Semitic anti-Semitism

Israel and Apartheid: In Defense of Jimmy Carter
http://tonykaron.com/2006/12/22/israel-and-apartheid-in-defense-of-jimmy-carter/

Nothing makes liberal American supporters of Israel more uncomfortable than the comparison between the circumstances it has imposed on the Palestinians and those that the apartheid regime imposed on black South Africans. That’s precisely why it is so important and commendable that Jimmy Carter has tempted the wrath of the Israel lobby and many Jewish-American liberals-in-denial by making that comparison — as he says, it’s time Americans took a look at Palestinian life and history, and as any good person of faith or basic humanity would, treat it as of equal value. The point being that Jimmy Carter had to write this book precisely because Palestinian life and history is not accorded equal value in American discourse, far from it. And his use of the word apartheid is not only morally valid; it is essential, because it shakes the moral stupor that allows many liberals to rationalize away the daily, grinding horror being inflicted Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Or preferably, to avoid discussing it altogether. As Carter notes:
For the past 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize policies of the Israeli government is due to the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices. It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defence of justice or human rights for Palestinians… What is even more difficult to comprehend is why the editorial pages of the major newspapers and magazines in the US exercise similar self-restraint, quite contrary to private assessments expressed forcefully by their correspondents in the Holy Land.

Indeed, you only had to look at the coverage of Carter’s book in much of the mainstream media, which focused less on the arguments he presented, than on the — entirely predictable — furor they caused.

The whole article is worth a read, but rabid anti-Semites will find a few choice passages particularly interesting:

Jimmy Carter doesn’t say this, of course, but I have a strong suspicion that many — although far from all, and I’m not even sure who’s in the majority — Jewish liberals in America have an emotional block on confronting the ugly side of Israel. Let’s just say that if the occupiers and settlers of the West Bank and Gaza were Orthodox Christians, or Confucians or Muslims, I’d venture to suggest that the moral outrage over the plight of the Palestinians would be far more universal than it currently is. (Nor is this a uniquely American phenomenon — I’ve long marveled at the fact that people are who are capable of a strong, objective morally sound critique of just about every human rights abuse everywhere else in the world suddenly become evasive, or even turn into Avigdor Lieberman when the issue is the Palestinians.)

Translation: non-Arab Semites, self-reknowned as moral gatekeepers, are simply pursuing the same double-standard enshrined in their holy books 3000 years ago.

A digression: I’ll admit that growing up as a Jewish liberal in South Africa, I somehow managed to convince myself that apartheid had nothing to do with us, that Jews were somehow automatically in the anti-apartheid column — it was a lot easier to do this in light of the rabid anti-Semitism of the ruling National Party, whose leaders had actively sympathized with the Nazis. Even then, it wasn’t true; evidence to the contrary was everywhere: Israel was, together with Pinochet’s Chile, the closest foreign ally of the regime, and in 1976, it welcomed the unrepentant Nazi, Prime Minister John Vorster (who had spent time in an internment camp during the war after being captured running sabotage operations under the direction of the Nazi intelligence service) on a state visit, and even took him to Yad Vashem! Activists of my wing of the Zionist youth movement, the socialist-inclined Habonim, protested, and were told to shut up by the senior leadership of the SA Zionist Federation. The following year, one of the leading lights of the Likud-aligned Revisionist bloc that dominated the SAZF, Abe Hoppenstein, stood for parliament on the National Party ticket.

Then, one of my early forays into campus activism took me, along with some friends, one afternoon, to Herzliah, Cape Town’s Jewish high school, to distribute leaflets explaining why black students were on strike across the city. Waiting for the final bell to sound to dismiss the students for the day, a fat, bald mustachioed man came lumbering towards me. I immediately recognized Brenner, my downstairs neighbor. We didn’t like each other much, but all I was expecting from him was his customary disapproving grunt. Then I saw the gun in his hand. “I’ll take those,” said Brenner, grabbing our leaflets. “Now, get in your car and follow me, and if you run away, I know where to find you…” He gestured at us with the revolver, while flashing his police reservist’s ID. He drove us down to Caledon Square, and delivered us into the hands of Captain “Spyker” van Wyk, a notorious security police torturer. “Spyker” quickly realized we were minnows and knew nothing of interest to him, and after six hours we were sent home with chilling warnings to stay out of politics. But the experience taught me that Jews were just as capable as anyone else of doing the apartheid regime’s dirty work — I later learned that the prosecutor who tried to have Mandela hanged, Percy Yutar, fit the same bill, trying to show the regime that some Jews could be “trusted” — after all, the three white men in the dock along with Mandela were all Jewish, too. (My kind of Jews!) I learned that there was nothing about inherited Jewishness that precluded anyone from doing evil; every Jew in South Africa faced inescapable moral choices.

