The growing public anger over gender segregated buses in Israel signifies the profound hypocrisy of those in the West who complain about gender apartheid in the Muslim world and remain mute over Israel’s ultra-Orthodox insanities.
Here’s a trailer from a documentary about the issue, Black Bus:
Jerusalem Post writer Caroline Glick – there’s nothing like a good bombing to get her out of the bed in the morning – increases her rhetoric to the point of, well, you decide:
Israel is not the only target of the Red-Green alliance. Its operations span the globe. Sometimes, as in the case of the Goldstone Report, the Left leads the charge. Sometimes, as with the Hamas-led missile offensive against Israel that preceded Cast Lead, the jihadists move first.
In general, jihadists are motivated to attack non-Muslims by their religious belief that Islam must dominate the world. And in general, the Left’s justification of jihadist aggression stems from its neo-Marxist faith that the liberal nation-state is the root of all evil. Whether the Left recognizes that if successful, its collusion with jihadists will lead to the destruction of human freedom, is subject to debate. But whether or not the Left understands the consequences of its actions, it has played a key role in abetting this goal.
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Here it is the Left that leads the jihadists by the hand. Take the Left’s campaign against Jewish property rights in Jerusalem. In the Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon Hatzadik neighborhood, buildings owned by Jews were seized by Jordan in 1948 after its conquest of the city. For the past decade Jewish property owners have been working through the courts to assert their rights to their buildings and remove the Arab squatters who took them over.
Court after court upheld their rights to their property. And, indeed, more than a decade ago, the squatters reached a settlement in which they acknowledged the owners’ property rights and the owners agreed to let the squatters stay so long as they paid rent. But when the squatters stopped paying rent, the Left pushed them to refuse to vacate the premises and to try to re-litigate the old settlement. Finally, the case made it to the Supreme Court, which also recognized the rights of the Jewish owners and ordered the police to enforce its ruling and remove the illegal squatters.
The police removed the squatters last month and within hours, Jewish residents moved in, in accordance with an agreement with the buildings’ lawful owners. Since they moved in, the Jews have been under constant attack from their Arab neighbors. They have been beaten and threatened with murder.
In the meantime, the Left has turned the case of the illegal Arab squatters into a cause celebre. Last week, thousands of leftists staged an anti-Semitic demonstration outside the compound, demanding that the Jews be removed from their homes. The argument, of course, is that allowing Jews to exercise their legal property rights by peacefully residing in a predominantly Arab neighborhood is an unacceptable “provocation.” The Arab squatters attempting to steal the property, on the other hand, are “victims.”
The growing global effectiveness of Israel Apartheid Week is pleasing.
Suffice to say, this doesn’t please Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz:
Every year at about this time, radical Islamic students—aided by radical anti-Israel professors—hold an event they call “Israel Apartheid Week.” During this week, they try to persuade students on campuses around the world to demonize Israel as an apartheid regime. Most students seem to ignore the rantings of these extremists, but some naïve students seem to take them seriously. Some pro-Israel and Jewish students claim that they are intimidated when they try to respond to these untruths. As one who strongly opposes any censorship, my solution is to fight bad speech with good speech, lies with truth and educational malpractice with real education.
Accordingly, I support a “Middle East Apartheid Education Week” to be held at universities throughout the world. It would be based on the universally accepted human rights principle of “the worst first.” In other words, the worst forms of apartheid being practiced by Middle East nations and entities would be studied and exposed first. Then the apartheid practices of other countries would be studied in order of their seriousness and impact on vulnerable minorities.
Under this principle, the first country studied would be Saudi Arabia. That tyrannical kingdom practices gender apartheid to an extreme, relegating women to an extremely low status. Indeed, a prominent Saudi Imam recently issued a fatwa declaring that anyone who advocates women working alongside men or otherwise compromises with absolute gender apartheid is subject to execution. The Saudis also practice apartheid based on sexual orientation, executing and imprisoning gay and lesbian Saudis. Finally, Saudi Arabia openly practices religious apartheid. It has special roads for “Muslims only.” It discriminates against Christians, refusing them the right to practice their religion openly. And needless to say, it doesn’t allow Jews the right to live in Saudi Arabia, to own property or even (with limited exceptions) to enter the country. Now that’s apartheid with a vengeance.
