U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, February 15, 2020. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons/Flickr
Gerald A. Honigman | Exclusive to Ekurd.net
Before getting into high gear regarding Bernie Sanders & Co., it may be useful to review some previous thoughts for good background information. So, let’s take a look…
Spend some time on many-to-most university campuses these days; read or listen to numerous Jewish commentators and editorialists in the mainstream media dealing with Israel and the Middle East.
With rare exceptions, you’ll be hard pressed finding Jews (let alone others) who have not succumbed to the pressure to adopt one set of standards by which Israel and Zionism is studied and judged, and another entirely different set by which the rest of the Middle East and North Africa—indeed, the rest of the world–is scrutinized. While Zionism is routinely vilified, have you ever heard the word Arabism even mentioned? Has it come up in any of the Democrat debates to see who gets to confront President Trump in the-fast approaching American election?
Frequently, Jewish organizations (J Street U, Jewish Voice For Peace, and too many others–including even Hillel, at times) are prominent, or at least collaborative, in partaking in the one-sided Israel and Zionism-bashing goings-on of other groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Muslim Students Association, radical Leftists, and “Progressive” Liberals.
While students learn about the ‘evil’ quest of Jews to cast off their millennial victim, scapegoat, and whipping post status, they’ll neither hear nor read anything about the plights of scores of millions of other non-Arab peoples in the region. They won’t find, for example, a local chapter of Students for Justice in Kurdistan or for the Kabyle or Amazigh (Berber”) people, whose programs they can attend. And they won’t find a post-Zionist, “Progressive” Hebrew or other professor mentioning anything about them either. Together, just the Kurds and Imazighen alone account for some 75-80 million non-Arab people in a region that Arabs claim to be merely “purely Arab patrimony…the real main cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a nutshell.
As for Jews themselves, you’d think that, after what people like Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Theodore Herzl, and Dr. Judah Leib (“Leo”) Pinsker witnessed in the “enlightened” 19th century, the lesson of placing faith in such “Progressive” movements would have been learned by now.
As for those other truly stateless peoples mentioned above, did you ever wonder why you’ve hardly heard anything about them, while, at the same time, you are lectured constantly—including by the new crop of Democrats ascending in America, about the need for Israel, which one needs a magnifying glass to locate on a world globe, to either grossly endanger itself or commit suicide so that a 22nd–if not 23rd–Arab state can emerge in its stead? Note that this would be the second political entity created as a gift to Arab nationalism, in yet another of its many allowed subspecies, in the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine. As cannot be repeated too often, the first was given as a gift by Great Britain in 1922, today’s “Jordan,” on almost 80% of the total original territory.
Ironically (or worse), while national liberation movements are usually viewed in a favorable light, that of perhaps the most oppressed people this planet has ever known–modern political Zionism–has increasingly been regarded as illegitimate.
There are several reasons for this…
For some, theology has taught for millennia that Jews were children of the Devil and cursed to be perpetual, stateless wanderers for their alleged “deicide.” Given this, how dare Jews upset such “holy” beliefs! And often, for many living in a post-Auschwitz world, the animus earlier reserved for Jews as individuals simply gets transferred (and becomes more acceptable) as hostility towards the Jewish State–the Jew of the Nations–instead.
For others, no other nationalism but their own is deemed legitimate. As seen earlier here, Arabs, for example, simply call the entire Middle East and North Africa “purely Arab patrimony” and a permanent part of the Dar ul-Islam, never to be allowed to revert back to the Dar al-Harb (Realm of War). Literally millions who have stood in the way or challenged such ideas have been slaughtered over the centuries–including to this very day. The Arabs’ Anfal Campaign in 1980s Iraq wound up killing some 200,000 Kurds as a result of gassing and other means of wholesale slaughter.
In between the above rationales, there exists a blend of others which have been used to also apply a constant set of duplicitous actions and attitudes towards the resurrected tiny State of the Jews.
While perfect justice is found nowhere among the realm of imperfect man, it is nevertheless demanded of Israel in its struggle to survive. Just listen to the current debates among American Democrats or a session of the United Nations as a few examples.
To see a continuation of this historical journey of Zionism, from the Biblical tears shed by Jews weeping on the Rivers of Babylon, to the confrontation with Rome over Jewish freedom and independence, to the current struggles today, please take a look at what’s in this next link.
For religious Zionists, the Hand of G_d was at work in all of these events throughout the ages leading up to the rebirth of Israel in 1948. It took, after all, the rejection by the non-Jewish world of even the most assimilated of Jews–men like Captain Alfred Dreyfus–before the rebirth of political Zionism could become a reality. But not all Jews were religious Zionists–if Zionists at all. “Zion” is simply another name for Jerusalem and in greater perspective, the land of Israel–for those who may not know.
Over the millennia, Jews had tried just about everything to gain acceptance in the non-Jewish world; but events like the Dreyfus Affair, pogroms, and other often murderous actions culminating in the Holocaust kept on occurring in the “modern” age anyway.
So Zionism came to have another meaning… It represented a chance for Jews to simply bring a semblance of normalcy into their lives. Since the fall of Judea to Rome, forced conversions, expulsions, inquisitions, blood libels, massacres, demonization, ghettoization, dhimmitude, and every other imaginable humiliation had become the plight of the Jew in the Diaspora.
