A Steady Diet of Hate

Michael L.

The Elder has a piece from last Wednesday, November 25, entitled, The death cult.

It is the story of two Arab-Palestinian children, one aged 11 and one aged 14, who recently set forth to murder Jews.

The Times of Israel tells us:

In their interrogation, the two children said they carried out the attack as an act of revenge, without planning in advance and with no encouragement from any adults.

“We travelled from Shuafat to Damascus Gate in order to stab a soldier but did not do it because the soldiers were in groups and we didn’t find one standing alone,” recalled the 11-year-old. “Then he told me ‘let’s do an attack together to revenge the death of Muhammad Ali.’ He opened his bag and showed me the knife. At Damascus Gate I bought a pair of scissors and then we boarded the light rail and looked for Jews to stab.” (Emphasis added.)

Looked for Jews to stab.

One thing that needs to be understood is that none of this is new.

Arabs have encouraged their children to harm Jews, or stab Jews, or stone Jews, for many centuries since the time of Muhammad.

In Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Social and Cultural Relations, S.D. Goitein recalls that:

In former times--and in remote places even today--it was common for Muslim schoolboys to stone Jews. When the Turks conquered Yemen in 1872, an envoy was sent from the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul to inquire what grievance the Yemenite Jews had against their neighbors. It is indicative that the first thing of which they complained was this molestation by the schoolboys. But when the Turkish Governor asked an assembly of notables to stop this nuisance,there arose an old doctor of Muslim law and explained that this stone-throwing at Jews was an age-old custom (in Arabic 'Ada) and therefore it was unlawful to forbid it.

Unlawful, under al-Sharia, to forbid it.

People need to understand that Arab violence against Jews is not because Jews are mean to Arabs.

The fact of the matter is that if Israel was a 23rd Arab-Muslim country it would be regarded as the most enlightened country in that part of the world; the freest country and the country with most civil liberties for its citizenry, the only country hospitable to the civil liberties of Gay people and of women and of all people, regardless of religion.

It is strictly because it is the lone, sole Jewish state that it is reviled by the surrounding Arabs and its hostile European interlocutors.

And it should not be terribly controversial to say that the reason the nearly 400 million Arabs surrounding the Jews are largely impoverished is due to the heavy hand of Islam because Islam discourages freedom of thought.

The reason that Arab children are fed "a steady diet of hate" is for religious reasons.  The Quran specifically directs hatred toward the unbeliever in a manner that is not found in either the Bible or the New Testament.

There is much blood in the Bible, but it is not prescriptive.  The Bible is, in a sense, an initial attempt at history... prior to Thucydides.

But nowhere in either book do we read anything like this, found in the Quran:

O you who believe!  Fight the Unbelievers who are around you, and let them find firmness in you: and know that Allah is with those who fear him.

The idea of fearing G-d is intrinsic to all three faiths of the Levant, but it is only within Islam that fear of G-d is translated into the necessity for submission of the infidel.  

Christianity is about peace.  Whatever anyone might say about the behavior of Christians over the centuries, there is no question that Jesus is a figure of peace.

Judaism is about law.  It is about following the precepts of G-d.  It is about justice.

Islam is about submission.

It is the very meaning of the word.

The Jewbadours - Peg

Doodad

 Just heard about these guys!

I don't Always Drink Beer But When I Do.....

Doodad

  A possible explanation for her recent weird choices.

We must change the narrative. What are we going to do in order to do so?

Sar Shalom

This past week, Malanie Phillips wrote an article on the need to change the narrative surrounding the conflict over Israel (h/t Elder). Those who have followed my writings for some time should not be surprised that I find Phillips to be absolutely correct. The issue is, what should be done in order to address the narrative.

The first step in addressing the narrative is to identify it. To paraphrase Phillips, the root of the western narrative

is that the "Palestinian people" are the original inhabitants of the land. Whatever justification Europe's behavior towards its Jews, most notably during the Holocaust, created, the Zionists displaced those original inhabitants in creating their state. As such, their rights are limited to a portion of the land and the "Palestinians" are merely "resisting" to reclaim what the Zionists took beyond their entitlement.

Further statements are derivatives of this root narrative. Examples include John Kerry saying

There’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.

and the equation of the deaths of Palestinian terrorists killed in the act of perpetrating terror with those of their victims.

