U.N. rights chief hit on Arab RACIST charter support [international Arab lobby monster]

U.N. rights chief hit on Arab RACIST charter support [international Arab lobby monster]
U.N. rights chief hit on Arab charter support

Published: 01/29/2008

UN Watch has criticized the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights for endorsing the Arab Charter of Human Rights.

The charter, according to a letter sent to High Commissioner Louise Arbour, includes "blatantly anti-Semitic statements" and equates Zionism with racism, a concept that was rejected by the United Nations in 1991.

The preamble of the Arab Charter states that the signatories are "Rejecting racism and zionism, which constitute a violation of human rights and pose a threat to world peace."

The Arab League adopted the charter in 1994, but it did not have the required number of endorsers until earlier this month when the United Arab Emirates became the seventh of 22 member states to ratify it.

On Jan. 24, Arbour released a statement welcoming theratification.

UN Watch urged Arbour to clarify her endorsement.

"As you know, Zionism is the movement for Jewish self-determination and asserts the inherent and internationally-acknowledged right of Israel to exist," the letter said. "A text that equates Zionism with racism, describes it as a threat to world peace, as an enemy of human rights and human dignity, and then urges its elimination, is blatantly anti-Semitic."

The letter notes that former Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the U.N. General Assembly’s 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution as a low point of the U.N.’s record on anti-Semitism. It also encourages Arbour "to hold accountable any members of your Office who were or should have been aware of , but failed to call your attention to, these racist provisions."

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/106682.html

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Arbour criticizes Arab human rights charter
Canadian Jewish News, Canada -

Neuer said the Arab Charter twice attacks Zionism as a form of racism and describes it as a threat to international peace and security that must be ...

http://www.cjnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14015&Itemid=86

George Jonas on Louise Arbour and the Arab Charter on Human Rights ...
National Post, Canada - Feb 2, 2008
“Moreover, to the extent that it equates Zionism with racism, we reiterated that the Arab Charter is not in conformity with General Assembly Resolution ...

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/02/02/george-jonas-on-louise-arbour-and-the-arab-charter-on-human-rights-a-moral-relativist-par-excellence.aspx

United States Says No to Anti-Racism Conference
Forward, NY
During the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, Israel came under fire from Arab and Muslim countries, as well as a number of ...

http://www.forward.com/articles/12604/

'Anti-Zionist' Arab charter inconsistent with UN norms'
Jerusalem Post, Israel - Jan 31, 2008
The office also said that the charter, "to the extent that it equates Zionism with racism... the Arab Charter is not in conformity with General Assembly ...

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1201523806850&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

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Are American Jews Too Powerful? Not Even Close.

From: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201659.html

Are American Jews Too Powerful? Not Even Close.

By Ruth Wisse
Sunday, November 4, 2007; Page B03

These days, it's becoming downright chic to hint forebodingly that America's Jews are just too powerful. But whether it's the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt or former president Jimmy Carter, those who accuse modern Jews of having excessive clout are getting it precisely backward. In the real world, Jews have too little power and influence. They also have too little self-confidence about defending themselves.

Consider a basic paradox. Even anti-Semites often give Jews credit for having exceptional intelligence. Self-congratulatory Web sites reckon that Jews, who make up about 0.2 percent of the world's population, have been awarded more than 160 Nobel Prizes. But if Jews are so smart, why do 22 Arab League countries account for a tenth of the Earth's land surface while the Israelis struggle to secure a country that is 1/19th the size of California? If Jews are so powerful, why does Israel attract twice as many venture-capital investments as all of Europe, even while it's the only one of the United Nations' 192 member states that has been charged with racism for the crime of its existence? How powerful is that?


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In fact, there's an excellent historical reason why Jewish intellectual achievement sits alongside political weakness. Simply put, Jewish achievement in other areas has come at the expense of political strength, and the strange relationship of Jews and power has made them history's favorite prey. Centuries of survival in other people's lands prevented Jews from achieving full acceptance -- and access to the levers of government. Some individual Jews may have lived large, but the Jewish people as a whole lived on sufferance, afraid to antagonize those from whom they sought tolerance.

These questions mean a lot to me. I'm often asked how I, a teacher of Yiddish literature, came to write about politics. But remember that the Yiddish language, developed by European Jews over almost a thousand years, was practically erased along with them in a mere six, 1939-45. So studying Yiddish literature, almost by definition, concentrates the mind on Jewish political disabilities.

When Jerusalem was crushed by Rome in the year 70 -- so brutally that, according to the historian Josephus, "no one visiting the spot would believe it had once been inhabited" -- some Jews stayed on, but the vast majority made their homes in foreign lands. For more than 18 centuries, Jews survived as a nation without three basic staples of nationhood: land, central government and independent means of self-defense.

Instead, Jews turned to strategies of accommodation. They provided goods and services to their gentile neighbors in return for being allowed to stay in the country. They became money-lenders, bankers, minters, craftsmen, midwives -- trades that gentiles would let them perform and that allowed Jews to observe their calendar, customs and religious laws. But they had no independent way to protect their achievements.


Unlike their Christian and Muslim overlords, Jews had good reasons to avoid irking those from whom they sought acceptance. The German poet Heinrich Heine, who called conversion to Christianity his "ticket of admission" to European culture, likened Jews to a prince whom "black magic" had transformed into a dog: "All week long he goes on scraping/Through life's excrement and sweepings/To the mockery of jeers of street boys." Only on Friday evenings, while ushering the Sabbath into his own home, does the dog resume its human shape. Heine saw that the humiliation of the Jews was offset by a moral serenity, and that their moral serenity was offset by acute political vulnerability.

The creation of the state of Israel in May 1948, after the carnage of the Holocaust, was supposed to change all this. But the newly formed Arab League made opposition to Israel the only common goal of its otherwise quarrelsome membership. The new United Nations, tribune of emerging post-colonial nations, did not protect Israel from assault, and over time the world body became a party to the Arab League's war against Jewish statehood.

