I have had it.
There comes a point where the level of disgust reaches such a crescendo that it makes me want to rip my left arm directly out of the socket so as to beat myself senseless with it.
{Now there is an image for you to carry through your day!}
Look, I have a question. How is it that western-left venues always harp on alleged Jewish atrocities in the Middle East, such as the latest wholly justified Gaza incursion, while almost entirely ignoring the much more significant and perverse Muslim-on-Muslim, Sunni versus Shia violence throughout that part of the world featuring beheadings, no less?
It is profoundly unjust, which is part of the reason that Matti Friedman's work for Tablet magazine uncovering institutionalized anti-Israel / anti-Jewish media bias in "Operation Protective Edge" resonates so well.
A few years ago I wrote a brief piece entitled, Israel 1242 - Tibet 18 which garnered some attention and in which I noticed the following:
A basic tag search of the Daily Kos blog reveals that between Feb 21, 2009 and today there were a grand total of 18 essays on the topic of Tibet. That is a total of 18 essays over the period of about 13 months on a left political blog with over 200,000 registered users. During that exact same period of time, however, there were 1242 diaries on the subject of Israel...
In truth, these people do not really care about human rights at all for if they did they would care about the human rights of people who do not happen to live in Ramallah or Gaza City. If they honestly cared about human rights they would care about the Tibetans. They would care about Darfur. They would care about Congo and Chechnya.
They don't.
1242 to 18.
The blatant hypocrisy is astounding.The point, of course, is that the grassroots / netroots of the Democratic party in the United States, and the western-progressive left, as a whole, excoriates Israel far-and-away out of all proportion to Israeli-Jewish sins. Those who read these pages know this. The problem is getting the rest of them to understand the nature of the ongoing misinformation campaign against the Jews of the Middle East.
Let us look at one small example from Peter Beinart that the Elder quoted last Thursday, September 18.
Beinart claims:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the story of a powerful state oppressing a stateless people. But it’s also the story of rival, equally legitimate, nationalisms.This is simply, wholly, and entirely false.
These two brief lines show us very clearly that Beinart has swallowed the so-called "Palestinian narrative" whole. He lapped up every ounce of poison cream and believes wholeheartedly in The Great Inversion of 1967 that Joshua Muravchik recently wrote about in Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel and that the Elder recently reviewed. Beinart's first big mistake, therefore, is buying into the nonsense that the conflict is between a powerful state and a small, helpless, largely innocent native population.
This is not only false, it is precisely the Arab propaganda line that the PLO first started hawking, upon Soviet tutelage, in the mid 1960s. It sounds good from a semi-academic, post-colonial, Edward Saidian perspective, but it also happens to be historical hogwash.
There is no "Israeli-Palestinian conflict." What there is is an Arab conflict with everyone else in that part of the world, including the Jews. We must make it very clear that this is an ongoing, millenia-long aggression by the majority Arab populations against all minorities in the Middle East. The problem arises when we allow acidic and ignorant individuals such as Beinart to decontextualize the conflict by making it seem that Jews are the aggressors when, in fact, Jews are defending themselves from an exceedingly aggressive and hostile Arab majority, as are others, such as the Copts and the Kurds.
The question of Israel is a question of the civil liberties and human rights of the Jewish people. The Arabs hold well over ninety-nine percent of the landmass of the Middle East and control twenty-one countries. These are Algeria, Bahrain, the Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
And, yet, Peter Beinart thinks that the Jewish people, his own people - a people held under a system of submission to a foreign power for thirteen long centuries - needs to cut itself in half to give a state to its enemies on its own minuscule bit of land. And he thinks so despite the fact that the Arabs have always and perpetually turned down the two-state offer. They turned it down in '37 and '47 and '67 and 2000 and 2008... and every moment and every day in between.
Furthermore, the "Palestinians" are not a stateless people quite simply because they are not a distinct and separate ethnicity. The conquering Arabs represent something close to 400 million people throughout that part of the world and they have, over the centuries since Muhammad, claimed all of that territory for themselves while driving out and persecuting both Christians and Jews and all non-Muslims.
Finally, to call "Palestinian" nationalism equivalent to Jewish nationalism is to show a deep and profound disrespect not only for history, but for one's own people. The Jewish people have lived on that land for something over 3,500 years. We are, in fact, the closest thing to an indigenous people that that land has... unless there is some misplaced tribe of Jebusites wandering around somewhere who have eluded notice.
"Palestinian" nationalism, on the other hand, was born a quarter past last Tuesday and represents an entirely aggressive response to Jewish national reconstitution. These are hardly "equivalent" nationalisms and I do not see where the Jewish people are under any obligation (moral, legal, or otherwise) to recognize a people who only recently constituted themselves as a people for the sole purpose of opposing the creation and maintenance of our small home.
In the mean time, I cannot even book a room at the Mecca Hilton.That is quite some beautiful building, wouldn't you say?
The Elder recommended that I give it a shot and I thought, "why not?" So I called the Hilton Corporation and, indeed, I failed in this modest endeavor. I tried twice, in fact, and both times I ultimately found myself listening to muzak.
I also called the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles a couple of times, but they were even less helpful than the Hilton staff.
At one point one of the clerks from Hilton said, "We don't want to exclude anyone," yet, another, perhaps more honest clerk, told me straight-up, "Non-Muslims cannot enter the Holy City of Mecca."
Ya don't say?
And, yet, the left constantly excoriates
It is entirely unjust,
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.