A friend writes:
Nicholas Kristof today says a Sudanese Mom shooting a machine gun at Sudanese soldiers is a hero and an example for our leaders (as if we need more leaders willing to use weapons), but in 2010 lectured Palestinians on Gandhi and criticized them for throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. Sure, the situation is more immediately life threatening in southern Sudan than in Palestine, but there is still some significant hypocrisy here. Kristof exemplifies typical US double standards on Israel/Palestine relative to other struggles. Can anyone imagine Kristof under any circumstance praising a Palestinian who shot at an Israeli soldier?
Excerpts of the two columns:
If Only Our Leaders Had Mariam’s Guts By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: June 6, 2012
I’d like to introduce a valiant woman here, Mariam Tia, to President Obama and other world leaders, so she could explain how they’re allowing Sudan’s leaders to get away with mass atrocities that echo Darfur.
…Mariam was pregnant when the Sudanese Army invaded her village here in the rebel-held Nuba Mountains and shot her husband dead. Enraged, she took over a mounted machine gun set up by rebels and began to rake the soldiers as they burned the village’s huts.
Mariam said she isn’t sure whether she actually shot any soldiers and that soon they began firing back, so she had to run for her life. …
She named her baby girl Fakao, which is shorthand for: bombs are dropping. When people hear Antonov bombers releasing their payloads, they shout “Fakao! Fakao!” That’s the signal to huddle behind rocks and hope for the best.
“When this child was in my stomach, I used to run from the bombers,” Mariam told me as she nursed Fakao in front of her cave. “I named her this so that I could remember the struggle we went through to give her life.”
“If I ever see the enemy again,” she added, “I will tie this baby to my back and pick up a gun and fight them.”
Waiting for Gandhi By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: July 10, 2010
Despite being stoned and tear-gassed on this trip, I find a reed of hope here. It’s that some Palestinians are dabbling in a strategy of nonviolent resistance that just might be a game-changer.
The organizers hail the methods of Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., recognizing that nonviolent resistance could be a more powerful tool to achieve a Palestinian state than rockets and missiles….
But then a group of Palestinian youths began to throw rocks at Israeli troops. That’s the biggest challenge: many Palestinians define “nonviolence” to include stone-throwing.
Soon after, the Israeli forces fired volleys of tear gas at us, and then charged. The protesters fled, some throwing rocks backward as they ran. It’s a far cry from the heroism of Gandhi’s followers, who refused even to raise their arms to ward off blows as they were clubbed…
I don’t know whether Palestinians can create a peaceful mass movement that might change history, and their first challenge will be to suppress the stone-throwers and bring women into the forefront. But this grass-roots movement offers a ray of hope for less violence and more change.
Kristof’s double standard on violent resistance
link to youtube.com
If only Americans had Mariam’s guts…..there wouldn’t be any Kristofs.
American wrote:
“In only Americans had Mariam’s guts…. there wouldn’t be any Kristofs.”
*The* funniest thing ever written on this blog.
If only Americans had Mariam’s guts…..there wouldn’t be any Kristofs.
You know, I don’t recall anyone asking the Kuwatis to develop a non-violent resistance movement. That sort of discussion just never took place.
None of the operations staff in Central Command ever suggested that a one state solution might be preferable to a two state solution. If the disastrous predictions about the environmental and economic consequences arising from the Iraqi threat to set the oil fields of the region on fire didn’t make the occupation irreversible, its hard to see how people here can get so discouraged over the construction of some immaterial houses and roads. Those “obstacles” could be converted for use by Palestinians in the twinkling of an eye or converted for use of the peacekeeping forces ala Sadaam’s palaces and bunkers.
In fact, when I hear someone today say that international law and UN resolutions won’t ever remove Israel from Palestine, I wonder if they have Alzheimer’s? UN resolutions and the law of war worked just fine for removing the Iraqi Army from Kuwait and the ground combat phase only took us about 100 hours.
At the time, the Arab members of the international coalition even included the Syrians. They and the other Arab nations were led to believe that we would use UN resolutions and international law in exactly the same fashion, if necessary, to remove Israel from the occupied Arab territory. Here is how historian Avi Shlaim describes it:
If Bush Jr. wanted to finish the job his father started, he must have forgotten about that minor detail.
All I can say Hostage is if Americans had any guts there wouldn’t have been a Bush II, if we had guts we wouldn’t be letting our country make a frigging mess around the world, if we had guts we’d have better choices than republicans and democrats. If only….
But don’t confuse my use of Americans with US government or assume I mean 100% of Americans.
And hey, don’t be getting on me about international law, I’ve been harping on it, insisting on it, as the one legitimate vehicle for the I/P solution for 11 years……I’m just getting tired of waiting.
American- If only Americans had Mariam’s guts…. there wouldn’t be any Kristofs.
Does that mean, that all the Kristofs would be dead. Does it mean that the Kristofs would allowed to be alive, but they wouldn’t be writing for the NY Times because the columns would be written by people who are less Kristof like and more “American” like?
It means the Kristofs would be obliged to make an honest living.
