Sunday 3 January 2010

The Jews are the Worst

The Jews are the Worst

Last week some of us debated the existence of Rabbi Tony Jutner, a person who leaves extreme anti-Israeli comments at The Forward. The general feeling was that he's "too bad to be true", so to speak. No real person could be so totally idiotic in their single-minded rejection of Israel. (That, and the fact that Google couldn't find any trace of the fellow's existence).

I introduce you to Alex Kane, a 20-year-old student in New York, who writes regularly for The Indypendent; I came across him at Mondoweiss.

The question was like an electric shock to the six or so Palestine solidarity activists, including myself, as we were standing inside a classroom at a school in Gaza City.“Why the Palestinians? Why are we the only ones suffering?” asked a Palestinian girl who was probably about nine or ten-years-old. And then the enormity of what the people of Gaza go through every day hit me...

Although I didn’t have this reaction to the question of “why the Palestinians” right away, and I wouldn’t have said it out loud in front of a classroom of young Palestinian girls, I thought back to a story a professor at school told me. He is a Holocaust survivor, and was teaching a course I took on the culture and politics of Nazi Germany. One story that remains with me from that professor is when he described a scene in Hungary, where an Austrian friend, who came to stay with his family in Hungary after the Nazi invasion in 1938, repeatedly asked, “What have we done?” And someone in my professor’s family responded, “Your only crime is that you were born a Jew.”

The only reason why these innocent girls, and all the innocent children and people of Palestine are suffering, is because they committed the “crime” of being born Palestinian. Had they been born Israeli, or in the United States, the crippling siege on Gaza would not be a reality for them. But it is. The Zionist movement had looked to Palestine as a place where Jews could create an state where only Jews would reside, and the children of Gaza continue to live with the indescribable effects of occupation, war, and death that came as a direct result of the Zionist move to establish a state in Palestine.

I've been around long enough to recognize that college students need the opportunity to take positions they'll later reject. I even did it myself, briefly. Yet this tolerance isn't open-ended. Saying that the Jews purposefully and intentionally have persecuted anyone to an extent without equal anywhere else is beyond the pale in my book. Kane lives in a democracy so he may say whatever he wishes, but the rest of us need to brand him for what he says. What he chooses to write, beyond being a simple pack of lies, is also stark hatred of Jews.

Hosted on a site owned by two Jews.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

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