Do you think that when Nordic talks about how he's "so angry his head could explode," that might be due the power asymmetry between the IDF and the dead Palestinian youths he was talking about?
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by backtoiam » Wed Oct 14, 2015 11:35 pm
Do you think that when Nordic talks about how he's "so angry his head could explode," that might be due the power asymmetry between the IDF and the dead Palestinian youths he was talking about?
by Searcher08 » Thu Oct 15, 2015 8:47 am
FourthBase » Wed Oct 14, 2015 10:43 pm wrote:Wombaticus Rex » 14 Oct 2015 17:40 wrote:Thank you. I don't think you're mis-characterizing those comments.
I do, however, think you're making quite a leap to attribute those comments to "Jew-hating," though. Especially since we're talking about Israel, not Jews, right?
Of course.
by AlicetheKurious » Thu Oct 15, 2015 2:59 pm
Nordic » Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:33 am wrote:Okay. I didn't know about this rule.
And yes, I hate Jews because Israel, like I hate all white men because The Bush Administration.
So logical. How could I have not seen that I hated Jews?
Anyway here's more. An English Quaker, not a young man, violently assaulted by "settlers" (land thieves/bullies/terrorists/schoolchildren-shooters) while trying to protect Palestinians who were engaged in the seditious and terroristic act of trying to harvest olives from their olive trees.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 93986.htmlDavid Amos: Gun-wielding gang of Israeli settlers attack British volunteer in West Bank
'A man stood no more than four feet from me and threw this rock which hit me on the back of the head', Mr Amos told The Independent
A 66-year-old British man volunteering in the West Bank has been hospitalised after being attacked by a gang of gun-wielding Israeli settlers hurling rocks at him.
David Amos, a retired publishing company worker, was struck in the head by a rock as he tried to protect Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest.
He was evacuated from the area by ambulance and taken to a hospital in Nablus, where he received five stitches.
He told The Independent the group of settlers came down a hill from the direction of the Yizhar settlement towards Palestinian farmland near the village of Burin where he and two other British women. ''There were eight or nine of the settlers, all masked and they were carrying large rocks.''
Mr Amos said that the settlers fired gunshots as they approached, causing him to sit on the ground and yell to his colleagues to take cover. ''They were shouting at us 'go' in English and also shouting in Hebrew. A man stood no more than four feet from me and threw this rock which hit me on the back of the head. I was sitting upright and I fell over on my side and then he and two others kicked me. The women were shouting 'we are British' so they knew we were British before the rock was thrown.''
Mr Amos said the settlers also set fire to undergrowth. ''There was already a fire burning by the time they threw the stone at me. They set fire to more trees and undergrowth as we made our way away from the olive grove. They pursued us but they didn't come and attack us again.'' A Palestinian farmer was also wounded by stone throwing in the same incident, Mr Amos said.
Mr Amos said he would file a complaint with Israeli police even though such complaints very rarely lead to indictments. Mr Amos, a Quaker, came to the West Bank with the British group, the Olive Harvest Trust, which he says is an organisation committed to nonviolence and to protecting Palestinian olive farmers.
Palestinian eye-witnesses claimed that the group of farmers was attacked and had stones thrown at them.
Eight Israelis have died in a string of stabbings, shootings and the stoning of a car, while 29 Palestinians have been killed in the last two weeks.
According to a police statement, the Israelis claimed that the altercation began after stones were thrown at a car belonging to an Israeli woman.
Ziv Stahl, Research Department Director, Yesh Din said: "We are in the midst of the olive harvest season, and Burin is a known friction area, where Yesh Din has documented numerous violent incidents against Palestinian farmers. During this period of high tension, we would expect that the Israeli security forces would be present on the ground in order to prevent any escalation of violence and to protect the local population, as they are obliged by law.
According to Israeli police, four Israeli citizens were arrested for disturbing the peace after an altercation between them and Palestinian farmers who were harvesting olives in Burin.
13 October was the worst day of violence in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories since tensions erupted last month.
Three Israelis and three Palestinians, including two attackers, were killed and many more were injured in stabbings, shootings, rock-throwing and clashes with security forces.
Hundreds of soldiers are being deployed in Jerusalem and across Israel as tensions continue to increase.
Eight Israelis have died in a string of stabbings, shootings and the stoning of a car, while 29 Palestinians - including 12 identified by Israel as attackers - have been killed in the last two weeks.
