This is my first post for The Seminal at Firedoglake and I’m glad to be here.  I thank Alex Thurston for inviting me to share my perspective on the Israeli-Arab conflict and Muslim-Jewish relations.  I’ve written Tikun Olam since 2003.  Being a progressive Jewish blogger writing on the subjects I did was a very lonely occupation at the time.  But there has been a sea change in the interval.  Now there are so many progressive Jewish blogs I can scarcely fit them all in my blogroll.  We have a president who "gets" the Israeli-Palestinian issue and actually has a vision to resolve it.  We still don’t seem to have an Israeli political system that "gets" much of anything, but that’s less important to me than the other factors at work which all militate in a more positive direction than ever before in my life.

I hope to stir up a conversation about U.S. policy toward Israel and all the general issues I mentioned above.  Given the contentiousness of the subject, that shouldn’t be hard at all.  With that introduction, let’s get right to it.

Marwa el Sherbini

German Muslim martyr: Marwa el-Sherbini

Haaretz reports that a crazed neo-Nazi stabbed a pregnant Muslim woman to death in front of her 3 year old son and husband. The incident began at a local playground when the woman, Marwa el-Sherbini, requested that the man allow her son to use the swings. The incident escalated and he began taunting her and attempting to tear her head-scarf off her head. She pursued a civil action against him in a Dresden court and won a judgment that included a fine.

He was appealing the verdict and she was about to testify in court when he attacked her with a knife he has somehow smuggled into the courthouse. The murderer stabbed her 18 times. When her husband came to her defense, a security guard mistook the husband for the attacker (how?) and shot him in the leg. He is now in critical condition in the hospital, he is a widower, his son is motherless and their second child, with whom she was pregnant is dead.

I understand the European courthouses do not have the same type of security American ones do. But given the acrimony in this case, how could the police and court authorities not have separated the parties to prevent precisely such an escalation?

Thankfully, the German Jewish community has had the sense to denounce this foul incident and joined with the leadership of the Muslim community to visit the husband where he is recovering from a stab wound inflicted by the killer and his other injury. The leader of German Jews said:

All those people who have in the past belittled our concern about a phobia against Islam in Germany are seeing after this awful act how wrong they were…" Officials from a German Muslim group and the country’s main Jewish group made a joint visit Monday to the Dresden hospital where the victim’s husband is being treated. "You don’t have to be a Muslim to act against anti-Muslim behavior, and you don’t have to be a Jew to act against anti-Semitism," said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews.

I issue a challenge to Muslim-haters among us like Daniel Pipes to denounce this despicable act. Let us see whether there is any act of violence against Muslims which would trouble their consciences. We shouldn’t let people like Abe Foxman off the hook either since the ADL claims a mission of combating racism and religious prejudice.

It is worth noting that the attacker is an immigrant from Russia where neo-Nazi and anti-foreigner sentiments runs deep. Vicious attacks on minorities of this sort are commonplace. How can the German authorities not have been more aware of the violent propensities of someone like this and done a better job of protecting the victims?

In a local Seattle incident eerily reminiscent of this hate crime, a Seattle Muslim woman wearing a head-scarf was threatened with a knife by a local white supremacist. This is from the Seattle Times coverage:

A self-proclaimed white supremacist with a history of threats and harassment was charged today under the state’s hate crime statute after he allegedly threatened a young Muslim woman with a knife while she was waiting in line for services at the Seattle Indian Health Board…

…Eric Lee Garner walked up to the woman on July 1, pointed at her head scarf and said, "you Muslim people scare people when you wear things like that!" He followed up with other derogatory remarks. The woman, who was holding her six-month-old son, tried to reason with the 24-year-old Auburn man by saying that her "her clothing does not make her a bad person"…

When the insults didn’t stop…the woman backed away from Garner and tried to shield her son from him. Garner then cursed at the woman, got in her face and pulled out a large sheathed knife, court papers said. Garner told the woman he was going to "cut" the woman and her baby with the knife, charging documents said.

One report says he threatened to "cut her genitals." Another says he called her a "Muslim bitch." Luckily a state employee intervened and took the knife away from the would-be attacker before he could use it. The Seattle Police (who sometimes DO do something right) arrested him the next day. He bragged to them that he owned an AK-47 which he’d purchased after 9/11.

Apparently, Garner is a real model citizen:

[He] has prior convictions for felony harassment, trafficking, theft, violation of a domestic violence court order, assault, indecent exposure and drug possession.

By the grace of God or a higher power, neither this woman or her infant were harmed. May the police and prosecutor learn a lesson from the German incident and keep this savage thug as far from his victim as possible during future legal proceedings.

Given the history of Muslim-Jewish violence in here in Seattle, where a mentally disturbed Pakistani-American attacked our local Jewish federation building and killed a staff member and wounded five others, it is imperative that the local Jewish community strongly denounce this Islamophobic act. Despite the violence swirling in the Middle East, we Jews have much more in common with our brother and sister Muslims that what divides us. We too are often the victims of prejudice and violence because of our religious beliefs. In fact, the wearing of a head-scarf, which provoked the German and Seattle attacks, echoes prejudice against observant Jews who wear a yarmulke. If we focus too much on the violence of the Israeli-Arab conflict, we forget what we share.

I hope that local Jewish groups here express their outrage at this incident and solidarity with our Muslim brothers and sisters in the face of Islamophobia. Rob Jacobs, local director of Stand With Us, a pro-Israel group which often expresses hostility to Palestinians and Muslims in general did criticize the attack saying: “Of course an attack, or, as in the case you refer to, threatening to attack anyone is wrong.” But along with this he launched into a harsh attack on me for even asking the question

This is unfortunately what a number of us liberals in the Jewish community have become used to on this question. Lots of heat and very little light. Paranoia and defensiveness but very little reason.