Total number of comments: 190 (since 2009-08-03 06:09:51)
The Hasbara Buster
Linguist from Rosario, Argentina. Amateur musician. Committed anti-zionist.
Website: http://thehasbarabuster.blogspot.com
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Showing comments 190 - 101
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By singling out Israel, Obama has outed himself as the antisemite he is. Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz were right all along.
I first drew attention to the similarities between the Israeli and South African hasbaras here. My article was in jest, but I'm glad you're now doing a serious, systematic study of the issue.
I agree 100% with your comments about Atzmon. The guy is clearly antisemitic, fully hurtful to the PSM and to an extent it's a disgrace that a post like this was even published on Mondoweiss. It's the crossing of a red line and I expect some kind of apology from the blog's top guys.
That being said, I don't agree that the kind of indoctrination you find in the Jewish community is the same that you would find in other communities. Intermarriage and Israel, in particular, are two topics the official Jewish community has very weird ideas about.
Recently Atzmon linked to one of my articles.
Am I an antisemite?
Shmuel, all Israel's "landmark decisions" come with caveats that render them irrelevant. Torture bans that don't ban torture, generous offers without maps or dates, settlement freezes with loopholes, etc. See here for my analysis.
In this case, however, with Adnan having become a sort of MSM celebrity, Israel would have a hard time justifying his detention beyond April 17.
Spectacular post!
Hasbara is best rebutted with FACTS. Not that there's a shortage of them, but it takes some time and dedication to compile them, and you've taken the trouble to do so.
Now, quite apart from the fact that spikes in Palestinian rockets are preceded by high numbers of Israeli projectiles fired on Gaza, it should always be underscored that while Palestinians engage in cyclical violence, Israelis exert permanent violence through the outposts illegally erected on Palestinian land.
You can't unscramble an egg and you can't have a 2ss. Settlements like Ariel can't be undone and a Palestinian state consisting of three or four cantons cut off from each other is simply a crazy idea. To Finkelstein's credit, he, as well as Chomsky, has always adhered to the "realistic" approach that a 2ss is what you can fight for. However, the fact that most Israelis claim they would be comfortable with such a solution collides with the reality that no one has ever produced a workable blueprint of how the proposed Palestinian state could come into being. All of the Israeli generous offers and landmark proposals have come with enough caveats to render them irrelevant.
I also don't understand where Finkelstein gets the idea that BDSers want to destroy Israel. A 1ss would not destroy the polity currently called Israel, but expand it to accommodate the new geopolitical and demographic reality of two peoples increasingly intermingled within a single natural region west of the Jordan river.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach also attested to the assault
I went down to Boteach's blog and what I read is simply nauseating. Boteach writes that when he saw a group of spectators, including this elderly AIPAC memeber, subdue Abileah and hold her horizontal on the gorund, he doubted whether he should intervene. But his possible intervention wouldn't have been to protect Rae, but to assist the people who were immobilizing her!
Rule of law means that the State holds the monopoly of violence. No matter how nasty he may have found the protester, so long as she was physically threatening no one the only ones who were authorized to deal with her were the security guards of the US Congress.
Is the Lobby above the law? Let's see what happens with this vocational lobbyist.
Dershowitz said the answer is that the Jews didn't steal the land.
This is why I suggested the other day that we should start compiling a list of Dershowitz' lies.
In his speech, Dershowitz said that the land had been bought from landowners who lived in Syria and Lebanon. But that was about 1,800 sq km out of a total area of around 22,000 sq km. The rest of the privately-owned land was, in an overwhelming proportion, confiscated through the Absentee Property Law of 1950.
Nonsense. This is just the umpteenth iteration of the well-poisoning canard. Antisemites!
David, you caught the Dersh with his pants down once again. But can anything be done? We see a lot of refusal to see the emperor's nakedness when it comes to this individual. We see a lot of suspension of disbelief when he manufactures, or disseminates, ludicrous stories of Israeli holiness and Arab wickedness. He's a semiliterate writer, with hardly an academic paper to his credit, yet he's acclaimed as a superstar scholar.
I suggest that we start compiling a list of Dershowitz lies. It will do nothing to dent the prestige irrationally bestowed on him, but at least it will be useful for making his fans uncomfortable, and, who knows, for convincing the handful of people out there truly concerned with the truth.
I'm confused by alum, alumnus and alumni.
Yet the fantasy has prevailed that Israel is a compassionate heaven for assylum seekers. Fabulous accounts of Israel's treatment of refugees, verging on the hagiographic, are part and parcel of the most recent wave of Hasbara efforts. The most frequent claim is that the Jews, themselves having been refugees so many times and in so many places, cannot deny shelter to other people who are also refugees. The reality, as reported by the refugees themselves, is quite different.
His stance on Palestinian resistance is admirable in a context in which it is increasingly fashionable to decry the barbarism of Israeli oppression only to cluck sternly at the Palestinians when in weak reply they send a rocket skyward, the overwhelming majority of which crash blindly into Israeli fields and deserts.
Couple of thoughts.
First, I don't understand Finkelstein's romanticizing of Hezbollah and Hamas. I would understand his calling them a necessary evil, or what you get when the West interferes too much. But depicting them as unqualifiedly positive forces in the struggle for Palestinian nationhood is way too much for me to stomach.
