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Israel Should Be the Litmus Test of Muslim Moderation

Western observers are all too eager, writes Liel Leibovitz, to sort Muslims into “moderate” and “extremist” camps. The limits of such distinctions immediately become apparent when the attitudes of supposedly moderate Muslims toward Israel come to the fore. Take, for instance, the seemingly “moderate” father of the perpetrator of the San Bernardino attack, who responded to his son’s obsessive hatred of Israel by reassuring him that Israel will disappear in a few years and the Jews will be sent “back to Ukraine.”

[W]hen it comes to moderate Muslims, we view Jew-hating as understandable, even acceptable. . . . [V]ile statements [about Israel] are explained away by mumbling something about the occupation or Gaza or the lasting effect of a strange religious conflict over some faraway land none of us well-heeled Westerners have any business trying to understand. That’s a travesty.

A tiny religious minority group with its own independent national existence, Jews are the Middle East’s essential others. A failure to think of them in any other way but yearning for their destruction [means] you should neither call yourself a moderate nor hope ever to strike roots in a democratic society that still believes in the bounties of peace, pluralism, and liberty.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel & Zionism, Moderate Islam, Muslim-Jewish relations, Terrorism

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic