Two events happened on Wednesday which should send a shiver down the spine of
everyone concerned about the future of the American Jewish community. But to
understand their importance it is important to consider the context in which
they occurred.
On January 13, The New York Times reported on a series of
virulently anti-Jewish comments Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made in
speeches given in 2010. Among other things, Morsi said, “We must never forget,
brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for
Zionists, for Jews.” He said that Egyptian children “must feed on hatred; hatred
must continue. The hatred must go on for God and as a form of worshiping
him.”
In another speech, he called Jews “bloodsuckers,” and “the
descendants of apes and pigs.”
Two weeks after the Times ran the story,
the Obama administration sent four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt as part of a
military aid package announced in December 2012 entailing the provision of 20
F-16s and 200 M1-A1 Abrams tanks.
The Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, the
Jewish Council for Public Affairs and other prominent American Jewish groups did
not oppose the weapons transfer.
With the American Jewish leadership
silent on the issue, Israel found its national security championed by Sen. Rand
Paul. He attached an amendment to a budget bill that would bar the US from
transferring the advanced weapons platforms to Egypt.
Paul explained,
“Egypt is currently governed by a religious zealot... who said recently that
Jews were bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and pigs. This doesn’t sound like
the kind of stable personality we [sh]ould be sending our most sophisticated
weapons to.”
Paul’s amendment was overwhelmingly defeated, due in large
part to the silence of the American Jewish leadership.
The Times noted
that Morsi’s castigation of Jews as “apes and pigs” was “a slur for Jews that is
familiar across the Muslim world.”
Significantly the Times failed to note
that the reason it is familiar is because it comes from both the Koran and the
hadith. The scripturally based denigration of Jews as apes and pigs is legion
among leading clerics of both Sunni and Shi’ite Islam.
It was not a
coincidence that the Times failed to mention why Morsi’s castigation of Jews as
apes and pigs was so familiar to Muslim audiences.
The Islamic sources of
Muslim Brotherhood Jew hatred, and indeed, hatred of Jews by Islamic leaders
from both the Sunni and Shi’ite worlds, is largely overlooked by the liberal
ideological camp. And the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish
leadership is associated with the liberal ideological camp.
If the Times
acknowledged that the Jew hatred espoused by Morsi and his colleagues in the
Muslim Brotherhood, as well as by their Shi’ite colleagues in the Iranian regime
and Hezbollah is based on the Koran, they would have to acknowledge that Islamic
Jew hatred and other bigotry is not necessarily antithetical to mainstream
Islamic teaching. And that is something that the Times, like its fellow liberal
institutions, is not capable of acknowledging.
They are incapable of
acknowledging this possibility because considering it would implicitly require a
critical study of jihadist doctrine. And a critical study of jihadist doctrine
would show that the doctrine of jihad, or Islamic holy war, subscribed to by the
Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, as well as by the Iranian regime and
Hezbollah and their affiliates, is widely supported, violent, bigoted, evil and
dangerous to the free world.
And that isn’t even the biggest problem with
studying the doctrine of jihad. The biggest problem is that a critical study of
the doctrine of jihad would force liberal institutions like the New York Times
and the institutional leadership of the American Jewish community alike to
abandon the reigning dogma of the liberal ideological camp – moral
relativism.
Moral relativism is based on a refusal to call evil evil and
a concomitant willingness to denigrate truth if truth requires you to notice
evil.
Since pointing out the reality of the danger the jihadist doctrines
propagated by the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood involves the implicit demand
that people make distinctions between good and evil and side with good against
evil, moral relativists – that is most liberals – cannot contend with
jihad.
This is why the American Jewish leadership refused to join Rand
Paul and his conservative Republican colleagues in the Senate and demand an
immediate cessation of US military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled
Egyptian military even after the evidence of the Brotherhood’s genocidal Jew
hatred was splashed across the front page of the Times.
It is the
dominance of moral relativism in liberal institutions like the New York Times
that make even the most apologetic expose of the Muslim Brotherhood a major
event. And it is the dominance of liberal orthodoxies in the mainstream Jewish
community that makes it all but impossible for Jewish leaders to speak up
against the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the manifest danger its genocidal hatred
of Jews poses not only for Israel, but for Jews everywhere.
It is bad
enough that liberal Jewish leaders won’t speak out against the Koranic-inspired
evil that characterizes the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. What is worse is
what their own morally relative blindness causes them to do.
On
Wednesday, we saw two distressing examples of the consequences of this
self-imposed embrace of ideological fantasies.
First, on Wednesday,
Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School’s Journal of Conflict Resolution gave
its annual International Advocate of Peace Award to former president Jimmy
Carter.
