Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Manipulation of the order in which the news is given and of the news itself. The headlines give the number of Palestinians killed or wounded in most articles, at least in Europe, before describing the gunfights and their causes, and linger on the age and family stories of the terrorists. The purposes of the IDF actions, such as capturing terrorists, destroying arms factories or hiding places and bases for attacks against Israel, are rarely mentioned. On the contrary, Israel’s operations are often described as completely uncalled for, bizarre, wicked, and useless.

  Manipulation of language, taking advantage of the great confusion about the definition of “terrorism” and “terrorist.” This too is an old issue, connected to the concept of freedom fighter, so dear to my generation.

  A few days ago, at a checkpoint, I was doing some interviews. It soon became clear to me that the use of the word “terrorist” sounded to each one of my Palestinian interlocutors a capital political and semantic sin. The press has learned this very well: the occupation is the cause of everything, terrorism is called resistance and does not exist per se. Terrorists who kill women and children are called militants, or fighters. An act of terrorism is often “a fire clash,” even when only babies and old men are shot inside their cars on a highway. It is also interesting to note that a young shahid is a cause of deep pride for the Palestinian struggle, but if you ask how a child of twelve can be sent to die and why young children are indoctrinated to do such acts, the answer is: “Come on, a child can’t be a terrorist. How can you call a twelve-year-old boy a terrorist?”

  This is perhaps the most crucial point: Given the fact that there is a ferocious debate on the definition of terrorism, it is widely accepted that terrorism is a way of fighting. This is a semantic and even substantial gift of the new antiSemitism, where it is natural for a Jew to be dead. Namely, intentionally targeting civilians to cause fear and disrupt the morale of Israel is not a moral sin. It doesn’t raise world indignation, and if it does, it hides in its folds some or much sympathy for the terrorist aggressor. What the European press fails to or doesn’t want to understand is that Terror is a condemnable and forbidden way of fighting, regardless of the specific political goal it tries to achieve.

  The media have promoted the extravagant concept that the settlers, including women and children, are not real human beings. They present settlers as pawns in a dangerous game they choose to play. Their deaths are almost natural and logical events. In a way, they asked for it.

  On the other hand, when a Hamas commander is killed, even though he obviously “asked for it,” an ethical, philosophical debate arises, on the perfidy of extrajudicial death sentences.

  This would certainly be a licit debate, were it not for the grotesque double standard on which the worldwide press bases it.

  Not to go overlooked is that censorship and corruption within the Palestinian Authority and the physical elimination of its political enemies are hardly ever covered.

  The points listed above all point in one direction: Durban.

  Here, the human rights movements that we will later find on the streets demonstrating against the war in Iraq chose Israel as their primary target and enemy. This choice constitutes a great success for Palestinian propaganda, but also a very serious signal of weakness from the movements themselves. The ideologically and politically cornered Left chose to adopt as universal a very controversial and sectarian struggle, marked heavily by terrorism. A Left incapable of confronting the capitalist globalization system decided to appoint the State of Israel as its main target. In a word, the Left decided to make Israel pay for what they think America should pay. Isn’t this real cowardice?

  In addition, there is the issue of how the UN and its outrageous policy have helped this process, and how Europe has coddled it because of its ancient sense of guilt toward Israel and its hate for the United States, Israel’s friend and ally. This matter alone deserves an entire book.

  Denouncing this new human rights anti-Semitism is psychologically a terribly arduous task for Israel and for Diaspora Jews.

  It is even more difficult because between the Jews and the Left there is a divorce that the latter does not want. The Left wants to continue being considered the paladin of good Jews. It pretends to continue mourning the Jews killed in the Holocaust, crying together with the Jews shoulder to shoulder. And it does so because this gives it the moral authorization to go a second later and speak of the “atrocities” of Israel. After writing about the “atrocities” of Israel, the good European leftist will talk to you with vivacity about the fascinating shtetl culture and the sweetness of Moroccan Jewish dishes.

