Those Crazy Jews - "Goyim Kill Goyim & Hang Jews"

[Ryan-NZ]

"Why anti-Zionists lie and exaggerate about Israel - opinion - The Jerusalem Post"

https://m.jpost.com/opinion/article-701398

Excerpt: 'Goyim kill goyim, and they come to hang the Jews," said Menachem Begin in 1982, when Christian Phalangists murdered Palestinians in Lebanon. Today, as Russians massacre Ukrainians, and then millions "like" Gigi Hadid's pledge to "support those experiencing the same in Palestine," let's update Begin's line: "Goyim kill goyim, then bash Israel."

Writers who make their careers demonizing Israel embrace this libelous idiocy. In The Guardian, Peter Beinart argued that if "remaking borders by force violates a core principle of international law," America must undo "Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war." Straining to compare Israel with Russia, Beinart prefers twistory to history, ignoring the inconvenient facts that Syria repeatedly bombarded Israel from the Golan and never respected Israel's right to exist – I somehow missed Ukraine's bombing and anti-Russian delegitimization campaign.
- Ukraine is bombing the break-away pro-Russian republics and was doing so before the Russian attack in March of 22. The Jew is quite well aware of this fact.

These obsessive attacks weave antisemitism into anti-Zionism, as the Jewish state becomes the despised, scapegoated collective Jew, the all-purpose lightning rod attracting so many different bolts of hatred. These smears prove that Jews can be guilty of Jew-hatred when they collaborate in the Jew-haters' dirty work. They prove how plastic Jew-hating Zionophobia is, as the haters keep adapting it to changing headlines. And they prove Natan Sharansky's analysis that demonizing and delegitimizing Israel, holding it to double standards, sinks from criticizing Israel into traditional cesspools of Jew-hatred.

In this topsy-turvy context, I admire Paul O'Brien's honesty. This Amnesty International official said Israel "shouldn't exist as a Jewish state." He dismissed scientific polls showing that 80% of American Jews support Israel – because those aren't the elitist progressives he hobnobs with. "I actually don't believe that to be true," O'Brien proclaimed. Why? "I believe my gut tells me" that instead of a Jewish state, American Jews want "a safe Jewish space."

TO COMBAT this anti-Jewish obsession, three-dozen countries and dozens of universities approved the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as "a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews."

Two of the examples the IHRA definition offers – to help people criticize Israel and Jews without crossing redlines – are relevant to the latest onslaught: rhetoric "calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews" and making "mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews," in the spirit of "classic antisemitism."

Nevertheless, now, when the attacks are so brazen, if you resist this gob of Zionophobic lies, you risk being accused of Islamophobia.

Petty propagandists are often projecting. If you seek something straight out of the Putin playbook, check out this totalitarian assault on Israel, with its lies, its twistory, its negation of a sovereign nation's rights and narrative, and its bullying attempt to squelch debate.

Still, it is best to avoid cheap comparisons and sloppy historical analogies. But we should expose the chilling effect of these attempts to make radioactive any defense of Israel, or every counterattack against Jew-hatred and Zionophobia.

Ultimately, these totalitarian twistorians' false comparisons, made-to-order narratives, and bullying self-indulgence backfire. It's obvious; when your position is weak, you distort and browbeat. Franklin Roosevelt said "judge me by the enemies I make." Judge Israel by the good arguments our enemies can't take.

The writer is a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University  and the author of nine books on American history and three on Zionism. His book Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People, coauthored with Natan Sharansky, was published by PublicAffairs of Hachette.