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Contents:
Israel’s Next 22 Months: Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 12, 2015 — The next 22 months until President Barack Obama leaves office promise to be the most challenging period in the history of US-Israel relations.
We are Witnessing a New, Sophisticated, Virulent, and Even Lethal Anti-Semitism: Irwin Cotler, National Post, Mar. 5, 2015 — Recently, I participated in a historic UN General Assembly forum on anti-Semitism, which was timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
An Alarm Bell in Estonia: Efraim Zuroff, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 8, 2015 — I very much doubt whether anyone in Israel paid close attention to this past Sunday’s national parliamentary elections in Estonia …
Balancing Faith and Reason: Joseph Epstein, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2, 2015 — A high percentage of the best historical novels have been written with the classical world as background.
Crossing the Line 2: the New Face of Antisemitism on Campus (Video): Step Up For Israel, 2015
Every Vote Counts in This Crucial Election: Isi Leibler, Candidly Speaking, Mar. 12, 2015
Barack Obama and the Fatal Myth of Appeasement: John Bolton, Algemeiner, Mar. 12, 2014
Guarding Denmark’s Jewish Heritage: Bo Lidegaard, New York Times, Feb. 26, 2015
Where the Road From Auschwitz Ends: Roger Cohen, New York Times, Mar. 10, 2014
Caroline Glick
Jerusalem Post, Mar. 12, 2015
The next 22 months until President Barack Obama leaves office promise to be the most challenging period in the history of US-Israel relations. Now unfettered by electoral concerns, over the past week Obama exposed his ill-intentions toward Israel in two different ways.
First, the Justice Department leaked its intention to indict Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez on corruption charges. Menendez is the ranking Democratic member, and the former chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is also the most outspoken Democratic critic of Obama’s policy of appeasing the Iranian regime. As former US federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote this week at PJMedia, “It is perfectly reasonable to believe that Menendez may be guilty of corruption offenses and that his political opposition on Iran is factoring into the administration’s decision to charge him. Put it another way, if Menendez were running interference for Obama on the Iran deal, rather than trying to scupper it, I believe he would not be charged.”
The Menendez prosecution tells us that Obama wishes to leave office after having vastly diminished support for Israel among Democrats. And he will not hesitate to use strong-arm tactics against his fellow Democrats to achieve his goal. We already experienced Obama’s efforts in this sphere in the lead-up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before the joint houses of Congress on March 3 with his campaign to pressure Democratic lawmakers to boycott Netanyahu’s address. Now, with his move against Menendez, Obama made clear that support for Israel – even in the form of opposition to the nuclear armament of Iran – will be personally and politically costly for Democrats. The long-term implications of Obama’s moves to transform US support for Israel into a partisan issue cannot by wished away. It is possible that his successor as the head of the Democratic Party will hold a more sympathetic view of Israel. But it is also possible that the architecture of Democratic fund-raising and grassroots support that Obama has been building for the past six years will survive his presidency and that as a consequence, Democrats will have incentives to oppose Israel.
The reason Obama is so keen to transform Israel into a partisan issue was made clear by the second move he made last week. Last Thursday, US National Security Adviser Susan Rice announced that the NSC’s Middle East Coordinator Phil Gordon was stepping down and being replaced by serial Israel-basher Robert Malley. Malley, who served as an NSC junior staffer during the Clinton administration, rose to prominence in late 2000 when, following the failed Camp David peace summit in July 2000 and the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war, Malley co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times blaming Israel and then-prime minister Ehud Barak for the failure of the negotiations. What was most remarkable at the time about Malley’s positions was that they completely contradicted Bill Clinton’s expressed views. Clinton placed the blame for the failure of the talks squarely on then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s shoulders. Not only did Arafat reject Barak’s unprecedented offer of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty over all of Gaza, most of Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount, he refused to make a counter-offer. And then two months later, he opened the Palestinian terror war.
