Dershowitz Doesn't Get It

Phillips is right - many American Jews have an ideological blind spot that does not let them see enemies on the left. But in the case of many intellectuals (or would-be intellectuals), the disease has progressed well beyond a mere blind spot. Even non-Jewish supporters of Israel (including me, find themselves arguing Israel's case against American Jewish anti-Zionists (which should be, but unfortunately no longer is, an oxymoron). The ideological rot that has taken hold of the left in general has not spared Jewish leftists, at least in the U. S. I tremble for the future of Israel and the West.


He doesn't get it
Sat, Jul 4, 2009 5:26 pm
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3736806/he-doesnt-get-it.thtml

Melanie Phillips

Friday, 3rd July 2009

The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz is one of the most prolific, high-
profile and indefatiguable defenders of Israel and the Jewish people
against the tidal wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling
currently coursing through the west. So a piece by him in the Wall
Street Journal giving expression to the rising anxiety being felt
about Obama by American Jews naturally arouses great interest.

But just like the majority of American Jews, getting on for 80 per
cent of whom voted for Obama, he is a Democrat supporter who is
incapable of acknowledging the truth about this President. For most
American Jews, the horror of even entertaining the hypothetical
possibility that they might ever in a million years have to vote for a
Republican is so great they simply cannot see what is staring them in
the face -- that this Democratic President is lethal for both Israel
and the free world. And in this article Dershowitz shows that he too
is just as blind.

Acknowledging the anxiety among some American Jews about Obama’s
attitude to Israel, Dershowitz concludes uneasily that there isn’t
really a problem here because all Obama is doing is putting pressure
on Israel over the settlements, which most American Jews don’t support
anyway. But this is totally to miss the point. The pressure over the
settlements per se is not the reason for the intense concern.

It is instead, first and foremost, the fact that Obama is treating
Israel as if it is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Obama
thus inverts aggressor and victim, denying Israel’s six-decade long
victimisation and airbrushing out Arab aggression. The question
remains: why has Obama chosen to pick a fight with Israel while soft-
soaping Iran which is threatening it with genocide? The answer is
obvious: Israel is to be used to buy off Iran just as Czechoslovakia
was used at Munich. Indeed, I would say this is worse even than that,
since I suspect that Obama – coming as he does from a radical leftist
milieu, with vicious Israel-haters amongst his closest friends --
would be doing this to Israel even if Iran was not the problem that it
is.

In any event, the double standard is egregious. Obama has torn up his
previous understandings with Israel over the settlements while putting
no pressure at all on the Palestinians, even though since they are the
regional aggressor there can be no peace unless they end their
aggression and certainly not until they accept Israel as a Jewish
state, which they have said explicitly they will never do. On this,
Obama is totally silent. So too is Dershowitz. That’s some omission.

Next, Obama is pressuring Israel to set up a Palestine state – within
two years this will exist, swaggers Rahm Emanuel. But everyone knows
that as soon as Israel leaves the West Bank, Hamas – or even worse –
will take over. The only reason the (also appalling) Abbas is still in
Ramallah, enabling Obama to pretend there is a Palestinian
interlocutor for peace, is because the Israelis are keeping Hamas at
bay. Yet Dershowitz writes:

There is no evidence of any weakening of American support for Israel's
right to defend its children from the kind of rocket attacks candidate
Obama commented on during his visit to Sderot.

So what exactly does he think would happen if Israel came out of the
West Bank and the Hamas rockets were down the road from Jerusalem and
Tel Aviv (literally: many in the west have absolutely no idea how tiny
Israel is). It’s not a question of Israel’s ‘right to defend its
children’. If Obama has his way, Israel would not be able to defend
its children or anyone else, because Obama would have removed its
defences by putting its enemies in charge of them. It is astounding
that Dershowitz can’t see this.

Then there was Obama’s appalling Cairo speech -- which I wrote about
here – in which he conspicuously refrained from committing himself to
defending Zionism and the Jewish people from the attacks and
incitement to genocide against them, but committed himself instead to
defending their attackers against ‘negative stereotyping’. On this,
Dershowitz has nothing to say.

