Progressives for Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

Ziontruth

It is my intention in this article to expose the unflattering reality behind white angel wings that certain people imagine themselves sporting. Within the Progressive Left we find a shrinking proportion of Two-State Solution advocates who are either pro-Israel, with their hearts in the right place but unfortunately are lacking critical information, or anti-Zionists who are two-staters because they think the “damage” of setting up the state of Israel can only be contained, not reversed; and we find a growing contingent of people who call for the Binational (One-State) Solution, in the thinking that undoing Zionism is both desirable and possible. I contend that the former group are guilty of calling for ethnic cleansing, despite their denial of the term, and that the latter are unwitting accessories to genocide, by virtue of their incurable naïveté.

Calls for Ethnic Cleansing

A complicated matter needs complex explanations; I am perfectly willing to take the time for reading a subject where, to paraphrase Einstein, things cannot be made simpler than possible. Where, however, the matter is simple, it is just as bad to frame it in complex terms and elaborate wording. Ethnic cleansing is such a matter: Very simply put, anybody who argues that a particular piece of land should be emptied of members of a particular ethnos residing in it is an advocate of ethnic cleansing. It is really that simple and it will not do to complicate matters.

It is told of W. C. Fields (or George Bernard Shaw, alternatively) that he once asked a lady if she was willing to spend the night with him for a million pounds, and she said yes; then he asked her if she was willing to do the same for a few pennies, and she answered, indignantly, “What do you think I am—a prostitute?!” Whereupon he said, “Lady, we have already established that. We are now discussing prices.” With Progressives who call for ethnic cleansing, the same lack of awareness can be found: Having said that a two-state solution would by necessity involve the evacuation of all Jewish residents (“settlers,” in in the revisionist parlance of Arab imperialism) from Judea and Samaria, they are the first to flare in righteous anger when someone suggests that the same two-state solution would reciprocally involve the relocation of all Arabs in pre-1967 Israel to the newly-formed Arab state of Falasteen. “That’s ethnic cleansing!!!” they reply in fiery rage, with the assumption taken for granted that their call for the relocation of Jews is not ethnic cleansing at all.

Let us be clear about two separate facets of this issue: Ethnic cleansing itself and the question whether it is justified. When a supporter of the Two-State Solution, or on the other hand a Helen Thomas clone calling for Jews to go “back home” to the lands where six million were exterminated, says a part or all of Palestine should be emptied of Jews in order for peace to be possible, they are both calling for ethnic cleansing and offering a reason as to why it is justified. That they call for ethnic cleansing is not in dispute—it flows from the cold, hard, objective meaning of the term “ethnic cleansing.” Trying to counter the accusation with a statement like, “It is not ethnic cleansing to kick squatters, settlers, colonists out!”, they do nothing but double down on their calls for ethnic cleansing; the bit about “squatters, settlers, colonists” is not a refutation of the charge of ethnic cleansing, it is a justification of their call for it.

The burden of standing up to their hypocrisy is on the Progressive-Leftists, as it is one of their tenets that ethnic cleansing is never justified. In the years 1993–2005 there was a window of opportunity when the majority of the Israeli Jewish public believed in the viability of the Two-State Solution, including the prospect of ethnic cleansing Judea and Samaria and Gaza of all Jewish residents as part of bringing that solution about; this culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip in August 2005. In the course of the 2000s decade, the Arabs closed that window by making it clear to the Israeli Jewish public that they had no intention of settling for Judea and Samaria and Gaza, but wanted everything the Jews have, meaning pre-1967 Israel as well. The Israeli Jews have passed the test of flexibility with flying colors; it is therefore not they but the other side—Arab imperialists and their Progressive-Left supporters—who have some proving to do in that department.

It is already curious that the Progressive-Leftist advocates of the Two-State Solution take it for granted that ethnic cleansing of the Jews is a noble prerequisite to such a solution while the notion of a reciprocal population exchange involving the pre-1967 Israel Arabs is taboo. It is evident that there is a double standard here, and it looks probable that such a double standard has its source in the selfsame anti-Zionist narrative that posits the Jews as interlopers in Palestine. Whatever the case, and whatever the justifications they bring for their plans for all the Jews in certain parts of Palestine and the convoluted explanations as to why such justifications do not apply to Arabs in any part of Palestine, the cold, harsh truth remains that they call for ethnic cleansing. This would not be much of an issue if the Progressives did not claim ethnic cleansing to be a heinous crime, but they do, and since they do so, they must be held to their claim.

A Genocidal Solution

The hypocrisy may have been one of the factors prompting the Progressive-Left winds to shift away from the Two-State Solution into the Binational Solution. Insofar as the Binational Solution of having a single state shared by Jews and Arabs allows everyone to stay where they are (ah, give and take a million descendants of the defeated Arabs of 1947 “returning” to flood the new binational state), the Binational Solution really is free of ethnic cleansing. In it, however, the prospect of ethnic cleansing is exchanged for one far worse, that of genocide.

We have it on experience, from Lebanon, break-up Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Darfur, that forcing nations that hate each other into a single state could have dire consequences. Although there are other, benign cases such as Switzerland (one of the few successful examples), Belgium (where the Flemish and Waloon populations just keep a simmering contempt for one another instead of erupting into violence) and the United States of America (now under great strain thanks to unscrupulous politicians pitting the constituent groups against each other, then claiming to be the cure for strife), the track record of multinational states has not been stellar, to say the least. I am willing to bet Progressives would avoid drinking a cup of water known to have a 5% chance of being poisoned just like all people, yet they are all too ready to gamble the lives of millions on their pipe-dreams.

The Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda looked similar and spoke mutually intelligible dialects of the same language, yet that did not prevent the massacre that took place in 1994. But we are being asked to believe that Jews and Arabs could somehow live together peacefully in the same state! We are being called to believe, on pain of being branded as “racists,” that the decades-long indoctration of Arab children to wish to massacre the Jews has no significance whatsoever, and can in no way impede the vision of peaceful coexistence. All I can say is that it is much easier to bet somebody else’s farm than your own. Owing to Jewish experience—of life under Islamic as well as Christian rule—Israeli Jews cannot honestly be asked to treat the Binational Solution with enthusiasm.

Notes and Directions

The note I wish to leave Progressives in all this is that they are not so angelic as they imagine themselves to be. Whether they call for ethnic cleansing while deluding themselves they do not, or advocate a scenario so perilously open to the possibility of ending in genocide, the fact is the Progressives are reckless in their thinking, not giving enough care to the fate of either Jew or Arab in Palestine. The reality-based thinker acknowledges the existence of the element of imperialism in the conflict that makes it a far more difficult matter to solve than either Two-State or Binational advocates think it is. Of course, some observers outside Israel might come to think this is a hopeless cause and they should stay out of it and let the chips fall where they may—I have no problem with that kind of thinking, which I consider much better than the delusion that somehow the bombings in Boston, hackings in London, stabbings in Paris and massacres in Delhi would all magically cease or even just go down in their frequency if only the Jewish–Arab Conflict were solved.

The way forward to peace is unclear, and anyone who says otherwise is either deluded or deceiving. It might even involve the Two-State Solution, but if and only if the Israeli Jewish public is convinced that the other side wants a state alongside ours rather than the appropriation of everything we have. Let one thing be as clear as crystal to all interested in peace in the Middle East: Until the national rights of the Jews as the indigenous Palestinian nation are recognized, instead of being denied with Zionism being maliciously construed as a branch of European colonialism, there will be no prospect of any just and viable peace. Progressives claim to stand for the rights of indigenous peoples; let them make good on their claim regarding the indigenous people of Palestine—the Jews.

Are The Greens Australia's First Islamist Party?

geoffff

Two days ago two  Australian Greens politicians publicly refused to sign the London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism. Not only that, they were proud of themselves. They even submitted an article to New Matilda claiming credit for it. As if this was something honourable and courageous. Here it is.  Do read it all but to sum up the reasoning there were too many bits in the declaration about Israel being the Jewish state and therefore Israel should not be boycotted on that account or its supporters singled out for racist abuse at UN conferences like Durban. And also Zionism is racism.

Whilst there are some interpretations of Zionism that are compatible with a peaceful, multi-ethnic and religious state, in its name Palestinian homes have been demolished, the granting of Israeli citizenship has been granted based on the grounds of race and religion and illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank have been constructed.

