This Goes Up To Eleven

Empress Trudy

{Editor's note - Israel Thrives is pleased to announce that Empress Trudy is the latest writer to grace our pages.  Trudy is, I am happy to say, a solid, strong, and knowledgeable supporter of the Jewish State of Israel and I am very much looking forward to her participation going forward.  Please welcome our newest contributor. - Mike L.}

I've been looking at the news this week. Prisoner X, a report by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry applauding 'opening of probes into the matter' and reports in Ha'aretz that 'information is being drowned out by hate speech'. Information which clearly points out that he was a traitor, he sold or gave information to a foreign government, he was tried and convicted, he was given a false name for his own protection and the protection of his family, his family was notified, the Australian government was notified, the Israeli courts were notified and he wound up hanging himself with a bed sheet. And all of this seemingly points, to the liberal left, of the horrors of the Jews and their brutal treatment of people and puppies and the planet.

I've been reading about the 3^rd or 4^th very public speech Chuck Hagel made lamenting the evil Jews and their apartheid, a report in EoZ that quotes some Lebanese 'academic', Sari Hanafi, who accuses the Jews of killing 'space itself'. Yeah me neither, who knows?

I'm reading how one of the Cardinals in the running for Pope, Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, is a naked and outspoken antisemite, blaming the “Jews” for the sexual offenses of Catholic priests.

I'm reading that unsurprisingly, Honest Reporting tallied that in 2010 68% of their Op-Eds were anti Israel, 32% were blandly neutral and 2 columns in total could be called pro Israeli.

I was looking at the IDF COGAT website's PDF reports that showed 47 thousand tons of material and goods shipped into Gaza this month, 279 tractor trailer trucks alone last week; there are the obligatory screams of 'blockade!” and such.

And of course the fallout from 60 Minutes favorite anti Israeli partisan, Bob Simon, who indicated that because of Iron Dome, somehow Jews not volunteering to commit suicide is itself some form of crime against humanity.

And I concluded that all our hasbara, itself now a dirty word on blogs like CNN or Huffington Post, all our efforts to get the word out, to speak the truth, every polite comment and studied response is not only a complete failure it's never been in the same world as the Arabs. It's not built to fight that battle it needs to win. It doesn't understand what the battle even is.

The Arabs win because they have a brilliant simple impenetrable strategy. It consists of one word. Occupation. One word. That's it. That's their response to every question every comment every news byte, every complaint, every fact. Occupation, or some variation on that single word - “apartheid”, “illegal”, “barrier”, “blockade”. Complain about rockets? “Occupation”. Bus bombing? “Occupation”. Killing 'collaborators'? “Occupation”. And so on to the millionth degree. The great beauty is that it's stupid, it's easy to chant, it's vague, it means whatever you like, it's angry and self righteous and it defeats all attempts to argue with it. It's like shouting 'racist' when you run out of energy to talk about US domestic policy. It's meant to shut you up. It is the self proving accusation. And it goes to the core of 2000 years of antisemitism. The same J'accuse!. The same unfounded unhinged supernal cosmic hatred. The screams of “Occupation!” exist outside of fact and history, outside of reality. This is what makes them so hard to defeat so hard to argue with. It's not meant to BE argued with. You can't engage an opponent who starts out by saying everything in your whole being is illegal, wrong, racist and a lie. You can't confront a million repetition of 'Zionazi' with calm lists of facts proving otherwise.

We live in many ways, in post-factual world. The recently dead 'historian' Howard Zinn, Marxist, communist and occasional anarchist, revisionist, hater of America and Israel and author of one of the most heavily used college history textbook in America once said, and I paraphrase, I don't care about historical accuracy, I care about politics, my political agenda. That is what he was selling. He was selling propaganda, not history. He was selling revisionism. He, like fellow 'historian' Gar Alperovitz openly talked about their own revisionist views and agendas. So that Hiroshima became a specifically racist war crime and Israel became a racist colonial invasion. An Occupation.

