Rightwing bigots are bristling at Juan Williams’ firing from NPR for his remarks about Muslims on airplanes. Thank goodness he still has that $2 million job at Fox News, which apparently has lower standards of professional conduct or, for that matter, basic human morality.
“I think the U.S. Congress should investigate NPR and consider cutting off their money,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also a Fox News contributor. Gingrich called William’s’ firing “an act of total censorship. […] I think the whole idea that if you honestly say how you feel about Islam — what he said was very balanced, people should read what he actually said — the idea that that’s the excuse for National Public Radio to censor Juan Williams is an outrage and every listener of NPR should be enraged that there’s this kind of bias against an American,” Gingrich said.
Ok, Newt, here’s what Williams actually said:
“But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.”
If Gingrich can’t understand why these words applied to Muslims are so offensive, perhaps a couple of pictures of air travelers in “religious garb” who are also identifying themselves “first and foremost” as members of a particular religious group will illustrate the pernicious bias against Muslim Americans and the double-standard that NPR finally did something about.
When Americans go to the polls on November 2nd, we will drag along considerable anger into the voting booths — anger at incumbents, anger at the economy, anger at the decline of American power, and anger at a growing sense that the country has run off the rails. As angry as we are, we will lash out at everyone and do anything but look in the mirror at the quite unflattering image before us. For, in reality, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the mess we are in.
True, incumbents from both parties voted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and now Pakistan — wars which have accounted for $1.1 trillion of our $1.3 trillion deficit. But it was the average citizen who wanted to lash out at someone — anyone — after 9/11. It was we voters who put in motion wars signed off by politicians from both parties who replaced their own consciences and judgment with polls and focus groups. Besides, haven’t all our wars been slam-dunks?
It was we ourselves who gutted state governments, schools, libraries, and added to our own insecurity by choosing to slash taxes and support services. This winter if we break a strut in an icy pothole we can only blame ourselves for neglecting infrastructure. If grandma has to start eating pet food or choosing which medication to take because retirement benefits have not kept up with inflation for two years — we can blame ourselves for insisting on fiscal restraint for everything except wars, spying, and police services. Some of us want to smash the gods of government by dismantling the EPA and the Department of Education because we have lost our faith. The new watered-down health care bill is an abomination at the altar of Free Market Capitalism.
Angry people are seldom rational people. Americans are not unique in grasping at easy answers, quick solutions, the quarterly return, the unstudied decision, and even at straws. The lure of the Tea Party has both Democrats and Republicans scrambling to share some of their radical rhetoric. It may feel good to scream for the death of government, but if we throw the baby out with the bathwater, at the end of the day one out of ten of us will still be sitting, unemployed, in a recently foreclosed house, without any rational plan by a government to get us out of this mess — and still waiting for the Free Market to help out.
Whoever survives the next election is going to be there with agendas set — not by some cabal of “special interests” — but ultimately by us, the voters. If we see a rise in demagoguery, an increase of hate directed against gays, Latinos, Muslims, Blacks, Mormons, liberals, or some “other,” we need only look in the mirror to see the cause. We ourselves have permitted a new generation of Gordon Gekkos to wreck the economy by rewarding corporations for sending jobs offshore or literally gambling with our money. Some want to expel all foreigners and abolish the 14th Amendment. Hate won’t bring the jobs back from China but tough talk apparently sells at the polls. But talk is cheap.
If all this rage produces a series of poor choices, don’t expect the politicians to save us from ourselves. We citizens may have no interest in forcing election reform, but we sure like to whine about craven politicians whose votes reflect our own views — those of us who bother to vote or to express them. Don’t expect the news media to inform us of anything other than what’s “newsworthy.” We can’t understand economic analysis or international news — we don’t even know where some of these countries are — and besides, we have short attention spans; half of us think we need another war with Iran. We’d much prefer Talking Angry Heads, conspiracy theories, and Reality TV. And even though it’s stealing trillions of dollars from our future, we don’t really want to see stories about Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan on the 11:00 news. We want to know about warehouse fires and dog bites. And so that’s what we get.
