Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes: Cape Town, South Africa – The global center of the world BDS movement is, when you think about it, South Africa. BDS, in an attempt to sound more reasonable and less hateful, rarely compares Israel to Nazi, Germany, the way, say, arch-anti-Semite Roger Waters of Pink Floyd does. No, BDS argues that Israel practices apartheid the way that pre-Nelson Mandela South Africa did.
You can imagine, therefore, that it’s not all that easy being a proud lover of Israel in South Africa. That the Jewish community here pulls it off, remaining staunch Zionists, is impressive. But there are fissures in the support. Israel is under constant assault by some ANC ministers who make the false and erroneous comparison of Israel’s existential war against Islamic terrorists to the ANC’s struggle against white apartheid rule. Last week I responded to this ridiculous comparison. This week I want to focus on what it’s like to be subject to it.
It’s impossible for world Jewry to be the brunt of so much hatred, and to constantly be on the defensive about Israel, without some of that bile and poison seeping in. The constant attacks start playing with your head. Maybe there is something wrong with us Jews.
With Christianity saying for 2000 years that Jesus is loving while the God of the Old Testament is vengeful, maybe Judaism is too rigid. Maybe in Israel we’re overdoing it. With the Palestinians saying they’re humiliated by checkpoints, perhaps Israel is purposely trying to degrade them as opposed to instituting security measures to stop buses filled with children from being blown up. And maybe, just maybe, we Jews who live outside of Israel are simply giving Israel too much mindless support.
I remember twice visiting Dakar, Senegal, one of the poorest countries on earth, and being struck by the advertisements all over the city for skin bleaching agents.
But maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Gorie island in the city is where millions of African slaves departed through ‘the gate of no return’ to a life of chains in the Americas and Caribbean. When you’re brutalized with that kind of hatred just for the color of your skin you don’t always see beauty when you peer in the mirror.
The gradual trickle of self-hatred into the Jewish soul is evidencing itself in the growing American Jewish call for Israel-hating speakers to be hosted by Jewish organizations at Jewish venues in order to demonstrate our open-mindedness.
We first saw this with Swarthmore Hillel when it bizarrely announced its “Open Hillel” policy, opening their doors to anti-Zionist speakers. Asking people who wish to destroy Israel to come and address Jewish audiences – and make no mistake about it, BDS is only about destroying Israel – would be the equivalent of the ANC inviting white bigots to argue that apartheid should be reinstated. I am all for inviting Israel’s opponents to open, rules-based debates, where they are forced to rationally defend their positions in the marketplace of ideas, and indeed, our organization, This World: The Values Network, will be sponsoring debates along these lines across the United States, beginning at Columbia University on 31 March. I believe strongly in freedom of speech and fair and intelligent exchange. And if it’s a credible opponent but who has the intention of obliterating your very home it can only be a debate format and on neutral ground. But what fool would allow poisonous, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic propaganda offered to impressionable Jewish minds without a retort? To invite people who want to malign and defame Israel to address Jewish audiences is proof of the old adage that there is no hatred like Jewish self-hatred.
Sunday, December 07, 2014
Europe & The Jews
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes: At the Oxford Union debate on Iran that I participated in last Thursday night, I waited for the inevitable argument that we’re wasting our time fighting over the Islamic Republic when the real wolf in sheep’s clothing is of course the Jewish state. Sure enough it came in the first thirty minutes when a bearded Islamic student who did not look much different to me (lucky, handsome devil) joined the floor debate. He argued that Israel, an apartheid state, is responsible for the real atrocities in the Middle East. So why bother with the Iranian distraction?
Time was when an argument like that would have been shot down by the intelligent students witnessing the debate. Really? You’re going to compare a liberal democracy like Israel, with every freedom from religion to press to assembly, to a theocratic nightmare like Iran? Iran last year put 700 of its citizens to death, hangs gays and blasphemers from public cranes, and stones women to death on false accusations of adultery so their husbands can marry younger women. Are you seriously going to compare Israel to a country that used snipers to murder political protesters in the streets of Tehran in 2009 and infamously shot Neda Agha-Soltan in the heart? The martyred Iranian woman even has a scholarship at Queens College, Oxford named after her.
Press accounts of the Oxford debate have our side demolishing those of the pro-Iran faction and for anyone who was there the huge applause I was fortunate to receive from the entire audience – easily in evidence on the video of the debate shows how well we connected with the students. But… we lost anyway. When it comes to Israel, British Universities seem impervious to reason.