As Jonathan Tobin explained in Commentary this week, through his writings and public statements, Malley has legitimized Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Malley thinks it is perfectly reasonable that the Palestinians refuse to concede their demand for free immigration of millions of foreign Arabs to the Jewish state in the framework of their concocted “right of return,” even though the clear goal of that demand is to destroy Israel. As Tobin noted, Malley believes that Palestinian terrorism against Israel is “understandable if not necessarily commendable.” During Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, then-senator Obama listed Malley as a member of his foreign policy team. When pro-Israel groups criticized his appointment, Obama fired Malley. But after his 2012 reelection, no longer fearing the ramifications of embracing an openly anti-Israel adviser, one who had documented contacts with Hamas terrorists and has expressed support for recognizing the terror group, Obama appointed Malley to serve as his senior adviser for Iraq-Iran-Syria and the Gulf states. Still facing the 2014 congressional elections, Obama pledged that Malley would have no involvement in issues related to Israel and the Palestinians. But then last week, he appointed him to direct the NSC’s policy in relation to the entire Middle East, including Israel.
The deeper significance of Malley’s appointment is that it demonstrates that Obama’s goal in his remaining time in office is to realign US Middle East policy away from Israel. With his Middle East policy led by a man who thinks the Palestinian goal of destroying Israel is legitimate, Obama can be expected to expand his practice of placing all the blame for the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians solely on Israel’s shoulders. Malley’s appointment indicates that there is nothing Israel can do to stem the tsunami of American pressure it is about to suffer. Electing a left-wing government to replace Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will make no difference. Just as Malley was willing to blame Barak – a leader who went to Camp David as the head of a minority coalition, whose positions on territorial withdrawals were rejected by a wide majority of Israelis – for the absence of peace, so we can assume that he, and his boss, will blame Israel for the absence of peace over the next 22 months, regardless of who stands at the head of the next government….
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
WE ARE WITNESSING A NEW, SOPHISTICATED,
VIRULENT, AND EVEN LETHAL ANTI-SEMITISM
Irwin Cotler
National Post, Mar. 5, 2015
Recently, I participated in a historic UN General Assembly forum on anti-Semitism, which was timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. While the horrors of the Holocaust are seven decades old, let there be no mistake about it: Jews died at Auschwitz because of anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism did not die. This has been made tragically clear by recent attacks in France, including at the Hyper Cacher supermarket and at a Jewish community centre in Nice, and more recently by a shooting at a Bat Mitzvah celebration in Copenhagen. Yet these incidents are only the latest manifestations of a more generalized upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe and around the world.
This past summer and since, hate-filled demonstrations have been replete with genocidal chants of “Jews, Jews to the gas,” accompanied by the firebombing of synagogues — eight in France last July — attacks on Jewish community centres, and assaults on Jewishly identifiable people and places. And Canada has not been spared. In its 2013 report, Bnai Brith found a 48% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in this country since 2004. Chants of “kill the Jews” and “Hitler was right” were heard on the streets of Calgary last summer, and days ago, cars in the parking lot of a Montreal apartment building were vandalized with swastikas, accompanied by threatening messages.
Globally, we are witnessing a new, sophisticated, virulent, and even lethal anti-Semitism, reminiscent of the atmospherics of the 1930s, and without parallel or precedent since the end of the Second World War. This phenomenon overlaps with classical anti-Semitism but is distinguishable from it. While classical anti-Semitism is the discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon the rights of Jews as people to live as equal members of whatever society they inhabit, the new anti-Semitism involves the discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon the right of the Jewish people to live as an equal member of the international community, with the state of Israel as the targeted collective Jew among the nations. Let me be clear: Israel should not be afforded special treatment, and criticism of Israeli policies or actions does not, in itself, constitute anti-Semitism. What I am referring to is the singling out of Israel for discriminatory treatment, and the denial of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.
This new anti-Semitism can be identified by four main indicators. The first is what may be called genocidal anti-Semitism, and can be seen, for instance, in the state-sanctioned incitement to genocide of Khamenei’s Iran, a characterization I use to distinguish it from the people and public of Iran, who are otherwise the targets of Khamenei’s massive domestic repression. It can be seen, as well, in the charters of such terrorist movements as Hamas and Hezbollah. The Hamas charter, for example, calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they may be, and it is replete with anti-Semitic tropes, including the notion that the Jews were responsible for the French revolution, the First World War, the Second World War, the League of Nations, and the United Nations, and that no war has broken out anywhere without Jewish fingerprints on it. Genocidal anti-Semitism also describes the abominable calls on the streets of Calgary, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere, for the resumption of the Nazis genocidal efforts.
