Comment Trail for Sunday:

Buj- al-Arab's sense of fun:

My comment: I don't think you fully appreciate the genius of this cartoon. It is a spoof on the myth that vampires are terrified of crosses. Netanyahu is depicted as a vampire while "Mother Palestine" is the virtuous Christian, who chases away the blood sucker with her version of the cross: the key.

Latuff, who won a prize in a contest of caricatures mocking the Holocaust, would have that kind of mindset. The Holocaust could happen because people had been conditioned to accept cruelty to Jews by centuries long indoctrination in the myth of the blooducking Jew, the anti-Christ Jew and what not. Latuff is one cog in the vast anti-Israel propaganda machine which works hard at making people think of Israelis (actually, Jews) in a certain way. He is doing his faithful part in building up for a second Holocaust, by dehumanizing and demonizing Israelis.

And it is little wonder that you, who spoke of the Hebron "massacre" would find this kind of humour appealing.

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BTW, it is also a misreading of the vampire myth. Because obviously Israelis are not going anyway no matter how many keys are thrust at them. It is more of a wishful thinking rather than any realistic projection of the status quo.

Certainly this kind of cartoon and your admiration for it are unlikely to persuade Israelis that they can trust their Palestinian Arab neighbors to make genuine peace

But this comment by another blogger (a self-designated poet, no less) deserves attention:

He is doing his faithful part in building up for a second Holocaust

Oh one could only wish hope and dream!

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UNclear Israel? Buj-Al Arab opines about a resolution that urges Israel to put all its atomic sites under UN inspection and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

"So, fanatic racist Israel can have nuclear weapons (and not much nuclear power) and (equally?) fanatic Iran is not allowed to have any of the above? Perhaps it's worth noting that Israel is Jewish and Iran is Muslim."

What I found interesting is the blogger's pathological inability to deal with historical realities. Check it out:

Here is my comment.

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Remembering the Hebron Massacre: The blogger Solomon2 reminds readers of this event, points to the way an Arab blogger dismisses it, and asks:

"Would Israel even have to exist as a separate Jewish State if events like the Hebron Massacre hadn't demonstrated the failure of Arabs to stand for justice within their communities, so that if Jews were to live in their internationally-endorsed homeland, they would have to fight to establish justice themselves? And is this not similar to the struggles other minority population in the middle east have today?"

My comment:


FWIW, I think Buj is a decent enough fellow who has a hard time dealing with a different version to truth than the one he was brought up upon. I do not read Arabic so I rely on Arab sources written in English or translations to learn about Muslim and Arab attitudes. Al-Jazeera is one such source. Al-Ahram is another. What I have noted in these two media outlets is the inability to differentiate between editorializing and facts, between inclination and opinion, between belief and recorded, verifiable history. Their reports overflow with sarcasm and hateful asides. I have been thinking there is little surprise that the much dreaded "Arab street" is simply simmering with anger and indignation against Israel, Jews and the West. Angry people do not think. When people are kept at a constant, low-level of anger and resentment all the time, they lose all capacity for self-reflection or self-criticism.

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The dark history of Hebron The blogger, somewhat subtly, re-writes the event of the Hebron massacre:

Israel's West Bank settlers are often religious nutters who claim a divine right to live anywhere in Biblical Israel. This is true of the Hebron settlers, but they also cite another justification for their presence in the town. Before the foundation of the state of Israel, Hebron also had a Jewish presence. In the British mandate period, increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine from those committed to political Zionism led to increasing tension. In 1929 in Hebron, many of the local Palestinians turned on their Jewish fellows.

Reading this one comes away with the impression that the only Jewish presence in Hebron was relatively recent and consisted of "Zionist nutters". Since there has been recorded Jewish presence in Hebron since the early 15th century, the question is what is there about the real, recorded history of the Jews of Hebron that is so threatening to the blogger's view of the I/P conflict?

My comment:

Your account is seriously misleading. There has been recorded Jewish presence in Hebron since the early 15th century. You can read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebron#Ottoman_rule

Since the material is all too available through the google tool, one can only conclude that the author of this account is at best willfully ignorant.

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Witness in Palestine is a usual lachrymose account of Palestinian suffering, as compressed through the heated the heated imagination of the "witness". In her telling of the Hebron massacre she writes: "In 1929, some 30 Jews were brutally murdered by Palestinians who resented their growing presence in Hebron... the vast majority of Jews killed in the massacre were recent immigrants from Europe, because most of the native Hebron Jews were saved by their Muslim neighbors who hid them in their homes."

In my comment I corrected her about the number. There were 67 Jews who were massacred.

Surely a detail such as this would not have been all that hard to find out, would it? Why would she try to reduce the number of Jews killed in Hebron, I wonder?

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What's in a name: @ Z-word blog

"...examining how racists of both leftist and rightist varieties will vilify a person not because of what they say, but because of what they are called. Barack Hussein Obama. "

My comment:

Esther Delisle, who wrote a book about the legacy of Lionel-Groulx and antisemitism in Quebec, talked about how the idea of the invisibility of the Jew was a source of national paranoia during the thirties and forties. A Jew named Goldberg could change his name to Godbout and there would be no way of telling him apart from non-Jews.

Mordechai Richler had an ironic twist on this paranoia when he discussed Jews as being designated “an invisible minority”. “My people”, he used to say with some acerbity, “are anything but invisible”.

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Update: Take a look at the comments