Today I link to something that I did not enjoy reading, just to illustrate a point. It is a truly poor article by one Niles Gardiner in the Telegraph.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100041748/the-world-demonises-israel-once-again/
I point out merely in passing that the first few hundred overwhelmingly negative comments were deleted by the Telegraph. But the real reason I link is the significance of the strapline:
He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.
I bet he does. He has no international diplomatic experience, no knowledge of international law and very little experience of the hotspots of the world. But he is fully armed with the set of opinions those news outlets want their readers to hear.
Absolutely anybody can write this rubbish. Just string these elements together:
Poor little Israel. Threatened from all sides. Nazi Germany. Islamic terrorism. Hamas. Anti-semitism. Brutal Jihadists. Self defence. The right to return. Only democracy in the Middle East. Self defence. Iranian President threat to wipe off map. 8,000 Hamas rockets. Alliance of liberals, commies and islamists. 9/11. Chopping off hands. Subjugation of women. Taliban. Clash of civilisations. Existential threat. Self defence.
I could churn this stuff out easily and be on Fox, Sky and BBC as often as I like. I could pick up a fat salary like Nick Cohen for a weekly column of this stuff, and pocket the Rupert Murdoch TV fees as an extra. I could sit in a think tank. I would certainly be a great deal more qualified, and a great deal more convincing, than Niles pisspoor Gardiner. I write a lot better too.
But then I am handicapped by morality.
Which reminds me. Having followed the media coverage of the Israeli action very carefully, have you noticed what seems a complete absence on TV of bona fide experts in maritime law?
Normally live news brings in “experts” at the drop of a hat to fill in the 24/7 broadcasting, but despite the fact that professors of international law specialising in the law of the sea are not exactly hard to find, no TV station has asked one about the legality of the Israeli action.
That is because the martime law community is unanimous that the Israeli action is illegal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksvA8iSwdfU
“My point is that the Germans knew when to accept defeat and to come to terms with the loss of their homes and their land. The Palestinian Arabs never have.”
Equating these two situations is really rather bizarre. Germans were displaced as a direct consequence of the atrocities committed by their (i.e. my) own people, namely starting another world war and killing millions of people.
What did the Palestinians do to deserve to be displaced?
Since you seem to be very fond of rather outlandish ideas how about these:
1)They trusted the British to keep their promise. Help the British fight the Ottoman empire and the British would help them establish their own country – Right, well, maybe that kind of naivety needs to be punished in your view?
2)After the British betrayal they refused to accept giving almost half their land, and the most fertile areas to boot, to immigrants they had initially welcomed with friendliness and who now formed a sizeable but still small minority. – I mean seriously, they should have just handed over their lands and be grateful they were allowed to keep some of it.
3)Maybe they deserve to be punished because they stayed in Palestine after their Jewish neighbours left and then eventually converted to Islam after their land was conquered?
I’m sure you’re quite aware of the genetic research which has found that the Palestinians are direct descendants of the people who lived there under Roman rule. But seriously, that’s just being stubborn, isn’t it? Totally boring, never migrating anywhere else…
4)Oh, no, I know, this is a good one: they deserve their fate, because their elite abandoned them to British and Jewish shenanigans – their own fault for being middle and lower class, who cares about them, right?
5)I’ve got it now, they deserve their fate because they were just not powerful enough to blackmail and strongarm small countries into rejecting the UN resolution that decided to establish the state of Israel on their land. It would have been kinda tough, though, to try and beat the US and the UK at their own game, after all, it didn’t do exisiting small countries any good to complain about it, did it?
6)hmm, this one might be what you’re looking for – they deserve their fate because their Arab brothers couldn’t help them, because they needed British and American support for their own schemes…
Take your pick, Michael Patek, or maybe you can suggest some more? I doubt, though, that my reasons are any more ridiculous than yours.
Craig, the blacks in South Africa had other ways of dealing with their situation. And they did it successfully, sixteen years ago, not least through the magnanimity of Nelson Mandela.
They also succeeded because the moral repugnance of institutionalised racial equality based on differences in skin pigmentation is self-evident.
I should have thought that a system of religious apartheid such as that envisaged by Hamas is also self-evidently repugnant based as it is on religious untruth.
Under shari’a law anyone neither a Christian nor a Jew is to be put to death without mercy or pity if he refuses Islam. Christians and Jews can keep their lives and their worship as long as they accept the humiliating and degrading condition of dhimmis, and if any of them breaks the pact of protection (dhimma), the whole community loses immunity of life and property.
There has never been anything in the ANC’s ideology which claims that Afrikaners are the offspring of apes and pigs and the blood enemies of humanity.
The ANC never disseminated anti-Afrikaner propaganda comparable to the demented anti-Semitism which emanates from parts of the Arab media.
