Singling out raised to the power of two

OK; let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that we anti-Zionists are in fact guilty of singling out Israel for demonization, like the Hasbara troupe likes to charge. Of all the countries that commit human rights abuses in the world, we condemn Israel and only Israel, even when other countries are far worse offenders, and that's a severe moral fault.

But are we alone? Check the following photograph of an anti-Sri Lanka rally held in London on February 2 (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE):



The sign in the red box reads:

DON'T JUDGE THE GROUND REALITY
THROUGH THE EYES OF
"EMBEDDED JOURNALISTS"
IT'S A GENOCIDE IN SRI LANKA

Some of these demonstrators may have been Sri Lankan Tamils, a group that seeks autonomy from the majority Sinhalese people. Some others may have not. But one thing is certain: they accused the Sinhalese of a genocide that is not taking place. Worse still, they did not speak about Darfur, where an actual genocide is under way. In other words, they singled out the ethnic group that rules Sri Lanka for demonization. There can be no doubt that they are anti-Sinhalites.

Yet the Hasbara peddlers don't say a word about those pro-Tamil demonstrators, even when their behavior is comparable to that of us anti-Zionists. In other words, of all the people who single out countries for demonization, the Hasbaristas only charge anti-Zionists with racism, while leaving all other demonizers alone. That's singling out raised to the power of two, an arguably worse sin than the single-level singling out we are accused of engaging in.

By now you must have gotten my point. If all people were under an obligation to write a treatise on all similar offenses each time they want to denounce a particular instance of wrongdoing, no one would ever be able to denounce anything. The Zionists would be well-advised not to cry "racism" whenever we talk about Israel, because we don't have any moral duty to talk about similar or worse countries. But if they believe we do, then they should be hurling the racism slur against all people who denounce one and just one country -- or accept they're themselves guilty of singling out a group for demonization.

World champions of fig-leaf donning

Once upon a time Israel used torture to extract confessions from "ticking bomb" terrorists. Nay, it wasn't even torture, it was "moderate physical pressure." But then on September 6, 1999, Israel's High Court issued a landmark ruling which banned even that moderate pressure. Therefore, Israel is a torture-free land, as befits its position as the most moral country in the world and, just in case, a light unto the nations. We all know this.

Luai Ashkar, however, begs to differ. This Palestinian was arrested on April 22, 2005, on ticking bomb suspicions. He describes his experiences in the following video:



To make a long (and horrific) story short, however, Askar was subjected to the "banana position," in which his body was horizontally placed, face up, on a chair and bent like the letter U until his hands met his feet under the chair between the seat and the floor. Then an Israeli General Security Service man pressed his chest with his foot until Askar's backbone broke. The man was left paralyzed.

How could this happen in 2005, if "physical pressure" (in the literal sense of the word, in this case) had been banned in 1999?

The key to it is that the High Court did not ban torture at all. Paragraph 38 of the decision opened the door to continued use of it. In Regulating torture in a democracy: death indignity in Israel, Michael L. Gross explains that:

The Supreme Court was no longer impressed with the existential argument and acknowledged that while a democracy had to fight "with one hand tied behind its back," terrorism would not bring down the State of Israel. Further convinced that conditions for a "ticking bombs" were rarely met, the court concluded that "ticking bombs" could not underwrite a sweeping policy of torture. Absent definitive legislation, ruled the court, moderate physical pressure remained illegal. Nevertheless, the court did not ban torture absolutely, allowing recourse to the necessity defense and permitting investigators to use torture to meet immediate and otherwise unavoidable grievous threats to innocent life (para. 38).

(My emphasis.)

Needless to say, what has happened since is that whenever Israel wants to torture someone, it defines them as a "grievous threat to innocent life" and proceeds with the torture -- even if the prisoner's harmlessness is crystal-clear (on February 27, 2006, Laskar was convicted to 26 months in prison for crimes described as "not serious" by the prosecution). In a 2007 report, the Israeli human-rights organization B'Tselem found that half of all Palestinian prisoners are beaten, and two-thirds suffer physical injuries, with a staggering 96 percent being forced into painful positions.

Let's turn to another High Court decision. Israel has long used human shields in the "neighbor procedure": when the Israeli army wants to nab a terrorist, they take someone from the neighborhood and force them to enter the terrorist's house to call on him to surrender. When in 2002 a neighbor was killed in one of the procedures, the High Court issued a temporary injunction against the practice. The Army continued using it, only requiring that the Palestinian gave his consent to be used in the operation. Then in October 2005 the High Court banned the procedure altogether, citing, precisely, that a Palestinian wouldn't be able to make a free choice if asked by the IDF to serve as a human shield.

Despite which on February 27, 2007, during Operation Hot Winter in Nablus, the IDF used Jihan Tahdush as a human shield in a neighbor procedure, forcing her to march ahead of the soldiers in a house-to-house search. Here's the testimony of this lovely 11-year-old girl:



If you can bear with me until I explain why I'm bringing up all of this, allow me to turn to an apparently unrelated topic: an article by the New York Times' Thomas Friedman which explained the recent war on Gaza. Israel, he argued, may have been educating Hamas just like it educated Hizbullah in 2006:

Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

In essence, this paragraph says that while Israel's objective isn't to destroy the civilian infrastructure, only to crush the terrorists, by a felicitous coincidence enough infrastructure is obliterated in the process that civilians will be discouraged from continuing to support the terrorists.

This is clearly not the case; Israel destroys civilian infrastructure on purpose, not as collateral damage. An IDF report on the war on Gaza is already noting that the high number of houses razed is incompatible with any reasonable military objective. Also, Gaza's industrial sector (or what remained of it after the crippling Israeli blockade of 2007-2008) was completely destroyed by Israel in the last two days of the operation, when the military conflict had ended and no credible strategic value could be attached to those buildings (see here for an example).

So why would Israel's High Court issue a ban on torture that is not a ban, or a prohibition of the neighbor procedure that is ignored by the IDF? And why would a journalist state that the civilian pain that is necessary to discourage support of the terrorists is not a policy but collateral damage -- an unintended yet extraordinarily convenient consequence of the attacks?

The answer is that Zionists need to don a fig leaf whenever Israel does nasty things. Since that is an everyday occurrence, the result is that Zionists have become world champions of fig-leaf donning. There are several procedures to make it appear that there exist factors counterbalancing the bad behavior, notably:

1. Landmark High Court rulings that contain caveats: The High Court outlaws bad things Israel was doing, but allowing them in situations that theoretically should be very exceptional. Then the exception becomes the rule and Israelis enjoy the best of two worlds: total freedom to apply torture and the ability to claim that they banned it.
2. Landmark High Court rulings that are never implemented: The Court outlaws improper behavior but the decision is not enforced. Inquiries on army abuses in defiance of the rulings usually die at the internal investigation level, i.e. the soldiers acquit themselves of their own human rights violations.
3. Claims that the damage caused is unintended (even if these claims are often accompanied by cynical statements that the deterrent aspect of Israel's wars is not the elimination of terrorists but, precisely, the pain involuntarily inflicted on civilians).

The most striking aspect of these rhetorical games is its masturbatory nature. Zionists have decreed that the public opinion can be won over using technicalities in court-of-law fashion. To them, what is important is not whether something happened or not, but whether it can be plausibly denied. That's why we see them on the blogs whining their frustration that the public at large doesn't buy into the brilliantly put together arguments that so much convince themselves, and ascribing it to the endless antisemitism of the world.

But the public is endowed with reasonableness and common sense, and tends to judge by the results and not by the good intentions the road to hell is proverbially paved with. They will, e.g., divide 1300 Palestinian casualties into 13 Israeli ones and conclude that 100-to-1 is not a reasonable proportion even if Israel did not intend to kill a single child. No antisemitism there, just the ability to grasp some uncomfortable realities no amount of fig leaves can be sanely expected to conceal.

The "disproportionate" debacle

The Hasbara world is in disarray over Israel's increasingly explicit admission that its response to the annoying, but relatively harmless, Palestinian rockets is disproportionate. First it was the Israeli ambassador to the UN who, during the Second Lebanon War, stated, to the dismay of the Hasbaristas: "And to those countries who claim we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: you're damn right we are!" At that time it was dismissed as a hot-blooded outburst during a harangue. But then came military analysts and generals who confirmed that, in fact, there existed an adopted policy of disproportionality. Finally, it was Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who declared that each Palestinian rocket would be met with disproportionate force.

