but what about what about what about what about?

Why do you refuse to believe that former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu doesn’t mean it when he says that all Palestinians in Gaza are “collectively guilty” and urges the IDF to “carpet bomb” them and not to worry about the indiscriminate injuring or killing of noncombatants because Jewish war ethics has absolutely no prohibition against indiscriminate killing of noncombatants? Why do you refuse to believe that Schmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safed and son of Mordechai, doesn’t mean it when he says, “If they don’t stop after we kill 1000, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. And if they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million”? I thought you said “when lunatics say looney things, they often mean them.” Why do you refuse to believe that these two lunatic and fanatical rabbis don’t mean what they say? You go out of your way to read the worst possible meanings into statements by Hamas and other Palestinians (even finding prescriptions for genocide that aren’t there), but you also go out of your way to pretend that Zionist Jews calling for genocide in the clearest terms are actually saying something other than what they are clearly saying. Why is this? Are you obtuse? Are you unaware that your double moral standard–which causes you to judge Jews one way and Palestinian Arabs another– is motivated by and reveals your own deep-seated Zionist racism? Your double moral standard is so blatant and so transparent that it is almost embarassing to read your posts.

Finally, just what about the former Sephardi chief rabbi’s call to genocide didn’t I understand? I understood it perfectly. He wants to “eradicate” his enemies. You are the one refusing to understand a statement whose meaning is clear. “If they don’t stop . . .we must kill 100,000, even a million.” The former Sephardi chief rabbi added,”This is a message to the Jewish people not to be compassionate.” You obviously agree with him. You don’t seem to have an ounce of compassion for the Palestinian people and their suffering under the cruel and brutal occupation of the Zionist state.

I note what the rabbi said. I think you are not interpreting it either in context or, if in context, you did not understand what he said.

Hue,

I understood the comment perfectly. I also understand that the Hamas group’s official political program is genocide. That is, to me, significant. You would think the world would learn something when lunatics say loony things, they often mean them, especially when the loony things become part of a political program.

You’ve repeated exactly the same thing at least 4 times AFTER it’s already been answered at least twice.

Give it a break. Move on.

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage–torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians–which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irishwomen’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities–in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna–believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.

As horrible as that may be, it is different than sniping school girls on their way to class for no other reason than to show you can. But this is besides the point that I was making concerning your, ““I trust you know that the attack on Passover eve killed a bunch of elderly people celebrating a religious holiday. It does not get much lower than that”. You believe elderly people celebrating during a religion’s holiday (only “your people”) is as low as one can get and I found that to be morally selective. You didn’t have to say it’s the lowest-but you did.

When people take to claiming morality for their outrage concerning people they consider “theirs”, yet show callous apathy and hatred for people they don’t, it betrays how sincere that person truly is over their tears for anyone.

Reminds me of all the good Americans mustering up croc tears for the WTC to justify the death handed out to children in far away places who they don’t give a fuck about. They care about “their people” as far as it helps them identify themselves as good Americans.

…One should not dismiss the undercurrent of racism that runs through the discussion of the Israel-Arab conflict. That is the meaning of the tacit assumption that the indigenous population does not have the human and national rights that we naturally accord to the Jewish immigrants who largely displaced them. The assumption is rarely challenged, or apparently even perceived. That is true when the denial of Arab rights is merely presupposed, and remains so even when the expression of racist attitudes is crude and explicit. A number of examples have been mentioned. It would be an error to think of them as merely scattered cases.

Consider, for example, a New York Times Magazine article by Thomas Friedman entitled “Proposals for Peace,” outlining his ideas about a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israel conflict. He begins by introducing “an elderly curmudgeon named Sasson,” a representative of “the Israeli silent majority.” The article asks what will convince this silent but reasonable ordinary man–whose alleged views turn out to be remarkably like Friedman’s–to agree to a political settlement. “Sasson is the key to a Palestinian-Israeli peace settlement,” Friedman holds. Two proposals are offered that might satisfy Sasson; these are presented as speeches by some Israeli political figure who would be farsighted enough to listen to Friedman’s advice. One is Friedman’s south Lebanon proposal, already discussed: place the territories under the control of a mercenary force backed by Israeli might, and warn the Palestinians that if “they put one of ours in the hospital, we’ll put 200 of theirs in the morgue,” and Israel will “obliterate” whatever the Palestinians construct if they threaten Israel “in any way.” The second is a “diplomatic solution” along the lines of Labor Party rejectionism, with enough power deployed to convince Israelis “to ignore Palestinian poetry” that they do not like. Again, the familiar racist arrogance.