Wednesday, April 09, 2014
Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa by Ilana Mercer
I did this interview via email.
1. LUKE: How eager was the publishing world and then the reading public for the messages of your book “Into the Cannibal's Pot”?
ILANA MERCER: As is often the case, the “publishing world” was at odds with the reading public. The public was extremely eager for the message of “Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.” With the exception of the book’s heroic publisher, whose words of wisdom your readers can read on “The Cannibal’s” Amazon page (“This is a book about ideas and ideology,” he writes.) The courage and forethought of Stairway Press of Seattle paid off. The book has done well, given the fact that mainstream publishers ran from it horrified. The “Preface” to the book, available through Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, details the ridiculous responses my agent received from what conservatives and libertarians consider their go-to imprints.
2. LUKE: What are the chief lessons for America from South Africa's decline?
ILANA MERCER: One crucial lesson, and I quote form the “Introduction” to “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” is that “a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure. In the U.S., a slower, more incremental transformation is under way. It began with a state-orchestrated, historically unparalleled, mass importation of inassimilable ethnic groups into a country whose creed is that it has no creed any longer.”
The US is fast becoming a mass of competing interests, in which the politically weak vie to keep more of their rightful property; the politically powerful fight to get their paws on that very property. Democracy is especially dangerous in such ethnically and racially divided societies, where majorities and minorities are rigidly predetermined and politically permanent. Like South Africa, America is destined to degenerate into a dominant-party state. Thirty years on, when the immigration Rubicon is crossed, the population of our country will be poorer, less educated and more welfare-dependent. One party will represent this majority. This party will serve as an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by a politically powerful majority, just as the African National Congress does in South Africa.
3. LUKE: Given the decline in South Africa since the end of apartheid, do you, in retrospect, give apartheid more credit? Do you think your father was right to protest apartheid?
ILANA MERCER: My book distinguishes between natural rights and political rights. Man is endowed with natural—but not necessarily political—rights. People fuss about apartheid having denied the majority its democratic rights (the vote). Citizenship rights, however, are not natural rights. It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold. In denying blacks these rights, apartheid was reprehensible. To quote from “The Cannibal”: "In its police state methods—indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency—apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable." (Page 231.) Dad was right and heroic to oppose apartheid before it became fashionable to do so; he was wrong to place his trust in the ANC and in what I’ve termed “raw, ripe democracy.”
4. LUKE: What do you think about Israel absorbing about 80,000 Ethiopians and calling them Jewish? Do you expect more non-Jews around the world to identify as Jews if it will get them into the prosperous modern state of Israel? Should Israel fall for this scam? Do you expect Israeli Ethiopian Jews to assimilate into Israel and to reach the same average levels of success as Ashkenazi Jews achieve? Do you think all peoples and races and religions are equally suited for flourishing in a first world economy such as Israel's or America's?
ILANA MERCER: I believe that very many Russians have done just that—immigrated to Israel for a better life claiming Jewish ancestry. Unlike America’s preferred immigrants, these Russians are said to be right-leaning and nationalistic. However, Israeli leaders seem far more inclined than America’s louts to do what’s in their countrymen’s best interests. Bibi Netanyahu wants to retain Israel’s national character. He said as much recently to members of Israel’s Manufacturers Association. And I quote the Israeli PM: “We suffer from a problem that actually stems from Israel’s economic success,” he said, explaining the problems that arise from the breached border with Egypt. “We have become almost the only First World country that can be reached by foot from the Third World. We are flooded with surge of refugees who threaten to wash away our achievements and damage our existence as a Jewish democratic state.”
Unlike the Demopublican quislings, Benjamin Netanayu doesn’t suffer any blind spots when it comes to the very real potential of Third-World refugees flooding Israel and transforming his country for the worse, forever.
As to the other part of your question: I’m not up on the Ethiopian issue, but I see societies as a reflection of the individuals that make them up, and individuals as a reflection of their actions. Thus, I have no doubt that certain Israeli Ethiopians will do very well in Israel. As an individualist, race as an organizing principle doesn’t work for me. Rather, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state so that individuals can regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.
*** ILANA Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the United States. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a contributor to the preeminent libertarian site Economic Policy Journal, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank. Ilana’s latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.BarelyaBlog.com.
1. LUKE: How eager was the publishing world and then the reading public for the messages of your book “Into the Cannibal's Pot”?
