Saturday, September 6, 2014

Israel's Moral Depravity

Somebody left a copy of the Toronto Star lying around the other day. Out of curiosity, I opened it up to the opinions page and found this nauseating example of complete moral depravity:

"World too hasty in judging Israel’s conduct in Gaza: Israel’s conduct should be judged on the same level as that of other democracies during wartime."

Let's be very clear here, for all the racists and sadists, "Operation Protective Edge" was not merely a "war of choice." It was a slaughter of choice. The only step lower for Israel to go is to put a few hundred Palestinian men, women and children into an amphitheatre and film themselves using them for target practice. This had nothing to do with Hamas kidnapping and murdering three Israeli teenagers, because the Israeli government knew that Hamas had nothing to do with it.

Supposedly Hamas hides their weapons under civilians' homes and inside hospitals and UN buildings. They don't conveniently locate them in distinct ammunition storage containers for easy destruction, the way any other army of any other state does. Wait! "Palestine" isn't a state. It doesn't have an army. If they were, Israel wouldn't be allowed to impose curfews and "diets" on them! If Palestine was a country, then a war would have had to have been formally declared upon them and the Palestinians could have turned to the UN as a full-member state and asked for a cease-fire against Israeli aggression.

Where, by the way, did the Polish Underground store its weapons during World War Two? In ammunition dumps? This question, please note, is not meant to equate Hamas with the Polish Underground, or Israel with the Nazi Occupation of Poland. It is, gentle reader, merely meant to outline the stupidity and ridiculousness of condemning Hamas for hiding its weapons under houses in one of the most densely populated places on earth.

I have already outlined in detail that both Israel and Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. What Israel doesn't have the right to do is to steal the Palestinians' land, shoot them when they protest, and abuse them on a daily basis. Which they do. A handy rule-of-thumb in human affairs is that weak people tend not to attack strong people. It seems even more logical to add that weak people tend not to attack strong people, repeatedly, over and over again, attacking them no matter how beaten and bloodied they get. (Obviously, there are some racist fuckwits who will maintain that the Palestinians are not normal human beings, but instead, deranged Arab-Muslim death-cultists who "hate" Jews the same way that Hitler hated the Jews, because the root-cause of anti-Semitism is internal evil that invents some piss-poor justifications for its genocidal inclinations. I don't subscribe to this drivel. I'm pretty sure that Hitler's genocidal racism is different from Palestinians' anger against their Israeli occupiers.) So, if we accept that both sides have a right to defend themselves, and also accept that it's more likely that the more powerful Israelis are the aggressors in this relationship, it should stand to reason that much of this conflict would die-down if Israel stopped attacking the Palestinians. Furthermore, any honest reading of documented history by a sane person would reveal that Israel has, in fact, been the aggressor against the Palestinians, over and over again.

Oh, and lastly, ... what the fuck does Hamas storing weapons under people's houses have to do with shooting little boys playing soccer on the beach?  The IDF has said that this was a regrettable accident, but it seems to me to be much more likely that the only thing they regret is that there was a journalist present. Why the fuck would you shoot four boys playing on the beach when you were supposedly trying to snuff-out Hamas and its weapons? I rather think that these disgusting racist cowards deliberately murdered many more children, only in those instances, there wasn't a reporter present to expose their crimes.

