Paul Lin’s (林保華) essay “Israel, Jews and US-China relations,” (March 30, page 8) contains a number of accusations about US society as well as stereotypes about the Jewish people often cited by anti-Semites.
As an American Jewish resident of Taiwan, it came as a great disappointment to read such statements in the Taipei Times.
Lin writes that the Jewish community has an influence over “US financial circles and several other industries including the academic economics community, as well as the information and media industry,” and this “gives it strong political clout.”
He further makes the baseless accusation that China is “exerting great effort to gain influence over the Jewish community to co-opt Trump and remove all obstacles to its overarching strategy to take over world leadership.”
To paraphrase a statement issued in December last year by the Anti-Defamation League — a civil rights organization that fights anti-Semitism — in response to a US politician who suggested that US foreign policy in the Middle East is driven by Israel, Lin’s remarks imply that US foreign policy is based on religiously or national origin-based special interests rather than on the US’ best interests.
Whether intentional or not, Lin’s words raise the specter of age-old stereotypes about Jewish control of the US government, a poisonous myth that persists in parts of the world where intolerance thrives, but should have no place in open societies like the US or Taiwan.
If, as Lin states, the US Jewish community is increasingly important to Taiwan-US ties, and “some Taiwanese in the US are paying a great deal of attention to this issue and they have formed quite a good understanding of it,” hopefully such understanding is based on the reality that US support for Israel is due to the shared values of democracy and rule of law, and is not due to the stereotypes cited by Lin.
Such shared values, without the need to influence industries, academics or politics, could also form the basis for stronger Taiwan-US ties.
Ross Feingold is chairman of the Taipei Jewish Center. The views expressed here are his own.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this