Tag Archive

You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Gilad Shalit’ tag.

Tyranny of victimhood: Why the Guardian gives a free ride to reactionary Palestinian movement

November 16, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | by | 13 comments

Yesterday, some anti-Israel agitators pretended to be “civil rights” activists by riding on buses Israeli citizens in the territories use to travel to Jerusalem.

These buses do not allow non-citizens (without proper permits) to enter communities in Judea and Samaria in order to stop potential Palestinian terror attacks.  

No, it’s not surprising that the the decidedly reactionary Palestinian movement would cynically exploit the genuinely liberal US Civil Rights Movement – which, in the early 1960s, attempted to end the practice, in the American south, of requiring that African Americans ride on the back of municipal buses.

And, no it’s not surprising that the Guardian would give the stunt a positive spin, “Palestinian protest ‘racist’ bus policy“, , Nov. 15.

However, the mere ubiquity of such narratives (by both the MSM and the Guardian), which represent the Palestinian cause as anything resembling a truly progressive, anti-racist movement, doesn’t render them any less reprehensible.  

As we’ve noted previously, per Freedom House, Palestinian political culture is undemocratic and lacks basic checks and balances; it fails to respect the rights of religious minorities, women, and the LGBT community; and the rights of citizens to peacefully dissent and criticize the government are not respected.

Further, Palestinian culture is imbued with explicit antisemitism and incitement, and PLO officials have even stated that they will not allow Jews to live in a future Palestinian state.

Anti-Israel activists zealously advocating for the Palestinian cause seem, necessarily, to be required to strenuously repress the cognitive dissonance of understanding that such activism is often at complete odds with the progressive values they otherwise cherish.

How then to explain how such an illiberal movement has become a popular cause within liberal circles in the West?

The more I’m involved in efforts to combat the assault on Israel’s legitimacy at the Guardian the more I’m convinced that an unreflective sympathy for those deemed “victims” (whatever the objective merits of designating a group with such a status) party explains the resistance many have to even the most stubborn facts, logic and moral common sense about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict – even evidence demonstrating Israel’s pronounced liberal advantage over her Palestinian neighbors.

Robbing their Palestinian protagonists (objects of an a priori sympathy) of the moral agency typically assigned to responsible adults allows the Western left to excuse, rationalize, or ignore clear evidence of Palestinian villainy – whether such behavior includes explicit expressions of antisemitism or other reactionary political values, or even acts of terrorism. 

A good start in further understanding this dynamic can derived by the thoughts of scholar Shelby Steele, whose recent lecture, (excerpted by The Hudson Institute), included a meditation on the moral interplay between the West and Palestinians.

In his lecture, ”The Narrative of Palestinian Victimhood“, Steele argues that the real interest of Palestinians and their anti-Zionist supporters is to situate the Palestinian people within a narrative of victimization.  Their ulterior goal, Steele argues, “is to see themselves and to have others see them as victims of colonialism, as victims of white supremacy.”

Says Steele:

“Listen to their language; it is the language of colonial oppression. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas claims that Palestinians have been occupied for 63 years. The word oppressed is constant, exploited. In this, there is a poetic truth; like poetic license, in a poetic truth a writer will bend the rules in order to be more effective.”

Thus, Guardian foreign editor David Hearst, in a column with the chilling title of “Could Arab staying power overcome Zionism“, Aug. 5, can positively cite his Arab-Israeli protagonists as questioning the “supremacist” nature of Israel, a characterization of the Jewish state, I’ve noted, which was popularized by an antisemitic extremist.

And, ‘Comment is Fee’ can similarly publish an essay by Sam Bahour, Aug. 4, which characterized Palestinians as victims of the “settler, colonial, apartheid, racialist, exclusivist” ideology of Zionism.

It also explains why Deborah Orr can even interpret the release of Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1027 Palestinian prisoners as evidence of Israeli racism.

The narrative that Palestinians are victims of racism, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, and even a from of racial supremacism has a life of its own, and, Steele argues, is often resistant to even the most serious critical scrutiny.  

Steele:

“Poetic truths like that are marvelous because no facts and no reason can ever penetrate. Supporters of Israel are up against a poetic truth. We keep hitting it with all the facts. We keep hitting it with obvious logic and reason. And we are so obvious and conspicuously right that we assume it is going to have an impact and it never does.” [emphasis mine]

Adds Steele:

“These narratives, these poetic truths, are the source of their power. Who would [the Palestinians] be if they were not victims of white supremacy? They would just be poor people in the Middle East. They would be backwards. They would be behind Israel in every way. So this narrative is the source of their power….It is the source of their self-esteem. Without it, would they be able to compete with Israeli society? 

Steele further argues:

“The idea that the problem is…the Jews protects Palestinians from having to confront that inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world…Our facts and our reason are not going to penetrate easily that definition or make any progress.”

As to why the liberal West perpetuates this narrative, Steele argues:

“The Western world [feels it] lacks the moral authority to call them on it. The Western world has not said…’your real problem is underdevelopment.’ That has not been said, nor will ever be said – because the Western world was once colonial, was once racist, did practice white supremacy, and is so ashamed of itself and so vulnerable to those charges, that they are not going to say a word. They are not going to say what they really think and feel about what is so obvious about the circumstances among the Palestinians. So the poetic truth that Palestinians live by carries on.”

“[So] the international media give [the Palestinian cause] a kind of gravitas that it would never otherwise have.”

Steele further argues that the I-P Conflict will never be solved until we somehow get beyond this “poetic truth” that they are the perennial victims of a malevolent and racist Israeli state.  

So, as long as the moral gate keepers at the Guardian, and the MSM, continue to prop up this poetic truth, grants it life, sustenance and moral license, Palestinians have little motivation to overcome the tyranny of their victimhood.

In contextualizing the Guardian each day, I read each story and commentary on Israel and the Palestinians without any question as to how the story will be framed.  The facts and details of each story may change, but the immutability of Palestinian victimhood renders any objective analysis of the I-P Conflict all but impossible.

Today, Palestinians are “freedom riders”.

Tomorrow it will be some other cynical exploitation of the language of liberalism and human rights which the Guardian will legitimize.

Israel’s military and terrorist threats are indeed quite real, but the cognitive war we’re fighting is every bit as dangerous and – unlike the physical theaters of war where battles are won or lost largely by strength of arms – requires a rhetorical arsenal we’ve yet to adequately develop, yet alone effectively deploy.  