Of course, Israel now had an army, and a formidable one at that. But the Israel Defense Forces did not change the Jews' existential condition as a minority; Israel was now a minority among the nations, contending with Arab states that sought to dominate or destroy it. Israel still lived by strategies of accommodation, trying to supply its neighborhood with useful services and goods such as medical, agricultural and technological know-how. In the 1990s, utopians such as Shimon Peres, now Israel's president, hailed a "new Middle East" of economic and political cooperation. When Peres and Israel's late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin installed Yasser Arafat as the head of a Palestinian proto-state, they began another doomed Jewish political experiment -- making Israel, as best I can figure, the first country in the world ever to arm its enemy in hopes of gaining security.

What about American Jewry? Mearsheimer and Walt allege that a Jewish cabal dictates U.S. policy in the Middle East, helping Israeli interests and hurting U.S. ones. So have American Jews really begun to mobilize effectively to protect Israel, or are people again overstating Jewish power and its supposed dangers?

Consider the halls of ivy where, if anywhere, the intellectual firepower of Jews might be expected to be on display in defense of Jewish interests. At Columbia University, the late Edward Said used his authority as a teacher of comparative literature to apologize for Palestinian terrorism and condone Arab violence against Israel, including, in one instance, by personal example. (In 2000, a photographer for a French news agency snapped him in southern Lebanon tossing a rock toward an Israeli position.) Much of the Jewish professoriat looked the other way or signed his petitions.

Elsewhere in the academy, Jewish professors themselves lead the anti-Israel barrage. In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt expected Jewish organizations to sponsor their talks and complained of "censorship" when the groups did not. Clearly, there is nothing quite as fun -- or as lucrative -- as baiting Jews.

Read rest of article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201659.html

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Islamization, Londonistan // Britain’s Anti-Semitic Turn

Britain’s Anti-Semitic Turn
Melanie Phillips

A new manifestation of the oldest hatred demonizes the Jewish state.

In August 2006, as the war in Lebanon raged, a gang of teenage girls confronted 12-year-old Jasmine Kranat and a friend on a London bus. “Are you Jewish?” they demanded. They didn’t hurt the friend, who was wearing a crucifix. But they subjected Jasmine, a Jew, to a brutal beating—stomping on her head and chest, fracturing her eye socket, and knocking her unconscious.

According to the Community Security Trust, the defense organization of Britain’s 300,000-strong Jewish community, last year saw nearly 600 anti-Semitic assaults, incidents of vandalism, cases of abuse, and threats against Jewish individuals and institutions—double the 2001 number. According to the police, Jews are four times more likely to be attacked because of their religion than are Muslims. Every synagogue service and Jewish communal event now requires guards on the lookout for violence from both neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists. Orthodox Jews have become particular targets; some have begun wearing baseball caps instead of skullcaps and concealing their Star of David jewelry.

Anti-Semitism is rife within Britain’s Muslim community. Islamic bookshops sell copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the notorious czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; as an undercover TV documentary revealed in January, imams routinely preach anti-Jewish sermons. Opinion polls show that nearly two-fifths of Britain’s Muslims believe that the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target “as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East”; that more than half believe that British Jews have “too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy”; and that no fewer than 46 percent think that the Jewish community is “in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics.”

But anti-Semitism has also become respectable in mainstream British society. “Anti-Jewish themes and remarks are gaining acceptability in some quarters in public and private discourse in Britain and there is a danger that this trend will become more and more mainstream,” reported a Parliamentary inquiry last year. “It is this phenomenon that has contributed to an atmosphere where Jews have become more anxious and more vulnerable to abuse and attack than at any other time for a generation or longer.”

At the heart of this ugly development is a new variety of anti-Semitism, aimed primarily not at the Jewish religion, and not at a purported Jewish race, but at the Jewish state. Zionism is now a dirty word in Britain, and opposition to Israel has become a fig leaf for a resurgence of the oldest hatred.

Anti-Semitism has continually changed its shape over the centuries. In the Greco-Roman world, it expressed itself in cultural hostility, resentment of the Jews’ economic power, and disdain for the separate lives that Jews led as the result of their religious practices, such as dietary laws and refusal to marry outside the faith.

Adding fuel to these pagan prejudices, Christian theology accused Jews of deicide and held them responsible for all time for killing Christ, a position that effectively associated them with the devil and, crucially, laid the blame for their suffering on their own shoulders. Later, medieval Christianity attempted to usurp the Jewish heritage through “replacement theology,” which claimed that Christians inherited all the promises that God had made to the Jews, who were to be eliminated through either conversion or death. These ideas underlay medieval Europe’s regular anti-Jewish pogroms, which consisted of massacres, forced conversions, and torchings of synagogues.

Theological anti-Semitism’s themes reemerged in the next mutation: racial anti-Semitism. This ideology held that, on account of their genetic inheritance, Jews were the enemies of humanity—a demonic conspiracy whose malign influence could be countered only by removing them from the face of the earth. Nazi Germany tried to do just that, killing 6 million Jews between 1933 and 1945.

And now, in Britain and elsewhere, anti-Semitism has mutated again, its target shifting from culture to creed to race to nation. What anti-Semitism once did to Jews as people, it now does to Jews as a people. First it wanted the Jewish religion, and then the Jews themselves, to disappear; now it wants the Jewish state to disappear. For the presentation of Israel in British public discourse does not consist of mere criticism. It has become a torrent of libels, distortions, and obsessional vilification, representing Israel not as a country under exterminatory attack by the Arabs for the 60 years of its existence but as a regional bully persecuting innocent Palestinians who want only a homeland.

Language straight out of the lexicon of medieval and Nazi Jew-hatred has become commonplace in acceptable British discourse, particularly in the media. Indeed, the most striking evidence that hatred of Israel is the latest mutation of anti-Semitism is that it resurrects the libel of the world Jewish conspiracy, a defining anti-Semitic motif that went underground after the Holocaust.

