Sunday, July 09, 2006
We Told you So
1. For those confused about freedom of speech in Israel, we think we can
clarify things for you. Demanding that terrorists kidnap Israelis is
free speech. Criticism those same people who demand that terrorists
kidnap and murder Israelis, however, would be "slander!
ARAB MK ADMITS: I ADVISED PA TO KIDNAP SOLDIER
Knesset Member Wasal Taha, corresponding publicly with internet surfers on
the Arabic-language IslamOnline site, said he repeatedly advised PA
terrorists to battle and kidnap Israeli soldiers.
MK Zevulun Orlev (National Religious Party), who last week submitted a
bill to negate Knesset membership to MKs who support terrorists, said that
Taha's "traitorous" remarks are further proof that Israeli democracy must
protect itself.
According to a report in Maariv newspaper today, Taha told surfers on
Thursday that he repeatedly advised the PA Arabs to stop shooting and
targeting civilians, and to concentrate on IDF targets. An English
translation of Maariv's Hebrew translation of Taha's Arabic words:
"We told them more than once that the Palestinians, who are subjected to
murder and ongoing crimes on the part of the Israeli army, have two
options: One is to explode and kill civilians - and these are much easier
operations. The second option is the military option, in the framework of
which a military unit from the resistance [i.e., terrorist infrastructures
- ed.] is established in order to break into a military camp, clash with
the soldiers and battle them and take them and the conquest into
captivity."
Taha also had words of advice for the PA on the publicity front, saying
that the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit should not be called "kidnapped"
but rather "imprisoned" or "captive." Taha said, "Kidnapping is an act
carried out by gangs, terrorists, and the like. But 'captive' means that
[it is carried out by] an organized, legitimate group that makes
decisions. Israel is trying to present our resistance as something less -
as terrorism, murder, and kidnapping - in order that the diplomatic circle
will be closed to it."
Arutz-7's Uzi Baruch spoke with Taha's aide, who said that Taha's words
had been taken out of context. She then repeated over Taha's words as
they appeared in Maariv, and added, "I don't tell and won't tell the
Palestinian Authority and the organizations how to act."
Asked if MK Taha condemns the abduction of Corp. Gilad Shalit, his aide
said, "We do not condemn actions against IDF soldiers, we condemn actions
only against innocent civilians."
MK Orlev responded today, "The traitorous words of MK Taha prove that
Trojan horses have invaded the Knesset, and the democracy must protect
itself from them. Taha brags about his collaboration with the enemy and
shows that the instructions for the kidnapping did not emanate only from
Khaled Meshaal in Syria."
"Taha must be tried for treason," Orlev added.
2.
Gideon Levy is essentially the Ilan Pappe of Israeli journalism. He is
arguably the most openly anti-Israel journalist in Israeli media. He
devotes a column every week to moaning about Palestinians injured when
Israel shoots back, but has never had a word to say about Jews murdered
and maimed by terrorists. He is a regular columnist in some of the most
opely anti-Semitic web magazines on earth, including the pro-Hamas
pro-terror "Counterpunch", published by anti-Semite Alexander Cockburn
(who claims Jews were behind the 9-11 attacks on the US and also the
anthrax attacks).
In today's column in Haaretz, Levy devotes his crayon to justifying Kassam
attacks on Israel by the Palestinians and kidnappings of Israelis. It's
theme is that even though Israel has completely evacuated the Gaza Strip,
Israel is still oppressing the poor Palestinians there and so when the
Palestinians fire rockets into Sderot and Ashkelon, this is a justified
and moral response to Israel's continued occupation of Gaza.
Here are some snippets:
"Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and
shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians,
including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but "they started."
"Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The
disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like "partition"
and "an end to the occupation," did result in the dismantling of
settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' departure from Gaza, but it did
almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the
Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live
in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air
and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They
cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel,
upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years.
Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of
escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it,
nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage,
threw away the keys and left the residents to their bitter fate. Now, less
than a year after the disengagement, it is going back, with violence and
force. What could otherwise have been expected? That Israel would
unilaterally withdraw, brutally and outrageously ignoring the Palestinians
and their needs, and that they would silently bear their bitter fate and
would not continue to fight for their liberty, livelihood and dignity? We
promised a safe passage to the West Bank and didn't keep the promise. We
promised to free prisoners and didn't keep the promise."