  Until we break the silence, we, the Jews, give them the authorization to deny us the right to a nation of our own, and defend its people from unprecedented anti-Semitism.

  Just as it curses Israel, the Left of human rights, of pacifism, of protest against the death penalty or war or racial and gender discrimination, also praises suicide terrorists and the caricatures of Sharon worthy of Der Stürmer. And none of its people will ever sit as a human shield in an Israeli coffee house or in a Jerusalem bus.

  Still, this new anti-Semitism has a peculiar characteristic: It allows conversion. This kind of anti-Semitism, unlike Nazi anti-Semitism, is more like the older theological anti-Semitism, for it gives the Jews the option to renounce the devil (Israel, or sometimes Sharon). Whoever declares a sense of revulsion toward Israel’s conduct is allowed to set foot again in the civil society, the one of common sense, civilized conversation, groups of good people full of goodwill that fight for human rights.

  If we want to obtain something, if we decide that it is about time to fight, we must renounce “liberal” imposters. We have to know how to say that the free press is a failure when it lies, and that it does lie. We have to say that all human rights are violated when a people is denied the right of self-defense, and that right is denied to Israel. Human rights are also violated when a nation is subjected to systematic defamation and made a legitimate target for terrorists. We have to stop what we have accepted since the day the state was born, namely, that Israel be viewed as a different state in the international community.

  Another very important point is that of all the parameters of anti-Semitism now used, one is the confusion between “Israeli ” and “Jew.” Supposedly, it is wrong to insinuate that the Jews act in the interests of the State of Israel and not their own state. The more a country confuses the two terms, the more anti-Semitic it is considered, and therefore one would imagine that the Jews combat this prejudice.

  This is a serious conceptual error. Since the State of Israel, and along with it Jews, have been made the objects of the worst kind of prejudice, Jews everywhere should consider their being identified with Israel a virtue and honor.

  They should assert that identification with pride.

  If Israel is, and it is indeed, the focal point of anti-Semitic attacks, our attention must be concentrated there. We must measure the moral character of the person we are speaking to on that basis: if you lie about Israel, if you cover it with bias, you are an anti-Semite. If you’re prejudiced against Israel, then, you’re against the Jews.

  This doesn’t mean criticizing Israel and its policies is forbidden. However, very little of what we hear about Israel has to do with lucid criticism. Prejudice and bias, not Sharon’s personality, is the major reason for criticism. The self-defined critics are not the pious interlocutors for the Jews that they pretend to be. So we must tell them: From now on you cannot use the human rights passport for free; you cannot use false stereotypes. You must demonstrate what you assert: that the army ruthlessly storms poor Arab villages that have nothing to do with terrorism; that it shoots children on purpose; that it kills journalists with pleasure. You cannot? You called Jenin a slaughter? Then you are an anti-Semite, just like the old anti-Semites you pretend to hate. You have to convince me that you are not an anti-Semite, now that we know that you do not condemn terrorism, that you have never said a word against the contem
porary caricatures of hooked-nosed Jews with a bag of dollars in one hand and a machine gun in the other.

  Israel is in shock over the new anti-Semitism. All the theories that claimed classic anti-Semitism would abate with the creation of the State of Israel and that, in the long run, it would be extinguished have been destroyed. Furthermore, Israel has actually become the sum of all the evil, the proof that the Protocols and the blood libels were right. The Palestinians are turned into Jesus, crucified; the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan waged by the United States is part of the Jewish plan of domination. Jews all over the world are threatened, beaten, even killed to pay the price of Israel’s existence.

  Israel and the Jews have today only one certainty: Now that Jews have their own means of defense, a new Holocaust is no longer possible. Still we have to pass from the idea of our possible physical elimination to that of possible moral elimination. The only way to face this threat is to fight fearlessly, on our own terrain, using all the historic and ethical weapons that Israel possesses. No shame, no fear, and no sense of guilt.

