Category Archives: Palestinian Authority

Updated: 'Driven' To Stab

Crime, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Palestinian Authority, Propaganda, Reason, Terrorism

Mainstream media and the community of documentarians have “explained” ad nauseam the vexing nuances of the “Palestinian problem.” We know why jobs are unavailable in that otherwise economically viable anarcho-terrorist territory, why government consists of competing terrorist gangs (rather than only one), and why civil society, such as it is, canonizes killers. Israel; it’s all Israel’s fault! [Plagiarized from “The Plight That Never Shuts Up”]

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s watch a professional victim get creative. In this LiveLeak video, our young cherub—what is she, all of 15?—is driven to stab a checkpoint guard. Why do I use the passive form of the verb for a premeditated act of savagery? Read “Coddling Killers” for the framework you need.

Such aggression is an every day occurrence at these checkpoints; alas, it’s not as common on the Internet, which is festooned with ahistoric, fact-challenged “documentaries” such as this one. For one, the crawl text begins with stock propaganda, calling Gaza and the West Bank “occupied territories.” Let me dispel that factoid herewith:

“Prior to 1967,” explains palestinefacts.org., “Jordan had occupied the West Bank and Egypt had occupied the Gaza Strip; their presence in those territories was the result of their illegal invasion in 1948. Jordan’s 1950 annexation of the West Bank was recognized only by Great Britain and Pakistan and rejected by the vast majority of the international community, including the Arab states.”

“International jurists generally draw a distinction between situations of ‘aggressive conquest’ and territorial disputes that arise after a war of self-defense. Former US State Department Legal Advisor Stephen Schwebel, who later headed the International Court of Justice in the Hague, wrote in 1970 regarding Israel’s case:

* Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title.

“Israel only entered the West Bank in 1967 after repeated Jordanian artillery fire and ground movements across the previous armistice lines; additionally, Iraqi forces crossed Jordanian territory and were poised to enter the West Bank. Under such circumstances, even the United Nations rejected Soviet efforts to have Israel branded as the aggressor in the Six-Day War.

Regardless of how many times the Palestinian Arabs claim otherwise, Israel cannot be characterized as a ‘foreign occupier’ with respect to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

[SNIP]

Predictably, and like Swiss clockwork, a RIOT erupted after this, or another, “victim” (the aggressor/stabber, naturally) was arrested. The audacity! I urge you to read “Rah-Rah For Rioters” for the anatomy of a victim in-riot and his enablers.

ERGO: Roadblocks or checkpoints, the quintessential pacifist form of self-defense—akin to lifting your hand in front of your face to shield it from a blow—must be dismantled. And that goes for The wall, which has cut deaths by homicidal bombers by 80 percent.

Don’t you know that Palestinians sans medical care and jobs have a natural right to Israeli markets and manpower (hospitals)? Yeah, that’s the progressive definition of a right.

You say you’re all for shielding girls like the exquisite Sgt. Ma’ayan Na’im, 19, of Bat Yam, who “was murdered (33 others were wounded) when a bomb exploded at a bus stop in downtown Tel Aviv at about 7 a.m., July 11, 2004.

Hmmm. That’s a tough one. I’ll have to think on that…

Update: WALLING. It’s hard to get over the audacity of those Israelis. Their intention to screen and secure ports of entry is just so … UnAmerican. What are they afraid of? Terrorists? A surplus of cheap labor in a recession? Both? C’mon. The duty of a government is to always work against its own people. Have the Israelis learned nothing from the American ship of state?

Apparently so. We now learn that “Israel will Build Barrier Along its Egyptian Border”:

Israel will build a barrier along the entire length of its southern border with Egypt, the Prime Minister’s Office said today in a statement posted on its Web site.
The barrier is meant to keep out “intruders and terrorists,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the statement, including “illegal workers who try to enter Israel by way of its southern border.”
The barrier will cost at least a billion shekels and take several years to construct, the statement said.

