As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book, The World Turned Upside Down,
since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge some three weeks ago,
the streets of American and European cities have been crammed with
activists intent on expressing their collective indignation for Israel’s
perceived crime of defending its citizens from slaughter from the
genocidal thugocracy of Hamas.
Rowdy and sometimes violent demonstrations have taken place in
Berlin, Paris, Toronto, London, and Madrid, where blatantly anti-Semitic
chants of “Death to Jews!,” “Hitler was right!,” “Gaza is the real
Holocaust,” “end Israeli apartheid,” and “Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come
out and fight on your own!” could be heard, with similar events taking
place in such U.S. cities as Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and
Seattle.
Joined with Muslim supporters of those wishing to destroy Israel
and murder Jews were the usual suspects of peace activists,
Israel-haters, social justice advocates, and labor unionists who decried
Israel’s “genocide” against Gaza as well as the militarism, oppression,
imperialism, and brutality imbued in Zionism itself. These radical,
Israel-loathing groups include, among others, the corrosive, ubiquitous
ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), Code Pink, Jewish Voice for
Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine.
What was particularly revealing, and chilling, about the
hate-filled rallies was the virulence of the chants and messages on the
placards, much of it seeming to suggest that more sinister hatreds and
feelings—over and above concern for the current military operations—were
simmering slightly below the surface. Several of the morally
self-righteous protestors, for instance, shrieked out, to the
accompaniment of drumbeats, “Long live Intifada,” a grotesque and
murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists
murdered some 1000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others.
That pro-Palestinian student activists, those who purport to be
motivated by a desire to bring “justice” to the Middle East, could
publicly call for the renewed slaughter of Jews in the name of
Palestinian self-determination demonstrates quite clearly how
ideologically debased the human rights movement has become. Activists on
and off U.S. campuses, who never have to face a physical threat more
serious than getting jostled while waiting in line for a latte at
Starbucks, are quick to denounce Israel’s very real existential threats
and the necessity of the Jewish state to take counter measures to thwart
terrorism. And quick to label the killing of Hamas terrorists by the
IDF as “genocide,” these well-meaning but morally-blind individuals see
no contradiction in their calls for the renewed murder of Jews for their
own sanctimonious cause.
Other protestors were less overt in their angry chants, carrying
signs and shouting out the oft-heard slogan, “Free, Free Palestine,” or,
as they eventually screamed out, “Palestine will be free, from the
river to the sea.” That phrase suggests the same situation that a
rekindled Intifada would help bring about, namely that if the fictive
nation of “Palestine” is “liberated,” is free, there will, of course, be
no Israel between the Jordan River and Mediterranean—and no Jews.
Another deadly chorus emanated from protestors during the rally:
“When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” That is an
oft-repeated, but disingenuous and false notion that stateless
terrorists have some recognized human right to murder civilians whose
government has purportedly occupied their territory. That is clearly not
any longer the case in Gaza, where every Jew was removed in 2005 and
where there is a blockade in effect to prevent the influx of weapons,
but clearly no occupation or, as commonly referred to, a “siege.” It may
be comforting for Israel’s ideological foes to rationalize the murder
of Jews by claiming some international right to do it with impunity and a
sense of righteousness. Unfortunately, however, as legal experts have
inconveniently pointed out, the rally participants and their
terror-appeasing apologists elsewhere are completely wrong about the
legitimacy of murder as part of “resistance” to an occupying force.
Article IV of the Third Geneva Convention, the statute which defines
combatants and legitimate targets in warfare, is very specific about who
may kill and who may be killed, and it does not allow for the murder of
either Israeli civilians—or soldiers—by Palestinian suicide bombers who
wear no identifying military uniforms and do not follow the accepted
rules of wars.
So when pro-Palestinian activists and critics of Israel repeat the
claim that Palestinians somehow have an internationally-recognized legal
“right” to resist occupation through violent means, they are both
legitimizing that terror and helping to insure that its lethal use by
Israel’s enemies will continue unabated. Those who lend their moral
support to terrorism, and who continually see the existence of
“grievance-based violence” as a justifiable tool of the oppressed, have
helped introduce a sick moral relativism into discussions about radical
Islam and Palestinianism, not to mention Israel’s right to protect its
citizens from being slaughtered. And the notion that Israel cannot, or
should not, retaliate against these rocket attacks until a sufficient
number of Israelis has been murdered is equally grotesque.
