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Marty Kaplan is a wise-guy kind of professor at USC who loves to flaunt his Jewishness in his writings.
The problem is, he loves to brag how little his tradition means to him. In a free country, he may say that all day long.
He sounds like a chap who was the class clown during his school days. He probably went to extremes to draw the glare of attention to his insecure self.
Normally, nobody off-campus should care what free-swinging Marty thinks.
But as a published columnist, he has become a public figure.
So What If They Are Terrorists?
In his latest weekly essay, he has, in a most disgusting manner, thrown a hefty punch into Israel’s face over the Gaza Strip War.
Says that because so many Gaza children have been killed in the last week and a half, by golly, he finds it impossible to pull for his fellow Jews — even against terrorists, even against terrorists who use Gaza children as human shields, even against terrorists who plant their weaponry in the homes of ordinary persons so Israel will strike the property and kill the occupants.
He writes a sing-song essay. He shilly-shallies. He writes a back-and-forth column that says, essentially, “on the one hand, children in Gaza should not die, on the other hand, my people in Israel have a right to defend themselves. Now which do I believe in more?”
But his heart defeats his mind. Being a reliable left-winger, emotion overcomes him. He concludes Israel is dead wrong.
Prof. Kaplan writes:
I wish I didn't believe that the events now unfolding in the Middle East are too complicated for unalloyed outrage. I wish the arguments of only one side rang wholly true to me. I am the first to accuse myself of paralyzing moral generosity — the fatal empathy that terrorists prey on. But ambivalence is not the same as moral equivalence, and holy war, no matter who is waging it, makes my flesh crawl.
Just as the Los Angeles Times this morning once again, amazingly but not surprisingly, recognized the legitimacy of Hamas, its equivalency with Israel, Prof. Kaplan ran to the identical conclusion.
He decided that two peoples equally desirous of peace have engaged each other, each with an equally legal and moral right to live side by side. The only difference is one side speaks with a Hebrew accent, the other with an Arabic accent.
Pathetically, Prof. Kaplan cannot believe that Hamas is nearly as evil as critics claim nor that Israel is as morally astute as 95 percent of Jews assert.
If the professor forgive the verb, he tortured himself over where to direct his cheers, and the scenes produced by Hamas coming out of Gaza were so darned unsettling that he could not cheer for his own people.
He wrote:
I saw pictures of massive devastation in Gaza on the front pages of the newspapers, and I thought, What good does it do if Israel appears to act like its enemies?
Hopefully, when he comes to his senses, Prof. Kaplan will formally abandon the Jewish People and convert to any other religion in the world. Just leave us alone.