But what do we Zionists do in this so called 'post Zionist' world? We argue politely. We tabulate facts, we footnote. We quibble about international law. No one cares about international law. International law is war by other means. France has stated numerous times that they use the UN and international law as a bludgeon to push their own foreign policy because it allows them to punch far above their weight otherwise. There is no international law. Arguing what Arthur Goldberg thought about in the precise language of Res 242, whether he meant 'the' or not is utter silliness. It means nothing. It misses the point, it is a distraction.

I'm reminded of a movie. The remake of “The Stepford Wives” made a few years back with Chris Walken and Glenn Close. Ms. Close's character, talking about her project says “While women were becoming men, men were becoming GODS.” The women were fighting the wrong war. They won the battle and lost everything.

This is where we are today. We Jews, we Zionists, we're arguing and parsing and footnoting. We're pointing out to every screaming maniac waving a sign telling us to be gassed “Oh no you have that wrong historically, that's too mean to say.” We're fighting the wrong war. We're justifying ourselves to ourselves. We feel good about feeling good about it. We think right is on our side and eventually we will win out because people are fundamentally sane and good and just.

5,000 years of blood guzzling insanity would tend to demonstrate that's not the case. People aren't good, they're sort of good, or good enough, to some people, some of the time. They're occasionally just but mostly they're expedient. They're parochial. People are typically sane but groups of people rarely are. They are mobs and herds. Go read Elias Canetti's “Crowds and Power” if you're curious about that.

But all of this is incidental. The point is, what do we say, what do we do? How to manage the old ladies and geezers marching around outside of a performance of an Israeli dance company while they wave their Palestinian flags. We bring it to them. We have one answer. Mass Murder. Terrorism. Child Killing. Torture. Wife Beating. Terrorism, violence, murder. That's our answer. Why is there a fence? Terrorism. Why are there berms and checkpoints in Yesha? Terrorism. It matters to NO ONE that the number of those checkpoints has been reduced 90% to 27, only 12 of which are even manned. Maybe my numbers are slightly off but not by much. Arguing there are 'only' 12 is a waste of time. The correct answer is Terrorism, murder, shooting pregnant women. That's the answer. The only answer.

There are NO settlements. That's not the answer. There are Jews who live in suburbs in Yesha, 90% of whom are closer to downtown Jerusalem than almost anyone in America drives to Starbucks. But that is also not the answer. The correct answer is “You're savages who murder our women and children wherever they live whether you suffer to permit that or not.”

Why are there closely controlled crossing points that abut Gaza? Terrorism. There are no restrictions for non-terrorists. There are plenty of restrictions to terrorists. “Collective Punishment?” Terrorism and mass murder. It doesn't matter how many sick Gazans are treated in Israeli hospitals for free. It could be one person or all of them. Irrelevant. Not worth the time spent mentioning. Woman goes into labor waiting to cross into Israel? Because your people wage indiscriminate mass murder. No further explanation is required.

We live in a post-factual world. We live in a world where the IDF sends field hospitals to Haiti and Jenny Tonge in the UK House of Lords accuses Jews of stealing livers from living people. Israel has more legal gay rights than even the UK and Code Pink accuses them of 'pink washing'. It's not worth discussing because it's not supposed to be discussed. It's a hand grenade. Desmond Tutu accuses Israel of apartheid knowing with 100% absolute certainty he is lying about it. And on every college campus some angry group of overfed undereducated fools 'debates' whether Israel even has the right to exist. Not Worth Discussing. The correct answer is mass murdering terrorist psychopaths. If that's who they're rooting for, stand up and be counted!

Our response should be simple, it should be direct and it should be uncompromising. And it needs to be repeated a hundred million million times, banged into the mob's head until it's so familiar they think they thought of it in the first place.

I remember hearing once that more words had been written about Clinton-Lewinsky than the total output of all human endeavors in the history of the world from the invention of cave drawings to the year 1900. I don't know if that's true. It sounds true. But that's what matters in the end. This goes up to eleven.