Anti-Zionism: The Führer’s  New Clothes

A new and improved version of the ancient and continuing antisemitism that has plagued the Jewish community for centuries has been introduced in the postmodern world of consequentialism and multiculturalism. The old antisemitism is now being marketed in an acceptable, even glitzy, package called anti-Zionism.^[1] After lying low for a time, the ugly and abominable spirit that produced the Holocaust has emerged from the shadows in Europe, the Middle East, and in a shocking number of nations around the world. Far and wide, it has become fashionable for ultraliberal politicians and the extreme leftist secular press to sport the garments of anti-Zionism, the new antisemitism. Now being clothed in the newest fabrics and styles of anti-Israel haute couture has become a badge of hauteur in far too many societies around the world. This is especially true in the elite, rarified air of avant-garde leftist media, academia, and politics. In much of Western Europe, the delegitimization of Israel has become a cottage industry,^[2] and anti-Zionism has become “a ‘respectable’ anti-Semitism.”^[3] At the same time, ancient Eastern European hotbeds of antisemitism that had flourished for centuries only to be driven underground by post-World-War-II civility have now begun to erupt with the intensity and regularity of Old Faithful.^[4] Now, the old, pustule-infested emperor thinks he has a gleaming new wardrobe of politically correct garments! The naked truth, however, is that, when clothed with the garments of anti-Zionism, the old antisemitism, though subtle and politically correct, is even more heinous and insidious than its source, the evil Haman, and its most recent incarnation, the Führer himself.

Interestingly, it was Hitler who set the stage for clothing antisemitism in the garments of anti-Zionism: “While the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle.”^[5] Hitler’s ideas are alive and well, as is evidenced by 1998 Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s^[6] depiction of Israel a “racist state by virtue of Judaism’s monstrous doctrines—racist not just against the Palestinians, but against the entire world, which it seeks to manipulate and abuse.”^[7]

Very subtly, anti-Zionists have discarded the foundation of eugenics, race, and social Darwinism that the Third Reich employed for its antisemitism and have adopted a new, politically correct foundation for their perverse hatred of Jews, which they trumpet as “human rights.” Recognizing this transition from racial to socio-political antisemitism, Anthony Chase said, “The twentieth century brought with it anti-Zionist and anticolonialist movements in the Arab world, some currents of which looked to human rights as a basis of support.”^[8] The Arabs were joined immediately by Europeans, Latin Americans, and others who had discovered the new and universally approved means of vaunting their inherent and long-held antisemitism. The major promulgator of this new antisemitism, however, has been the United Nations, which has not hesitated to accuse Israel of “racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and attempted genocide.”^[9] When the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3329 in 1975, declaring, “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” many Western nations tacitly endorsed this indictment by their silence and their acquiescence to it.^[10]

Robert Wistrich described the emergence of the new, socially acceptable antisemitism that is marketed as anti-Zionism: “Anti-Semitism did not dissolve or significantly diminish, let alone disappear, after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Instead, Israel itself would gradually be identified as the new ‘Jewish question.’”^[11] This new antisemitism would even be so inane as to maintain that “Jews benefited from exploiting their suffering during the Holocaust.”^[12] Anti-Zionism, therefore, has become a socially acceptable way to advocate for the elimination of the state of Israel.^[13] Jonathan Sacks says it well: “The new antisemitism is clearly continuous with the old. It has recycled all the old myths, from the Blood Libel to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^[14] Yet it is different. It is not Christian anti-Judaism, nor is it the racial antisemitism of Nazi Germany. It is . . . focused not on Jews as individuals but on Jews as a nation in their land.”^[15] As David Blumenthal says, “Jew-haters in the West who feel uneasy labeling themselves ‘antisemites’ find in ‘anti-Zionism’ an easy way to sustain their Jew-hatred under a socially acceptable label.”^[16]

Today, old underlying currents of antisemitism can hide behind what is euphemistically called a “critique” of Israel. “This new expression of anti-Semitism is found in right wing populism, Islamist propaganda, and sometimes left wing ideologies,” says Andreas Zick. Additionally, “Israeli policies against Palestinians are sometimes defined as ‘Jewish’^[17] and thus attributed to religious rather than nationalistic causes. This anti-Semitic critique is linked to two other themes: first, a comparison of Israeli policies to the crimes of the Nazis in the Third Reich; and second, a separatist ideology categorizing Jews as a strange community that is not part of society.”^[18] No matter how it is disguised, however, “anti-Zionism contains anti-Semitism like a cloud contains a storm,”^[19] says Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery. And no matter how it is presented, “the antisemitism that is anti-Zionism has permeated respectable public discourse, incorporating the hoary antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as vindictive and bloodthirsty.”^[20] Even though anti-Zionists have tried desperately to mask their antisemitism with a thick layer of politically correct cosmetics, the hideous, pock-marked ugliness remains. The underlying reality is what Emmanuel Lévinas described when he spoke of the Jewish perspectives on anti-Zionist antisemitism: “Do we not smell here . . . beyond all violence which still submits to will and reason, the odor of the camps? Violence is no longer a political phenomenon of war and peace, beyond all morality. It is the abyss of Auschwitz or the world at war.”^[21]

Jonathan Sacks speaks of three degrees of anti-Zionism: 1) “Jews are not entitled to a nation-state of their own,” which is, in effect, a denial “of the right of Israel to exist”; 2) “the existence of Israel is merely an aberration” which “is responsible for all the evils of the world”; and 3) “all Jews are Zionists; therefore all Jews are responsible for the sufferings caused by Israel; therefore all Jews are legitimate targets of attack.” This third degree, says Sacks, is the “bridge from anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism.”^[22] This is why, as Walter Laqueur has argued, “There is no clear borderline” between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.^[23] Whatever the case, Rosemary Ruether hit the nail on the head when she said, “There is no doubt that anti-Zionism has become a way of reviving the myth of the ‘perennial evil nature of the Jews.’”^[24] Clearly, in today’s world, the “enemies of the Jews nearly always use the word ‘Zionist’ when they mean Jews.”^[25] In fact, antisemitism’s new garments are becoming less and less subtle and more and more crude and vulgar.