Related articles

Deborah Orr Tweet of the day: Jews are “not allowed” to “not allow people to be critical” of Israel

November 15, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | 21 comments

Our post yesterday attempted to get the Guardian’s Deborah Orr to issue a more genuine apology for her mocking and distorted characterization of Jews as “the chosen” people in an Oct. Guardian piece on the deal to release Gilad Shalit.

In her original column – for which she ultimately wrote a quasi apology which didn’t address her most egregious passages – Orr essentially argued that the release of 1027 terrorist prisoners by Israel in exchange for one Israeli is evidence of  the Jewish state’s racism, a racism, she implied, which is embedded in Judaism itself.

We posted our request to Orr to issue a more sincere apology following a Twitter exchange in which she challenged us to offer our views on what she should have written, and added that she’d read it and consider endorsing it.

Well, after Tweeting our post (with text of an apology we hoped she’d consider issuing) directly to Orr, she responded in a way clearly showing her lack of remorse for advancing the toxic idea that “chosenness” indicated Jewish racism or a sense of supremacism – a Judeophobic trope which, we added, is typically advanced by antisemitic extremists.

After a series of exchanges there was this Tweet by Orr:

I included this Tweet (before her answer to our direct question) because I think it gets to the heart of the matter regarding a UK liberal intelligentsia (and I use that term lightly) who truly believes that there’s a dearth of criticism regarding Israel, and that powerful pro-Israel Jews are attempting to silence the debate.  

Evidently, Orr is unaware of her own paper’s obsessive negative coverage of the Jewish state – Israel represents the fifth most covered country in the world by the Guardian, based on their own data – nor the fact that such hyper criticism is leveled on the website of a broadsheet which garners tens of millions of unique visitors a month.

If Zionist Jews were indeed attempting to muzzle criticism of Israel then a brief survey of the quantity and degree of such fierce opprobrium towards the Jewish state (found both on blogs and in the MSM) would clearly indicate that we are failing spectacularly at such efforts.

Finally, Orr’s reply, to our Tweet asking her to endorse the apology we wrote, was this.

Yes, Deborah, you continue to make your views quite clear. 

Related articles

The apology to the Jewish people Deborah Orr should have written

November 14, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , | by | 15 comments

Guardian journalist Deborah Orr may have felt the need, or perhaps was required, to issue a quasi apology in response to the criticism which followed her Oct. 19th Guardian polemic, “Is an Israeli life really more important than a Palestinians’s?”

In her apology she wrote:

“Last week, I upset a lot of people by suggesting Zionists saw themselves as “chosen”. My words were badly chosen and poorly used.”

However, this is far less than accurate as she was clearly suggesting that Jews, as such, and not merely “Zionists” – insofar as Israel is understood as the state of the Jewish people – saw themselves as chosen.

Indeed her original post expressed disgust at the prisoner exchange which freed Gilad Shalit, not out of concern that hundreds of unrepentant terrorists were released for one Israeli soldier – and, indeed, the post was accompanied with a celebratory photo of a released female terrorist who tried to carry out a 2004 suicide bombing - but because, in her moral calculus, such a deal demonstrated Israeli racism.

Unfortunately, much of Orr’s apology largely fails to address the most serious issue with her original Guardian piece.

In the essay, she rails against “the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives”, before concluding contemptuously that “so many Zionists believe…that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours.” [emphasis mine]

What Orr suggested can be summed up as follows:

The release of 1027 terrorist prisoners by Israel in exchange for one Israeli is evidence of  the Jewish state’s racism (or feeling of supremacy), a racism embedded in Judaism itself.

CiF Watch recently got into a Twitter exchange with Orr, and asked if she would issue a more thorough apology, addressing the argument she actually made.

Here was her response:

Ok, I’ll take a stab at it. Here’s the apology which we’d like to see Orr sign.

In an Oct. 19th Guardian piece, I made the indefensible argument that Israel’s prisoner deal with Hamas, which secured the release of Gilad Shalit in exchange for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners (many who committed or planned terrorist acts), was evidence of the racist belief by Jews that they are “the chosen people”.

I know now both that such an asymmetrical prisoner deal between Hamas and Israel merely reflected the former’s better negotiating position, and says nothing whatsoever about the morality of Israel, who, obviously, would have preferred to secure Shalit’s release without having to release even one Palestinian prisoner.

More importantly, I now understand the odious history of the distorted narrative of Jews as “the chosen people”.

I realize the truth of what Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott recently wrote: “Chosenness”, in Jewish theology, tends to refer to the sense in which Jews are “burdened” by religious responsibilities; it has never meant that the Jews are better than anyone else. Historically it has been antisemites, not Jews, who have read “chosen” as code for Jewish supremacism.”

I regret having used a trope which evokes historical antisemitic narratives and understand the following:

‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, the most widely distributed antisemitic forgery in history is premised partly on the idea of Jews’ “chosenness”.

I know now that a distortion of the idea of Jews’ “chosenness” is a widely used theme in perhaps the most popular antisemitic site on the web, Jew Watch.

Finally, I’ve learned that the most well-known white supremacist in the U.S., David Duke, uses the theme of Jews’ “chosenness” to prove that Jews are the most racist people on the planet in his book “Jewish Supremacism”.

In short, such distortions of Jews’ understanding of their identity, and of Judaism itself, are quite dangerous and should be strenuously avoided by those who consider themselves anti-racists.

As an anti-racist, I will, of course, strenuously refrain from advancing such inaccurate, and harmful, stereotypes in the future.

Ms. Orr:  It would certainly be heartening to see you dissociate yourself, without qualifications, from such toxic narratives about Jews and agree to endorse this proposed apology. 

Related articles

Guardian Letters Editor abets distortion of Gilad Shalit’s comments about Palestinian prisoners

October 30, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , | by | 2 comments

The televised interview with Gilad Shalit by Egyptian Nile News TV presenter Shahira Amin was both abusive and illegal, as it was conducted under duress in violation of the fourth Geneva Convention and without Shalit having been examined by a representative of the Red Cross beforehand.

On the day of the interview, the Guardian’s Chris McGreal thought it appropriate to rely upon the translation of Shalit’s responses by a Hamas apparatchik and rushed to publish the distorted version on the Guardian’s Live Blog.

Despite all that, it seems that the Letters Editor at the Guardian is not up to speed with any of the above and hence found it appropriate to publish a letter on October 28th from one Benedict Birnberg. 