We (he and I, and I believe many others analyzing this conflict) are supposed to be rational. We're atheists. No party or faction with a religion-driven agenda should get our full sympathy, and we should be very careful in the support we give them.
My second point is that I don't believe the right to resistance can in any way be compatibilized with the firing of missiles at civilian targets, however imprecise the devices. This is not to say that a completely peaceful approach should be used. Rioting in the West Bank and throwing rocks at heavily armored vehicles are acceptable kinds of low-level violence that disrupt daily life and convey a message while not affecting innocent people. It is when random violence is deployed against noncombatants that a red line is crossed. Supporting such tactics is a disaster, both PR-wise and on moral grounds.
Not only that. Ahmadinejad has made it clear that the collapse of the Zionist regime will come about spontaneously. For instance:
Concerning Holocaust and collapse of the Zionist regime, Ahmadinejad said that downfall of the regime does not need any atomic bomb and even a war, because this regime is based on cruelty and massacre so it will collapse automatically.
Also:
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the Zionist regime is inherently doomed to annihilation and there is no need for Iranians to take action.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of D8 summit in Malaysia, he said the Zionists themselves are well aware of the fact that their time is over.
"They label us as aggressors but this is a big lie because the Iranian nation throughout the history never attacked any nation," he said.
So that Ahmadinejad has not threatened to destroy Israel or even the Zionist regime after all. All he's said is that it will collapse on its own.
The High Court of Israel is nothing to do about justice and everything to do about protecting Israel's interests.
A few years ago, Israeli Arab citizens who had been expelled from Iqrit, a village within Israel, petitioned to return there. In rejecting the petition, the Court stated:
In view of these changes, whereby the Palestinians have raised
the demand for the right of return, the precedent entailed in allowing the uprooted [i.e. the Iqrit villagers] to return to their homes could harm serious state interests. This position is based on political considerations, where the government has wide discretion and the boundaries of reasonability regarding its conduct are very wide.
In other words, Israeli Arab citizens who had been ethnically cleansed were not allowed to return to their village because this would open the door for other Palestinians who were not citizens to ask for the same right.
This attests both to the legitimacy of claiming the RoR for all Palestinians and to the Court being a mere tool of political power.
This example of an enlightened looting gives a whole new meaning to the expression "People of the Book."
Israel's existence threatens the existence of Israel. Look: there's no way Israel could cease to exist if it didn't exist in the first place.
Ergo, the UN members who voted for the Partition Plan in 1947 are antisemitic.
Thank you, David. I wanted to play on the Zionist concept that thanks to Israel Jews elsewhere can be assertive, and that we oppose Israel because we want them to be submissive.
Can you suggest a better wording for the admittedly failed joke?
For God's sake, fellows, it was IRONY!!
There was a time when Jews were expected to shut up and follow along. Not any longer. Thanks to Israel, Jews like Adler are speaking their mind now, and the antisemites are not liking it.
When Israel carried out its operation in Jenin 10 years ago (I don't remember the sadistic name for that op), hasbarists claimed that the fact that 23 Israeli soldiers had died was indicative of the IDF's high morality. Instead of bombing from the air, the argument went, Israel had carried out house-to-house searches, losing soldiers but protecting innocent lives. Because Israel had a genuine concern for civilian casualties.
Four years later, in the second Lebanon war, Israel began to bomb from the air, and lo and behold, the hasbara troupe suddenly discovered that the practice wasn't bad after all, because the unarmed Lebanese weren't really civilians! And when the strategy was perfected in Cast Lead (when no search was carried out without prior intensive bombing that blew up most of the buildings in the area), the hasbarists all agreed that the morality test was passed if leaflets were dropped before the bombs, or if the Palestinians got text-message warnings that they would be massively destroyed.
Nothing had changed from 2002 to 2006 to 2009 on the Palestinian side -- if anything, in 2002 they had been far more dangerous than afterwards. But on the Hasbara side, the arguments had changed to accomodate the new Israeli behavior. Which is the constant in the Zionist discourse.
Just think that 10 years ago we had the Electronic Intifada and we had Palestine Remembered, but we had no Mondoweiss, no Tikun Olam, no Magnes Zionist. I don't know if there are more Jewish critics of Israel than before, but certainly they're much more visible and vocal.
Do you think the assimilation of Jews is a good thing?
I know first-hand of a middle-aged Jewish couple here in my city who refused to see their daughter again after she converted to Catholicism to marry a Catholic. I'll be antisemitic (or blunt, in another interpretation): I consider such behavior (the parents', not the daughter's) monstrous.
If the assimilation of Jews means prioritizing parent-child kinship over the Jewish religion, yes, it's absolutely a good thing.
The point is that those "fringe anti-Zionist groups" didn't formerly exist, and it was very rare to see Jews organizedly advocating for Palestinian rights. Also, Jewish criticism of Israel and the Lobby is enjoying increased normalcy -- what Tom Friedman recently said in the NYT would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
One important fact that should be underscored is that we have reached a critical-mass point in which the sheer numbers of Jewish critics of Israel enables us non-Jews to also criticize the country without fear of being called antisemites. Indeed, the antisemitism slander, one of the most powerful weapons previously wielded by the Hasbara brigade, is being quietly dropped as it is ludicrous to call someone a Jew-hater for saying the same things that large numbers of Jews also say.
