Israeli soldier slams haters – and a new cartoon

April 3, 2014

J STREET U AND HILLEL SPONSOR ANTI-ISRAEL EVENT – NO DISSENT ALLOWED

Be open to unfamiliar ideas, be willing to have the uncomfortable conversations – these are the mantras of anti-Israel organizations like J-Street, Open Hillel, and Breaking the Silence as they try to insert their Isracidal agenda into mainstream discourse. But as is too often the case with such groups, what is good for me is not for thee. Hen Mazzig, an IDF officer currently serving in the reserves found this out the hard way while attending a “Breaking the Silence” event at Washington University in St. Louis last week. Breaking the Silence is a single agenda organization dedicated to the full time demonization of the Jewish state and her citizens. Washington U is no stranger to controversy, earlier this week photos emerged of two J-Street activists at W.U. sporting violence promoting T-shirts that proclaimed “Resistance is not Terrorism”.

Settling into his seat at a Breaking the Silence event sponsored by Hillel and J Street U, Hen, an educator with StandWithUs discovered that no unapproved questions or comments would be tolerated. In his JNS article he writes…

As an Israeli reservist who had been stationed in the West Bank, I sat in disbelief as the speaker described attitudes and policies that were entirely divorced from reality.

The former soldier, Oded Na’aman, claimed that Israeli soldiers are trained to oppress the Palestinians individually and as a people, that they maliciously mistreat Palestinians in the West Bank, and that they are taught to make Palestinians fear Israeli soldiers. He argued that there are no civil rights for Palestinians and that the Jewish people who now have a state use their power to oppress Palestinians.

I had no idea what he was talking about or what motivated him to lie.

Astonished at the shameless propaganda assault to which he and the others in attendance were being subjected, Hen longed to respond, to speak up for his people and his country. But this supposed human rights organization would tolerate no such dissent.

I wished I could have spoken up and shared the reality I knew. Instead, the organizers and sponsors made it very clear that there would be no dialogue. They handed out a list of rules that included not telling anyone what was said in the room, how we needed to allow our beliefs to be challenged, and how we should be accepting of the speaker’s comments. The sponsors didn’t even allow us to openly ask questions. We could only write them on a piece of paper, and then they would choose which ones to ask the speaker. Clearly, they did not want the speaker to be challenged.

It was very hard to understand how the speaker represented “Breaking the Silence” when I was being silenced.

Read the entire article HERE.