The decision by a German pope to rehabilitate a bishop who is an avowed Holocaust denier (re. “Forget Backman — meet the Pope’s anti-semite” (yesterday, item 5)) has, not surprisingly, caused outrage in the global Jewish community.
As a baptised, church-going Roman Catholic, I’m not the least bit uncomfortable about the outpouring of anger we have seen from many Jewish leaders, and I don’t for a single second see their criticism of the pontiff as a sectarian slur against Catholics in general. Like them, I think Pope Benedict’s decision is grotesquely insensitive, and while I am incensed at what he’s done, I don’t feel in any way under siege or fear that I will be branded an apologist for his actions simply because I belong to the same faith.
Why then do we hear cries of anti-Semitism when someone launches into a strident attack on Israel (and not on Jewish people per se) for the outrage committed by the Israeli government and military in Gaza?
Before I go on, let me make it clear that I don’t believe The Age should have run Michael Backman’s tirade against Israel, at least not in the form he submitted it and certainly not in the finance section of the paper.
As Margaret Simons has so eloquently pointed out, the publication of Backman’s column on January 17 was a failure of editorial control — the sad evidence of a once great news organisation hopelessly under stress because of cost cutting by a management that seems completely clueless about the business it’s in.
With some judicious sub-editing, including a demand for the writer to substantiate some of his claims, Backman’s piece would have been entirely appropriate on the main opinion page of the paper. Yes, it would have been provocative, but what is the point of an opinion page if it doesn’t provoke debate?
However, while there might be much to criticize about Backman’s column and its absurd misplacement in the finance section, the one thing it wasn’t was anti-Semitic.
Sure, Backman was resorting to over-the-top polemics in making the unqualified statement that Israel was to blame for terrorist attacks against Western targets. However, there is nothing at all radical in the idea that the failure to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been a source of deep resentment throughout the Islamic world. Long before Israel’s latest onslaught in Gaza, the ongoing denial of proper sovereignty for Palestinians has been the one unifying grievance for Muslims everywhere, and the grievance cited time and time again by lunatic Islamists in their pleas to young Muslims to take up violent Jihad against the West.
While Backman might have been wrong to describe Israel’s treatment as “the nub of the problem”, it is undeniably a major factor in driving terrorism. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that is dangerously in denial.
Backman brought none of his specialist knowledge as a finance journalist to his column. Had he done so it would have an appropriate piece for the finance pages. For instance, he complained about the huge amount of aid the U.S. was giving to Israel but failed to provide a figure. For the record, the latest numbers available from the U.S. Congressional Library put the cost at just over $US2.5 billion for 2007. That’s peanuts compared to the hundreds of billions the U.S. is throwing at the banks right now but it could fill a lot of pot holes in Obama’s promised program to put America on the road to recovery by fixing its broken infrastructure.
While Backman failed to use any of his finance smarts to support his argument, his extensive experience reporting in Asia has provided him with an insight into how Muslims a long way from the Middle East think about Israel.
Take this observation about Malaysia:
Every citizen of this outpost of Islam has printed in his or her passport that the passport is not valid for Israel.
And given that Malaysians are not allowed to hold dual citizenship, this essentially means that every Malaysian citizen, including the 40% who are not Muslims, are banned from visiting Israel.
“When will Malaysia recognise Israel?” I once asked the then finance minister. “Once Israel treats the Palestinians better,” was his reply.
How would he determine that? “When the Palestinians tell us,” he said.
Backman came in for most criticism for his comments about Israeli tourists behaving badly abroad. This is where he was in desperate need of some solid evidence beyond his own musings. Strangely, several days after the offending article was published in The Age, Backman provided this link on his website to an article by an Israeli travel writer which provided strong support for his argument in prose that would make even the most hardened Israeli bater blush. (Margaret Simons says Backman found the link on her blog.)
Yehuda Nuriel, in an article published on the very mainstream Israeli news website, Ynet, made the same accusations Backman did about Israeli travellers but in much blunter terms:
The Israeli, any Israeli, has become an icon of evilness, ugliness, corruption and exploitation. There is no use searching for ways to change the behaviour of Israelis abroad. This is a lost cause.
In an exchange via Facebook on Monday, Nuriel told me that he had originally written the article in Hebrew and he regarded the English version as a “quite accurate translation”. He didn’t retract any of the statements made in the article.
It has to be said there is nothing new in what either Nuriel or Backman have to say about Israeli travellers. I have had various accounts about their antics related to me only recently, including by a friend in London, a BBC journalist who just happens to be Jewish himself. The Israelis’ bad reputation is not dissimilar to that of loud Americans, overbearing Germans, sun-fried and oafish English backpackers or booze-addled Australians crashing their way through exotic places.
The essential point missing from Backman’s piece and what would have made it relevant to the Gaza situation was that the Israeli tourists renowned for causing so much grief abroad are young people recently released from the army.
Nuriel makes the connection to military service explicit in his article. To him the bad behaviour of Israeli travellers serves as a timely metaphor and reinforces a negative stereotype of Israel as a whole:
Look at them and see us: a violent horde that treats the world as yet another policing mission, a destination that needs to be conquered and subdued.
Those who accuse Backman of anti-Semitism should look at what some Israelis are saying about their own government and what its actions are doing for the nation’s reputation.
If this rape of another country (Palestine) was of another time and another place-some mythical oriental country during the Yuan dynasty- I have no doubt the majority of Jews would condemn the Emperor who seized another country’s land then set about torturing, and practising genocide towards the original owners of the land: generally carrying on like the hordes of Ghengiz Khan. But because of the dreaded issue of religion today’s Jews in the diaspora feel entitled to play the racist card. Why?
