In Boston (Stoughton) Jews Gone Wilders, I covered Geert Wilders' recent appearance at Ahavath Torah, which is a conservative synagogue in Stoughton, MA. The first few minutes of his speech can now be watched on youtube:
The initial 43% of the videoclip gives a snapshot of typical American Jewish anti-Muslim bigotries.
Rabbi Jonathan Hausman spouts fantasies about non-existent late 18th and early 19th century Arab Jihadism, misquotes the US Marine Hymn, and abuses an unfortunate and ignorant stylistic comparison made by the non-Arabic-speaking Winston Churchill between the Quran and Mein Kampf.
Unfortunately, the other 5.7 minutes of the clip does not do full justice to the ideological potentially genocidal anti-Islamism that Wilders expresses and that has become an integral part of a revised form of Zionism that constitutes the political orthodoxy of the vast majority of American and Israeli Jews.
An Interview with a Local Hero: Rabbi Jon Hausman by Jerry Gordon gives a much better feel than the videoexcerpt for the mentality of most Jews and for the nature of Wilders' ideology:
When the film was over, I had just begun my introduction for Wilders when the place exploded with applause as he came to the podium. It was quite a moment. A standing ovation! To watch him begin to grin as he saw that an ordinary crowd of people understood his battle for freedom and liberty in protecting and defending Judeo-Christian values and civilization, his love of his native Holland’s freedoms that are under assault solely from a restive and increasingly radicalized Muslim population and his affinity for Jews and Israel was something to behold. He spoke passionately of his kinship with Jews, his over 20 visits of varying lengths and reasons to Israel, his having lived in Israel for over two years earlier in his life. He emphasized that his feelings for Jews and Israel and his relationships with Jews and Israel make him anathema to the right and the left, an odd alliance he remarked. “Neither the far right nor the far left can claim me nor want me, and I denounce both,” was his comment
(View an excerpt of Wilders appearance on YouTube, here.)Personally, I focused on what is happening in Holland and elsewhere in Europe, and it is deeply disturbing: Islamic clerics and Muslim political organizations are openly, indeed brazenly, attempting to impose Shari’a law on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, using violence and the threat of violence to get their way. In the face of these provocations, the people who should be defending the liberal traditions of western democracy run and hide, leaving the field to terrorists and those who sympathize with and enable them. At the risk of his life and his freedom, Geert Wilders has tried to expose this danger, and to warn Americans that what has happened in Europe could happen here. Indeed, as he pointed out on Wednesday, it is happening here. ‘Lawfare’ is an increasingly used tool for the Islamist agenda in the US. My colleague, Professor Dennis Hale of Boston College, was one of several people sued for defamation for pointing out the connections between the leaders of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) and such terrorist organizations as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. These were not fanciful charges based on rumor or innuendo. They were based on documentary evidence, and as that evidence accumulated, the ISB (the Roxbury Mosque) was forced to drop its lawsuit. However, they remain free to teach the next generation of Boston Muslims, the same hateful ideology that has forced Geert Wilders to travel with bodyguards.
The interview of Hausman is also valuable because it provides information on the links among the organized Jewish community, Israel advocacy, and rabid Islamophobic incitement.
The genocidal hate-filled language and ideas espoused by most Jews and xenophobes like Wilders makes any rational dialogue impossible.
Until Jews shape up and renounce their bigotries, at the very least Muslim Jewish and Christian Jewish interfaith activities are completely pointless (see Open Letter to MPAC), and Muslims need to develop strategies to defend themselves from the Jewish-Zionist threat.
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