Take the much-abused term “neoconservatives,” which has become code for the Jews who have supposedly suborned America in Israel’s interests. In the Guardian, Geoffrey Wheatcroft lamented the fact that Conservative Party leader David Cameron had fallen under the spell of neoconservatives’ “ardent support for the Iraq war, for the US and for Israel,” and urged Cameron to ensure that British foreign policy was no longer based on the interest of “another country”—Israel. In the Times, Simon Jenkins supported the notion that “a small group of neo-conservatives contrived to take the greatest nation on Earth to war and kill thousands of people” and that these “traitors to the American conservative tradition,” whose “first commitment was to the defence of Israel,” had achieved a “seizure of Washington (and London) after 9/11.” According to this familiar thesis, the Jews covertly exercise their extraordinary power to advance their own interests and harm the rest of mankind.

The New Statesman took a more straightforward approach in 2002, printing an investigation into the power of the “Zionist” lobby in Britain, which it dubbed the “Kosher Conspiracy” and illustrated on its cover with a gold Star of David piercing the Union Jack. The image conveyed at a glance the message that rich Jews were stabbing British interests through the national heart.

The British media accuse Israel of a host of crimes. The Guardian published a two-day special report painting Israel as an apartheid state, ignoring the fact that Israeli Arabs have full civil rights. Another Guardian article, by Patrick Seale, portrayed Israel’s incursions into Gaza as a “destructive rampage.” Dismissing or ignoring the rocket attacks, hostage-taking, and terrorism that those incursions were trying to stop, Seale concluded instead that Israel “deliberately inflicts inhumane hardships on the Palestinians in order to radicalise them and drive the moderates from the scene.” When the National Union of Journalists, joining a number of other academic and professional groups, voted last April to boycott Israeli goods—a move that it has since reversed—one of its members, freelancer Pamela Hardyment, described Israel as “a wonderful Nazi-like killing machine backed by the world’s richest Jews.” Then she referred to the “so-called Holocaust” and concluded: “Shame on all Jews, may your lives be cursed.”

The British media uncritically regurgitate Palestinian propaganda even when it is demonstrably false. In April 2002, many outlets labeled Israel’s assault on the refugee camp in Jenin a “massacre” with thousands dead; in fact, some 52 Palestinian men had died (of whom the great majority were terrorists), along with 23 Israeli soldiers. In last year’s Lebanon war, the media propagated manifestly false Hezbollah claims of Israeli massacres that later proved to have been staged.

During the same war, the Guardian published a cartoon depicting a huge fist, armed with brass knuckles shaped like Stars of David, hammering a bloody child while a wasp representing Hezbollah buzzed around ineffectually. The image suggested that Israel was a gigantic oppressor, slaughtering children in brutal overreaction to Hezbollah, a minor irritant. It was reminiscent of an earlier cartoon in the Independent that showed a monstrous Ariel Sharon biting the head off a Palestinian baby, which won first prize in the British Political Cartoon Society’s annual competition for 2003. By showing Jews killing children, both cartoons employed the imagery of the blood libel—the medieval European calumny that sparked many massacres of Jews by claiming that they murdered Gentile children and used their blood for religious rituals.

The BBC, despite its claims of fairness and honesty, is just as marked by hatred of Israel, and much more influential. It reported the Lebanon war by focusing almost entirely on the Israeli assault upon Lebanon, with scarcely a nod at the Hezbollah rocket barrage against Israel. Its reporters blame Israel even for Palestinians’ killing of other Palestinians. Last December, in a briefing for other BBC staff, Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen wrote of the incipient Palestinian civil war in Gaza: “The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel’s military activities, land expropriation and settlement building—and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government.”

Some media websites publish readers’ anti-Semitic comments. On the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog—which does try to remove some of the more offensive remarks—one reader wrote: “Because of their religious teachings whenever Jews have had power they have used it to persecute non-Jews—from the extermination of Amalek to the killing of Christian converts, to the oppression of medieval peasantry in Poland to the Palestinians today.” A message board on BBC Radio Five Live’s website published a reader’s remark that “Zionism is a racist ideology where jews [sic] are given supremacy over all other races and faiths. This is found in the Talmud.” Though the site reserves the right not to post messages that are “racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable,” it refused to remove that posting, which apparently “did not contravene the house rules.”

Another force propagating the new anti-Semitism is the institution at the heart of the old theological version: the Church, which has reverted to blaming Jews for their own suffering and accusing them once again of a diabolical conspiracy against the innocent. Although Britain is in many ways a postreligious society, it still sees the churches as custodians of high-minded conscience and truth. And those churches are viscerally prejudiced against Israel.

The Church of England is especially unfriendly; one might say that it is the Guardian at prayer. In a lecture in 2001, the archbishop of Canterbury’s representative in the Middle East, Canon Andrew White, observed with concern that propaganda accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and of systematically “Judaising” Jerusalem had assumed great authority within the Church of England. The Church, he said, was undergoing not just a spell of Israel-hatred but also a revival of theological anti-Semitism.

One major influence here is radical Palestinian Christian theology, such as that of Canon Naim Ateek, which revives the imagery of Christ-killing in order to claim that the Palestinians are the rightful inheritors of God’s promise of the Land of Israel. Another is the prominent Reverend Stephen Sizer, who has said that Israel is fundamentally an apartheid state, that he hopes that it will be “brought to an end,” and that Christianity has inherited God’s promises to the Jews. Sizer agrees with another leading Anglican, Reverend Dr. John Stott, that the idea that Jews still have a special relationship with God is “biblically anathema.” And Colin Chapman’s book Whose Promised Land?—hugely influential within the Church—likewise says that God’s promises to the Jews now pertain to the Christians, adding that violence has always been implicit in Zionism and that Jewish self-determination is somehow racist.

Small wonder, then, that Christian aid societies regularly represent Israel as a malevolent occupying power, distorting Jews’ historical claims to the land and making scant reference to the sustained campaign of Arab terrorism against them. A 2005 report by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network—which underpinned a short-lived move to “divest” from companies supporting Israel—compared Israel’s security barrier with “the barbed-wire fence of the Buchenwald camp.” Jews were apparently like Nazis—and because of a measure aimed at preventing a second Jewish Holocaust. Last Christmas, several Anglican and Catholic churches replaced their traditional nativity tableaux with montages of Israel’s security barrier, carrying the unmistakable message that the Palestinians were the modern version of the suffering Christ being crucified all over again by the Jews. And earlier this year, the Catholic weekly The Tablet revealed that almost 80 percent of British Christians polled did not believe that Israel was fighting enemies that were pledged to destroy it.

