Saturday, March 30, 2013

We Need More Apologies!

Mike L.

{Originally published at the Times of Israel.}
Now that Israel has apologized to Turkey for Turkey's attack upon her, she now must apologize to every other country in the region, first and foremost to Iran.  Israel owes Iran a profound apology because although the ayatollahs have been screeching for Jewish blood for decades, if not centuries, Israel has claimed that it will do what it can to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weaponry.  This high handed and arrogant attitude on the part of the Jewish State cannot go unredressed.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now essentially admitted to the world, the Jewish people have no rights to self-defense and must therefore apologize to Iran and, further, as a gesture of good will, must assist Iran in its march toward nuclear weaponry.  In the name of morality and basic human decency Israel must not only apologize to those who have sworn genocide for the Jews in the Middle East, but beg forgiveness for being so rude as to oppose them.
Israel also owes Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood the most obsequious apology that she can muster.  Sure Muhammed Morsi is a vicious anti-Jewish racist who thinks that Jews are descended from apes and pigs, but he's allowed, obviously.  What's not allowed is either disagreeing or in any way suggesting that just maybe the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East within the joyous "Arab Spring" is anything other than the great upwelling of democracy.  Many Israelis have expressed a certain doubt about this and must therefore apologize to Egypt, the Brotherhood, and Mr. Morsi, for those doubts.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, The Great Apologizer, has essentially told the entire world that Israel has no national pride and that Jews, as a whole, have no self-respect.  Good job, Mister Prime Minister!  This precedent has now been established and cannot be retracted.  Furthermore, just as Israel must apologize to very many countries around the world it must also immediately apologize to the Palestinian-Arabs for daring to reestablish itself within their historical homeland.  It doesn't matter that Jews have been living in the area for something like four thousand years and that the Arabs didn't show up in the region for thousands of years afterward.  It's their land because they claim it is and thus Israel must not only apologize, but immediately hand over Jerusalem and whatever else that dictator Abbas wants for himself and his people.
Also, there is no one more deserving of an Israeli-Jewish apology than Hamas.  Just because their very charter vows your slaughter and just because they sought to make good on that vow throughout all of last year, it does not mean that you have the right to fight back.  As Hillary Clinton made quite clear last November, Hamas has every right to shoot rockets at you, but you have no rights to resist, which is why she dropped in to begin with, to prevent you from actually defeating Hamas.
Furthermore, the Western Wall must be abandoned and given over to the Palestinian-Arabs so that they can use it for a football court.  The fact that Jews have been withholding this ancient Palestinian-Arab football court for so long is yet another reason to apologize.
Also, of course, the Jews of the Middle East must apologize for their brazen theft of falafel.  Falafel is emphatically not Jewish cuisine, but is a food of other peoples and the Zionist Entity has no right to go around claiming falafel as some kind of national dish.  First you steal their land, then you steal their cuisine, and now you need to apologize.
What I want is for every Jew in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Haifa to follow PM Netanyahu's lead and apologize.  What we can do is reserve a moment sometime within the next week, or thereabouts, wherein all Jews throughout the country will simultaneously stick their heads from their windows and cry out to the world, "We apologize!"
I have to say, the recent Obama trip worked out very well for everyone involved.  Turkey got its apology, although it clearly wasn't abject enough.  Abbas got 500 million dollars.  Obama got Israeli compliance.  And Israel got to apologize!
I say we need more apologies.  There is nothing like good old-fashioned self-abasement to feed the soul.  And, of course, there is nothing in this world that people respect more than an apology for daring to defend yourself.   I just hope that when Obama left Netanyahu's office that Netanyahu thanked him in the only manner appropriate... on his hands and knees.

13 comments:

  1. I'm sorry (heh) I didn't get to this one earlier, Mike.

    I feel the same as School, I think it was, who noted the other day that I wouldn't have done it myself, yet it didn't sound like any kind of admission of wrongdoing, but rather just some face-saving compromise so the two countries can go back to business as usual.

    FWIW, it also makes Israel look like the adult that it is in a region full of bigoted bully babies whose tough talk masks their own impotence, but whatever.