Zionists around the world tend to be more Catholic than the Israeli pope, and it's amusing to watch their embarrassment when their own masters deny what they, the Hasbara peddlers, had been claiming all along in Israel's defense. This tends to confirm a theory I have long held, namely that Israelis are actually fed up with their Western lapdogs, are deeply annoyed by their efforts to angelize the country, and would actually enjoy it if the lapdogs could bring themselves to criticize even a single aspect of the State of Israel for a change. But it ain't gonna happen.

Be it as it may, the Hasbara troupe is faced with many Israeli people candidly admitting to disporportionality. There have been two lines of response to this.

The primary reaction has been to claim that the Israelis are talking nonsense. Olmert simply has no clue what disproportionate means. Neither he nor his generals are aware of the true meaning of this word, but people whose closest approximation to a military conflict has been typing on a keyboard with spelling mistakes claim they do understand the term, and according to their grasp thereof Israel is not disproportionate. However, this is not very convincing, because generals, in general (bad pun intended), tend to know a lot more about military terminology than pundits or bloggers.

A slightly more elaborate reaction has been to claim that the nature of conflicts has changed, and that the Geneva conventions did not foresee the rise of terrorism. Therefore, the very concept of disproportionality is null and void, because overwhelming force may be actually needed to fend off the terrorist scourge. To some extent this is a variation of the first reaction. The flat-screen generals on the blogs want us to believe the authors of the Geneva conventions did not know that a guy called Guy (terrible pun again intended) Fawkes once tried to blow up the British Parliament, and therefore were not aware of a phenomenon called terrorism and did not set forth special provisions to combat it.

But that is not so. The message of the Geneva convention was, precisely, that an army must respond in a civilized way even to uncivilized enemies. To make an everyday analogy, if you spit on my sister this doesn't mean I'm entitled to kill your aunt. Examples of countries that did not react disproportionately to persistent terror abound, but a case in point is the British reaction to Jewish terror in the 1940s, which didn't include massively shooting Haganah people or blowing up their headquarters.

Those of us who have opposed any excuse for Palestinian terrorism, and who refuse to accept the theory that in asymmetrical warfare certain actions may be allowed that would be forbidden in a war between equals, are dismayed to see Zionists propounding a very similar theory: that there exist "special situations" which require rules to be waived.

In sum, yes, when the Israelis say "disproportionate" they mean disproportionate, and no, there are no exceptions to the rule requiring a proportional retribution to war actions. The Zionist attempt to claim otherwise represents a further dive into intellectual dishonesty by a Hasbara brigade with already very solid bad faith credentials.

The angelization of Israel

I don't think I'll ever be able to understand why Zionists insist on singling out Israel for angelization. They have nothing to win and a lot to lose.

By angelizing Israel, its apologists oblige themselves to prove not only that its actions are justified (already a daunting task), but also that the country's behavior is superior to that of "any other country in its position." This is due to a number of extraordinary claims the Zionists make: most notably, that Israel holds the moral high ground not only in relation to its Muslim neighbors, but also as compared to other developed democracies where its leftwing critics live.

A key ingredient of the angelization is the claim that the Israeli Defense Forces are the most moral army in the world, which is regularly repeated, most recently in relation to the Gaza op.

A case in point is the ineffable Alan Dershowitz. A writer notable not for the depth of his ideas, but for the influence (itself telling) he exerts on the lower echelons of the Hasbara troupe, a.k.a. Zionism's useful idiots. In his book The Case for Israel Dershowitz describes Israel's doctrine of "purity of arms," which "requires that soldiers put their own lives at stake in order to avoid harming non-combatants" (p. 145). He gives an example:

Recall that when Israel sought to protect itself against Beirut-based terrorism in 1982, it sent a team of soldiers --led by then Major General Ehud Barak, dressed as a woman-- to target the terrorists themselves in a building then being used as their base, instead of bombing the building from the air, which would have resulted in many more casualties. This is typical of the Israeli "retail," rather than "wholesale," approach to targetting terrorism (p. 151).

This is a puzzling example. I thought dressing like women was a very wrong thing for soldiers to do, and the only reason why so many Palestinian women died in Israeli attacks. Now it turns out it's commendable, if done by Jewish soldiers.

More importantly, the incident Dershowitz refers to is not illustrative that Israel does not perform wholesale murder; it only means that in some cases pinpoint operations may be more effective. It did not take place during the 1982 war, as Dershowitz suggests, but as part of Operation Springtime of Youth, carried out in 1973 to wipe out three PLO members alleged to have played a part in the Munich massacre. It was not a time of war and a discreet operation by a handful of men had a greater chance of success.

The doctrine of "purity of arms" must be tested in war conditions. And in the recent war on Gaza, I can't think of a single instance of an Israeli soldier's life being risked so that civilians won't die. In fact, only about 3 Israeli soldiers died from enemy fire, against at least 400 Palestinian women and children. This does definitely look a lot more like wholesale than retail, yet I haven't seen any comment on this imbalance from Israel's angelizers explaining how it can be reconciled with any notion of purity.

So why insist on the "most moral" thing? Why bring up a nonexistent spirit of self-sacrifice on the Israeli soldiers' part? Such preposterous claims only invite scrutiny -- and exposure when proved false.

But of course, the Zionists respond to this by playing the "double standards" card. "We say that we're morally superior, but if you try to check out if we're morally superior, then you're judging us by standards you don't expect any comparable country to meet." Why, of course, but that's because you claimed to meet higher standards in the first place. What you're doing is something only bad-behaved children do, and the name for it is wanting to have it both ways.

Repercussions

In my previous satirical post, I argued that South Africa had been "demonized" during Apartheid, because it was ostracized by the international community when other, far worse regimes were left alone. This was meant to expose the fallacy of the Zionist argument that singling out Israel for criticism is tantamount to demonization.

The piece was cross-posted on Harry's Place, a site which, while largely supporting behaviors and policies we have been fighting here, displays an openness not usually found in political blogs. HP was fiercely criticized by some of its unconditional followers for allowing me to cross-post the article.

One of HP's frequent contributors, Brett, responded in two different posts. On 28 January he pointed out several factual errors in my post, which were mostly deliberate and mocked the factual errors the Zionists commit in their defense of Israel. However, he didn't rebutt the demonization argument.

Then, on my insistence, Brett published a second post on 29 January, in which he did tackle the problem of why Apartheid was uniquely punished.

His new response posits that the African National Congress worked better than other liberation movements in presenting their case before the international community. To begin with, they had a Freedom Charter that was a model of good intentions. Next, they had clear and logical objectives. Finally, they showed good communicational skills. Their case was "better packaged" than that of other peoples who also fought for their freedom. Such is, in a nutshell, Brett's argument.

While publishing a response to it on HP would seem to be the logical step, I also understand that it would further anger the blog's "constituency," which does not appear to enjoy dissent very much. I don't expect HP's editors to commit blogospherical suicide for the sake of balance. Therefore, I'm responding to Brett here on my blog.

One must give the benefit of the doubt that Brett actually believes what he says. He lived in South Africa, and is much more aware than the Western public about the complexity of the ANC movement.

However, the reasons he gives are not the ones behind the international rejection of Apartheid. No one can honestly say that the people who demonstrated against Apartheid had the faintest idea of the Freedom Charter. And the ANC's bad image peaked precisely when punitive measures were being implemented.

Thus, for instance, the US imposed stiff sanctions in 1986 -- a time at which the ANC was rejected by the American government (which branded it as a terrorist organization) because of its associations with the Communist Party.

In fact, bilateral sanctions by the world's leading economies were imposed between 1985 and 1986. What was the ANC's image in those years? Let's see:

1) The ANC was seen as the organization behind several major terror attacks. Brett's assertion that these attacks were objected to by the ANC's leadership is highly debatable. In fact, after the Church Street bombing (aimed at a military building, but which mostly killed civilians), Oliver Tambo, ANC's leader in exile, declared it a legitimate target. Even one who had in fact read the Freedom Charter would have been horrified by this attack in rush hour, in which civilian casualties were inevitable.