Like the media and the churches, Britain’s political and academic Left is making common cause with Islamist radicalism. The Islamists oppose the Left’s most deeply held causes, such as gay rights and equality for women. Yet leftists and Islamists now march together under such slogans as “We are all Hezbollah now” during rallies protesting the Lebanon war, and even “Death to the Jews” outside a debate over whether Manchester University’s Jewish Society should be banned.

In 2005, London’s far-left mayor, Ken Livingstone, illustrated this unholy alliance by publicly embracing Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the cleric who endorses suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq. In the same year, he asked a Jewish reporter who approached him after a party, “What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?” When the reporter said that he was Jewish and that the remark offended him, Livingstone likened him to a “concentration camp guard.” After a government panel found that Livingstone had brought his office into disrepute, the mayor challenged the finding in court, where a judge ruled that his remarks were not anti-Semitic. But the Community Security Trust found that a number of perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks mentioned those comments. And John Mann, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism, was in no doubt: “If you have people like the Mayor of London crossing the line . . . then it gives a message out to the rest of the community. That is why antisemitism is on the rise again—because it’s become acceptable.”

Livingstone is not the only leftist politician “crossing the line.” In 2003, Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell claimed that Tony Blair was “being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers.” Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge, whose party honored her with a peerage after she sympathized with suicide bombers and compared Arabs in Gaza with Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, told her party conference in 2006: “The pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world. I think they’ve probably got a certain grip on our party.”

Even a distinguished general told me, without a shred of evidence, that Rupert Murdoch had ordered the Times, which he owns, to limit its opposition to the Iraq War “on the instruction of the Jewish lobby in America.” Furthermore, claimed the general, George Bush had invaded Iraq because “he had Ariel Sharon’s hand up his back.” Moreover, a number of institutions and professional groups have tried to launch boycotts of Israel: academics, journalists, architects, doctors, public-sector unions, and again the Church of England. Many of these have not succeeded, but they have served to remind the public that Israel is a pariah.

Given these views, widespread in the media and among political and intellectual elites, it’s no surprise that many Britons believe that global Islamic terrorism is the result of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians—or that hatred of both the Jewish state and Jews in general has become increasingly acceptable among the population. As a woman said to me conversationally at dinner one evening: “I hate the Jews because of what they do to the Palestinians.” So acceptable has the new anti-Semitism become that many left-wing Jews promulgate the idea that Israel is a racist or apartheid state, demonize those Jews who seek to defend it against slander, and claim that because they are Jews themselves, their words cannot be anti-Semitic—despite the fact that throughout history there have been Jews who have turned on their coreligionists.

One of the most conspicuous features of British anti-Semitism is that the British deny its existence. The Parliamentary inquiry received only a muted response. Both Mann and Richard Littlejohn, a journalist whose TV program on the subject aired in July 2007, encountered people who, when discovering their concern about anti-Semitism, said: “Oh, I didn’t know you were Jewish.” But Mann and Littlejohn aren’t Jewish. As Littlejohn noted, the implication was that no non-Jew would ever identify anti-Semitism, and therefore that anti-Semitism was generally a figment of the Jewish imagination. When I proposed to write a book about it, I was turned down by every mainstream publishing house. “No British publisher will touch this,” one editorial director told me. “Claiming there is anti-Semitism in Britain is simply unsayable.”

Many Britons deny the resurgence of anti-Semitism because they think of it as prejudice toward Jews as people and believe that it died with Hitler. The argument that attitudes toward Israel may be anti-Semitic strikes them as absurd. But consider the characteristics of anti-Semitism. It applies to the Jews expectations applied to no other people; it libels, vilifies, demonizes, and dehumanizes them; it scapegoats them not merely for crimes that they have not committed, but for crimes of which they are the victims; it holds them responsible for all the ills of the world. These characteristics remain precisely the same in today’s hatred of the Jewish state. Israel is held to standards expected of no other nation; it is libeled and vilified; it is blamed both for crimes that it has not committed and for those of which it is the victim; and it is held responsible for all the world’s misfortunes—most recently, Islamic terrorism.

So the Israel boycotts that have broken out in Britain are intrinsically anti-Semitic. The boycotters do not seek to cut ties with any other country, however tyrannical or murderous. They blame no other country for populations that have been displaced through war or other upheavals. And they expect no other nation that has held off its mortal enemies to defer to those aggressors and accede to their demands.

Britons also tend to suspect that Jews use the charge of anti-Semitism to divert attention from Israel’s crimes. This is why, for so many in Britain, the suggestion that anti-Semitism is enjoying a renaissance seems not only false but sinister. Outraged to be accused of peddling bigotry, they begin to hate those who level that charge—who, they conclude, are part of a conspiracy against truth.

Thus Jews who seek to defend Israel find themselves in a trap. By complaining that attacks on Israel are anti-Semitic, they become examples of the supposed Jewish tendency to play the anti-Semitism card to suppress legitimate debate—and provoke yet more of the very prejudice that they are trying to combat. Such Jews find themselves in a situation that Kafka could have scripted. The Economist hosted a 2004 debate in London proposing that “the enemies of antisemitism are the new McCarthyites” because they were trying to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel. And at that debate, a former Conservative higher-education minister and a member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding stated that any British Jew who supported Israel’s policies was guilty of “dual loyalty.” I myself, on the BBC’s Question Time in 2001, was accused of dual loyalty for the same reason.

Insofar as Britons are forced to acknowledge a rise in anti-Semitism, they assume that Jews have brought it on themselves because of Israel’s behavior. There is certainly a link: whenever Middle East violence surges, as in the 2006 Lebanon war or at the height of the second intifada, physical attacks on British Jews surge, too. Since violence in the Middle East invariably consists of attacks on Israel to which it is forced to respond, the appalling conclusion is that the more Jews are murdered in Israel, the more Jews are attacked in Britain.

