Israel Derangement Syndrome

We have seen it all before, in various guises. As if "Thou shalt hate, demonize and slander Israel" were the eleventh commandment. And maybe it is, for a certain malevolent cult on the Left, a cult whose discourse, for some reason, succeeds in passing itself off as legitimate by academics and other so-called pundits.

The latest outlandish example comes from City University of New York Professor Sara Schulman "who is feverishly anti-Israeli to the extent of advocating the boycott of Israeli universities based on the standard Islamist-Leftist accusation of Israeli Apartheid."

Her complaint:

"Writing in The New York Times, Schulman accuses Israel of Pinkwashing, namely using its gay-tolerant policies as a propaganda tool to oppress Palestinians:

Last year, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States….

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.. "

(She is probably referring to this kind of PR)

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Another recent example for this derangement should be fresh in the minds of those who do not wish ill on the Jewish state. It was the notorious case of Deborah Orr's mystifying attempt to present Israel's excruciatingly painful compromise in the Gilad Shalit exchange as a sure sign of Israelis exhibiting their racial supremacy inclinations. In the October 19th 2011, article, entitled "Is an Israeli life really more important than a Palestinian's?" Orr states that the trade for one Israeli soldier in exchange for over 1000 Palestinian prisoners "acknowledges what so many Zionists believe - that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours."

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Perhaps the biggest jaw-dropper in this roster of grotesque demonizations of Israelis was a dissertation, or something, being done by Tal Nitzan, an Israeli PhD hopeful, which purports to answer the stunning question of:

Why don't Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women?

The answer is, you guessed correctly, Israelis' racial supremacy.

So you see, for the unfathomably bored and pornographic minds of Schulman, Orr, or Tal Nitzan (and many others sharing their cultish thrall to the fanatical worship of anti-Israel hatred), any feature of Israeli society that would normally be accepted as signs of sanity and compassionate kindness, basic elements that all peaceful and free societies pursue, magically gets monstrified into its very opposite. Thus, the tolerance within Israeli society to its gay members, IDF's soldiers disciplined behaviour which excludes rape, Israeli society's profound care for its sons in captivity are not signs of a decent ethos but its very opposite.

Talk about Orwellian Doublethink:

"The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this."

These writers relate to Israel, in the same way the denizens of Oceania related to Emmanuel Goldstein, with a periodical spasm of supreme hatred for which source they will be hard pressed to account.