For or against?

Check out this most disturbing moment of clarity. I struggle with my positions on many things, my relationship with g-d, Torah and the state of Israel. I’ve found that often the real struggle is between the liberal and conservative in me, the person who wants to keep an open mind and the person who has looked at the world with an open mind, found what it was looking for and now seeks to defend that from those who would destroy it… maybe I’m being dramatic, but I’m a dramatic guy, this clip is from David Horowitz's talk at the University of California, San Diego. It is disturbing on many levels.

A polite yet hostile student in the audience introduces herself as Jumanah Imad Albahri of the Muslim Students' Association; she refuses to condemn either Hamas or Hezbollah when Horowitz asks her to clarify her position. He asks her a series of questions which she dodges until he asks her this one:

"I am a Jew," he says. "The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For or against it?"

"For it," she says.

It is moments like this one that help me clarify my own stance. I am still a liberal in many ways but it is views like the one of this girl that make me less open to talking about Israel and its place in the world, that make me less open to the idea that there could ever be any kind of lasting peace with Hamas or Hezbollah and it is moment like these that make me say to myself, Israel may be deeply flawed but I am a Jew if I do not support it, if I do not stand against those who hate it, it will perish in a moment. Michael Totten, an excellent writer on Middle Eastern Affray has this the say:

No sooner was the video of this exchange posted when one of the student’s teachers rushed to defend her.

“This girl is actually my student,” A. Casavantes wrote in the comments’ section of Horowitz’s NewsReal blog. “I know her to be an intelligent, moral young woman who believes in peace. I do not support any organization that advocates violence against any specific group, nor do I believe that my student would do so. As a peace loving, Catholic teacher, I’m saddened that this speaker — her elder — manipulated the conversation in this fashion to make her look like someone she isn’t, out of an egotistical desire to prove his own point, rather than engaging in a constructive dialogue.”

It’s a phenomenon as peculiar as it is disturbing, motivated in large part...by fear. “Too many very intelligent people are running away from looking at some very influential and pernicious doctrines of our own time. They don’t want to look. They prefer to shut their eyes and hope for the best.”

There is a difference between being open minded and having a hole in your head