"April 2009, Australia Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd,
addressed the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, where he referred
to the government of Iran as 'racist'"
Shame, Mr
Rudd! You know better
than to label Iran as Anti-Semitic! by Father Dave
On Friday, April 24, Australia Prime
Minister, Kevin Rudd, addressed the Australia-Israel Chamber of
Commerce, and referring to the recent speech given by
Iranian President Admadinejad at the Durban conference on racism, said:
"The
inflammatory remarks of President Admadinejad of Iran at the conference
are unacceptable and underlined the Australian Government's decision
not to attend the conference. The Australian Government
condemns the continued campaign of anti-Semitism on behalf of the
government of Iran."
That statement really upset me, and it
leaves me in a very uncomfortable position where I find myself critical
of Kevin Rudd - a man I deeply admire - for his attack on Mahmoud
Admadinejad - a man I seriously dislike. Even so,
to accuse the government of Iran of anti-Semitism is out of line,
especially if our Kevin
was basing his accusation on Admadinejad's speech at the Durban
conference.
Anti-Semitism, as I understand it, is a form
of racism that discriminates against Jewish people (and perhaps against
all Arabic people, as they are all technically 'Semitic' ) purely
on the basis of their ethnicity. It is a form of racial
prejudice. Admadinejad's vitriolic speech was targetting
governments and the ideologies that support them. Whether his
criticisms were valid or invalid is open to question, but there was
nothing racist
in his remarks so far as I could see.
Did the Aussie Prime Minister actually read
the speech? I don' think he did.
Mr Rudd spoke of the way Admadinejad 'singled out'
Israel for criticism when, from my reading of the speech, the Iranian
President reserved his most trenchant invective for the USA.
At any rate, even if we dislike Admadinejad and his speech and and his
government, the question of whether or not he was being anti-Semitic is
still another question altogether and should be treated as such!
The problem is that it has become
politically fashionable to equate any criticism of the government of
Israel with anti-Semitism,
and this serves as a convenient mechanism for deflecting valid
international concern about the way the Israeli government treats its
Palestinian population, and Mr Rudd should know better than to buy into
this!
Admadinejad's thrust was that the ideology
of Zionism, which drives so much of Israeli politics, is itself a form
of racism, and that statement is hard to dispute. The United
Nations General Assembly reached the same conclusion on November 10th,
1975, stating, in resolution 3379 "that
Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination."
That the current Israeli government
discriminates between people on the basis of race is no
secret. More water in Israel is given to Jewish citizens than
to Palestinians, jobs are more plentiful for Jewish citizens than for
Israeli Palestinians, Jewish citizens are not subjected to torture
while in prison, only Israeli citizens and Jewish settlers are allowed
freedom to travel throughout the Holy Land, non-Jewish Israelis cannot
buy or lease land in Israel, etc., etc., etc.
The Zionist ideology of the current Israeli
government is similar, in many ways, to the Apartheid ideology that was
until recently the scourge of South Africa. To point this out is to do
no more than did former US President Jimmy Carter did in his book of
November 2006, "Palestine,
Peace not Apartheid".
Of course, former President Carter has also
been accused of being
'anti-Semitic', but the truth is that Carter's critique
pales in comparison with the condemnation that the Israeli
government has received from any number of Jewish commentators
and academics from around the world - people who surely can't be
accused of 'anti-Semitism'.
Professor Ilan Pappe, a Jew, and chair of
the Department of History at the University of Exeter, wrote on April
22nd 2009.
"Israel's policy - in the last 60 years -
stems from a racist hegemonic ideology called Zionism, shielded by
endless layers of righteous fury. Despite the predictable
accusation of anti-Semitism and what have you, it is time to associate
in the public mind the Zionist ideology with the by now familiar
historical landmarks of the land: the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the
oppression of the Palestinians in Israel during the days of the
military rule, the brutal occupation of the West Bank and now the
massacre of Gaza. Very much as the Apartheid ideology
explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this
ideology - in its most consensual and simplistic variety - allowed all
the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the
Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them."
