Must-Read

Here is a must-read from the reliably on-target Ruth Wisse.

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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The drawback in Wisse's piece is that she is so historically focused that she overlooks one of the Gifts of the Jews: that history is not destiny. Progress means that patterns can be changed through focused action. Clearly Zionism and the Soviet Jewry movements were examples.

The solution, I believe, lies in an initiative brewing at the Shalem Center. Its president, Dan Polisar, recently delivered a speech in which he put his finger on the allergy that most young Israelis now feel for the repugnant sphere of politics. He argues that the successful slogan "ha-tovim l'tayis" ("the best youth to the air force") should be recast as "ha-tovim l'politica," as part of a major educational initiative. Currently, self-interested scoundrels, often supported by antagonistic foreigners, have the run of the government.

Here is a long, brilliant piece on the surge of anti-Semitism in England, from the reliably terrific City Journal. It is indicative of what is happening everywhere where Jewish and Muslim populations intersect, given that "imams routinely preach anti-Jewish sermons."

When will the West learn from history that Jews are canaries in the coal mine and that non-Jews are next?

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.”

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Another must-read from Caroline Glick, who fleshes out the IRIS thesis that the Left is fundamentally antagonistic to Israel:

One of the most difficult things in life is to draw the line between friend and foe. Take the Palestinian terror groups.

Last week in Mecca, the Fatah terror group, which mixes the murder of Israelis with negotiations with Israelis, officially joined forces with the Hamas terror group, which murders Israelis while refusing to negotiate with us.

A brilliant encapsulation the Chelm-like nature of the thinking of Israel's leadership.

Although the agreement makes it clear that both are at war with Israel, on Sunday the Olmert government decided to reserve judgment on the terror unity deal. And Monday morning Vice Premier Shimon Peres warned that saying bad things about the Mecca deal would only weaken Fatah terror boss Mahmoud Abbas, whom we should strengthen because he likes to negotiate while killing.

Unfortunately, the white knight savior, the presumptive next Prime Minister, also cannot identify the Palestinians as an enemy.

Given how hard it is for Israel to identify its Arab foes, it is little wonder that identifying Jewish foes is a near-Herculean task.

Last month the American Jewish Committee took an important first step in this direction by publishing a paper by Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld from the University of Indiana entitled, "'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism." Explaining the difference between criticism of Israel and demonization of the Jewish state, Rosenfeld wrote, "To call Israel a Nazi state? as is commonly done today, or to accuse it of fostering South African-style apartheid or engaging in ethnic cleansing or wholesale genocide goes well beyond legitimate criticism." Rosenfeld noted that these descriptors of Israel, which aim to single out Israel "as a political entity unworthy of secure and sovereign existence" are today "part of a standard discourse among 'progressive' American Jews, who seem to take for granted that the historical record shows Israel to be an aggressor state guilty of sins comparable to Hendrik Verwoerd's South Africa and Hitler's Germany."

HAVING described the phenomenon, Rosenfeld proceeded to identify prominent American Jews, including New York University Prof. Tony Judt, playwright Tony Kushner, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, Noam Chomsky, and Adrienne Rich as leading Jewish lights in the leftist assault on the Jewish people's right to self-determination in our homeland.

Rosenfeld's paper evoked strong reactions in the American Jewish community. A New York Times write-up of the controversy entitled, "Essay Linking Liberal Jews and Anti-Semitism Sparks a Furor," described how the same "progressive" Jews and their supporters are up in arms over being painted as anti-Semites. Judt opined that the point of the article was to silence them.

This of course, is pure nonsense. All the Jews in America couldn't silence Judt and his colleagues even if they wished to. As anti-Israel Jews, they will never lack prestigious forums from which to propagate their hatred for Israel.

A generation ago, the Jewish People focused on the right issue--rescuing Jews from the evil Soviet regime. Natan Sharansky is calling for a new Jewish mobilization against anti-Semitism without mentioning the evil that is behind its frightening resurgence--Islamism.