ILANA MERCER: As is often the case, the “publishing world” was at odds with the reading public. The public was extremely eager for the message of “Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.” With the exception of the book’s heroic publisher, whose words of wisdom your readers can read on “The Cannibal’s” Amazon page (“This is a book about ideas and ideology,” he writes.) The courage and forethought of Stairway Press of Seattle paid off. The book has done well, given the fact that mainstream publishers ran from it horrified. The “Preface” to the book, available through Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, details the ridiculous responses my agent received from what conservatives and libertarians consider their go-to imprints.
2. LUKE: What are the chief lessons for America from South Africa's decline?
ILANA MERCER: One crucial lesson, and I quote form the “Introduction” to “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” is that “a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure. In the U.S., a slower, more incremental transformation is under way. It began with a state-orchestrated, historically unparalleled, mass importation of inassimilable ethnic groups into a country whose creed is that it has no creed any longer.”
The US is fast becoming a mass of competing interests, in which the politically weak vie to keep more of their rightful property; the politically powerful fight to get their paws on that very property. Democracy is especially dangerous in such ethnically and racially divided societies, where majorities and minorities are rigidly predetermined and politically permanent. Like South Africa, America is destined to degenerate into a dominant-party state. Thirty years on, when the immigration Rubicon is crossed, the population of our country will be poorer, less educated and more welfare-dependent. One party will represent this majority. This party will serve as an instrument of perpetual oppression of the minority by a politically powerful majority, just as the African National Congress does in South Africa.
3. LUKE: Given the decline in South Africa since the end of apartheid, do you, in retrospect, give apartheid more credit? Do you think your father was right to protest apartheid?
ILANA MERCER: My book distinguishes between natural rights and political rights. Man is endowed with natural—but not necessarily political—rights. People fuss about apartheid having denied the majority its democratic rights (the vote). Citizenship rights, however, are not natural rights. It is natural rights that the law ought to always and everywhere respect and uphold. In denying blacks these rights, apartheid was reprehensible. To quote from “The Cannibal”: "In its police state methods—indefinite detention without trial, declarations of a state of emergency—apartheid destroyed the individual defenses of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, habeas corpus and various other very basic freedoms. That the apartheid regime contravened natural justice by depriving Africans of rights to property and due process is indisputable as it is despicable." (Page 231.) Dad was right and heroic to oppose apartheid before it became fashionable to do so; he was wrong to place his trust in the ANC and in what I’ve termed “raw, ripe democracy.”
4. LUKE: What do you think about Israel absorbing about 80,000 Ethiopians and calling them Jewish? Do you expect more non-Jews around the world to identify as Jews if it will get them into the prosperous modern state of Israel? Should Israel fall for this scam? Do you expect Israeli Ethiopian Jews to assimilate into Israel and to reach the same average levels of success as Ashkenazi Jews achieve? Do you think all peoples and races and religions are equally suited for flourishing in a first world economy such as Israel's or America's?
ILANA MERCER: I believe that very many Russians have done just that—immigrated to Israel for a better life claiming Jewish ancestry. Unlike America’s preferred immigrants, these Russians are said to be right-leaning and nationalistic. However, Israeli leaders seem far more inclined than America’s louts to do what’s in their countrymen’s best interests. Bibi Netanyahu wants to retain Israel’s national character. He said as much recently to members of Israel’s Manufacturers Association. And I quote the Israeli PM: “We suffer from a problem that actually stems from Israel’s economic success,” he said, explaining the problems that arise from the breached border with Egypt. “We have become almost the only First World country that can be reached by foot from the Third World. We are flooded with surge of refugees who threaten to wash away our achievements and damage our existence as a Jewish democratic state.”
Unlike the Demopublican quislings, Benjamin Netanayu doesn’t suffer any blind spots when it comes to the very real potential of Third-World refugees flooding Israel and transforming his country for the worse, forever.
As to the other part of your question: I’m not up on the Ethiopian issue, but I see societies as a reflection of the individuals that make them up, and individuals as a reflection of their actions. Thus, I have no doubt that certain Israeli Ethiopians will do very well in Israel. As an individualist, race as an organizing principle doesn’t work for me. Rather, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state so that individuals can regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will.
*** ILANA Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the United States. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a contributor to the preeminent libertarian site Economic Policy Journal, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank. Ilana’s latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. She blogs at www.BarelyaBlog.com.
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