Jonathan Rosenbaum: Zion Denier

I bristle every time I read the palpably anti-Zionist screeds of one Jonathan Rosenbaum who writes for a pathetic hate-filled publication called "Cross-Currents".

Week after week, he and his compatriots negate the realities of our world. They write as if the powerful and beautiful State of Israel does not exist.

This is utterly idiotic.

I'm labeling Mr. Rosenbaum a Zion-Denier. He is worse than a Holocaust Denier. He denies the reality of the modern State of Israel. He writes as if it does not exist. He is worse than any Arab propagandist. He is a Jew who hates himself and his people.

Here is his latest crap.

It is time to embrace our abnormal existence.

The enduring, irrational, and protean nature of the hatred directed at us in all generations and all places is the greatest proof of that we have been singled out for a unique mission. The “miracle” of anti-Semitism is something that even non-religious Jews can grasp.

Rather than depressing us, we should view the rapid metamorphosis of anti-Zionism into the same old Jew-hatred as one of the clearest proofs of our chosenness, and, incidentally, of the world’s unconscious recognition of that fact. Not by accident does the UN Human Rights Commission occupy itself with no subject other than Israel, or every European paper seemingly devote two or three articles to Israel every day.

In any event, Israelis have no choice but to embrace their predicament. Alain Finkelkraut, speaking in Jerusalem Sunday night both as a Jew and as a defender of French civilization, dismissed as futile efforts to improve Israeli propaganda, for such efforts fail to comprehend the nature of the hatred.

The idee fixe of our age, according to Finkelkraut, is one that De Tocqueville associated with early American democracy: le passion de semblance, the quest for sameness. Europe’s vaunted cosmopolitanism is nothing more than an assertion of its own nullity, the denial of all differences between cultures and civilizations.

That is why European intellectuals reject the possibility of a clash of civilizations and cannot bring themselves to view Islamists as the enemy. The oft-made statement that the new Europe was born in Auschwitz is a profoundly dangerous one, Finkelkraut asserted, for it denies all history, all culture.

Against this homogenizing trend and post-national Europe, stands Israel and its claim to be both a democratic and Jewish national state. That claim enrages the Europeans in a way that Islamic theocracies and dictatorships do not. Just one more chapter in the Jew’s age-old assertion of his difference.

Contrary to the cosmopolitan quest for a world without borders, the Torah describes a world in which God created 70 different nations and assigned each its own place. And of those seventy nations, one was chosen and assigned the task of spreading the knowledge of Him.

It is that choice we will celebrate next week at the Seder. Now more than ever must we do so.

This man is both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic. He has no shame. He denies the absolute power and achievement of the State of Israel and writes as if it was null and void.

Our existence as a Jewish people is both normalized and sanctified by the State of Israel. You choose to deny that. For shame.

I am compelled to stand and scream at him. At your Seder you will deny the reality and achievements of the State of Israel and all that it does to protect and to elevate the Jewish people among the nations of the world. May the Lord save us from you.