Video of the week:Arson terrorists destroy vineyard in Dolev, Israel- http://tinyurl.com/z3kp9tv
MICHAEL GOVE The Times 16-12-
2016
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For the full
article go to: https://cfoi.co.uk/michael-gove-lefts-hatred-of-israel-is-racism-in-disguise/
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How do you know if someone’s an antisemite?
They don’t all perform stiff-arm salutes for the camera and offer interesting
140-character thoughts about race theory on Twitter. Although those are helpful
clues, as the American alt-right, Hezbollah and Iran’s leadership prove.
But antisemitism isn’t a prejudice restricted to the likes of
Richard Spencer, Hassan Nasrallah and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As befits the
world’s oldest and most durable hatred, it has many more adherents and has
taken many different forms.
In medieval times, when individuals made sense of their world
through the prism of faith, antisemitism was a religious prejudice. In the 19th
and early 20th centuries — the age of Darwinism — antisemitism clothed itself
in the white coat of the scientist. Biological metaphors were deployed to
modernise hate. The Jews were carriers of “racial contamination” who had to be
eliminated as a pathological threat to humanity’s future.
That belief led to history’s greatest crime. The extermination of
six million powered by hatred of one thing — Jewish identity. It should have
been the case that antisemitism died in the furnaces of the Holocaust. But the
hatred survived. And, like a virus, mutated.
Antisemitism has moved from hatred of Jews on religious or racial
grounds to hostility towards the proudest expression of Jewish identity we now
have — the Jewish state.
No other democracy is on the receiving end of a campaign calling
for its people to be shunned and their labour to be blacklisted. The Boycott,
Disinvestment and Sanctions movement is a growing force on our streets and
campuses. Its campaigners argue that we should ignore ideas from Jewish
thinkers if those thinkers come from Israel and treat Jewish commerce as a
criminal enterprise if that business is carried on in Israel.
This is antisemitism, impure and simple. It is the latest
recrudescence of the age-old demand that the Jew can only live on terms set by
others. Once Jews had to live in the ghetto, now they cannot live in their
historic home.
It is to Britain’s eternal credit that we rejected centuries of
prejudice one hundred years ago and pledged to extend to the Jewish people the
rights enjoyed by Germans and Italians, Japanese and Mexicans — the right to a
land they could call their own. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 was followed in
1948 with the creation of the state of Israel. Since then, that state’s success
has been near-miraculous.
Surrounded by enemies who sought to strangle it at birth,
continually threatened by war and constantly under terrorist attack, a nation
scarcely the size of Wales with no natural resources, half of whose territory
is desert, has become a flourishing democracy, a centre of scientific
innovation, one of the world’s major providers of international humanitarian
relief and the only state from Casablanca to Kabul with a free press, free
judiciary, a flourishing free enterprise economy and freedom for people of every
sexual orientation to live and love as they wish.
And that is the reason it attracts such hostility. Not because of
what Israel does. But because of what it is.
For those on the left addicted to guilt-tripping and
grievance-mongering, who believe that poverty is a consequence of western
exploitation and that bourgeois ethics lead to oppression, the existence of a
political entity that is a runaway success precisely because it is a
bourgeois-minded, capitalist-fuelled, western-oriented nation state is just too
much to bear. Their ideological prejudices have collided with a stubborn,
undeniable, fact.
So what do they do? Keep the prejudices, of course, and try to get
rid of the fact. Try to undermine, delegitimise and reduce support for Israel.
Make it the only country in the world whose right to exist is called
continually into question. Make the belief in that state’s survival, Zionism, a
dirty word. Denounce, as the NUS president has, a British university for being
a “Zionist outpost”. And instead call organisations pledged to eliminate Israel
such as Hezbollah and Hamas “friends”, as Jeremy Corbyn has.
Antizionism is not a brave anti-colonial and anti-racist stance, it
is simply antisemitism minding its manners so it can sit in a seminar room. And
as such it deserves to be called out, confronted and opposed.
Because the fate of the Jewish people, and the survival of the
Jewish state, are critical tests for all of us. The darkest forces of our time
— Islamic State, the Iranian leaders masterminding mass murder in Aleppo — are
united by one thing above all: their hatred of the Jewish people and their
home. Faced with such implacable hatred, and knowing where it has always led,
we should not allow antisemitism any space to advance, or incubate.
Instead we should show we’re not going to be intimidated by those
who want to treat Israel as a second-class state, we’re not going to indulge
the antisemitic impulse to apply the double standard. Israel is the only state
where we don’t locate our embassy in the nation’s capital and the only ally the
Foreign Office has refused to let the Queen visit. So let’s celebrate the
centenary of the Balfour Declaration by moving our embassy to Jerusalem next
year and inviting Her Majesty to open it. What are we afraid of? Earning the
enmity of those who hate Israel? To my mind, there could be no greater
compliment.
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