To analogize, the root narrative is like rotting vegetables, the derivative narratives are like vermin, and activities like BDS are like the diseases that the vermin carry. No matter how often you call the exterminator, if rotting vegetables are strewn about, the vermin will come back and come back and spread whatever diseases they carry. Similarly, if the Jews did steal the land from the native Palestinians, then it is truthy that Israel is gobbling up land for settlements. And if Israel is gobbling up land and no appeals to moral conscience are inducing a change, then BDS may be necessary to push Israel's hand. However much we knock down the BDS efforts, if it is truthy that Israel is gobbling up land, the BDSholes will find fertile ground with the public and as long as the public believes that Jews are not indigenous to the southwest Levant while the Palestinians are, Israel's gobbling up land will be truthy.

One observation about supplanting the current western narrative is that doing so will require repeated airing of a counter-narrative. One means of doing so would be for someone who is sympathetic to Israel and has a position in the major media to write regularly about the history of the Jews of Palestine. An alternative approach would be for a public official to push information that challenges this narrative, which the media would be forced to cover. As of now, this is unlikely because no politician faces any pressure to do so. This is because currently the pro-Israel community's definition of a friend of Israel is one who is at least non-belligerent about the "settlements," a measure by which Obama is notably poor, or who supports providing arms to Israel, by which Obama is imperfect but reasonably good. Those two objectives are altogether appropriate objectives, focusing on them ignores what drives the constant challenges on those fronts. The message we have to tell our lobbyists who press our case to the politicians and decide whom to support is "It's the narrative stupid!"

If we were to evaluate politicians based on their contributions to the narrative, the question becomes what contribution we should demand from those wishing to be viewed as friends of Israel. There are two general categories of what we should wish to see promoted. One is the general history of the Jews of the southwest Levant. Critical topics would be Jewish history of the region in all major time periods and connections maintained between the diaspora and the Land of Israel. A supplement to this would be that the Arabs have no record of any kind showing any sort of connection to the southwest Levant. The second is the social order between Jews and Muslims in 19th century Palestine. These two categories provide a one-two punch against the prevailing western narrative. The former demonstrates that long before anyone migrated from Arabia to the southwest Levant, Jews were building there culture there and that they never fully vacated the region. The latter sets up a counterclaim regarding the reasons for Palestinian "resistance." Our goal should be that instead of seeing such "resistance" being based on "statelessness," that it is based on irredentism for the 19th century social order. In order to make that claim, it is necessary to describe what the Palestinians are irredentist for. The history of the 19th century provides that.

Brief Note: The NATO-Russia Proxy Fight in Syria

Michael L.

Whatever else the chaos is in Syria, it is also a proxy fight between NATO and Russia over the Assad regime.

This situation is broadly reflective of the Cold War alliances and the proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam) between the United States and the Soviet Union that took place during the mid-late twentieth-century.  

This is an important context to put the current Russia-Turkey dispute within, if you wish to understand it.

Turkey is a member of NATO as, of course, is the United States.  Russia is not.  Russia is endeavoring to prop up Syria's Assad, whereas the US and NATO are opposed to that regime.  In the mean time, everyone agrees that the heinous Islamic State needs to go away, but nobody wants to put boots on the ground and Russia is more interested in defending its ally then going after ISIS.  This means that Syria is a land wherein numerous sovereign countries exercise their rights to bomb whatever the hell they want.

Since Putin backs Assad this means, naturally, that Russia bombs the rebels.

But NATO and the US back the rebels and this is why, essentially, we are looking at a proxy fight between NATO and Russia in Syria.  It should also be noted that the anti-Assad rebels are also mainly, if not entirely, Jihadis, thus US foreign policy in the region remains consistent with Obama's egregious pro-Islamist tendencies.

Complicating matters is the fact that Syria and Turkey have a long-standing border dispute in the region wherein Turkey took down that Russian warplane last Tuesday.  As far as Russia was concerned, Syria being its ally, they were still within Syrian airspace.

Turkey, obviously, disagreed.

Now we are seeing Putin place a raft of economic sanctions on Turkey.

Reuters tells us:

The decree, which entered into force immediately, said charter flights from Russia to Turkey would be banned, that tour firms would be told not to sell any holidays there, and that unspecified Turkish imports would be outlawed, and Turkish firms and nationals have their economic activities halted or curbed.

"The circumstances are unprecedented. The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat," Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, said hours before the decree was published.

A senior Turkish official told Reuters the sanctions would only worsen the standoff between Moscow and Ankara. 

So, boys and girls, from an international crisis perspective, Europe is beginning to contend with the Middle East for the Grand Prize.

When you add the NATO - Russia fight in Syria to the amazingly ill-considered open-door policies of Germany, Sweden, and the EU to the immigration crisis, you get the sense that Europe is beginning to swing around like a yo-yo in the hands of an Arabic six year old.