Jewlicious

Does Pat Oliphant Need an Education?

16 years ago
78 Comments
by themiddle
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This is what Pat Oliphant thinks of the Jewish state and what happened with Gaza.

Pat Oliphant is wrong.

However, there is a lesson here for Israel. No matter how hard Israel tries to minimize injury to civilians, to fight ethically and to protect its citizens from the endless attacks they’ve had to endure, it will be vilified. Even if Israel unilaterally leaves land where Palestinian live and leaves them to their own governance, it will be vilified. Three, no matter how many rockets are fired by Palestinians or Hizbullah at Israel, any response will be painted as inhuman.

The lesson is that next time Israel should do what it will be accused of doing anyway. If we’re going to have to watch anti-Semitism surge, lies about Jews spoken publicly by prospective government officials, hideous reports and votes coming out of the UN, uncomfortable situations across numerous N. American university campuses, and more, then the least the Israelis can do, for themselves and for Jews living outside Israel, is to finish off Hamas. They accomplished nothing in this war other than to powerfully arm Israel’s haters.

Pat Oliphant is proud of his work, I’m sure, but he should be ashamed of the ugly depiction of Israelis, of Jews, and especially of the comparison to the Nazis. He should also take a good look at Hamas men next time he has a chance because they don’t look like that little old lady.

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78 Comments

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  • LD says, after another round of backtracking, lying about what was written, huffing and puffing and proving nothing:

    “Go back and read your history you condescending prick.”

    Hmm, I do believe it’s time to savor this victory. Nobody calling anybody a fucking Nazi, nobody talking about the Jewish establishment, and nobody talking about Jews and race.

    Instead, the little puppy is whimpering as he runs away with that cute tail tucked between his legs,

    “Waaaah, he’s such a condescending prick. No, no, no, he’s a retard and a moron, and a Nazi and he’s yucky. Waaah.

    I know, LD, it’s hard when a retard and a moron turns that Benny Morris quote of which you’re so proud against you. Twice. I do it humbly, not with condescension.

    Heh.

    Ciao, LD.

  • You haven’t proved anything. You’re just insisting on your argument and straw-manning.

    Morris implies that the unifying mechanism was religion.

    But he provides context as to why. He brings up the British and French fragmentation of Arab society. The Chieftains who were essentially bought off. The Arab leaders who advocated Zionism (against the sentiments of the people).

    Morris is not saying the antagonism to Zionism was religious. Only that, as a tactic in the burgeoning nationalist movement – Islam was a unifying force. Unifying because the other manners in which to bring those people together failed since the society was so fragmented.

    It was not dogma. It was strategy. That’s my point, you fucking retard. You really are dense.

    Morris goes on to say that the CHIEF MOTOR – meaning, the main reason, which was my point – of Arab antagonism to Zionism was fear of territorial displacement and dispossession.

    You pick and choose the statements Morris made to support your inanely idiotic conclusions.

    Hence, why I provided the entire quote w/ context. Yes, there was violence against Jews (btw which did not rival that against Arabs, again according to Morris who you predictable implied is pro-Palestinian earlier) but this was due to the nationalistic tendencies within the populace.

    Not Jew-hatred. Especially in the context of the times – all these people were getting States. The Arabs wanted there own State as well but were not logistically equipped for it yet. They had a lot against them. Most of all the corrupt Arab leadership.

    Again, quite explicitly – Morris states “[…] of course, the chief recruiting agent for Palestinian Arab nationalism was Zionism itself. Above all, the fear of and antagonism toward the Zionist enterprise fueled national awareness and passions in the salons, coffee shops, and streets of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa.”

    themiddle said:

    ——
    Suggesting that since Darfur has the same number of write-ups as Israel, Amnesty and HRW are being fair to Israel is very poor data analysis resulting in a false conclusion.
    ——

    You were the one complaining about the sheer number of reports. This is all just about numbers to you.

    Why does Israel not “deserve” more reports? The reports reflect the crimes. The crimes are clearly aplenty. You just think they aren’t and thus, fabricate this concept of a bias.

    I already stated that if one is to pursue this idiocy, one has to first agree to several premises.

    First, that such a bias may exist (humoring your stupidity). Then one has to accept the concept of a bias within YOUR context.

    Like, ok let’s say there is one. What does it entail? That these reports are false and aplenty? If that’s the case – it’s biased but you haven’t read any of them. I doubt you read anything about the conflict that doesn’t adhere to your narrative.

    What was your contention? That based on sheer numbers, Israel is unfairly reported on.

    Then when Falk outlined that there was no huge disparity between Israel and everyone else (meaning Israel has tons of reports while others do not) you weasel-worded your way out of your early definition of ‘bias’.

    Now, it’s about Israel being of equal frequency reports.

    You’re a hack.

    Keep telling yourself that you’ve been giving a history lesson.

    Your conclusions – which are based on bullshit – are laughably idiotic.

    The Palestinians identified themselves much closer with the Egyptians and the Jordanians. Their rule was not of the same nature as the Israelis.

    The Palestinian nationalist movement was still growing and ironically it simply further proves my point – that it was a reaction to Zionism.

    You still fail. Go back and read your history you condescending prick.

  • When at any point did you express a substantiated argument w/ anything resembling a ‘history lesson’?

    You’re delusional.

    🙄

    There are still a number of questions I’ve asked you which you’ve ignored.

    And your conclusions are the problem. Note what I said – the Egyptian/Jordanian rule of the OT was not the same type of rule as Israel’s Occupation.

    And the original point of contention was whether or not Arabs blindly hated Jews, being the chief motor of their antagonism towards Zionism.

    I never said that Arabs blindly hated Jews. And that was not the point of contention. You quoted Morris and I pointed out that he is not focusing on Palestinian nationalism but on shared religion.

    As for Jordan’s occupation being different from Israel’s, that’s just evidence of Palestinian nationalism having little support among Palestinians. Otherwise, they would have fought the monarch who tried to annex their land. It’s just that they didn’t see it as their land and they hadn’t formulated a nationalist vision yet.

    The history lesson never stops.

    And Morris pointed out that it was the fear of territorial displacement and dispossession that was their main reasons for resisting.

    It’s correct that the nationalistic character of the resistance was burgeoning in the beginning but had not taken full-form later but that’s not the point.

    All that meant was that the Palestinians were not organized. And between the local ‘chieftains’ and the British/French and the Hashemites/ibn Ali/etc. – the region was still fractured. Within the context – which Morris provided – there was no unifying force.

    But that doesn’t mean they did not feel those nationalistic tendencies. It just wasn’t logistically plausible yet.

    So now you’re backtracking and accepting my shallow, superficial argument but instead of admitting that you’ve been whipped, you want to tell us that you didn’t really mean nationalism, because they weren’t quite ready for it, it’s just that you really meant…uh, nationalism.

    Whatever.

    Morris goes on to say that the religious element was a good recruiting mechanism.

    Score another one for The Middle.

    True, but he does not say that this was the reason they resisted a Jewish State. Merely, that given the history of the region/etc. (he points out that as people became more educated and realized what was happening, they became more radicalized POLITICALLY), the religious ‘dressing up’ was a good way to unify people. And that’s just a tactic. Not dogma.

    That’s your interpretation. In fact, it’s an incorrect conclusion to what he says. You see, he SAYS that nationalism was slowly taking root and would influence anti-Zionist riots, but the ONLY EVIDENCE he provides alludes to Muslim religious reasons. Read your own Morris quote again and you’ll see that I’m right.

    Again.

    Here, just so you won’t say you couldn’t find it:

    From page 10-12 of ‘1948: A History Of The First Arab-Israeli War’, by Benny Morris:

    ——-
    Without doubt, the British had ignored the will of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. But imperial powers at the time generally took no note of the wishes of third world peoples. And there were specific extenuating circumstances – the Arabs of Palestine, like the majority of those outside Palestine, had supported and were still supporting the (Muslim) Ottoman Empire in its war against the (Christian) Allied powers; and there was, at the time, no Palestinian Arab national movement nor any separate Palestinian Arab national consciousness. Indeed, “Arab” national awareness, with concomitant political aspirations, was barely in its infancy among the elites in the neighboring Arab centers of Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad. Morever, the primary agents of Arab independence during the war, the Hashemite leaders of the desert revolt, appeared not to be averse to Jewish rule over Palestine. When Weizmann (LD’s note: Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel) met Faisal, Hussein ibn ‘Ali’s (LD’s note: ibn ‘Ali was Sharif of Mecca, and Emir of Mecca from 1908 until 1917) son and the commander of the Hashemite army, in a wadi in southern Transjordan in June 1918, the two men got on famously – and Faisal, interested in Zionist support for Hashemite ambitions, endorsed Zionist colonization of Palestine.

    When the dust had settled, Faisal was installed by the British as ruler in Syria while his brother, ‘Abdullah, was given a separate emirate in Transjordan. In March 1920 Faisal declared himself “King of Syria and Palestine.” But in July 1920, partly in response, the French, already masters of Beirut, invaded Syria and conquerered Damascus, ejecting Faisal. The British then reinstalled Faisal as king of Iraq, which he and his offspring were to rule for almost forty years.

    France emerged from the world war with League of Nations mandates over Lebanon and Syria while the British held sway directly over Mandated Palestine and Iraq and indirectly over Egypt and Transjordan. The grand Hashemite vision of one giant, powerful Arab state had dissipated into a handful of smaller, separate semi-independent or mandated Arab territories, at least temporarily under Western imperial boots. But the imperial powers were only partyly to blame for this fracturing of the Arab world; so, too, were the Hashemite princelings and the separate local Arab nationalist groupings, in Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut, and Cairo. Each sought power and independence in his own turt; none wished to be ruled from the remote, medieval village of Mecca by the would-be, unifying tribal chieftain, Hussein ibn ‘Ali.

    The imperial carve-up left British-ruled Palestine cut off from its former provincial capitals, Damascus and Beirut, now under French control, and the Palestinian elite quickly understood that their future would be separate from that of Syria and Lebanon. Thus, 1920 was to prove crucial in the emergence of a separate Palestinian Arab national movement and a decisive moment in the evolving Zionist-Arab conflict. The events in Damascus had released Arab nationalist passions that were indirectly and directly to lead to the first major Arab-Jewish clashes in Palestine.

    These broke out in March-April that year. In the Galilee Panhandle, a gray no-man’s-land between the French and British areas of control, a band of Arab marauders – driven by either anti-French or anti-Zionist sentiments – in the first week of March assaulted the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai. The assault led to the Zionist evacuation of the area, to which settlers returned only in October, after Britain and France had agreed that the Panhandle would be part of the Palestine Mandate. but this was a sideshow. More omnious was the outbreak, on 4 April, in the midst of the Muslim Nabi Musa (the Prophet Moses) festivities, of pogram-like Arab rioting in Jerusalem’s Old City. A Muslim religious procession, the marchers wiedling knives and clubs, erupted in anti-Jewish violence; shouts of “Idbah al-Yahud” (Slaughter the Jews) and “Muhammed’s faith was born with the sword” filled the air. At the end of three days, six Jews lay dead, with about two hundred injured and a handful raped. The British authorities had reacted lackadaisically and ineptly, drawing from the Jews the accusation that they had behaved like Russian policemen during pogroms. The Zionist leadership, prodded by veterans of Hashomer, the Zionist self-defense/guards association founded a dozen years before, and the Jewish battalions that had fought with the British army in WWI, reacted by establishing an underground “national” or ethnic militia, the Haganah Organization (Irgun Hahaganah, Hebrew for defense organization), known simply as the Haganah.

    The 1920 outbreak was only the first in a series of bouts of violence – 1921, 1929, 1936-1939 – that grew progressively more lethal and more extensive. The spread of national consciousness during the 1920s and 1930s clearly paralleled, and probably drew sustenance from, the dramatic increase in literacy among Palestine’s Arabs, one of the fruits of the enlightened British Mandate administration. Increased prosperity, triggering hopes of further betterment, relative political freedom, and the gradual emergence of an urban middle class also tended to radicalize the populaiton. This burgeoning national consciousness periodically expressed itself in anti-Zionist violence.

    But violence did no emerge only from “modern” nationalist passions; it also drew on powerful religious wellsprings. Nothing, it seemed, could mobilize the Palestinian Arab masses for action more readily than Muslim religious rhetoric and symbols. It was no coincidence that the April 1920 outbreak was triggered by religious festivities or that the far larger outbreak of 1929, in which 130 Jews were murdered (including 69 ultra Orthodox, non-Zionist yeshiva students massacred by their neighbors in Hebron) was prompted by accusations that the Jews intended to take over Haram al-Sharif (the noble sanctuary, the Temple Mount), destroy its two sacred mosques, and rebuild the Solomonic temple at the site. And it was indicative that the emerging leader of Palestinian Arab national movement, Muhammed Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was to dominate Palestinian politics until mid-1948, was a (Muslim) cleric (an unusual phenomenon in the third world nationalist movements). Al-Husseini and others consciously deployed religious rhetoric and symbols to mobilize the masses for anti-Zionist and later anti-British violence.

    But, of course, the chief recruiting agent for Palestinian Arab nationalism was Zionism itself. Above all, the fear of and antagonism toward the Zionist enterprise fueled national awareness and passions in the salons, coffee shops, and streets of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa.

    You see how much he wants to say that it’s nationalism, but every example includes religious overtones? That makes plenty of sense when you realize Jews are only a small fraction of the region’s inhabitants at the time. The problem isn’t that of Arab nationalism, it’s that of Islam prohibiting non-believers from controlling what is considered Muslim lands.

    themiddle said:

    —-
    A “law-breaking state” that has a fraction of the casualties, destruction or duration of wars compared to Iraq or Darfur, yet gets as many write-ups? Hmmmm…

    I’d say that reveals a clear and very strong bias. Which by the way, was further proven by their attendance and participation in Durban.
    —-

    Explain why. First of all I provided plenty of statistical proof. Are you talking about the UN?

    We weren’t discussing the UN, although we could if you like. No we were discussing Amnesty and HRW. Your statistical evidence came from Falk and as I pointed out, even without his clear anti-Israel bias, the data may be correct but the interpretation is entirely flawed.

    Suggesting that since Darfur has the same number of write-ups as Israel, Amnesty and HRW are being fair to Israel is very poor data analysis resulting in a false conclusion.

    Tell me, whether these reports on Israel are unwarranted. Simply looking at numbers means nothing. And that’s the extent of your analysis.

    You’re literally just looking on the surface and making a judgment.

    So tell me if these reports are unjustified. That would require actually reading them though – which I know you won’t do.

    I read the reports quite often and somewhere on this site there are even a couple of posts or comments analyzing reports. Some claims are warranted and some are not. The issue was the focus on Israel which you tried to show was fair and equitable and which I disputed.

    You brought them up, not I. I was responding to your claims and stats. You want to set up the game-board and then when you get clobbered, you complain about the game board and the game.

    Hey, that sounds just like Palestinian history of the last century.