The second indicator of the new anti-Semitism is the indictment of Israel and the Jewish people as the embodiment of all evil, including racism, imperialism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and even Nazism. And this serves as a validator for the third indicator, political anti-Semitism, by which I mean the denial of fundamental rights to the Jewish people, and only to the Jewish people. Political anti-Semitism includes the denial of Israel’s right to exist to begin with, and the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, if not even the denial of the Jewish people as a people. It is what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim and freely accord all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews.”
Which brings me to the fourth and final indicator of the new anti-Semitism: the laundering of Jew-hatred under the protective cover of universal values, including the UN, international law, the culture of human rights, and the struggle against racism. The laundering of anti-Semitism under the protective cover of the UN found dramatic expression in December, when the General Assembly — in yet another annual discriminatory ritual — adopted 20 resolutions of condemnation against Israel, and only four against the rest of the world combined. An example of laundering under the authority of international law occurred this past Dec. 17, when the contracting parties to the Geneva Convention put Israel in the docket of the accused for violations of international humanitarian law. Only three times in 50 years has a state been so accused, and all three times, that state was Israel.
And the laundering of anti-Semitism through the culture of human rights occurs each time the UN Human Rights Council singles out Israel for discriminatory treatment. This singling-out is starkly illustrated by the juxtaposition of the Council’s permanent agenda item 7 —“violations by Israel of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” — and permanent agenda item 8: “human rights violations in the rest of the world.” Sadly, these examples are but a sampling of the Jew-hatred that continues to plague the world, and from which Canada is not exempt. Yet, Canada can and must be a world leader in heeding the call of the recent UN forum to renew, reaffirm, and reinvigorate efforts to combat anti-Semitism, and to promote mutual respect, tolerance and understanding.
Efraim Zuroff
Jerusalem Post, Mar. 8, 2015
I very much doubt whether anyone in Israel paid close attention to this past Sunday’s national parliamentary elections in Estonia, but I was anxiously awaiting the results to see how the EKRE, the Conservative People’s Party, would fare. A week previously, I had personally seen the party in action in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital and largest city, where as part of their election campaign, they staged a torchlight parade to celebrate Estonian Independence Day. The march was sponsored under the slogan of “Estonia for Estonians,” a very clear and exclusionary message for the country’s minorities, many of whom have been residing there for generations.
I went to protest and monitor the march as part of a project to document and assess four neo-Nazi/ ultra-nationalist marches which are taking place in a span of less than 30 days in the capitals of the Baltic countries of Lithuania (two marches, one in the prewar capital of Kaunas [Kovno], and another one in the current capital of Vilnius [Vilna]), Latvia and Estonia. The marches in the first two countries have been staged regularly for quite a few years, but the march in Estonia was being held only for the second time. The number of marchers has been on the rise throughout the region, and the major themes are the lack of tolerance for minorities and the glorification of wartime local Nazi collaborators.
The latter theme is part of a systematic effort by most of post-Communist Eastern Europe, led by the Baltic countries and especially by Lithuania, to rewrite the accepted narrative of World War II and the Holocaust by promoting the canard of equivalency between Communist and Nazi crimes. The motive in this case is to hide, or at least minimize, the significance of the war crimes committed by local Nazi collaborators and emphasize the suffering of these nations under Communist rule. At the march, the main banner bore the inscription “For Estonia,” but the message was clearly directed against the country’s minorities, who are perceived as a threat, which is hardly surprising since some of the leaders of the EKRE are known for their lack of tolerance. Thus, for example, prominent party member Martin Helme not that long ago summarized his attitude toward the possibility of African immigrants coming to Estonia as “If you’re black, go back.”