The second entity on any apartheid list would be Hamas, which is the de facto government of the Gaza Strip. Hamas too discriminates openly against women, gays, Christians. It permits no dissent, no free speech, and no freedom of religion.
Every single Middle East country practices these forms of apartheid to one degree or another. Consider the most “liberal” and pro-American nation in the area, namely Jordan. The Kingdom of Jordan, which the King himself admits is not a democracy, has a law on its books forbidding Jews from becoming citizens or owning land. Despite the efforts of its progressive Queen, women are still de facto subordinate in virtually all aspects of Jordanian life.
Iran, of course, practices no discrimination against gays, because its President has assured us that there are no gays in Iran. In Pakistan, Sikhs have been executed for refusing to convert to Islam, and throughout the Middle East, honor killings of women are practiced, often with a wink and a nod from the religious and secular authorities.
Every Muslim country in the Middle East has a single, established religion, namely Islam, and makes no pretense of affording religious equality to members of other faiths. That is a brief review of some, but certainly not all, apartheid practices in the Middle East.
Now let’s turn to Israel. The secular Jewish state of Israel recognizes fully the rights of Christians and Muslims and prohibits any discrimination based on religion (except against Conservative and Reform Jews, but that’s another story!) Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel (of which there are more than a million) have the right to vote and have elected members of the Knesset, some of whom even oppose Israel’s right to exist. There is an Arab member of the Supreme Court, an Arab member of the Cabinet and numerous Israeli Arabs in important positions in businesses, universities and the cultural life of the nation. A couple of years ago I attended a concert at the Jerusalem YMCA at which Daniel Barenboim conducted a mixed orchestra of Israeli and Palestinian musicians. There was a mixed audience of Israelis and Palestinians, and the man sitting next to me was an Israeli Arab, who is the culture minister of the State of Israel. Can anyone imagine that kind of concert having taking place in apartheid South Africa, or in apartheid Saudi Arabia?
There is complete freedom of dissent in Israel and it is practiced vigorously by Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. And Israel is a vibrant democracy.
What is true of Israel proper, including Israeli Arab areas, is not true of the occupied territories. Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza several years ago, only to be attacked by Hamas rockets. Israel maintains its occupation of the West Bank only because the Palestinians walked away from a generous offer of statehood on 97% of the West Bank, with its capital in Jerusalem and with a $35 billion compensation package for refugees. Had it accepted that offer by President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak, there would be a Palestinian state in the West Bank. There would be no separation barrier. There would be no roads restricted to Israeli citizens (Jews, Arabs and Christians.) And there would be no civilian settlements. I have long opposed civilian settlements in the West Bank, as many, perhaps most Israelis, do. But to call an occupation, which continues because of the refusal of the Palestinians to accept the two-state solution, “Apartheid” is to misuse that word. As those of us who fought in the actual struggle of apartheid well understand, there is no comparison between what happened in South Africa and what is now taking place on the West Bank. As Congressman John Conyers, who helped found the congressional Black caucus, well put it:
“[Applying the word “Apartheid” to Israel] does not serve the cause of peace, and the use of it against the Jewish people in particular, who have been victims of the worst kind of discrimination, discrimination resulting in death, is offensive and wrong.”
The current “Israel Apartheid Week” on universities around the world, by focusing only on the imperfections of the Middle East’s sole democracy, is carefully designed to cover up far more serious problems of real apartheid in Arab and Muslim nations. The question is why do so many students identify with regimes that denigrate women, gays, non-Muslims, dissenters, environmentalists and human rights advocates, while demonizing a democratic regime that grants equal rights to women (the chief justice and speaker of the Parliament of Israel are women), gays (there are openly gay generals in the Israeli Army), non-Jews (Muslims and Christians serve in high positions in Israel) and dissenters, (virtually all Israelis dissent about something). Israel has the best environmental record in the Middle East, it exports more life saving medical technology than any country in the region and it has sacrificed more for peace than any country in the Middle East. Yet on many college campuses democratic, egalitarian Israel is a pariah, while sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, terrorist Hamas is a champion. There is something very wrong with this picture.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders is enjoying great political success in his country, spewing anti-Islam hatred. Islam is a “fascist ideology”, he says, but “I have nothing against Muslims.” Indeed.
