David Brummer Writes On Silverstein's Madness

David Brummer, blogger and recipient of the Congressional Recognition for Excellence in Public Diplomacy in Support of Israel (on behalf of his work with The Israel Project), has written an article on his blog Brumspeak detailing his own take on the madness of Richard Silverstein:

Thursday, July 23, 2009
Silverstein Unhinged: Hoisted, yet again, by his own Petard
Silverstein lashes out at SWU, Rob Jacobs & myself
Palestinian Canon Naim Ateek: “Worse than Hamas”
A little background on this champion of “peace and justice.” Richard Silverstein bloviates almost daily on his ironically named ‘Tikun Olam’ blog. He controls his blog like a Soviet style apparatchik, editing out readers’ responses that the commandant deems at odds with the Silverstein party line.
Silverstein fancies himself a “progressive” supporter of Israel, of the tough-love kind, who does his friend the ultimate service of pointing out his errors and saving him from himself. He shows this love and “support” by endorsing divestiture efforts against Israel like last year’s I-97 anti-war, anti-Israel initiative. In the JT News article, Divesting, not Boycotting, he makes the tortured distinction between divestiture (good) and boycotts (bad).
Another way this lover of Israel shows his affections is by promoting the sloppy scholarship and borderline anti-Semitic rantings of Professors Walt & Mearsheimer (The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy), the unhinged anti-Zionist Avraham Burg (The Holocaust is Over), and the historically challenged reflections of Jimmy Carter (Palestine: Peace not Apartheid). Silverstein defends the deranged Norman Finkelstein, last seen offering up a ‘Heil Hitler’ in Yoav Shamir’s sham documentary Defamation, an embarrassingly shallow film meant to trivialize anti-Semitism. Finkelstein apparently caught the director off guard with his nod to the Fuhrer.
Silverstein has now taken up the cause of Sabeel’s Naim Ateek, liberation theologist and Palestinian Christian who lives in Jerusalem and peddles a disingenuous cry for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. The only problem is he openly declares that the very notion of Israel as a Jewish state is a racist construct. Hear him on KUOW interview on7/20, Arab Christians in Palestine: A Conversation with Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek.
He also has a nasty habit of likening Palestinian suffering to Christ’s crucifixion. Ateek presents a picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so decontextualized and removed from history as to be rendered virtually meaningless. Palestinians are portrayed as the eternal innocent victims, while Israeli Jews are demonized as the relentless, oppressive occupiers, who just won’t desist from ‘stealing’ Palestinian land.
Silverstein fancies himself a broadminded progressive who knows what Israel needs to do to bring about a just and lasting peace. The trouble is irksome Israel advocates and real Zionists keep thwarting his plans. Never at a loss for an ad hominem against those with whom he disagrees, Silverstein characterizes figures like Natan Sharansky (last I checked, still something of a national hero of the Jewish people) as an “intellectual thug” (he throws Dore Gold, former Ambassador to the U.N. into the same category), Alan Dershowitz as a “charlatan,” Ambassador Michael Oren, one of the most brilliant and independent thinkers in modern Zionism as an “egghead,” Bernard Henri-Levy (BHL) as a traitor to the left, and on and on. I’ve recently learned that his special moniker reserved for me is “repulsive thug.”
Silverstein continually mischaracterizes StandWithUs as a “radical, right-wing” organization, and has a particular animus for Rob Jacobs, SWU/NW’s executive director, and myself. He has expressed “repulsion” at the fact that I was, up until last month a board member at our local conservative shul, and incredulously pointed out to his readers that I am a social worker at “the local Jewish old age home, “(“if you can believe it”, was how he put it).
Ironically, this thin-skinned attack dog took gargantuan offense when I offhandedly, in a private e-mail, suggested that his childlike antics might best recommend him for a public spanking. This was in response to his outlandish clarification that what he meant by “intellectual thuggery” was that “if Sharanksy or (Dore) Gold had their way, people like me (Silverstein) would end up in left-wing internment camps.” I kid you not.
Dumbstruck, all I could think to respond was that if people like Sharansky and Gold even gave this egoist a second glance, “they’d probably recommend a public spanking.” The metaphor-deaf Silverstein took my throwaway line as an actual threat, and then, get this, threatened to take me to a Beit Din. He settled for “telling on me” to the Board President and the Rabbi, of course, omitting any context that might explain what actually transpired.
As the old joke goes about the bear and the hunter who continually misses shooting the bear with ever larger weaponry, each time by the broadside of a barn, I can only conclude
“that this is not about hunting.”
Addendum: Apparently, in the world according to Silverstein, SWU is now in cahoots with some imagined cabal of pornmeisters, trying any which way to promote Israeli tourism and culture.
Here’s a snippet just to give one a flavor of this nuttiness:
“Make no mistake, this is not a one-off promotion by an odd-ball Jewish gay pornographer. This is part of an orchestrated hasbara campaign spearheaded by groups like Stand With Us, who promoted Israel during the latter’s Gay Pride Festival as a natural ally of gays around the world. The angle for SWU (and there always IS an angle with groups like this) is to trumpet the alleged homophobia of Palestinian/Arab society compared to the alleged freedom and tolerance of “western” Israel towards a gay lifestyle. Never mind that Israel is less tolerant of gays than the average western country. That matters little for the hasbaraniks of SWU.”
Well, there you have it, “straight” from ‘Tikun Olam.’
david brumer