As Abunimah says on his site, anyone who's read his writings over the years is aware that such words as "the Jews do this or that" couldn't have been uttered by him.
However, I think SWU truly believes he did utter them. Those are the kinds of things that happen when you hate too much. You deny your rival's humanity, and are prepared to believe anything about him.
But according to eee, BDS is failing.
With failures like these, who needs success.
Phew, eee, I thought you would again claim that US politicians applaud Netanyahu because they like what he says, not because of Jewish donor money.
But I'm pleased to see that you've changed your line; that you now state that Jews are smarter than other groups at playing by the rules. They give more money and, consequently, are getting their reward, be it in the form of ambassadorships, strong support for Israel in international forums or -- standing ovations for visiting Israeli PM's.
Tom Friedman was right, and the US Congress is bought and paid for by the Lobby; or, as you would have it, "Jews doing perfectly legal things."
Read again the post title. The big problem is not that he's not a universalist. The big problem is that "too many [fill in with ethnic group]" is an ugly phrase to say, and the rabbi said it.
In order to defend the indefensible you're beginning to say very weird things, eee.
Jews in the West fought for decades for the right not to be excluded from certain country clubs, or from certain law firms.
It turns out that, according to you, it was OK... Those clubs and firms were just composed of people who felt more comfortable with "guys like them."
There's a symmetry between failing to mention the Jewish presence in the Holy Land in ancient times and failing to mention the Palestinian presence in present-day Israel prior to 1948, as Israeli officials routinely do. Nothing to complain about here.
On another note, while Mikis Theodorakis may be an anti-semite, no government pays him for being so. On the other hand, all the Israeli rabbis who make incendiary statements about the Gentiles get paid by the State. It is officially-encouraged hate that should worry us the most.
I see, you are now FOR collective punishment.
Read again. I suggested that the settlers who carry out violent actions (like the mosque torching) be restrained. The State of Israel has a General Security Service that perfectly knows who those settlers are, yet nothing is done to stop them.
The concept of collective punishment does not apply to people who deserve to be punished.
Your use of the neutral term "confrontation" fails to convey the notion that it was an attack by the settlers on the villagers, and that the latter were only trying to defend themselves, their property and their livelihoods.
There is no coverage of the key aspect of this "confrontation," wich is that the State of Israel does nothing to prevent Jewish criminals from attacking Palestinians. After the mosque torching, these people should have been at the very least restrained from leaving their settlement.
As we aproach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, please remember that you don't say "French fraud"; you must say "Freedom fraud."
If you don't want to use Israeli products, then be consistent. Stop using your cell phone. Stop using your computer. Stop using the medical advances from Israel that daily save countless lives.
I will stop using cell phones as soon as Israelis stop using methadone and guided missiles, both Nazi inventions. For the whole argument, see here.
Rabbi Spivack's position doesn't make any sense precisely because BDS is not hate-driven. BDS proponents don't want to boycott Israeli products because Jewish things are bad. They want to boycott Israeli products to hurt Israel's economy, much in the same way that South African products were boycotted back in the 80s to hurt the Apartheid economy.
Of course, BDS proponents don't want to hurt themselves in the process, so that they won't boycott Israeli products that they need. Spivack somehow expects BDS people to be incurable idiots, and seems to be a little frustrated that they are not.
The backlash against her was the same knee-jerk political correctness that would have been applied to someone suggesting that African Americans should go back to Africa or that an Arab American should go back to Arabia.
No, sir. It only works that way with the Jews. You can perfectly say that someone else should be expelled from their land and nothing will happen to you. Only if you suggest that about the Jews will your career be destroyed.
Need an example? Just remember the following infamous dialog:
MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there?
Rep. ARMEY: Yes.
MATTHEWS: OK. Thank you very much. More with Congressman Dick Armey coming back. You're watching HARDBALL.
This representative, who was then the House Republican leader, didn't suffer any backlash or have his career destroyed, even if he said exactly the same as Helen Thomas.
Here's some stuff to think about. In his op-ed Goldstone makes some bizarre statements that come very close to Israeli propaganda, for instance that the Human Rights Council should condemn the Itamar massacre. Now the HRC can only condemn actions carried out by state actors or political factions. And in this case, it isn't yet clear that the massacre was committed by either. For all we know, the killer may have been a Thai worker. It would be a major blunder for the HRC to condemn it since the HRC cannot condemn common crime.
Do you think that passing judgment on a case still under investigation can be part of a judge's "honest thinking"? If it can, it means that said judge displays an astounding ignorance of some elementary principles of law.
He repented in the most medieval way, with a public recantation.
You nailed it. Reading Goldstone's retraction one can picture Galileo renouncing his theories under the Inquisition.
The New Inquisition doesn't burn people alive or even place them under house arrest as Galileo was. They only destroy careers, like Finkelstein's, or threaten to ruin a boy's bar mitzvah to pressure his grandfather, like in the case of Goldstone, or smear the names of countless people under the blanket and baseless accusation of antisemitism, self-hate or a combination thereof.
If you don't toe the line, you won't be prevented from picking up strawberries or doing menial jobs, but you won't get to be, for instance, an elected official in the US. True, the academia remains a place not all heretics have been purged from; but they're working on that and I'm sure they'll come up with a solution.
