At the end of his 1981 movie A History of the World, Part I, Mel Brooks added three funny fake “trailers” for non-existent movies, one of them being Jews in Space. The trailer showed a Star of David-shaped spacecraft, crewed by bearded guys in yarmulkes and prayer shawls, winning an interstellar holy war.
In titling this piece “Jews in Space,” I’m not referring to that kind of Jew in space – I’m talking about a category of Jews who seem so hostile to their own people and heritage that they’ve entirely escaped the gravitational pull of basic common sense, decency, and fact and spun out into the orbit of rabid anti-Israeli and pro-Islamic radicalism. Jews such as the following:
Richard Falk, U.S. jurist. Falk should have been forever disqualified from holding any responsible position when, after meeting the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, he mocked claims that the ayatollah was fanatical or reactionary. Later appointed UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine he repeatedly compared Israel to Nazi Germany, saying that it exhibits “genocidal tendencies” and warning of a forthcoming “Palestinian holocaust.”
To Falk, the Boston Marathon bombings were an understandable act of “resistance” to U.S. imperialist hegemony and Americans’ outraged reactions were rooted in “Islamophobia.”
And Falk is a 9/11 Truther whose call for a study of U.S. officials’ alleged involvement in the annihilation of the Twin Towers moved even morally lethargic UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to label his charges “preposterous.”
Roger Cohen, British-born New York Times columnist. A series of staggeringly fatuous columns Cohen wrote in 2009 about a two-week visit to Iran cemented his reputation as “American journalism’s most prominent Iranian apologist” (to quote The Weekly Standard ‘s Michael Goldfarb). Notwithstanding Ahmadinejad’s rants about wiping Israel off the map, Cohen praised Iran as the Middle East’s most democratic state, other than Israel, and insisted that viewing it as totalitarian was a “grotesque caricature.”
When he spoke at an L.A. synagogue, an audience of Iranian Jews responded with derisive laughter to his naivete about the true intentions of Hamas and Hizbullah.
Ronnie Kasrils, South African politician. After spending over a quarter-century as an anti-apartheid guerilla fighter, Kasrils, the African National Congress’s highest-ranking white leader as well as a longtime member of the South African Communist Party Politburo, joined the post-apartheid RSA government – serving for several years as Minister of Intelligence – and began advocating zealously for the Palestinian cause. Among his goals: to convince his fellow South African Jews that the suffering inflicted by Israel upon Palestinians is “far worse than anything our people faced during the most dreadful days of apartheid.”
To Kasrils, Israelis are “baby killers” and “Nazis,” and Israel’s security fence is totally unjustifiable – this from a man who during the Cold War (when he was trained by the KGB and Stasi and counted both Che Guevara and Fidel Castro as chums) accepted the Kremlin line that the Berlin Wall was necessary to keep West Germany from destroying the GDR.
Sarah Schulman, U.S. writer. Schulman, a lesbian novelist and playwright who teaches at the City University of New York, is the leading promoter of the insipid concept of “pinkwashing” – the claim, which in the last couple of years has gained traction in the American and European academy with alarming speed, that Israel markets its liberal gay-rights record as a way of distracting from an illiberal policy of oppressing innocent Palestinians.
Schulman, who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, has marched with members of Hamas.
Dror Feiler, Swedish-Israeli artist. Raised on a communist kibbutz, Feiler has lived in Sweden since 1973. The head of several pro-Palestinian groups and an organizer of the Gaza “Freedom Flotillas,” he’s worked alongside Hamas leaders. At a 2010 rally in Turkey, Feiler stood by in silence while another speaker decried “the filth that is Israel” and the crowd shouted “death to Israel.” “Snow White and the Madness of Truth,” a 2004 art installation by Feiler and his wife, Gunilla, memorialized Hanadi Jaradat, a Palestinian suicide bomber who killed 21 people in Haifa.