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Wednesday, April 28, 2004 |
Today and tomorrow a Conference on anti-Semitism is held in Berlin. A very good initiative. What happened in Europe in the middle of the previous century should never, ever happen again.
However, there is a tendency among Jewish people (Zionists mainly) to take advantage of the holocaust for present-day political purposes, to obscure human rights issues in their own country. What is a Semite? "Semites are peoples who speak Semitic languages; the group includes Arabs, Aramaeans, Jews, and many Ethiopians. In a Biblical sense, Semites are peoples whose ancestry can be traced back to Shem, Noah's eldest son. The most prominent Semites today are Arabs and Jews." (History)
So, actually, we could as well say the state of Israel is an anti-Semitic state, as it treats Palestinians - who are Semites - as second-class people and denies them the same rights as the Jewish population. Some Zionists are close to fascism:
"Inspired by the racial nationalism of Zeev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a right-wing Zionist who modelled his Revisionist Zionist movement on Mussolini's fascism, down to the brown shirts worn by his Jewish terrorist squads, the majority of the Likud Party and its allies wanted Israel to annex permanently all of the land west of Jordan. The major debate among Likudniks was whether to 'transfer' three million Arabs in an act of wholesale ethnic cleansing, or to rule the Arabs indefinitely, converting Israel into an apartheid state in which the Arabs would have no political rights and would work as menial laborers for Jewish colonists in conditions of racial segregation." (From Made in Texas by Michael Lind)
Fortunately not all Jews are Zionists: "... the best way to protect Israel and the Jewish people is to use the power of the international community to impose a settlement and end the occupation." There exist a lot of myths about Israel. These myths are counter-productive and self-destructive.
FT: "While anti-Semitism has decreased in most of Europe over the past two years, Europeans harbour increasingly hostile views towards Israel, according to a survey released yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League, the US civil rights organisation."
Haaretz: "The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical."
The fact that the extremist right-wing Jewish lobby in the US is actively involved in the war in Iraq is doing much harm to the Jewish community. And accusing critics of Israel of being anti-Semites doesn't help either.
5:59:02 PM 
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© Copyright 2004 Hetty Litjens.
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