The Rap Against Israel
Israel’s will to live continues on a collision course with those seeking her destruction.
The Defense Ministry this week set in motion a plan to study the feasibility of the development of 70 outposts, which are essentially budding Israeli communities. This activity has been allowed by various Likud governments since 1977. Ariel Sharon played a major role in the development of Judea and Samaria as a home for Jews.
This will receive a severe rebuke from European and Arab governments. Some of us in the West have allowed evil to flourish for the past 25 years (in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict) because we’ve been too soft on those seeking Israel’s destruction.
My friend Brian Schrauger is currently in Europe and has written poignantly of the rise of anti-Semitism, to pre-World War 2 levels.
I include in the list of those seeking Israel’s destruction the various Western media, political, and religious figures who appear to be more reasonable than, say, Hamas. Some are clueless dupes, some are more nefarious.
Add to the list the rapper Vic Mensa, who has just returned from a visit to “Palestine,” where he condemned alleged Israeli abuses of Palestinians. He drew the now infamous parallel of the treatment of blacks in America during the Civil Rights era. Of course, Mensa, clearly not a student of history, compared it to Chicago:
“It’s as if the South Side of Chicago’s most forgotten and disenfranchised neighborhoods were separated from the luxury of Downtown’s Gold Coast by a simple concrete wall.”
He refers to the security fence built by Israel to stop the murder of Jews. The fence has been very effective.
The Dream Defenders, a radical group, sponsored Mensa’s trip. Among the board members of DD are radical leftists Angela Davis and Linda Sarsour.
A Jerusalem Post report highlighted Mensa’s op-ed in TIME:
“The rapper, whose new music video for his song ‘We Could Be Free’ features footage of the West Bank, admits to not having a full understanding of the conflict. ‘The blood on both sides runs deep. I do not pretend to be familiar with every nuance of the longstanding turmoil that engulfs Israel and Palestine; it is no doubt as aged and tangled as the family trees ripped apart by its brutality. I can only speak to the experiences I had there,’ he writes.
“He professes his horror at Palestinian boys facing a mandatory minimum sentence of four years in prison for throwing stones, for example, without mentioning the deaths of Israeli adults and children in some of those attacks.
“’As with the black community in the US, the use of incarceration, racial profiling and targeting the youth as methods of control are heavily prevalent in the occupied West Bank. The main difference I see between our oppression in America and that of Palestinians is how overt and shameless the face of discrimination is in the occupied West Bank,’ Mensa also wrote.”
No kidding Mensa isn’t familiar with the conflict, but rather is regurgitating propaganda he’s heard from Left wing groups and individuals.
And the comparison of Israel’s security fence with Chicago’s South Side—a cauldron of violence and crime for more than 100 years—is equally lame. No one in Chicago is dedicated to the extermination of an entire people, as the Palestinians have wed themselves to in an attempt to rid the Middle East of Jews.
Mensa—his name is ironic—is but another American left wing activist. He is no different from so many in the Evangelical leadership community.
(In fact, a number of them this week pandered to minorities by writing op-eds and blogs championing Martin Luther King; they are also very close to groups like Black Lives Matters that demonize Israel and use the false corollaries Mensa has regurgitated. Wonder how they’d handle knowing that MLK spoke glowingly of Israel?)
As we often note here, we live in a remarkable moment in history, one in which it feels that the train is about to pull into the station. On the one hand, we have an Israeli government that understands it is morally legitimate to allow Jews to live in their ancestral homeland. And on the other hand, we must listen to the moral piety of Western dupes, who enable monstrous ideologies to flourish and threaten Israel.