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Michael Oren Sees a US Alliance in Tatters, and Israel ‘On Our Own’: David Horovitz, Times of Israel, June 18, 2015— Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, chose to give his book on that period in Washington the catchy title “Ally”.
Western Anti-Semitism is Not a Phenomenon of the Past. It is Very Well Alive: Julien Bauer, National Post, June 15, 2015 — Anti-Semitism is at the core of Western culture.
An Anti-Semitic Incident Adds to Austria’s Shame: Abraham Cooper & Yitzchok Adlerstein, Newsweek, June 12, 2015 — Our institution's namesake, Simon Wiesenthal, the late Nazi-hunter, was often asked, "Why did you set up the Jewish Documentation Center in the heart of Vienna? Why not Geneva, London or even Tel Aviv?"
How to Avoid a Victimization Olympics: Catherine Chatterley, Huffington Post, June 17, 2015 — Comparing the suffering of human beings is a fruitless enterprise that breeds resentment, hostility, and competition.
How Obama Abandoned Israel: Michael B. Oren, Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2015
Jewish Violinist Completes Father's Performance, 80 Years After Cut Short by Nazis: Aron Heller, Ha’aretz, June 2, 2015
A Nazi Wrong Made Right—After 77 Years: Jonathan Zalman, Tablet, May 15, 2015
In Morocco, Exploring Remnants of Jewish History: Michael Frank, New York Times, May 30, 2015
MICHAEL OREN SEES A US ALLIANCE IN TATTERS,
David Horovitz
Times of Israel, June 18, 2015
Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, chose to give his book on that period in Washington the catchy title “Ally”. But this new memoir — an unprecedented case of a former public servant so quickly writing up sometimes intimate revelations on acutely sensitive core issues — does not describe an alliance at all.
The US-born former diplomat, who is now a Knesset member for the Kulanu party, notes in his foreword that the Hebrew term for “ally” is ben brit — literally “the son of the covenant.” And what he documents is actually the breaching of a covenant, the collapse of an alliance — an accumulated arc of abandonment by the Obama administration, and most especially the president himself, of Israel. It’s a charge, unsurprisingly, that the administration has rushed to deny, and, rather more surprisingly, that Oren’s own party chief Moshe Kahlon has hurried to dissociate Kulanu from.
Oren’s style is not excitable or melodramatic. In fact, he writes in generally understated tone, with the measured sense of perspective you’d expect from a best-selling historian. So when he notes, as he does near the very end of the book, that last summer’s Israel-Hamas war left “aspects of the US-Israeli alliance in tatters,” you take him seriously, and you worry.
And when you read that Washington worked relentlessly to quash any military option for Israel, most especially in 2012 — arguably the last moment at which Israel could have intervened effectively to thwart Iran’s drive to the bomb (though Oren does not confirm this) — you sense that he has exposed the emptiness of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endless assertions that Israel will stand alone if necessary to stop a nuclear Iran. And you register, with all its grim repercussions, the realpolitik of a broken relationship with our key defender — the rupture that now leaves Israel vulnerable to an increasingly bold Islamist regime that avowedly seeks our annihilation.
For an hour in his Knesset office on Monday, Oren discussed his book with The Times of Israel, elaborating in several key areas, and often rendering his depiction of relations with the Obama administration, and the implications for Israel in its battle for survival, still more disconcerting. So much so that I found myself asking Oren, “Are people going to look back in a few years’ time and say, This is what they were talking about in Israel as Iran closed in on the bomb and they were wiped out?” His bleak reply? “It’s happened before in history, hasn’t it?” Oren then laughed rather bitterly, and remarked, “The whole conversation is very down here.” And how.
The Times of Israel: You call the book “Ally,” but its central theme is the incredibly problematic Obama presidency, to put it mildly, on Israel. The central theme of the book is about someone who grows up in America, loves America, but has an abiding passion for Israel and the Jewish people, and dreams of someday being the bridge between these two countries that he loves, gets to actually do it, but does it during a period of almost unprecedented challenge in those relationships.