2) The ANC was seen as the organization behind the blood-curdling practice of necklacing, a summary execution of political opponents and impimpi (police informers) carried out by forcing a rubber tire, filled with gasoline, around a victim's chest and arms, and setting it on fire. Although Brett argues that the practice was short-lived (1984-87), those who imposed sanctions in 1985-86 couldn't have known that. Also, the most visible ANC figure, Winnie Mandela, did endorse it quite explicitly. While Brett dismisses Winnie's importance within the ANC, the West saw her as the actual ANC leader, with her husband in prison and Tambo in London. She was even called "Mother of the Nation," which was perfectly known to Western anti-Apartheid demonstrators. As for the perpetrators of the necklacings, they were not ashamed of what they did. As the first man to photograph one, Kevin Carter, said:

After having seen so many 'necklacings' on the news, it occurs to me that either many others were being performed (off camera as it were) and this was just the tip of the iceberg, or that the presence of the camera completed the last requirement, and acted as a catalyst in this terrible reaction

3) The ANC was seen as one of the factions in the fratricidal war on Inkatha. Whether this war was encouraged by the Apartheid regime or not, the fact is that the West saw horrible black-on-black violence. Internal warfare is, as everyone knows, terrible publicity for a liberation movement. "If they can't help fighting each other, how could they run a country?"

Therefore, Brett's fable of a "good packaging" does not hold much water. Quite on the contrary, it can be argued that the West ostracized the Apartheid regime in spite of what could be seen in the news about the ANC. The question remains, then: why? My theory is that the reasons behind the West's shunning of South Africa are similar to those behind the widespread criticism of Israel: we know and care more about both countries because they're more "like us" than, say, Pol Pot or Jean Kambanda.

For those of you who don't know (whose existence, if confirmed, would thoroughly prove my point): Kambanda was Rwanda's Prime Minister during the Tutsi genocide.

On how Apartheid South Africa was unfairly demonized -- like Israel

The Afrikaner, or Boer, people of South Africa were internationally demonized like no other people in history.

The Afrikaners began to settle in South Africa in the 18th century, fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They established two prosperous states which created job opportunities for blacks, who began pouring in from adjacent areas. The United Kingdom unleashed two devastating wars on them -- the Anglo-Boer wars. The British used scorched-land methods and invented the concentration camp, in which 15% of Afrikaners from both republics died.

When Afrikaners finally obtained independence, they understood that only a strong Afrikaner state would prevent further massacres. The Republic thus created was not perfect, granted; the blacks, coloreds and Indians were discriminated against. But the world obsessively focused on the Afrikaners' errors, leaving no stone unturned in their drive to demonize them.

South Africa was uniquely singled out for criticism. Not a word was said about the enslavement of the Pygmies in the Central African republics, yet the public yelled "Apartheid!" every time an Afrikaner showed up at an international event. The Chinese occupation of Tibet concerned no one, but the South African treatment of nonwhites --who enjoyed freedoms Tibetans could never dream of, either then or now-- was severely chastised.

Under the Afrikaners, the blacks enjoyed a standard of life far above that of any other African state. By any measure --infant mortality, literacy, life expectancy, you name it-- South African blacks were better off than their neighbors -- so much so that the latter began to leave their civil-war torn countries for peaceful South Africa.

But not content with taking advantage of the Afrikaner-created wealth, the blacks began a terroristic campaign by the African National Congress that killed thousands. Where was their Gandhi? They bombed public places, mined roads killing innocent civilians and sabotaged productive infrastructure. Although the government reacted to this, most deaths were caused by black-on-black violence. A particularly barbaric murder method was approved of by the wife of Nelson Mandela -- the necklacing, a summary execution carried out by forcing a rubber tire, filled with gasoline, around a victim's chest and arms, and setting it on fire. This was used against opponents in internecine ANC warfare.

The Afrikaners only wanted peace, which was offered multiple times to the blacks. After being met with ever more terrorism, Afrikaners diesngaged from 20 areas that were designated as black homelands. Each of these territories was offered full independence; four of them took it -- Transkei, Venda, Bophuthatswana, and Ciskei. But instead of focusing on building their nations, the blacks continued to resort to terror.

Meanwhile, the international community shunned South Africa -- but not Saudi Arabia, a theocracy where converts from Islam face capital punishment; or East Germany, where people who tried to leave the country were shot dead; or Kampuchea, where Pol Pot perpetrated a genocide of more than 1 million people. Only South Africa, where less than 2,000 blacks were killed by a government faced with guerrilla warfare, was subjected to UN sanctions -- but not Angola, where civil war killed hundreds of thousands.

International hypocrisy peaked in the 70s and 80s. When the South African rugby team (the Springboks) toured Australia in 1971, the leader of the Labour Party, Gough Whitlam, opposed the tour and declared: "Australians should never let an afternoon's entertainment blind them to a lifetime's repression for another nation." This, said by a politician from a country that dispossessed and mostly exterminated its Aboriginal population. Huge and widespread protest also occurred in New Zealand in 1981 against a Springbok tour -- that, in a country that committed cultural genocide against the Maoris, whose language is in a terminal state.

An automatic anti-Afrikaner UN majority recommended several times economic sanctions against South Africa, and third world countries were quick and happy to implement them. Even the US disgraced itself by applying economic sanctions it never imposed on far worse human-rights offenders like Mozambique or the Congo. Of course, none of those countries stopped using South African diamonds or gold, which are key to high-tech industries, or performing heart transplants, an Afrikaner-invented medical procedure.

CONCLUSIONS

After thoroughly analyzing the undemocratic, yes, but relatively benign Afrikaner rule in South Africa, and the disproportionate international reaction to it, only one of two conclusions can be drawn. EITHER

1) The world was full of anti-Afrikaner prejudice and even hate, which is evident in the sanctions imposed by the world's nations against Apartheid South Africa, and their silence regarding atrocities, massacres and genocides that dwarf it. The only moral thing to do is acknowledge the injustice done to Afrikaners and revert to the situation of 1991, before the Apartheid regime was toppled by the pressure of a hypocritical international community;

OR

2) Apartheid was wrong, even if methods used to fight it were also wrong, and even if other human-rights violations were even wronger. Toppling it was justified, and there was nothing inherently unfair in singling out the Afrikaners, even if the Congolese behaved worse; just like there's nothing wrong in denouncing the lack of freedom in Cuba, even if Somalia has far less liberties, or -- in criticizing Israel, even if its dispossession of Palestinians pales beside the genocide in Darfur.

My father once heard MLK denounce Israel

My father once heard Martin Luther King denounce Israel. As a young immigrant to the US in the 1960s, he would attend MLK's rallies because he understood that what was good for the blacks also had to be good for the Latino community. At one of those rallies, MLK said, as reported by my dad:

Israel has grabbed land which belonged to the Palestinians, with the same self-granted right with which the slavers grabbed the black people in Africa: the right of a master race dealing with a downtrodden people.

What! You don't believe me? Oh, yes, you must have read somewhere that famous MLK quote. The one in which King says that those who criticize the Zionists actually mean the Jews and are, thus, antisemites.

The problem is that there is as much evidence to prove that my father heard him denounce Israel as there is to confirm that he equated anti-Zionism to antisemitism. Below is the passage familiar to all of us:

Shortly before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Boston on a fund-raising mission, and I had the good fortune to attend a dinner which was given for him in Cambridge. (...) One of the young men present happened to make some remark against the Zionists. Dr. King snapped at him and said, "Don't talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism!"

But, who reported this? An independent observer, with unimpeachable credentials as a nonbiased reporter?

Er no. It happens to be a very partisan source, namely Dr. Seymour Martin Lipset, a former chair of the National B'nai B'rith Hillel Commission and the Faculty Advisory Cabinet of the United Jewish Appeal who died in 2006. The quote comes from the article "The Socialism of Fools: The Left, the Jews and Israel" which was published in the December, 1969 (page 24) edition of Encounter magazine, and was reprinted in other publications. Encounter was a neoconservative publication avant la lettre, which was initially funded by the CIA.

