TISHA B’AV 2009: 

A Jew looks at America’s Scandalous Award to Mary Robinson

 

By Howard Rotberg

 

Tisha B'Av, the Fast of the Ninth of the Jewish month of Av, is a Jewish day of mourning to commemorate the many tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people, many of which coincidentally have occurred on the ninth of Av.   This year it fell on July 30^th.

Tisha B'Av primarily commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, both of which were destroyed on the ninth of Av (the first by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and the second by the Romans in 70 C.E.)   The Western Wall around the Temple, Judaism’s holiest place is the remains of the wall around the Temple. Arab revisionist history holds that there never was a Jewish Temple, all archeological verifications notwithstanding. Israel, since Jerusalem was reunified in 1967 tolerates Palestinian prohibitions against Jews wishing to visit the Temple Mount, now the site of an Arab mosque.

Although this holy day is primarily meant to commemorate the destruction of the Temple, it also the many other tragedies of the Jewish people, many of which occurred on this day, most notably the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

Traditional Jews who follow the Torah learn that when the twelve scouts sent by Moses to observe the land of Canaan returned from their mission, the majority spoke disparagingly about the land which caused the Children of Israel to panic and despair of ever entering the "Promised Land". For this, the Torah states that they were punished by God that their generation would not enter the land.  Moreover, because of the Israelites' lack of faith, God decreed that for all generations this date would become one of crying and misfortune for their descendants, the Jewish people.

Here is the list of calamities that happened to the Jewish people on Tisha B’av through the ages:

1. The First Temple built by King Solomon and the Kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians led by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and the Judeans were sent into the Babylonian exile.

2. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, scattering the people of Judea and commencing the Jewish exile from the Holy Land.

3. Bar Kokhba's revolt against Rome failed in 135 CE. Simon bar Kokhba was killed, and the city of Betar was destroyed.

4. Following the Roman siege of Jerusalem, the razing of Jerusalem occurred the next year. A Temple was built in its stead to an idol.

5. During the First Crusade, 10,000 Jews were murdered on Tisha B’Av (1095)

6. In 1290, Jews were expelled from England on Tisha B’Av.

7. The Alhambra Decree of 1492, expelling the Jews from Spain, took effect on the 7th of Av, just two days before Tisha B'Av.

8. On the eve of Tisha B'Av 1942, the mass deportation began of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, en route to Treblinka concentration camp.

9. The deadly bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires occurred on Tisha B’Av (1994).

10. The Second Lebanon War took place in the three weeks leading up to Tisha B'Av in 2006.

 

And now, on Tisha B’Av in the Hebrew year of 5769, being July 30^th 2009, a major catastrophe has again fallen on the Jewish people.   The actual event of which I am speaking may seem to be relatively unimportant – President Obama has awarded the Medal of Freedom to Irishwoman Mary Robinson.   Robinson presided over the United Nations Commission on Human Rights as it transformed itself to the almost single concern of vilifying Israel, and presided over the infamous Durban Conference.  The honour itself, however, is indicative of something much more important and ominous – the transition of the United States from being the leader of the free world and (on balance) a force for justice and freedom in the world to becoming a European-like rationalizer of injustice by emphasizing the supposed value of “tolerance” and “multi-lateralism” in a world of evil nations and transnational terrorists.   The giving of an honour to the woman who most epitomizes the evil of the Durban conference and the preoccupation with characterizing Israel as the new Nazis and the Palestinians as the new Jews, could unfortunately symbolize a turning point in American and world history.

Previously, the terrorism utilized by Palestinians with the support of Muslim nations, and the tolerance and funding of European nations, seemed to at least face a line in the sand with the United States. Jews thought they could depend on the liberal democrats of the United States to understand that terrorism is caused, not by the failure to give terrorists what they want, but by allowing and tolerating, even nourishing the climates of hate in which terrorists thrive.

And so, in the infamous Durban Conference of 2001, the United States under the leadership of Secretary of State Colin Powell drew a line in the sand, beyond which the Americans were not prepared to allow the conference to proceed (with American participation) – that an international conference on Racism, could not be hijacked to deal only with one political dispute in the world, given that this was a dispute over land boundaries (and no other political disputes were being discussed).  Moreover,  that it was in fact a racist agenda that it had been adopted by the Durban pre-conference (held in Iran!) to criticize Israeli counter-terrorism - in the absence of criticism of the terrorism itself – and to equate the six million deaths of  Jews in the Holocaust with Israeli self-defense against hostile militant neighbours and terrorist organizations, and to criticize Israel as being guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid”.   The American leadership withdrew from the conference.

