments against Israelis for war crimes in the Hague, the erosion in the UN, and the incitement against Israel; if we sit quietly and allow this insidious evil to flourish in our midst, then the legitimacy of the Free World’s own struggle against jihadism will most assuredly be undermined.
ENDNOTE
It should be noted that on March 15, 2010, the European Commission on Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Greek Cypriots who fled their homes as a result of the 1974 Turkish invasion did not have a right of return to Northern Cyprus, but one can be assured that this precedent will never apply to the Palestinians’ demand to return to Israel.
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