As we noted previously, here’s what Shalit actually said:

“I will be very glad if they [Palestinian prisoners] will be freed but they should not fight Israel anymore, it should be as part of a peace process and there should not be more wars.” [emphasis mine]

Birnberg is of course a Guardian letters page ‘frequent flyer’. He is company secretary for the charity ‘War on Want’ which is infamous for its anti-Israel campaigns. He is also a trustee for the ‘Free Vanunu’ campaign and a supporter of BDS.

It comes as no surprise that Birnberg would attempt to reap political capital by twisting the words uttered by Gilad Shalit in an abusive situation, surrounded by armed and masked Hamas terrorists, and before he gained his freedom.

It is, however, totally inappropriate that the Guardian Letters Editor should be aiding and abetting Birnberg in adding to the abuse by exploiting the deliberately misconstrued words of a prisoner. 

Related articles

Jonathan Freedland’s Intifada delusions.

October 27, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 37 comments

It was disappointing to say the least to see that in his October 25th article on CiF Jonathan Freedland appears to have succumbed to the myth of a non-violent First Intifada.

“ There is hopeful talk of a “Palestinian spring”, a popular movement demanding independence that world opinion would find hard to oppose, one inspired by the first, stone-throwing intifada begun in 1987 rather than by the murderous second one that began in 2000. Such an uprising would also put pressure on the Israeli government to make the concessions necessary for peace, much as the first intifada pushed Israel into the Madrid and Oslo processes.”

Ironically, the event which seems to have prompted Freedland’s article is the release of Gilad Shalit in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, several of whom were serving sentences as a result of having been convicted for rather more than ‘stone-throwing’ during the First Intifada.  

Whilst it is of course true that the Second Intifada was considerably more violent than the first one, (partly at least due to the fact that by September 2000 the Palestinian terror organisations had much easier access to weapons as a result of the Oslo process), it is by no means accurate to claim that the First Intifada was not ‘murderous’, both in its intent and results.

Memorial for the 16 Israelis killed in first attempted suicide attack of 1st Intifada, in 1989. The attack occurred when the 405 bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was forced off the road by a Palestinian terrorist named Abd al-Hadi Ghanayem. Ghanayem is to be released in the deal for Gilad Shalit.

The First Intifada began on December 9th 1987, but its end is more difficult to date. Some sources define it as ending with the Madrid Conference of October 1991. Others consider it to have continued until the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993. Between December 1987 and September 1993, Palestinian terrorists carried out some 3,600 attacks with Molotov cocktails, 100 attacks with hand grenades and 600 attacks with guns or explosives. Below is a partial list of some of the events which Freedland and others who attempt to airbrush the First Intifada prefer to ignore.

December 28th, 1987 – Israeli postal workers discovered 8 letter bombs, one of which exploded, injuring 2 people.

March 7th, 1988 – Fatah terrorists entered Israel from Sinai, Egypt and murdered Victor Ram, Miriam Ben-Yair and Rina Sharetsky – all workers at the Dimona nuclear plant – and injured 8 others.

April 8th, 1988 – Palestinian gunmen attacked a group of hikers, killing one girl and wounding 15 others.

June 22nd, 1988 – Professor Menahem Stern was stabbed to death in Jerusalem by two Palestinian terrorists whilst walking from his home in Rehavia to the library.  

August 20th, 1988 – Terrorists (probably from the Abu Nidal faction) exploded a hand grenade in a Haifa mall, injuring 25.

October 30th, 1988 – Terrorists firebombed an Israeli bus in Jericho killing a mother and her 3 children and a soldier who tried to rescue them. Ahmed al Takruri was convicted for the attack and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released under the terms of the October 2011 Shalit deal.

February 16th, 1989 – Sgt. Avi Sasportas was kidnapped and shot to death by terrorists. His body was discovered 3 months later.

March 21st, 1989 – A construction worker from Gaza – Mohammed Zakout – stabbed and killed two Israelis and seriously injured a third in Tel Aviv. He was released in October 2011 under the Shalit deal.

May 3rd, 1989 – Cpl. Ilan Sa’adon was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists. His body was only discovered in 1996.  Muhammed al Sharatha, head of the cell which murdered both Sasportas and Sa’adon, was released in October 2011 under the terms of the Shalit deal. Also on the same day, two Israelis were stabbed to death and three injured by Palestinian terrorists in an attack in Zion Square in Jerusalem.

June 16th, 1989 – An Israeli was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist near Ariel.

July 6th, 1989 – An Islamic Jihad terrorist forced bus no. 405 off a cliff on the road to Jerusalem, killing 14 people and wounding dozens more. The perpetrator, Abd al Hadi Rafa Ghanim, survived and was sentenced to 16 life sentences. He was released on October 18th 2011 under the Shalit deal.

May 28th, 1990 – A bomb hidden in a stall at the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem killed one person and injured 12.

May 30th, 1990 – A PLF terror attack by sea on Tel Aviv beaches was thwarted.

June 7th, 1990 – An Islamic Jihad bomb in a Jerusalem shopping centre killed one person and injured 9 others.

July 28th, 1990 – a Canadian tourist was killed and 18 others injured by a pipe bomb planted on a beach in Tel Aviv.

August 4th, 1990 – Two Israeli teenagers were kidnapped from Jerusalem and murdered.

September 20th, 1990 – Reservist Sgt Amnon Pomerantz was stoned to death and burned in his vehicle after losing his way in the Gaza Strip.

October 21st, 1990 – Three Israelis were stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist in Jerusalem.

December 2nd, 1990 – Hamas terrorists stabbed one Israeli to death and injured 3 others on a bus between Petah Tikva and Tel Aviv.

December 14th, 1990 – Hamas terrorists murdered 3 employees at a factory in Yaffo.

March 18th, 1991 – A Palestinian terrorist murdered 4 women in Jerusalem.

October 11th, 1991 – Two soldiers were killed and 11 others injured when a terrorist deliberately ran them over at the hitch-hiking station at Tel HaShomer.

October 28th, 1991 – PIJ and PFLP claimed responsibility for an attack by gunmen on a civilian bus in which two Israelis were killed and several others wounded.

February 14th, 1992 – Three Israeli soldiers were axed to death by terrorists near Kibbutz Gal’ed.

May 17th, 1992 – one Israeli was shot and killed by Palestinians in Bet Lahiye, Gaza Strip.

May 24th, 1992 – 15 year-old schoolgirl Helena Rapp was stabbed to death by a Hamas terrorist in Bat Yam. The murderer, Fuad Amrin, was released under the Shalit deal in October 2011.