The anti-intellectualism, the anti-liberalism, the anti-westernism, and indeed the anti-Semitism of the Arab and Muslim world joined with self-hating members of western Non-Governmental Organizations, were exposed in Durban as a major threat to Western civilization.  For those, who didn’t get the message from this conference, which ended on September 7^th, 2001, a mere four days later militant Islam attacked New York’s World Trade Towers.   President Bush took up the challenge and vowed to stop terrorism in the United States, and despite other weaknesses in his administration, he, for the main part kept this vow.   To Jews, the travesty of Durban followed so closely by the horrors of 9/11 indicated that once again the Jews were the canaries in the mine, and how the world views anti-Semitic persecution of Jews is a harbinger for the prospects for freedom and peace in the so-called civilized world.

In my novel, The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel about a Book and its Author (Mantua Books), the fictional author of the book-within-the-book argues that the Durban Conference in today’s war against the Jews is equivalent to the Wansee Conference in the Nazi war on the Jews.

But now the Americans have embraced a candidate of change.   Despite ominous past associations with a rogues’ gallery of anti-Israel and anti-American types (including, most importantly, having as a pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose message was not so much Christian as anti-American and anti-Israel), Americans, including an astounding 75% of American Jews, voted for Obama as President.

His very first acts on the international stage were promises to “engage” with the terrorist-sponsoring and genocidal nuclear-arming Iranians, and to bow to Saudis and to create an American “submission” to Islam by fabricating a view of history - by stating that “the truth (is) that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings … Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.”

By making “tolerance” the supreme American value as opposed to “Justice”, and then to equate America’s sense of tolerance with whatever that word means in Islamic countries, Obama prostituted centuries of American notions of freedom and justice to what only can be termed a first step in the “submission” to Islam.

And his promises of “engagement” with Iran were put on the back burner, as America watched impotently as the Iranian mullahs and their evil hit-man Ahmadinejad violently put down protests over election fraud and the restriction of liberties for the Iranian people.

In this, Obama seeks to bring America closer to the submissionist ideologies and practices of countries like Britain and France, which allow parallel systems of sharia law that deny Muslim women the great individual protections of Western human rights law, and which have altered both domestic and foreign policies to placate their growing Islamic populations.

And so, on Tisha B’Av, July 30^th, 2009, Obama made an even more shocking symbolic submission to foreign values, when he awarded a medal of freedom to Ireland’s Mary Robinson, the infamous former head of the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the founder and chief organizer of 2001’s Durban Conference.  This award must surely be viewed with horror for those who hold out a future for our children of peace, freedom and the continuation of western standards of individual and human rights. This award to Jews must surely be seen as yet another catastrophe in a long list of catastrophes that have happened on Tisha B’Av throughout Jewish history.

Before turning to an examination of the abhorrent views and actions of Ms. Robinson, it is important to examine President Obama’s views in more detail. 

As I have just returned from three weeks in Israel at the time of writing this (July 31, 2009), I can perhaps give a view of how Israelis, in my recent discussions with them, are viewing Obama’s America.   Of course, this exercise is largely subjective, because Israelis, living in a liberal democracy hold a vast array of different opinions, but certain trends are discernable.

Israelis can be excused for wondering just who Barack Hussein Obama really is and what does he stand for.  Is he Black or white, Muslim or Christian, friend of domestic terrorists or mainstreamers, confidant of Edward Said or establishment Jews, brilliant writer of two autobiographies or purveyor of unacknowledged ghost written material, supporter of Arabs or Israel, lawyer attuned to human rights or community organizer attuned to collective rights, follower of Christian values or liberation theology positioned between Reverend Wright and Louis Farakhan, proud of American historical values or apologetic to the terrorists in accepting the responsibility of America and Israel for the “root causes”?

 

Obama, it must be conceded, is in fact a product of contemporary American culture, and it is that culture of cultural relativism and moral equivalency, which has been a concern of many Israelis for the last 10 years or so.   For even though George Bush was perceived as a friend of Israel, the political class in America has been inching back to the State Department’s philo-Arabism as opposed to the traditional liberal respect for the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.  When the New York Times publishes anti-Israel Jews like Tony Judt, and the Hollywood establishment did not understand the moral travesty that Steven Spielberg created from a script by anti-Israel Jewish writer Tony Kushner, in Munich, it can be argued that Obama is the result of what the American liberal culture has become, not the cause of it.

 

As someone interested in cultural history (the history of ideologies and values), and the author of three books on the subject, I try to visit Israel often.  I share the view (often ascribed to the “right”) that Israel is the front line in Huntington’s clash of civilizations or, to put it another, yet similar, way, is among the most important fronts in the War Against Radical Islam (called by those who haven’t the moral fiber to speak the truth, the War on Terror). 

 

And so, having been travelling around Israel for the last few of weeks, and listening to an assortment of Israelis and Israeli media, I have noticed an interesting reaction to what America is becoming under the President whose values and background are so inscrutable.  From an initial positive attitude towards someone who advanced so rapidly to the Presidency, only 6% of Israelis now view Obama as “pro”-Israel.   In no particular order here are some things they are thinking about:

 

In my travels around Israel, I see the huge accomplishment of a country that has an open immigration policy for every ethnicity of Jew who wants or needs sanctuary in a Jewish state where he or she can be free from prejudice or persecution.  From the light brown Sephardic Jews driven out of Arab countries, to the darker brown Jews of India, to the black Jews of Ethiopia, all, no matter their education or suitability to contribute to the country, are accepted.   Within a generation their children are (in reasonable numbers) successfully assimilated to the modern, western, technological society and culture of Israel.  

