Jewish racist of the day

Although there is no shortage of nominees, today's award goes to Rabbi Dov Lior, head of the Kiryat Arba yeshiva. Sorry, Daniel Pipes; your efforts are commendable, but the Rav is trying harder and has clearly outdone you.

The distinguished sage chose to use the platform of the fourth Ramla conference to state that the State of Israel "must encourage Bedouins to return to their native land." In case you believe, correctly, that the native land of Israeli Bedouins is, well, Israel, be advised that Lior has a different theory which posits that they were born in Libya and Saudi Arabia. Where he gets that from is unclear, but a good bet is that someone recently presented him with a copy of Joan Peter's From time immemorial. It would be interesting to know Lior's theory of how these non-Jews managed to immigrate to Israel, where, individual cases aside, only Jews are allowed to become citizens. I guess it must have something to do with Arab deceptiveness.

In support of his proposal, Lior stressed that "If they are left here, there won't be any solution as they work against the people of Israel and the State of Israel."  It is a particularly well known fact that Bedouins, together with the Druze, serve in the IDF, which is not the case with yeshiva students such as, ehm, Lior's. Facts? What's that? It's narratives that count, dude.

Lior is a chemically pure hater. His résumé includes a variety of jewels, among which:

• In 2008 he pioneered the restrictions-on-Arabs wave by calling on Jews not to employ them.
• In 2010 he endorsed and foreworded Yitzchak Shapira's The complete guide to killing gentiles. (Well, the tract's title is actually The King's Torah, but it does remove most restrictions on killing non-Jews, including newborns: “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”)
• Also in 2010, he signed on to the rabbinical letter forbidding Jews from renting houses to Arabs.
• In 2011, he ruled that Jewish Law prohibits sterile couples from conceiving using non-Jew's sperm, as it causes adverse traits. With a logic that would dwarf Aristotle, this Jewish genius wondered: "If the father in not Jewish, what character traits could he have? Traits of cruelty, of barbarism! These are not traits that characterize the people of Israel."

When US journalist Helen Thomas claimed that Israeli Jews should return to where they came from, all hell broke lose and she was fired. When a relevant Israeli rabbi who is (literally speaking) right at the center of Jewish-Arab land disputes says the same about Bedouins the story is met with deafening silence from the world press. I'm not outraged at this unequal treatment. It signals that in one case the hateful statement is extraordinary, abnormal, anomalous, while in the other case it's an everyday occurrence that hardly raises eyebrows anymore.

In any event, Rabbi Lior is a valuable asset for those of us who spend time exposing officially-supported (Lior is a State employee) hate of Arabs in Israel. That's why I'm giving him the Jewish Racist of The Day Award.

Israel tastes own medicine, cries antisemitism

On Sunday, several crazed Jewish settlers invaded Palestinian Area A territory (where, in theory at least, Palestinian Authority exercises full control) to pray at the so-called Joseph's tomb in Nablus, without previously getting the required authorization. It appears that PA policemen tried to stop them. The Jews refused to give themselves up and apparently broke through a checkpoint. Warning shots were fired, and they still refused to stop. In an unclear turn of the events, the settlers were then shot at, with the result that Ben Yosef Livnat (the nephew of Minister of Culture and Sport Limor Livnat) was killed and the four others were injured.

For what it's worth, I'm against the police shooting trespassers unless it's patently clear that they intend to hurt the officers; I believe this was an avoidable tragedy. That said, one would expect the Israeli authorities to be very happy with this outcome, since it perfectly fits into Israeli engagement rules. They should have noted that:

• The settlers were criminals seeking for trouble and they got it.
• This is war, and war is messy.
• The Palestinian policemen have the right to prioritize their own lives over those of the civilians they regrettably kill.
• The settlers made suspicious movements.
• The policemen had to make difficult decisions in a short instant of time, decisions you and I don't face.

Instead, the Israeli government displayed the crudest Jewish victimhood. Minister Livnat said:

I woke up this morning and received a phone call from Ben-Yosef's mother, who told me that he was murdered by a terrorist masked as a Palestinian police officer.