May 27th, 1992 – A rabbi from Gush Katif was stabbed to death by a Hamas terrorist.

May 30th, 1992 – One Israeli was killed in Eilat by Palestinian terrorists.

June 25th, 1992 – Two Israelis were stabbed to death by Hamas terrorists in a packing house in Gaza. On the same day another Israeli was injured by a terrorist with an axe.

September 18th, 1992 – an Israeli soldier was kidnapped and stabbed by Hamas terrorists.

September 22nd, 1992 – Border policeman Avinoam Peretz was shot and killed by a Hamas terrorist in Jerusalem.

November 20th, 1992 – A car bomb planted by Hamas terrorists in Or Yehuda was defused.

December 12th, 1992 – Staff Sgt. Major Nissim Toledano was kidnapped and subsequently murdered by Hamas terrorists.  Ahmed Atwan, who was sentenced to 3 life sentences for his part in the incident was released in October 2011 as part of the Shalit deal.

December 19th, 1992 – A policeman was kidnapped and murdered in Jerusalem.

February 24th, 1993 – an 11 year-old girl, Hava Wechsberg, was killed when Palestinians threw rocks at the car in which she was travelling, causing it to crash.

March 12th, 1993 – Pvt. Yeoshua Friedberg was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists. Mahmud Shammasina who was serving three life sentences for his part in Friedberg’s murder (in addition to 3 others) was released in October 2011 as part of the terms of the Shalit deal.  

March 29th, 1993 – An Israeli was killed by two Palestinians wielding an axe in Petah Tikva.

April 16th, 1993 – Hamas detonated a bomb in the parking lot of a restaurant at Mehola, killing one person.

May 28th, 1993 – A Yeshiva student was murdered in Hebron whilst walking to synagogue.  

July 1st, 1993 – 3 Hamas terrorists killed 2 women and wounded 2 other people during an attempted bus hijack in Jerusalem.

August 5th, 1993 – An Israeli soldier – Yaron Chen – was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas terrorists. Fahad Schludi who was imprisoned for his part in the murder was released in October 2011 as part of the Shalit deal.

September 24th, 1993 – Yigal Vaknin was stabbed to death by Hamas terrorists in an orchard near his home.

In addition to the Israelis killed in the First Intifada (according to the chosen time frame, numbers range from 160 to 185), Freedland also makes no mention of the hundreds of Palestinians killed by their fellow countrymen during that time on the often trumped-up charge of ‘collaboration’ with Israel.

Freedland also appears to think that the First Intifada had the positive effect of pushing Israel towards the Madrid Conference and the Oslo Accords and implies that a contemporary repeat of such an uprising might have similar effects today, of which he appears to approve.

Unfortunately, Freedland neglects to mention that after the signing of the Oslo Accords the rate of terrorism only worsened with 91 Israelis murdered between September 1993 and the end of 1994 alone.

By perpetuating the myth of a non-violent First Intifada and by ignoring the terror which subsequently worsened as a result of the refusal of assorted Palestinian terror factions to accept the concept of peace with Israel as outlined in the Oslo Accords, Freedland is apparently able to delude himself into believing that all that is needed in order for sweetness and light to envelop the Middle East is a ‘gesture’ from the current Prime Minister or the involvement of the international community.

His personal delusions are his own affair, but his air-brushing of the historical facts on the pages of the mainstream media are not.

Related articles

Saudi cleric’s message, offering reward for kidnapped Israeli soldiers, removed from Facebook

October 27, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , | by | 4 comments

The Facebook message posted by prominent Saudi cleric, Dr. Awad al-Qarni, which offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who abducts Israeli soldiers, has been removed from his page.

Here’s the text of his message, as we reported yesterday:

“Media has reported the news that Zionist settlers pay huge amounts of money to those who would kill the released Palestinian prisoners. In order to answer these criminals, I declare to the world that any Palestinian who captures – inside Palestine [by which he means, all of Israel] - an Israeli soldier in order to exchange him for prisoners, I promise to pay him a reward and prize totaling one hundred thousand dollars.” 

Here’s a screen capture of the original message, in Arabic, as it looked yesterday:

Now, when you try to open the link to the message, you get this:

So, thanks to all the readers and fellow bloggers who complained to Facebook that the cleric’s post represented an egregious violation of FB’s terms of service.

Related articles

Deborah Orr’s Disgusting Excuse For an “Apology”

October 26, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | by | 35 comments

This is a cross post by Simon Plosker of Honest Reporting

Deborah Orr

Deborah Orr’s obscene abuse of the concept of the “chosen people” in a Guardian commentary deriding Israel’s efforts to bring back Gilad Shalit as motivated by Jewish racism rightly upset many people.

Such language is regularly employed by anti-Semites to falsely assert that Jews claim to be superior to non-Jews not only in a theological sense but also in a racial one and it was no surprise that Orr found herself in the eye of a storm of criticism.

This and the deluge of emails from HonestReporting subscribers and other concerned parties to The Guardian has had some effect. The October 27 print edition contains a response from none other than Deborah Orr herself:

Last week, I upset a lot of people by suggesting Zionists saw themselves as “chosen”. My words were badly chosen and poorly used, and I’m sorry for it. But accusations of antisemitism have also been intemperate. One can accept the right of Israel to exist, while still believing that the manner in which the nation was created – against the wishes of many of the people already living there, hundreds of thousands of whom became refugees – was problematic and made a contribution to Israel’s subsequent and terrible troubles. (This, in turn, does not imply that the violence against Israel has been either justified or deserved. It has done the Palestinian cause much damage, and rightly so.)

Nevertheless, it would be absurd to believe that Jewish people are any more or less capable of making geo-political miscalculations than anybody else, or any more or less likely to be called to account for them. Evidence from every corner of the world, throughout the ages, attests to the fact that such behaviour is all too typical of humans, as is reluctance to accept that such actions are bound to have their critics.

Deborah Orr’s response is revealing. Does she even know what she has been accused of?

Addressing charges of anti-Semitism, she says that “one can accept the right of Israel to exist.” Orr’s use of the third person leaves us wondering whether or not she does actually does accept Israel’s right to exist. In any case, this was never the issue and it is incredibly disturbing that Orr’s best defense against the charges against her is to concede that Israel may have the right to exist as if this lame concession should immunize her against the criticism she is facing.

Orr offers the sort of explanation given by those who accuse Israel and Jews of “playing the anti-Semitism card” to shut down debate over Israel’s policies. Indeed, it is legitimate to criticize Israel and not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. But Orr went beyond legitimate criticism and attributed Israeli policies to some racist characteristic of Jewish people themselves.