 

The politics of race here results in some odd voting blocks and coalitions, but there is very much an underlying consensus that every Israeli is who he is and does not pretend to be something else.  This holds true for the hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs living in peace with their Jewish neighbours, having representation in the parliament, an ambassadorship, a place on the Supreme Court, and in the case of the Druze Arabs, service in the army.   Unlike their cousins, who now call themselves Palestinians, the Muslims who stayed put, know who they are, and did not have to invent an identity.

 

Obama, from the Israeli viewpoint, is a mystery.   He somehow appears a post-racial poseur akin to Michael Jackson, bending race to the requirements of art and public adulation.  Is he his father’s son (an already married upper class Kenyan student who tired of Barack’s mother and went home) or his mother’s son (a naïve and largely expatriate academic from the Midwest)?  How can the son of a Kenyan and a white woman whose parents were from Kansas, and who availed himself of the fruits of the American affirmative action program, wrap himself in the mantle of oppressed black American males whose cultural impotency stems directly from the slave experience and a failed assimilation to American values?  The very notion that his blackness links him automatically to the black mainstream is, in this viewpoint, a fundamentally racist construct.  Skin colour matters less to Americans today than cultural values. In other words, the typical educated American would rather have a black lawyer or ball player as a neighbour than a white Appalachian.    The remaining prejudice towards blacks is not a function of skin colour as it is a reaction to perceived difference in cultural values.

 

Obama’s grandparents (who grew up in Kansas) took the main burden of raising him.   Where is Kansas and what was it named after?   That would be of interest to Israelis, but apparently not so much to American journalists.   Kansas after all was named after the Kansa Native American tribe who along with most Native Tribes were basically ethnically cleansed by white settlers with governmental and military backing. Before Obama apologizes to Muslims, perhaps he should apologize to American natives.

 

Or is Obama, like most young Americans who today fail to seriously study history, entitled to divorce himself entirely from ancestral deeds and heritage?   Have we post-moderns dismissed the traditional notion of examining someone’s family to understand their bearings?   Why then, does Obama obsess over the historical details of Israeli settlement policy and not the settlement policy of his ancestors in Kansas and Oklahoma?

 

Does Obama know that Mary Robinson’s appeasement of the derailing of the Durban Conference on Racism was not only to turn it into an anti-Israel hatefest, but also to extinguish the original hope to have the conference deal with the historical wrongs of slavery and colonialism, and obtain for African countries some measure of apology?  In fact, the first Black American President, in his eagerness to reward Mary Robinson’s conduct at Durban, also has created a slap in the face for the African countries who had such great hope at Durban.   Of course, not sharing a background in slavery like most other American blacks, and not wanting his white ancestors’ benefits from Aboriginal ethnic cleansing in Kansas and Oklahoma to see the light of the media, Obama neither understands nor empathizes with the hopes for redress that were dashed by Robinson.

 

Obama, in his few pronouncements about Israel, seems to lack any serious historical context.   This is not surprising to Israelis because there is far less justification for what the white American settlers did (including Obama’s great grandparents who owned property in Oklahoma, where some of the most serious injustices to Natives happened), than what Israeli settlers have done, which is to reclaim land which historically was Jewish for thousands of years, after a defensive war.   So when Obama hectors Israelis on their settlements, he is viewed as transparent and hypocritical.

 

Or is the American problem one of handing the complexities of American foreign policy - in an age of aggressive fundamentalist Islam’s attempt to seize control of massive areas of the world - over to a Georgia peanut farmer or an undistinguished Texas governor, or, as we have now, a public relations and internet savy “community activist”?

 

Israelis are rankled by Obama’s blatent double standards:

He is loath to “interfere” by seizing a historic opportunity to reverse Iranian Islamofascist tyranny in Iran and export of terrorism through Hizbollah and Hamas:  "It's not productive given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling," he stated.  The fact that it was another inexperienced American Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, who projected American weakness, was instrumental in encouraging the Mullah’s Islamic revolution in Iran, is lost on the Obama crowd.  But, when it comes to Israel, Obama meddles in the greatest detail – demanding, contrary to previous commitments to Israel (as substantiated by Elliot Abrams), that no Israeli settlement be allowed even one inch of growth to accommodate new family formation.   To Jews who are attuned to the demographic realities of the Middle East, this is perceived ominously like an American proscription against Jewish births, and ties Obama to historical fascist oppression of Jews.