“Like all anti-Semities, the anti-Zionists oppose the Jewish state not for any action [that it has committed]but for its presence,” says David Patterson.^[26] “Whatever the current evil might be—racism, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or genocide—one can be sure that the anti-Zionists will hang the label on the Jewish state. Like the religious and secular anti-Semites of the nineteenth century, the religious and secular anti-Zionists, from rabid Jihadists to radical liberals, share a self-righteous indignation over the very existence of the Jewish state precisely because they themselves would be the moral measure of humanity.”^[27] What is amazing about such anti-Zionist moralizing is that many—if not most—of those who make such judgments against Israel are generally amoral agnostics who have arrogated to themselves the right to adjudicate morality and “fairness” while living lives of complete hypocrisy often void of constraint and lacking any true ethical boundaries! In reality, many are postmodern nihilists who ultimately believe in nothing—even denying the possibility of objective truth—and accept no moral restrictions except what they in their narcissistic subjectivity wish to impose on others.^[28]

Anti-Zionism, the New Christian Antisemitism

Any reasonable person would think that the Holocaust would have forever destroyed the historical Christian antisemitism that before that time had raged throughout Europe and elsewhere for nearly a millennium, beginning at the turn of the eleventh century. Sadly, this has not been the case, for the brutality of the Holocaust did not bring many Christians to true biblical repentance^[29] for the church’s complicity in the breeding ground for the Holocaust and in the mechanics of its manifestation. Sadly, it served only to drive much of Christian antisemitism underground where it continued to seethe, awaiting an opportunity and an excuse to erupt. That excuse came when Palestinian Arab and Muslim propaganda, which had been directed relentlessly against the state and people of Israel, began to impact mainstream Christian denominations and, more recently, even some Evangelicals. Anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism that is now in vogue in far too many Christian circles, where attacks on Zionist “colonialism” give vent to latent, but insidious, antisemitism.

Patterson, however, makes the historical connection that anti-Zionist Christians would like to ignore: “The diatribes of the anti-Zionist anti-Semites reek of the odor of the camps, and they reek most disgustingly in the sanctimonious denunciations of the Israelis that erupt from the mouths of well-meaning liberal Christians and not-so-well-meaning liberal intellectuals. In both we discover that time-worn manifestations of Jew hatred turn out to be timeless. Liberal Christian anti-Zionism has implications that play into the hands of supersessionist theology. Left-wing intellectual anti-Zionism is the fashionable expression of Jew hatred traceable to what we have seen in the Enlightenment and the socialist liberalism that followed in its wake.”^[30] Franklin Littell identified the source of the new, improved version of the old Christian antisemitism: “The rage for universal truths, accompanied by abandonment of holy events and the Scriptures that record them, came to dominate university thinking following the Enlightenment. It is this style of thinking that is the most fertile single source of liberal Antisemitism—whether religious or secular.”^[31]

While the Roman Catholic Church has led the way in identifying and removing historical and theological foundations for outright Christian antisemitism,^[32] it has still maintained a posture toward the state of Israel that is not-so-subtle anti-Zionism. This posture can be traced to the beginning of the Zionist movement. “When in 1903 Herzl visited Pope Pius X, the latter declared that whereas the Church could not prevent a Jewish return to Jerusalem, it could never sanction it.”^[33] This policy was maintained until 1993,^[34] when the Vatican finally granted the state of Israel official recognition. Even then, the Vatican policy was not one of full acceptance of the Jewish right to the whole land of Israel, including its undivided capital city, Jerusalem. In fact, when all of the old city of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, was returned to Jewish control during the Six Day War, “the Vatican began to issue a series of calls” for the internationalization of Jerusalem, something that it had never requested “during the nineteen years that the city [had been] under Jordanian control.”^[35] Even during the historical deliberations of Vatican II and the development of its Nostra Aetate declaration—which rejected the historical Christian charge of deicide that had been lodged against the Jews for centuries—Muslim pressure, together with that of “Arabophile Catholic factions,” succeeded in having its original draft replaced “with a watered-down version.”^[36] As a matter of fact, “the dhimmi Arab clergy considered the passage which annulled the collective accusation of deicide against the Jews as untimely and demanded its removal.”^[37] The Arab Catholic clergy even argued that Muslim protests “against the disculpation of the Jewish people” were made in “a perfectly authentic pursuit” of the Koran, a demand “for the honor of God and of both Christ and the Virgin.”^[38]

Among mainstream Protestant denominations, the World Council of Churches has long championed the cause of Christian anti-Zionism—and, indeed, of Christian antisemitism both before and after the declaration of the statehood of Israel. Before that time, mainstream Protestant denominations lobbied against the formation of the Israeli state, arguing that the land of Israel (Palestine) should be a cultural center for Jews and nothing more. In 1948, “pressure from Arab Protestants and local missionaries, supersessionist theology, oil ties, dislike of Jews and the emphasis on peace and justice issues led the new World Council of Churches to be ambivalent or even hostile to the new state [Israel].”^[39] From its earliest days, the WCC Middle East media were “composed of people from Arab countries”^[40] and did not have even one Israeli or Jewish voice. In 1948, the Christian Century “supported the internationalization of Jerusalem” and “blamed the creation of Israel on New York Jewish voters.”^[41]

As a result of the liberal Protestant press promotions, the WCC was—and has continued to be—the leading Christian voice denouncing Israel. Melanie Phillips notes that in WCC-backed publications “the critique of some Israeli sin would be severe, while Arab countries were spared any kind of condemnation in order not to jeopardize Christian missionary interests there.”^[42] This position became particularly true after the Six-Day War “when the influential Protestant journal Christianity and Crisis switched from a pro-Israel position to the Palestinian camp on the grounds that nothing could ‘sanctify the right of conquest in the twentieth century.’”^[43] Phillips states the obvious when she says, “If one wonders how it could possibly be that both the liberal churches in particular and the West in general consistently blame Israel not just for crimes it has not committed but of which it is often the victim, one need look no further than the WCC.”^[44] This posture of the World Council of Churches was particularly on display in the major role that it played in the 2001 United Nations Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, which branded Israel as a racist state.^[45] Continuing WCC anti-Zionism and antisemitism have been so pervasive as to produce innumerable examples of the duplicity of double standards wherein Israel is condemned for offenses that are minor in contrast to those of its persecutors from the Muslim world for which there is little, if any, condemnation.

Jewish Anti-Zionism

Amazingly, not insignificant numbers of the Jewish people have expressed either apathy or antipathy toward Zionism—and for a variety of reasons. On the one extreme, are the Haredim, the ultra-conservative Jews whose anti-Zionist stance has been maintained for purely religious and halakhic reasons. The Haredim establish their position on rabbinic rulings that anything that is new “is prohibited from the Torah in all places” as well as on rabbinic prohibitions against “hastening the day of redemption” since Zionism has formed a secular state that is not the Messianic state.^[46] On the opposite end of the spectrum, large numbers of socialist and liberal European and American Jews were against the formation and continuation of the State of Israel from the earliest days of the Zionist movement primarily because they believed that assimilation into the nations and cultures where Jews lived was the best-case scenario for Jewish survival and prosperity. Thomas Kolsky confirmed that “the longest, fiercest, and most persistent resistance to [Zionism] in America came from Reform Jews.”^[47] While in the earliest days of the Zionist movement, “Jews opposing Zionism were surely more common than Jews supporting it,”^[48] this situation gradually changed with discourse and was reversed with the Holocaust, though some ambivalence still existed in many Jewish circles. Regardless as to the circumstances, a small minority of Jewish intellectuals has continued to be anti-Zionist. Paul Eidelberg describes some of these intellectuals in this manner: “Jewish socialists sought to dissolve not only class distinctions but also their own Jewishness in the amorphous sea of egalitarianism,” which has rendered them “all the more prone to demophrenia” in which “they identify with their enemies” and “jeopardize their own interests.”^[49]

