(Mondoweiss) -- by Philip Weiss --
Steve Walt ends a column on Martin Kramer’s idea of limiting Palestinian births with the million-dollar question, which he does not answer: what’s an Israeli-American wingnut doing at Harvard? Why is he so well connected?
"[M]any Israelis and most American Jews would undoubtedly find Kramer’s views offensive. At the same, however, he is hardly an isolated extremist, or some messianic settler sitting in a trailer in an illegal outpost in the West Bank. On the contrary, he is an especially well-connected individual, with appointments at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and of course Harvard. Moreover, he is not the only Israeli who has expressed such hateful views about the Palestinians. Of course, one can find equally hateful sentiments about Israeli Jews coming from Palestinians and Arabs. But the key difference is that they don’t hold appointments at prestigious institutions like Harvard."Kramer reminds me of Charles Jacobs, the extremist at the head of the David Project who nonetheless exerted tremendous influence over Columbia University a few years ago. Kramer also reminds me of former ambassador Dore Gold, the neoconservative Netanyahu aide who runs a thinktank in Jerusalem, was raised in CT, seems to be coordinating attacks on the Goldstone Report, and has long been a $96,000-a-year scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. What are these men doing in influential American institutions? They are there because powerful backers want them there; because neoconservatism with its hostility toward the Arab world remains a strong and largely-unchallenged current in Jewish life, even among liberals at the Forward– and therefore in the life of the U.S. establishment...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
Walt says that "most American Jews would undoubtedly find Kramer’s views offensive," but I question this.
What's important to remember about ethnocentric Jewry, which is a clear majority of the membership that comprises organized Jewry, is that it subscribes to a kind of dual morality in terms of the kind of speech it is willing to "tolerate" -- one set of standards for itself, and another set for the non-Jewish world. The standards that it applies to the non-Jewish world are much more stringent and politically correct than the standards it applies to itself, and it often screams bloody murder when non-Jews cross the artificial moral line that Jewry has imposed upon them. But when it crosses the same line itself..."Ho-hum, what's the big deal?"
For example, here's another quip from Phil Weiss on the same issue that Kramer has been hammering on -- what Jewry regards as the "problem" of Palestinian pro-creation -- but critical of a "liberal" Jew who, exactly like "wingnut" Kramer, is so narcissistic and self absorbed (or perhaps sociopathic) that it never even occurs to her how fascist her own perspective is:
Here is Jesse Singal, a liberal American Jew and frequent contributor to the Boston Globe, saying that the "new American Jew" has the right to criticize Israel. Good reporting on a Hillel event featuring Jeremy Ben-Ami, but note the repeated invocation of an idea– the "demographic time bomb"– that in an American context would be seen as flatly, well, racist. Again, this is American Jews holding Israel to a far lesser standard than they would hold their own country, which is part of the operating system of the Israel lobby.So apparently there really isn't that much difference in mentality between left-liberal Jews like Singal, and right-wing Jews like Kramer; they're both statist-utilizing sociopaths who apply one set of stringent, politically correct standards to non-Jews and how they're allowed to engage in dialogue, and another set of far more free-wheeling and uncensored standards to themselves when they're engaged in dialogue about Gentiles.
Is this simply a result of the Holocaust, and Jewish fears that free dialogue amongst non-Jews inevitably leads to anti-Semitism? Sorry, but the Jewish Bolshevik Soviet Union, which pre-dated Nazi Germany, set up a similar program of government-enforced censorship -- only on a murderous scale that even surpassed that of the Holocaust, and set precedents that Hitler merely followed.
The Judeofascists have been at this totalitarian game for a long time, and not surprisingly, it has brought a lot of grief upon not only the non-Jewish world, but upon their own tribe, as well.
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