In the wake of the innocuous-sounding “Arab Spring” that has brought openly Jew-hating Islamists to power in the Middle East, Israel’s enemies everywhere smell blood. Twice last year her borders were breached by mobs seeking violent confrontation, which they achieved as the Israelis defended against the invasion. Recently a global program designed to demonize the tiny democracy, called Israeli Apartheid Week, revved up further anti-Israel sentiment. And now on March 30, an Iranian-backed protest march will attempt to storm Israel’s borders again in an effort to take Jerusalem – or at the very least to draw fire, enabling the marchers and the complicit media to denounce Israel’s “brutality” against “peaceful” protesters.
The Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ) is a well-organized, well-funded movement consisting of Israel-hating activists from around the world seeking to deny Jewish historical connections to Jerusalem and to claim the city for the Palestinians instead. In a clear case of psychological projection, the organizers’ strategy begins with falsely accusing Israel of racism and war crimes:
The march will confirm that the policies and practices of the racist Zionist state of Israel against Jerusalem and its people are a crime not only against Palestinians but against all humanity.
The march is ostensibly peaceful, but in reality the marchers plan to launch their offensive from the Arab countries surrounding Israel and to infiltrate its borders, forcing the Israelis to respond with (justifiable) force – their ultimate goal being to overwhelm the Jewish state and Jerusalem itself by sheer numbers:
We aim to make this march a turning point in the nature of the confrontation, with the occupation having to face millions of protesters and demonstrators demanding Freedom for Palestine and its capitol Jerusalem.
At the heart of the GMJ lies Iran, whose regime expresses, on an almost weekly basis, its desire to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. It is financially backing various groups participating in the march, and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei verbally lent his imprimatur to the movement recently.
The protest has also been endorsed, unsurprisingly, by prominent radical leftists in the West including anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former British MP George Galloway, radical professors Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, Code Pink activist Medea Benjamin, and the notoriously controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. A closer look at the anti-Israel track record of this star-studded lineup gives one a clear picture of just how great is the animus that the movement bears toward Israel.
Asserting that “Israel is like Hitler and apartheid,” Archbishop Tutu has been a decidedly anti-Israel voice for many years. Pro-Palestinian activist Galloway is an admirer of Saddam Hussein, Castro, Chavez, Mao, and Stalin. He insists that it is “necessary” for the “two great forces” of Islamists and progressives to unite against “Zionist occupation” and “savage capitalist globalization.”
As for GMJ’s prominent American supporters, influential academic Chomsky openly detests Israel; in 2005 Rachel Neuwirth called him
a one-man cottage industry of hundreds of anti-Israel books, articles, recorded interviews and lectures… Over a thirty-five year span Chomsky has repeated every distortion and libel directed against Israel that's ever appeared in Arab, Western, and left-wing Israeli publications, to which he adds some conspiracy theories of his own devising.
Racist professor Cornel West is a close friend not only of Obama, the most anti-Israel President in history, but also of noted anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan; West is also an avowed admirer of Rev. Wright (see below). Medea Benjamin and her group Code Pink, who express support for every conceivable extant enemy of the United States from Cuba to North Korea to the Taliban to Hamas, blames the Middle East conflict largely on our “biased policy toward Israel”; meanwhile she praises the savage Hamas for its commitment to “mutual respect and adherence to international law.” That would be the same Hamas whose very charter promises the eradication of Israel.
Black liberation theologist Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s spiritual mentor for nearly twenty years, has expressed his anti-white racism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism on too many occasions to enumerate. He has likened Israel to “a dirty word,” and accused it of waging genocide against the Palestinians (if so, it’s the most incompetent genocide in history, since the Palestinian population is one of the fastest-growing in the world). He and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, another former Obama associate, jointly addressed a crowd of pro-Palestinian protesters in Chicago in 2009. Like Ayers, Wright is so radioactive that even Obama finally distanced himself from the firebrand. Asked if he had spoken to Obama since he had taken office, Wright replied, “Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me.” The White House maintains its silence in response to Wright’s endorsement of the march on Israel.
Other notable American supporters of the march on Jerusalem are boosters of Obama as well. Writing for the Washington Free Beacon, Adam Kredo points out that progressives Clayborne Carson and Marcy Winograd donated to Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, as did United Nations official Richard Falk. Carson is a Stanford University professor who cites radical historian Howard Zinn as inspiration for his own political activism and scholarship, and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) schoolteacher Winograd is a Green Party activist who organized OccupyLAUSD to protest school budget cuts. In his position as UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Falk outraged many with his article “Slouching Towards a Palestinian Holocaust,” in which he described Nazi horrors and then drew a parallel with Israel:
Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.
The GMJ’s principal backer in the U.S. is the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a radical anti-Israel organization that justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians and actively obstructs Israeli security and anti-terrorism operations. ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf has acknowledged that her organization works with such paragons of peace as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
With supporters like these, it’s clear that the Global March to Jerusalem is not a peace movement but a large-scale publicity stunt designed to provoke Israel into a violent response, which the participants hope will play right into their relentless strategy to isolate and delegitimize the hated Israel.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 3/30/12)
