Integrity counts and truth matters and the two integrate with honest scholarship. “Simply put, the Jews fleeing Europe and the atrocities of Nazism, found a home in the mid-1940s in the newly-created State of Israel, while the Palestinians lost theirs.” It’s not true. It’s stated as true because it’s believed, easily comprehended, and perhaps troublesome to actually independently research. Even intending to “get into the books” may be complicated by questions like “how far back does one go?” Or “what should be taken into account and what dismissed?”
Zionism responds to centuries of European persecution, and in fact discrimination that targeted Muslims along with Jews. The leveraging of religious passion and supersessionary argument account for that (the Church has had its institutional subscription building and subscription-taxing interests too) as does ethnic minority status outside of one’s homeland.
Modern Zionism is also a 19th Century pursuit and the subsequent Jewish immigration and agricultural capitalization of what is today Israel far precedes the rise Nazi Germany.
The best scholars serve God because the attachment of mind to cultural and personal loyalties produces ephemeral research and dishonest and disingenuous findings. We should not see what we want to see but see what is to be seen, and doing that with clarity, we may then repair some things.
Source of the little bit of grit in this clam’s shell:
Proposed new approach: adopt empirical methods; adhere to good principles in ethics, morality, and scholarship; and let’s move on to get people settled without rancor in their various spaces and otherwise integrated, independent, and living as the free agents of their own destinies, not as the subjugated pawns of the destinies of piratical dictators or their mafias.
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
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Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
Moreover, they may be proven untrue, the Jews being the absolute worst genocidiers on the planet: before they kill you, they afford you basic services, emergency and sophisticated specialized health services (in which all patients are treated absent of politics), Internet access, freedom of speech sufficient to sustain adverse public relations and research organizations (like B’Tsalem).
What may be true is the greater the hate encountered in anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist cant (there is no difference between those two), the greater the opportunities for Israel’s expansion.
The Abbas speech may be investigated and laid out purple phrase by phrase (“Amidst a torrent of massacres and storms of massive destruction” — not one mention of the more than 10,000 rockets launched from Gaza since 2005 and every two to few years to launched at a tempo sufficient to call the same an assault against Israel’s children).
Sins of omission are not the only sins evident in Abbas’s speech before the UN.
Note the demonizing of Israel, the “reflections in a mirror” — a very dark and most primitive mirror in language — in such well-known canards as “However, and as usual, the Israeli government did not miss the opportunity to undermine the chance for peace” — never mind those tunnels illegally and surreptitiously built (with child labor, 160 accidentally killed or deliberately murdered in the process) to assault Israeli communities.
Add to that demonizing simple Arab refusal of just responsibility for the Arab refugees of 1948:
Israel refuses to end its occupation of the State of Palestine since 1967, but rather seeks its continuation and entrenchment, and rejects the Palestinian state and refuses to find a just solution to the plight of the Palestine refugees.
BackChannels no longer casually employs the term “Palestinian”.
As neither Egypt nor Jordan will absorb nor take responsibility for the constituents of (Judenfrei since 2005) Gaza, I refer to the same as “Gazans”).
Given the lying going on around Gazans — allegedly on their behalf but never beyond sacrificing them (individuals, family, finances, and property) as the pawns of Hamas’s supersessionary war against Judaism, one might expect them to become independent in their own right and to insist on the development for themselves of an independent, modern, responsible, responsive, and transparent democratic government.
Judea may be more complicated with its historic flow-down from the Soviet’s brand of poison (not only the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in spirit, remains present but a simple right-click of the mouse is all one needs to reach the airliner-hijacking Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the effects of the anti-Semitic New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left lingering long on the landscape, still leveraging the language of the refugees, which comes in the Abbas speech as, ” . . . against Israel’s policies of occupation, apartheid and colonial settlement . . . .’
The lie that is self-aggrandizing speech is there in that portion: one wonders just how large the combined International and Palestinian Solidarity Movements really are.
Investigating consultant and journalist Lee Kaplan has told me about the seeding of these groups on America’s college campuses and their access to student activity funds, which is fair under the precepts of freedom of speech in a truly open democracy, but we didn’t get to how really small these movements may be despite their broad distribution and the money pumped into them for priming.
The phrase comes from the 1940’s film Gaslight, in which an abusive husband deliberately dims the gaslights in the house, but when his wife comments on it he tells her she’s imagining it, that the lights never dimmed at all.
