Monday, September 22, 2014

Arab Racism and Insipid Western Apologies

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}

finger
I have had it.

There comes a point where the level of disgust reaches such a crescendo that it makes me want to rip my left arm directly out of the socket so as to beat myself senseless with it.

{Now there is an image for you to carry through your day!}

Look, I have a question.  How is it that western-left venues always harp on alleged Jewish atrocities in the Middle East, such as the latest wholly justified Gaza incursion, while almost entirely ignoring the much more significant and perverse Muslim-on-Muslim, Sunni versus Shia violence throughout that part of the world featuring beheadings, no less?

It is profoundly unjust, which is part of the reason that Matti Friedman's work for Tablet magazine uncovering institutionalized anti-Israel / anti-Jewish media bias in "Operation Protective Edge" resonates so well.

A few years ago I wrote a brief piece entitled, Israel 1242 - Tibet 18 which garnered some attention and in which I noticed the following:
A basic tag search of the Daily Kos blog reveals that between Feb 21, 2009 and today there were a grand total of 18 essays on the topic of Tibet. That is a total of 18 essays over the period of about 13 months on a left political blog with over 200,000 registered users. During that exact same period of time, however, there were 1242 diaries on the subject of Israel...
In truth, these people do not really care about human rights at all for if they did they would care about the human rights of people who do not happen to live in Ramallah or Gaza City. If they honestly cared about human rights they would care about the Tibetans. They would care about Darfur. They would care about Congo and Chechnya.
They don't.
1242 to 18.
The blatant hypocrisy is astounding.
The point, of course, is that the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic party in the United States, and the western-progressive left, as a whole, excoriates Israel far-and-away out of all proportion to Israeli-Jewish sins.  Those who read these pages know this.  The problem is getting the rest of them to understand the nature of the ongoing misinformation campaign against the Jews of the Middle East.

Let us look at one small example from Peter Beinart that the Elder quoted last Thursday, September 18.

Beinart claims:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the story of a powerful state oppressing a stateless people. But it’s also the story of rival, equally legitimate, nationalisms.
This is simply, wholly, and entirely false.

These two brief lines show us very clearly that Beinart has swallowed the so-called "Palestinian narrative" whole.  He lapped up every ounce of poison cream and believes wholeheartedly in The Great Inversion of 1967 that Joshua Muravchik recently wrote about in Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel and that the Elder recently reviewed.  Beinart's first big mistake, therefore, is buying into the nonsense that the conflict is between a powerful state and a small, helpless, largely innocent native population.

This is not only false, it is precisely the Arab propaganda line that the PLO first started hawking, upon Soviet tutelage, in the mid 1960s.  It sounds good from a semi-academic, post-colonial, Edward Saidian perspective, but it also happens to be historical hogwash.

There is no "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."  What there is is an Arab conflict with everyone else in that part of the world, including the Jews.  We must make it very clear that this is an ongoing, millenia-long aggression by the majority Arab populations against all minorities in the Middle East.  The problem arises when we allow acidic and ignorant individuals such as Beinart to decontextualize the conflict by making it seem that Jews are the aggressors when, in fact, Jews are defending themselves from an exceedingly aggressive and hostile Arab majority, as are others, such as the Copts and the Kurds.

The question of Israel is a question of the civil liberties and human rights of the Jewish people.  The Arabs hold well over ninety-nine percent of the landmass of the Middle East and control twenty-one countries.  These are Algeria, Bahrain, the Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

And, yet, Peter Beinart thinks that the Jewish people, his own people - a people held under a system of submission to a foreign power for thirteen long centuries - needs to cut itself in half to give a state to its enemies on its own minuscule bit of land.  And he thinks so despite the fact that the Arabs have always and perpetually turned down the two-state offer.  They turned it down in '37 and '47 and '67 and 2000 and 2008... and every moment and every day in between.

Furthermore, the "Palestinians" are not a stateless people quite simply because they are not a distinct and separate ethnicity.  The conquering Arabs represent something close to 400 million people throughout that part of the world and they have, over the centuries since Muhammad, claimed all of that territory for themselves while driving out and persecuting both Christians and Jews and all non-Muslims.

Finally, to call "Palestinian" nationalism equivalent to Jewish nationalism is to show a deep and profound disrespect not only for history, but for one's own people.  The Jewish people have lived on that land for something over 3,500 years.  We are, in fact, the closest thing to an indigenous people that that land has... unless there is some misplaced tribe of Jebusites wandering around somewhere who have eluded notice.

"Palestinian" nationalism, on the other hand, was born a quarter past last Tuesday and represents an entirely aggressive response to Jewish national reconstitution.  These are hardly "equivalent" nationalisms and I do not see where the Jewish people are under any obligation (moral, legal, or otherwise) to recognize a people who only recently constituted themselves as a people for the sole purpose of opposing the creation and maintenance of our small home.

Mecca HiltonIn the mean time, I cannot even book a room at the Mecca Hilton.

That is quite some beautiful building, wouldn't you say?

The Elder recommended that I give it a shot and I thought, "why not?"  So I called the Hilton Corporation and, indeed, I failed in this modest endeavor.  I tried twice, in fact, and both times I ultimately found myself listening to muzak.

I also called the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles a couple of times, but they were even less helpful than the Hilton staff.

At one point one of the clerks from Hilton said, "We don't want to exclude anyone,"  yet, another, perhaps more honest clerk, told me straight-up, "Non-Muslims cannot enter the Holy City of Mecca."

Ya don't say?

And, yet, the left constantly excoriates the Jews Israel on issues of universal human rights.

It is entirely unjust.

