Monday, March 06, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
There is an important element of the BDS mindset, indeed of the
anti-Israel mindset generally, that provides its practitioners a significant
amount of rhetorical power in any argument, protest or debate: their ability to
ignore every inconvenient fact that gets in the way of their own narrative.
How many times at a rally or debate have we seen these “Friends
of Palestine” confronted with questions about rocket and bombing attacks on
Israeli civilians, about the killing of Palestinians by each other or by Arab
leaders (like Assad of Syria), or about the abuse of women, gays and minorities
in Muslim lands, only to watch them deal with such criticism by:
1. Ignoring it completely
2. When that fails, rolling their eyes and issuing a scoffing
laugh while spinning on their heels and walking away
3. And when that fails, pretending to agree “yes, the
killing of Israeli civilians is completely unacceptable…” followed by the usual
“big but” (as in “…BUT those missiles,
kidnappings and bombings would never have occurred if not for the Occupation™).
Unlike the small child who simply blots out that which they
don’t agree with or understand, the effort to ignore so much history, so many
facts, so much bloodshed delivered by their allies actually takes a great deal
of creative effort on the part of the BDS brigade.
For example, take a look at the elaborate constructs surrounding
the need to ignore peace deals offered to the Palestinians over the last ten
years, nearly all of which would give them 99-100% of the land they claim to
have craved since time immemorial. Now one could make the case that those peace
deals did not include things the Palestinians hold more dearly than land (such
as the so-called “Right of Return”). Or you could highlight the obvious
political division within the Palestinian camp to point out the difficulty of
cutting any deal. Both would expose the Palestinian position as not ready for
reasonable negotiations towards peace, but at least they reflect something
approaching reality.
But rather than go down this route, the boycotters instead
create an elaborate fantasy world in which peace deals everyone knows about
down to the last detail were never actually made. And their constructs include
maps, essays, books, articles, speeches, curricula and all kinds of other
materials that require a huge amount of effort to prove that white is black and
night is day (similar to the fantasy literature around faux “massacres” such as Jenin).
My favorite example of this kind of creepy creativity has
to do with gay rights. As a blogger friend once described, the difference between Israel (which give homosexuals more
legal rights than almost any other country in the world) and the rest of the
Middle East (where homosexuality is legally and religiously outlawed and its
practitioners killed) is “so true they can’t stand it.”
But when the magnitude of this truth became too huge to
ignore, they came up with a novel solution to this problem by inventing the
non-existent phenomena of “pinkwashing.” This term (originated by breast-cancer advocates, as it turns out)
implies that anyone bringing up the issue of gay rights in the Middle East is
doing so as part of a nefarious propaganda campaign designed to distract from
the dark, evil that is Israel and “the Occupation.”
Now I understand that homosexual rights is a challenge for
BDSers, given that their main target are progressives who care about issues
such as gay marriage. And you can only ignore an elephant this large for so
long. But rather than simply accept the fact that Israel is in a superior
position on this issue (and make the reasonable claim that it does not mean
they should be given a pass universally), instead the Israel haters rant and rave about
“pinkwashing” (and now “greenwashing” – which declares Israel’s entire green
technology revolution is also part of a propaganda war) so as to make the
debate about these manufactured controversies, rather than the genuine
underlying issue under discussion.
Naturally, the rights of actual gay human beings in the actual
Middle East (like the plight of actual Palestinian human beings killed by actual
Hamas members and Syrian soldiers) gets lost in all of these creative efforts
to ignore what is inconvenient to the boycotters. And yet they still demand the
moral high ground be granted to them immediately and unconditionally and never
be questioned as to why.
Well ignore, and scoff, and eye-roll and spin all you like BDS. But
the rest of us have taken your measure, and all we see is a bunch of immoral
creeps.
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