    It’s really weird that you think you’ve said anything substantial in our exchange.

    You keep talking about Phil like I worship his blog. That’s all you got? And then you keep reiterating that you’ve been giving me a history lesson?

    All you’ve done is draw superficial conclusions from superficial truths. You’re a fucking retard.

    And a fucking Nazi. I know, I know.

    Listen, I’m just hoping you’ll go back there because this has been a massive waste of time. There are some issues you could have raised that would have been very hard to rebut, but instead you keep making all kinds of elementary mistakes.

    There’s a guy who visits us by the moniker, Xisnotx. Now, he presents a tough debate about these topics. You don’t. You just take up time.

  • When at any point did you express a substantiated argument w/ anything resembling a ‘history lesson’?

    You’re delusional.

    And your conclusions are the problem. Note what I said – the Egyptian/Jordanian rule of the OT was not the same type of rule as Israel’s Occupation.

    And the original point of contention was whether or not Arabs blindly hated Jews, being the chief motor of their antagonism towards Zionism.

    And Morris pointed out that it was the fear of territorial displacement and dispossession that was their main reasons for resisting.

    It’s correct that the nationalistic character of the resistance was burgeoning in the beginning but had not taken full-form later but that’s not the point.

    All that meant was that the Palestinians were not organized. And between the local ‘chieftains’ and the British/French and the Hashemites/ibn Ali/etc. – the region was still fractured. Within the context – which Morris provided – there was no unifying force.

    But that doesn’t mean they did not feel those nationalistic tendencies. It just wasn’t logistically plausible yet.

    Morris goes on to say that the religious element was a good recruiting mechanism. True, but he does not say that this was the reason they resisted a Jewish State. Merely, that given the history of the region/etc. (he points out that as people became more educated and realized what was happening, they became more radicalized POLITICALLY), the religious ‘dressing up’ was a good way to unify people. And that’s just a tactic. Not dogma.

    themiddle said:

    —-
    A “law-breaking state” that has a fraction of the casualties, destruction or duration of wars compared to Iraq or Darfur, yet gets as many write-ups? Hmmmm…

    I’d say that reveals a clear and very strong bias. Which by the way, was further proven by their attendance and participation in Durban.
    —-

    Explain why. First of all I provided plenty of statistical proof. Are you talking about the UN?

    Tell me, whether these reports on Israel are unwarranted. Simply looking at numbers means nothing. And that’s the extent of your analysis.

    You’re literally just looking on the surface and making a judgment.

    So tell me if these reports are unjustified. That would require actually reading them though – which I know you won’t do.

    It’s really weird that you think you’ve said anything substantial in our exchange.

    You keep talking about Phil like I worship his blog. That’s all you got? And then you keep reiterating that you’ve been giving me a history lesson?

    All you’ve done is draw superficial conclusions from superficial truths. You’re a fucking retard.

  • Why the hell would Palestinians would be revolting against the Jordanians/Egyptians?

    You said they had nationalism driving their actions. If so, they would have continued to pursue their nationalistic dreams even if other Arab states are occupying them. I said they were motivated by other factors including faith. I believe your statement here proves my point and negates yours. The fact is that real nationalistic drive isn’t seen among the Palestinians until the late 50s, early 60s. When the PLO is founded, in 1964, you see the first organized drive to pursue nationalistic goals.

    The connotation you apply to that period (as Occupation, as in the Occupation of the past 40+ years) is completely false.

    Why? If you’re dreaming of a country, as you suggest, then living under the thumb of a monarch isn’t the way you’d want to live. Is it? If you’d rather call it something other than “occupation” because the Palestinians didn’t rebel? Of course they didn’t, because nationalistic motives weren’t on the agenda. When they become the agenda, then you start seeing friction between Palestinians and the Jordanian government culminating in Black September.

    I’ve been providing you with history lessons throughout this discussion and your best rebuttals so far are, “You fail and your assertions are shallow/superficial.”

    I haven’t even gotten to that part though. But your assertion is again superficial. You didn’t counter a damn thing I said. Your rebuttals have consisted of one-liners about how I’m a racist or how my source is racist.

    Forgive me, little guy, but you need to do better. Throughout the discussion I’ve given you substance and history, not to mention common sense and logic. Your whining is amusing but doesn’t convince anybody.

    Falk being anti-Israel? How do you even prove this? And furthermore, what the fuck does it matter? Counter the FACTS I laid out.

    I did. I gave you numbers. I showed you that comparing Darfur to Israel is a joke considering that you have at least 500 TIMES more victims there but according to Falk’s claims, Israel is treated fairly because it gets about the same number of mentions by Amnesty or HRW.

    I’ve already made this assertion once and instead of addressing it, you’re claiming I didn’t. Go back to my previous comment and it’s all there. There are 22 Arab countries with about 60 times Israel’s population but all of these countries merit just 4 times as many mentions as Israel even though they are almost all dictatorships or monarchies. That is equitable? Not only that, but to get to the 4 multiple, you have to include the Iraq war and Darfur where a genocide is taking place.

    He works for the UN.

    Yes, but he works for the egregiously biased UN Human Rights Council as the rappeu…oh wait, I already told you this once before above. Read and learn, idiot.

    “He put out a book that went through the documentary record.”

    And when people publish, you can criticize them anyway. As I did. Do you have a counter-claim or are you just going to pretend that any UN employee who writes a book is automatically to be believed?

    Check Amnesty International and HRW.

    Sure, I did. They’re biased, that’s my conclusion. And if Falk’s totals are correct, then these groups should be deeply ashamed that Israel merits as many topics as Iraq or Darfur.

    Like I said, you dismissed that excerpt based on the fact that Falk wrote it. Pathetic.

    No, I gave you the same reasoning above and then dismissed him as an Israel hater. So you got both reasons and then dismissal. What’s pathetic is that you either didn’t read it, didn’t understand it or are plainly lying.

    If he’s so easily dismissed, logically, you should be able to dismiss his argument.

    Which I did. Easily.

    Recall the preface to the excerpt.

    To deal with you asinine argument one must first lower themselves to your level.

    I would first have to agree there may be a bias. I would also have to agree with the concept of a bias within the context of these affairs (one country’s crimes versus another).

    Then I’d have to ponder the motive and such. Like WHY is the UN so “anti-Israel” – if it is.

    *Yawn* Dude, if you read what I had written, I wouldn’t have to read through all this idiocy. Please stop already, I’m crying from boredom.

    “Anti-Israel”….another fucking stupid concept, see: the ridiculousness of calling Soviet dissidents like Sahkarov(sp) “anti-Soviet” as a demonstration of the ridiculousness of calling someone “anti-Israel” or “anti-American.”

    So even if we conclude there is a “bias” the question then becomes, whether the reports/etc. on Israel are unwarranted.

    It may simply be that Israel is a law-breaking State and thus, is documented extensively as a result.

    A “law-breaking state” that has a fraction of the casualties, destruction or duration of wars compared to Iraq or Darfur, yet gets as many write-ups? Hmmmm…

    I’d say that reveals a clear and very strong bias. Which by the way, was further proven by their attendance and participation in Durban.

    So it’s not a serious question. There are several preliminary questions to ask that easily expel the legitimacy of your assertion.

    You still fail. I’ll get to the rest later.

    Please don’t. If you’re going to waste my time just so I can keep repeating earlier claims that you ignored or were too stupid to understand, I’d rather you go back to Weiss. Please, please, please go back to him already.

  • Why the hell would Palestinians would be revolting against the Jordanians/Egyptians?

    The connotation you apply to that period (as Occupation, as in the Occupation of the past 40+ years) is completely false.

    I haven’t even gotten to that part though. But your assertion is again superficial. You didn’t counter a damn thing I said. Your rebuttals have consisted of one-liners about how I’m a racist or how my source is racist.

    Falk being anti-Israel? How do you even prove this? And furthermore, what the fuck does it matter? Counter the FACTS I laid out.

    He works for the UN. He put out a book that went through the documentary record.

    Check Amnesty International and HRW.

    Like I said, you dismissed that excerpt based on the fact that Falk wrote it. Pathetic.

    If he’s so easily dismissed, logically, you should be able to dismiss his argument.

    Recall the preface to the excerpt.

    To deal with you asinine argument one must first lower themselves to your level.

    I would first have to agree there may be a bias. I would also have to agree with the concept of a bias within the context of these affairs (one country’s crimes versus another).

    Then I’d have to ponder the motive and such. Like WHY is the UN so “anti-Israel” – if it is.

    “Anti-Israel”….another fucking stupid concept, see: the ridiculousness of calling Soviet dissidents like Sahkarov(sp) “anti-Soviet” as a demonstration of the ridiculousness of calling someone “anti-Israel” or “anti-American.”

    So even if we conclude there is a “bias” the question then becomes, whether the reports/etc. on Israel are unwarranted.

    It may simply be that Israel is a law-breaking State and thus, is documented extensively as a result.

    So it’s not a serious question. There are several preliminary questions to ask that easily expel the legitimacy of your assertion.

    You still fail. I’ll get to the rest later.

  • I haven’t countered you claims?! I’ve done so one by one.

    I didn’t tell you to prove the UN is anti-Israel. I challenged you to prove the UN Human Rights Council isn’t anti-Israel because Falk works for them.

    http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/

    It should be easy for you to do this if mine is just a shallow assertion.

    As for “point scoring,” I’m sorry that providing you with historical evidence is considered point scoring by you. Pointing out that your claims about nationalism are proven moot by the absence of any attempt to found a state when the Palestinians were under Jordanian and Egyptian rule is not point scoring. It’s factual information that undermines your claims.

  • Your challenge to me (to demonstrate that the UN is not anti-Israel) is preposterous.

    The nature of these reports does not concern you. Just the sheer amount. Just as I said – you are inanely idiotic and shallow.

    And comparing the size of a country to another versus each others’ crimes is relevant HOW exactly? Again, another shallow assertion.

    Do you even think about what you’re writing? Do you have a basis grasp of logic?

    I’m not twisting ANYTHING. The cartoon has a fucking plume of smoke that is wavy just like a standard picture of the Israeli flag would have a wavy blue line on top.

    Often a flag is shown wavy like that as if the wind was blowing on it.

    Hence, the plume of smoke in the shape that it is. Even the ground is wavy.

    It’s a FLAG.

    It’s not morally wrong to call Israelis, Nazis. It’s just inaccurate – but even then, within the same sphere of shared components. Nazism is a form of fascism/racism/etc.

    And the figure in the picture is not specifically a Nazi. That’s just the conclusion we all draw because of the cultural effect of the Nazis.

    You fail so hard.

  • I’m not an antisemite and your reasoning that I am was fucking retarded.

    Just as you rebuttals. Anything contrary to your perspective is anti-Israel or biased against Israel.

    You don’t give a substantiated argument. You rely on ‘point scoring’ hasbara bullshit.

    It’s real easy to dismiss anything that contradicts your views as antisemitic or anti-Israel. And that’s exactly what you’re doing.

    You’re not countering my claims – you’re dismissing them on the grounds that they themselves are biased.

    Absolutely ridiculous. You’re a child.

  • Of course you’re an anti-Semite. I show that above in a couple of places.

    I’ll respond to the rest of your comment when I have more time. But I do encourage you to re-read the section by Morris which you quoted (and for the record, I don’t have the same respect for the work of Morris as many of the pro-Palestinians out there). He points out that the flavor of the attacks on Jews and their causes was Islamic in nature. Nationalism, for the Palestinians, was not a powerful or influential movement until recent decades. They were unified in the early years of the last century by religious symbolism. As you probably know, Islam as a religion has no issue with Zionists because they don’t exist in the Quran or hadiths. Jews and other minorities, however, do exist and there are prohibitions and rules about the treatment these minorities deserve. It is within this context that one has to view the attacks on the Jewish Yishuv in those early years.

    Since then, the negative views of Jews in Islam have come to dominate over any positive interpretations.

    To put a little extra perspective on this question of nationalism versus religiously inspired hatred and enmity, I would ask you to consider the following question: why, in the 19 years that Palestinians lived under Jordanian and Egyptian rule (1948-1967), did they not demand or rebel for a Palestinian state?

    —-

    The suggestion that Israel with its 6 million inhabitants merits a fourth as many “reports” by NGOs as the Arab world with hundreds of millions of inhabitants is laughable. The comparisons with the reporting on Sudan and Iraq prove the point. The first has a genocide going on where in a couple of years several multiples of ALL the victims, Jewish and non-Jewish, of the fighting since Zionism arrived in Palestine, have been murdered. The other has had a multi-country army with about 150,000 troops engaged in fighting in an ongoing war inside a country with 2.5 times Israel’s population. You would expect far more coverage of this war, but you don’t get it. The focus and emphasis on Israel is entirely unreasonable.

    Furthermore, the very organization for which Falk (co-author of your “research”) works IS, without question, the most anti-Israel institutional body in the world. He is a vocal and unfair opponent of Israel’s and was cynically placed as the UN human rights’ body’s special rapporteur on Israel with a mandate not to investigate both sides or even one side, but rather to investigate the Israelis’ violations of rules and laws. In other words, you’re quoting the fox in the henhouse.

    I’ll tell you what. Since you quoted Falk in your claim that Israel isn’t singled out unfairly, I challenge you to show me how the organization for which he works, a UN organization no less, doesn’t have a clear bias against Israel. Show me how Israel is treated fairly in this body. Good luck!

    —–

    Your twisting and turning about the cartoon and how Nazism is associated with evil and therefore Israel is now the new Nazi are false. Did Oliphant draw a stormtrooper to describe the genocide in Sudan? Or is that number of dead, hundreds of times greater than what happened in Gaza – and unlike Gaza where most of the dead are militants and terrorists, and the civilian dead are almost entirely unintentional, in Sudan civilians are targeted almost exclusively – less deserving of stormtroopers and Nazi references than a cartoon showing his opinion of Gaza and Israel?

  • *themiddle said:
    ——————–
    No sir, people don’t draw Nazi-like stormtroopers for just any old political ideology. He meant to say that the Jews are like the Nazis. If he had wanted to convey that it was Israelis or “Zionists” then he would have used a different image than a stormtrooper.
    ——————–

    Not JEWS, themiddle. ZIONISTS.

    And why not a stormtrooper (I’m humoring your premise)?

    Isn’t it ANTISEMITIC to suggest that only a Jew can be associated with a stormtrooper and not a Zionist?

    Or is it that you believe Zionism = Judaism? I think that’s what it is. Zionism is a political ideology. Judaism is a religion. Jewish identity is complex. You can be of Jewish descent and you can be a Jew by religion. Where does Zionism fit in all of this?

    It is a a nationalistic ideology for those of Jewish ethnicity and religion. But it does not represent Judaism or all those of Jewish descent. There were plenty of Orthodox Jews back in the early days of the Zionist movement who opposed the project as it was imagined and there are plenty fo Orthodox Jews who oppose it now. And if Orthodox Jews can oppose Zionism, so can ethnic and moderately religious Jews and those who are of Jewish descent but do not feel a connection to the faith.