Many on the Right back Wilders and we should ask why. Demonising Islam is easy. Suggesting all Muslims have a secret Islamist agenda is absurd. Imagine the outcry if similar comments were made against Jews.
Welcome to future of the Netherlands?
Here he is at a press conference at the House of Lords in the UK on 5 March, after the screening of his film Fitna:
In the days leading up to Israeli Apartheid Week’s opening event at Columbia University, leading anti-Muslim blogger Pam Geller posted an image of an SS officer with the name of one of the event’s speakers, Ben White, emblazoned on his uniform. (The image recalled placards held by far-right settlers depicting Yitzhak Rabin in an SS uniform just days before he was assassinated.) Geller was among the crowd at the Columbia event, making sure to catch White’s eye as he walked to the podium to speak. He told me that she mouthed to him, “You’re a Nazi.” The day after the event, Geller posted another characteristically juvenile screed describing White as “Nazi boy.”
There is little reason to engage a figure like Geller on the merits of her deranged characterizations. And it would be unfair to ascribe crude views like hers to the established pro-Israel groups working to discredit Israeli Apartheid Week. Their tactics are slightly more sophisticated, even if they have also demonstrated a reluctance to engage White and other participants on the facts about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians. (Canadian pro-Israel students have united around a vaguely pornographic counter-campaign called “Size Doesn’t Matter” that invokes insecurities about penis length and equates traveling to Israel with the pleasure of oral sex.)
An interesting report on Al-Jazeera on Israel’s increasing targeting of Muslim houses of worship in the occupied territories.
As my tipster tells me:
I was in Cape Town a couple of years after the formal end of apartheid and visited an area which had been seized from its “coloured” inhabitants for the exclusive use of whites. Every building had been razed except the mosques.
A fine letter in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald:
Finally, Kevin Rudd has done the unthinkable and questioned Israel about its actions (”Betrayed PM should not be taken for granted by Israel”, February 26). As Peter Hartcher points out, this is not the Prime Minister’s style.
Mr Rudd seems to have a distorted his Christianity by stating that “Israel is in his DNA”. As a Christian, I would have hoped he would recall the essence of the Christian message – that we are all children of God and implicitly share the same DNA: Muslim, Jewish, Christian and everyone else.
Mr Rudd was silent on the invasion of Gaza in February 2008, which left more than 120 Palestinians dead. He was silent about the deaths of more than 1300 Palestinians in January last year. He dismissed the United Nations fact-finding mission to Gaza, led by Richard Goldstone, that called for transparent war crimes investigations on both sides.
He would have also ignored the extrajudicial killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh but for the forgery of the three Australian passports. Certainly not a perfect example of man committed to following the principle of international law, but better late than never.
Yes, Israel needs friends, and there is no question that Australia remains one, but friends must be accountable for their actions. If Israel wishes to see the end of Hamas arms traders and of rocket attacks, it needs to follow international law, cease attacks by its air force, navy and army on Palestinians, and end the occupation of Palestinian territory.
Stewart Mills Balmain
How does Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post report an attack when it’s “only” committed by a white person (instead of a Muslim?)
The extremism of the ultra-Orthodox community is revealed once again in this Der Spiegel article:
The community of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel is half a million strong and growing. They live in a parallel universe cut off from the modern world in tight-knit communities where everything revolves around religion. Only a few dare to abandon this life — and the price for doing so is high.
When she left, she left everything behind — even her name. She no longer wanted to be known as Sarah, the name her parents had given her. She’d felt imprisoned by that name for too long; it made her feel different and subject to laws that others imposed upon her. So, she started her new life with a new name, Mayan, the Hebrew word for “source.”
It’s been seven years since Mayan “landed on planet Earth,” as she puts it. But the 27-year-old doesn’t feel completely at home here yet. She’s a young, modern Israeli woman. Still, despite the dragon tattoo on her shoulder and the loose top offering occasional glimpses of her bra, there are always some moments that betray her past. For example, when her friends talk about old TV series, classic pop music or their first schoolyard crushes, Mayan can’t join in. Until she was 17 years old, Mayan lived in another world, a world where those things simply didn’t exist.
