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THE
JEWISH
PEOPLE'S The panel discussion in the Los Angeles auditorium was so weightless it could have been held on the moon. There was, I'll admit, a certain otherworldly atmosphere to the gathering, a disconnect that made me feel as if I had stepped through a time warp. Antiquated slogans, such as " give peace a chance" "no war is morally justifiable" and " compromises for peace" reverberated through the hall making me eerily uncertain whether I was sitting at a forum for peace in the Middle East or at an anti-Vietnam War rally circa 1968. While the speakers and attendees at the town hall meeting, a joint program of the Hillel Council at UCLA and the Progressive Jewish Alliance, gave the outward appearance of objectivity, I was unconvinced. As I listened closer I began to recognize a disturbing undertone. Among the proposals for peace, were few words of condemnation for Palestinian terrorists but plenty of accusatory reproaches to Israel. Little effort was made to pass moral judgment on Palestinian rejection of the Barak proposals in the summer of 2000, while Israeli intransigence was carefully chronicled. Within the standard peace rhetoric there appeared to be a presumption that Israel's battle for survival could and should be detached from the United States' global war on terror. I walked away from the event certain that I had just witnessed the demonstration of a phenomenon. Only sixty years after the Holocaust, there are, apparently, Jews who see Israel as a liability in their lives and are unwilling to defend it at a time of its greatest peril. How to explain it? Many pass it off it as emblematic of the diversity that is proclaimed the great hallmark of Jewish tradition. But that is a cheap excuse. More persuasive is the notion that adopting far left-wing positions places one firmly in the intellectual, academic and celebrity mainstream. To be a contrarian is a badge of honor in our politically correct world and a ticket to social acceptance.
When I hear these men and women justify their condemnation of Israel as an outgrowth of their Jewish humanism, I am reminded of the infamous Judenraten of the Holocaust. The Judenrat was a council appointed by the Nazis to execute their orders in Jewish towns and villages in the Russian hinterland. This usually involved selections and deportations to death camps. There were many who refused to obey the Nazi orders and chose suicide rather than obedience. Others fled. But there were some, either by convincing themselves that their actions would save Jews, inflated by a sense of self-importance or seeking to ingratiate themselves with their oppressors for personal benefit, who complied. They became both witting and unwitting accomplices to murder. Ironically, these Judenrat members rarely survived those they deported. Within months they would follow on the same trains.
As I left the hall I thought I heard the rumble of those trains. In a plaintive voice Seidler-Feller dissembled – " suicide bombings have only appeared in the last two years," ignoring the fact that they have, in fact, plagued Israel for the entire nine years of the Oslo Process. My heart sank. Cognitive dissonance, political immaturity or just plain old narcissism; call it what you want. It all amounts to the same thing - a desperate desire for attention and a need to be loved that is pooled into a justification for the murder of Jews. ============== Avi Davis is the senior fellow of the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies and a senior editorial columnist for Jewsweek.com
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Now
a few words from Masada2000.org! Definition of Judenrat "The Jewish councils appointed or elected to carry out Nazi orders in the Jewish communities of occupied Europe." Some people say it's hard to judge their actions due to the abnormal circumstances. Others say these Judenrats were trying to gain time and save as many Jews as possible. Bullcrap! These Judenrats, also called kapos, betrayed the Jews by organizing the shipment of fellow Jews to the death camps to gain favor with the Nazi butchers in order to save THEIR OWN skins!
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Today,
sadly, we Jews still have our Judenrats... our Kapos. Rachel
Neuwirth, a writer, accused Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the director of
the Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA, of kicking her Oct. 21, 2003
outside the Royce Hall auditorium after a speech by Harvard Law School
professor Alan Dershowitz. As she passed Rabbi Seidler-Feller in the
hallway after the lecture, she overheard him asking a student if he were
planning to attend the next day's lecture by Sari
Nusseibeh. Ms. Neuwirth felt compelled to asked the rabbi if he were
aware that Sari Nusseibah was caught by Israeli intelligence during the
Gulf War phoning Iraqi officials in Amman, (Jordan) telling them to tell
Saddam Hussein to send scud missiles not to the empty Negev Desert but to
more "effective places." The rabbi called Ms. Neuwirth a
liar, grabbed her wrist and proceeded to kick her. Ms. Neuwirth then called the rabbi a "kapo"... which of
course he is! So what does a highly respected, highly educated rabbi
do? He physically attacks her! Ms. Neuwirth sustained injuries as a
result of this unwarranted attack by such a peace-seeking,
compromise-seeking, dialogue-seeking, mutual understanding-seeking kapo,
eh, I mean, rabbi. He [heretofore known as Seidler-Felon] will soon enough has his day in court to fully
explain why he beats up on women. |
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Chaim Seidler-Feller may be the exemplar par excellence of the
art of social climbing masquerading as ideological purity. Although
possessing rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University, the UCLA
Hillel Director today describes himself as " post-
denominational" - a meaningless but convenient designation that
allows him to float ideologically between causes. But any accusations of
intellectual fuzziness seems not to have not tainted his mystique. He
has, in fact, become the cynosure for Los Angeles liberal-left causes,
an organizer of conferences involving groups who spew the most venomous
anti-Semitic and anti- Zionist rhetoric and an adamantine critic of all
right wing governments – whether Israeli or American. For taking such
popular leftist stances he has been rewarded with the elan of social
recognition. But such self-absorption carries a heavy price. How do
UCLA's Jewish students, assaulted daily with a previously unknown rash
of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, understand a supposed mentor who is
so equivocal in his support for the Jewish state? The answer is that
they either spurn him as unreliable or, as is more common, sink into
confusion about their own levels of commitment to both Israel and
Judaism.
Seidler-Feller, however, is a tiny fish in a big pond when compared to
the piranha of Jewish liberal avatars, Michael Lerner. The editor
of a far left wing magazine Tikkun, Lerner has been an icon in the
Berkeley/San Francisco milieu for decades, presiding as a latter day
saint to thousands of disaffected radicals. He obtained a brief moment
of fame in 1993 when Bill and Hillary Clinton lent his political
manifesto, the Politics of Compassion their imprimatur, opening doors to
the media. Although he soon lost favor with the Clintons (who were
ridiculed for embracing such an intellectual light weight), he has since
parlayed his national celebrity into campaigns to lambaste Israel
anywhere he can find an audience, while doing almost nothing to decry
continuing Palestinian terrorism.
But the reign of these apostles of liberalism may soon be coming to a
close. Other wannabes now shake their perch. 
Himmler 60 years ago. 