    Bottomline: The smoke plume and the border of the floor in the cartoon + the Star of David convey the image of the Israeli flag. It’s art. It’s clever.

    Regularly, REGULARLY, people associate countries/people/etc. with Hitler and Nazi Germany.

    The Nazis are associated with pure evil. That’s what they have become in world culture (perhaps some still support them, but at the least it’s political suicide and thus, no where in the mainstream of most of the world is there support for Nazism).

    I personally have used the analogy but it’s more of an emotional reactionary response rather than a truthful statement.

    I think it’s much more accurate to say Israel is a fascist/militaristic/chauvinist society. It’s become a Spartan society. Like Joel Kovel has said, the ‘Macbeth of the Nations’.

    There are plenty of similarities between the Nazis and the Israelis. But when we say Nazi, we think Holocaust. We think pure evil due to the Holocaust. Sort of how people were saying Israel was committing a Holocaust in Gaza. Definitely an overstatement but there’s some truth in it.

    The correct analysis is that there are structural similarities between the societies. They belong in the same category. But no one is a Nazi. No one has achieved that KIND of evil because I don’t think anyone could kill 6+ million people today like they did (assembly-line style massacre). That’s why they are associated with pure evil – due to the Holocaust, with a capital ‘H’.

    So this piece of art – is meant to convey an image of the Israeli military machine as a fascist zombie. Tyrannical/etc.

    And that’s absolutely accurate.

    *themiddle said:
    ——————–
    (Quoting LD): Jewish political ideology IS causing antisemitism. You’re so dense you think people hate Jews or anyone for that matter for no reason?

    (themiddle): Bullshit. There are plenty of countries that do terrible things that are entirely unjustified, unlike Israel which is justified in its actions and they don’t get anywhere near the level of hatred or acrimony directed at Israel. Go ahead and show me how Russia has been vilified anywhere near like Israel for the far, far, far worse onslaught on Chechnya.
    ——————–

    Israel is not justified at all.

    But let’s go through this claim that Israel is getting more attention than others.

    First of all, one has to agree to your premise – that this attention is somehow unfair. And if it’s ‘unfair’ – in what way? Does that attention make Israel’s crimes even worse than they are? No. They are already disgusting. Colonization/theft of Palestinian land and resources/etc.

    This is good ole’ fashion colonialism. I could care less if people think it’s somehow unfair that Israel is hated because it’s a COLONIALIST STATE. There are all sorts of variables that affect where we focus our attention.

    We’re not all Amnesty International. A lot of these news items are framed in a certain narrative. Some are simply more ‘interesting’. But in the West, we bare a large responsibility since Israel gets an annual allowance from us as well as unprecedented military and political support. Not only that, but the American Jewish community account for the second or first highest population of Jews in the world.

    Zionism is the guiding political ideology of American Jewry. Our country is a Philo-Semitic culture. Jews have assimilated into American society. Furthermore, our own history as a nation is similar to Israel.

    Group of religious and ethnocentric fanatics come to a foreign land and claim it for themselves in the name of God. As in God prefers them. Manifest Destiny = Zionism.

    They both drive out or exterminate the native population. Native Americans = Arabs.

    They engage in a series of ‘peace processes’ that always seem to break down. Sort of like the countless treaties the Native Americans signed with the Euro-American colonists that obviously did not work.

    They both engage in a massive propaganda campaign against the group they are exterminating or driving out. Portraying themselves as the victims even though they are vastly more powerful.

    I.e. -> those savages just want to scalp all of us and eat our babies and wipe us out = those Arab/Islamic terrorists just want to throw us in the sea because we’re Jews and they hate Jews.

    Oh and then there’s slavery. Plenty of White Southerners justified slavery because Blacks were the ‘Children of Ham’. Israelis have consistently been polled as being virulently racist and chauvinistic towards Arabs. Plenty of fanatical Zionists (somewhat superfluous) believe Arabs are Amalek.

    From Ynet:
    http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3350467,00.html

    Excerpt:

    ——-
    Recent poll reveals 75 percent of Jewish students believe Arabs uneducated, uncivilized, unclean. Similar stereotypes found amongst Arab students toward Jews, but in lower percentages.

    […]On the other hand 25 percent of the Arab youth believe that Jews are the uneducated ones, while 57 percent of the Arab’s believe Jews are unclean.

    […]The poll was conducted by Dr. Haggai Kupermintz, Dr. Yigal Rosen and Harbi Hasaisi of Haifa University’s Center for Research on Peace Education.

    The data was presented at a bi-lingual conference held in Haifa. The study, titled “Perception of ‘the Other’ amongst Jewish and Arab Youth in Israel” included 1,600 students studying in 22 high schools around the country.

    “We have found a serious expression of stereotypical thinking on the Jewish students’ part regarding the Arab youth,” said Dr. Kupermintz, who pointed out that 69 percent of the Jewish students think that Arabs are not smart.

    […]He also added that, contrary to stereotypes, the Arab public in Israel shows more willingness of integration in the Jewish sector, than Jews do in the Arab sector.
    ——-

    This is just the tip of the iceberg.

    There are other abstract reasons why people focus on Israel more. Again, the focus is not unwarranted or unjustified. Criminal behavior is criminal behavior. Who gives a damn if one criminal is given more attention than others? The Holy Land is the center-stage of the Western World right now due to constant inteventionist policies in the ME. There is historical/religious/political allure to the Israel-Palestine conflict. That’s a fact of life you’ll have to live with.

    But keep in mind, you have the relevant support – that of the power elite. Money and guns and PR. It’s not like the general population ever get a say in our foreign policy.

    But moving on to more concrete analysis. I’ll refer to one set of statistics from the book, ‘Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East’, by UN rep. Richard Falk and author Howard Friel:

    Excerpt from page 188:

    ——-
    The charge here is that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are guilty of “bigtory” since, according to Dershowitz, they focus their human rights monitoring disproportionately on Israel as compared to Muslim countries such as Sudan and Algeria. This means, presumably, that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch publish disproportionately more reports critical of Israel that they do of the Muslim countries he identifies – but this is not the case. For example, with respect to Sudan, from September 29, 2000, to September 30, 2006, Amnesty International issued approximately 320 reports on Sudan, compared to 310 on Israel and its conduct in the Palestinian territories and in the 2006 Lebanon War. These figures for both Sudan and Israel refer to reports that Amnesty Intenrational designates as “Urgent Actions,” “News,” and “Reports.” Likewise, in the same period Human Rights Watch issued about 210 reports on Sudan and 180 on Israel. Thus Dershowitz once again, is simply wrong about his facts.

    In terms of other Muslim countries covered by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, there is no evidence of Amnesty or HRW favoring these countries. While Amnesty International issued 310 reports on Israel from September 29, 2000, to September 30, 2006, it also issued 120 on Saudi Arabia, 169 on Egypt, 178 on Afghanistan, 199 on Pakistan, 291 on Iraq, and 381 on Iran – all Muslim countries. Likewise, while HRW issued 180 reports on Israel within the period, it also issued 57 on Saudi Arabia, 86 on Pakistan, 119 on Iran, 137 on Egypt, 253 on Afghanistan, and 266 on Iraq. This means that for the six-year period, Amnesty International issued more reports on Sudan and Iran than it issued on Israel, and HRW issued more reports on Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq than it issued on Israel.

    There is another way to read these firgures in the context of the charge from Dershowitz that Amnesty International and HRW favor Muslim countries: For the period September 2000 to Septemeber 2006, Amnesty International issued about 1,338 reports – almost all of them highly critical – on the Muslim countries cited above, while issuing 310 on Israel. Likewise, for the same period, HRW isued about 918 reports – also highly critical – on the same Muslim countries for the same period, compared to 180 on Israel.

    In summary, there is no evidence of pro-Muslim [or] anti-Israel bias at either of these human rights organizations.
    ——-

    *themiddle said:
    ——————–
    {quoting LD): Do you really think, that Palestinians do not care about their day to day lives? They just arbitrarily hate Jews? That’s delusion AND narcissism.

    (themiddle):Really? So tell me why Palestinians were attacking Jews in 1920 when Jews were 10% of the population.
    ——————–

    Tell me exactly what your conclusion is. I am not dismissing Arab antisemitism but it’s far overblown. It’s not the reason why Arabs were antagonizing Jews during the early days of Historic Mandate Palestine.

    That’s not to say there wasn’t ANY religiously themed violence against Jews but there is no substantiated argument that proves this was the CHIEF MOTOR (as famed historian on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Prof. Benny Morris states) of Arab resistance to Zionism.

    Furthemore, let’s look at some historical analysis:

    From page 10-12 of ‘1948: A History Of The First Arab-Israeli War’, by Benny Morris:

    ——-
    Without doubt, the British had ignored the will of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. But imperial powers at the time generally took no note of the wishes of third world peoples. And there were specific extenuating circumstances – the Arabs of Palestine, like the majority of those outside Palestine, had supported and were still supporting the (Muslim) Ottoman Empire in its war against the (Christian) Allied powers; and there was, at the time, no Palestinian Arab national movement nor any separate Palestinian Arab national consciousness. Indeed, “Arab” national awareness, with concomitant political aspirations, was barely in its infancy among the elites in the neighboring Arab centers of Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad. Morever, the primary agents of Arab independence during the war, the Hashemite leaders of the desert revolt, appeared not to be averse to Jewish rule over Palestine. When Weizmann (LD’s note: Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel) met Faisal, Hussein ibn ‘Ali’s (LD’s note: ibn ‘Ali was Sharif of Mecca, and Emir of Mecca from 1908 until 1917) son and the commander of the Hashemite army, in a wadi in southern Transjordan in June 1918, the two men got on famously – and Faisal, interested in Zionist support for Hashemite ambitions, endorsed Zionist colonization of Palestine.

    When the dust had settled, Faisal was installed by the British as ruler in Syria while his brother, ‘Abdullah, was given a separate emirate in Transjordan. In March 1920 Faisal declared himself “King of Syria and Palestine.” But in July 1920, partly in response, the French, already masters of Beirut, invaded Syria and conquerered Damascus, ejecting Faisal. The British then reinstalled Faisal as king of Iraq, which he and his offspring were to rule for almost forty years.

    France emerged from the world war with League of Nations mandates over Lebanon and Syria while the British held sway directly over Mandated Palestine and Iraq and indirectly over Egypt and Transjordan. The grand Hashemite vision of one giant, powerful Arab state had dissipated into a handful of smaller, separate semi-independent or mandated Arab territories, at least temporarily under Western imperial boots. But the imperial powers were only partyly to blame for this fracturing of the Arab world; so, too, were the Hashemite princelings and the separate local Arab nationalist groupings, in Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut, and Cairo. Each sought power and independence in his own turt; none wished to be ruled from the remote, medieval village of Mecca by the would-be, unifying tribal chieftain, Hussein ibn ‘Ali.

    The imperial carve-up left British-ruled Palestine cut off from its former provincial capitals, Damascus and Beirut, now under French control, and the Palestinian elite quickly understood that their future would be separate from that of Syria and Lebanon. Thus, 1920 was to prove crucial in the emergence of a separate Palestinian Arab national movement and a decisive moment in the evolving Zionist-Arab conflict. The events in Damascus had released Arab nationalist passions that were indirectly and directly to lead to the first major Arab-Jewish clashes in Palestine.

    These broke out in March-April that year. In the Galilee Panhandle, a gray no-man’s-land between the French and British areas of control, a band of Arab marauders – driven by either anti-French or anti-Zionist sentiments – in the first week of March assaulted the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai. The assault led to the Zionist evacuation of the area, to which settlers returned only in October, after Britain and France had agreed that the Panhandle would be part of the Palestine Mandate. but this was a sideshow. More omnious was the outbreak, on 4 April, in the midst of the Muslim Nabi Musa (the Prophet Moses) festivities, of pogram-like Arab rioting in Jerusalem’s Old City. A Muslim religious procession, the marchers wiedling knives and clubs, erupted in anti-Jewish violence; shouts of “Idbah al-Yahud” (Slaughter the Jews) and “Muhammed’s faith was born with the sword” filled the air. At the end of three days, six Jews lay dead, with about two hundred injured and a handful raped. The British authorities had reacted lackadaisically and ineptly, drawing from the Jews the accusation that they had behaved like Russian policemen during pogroms. The Zionist leadership, prodded by veterans of Hashomer, the Zionist self-defense/guards association founded a dozen years before, and the Jewish battalions that had fought with the British army in WWI, reacted by establishing an underground “national” or ethnic militia, the Haganah Organization (Irgun Hahaganah, Hebrew for defense organization), known simply as the Haganah.

    The 1920 outbreak was only the first in a series of bouts of violence – 1921, 1929, 1936-1939 – that grew progressively more lethal and more extensive. The spread of national consciousness during the 1920s and 1930s clearly paralleled, and probably drew sustenance from, the dramatic increase in literacy among Palestine’s Arabs, one of the fruits of the enlightened British Mandate administration. Increased prosperity, triggering hopes of further betterment, relative political freedom, and the gradual emergence of an urban middle class also tended to radicalize the populaiton. This burgeoning national consciousness periodically expressed itself in anti-Zionist violence.

    But violence did no emerge only from “modern” nationalist passions; it also drew on powerful religious wellsprings. Nothing, it seemed, could mobilize the Palestinian Arab masses for action more readily than Muslim religious rhetoric and symbols. It was no coincidence that the April 1920 outbreak was triggered by religious festivities or that the far larger outbreak of 1929, in which 130 Jews were murdered (including 69 ultra Orthodox, non-Zionist yeshiva students massacred by their neighbors in Hebron) was prompted by accusations that the Jews intended to take over Haram al-Sharif (the noble sanctuary, the Temple Mount), destroy its two sacred mosques, and rebuild the Solomonic temple at the site. And it was indicative that the emerging leader of Palestinian Arab national movement, Muhammed Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was to dominate Palestinian politics until mid-1948, was a (Muslim) cleric (an unusual phenomenon in the third world nationalist movements). Al-Husseini and others consciously deployed religious rhetoric and symbols to mobilize the masses for anti-Zionist and later anti-British violence.

    But, of course, the chief recruiting agent for Palestinian Arab nationalism was Zionism itself. Above all, the fear of and antagonism toward the Zionist enterprise fueled national awareness and passions in the salons, coffee shops, and streets of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa.
    ——-

    Now, I have focused on the history only but your earlier assertions have been that Palestinians TODAY, still hate Jews because they are Jews and that they themselves do not want a State fo their own. But rather, just want to see Israel destroyed and blah blah.

    I didn’t have to go through the historical record to dismiss your simplistic/shallow conclusions. One could just focus on your argument rhetorically and use COMMON SENSE.

    Let’s put a rest to this nonsense. No one denies Arab antisemitism but it’s of a wholly different nature than the classic European flavor of antisemitism.