Gaslighting is one of the most insiduous, viscious, nasty and effective forms of emotional and psychological abuse.
Transporting psychology — the study of individual mind and mentality — into politics may have inherent issues in both psychology and politics: for example, are we now going to filter or judge politicians in relation to our concept of “malignant narcissism”, which in turn would seem to inform the psychology of dictatorship? At the same time, what choice has the world suffering war between brutal and sometimes immense despotic personalities?
(Of Bashar al-Assad and opponent (in general terms) al-Nusra, I have often remarked: “Different talk — same walk”.
The two together, Assad and al-Nusra — and the advent of BadDaddy and the Islamic Hate represent where the path of the malignantly narcissistic winds up — have burned out and left scorched the middle humanity of the historic Syrian state — factually speaking, about 9 million Syrians have been displaced in the fighting between the tyrant and the zealots [about 200,000 souls have been separated from life altogether]).
What I have been calling “The Islamic Small Wars” — the internecine competitions and interfaces within Muslim-majority political space running from Afghanistan to Yemen — have been wars about integrity — basic truth telling — requiring armies of poets and detectives for fighting and resolving.
Some people lie.
That’s a sad fact of life, and criminals and politicians both often draw the pointing fingers on the basis of their affiliations, ambitions, and reputations. Less acknowledged and less stated: observations about culture-wide denial, dissimulation, false assertion, and hapless vulnerability to the beguiling and patronizing sweetness of an evil tongue.
Often, in many quarters of the world, if not most, a loyal lie may be preferred to an uncomfortable truth, for shows of loyalty may draw immediate rewards, from praise to patronage, while relaying a critical or damaging truth may be met with punishment, including that of a swift death.
“The truth is that this started as a war against Israel, but it turned into a war between the Palestinians,” Gazans tell me. “And it’s not a war between Hamas and Fatah anymore, but rather between factions within Hamas, factions within Fatah, between individuals.”
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4573441,00.html – “In Gaza, hatred for Hamas and resentment of West Bankers: They may be too scared to speak publicly against Hamas, but the signs are there; and they have not forgotten that protests from their compatriots during the recent fighting were conspicuous in their absence.” by Francesca Borri – Published: 09.22.14, 00:04 / Israel News
It’s just not news when a blogger creates a new category.
However, I think the last Hamas war with Israel amply illustrates all of the issues with the Muslim Brotherhood, its behavior in language, and its soul-deadening program.
Billionaire Khaled Mashaal seems at the moment somewhere between stays in Qatar and Tunisia or Turkey.
“Gaza Fortress” lies in ruins.
And if Gazans have not figured out anything else, they’ve got to be figuring out this: they’re on their own.
I have made “Gaza Suzerain” a category here because . . . it’s a theme I believe the realpolitik within Gaza will make clear.
Let the residents of Gaza — Gazans — become their better selves with the human rights afforded others in the world, and let them do that for themselves with greater security provided by Egypt and Israel both.
Welcome to modernity.
Gazans may come up with something better than Israel: i.e., their own internally autonomous, democratic, and tolerant culture and state.
The concept of suzerainty (and protectorates) has a life longer in history than any given YNet News article, but checking back on this piece, I was surprised to find the referenced key link broken.
What sent me to look?
Last week’s Gaza “boat people” drowning, which is being spun as having been motivated by (that tired old canard) “the occupation”, which anti-Semitic truth I refer to as “The Preoccuation”. Francesca Bourri’s article focused the spotlight where it needed to be focused: Hamas’s dismal record in governance and in war and the quite probably truth about the despair Gazans deal in their isolation between large forces: Israel, Egypt, the Arab world, the modern world.
That deadlock is not eternal.
Gazans themselves need strengthening with reference to their unfortunate relationship with Hamas, which looks to me like showbiz — good script: it just hasn’t anything to do with humanity and its real aspirations, beliefs, needs, and wants — covering kleptocracy.
I’ve tweeted Borri and Ynet News. I want to hear how a story disappears from major Israeli media.
The talkbacks for the article still appear online:
“In the end you are left with 1.7 million people in Gaza, and you don’t really want that.”
Responsibility.
