May 26, 2011

By Joan Swirsky

Jew hatred comes in many forms, all of them irrational and unsupported by empirical fact, but all of them powerful and largely effective in deflecting personal and political failures onto a tiny people which by their mere existence highlight the glaring deficiencies that exist in their adversaries. Like a deadly systemic infection, be it viral or bacterial, Jew hatred comes in many strains.

STRAIN #1—THE DUMB FACTOR

This strain is based mostly on ignorance. In short, a dim-witted parent, family member, friend, teacher or coach—who was “schooled” by another dimwit—tells an innocent child that everything that is wrong with his or her life is because of “the Jew” who lives down the street or employs his or her parent or publishes the local newspaper whatever.

“They may look like you and me,” the critic says, “but underneath that head of hair are horns, and by the way they bake their Passover holiday bread-substitute with the blood of kids like you and your sister, and you should know that they control all the money in the world, and never forget that they killed Jesus.” Then the kid gets older and his actual life experience contradicts what he’s heard as he or she studies or socializes or works with Jews and sometimes falls in love and marries one.

But the Dumb Strain, it seems, never quite dissipates as even “reformed” Jew haters brag with genuine pride that their doctors and lawyers and accountants are Jewish! They want other people to consider them intelligent enough to pick “the best” professionals, while they’re also boasting that the last bargain they got was a result of “Jewing down” the store manager. As I said, dumb.

But dumb anti-Semitism is still anti-Semitism, just like dumb stereotypes about tap-dancing blacks or whiskey-guzzling Irish people or can’t-screw-in-a-light-bulb Poles or Mambo-obsessed Hispanics or kemo-sabe-spouting American Indians are still destructive to a decent and respectful social order.

The only difference is that malevolently stereotyping Jews—and, today, Christians—has once again become acceptable, whereas defaming other groups is strictly taboo among the fetishists of political correctness and multiculturalism, selective as they are in what offends their very delicate sensibilities.

Say something even mildly negative about women, gays, Muslim terrorists, or the above-mentioned ethnic groups and the leftists among us go into an orgy of frenzied outrage. But slander a Jew—or murder a Jew—no problem.

Glaring examples emanate daily from the Middle East, where “Palestinian” jihadists not only slit the throats of Israeli babies, but vow to destroy the Jewish state, while the craven Western media scramble to rationalize their bestial acts or, predictably, blame the victims.

But how to explain the Jew hatred that has come to our shores, in, for instance, the egregious non-action of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City, which this month stopped a plot by two terrorists to bomb the largest synagogue in the Big Apple, but decided not to press charges—to let the jihadists go—because the incident was probably “mischief”?

And that’s only an infinitesimal part of the ongoing and deliberate attempt to marginalize not only Jews in general but the sovereign State of Israel, our most trusted and only democratic ally in the entire Middle East.

STRAIN #2—THE EMOTIONAL FACTOR

There are legions of highly intelligent people—in terms of IQs, advanced college degrees, professional accomplishments, published books, and fancy titles—who are nonetheless driven almost exclusively by their feelings. Ironic that they’ve spent lifetimes honing their razor-sharp intellects, refining their debating skills, priding themselves on scrupulous research—but still, emotion prevails. This is no surprise because, simply, emotions are stronger than the intellect. On PET scans of the brain, anger and fear “light up” significantly more than the higher cognitive processes of reasoning and logic.

The emotional anti-Semite is one into whose brain the thorn of Jew hatred gets stuck, and no amount of rationalizing or higher-center thought can excise it. Even the one who harbors the feelings may wonder about the dissonant “reasoning” that inspires this hatred. But like the Mark of Cain, it’s there for life.

In a very real way, Jew hatred is consoling to this species, analogous to the Xanax that so many people take to alleviate anxiety. Have a problem that is unbearably agitating? It’s the Jews! Aahhh, I feel better. Feeling depressed? I don’t need an anti-depressant like Celexa or Lexapro, it’s the Jews! Aahhh, I feel better.

