Apartheid Lies

The WaPo's Rogers Cohen gets its mostly right about the "apartheid" smear and why Israel's, er, "critics" continue to run with it (H/T MK):

...Israel's critics continue to hurl the apartheid epithet at the state when they have to know, or they ought to know, that it is a calumny. Interestingly, they do not use it for Saudi Arabia, which maintains as perfect a system of gender apartheid as can be imagined -- women can't even drive, never mind vote -- or elsewhere in the Arab world, where Palestinians sometimes have fewer rights than they do in Israel.

A recent op-ed on Israel in the Financial Times employs the word apartheid several times. Some of the time it seems to be applied to the West Bank, but other times it is applied to Israel proper. Either way, this shoe doesn't fit. (Security concerns are not rooted in racism.) The author of the piece is Henry Siegman, a harsh critic of Israeli policies and a former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, so anti-Semitism is not the issue here -- just sound judgment. Sometimes impatience can lead to imprudence.

But anti-Semitism is not so easily dismissed with others. This is "Israeli Apartheid Week" on campuses across the world, and it is clear that what furiously animates many of the protesters are not legitimate grievances but imaginary ones. Israel is not above criticism and the Palestinians have their case, but when that case is constructed out of lies about the Jewish state, it not only represents a wholly unoriginal cover of some old anti-Semitic ditties but also denigrates the Palestinian cause. It does not need lies...

FYI, Richard, a Jew can be a Jew-hater; history, alas, is replete with them. Also, the "Palestinian cause," as you call it, aims to get rid of the Jewish state and replace it with an Arab one--which would be rather a tough sell without all the lies (what with there being 22--count 'em, 22--Arab lands, some of them vast, and all told comprising a vast population, and only one puny nation of a few million Jews). You could say the "lies" are all it has going for it. Hence all the "colonialist," "imperialist" crapola and the refusal to accept that the Jewish claim to this land goes waaay back, predating the daddy of Islam, even. They're lies that Lefists and Jihadists/Islamists spew so as to dress up their Zionhass and its eliminationist agenda in the fleece of "social justice."

Eliminationism="justice": the biggest lie of all.