A Life Completely Focused on Religion
The “parallel universe” Mayan used to live in has around 550,000 inhabitants. It is the world of the Orthodox Jews in Israel, whose adherents live in tight-knit communities where everything revolves around religion. They radically shield themselves from modern life. Television is frowned upon, as is non-religious music, telephones and the Internet. News that is important to the community is disseminated via notices posted on walls. Boys and girls go to school, but their education is primarily focused on religion.
“Everyone can read and write, but math was over after simple multiplication,” Mayan says. “When I left school, I didn’t even know what New York was, and I had never even seen a dog because nobody kept any pets.”
According to Irit Paneth, it is this lack of education, in particular, that makes it almost impossible for doubters in these communities to break out of the inflexible corset of their belief. Paneth is a member of Hillel – The Right To Choose, an organization that helps those leaving the Orthodox faith start a normal life. “We are not against the religion,” Paneth explains. “But Ultra-Orthodoxy is more like a cult that intellectually cripples children in the name of religion.” For most young people who break away from the Orthodox life, she explains, it’s like leaping off a cliff into the unknown. “They come without money, without education in the classical sense, without any chance of employment,” Paneth says.
When Muslim children are treated in a similar way the media and wider community are outraged and essentially claim parents are inflicting abuse.
But with Jews, we allegedly tolerate this cult-like behaviour.
An interesting Associated Press story that explains why so many in Gaza are keen to be Hamas policemen. Not because of Islamist ideology but simply getting money to support families.
Barack Obama has behaved in the Middle East exactly like his predecessor, George W. Bush. Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas is right:
Barack Obama does have a foreign policy. It’s called war.
But wait, pleads Hillary Clinton, we’re trying so damn hard:
Call it Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “Keep Hope Alive” tour.
The secretary of state ventured to the Middle East this weekend to assuage doubts that have arisen over the Obama administration after an initial bout of euphoria that the new president could quickly break the stalemates within the region, and between Islam and the West.
In what aides billed as a sequel to President Obama’s speech in Cairo last June, in which he called for ending the “cycle of suspicion and discord” between the United States and the Muslim world, Clinton on Sunday delivered a lengthy speech before the U.S.-Islamic World Forum here that essentially pleaded for patience even as many of the administration’s initiatives on Middle Eastern peace, and on outreach to Iran, have faltered.
Clinton acknowledged concerns in the region “that the U.S. commitment is insufficient or insincere, that we have not fully embraced the spirit of mutual respect and partnership that the president described, or that we will fail to translate that spirit into the concrete steps needed to achieve real and lasting change in the world.”
But she said such changes “cannot happen overnight or even in a year.”
“It takes patience, persistence and hard work from us all,” Clinton said.
How disturbed should we be when the far-right shows support for Israel because the Jewish state is supposedly fighting radical Islam?
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen is one of the better mainstream American commentators on the Middle East. Though unbelievably mild and seemingly unwilling to suggest Washington do anything to pressure Israel apart from harsh words (like that’s going to work), his latest piece continues the admirable trend:
For over a century now, Zionism and Arab nationalism have failed to find an accommodation in the Holy Land. Both movements attempted to fill the space left by collapsed empire, and it has been left to the quasi-empire, the United States, to try to coax them to peaceful coexistence. The attempt has failed.
President Barack Obama came to office more than a year ago promising new thinking, outreach to the Muslim world, and relentless focus on Israel-Palestine. But nice speeches have given way to sullen stalemate. I am told Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have a zero-chemistry relationship.
Domestic U.S. politics constrain innovative thought — even open debate — on the process without end that is the peace search. As Aaron David Miller, who long labored in the trenches of that process, once observed, the United States ends up as “Israel’s lawyer” rather than an honest broker. The upside for an American congressman in speaking out for Palestine is nonexistent.
I don’t see these constraints shifting much, but the need for Obama to honor his election promise grows. The conflict gnaws at U.S. security, eats away at whatever remote possibility of a two-state solution is left, clouds Israel’s future, scatters Palestinians and devours every attempt to bridge the West and Islam.
Here’s what I believe. Centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust created a moral imperative for a Jewish homeland, Israel, and demand of America that it safeguard that nation in the breach.