WWII was a long, long time ago and yesterday’s persecuted Jews were entitled to search for a home land. Some sixty years later the persecuted Jew in the land of Israel has become today’s arrogant tyrant. Why should the Jewish religion exempt the Israelis from being answerable to charges of infamy? More importantly, why do Jews in lands other than Israel thump the racist drum?
If I was a Catholic I wouldn’t hesitate to condemn the Inquisition. Why should Jews be any different? There are many Jews who are appalled by Israel’s behaviour, yet they too are ridiculed by their fellow Jews. Why does the world, including Jewish dissenters, deserve to have their criticism of Israel silenced by the blackmail of Auslander Jews? Hypocrisy seems to have become an art form.
Cal and jewboy should really address their conerns to the powerful and strident Jewish lobbies worldwide that weave in attacks on Israel with being part of the Jewish identity. This old Jew has had a real gutfull of them and I now view them as Jewish people’s worst enemy as they perpetate every rediculous Jewish stereotype.
People like Vic Aldaheff who is ready with a quote everytime to defend , indefensible Israeli actions and cry “anti-Sentism” at the drop of a hat, or Mark Leibler who endlessly perpetuates the myths about Hamas using “human screens” while blithely ignoring the fact that IDF members live with their famles and amongst civilians, and their continual bleatings about “plucky little Isarel” with it’s unbelieable armory needing to defend itself from some fairly useless rockets .
I disagree jewboy. Israel is acting like the Nazis and a comparison is warranted. Stealing land and creating ghettos ,apharteid, sanctions, preventing supplies and not allowing the international media to be present as they commit atrocities and war crimes in Gaza. If it walks and talks etc etc.
I don’t know what is happening in Israel but something very bad is bringing that country to a precipice of moral collapse. The once great experiment of a socialist democracy has vanished and some very cruel and ruthless people are running the place. Israelis should mourn-they are losing their soul.
And Marilyn is correct-the world is possiby Hollocausted out and every bit of pity has been wrung out of that terrible time. In fact-it makes me extremely angry now that the event overshadows other terrible events like the Armenian massacres.
Zionist Terror and the Palestinians
As a person of no religious persuasion, my understanding is that a semite is a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs. It would appear that the Zionists within the Jewish community are confusing Zionism with Semitism which I understand to be quite separate concepts. Being opposed to Zionist terrorism is not in itself anti-Semitic.
An outsider, I see very little distinction between the treatment of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli Defence Force and some of the reprisal raids undertaken by the Nazis in World War II. Having read Blackman’s Age article as a consequence of the publicity arising from Jewish lobby protests, it does not in any way appear to be anti-Semitic, but is sympathetic to the position of the Palestinians at the hands of the Zionists who run Israel.
The sensitivity of the Jewish lobby when the Zionists are criticised for their appalling behaviour towards Palestinian civilians, and the ongoing Palestinian resistance to the dominating power of Israel in some way reflects the struggle of the Zionists in the 1920s 30s and 40s to obtain a Jewish homeland at the expense of those who occupied it at the time. It is sobering to read of the terrorist activities undertaken by Jewish terrorists in the period leading to the ultimate formation of Israel and dispossession of the Palestinians from land that they had occupied for hundreds if not thousands of years. These are clearly forgotten or suppressed by those who would try to legitimise the use of terror on their own behalf whilst opposing it in others.
Cal, I appreciate your feelings but this is the wrong response.Reading Backman I read an article critical of Israeli policy actioins, not of Jewish people per se. Don’t deny the facts be guided by them( to quote Obama on matters in general).
We do not always like the truth but eventually we must live with its reality.
There are no angels here & until it becomes the norm to name the things that are wrong irrespective of thoe that do them we will not be helping.
You are not guilty of any of these wrong doings,nor are jews per se, but if you deny the facts you are in danger of making yourself share in responsibility for it & what follows. Unfortunately there are too many over the many decades since 1948 thet that had/have that role. Many of these are not jewish either.
Who cares? Most of the world have just plain had a gutful of whining jews using the holocaust to hold all of us to ransom.
110 million people died in wars last century – the only ones continually whining, carping, stealing land and demanding squillions in compensation are jews.
Giles MacDonogh in his book “After the Reich” found records that proved a full two thirds of jews escaped Germany and Austria before the bloody holocaust and now claim they are “survivors” . Shimon Peres was in Palestine by 1938 and reports show that most jews were simply allowed to leave.
In the words of Norman Finkelstein’s mother who survived two of the concentration
camps “if so many survived, who did Hitler kill”.
MacDonogh shows in detail how the nazis and others grossly exaggerated the numbers of jews killed – in one case they claimed they took 10,000 people by truck and shot them. It turned out to be 300.
If we want to whinge here we should ask the AGE why they censored part of Jason Koutsokis’s piece yesterday about grafitti and destroyed furniture in the Samouni house.
And stop pandering to the damn jews. It’s a cult invented to justify their theft of Palestine and nothing more.
They did not exist in the area thousands of years ago, were not schlepped out on trucks by the romans, did not wander 40 years in the desert and not manage to leave a single trace and there were no wretched temples.
The Judea and Samaria they whine about are not in Palestine, but in Iraq and around Bablyon. that’s if anyone is deluded enough to believe their silly “bible” has any credible basis in fact.
The zionists in their quest for Palestine admitted in 1929 that it was all bollocks and Shlomo Sand of the Tel Aviv University confirms it. Jews were never a “people” it is a made up cult.