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Joe Lieberman fails first big moral test

Mid-East Realities, 10 August 2000

Just imagine for a moment if a few days before he was nominated to be Vice-President of the United States a major Arab leader had said Jews were "snakes", that they "were all thoroughly evil" and that "God himself was sorry he ever created them". You can bet both Joe Lieberman and Holocaust-survivor Hadassah Lieberman, and Al Gore too, would have been outraged and would have insisted on providing us all with moral leadership.

Well, as Senator Lieberman was basking in the accolades of his being chosen to run for V-P, one of Israel's leading Rabbis, in fact a former Chief Rabbi of the country, did say these very things -- but about the children that have descended from Abraham's other wife, about the Arab people who are today far more numerous than the Jewish people.

But even though Senator Lieberman went to some pains to tell us how proud he is as a Jew, what a strong supporter he is of Israel, how he has many Arab friends (he named a few Arab Kings and rulers), how "the Rabbis" make exceptions for emergencies on the Sabbath, and how his wife comes from a family that survived the Holocaust, not a word from the Senator about one of the most blatantly racist and bigoted comments to be ever uttered in front of the world about an entire people by one of the major religious figures in Israel.

There is such a terrible double-standard these days; and sadly it is one many Jewish leaders have allowed to take hold and even encouraged. Since the Holocaust the Jews have demanded many things for themselves -- including tremendous dollar amounts of reparations and restitution from far and wide. But when the same terrible slanders that were once used against them and in fact led to the Holocaust are now uttered by senior personalities within their own ranks, the Jewish "moral" leaders of our day cower in submission, hide behind easy excuses, pretend they have no responsibility to loudly speak up, condemn, and insist "never again".

Meanwhile, at least an Israeli writer, Akiva Eldar, has filled in where Joe and Hadassah and Al fear to tread. The following article is from the leading Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, on Wednesday, written the very day Joe Lieberman was celebrating his nomination in front of the world without saying one word in public about any of this.

Let's not be coy or restrained about this; and let's not let the many available excuses prevail. It was precisely this kind of moral insensitivity and political cowardice that initially led to Crystalnaught, then to the Yellow Stars, and then to the concentration camps and crematoriums of just 60 years ago.

Let's also not forget that as Gore and Lieberman were planning to come forward as a team to provide their brand of political and moral leadership last weekend, others in Washington were protesting the "genocide" of our time that these two American politicians have both personally helped bring about and which has resulted so far in 1.5 million corpses and tremendous human misery at the very cradle of Western civilization...in Iraq.

And as Seymour Hersh, himself a courageous American Jewish journalist, warned in his important book "THE SAMPSON COMPLEX", deep-seated Israeli racism could still lead to a nuclear catastrophe in the Middle East with Israel carrying out its threats to unleash nuclear weapons on Arab capitals if anyone dares to challenge the Jewish State's continuing determination to dominate the region keeping the entire Arab and Muslim worlds weak, divided, and in post-colonial bondage.