History News Network

Breaking News

Departments

Deja vu — Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Daniel Mandel

CELEBRITY HATE

A curious feature of the present world crisis has been the fulminations of celebrities expressing, not criticism, but hatred, for the Jewish state. Miss Belgium hopeful, Halima Chehaima , currently Miss Brussels, is but the latest. Chehaima recently stood in local elections in Molonbeek on behalf of the Marxist-Leninist Labour Party. The party gained no seats but Chehaima did achieve prominence by calling for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Celebrity venting against Israel was probably pioneered by British actress Vanessa Redgrave, a chronic Trotskyite who once ran in British elections for the British Workers Revolutionary Party. In 1978, she availed herself of the opportunity afforded by her Oscar acceptance speech for the title role in Julia to sound off about “Zionist hoodlums” – a reference to Jews who had exhibited the temerity to demonstrate against her support for the PLO, an organisation that was then not only actually committed to Israel's destruction, but publicly so.

More recently (and blatantly under the influence of alcohol), Mel Gibson divulged what he thought of the Jews – a people “responsible for all the wars in the world.”

All of which prompts some questions: Some 25 million people are estimated to have been killed in internal conflicts since 1945. Are the 8,000 civilians killed in the Arab-Israeli conflict, thereby ranking 46th in the list of victims, to be laid all at Israel’s door and to take centre stage to the exclusion of all other pressing humanitarian issues? Isn’t the genocide in Darfur indicative of worse tragedies and problems than those allegedly unleashed on the world by Jews? Why the obsessive exaggeration of Jewish power and influence?

I’ll return to this subject another time.

Posted on Monday, November 27, 2006 at 6:26 PM | Comments (3) | Return

Home Newsletter Submissions Advertising Donations Archives Internships About Us FAQs Contact Us All Articles