Also Google: "Jerusalem - Beit Shemesh 'Taliban Mother' Found Guilty of Child Abuse ."
Also Google: "Police arrest Netivot mother suspected of raping two sons"
Also Google: "State helpless in face of skeletons in haredi closet," from where I quote:
"One harrowing case after another, yet welfare officials stand by helpless: Faced with a string of heart wrenching cases of child abuse in the haredi community, even state officials now concede that they have only been able to reach this closed community on rare occasions, and often too late. "
Do I hear the sound of crickets in the room?
@annie: You may not have noticed the cases of child abuse in the Haredi community, but Yedioth Ahronot certainly did. I understand the politically correct need to disengage yourself from my previous posts, but the truth is simple: Haredim brutalize their children with a startling frequency. Not all Haredim; not as a Haredi policy. But it does happen on a regular basis, and it has everything to do with their being Haredim, i.e. an insular community, disconnected from the world.
eee,
Google this:
"Itai Ben Dror stabbed the children a total of 150 times as they slept under the influence of sedatives he had slipped into their drinks."
Google this:
"Haredi 'Rabbi' Elior Chen sentenced to 24 years in prison for child abuse"
Google this:
"Mother who helped torture her children on orders from Israeli cult leader gets 5 years in prison"
Google this:
"A haredi resident of Jerusalem was recently arrested on suspicion of starving her three-year-old son."
Google this:
"Haredi Man Indicted For Murdering Baby Daughter"
I am not saying that this is standard Haredi behavior. I'm not saying it's the norm. I'm not saying all Haredim act alike. But for a small community of 200,000 Haredi adults, the above incidents, which took place over less than two years, certainly constitute "startlingly frequent" cases of abuse. I do believe that the insularity of the community may lead you to lose your senses.
For instance, I live in a country of 40 million and don't remember a single instance of a man smashing his baby against the wall because his wife refused to have sex with him, like a Haredi in one of the cases above did.
That's why I say the babies in Itamar may have been killed by a demented (NOT sane) Haredi.
At present, no one knows who killed the family in Itamar. It may have been a Palestinian, a Thai worker, a Haredi Jew (cases of demented Haredim torturing or slaughtering babies have been startingly frequent within Israel proper) or a person of another ethnicity. For all his titles and positions, Prof. Kfir is unaware that he can't pass judgment on an incident currently under investigation, much less describe it as part of the I/P conflict rather than as an individual case of homicide.
Actions speak louder than words. Israel's actions since the Goldstone Report have proved its essential truthfulness.
For instance, in late 2010 Israel implemented its first-ever training course for a new military post aimed at helping Israel minimize harm to civilians. During the course, the officers were taught how to assist battalion and brigade commanders in planning operations while taking into consideration the effect these operations will have on the civilian population.
The officer in charge explained, among other things, that “If a field commander needs to conquer a city or a neighborhood, our officer will be there to explain what the sensitive targets are in the area of operations and what to look out for. We are adding the humanitarian side, like which road needs to be kept open so civilians can evacuate if needed.” I.e., the fact that escape routes for civilians needed to be provided was taken into consideration for the first time in 2010, meaning that all the leaflet-dropping and text messaging warning civilians to evacuate the areas under attack were useless, since they had nowhere to go to as the roads were closed.
The Israelis candidly commented that this course was given "as the key to preventing another Goldstone Report." Now that Goldstone has published his bizarre retreat, the Israelis will be able to resume their careless bombings and ascribe the massacres to mistakes interpreting aereal photos.
Why, at last someone points to the elephant in the parlor, or to the emperor's nakedness. Berkman could have added that, unlike Palestinian incitement, the Israeli variety has the potential of immediately affecting Arabs, since it's the Jews who can harm non-Jews in Israel/Palestine, not the other way round. For instance, only a few days after the rabbis issued the fatwa against renting to Arabs, a young Druze man, who had served in the IDF, was driven from his apartment in Tel Aviv after his landlady was threatened by thugs. Hate speech is far more dangerous when the haters are strong and the hated are practically defenseless.
If it is just about gays serving in the military, why are the criss cross Israeli and American flags shown? Will the event discuss the gunning down of two teens at a Tel Aviv gay center in 2009? Will Jewish MK Shlomo Benizri's theory that gays cause earthquakes be analyzed? Will Interior Minister Eli Yishai's statement that gays are sick people whom he wishes a speedy recovery be brought up? Undoubtedly these are facts which would be of great interest to the Yale gay community.
I mean, come on, guys! The LGBTQ co-op is pinkwashing the only democratic country where overt homophobes can serve as high-ranking officials, instead of calling for a boycott of such a hotbed of anti-gay hate.
Here's the question I submitted:
"You talk about Palestinian incitement all the time, but you allow Israeli Jewish incitement. Rabbis have called on their followers not to rent houses to Arabs, yet you keep paying their salaries. When will this State support of Jewish haters stop?"
Based on experience, even if this question got to be asked Mr. N. would change the subject to something else.
Unfortunately Walt didn't go far enough and, for all his criticism of the Lobby, still fell into the politically-correct trap of supporting the two-state solution. No clear-minded analyst can actually deceive himself into believing that a supremacist state within tortuous borders gerrymandered to ensure a Jewish majority has any viability as the stable end result of any negotiation.