Obama is one challenge. The press is another challenge. The American Jewish community is another challenge. What isn’t a challenge? There are objective challenges. There is America that is starting 2009 in the depths of the worst financial crisis since the Depression. There is America that is bogged down in political polarization such as they’ve never experienced. Nothing can get done. There is America that is traumatized by two wars in the Middle East, exhausted. It doesn’t like to hear about the Middle East. It’s sick of us, wants to go home. That kind of challenge. To say nothing of what was going on here. Then the entire Middle East unravels. Egypt has not one, but two violent revolutions. Syria and Iraq cease to exist. The peace process is dead in the water. Abbas won’t talk to us for most of the period. All that’s going on, plus other issues: Women of the Wall, people spitting at women. All these things are happening in a very short period of time.
You took notes every night? I’m not a diarist, but when I got into this job my wife Sally got me a really nice diary. She said, You might want to jot down a few things. And I came back from my first meeting with Obama in May 2009, and I thought, “Wow, that was interesting. Let me start jotting down a few things.” Then it became an actual diary. I never wrote anything secret in it, but I wrote discussions and observations. Some of them are very funny. When (the then White House chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel calls me at 2 o’clock in the morning and says, “I don’t like this fucking shit,” and I have nothing else to say to him other than “I don’t like this fucking shit either” and it goes on like that, I would then turn around and write this. I thought it was so funny. So interesting. But it’s also very revealing…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
WESTERN ANTI-SEMITISM IS NOT A PHENOMENON OF THE PAST.
Julien Bauer
National Post, June 15, 2015
Anti-Semitism is at the core of Western culture. Even when a popular expression is “Judeo-Christian values,” it should not hide the fact that these “values” are lopsided. On one hand we have a God of revenge, on the other a God of mercy, Judas is the archetypal Jew, a traitor, as if all the apostles were not Jewish. The relations between the two creeds, Judaism and Christianity, were symbolized by the Disputations on the validity of both religions, the verdict known in advance: Judaism is wrong, Christianity is right. An analysis of classical European literature, in its French, English and other expressions, shows a regular feature of anti-Semitism stereotypes, from Shakespeare to Voltaire.
In modern times, what was mainly anti-Judaism — Jews converting to Christianity were welcomed if not feted — became anti-Semitism. Theological arguments, in a less religious society, were not anymore convincing. The ascending role of secular nationalism gave way to a secular form of anti-Jewish discourse, insisting on the racial identity, without possibility of opting out. Jews are intrinsically bad and should be either checked very closely (milder anti-Semitism), or exterminated (stronger anti-Semitism).
A rather equivalent attitude prevailed in Muslim societies. As the Christians, Muslims had to recognize the anteriority of Judaism and to affirm that their monotheism was of a higher level. When not using religious arguments, Muslim countries rely on racism: Jews, even without a theological component, are by definition inferior. How can we understand the interest, if not the obsession, of the West for anything Jewish. The symbol of Jews is less a specific religion, Judaism, but a national one in its Israeli expression. Israel is therefore treated as the archetype of anything bad and evil in the world. No word is strong enough to condemn Israel.
This obsession is so ingrained that many Western decisions are self-defeating. The European Union, for instance, recognizes the vitality of Israel’s economy, research and development, and sign treaties for joint endeavours, a normal way of dealing with national interests. Such is the case for inviting Israel to become a member of OECD, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2010, or to become a partner in CERN, the first and only non-European member of European Organization for Nuclear Research in 2014.