The usual lies about home demolitions, illegal settlements, "apartheid walls" and comparisons with South Africa, and of all places Burma, but see the phrase in bold.  So much for Jewish nationhood. Israel alone of the nations has no legitimacy because to identify as Jewish in the Jewish homeland is to discriminate "on the grounds of race and religion".  

No doubt there will be more Greens lining up to show their contempt for the political and other human rights of Israelis because they are Jews, or more to the point not Muslims. I commented about this noble stand of principle here and left this at New Matilda.

It is just a simple outright lie that people who have criticisms of Israeli Government policy at checkpoints or building approvals risk being labelled antisemites. 

They do not. Read this disgusting article and you will see this lie at full strength.

 If you believe that the existence of the Jewish state is the reason for the misery of the "Palestinian" people then you are not necessarily an antisemite. Ignorant, with the intellectual depth of a child's wading pool in summer and driven by dinner party activism probably but not necessarily a full blown racist.

If you stand for the destruction of the Jewish state then you are an antisemite. If you are agnostic on the question of whether the Jewish state should be torn down as if it was the old apartheid regime in South Africa then you are an antisemite. No amount of mealy mouthed  double talk of the type you see here will disguise that.

This is why the Greens are correctly labelled as full blown racists. And pro-war. Their presence in Australian politics, like that of One Nation's two decades ago, shames us all

One of these politicians is David Shoebridge. Two weeks ago Shoebridge attended a Nakba Day rally during which he demonstrated his passion for human rights by entertaining Iranian Press TV with a long and friendly interview about the evil Israelis. Shoebridge is spokesperson for his party on Gay and Lesbian rights.  

What can you say? I tried this.

Greens campaign against combating racism? Greens giving comfort and support to regimes that murder Gays? Greens complicit in the brutal oppression of women abroad?  You better believe it.

Welcome to Greens foreign policy.

And welcome to Shoebridge's website where you will find this text book piece of subliminal racism, and not so subliminal antisemitism.  

The Racist World of the Greens.

This is not some sort of satire. This cartoon is genuine and comes from the official site of this Greens parliamentarian  and anti-Israel activist. It is the official Greens position and provides the background for this.

It's the usual four map illusion with mirrors that has been debunked so thoroughly it raises ugly thoughts about the motives of those who deploy it. But deploy it they do and in this case with a couple of twists unique to the Australian Greens  There are a couple of perversions of their own which really should settle the question of  whether it is populist ignorance or deep rooted prejudices that drive Greens foreign policy interventions.

Can you spot these?

The first map is the biggest lie as noted by the Elder. As is usual it is a snapshot of the Mandate for Palestine in 1946 thereby sidestepping any possible thought crimes  that might occur among the punters had the snapshot been taken in 1920 when the Mandate was created or in 1922 when Palestine was illegally split by the British hiving off 77% to a new Arab state east of the river where Jews were forbidden to live by law. Still are. This also avoids any possibility of curiosity about the history of Zionism and the Jewish struggle for national liberation in the explicit context of the rule of international law in the twentieth century.

But there's something else. In the usual map one lie what is here shown as the white bits, if they are shown at all, are explained to be "Jewish owned land" and indeed probably do correctly depict the extent of privately owned land lawfully held by Jews and Jewish bodies at that time. The lie is that the balance was "Palestinian"  owned land. It was not. The vast bulk of it was not private land at all. It was public land and the suggestion that it was owned by one section of the population to the exclusion of another has to say something about the mindset. However it gets worse:

On the Greens' map the white bits are not even described as "Jewish owned land". Instead they are depicted only in the negative, as not part of "Palestine". According to the Greens a Jew lawfully owning land in the Mandate for Palestine was sufficient to remove the land from whatever polity the Greens imagine prevailed at that time. The land had in effect been stolen solely by virtue of being owned by Jews. 

And the other thing? "Shrinking Palestine", with the Jewish bits steadily expanding from what looks like the aftermath of an attack by a plague of sabre toothed moths on an antique table cloth, to big shark like bites, is coloured green; the natural colour of empathy for this party. Look at the poor green little country being gulped up in big bites as if the Jews are Great White Sharks attacking a school of painted pilchards.

The other lies are dealt with by the Elder  It is almost amusing to see the period 1967 to 2012 skipped without so much as a yadda yadda yadda as if several wars, two intifadas, two peace treaties, one land for peace deal, two unilateral withdrawals and the Oslo fraud happened without so much as a blink of the eye*; but note one other oddity. Map three shows Gaza then administered by Egypt and the West Bank then under Jordanian control as an "UN mandate". What UN mandate? Am I missing something?

It's almost as if truthfully showing there was no "Palestine" and no "mandate" over "Palestine" right up until 1967 when at any time an independent "Palestine" was there for the making might derail the narrative. All the "Palestinians" and the Arab states had to do was want a state of "Palestine" . They did not. They wanted something else. Something they can never have. They still do. Nothing has changed.

The Greens prefer to lie about this.

Here's another map. Here's some truth from some Irish activists.  The Greens will never accept the implications of this.

Where Middle East Jews No Longer Live

*Not to mention the expulsion and flight from persecution and pogroms of Jews from Muslim lands, many more in number than the Palestinian refugees, where they had lived for a thousand years and more before there were Muslims and who with their descendants comprise a majority of the Jewish population of modern Israel. Greens might feign some kind of emotion about the lost Jewish civilisations of Russia and Europe. It would be politically correct to do so. But you will never hear a whisper of interest about the lost ancient Jewish cultures of Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan and so on. That would be politically incorrect.   

cross posted Geoffff's Joint

Interlude

Mike L.

The drums must continue to beat, but over the next few days they will have to do so without my participation.

I have got family business to attend to, so you guys will not likely see much of me until the early part of next week.

But keep hammering.  Keep thinking.

Keep changing the terms of discussion.

Because that is really what this is all about.

Be bold.

Be brave.

Fight back.

After Terrorism

Empress Trudy

Terrorism is over. Or we’re at the point where we can say that it’s the end of an era. And that is a terrible thing. What used to have the capacity to ‘terrorize’ us is over. We can argue endlessly about what terrorism is and is not and why it is and why not but what is clear is what it attempts to do in its asymmetrical way; instill moral erosion and emotional trepidation in the target population. Degrade not their ability to fight but their will to. The purpose is fear and demoralization which are sudden and frightening but which are also both long and slow, eventual things. Coupled with the inner softness and naivete of many in the west it results in a weird moral inversion. The kind of inversion you see where feminists and gay rights spokesmen embrace the people actively involved in mass murdering them, for instance. But again, those are far off things; side effects. The point, if one exists, to terrorism is to let the animal in your house. To make you look at the spectacle of gore.

And for a while this worked quite well. We watched the Golden Age of Terrorism unravel as the PLO high jacked airliners and blew them up. High jacked the Olympics, attacked embassies and so forth. Over time though this became less effective and shocking. Ho hum another high jacking. The special intelligence services rounded up another 20 people before they do much harm. So the terrorists switched gears again and attacked buses and trains and pizzerias. We are shocked and horrified but again terrorists tend to overplay their hand and numb us to it. We’re willing to go to extraordinary lengths to address that but what we discover is that the lengths aren’t so extraordinary after all. Another security guard, another pat down, another instance of being alert. 

And then they changed tactics again. In fact one could make the case that rocket attacks aren’t terrorism, they’re just war. We know how to ‘do’ war, far better than they do. We build bomb shelters and we send in the drones.

When populations became inured of it though as they always do, terrorists switched gears again and pull a page from the CCCP’s KGB manual and worked to use terrorism to rally public opinion to their side. The narrative of “Why ELSE would desperate people do this unless their cause was just….?” The idea that one can fight a terrorist war almost solely on the pages of the press on TV and online has its appeal. It’s cheap, it’s distributed, anyone can do it and you get to use your enemy’s own value system against them. Any of us who’s ever felt they were swatting at flies understands this.  Genocidists, maniacs, anti-Semites, mass murderers and their hangers on are more successful simply SAYING they are just and the Jews (and anyone else you want to stand in as their proxy) are by definition evil.

But as I said, the coupling of that with terrorism is over. Why do I say that is a terrible thing? Because violence is a drug, an addiction. We were shown airliners grounded in Jordan blown up – with no one on them, in 1970 and that was shocking. We heard Leon Klinghoffer was tossed into the sea in his wheel chair and that was shocking.  Bus bombings, train bombings, roadside bombings, rocket attacks, and worse stunned us. For a while. But like all addicts and voyeurs, it’s never enough. The consequence of violence is ennui, indifference, being jaded.

