FULL ARTICLE

ISRAEL AND THE SURRENDER OF THE WEST

Israel and the Surrender of the West
One of the world’s oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.
By Shelby Steele
The Wall Street Journal
June 21, 2010

The most interesting voice in all the fallout surrounding the Gaza flotilla incident is that sanctimonious and meddling voice known as “world opinion.” At every turn “world opinion,” like a school marm, takes offense and condemns Israel for yet another infraction of the world’s moral sensibility. And this voice has achieved an international political legitimacy so that even the silliest condemnation of Israel is an opportunity for self-congratulation.

Rock bands now find moral imprimatur in canceling their summer tour stops in Israel (Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Gorillaz, the Klaxons). A demonstrator at an anti-Israel rally in New York carries a sign depicting the skull and crossbones drawn over the word “ Israel .” White House correspondent Helen Thomas, in one of the ugliest incarnations of this voice, calls on Jews to move back to Poland . And of course the United Nations and other international organizations smugly pass one condemnatory resolution after another against Israel while the Obama administration either joins in or demurs with a wink.

This is something new in the world, this almost complete segregation of Israel in the community of nations. And if Helen Thomas’s remarks were pathetic and ugly, didn’t they also point to the end game of this isolation effort: the nullification of Israel ‘s legitimacy as a nation? There is a chilling familiarity in all this. One of the world’s oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.

“World opinion” labors mightily to make Israel look like South Africa looked in its apartheid era – a nation beyond the moral pale. And it projects onto Israel the same sin that made apartheid South Africa so untouchable: white supremacy. Somehow “world opinion” has moved away from the old 20th century view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a complicated territorial dispute between two long-suffering peoples. Today the world puts its thumb on the scale for the Palestinians by demonizing the stronger and whiter Israel as essentially a colonial power committed to the “occupation” of a beleaguered Third World people.

This is now – figuratively in some quarters and literally in others – the moral template through which Israel is seen. It doesn’t matter that much of the world may actually know better. This template has become propriety itself, a form of good manners, a political correctness. Thus it is good manners to be outraged at Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and it is bad manners to be outraged at Hamas’s recent attack on a school because it educated girls, or at the thousands of rockets Hamas has fired into Israeli towns – or even at the fact that Hamas is armed and funded by Iran. The world wants independent investigations of Israel , not of Hamas.

One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past – racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

When the Israeli commandos boarded that last boat in the flotilla and, after being attacked with metal rods, killed nine of their attackers, they were acting in a world without the moral authority to give them the benefit of the doubt. By appearances they were shock troopers from a largely white First World nation willing to slaughter even “peace activists” in order to enforce a blockade against the impoverished brown people of Gaza . Thus the irony: In the eyes of a morally compromised Western world, the Israelis looked like the Gestapo.

This, of course, is not the reality of modern Israel . Israel does not seek to oppress or occupy – and certainly not to annihilate – the Palestinians in the pursuit of some atavistic Jewish supremacy. But the merest echo of the shameful Western past is enough to chill support for Israel in the West.

The West also lacks the self-assurance to see the Palestinians accurately. Here again it is safer in the white West to see the Palestinians as they advertise themselves – as an “occupied” people denied sovereignty and simple human dignity by a white Western colonizer. The West is simply too vulnerable to the racist stigma to object to this “neo-colonial” characterization.

Our problem in the West is understandable. We don’t want to lose more moral authority than we already have. So we choose not to see certain things that are right in front of us. For example, we ignore that the Palestinians – and for that matter much of the Middle East – are driven to militancy and war not by legitimate complaints against Israel or the West but by an internalized sense of inferiority. If the Palestinians got everything they want – a sovereign nation and even, let’s say, a nuclear weapon – they would wake the next morning still hounded by a sense of inferiority. For better or for worse, modernity is now the measure of man.

And the quickest cover for inferiority is hatred. The problem is not me; it is them. And in my victimization I enjoy a moral and human grandiosity – no matter how smart and modern my enemy is, I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only reflect a moral superiority, while my enemy’s wealth proves his inhumanity.

In other words, my hatred is my self-esteem. This must have much to do with why Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s famous Camp David offer of 2000 in which Israel offered more than 90% of what the Palestinians had demanded. To have accepted that offer would have been to forgo hatred as consolation and meaning. Thus it would have plunged the Palestinians – and by implication the broader Muslim world – into a confrontation with their inferiority relative to modernity. Arafat knew that without the Jews to hate an all-defining cohesion would leave the Muslim world. So he said no to peace.

And this recalcitrance in the Muslim world, this attraction to the consolations of hatred, is one of the world’s great problems today – whether in the suburbs of Paris and London , or in Kabul and Karachi , or in Queens , N.Y. , and Gaza . The fervor for hatred as deliverance may not define the Muslim world, but it has become a drug that consoles elements of that world in the larger competition with the West. This is the problem we in the West have no easy solution to, and we scapegoat Israel – admonish it to behave better – so as not to feel helpless. We see our own vulnerability there.