Updated: The Golem* Goldstone Goes To Gaza

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Just War, Law, Palestinian Authority, South-Africa, UN

From my new WND column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza”:

“When introducing Judge Goldstone, Fareed Zakaria described the judge as having made his name, among other acts of greatness, in pursuing an end to the political violence that came with apartheid in his home country of South Africa.

Ostracized for his convictions, this writer’s father – Rabbi Ben Isaacson – was a leading anti-apartheid activist. Goldstone had no such history of protest, father assures me. The roaming judge attached himself like a limpet mine to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

Goldstone’s Wiki biography corroborates father’s recollection. The judge joined the cause du jour in ‘the latter years of apartheid in South Africa.’ Goldstone’s “courageous” judicial decisions in the cause of freedom, moreover, comported with what South Africa’s Western system of Dutch-Roman law provided – a system currently being replaced, by the African National Congress, with a blend of tribal and totalitarian laws.

To this expatriate South African, the most anodyne assertion Goldstone made to zombie Zakaria was this one…”

Read the complete column, “The Golem Goldstone Goes To Gaza.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (Jan. 9): A few readers, some via my WND mail box, have told me I’ve erred as far as the meaning of Golem goes. I’m relatively confident that my commonplace use of the term is accurate (if perhaps not true to the original meaning), so I’ve left it. Usually, I hurry to correct blatant errors.

So why am I comfortable with the column’s usage?

I’m an ex-Israeli. My first language is Hebrew. Although I once spoke and wrote a sharp Hebrew (much like my English), slang has since (as in the US and the UK) changed older, popular usage. As old-timers like myself are in the habit of saying, no one speaks Yerushalmic Hebrew on the news any longer as the wonderful Haim Yavin used to. Yavin was the most elegant anchorman in looks and language.

Back to the topic. “Golem” in popular, modern usage is a derogatory term. Call an Israeli of my age group (still way younger than Yavin, of course) a Golem, and, while you’ve not wounded him mortally, you have, in good humor, berated him.

Update III: Middle America Or Meathead’s America?

America, BAB's A List, Christian Right, Human Accomplishment, Iraq, Israel, Just War, Paleoconservatism, Palestinian Authority, Political Philosophy, Republicans, The State, Welfare

THE EXCERPT is from “Is heartland America Ignorant And Gullible?”, my new WND.COM column, now (Sept. 12) on Taki’s:

“Given the perpetual parade of ‘intellectuals’ who are not intelligent in our media — Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS and the ‘parrot press’ — I don’t expect you to be familiar with political philosopher Paul E. Gottfried. Nevertheless, Paul (he’s a friend) is one of the most important intellectuals in America.”

“Historian Eugene Genovese calls Paul incorruptible, ‘an American intellectual of superior talent.’ Author and historian John Lukacs praises Professor Gottfried as ‘a very profound thinker.’ And L. Brent Bozell III salutes his ‘amazing intellectual courage’ — courage in the face of the malign, philistine forces of the liberal and neoconservative mainstream.”

Over the years, I’ve interviewed Professor Gottfried pursuant to the publication of his many books. I do so again on the occasion of the publication of “Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.”

READ THE interview, “Is heartland America Ignorant And Gullible?”, now on WND.COM. And on Taki’s Magazine on the weekend.

Update I (Sept. 11): Please note that the always-genial and brutally candid Paul Gottfried has replied to his detractors in the Comments Section. Some of the critics have been quite harsh (and this forum is moderated).

Update II: Randy, the war on Iraq is not going to be adjudicated again here, not ever. I chronicled the invasion of Iraq at great length, applying fact and every ounce of reason in my possession to repudiate and denounce that war crime. The case is closed! Neoconservative ideologues stand in the dock for aiding and abetting a war crime. Any reader is welcome to read my article archive on the topic (search the blog archives too). I can well imagine that many ideologues who supported the war urgently need to make peace with their maker, or consciences, for their role in a crime of such moral and material magnitude.

