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The Anglican chaplain of Sussex University, Paul Oestreicher, has been plucking his now-dead Jew-strings and replied in the Guardian (where else?) to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s attack on the General Synod’s misguided and one-sided discrimination against Israel when Israel faces her greatest threat so far: annhilation by Iran, Syria, and Hamas.
There’s nothing new in Oestreicher’s brand of antisemitism. For centuries it’s often been an option to the intellectually-challenged to blame antisemitism on the Jews themselves. For a brilliant rebuttal of “Jews do it to themselves” thinking, check out Maccoby’s “A Pariah People: The Anthropology of Antisemitism”.
Melanie Phillips has published a scathing rebuttal to Oestreicher’s delusional attempt at historical revision and she is also not fooled by Oestreicher’s attempt to intellectualise antisemitism into a self-induced prophecy. Her response, well worth printing out and circulating, is here.
In particular, she picks out the wolf-in-sheep’s clothing gambit that many a supposed “friend of Israel” tries to pull on Israelis. Namely, in the all too familiar “my father’s great uncle’s third cousin’s fifth grandchild’s fourth wife was Jewish…I think”, ‘was‘ is the operative word; it has no relevance to the obfuscation about to be attempted by the author of middle east revisionism. It’s merely the first stage of their myth-making designed to add weight to their groundless blame-game.
Rule of Thumb:
As soon as someone spins out a parallel universe where Israelis play the pariah role of sole cause of the problem, where Israel’s right to defend herself is described as morally akin to Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa, where Zionism is nothing more than terrorism instead of its sole purpose of Jewish survival in the Jewish homeland that was stolen from Jews during the Arab conquest anyway, then Israelis in this universe know they have a traitor in their midst spinning facts and obfuscating responsibility into lies and defamation and age-old antisemitism. Such people, if they try to appear on the inside, make up Israel’s fifth column and it must be dealt with like any other fifth column.
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