Jewish Voice for What?

It seems odd to speak out against an organization named "Jewish Voice for Peace." After all, I'm Jewish. I have a voice. I'm for peace.

But despite its self-righteous name, and its occasional use of cautious, moderate rhetoric, JVP, the organization behind MuzzleWatch, is not much different than the number of other reflexively pro-Palestinian and harshly anti-Israel extremist groups that exist to demonize the Jewish state.

Here are some telling tidbits:

Jewish Voice for Peace signed a "friend of the court" brief supporting a law suit by the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) that was meant to silence — yes, "muzzle" — the David Project and media organizations looking into a controversial land deal between the ISB and the city of Boston. (The lawsuit was eventually dropped.)

Also indicative of JVP's extremism is its booklist, which recommends, among works by other fringe anti-Israel activists, four books by Norman Finkelstein, a man who recently told the Iranians that Israel is a "satanic state" from "the boils of hell," which, by the way, "is committing a holocaust."

So extreme they are, that their newsletters feature essays by Ali Abunimeh, a co-founder of the Israel-bashing site Electronic Intifada, and Ran HaCohen, an activist who's so dogmatically entrenched against his country that he casts lifelong peace activists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua as war-hungry jingoists because they dared to think Israel had a right to respond to acts of war by Hezbollah. He even takes Yehoshua Sobol to task for asserting that Hezbollah is opposed to Israel's right to exist, though this is something openly and repeatedly admitted by the antisemitic (or "antiJudaic") terrorist organization.