FULL ARTICLES

UN CONDEMNS ISRAEL FIRST, INVESTIGATES LATER

UN condemns Israel first, investigates later
By Rex Murphy
The National Post (Canada)
June 5, 2010

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/05/rex-murphy-un-condemns-israel-first-investigates-later

I don’t suppose the world needs to remember Rwanda to note how sluggish in the face of imminent horror the United Nations is and can be. If that is not a sufficient cue, we could bring in other examples of areas of great threat or immiseration or both: Darfur, Tibet, Chechnya, North Korea, Zimbabwe, the Congo or Iran. On these the UN has the patience of a stone but only some of its energy.

But torpid as is its nature, and comatose as are its eternal deliberations, on one subject, and toward one state, the United Nations acquires a strange and uniquely transformative power. Bring Israel under its gaze and the diplomatic sloths at UN headquarters morph into the swiftest of gazelles. From lotus-eaters to adrenalin junkies in the twinkling of an eye. Quite amazing, really.

So naturally when the debacle over the so-called “freedom flotilla” – news media should be wary of letting activists choose the names of things – roared into the headlines, the UN reacted at the diplomatic equivalent of the speed of light. The Security Council issued its “condemnation,” and in a wonderful reversal of cause and effect also called for an investigation into what it had “condemned.” And the cruellest joke on the planet, what the UN with unbounded irony refers to as its Human Rights Council, issued, as unfailingly in every previous international incident involving Israel it has, a condemnation as well.

If the flotilla’s real purpose was to bring aid, then merely by complying with Israel’s request to dock at Ashdod – as five of the ships did, with no blood shed and no international headlines – the supplies on the sixth ship would now be in Gaza. In reality, it was exercise in early 21st century propaganda on the battlefield of world opinion. Its only purpose was to challenge and delegitimize Israel’s blockade of ships travelling to Gaza – a blockade, as too many news reports fail to emphasize, which up until this “incident” was also being maintained by Egypt. That the Egyptian government, until a few days ago, mirrored in its actions Israel’s concerns about what might get shipped into Hamas is the only real obstruction in the otherwise perfectly concentrated anti-Israel narrative.

As to the “peace activists” on that sixth ship, the ones who received the Israeli soldiers boarding the ship with bats, pipes, knives and chains – well, the video footage of the moments preceding the boarding and the boarding itself will make most rational people review their understanding of peace and activism and some of the organizations that fly the flags of these conveniently fungible designations.

Any real investigation of the flotilla will not confine itself to the boarding, but include an equally scrupulous inquiry into the origins of some of its actors, its unstated as well as it stated aims, and the facility and speed with which it revved up the engine of international protest against Israel. It seemed like half the world took to the streets in less than half a day.

This was but one installment in the long and continuous campaign to isolate Israel, and to turn that state in the eyes of international opinion into a pariah, to erode its legitimacy and to break its will. You’ve seen the branding. Apartheid Israel. Israel is the worst thing to happens to Jews since the Holocaust. Racist Israel. Imperialist Israel.

The campaign has been remarkably successful, which is much to Israel’s woe and may be to the world’s woe as well. There are far larger, more egregious causes for the world’s attention than the episode off Gaza last Sunday, greater threats and deeper anxieties. But it is truly worth remarking that when Israel is in the dock, protest rage goes epidemic. To use that vile term so often recently turned upon Israel when it acts in its self-defence, the response is extravagantly “disproportionate.”

I truly do not know why this is so. Israel is a sanctuary state established after one almost successful attempt just two generations ago to rid all the world of Jews. And Israel is now in the shadow of a fundamentalist, ferociously anti-Israel theocracy which is about to equip itself with nuclear weapons. Perhaps, alas, under the threat of a second attempt.

Yet somehow Israel is the rogue, the barbarian nation, the only state on earth that can energize the professionally lethargic diplomats in the great tower of hypocrisy on the East River. Strange and dangerous times.

“THE UNRESTRAINED ASSAULT ON ISRAEL IS UNPRECEDENTED. NO OTHER NATION GENERATES SUCH LANGUAGE OR FOCUS”

A Flotilla of Demonisation
By Dvir Abramovich
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) / The Age (Australia)
June 11, 2010

Oceans of ink have been poured about the flotilla incident. By now, with the copious documentation and viewing of the video clips, the facts about the aims of those on board, their terrorist links and about what really happened on board, are gradually emerging.

But the speed and intensity by which the world recklessly rushed to blame Israel, and only Israel, and the scale and venom of the reaction, has left me speechless. Until now.

I don’t know how to depict a world that clamours to indict Israel while exonerating its enemies, that uses double standards in promoting false and baseless accusations, and that has forgotten history so as to use the language of the Holocaust to portray Israelis as the epitome of evil. I don’t know what to make of a world that is silent when Israelis die in homicidal bombings or rocket attacks, or a Europe that tries to seek forgiveness for its colonial past by defaming Israel time and again and is silent when atrocities are committed against Israelis. I am still shocked by intellectual and cultural figures who ceaselessly denounce Israel, leading the charge for boycott and divestment, and seek Israel’s isolation.