In other words, Lipset was a member of an institution that raised money for Israel's wars writing in a magazine closely allied to the US government. The details he gives are extraordinarily vague: "shortly before he was assassinated" (exactly when?) King went to a dinner in Cambridge (exactly where?) where he admonished a black student (exactly who?). But if it wasn't true, couldn't Dr. King have protested to the magazine? No, he couldn't; he died the year before the article was published.

Do we have further details from other sources? Well, yes; CAMERA claims that King's words were pronounced "in a 1968 appearance at Harvard." Is that so? Er no. On the day of his death, the Harvard Crimson (the university's students' paper) reported:

The Rev. Martin Luther King was last in Cambridge almost exactly a year ago--April 23, 1967.

So that CAMERA is wrong on this (which, by the way, debunks the often-made claim "CAMERA may be biased but it's always factually correct"). All other references to the King quote are either explicitly based on Lipset's article or verbatim transcriptions without attribution.

The evidence being so flimsy, a few years ago someone had the brilliant idea of manufacturing a complementary "Letter to an anti-Zionist friend" by King, which "appeared" in an August, 1967 edition of Saturday Review, and "ratified" King's views on Zionism and antisemitism. Only, those people weren't properly trained on how these things are done. They provided a detail that gave them away; Tim Wise took the trouble to examine all issues of Saturday Review from August, 1967, and found not a hint of a King letter to anyone. Lipset had been much wiser, giving what seemed to be a lot of information on the background to the King quote, but without providing a single concrete, verifiable detail.

And thus are created the Zionist talking points. No, the British commander at the King David never said "I don't take orders from Jews; I give orders to them." And no, never were orders for Arabs to leave Israel broadcast on Arab radio in 1948! But those are subjects for further posts.

So, what do you say? Do you believe Lipset or my father? Or me? Or none?

A man with an axe to grind

Ah, these endlessly evil Palestinians! If suicide bombings fail, they'll try rockets; if rockets fail, they'll try bulldozers; and if bulldozers fail, they'll try -- axes!

The following is a news item from the beginning of the Cast Lead operation Israel has just finished in Gaza with unclear achievements:

An ax-wielding 20-year-old man from Jenin attacked passersby on Rehovot's main Herzl Street on Friday, lightly wounding two people.

The assailant then stood with the ax and shouted "Allahu Akhbar" before being arrested.

A 17-year-old suffered light cuts near his ear. He was treated at the scene. A second person also sustained light wounds, but left before paramedics could reach him.

The attacker told police he came to avenge the death of a friend who died in the IDF's Gaza operation.

"We view this as a sporadic incident, not an organized attack," a Shfela Police spokeswoman said.

The suspect was transferred to the security forces for further questioning.

One of the commenters unsurprisingly proposed:

9. Destroy this man's hometown
That is the only way to fight the terror - destroy the hometown of the terrorist - terror will stop very very quickly. It's up to you Israel, do you want to stop the terror or do you want to be a nice goody two shoes always genuflecting to the internazional community?
Rami - (01/10/2009 22:55)

With most standard dictionaries now defining "disproportionate" as "not done by the Israeli army," I guess this proposal must by now be considered part of the mainstream.

But I see two interesting aspects in this report:

1. The man came all the way from Jenin to Rehovot. It's not exactly a short walk (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE):



He must have crossed a few checkpoints and the Apart... Security Fence, yet he wasn't stopped. This would suggest that the dramatic decrease in terror attacks coming from the West Bank may not have to do with walls and roadblocks after all, but with an actual decision by most Palestinians to drop terror as a means to fight Israel.

2. The young man explicitly mentioned his friend who died in the Gaza op. This appears to indicate that terror attacks may not be the result of a Palestinian lust for Jewish blood after all, and that they may be related to actual suffering --be it material deprivation or the loss of their loved ones-- imposed on them by Israel. For God's sake, it even looks like these killing machines are capable of human emotions such as friendship!

Of course, one case is not a sample, but I was impressed by how easily the man made it to Rehovot with his axe, and by how deeply a death can be felt even in a region where seeing people violently die is a daily occurrence.

The new anti-Euskarism

Picasso's "Guernica," an allegory of the destruction perpetrated by the Nazi Air Force on the Basque town of Gernika in 1937.

The actual destruction.

The word Euskara means "Basque language" in the Basque language. And anti-Euskarism is prejudice against or hostility toward Basques.

Once upon a time anti-Euskarism was characterized by violent physical and cultural repression of the Basque people. During the Spanish civil war, Euskal Herria, or the Basque country, was ruthlessly razed by Generalísimo Francisco Franco's National Movement, as well as his Nazi and Fascist allies. Particularly gruesome was the levelling of the town of Gernika by the German air force on 26 April 1937. Also, Basque prisoners suffered unspeakable torture in Franco's jails. And, once the Basques were defeated, the cultural persecution began. Euskara was not allowed in public, and any children who were caught talking in it at school were made to kiss the ground. Basque dances and music were forbidden as well.

Spain is a democracy now, but anti-Euskarism is by no means gone. Only, it now takes a subtler form. Basques are no longer attacked or tortured, and Euskara is taught at school. But the new anti-Euskarism consists of the notion that, of all the peoples in the world, the Basques, and only the Basques, have no right to a State of their own. While Europe has been creating statelets like crazy in the last decade, many of them less populated and less viable than the economically robust Euskal Herria, the European Union upholds the Spanish constitutional prohibition of a Basque state. Peoples around the world have been given an independent country -- the Slovaks, the Timorese, the Armenians, even the Jews, despite their frequent moaning that they're denied one. But not the Basques.

This goes hand in hand with their demonization. Granted, the fight for independence has been carried out by the Basques through in some cases objectionable means, such as ETA's terrorism. But, curiously, it attracts an attention from the media absolutely disproportionate to the real harm it causes. For instance, in all its history ETA has caused some 900 deaths. In the same period, the Lord's Resistance Army has killed tens of thousands in Uganda. However, when you search the New York Times for ETA you find some 6,000 stories, against some 1,500 much shorter ones in the case of the LRA.

The media's bias is evident if we consider that whenever ETA kills a Spanish politician it makes headlines all over the world. However, not a word was said about the Second Congo War, in which 5.5 million people died and the Pygmies were hunted down and eaten by both warring factions!

It is depressing just to compare the enormous amount of coverage devoted to Basque terrorism in relation to that dedicated to the African wars. And we’re talking about people who at most kill 2 or 3 Spaniards a year.

The world is obsessed with the Basques! Why so much prejudice? Why this wave of new anti-Euskarism?

Too good not to boast about it

In a recent post we saw how US Secretary of State Condi Rice planned to vote in favor of the Gaza ceasefire resolution at the UN, but president Bush overruled her after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told him to. The US eventually abstained in the vote.

After Olmert publicly boasted of his feat, US diplomats tried to do the understandable damage control, denying that the abstention had to do with any suggestion from Israel's PM. However, neutral observers who witnessed the whole process have, according to a Haaretz article, confirmed Olmert's version. The Haaretz piece ends with this observation:

Olmert's associates understand all too well that this story merely provides fresh ammunition to those who claim the Jews are the ones who really control America.

Well, yes, it sort of looks like, no? Unless Prince Bandar has achieved unprecedented levels of subtlety in his Machiavelian schemes, this is definitely not a product of the all-powerful Saudi lobby.

It is not the first time that Israeli officials are candid, or, euphemisms aside, cynical about the US's servile attitude. In a very juicy interview given in 2006, Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon's foreign policy adviser, had this to say:

The channel between [US Secretary of State] Rice and me has two main purposes. One is to advance processes that are initiated, to examine our ideas and their ideas. The road map, for example, or the disengagement plan. But there is an equally important function, which is troubleshooting. If something happens - an unusual military operation, a hitch, a targeted assassination that succeeded or one that didn't succeed - before it becomes an imbroglio, she calls me and says, `We saw so-and-so on CNN. What's going on?' And I say, `Condy, the usual 10 minutes?' She laughs and we hang up. Ten minutes later, after I find out what happened, I get back to her and tell her the whole truth. The whole truth. I tell her and she takes it down: this is what we intended, this is how it came out. She doesn't get worked up. She believes us. The continuation is damage control.