Terrorists inherently understand this which is why you no longer see any sort of connection between terrorist acts and anything resembling a goal or objective. We are told, or its implied that we already  ‘know’ what they want and we’re left to draw our own conclusions. It could be the Jews, or American foreign policy, or capitalism or pollution or some real or perceived snub to Islam. The point is, there is no ‘is’. There are no longer any objectives.  There are comparatively few terrorist acts now. And the few that pop up here and there while shocking don’t drive any results or effects past the immediate terrorist act. Israelis didn’t stop riding the bus, Americans didn’t abandon air travel, Spaniards still ride the train, children still go to school in Sderot. 

And that why this is a terrible thing. Terrorism has degenerated into Horror, or Horror-ism, or slasher porn. It has simply become savage atrocities for nothing. It has become its own nihilistic fury.  And in doing so it has become acceptable.  When atrocities become acceptable then anything goes. There are no more rules in the world. Chopping off someone’s head on YouTube is interchangeable with screaming something in the UN. A pogrom, a genocide, a UN resolution, a blog posting it’s all the same thing.

With ever diminishing returns terrorist have gone insane. In the past few weeks we’ve been treated to decapitations in the street, stabbings at the Eiffel Tower, bombings at sporting events followed by shootouts and people running each other down in the street.  We’ve seen whole families in Gaza butchered in honor killings, and Baghdad brothels shot up killing a dozen because ‘prostitution is haram’ (child rape and mass murder and slavery apparently there was no law against that…).  Hundreds of people have been blown up across the region in the last 10 days and it’s called ‘instability’. A so called red line about chemical weapons is obviously meaningless. We see people killing and EATING each other on video. Terrorists have to push harder to shock and ‘terrorize’ us.

It’s the crispy edge of sanity, no?

In an odd way this is a trap that all the anti Americans, anti-Semites, pro terrorist cheerleaders like Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky fall into. They defend mass murder on the basis of “You do it too, why isn’t that terrorism too?” And of course one could argue the point but the trap they fall into is, even if it is, YOU’VE just made a wonderful case for obscene brutality. The response to war crimes should not be pointing to other war crimes as an excuse.  

But there you have it. We have amused ourselves to death and excused and explained the worst excesses of the Dark Ages. We are defending cannibalism. So when the missiles come flying into Israel with sarin or tularemia or botulism or VX in them we’ve ALREADY accepted it. And part and parcel with accepting it is condemning anyone who fights back. Just part of the scenery you know. You Israelis, you Jews, you just have to get used to dirty bombs and eating human lungs, nerve gas and napalm. We are poised on the border of a new conflict which isn’t like many other we’ve ever seen in the modern age. It isn’t a modern conflict at all. It’s tribal. Tribal battles are based on a few basic principles  - 

1. Defense is pointless, just storm over the hill and kill everyone you see after they attack you.
2. Perpetrate atrocities because it binds the tribe together
3. Perpetrate atrocities because someone has or will do it to you
4. Fight to the death
5. Killing them all isn’t enough, obliterating them from history is required
6. No negotiation ever, about anything
7. Mass suicide is acceptable if it kills everyone else
8. Enemies are eternal

This I’m afraid is close to where we are.  The Arab Spring was never going to grow anything other than jungle vines, poison mushrooms and carnivorous plants. It gave license to barbarism while ‘tolerance’ ran cover for it. The west looked on at these humanitarian wars of peace and, I don’t know, hoped they’d stop on their own? How many wars just stop like that? Any? What happens when the Arab Spring finally comes to Paris and they burn down the Louvre? What happens if after a generation of legitimizing terrorism it mutates into horror porn and descends on the very people who ran cover for it? When will someone get hacked to death with cleavers in the House of Commons? Oh, it’s coming, you know it is. What happens when we finally realize that the self haters aren't ideological morons, they're just cowards who won’t fight back, ever? What do you think happens when people go to jail for smoking cigarettes but are given interviews on CNN when they slaughter children?

If Assad falls then Syria disintegrates into tribal demi states each with weapons each bent on killing everyone, including Israel. If Hezbollah implodes and drags Lebanon into Syria’s tribal war then southern Lebanon becomes a Mad Max wasteland. A nuclear Iran WILL use it on someone. It’s not clear that the Jews are always number one on the list but Israel is always near the top. Maybe it’s Riyadh or Bucharest or Damascus or Cairo or Athens or Ankara or Zagreb or Rome too. It might not matter to Iran. And importantly it does not appear to matter to us or anyone else either. Meh – a nuclear strike on someone – we saw that movie I think Morgan Freeman was President.

We like to comfort ourselves by chanting “Never Again” as if keeping the boogey man at bay will save us. Never mind that since then millions of people have perished in what can only be described as industrial scale genocides that vary from the Holocaust only in fairly minor ways – perhaps the length of time they took or what weapons they used or whether they destroyed ethnicities or people who could read. What they all share is that someone got away with it. It became acceptable.  We’re at the point where terrorism and genocide, cannibalism, war crimes, apocalyptic horsemen all, are something less to do about something and more something to debate on the op-ed pages.

We are turning a corner, a corner after terrorism. Because terrorism flourishes where at least someone is still civilized and fearful of losing what they’ve built.  We’re close to running past that now where everyone believes they have nothing to lose, little to gain and there no rules except “exterminate them all”.

John Kerry Hallucinating at the Dead Sea

Mike L.

{Cross-posted at the Times of Israel.}

In his recent speech at the "World Economic Forum" held in Jordan, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, referred to the so-called "Arab Spring" as the "Arab Awakening" no less than seven times.  I presume that Kerry is aware of the fact that in the field of twentieth-century Arab history the term "Arab Awakening" refers to the rise of Arab nationalism as an alleged response to European colonialism and imperialism.  It was the "Arab Awakening" that gave us figures like Gamal Abdel Nasser and Hosni Mubarak.  It was the "Arab Awakening" that would eventually usher people like Saddam Hussein and Yassir Arafat onto the world stage.

Thus it is rather unusual that Kerry would use that term to describe the hysterical series of murders and riots and rapes that characterized the rise of political Islam during the recent "Arab Spring."  Kerry, much like his boss, Barack Obama, seems entirely immune to history.  When the "Arab Spring" first arose I was willing to wait and watch even as others, including the president of the United States, hailed the development as the great upwelling of Arab democracy.  People like Kerry and Obama interpreted the brutal chaos and blood that we saw in Tunisia and Libya and Egypt as a positive thing.  They saw it, initially, as a youth movement hell-bent on freedom and autonomy for the Arab peoples living under the yoke of dictatorship.

In this way they projected their own ideological pasts onto the Arab present.  For Kerry this is palpable given that his ideological moment in the sun came as a significant progressive-left political leader among disaffected American soldiers and American youth during the Vietnam War.

Kerry said this:

As we all remember, it was the lack of that kind of basic respect that ignited the Arab Awakening. It started with a single protest – a street vendor who deserved the right to be able to sell his goods without police interruption and corruption. And then it spread to Cairo, where young Egyptians used their cell phones and tweeted and texted and Googled and called and summoned people to the cause.

As Arabs were killing one another in the streets throughout the Muslim Middle East over the rise of political Islam, ideological western baby boomers, like Kerry, interpreted what they were seeing through the lens of 1960s America.  They projected their own failed hopes and dreams onto another people going through upheaval in a different time and place.  The truth, of course, is that the youthful idealism of Kerry's glory years have nothing whatsoever to do with the rise of political Islam, which is essentially a fascist movement.

That's the deep irony.

What's most disturbing, however (at least to me) is the absolute failure to learn from the past.

Kerry said this:

And what is fundamentally driving the demand for change in this region is, in fact, generational. It’s about whether the massive populations of young people, still growing, has hope that there is something better on the horizon. It’s about opportunity and it’s about respect and it’s about dignity.

This is, of course, absolute nonsense and I am amused that after all this time the Obama administration is still interpreting the "Arab Spring" as a positive development.  Obama even stood before the United Nations and bragged about assisting it.  This is no longer a case of wishful thinking, but of full-on denial.  They still honestly interpret the rise of political Islam (or "radical Islam" or "Islamism") in a way that evokes the western youth movement of the 1960s.  They still see it as the herald of a glorious new day in which the masses will arise and throw off the hard and crusty and violently corrupt leadership characteristic of the Arab world.

John Kerry stood at the Dead Sea and hallucinated his brains out.  And if that was not sad enough, he articulated this hallucination, as the American Secretary of State, before dignitaries from around the world.

