Say this on many campuses in North America or Europe and you will be mocked, scorned, intimidated, bullied, raged at, perhaps even physically endangered. And not by illiterate, impoverished, formerly colonized people but by well-heeled tenured faculty and bright doctoral students – some of whom will soon run for public office.
“Politically correct” Americans, including some Jews, have joined Islamists in embracing the Palestinians as the most oppressed and most Noble of Savages whose misery, in their view, has been caused solely by a cabal of Zionists, Orthodox Jews, and Christian Republican conservatives.
This unholy alliance of politically correct progressives and Islamists has presented the long-suffering Palestinians and their corrupt and murderous leadership as secular versions of Jesus crucified. Newspaper cartoonists have literally portrayed Arafat as Jesus. They have also romanticized Arafat, bin Laden, and their human bombs as Che Guevara- and Nelson Mandela-like ‘freedom fighters.’
Bizarrely, tragically, these new anti-Semites have decided that Israel is the “greatest oppressor of all time,” and is “worse than the Nazis” – surely a new form of Holocaust denial.
They also characterize Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state (which it is not). In fact, Islam is the largest practitioner of apartheid in the world, both in terms of religion and gender; Israel once again is the scapegoat for this.
Today, Israelis are being slaughtered not only because they happen to live in a nation engaged in a local war with a neighboring nation but because Israel is a Jewish nation that has been under almost perpetual siege since its birth in 1948. Twenty-one thousand Israelis have lost their lives in wars of self-defense and in acts of terrorism against the Jewish state since 1948.
Since the fall of 2000, Israelis have endured the equivalent of 9/11 almost every other week. I cannot imagine the level of post-traumatic stress symptomatology Israelis must be suffering – they, who have lived through so many unchosen wars of self-defense and whose parents and grandparents endured Hitler?s Final Solution, the Gulag, Cossack pogroms, and persecution and exile from Arab and Muslim lands.
The Israeli Toll in American Terms
As I’ve noted, the slow-bleed of Israelis from 1948-2000 has been barely noted among western intellectuals. “Everybody dies, other people also suffer. Enough with the Jews!” Jewish blood does not register with them – or, rather, Jews are supposed to die; they are not shocked when it happens. In an attempt to awaken such hard-hearted intellectuals, some of whom are, sadly, Jews, I decided to convert the Israeli reality into American terms.
Thus, from 9/29/2000 to 5/12/04, 961 Israelis were murdered by terrorists. This represents 0.015% of the Israeli Jewish, Christian, and Muslim population of six million, four hundred thousand. Based on an American population of approximately 293 million, the Israeli civilian death count is the equivalent of 44, 005 Americans killed by terrorists on our own soil, in pizza parlors, on buses, at Passover sedorim, in our beds.
In addition, between 9/29/2000 and 5/12/04, a total of 6,344 Israelis were wounded by terrorists, often seriously, and for life. This represents .099% of the Israeli population. In American terms, this is the equivalent of approximately 290,000 Americans wounded by terrorists.
Every Israeli personally knows someone – a parent, a child, a spouse, a co-worker, a neighbor, a friend – who has been killed. Every Israeli personally knows someone who has been wounded for life. Ads for hospital beds and orthopedic devices regularly appear in mainstream newspapers, not in medical journals.
And yet, our ‘best and brightest’ suggest that the Jews are ‘paranoid’ about anti-Semitism, ‘alarmist,’ ‘neurotic,’ that Hitler killed millions of people who were not Jews (“Why do the Jews go on and on only about themselves as if they are the only victims?”), that the Israelis are now perpetuating a ‘Holocaust’ upon the Palestinians, (another way of saying that “Hitler should have finished the Jews off”), that Israel is a ‘colonial’ state that should be abolished – exterminated – and that this suggestion, which is being made by many progressives and intellectuals, does not necessarily amount to Jew-hatred.