 

Moreover, Israelis who lived through the almost daily suicide bombings of 2001 -2002, the Hizbollah rockets on Northern Israel in 2006, and the 7 years of rockets from Gaza against Israeli towns like Sderot and Ashkelon, are saddened to hear a one-sided concern from Obama.   Waxing eloquent about Palestinian suffering (which is perceived by most Israelis to stem in main from their own leaders’ rejection of Israeli peace offers including Camp David  in 2000 and Olmert’s offer in 2008), Israelis are irked that his sympathies do not extend to their suffering, too.   Israelis who are trying to explain to their children why hundreds of millions of hostile Arabs periodically attack their country, sponsor terrorist attacks, and now are joined by the Islamofascist state of Iran which (all the way back to Rafsanjani in the 1990s) has been promising to attain nuclear weapons and use them on the Jews.   And how do they explain that despite three thousand years of Jewish presence in Israel, the Palestinians reject the Israeli offer of an independent state, because they cannot also have their people return to the one small Jewish state (their rejection is based on the misleadingly named “right” of return.)

 

Perhaps the most obscene double standard of all, from the point of view of women, anyway, is that in a Muslim world that tolerates “honour” killings, Obama does not seem to notice.  A so-called liberal embraced by American women praises Islam for tolerance, when that tolerance includes the obscenity of honour killings and rapes.   Just check out the writings of the great American feminist Phyllis Chesler (now shunned by mainstream feminism) on the extent of honour killings and abuse of women in Islamic culture.

 

The cultural relativists have so fallen in love with Islam that they accept Islam’s right to abuse women and children.   They also seem to accept in this bizarre moral relativism Hamas’ right to make women and children into human shields.   They reserve their indignation for Israel’s self defense that targets rocket launching sites, after telephone calls to the civilians to evacuate, and when they do not and suffer casualities, Israel is held to be solely responsible.  

 

For Israelis, whether or not they are Torah observant, know that the Torah values justice more than anything.   The United States used to agree.  Now under Obama it appears that Tolerance is the new value of choice, and that tolerance leads to horrible double standards, and it is that underlying divergence of values that will separate Israel and the United States more than anything else.  The Democrats will portray their policy choices as reflecting “balance” and national interest;  in fact the Americans are following the Europeans towards a crisis in traditional values of Western civilization, wherein tolerance is seen to be at least as important as Justice.   One cannot emphasize too greatly that when Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg portrayed the Israelis as vengeful in Munich, they were reflecting a sad cultural decline:  Rather than emphasizing  Justice, Spielberg reflected an adoption of Tolerance to the sad failures of the German authorities to bring the murderers at the Munich Olympics to justice, and to the distorted values of the terrorists themselves and the people who sent them on their dastardly mission.

 

By choosing to portray the victims as Shylock-like in their vengeance, Spielberg and his fans have made clear how much anti-Israelism depends on anti-Semitism.   Obama is the perfect president for a nation without values. When Michele Obama stated that with her husband’s election, she could finally be proud of America, that seems to me to say that at last America will change its values to approach the European Leftist abrogation of Justice and away from traditional American values which have been rejected as Right-wing and non-tolerant.   Formerly the “canary in the mine” with respect to injustice in the world, Israelis sense that they have been replaced by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, dominated by Islamic dictatorships.   If the conscience of America is now Jimmy Carter, rather than Eli Wiesel, the Israelis feel that a Second Holocaust will be permitted by America.

 

The worry for an educated Jew, however, is that while a Canary in a coal mine was valued by the miners for detecting dangerous gases, the Jews of Israel will not be appreciated for criticizing moral values, especially when Israelis themselves are so far from perfect;  in fact, it can be argued, that anti-Semitism is in large part based on the resentment towards those preaching justice and goodness by those intent on injustice and murder.   Hitler’s policies of course breached most of the Ten Commandments.   American Jews who stand up for the values of Justice against the values of Tolerance are in danger of falling into Walt and Mearsheimer’s dastardly Jewish lobby.   Israelis with a perfect sense of the history of anti-Semitism, know the potential problem that Obama creates for the Jewish people.

 

Israelis are viewing Obama’s Cairo speech in a very different light than Obama’s young (and apparently historically ignorant) base in the Democratic party who equate eloquence with intelligence. To the Israelis, as recently pointed out by Sarah Honig, in the Jerusalem Post, Obama is making the mistake of using American prestige to in fact support democracy’s most rabid enemies, while being nasty to an embattled liberal democracy (whose “crime” seems to be what policies they have adopted after three wars against it by the Arab states, and numerous terrorist campaigns.)

 

As Honig puts it:  “As pro-democracy demonstrators are killed in Teheran and as its ayatollahs further their designs to arm themselves with nukes, the leader of the free world harps on Israeli settlements.  You can almost understand where he’s coming from.  Iran is a tough customer and crazy too.  It’s tempting not to rile it and to deflect criticism by focusing on some lonely remote outposts in the middle of Judea and Samaria’s barren moonscape.”   For Israel, unlike the Arabs or Iran, according to Honig, will “broadmindedly collaborate in an effort to appease its detractors.”

