Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Palestinian rock thrower shot dead in Samaria

Michael L.

rockIsraeli troops on Monday shot and killed a Palestinian who had been throwing rocks at cars on a main road near Tapuach Junction in Samaria.

An IDF spokeswoman said troops shouted at a group of Palestinians throwing rocks to halt and then fired warning shots.

"Once they didn't comply, [the soldiers] responded to the threat with direct fire, wounding one of the attackers," the spokeswoman said, adding that the Israel Defense Forces had opened an investigation into the incident.
I have zero sympathy for rock throwers.

The local Arabs need to be made to understand that if they tolerate, or encourage, rock throwing by their kids then they will pay a major price.

The IDF needs to shoot rock throwers, in their teens or older, in the legs with live fire.  The parents of children who throw rocks need to be placed on trial for something like child neglect.

The terrorists need to understand that each and every time that they throw a rock at a Jew, or a Jewish vehicle on the road, that they risk taking bullets to the leg.  I would train the IDF to be exceedingly aggressive in going after rock throwers.  Once they encounter anyone throwing rocks they should pursue such individuals with guns ablazing.

Israel is in no position to allow an internal enemy population to constantly harass and attempt to kill the Jewish population of that country.

Pelting Jews with rocks has been a long standing Arab-Muslim tradition going back many centuries, but it is now time to put a close to that tradition by vigorously pursuing such people in a meaningful and painful way.

Israel needs to make rock throwing an exceedingly perilous activity among Arab youths.  They need to understand that anytime they engage in such behavior there is an excellent chance that they might lose a leg.

If Israel seriously pursued such a strategy the Arab-Muslim tradition of pelting Jews with rocks would soon come to an ignominious demise.

Monday, December 29, 2014

To Hate or Not to Hate?

Michael L.

hateThe Jewish people have every reason to despise Arabs and Muslims.

{How do you like that statement?}

In fact, the Jewish people have every moral reason to despise Arabs and Muslims.

This is because the Arab and Muslim majority population in the Middle East has oppressed the Jewish minority in that part of the world since the time of Muhammad.

According to Efraim Karsh - the founding director and professor emeritus of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, London - there was at least 200,000 Jews in Israel at the time of the Arab-Muslim conquests in the 7th century but that by the nineteenth-century 95 percent of the Jewish population was wiped out, leaving a mere 24,000 in the area by the time Samuel Clemens showed up to wonder where everyone had went.

{See Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, Yale University Press, 2010, pg. 8.}

The truth is that while Christians were beating the crap out of Jews throughout the Medieval period in Europe, the Arab-Muslims were doing likewise within Israel.

The Arabs have treated the Jews with little more than contempt and violence since they first started chopping off our heads in the 7th century for refusing submission.

Furthermore, the Arabs come from the Arabian peninsula, while the Jews come from Judea along the eastern Mediterranean coast, yet we are constantly told by Arab-Muslims and western-secularists that Arabs are the true owners of our small bit of land.

Because Arabs, Muslims, and western-secularists have decided that historically Jewish land actually belongs to Arabs it means, therefore, by definition, that the Jews (also known as "Israel") are occupying and exploiting and murdering and abusing the "indigenous Palestinian population."

There are 6 million Jews in the Middle East and around 400 million Arabs who control 99.9 percent of the landmass, yet we are constantly told that the fault for the ongoing war against the Jews is due to Jewish behavior.  Whenever we are killed by Jihadis we are told by our alleged western allies that the murder of Jews is a matter of righteous resistance against the occupation.

That is, the western Left largely considers theocratically-based Muslim efforts to murder Jews as a perfectly understandable response to the Jewish persecution of the "native" Arabs.

In addition to this, of course, Arabs are currently on a killing spree (intifada) against Jews throughout Israel, but the west could hardly care less.

The most recent attack was upon Ayala Shapira, an eleven year old Jewish girl who got fire-bombed in her father's car.  Often when Arab kids are having fun they throw rocks at Jews, but this time it was a Molotov cocktail.   She may live, but if she does will do so with scars from third degree burns over fifty percent of her body throughout the rest of her life.

{Speaking for myself, quite frankly, I would rather be dead.}

So, yes, when defeated conquerors kill Jewish children on the land where we come from and when their western-left friends tell us that our tiny bit of land actually belongs to our conquerors, hatred develops within the Jewish heart.

