Posted on 06/14/2018 5:23:25 PM PDT by SJackson
Palestinians are pushing new frontiers in terrorism.
With Hamass Kitetifada, Palestinians are pushing new frontiers in terrorism, again while giving nationalism a bad name, again.
Its become a routine surprise to watch the world overlook Palestinians assaults on international norms. One day their goons threaten Argentinean soccer stars and everybody blames Miri Regev for the Messi mess. (Even while criticizing her grandstanding, lets acknowledge that boycotters dont need her to prompt their thuggishness.) Before and after that debacle, Palestinians violate the Geneva Conventions ban on attacking foodstuffs or crops, and everybody blames Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu for the American embassy to Jerusalem move.
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We should be used to this selective perception and moral prosecution-as-persecution. Still, its disappointing that many who renounce nationalism because they dislike Trumps aggressiveness nevertheless tolerate Palestinians violence.
Its become one of this springs big underreported stories. Once again being honest, exposing the March of Return as an attempt to destroy its neighbor, Hamas launched hundreds of combustible, often poisonous kites and balloons.
The kites in a touch no novelist or anti-Palestinian propagandist would dare concoct were exposed by Adele Raemer of Kibbutz Nirim and other intrepid bloggers as gifts from the Japanese people to Gazas children. While Israels air defenses have intercepted as many as 500 burning kites, another 300 or so have set more than 270 fires, destroying 2,510 hectares of land, including vast parts of the Beeri Crater Nature Reserve. Once known for its red carpets of anemones every February, its gazelles, its porcupines, its turtles, the reserve is now scarred by tens of hectares of newly blackened wasteland.
The Geneva Conventions 1977 protocols proclaim: It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works... whatever the motive.
Mocking those who turn swords into plowshares, Hamas makes toys into rockets. From terrorist tunnels to combusta-kites, its perverse creativity evokes Maxwell Smarts Get Smart catchphrase: If only they could use their genius for goodness instead of rottenness. Its a stunning metaphor for the two competing nationalisms and the choices their respective leaders keep making: Zionists sow and reap Palestinian terrorists burn and destroy.
Of course, human life is more precious, and most countries have long indulged the Palestinian terrorist epidemic, which helped routinize attacks on the vulnerable as a political tactic. Since the Palestine Liberation Organizations founding in 1964 three years before the Six Day War Palestinians have taught the worlds totalitarian thugs how to target innocents. In the 1960s and 1970s, the PLO specialized in violating airports, airplanes, schools and popular events notably the 1972 Munich Olympics. By the 1990s, Hamas focused on suicide bombs in buses and cafes.
Now, theyre turning on nature. If there was an Ignoble Prize, the Palestinians and their homicidal leaders -- would have won it by now. One wonders if theres an internal Palestinian conversation wishing their people would be known for contributing something constructive to the world.
Instead, the Palestinian movement has turned many observers into practitioners of Orwellian double-think. Good people, who abhor killing, justify Palestinian terrorism, including this new Kitetifada. Naively judging the purity of the motive by the extremism of the act, too many assume that the Israelis must be extraordinarily brutal to trigger the kinds of reactions they have why else would someone strap on a bomb-filled vest and walk into a group of people? Why else would that mass murderers parents and society celebrate such evil? Such amoral illogic contradicts Americas great UN ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, refusing to blame the victim, didnt condemn the accused at all but the accusers.
Today, Palestinians nihilistic nationalism is particularly problematic. As many in the West lose faith in nationalism, the cognitive dissonance involved in justifying Palestinian crimes against humanity to advance their national goals takes its toll on many Western supporters even if they wont admit it. This is particularly so when many rational observers would conclude that if only Palestinians accepted Israels existence, they probably would have secured a Palestinian state long ago.
All this enabling and apologizing causes subtle but significant collateral ideological damage. It hollows out faith in nationalism, especially among liberals. While doing intellectual flip-flops to justify Palestinian brutality, we the enlightened Western multiculturalists decide their primitive nationalistic expressions are as beneath us as our political rivals Trumpian immigration restrictionism and white privilege. Its now fashionable to define nationalism at its worst, claiming it bonds humans at their most dyspeptic. In fact, liberal nationalism has long sought to mobilize humans to be our best.
Unfortunately, critics of Americas president, Israels prime minister, and other right-wing nationalist leaders cannot see beyond them to appreciate that liberal nationalism is not defined by one leader, and that Trumps lowest-common-denominator Yahoo nationalism is not liberal nationalism.
The word patriotism is insufficient anyone living anywhere can love a country or a homeland. Liberal nationalism emphasizes that, for the small select group of world democracies especially idea-based democracies like the United States and Israel love of country is inextricably connected to love of certain ideals. How tragic that even as Palestinian nationalism continues to showcase nationalism at its worst, it gets a moral pass from the world, while Jewish nationalism i.e., Zionism which remains democratic, pluralistic, and liberal despite its flaws has become the worlds punching bag.
The writer is the author of the newly released The Zionist Ideas, an update and expansion of Arthur Hertzbergs classic anthology The Zionist Idea, published by the Jewish Publication Society. A distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University, he is the author of 10 books on American history, including The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s. www.zionistideas.com
Shoot the jackass holding the string i would say.
Palestinians Put Swastikas on Incendiary Kites, We Want to Burn Jews
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Don’t even think of wiping out the bastards.
What a ridiculous go-round.
I thought they were not allowed to fly kites? Where’s the talliban when you need them?
That photo has clearly been photo-shopped by the Jooos!
Okay.
Put some drones over the areas, and shell the heck out anyone launching a kite.
Y’know, the next step is going to be balloons carrying wires to short out power transmission lines.
There never seems to be a lightning storm when you need one.
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