The Settlers

Probably the stupidest thing that the progressive-left has done as a group, in regards the I-P conflict, was demonize the so-called "settlers" in Judea and Samaria, what the Jordanians dubbed "the West Bank" in order to erase Jewish history there.

Not only is it entirely racist to target that specific group of people as something akin to evil merely for living, or building, where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do not want them to, but it is also entirely counterproductive toward any future peace.

It's also illiberal, by the way.

This is fine for your average bottom-feeding anti-Zionist or Israel Hater, because they do not want peace anyway. People like, say, Lefty Coaster absolutely love the settlers because the settlers are within the boundaries of acceptable progressive-left hatred. Because the Obama administration, and the progressive-left as a whole, has validated Jew Hatred if it is directed at those Jews, anti-Zionists feel more than free to spew forth absolutely monstrous hatred, even hatred sufficient to justify genocide, sufficient to justify the beheading of a three month old baby girl, in the minds of some.

What saddens me the most, I think, is that this hatred is also validated by many liberal Jews who seem to share Barack Obama's belief that Jews may live here, but not there. They may build homes and rec centers and second bathrooms in the ghetto, but not beyond. I frankly find it amazing... stupifying, really... how easily people slide into this casual racism that has the delicious side effect of entirely screwing up any prospects for a negotiated solution.

Progressive-left attitudes towards those people is like a Christmas present for Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas. Because American president Barack Obama marked those Jews as valid targets of hatred, Abbas felt free to avoid negotiations entirely, which he never wanted to begin with. Furthermore, by marking those Jews as legitimate targets of hatred, Barack Obama helps lay the groundwork for violence against them.

That is surely not his intention, merely his effect.

The Fogel family was slaughtered by Jihadis who have a principled, and entirely racist, belief that Jews must not have sovereignty on Jewish land. This belief is perpetually bolstered by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. That much is to be expected. Hamas believes in the genocide of the Jews, as expressed in their charter. The PA, which morphed out of the PLO, merely believes in the destruction of the Jewish state. We expect them to teach their children to despise the Jews because that is precisely what their forbears have been doing for fourteen centuries.

For fourteen centuries the Jews of the Middle East have lived as an oppressed minority under Sharia as dhimmis. And while dhimmitude was not quite so horrific as African-American slavery, or what we Jews endured under Chistrendom during the Middle Ages, it was certainly bad enough.

As journalist Adi Schwartz writes in Azure:

As non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state, Jews were assigned the inferior status of dhimmi (“dependent”). This position ensured the protection of their lives and property, the right to practice their religion, and a degree of internal communal autonomy. In exchange for all these, however, the Jews were required to submit to various forms of legal and social discrimination.11


There is no shortage of historical examples of this approach: In the fourteenth century, the Jews of Egypt and Syria were prohibited from living in tall buildings, raising their voices in prayer, burying their dead in graves more impressive than those of their Muslim neighbors, or filling clerical roles. If they wished to enter a public bathhouse, they had to hang a bell or copper coin around their necks.12 Until 1912, the Jews of Morocco were forced to walk barefoot or wear straw shoes outside the Jewish quarter as a sign of respect for the Arab nation.13 And the Shi’ite law introduced in Yemen by Zaydi imams determined that a Muslim who murdered a Jew should not be sentenced to death. Jews were obligated, moreover, to wear simple-looking clothes and to refrain from donning a headdress. And if this were not enough, many Jewish orphans were abducted by Yemen’s authorities and forced to convert.14

Then, as now, there were also restrictions on where Jews should be allowed to live and it is for this reason that Obama's restrictions on Jewish living space is so galling. Just because Jewish people happen to live and build housing for themselves on land where Jews originally came from, it does not automatically follow that Mahmoud Abbas cannot sit down in a room with Benjamin Netanyahu and draw a line on a map.

All Obama is doing, and all Obama's followers are doing when they spit their hatred at Jews who are living in the wrong place, is validate Palestinian anti-Semitism.  Dictator Abbas and his ministers have claimed that any future state of Palestine must be Judenrein. This would make it among the only states in world history, along with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Nazi Germany, to have such a policy and the Obama administration validates such a stance when he insists that Jews must not be allowed to live, and thus build housing for themselves, on historically Jewish land.

The pure stupidity of it is awe-inspiring.

Open Thread

Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and the Progressive Abandonment of Universal Human Rights

According to recent polling data Barack Obama is losing ground among Jewish voters.

Disapproval among Jewish voters exceeded approval of Obama's presidency for the first time during the current administration. Jewish approval of Obama’s performance as president declined to 45%, with another 48% disapproving and 7% undecided.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Astonishingly enough a greater percentage of American Jews now disapprove of Obama's job performance than approve of it.

{Shocking, I know.}

My prediction is that in November of next year Barack Obama will drop between 15 and 20 percent of the Jewish vote that he received last time around. That is, if Obama received about 80 percent of the Jewish vote in '08, I suspect that he will receive between 60 and 65 percent of the Jewish vote in '12. No matter what Obama does, however, he will still receive a majority of that vote. In fact, if Barack Obama were to hold a press conference in which he stripped down naked and danced the Macarena while shooting up heroin and kicking puppies, he would still receive a majority of the Jewish vote.

Most liberal Jews would rather yank their right arm out of its socket and beat themselves silly with it than vote for a Republican or against a Democrat. The Democratic Party and the progressive movement have us in the bag almost as much as they have Black people.