Then, there are some Jews who have a strong distaste for the state of Israel based on the Zionist agenda that helped form it. Shlomo Sand, among others, attacks the historicity of Jewish legitimacy as a people, as a nation, and as rightful possessors of the land: “The myth of the historical claim to Eretz Israel, which fortified the self-sacrificing endeavors of the first Zionist settlers and legitimized the acquisition of the territorial base for the future state, led it after nineteen years of independence to become immured in an oppressive colonialist situation.”^[50] Some rabbis have also joined the chorus of anti-Zionist rhetoric, even adopting some of the language, if not the philosophy, of the anti-Zionists. As an example, Mark Ellis points to a Jewish Voice for Peace Passover Seder observance in which, rather than following the tradition of reciting the Ten Plagues that God visited on Egypt in order to secure the release of Pharaoh’s Israelite slaves, the group’s rabbis listed the ten Israeli plagues of “occupation, poverty, restrictions on movement, water shortage, destruction of olive trees, home demolitions, settlements, political prisons, profiteering, denial of the right of return, and erasures of histories.”^[51] In the end, Patterson probably has a good point when he says that “the Jew’s Anti-Zionism is rooted in a certain rebellion against the Zion from which the Torah goes forth, against the Torah that comes from the Holy One, and against the holiness that lies at the core of the Jew’s humanity.”^[52] Perhaps virulent anti-Zionism, even among Jews, is akin to antisemitism in that it is rebellion against—even a hatred of—the God of the Jews and his moral demands upon Israel and the world.

As a result of historical and even present-day postures in which either antipathy or ambivalence toward Israel exists among Jews, nearly all anti-Zionists have formed the habit of pointing to supposedly anti-Zionist Jews as examples of those who are truthful in sharing the objections of Palestinian Arabs and others to the existence of the state of Israel.^[53] Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin counter this argument, however, by saying, “Anti-Zionists would be hard put to find any affirmatively identifying Jew who would not view them as mortal enemies. Studies and opinion polls have shown that 99 percent of American Jewry identifies with the right of Jews to the Jewish state.”^[54] Perhaps this is why after Alvin Rosenfeld had recounted “the infinitely varied attempts, mostly by Jewish progressives, to depict Israel as the devil’s own experiment station, the epitome of apartheid, and the one genuine inheritor of Nazism,” he concluded that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.”^[55] For Jews no longer bound by religion or tradition or peoplehood, there seemed to nothing left of Jewish “identity” except to attack the Jewish state.^[56]

The New Blood Libel: False Indictments

Every accusation imaginable—and some, unimaginable—has been hurled at the Jewish people through the centuries. Perhaps the most damnable has been the unrelenting Christian charge that all Jews were guilty of deicide because they were said to have been solely responsible for the death of Jesus.^[57] Of almost equal magnitude to the diabolical charge of deicide has been the Blood Libel, which was the Medieval Christian myth that accused the Jews of kidnapping and murdering Christian children in order to use their blood in religious rituals during Jewish holy days.^[58] A third vile accusation against the Jews was another Medieval Christian fabrication, the so-called “desecration of the host,” in which “Jews have been accused of stealing the bread of the Eucharist and then breaking it, torturing it, transfixing it, even causing it to bleed so that they can reenact the crucifixion of Jesus through the host.^[59]

What has been all too common among the superstitious and ignorant masses of history, however, has continued to be maintained during humanity’s most knowledgeable era, the time of modernity and postmodernity. Fabrications as specious as the Blood Libel^[60] and the charge of deicide continue to be leveled against the international Jewish community and more specifically against the nation and people of Israel. Whatever charge is in vogue in the politically correct world of post-modern “tolerance” finds an easy target in the Jews and Israel.^[61] The Western media are especially devious and corrupt in adopting and promulgating such accusations as “undeniable facts.” In actually believing such utterly preposterous Palestinian Arab myths, some Western journalists demonstrate an incredible level of naïveté, especially they when ignore the simple fact “that the Arab world does not maintain journalistic standards according to western values.”^[62] When they are “exposed to the popular ‘Palestinian story’ . . . their sympathy for that narrative grows and, eventually, they become dependent on those Palestinian sources” for their information.^[63] Then, such deceitful Muslim “media”^[64] create totally unbelievable and outrageous claims like this: “[Palestinian villagers] spoke spontaneously how Nablus, Ramallah, and al-Khalil [Hebron] turned into modern-day Aushwitzes [sic], Treblinkas, and Bergen-Belsens,” and they make comparisons of the “Nazi holocaust [sic] against the Jews” with the “Jewish-perpetuated holocaust [sic] against [the Palestinian Arabs].”^[65] Such media-generated—or at least media-perpetuated—propaganda is void of reason and is totally lacking in traditional standards for ethical and responsible journalism.

Ultra-hyperbolical propaganda of this sort does not always reach media audiences in the West; however, it does influence naïve and sympathetic Western reporters and writers to such a degree that the vitriol filters down in other accusations against Israel that are equally preposterous though less sensationalized. As Akbar Ahmed observes, “Hyperbole may be thought appropriate for the mob gathered in the Muslim city—wiping the enemy from the face of the earth, the mother of battles which would claim thousands of lives, and so on—but it translates badly in the international press.”^[66] On the other hand, some Western media journalists and analysts—particularly television personalities—gleefully report some of the most highly toxic Muslim propaganda as though it were true, and they report some extreme incidents of supposed Israeli brutality as true when, in fact, those incidents have been deliberately staged by the Palestinian Arabs, sometimes in collusion with those Western reporters themselves.^[67] Some Western television crews have even “manipulated images of Palestinian youth throwing stones to portray them as very skilled fighters,”^[68] and others have paid Palestinian Arab youth to add drama to their on-camera reports by engaging in rock-throwing incidents. With such duplicity common in the Muslim media and even not infrequent in the Western media, is it any wonder that the real issues of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are barely covered and what is covered is more sensationalism designed to boost television ratings than serious journalism that seeks to discover and report the real issues and events?

The false accusations hurled against Israel—and Jews, in general—take many forms, generally stretching to the patently absurd and often to the insane, a fact which only marginalizes any legitimate claims that the Palestinian Arabs may have against Israeli government policies or practices. The outrageous indictments that have been leveled against Israel include the following: 

Maintaining an Apartheid State

Former US President Jimmy Carter famously made the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state, though when his hand was called on the matter, he walked back his blanket statements by saying they applied to the “West Bank” and not to all of Israel.^[69]  Alan Dershowitz said, “One thing is certain: [Carter’s] book has fed the anti-Israel hatred that helps keep the conflict going. He has granted undue legitimacy to the claims of a once-marginal group of extremists that has sought for years to equate Israel with apartheid South Africa.”^[70] Leftist luminaries like Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu have supported such insidious and ridiculous claims, even accusing Israelis of “fighting against God”^[71] and comparing the Jews with Hitler and other mass murderers. “The Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful,” said Tutu. “The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevec, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust,”^[72] he continued, perhaps even trying, by implication, to prophesy of Israel’s future demise.

