By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO –Efforts to appease radical Islamists prompt the kind of massacres recently seen in Paris and in San Bernardino, Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Stephens told a first-night Chanukah dinner sponsored by StandWithUs at the Torrey Pines Hilton on Dec. 6.
First discussing Paris, Stephens said: “Before there was last month’s attacks, in which 130 people were murdered, there were the January attacks on the newspaper offices of Charlie Hebdo, in which 12 people were murdered as well as the attack on the kosher supermarket … in which four people were murdered. But before those attacks, in the summer of 2014, there was an attack on a synagogue in Paris that nearly became the first pogrom in modern European history if the police hand’t intervened in the nick of time. And before that attack there was the attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse, in which three Jewish schoolchildren and their teacher were murdered. And before that attack there was the murder of Ilan Halimi, a young-Jewish -Moroccan cell phone salesman who was kidnapped in 2006 by a gang that called themselves ‘the barbarians’ and tortured for 24 days.”
Stephens, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said while this chain of events was occurring in France, that nation’s parliament had the idea “unilaterally to recognize a Palestinian state” in the wake of the 2014 Gaza War
“Think about that,” he told a crowd of more than 500. “A war in which Hamas rains thousands of unguided missiles and mortars at Israeli civilians, a war in which Hamas uses terror tunnels to infiltrate nearby Israel kibbutzim and take hostages, a war in which Hamas unilaterally violated no fewer than nine ceasefires that could have ended the war — a war that the Palestinians started and which they continued so Palestinian casualties could earn sympathy points from the West–in the wake of this war, that’s when the legislators of France decided it was time to recognize a Palestinian state.”
Stephens said although the elites of France “may think they’re buying off the jihadist furies in their streets in the coin of cheap anti-Israel politics, what they are really doing is whetting their appetites.” While some claim that there is a difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, “the terrorist who murdered those four Jews at the supermarket wasn’t so discriminating.”
Turning to the recent San Bernardino massacre, Stephens asked “why didn’t we notice that there was something deeply amiss with this man (Syed Rizwan Farook) and his wife before he opened fire.” His father was quoted as saying after the massacres that his son had been “obsessed with Israel.”
Stephens suggested that “Farook’s ideology was hidden in the cultural fog… the fog in which a UCLA student named Rachel Beyda was rejected from a student government position because she was Jewish… [and} in which a Stanford student named Molly Horwitz was interviewed by a student organization and asked how she would vote on divestment “given that she was Jewish.”
“This is the fog of pervasive anti-Israel bigotry, which hides anti-Semitic bigotry, which in turn hides the jihadist furies,” Stephens said.
“This is why the ideological and political battles being waged about Israel — in campuses, on op-ed pages, at the U.N., in government bureaucracies–are so important. What starts by calling Israel a colonialist enterprise or an apartheid state–these historical and relative abstruse terms — never ends there. The intellectual defamation becomes a license for demonization. What you demonize you consider permissable to attack. If you can attack Israel, why not also go after its supporters outside of Israel? Some of those supporters are Jews, some aren’t Jews, but they’re all fair game” in the eyes of terrorists.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com