I have spent my subway commute this winter reading Paul Kriwaczek’s sweeping history Yiddish Civilization, a must-read and endlessly revealing tale of the years between the Roman Empire and the collapse of the heym. And one observation about early Jewish life in the Ukraine jumped out at me for its relevance both to the experience of Jews in South Africa, and of the Israeli experience, particularly after 1967.

Kriwaczek, in a prelude to his explanation of the notorious Cossack pogrom of mid-18th century Ukraine, explains the fraught relationship between the Polish nobility, the Ukrainian peasantry and the Cossack warlords, and the way Jews were inserted into that complex and unfortunate web. Polish nobles who had feudal ownership over the Ukrainian villages began renting them to Jewish entrepreneurs. These frontier moneymen were now “owners” of the land and feudal labor of the Ukrainian peasantry, and were inclined, as market forces dictated, to extract as much surplus as they could. At the same time, Jews had long been used by the Polish nobles as their tax collectors and bailiffs, making them the on-the-ground presence of an oppressive feudal system under which the peasants chafed. It was a moral disaster, writes Kriwaczek:

The alliance between ruthless Polish nobles and insecure Yiddish frontiersmen proved dangerous and destructive. The Jews now held a position that nothing in their background or religious law had properly prepared them for. They had been placed in authority over another people, of another social order, another culture and another religion, a people of whom the [Polish noble] magnates, the Jews’ masters, regarded as racially inferior and fair game for callous exploitation. Tragically, shaking off the restraining influence of the wise [Rabbinical] counsel of the West, the repeated warnings of the rabbis of metropoiltan Cracow, Posen and Lublin, the Yiddish businessmen who flocked to the colony came to reagard the peasantry in a similar contemptuous light.

The parts I emphasized in italics could as well have been applied to many of the Jews arriving in already colonially-segregated South Africa in the first three decades of the last century. And, of course, to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Indeed, Jimmy Carter wasn’t the first person to raise the idea in my head that what Israel had created in the West Bank and Gaza is an apartheid situation. Back in January of 1979, when he was still in the White House, I was in Israel, living and working on Kibbutz Yizreel for about six weeks, fervently committed to making aliyah myself. Yizreel, in the Jezreel Valley, was home to a number of graduates of South African Habonim. And I vividly remember a discussion they started with us one afternoon, about the policy of building Israeli settlements in the West Bank that the new Likud government was encouraging. The South African-Israelis saw the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a disaster for Israel and for their own progressive version of Zionism. And they recognized that the settlements were a calculated strategy by Begin and Sharon to create “facts on the ground” that would make handing it back impossible. “And so,” one summarized, “you have a situation where Israel now has control over more than 3 million Palestinians. If it annexes the West Bank, they become citizens of Israel, and Israel quickly loses its Jewish majority. So that’s not an option. But the settlement policy makes it more and more difficult for Israel to envisage letting go of the territories. So what are you left with? An apartheid situation.” Of course. To anyone who had lived in South Africa, it was blindingly obvious.

Do I really need to add anything to that?

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on Wednesday, December 27, 2006 at 03:56 PM in Jewish Diaspora, That Question Again
Comments (17) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 27, 2006, 11:27 PM | #

I don’t see the resemblances of Israel to South African apartheid, to Dixie segregationism, or to German national socialism with its racial hygiene laws such as who can marry or have sexual relations with Jews, its legal definitions of who’s a Jew and so on, as something to condemn but rather as a sign potentially pointing to the legitimacy of all four: the legitimacy of South African apartheid, of Dixie segretationism, of German National Socialism, and of National Socialist apartheid Israel.

As for Jewish liberals such as this Tony Karon person who advocate Israel’s annihilation on grounds that consistency requires it (since they’ve spent their lives advocating Eurochristendom’s annihilation), what good do they do anybody? None. They do no one any good whatsoever. They are pure destructiveness. They’re like this flesh-eating strain of bacteria that eats the flesh right off you and rots your internal organs from inside out, turning a living, breathing human in no time into a gelatinous mass of twitching goo on the floor.

