The Pro-Palestinian Left Speaks Out

New York Times editors discovered what their opinion pages were missing: yet another dimwitted anti-Semite. It remedied the problem by hiring Michelle Alexander,  a no-account activist and defender of Palestinian terrorism.

Writing in the New York Times Alexander decries the silence about the Israeli occupation and the oppression of the poor Palestinian people. Of course, leftist anti-Semites, of which there are many, have been talking about nothing else for decades now. Apparently, Alexander did not notice.

Today, the Times editorial pages and even Times news stories have been taking sides against Israel, the charge of silence is absurd.

So, Alexander pretends to be courageous in speaking out against Israel and does it in the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. And yet, she completely ignores the fact that the poor oppressed Palestinian people have been committing serial terrorist actions against Israel for decades now. And that they have embraced, not the cause of liberation, not the goal of statehood, but the passion for killing Jews. About that Alexander remains mute.

In truth, she is merely repeating the standard leftist attacks on the Jewish state, attacks that are now being promoted by members of Congress and by, for instance, the leader of the British Labour Party. As the Trump administration attempts to sanction Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-Semitic terror, the European Union, led by its Western nations, tries to rescue the Iranian regime--  and then whines about not being treated as an American ally. If European states want to be treated like allies, they should act like allies.

At a time when the Palestinian terrorist cause has lost most of its most important backers, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, it is rich to see a New York Times supporting terrorism— by refusing to mention any Palestinian terrorist actions.

Alexander explains that her deepest values—a absurd locution—oblige her to attack the only democratic nation in the Middle East… in defense of anti-Semitic terrorism.

In her words:

But it set an example of what is required of us if we are to honor our deepest values in times of crisis, even when silence would better serve our personal interests or the communities and causes we hold most dear. It’s what I think about when I go over the excuses and rationalizations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.

I have not been alone. Until very recently, the entire Congress has remained mostly silent on the human rights nightmare that has unfolded in the occupied territories. Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel's political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimized and deflected criticism of the State of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.

What Alexander calls a great moral challenge is effectively a seven decades old war against the Jewish state… and effort to complete what Hitler started. The fact that Jews could build a successful modern nation in the Middle East is the ultimate indignity for Palestinian terrorists. They are incapable of building anything, so they have set about destroying what others have built.

She is happy to ignore Palestinian behavior and to blame it all on the Jews. When people go out looking for scapegoats, they often light on Jews. If you think that this is merely an attack on the Jewish state, you need to turn the lights back on.

Again, in her bill of indictment, she never once mentions the actions of Palestinians and their manifest wish to rid the region of all Jews:

And so, if we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.

We must not tolerate Israel’s refusal even to discuss the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as prescribed by United Nations resolutions, and we ought to question the U.S. government funds that have supported multiple hostilities and thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the $38 billion the U.S. government has pledged in military support to Israel.

As you know, the right to return means that Palestinians will force Israelis out of the homes and nation they built. It is a genocidal wish. Precisely why anyone would discuss it is beyond me.

Alexander has offered up a smorgasbord of anti-Semitism, in the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. She has nothing original to say. She is offering Jew hatred in modern politically correct dress.

If you like your opinion balanced, you can also read Bari Weiss’s New York Times essay about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in America. After all, at a time when Alexander thinks that she is overcoming silence about Israel, the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives has just put a notable anti-Semite, Ilhan Omar on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Responding to Omar’s assertion that Israel has hypnotized the world, Weiss responds:

But the biggest “Jew” today in the demonology of modern anti-Semitism is the Jewish state, Israel. While there are perfectly legitimate criticisms that one can make of Israel or the actions of its government — and I have never been shy about making them — those criticisms cross the line into anti-Semitism when they ascribe evil, almost supernatural powers to Israel in a manner that replicates classic anti-Semitic slanders.

During the weeklong November 2012 war, which began when Hamas fired roughly 100 rockets at civilian targets, Israel “hypnotized” nobody. It was subject to the usual barrage of intense criticism in the news media and at the United Nations, and from the leaders of other nations, not to mention protesters across the world. That Israel continues to retain support in the United States among mainstream Democrats and Republicans is because — contrary to Ms. Omar’s tweet — the Jewish state is not engaged in “evil doings,” but defending itself against the enemies pressing on all of its borders, including Hamas, which has genocide of the Jews, and a belief in Jewish manipulative power, at the heart of its ideology. The original Hamas charter from 1988, only recently revised, claimed that the Jews orchestrated the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars.

Not a word of this in Alexander’s column. As for the opinion, expressed by Times columnist Michelle Goldberg—a leading useful idiot on the anti-Israeli left—that anti-Zionism is not really anti-Semitism, Weiss responds:

Those who call themselves anti-Zionists usually insist they are not anti-Semites. But I struggle to see what else to call an ideology that seeks to eradicate only one state in the world — the one that happens to be the Jewish one — while empathetically insisting on the rights of self-determination for every other minority. Israeli Jews, descended in equal parts from people displaced from Europe and the Islamic world, are barely 6.5 million of the world’s 7.7 billion people. What is it about them, exactly, that puts them beyond the pale?

At a time, Weiss concludes, when there is a rising tide of hate crimes against American Jews, we ought to be speaking up against them, not fomenting violence by demonizing Israel.