A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.
Often in the rush that comes with appreciating a well known writer’s voice on a cogent topic, I’m wont to overlook the date or catch up with that detail after posting. Not this time. February 18, 2009 — the last war involving Hamas! Same evil — same useful idiots out on the street embarked on their very own experience of that syndrome well known to the Tutsi of Rwanda: Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation AKA “Reflection” or “Reflection in a Mirror.”
Try a hall of mirrors, for this habitual mode known well to the rank and file of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left (start with the rabid anti-Semites of the International Solidarity Movements, please) would seem well related to both the grandiose messianic delusions of malignant narcissists and the methods launched against others to get whatever it is they want, never mind that whatever they get, it’s never enough, for the damage in their souls is located elsewhere: nonetheless — flattery and patronage on one hand; intimidation, theft, and murder on the other.
And in between, “Gaslighting” with that capital “G”, i.e., the effort to produce so closed and pervasive an information environment — add an equally perverse communal group-think environment (bounded by ostracism or violence) — that their marks actually swallow their garbage.
Would that the manipulation had to do with only garbage, but these that fabricate their own “hall of mirrors” without end, who aggrandize themselves on their martyrdom of children and whole families, have ways of “taking off” that bring ruin to their worlds.
The case I make with that date and the persistent relevance of Howard Jacobson’s fine observations: what Hamas does in setting itself up and what it does to others by way of exploiting their energies and ultimately ruining their lives has to do with “habits of mind”.
Break those habits in the head suspended in cliches and tropes, and the criminality and the warring will diminish; keep them going — another six months or another sixty-six years — and they will grind down the humanity that keeps those habits in its possession.
Related from Pat Condell and posted to YouTube today:
“. . . You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist.’ And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews–this is God’s own truth.
“Antisemitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently antisemitic, and ever will be so.
“Why is this? You know that Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land. The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. Driven from their homeland, their nation in ashes, forced to wander the globe, the Jewish people time and again suffered the lash of whichever tyrant happened to rule over them.
About seven additional paragraphs follow from the three quoted here.
The hitch?
The body’s a hoax, but not completely inauthentic:
However, because we do not ordinarily rely on anyone else’s research, we decided to double-check, by searching back issues of Saturday Review (Rabbi Shneier’s book had referenced the “letter” as being published in the August 1967 Saturday Review). We found no such letter in any of the August issues, nor do the page and volume numbers cited conform to those actually used by that publication. CAMERA also checked with Boston University, where Dr. King’s work is archived. The archivists, too, were unable to locate any such letter. We can only conclude that no such letter was written by Dr. King . . . Since the message of the letter (anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism) was one Martin Luther King, Jr., had indeed articulated, we can understand why the King family and the ADL did not feel the need to verify the “Letter to an anti-Zionist friend.” This episode is a reminder of the importance of verifying the authenticity and accuracy of sources, even when they appear to be solid.
Some of the trapped Jews fought their way out as the riot police dispersed the crowd. Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister, condemned the attack in “the strongest possible terms”, while Joel Mergei, a community leader, said he was “profoundly shocked and revolted”. The words had no effect. Two weeks later, 400 protesters attacked a synagogue and Jewish-owned businesses in Sarcelles, in the north of Paris, shouting “Death to the Jews”. Posters had even advertised the raid in advance, like the pogroms of Tsarist Russia.
“He hit me and quickly cried: ‘He attacked me,’ he lied.”
It aptly describes the way Palestinian thugs and leaders—from the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas to the maniacs of Hamas—attack or try to cheat someone and then rush to complain about being beaten up or victimized.
The title’s a bit heady and long for a brief compendium and observation on a blog . . . but on with it —
Old folk wisdom: “He who points the finger at others out to point it back at himself first.”
Mea culpa: the Israelis are not perfect, but in the site of God — or perhaps just one another, open courts, and an open democracy — they keep working on becoming better children of the universe and students of the universal in humanity.
