HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS

Cartoonist Jacob Kirchen of dry bones blog highlights the hysterical blindness of apologists all over the world over the venal acts of thuggery prepetrated last week in Mumbai.

One such apologist is a Mr. Sol Salbe of Maidstone, Victoria who didn't have to be restrained to make apologies for the failure of Muslim community leaders to condemn the atrocities perpetrated in India (some of them were too busy justifying these acts to do that). Salbe penned this letter to the Age on Wednesday:

Staying silent where others have before

TIME and time again, we are told that Muslim Australians are failing to integrate into our society. But it seems that it is a case of damned if they don't and damned if they do.

Letter writers berate Australian Islamic organisations for remaining silent. But the standard practice in this country is for members of specific communities to say nothing when people in their country of origin commit atrocities.

Such atrocities have been committed in the name of nationalism, democracy and other ideologies, as well as protecting dozens of "sacred homelands". But a search of newspaper files will not find too many letters from organisations representing American-Australians, Israeli-Australians or Serbian-Australians (and the list is far from exhaustive).

I personally think that condemning the Mumbai attacks would have been wise move for the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. But it should not be damned for doing something where no one else has shown it the lead.

Sol Salbe, Maidstone

Salbe has it so very wrong when excusing silence on the basis of the silence of others. Apart from his moral blindness, he gets it factually wrong as well. In the wake of the murder of the deranged madman Baruch Goldstein of 29 Arabs in Hebron in 1994, the then president of the Rabbinical Council of Victoria, the late Rabbi Chaim Gutnick wrote this letter which was published in the Melbourne Age:

Whatever the provocation, the murder of the Arabs praying in their mosque was a heinous and dastardly crime and it stands condemned in the eyes of those who belong to the Jewish faith.

Sadly Mr. Salbe, a reprentative of the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, has by resorting to a twisted form of explanetics, chosen to join the hysterically blind. But that seems to be the way of Jewish anti Zionists. As Yossi Klein Halevi points out in The New Republic when discussing why Israelis love Chabad:-

Contrast Chabad's embrace of the Israeli ethos with ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists--one of whom, Leibish Teitelbaum, a member of the Satmar hasidic sect, was killed in Mumbai. Teitelbaum's family demanded that his coffin not be draped in the Israeli flag, even though his body had been retrieved and flown home by the Israeli government--a reminder that Jewish anti-Zionism is less an ideology than a character flaw, a lack of capacity for gratitude. Chabad defines itself by its love for every Jew; the anti-Zionists define themselves by the Jews they despise.