Monday, October 08, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
One of the great frustrations when dealing with BDS
propagandists is the difficulty getting them (or anyone else) to acknowledge
the yawning chasm between their zeal to fight for “Justice for Palestine” when
said Palestinians come under Israeli jurisdiction and their complete
indifference to the suffering of those same Palestinians (or anyone else) at
the hands of non-Israelis.
“Syria is that way!” taunted the Israeli Prime Minister a
few years back when a crop of Flotillists tried to break the quarantine of Gaza
with their pretend load of “humanitarian aid,” summing up the question many of
us ask regarding why those who storm the streets the second the Jews shoot back
can’t bring themselves to even run a pancake-breakfast fundraiser for the
hundreds of thousands dead in Syria’s civil war – especially since that number
includes more Palestinian casualties than were generated in 60+ years of war
with Israel.
As always, if you confront a BDSer with this seeming
inconsistency/hypocrisy, they will simply ignore you in
favor of continuing to spew their own propaganda messaging, regardless of what
you have to say. But if they get backed
into a corner, one of their most frequently used counter-moves is to attack
their opponent for practicing “whataboutism” (also pronounced “whadaboudism” –
preferably with a Sylvester Stalone accent).
Unlike “Pinkwashing” – a fake phenomenon the Israeli haters baked
up in order to have something else to talk about whenever the gap between gay
rights in Israel vs. the Arab world is pointed out – whataboutism is an actual
argument, which means there is a surface logic to the BDSers using it to defend
their own glaring inconsistency with regard to human rights concerns.
The term describes a fallacy which assumes if you support
one cause then you are being inconsistent (or even hypocritical or neglectful)
by not applying the reasoning behind that support to all similar (especially
similar but far worse) cases with equal or greater verve. As an example, claiming that someone
fighting for civil rights of African Americans is a hypocrite if they don’t put
even more energy into fighting for black lives in Sudan’s Civil War is a clear
example of “whataboutism.”
The reason this is a fallacy is that it assumes everyone is
obliged to be perfectly consistent regarding what they choose to care about,
and that not applying their energies based on the rank order of need translates
to indifference to that suffering. But
here on earth, we all make choices that prioritize some goods vs. others. If you support your local Boy Scout troop or
help create a community farm, are you a good citizen or an uncaring monster for
not putting that energy into “worthier” causes such as rescuing orphan boys in
far-off civil wars or feeding the starving (vs. well-fed locavores)? And if you claim to fight for general principles
like “human rights,” there is always someone worse off than the particular
group you have chosen to be the recipient of your support.
This is why there is a certain logic for a supporter of
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions directed at Israel to claim that someone
asking them why they don’t BDS China or Sudan might be practicing whataboutism
since, in those instances, China and Sudan are distinct issues (even if they
all fall into the general category of human rights abuse cases).
The reason I described this as “surface logic” earlier is
that the crude: “You can’t fight for Palestine if you don’t also fight for
Tibet” argument is not really what critics are saying when they ask for
consistency with regard to places like Gaza, Syria or elsewhere in the Middle
East. For human rights abuses in those
places are not peripheral to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but central to it.
Take Gaza where Hamas came to power by killing off their
Fatah rivals, stay in power through terror directed at their own population,
and trigger repeated wars with Israel after securing their own safety in
tunnels built below hospitals, schools and mosques while forcing the civilian
population to stay above ground to serve as cannon fodder for the propaganda
component of their ongoing war effort.
Given this, pointing out the BDSers indifference to Palestinian
suffering in Gaza is not peripheral but central to the question of whether they
really stand for human rights at all (vs. shielding their militancy behind a
human-rights vocabulary).
Syria is another example where asking why such “human rights
supporters” don’t seems to give a damn about the hundreds of thousands of people
killed there since the start of the Syrian Civil War is central vs. tangential
to any discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
For Syria is and has always been a key player in that conflict, having
participated in conventional wars, terror wars, and proxy wars against the
Jewish state, not to mention participating in nearly a century of economic
warfare (Damascus was HQ for the Arab League’s boycott office for decades, for
example). So highlighting that this
progenitor for the BDS movement is currently killing more Palestinians than
Israel ever has is not a distraction but a perfectly valid question that the
BDSers simply would prefer to not have to answer.
In fact, one could make the case that the entire Arab war
against Israel represents whataboutism on an industrial scale never before seen
in human history. For – as is playing
out today in a Middle East aflame – the problems of the region have always been
about the dysfunctional government, fanatical politics and instability that
characterizes virtually every nation in the Middle East save Israel, embodied
in states which are by any measure the world’s worst human rights abusers.
But bring any of this up and you’re sure to be met with a
photo of a dead Gaza child (or, just as likely, a photo of a dead Syrian being
laundered as a Palestinian) or loud demands that we talk about the latest
bathroom addition to an apartment in Gilo – anything but the human rights
catastrophe that characterizes those nations that have been at the forefront –
and are thus the de facto partners – of the propaganda war current traveling
under the name of BDS.
Going further, the transformation of the United Nations and
virtually every organization and entity created for fight for human rights
across the planet into weapons directed at the Jewish state is meant to ensure
that whataboutism never needs to be invoked by Israel’s foes since a refusal to
look at the vast crimes of Israel’s enemies is now hard wired into the system.
Back in the 1980s, someone toted up million+ people killed
in the Middle East since 1948 who died in wars and other violent acts that had
zero to do with Israel’s existence or continuation. And it would not surprise me if contemporary
calculations brought that number well above the two-million mark. Which leaves us at the question anyone
genuinely interested in human rights should be asking: whataboutthem?
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