It’s hard to understand why countries, journalists and commentators have turned a blind-eye to the obvious provocative nature of the flotilla, the role Hamas plays in the suffering of Gaza, or to its charter that calls for the destruction of Israel, or to the fact that when Egypt opened its borders with Gaza shortly after the incident, thousands of residents massed at the border, hankering to get out - only to be stopped by Hamas. It’s hard to fathom why TV channels, radio stations and newspapers have sought to paint a one-sided picture that takes no account of Israel’s account and defensive needs.

A clear-eyed examination of the facts would ask: if the Turkish convoy was only interested in delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza, why did it not accept Israel’s offer to peacefully off load the relief in the Israeli port of Haifa for transport into Gaza? After all, Israel ships into Gaza 15,000 tonnes of food and medical supplies every week.

The IHH, the Turkish group who organised the convoy, has been named in a US Federal court as having an “important role” in the attempt to blow up an LA airport. As organizer Greta Berlin confessed, the flotilla was not about humanitarian aid, but about breaking the blockade. Military experts have pointed to the links IHH has with Hamas and global jihad movements.

But beyond the actual incident, another aspect that is becoming disturbingly evident is the blistering demonisation, and delegitimisation of Israel. And the viciousness of such vilification by the media, and international governments who should know better, is mind-blowing. As philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote: “The flood of hypocrisy, bad faith and, ultimately, disinformation, that seems to have just been waiting for this pretext to flow into the breach and sweep across the media worldwide - as is the case every time the Jewish state slips up and commits an error - is by no means acceptable.”

How many journalists have explained that both Israel and Egypt have imposed a naval blockade of Gaza, and that Israel did so to prevent the re-arming of the Iranian-backed Hamas? How many journalists have noted that no country allows ships to enter its waters without inspection for illicit goods of military weapons and ammunition? Elie Wiesel rightly points out: “We know that the six vessels of the flotilla were chartered by pro-Hamas groups, the initiative coming from the most militant wing of Hamas. How could Israel be sure that they did not carry weapons to kill and destroy?

How many journalists have written about Gaza being used as a base for the launching of thousands of rockets into Israeli towns in a murderous and relentless war of attrition? How many journalists have alerted readers to the brutal Hamas regime in Gaza that is stockpiling weapons for eventual targeting of Israeli cities, violently puts down any political opponents, and is slowly imposing fundamentalist Islamic law?

How many readers know that one of the passengers, rejecting an Israeli request to berth the ship for inspection, replied: “Shut up and go back to Auschwitz” while another blockade runner said: “We’re helping Arabs going against the US. Don’t forget 9/11, guys”.

The virulent call for Jews to return to the extermination camp of Europe provides a glaring and bloodcurdling insight into the mindset of those on board.

And the hypocrisy is something to reflect on. The unrestrained assault on Israel is unprecedented. No other nation generates such language or focus.

Consider that no similar condemnation and media attention has been applied to North Korea’s recent sinking of a South Korean boat and its monstrous regime, or to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and oppression of its citizens, or to the genocide in Darfur and Congo, or to Zimbabwe’s dictator, or to the Russian invasion of Georgia, or the human rights abuse in Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or to the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and Tibet, or to India’s military occupation of Muslim Kashmir. And the list goes on.

As one commentator observed, these dictators must be sitting back and laughing at the world’s reaction to the flotilla episode given their crimes. Or as Tom Gross notes about the recent killing of an al-Qaeda leader, “plus his wife, three of his daughters, his granddaughter, and other men, women, and children” by an American missile strike: “No one seems to be getting hysterical about this anywhere in the world. Now imagine if Israel had been involved . . .”

The EU representative for foreign affairs, Catherine Ashton, demanded an opening of the Gaza blockade. Yet, the EU, since 2002, has insisted that no one deal with Hamas until it recognised Israel’s right to exist and renounce violence. Hamas has not done so. The President of Bosnia compared the Gaza blockade to the siege of Sarajevo of the 1990s where about 10,000 people died.

News agency Reuters has just admitted that it cropped images so as to show Israel in a negative light. In the uncut photo, you can see the hand of an unidentified commander holding a knife over an Israeli soldier lying on the deck of the ship. In the Reuters photo, the knife is missing.

And what was Fairfax Media’s journalist Paul McCeough thinking when he described Israeli soldiers as hyenas. Did he not feel that such a description was loaded with inflammatory bias? Could he not think of another turn of phrase? Such language is extravagantly prejudicial and hurtful, drawn from vocabulary and a time we thought had been relegated to the dustbin of history.

Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas told Rabbi David Nesenoff that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to ‘‘Germany, Poland” - where 6 million people were murdered. Her on-camera comments embodied in many ways the disproportionate hostility exhibited towards the Jewish state by intelligent and educated people. Whether Thomas really meant that Israel should disappear, or that a mass expulsion of Jews should take place is unknown. But her words echo a worrying trend in which people are openly talking about a world without Israel. And I just don’t mean the Iranian President who wants Israel wiped off the map.

Such incitement only fuels anti-Jewish sentiment.

