Monday, August 31, 2009

Extremists of the center

As Jews we have nowhere to go, neither "right" nor "left" in the conventional political sense. The extreme right in the western world is anti-Semitic and the extreme left is anti-Israel, as a cover for it's anti-Semitism. So we Jews are stuck in the middle.
As an example, the Scandinavians, who have been projected as progressive and model liberals, currently have a "blood libel" that has been published by the Aftenposten newspaper in Stockholm. This claims that IDF soldiers deliberately killed Palestinians to harvest their organs for transplant. This is a gross slur, and even the author of the article and the editor of the newspaper in separate interviews agreed that there was no actual evidence for this claim. But, the situation has become so severe that journalists of the left think that it is justifiable to publish invented and anti-Semitic articles as long as they are anti-Israel. In fact, this same claim was published previously in 2001 but was never substantiated. Also, a Palestinian who was quoted as supporting this claim, when interviewed by the Jerusalem Post denied that he ever said this. So we are left with letist media making up a blood libel against Jews in order to fuel their anti-Israel bias. The left and the right meet.
The Israeli Government has asked the Swedish Government to reject this abominable lie, but the Swedish PM and FM have denied this request and claimed that they cannot do anything since Sweden is a free country with laws that protect freedom of expression (it also has a large Muslim minority). In other articles, the backgound of anti-Semitism in Sweden has been exposed, including the reluctance to take Jewish refugees during WWII, allowing armed German troops to cross Swedish territory to enter Norway (a break of neutrality) and supplying iron ore to Nazi Germany, so that they could build guns and railway carriages to transport Jews to their deaths.
Within Israel there is a conventional division of politics between right and left, but the responsible left in Israel often finds itself rejected by the European and international left because they are of course Jews and Israelis. And the right in Israel cannot make common cause with European right wing parties that are racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel (they might also be anti-Muslim). Those who reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish State, such as the film maker who withdrew from the Toronto film festival because it celebrates 100 years of Tel Aviv (but doesn't mention the "suffering" of the Palestinians in Gaza!), find no sympathy for any Jew of Israel.
So we are doomed to be extremists of the center, determined to survive despite the best efforts of the fascist Islamists, the fascist Europeans, the extreme left and the "progressive" left.

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