Topic: WorldNetDaily
Barry Farber turns in a surprisingly strong smackdown in his Aug. 10 WorldNetDaily column:
I'm chilled by the words of "real" Jews, Jews willing to stand in the hedge and take up the gap in the fight for Jewish and Israeli survival. From the very famous to the almost famous to the obscure, it's as if some very non-Jewish thought-virus has commandeered their minds to get Oslo screamingly wrong.
No names or attributed quotes, please. I love these people and I expect to be on their side again for the rest of my life. But first, Oslo!
Their theme, crudely stated, is something like this. "Hold everything, folks. This just in! Did you know that those Norwegian children who were shot down at a 'summer camp' were being brainwashed and molded into an anti-Israel strike force planning anti-Israel boycotts and militating for the declaration of a Palestinian state? No, folks, this 'summer camp' wasn't for roasting weenies and telling ghost stories around the campfire. This summer camp was more like a 'Hitler Youth' outing!"
One extremely famous Jewish commentator even had Norway on the wrong side in World War II. One Jewish activist punctuated her comments about the Norwegian people by saying, "They just hate Jews!" (They don't!)
May I borrow my favorite line from Christianity? Namely, "Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do!"
It's true that the government of Norway is fiercely pro-Palestine and anti-Israeli. And like all governments and individuals who hold that position, Norway is factually bankrupt. They say officially that the cause of Palestinian terrorism is the Israeli "occupation." Ask them what the cause of that terrorism was before the 1967 war that led to Israel's "occupation" and the Norwegians lose their audio. Forget anything as complex as Israel never taking one inch of land that was "Palestinian" or even "Arab." All that land was an unsettled leftover of the Ottoman Empire's defeat in 1918. Norwegian officials don't want to risk the even deeper confusion that might attend an honest exploration of the facts.
For democratic, highly civilized Norway to be swine-headed over Israel is beside my point. How dare any Jew suggest that somehow Norwegians had Anders Breivik's massacre coming to them because of their anti-Israel feelings! I especially rebel at the cowardly attempt to say that without saying it. All the offending statements include assurances that, "I'm not saying Norway's anti-Israeli feelings justified the slaughter."
Oh, no? You're not! Then why do you bring it up? I don't care if the children at that summer camp were all wearing swastika armbands and learning the "Horst Wessel" song in German, that doesn't justify their murder. Neither does it justify Jewish insinuations about their "anti-Semitism" while pretending no such insinuations.
Unfortunately, as courageous as his criticism was, he wasn't so courageous as to name those who he was criticizing because, he says, "I love these people." There may be another issue as well: the top person on that list is another WND columnist, Pamela Geller.
In a post on her Atlas Shrugs blog, Geller did indeed suggest that the victims at the youth camp allegedly shot up by Anders Brevik deserved to die because the camp is part of an anti-Israel "indoctrination training center." She says the victims would have grown up to become "future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole." She also claimed that the camp's attendees were "more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian (a claim she later deleted from her post).
It's more than legitimate to ask why WND permits a person who wrote such vile things to be a weekly columnist, but unfortunately, Farber doesn't seem interested in pursing the issue.