Indictments of Israel for “apartheid” policies gained ascendancy in 2001 when the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance focused primarily on Israeli treatment of Palestinians and only secondarily on human-rights violations and attempts at genocide in the rest of the world. Using the backdrop of Durban, South Africa, where this conference was convened, the U.N. leaders attempted to reify the charge of apartheid against Israel. The draft of its resolutions included “statements equating Zionism with racism, and alleging that it is an ‘apartheid’ state guilty of ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ designed to ensure a Jewish state.”^[73] Journalist Benjamin Pogrund, himself of South African heritage, was shocked—“gobsmacked,” as he called it—to see these draft resolutions. “I knew apartheid and had already learned enough about Israel to know that the draft was a concoction of lies and distortions. . . . The actual text accused Israel of ‘a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity’; it singled out Israel for alleged ‘ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of historic Palestine’; it said Zionism was ‘based on racial superiority’.”^[74]

The charges that purported Israel to be an apartheid state have always been designed to undercut the right of both the people and the nation of Israel to exist. In fact, it was the Palestinian Liberation Organization, one of history’s most mendacious and vicious terrorist movements, which “invented the apartheid canard in the mid-1960s, years before Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.”^[75] As Yehuda Bauer says, “Israel is being accused of being an apartheid state, with the obvious conclusion that as an apartheid state, it has no legitimacy of any kind and has to be destroyed, and the same genocidal and antisemitic attitude is propagated as with the antisemitic liberals.”^[76] Victor Sharpe makes a strong but true rebuttal of such claims: “The Left refuses to admit that it is the Arab-Muslim culture that actively engages in the very evil practices that they falsely hurl at Israel. And where do you find apartheid, racism, repression and torture? Why, in the very Arab-Muslim world the Left supports and embraces.” Instead of exposing Arab-Muslim hypocrisy, however, the leftist apologists always retreat “to the tawdry defense of hurling charges of Islamophobia and racism at all who attempt to correct it.”^[77]

The charge of apartheid Israel is demonstrably false. “There is no Israeli ideology, policy or plan to segregate, persecute or mistreat the Arab population. . . . Arab citizens of Israel enjoy the full range of civil and political rights, including the right to organize politically, the right to vote and the right to speak and publish freely. Israeli Arabs and other non-Jewish Israelis serve as members of Israel’s security forces, are elected to parliament and appointed to the country’s highest courts. . . . These facts serve as a counter to the apartheid argument and demonstrate that Israel is committed to democratic principles and equal rights for all its citizens.”^[78] In truth, “Israel actually is the only apartheid-free state in the Middle East,”^[79] says Efraim Karsh. If this were not true, Evelyn Gordon could not have written that “back in 2011, when the Arab Spring revolutions were at their height, Haaretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer reported being stunned to hear from demonstrators in both Tunis and Cairo—neither of whom knew he represented an Israeli newspaper—that they wanted ‘a democracy like in Israel,’” nor could she have reported that “the Middle East Media Research Institute published excerpts from articles in the Arab press over the last year that held up Israel as a model Arab states should learn from—in some cases, because of its economic, scientific, and democratic achievements, but in others, because of its democracy and even its morality.”^[80]

The truth is that Israel is just the opposite of an apartheid state, for it promotes and lives by values that are diametrically opposed to those of the prototypical apartheid regime in South African. “Israel has not since its inception taken away vested Israeli citizenship of even one Palestinian for the sole reason that the person is ethnic Palestinian. Israel has not created designated territories within its border to which it has forcibly removed its own citizens who are ethnic Palestinian. Indeed, when one starts to look at what apartheid really was, any comparison between Israel today and South Africa at the time of apartheid becomes ludicrous.”^[81] It is for this reason that Jean-Christophe Rufin recommended that the charge of apartheid against Israel should be criminalized because is so ridiculously opprobrious. “What should be penalised,” he said, “is the perverse and defamatory use of the charge of racism against those very people who were victims of racism to an unparalleled degree. The accusations of racism, of apartheid, of Nazism carry extremely grave moral implications. These accusations have, in the situation in which we find ourselves today, major consequences which can, by contagion, put in danger the lives of our Jewish citizens.”^[82] Sadly, as Alan Dershowitz points out, “The slander that portrays Israel as a ‘racist colonialist apartheid state’ is already so widespread as to be part of the international community’s ordinary parlance.”^[83] The rush to make moral equivalencies based on imagined parallels between one set of circumstances and another has not helped anyone except the smugly self-righteous who perpetrate such nonsense.

If any of the nations in the Middle East could be accused of being apartheid states, it would certainly have to be the Arab states. Efraim Karsh confirms the longstanding nature of this truth: “Apartheid has been an integral part of the Middle East for over a millennium, and its Arab and Muslim nations continue to legally, politically, and socially enforce this discriminatory practice against their hapless minorities.”^[84] A prime example is the “religious apartheid” of which Pakistan is guilty, wherein Muslims are “a separate—and privileged—class from others.” In reality, the very origin of Pakistan is “traceable to religious apartheid,” says India’s Foreign Affairs Record.^[85] What can be said of the social and religious practices of Pakistan can also be said of many other Muslim nations whose radical interpretations of the Qur’an and Islam in general establish and reinforce institutions of discrimination that are the essence of apartheid against minority religious populations. This is clearly the case in Saudi Arabia which even denies non-Muslims entrance to Mecca.

Comparing Zionism with Nazism

Increasingly, in both Arab nations and in other parts of the world, Zionism is being compared with Nazism in what may be one of the most psychotic accusations in history. This despicable tactic of anti-Zionists simply carries forward and expands the false indictment that the Communists made in the 1930s when they said that “Zionism and Nazism were collaborating to produce mass hysteria, a situation most favorable to Zionist plans of mass immigration into Palestine.”^[86] One of the prominent Middle Eastern agents of the Communist Comintern^[87] even suggested that “Hitler should be elected honorary president of the Zionist movement.”^[88] These arguments are today mirrored in the thinking and rhetoric of Palestinian Arabs: “In general, academic Palestinian historical discourse does not deny the Holocaust, but there is an attempt to describe its ‘instrumental’ aspects, especially when certain aspects of cooperation between Zionism and Nazism are emphasized.”^[89] In fact, in the larger Muslim world, “Zionism is actually considered to be a far more heinous crime than Nazism.”^[90] In the words of the so-called “moderate” Muslim prime minister of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, “[The Israelis] curse Hitler morning and night; however, now their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”^[91] To say that Erdogan’s accusation is absurd is a gross understatement!