So, no. "Operation Protective Edge" was an unjustified example of deliberate mass-murder and anyone racist enough to cheer it on, or stupid enough to defend it as "self-defence" has automatically discredited themselves. Apologists for this crime against humanity are scum. Which brings me to this attempt to rationalize mass-murder by one Uri Dromi, former Director of the Jerusalem Press Club. His essay begins with a quote:
“This was the first air campaign in history where only precision-guided munitions were used. (We) approached each individual targeting decision with extraordinary caution. We had solid intelligence and a very strict target selection process . . . to minimize any risk of civilian casualties.”
You might think that this was the response of the Israeli government to accusations of using excessive force in Gaza recently. But actually, it was a statement of NATO rebutting the same kind of allegations regarding its 2011 air campaign in Libya.
This is the great thing about being a left-wing extremist. You don't get tripped-up in inconsistencies such as cheering for NATO's criminal behaviour in Libya and then feeling queasy watching the IDF shooting humans in a barrel in Gaza. I think both actions were abominations. I condemn both of them as brutality bathed in bullshit.
The statement regarding the Israeli conduct of war goes as follows: “I don’t think there’s ever been a time in the history of warfare when an army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.” Again, these were not the words of an Israeli official spokesman, but of Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, someone who probably knows what he is talking about.
So, another imperialist shill supports another. Big fucking deal. You people don't grasp how discredited and disgusting you are. If you did, you wouldn't be using each other for "character" references.
Was there a UN commission established to investigate NATO’s Libyan campaign? Were there threats to drag Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard, the Canadian commander of the operation, to the International Criminal Court? Nothing of the sort. On the other hand, whenever it comes to Israel, there is this UN knee-jerk reaction to blame and prosecute.
This sort of pathetic, pitiful wailing actually exposes some interesting tensions at the upper-levels of the world's imperialist powers. There generally isn't much but sustained applause from the US-American corporate media when the USA is in conflict, but, while they maintain a consistently Israeli-enabling tone throughout all their reporting, US journalists do occasionally speak more critically of isolated Israeli atrocities. Perhaps this mild criticism is part of a sophisticated calibrating of Israel's place in the international pecking-order.  Other than that though, this sickening whining is useless.
No wonder Israelis are suspicious of UN commissions of inquiry. The one headed by Judge Richard Goldstone in 2009 condemned Israel for alleged crimes in the 2008 Operation Cast Lead. Goldstone regretted this later, writing in the Washington Post that contrary to what had been written in his report, “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” But that was too little too late.
Sorry, you racist apologist for mass-murder; whatever Goldstone said, or didn't say, ...
The second, more significant reassessment by Goldstone is that he was wrong to conclude in his report that Israel intentionally targeted civilians "as a matter of policy"
Despite Goldstone’s misleading wording in the article, he is referring not to an Israeli order to intentionally murder civilians but a policy in which indiscriminate attacks were undertaken with a disregard to likely casualties among civilians.
...doesn't change the fact that "Operation Cast Lead" was yet another example of indiscriminate slaughter and crimes against humanity. It is a sign of being a humanitarian to acknowledge this, and a sign that one is losing sight of one's own humanity to grab at any straw to rationalize your revolting, racist blood-lust.
Now comes the sequel, with a new UN commission headed by Canadian professor William Schabas — a man who in 2012 already concluded that Israel was a serial war criminal. That this “judge” didn’t recuse himself shows how fair all this façade of international justice is.
Perhaps we should find someone who believes that Israel is a paragon of virtue? Or, perhaps someone who has no opinions on Israel whatsoever? Perhaps there's a hermit in the Gobi Desert who is qualified to head this investigation? Or perhaps we should take all of the IDF's own bullshit "investigations" of themselves and of Hamas and flush them all down the toilet where they belong? I really don't know what to say in the face of this nauseating self-pity.
Apart from this double standard, what bothers Israelis is that world public opinion can’t see that unlike Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, which are thousands of kilometres away, death tunnels from Gaza open up in the backyard of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, 500 metres away, and short-range mortars from Gaza have just killed two of the kibbutz members.