Correct me if I'm being antisemitic, but this amounts to stating that when Israel fucks it up, the US rushes to do the face-saving for them.

Maybe the Israelis have decided not to deny anymore that they exercise an out-of-all-proportion influence on the US. But it may also be that when you have the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in history as your errand girl, it becomes somehow difficult not to brag about it.

When they say "the Islamists..."

...they mean the Muslims. They may use other words and constructions, like "the jihadists," or "the radical elements within Islam," but they always mean the Muslims. They will be careful to quote other Muslims to make the most outrageous claims, like "not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim." They will make it clear there exist individual Muslims who are good people (although they'll rarely bring themselves to say "I have a Muslim friend"), but then will proceed to cite so many Islamic people who are real bastards as to leave you asking if there really exists a single decent person within the faith. They will say that the problem is not the religion, but then will introduce so many caveats and bogus research items from Islamophobes as to convince you that the problem is the religion.

These polite haters know they don't need to say things explicitly. They're confident that rank-and-file Zionists, the ones who write letters to the editor and go to the demos, will get the message. Because they(the letter writers and demo goers) are intelligent people who chose the right side in the Crusade, oops, War on Terror.

And get the message they do:


(ISLAM = CULT OF HATE banner held by demonstrators in a pro-Israel rally in New York City. From Bomb a ghetto, raise a cheer, a video by Max Blumenthal.)

What's Turkish for "First they came"?

The last few years have been marked by signs of genocide around the world. In the Second Congo War, the Pygmies were hunted down and eaten by both warring factions. More to the point, in Sderot a roof was broken by a Hamas missile two weeks ago.

But the world can't take any more massacres, be it of short black people or of Jewish real estate. That's why we have Holocaust Museums, and Holocaust experts who tour the world's auditoriums to preach their Never again message.

But, is it working?

Not according to Ben Cohen, an occasional contributor to Harry's Place. Under the title Antisemitism roars in Turkey, Cohen scares us out of our ignorance by painting a grim picture of the situation of Jews in Turkey:

There are people around the clock besieging the Israeli consulate in Istanbul shouting their hatred against Israel and Jewish people. All around Istanbul billboards are full of propaganda posters against Israel like; “Moses, even this is not written in your book” and “Israel Stop this Crime.” On the streets the people are writing such graffiti as: “Kill Jews,” “Kill Israel,” “Israel should no longer exist in the Middle East,” and “Stop Israeli Massacre.”

The week-end before, some people wrote, “We will kill you” on the door of one of the biggest synagogues in Izmir resulted in the closing down of synagogues. Near Istanbul University, a group put a huge poster on the door of a shop owned by a Jew: “Do not buy from here, since this shop is owned by a Jew.” A group put posters on his wall saying that: “Jews and Armenians are not allowed but dogs are allowed.” Some young people are even threatening others with violence if they are seen as pro-Israel in social networking websites such as Facebook and Hi5.

However, I ask for Cohen's forgiveness if I'm a bit skeptical about his post. In a world in which the Lord's Revolutionary Army kidnaps young children in Uganda and brainwashes them into guerrilla fighters, are a few hate posters such a big deal?

Of course, it can be argued that, because Cohen is Jewish, the LRA's horrible practices are not as important to him as attacks that are related to the Jewish community. In that case, one wonders why he didn't write a post on this Jewish-community-related incident:

Extremists spray-painted "Mohammed is a pig" and "Death to Arabs" early Sunday on the walls and doors of the Sea Mosque in Jaffa, sparking the fury of the Islamic Movement in the mixed Arab-Jewish city.

The hate slogans also included "Kahane was right," a reference to the slain Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the outlawed anti-Arab Kach movement, and "No peace without the House of Peace," alluding to the Hebron structure from which dozens of far-right activists were evicted earlier this month.

Haaretz, 21 Dec 2008

But, more importantly, it's startling that Cohen manages to write a full post on Turkey without addressing the shameful attitude of Israel, Zionism and the organized Jewish comunity vis-à-vis the state's brutal assault on other minorities. In a country that murdered or expelled Armenians, Greeks and Kurds, with the Jews remaining silent, it was a matter of time before the Jewish community itself would be targeted.

Particularly outrageous is organized Jewry's refusal to acknowledge, and in some cases outright denial of, the Armenian Genocide. Here's a short reminder:

• In 1982, the Israeli government asked Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel not to attend the International Conference on the Shoah and Genocide held in Tel Aviv, because the Armenian genocide would be discussed there. Wiesel gave in to the pressure and boycotted the conference, under the aliby "I can't do anything against Israel's will."
• In 2001, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres made the astonishing claim that the Armenians – 1.5 million of whom were slaughtered by Ottoman Turks in 1915 – never experienced a genocide. He went so far as to refer to the Armenian account of the mass slaughter as "meaningless".
• In 2007, Bernard Lewis, one of the main propounders of the concept of a "new antisemitism," had this to say to Haaretz: "The meaning of genocide is the planned destruction of a religious and ethnic group, as far as it is known to me, there is no evidence for that in the case of the Armenians." For remarks in a similar vein published in Le Monde, Lewis had been found guilty of genocide denial by a French court the previous year.
• The US Jewish community has sabotaged repeated times efforts to give Congressional recognition to the Armenian Genocide. Among the institutions involved in the repulsive drive were the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), B'Nai Brith, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC)..

As can be seen, the government of Israel, Zionist and Jewish institutions, and Jewish-studies scholars have repeatedly engaged in efforts to downplay and in fact deny the Armenian genocide. The excuse given was that acknowledging it would endanger the position of the Jewish community in Turkey. If what Cohen reports is accurate, it looks like the brilliant strategy has failed and they sold their intellectual honesty for a bowl of lentils.

In fact, that's what would be suggested by the poem found at the house of Martinesip Niemollerzöglu, a Turkish Jew who committed suicide days ago:


First they came for the Armenians — and I said nothing because I’m not an Armenian.

Then they came for the Greeks — and I didn’t speak up because I’m not a Greek.

Then they came for the Kurds — and I remained quiet because I’m not a Kurd.

Now they come for me — I always said they were a bunch of antisemites!!!

A question for my shrink

Dear Dr. Campodónico,

I have a query to make, and I can't wait till Thursday's session. No; it's not about a dream this time around (bad news in that area, by the way: the blonde with the three tits keeps popping up), but about an article I've read in the Jerusalem Post. These are the relevant paragraphs:

The Security Council resolution passed on Friday calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza was a source of embarrassment for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who helped prepare it but ultimately was ordered to back down from voting for it and abstain, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday.

Rice did not end up voting for Resolution 1860, thanks to a phone conversation he held with US President George Bush shortly before the vote, Olmert told a meeting of local authority heads in Ashkelon as part of a visit to the South.

Upon receiving word that the US was planning to vote in favor of the resolution - viewed by Israel as impractical and failing to address its security concerns - Olmert demanded to get Bush on the phone, and refused to back down after being told that the president was delivering a lecture in Philadelphia. Bush interrupted his lecture to answer Olmert's call, the premier said.

America could not vote in favor of such a resolution, Olmert told Bush. Soon afterwards, Rice abstained when votes were counted at the UN.

See, after reading this I was left with the impression that -- well -- I'm not sure I'll gather the courage to confess this -- although it's also true you're bound by doctor-patient privilege--

OK, let's say it once and for all: it looked to me, from the article, that the Prime Minister of Israel gave an order to the President of the United States, and as a result of that order the US Secretary of State had to change the vote she had already decided to cast at the UN Security Council to accomodate the Israelis' desires. And even though I rationally knew that it couldn't be true, that these kinds of things can only happen in conspiracy theories, in my innermost self I was convinced that my twisted reading of the events was accurate.

Dr. Campodónico -- am I an antisemite?

Placing more value on Jewish lives

Eamonn McDonagh and I have something in common: we're both Argentina-based bloggers who write in English on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Other than that, our worldviews differ radically as he believes all criticism of Israel can be explained away as antisemitism. Of course he will make the usual disclaimers stating there can be anti-Zionists who aren't antisemites, but he will never provide an actual example.

Eamonn's method to prove an anti-Zionist's antisemitism is simple: first, check his location and ethnicity; next, compile a short list of human-rights violations affecting his country or ethnic group; and, finally, conclude that he is an antisemite because he talks about Israel's crimes but not about those other violations he should be more concerned with.

