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Monday, October 28, 2013

Releasing the Murderers of Jews

Michael L.



{Cross-posted at the Times of Israel and News and Views From Jews Down Under.}

The tidbit below was written by Yasser Okbi and the Jerusalem Post Staff.
Palestinian Authority Prisoner Affairs Minister Issa Karaka said Monday that there would be an official welcoming ceremony for 26 Palestinian security prisoners being released from Israeli jails at the Presidential Palace in Ramallah on Tuesday at midnight.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas was set to be on hand at the ceremony to greet the prisoners, released as part of ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

A Ministerial Committee on Sunday approved the release of 26 prisoners imprisoned for murder or attempted murder prior to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. A first batch of 26 prisoners was released in July.

"The second phase of the prisoner release is a great achievment for the Palestinian leadership, for Abu Mazen [Abbas] and for the Palestinian people because it represents an extra step toward the release of all the prisoners from the Israeli occupation's jails," Karaka stated.
They were imprisoned for the murder or the attempted murder of Jews.  There is a deep irony and symbolism in the fact that someone like Simon Wiesenthal could spend his life hunting Nazis so that they might be held accountable for the murder of Jews and now Israel is in the business of freeing the murderers of Jews.

And why is the Jewish State freeing the murderers of Jews?  In order to gain the privilege of sitting down for negotiations with a corrupt terrorist leader, with ideological ties to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, who thinks that any future state of Palestine must be Judenrein, and does so at the insistence of an American president that supported the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East.

So, what I say is, pack it in, guys.

There are some allegedly pro-Israel people - like, say, David Harris-Gershon - who think that the best way to support the Jews of the Middle East is to kick them in the teeth every chance they get.  Why shouldn't allegedly pro-Israel BDS people (the heinous Peter Beinart and J-Street crowd) think that the best way to help Israel is to hurt Israel, when the Israelis, themselves, give them considerable support?

Then, of course, there are the pro-Israel people, such as Jonathan Segall, who think that the real problem is not ongoing Arab-Muslim genocidal hostility toward Jews, but the fact that some Jews prefer to live in Judaea and Samaria.  This bigotry toward Jewish people somehow doesn't register as bigotry among progressives who do little more than scream about bigotry and racism and Islamophobia on a daily basis as a club against their political opponents.   The progressive-left is perfectly OK with rank discrimination against the Jewish people even as they self-righteously decry it everywhere else.

And then there are the Jews who are simply done with peace processing because they recognize that such efforts are not only worthless, but entirely counterproductive to the well-being of the Jewish people.  Many of these folks call for the annexation of the entirety of the Jewish homeland, which is to say, the annexation of Judaea and Samaria, or what progressive-left Jews call the "West Bank" despite the fact that this term wipes out more than 3,500 years of Jewish history on Jewish land.

What I say is that if the Israeli government is so weak that it would yield to outside pressure from Mahmoud Abbas and Barack Obama to release the murderers of Jews then the Zionist project is essentially over.  The point of Zionism was never merely just the protection of the Jewish people.  It also redeemed the Jewish language and opened venues for Jewish literature and Jewish art and Jewish culture, more generally.  It gave a place for Jewish scientists to explore their studies and for regular Jews to gain an appreciation for their heritage and history.  It gave a place for deeply religious Jews to practice their faith among their own people and upon their own land.

The movement for Jewish Liberation, which is the Zionist movement, is a movement for the redemption of a people that is among the most persecuted people within recorded history.  Along with Native-Americans, who were likewise subject to a genocide, and the slaves from Africa, who were subject to European and Arab-Muslim subjugation, the Jews of the Middle East were subject to dhimmitude in which their numbers were kept artificially small and their people subject to daily humiliations, violence, and servitude.

Among the various purposes of Israel, one of the foremost was to undermine anti-Semitism by normalizing Jewish people-hood through the establishment of a Jewish state.  Theodor Herzl and the early Zionists thought that the establishment of a Jewish state would ease relationships with the rest of the world because no longer would Jews be a stranger in someone else's home.  This has turned out not to be the case because in the twentieth-century anti-Semitism simply morphed into anti-Zionism and generalized hatred for Israel, even among many Jews, such as Harris-Gershon.

