Standing up for the Jewish people (or: Stuart's Folly)

Mike L.

It has to be understood that one cannot stand for the well-being of the Jewish people if one refuses to stand against political Islam.

The rise of political Islam is the foremost challenge to Jewish sovereignty and Jewish well-being in the world today.  All throughout the Middle East imams and ayatollahs cry out for Jewish blood and tell their people that the Jews are the children of apes and pigs and that we are responsible for all war and that we eat local Arab children like Cheezy-Doodles.

Islamists and anti-Jewish racists throughout the Muslim world and Europe are creating an exceedingly dangerous environment for Jews everywhere and we must acknowledge that fact, particularly since the Jews of the Middle East represent a very tiny minority.  There are sixty or seventy Muslims for every Jew in the Middle East and, for the most part, those Muslims do not accept Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land.

Thus political Islam represents a very real danger for Jewish people, but not only Jewish people.  If we honestly believe in universal human rights, then we have to oppose al-Sharia.

That means we need to oppose politicians, like president Barack Obama, who offer moral and military support to enemies of the Jewish people and to enemies of the United States.

Furthermore, this has to be understood as a problem primarily grounded in the western-left.

For a variety of reasons, I have tended not to support the political right-wing in the United States or the Republican Party.  Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that it is the conservatives and the political right within the United States that has, for long decades, been far more friendly to the Jewish people, and the Jewish state, than has the progressive-left.

Jewish liberals may not like me saying so, but I am not saying anything that is not entirely obvious to anyone who is observing American politics with a mind that can comprehend that when an American president pledges F-16 fighter jets and hundreds of Abrams tanks to a country with an Islamist government, that such a president supports political Islam.

This conclusion is obvious on its face and those who deny that conclusion are deceiving themselves.

Some will say that speaking out against political Islam is "racist."  I do not agree.  Standing against political Islam is to stand against racism.  The movement for political Islam is the single most racist political movement in the world today.  Just as we liberals stood against American slavery in the nineteenth-century, and just as we stood against the Klan and the rise of the Nazis and Jim Crow, so we should stand against the rise of political Islam.

Our failure to do so is a moral failure.

What we are seeing today is the abdication of the liberal-left dedication to universal human rights.  The notion of universal human rights is central to western-liberal ideals and the degree to which the western-left fails to stand up for universal human rights is the degree to which it has betrayed its own values and, thus, betrayed its very reason to be.  What is the point of supporting the progressive-left, or the Democratic Party, if neither will stand up for their own alleged values?

There are, it must be admitted, understandable reasons why the progressive-left has failed to stand up for universal human rights throughout the world.  We refuse to stand for universal human rights because the "multicultural ideal" mitigates against it.  Those of us who come out of the left want to respect other cultures and treat them the way that we would like to be treated.  In Europe and the United States we tend no longer to believe in the "melting pot" theory of integration, but in the "salad bowl" idea.  We want people with different languages and clothing and culinary traditions and religious traditions to live cheek-by-jowl and get along in comity.

This also means, within the tension between universal human rights and the multicultural ideal, that we are exceedingly slow to criticize "indigenous" cultures out of a recognition of the history of western imperialism.  Who are we, after all - us allegedly privileged white people - to look down our noses at the off-spring of our former servants and slaves?  By what moral right are we to condemn the children and grandchildren of those who we historically abused and enslaved and persecuted and exploited?

That tends to be the general mind-set of people who think of themselves as "progressive" or "liberal" or "left" and its the tradition that I come out of, as well.  These are people seeking to be fair-minded and who have the finest of intentions.  The problem is that ultimately they have, in an unspoken outplaying of this tension, chosen the multicultural ideal over the ideal of human rights because they do not wish to offend peoples in, or from, other parts of the world.

What this means, sadly, is that women continue to be stoned to death in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran, and we keep our mouths shut.  Not only do we keep our mouth shut about these kinds of atrocities, we even denounce our fellow liberals who dare to speak up as "racist."  Throughout the Arab-Muslim Middle East Gay people are treated as something worse than criminals and are summarily murdered and, yet, even the western GBLT community generally remains quiet because it does not want to be thought of as bigoted toward Arabs or Muslims.

The diaspora Jewish community is, to my view, particularly egregious in this regard.  Aside from a few rogue individualists, like activist Pamela Geller, diaspora western Jewry is sticking its head in the sand and refuses to speak out despite the fact that the Jews of the Middle East are a people under siege.  We allow Arab leaders to tell us that any future state of "Palestine" must be Judenrein and we do not forcefully object.  On the contrary, the western Jewish left tends to agree that Jewish people should not build housing for themselves on the traditionally Jewish land which, for some reason, they call by the Jordanian name "West Bank."

The Jews are maybe fourteen million people throughout the entire world.  Our numbers have been kept small by European and Arab-Muslim aggression.  Until we are ready to honestly stand up for ourselves by denouncing our foremost enemies, the Islamists, then we will always be on the defensive and our natural allies will not stand with us, because we refuse to stand up for ourselves.  The western left should stand with the Jewish people because the movement for Jewish self-determination, like  other movements for national liberation, is a movement for social justice among an historically persecuted people.

There will never be peace until the vast Arab peoples, our former rulers, accept Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land and they will never do so until non-Jewish Americans and non-Jewish Australians and non-Jewish Europeans insist upon it.  However, non-Jewish Americans and non-Jewish Australians and non-Jewish Europeans will not do so until we insist upon it and that means that we must stand up to this fascistic movement that is rising throughout that part of the world.

Unless we stand up for ourselves, no one else will do so for us.  And unless we forcefully speak out against the rise of political Islam, we cannot really be said to be standing up for the well-being of the Jewish people, nor even for the ideal of universal human rights, within which contemporary liberalism is grounded.

In this way, the progressive-left betrayal of the Jewish people is nothing less than the progressive-left betrayal of the progressive-left, itself.