Least of all has the ANC ever accepted as the word of God anything like:
“The hour of judgment shall not happen until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Muslims shall kill the Jews until the Jew shall hide behind a rock or a tree and the rock or tree shall call on the Muslim saying: O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him, except the Gharqad tree which will not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.”
Who is the Palestinian Nelson Mandela? Khaled Mashaal?
Michael,
No idea where that quote is from. nor do I care. Plenty of equally bloodthirsty quotes in the Old Testament. Your argument again comes down to “The Palestinians deserve to be subjugated because they are Muslims”.
Sigh – @Apostate we don’t need any of your “holohoax” stuff here. I am not sure whether you just intend to revise the figures, or you think it didn’t happen at all, but it is creepy, unhelpful, and plain wrong.
Michael P might be a nutter (I think his website justifies Israeli expansionism by looking forward to the Rapture – may he float off in his pyjamas quickly) and is I dare say inclined to call anti-semetism every time you sneeze. But he’s right to object to what sounds dangerously like Holocaust denial – please stop it.
Mae at June 7, 2010 12:00 AM
Nice one.
I might also add that the vast majority of jewish settlers are/were Ashkenazi which according to Koestler, and more recently Shlomo Sand inter alia, are decended from 8th century Khazarian converts to judaism. In other words the Palestians were displaced using a false (zionist) history according to a number of jewish scholars.
Talk about adding insult to injury…
Mae, it is irrelevant that the Germans were expelled as a result of Nazi atrocities. On a human level it doesn’t hurt any less. The sheer scale of the displacement was unprecedented in history, and it was also unnecessary as the whole of Germany was to be subjugated under Allied rule anyway.
What of the displacement of the Palestinians? It’snot a matter of what anyone deserved, it’s that they fought and lost a war with Jews in a land without a state to keep the peace. The Jews established a state and pacified the place, the Arabs didn’t.
Now, as for genetic bloodlines of the Palestinian Arabs, it’s true that the Christian Arabs are descended from the Ghassanids, 12,000 of whom became Muslims after the Battle of Yarmuk in 636. A good many of them migrated from Syria to Palestine during the 20th century.
The rest of the Arabs are not. Their ancestors entered Palestine as invaders and aggressors from Arabia itself.
Michael Petek at June 7, 2010 12:22 AM
It was peaceful under the Ottomans.
Muslims, jews and christians co-existed in harmony.
How do you explain that?
‘Neturei Karta Condemns Israeli Attack on Flotilla’
‘”Authentic Orthodox Jewry worldwide decries unequivocally the cold-blooded slaughter carried out by the Zionist occupational forces against innocent, peaceful and freedom-loving noble activists committed to peace and human rights,” said Rabbi Dovid Feldman of Neturei Karta International. “This brutal attack took place in international waters on ships bearing humanitarian aid for our brethren, the Palestinian residents in the besieged Gaza Strip. It was an explicitly illegal act which breaches, in a serious manner, basic G-dly human rights, justice and law.’
http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Press/20100603Flotilla.cfm
“It was peaceful under the Ottomans.
Muslims, jews and christians co-existed in harmony.”
BWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Craig at 12:16, the quote is from a collection of ahadith called Sahih Muslim Book:41 Number:6985.
Subjugating Palestinians has nothing to do with the bare fact that they are Muslims.
Anyone – and I don’t care whether it’s a Palestinian, a Brazilian or a Lithuanian – who raises a weapon to wage a jihad to impose shari’a law for the purposes of imposing that disgusting system as I described in my previous post ought to be fought and if necessary killed or driven out.
My home town is full of Sudanese and Egyptian Copts who have no shortage of empathy for what I have to say here.
I don’t need any justification from the Old Testament to do so. All I need to know is that the Qur’an isn’t the word of God.
Larry from St. Louis at June 7, 2010 12:30 AM
Did I wake you up, Loony?
Care to refute with sources?
ScouseBilly, the only harmony the Muslims, Christians and Jews existed in under Ottoman rule was the harmony that has Muslims on the top deck, dhimmis underneath. If Christians and Jews agitated, they ended up with things like the Bulgarian atrocities and the Armenian massacres and – for the Assyrians – a cull every other generation.
Michael Petek at June 7, 2010 12:37 AM
Meanwhile back here on planet Earth and specifically Palestine under Ottoman rule, did we not have harmony?
ScouseBilly
He doesn’t explain it.
What he just makes claims on what other people will do when they take power to hide the fact about what is happening now when the Zionists are in power.
If you cut out the Bullshit what he is saying is the Zionists can do what they want because they have the sword, the ability to do it.
Well they have that ability now, and it is our Job to change it.
And change it we shall.
Well I think I’ll turn in and leave you freaks to Google frantically 😉
Arsalan, you are right I wan’t referring to you as a freak I was still posting.