It should be obvious that during a time of exceeding chaos and turmoil throughout the Middle East that the last thing that anyone can afford is a western political leadership that refuses to learn from the past or to even see what is before their very eyes.  The rise of political Islam under the misnomer "Arab Spring" is not about economics and it is not about well-meaning radical youth deposing dictatorships.

It is about the replacement of one kind of dictatorship with another kind of dictatorship.

From an historical perspective what Kerry dubbed the "Arab Awakening" (which I suppose we could call Arab Awakening Mark II) is about the transition from the original Arab Awakening of secular nationalism to the current Arab Awakening of political Islam.  What we are seeing in the Middle East is a sea change.  It is a transitional moment, but the transition is nothing like what Barack Obama and John Kerry tell us it is.  It is not a transition from dictatorship to freedom, but a transition from secular dictatorship to Islamic theocratic dictatorship.

How it is possible that Barack Obama and John Kerry are unaware of this seems unfathomable.  I suppose it is possible that they are fully aware of it, but are simply lying through their teeth.  In either case, the refusal to publicly recognize and oppose the rise of political Islam is the foremost failure of Obama administration foreign policy.  It was, in fact, this failure of recognition that eventually lead to the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his staff on September 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya.  If the Obama administration had even the slightest clue about the nature of political Islam they never could have left the security of their diplomatic team in Benghazi to local militias, which is precisely what they did do.

Sadly, however, John Kerry's hallucinatory ramblings at the Dead Sea did not stop at the macro-level of misinterpreting the Arab Spring but continued on to the micro-level of the Arab residents of Israel.  Kerry is suggesting that the west should fork over four billion dollars to the Palestinian Authority in order to wean them off charity as the basis of their economy.

Kerry said this:

Ultimately, as the investment climate in the West Bank and Gaza improves, so will the potential for a financial self-sufficient Palestinian Authority that will not have to rely as much on foreign aid. So just think, my friends – we are talking about a place with just over 4 million people in a small geographic area. When you’re talking about $4 billion or more and this kind of economic effort, you are talking about something that is absolutely achievable.

Let me ask you if this makes a wit of sense.

John Kerry is proposing that in order to make the Arab residents of Israel "self-sufficient" they need to be given 4 billion dollars?  In other words, Kerry is suggesting that in order to wean the Arab residents of Israel off the economy of charity we should give them four billion dollars.

Yes, that makes a great deal of sense.

Our Dignity Matters

Ziontruth

“Israel has lost some of its support in Britain and in other European countries over time … because of settlement activity, which we condemn.” So said British Foreign Secretary William Hague, with the assumption taken for granted that the Jewish nation-state is so much in need of British and European support that such a statement would be enough to sway policymaking in Israel. While many of the comments below the article endeavored to disabuse him of that notion, common-sense reactions as displayed by Israeli Jewish hoi polloi have yet to trickle up to Israel’s all-knowing media and fearless leadership. (Yes, you got that right: Sarcasm.)

Israel’s leaders are pragmatic to a fault. So steeped are they in the philosophy of “Better be smart than right” that they fail to see how over-pragmatism amounts to the least smart and pragmatic course of action. Israel’s constant apologies to aggressors and half-hearted actions where said aggressors are still supplied with “humanitarian” food, water and electricity are like a neon light that attracts attention all around, bringing to relief the ability to prey on the Jewish state’s chief weakness, that desire to be loved at all costs. What may have begun as a reaction to centuries of Jewish existence hated by the surrounding non-Jews (Christians and Muslims alike) has grown into a hypercorrective madness, an attitude of abject kneeling that no other nation would lower itself to.

Sentimental though the concept of dignity might seem, it is in a nation-state’s highest pragmatic interests to preserve it, even at the cost of outward shows. We can learn this from one leader before whom ours have recently prostrated, Turkey’s Islamic dictator Erdoğan. After the Terrorism Flotilla incident of 2010, he insolently addressed Israel on the scenario of losing Israeli tourism to Turkey, saying Turkey had no need for all the tourists from Israel, being quite capable of filling the void with tourists from Muslim countries.

Unless Erdoğan could somehow bring an air-convoy of Muslim tourists from the rest of the world, it is obvious that his was an empty boast. The number of Muslim tourists already visiting Turkey could not magically rise, while the absence of the Israeli Jewish tourists would surely be felt—all the more so as Israeli tourism in Turkey was such a booming business prior to the Terrorism Flotilla incident. Erdoğan probably knew it when made that statement; if not, then his underlings in charge of Turkey’s tourism and finances did, whether or not they had the courage to tell their dictatorial boss so. But Erdoğan had the dignity of Turkey in mind, and he was not going to sacrifice it for Israeli tourism, no matter how much money was to be had that way. Three years later his decision paid off, in receiving an apology from the leader of the country he attacked, a leader who thinks national dignity is a small short-term price to pay, long-term consequences be damned.

Likewise, the Turkish press dutifully takes care not to call members of the Kurdish nation by name. “Mountain Turks,” that is the name assigned to those non-Turkish, non-Arab speakers of a language related to, yet distinct from, Persian on the southeastern regions of Turkey. Unlike the Arab settler-colonists in Palestine, the Kurds are a real nation (they have a distinct language and culture), not a contrived anti-nation propaganda device. What a contrast, then, we have between Turkey’s insistence on her stance up to the point of denialism and Israel’s bone-headed refusal to uphold her dignity by adhering to the truth, to an anti-denialist stance (for the fictitious non-Jewish faux-Palestinian nation narrative has but one purpose, the denial of the truth that the Jews are the one and only Palestinian nation).

I know what many people will say at this point: “We can’t lie to ourselves; the reality is that we do need things from other nations.” But that was not my argument. Every nation needs things from other nations in our day and age; the issue is what lengths a nation would go to attain those needs. My argument is that the prices Israel is willing to pay go far beyond sanity, beyond what any normal nation would pay. And by “pay” I’m not talking about money but the far greater price of national dignity, a price that is later realized in Jewish blood as the loss of dignity invites all manner of attackers, knowing that they would later be apologized to and compensated by those they had attacked.

In many classical Jew-hating websites (those that do not bother to hide their Jew-hatred under the mantle of anti-Zionism; the Far Right cesspools, for example), it is customary to refer to the U.S.A., and often the entire non-Jewish world, as the shabbos goy of the state of Israel, recruited to do the Jews’ dirty work for free. In the world of Jewish Law, the shabbos goy is a non-Jew who does some work that is forbidden for Jews on Shabbat where it is essential, such as flipping the circuit breaker to restore the light to a synagogue. Crucially, however, Jewish Law says the shabbos goy is not to do the job for free—he or she must be paid. This is so that the job would not be a favor they do the Jews, and therefore the Jews would not be indebted. A shabbos goy is employed as a matter of plain dealing.

Whether Israel can do this thing or the other by itself or needs help from outside, it is clear that the help from outside has not been on the lines of the shabbos goy, contrary to the assertions of the aforementioned Jew-hating scum. Instead of plain dealing, Israel has far too much courted the favors of non-Jewish states. America’s foreign aid that has become a tool of extortion to make Israel give up its own lands needs no elaboration upon. Submarines have been ordered at a cut price from Germany in the thought that the “special post-Holocaust relationship” would make such a deal safe, only to have one of the recent orders threatened by the German government on account of Israel’s “West Bank settlement” activity. Had the orders been a matter of pure plain dealing, any such threat could be responded to by a counter-threat that our money would be spent elsewhere.

We need certain things from the non-Jewish states, such as weapons, but why do they have to be obtained through favors? Why not just buy and close the deal, with no fanfare and no strings attached? Israel’s pragmatic needs can be answered without compromising her dignity, simply by employing the same common-sense methods that any normal nation-state does. We Jews can inhabit our country without limit (that means the post-1967 territories as well), tell the world our enemies are just a part of the Arab nation, drive out a flotilla of terrorists and terrorism supporters without any apology later and keep our dignity, our pride before the other nations, at the same time. How is it done? Simply by sticking to plain dealing—by not giving other nations any opening to manipulate us through the attaching strings of favors done.

One of the earliest works urging the revival of Jewish nationalism (a.k.a. Zionism) was the book Auto-Emancipation by Leon Pinsker. In it, he called for the Jews to return to being masters of their own fates—masters in the sense that any other, normal, nation is a master of its fate. This vision has gotten derailed in recent times, yet it is not too late to return to it.

The Truth Isn't Always Politically Correct

Mike L. 