Ehud Yaari‘s remark at The Washington Institute’s two-person panel “Sept. 11 – Gaza and Beyond: The Arab-Israeli Arena in the Wake of the Hamas War,” may tell how Israel’s latest response to Gaza rocket fire (and assault tunnel building) reached completion without changing much.
Indeed, Robert Satloff, the second speaker, would go on to characterize the incursion as “urgent, not very important.”
When asked in the Q&A that followed, “What does Israel want?” Yaari suggested that what Israel wants is to “let Hamas rot in the Gaza Strip.”
Noting that Hamas had seen fail it’s “Gaza Fortress” approach to assaulting Israel, the journalist said the Hamas would “try to make a leap to the West Bank . . . a whole new opera” with the contemplation of its terrorism reaching everywhere in Israel.
*
Not only Hamas may rot in Gaza, for no powerful or key element seems to want even to approach taking responsibility for 1.7 million Gazans.
Egypt, having with decision made the Muslim Brotherhood its problem, certainly does not want Gaza’s most egregious problem, except to keep the same exactly where it is.
Israel and Israelis: ditto, Egypt.
If there’s a transition plan for Gaza from Hamas sanctuary to, say, protectorate or suzerain in enthused and lasting peace (with the Jews and the Jewish State), I should like to hear of it.
The highly experienced and now octogenarian Mahmoud Abbas, who, anti-Semite that he may be, has been promoted as representing the Next Best Government, has looked over the nest and, so suggests Yaari, hasn’t the wish to run Gaza while Hamas, aspiring to ape Hezbollah, maintains its own army. While Hamas planners in Turkey pass thoughts to the West Bank Committee in Gaza, with interest in unseating Abbas, Abbas would have to address the massive screening of old staff, the mustering of troops sufficient to overwhelm Hamas, and that’s not happening.
Gaza appears to be stuck with Hamas.
Even worse for Hamas, Hamas appears to be stuck with Gaza.
While Hamas stews over Gaza as well as in it, Israel and the Arab World, so suggests Satloff, may be experiencing some convergence of perception of regional states of affairs.
Perhaps such as ISIS helps with that.
While Hamas may be isolated in Gaza — imho, it sure looks that way — and both Egypt and Israel control the boundaries and crossings containing the same and the Global Jew-Hate Commune emphasizes hate over help (most often) and the UNRWA remains deeply compromised (as a Hamas helper), Gaza may have one partner for peace after all: Gazans.
It’s what we all have, isn’t it?
Ourselves when it’s us.
Themselves when it’s them.
Some friends convince me that Gazans love Hamas, vote for Hamas, die for Hamas.
Happily.
Proudly.
And some friends convince me otherwise.
Except through the Hamas filter — media controlling, politically intimidating, image obsessed — one cannot “see” Gazans (politically) otherwise, or, perhaps simply not yet.
It’s true I may now scribble notes at a desktop two hours away from the event location — but can I read them afterward? 🙂 And did I get words down right in the first place? And can I do a better job of differentiating between what someone else said and what I happen to think? Of course. With practice.
Every day online brings with it a slightly updated dawn that changes even the most remote soul’s intellectual ecology.
Yesterday’s live event, which I watched, is now a recorded event at the URL noted in reference. I may give it another listen, and if I must update here, I will. Internally, there’s an art in play — listen, notate, reflect, report, opine — and each step is its own dimension.
“Rather than falsely accusing Israel,” the letter continued, “one might have expected that as the executive head of the UN, you would have admitted responsibility of the UN for such abuse of its facilities, and instituted a thorough inquiry as to how and why UNRWA facilities were placed at the disposal of the Hamas terror organization, how and why the UN officials responsible for such facilities permitted this situation to occur, and why those rockets and other weapons that were discovered in such facilities were transferred to Hamas, for their continued use against Israel’s citizens.
“In permitting the storage of weapons, and in transferring such weapons into the hands of Hamas,” the letter asserted, “the UN has in fact permitted itself to become accessory to the commission of war crimes.”
The above passage has been added to the piece on this blog titled “United Nazis Workers Relief Agency (UNRWA)”, which appears to have been abused by Hamafia and Associates, and that to allowing its budget and facilities to abet the terrorist organization with its assaults against Israelis and, in essence by way of its tactic of putting noncombatants and civilian assets directly in the line of fire, Gazans as well.
