The Duality of Al Franken

Based on a construction from those erroneous claims, Rabbi Marder invoked action:

Instead, we need to explain patiently and logically why it is indeed in America’s best interest to support Israel. First, because Israel is a dynamic and robust democracy – the only one in the Middle East; not a perfect country, but one founded on Western values of liberty, equality and tolerance that is stable, open and a reliable supporter of the U.S. And second, because Israel is a country created by survivors of genocide, a people that was nearly exterminated in the most enlightened nations of Europe. Israel is today a society that is culturally, economically and technologically advanced, with much to contribute to the larger world. But its strongest claim to American allegiance is that it provides a safe haven for a people that existed, precariously, for two thousand years with no means of protecting themselves from rampant prejudice and hatred, and suffered devastating consequences as a result of such vulnerability.27

Like Franken, Rabbi Marder’s claim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East is sadly a blind assertion that negates the non-Jewish minority of Israeli citizens who endure apartheid-like conditions, dismissing the millions of other people who were disenfranchised by Israel. Second, Israel was not created by the survivors of the Holocaust. Israel is primarily the proud work of Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl, David Ben Gurion, and Chaim Weizmann, long before the Holocaust. Tragically, Hagana, the military arm of Ben-Gurion’s labor organization, Histradut, had sacrificed Jewish immigrants from Germany as martyrs to the future Jewish state in an effort to override British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine – a bold and coldly calculated sacrifice of unwitting Holocaust survivors, martyrs to the Zionist cause28.

Furthermore, in contrast to the Jewish National Fund’s purchase of land in Palestine between 1919 and 1936, using $400 million invested by Jews – the Fund leased state-owned land for ninety-nine years at nominal sums and bought land belonging to absentee Arab owners who had been physically isolated from their property – with the express prohibition of either reselling such land to Arabs or of employing Arabs to work on it29, Emir Feisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, the purported leader of Arabs during WWI and the Arabs’ diplomatic envoy to the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, stated:

The Jews, like ourselves, are Semites. And instead of relying upon any of the great powers, we should like to have the cooperation of the Jewish people for assistance in building up a great Semitic state. I appreciate fully Zionist aspirations, even extreme Zionist aspirations. I understand the desire of Jews to acquire a homeland. But so far as Palestine is concerned, if they have made up their minds that it is Palestine or nothing, then it must be Palestine subject to the rights and aspirations of the present possessors of the land. Palestine is still in effect the land of the Arabs and must remain an integral part of the Arabian state.30

So, given the aforementioned, “What is a Lie?”31