Monday, January 09, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
As every Jew-hater knows, there’s no limit to Jewish cunning.
It’s not just that “the Jews are our misfortune,” as the Nazis put it so
pithily; it’s also that even if there is something that would seem to be very
bad for the Jews themselves, any decent Jew-hater will know that the Jews could
still be behind it. Take it from the Hamas Charter
(Art.22):
“They were behind World War I, when
they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and
controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League
of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War
II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and
paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated
the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security
Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on
anywhere, without having their finger in it.”
Veteran anti-Israel activist (and Hamas fan) Ali Abunimah
usually tries to avoid such crude echoes of the notorious “Protocols of
the Elders of Zion,” but his efforts to appear a bit more sophisticated
can’t quite conceal how much his obsessive demonization of the world’s only
Jewish state is indebted to the oldest hatred.
As reflected in Abunimah’s Orwellian
definition of antisemitism, he is an ardent admirer of the Stormfront-style
rants of Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad, who has repeatedly
peddled preposterous claims about a meeting of minds and happy collaborations
between Zionist Jews and the Nazis. A more recent version of the same theme is
the idea that Israel somehow controls or collaborates with jihadi terror groups
like the savage Islamic State (ISIS) and various Al Qaida-type groups. But as
every good Jew-hater knows, you can’t expose Jewish evil-doing without suffering
a backlash – orchestrated by the Jews, naturally!!! – and so Abunimah recently concluded
that he was facing an “uptick in attacks” that had to be “related” to an
article in which he was supposedly “detailing Israel’s alliance with al-Qaida’s
Syria branch.”
However, as Abunimah knows full well, the “attacks” he
complains about have nothing to do with Israel; instead, he is facing
well-deserved criticism from erstwhile fans who largely share his views on
Israel but are appalled by his failure to condemn Assad’s pivotal role in the
carnage in Syria. It is of course understandable that Abunimah is frustrated to
see cracks in the unified anti-Israel front, but as I have described in two
previous posts (here
&here),
this controversy has been going on for a while and it seems to continue
unabated. In his frustration, Abunimah is now resorting to his usual cheap
tactics, and he is trying to discredit his critics by falsely
claiming they are somehow collaborating with “extreme hasbarists” like
yours truly… The terrifying result is a “Troll equivalent of Israel-Jabhat
al-Nusra alliance.”
So what about these alliances between Israel and Islamist
terror groups that Ali Abunimah sees everywhere?
The article
in which Abunimah is supposedly “detailing Israel’s alliance with al-Qaida’s Syria branch” is a
downright ridiculous attempt to reduce a publication of roughly 260 pages – the
latest
issue of the annual “Strategic Survey for Israel” published by the
Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) – to a few cherry-picked points.
Abunimah devotes one section of his article to the topic “Israel
and al-Qaida in Syria” – a title that already indicates his agenda. He starts
out by noting – doubtless with great satisfaction – that Israel continues to
regard what he fondly calls “the Lebanese resistance movement Hizballah” as a serious
threat. Abunimah then quotes comments on the situation in Syria from page 248
of the report:
“From Israel’s perspective, the
best scenario is the disappearance of the Assad regime, along with the removal
of Iran and Hezbollah from Syria on the one hand, and the defeat of the Islamic
State and the establishment of a moderate Sunni regime in Syria on the other.”
It’s safe to assume that if this is Israel’s preferred
scenario, Abunimah is ardently hoping for the opposite: that Assad will remain
in power, backed by Iran and Hezbollah; perhaps he’s even hoping that the
terror group Islamic State will be able to avoid defeat and will eventually get
around to attacking Israel.
What bothered Abunimah enormously is that the report also
argued that Israel’s best-case scenario had “materialized in limited form in
the Golan Heights, where moderate Sunni rebels are successfully combating both
the Assad regime and the Islamic State.”
Abunimah proceeded to claim that “Israel has long provided
aid and support in the Golan Heights to Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s franchise
in Syria” and he misleadingly asserts that “Moshe Yaalon, one of the report’s authors, publicly acknowledged the Israeli assistance to Jabhat al-Nusra
fighters in 2015, when he was Israel’s defense minister.” But Abunimah’s own
link undermines his claim, because the relevant Times of Israel article emphasized that Israel’s “general policy” was not
to get involved in the war in Syria, and that Israel only “provided
humanitarian assistance to wounded Syrian fighters located near the shared
border … under two conditions – that the fighters don’t let Islamic extremists
… get close to the border, and that they don’t hurt the local [i.e. Syrian] Druze
population.”
Since Abunimah
obviously favors Assad and would surely be pleased to see al-Nusra attack
Israel, it is not surprising that he is upset about Israel’s conditional
humanitarian assistance, designed to keep the border quiet and to keep the
relatives of Israel’s Druze population safe. The fact that he spins this as “Israel’s
alliance with al-Qaida’s Syria branch” just goes to show what a manipulative
liar he is.
But Abunimah’s
attempt to vilify Israel as having an “alliance with al-Qaida’s Syria branch”
is also particularly pathetic in view of the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah –
the Islamist terror groups Abunimah likes to glorify as noble “resistance”
movements – are really not picky about their alliances: plenty of reports reveal the collaboration between Hamas and the
Islamic State group’s Sinai branch, and it is well documented that Hezbollah has
been very busy helping Assad butcher Syrians. Of course, these are alliances
that Abunimah would warmly endorse – not least because when it comes to
individuals and groups that want to destroy Israel, it’s quite obvious that as
far as Abunimah is concerned, no alliance is too sordid. And as long as Abunimah
hopes the “resistance” he champions will eventually turn on Israel, he couldn’t
care less how many Arabs were killed by these groups before they get down to
the eagerly anticipated business of killing Jews.
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