2) Terror's enablers
After Anders Behring Breivik carried out his terrible massacre last year, columnist Roger Cohen knew who was at fault. In a column,
Breivik and his enablers he wrote:
Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment. The enablers include Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who compared the Koran to “Mein Kampf” on his way to 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 election; the surging Marine Le Pen in France, who uses Nazi analogies as she pours scorn on devout Muslims; far-rightist parties in Sweden and Denmark and Britain equating every problem with Muslim immigration; Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target “creeping Shariah in the United States” at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein; U.S. church pastors using their bully pulpits week after week to say America is a Christian nation under imminent threat from Islam.
Everyone who was critical or cautionary about the rise of political Islam was an enabler. There was no subtlety in Cohen's blanket indictment. Peter King was as guilty as Marine Le Pen. But consider the following he wrote in a column he wrote two years ago,
Hard Mideast Truths:
This, too, I believe: Through violence, anti-Semitic incitation, and annihilationist threats, Palestinian factions have contributed mightily to the absence of peace and made it harder for America to adopt the balance required. But the impressive recent work of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in the West Bank shows that Palestinian responsibility is no oxymoron and demands of Israel a response less abject than creeping annexation.
The extremism that is regularly broadcast over the
official Palestinian media is attributed to Palestinian "factions,' not to its government. Those who turn a blind eye to the incitement (what in the world is "incitation?") deserve a lot more blame for the lack of peace in the Middle East. Cohen, though, is content to blame "creeping annexation."
Now comes word from Norway that the creator of "peace studies," is a raving antisemitic lunatic. No major American newspaper has seen fit to report on Johann Galtung's pronouncements. Fortunately,
as Ynet reports, at least publications in Norway have noticed:
Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet published in October an article by journalist John Faerseth, who attended one of Galtung's lectures at the University of Oslo, where he outlined his doctrine in front of a cheering crowd.
Throughout the article, Fearseth slams Galtung, who is dubbed "the father of peace studies", saying the "findings" on which he bases his theories against Jews are "dubious" at best.
Norwegian magazine Humanist published a correspondence between Galtung and Fearseth, in which Galtung claimed, as he did several times in the past, that the Jews control world media.
Cohen is currently on leave, so we won't see any column from him on the topic of those who
hate Israel and how they enable Palestinian radicalism. Walter Russell Mead observes:(via
Instapundit)
He hinted at links between Anders Behring Breivik’s attack on civilians in Norway and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. He suggested there was some truth behind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He said that Jews share some of the blame for what happened at Auschwitz — they had provoked the poor Germans under the Weimar Republic. He suggested that Jews control the American media and academic establishments. The list goes on and on — the kind of remarks that haters call “common sense” and “daring to tell the truth” but that sane people see as hatred, error and bile.
Professor Galtung is 82 and perhaps these days like his soul mate Helen Thomas he expresses himself with more freedom and less restraint than in former times. And perhaps the mind is not everything that it once was. But his example demonstrates that the bacillus of Jew-hatred, responsible for centuries of folly and murder before climaxing in the Holocaust and the destruction of half Europe, has not been extirpated. Even among liberal academics who specialize in the study of peace, the flame of hate sometimes burns.
There may be some who say that the Professor is not an anti-Semite; he is merely an anti-Zionist whose righteous passion against the sins of Israel drove him momentarily into some incautious language. And they will argue that such a peace oriented fellow could only have been stimulated to such passions by truly unconscionable activities on the part of “the Jews.” That is how such people often talk, and it is always contemptible, always dishonest, always a manifestation of a failure of either character or intellect.
More at
memeorandum.
Criticism of Israel these days is so uninformed and vicious (not to mention counterproductive) it's impossible not to ask if there's another motive behind it.
No comments:
Post a Comment