Defending Israel against rising anti-semitism is our fight

Initially I said to myself, this is not my battle.

But then I watched, in horror, as people marched through the streets of Philadelphia chanting the genocidal slogan of the Palestinian people: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”

Translation: Kill the Jews, push them into the river, keep faith with the ancestors and their desperate attempts at a final solution.

In fact, I heard the words “solution” used in exactly that context by young students of all races and religions as they filled Rittenhouse Square on a warm October evening.

My first instinct was to provide quiet support and let the Jewish residents of Philadelphia take the lead in the PR war. But then I started seeing the reports of what had been done in Gaza to innocent Israelis. I heard about the kidnapping of elderly grandmothers, the rape of younger women, the murder of babies.

I realized that we had entered a very dark period when, instead of crying out in horror that infants were massacred, supporters of Palestine were quibbling about whether the children had been decapitated, thrown in ovens or simply shot.

That was the hill the defenders of Hamas were willing to die upon.

We all have a role in this tragedy if we are human beings. The suggestion that this is not our battle to wage, and that we must be polite and judicious and respect the defenders of Hamas is as repellent to me as the thought that there is some value to Talibanic rule and the dehumanization of women in Afghanistan.

It is as inconceivable as the idea that mutilating the genitals of a young Muslim girl in West Africa should be respected as a “cultural tradition.”

It is as maddening as the argument I once heard from a judge at an asylum hearing that we in the United States cannot hold other countries to our standards of human and civil rights.

...continued

swipe to next page