Yet it remains the truth. While Europe remains fixated on counting Jewish houses in Judea and Samaria, their own houses burn to the ground.

Yishai Kohen, YeShA, Israel (05.28.13)

If you follow the link above you will see that this is a remark in a Y-Net article.

It couldn't be more concise or more accurate.

For so many years, now, we've been reading about how Europe is losing its culture and how Muslim immigrants from North Africa or Pakistan are creating unassimilated enclaves of no-go zones within European cities.

When I first started hearing these complaints during the Bush II years I assumed that this was just the squawking of privileged white racists.

Now I know different.

Answers Number Four and Five to the Namavaran Network Corporation

Mike L.

For those of you who may not know, I have been tapped by an Iranian media outlet to answer a series of questions around the Arab-Israel conflict and have agreed to do so.

4- Who are the main leaders of Zionism?  

5- Are they really the main determiner of US policies or not?

I take question number four as a little odd because the fact of the matter is that the movement for Jewish nationalism, also known as "Zionism," fulfilled its mission in May of 1948 with the reestablishment of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people.

In truth, if "Zionism" has leaders these leaders seem to have virtually no followers.  I know of no single Jewish supporter of the State of Israel that follows any "Zionist" leader.  There are a number of pro-Israel organizations that have the name "Zionist" in their organizations' titles, such as the Zionist Organization of America, but such usage is a throwback to an earlier era when Jews were still endeavoring to establish Israel as the Jewish State.  Now that Israel has been established as a Jewish State, Zionism is basically over with.

There are some people who continue to use the word "Zionism" to indicate support for Israel, however, and there are many people who use it as an epithet and as a negative code word for Jews, in general.

As for whether or not these non-leaders are the main determiners of US policies, the answer is absolutely not, as I indicated in a previous answer to a previous question.  If AIPAC, for example, really had much influence over the United States government then the US would have recognized Jerusalem as the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish State of Israel long ago, but they have refused to do so.

And, again, this notion that Jews (or "Zionists") are behind the scenes, pulling the strings, is a very old and paranoid anti-Semitic trope that people should be exceedingly leery of promoting lest they intend to promote hatred and violence toward the tiny Jewish minority.  It is, needless to say, a staple of the anti-Jewish rhetoric that comes out of the small and largely irrelevant hard-right racist groups that we have in the United States, such as Neo-Nazis or "Skin heads."  It is also a prominent trope embedded in the much, much larger movement for political Islam that is rising throughout the Muslim Middle East.

This obsessive hatred for Jews, and this toxic anti-Zionism that we find among many Muslim leaders throughout the world, is little more than a means by which to deflect the failings of their own societies onto a Jewish scapegoat.

The Root of the Benghazi Scandal

Mike L.

{Cross-posted at Geoffff's Joint.}

As of this moment the Benghazi scandal centers around four ugly facts.

1) The Obama administration refused to bolster security at the Benghazi facility despite requests to do so by Ambassador Stevens who was subsequently murdered by Jihadis.

2) The Obama administration failed to come to the aid of Ambassador Stevens and his staff despite the fact that they had all night to do so.  This was not an attack that took half an hour or one hour or three.  It went on throughout the night and yet the US military was told (by someone) to stand down.

3) The Obama administration then lied to the American people about the source of the attack, claiming that it was due to some internet video concerning the life of Muhammed, and did so for political and electoral reasons.  Obama had told Americans that Qaeda was, if not defeated, on the run, and he knew that if the administration admitted that this was a terrorist attack by a Qaeda affiliate, the lie would have been exposed and that would have harmed his bid for reelection.

4)  The Obama administration then lied about lying through White House spokesmen, Jay Carney, who insisted that the White House did not force any substantive changes to the CIA talking points which originally sourced the attack to Islamists.

There is a lot to answer for here and what we clearly need is a fair and independent investigation into the matter so that the truth can be more closely apprehended.

It needs to be understood, however, that the root of the scandal is Obama's foreign policy ideology.  That's the key. The Obama administration has a policy of bolstering political Islam and partnering with Islamists throughout much of the Middle East, particularly in Egypt.  According to Professor Barry Rubin, the reason that the Obama administration bolsters political Islam and partners with Islamists is out of a delusional and ahistorical belief that there are "moderate" Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and "extremist" Islamists, like Qaeda.  The "moderate" Islamists tend not to use violence to bring about the Jihad against Israel and the west, although they tend to support the "extremist" Islamists who are now going so far as to cut the hearts from their victims and eat those hearts before the cameras... as utterly revolting as that might be.

Political Islam (or "radical Islam" or "Islamism") is a rising political movement throughout the Muslim Middle East that is characterized by hatred and a form of theological fascism as defined by Sharia law.  As a movement it oppresses women, going so far as to stone them to death for the "crime" of marital infedility.   Adherents murder Gay people outright, sometimes hanging them from cranes as we have seen in Iran.  Their hatred for Jews - those infamous "children of apes and pigs" - is absolutely legendary bordering on genocidal.  And, needless to say, they absolutely loathe the decadent west, particularly that Great Satan, the United States.

Obama's stance toward political Islam, and thus toward Israel, is grounded in a number of fundamental misunderstandings.  The first misunderstanding is in the nature of political Islam, itself.  Political Islam as we know it today derives from the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood going back to the late 1920s in Cairo.  The movement was always fascistic, is still fascistic, and, in fact, sided with the Nazis during World War II.  Either Barack Obama knew this or he did not know this.  If he did not know this then the man is not competent to make decisions regarding American foreign policy.  If he did know this then his behavior borders on treasonous.

Barack Obama thought that he could partner with the Islamists and help moderate them.  This is false.  There is no way that any American administration can moderate a theological and revolutionary fascist movement under the umbrella of Islam because the movement, itself, opposes the west.  They may for practical reasons cooperate with the west and hold elections, but their primary ideology is that of the Caliphate.  They will never stand with the west because their entire reason to be is in opposition to western interests.  Nonetheless, Barack Obama sought to court political Islam and thereby helped usher the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Egypt, scrubbed any reference to Islam from the internal administration conversation around terrorism, and hoped to show good faith to the new Libyan government by allowing Jihadis to provide security to the American diplomatic team in Benghazi.

And this is why Ambassador Stevens and his people are now dead.

There are those on the hard right of the American political scene who think that Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim and that this explains his eggregious behavior.  There are those on the hard right who think that Barack Obama is a crypto-Islamist and that he actually favors the rise of political Islam as a good in itself.  I disagree.  What's clear is that Barack Obama is not nearly so intelligent as they kept telling us that he is.  Obama seems to have thought that he could somehow work with and moderate the movement.  He thought that supporting radical Islam in the Middle East, or the Brotherhood in Egypt, would promote American interests if he could get them to moderate their positions.

I have to say, though, that it takes a special type of stupidity to think that helping your enemies, while subverting your friends, can possibly be in the interests of the American people or our allies; a little fact that Barack Obama unwittingly taught Ambassador Stevens the hard way.

My suspicion is that Obama and his people are beginning to awaken to this reality, but it is far, far too late and there is little that they can do at this point to change course, anyway.  Barack Obama made a crucial and fundamental miscalculation at the beginning of his tenure and he will never admit what a profound mistake it was to support political Islam in that part of the world.  He cannot admit it because it would be tantamount to acknowledging responsibility for failure, which he will never do.  He won't do it and his supporters won't do it, even if they recognize it, which itself is rather doubtful.

PM: Sanctions haven't stopped Iran’s nuclear quest

Mike L.

This was written by Tovah Lazaroff and Greer Fay Cashman and published in the Jerusalem Post.

Economic and diplomatic pressure has failed to stop Iran’s nuclear program, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told British Foreign Minister William Hague before meeting with him in Jerusalem on Thursday.

“The just released report of the International Atomic Energy Agency shows clearly that Iran is continuing to expand its nuclear enrichment program,” Netanyahu said.

“In parallel, it’s [Iran] working on a heavy-water reactor to build a plutonium-based bomb,” he said.

“This is the biggest challenge facing us. I think it’s the biggest challenge of our time,” Netanyahu said.

There is very little to suggest that Barack Obama was serious when he claimed to "have Israel's back" or when he claimed that he would deter Iran from the attainment of nuclear weaponry.  I have been deeply suspicious of Obama administration claims to the contrary mainly because it seems entirely out of keeping with Obama's general policy of appeasement, if not friendliness, toward regimes associated with political Islam.

