Israel, Zionism and the Media

Month: June 2012

So, as I was saying about valuing life, valuing death…

I recently posted a blog about the Palestinian death cult masquerading as ‘resistance’.

The very next day Challah Hu Akbar broke a story about a Palestinian Kindergarten in Gaza which promotes this particular form of resistance.

This story soon spread like wildfire across the Net invoking predictable reactions on both sides.

What was instructive was contrast between the outrage of people I would call ‘right-thinking’ and the apologists for this particular form of child abuse who, of course, blamed it on Israel and even accused Israelis and their supporters of being hypocrites because Israel teaches its children to behave the same way to Palestinians – apparently.

First, here’s the very brief article from Challah Hu Akbar:

The following photos were taken at a recent graduation ceremony at a Gaza City kindergarten.

According to the director of the kindergarten, they have this every year during the graduation ceremony.

 One of the children is quoted as saying “When I grow up I will be working in Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades, and I will resist the Zionist enemy and fire rockets at it until I die a martyr.” The same child says that he loves “the resistance” and hopes to “kill” Zionists.

Here’s just one image:

Let me remind you – this is a kindergarten.

This story was taken up by YNet News

Here’s a flavour of that article:

One child, Hamza, said “When I grow up I’ll join Islamic Jihad and the al-Quds Brigades. I’ll fight the Zionist enemy and fire missiles at it until I die as a shahid and join my father in heaven.

“I love the resistance and the martyrs and Palestine, and I want to blow myself up on Zionists and kill them on a bus in a suicide bombing,” he said.

During the ceremony the children “demonst


rated” how Israel treats Palestinian prisoners. In the display, handcuffed children depicting inmates were placed in cages, with an “Israeli guard” standing nearby.

Another child depicting an Israeli prison guard placed the head of a “Palestinian prisoner” in a bucket of water to demonstrate how Palestinian prisoners are “tortured” in Israel.

“At every kindergarten graduation ceremony we focus on the children to represent the role of struggling and resistance in the way of Allah so they will grow up to love the resistance and serve the cause of Palestine and Holy Jihad, as well as to make them leaders and fighters to defend the holy soil of Palestine,” one of the teachers said.   

מדמים חייל שמטביע עצור פלסטיני

Most instructive were some of the comments.  Here goes – get the sick bag ready.

Jarda from the Czech republic said:

They are right

You stole their land, you expelled them from their homes. They are right to hate you. I wish them good luck in their fight against intruders.

MO from ‘Palestine’:

What are the kids in Israel doing in their KG? how to make a pizza????
Don’t beleive that 🙂
Hee guys … you are pressing the people in Gaza like a lemon from all sites … what do expect??? 

Marwan, Tel Aviv ‘Palestine’

so how is this different from what settlers teach their kids

oh come now! who do you think you’re kidding with such reports?! we all know that hate & racism are taught in israeli schools 24/7 and everyday of the year! it’s even in every page of the curriculum! so stop trying to fool the world with such lame propaganda stunts… we won’t teach our children to love those who wanna enslave and murder them!

So you see, how hatred justifies the most appalling moral depravity. But this is not ordinary hatred; it is a perverted religious death cult so obscene that it its adherents and apologists have to invent an even greater depravity to justify it resulting in a downward spiral of unimaginable dehumanisation not just of the ‘enemy’ but the self and a society.

You cannot argue or rationalise this kind of nihilism which feeds on itself.

As I continued to read Rabbi Israel Meir Lau’s great memoir, Out of the Depths, today I came across the final words of Hitler’s will written before he committed suicide in the bunker:

Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.

Did not Hitler put uniforms on children and indoctrinate them in Jew-hatred?

 

Israel, Palestine, valuing life, valuing death

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of hearing Rabbi Israel Meir Lau speak at the official opening of the new King David High School in Manchester.

I had heard him on three previous occasions, the first in Birkenau in 1998. You can see a snippet of that speech in the video I posted of the March of the Living here. Rabbi Lau, now Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, mesmerised his audience at King David with a vivid account of his experiences after liberation from Buchenwald concentration camp. He was 8 years old and was at a young persons convalescent camp near Paris.

I won’t rehearse the story here. I suggest you do what I did and that is to buy his memoir ‘Out of the Depths’.

Almost every page contains a heart-rending story, an amazing life-saving incident, a tearful memory. You gasp, you cry with every line and the unfolding of his amazing story.

I was struck at the beginning of the book where Rabbi Lau describes one of the many occasions where his life was saved by what appeared to be a providential hand.

