PrintJanuary 18, 2008
The Feminists and the Jews
Of the three women pictured here, one is the President of the Supreme Court, the second the Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the third is the Speaker of the Parliament. Women in positions of real power, and all are members of a Middle East government.
Any magazine committed to feminism, the empowerment of women, and the evolution of women's rights in the Middle East would hunger for such a photo, or so you would think.
Yet, MS. Magazine refused to publish these photos of Dorit Beinish, Tzipi Livni, and Dalia Itzik, three Middle East women whose society does not treat women as chattel and encourages the development of their full human potential.
The problem for MS was that these are Jewish women, holding office in Israel, and the caption beneath the photo reads, "This is Israel."
This is not the face of Israel the left wants people to see.
This is not the David (Palestine) and Goliath (Israel) commonly depicted in news footage of Palestine children throwing stones at Israeli Jeeps and tanks.
This not the probably contrived photo of Israelis "shooting" Muhammad Dura, as his father uses his own body to cover him.
Today's political left has embraced an authoritarian mindset that bifurcates the world into distinct stereotypic groups. This is the mindset that dominates our politically correct universities and has produced generations of students who have been indoctrinated into seeing the world as divided into one of the oppressed and oppressor.
All of the world's ills-in this distorted view -- are the consequence of the actions of the oppressor class: whether heard it the sanctimonious babble that Hurricane Katrina was caused by the Bush administration's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocols, or the absurd proposition that American led globalization is now responsible for all the economic ills in the world. This is the mantra of indoctrination being chanted in our institutions of higher education.
And for the left, the leading force behind globalization is the conspiracy of investment bankers, international financiers and conglomerates, and, of course, the media-all simplistically translated once again as "the International Jew."
So, why should anyone be surprised that Ms. Magazine, which bills itself not just as a magazine but a feminist social movement, should refuse to run an ad, however accurate, that would depict Israel in a way that would be incongruous with leftist propaganda? After all, the vitriol the ad is reputed to have created among the staff is the natural course of the creation of the new feminist authoritarian type-The Femi-Nazi.
Jewish liberals regrettably see anti-Semitism as a disease of the right, unmindful that the National Socialism, grew out of the German Worker's Party, and that Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia were not at opposite ends of the political continuum but adjacent to each other The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not an unholy alliance but an instinctive one.
The need to create scapegoats is a natural tendency for all movements that mobilize true believers. It makes no difference if the movement mobilizes itself in the interests of race or class, or even gender. Such movements require simplistic solutions to complex problems. And all such movements use hatred as the great unifier.
Whether it is the male, white people or the economic system, if there is no victimizer, there is no victim. In today's leftist fantasy, all victimization ultimately traces itself back to the international Jewish capitalist. As a recruiter for the Green Party unabashedly said to me at our local farmer's market, "So what if Iran gets the bomb. The only people they'd use it against are Jews. Who cares about them?"
Well, obviously not the Green Party, or for that matter the political left.
My liberal Jewish friends and supporters of Ms. Magazine and its advertisers should ask themselves this simple question: From what other country would Ms. Magazine refuse to put three women on its cover?
From China which occupies Tibet?
From Mozambique where dictatorship has run amuck?
From any of a number of societies where women are treated as chattel, mutilated, and denied the rudiments of self determination?
Israel and Israel alone is shunned.
Abraham H. Miller is emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati. A specialist on the media and political terrorism, he is editor of Terrorism, The Media and The Law.