    As Morris states, the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism was the fear of territorial displacement and dispossesion. Not blind Jew-hatred.

    I’ll get to the rest of your post later since I wrote a ton just now.

    I know we got on the wrong foot. I can’t take back the things I said earlier and quite frankly I think it wouldn’t matter. We don’t seem to get along and you think I’m an antisemite.

  • The cartoon is NOT antisemitic.

    The smoke plume (correct word?) and the border of the floor at the bottom help convey the image of the Israeli FLAG.

    Hence, ZIONISM. Not Judaism.

    No sir, people don’t draw Nazi-like stormtroopers for just any old political ideology. He meant to say that the Jews are like the Nazis. If he had wanted to convey that it was Israelis or “Zionists” then he would have used a different image than a stormtrooper.

    Jewish political ideology IS causing antisemitism. You’re so dense you think people hate Jews or anyone for that matter for no reason?

    Bullshit. There are plenty of countries that do terrible things that are entirely unjustified, unlike Israel which is justified in its actions and they don’t get anywhere near the level of hatred or acrimony directed at Israel. Go ahead and show me how Russia has been vilified anywhere near like Israel for the far, far, far worse onslaught on Chechnya.

    Do you really think, that Palestinians do not care about their day to day lives? They just arbitrarily hate Jews? That’s delusion AND narcissism.

    Really? So tell me why Palestinians were attacking Jews in 1920 when Jews were 10% of the population.

    Hence my point: Zionism simultaneously promotes the image of Jews (dishonestly of course) as ‘eternal victims’. This is just a PR thing. Israelis are clearly much stronger and militarized than the Palestinians.

    It’s not the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it’s the Israel-Arab conflict. To remind you, Israel has fought most of its wars against standing armies that were fighting against Israel in unison. That the Palestinians choose to fight the same army and then complain that it has superior firepower is like taunting a bulldog and complaining that it has sharp teeth when it bites.

    So yes, the Israelis are far better armed than the Palestinians. However, their military is built for regional conflicts and in that respect they are always struggling to maintain technical and operational superiority.

    Now, as to my comparisons to the Nazis. Yea, that’s accurate. You’re so desperate you have to nit-pit semantics? That guy was talking about ethnically cleansing the remaining Palestinians by STARVATION.

    I was referring to NAZIS like HIM.

    Liar. Read your own words. You’re a lowlife.

    This is my point. This is what the Jewish Establishment is. Morally bankrupt. You are not a morally serious person.

    Just look at your argument. It’s all empty rhetoric.

    Yep, you’ve convinced me. You, a person who calls Jews “Fucking Nazis” are going to lecture me about empty rhetoric and moral seriousness. That’s funny.

    Example: Your statement that Hamas was “arming itself to the teeth.”

    Or that “the Gazans were able to walk their streets safely until they launched rockets at civilian targets in Israel.”

    First of all, the Gazans did not launch those rockets. Hamas did. And during the truce it was not Hamas.

    You are justifying terrorism by conflating a population with it’s political leadership.

    Again, DISHONEST and morally bankrupt rhetoric to compensate for the lack of facts-on-the-ground.

    Gaza is a prison. Israel could have stopped the rockets if they accepted the terms of the truce JUST as Barak said in the cabinet meeting.

    That’s precisely the point. The Gazans who did not launch the rockets WERE able to walk their streets safely. The Israelis in the Westen Negev who also did not launch rocket WERE UNABLE to walk their streets safely.

    Denying Hamas’s culpability in the attacks is laughable. It’s recorded that they turned a blind eye or released people they caught launching. Further, they were smuggling and are smuggling arms by the tons into Gaza when the same funds could be used to build industry, economy, playgrounds, schools and get the crossings to reopen because the Israelis wouldn’t have to fear the passage of arms into Gaza.

    What’s sadder about your claims is that every other Palestinian advocate out there always likes to point out that those thugs who throw opponents to the ground from the tops of buildings were “democratically elected” by Gazan voters. So please decide which it is because I’m all confused.

    Besides, Israel’s actions are not terrorism. They target Hamas and other Palestinian militants and terrorists. That’s why they take great pride in low civilian losses on the Palestinian side even in a built up urban landscape. Terrorism, just to remind you, is what happens every time the Palestinians shoot rockets into Israeli civilians centers.

    Israel could have stopped which rockets? The rockets didn’t stop throughout the truce. They never stopped. Ever. The mortars and rockets slowed, but they kept coming and Hamas continued to arm themselves. And then they launched dozens of rockets before the truce expired. The Palestinians wanted their cake and the icing on top. They never stop shooting but the Israelis open the crossings.

    You keep dodging this. And then you go on to spew more bullshit:

    “Then they had to worry whether one of the rocket launchers was close to them because Israel would retaliate. Sderot residents didn’t know on a daily basis whether their loved one was coming home that day or not because it was Russian roulette. That you and other Palestinian apologists continually minimize years and thousands of rocket attacks is what loses any credibility you would have had without the attacks on Jews (”Fucking Nazis”).”

    No retard. I am not MINIMIZING their suffering. I am putting BOTH Palestinian and Israeli suffering IN FUCKING CONTEXT.

    So was I. I was correcting your misrepresentations of the truth. You would like to minimize Israeli concerns about the rockets because, as you pointed out, not enough Israelis were killed. I was reminding you that life was impossible in the western Negev without some sort of attendant psychological harm.

    In fact, this is true of the entire Palestinian terror campaign of the past several decades. The intention has been to undermine Israelis’ feelings of security with terrorism. It is no accident that the Palestinians have targeted a variety of public places and events. The idea has been to cause Israelis to live in fear that wherever they went, school, bus, restaurant, kiosk, night club, main street thoroughfare or even their homes, they would conjure up some brutal murder that had been perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists.

    Sderot and the western Negev are a continuation of that and were essentially being held hostage by the Palestinians AFTER Israel left this territory entirely. Thousands of rockets over a period of years is the context here, little guy.

    That’s what people do when they want to seriously solve problems.

    This is not a symmetrical conflict. It is not symmetrical in any sense. Logistical/political/etc.

    That’s correct. There are numerous Arab countries, hundreds of millions of Arabs and god knows how many Muslims and leftists aligned against Israel. There are numerous Arab countries that have hostile relations with Israel or that have tried through war or through proxies to attack Israel.

    An Israeli is constricted from moving safely within his country’s borders, certainly within his country’s territory and cannot leave this small country at all other than perhaps a short visit to Jordan or to the Sinai. The size of this country? It takes six hours to travel from north to south and less than an hour from east to west in the center. They are surrounded by land, by enemies and they feel danger all the time.

    All of that is not to minimize the Palestinians’ suffering, but to put that into context: Israel left Sinai in its entirety for peace. Israel left Gaza entirely. Israel left Lebanon entirely. Israel has negotiated with Assad Sr. about leaving the Golan entirely. The Palestinians think they can win by playing for time and by breaking down the Israelis.

    Now that you have a slightly different context than what you meant, you are welcome to tell me about Palestinian suffering.

    The FACT is that Israelis do NOT suffer as much as Palestinians. The suffering is VASTLY against the Palestinians.

    Not surprising, given the logistical differences.

    That is not me MINIMIZING Israeli suffering. That is me putting them side by side to put things in context. The violence is not coming out of nowhere.

    So when you go on and on about the suffering of Southern Israel, I can easily counter you w/ the suffering of Gaza because it was infinitely WORSE.

    But the Israelis had left Gaza entirely and until the Palestinians attempted to send terrorists through the crossings, had the crossings open. Same with the roadblocks in the West Bank. Israel used to have fewer roadblocks but then the Palestinians went on a rampage of suicide bombings. Today there are far more roadblocks that cause the Palestinians suffering, but the number of successful terror attacks has diminished greatly.

    And when you factor in the OBVIOUS fact that Israel is far stronger and controlled Gaza indirectly by controlling it’s borders/etc. – it’s on the more powerful entity to make the first step.

    Which it did by leaving Gaza entirely. Not a single Jew was left in Gaza.

    Hamas was adhering to the truce. Israel concedes this.

    Israel concedes only that Hamas attempted to stop their own folks, but it is also believed they winked when other groups sent rockets and mortars. Hamas did violate the truce by setting up the tunnel for an operation near the Gazan border with Israel, and then with a barrage of nearly 100 rockets after those folks were stopped in their tracks.

    Barak does as well. I cited a bunch of articles that corroborate these notions.

    And I cited facts that explain that Hamas violated the truce, sought to then use that violation as leverage for a new truce with different terms, and were caught by surprise when the Israelis didn’t buckle but attacked. Nobody here is stupid, LD, Hamas was building its arsenal throughout the truce. Why? If their intentions are peaceful, why would they? And if their intentions are not peaceful, why let them proceed with arming themselves so they can attack Israeli civilians and kidnap soldiers who aren’t permitted to see even Red Cross people for years?

    Next you quoted Israel wanting to continue the truce. Yes, of course, because the truce was literally still going on. It was to FORMALLY END on the 18th-19th.

    You say that Hamas wanted to ‘up’ their “demands” – again DISHONEST rhetoric.

    This is not a kidnapping. They aren’t asking for 1 million dollars and a choppa.

    They were asking for an end to the fucking blockade and a truce that would extend to the W. Bank. This was to be the first steps toward something better.

    Of course they were. They wanted to smuggle more arms and put themselves in a position to throw Fatah men off rooftops in the West Bank. Nobody is fooled.

    If they wanted to stop the rockets, they knew exactly how to do it. If they can throw Fatah men off the rooftops, they can throw Islamic Jihad men off rooftops as well. They didn’t because they didn’t want to end the attacks, just keep them on a low flame.

    The crossings would have opened if terror attempts would have stopped. It’s that simple.

    Now, when one actually considers this context the characterization of Hamas’s conditions is not “demands”.

    You slip language in there like that because you’re a fucking snake.

    Actually, the snake here is the person who accepts ongoing truce violations, continued arming by the terror group, claims that Gazans – where the standard of living is higher than parts of Egypt – are destitute, pretends that polls don’t exist showing a consistent majority of Gazans who support the rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, claims that a truce violation of 84 rockets launched in a couple of days before the truce was over is nothing and that Hamas was still a party to be trusted and who wants to call people like Barak and, well, me “Nazis” but then tries to quote him as if he was okay with a new truce when he was the architect of the Israeli incursion into Gaza.

    Now, once again:

    Show me proof that those tunnels were being built WITH the intent to kidnap Israeli soldiers and that it was inside Israel.

    Then show me proof that during the truce Hamas was ‘arming themselves to the teeth’.

    The proof is that Israel attacked those six Palestinians when the only other times they had attacked tunnels was when they were known as arms-smuggling tunnels. The NY Times ran an article during the Gaza incursion where they went to the Egyptian side of a smuggling town. One of the tunnelers is quoted there – this is in the NY Times, no less – as saying that somehow the Israelis know which tunnels to attack and are only attacking the arms-smuggling tunnels but leaving tunnels used for smuggling regular civilian supplies alone.

    The proof that Hamas was “arming themselves to the teeth” is borne by a number of reports from Israeli security agencies, publicly, about their estimates of tons of armaments flowing through.

    But let’s say that isn’t proof enough, since you will call that PR. The real proof is in the markedly improved technology of the rockets Hamas used after the truce and before. The same article you quoted about the diminished number of rocket attacks contains the specifics of the increased range and targeting of the rockets before and then after the truce.

    That is ample evidence to address both your points.

    Then give me any kind of argument – rhetorical or factual – that concludes that Israelis suffer even equally as much as the Palestinians.

    They don’t. But then again, the Arabs have lost the wars they started and have rebuffed all efforts at compromise. Crying about their suffering in this context is counter-productive. Take a look at Gaza. Israel was out. All the Palestinians needed to do was behave civilly and their lives would have become completely normal.

    All of this bullshit is just a rhetorical game for people like you. You have no incentive to make peace with the Palestinians because they are the weaker entity.

    You mean Nazis like me?

    You turd. I dream of peace. I fully support many Israeli concessions including a division of east Jerusalem or making it into an international city for the sake of peace.

    This is the moral bankruptcy of the Jewish Establishment. You don’t give a damn about peace. You want more of their land and resources (example: water resources in the W. Bank).

    No, you turd. I would happily give up the cradle of Jewish civilization, Judea and Samaria, for peace. Have the Palestinians given up on their designs on Israel? No.

    The only thing you have on the Palestinians is money and guns. Not virtue. You’re about as legitimate as any other fascist/chauvinist/militarized State throughout history.

    Actually, when the Palestinians joined their Arab brethren in attacking the Jews in 1948 and the Jews had their backs to the sea, the Jews fought hard and won. Since then, they have been under attack for decades and relentlessly. Take a look at what Russia did to Chechnya or China has done to Tibet to gain an understanding of why Israel is very different.

    I take back my comments about Nazis. It’s really insincere to put the Nazis on this pedastal as the great evil of our times.

    Israelis are far worse. Just because genocide is no longer fashionable for a ‘Western’ ‘judeo-christian’ country doesn’t mean you bastards wouldn’t do it if you could.

    Your ignorance is overwhelming.

    Let me teach you something, you piece of dirt. In 1939 the Nazis began methodical extermination of Jews using ground troops. Over the next 18 months around 1.5 million Jews were murdered in cold blood. Since 1967, the Palestinian population in the Territories has trebled and universities and hospitals were created by the Israelis for the Palestinians. Even in this incursion into Gaza, Israel has taken great pride in pointing out that only a quarter to a third of the Palestinian dead are civilians. Even if you buy the Palestinian numbers, you still cannot escape that the Israelis intended to minimize civilian casualties.

    Your continued conflation of Israelis with Nazis and the Jewish establishment is disgusting, puerile anti-Semitism. Talk about snake-like rhetoric.

    You low-life.

  • The cartoon is NOT antisemitic.

    The smoke plume (correct word?) and the border of the floor at the bottom help convey the image of the Israeli FLAG.

    Hence, ZIONISM. Not Judaism.

    Jewish political ideology IS causing antisemitism. You’re so dense you think people hate Jews or anyone for that matter for no reason?

    Do you really think, that Palestinians do not care about their day to day lives? They just arbitrarily hate Jews? That’s delusion AND narcissism.

    Hence my point: Zionism simultaneously promotes the image of Jews (dishonestly of course) as ‘eternal victims’. This is just a PR thing. Israelis are clearly much stronger and militarized than the Palestinians.

    Now, as to my comparisons to the Nazis. Yea, that’s accurate. You’re so desperate you have to nit-pit semantics? That guy was talking about ethnically cleansing the remaining Palestinians by STARVATION.

    I was referring to NAZIS like HIM.

    This is my point. This is what the Jewish Establishment is. Morally bankrupt. You are not a morally serious person.

    Just look at your argument. It’s all empty rhetoric.

    Example: Your statement that Hamas was “arming itself to the teeth.”

    Or that “the Gazans were able to walk their streets safely until they launched rockets at civilian targets in Israel.”

