Michael J. Totten deftly takes Juan Cole to task for his horrendously bigoted statements on the death of US solider. This is what Cole said about that death and the subsequent murder trial:
The Iraqi killer of Reserve Navy Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman has been brought to justice in an Iraqi court. Although he has since changed his story, he at one point admitted to killing Jones-Huffman with a bullet through the back of the neck while the latter was stuck in traffic in downtown Hilla. The assassin said that he felt that Jones-Huffman “looked Jewish.” The fruits of hatred sowed in the Middle East by aggressive and expansionist Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza against the Palestinians and in south Lebanon against Shiites continue to be harvested by Americans.
This statement is one of the most disgusting statements I’ve ever heard. As Totten points out:
Well, professor, I suppose you join a phalanx of “informed commenters” who blame the United States for the World Trade Center attacks. Nice company you have there. Do you blame black people for Ku Klux Klan lynchings and cross-burnings? Perhaps you blame the gay rights movement for the murder of Matthew Shepherd. I’m just assuming since you’re a professor that you know how to apply a little consistency in your thinking, but I wouldn’t know.
This argument is no different than telling a woman that had just been raped that if Paris Hilton didn’t parade around like a whore she would have never been raped. It’s a disgusting and odious argument to make, and factually incorrect to boot. There is absolutely no excuse for murdering someone because they “looked Jewish” — it is irrelevant whether the person was an Iraqi, an American, or a far-left professor. Making any sort of excuses for such behavior is morally unacceptable.
The roots of hatred in the Middle East run far deeper than 1948. Jews were being killed in the British mandate of Palestine long before the state of Israel exists – view the Hebron Massacre of 1921 or the way in which the viciously anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Ali al-Husseini was working with the Third Reich to build a death camp in the mandate of Palestine to continue the Final Solution there. The roots of hatred of the West that fuel the current Islamofascist movement predate Israel.
What makes this argument so odious is that it provides tacit justification for anti-Semitic violence, but it also assumes that the Arab peoples aren’t smart enough or sufficiently moral agenda to understand that killing someone because they “looked Jewish” has nothing to do with Israel. As Totten notes, if a white man killed a black man in the US because of Robert Mugabe’s brutalization of whites in Zimbabwe it wouldn’t matter at all — Cole certainly wouldn’t be arguing that such a specious and racist line of logic was some kind of justification for murder. So why make that excuse when someone is killed because they looked Jewish?
This kind of argument is frequently used to provide tacit justification for Islamic extremist violence, as though it would be at all moral to let such fanatics murder everyone in Israel in order to buy respite from terrorism. It has become quite fashionable in academia to do exactly that, and the fact that Professor Cole chooses to use the same line of argumentation employed by the KKK reflects on how the moral compass of the left no longer points in the right direction when it comes to the Middle East.
I find your argument muddled, that’s not to say it is, but I personally feel you take a lot of prejudiced opinions for granted that Cole and others have strong grounds for discarding out of hand.
To deal with the analogy first though, what is the problem with telling a woman she was likely raped because of X parading around if there is a strong possibility it is true? Ridiculous and awful as it is, if a western dressed woman were to insult the Prophet or whoever live on Saudi TV then I wouldn’t hold out much hope that another western dressed woman walking around unprotected the same day wouldn’t find herself raped as a direct consequence.
Now, though it is popular amongst Jewish commentators to maintain that Jews have always been hated by everyone (esp. Muslims) there is a great deal of academic debate about whether there is any grounds to believe so beyond it’s great propagandic value to Zionist policies being pursued in Israel. It’s quite simple to make a case for Jews being hated no more or less than other minority groups in the region over the course of the centuries.
The hatred of Jews in the Middle East is likely quite ungrounded in history and quite specific in response to modern and present day policies played out for Muslims in their newspapers and television channels. A similar hate for black people could be provoked in America if it were possible and politic for Mugabe to be depicted in a certain light. The lashing out – be it lynching, or assassination is born of a feeling of impotence to stop Israel.
Finally the identification of Jewish with Israeli is one promoted by the Israeli State itself when it publicly (and frequently) proclaims that all Jews are Israeli (to encourage immigration, I assume). Further, Israel is not a secular State and having established itself as the only Jewish Homeland encourages comparisons to be made between Jew and Israeli. I believe similar assumptions were once fairly regularly made about Muslims and Turks.
Taking that same logic, if a black person were convicted of raping a white woman in the South, would that give the KKK license to start lynching black people?
I don’t know of a single credible historian who would argue that Jews haven’t been persecuted for centuries. You have the Egyptians during the Mosaic period, the Babylonians later, the Romans during the First Century, the Ottomans (although less so) for centuries afterwards, the Crusaders, then the Ottomans again, then the British — and that’s just in the Middle East.
Except Israeli Arabs have full political rights as well — they can vote and have representation in the Knesset. Not all Israelis are Jews and not all Jews are Israelis.