We had a screening of the film, The Case for Israel: Democracy’s Outpost, Saturday night in the newly constructed Temple Shalom in Fayetteville, AR with comments from the producer, Gloria Greensfield. It was a huge success.
There were nearly a hundred people there of whom about a third were from pro-Israel Christian Churches. As certain segments of the Jewish community have gone wobbly on Israel, the support of the Christian community is becoming more important.
But the most important reason that the screening was a huge success is that it was probably the largest pro-Israel gathering in a college community dominated by the anti-Israel King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, created with an $18 million gift from the Saudi Arabian government. The King Fahd Center along with the Omni Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology host a few anti-Israel conferences each year.
The oddest thing about these King Fahd and Omni Center events is their singular focus on human rights abuses by Israel. Yes, the government of Israel along with the governments in the US and all other democracies can work on improving how they treat their own and other people. But if we really wanted to address human rights abuses wouldn’t we be paying a whole lot more attention to the flagrant oppression perpetrated by the dictatorships governing every other country in the Middle East?
In Saudi Arabia , Iran, Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East (but not Israel) homosexuality is a crime sometimes punished by death. Religious and political dissent is almost entirely repressed in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Gaza, and elsewhere in the Middle East (but not Israel).
Shouldn’t progressives who value freedom for homosexuals as well as religious and political minorities (as I do) be devoting much more energy protesting other countries in the Middle East? And shouldn’t people who value democracy and human rights (as I do) praise those countries in the world where such values exist and are implemented (even if very imperfectly) rather than concentrating the bulk of their energy denouncing those countries? It’s as if we have gone through the looking glass and up is now down.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 