Now the world needs the next Walt, the one who will point to the emperor's nakedness and unequivocally state that the 2ss is dead and buried.
All Fahmy had to do was apply for Israeli citizenship after 1967.
BULLSHIT.
Any Israeli Arab citizen can be stripped of their nationality after living for 7 years abroad, under section 11(a)(2) of Israel's Nationality Law. See here.
Jews can also have their citizenship revoked for the same reason, but, as different from Israeli Arabs, they can immediately reapply for it under the Law of Return.
The result: any Jew can freely travel abroad for as long as they wish with no risk of losing their nationality. No Israeli Arab, on the other hand, enjoys the same freedom, because their citizenship would be revoked.
Two very different kinds of citizenship. And they wonder why we call Israel an Apartheid country.
There are two wrong ways to analyze this crime.
One wrong analysis is to excuse it because of the Palestinians' plight. This is clearly and utterly unacceptable -- newborns and toddlers shouldn't pay because their parents uprooted olive trees and stoned schoolgirls on their way to school. The parents themselves should pay, but not with their lives; they should be jailed if anything close to justice existed in the West Bank. These stabbings are morally totally wrong and MW must be praised for publishing a clear condemnation therof.
The other wrong analysis is to compare what this insane (alleged) Palestinian did with what the State of Israel does and conclude that only one side, the Palestinians, intentionally kills civilians. Three thoughts arise:
1) The Palestinians can't disguise their crimes as military actions. The Israelis can. We can't say "the Israelis don't kill civilians;" at most, we can say that the extent of IDF operations makes it impossible to ascertain if the civilians that they kill are intended murders or not. The recent case of an old man killed in his sleep by IDF forces provides an excellent example of a totally unnecessary and highly suspicious death in which the soldier who pulled the trigger is acquitted based on his own testimony.
2) The Israelis have at their disposal --and use-- a variety of methods to punish the Palestinians, from bombing their power plants to targetedly killing their leaders (and a few bystanders in the process) to impeding the import of food and clothing. The only way the Palestinians have of exacting a price for the Israelis' crimes is to randomly kill civilians. Again, this is not to excuse those killings; it's simply to compare the many retaliatory options the Israelis enjoy with the only one the Palestinians have. Give them planes, choppers and the most powerful army in the Middle East and they will probably do other, less disgusting things, such as blacking out Tel Aviv, killing 120 policemen at a graduation ceremony or using Israeli minors as human shields.
3) If any valid comparison is to be established, it must be with what the Jews did when they didn't have a State. And when the Jews didn't have a State, they randomly killed civilians -- 42 machine-gun attacks on buses, trucks and carts in January-March, 1948, alone; Arab women, children and elderly people blown to smithereens in markets; high-ranking UN officials mowed down in the street... And remember, the most ferocious Jewish terrorist of all, David Raziel, has hundreds of streets and even a town named after him. Indeed there may exist a peaceful people that fully rejects the killing of civilians, but it's not the Jews.
Weiner said it was OK to destroy anything in a war, and pointed out that Israel had dropped leaflets on civilian residences announcing impending bombardment so the civilians could get out, as evidence if Israeli morality. I do not remember any discussion of whether or not there was anywhere for such civilians to go which would be safe from bombardment, shooting, etc.
The answer is that prior to the Goldstone report Israel did not even care whether the fleeing population had any safe escape route. Only after the report was issued did the country organize its first-ever training course for a new military post aimed at minimizing harm to civilians. Among other curious statements, the course instructor declared: “We are adding the humanitarian side, like which road needs to be kept open so civilians can evacuate if needed.” See here. I.e., the fact that leaflets were dropped in Gaza doesn't mean that civilians were allowed to safely evacuate -- only that they were warned that they would be bombed.
Thank God the ADL stepped in in time. Aparently, around 50 State-paid bishops and priests were already preparing a letter calling on Christians to stop renting or selling houses to non-Christians; and in some towns programs were being put in place to prevent intermarriage between Christians and atheists and other heretics.
David, your acidic writings are already in direct competition with Diane Mason's. Kudos to both of you for exposing Zionist hypocrisy with such a wonderful display of humor.
Yet another classic post by David.
I would only add that the ADL didn't react either when Jeffry Goldberg, who reaches an audience maybe 100 times larger than Dershowitz', called Caryl Churchill's drama Seven Jewish Children a blood libel at The Atlantic -- even when matzah is never referrenced to in the play.
Head-butting is a usual form of punishing unarmed Palestinians. Here I posted a video of an Israeli soldier twice head-butting Palestinians, one of them a woman, in Jerusalem.
Well, I don't agree that there's anything particularly intolerable about Jews perpetrating crimes. Although there's an almost racist belief in the West that Jews are more moral than other peoples, this is clearly not the case; they're exactly like all other peoples, and the fact that they commit crimes, including against humanity, should surprise no one.
Interestingly, this belief in Jewish sanctity is nurtured by the Zionists' frequent declarations that the Jewish state has the most moral army in the world, or instructs its soldiers to risk their lives to avoid harming civilians, or cares for the refugees from Darfur, or never seeks vengeance. All of these are lies.
Well, I would call this the banality of murder. I sometimes wonder what goes through a young Israeli soldier's mind after gratuitously killing an old man. Does he dismiss him as just an Arab? Or does he decide he'll join Breaking the Silence?
