A dissonant voice on MSNBC. Professor Ferguson presents an analytical view of the situation in Egypt, without the romanticism that the Left attaches to anything "revolutionary."
Friday, April 8, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Afghan Savages Burn Cross and Obama's Effigy
Reports of the riots in Afghanistan are being presented with the explanation that they were triggered by the burning of a Q'uran by Reverend Terry Jones. Afghan members of the religion of peace have shown how tolerant they are by decapitations and assassinations. In this video, the headline is that Obama is burned in effigy. Upon watching this video, one can notice that beside Obama's effigy, the savage mob burns a cross. I am sure that the Vatican will react by apologizing about the Crusades.
In the meantime: Terry Jones is bad and intolerant, but Muslim outrage has to be understood. Repugnant!
In the meantime: Terry Jones is bad and intolerant, but Muslim outrage has to be understood. Repugnant!
Saturday, April 2, 2011
The Tyrannies Are Doomed:
Barry Weiss discusses the Middle East with Professor Bernard Lewis. Published in the Wall Street Journal.
Princeton, N.J. 'What Went Wrong?" That was the explosive title of a December 2001 book by historian Bernard Lewis about the decline of the Muslim world. Already at the printer when 9/11 struck, the book rocketed the professor to widespread public attention, and its central question gripped Americans for a decade.
Now, all of a sudden, there's a new question on American minds: What Might Go Right?
To find out, I made a pilgrimage to the professor's bungalow in Princeton, N.J., where he's lived since 1974 when he joined Princeton's faculty from London's School of Oriental and African Studies.
Two months shy of his 95th birthday, Mr. Lewis has been writing history books since before World War II. By 1950, he was already a leading scholar of the Arab world, and after 9/11, the vice president and the Pentagon's top brass summoned him to Washington for his wisdom.
"I think that the tyrannies are doomed," Mr. Lewis says as we sit by the windows in his library, teeming with thousands of books in the dozen or so languages he's mastered. "The real question is what will come instead."
For Americans who have watched protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Bahrain and now Syria stand up against their regimes, it has been difficult not to be intoxicated by this revolutionary moment. Mr. Lewis is "delighted" by the popular movements and believes that the U.S. should do all it can to bolster them. But he cautions strongly against insisting on Western-style elections in Muslim lands.
"We have a much better chance of establishing—I hesitate to use the word democracy—but some sort of open, tolerant society, if it's done within their systems, according to their traditions. Why should we expect them to adopt a Western system? And why should we expect it to work?" he asks.
Mr. Lewis brings up Germany circa 1918. "After World War I, the victorious Allies tried to impose the parliamentary system on Germany, where they had a rather different political tradition. And the result was that Hitler came to power. Hitler came to power by the manipulation of free and fair elections," recounts Mr. Lewis, who fought the Nazis in the British Army. For a more recent example, consider the 2006 electorial triumph of Hamas in Gaza.
Elections, he argues, should be the culmination—not the beginning—of a gradual political process. Thus "to lay the stress all the time on elections, parliamentary Western-style elections, is a dangerous delusion."
Not because Muslims' cultural DNA is predisposed against it—quite the contrary. "The whole Islamic tradition is very clearly against autocratic and irresponsible rule," says Mr. Lewis. "There is a very strong tradition—both historical and legal, both practical and theoretical—of limited, controlled government."
But Western-style elections have had mixed success even in the West. "Even in France, where they claim to have invented freedom, they're on their fifth republic and who knows how many more there will be before they get settled down," Mr. Lewis laughs. "I don't think we can assume that the Anglo-American system of democracy is a sort of world rule, a world ideal," he says. Instead, Muslims should be "allowed—and indeed helped and encouraged—to develop their own ways of doing things."
In other words: To figure out how to build freer, better societies, Muslims need not look across the ocean. They need only look back into their own history.
Mr. Lewis points me to a letter written by France's ambassador in Istanbul shortly before the French revolution. The French government was frustrated by how long the ambassador was taking to move ahead with some negotiations. So he pushed back: "Here, it is not like it is in France, where the king is sole master and does as he pleases. Here, the sultan has to consult."