Hamas, its associates, and its fans would seem to represent a different sort of unconscionable consciousness, one always accusing, deflecting, denying, and lying, for here is a short list of egregious accidental (on purpose?) and deliberately evil behaviors that have led to the injuring and killing of hundreds of residents of Gaza.
Shifa Hospital – Hamas Headquarters
On July 15, for example, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Back in 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing how gunmen roam the halls of the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building—where the camera crew was obviously prohibited from filming.
The station said that a “Hamas Fajr-5 rocket aimed at central Israel, which was fired from a playground outside the Shifa hospital and exploded on the site causing casualties, had at least a 100 kg (220 lbs) warhead,” according to The Times of Israel.
Reporter Nir Devori of Channel 2 and analyst Ehud Yaari confirmed the carnage was most likely the result of a failed Fajr rocket launch — aimed at central Israel.
What kind of a monster would deliberately “shield” a war room, a control room, a bunker, with a hospital of ill and injured patients above it?
Among this blog’s key terms, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” takes a good run at the anomic aspect of Hamas, which appears not to care about the humanity of its constituents. From that alone, whether it cares much about God either: it shouts a lot, collects and keeps hundreds of millions of dollars in the pockets of its own, and it gets other people to die for its own grandiose delusions.
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Hamas said the explosions were a “direct” strike by Israeli drones, while Israel said they were caused by failed militant rockets. “A short while ago Al-Shifa hospital was struck by a failed rocket attack launched by Gaza terror organizations,” the IDF said in a statement, adding that “there was no Israeli military activity in the area surrounding the hospital whatsoever. “
UNRWA has admitted that a Hamas misfired rocket hit a U.N.-run school in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, according to Channel 2′s Ehud Ya’ari, but an errant IDF artillery shell also may have hit the facility, where Gaza sources claim an estimated 17 children and United Nations personnel were killed and 200 others were wounded Thursday afternoon.
I like my month/day/year style more than Israel’s day/year/month, but beyond that, these two items tells that the Big Media Story was suspect from near start.
The results of the IDF forensic investigation naturally follows, and while its conclusions may be displeasing to some and suspect by anti-Semites (because they are what they are), the data will be around for independent examination when the fighting concludes.
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The preliminary report indicates that militants fired anti-tank missiles at IDF soldiers, who then responded by firing several mortars in their direction.
The preliminary inquiry and footage indicate that a single errant mortar landed in the courtyard of the UNRWA school, when it was completely empty.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
But there is no Iron Dome for tunnels. The tunnels give me real pause. It’s hard enough to imagine a situation in which your neighbours are quite intentionally trying to blow up your house and kill your children with rockets. But Hamas’s well-developed kidnapping strategy represents a whole other category of depravity. The handcuffs and tranquilizers are mere baroque, Pulp Fictionish details. The core depravity of Hamas is its longstanding policy of treating every Jew as a target for elimination.
Multiple media outlets report that Hamas’s offensive tunnel network – now known to have been composed of over forty attack tunnels dug underneath Israel’s border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip – was set to be activated during the Jewish High Holidays (September 24th) as a mass terror attack.
The attack was meant to generate as many as ten thousand casualties, men, women and particularly children and hundreds of captives. Explosives were particularly placed underneath kindergartens to make certain that these “institutions” would be the first struck, even before any thing else.
The tunnel-building program involved 800 million tons of concrete, according to reports on the web, the deaths of 160 Palestinian children (that would seem the minimum number known), about $1 million per project, so now we’re about looking at $40 million or more dollars worth of wreckage — completely wasted Gazan money, except for those who got paid working underground — and that’s probably another dismal story about exploitation (I wonder how much line-level workers made).
Involving Hamas Earlier in Time
I would like to have seen more snap in this calmly narrated video, but the point of it is clear: a violent incident of some kind within Gaza and independent of the IDF took place, killing and wounding a “cast” reassembled on a beach and filmed for anti-Israel propaganda.
Again: where the data persists and the investigative method is empirical, the dead may well tell a different story than the malignant narcissist would have you believe.
The mentality: aggrandizing, bloodsucking greedy, unrestrained sociopaths.