But why threaten to impose special labelling for Israeli products manufactured in the West Bank, when not such a treatment is even considered for products from Chinese-occupied Tibet or Turkish-occupied (half of) Cyprus. How can we understand the French proposition, encouraged by many European Union members, to impose a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and declare that Jerusalem, the Holy City of Judaism before there was Christianity or Islam, is Palestinian? Even more striking is the attitude of the Vatican. Christians constitute a dwindling population in the Middle East, except in Israel. They are massacred, their churches burnt down. The Holy See, in response, signs a treaty putting its own churches in Jerusalem under the tender loving care of the Palestinian Authority. It could be the reaction of a Catholic Church frightened by an unpleasant reality, it is also a demonstration of self-defeating anti-Semitism: we hate you, Jews, more than we love ourselves.
Non-Western countries, specifically Asian ones, do not have this kind of background. When religions are neither Christian nor Muslim, such as Confucianism, Bouddhism, Hinduism, they have no reason to be obsessed by Jews. You cannot ignore Judaism if you are a Christian or a Muslim, but you may be totally unaware of it when you are an adept of a non-monotheistic faith. Does that entail that Asian countries are more open to Jews in general, to Israel in particular?
Till 25 years ago, the two major Asian states, China and India, were leading members of the Conference of Non-Aligned States, officially neither with Washington nor with Moscow. The leaders were Nehru, Chou En Lai, Nasser, Tito. The Conference was hostile to Israel but, in the case of China and India, this had no anti-Semitic connection. New Delhi and Beijing considered in their national interests to lambast Israel and befriend Arab states. When they estimated it was in their national interest to establish relations with Israel, even close relations, they did so without any theological or racial issues. They do not pretend to be ontologically superior to Israel and entitled to dictate their views, they maintain relation both with Israel and Arab states for the promotion of their own interests
The results are already tangible. A few years ago, two-thirds of Israeli economic exchanges were with the European Union and the United States. Today the second-largest partner is China and India is coming close. This trend, an upsurge of Asian countries in world economy, is obvious. The country’s economy is booming, and less and less dependent with the West.
An example of the open minded approach of the Asian countries comes from South Korea. This country studied the reason of the exceptionally high number of Israeli scientific Nobel Prizes and the rate that Israel discovers new technologies. They estimated that the intellectual ability encouraged by the study of Talmud was one of the explanations. They decided to introduce Talmudic studies in the schools. It has nothing to do with religion but was considered a tool, albeit of Jewish origin, for the specific goal of enhancing Korea’s place in the field of knowledge. The mere idea of a Western country doing the same is ludicrous.
If we believe in the “Judeo-Christian” discourse, Israel is part and parcel of the West. When we witness the permanence of anti-Semitism in Western culture, this link is questionable. The West is, most probably without being conscious of it, encouraging Israel, and its high technology sector, to be increasingly linked with Asian countries, accelerating the rise of Asia in the world. In that way, the West’s enduring anti-Semitism, consciously or not, is helping bring about the end of Western political, cultural, economic and perhaps even cultural domination of the world.
[Julien Bauer is professor of political science at Université du Québec à Montréal
and an Academic Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.]
AN ANTI-SEMITIC INCIDENT ADDS TO AUSTRIA’S SHAME
Abraham Cooper & Yitzchok Adlerstein
Newsweek, June 12, 2015
Our institution's namesake, Simon Wiesenthal, the late Nazi-hunter, was often asked, "Why did you set up the Jewish Documentation Center in the heart of Vienna? Why not Geneva, London or even Tel Aviv?"
"If you want to catch mosquitos, you cannot avoid the swamp" was Simon's response. Indeed, everyone in Vienna, friend and foes, came to recognize the one Holocaust survivor who was every ex-Nazi war criminal's nightmare. Vienna never opened its arms to Wiesenthal; the city was uneasy at the sight of a Jew who had the chutzpah to stand tall after the Shoah.
Not even multiple death threats, nor the bombing of his modest house on a Friday night while he and his wife, Celia, were in their bedroom, would deter the unofficial ambassador of 6 million ghosts from pursuing his lonely crusade for justice. Wiesenthal would die in Vienna at the age of 96, having helped bring 1,100 Nazi war criminals to the bar of justice, overcoming local hostility and the broader apathy of a largely (still) uncaring world.