 

Americans with their wide-open spaces and huge country, have a hard time understanding a tiny sliver of a country, which under the non-lamented ’67 borders was a little as 9.5 miles wide, and which now finds itself surrounded on the north and the south-west by Iranian terrorist proxies, and which is being asked to add a state to its east, which in all likelihood will become, like Gaza, ruled by terrorist Hamas. Israel indeed has a love-hate relationship with America.

 

While American fans of Obama might accept his argument of equivalency between one of history’s greatest liberal democracies on the one hand, and a series of regimes that grant few if any individual rights and often promote abuse of women, torture and have abysmal justice systems, on the other, Israelis react to this claim with shock and horror.   Obama stated at Cairo that America and the Muslim world “share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”   To most Israelis, the man is either a lunatic or attempting the most disgraceful appeasement since Neville Chamberlain refused to react to the Nazi threat.   To Israelis, who, particularly in Haifa and the Galilee live near, and sometimes work with, moderate Muslim Arabs, there is a knowledge that individual Muslims, free of indoctrination and brainwashing by Muslim governments, can be good neighbours.  But they know Obama is wrong when he whitewashes the corrupted leaders of the “Muslim world”, for Israelis know better than anyone how those leaders have cast the Jewish State as the source of all blame for everything wrong in the world.

 

To Israelis, appeasement of evil today, means a bloodier and longer war tomorrow.   To America, its golden tongued orator will talk radical Islam into giving up all of its goals.  Leaning on Israel will, this line of thinking goes, lead Islamists to come to their senses. To Israelis, who actually have a long history of dealing with the Arab rejection of any compromise in their belief that every descendent of every Palestinian should be allowed to move to Tel Aviv, Obama projects nothing more than weakness and ignorance.  The Israelis have learned or ought to have learned by now – depending which politician one is viewing – that making concessions to Islamists is only viewed by them as weakness leading to more concessions.  Israelis believe that the Palestinians have a very different time frame than do leftist Americans and Europeans:  Palestinians are prepared to wait for 50 or 100 years, if necessary, for the resolve of the enemy to break.  Such is the purpose of terrorism – to break the will, to force submission, to make popular the idea of appeasement.

 

As young Americans leave organized religion in droves, many no longer accept the traditional concepts of good and evil.    They believe, like Obama, that the evil just need some more concessions.  America is in danger of losing the ability to understand how the “evil” of a Hitler or an Ahmadinejad compromises the ability of freedom loving countries to defend against mortal threats to Western civilization. To that portion of the Israeli population that accepts religious values, it is sad that the supposedly Christian leader of the world’s leading democracy was given his religious guidance by a minister as anti-American as Reverend Wright.   It is even sadder to see him deeply bow to the Saudi King and preach about the moral equivalency of Christianity and Islam.

 

To Israelis, even though Bush together with his Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, were less than successful, at least they acknowledged that the U.S. was in a War with radical Islam, including Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.   It is sad to see that Obama has submitted to Muslim arguments that such Islamist organizations are on the periphery, instead of contaminating the mainstream.   Israelis have been reading recently how Al Jazeera, the dominant network for Muslims world-wide, in fact was set up by the emir of Qatar, to promote the ideals of the Muslim Brotherhood, which threatens the stability of Egypt, as well as being the dominant influence on Hamas.   Do Americans know this, and if so, do they care?   Do they believe a speech by Obama can compete with the hours of anti-U.S. and anti-Israel programming consumed daily by millions of Muslims?    As Zvi Mazel, formerly Israeli ambassador to Egypt, has recently written, “Al Jazeera leads an all-out war against Israel in which there is no room for true reporting. The purpose is to bring all Arabs to support the Palestinians and, more specifically Hamas, which is, after all, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.  No efforts are spared to present the Palestinians as the ultimate victims.  Hamas representatives are warmly received by news anchors and commentators and they receive far more air time than the Palestinian Authority”.

 

One would think the media-savy American president, who relied so much on media support to win the election, would understand the power of Al-Jazeera and challenge its subversion of journalistic standards;  instead he is too busy “apologizing” and attributing the tension between America and the Muslim world to a “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations”.   Perhaps if Obama watched Arab media, read Arab textbooks, and listened to the sermons of certain imams, he would come up with another explanation of the tension between America and the Muslim world.

 

But alas, he appears to read less than he writes.   In an internet world of short newsclips and symbolic acts, be they of terrorists, or the symbols adopted by Obama himself, the symbolic significance of awarding a medal to Mary Robinson is, quite simply, to tell the liberal Jews of America that they have no future as liberal American Jews, reflective of Biblical values of Justice and human rights, but only as “tolerant” Americans.  That itself, given the contributions of Jews to American society and culture is a tragedy of the highest magnitude, equivalent to other tragedies that took place on Tisha B’Av.   What it says about the security of almost six million Jews to be free of another Holocaust, this time in our ancestral homeland, is too scary to think about.   When Obama says the champion of freedom is Mary Robinson, that is a tragedy for all Jews.