But now we have the Jewish state, itself, freeing the murderers of Jews.

What I fail to understand is that if Israel will not really stand up for itself, why anyone else would possibly stand up for it?  The releasing of the murderers of Jews is a deeply symbolic act that is certainly not lost on the Palestinian-Arabs, even if it is lost on the Netanyahu government.  When Israel behaves in a manner that goes directly against the well-being of Jews throughout the world, as this prisoner release does, it gives great pause to pro-Israel diaspora Jewry because it makes us wonder just what Israel actually stands for?

The question is this:  how can Israel stand for the well-being of the Jewish people when it releases the murderers of Jewish people?

I wish I had a reasonable answer, but I don't.

8 comments:

  1. There are quite a few of the HuffPo-Salon-TPM-Politico crowd who demanded and continue to demand just that. In fact that's a key thesis of Glenn Greenwald.

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  2. Or you could rip a page from "The Punisher"; 'God's gonna sit this one out'.

    I am going to say some very unpopular things here.

    To me the most basic problem is a refusal to understand what war is. Israel is embroiled in the first tribal war of the 21st century. That's the nature of it. Not merely 'asymmetrical' but purely unrestricted.

    Unrestricted war is not unlimited war it's war fought in EVERY way. Every single parameter of confrontation is used: conventional, political, economic, media, cyber, asymmetric and.......terrorism. But it is war and it has to fought in every single way every single time. It's not enough to provide a conventional defense and deterrence coupled with good swift counter terrorism tactics. It has to be combined with political warfare, economic warfare, war in the media and online, in the courts, everywhere and, I'm afraid with the same kinds of terrorism they employ and celebrate.

    For a good primer on what unrestricted warfare is, I refer you to the book, aptly called "Unrestricted Warfare" published by the PLA (Army of the PRC), written by two mid level officers in the PLA. Its available for free online or from Amazon. Note though there are a few Amazon editions which seem to paint it as an attack on the US which it is not. It's a book on the nature of multidimensional warfare, open source conflict as it were.

    Anyway, the key is, Israel's response always seems to be the wrong one. Shoot down some rockets, arrest a few bad guys. A better approach would be to look at a broad spectrum of responses from economic partial paralysis, targeted assassinations, full court political attacks, lawfare, over the top media propaganda and......terrorism.

    Was is war and war has casualties. We need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that playing nice by our own definition of playing nice is either good or even ethical. It's not. There shouldn't even be rules of engagement. There should be a broad array of overlapping responses in every axis simultaneously. For example, end the talks now and kick all the representatives out of the country. Set a milestone where every infrastructure service will be cut with the Arabs. Sue them all in every country in Europe. Try all their leaders in absentia for war crimes in Israel. Put a bounty on the heads of Hamas and PLO leaders AND all their families and so on. And by so on I mean the occasional exploding building.

    For example in this latest case of freeing murderers. Fine, they agreed and that's that. But before they do Israel should collect the names, faces and current addresses of all known family members ALL of them from birth to age 100 and plaster then all over Israel w.o. any comment. Let the Arabs draw whatever conclusions they like. Then announce that whomever of them is ever found in Israel is subject to immediate arrest on the charge of supporting terrorism. They can hide, turn themselves in or get dealt with by street justice. Anyone who complains just run an endless loop of Hamas lynching people and dragging them behind motorbikes.

    Then gather up all the names of all the Jew hating 'activists' like Richard Falk and Greta Berlin and try them in absentia too. If they ever show up arrest them and toss them in prison for life.

    Again the point is not to wage total war and burn down everything. The point is to wage a war in every single conceivable way all the time. Be creative. For example Israel should have been screaming to protest Saudi Arabia's (since declined by them) nomination to the UNSC. The reasons don't matter. Israel should be calling for the arrest of every member of the UNHRC under the laws of genocide. Israel should refuse 100% of every request or demand or statement placed on them by any body of the UN. Whatever it is, protest it and refuse.,

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    Replies
    1. I love your stuff because it rattles the brain.

      I may front page some of this.

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    2. Empress Trudy I love that you say stuff that other people are too dumb to even think! You are an evil genius and I LOVE IT!!! Question is: what are we doing about it? Who's even reading this blog?????

