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 30th.
Tisha B'Av primarily commemorates the destruction of the first and second
Although this holy day is primarily meant to commemorate the destruction of
the
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
3.
Bar Kokhba's revolt against
4.
Following the Roman siege of Jerusalem, the razing of
5. During the First Crusade, 10,000 Jews were murdered on Tisha B’Av (1095)
6.
In 1290, Jews were expelled from
7.
The Alhambra
Decree of 1492, expelling the Jews from
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
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 30th 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
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
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 7th, 2001, a mere four days later militant Islam attacked
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
In
this, Obama seeks to bring
And
so, on Tisha B’Av, July 30th, 2009, Obama made an even more shocking
symbolic submission to foreign values, when he awarded a medal of freedom to
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
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
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
And so, having been travelling around
In my travels around
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
Obama’s grandparents (who grew up in
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
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
Obama, in his few pronouncements about
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
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
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
For Israelis, whether or not they are Torah observant, know
that the Torah values justice more than anything. The
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
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
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.
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.
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
To Israelis, appeasement of evil today, means a bloodier and
longer war tomorrow. To
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.
To Israelis, even though Bush together with his Secretary of
State, Condoleeza Rice, were less than successful, at least they acknowledged
that the
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
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
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
Lantos writes that
"much of the responsibility for the debacle rests on the
shoulders" of Robinson, who "in her role as secretary
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
Of course, the late Mr. Lantos is no longer around to see
his Democratic party resolve to have
Even before the convening of the full conference in
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
Lantos noted that the declarations adopted by the Asian
nations in the ‘discriminatory’ environment of
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
Prior to
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
If so, would Obama the Christian and his wife the feminist
feel as comfortable living in
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
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.