Over the last week, a Jewish student wearing a yarmulke was assaulted at Sydney University. Unsurprisingly, The Northwest Intelligence Network reports: “A palpable animosity against Israel and the Jews, most recently exacerbated by media bias with regard to the nature of the aid flotillas to Gaza, are generating a new and vicious level of anti-Semitism worldwide.”

Across the Arab world, hateful and anti-Semitic newspaper cartoons have fanned the flames of intolerance. In Al-Watan, Qatar, a hook nosed, black-hatted Jew with tentacles holds a bloody knife and a gun; in Al Iqtisadiyya, Saudi Arabia, a flag with the Swastika is shown over a Star of David, with an image of a skull and crossbones.

[Tom Gross adds: see here for these cartoons, where Dvir Abramovich derives them from.]

The Turkish government has labelled the Israeli raid a massacre, and likened it to 9/11. Its ambassador to the US said last Friday that Hamas is a key and necessary part of the “Final solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such comments, inadvertent as they may be, would horrify those who know history. Turkey, part of NATO, who wants to become a member of the EU, should do well to avoid its self-righteous outbursts and look back at its past - specifically the Armenian Genocide and the way it has treated the Kurdish Independence movement that by some estimates has so far led to the death of 40,000 lives.

Thankfully, the history books are slowly being corrected. Here is what Tony Blair, Special envoy of the Quartet of Middle East peace mediators, said yesterday about the flotilla incident: “There’s no question that there are rockets fired from Gaza and that there are people in Gaza who want to kill innocent Israelis. When it comes to security, I’m 100 per cent on Israel’s side. Israel has the right to inspect what goes into Gaza.” Kuwaiti journalist Abdallah Al-Hadlaq agrees, writing that the outcome of the Israeli navy’s operation was “in direct proportion to the violence” of the flotilla activists.

He further notes that the flotilla organisers are known to have ties with global and regional terror organisations.

Robert Fulford tries to explain the enmity towards Israel by quoting from The Israel Test, a book by George Gilder. Gilder writes: “Without oil, beset by passionate enemies, Israel has nevertheless achieved astonishing, unprecedented success. It now stands second only to the United States in microchips, telecom, software, biotech, medical devices and renewable energy. Per capita, it’s easily the most innovative country on the planet.” Fulford ends his article with this question: “Gilder’s “Israel test” asks how others respond to this achievement. Do we study, admire and emulate it? Or do we consider it a devilish trick and hope to see it destroyed?

I think we all know the answer.

WHAT IS A PEACE ACTIVIST ANYWAY?

Why do the peace activists ignore the violence of Hamas?
By Lindy McDowell
Belfast Telegraph (UK)
June 9, 2010

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/lindy-mcdowell/why-do-the-peace-activists-ignore-the-violence-of-hamas-14834634.html

What is a peace activist anyway? Is there such a thing as a peace passive-ist? And how does a peace activist differ from a plain old pacifist?

Even before the “freedom flotilla” set sail for Gaza, another armada of small loaded, descriptive terms was being launched upon the world.

The “freedom flotilla” we were assured, was carrying “humanitarian aid”. Those on board were “peace activists”. “International peace activists” to boot.

God, how could you be against anything in that lot.

Israel raising (legitimate) concerns about its right to secure its own borders didn’t count in this freedom-fest. If Israel intercepted the aid boats, Israel was always going to look monstrous.

Israel knew that.

But Israel unfortunately didn’t actually have a choice.

Gaza, where the boats were headed, is under the control of the terrorist grouping Hamas which has been responsible for pounding Israeli towns (and Israeli civilians) with increasingly sophisticated missiles for years.

It was to protect Israeli families from Hamas suicide bombers that Israel began erecting its security fence in 2002.

In 2005 Israel (in the interests of peace) moved out of Gaza.

The thanks it got were even more rockets (often supplied by Iran) raining down on its civilian population courtesy of Hamas which charmingly declares itself dedicated to wiping the Israeli people off the face of the earth.

Israel, understandably, has insisted on monitoring what materials go into Gaza and, thus, what (potentially lethal) materials Hamas could have access to.

All of us in the West live in countries which maintain a similar right to ensure the safety of their own civilian populations. Most countries have reasons why they would not be confident to leave this role up to the international community. Israel has at least six million extra reasons.

And interestingly Israel is not the only country involved in the “blockade of Gaza”. Egypt which also has a land border with Gaza (and similar concerns about Hamas) only lifted its blockade after the Mavi Marmara killings.

But it was Israel which was entirely the target of the “freedom flotilla”. Not Egypt. Not even the long-suffering people of Gaza. This wasn’t about getting aid in. It was about getting a propaganda message out.

Tellingly Israeli commanders themselves appeared to have assumed that the “peace activists” onboard the Mavi Mamara would act peaceably.

According to news reports, we now know, however, that the first soldier to rappel on board was battered unconscious. Three Israeli soldiers were disarmed and taken hostage. When found, reports say, one commando was chained up with a gun held to his head. Pictures of the soldiers show them bloodied and beaten. One was shot.