This type of anti-Semitism is the default position of people who are “smart” enough to reinvent objective history and who purposefully invent events such as the Al Dura hoaxor deny that the Holocaust ever existed in order to create an anti-Semitic “reality” out of whole cloth, one that invariably gibes with their intractable, all-consuming hatred of Jews.

Think of a person with childhood-onset diabetes or a seizure disorder. No amount of hoping the condition away has any effect. It’s simply there, deep within, with symptoms that must be treated constantly in order to stem the horrible symptoms that ensue if the condition is not attended to. Emotion-driven anti-Semitism is in this category, incurable but, unlike diabetes, unfortunately untreatable.

STRAIN #3—THE SELF-HATE FACTOR

Okay, you may say, people of other religions may hate Jews, but how is it possible for Jews themselves to hate Jews? Surprisingly, the answer is rather simple: It’s hard to be a Jew, and most people simply aren’t up to it. Yes, they can be proud of their brains and talents, but when it comes to their backbones—that’s another story.

The most universal desire in the world is to be liked and accepted, starting with pre-verbal babies who know by the smiles of strangers that the world is a friendly and welcoming place, and extending to full-grown adults who continue to seek acceptance in intimate relationships as well as in groups, including in the workplace, in recreational activities, and in politics.

For many Jews, being a member of the world’s most historically vilified minority is just “too much” to cope with. In fact, to withstand the relentless onslaught would require them to have an accurate knowledge of Jewish history, a history that the spineless set has abandoned teaching their children. It would require a willingness to correct the constant blitz of misinformation that an anti-Semitic world never tires of perpetuating. It would require a willingness to stand on principle when the entire world is substituting propaganda and violence for righteousness. And it would require a belief that the land of Israel was indeed bequeathed to the Jews by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that their return to Zion after Hitler incinerated six million of their brethren during the Holocaust was the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, and that, perversely and for the first time in world history, they should return the lands won in the belligerent wars waged against them by anti-Semitic Arabs who remain intractably so to this day.

Liberal Jews are not psychologically up to any of these challenges, hence their pathetic over-eagerness to “understand” the people who hate them, to accommodate themselves to the enemies of Israel (which means all Jews), to capitulate to the ever-escalating and invariably-one-sided demands for “compromise,” to slavishly follow Jews like linguist Noam Chomsky and financier George Soros and playwright Tony Kushner who are so suffused with Jew hatred that their entire lives have been devoted to amputating any vestige of Jewish identity from their beings, to vote year after year after year for Israel-loathing leftists like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and to stand up and applaud Obama at an AIPAC conference not 48 hours after he announced his intention to plunge Israel back to what then-Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban referred to as “the Auschwitz borders” of 1967!

As Boris Shusteff, a Russian immigrant to the United States and a research associate at the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies, writes: “The simple truth is that under the facade of their `progressiveness` there is always a subconsciously hidden attempt to escape from their Jewishness. They use beautiful words and convincing arguments to prove the necessity of fighting for somebody else’s abstract rights instead of proudly defending their own. They say that they ennoble the world community by defending the interests of other nations, while disregarding the fate of their brethren. They rush to a cosmopolitan universe, where all the uniqueness of the nations disappears and where they can call themselves citizens of the universe.”

Aha, the famous “one world order” the progressives among us have embraced, while they demonize Jews like me—and there are millions of us—who prefer not to have their identities blended and bastardized into some amorphous tasteless valueless Godless gruel!

STRAIN #4—THE MOTHER’S MILK FACTOR

This variant is infused into tabula rasa embryos by a loathing so systemic it suggests a DNA aberration. After delivery, infants literally imbibe a particularly toxic brew of anti-Semitism flowing either from their mothers’ breast milk or worldview. And when they have been sufficiently intoxicated, they enter into a family and “culture” that makes the hatred of Jews their entire raison d’v™tre.

