Self-Hating Jews and Other Sad Cases

I've received a lot of mail already in reaction to my post about the crisis in Israel -- a crisis caused by the willful disregard of settler extremists to Israeli law, and by the Israeli government's impotence in the face of such law-breaking -- and I'll post some of it throughout the day, but here's one sample:

Mr. Goldberg,

I've decided your a self-hating Jew. You would rather have the approval of Barack Hussein Obama and the self-hating Jews that are his lapdogs than of your own Jewish people. You want to make Israel Judenrein, and Heaven will punish you for that. Shame!

Shame is right. By the way, if I'm a self-hating Jew, then anyone who is not a rabid, land-stealing settler is a self-hating Jew. I believe such a category exists -- though in my experience, the Jews who hate being Jewish and afflict the rest of us with their hatred generally tend, in an overall way, to love themselves very much. But what you have in this debate over self-hating Jews -- remember, there's a report out that Bibi himself has called Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod self-hating Jews -- is the hijacking of Judaism by a group of extremists who have conflated support for the settlement project with love for Israel and the Jewish people.