And in the end we get the democracy we deserve. If we are well-informed and work at understanding the roles of government and business and can appreciate the function and limits of both, our elected representatives will formulate sensible economic, environmental, educational, and foreign policies. But if all we are capable of expressing is anger and rejection, the search for easy answers will only lead us deeper into the swamp.
The Forward listed Charles Jacobs as one of America’s Top 50 Jewish leaders in 2007. Apparently they were looking more at the range of his activism and less at what mischief he was actually up to.
Long before the Park51 project made news, Charles Jacobs spearheaded opposition to an Islamic Center in Roxbury and slammed governor Deval Patrick and Boston mayor Thomas Menino for supporting the project and meeting with Muslim community leaders. Despite widespread repudiation Jacobs continues to maintain that the Roxbury center is linked to global terror plots. He has also leveled personal attacks in the Jewish Advocate on fellow Jews who extended hands of friendship to the Muslim community, notably Rabbi Eric Gurvis. In June seventy Boston area rabbis signed a petition supporting Gurvis and denounced Jacobs’ smears.
In a FrontPage Mag interview Jacobs describes how he – and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs – views Islam as nothing more than a rulebook for terrorists:
Two years ago I attended a three day conference in Jerusalem on Global Anti-Semitism sponsored by Israel ‘s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Senior leaders of American Jewry were present. We all heard how Islamic anti-Semitism – theologically based, was spread with Saudi funding to mosques and madrassas throughout the Islamic world, instructing tens if not hundreds of millions of people that Jews were the sons of monkeys and pigs and that to kill us is a holy deed.
Jacobs is a regular contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace blog and to David Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag. His “Clash of Civiliations” worldview meshes with pro-Israel advocacy and neoconservatism.
In July of this year Jacobs participated in a panel discussion in Aspen, Colorado, entitled “Conscience and Conflict,” featuring fellow neocons John Bolton, Phillis Chesler and Caroline Glick, at which he bemoaned Europeans as “neopagans” and “socialists,” decried mosques as “victory markers,” and stated “there is no moderate Muslim doctrine.”
Recently Jacobs made a big stink over a visit of students from the Wellseley public schools to an area mosque as part of multicultural education. In an article entitled “Propaganda is not Education,” Jacobs wrote:
Those who care about “religious ignorance and conflict over belief systems” should care about the radicalization of the historically moderate American Muslim community and the unwitting embrace of radical Muslims by our political and civic leaders.
Not only are Jacobs’ enemies all of the world’s Muslims, the press, Europeans, the United Nations, non-governmental aid agencies, liberals, and academics – but now even political and civil leaders have let him down too.
Dennis Prager is at war with leftists, secularists, labor unions, civil rights organizations, Big Government, academics, atheists, Europeans, internationalists, “moral relativists” – and Muslims. Nothing personal, it’s just his worldview – that and the fact that not one Muslim in the entire world is a moderate:
There are a billion Muslims in the world. How is it possible that essentially none have demonstrated against evils perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam? This is true even of the millions of Muslims living in free Western societies. What are non-Muslims of goodwill supposed to conclude?
Long before it was fashionable to burn Qu’rans, Prager, a Republican convert, began trash-talking them:
In 2006 he wrote that “America, not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on,” in taking great offense that the first Muslim elected to Congress had decided to take his oath of office on a Qu’ran and not on a Christian bible. The ADL noted the bigotry of Prager’s remarks and conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson pointed out the irony that “here we have a Jew pushing a Muslim to use the Christian Bible.”
In Moment Magazine, which features articles of contemporary Jewish interest, Prager awkwardly (and self-contradictorily) defended his views, even after it was pointed out that many politicians had sworn their oath of office on books other than the bible or on none at all:
America has no state religion, nor should it ever be allowed to have one. But it has always been a Judeo-Christian country. Jews – and America itself – will suffer if we cease to be one. Just ask the Jews of secular Europe how their secular societies treat them and Israel. For that matter, just think about how our secular universities have become anti-Israel hate centers.