That she concludes by saying that Jews and others are reluctant to accept that their actions are bound to have their critics shows that Orr is addressing not her disgusting usage and abuse of the “chosen” concept but the very fact that she was criticized at all.

In the final analysis, Orr is clearly not sorry for what she said but how she said it. It’s certainly not an apology but a confirmation that Deborah Orr is one nasty piece of work.

CiF comment justifies antisemitism as normal reaction to Zionism: 74 “recommends” & not deleted

October 26, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , , , | by | 15 comments

In the comment section beneath Jonathan Freedland’s CiF essay, “Gilad Shalit has been brought home to an Israel that has no plan for peace.“, there was this comment by someone using the moniker FreshNews:

The reasoning which informs such vitriol against Israel is nothing new to CiF Watch readers.  

One of the more prolific antisemites on the far left, Gilad Atzmon – who was given a platform by the Guardian several weeks ago – has written the following:

“There is no anti-Semitism any more. In the devastating reality created by the Jewish state, anti-Semitism has been replaced by political reaction. I am saying that these acts [vandalizing synagogues and Jewish cemeteries] should be seen as political responses rather than racially motivated acts or ‘irrational’ hate crimes. If Israel is the state of the Jewish people and the Jewish people themselves do not stand up collectively against the crimes that are committed on their behalf, then every Jewish person, Jewish symbol and Jewish object becomes an Israeli interest and a potential terrorist target….we should be consistent and regard any act against Jews as a political reaction rather than an irrational racist attack.”

CiF commentator, Medhi Hasan, has advanced a similar narrative:

 ”...the state of Israel – created ostensibly to protect Jews from across the world from hatred, prejudice and violence – through its actions today, and through its self-proclaimed role as the leader and home of world Jewry, provokes such awful anti-Semitic attacks against diaspora Jews.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had a great response, in an interview by David Frost, to the question of whether Israel’s actions provoke violence:

Begin told Frost that during his youth in Poland, he asked a group of Poles why they felt a need to beat up Jews, and they responded that the very presence of Jews was a “provocation.”

As such, it is a morally grotesque proposition to suggest that the actions, or mere presence, of Israel, causes or provokes antisemitism.  

While manifestations of antisemitism have varied throughout history, the one common thread which unites them all is that such bigotry existed as an a priori phenomenon, and was not informed by any particular Jewish behavior.  

Modern antisemites don’t gravitate towards Jew hatred as the result of Israeli behavior.  

The hatred of Jews has simply never been informed by such causation, nor any semblance of moral or political logic. 

Related articles

Report Saudi cleric’s Facebook message, offering reward for kidnapping Israelis, to FB as abuse

October 26, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , | by | 3 comments

It’s been reported on Ynet that, a week after the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, top Saudi cleric Dr. Awad al-Qarni began offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who kidnaps more Israeli soldiers – in a message he posted on Facebook.  

Al-Qarni’s call was in response to an ad published by the Libman family offering a reward for anyone who catches the person who murdered their relative Shlomo Libman, who was killed by terrorists near the settlement of Yitzhar in 1998.

Al-Qarni is a famous Muslim cleric who often appears on Saudi TV shows and operates his own website where he discusses various religious law issues.

Here’s al-Qarni’s Facebook  page.

Here’s a screen capture of the status update calling for the abduction. 

While you can use the translate function on your browser, here’s a more precise translation of the text provided by a CiF Watch supporter who works as professional Arabic translator:

“Media has reported the news that Zionist settlers pay huge amounts of money to those who would kill the released Palestinian prisoners. In order to answer these criminals, I declare to the world that any Palestinian who captures – inside Palestine [by which he means, all of Israel] - an Israeli soldier in order to exchange him for prisoners, I promise to pay him a reward and prize totaling one hundred thousand dollars.”

The message has received over 1,800 “Likes” so far, and hundreds of laudatory comments.

To report this sick call to abduct Israelis to Facebook – as a violation of their terms of service which prohibits “incitement to violence” – go to the cleric’s FB message, here.  When, you hover your cursor to the right of the message you’ll see an “X”, which will open up hyper-linked text allowing you to report it as abuse.

Related articles

Deborah Orr “chosen people” update:Israel to free 25 Egyptians for 1 Jew, thus Jews 25 X more valuable than Egyptians

October 25, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , | by | 10 comments

H/T AKUS

As we’ve noted (here and here) the Guardian’s Deborah Orr has advanced an argument based on one of the most peculiar examples of moral calculus I’ve ever come across. 

Orr wrote:

“It’s quite something, the prisoner swap between Hamas and the Israeli government that returns Gilad Shalit to his family, and more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to theirs…[which is] an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives….“At the same time, however, there is something abject in [Hamas's] eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbors.”

As I noted previously, the logic is almost beyond comprehension, and implies that Israel should have demanded that Hamas not submit to the blatant  racism of allowing over a thousand of their terrorist free in exchange for Gilad Shalit, and accept a one for one prisoner exchange, in the name of anti-racism.

Recently, the Guardian reported the following on the American Israeli,  Ilan Grapel, detained in Egypt since June 12, on charges of spying:

Egypt is to release a US-Israeli citizen held since June on suspicion of spying, according to a statement issued by the office of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday evening.

Israel will release 25 Egyptian prisoners in exchange for Ilan Grapel, who has been held without charge since he was arrested in Cairo on June 12.

So, employing Orr’s moral logic, both Egypt and Israel must believe that an Israeli life is 25 times more valuable than an Egyptian life – indicating a racism rate not nearly as odious as the relative worth of Israelis to Gazans, where Israeli life is 1027 times more valuable. 

The one truly remarkable thing is that such clearly intuitive reasoning has, until now, eluded the greatest ethicists and moral logicians of our time.

Orr will no doubt be teaching her Israeli Racism Calculation Theory at an Arab funded UK university soon.   

Related articles

The Hostage-Prisoner Exchange and the world of imaginative sympathy

October 24, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , | by | 25 comments

This is cross posted by Richard Landes, who blogs at Augean Stables. Landes is the author of: “Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience“.

One of the supreme ironies among the European moral stances has to do with their discourse on the “death penalty.” It’s a standard trope of European contempt for the USA that it still has a death penalty, a sign of its cowboy nature and its retardation in the moral progress of nations. At least when it comes to the death penalty, America is still in the 20th century. “Moral Europe,” on the other hand, stands at the vanguard of the global community of nations and its appreciation of the value of human life undergirds its horror at the execution of criminals, no matter what their deeds.

