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Naomi Klein, poster girl for so many on the left, spoke last week at a seminar in Ramallah. Her words have received almost no coverage outside Israel. They should have done. Because they reveal something pretty revolting about the way she views Jews.
Jews, she said:
even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free-card.
Jews, in other words, are exactly as the centuries-long antisemitic tropes have it: fundamentally evil, prone to murder non-Jews for the sake of murder.
Noam Schimmel in the Jerusalem Post goes into more detail:
It is not just an insensitive, crass, and highly offensive
statement. It is a violent and unethical one, laced with antipathy
toward Jews. The fact that Klein prefaced it by explaining that she is
a Jew does nothing to minimize the pathology it manifests....Commenting on the UN Durban Review Conference held in Geneva in
April, Klein says that she was disturbed by "the Jewish students' lack
of respect for the representatives from Africa and Asia who came to
speak about issues like compensation for slavery and the rise of racism
around the world." Again, Klein speaks in broad pejorative stereotypes
about Jews, only this time, Jewish students in particular.As a Jewish student who attended the conference, I reject this
reductive characterization of a diverse group of more than 200 students
from countries around the globe. Many of the Jewish students I spoke to
attended the conference in large part out of their interest in and
concern for human rights and social justice. To caricature them and
demean them as being unconcerned with these issues is unfair and
inaccurate.The same Jewish students that Klein speaks of so disparagingly
were engaged in advocacy for the rights of Rwandan genocide survivors,
for the victims of genocide and mass atrocity in Sudan, for women and
religious and ethnic minorities in Iran and around the world, for gays
and lesbians, for indigenous peoples and for the poor and the
marginalized in the developing world. Africa, Asia and Latin America
were definitely concerns for some of these students and priorities for
some as well. We met with ambassadors, attended plenary sessions,
advocated on these issues, among others, and educated ourselves about
them.In an interview with Haaretz, Klein described the Jewish
students who protested against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
speech at the conference as "truly awful" - in the same breath as she
described Ahmadinejad as "truly awful." Is there really a moral
equivalency between Jewish student protesters protesting his speech
with clown outfits, and his anti-Semitic tirades and calls to destroy
Israel? When the Jewish students wore clown outfits and plastic noses
to say that Durban is a joke, they were protesting the masquerade
nature at the heart of the Durban conference, including but not
exclusively Ahmadinejad's speech and the anti-Semitic statements of the
Iranian delegation. They were not mocking the rights and claims of
African and Asian representatives seeking redress for historical
injustices