Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Why Progressives are Clueless on I-P



{Cross-Posted at Pro-israel Bay Bloggers}

Karam

There are reasons why the progressive-left likes to smack around the Jewish state and one of the foremost of such reasons is their near total misapprehension of the source of the conflict. Progressives tend to think that the reason for the never-ending, and increasingly annoying, I-P conflict, is that the Jews of the Middle East are mean.

In the plainest terms possible, that is it. Progressives, as a rule, think that Israel is mean. The mean Jewish Israelis are oppressing the innocent "indigenous" Palestinians and they need to stop it. This represents the essential mental process of most progressives when they bother considering the Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East. It's all about underdogs. Whoever holds underdog status is considered to be the righteous "good guy" among the vapid progressive activist types.

In the summer of 1967 the Jews of the Middle East successfully defended themselves from Arab aggression and, in doing so, acquired the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the "West Bank" from Jordan. After both those countries refused to take back that land in return for peace, as they told us with the three famous "no's" at Khartoum, the Soviets, the Arabs, and their western progressive allies have successfully turned the Jewish David into the Israeli Goliath.

Of course, they get a little cognitive help among people who are paid to encourage them to think this way. NGOs, the United Nations, and various journalists and academics who specialize in spreading hatred toward the Jewish state... and G-d only knows how many anti-Semitic anti-Zionist bloggers who do it not for pay but out shear self-serving righteous indignation combined with willful ignorance of the subject... continually paint Israel as a racist, apartheid, imperialist, colonialist, rogue state.

So what is your average American liberal to think?

Day after day after day Israel gets clobbered by people either emotionally or financially invested (oftentimes both) in doing everything that they possibly can to demean and defame that country for its alleged crimes against the Palestinians and they are almost always on the left.  This is, in fact, the product of untold billions of dollars in Arab oil revenue over the recent decades as a source of funding for non-stop anti-Zionist propaganda directed at gullible, usually well-meaning, western liberals.

If this were not true, surely Israel's defamers would not be defamers, but instead would be honest critics. For if they were honest critics they might note the 1,300 years of Jewish persecution in Muslim and Arab lands that directly preceded the long Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East from the 1920s until today.

But they don't.

The only way to make the acidic progressive case against the Jewish state, and thus against the Jewish people, is to ignore centuries of Jewish history in that part of the world. Unless you ignore the long centuries of Jewish second and third class citizenship under Muslim rule, it is impossible to portray the Jews merely as the callous oppressors of the innocent Palestinian-Arabs.

In truth, you have to ignore all sorts of things to maintain the typically progressive stance that the Jews are guilty and that the Palestinians should be free to react in any violent manner possible because they are the righteous victims.

Not only do you have to ignore 13 centuries of dhimmitude to paint the Jews in roguish colors, you also have to ignore all the various times that the Palestinian-Arabs have refused to accept a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. If you admit, as the historical record shows, that the Palestinians have never accepted a peaceful resolution to the conflict despite ridiculously good offers for statehood, such as the Peel Commission proposal of 1937, then you must conclude that the reason for the ongoing problem is not the Jews, but persistent Arab intransigence to this very day.

Yet the Jewish state is the only country on the planet that suffers daily attack in the progressive press and they do so under the guise of "social justice" and "human rights." 5.5 million people are dead in the Congo over the last 15 years, but the progressive-left does not care. Tibet remains under the brutal Chinese occupation, decade after decade, but the progressive-left does not care. In Darfur Muslims slaughter black Africans and use rape as a weapon of war, resulting in the dislocation of millions of people, but the progressive-left does not care.

And I am supposed to take progressive anti-Zionist hatred toward the Jewish state as something other than anti-Jewish racism?

Oh, please.

.

3 comments:

  1. Clueless? If only. Clueless can be fixed with a little knowledge. With the anti-Zionists you don't get mere ignorance, you're confronted with a total unwillingness to listen. Buttressed by utter contempt.

    "For a just and viable peace that guarantees the rights of the Palestinians while taking account of the Israelis' security needs." Yes... one side has rights (dreams, lofty ideals, justice aggrieved etc.), the other, mere security needs (measures to ensure they aren't killed—why, thank you).

    The past two decades, Israeli Jews have debated the outcome of 1967, including the Jewish population centers set up in the post-1967 territories, sincerely and furiously. There was even a limited readiness to broach the topic of 1948, though the prospect of having the very foundation of the Jewish state condemned has never been welcomed even by Meretz. In contrast to this, any notion that the Jews have a right to their state in Palestine, as opposed to having been done a favor in the face of the Holocaust, is derided as racism, false history, mythology or worse.

    The Progressive Left has never respected the Jewish claim. Their view of Zionists is from above, and from the judgment seat. They hold that the very first batch of Jews arriving from Russia in 1882 (always Russia—a similar arrival from Yemen is never mentioned, lest it seriously dent their view of Zionism as "White European Settler-Colonialism") was the beginning of sin, the point before which everything was perfect. From such a standpoint, they view even the Binational "Solution", where the Jewish nation is to be dispossessed of its one and only nation-state, as an act of clemency, graciousness over true justice, which would be Helen Thomas's call for all Jews to be ethnically cleansed from Palestine.

    The greater part of the Israeli Jewish public in the years before the Great Disillusionment (which would be August 2005—the evacuation of all the Jews in the Gaza region, followed by rocket barrages on pre-1967 Israeli Jewish towns) would have been content with an equal-claimants view of this conflict. That is, if the world had accepted comparisons to the Hutus and Tutsis, similar peoples with an equal claim to the land that had better be solved by some sort of sharing agreement. But the Progressive Left rejects forthwith any such view; its beloved comparison is of French vs. Algerians in Algeria, and we know how that ended. The greatest contempt the Progressives have is for the Zionist who believes Jews too are in Palestine by right. Such an uppity thought does not go well with the ideal of Israel and Zionism standing trial before the world.

    In all my years of reading the stuff on anti-Zionist forums, Karmafish, nothing, and I mean nothing, has outraged me more than the anti-Zionists' sheer contempt they have for the idea of the Jews' connection to this land. The lighthearted ease with which they dismiss that connection as a bunch of fairy-tales and construe Zionism as a colonialist relic is something that should fill any Jew with righteous indignation. If no respect is given to us and our rights—nothing but bones of "security needs" thrown to us, and not very reliable ones either—then how do they have the gall to demand our respect toward our adversaries? It's usually better to be smart than right, but only up to a point; once the imbalance is such that you become a doormat, you're no longer smart either.

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  2. I want you to send me an email at mike.lumish@gmail.com 

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  3. “According to the original law of Mohammed, there are no innocent civilians.

    Radical Islamists consider all people — in or out of military uniform — who do not believe in the original Islam of Mohammed, to be the enemy, until they convert or are subjected to Islamic law.”

    SOURCE: They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It (Introduction Chapter, page 3) by Brigitte Gabriel, year 2008, year 2010, St. Martin’s Press, 288 pages, ISBN 0312571283, ISBN 9780312571283.

    MICROBIOGRAPHY: Brigitte Gabriel, the author of:
    They Must Be Stopped, is a Christian Arab, born in Lebanon. Arabic is her native language.

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