It was cold-blooded murder. Ben-Yosef went to pray with other Jews, and he was murdered simply for being a Jew.

Prime Minister Netanyahu concurred:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned on Sunday evening the shooting incident at Joseph's Tomb in Nablus that killed 24-year-old Ben-Yosef Livnat and injured two other Hasidim, calling it a "terrorist attack."

In his statement, Netanyahu urged the Palestinian Authority "to take harsh steps against the perpetrators who committed this heinous act against Jewish worshipers who were on their way to prayer."

Defense Minister Barak was also furious:

Barak's office said: "No coordination mishap justifies this kind of outcome or the shooting of innocent people." Barak ordered the IDF to investigate, as well as demanded "the PA take swift and full measures against the shooters."

I for one am unimpressed by these gentlemen's (and lady's) outrage. Of course, if Livnat hadn't been a fanatical Jew he wouldn't have been there in the first place, so that his death is, in a way, related to his Jewishness. But the reason he was shot is not that he was a Jew; it's that he broke the law, and while you can get away with it most of the time if you're a West Bank settler, there are times when your luck runs out and you get shot.

It's interesting to compare the killing of this Jew with that of an elderly Palestinian citizen earlier this year:

A Palestinian resident of the southern West Bank city of Hebron was killed early Friday during an Israel Defense Forces raid on the city to arrest Hamas members, security and medical sources said.

The IDF raided Hebron to re-arrest six Hamas members that the Palestinian Authority had released only the day before following an intervention from the emir of Qatar.

Medical sources said a 65-year-old Palestinian, who was reported to be an unarmed civilian, was brought dead to hospital with several bullet wounds to the upper part of his body. They said the man had been shot in a building the soldiers had raided to arrest one of the Hamas members.

The man who was killed, Amr Qawasme, was asleep when soldiers broke into his home before dawn. His wife, Sobheye, said IDF troops brushed past her into the bedroom, where she heard several shots fired. When she went in, she found her husband in a pool of blood.

There are several differences between both killings:

• The settlers were engaging in illegal activities. The Palestinian old man was asleep.
• The PA responded to a conflict initiated by the settlers. The IDF started a conflict by invading the Palestinian's house.
• The PA policemen were taken by surprise. The IDF action had been carefully planned.

Despite this, PM Netanyahu didn't find the "misshap" that ended in Qawasme's death outrageous at all. It was just a product of the messiness of war.

The fact that Israeli authorities are not even mentioning the illegality of the shot settler's actions is very telling, considering that even the victim's relatives blame him for his lunacy:

The 17-year-old brother of one of the wounded men arrived at Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva, where they have been hospitalized.

"They knew what they were getting into, and the level of risk involved. But they considered it as action," the brother told Ynet.

"They only wanted to pray; sometimes fate can be pretty bad and unpleasant," he said, adding "they have a rabbi that coordinates these entries. This time they came without a permit or authorization of the rabbi.

"When the visits are coordinated nothing happens – the rabbi looks after us. However this time the rabbi wasn’t there with them; it was a crime for them to enter the tomb without the rabbi or a permit," noted the brother.

But it's always easier to cry antisemitism than to reflect on how your crazy policies are encouraging young people to consider themselves above the law -- and meet their death as a consequence.

Yes, but what about Tibet!

This week saw the resolution of the Itamar murders case, in which five members of a family, including three children, were apparently killed in cold blood by two Palestinians from the village of Awarta. It must be noted that, according to the IDF account, the two acted on their own. The organization they belonged to, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, didn't authorize the attack, and, although it doesn't seem to have done anything to stop it (much like the Israelis at the time of the Sabra and Shattila massacre), they didn't provide the murderers with the weapons they had asked for. It is true that several PFLP members seem to have given shelter and cover to both murderers after the attack, but they seem to have done so as their relatives, not as members of the organization.

In any event, Israeli Jews were quick to blame the whole Palestinian people. Reflected the father of the illegal settler slain:

This is a heinous murder of bottomless hate that is simply impossible to understand. Going into a family home and murdering people is something that only those who have it instilled in them from babyhood can do.