Worse still, by falsely asserting that the Jewish aspiration for
Israel derived from the Holocaust, Obama effectively denied that the
Jewish people were in Israel as of right and thus endorsed the core
element of the Arab and Muslim propaganda of war and extermination. On
this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.

Obama drew a vile – and telling – equivalence between the Nazi
extermination camps and the Palestinian ‘refugee’ camps. On this,
Dershowitz has nothing to say. Obama's statement that the Palestinians
‘have suffered in pursuit of a homeland’ was grossly and historically
untrue, and again denied Arab aggression. On this, Dershowitz has
nothing to say. Equally vilely, Obama equated genocidal terrorism by
the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the
resistance against apartheid in South Africa. On all of this,
Dershowitz has nothing to say.

Dershowitz also grossly underplays the terrible harm Obama is doing to
the security not just of Israel but the world through his reckless
appeasement of Iran. In the last few weeks, this has actively undercut
the Iranian democrats trying to oust their tyrannical regime, and has
actually strengthened that regime. All the evidence suggests ever more
strongly that Obama has decided America will ‘live with’ a nuclear
Iran, whatever it does to its own people. Which leaves Israel hung out
to dry.

But even here, where he is clearly most concerned, Dershowitz scuttles
under his comfort blanket – Dennis Ross, who was originally supposed
to have been the US special envoy to Iran but was recently announced
senior director of the National Security Council and special assistant
to the President for the region. It is not at all clear whether this
ambiguous development represents a promotion or demotion for Ross.
Either way, for Dershowitz to rest his optimism that Obama’s Iran
policy will be all right entirely upon the figure of Dennis Ross is
pathetic. Ross, a Jew who played Mr Nice to Robert Malley’s Mr Nasty
towards Israel in the Camp David debacle under President Clinton, is
clearly being used by Obama as a human shield behind which he can
bully Israel with impunity. American Jews assume that his proximity
to Obama means the President’s intentions towards Israel are benign.
Dazzled by this vision of Ross as the guarantor of Obama’s good faith,
they thus ignore altogether the terrible import of the actual words
coming out of the President’s mouth.

The fact is that many American Jews are so ignorant of the history of
the Jewish people, the centrality of Israel in its history and the
legality and justice of its position that they probably saw nothing
wrong in Obama saying that the Jewish aspiration for Israel came out
of the Holocaust because they think this too. Nor do they see the
appalling double standard in the bullying of Israel over the
settlements and what that tells us about Obama’s attitude towards
Israel, because – as Dershowitz himself makes all too plain -- they
too think in much the same way, that the settlements are the principal
obstacle to peace.

Many if not most American Jews have a highly sentimentalised view of
Israel. They never go there, are deeply ignorant of its history and
current realities, and are infinitely more concerned with their own
view of themselves as social liberals, a view reflected back at
themselves through voting for a Democrat President.

Whatever else he is, however, Dershowitz is certainly not ignorant.
Which makes this lamentable article all the more revealing, and
depressing.

The Real 4th of July

The Founding Fathers faced charges of treason that carried a death penalty and particularly brutal death penalty . . . and probably no chance of a 20 year appeal either. Indeed, many lost life, liberty, livings, personal wealth, families. Yet, they believed so strongly that America should be free and govern herself that they put their lives on the line, put their money and property on the line and fought, after they had tried every other way at their disposal to get the situation rectified.

The Real 4th of July
By Dan Gifford
Big Hollywood.com
July 4th, 2009
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/dgifford/2009/07/04/the-real-fourth-of-july/#more-176090


“A revolution principle certainly is, and certainly should be taught as
a principle of the Constitution of the United States, and of every State
in the Union.”

James Wilson
Signer of the Declaration of Independence, a major force in the drafting
of the Constitution, a leading legal theoretician and one of the six
original justices appointed by George Washington to the Supreme Court of
the United States.