In Middle Eastern history "consultation is the magic word. It occurs again and again in classical Islamic texts. It goes back to the time of the Prophet himself," says Mr. Lewis.
What it meant practically was that political leaders had to cut deals with various others—the leaders of the merchant guild, the craft guild, the scribes, the land owners and the like. Each guild chose its own leaders from within. "The rulers," says Mr. Lewis, "even the great Ottoman sultans, had to consult with these different groups in order to get things done."
It's not that Ottoman-era societies were models of Madisonian political wisdom. But power was shared such that rulers at the top were checked, so the Arab and Muslim communities of the vast Ottoman Empire came to include certain practices and expectations of limited government.
Americans often think of limited government in terms of "freedom," but Mr. Lewis says that word doesn't have a precise equivalent in Arabic. "Liberty, freedom, it means not being a slave. . . . Freedom was a legal term and a social term—it was not a political term. And it was not used as a metaphor for political status," he says. The closest Arabic word to our concept of liberty is "justice," or 'adl. "In the Muslim tradition, justice is the standard" of good government. (Yet judging from the crowds gathered at Syria's central Umayyad mosque last week chanting "Freedom, freedom!," the word, if not our precise meaning, has certainly caught on.)
The traditional consultation process was a main casualty of modernization, which helps explain modernization's dubious reputation in parts of the Arab and Muslim world. "Modernization . . . enormously increased the power of the state," Mr. Lewis says. "And it tended to undermine, or even destroy, those various intermediate powers which had previously limited the power of the state." This was enabled by the cunning of the Mubaraks and the Assads, paired with "modern communication, modern weapons and the modern apparatus of surveillance and repression." The result: These autocrats amassed "greater power than even the mightiest of the sultans ever had."
So can today's Middle East recover this tradition and adapt it appropriately? He reminds me that he is a historian: Predictions are not his forte. But the reluctant sage offers some thoughts.
First, Tunisia has real potential for democracy, largely because of the role of women there. "Tunisia, as far as I know, is the only Muslim country that has compulsory education for girls from the beginning right through. And in which women are to be found in all the professions," says Mr. Lewis.
"My own feeling is that the greatest defect of Islam and the main reason they fell behind the West is the treatment of women," he says. He makes the powerful point that repressive homes pave the way for repressive governments. "Think of a child that grows up in a Muslim household where the mother has no rights, where she is downtrodden and subservient. That's preparation for a life of despotism and subservience. It prepares the way for an authoritarian society," he says.
Egypt is a more complicated case, Mr. Lewis says. Already the young, liberal protesters who led the revolution in Tahrir Square are being pushed aside by the military-Muslim Brotherhood complex. Hasty elections, which could come as soon as September, might sweep the Muslim Brotherhood into power. That would be "a very dangerous situation," he warns. "We should have no illusions about the Muslim Brotherhood, who they are and what they want."
And yet Western commentators seem determined to harbor such illusions. Take their treatment of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi. The highly popular, charismatic cleric has said that Hitler "managed to put [the Jews] in their place" and that the Holocaust "was divine punishment for them."
Yet following a sermon Sheikh Qaradawi delivered to more than a million in Cairo following Mubarak's ouster, New York Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick wrote that the cleric "struck themes of democracy and pluralism, long hallmarks of his writing and preaching." Mr. Kirkpatrick added: "Scholars who have studied his work say Sheik Qaradawi has long argued that Islamic law supports the idea of a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy."
Professor Lewis has been here before. As the Iranian revolution was beginning in the late 1970s, the name of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was starting to appear in the Western press. "I was at Princeton and I must confess I never heard of Khomeini. Who had? So I did what one normally does in this world of mine: I went to the university library and looked up Khomeini and, sure enough, it was there."
'It" was a short book called "Islamic Government"—now known as Khomeini's Mein Kampf—available in Persian and Arabic. Mr. Lewis checked out both copies and began reading. "It became perfectly clear who he was and what his aims were. And that all of this talk at the time about [him] being a step forward and a move toward greater freedom was absolute nonsense," recalls Mr. Lewis.
"I tried to bring this to the attention of people here. The New York Times wouldn't touch it. They said 'We don't think this would interest our readers.' But we got the Washington Post to publish an article quoting this. And they were immediately summoned by the CIA," he says. "Eventually the message got through—thanks to Khomeini."