On the one hand Prager says America should be secular. But on the other hand he says it should privilege Jews and Christians. This is vintage Prager – a new believer in Kulturkampf between Islam and the West.
Despite his own advanced case, Prager denies that Islamophobia actually exists. As the co-author of a book on anti-Semitism himself, Prager should know better, but he wrote:
The fact remains that the term islamophobia has one purpose – to suppress any criticism, legitimate or not, of Islam. And given the cowardice of the Western media, and the collusion of the left in banning any such criticism (while piling it on Christianity and Christians), it is working.
When it comes to anti-Semitism, however, Prager rejects identical arguments and in fact argues that Zionism is part of Judaism – so any criticism of Israel or Jewry amounts to the same thing:
Among the many lies that permeate the modern world, none is greater – or easier to refute – than the claim that Zionism is not an integral part of Judaism or the claim that anti-Zionism is unrelated to anti-Semitism.
Thus, anyone who challenges Zionism – for example, Palestinians who are in conflict with Israel or the legions of academics, NGOs, international organizations, or human rights groups, even many Jews – is by definition an anti-Semite.
The Middle East conflict? Bah! That’s just anti-Semitism he writes in a piece, “The Middle East conflict is hard to solve but easy to explain:”
Those who deny this and ascribe the conflict to other reasons, such as “Israeli occupation,” “Jewish settlements,” a “cycle of violence,” “the Zionist lobby” and the like, do so despite the fact that Israel’s enemies regularly announce the reason for the conflict. The Iranian regime, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Palestinians – in their public opinion polls, in their anti-Semitic school curricula and media, in their election of Hamas, in their support for terror against Israeli civilians in pre-1967 borders – as well as their Muslim supporters around the world, all want the Jewish state annihilated.
Thus Prager completely dismisses any geopolitical causes or trivial issues like land theft or ethnic cleansing. No, there is just one reason for all this hostility and it can only be Islam. And it’s clear that Prager is not just talking about a few fanatical winguts when he lumps all of the world’s Muslims into this denunciation, in an article entitled “The Islamic threat is greater than German and Soviet threats were:”
A far larger number of people believe in Islamic authoritarianism than ever believed in Marxism. Virtually no one living in Marxist countries believed in Marxism or communism. Likewise, far fewer people believed in Nazism, an ideology confined largely to one country for less than one generation. This is one enormous difference between the radical Islamic threat to our civilization and the two previous ones. But there is yet a second difference that is at least as significant and at least as frightening: Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.
So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims – specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others – the term “Islamo-Fascism” is entirely appropriate.
Dennis Prager’s attitudes toward Muslims are echoed in his views on immigrants in America. A Tea Party supporter, Prager supports Arizona Law SB1070 and believes in American Exceptionalism or Judeo-Christian Dominionism. In this clip at a Tea Party event in Colorado, sitting next to Sarah Palin, Prager describes his revulsion for internationalism and European morality, praising something rather like an American version of Zionism. His a world view common to the Tea Party, Likudniks, and neoconservatives.
As for Islamophobia – it’s just one of Prager’s many hobbies – but integral to this worldview.
There’s no pretty way to say it — Zionism is incompatible with American values. American Zionists do not — can not — really claim to respect Constitutional principles of separation of church and state, basic equality, or a democracy for all citizens. To be fair, fundamentalists of all stripes lack respect for these values, but American Jews are not typically fundamentalists.
Yet it is astounding to speak with normally liberal, tolerant fellow Jews — who fear creeping Christian fundamentalism or express contempt for shariah in places like Afghanistan — but who see nothing wrong with creeping Jewish shariah (pardon me, halakha) in Israel. Or who find nothing wrong with expressly making Palestinians second class citizens. Their argument is simple — there are many Arab countries but only one Israel; the Palestinians should simply go away so that a Jewish state can exist. What’s so wrong with that?