Just over three years ago, at the first-ever global forum on anti-Semitism organized by the State of Israel, the essential task was to define the beast - the new anti-Semitism. Since then, as the fourth such global gathering meets this week, efforts to incorporate the "three-D" distinction between legitimate criticism of Israel and the new anti-Semitism - demonization, double standards and delegitimization - have become part of international documents and discourse.

These and other accomplishments, as important as they are, have been dwarfed by the quantum leap anti-Semitism itself has taken. It has leapfrogged from isolated attacks against Jews to incitement to genocide - the actual elimination of the Jewish state.

This shift has come in the form of a pincer movement. On one side, we have the Iranian regime, which is denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map" while racing to develop the physical means of doing so. On the other side, we have what is, in effect, international silence in response, coupled with growing willingness to discuss Israel's existence as a mistake, an anachronism, or a provocation.

We must recognize the fact that though sympathy for Iran's expressed goal of Israel's destruction is hardly mainstream, the idea of a world without Israel is more acceptable in polite company, the media and academia today than Hitler's expressed goal of a Europe without Jews was in 1939.

Given this situation, it should be clear that we are beyond the stage of definitions. The Jewish world now must mobilize at a level no less than during the struggles to establish the State of Israel and to free Soviet Jewry. It is this latter struggle that presents the most potent model for action today.

Another must-read by Caroline Glick:

In the world of international diplomacy few issues receive more wall-to-wall support than the notion that it is essential to establish a Palestinian state. Leaders worldwide are so busy speaking of how essential it is for a State of Palestine to be founded that none of them seems to have noticed that it already exists.

This state was officially founded in the summer of 2005, when Israel removed its military forces and civilian population from the Gaza Strip and so established the first wholly independent Palestinian state in history. Israel's destruction of four Israeli communities in Northern Samaria and curtailment of its military operations in the area set the conditions for statehood in that area as well.

And so it is that as statesmen and activists worldwide loudly proclaim their commitment to establishing the sovereign State of Palestine, they miss the fact that Palestine exists. And it is a nightmare.

In the State of Palestine 88 percent of the public feels insecure. Perhaps the other 12 percent are members of the multitude of regular and irregular militias. For in the State of Palestine the ratio of police/militiamen/men-under-arms to civilians is higher than in any other country on earth.

In the State of Palestine, two-year-olds are killed and no one cares. Children are woken up in the middle of the night and murdered in front of their parents. Worshipers in mosques are gunned down by terrorists who attend competing mosques. And no one cares. No international human rights groups publish reports calling for an end to the slaughter. No UN body condemns anyone or sends a fact-finding mission to investigate the murders.

In the State of Palestine, women are stripped naked and forced to march in the streets to humiliate their husbands. Ambulances are stopped on the way to hospitals and wounded are shot in cold blood. Terrorists enter operating rooms in hospitals and unplug patients from life-support machines.

In the State of Palestine, people are kidnapped from their homes in broad daylight and in front of the television cameras. This is the case because the kidnappers themselves are cameramen. Indeed, their commanders often run television stations. And because terror commanders run television stations in the State of Palestine, it should not be surprising that they bomb the competition's television stations.

Finally, some publicity for the extensive Muslim enablement of the Final Solution, thanks to Max Boot:

It is worth noting that Muslims were not as blameless in the genocide of the Jews as Ahmadinejad and his ilk would have it. Arabs were, on a small scale, cheerleaders and enablers of the Final Solution. The most famous example was Haj Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (and uncle of Yasser Arafat), who took refuge in Berlin in World War II. A rabid Nazi, he personally lobbied Hitler to kill as many Jews as possible and even helped out by recruiting Bosnian Muslims to serve in the Waffen SS.

Robert Satloff, one of the world's smartest Arabists, reveals other links between the Arabs and the Holocaust in his groundbreaking new book, "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab Lands." He shows how the Nazis set up the machinery of death in North Africa. Although "only" 4,000 to 5,000 Jews died before the Allies liberated the area in 1943, many more were consigned to forced labor camps in hellish conditions.

"Arabs played a role at every level," Satloff wrote. "Some went door to door with the Germans, pointing out Jews for arrest. Others led Jewish workers on forced marches or served as overseers at labor camps."

Nazis are still revered by Muslims. See, for example, Hitler Wins Palestinian Primary.