The Obama administration is a passive government on foreign policy, as former US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, could attest were he not dead precisely because of that passivity.

What this means, of course, is that Israel cannot count on the United States, under this president, to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weaponry despite its anti-Semitic genocidal screechings in the past.  If the Obama administration will not defend its own people, it certainly cannot be counted on to defend Israelis.  And what that means is that Israel will have to do the job, if it has the capabilities, and if it honestly intends to fulfill its mission of protecting the Jewish people from tyrants.

Two of the big questions that we need to ask ourselves, however, is just how China and Russia would respond to an Israeli attack on their ally's nuclear facilities?  Both China and Russia have significant interests in Iran and neither would take kindly to an Israeli attack.  On the other hand, both of those countries have significant interests in Israel, as well.

I do not know the answer to these questions, but they must be considered.

I do feel reasonably certain that Barack Obama does not have Israel's back, however.

I definitely wouldn't put any money down on that bet.

They're Rioting

Mike L.

Everywhere you look Arab youths are rioting. Whether in Sweden or England or Israel, they're rioting.

Arab Mob Pelts Firefighters With Rocks as They Put Out Blaze

An Israeli firefighter was injured in an Arab riot in Jerusalem Thursday morning, as he sought to put out a fire. The fire had broken next to the Arab village of Issawiya, which is within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem. A fire station is located close by, and a fire truck was dispatched to douse the blaze before it had a chance to spread too far.

The firefighters were greeted by a large mob of Arabs, who pelted them with stones and bricks. One firefighter was injured and was taken to Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital for treatment. Police were called in to clear the area and allow the firefighters to continue putting out the blaze.

Meanwhile back in Europe, we read:

Swedish Riots Spread

A nearly week-long spate of rioting spread outside Stockholm on Friday but authorities said police reinforcements sent to the Swedish capital had reduced the violence there, even though dozens of youths set cars and a recycling station ablaze.

The rioting - set off earlier this month by the police shooting of a 69-year-old man - continued for a sixth night in mainly poor immigrant areas in Stockholm.

In a country with a reputation for openness, tolerance and a model welfare state, the rioting has exposed a fault-line between a well-off majority and a minority - often young people with immigrant backgrounds - who are poorly educated, cannot find work and feel pushed to the edge of society.

And in London the newspapers are all over a story about a recent Jihadi attack.

Family of slain soldier Lee Rigby: we thought he was safe in Britain

Political Islamic Violence in London

Mike L.

VIDEO – The murder of a British soldier by Islamic extremists in southeast London this week continues to generate shocking footage: The Daily Mirror website on Friday posted a video showing how police gained control of the two suspects, minutes after they beheaded Drummer Lee Rigby.

According to the Daily Mirror, the two lured police to the scene by dragging the body of the murdered fusilier into the middle of the road. When they saw the first police car arrive, the pair split up. One of them, seen in a different video wielding a bloodstained blade, run at officers head-on while his accomplice advanced alongside, aiming his gun at them.

There may come a time when the western governments decide to oppose the radical Jihad.

At some point they may come to that conclusion.

In the mean time, the citizenry of Britain and France and Germany and Israel and the United States and Australia and the rest of the western countries will continue to accept religious violence against their own people because they are weak and they are stupid.

If these countries refuse to defend themselves then they refuse to defense themselves.

And whose fault is that?

Answer Number Three to the Namavaran Network Corporation

Mike L.

For those of you who may not know, I have been tapped by an Iranian media outlet to answer a series of questions around the Arab-Israel conflict and have agreed to do so.

Was it wise of me to do so?

I have no idea, but this is Mr. Soleimani's third question:

3- Is it true that on the issue of Palestine, America obeys Israel? Or vice versa? What about Iran?

This is absolutely a terrific question.

Does Israel control the United States or does the United States control Israel?

This question is directly at the heart of how so many people - Muslim, Christian, and otherwise - view the Jewish State of Israel.  According to the hate-filled and racist Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as Mearsheimer and Walt's book, the Jews represent a malevolent force that stands behind the scenes manipulating foreign governments and foreign media to the detriment of the innocent citizens and residents of those lands.  According to this fantasy, America obeys Israel.

This is what the Nazis thought, by the way.

They thought that Jews controlled Germany.

Hitler imagined that the German defeat in World War I was the fault of the tiny Jewish minority in Germany at that time.  You may not be aware, but Jewish-Germans represented a grand total of about 1 percent of the entire population of the country, which is why they were so easily swept up.  We simply did not have the numbers to defend ourselves either physically or rhetorically via the media.  The hatred against us came about so quickly, or so it seemed, and did so in such an overwhelming fashion that we stood no chance to even begin to stand up for ourselves.

The German people honestly believed that the Jews were guilty for their economic and military losses after World War I, which is why they voted for Hitler to begin with.  We were scapegoated then, just as we are being scapegoated now, by the vast Arab-Muslim majority in the Middle East.

The truth, of course, is that the United States does not obey Israel.  I just wish that the United States would take Israeli advice now and again.  You may not be aware of this but my friend Arik Sharon recommended to George W. Bush against attacking Iraq, because he considered Iran, your country, to be the real threat.  George W. Bush disagreed and went about conducting a little military operation known as Shock and Awe that took Saddam Hussein out of power.

I marched against that war, you should know.

In any case, Israel does not control the United States, nor does the United States control Israel.

The US and Israel are allies because - as we so often say - we share the same values.  In today's world what that means is supporting secular democracy as opposed to al-Sharia.  Iran, whatever its virtues, is an Islamic theocratic state.  The Jews in Iran are a terrified and subdued minority and Gay people, which according to outgoing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, don't even exist in your country, are sometimes hung from cranes.

Women are occasionally stoned to death for the crime of infidelity... or, perhaps, the crime of getting raped... not that western feminists care.

So, what about Iran?

You know what might be helpful?  If Iranian leadership were to say to the rest of the world that what they want is to open up trade relations with Israel.  That would be terrific and there's no reason - aside from the prevailing bigotry against Jews in so much of the Muslim world - that it could not happen.

Until that does happen, however, Israel cannot allow your country to gain nuclear weaponry because you have threatened to wipe us off of the map.

Why would you think that Jewish people would ever allow any such thing?

We won't.

Respecting Our Enemies

Ziontruth

One of the greatest problems in the Jewish–Arab Conflict—and beyond, as the reactions to the terrorist attacks in Boston and Woolwich show—is the lack of respect accorded to our enemies.

That’s right, that wasn’t a mistake in thinking or typing: Our enemies. It has become politically correct not to respect them for what they are.

Our enemies are human beings. They should be respected as human beings, adult human beings with fully mature mental and emotional capacities. They are not children, much less animals acting on nothing more than instinct or micro-organisms reacting to external chemical stimuli.

Human beings have their good and evil sides. They have their desires sublime and base; they have their greed, together with the moral justification to soothe the pangs of conscience resulting from that greed.

We have read about the colonial exploits of the West. In fact, we can’t stop hearing about them, even though the West decolonized its possessions, not to mention abolished slavery, sometimes at a huge cost as in 19th-century America. Slavery was ended, and decolonization was all but completed about thirty years ago.

Yet there are many people who would have us believe that Western colonialism is ongoing—with Zionism, Jewish nationalism, depicted as being an integral part of it, in a monstrous feat of denialism—and that colonialist greed and imperialist expansionism is a Western-only thing. That all the terrorism since 1979 or so can be explained only as a reaction to it.

The most politically incorrect idea one could suggest today is that the terrorist attacks committed by Islamic jihadists stem from their own free, imperialistic will, having nothing to do with the West’s colonial past or Israel’s Big-O Occupation or anything like that.

It’s politically incorrect, but it respects our enemies as human beings. It respects them as free agents with their own consciousness and—gasp—responsibility for their actions.

The British had imperial dreams in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Germans had imperial dreams in the 20th century. For over thirteen centuries, imperial dreams—the imperialist vision of a world under the rule of Islamic law, shariah—have animated the Muslim world. It is to be acknowledge and understood; they are only human.

Yes, most of them want to live happily and in plenty with their families. But why commit a bifurcation fallacy? When the Great Depression dragged on in the 1930s, the German man in the street wanted out of that catastrophe, and also thought that the plans of a certain Austrian painter would achieve exactly that. Today, with Egypt for example in economic ruin, what better way for the man in the Cairo street to enjoy a life of material abundance than steal the riches of the successful neighboring Jewish state, and also please Allah in the process?