Of course such an argument makes as much sense as forcing Native Americans to go back to — where? Asia? — because America is now mainly a Caucasian nation. Yet the argument for Zionism voiced by many American Jews is essentially the same and it could quite easily be turned against us. For example, some future Evangelical Avigdor Lieberman (spawning in a Tea Party test tube somewhere as I write this) could simply declare the US a Christian nation. Legal, social, and professional rights would be restricted for non-Christians in this nightmare world. Jewish heretics who taught evolution would end up in the slammer. Jewish civil libertarians would be given the same treatment they were given in the early 1900’s when everyone suspected them of being anarchists; or given the same treatment that they got in the 1950’s when everyone suspected them of being communists. Most Jews are liberals precisely out of such fears — at least on one side of the brain.
But then there’s Israel. Many Jews regard Israel as an “insurance policy” against precisely the kind of Christian dystopia I just described. But this is where the two hemispheres of our brains do not seem to be connected. On the one hand, we have our fears. On the other, we are completely prepared to inflict the same violence and ill-treatment on Palestinians. In fact, it’s worse than that. We wouldn’t do it ourselves – after all, here in America we have friends everywhere in business, at university, in the community, who are Muslim. But Israel, as the ultimate insurance policy, must be allowed to do anything it likes as long as it exists to protect us from our most secret fears.
But there are many other aspects of Israel for American Jews. Israel is the land of the patriarchs, the landscape of the prophets and of countless Torah stories. Jewish fundamentalists believe it was literally given by God (although they would like to have David’s Kingdom, which includes Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and more real estate). For some Israel is a Jewish Disneyland where American Jews can go to live out a fantasy of returning to our roots — even though, as Helen Thomas pointed out, our roots might actually be in Germany, Poland, Russia, or Lithuania. As a secular Jew, it seems to me that the allure of making aliyah (emigrating to Israel) fulfils a mainly psychological function. American Jews from Brookline to Orange County are not in any kind of real danger, so let’s be honest — they are not moving to Israel to ensure Jewish survival. And let’s be a little more honest — when you move from country A to country B, you do love country B more.
While Jews have always revered the land of our ancestors and desired some kind of return to Israel — at least by the pious among us — Judaism managed to survive thousands of years without the Revisionist Zionism of today. During all these centuries, Jewishness was something preserved in cultural diversity, observance of the law, study of the Torah or — for the more secular — in Judaism’s ethics. Collectively the “Jewish people” — Klal Yisrael — meant many different things. But when the Jewish state came into existence, Zionism expropriated thousands of years of tradition and understanding and replaced “the Jewish people” with a state to which all Jews were able (if not obligated) to immigrate. And this state has not done a particularly good job of preserving the Jewish cultural diversity of the past; as in any society, there are winners and losers. In Israel the Ashkenazim now determine what Germans like to call the Leitkultur. Yet most American Jews now speak of their great love for this particular state, its centrality to their Jewish identity, and even the siddurim (prayer books) make references to the modern state — not just the biblical one — and offer prayers for it. In religious institutions, the preoccupation with the state of Israel has advanced nearly to the point of idolatry.
All these seem to be symptoms of some serious cognitive disorder. We just can’t help ourselves. Real estate has taken priority over values. We are no different from the Wahhabists. Jerusalem and Hebron are our Mecca and Medina. Our attachment to Judaism is now defined only by this new nation-state. Without Israel, our identities would be shattered, our faith incomplete, our hope for redemption lost. And don’t forget the Holocaust! We are a traumatized people! It is argued to the point of annoyance that Israel is necessary as a refuge to preserve Jewish existence. But even if it no longer serves an existential purpose, then it is a psychological homeland for people who can never return to Europe. Of course I am glad that so much positive mental health has been achieved, but I also care about the Palestinians.