 

The Medal of Freedom is designed to recognize individuals who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors." It is a very significant award.

 

The best source on the evil represented by Mary Robinson is the first-person account of the late American Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos, himself a victim of the Holocaust.  At the time, he was the ranking Democratic member of the International Relations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.  Lantos, remember, was like most Jews, a loyal Democrat, and in fact was a strong opponent of perceived American unilateralism under Bush, right after 9/11, and a promoter of working through coalitions that later developed.  Lantos was appointed the leader of the American delegation to the Durban Conference, and, as such, was closely involved with the American’s attempted negotiations with Robinson that were unsuccessful in getting her to change the course of the conference.

 

In an essay in the Winter/Spring 2002 issue of the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs (of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University), Lantos published his account of the Durban Conference as “The Durban Debacle:  An Insider’s View of the World Racism Conference at Durban”.   It is most important to read this “insider’s” view of the woman who Obama has awarded a Medal of Freedom.

 

Lantos writes that "much of the responsibility for the debacle rests on the shoulders" of Robinson, who "in her role as secretary general of the conference, failed to provide the leadership needed to keep the conference on track."   Lantos also faults the Islamic states, and moreover argues that a failure by the U.S. to show leadership at the United Nations and its various organizations, created a resentment against American unilateralism (of course Bush later tried the multi-lateral route, without great success in that) which made it harder to control what happened at Durban.

Interestingly, for those who support Obama’s appeasement and embracement of cultural relativism and American apologies as the modus operandus of dealing with the enemies and their supporters in the War against Militant Islam, Lantos had some interesting points to make, which Obama should well study.   Lantos, the Holocaust survivor, argues in his essay, “The Durban Debacle”, that “(t)he international mechanisms that we have helped build to support a liberal international system, including the UN, require U.S. leadership to stay on track.  When we fail to lead, rogue regimes and hostile forces are quick to step into the breach to appropriate these mechanisms for their own propaganda and political purposes.  If we want to win our war against terrorism, we will have to stay engaged in the UN and elsewhere, promote American interests and values abroad and transform our coalition against terrorism into a new international order that supports pluralism, democracy and human rights.”  

 

Of course, the late Mr. Lantos is no longer around to see his Democratic party resolve to have America “lead” less and “submit” more to regimes that prohibit pluralism, democracy and human rights, by negating the fundamental differences the West has with the Islamist model.  

 

Even before the convening of the full conference in Durban, there were signs that Robinson lacked an understanding of, and sympathy for, the rejection of anti-Semitic acts of hostile Muslim states. There were a number of preparatory regional conferences, including one for Asian countries in Tehran.  Despite her assurances to the contrary, the Iranians were able to exclude Jewish NGOs and Israelis and other holders of Israeli passports from attending.   This Muslim racism made a mockery of the process to hold a conference against Racism.    In fact, Australia and New Zealand were also barred from attending the Tehran meeting because they were seen to be too supportive of Israel.

 

While Robinson was forceful in the regional pre-conference meetings in South America and Europe, speaking eloquently of the need for every country to confront its own racism, at Tehran she took the opposite approach.  Lantos notes that she spoke not a word about anti-Semitic textbooks and curricula in Arab schools, no appeal for the rights of non-Muslim minorities, no appeal to improve the horrible lot of imported domestic workers in Arab sheikdoms, no condemnation of the Taliban’s destruction of ancient Buddhist artifacts, and no plea for an elevation for the status of women in Muslim societies.  Said Lantos: “To many of us following these early developments, her silence was deafening.”

 

Lantos noted that the declarations adopted by the Asian nations in the ‘discriminatory’ environment of Tehran, under Robinson’s watch, amounted to a statement of intent to use the Durban anti-racism conference as a tool of propaganda and hate against the world’s only Jewish state.  The text accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and implementing a system of ‘apartheid”, accusations well beyond the limits of previous anti-Israel discourse.   And Robinson?   In a statement that Lantos found “baffling” she did not criticize this hijacking of the agenda to create a non-political conference against racism and not against specific states.  Instead she congratulated the delegates for coming up with a “Consensus”!    According to Lantos, she characterized this preliminary hatefest as a “productive dialogue between civilizations”.   When asked why, despite all guidelines, the Asian pre-conference had centred out Israel as the only source of racism in the world, she stated:  “The situation in the Palestinian occupied territories was brought up at the meeting and it was reflected in the final declaration.” 

 

Note the comment by Lantos:

 

“These comments (by Robinson) represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the WCAR.   By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israel-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the world conference, she betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes.  From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.”

 

The world conferences on racism that were held in 1978 and 1983 were held when the world was showing a consensus against the Apartheid regime in South Africa.  It became clear that the Islamic states, with the appeasement of Robinson, were poised to win a propaganda war to shun, isolate and boycott a state, whose civilians at that very moment were being attacked by so-called suicide bombers, supported financially and morally by the complete Arab world.   By the use of the WCAR, the Islamic world hoped to portray the Israelis not as victims, but as the perpetrators and moreover wrap the Israelis up in the images of Nazis and South African racists.   And Mary Robinson helped them.