    First of all, the Gazans did not launch those rockets. Hamas did. And during the truce it was not Hamas.

    You are justifying terrorism by conflating a population with it’s political leadership.

    Again, DISHONEST and morally bankrupt rhetoric to compensate for the lack of facts-on-the-ground.

    Gaza is a prison. Israel could have stopped the rockets if they accepted the terms of the truce JUST as Barak said in the cabinet meeting.

    You keep dodging this. And then you go on to spew more bullshit:

    “Then they had to worry whether one of the rocket launchers was close to them because Israel would retaliate. Sderot residents didn’t know on a daily basis whether their loved one was coming home that day or not because it was Russian roulette. That you and other Palestinian apologists continually minimize years and thousands of rocket attacks is what loses any credibility you would have had without the attacks on Jews (”Fucking Nazis”).”

    No retard. I am not MINIMIZING their suffering. I am putting BOTH Palestinian and Israeli suffering IN FUCKING CONTEXT.

    That’s what people do when they want to seriously solve problems.

    This is not a symmetrical conflict. It is not symmetrical in any sense. Logistical/political/etc.

    The FACT is that Israelis do NOT suffer as much as Palestinians. The suffering is VASTLY against the Palestinians.

    Not surprising, given the logistical differences.

    That is not me MINIMIZING Israeli suffering. That is me putting them side by side to put things in context. The violence is not coming out of nowhere.

    So when you go on and on about the suffering of Southern Israel, I can easily counter you w/ the suffering of Gaza because it was infinitely WORSE.

    And when you factor in the OBVIOUS fact that Israel is far stronger and controlled Gaza indirectly by controlling it’s borders/etc. – it’s on the more powerful entity to make the first step.

    Hamas was adhering to the truce. Israel concedes this.

    Barak does as well. I cited a bunch of articles that corroborate these notions.

    Next you quoted Israel wanting to continue the truce. Yes, of course, because the truce was literally still going on. It was to FORMALLY END on the 18th-19th.

    You say that Hamas wanted to ‘up’ their “demands” – again DISHONEST rhetoric.

    This is not a kidnapping. They aren’t asking for 1 million dollars and a choppa.

    They were asking for an end to the fucking blockade and a truce that would extend to the W. Bank. This was to be the first steps toward something better.

    Now, when one actually considers this context the characterization of Hamas’s conditions is not “demands”.

    You slip language in there like that because you’re a fucking snake.

    Now, once again:

    Show me proof that those tunnels were being built WITH the intent to kidnap Israeli soldiers and that it was inside Israel.

    Then show me proof that during the truce Hamas was ‘arming themselves to the teeth’.

    Then give me any kind of argument – rhetorical or factual – that concludes that Israelis suffer even equally as much as the Palestinians.

    All of this bullshit is just a rhetorical game for people like you. You have no incentive to make peace with the Palestinians because they are the weaker entity.

    This is the moral bankruptcy of the Jewish Establishment. You don’t give a damn about peace. You want more of their land and resources (example: water resources in the W. Bank).

    The only thing you have on the Palestinians is money and guns. Not virtue. You’re about as legitimate as any other fascist/chauvinist/militarized State throughout history.

    I take back my comments about Nazis. It’s really insincere to put the Nazis on this pedastal as the great evil of our times.

    Israelis are far worse. Just because genocide is no longer fashionable for a ‘Western’ ‘judeo-christian’ country doesn’t mean you bastards wouldn’t do it if you could.

  • “I wasn’t talking about everyone on the site. I was talking about the guy who wanted to induce an ethnic cleansing by starving the remaining Palestinians in Gaza and the W. Bank.”

    Which is why you brought up “Jewish Establishment” (indicating more than one person) and “You freaks” (in the plural) and then concluded with “Fucking Nazis,” in the plural again.

    So you’re a liar as well as a bigot.

    Are you clear on that or do I need to demonstrate how you lie?

    That, of course, doesn’t relate to your discussion of race, or to your new theme of “Jewish identity as eternally victimized,” or the lie that some Jewish political ideology is what is causing antisemitism. What a joke.

    The cartoon you see at the head of this post is an approximation of the average cartoon published in Arab countries about Israel over several decades now. They are feeding the antisemitism, not the other way around.

    —

    As for comparing suffering, that’s your issue not mine. The Gazans were able to walk their streets safely until they launched rockets at civilian targets in Israel. Then they had to worry whether one of the rocket launchers was close to them because Israel would retaliate. Sderot residents didn’t know on a daily basis whether their loved one was coming home that day or not because it was Russian roulette. That you and other Palestinian apologists continually minimize years and thousands of rocket attacks is what loses any credibility you would have had without the attacks on Jews (“Fucking Nazis”).

    Now let’s review:

    Rockets and mortars slow down but never officially stop. Israel believes Hamas wants to have its cake and eat it too – let some rockets launch but still have crossings open completely. Israel resists.

    In November, Israel attacks a tunnel right next to the border, claiming their intelligence said was it was going to be used for a soldier kidnapping operation like Schalit’s. Hamas, which had been arming themselves to the teeth throughout the lull claims it’s a “defensive” tunnel. From this point on, rocket fire increases dramatically.

    Then Israel offers to extend the truce:

    “Israel supports the continuation of the ceasefire in Gaza – if Hamas adheres to the conditions. This is the message Amos Gilad, the head of the Defense Ministry’s Diplomatic-Security Bureau, intends to relay to Egypt.”

    And later in the article it mentions that Hamas ups their demands if Israel wants to maintain truce.

    On Dec. 20, one week later, Hamas declares the truce over. Then a few days after that, they declare that they’re willing to have truce but within two days, 87 rockets are launched at Israel.

    And that was that.

    Now, you keep talking about the crossings and you neglect the fact that mortars and rockets never ended. They never ended. You neglect to mention that Hamas declared the truce over and that Israel offered to extend it.

    And of course, you neglect to mention the ongoing smuggling of weapons which increased Hamas’s range and capabilities to a degree that was superior to what they would have done without a truce.

    Now seriously, go back to Philip Weiss. He might appreciate your generalizations about Jews (“Fucking Nazis”), oh sorry, about the “Jewish Establishment” more than us.

  • Your self-righteousness is amusing.

    I wasn’t talking about everyone on the site. I was talking about the guy who wanted to induce an ethnic cleansing by starving the remaining Palestinians in Gaza and the W. Bank.

    And my comments on the Jewish Establishment are accurate.

    And the FACTS according to the various reports and news articles are that Hamas was willing to renegotiate terms following the formal end of the truce on the 18th/19th.

    The head of the Shin Bet met with the Israeli cabinet with said terms which were clear-cut: end the blockade which was DESTROYING Gaza and it’s population and extend the truce to the W.Bank.

    Quite reasonable I’d say. Israel refused though.

    Barak acknowledged that the rockets would have stopped had ISRAEL accepted the ‘calm’.

    The sporadic rocket fire during the 4-5 month lull were carried out by groups acting independently and in defiance of Hamas. Fatah and Al Qaeda supporters. The MFA report concedes this. It also acknowledges that Hamas was keeping to the terms of the truce.

    Now, Israel was to ease the blockade sufficiently. Did it do so? No. It allowed in 120-130 truck loads per day of supplies.

    During 2007, it allowed in 500 truck loads. Countless mainstream NGOs and spokespeople for said NGOs condemned Israel regularly for the disaster in Gaza.

    So, it’s understandable to not expect either side to be perfect. We judge them based on that lowered standard.

    14 rockets got through. Israel said they weren’t carried out by Hamas.

    Insufficient supplies got into Gaza.

    And now, let’s compare suffering. Just try to tell me that the residents of Southern Israel were under the same stress and pain as the residents of Gaza.

    It ALWAYS comes back to the Occupation. You want to begin history when Hamas or whoever starts attacks.

    Your rhetoric is based on that and it’s unfortunate that – due to the collusion of American foreign policy and the power of the Jewish Establishment – this is perspective we see in the US most of the time.

    I could care less what you think of me personally. You’ve yet to counter my argument.

    I recall seeing a news article during the massacre with a side-by-side picture of a Israeli women from S’Derot and a Palestinian women from Gaza.

    The Palestinian women had lost her kid and was visibly distraught/crying. The Israeli women had been stressed out due to the sirens and blah blah.

    There’s also this YouTube video going around of a resident of S’Derot crying about the sirens and the stress.

    It’s absolutely ridiculous.

    Not in and of itself – mind you – but rather this comparison. Or lack thereof.

    You have to employ dishonest rhetoric to somehow equate the sides of this conflict. But it’s all bullshit propaganda.

    Logistically the sides are vastly unequal – in Israel’s favor of course.

    So naturally, the violence would be directed towards the Palestinians in much greater frequency and force.

    Last comment – because this site is sort of a bad joke at this point and not worth the time.

    You can keep telling yourself that the Palestinians do not want anything for themselves. Like the idea of yours that they are not human beings that are as complex as the rest of us and have their own wants and needs and ambitions.

    You can keep deluding yourself into thinking people hate Jews and that’s why this stuff happens. But it won’t last forever. How do you think you’ll get rid of them? They have been resisting your bullshit since Day 1.

    Clearly, the Zionists have more money/guns and a better PR campaign but even then you can’t get rid of them.

    Whatever happens, you lose AND while you’re losing, this image of Jewish identity as eternally victimized and blah blah will dissipate. Zionism has hijacked the Jewish community and this POLITICAL IDEOLOGY which has institutionalized hatred towards Arabs and Islam is what is causing antisemitism.

    Not envy or blind hatred.

    So I guess I should say – keep doing what you do. Be yourself. That makes it much easier since people are paying attention now.

  • LD, you little scumbag who dares to call me a Nazi, I’m going by what I see, which is somebody who spoke to all Jews in a rather aggressive, demeaning manner and then called them all Fucking Nazis.

    Let’s quote:

    ” the obvious moral bankruptcy in the Jewish Establishment.
    It must be great living in a bubble. You freaks cry about 20 rockets in 8 years while incinerating 200-300 Palestinian children and concluding that this is an US vs THEM war?
    Fucking Nazis.”

    “I’m saying that as a Jew, there are certain sociological pressures (as there are for all groups, beyond race/ethnicity as well, it could be religion and sexuality) that influence political ideology and behavior.”

    “I think it’s important to have an HONEST discussion of race. It’s racist to think that you are born with any variation of the Jewish “identity” (denoting, political or philosophical leanings as INHERENT).”

    Now listen, that you can’t say “the rockets and mortars stopped” or “the Palestinians stopped arming themselves to the teeth and focused on civic matters once the cease fire was in effect or once Israel left Gaza” is the problem with your entire argument. That your universe of quotes includes some of the most anti-Israel newspapers and websites out there also doesn’t do your claims any favors either.

    However, as long as you were talking about Israel and Gaza, it was one thing. The business about “you freaks” coming in with “fucking Nazis” coming right after “Jewish establishment” in a statement where you lie about what was said, “You freaks…20 rockets in 8 years while incinerating 200-300 Palestinian children” is where you went over the line. Do you require a hasbara workbook to explain to you that calling us – not the Jewish Establishment, as if you could even pinpoint what the Jewish Establishment is – child incinerators and fucking Nazis is not about expressing a view but about lumping all of us into one group and it so happens that you then equate that group with a genocidal group that targeted our group. Clear enough yet?

    And you bring up race, you piece of dirt. Surely, somebody as educated as you, who reads uber-sophisticated sites like Mondoweiss, Muzzlewatch and Ken Silverstein, knows who else uses and used the “race card” regarding the Jews. Sure you do. And you believe it and wrote it anyway.

    As for justifying the Israeli attack on Gaza, the offensive it was more than justified and long overdue. That you would like to pretend that Hamas was done with war is betrayed by the vastly improved range and targeting of the Palestinian rockets AFTER the so-called cease fire versus their capabilities before it.

    That they rained rockets on Israel before the cease fire officially ended is also indisputable, and that rockets and mortars never stopped during the cease fire, even if their numbers dropped considerably, is also indisputable. The fact that the western Negev towns were under constant threat is a fact, and people’s lives there were detrimentally affected for years because of the Palestinian rockets is another fact. The fact that Hamas led these attacks or facilitated them is yet another fact just as the fact that Hamas kept trying to send terrorists into Israel remains yet another fact.

    These are the facts which you say are not on Israel’s side, but actually they are. The key fact is that Israel left Gaza entirely and initially attempted to enable Gaza to have regular traffic in and out. If Israel had to change its tactics, it was due to Palestinian violence and attempted violence, particularly using those crossings and the shelling of Israeli towns for years using thousands of rockets.

    Be clear that if your response contains any antisemitic element, I will erase everything you’ve written. You can go whine to Philip Weiss about it.

  • You’re being ridiculous. My handiwork? I never heard of this site before reading Phil Weiss’s blog.

    It’s more like you can’t provide a substantiated argument to justify Israel’s policies. You can’t justify the Gaza massacre.

    I said Jewish ->Establishment<-. And that’s NOT antisemitic.

    Establishment means “an established order of society: as often capitalized : a group of social, economic, and political leaders who form a ruling class (as of a nation).”

    AIPAC is a good example.

    Our country facilitates ‘identity politics’ and lobbying.

    Your response is infantile. I find it ironic that you’re spending so much time on me when one of your regulars said:

    “Dahlia –

    There are several options:

    1) Jordan’s population is the same ethnic group as those now called “Palestinians”.

    In fact, for the first 30+ years after 1967 there was a steady stream of illegal “Jordanians” who came into the West Bank to enjoy the running water and 1st-world medical care provided by the “colonial oppressor-occupier”.

    Now that most of the WB is back in (corrupt, violent) Arab hands, there is net emigration the other way.

    Cut off water and electricity, and seal the border with Israel – and you will see many more Palis slink away to the “other homeland”.

    2) Almost every day there are long lines outside the foreign embassies in Jerusalem – lines of Palis hoping for visas and green cards.

    Most of these are young folk – who will either breed or blow themselves up if they remain in the area.

    There is strong Arab pressure on developed countries not to issue large numbers of visas – so as to keep the pressure on Israel.

    Again, creating a “humanitarian crisis” would accelerate the granting of visas.”

    —

    So this person is advocating ethnic cleansing. Instead of deliberate terror and murder – as the early Zionists employed – your regular is advocating intensifying the humanitarian disaster in Gaza and possibly inducing one in the W. Bank – on the Palestinians.

    But you’re busy being a wind bag on my (your view) antisemitism?

    This card is getting old. People are not going to put up with this bullshit as Israel continues destroying Palestine and ruining more lives.

    You can’t debate the issues because the facts aren’t on your side.

    So you rely on Hasbara. Specifically, “point scoring.”

    From Jewish Voice for Peace:

    http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2009/03/19/hasbara-handbook-how-to-pretend-to-debate-while-smashing-your-opponent/

  • No LD, you crossed into anti-Semitism. Please go back to wherever you came from. I will erase everything, LD and I’m sure you want your handiwork up. Don’t you?