And yet when that same moral entity turns its gaze on the Middle East, the country they have the most contempt for is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment, and they have the most admiration for a country that among a widespread political culture that extensively uses torture and execution for the maintenance of public order, shows perhaps the most contempt for the lives of its own peoples and its enemies.

Normally, this would not be even worth mentioning. Most people would just roll their eyes while others complain about Zionist imperialists trying to divert attention from their oppression of the Palestinians. But if you want to understand the “hostage-for-prisoner-exchange” that just took place in Israel and the Western media’s coverage of the event, then you need to pay attention to the issue.

Israel first outlawed the death in 1954, thus reversing the Mandate Law, which, in most other instances, Israel took over from the British. They based themselves both on rabbinic precedent (concerns for both respecting the image of God in man and the unattainable burden of proof) and modern liberal sentiment (Robespierre initially opposed the death penalty). In doing so, they became the first modern Western democracy after Germany (1949) to ban the death penalty, followed a decade later by Britain (1965), Sweden (1972), Canada (1976) and France (1981).

Note that Israel passed this law five years after the creation of a polity dedicated to equality before the law for all its citizens, a move that earned them the ferocious hostility of their neighbors in the Arab Muslim world. Normally, when countries attempt these egalitarian revolutions and find themselves surrounded by hostile enemies, they have, by year five, descended into mass executions of their own citizens (French Revolution in their fourth year, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, almost immediately). Israel, on the other hand, outlawed the death penalty even for Arab terrorists who were captured while killing Israeli civilians. Israel has only executed one person, Adolph Eichmann, held responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

If the Israelis had hundreds of terrorists in their prisons, in some cases serving multiple life sentences, available to trade for Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped from Israeli soil by Hamas combatants five years ago, it’s because of this attitude towards human life, both their own and those of the Palestinians. And that attitude was on full display throughout this exchange, with people agonizing over endangering future Israelis from releasing these men, and the profound commitment to getting Gilad Shalit back. Some Arabs recognized the unflattering light this shed on their own culture, while others reveled in it.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, represent almost the polar opposite. This is a culture in which killing daughters and wives and homosexuals for shaming the family with (even suspected and loosely interpreted) inappropriate sexual behavior is a regular feature of society, where “collaborators” are summarily executed, where official statistics for executions put the PA at a rate of formal, legal execution that cedes only to China, Iran, N. Korea, Yemen and Libya.

The trade of over a thousand Palestinians for one Israeli highlights the radical differences between the cultures, themselves outlined often in a triumphalist statement of superiority by the Palestinians (and others in the name of Islam):

“In as much as you love life, the Muslim loves death and martyrdom. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and [strives for] martyrdom.”

As Hizbullah’s Nasrullah put it after a prison exchange in 2004:

“We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

These are not mere abstractions or rhetorical verbiage. Palestinian culture inculcates a culture of hatred, murder of enemies, contempt for life. In a chilling exchange at the height of the intifada, one sweet 12 year old girl told an approving TV interviewer:

“Shahada [martyrdom through suicide bombing] is a very, very, beautiful thing. Everyone yearns for Shahada. What can be more beautiful than going to heaven.” 

As one Israeli observer noted in commenting on a op-ed by Palestinian Bassem Nasser complaining that it’s inappropriate to depict those released as convicted “terrorist murderers” because they are heroes in Gaza.

The picture Nasser so proudly paints of Palestinian society, glaringly clarifies to all that the leaders of Gaza and its citizenry as a whole comprise one of the most despicable and detestable societies in the history of Man. No Hollywood studio has ever created a villain as evil as the likes of Khaled Mashaal, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini or Hassan Nassrallah.

No Hollywood writer has ever written a script about an entire society of evil, millions of devout clones of a murderous, deviant ideology and eschatology.

The reality of Gaza today, and most of the Arab world, is too strange for fiction.

If a European, concerned about the nature of the aggressive Islam that has begun to crop up in and around his or her cities, claiming for example Sharia-zones, wanted to understand the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he might spend a moment visiting the sites of Palestinian anti-Zionists, where this profoundly perverse culture teems.

But of course, that would be politically incorrect. To spend any time pointing out the problems here constitutes the highest level of politically-incorrect Islamophobia. How dare one essentialize an entire culture as morally repugnant? How demeaning to Palestinians, how insulting to Islam. Little matter that they openly embrace these values. After all, “who are we to judge?”

So instead of helping Europeans understand what’s at stake here, most of the media and the NGO community (like Amnesty International) have done their best to spin this story as one of violations of human rights on “both sides” with a heavy focus on Israeli misdeeds. The prisoners were considered as “equal,” and Israeli primarily held accountable by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of enemy combatants when, in reality, the only one protected under these conditions was Shalit, a uniformed soldier kidnapped on his own soil in non-combat situation, and the thousand Palestinian prisoners where convicted in a court, primarily of crimes related to terror attacks on civilians (an, alas, necessary redundancy in these days of sophism).

Thus, the NYT’s Robert Mackee could speak glibly about the “joy of parents on both sides” at the return of prisoners, and the UN could voice its concern that the prisoners Israel released might be subject to illegal forced transfer.

“Returning people to places other than their habitual places of residence is in contradiction to international humanitarian law.”

The UN’s exquisite concern for the full exercise of free will by convicted mass murderers illustrates the problem. Humanitarian discourse has been turned on its head to protect the ugliest players in this particular game, threatened by ugly forces within their own society, all the while implying that Israel, in its haste to get its own soldier back, trampled their rights and violated humanitarian law. Not surprisingly this led Ban Ki Moon to a moment of moral vertigo where he denounced the violation of everyone’s rights.

Of course, in order to present the moral equivalence (if not inversion) of all the “prisoners” in the swap, one has to play down the heinous nature of the crimes and personalities of the Palestinian prisoners released. BBC Correspondent Jon Donnison showed the extent of ignorance and laziness among the supposedly professional news media by interviewing a man in prison for organizing and abetting several suicide bombings. (Because the attacks only injured but did not kill, he did not receive life sentences.)

“You are 31 years old, 10 years in prison, serving a life sentence for being a member of Hamas, I mean, how do you feel today?”

BBC viewers could be excused for sympathizing with a political prisoner, inhumanly incarcerated for belonging to an opposition party, free at last.