Not all Britons who oppose Israel are anti-Semites, of course. Many are decent people who hate prejudice. Indeed, that is why they hate Israel—because they have been taught that it is like apartheid-era South Africa. Profoundly ignorant of the history of the Jewish people and of the Middle East, they have been indoctrinated with one of the Big Lies of human history. And it is because of their very high-mindedness that the better educated and more socially progressive they are, the more likely they are to spew Jew-hatred.

But why has this poison seeped into the British bloodstream? Why has the country that was once the cradle of the Enlightenment values of tolerance, objectivity, and reason departed so precipitately from its own tradition?

For one thing, Britain has always had an ambivalent relationship with the Jews. Medieval England actually led the European charge against them. The blood libel is thought to have originated in twelfth-century England; and in 1290, after numerous pogroms against its Jewish citizens, it expelled them altogether. It was not until 1656 that, for a variety of economic and religious reasons, Oliver Cromwell allowed Jews to return to England. Though they subsequently flourished there, a measure of social anti-Semitism persisted until the Holocaust.

Britain’s role in the creation of modern Israel is also a factor in British antagonism toward the Jewish state. In the early 1920s, the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the administration of Palestine, holding it responsible for “placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” For almost three decades, the British tried to evade that obligation in order to appease the Arabs. The Jews of Palestine thus found themselves fighting the British as well as the Arabs, a fact that caused lasting resentment in Britain. Public opinion recalls with undimmed bitterness the Jewish terrorism of that period, such as the 1946 destruction of the British headquarters at Jerusalem’s King David hotel. Arabism is still the default position at the Foreign Office, where sympathetic diplomats are dubbed “the camel corps.”

But a subtler reason exists for Britain’s embrace of the new anti-Semitism. After the Second World War, the radical Left set out to destroy the fundamentals of Western morality, but its campaign played out very differently in America and Britain. In America, it resulted in the culture wars, with conservatives, many churches, and sensible liberals launching a vigorous counterattack in defense of Western moral values—and, as it happened, Israel.

Exhausted by two world wars, shattered by the loss of empire, and hollowed out by the failure of the Church of England or a substantial body of intellectuals and elites to hold the line, Britain was uniquely vulnerable to the predations of the Left. The institutions that underpinned truth and morality—the traditional family and an education system that transmitted the national culture—collapsed. Britain’s monolithic intelligentsia soon embraced postmodernism, multiculturalism, victim culture, and a morally inverted hegemony of ideas in which the values of marginalized or transgressive groups replaced the values of the purportedly racist, oppressive West.

Further, people across the political spectrum became increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior. This erasing of the line between right and wrong produced a tendency to equate, and then invert, the roles of terrorists and of their victims, and to regard self-defense as aggression and the original violence as understandable and even justified. That attitude is, of course, inherently antagonistic to Israel, which was founded on the determination never to allow another genocide of Jews, to defend itself when attacked, and to destroy those who would destroy it. But for the Left, powerlessness is virtue; better for Jews to die than to kill, because only as dead victims can they be moral.

And this general endorsement of surrender feeds straight into a subterranean but potent resentment simmering in Europe. For over 60 years, a major tendency in European thought has sought to distance itself from moral responsibility for the Holocaust. The only way to do so, however, was somehow to blame the Jews for their own destruction; and that monstrous reasoning was inconceivable while the dominant narrative was of Jews as victims.

Now, however, the Palestinians have handed Europe a rival narrative. The misrepresentation of Israeli self-defense as belligerence, suggesting that Jews are not victims but aggressors, implicitly provides Europeans with the means to blame the destruction of European Jewry on its own misdeeds. As one influential left-wing editor said to me: “The Holocaust meant that for decades the Jews were untouchable. It’s such a relief that Israel means we don’t have to worry about that any more.”

It is no accident that Jews find themselves at the center of Britain’s modern convulsion. Today’s British prejudices rest on a repudiation of truth and a refusal to defend Western moral values. And it was the Jews who first gave the West those moral codes that underpin its civilization and that are now under siege.

If British politicians were to start speaking the truth about Israel’s history and defending Jews publicly, they might help stem the new anti-Semitism. Likewise, British Jews—who, unlike their American counterparts, are almost totally silent for fear of making things worse—need to put their heads above the parapet and start telling the truth about Israel. But for Jews who had allowed themselves to believe that they were truly at home in Britain, the new anti-Semitism is the end of an idyll.

Melanie Phillips, a British writer, is a commentator for the Daily Mail and the author of Londonistan. She blogs at www.melaniephillips.com.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_anti-semitism.html

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The U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Not the Fault of Israel and Its Supporters

The U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Not the Fault of Israel and Its Supporters

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3011

The U.S. Invasion of Iraq: Not the Fault of Israel and Its Supporters

Stephen Zunes January 4, 2006


Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org


As the official rationales for the U.S. invasion of Iraq—that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” which threatened the national security of the United States and that the Iraqi government had operational ties to al-Qaida—are now widely acknowledged to have been fabricated, and the back-up rationalization—of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq—is also losing credibility, increasing attention is being given as to why the U.S. government, with broad bipartisan support, made such a fateful decision.

There are a number of plausible explanations, ranging from control of the country's oil resources to strategic interests to ideological motivations. One explanation which should not be taken seriously, however, is the assertion that the right-wing government of Israel and its American supporters played a major role in leading the United States to invade Iraq.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and its supporters here in the United States deserve blame for many tragic policies in recent years which have led to needless human suffering, increased extremism in the Islamic world, decreased security, and rampant violations of the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, and other international legal principles. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, however, is not one of them.

Arguments Supporting Claims of a Major Israeli Role in the U.S. Invasion of Iraq
There are four major arguments made by those who allege a key role by Israel and its American supporters in leading the United States to war in Iraq:

“Despite propaganda by the Bush administration and its bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill, Iraq was not a military threat to the United States. As a result, the invasion had to have been done to protect Israel for an Iraqi attack.”

