J Street is a One Way Street - Do Not Enter

What anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demagogues have learned since the Holocaust and 70 years of Holocaust memorials, events, art and films is one simple lesson:

You can legitimately ply your trade of hate so long as you include the words, "Peace" or "Justice" in the title of your organization. Had Hitler and the Nazis described their party as "Pro Peace" and hidden their intent to exterminate Europe's Jews, they most likely would have succeeded in murdering every single Jew within their sphere of control instead of only a third of world Jewry.

American Jews, for the most part, are heirs to a shameful record of either being uneducated, naïve or - incredibly - indifferent to the fate of their brothers and sisters during the Holocaust. Professor David Wyman and others have recorded the stark history of the failure of American Jewish leadership to alert and to expend efforts to save the six million.

The American Jewish community is facing another existential challenge today, a mere generation after history's most horrific genocide. A Muslim, religious fanatic in the person of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, President of Iran, is threatening to annihilate millions more in Israel. As we speak, his regime is developing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them while many American Jews are either, naïve, uninformed or indifferent to the threat.

There are American Jewish groups that are seeking to outdo their counterparts of 70 years ago. Among these, the leading group is J Street, a lobbying and political action group that has allied with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and which acts as the chief apologist for the madmen of Teheran. J Street's founder and director, Jeremy Ben Ami, formerly of the New Israel Fund and an official of the Clinton Administration, recently said,

"Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons because they have been backed into a corner...American and Israeli actions over the last years have led to a point where the Iranians feel they have no other recourse."

If that's not an apology, then there is no such animal.

In similar statements, J Street has drawn a moral equivalency between Hamas and the state of Israel. Were American Jews to act like a normal, proud, democratic people, organizations like J Street would be unwelcome in any conceivable venue. Just imagine an African American group in the 1960's welcoming a group that supported Sheriff Bull Connors, the bigot who set dogs upon Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Duplicitously intoning "Peace" and "Pro Israel", J Street preys upon the genuine desire of most American Jews who long for real peace and a secure Israel. Real peace, however, cannot be attained by identification with anti-Semites or by embellishing a fantasy. In the late 1930's there were American Jews, too, who wanted nothing to do with opposing Hitler, who saw Jewish "behavior" as the reason for the Nazis' rise to power.

Some positions are beyond the pale, some individuals are either too naïve or too complicit to be welcomed as legitimate participants in discussions that may well determine whether another 6 million will live or die. On June 18th, at Temple Emanuel in Newton, the CJP of Greater Boston will welcome J Street to present its point of view in a debate with AIPAC.

Some tents are not big enough to accommodate the delusional.

The scathing, ad hominem attack of Hillel Stavis on J Street and on me in last week's Advocate would ordinarily not prompt me to respond. While always saddened when those who disagree with J Street and its vision for a secure Israel choose name-calling rather than a serious discussion of the issues, I generally feel such attacks are not worthy of a response...

...Though Stavis and other hawkish voices might want to believe otherwise, they cannot argue with the numbers. Seventy-eight percent of American Jews voted for President Barack Obama, whose campaign platform -- and now his presidential policy -- supported both tough, direct diplomacy with Iran and strong U.S. leadership to achieve a two-state solution...

Of course, we recognize that the threats Israel faces go beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no doubt that Iran's nuclear program and support for terror threatens Israel, regional stability and U.S. interests around the world.