Ignorant anti-Semites

New anti-Semites can't tell us apart from Arabs, uninterested in facts

Yair Lapid|Published: 10.25.09 , 18:24

Part 2 of article

We prefer to classify people, because it's more convenient that way. What's the difference between the Swedes and Norwegians for example? Some of my best friends are blond, but it's hard to tell who's who.

And who around here can tell apart the Japanese and Korean? The Hutu and the Tutsi? The Bolivians and Paraguayans? All these nations engaged in wars that were much crueler than the one between us and the Palestinians; wars that left millions of people dead and lasted for many years.

A total of 7,000 Palestinians were killed in the 62 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That accounts for one day in Bolivia's Chaco Valley or two hours in the bleeding Rwanda, but just like we can't tell them apart, they can't tell us apart.

From the chilly Stockholm, in a world of 1,000 TV channels, we all look the same: Dark-skinned, sweaty, and shooting at each other. The story told by Bostrom, in his view, is not about Jews and Arabs, but rather, about a terrible place where everyone behaves like an animal.

His anti-Semitism does not stem from prejudice, but rather, from ignorance.

The new anti-Semites absolve themselves from researching the facts. For them, we are no more than a "story." They tell it not because they are convinced that it's true, but rather, because they don't understand that there is no way in the world it could be true. They tell themselves that "maybe," in a place where they can be no maybes. They say that "it's possible" in a place where there is no such possibility.

They are not writing the new version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; they merely think it's their journalistic duty to read them and then publish them.

Bostrom does not reject the possibility that we may be committing Nazi-like crimes because he fails to understand that Israel is an enlightened Western democracy that struggles for its existence in the wild East.

He fails to distinguish Jewish morals from radical Islam's lack of morality; he cannot tell the difference between our rule of law and our enemies' rule of hatred; he can't see the difference between a state that established the Winograd committee and constantly investigates itself and a terror group that rejects nothing and that it has the right to lie ceaselessly in order to taint our image worldwide.

I am not arguing for moment that every Israeli act in the territories is proper or justified. I thought, and wrote it in real-time, that the killing of children in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead was an immoral and possibly unforgiveable act. However, there is a difference – a great, fundamental, irrefutable difference – between tragic mistakes that happen during war and radical Islam's indiscriminate wickedness.

At the end of the day, we can sum up the differences between us in two simple sentences: We can erase them off the face of the earth, yet we'll never do it. They can't kill us all, yet had they been able to, they would do it without thinking twice.