Double Standard Watch: Moonbats against Israel - Alan M. Dershowitz

It must be the summer heat, but the moonbats seem to be loonier than ever when it comes to Israel and Jews.

By - Alan M. Dershowitz

Oliver Stone urges us to see the positive side of Hitler and Ahmadinejad, while imitating his two heroes by railing against Jewish control of the media. (To his credit, Stone has apologized for his bigoted statements, but Meg Ryan has refused to apologize for canceling a scheduled visit to the Jerusalem Film Festival, even after learning that the festival has promoted pro-Palestinian and pro-peace films for years.) Doctors Without Borders suddenly erects borders when it comes to Israeli doctors who flew to the Congo to treat 50 local villagers who had been severely burned. The Israeli volunteers worked around the clock, treated the burn victims and trained local doctors to perform skin grafts, and donated tons of medical equipment. But the bigoted Doctors Without Borders refused to work with them and treated them "as though we were occupiers."

This should not surprise people who have been following Doctors Without Borders over the years. Dr. Marie Pierre Allie, President of the french branch of the organization, said that Israel's self defense actions in Gaza were actually worse than the Darfur genocide in the Sudan. Only a blind moonbat could even make such a comparison! As one critic put it well, these are doctors with borders but without scruples.

J Street, a leftist organization that pretends to be pro Israel, puts out a television ad suggesting that I am against peace between Israel and the Arabs and that I agree with Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin in opposing the two state solution and supporting expansion of civilian settlements. When told that this was a lie, the head of J Street publicly acknowledged that, "He [Dershowitz] does support the notion of a two-state solution," but he has kept his mendacious ad unchanged.

Radical leftists, who support the expansion of rape law to cover obtaining sex by fraud, rail against Israel when Israel actually enacts such a law and applies it. An Israeli court sentenced a married Arab man to several months in prison for having sex with a woman after claiming that he was an unmarried Jew interested in marrying her. The Israeli courts had previously applied this law to Jewish men who had perpetrated comparable frauds. Though I personally think these sex-fraud law are seriously misguided (except in extreme cases such as lying about AIDS), I find it hypocritical in the extreme for radical leftists, who generally favor such laws, to use them as a club against the Jewish state and only the Jewish state.

A fifth-rate French university has canceled a writer's conference that was supposed to deal with "writing today in the Mediterranean Region: exchanges and tensions," because some unnamed participants refused to take part in a dialogue that included an Israeli Jewish author. This university, Provence Aix Marseille, would have been lucky to attract any accomplished Israeli authors, but the conference could not go forward because the president of the school, to his credit, would not allow a conference to be held by bigots who would exclude others on the ground of religion or national origin.

There are moonbats on the other side as well. A racist Israeli rabbi wrote a book authorizing the killing of non Jews, but not of Jews, who endanger the state of Israel. The Israeli government has indicted him for racial incitement. And other moonbat rabbis are trying to take control over all conversions to Judaism and declare people who are converted by conservative or reform rabbis to be non Jewish. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, opposes any conversion rules that would divide and alienate Jews around the world, but some rabbis insist on claiming a monopoly on deciding who is and who is not a Jew.

I'm afraid that the summer heat alone does not explain these moonbats. Absurdly extremist views regarding Israel and the Jewish people seem to rear their ugly heads throughout the year, regardless of the temperature. And speaking of temperature, Claire Short, the former Secretary of State for International Development in the UK Labour Government, has declared that Israel will cause the end of the human race. No, she was not relying on the Biblical Apocalypse, but rather on the absurd claim that because the Jewish nation diverts the world's attention from the problem of global warming, it is causing a climate apocalypse. Not China, the United States or other large polluters, but tiny Israel, which is one of the most environmentally conscious nations in the world, is now being blamed for global warming by this moonbat.

How should rational people deal with these kinds of brain warp? No rational arguments, no hard facts, no appeals to truth seem to affect the biases of these extremists. Nonetheless, all people of good will must keep fighting for truth and rationality, even - perhaps especially - when it comes to the Jewish state and the Jewish people.