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Heaven On Earth
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Redefining a Vampire: Europundit’s spoof on the death of Sheikh Yassin
On the 22 of March 2004, the Israelis assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a targeted killing. The Israelis struck at this man because he was the spiritual advocate of the vicious Hamas strategy of suicide terror, which had attempted to turn all of Israel into a hell of fear and grief. The strike killed its target, two of his body guards and nine bystanders, including two of Yassin’s sons. The world was swept with an outpouring of outrage at the Israelis, and sympathy for the “poor, blind, parapalegic, spiritual figurehead” of Hamas. Indeed — mind you, this is 2004! — some worried that the assassination might harm the peace process.
The obituaries for this man were cloying at best, idiotic at worst. And they were everywhere. Except, of course, Nelson Ascher whose stealth obituary I reproduce below:
A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
Indignation took hold of the whole world as soon as news transpired of the cold-blooded murder of Transylvania’s spiritual leader, Count Dracula. The militant and founder of the local anti-imperialist movement was a victim of what both human right organizations and specialists in International Law called an “extra-judicial execution”. The UK government took responsibility for the action, justifying it as a legitimate reprisal against an open enemy in a context of war. Diplomatic sources, on the condition of anonymity, disclosed that the aristocrat has been killed by members of the SAS under the command of the notorious Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.
The count, better known among his many friends as Vlad Tepes (Vlad, the Impaler) founded and has been leading for over 500 years the MLT (Movement for the Liberation of Transylvania). Though nobody disputed his popularity in the region, a popularity made obvious by the thousands of protesters who took immediately to the streets of Timisoara, Oradea, Cluj-Napoca and Tirgu Mures, his enemies insisted that he was nothing but a “vampire”, something his followers deny, claiming that “one man’s vampire is another man’s freedom fighter”.
The spiritual leader of the Transylvanians was finally found out by his killers yesterday in the crypt of his castle in Bran, 20 miles from Brasov, in the Central Carpathians. His spokesperson, Mr. Renfield, told our reporters that, cowardly caught during his morning nap while he was resting in his coffin, the defenseless old man had no chance to react against the high-tech wooden stakes with which the Americans supply abundantly the British army. He also assured us that “there are no vampires: they’re but an excuse to deprive us criminally of our lands and to justify this illegal occupation”.
The Uses of Antisemitism: More from Neslon Ascher (Europundit)
THE USES OF ANTI-SEMITISM
We all have spent too much time talking about the widespread anti-semitism in the Muslim world and discovering, to our surprise, that many in the West actually share this feeling, while many more couldn’t really care less. This is a mistaken approach.
Instead of trying to understand “why they hate us” and why they (and many others) hate the Jews (something I hope we’ll still be discussing for several generations), what we have to understand right now is: what is anti-semitism good for? What are the uses of anti-Semitism?
Whether those who manipulate anti-Semitism are themselves anti-Semites (or anti-Zionists or whatever), whether they personally share the hatred, all that is irrelevant right now. The historical roots of the hatred, its psychology and so on are not questions we have time to analyse, dissect, discuss endlessly nowadays. (And we’re still debating the Holocaust, how and why it happened etc., 61 years after the end of WW2, without having reached anything resembling consensual answers.)
We are spending precious time getting surprised or scared, wondering about the hatred itself, its depth and extension. That’s important, but not what’s most important or urgent. What we need to understand is that this hatred is being once again used cynically to obtain certain results.
Besides being anti-semitic themselves, the Nazis used anti-Semitism skilfully to subvert other countries and societies. Though Nazism was (among other things) a form of German expansionism, wherever there were anti-Semites the Germans would also find collaborators. Anti-semitism was used by the Germans to undermine from the inside countries, societies and armies that could or would stand up to them.
The Nazis managed to convince millions and millions of Frenchmen and Poles, Belgians, Norwegians etc. and, yes, Brits and Americans that, since they were fighting a common enemy (the Jews), they weren’t really the mortal enemies of France, Poland, Belgium, Norway, England and the US. Untold millions were eager to believe that Germany wasn’t really threatening them and their countries, that the Germans didn’t really want to conquer, exploit and kill them. Why? Because they either thought that they could make common cause with the Nazis against the Jews, or remained indifferent, neutral and defenceless. Since, when not actively loathing or persecuting them, they were indifferent to the fate of the Jews, they also believed it was none of their problem. Many of them even turned against those in their own countries who wanted to fight the Nazis and blamed them for putting everyone else in danger just to “protect the Jews”.