“Does that mean, that all the Kristofs would be dead”…WJ
Not quite that drastic. I was thinking of more like a required medical treatment for their disorder, lobotomies or shock treatment, that sort of thing…..LOL
Not only do the Palestinians throw stones…it has been reported (I am sure I have read this somewhere) that often they use Bad Language!! (when they are being shot, tear gassed, drone hell-fired, etc etc).
No doubt about it, Palestinians are their own worst enemies.
The Sudanese soldiers were massacring people and burning the village. The Israeli soldiers were blocking access to the wall. If she hadn’t shot back, the Sudanese soldiers would still have killed her people. If the Palestinians didn’t throw stones they wouldn’t have been shot. In fact they weren’t shot even when they threw stones. You may think the Israeli soldiers have no right to self-defense, but whether you think that or not, they were defending themselves from a physical attack.
Your idea of self defence is shooting at innocent victims, harassment and unprovoked violence. The IDF are an occupation militia who deliberately provoke and injure people in areas where they have no right whatsoever to be. You are ridiculous and a troll.
This is typical Israeli thinking
Israel is building a wall to confiscate someone else’s land without their permission, then zionists call it “self defense” to prevent those people from “access to the wall”
And in fact, Israeli soldiers (and settlers) have massacred the Palestinian woman’s people and destroyed many of their villages, however, as most Palestinian villages were not made of burnable material, more by explosive and bulldozers. Much if not most on areas outside Israel’s recognized borders, like the incident at the wall. This is what Israel calls “self defense”.
No, I call it “self-defense” to keep people from throwing rocks at you.
No, I call it “self-defense” to keep people from throwing rocks at you.
Fred there are plenty of videos on YouTube of Settlers stoning little Palestinian kids trying to go to school or some other innocuous business. The Wall was not built on the Armistice Line. It’s purpose is not self defense, it is being built to steal land from Palestinians and to persecute them.
If you came to a neighborhood in America and built a wall and persecuted Americans in a similar fashion, they’d kill you without giving it a second thought.
Fred
your concern shows how much you love humanity
you know what the Sudanese soldiers should have done? they should have put all the people into tent cities supervised by the prison service
link to haaretz.com
Fredblogs: … blocking access to the wall
Access to the wall. Sure.
The Israeli soldiers were blocking access to the wall.
The Secretary General and Rapporteur reports included in the 1000+ page UN dossier for the Wall case noted that the Israeli Wall had cut people off from adequate sources of food and water, and made them totally dependent on unreliable supplies of foreign aid. The Secretary also noted that unharvested crops withered and died in the fields, while Palestinians under closures and curfews suffered from malnutrition and couldn’t even leave their homes to obtain food or bury their dead. If you were subjecting neighborhoods in the US to the same regime, killing Israelis would be considered a mitzvah.
And how exactly does throwing rocks at people help with any of that? How exactly does that solve any of the problems you listed? If you don’t like being at war with Israel, make peace. The wall, regardless of its effects was built because Palestinians were coming into Israel and blowing people up.
If you don’t like being at war with Israel, make peace.
LOL! Israel has never missed an opportunity to violate its obligations under existing peace plans you ignoramus.
In 1943 the US Consul at Cairo cabled the State Department:
— Kirk link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu
Dr. Shlomo Ben-Ami is an Oxford-trained historian and former Foreign Minister of Israel. He has written that it was ironic that the same Israeli leadership that had gone to the UN and demanded the partition in November of 1947 was already well prepared and ready to go to war in the winter of 1947 to prevent that plan from being the outcome.
In 1973 the DoD, the US National Security Council Staff, and Secretary of State Kissinger advised that Israel had the capability to produce small numbers of nuclear weapons (pdf page 1027). They agreed that measures beyond conventional military self-help would be necessary to insure Israel’s future security after the Yom Kippur War, but that the US would have to disavow support for any public threat by Israel to use nuclear weapons on Arab targets (pdf page 766). The Egyptians had advised the US government that Israel was engaged in long range missile and atomic weapons testing (pdf page 110). The assessment of our own NSC staff was that Israel would probably use atomic bombs before they would concede and withdraw to the 1967 borders (pdf page 512). link to static.history.state.gov
In fact they were shot when they didn’t throw anything, Freddyboy.
Kristof does seem to have two different visions of women as heroines. In one case they must be innocent, vulnerable and pacific, suppressing barbarous children who throw stones. In the other they must be brave, angry and amazonic, spraying machine gun rounds. A kind of Christian and a kind of pagan iconography, chosen in each case for convenience.
The actual moral rules for civilian resistance to conquerors and marauders are not that easy to formulate, of course.
Kristof has become one of the leading advocates of “humanitarian” war especially if that war has the potential to break up another Islamic nation state. He was the primary source for spreading the lying propaganda designed to get us into Darfur in 2004-2005 (the humanitarian warriors lost that one because we were already over committed in Iraq). He shed crocodile tears over the atrocities in Libya last winter. Great outcome there as we see massive ethnic cleansings of Black skinned Libyans from the Mediterranean cities (remember the “mercenaries” lie).
It doesn’t matter if he is a manipulative war party operative or just a simple fool, the results of his writing is to promote more war.