By Steven Plaut
The assault against Israel involves a war of words and concepts which are just as deadly as the vicious episodes of terrorist violence that punctuate daily life in the Jewish State. A propaganda narrative casting Israelis as “Nazis” who are perpetrating a Jewish version of the Final Solution against hapless Palestinians has spread from the Middle East into the capitals of Europe, and is echoed in the “boycott and divestment” movement and “Anti-Israel Apartheid Weeks” on prestigious American college campuses.
One of the most wrenching facts of this war against the Jews is the central role played by Jewish enablers of anti-Semitism. These individuals, mostly in the universities (American and Israeli alike), have given protective cover to the revival of Jew-hatred, which gains momentum with each passing day. The fact that these enablers are Jewish gives legitimacy to the hateful rhetoric about Jews and the Jewish State, and allows such ideology to flourish with utter impunity.
“Jewish Enablers of the War Against the Jews” by University of Haifa Professor Stephen Plaut exposes these Jewish Jew-haters—this is the only label for them—for what they really are. Plaut has written 20 searing portraits based on the words and deeds of these enablers, including figures such as the notorious Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein; the pseudo-rabbi Michael Lerner; and Harvard’s Sara Roy, an apologist for the terror group Hamas. This collection is comprised of Israelis as well, including Oren Yiftachel, who composes tracts purporting to show that his own country is a racist, apartheid state.
As Plaut’s work shows, these are not “self-hating” Jews; they hate both Israel and America.
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In American academia, the campus war against Israel and the Jews is led by a group of anti-Semites, many of them faculty members, who have made careers for themselves by traveling from one university to another supporting Arab terrorism and Jew-hatred. They invariably pretend that they are promoting peace. But in the Orwellian bubble where these anti-Semites live, Arab aggression and terror are reframed as self-defense, while Israeli self-defense is cast as aggression and terror. Israeli democracy is portrayed as apartheid, while Arab genocide is depicted as liberation.One of the most bizarre aspects of this campus war against the Jews is the presence of numerous self-hating, anti-Semitic Jews in the ranks of a movement whose ultimate goal is to achieve the annihilation of Israel. These people use their birthright to give authenticity to the campaign of delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. Today the leading promoters of “divestment” and boycott campaigns against Israel are academic Jewish leftists, some of them from Israel itself. In a few extreme cases, this detestation of Israel is combined with a fawning courtship of Islamic terrorists, American and European Neo-Nazis, and even Holocaust deniers.
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By Dennis Prager
Some recent news items about Jews aiding enemies of the Jews:
Last week, professor Noam Chomsky went to Lebanon to speak at the headquarters of Hezbollah. As described by the BBC, not a media friend of Israel, "Hezbollah's political rhetoric has centered on calls for the destruction of the state of Israel," and Hezbollah has been "synonymous with terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings." The terror group's views on the need to annihilate the Jewish state are identical to those of Hamas and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chomsky announced his support for Hezbollah and its need to be militarily strong.
Also last week, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi from Vienna, a member of a [tiny and powerless] Jewish sect [that has been condemned by the entire fervently-religious world] called Neturei Karta, went to Stockholm to meet with a Palestinian Hamas official to help raise funds for Hamas. Hamas is, of course, dedicated to annihilating Israel, as is Neturei Karta, an Orthodox Jewish fringe group that believes no Jewish state should exist unless founded by G-d. It therefore supports Palestinian and other Muslim groups that murder Jews in Israel.
In March, a group of five Neturei Karta rabbis from Britain and the United States went to Tehran to lend their support to the Iranian regime in its calls for the annihilation of Israel. The group said nothing about the Iranian regime's repeated denials that there was a Holocaust.
This week, the University of California at Irvine Muslim Student Union is sponsoring a series of lectures under the heading, "Holocaust in the Holy Land" and "Israel: The Fourth Reich." Featuring activists committed to Israel's destruction, its lead speaker is a Jew named Norman Finkelstein, a professor who devotes his life to attacking Jewish communities and Israel. Also appearing is Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss from the above-mentioned Neturei Karta.
Tony Judt, a widely published New York University professor, recently wrote that "Israel, in short, is an anachronism," and should therefore cease to exist. The Jews of Israel should live under Arab/Muslim rule. Note that of all the countries of the world, Judt — who the Jewish newspaper The Forward identified as "raised in the heavily Jewish East End section of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis" — has advocated the disappearance of one country, the Jewish one. Why, for example, does Judt not write that Pakistan, a Muslim state carved out of India, is an "anachronism"?
Jews siding with the Jews' enemies or even actually fomenting Jew-hatred has a history that long predates Chomsky, Finkelstein, leftist Jewish professors and the Neturei Karta. Karl Marx, though baptized a Christian, was the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis but wrote one of the most anti-Semitic tracts of the 19th century, "On the Jewish Question." In it he wrote, among other anti-Semitic charges, that "Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist."
How is one to explain these Jews who work to hurt Jews?
I think the primary explanations are psychological. As I wrote in a previous column, it is almost impossible to overstate the pathological effects of thousands of years of murder of Jews — culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, when nearly all Jews on the European continent were murdered — have had on most Jews.
It is not coincidental that Norman Finkelstein's parents went through the Holocaust or that Yisroel Dovid Weiss's grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. But even Jews who lost no relatives in the Holocaust fear another outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, and given the Nazi-like anti-Semitism in the Muslim world today, that is not exactly paranoia.
One way to deal with this is to side with the enemy. Consciously or not, the Jew who sides with those dedicated to murdering Jews feels that he will be spared. He becomes the "good Jew" in the anti-Semites' eyes. How else to explain the visit of a Jew named Noam Chomsky to Lebanon to support Hezbollah or the fact that Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust? How else to explain Norman Finkelstein telling cheering German audiences that the Jewish state is morally the same as the Nazis? How else to explain rabbis visiting Tehran to extol the Holocaust-denying regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran that seeks to exterminate Israel?
The other psychological explanation is related. The Jew — specifically the radical Jew — who sympathizes with Jew-haters wishes to announce to the world that he is not really like other Jews. While the other Jews are moored in provincial Jewish ethnic or religious identity, he is a world citizen who no more identifies with the Jews' fate than with the fate of Iroquois Indians.
The prevalence of Jew-hating Jews would be no more than an interesting study of psychopathology were it not for one additional fact: All these [born-]Jews (except for the fringe Neturei Karta rabbis) also hate America. And they do the same damage to this country — aiding the enemies of America just as they do the enemies of the Jews.