If African-Americans are the number 1 taken for granted group among Democrats, the Jews are very definitely number 2 on that list. I would like to recommend that we change this dynamic a little, though. I would like to recommend that in the coming years Jews avoid voting for Democrats so long as the Democratic Party remains a home to anti-Zionist bigots.

There is no reason in this world why Jewish people should be the only people on the planet who think that they must vote against their own best interests, not to mention the best interests of their children, on moral grounds.

I know that many Jewish liberals will think that voting for the Democrats is in their own best interests, or in the best interests of the Jewish people or the state of Israel, not to mention the American people. Of course, they are entirely wrong to think so, but at this point... after so many decades of slavish Jewish allegiance to the left... it will be exceedingly difficult to break them of this ugly habit in the near term.

What I would argue to my Jewish brothers and sisters is that Barack Obama has been a failure on I-P, that the grassroots of the Democratic Party is playing footsie with anti-Zionists (who are, themselves, playing footsie with actual Jihadis), and that the progressive-left has almost entirely abandoned any honest concern for universal human rights.

For me that is a big one.

The Democratic Party and the progressive-left have given up almost entirely on western ideals of universal human rights. If they cared about universal human rights then they would care about the genocides in Darfur and Congo, but they do not. While a contingent in the activist base spits poison at the Jewish state on a daily basis, they almost entirely ignore the far, far worse things going on elsewhere.

Did you know that only about 50,000 people have died in the I-P conflict since 1948? The numbers are somewhere in that area and about two-thirds of those were non-Jews and about one-third were Jews. 50,000 people is a lot of people, of course, but something like 5.5 million have died in the Congo over the last decade.

5.5 million. {Look it up.}

This tells me that the progressive-left stands for virtually nothing. Because universal human rights have been replaced as an ideal on the Left by multiculturalism, this means the death of both feminism and humanitarianism as guiding principles within the progressive movement. That feminism is dead is without a doubt. Once feminists start justifying gender apartheid, and all that entails, in the Arab world, then you know for certain that feminism is dead in the west.

If I recall correctly, Phyllis Chesler credits Edward Said with placing Arab men, particularly Palestinians, above women, in general, as the primary uber-victims of choice for liberals. In practice what this means is that Arab men get a pass on behavior that white men do not get. That is to say, western feminists will still fight for their own rights in western countries, because they have a rational self-interest in doing so, but have given Arab men a free pass to stone Arab women to death for the crime of getting raped or to honor kill their daughters or to cover their women from head to toe in a big, black tent.

Today's feminists have virtually nothing to say about the abuse of women in the Muslim world, because they do not want to offend Arab or Muslim men or those few privileged, elite non-western Muslim women who they may be in dialogue with. Furthermore, some Arab or Muslim women tell western feminists that Sharia is liberating and that they like living under a big, black tent, so who are we to judge? After all, if we as white people are the source of racism and imperialism and colonialism and oppression and genocide and ethnic cleansing and apartheid and racism, then we are in no position to lecture our victims on matters of social justice, now are we?

So? What does this have to do with the dropping off of Jewish support for Barack Obama? In some measure Jewish displeasure with Obama is because of Obama's obvious failures on the domestic front and the foreign policy front, including major failures on the I-P front. However, in some measure, it is likely that Jewish displeasure with Barack Obama is a function of Jewish displeasure with the progressive-left, the movement that Barack comes out of. Jewish people who care about politics, and particularly Jewish people who care about the state of Israel, know that the progressive movement is, as a general rule, hostile to the Jewish state and thereby, in an oblique way, hostile to the Jewish people.

I suspect that some of the reason that we saw this stunning Democratic loss in NY-09, a congressional district that had been held by the Democratic Party continuously since 1923, is because Jews are not only becoming disenchanted with Barack Obama, but because Jews are becoming disenchanted with the progressive-left and the Democratic Party.

Slowly. Slowly. Slowly.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The times, they are a'changing.

A Tip 'O the Kippa to Citizen53.

Credit when due

Karma has asked me to contribute regarding dKos. Most of you know what I think of the place; but, every so often even one of the most despicable Kossacks gets it right. Case in point, Geekesque's diary outlining John Mearsheimer's descent into antisemitism via his support for the new book by vile antisemite Gilad Atzmon. Condemnation was almost universal BUT you know at least one anti-I Kossack had to rise to the occasion.

You don't need Walt and Mearshimer (0+ / 0-)

to know the disproportionate influence the Israeli lobby has over U.S. Mideast policy. All you have to see is how Obama was bullied, threatened and smeared into doing what the Netanyahu government wanted.

“If you think I can be bought for five thousand dollars, I'm offended." Rick Perry.

by Paleo on Mon Sep 26, 2011 at 04:11:01 PM PDT

Oddly, no one recc'd him even though that particular sentiment is echoed daily in I/P. But I guess it wasn't the right moment to be a Zog accuser and there's always tomorrow, right?

In the meantime, good for Geekesque.

Daily Kos Bans Citizen53

Well, it's not like I did not see that one coming a mile away.

Maybe he will drop in here and take over the dKos beat, because... I have to tell ya... I am sick to death of following that blog's insidious interpretations of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The only reason that I do it is because Daily Kos, much like the Huffington Post, gives us a sense of where the grassroots / netroots is on an issue that I care about.

Anyone want to fill that function for Israel Thrives?