Anti-Israelism has mutated to suit the coronavirus - Phyllis Chesler

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by Phyllis Chesler

The newest mutation of antisemitism takes its place among reconstituted older forms, all of them perniciously making their appearances in a host of welcoming milieus.

The Blood Libels against Israel and the Jews never seem to quit. Human Rights Watch, Gisha, IfNotNow, JVP, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR-I), Amnesty, etc. are all well funded to work full-time creating and spinning just such pernicious propaganda. 

According to NGO Monitor, these NGOs claim that Israel is to blame—not Hamas, never Hamas—for “confining” or “caging” Palestinians in Gaza, denying them medical care, and “decimating Gaza’s health care sector.” Hamas’s choice to use their money to build tunnels, buy rockets, fund suicide killers, and their refusal to use monies to build infra-structure for their people, including hospitals, are never mentioned, nor is the fact that this virus “arrived in Gaza via students returning from Pakistan.” According to NGO Monitor:

“NGO campaigns on COVID-19 are simply a rebranding of the past 20 years of NGO anti-Israel hatred, repackaged to exploit the current global pandemic.”

However, equally pernicious, and perhaps as dispiriting, are the ways in which presumably high-quality scientific and medical journals, such as Lancet, have also published highly politicized non-truths in their pages. For example: That the alleged Israeli “occupation” of “Palestinian lands” has led to an increase in woman-battering on the West Bank and in Gaza.

The truth of Muslim women’s lives is better portrayed in a new film by veteran filmmaker Pierre Rehov. Child marriage, forced veiling, honor killing, and wife-beating are pandemic in Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. "West Bank" and Yehuda veShomron in Hebrew) as well as in Gaza and have absolutely nothing to do with Israel’s policies of self-defense. As of 2019-2020, Palestinian imams and terrorist leaders all support Sharia law for women. This means wife-chastisement for disobedience, and in Allah’s name—child marriage, polygamy, and veiling.

Given this larger picture, there are times I wish to escape to another world, a better one. But I can’t. When I pick up a literary magazines or read the mass (left stream) media I am met with a steady acidic drip-drip-drip of Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism. These days, no avid reader can hide from it.

For example, in an April, 2020 book review for the New York Review of Books—and on another subject entirely (“hipness,” the creation of celebrity, the Andy Warhol 80s), Luc Sante casually burnishes his own credentials by writing this: “Naturally, he (Glenn O’Brien, whose book Sante was reviewing) was a liberal; he despised Trump, the NRA, Israeli apartheid, the sanctioning of Cuba—he also despised burqas, on which he took the French government’s view.”

The absolutely false allegation of Israeli apartheid is right up there with prevailing left and liberal views of Trump and the NRA—those whom we are supposed to hate at all times and in all places.

On March 30, 2020, the New York Times published an obituary of Sol Kerzner, a very successful Jewish businessman and a leading opponent of real apartheid in South Africa—a man who worked with and for Nelson Mandela. Nevertheless, Kerzner is gratuitously described as “sharp elbowed” and as the “South African version of Donald J. Trump.” Supposedly questionable business dealings are trotted out. Kerzner is also described as someone who “profited hugely by circumventing the social and sexual strictures of apartheid.” Talk about no good deed going unpunished! Kerzner’s crime is that of relaxing apartheid rules for his gambling casinos and hotels, and profiting from doing so. (Shades of Jews and filthy lucre!)  The obituary admits: “There, blacks and whites could do what was forbidden in the rest of South Africa: Mingle and frolic freely.”

I have read many NYT’s Obituaries for real estate salesmen and developers that do not sound like this.

For example, only two weeks later, on April 14th, the NYT’s ran an obituary of a real estate “player and philanthropist” named Robby Browne about whom only positive things were written. Like Mr. Kerzner, Browne also mingled with V.I.P.s and Hollywood celebrities but he was not “arrogant about his success.” Unlike the self-made Kerzner, Browne’s father ;attended Phillips Academy and Yale University; his mother “went from waltzing with society swans to selling mansions to them.” Browne was something of a blue-blood and he, too, attended Phillips Academy and both Princeton and Harvard. “He lived according to Gore Vidal’s principle that no one should ever turn down the opportunity to go on television or have sex.”

I doubt that blue-blooded Browne was Jewish.

May both real estate mavens rest in peace and may our cognitive warriors, our truth-tellers go from strength to strength.


Phyllis Chesler is a Ginsburg-Ingerman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, received the 2013 National Jewish Book Award,.authored 18 books, including Women and Madness and The New Anti-Semitism, and 4 studies about honor killing, Her latest books are An American Bride in Kabul, A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25593?mc_cid=02d2884de8&mc_eid=b38bea0d50

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