As far as historical issues, they were noticeably absent, even though the EKRE reportedly is the party of choice of many Estonian SS veterans. Since the latter meet every summer in Sinimae, where they host their fellow Waffen-SS veterans from various Western European countries, where such gatherings are prohibited by law, it’s possible that the preference was to focus on the more pressing issue of national identity. Another possible explanation might be that he Holocaust does not concern most Estonians, since the scale of the tragedy was ostensibly very minor, with only 1,000 Jews being caught by the Nazi occupation in July 1941. The fact of the matter is, however, that almost every single one of those Jews was murdered, in many cases by Estonian Nazi collaborators. In addition, tens of thousands of Jews from other countries were deported to Estonia to be worked to death in some 20 concentration camps staffed by Estonians, and the 36th Estonian Security Police Battalion participated in the mass murder of thousands of Jews in Nowogrudok.
While planning my trip, I consulted with an Israeli friend living in Tallinn for many years, who suggested that I postpone my visit until after the elections on March 1, lest my presence at the march be considered a provocation, which would help the ultra-nationalists at the polls. I explained that obviously I could not accept his suggestion, since it was important to personally attend the march, which was planned to celebrate Estonian Independence Day on February 24. As it turned out, the march took place without any unpleasant incidents, with only about 200 people participating, although the Estonian press did note my presence in negative terms. The electoral results indicated, however, that there are far too many Estonians willing to support the ultra-nationalist EKRE, which received 46,763 votes, and seven seats (out of 101) in the Riigikogu, the Estonian parliament. They will almost certainly not be part of the new government coalition, but their initial success should ring a loud alarm bell, not only in Tallinn, but also in Brussels.
Joseph Epstein
Wall Street Journal, Jan. 2, 2015
A high percentage of the best historical novels have been written with the classical world as background. One thinks of Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian,” Robert Graves’s “I, Claudius,” John Williams’s “Augustus,” Steven Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire,” and those of Mary Renault’s novels set in ancient Greece. Milton Steinberg’s “As a Driven Leaf” (1939) is another splendid historical novel, this one set in second century Jerusalem and Antioch, one generation after the destruction of the Jewish Temple (A.D. 70) and during the rise and suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt under the Roman rule of the Emperor Trajan.
The author of “As a Driven Leaf” was the rabbi at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, where he was famous for his learning and the power of his sermons. A student of the legendary philosopher Morris R. Cohen and for a time the disciple of the rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Steinberg, who died in 1950 at the age of 46, left behind two nonfiction books—The Making of the Modern Jew (1934) and Basic Judaism (1947)—still read in our day. A second, unfinished novel, “The Prophet’s Wife,” was published posthumously in 2010. “As a Driven Leaf”—the title comes from Job 13: 24-25: “Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face…/ Will Thou harass a driven leaf?”—is a book with something like a cult following…
Ambitious in scope, the theme of “As a Driven Leaf” is the conflict between reason and revelation, science and faith that faces Elisha ben Abuyah, Steinberg’s protagonist. Handsome, highly intelligent, born to wealth, Elisha is brought up under the guidance of a Greek tutor. When Elisha’s father dies, an uncle, orthodox in his Jewish belief, takes responsibility for the boy’s upbringing and sends him off to be educated by a learned rabbi, a man whose saintly simplicity and wisdom win Elisha’s heart and set him on the path of Jewish learning. He becomes one of the most promising young rabbis of the age, rising to become a member of the Sanhedrin, the supreme court composed of the most learned men in Judea. Elisha ben Abuyah was a historical character, a Jewish apostate, about whom not all that much is known. He is said to have lapsed into hedonism, replaced Jewish ethics with pagan aesthetics, and betrayed the Jews to the Romans during the Bar Kochba rebellion. With great novelistic skill, Steinberg fleshes out the bare bones of information we have on Elisha ben Abuyah, breathes life into him and into the large cast of characters he encounters in the novel, and gives his story impressive dramatic unity.