To begin with, Iraq during the final years of Saddam Hussein's rule was no more of a threat to Israel than it was to the United States. All Iraqi missiles capable of reaching Israel had been accounted for and destroyed by UNSCOM, the International Atomic Energy Agency had determined that Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, and virtually all the country's chemical weapons had similarly been accounted for and destroyed. All this was presumably known to the Israelis, who actively monitored United Nations disarmament efforts in Iraq and had the best military intelligence capabilities in the region.

Though observers were less confident regarding the absence of biological weapons, the Israelis recognized that there was no realistic threat from that source either. Respected Israeli military analyst Meir Stieglitz, writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, stated categorically that “there is no such thing as a long-range Iraqi missile with an effective biological warhead. No one has found an Iraqi biological warhead. The chances of Iraq having succeeded in developing operative warheads without tests are zero.” Similarly, it is highly doubtful that Iraq would be able to attack Israel with biological weapons by other means, either. For example, it is hard to imagine that an Iraqi aircraft carrying biological weapons, presumably some kind of subsonic drone, could somehow make the 600-mile trip to Israel without being detected and shot down. Israel—as well as Iraq's immediate neighbors—had sophisticated anti-aircraft capability.

More fundamentally, if the United States was really concerned with Israel's safety from Iraqi attack, why did the U.S. government provide Iraq with key elements of its WMD capability during the 1980s—including the seed stock for its anthrax and many of the components for its chemical weapons program—back when Iraq clearly did have the capability of striking Israel ? How could the “pro-Israel lobby”—which was no more influential in 2002 than it was fifteen years earlier—have the power to push the United States to invade Iraq when Saddam was no longer a threat to Israel when the lobby was unable to stop U.S. technology transfers to Iraq when it really could have potentially harmed Israel ?

“Though Iraq had no connection with al-Qaida, they were supporting other terrorist groups that were attacking Israel. A U.S. invasion was seen as a means to stopping the terrorist threat targeted at the Jewish state.”

Saddam Hussein did support the Abu Nidal group, a radical secular Palestinian movement, during the mid-1980s, though they tended to target moderate leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organizations as much as they did Israelis. Ironically, the Reagan administration dropped Iraq from its list of states sponsoring terrorism at that time in order to be able to transfer arms and technology to Saddam Hussein's regime that would have otherwise been illegal. Iraq was put back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism immediately following its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, despite evidence that Iraq's support for international terrorism had actually declined. Abu Nidal himself became chronically ill not long afterward and his group had been largely moribund for more than a decade when Saddam Hussein had him killed in his Baghdad apartment in 2002.

Iraq did support a tiny pro-Iraqi Palestinian group known as the Arab Liberation Front, which was known to pass on much of these funds to families of Palestinians who died in the struggle against Israel. These recipients included families of Palestine Authority police and families of nonviolent protesters, though some recipients were families of suicide bombers. Such Iraqi support was significantly less than the support many of these same families had received from Saudi Arabia and other U.S.-backed Arab monarchies, which—unlike Iraq—also provided direct funding for Hamas and other radical Palestinian Islamists. In any case, given that Israeli occupation forces routinely destroyed the homes of families of suicide bombers and the Iraqi money fell way short of making up for their losses, it was hardly an incentive for someone to commit an act of terrorism, which tends to be driven by the anger, hopelessness, and desperation from living under an oppressive military occupation, not from financial incentives.

“Individuals and organizations sympathetic to Israel strongly supported the invasion. Sizable numbers of otherwise dovish Jewish members of Congress voted in support of the war resolution, and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), long considered one of the most powerful lobbying groups on Capitol Hill, pushed Congress to authorize an invasion on behalf of Israel.”

While AIPAC undeniably has influenced Congressional votes regarding Israeli-Palestinian concerns and related issues, they did not play a major role lobbying members of Congress to vote in favor of the resolution authorizing a U.S. invasion of Iraq, in large part because they knew there was such overwhelming bipartisan support for invading that oil-rich country they did not need to. More fundamentally, there are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC, such as the oil companies, the arms industry, and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted “Zionist lobby” and its allied donors to Congressional races. The American Jewish community, like most Americans, is turning against the war. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, along with its chairman of the board, Robert Heller, recently sent a letter to President Bush stating that “We call not only for a clear exit strategy but also for specific goals for troop withdrawal to commence after the completion of parliamentary elections.”

It is noteworthy that in the authorization of force for the 1991 Gulf War, the majority of Jewish members of Congress voted against the war resolution, which is more than can be said for its non-Jewish members. In the more lopsided vote authorizing the use of force in October 2002, a majority of Jewish members of Congress did authorize the use of force, though proportionately less so than did non-Jewish members.

“Pro-Israel Jewish neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and others were among the key architects of the policy of ‘preventative war' and were the strongest advocates for a U.S. invasion of Iraq.”

While it is true that a disproportionate number of Jews could be found among the policy makers in Washington who pushed for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is also true that a disproportionate number of Jews could be found among liberal Democrats in Congress and leftist intellectuals in universities who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Furthermore, while a number of prominent neoconservative intellectuals are of Jewish background, they have tended not to be religious nor have they, despite their support for the current right-wing Israeli government, been strongly identified as Zionists.

It should also be noted that these same neoconservatives, while in the Reagan administration during the 1980s, were advocates of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua and Cuba as well as a nuclear first strike—in a so-called “limited nuclear war”—against the Soviet Union. In short, they are hawks across the board, not just in regard to the Middle East . Support for Israel has always been seen as part of a broader strategic design to advance perceived U.S. interests in the region.

Furthermore, the most prominent backers of the U.S. invasion of Iraq—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney—are neither Jewish nor prone to put the perceived interests of Israel ahead of that of the United States. Indeed, strong U.S. strategic interests in the Persian Gulf region, home of most of the world's known oil reserves, have existed for many decades and even pre-date the establishment of modern Israel.

Has the U.S. Invasion of Iraq Helped Israel?
To argue that support for Israel and/or pressure by supporters of Israel was a crucial variable in prompting the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq assumes that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has been good for Israel .

