Isn't it lovely how AnnaA conflates Hamas with J Street. Just lovely.

KM, Tzipi Livni, Jerusalem -- Wednesday, October 21, 2009

To Mr. Jeremy Ben-Ami, Executive Director, J Street

'I would like to congratulate you on your inaugural national conference. I believe most American Jews support Israel and want to see it thrive as a Jewish and democratic state.'

However, in the eyes of many, the reality is that Israel is arguably neither Jewish nor democratic.

The state of Israel was established in 1948 by the UN as a Jewish homeland, in the aftermath of the Holocaust in which the majority of European Jews were liquidated by the Nazis in industrial style murder factories.

In the beginning, it served its true purpose and welcomed all those who had suffered from persecution around the world and who were born of a Jewish mother. But in the years that followed, the vision blurred and Herzl's dream of a Jewish agrarian co-operative, set within a Muslim Middle East and living in harmony with its indigenous neighbours, soon turned into a nightmare.

The indigenous Arabs voted, en bloc, against the UN resolution of 1947 that proposed to divide their land to accommodate a Jewish state in Palestine, and when their voices were ignored they attacked the fledgling state immediately upon its birth, which they saw as illegitimate. But the Arab armies, lost, and with that loss the new Israeli state gained an arrogant maturity. If a small Jewish army could defeat the combined armies of the Arabs, then surely God was with them and they could impose their rule at will.

In fact, they succeeded in imposing their will only with the covert, but subsequent overt, help of the United States - or rather, the American Zionist lobby, later to adopt the more benign name of AIPAC, the American Israel Jewish Affairs Committee, that now exerts such a powerful influence on US foreign policy through its control on the voting behaviour of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Throughout the post-war years, as America's power increased worldwide, the tiny Israeli state hung onto its coat-tails, fed and sustained with billions of tax dollars from unknowing Americans. And so, the state of Israel grew exceedingly arrogant and with that arrogance, came brutality. For the grandchildren of the survivors of the Holocaust grew to forget the horrors of war-time Europe that had so decimated their grandparents in Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Holland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Like an abused child, who in turn abuses his or her own children - Israelis began to oppress and humiliate their neighbours. Then came the killings, which, it was claimed, were in self-defense. But too often it was women and children who died at the hands of the Israeli army. Too often, unarmed civilians.

But the IDF was increasingly composed of young soldiers of Russian or Ethiopian origin, whose parents may, or may not, have been born Jewish.

Israel consistently claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East, but her actions are anything but democratic. She kills, imprisons and tortures many thousands - even up to today. Without trial and without any semblance of justice but with every semblance of inequality.

That the state of Israel is carried on the back of the American tax-payer is common knowledge but it is open to debate whether that small country is entirely Jewish or democratic. Certainly, as a Jewish Democrat, originally from a very old, east European Jewish family, I am exceedingly doubtful.

The degree and extent to which MJ has become divorced from reality is truly frightening. The reality is that the world is increasingly becoming frightened and up in arms at the growing anti-semitism, and is responding to it. The anti-semites are at most 1% of the population, and generally regarded as a lunatic fringe of disturbed right-wing bigots. Maybe in their own minds they think people take them seriously, but no one in the real world does. I can't believe that Marshall is allowing this gibberish to be published. It totally destroys the credibility of the site.

J Street's conference was to have featured a "poetry slam" and panel that was later cut from the program after this blog posted video of one of the speakers making statements that J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami subsequently condemned as an "abuse of Holocaust imagery." Still speaking at the conference is Salam Al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. In 1994 Al-Maryati wrote that "just as Hitler forged a conflict between Judaism and Christianity, apologists for Israel crave for Islam to be at odds with both Judaism and Christianity." On September 11, 2001, just hours after the World Trade Center fell, Al-Maryati pointed the finger at Israel in a radio interview. "If we're going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list," Al-Maryati said. A year later at the campus of California State University-Northridge, Al-Maryati's Muslim Public Affairs Council put on an exhibit that contained a photograph carrying the slogan "Zionism is Nazism."

On the one hand we have a Holocaust survivor and rightful Nobel Peace Prize winner addressing an organization whose pro-Israel credentials J Street has repeatedly attacked. And on the other we have a paranoid, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist addressing an organization that the Israeli ambassador refuses to engage on the grounds that the policies it supports could "impair Israel's interests."

Ben-Ami said of Hagee's remarks last spring that they were "offensive not just to Jewish people who suffered at the hands of Adolf Hitler but to all Americans, their parents and grandparents who fought and sacrificed to defeat Nazi Germany." So then why is Elie Wiesel speaking at Hagee's conference and Salam Al-Maryati speaking at Ben-Ami's?
Posted by Michael Goldfarb at 09:03 AM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/10/elie_wiesel_to_keynote_cufi_co.asp