Like Stockholm Syndrome, Only In Tel Aviv
By Mitch Berg
I’ve been perplexed…
…well, no. That’s the wrong word. I’ve seen what I know about the US, and International, left’s antisemitic roots fully validated yet again during and after the latest war in Gaza.
Israel is facing an opponent that uses human lives – non-combatant Palestinians in Gaza – as sacrificial pawns, worth only what their deaths will garner in one-sided international outrage. That outrage comes, naturally, from people who are perfectly fine accepting that the combatants among these same people have been lobbing rockets at Israeli civilians for the previous months on end.
In other words, noncombatant deaths are ammunition in the public opinion war.
But the Jews have been fighting the public opinion war for millenia, notes Rami Kaminski.
It’s only when they started contesting that war that things got bad for ’em:
As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries, Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.
Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by Israel’s defensive military action insist Hamas uses only crude rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were somehow equivalent with moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Beer Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminate killing in the name of holy war which Israel has lived with for years. Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamists professed intentions for the infidels.
Read the whole thing, naturally.
February 27th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I reccommend to you and your readers an excellent blog called “Breath of the Beast”, http://breathofthebeast.blogspot.com/. Its host, Yacov Ben Moshe, has an inside and compelling take on the constant hostilities between Israel and Hamas and it’s implications in the GWOT. I’ve linked a couple of times to his stories about the citizens of Sderot and the macabre calculus performed by the Israelis government and Hamas leadership on just how far they can go without triggering a catastrophic response. Very passionate, very articulate writing and analysis from one who knows what he’s talking about.
February 28th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I have serious problems with theocracies, regardless of what religion they happen to promote. It doesn’t matter if the religion is Jewish, Islamic or something else.
While I haven’t visited Israel for some time, it left a very strong impression on me when I was there for several weeks that they could easily avoid a great deal of the troubles they are in with their own population and with their neighbors if they did not give such an unfair preference to anyone who happened to be of the Jewish faith while penalizing anyone who was not. While we here in the US extol Israel for being a democracy, we tend to not represent to the US THAT aspect of their government and society. I don’t think it is anti-semitic in the least to criticize the unfair treatment of a significant segment of the population of Israel. The Israeli government could do a great deal more than they have to co-exist peacefully with their non-Jewish residents and neighbors. They initiate SOME of the problems.
I wholeheartedly support the right of Israel to defend itself. There is nothing quite like a night spent at a kibbutz on the Golon Heights, right on the border with Lebanon during a period when there was regular bombing over the common border to make one vividly aware of the security problems of Israel. Few of my other travel experiences have involved hospitality that included directions to the bomb shelters along with transporting one’s luggage to sleeping quarters.
I do have a problem with SOME of what Israel did in Gaza. The destruction there relative to the damage to Israel was horribly disproportionate. I was particularly horrified at the phosphorus burns to children and women, burns which continue to cause injury even while the medical staff attempted to debride the wounds to treat them. While there is some justification for that kind of munition to provide light during night time attacks, the Israelis used them equally during the daytime, knowing the kind of damage they were causing to civilian populations. I was surprised that there were only a few rocket attacks during that conflict from Lebanon; I was expecting more.
A frightening antisemitic incident which I only saw covered on BBC occurred recently in Venezuela. I think the violence against Jewish populations in other countries where those citizens are NOT harming anyone is of serious concern. We would be wise to be more aware of those kinds of anti-semitic incidents.