Goldstone did make a difference. As the Jerusalem Post reported recently, "In what some in the IDF are banking on as the key to preventing another Goldstone Report, the IDF this week wrapped up its first-ever training course for a new military post aimed at helping Israel minimize harm to civilians during future operations in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon." (My boldface; see here).
I.e., it was the Goldstone report, not any internal self-criticism, that moved Israel to train specialized military personnel, for the first time ever, in how to kill fewer civilians. That alone justifies the report, as well as further international criticism of Israel.
Well I read this and thought to myself, what a load of nonsense.
I know a Jew in my city whose parents refused to meet his Catholic fiancée, and only agreed to do so after they had children of their own. I also know a Jewish woman whose family never saw her again after she converted to Catholicism in order to marry a man of that faith.
Now that gay marriage is legal in my country, I wonder what the Jewish attitude is toward a Jewish boy who marries a goyish boy?
Religion makes people very, very stupid, and in its current form, Orthodox Judaism is a racist cult and must be denounced as such.
When I first read David's posts and comments I was struck by his clarity of ideas. I remember the very first piece by him that I came across, "The China/Darfur distraction," which took apart the idea that anti-Zionists have any obligation to be "balanced," or to denounce all other human-rights abuses in the world before they can focus on the case of Israel. I had tried for some time to put together a counterargument to that Zionist defense, and here he was saying exactly the things that needed to be said, and which came in handy for debating Zionists on the Internet and in other forums.
Then I corresponded with David and finally met him in NYC. We had a lengthy conversation which essentially covered the same topics as this post, i.e. his journey from a Zionist upbringing to his first misgivings to his current opposition to an ethnically supremacist state. One thing that I found particularly convincing about his positions is that he also opposes random violence as a means to dismantle that anomaly of a state, and is not afraid to confront other anti-Zionists who support or at least condone such violence. It takes some moral courage to take a principled stance like that.
As an anti-Zionist blogger, but a somewhat lazy one, it's comforting to know that if I don't have the time or patience to write an exposé of a certain Zionist myth, deception or outright lie, sooner or later David will.
You make it sound as if these teenagers' racism had popped up in a vacuum. Not so. In recent weeks, a long list of racist attacks and instances of incitement has shaken Israel, to the point that the Defense Minister is talking of a wave of racism sweeping the country. The incidents have included:
--A letter by 50 State-paid rabbis calling on Jews not to rent out to Arabs.
--A letter by their wives calling on Jewish girls not to date Arabs.
--An attack on a building in Safed where Arab students lived by Jewish demonstrators who shouted "Death to the Arabs" and hurled rocks and bottles at the building, shattering glass.
--An attack on five Arabs (one of them a Druze IDF veteran) in Tel Aviv, who were kicked out of the apartment they were renting after their landlady was threatened with the torching of her building.
--A ruling by the chief rabbi of Rosh Ha-Ayin that Arabs can't be hired in stores that employ Jewish girls.
--A demonstration in Bat Yam protesting the presence of Arab residents in the town.
--A decision by Jewish teachers in Jaffa to ban the use of Arabic in their classes, including by Arab children talking to each other.
As you can see, it's not just a matter of "a few stupid teenagers." By denying what the Defense Minister of Israel himself admits, you're being more Catholic than the Israeli pope.
Thank you, Max, for this complete report. To the many incidents you cite, may I add the story of the five Arabs who were expelled from an apartment in Tel Aviv after their landlady was threatenened with the torching of her building if she continued to rent out to Arabs.
Israel has always been a racist society, but it's striking to see how mainstream the hate has gone, and how freely it is expressed these days.
It is usually asserted that those Arabs who do serve in the IDF are respected and honored. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Just two days ago, a Druze IDF veteran was kicked out of an apartment he was renting in Tel Aviv because he's an Arab.
The Druze community sold their souls to the devil so that they could feel part of the mainstream Israeli society. Bad news for them; they're not.
Sderot's main problem is not Gazan missiles, but poverty and governmental neglect. They are actually longing for the Qassam times, when they would be paid attention to by the State.
One private Jordanian citizen acts in a despicably racist mannner and HRW issues a harsh report. Meanwhile, in Israel three dozen chief rabbis (who are State employess) have signed a letter calling on Jews not to rent apartments or sell homes to non-Jews, and, following the call, a Jewish mob shouted "death to Arabs" and shattered glass in a building where a few Arabs lived. But for some reason, racism that targets Jews is considered more scary than racism perpetrated by Jews and condoned by the government that pays their salaries.
In an extreme case, a Holocaust survivor residing in Israel has been threatened by ultra-Orthodox Jews becaused he rented a few rooms to Arab students. Of course, all hell would break loose if a Nazi victim were thus treated anywhere else in the world. But since the warning that his house would be burnt came from fanatical Jews, it's OK.
Witty, it's rich that you ask for a citation when you haven't been able to provide a link in the many cases in which you have been asked to (e.g. with regard to Finkelstein's assertions re the legal force of General Assembly resolutions).
But I'd like to point out what your mistake is re the percentage of Arabs who fled. The 140,000 or so who remained in Israel were 50% of those who lived in the original Jewish state, not in the whole area finally taken over by the Jews. By the end of the war, Israel had almost doubled its size, and most of the Arab refugees came from new the lands conquered by the Jews.