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    3. Another point to consider, is that the planet is quickly running out of the main (only?) valuable asset many of Israel's enemies have to offer (and can threaten more than a few overly-dependent Western nations with) - dinosaur juice.

      I reject the argument of those who claim that time is not on Israel's side.

      Since, in fifty years, if there is indeed still a global economy, I'm going to go ahead and predict that Israel will have much more to offer (and therefore, much more influence), than a bunch of broken, medieval desert theocratic dictatorships consisting mostly of a sand dune here, a crumbling, never-finished, hideous 170-story skyscraper there, and an environmentally-catastrophic, landfill real estate development scheme just off their coasts screwing up the development of desperately-needed desalination plants that they turned down from Israel decades in the past due to racist reasons, anyway...

      Tick, tock.

      Works both ways, for those who didn't know...

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    4. Yup.

      We need to break the choke-hold that Arab dictatorships have on the international economy based upon oil.

      And it absolutely looks like this is happening. Israel is developing newly found deposits and is figuring out how to get usable energy from shale. It's very hopeful, I think. Israel will soon be an oil exporting country, if it is not already.

      I imagine that I must give people a sense of pessimism, but the truth is that I am in awe of what Yisrael has accomplished. It's just nothing short of astonishing. Given the intense hatred pointed at those people by a far larger majority it is unbelievable what they have accomplished since '48.

      People talk about Israel as an isolated country, but nothing could be further from the truth. From a diplomatic standpoint, economic standpoint, scientific and intellectual standpoint, Israel is not isolated. Just the opposite.

      The real problem is that our numbers are so small.

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  3. I just find it harder and harder to stand up for Israel, Norman, when it refuses to stand up for itself.

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  4. Guardian [British newspaper] images highlight freed terrorist; ignores Holocaust survivor he murdered
    http://cifwatch.com/2013/10/30/guardian-images-highlight-freed-terrorist-ignores-holocaust-survivor-he-murdered/

    ----

    Antisemitism is everywhere in the mass media - Sometimes it is relatively subtle... - How The Economist [British magazine] Attacks the Jews, by Francisco Gil-White, June 3, 2006

    " There is of course a great deal of blatant antisemitism in the mass media. But it is also good to be aware of the subtle ways in which antisemitism is pushed by the major media outlets. Why? Because, once it dawns on you how carefully antisemitism is inserted into the smallest details, you will realize that it is everywhere, and that it is there by design.

    "What you see to the right is a recent example of 'News Summaries' that the well-known British magazine The Economist regularly sends out.

    "In this news summary, The Economist writes:

    " 'Violence flared on Israel's borders. Israel and the Lebanese militia, Hizbullah, fought their fiercest border duel for years. And Israel sent special forces back into the Gaza Strip to kill Palestinians firing rockets into southern Israel.'

    "What is the problem with what The Economist writes? Everything. ..."

    http://www.hirhome.com/israel/subtle.htm

    The modern "Protocols of Zion" - How the mass media now promotes the same lies that caused the death of more than 5 million Jews in WWII, by Francisco Gil-White
    http://www.hirhome.com/israel/mprot1.htm

    Anti-Semitism 2.0, by Mudar Zahran

    "The concept of the 'evil Jew' has made a well-disguised comeback: Criticizing Israel and Zionists, is now deemed a legitimate option to cursing Jews and Judaism. Not only is it open, socially acceptable and legal, but it can actually bring prosperity and popularity. This new form of anti-Semitism 2.0 is well-covered-up, harder to trace and poses a much deeper danger to the modern way of life of the civilized world than the earlier crude form of it, as it slowly and gradually works on delegitimizing Jews to the point where it eventually becomes acceptable to target Jews, first verbally, then physically -- all done in a cosmopolitan style where the anti-Semites are well-groomed speakers and headline writers in jackets and ties; and not just Arab, but American and European, from 'sanitized' news coverage of the most bloodthirsty radicals, to charges against Israel in which facts are distorted, selectively omitted or simply untrue, as in former President Jimmy Carter's book on Israel.

    "Why would a Palestinian[*] be writing this? The answer is simple: ..."

    http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/1979/anti-semitism-20

    Note: * "Palestinian": 'Palestinian' Arab

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