I doubt very much that the Left understands or cares about the details regarding the horrors of an Iranian stoning. This column by Shmuley Boteach is not for the squeamish.
by Shmuley Boteach
My father was born in Iran and remains firmly attached to his Iranian heritage. He loves the food, the music, the language and the culture. It’s something I have witnessed with most Iranian exiles. Their country travels with them.
And why not? Iran was once one of the world’s greatest civilizations and the Middle East’s most highly educated state.
Then came Ruhollah Khomeini, and the slow descent into barbarism began.
To see what Shi’ite technocrats have done to Iran is tragic. I do not speak only of the violent clown Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, who can look an Ivy-League audience in the eye and say there are no homosexuals in Iran. Rather, I speak of a country so riddled with hate that it thinks nothing of producing cartoons, available on a website promoted by the semi-official Fars news agency, denying the Holocaust and portraying Jews as hook-nosed vermin. Have the Iranians been taught to hate Jews so much that they can caricaturize the gassing of one million children? When I visited Poland I walked into a clearing near Tarnow where 800 Jewish orphans had been murdered, mostly by having their brains dashed against trees. The Iranians would make fun of this as well? What level of humanity must be compromised before one feels that wholesale slaughter is a matter of comic relief? I forced myself to watch all of The Stoning of Soriah M by Iranian director Cyrus Nowrasteh. Based on a true story, it’s final scene – depicting an innocent woman buried up to her neck and having her skull slowly crushed by average men including her own father, husband and son throwing stones large enough to injure but not to immediately kill – is easily one of the most brutal events ever depicted on film.
If only it were an exaggeration.
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IN HIS speech last week from Governor’s Island about why the ‘Ground Zero’ mosque ought to be built, Mayor Mike Bloomberg said the 9/11 attacks were committed by ‘fanatics.’ He refused to mention even once that the attackers were Muslims. Are we doing our Islamic brothers and sisters a favor when we whitewash crimes committed by Islam, or should we be encouraging them to cut out the stubborn cancer in global Islam?
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Read the rest: Iran’s desecent into barbarism
Historian Tony Judt died this past weekend of “Lou Gehrig’s disease”. I knew someone who died of A.L.S. and I would not wish it on anyone. Judt – a brilliant historian of 20th century European affairs had a blind spot when it came to Israel and wrote an execrable piece for the left-wing vomit paper “The New York Review of Books” calling for Israel to be replaced by a bi-national state – yeah right, bi-nationalism has worked out so well in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda. Essentially a call for bi-nationalism is a call for the extermination of the Jews of Israel. For decades the “one-state solution” was the official policy of the P.L.O. Muslims really have a history of religious tolerance and equality with non Muslims – right? I guess not. This Jerusalem Post editorial nails it.
The death of Tony Judt, historian of contemporary Europe, offers an opportunity to revisit a case of strongly anti-Zionist sentiments held by a prominent Jewish intellectual.
The London-born Judt – who passed away on Friday at the age of 62 at his home in Manhattan, after being diagnosed two years ago with Lou Gehrig’s disease – produced remarkably lucid and readable studies of 19th and 20th century social history. However, it was the New York University lecturer’s polemical essays and public statements against Zionism, and his rejection of the legitimacy of the Jewishness of the State of Israel, that thrust him onto the public stage.
In a much-cited October 2003 essay in The New York Review of Books, Judt called to dismantle the state and to replace it with “a single, integrated, bi-national state” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – a recipe for national suicide for the sovereign Jewish entity.
This categorical rejection of Zionism put him in a class with other contemporary Jewish intellectuals of the Diaspora such as Jacqueline Rose, Michael Neumann and Joel Kovel, who have chosen to single out Israel for opprobrium that is rarely, if ever, directed at other countries that choose to adopt unique religious or cultural-based nationalities.
At the center of Judt’s attacks on Israel was a stubborn refusal to accept the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in a distinctly Jewish state. In the above-mentioned article, entitled “Israel: The Alternative,” Judt posited that Israel artificially imported “a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law.”
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Read the rest here: So farewell then, Tony Judt
Tags: Shmuley Boteach
