Posted on 12/29/2001 12:08:08 AM PST by H.R. Gross
December 28, 2001
As Israel prepares to expel its Arab helots from Palestine, its "amen corner" worldwide is also on the march, excoriating anyone who looks cross-eyed at Ariel Sharon as an "anti-Semite." The latest front in this campaign is England, where Barbara Amiel, wife of media magnate Conrad Black, went on a rampage in the Telegraph, claiming that, at a recent dinner party, the French ambassador referred to Israel as "that sh*tty little country," and wondered why the world had to be dragged to the edge of World War III on account of it. On the basis of evidence gleaned at ritzy cocktail parties, says Ms. Amiel, the world is experiencing a revival of anti-Semitism, which is now "respectable" again.
Oh, please! Does she really expect us to believe that Osama's infamous videos denouncing the "Jews and Crusaders" are the "in" thing with the hip cognoscenti? Lay off the crack pipe, lady, and get real: anti-Semitism is less respectable than pedophilia. After all, hordes of people aren't buying The Protocols of the Elder of Zion the way they're snatching up those Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs, now are they? Amiel's essay is just one breathtaking inversion of reality after another. Getta load-a this:
"For the past 25 years, I've watched sad-faced Israeli activists trudge around Western capitals with heavy hearts beating under ill-fitting suits. They carry folders of transcripts and videotapes to document the misrepresentations in the press and the moral hypocrisy of the world towards Israel. They want to win the war of ideas on its merits. Their attention to detail in translating the hate literature of the Middle East and the hate-filled speeches of its leaders is commendable."
One can only wonder what "Western capitals" she means: surely not Washington, D.C. Everyone acknowledges that the Israel lobby is among the most powerful in the Imperial City. How else have they managed to get their hands on a grand total of $90 billion-plus in American military and economic aid since Israel's inception?
Aside from US exporters, Israel is the single largest beneficiary of our "foreign aid" program: US tax dollars paid for a booby-trap bomb planted near an Arab elementary school, which blasted a group of Palestinian children – children! – to bits. American tax dollars also pay for Israeli "settlements" inhabited by violent, fanatical fundamentalists intent on provoking war no matter what. This image of sad bedraggled little underdogs making their rounds, desperately fighting an uphill battle against overwhelming odds, is nothing but a bad joke – either that, or it is meant to be ironic.
If the Israeli lobby is so powerless, then why this American largesse? We not only arm Israel, but we also prop up their sh*tty little socialist economy with constant infusions of cash. Whatever those Israeli "activists" are carrying around in their folders, whatever is on those videotapes, it must be some pretty powerful stuff. Given the Fox News revelations about the extent of Israeli spying in the US, I don't even want to hazard a guess as to what's in them.
They want to "win the war of ideas on its merits"? Tell that to Jean Ryan, former managing editor of the Oneida (NY) Daily Dispatch, and city editor Dale Seth (a 15-year veteran of the paper), who were both fired when a delegation of Israel Firsters approached the editor and then the owner demanding the paper retract an allegedly "anti-Semitic" post-9/11 editorial written by Seth. Seth's crime was to recall the terrorist origins of the Jewish state – as if no one had ever heard of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, both of which waged war on the Arab civilian population – and without which the state of Israel would never have come into existence. He also made the true but politically incorrect observation that the whole region is rife with religious fanaticism, and Israel is no exception to the rule:
"The United States, through its close association with Israel since its inception, has now been dragged kicking and screaming right into the middle of that centuries-old Middle Eastern conflict. From that position, it would behoove that party in the middle to consider the hearts of the warring parties. Neither can be simply beat into submission."
A local attorney, Randy Schaal, demanded a meeting with Ryan to protest the editorial: Ryan refused to meet with him, pointing out that that if the staff met with everyone who disagreed with an editorial, they would never get a paper out. She told him to write a letter to the editor, which he did. But Schaal also contacted local politicians, as well as the Anti-Defamation League, and it wasn't long before pressure was brought to bear on the paper's management, which then ordered its editors to come up with a "clarification." This was published alongside Schaal's letter, a letter from Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), and a missive from the mayor of Oneida. Still, Schaal and his fellow Ameners weren't satisfied. They went to the President of the Journal Register Co., and demanded a retraction and an apology: it was unconditional surrender, or nothing.
