Anti-Zionism abets anti-Semitism

By Pamela Zuker On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazis unleashed unimaginable violence on the Jews of Germany. The wave of atrocities became known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Adolf Hitler, in one of his frequent cynical attempts to cloak pagan barbarism with Christian respectability, declared that the horrors were inflicted in honor of the vehemently anti-Jewish Martin Luther’s birthday the next day.

(Editor: Anti-Israel divestiture efforts at the University of Colorado prompted this historical essay by our friend Pamela Zuker, a scholar and writer in Aspen, on the long and shameful history of Jew-hatred. As she notes, it is a legacy in which Christians have sometimes participated, though without any valid theological warrant -- in repudiation of which, the Christ-followers in my family and church solemnly vow, in much the same words as Zuker quotes at the end from our brave Jewish friends: “Never again.”)

Until Kristallnacht -- despite the enactment of laws prohibiting intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, a national boycott of Jewish stores, the exclusion of Jews from respected professions, the expulsion of Jewish students from German schools, the revocation of the German citizenship of all German Jews, and even the requirement that Jews wear yellow “Jude” stars on their clothing -- many Jews had refused to flee the country, believing that German anti-Semitism would abate.

In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, however, virtually every remaining Jew in Germany attempted to emigrate. Sadly, even after the Nazi atrocities were known to the world, few countries would provide Jews asylum. When asked how many Jews his country could accommodate, a high government official in Canada replied, “None is too many.”? The British, bent on thwarting Zionism (the desire to create a sovereign Jewish State in Israel), imposed a prohibition on Jewish emigration to the Land of Israel, and even refused safe passage to a ship that arrived in British-controlled “Palestine” bursting with Jewish Holocaust refugees. By escorting them back to Europe, the British ensured that when Jews needed their ancestral home the most, it would not be their safe haven.

That dismal chapter in Jewish history finally cemented in the minds of the world’s Jewry the urgent necessity to return to a world with a sovereign Jewish State.

In 136 C.E., Romans forcibly expelled the Jews from the Land of Israel (then called Israel, Judea and Samaria). This expulsion brought to an end more than one thousand years of Jewish reign (with several intermittent periods of external rule by conquest), compelling the global dispersion of the world’s Jews, and inaugurating eighteen centuries of cruel oppression and genocidal persecution. In the nearly two thousand years between Jewish expulsion from Israel and their return, Jews were variously subjected to forced conversions, confiscations of land, money, and personal property, expulsions from several countries, slavery, prohibitions on the practice of Judaism, frequent massacres, the burning of sacred books, the burning of Synagogues, and being burned alive. Several countries attempted to obliterate their Jews, resulting in the annihilation of a third of the Jewish population of Germany and Northern France, during the first thousand years of exile. The entire population of Jews in England was murdered and/or imprisoned in the 13th century, and in 1472, when all Jews were expelled from Spain, even the descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity were prohibited from attending university, joining religious orders, holding public office, or entering any of a long list of professions. One third of Poland’s Jews were slaughtered in the 1600s, and during the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, Jews there were massacred to complete elimination. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in Russian pogroms in the 19th and 20th centuries. The pogroms that accompanied the Revolution of 1917 alone orphaned more than 300,000 Jewish children.

The staggering Jewish genocide during what Jews have come to call the “Shoah” (calamity) of World War II, saw approximately six million Jews sadistically tortured and murdered at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators. At the war’s end, fully one-third of the world’s total Jewish population had been brutally butchered.

The history of Jews outside of Israel until the end of World War II is largely a history of oppression, genocide, and expulsion – punctuated by burnings at the stake, public torture, and insidious, malicious libel. Remarkably, Jewish “displaced persons” continuously assimilated into other cultures around the world while retaining their unique religion and identity as a people, a feat that Jews all across the globe are somehow still able to accomplish.