  • @themiddle

    I think I was out of line to just come here and insult you and for that I sincerely apologize. I don’t think I was being antisemitic though.

  • Is it because I said “Jewish Establishment”?

    I think that’s accurate.

    I don’t think a person is a Jew first and then a human being.

    The same goes for other groups of people.

    I attached the word ‘establishment’ to denote the political aspect of the Jewish identity.

    I’m not saying a Jew is inherently a certain way.

    I’m saying that as a Jew, there are certain sociological pressures (as there are for all groups, beyond race/ethnicity as well, it could be religion and sexuality) that influence political ideology and behavior.

    I don’t think that’s antisemitic.

    In fact, I think it’s antisemitic to say that Zionism is Judaism.

    Jewish identity is a complex issue. It’s not just a religion or an ethnicity. And people can certainly ‘feel’ Jewish depending on what that means to you (persecuted/etc.).

    I think it’s important to have an HONEST discussion of race. It’s racist to think that you are born with any variation of the Jewish “identity” (denoting, political or philosophical leanings as INHERENT).

  • Dahlia –

    There are several options:

    1) Jordan’s population is the same ethnic group as those now called “Palestinians”.

    In fact, for the first 30+ years after 1967 there was a steady stream of illegal “Jordanians” who came into the West Bank to enjoy the running water and 1st-world medical care provided by the “colonial oppressor-occupier”.

    Now that most of the WB is back in (corrupt, violent) Arab hands, there is net emigration the other way.

    Cut off water and electricity, and seal the border with Israel – and you will see many more Palis slink away to the “other homeland”.

    2) Almost every day there are long lines outside the foreign embassies in Jerusalem – lines of Palis hoping for visas and green cards.

    Most of these are young folk – who will either breed or blow themselves up if they remain in the area.

    There is strong Arab pressure on developed countries not to issue large numbers of visas – so as to keep the pressure on Israel.

    Again, creating a “humanitarian crisis” would accelerate the granting of visas.

  • LD, you were talking about Israel before and you made a legitimate case that deserves a response. However, you’ve now crossed the line into open anti-Semitism and that won’t be accepted here. I’ll make it simple for you, I’m reminded of another commenter that I consider banished from this site. I won’t put up with your anti-Semitism either. So, the next time you post anything of that nature, I will erase every single comment you have made on this site. Or will make. I know you will find my call here very fair.

  • LD- what do you hope to gain by what you have written here. With all due respect which is very little, if any at all), if you wish for us “evil Zionists” to be better educated, I would suggest refraining from offensive language and posturing, and sticking with facts. If, however, your goal is simply hate speech, then I might simply remind you that while the first ammendment may protect your right to freedom of speech, you do not need to always excercise that right, particularly in an offenseive manner.

    Ben-David: to where do you intend to send those individuals calling themselves “Palestinians?” Legally speaking, youhave both backing and precedent; population transfer is allowed by the Geneva Convention, and has taken place such as between Turkey and Greece. However, in order to transfer a population, you need a place to which to tranfer them, such as another country which agrees to accept them. What country will accept problematic entity into its midst?

    Ahad Ha-Am: Just because something is printed in HaAretz does not mean that it is accurate. I know for a fact, as in with 100% certainty, that at least one of their writers makes up facts, whenever she is lacking in them, and then sites them ascoming from other sources. (Of course, when you contact those sources to get their data, they have no idea what you’re talking about as they have never compiled such data). I’m not saying that every writer there makes up facts or that the entire newspaper is always wrong. However, before trusting it implicitely, I would do some follow-up.

  • You might want to use your self-acclaimed moral superiority towards something like decents manners. In the meantime, please refrain from using “Zionist” technologies, hypocrit:

    As for trolls:
    troll

  • A troll for you is anyone that points out the obvious moral bankruptcy in the Jewish Establishment.

    It must be great living in a bubble. You freaks cry about 20 rockets in 8 years while incinerating 200-300 Palestinian children and concluding that this is an US vs THEM war?

    Fucking Nazis.

  • Hey middle, instead of arguing with obvious trolls – please answer Joshua’s question:

    Why should Israel unilaterally withdraw from areas overlooking Tel-Aviv and Haifa given what’s coming out of Gaza?

    Unilateral withdrawal is so…. Oslo-era.

    Those of us living within range of the missiles are already way past that.

    Look at a map – preferably one with topographic markings. The West Bank is closer to – and higher than – the most populous areas of Israel.

    And the cousins are already reaching Ashkelon from Gaza.

    Get real – this is an us-or-them struggle, and the only real solution is permanent displacement of the Palis.

  • That’s your reply? Your characterization of my post is a straw-man. Everything I’ve said is based on facts and is all sourced. So I don’t know where you’re coming from when you denigrate my views. You may disagree, sure, but I’ve done my homework. I’m not offended, just surprised. (I realize I’ve called you a scumbag for the past couple of posts, so maybe you’re just upset.)

    Read it again, and give me a serious reply. Disregard my name-calling, I can stop that.

    Hamas did not fire 10 rockets a month during the lull, moron.

    They fired 3 rockets after the 19th of June (when the truce began).

    Then 11 more across the next few months.

    Furthermore, the MFA report conceded that these rockets were carried about groups in defiance in Hamas – Fatah/Al Qaeda supporters. Not Hamas directly.

    You’re playing this all off. Even the Israeli government recognized this.

    Read the part where Barak said that had Israel accepted the calm the rockets would have stopped.

    After the Nov. 4th – 5th attack (that killed 6 Palestinian militants) on the Gaza tunnels, Hamas escalated the rocket fire back to normal levels. Jimmy Carter described these tunnels as ‘defensive’ and ‘inside Gaza’ in the Washington Post. That’s the only characterization I’ve seen.

    On a side-note: I don’t see anything wrong with Palestinians arming themselves. I think that’s their right. And I think both of us should agree that the Palestinians have a right to fight the ISRAELI ARMY. Not civilians. But on the same hand, Israel still kills more Palestinian civilians than the ‘terrorism’ of Hamas/etc.

    All that aside, I’d like to see some proof that the Gaza tunnels were being dug w/ the intent to kidnap Israeli soldiers. I’d like to see some proof that they were inside Israel.

    Now, the truce formally ended on the 18th-19th. At which point, the head of Shin Bet relayed Hamas’s new terms. And it was Israel who refused. They then launched the operation a bit later.

    Throughout the truce, Israel allowed in 120-130 truck loads of supplies in to Gaza. During 2007, they allowed in 500 truck loads.

    Under the circumstances, as the Red Cross/UN/etc. all condemned Israel for the humanitarian crisis, shouldn’t Israel have done a better job? It’s totally unacceptable.

    And while I sympathize with the S’Derot residents, you have to compare and contrast constantly. Otherwise, how is anything fair?

    You want to tell me that the residents of Southern Israel have suffered as much as the Gazans?

    Those rockets were very ineffective. 15 deaths in 8 years before the Operation. Whereas Gaza had been turned into a prison and blah blah. Everyone knows what was going on in there.

    And yes, Israel planned it all in advance. I mentioned all those sources explaining this point because it shows on INSINCERE Israel is. How dishonest the body politic is.

    Bombing the police graduations? Why?

    I know I’m in enemy territory so I shouldn’t expect anyone here to understand. But meh.

  • I let your cut and paste job through, but don’t spam us or you’ll go into the spam folder permanently. If you want to debate, that’s fine. If you’re going to cut and paste things that you copied from elsewhere, just provide a link and let us figure it out for ourselves.

    In short, you’re trying to say that Hamas was being nice and didn’t deserve to be bombed. That Israel was the party that broke the cease fire while Hamas was sitting primly and properly in the corner doing nothing. That the exercise of going into Gaza was driven by Israel and not Hamas actions.

    Well, actually, the attack by the IDF on the six Hamas members took place while they were in the middle of an operation that was supposed to hit an army target. When the cease fire expired, Hamas began launching multiple rockets at Israeli towns again. Now, it’s not as if they had ever stopped. The rockets always continued, except that during the cease fire, instead of 30-50 a month, you had 10. The same headgames were being played upon the Israelis who were in rocket range.

    You feel that’s not a cause for a war and I disagree with you strongly. One of the first things Hamas did when the war broke out was to fire some of its new rockets. They hit towns much farther than anything they had hit before. It wasn’t even close. This meant that, and it’s likely Israeli intelligence knew this, all that tunnel smuggling by Hamas had worked and they had an upgraded and updated rocket arsenal. Since that arsenal would only improve and give Hamas far greater reach over Israel, the danger was clear.

    Had Israel prepared its army early? You bet. Why would they not be prepared to fight one of their enemies. That’s what armies do: prepare to fight. That’s because they can never know when they’ll be called to fight.

    Now, all of this answers some of your points. But, as someone who visited one of the primary targets of Hamas rockets, the town of Sderot, at a time when it was under attack, I can assure you that these rockets are seriously screwing with people’s heads. You’re basically playing Russian roulette with your and your family’s life every time a rocket heads your way. And 30-50 rockets a month had been heading toward Israel and a third to a fifth of this total kept coming after the cease fire.

    As for the rest of your crap like justifying terror, praising Finkelstein, criticizing me for doing far less than you do when you insult Zionists, etc., you should know I’m not too impressed. If you represent the typical defender of the Palestinians, they should really make an effort to have you quit and replace you with somebody who can express these ideas better.

    Oh, and you’re scum.

  • Ha. You sound just as shallow as Wolf Blitzer here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-8aTGnjHnI

    And Norman Finkelstein IS legitimate. Only the Jewish Establishment and Zionists in general, find him to be so threatening that they resort to distortions of his arguments and personal insults.

    Pathetic how you’ll dismiss even a former Israeli politician to suit your agenda. That’s nationalism for you. You should read some Orwell to understand your psyche profile, scumbag.

    “Thriving democracy” LOL

    As to your bullshit about terror attacks. The Palestinians only fault is that they may attack Israeli civilians from time to time. Israel still kills far more Palestinian civilians.

    Every single IDF soldier and member of the Israeli army should be targeted. Not innocent civilians.

    But then, every single nationalist movement throughout history has used violence. So did the early Zionists.

    The term ‘terrorism’ is entirely political. It has no meaning beyond rhetorically bludgeoning the ‘opposition’.

    All power structures use terror. Big and small.

    In fact, the terror carried out by more powerful entities is always on a larger scale and affects more people.

    Israel has never wanted peace. The Gaza massacre is a great example. All planned in advance.

    And as to the truce. Of course Israel broke it and goaded Hamas into escalating the rocket fire.

    This is what I posted in another thread, on another website for shallow Jewish supremacists and bigots:

    —-

    RR is using dishonest rhetoric to describe Hamas’s actions.

    These rockets were highly ineffective. Killing 20-24 people in 8 years (15 people overall before the massacre I believe).

    Furthermore, RR’s use of emotional rhetoric is simply to compensate for the lack of facts on the ground.

    We could just so easily employ the same type of characterizations for Israel’s blockade on Gaza.

    (RR is dishonest here again, stating that Israel ‘left’ Gaza in 2005. This is only a superficial truth. Gaza had no autonomy. Hence, Israel’s regular attacks into Gaza. Hence, the lack of control by Hamas on the borders of Gaza and the land/air/sea. Etc. etc.)

    So let’s ignore the sensationalism and focus on facts.

    The truce was working. Read Israel’s own MFA report. The MFA report acknowledges Hamas’s ‘careful’ attention to maintaining the ‘quiet’. Furthermore, the report states explicitly that the sporadic rocket fire during the lull (14 rockets) were carried out by groups in defiance of Hamas – mainly Fatah and Al Qaeda supporters. Not Hamas directly.

    Now this is where we could use RR’s dishonest rhetoric – ONLY, it would actually be appropriate because it reflects the facts-on-the-ground.

    In fact, this is what former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was trying to say in response to Joe Scarborough’s spewing of that same type of establishment lies and dishonest rhetoric.

    [b]Zbigniew Brzezinski Calls Joe Scarborough ‘Stunningly Superficial'[/b]

    [url]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/30/zbigniew-brzezinski-calls_n_1 54211.html[/url]

    The former U.S. National Security Adviser also refutes RR’s comments on the peace process. Scarborough and RR are basically on the same level in this case. Brzezinski was someone who was in the political arena at the time (still is) and knew exactly what happened.

    See, RR will sensationalize the attacks on Southern Israel because in-reality not many people died. So she has to package it somehow, purely for rhetorical purposes. Clearly, she’s not a morally serious person who cares about the truth and maybe even the safety of Israelis.

    Now Israel broke the truce on Nov. 4th/5th. This was all planned in advance similar to how the 2006 Lebanon War was planned in advance. Not conspiracy record – its public record.

    Read the Guardian/BBC/Haaretz/etc. The Guardian reported in Feb 2008:

    [url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/29/israelandthepalestinians1? gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront[/url]

    [b]Israeli minister warns of Palestinian ‘holocaust'[/b]

    [quote]There were further indications that Israel was preparing for an offensive by sending confidential messages to world leaders, including the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who plans to visit the region next week.

    “Israel is not keen on, and rushing for, an offensive, but Hamas is leaving us no choice,” the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, told the senior figures, according to Israel’s mass circulation daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

    [b]Security sources were quoted by both Israel Radio and army radio as saying a big operation was being prepared but was not imminent.[/b][/quote]

    Haaretz corroborates this report as well, which leads us to the obvious conclusion (Occam’s Razor) – that Israel was planning the massacre months in advance:

    [url]http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057648.html[/url]

    [b]How IDF legal experts legitimized strikes involving Gaza civilians[/b]

    [quote][b]The idea to bombard the closing ceremony of the Gaza police course was internally criticized in the Israel Defense Forces months before the attack.[/b] A military source involved in the planning of the attack, in which dozens of Hamas policemen were killed, says that while military intelligence officers were sure the operation should be carried out and pressed for its approval, the IDF’s international law division and the military advocate general were undecided.

    After months of the operational elements pushing for the attack’s approval, the international law division headed by Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch gave the go-ahead. In spite of doubts, and also under pressure, Sharvit-Baruch [b]and the division also legitimized the attack on Hamas government buildings and the relaxing of the rules of engagement, resulting in numerous Palestinian casualties.[/b] In the division it is also believed that the killing of civilians in a house whose residents the IDF has warned might be considered legally justified, although the IDF does not actually target civilians in this way.[/quote]

    Now, back on topic – specifically. Hamas wanted to renew the truce.

    The truce ended formally on the 18th or 19th of December. The head of the Shin Bet met w/ the Israeli cabinet to relay Hamas’s terms. Israel refused.

    There is several new articles that came out after the massacre that corroborate the claim that Israel was not interested in renewing the truce.

    Here are some examples:

    [url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/01/israel-hamas-olmert-palest ine-shalit[/url]

    [b]Israel PM’s family link to Hamas peace bid[/b]

    [quote][…]Two years after his first contacts through the Olmert family – and with war looming – Baskin said he tried to use his contact again. “I only involved [the person] one more time. I was desperate to get a message to Olmert.” This time, however, he was told bluntly that he would “need to find another messenger”. He told the Observer: “At this point war had already been decided on.”

