A thread on Amos Oz. I know how much liberals of the West love to love this man. He was a racist war criminal, and his racism extended to non-European Jews. I wrote about him on my blog before but I will summarize. In the early 1990s, I was teaching at Colorado College..
in Colorado Springs (it is a most interesting and progressive school, where the two daughters of Dick Cheney went to school, and where his wife sat on the board for years). Amos Oz was invited for a public lecture in the year I was there. I did not want to attend but a British
student of mine urged me to go and said: you can't let him talk without a refutation. I went. I was sitting and seething as he vomited his US rhetorical schtick. He spoke about abuse of language as a sign of moral degradation in society. He said this was the early sign in Nazi
Germany, that language was abused. He spoke proudly of his war effort: from the tripartite invasion of Egypt in 1956 to the 1973 war. When he was done, I addressed the audience: I said let me use his own criterion for the moral deterioration in society. He talked about abuse
of language. I sat here as he associated the word Palestinians with terrorism 27 times. 27 times in one evening. If this is not abuse of language what is? And I continued on other matters. He tried to engage me but I left. I knew that leftist academics on campus liked him.
One of them was a radical feminist author, who became known later. I told those liberals: you see in Amos Oz in the West what he does not see in himself. You talk about him being for non-violence when he asserts in every talk about his pride in his war effort--every war effort.
Amos Oz has to remind US liberal audiences that he is not a pacifist and that he never was, despite liberal insistence that he was. They talk about him being against racism when he was a quintessential liberal European racist. His racism extended to non-European Jews. It was
in the 1980s when he wrote for the New York Times Magazine (if I remember) and he blames the rise of the Likud in Israel to non-european Jews. He was one of the early Zionist propagandists who associated the Palestinian National Movement with Nazi ideology. He never met an
an Israeli war or an act of aggression which he did not bless. Every one of them, including the recent wars on Gaza and the July war on Lebanon in 2006. But he has a ploy: he supports every war but then in the last days of the war, he issues a statement in which he calls for an
end to this war which he just had blessed. He is not opposed to Israeli killing of children but he will speak out if the number of children killed exceed a certain percentage. This is in a nutshell is Zionist liberalism for you. He supported the apartheid wall but believed it
should have taken a different route. Amos Oz was not the man Western liberals wanted him to be. But then again: Western liberals are capable of turning Netanyahu into an enlightenment idol.