That’s exactly what they do to nations. We need these people like we need to inject ourselves with a syringeful of flesh-eating bacteria.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 28, 2006, 12:03 AM | #

Yes there’s a Jewish-Eurochristian tribal war going on and yes, most Jewish élites are consciously waging it with the explicit goal in mind of annihilating Eurochristians and yes, most Eurochristian élites are too unprincipled, uncultured, stupid, dishonest, selfish, and slimy even to open their eyes to it much less lift their little finger to stop it (think William F. Buckley, Jr., Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth, the Bush family, Jacques Chirac, and so on) and yes, most ordinary Eurochristians don’t have a clue this war to bring about their own doom is being waged. All that’s perfectly true and crystal clear. But how does it advance Eurochristian interests one iota to applaud yet another nation-destroying society-poisoning race-eradicating liberal Eurochristian-hating Jew merely because he wants to do to Israel what he and his liberal-Jewish friends have striven so hard and so long to do to Eurochristendom? Where does that get anybody?

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on December 28, 2006, 01:13 AM | #

Yes, I suppose I should’ve repeated my oft-stated position that I don’t begrudge Israel the desire for and pursuit of ethnostatism. On the contrary, I support it. On the other hand, I do point out how Israeli Apartheid shows the total hypocrisy and illegitimacy of the modern western zeitgeist, especially so for the non-Arab Semite diaspora.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 28, 2006, 01:24 AM | #

“Israeli Apartheid shows the total hypocrisy and illegitimacy of the modern western zeitgeist, especially so for the non-Arab Semite diaspora.” (—Svy)

Agreed, of course.

Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on December 28, 2006, 08:22 AM | #

May I remind you all of 1973. The UN wanted to recognize both Zionism and Apartheid as offences against mankind. But under US pressure only Apartheid remained…

Was Apartheid really so bad? See: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53375
The ugly truth about democratic South Africa

And the most ugly things in South Africa still have to come!!!!

Posted by Matra on December 28, 2006, 01:39 PM | #

It’s interesting how the pro-Israel parts of the US press reviewing Carter’s book have suddenly rediscovered so-called Christian anti-Semitism. Actually they’ve always hated Christians including Southerners who may be pro-Israel and every once in a while it comes out. Remember how Krauthammer reacted to Howard Dean’s Confederate flag flop? - “Dean’s going for the white trash vote”. That tells you what the neocons really think about the mostly small town white soldiers fighting in Iraq.

With Carter’s book Jewish and philo-Semitic writers and bloggers have returned to their Christian-hating roots after years of giving the Pat Robertsons of the world a pass because they’re pro-Likudnik. It began with Jeffrey Goldberg’s review of Carter’s book in the Washington Post and has continued to this week in the WSJ. Goldberg used the bogey term “faith-based” to describe Carter’s supposed hatred of Israel. One prominent warblogger had the title - “Is Jimmy Carter Just An Old-Fashioned Christian Fundamentalist, Anti-Semitic Bigot?”

There is a thin line between a respectable Christian and a bigoted Christian and evidently it’s got nothing to do with abortion or marriage for homosexuals.

I predict that Jewish opponents of Carter’s transparent attempts to turn many Christians away from their Likudnik positions will resort to a new tactic. Instead of just accusing Christians like Carter of bigotry - too much risk of a backlash - they will convince Christians through sly manipulation that Carter is all mixed up about what Christians are supposed to believe. We saw this during The Passion movie controversy when Jewish spokesmen said the movie wasn’t the correct interpretation of biblical events because as we all know Abe Foxman knows much more about what Catholics are supposed to believe than do Catholics themselves. These Christians just need a little bit of guidance from their betters before they can properly interpret events.

Posted by Matra on December 28, 2006, 02:07 PM | #

Was Apartheid really so bad?

Not for whites. Under apartheid South African whites had among the highest living standards in the world. Maybe they didn’t earn as much as most Westerners but they had other benefits such as low cost of housing and food. Whites were also relatively secure under apartheid suffering little by way of private violence or government intrusions into personal liberty. Also the Afrikaners were able to save their language and culture through their hegemonic position in a state in which there were almost ten times as many non-Afrikaners.

Today the whites are not doing so well. But according to press reports neither are the vast majority of blacks. An elite few blacks are doing fine but the poverty, violence and despair remain for most just like everywhere else in Africa. The removal of apartheid has only led to equality of misery.

Posted by ben tillman on December 28, 2006, 03:09 PM | #

Apartheid (like segregation in the US) was nothing more than a straightforward expression of the concept of property.

By the way, Carter’s sister married an Orthodox Jew.