And the incitement continues…Too often, they were/are either perpetually doomed, wandering “G_d killers” in the Christian West or kilab yahud–“Jew Dog”– killers of prophets in the Muslim East.
So, not all Jews who longed for Zion did so out of an urge to become the Hebrew Bible’s nation of priests or a light unto the nations. While the high ideals of religious Zionism remained in many a Jewish heart and soul (even among agnostics), the chance to simply change their age-old fragile existence, being treated as a perpetual stranger in someone else’s land, was also a major motivating factor.
Besides wanting to escape the mandatory ghetto (and subconsciously the evolved ghetto mentality) of Christendum or the mellah of the Dar ul-Islam–and the negative effects and consequences such existence both produced on and brought out from themselves over the centuries–Jews just wanted to have a nation like all others.
Some, like Karl Marx, would seek solutions in a broader context, via political and socio-economic reform. Ironically, while Marx despised his Jewish roots, he sounded like a Hebrew Prophet in his demand for justice for the poor and the oppressed. Isaiah, Micah, Amos and others, including Yehoshua/Jesus later on, would have understood his passion well…Indeed, they were his teachers.
Now, with the above as background, we’re ready to examine what really makes Bernie tick in these regards…
In a good Jewish vein, “Progressive” Hebrews promote the national liberation movements of all victims of imperialism and oppression.
Too often, however, as in Bernie’s case–regardless of his phony protestations to the contrary (witness his fervent embrace of blatant anti-Semites like Linda Sarsour, Muslim Brotherhood-connected folks, The Three Amigas, and others leading his charge)–the Sanders ilk excludes the right of Jews to such national revival and liberation, the very people who are the world’s longest surviving victims of imperial conquest and oppression.
Such Progressive Hebrews absolutely love Tikun Olam–healing the world–as long as Jews, as JEWS, aren’t included. And as if believing Jews have not been in the forefront of such endeavors to assist all peoples for millennia–which they indeed have been.
And that now leads us to the real guts of the matter…
Communism–or something very closely related–is what the Bernies of the world are really all about.
Communism is a post-nationalist ideology.
While many sins have been committed in the name of nationalism, like it or not, as seen above in this very analysis, Jews were forced to embrace it since their historical attempts to be accepted in others’ lands usually had tragic results. The pre-Herzl, 19th century Russian Jewish physician, Leo(n) Pinkser, spelled this out hauntingly in his treatise, “Auto-Emancipation…” It’s not long and is definitely worth the read.
Far Leftist movements (not “Liberals”) regard the national liberation movement of the Jewish people–Zionism–as reactionary. Hence, Zionism emerged successful just at a time when post-national Socialist and Communist movements were arising.
While religious Jews saw G_d’s long-awaited Prophetic Hand in Israel’s rebirth, many other, more secular Jews embraced these ideologies. They had the potential to serve as protective umbrellas under and within which oppressed minorities–especially Christianity’s deicide people–could blend and become part of a greater whole.
For Jews, however, this embrace turned out to be a nasty pipe dream. Stalin, the Communist, slaughtered them the same as the Russian czars did.
So, whether they were murdered or otherwise victimized by proto-nationalist Czarist Russia, or in the Soviet atheist USSR, Jews still remained simply dirty Jews. And that was the situation in numerous other “enlightened” nations as well.
Comprenden mis amigos?
Progressive Jews are appalled by Jewish Jews…The latter remind them and the Gentiles that Jews are a distinct people–something used too often in the past to demonize, ghettoize, dehumanize, and massacre them. Since Napoleon freed them from the ghetto, a return to such existence had always been a nightmare. The birth of the Reform Movement in Judaism was itself largely a reaction to this, with the latter even proposing changing the Sabbath to Sunday to avoid the perception of Jewish uniqueness. And for them, Zionism was especially a nightmare.
The Lefties don’t want to be reminded about who they are…like German Jewish WWI vets proclaiming their German loyalties and showing laughing Nazis their war medals before being sent off to the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz.
While the above does not tell the entire story about why too many Jews, for example, oppose President Trump’s fair and favorable actions towards Israel and the Jewish people, it does go far in explaining much of it. And I write this as a registered Florida NPA Independent who also voted for Democrats in the past and has criticized the President on more than one occasion.
The above also leads folks like the pathetic–yet dangerous–Sanders ilk to attack any Israel that has a chance of surviving the Far Left’s preferred Arab version of a peace (of the grave) deal for the resurrected Jew of the Nations–Israel. The latter’s alleged latter-day Arafatian “peace partners”– the ones who pay other Arabs nicely for such heroics as decapitating Jewish infants asleep in their own homes–openly call any dealings with Israel a “Trojan Horse,” designed to further their “destruction-in-stages” plan for the Jews…Is there any wonder why Bernie is beloved among overt and covert Jihadis both here and abroad?
We live in an age when increasing world-wide (and often disguised) antisemitism is accompanied by cowardly Hebrews who aid and abet such attitudes and actions themselves.
Remember this when the 2020 election comes around…and please share what you’ve now learned (or have been reminded about) with others, if this subject is important to you at all.
Gerald A. Honigman is a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs. He has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated many Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world. You can visit his website at geraldahonigman.com Gerald A. Honigman is a longtime senior contributing writer, from 2007, and columnist for Ekurd.net. Honigman has published a major book, “The Quest For Justice In The Middle East–The Arab-Israeli Conflict In Greater Perspective.” For more see below.
The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Ekurd.net or its editors.
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