A still more disgusting example concerns the Sbarro Pizza bombing, one of the most revolting of all the suicide attacks because it explicitly sought to kill as many little children as possible (and succeeded). Palestinian students celebrated its anniversary with an astonishing exhibition, recreating in papier mache the moment of detonation so viewers could savor their Schadenfreude.

The parents of one of the girls killed in the attack, Malki Roth, objected to the release of Ahlam Tamimi, who not only planned the attack meticulously as an attack on religious children, but, in prison, showed not only no remorse, but real pleasure at the news that she had killed 8, not just 3 children.  Many in the media preferred “driver of the suicide bomber,” thus making the Roths look petty for objecting to her freedom. Meantime, the “moderate” Jordanians celebrated her release with a ceremony at the Family Court in Amann.

So, if one might ask the question, “Will the world ask: ‘Why do Palestinians celebrate murder?’” the answer is, “no.” Even those who know that’s what they’re doing, will have had any moral indignation bleached out of their awareness long before they’ve had a chance to ponder the variables.

In acquiescing with a Palestinian narrative in which hatred and child mass murder are considered legitimate expressions of “resistance” to “occupation,” Western human rights activists – including too many journalists – have degraded humanitarian language at the same time as they have allowed into the public sphere a discourse of genocidal hatred, they have excluded any sympathy for Israelis who defend themselves from the onslaught they have shut out from their, and their audiences’ consciousness. As Leon Wieseltier put it in a different context, this all reflects “the new heartlessness toward Israel. A whole country and a whole people have been expelled from the realm of imaginative sympathy.”

It may seem cost-free to Westerners who, for one reason or another, don’t like pushy Jewish overachievers, but it’s not. In misreading the nature of the threat Israel faces, in adopting a degraded language of human rights to protect the greatest enemies of human rights on the planet, in adopting a  that masquerades as empirically accurate, they embrace  all the kinds of techniques that put them in danger when faced with the same enemy.

Related articles

Jewish supremacism revisited: And, Deborah Orr’s faulty memory

October 24, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , | by | 10 comments

As I noted in “On the explicit antisemitism of the Guardian’s Deborah Orr“, Orr, commenting on the Shalit prisoner swap for the Guardian, advanced a simply inexplicable moral calculus – one just brimming with animosity towards Jews.

Regarding the former, Orr somehow interpreted Israel’s willingness to release over a thousand Palestinian terrorists, for one Israeli who had never committed a crime, as evidence of Israeli racism.

She wrote:

“It’s quite something, the prisoner swap between Hamas and the Israeli government that returns Gilad Shalit to his family, and more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to theirs…[which is] an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives.”

Of course, such bizarre logic shows how debased the commentary over Israel has become, especially when you consider the real moral implications of the deal with Hamas: that the value of the hundreds of Israeli lives extinguished by the Palestinian terrorists released in the deal were apparently of no particular concern to Hamas, Orr or other European critics of Israel.  

Regarding Orr’s broader animosity towards Jews as such,  it seems that our crusading anti-Zionist friend forgot what she has written – or so it would seem by a Twitter exchange she had recently with a critic of her Guardian diatribe.

Here’s the Tweet which challenged Orr to fess up to her peculiar logic:

Then, Orr:

OK, I’ll jog her memory. She wrote, in her Guardian piece:

“…so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbors.”

As I sense that Ms. Orr isn’t the brightest bulb in the lot, let me spell is out to her.

Despite having no recollection of arguing that “Jews think they’re better” than others, a mere few days ago she opined her disgust with the notion “that the lives of the chosen” – JEWS – “are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbors”.  

And, of course, by “unfortunate neighbors”, it is, to be honest, less than clear which bastions of peace, brotherhood, universal love, and religious tolerance she’s referring to: Is it Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iran? She doesn’t say.  

Yes, those pesky Jews – so crippled by selfishness that they fail to even consider submitting to the Islamist universal-ism which their neighbors so selflessly wish upon them.  

Related articles

Shalit after Hamas captivity vs Palestinian terrorists after Israeli incarceration: A visual/moral contrast

October 23, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , | by | 9 comments

Per AP 

GAZA CITY, Gaza City – A leader of the Palestinian militant group that captured the Israeli soldier swapped this week for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners said Saturday that the soldier was treated well during his captivity.

Zuhair Al-Qaisi of the Popular Resistance Committees told The Associated Press that Gilad Schalit was given sufficient food and allowed to watch Hebrew-language TV.

Schalit was notably gaunt, pale and exhausted when he was freed. His father says his son is suffering from malnutrition, the effects of isolation and lack of exposure to sun and also wounds sustained during his capture that had not been treated properly. Noam Schalit also said his son “endured harsh things” in his more than five years of captivity in Gaza.

Al-Qaisi dismissed the accusations, saying that Schalit was provided food that “fits him as a Jew,” by which he appeared to mean kosher food….”

“The way Schalit looked when he was released proved that he was treated well,” said Al-Qaisi.

However, look at the following.

Note Schalit’s appearance during the infamous Egyptian TV interview, and then later when he was finally on Israeli soil:

Does Gilad Schalit look fit, well-fed and cared for?  Does he seem to be as healthy as the terrorists kept at the Israeli taxpayers’ expense?

Judge for yourselves from the Palestinian photographs below.  Note the significant difference between the appearance of the freed Palestinians and that of Schalit. 

(Note also that these photographs, by Talla Photography, were taken from pro-Palestinian web pages.  I collected them so that, despite the bizarre accusations circulating that the photographs and film footage of Schalit had been doctored to make him look more unwell than he actually was, there can be no credible claims that these photographs have been altered by the Palestinian media to make the subjects look fit, well, suntanned and healthy) :

When white faces at the Guardian refuse to treat non-white faces as moral equals

October 23, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , , | by | 21 comments

Lara Pawson’s CiF essay on Oct. 20, “When a white face becomes the face of the Congo“, is a perfect illustration of the egregious double standards, operating under a veneer of anti-racism, which continues to deny moral agency to those categorized (often arbitrarily) as “people of color”.

Indeed, such reasoning, where victim and perpetrator in the Middle East is pre-assigned, continues to skew the Guardian’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East. 

Pawson opens her essay as follows:

“We have learned a lot about the 25-year-old Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit since his arrival in Egypt on Tuesday. We know the name of his father, Noam Shalit, his mother, Aviva Shalit, and that of his hometown, Mitzpe Hila. We know he was wearing a black baseball cap and a grey shirt when he was handed over to the Egyptian authorities. We know that despite looking gaunt, medical experts have judged him in good health. We also know the sound of this young man’s voice and what he said to journalists before finally returning home.”