Michael,
I could waffle on about the Crusader sack of Byzantium – or the massacre of Sebrenica. But human rights are universal and not dependent on somebody’s religion. That is the escape from medievalism which seems to have bypassed you.
I think we have given quite enough space to a religous nutcase like you. Plesae leave now. You can post what you like on your own website, where people can read your theories to their heart’s desire:
http://www.crownofdavid.com/
How about the sack of Jerusalem in which the Crusaders killed everyone including their own Christians.
If anything, this thread has demonstrated precisely the religious nutjobs that are running Israel at the moment.
You see them in the settler community and in the recent immigrants from Russia. Israel, and indeed Zionism as a project, is being destroyed from within by some very mentally disturbed people. That’s a commonality in Israel itself at the moment, and for a few years past.
Ben Gurion even predicted such a scenario 40 years ago. And so it’s come to pass.
Religiousity on the level Michael Petek expresses it is one of the prime symptoms of a deep mental illness. You only have to look at his website to see how truly disturbed he is.
These right-wing Israelis and their supporters are psychopaths, pure and simple.
It’s imperative that we ensure that these people don’t drag the whole of humanity down with them into nuclear armageddon. I have this horrible feeling though that that’s precisely what they want.
Israel is a very very sick society.
David,
I totally agree. How can such a psychopathic society be left with nuclear weapons? Israel must be disarmed
immediately.
“Israel must be disarmed
immediately.”
You keep writing that Ruth. That you think that could happen is an indication of your immense ignorance of the situation.
The Italian Mafia were eventually disarmed and neutered.
Other terrorists have been disarmed.
Duuno why Loopy Larry from the Killing Fields thinks that the Israeli terrorist State can’t be disarmed.
Unless he thinks that the miserable psychotic Israeli terrorist state is gonna take on the whole world.
Hmmm. I suspect that’s what Loopy Larry does think. Him and religious fruitcake nutters like that clown seriously disturbed Michael Petek.
This is a wonderful site which provides testimony from Israeli male and female soldiers about what the Zionist psychopaths and their supporters in the USA force them to do to Palestinians, resulting in the human degradation of the soldiers themselves, and ultimately the Israeli society they return to.
“Cases of abuse towards Palestinians, looting, and destruction of property have been the norm for years, but are still excused as military necessities, or explained as extreme and unique cases. Our testimonies portray a different and grim picture of questionable orders in many areas regarding Palestinian civilians. These demonstrate the depth of corruption which is spreading in the Israeli military.
Breaking the Silence voices the experiences of those soldiers, in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.”
http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/index_e.asp
Whilst Loopy Larry and his Zionist mates are stuffing their fat filthy American asses with super sized burgers in St Louis and other places, those he sends out to do his dirty work are telling the truth about the murderous psychopathic Zionist project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37MFa7ZKQWo
Michael Petek
It’s fine for you that our politicians believe vomit generated by Zionists inside the UK intelligence agencies. Our politicians eyes have started to swivel so fast that they are united in believing that outright war on Iraq and Afghanistan are essential uses for borrowed billions on interest from the banks.
Yet you insult the Qur’an. You fantasise about a world in which truth and faith are abandoned in exchange for irrational fears generated by a cursed, Satanic sect. Well, you are able to live out your fantasies, because the grip of the Zionist lies is going to increase. Don’t worry about the past, you’re going to have lots more eye-swivelling wars and rumours of wars to enjoy while the powers that be are still following the Zionist lies.
Why can’t you just watch horror movies and porn like everybody else? Why do you have to revel in the sufferings of real people, who are being starved and oppressed at the centre of civilisation, the Middle East? The thrill of seeing Zionist lies inside the heart of Western governments being transformed into actual human suffering by weaponry and military activity paid for by borrowing from the Zionist bankers is too much for you.
You come on this blog to experience orgasm after orgasm from the repeating your fantasy that Zionist lies to government intelligence are being transformed into real violence against the believers in God.
“You come on this blog to experience orgasm after orgasm from the repeating your fantasy that Zionist lies to government intelligence are being transformed into real violence against the believers in God.”
This, apparently, is the kind of perspective that Craig Murray doesn’t object to on his blog.
Important information about the Muslim religion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPJP2Q6MqtE
I’m glad to have found this intelligent blog through an Information Clearing House link.
Wow….
“Israeli MP Haneen Zoabi faces being stripped of her citizenship for joining last week’s aid flotilla that ended in a bloody showdown with Israeli commandos.
The move to strip Ms Zoabi of her citizenship is being driven by Interior Minister Eli Yishai”
http://www.theage.com.au/world/israeli-move-to-strip-aid-ship-mp-of-citizenship-20100606-xnag.html?autostart=1