Given the rise of political Islam, with all its righteous and glorious head-chopping, it is not surprising that some Jewish people would come to despise Islam as a whole.

I know that your average western-leftist would consider the natural Jewish response to centuries of persecution to be "racist" but it is not.  On the contrary, it is "racist" to hold Jews to a standard of perfection that people never hold anyone else to.

What I would suggest, however, is that to hate Muslims, as a whole, is nonetheless vile.

It may be understandable given the history of the Jewish people under the boot of Muslim imperialism from the 7th century until the twentieth, but it remains unethical to hate people merely for being born into an Islamic household.

Our problem is not with self-identified Muslims.

Our problem is only with those who seek to advance Islam onto the rest of us.

From a strategic standpoint, opposing the entire Muslim world is foolish.  We are outnumbered by a factor of over 100 to 1.

From an ethical standpoint, it simply is unacceptable because it is the political movement that is the significant enemy of the Jewish people, not your average Muslim seeking to put food on the table.

I will never condemn my Muslim friends and neighbors merely for being Muslim and it is entirely unethical for any of us to do so.

If I am required to despise Muslims, in general, then leave me out.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

My Discussion with Jon Haber

Michael L.

{Originally posted at the Elder of Ziyon.}

There is no more rational defender of Israel against the racist BDS movement than Jon Haber.

In fact, I am a tad pissed-off that none of Jon's writings were included in Nelson and Brahm's The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.  The reason for this is academic snobbery.  There is no one making a better, more consistent, and academically rational case against BDS than Jon Haber at divestthis!

Haber has been fighting a lonely fight against BDS for years and he is one of those bloggers that should not need to be brought from the shadows.  This is a gentleman that any university would do well to stand up before students in order to talk about political social media and discourse around the Arab-Israel conflict.

This does not mean, however, that we are entirely in agreement.

We most certainly are not.

Jon and I are having a conversation over the role of the western-left in the ongoing persecution of the Jews in the Middle East.

My argument is that the Obama administration has done a terrible disservice to both the Jewish people and the American people through accepting political Islam within the realm of rational political actors.  When I voted for Obama in 2008 the last thing that occurred to me was that he would legitimize religious hatred against Jews.

But, hopefully each of us learn from experience and from the rousting of our own political naiveté.

For reasons that are somewhat unclear to me Haber remains in defense of the Obama administration.

What I have primarily argued is that because the Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood, and the rise of political Islam via the so-called "Arab Spring," that his administration never deserved the popularity of Jewish Americans, if those Jewish Americans support the well-being of the Jewish State of Israel.

It is really as simple as that.

No politician, including the President of the United States, can support the enemies of the Jewish people and still expect the support of the Jewish people.

In Jon's latest retort he stands behind three essential premises.

The first is that a single example of Obama administration stupidity in briefly supporting the Brotherhood is not sufficient to condemn the administration.

The second is to excuse the Obama administration as simply following the line as put down by the Carter administration in terms of financial support for Egypt as a bribe to not kill Jews.

The third is to suggest that my criticisms are largely partisan.

Let me briefly take these in reverse order.  First off, the charge of partisanship is entirely without merit, nor can it be substantiated.  Although I have been a Democrat throughout the great majority of my adulthood, I am currently without political party.  I am thus not a partisan and I do not support the Republican Party... not yet, in any case.

However, the idea that the Obama administration is simply following American foreign policy as put forth by the Camp David Accords is not a fair criticism.  The point was never that the Obama administration merely provided financial and military aid to the Islamist government in Cairo, but that the administration went out of its way to assist that government in a variety of manners, not the least of which was the UN speech suggesting that the rise of political Islam was something akin to the Spirit of '76 and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The main point, however, that I want to address in Jon's argument is his first.

He claims that one single example of administration stupidity is simply not enough to condemn it.

He writes:
genuine understanding can only come from focusing on more than one fact
I absolutely agree and would make two suggestions.

The first is that the single fact is very interesting because it demonstrates the central contradiction at the heart of Obama's foreign policy.  I am relieved that the Egyptian people had the basic decent common sense to get rid of the Brotherhood and am entirely horrified that Barack Obama supported that gang of racist thugs to begin with.

