Divided Loyalties

Jews living in foreign countries are often subject to (or at least think they are subject to) suspicions of dual loyalty. Yet, brandishing a charge of "dual loyalty" as a weapon actually makes no sense. Everyone has multiple loyalties - to God, family, country, coreligionists, baseball team, AA group... whatever. But if an anti-Semite speaks of "dual loyalty" in reference to Jews, then what he really means to say is that Jews have a "single loyalty" - to the Jewish people or state and not to the country of their residence in the Diaspora.

Well, I am going to finally reveal the truth. Pay attention, anti-Semites.

It's true: we Jews do have a "dual loyalty." There. I've said it.

But the irony is that the "dual loyalty" I have in mind only intensifies once Jews actually live in a Jewish state.

On the one hand, we are loyal to and often feel an obligation towards the Jewish people. On the other hand, Jews feel a loyalty to and often an obligation towards all mankind, especially those who are suffering.

That's our Jewish dual loyalty.

It was manifest throughout history - from the time of the Romans, when Jewish ideology and example contributed to slave revolts in the Empire, through the Jewish organizations taking the lead in efforts to raise awareness of the ongoing Darfurian massacres. Were not Jews overrepresented in the civil rights movement for Blacks in the United States? Were not Jews overrepresented among anti-Apartheid activists in South Africa? Were not Jews overrepresented among those idealists seeking to give the working man
The "dual loyalty" I have in mind only intensifies once Jews actually live in a Jewish state.
collective power in American industry?

A dedication to helping mankind does not guarantee that the path chosen to do so will be right or even moral. That is how Jews came to be overrepresented among early eastern European and Russian communists (but also, perhaps, why their less altruistic "comrades" later got rid of them).

And now that we have an independent state, Israeli medical professionals, scientists, emergency crews, firefighters, agriculturalists, and more are sent by that state to all corners of the world to offer aid and assistance. That is how Israeli doctors ended up providing medical help after the giant tsunami in southeast Asia, how Israeli search-and-rescue crews ended up in Turkey after that nation suffered a devastating earthquake, how Vietnamese "Boat People" ended up finding a safe haven in Israel, how even America received assistance from Israeli experts and universities in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, how more than 140 countries have received Israeli humanitarian aid since 1948.

And yes, that is even how Israeli medical and humanitarian aid to the Arabs in the Palestinian Authority exceeds that offered by all the Arab nations, both when Egypt and Jordan controlled the territory in question and now. That is also how Iran was even given the possibility of foolishly and condescendingly rejecting Israeli aid proffered when the Bam earthquake killed tens of thousands.

Most recently, Israel sent a delegation to Peru after that country suffered an earthquake that killed upwards of 500 people. Israel also sent a delegation of firefighters to help Greece combat more than 200 fires that have wracked that nation.

So, yes, we have a dual loyalty. Nations and peoples around the world have benefited from it, we and others have sometimes suffered because of its more unrestrained manifestations - but there it is.

In contrast, living among us Israeli-Jews-with-dual-loyalty, is a non-Jewish population with no such "issues." They are a single-loyalty bunch, if we are to judge by the statements and actions of some prominent or not-so-prominent Arab (particularly Muslim) Israelis in recent weeks. They are singularly loyal to those Muslims or Arabs who are enemies of the country in which they live. Period.

An Israeli Arab MK is busy "building bridges" between Hamas and Fatah, two Palestinian Authority terrorist groups vying for seniority in bloodthirstiness. Police busted up a Hamas fundraiser in Jerusalem, attended by Israeli Arab Islamic leaders. An Israeli Arab terrorist group in the Galilee boasted of its murderousness. A former Israeli Arab MK who fled charges of espionage for Hizbullah has turned up again, flaunting his treason. Or is that his "single loyalty"?

Yuli Tamir Goes A-Snipping

Can the procedure be performed from the neck up?

Hold on to your -- er -- hats!

Before pouncing upon me for posting a tasteless spoof, let me forewarn you that this is NOT a spoof.  It is for real, and any nausea you feel should be directed against the actual cause, not your humble messenger.

Nevertheless you can check it all out for yourself.  It is there in black and white. Never mind that the Israeli mainstream media have hidden the story for the past 11 years, trying to protect the rep of the Labor Party's daffiest leader.