The very idea of comparing the movement to establish the Jewish people in the safety and security of their own ancestral land with Adolph Hitler and the German Third Reich, whose goal it was to preside over the genocide of the Jewish people, is so repugnant that it is unclear how anyone with a scintilla of conscience and even a cursory knowledge of the Holocaust could even conceive the idea of making such a comparison. In case politicians, autocrats, and media people of the Muslim world have not noticed, Israel has not murdered even one Palestinian Arab with cyanide gas or firing squads, and until recently there has never been a single crematorium in Israel.^[92] Yet, it seems that there is no depth to which Muslim anti-Zionists will not stoop in order to stigmatize the Jewish state of Israel, and, sadly, Western media generally march in lockstep with Muslim polemicists and libelists.

Bernard Harrison says, “Coupling the Star of David with the swastika, and Israel with the Nazis . . . is not to engage in ‘criticism of Israel’; it is rather to engage in political anti-Semitism in its most traditional form.”^[93] Alan Dershowitz agrees, “Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is anti-Semitism, pure and simple. There is no other explanation for it, especially in light of the reality that there is no actual similarity between Hitler’s systematic genocide against the Jews and Israel’s efforts to defend itself from genocidal threats against its Jewish population.”^[94] When people in Germany, of all places, have the audacity to equate Zionism with Nazism, they manifest the pathology that Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rex described in these terms: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”^[95] French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch is said to have remarked that the Germans would not be alone in this regard, for the Holocaust was an immense crime for which the Germans were chiefly responsible but for which the list of coconspirators is long.^[96]

Charges that Zionism Is Racism

The opponents of the Jewish state of Israel “claim that in pursuing their aims Zionists have actually created a new oppressed and homeless people. Moreover, they charge, the sources of Zionism are the same ones that bred western colonialism and racism, meaning that its ideas must be rejected by all right-thinking human beings.”^[97] This was the theme of the infamous 2001 United Nations Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, which specifically labeled Zionism as racism. A study of what prefaced this absurd accusation is revealing. While speaking before the 1985 session of the United Nations Special Political Committee, the Representative of Syria summed up the recurring and unending anti-Zionist Muslim charges of Nazism and racism against Israel: “Palestinians are the victims of Zionism, the real heir of Nazism, which not only professes its racism but to this day also exploits the painful memory of the victims of Nazism to justify its crimes and atrocities against the Arab citizens suffering under the yoke of Zionist occupation.”^[98] Unfortunately for Israel, says Thomas Idinopulos, “the charge that Zionism is racist revives old obfuscations that have bedeviled Zionists for the past 50 years.”^[99] It extrapolates principles from real cases of racism around the world and applies them unfairly to the Jewish people.

The lies that have been fabricated against the Jews for more than a millennium simply will not die: they are merely reincarnated in new circumstances and venues by those antisemites around the world who camouflage their real pathological hatred for the Jews under the banner of anti-Zionism. The 2001 formulation of Zionism as racism merely continued the parade of such charges. Is it any wonder that US Ambassador Daniel Moynihan called the Zionism-racism resolution “obscene” and thundered to the UN’s Thirtieth General Assembly, “Today we have drained the word ‘racism’ of its meaning”^[100] or that Yale University political scientist Charles H. Fairbanks wrote, “To call Zionism a form of racism makes a mockery of the struggle against racism as the emperor Caligula made a mockery of the Roman Senate when he appoint to it his horse”? Fairbanks was even more incisive and insightful when he said that the UN General Assembly’s majority had inflicted “the most crippling blow yet dealt in the irreversible decline of concern with human rights as we know it.”^[101]

The racism charges that have been made against Israel are “not a constructive call for change in Israeli policies,” says Yosef Mazur. Instead, they are “meant to strike at the very foundations of Israel’s legitimacy as a nation” by associating “the Jewish state with a system declared a ‘crime against humanity.’”^[102] Mazur also points out the utter fallacy of the “racism” charge: “The Jews of Israel themselves comprise multiple racial and ethnic groups. Jewish Israelis comprise Europeans, Africans, Ethiopians, Georgians, Persians and other groups. Race, therefore, cannot form the basis for alleged institutionalized discrimination in Israel because the alleged discriminators (Jewish Israelis) are multiracial themselves.”^[103] Moreover, many Druze, Baha’is, Circassians, Bedouins, and Christians are also citizens of Israel even though they certainly come from different ethnic backgrounds.^[104]

Even in the United States, where an overwhelming percentage of the population is supportive of Israel, some politicians have “used the chimerical Zionism-racism charge to cast the Palestinians as blacks and the Israelis as rednecks,” a feeble attempt to parallel the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the history of slavery, segregation, and racism in the United States. Although U.S. President Barack Obama protested, “We will always reject the notion that Zionism is racism,” Gil Troy says that this analogy has “reduced the story [of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] to one of racial oppression, rather than what it is—national conflict.”^[105]

Apparently, those who attack Israel as being a racist nation do not know the difference between nationalism and racism.^[106] If nationalism is racism, then virtually every nation in the world is racist. In reality, however, even though some nations do consider their citizens to be racially superior to other nationalities and ethnicities,^[107] most nations simply take pride in their own cultures and governments in what can be described as patriotism. Christopher Wellman notes that “we are right to distinguish between racism and patriotism. . . . We not only confirm that patriotism is benign and racism malignant” and “we [also] see better why (and in what forms) patriotism is healthy and why racism is so deplorable.”^[108]

From its inception, Zionism has simply sought to restore the Jewish nation of Israel that was destroyed nearly two millennia ago, when its people were forced into worldwide dispersion. Regardless as to the extent of their dispersion and persecution, the Jewish people were able to cling to their sense of corporate—even national—identity; consequently, the restoration of the people, the nation, and the land was transformed from a hope to an expectation and finally to a reality. There is every reason, therefore, for the Israeli people to be patriotic about their nation and their land, considering the fact that for so many centuries their ancestors were involuntarily nationless and landless and were condemned to the status of being the Wandering Jew, stripped of human rights and dignity and without any means of protecting themselves and their families from the unending violence of thieves, rapists, and murderers that nearly effected their genocide. The truth is that Jewish nationalism and ethnic pride is far more removed from racism than the patriotism of most European nations and certainly of virtually all Muslim nations.

Accusations of War Crimes and Genocide

Palestinian Arab propaganda mills constantly churn out indictments against Israel, accusing the Jews of war crimes and attempted genocide. William Cook argues that “the Palestinian people are defending themselves and their land and their homes against Israeli war crimes and Israeli war criminals, both military and civilian.”^[109] Once again, the United Nations endlessly supports these specious indictments through a complicit and willing Western press. With furrowed brow, the UN Commission on Human Rights expressed its grave concern about atrocities inflicted upon the Palestinian people, calling them “war crimes, flagrant violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity.”^[110] Such oft-repeated diatribes have even affected some Israeli Arabs as is evidenced by the pronouncement of a Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel that the nation was “committing genocidal actions, war crimes, and crimes against humanity” in its military responses to Hamas missile attacks from Gaza.^[111] Needless to say, plenty of hyperventilated charges, filled with extremist rhetoric, have been and continue to be hurled against Israel for initiating exercises to protect its people and their land from indiscriminate violence and terrorism. For simply providing for the common defense of its citizens—one of the most basic responsibilities of any nation—Israel is continually charged with racism, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and attempted genocide. 