After a series of meetings with various self-appointed representatives of the Jewish community, the owners of the Daily Dispatch caved and published a groveling mea culpa: "We understand many felt [the editorial] expressed anti-Semitic sentiments," it said. "We will not further offend our readers by attempting in any way to justify what was written; we can only assure readers that The Dispatch is not anti-Semitic and that we acknowledge the editorial should not have been published."
So much for the Israeli lobby winning the war of ideas on the "merits" of their case. Clearly, another strategy is at work here: not debating their opponents but silencing them.
The rest of Amiel's essay is really a kind of paean to the efficacy of brute force. While those poor bedraggled Israeli "activists" may have been fighting an uphill battle, according to Amiel, in the post-9/11 era the tide seems to be turning, and she can hardly keep herself from gloating that now the Arabs are really going to get it:
"Powerful as the truth may be, it needs a nudge from 16,000lb daisy cutter bombs once in a while. The Arab/Muslim world's intransigence comes into sharper focus when we see the Americans liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban in six weeks and a cornered Arafat unable to go to the bathroom without the risk of being blown into the next world."
Here is the kind of Zionist who clearly enjoys the brutality and indignity of the Israeli occupation. Such people now feel free to publicly exhibit and even flaunt their perversity, which seems like something straight out of Kraft-Ebbing. What else can one call Amiel's odd interest in controlling Arafat's bowel movements other than a sh*tty little perversion?
"Nothing succeeds like powerful bombs," exults this war goddess, "as bin Laden explained in his latest video release. 'When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,' he said." How natural for her to approvingly cite bin Laden on the terroristic imperative: but then that is what tribal warfare is all about, no matter which side one fights on.
Yes, it is force, not reason or negotiation, that is decisive, avers Ms. Amiel, who gleefully predicts that "All those people badmouthing the Jews and Israel will quieten down." Or else be quieted down, involuntarily, like Jean Ryan, Dale Seth, and now perhaps Carl Cameron, of Fox News. "You are looking," Amiel continues, "at the tail end of the train but the engine has already turned a corner and is going in the opposite direction" – and anyone who shows up at one of those ritzy parties she's always attending had better get on board, or else.
No one would think to label denunciations of, say, Robert Mugabe, as the equivalent of anti-black racism: but we are expected to just accept that virtually all criticism of Israel and Ariel Sharon is due to "anti-Semitism." Amiel's blatantly dishonest and self-serving jihad is naturally bound to cause resentment among all thinking people – an emotion that could, easily, turn into genuine anti-Semitism. But that, I believe, is the point: anti-Semitism serves the interests of the most extreme wing of the Zionist movement, and always has.
Founded as it is on the permanence of Jewish victimology, and the idea that anti-Semitism is inevitable, Zionism thrives when Jewish persecution grows. It is a natural tendency of Zionist propaganda to exaggerate hostility to Jews. The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, was confirmed in his opinion that it was "futile" to combat anti-Semitism when the infamous Dreyfuss case was at the center of a storm of controversy. Today, however, with the rapid decline and marginalization of anti-Semitism everywhere but in the Middle East, the pressing need for a Jewish state requires more justification.
Anti-Semitism in the West, as "hate crime" statistics and other research has shown in recent years, is practically nonexistent. This good news was hailed by Jewish organizations in the US when it was first announced, but the extreme Zionists were no doubt made uneasy. For if anti-Jewish prejudice is distinctly beyond the pale, at least in the civilized world, i.e., the West, then what do we need a Jewish state for? This is a question many Jews, when faced with an appeal to emigrate to Israel, must ask themselves, and, at least up until Ms. Amiel's outburst, the Zionists have had no good answer. Now they appear to have solved the problem by simply redefining "anti-Semitism" to mean any criticism of Israel's expansionist policies and its current radical right-wing government.
