Stockholm Syndrome reared its head last Friday, when an academic who identifies herself as Jewish published op-ed in the Los Angeles Times explaining why she voted for the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli universities, about which I wrote recently in the Jerusalem Post.
The Times piece said that the writer had just returned from a trip to Israel and “Palestine” sponsored by Interfaith Peace-Builders, a group that subtly propagandizes for the Palestinian jihad. She was easily taken in. “Palestinian students of all ages,” she claimed, “endure harassment at military checkpoints, frequent school closures, unprovoked arrests, imprisonment and sometimes death at the hands of trigger-happy soldiers.”
The entire piece is just Islamic propaganda. The boycott, which is only the latest and most glaring manifestation of the ASA’s rabid antisemitism, now becomes an opportunity for major mainstream media organs like the Los Angeles Times to run a venomous libel against the Jewish state – written by a Jew, of course, in order to mask the viciousness of the attack. This is a blood libel couched as a “reasoned argument” and set out with sophisticated rhetoric. But we know what attacks like this really is, and where it leads.
The ASA has rightly been damaged by its Nazi-like anti-Jew resolution: it has lost members, a competing organization has been launched, and there has even been a challenge to its 501c3 status. American universities rejecting the boycott include Boston University, Brown, Cornell, Duke, George Washington University, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, New York University, Northwestern, Princeton, Purdue, Stanford, Tufts, Tulane, the University of California-Irvine, the University of California-San Diego, University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, Wesleyan, Yale, and many others.
Still, the resolution itself has also done enormous damage. That ill-used useful idiots and self-loathing Jews would be given major platforms to spread such poison is astonishing. The writer of the Los Angeles Times piece declares herself a Jew two sentences into her piece. Yes, she’d have to, or the unsuspecting reader might think her a member of a neo-Nazi or jihadi group. She aligns with the worst Jew-haters in the world and yet cloaks herself in self-righteousness, while traipsing off to Gaza to speak of how “profoundly shaken” she was by the “brutality” she saw Israelis display “toward Palestinians.” What brutality did she see? She never says -- of course.
Instead, the Times dusts off every Jew-hating bullet point in the “Palestinian” arsenal, including “harassment at military checkpoints.” What would the Times have the Israelis do? Give unfettered access to homicide bombers? Suicide bombings were a daily, yes, daily occurrence before the security fence and the construction of those checkpoints that devastate her fragile sensibilities.
The Times also libels Israeli soldiers as “trigger-happy.” How dare they? Is there any army in the world that has shown as much self-restraint as the Israeli army? What other country quietly suffers rocket attacks at homes, schools, and hospitals without taking much-needed action? And when they do finally take action, they warn the Jew-haters that they will be removing the rocket launchers from their living rooms. What other army drops leaflets warning the population in advance that armaments and rocket launchers will be removed?
As a people, we revere life as our highest value -- precious life. Does The Los Angeles Times think that the Jews want to fight? Do they think that Jewish parents want to send their children off to war? The Islamic narrative is one big fat lie, and they are carrying water for these annihilationists. Israelis leave their schools, their workplaces, and their families because they get drafted into the reserve, in order to stop people from going into Jewish homes and cutting their children’s throats. The Times’s silence on the Jew-hatred that fuels the whole of the war on Israel exposes their vicious op-ed for what it is.
The Times writer makes it up as she goes along, citing examples of “blacklisting or denial of tenure, promotion or academic positions” to opponents of Israel – incidents that she says “go unreported.” If they aren’t reported, how does she know that they happened at all. She lustily supports the 21st century version of Kristallnacht -- the BDS movement’s boycotting of the Jews -- and does so with an odious braggadocio.
The Los Angeles Times appears to know nothing of the history of the war against the Jews, and worse still, doesn’t seem to want to know. The piece equates Israeli policy with the vile Jim Crow south. It does this in defense of the “Palestinians” who have declared numerous times that all of “Palestine” will be Jew-free. Israel, where “Palestinians” live free (freer than in most Muslim countries), run for government office and are free to rail against Israel from the floor of the Knesset.
When the history books are written, the Los Angeles Times will be reviled for giving space to trolls who aided and abetted the second holocaust. Children will shake their heads, asking mommy how Jew-hatred could have been sanctioned in the twenty-first century, and not been relegated to the absolute fringe of decent society. It is because the Los Angeles Times runs this evil propaganda -- but its pages are never open to supporters of Israel like me and my colleagues.
It make my skin crawl. We have seen all this before. Our history is riddled with miserable traitors who have tried to separate their lies against the Jewish state from the Jews. It is one and the same. Methinks the Los Angeles Times dost protest too much.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of AtlasShrugs.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her onTwitter here.