Judenrat: Beinart (Updated)

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

Peter Beinart is a Judenrat.

This is to say, he acts as an agent and intermediary of the enemies of the Jewish people while claiming to be a friend to the Jewish people.  This is not to say that Beinart is disingenuous.  I have no reason to doubt that he believes every word he says.

Recently, at the rather non-traditional Beth Chayim Chadashim Progressive synagogue in Los Angeles, he said this:

While we condemn Palestinian violence, we must recognize this painful truth: that Israeli policy has encouraged it," Beinart told his audience. "Israel has encouraged it by penalizing Palestinian nonviolence, by responding to that nonviolence by deportations, teargas, imprisonment, and the confiscation of Palestinian lands. Hard as it is to say, the Israeli government is reaping what it has sowed.

Can we agree that anyone who justifies violence against the Jewish people in the Middle East by the much larger hostile Muslim majority is not a friend to either Israel or the Jewish people?  And why do I get the sense that of all the peoples on the planet, it is only Jewish people who are forced to even ask the question?

There is no other people, or nationality, who, if under attack by a long-standing enemy, gives the benefit of the doubt to those within that nation who justify, and thereby encourage, the violence against his or her own people.

What Marty Peretz must have done to Peter Beinart when he worked for him as managing editor of the New Republic, between 1995 and 1997, is hard to fathom.  What could the experience of working under Peretz as an editorial wunderkinder have done to the poor guy to turn him into what we see today?  Or, more likely than not, Beinart kept his anti-Semitic anti-Israelism under his kippa before, and during, his tenure at the New Republic.  It was only when he was in a position to profit from his hostility toward Israel that he came out of the closet.

Beinart argues, hysterically enough, that Israel has encouraged Arab-Muslim Jihadi violence against Jews by "penalizing Palestinian nonviolence."

Palestinian non-violence?  Have I missed something?  Did a Palestinian-Arab Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., ever emerge out of their culture of grievance and hatred?  I do not think so.  Beinart seems to have gotten lost in the alleys and byways of his own imagination and hard-left ideology.  Where is this movement for non-violence among the Palestinian-Arabs?

I do not see it.  Do you?

On the contrary, what I see is year after year, decade after decade, century after century, of violent Arab-Muslim incitement against the Jewish minority in the Middle East.  They have already driven Jews out every country in the region and now they want to drive us out of our tiny national homeland by inscribing malice into the souls of their children and encouraging them to use the knife, if not the auto, as the expression of that malice.

...by responding to that nonviolence by deportations, teargas, imprisonment, and the confiscation of Palestinian lands.

I have to assume that Beinart understands that Israel does not deport Arabs, teargas Arabs, imprison Arabs, or confiscate "Palestinian lands" for the crime of being non-violent, although this is the irrational and obvious implication of his words.  This is only the implication, however, among those who know nothing of the conflict.  I assume what he means is that some Palestinian-Arabs, who do not throw rocks or pipe bombs or Molotov cocktails, have been deported for political reasons.  I wonder just what those political reasons might be?  Could incitement to violence or, even, incitement to genocide have something to do with it?

Hard as it is to say, the Israeli government is reaping what it has sowed.

Well, the Israeli government is a democracy and, thus, represents the will of the people.  When Beinart claims that the Israeli government is responsible for violence against Jews in Israel, by obvious extension he means that the Jewish people of Israel are the cause of the violence against them.

The only way to spread such vile and physically dangerous innuendos against the Jewish people, one's own people, is by completely ignoring the long history of Jews under the boot of Muslim imperial rule from the seventh-century until the fall of the Ottoman empire in the beginning of the twentieth.  Furthermore, he must also ignore the exceedingly vicious efforts of the local Arabs to restore their domination over Jews prior to the international recognition of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people in 1948.

According to historian Edwin Black, in The Farhood: Roots of the Arab Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust, prior to the Arab anti-Jewish pogroms in Hevron resulting in the massacre of 67 Jews, including 47 Yeshiva students in 1920, the Arab chant on the street was:

Palestine is our land, the Jew is our dog!

But the 1929 massacre of the Jews was a bit more extensive and a bit more creative on the part of the Arab enemies of the Jewish people at that time.  According to Black:

Not a single victim was simply killed.  Each was mutilated and tortured in accordance with their identities, the specific information provided by the local Arabs.  The Jewish man who lent money to Arabs was sliced open and the IOUs burned in his body.  The Jewish baker's head was tied to the stove and then baked.  A Jewish scholar who had studied Koranic philosophy for years was seized, is cranium cut open, and his brain extracted.  Another man was nailed to a door.

(Edwin Black, The Farhud, Dialog Press, Washington D.C., 2010, pg. 206.)

I do not pass this along to incite against Arabs.

I pass it along so that people who think like Beinart might get it through their thick skulls that the problem in Israel is not the Jews, nor even the Israeli government.  The problem is 1,300 years of continual Arab and Muslim political dominance of a people that they - much to my amazement - consider inferior and worthy of persecution for religious reasons, no less.

Any honest observer understands that Israel treats its Arabs far, far better than do the 22 Arab-Muslim countries, yet it is constantly Israel that takes a beating in the press and in the UN and in the White House under Barack Obama for being unjust to Arabs.

{Shocking, I know.}

Within living memory of the Holocaust the international community, with the assistance of Judenrats like Beinart, is again twisting the screws on the Jewish people... this time with Barack Obama leading from behind.

Update:  I made a mistake.  The term "Judenrat" is not appropriate.  I should have gone with "Kapo," instead.