  Israel has the chance to prove itself for what it really is: the outpost of the fight against terrorism and the defense of democracy. That is no small thing. But we the Jews pose as victims and hide from this chance because using it puts us in conflict with our ancient sponsors and their legitimization. We have to realize that legitimization is really in our own hands and we never used it.

  The watchword of the Jews should be “Jewish pride,” in the sense of pride in our history and national identity, wherever we are.

  Jewish pride means that we have to claim the unique identity of the Jewish people and its right to exist. We must act as though it has never been acknowledged, because today, once again, it no longer is. In defending this identity we have to be, as Hillel Halkin says, as tough as can be and as liberal as no one else is.

  No left and no right. We won’t give the Left the power to decide where we stand. We will decide our alliances by ourselves, according to the actual position of our potential partners.

  PART SEVEN

  THE DEICIDE ACCUSATION

  NAT HENTOFF

  Who Did Kill Christ?

  LENNY BRUCE USED TO TELL, in his act, about a Jew who was weary not only of being called a Christ killer but of occasionally being punched in the mouth by disciples of the Prince of Peace. Finally, this beleaguered Jew put a note in his cellar, where it could easily be found. He wanted to absolve all other Jews. It said: “I did it. Morty.”

  This question of the Jews’ responsibility for the crucifixion has considerable resonance for me because I grew up in Boston, then the most anti-Semitic city in the country, and lost some teeth after being punched in the mouth by young hooligans whose after-dark sport was invading our ghetto and bashing Jews to avenge that deicide.

  My mother told me that in the Old Country, when she was a girl and word spread that the cossacks were coming, her mother popped her into the oven, which fortunately was not lit.

  Therefore, I have become much interested in a story out of Washington about a Jewish conservative journalist, Evan Gahr, who has left three leading conservative institutions after charging Paul Weyrich with anti-Semitism. Weyrich, a founder of the contemporary conservative movement, was at one point its most successful fundraiser.

  Thomas Edsall broke the story in the April 21 Washington Post. He cited an April 13 Paul Weyrich commentary, “Indeed He Is Risen!” on Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation’s Web site.

  The Weyrich statement, e-mailed to supporters, said, “Christ was crucified by the Jews who had wanted a temporal ruler to rescue them from the oppressive Roman authorities. Instead God sent them a spiritual leader to rescue them from their sins and despite the fact that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, performed incredible miracles, even raised people from the dead, He was not what the Jews had expected so they considered him a threat. Thus He was put to death.”

  In his article, Edsall quoted Evan Gahr, who had criticized Weyrich on the American Spectator Web site. Gahr called Weyrich “a demented anti-Semite” for that resurrection of Jews as Christ killers.

  In Edsall’s Washington Post article, there was further reaction from Marc Stern, a constitutional lawyer at the American Jewish Congress, whom I consult on establishment-clause cases, and Eugene Fisher, director of Catholic-Jewish relations for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

  Stern noted that, through the centuries, the “blood libel” that we Jews were the ones who killed Christ had ignited pogroms.

  And Fisher declared that Weyrich’s accusation “is exactly the type of collective guilt on the Jewish people that the Second Vatican Council specifically condemned in the declaration Nostra Aetate, October 28, 1965.” He added that last year, while in Israel, Pope John Paul II made clear that the Catholic Church is “deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews.”

  In the May 15 Wall Street Journal, David Novak, who teaches Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, noted that Weyrich is a deacon in the Catholic Church, which “has officially repudiated the old charge that the Jews, even the Jews of today, are responsible for Christ’s death.”

  Novak added that “the greatest modern Christian theologian, Karl Barth,” emphasized that “Jesus’ death on the cross is atonement for the sins of all humans, even the sins of his followers. Thus, for Christians to deny their complicity in the death of Jesus, by shifting sole blame to the Jews, is to deny their own need for atonement.”