Anti-Semitism used to mean legal and cultural proscriptions directed against Jews. In medieval Europe, Jews were forced into ghettos, in Nazi Germany they were branded with the yellow star and exterminated, and, in America and Europe, it used to be that some establishments, both high and low, would not do business with Jews. Certain hotels and men's clubs would not admit them, and anti-Semitism was especially rife in the universities where an unofficial Jewish quota kept their numbers and influence limited. This is real anti-Semitism, and, today, it is not only illegal but socially and politically unacceptable: anyone deemed an anti-Semite in this, the original sense, is in effect a pariah, and rightly so.
Among the colorful revelers of Allenby street, in crowded restaurants of merry-making Tel Aviv nights, a vision came to me, a vision of an angel in battle-dress, chalking up on a wall three words, Mene, Tekel ufarsin. My Angel-English on-line dictionary prompts a translation: you were tested and you failed the test.
These are the darkest days for the people of Israel. They are dark, as the lamentations and protests of us and our fathers turned out to be as genuine as a three-dollar bill. In 1968, a young Jewish Russian kid, I wrote on the walls of my native Russian city, ‘Hands off Czechoslovakia’. The beautiful deep voice of a Jewish Russian poet Alexander Galitch intoned: Citizens, our motherland is in danger, our tanks are on foreign soil! Some Russian Jews demonstrated on the Red Square against the invasion, and were beaten up by the police. We protested against the presence of the Russian tanks in Budapest, Prague and Kabul as Russian citizens who value honor above the ill-understood loyalty, humankind above blood ties. In the same time, Jewish American kids demonstrated against their country’s intervention in Vietnam, while Jewish boys and girls in Europe fought against racism. Years passed by, and now our Jewish tanks are on the foreign soil.
Our Jewish army murders civilians, demolishes houses, starves millions and imposes the siege on the Palestinian villages. Our crimes exceeded the Russian crimes committed in Chechnya and Afghanistan, the American crimes in Vietnam and Serb crimes in Bosnia. Surely, the Israeli intellectuals demonstrate en masse on our equivalent of Pennsylvania Avenue or Trafalgar Square, American Jews raise their voice against the America-armed killers of Palestinians, Russian Jews speak up for the human rights of the enslaved Gentiles of the Holy Land? No fear, our literati exalt the courage of our Jewish soldiers, venerate the steady hand of our Jewish snipers and glorify the immense humanity of the Jewish folk, who could pulverize all the Gentiles of Palestine, but kindly limit ourselves to a few hundred wounded and maimed a day.
My grandfather in the Pale of Settlement complained against the restrictions of the free movement of Jews in the Russian Empire, while in our generation Anatoli Sharansky became a symbol of struggle for human rights. In our own country, the Gentiles are fenced into reservations and concentration camps that the Pale pales in comparison with. A Palestinian cannot go to the next village without the Jewish ausweis, he is forever checked by our Checkists. He can only dream of the sea, washing the shores of his ancestral home ? we do not let Palestinians to pollute the Jewish purity of our beaches.
Ostrovsky reported that Mossad gents bugged the home of a Middle Eastern diplomat during the administration of Jimmy Carter in order to embarrass the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, after Young sought to establish informal talks with PLO representatives. When Young met with the unofficial United Nations PLO representative Zehdi Labib Terzi "accidentally" in the home of a friendly diplomat, Kuwaiti Ambassador Abdalla Yaccoub Bishara, listening devices planted surreptitiously and without Terzi's knowledge by Mossad field officers recorded every word of the diplomats conversation. The incident soon became front- page news in the Zionists' most prominent U.S. propaganda organ, The New York Times, and President Carter caved in to public pressure and asked for Young's resignation. Thus, that early effort to establish relations between the U.S. government and the PLO became a footnote in history when, on September 23, 1979, Young resigned from his position. Young, an African American, has never since served in the upper levels of government.
