In Haaretz, Bradley Burston’s eye scales drop away:
For the whole of my adult life, it irked me when my fellow Jews would routinely and without compunction, accuse anti-Zionists of being anti-Semitic, and conflate anti-Israeli sentiment with the Nazis.
I felt that the latter eroded the memory and the magnitude of the Holocaust, and that the former was a slightly more elegant way of telling people with whom one took issue, to shut the hell up.
Only this week did I realize my error.
It turns out, that when Jews suspected that the Jihadi hated the Jew the way the Nazi hated the Jew, they were right.
After all this time, I am embarrassed to admit that only when the monsters entered Chabad House in Mumbai, did I understand.
Richard Silverstein is still in denial mode. In fact, he is in super charged high-octane denial mode.
Following his very silly CiF article, in which he attempted to argue that it was “anti-Israeli, though not necessarily antisemitic” for Islamist terrorists to murder, deliberately, any Jew that they could find in Mumbai, and that Hamas “eschew the language of religious jihad to portray their struggle”, he has returned to the fray.
Richard Silverstein’s new theme is that, to point out that Islamists set out to kill Jews because they are Jews makes you a “Jewish Jihadi“:
Yes, I know. Jihadis are supposed to be Muslim. After all, Islam created the concept. But I’m afraid that it’s somehow rubbed off on many right wing Jews. They need to see all of Islam arrayed against all of Judaism in a holy war in which we will all fight to the death.
Here he is, on Engage, calling the commentators “my little Jewish holy warriors”
What appears to have upset Richard Silverstein is the suggestion that when Islamists write into their constitutional documents, religious texts such as this:
The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
… they actually might mean it.
This is Silverstein’s central argument:
If you want to characterize the attack as anti-Semitic, you have to have some idea of how the terrorists saw the target. Imposing your own interpretation of their motives on the attack would be as if a Jew killed a Palestinian and Muslims claimed to know the killer’s mind and stated with certainty that he hated all Muslims and the attack was part of a holy war against Islam. How would they know unless the killer said so explicitly (which the Mumbai killers did not)?
Talk about “imposing your own interpretation of their motives”! Richard Silverstein deals the Islamists a grave insult. What he is saying, effectively, is that they are not doing what they do for God, but for temporal reasons. Silverstein is telling Islamists that they don’t take their religious obligation, at all seriously.
By contrast, Silverstein has no difficulty in identifying the racist and religious motive that underpins attacks by religious settlers in Hebron on Palestinians. Odd that.
What Silverstein misses is this. Even if the Islamist terrorists had no theological perspective on their Jew-killing mission – frankly, to think that, you can never have listened to Islamists – the decision to kill any Jew ‘for Palestine’ would still be an antisemitic act.
Jeez – how explicit do I have to make this, Richard:
The murderers who carried out this lynching might well have been terribly upset about the way that the American Civil War turned out. I’m certain that they were, in fact.
This was still a racist murder.
Do you get it, Richard?
He is never going to get it, is he?
(For TM, who would have enjoyed this post)
