by Caroline Glick
Two
events happened on Wednesday which should send a shiver down the spine
of everyone concerned about the future of the American Jewish community.
But to understand their importance it is important to consider the
context in which they occurred.
On January 13,
The New York Times reported on a series of virulently anti-Jewish
comments Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made in speeches given in
2010. Among other things, Morsi said, "We must never forget, brothers,
to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for
Zionists, for Jews." He said that Egyptian children "must feed on
hatred; hatred must continue. The hatred must go on for God and as a
form of worshiping him."
In another speech, he called Jews "bloodsuckers," and "the descendants of apes and pigs."
Two
weeks after the Times ran the story, the Obama administration sent four
F-16 fighter jets to Egypt as part of a military aid package announced
in December 2012 entailing the provision of 20 F-16s and 200 M1-A1
Abrams tanks.
The Anti-Defamation League,
AIPAC, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and other prominent
American Jewish groups did not oppose the weapons transfer.
With
the American Jewish leadership silent on the issue, Israel found its
national security championed by Sen. Rand Paul. He attached an amendment
to a budget bill that would bar the US from transferring the advanced
weapons platforms to Egypt.
Paul explained,
"Egypt is currently governed by a religious zealot... who said recently
that Jews were bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and pigs. This
doesn't sound like the kind of stable personality we [sh]ould be sending
our most sophisticated weapons to."
Paul's amendment was overwhelmingly defeated, due in large part to the silence of the American Jewish leadership.
The
Times noted that Morsi's castigation of Jews as "apes and pigs" was "a
slur for Jews that is familiar across the Muslim world."
Significantly
the Times failed to note that the reason it is familiar is because it
comes from both the Koran and the hadith. The scripturally based
denigration of Jews as apes and pigs is legion among leading clerics of
both Sunni and Shi'ite Islam.
It was not a
coincidence that the Times failed to mention why Morsi's castigation of
Jews as apes and pigs was so familiar to Muslim audiences.
The
Islamic sources of Muslim Brotherhood Jew hatred, and indeed, hatred of
Jews by Islamic leaders from both the Sunni and Shi'ite worlds, is
largely overlooked by the liberal ideological camp. And the overwhelming
majority of the American Jewish leadership is associated with the
liberal ideological camp.
If the Times
acknowledged that the Jew hatred espoused by Morsi and his colleagues in
the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as by their Shi'ite colleagues in the
Iranian regime and Hezbollah is based on the Koran, they would have to
acknowledge that Islamic Jew hatred and other bigotry is not necessarily
antithetical to mainstream Islamic teaching. And that is something that
the Times, like its fellow liberal institutions, is not capable of
acknowledging.
They are incapable of
acknowledging this possibility because considering it would implicitly
require a critical study of jihadist doctrine. And a critical study of
jihadist doctrine would show that the doctrine of jihad, or Islamic holy
war, subscribed to by the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates, as
well as by the Iranian regime and Hezbollah and their affiliates, is
widely supported, violent, bigoted, evil and dangerous to the free
world.
And that isn't even the biggest problem
with studying the doctrine of jihad. The biggest problem is that a
critical study of the doctrine of jihad would force liberal institutions
like the New York Times and the institutional leadership of the
American Jewish community alike to abandon the reigning dogma of the
liberal ideological camp - moral relativism.
Moral
relativism is based on a refusal to call evil evil and a concomitant
willingness to denigrate truth if truth requires you to notice evil.
Since
pointing out the reality of the danger the jihadist doctrines
propagated by the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood involves the implicit
demand that people make distinctions between good and evil and side with
good against evil, moral relativists - that is most liberals - cannot
contend with jihad.
This is why the American
Jewish leadership refused to join Rand Paul and his conservative
Republican colleagues in the Senate and demand an immediate cessation of
US military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian military
even after the evidence of the Brotherhood's genocidal Jew hatred was
splashed across the front page of the Times.
It
is the dominance of moral relativism in liberal institutions like the
New York Times that make even the most apologetic expose of the Muslim
Brotherhood a major event. And it is the dominance of liberal
orthodoxies in the mainstream Jewish community that makes it all but
impossible for Jewish leaders to speak up against the Muslim
Brotherhood, despite the manifest danger its genocidal hatred of Jews
poses not only for Israel, but for Jews everywhere.
It
is bad enough that liberal Jewish leaders won't speak out against the
Koranic-inspired evil that characterizes the ideology of the Muslim
Brotherhood. What is worse is what their own morally relative blindness
causes them to do.
On Wednesday, we saw two distressing examples of the consequences of this self-imposed embrace of ideological fantasies.
First,
on Wednesday, Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School's Journal of
Conflict Resolution gave its annual International Advocate of Peace
Award to former president Jimmy Carter.