The world has seen this pattern repeated around the world, and while it would seem to be waking up to it, it may not be doing so with the strongest hand, the ambitions of the venal outstripping efforts to get at them before they do real damage as has been deeply experienced in places as different as Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq.
After the evacuation, Israel opened up border crossings to facilitate commerce. The Palestinians were also given 3,000 greenhouses which had already been producing fruit and flowers for export for many years.
But Hamas chose not to invest in schools, trade, or infrastructure. Instead, it built an extensive network of tunnels to house thousands upon thousands of rockets and weapons, including newer, sophisticated ones from Iran and Syria. All the greenhouses were destroyed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/post_8056_b_5602701.html – 7/28/2014. I don’t agree with the nastiness covered by political politeness in the first point (or similar ploys): “Yes, there’s an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it’s a human rights disaster” — for, no, there has been no Israeli occupation of Gaza since surrendering it to the refugees in 2005: there has been only a military cordon to keep out arms (which cordon appears to have failed despite its naval blockade and inspections of overland shipping. And the same cordon has not been illegal by any internationally agreed upon basis in law. That the Arab states arrange gang-ups in the UN and such anti-Semitic spectacles as the Durban conferences is just a fact of life, but that it happens doesn’t make it right.
Mudar Zahran: I think Egypt must take responsibility for Gaza. Egypt must take responsibility for Gaza the same way Jordan must recognize its responsibilities towards the Palestinians. And I do see Egypt intervening to booth protect and save Gazans as well as provide to them.
BackChannels: To protect them from Hamas or from Israel? Our small world should not want to continue the Hamas-style Islamist enterprise and the anti-Semitic cant that forms a part of its character. That way of speaking — to demonize and slander the Jews (above all) — is in part everyone’s enemy.
From correspondence with Mudar Zahran, Jordanian Palestinian and peace activist, July 27, 2014
The HamaNazi part of the Islamic Botherhood goes.
Gazans — refugees proven unwanted by and not actively integrated into the rest of the Arab world — decidedly stay.
A new culture is born.
Occupation: yes — a real one, not a phony baloney political slogan.
Occupiers: Egyptian and Israeli military.
Transition: from God Mob mafia state to responsible and responsive local governance with foreign policy overseen by an Egyptian-Israeli-Gaza partnership.
Guaranteed: Gazan freedom and self-determination; real respect in the world.
On the basis of our ethics and practice, we are denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel.
We ask our colleagues, old and young professionals, to denounce this Israeli aggression. We challenge the perversity of a propaganda that justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre, a so-called “defensive aggression”. In reality it is a ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity. We wish to report the facts as we see them and their implications on the lives of the people.
We are appalled by the military onslaught on civilians in Gaza under the guise of punishing terrorists.
Rightfully, the esteemed publication caught heat:
The Lancet, a top tier scientific journal by all accounts, did a great disservice to the medical community. The publication of an extremely biased one-sided analysis of such a complex situation is outrageous and full of lies.
And setting to rights, it brought also a long riposte by nearly a dozen esteemed medical professionals at the end of last week (8/15/2014). Excerpted:
For The Lancet and its editors to avoid any further embarrassment in associating this prestigious journal with such a vituperative betrayal of its scientific mission, we recommend The Lancet retract the authors’ letter on the basis of favouritism for anti-Israeli political positions, the victimisation of Israeli academia, and the competing interests of a lead author known to be a political activist with anti-Israeli stances . . . .
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We find abhorrent that academic authors would, without evidence or data, accuse an entire academic community of crimes against humanity by association of national identity or professional affiliation, an accusation that is not only a rank dehumanisation of an entire state, but explicitly seditious in propagating virulent anti-semitic sentiments to the detriment of whole academies. Although our feelings will undoubtedly recover, the authors, through their reckless words, have inflicted a deep wound to the body and soul of global scientific and medical academia at the very moment opportunities for apolitical engagement, collaboration, and bridge-building are most needed.
I am so sorry for these upside-down wars driven by a malevolent mindset.