My reasons are not limited to the mere fact that Obama supported a short-lived anti-American and anti-Jewish regime in Cairo, but that it shows the central incoherence of the administration's foreign policy viz-a-viz political Islam.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization of both Qaeda and Hamas.  Obama tried to square a circle by supporting the Brotherhood while opposing Qaeda and remaining indifferent toward Hamas.

It simply does not work that way, Jon.  If one opposes Qaeda because one opposes political Islam as a rising movement throughout the world, than one must oppose the Brotherhood and all factions of this misogynistic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and head-chopping authoritarian movement arising within the Middle East.

That is my first point.

My second point is that criticisms of Obama administration Middle East policy are hardly limited to his support of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Another highly significant criticism would be the administration's insistence that Jews building housing for themselves in Judea is somehow a crime against peace.  If there was any chance at a peaceful resolution of the conflict under Obama's watch it was not going to come from demanding that Jews be allowed to live in one place, but not another.

Finally, there is the question of history.

In Jon's conclusion he references his admiration for the writings of Harvard professor of Yiddish literature, Ruth Wisse, and Hebrew University historian, Robert Wistrich.  I, too, have considerable admiration for both, because both understand that the conflict cannot be meaningfully discussed without the proper context.

Our understanding of the context of the conflict needs to be expanded both geographically and in time.  From a geographic standpoint the conflict is between the Jewish people of the Middle East and the greater Arab-Muslim world.  It is not a matter of a Jewish Goliath versus a "Palestinian" David.  It is, rather, a conflict between around 400 million Arabs who, for the most part, oppose 6 million Jews seeking to maintain their freedom and autonomy.

Furthermore, this conflict did not begin in 1948 with the Arab attack on the Jewish people, but has been ongoing since the time of Muhammad.  This is a war fundamentally grounded in Arab-Muslim theocratic bigotry against Jews.  The local Arabs do not want a state for themselves in peace next to Israel.  If that is what they wanted they could have had it many times over by now, but they have rejected any such accommodation.  What they want is what they always tell us that they want.

They want Israel gone and the Jews dead.

And, yet, for some reason Barack Obama honestly thinks that the real problem is that Jews are living where neither he, nor Mahmoud Abbas, want them to live.  And that, my friends, is not only wrong-headed and counterproductive, but entirely racist, as well.

How to Stab a Jew (Or Anyone Else, for that matter) - Updated

Michael L.

Various outlets are reporting that the video below - alternatively entitled "How to Stab a Jew" or "How to Stab Someone" - has gone viral on Palestinian Authority social media.

One of the main points of the video is to let Jihadis within Israel know that when they stab a Jew they need to remember to twist the knife.

Update:  I have elected to remove the video from Israel Thrives because it is so vile that I simply do not feel comfortable hosting it here.

If anyone wishes to check the 73 second video you can do so here.

The Religion of Peace

Michael L.

In the video below, Paul Weston of the newly formed Liberty GB Party in England skewers Islam as anything but a religion of peace.

Those of you who follow Israel Thrives know that Shirlee and I are discussing the question of whether the problem that we are facing is that of political Islam or, as Shirlee and Weston would have, Islam as a whole.

Essentially Weston's argument is that Islam cannot be a religion of peace when it is so war-like in so many ways.  The Koran, for example, calls for the beheading of the unbeliever.  What kind of "religion of peace" calls to for headchopping people who are not part of the faith?

Furthermore, what kind of "religion of peace" divides the world into Dar al-Islam (the House of Submission) versus Dar al-Harb (The House of War)?  In other words, if Islam is at war with everything non-Islamic, how can it possibly be considered a religion of peace?

Where I differ with Shirlee and Weston is that however one may judge Islam as a whole, the only Muslims who concern me are the ones seeking to shove it down the throats of the rest of us and those screeching to the heavens about the theocratic imperative to slaughter Jews.

People can think whatever horrible thoughts that they like in the privacy of their own homes.  My only gripes are when they insist that all of us must be subject to rule under their particular theology or when they promote violence.

This is particularly true because within Islam Christians and Jews are forced to live under a system of Islamic Supremacism - a system of submission in which the dhimmi is tolerated if he embraces his social inferiority and enacts that inferiority in ways required by the Koran and the Islamic religious authorities.