But past persecution of the Jews cannot be a license to subjugate another people, the Palestinians. Nor can the solemn U.S. promise to stand by Israel be a blank check to the Jewish state when its policies undermine stated American aims.
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The U.S. objective is a two-state peace. But day by day, square meter by square meter, the physical space for the second state, Palestine, is disappearing. Can the Gaza sardine can and fractured labyrinth of the West Bank now be seen as anything but a grotesque caricature of a putative state? America has allowed this self-defeating process to advance to near irreversibility.
In fact, it has helped fund it. The settlements are expensive, as is the security fence (hated “separation wall” to the Palestinians) that is itself an annexation mechanism. According to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, U.S. aid to Israel totaled $28.9 billion over the past decade, a sum that dwarfs aid to any other nation and amounts to four times the total gross domestic product of Haiti.
Israel is facing an increasing challenge to get its voice heard at American universities. That’s what happens when you spend decades occupying another people.
Take this continually interrupted speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. Hours before he spoke this was released:
UCI’s Muslim Student Union said in an email today that its members “condemn and oppose the presence of Michael Oren, the ambassador of Israel to the United States, on our campus today. We resent that the Law School and the Political Science Department on our campus have agreed to cosponsor a public figure who represents a state that continues to break international and humanitarian law and is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than all other countries in the world combined.”
The Jewish Forward editorialises strongly against Israel’s growing religious extremism (just remember what the Western media says when genders are divided in Muslim nations):
The need to restrain the burgeoning power of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel grows ever more urgent. The latest flashpoint is public transportation.
For several years, on an increasing number of public buses, women have been expected not only to cover their arms and legs, but also to board and sit separately from men, in the back of the vehicle. On January 31, in a long-awaited decision, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz announced that these so-called “mehadrin lines” — borrowing a phrase that implies very strict adherence to religious rules — were legal as long as they were “voluntary.” He said that the state would not tolerate the use of threats or violence to enforce the separation, a pledge that became immediately suspect after he also said that he found no evidence of such coercion used against women.
That would be news to the women who more than three years ago petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to ban gender-based segregation on public buses, using as proof their own experiences of harassment. The Israeli writer Naomi Ragen, an Orthodox Jew, was one of those petitioners. She had been physically threatened on the No. 40 bus in Jerusalem because she refused to give up her seat to a man.
For the operator of a public bus to suggest that women sit in the back is akin to the person behind the luncheonette counter in Greensboro, N.C., declining to serve the four black students who arrived there 50 years ago and tried to order some food. There is nothing voluntary about segregation. The mere suggestion is demeaning and unacceptable in modern society.
We fear that this continued diminishment of women’s rights will open up a dangerous wedge in the already fraught relationship between American Jews and Israel. In the last few months, a woman was arrested for wearing a prayer shawl at the Kotel, and another woman was hauled in for police interrogation just for praying there, as she had done for years. “Where does it end?” Ragen asked in 2007 after her experience on the bus, when she said there were 30 mehadrin bus lines in the country. Now estimates put the number between 56 and 90.
Supporters of Israel must strongly protest Katz’s acquiescence to the segregationists. The right of Haredi men and women to live and worship as they please must be protected, of course. But Israel’s public sphere must be open to all. In a 21st-century democracy, no one should be relegated to the back of the bus.
Unique journalism is getting an angle rarely reported or understood.
Take this fascinating British Dispatches program that features inside the “enemy camp in northern Afghanistan”:
Israeli historian Benny Morris – a Jewish man who rather likes the concept of bombing Arabs and/or Iranians – has run into a problem in Britain:
The Cambridge University Israel Society have cancelled a talk by former Cambridge student Benny Morris after pressure from students.
The political historian, who was due to speak at Catz, has been accused in the press of ‘Islamophobia’.
The decision to cancel the talk was made by Israel Society after a letter was sent to CUSU signed by over a dozen University employees and students, including committee members of the CU Islamic Society, and English Faculty staff.
The letter called on CUSU to “reassure the university’s Muslim students” by condemning the talk, asking “What would happen if a registered CU society invited someone to speak who was on record speaking like this about the ‘Jewish mentality’, or who described British descendents of Caribbean immigrants as a ‘dangerous threat’ that has ‘penetrated’ the West?”