When Ayesha Siddiqa writes, “It is interesting to see how people engaged in social media are calling out people who seem to be slow or timid in condemning Israeli atrocities,” one wants to note, even merely suggest, that its Hamas that invites war by making war on the Jews, Israel first (Israel, incidentally, is 20 percent Muslim).
Smuggling tunnels, tunnels into Israel, tunnels leading to underground launch sites, tunnels for everything but use as bomb shelters for the residents of Gaza . . . that’s the truth: then humans and civilian sites, including UN schools, for shielding rockets, launch sites, manufacturing elements.
As with most anti-Semitic / anti-Zionists (the two are inseparable) political cant, the lie appears in the first or second paragraph. Baldfaced dishonest, meddling, mischief-making. It sounds loyal to the ear. It panders. But it does not bear examination.
By the accidents of fate and technology, I have been a part of the Islamic Small Wars for more than seven years, not a long time in a scholar’s life, but long enough to note that Muslim-on-Muslim violence predominates in the world’s obviously troubled Islamic-majority states, that “more Islam” as al-Qaeda to Taliban would have it has meant only more death and plunder for the Islamists, and that the demonizing of Jews and the Jewish-majority state of Israel, which is actually a vibrant people-aiding — ALL people aiding — secular society, again itself 20 percent Muslim with the same treated by law like everyone else, Jewish, Christian, Sunni, Shiite, Baha’i Buddhist, Hindu, and so on. Wherefore then Ayesha Seddiqa’s familiar Jew hate in the name of Islam?
Take another look at Israel: hospital care for Palestinian children: routine; provision of all basic services continuing despite open warfare; higher education services for qualified Palestinian students — long offered and often fulfilled (some of that has changed, I don’t know the details); trade economy — Israel is Gaza’s first export customer, and it does not impede business and trade development by Gaza beyond Israel.
Pakistan has its own now long history of suffering directly at the hands of bomb-making, mosque-destroying fanatics. Jews have never been a part of that and never will be. That is not who we are. With regard to Gaza, we regret every single death with perhaps the exception of those actually doing the building, aiming, and firing of rockets at our own children. Our IDF frequently aborts launch-site or rocket-destroying missions in light of the presence of noncombatants in the target. Ask Bashar al-Assad — or Baghdaddi’s Islamic state now sowing mayhem and murder throughout Iraq — to consider that kind of consideration for humanity.
A well funded and long-planned propaganda campaign has been launched against Israel, but the funny thing is it has been launched against you too. It takes you in. It tells you that for being Muslim, you are wonderful, which might be true, Muslim or not, but then your nominal co-religionists in the Muslim Brotherhood, and they show the world what their idea of Islam is about, and then they push children and families — not their own — in front of an army legitimately defending its children, its families, its people, Jewish in majority but larger than that and democratic, open, and generous.
The “sides” engaged in The Islamic Small Wars may not be anything like what they first appear to be.
The Jews tell the truth. We don’t lie. We accept criticism. We believe in ourselves and we believe in mankind, and we go to work on those beliefs, providing emergency and health services — and emergency charity services to all, worldwide, and much including Pakistan: we’re a small entity in the world, but when there’s an earthquake, we give what we can give.
Those who wish to destroy us would seem to be manipulated to rally around bigotry and hate as well as a mode poisoning every aspect of their lives and their communities. Where they would exclude, we include. We don’t know where the current fighting will go, but if Hamas is gone and war is finished for a time in this enclave between Israel and Egypt, who have been pushed more together because of this deeply egotistical Brotherhood affiliate, we will be there to help our neighbors, even deeply resentful with enmity, recover.
The Palestinian Cause as a rallying point, the tropes that go with that, belie an inhumanity most apparent in Pakistan where terrorists have for years routinely attacked facilities, including mosques, and populating,much including minorities, with near impunity, and the state has fought back with military and paramilitary forces in ways that have gone dismally hard on innocents caught in the middle of the violence. Those victims of the Islamic Small Wars would seem to be forced to experience the worst of both worlds, for who really embraces their well being and security?
BackChannels 