Distorted Mirrors, Distorted Perceptions
March 7, 2008
Israel does not need it’s morality assessed by dysfunctional regimes or equally dysfunctional Arab ‘intellectuals’ or apologists in the west. She is the only democracy in the region and despite facing existential threats from a bevy of some of the most immoral nations for almost 60 years, she thrives.
Israel does not need her morality assessed by leftists that resent her democratic tendencies. Shrinkwrapped writes in Maneuvering Between The Headlines,
The liberal credo has always been that if we treat people well and follow the Golden Rule, they will treat us well. It would be wonderful if the this were true. It is an extraordinary leap into a blind abyss for a liberal to recognize that no matter how you treat some people they will always want to harm you. What the Palestinians have done is manage to convince the Israelis is that they will never accept the existence of the state of Israel; that they prefer murdering Jewish children to building a home for their own children; they exalt the murderous suicides more than those who would try to teach liberal tolerance to their own people.
The Arabs and leftists will go to great lengths to camouflage those truths. Writing in the Arab News, Linda Heard says that Israel Should Embrace The Arab Peace Plan:
Israel is concerned about maintaining a demographic balance so that Jews outnumber non-Jews. Fears are that should there be more Arab Israelis than Jewish Israelis Israel would no longer be able to label itself a Jewish state and would have to fend off calls for a one-state solution.
No Ms Heard, Israel and the civilized world are not so much concerned with a ‘one state solution’ as they are worried about wholesale slaughter, as promised by the religious leaders of her patrons, the Saudis, the rest of the Arab world and the Palestinians themselves. Israel is concerned that ‘Itbach Al Yahud!’- Slaughter the Jews! is an acceptable expression of religious and political expression in the Arab world. Israel is concerned Holocaust denial is most loudly heard from by the same people who ‘promise to finish what Hitler started. Israel is concerned about what is taught in Arab world schools, broadcast on Arab world media and preached from Arab world pulpits.
Ms Heard can pretend as mightily as she can that the Arab world, Israel and the west are all moral equivalents, but in the end, you can’t make reality go away no matter how many times you click your heels.
The Arab worlds’ biggest enemy isn’t Israel. It is video and audio tape.
Shrinkwrapped goes on to say,
The logic of liberalism is that it is better to accept more Israeli deaths if it will better foster peace than to risk inconvenience or humiliation of Palestinians. Most Israelis have rejected this for perfectly valid reasons. The separation wall is a last ditch attempt by Israel to avoid following the logic of warfare (in fact, less than 5% of the security boundary is a wall. The other 95% is a fence- SC&A). If the wall does not prevent an unacceptable threshold of Israeli deaths from being crossed, the war will devolve into an existential fight to the death not just for Israel, but for the Arabs as well..
Under tyrannical regimes with no hope for a future for themselves or for their children, it isn’t hard to understand how so many otherwise rational people would be intoxicated with the idea of a meaningful life by fighting for a ’cause,’ bought and paid for by regimes with a vested interest in keeping rage and attention focused outward. These regimes go with the tried and true- make Israel and the Jews the enemy, not only of the Palestinians but the enemy of Islam as well. Throw in a few wild conspiracy theories, a harsh repressive police force and the road to maintaining power in the region is assured. Make sure the media, school curriculum’s and carefully chosen clergy that can be bought and paid for easily, will spew hate, bigotry and revisionism on demand and populations that number millions, will come out and march for you. Why? Because they believe that an ideology or religion that bestows upon them even a contrived notion superiority and meaning is more than they can ever hope for in their real lives. Add a few cameras, wave the flag and millions upon millions will thank their leaders for their oppression.
Of course, leftists, like Arab leaders, will say that what we see unfolding before our very eyes is ‘relative.’ We need to see and understand those events in ‘context.’ That is why they are so busy redefining and revising events even as we see them. We are unable to to interpret events we see. We cannot ‘understand’ reality- and so, mythical conspiracy theories need to be promulgated.
If 9/11 was the result of radical Islamism alone, the political ideologies that birthed that kind of terror needs to be seen for the failure and danger those kind of ideologies really present. Both the Arab world and leftists have too much invested in their ideologies to allow that to happen. To see 9/11 for the expression it really was, is to weaken decades of Arab and leftist ideologies and thus weaken the hold those ideologies hold. Thus, the conspiracy theory. ‘It wasn’t us, it was them.’