Now, thanks to Tehran's enduring Khomeinism, the regime is unpopular and under threat. "There is strong opposition to the regime—two oppositions—the opposition within the regime and the opposition against the regime. And I think that sooner or later the regime in Iran will be overthrown and something more open, more democratic, will emerge," Mr. Lewis says. "Most Iranian patriots are against the regime. They feel it is defaming and dishonoring their country. And they're right of course."
Iranians' disdain for the ruling mullahs is the reason Mr. Lewis thinks the U.S. shouldn't take military action there. "It would give the regime a gift that they don't at present enjoy—namely Iranian patriotism," he warns.
By his lights, the correct policy is to elevate the democratic Green movement, and to distinguish the regime from the people. "When President Obama assumed office, he sent a message of greeting to the regime. That is polite and courteous," Mr. Lewis deadpans, "but it would have been much better to send a message to the people of Iran."
Let's hope the Green movement is effective. Because—and this may be hard to square with his policy prescription—Mr. Lewis doesn't think that Iran can be contained if it does go nuclear.
"During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States had nuclear weapons but both knew that the other was very unlikely to use them. Because of what was known at the time as MAD—mutually assured destruction. MAD meant that each side knew that if it used a nuclear weapon the other would retaliate and both sides would be devastated. And that's why the whole time during the Cold War, even at the worst times, there was not much danger of anyone using a nuclear weapon," says Mr. Lewis.
But the mullahs "are religious fanatics with an apocalyptic mindset. In Islam, as in Christianity and Judaism, there is an end-of-times scenario—and they think it's beginning or has already begun." So "mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent—it's an inducement."
Another key variable in the regional dynamic is Turkey, Mr. Lewis's particular expertise. He was the first Westerner granted access to the Ottoman archives in Istanbul in 1950. Recent developments there alarm him. "In Turkey, the movement is getting more and more toward re-Islamization. The government has that as its intention—and it has been taking over, very skillfully, one part after another of Turkish society. The economy, the business community, the academic community, the media. And now they're taking over the judiciary, which in the past has been the stronghold of the republican regime." Ten years from now, Mr. Lewis thinks, Turkey and Iran could switch places.
So even as he watches young Middle Eastern activists rise up against the tyrannies that have oppressed them, he keeps a wary eye on the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. It is particularly challenging because it has "no political center, no ethnic identity. . . . It's both Arab and Persian and Turkish and everything else. It is religiously defined. And it can command support among people of every nationality once they are convinced. That marks the important difference," he says.
"I think the struggle will continue until they either obtain their objective or renounce it," Mr. Lewis says. "At the moment, both seem equally improbable."
Ms. Weiss is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
British Muslims for Israel
What a refreshing voice. In the following video you will hear from Hassan, a British Muslim saying exactly what millions of his coreligionists should be saying. If more Muslims voiced his opinions, a Palestinian state would have been in existence a long time ago.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Fogel Massacre
Although I am not in the habit of putting morbid pictures in my blog, I feel that the pictures below must be seen. These are some of the pictures of the Fogel family who was massacred by Palestinian terrorists. Building a house in East Jerusalem is condemned by the world as an obstacle to peace. Massacring a family of five is totally ignored. YouTube removed a video showing these pictures. I guess that they didn't want us to believe that the religion of peace is not so peaceful after all.
Below the pictures, you will be able to read an article by Caroline Glick that summarizes what so many of us feel.
Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the Palestinian terrorists pounced on her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay in bed on Friday night in their home in Itamar.
The terrorists stabbed Ruth to death as she came out of the bathroom. With both parents and the newborn dead, they moved on to the other children, going into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi's sons Yoav (11) and Elad (4) were sleeping. They stabbed them through their hearts and slit their throats.
The murderers apparently missed another bedroom where the Fogels' other sons, eight-year-old Ro'i and two-year-old Yishai were asleep because they left them alive. The boys were found by their big sister, 12-year-old Tamar, when she returned home from a friend's house two hours after her family was massacred.
Tamar found Yishai standing over his parents' bodies screaming for them to wake up.
In his eulogy at the family's funeral on Sunday, former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau told Tamar that her job from now on is to be her surviving brothers' mommy.