In his latest post, Eamonn discusses a recent incident in the city of Resistencia, in Northeastern Argentina, where a group called Túpac Amaru protested Israel's actions in Gaza by painting graffiti on Jewish institutions. A despicable and irrational action that must be thoroughly condemned, certainly, but one that must be seen in the context of a country where vandalization of public and private property enjoys wide impunity. Eamonn comments:

Some will respond by saying that this is a non-story about a non-event, just slogans painted on a few buildings, not exactly the end of the world. I don’t agree. In a province with some of the nation’s gravest social problems and with a large indigenous community, the bulk of which lives in conditions of abject poverty, at least one small planet in the vast constellation of the country’s social and human rights organizations decided last Thursday night that of all the problems with which the world is afflicted, the most urgent is Gaza and that the best contribution it could make to resolving it was to harass the tiny Jewish community of Resistencia.

McDonagh mixes one reasonable assertion (the Jewish community should not be attacked because of the Gaza op) with one unreasonable one (Túpac Amaru should not protest about Gaza because there are other more urgent problems) in the hope that the reasonableness of the former will make up for the ludicrousness of the latter.

In fact, Túpac Amaru is addressing all the time the grave social problems Eamonn wants them to tackle, as is known to any habitual reader of the Chaco press (but not to Eamonn himself, who only gets interested in the province when he smells the possibility of charging someone with antisemitism).

The suggestion that Túpac Amaru can't talk about Gaza so long as poverty and discrimination against indigenous peoples persist reminds one of the argument (unfortunately often made) that the State shouldn't finance universities so long as there exist hungry people that could be fed with that money.

Eamonn proceeds then to draw his conclusion:

The idea is taking hold in some very remote places that every Jew is jointly and severally responsible for the actions of every other.

Which, of course, is thoroughly disingenuous. Jewish institutions in Argentina are pro-Zionist to the marrow of their bones, and what was attacked in them was their support for Israel, not their Jewishness. Nonaffiliated Jews were not attacked; secular Jewish university professors were not harassed over the Madoff scandal; bearded and hat-covered Haredim were not punched in the face over businessman Enrique Eskenazi's dubious dealings with the Kirchner presidential family. It was Israel-supporting institutions (not random Jewish citizens) that were attacked over what Israel (not an isolated Jew) did.

But Eamonn McDonagh demands very high standards from us. The question is: does he meet them?

From his bio, Eamonn is an Irishman who came to live in Buenos Aires in 1999. We could expect him to write about the national healing process in Ireland, or about the many socioeconomic issues Argentina faces. But that's not the case. He hardly ever mentions Ireland, and, while he writes a lot about Argentina, it's only when the story can in some way be connected to antisemitism.

Why is he so obsessed with antisemitism, and with criticism of Israel?

Is it because he's concerned about the status of minorities? No; that can't be: the Bolivian minority is widely discriminated against in Argentina. Unlike the Jewish community, the Bolivian community has had members killed in the last five years because of their ethnicity (see, for instance, here, here and here), yet Eamonn has remained quiet about it. And despite his pretended interest in the country's indigenous communities, he has said nothing about the Argentinian State's attempt to swindle the Mapuche Curruhuinca people in connection with a touristic resort built on their lands.

Is it, then, because McDonagh wants a balanced reporting of conflicts? That can't be either. When on 6 March 2008 eight Jews were murdered by a Palestinian in Jerusalem, Clarín, Argentina's foremost daily, reported it on its cover:


When on 6 June 2008 21 Sinhalese were killed by the Tamil Tigers in Sri lanka, on the other hand, Clarín did not devote cover space to the incident:


Yet Eamonn did not write a post in condemnation of Clarín's unfair treatment of the Palestinians, lambasting the daily for giving far more prominence to their terror attacks than to the Tamils' much worse mass killings.

Is it, then, because he is concerned about religious persecution? Again, that can't be; otherwise he would be writing post after post about the Hindu persecution of Christians in India.

What's the origin of Eamonn's obsession, then? I can't tell for sure, but I'll make an educated guess. Eamonn, like some Jews and, indeed, like many non-Jews imbued with an irrational adoration of the Jewish people, believes a Jewish life to be more valuable than a non-Jewish one. It's true that many people in his adoptive country suffer much more than the Jews. But they're brown, monotonous, uninteresting people who haven't won any Nobel prizes.

That's why spray-painted graffiti on a Jewish center or, in his words, the "new, cool, fat-free, environmentally responsible anti-Semitism" worry him more than the real death, suffering and dispossession of peoples that committed the original sin of not being Jewish.

On Hamas, the Likud, charters and partnership for peace

Using its secret war-winning formula ("always fight the Arabs"), Israel is dealing Hamas a crushing defeat in Gaza. This can hardly come as a surprise to anyone, since all analysts concurred that the Islamic group didn't even remotely match either the weaponry or the discipline that allowed their cousins from Hizbullah to, at least, hurt Israeli pride (but actually not much more) in 2006.

But dealing a defeat is not the same as getting a victory. Yesterday, the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire, with the US significantly failing to veto it. Also, president-elect Barack Obama has voiced concern about the number of casualties -- a statement that, for an American president-elect, would be considered by some as verging on antisemitism. This comes as a diplomatic blow for Israel, despite the considerable effort invested by Zionism in the propaganda arena. Zionists have fielded an impressive army of spokespeople, speechwriters, pundits and bloggers who have spent the last two weeks splitting hairs over the definition of "disproportionate" (when in fact, disproportionality is now an official Israeli policy).

But the public does not pay much attention to those tireless (and tiresome, and tire all) efforts. As Gideon Lichfield has noted:

Six hundred Palestinians dead versus nine Israelis, as of today's figures: There's just no way to make that proportion look pretty. Retired generals can drone on all they like about what "proportionality" really means in the laws of war, ambassadors can helpfully point out that many more Germans were killed than British in the Second World War, but these are theoretical notions; on television, what looks bad looks bad.

When the dust settles (not a short-term scenario, admittedly, given the enormous amount of dust lifted), Israel will have to negotiate with Hamas. This prospect drives some Zionists crazy: Hamas is committed to the destruction (obliteration or annihilation in other renderings) of Israel! As one of our readers asked: Have you read the Hamas Charter?

Well, yes, I've read it. I tend to despise people who don't know how to write, and I despise more the people who actually quote the pathetic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (itself terribly written), and even more those who call for obliterations. I also believe, however, that, with regard to Hamas, there exist certain glasses that are half-full, despite the stubborness of some in seeing them as (pardon the oxymoron) fully empty.

Hamas has proved it is capable of holding a truce. The period starting from June 2008 was marked by a sharp decrease in the number of imprecise rockets lobbed at southwestern Israel. The following chart (from The Huffington Post via Jews sans Frontières, and based on data from Israeli diplomatic sources) makes this quite clear:



These are the rockets fired at Israel in 2008. The truce started in June, in the context of an average of 200 rockets per month in the January-May period. By July the number had decreased to 1 rocket in the whole month, which was repeated in September and October; August was slightly worse with 8 rockets. While not perfect, this is a huge improvement. Also, the 11 rockets launched in those 4 months were fired by other organizations than Hamas: Islamic Jihad, for instance. One could expect Israel to understand these exceptions, given that the country often claims it can't control its own settlers.

The truce was undermined by Israel, not by Hamas, by imposing a crippling blockade on the Strip. And it was breached by Israel, not by Hamas, when the IDF killed 6 Hamas members in early November. It is undeniable that Hamas did more than its part to uphold the truce.

Does Hamas promise to destroy Israel in its charter? Yes it does. Do clerics in Hamas-controlled Gaza call for horrible things done on Israel and the Jews? Yes they do. But actual actions speak louder. And, moreover, it's just as easy to build an impressive case against Israel by examining its own record when it comes to charters and statements.

Take, for instance, Likud, the party that was leading the polls when the current war started. The Likud party's platform expressly rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, and is adamant that the settlers must stay put.

The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities [i.e. settlements in Judea and Samaria] and will prevent their uprooting. (...)

The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.

The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration and ecology, their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel's existence, security and national needs.