In short: if the Jews were used in the beginning as scapegoats, their main use throughout the war was as a tool to “divide and conquer”. Thanks to their sincere or opportunistic ant-semitism, the Germans were able to paralyse important forces in the countries and societies they wanted to defeat and submit.
Rachel Neuwirth Compiles the Evidence for Israel’s Operation Cast Lead and the Damage to Civilians
(Somehow this post was prepared a while ago and I forgot to post it. It’s late, but not too late.)
Rachel Neuwirth has an excellent and well-documented collection of imformation on the accusations against Israel, and their validity. Please add any additional references you think worthwhile.
I personally don’t go for the dichotomy “the Lie… the Truth”; I prefer, “the claims… the evidence.” But that’s just my pomo peculiarties.
“War Crimes” Propaganda Against Israel
by Rachel Neuwirth
www.opednews.com
Most of the American and European media have accused Israel of having committed “war crimes” in its recent “assault” on Gaza, and of waging war indiscriminately on its civilian population. Israel is said to have damaged schools, hospitals, ambulances and mosques and to have inflicted an immense number of deaths and injuries on innocent civilians. The same accusations have been hurled at Israel by the United Nations, by many of the world’s governments, and by numerous pseudo-do-gooder “Non-governmental organizations” (or “NGOs”), such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The International Criminal Court in the Hague is considering whether to file war crimes charges against Israeli military and political leaders, and the nations of the European Community are debating amongst themselves
But when we probe into the matter a little deeper by looking at the reports of journalists who did some independent investigating, and who interviewed Gaza civilians who agreed to talk with them (anonymously or using nicknames, for fear of Hamas reprisals), we get a completely different picture: Israel took great care to avoid hurting innocent people, while Hamas deliberately tried to cause as many casualties among the Gazan people as possible.
Let’s go through some of the biggest media lies one by one, and then expose the truth.
The Lie: Israel waged war on Gaza’s civilian population; it deliberately killed innocent civilians.
The truth: Israel exerted more care than any other country in history to avoid inflicting casualties on civilians, even at considerable cost to the effectiveness of its military operations.
Israel’s Minister of Welfare and Social Services Isaac Herzog, who is coordinating Israel’s humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, has pointed out that “[The IDF] made 250,000 phone calls], it has sent text messages and delivered leaflets by air. It has [made] broadcasts on television and on radio and asked people to move away. It did whatever it could to prevent human suffering[2].”
250,000 phone calls? That is virtually every single individual household in Gaza! (total population 1.4 million, with many large families). There is no precedent in history for an army calling up each individual household in enemy territory to warn them in advance to take shelter from bombing or shelling by the army. The Israelis even went so far as to call up leading terrorists 45 minutes in advance of bombing their houses, which were used for storing weapons and ammunition and for concealing terrorist tunnels and bunkers in their basements, in order to give the terrorists and their innocent families time to escape unharmed.
When Israeli planes tracked trucks carrying weapons and ammunition to Hamas, they sometimes deflected the missiles in mid-flight, causing them to fall harmlessly in open spaces, if the trucks happened to pass by civilians on a crowded street. In deflecting their own missiles by remote control, the Israeli pilots and ground controllers passed up the opportunity to destroy enemy weapons and ammunition, solely in order to protect Arab civilians. These humanitarian measures by the Israeli forces have been abundantly documented by “live” video cameras, and the resulting video records have been broadcast by the IDF on YouTube.[3]
These unprecedented humanitarian precautions in time of full-scale war must have enabled thousands of terrorists to escape from Israeli bombing and shelling attacks by forewarning them. Israel was willing to undermine the effectiveness of its anti-terrorist operation solely in order to save the lives of “innocent” (and in some cases not-so-innocent) civilians. No other army — not the Americans, nor the British, nor French or much the less the Russian ,Chinese, Japanese or German armies — has ever exercised even comparable restraint and care to protect noncombatants on the “enemy” side of a war zone as the Israel Defense Forces routinely does. [4]
The Lie: Israel killed six hundred or more civilians in Gaza. More than half of those killed by Israel were innocent civilians.
Bayefsky Weighs In: The Obama Administration Double-Deals On Israel
I expressed considerable optimism at the news about America pulling out of Durban II, but did note the last word isn’t in yet, and that there would surely be some counter-measures. Here’s Anne Bayefsky’s take. Not too encouraging. (oao, don’t crow.)
The Obama Administration Double-Deals On Israel
Anne Bayefsky, 03.01.09, 01:59 PM EST
Anti-Semitism, ‘Islamophobia,’ Durban II and the U.N.Barack Obama just added double-dealing to his foreign policy repertoire. On Friday, administration officials led many Jewish leaders to believe that it had decided to boycott the United Nation’s “anti-racism” conference known as Durban II. At the same time, however, human rights organizations were being led to believe that the administration was not pulling out and was looking for a way to “re-engage.”
