Marvin Hier, a rabbi and the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, writes in the Wall Street Journal about the double standard applied against Israel and the Jews.
The world-wide protests against Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza are so full of hatred that they leave me with the terrible feeling that these protests have little to do with the so-called disproportionality of the Israeli response to Hamas rockets, or the resulting civilian casualties.
My fear is that the rage we see in the protesters marching in the streets is far more profound and dangerous than we would like to believe. There are a great many people in the world who, even after Auschwitz, just can’t bear the Jewish state having the same rights they so readily grant to other nations. These voices insist Israel must take risks they would never dare ask of any other nation-state — risks that threaten its very survival — because they don’t believe Israel should exist in the first place.
Just look at the spate of attacks this week on Jews and Jewish institutions around the world: a car ramming into a synagogue in France; a Chabad menorah and Jewish-owned shops sprayed with swastikas in Belgium; a banner at an Australian rally demanding “clean the earth from dirty Zionists!”; demonstrators in the Netherlands chanting “Gas the Jews”; and in Florida, protestors demanding Jews “Go back to the ovens!”
I remember the US media’s reaction to the 1967 war. It was overwhelmingly admiring of the Israeli repulse of the Arab invasions and subsequent victories against the massed attacks. Things have sure turned around since then. Now a rain of terror rockets dropping down on civilians is supposed to be shrugged off by the Israelis. If not, then they are condemned. The west will again impose a ceasefire – which Israel will abide by while Hamas ignores it.
It’s worse than a double standard, really. Much, much worse.
Some of it has to do with the low expectations that the world holds for Palestinians. No one really believes that they will act in a civilized manner, so when they don’t no one is really surprised.
It is sickening to watch newscasts of this conflict. They spend minute after minute detailing Palestinian casualties and deaths. They focus in on body after body, show face after face of women and children affected by the Israeli offensive. They interview mothers of dead and wounded children. They interview doctors in Gaza hospitals about how bad the carnage is. They drone on and on about the starvation and hardship of the Palestinians.
In the meantime they don’t show one single foot of coverage about the carnage caused by Hamas rockets raining down indiscriminately in Israel. They don’t show a single Israeli casualty – no women, no children, no bodies, no damage. The Palestinians fire their rockets indifferent to where they might land – it could be a school, a hospital, an orphanage – they just plain don’t care. The people killed will just be Jews after all. It was Hamas that broke the cease fire by attacking Israel but no one in the news reports ever mentions that.
It is blatant anti-semitism at its worst. That there is still so much hatred of Jews in the world and even in our own, supposedly tolerant, nation is just incredible to me.