Exactly what happened may not become clear until a full inquiry is held. But there are obviously two sides to this story.

Not that we’ve been getting much of a whiff of that in the Western media. The language, never mind the actions, of the “activists” goes unchallenged.

Gaza is “the biggest open air prison in the world”. (Um, where does that leave North Korea?)

And Israel is entirely responsible for the living conditions endured by the people in Gaza. This despite a recent Amnesty International report on the Hamas repression of the people which cited a campaign of “abductions, deliberate and unlawful killings, torture and death threats.”

The “peace activists” must have missed that one?

HAMAS IS TO BLAME FOR GAZA TRAGEDY

Hamas is to blame for Gaza tragedy
By Eamon Delaney
The Sunday Independent (Ireland)
June 6, 2010

www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/hamas-is-to-blame-for-gaza-tragedy-2209686.html

THE storming last week of the aid convoy to Gaza by Israeli commandos was not only a tragedy for the victims, it was a disaster for Israel and for its many friends in the West, although in the past few years it has been difficult to defend Israel. The storming of these boats, in international waters, shows a flagrant disregard for human safety, but also for international concerns, as does Israel’s misuse of Irish passports for hit jobs in Dubai, and its ongoing building projects on Palestinian land around east Jerusalem, totally undermining any meaningful peace process.

This attack confirms that Israel is locked into a ‘security only’ policy and will blindly strike out at those whom it perceives are against it. In doing so, the Israeli government is condemning another generation of Israelis to live under siege, and to be the citizens of a state that is for many an international pariah. As someone who has taken a supportive attitude to Israel over the years, especially when it comes to the hypocrisy of those who would criticise Israel for responding to attacks on its people and territory, this is not a comfortable thing to write.

But for some time now, making the case for Israel has been hard. In 2006, there was the bloody invasion of Gaza, but at least this was part of an actual conflict and an incursion deliberately provoked by the deadly Hamas, an organisation which has been nothing short of disastrous for the Palestinian people.

Of more lasting damage has been the apparent lack of any serious intent on the part of Israel in entering into the search for peace in the West Bank and in the creation of a Palestinian state. Here, its partners are not Hamas but the moderate Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah. However, Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to stop the building of illegal settlements, especially around Jerusalem. This made a mockery of any meaningful negotiations. It also made a mockery of US president Barack Obama’s promises on the matter. No wonder his peace envoy George Mitchell is in such despair. Having worked his magic in Northern Ireland, Mitchell knows that for any such settlement to work, there has to be a basic foundation of trust and compromise. Amazingly, however, there is now actually some hope of a settlement there with, according to Fatah, the broad parameters in place and new talks about to begin between the two sides. So there may yet be a rare positive side-effect from the flotilla fiasco.

However, for Gaza itself, which is run by Hamas, Fatah’s bitter rivals, the situation looks utterly bleak. Context is everything, after all, and it is worth noting how we have come to this pass. For years, Gaza was administered by Israel but in 2003, finding it too difficult to handle, it uprooted the few Jewish settlements there and withdrew. However, instead of it becoming a pliable Palestinian territory, Gaza fell into the hands of the Hamas organisation who immediately declared their total non-recognition of Israel and used the territory as a base from which to launch attacks. In response, Israel put Gaza under a blockade, which has had severe consequences for the population. Not that Hamas seems to care. This is an organisation which picked a war with Israel that it knew it had no hope of winning. Instead, it launched hundreds of rockets from deep inside residential areas, knowing the Israeli reaction, and over-reaction, would result in civilian deaths. This is how Hamas fights its wars.

And yet none of this deters Hamas. In a Guardian interview, published on the very day of the flotilla-storming, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal almost jauntily looked forward to the next round of “fighting with Israel”. “It won’t be a picnic,” he said and reiterated his organisation’s complete unwillingness to recognise the original Israeli state, despite pleading from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, Hamas continues to be funded by the Syrians and Iranians, anxious to stoke bloodshed, but suitably far away enough not to suffer the consequences. With proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad needn’t feel too disappointed that he hasn’t yet got nuclear weapons so that he can fulfil his repeatedly stated ambition of “wiping Israel off the map”. (And still Western critics say Israel should get over its hang-up with the ‘holocaust’!)

The reality is that Hamas should be blamed for bringing ruin and destruction to the people of Gaza. Inside the coastal territory, Hamas now enforces an authoritarian regime, and has imposed a repressive Islamic culture, which has, thankfully, whittled away its popular vote of 2006. Not that the residents will have a chance to express this, given that Hamas has cancelled elections and forcibly and bloodily evicted its rivals in the Fatah movement.

These are awkward questions for the flotilla volunteers. Granted they were on a humanitarian mission, but it was also a political gesture of solidarity with the besieged territory. And yet despite the blockade, Hamas has managed to get plenty of arms into Gaza, mainly through desert tunnels, and has been able to launch hundreds of rocket attacks into Israel.