In a rare move, the Prime Minister's Office released photos of the Fogel family's blood-drenched corpses.
They are shown as they were found by security forces.
There was Hadas, dead on her parents' bed, next to her dead father Udi.
There was Elad, lying on a small throw rug wearing socks. His little hands were clenched into fists. What was a four-year-old to do against two grown men with knives? He clenched his fists. So did his big brother.
Maybe the Prime Minister's Office thought the pictures would shock the world. Maybe Binyamin Netanyahu thought the massacre of three little children would move someone to rethink their hatred of Israel.
That was the theme of his address to the nation Saturday night.
Netanyahu directed most of his words to the hostile world. He spoke to the leaders who rush to condemn Israel at the UN Security Council every time we assert our right to this land by permitting Jews to build homes. He demanded that they condemn the murder of Jewish children with the same enthusiasm and speed.
He shouldn't have bothered.
The government released the photos on Saturday night. Within hours, the social activism website My Israel posted a short video of the photographs on YouTube along with the names and ages of the victims.
Within two hours YouTube removed the video.
What was Netanyahu thinking? Didn't he get the memo that photos of murdered Jewish children are unacceptable? If they're published, someone might start thinking about the nature of Palestinian society.
Someone might consider the fact that in the Palestinian Authority, anti-Jewish propaganda is so ubiquitous and so murderous that killing the Fogel babies was an act of heroism. The baby killers knew that by murdering Udi, Ruth, Hadas, Yoav and Elad they would enter the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. They can expect to have a sports stadium or school in Ramallah or Hebron built for them by the Palestinian Authority and underwritten by American or European taxpayers.
And indeed, the murder of the Fogel children and their parents was greeted with jubilation in Gaza.
Carnivals were held in the streets as Hamas members handed out sweets.
Obviously YouTube managers are not interested in being held responsible for someone noticing that genocidal Jew hatred defines Palestinian society - and the Arab world as a whole. But they really have no reason to be concerned. Even if they had allowed the video to be posted for more than an hour, it wouldn't have made a difference.
The enlightened peoples of Europe, and growing numbers of Americans, have no interest in hearing or seeing anything that depicts Jews as good people, or even just as regular people. It is not that the cultured, intellectual A-listers in Europe and America share the Palestinians' genocidal hatred of the Jewish people.
The powerful newspaper editors, television commentators, playwrights, fashion designers, filmmakers and professors don't spend time thinking about how to prepare the next slaughter. They don't teach their children from the time they are Hadas and Elad Fogel's ages that they should strive to become mass murderers. They would never dream of doing these things.
They know there is a division of labor in contemporary anti-Semitism.
The job of the intellectual luminaries in Western high society today is to hate Jews the old-fashioned way, the way their greatgrandparents hated Jews back in the days of the early 20th century before that villain Adolf Hitler gave Jew hating a bad name.
Much has been made of the confluence of anti-Semitic bile pouring out of the chattering classes. From Mel Gibson to Julian Assange to Helen Thomas to Charlie Sheen to John Galliano, it seems like a day doesn't go by without some new celebrity exposing himself as a Jew hater.
It isn't that the beautiful people and their followers suddenly decided that Jews are not their cup of tea (or rail of cocaine). It's just that we have reached the point where people no longer feel embarrassed to parade their negative feelings towards Jews in public.
A DECADE ago, the revelation that French ambassador to Britain Daniel Bernard referred to Israel as "that shi**y little country," was shocking. Now it is standard fare. Everyone who is anyone will compare Israel to Nazi Germany without even realizing this is nothing but Holocaust denial.
The post-Holocaust dam reining in anti-Semitism burst in 2002. As Jewish children and parents like the Fogels were being murdered in their beds, on the streets, in discotheques, cafés and supermarkets throughout Israel, fashionable anti-Semites rejoiced at the opportunity to hate Jews in public again.
The collective Jew, Israel was accused of everything from genocide to infanticide to just plain nastiness.
Israel's leaders were caricatured as Fagin, Shylock, Pontius Pilate and Hitler on the front pages of newspapers throughout Europe. IDF soldiers were portrayed as Nazis, and Israeli families were dehumanized.
