On delegitimization – A 'Jerusalem Post' roundtable
'We have to take back the narrative and reframe it and get out of the docket of the accused' – Irwin Cotler.
The panelists included:
Cotler: It's not only a matter of denying Israel's right to exist but also undermining its legitimacy and that shows that delegitimization is not only an objective, it's a strategy. And there are series of ways and means of undermining Israel
Wistrich: It's a little more difficult that it might appear a first. You could make the argument that all forms of anti-Semitism we have known, from antiquity until the present, have involved forms of delegitimization as one aspect of the way anti-Semitism works. It's delegitimizing because the core of Jewish identity was defined both by Jews and non-Jews in religious terms, delegitimizing Judaism, presenting it as demonic, that was an extreme form of delegitimization.
http://gazaflotilla101.com/
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4088082,00.html
http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=226829
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-fears-gaza-flotilla-activists-may-try-to-kill-idf-soldiers-1.369923
Flotilla organiser is alleged Hamas operative
Mon. 27 Jun. 2011 @ 13.28 –
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Building Boom in Gaza's Ruins Belies Misery That Remains
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: June 25, 2011
Related
Times Topic: Gaza Strip
Israel to Allow Building Cargo to Enter Gaza (June 22, 2011)
U.N. Charts High Jobless Rate in Gaza, Despite Israel's Easing of Blockade (June 15, 2011)
Israel warns journalists not to join Gaza flotilla or risk being banned from Israel for ten years
Queers Should Focus on Arab World and Iran, Not Israel
BY BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
The LGBT communities of the world are now confronted with a strange fusion of homophobic radical Islamists and extreme left-wing groups.
In recent weeks, the anti-Israeli groups Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) and Siegebusters have taken shots at the one Middle Eastern country that respects the rights of its LGBT community. As 100,000 people took part in the annual Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv, QAIA stoked hatred of the Jewish state at similar parades in Brooklyn and Queens. They are slated to march in the jumbo Pride Parade in Manhattan on June 26.
Meanwhile, Siegebusters — whose membership appears to overlap with QAIA's –– are raising funds to sponsor a flotilla to violate Israel's legal naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
The alliance between Hamas and Siege Busters/ QAIA is unsettling. Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar has said, "You in the West do not live like human beings. You do not even live like animals. You accept homosexuality. And now you criticize us?"
Both the European Union and the United States have designated Hamas a terrorist organization because it showers Israel's southern cities with rockets and calls for the obliteration of the Jewish state. The purpose of the naval blockade is to prevent weapons and rocket smuggling into Gaza.
Meanwhile, homosexuality remains a crime across the Muslim world. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad's regime imposes a three-year prison sentence for same-sex relations. In Libya, where Muammar Qaddafi has ruled for more than 40 blood-soaked years, the punishment is five years in prison. In Yemen, the penalty is death. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia lead the world in enforcing capital punishment against their LGBT communities. And the list goes on.
What is most ironic about QAIA's obsession with Israel is that the Jewish state is the only government in the Middle East that openly encourages acceptance of LGBT communities –– and even tourism by foreign gays.
Tzipi Livni, Israel's former foreign minister and head of its opposition party Kadima, spoke at the Tel Aviv pride event. Citing Israel's declaration of independence, she highlighted the government's responsibility to guarantee the rights of all people.
"There are still many teenagers who fear the price of freedom is the love from their parents if they come out to them," Livni said. "There are parents who are still prejudiced and unwilling to accept their children as they are."
Nitzan Horowitz, an openly gay member of the Meretz party in the Knesset, told participants in the Tel Aviv parade, "We will expand the struggle so that anybody who wants to live his or her life on their own path can do that without fear of being cursed or hit in the street, without fearing being thrown out of their home, and without the fear of being harassed at work."
In a largely overlooked remark to a joint session of the US Congress in late May, even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the lethal homophobia flourishing in Muslim countries. He compared Israel's "path to liberty" with "the Middle East [that] has long rejected it. In a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted, Israel stands out. It is different."
In early June, New York's LGBT Community Center denied QAIA permission to hold meetings there, leading to charges it was silencing dissent and free speech. Yet the Center would surely deny individuals and groups the opportunity to rent space when their rhetoric is animated by hatred. It would never welcome, for instance, the crackpot anti-gay Reverend Fred Phelps and his followers, who blanket military funerals and gay events with signs reading "God Hates Fags."
When QAIA equates Israel with the former Apartheid regime of South Africa, they evince little practical understanding of the vast distinctions between them. Those distinctions are not lost, however, on the Vanguard Leadership Group, made up of students and alumni from historically black colleges and universities in the US. In April, the organization spoke out against the odious likening of the Jewish state to the former Apartheid regime.
Vanguard president Michael Hayes said, "This rhetoric does absolutely nothing to help Israel-Palestine negotiations or relations. We feel this type of action serves to hinder the peace process domestically and abroad, and have made it our priority to take a stand to shift the tide of understanding."
In fact, our understanding of anti-Semitism has broadened in recent years to respond to new manifestations of "the world's oldest hatred." The former Soviet Union's renowned refusenik Natan Sharansky, now an Israeli human rights activist, explained that the Jewish state faces extreme critics in the West identifiable through a "3-D test" –– in that they demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to Israel, ones they would apply to no other country in the world. QAIA's rhetoric and actions are consistent with that pattern of attack.
Siegebusters and QAIA have said nothing of the thousands of Syrian refugees who fled as Assad began gunning down his own citizens. They have uttered not a peep as Libya and Yemen have persecuted democratic reformers.
In a preemptive move to insulate themselves from charges of anti-Semitism, QAIA and Siege Busters note that some of their members are Jewish. Sherry Wolf, a self-described socialist and anti-Zionist Jewish member of Siegebusters, has invoked this Jewish insurance policy to inoculate the group against criticism it is fanning the flames of Jewish hatred.
