Bill Moyers Skips Over His Judeophobia

Bill Moyers, as we all know, suffers Judeophobia.

How do we know?

He said so:

What we are seeing in Gaza is the latest battle in the oldest family quarrel on record. Open your Bible: the sons of the patriarch Abraham become Arab and Jew. Go to the Book of Deuteronomy. When the ancient Israelites entered Canaan their leaders urged violence against its inhabitants. The very Moses who had brought down the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” now proclaimed, “You must destroy completely all the places where the nations have served their gods. You must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, set fire to the carved images of their gods, and wipe out their name from that place.”

So God-soaked violence became genetically coded.

Genetically?

Through blood? DNA? What genes?

(see here for some interesting material)

Bill Kristol took Moyers on and wrote this:

The liberal sage Bill Moyers has been a harsh critic of Bush. On Jan. 9, on PBS, he also lambasted Israel for what he called its “state terrorism,” its “waging war on an entire population” in Gaza. He traced this Israeli policy back to the Bible, where “God-soaked violence became genetically coded,” apparently in both Arabs and Jews. I wouldn’t presume to say what is and isn’t “genetically coded” in Moyers’s respectable Protestant genes. But I’m glad it was George W. Bush calling the shots over the last eight years, not someone well-thought of by Moyers.

Moyers responded

Re “The Next War President” (column, Jan. 19):

I take strong exception to William Kristol’s characterization of what I said about Israel’s action in Gaza and my position on violence in the Middle East. According to him, I “lambasted Israel” for what I “called its ‘state terrorism.’ ”

Here is the exact transcript of what I said:

“Every nation has the right to defend its people. Israel is no exception, all the more so because Hamas would like to see every Jew in Israel dead. But brute force can turn self-defense into state terrorism. It’s what the U.S. did in Vietnam, with B-52s and napalm, and again in Iraq, with shock and awe. By killing indiscriminately the elderly, kids, entire families, by destroying schools and hospitals, Israel did exactly what terrorists do and exactly what Hamas wanted. It spilled the blood that turns the wheel of retribution.”

Furthermore, I do believe that the violence in the Middle East has roots deep in history, and in the competition of the three monotheistic faiths, each of which claims divine title to much of the same land. But from my days in the Johnson White House, I have defended Israel’s right to defend itself, and still do.

When I was the publisher of Newsday, I instructed our newsroom to cover atrocities in Vietnam. I believed (and still do) that it is important to know what our military was doing in our name.

Killing civilians is wrong, whether done by Hamas, Israel or the United States. To be indifferent to that suffering is, sadly, to be as blind as Samson in Gaza.

Bill Moyers

And the "genetically coded" remark?

That he skipped.

And the New York Times, in its anti-Israel bias, permits him to get away with it.