Have you ever been short of breath, shaking, nauseated and light-headed in elevators, closed rooms or crowded places? Experienced a panic attack in a high-rise? Do you have an irrational fear of germs? Of strangers or foreigners? Of shadows? Of thunder or lightning? Of spiders? Of public speaking? Afraid of flying?Now look at the examples he gives from "Zionist propaganda:"
If you've experienced any of these, you're suffering from a type of irrational fear called a phobia. These are some of the most common phobias. People suffer from literally hundreds of phobias.
A relatively recent irrational phobia that hasn't even appeared on all the lists is Islamophobia - fear of Islam.
Why, after more than a decade, do Westerners still believe these false assumptions about Islam? What are the sources of the baseless fears feeding these perceptions?
Many of the distorted impressions come from Zionist propaganda:
So, according to Balles, Israeli nomenclature of calling terrorists "terrorists" and of calling disputed territory "disputed territory" are obvious manifestations of Islamophobia. He goes on from there down an irrelevant path that shows his complete misunderatdning of basic English, and from there to conflating Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter with Zionist propaganda.
Israel's use of words like "disputed territory" rather than occupied, "redeeming" for stealing land, "terrorists" rather than resistance fighters for Palestinians, "anti-Semites" for critics of Israel (or "self-hating Jews" if the critics are Jewish).
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) bulletins and lobbying - AIPAC's only purpose is to ensure American support for Israel. No matter what Israel does, it cannot do any wrong.
American Jewish Committee newsletters - despite efforts by Jewish organisations to stifle criticism of Israel and objections to Zionism, anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Not all Jews are Semites. Most Arabs are.
Now, a nonsensical op-ed in a Bahraini newspaper isn't that noteworthy, until you look up Balles' bio:
Dr. Paul Balles has lived and worked in the Middle East for 40 years - first as an English professor (Universities of Kuwait and Bahrain), and for the past ten years as a writer, editor and editorial consultant.So this is not some Arab writing gibberish, but a Western Arabist professor.
You know - an intellectual.
Slight research shows how rigorous his research methods are. From another article of his, published in The Radical Press:
As we have previously discussed the Rabbi Yisrael Rosen quote is wholly fictitious, and as far as I can tell, made up by Egypt's Al Ahram newspaper.
Israeli educators, scholars and politicians openly advocate the annihilation of all Palestinians. Dr Nachum Rakover, a legal scholar, opined: “They voted for killers and sent them to kill us. To call them [civilians] innocent is a tragic comedy… [C]ivilians are partners of the killers.”
Many other politicians called for the need for “wiping off Gaza from the face of earth”, and “annihilating of every moving thing there”. The right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman proposed nuking Gaza following the US example when it dropped the atomic bomb on Japan during World War II.
“All of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants and even their beasts,” cries the religious opinion of Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, the director of the long-established Tsomet Religious Institute.
According to the Pakistan Daily, “Israeli spokeswoman Tzipora Menache stated that she was not worried about negative ramifications the Israeli onslaught on Gaza might have on the way the Obama administration would view Israel. She said ‘You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House.”
Adding to her own boasts, Tzipora Menache said:
You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they [Americans] do to us? We control Congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America, you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel. [all bold is mine. ed.]
The Lieberman quote is similarly a lie. Lieberman called for Israel to force Hamas to surrender the way that the US forced Japan to surrender, and anti-Israel pundits immediately changed that into "Lieberman calls on Israel to nuke Gaza."
How about the quote by "Tzipora Menache"? Here, the scholar Balles goes one better - not only is the quote made up, so is she! Even rabidly anti-semitic websites acknowledge that "Tziporah Menache" does not exist, and they blame this quote on Zionist propagandists (who, they bizarrely claim, are trying to get people to click on Google links with her name to place a virus on their computers.) See this Google search for "Tzipora Menache hoax".
And Balles believes a website with zero credibility, the Pakistan Daily, which regularly publishes anti-semitic articles.
The upshot is that Professor Paul Balles is dumber than the average Rense or Stormfront anti-semite.