Eighteen hundred twelve years after Rome exiled the Jews from their homes in Eretz Yisroel (the land of Israel), and changed the names of the Jewish lands to Palaestinia (the land of the Philistines – so named in an attempt to sever Jews’ ties to their land), descendents of 2nd century Jewish refugees returned home as 20th century Jewish refugees.

In the first year of the existence of the State of Israel, roughly 500,000 homeless European Jews emigrated. Within ten years, the population of Israel had grown to two million. The majority of the Jewish immigrants, including 700,000 refugees from Arab countries, arrived with no possessions.

In contradistinction to neighboring states, Israel established free and fair elections, universal suffrage, a free press, and the right to a fair trial with an independent judiciary. Arab citizens of Israel, regardless of religious affiliation, are afforded the same rights and privileges as Jewish citizens, and all women who are citizens of Israel, regardless of religious affiliation, are afforded rights equal to those of men. In Israel, Jews created a country that allows both the freedom of religion and full access to Jerusalem’s Jewish, Christian and Muslim Holy sites that were denied Jews when Jerusalem was not under Jewish rule.

Despite this, in the rest of the world, particularly in difficult economic times, antisemitism rears its ugly head. Even – or perhaps more accurately, especially – in the world’s most respected international forum, the United Nations, antisemitism is rampant.

On November 10th, 1975, the 37th anniversary of Kristallnacht, rather than issuing a statement in memory of the Jewish victims of Nazi savagery, the United Nations passed Resolution 3379 branding Zionism, the reestablishment of a Jewish State in Israel, “a form of racism.” Although renounced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., as “obscene,” it was through this resolution that Jew-hatred was sanitized, repackaged, and propagated globally as politically correct “anti-Zionism.” It took the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had voted in lockstep with Arab nations and other countries with anti-Jewish interests, for the U.N. to officially revoke the resolution, but the damage had been done and the precedent set.

As a particularly ludicrous example of the United Nations’ stance toward Israel, at the International Women’s Year Conference in 1975, a resolution denounced Zionism as an enemy of all women (despite women’s equal rights in Israel) but did not denounce sexism as an enemy of all women because the call for women’s rights was seen as an attack on the Arab-Muslim world.

Appallingly, on June 8, 2010, a Syrian representative at the United Nations perpetuated a modern version of the ancient blood libel to the United Nations Human Rights Council: “Let me quote a song that a group of children on a school bus in Israel sing merrily as they go to school,” he said, “and I quote, ‘With my teeth I will rip your flesh. With my mouth I will suck your blood.’” As shocking as this is, it should not be surprising given that these myths persist not only in Muslim countries, but even, according to anthropologists in a 2008 study, among Catholics and Orthodox Christians of all social classes in places as far from the Middle East as Southeastern Poland.

In November, 2010 the annual UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People featured speeches from Libyan and Syrian demagogues that referred to Israel as, “the cancerous settlement in all the Palestinian territories,” and included statements such as, “Zionism, in reality, is the worst form of racism,” “Israel shows and rears its ugly face,” and, “the word Israel has become synonymous with words such as aggression, killing, racism, terrorism.”

Words like “butchering,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “racism,” “brutality,” “crimes against humanity,” “torture,” “killing in cold blood” and “barbarism” were invoked not to describe the reasons for the creation of the state of Israel, but to condemn it. Opposition to “Judaization” – Jewish presence on what is perceived as Arab territory – was proclaimed and by default, legitimized.

For some reason, the depictions of a “cancerous” Jewish state with its “ugly, bloodthirsty” Jewish occupants – utterances that would be recognized as unambiguously anti-Semitic if spoken elsewhere – are not considered beyond the pale at the United Nations. By the end of 2010, half of the country-specific condemnatory resolutions and decisions ever adopted by the UN Human Rights Council targeted Israel.