    I'm quite confident Israel can still dole out the occasional smack in an unruly neighbor's mouth when necessary, too. ;)

    ...

    (Any truth to the rumors that the Palestinian-Arabs invented racquetball right there at the Western Wall 47,000 years ago, around the same time they invented chickpeas and parsley and opened the first air-conditioned olive oil production facility around which they designed the world's first international monetary system?)

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    1. I think I heard that last rumor at Daily Kos, in one of those weekly anti-Israel incitement Friday Video Drools from one of the interchangeable, half-bright dopes that make up the 'Pro-Palestinian only when it involves Jews' caucus there...

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  2. It doesn't even make pragmatic sense. Not only because, in the Middle East, if you're not right then you're not wise either, but even in the plain facts that anyone can see.

    I usually argue ideologically, because that's where I believe anti-Zionism stems from, but I'm perfectly able to make pragmatic arguments. For instance, if some anti-Zionist says, "I don't care about history, Biblical claims, indigenous peoples and all that stuff—give me a reason from cold, hard reality why Israel should keep the post-1967 territories, why it shouldn't concede them from the sake of peace," then I reply, "Very well then, an argument from cold, hard reality it is: The Jewish State does not have land to spare. We are not land-rich like most of the countries telling us to give away lands, and we can ill afford the reduction of our nation-state from the point of view of both military strategy and natural resources." That's my pragmatic argument. At which point, of course, 99% of anti-Zionists lob the word "Lebensraum," bringing them back to the ideological battlefield, a convenient shift that I promptly call them hypocrites for.

    There are pragmatic as well as ideological reasons for opposing the apology to Turkey, and even more so for standing against Turkey's demand that Israel pay one million dollars (!) for every terrorist killed aboard the Mavi Marmara. Chief among the pragmatic reasons is: We do not have money to spare. Israel may be a "Start-Up Nation," but we have the same fiscal crises as those that are blighting the United States and the Eurozone; add to this the necessities of military spending, and it's obvious we can ill afford to spend so much money on compensating Turkish terrorists and supplying free electricity to the Arab colonial terrorist entity in Gaza (yet another failure of Netancoward—not even during Operation Pillar of Cloud was the power supply cut off, too fearful of what the world might say or do is he).

    Our enemies are land-rich and oil-rich, so let them do all the compensating steps needed—give away some of their extra land to the Arab colonists kicked out of Jewish territory, and pay the Turks' satisfaction. We simply have barely enough to sustain ourselves, so generosity toward other nations just doesn't jive with the cold, hard reality of pragmatic necessity.

    That's a good pragmatic argument to make. I'm sure, once again, that 99% of the anti-Zionists would shift back to ideological argumentation; the instant they do that, give 'em a good kick in the derriere for their hypocrisy and you've won with your head held high. Which is more than you can say for Israel's pusillanimous leadership.

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    1. I can agree with this view, too. As I said, I wouldn't have apologized / admitted operational errors / whatever it was, myself, I just don't think it augurs any long-term negative implications down the road.

      Unless, as Mike jokes, they also start apologizing for 'stealing falafel' and shit like that. Then I'm gonna have to go with "yeah, maybe it's time for someone else." ;)

      Good point on the money thing, however. I would, and do, oppose paying one cent to anybody.

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    2. "I just don't think it augurs any long-term negative implications down the road."

      I don't agree with your assessment. We will live to regret this, and dearly. The weakness shown by the apology draws the Islamic imperialists to aggressive acts as surely as a shark is drawn to blood in the water. The price will be real and high.

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    3. I hope I'm right in the end, though I fear you may be.

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  3. I would have the top 100 media antisemites in the US criminally charged for hate crimes. I would have Erdogan charged in the ICC for genocide and war crimes. I would have Abbas criminally charged in the ICC for genocide. I would have the Huffington Post charged by the US DoJ as a hate speech site. At the very least dump all of HPM's findings in the lap of each AOL board member, personally. I would charge Mondoweiss as an illegal holocaust denier site in Germany since people read it there. I would lobby the Israeli government to specifically bar Chuck Hagel and John Brennan from setting foot in Israel for life. I would label Miftah as a terrorist organization and put a bounty on all their heads. I would throw out every BBC, NYT and Guardian employee from Israel and ban them from operating in Israel for a period of 50 years.