Well, I think it's pretty clear that if Israel wants the rockets to stop, then Israel should stop attacking the Palestinians. Stop stealing their land. Stop torturing them. Stop with the daily humiliations. Stop being the aggressor.  That is if (a big "if") Israel's leaders don't see those Israeli deaths as acceptable losses in their long-term campaign for the total eradication of Palestine as a political concept.
Perhaps people will start changing their opinion about what Israel is doing when Abu Khalid al-Kanadi (“the Canadian”), John Maguire of Ottawa and the likes of Calgary suicide bomber Salman Ashrafi return from the battlefields of the Islamic State and start practising their holy war back home.
Battlefields in wars subsidized by the USA and its whack-job, super-corrupt, medieval Arab allies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and other such dictatorships.
In the meantime, Israel is also facing an internal challenge, with its 20 per cent minority of Israeli Arabs. If Israel were smart, it would have made them the happiest people in the country, fully equal to the Jewish Israelis. Regrettably, we have failed to do so, with one notable exception — the second premiership of Yitzhak Rabin (1992-95), when the government mounted a formidable endeavour to address the inequality of the Israeli Arabs.
Socio-economic grievances aside, the Israeli Arabs are torn apart by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where, in the words of Israeli-Arab politician Abed al-Aziz Zoabi, “My country is at war with my people.” Their recent violent protests against the war sparked counterattacks and racist remarks by right-wing Jewish Israelis, which drove some people to rush to the conclusion that Israel had lost its liberal compass.
Not so fast. Again, Israel’s conduct should be judged on the same level as that of other democracies during wartime. Have we hurriedly passed a dubious “Patriot Act” restricting civil liberties? Have we put our Israeli-Arab citizens in concentration camps, like the Americans did to their citizens of Japanese origin during the Second World War?
Here, Dromi makes some points that should resonate with witless, hypocritical Westerners. But, once again, being a radical leftist, I have nothing to apologize for. I did not shriek for the Anti-Terrorism Act for Canada after 9-11. I do not cheer for the torture of my fellow citizens the way right-wing Canadian tea-baggers do. I supported the campaign for redress for Japanese-Canadians who were interred during World War II. I did not support the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, or Syria. Unlike Canadian colonialists, I want there to be justice, dignity and autonomy for the original inhabitants of this land, the First Nations. I have not lost my moral compass. I have not lost sight of the importance of our legal, civil, political and overall human rights, in this stupid con-job called the "War on Terror."
Above all, according to recent opinion polls, with all the rhetoric about secession, 77 per cent of the Arabs in Israel consider themselves to be Israelis (more, I believe, than the 49 per cent of Quebecers who want to remain Canadian, as one poll from 2013 showed). It’s up to us Israelis — and the news about the demise of our liberalism is exaggerated — to embrace them and to coerce our government to do so as well.
Considering that "the right of return" is a pressing demand of the Palestinian diaspora, and considering the hay that racist Israelis would make if 79% of Palestinians in Israel said they didn't consider themselves citizens of Israel, this shouldn't be too surprising.
There is no other democracy that faces such challenges, both externally and internally, and still keeps its democratic nature. Except that we don’t get credit for that. It reminds me of the joke about Bill Clinton’s visit to Israel. During a boat cruise in the Sea of Galilee, Hillary’s hat falls into the water. Bill steps out of the boat and walks on water to retrieve it. The press, in hot pursuit in another boat, concurs: Clinton can’t swim.
Uri Dromi is the Director of the Jerusalem Press Club. Between 1992 and 1996 he was the Spokesman of the Rabin and Peres governments.
Ha-ha-ha! Ahem! It's long been established that many of the "challenges" that Israel faces are produced by Israel's policy of the theft of the Palestinians' lands and their oppression of the Palestinians when they protest. Stop doing this, and many of your "challenges" will disappear.

I'd like to conclude with a joke of my own though. In 2014, Israel used a pretext to justify an attack on the crowded, outdoor prison camp/home to 1.8 million Palestinians, called "Gaza." They killed well over a thousand innocent men, women and children. And the USA shipped military supplies to them the whole time. And zionists worldwide cheered them on. And some people said that killing innocent civilians in such a way was a moral outrage. And miserable excuses for human beings like Uri Dromi were either too stupid, too racist, too deluded, too much whatever the fuck sort of failure you think explains it, to shut-up, and instead, wrote sniveling apologies for it. And media outlets like the Toronto Star didn't have the sense not to print such garbage.

I admit; it isn't a very funny joke.

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