Bigotry pins blame on Jews [View All]

[Jim Sagle]

What was Mel Gibson's catch-all solution to his woes? `Jews are bad.'

By David Mamet
Published August 6, 2006

<snip>

Israel wants peace, the Arabs want Israel gone (in 2000 Yasser Arafat, on the eve of ending a territorial dispute that would have given him 98 percent of the land he desired, withdrew and went to war). Yet most of the Western press, European and American, picture Israel as, somehow, the aggressor, and the Israelis as somehow inhuman, and delighting in blood.

There is no "cycle of violence." Israel wants peace behind the 1949 armistice borders, with some relatively minor variation. There is no indictable "disparity of force." Israeli civilians are being bombed. Hezbollah knows where the Israeli military bases are, but chooses to bomb civilians. Hezbollah puts its armaments exclusively in the midst of civilians. The Israeli aim is not to invade Lebanon (Israel left Lebanon) but to force Hezbollah to stop killing the Jews.

That the Western press consistently characterizes the Israeli actions as immoral is anti-Semitism. What state does not have the right to defend itself--it is the central tenet of statehood.

The Jews are not the victims of bad PR. They are the victims of anti-Semitism.

More at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0608060379aug06,1,3537615.story (registration required)