April 10, 2019: Growing hostility to Israel

In “AIPAC shows that Twitterdom is Twitterdumb” (March 31), Gil Troy is overly sanguine about the future of support for Israel in the United States. He is correct that AIPAC’s power comes from the current widespread support for Israel in America, but the future is much less rosy, and not just because Twitterdom is increasingly just plain dumb.

 

The threat comes from the infiltration of pro-Islamist indoctrination into American education. What was once just an occasional problem at the college level has become fairly widespread in high schools and is even making its way into middle schools (ages 11-14). Accusations of “Islamophobia” have often been sufficient to protect faculty members who have privileged Islamic ideas and beliefs in their classrooms. These ideas are hostile to Israel and Jews.

 

America’s Jewish leadership has failed to stand up against these attacks, and is often complicit in them. Thus, in Newton, Massachusetts, where a suit has been filed to end pro-Islamist indoctrination in the public schools, many of the leaders in the city are Jews and there has been essentially no support from the local Federation. 

 

If this challenge isn’t met, the future will belong to the Omars, Tlaibs and Ocasio-Cortezes, and that can’t be good for American Jews, never mind Israel.

 

Teaching the Holy Book to Booker

 

Regarding the article by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “Cory Booker, Hebrew and support for Israel” (April 2), the writer tells us that while serving as the Chabad Rabbi at Oxford University, he taught Torah to Cory Booker, a non-Jew who is now a senator in the American Senate and a presidential candidate. 

 

The Babylonian Talmud (Chagiga 13a) states that a Jew many not teach Torah to a non-Jew. Torah is our inheritance and specific to Jews. He may teach Torah to a non-Jew concerning the seven mitzvot that the latter is obligated to keep. He may also teach him Torah to enable him to convert to Judaism. Neither of these exceptions is relevant to the writer teaching Torah to Cory Booker.

One wonders on what halachic basis Boteach was able to teach Torah to Cary Booker.

 

Trump is right

 

Now that the election is over, it seems that one of the most astute observers of the election was US President Donald Trump (“‘Close’ Israeli race is between ‘two good people,’ April 8). Yes, Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu are both good people – intelligent men who have dedicated their lives to our cause, served our country well and still have much to offer. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to both of them.

 

Let’s hope that they and all of our newly elected members of Knesset can set aside differences and cooperate to continue to lead our country, with love and vision, to even greater achievements.

 

What’s next?

 

Regarding “What should Israel’s next foreign minister do?” (April 8), Nimrod Goren has indeed written a fabulous wish list – especially concerning peace with our neighbors. But which of our neighbors wants peace with us?

 

How will PA President Mahmoud Abbas be personally better off when he is no longer able to blame his Jewish neighbors for every single financial, social, racist deficit that his kleptocracy depends on?

 

How could the benign oligarchy of Hamas survive without having its rockets and missiles protected by tiny tots?

 

This utopian idea that if we change our whole way of life our neighbors will love us was surely proven false 80 years ago when the Grand Mufti supported (and possibly even suggested) the Nazi concept of a Final Solution?

 

If our bargaining chip with those who call to terminate our existence is national suicide and another Masada, then no thanks!

 

Timely JPost article about NYU

 

Kudos to Romy Ronen for his timely column exposing the shameful actions of Andrew Hamilton, president of New York University, in awarding a Presidential Award to a disruptive group with the name Students for Justice in Palestine (“NYU president Hamilton – Is this how you support justice?” April 9).

 

As an alumnus of NYU’s Graduate School of Law, I received on Monday a request to participate in a survey of how NYU is doing in the community. But for Ronen’s column, I probably would have ignored the request.

 

Now, aware of Hamilton’s insensitivity to the large Jewish student population at NYU and in the surrounding community, I anxiously await the survey to let Mr. Hamilton know how shocked and disappointed I am at his decision.

 

Regarding “Beto O’Rourke: PM is a racist” (April 9), that Democratic presidential hopeful seems to have lost the plot. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Arabs were coming to the polls, that was a matter of fact regarding political opponents, not a racist comment. O’Rourke is the one interpreting it as racist. (Had Netanyahu said to prevent Arabs from coming to the polls, that would have been racist.)

 

Israel has many cultural differences, but we look out for each other and are trying to make things better. O’Rourke seems to have been brainwashed by people who neither hold elections nor have free elections. 

 

Does Beto O’Rourke really call out racism when he sees it?

He demonizes Israel as country that has “a prime minister who is a racist,” despite the fact that in many years of public service, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu never made a single indisputably racist remark.

 

Yet one can’t help but notice that O’Rourke doesn’t call Mahmoud Abbas a racist, despite the PA leader’s long history of genuinely racist (and patently false) utterings, such as:

 

• “Certain rabbis in Israel have said very clearly to their government that our water should be poisoned in order to have Palestinians killed.”

 

• “Al-Aqsa is ours, and they [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to [prevent that].”

 

• “[Jews] say that they made sacrifices in World War II [but] they should not treat us the way they were treated” (i.e. Jews are Nazis).

 

• “Zionists believe in the purity of the Jewish race, as Hitler believed in the purity of the Aryan race.”

It is easy to list many additional racist remarks by Abbas and other Palestinian leaders. If O’Rourke is really a crusader for truth and against racism, he will apologize for his mistaken remark about Netanyahu and rush to correctly brand Abbas a racist.

But don’t hold your breath. There’s a word for people who apply a double-standard to Jews and Israel: Beto O’Rourke is a racist.