Prior to World War II, Jews played an outsized role in Austrian society. Three in 4 Austrian Nobel Prize winners were Jewish, as were half of the country's physicians and 60 percent of its attorneys. Vienna was home at various points to Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler and Franz Kafka. But Austria was also home to a young Adolf Hitler, whose first hearing of a Wagner opera was at a performance conducted by Mahler. Hitler credits two Austrians, Karl Leuger and Georg Ritter von Schönerer, for teaching him to hate Jews.
Leuger, still hailed for his achievements as Vienna's mayor at the beginning of the 20th century, was a thoroughly modern politician who used rousing speeches, punctuated with stereotypical images of alleged enemies, especially the Jews. Every setback was reduced to a simple mantra: "The Jews are to blame." He helped morph traditional Catholic anti-Semitism directed against "money and stock market Jews," "press Jews" and "ink Jews." Hitler soaked it all in. In 1938, millions of Austrians greeted Hitler and his Anschluss (annexation) with cheers and flowers, and watched with glee as Jewish residents were forced to scrub the streets on their knees.
After World War II, a defeated Germany took decisive measures to own up to its Nazi-era crimes. Austrians, however, convinced themselves that they had been "invaded" by the Nazis, and though they were loyal foot soldiers to the Third Reich, they wanted to be treated as Hitler's victims, not his enablers. Austrians elected Kurt Waldheim president in 1986, despite the exposure of his sordid Nazi past. It was not until 1991 that the government acknowledged Austrians' role in the Nazi extermination machine, but anti-Semitic provocations and feelings continued. Alarming numbers of Austrians would later embrace far-right parties, including politician Jorg Haider, who referred to Nazi concentration camps as punishment camps and sought military honors for Waffen-SS veterans.
In 2014, the spike in European anti-Semitism was also in evidence in Austria with reported hate crimes up 100 percent over the previous 12 months. Now comes word that a landlord in Vienna is "offended" by the display of an Israeli flag inside a window of an apartment first placed there in celebration of Israel's participation in the Eurovision songfest. The landlord also informed the Jewish tenant that to avoid eviction he must not only take down the flag but also remove his mezuzah (the small case holding Biblical verses) affixed his doorposts.
Balancing the rights of one person in a democracy to display his pride in a member state of the U.N. with another citizen's right to hate ought to be fairly easy to sort out for the authorities. But this is 2015 Europe, where the rights of Jewish citizens are not always protected. It is true that Austria deserves credit for some positive aspects of its treatment of post-war Jews. When the former Soviet Union began releasing some of the Jews it had essentially held captive for decades, Austria agreed, at least for a while, to be the neutral transit point for the Jewish émigrés, most of whom would reach Israel. Austria also absorbed many Iranian Jews who fled the Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power.
But Austria has never come to terms with its role in the Holocaust, leaving it with a trifecta of Jew hatred: traditional anti-Semitism, the new virulent anti-Israelism and the so-called secondary anti-Semitism caused by the Holocaust itself. In Der Ewige Antisemit (The Eternal Anti-Semite), Henryk Broder first introduced us to a startling reality of contemporary anti-Semitism: "The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz." And some Austrians it seems still have trouble dealing with pesky live Jews who dare to hold their heads high above gutter level…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
[Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
and a CIJR International Board Member]
HOW TO AVOID A VICTIMIZATION OLYMPICS
Catherine Chatterley
Huffington Post, June 17, 2015
Comparing the suffering of human beings is a fruitless enterprise that breeds resentment, hostility, and competition. An old professor of mine at the University of Chicago, the distinguished historian Peter Novick, called this dynamic, appropriately, the "Victimization Olympics." For scholars trained in specific fields of history, comparative analysis of different genocides can be valuable and productive, but for the general public, for ethnic victim groups, and even for academics with a more activist orientation to scholarship, comparing genocides often devolves into this kind of destructive competition. Often, the goal in these cases is not really comparison but equation, and even supersession, of others' experiences.
