Sultan Knish
New York Times bureau chiefs in Jerusalem are expected to set new
standards for malicious bias and during his time there, Ethan Bronner
was no exception.
A
bureau chief anywhere else in the world may be expected to explore the
life and color of the city. But in Jerusalem, a New York Times scribe
fills the same spot as the bitter goth kid working on the high school
paper who is forced to review musicals put on by cheerleaders. What
comes out the other end may have a distant resemblance to journalism,
but is mostly just gallons of congealed bile.
Ethan Bronner, who has moved up the New York Times totem pole from
attacking Israel to attacking America, still visits the old country on
occasion and still pens spiteful little pieces about how dumb and
shallow the cheerleaders are. The latest Bronner missive sees him
attending a wedding and grumbling at how happy everyone seems to be.
At a "raucous wedding", Bronner finds that few people are interested in
discussing "the Palestinians or the Arab world on their borders".
Instead, "everyone was celebrating". And why wouldn't they be
celebrating? It is a wedding. And people at weddings generally don't
talk about the people trying to kill them. Average weddings in the
United States don't involve detailed discussions of terrorism, even when
New York Times reporters are in attendance.
But Bronner's thesis is the same as the one put forward by John Kerry.
"People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow
there will be peace because there is a sense of security and a sense of
accomplishment and of prosperity,” Kerry complained. Israelis are having
too many weddings and not suffering enough. The limited autonomy
achieved in daily life what the peace process was supposed to.
It's not just about the physical suffering of terrorism. What bothers
Bronner is that Israelis aren't conscious of the grievances of their
enemies. They don't carry the burden of guilt that comes from knowing
that their border controls prevent Hamas from getting the weapons with
which they could inflict more death and suffering on Israelis.
The peace process is a myth because its end result was never meant to be
peace. Instead it was meant to achieve exactly what it did achieve in
the 90s. A state of terror. A way of life that would make every Israeli
conscious of the terrorists and their demands all the time. That's not
just their plan for Israel. It's their dream for the entire free world. A
world liberated from its freedoms.
The left does not set out to solve social problems, but to induce a
state of permanent crisis in order to impose a permanent state of
insecurity and guilt on the populace. Its solutions always make problems
worse because the left views violence as not the problem, but a symptom
of the true problem, which is the oppression of the violent by their
victims.
The negotiations and concessions were not supposed to bring peace. They
were supposed to make Israelis suffer. And through this ritualistic
suffering, the descendants of Holocaust survivors would finally
understand their burden of guilt to the descendants of the conquerors
who had repressed them and ruled over their land for centuries.
Terrorism is meant to destroy morale. To break down the sense of
stability and order on which every system depends and replace it with
uncertainty. And that uncertainty makes people doubt their own rights
and more easily accept the arguments of their enemies. Like violent
interrogations, the process of terror breaks down the morale of the
prisoner and makes him more willing to concede the premises of his
captor until he finally learns to love Big Brother. Until the victim of
terrorism becomes a supporter of terrorism recognizing that he is the
one who is guilty, not the terrorists.
The peace process was working when Israelis were dying. And the bar was
being moved further down. It stopped working when Israelis stopped
dying.
Supporters of the terrorist cause, whether at the New York Times or the
State Department, don't want to see happy Israelis. They want to see
frightened Israelis, sobbing Israelis, confused Israelis and hysterical
Israelis. They will even settle for angry Israelis. But the last thing
they want to see is Israelis who seem indifferent to the torture being
inflicted on them.
Israelis are by no means as safe and secure as Kerry pretends or as
aimlessly cheerful as Bronner describes them, but neither are they the
broken shells that they were supposed to be after decades of terror and
appeasement. Israelis have taken a beating, but they haven't been
beaten.
What infuriates New York Times reporters and State Department trolls
alike is that Israelis can go for hours and even days without
contemplating the tortures prepared for them. Not only are they not
struggling with the question of whether to love or hate Big Terror, they
can sing and dance as if Big Terror isn't even in the room. They commit
the worst crime that the left can imagine. They disregard it. They
escape it. And the only people who fear political escapes are the
political jailers of the left.
The left's Oceanian utopias, its inhuman animal farms, depend on
indoctrinating total consciousness. If you aren't outraged, then you
aren't paying attention. If you aren't part of the problem, then you're
part of the solution. If you aren't doing either one, you're exercising
white privilege. And it is telling that to the left, the unawareness of
its agenda is privilege. If you're one of those people dancing at that
wedding under the "glistening chandeliers" and "sky-high ceilings", then
your lack of awareness of the plight of everyone who isn't at that
wedding is privilege and makes you part of the problem.
The Israeli man is not supposed to be dancing to music until dawn as if
he were in a middle-eastern flavored production of Fiddler on the Roof.
He is supposed to be weighed down by the burden of all the people he is
oppressing. He has no native right to be happy. Having his own country
should crush him to the floor with guilt. He should be wearing a red
t-shirt and marching around denouncing the government for not doing
something, anything, to convince the terrorists to come to the
negotiating table. Instead he's dancing all night.
Fear is the gateway to guilt as Stockholm Syndrome devotees know. To
induce the guilt that the left craves, there must be fear. A sense of
insecurity. A gnawing worry. Without fear, there is no punishment.
Without punishment, there is no purpose to progressivism which exists to
take property, land and life from one and give it to the other and put
things in order the way "they ought to be".
Men and women dancing lightly on their feet have light consciences. They
aren't weighed down by all the guilt they ought to be feeling. Instead
they are happy and free.
Terrorism was supposed to be the punishment that Israelis needed to
experience in order to destroy their sense of rightness. Just as it is
meant to fulfill that same role for Americans and Brits and many of the
other nations of the First World.
In the calculus of the left, terrorism isn't just violence, it's
righteous violence. The more horrific it is, the more it upends your
understanding of how the world is supposed to work. The moral order, the
code that you grew up that says you don't plant bombs next to
8-year-olds gets blown away and you are left to either conclude that
your enemies are monsters or that they are paying you back for something
even worse that you did to them. They are not the ones murdering
8-year-olds. You are.
Faced with someone else's inhumanity, you are told to assert your own.
To reach for the moral high ground. To try and understand why this is
happening so that you can try to be better than those who did it, only
to learn that you are actually much worse.
And it's not that some Israelis haven't caught the disease. It's not
that parents of terror victims haven't met with the parents of suicide
bombers to understand their pain. It's not that Israeli leaders haven't
said that they might have been terrorists if they had been born on the
other side. All the sycophantic appeasement and moral degradation is
there, but it also goes in one ear and out the other.
Israelis are an impatient people. They have less appetite for endless degradation with no way out.
And that is what the Peace Process was. It would be nice to say that
Israelis have seen through it. Mostly they've seen through it about as
well as Europeans have seen through immigration or Americans have seen
through the politics of racial division. The common sense awareness is
there, but it hasn't percolated into widespread political awareness of
what's wrong. Instead there is an impatience with the dead letter office
of peace where treaties go and never come back.
The Israelis have chosen not to carry the burden because they know it's a
lie. They were there in '67 when they had to fight, not because of the
so-called occupation, but because they were under siege. They were there
in '48 when the Jews were ethnically cleansed from East Jerusalem by
the invading armies that have kept on claiming that their act of ethnic
cleansing made that part of the city theirs.
The Israelis have chosen not to carry the burden of guilt for the actions of their enemies. Instead they have chosen to dance.
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