WHAT ARE JEWS DOING ABOUT THE DEMONIZING OF ISRAEL?

t`s open season on Israel

Israel Harel - Aug 28, 2009
Haaretz

Avigdor Lieberman is a nuisance - a nuisance to those who hide their heads in the sand and deny that a storm is raging around us. Lieberman broke official Israel`s conspiracy of silence in the face of the worldwide smear campaign being waged by various media outlets and countless nonprofit organizations (including Israeli ones), which are preparing public opinion - and the governments that follow public opinion - to see the Jewish state as a virus that endangers world peace.

Only due to the uproar that Lieberman fomented did the public become aware of the anti-Israel zealotry of many of these nongovernmental organizations, which are financed, inter alia, by donations from Arab oil powers, huge western foundations like the Ford Foundation, countries such as Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and the European Union.

The assault on the Israel Defense Forces by a Swedish newspaper is part of a worldwide blood libel campaign. When this campaign`s participants include organizations that present themselves as global guardians of human rights, it stops being merely absurd (the IDF traffics in organs and kills women and children waving white flags), and becomes another link in the chain of depredation.

Millions of people worldwide are deluged morning and evening with a flood of libelous op-eds and reports, broadcasts full of crude lies, and hate-filled caricatures. The language used to criticize the globe`s worst tyrannies does not even come close to the hate-filled language used against Israel.

If a Swedish newspaper, albeit a tabloid, decided to publish this libel about organ trafficking, that means the author and the editor deem it conceivable that it really happened. If the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by an Israeli who urged a total boycott of his own country, there is only one possible conclusion: A global boycott of Israel would be perfectly legitimate.

Indeed, since the reports issued by Breaking the Silence (an Israeli organization) and Human Rights Watch (an international organization) include allegations of crimes against humanity committed by members of a nation that was itself a victim of such crimes just 70 years ago, it must be proper to impose a boycott. In the past, before the demonization had gained a foothold even in the serious press, no American paper would have dreamed of publishing an op-ed like this.

Lieberman`s response in the affair of the Swedish paper was not the opening shot of a comprehensive campaign against the dehumanization of Israel. It seems doubtful that his statements will succeed in breaking the conspiracy of denial about the gravity of the problem, even within his own ministry. The Foreign Ministry, even if the minister assigns it this task, is not built - primarily due to lack of motivation and deep faith in the justice of Israel`s cause - to wage a multipronged strategic campaign against the numerous tentacles of organizations whose main goal, and perhaps even their only one, is to bring about Israel`s collapse. Fact: It is not the Foreign Ministry, with its hundreds of employees, that has gathered most of the information we have about these organizations, but NGO Monitor, a small nonprofit headed by Prof. Gerald Steinberg, which obtained this information via patient, diligent footwork.

Words, screamed Peace Now earlier this week, can kill. That is true. And what about the millions of words denouncing Israel that this organization, and others like it, export overseas, where they serve as weapons of propaganda against Israel? (In 2007, to take one example, the British government donated more than NIS 4 million to radical leftist organizations like Peace Now and Breaking the Silence in order to fund these words. And that is on top of the money from private donors, the European Union and various foundations.) Can these words not also kill?

As far as is known, Military Intelligence and the Mossad have not identified the globalization of anti-Israel hatred as a strategic threat. Nor has the "sextet" of key cabinet ministers ever dealt with this issue, even though each one of them personally understands that the de-legitimization of Israel undermines the rest of the world`s motivation to stand up to Iran`s rulers over that country`s nuclear program. Maybe now that the National Security Council, under Uzi Arad`s leadership, is assuming both an authority and a strategic vision that it lacked before his arrival, there will be someone capable of correctly identifying the magnitude of the threat. But merely identifying it is not enough.