Israel's Minister of Education, Yael "Yuli" Tamir, has campaigned publicly for the common form of female mutilation in the Third World known as "Clitoridectomy."  It means what you think it means.  "Yuli," back in 1996 when she launched her campaign, was a Professor at Tel Aviv University and had just joined Labor.  Previously she had been Shulamit Aloni's sidekick in the "RATZ" party.  She was in the news the past few weeks for proposing that Arab students in Israel learn from textbooks that portray Israel's very existence and creation as a "Naqba" or catastrophe.

The "Boston Review" is a left-leaning political and literary quarterly in Boston, the sort "anarchists" read.  In its summer 1996 issue it ran Tamir's own article entitled, "Hands Off Clitoridectomy."   Its theme was that all those Westerners expressing revulsion at the practice of slicing up female genitalia in certain parts of the world are themselves evil insensitive chauvistic philistine racists.  Westerners should stop criticizing and allow the Third World to carry on with its enlightened multicultural clitorectomies. 

She rants thus in the article:

'In discussions about multiculturalism, clitoridectomy is now the trump card, taking over the role once played by cannibalism, slavery, lynchings, or the Indian tradition of Sati: "Is this the kind of tradition you would like to protect?" liberals ask embarrassed multiculturalists, who immediately qualify their cultural pluralism. Clitoridectomy defines the boundary between us and them, between cultures we can tolerate and those we must condemn....

'Furthermore, it seems clear that Western conceptions of female beauty encourage women to undergo a wide range of painful, medically unnecessary, and potentially damaging processes -- extreme diets, depilation, face lifts, fat pumping, silicone implants. Of course, adult women do these things to their own bodies, and, it is said, their decisions are freely made. But would our gut reaction to female circumcision be very different if it were performed on consenting adults? It is not unlikely that girls at the age of 13 or 14, who are considered in traditional societies as adults mature enough to wed and bear children, would "consent" to the mutilation of their bodies if they were convinced that marriage and children were contingent on so doing. Many women who followed the tradition of Sati seemed to do it as a matter of choice....

'But our own culture fosters false beliefs of a similar kind. According to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, some 75 percent of women aged 18-35 believe that they are fat, whereas only 25 percent are medically overweight.¹ Still more heartbreaking is the fact that the majority of the 30,000 women who responded to a Glamour questionnaire preferred losing 10-15 pounds to success in work or in love. So the fostering of such beliefs cannot differentiate their culture from our own and explain our hostility to it....A fulfilling sex life is certainly one good, but there are others. ...

'My purpose, however, is not to justify clitoridectomy, but to expose the roots of the deep hostility to it -- to reveal the smug, unjustified self-satisfaction lurking behind the current condemnation of clitoridectomy. Referring to clitoridectomy, and emphasizing the distance of the practice from our own conventions, allows us to condemn them for what they do to their women, support the struggle of their women against their primitive, inhuman culture, and remain silent on the status of women in our society.'

We have a suggestion for the Olmert government.  Remove the worst embarrassment in the cabinet by performing a small procedure of SNIP-SNIP!

Cheech and Chong to Work as JTA Editors?

The new Religion Editor and the New Business Editor at JTA unwinding before shabbas?

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency seems determined to destroy its own reputation as a respectable source of news.  Founded in 1917, the JTA has long been a leading source for news about Jews and Jewish communities.  It occasionally lets its liberal bias show (do a search of its pages for "Tikkun Olam" - the assimilationist liberal version of the term - if you want to see an example).  It tends not to distribute non-liberal opinion columns and treats buffoons like Michael Lerner with deference, calling him "Rabbi." I counted 25 articles on the site by Leonard Fein, 16 by or about Arthur Waskow, and none at all by me (I have published scores of articles just in the NY Jewish Press). 

Well, JTA's chances of being taken seriously are going up in a puff of hashish smoke!   The FORWARD reports that JTA has hired Daniel Sieradski, better known for his nickname "Mobius," as their "Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s director of digital media."   