Yet somehow, in the face of this, in the 1970s, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had the courage to sign a peace treaty with Israel. In advance of the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously remarked with sadness to Sadat, “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

Today in Colorado, Palestinian advocate Michael Rabb and his group “CU Divest” hope to convince the Board of Regents at the University of Colorado to divest its portfolio of any investments linked to our staunchest ally in a troubled and increasingly less stable region. While we have every right to choose to disagree with Israel’s policies, it is essential that we protect, defend, and support its right to exist and to defend its inhabitants from virtually unceasing violent incursions.

One can only hope the University will recognize that weakening Israel will not facilitate peace in the Middle East. In fact, only a strong and globally acknowledged Jewish state of Israel with widespread support from the world’s democracies will allow others in the region to enjoy the human and civil rights taken for granted in the U.S., Israel, and Europe.

In the decades since the Holocaust, the haunting mantra, “Never Forget” serves to define the Jewish people’s role and responsibility to humanity as a constant reminder of the moral imperative to treat every human being – regardless of race or religion – justly and with decency, dignity and compassion. The existence of Israel is a necessity for the world’s Jews as a safeguard against a recurrence of the horrors of the last two thousand years and a protection of Jews’ human rights. But it is also a necessity for the human rights of those surrounding that tiny island of democracy. It is how the world treats Israel that will determine whether it is possible to move toward a world with universal human rights.

The citizens of Israel along with the citizens of other democracies across the globe share a fervent hope that Israel’s neighbors will one day know freedom, prosperity and true peace.

Until then, Israel is their last best hope.

Fairness? Just the opposite

Obama admits that raising taxes decreases revenue. He does not hide that his goal in increasing taxes on individuals and small business owners who qualify for his tax hike is emphatically not to increase tax revenue. Because a "single mom" gets taxed at a higher rate than "her boss's investments," Obama is willing to sacrifice necessary revenue in the service of what he defines as "fairness." But how is it "fair" to tax the boss's money at the same rate as the "single mom's" (or more likely, a higher rate) when the money is first earned, and then not only tax it again, but raise the second tax on it - merely because it is invested? Don't we want to encourage investment in American companies?

How is it "fair" to deprive the country of essential tax revenue needed to decrease the deficit and run all our bloated government programs (programs that only McCain is willing to reform)? Don't we want the deficit to shrink instead of grow?

And how is it "fair" to the "single mom" who relies on her job to care for her family's needs to jeopardize her employment by increasing the tax burden on her boss (who very well may be a "single mom," too)?

According to Obama, wanting to keep the money you earn (and invest it and even decide for yourself which non-profit gets your donations) is what he calls, "selfish," and the most recent figure for who will get taxed under his plan has changed to people making more than $120,000.

Obama even believes that a good way to "spread the wealth around" is to take your money and give checks to people who don't pay taxes - more than 40% of the people getting Obama's "tax relief" money pay no federal taxes at all. That's not "fair," that's "welfare" and it traps people in poverty.

This isn't "restoring fairness to the tax code." This is creating the appearance of fairness in the tax code. But it isn't honest and it isn't fair. It's class warfare - divisive and polarizing. What happened to the Obama of, "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America" fame?

I guess he's the same Obama that followed, "people don't expect government to solve all their problems" with "But..."

Dr. Pamela Zuker received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Psychology from the University of Chicago where she performed research at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). She also holds degrees in Anthropology and Clinical Psychology, and practiced marriage, child, and family therapy before focusing on positive psychology. Her current research is on the role of meaning in adult life. She lives in the Roaring Fork Valley with her husband and two children.

His moral relativism discredits Obama

Democrats like Obama the Intellectual like to denigrate "folksy" and "unintellectual" Republicans as "clinging to guns or religion," but what they really abhor about their "lowbrow" Republican counterparts is the willingness to stand in moral judgment. I am not in any way arguing that every time a Republican uses a moral argument it is a correct application. However if we are not willing to even engage in moral discourse, we will travel a very dangerous path. Only a moral realist holds that there are right and true moral universals that exist across all cultures, nations, languages and time, regardless of human comprehension or behavioral conformity to these moral truths. Only a moral realist can believe, for example, that slavery or murder is objectively wrong and was never right despite cultural norms that once permitted it.