Pawson then complains:

“What do we know about the 1,027 Palestinians for whom Shalit was exchanged? Can you name a single one? Beyond a summary of the crimes for which they were convicted in Israel, we know little else.”

Does Pawson really want to find out more about the terrorist history of such released prisoners?  Not likely. 

But, if she truly wants to know more about such faceless Palestinians, here’s a summary of the five top released terrorists, along with the Israeli victims of their ruthless acts.

YEHYA SINWAR

The 49-year-old Gaza native, who is generally considered the most senior prisoner released, helped establish Hamas’s military wing in Gaza — including an internal security network that killed Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel — and was serving four life sentences for his involvement in the 1994 kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldier Nachshon Wachsman. According to Al Jazeera, Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed, may have helped engineer Hamas’s abduction of Gilad Shalit. Upon returning home to Gaza, Yehya Sinwar stated that capturing Israeli soldiers was the best way to free Palestinian prisoners. “For the prisoner, capturing an Israeli soldier is the best news in the universe, because he knows that a glimmer of hope has been opened for him,” he declared, per the New York Times.

WALID ANAJAS

The 31-year-old Hamas operative was serving 36 life sentences for his role in suicide bombings at Jerusalem’s Café Moment (11 killed) and the Rishon LeZion pool hall (16 killed) in 2002 during the Second Intifada. 

Here are the Israeli victims of Anajas’s actions:

HUSAM BADRAN

The Hamas military leader helped plan many of the deadliest suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, including 2001 attacks on a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem (15 killed) and a disco near the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv (21 killed), and 2002 attacks on a Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya (30 killed) and the Matza restaurant in Haifa (15 killed). Israel has decided to relocate Badran, who was serving over 17 years in prison, abroad rather than return him to the West Bank.

On June 1, 2001, a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up outside a discotheque on a beachfront in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing 21 teenagers and injuring 132.

Here are the Israeli victims of Badran’s acts:

Israeli victims of suicide attack in 2001 at discoteque

More Israeli victims of discotheque bombing

Passover massacre

Here are the Israeli victims of the Passover massacre:

Israeli victims of Passover massacre

Suicide bombing in Matza Restaurant in Haifa (Mar 31, 2002)

Here are the Israeli victims.

Ron Aviel

Orly Ofir

Ofer Ron,

Anat Ron

Shimon Koren

Ran Koren

Gal Koren

Adi Shiran

Shimon Shiran

Suheil Adawi

Moshe Levin

Danielle Menchel

Ya'akov Shani

Daniel Carlos Wegman

Carlos Yerushalmi

AHLAM TAMIMI

The 30-year-old former television reporter helped plan and carry out the Sbarro pizzeria bombing, driving the suicide bomber, and the bomb, to the restaurant. Frimet Roth, the mother of a 15-year-old victim, wrote an editorial in Haaretz over the weekend criticizing the Israeli government for releasing Tamimi, who expressed no remorse for participating in the bombing in 2006 and has since vowed to carry out a similar attack if she has the chance.

Israeli victims of Tamimi’s act:

ABED EL-AZIZ SALHA

In 2000, a 20-year-old Salha arrived at a Ramallah police station where two Israeli reservists had been taken and beaten by a mob after they mistakenly drove their car into the West Bank city. As Haaretz tells it, Salha removed a knife from the back of one of the soldiers and stabbed him three more times. He then proudly waved his bloodied hands outside the window in what was one of the most horrifying images of the Second Intifada. He was sentenced to life in prison and will be relocated to Gaza

ABED EL-AZIZ SALHA holds his bloodstained hands aloft for the baying mob below

IDF Reservists Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossef Avrahami: Israeli victims of the Ramallah lynching

Pawson’s perverse logic concludes:

[The way the stories are told by the MSM] tell us who holds power and how it is reproduced, and how closely today’s hierarchies are connected to centuries of history. They remind us that we have created a world in which a thousand Palestinians are equal to one Israeli. 

No, actually, something closer to the opposite is true. The reason why the media has provided a few sympathetic portrayals of Gilad Shalit is because, unlike the Palestinian terrorists noted above, he was being held captive for five years yet hadn’t committed a crime of any sort. 

The insistence of Pawson and her political fellow travelers to deny moral agency to the Palestinian terrorists who murdered so many Israeli civilians – and, upon their release, have vowed to commit more acts of violence – suggests a two-tier system of ethics and justice: one for Israelis (for whom they assign maximum moral responsibility), and another for Palestinians (whose crimes they minimize, rationalize, or simply ignore).

It is this profound moral pathos (which informs such blatant liberal racism) that, more than anything else, continues to define the rigid ideology known as the Guardian left.  

Related articles

What the Guardian won’t report: Freed Palestinian terrorist implores Gaza children to follow her example

October 21, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: , , , , , | by | 15 comments

Per Ynet, a would-be Palestinian suicide bomber freed by Israel in the prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit told cheering schoolchildren in Gaza the day after her release on Wednesday she hoped they would follow her example.

“I hope you will walk the same path we took and God willing, we will see some of you as martyrs,” Wafa al-Biss told dozens of children who came to her home in the northern Gaza Strip.

Freed terrorist, turned children's motivational speaker in support of Jihad, Wafa al-Biss, with her mother

Biss was travelling to Beersheba’s Soroka hospital for medical treatment in 2005 when IDF soldiers at the Erez border crossing noticed she was walking strangely. They found 10 kgs (22 lbs) of explosives had been sewn into her underwear.

A member of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, Biss was sentenced to a 12-year term for planning to blow herself up.

After she spoke, the children cheered and waved Palestinian flags and chanted: “We will give souls and blood to redeem the prisoners. We will give souls and blood for you, Palestine.”

Perhaps the only thing more certain than the fact that Palestinian terrorists released in the deal to free Gilad Shalit will continue on the path of Jihad, and implore others to follow in their example, is the fact that you will never read about such immutable malice towards innocent Israelis on the pages of the Guardian. 

Related articles

CiF Watch Newsletters

Sign up for our free newsletter!

Guardian's Israel obsession in one image

Gaza Rocket Counter

Watch videos at Vodpod.

Join our Facebook Page

Follow CiF Watch on Twitter


Buttons for Twitter

CiF Watch on Twitter Counter.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 6,341 other followers

http://www.wikio.com

Recent Comments

Twitter Updates

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 6,341 other followers