Yet another Obama official lashing out at Israel

[Secularbeliever]

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=53272&pageid=44&pagename=Slices

Obama and Israel Back to Slices 

Blaming the Victim: U.S. Envoy to Belgium Tells European Jews Muslim Antisemitism Is Israel's Fault
World Jewish Daily

 
Amb. Howard Gutman


Yet another chapter in the long and disgraceful history of blaming the Jews for antisemitism was written on Friday by the U.S. envoy to Belgium, a major fundraiser for President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. Howard Gutman, who is himself Jewish, reportedly told a conference called by the European Jewish Union that a distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Gutman said. He also argued that an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty will significantly diminish Muslim anti-Semitism.

Mr. Gutman did not specify precisely what differentiates Muslim antisemitism, which employs such themes as Jewish world domination, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, calls for the genocide of the Jewish people, and the blood libel, all of which are part and parcel of "traditional antisemitism," from any other form of Jew-hatred. Certainly, the participants of the forum, though they applauded Gutman's brief appearance, made their feelings clear after the event. The conference was attended by Jewish lawyers from across Europe. The legal experts at the event were visibly stunned by Gutman’s words, and the next speaker offered a scathing rebuttal to the envoy’s remarks. The modern Anti-Semite formally condemns Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and expresses upmost sympathy with the Jewish people. He simply has created a new species, the “Anti-Zionist” or – even more sophisticated – the so-called ‘Israel critic,’” Germany attorney Nathan Gelbart said.

“The ‘Israel critic’ will never state ‘Jews go home’ but is questioning the legality of the incorporation of the State of Israel and therefore the right for the Jewish people to settle in their homeland. He will not say the Jews are the evil of the world but claim that the State of Israel is a major cause for instability and war in the region. There is no other country, no other people on this planet the ‘Israel critic’ would dedicate so much time and devotion as to the case of Israel. For no other country he would criticize or ask to boycott its goods or academics. And this for one simple reason: Because Israel is the state of the Jewish people, not more and not less.”

Since the outbreak of the second intifada, it has been commonplace for many political and cultural figures to either deny Muslim antisemitism outright, or to obliquely claim that the Jews have brought it upon themselves.This slander is far from original, in fact, it even predates Christianity, as pagan Jew-haters such a Apion and Tacitus claimed that the Jews were hated because of their contempt for others and their strange way of life.

Christian antisemites claimed that the Jews had brought hatred upon themselves by rejecting and then killing Jesus; while Islam did the same by simply changing the rejected party to Muhammad.

Modern secular antisemites were no different, with those on the left claiming that the Jews were hated for their backward and barbaric ways; while those on the right claimed that it was because the Jews sought to undermine and destroy traditional values.

This is not even to mention Nazism, which believed that the Jews were hated because they sought to destroy the master race by introducing racial impurities to it.

In short, there has never been a form of antisemitism that has not blamed the Jews for its own sins. For those of us who subscribe to the radical notion that antisemitism is the fault of antisemites, we hope that President Obama will see fit to disassociate himself from this latest form of a very old slander.