And its charter claims sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel, which (as different from the State of Israel) includes Judea and Samaria. The charter calls for:

Preserving the right of the Jewish Nation to the Land of Israel as an eternal, inalienable right; perseverance in the settlement and development of all parts of the Land of Israel; implementation of the State's sovereignty on them.

MK Uzi Landau confirmed this when he declared:

I am against the establishment of a Palestinian state and everything must be done to prevent it.

As for Jewish clerics, they have advocated a genocide in Gaza in response to the harmless rockets:

"If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," said Shmuel Eliyahu. "And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."

Joining the verbal warfare are Likud politicians such as Moshe Feiglin, currently running for the Knesset on the party's ticket:

Why should non-Jews have a say in the policy of a Jewish state? (...) For two thousand years, Jews dreamed of a Jewish state, not a democratic state. Democracy should serve the values of the state, not destroy them. You can’t teach a monkey to speak and you can’t teach an Arab to be democratic. You’re dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers. Muhammad, their prophet, was a robber and a killer and a liar. The Arab destroys everything he touches.

So a case could be made that Palestinians have no one to talk to, no partner for peace. And they have all the right in the world to refuse to negotiate until:

1. The Likud is illegalized, or its charter and platform modified so that they'll accomodate the possibility of a Palestinian state.
2. Incitement by rabbis and politicians is stopped.
   
3. Feiglin is expelled from the Likud, and preferably jailed.

Of course, Israel supporters wil ask me to see the half-full glass: Likud's platform notwithstanding, the party did not create any trouble when timid steps toward Palestinian statehood were taken; and Eliyahu and Feiglin's words have not influenced mainstream politics. Fine; I ask them to display a similar pragmatic approach with regard to Hamas.

Israelo-Palestinian negotiations that will include (either directly or indirectly) both the Likud and Hamas are inevitable. Dismissing the latter as a group one can't negotiate with because of its charter or statements is an instance not only of stubborn disingenuousness, but also of a pot calling a kettle black.

Gaza: Food for thought -- or derision

On his blog, as well as over here, Dr. Lozowick, of Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations fame, has sort of prompted me to comment on the situation in Gaza.

One annoying aspect of Lozowick's bloggering is his didactic tone, always explicitly stating the conclusions that a less sophomoric pundit would leave it for his readers to draw (namely, that anti-Zionists are a bunch of morons, jackasses, nutcases and kneejerks). I suspect he's not so much interested in my opinions as in the possibility of making fun of me (although in a way it will be mostly his diehards who will find terribly funny) in a paragraph that will begin with the word "predictably".

Even so, I have a few ideas of my own re the situation in Gaza, and it will do no harm to express them even if I risk the doctor's derision.

1. I don't understand Hama's use of rockets against Sderot and other Israeli towns. It makes no sense even if you subscribe to some idiotic theory that "all Israelis are soldiers or future soldiers" or such. To put it cynically, if you know the world will condemn you for your actions, at least you should make it sure you hit your enemy hard. For instance, the kidnapping of Gilad Schalit, also indefensible under any civilized standard, at least made sense under a tortured tit-for-tat logic: Israel kidnaps Palestinians, so Hamas kidnapped an Israeli to gain bargaining power and possibly exchange him for the Palestinians held by Israel. Immoral, but not crazy. However, the rockets on Sderot achieve the rare feat, even by Hamas' standards, of being both immoral and crazy. Without dismissing the anguish and stress suffered by southwestern Israelis, it is pain Israel can live with, while Israel's responses (first a crippling blockade, now widesacale bombings, next possibly an invasion) are pain Gaza is much less likely to be able to cope with.

2. It's appalling that certain commentators are using the words "genocide," "Holocaust" or "Nazi" in connection with the Israeli op. These words do a great disservice to the Palestinian cause and make their users' credibility plummet. No; unlike those who have generalized the word "antisemitism," and now apply it to, say, people who don't talk about Tibet, I don't find it acceptable to similarly devalue the word "genocide." It means the systematic killing of a people, like the Armenians under the Turks, the Jews and Gypsies under the Nazis, the Tutsis under the Hutus and possibly the Pygmies under Les Éffaceurs. Israel has clearly never committed, will never in any likelihood commit and is certainly not comitting genocide in the present Gaza action.

3. That said, a lot of bad faith has been on display on the Zionist side in the context of explicating (is there such a word as "hasbarizing"?) the Gaza op. We know that the brainwashed will repeat clichés with admirable discipline, but the problem is with the brainwashers who supply them with the sound bites, who would seem to be missing (but one suspects are not) a few important points.

One ususally-made argument is "Israel withdrew from Gaza, and the Palestinians, instead of building a state, started to launch rockets." This is disingenuous for several reasons:

a) Gaza is a small and overcrowded strip of land with virtually zero natural resources and can hardly constitute the basis for a future state.

b) While Israel can disengage from Gaza, Gaza can't be "disengaged" from the West Bank. To make an analogy both silly and sound, if the United States took over Mexico and then withdrew from Baja California, the Mexicans living in the peninsula couldn't be reasonably expected not to keep on fighting for the rest of their country.

c) The disengagement was not part of an agreement, and involved none of the guarantees that are vital to get an economy functioning, such as freedom of movement into and out of the territory, the right to collect and use taxes, etc. Of course a point can be made that Israel can't offer that for security reasons, but the failure to build a state in Gaza can't be analyzed as if such guarantees had been in place.

d) Most importantly, Israel didn't withdraw from Gaza to allow the Gazans to rule themselves. It withdrew, in part, because Gaza is not a valuable piece of real estate; it has no water, scarce arable land and little strategic importance; it wasn't worth the budget it consumed. But it also withdrew precisely to be able to charge the Palestinians with not building a(n impossible) State and thus justify the failure to implement further withdrawals, for instance from any reasonable fraction of the at least 105 illegal outposts the Jewish settlers have established in the West Bank. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon's foreign policy adviser at the time of the disengagement, explained it with remarkable candor in an interview with Haaretz:

“When you freeze that process [i.e. the political process with the Palestinians], you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem...Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state . . . has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”

"The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."

I want to remind you that there will also be a withdrawal in the West Bank.

"The withdrawal in Samaria is a token one. We agreed to only it so it wouldn't be said that we concluded our obligation in Gaza."

"On the other hand, in regard to the large settlement blocs, thanks to the disengagement plan, we have in our hands a first-ever American statement that they will be part of Israel."

4. Another argument that has been put forward is that Israel had to do something about the rockets raining on Sderot and that the only thing it could do is what it did. Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, former commander of the IDF's Gaza Division, begs to differ:

"The state of Israel must understand that Hamas rule in Gaza is a fact, and it is with that government that we must reach a situation of calm."

(...)

In Zakai's view, Israel's central error during the tahadiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce that formally ended on Friday, was failing to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip.

(...)

"We could have eased the siege over the Gaza Strip, in such a way that the Palestinians, Hamas, would understand that holding their fire served their interests. But when you create a tahadiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues, it's obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahadiyeh, and that their way to achieve this, is resumed Qassam fire.

"The carrot is improvement of the economic situation in the Gaza Strip. You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they're in, and to expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing. That's something that's simply unrealistic."

This general with some on-the-ground experience seems to sense what the flat-screen warriors in Europe and the US don't, namely that a political process is necessary even under an imperfect truce, and that not punishing a whole population, even if it's the same population that voted for Hamas, over the rockets on Sderot, might be a good idea. "All stick and no carrot makes Israel a dumb boy..." or how was it?

5. Finally, the issue of proportionality. During a six-month period there was low-level violence materialized in isolated rockets (but not barrages) thrown from the Strip, causing stress but no victims, met with a crippling blockade of Gaza on Israel's part, also causing stress but no victims. Then on Nov. 5 Israel killed 6 people in Gaza. Call them terrorists, militants or resistance fighters: the fact is that they were the first people to be killed in the truce period.

Although much has been made of the fact that the Qassams are fired randomly and thus any rocket can kill people, the fact that no person had been killed does have relevance. (Even though the Zionists spoke of unbearable Israeli pain in Sderot, they are the same Zionists who were boasting that the terrorists hadn't been able to disrupt national life -- what gives?) If you use missiles that have an extremely low probability of hitting someone, not firing enough of them that a person will likely be killed is a form of restraint. And Qassams (and Grads, and Katyushas) began to be thrown in casualty-causing amounts only after the six Gazans were killed by Israel.

