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Why I quit Hookers in Black

Why I quit Women in Black
by Linda Wulf Sunday, Jul. 12, 2009 at 3:38 AM

(Linda Press Wulf is the author of "The Night of the Burning" (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, Sept 06; Former protester with Women in Black

From my high school years, I was an instinctive left winger,
championing the weak and berating the powerful. Living in Israel in
the 1980s, I protested against the ongoing Israeli occupation of the
West Bank and cheered the legalization of the PLO. But in the 1990s I
began to question my own reactions. At first I was dismayed by the
Palestinians' passivity and self pity in the face of twin handicaps:
their political leaders' debilitating corruption and self interest,
and the terrorists among them who callously sabotaged any compromise
that might lead closer toward accommodation with Israel. What turned
my sympathies finally, though, was the deliberate education of their
children to hate. Basic addition was taught to Palestinian students by
totaling the killing of three Israelis plus five Israelis. Summer
camps featured songs glorifying young suicide bombers. Festive
celebrations with guns shot into the air marked a "good" number of
Israeli citizens killed by bombs on school buses or outside a
synagogue as Sabbath prayers were ending or at a Passover celebration
where entire families were gathered. After the handful of times when
fanatical and unstable Israelis killed groups of unarmed Arabs --
among them, Baruch Goldstein shooting Arabs at prayer in a mosque in
1994 and a deserter from the Israeli army shooting inside a bus
carrying Israeli Arabs in August of 2005 -- the Jewish nation's shame
(and the heavy punishment meted out if the perpetrator survived, as
did Ami Popper in 1990) was loud and clear. Even as 18-year-olds began
their compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces, the
significance of the word "Defense" was drummed into them, while Hebrew
songs about peace have been at the top of the hit parade for decades.
But none of this seems relevant to those political left-wingers in
Europe and North America who keep the sufferings of the Palestinians
close to their hearts. To my bewilderment over the years, the crimes
of Israel -- three decades of delay in resolving the final status of
land captured in an unwanted war, lengthy and humiliating checkpoints,
rough searches and destruction of Arab houses under suspicion,
periodic fatal shootings of some of the angry youngsters who gather to
hurl rocks, and unsatisfactory legal battles over the government's
confiscation of land farmed by previous generations of Palestinians --
clearly seem more urgent and more evil to the international left than
the mass rape and mass murder of Africans by Muslims in Darfur; the
open and widespread ownership of slaves by Muslims in Niger right now
at this very hour; the denial of independent freedom for the female
half of the population by every Muslim nation; the persecution of Arab
homosexuals to the point that Palestinians flee to Israel where
discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is illegal; and the
disappearance, torture, and murder of dissident journalists and
political activists in every Muslim nation, including "moderate"
countries like Pakistan and Turkey. Eventually, it is impossible to
deny the reason for such disproportional empathy
with the Palestinians. Through history, each group that has blamed the
Jews has been utterly convinced that its own unique reason for doing
so is fair and obvious. Surely, they say, the Jews would recognize
they are at fault if only they'd stop crying "Anti-semitism!" "Et tu,
Brute?" I want to murmur to the unworthy descendents of a political
movement which strove honestly and painfully to make the world safe
for ALL people, including (and at times, especially) the Jews. Like a
Roman mob moved by demagoguery rather than logic, the left has taken
to criticism of the United States and her allies as an unthinking
raison d'etre, a fashionable and comfortably self-congratulatory
pursuit. And if in the process the Jews lose their ancient homeland
and only hope of long-term safety after 2,000 years in the diaspora,
so be it. They must have brought it upon themselves; everyone says so.
Do those who spring to attention at the siren call of "Zionism is
Racism" ever question their own readiness to believe what they are
told? Is the comradeship and complacency of the Left so attractive
that they have forgotten the movement's infamous delay in breaking
ranks to criticize the sacred cow of communism under Stalin? In
Berkeley, California, the racing heart of left-wing America, I do not
allow my young sons to wear T-shirts bearing Hebrew writing unless I
know where they are going and am with them as a shield against
potential abuse. (No prejudice is acceptable in Berkeley except
anti-Zionism, which is worn as a badge of honor.) For the proudly
left-wing citizens who claim their animus against Israel is grounded
in brave truth (and is therefore not anti-semitic), I venture to
recommend they read Alan Dershowitz's book called "The Case for
Israel." Surely that is a simple enough task for all those who "know"
that Zionism is racist and the cause of terrorism and unrest in the
Arab world and the catalyst for bin Laden's hatred of all Westerners
and the hidden reason for Bush's war on Iraq and, for all I know, the
bubonic plague (another century, same principle). It is time for
people of sound heart to open their eyes and look around. We can
survive without your support. We have done it before. But the problem
is clear. And despite the Jews' convenient existence whenever and
wherever trouble rears its ugly head in the world, the problem, yet
again, is not the Jews. --

http://www.gees.org/documentos/Documen-745.pdf

www.gees.org/documentos/Documen-745.pdf