"Historians may look back at this period and wonder if people had lost their bearings. Few reporters have traveled to Iraq to bear witness to the Nazi-like wave of terror that is rolling across that country. The United Nations has been mostly mum. World leaders seem to be consumed with other matters in this strange summer of 2014. There are no flotillas traveling to Syria or Iraq. And the beautiful celebrities and aging rock stars — why doesn’t the slaughter of Christians seem to activate their social antennas?"
Two answers:
1. Reporters are not traveling to Syria and Iraq because it is too dangerous there. Look what happened to James Foley. And if it's out of sight on your nightly news, it's out of mind.
2. It's so much more fun for liberal-minded folks to scoldthe Jews, excuse me, the Zionists, for their "disproportionate" response to the firing of more than 3,000 rockets at civilian population centers throughout Israel over the past month. Pictures of suffering Palestinians in Gaza? They are available to journalists in abundance, as long as the journalists don't break Hamas's rules and film rockets being fired at Israel from the proximity of schools, hospitals or mosques.
Mr. Lauder asks that the Jewish people become more involved in this tragedy. Believe me, Mr. Lauder, I'm trying, but no one is listening.
Jeffrey, like you and Ronald Lauder I am appalled by the silence surrounding the slaughter of Christians as much as I hate antisemitism.
ReplyDeleteI find Mr. Lauder's column good and important.
I also find the introductory/editorial paragraph profoundly antisemitic.
"People are getting killed because of their beliefs. Jews have a duty to speak up."
This isn't in the column. This is the predictable antisemitic NYT twist. It probably demonstrates well the fact that any dealing with antisemites results in collaboration.
Now, why am I so angry? I find this insistence that "Jews have a duty to speak up" profoundly antisemitic. When the Holocaust survivors emerging from the Nazi or post WWII displaced persons camps, when refugees from Arab countries, fleeing the massacres there, when Jews in Israel hiding from Hamas rockets are ordered "to speak up for others" I am fuming. Few things can be more antisemitic, more dehumanizing than ordering a small group of tragic people to care .... about others. Only. They don't have the right to grieve and heal, they don't have the right to try to have a semblance of normal life and to start their families and tale of them, they don't have the right to protect themselves, etc. They must, must, must "SERVE" others, including children of their perpetrators. There are billions of Christians, but 14 millions of Jews, most of them immigrants, must do what the Buffetts; the Obamas; the Presbyterian leaders and the Desmond Tutus of the worlds (who are sooooo busy attacking Jews), etc. don't have any intention of doing.
I don't know who started this nonsense ("Jews must speak up for....") but again I have no doubt that it is profoundly antisemitic.
Correction.
ReplyDeleteI want to correct the sentence I scrambled.
The sentence which starts with "They don't have the right to grieve and heal ... " should end in "... start their families and TAKE CARE OF THEM, they don't have the right to protect themselves, etc."