Tuesday, December 15, 2009

‘A few years ago I used McCarthy tactics against a professor who criticized Israel. Now I’m going on the Gaza Freedom March’

Josef Glatzer
"A few years ago I had a professor say that Israel made Gaza into “the biggest open-air prison in the world”. I had no idea what or where Gaza was, but he criticized Israel. I loudly protested, calling him: anti-Israel, Anti-American, and an Anti-Semite. When I later told my friend how offended I was, I claimed the professor blamed the Jews for all the problems in the world.
This was part of my experience being a knee-jerk, uncritical defender of Israel. Nobody taught me McCarthyism specifically; labeling any defense of Palestinian human rights as anti-Israel came naturally to me. It’s truly what I thought being Jewish–I’m half–was about."
Mondoweiss

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