Evidence suggests strongly to the contrary, however. As cited above, in the years leading up to the March 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraq was no longer a strategic threat to Israel nor was it actively involved in anti-Israeli terrorism. In short, Israel had little to worry about Iraq during Saddam Hussein's final years in power. They do now, however.

Key leaders of Iraq's current government and likely future government are part of fundamentalist Shiite political movements heavily influenced by Iran . These movements are strongly anti-Zionist in orientation and some have maintained close ties to other radical Arab Shiite groups, such as the Lebanese Hizbullah, whose militia has battled Israel for more than twenty years. One of the dominant parties of the U.S.-backed governing coalition has been the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq , whose 15,000-strong paramilitary unit, known as the Badr Brigade, was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who also helped trained the Hizbullah.

Meanwhile, the anti-government and anti-U.S. insurgents in Iraq are dominated by Sunni Salafists and radical nationalists, both of whom tend to be anti-Israel extremists. Thanks to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq , these insurgents are becoming stronger and increasingly sophisticated fighters gaining valuable new experiences in urban guerrilla warfare as well as terrorist tactics. These Iraqi insurgents have developed close ties with radical Jordanian and Palestinian groups with the means and motivation to harm Israeli civilians and Israel will undoubtedly feel their impact.

University of Michigan historian Juan Cole, a leading authority on internal Iraqi politics, has noted that while such radical currents were kept under control by Saddam Hussein, “An Iraq in which armed fundamentalist and nationalist militias proliferate is inevitably a security worry for Israel .” General Shlomo Brom, former chief of the Israeli army's strategic planning division, has stated that “The U.S. presence there actually causes harm to some of our interests.”

To help the United States deal with the deteriorating situation in Iraq , Israel has helped train U.S. Special Forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations, sending urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg to, among other things, train assassination squads against suspected Iraqi guerrilla leaders. American officers have also traveled to Israel and Israeli officers have traveled to Iraq for additional consulting. In addition, Israelis have helped arm and train pro-American Kurdish militias and have assisted U.S. officials in interrogation centers for suspected insurgents under detention near Baghdad . Israeli advisers have provided advice on erecting and manning roadblocks and checkpoints, mine-clearing and wall-breaching methods, as well as techniques for tracking suspected insurgents using drone aircraft. Israel has also provided aerial surveillance equipment, decoy drones, and armored construction equipment.

It has long been assumed that working so closely with Israel would harm U.S. interests in the Middle East, given the longstanding anti-Israeli sentiment in the region. However, as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the bloody counter-insurgency war which has followed, popular resentment in the Middle East against the United States today is arguably even greater than popular resentment against Israel. Indeed, the death, destruction, and dislocation resulting from U.S. policies in Iraq eclipse that from Israeli policies in the West Bank. Israel's war crimes against civilians living in Jenin in 2002 were horrendous, but pale in comparison with U.S. war crimes committed in Fallujah in 2004. Israel's mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners is also a serious matter, but does not come close in scale to America's torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Israel has openly violated the United Nations Charter and other critical standards of international law, but the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath is of even greater negative consequence to the international legal order.

As with other powers that have tried to control the Middle East, American efforts to impose its hegemony has spawned its own resistance. With the United States itself on the other side of the globe, Israel may become an easier target by those resisting this hegemonic American effort in the heart of the Middle East by going after its closest regional ally. While in the past, U.S. support for Israel has led to increased anti-Americanism in the Arab-Islamic world, today it appears that Israeli support for the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is exacerbating anti-Israeli sentiments. By further solidifying its strategic relationship with the United States through support of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Israel is finding itself further isolated, less likely to be able to normalize relations with Arab states, more likely to be subjected to terrorist attacks by extremists, and more vulnerable to the whims of U.S. foreign policy.

As a result, rather than goading the United States into taking military action against Syria, the Israeli government has been cautioning the United States to back off from its pressure against the Assad regime, fearing that if the Baathist leader was overthrown, more radical elements could come to power or that the country could be thrown into a destabilizing civil war. Similarly, public opinion polls show that a sizable majority of Israelis oppose pre-emptive military action against Iran for fear that an attack on that large Islamic country could have serious negative consequences to Israeli security interests.

The U.S.-Israeli Alliance
Using Israel to advance perceived American interests in the Middle East and beyond is nothing new. In previous decades, Israel helped prevent victories by radical nationalist movements in Lebanon and Jordan, as well as in Palestine. They have kept Syria, with its radical nationalist regime and its role as a one-time ally of the Soviet Union, in check. Their air force is predominant throughout the region. Israel's frequent wars have provided battlefield testing for American arms. Israel has missiles with ranges of thousands of miles and has cooperated with the U.S. military-industrial complex in research and development for new jet fighters, anti-missile defense systems, and other sophisticated weapons systems. Israel also served as a conduit for U.S. arms to regimes and movements too unpopular in the United States for openly granting direct military assistance, such as apartheid South Africa, Iran's Islamic republic, Guatemala under its rightist juntas, and the Nicaraguan Contras. Israeli military advisers have assisted the Contras, the Salvadoran junta, and other movements and governments backed by the United States. The Mossad has cooperated with the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services in intelligence gathering and covert operations.

As one Israeli analyst described it during the Iran-Contra scandal, “It's like Israel has become just another federal agency, one that's convenient to use when you want something done quietly.”

Rather than being a liability, the 1991 Gulf War proved Israel once again to be a strategic asset for the United States: Israeli developments in air-to-ground warfare were integrated into allied bombing against Iraqi missile sites and other targets; Israeli-designed conformal fuel tanks for F-15 fighter-bombers greatly enhanced their range; the Israeli-provided mine plows were utilized during the final assaults on Iraqi positions; Israeli mobile bridges were used by U.S. Marines; Israeli targeting systems and low-altitude warning devices were utilized by American helicopters; and, Israel developed key components for the widely-used Tomahawk missiles.