"Blessed are the peacekeepers". -- Jesus
"Fuck you, peacekeeper, here's a rock to the head" -- Israeli "settlers".
by Searcher08 » Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:17 pm
by tapitsbo » Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:19 pm
by Searcher08 » Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:39 pm
tapitsbo » Thu Oct 15, 2015 7:19 pm wrote:I would imagine there are quite a few Russian immigrants to Israel who would be very quick to criticize the hyper-nationalism going on there. I know I've met people like this in Canada who do not support what's going on there.
by AlicetheKurious » Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:40 pm
by conniption » Thu Oct 15, 2015 7:22 pm
informationclearinghouse
Israel, the Media and the Anatomy of a Sick Society
By Eric Draitser
October 15, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Counterpunch"
The moment OF the PALESTINIAN child Ahmed MANASRAH execution - 10/2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNcCpsMGTbc
The video of 13 year old Palestinian Ahmed Manasrah bleeding to death on the pavement of an East Jerusalem neighborhood has been described as “shocking,” “disturbing,” and “painful to watch.” The callous verbal abuse and insults from Israelis watching the child writhe in agony are variously characterized as “heartless” and “cruel”; and indeed they are. “Die you son of a whore. Die! Die!” the Israeli onlookers can be heard shouting in the video which has since gone viral on social media.
While there has been much discussion of this video, and other similar incidents involving the extrajudicial executions of Palestinian youths accused by Israel of having stabbed Israelis (the veracity of some of these claims is disputed), there is decidedly little examination of the sociological implications. Specifically, it has become taboo to interrogate just what sort of ideological and psychological conclusions can be drawn about Israelis society – a society where such behavior is not an outlier; where, rather than being an anomaly, it is indicative of a significant, if not mainstream, attitude. Such undeniably barbaric treatment is not simple hate, and cannot be explained away or justified. But that is precisely what the corporate media does.
Suffice to say that there are many political analysts, activists, and others who are timid about outright condemnations of Israeli society and Israeli attitudes. They are, with much justification, fearful of being demonized as anti-Semitic, terrified that rather than open dialogue and critical examination, they will have their arguments twisted and portrayed as hateful and racist. While such accusations are sometimes warranted – as in the case of fascist bigots and neo-Nazis for whom “Jew” is synonymous with “evil” – more often than not these are willfully deceptive deflections designed to shield Israeli society from the criticism that it so clearly deserves.
But those whose interest is in justice and speaking the truth cannot be silent, cannot allow themselves to become the victims of self-censorship induced by fear. For muted criticism of Israel is in fact a failure to properly defend oppressed people; it is an abdication of the responsibility to speak against injustice, the brutality of colonialism, and the inhumanity of contemporary Zionism. It is equally an abandonment of the duty to deconstruct dominant narratives in the interest of social justice, to challenge the propaganda of corporate media whose primary function is to shield power from the uncomfortable light of criticism. I cannot, and will not, be silent.
Media Propaganda and the Danger of False Equivalence
Reading the New York Times, Washington Post, and other allegedly liberal major media outlets, one could be forgiven for thinking that the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tit-for-tat, that it is the product of an ongoing cause-effect-countereffect relationship. That is precisely how the conflict is portrayed in nearly all so-called ‘respectable’ papers.
Take, for instance, an article published in America’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, just hours after the incident with the headline Stabbings, and Deadly Responses, Add to Israel’s Security Challenge. In deconstructing the headline alone, it is clear where the bias and deception lies; the Times imbues the very headline of the article with a presumption of guilt on the part of the Palestinians. According to the syntactic logic of the headline’s construction, it is the “stabbings” (presented first) which are the root of the problem and, therefore, the “deadly responses” are just that, responses. The effect is to justify the murder of Palestinians by portraying them as simply responses to an external factor: violence against Israelis.
But of course anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of the issues knows that the stabbings are themselves responses to the attacks by Israeli settlers and security forces on Palestinians, as well as the predictable outgrowth of seemingly endless brutality and occupation, poverty and despair. The history of colonialism is replete with such examples.
And yet Israelis, and the Israeli state itself, are presented as the victims. The headline frames the issue as being one of a “security challenge” for Israel, rather than, say, a colonialism problem, or a vicious occupation. So, taken in total then, the headline and accompanying article have the cumulative effect of making the victims into perpetrators, and perpetrators into victims, thereby inverting the oppressor/oppressed relationship. This inversion is absolutely necessary in order to whitewash Israel’s crimes, and absolve the state and its fanatical, fascist far right of guilt.
Even the allegedly even-handed treatment of the issue by a presumably moderate liberal outlet such as NBC News, belies a dishonest treatment of the conflict and the recent violence. In covering the incident, NBC News published a story about the Ahmed Manasrah shooting and subsequent taunting with the headline Viral Video of Shot Ahmed Manasrah Sums Up Israel-Palestinian Conflict. The article purports to present the issue fairly by presenting the events surrounding Ahmed’s heinous shooting as emblematic of the entire conflict. Essentially, NBC News here tries to present the competing narratives of Israeli and Palestinian sources as indicative of the broader struggle for public opinion, trying to convince readers that the ongoing allegations and counter-allegations are just more of the same, and that the truth is simply unknowable; after all, Israeli sources say X, Palestinian sources say Y. I guess we’ll never know.