A Ynet reader noted in a comment:

84. What kind of society spawns teens who slit a baby's throat?

There is a very deep problem here. Palestinians had better stop wallowing in the blame game, and start addressing it.
Serge, Montreal, Canada (04.18.11)

Zionist like to make Tibet analogies. You know, Israel may occupy Palestinian land, although Israel disputes this, but what about the Chinese occupation of Tibet? So that it occurred to me to compare the Palestinians' reaction to Israeli occupation to the Tibetans' reaction to Chinese annexation.

First a little context. Tibetans are full Chinese citizens and enjoy exactly the same rights (or lack thereof) as their ethnic Han fellow citizens. They face no checkpoints. They can drive on the same roads as the Han. China has built extensive infrastructure for them, including the highest railroad in the world, against zero investment in infrastructure for the occupied Palestinians on the Israelis' part. The Tibetans' "suffering" is nowhere like the Palestinian subjugation at Israeli hands.

When Tibetans rioted in Lhasa in 2008, however, they behaved with "bottomless hate." They caused extensive damage to property:



Five girls were burnt alive in a store:



All in all, 10 people were burnt alive during the protests. The rioters made it a policy to target Han people and businesses, so that ethnic Tibetans had to attach white prayer shawls to their houses and stores for them not to be set on fire.

So what kind of people can stab a baby to death? I guess the same kind of people who can burn a shop assistant alive. It's called human beings. The Palestinian reaction is very much like that of any other people under similar conditions of oppression and humiliation.

To summarize, if Israel's behavior must be compared to China's, the Palestinians' response must be compared to the Tibetans' -- which Zionists never do, in a clear example of double standards.

The Jews do do these things

On 11 March 2011, an adult couple and three of their children were stabbed to death at the Israeli settlement of Itamar. It is yet unclear who murdered them, and I was waiting for the investigation to reach a conclusion before commenting on the case. Almost one month has passed, though, and a gag order remains in place forbidding Israeli officials from releasing information on the investigation's progress. However, today, April 9, is a good day to reflect a little on this tragedy and how it has been handled.

One of the most striking aspects about the coverage of the massacre was how the Zionist media were quick to ascribe it to terrorists, despite the alternative explanations available (revenge killing by a Thai worker, retribution for the killing of 2 Palestinian children near the settlement two years ago...). Not only that, but the whole Palestinian people were dehumanized in op-ed after op-ed, despite the Palestinian Authority's condemnation of the murders. In some cases the demonization reached cosmic levels. I was particularly shocked by a Hanoch Daum article at Ynet under the title These are not humans:

Are they members of the family of nations at all? Would a human being stab a three-month-old baby girl in her sleep and kill a tender four-year-old child sleeping peacefully in his bed next to his parents’ bedroom? (...)

We can keep talking at length about painful concessions, but as long as on the other side we have blood-thirsty psychopaths capable of knifing an 11-year-old child, a four-year-old boy, and a baby who was just born, such talk would mostly be futile.

We have to recognize the following fact: Inhumane elements exist in the other camp. These are terrorists that Israel must eliminate, before they kill our children.

The desired reader reaction took nothing to arise:

15. Kill of 5 family members
The pain that is coused here is too unbearable. something must be done about it. my heart bleeds for this family- wich will have a heavy future. May god protect us from those Unhuman Living things wich act worse then animals.
Katy, Vienna (03.14.11)

30. Time to kill Palestinians (End)
Eyal, USA ISRAEL (03.14.11)

43. The Murderers are not Psychopaths
Hanoch Daum is wrong. The murderer who perpetrated this horror is not a psychopath. He is not a sick individual. He is the natural product of his upbringing, an upbringing that glorifies the spilling of Jewish blood. A society that names public squares and schools after murderers is going to produce more of the same. When are we going to wake up this reality. Bibi and all the rest talk of bringing the perpetrator to justice. The entire society is to blame. The perpetrator is simply the agent who actually carried out the horror. The society applauds him and in a few years will name a school or a hospital after him.
Moshe Tokayer, Petach Tikvah (03.14.11)

Now Ynet talkbacks are moderated. One wonders what the reaction would be if, say, The Guardian published a comment along the lines of "Time to kill Jews."