Meanwhile, the US and most European states also regard Hamas as a terrorist organisation and treat it as such. Of course, many observers now feel that Israel should simply recognise Hamas as the administrator of Gaza and deal with it accordingly, however unpalatable this might be. After all, the Israelis said they would never deal with Yasser Arafat and the PLO but they ended up doing a peace deal with them. In that case, the PLO eventually recognised Israel and the argument is that Hamas would grudgingly do the same if given a durable peace settlement and the lifting of the blockade. This would be quite similar to Northern Ireland where Sinn Fein still holds out its aim of a united Ireland while recognising the ‘de facto’ rule or ongoing administration of Northern Ireland by the British.

If there is no such agreement, it is hard to see where this will end up. Israel cannot destroy Hamas and the more it attacks it and enforces the blockade of Gaza, the more it will reinforce Hamas. Hamas, however, cannot destroy Israel or wish it away. Any hope of that evaporated long ago, with the continued defeat of the neighbouring, and much larger, Arab countries when they went to war against Israel over the decades. Egypt and Jordan now have peace agreements with Israel, and Syria is close to one. (Although rogue state Iran is trying to develop the bomb.)

But in the meantime, the question for Israel is how does it deal with a hostile neighbour who doesn’t even recognise its right to exist. Now there’s one for the ever-patient George Mitchell to ponder.

ANTI-SEMITISM IN PRINT TOO

Articles in Arab newspapers are equally disturbing. For example, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority (funded by the U.S. government and the European Union, among others), says Jews are “people who have nothing to do with humanity” – which echoes a phrase from Nazi Germany.

An editorial in Al-Ahram, one of the main papers in Egypt (also a U.S. ally) says Israelis are “killers of the prophets and the servants of Satan.”

The London-based British-Arab paper Al-Hayat, whose journalists are favored guests on the BBC, says “Israel can be summed up in its entirety by one word: crime.”

In a separate article Al-Hayat (UK) says “the Gaza Strip has become an open-air Nazi concentration camp”. (See pictures here.)

In an editorial, the Jordanian paper Watan, says “There is no one lower, more impure, evil-smelling and humiliating than someone who puts his hand in the hands of the Jews.”

Ammon News (Jordan) says Israel is “the embodiment of the Nazi regime by all means. It does not differ from what the Nazis did to the Jews, if indeed what the Nazis did to the Jews is a historical fact.”

NOT AN ISOLATED OCCURRENCE

Please also see this previous selection of cartoons from the Arab world, that I compiled.

And this selection from elsewhere in the world.

Surely it is obvious that anti-Semitism, both Arab and Western, can only serve to make the Israel-Palestine conflict even more bitter.

THE GUARDIAN

The British paper The Guardian published a record 37 articles, comment pieces and cartoons on the flotilla incident between May 31 and June 9.

At the same time (as usual) they all but ignored the 130 other conflicts around the world – most of which are far more deadly than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (such as the ongoing genocide against Muslim and other minority populations in Burma about which the world cares nothing).

Western media that bash Israel are even silent on the killing of Afghans that their own armies carry out every day. (42 countries have armies in Afghanistan.)

***

Among past dispatches on the flotilla, please see this one for more details.)

-- Tom Gross

THE FORGOTTEN RACHELS

The Forgotten Rachels
By Tom Gross
The Spectator
October 22, 2005

Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb attack on a crowd of teenagers on 16 February 2002.

Even though Thaler was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live, her death has never been mentioned in a British newspaper. [Note: actress Maureen Lipman subsequently did on one occasion, as a result of reading this article.]

Rachel Corrie, on the other hand, an American radical who died in 2003 while acting as a human shield during an Israeli anti-terror operation in Gaza, has been widely featured in the British press. According to the Guardian website, she has been written about or referred to on 57 separate occasions in the Guardian alone, including three articles the Saturday before last.

The cult of Rachel Corrie doesn’t stop there. Last week the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, reopened at the larger downstairs auditorium at the Royal Court Theatre (a venue which the New York Times recently described as “the most important theatre in Europe”). It previously played to sold-out audiences at the upstairs theatre when it opened in April. (It is very rare to revive a play so quickly.)

On 1 November the “Cantata concert for Rachel Corrie” – co-sponsored by the Arts Council – has its world premiere at the Hackney Empire.

NO CULT AROUND THESE RACHELS

But Rachel Thaler, unlike Rachel Corrie, was Jewish. And unlike Corrie, Jewish victims of Middle East violence have not become a cause célèbre in Britain. This lack of response is all the more disturbing at a time when an increasing number of British Jews feel that there has been a sharp rise in anti-Semitism.

Thaler is by no means the only Jewish Rachel whose violent death has been entirely ignored by the British media. Other victims of the Intifada include Rachel Levy (aged 17, blown up in a grocery store), Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus), Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Passover meal), Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children), Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 16 while at home), Rachel Ben Abu (16, blown up outside the entrance of a Netanya shopping mall) and Rachel Kol, 53, who worked at a Jerusalem hospital and was killed with her husband in a Palestinian terrorist attack in July a few days after the London bombs.

