Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is one of my oldest friends. We attended Yeshiva Flatbush elementary school together. When Karen and I made our first exploratory trip to Los Angeles, Abe was one of the first people we contacted. At the most difficult time in our lives, Karen and I called on Abe to officiate at our son Ariel Chaim’s funeral. And just last week, Karen and I had a delightful Shabbat dinner at Abe’s home.
Abe has written a sharply focused essay about the IslamoNazi threat to civilization and the double standard applied to the Jewish state by the liberal West.
Jews are butchered in Israel every day. Yet Paris, Brussels, Berlin, London and Stockholm continue to insist, blindly, that the IslamoNazi war on Israel is somehow different.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche posited, “You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist.” Such moral relativism underpins the double standard that allows international leaders and powerful media to promote a crusade against ISIS terror while at the same time cast a blind eye to barbaric targeting of Israel and Jews.
The problem is that moral relativism — or, more accurately, immoral relativism — empowers terrorism and inevitably dooms any campaign to defeat global terrorism.
Meanwhile, the antisemitic world headquarters in Tehran is busy forging its latest “blame the Jew” big lie — that Israel and “Zionist aggression” lurk behind the 11/13 Paris attacks. Iran’s FARS News Agency has “once again confirmed that French Jews were informed that the tragedy would happen. Just as it happened in the September 11 attacks 14 years ago.”
And while most of the world mourned innocents murdered on a Friday night in Paris, Gaza erupted in a pro-ISIS celebration, allowed by supposedly anti-ISIS Hamas. They burned the French Tricolour in celebration of the Paris terror attacks as a blow for ending Zionist oppression. In an interview to the Iranian news agency, Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki praised “the heroic acts being carried out by the young Palestinians against the Israeli enemy,” while equating Israelis and Nazis. Each of these murderers immediately enter the Palestinians’ online Hall of Fame of Terror.
The sickness and evil of anti-Israel bigotry is nourished by Mary Hughes-Thompson, co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement. She tweeted, “I haven’t accused Israel of involvement. Still, Bibi is upset about the European settlement boycott. So who knows.” And then posted a cartoon showing a grotesquely caricatured Jew saying “Merci [thank you]” to an ISIS fighter, because “Everything is working out as planned. Soon those white goyim will be on their knees.”
What is shocking is how important leaders in democracies, wittingly or not, actually undermine the anti-ISIS campaign. In Sweden, where the Jewish community had to cancel all evening activities and shutter its synagogues until further notice, Foreign Minister Margot Allstrom has linked Paris terror to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in an appalling way. She refers to the Middle East, “where not least the Palestinians see that there is no future. We must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.” Her use of “we” suggests moral solidarity, not with Jews under threat in Israel or in her own country, but with Palestinian terrorists.
Secretary of State John Kerry further muddied the waters by declaring at the US Embassy in Paris: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo [last January in Paris], and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘OK, they’re really angry because of this and that’.” Back in Washington, he tried to dial back the comment, but the damage had been done.
A few days earlier, State Department spokesman John Kirby reacted to the unending terrorist stabbings and shootings of innocent Israeli civilians by stating: “Individuals on both sides of this divide are – have proven capable of, and in our view, are guilty of acts of terrorism.”
The first post-Paris terror incident in France was the stabbing of an Orthodox Jewish teacher by an ISIS sympathizer. The world reacted with a collective yawn.
In the Jewish state, a year and a day after two Palestinians used meat cleavers to literally butcher Rabbis at prayer in a Jerusalem Synagogue, terrorists murdered Jews at prayer in Tel Aviv and gunned down an American Yeshiva student and two Israelis on a West Bank road. Much of the reportage defaulted to the “cycle of violence” in the Holy Land and listed statistics of how many died on “both sides.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote on Facebook: “Behind these terrorist attacks stands radical Islam, which seeks to destroy us, the same radical Islam that struck in Paris and threatens all of Europe. Whoever condemned the attacks in France needs to condemn the attacks in Israel. It’s the same terror. Whoever does not do this is a hypocrite and blind.”
But while leaders quietly appreciate the real-time intelligence Israel is providing to France and the media dutifully reported that Israeli radar was the first to detect evidence that a bomb brought down the Russian jet over Sinai, sympathy for Israelis cut down by terrorist is rarely expressed and Palestinian terrorism is rarely condemned.
The war on terror is indivisible. After France’s 11/13, the world has another opportunity to launch a global action plan.
A key starting point is to reject the “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” mantra that provides moral cover for those who direct or benefit from terrorism. It has worked especially well for Palestinian leaders. Why stop terror, when millions keep flowing in from donor nations, when human rights NGOs maintain a stoic silence when Jewish blood flows and when diplomatic legitimacy continues to expand?
Hopefully, ISIS will disappear at some point. But if the scourge of our time is to defeated , civilized civilized people must set a single standard in the war to eradicate terrorism. Otherwise, new deadly acronyms of terror will emerge. And we and our children will be no safer.
This article was originally published by FOX News.
Bli ayin hara but… Dream on.
No. This will not change Europe’s attitude towards Israel.
I have two American cousins who live respectively in Paris and Germany, and one foreign exchange “brother” who lives in Belgium.
They have all told me that the Israeli-“Palestinian” conflict is different because they have been fighting each other since Israel was founded and because Israel was not supposed to take more land than what they were given in 1949.
And, none of them have any interest in actually studying real history. They all take it for granted that the lies they are fed by the worldwide entertainment media are actually true.
So, no. Based on that small sampling, and based on the ordinary “news media,” I see no hope that Europe is ever going to change its attitude toward Jews and Israel. As a matter of fact, as Europe becomes more Islamized, I believe it is probably going to get worse.
I think the reality is more evil than that. Don’t expect Europe to give up its centuries-long love affair with antisemitism.
Consider for example “Isreal wasn’t supposed to take more land than they were given”. Didn’t the UN gave Israel the whole west bank and Gaza? So perhaps apart from the Golan Heights, which is a simple case of self defense, that make-believe excuse is simply false.
As for Kerry, take pity on him. He’s mentally defective, he just doesn’t realize it yet.
In reality, the San Remo Conference of 1920 allocated more than the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine for a Jewish State.
Just as it allocated most of the rest of the Middle East to become Arab States.
This was confirmed by an international court at some later date (1921; 1922? Not sure).
Great Britain violated this decision by turning over Transjordan to the Arabs.
And – Chapter 8 of the UN Charter says:
“Article 80
1. Except as may be agreed upon in individual trusteeship agreements, made under Articles 77, 79, and 81, placing each territory under the trusteeship system, and until such agreements have been concluded, nothing in this Chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.”
Which means, of course, that the Arab countries; the UN; and anyone else who is objecting to the land that Israel currently claims, is acting in violation of signed; sealed; and delivered, International Law.