This strain has been on vivid display in the Arab world for decades—actually centuries—where toddlers are taught to echo the Jew hatred drummed daily into their developing brains, instead of being taught how to play the piano or play ball or play with dolls, and where young children are taught by the time they’re three-years-old how to strap suicide bombs onto their young bodies.

It is in this “culture,” which has not changed significantly since the seventh century, that “leaders” keep the abhorrence going by inflaming the masses they have purposefully kept poor and ignorant, the better to energize them not by jobs and creativity but by the adrenaline fueled by hatred. These palace-dwelling leaders generously pay the media to perpetuate the hate, and also endlessly “play” the United States of America like a Stradivarius by extorting billions every year to keep a so-called reasonable lid on their Jew hatred.

No wonder Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, said: “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

But it’s not just Arabs and Muslims who make the hatred of Jews the virtual centerpiece of their lives. There is the full-blown return of anti-Semitism in Europe, as Guy Milliv®rewrites, where citizens have now been effectively Islamized and the entire region is on the way again to being Judenrein, or “cleansed of Jews.” In fact, anti-Semitism has now reached pandemic proportions, right in time for an American “president” to help orchestrate the so-called spontaneous “pro-democracy” uprisings throughout the Arab world, from Tunisia to Yemen to Egypt to Lebanon to Jordan to Syria to Bahrain, on and on.

Yes, orchestrate! And while he’s at it, make a practice out of de facto condoning the butchery and hatred of America’s and Israel’s enemies Iran and Syria, while at the same time punishing America’s longtime allies and Israel’s longtime “cold peace” partners Egypt and Libya.

To what end? Certainly not to encourage democracy, of which the entire world has seen not a hint since this smoke-and-mirrors travesty began, but rather to ferret in the real new world order, in which the virulently anti-Semitic, Nazi-inspired Muslim Brotherhood will reign, with its oft-stated intentions of obliterating Israel and every last Jew who breathes on its land. (During World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt allied himself with Hitler and was active in recruiting Arabs for the Waffen SS).That’s the same Muslim Brotherhood whose terrorist branch Hamas has launched over 12,000 missiles at Israeli civilians. The same Muslim Brotherhood—in Egypt—that condemned Bin Laden’s death and wants to end the peace accord with Israel. The same Muslim Brotherhood that, according to Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, citing an AP report, is about to receive $1 billion from Obama! As Hoft says, “Obama wants to reward them.”

STRAIN #5—THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER FACTOR

According to author and columnist Dennis Prager, the reason that “for thousands of years there has been so much attention paid to Jews and why, today, to Israel, the one Jewish state is that Jews are God’s Chosen People.

Atheists are exempted from this theory, Prager says, because “they don’t believe in a Chooser, so they cannot believe in a Chosen. But for most believing Jews and Christians (most particularly the Founders who saw America as a Second Israel, a second Chosen People), Jewish Chosen-ness has been a given.”

Prager says the proof of this “chosen-ness” is that “evil has consistently targeted the Jews,” for instance:

· Nazi Germany was more concerned with exterminating the Jews than with winning World War II.

· Throughout its 70-year history, the Soviet Union persecuted its Jews and tried to extinguish Judaism.

· The United Nations has spent more time discussing and condemning the Jewish state than any other country in the world.

· Much of the contemporary Muslim world—and nearly all the Arab world—is obsessed with annihilating the one Jewish state.

This obsession, he says, “can be best explained only in transcendent terms, namely that God, for whatever reason, chose the Jews.”

But I think of an equally visceral kind of jealousy when I contemplate the Greatest Hatred Ever Known. I think of what it must be like for a huge population of well over 300-million Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East to watch as the straggling remnants of European Jewry—cadaverous, hungry, heartbroken, stupefied by the cruelty they had endured and witnessed—rose up to repel the savage Arab armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria (backed by Saudi Arabia and Yemen)—that tried to annihilate the nascent Jewish State in 1948 and then to defeat them again and again in the many wars the Arabs continued to initiate.