Corrie’s death was undoubtedly tragic but, unlike the death of these other Rachels, it was almost certainly an accident. She was killed when she was hit by an Israeli army bulldozer she was trying to stop from demolishing a structure suspected of concealing tunnels used for smuggling weapons.

Unfortunately for those who have sought to portray Corrie as a peaceful protester, photos of her burning a mock American flag and stirring up crowds in Gaza at a pro-Hamas rally were published by the Associated Press and on Yahoo News on 15 February 2003, a month before she died. (Those photos were not used in the British press.)

While Thaler’s parents, after donating their murdered daughter’s organs for transplant surgery, grieved quietly, Corrie’s parents embarked on a major publicity campaign with strong political overtones. They travelled to Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasser Arafat on behalf of their daughter. They circulated her emails and diary entries to a world media eager to publicize them. They have written op-ed pieces, including a recent one in the Guardian.

“EVEN YASSER ARAFAT MIGHT HAVE BLUSHED AT THAT ONE”

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the group with which Corrie was affiliated, is routinely described as a “peace group” in the media. Few make any mention of the ISM’s meeting with the British suicide bombers Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif who, a few days later, blew up Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv pub, killing three and injuring dozens, including British citizens. Or of the ISM’s sheltering in its office of Shadi Sukiya, a leading member of Islamic Jihad. Or of the fact that in its mission statement the ISM said “armed struggle” is a Palestinian “right”.

According to the “media co-ordinator” of the ISM, Flo Rosovski, “‘Israel’ is an illegal entity that should not exist” – which at any rate clarifies the ISM’s idea of peace.

Indeed, partly because of the efforts of Corrie’s fellow activists in the ISM, the Israeli army was unable to stop the flow of weapons through the tunnels near where she was demonstrating. Those weapons were later used to kill Israeli children in the town of Sderot in southern Israel, and elsewhere.

However, in many hundreds of articles on Corrie published in the last two years, most papers have been careful to omit such details. So have actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, co-creators of My Name is Rachel Corrie, leaving almost all the critics who reviewed the play completely ignorant about the background to the events with which it deals.

So in April, when reviewers first wrote about the play, they tended to take it completely at face value. “Corrie was murdered after joining a non-violent Palestinian resistance organisation,” wrote Emma Gosnell in the Sunday Telegraph. The Evening Standard, for example, described it as a “true-life tragedy” in which Corrie’s “unselfish goodness shines through”.

Only one critic (Clive Davis in the Times) saw the play for the propaganda it is. At one point Corrie declares, “The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance.” As Davis notes, “Even the late Yasser Arafat might have blushed at that one.”

But ultimately the play, and many of the articles about Corrie that have appeared, are not really about the young American activist who died in such tragic circumstances. They are about promoting a hate-filled and glaringly one-sided view of Israel.

PHOTOS OF VICTIMS

Please click here to see photos of “the Forgotten Rachels”

Rachel Thaler, 16,
blown up in a pizzeria
Rachel Levi, 19, murdered
while waiting for the bus

Rachel Levy, 17, blown up
in a Jerusalem grocery store

Rachel Charhi, 36, blown up
while sitting in a café

Rachel Gavish, 50, killed with her
husband and son while at home

Rachel Kol, 53, who worked for
20 years in the neurology lab at
Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital,
murdered with her husband in a
drive-by shooting by the Fatah
al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, in
July 2005 (in the midst of a
supposed Palestinian truce)

Rachel Ben Abu, 16, killed with
her teenage friends by a suicide
bomber at the Netanya shopping
mall, in July 2005 (in the midst
of a supposed Palestinian truce)

Rachel Shabo, 40, murdered with
her three sons aged 5, 13 and 6,
while sitting at home

For other background to today’s events, please see text, photos and videos here:

* Videos, articles and notes about the tragic incident off the coast of Israel

* Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size swim pools: what the media won’t report about Gaza

* “The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million – that number again”

FULL ARTICLES

6 MILLION – THAT NUMBER AGAIN

Those troublesome Jews
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post
June 4, 2010

The world is outraged at Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey denounces its illegality, inhumanity, barbarity, etc. The usual U.N. suspects, Third World and European, join in. The Obama administration dithers.

But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel – a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.

In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan. And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded (“quarantined”) Cuba. Arms-bearing Russian ships headed to Cuba turned back because the Soviets knew that the U.S. Navy would either board them or sink them. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry.

Oh, but weren’t the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel’s offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza – as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.

Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel’s inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.

Israel has already twice intercepted ships laden with Iranian arms destined for Hezbollah and Gaza. What country would allow that?

But even more important, why did Israel even have to resort to blockade? Because, blockade is Israel’s fallback as the world systematically de-legitimizes its traditional ways of defending itself – forward and active defense.

(1) Forward defense: As a small, densely populated country surrounded by hostile states, Israel had, for its first half-century, adopted forward defense – fighting wars on enemy territory (such as the Sinai and Golan Heights) rather than its own.