Durban II, scheduled for Geneva in April, is the U.N.’s attempt at a rerun of the 2001 global anti-Semitic hate fest held in Durban, South Africa.
After sowing confusion over the phone lines, the State Department chose late Friday night to put the real deal in print. Their release reads: “the current text of the draft outcome document is not salvageable,” and “the United States will not … participate in a conference based on this text,” but we will “re-engage if a document that meets [our] criteria becomes the basis for deliberations.” A new version must be: “shorter,” “not reaffirm in toto the flawed 2001 Durban Declaration,” “not single out any one country or conflict,” and “not embrace the troubling concept of “defamation of religion.”
And by the way, it continued, the U.S. will “participate” for the first time in the U.N. Human Rights Council.
All of this leaves the American people not knowing whether they’re coming or going.
It does open a window, however, into Obama’s gerrymandering. On one phone line with Assistant Secretary of State Karen Stewart were Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.N. Foundation, the UNA-USA Association and the Arab American Institute, among others. On the other line with National Security Council member Samantha Power were Jewish organizations. The dangerous message was that an Arab advocacy group does human rights, while Jewish organizations do Jews.
The Durban Declaration claims that Palestinians are victims of Israeli racism; with Israel the only U.N. state charged with racism. The end game, as 2001 attendee Yasser Arafat made plain, is to analogize Israel to apartheid South Africa, pile on political isolation and sanctions and defeat Israel politically, if not militarily. The purpose of Durban II, as decided in August 2007 with the consent of the European Union, is to “foster the implementation of the Durban Declaration.” In January of this year, the E.U. agreed to “reaffirm” the Durban Declaration “as it was adopted at the 2001 World Conference.” Durban II cannot be salvaged; its very raison d’être includes demonizing Israel.
What’s in a gym? A Look Inside the NGO Culture in the “Territories”
Seth Freedman is a columnist for the Guardian. He served in the Israeli army and has a complex attitude towards the Israelis which partially tempers his tendency to believe that the overwhelming hostility to Israel from the “Left” must have something to it:
Then there are those – like me – who prefer to incorporate the “10-bar theory” into their thinking. Namely, that if you walk into a bar and someone starts a fight with you, the chances are that they’re the one with the problem. But if you walk into 10 bars and each time someone wants a piece of you, then it’s more than likely that you’re the one doing something wrong.
I don’t know. Given the madness going around, the high-octane anti-Semitism and the low-octane anti-Judaism that the post-modern folks at the bar are imbibing, why anyone would go with the 10-bar rule is beyond me. But hey, if it gets you a stint at the Guardian, why not?
I the meantime, he’s got enough intellectual integrity to give us a real insight into the culture of NGOs at work “helping” the Palestinians.
Battling it out at the gym
Seth Freedman
Friday 19 December 2008 09.00 GMT
An innocuous inquiry about where to work out in Ramallah has sparked a fury among NGO workers in the cityDespite inauspicious beginnings, I am generally well-disposed to the legions of aid workers who flock to the occupied territories to alleviate the suffering of the local populace. Their cause is just, their aim is true – regardless of the brickbats hurled their way by the likes of NGO Monitor and other such detractors.
There’s a lot of subtext here which emerges from a reading of the two links – both to Freedman himself. I might be willing to argue that their “cause is just” if it is indeed to alleviate the suffering of the local populace; but I’d be very hard put to accept the (facile) claim that their “aim is true.” On the contrary, if their aim were true, they would either a) be working elsewhere where the local suffering is far greater (say Darfur or Congo) — something even Freeman acknowledges; or b) be targeting the predatory practices of Palestinian leaders, both secular and religious, who so amply contribute to the suffering of their own people.
Of course when your militancy confronts the Israelis, you don’t have to worry too much for your safety; and when you don’t confront the vicious (and touchy) elites who oppress the people whose suffering you want to help, you can live without too much anxiety for your safety.
Dropping everything in their home countries and relocating halfway round the world to help those who can’t help themselves are qualities that ought to be admired by anyone with an interest in promoting global tolerance and goodwill among men.
The real issue is how one understands the phrase “can’t help themselves,” and the degree to which one’s help further infantalizes the ones one wishes to help. If you go in, as does International Solidarity Movement, determined not to challenge the Palestinians on their addiction to hate-mongering and terrorism (like suicide bombing), then, I’d say, you’re not doing them any favors.