Of course, the conspiracy theory is presented as ‘fact’ and subjecting those ‘facts’ to scrutiny is verbotten. To suggest otherwise is almost tantamount to treason. Instead, the focus is placed on our response. Our antagonists must be held blameless- it is we that must be excoriated.
Again, Shrinkwrapped, in The Suicidal Pursuit Of Perfection:
They insist that the world should be the way they want it to be, and further, try to force others to collude with them in imagining the world is the way they wish. If they win one victory, they need to escalate; this is the logic of the pursuit of perfection. Thus, if the administration agrees to allow lawyers to visit inmates in Guantanamo, they cannot be satisfied, but then must escalate to demanding full rights of access to the American legal system. If they ever were to become successful at getting people to agree with them, their logic insists that the West effectively disarm; we must stop all NSA intercepts, stop monitoring Mosques and other locations, and maintain the inviolability of personal privacy from any government intrusion. Because their true demands are so extreme, they can only face marginalization by pressing their agenda; further, if they truly cared about civil liberties, they would find a way to compromise because the greatest risk to civil liberties would be posed by a second attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse. Were such an attack to occur, all notions of acceptable limits of governmental intrusion would be jettisoned, with the agreement of the vast majority of the American people. In either case, whether they win or lose the current argument, they ultimately must lose.
One must note that those who would deny us effective measures so as to protect ourselves, also are the greatest apologists and supporters of those who have already done us harm- and would do so again, given the chance, by their own addmission. In conjunction with their attempts at hamstringing our efforts at self preservation, current events are immediately recast so as to as to limit the magnitude of the threat. We are the problem. Israel is the problem. Iran is the problem, but only because of Israel and the United States.
There is a more serious aspect to the recasting of events. In addition to the clear deception and propaganda efforts ( see Dr Sanity here for an excellent look at how propaganda works).
Shrinkwrapped goes on to note
The fact that those who cry loudest about the Bush administration abusing civil liberties (in the absence of any real evidence for specific abuses) are doomed to lose no matter what the outcome, is evidence that they are expressing, through often elegant and elaborate rationalizations, a true self-destructive wish which is hidden and unrecognized. The fact that they are willing to risk the lives of others in order to hold onto their ideological position is further evidence of the aggression that contaminates their purity of vision (emp- SC&A)
Clarity is essential. For the left, these self destructive tendencies are the westernized version of Jihad and martyrdom that threatens our own existence. Islamist Jihadism is focused outward. The leftist equivalent is focused inwards.
Dr Sanity seems to agree. In Democrat Insurgents, Dead Enders And Terrorist Enablers, she challenges the left to explore real self examination, though she remains pessimistic:
…that would require insight and a willingness to examine their own motivations–and the revelations that would result are unacceptable to their self-concept.
In the same way that Muslim Jihadis reflect no more than a superficial and simplistic expression of Islamic ‘pride,’ so too do the western Jihadis who express hatred for all things western (including the notions of freedom) until you attempt to take it away from them. It is at that point the western Jihadis will demand their rights and freedoms with more fervor than than the NRA demands the right to bear arms.
In the end, the leftists embrace a myopic belief system with shallow roots. They, like the other Jihadis, are engaged in nothing more than a self serving ideology fueled by the same self loathing. In the self absorbed and upside down world in which they lives, there are those on the left that are confident that no matter what their excesses, carnage and death they helped bring about or supported, they can sleep easy in the knowledge they will be forgiven, because ‘they meant well.’
That is why the leftists feel no guilt in excoriating Israel. The Jews of this generation have proved they will defend themselves with great fervor and if another Holocaust were to occur, the leftists can say,
How sad, how tragic. We meant well. If only they had submitted willingly to the racism, bigotry and hate of the nations for whom Mein Kampf is a gospel, all of this might have been avoided.
We are forgiven, of course, because we meant well.
Right?
For many on the left, nothing is more meaningful than a Holocaust (of people, pets, plants or Conservatives). Not even preventing one at home or anywhere else.
Not even the dysfunctional Arab world is so detached from reality. Their hate is on the surface.
The gentle, refined, poetic and pained artistic souls of the left want life to imitate their self expressive art, truth and reality be damned. For the leftist, fighting evil has made us evil.
For the leftist, terror is a violent expression and reaction to injustice by oppressed people. This definition of acceptable terrorism is applicable only to leftist terrorists and always implies a just cause and is therefore justification of the terrorist act. It is the cause that determines the nature of terror.