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has just concluded its five-year investigation of the residential schools system, a traumatic program of forced assimilation imposed upon the Aboriginal populations of Canada from mid-1800s until 1996. And unfortunately, the "Victimization Olympics" have begun again. I want to suggest that we stop comparing the experiences of victim groups and understand the specificity of each collective experience, while noting the diverse experiences of individuals within each group.
Over the last decade, students have entered my university courses on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and made instant equations made between Auschwitz and Canadian residential schools. I have learned not to react to these uneducated assumptions and explain that as students learn about Auschwitz-Birkenau these kinds of inaccurate equations disappear. As horrifying as residential schools were for the children forced into them, they have no resemblance whatsoever to a death camp designed to gas and burn human beings, in a larger process of systematic physical annihilation across Europe. Forced acculturation is not extermination. In fact, the very concept of using education and socialization to "kill the Indian in the child" assumes that there is a common underlying humanity that is actually accessible and "reformable." This would have been a total impossibility in Nazi racial thinking.
These differences are historical facts, but they should not be used to rank the suffering of people. The Holocaust was not a universal human experience; it was a specific program to erase the Jewish people from the continent of Europe. It was the most extreme genocide in modern recorded history and therefore it should not be used as the primary meter stick to gauge human suffering or to define genocide. There are parallels, however, between the destruction of aboriginal cultures and languages under European colonialism and the forced conversions and subjugation of Jews in Christian Europe. In the modern period, as well, the French Revolution allowed for the emancipation of Jews granting them civil rights, but with the requirement that they be "reformed" out of their Jewish identity and turned into Frenchmen. Both Jews and Aboriginals have lived under enormous assimilationist pressure and much of it violently coercive.
Facile comparisons to the Holocaust and other genocides do not do justice to the uniqueness of the Aboriginal experience either. Life was completely altered for the indigenous populations after European settlement was established in Canada, which made their traditional existence impossible. The government and churches dictated one's rights, obligations, and movements, and invaded one's most intimate setting — the family. Having this kind of absolute control over the lives of people invited widespread opportunities for abuse and the sexual and physical violation of children by clergy is a whole other level of trauma that does damage to the very souls of people. These are enormously complex levels of abuse and damage, and they deserve scholarly attention and respectful discussion at the public and governmental level…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
[Catherine Chatterley is an Academic Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends and Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
How Obama Abandoned Israel: Michael B. Oren, Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2015—‘Nobody has a monopoly on making mistakes.” When I was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to the end of 2013, that was my standard response to reporters asking who bore the greatest responsibility—President Barack Obama or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—for the crisis in U.S.-Israel relations.
Jewish Violinist Completes Father's Performance, 80 Years After Cut Short by Nazis: Aron Heller, Ha’aretz, June 2, 2015 —In 1933, the promising young Jewish-German violinist Ernest Drucker left the stage midway through a Brahms concerto in Cologne at the behest of Nazi officials, in one of the first anti-Semitic acts of the new regime
A Nazi Wrong Made Right—After 77 Years: Jonathan Zalman, Tablet, May 15, 2015—In 1938, Ingeborg Rapoport (née Syllm), a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of Hamburg in Germany, had just completed her thesis on the infectious disease, diphtheria. But with Hitler in power, Rapoport, who was raised Protestant (though her mother was Jewish), was banned from taking the oral examination for “racial reasons,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Officials marked her exam forms with a telltale yellow stripe” despite the fact that her professor, then a member of the Nazi party, supported her academic work.
In Morocco, Exploring Remnants of Jewish History: Michael Frank, New York Times, May 30, 2015—Boy 1: “What are those two guys doing walking around here?” Boy 2: “It’s obvious. They’re looking for the Jews.” This exchange was translated from Arabic by Youness Abeddour, a guide and documentarian who agreed to share with me his knowledge of the mellah, the walled Jewish quarter, of Fez.