Carter’s long record of anti-Israel, and indeed anti-Semitic,
actions and behavior made the decision to bestow him with the honor an affront
not only to the cause of peace, but to the cause of Jewish legal rights. As an
advocate of Hamas and a man who castigates Israel as an illegal “apartheid”
state, Carter has a long record of outspoken opposition to both Jewish human
rights and to viable peace between Israel and its neighbors.
For
outsiders, the Orthodox Jewish university’s law school’s law journal’s decision
to honor Carter was shocking, but as it works out, the Cardozo Journal of
Conflict Resolution confers its prize almost exclusively on people active in
pressuring Israel to make concessions to Palestinian terrorists who reject
Israel’s right to exist. Past winners include Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton, Richard
Holbrooke, George Mitchell, John Wallach and Seeds of Peace and, perhaps most
astoundingly, the outspoken Jew hater Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
In other
words, Carter wasn’t chosen for the honor despite his anti-Israel record. He was
selected because of his anti-Israel record.
In a similar fashion, New
York’s 92nd Street Y invited virulent Israel hater Roger Waters to perform a
concert on April 30. Given Waters’s outspoken opposition to Israel, his call for
total economic and cultural warfare against the Jewish state and his leading
role in the BDS movement, it is not possible that the 92nd Street Y was unaware
of his radical, anti-Semitic sentiments.
And so, the only reasonable
explanation for his invitation to perform at the Jewish institution is that the
Y wanted to invite this openly anti- Semitic musician to perform. A public
outcry by pro-Israel activists forced the Y to cancel his
performance.
The day that Carter was embraced by the Orthodox Jewish
establishment, Jewish author and activist Pamela Geller was silenced. Geller is
the nightmare of the liberal Jewish establishment.
She is a beautiful and
articulate speaker and writer who has risen to prominence in the US for her
steadfast commitment to exposing the deadly pathologies of Jew hatred, misogyny
and other prejudices inherent to jihadist ideology.
Geller’s website,
Atlas Shrugs, is a clearinghouse for information on Islamic persecution of
women, Christians and apostates and hatred of Jews. She also showcases the
documented ties between mainstream American Islamic groups and the Muslim
Brotherhood.
An indefatigable defender of Israel, Geller recently ran a
highly controversial, and successful ad campaign in the New York and San
Francisco public transportation systems in response to an anti-Israel ad
campaign. Her billboards read, “In any war between the civilized man and the
savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.”
Geller
was scheduled to speak on April 13 at the Great Neck Synagogue in Great Neck,
New York. The topic of her talk was “The Imposition of Shari’a in
America.”
Last month, after learning of her talk, a consortium of Islamic
and leftist activists in Nassau County led by Habeed Ahmed from the Islamic
Center of Long Island launched a pressure campaign to coerce the synagogue into
cancelling her speech. Members of the group telephoned the synagogue and
castigated Geller as a bigot, and likened her to the Nazis in the
1930s.
In short order liberal rabbis Michael White and Jerome Davidson
took over the opposition to Geller and launched a media campaign attacking her
as a bigot and demanding that the Great Neck Synagogue cancel her
speech.
Rejecting the distinction Geller makes between jihadists and
their victims – Muslim and non- Muslim alike, White and Davidson claimed that
she opposes all Muslims and so her speech must be canceled. By hosting her, they
intoned, the Great Neck Synagogue would be guilty of propagating hate speech.
Liberal Christian and Jewish activists and their Muslim associates threatened to
protest the speech.
On Wednesday the synagogue caved in to their massive
pressure. Citing “security concerns” the synagogue board released a statement
saying that while “these important issues must be discussed, the synagogue is
unable to bear the burden” of the pressure campaign surrounding Geller’s planned
speech. Her event was canceled.
Surveys of the American Jewish community
taken in recent years by the American Jewish Committee demonstrate that the vast
majority of American Jews are deeply supportive of Israel, and their views tend
toward the Right side of the political spectrum in issues related to Israel, the
Palestinians and the wider Islamic conflict with the Jewish state.
On the
other hand, the AJC’s surveys show that for the vast majority of American Jews,
Israel is not a voting issue. This state of affairs was reflected by a comment
that Yeshiva University student Ben Winter made to the media regarding the
absence of student protest against Carter on Wednesday. In Winter’s words,
“While many students at YU feel strongly about their Zionism, few have the
courage to publicly express their opinions.”
The danger exposed by the
cancellation of Geller’s speech and the conferral of honors on the likes of
Carter and Waters by mainstream Jewish institutions is daunting. If moral
relativism remains the dominant dogma of the American Jewish establishment, the
already weakly defended, but still strongly rooted, support for Israel among the
rank and file of the American Jewish community will
dissipate.
caroline@carolineglick.com
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