In her Nov. 17 Wespeak, Alison Weir takes issue with the claim that she advances anti-Semitic views and ends with a plea for evidence, moderation, debate, and a free marketplace for ideas. Oh, please. Once she began including combatants in her casualty calculations so she could argue that Israel murders children, Ms. Weir passed irredeemably beyond the realm of reasoned debate and into pure polemics. That being her stance, since she is an advocate for a bigoted cause rather than a seeker of truth, it is appropriate to accuse her of sharing the bias that motivates her cause: To wit, anti-Semitism.
I will not engage Ms. Weir in the erroneous factual assertions in her Wespeak. Doing so would be pointless since advocates for the Palestinians abjure both fact and logic. But I note the extraordinary difference between Haaretz publishing an article exploring neo-conservatism as an idea, and noting that many of its proponents are Jewish, and what Ms. Weir did, which was to use the headline of the article to claim that Israel-supporting American Jews pushed the United States into war in Iraq in order to advance their own nefarious ends.
The secret-cabal-of-Jews-controlling-America theme is neither new nor surprising, because anti-Semitism is exactly and only what this conflict is about. Indeed, the idea harkens back to the Nazi propaganda of the 1920s, which makes perfect sense when one recalls that Palestinian nationalism drew its intellectual support from, and made common cause with, Hitler’s Germany. Or perhaps Ms. Weir also thinks all of those speeches by the Grand Mufti and all of those Palestinians he recruited for the Waffen-SS are just another fabrication of the mysterious all-powerful Jewish conspiracy.
I write, though, not to criticize Ms. Weir, but to praise her call for the media to pay more attention to the Palestinian perspective. It was truly despicable for the major networks to protect American sensibilities by cutting away after only a few seconds from Palestinians dancing in the streets on Sept. 11, 2001, for example. Fortunately, well-regarded and accurate translations of Arabic speeches by Palestinian religious and political leaders, as well as newspaper articles, are available from the Middle East Media Research Institute, at www.memri.org. More media attention to what Palestinians actually say to each other about what they believe could only elevate this “debate.” And there is no better demonstration of the morality of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians than the Palestinians themselves.
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