A moral relativist, on the other hand can assert, as does Dr. Richard Shweder, respected professor at the University of Chicago where Obama taught, “…even the presumption that infanticide is immoral is too presumptive and provincial to count as a moral universal.”

Only a moral realist truly affirms human rights. Yet the conviction that we all occupy one moral universe is not "high-minded" enough for elite universities, and unless one manages to escape higher education with one's moral compass unadjusted, what was abhorrent before exposure to postmodern deconstructionist thought will afterward be considered benign or even commendable.

Lest we forget, imprisonment of innocents, human experimentation, slavery, murder, and even genocide were legal in Germany during WWII, and it was the educated who formed the Einsatzgruppen “intervention groups” tasked with carrying out systematic mass murders of Jews, gypsies, and others. If there existed no moral realists during that time, there would have been no one willing to risk their own lives to protect society's outcasts. Meanwhile, many "good" German people chose to do nothing. Moral relativism instantiates what Martin Luther King referred to as "the appalling silence of the good people" and produces indifference - or at best diffidence - in the face of evil.

"We must face this challenge. We can face this challenge. We must totally defeat it, and we're in a long struggle." says McCain.

Says Obama the Intellectual, without a hint of irony, "Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, because a lot of evil's been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil."

As Edmund Burke wrote, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing." Yet Obama the Intellectual represents a perspective that is not merely morally diffident, but posits moral equivalences between actions that should be easily recognized as morally unequal. He additionally manages to associate with people who would be (correctly) unambiguously identified as racist (Wright and Farrakhan), felonious (Rezko) and terrorist (Ayers and wife, Dohrn) if they were evangelical, white, and “unintellectual.”

Cries of “we gotta be careful of guilt by association” and “these are attempts to connect Obama with events that happened when he was eight years old” obfuscate the real issue: how can we trust the judgment of someone who found none of his “controversial associates” beyond the pale? Even in condemning Ayers, Obama follows with “But…” and describes unrepentant Ayers as simply “a professor of education at the University of Illinois.”

Have we become so numb to the word "terrorist" that it has no effect when used to accurately describe FBI Most Wanted former fugitives, Ayers and Dohrn who helped blow up over 20 buildings (including one in which Ayers' former girlfriend accidentally blew herself up with a nail bomb)? Dohrn reportedly commended Charles Manson's followers while exhorting her compatriots to be “less wimpy” and was allegedly involved in the 1981 Brinks armed robbery in which two men were injured and three were murdered, leaving nine children fatherless.

Dohrn spent seven months in jail for refusing to cooperate with authorities. When two of their dear friends were sent to prison for murder and armed robbery, Ayers and Dohrn became guardians of the convicts' baby son whom they raised to be an intellectual - like themselves. When interviewed by Slate regarding his Rhodes scholarship in 2002, Yale graduate Chesa Boudin claimed he was dedicated to the same principles as "all" his parents.

It was in their living room that Obama the Intellectual’s breathtaking political ascent had its genesis in 1995, and seven years later, Ayers sat on a panel with Obama entitled, “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis.”

Intellectualism guarantees neither good judgment nor sound moral principles. One need only look at Colorado’s own Ward Churchill. But Churchill merely raved about terrorism. Ayers and Dohrn actually delivered. Churchill has at least one thing in common with the dynamite duo, though: Both Ayers and Dohrn are also university professors.

Come to think of it, “folksy and unintellectual” doesn’t sound so bad.

Dr. Pamela Zuker received her Ph.D. in Human Development and Psychology from the University of Chicago where she performed research at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). She also holds degrees in Anthropology and Clinical Psychology, and practiced marriage, child, and family therapy before focusing on positive psychology. Her current research is on the role of meaning in adult life. She lives in the Roaring Fork Valley with her husband and two children.