One of the more unsettling aspects of this kind of strategic cooperation is how closely it corresponds with historic anti-Semitism:

Throughout Europe in past centuries, the ruling class of a given country would, in return for granting limited religious and cultural autonomy, set up certain individuals in the Jewish community to become the visible agents of the oppressive social order, such as tax collectors and money lenders. When the population would threaten to rise up against the ruling class, the rulers could then blame the Jews, sending the wrath of an exploited people against convenient scapegoats, resulting in the pogroms and other notorious waves of repression which have taken place throughout the Jewish Diaspora over the centuries.

The idea behind Zionism was to break this cycle through the creation of a Jewish nation-state, where Jews would no longer be dependent on the ruling class of a given country. The tragic irony is that this cycle has been perpetuated through Israel being used by Western powers to maintain their interests in the Middle East . Great Britain and France , in their unsuccessful military campaign to bring “regime change” to Egypt in 1956, enlisted Israel in their fight. Subsequent to 1967, in ways described above, the United States has used Israel to advance its strategic interests in the region and beyond.

Therefore, one finds autocratic Arab governments, Islamic extremists, and others blaming Israel, Zionism, or the Jews for their problems rather than the United States or the broader exploitative global economic system and their own elites who benefit from and help perpetuate such a system.

The late respected Israeli intellectual Ishawa Leibowitz once observed, “The existence of the Jewish people of 60 to 80 generations … was a heroic situation. We never got from the goyish world a cent. We supported ourselves. We maintained our own institutions. Now we have taken three million Jews, gathered them here and turned them over to be parasites of America. And in some sense we are even the mercenaries of America to fight the wars of what the ruling persons in America consider to be American interests.”

In the Israeli press, one can find comments like those in Yediot Ahronot which describes their country as “the Godfather's messenger,” since Israel undertakes the “dirty work” of the Godfather, who “always tries to appear to be the owner of some large respectable business.” Israeli satirist B. Michael describes U.S. aid to Israel as a situation where “My master gives me food to eat and I bite those whom he tells me to bite. It's called strategic cooperation.”

This explains why the United States has moved increasingly toward Sharon's position of refusing to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians and continuing to occupy and colonize large sectors of the West Bank while rejecting Israeli moderates who are willing to accept Palestinian offers of enforceable security guarantees in exchange for a withdrawal from the occupied territories: an Israel in a continuing state of violence and insecurity is far more likely to do the bidding of the United States than an Israel at peace. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once noted, “Israel's obstinacy serves our interests best.”

The United States and Israel under their right-wing governments do share a number of common perceived strategic interests. However, rather than being a tail-wagging-the-dog situation, as apologists for U.S. policy contend, Israel still is very much the junior partner in the relationship and is playing that role to its own detriment.

Blaming the Jews
As part of its desperate strategy to defend its disastrous policies in Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters are now using the defense of Israel as an excuse. While such claims have no more validity than claims that Saddam Hussein had operational ties to al-Qaida or still possessed WMDs, it carries the additional danger that Israel and its American Jewish supporters will end up getting blamed for the whole Iraqi debacle. The American Jewish newspaper The Forward noted how a number of pro-Israel American activists and prominent Israelis had criticized recent comments by President George W. Bush and other prominent Republicans who have recently played the Israel card to justify the increasingly unpopular war. For example, Dani Rothschild, a retired Israeli major general who had served as the Israeli army's top administrator in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, noted how “It could put Israel in a very awkward situation with the American public, if Israel would be the excuse for losing more American soldiers every day.”

Using Israel as an excuse for unpopular U.S. policies in the Middle East is nothing new, either. Over the past decade, I have had the opportunity to meet with a half dozen Arab foreign ministers and deputy foreign ministers and have asked each of them why their government was still so friendly with the United States, given U.S. policy toward the Palestinians, the Iraqis, and other Arabs. Every one has answered to the effect that U.S. officials had explained to them that the anti-Arab bias in U.S. foreign policy was not the fault of the U.S. government itself, but was the result of wealthy Jews who essentially ran U.S. foreign policy.

In short, American officials are utilizing classic anti-Semitic scapegoating by blaming an alleged cabal of rich Jews behind the scenes for being responsible for a widely-perceived injustice as a means of deflecting attention away from those who actually are responsible.

Similarly, some defenders of members of Congress who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq and falsely claimed that Iraq still had “weapons of mass destruction” are now trying to deflect criticism directed at these powerful senators and representatives by claiming they were somehow forced into voting for the war by powerful Jewish interests. In reality, however, the only people responsible for authorizing the illegal and tragic U.S. invasion of Iraq are those individuals who cast their votes in favor of the resolution and should therefore be held personally responsible.

This does not mean the growing awareness of the tragedy of the Iraq war cannot be utilized to raise consciousness regarding certain institutional factors which helped make the invasion possible. Indeed, this could be a great opportunity for progressives to demonstrate that this tragedy was a result of not only the war mongering of the individual members of Congress and the administration who made it possible, but that it was also a reflection of the power of the oil companies, military contractors, right-wing ideologues, the corporate-owned media, and overall excessive corporate influence over our government's foreign and domestic policy. This, in turn, could spur demands for badly-needed radical reforms in the American political and economic systems.

It would be tragic if this opportunity for pressing for advancing such badly-needed social change becomes sidetracked by the time-honored tactic of diverting attention from the real issues and instead “blaming the Jews.”

This does not mean those who exaggerate the role of Israel in propelling the United States to war with Iraq are necessarily guilty of anti-Semitism. There are any number of theories as to why the United States government decided to invade that oil-rich country. This one just happens to be wrong. Because this particular theory parallels dangerous anti-Semitic stereotypes which exaggerate Jewish power and influence, however, it is a particularly grievous misinterpretation, not just because it reinforces longstanding oppressive attitudes against a minority group, but because it diverts attention away from those who really are responsible for the unfolding tragedy in Iraq.

Indeed, that has largely been the functional purpose of anti-Semitism throughout Western history: to misdirect popular opposition to economic injustice, disastrous military campaigns, or other failures by political and economic elites onto a convenient and expendable target. It is critical, therefore, for people to resist—particularly those who identify with the peace movement—buying into this myth that it was Israel and its supporters who were responsible for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

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