No longer civilians with an inherent right to live, in universities throughout the US and Europe, Israeli innocents were castigated as "extremist-Zionists" or "settlers" who basically deserved to be killed.
Professors whose "academic" achievements involved publishing sanitized postmodern versions of anti-Jewish Palestinian propaganda were granted tenure and rewarded with lucrative book contracts.
Today, when properly modulated, Jew hatred is a career maker. Take playwright Caryl Churchill's 1,300- word anti-Semitic monologue "Seven Jewish Children."
The script accuses the entire population of Israel of mass murders which were never committed.
For her efforts, Churchill became an international celebrity. The Royal Court Theater produced her anti- Jewish agitprop. The Guardian featured it on its home page. When Jewish groups demanded that The Guardian remove the blood libel from its website, the paper refused. Instead, it left the anti-Semitic propaganda on its homepage, but in a gesture of openmindedness, hosted a debate about whether or not "Seven Jewish Children" is anti-Semitic.
From London, "Seven Jewish Children" went on tour in Europe and the US. In a bid to show how tolerant of dissent they are, Jewish communities in America hosted showings of the play, which portrays Jewish parents as monsters who train their children to become mass murderers.
"Seven Jewish Children's" success was repeated by the Turkish anti-Semitic action film "Valley of the Wolves- Palestine," which premiered on January 28 - International Holocaust Memorial Day. The hero of that film is a Turkish James Bond character who comes to Israel to avenge his brothers, who were killed by IDF forces on the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara last May.
No doubt owing to the success of "Seven Jewish Children" and "Valley of the Wolves-Palestine" and other such initiatives, anti-Semitic art and entertainment is a growth sector in Europe.
Last month Britain struck again. Channel 4 produced a new piece of anti-Semitic bile - a four-part prime-time miniseries called "The Promise." It presents itself as an historical drama about Israel and the Palestinians, but its relationship with actual history begins and ends with the wardrobes.
In what has become the meme of all European and international left-liberal salons, the only good Jews in the mini-series are the ones who died in the Holocaust. From the show's perspective, every Jew who took up arms to liberate Israel from the British and defend it from the Arabs is a Nazi.
WHAT ALL this shows is that Netanyahu was wasting his time calling on world leaders to condemn the murder of the Fogel family. What does a condemnation mean? France and Britain condemned the massacre, along with the US. Does that exculpate the French and British for their embrace of anti-Semitism? Does it make them friends of the Jewish state?
And say a British playwright sees the YouTube censored photographs. No self-respecting British playwright will write a play called "Three Jewish Children" telling the story of how Palestinian parents do in fact teach their children to become mass murderers of Jews.
And if a playwright were to write such a play, The Royal Court Theater wouldn't produce it. The Guardian wouldn't post it on its website. Liberal Jewish community centers in America wouldn't show it, nor would university student organizations in Europe or America.
No, if someone wanted to use the photographs of Yoav's and Elad's mangled corpses and clenched little fists as inspiration to write a play or feature film about the fact that the Palestinians have no national identity outside their quest to annihilate the Jewish state, he would find no mass market.
The headlines describing the attack make all this clear.
From the BBC to CNN the Fogels were not described as Israelis. They were a "settler family." Their murderers were "alleged terrorists."
As far as the opinion makers of Europe and much of America are concerned, the Yoavs and Hadases and Elads of Israel have no right to live if they live in "a settlement."
So too, they believe that Palestinians have a right to murder Israelis who serve in the IDF and who believe that Jews should be able to live freely wherever we want because this land belongs to us.
Until these genteel Jew haters learn to think otherwise, Israel should neither seek nor care if they condemn this or any other act of Palestinian genocide. We shouldn't care about them at all.
Caroline Glick
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
Below the pictures, you will be able to read an article by Caroline Glick that summarizes what so many of us feel.
Three of the victims
4 years old Elad
Father and baby daughter, 4 months old Hadas
11 years old Yoav
Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the Palestinian terrorists pounced on her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay in bed on Friday night in their home in Itamar.
The terrorists stabbed Ruth to death as she came out of the bathroom. With both parents and the newborn dead, they moved on to the other children, going into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi's sons Yoav (11) and Elad (4) were sleeping. They stabbed them through their hearts and slit their throats.
