New Zealand Singer Lorde vs. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

New Zealand singer Lorde seems to be realizing that there is more to the “anti-Semitism” ideology than meets the eye and ear. The pop star has decided to cancel a planned concert in Israel to protest the Israeli regime’s genocidal project against the Palestinians, also known as settlements.

Roger Waters, Peter Gabriel, Tom Morello and Brian Eno have all supported Lorde. They wrote a letter which read in part: “We write in support of Lorde, who made public her decision not to perform in Israel and has now been branded a bigot in a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post.”

Guess what? According to Shmuley Boteach, “America’s most popular rabbi,” Lorde should never have chosen to cancel the concert. Lorde, says Boteach, has joined a growing number of anti-Semites out there who have nothing to do but attack Israel.

Boteach’s perverse move here is obviously pregnant with meaning. What he invariably ended up saying is simply this: Lorde could not choose to cancel her own concert. Thought-police like Boteach did not give her that freedom. She has broken an unwritten law. She, therefore, had to pay the consequences.

The 21-year-old singer is now accused of being a full-blown anti-Semite. This bitter hatred, we are told over and over in books and articles, has infested Europe and much of the West for centuries. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has argued, it is “the devil that never dies.”[1] Boteach said:

In choosing to ally herself with those committed to Israel’s fiscal destruction, Lorde broke with some of the greatest names in modern music….[2]

Boteach, who is a frequent contributor to Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News, added: “Let’s boycott the boycotters and tell Lorde and her fellow bigots that Jew-hatred has no place in the twenty-first century.”[3]

How about ethnic cleansing? Does it have a place in the twenty-first century? How about the settlements? Should anyone with a rational mind support this essentially diabolical enterprise? Here Boteach just proves that the Zionist or Israeli ideology is against all mankind and therefore invalid.

Roger Waters, Peter Gabriel, Tom Morello and Brian Eno again remind the world that Boteach “has nothing to teach artists about human rights. We deplore the bullying tactics being used to defend injustice against Palestinians and to suppress an artist’s freedom of conscience.”

But it gets even better. Boteach moved on to say that Lorde ignored the Syrian war and prejudicially concentrated on Israel. Lorde should have accepted the challenge. In fact, Israel is almost exclusively responsible for the war in Syria. If this sounds far-fetched, then perhaps we need to bring in Israeli ambassador Michael Oren once again, who said unequivocally that Israel preferred terrorist cells in the Syrian government over Assad. Oren:

We understand that they are pretty bad guys. Still, the greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria. With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go.[4]

The Israeli regime supported terrorist organs in Syria. They bragged about it.[5] Put simply, if Boteach wanted to be honest, then he would not have brought up the Syrian war issue at all because that essentially ruined any point that he was trying to make.

Charges of “anti-Semitism” are becoming less effective because its proponents have not been able to shoulder the burden of serious proof required to substantiate it.

Endnotes

[1] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2013).

[2] Chloe-lee Longhetti, “Oh Lorde! Kiwi singer slammed as ‘a bigot’ in controversial Washington Post ad… after cancelling show in Tel Aviv,” Daily Mail, January 1, 2018.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Herb Keinon, “Israel wanted Assad gone since start of Syria civil war,” Jerusalem Post, September 17, 2013.

[5] Rory Jones, Noam Raydan, and Suha Ma’ayeh, “Israel Gives Secret Aid to Syrian Rebels,” Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2017; Jack Moore, “Israel Secretly Paying Salaries of Syrian Rebels on Golan,” Newsweek, June 19, 2017.