Notably missing is any Palestinian Sasson, or indeed any recognition that it might matter what Palestinians think or want. The discussion of proposals for peace is based on the assumption that all that matters is what is good for the Jews. Friedman takes great pains to explain to American readers Jewish attitudes into which he feels he has much insight: the attitudes of Sasson, or Ze’ev Chafets, the American-born former director of the Israeli Government Press Office, sympathetically portrayed as he calmly explains that his son would drop a nuclear bomb on the Rashdiye refugee camp “without a second thought” if he felt that Israel’s security were threatened. There is no indication that Friedman understands anything about the Palestinians, or cares to. They are a nuisance that Israel cannot get rid of, and for its own good, Israel should give Ahmed a seat on the bus to shut him up. That ends the discussion.

The racism is often not subtle at all. We read that Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer is offended by the willingness of the Sandinistas “to express solidarity with Palestinians, M-19s, and other Third World detritus” (Joe Klein); replace “Palestinians” with “Jews” and no one will fail to recognize the echoes of Der Stuermer. The same reaction would be elicited by a complaint that New York is “underpopulated,” meaning that it has too many Blacks, Hispanics, and Jews and too few WASPs; but there is no reaction to a reference to the “underpopulated Galilee,” meaning that it has too many Arabs and too few Jews (Dissent editor Irving Howe in the New York Times). Liberal intellectuals express no qualms about a journal whose editor reflects on “Arab culture” in which “no onus falls on lying,” on a “crazed Arab,” but “crazed in the distinctive ways of his culture. He is intoxicated by language, cannot discern between fantasy and reality, abhors compromise, always blames others for his predicament, and in the end lances the painful boil of his frustrations in a pointless, though momentarily gratifying, act of bloodlust” (New Republic editor Martin Peretz). Comparable statements about “Jewish culture” would be recognized as a reversion to Nazism. Gary Hart was forced to terminate his presidential candidacy because of alleged indiscretions, which did not include his withdrawal of money from a bank when he learned it had Arab investors: “`We didn’t know it was an Arab bank,’ said Kenneth Guido, special counsel to the Hart campaign. `We got him (Hart) out of it as soon as we knew’.” Nor was Walter Mondale accused of racism when he returned campaign contributions he had received from Arab-Americans or, in one case, a woman with an Arab-American surname, “for fear of offending American Jews,” the Wall Street Journal reported; or when he accepted the endorsement of the The New Republic. Change a few names, and the meaning of these facts is evident enough. In the New York Times, William Safire condemns “the world’s film crews” for their coverage of “a made-for-TV uprising of a new `people’…in Israel’s West Bank”; such derision of Jewish resistance to comparable abuses would be unthinkable, apart from neo-Nazi publications, but this passes without notice. It is pointless to discuss the journal of the American Jewish Committee, considered one of the most respectable voices of conservative opinion, where a lead article seethes with bitter scorn about “the Palestinian Arabs, people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery”; this is “the obvious key to the success of the Arab strategy” of driving the Jews into the sea in a revival of the Nazi Lebensraum concept, the author of these shocking words continues. We may, again, imagine the reaction if a respected professor at a major university were to produce the same words, referring to Jews.

Well, the Palestinian Arabs did just what you said. They took a school hostage and then killed the children.

Have you ever heard of the Ma’alot massacre? Gangsterish terrorists from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine murdered 22 religious high school students.

You are correct, the Hamas covenant does not speak to exact numbers. It advocates killing all Jews. Perhaps Hamas does not know the number.

As for Rabbi Eliyahu, you are quoting him out of context and without examining what he meant.

I am familiar with what he said. The context was Palestinian Arabs who were shooting rockets into the Israeli town Sderot and killing innocent civilians and making life miserable. He was speaking specifically about preventing rocket attacks by Palestinian Arabs by using the Israeli air force rather than risking lives of Israeli soldiers.

He clearly did not mean that Israel should really kill a million Arabs. That is why he also spoke of smaller numbers of people being killed. What he meant is that Israel should do whatever is necessary to protect its civilian population.

He also took the view – a view which the rest of the world employs – that there is some degree of collective responsibility of a population. In this case, the Palestinian Arab population does nothing to prevent Palestinian Arabs from shooting rockets at Sderot. They, for their failure even to try to prevent attacks on civilians, bear moral responsibility. That, you will note, is entirely in line with the Geneva Convention, which holds a people responsible where they allow military establishments to hide in a civilian population. In that circumstance, it is moral and legal, under the Geneva Convention, to do what is necessary, even if it means civilians will be killed.