For years, the Jews protested the discrimination in employment and education. In our own state we created the system of total national discrimination. In our state-owned Electric company, out of 13000 employees there are six Gentiles. 0,0004%. Gentiles form forty percent of the population between the Jordan River and the sea, but only one out of four has the right to vote. There are no Gentiles in the Supreme court, in the government, in Air Force, in the secret services. There is not even one Gentile on the board of the main Israeli Liberal newspaper, Haaretz.
That is why all complaints of Jews in the Diaspora deserve to be re-written in the light of the events. We did not fought for the human rights, but for the rights of Jews. We were for the freedom of movement and freedom of choice ? for Jews only. We spoke of the universal suffrage, but we meant the right of vote for Jews only. We do not mind occupation and invasion, as long as we invade and occupy. The sight of a child raising hands in front of the machine gun toting thug grieves us only if it is a Jewish child. The Gentile child can be shot at freely.
When Bialik wrote “Devil did not invent a fit punishment for the murder of a child”, he actually meant ‘a Jewish child’. When he was horrified by the scenes of pogrom, he was horrified that the violence is directed against Jews. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with pogrom per se. The Jews of Upper Nazareth committed a pogrom of Gentiles in Nazareth, but no pogromchik was tried. Police helped them by murdering few of pogrom victims. Still worse were the pogroms of Ramallah and Beth Jallah, committed with the helicopter gun ships and tanks.
Tsarist Russia, ‘the land of pogroms’, was much hated by our grandfathers, and eventually destroyed by them. Still, hundred years of Jewish pogroms caused fewer casualties than we murder in a week. The most horrible pogrom of Kishinev claimed 45 dead and 600 wounded. Last weeks in Israel, 300 were killed and many thousands wounded. After the pogrom in Tsarist Russia, all writers and intelligentsia condemned the perpetrators. In the Jewish state, hardly few dozens gathered on the demonstration in Tel Aviv, while the Hebrew Writers Union supported the pogrom of Gentiles.
In 1991, the majority of the Russian Jews took the stand against communism and for the private ownership. They actually had in mind Jewish private property, as we confiscate the Gentile property with greatest ease. Go through the best areas of Jerusalem, Talbieh, Old Katamon, Greek and German Colonies, and see the marvellous palaces. They belonged to Gentiles, - Germans, Armenians, Greeks, British, Russians, Palestinians ? Christian and Moslem. All of them were confiscated and given to Jews. During last weeks, hundreds of acres of Gentile property were confiscated, and hundreds of Gentile houses seized or demolished.
Just before his arrest, the richest Russian Jewish media-lord Gusinsky came to Israel and expressed his unlimited support. At the same time he asked the world to help him in his fight with the Russian authorities who try to save the TV from his clutches. His support of Israel proves that Mr Gusinsky approves confiscations on the ethnic base. He is just against the confiscations of the Jewish property. He is against Jews being arrested ? the Gentiles may rot in prisons forever, as it happens in the Jewish state.
In no time at all we succeeded to undermine the long-term achievements of Jews in the struggle for democracy, human rights and equality. What we did not like about the German Nazis? Their racism? Our racism is not less wide-spread and poisonous. The Russian language newspaper Direct Speech published in Jerusalem asked hundreds of Russian Jews about their feelings towards the Palestinians. Typical answers were: “I would kill all Arabs”, “All Arabs must be eliminated”, “Arabs must be expelled”, “An Arab is an Arab. They have to be eliminated”. I am not sure you would get better results in Germany in 1938. Even Nazis did not intend to kill their Jewish enemies until 1941.
Let us put it straight, we were against racism as long as it was somebody else’s racism. We were against death squads and Sonderkommando as long as they acted against us. Our own killers, our Jewish Sonderkommando is the object of our tender admiration. The Jewish state is the only place in the world possessing legitimate killer squads, embracing the policy of assassinations, practicing torture on the medieval scale. Do not worry, dear Jewish readers, we torture and assassinate Gentiles only.
