Washington Times, that is. On a day when the New York Times prints dismal orthodoxy from Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg (and much of Goldberg's piece had appeared earlier on his blog; so much for the Times policy on no warmed-over material), the conservative Washington Times prints a beautiful piece by Denver prof Randall Kuhn destroying the idea that Gaza is anything like Mexico firing on the US.
Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players.
What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their homes in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people in the United States and abroad, planted forests on their former towns, creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy? Sounds pretty awful, huh? I may be called anti-Semitic for speaking this truth. Well, I'm Jewish and the scenario above is what many prominent Israeli scholars say happened when Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza.
Piece ends on a beautiful note:
Maybe some day soon, common sense will prevail and no corpus of misleading analogies abut Tijuana or the crazy guy across the hall who wants to murder your daughter will be able to obscure the truth. And at that moment, in a country whose people shouted We Shall Overcome, Ich bin ein Berliner, End Apartheid, Free Tibet and Save Darfur, we will all join together and shout "Free Gaza. Free Palestine." And because we are Americans, the world will take notice and they will be free, and perhaps peace will prevail for all the residents of the Holy Land
All these analogies and "thought experiments" make no sense because all of them skirt around the central question: does Israel have the right to self-defense? As Neumann (CounterPunch) notes. Israel–like all sovereign nations–has the right of self-defense, but it does not apply in this situation. No state has a right to defend itself against a nation it's occupying: the Palestinian right to resist occupation nixes Israel's right to self-defense. All Israel has is the RESPONSIBILITY to protect the population of the territory it occupies.
yes Dalia. What Neumann and you suggest makes sense. But that is kind of boring. I am beyond the ethics of it. The interesting subject for me is what makes so many people in USA and Europe (both media elite and the average persons) unable to grasp the simplicity of this concept.
Mohammad, the reason Americans buy it is that most have no information at all concerning the long occupation. All info they
have through their usual news channels (TV & MSM print) never even mentions the long occupation, only poor Israel, their courageous ally, the only democratic state in the middle east, defending itself from rabid terrorists. The Germans only had their government-given radios to give new, along with the NAZI controlled print press. The media situation in the USA today is a sophisticated version of the same. Most Americans don't use the internet to go beyond this
lockstep spiel; they view the internet as a a source for pure entertainment. This is only changing slowly, and in slow-mow keeping with the average Americans sports & gossip priority diversion interests. Even as average Americans slowly turn to
Google etc to double check the breaking news on MSM, Google et al are being censored and redacted by their own Zionist owners, members and participants.
"Israel–like all sovereign nations–has the right of self-defense, but it does not apply in this situation. No state has a right to defend itself against a nation it's occupying: the Palestinian right to resist occupation nixes Israel's right to self-defense. "
Utter bullshit logic.
'Israel–like all sovereign nations–has the right of self-defense, but it does not apply in this situation. No state has a right to defend itself against a nation it's occupying: the Palestinian right to resist occupation nixes Israel's right to self-defense. All Israel has is the RESPONSIBILITY to protect the population of the territory it occupies.'
As concise a distillation of the essentials as I have read, thanks dalia (and Neumann). Your response Richard leaves a lot to be desired, but truthfully I don't desire to hear it (again).
Mohammed, citizen is right. If anyone remembers Max Headroom years ago, the concept was an all-powerful fascist state which kept the natives info-poor. Max the hero managed to hack into network broadcasts with samizdat truth bulletins which galvanised the populace into revolt.
That's what we need. Jesus, even an air-drop of leaflets into American cities and towns. You'd have to KISS, though.
Great catches Eva.
Richard Witty:
What is "utter bullshit logic?"
Why does Israel have a right to defend itself against the people it has been starving, and their land it has been blockading on land and over air? Please tell us what your Zionist POV is, tell us, type it out and send it to us, even as your are totally protected by goy GIs to do so–you know, those guys and gals you would never want your son near?
zionist are a sad excuse for the myth the jews have made themselves out to be.
never again.
http://counterpunch.com/giroux01142009.html
From Mississippi to Gaza
Killing Children With Impunity
By HENRY A. GIROUX
The unsettling and deeply disturbing images of children in Gaza mutilated, bleeding, and dead evoke similar images from our collective memory. One such image is that of Emmett Till, whose body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955. White racists in Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed the young 14-year-old African-American boy for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Determined to make visible the horribly mangled face and twisted body of the child as an expression of racial hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy's mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the A.A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the South Side of Chicago, be left open for four long days. While mainstream news organizations ignored the horrifying image, Jet magazinepublished an unedited photo of Till's face taken while he lay in his coffin. Shaila Dewan points out that "[m]utilated is the word most often used to describe the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Inhuman is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye, swollen so large that its patch of wiry hair looks like that of a balding old man, not a handsome, brazen 14-year-old boy."