Language varies. Color is universal.
Israel
Obama’s Top Ten Insults Against Israel
Nile Gardiner, writing in The Telegraph
It should be clear that many of the policies/actions mentioned represent not only threats to Israel, but threats to the United States and to the entire civilized world.
Obama, Israel, and the Palestinians
Here is a detailed analysis of the evolution of Obama’s views on the Israel-Palestinian issue. For anyone who wishes Israel well but is still supporting Obama, you owe it to yourself to read it carefully. The author clearly demonstrates how the left’s hostility toward Israel is part and parcel of their generalized hostility toward Western societies.
The title that was given to the article…”Pro-Palestinian-in-Chief”…seems questionable, though. Supporting the “Palestinian cause” in the way that Western leftists do is not really pro-Palestinian, at least not pro-those-Palestinians-who-want-to live peaceful and happy lives. Great harm has been done to these people, as well as to Israelis and to the world in general, by the way in which the Palestinian conflict with Israel has been hyped and romanticized. It is specifically the insane focus on anti-Israel beliefs and action which has acted to prevent the economic development of the Palestinian areas and ensure the continue immiseration of its people, and all of this has been greatly aided and abetted by American and European leftists.
See this related article by Fouad Ajami, which contrasts the behavior of the Palestinian leadership with the behavior of pre-statehood Israeli leadership.
Wretchard:
It is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.
Of course, this week, the phrase “It’s not going to happen” clarified.
Jethro Gibbs’ laconic “Yah think.” (Foreign policy, domestic policy, life) works, too.
But the obvious may need saying – before it’s swamped by the irrelevant.
“Competing visions of ‘Never Again'”
Following on David Foster’s Yom Hashoa post, the following extended excerpts from this brilliant column by Caroline Glick frame the issues well in modern political context:
AFTER THE war, world Jewry adopted “Never Again,” as our rallying cry. But “Never Again,” is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.
These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.
The first strategy was based on international law and human rights. Its champions argued that the reason the Allies didn’t save the Jews was because the laws enjoining the Allies to rescue us on the one hand, and prohibiting the Nazis from killing us on the other were insufficiently strong. If they could promulgate a new global regime of international humanitarian law, they believed they could force governments to rise above their hatreds and the shackles of their narrow-minded national interests to save innocents from slaughter. Not only would their vision protect the Jews, it would protect everyone.
The Jews who subscribed to the human-rights strategy for preventing another Holocaust were the architects of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. They were the founders of the international human rights regime that now dominates so much of Western discourse on war and peace.
Unfortunately, the institutions these idealistic Jews designed have been corrupted by political forces they had hoped to defeat.
Consequently, the international human-rights regime they created has failed completely to accomplish what they hoped it would accomplish. Instead, the regime they created to protect the Jews is now a key weapon in the political war being waged against them.
[. . .]
A secondary casualty of the failure of the human rights paradigm has been intra- Jewish relations. Faced with their preferred paradigm’s failure and corruption at the hands of anti-Semites, many Jewish human-rights activists have opted to abandon their fellow Jews and Israel in order to maintain their allegiance to the corrupt, anti-Semitic human-rights model.
PARTICULARLY ANNOYING to these human-rights followers is the stunning success of the other post-Holocaust Jewish strategy for giving meaning to the slogan “Never Again.”
That policy is Zionism.