Our enemies are not reacting to anything Israel has done, although they trumpet it as an excuse. The Land of Israel a.k.a. Palestine is coveted by them simply because there are riches to be looted and a perceived humiliation of the Arab nation or Islamic ummah to be remedied—the humiliation of having a hole in the territorial entitlement of the Master Religion. Theirs is the aggression—of their initiative, of their accord, of their authorship. Imperial dreams is what they have, just as Alexander of Macedon had them. It is only human.

And there is a flip side to all of this.

We can be victims of imperialist designs. We can have our lands colonized. And some (many?) of us, when that happens, can react to such threats.

Israeli Jews of the 1970s onward have been raised on the idea that land-for-peace deals are possible and viable. The deal with Egypt was especially encouraging. The Oslo Accords of 1993 had their vocal detractors but a majority of supporters, a majority that held out through the 1990s.

But when Arabs of both pre- and post-1967 Israel launch an Intifada in October 2000 just after Ehud Barak’s unprecedented offer, and Kassam rockets keep raining on Sderot after the evacuation of all Jewish population centers in the Gaza region in August 2005, and Israel’s north gets missiles from a totally Israeli troops-free Lebanon in July 2006, and Turkey stabs us in the back with a flotilla of terrorists, and in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood (whose Palestine chapter is Hamas) rises to power—

When all that happens, in plain sight of everybody in Israel, what’s an Israeli Jew with a functioning brain to think? The anti-Zionists justify an Arab colonist’s support for suicide-murder for much less (“The occupation radicalized him”), but when an Israeli Jew dares to begin suggesting our enemies may have imperialist designs on us, that can be nothing but Big-R Racism. An Israeli Jew who has lost his relatives in a terrorist attack is still “racist” for expressing doubts about the viability of a peace process as conventionally conceived.

Call us racists if you will, anti-Zionists. One thing you should know, however, is that it goes back to poke you in the eye. You’re the racists here, the bigots who look at a group of people with absolute contempt for their humanity, and I’m not talking about the Israeli Jews, I’m talking about Israel’s enemies (and indeed jihadists worldwide like the Tsarnaevs and the Woolwich murderer). You don’t think of them as human beings at all. According to you, they’re nothing but dumb oxen who have no choice but to gore others when provoked.

I don’t buy that anymore. A lot of my fellow countrymen don’t, either. We respect our enemies as human beings, with all that that classification entails, including the susceptibility to imperial dreams. Zionism is based on the rightness and justice of the Jews having a state on their one and only piece of land in the world, and the Arab/Muslim anti-Zionism that we have had to contend with for about 120 years is the result of imperialist greed, of the willful and very human coveting of our one and only sheep and vineyard by those who already have an abundance of sheep and vineyards to themselves.

Our enemies deserve to be respected for what they are; our survival demands that we accord them such respect.

Rock Attacks Up Threefold, Firebombs Fourfold

Mike L.

This piece was written by Gil Ronen of Arutz Sheva:

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee's Subcommittee on Judea and Samaria was told Wednesday that Arab rock attacks on Jews were 2.5 times more frequent in 2012 than in 2011, and that the numbers for 2013 are 3.5 times larger than those of 2011.

The average number of rock attacks per month in Judea and Samaria is currently 54, the military said.

Firebomb attacks againstg civilians were up more than fourfold. In 2011, 17 firebombs were thrown at civilians. In 2012, the number was up to 74, and the frequency continues to rise in 2013.

Terrorist acts against the Jewish communities were up to 58 in 2012 from 19 in 2011 -- a threefold rise.

What really slays me is that if I say, "Oh, look, Arabs are pelting Jews with stones" this makes me a racist within the progressive-left, including among many progressive-left Jews.

Y'know, there could be peace in the Middle East between Arabs and Muslims and Jews.

Do you know what it will take?  It will take western progressives actually standing with the Jewish people.  If we did not constantly fund and justify Arab-Muslim aggression toward the Jewish people in the Middle East - which is something, by the way, that conservatives do not want to do - then their hostility would decline.  It would have to decline because it simply would not receive the international support that it now enjoys.

The west funds Hamas and it funds the PLO and Fatah and it constantly tells the world that the Arab residents of Israel are the victims of some terrible Jewish aggression.

It's a lie.  It's the Big Lie and yet they keep it going.

The west has got to stop encouraging Arabs to kill Jews.  And, make no mistake, that is precisely what they do every time they spread these lies about Israel as an "apartheid" state that should be boycotted, divested from, and sanctioned.  It's practically a Get Out of Jail Free card for the purpose of harassing and harming the indigenous Jewish population in the Middle East.

And what really kills is that they do it in the name of "social justice" and "universal human rights."

This is not merely ironic.  It is deeply ironic in a manner that is entirely toxic and entirely unjust.

The western left, as a political movement, has thrown its purpose straight into the garbage because it no longer stands for universal human rights, if it ever really did.  It doesn't stand for the well-being of women in the Middle East, who are treated like chattel.  It doesn't stand for the well-being of Gay people in the Middle East, who are often murdered outright.  And it certainly doesn't stand for the well-being of Jewish people, who are a tiny minority subject to the never-ending hatred of the much, much larger Arab-Muslim majority in that part of the world.

Please let me know when these Arab kids stop throwing rocks at us and please let me know when western progressives stop encouraging them to do so.

That will be a banner day and I will raise a toast to the wisdom of the western left on that day.

So far, however, I do not see it happening.

Answer Number Two to the Namavaran Network Corporation

Mike L.

Mr. Soleimani asks this:

2- In your opinion, is there any distinctions between Israel and Zionism?

That's a rather odd question.  Certainly there is a difference between Israel and Zionism.  Israel is a country.  Zionism is the political movement by which the country came into being.  I suppose one could interpret the question as asking whether or not Israel can, or should, exist as a non-Zionist state, i.e., as a state that does not represent the national homeland of the Jewish people.

If that is close to what you are actually asking then the answer is "no."  For the last four thousand years, or thereabouts, the Jews of the Middle East have lived on that tiny sliver of land as their home.  For thirteen of the last fourteen centuries they did so within the system of oppression, under Sharia, known as dhimmitude.  But, as I am exceedingly happy to report, the day of the dhimmi is done.  The Jews were second and third class citizens under the boot of Islamic imperialism from the seventh century, when Muhammed's armies conquered Judea and Samaria, until the fall of the Ottoman empire.  Although dhimmitude varied in its cruelty from time to time and place to place it was never better than African-Americans had it under the system of Jim Crow in the United States.  

Arab youths have always had a fondness for trying to injure or murder Jews by pelting them with stones.  The difference is that under the system of dhimmitude we had to take our beating and like it.  

Now we do not.  

The Jewish minority of the Middle East, due to the violent racism toward them by the overwhelming Arab-Muslim majority, have finally, after so many centuries, organized themselves in a manner as to protect themselves and their children.  Thus Israel is, and will remain, the nation-state of the Jewish people as a matter of self-defense.  If there was no long history of dhimmitude and brutality living under Sharia then there might not be any necessity for a Jewish state, but there is such a necessity.

Much of the world seems to think that it is the Jews who are the aggressors in the long Arab-Muslim war against us, but this is false.  Anyone who cares to take even a cursory glance at the history of the Jews in the Middle East knows that they were a persecuted minority for 13 centuries.

But, as I say, The Day of the Dhimmi is Done. 

We will go forward making computer bits and pieces and technological and medical doodads of all sorts, while sending Natalie Portmans out into the world, and the Arab-Muslim Middle East can continue to spread their hatred toward us, but so far - as a poker player - my money is on the Jews.

Answer Number One to the Namavaran Network Corporation

Mike L.

I agreed to do an e-mail interview with a Mr. Iman Soleimani of the Namavaran Network Corporation, which is an Iranian media outlet that is clearly hostile to the Jewish State of Israel.  He has eight questions that I will take one by one over the course of the next week, or so.  My expectation is that, much like this interview by Mr. Soleimani, it will be published verbatim.

Here is the first question:

1- Who are Zionist and what are the Zionist lobbies in US policy?

 A "Zionist" is anyone, from the latter part of the nineteenth century through the middle part of the twentieth century, who worked for the establishment of a Jewish state on historically Jewish land in what was a small slice of Ottoman territory before their defeat by the European powers during World War I.