The murderers apparently missed another bedroom where the Fogels' other sons, eight-year-old Ro'i and two-year-old Yishai were asleep because they left them alive. The boys were found by their big sister, 12-year-old Tamar, when she returned home from a friend's house two hours after her family was massacred.
Tamar found Yishai standing over his parents' bodies screaming for them to wake up.
In his eulogy at the family's funeral on Sunday, former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau told Tamar that her job from now on is to be her surviving brothers' mommy.
In a rare move, the Prime Minister's Office released photos of the Fogel family's blood-drenched corpses.
They are shown as they were found by security forces.
There was Hadas, dead on her parents' bed, next to her dead father Udi.
There was Elad, lying on a small throw rug wearing socks. His little hands were clenched into fists. What was a four-year-old to do against two grown men with knives? He clenched his fists. So did his big brother.
Maybe the Prime Minister's Office thought the pictures would shock the world. Maybe Binyamin Netanyahu thought the massacre of three little children would move someone to rethink their hatred of Israel.
That was the theme of his address to the nation Saturday night.
Netanyahu directed most of his words to the hostile world. He spoke to the leaders who rush to condemn Israel at the UN Security Council every time we assert our right to this land by permitting Jews to build homes. He demanded that they condemn the murder of Jewish children with the same enthusiasm and speed.
He shouldn't have bothered.
The government released the photos on Saturday night. Within hours, the social activism website My Israel posted a short video of the photographs on YouTube along with the names and ages of the victims.
Within two hours YouTube removed the video.
What was Netanyahu thinking? Didn't he get the memo that photos of murdered Jewish children are unacceptable? If they're published, someone might start thinking about the nature of Palestinian society.
Someone might consider the fact that in the Palestinian Authority, anti-Jewish propaganda is so ubiquitous and so murderous that killing the Fogel babies was an act of heroism. The baby killers knew that by murdering Udi, Ruth, Hadas, Yoav and Elad they would enter the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. They can expect to have a sports stadium or school in Ramallah or Hebron built for them by the Palestinian Authority and underwritten by American or European taxpayers.
And indeed, the murder of the Fogel children and their parents was greeted with jubilation in Gaza.
Carnivals were held in the streets as Hamas members handed out sweets.
Obviously YouTube managers are not interested in being held responsible for someone noticing that genocidal Jew hatred defines Palestinian society - and the Arab world as a whole. But they really have no reason to be concerned. Even if they had allowed the video to be posted for more than an hour, it wouldn't have made a difference.
The enlightened peoples of Europe, and growing numbers of Americans, have no interest in hearing or seeing anything that depicts Jews as good people, or even just as regular people. It is not that the cultured, intellectual A-listers in Europe and America share the Palestinians' genocidal hatred of the Jewish people.
The powerful newspaper editors, television commentators, playwrights, fashion designers, filmmakers and professors don't spend time thinking about how to prepare the next slaughter. They don't teach their children from the time they are Hadas and Elad Fogel's ages that they should strive to become mass murderers. They would never dream of doing these things.
They know there is a division of labor in contemporary anti-Semitism.
The job of the intellectual luminaries in Western high society today is to hate Jews the old-fashioned way, the way their greatgrandparents hated Jews back in the days of the early 20th century before that villain Adolf Hitler gave Jew hating a bad name.
Much has been made of the confluence of anti-Semitic bile pouring out of the chattering classes. From Mel Gibson to Julian Assange to Helen Thomas to Charlie Sheen to John Galliano, it seems like a day doesn't go by without some new celebrity exposing himself as a Jew hater.
It isn't that the beautiful people and their followers suddenly decided that Jews are not their cup of tea (or rail of cocaine). It's just that we have reached the point where people no longer feel embarrassed to parade their negative feelings towards Jews in public.
A DECADE ago, the revelation that French ambassador to Britain Daniel Bernard referred to Israel as "that shi**y little country," was shocking. Now it is standard fare. Everyone who is anyone will compare Israel to Nazi Germany without even realizing this is nothing but Holocaust denial.