In the novel Elisha contracts a disappointing marriage to a woman of crabbed and conventional views whose miscarriage prevents her from having children. He finds succor in the home of a disciple, whose two young children later die of plague. “It is not in our power,” a dictum of the Jewish sages runs, “to explain either the happiness of the wicked nor the suffering of the righteous.” The death of these children turns Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah’s mind to doubt, and to searching for answers to the world’s mysteries outside the realm of Torah and Jewish learning. Greek learning is where this search soon leads. A crucial book for Elisha is the geometry of Euclid, in which he discovers what Jewish learning cannot deliver: cold axiomatic proofs set out through a series of indisputable propositions. As Elisha puts it later in the novel, favoring Greek learning over Jewish learning: “Their success, I am convinced, followed from the fact that they started from the foundations. We, on the contrary, have always tried to bolster a pre-established case.” Elisha ben Abuyah’s intellectual wandering ends in apostasy and eventually with his excommunication from the rabbinate.
The first part of “As a Driven Leaf” is set in Judea; the second, in Antioch in Syria. In Antioch, Elisha’s search for certainty takes him further afield—to study Gnosticism, the arguments of the agnostics, the doctrines of the Cynics. Steinberg was learned in Greek and Latin, and steeped in ancient history, and the detailed settings of his novel have a clinching convincingness. In Roman Antioch Elisha encounters the barbarity of the Roman slave markets, the bloodiness of the gladiatorial arena, where his fellow Jews are put to death at the command of the cruel Roman praetorian prefect, Marcus Tineius Rufus. Elisha’s own past reverence for the Pax Romana is wiped out as he sees, “with such fearful clarity, that no society, no matter how great the achievements of its scholars, can be an instrument of human redemption if it despises justice and mercy.”
Like the Old Testament God, Steinberg puts Elisha through arduous tests: the temptation of adultery, the seductions of intellectual vanity, and more. Elisha comes to self-knowledge, but the secrets of the universe remain withheld from him. He feels his error in hoping for certainty in life, in abandoning his people and his religion out of intellectual hubris, when he also comes to realize that important truths do not await at the end of a syllogism. Faith and reason, he finally grasps, need not stand opposed. “On the contrary,” he tells his old disciple, “salvation is through the commingling of the two, the former to establish first premises, the latter to purify them of confusion. … It is not certainty that one acquires so, only plausibility, but that is the best we can hope for.”
In his spiritual wanderings Elisha has gone too far, and can never again accept the authority of his old religion. At the novel’s close, his search continues. “Older, sadder, wiser, I go seeking now, through faith and reason combined, the answer to this baffling pageant which is the world, and the little byplay which has been my life.” One imagines that in writing “As a Driven Leaf” Milton Steinberg was writing about his own intellectual conflict over the issue—faith or reason, and in what proportions?—that remains fundamental to thoughtful people to this day. The tension that this conflict stirs in a first-class mind in his novel is compelling, and the incisive portrait of the man caught up in it is what gives “As a Driven Leaf” its standing as a masterpiece.
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends and Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Crossing the Line 2: the New Face of Antisemitism on Campus (Video): Step Up For Israel, 2015
Every Vote Counts in This Crucial Election: Isi Leibler, Candidly Speaking, Mar. 12, 2015—The wretched state of Israeli politics and this unnecessary election have alienated the majority of voters. With the exception of those voting Meretz, Habayit Hayehudi, and the haredi and Arab parties, most Israelis will be holding their noses and voting unenthusiastically for the party that they feel least offends them.
Barack Obama and the Fatal Myth of Appeasement: John Bolton, Algemeiner, Mar. 12, 2014—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s powerful speech to Congress about Iran’s nuclear weapons program now is behind us.
Guarding Denmark’s Jewish Heritage: Bo Lidegaard, New York Times, Feb. 26, 2015 —The attack on Copenhagen’s synagogue earlier this month that left a volunteer Jewish watchman dead is a tragedy for a society that, for more than two centuries, has insisted that there is no tension between being Jewish and being Danish.
Where the Road From Auschwitz Ends: Roger Cohen, New York Times, Mar. 10, 2014—The most important word in the title of Goran Rosenberg’s beautifully wrought book, “A Brief Stop on the Road From Auschwitz,” is the unlikely one that precedes the name of the Nazi death camp. Auschwitz, for the Jews, and not only for them, was a destination with no return ticket, a place of gas and ashes.
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