Timothy McVeigh killed far fewer people in Oklahoma City than have leftist terrorists, yet he is regarded by leftists as a ‘rightist’ personified. His cause was unacceptable to the left. That said, to the leftists, bombing Passover meals or Jewish weddings is a perfectly acceptable kind of terror. Bombing weddings in Jordan is not acceptable terror.
Fighting injustice is one of the noblest calls of mankind. To fight injustice is to respond to that call. It is in how justice is fought that we can determine the validity and morality of those engaged in that battle.
The leftists and the Arab world have made clear how they will address grievances.
The bigoted, racist and hate filled school curricula, media and religious ideologies foisted on the Arab world by dysfunctional leaders have become an integral part of Arab culture and failure. There is no amount of dancing can hide that reality
From Maneuvering Between The Headlines:
The point cannot be made more clearly or succinctly. To not recognize there are bad people out there, is to be a fool, living in the Ashram of Intellectual Irrelevance.
The morality of the Israelis is very different from that of the Palestinians and their Arab supporters.
We have noted that
Irrespective of the cause, even a cause seemingly just, killing is never the goal. The cost of a military victory is understood. Eisenhower and other Allied generals visited the Death Camps and wept, and then went into the coldest rage a human can muster- unlike their German counterparts, who posed for pictures and laughed at the plight of the 30 million dead souls. The heirs to the Nazis, the Islamists have posed for pictures with the heads of those they have decapitated. Palestinians bare bloodied hands, some holding human entrails, of Israelis they have butchered. They have filmed themselves kicking a decapitated head about on a field, as if it were just another soccer field. All the while, mosques celebrate these barbarities with music and sweet pastries.
We do not kill with joy. We do not place civilians, or schoolchildren or the sick an infirm in harms way. We do not engage an enemy, hiding behind children. We develop weapons that are ever more accurate. Others develop weapons with labratory developed poisons that can be ever more widely dispersed- and they have used them.
To kill with joy and to celebrate death, is to disregard God. To commit terror and celebrate the deaths of innocents, is to dishonor God and to refute his Dominion. Those who disregard His message corrupt and debase His message. Those who find justification or apology for such acts, or blame the victim, disgrace themselves and their faith. In the assembly of believers, they accomplish nothing but to shame themselves and their communities.
Terrorists have families and mothers. While that is an absolute truth, that in no way means terrorists are just like us, no matter how mightily leftists want us to believe that.
Portions of this post have been previously published.
The attack on the Jewish seminary in Jerusalem was not the first time Palestinian terrorists chose a religious venue.
Recall the Passover Massacre of 2002.
There was attack on a Jewish seminary, in another time. Flashback to 1929:
“At 4:00 pm, an Arab crowd began gathering outside the Hebron Yeshiva and throwing stones through the windows. Only two people were inside, a student and the sexton. Upon being hit, the student tried to leave to find himself facing the Arab crowd, who grabbed him and stabbed him to death… Early the following Saturday morning, a crowd armed with staves and axes appeared in the streets and killed two Jewish boys, one stoned to death and the other stabbed…some of the remaining rioters, shouting “on to the Ghetto…”
One third of the killed were students of the Hebron yeshiva…
On September 1, Sir John Chancellor [publicly] condemned:-
‘the atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless and bloodthirsty evildoers… murders perpetrated upon defenseless members of the Jewish population… accompanied by acts of unspeakable savagery.’
High Commissioner Chancellor had more to say. From a letter to his son:
I do not think history records many worse horrors in the last few hundred years.
I am so tired and disgusted with this country and everything concerned with it that I only want to leave it as soon as possible.
The principle instigator was Haj Amin El Hussein. The Mufti was certainly known by the company he kept;
November 2, 1943 Himmler’s telegram to Mufti (see image):
‘To the Grand Mufti: The National Socialist movement of Greater Germany has, since its inception, inscribed upon its flag the fight against the world Jewry. It has therefore followed with particular sympathy the struggle of freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against Jewish interlopers. In the recognition of this enemy and of the common struggle against it lies the firm foundation of the natural alliance that exists between the National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the whole world. In this spirit I am sending you on the anniversary of the infamous Balfour declaration my hearty greetings and wishes for the successful pursuit of your struggle until the final victory.’ Reichsfuehrer S.S. Heinrich Himmler
…During the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that The Mufti was one of the initiators of the extermination of European Jewry and a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the initiation of the Final Solution.
