Police in Ferguson, Missouri (courtesy NY Times)
The sheer irrationality of the Israel-haters is so great that it becomes impossible to mock them.
When the news of the massive protests and police reaction in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of an unarmed black teenager reached Israel, people joked about how long it would take before Israel would be blamed.
The actual answer was ‘a couple of days’.
Yes, really. It seems that US police sometimes visit Israel for courses in counter-terrorism, and the previous police chief of Ferguson, Tim Fitch (not Finch, as at the link) did so in 2011.
Case closed, say Glen Greenwald and Trita Parsi!
And what do American policemen learn in Israel? Max Blumenthal, famous for interviewing drunks in bars, explains that they learned about torture, “Israeli killing methods” and “profiling and behavioral assessment techniques … that were initially tested on Palestinians.” US police and security agencies are being, gasp, “Israelified.”
Blumenthal’s article is long and full of suggestions of conspiracies. The simple fact that Israel is the target of more terrorism than any other place in the world and that Israeli security people have learned a lot about how to prevent and react to it is lost on him.
Blumenthal, who wrote an awful book called ‘Goliath’ viciously attacking Israel (which even embarrassed many who are usually counted as part of the anti-Zionist Left), is perhaps a special case, a man so obsessed as to be considered mentally ill.
But the fact that it is even possible to say out loud that Israel is in any way responsible for the alleged behavior of American police without provoking gales of laughter is worrisome.
Shabbat shalom!
Anyone who has a knowledge of Jewish history knows that the fanatical haters, the lunatics, the obsessive maniacs all must be taken seriously when they target the Jews.
Our consolation these days is that we have a state of Israel with an Army that has prevented the kinds of disasters recurrent in Jewish history from happening again.
The itty- bitty Western anti- Semitic haters are repulsive but not the main worry. This belongs to the Khameinis , Nasrallahs , Erdogans, etc.
Let us pray that Israel will be as successful in the future as it has been in the past in not allowing the murderous haters to have their way.