 

Prior to Durban, there were no substantial calls for boycotts against Israeli professors or the other university activism now sadly a part of the academic scene.   The fact that the United Nations oversaw such an event helped pave the way for illegitimate boycotts and one sided conferences now taking place at universities all over the world, including, sadly, universities in the United States and Canada.

 

The forgoing should be sufficient to disentitle Robinson from the award.  But the most important reasons are these:   First, according to Lantos, in discussions during the conference she "refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East.  Instead, she discussed "the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand and ... the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other."

 

The alleged moral equivalency between the Nazi final solution to the Jews and Jewish treatment of Palestinians is a morally corrupt position.  It is meant by many of its proponents to pave the way for a second “final solution” where the Jews of Israel are fair game for murder because of their alleged treatment of Palestinians.  Robinson not only permitted this nonsense to be spouted ad nauseum at Durban, the above quote from Lantos shows that she was a proponent of this ideological component of anti-Semitism.   If the Jews are as bad as the Nazis, then they too should be killed. Obama has no business giving the imprimatur of an American Medal of Freedom on one who subscribes to such views, and then uses her tenure at the head of a United Nations Human Rights Commission to popularize such views.

 

If Robinson is given a Medal of Freedom by Obama, it in effect legitimizes her abhorrent views that the lack of “freedom” of the Palestinians is an event comparable to the Holocaust of the Jews.  It must also mean that Obama finds nothing anti-Semitic in such a notion.   In fact that abominable position is a characteristic of modern anti-Semitism, just as surely as  the yellow badge that Hitler forced the Jews to wear was a characteristic of Nazi anti-Semitism.   Obama has in effect stated that anti-Semitic attitudes and actions are not a bar to receiving a Medal of Freedom;  it seems to me that such attitudes allowed to her to lead a very anti-Semitic organization, the UN Commission on Human Rights, dominated by anti-Semitic, in fact genocidal nations.  And thus her leadership of such nations whose idea of freedom involves the death of Jewish civilians constitutes a debasement of the idea of “freedom”.    American Jews, having witnessed numerous American professors argue that “terrorists” are really “freedom fighters”, now witness their President award a Medal of “Freedom” to one who accepts that the subjects of terrorism are really Nazis.

 

In fact the status of the organization that Robinson led became so problematic that it was reformulated and renamed the UN Human Rights Council.   After Robinson finally retired, others were at least embarrassed that a Human Rights commission should have as members Sudan (the Commission, after Robinson retired, refused to take action against Sudan regarding the genocide in Darfur in 2004, preferring instead to elect it as a member two years later), as well as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Cuba and Sri Lanka, all adjudging Israel (which was the subject of over one-third of country-specific resolutions).

 

Again, the attempt to vilify Israel is now complete, if Israel’s terrorist enemies are freedom fighters, and the American Medal of Freedom goes to the longtime head of a “human rights” commission which honours the abusers, and who helped establish the international principle that Israel is Nazi-like in its persecution of freedom fighters.

Surely, thoughtful American Jews must understand the Orwellian world that surrounds them.

Obama’s announcement on Tisha B’Av 2009 that Mary Robinson would get an American Medal of Freedom is in fact the third strike against American Jewry’s best hitter in the important game of whether anti-Semitism (in the guise of anti-Zionism) is to be unequivocably exempted from prohibited Racism. This strike comes contemporaneously with the growing acceptance by the culturally relativistic elites of a hands-off approach to Muslim Shariah Law allowing abuse of wifes and daughters. To American Jewish liberals, who have for generations understood American liberal values as most similar to Jewish values, the recognition that group rights of misogynistic religions can trump individual human rights, poses, to the thoughtful, almost an existential threat.    How many will allow their thoughfulness in this regards to challenge their financial and emotional comforts in the land where the streets were “paved with gold” is questionable.  You see, this third strike comes at a time when 75% of American Jews joined Obama’s team and thought he was on their side.

 

Would that American Jews have understood that the first black President should have been Colin Powell not Barack Obama and would that they have thrown their (supposedly) powerful lobby into getting Powell selected by the Republicans.   Yet the sad, if not outright pathetic, story of Obama’s manipulation of American Jews does nothing so much as disprove the meanspirited, perhaps anti-Semitic rantings of Professor Walt and Mearshimer, and other critics of the so-called lobby.

 

In fact the three strikes against American Jews (which are similar to what has happened already to British Jews) are as follows:

 

The first strike was academia (again a forum supposedly dominated by Jews) where the definition of “racism” was taken over by sociologists who imported into the concept a necessary prerequisite of the inequality of power and the use of words and action to perpetuate an imbalance of power, often to support a status quo. Therefore the weak can not be truly racist, as all words and actions are excused by the theory that they are seeking to end an unjustified inequality of power.   This sociological construct was then utilized by such philosophers as England’s John Honderich to somehow deduce that groups like the Palestinians were not only not racist to advocate killing of Jewish civilians but had a moral right to do so.