Carter's
long record of anti-Israel, and indeed anti-Semitic, actions and
behavior made the decision to bestow him with the honor an affront not
only to the cause of peace, but to the cause of Jewish legal rights. As
an advocate of Hamas and a man who castigates Israel as an illegal
"apartheid" state, Carter has a long record of outspoken opposition to
both Jewish human rights and to viable peace between Israel and its
neighbors.
For outsiders, the Orthodox Jewish
university's law school's law journal's decision to honor Carter was
shocking, but as it works out, the Cardozo Journal of Conflict
Resolution confers its prize almost exclusively on people active in
pressuring Israel to make concessions to Palestinian terrorists who
reject Israel's right to exist. Past winners include Dennis Ross, Bill
Clinton, Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell, John Wallach and Seeds of
Peace and, perhaps most astoundingly, the outspoken Jew hater Archbishop
Desmond Tutu.
In other words, Carter wasn't
chosen for the honor despite his anti-Israel record. He was selected
because of his anti-Israel record.
In a similar
fashion, New York's 92nd Street Y invited virulent Israel hater Roger
Waters to perform a concert on April 30. Given Waters's outspoken
opposition to Israel, his call for total economic and cultural warfare
against the Jewish state and his leading role in the BDS movement, it is
not possible that the 92nd Street Y was unaware of his radical,
anti-Semitic sentiments.
And so, the only
reasonable explanation for his invitation to perform at the Jewish
institution is that the Y wanted to invite this openly anti- Semitic
musician to perform. A public outcry by pro-Israel activists forced the Y
to cancel his performance.
The day that Carter
was embraced by the Orthodox Jewish establishment, Jewish author and
activist Pamela Geller was silenced. Geller is the nightmare of the
liberal Jewish establishment.
She is a
beautiful and articulate speaker and writer who has risen to prominence
in the US for her steadfast commitment to exposing the deadly
pathologies of Jew hatred, misogyny and other prejudices inherent to
jihadist ideology.
Geller's website, Atlas
Shrugs, is a clearinghouse for information on Islamic persecution of
women, Christians and apostates and hatred of Jews. She also showcases
the documented ties between mainstream American Islamic groups and the
Muslim Brotherhood.
An indefatigable defender
of Israel, Geller recently ran a highly controversial, and successful ad
campaign in the New York and San Francisco public transportation
systems in response to an anti-Israel ad campaign. Her billboards read,
"In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the
civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat Jihad."
Geller
was scheduled to speak on April 13 at the Great Neck Synagogue in Great
Neck, New York. The topic of her talk was "The Imposition of Shari'a in
America."
Last month, after learning of her
talk, a consortium of Islamic and leftist activists in Nassau County led
by Habeed Ahmed from the Islamic Center of Long Island launched a
pressure campaign to coerce the synagogue into cancelling her speech.
Members of the group telephoned the synagogue and castigated Geller as a
bigot, and likened her to the Nazis in the 1930s.
In
short order liberal rabbis Michael White and Jerome Davidson took over
the opposition to Geller and launched a media campaign attacking her as a
bigot and demanding that the Great Neck Synagogue cancel her speech.
Rejecting
the distinction Geller makes between jihadists and their victims -
Muslim and non- Muslim alike, White and Davidson claimed that she
opposes all Muslims and so her speech must be canceled. By hosting her,
they intoned, the Great Neck Synagogue would be guilty of propagating
hate speech. Liberal Christian and Jewish activists and their Muslim
associates threatened to protest the speech.
On
Wednesday the synagogue caved in to their massive pressure. Citing
"security concerns" the synagogue board released a statement saying that
while "these important issues must be discussed, the synagogue is
unable to bear the burden" of the pressure campaign surrounding Geller's
planned speech. Her event was canceled.
Surveys
of the American Jewish community taken in recent years by the American
Jewish Committee demonstrate that the vast majority of American Jews are
deeply supportive of Israel, and their views tend toward the Right side
of the political spectrum in issues related to Israel, the Palestinians
and the wider Islamic conflict with the Jewish state.
On
the other hand, the AJC's surveys show that for the vast majority of
American Jews, Israel is not a voting issue. This state of affairs was
reflected by a comment that Yeshiva University student Ben Winter made
to the media regarding the absence of student protest against Carter on
Wednesday. In Winter's words, "While many students at YU feel strongly
about their Zionism, few have the courage to publicly express their
opinions."
The danger exposed by the
cancellation of Geller's speech and the conferral of honors on the likes
of Carter and Waters by mainstream Jewish institutions is daunting. If
moral relativism remains the dominant dogma of the American Jewish
establishment, the already weakly defended, but still strongly rooted,
support for Israel among the rank and file of the American Jewish
community will dissipate.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
Caroline Glick
Source: http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/04/moral-relativism-and-jihad.php
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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