I am sitting here on the eve of national elections a free man, permitted to vote, to write letters to the editor, to demonstrate, to live in a neighborhood with people of other ethnicities and religions, and I live under the same laws that apply to all citizens. My home cannot be summarily bulldozed with twenty-four hour notice. My neighborhood cannot be declared a military zone one day and then given to a Christian developer the next. Except for exceptional circumstances If I run afoul of the law I will be tried under transparent civilian laws, not by a military tribunal.
I am a free man and a free Jew not because of Israel but because of a bunch of privileged white male slave holders whose flawed but thoughtful and secular vision of democracy was nevertheless sound enough to endure and to improve upon for a couple of centuries. Meanwhile, the “Jewish state” we love so much exhibits an advanced case of the disease starting to afflict us here. In Israel non-Jews barely merit being treated as human, democracy is in shambles, and I am left to wonder whose perverted concept of Judaism managed to make Israel a nation which (for many Jews) has become a proxy for authentic Jewish values or practices.
You can’t be a Zionist and claim to revere American-style democracy too.
YNet News reported today that the United States has backed Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand for recognition by the Palestinians as a “Jewish state” — even though Israelis themselves heatedly dispute the meaning of the term.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley backed the new Israeli demand, saying, “I’m not making any news here. […] It is a state for the Jewish people. […] What Prime Minister Netanyahu said yesterday is, in essence a core demand of the Israeli government, which we support.”
In siding with Netanyahu, the US move puts Abbas in an impossible position, but it also ignores the fact that Israel is actually more religiously diverse than the United States.
Israel’s population of 7.64 million is 75% Jewish and 25% non-Jewish. The Jewish population may in fact be lower than the official numbers because of Eastern Europeans who are not halachically Jewish and Druze and Bedouin populations may be higher because some have never been counted. In comparison, the population of the United States is 86% Christian and 14% non-Christian, yet sensible Americans do not define the United States as a Christian state.
Of Israel’s 5.77 million Jews, 42% or 2.44 million are secular. The number of people in the Jewish state who actually want to preserve a Jewish ethnocracy could well be a minority. And yet the State Department feels compelled to butt into a discussion of the character of another state.
When Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat, there was no question he had a Jewish state in mind, although the monarchy he proposed governing a nation of transplanted Europeans, which had purchased (not stolen) the land of natives who then conveniently disappeared, bears almost no resemblance to Israel. But since the first Zionist congresses and even Ben Gurion’s time the nature of the “Jewish state” is something that has deliberately remained a bit vague. Zionism, as a nationalistic movement, promised to offer something for everyone [except of course the native people who did not go as willingly as Herzl had hoped], but the intractable tension between secular and religious Jews has existed since the founding of Israel.
On the one hand, seen from a purely Jewish perspective, the nature of Israel is a Zionist question which Israeli Jews (and perhaps friendly Diaspora Jews) have to dispute. But in this discussion Phillip Crowley and Hillary Clinton don’t get a vote.
On the other hand, seen from a democratic perspective, the nature of Israel as a country with substantial religious minorities is one the minorities should also have a vote on. Unfortunately, the 25% of the non-Jewish population is represented in only 9% of the Knesset and not at all in the governing coalition. And then their remaining democratic rights are to be scrutinized and be subject to loyalty oaths.
Not surprisingly, the Jewish and democratic perspectives do not align at all.
If the United States feels compelled to speak out for something, it should be human and civil rights for all of Israel’s citizens and the subjects of its half century occupation. It is disappointing that the State Department continually demonstrates contempt for the principles of freedom or justice — such as by not intervening on behalf of Abdallah Abu Rahmah or taking an interest in the American citizen killed in the Mavi Marmara flotilla attack. It is shocking and sickening that the Obama administration is backing the religious nature of a state jammed down the throats of its victims — something even inimical to our own constitution — and that this new Israeli precondition is actually a new obstacle to peace.