The Israeli bombing campaign started on Saturday does not seem to meet a reasonable standard of proportionality. While popular belief has it that civilian casualties are wrong and noncivilian ones are right, the actual distinction is between combatants and noncombatants. And for instance the young cops who died in large numbers at a police academy graduation ceremony are clearly noncombatants. Although Israel plays on the West's image of a Palestinian policeman as a dark-skinned, thick-eyebrowed guy with shining black eyes and a knife between his teeth, the group is more likely to be mostly composed of cops like this:



who doesn't strike me as an immediate threat to Israel's security.

Also, the destruction of administrative infrastructure would seem to indicate that the lessons of Iraq have been lost on some. The Americans destroyed the whole Baathist administrative apparatus (instead of recycling it for democratic purposes) and made the local population pay dearly for it during the period of chaos that ensued. But it's not that Mr. Ehud Barak doesn't know this. The answer may lie in the coming Israeli election and the deep dive of his Labor party in the polls. It's a dangerous thing when a candidate is accountable to a public that wants blood.

One thing is for sure: bombing 'em into the Stone Age won't do the trick. Any long-term solution requires a political strategy, complete with goals, sticks, carrots and the intervention of international players. And I don't see the Israeli leadership formulating any policy other than the ephemeral manu militari solution it is currently implementing.

The phone book as criminal evidence

Q.: What do Baruch Sofer, Elad and Noa Mandel, Tehila Cohen and Eitan Klein have in common?
A.: They are all listed in Israel's phone books.

So what, you'll say. So are 4 million other Israelis.

But these people live in illegal Israeli outposts in the West Bank. Sofer is a resident of Amona, the Mandels live in Palgei Mayim, Cohen calls Neveh Erez home and Klein is a dweller of Nofei Nehemia, Rehelim, the first outpost listed in the Sasson Report, a 2004 document that examined the State of Israel's role in assisting the settlers in the establishment of those unlawful outposts.

How did these folks get to have a telephone line in the first place? At first sight it would look a bit illogical. The current Israeli government claims to be opposed to the unilateral seizure of Palestinian land by the settlers. Now since there exists a State entity that regulates the telecommunications business, all lines installed in territories under Israeli control must be approved by the State. Therefore, the lines in the outposts enjoy the legal approval of the State of Israel, the same state that has called the outposts illegal. Surprised?

Well, you shouldn't be. The whole issue is part of a bigger problem, namely the Israeli governments' constant equivocation when it comes to the settlements; their saying one thing and doing another. Their denouncing the settlers while allocating resources to build homes for them like crazy. Their decreeing that this or that outpost will be evacuated while looking for the legal loopholes that will allow the decision not to be implemented. Their claiming that they only intend to keep those settlements next to the Green Line (1967 border) in a final agreement, while approving a new civilian settlement in Maskiyot, far removed from that line.

No amount of evacuation promises will convince the international public that Israel's government has the determination or even the wish to remove the illegal outposts from the West Bank, when it can't even bring itself to remove them from the phone book.

Can one say "the Jews"?

I don't mean "the Jews" as in "the Jews have won one-fourth of all Nobel prizes." I mean "the Jews" as in "the Jews have poisoned wells and fields in the West Bank." Can one say that? There seems to exist a stigma attached to the suggestion that if a Jew does something wrong it has anything to do with his being Jewish -- a stigma that does not apply to other peoples. If a Hungarian beats up a Jew, for instance, that's yet another example of perennial Magyar antisemitism. If a Jew beats up an Arab, on the other hand, we rush to show evidence that the man is deranged and that his Jewishness played no role in the event.

It is true that, in principle, generalizations should never be made. It is wrong to say "the Argentinians invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982," for instance. I'm an Argentinian and I didn't invade the Falklands, nor do I support the notion that our (in my opinion) legitimate claim to sovereignty over the islands should be realized by military means, or that our rights should trump the rights of the population already living there, for whom becoming Argentinians is anathema. But I don't go ballistic over hearing "the Argentinians invaded the Falklands" because, after all, the invaders were not private agents, but representatives (even if unelected ones) of Argentinian interests. It's unfair to the substantial minority of Argentinians who believe the invasion was wrong on moral grounds; but it can hardly be described as an outright outrage.

Things get a little fuzzier with the following kind of generalization:

Many goyim watch these movies, not out of compassion, but out of self-congratulatory sentiment. Alas, the Jews of the Holocaust are used - used for their juxtaposing of the Nazis and fascists for being as evil as we see them. Or did the double-standards not occur to you - of how those Jews butchered by the Soviets and the Romanians and the Poles and the Czechoslovaks are rarely mentioned in leftist-dominated visual media, but the suffering of those Jews butchered by the Nazis and fascists is always on our screens?

Did "the Poles" butcher Jews? Or did some Poles murder Jews, with most others taking no part in the killings, and not condoning them? Were the Poles comparable to the Nazis (i.e. State agents) -- or to the Jewish kapos who actively collaborated in the massacres (i.e. individual wrongdoers)? Sure, lots of Poles did kill Jews, there's no denying that -- but did they kill them as Poles, or as people who wanted to take over their houses, or were moved by irrational superstitions? The author of the quoted excerpt seems to think they acted as Poles. Others would beg to differ.

Now let's fast forward 60 years and change continents. In recent years there have been reports of water well poisoning in the Israeli-occupied West Bank -- and according to Israeli police estimates, Jewish settlers are to blame (Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5, Source 6, Source 7). Poisoned wheat kernels have been spread over the Palestinians' pasture fields as well; and, again, Jewish settlers have been deemed responsible (Source 8).

In the Middle Ages, the Jews were falsely accused of trying to poison the Christians, especially through well-poisoning. Any suggestion that the recent instances of poisoning in the West Bank can be blamed on "the Jews," as opposed to a collection of individual Jews, touches thus a very sensitive nerve and should not be irresponsibly made.

Now the fact that an accusation shouldn't be irresponsibly made does not mean it can't be made at all. Only, a threshold of responsibility must be established, composed of very stringent criteria. Thus, it would appear to be unfair to collectively blame the Jews for an act of violence unless the following conditions are met:

1. It must be carried out in the name of Jewish interests.
2. It must be part of a policy.
3. It must be done with the support and connivance of official Jewish institutions.
4. It must not be condemned by the majority of the Jewish public.

In the case of the Jewish poisoners in the West Bank, all four conditions are unfortunately met. The settlers don't try to poison the Arabs for personal reasons, but to make them flee from the land given by God to the Jews. They don't do the poisoning in isolation, but as part of a violent combo that also includes clubbing elderly shepherds, uprooting fruit trees, torching houses, desecrating cemeteries, smashing cars and market stands, stoning schoolgirls and more. They must not fear retaliation from the local population because they have the full weight of the Israeli army behind them. Although investigations are ostensibly opened, those responsible are never caught, much less jailed. Finally, neither the Israeli citizenry nor a relevant percentage of Diaspora Jews demand for Israel's government to crack down on the settlers or else.

Of the four conditions, the most critical one, in my view, is #3. The settlers could not rampage the West Bank if they did not enjoy heavy subsidizing and military support from Israel, as well as the impunity ensured by the State's justice system. (Which is irrespective of whether fig leaves are donned or not. "We strongly condemn the settlers" is no substitute for actually jailing them; even Czarist Russia prosecuted a few perpetrators after the worst pogroms.) Here, in the support provided to the settlers, is where the self-styled Jewish state takes their crimes out of the private sphere and makes them the responsibility of the whole population represented by that state -- i.e. Israeli Jews (Israeli Arabs are not represented, only contained, by the State), as well as Diaspora Jews who accept for Israel to act in their name.

It's in those Jews' power to dismantle Israel as a racist state and reinvent it as a state of all its citizens that won't tolerate and support acts of violence against defenseless minorities. Until they do, saying "the Jews have poisoned wells and fields in the West Bank" will be just as fair as saying "the Argentinians invaded the Falklands in 1982."