And what must it be like for the immensely wealthy Arab potentates , as well as their serfs, to not only lose war after war to the Jews, but to see the people they call “pigs” literally make long-barren deserts bloom, to have the world’s only thriving economy, to lead the world in technology and science, to create magnificent symphonies and athletic teams and life-saving medical remedies, et al, while the most the Arab world has ever accomplished in the last six decades is to “create” terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and of course those itty bitty suicide bombers.

And further imagine what it must be like to live in these feudal swamps and to know that big bad America—which has sent trillions of dollars to the Arab countries over the years—continues to support the sole democracy in the Middle East, Israel.

It must be eerily like what the black citizens of America and their leftist leaders think when they contemplate the wealth of our country and realize that every program—in education and job-equality and equitable healthcare that the liberals-cum-progressives have magnanimously funded and enacted for over half a century—has failed thunderously.

What do these two things have in common? Again, the answer is so simple—rage and envy. The same things that the Arabs don’t “get” about the roots of genuine success and empowerment are the same things that community organizers—and for that matter the Resident in the White House—don’t “get,” is that self-actualization, certainly for Americans, is not based on a mind-set of victimhood and lifelong entitlement but rather on the reality of plain old nose-to-the-grindstone hard work, resilience in the face of adversity, the strength of family ties, a devotion to the U.S. Constitution, and a belief in the overriding Judeo-Christian ethos that has blessed our country with benevolence and guidance for nearly 235 years.

WHO IS BEHIND OBAMA’S OBSESSION?

That is, his malignant obsession with Jews and with Israel!

Untold numbers of words have been written about the woman and man Obama claims were his mother and father, the far-left Stanley Ann Dunham and the Kenyan-born Marxist, Barack Obama Sr. Then there is the couple he claims were his grandparents, the far-left Madelyn Dunham and Stanley Armour Dunham. I say “claims” because there is still no certifiable birth certificate that attests either to Obama’s parentage or citizenship. But we do know that these people “raised” Obama and along with Frank Marshall Davis, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, et al, profoundly influenced his hate-whitey, anti-American, and anti-Israel world view.

Last year, to the month, I wrote Obama’s Jewish Problem, in which I remarked that “to prepare for his meeting on May 18 with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama prepared a menu of poison pills—the kind given to people with the same Hobson’s Choice that Mafia attorney Tom Hagen gave to the imprisoned and about-to-testify-before-Congress Frankie Pentangeli in `Godfather Two`—either commit suicide or we’re going to kill you.” Sound familiar?!

In that article, I listed the people—more accurately, collaborators—who aid and abet what Mona Charen calls Obama’s “genocidal hostility toward Israel.” The following is the short list:

· Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who according to Dick Morris has had “relationships with terrorists [that] began in the mid-1980s when she served on the Board of the New World Foundation, which gave funds to the Palestine Liberation Organization [when] the PLO was officially recognized by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.”

· Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, who has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and has inspired dozens of articles with titles like these in Commentary: Susan Rice Is Doing Something at the UN: Targeting Israel and What Was Susan Rice’s Embarrassing Anti-Israel Tirade Supposed to Accomplish?

· Lee Hamilton, who Ed Lasky calls the eminence grise of Obama’s Mideast policy and who has suggested that the U.S. should pressure Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and leave the West Bank—but not a word about dismantling Hamas or Hezbollah!

· Zbigniew Brzezinski, longtime Israel loather, who suggested that the Obama administration should tell Israel that the U.S. will attack Israeli jets if they try to attack Iran.

· John Brennan, Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security,suggests, among other egregious things, that Obama & Co. “reach out” to Hezbollah.

· Samantha Power, now on Obama’s National Security Council, has advocated ending all U.S. military aid to Israel and written of her willingness to “alienate a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import [American Jews]…” She has also advocated, Ed Lasky writes, “that America send armed military forces,” “a mammoth protection force” and an “external intervention” to” impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.”

· Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s Senior Advisor. According to Ulsterman, the by-nowinfamous Washington Insider, “weeks after widespread Middle East chaos first erupted, and with a growing number of nations now poised to join the likes of Egypt and Libya into all out rebellion, some are finally questioning the role played by the Obama White House in helping to hasten these events. Of primary concern is the reasoning behind Barack Obama’s quick repudiation of Egypt’s Mubarak, and near silence regarding Libya’s Gaddafi. Why such a disparity in tone between one uprising vs another? …Perhaps the answer to this disparity can be found with President Obama’s closest and most powerful adviser—[Iranian-born Muslim] Valerie Jarrett

In addition, according to Ryan Mauro, founder of WorldThreats.com: “The “most influential Muslim” in the White House is Dalia MogahedShe is a close colleague ofJohn Esposito, a staunch defender of the Muslim Brotherhood and a witness for the defense during the Holy Land Foundation trial. Officials from the Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration, have made a concerted effort to court these Brotherhood affiliates, including senior advisor Valerie Jarrett; chief counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan; Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano; Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough and many other lower-level government officials”

And that is not to omit the aforementioned George Soros, the man who is running not only Barack Obama but just about the entire American media. According to Dan Gainor, Soros “spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004 [and today] has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets—including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.”

I can’t think of one of Obama’s advisors, czars, even Court Jews who is not floridly anti-Israel, in both word and deed. The belief, indeed conviction, that all of these people have in common is that everything wrong with their lives and with the world would magically disappear if only those damned Jews and their damned country Israel were destroyed. Hence the salami tactics to whittle away territory until Israelis simply cannot defend themselves and so perish at the hands of neighbors who have been promising nothing less than annihilation for decades.

This is Obama’s malignant intention, as well. Hence the 1967 lines!

THE BETRAYAL UNMASKED

This is the title of an article by Paul Schnee, in which he says that the Obama speech “confirmed in the starkest terms why his long held prejudices, cloaked as a foreign policy, have made his Oval Office not only the graveyard for any peace and justice in the Middle East but also the incubator for the next great conflict there.

“Obama’s intentions towards Israel have never been good,” Schnee adds, “but yesterday he proved just how hostile he is to the Jewish state of Israel. One of the most perverse forms of anti-Semitism is to expect Jews to die meekly His speech was a shameful act in a career of shameful acts”

Victor Sharpe, author of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish State, agrees. “Obama parrots the Arab policy of `stages` whereby Israel is forced to commit national suicide through the diabolical euphemism called `land for peace.‘Obama embraces the darkness of the Arab world and chooses—not from ignorance but from hatred—to enact under his watch the eventual annihilation of the Jewish state.”

Is there any light in this bleak picture? According to Professor Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, “Israel is not going to allow a president with no credibility, who clearly doesn’t understand what’s at stake, fails to support his Arab allies, is soft on his Iranian and Syrian enemies, doesn’t learn from his past errors, is sacrificing U.S. interests in the region, and pays no attention to what’s happening in Egypt, to determine its future.”

But the last word (at least of this article) has to go to writer and Army veteran J.D. Longstreet, who cites Amos and Jeremiah and Ezekiel in “America’s Betrayal of Israel,”in which he states:

“Let me be very clear here: ISRAEL WILL NOT LOSE. Its enemies WILL lose…as a result of the Obama’s announced policy demanding that Israel return to the pre-1967 war borders.

What Obama, and Israel’s other enemies, fail to understand (or understand it and choose to ignore it) is this: That of all the dry land on this planet earth, there is only one tiny little piece of geography that God, Himself, has designated as belonging to a single people—ISRAEL.

What the evangelical Christian Americans rightly understand is this: When God brought the people of Israel, His people, home and gave them a “state,” a nation, in May of 1948, God had already made it as plain as possible that Israel would never be moved from that land again—forever.