I do not, actually, consider myself a Zionist at all given the fact that the movement fulfilled its purpose in 1948.  A better question, perhaps, is what do enemies of the Jewish people and the Jewish State mean when they use that word?  In the vocabulary of contemporary anti-Zionists the word "Zionist" means a racist, imperialistic, colonialist, apartheid-loving, Arab-hating, pro-Israel militarist.  This is what that word means to those with an irrational disdain for the Jewish people and for Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land.

The word "Zionist," within the anti-Zionist lexicon, has become a toxic epithet that is spit at Jewish people who care about the well-being of the tiny Jewish minority among the hostile Arab and Muslim majority in the Middle East.

As for "Zionist lobbies," they are weak.  The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the strongest among them, but AIPAC does little more than encourage comity between the government and people of Israel and the government and people of the United States.  If "Zionist lobbies" had any actual power over the US government then the United States would have recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel long ago.

This obsessive concern among racist anti-Zionists - both western and Islamic - concerning the "Zionist lobby" or the "Jewish lobby" or the "Israel lobby" is an anti-Semitic hangover from an earlier era that was given new life by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

What Mearsheimer and Walt (shamefully) did was resurrect the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a form that is user-friendly for the contemporary west.  In the early-middle of the twentieth century this defamation helped bring about the Holocaust in which one third of the entire Jewish population on the planet was slaughtered, including almost the entirety of my father's side of the family.

I have considerable faith that it will not have a similar effect in the twenty-first century and much of that faith is due to the fact of Israel, itself.  Unlike one hundred years ago, the Jewish people are now in a position to defend ourselves and defend ourselves we will.

The Indigenous Argument

Ziontruth

The argument for denying the Jewish nation their rights to political sovereignty on the Land of Israel a.k.a. Palestine is based today principally on the claim that there is an indigenous non-Jewish Palestinian nation whom the Jews have dispossessed, and one of the stronger (IMO) refutations of this is the counter-argument that there is today no nation indigenous to Palestine other than the Jewish nation. This clash of views may raise a cogent meta-question: Does the term “indigenous” have any objective meaning at all? Or, to put it another way, is there more to the clash than an ideological assault on Zionism and the Zionist response to it?

I contend that the term “indigenous” has significance beyond the subjective. That said, I will concede two points:

1. The term has a relative, not absolute, meaning; we can objectively point out that a certain nation is indigenous to a land, but we can only do so in a context. That by itself explains why lovers of exactitude are reluctant to embrace such a term.
2. There are many arguments for the rightness of Zionism; my choice of the indigenous argument over the others is indeed motivated by the prevalence of the “Zionists dispossessed the indigenous Palestinians” claim of the anti-Zionists.

The rest of the article will follow from these two points.

A Relatively Descriptive Term

Some may scoff at the term “indigenous people” on the grounds that it can mean anything one wants it to mean. While this is not so, it is easy to see how it is possible to reach such a conclusion: There is no absolute definition of the term as in more solid history, let alone the hard sciences, and the way the Progressive Left selectively applies the term “indigenous” also makes it seem arbitrary. I will deal with the significance of the second issue later; the first issue to be understood is that the term is meaningful but not absolute—it has a relative meaning.

Who, for example, are the indigenes of Britain? The answer depends on the context of the question. In the sense that the Celts had populated the island for thousands of years before the Germanic Anglo-Saxons invaded, conquered and pushed the Celts aside, the Celts are the indigenous British while the Germanic peoples are colonists. However, in the present-day context it is considered that the descendants of both the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons are indigenous British, while the modern colonists are the third-world immigrants of the last few decades. The Anglo-Saxons are colonists relative to the Celts, while the arrivals from the former overseas possessions of Britain are colonists relative to both Celts and Anglo-Saxons.

What about the American Indians? It is agreed that they are the indigenous peoples of America, despite the fact that it is well known today that they too are arrivals to America from the outside, although much further in the past than the Europeans in America, and by way of the Bering Straits rather than the Atlantic Ocean. The priority in time, as well as the fact of having a culture (or remains of it—more than you can say for the Arabs pretending to be “Palestinians”) that is tied to the land, are the reasons for calling the descendants of Siberians in America indigenous. Were America to be settled once again by a new nation from abroad, both American Indians and the descendants of European arrivals (and of African slaves) would be indigenous in relation to the new invaders.

We can see that the term “indigenous” is not devoid of meaning; but because of its relative sense, it is less precise than classifiers would like it to be. All attempts at defining “indigenous” in absolute terms have either been foiled by too many exceptions or have proven to be subjective, teaching us more about the user than the people referred to. One proposal to use the term “autochthonous,” meaning “sprung from the soil,” has been raised but solves nothing at all; it particularly fails on the common-sense ground that, well, human beings do not normally grow out of the soil (maybe into, but not out of). It is futile to square the circle; better accept that “indigenous” is a relative term and deal with it from that standpoint.

Bringing this relative term to the question of Palestine, we might now ask which nation passes. The Canaanites would be the indigenous Palestinians if they still meaningfully existed, but they have not survived culturally. Even if some of the speakers of Arabic in Palestine are genetically descended from the Canaanites, they are not meaningfully Canaanite because it is culture, not genetics, that makes a distinct nation. The oldest nation extant having a cultural connection to the land, a real, not imaginary one, is the Jewish nation. Runners-up would be the Samaritans, who are an ancient Palestinian nation too but later arrivals than the Jews. The Arabic-speakers are fully within the cultural and linguistic milieu of the Arab nation, in Palestine as in Iraq and Morocco; this makes them colonists in all lands outside the Arabian Peninsula, where they are the indigenes.

By now the readers may be frustrated by the depth of the terminological discussion and its application. They may well ask why this matter is so important that it needs to be delved into in such detail. The answer is that, for the Progressive Left, the term “indigenous” has a significance far beyond being a descriptive term.

A Morally Prescriptive Term

The Progressive Left does not freely allot the term “indigenous” to a nation, even when the case for it is overwhelming. The decision to call one nation indigenous and deny that status to another rests on political expedience, for the term “indigenous” in Progressive Leftist usage is quite apart from a description—it carries with it a moral dictum. To be accorded the status of “indigenous people” by the Progressive Left is to be handed a Moral Authority card, a certificate of Moral Absolution that grants the people in question the right to do things that the Progressive Left claims to stand against. Were this certificate put into formal writing, here is how it would read:

We, Progressives of the world, hereby give You, (name of nation), as the Indigenous People of (name of land), the Moral Authority to engage in acts that are criminal for Colonists to engage in. Included herewith is the agreement that Your wars against Colonists shall be called resistance, that Your war crimes against Colonists shall be called reaction to oppression, that Your bigotry and even racism against Colonists shall be blamed on the Colonists, that Your acts of terrorism against Colonists shall be considered as weapons of the weak, and that should You even engage in genocide against the Colonists, that shall be excused and blamed on the Colonists’ intransigence. Granted to You herein is Moral Absolution: Your crimes are not crimes, Your ethnic cleansing is not ethnic cleansing, Your atrocities are not atrocities, Your hatred is not hatred, Your bloodlust is not bloodlust and Your slaughter of innocents is neither slaughter nor are they innocents.

It is important to understand the impact of this unwritten agreement. Once the Progressive Leftists have labeled the one party “indigenous” and the other “colonists,” this is how they will judge the conflict between them. There will be no fairness toward the “colonist” side, and conversely, the worst acts of the “indigenous” side will be given a justification, and one that blames the “colonist” victims (who are never called victims, of course) at that.

The Progressive Left having decided that the Jews in the Land of Israel are “colonists” and the Arabs are the “indigenous Palestinians,” this is exactly what we see. The moral prescription overrides all—this explains why the Progressive Left anti-Zionists stand with Hamas despite the latter being a theocratic organization whose values are all diametrically opposed to what Progressives profess to stand for. So too in the news, on the Arab “indigenous Palestinian” side, the world gets to see women and children in their homes, while the same news “reports” show only soldiers or screaming men on the Jewish “colonist” side. The narrative feeds itself.

Let me be blunt: The portrayal of the Jewish–Arab Conflict as one between “Zionist colonizers” and “indigenous Palestinians” is, through the mindset of the Progressive Left, a wholesale license to murder Israeli Jews. They will deny it, of course; they will say, “A total lie! We do not condone hurting Israeli civilians.” Which is true, they don’t—they only make excuses as to how the Israeli Jews deserved it, how they made the “Palestinians” do it, when it happens. Over the years, through the trickling of this subtle message in the media, the world is primed to view the murder of Israeli Jews as comeuppance. That alone is the reason why the false narrative of the anti-Zionists needs to be struck at its root.