If anyone doubts the unsuitability of the United States as an “honest broker” in this conflict, this is just one more example.
The current Middle East peace talks have played out much as they have in past years. The United States lavishes billions of dollars of military aid each year on Israel, ignores or defends its misuse of military power on civilians throughout the world, and still pretends to be an impartial peace broker. The Israeli Right calls for more settlements. The Palestinians, their unity fractured, call for an end to settlement activity. A few days ago a formal 10-month “freeze” on Israeli settlements ended — although in practice building never stopped in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. The Palestinian side had warned that they would walk away from the peace talks if building resumed formally, but so far they have only appealed to the United States to exert whatever influence it can to stop the new construction.
The United States and its Israel Lobby advisors are now asking Israel for a two month extension of the November 2009 ten-month “freeze” in exchange for backing Israel’s annexation of the Jordan valley (goodbye 1967 borders!), offering future vetoes in the UN security council in behalf of Israel, additional aid beyond the $30 billion defense plan, this year’s $205 million Iron Dome gift (which has ballooned to $422 million), a $3 billion missile shield program called David’s Sling, and this year’s outright gift of $2.75 billion for F35 jets, another $1.5 billion in contracts for parts for those jets, and $2 billion in jet fuel. All this for two months of extending a freeze that actually never happened. Or could these bogus peace talks simply be an opportunity for the US to arm Israel to attack Iran? Obama’s willingness to abandon even approximate 1967 borders is something that neither Palestinians, members of the Arab League, Jordan, Syria, or Egypt are likely to accept.
To make matters worse, in this round of talks, Israel has introduced new preconditions which can only be interpreted as signs that, as a recent TIME magazine article reported, Israelis are not particularly interested in peace. Netanyahu now wants the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. While to some this may appear to be a perfectly reasonable request, it is not the same as recognizing Israel — to which both the Arab League and Hamas have agreed in exchange for a return to the 1967 borders. For the Palestinian Authority, however, it would sign away the civil rights of Israel’s 1.5 million Arab Israelis and claims to property in Israel by Palestinian refugees — which not even the Abbas government dares. Israel has also stated that it will not give up the Jordan Valley or return “consensus” settlements like Ariel or Ma’ale Adumim. And it just keeps building because there is nothing — and no one — to stop them. These are not the actions of a nation that wants peace.
For anyone who has bothered to look at a map of Israeli settlements and military zones in the West Bank, such as the one at peacenow.org/map.php, it is easy to see why the issue of settlements is central to peace talks. There is no longer enough land remaining after decades of Israeli land theft to cobble together a contiguous state. Palestinian writer Ali Abunimah advocates a bi-national state in his 2006 book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Former Israel defense minister Moshe Arens and current Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin have also promoted a bi-national state — an idea which 56% of West Bank Palestinians support. Mahmoud Abbas has hinted at it as an option. A few years ago, Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem’s former deputy mayor, wrote that “the question is no longer whether [Israel-Palestine] will be bi-national, but which model to choose.” It has come to this.
American favoritism, Israeli theft and intransigence, and Palestinian disunity have all led to the failure of a Two State solution. Perhaps it’s for the best, but a single state will plunge Israel and Palestine into several generations of a civil rights struggle we can’t even imagine. Besides the indigestible lumps of an already fractious Israeli society – twenty-two political parties, the ultra-Orthodox, the secularists, the settlers, the Russians, the non-Jewish Eastern Europeans, the Asian immigrants, the Ethiopians, the Mizrachim, the Ashkenazim, the existing Palestinians — the resulting national configuration will have a few million more new Palestinians — and there could still be the problem of Gaza. At some point — whether by politics or demographics — the Jewish nature of Israel will be questioned and — whether one, two or five decades from now — it will cease to be an ethnocracy which privileges only Jews.
The alternative, of course, is a Two State solution. But Israel and its domestic defenders will make sure that unchecked land theft makes that an impossibility.
All that remains is to pick a name for the new, eventual, bi-national state.