The story I have in mind is heart-breaking and unbearable. Rabbi Lau describes how, as a 7 year old, he was to be placed on a transport with his mother whilst his older brother Naphtali was separated with the men of working age.

Rabbinit Lau knew that she and the women and children were destined for death, whereas those who could work had a chance, at least, for life.

With a mother’s desire to see her child live she literally threw ‘Lulek’ at his brother in order to save him, knowing full well that it was unlikely she would see either of them again. She took the agonising decision to separate herself from her little boy and face almost certain death alone so that he might live.

Her instinct was to do anything she could to save her son.

How different, I thought, when reading this, from those mothers in Gaza and Jenin and across the Palestinian territories who do the exact opposite. Instead of saving their sons and daughters they encourage them to strap suicide belts to their bodies and detonate them in Israel. Then they celebrate their son or daughter as a martyr and rejoice at the deaths their child has caused.

Not all Palestinian mothers think this way, of course, but many, many do.

At the heart of the conflict with its many nuances and complexities lies this awful truth.

The Jewish experience means that we embrace life and mourn loss and regret the killing of innocents – their are always those who do not fit that generalisation, but it is largely and overwhelmingly the case; the Palestinian experience has taught them to embrace death and martydom and exult in its consequences – another generalisation but very often true.

Am Yisrael Chai

 

 

 

Julian Barnes and the truth of history

I have just finished reading Julian Barnes ‘The History of the World in 10½ Chapters‘.

I am currently doing my thing of finding an author I like and then gorging myself on the complete oeuvre.

The book is amusing and thought-provoking and, ultimately, eschatological.

And the end of the ½ chapter, which is titled ‘Parenthesis’, I was struck by a tidbit, a wee morsel of prose which struck a chord about the two parallel narratives with regard to Israel and the Palestinians which I’ll come to shortly.

This dual narrative is familiar to those involved in hasbara and defending Israel and I came face to face with the ‘other side’ on Twitter recently. A guy called Zbigniew was rather annoyed that I was tweeting the good news of the failure of the BDS brigade to stop the performance of Habima, the Israeli national theatre, at the Globe theatre in London where they performed The Merchant of Venice on two consecutive nights.

I have written previously about the shameful attempt by a group of luvvies who should know better to have Habima banned and the disgusting singling out of Israel just because Habima has played in settlements in Judea and Samaria/West Bank. It is, therefore seen as somehow complicit in the counter-narrative of colonialism, land-stealing and general oppression.

Zbigniew told me that Israel was to be ‘loathed’ and when challenged about which other contries he loathed he placed Israel in a group with Syria, Libya and Zimbabwe.

What I will, for the sake of shorthand, call the pro-Pal narrative always sees the conflict as one of good (Pals) against evil (Israel, or more precisely – Jews). Any wrongdoing by an Israeli or group of Israelis confirms them in their demonisation and hatred of Israel.

This is how Z tweeted:

“I think every right minded person should be concerned about Israel and what is happening…”

“does the expulsion and mistreatment of Palestinians not concern you? chants of Death to arabs?”

“Attacks on Arabs by (illegal) settlers, racism towards the african communities? Israel should be loathed!”

Of course, if you want to cherry-pick specific incidents, ignore history, and even fail to ask yourself questions like “why did these (mainly Muslim) Africans come to Israel in the first place rather than Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt etc.” then you will continue to see Israel and the conflict in this myopic and polarised way.

Such views never consider the actions of the other protagonists because you have already decided their cause is just and so whatever Israel does, even the patently good things, always have a malign intent or are dismissed as propaganda or irrelevant, or impossible without US dollars.

So here is the quote from Barnes which I believe so succinctly tells us about why hasbara is not working; historical truth is going the same way as moral relativism:

We all know that objective truth is not attainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what really happened. This God-eyed version is a fake – a charming, impossible fake… But while we know this, we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable; or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; or if we can’t believe this we must believe that 43 per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent. We must do so, because if we don’t we’re lost, we fall into beguiling relativity, we value one liar’s version as much as another liar’s, we throw up our hands at the puzzle of it all, we admit that the victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to the truth.

Too many people – luvvies in the UK, Israelis in Israel, left-wingers and the whole motley crew of dillusionals – are throwing up their hands and then prostrating themselves before the god of fashionable and deluded ‘truth’ that tells them it’s all Israel’s fault and if Israel changed its policies all would be right with the world.

Yet all they do is to give succour to the loathers and haters who have their single cyclopean historical eye put out but then claim, nevertheless, that they can see more clearly.