    With the conflict only two weeks away Baskin arranged a meeting with his key Hamas contact in Europe, which resulted in another offer to link Shalit to the lifting of the blockade. [b]Nobody on the Israeli side replied to the final offer.[/b][/quote]

    And this one is more concrete:

    (English version)
    [url]http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1069467.html[/url]

    [b]Olmert to Barak: You’re negating achievements of Gaza op [/b]

    [quote]
    [Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin], in his briefing, told the cabinet that [b]”during Cast Lead we established deterrence, and that is why Hamas is now willing to compromise where it wasn’t willing to compromise before. The Egyptians are holding talks with Hamas on a cease-fire agreement with Israel’s support.”[/b]

    At this point, Olmert cut him off, saying “there are no cease-fire talks with Hamas.”

    [b]Yadlin said other groups are responsible for the rockets being fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel and that Hamas is afraid to fire rockets itself.[/b]

    “Hamas prefers to reach a truce agreement that will open border crossings and enable reconstruction,” Yadlin said.[/quote]

    Israel’s MFA report corroborates Yadlin’s assertions in this article. During the lull [i]as well[/i], the sporadic rocket fire was carried out by Fatah and Al Qaeda supporters.

    Not Hamas directly, as the MFA report and Yadlin concede (separate occasions).

    If we compare each side’s efforts relatively, then it is easily Hamas that went above and beyond to maintain the lull.

    Here is a translation an article dealing with the same cabinet meeting (from Israel’s Galey Tzahal [Army Radio]):

    [url]http://glz.msn.co.il/NewsArticle.aspx?NewsId=36577[/url]

    [quote]A sharp confrontation has taken place around the table at the full Ministry meeting. Discussing the subject of the continual firing of rockets from Gaza,[…]Defence Minister [Barak] explained to his colleagues that negotiations are being conducted to ensure an arrangement with Hamas with Egypt acting as the intermediary. He was interrupted by the prime minister who said: “There are no negotiations. Israel does not intend to arrange a “calm” with that organisation.”

    [b]The Defence Minister responded that the firing of the rockets would have stopped had Israel accepted the calm.[/b]

    “What the Defence Minister proposes proves that there was no value to the whole Cast Lead Operation. You are suggesting that now that we have smashed Hamas, we should accept the conditions that they offered to us before the operation,” said the prime minister.[/quote]

    Translation provided by Sol Salbe via Richard Silverstein’s blog, Tikun Olam:

    [url]http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2009/03/09/barak-we-could -have-stopped-rockets-by-accepting-hamas-ceasefire/[/url]

    Defense Minister Barak’s comments definitively refutes the notion that Hamas did not want to extend the truce and make peace. Barak also takes responsibility for the breakdown of the truce and subsequent bloodshed.

    Here is some more corroborating evidence from an [i]Independent[/i] article by Johann Hari:

    [url]http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-h ari-the-true-story-behind-this-war-is-not-the-one-israel-is-telling-12 14981.html[/url]

    [b]Johann Hari: The true story behind this war is not the one Israel is telling[/b]

    [quote]
    ‘[b]Yuval Diskin[/B], [b]the current head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet[/B], “told the Israeli cabinet [on 23 December] that Hamas is interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms.” Diskin explained that Hamas was requesting two things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on the West Bank. [b]The cabinet – high with election fever and eager to appear tough – rejected these terms.[/b][/quote]

  • Oh, LD, you’re hurting my feelings with all this shouting.

    You should really try to address some important points instead of shouting. For example, why are Palestinians considered refugees when the standard for everybody else is that only the first generation are refugees?

    Second, Israel continues to prove it is a thriving democracy with a free press, a strong and independent judiciary, a strong army to protect itself, strong technology industry and basically an amazing success story considering they have had to build a country while fighting wars for decades. There is nothing “failed” or “rogue” about it although some people would like it to be just that.

    Shlomo Ben Ami didn’t happen to also say in that debate that he would launch terror attacks and a full out war if he didn’t agree to the peace deal offered to him, did he? I didn’t think so. That’s what the Palestinians did. Poor old Ben Ami is such a nice guy that he went to Camp David, kept upping his offers and every time he met Palestinian resistance to the offers, he upped them some more. And even after that, he felt as if it was somehow his fault; as if he needed to give more. Next time the Israelis should avoid sending bad negotiators to run negotiations. Next time Ben Ami might not want to legitimize somebody like Finkelstein.

    Anyway, Israel exists. It’s vibrant and extraordinary. It’s in a tough situation, that’s for sure, but its enemies are supported by people like you. That gives them the confidence of thinking they will somehow destroy Israel or take it over. In the meantime, Israel becomes more and more entrenched. 65% of its Jewish citizens were born inside Israel. Oops, there goes the “colonists” argument. The Palestinians never owned more than 30% of the land, and even then most of it was owned by a few foreign Arabs and some local families who lived comfortably in Egypt. Oops, there goes the land ownership claim. And so on and so on and so on.

    But I agree that I’m stupid. And you’re scum.

  • God you’re fucking stupid.

    A State exists. No shit. Israel exists.

    That doesn’t mean it HAS THE RIGHT to exist just because it DOES exist.

    As I said, moron, States are political entities.

    No one has to recognize any State. Whether it’s the United States or Sweden. No one HAS to. It’s entirely subjective.

    Now there is a threshold. Amongst reasonable people. If we know what a ROGUE State is. Or a FAILED State is, then understanding those definitions outline the threshold.

    All of this is academic. Relations between countries are not based on right and wrong. It’s business.

    It’s good business to recognize Israel. But the Palestinians will not because for them – it’s personal. It’s like asking them to legitimize the repression of THEIR right to self-determination.

    And please, don’t rifle off your bullshit propaganda. Even former Foreign Minister of Israel, Shlomo Ben-Ami wouldn’t agree with your hasbara. He said himself, in a debate with Norman Finkelstein on DemocracyNow!, that if HE were the Palestinians he wouldn’t have accepted the Israeli-US proposal.

    Zbigniew Brzezinski corroborated this perspective on Morning Joe, when he called Scarborough ‘stunningly superficial.’

    The ZioPuke narrative is full of lies and superficial truths. Emotional rhetoric and sensationalism. No surprise that – for example – the World Union Of Jewish Students will publish a ‘Hasbara Handbook – Promoting Israel on Campus’.

    In it it outlines the concept ‘point scoring’. Which they go on to say relies on people being uninformed.

    Only those ignorant of the ACTUAL history of the conflict will buy into your propaganda.

    It’s quite simple. You’re the colonist. The Palestinians are the original owners of the land. You stole nearly everything from them.

    You even steal their goddamn water.

    The WORLD will be better off when you Nazi State collapses.

  • Nice to see you here LD. You won’t be staying long.

    You’re scum. Let’s get that straight.

    And if you’re right that no state has the arbitrary and inherent right to exist, then the question is what gives the state the right to exist. The answer is simple: it exists. It was voted for in the UN and that gave Israel diplomatic and political legitimacy. It then won a war of survival and continued to exist.

    Therefore, it exists.

    Like any state, it has the right to determine who may immigrate into it and under what circumstances. If that means that they want only Martians, they can bring in only Martians. Some years ago for example, Canada allowed wealthy immigrants from Hong Kong to emigrate to Canada if they had a substantial net worth. This was completely arbitrary but they had the right to do it. The US is debating whether it wants to allow its illegal immigrants to become citizens and in the meantime it has built a huge and long wall at the Mexican border. Perfectly within its rights. Israel is no different.

    The Palestinian “refugees” are few in number if you hold them to the same standards as every other group of refugees in the world – in other words, UNCHR instead of UNWRA definitions. There are few refugees from 1948 still alive. Most are now their children and grandchildren who have been born or have lived virtually their entire lives in other countries. Jordan has absorbed its Palestinians but Syria and Lebanon have not. They are welcome to pursue a true peace agreement, establish their state and return to it. They can’t have Israel just like Mexico can’t have Arizona, Texas and California.

    As for murdering innocent people, that domain has been taken by the Palestinians for decades now. It’s how they fight and how they have fought since 1920. They target civilians, Israel targets Palestinian terrorists and fighters. They launch wars and lose land, then they have pigs like you call it “stealing.” They don’t want to come to a peace deal, so the land on which they sit remains in dispute, but you feel justified claiming it’s theirs, the water is theirs and anybody who doesn’t buy this line is a supporter of thievery.

    Not at all. Sorry.

    Israel would make peace tomorrow if the Palestinians were interested in a compromise. The outlines of the deal have been on the table since late 2000. They don’t want peace. People like you don’t want peace. That suggests to me that it’s you who is the scum here.

  • First of all moron, no State has the inherent and arbitrary right to exist.

    The entire ‘right to exist’ phrase is just a rhetorical device that people use to insinuate the opposition is antisemetic. And once Zionist scumbags like yourself and the other Zerglings do that, you divert attention from the conflict.

    States are political entities. People have a right to exist. States do not. States come and go. People can stay.

    When (IF) people say Israel has no right to exist then they should clarify by saying it has no right to exist as an ethnically Jewish State. Meaning, no right of return for the refugees. Meaning preferential treatment for Jews and institutionalized racism and bigotry towards Arabs. Etc. etc. etc.

    I know morons like you like to think everyone is out to get ‘the Jews’. That helps make murdering innocent people easier. That makes stealing their land and EVEN their fucking WATER, easier. You’re scum and so is the Zionist State.

  • With all due respect, I find this cartoon to be repulsive, to be wrong, to be malicious, and to be virulently anti-Israel. However, I must, unfortunately agree with LD (who, unlike the cartoon, appears to actually be anti-Semetic), that the cartoon is not anti-Semetic. Breaking it down, it takes the symbol of the state, and alludes it to being Nazi-like. However, in this specific incident, the Magen David is being used as a state symbol, rather than a religious symbol. I believe criticism of nations, when justified and well-founded, to be a good thing. Such is not the case, of course, yet nontheless, Oliphant’s right to freedom of speech affords him the protection and/or ability to make such malicious and misinformed statements.

    Suprisingly, I believe themiddle to be right,though he may have meant it cynically. If Israel believes that it has a right to exist, it should put up Jabotinski’s Iron Wall, and act accordingly. The world will blame Israel for simply existing, so Israel should do what it needs to to survive. (Note, I am not condoning massacring people, but I do believe in strong strategic military action)

  • Pat OliFu.Cker should die a slow and painful deaath. Too bad he wasnt in one of the Twin Towers when they went down. I hope he and his whole family suffer a tremendous tragedy and are all whiped clean off the face of this somewhat still good earth!!!

  • It’s funny hearing you people talk about this cartoon that isn’t antisemetic AT ALL.

    Jewish tribalism at work. Disgusting.

  • Oh Adam, “we” give it a rest sometimes but since this is your fourth comment on this site and all have included some form of bigotry against Jews, I’d say you never give it a rest. Why don’t you try, little puppy.

  • So you’ve how horrifically murdered howmany children in the latest “jewish teens deserve to shopping and to the cinema without any possible danger” security operation?

    And you still want to whine about your perception to the outside world because even your many friends in the media are having trouble glossing over the images?

    Jesus do you people never give it a rest?

  • “Solly,”
    Thanks for explaining your cartoon. Still think it sucked, though.
    Ellen:
    “Israel is making antisemitism come alive again for us Jews who are not Israelis or Zionists” Uh, no, antisemites are making antisemitism come alive again. No problem with people who criticize Israel & its policies (shoot, I’m one of them) but making a broad generalization against all Jews is just as asinine as blaming all Protestants for the conflict in Northern Ireland or all Buddhists for the persecution of the Tamils.
    Ilana Lapides: great idea… maybe we should have a contest 🙂

  • I’d relax if a pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist hadn’t used a Star of David to make his claim.

    The ADL is a dinosaur and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. I assume they are still effective with law enforcement and politicians, but they are not engaging effectively with the wider populace.

  • Middle, I think an approach that leaves this to the ADL– treating Oliphant as an anti-semitic outlier– is out of date. His cartoon may have been marginal, akin to hate speech, by the standards of a few years ago. Now, he’s much closer to the lefty mainstream, albeit on the Guardian/Nation magazine edge of it.

    I think what’s happening is that Israel’s aura of moral authority, and moral superiority vis-a-vis the Arab states/non-state actors around it, has eroded. After all, the cartoon is akin to depicting America as morally inferior to al-Qaeda. This is a worrisome development for Israel and its supporters, to be sure.

    In retrospect, there may have been something artificial to the bipartisan support Israel has had here for so long. There was always a tension on the left between supporting a close US ally which vigorously employs military power, and the romantic claim the poor, oppressed, darker-skinned Arabs/Palis had on the lefty imagination. The latter’s winning out over the former. It’s catnip for the left wing– this occupied non-Western people, at odds like the left itself with the democratic, capitalist chauvinism of America.

    This isn’t my issue, but I suspect that American Jews need to get over their spurned-lover response, and look around for other allies, of which there are plenty.

    As for the broader climate for Jewish life here in America– dude, I don’t blame you for being paranoid, but you need to take a deep breath and relax.

  • I had never even heard of Pat Elephant (or whatever) until I saw that idiotic cartoon. Believe me alot of Americans Christians as well as Jews support Isra and I doubt if most really give a darn about Oliphant,

  • Tom, how is he being depicted as marginal? He is a very prominent cartoonist. And we have been on top of this story for years. I seem to recall you challenging me on a couple of posts in the past about whether I was being too paranoid or too sensitive, but I believe our finger is on the pulse of what is going on out there.

    What is egregious to me about a cartoon such as this is that it entirely ignores the context of the attack on Gaza, and it entirely misrepresents the actions Israel took there. But there are many people around the world and in this country who see it Oliphant’s way, and many of those people broadly link the Jewish community to their perception of Israel.

    You may recall that I’ve spoken about how hard it must be for young Jews of university age to deal with the fallout from matters concerning Israel and the reaction to the Israeli Gaza operation is evidence of what I was saying.

    I can’t even bring myself to imagine it, because the USA of 2009 is an enlightened country, but somewhere in the recesses of my mind is this little red light that’s beginning to flash as I am reminded of the success of German Jews in the early part of the 20th Century, or the success of Spanish Jews in the 1400s.

    Time to read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-America-Novel/dp/0618509283

  • Ahad Ha’am, of course Israel waited patiently. All you need to do is see what their incursion into Gaza looked like to know that they were watching and waiting patiently.

    I’ll ignore that B’Tzelem is far from reliable in their reporting (I’d like to know how they know who was and wasn’t a civilian casualty), but here’s an example of an IDF action that resulted in Palestinian deaths in 2006, the year of the report you quote:

    http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1154525969198

    The IDF killed eight Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in air strikes and gun battles, as the army continued its sweep in search of tunnels used for smuggling arms and perpetrating attacks. …soldiers discovered a large tunnel extending more than 150 meters from a home in Shajaiyeh to the Israeli-run Karni cargo crossing. The tunnel, security officials said, was to have been used by terrorists to launch an attack against the Israeli side of the crossing.

