The United Nations refuses to condemn North Korea for deliberately sinking a South Korean ship and killing 46 South Koreans, but erupts, along with the rest of the European and American Left, over Israel killing nine people who attacked Israeli commandoes.
33 of the most recent 40 resolutions passed by the United Nations Human Rights Council have condemned Israel. Current member states include Cuba, Libya, and Saudi Arabia.
Syria declares publicly that “Israel is a state based upon crime, slaughter,” and Hugo Chavez denounces Israel as a “genocidal” state.
Israel takes some Darfur refugees, but not all, and is condemned, while Egypt sends them back to Sudan, without comment.
The United States and Russia achieve multiple targeted killings of terrorists, without comment (or indeed celebration), but Israel, upon whom the targeted terrorists have inflicted the most slaughter, targets terrorists and the world erupts.
The mainstream media (AP) provides a helpful list of all terrorist incidents that have occurred globally — but excludes any terrorist incident directed at Israel.
Israeli leaders cannot go safely into some European countries for fear of being arrested for war crimes under the faux-doctrine of “universal jurisdiction,” while children-targeting murderers such as Hamas face no such international reproach.
Leftist filmmakers, writers and actors abuse their celebrity to try to coerce the Toronto International Film Festival into banning Israeli films — though Israel has by far the most robust free press and free speech standard of any country in the Middle East, and these celebrities have nothing to say about Saudi Arabia, which prohibits movie theaters, or Iran, which issues death-dealing fatwas against artists insufficiently respectful of Islam.
What’s going on?
Not having been born Jewish, and therefore perhaps less sensitive to the easy hatred of Jews in many cultural narratives, the explanation of anti-Semitism doesn’t satisfy me. Though at times anti-Semitism has seemed the only explanation left, it doesn’t satisfy me because the Left — and that is where the bulk of anti-Israel sentiment now resides — simply does not rally around disgust at a nation based upon its minority ethnicity. Call the Left what you will — racially opportunistic (overplaying the race card), racially profligate (every modern conservative notion can be explained by racism), racially condescending (“those racists in the South”), racially hypocritical (“loves the black race, hates the black man”) — the Left is not simplistically “racist” in the traditional sense of that term and would not be at a bigoted war with Israel simply because it is populated by Jews.
Something else is going on.
It is, I believe, because there is a place, in the middle of Dar al-Islam, where Jews are powerful — or more precisely, powerful vis-a-vis Muslims. It is the power dynamic that disturbs the Leftists. For which we need some background.