The fact that so many demonstrators feel comfortable with openly
supporting a terrorist group with the single purpose of murdering Jews,
that they publicly proclaim that “We are all Hamas now,” indicates quite
dramatically how prevalent, and acceptable, genocidal Jew-hatred has
become, both in the streets and on campuses in America and Europe. This
is clearly not, as it is regularly asserted, merely “criticism” of the
Israeli government’s policies; this is what many define as a new
permutation of anti-Semitism—an irrational, seething animus against the
Jew of nations, Israel.
These fatuous, morally self-righteous activists, many of whom are
from the hard Left or the pro-Islamic Right, are, without any expertise
in military affairs, eager to advise Israeli officials on the rules of
war and denounce the lack of “proportionality” in Israel’s attempts to
defend its population from jihadist murderers. And so eager are they to
publicly assert their righteousness as defenders of the Palestinian
cause, they embrace and “eroticize” terroristic violence and willingly
align themselves with Israel’s deadly foes who seek its annihilation,
catering, as essayist David Solway lyrically put it, “to the ammoniac
hatred of the current brood of crypto-antisemites posing as
anti-Zionists.”
In fact, the continual pattern of violence in the Arab world
against Israel agitates liberals greatly, and makes them condemn Israel,
not its foes, for having inspired Arab rage, with the assumption that
only peoples with justifiable grievances are moved to violent ends to
solve their woes.
This explains why the Left has regularly glossed over terroristic
behavior on the part of Islamists—Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Al Aqsa
Brigades, or others—and has romanticized this violence as “resistance.”
This rationalization, that violence is an acceptable, if not expected,
component of seeking social justice—that is, that the inherent
“violence” of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism will be met by the
same violence as the oppressed attempt to throw off their oppressors—is
exactly the style of self-defeating rationality that in this age has
proven to be an intractable part of the so-called War on Terror.
Abetted by the Arab world, which has also perennially defined
Israelis as European interlopers with no legitimate connection to the
Levant, Israel-haters are now willing to sacrifice the very survival of
the Jewish state because they feel that false charge of racism and
apartheid against Israel is more incompatible with their fervent belief
in a perfectible world than the rejectionist and genocidal efforts of
the Arab world which, in fact have necessitated Israeli security
measures—the separation wall, indeed, the occupation itself—all of
which, ironically, are pointed to as indications of exactly how racist
Israel’s behavior actually is against the Palestinians.
In fact, observed Harvard’s Ruth Wisse, the more hostile the Arab
foes of Israel became, the more difficult it has become for liberals to
absolve Israel for creating the very violent urges that emerged to
eliminate it. “By blaming Israel for Arab complaints,” she wrote,
“liberals anticipate a reasonable, pacific solution to the conflict . . .
The democratic Jewish state is subject to ‘rational’ persuasion; not so
the Arabs. The more determinedly, and by Western standards,
irrationally, Arab governments and their agents pursue their anti-Israel
campaign . . . the more desperately the liberal imagination tries to
blame the Jews for incurring Arab displeasure.”
The language of multiculturalism that animates the hate-Israel
crowd is sprinkled with the code words of oppression, and radicals in
newly-identified victim groups frequently see themselves as deserving of
protection and special political, racial, and cultural recognition.
Thus, the decades-old emphasis on enshrining multiculturalism has meant
that activists have been seeped in an ideology which refuses to
demarcate any differences between a democratic state struggling to
protect itself and aggressive, genocidal foes who wish to destroy it
with their unending assaults. For the multiculturalist left, the moral
strengths of the two parties are equivalent, even though the jihadist
foes of Israel, for example, have waged an unending struggle with the
stated aim of obliterating the Jewish state through the murder of Jews.
There is no other explanation for why educated, well-intentioned
and humane individuals, experiencing paroxysms of moral
self-righteousness in which they are compelled to speak out for the
perennial victim, can loudly and publicly advocate for the murder of
Jews—who already have created and live in a viable sovereign state—on
behalf a group of genocidal enemies of Israel whose tragic condition may
well be their own doing, and, at any rate, is the not the sole fault of
Israel’s. That these activists are willing, and ready, to sacrifice the
Jewish state, and Jewish lives, in the name of social justice and a
specious campaign of self-determination by Palestinian Arabs, shows how
morally corrupt and deadly the conversation about human rights has
become.
And its lethal nature and intent should frighten us all.
Read more: The Moral Psychosis of Demonstrating in Support of Hamas | Richard Cravatts | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-moral-psychosis-of-demonstrating-in-support-of-hamas/#ixzz39Fwkng72
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