Although many within the Jewish community attempt to deny it, the trend of self-hatred, both currently and in our tribe's history, is beyond dispute. From Nicholas Donin, a 13th century French Jew who fabricated atrocities that correlated with common anti-Semitic libels in order to receive power by stimulating religious oppression and atrocities against his people, through the calumnies of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, to latter-day figures like Mike Savage and Normal Finkelstein, there have long been Jews who - be it for power and money, the desire to assimilate with a larger culture and/or political movement, or simply prejudices acquired from their external environment - have attempted to make person gains by playing on the centuries old hatred of their own people.
We can now add a man named Max Blumenthal to add to their ranks:
Why do I assert that Blumenthal is a self-hating Jew? I can answer that question with a series of my own queries:
1) Why did he chose Jews who were clearly inebriated?
2) Of the literally millions of Jewish youths in Israel, including tens of thousands of American Jewish tourists, why did he select only the handful of Jews who used profane and racially offensive language (including some, like "white power", that are antithetical not only to the interests of African-Americans, but of Jewish-Americans as well)?
3) Why did he then intentionally misrepresent them as epitomizing the larger population (and as the article indicates, he openly insists that this is the case), even though polls suggest that American Jews are not only supportive of Obama and his Israel policies, but overwhelmingly so?
That last point is perhaps the key one. In the 2008 presidential election, 78% of all Jews voted for Barack Obama over John McCain, one-and-a-half times more than the general voting public. Since his inauguration, Jews have consistently shown solid support for Obama's social, economic, and foreign policies, once again in gross disproportion to the degree felt by the rest of the American people. Even more noteworthy is the fact that these same polls show younger Jews as being far more pro-Obama than their elders, with the great bulk of the 22% who voted for McCain coming from either religiously orthodox communities or Jews above the age of sixty-five.
I think it is time for us to draw a clear distinction between legitimate criticism of Jewish individuals and institutions and veiled anti-Semitism. When someone points out the human rights violations committed by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people and compared them to apartheid (not the Holocaust or genocide, which are not only inaccurate but so over-the-top that one has to imagine they are motivated by a desire to pick on the Jews' own unfortunate history of persecution), that is legitimate criticism. When someone claims the Holocaust never happened, that is anti-Semitism. When someone attacks individual Jews who are guilty of harming the interests of this country, such as Bernard Madoff or Paul Wolfowitz, that is legitimate criticism. When someone begins to bring up the fact that they are Jewish as somehow being relevant to criticism of their actions (as opposed to doing what they would do with a Christian, Muslim or individual of another faith and simply focus on the actions themselves), that is anti-Semitism. Finally, when an individual attempts to grotesequely caricature the Jewish people based on facts that are demonstrably false, the word "anti-Semitic" needs to be applied - even if the individual to whom it is thereby affixed is himself Jewish.
The same people who rightly criticize anyone who asserts or implies that all Muslims are terrorists, or that all African-Americans are gangsters, have a moral obligation to recognize this for the deliberately distorted malicious propaganda that it is and clamp down against it as resolutely as they would an ethnic smear against any of the other aforementioned groups. I hope the media outlets of America, Europe, and the rest of the world will have the journalistic integrity to not give this video any meaningful publicity, since even doing so under the guise of its being a "news story" will spread its message and lend it legitimacy. This will be the test of whether the generosity of spirit which Obama has extended to the Muslim world will apply to Jews as well.
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