King’s student, Jamie Stern-Weiner led a campaign on Facebook to have the talk cancelled. The group, which today had 40 members, described the invitation extended to Morris as “offensive and appalling” and questioned why “an official student society would want to invite such an individual”.
Stern-Weiner said “This is not a political issue, it’s about making a clear stand against hateful opinions and the impact they have on the atmosphere on campus.”
Such “hateful opinions” include Morris’s belief that ethnic cleansing can be justified when dealing with Muslims and Palestinians.
In an interview in 2004 he said that Palestinians should be “contained so that they will not succeed in murdering us. Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”
Other controversial remarks include the following, printed in his book One State, Two States:
“Arabs, to put it simply, proportionally commit far more crimes… [and] lethal traffic violations than do Jews. In large measure, this is a function of different value systems (such as the respect accorded to human life and the rule of law)”.
The Israel society posted an update on their website following the cancellation, stating “We want to clarify that the intention of the Society was never to give racism a platform”.
They also apologised for any “unintended” offence caused to university members and antiracism campaigners.
This is a wonderful article (kindly passed along by a reader). Writing in the Guardian, German writer Alan Posener documents the growing voices that are begging the Jewish community to stop “wailing” about the Holocaust, use the catastrophe as a crutch and insulate themselves from criticism of Israel. Time to grow up:
Even today, there is a residual feeling among many Germans, and by no means only on the extreme right, that enough is enough, that too much self-examination and breast-beating somehow damages the German psyche, that it is time for a new self-confidence, that the nation needs to see the Nazi crimes in perspective. The horrors of Stalinism, after all, and the murderous antisemitism of Islamists such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would seem to indicate that Germany’s place in history is by no means singular.
This kind of revisionism is only to be expected. Debates on the issue sweep the country regularly. This year, however, something new has happened. Jewish authors have joined the fray on the side of the revisionists. In the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the Berlin-based New Yorker Benjamin Weinthal writes that “Shoah remembrance has come to resemble a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder” in Germany. And in Berlin’s “Tagesspiegel”, Henryk M Broder mounted a vicious attack on “wailing Jews (Jammerjuden), who use every talk show to tell people how many relatives they lost in the Holocaust and how afraid they are of the NPD” (the German Nazi party). Broder’s attack is all the more shocking for Jews in Germany, as he himself has made a career out of attacking what he perceives as Germany’s “eternal” antisemitism, a career that includes, of course, hundreds of talk show appearances.
Connected to these thoughts is a recent talk by British Jew Tony Klug titled, “Are Israeli policies entrenching antisemitism worldwide?”
Close to half of Americans admit to harboring prejudice against Muslims and negative feelings about Islam, a new study from the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies shows.
The level of anti-Muslim prejudice — 43 percent of Americans admitted feeling at least “a little” — is more than twice as high as Americans’ reported feelings toward Buddhists, Christians and Jews.
In a Sunday New York Times magazine feature about the Little Green Footballs blog – a once virulently bigoted website that seemed to thrive on hating Arabs, Muslims and anybody who didn’t crave American bombing campaigns – founder Charles Johnson is shown to have tolerated the sadly common bile directed at Palestinians:
If the tone of Johnson’s writing on the blog sometimes bordered, as his detractors claimed, on hate speech, that of his mostly anonymous commenters was reliably worse. A popular blog like L.G.F. functions as a kind of cloud-sourced id. It is not uncommon for a simple, 200-word post to accrue upward of a thousand written responses from readers. The question of how responsible he is, or should be, for these expressions of uncensored reader sentiment is one that Johnson, like many bloggers, has struggled with; but in the middle years of the last decade, whether for free-speech reasons or simply because he enjoyed being the popular focal point of such strong nationalist feeling, he did very little to rein it in. Muslims were described as “vermin.” The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined for the young American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, in reference to the Israeli bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options included terms like “targeted genocide.” As for Palestinians, “they don’t need statehood,” offered one commenter; “they need sterilization.” And on and on. A so-called stalker blog, called L.G.F. Watch, sprang up to document instances of what it considered hate speech on the part of Johnson and his followers. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott compared Johnson’s site to a “disorganized Nuremberg Rally.”
