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tell a friend* The Israeli Left is getting wackier by the day. Those who supported Oslo because they were simply naive or stupid are slowing disappearing through attrition from the Left. That leaves behind those motivated by a severe strain of Jewish anti-Semitism, individuals who hate their own people and who seek the destruction of their own country.
They are as motivated by anti-Israelism as the Berkeley Left is motivated by anti-Americanism; this is their raison d'etre. They represent the Middle East's Axis of Evil, the entente between Jewish Leftism and Arab fascism and Palestinian terror. These are also the people who have granted legitimacy to anti-Semites the world over, who can now protest their innocence and say they are only agreeing with the views espoused by Israel's own patriotic leftists.
* The Israeli Left is embracing assorted other wacky causes, down to and including identification with and participation in the circus of ''anti-globalization'' hooliganism. In this the Israeli Left is joined by its American counterpart; among those active in ''anti-globalization'' and anti-capitalism, making the world safe for North Korean style central planning, is the Reform synagogue movement.
* Jewish self-hatred and Jewish anti-Semitism dominate the Israeli media and the Israeli universities, although are rare elsewhere. Defeatism and detachment from reality — including the insistence on seeking fresh dialogue with Palestinians, are still broadly popular in
Israel.
* The American Left is gearing up for a new bout of solidarity with Saddam Hussein, and is still as motivated by anti-Americanism as it always has been. Recently I was in Berkeley, where signs and tables everywhere denounced the American ''war-mongers'' and expressed solidarity with Arab fascism. My favorite bumper sticker was ''Another Friend of Ishmael,'' which I suspect is too sophisticated for most lefties to understand.
As always, the Left is incapable of holding a thought or idea that cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker.
* Elements within the U.S. government, particularly the State Department, are still wedded to a policy of Good Terrorist-Bad Terrorist. Bin Laden and Saddam are bad, Palestinian murderers of Jews are moderates, activists, militants, people with whom a deal must be struck, people whose pain must be understood and whose sufferings must be righted.
* Israel's politicized Supreme Court continues to be one of the two worst threats to freedom and democracy in Israel — the other being the aforementioned stranglehold of the far Left on the Israeli media.
* Israel's Left, composed of countless splinters and front groups, continues to justify each and every Palestinian atrocity and continues to oppose each and every act or form of Jewish self-defense short of total capitulation to Arab fascism.
* Israeli Arabs, as opposed to Palestinians inside the ''territories'' of the West Bank and Gaza, are increasingly participating in terrorism and have been virtually nazified by Oslo. Almost every Israeli Arab leader and politician today endorses terrorism and atrocities against Jews and calls for Israel's annihilation.
* While there are pockets of reawakened identification with Israel and devotion to Jewishness in the United States, the American Jewish community is still dominated by the pseudoreligion of political liberalism masquerading as Judaism. Most of the American Jewish community has no compunction about to assimilating and intermarrying itself into total oblivion. The situation elsewhere in the Diaspora is only mildly less alarming.
* Anti-Semitism in Europe has exploded, partly due to the Moslem populations there. Europe often resembles a large Nuremberg Rally. As noted, the Israeli Left bears partial responsibility for this, as it has granted legitimacy to such anti-Semitism and endorsed its pretense of being merely opposition to Israeli ''Rightism'' and ''occupation.''
* More and more Israelis are ready to fight, to adopt at long last a real policy of battling Arab nazism with the sword and not with the playpen. The Israeli government, however, is lagging far behind them and is showing no such willingness.
* Most of the Israeli military is still dominated by defeatism. Most senior officers, not all, are leftist. Israel's intelligence services are still dominated by Oslo leftism and have yet to discover that Oslo never worked and that the PLO just played Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin as stooges to get itself entrenched in positions in the West Bank and Gaza in order to launch war.
* Outside of Turkey, Islam — whatever it once was and however great its historic achievements — has become by and large the religion of violence, terror, intolerance and barbarism (with a few exceptions elsewhere, but very few). Most Moslems outside Turkey are cheerleaders for bin Laden.
Steven Plaut is a professor at the University of Haifa.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Steven Plaut is a professor at the University of Haifa. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.
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