Your assertion re ethnic cleansing is simply a rhetorical game. You say Arabs were not ethnically cleansed from the whole of Israel. Agreed, but I don't think anyone has claimed as much. On the other hand, we constantly claim that Arabs were ethnically cleansed from some 350 villages that were razed by Israel. In other cases, the Arabs were expelled and Jews moved in to occupy their homes (like in Ein Hod, which was transformed into a colony for Jewish artists). Thus, full expulsions, aka ethnic cleansing, did take place in hundreds of communities, even if Arabs were allowed to remain in other villages and towns.
For example, the West Bank was entirely ethnically cleansed of Jews following 1948 (a couple hundred remained in East Jerusalem). (Thats close to 100% removed, compared to 50% that left Israel and was not permitted to return.)
Except that those Jews numbered fewer than 10,000. I.e., almost as many Jews were removed by Israel from Gaza as were expelled by Arabs from the West Bank.
As for the Jews of Hebron (another favorite subject of yours), if you look at the list of the fewer than 70 that were killed, more than 90% were ashkenazim. They were recent immigrants, and the local Arab leaders gave strict orders (which, it is true, were not followed) that the Sephardim who had always lived there were spared.
Also, the 500,000-750,000 Arabs who were expelled or fled from Israel didn't constitute 50% of the Arab population. Just 140,000 Arabs remained: do your math.
Thus, your analogy is utterly invalid. A few thousand, even if it's 100% of a population, is not comparable to hundreds of thousands, even if it's "just" 80% of another population. Numbers do matter.
Such a law of return exists today in several other countries, including Hungary and Germany.
This is not true. Germany's Law of Return covers only certain particular cases of people who were forcibly transferred, while Israel's Law of Return covers all Jews, even those who converted to the religion and had no previous link to the land. Also, in the German case the Law of Return does not confer more rights to ethnic Germans than to other citizens, while Israel's law gives Israeli Jews certain rights that Israeli Arabs don't enjoy.
For instance, if an Israeli citizen is absent from the country for seven years, the Ministry of the Interior may revoke their nationality. If they're Jewish, however, they can become Israeli citizens again through the Law of Return. If they're Arab, on the other hand, they lose their citizenship forever. Thus, Israeli Jews have the right to pursue careers abroad and then return to Israel, while Israeli Arabs do not enjoy that right. For a complete discussion, see here.
Not only is Dershowitz a liar; he's an illiterate one as well.
Good article, Mr. Loewenstein -- but why did you let Dershowitz off the hook so easily?
People deploying his line of defense of Israel should be cornered. Whenever they claim that BDS singles out Israel, they should be asked whether BDS played a significant role in the fall of Apartheid. Next, they should be asked if they opposed BDS against the Afrikaner regime in spite of the fact that South Africa had a much better human rights record than Mozambique or Congo, which were not targetted by sanctions.
That's the way to confront their linguistic contortionism. Their arguments by analogy should be turned against them.
Actually, he made the car bloom.
There is an excellent article by Diane Mason that picks apart the MSM's "balanced" coverage of Israeli settlements (i.e. giving the criminals the chance to opine about the legality of their crimes). A must-read.
David,
While it is true that IDF manuals pay lip service to respect for civilian lives, their recommendations have been grossly exaggerated by the Zios. For instance, there's a story going around that the IDF's "purity of arms" concept requires soldiers to put their lives at risk to avoid harming civilians. It has been repeated countless times by the usual suspects: Dershowitz, the ZOA, etc. It's totally false. See here.
As Diane Mason brilliantly pointed out, the US MSM treats the issue of the settlements as a complicated question in which the Israelis claim one thing and the Palestinians claim another thing. The whole problem becomes thus one of competing narratives, the validity of which is difficult to adjudicate.
But on 9 June 2004 the International Court of Justice ruled that all settlements, including those in East Jerusalem and, thus, Gilo, are illegal and an obstacle to peace, and have been established in breach of international law. By omitting this tiny fact Kershner misleads her readers into thinking that the different positions about Gilo are just a matter of personal opinion. Also, notice how she uses the adjective "most" to qualify the noun "Palestinians," as if there existed a current of Palestinian opinion that accepts the legality of the settlements.
I hope this has nothing to do with neocon pressure on progressive blogs over the attitudes of certain of their commenters.
If antisemites comment here, let it be so. No one is calling on The Jerusalem Post to censor its Jewish supremacist or racist commenters.
As for the trolls, it's healthy that contrarian commenters should express their opinions, even if it's to irk those of us who agree with the contents of the blog. To block them out would make this site less lively.
Great post, David. In fact, there's an "immense damage and destruction" policy in place, whereby Israel responds to isolated actions, like the kidnapping of a soldier, with wholesale attacks on civilian infrastructure. It's called the Dahiya doctrine.
A few months back I warned that Shmuley Boteach, a popular rabbi cum commentator, was pushing the insane view that building this mosque was wrong.
They have simply removed their masks and come clean about the bigots they have always been.
It took me some time to recover from the footballistic genocide Germany inflicted on us (just 65 years after the Holocaust, the insensitive bastards!), Dave, but I'm back on my feet.