But what I take issue with most is Hanoch Daum's assertion that "the other" side is capable of horrific actions that, presumably, his side would never engage in. Yes, the old, tired argument "They hate, we don't; the Jews don't do these things."

Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the settler family was murdered by a Palestinian, it is utterly wrong to compare what that presumed terrorist 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 here's where it is worth remembering that in such a day as today, April 9, but 63 years ago, Jewish terrorists under the command of later Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin carried out the Deir Yassin massacre, in which at least 93 Arabs were murdered in cold blood -- before Israel became independent, the seven Arab armies invaded, etc.

And it doesn't end there. 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.

Cum libel

When you think of an Arab you picture a dark-skinned man with a piece of cloth around his head, shining black eyes and a knife hidden somewhere he might stab you with if you get too close. This man is unredeemably machoist, irrational, Jew-hating and gay-bashing. That's anyway the image created by decades and decades of Hollywood films such as Exodus, or of journalistic ranting by the likes of Daniel Pipes, Ann Coulter or Melanie Phillips.

This Arab man is also, by the account of these specialists, a child rapist who specializes in sodomizing young boys. That's why when recently an Israeli Jewish boy aged 11 accused four Arabs of repeatedly raping him, there could be no doubt that the four were guilty. They  were immediately arrested, as the charges looked impressive:

Four Palestinians residing in Israel illegally have been arrested for allegedly raping and severely abusing an 11-year-old boy from central Israel several times. The four, aged 23-27, are also suspected of indecent acts.

The Tel Aviv Magistrates Court extended their remand by four days on Tuesday.

Police launched an investigation after the boy told his older brother he had been abused. The brother first became suspicious after the boy complained of stomach aches.

He eventually revealed his terrible secret: "They paid me NIS 400 to sleep with them, bought me presents I asked, and threatened me not to say anything, I was ashamed to talk about it."

The suspects were swiftly apprehended for fear they would flee to the territories.

Police suspect that the four, who were working at an event hall, promised the boy candy, presents and money and lured him into accompanying them to the building where they lived.

The four are also suspected of urinating on the victim, hitting him, putting out cigarettes on him, cutting him, and coercing him to use drugs.

Commenters on Ynet were quick to call the incident proof of the overall inhumanity of the Arab people:

6. Using sex for terror.
There are no bounds to their savagery. This is sexual terrorism. They are doing the same to young women through out Israel. At what point do we say enough?
Josh, US (03.29.11)

10. They have no respect for their own
They do this to their own women. So this brutality is not surprising.
Rachel, US (03.29.11)

24. Death Sentence for All Rapists!
The sick perverts also kidnapped the little boy and G-D gave the death sentence for kidnapping. The child has been scarred for life by these inhuman filthy predators. These demonic monsters must never be released to perpetrate more evil. Please, G-D, help this little boy and his family.
Linda Rivera, New York, USA (03.29.11)

To make a short story shorter, as it turned out the boy was lying. On a second round of questioning, he changed his story, supplied a different description of his alleged rapists and finally admitted that the apparent signs of abuse on his rear were the result of an enema he had undergone.

But just in case, the police had already beaten the four Arabs, spat on them, shouted "death to the Arabs" and stolen their cell phones. Nothing new there; it's the usual prescription for a Palestinian prisoner in Israel.

An interesting detail from this story is that these Arabs were Palestinians from the territories who were illegally working at an event venue inside Israel. How come the Apart... er, security fence did not stop these aliens from entering the country? And once they were inside, why did they look for a job, instead of committing a terror act to kill Jews, the ultimate objective of all Arabs? Maybe because they wanted to support their families rather than deny the Jews the right to self-determination? That can't be, they aren't that human.

In any event, it is still true that they bestialize their camels and goats, isn't it? They haven't been able to prove that they don't, have they?