I can’t recall who wrote this or where. All I know is that some libertarian had asserted that the evangelical leader Pat Robertson was a traitor for advising Israel against appeasing the United States of America.
Come again?
Patriots for a sane American foreign policy—myself included—ought to encourage all America’s friends to push back and do what’s in their national interest, not ours.
More so than most, libertarians know the U.S. often acts unjustly. Why then would we want our friends to prostrate themselves before us? Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states, who resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best stopgaps against hegemonic overreach.
Such libertarians generally concede the U.S. should not override the sovereignty of other nations. That some make an exception for Israel, illustrates how irrational hatred distorts principles and their consistent application.
Category Archives: Israel
Director of Premier Israeli Free-Market Think Tank Responds to ‘Reality on the Palestinian Ground’
Free Markets, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Terrorism
Daniel Doron, director of The Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress, and a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, responds to “Reality on the Palestinian Ground“:
Dear Ilana,
As usual you write brilliantly, and with incandescent moral passion. Two small remarks:
Yes, we should hold the Palestinians responsible for their actions, but we should consider (even when sentencing a murderer) extenuating circumstances.
Palestinian society was destroyed during the 1936-9 “Arab revolt” when the British for their nefarious divide-and-rule purposes established the arch terrorist Haj Amin El-Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem. He embarked not only on a war against Jews and the British but mostly on his own people, assasinatng many of his political opponents, and making most of the Arab elites flee their country. This is why in 48 Palestinian society, deprived of its traditional legitimate leadership and at the mercy of terrorists and hired hands, could not undertake a project of state building.
The Mufti’s wholesale liquidation of any alternative leadership is also the reason why while all other Arab dictators have an opposition, albeit in exile, Araft had none. All potential opposition was simply eliminated or terrorized.
So was the Arab population. It was not only terrorized but it has been, since Oslo, subject to the most horrendous camapign of indoctrination and brainwashing (with funds donated by Europe and the US). Before Oslo hundreds of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel, and they could have created mayhem and destruction had they tried to engage in terrorism. But terrorist incidents were far and few between until Oslo brought Arafat and his criminal gangs to the West Bank and Gaza, and until the Arab population was subject to intnese brainwashing. (Consider what three years of Geobbles indoctrination did to a nation that was reputedly very civilized!)
Another factor that is often neglected is that Palestinian factions are usually proxies of Arab nations plus Iran and Saudi privateers. They are financed by them and advance their intra-Arab rivalries. The only factor that unites them is hatred for Israel, which they exploit to advance these Arab imperialist interests, all the while betraying their own people and their best interests.
Best,
Daniel
Reality on the Palestinian Ground
Having superimposed their phantasmagoric narrative about Iraq on the world, Bush and Rice have set about validating the Palestinian parallel universe. They are now forcing Israel to let Hamas, whose plank includes the destruction of Israel, to campaign openly in East Jerusalem. Bush thinks he can change reality by announcing that forthwith, Hamas is just another party in the smorgasbord of Palestinian ‘democracy.’
Semantics, however, don’t alter facts. No amount of wanking with words is going to change that Palestinians, unlike their Israeli neighbors, don’t live under the rule of enlightened Western law, don’t have a free and ferociously critical media or liberal courts, and are more likely to approve when their coreligionists strap on belts of nails and dynamite and blow up innocents…
The excerpt is from “Reality on the Palestinian Ground.” Feel free to comment.
Lay Off Pat Robertson
Pat Robertson, “a life long supporter of Israel,” is being attacked for saying that God “has enmity against those who divide [His] land,’ suggesting He does not look kindly on Sharon. But as Ariel Sharon lies gravely ill , felled by a massive stroke, the seething cesspool known as the Palestinian Street has been rejoicing. Smiling children hold up placards with the words, “Sharon Die.” (Look at them; aren’t they precious?)
The Palestinians’ official leadership has been slightly more somber; the Arab world, after all, is and has always been more radical and militant than its leaders. As Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami once noted, “It is a peculiarity of the Arab political order that many of the rulers and the dynasties are more moderate than the populace.” Hamas, the Palestinians’ unofficial representative—it is expected to win the upcoming democratic parliamentary elections—has been leading these terrifying tykes in celebration.
Every bit as bent and brutal are the offerings on assorted hard-Left websites. The Counterpunch cranks, for example, set a similar tone with articles entitled: “Stroke of Luck? Political Hemorrhage in Israel.” Written by an Arab, the piece was no match in its pixelated glee for “Sharon Meets His Maker,” by an expatriate Israeli.
Far and away the most hateful anti-Israel-cum-anti-Semitic tracts are penned by Jews. For instance, the revisionist, pseudo-scholarly campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is the handiwork of Jews: “the New Historians.”
I have no doubt that were he alive today, Karl Marx would be a “New Historian.” Marx was one of the most notorious anti-Jewish thinkers. “Money is the jealous God of Israel, besides which no god may exist,” he wrote. In A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson presents an overview of Marx’s prolific anti-Semitism. Johnson has concluded that the archetype Jew in Marx’s thinking was replaced by the archetype capitalist.
Another marginal expatriate Israeli accused Bibi Netanyahu of dancing on Sharon’s grave. No links or quotes were offered in support of this inflammatory assertion. The commentator simply superimposed his twisted tantrum on innocent position statements made by the Netanyahu camp. The golem in question garnished his anti-Sharon prolixity with left-liberal root-causes rot: he contends a lone Jew—Rabin’s murderer—is to blame for the anarcho-terrorist society under construction, adjacent to Israel.
Sharon is old, overweight, and overburdened. I happen to think those realities caught up with him! Robertson disagrees. Like them or not, his theological beliefs include the idea that one will reap God’s wrath if one defies His wishes, as Robertson construes them. Big deal! Those who’ve been protesting Robertson with the greatest indignity are also the squawkers who were mum when Iran’s Majnun-in-Chief vowed to annihilate Israel. Let a Muslim cleric with a bucket of lopped off clitorises in the shed (I didn’t say that; Kathy Griffin did) make some or other ridiculous statement and it’s face to Mecca and keister up in the air for these bootlickers.
Robertson may be tactless, but his attackers are hypocrites. If they care so much about Sharon, let them turn the arrows in their quiver on the Palestinian Street, or on the hard-Left, or on other chronic loathers of Israel—and of civilization and liberty.