Yes, you did tackle Bernadotte's murder, but that can be dismissed as political assassination rather than a mass killing of civilians. What I meant is that the King David warnings claim shouldn't even be discussed because even if they had taken place (to which there's no direct evidence) they would have been an exception to the Zionists' routine procedure of bombing places without prior notice. Agreeing even to discuss whether giving a warning clears terrorists from their responsibility is playing into the Zionists' hands.
Whenever someone comes up with "But the British were warned," we should quickly reply with a list of examples of "unwarned" attacks.
As for honoring one's own terrorists, I have a piece on that, too. Basically, David Raziel, a bomber of marketplaces, is celebrated with streets named after him in all major Israeli cities. We should all have that example ready as a response to the claim that Arabs celebrate terrorists.
Philip, David, how many times will you fall into the same trap?
Never, never!, accept discussing the King David alone. Zionist terrorists carried out many atrocious massacres without any warning, like the Haifa market massacre of 25 July 1938, which killed 40 innocent Arabs and wounded 60 more. At the risk of overquoting me, allow me to direct you to a post I wrote on the subject, which gives examples of Jewish terror attacks, complete with newspaper clippings from the time, as well as to its sequel, which directly tackles the "warnings were given" claim.
Would you believe it? Israeli Jews are now in effect calling the Armenian genocide a Holocaust!
I don't agree with Finkelstein on that last one. We can refrain from publicly criticizing Hamas, because someone else is already doing it, and because Hamas doesn't have an army of defenders like Israel has. But we can't not judge actions that are objectively irrational and morally wrong, like firing rockets on civilian areas.
Well, yes, all very nice, but in the end of the day Bernie is a supporter of the group that relentlessly encroaches on another people's private property, uproots their trees, beats their shepherds and stones their children. No amount of politeness, apologies and crocodile tears will change that. A racist is a racist even if he's rational enough not to want to pay a fine.
I don't know if Richard Witty is a troll, but by saying "and yes, rage," you, Phil, are feeding him. For Palestinians should feel no rage, but compassion for those young soldiers who are sent to shoot blindfolded prisoners in the foot, burn olive trees and kill unarmed protestors with tear-gas canisters. Golda Meir wouldn't forgive the Palestinians for forcing Israelis to engage in such behavior, and neither does Witty.
Only Auschwitz-type genocide merits rage.
You're right; they're not civilized like Israeli Jews...
...who celebrate the killing of Gaza civilians handing out coffee.
Tell me now that Luis Miguel is out of coma and the news from the music world will be PER-fect.
I'd like to deconstruct a bit this young woman's intervention. Of course it's ugly and a huge victory for Hasbara, but is it actually as scary as you, Phil, claim it to be?
It's interesting to note Horowitz's own reflection: "What’s shocking is not so much that she holds such views, but rather that she was willing to admit it." Translation: these Muslims have a lot to learn in the way of hypocrisy. I recall that when the Twin Towers were blown up, many, many people in Argentina were exultant. The general comment in the bars and on the street was: "serves them right," "it was about time they tasted their own medicine." But the media said not a word about the public's reaction. We're a Catholic country, we don't hate, and if we do, we sweep it under the rug. Horowitz knows that the West hates, too, and what he objects to is not the hate itself, but the candor with which it's expressed.
But getting into a deeper layer of analysis, is it actual hate? Does this "For it" represent the student's actual thinking? Or does it belong in the realm of "I'll say this to piss you off"? Would she spontaneously support the Hamas chief's statement (which itself is just words, as attested by the regime's attitutde towards Jewish intellectuals who support the Gaza struggle?), or did she first think about it at Horowitz's prompting?
Are there any indications that this Muslim student ever engaged in Jew-hating? Horowitz was debating dishonestly. A more experienced activist would have reacted differently; they would have responded "I'm asking a question, and questioning the questioner is an ad hominem attack," or some such. Clearly the student's "For it" reflected her frustration at not being able to identify the fallacy and defuse it rather than an inner desire to kill all Jews. (Very much like the morning I found two intoxicated teenagers scribbling graffiti on the hood of my car. Told them "I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna get a piece of wire and hang you both from that light pole." Didn't.)
If anything is scary here is the Muslim students' lack of preparation, rather than an evidently nonexistent genocidal design.
Here is a video of an Israeli Defense Forces dog attacking an elderly Palestinian lady. Notice how, as the canine savagely bites the woman's hand, the soldiers try to pull it away, most probably causing her even more pain, instead of shooting the animal to prevent further harm to the human being attacked.
In a very literal sense, Palestinians are worth less than dogs to Israeli soldiers.
Israel celebrates its own terrorists. See here.
As for genocidal statements, the state-supported settlers have made quite a few... Not to speak of rabbis. One of them once called to kill one million Gazans. If that's not genocidal, what is.
How can you say that American Jews are fully empowered if they are still afraid to talk about their success?
Because empowerment is not incompatible with paranoia.
I like Salaam Fayyad.
The veto was not sustained, it was overridden. Please change the post's title accordingly.
Don't forget that white South Africans performed the first heart transplant, vs. no achievement whatsoever from black South Africans.
Keep in mind also that while Afrikaners had just one state, the blacks had 34 other countries to choose from.
>>For the UC system to BDS only Israel, makes no sense whatsoever.
Did it make sense for the UC system to boycott South Africa when Mozambique was a far worse human-rights offender?