 

The second strike was the adoption of the post-modern concept of cultural relativism.  Jews and American non-Jews alike were to be disabused of the notion that their culture emphasizing individual human rights was the only legitimate culture in the world, and in fact it was racist to disrespect those other cultures who grant no individual rights but only tribal rights or the right not to be disrespected or humiliated.  Such cultures could no longer be seen as bringing on their own humiliation by failing to equip their young for technology and economic prosperity or to respect peace and non-violence.  It was America and certainly it was Israel, according to these theorists, that was the “root cause” of the humiliation, rather than the behaviours and misdeeds of the cultures themselves.

 

The third strike, thrown by Obama on Tisha B’Av last is to tie American notions of freedom and justice to the notions permitted, even supported, by Mary Robinson at Durban.  Durban was allowed to stand for the proposition that Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians (notwithstanding all of the efforts made in the Oslo process and other deals made which the Palestinians did not honour) amounted to a Nazi-like genocide against the Palestinians.

 

Tom Lantos’ account of the tragedy of  Mary Robinson and the Durban Conference should be studied.   He met repeatedly with Robinson to challenge her acceptance of the Organization of Islamic States attempt to use the Durban Conference to delegitimize the Jewish State, and, together with Colin Powell, he held to their position that the Conference was not to be hijacked into involvement in one specific political dispute.

 

Lantos says that Robinson “refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East.

Instead she discussed ‘the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and … the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.’”

 

Whether or not this language was reflected in the final conference draft, after the Americans and others had pulled out, this display of hateful power by the Islamic states and anti-American and anti-Israel NGOs, as appeased by Mary Robinson on behalf of the so-called United Nations, was a turning point in world history.   And the awarding of a medal for this conduct reflects a turning point (which we hope can be reversed in the future) in American history.   For Obama, the President whose moral judgments as a member of Reverend Wright’s congregation were called into question, has demonstrated the validity of all the concerns.   The misuse of history, the false equivalencies between the Holocaust and Israeli assumption of sovereignty after a defensive war where its very existence was at stake, the appeasement of totalitarians without a free media or academia to correct its Big Lies, all have been given an American stamp of approval. On Tisha B’Av.

 

When Obama spoke at Cairo, he exemplified the American submission to Islamic doctrines.   First, he had the nerve to equate all of the tolerance towards minorities, women, gays, and blacks – which were not achieved without great struggle in America, but are now supported by some very strong laws – and the great American Justice system with the non-tolerance of minority rights, women’s rights and the lack of Justice in Islamic countries today. While no one should expect a President to be unduly insulting to his hosts, the following words are reflective of a submission and an appeasement which will enable Muslim states to continue their unjust persecution of some of their peoples:   Obama stated that America and Islam “share common principles, principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

 

If so, would Obama the Christian and his wife the feminist feel as comfortable living in Saudi Arabia or Iran as they do in Chicago or Washington?

 

The third strike, by comparing the Palestinian suffering under what is called an Occupation, to Jewish suffering under the Holocaust, does more than create the problem of moral equivalency, a particularly noxious form of moral relativism;  it in fact compares not only the sufferers (who surely should not be compared) but also the alleged perpetrators.   The success for Islamists and anti-Semites of all varieties was that an international conference with all the legitimacy bestowed by the United Nations, made it permissible in the future to compare the Nazi perpetrators of the planned extinction of every Jew on earth with the new Nazis, the Israelis.    And so, a world that came together to finally kill the Nazis could come together again, under the submissive leadership of Brown in England, Sarkozy in France and Obama in America, to kill the new Nazis, the Israelis.   Or, more likely, feel nothing more than Tolerance, as the Arab world, now supported by the soon-to-be nuclear power of Iran handles the actual genocide.

 

Tolerism, that excessive leniency towards the views of our enemies, is the ideological mask hiding the three strikes against the Jews:  allegations of racism and Apartheid against the Jews of Israel and their Jewish supporters around world, imposition of standards of cultural relativism, and finally on Tisha B’Av, 2009, the message that Mary Robinson was right – the Jews are the new Nazis.  

 

The American Jews have lost the first game in the series, whether they understand it or not.   It is time to wake up and understand the rules of the game.   The first step is to understand just what tragedy befell the Jewish people on Tisha B’Av 2009.

 

 

Howard Rotberg is a Canadian writer and author of The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel about a Book and its Author (Mantua Books), Second Generation Radical (www.HowardRotberg.ca) and Exploring Vancouverism:  The Political Culture of Canada’s Lotus Land (CanadianValuesPress).  His forthcoming book, of which the above essay is to be a chapter, is tentatively entitled  Tolerism: The Crisis in Our Values.