Similarly, British MP Sir Gerald Kaufman,
whose parents escaped the holocaust by fleeing to England but whose
grandmother was murdered by the Nazis, said in January 2009,
"My
grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering
Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government
ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles
over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their
murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives
are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count."
Even more inflammatory were the recent
comments made by Professor Emeritus Richard Falk, former United Nations
Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights and, again, himself a
Jew:
"Is
it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of
Palestinians with the criminalized Nazi record of collective
atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in
Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a
deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an
entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost
cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a
holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the
governments of the world and to international public opinion to act
urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating
in a collective tragedy."
And perhaps most damning of all are the
words of the Jewish politician, Ronnie Kasrils - former South African
Intelligence Minister - as he compares the Israeli political
model to the apartheid regime that he fought against in South
Africa.
"in its conduct and methods of repression,
Israel came to resemble more and more apartheid South Africa at its
zenith - even surpassing its brutality, housing demolitions, removal of
communities, targeted assassinations, massacres, imprisonment and
torture of its opponents, collective punishment and the aggression
against neighbouring states."
In the same speech, Kasrils goes on to say:
"It
needs to be frankly raised that if the crimes of the Holocaust are at
the top end of the scale of human barbarity in modern times, where do
we place the human cost of what has so recently occurred in Gaza and
against the Palestinians since 1948 in the 'nakba' (catastrophe) they
have endured?
How
do we evaluate the inhumanity of dropping bombs and blazing white
phosphorous on civilian populations, burning people alive, gassing them
in a Gaza ghetto under relentless siege with no place to run or hide.
For 22 days, relentless bombardment whole families vaporised before the
horrified eyes of a surviving parent or child.
Guernica,
Lidice, the Warsaw Ghetto, Dier Yassin, Mei Lei, Sabra and Shattila,
Sharpe ville are high on that scale - and the perpetrators of the
slaughter in Gaza are the off-spring of holocaust victims yet again, in
Cizling's words, behaving like Nazis. This must not be
allowed to go unpunished and the international community must demand
they be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. For
the lesson is that if apartheid Israel is not stopped in its tracks
these crimes will get greater and spread not only to engulf the entire
Middle East and Iran, but indeed anywhere that Israel is challenged."
These are strong words, and they go well
beyond anything Admadinejad's said in his speech. And we may
want to argue that Kasril's words and those of his fellow Jewish
academics are exaggerated or misinformed or only present one side of
the picture, but what we surely, surely must NOT conclude is that these
persons are 'anti-Semitic'.
Let me spell it out again: anti-Semitism is
a form of racism. It means thinking less of Jewish people
simply because they are Jewish. This is as unacceptable a
form of racism as is any other form of racial discrimination, and yet
it is surely totally distinct from the criticism of either an ideology
or a particular government.
Criticism of the government of Israel and
racism towards Jewish people are two totally distinct phenomena and
should not be confused. I hated Apartheid, but I have nothing
against South Africans. I hate what my own country did to our
indigenous population in generations past, but I am hardly
anti-Australian. And I hate the ideology of Zionism for the
way it is used to justify acts of violence against the Palestinian
people, and yet I am hardly anti-Semitic. I have many Jews
amongst my closest friends, and indeed it was my Jewish friends who
first educated me about the true nature of Zionism!
So please, Mr Rudd, don't play this
game. Don't sell out your integrity and the Palestinian
people along with it by blindly buying in to the lie that any criticism
of the actions of the Israeli government constitutes an act of anti-Semitism.
Admadinejad is not a nice guy and he has
done nothing to improve the prospects for peace between East and
West. But if we are going to have any hope of moving forward
together in this world we will need to be clear about what the real
issues are, and, for the moment, anti-Semitism, thankfully,
is not one of them.
Rev. David B. Smith
(the 'Fighting Father')
Parish
priest, community worker,
martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four www.fatherdave.org