Each time July 4th rolls around, whoever lives at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue makes speeches celebrating American freedom and some other stuff
like baseball and apple pie. But the guy at that address never gets down
to lauding what the 4th of July is really all about: It’s a celebration
of violence to achieve what most would agree was a just political end.

Yes, that political end was the achievement of independence from what
America’s mostly British-born founders considered English tyranny by its
German king and Parliament. But let’s have an honesty moment: I
seriously doubt many today would consider the British rule that so
angered our Founding Fathers anything to fight about. I mean, didn’t
Screen Actors Guild members recently vote some fellow thespians onto the
SAG Board of Directors who believe in taxation without representation?

That was a platform plank Marcia Wallace, Bob Newhart’s TV-shrink office
receptionist, pitched to me on the Director’s Guild steps when she was
running for a SAG Hollywood board slot. Her idea and that of some others
who got elected last go ’round is to bar actors who don’t make a certain
amount of money from voting in SAG elections and on union issues while,
at the same time, forcing them to pay dues and be SAG members if they
want to work. Is there any real difference between that scheme and the
plight of the colonists who had to pay taxes levied in London even
though they had no representation in Parliament? Maybe Wallace and those
who voted for her should share some time on Bob’s cognitive dissonance
couch with Mr. Carlin.

Talk about violence.

Anyway, when violence is used for the reason George Washington and Baron
von Gekko used it, violence, for lack of a better word, is good.
Violence is right, violence works. Violence clarifies, cuts through, and
captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

But the man in the White House right now doesn’t believe in violence for
just cause. He gave the order for the Navy SEALS to shoot the Somali
pirates to save the American ship captain they were holding hostage, you
say? No. My military sources say he equivocated and the SEALS took the initiative themselves just as they are trained to do.

He boldly sent the USS John McCain to intercept that North Korean ship believed to be carrying ballistic missiles for Iran?
No, my military sources say top Pentagon brass leaned on him behind closed doors until he acted. Againstthat record,
his deployment of additional troops in Afghanistan appears to be an aberration.

I believe the real view of the man currently living in our presidential
mansion was stated quite clearly last month by him while positioned in
his classic Mussoliniesque uplifted chin, quarter shot pose: “Resistance
through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.” The Borg
could not have said it better. But why stop there? Our president then
compounded the intellectual insult: “For centuries, black people in
America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of
segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It
was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center
of America’s founding.”

Those ideals embodied as rights in the American Constitution include
equality before the law, rights of due process against the power of the
state and the right to be left alone by the minions of government. But
the paramount right is at all times the right to use violence against a
government that violates those and other fundamental portions of its
contract with the people — aka: the Constitution — when all lawful and
peaceable remedies have failed. To say “it was not violence that won
full and equal rights” may be literally true in the sense they were not
won at the point of a gun, but the statement perpetuates a highly
misleading myth about passive resistance in general.

The non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are
shibboleths among the urban elite and academic classes for the only
moral way to challenge oppression and injustice. Fortunately, George
Orwell understood the brutal reality of that game even if his fellow
intellectuals didn’t: “Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till
the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”

Gandhi’s and King’s non-violence only worked because they were not
facing a Stalin or a Saddam or a Hitler or a Mao or a … Peaceful protest
against those and like regimes is a guarantee of becoming worm food.
Fact is, Gandhi and King protested the unjustness they saw within a
fundamentally just system constructed by those aforementioned dead guys
from Britain, and they didn’t just pull those principles out of their
rear ends.

Those principles we so take for granted that permit a balance between
the sovereignty of the individual and that of the state are the accrued
wisdom of centuries within an Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Viking alloy of
cultures that valued personal freedom and its legitimate limits within
the group that protected that freedom. Ya know, “The strength of the
pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack,” as Rudyard
Kipling put it. There are other ways of being akin to the beehive, but
if individuals want to remain individuals, the occasional sting of
violence or its threat is the only thing that prevents it.