8 comments:

  1. I suppose the Arabs have better marketing than Tibet. Also, westerners are far more likely to visit the sunny modern somewhat peaceful eastern Mediterranean than they are to shlep up the Himalayas to camp out in wet cold dirty pre industrial not many flush toilets but the pulmonary edema from altitude might kill you Tibet. And fight a recalcitrant Chinese government that won't let you go there and doesn't care what you think about that.

    It might sound trite but liberals are always seemingly fascinated and outraged about what they perceive to be the 'human rights' situation in easy to get to places they plan on visiting some day. It's not that easy to get or get into Maputo, Kinshasha, Ouagadougou, Bomako and 15 dozen other places where crocodiles and bugs and snakes and Ebola and Dengue and rape armies are focused on killing you. So there's not a big American 'photo safari' and shithole tourism business there. Sierra Leone had/has cannibals for god's sake.

    So they're unconcerned with it.

    Conversely, Cuba's 90 miles away and while a half million Americans are allowed to visit annually, the left squawks that they're oppressed or Cuba's oppressed, because, not in spite of its proximity to Florida.

    So they slap on their knock off indigenous headgear and head for the 'real experience' of Ramallah or Gaza. As if, because if push comes to shove they can hop on a bus to Amman, Cairo or Tel Aviv and take a flight to Nicosia, breathe a sigh of relief that they checked off that 'war tourist' spot from their bucket list. Got the green shmata, got the white checked scarf, got pictures of little kids climbing on a pile of rubble.

    But, as they say, Israelis don't have bad manners, they have NO manners. Westerners find that off-putting. We Jews aren't good at that whole Levantic hospitality facade. We don't 'serve' the rich white western touristy public. And this works against us. We're not as good as the Arabs at self promotion and marketing. We don't cast the light THEY want to see us in. Ask a thousand liberal vaguely anti Israel Americans how we could shape our public IMAGE in a way they would find attractive and there's your answer. It's about packaging and preconceived notions. I'm not saying Disney it up like Oktoberfest but if you listen to what THEY feel they would find more appealing you'd be amazed at how far that goes.

    The Beinarts of the world are a lost cause. They hate Jews. End of story. They always will hate Jews no matter what and if there was no Israel they'd invent one in their heads to tell you how much they hate it. There is little gained by arguing with someone who does not agree with your existence.

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    1. Trudy,

      I love your writings and wish that you would find the time to front page more material.

      You do have that sort-of Daniel Greenfield way about your words which, in itself, owes a little something to - of all people - Hunter S. Thompson.

      "We're not as good as the Arabs at self promotion and marketing."

      Despite little things like, oh, suicide bombings and head-chopping, this is largely true and the reasons are partly cultural but also due to the fact that they simply have us outnumbered by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1.

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    2. Milton, Dryden, Pope and Boswell, mostly are my influences.

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  2. The Mecca Hilton is nice up to about four stories, but what the fuck is that shit they threw on top of it? It looks like a Steve Wynn casino knockoff, only somehow with less class.

    What are those randomly-placed, shit brown, inexplicably-enclosed, Juliet-ish balcony-ish things? Are those the women's rooms, perhaps? Architectural burqas?

    At least it's white, though, as desert architecture should be, and not designed to 'challenge conventional expectations,' or whatever stupid phrase the 'starchitects' use anymore.

    All they're missing is the seven-story tinted-glass atrium placed just right so as to fry people like ants in the manner of sadistic children, when the sun shines in. Though it looks like some of those fourth-story windows might do the trick depending on the angle...

    Good luck running that thing when the oil's gone.

    Can we say "deadly, crumbling, even uglier 400-foot abandominium?"

    ~~~

    Ah, but sorry for the aside. Heh. Good post, Mike...

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    1. One of my best friends in the world studied urban planning before becoming a wealthy and happy sell-out and just loves to critique architecture.

      I, of course, have a crude palate, so I find the Mecca Hilton impressive, but what the fuck do I know?

      The only thing that concerns me is that neither one of us are allowed to step foot in the joint and our friends, who claim to care about universal human rights, and who scream to the heavens every time an Israeli Jew spits in the wrong direction, simply couldn't care less.

      The hypocrisy is astounding.

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    2. Different tastes and all, it's okay. ;)

      I tend to hate most things built since the 80s, as I find it all so cheap, bland, repetitive and boring.

      In the alternate universe where I went to college, I would definitely be an architect and transit planner who traveled widely, lecturing on urbanism. Heh.

      Yeah, the hypocrisy is incredible, but it's not surprising, either, sadly.

      Trudy nailed it above, if you ask me.

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    3. They should just give you an honorary degree.

      It's obvious, after all, that you are more well-educated than most college grads.

      I've often thought that universities should be able to test out people for a fee.

      I had a buddy at UCONN as an undergraduate who dropped out in his junior year and never graduated, but the thing is he was far more well read and knowledgeable than most of the rest of us. He was the kind of guy with long hair, an earring, on a motorcycle with a copy of HOWL in his back pocket, but he knew more about philosophy, mythology, art, and literature than anyone else that I knew at the time.

      Rumor has it that he died as a junky in the streets of New York, which would not surprise me.

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    4. Thanks, Mike. Shanah tovah to you and yours, and all of our friends here.

      My education was mostly built upon a solid foundation laid down by New Jersey public school teachers.

      Back then, I regularly tested at 'genius' IQ levels, and found myself placed in 'gifted and talented' classes.

      That all ended in high school, when I discovered girls, beer and weed, shortly after which I stopped caring about school, and even more importantly (I could have at least made a good career in the minor leagues as an exceptional defensive catcher!), stopped playing baseball.

      But that's neither here nor there, I suppose.

      Your friend is a familiar character in my life. I've lost a few of them. Probably would have been one myself, if not for the fact that I had a kid just before I turned 18, and left the 'substances' behind, cleaning myself up to stick around for her...

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