    Early Wednesday morning, the IDF fired an artillery shell at a Palestinian anti-tank cell and killed three of its members. Later, another two Palestinians were killed by IDF gunfire.

    At least one of those killed was a gunman and another was shot while trying to launch a rocket-propelled grenade, doctors and security officials said.

    Among those killed was a 14-year-old boy who was shot while watching the fighting with a group of people, hospital officials said.

    So no, Israel didn’t stop all operations which is listed among my counts in my #8 and my #12 as targeting rocket launchers, but it also did not attack Gaza or send large numbers of troops or firepower into there. Patiently quiet while the rockets kept coming.

  • Did someone actually suggest that Al Sharpton’s ridiculous accusations that a cartoon depicting a monkey shot dead by police after a violent tirade was a swipe at Obama? Seriously?

    That cartoon’s caption was something along the lines of “Looks like we’ll have to find someone else to write the stimulus legislation”.

    Listen closely, “Sheela”: President Obama didn’t write the abomination that was the “stimulus”. It was a turnkey piece borne of the fever swamps of the Democrat caucuses of the House and Senate.

    Obama was simply enough of a partisan hack to sign the flagrant power-grab/Democrat special interest group pay-off.

    And yes, the tools that put together that festering mass of dung could be favorably compared to a crazed chimpanzee – in fact, that would constitute a complimentary comparison – and should suffer the same fate POLITICALLY as the chimp did literally.

  • All we do is get rid of severely idiotic comments. And I mean severely! After close to 70,000 comments, we’ve only had to delete a handful so a comment would have to be really, really, really idiotic to get this treatment.

  • While his imagery is a bit extreme, Oliphant is a reliable mouthpiece for the bien-pensant American left. Treating him as some sort of marginal phenomenon, akin to a kid caught spraypainting a synagogue with swastikas, misses the point. What was marginal ten or even five years ago is mainstream lefty thinking. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if no small number of US Jews view Israel, or at least its government, as Oliphant does.

    Change is coming.

  • “We Jews do not need an Israel. Israel does not represent me, that’s for sure. What say my fellow Jews?”

    You are distanced from your people. We feel sad for you.

    But there have plenty of people like you in the past and their will be plenty more in the future. There have always been Jews willing to sell out their own in the name of “peace”.

  • Hi, the middle. must feel good to keep typing “repeat 2” -but it’s completely untrue:
    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/807007.html

    “According to an annual B’Tselem report, from the beginning of 2006 to December 27, Israeli security forces have killed 660 Palestinians, a figure more than three times the number of Palestinians killed in 2005, which was 197.

    The data compiled by the human rights organization also indicated a significant decrease in Israeli casualties. Palestinians killed 23 Israelis in 2006 – 17 civilians, among them one minor, and six Israel Defense Forces soldiers. The figure constitutes less than half of the 50 Israelis killed in 2005.

    …The report says the majority of Palestinian casualties were killed in the Gaza Strip in the second half of 2006, following the capture of IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit. During this period, 405 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip alone, of them 88 were minors and 205 did not take part in the hostilities at the time they were killed.”

    Not pro-rockets on civilians, of course, but don’t pretend Israel was patiently waiting.

  • Israel’s own battle with its own morality; Israel’s demographic quagmire; the world’s intolerance for the situation all dictate what has to happen.

  • TM, if it didn’t work with Gaza, what makes you think it will work with Judea/Samaria? Answer: it won’t.

  • Hitler, Holocaust, Antisemites, Nazis!

    Oh noes, it’s 1939 all over again !

  • Ben David, Israel needs to move its settlers west of the Fence tomorrow. Tomorrow. Unilaterally. That fucking settlement movement will yet destroy Israel. Tomorrow they should get every settler to move west of the Fence. They can keep the army in there for now until Iron Dome is operational, but then they should get the army out of most of the West Bank as well.

    It is time to understand that it is in Israel’s best interest to move into borders that are close to what should be the final outcome (something close to what was offered at Taba).

    It is time to understand that, if nothing else, the Palestinians have won the propaganda war with a sweeping victory over those stupid Jews in Israel and even outside Israel. The victory is so overwhelming that even as they win, you still have broad sections of the population that claim the media, owned by the Jews, stifles the pro-Palestinians. The joke is on us.

    They also win the morality dept. because now that they can’t get that many suicide bombers through, the Palestinians can and do claim the checkpoints are the problem, not the terror they stop.

    The Israeli right does not have the courage to do anything different to the Palestinians than the centrist government that’s leaving office now. You know why? Because it is a very difficult thing to do without violating laws and because Israel is hooked up with the USA which would look askance at the idea.

  • Middle –
    I’m so glad to see evidence of backbone in you that I hesitate to ask the next questions, but…

    What happens if/when it becomes clear that – as in most other aspects of this conflict over the last 2 decades – those “right-wing extremists” are again proven right, and it turns out that the Hamas platform *still* represents the wishes of most Gazans, which is why they voted Hamas in.

    Gazans no doubt resent Hamasniks for their corruption – but that’s the standard attitude of governed to government in Araby.

    And they’re no doubt shocked at their losses – since an entire generation of them has been raised on messianic fantasies and misinterpreted a generation of Israeli kid-glove peacemaking as weakness.

    But that doesn’t mean that large numbers of us still want to kill us rather than coexist.

    … in that reality what does “finishing off Hamas” mean?

    Will it somehow be tolerable for Israelis to sit in their bomb shelters as the successor-organization-to-Hamas, invited to lead by most Gazans, rains down Kassams again? Does it matter if the bombs on Sderot are launched by Saudi-backed fundies or Egyptian-backed commies?

    – and now that Dahlan and other “good” Palestinian “partners” in the West Bank have let the mask drop on their false “recognition” of Israel (another score for the RightWingExtremist debating team) – what does “defeating them” mean?

  • Oh shit, Joe, I forgot #22. Here you go:

    22. People post hideous pictures on Wikipedia and link to them trying to make a point about the horror of Israeli aggression

    Well, my guess is that if you compared Israel’s offensive in Gaza to, say, Russia’s in Chechnya or to Darfur, just to name two recent conflagrations, Israel would come out smelling like roses. War is brutal and can be ugly at times, but this war was the choice of the Palestinians, not the Israelis. They chose to keep pulling that old #2 over and over. They chose to keep sending terrorists through the crossings whenever the crossings opened. They kept smuggling arms intended to attack Israel. They threatened Israel with more attacks and even a graveyard if Israel should dare to enter Gaza. So Israel didn’t take chances and used bombs and planes to ensure a safer entrance for their soldiers.

    I understand how much you hate war and stuff, but Joe, none of this should surprise anybody, even those people trying to score points for the Palestinians. Why don’t you spend your time convincing the Palestinians to make peace and terminating good ol’ #2 (cuz they’re pulling #2s almost daily and soon Israel will have to go back in there)?

  • I asked earlier during the Gaza campaign what on Earth Israel was doing. I still ask. I am Jewish. The Gaza thing was wrong, way wrong. Israel is making life hard for the rest of us Jews. There, I said it. Israel is making antisemitism come alive again for us Jews who are not Israelis or Zionists. Israel is a country that never should have been. Not there. We Jews do not need an Israel. Israel does not represent me, that’s for sure. What say my fellow Jews?

    PS: Oliphant’s cartooon was not antisemitic. Was criticizing the state of Israel. He can do that. I agree with that cartoon, except for the goose-stepping shite. That was out of line, Pat!

  • ck:
    So then why don’t we just declare a fatwah against him? Chop off his head, something like that? Because it seems to work much better than, you know, whining…
    – – – – – – –
    We’re not whining – we’re holding Oliphant to his own (and our, and the Western world’s) standards of honesty and decency.

    Which is not at all like declaring a fatwah.

    Because our goals are different – unlike the fatwah-declarers and head-choppers, we don’t want to impose our opinions or will by force on anyone.

    We just want to live in peace – which requires defending ourselves when necessary.

  • Oh Joe, you disappoint me. Are you trying to shock somebody here? Did you think that Israel should have continued to wait patiently while Hamas bombed them with ever increasing range and improved targeting? Of course you do. And when Israel fights back, you want to complain because the same Hamas low-lifes use civilian neighborhoods, mosques and ambulances to fight, drawing fire upon the civilians around them.

    That is indeed monstrous behavior and it is no less monstrous to see people who were silent as 8000 rockets dropped on Israeli civilians suddenly try to claim that Israel is monstrous for responding. That’s not complex for you to understand, is it?

    I’ll spell it out fer ya.

    1. Israel leaves Gaza entirely
    2. Palestinian rockets launched at Israeli civilian centers
    3. Israel does nothing
    4. Repeat 2
    5. Israel opens crossings
    6. Repeat 2
    6a. Palestinians send terrorists through crossing
    7. Palestinian terrorists succeed or fail
    7a. Repeat 2
    8. Israel targets rocket launchers
    8a. Israel closes crossings
    9. Do-gooders blame Israel for attacking Palestinians
    9a. Repeat 2
    9b. Palestinians and supporters blame Israel for closing crossings
    10. Israel does nothing
    11 Repeat 2
    12. Israel targets rocket launchers
    13. Palestinians complain they are being attacked
    13a. Repeat 2
    14. Years pass and in the 3rd year, as Qassem rocket range reaches city of Be-er Sheva, Israel decides to launch offensive in Gaza
    15. Repeat 2
    16. Israel fights a war using its air force, artillery and tanks. It then sends in ground troops. It wins the fight with minimal losses.
    17. Palestinians mourn their 1200-1400 dead; start claiming all of them were civilians
    17a. Repeat 2
    18. Accusations against Israel send joy through world and through Joe Taxpayer: finally we’ll get those Israelis. Grrr.
    18a Repeat 2
    19. Israel causes a lot of damage to Gaza and only finds some of the leadership. People like Joe complain that Israel isn’t fighting fair because it’s not using Qassem rockets.
    19a Israeli soldiers in Gaza are surprised by the small number of playgrounds for kids, far fewer in number than the number of smuggling tunnels through which arms are being smugled.
    20. World condemns Israel
    21. Repeat 2; complain.

  • “…certain use of”

    1. Deny
    2. Qualify
    3. Obfuscate

    Looks like someone is still stuck on step 2. I think the jist of the report is that the substance was not used for illumination, but as a weapon, and that civilian locations were knowingly targeted. Can we all agree that this kind of behavior is monstrous, for lack of a better term? I’m sure that illuminating a complex issue was Mr. Oliphant’s only intention, in any case. Right?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ayman2.jpg

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ayman2.jpg

  • Oh shucks, Joe, I’m a taxpayer too and I read that document which forgets to mention that certain use of phosphorous is entirely legal according to international law, that phosphorous bombs are not incendiary devices and that Israel used these bombs as prescribed by international law. But don’t worry yourself too much about it because, like me, you have to work hard to keep paying your taxes so we can bail out some banks.

    Hey Pat, sorry about the “eternal insecurity,” apparently it’s justified.

  • Anybody know a good political satirist or cartoonist of the Heebish persuasion? Perhaps we shouldn’t be ‘whining’ but let’s fight ‘humor’ with ‘humor’.
    Some artistic fella can draw Oliphant looking like an idiot (that shouldn’t be too hard?)and we can just laugh at the humiliated version of him and move on. Or we can get some enterprising young writer to write what a moron this guy is. Too bad there are no Jewish writers, eh?

  • I think he got what he wanted from you guys. But for your bitching and moaning I would not even looked at this cartoon. This is the oldest marketing trick. Good job. As to the toon I think it is mediocre and but for you guys acting out of sense of eternal insecurity nobody would even notice it.

  • Hey… they gotta make up for losses from Madoff investments. Just as universities increase their endowments when their teams are in the Final Four or March Madness, some Jewish groups increase their endowments when they raise a shit storm.

    I should not be surprised by the cartoon or the reactions. Just this week I was reading TechCrunch and a simple story on Israeli Venture Capitalists and tech investments. This site is read by literate techies, isn’t it? And what followed was over 300 comments, many about the evil genocidal Israelis who are great a fone technology but awful at humanity.

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/now-that-china-is-the-new-israelwhats-israel/

  • We could raise the same sh!tstorm that Sharpton and Co. (rightfully) waged against the NY Post for printing the cartoon comparing our democratically-elected President & leader of the free world to a crazed chimpanzee… but then it’d just be another case of that nasty Jewish cabal trying to censor criticism of Israel.
    Seriously, what the f*ck is up with people these days? There’s two things you don’t do in my book: you don’t accuse a Black person of promoting a “lynching.” (Which someone did to then-Mayor Dinkins back in the day… and rightfully caught hell for it.) And you don’t accuse Jews of acting like Nazis, particularly when it is so clearly unwarranted. (Would Oliphant link Tianmen Square to Nanking? Or evictions of families in the current mortgage crisis to the Trail of Tears?)
    It never ceases to amaze me how some folks b!tch and moan about us wanting to remember the Holocaust, but think nothing of trotting out comparisons to Nazi atrocities when it suits their own agenda.

  • So then why don’t we just declare a fatwah against him? Chop off his head, something like that? Because it seems to work much better than, you know, whining…

  • No, some things deserve a “shit storm” because if we let them slide, then next time they’ll be worse.

  • Of course “Pat Oliphant is wrong” – talk about stating the obvious. Yet… yet I am still embarrassed by the ruckus raised by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL about this cartoon. Oliphant has often been provocative and that’s the role of an editorial cartoonist – to provoke conversation and thought. In the past he’s offended Chinese and Arabs, now it’s our turn.

    So yes the cartoon is imbecilic and almost moronic. It’s certainly offensive as well, but sheesh, we can handle it without the self imposed guardians of all things Jewish whining up a shit-storm.

  • When I first heard about the cartoon and the ADL, I thought, “Oh, the ADL thinks everything is anti-Semitic.” And then I saw it, and it looked like it was right out of the reationary Arab press or a Nazi newspaper. There is no reason for this ad, especially not in March 2009. There is no way it can be justified. And what about the chicken theat represents Gaza? Why doesnt the poor defenseless chicken have missiles or Iranian arms? Pulitzer prize winning Oliphant is lucky that the chicken isnt depicting the prophet Mohammed, or else he would have to watch is back and his front. Fortunately for him, depicting a Jewish Star of David, or the Jewish nation, or all Jewish as blood thirsty sharks being pushed by goose stepping storm troopers is considered benign by most readers and the editors who publish it. It is heart warming to think that an editor would have a fit and hours of debate over printing a silly Doonesbury cartoon, but thniks nothing of publishing this basura from Oliphant

  • The lesson is that Jews are not allowed to defend themselves and that no one really cares who is fighting us and if their tactics are ‘worse’.