Posted by Demond Jones on December 28, 2006, 07:32 PM | #

Apartheid in the US South, South Africa and Israel functioned differently than the apparent Anglo-Saxon apartheid that, according to Prof. Mark Thomas, transferred a fitness benefit to the invading Germanic tribes. It allowed an “English” population of between ten and two hundred thousand to virtually eradicate the Romano-Briton gene pool, of approximately two million, in central England.

Yet that was not the case, in the other examples. Fertility rates in the “separate” populations outpaced/outpaces the white/non-Arab-Semite populations. The discovery of diamond minds in South Africa in the mid-19th century encouraged mass immigration from all over the African continent to ensure the availability of cheap labour. The “Mines and Works Act” of 1911, for example, limited black workers exclusively to menial work and so guaranteed the availability of cheap labour. After WWII a succession of black wildcat strikes initiated a formal legal structure to suppress insurrection. Just as was the case in the US colonial south and to some extent in the Caribbean, white elites, changed tactics from an open immigration policy to ensure cheap labour to an apartheid policy that established a “white” yeomen class to protect against insurrection, while still ensuring a cheap source of labour. The Israeli situation parallels the South African. West Bank Palestinians are separate but still provide a cheap source of labour.

If, in fact, South African elites were loyal to white ethnic interests, a separate white or black state was well within their mandate to accomplish. However, unlike the Anglo-Saxon model, South African elites had no desire to transfer a fitness benefit to their subalterns but only desire to use them to ensure a cheap source of labour was continually available without the threat of insurrection.

Posted by Alex Zeka on December 29, 2006, 04:50 AM | #

It should probably be added that apartheid (white rule) also benefited the blacks of SA, as well as everywhere else it was practised. They enjoyed a standard of living several times better than that of their peers in the Black-run kleptocracies which spawned whenever the White Man left. For instance, Rhodesia had an income per head four times the African average, whilst that poor, ravaged nation which is its successor, Zimbabwe, is seeing its plummet towards the mean. There was no gang warfare, little crime, and a steady stream of work, uninterrupted by minimum wage laws and other expressions of sanctimonious egalitarianism. All in all, any objective assessment of their situation would lead the SA Blacks to beseech Dr. Smith to come back.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on December 29, 2006, 03:33 PM | #

Unfortunately Alex, that’s asking too much for blacks (with their short time horizons). They see a big shiny car, or a big shiny building, or a nice shiny white woman, and they want it. Future? What’s that?

Posted by wespa on January 01, 2007, 03:22 PM | #

Having grown up in SA as well, I find your statements, Svyatoslav, contradictory. You are obviously not a liberal any longer regarding blacks in Africa. Perhaps you never were, but made up the above to improve your credentials? Your last post contradicts your liberal SA credentials. If you had believed that blacks were useless in the first place, then you wouldn’t have challenged the “nasty” Afrikaners and their regime, or would you?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 01, 2007, 03:58 PM | #

Good comment by Matra of Dec. 28, 5:39 PM (which I’d missed until just now). I don’t think I’d agree with Carter’s book, but what I liked about Matra’s comment was the way it told frankly what Jews think of U.S. Southerners, something I first realized when I saw Bill Kristol interviewed on TV about the Trent Lott - Strom Thurmond birthday flap: they really, really hate Southerners. Already running out of patience with Bill Kristol by that point, I turned against him completely right then and there with that interview.

There’s a tribal war going on, folks, driven by seething tribal hatred. The sooner everyone realizes that the better.

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on January 01, 2007, 05:34 PM | #

Having grown up in SA as well, I find your statements, Svyatoslav, contradictory. You are obviously not a liberal any longer regarding blacks in Africa. Perhaps you never were, but made up the above to improve your credentials? Your last post contradicts your liberal SA credentials. If you had believed that blacks were useless in the first place, then you wouldn’t have challenged the “nasty” Afrikaners and their regime, or would you?

LOL. I think maybe politics aren’t your strong point. Might I suggest needlepoint?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 02, 2007, 10:28 AM | #

“they really, really hate Southerners” (—from my comment, above)

Here‘s what a right-thinking person thinks of U.S. Southerners.

Posted by wespa on January 07, 2007, 12:24 PM | #

[Unfortunately Alex, that’s asking too much for blacks (with their short time horizons). They see a big shiny car, or a big shiny building, or a nice shiny white woman, and they want it. Future? What’s that?]

With your above comment, you’ve shown yourself to be a hypocryte, Mr Svy
wespa

Posted by Svyatoslav Igorevich on January 07, 2007, 08:23 PM | #

Show me how, Miz Wespa.

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