Brendan O'Neill: This never-ending meltdown over Israel is the distress of fools
To see how illiberal and outright irrational anti-Israel sentiment has become, look no further than the fear and horror that has gripped SOAS over tonight’s visit by Mark Regev.INSANE: Newsweek Labels Palestinian-Arab Terrorist A ‘Man of Peace’
Yes, in a brilliant PR move, Regev, the colourful Israeli Ambassador to the UK, has agreed to speak about the prospects for peace in the Middle East at SOAS, a Uni known for its agitation with all things Israeli. It’s like the Chippendales visiting a convent, or Shane MacGowan crashing a meeting of temperance-movement bores. It’s hilarious.
People at SOAS don’t find it funny, though. It’s questionable whether they ever find anything funny, so steeped are their minds in the depressing creeds of postcolonial studies and ethnographic theory. No, they think Regev’s visit will cause “substantial distress” to the SOAS community. Really.
According to the Guardian, there are “fears” that Regev’s visit won’t only “spark unrest” — par for the course: every visit by an Israeli representative to a British campus sparks unrest — but that it will also lead to “substantial distress on campus”.
More than 150 academics from SOAS and other universities have written to SOAS director Valerie Amos to plead with her to call off the Regev meeting and save SOAS students from the “substantial distress” of having someone with a different opinion to theirs on campus.
The first thing to note here is how craven it is — a McCarthyite level of cravenness — for academics to demand the silencing of a speaker they disagree with.
Contrary to what the great Benjamin Franklin once said, there are actually three certainties in life: Death, taxes, and that members of the "Palestine" Liberation Organization (PLO) are perennial liars. The third certainty could not be more accurately depicted than in a dumpster fire article in Newsweek written by Dr. Hanan Ashrawi in defense of convicted Palestinian-Arab terrorist Marwan Barghouti.How ‘The Deranged Ones’ Are Reshaping France
Barghouti, who rightfully rots in an Israeli prison for murdering five innocent Israeli civilians, entered the spotlight almost two weeks ago for writing an op-ed in The New York Times accusing Israel of committing "judicial apartheid" and justifying why Palestinian-Arab terrorist prisoners started a hunger strike. In that article, he described himself as a "Palestinian leader and parliamentarian" rather than a former Fatah terrorist who was convicted in Israeli civil court for murder. Despite the deliberate lies and misrepresentation of Barghouti from The New York Times, Ashwari used her pedestal with Newsweek to describe the terrorist as a "man of peace."
First, Ashwari accused Israel of committing a "character assassination" regarding Barghouti, claiming that the terrorist "proved to be a strong advocate of good governance and human rights, including women's rights." As comical as that assertion is, Ashwari goes even further to claim that Barghouti has never possessed terrorist ambitions:
Even after he was deported by the Israeli occupation in 1987, he frequently met with the negotiations delegation and expressed his full support for a peaceful negotiated settlement. While Barghouti believes in the Palestinian people's right to resist occupation by all available means under international law, he always opposed attacks against civilians. In recent years, he advocated peaceful means and civil disobedience to achieve our freedom.
This spin-doctoring of a man convicted of killing innocent civilians represents another attempt by leaders within the PLO to brainwash ill-informed Western liberals that Israel is an oppressive force that is preventing peace. Unfortunately, history has proven that the Palestinian national movement itself has been the consistent cause for a lack of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinian-Arabs. This reality has been eloquently articulated by David Brog in the PragerU video below:
On the day before her killing, Sarah Halimi had, it seemed, complained to the concierge about her future killer. The killer and his brother were known in the small cité for being noisy troublemakers who were often under the influence and prone to fighting, and she was fed up. The young man was not only a drug user but also a dealer and sources close to the investigation indicate that he owned his suppliers a great deal of money, and the day the murder occurred was consequently very agitated.
Under the influence of drugs, and probably drunk, he then started to knock on several doors before someone opened a door to him. That someone was, coincidentally, Sarah Halimi’s neighbor. Did he know where he was going when he started to climb up the balcony leading to Sarah Halimi’s apartment? Or did he identify her only afterward? Did he start to beat her because he’d recognized her as the Jewish woman whose children he and his family had insulted for years, the neighbor who’d complained about him the day before? Did he hit her because she screamed and fought him? And when and why did he begin to shout “Allahu akbar”?
It appears that the murder was the result of a spiral of chance events, engineered by psychosis as much as by drug abuse, but with an anti-Semitic impulse in the background, which a significant portion of the French media and judicial apparatus is determined to edit out of the story, partly because it is confusing and partly for what might politely be termed “social hygiene.” What is clear is the reason the three police officer on the scene not only did nothing to stop what was unfolding but even prevented the neighbors from intervening.
France is not convinced by its own reassuring rhetoric about “the deranged.” The country has become so nervous and paranoid about terrorism that here is what, according to sources, apparently happened: Although the man was indeed deranged, the policemen hearing the killer shouting“Allahu akbar” thought they were dealing with a terror attack. They, therefore, backed off and waited for instructions and backup when they could have — and should have — intervened to save Halimi’s life.
A few days after her statement, and in a completely unrelated intervention, Marine Le Pen abruptly denied that France had anything to do with the deportation of Jews during World War II. (h/t Elder of Lobby)