The post-Holocaust dam reining in anti-Semitism burst in 2002. As Jewish children and parents like the Fogels were being murdered in their beds, on the streets, in discotheques, cafés and supermarkets throughout Israel, fashionable anti-Semites rejoiced at the opportunity to hate Jews in public again.
The collective Jew, Israel was accused of everything from genocide to infanticide to just plain nastiness.
Israel's leaders were caricatured as Fagin, Shylock, Pontius Pilate and Hitler on the front pages of newspapers throughout Europe. IDF soldiers were portrayed as Nazis, and Israeli families were dehumanized.
No longer civilians with an inherent right to live, in universities throughout the US and Europe, Israeli innocents were castigated as "extremist-Zionists" or "settlers" who basically deserved to be killed.
Professors whose "academic" achievements involved publishing sanitized postmodern versions of anti-Jewish Palestinian propaganda were granted tenure and rewarded with lucrative book contracts.
Today, when properly modulated, Jew hatred is a career maker. Take playwright Caryl Churchill's 1,300- word anti-Semitic monologue "Seven Jewish Children."
The script accuses the entire population of Israel of mass murders which were never committed.
For her efforts, Churchill became an international celebrity. The Royal Court Theater produced her anti- Jewish agitprop. The Guardian featured it on its home page. When Jewish groups demanded that The Guardian remove the blood libel from its website, the paper refused. Instead, it left the anti-Semitic propaganda on its homepage, but in a gesture of openmindedness, hosted a debate about whether or not "Seven Jewish Children" is anti-Semitic.
From London, "Seven Jewish Children" went on tour in Europe and the US. In a bid to show how tolerant of dissent they are, Jewish communities in America hosted showings of the play, which portrays Jewish parents as monsters who train their children to become mass murderers.
"Seven Jewish Children's" success was repeated by the Turkish anti-Semitic action film "Valley of the Wolves- Palestine," which premiered on January 28 - International Holocaust Memorial Day. The hero of that film is a Turkish James Bond character who comes to Israel to avenge his brothers, who were killed by IDF forces on the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara last May.
No doubt owing to the success of "Seven Jewish Children" and "Valley of the Wolves-Palestine" and other such initiatives, anti-Semitic art and entertainment is a growth sector in Europe.
Last month Britain struck again. Channel 4 produced a new piece of anti-Semitic bile - a four-part prime-time miniseries called "The Promise." It presents itself as an historical drama about Israel and the Palestinians, but its relationship with actual history begins and ends with the wardrobes.
In what has become the meme of all European and international left-liberal salons, the only good Jews in the mini-series are the ones who died in the Holocaust. From the show's perspective, every Jew who took up arms to liberate Israel from the British and defend it from the Arabs is a Nazi.
WHAT ALL this shows is that Netanyahu was wasting his time calling on world leaders to condemn the murder of the Fogel family. What does a condemnation mean? France and Britain condemned the massacre, along with the US. Does that exculpate the French and British for their embrace of anti-Semitism? Does it make them friends of the Jewish state?
And say a British playwright sees the YouTube censored photographs. No self-respecting British playwright will write a play called "Three Jewish Children" telling the story of how Palestinian parents do in fact teach their children to become mass murderers of Jews.
And if a playwright were to write such a play, The Royal Court Theater wouldn't produce it. The Guardian wouldn't post it on its website. Liberal Jewish community centers in America wouldn't show it, nor would university student organizations in Europe or America.
No, if someone wanted to use the photographs of Yoav's and Elad's mangled corpses and clenched little fists as inspiration to write a play or feature film about the fact that the Palestinians have no national identity outside their quest to annihilate the Jewish state, he would find no mass market.
The headlines describing the attack make all this clear.
From the BBC to CNN the Fogels were not described as Israelis. They were a "settler family." Their murderers were "alleged terrorists."
As far as the opinion makers of Europe and much of America are concerned, the Yoavs and Hadases and Elads of Israel have no right to live if they live in "a settlement."
So too, they believe that Palestinians have a right to murder Israelis who serve in the IDF and who believe that Jews should be able to live freely wherever we want because this land belongs to us.
Until these genteel Jew haters learn to think otherwise, Israel should neither seek nor care if they condemn this or any other act of Palestinian genocide. We shouldn't care about them at all.
Caroline Glick
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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