There are gays who are closeted and homophobic. There are women who are misogynists. And, sadly, there are Jews who are anti-Semitic.
The post World War II definition of anti-Zionism — a euphemism for opposition to Israel's right to exist — was neatly captured in the late 1960s by the Austrian Jewish writer Jean Amery, who noted, "Anti-Zionism contains anti-Semitism like a cloud contains a storm." When rising anti-Semitism burgeoned among left-wing Europeans in the late 19th century, the German Social Democrat August Bebel termed the affliction a "Socialism of Fools." The misguided leftists associated with QAIA, unfortunately, follow in that tradition, besotted with the anti-Semitism of fools.
Benjamin Weinthal is a fellow at the Iran Human Rights Project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
For Part 2 of this Face-Off, see Laura Durkay and Brad Taylor's "We're Here, We're Queer — And We Support Palestine!"
Germany's Left Party hard on Israel, remains silent on
real human rights abusers
Benjamin Weinthal
06.25.11, 16:56 / Israel Opinion
Germany’s Left Party passed a resolution earlier this month barring the
party’s parliamentary representatives and employees from participating in the
upcoming flotilla to break Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, which
remains under the control of the terrorist organization Hamas. Despite the
resolution - which also calls for an end to boycotts of Israeli products and
demands for the dissolution of the Jewish state - the Left Party remains in
denial about anti-Semitism in its ranks.
According to a German study, “Anti-Semites as a Coalition Partner†released
last month, “A power has established itself within the parliamentary spectrum
of the Left Party, which tolerates anti-Semitic positions.â€
In their groundbreaking investigation, Political scientists Samuel Salzborn from
the University of Giessen and Sebastian Voigt from the University of Leipzig
sharply criticized the entrenched left-wing anti-Israel attitudes within the
Left Party.
The Left Party is Continental Europe’s best organized and largest anti-Israel
party, and it has over the years promoted efforts to dismantle the Jewish state.
The group’s local branches in the German cities of Duisburg and Bremen called
for boycotts of the Jewish state. Hermann Dierkes, a city councilman for the
Left Party in Duisburg, termed Israel’s right to exist “petty.â€
Last year, Left Party city councilwoman Erika Zemaitis voted against funds to
build a new Synagogue in the city of Herford, to replace one the Nazis had
torched in 1938. The party’s foreign policy spokesman, MP Wolfgang Gehrcke,
has participated in demonstrations in support of the terrorist groups Hamas and
Hezbollah.
In May 2010, two Left Party parliamentarians, Inge Höger and Annette Groth,
joined a group of radical Turkish Islamists aboard the Mavi Marmara vessel, to
violate Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza. When they returned, along with
former party foreign policy spokesman and MP Norman Paech, who came along for
the ride, Left Party leaders gave them a hero’s welcome in Berlin.
Rising media pressure has forced the party to make cosmetic changes - hence its
new resolution to address persistent allegations of anti-Semitism. Nonetheless,
Dieter Graumann, the head of Germany’s 105,000-member Central Council of Jews,
is not impressed.
As Dr. Graumann said Monday, “The old East German anti-Zionist spirit still
haunts the party. Paradoxically, today it’s representatives from the west who
let out their rabid, almost pathological hatred of Israel. Unfortunately, it’s
these ideologues who claim responsibility for the Left Party’s policies on
Israel.â€
The Left Party is the successor party to the Socialist Unity Party of the former
East German communist state, and has attracted a mix of East German socialists,
West German leftists and trade unionists. Most members of these factions share a
common hatred of Israel.
Other parties of the German Left have successfully expelled anti-Semitic
members. In 2003, Christian Democratic Union MP Martin Hohmann called Jews a
“race of perpetrators†and argued that their involvement in the Russian
Revolution of 1917 exculpates German atrocities during the Holocaust. Following
this perverse line of reasoning, both Germans and Jews committed crimes against
humanity.
After some dithering, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was then in the
opposition, authorized a party process to eject Hohmann. Unfortunately, top Left
Party officials like Gregor Gysi, Gesine Lötzsch , Klaus Ernst, Petra Pau and
Katja Kipping have made no efforts to expel Left Party politicians like MP
Christine Buchholz and Hermann Dierkes who have called for violent Palestinian
resistance against Israel. Sadly, the list of Left Party politicians who fan the
flames of anti-Semitic anti-Israelism goes on.
Fourteen of 76 Left Party members protested the resolution and walked out of the
Left Party session. Several other MPs simply did not show up for the vote.
Gregor Gysi, the Left Party MP who heads the party faction in parliament,
navigated the resolution to a yes vote. According to reports, Gysi, whose father
was an East German Jew, threatened to resign if the Left Party rejected the
resolution.
Andrej Hunko, a Left Party MP, said Gysi’s approach was “blackmail and a
subjugation of the left-wing†of the party.
Gysi - and it must have been hard for him to say this with a straight face -
told the German press that there is “no problem of anti-Semitism†in the
party, and chalked up the party’s preoccupation with Israel to “passion.â€
He is right about passion; passionate anti-Semitism. All of this helps to
explain why the Left Party’s politicians and supporters get so riled up about
Israel but remain awfully silent about countries where real human rights abuses
are unfolding: Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, and the list continues.
If the Left Party is truly serious about improving its reputation, it should
expel members whose vitriolic hatred of Israel overwhelms every other position
they take.
Benjamin Weinthal is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Israel should not be fearing world opinion. Israel should be making the world respect her!!! And remember, it is the rich oil cartels who rule the world, NOT the Zionists!!
Mech'el B. Samberg
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