His full piece is here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/736009.html
It certainly would not surprise me if Levy's next column were about how
the Jews are illegally occupying Iraq and how they illegally occupied
Germany before 1939.
3. The Un-Educatable Left:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=6358
4. Take out the Champagne!
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2006/07/05/antiwarcom-contributor-killed-in-iraq/
5. News:
**Archaeologists have discovered a network of underground chambers and
tunnels where Jews prepared for a revolt against the Romans in A.D.
(C.E.) 66-70. The find was made at the Israeli village of Kfar Kana,
north of Nazareth. According to archaeologists, the underground rooms,
connected by tunnels, were built directly beneath above-ground homes in
order to provide access to supplies and a place to hide from the Romans.
One of the rooms still contained eleven storage jars. The elaborate
preparation is being offered as proof that contrary to the conventional
wisdom that holds the revolt to have been spontaneous, it was
well-planned. The original village under which the rooms and tunnels
were built . also a new discovery -- dates back to the 10th and 9th
centuries B.C. (B.C.E.).**
6. Someone prepared a nice expose on Chamishism at:
http://www.britam.org/Questions/QuesChamish.html
7. Great piece:
http://www.ilanamercer.com/HarvardHucksters.htm
Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of .The Israeli Lobby and U.S.
Foreign Policy,. have been touted by some in the press as .two of
America's top scholars.. The academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government and his co-author of the University of Chicago may occupy
prized perches, but that doesn.t make them scholars.
However you slice it, the half-baked folderol that is .The Israeli Lobby.
isn.t .scholarship.. Scholarship appeals to evidence and reason. Theirs is
a randomly yoked together bit of pamphleteering in the postmodern
tradition.its authors don.t reason or argue. Instead, they propagandize,
promoting as axiomatic a belief in the superiority of certain moral or
political positions, one of which is the idea of Israel.s foul founding.
A scholar, moreover, builds his case. These two declare their case open
and shut on page two of the screed. .Readers may reject our conclusions,.
they grandiosely state, .but the evidence on which they rest is not
controversial..
The logically invalid argument from authority undergirds .The Israeli
Lobby..and in particular, our authors. assertion that the facts they
present .are not in serious dispute among scholars,. because these rely
.heavily on the work of Israeli scholars and journalists..
Jews.Israelis included.are leaders of the new anti-Semitism, which
consists in the demonization of Israelis (often described as Nazis
vis-.-vis the Palestinians) and the delegitimization of the Jewish State.
Blaming Israel or the Israeli lobby for America.s foreign policy blunders,
and alleging that Israel was founded through systematic ethnic cleansing
and land theft are the centerpieces of their campaign.
Because a Jew.Israeli or other.has espoused these positions against
Israel, Harvard.s Tweedledumb and UChicago.s Tweedledumber would like
their readers to believe that they must be true. The Capos of the
concentration camps were Jews; did their Jewishness make their
depredations against their own people correct or commendable?
While our .scholars. both demonize and delegitimize Israel, they are mere
dwarfs standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants. Noam Chomsky, .The
Godfather,. Steven and Hillary Rose, Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Tanya
Reinhart in Tel Aviv, and Michael Cohen in Swansea.these are but a few of
the new anti-Semitism.s leading Jewish lights.
The real rock stars of the Israeli intelligentsia.Israel.s own Ward
Churchills.are the pretentiously self-styled .New Historians.. This is a
group of popular far-left fabricators (one of whom facetiously boasted:
.We perform at weddings and bar mitzvas.), who.ve cocked a snook at the
liberal country in which they.ve thrived, so as to gain admittance into
the fashionable Palestinian pantheon.
They claim "Zionist imperialists" cheated Palestinian peasants out of
their land (which was, in fact, bought fairly and legally), and that these
interlopers conducted a systematic and deliberate policy of ethnic
cleansing with respect to the .indigenous population.. (There undoubtedly
have been sporadic acts of aggression and even terror against Palestinian
Arabs by Jews during the War of Independence. But there is simply no
historical evidence that they have been the result of a concerted or
systematic campaign.)
The .New Historians.. rendition is fast becoming the received wisdom on
Israel.s history in the court of public opinion. This historical revision
of Israel.s birth, incidentally, resembles the way the Left has distorted
and reduced America.s history to a narrative of the oppressed and the
excluded. As Efraim Karsh, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the
University of London, has noted, .Partisan rewriting of history has
apparently become the accepted norm in those fields of research dealing
with highly contentious political, social, and historical phenomena, such
as the Arab-Israeli conflict..