The reader of the NBC article is left with the utterly dishonest, though politically very useful, conclusion that both sides are equally guilty, equally worthy of blame, and that the conflict itself is beyond critical analysis. Moreover, in presenting the issue in this way, the outlet, in this case NBC, is seen as fair, as having provided a balanced accounting. In reality however, it has simply obscured the true nature of the conflict: one between a colonial oppressor and its victims, displaced and dispossessed systematically for seven decades.
But false equivalence aside, by obscuring the truth of the issue, NBC News here inadvertently reveals something fundamentally true about the conflict; that, indeed, this incident very much “sums up the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Though they didn’t intend it this way, NBC News correctly exposes the fact that the behavior of the Israelis on camera is clearly emblematic of the broader society of Israel, one which sees Palestinian children as “dogs,” and “sons of whores” unfit to breathe, unworthy of living.
The Pathology of Israeli Fascism
What the Ahmed Manasrah video laid bare for the world to see is the inhumanity of Zionism, a Jewish supremacist ideology which necessarily places non-Jews in an inferior relation to Jews, which places less value on the life of the non-Jew. It is not simple hatred that motivated the disgusting comments from the onlookers, it is an ingrained, inter-generational sense of superiority bred of dehumanization of the Palestinian, and the Arab generally.
This fundamental fact is only very rarely discussed, but it lies at the heart of the Palestine conflict. By seeing Arabs as subhuman, many Israelis are able to justify, often on an unconscious level, all forms of brutality, violence, and oppression. It should be said here that there are some Israelis who fight against just such thinking (Gideon Levy is perhaps the most prominent and vocal opponent of such supremacist ideology), but sadly they are drowned out by the rabid barbarism of the Israeli right (and much of the center, it must be said).
And this phenomenon, quick to get you rhetorically tarred and feathered as an anti-Semite, is what underlies all Israeli policies, and the active or passive acceptance of those policies by the Israeli body politic. While Ahmed Manasrah bleeding to death amid a swirl of insults from Israelis may elicit a brief outpouring of shock on social media, it is merely one instance of such violence. Is it really that different from Israeli bulldozers demolishing countless Palestinian homes? Is it somehow more barbaric than the torching of Palestinian homes with babies sleeping inside?
Perhaps it would be best not to express shock and outrage at the video, but rather to see it as the logical outgrowth of the fascist, supremacist ideology espoused by the leaders of the Israeli state. For the Israelis on the video are merely following the example of leaders such as Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked who, at the height of Israel’s criminal war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, infamously wrote:
The Palestinian people has declared war on us, and we must respond with war. Not an operation, not a slow-moving one, not low-intensity, not controlled escalation, no destruction of terror infrastructure, no targeted killings. Enough with the oblique references. This is a war…It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority…This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people… What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy… Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs… They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.
Such rhetoric, with all the attendant dehumanization, is reminiscent of any number of fascist ideologies, from German Nazism of the 1930s to the contemporary Ukrainian politics of Right Sector and Azov Battalion. The notion of “total war” against an entire people, including non-combatant women and children, is really beyond simple war propaganda, it is the advocacy of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
And this is exactly the point: ethnic cleansing as both a concept and military objective has become the political currency of modern Israel. So why should it surprise anyone when young Israelis wish death upon a bleeding Palestinian, calling him a “son of a whore.” After all, isn’t Ahmed Manasrah just another “little snake”?
…And One More Thing
If past history is any indicator, what has been written above will undoubtedly elicit some negative reactions, condemnations, hate mail, and insults of every sort. “Anti-Semite,” “traitor,” and “self-hater” are some of the most common epithets I’ve heard countless times when I’ve written or spoken out about Israel, Zionism, Jewish supremacy, and such issues. Not only do such obloquies not deter me, they motivate me to further speak out because they are an indication that the words are striking a nerve, one that is raw, and desperately in need of exposure.
I equally recognize the privilege with which I write these lines. As an avowed atheist who rejects the ethno-nationalism and tribalism inherent in the political ideology of Zionism, my Jewish background provides me with a modicum of insulation from accusations of anti-Semitism (not that it stops them, of course). Not only does that allow me greater latitude to write and speak freely on these issues, it reminds me that I have a duty to do so.
For those who don’t righteously oppose the crimes of imperialism, colonialism, oppression, and genocide are undoubtedly complicit in them. I, for one, will not be.
Eric Draitser is the founder of StopImperialism.org and host of CounterPunch Radio. He is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City. You can reach him at ericdraitser@gmail.com.
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