Canadian philosophy professor Michael Neumann may have summed up all the new incarnations of the old Blood Libel against the Jews when he charged Israel with engaging in a “race war” against Palestinians and “specifically accused Jews of pure racism” simply for suggesting that “any shedding of Jewish blood is a world-shattering calamity.”^[112] As if to lay a capstone on his litany of libels, he also inculpated Israel for “genocide” against Palestinians and of “crimes worse than that of the German people in World War II.” Because Newmann is an academic and apparently because his preposterous charges were so patently irrational and absurd, he appended his diatribe by making the equally absurd argument that “it can be reasonable to be anti-Semitic”!^[113]

Demands for Divestiture

One of the growing tactics of the radical left against those with whom they disagree has been the call for divestiture of investments in the businesses that support the economies of those nations or people groups that they oppose or that provide resources and equipment for those nations.^[114] For some time now, Palestinian Arabs and their supporters have promoted the use of the same tactic against Israel. Amazingly, but not unexpectedly,^[115] the many organizations that have taken up this challenge include virtually all of the mainstream denominations of Protestant Christianity.^[116] Most prominent among these is the Presbyterian Church USA, which voted to divest $21 million from Caterpillar (maker of the D9 bulldozer that it says has been used to “destroy Palestinian homes”), Motorola (makers of surveillance equipment used in the West Bank), and Hewlett-Packard (creators of technology that is employed in Israel’s blockade of Gaza).^[117] To one degree or another, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church USA, and the United Methodist Church have followed the lead of the PCUSA.^[118] Additionally, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, while not calling for total divestiture of investments, has instituted a “diversion of all denominational resources and aid to ‘those who need it most,’ code language for the Palestinians.”^[119]

It is for this reason that Diana Appelbaum has written op-ed articles in the conservative American Thinker accusing Presbyterians of anti-Semitism and false allegations against Israel.^[120] Another opinion piece in the Jewish World Review took the charge even further by accusing the Presbyterians Church of committing a sin against God.^[121] One would think that if Christians of conscience sincerely desired to divest their resources from nations or organizations that engage in racism, terrorism, crimes against humanity, and even genocide and from the international business organizations that facilitate such actions, their prime target would be those Muslim nations and businesses as well that sponsor terrorism not only against Israel and the Jewish people but also against Christians and people of other religions. Neither Christians nor Jews are terrorists while Muslim jihadists clearly are. If Christians desire to stand against oppression and human suffering, the choice of whom to challenge is very clear, and it is not Jews or Christians!

While such atrocities can be incontrovertibly ascribed to organizations like the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram, they can also be leveled at Palestinian Arab organizations like Hamas and the Palestinian Authority as well as neighboring Hezbollah in Lebanon. One thing is for certain: the nation of Israel has never ordered the murder of even one Christian or the destruction of even one Christian shrine. At the same time, the murder of Coptic Christians and the destruction of their properties, including sanctuaries, have become routine practices of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Similarly, ISIS butchers have committed virtual genocide against the historical Chaldean Church of Babylon that has continually functioned since 1552 but increasingly faces extinction because of the systematic slaughter of its people and the confiscation or destruction of its properties. Doubtless Christian intolerance for Israel’s self-defense coupled with its tolerance for Palestinian Arab aggressive terrorism is patently absurd!

Though he advocates criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian Arabs, Marc Ellis observes what is becoming more and more a tragedy of the ongoing, and increasingly one-sided, Christian debate about Israel: “Holocaust remembrance events suffer from a loss of energy and attendance” as “more and more Christians see that the Holocaust now functions to limit dissent about Israeli policies toward Palestinians.” Ellis says that “the Holocaust as a lifeline to Israel is coming to an end. So, too, the endless discussion of antisemitism is seen as a relic rather than a contemporary challenge.”^[122] What Ellis describes in mainstream denominations is also beginning to take root in Evangelicalism, which was once the bastion of Christian support for the restoration of Israel. Apparently a new generation of Evangelicals is emerging that is like the Pharaoh “to whom Joseph meant nothing.”^[123] These Evangelicals are being infected with a subtle form of anti-Zionism that diminishes support for Israeli Jews in favor of standing with Palestinian Christians against supposed Israeli injustices.

Sadly, during the Third Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization in 2010, a Pew survey of evangelical leaders revealed that only a minority sympathized primarily with Israel.^[124] Additionally, some Evangelicals, second and third generations removed from those unequivocal supporters of Israel who founded their organizations, have been influenced by the antisemitic drumbeat of the secular media and now empathize totally with the plight of Palestinian Christians at the expense of support for Israel, and they often express blatant antisemitism in their anti-Zionist diatribes.^[125] While no one should have been surprised at mainstream Protestant Christianity’s abandonment of support for Israel and the Jews since most of those denominations were largely antisemitic in their supersessionist teachings even before Zionism arose, declining Evangelical support for Israel is another matter that few would have predicted fifty, even twenty, years ago.^[126]

Surely it is time at the very least for Christians, if not for the secular, postmodern, neopagans of Western societies, to take off the blinders and see the picture that is much bigger than the propaganda of the anti-Zionist antisemites that is vaunted in the liberal media. Christians who sit in churches and listen to diatribes against Israel or read reports of such charges in denominational literature should engage in divestiture themselves by divesting themselves of their membership in and support for such churches and denominations. Organizations that call for the boycott of Israeli-made goods and services should themselves be boycotted by tithe-paying parishioners. If one claims to be a Christian, it is time to take a stand for what the Bible, the founding document of the Christian faith, says! And, much to the chagrin of many nominal Christians, the Bible just happens to be a Jewish book!^[127] It is time to open this Jewish book, read it, and live by it—all of it, not just a few selected passages that serve as pious platitudes for many Christian leaders who are more dedicated to political correctness than they are to divine truth. Jesus and Paul did not encourage believers to learn the views of the godless societies in which they lived and syncretize their Hebraic faith with those views. In the richest of Jewish tradition, they instructed believers to read and practice Holy Scripture.^[128] It is far better to be biblically correct than to be politically correct! At best, political correctness will gain only ephemeral recognition and evanescent validation in the constantly changing relativism of atheistic, secularist, and Neopagan societies. Biblical correctness will ensure blessings that will endure in eternity.

Myths and Fantasies about Palestine

Many Palestinian Arabs, including Yasir Arafat and Faisal Husseini, have claimed that the Palestinians are descendants of autochthonous Canaanite tribes, particularly of the Jebusites.^[129] Some have even gone as far as to argue that since Abraham was an “Arab,”^[130] the Jews were “descendants of the Arabs [and that] the Arabs, who were Abraham’s original offspring . . . possessed prior rights to the land of Palestine.”^[131] Ted Swedenburg maintains that “by such means the [Palestinian Arabs] meant to affirm that their originary title to the land of Palestine predated and took precedence over rival Israeli Jewish claims.”^[132] The obvious hope of these Muslim historical revisionists is to place the Palestinian Arabs in Canaan before the arrival of the Jews and to hope thereby to invalidate Israel’s claim to the land.