What he also said is that Israelis should stop risking its soldiers’a lives in such a situation and should, rather than getting them killed, use the air force. In other words, he suggests that Israel should do what the rest of the world does. Why? Because it is morally proper and legal.

“I trust you know that the attack on Passover eve killed a bunch of elderly people celebrating a religious holiday. It does not get much lower than that”.

You really can’t think of anything worse or at least on par with this? I suppose targeting a little Israeli girl walking to school would be a poor waste of limited resources for the desperate and occupied, but personally sniping little girls in the head sounds a bit worse than your worst. How about dropping a payload on women and children while they sleep in their beds? It’s terrible for anyone, young or old to be killed while not fighting, but this appeal to morality you make is very selective

Ms. Wisse lives in the US and teaches at Harvard. Her views are irrelevant.

The issue that is important is the political program of those involved, not the rantings of those involved. To get straight to the point: what is the political program of Hamas?

They, unlike Ms. Wisse, have an official document which represents their position. It is, by any standards, among the most racist programs of any political party on Earth. It has no redeeming side. Rather, it advocates war, not negotiations. It advocates genocide, not peaceful co-existence. It asserts a world conspiracy, not a rational interpretation of what occurs in this world. It program is paraphrased, in not a small measure, from Nazi propaganda from the 1930’s.

That, not some rants by some individuals, is important.

As is typical of this website, what is presented is propaganda, not analysis. And, Mr. Petersen tends to lead in confusing propaganda with analysis.

And again: in the end, the parties to the dispute need to bury the hatchet. That means that both sides will get less than they want. That means that genocidal ideologies such as that of groups like Hamas need to be undermined. They, as they say, believe in Jihad and oppose any peace. They, not Palestinian Arabs and not Israelis, are the enemies of all involved because they want that group wants the dispute to continue, not be settled.

The obvious key to the success of Arab strategy is the presence, in the disputed territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River, of Palestinian Arabs, people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery.

Ruth Wisse in Commentary magazine, May 1988. Wisse was awarded the 2007 National Humanities Medal at the White House a few weeks ago.

You want me to quote people. I have quoted the political platform of the leading Palestinian Arab political party. Such was the product of an entire group of people who came together and chose their words carefully. Which is to say, it is a lot more important than what some politician said here or there and in some specific context, which neither of us knows.

I can, if you want, quote racist Hamas. Fine. Will The New York Times do for you? Let us see. Read this from a NY Times article titled “Bombers Gloating in Gaza as They See Goal Within Reach: No More Israel” (Joel Brinkley, The New York Times, 2002/04/04):

The goals of Hamas are straightforward. As Sheik Yassin put it, “our equation does not focus on a cease-fire; our equation focuses on an end to the occupation.” By that he means an end to the Jewish occupation of historical Palestine.

Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and full right of return for the four million Palestinians who live in other states. After that, the Jews could remain, living “in an Islamic state with Islamic law,” Dr. Zahar said. “From our ideological point of view, it is not allowed to recognize that Israel controls one square meter of historic Palestine.”

Mr. Shenab insisted that he was not joking when he said, “There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews.”

The Hamas leaders are clearly enamored of the suicide attacks carried out by their followers. “It is the most effective strategy for us,” said Dr. Rantisi. “For us it is the same as their F-16,” the attack fighters used by the Israeli military.

For them, the crowning achievement so far was the attack on Passover eve.

I trust you know that the attack on Passover eve killed a bunch of elderly people celebrating a religious holiday. It does not get much lower than that. I trust that you understand that what was advocated was the intentional massacring of civilians.

Also from the same article:

On the night of the Passover attack, Dr. Zahar released a statement saying it was intended in part to shut down the cease-fire negotiations then under way, directed by Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the American special envoy.

In the interview today, Dr. Zahar explained, “the Zinni mission was bad for us” because, under the proposed terms of the cease-fire, groups like Hamas would be disarmed and their leaders arrested.

“Besides,” Dr. Rantisi said, “we in Hamas believe peace talks will do no good. We do not believe we can live with the enemy.

Maybe the “enemy” would end up in Alaska. Maybe. More likely, he had in mind the political program from his own political group, which officially advocates genocide.

Again: the official program of Hamas is genocide. Such is stated in black and white in the group’s covenant. In fact, it is stated more bluntly than Hitler ever stated his program.