Rioting is Fun!

Mike L.

The snippet below was written and published by Arutz Sheva staff.

Three Arab rioters were arrested for throwing rocks Friday, following disorders at the Damascus Gate (Shaar Shechem in Hebrew) to Jerusalem's Old City. Another youth was arrested following a disorder next to the Church of All Nations on the Mount of Olives.

At the same time, additional disorders broke out in the area of the Rockefeller antiquities museum, across the street from the Flower Gate (Shaar Haperahim in Hebrew). Jerusalem District police, deployed with reinforcements since the early-morning hours in anticipation of pre-planned violent disorder, dispersed the rioters.

About 100 Arabs rioted next to Rachel's Tomb, between the Israeli capital and Bethlehem. They threw rocks at Israeli security forces.

Fourteen hundred years of Arab kids stoning Jews and today many western "progressives" honestly believe that the Jews of the Middle East deserve whatever beating they get.  They honestly think that Arabs throw rocks at Jews because the Jews are mean.

And this is not just hard-left fringe types that think this, but very many mainstream Democrats do, as well.  And, yet, we still stand in solidarity with a political movement that holds us in contempt despite all that we have done over the course of more than a hundred years to help build that movement.  In fact, it's considerably worse than that.  The Jewish people helped infuse the political left with the core values of social justice and human rights and now they use those concepts as a club against us despite the fact that it is the Jewish minority which remains the victim of the large and hostile Arab majority in the Middle East.

And just why do so many "liberals" think that the Jewish victims in the Middle East are actually the aggressors?  Rutgers University political scientist, Michael Curtis, has a few words on this matter.  He writes:

Arguably, the use of propaganda by Palestinians to gain compassion and political support has been their one great success.

The Palestinian narrative of victimhood, with its falsifications of history and politics, its portrayal of themselves as not only innocent but the most compelling victims in the world, its staging of events to blame Israel for atrocities they themselves have committed, its deliberate concentration on alleged injuries or deaths of children, and its achievement in persuading much of the media to accept and advance its manipulation of language and action, have all been part of its success in the propaganda war.

That success is shown by the fact that a considerable proportion of the European population accepts the Palestinian propaganda that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians, in spite of the reiteration by Palestinian leaders of their determination to eliminate the State of Israel. Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, is held responsible for the problems not only of the area but for those in the world in general.

In contrast, the Palestinians present themselves as helpless, blameless individuals who have been the victims of Israeli brutality and colonialism.

This presentation has been advanced in a number of ways but most successfully by three devices: using Palestinian children to assert Israeli brutality; staging and falsifying events, sometimes in collusion with sympathetic Western journalists, to portray Palestinians as innocent victims and Israelis as cruel oppressors; and by distorting the historical and political chronicle of Jews and Arabs.

Furthermore, even pro-Israel Jews assist the Arabs in their anti-Jewish / anti-Israel propaganda by using the very language created by the enemies of the Jewish people.  Thus we speak of Occupation with the Big O.  Thus we eliminate the ancient names of Judea and Samaria and refer to the region by the recent Jordanian term "West Bank" thereby erasing Jewish history on historically Jewish land.

So long as we honestly think that we are guilty of oppressing our oppressors why shouldn't regular Americans and Europeans and Australians support BDS?  So long as we frame our arguments in language that contains our guilt as a given there is no reason for people not to think that Israel is some hideous rogue state that needs to be boycotted, if not dismantled.

A big Tip 'O the Kippa to Daniel Bielak.