Muslims have even had the nerve to co-opt the Jewish Scriptures in an effort to support their argument since the Tanakh says that Jerusalem was a possession of the Jebusites before Israel entered the Promised Land^[133] and long before David conquered Jerusalem from them in the tenth century bc.^[134] David Wenkel, who has done an extensive study of the Palestinian Arab claim of historical and genealogical connection with the Jebusites, concludes that “the claim to Jebusite heritage within the Palestinian community is a recent construct.”^[135] Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi even confessed that Palestinian nationalists “anachronistically read back into the history of Palestine over the past few centuries, and even millennia, a nationalist consciousness and identity that are in fact relatively modern,” creating a “predilection for seeing in peoples such as the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites, and Philistines the lineal ancestors of the modern Palestinians.”^[136] Randall Price maintains that while some scholars have traced Canaanite artistic traditions to as late as 149 bc, there is simply no evidence in any historical document that indicates any of the Canaanite peoples continued to exist in the land of Israel.^[137] On the other hand, says Price, “Arab heritage is traceable in secular history no earlier than references in the Neo-Assyrian annals of the ninth to seventh centuries b.c.,” and “even this preserved influence of Canaanite art still leaves another 1,000 years until the coming of the Arabian nomads of Islam to the Land.”^[138]

This evidence could well explain the reason why neither the Qur’an nor any other Muslim document before, during, or immediately after the Muslim conquest of Israel mentions any “ancestral connection going back to the Canaanites (or to the Philistines or Jebusites).”^[139] Even Grand Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of Mecca, King of the Arabs, and guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia and Jerusalem, said in the early twentieth century that the Palestinians’ ancestors had only been in the area of the Holy Land for 1,000 years,^[140] which, if accurate, would have made their first appearance there around the time of Muhammad. A statement by the British Government also confirms that Palestinians themselves have long acknowledged the fact that their connection with the land reached back in history no further than Muhammad’s conquest of Palestine in the seventh century, which was more than a millennium after the Israelites/Jews settled the land.^[141] Even then, says Eliezer Schweid, “no other separate national entity based on this land alone had come into being in the land of Israel. That is to say, foreign conquest had not turned into the establishment of a new nation. The Arabs who lived in the land belonged, in terms of their national affiliation, to the greater Arab people, for whom the land of Israel was but one of many conquests.”^[142]

Yehuda Bauer has reached the conclusion that “there was no Palestinian people before the early 20th century, because local Arabs thought of themselves as inhabitants of Southern Syria (Sooriyah djanoobiyah).”^[143] In fact, for centuries before the founding of the state of Israel until long after that event, the term Palestinian was applied to Jews living in Palestine.^[144] Since the word Palestinian for centuries had referred to the Jews, the Arabs did not want to be associated with the term. As a matter of fact, some of the Arabs “denounced the term Palestine as ‘a Zionist invention.’” Daniel Gordis agrees with this assessment: “When Israel was created, there was no Palestinian national movement. Palestinian Arabs had long thought of themselves as Southern Syrians, and the term Palestinian was actually used to refer to the Jews of Palestine.”^[145] Interestingly, using the word Palestinian to describe both the land of Israel and those Jews who returned to their ancient homeland was so common that when the news of Israel’s declaration of independence was announced, it was published in the Palestine Post!^[146]

It is ironic, therefore, that the first time that the term Palestinian People was used to describe Arabs in Palestine was when it appeared in the preamble of the 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Charter that was drafted in Moscow. It is no wonder, then, that Yasser Arafat proudly boasted in his authorized biography, “If there is any such thing as a Palestinian people, it is I, Yasser Arafat, who created them.”^[147] In fact, one of Arafat’s military lieutenants, Zuheir Muhsin, made it clear that “the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”^[148] Doubtless, then, Palestinian Arab claims to be related to the Canaanites are a recent phenomenon, and they are contrary to historical evidence. How could the PLO resort to such utterly fallacious arguments to support its agenda? The answer is simple, says Roger Carasso: “The Arabs learned their disinformation tactic from the Nazis: If you repeat the lie long enough, and loud enough, people will actually believe you. As a result, most people now believe there is something called the ‘Palestinian’ people, a total fabrication, complete with a phony history and a phony culture.” Carasso concludes that “there is only one truth here, that there are 1.75 million people, a hodgepodge of Arabs and Turks, intentionally or maybe unwittingly, masquerading as a ‘people,’ and made into a ‘people’ by the PLO and many in the world community who relished attacking the Jews in yet another novel way.”^[149]

Based on these historical facts and arguments, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”^[150] By the terms of the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent League of Nations Covenant for Palestine and its British Mandate, the “occupied territory,” then, is not—and has never been—the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Instead, it is the Arab-occupied West Bank and the Hashemite-occupied Transjordan.

The Real Truth about Muslim National Traditions

Ironically, virtually all of the charges made by the Palestinian Arabs and their allies in the West are far more applicable to the Palestinian Arabs and the Muslim nations that support them than they are to Israel. Efrain Karsh lists the many strategies which Arab and Muslim nations regularly employ to enforce their ideologies and to exercise virtually total dominance over their citizens:

1) “Religious intolerance: Muslims historically viewed themselves as distinct from, and superior to, all others living under Muslim rule, known as ‘dhimmis.’ . . . Christians, Jews, and Baha’is remain second-class citizens throughout the Arab/Muslim world.”

2) “Ethnic inequality: Arabs, Turks and Iranians continue to treat long-converted [to Islam] populations that retained their language, culture and social customs, as inferior.”

3) “Racism: The Middle East has become the foremost purveyor of anti-Semitic incitement in the world. . . . Likewise, Africans of sub-Saharan descent are held in deep contempt, a vestige of the region’s historic role as epicenter of the international slave trade.”

4) “Gender discrimination:Legal and social discrimination against women is pervasive throughout the Arab-Islamic world.”

5) “Slavery: The Arabic-speaking countries remain the world’s foremost refuge of slavery, from child and sex trafficking in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to actual chattel slavery in Sudan and Mauritania.”^[151]

6) “Political Oppression: Many Middle Eastern regimes are little more than elaborate repressive systems aimed at perpetuating apartheid-style domination by a small minority: Alawites in Syria . . . the Saudi royal family; the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan.”^[152]

Political Corruption

The Palestinian Arabs continue to be almost hopelessly bellicose primarily because they are dominated—as they have always been—by shamelessly corrupt political leaders who transfer multiplied millions, if not billions, of dollars of Western “humanitarian aid” into private European bank accounts while keeping their people in abject poverty.^[153] If these “foreign aid” and “relief” efforts of Western nations alone had been directed to the Palestinian Arab populace rather than to its political leaders, the people could be secure and comfortable. If the oil-rich Arab nations who purport to support the “Palestinians” had simply given to the Palestinian Arab people the billions of dollars that they continually distribute to terrorist organizations, the status and situation of those people would be elevated exponentially, easing a great deal of their frustration and anger and eliminating one of their supposed motivations for terrorism. To be sure, Muslim autocrats and Palestinian Arab leaders do not have a monopoly on world political corruption; however, there has been and continues to be a tradition within their ranks that makes too few profoundly wealthy and powerful and too many poor and exploited.^[154] The very existence of such conditions foment anger and frustration which is vented, not against the corrupt Palestinian Arab leaders, but against the easiest target available—in this case, the perennial scapegoat of history, the Jewish people.

