….On the afternoon of 4 September 1997, Smadar and her best friend, Sivane, had auditions for admission to a dance school. She had argued that morning with her mother, who was anxious about her going to the centre of Jerusalem. “I didn’t want to row,” said Nurit, “so I let her go.”

Inadvertently, Pilger, in his opening lines, re-inforces what many Israelis and Jews regard as the uninterrupted sequence of antisemitic persecution: From the genocide of Jews in Nazi Europe to the attempted genocide of Jews by Palestinian terrorists in Israel.

But he tries to sever that sequence, by blurring the line between the two dead girls, to reduce their deaths to an equation. The passive voice when attribution to Palestinian terrorism is called for:

“There had been a suicide bombing in Ben Yehuda”

while Abir’s killing is graphically described, with attribution:

“Abir was killed by an Israeli soldier firing a rubber bullet point-blank at her small head”.

Who is Pilger’s Jewish hero? An Israeli whose history includes both Auschwitz and Palestinian genocidal terrorism who is willing to see Israel dissolved in order to accomodate Palestinian aspirations (actually, I’m not sure Rami is a one-stater but Pilger seems to believe it).

Now there is a Jew worth his salt! Not resisting aggression but coming to terms with it! The kind of Jew Gandhi would have approved of, when he urged:

“the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife…They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

But Pilger gives the lie to Gandhi’s expectation that this “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany…”

Germany succeeded very nicely in nearly exterminating Eueope’s Jews. And today the hearts of Europe’s finest intellectuals bleed only for Palestinians. Somehow they, Palestinians, are not urged to “throw themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

This still remains a fate only fitting for Jews.

“‘[C]heapening the charge of anti-semitism through frivolous and politically manipulative uses,’ wrote Greenwald, ‘weakens the ability to combat actual, real anti-semitism, which does still exist.’”

Is it just me or are the people who makes this argument the least likely to ever actually find anti-semitism? That is to say, every cry of anti-semitism is for Greenwald, et al to be denounced as frivolous and a risk to “real” anti-anti-semitism.