For more see Answering Islam The Nazi Islam Connection.
Once in Berlin, the Mufti received an enthusiastic reception by the “Islamische Zentralinstitut” and the whole Islamic community of Germany, which welcomed him as the “Führer of the Arabic world.” In an introductory speech, he called the Jews the “most fierce enemies of the Muslims” and an “ever corruptive element” in the world. Husseini soon became an honored guest of the Nazi leadership and met on several occasions with Hitler. He personally lobbied the Führer against the plan to let Jews leave Hungary, fearing they would immigrate to Palestine. He also strongly intervened when Adolf Eichman tried to cut a deal with the British government to exchange German POWs for 5000 Jewish children who also could have fled to Palestine. The Mufti’s protests with the SS were successful, as the children were sent to death camps in Poland instead. One German officer noted in his journals that the Mufti would liked to have seen the Jews “preferably all killed.” On a visit to Auschwitz, he reportedly admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently. Throughout the war, he appeared regularly on German radio broadcasts to the Middle East, preaching his pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic message to the Arab masses back home [emp-SC&A]
To show gratitude towards his hosts, in 1943 the Mufti travelled several times to Bosnia, where on orders of the SS he recruited the notorious “Hanjar troopers,” a special Bosnian Waffen SS company which slaugh-tered 90% of Bosnia’s Jews and burned countless Serbian churches and villages. These Bosnian Muslim recruits rapidly found favor with SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who established a special Mullah Military school in Dresden.
The only condition the Mufti set for his help was that after Hitler won the war, the entire Jewish population in Palestine should be liquidated. After the war, Husseini fled to Switzerland and from there escaped via France to Cairo, were he was warmly received. The Mufti used funds received earlier from the Hilter regime to finance the Nazi-inspired Arab Liberation Army that terrorized Jews in Palestine…
After the war, a member of Young Egypt named Gamal Abdul Nasser was among the officers who led the July 1952 revolution in Egypt. Their first act – following in Hitler’s footsteps – was to outlaw all other parties. Nasser’s Egypt became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals, among them the SS General in charge of the murder of Ukrainian Jewry; he became Nasser’s bodyguard and close comrade. Alois Brunner, another senior Nazi war criminal, found shelter in Damascus, where he served for many years as senior adviser to the Syrian general staff and still resides today.
Sami al-Joundi, one of the founders of the ruling Syrian Ba’ath Party, recalls: “We were racists. We admired the Nazis. We were immersed in reading Nazi literature and books… We were the first who thought of a translation of Mein Kampf. Anyone who lived in Damascus at that time was witness to the Arab inclination toward Nazism…” [emp-SC&A]
The PLO and notably Arafat himself do not make a secret of their source of inspiration. The Grand Mufti el-Husseini is venerated as a hero by the PLO. It should be noted, that the PLO’s top figure in east Jerusalem today, Faisal Husseini, is the grandson to the Führer’s Mufti. Arafat also considers the Grand Mufti a respected educator and leader, and in 1985 declared it an honor to follow in his footsteps. Little wonder. In 1951, a close relative of the Mufti named Rahman Abdul Rauf el-Qudwa el-Husseini matriculated to the University of Cairo. The student decided to conceal his true identity and enlisted as “Yasser Arafat.”
In an environment where Holocaust denial and ‘We’ll finish what Hitler started‘ is a part of the consciousness of every Palestinian, is the Hamas response to yesterday’s massacre really a surprise?
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday condemned a shooting attack in Jerusalem that killed at least eight people.
“President Mahmoud Abbas condemns the attack in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of many Israelis and he reiterated his condemnation of all attacks that target civilians, whether they are Palestinians or Israelis,” said Abbas aide Saeb Erekat.
Deja vu, all over again:
While in English language media, the Palestinian Authority condemned the attack saying “The leadership strongly denounces Netanya operation against Israeli civilians and decides to prosecute those involved or responsible,”[3] in Arabic it glorified the “shahid” on January 21, 2003, the official PA daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida published a report saying “the Tulkarm Shahids Memorial Soccer Championship tournament of the Shahid Abd Al-Baset Odeh began with the participation of seven top teams, named after Shahids who gave their lives to redeem the homeland. Isam, the brother of the Shahid, will distribute the trophies.” [4]
Plus ca change…
