Have you ever had to disown a close friend?
I did and it was heart wrenching. I am reminded of it because I got a notice for a meeting of the 9/11 neocons, a group organized in the S.F. Bay Area by the wonderful Cinnamon
Stillwell. 9/11 didn't change my politics, but I love the name she created. The date is what brought the issue to mind.
The event of 2001 on September 11th
cost me four coffee friends but had little effect on my politics. On
the Sunday following 9/11 a new member of the weekday coffee group in
North Beach, an Egyptian immigrant, Assam Elmagoop,
who was a standard Egyptian a
nti-Semite of little consequence, sent out
an email that accused the U.S. of carrying out terrorism around the
world and he explained in his email that the hairless-Arab's
airline-passenger-bombing of the U.S. was an understandable
consequence. The four former coffee friends sided with the
anti-American email sent by the Egyptian immigrant.
My
politics were not changed by the hairless-Arab attack on 9/11. The
biggest change in my politics had come a year earlier when Palestinian
murders began targeting Israeli citizens on buses, in coffee houses and
while eating pizza on the mall. It was what the Palestinians call the
Second Intifada that aroused my animosity toward Middle Eastern Arabs.
The need to deal with that growing problem was evident to me a year
before 2001.
One of the consequences of my change in attitude
was a decreased tolerance for anti-Israel anti-Semitism. I had to
disown a longtime close friend, Fran Peavey,
because she was clearly an anti-Semite and because she was a public
figure in the peace movement. I came to realize that public figures
who are anti-Semites don't deserve to keep their venom secret. The
whole affair is on record on my website.
One effect of the online notice was to slow down Ms. Peavey's funding for a year or two until she called me for a mediation. One of her funders was slightly a Jew, John Steiner, in Denver who was unhappy with my online posting. The mediation went nowhere but I changed my posting and got Ms. Peavey to write her side of the issue.
Readers of this blog know I have no tolerance for anti-Semites and I use the OECD definition of an anti-Semite. The OECD determined in a major pan-European conference that any one who holds Israel to higher standards than other nations in an anti-Semite. (That sure includes Mearsheimer and Walt who never write books or articles about non-Israeli lobby groups in Washington D.C.)