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  4. Trudy you are beginning to sound like me.!!
    I don't if that's good or bad. Take your pick. :-)

    I have been,and still am involved in huge issues here in regards to the AJDS - Australian Jewish Democratic Society, which Geoffff has blogged twice about.

    I had a huge run in with the President of the ECAJ - Executive Council of Australian Jewry, which is the umbrella organisation for the whole country. He started this argument on Facebook on Friday, in which he said he did not want to correspond with me any more as I am 'too aggressive'. Oh boy, I saw stars and I continued it via email. No laughing Mike !!
    I had to wait for shabbos to go out for his reply.

    Moi? Aggressive? Even a mouse would be seen as aggressive by the ECAJ.

    Last night we were emailing backwards and forwards until 1 am. The outcome.

    Not only did he apologise. He sent me a copy of their Statement in regards to the AJDS, which will be published on Thursday in the AJN.


    Just BTW Michael good piece.

    I'm of mixed feelings in regards to this apology of Israel's to Turkey

    No, it was a stupid ridiculous thing to do. How can you say sorry for offences not committed?

    On the other hand Israel needs a friend in the region and that really was the only option

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    1. "No, it was a stupid ridiculous thing to do. How can you say sorry for offences not committed?

      On the other hand Israel needs a friend in the region and that really was the only option
      "

      This.

      And as a show of good faith, I'll even refrain, for now, from bringing up my own personal Jim Kunstler-ian view of the long-term shortcomings of economic development based upon non-renewable energy resources, to note that now Israel will soon be exporting same to Turkey for handsome sums.

      I'm sure that played a role, too...

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    2. "On the other hand Israel needs a friend in the region..."

      This line of thinking (or feeling, more like) is the weakness our enemies prey on—whether Turkey, BDSers or slop-grade diplomats criticizing us on the "settlements," something they'd never dare to do to any other hosts. The impudence is fed by the idea that the Jews' need for affection and friendliness is so great that they'd take any offense lying down, if not outright groveling in apology.

      We've got to get rid of this mindset. It's unbecoming of any nation, not just the Jewish nation. This analogy of nations to people is faulty. Nations aren't people. People—individuals—do need friends, though even with people it's not advisable to seek friendship at too high a cost. Nations don't have friends, only interests. What Israel needs, in the pragmatic frame of thinking, is nothing but trading partners in plain dealing with no strings attached; no favors, just business. If, for instance, we buy a submarine from Germany for straight payment, that's the best deal because it places us in a position to reject any preconditions—no stuff like "Our delivery is contingent on your halting of settlement activity" because then the deal's off, along with the money paid.

      In pragmatic terms, there must be no cost beyond the ordinary. That's basic prudence in real life, not just in international politics. Israel's slovenly positioning with regard to the U.S.A. (brought under the thrall of extortion disguised as "aid" or "military loan"), Egypt (the natural gas deal that's now off, and consequently electricity prices in Israel are rising) and Turkey is the opposite of all wisdom and pragmatic smarts in international politics. And it all begins with the misconception that we, the Jewish nation, need other nations to be our friends or allies. We won't get out of our sorry state until we abandon this faulty thinking.

      Note that I've only put things in pragmatic terms so far. If I brought ideology into it, the case against Israel's dealings with Turkey would be even more devastating: The ideological recognition that any Muslim-majority state is a potential enemy state (which Turkey now is) demands that no relations of any kind, not even plain business deals, be opened by the Jewish State with any Muslim-majority state. Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia and Iran are the same in that regard.

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  5. Heya folks,

    I have an injured right paw due to a gardening accident, so I may be more or less out for the next few days.

    fyi

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  6. Sheesh Mike. Not the old gardening accident trick? You must know we're not allowed to do gardening. Not unless it is to grow food.

    Get better soon.

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  7. Get well soon, Mike. And if your hand is put in a cast, you can always make lemons out of the lemonade by saying it was in service of the country. (No joke: My uncle had a gardening accident during the Yom Kippur war, and anybody who didn't know about it congratulated him for his wartime bravery—even though he was not in active service at the time.)

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