Monday, April 15, 2024
From Ian:
John Podhoretz: Israel’s Splendid Isolation
John Podhoretz: Israel’s Splendid Isolation
So maybe there is a certain type of rueful wisdom to be taken from these undeniable statistics. Maybe the thing is, Israel doesn’t need the support of the international community and the Council on Foreign Relations and the panel on Washington Week in Review and the jawboners at the Aspen Institute and the billionaires who drink ambrosia from the boots of tyrants at Davos. Maybe the thing is, Israel is a nation that has had this miraculous rise because it has a purpose, which is something most other countries do not have or need, and something that Thomas Friedman and his ilk are (again) too unnerved by to understand.Christine Rosen: Why the Media Ignore Anti-Semitism
Israel is engaged in a purpose that is both world-historical and outside history. It exists as a refuge and haven and homeland for the world’s most stateless people, and its claim to statehood is not just due to its need for protection but based in part on a literally transcendent claim. That’s why I say it exists outside history as well.
To ensure the continuity of its existence, Israel must act. First, it must beat back those who would destroy it and who have been coming at it relentlessly since the day it was founded—genocidal evildoers whose Amalekite faces are now showing themselves even in America, really for the first time in our history.
Second, it must not only survive but thrive, because the fulfillment of its purpose depends upon it slowly making Jewish power a simple and undeniable and enduring reality in a world that has not known such a thing before—and is, as I said before, unnerved by it.
That was, in fact, happening during the 2010s with the Abraham Accords—until that progress was halted in part by a bizarrely feckless Biden administration that decided to hinge our national policy toward the world’s most important oil-exporting nation on the murder of a single person in a consulate in Turkey several years earlier. The fact that Israel had grown the way it had grown and shown how to be an innovative nation in a region mired in backwardness was its calling card.
But perhaps it was too focused on hurrying time along. For over the course of the past decade, Israel somehow found itself, like the sightless Samson in John Milton’s imagining, “eyeless in Gaza”—and made itself vulnerable to the worst single event in its history. At least Samson had been blinded by enemy Philistines; Israel’s leaders blinded themselves. They didn’t see the gathering danger because they wanted to look elsewhere and do other things.
Its response has, yet again, isolated Israel. That isolation is wearing away at the determination of some Israelis to see this war through to victory or is causing them to despair that there can be victory. It is a hateful thing, the isolation. It is unjust, it is foul, it is hypocritical, and it is, of course, anti-Semitic at its root.
But as the past six decades have shown us, when it comes to Israel’s purpose as both a change agent in history and a representative of a force outside of history, the isolation doesn’t matter at all. They—we—are not isolated. They—we—are chosen.
In fact, the decision to downplay the anti-Semitic threat from the left is deliberate. Left-leaning media do not like to cover the behavior of their own, as the inconsistent coverage of the Jew-baiting members of the Democratic Party’s “Squad” during the past several years attests. Mainstream reporters at outlets like the New York Times take great pains to provide context and explanations for Representative Ilhan Omar’s blatant anti-Semitism, for example. A 2019 piece gave Omar and her defenders ample space to claim she was being unfairly targeted for criticism because she was a progressive Muslim woman while glossing over the fact that she had repeatedly accused Jews of having dual loyalties.Seth Mandel: The Evil Campaign to Remove Jews from the Public Square
Amid the current conflict, it’s evident there is tacit agreement among most in the mainstream media that because Israel is defending itself by trying to root out Hamas in Gaza, the behavior of protesters is somehow justifiable and acceptable—but only because it involves Israel and the Jews.
This goes well beyond the deliberately misleading stories and factual errors about the war that have appeared in outlets such as the Washington Post. As Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff outlined in National Review, in a deep dive of the Post’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war, the newspaper “has been a case study in moral confusion and anti-Israel bias” and has “violated traditional journalistic principles that have shaped coverage of foreign conflicts by American newsrooms for decades.”
Similarly, a recent story in the Free Press by Uri Berliner, a long-time editor and reporter at National Public Radio, described how NPR “approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the ‘intersectional’ lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms,” which meant “highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.”
By contrast, imagine if an elderly African-American civil-rights activist were being heckled and bullied with racist taunts while trying to speak before a red-state city-council meeting about the need to properly recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Every major newspaper, magazine, and television and cable network would air nonstop coverage of the event.
The double standard at work in mainstream media has become impossible to ignore and is a sign of a deep moral failing in the profession of journalism: When it comes to threats and attacks against Jews, integrity is sacrificed on the altar of ideological conformity. Thus the self-proclaimed seekers of truth became handmaidens to barbarity and the world’s oldest and most destructive hatred.
In her book People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn recounts the furious response she received once when she mentioned, in a lecture, that the common story of immigration officials changing Jewish family names at Ellis Island is a myth. Immigrants’ names were taken from ship manifests, which were compiled using the immigrants’ own passports. Inspectors were there to confirm, not record, each passenger’s name.
Name-changers in the early-20th century were often Jews, but they were much more likely to be already-settled middle-aged parents of children who were pursuing a trade or a degree in higher education. In 1932, according to the historian Kirsten Fermaglich, 65 percent of those petitioning to change their name had Jewish-sounding last names. Most of the name changes—for Jews and non-Jews alike—at this time were motivated by the desire “to abandon ‘foreign’ names that were ‘difficult to pronounce and spell’ and to adopt instead more ‘American’ names,” Fermaglich writes. “These individuals were hoping to shed the ethnic markers that disadvantaged them in American society by taking on unmarked, ordinary names that would go unnoticed.”
This came at a time when public opinion in the United States had been turning against immigrants for a decade. Especially Jewish immigrants. A restrictive immigration bill would become law (over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto) in 1917. Momentum would soon get rolling toward another, even more restrictive one in 1924. Because immigration law was country-of-origin focused, there could be no official “Jewish quota.” But there were quotas for the parts of Europe that Jews were seeking to leave, and those quotas could be reduced in favor of more “desirable” countries of origin.
“The Hebrew race… in spite of long residence in Europe, is still as it has always been an Asiatic race,” thundered prominent immigration restrictionist Prescott Hall. Bolshevism, he said, was a “movement of oriental Tatar tribes led by Asiatic Semites against the Nordic bourgeoisie.” The historian Howard Sachar quotes a U.S. foreign-service officer inveighing against the Polish Jews seeking to come to America: “They are filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” Most of them “lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit, and the majority of this percentage is mentally incapable of acquiring it.”
That last line was intended to convey the point that assimilation into American ways was impossible for Jews. Therefore, one was right to be suspicious of them—whether or not they were born in America. Thus no one with a Jewish-sounding last name was spared the suspicion that he might not ever be truly American. Clubs and hotels and even residential neighborhoods tightened their policies excluding Jews. In 1922, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell repeatedly encountered potential donors who demanded to know how the president planned to “leave our university free of this plague.” Official quotas were still controversial, but the Ivies ultimately figured out the same thing the congressional crafters of immigration quotas did: You could limit your intake of Jews by adjusting geographic quotas. By the 1930s, Harvard had dropped its share of Jewish enrollment from over 25 percent to 10 percent, and Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Swarthmore had gotten their Jewish share into the single digits.
