Saturday, January 05, 2019
From Ian:
Alan M. Dershowitz: The New York Times Incentivizes Hamas Violence
Alan M. Dershowitz: The New York Times Incentivizes Hamas Violence
While Hamas is happy to boast openly about their fighters tearing at the border fences in Gaza and hiding behind civilians to evade Israeli soldiers—the New York Times makes no mention of this. Israeli soldiers are portrayed as faceless killing machines, without a single reference to the fire kites, terror tunnels, rockets or cross border explosive devices utilized by the Palestinians, or to the double war crime of Hamas targeting Israeli civilians by firing rockets from behind Palestinian civilians.The real racism against the Palestinians
These Israeli civilians are not occupiers or usurpers. They live in Israel proper not in occupied or disputed territory. This area was built from scratch by Israelis on barren desert land and the Israelis have a right to be protected from fire bombs and mobs determined to breach the protective fence. How would other nations respond to such threats? Certainly not by treating these dangerous mobs as peaceful protestors merely exercising their freedom of speech and assembly.
The Times's absurd conclusion that the shooter may have committed a "war crime," ignores the law of war crimes.
Contrast what Israel does with how the Palestinians treat terrorists who willfully target and kill Jewish children, women and other civilians. The Palestinian Authority pays their families rewards – in effect bounties -- for their willful acts of murder. Hamas promotes and lionizes terrorists who kill Jews. But you would not know any of that from reading the one-sided New York Times screed....All in all, it is a shockingly irresponsible report.
And we avert our eyes and let them get on with it. To do otherwise would mean confronting awkward facts that might disturb safe certainties. Why talk about the Palestinians jailed for selling land to Jews when we can demand Israel release the Palestinians jailed for killing Jews? Why talk about the stipends paid to the families of terrorists who murder Israelis when we can condemn Israel for the security fence built to stop the terrorists getting in? Why talk about the Palestinians’ insistence that the West Bank be rendered Jew-free before they pledge to accept a state there when we can repudiate Israel’s cunning scheme to ‘Judaise’ Judea? Why talk about Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian president, and his explicit, on-the-record, even book-length distortions of the Holocaust and Zionism when we can decry Netanyahu’s chauvinism and alliances with fellow chauvinists? Why, in short, face up to the real ‘obstacles to peace’ when we can pretend building houses in the West Bank is what’s really holding things back?When hating Jews becomes acceptable by the Far Left
Interrogating Palestinian politics, culture and social attitudes terrifies liberal souls because we might find things we don’t like. Things like Issam Akel’s sentence. Like jihad-themed kindergarten graduations. Like rocket launchers set up in civilian areas. Things that can’t be willed away with a sombre head shake and a plea to ‘both sides’. Things that might lead us to question the Palestinians’ interest in peace. Question our entire approach to the conflict since at least 1967. Question the viability, or even desirability, of a Palestinian state.
I’ve always railed against liberal blindness and hypocrisy on Palestinian extremism as a product of anti-Israel bias. I’m not so sure anymore. I’m starting to wonder if the real bias is against the Palestinians. We expect Israel to operate like Belgium south of Beirut and castigate it for failing to live up to our values (or what we claim to be our values). We expect almost nothing of the Palestinians, and certainly not for them to conduct their affairs as we do (or tell ourselves we do). In Jerusalem, we see Boers; in Ramallah, Zulus. This is not pro-Israel — it is based on the myth of Israel as a white European colonial enterprise — but it is flagrantly anti-Palestinian. Yes, these two cultures are distinct (though there is a deal of crossover). Yes, Palestinian culture has a lot of work to do to catch up on democracy, human rights, minority rights, and much else besides. But none of this is inherent to being Palestinian; these are political and social values and they, and the cultures that espouse them, can change. This, however, is at odds with the underlying assumptions of Western policy on the Middle East in which Israeli misdeeds are aberrations to be condemned and corrected while Palestinian misdeeds are shrugged off, excused or justified. This is just who they are.
The sentiment is sympathy but the logic is pure bigotry. We are not friends of the Palestinians. We are not lending them solidarity by indulging their outrages. We are treating them like a savage tribe from an Edgar Wallace adventure, benighted but noble in their own way, wide-eyed grateful to the white man for understanding their backwards customs. There is your racism. Issam Akel is going to jail for selling land to a Jew and our hearts break for his jailers because they couldn’t possibly know any better.
Talk of antisemitism moving from the margins of American society into the mainstream often centers on white nationalism, that is, Jew hatred from the right. One need look no further than the November elections, in which two Holocaust deniers received 56,000 and 43,000 votes in bids to win Congressional seats in Illinois and California, respectively.
Presumably, many registered Republicans who voted for these antisemitic candidates were ignorant of their extremism and reflexively chose the candidate with an “R” next to their name.
And at least the Jewish community could take comfort in the fact that from the outset, the Republican Party categorically rejected both candidates, each of whom lost by wide margins.
White nationalists, it would seem for now, are still universally denounced and abhorred by all people of conscience.
On the other hand, there’s far too much tolerance for antisemitism on the left, which often masquerades under the cover of anti-Zionism. To make matters worse, it’s sometimes abetted by Jews themselves. All of which brings me to the case of Marc Lamont Hill, a professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University in Philadelphia and former CNN political commentator.
In November, Hill was fired by CNN after appearing at a UN event during which he endorsed a political slogan associated with Palestinian extremists calling for Israel’s destruction. Speaking at the UN’s annual “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” Hill called for “action” to “give us what justice requires…a free Palestine from the river to the sea [emphasis added].” He also stated that Palestinians have a right to “resistance” against Israel without specifically ruling out acts of violence and terrorism.
The question isn’t whether CNN should have fired Hill; rather, it’s this: Why did it take CNN so long to part ways with a contributor with a long history of antisemitism and vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric?
For years, Hill used his appearances on CNN to portray Israel as a contemptible Apartheid state guilty of committing “ethnic cleansing,” a claim he repeated during his UN diatribe. Not surprisingly, he’s a staunch supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and considers BDS founder Omar Barghouti, who rejects Israel’s right to exist, someone “we must stand behind.”
In 2015, merely weeks after he tweeted about fighting antisemitism, Hill traveled to the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, which he insisted was in “Palestine.” During the visit, he declared that he had come to a land “stolen by greed,” thus reinforcing the ugly antisemitic stereotype of greedy Jews.
In October of that year, Hill wrote an opinion piece in the Huffington Post entitled, “Why Every Black Activist Should Stand with Rasmea Odeh.” In it, he referred to Odeh, a convicted Palestinian terrorist, as a “venerable woman” and “freedom fighter.” As far as Hill is concerned, the murder of two young Israeli Jews in a 1969 bombing planned by Odeh wasn’t a horrific crime – it was an act of “justice.”
None of these troubling issues was enough for CNN (let alone Temple) to fire Hill. Nor, shockingly, was his close association with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam founder whom the ADL has called the “leading anti-Semite in America.” Farrakhan once called Adolf Hitler “a great man,” and recently, he compared Jews to “termites.” In August 2016, Hill uploaded onto Instagram a picture of the two smiling together. His caption read, “Been blessed to spend the day with Minister Louis Farrakhan. An amazing time of learning, listening, laughing.”
We Jews aren’t laughing. That CNN, which claims to be “the most trusted name in news,” could keep Hill under contract for so many years is indicative of a much larger problem.