For more than 66 years, the game against the Jews of Israel hasn’t changed much. From armies to rogue political movements to terrorist gangs, the genocidal, go-nowhere, nothing-to-offer character of the anti-Semitic aspect of the Middle East Conflict has not changed.
I’ve mentioned suzeraintyon this blog, which may be too much or too little but at least addresses Egyptian and Israeli security issues associated with the strip, its inhabitants, and its Hamas and other parasites. What I haven’t brought into the BackChannels conversation is the power inherent in genuine local rule.
The Hamas enterprise, which has been about getting rich, offing the Jews (wow, what a combination), and aggrandizing itself beyond all measure, has never been about modern representative, responsive, and responsible local governance.
When The Occupation of Gaza By Hamas comes to an end, however it may do that, the arm twisting, conflict with Israel, deep smuggling, and plundering of the local population in the name of Islam will come also to an end. In that, and perhaps only that, is there a new dawn for Gazans.
I repeat the three “R”s: Representative | Responsible | Responsive.
Bring those three into honest existence, and the entire of the middle east conflict, sixty-six years of not only of empty promises but of futile and wasteful ends, concludes.
Can approximately two million people rise to reclaim their lives in the place where they have settled?
Yesterday’s headlines are that Hamas has just rejected Egypt’s offer of a ceasefire with Israel and instead continues to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli towns and cities.
Less known is a crucial fact: the people of Gaza are solidly against these Hamas policies. Indeed, by a very large majority, they oppose Hamas rule altogether.
Hamas’s biggest weakness of all is its unpopularity among Palestinians in Gaza now. A poll taken in June, before the latest fighting began, showed that 70 percent of Gazans wanted a continuing cease-fire with Israel; 57 percent wanted a Fatah-Hamas unity government to renounce violence against Israel; 73 percent thought nonviolent resistance had a positive impact, and large majority thought Hamas had failed to deal with crime and corruption.
Then as Gaza’s economy began to worsen almost as quickly as the Palestinian Authority’s corruption level grew higher, fed up Gazans finally voted the PA out – and the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas into power.
Anyone who expected Hamas to do a better job for the Gazan population was soon sadly disappointed. A Sunni Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, Hamas remains fanatically resolved to destroy Israel and to murder millions of Jews in the process.
I wonder if Gazans have the same question I do about Israel’s posture toward Hamas, a stance that seems invested in negotiating a peace with an entity that has long had all of its chips in for the annihilation of Israel and Jewry worldwide.
When Hitler finally committed murder and suicide in his Berlin bunker, Germany had been already overrun by the military machinery it inspired and brought to life to do exactly that. There were no questions about leaving the Nazis in power or negotiating anything less with them than unconditional surrender. Has Hamas, which has grown fat off the people of Gaza, given them nothing, and brought heartache to their doors — the angered weeping of war is the province of all mankind — any different?
It turns out that last night the representatives of the Palestinian Authority were putting forth a patently untrue story as to what Israeli and Hamas had agreed, when neither had. Unfortunately, all of the press (both Israeli and worldwide) reported the story as true.
. . . even if the obstacles erected by those who revolve in the Zionist orbit, aiming at obstructing the road before the Jihad fighters, have rendered the pursuance of Jihad impossible; nevertheless, the Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take.
Hear, oh Israel (and all others): with Hamas and what drives it — that deeply malignant narcissism that lends to each his own indulged and grandiose center of the universe — there is nothing to negotiate.
So Hamas does not negotiate in good faith, neither for peace and prosperity to be shared by Gazans nor for considerations having much to do, after all, with The All.
Why should Hamas or any other Jihad Joe group come equipped with an “off button”?
The enterprise clearly cons the public, makes a lot of money (which with “terror tunnels” and all would seem not to reach intended deserving recipients), and harms the principles not at all (although, perhaps, after all, Allah knows what they do — and, for now, has them getting away with it).
As ethical, apolitical, and professional members of the academic community, we find the open letter for the people in Gaza1 an outrageous diatribe lacking context and deliberate vilification of the sovereign state of Israel and, by extension, every Israeli. In publishing such invective, The Lancet has allowed itself to become a platform for distorted political activism, as has been previously noted by others.2,3 Because we are scientists and physicians who are accustomed to incorporating all data into the formation of educated opinions (even public commentary), we are obliged to redress the imbalance.
BackChannels 