Where possible (Sinai, for example) Israel has traded territory for peace. But where peace offers were refused, Israel retained the territory as a protective buffer zone. Thus Israel retained a small strip of southern Lebanon to protect the villages of northern Israel. And it took many losses in Gaza, rather than expose Israeli border towns to Palestinian terror attacks. It is for the same reason America wages a grinding war in Afghanistan: You fight them there, so you don’t have to fight them here.

But under overwhelming outside pressure, Israel gave it up. The Israelis were told the occupations were not just illegal but at the root of the anti-Israel insurgencies – and therefore withdrawal, by removing the cause, would bring peace.

Land for peace. Remember? Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land – evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack.

(2) Active defense: Israel then had to switch to active defense – military action to disrupt, dismantle and defeat (to borrow President Obama’s description of our campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda) the newly armed terrorist mini-states established in southern Lebanon and Gaza after Israel withdrew.

The result? The Lebanon war of 2006 and Gaza operation of 2008-09. They were met with yet another avalanche of opprobrium and calumny by the same international community that had demanded the land-for-peace Israeli withdrawals in the first place. Worse, the U.N. Goldstone report, which essentially criminalized Israel’s defensive operation in Gaza while whitewashing the casus belli – the preceding and unprovoked Hamas rocket war – effectively de-legitimized any active Israeli defense against its self-declared terror enemies.

(3) Passive defense: Without forward or active defense, Israel is left with but the most passive and benign of all defenses – a blockade to simply prevent enemy rearmament. Yet, as we speak, this too is headed for international de-legitimation. Even the United States is now moving toward having it abolished.

But, if none of these is permissible, what’s left?

Ah, but that’s the point. It’s the point understood by the blockade-busting flotilla of useful idiots and terror sympathizers, by the Turkish front organization that funded it, by the automatic anti-Israel Third World chorus at the United Nations, and by the supine Europeans who’ve had quite enough of the Jewish problem.

What’s left? Nothing. The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals, and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing onto a consensus document that singles out Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons – thus de-legitimizing Israel’s very last line of defense: deterrence.

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million – that number again – hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists – Iranian in particular – openly prepare a more final solution.

TURKEY MUST BE THE FOCUS OF ANY INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATION

Turkey’s Erdogan bears responsibility in flotilla fiasco
Editorial
The Washington Post
June 5, 2010

WESTERN GOVERNMENTS have been right to be concerned about Israel’s poor judgment and botched execution in the raid against the Free Gaza flotilla. But they ought to be at least as worried about the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which since Monday has shown a sympathy toward Islamic militants and a penchant for grotesque demagoguery toward Israel that ought to be unacceptable for a member of NATO.

On the opposite page today, Turkey’s ambassador to the United States makes the argument that Israel had no cause to clash with the “European lawmakers, journalists, business leaders and an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor” who were aboard the flotilla. But there was no fighting with those people, or with five of the six boats in the fleet. All of the violence occurred aboard the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara, and all of those who were killed were members or volunteers for the Islamic “charity” that owned the ship, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH).

The relationship between Mr. Erdogan’s government and the IHH ought to be one focus of any international investigation into the incident. The foundation is a member of the “Union of Good,” a coalition that was formed to provide material support to Hamas and that was named as a terrorist entity by the United States in 2008. In discussions before the flotilla departed, Turkish officials turned down offers from both Israel and Egypt to deliver the “humanitarian” supplies on the boats to Gaza and insisted Ankara could not control what it described as a nongovernmental organization.

Yet the IHH has certainly done its best to promote Mr. Erdogan. “All the peoples of the Islamic world would want a leader like Recep Tayyip Erdogan,” IHH chief Bulent Yildirim proclaimed at a Hamas rally in Gaza last year. And Mr. Erdogan seems to share that notion: In the days since an incident that the IHH admits it provoked, the Turkish prime minister has done his best to compete with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah’s Hasan Nasrallah in attacking the Jewish state.

“The heart of humanity has taken one of her heaviest wounds in history,” Mr. Erdogan claimed this week. He has had next to nothing to say about the slaughter of Iranians protesting last year’s fraudulent elections, but he called Israel’s actions “state terrorism” and a “bloody massacre” and described Israel itself as an “adolescent, rootless state.” His foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said in Washington on Tuesday that “this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey” -- an obscene comparison to events in which more than 2,900 genuinely innocent people were killed.

Mr. Erdogan’s crude attempt to exploit the incident comes only a couple of weeks after he joined Brazil’s president in linking arms with Mr. Ahmadinejad, whom he is assisting in an effort to block new U.N. sanctions. What’s remarkable about his turn toward extremism is that it comes after more than a year of assiduous courting by the Obama administration, which, among other things, has overlooked his antidemocratic behavior at home, helped him combat the Kurdish PKK and catered to Turkish sensitivities about the Armenian genocide. Israel is suffering the consequences of its misjudgments and disregard of U.S. interests. Will Mr. Erdogan’s behavior be without cost?

For other background to this story, please see text, photos and videos here:

* Videos, articles and notes about the tragic incident off the coast of Israel

* Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size swim pools: what the media won’t report about Gaza

* “Rachel Corrie is on Her Way” – Due to attempt to land shortly in Gaza