We were against ghetto while we were pushed into a ghetto. Now the most liberal Jewish plan calls for creation of a few Gentile ghetto fenced by barbed wire, surrounded by Jewish tanks and Jewish- owned factories at the fence, where the Arbeit will macht the Gentiles frei. We shall give the ghetto full independence previously removing all sources of income and sustenance.
Israelis are brainwashed from kindergarten, they are taught they belong to the Chosen People, who are Uber Alles. They were indoctrinated in belief that the Gentiles are not fully human, and therefore they can be killed and expropriated at will. After all, Israel fulfilled one UN resolution, the one that called Zionism a form of racism. What is upsetting that the internationalist upbringing in the Soviet Union could not withstand the poison of Zionist propaganda of Jewish superiority. I do regret the moral collapse of my own Russian community in the Holy Land.
Now, as the angel wrote his fiery words, as prophets called the people to repent, we have the choice. We can choose the way of Nineveh, to repent, to return the stolen property, to give full equality to Gentiles, to stop discrimination and murder, and hope to be forgiven by God, if not for our sake, then for the sake of our cats and dogs. We can persist in our evil ways as the people of Sodom and wait for the flood of fire and burning sulfur from the angry heavens of Palestine.
Peace.......
Again, you seem to be confusing the faith of the Jews with the State of Israel.
As you know, I'm a Catholic so I not only share your veneration of the Old Testament, I share in your traditions as well. Were it not for the faith, the prophecy and the tradition of the Jews, my Christian faith would be absolutely incoherent and I would have no basis for believing (as did many of the Jews who knew him) that Christ was indeed the Messiah.
Without a Jew's knowledge and love of the Psalms, "My God my God, why hast thou forsaken me" would be a moment of supreme futility, forsaken and alone ... not the intro to a most magnificent witness of God's triumph.
So ... we're about as simpatico as we can be without my being Jewish (impossible) or your being Catholic (not likely), I guess.
That said -- what in the world makes you think that heretic Muslims (much less Buddhists, atheists, American Indians, Hindus, the Enlightened, etc.) ... the entire world -- must respect God's exclusive promise to the Jews? Why?
Unless you believe in a fiend for a God, I can't see what it is about the birth of the state of Israel -- the Interested Parties among the globalists or the coercion, assasination, fear and intimidation of terrorists that screams: "God's will at work here!".
Does it not bother you in the least that, as far as the eye can see, there is no particular Messiah (riding an ass or triumphant) but only a handful of terrorists and globalists at the heart of Israel's confection?
Can you not step back and shed for a moment your understandably religious take on Zion and see the possibility the truly objective and cunning militant atheist has co-opted your religious zeal to suit his geo-political purposes?
For Pete's sake ... surely it's obvious they've got a ring through the nose of most Christians these days. Given the absolutely ESSENTIAL nature of Israel in perpetuating conflict, you think it was just a happy accident of some sort and that God's some sort of Great American Pragmatist who'll eventually transform the utter enormity of the Israel-Arab conflict at present into some sort of peaceful and ultimate Good?
Given the vitriol of your average Israel-firster on the forum, I think that particular bit of pragmatic alchemy's got a snowball's chance in hell.
And ... therein lies the "beauty" of this particular knot that will not be untied.
Israel has become the largest exporter of military technology and weapons to India in recent years. Its not just a 'kill muslims' thing ... just 'good for business'.
I'd refer you to our exchange with AGAviator with our analogies for this rhetoric.
As for the muslims in Russia, the same danger exists in America. Being aware of that is one thing, making radical decision based on that is another.
So are you saying they were ... or they weren't?
A minority.
As seems to be the case with all people of whatever faith.
Doesn't change the fact that it's the Orthodox for whom it's most likely "IS" still means "IS" (ever was, and shall be).
Then look me up on the search engine. Lord knows, I haven't exactly been a shrinking violet. Madrussian, you seem to have too much good sense to be playing this baiting game. Why are you doing it?
I've got a Holy Hour so I have to skat, but I'm curious as to why you think these things. People like Hiffman give me the creeps.
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