Where is it coming from and why
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| “Bike to Boycott’ protesters in Philadelphia (Jerusalem Post) |
Now, in some cases, criticism of the Jewish state is
legitimate. Even if I don’t agree with the criticism, I can understand why
someone might see things differently than I do. And that is, I suppose, how the
Jews who join antisemites in Congress get away with it. They are, after all,
Jews. So how could they be antisemitic?
They see Netanyahu turning a blind eye to ‘settler’
violence, and his war against Hamas destroying Gaza much the way the United
States destroyed Dresden during World War II. Destroying home after home,
building after building, and killing more than 40,000 ‘innocent’ Palestinian
civilians in Gaza. Indiscriminately, it seemed.
Claims by Israel that it is not an ‘apartheid regime’ and
has not ‘enslaved its indigenous peoples’ since occupying the West Bank in 67
are dismissed by those saying they are true. They conder them established
facts. Too many Jews in Congress buy into that narrative. And there are some
well-meaning non-Jewish members of Congress who buy into it, too, without the
slightest compunction that there might just be another side to the story. One
that would place responsibility for the devastation experienced by Palestinians
where it really belongs: on the Palestinian leadership, which would have it no
other way than to see large numbers of casualties among its own people, upon
which it can blame Israel.
Hard to believe something like that. Which is why they
don’t. But the truth is the truth.
Until Israel’s military response to October 7th,
there were few in Congress or the mainstream media who saw Israel this way.
There was still a residue of sympathy for Jewish refugees of the Holocaust who
had suffered the loss of six million relatives and had nowhere else to go. But
that sympathy has almost entirely disappeared, except among a few diehards who
have retained it. Jews included.
Now there are actual antisemites in Congress who get away
with it by bashing Israel. I believe Senator
Chris Van Hollen qualifies for that distinction. I am sure he would deny
being antisemitic until his dying day. But he was anti-Israel long before it
became popular among Democrats (and a few Republicans) to be so. He is
sponsoring a bill that would basically severs the US relationship with Israel.
And convinced 12 of his Democratic colleagues to join him.
Those most guilty of this kind of bias are the young. People
who have no memory of the Holocaust. People who are now a few generations
removed from it, many of whom have never even heard of Auschwitz. And if you
try to remind them, they will usually respond with something like, ‘Get over
it!’ It happened over 80 years ago, and who really knows what happened there
anyway?
What these young people value now is progressive ideology.
While that may not be universally true, progressive politicians are
increasingly winning over young voters.
Most young voters believe in the values of humanism upon
which progressivism bases its political philosophy. The more humanistic one is,
the less inclined one may be to see the importance of nations and borders. The
more one embraces the world envisioned in John Lennon’s Imagine...
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