  And the head of the Anti-Defamation League, my friend Abe Foxman, with whom I often debate—but not this time— said of Paul Weyrich’s assertion that “such destructive myths stated as fact may well reinforce the bigotry of the ignorant and uninformed, potentially leading to hateful anti-Semitic acts.”

  Like the removal of my teeth. But I do not call that a hate crime. Thirty days for assault would have been fine. No extra prison time.

  On his Free Congress Web site, Paul Weyrich wrote on April 24 that Evan Gahr’s charge “is absolutely amazing to me and shows how far down the road to political correctness we have come in our society.” (And this response shows that one conservative can accuse another of political correctness.)

  About his indictment of the Jews, Weyrich said, “This is historical fact. Are we now to be forbidden to mention historical fact? . . . I was merely quoting Scripture. Scripture is truth. And the truth shall set you free.”

  Evan Gahr’s accurate description of what Weyrich wrote in “Indeed He Is Risen!” has set him free of all his writing and research assignments at three conservative organizations. Gahr has been removed from the list of contributing writers at the American Enterprise Institute’s magazine and barred from using its office facilities. The Hudson Institute, where Gahr had been a senior fellow, fired him.

  Gahr, who had been writing for David Horowitz’s Front-Page[magazine] Web site, has also been fired by that very paladin of free speech, who so vigorously attacked those college newspaper editors who refused to run the Horowitz ad denouncing reparations for slavery.32

  I have read the explanations these conservative warriors have given for letting Gahr go, and I have talked with the Hudson Institute. They all claim that Gahr was fired for other reasons. He does not believe this, nor do I. My congratulations to Linda Chavez, head of the Center for Equal Opportunity, who is not afraid of free speech and has brought in Gahr as an adjunct scholar.

  If any of the conservative magazines or high-profile conservative intellectuals have spoken up for him, I haven’t seen it. Stanley Crouch wrote about Gahr and Weyrich in the May 4 Daily News. But Stanley is not a conservative. He’s part of the world of jazz, where free expression is the lodestar.

  As Stanley writes: “Dissension in the ranks is a crime among hard-core ideologues, from far right to the far left.”

  PETER J. BOYER

  The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession

  ONE RAINY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON this summer, I made
my way to the Sony Building, on Fifty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue, where, through the accommodation of a friend in the entertainment business, I attended a private screening of The Passion, Mel Gibson’s unfinished film about the final hours and Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. I didn’t know quite what to expect. I’d heard that some people had been so moved by the film that they openly wept, and that others were rendered speechless. I knew, too, that a group of religion scholars and Jewish activists had condemned Gibson and his film as dangerous and anti-Semitic, based upon their reading of a Passion screenplay. That afternoon, Gibson, wearing jeans, a Hawaiian shirt, and a pair of leather clogs, perched on a table at the front of the room and explained that he was still editing the film, and that the version we were about to see was quite rough. There were a couple of dozen people in the small screening room, two or three of them in clerical attire. Gibson joked a bit, then said, “Let’s get started.” He took a place in the back row as the lights dimmed.

  The dark screen filled with the printed words of prophecy from the Old Testament Book of Isaiah, written four hundred years before Christ: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities. By his stripes we are healed.” There was, in the two hours that followed, much wounding and crushing, and, when the lights came back up, there was some wiping away of tears. I found the film riveting and quite disturbing, and I was struck by an insistent memory from a Jesus movie from my childhood, George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told . In the final scene, the risen Jesus, wispily played by Max von Sydow in a pageboy haircut, levitates in the clouds as a heavenly choir sings the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Gibson had undertaken The Passion with the avowed purpose of contravening the overwrought piety of such conventions, and in that, certainly, he had succeeded. Gibson’s resurrected Christ rises in the tomb with a steely glare, and then strides purposefully into the light, to the insistent beat of martial drums. With that, Gibson’s Passion story, and perhaps even, the controversy that has attended it, became clear. Gibson had once said that he wasn’t interested in making a religious movie, and in The Passionhe hadn’t. He was making a war movie.