Comparing Sacred Scripture: Teachings of Peace, Teachings of War

A comparison of the teachings of the sacred writings of both Judaism and Islam produces some revealing truth. For the Jews, the Torah stipulates that no human being is ever to commit homicide (murder).^[155] This commandment is so important that it is included in the Ten Words that were thundered by God himself when Israel gathered at Sinai. In Jewish thought, the commandment proscribing murder is considered to be inviolable and cannot be suspended even to save one’s own life.^[156] For Muslims, while the Qur’an also condemns murder, it alsosays that when Muslims are engaged in jihad (holy war), they are to “kill [the infidels] whenever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you . . . if they fight you, then kill them.”^[157] Ultimately, radical Islam and many in mainstream Islam mandate three choices for non-Muslims, especially Jews and Christians: conversion to Islam, subjugation to Muslim rule and taxes, or death, because the jihad (“holy war”) will continue until all who resist are killed.^[158] The killing in jihad is not limited to self-defense: the holy war is a war of aggression against infidels in which even the innocent can be slaughtered with impunity.

For Jews, the Torah commands: “You shall not bear false witness.”^[159] This commandment is “a bulwark not only against trivial lying but especially against perjury in the court.”^[160] For Muslims, the Qur’an specifies not only their right but also their obligation to engage in prevarication and deception if by doing so they can advance the cause of Islam: “And they [the disbelievers] schemed, and Allah schemed [against them]: and Allah is the best of schemers.”^[161] The Arabic word for “scheme” (or plot) in this passage is makara, which literally means “deceit.” There can be no doubt that “if Allah is supremely deceitful toward unbelievers, then there is little basis for denying that Muslims are allowed to do the same.”^[162] Islam teaches that there are three types of deception when dealing with non-believers, taqiyya (sacred deception and dissimulation),^[163] kitman (lying by omission), and khodeh (trickery and deceit). In addition, “adarorah, meaning ‘the ends justify the means,’ has become the Sunni version for permitting or commanding deceit in order to protect the faith [of Islam].”^[164] If the cause of Islam can be advanced in any way, a Muslim is permitted to lie and is encouraged to do so, especially if he can “gain the trust of non-believers in order to draw out their vulnerability and defeat them.”^[165] This is why Islam says, “The prophet said, ‘War is deceit.’”^[166] The context from which this saying was drawn was likely the story of the incident when Muhammad’s associates murdered Usayr ibn Zarim and thirty unarmed men with him after Muhammad had “guaranteed” them safe passage.^[167] Abi Hamid Al Gahazali, founder of Sufism, the inner mystical dimension of Islam, goes even further with these arguments by saying, “You can lie if that will keep you from evil or if it will result in prosperity.”^[168]

For Jews, the Torah makes no exceptions when it says, “You shall not steal.”^[169] This means that the right of each individual to life, liberty, and property are protected by this commandment.^[170] For Muslims, while the Qur’an prescribes stiff penalties for those who are caught in petty theft, it alsopermits theft from unbelievers who are perceived as warring against Islam, even giving rules mandating the manner in which the spoils of war are to be divided.^[171] This ruling easily extends to the positions of Muslim police who do not enforce laws against “thieves who steal from infidels,” and it is extrapolated as a means of identifying “infidel business for theft and ransom.”^[172]

Considering the contrast of moral and ethical positions in the Torah and the Qur’an, one must wonder how anyone—journalist, politician, diplomat, or military commander—could ever trust radical and reactionary Muslims in any matter when their religion not only does not prohibit but also excuses and even commands murder, deception, and theft.

Turning the Tide of Antisemitic Anti-Zionism

The state of Israel has made many mistakes in its near seventy-year history, and it has suffered considerably for them. Since all human beings err, Jews should be held to no higher standard than anyone else, even though the prophets tended to hold “their own people up to higher moral standards than they [did] other people . . . because the Hebrews were introduced to a moral and religious code that made certain demands on them.”^[173] On the stage of world politics, however, Jews cannot be expected to lay down their lives so their enemies can bolster their self-worth and expand their power and resources. The murderous spirit that is determined to annihilate the Jews must not be allowed to triumph.

Now is the time for Christians to take the lead in helping to turn the tide of lies and deceptions that have become the staple of radical Muslim propagandists and Western media. Surely it is time to stop supporting individuals and movements which, with their distortions and outright prevarications, make it possible for people like the young Palestinians in Germany to express the views of most fundamentalist Muslims regarding Israel and Jews in general by saying outrageous things like, “The damned Jews should be burnt,” and, “They should be slaughtered like pigs,” and, “I would eradicate all Jews, shooting them into the sea and goodbye.”^[174] What insanity it is that anyone could mouth such abominable statements—and all in the name of God and religion!

A groundswell of support for the people and the nation of Israel must arise, especially among those who seek peace on earth.^[175] It is time to recognize the bountiful oasis of peace-loving Jews in Israel that is surrounded by a desiccated desert of anger, hate, violence, terror, and war. Christians everywhere must come to the understanding that “what the anti-Zionists would obliterate is precisely the voice of the Torah—and with the Torah, God and Israel as well.”^[176] Ultimately, any plan to annihilate the Jews is at bottom a plan to neutralize, if not destroy, the God of the Jews. The promises of God to the descendants of Abraham are, however, secure, and nothing can prevent their fulfillment. The time has come for the world to admit that the Jewish people have suffered enough.^[177] Those who recognize the righteous precepts of the God of Scripture must grant the Jews the blessings of freedom and security. It is time to stop both Holocaust deniers who “deny the Jews their deaths and their past” and anti-Zionists who “deny the Jews their lives and their future.”^[178]

The spirit of anti-Zionism, the new unholy garments of the ancient and enduring antisemitism, must be discarded. Of a truth, anti-Zionism’s days are numbered, for when the Messiah comes, he will not establish his throne in New York, London, Rome, Athens, Geneva, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, Damascus, Istanbul, or Mecca. His universal dominion will be headquartered on Mount Zion in the city of Jerusalem, and from that foundation, he will extend peace like a river to all the inhabitants of Israel and from them to all the inhabitants of the earth.^[179] It is time for songs of peace to echo around the world, for “peace sown by peacemakers brings a harvest of justice.”^[180] This is what Yhwh, the God of Israel says of his holy nation and his holy land: “I will return to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. . . . Old men and old women will again sit in the streets of Jerusalem . . . and the streets of the city shall be filled with boys and girls playing in its streets.”^[181]