We recently commented on "Mobius" and his campaign to promote the use of illegal drugs among Jews.  Mobie is also a far leftist calling himself an "anarchist," who has been active in trying to help the "anarchists" tear down Israel's security fence to make it easier for terrorists to murder Jews.   He runs a number of web sites promoting drugs, "anarchism" and Hip-Hop "music" as the highest ultimate Jewish values.  He is quoted here as saying:

My belief is that psychedelics can inform our understanding of Jewish theology and ritual, and my hope is to eliminate the stigmas towards drug use in the religious community so that we can address the subject of drug abuse from an informed and rational place. Ultimately I would like to see it regarded as “okay” to use psychedelics ritually, while drawing a clear line between productive spiritual exploration and overt, damaging drug abuse.   

We certainly hope JTA makes Mobius show up wearing a tie and shoes.  Since Mobius usually uses the "F" word instead of punctuation marks, JTA postings may be getting spicier soon.

Mobius (on left) without his hookah:

Of course, it is also possible that having a real job could change Mobius for the better. 

There is a new cowboy song, based on the old "Get Along you Old Doggies," with revised chorus "Yuppie Tie Yay Yo Get a Job you Old Hippie, Trade your dungaree jacket for a suit and a tie. Yuppie Tie Yay Yo, Git Upwardly Mobile, cause the almighty dollar's gonna be your new high."

Ehud Barak's Campaign Jingle for 2008

BGU Post-Zionist Professor Equates Naqba with Holocaust

Ben-Gurion University is host to many of the worst anti-Israel extremists, tenured traitors, "New Historians", and "Post-Zionists" in Israel academia.  Some openly call for Israel to be annihilated.  Unlike other universities where such people are repudiated by the institution officers and officials, at Ben Gurion University they are celebrated and endorsed by the university officers as fine scholars and sensitive peace lovers.  This has earned Ben Gurion University its frequent nickname, the "Bir Zeit of the Negev."  BGU is so obsessed with hiring and promoting anti-Israel extremism that it sometimes trashes academic standards of scholarship altogether.

While Ben Gurion University is also home to many serious researchers and to some departments that are scrupulous in maintaining serious academic quality, it hosts academics who endorse law breaking and terror, who call for Israel to be boycotted, and who denounce Israel as a Nazi apartheid regime.  University officials there have never been bothered by any of that.  In fact, they celebrate their Post Zionists as heroes!

Among the many extremists at BGU is Professor Dan Bar-On, a "Post-Zionist" professor of psychology who used to be Dean of Social Sciences at BGU.  Writing in the pro-Palestinian Middle East Times of April 27, 2007 with an Arab co-author, Bar-On mimics so many of the vogue radical haters of Israel in drawing moral-historical comparisons between the Nazi Holocaust of Jews in World War II and the "Naqba" (catastrophe in Arabic), the fashionable nonsense term that is often used by such people when describing the "sufferings" of Arabs when Israel was first created. 

Bar-On, who was active in the movement to organize mutiny and insurrection among Israeli soldiers until Israel capitulated to the demands of the Far Left, writes:

The Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and the ruins of Deir Yassin may be in geographical proximity, but a world apart in the psyche of Jews and Palestinians. While the first commemorates the systematic mass extermination of European Jews under Nazi occupation prior to and during World War II, the second marks the village where Palestinians were massacred at the hands of Jewish extremists in April 1948, and symbolizes Palestinian dispossession and their struggle for self-determination....Israeli Jews have generally refused to take even partial responsibility for the Nakba (the Catastrophe) that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Such an acknowledgement, in their mind, creates a moral obligation for the Right of Return or its equivalent, thereby undermining their majority in the State of Israel....It may be not a coincidence that the new exhibit of Yad VaShem in the form of a deep mountain tunnel opens up unwittingly toward the hill where Deir Yassin was once located. That, for sure, was not the intention of the architect. It takes a new kind of courage to recognize the symbolic importance and implications of both Yad VaShem and Deir Yassin in order to go beyond them and envision a better future for both Israelis and Palestinians.   

He has been arguing that the Holocaust and "Palestinian suffering" in 1948-49 are moral equivalents for many years.  He signed a statement claiming Israel was about to perpetrate genocidal atrocities against Arabs the moment Allied forces invaded Iraq, but never apologized when this proved completely false.

Elsewhere he writes: "Some of the aggression that the Jews did not exercise against the Germans, they are expressing against Palestinians."  He has been active in producing and promoting textbooks that present the historic falsehoods that comprise the anti-Israel "narrative" as at least as valid and true as actual history.  For example, terrorists were always described also as freedom fighters.