Chloe Valdary: The fake sincerity of pro-Palestinian commentators
This process usually occurs when the acolytes of armchair social justice mistake colloquy in echo chambers for sincere concern for the wellbeing of others. Politicians, professors and journalists alike carry on mindlessly suggesting untenable and, worse, immoral prescriptions that ostensibly help Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank but which in fact bring about their demise. The logic of these academics, when put to practical use, reads more like a satirical pamphlet than advice intended to be taken seriously:Natan Sharansky: When did America forget that it’s America?
• Let’s prove we love Palestinians by creating a state which, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority, has already robbed them of international aid, persecuted their minority population, and withheld from them the dignity of basic civil liberties – such as the right to vote, and the right to choose one’s own religion.
– Every pundit on CNN (et al) who advocates for a Palestinian state, without fully comprehending what they are calling for.
• Let’s prove we love Palestinians by championing the tunnel complex built by Hamas – even though those tunnels were built with the blood of Gazan children who were deemed to be expendable by the Hamas regime.
– Al Jazeera (et al) which, when describing the tunnel system as a “Palestinian assertion of political autonomy and resistance” failed to realize that it was symbolically standing on the graves of innocent Gazans in order to push a brutal political agenda.
• “Let’s prove we love Palestinians by suggesting that Hamas was ‘resisting’ against oppressive Israeli policies in the 2014 conflict even though Hamas reigns brutally over its own people á la Joseph Stalin.
– Every member of the glib pep squad that is Students for Justice in Palestine (et al) who serve as proxies running interference on campus for regimes that persecute their own people.
I am afraid that the real reason for the U.S. stance is not its assessment, however incorrect, of the two sides’ respective interests but rather a tragic loss of moral self-confidence. While negotiating with the Soviet Union, U.S. administrations of all stripes felt certain of the moral superiority of their political system over the Soviet one. They felt they were speaking in the name of their people and the free world as a whole, while the leaders of the Soviet regime could speak for no one but themselves and the declining number of true believers still loyal to their ideology.PMW: "There were between one and two million Jewish victims" of the Holocaust, says official PA daily
But in today’s postmodern world, when asserting the superiority of liberal democracy over other regimes seems like the quaint relic of a colonialist past, even the United States appears to have lost the courage of its convictions.
We have yet to see the full consequences of this moral diffidence, but one thing is clear: The loss of America’s self-assured global leadership threatens not only the United States and Israel but also the people of Iran and a growing number of others living under Tehran’s increasingly emboldened rule. Although the hour is growing late, there is still time to change course — before the effects grow more catastrophic still.
On the occasion of the Israeli remembrance day for the victims of the Holocaust last week, a regular columnist in the official Palestinian Authority daily wrote an op-ed in which he recognized the fact that the Holocaust occurred and targeted Jews. But although the writer even called it "a catastrophe," he reiterated false statements that have long been part of PA policy regarding the Holocaust, minimizing its scope and blaming the Zionist movement for participating in evil.
The PA daily repeated the claim that Jews have exaggerated the number of victims and that it was not 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, but only "between one and two million":
"Estimates regarding the number of Holocaust victims differ. The supporters of the Zionist movement have exaggerated the number of victims, claiming that it amounts to 6 million, whereas others, unbiased researchers, have estimated that there were between one and two million Jewish victims." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 18, 2015]
The writer hinted to an oft-repeated accusation that Jews were themselves at fault because their non-Jewish fellow citizens wanted to be rid of them due to the inherent Jewish evil:
"Regardless of the number, the bottom line is that a catastrophe that harmed the Jews in Europe occurred, due to matters concerning the relations between the European nations and the Jews living among them. "
The writer also repeated the claim that Zionists wanted "to increase the Jews' suffering" in the Holocaust in order to blackmail Europe into supporting Israel - "the Zionist colonialist project", to further Jewish immigration to Israel and to create more "compassion" for the Jews:
"The Zionist movement wanted to achieve a series of goals: First, to take advantage and use this [the Holocaust] to blackmail the European states financially and politically to make them support the Zionist colonialist project. Second, to bully the Jews to immigrate to the Israeli ethnic cleansing state, which was [then] in in the preparatory stages of establishment. Third, to increase the Jews' suffering and abuse in order to take advantage of the world's compassion for them."