The Harvard philippic defers to the .New Historians.. most flamboyant and
fishy associate, Benny Morris. In fact, it was Morris.s bowdlerization of
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.s words that first prompted Karsh to
investigate the fraud perpetrated by these hip historians, and expose it
in his masterful book, .Fabricating Israeli History: The .New
Historians...
While perusing the English-language version of Morris. doctored-to-death
book, .The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,. Karsh happened upon
a quote from a letter Ben-Gurion wrote to his son, allegedly stating that,
.we must expel the Arabs and take their places.. Karsh .recalled the
letter saying something quite different.. On examination, it transpired
that the Hebrew text read as follows: .We do not wish, we do not need to
expel Arabs and take their place . All our aspiration is built on the
assumption that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the
Arabs..
Initially Karsh, a gentleman and a scholar, read Morris charitably,
attributing the mangled citation to an innocent mistranslation or typo.
Still, to allay his worst fears, he proceeded to plumb all primary
source-material Morris used to shore-up his allegations.
Parroted by Walt and Mearsheimer, Morris has charged that the .Zionists.
systematically .drove Palestinians into exile,. and .that the Zionist and
Israeli establishments have systematically falsified archival source
material to conceal the Jewish state's less-than-immaculate conception..
It turns out Morris was projecting. For, as an incredulous Karsh
discovered, .Morris not only fails to show rewriting by [the Israeli
founding fathers], but he himself is the one who systematically falsifies
evidence..
Indeed, .there is scarcely a document that he does not twist.. As Karsh
demonstrates in detail, Morris and his cohorts have .violated every tenet
of bona fide research.: they misrepresent documents, resort to partial
quotes, withhold evidence, make false assertions, and rewrites original
documents. Such is the incompetence of these Arabists that they even
neglect Arab archival material, relying almost exclusively on
Western.often only secondary.sources.
.Through documentary manipulation,. observes Karsh, the Israeli .scholars.
(lauded by Walt and Mearsheimer) have turned .Israeli history on its
head..
Although Karsh has been attacked personally and stigmatized, the
blistering, textual bitch-slap he dealt these charlatans remains
unassailable. A dejected Morris even wrote to the Times Literary
Supplement to admit that .Karsh has a point. My treatment of transfer
thinking before 1948 was, indeed, superficial..
The Arab-Israeli debate, however, doesn.t hinge on the .professional and
intellectual integrity. of the interlocutors. Irrespective of whether they
are true or false, certain positions in contemporary Middle-Eastern
Studies and history departments are automatically deemed virtuous, and
veracity be damned. Their proponents are published in prestigious journals
and by distinguished publishing houses and become media darlings.
Popularity, fashion, and the booming .bash-Israel business. account for
the .new historians.. tenure, not scholarship. Ditto the Harvard hucksters
who promote them.
2006 By Ilana Mercer
8. In the latest assault on freedom of speech in Israel, it is becoming
risky to say "We told you so!" Ever since the start of the Oslo
"process", opponents of Oslo have illustrated 20-20 foresight and
predicted exactly why the "process" would fail and would only aggravate
terrorism and Arab aggression against Israel. And after each failure of
the Israeli government when it implemented the Left's Oslo strategy,
meaning governments both led by the Labor Party and the Likud,
opponents would say "We told you so." That enraged the Left. In
post-survivalship Israel, one must never point out that the Left's agenda
and strategy have failed. One must never point out how many times the
Left has been wrong. (How many times was it? Well, it was EVERY time
about EVERYTHING!)
After the initial implementations of Oslo by Rabin and Peres produced the
suicide bombers on buses and in cafes, some people dared to say "We told
you so!" The Left responded with demands that these people be indicted
for "incitement". "Inciting against Rabin's agenda" became a new
and original basis for investigation and legal harassment.
Now, with rockets hitting schools in Ashkelon and Sderot converted into
the Israeli Guernica, all thanks to the mind-numbingly stupid
"disengagement" from Gaza last summer, many of the opponents of Israeli
Self-Annihilation are saying "We told you so!". In fact, a large ad was
put in Haaretz a few days back by some members of Professors for a Strong
Israel.
That has outraged the Left. The Israeli media are now filled with Op-Eds
denoucning anyone for having been correct about the Gaza "disengagement"
and demanding that people now saying "We told you so" be silenced.