Update III (Sept. 12): Hayim, one doesn’t have to endorse everything Paul Gottfried writes or espouses to appreciate his contribution and steadfast principles. As someone who is ostracized by even more factions than Paul, I recognize the strength of character it takes to resist group pressure to conform and compromise one’s notion of right and wrong.

As to the article you cited, and which I skimmed: I have quoted Dershowitz on Israel and find his commentary worthwhile. I do not appreciate the dichotomy—or hypocrisy—the likes of Dershowitz evince in that they are hard-core rightists when it comes to Israel’s right to preserve its ethnic identity. But anyone arguing that the preservation of the historical America is essential to the preservation of freedom itself is a racist in Dershowitz’ books. That aspect of the Jewish Diaspora sickens me. Israelis are nothing like these American Jews.

In “Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians,” I expressed exactly what I thought of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of “The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Norman Finkelstein I include among “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants. Noam Chomsky (‘The Godfather’), Steven and Hillary Rose … Joel Kovel, Tanya Reinhart in Tel Aviv, and Michael Cohen in Swansea—these are but a few of the new anti-Semitism’s leading Jewish lights.”

Where I agree with Paul is in his assertion that there is among the anointed Jewish leadership a crass abuse of “the Holocaust for propagandistic purposes.” No doubt about it. And it’s repulsive. To the extend Finkelstein exposes this, to that extent he makes a valid point. The Holocaust industry makes even me turn away from a catastrophe that has truncated my own family tree.

I also find the premise of the Daniel Goldhagen book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, appalling.

I think that on the whole Joan Peterson’s book is pretty good. If there are a few factual problems—and I don’t know that there are—they serve in this context as a fig leaf for those who would deny the central truth about the Jewish settlement of Israel:

“The territory within which the State of Israel was established did not form part of any larger state that opposed its creation. The territory was, moreover, one where Jews formed a majority on land they had purchased legitimately.”

Unanimously, this Jewish majority issued a declaration of independence promising that ‘the State of Israel will … foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants,’ not for the benefit of mankind. They promised that the country would ‘be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisioned by the prophets of Israel”; that it would ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,’ and ‘safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.”

It is a joke to claim, as the anti-Israel right does, that Israel doesn’t respect the rights of all its inhabitants, Arabs included. Let the Raimondos of this world—hopefully there is only one of his kind—go live/or vacation in the Palestinian Authority.

Above all, it is undeniable that Arabs had trashed the Holy Land throughout their occupation of the place. It took Jews to dry the swamps—they died in droves of malaria doing so—to plant orchards, start industries, and generally build from a howling wilderness a prosperous country.

You won’t find me lamenting that wonderful achievement.

Oy Vey Uyghur!

China, Foreign Policy, Islam, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Palestinian Authority, Russia, Terrorism

“Oy vey, or just oy,” writes Wikipedia, is a [Yiddish] exclamation of dismay or exasperation meaning ‘woe.” Woe indeed. The Uyghurs, as far as I know, are to China as the Chechens are to Russia: fractious Muslims, with mayhem on their minds, a state-of-being also described as a quest for “self-determinism,” when used by left-liberals vis-à-vis the acting-out Palestinians, Uyghurs and Chechens do.

Yet, for the life of me, I cannot locate on Wikipedia a reference to the Muslim faith of the estimable Uyghurs, now rioting in China’s Xinjiang region.

Wikipedia does note, without elaborating, that China sympathized with the US after 9/11, but leaves hanging the reaction of the Uyghurs. Did they dance in the streets as their Palestinian coreligionists did?

Ever consistent (NOT), expect neocons to weigh-in on the side of Uyghur independence (forgetting that they just bemoaned the release from Gitmo of a couple of Uyghurs), as liberals like Obama, on a Disney-like tour to Russia, imperiously counter with calls for Georgian and Chechen independence. Idiots all.