Deviancy Defined Down
Via: Martin Kramer's Sandbox
Mr. Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton writes in WSJ:
Yet rather than promoting the rule of law in a future Palestine, the Obama administration essentially urges us to accept that, because Palestinians will kill unprotected Jews, Jews cannot be permitted in a Palestinian state.
This is what the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "defining deviancy down." Will it provide the basis for peace in the Middle East for us to define deviancy for Palestinians in such a way that essentially accepts Fatah's goal of a Jew-free Palestine? As Mr. Moynihan once wryly understated it, such a move would simply be our deciding to "get used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us"—let alone for Israelis and Palestinians.
So the premise that Palestine will be Judenrein is thus enshrined as a law unto itself, self-evident and self-explanatory.
Why would it stop with this premise?
How about sanctifying, by law, the antisemitic preachings in the Quran so that they become immune, in the West, including the US, from being noted, published or criticized? At what point will it be forbidden to object to that kind of preaching, because the premise of the perfidious Jew is part and parcel of Islamic sacrosanct scriptures?
posted by The Contentious Centrist @ Monday, October 12, 2009
15 comments
15 Comments:
how about 70% immigrants by plans andships and 20% natives. in israel
and 90 persent natives and 10 illegal smuglled living in the westbank?
ok lets leave the use of numbers in this way.
why settlments are obstical to peace.? . settlments are agianst all laws and are illegal and are designed to be permmenant.
when the idiot doesnt have a case to present and support he will look for anything and juderian or other nazi logos are an example.
may we be followers of the last message and the messages before it. in the age where the silly thinks he knows whats peacfull and that god and the weak are terroists and obstical to peace. now one of the greatest obsticals to peace..which is settlments, is made into a minor issue, and an issue that if you stand agianst its like bieng judenrian or nazi. where did the wsj reach..and they whant to buy aljazeera...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-YRK55v0uk&feature=related
as to making the quran responsibale for everything.....
there is a book called islam and capitalism. it would be good to read and understand.
so israel doesnt hold any liebilty what so ever?
or is it that jews are so consumed by the nazi era cliches and cant view the world excpet on those cliches "judenhien, work for freedom........"
so when we call for the end of settlments its equall to judenrian.?
I mean i know that the israli government are mickaviliest and they lie and they know they are big luyers.......thats politics. but I swear any israeli that comes and tries to make the israeli government policies morale and humane is mking a fol of himself because at least the israeli governemnt know that they luy and will use any low tool to do whats good for israel, but those who defend what the israeli governemnt does are ether dump or part of the luying procces.
"so when we call for the end of settlments its equall to judenrian.?"
What is it, then? Is it your position that Jews should not be allowed to live in the West Bank? Even when they were ethnically cleansed from those areas as late as 1948?
By the same token, is it your opinion then that Palestinians have no right to live in the state of Israel?
Please answer both questions, clearly and without unnecessary flourishes.
"I mean i know that the israli government are mickaviliest and they lie and they know they are big luyers"
How do you know the Israeli government lies? What does it lie about, can you give me an example?
Settlments in the westbank Are illegal. Saying that they compromise 10
percent and comparing them to the legal Arab natives in Israel is wrong. The writer is comparing something legal to something illegal. And before even the state of palestian is declared the issue of Jews rights who will compramize only ten percent is given the priority over everything.
"Settlments in the westbank Are illegal."
Why are they illegal? What about the Jewish community that lived in the West Bank prior to 1948? Were they illegal, too?
Is Palestinian RoR illegal too, then?
ok can you get me a document or numbers showing what the number of the jewish community before 1948. i mean personally i am not agianst anyone before 1948 but the issue here is the "legitimizing" of the new settlments and changing the demography by force and agianst the will of the inhabitants of the westbank.
so let us forget aboyt the westbank......you have numbers of jewish community before 1948.?
Sorry i meant do you have numbers of the jewish community in the westbank before 1948.?
You seem like a very intelligent and capable poster. I'm sure you can do your own research. I'll give you a couple of hints to kick off your search: Hebron massacre, 1929. Gush Etzion. The Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem.
What happened to all the Jews who had lived there?
The point that a Palestinian state should have religious freedom, and therefore grant equal rights to Jewish residents, goes back to Resolution 181, and I too find it strange how absent the idea is from contemporary discussion of a Palestinian state.
However I experience a gap here, though whether it is in R James Woolsey's argument or in my knowledge, I'm not sure. What I'm missing is an intention or desire in some part of Israel's political mainstream for the Jewish communities on the West Bank to be integrated into a wider West Bank society, either with or without the establishment of a Palestinian state. If the gap is in my knowledge, I'd appreciate any attempt to fill it!
No, the gap is there. It is the gap between what is practical and what is ideal. The integration of the Jewish communities on the West Bank into a wider West Bank society, is a virtual impossibility, even though the settlers themselves sometime make that argument. It is not realistic. Israel will not abandon those settlers to their own devices.
However, I do think it is important to remember WHY this is an impossibility, as well as remind people why there was no Jewish presence in the West Bank between 1948-1967. It is important to straigten the frame of reference and put a stop to the ever more prevailing assumption that Jews are interlopers in a land to which they have no claim. It is factually wrong, and Woosley's article makes the point that it is also morally wrong.
Welcome to the new multicutluralim. Jews and Caucasian Christians need not apply.
"...The integration of the Jewish communities on the West Bank into a wider West Bank society..."
Are you asking whether West Bank Jews will become patriotic and loyal citizens of a Palestinian state, like American Jews are loyal and patriotic US citizens?
No chance of that happening. At most there will develop a situation mirroring that existing within Israel today, where Arab citizens are law abiding and identify with the state to some degree, but have separate national and cultural loyalties and live in their own communities. Furthermore the security of Israeli communities living in the West Bank without the protection of the IDF will be problematic at best, and Israelis do not trust the Palestinians to refrain from harassing or harming them.
I remember hearing Aluf Matti Peled, the leading leftist pro-Arab ideologue of his generation, once giving a lecture in the US on the conflict. He gave short shrift to a questioner who asked him why Israel does not integrate its Arab citizens into Israeli society. His tone was angry and peremptory, and he railed at the American who had innocently asked the question. Peled said that in Israel such integration implies a negation of the worth of Palestine Arab national identity and was contrary to Arab wishes. Interestingly (perhaps out of tact), he did not express an opinion about whether integrating Jews into a non-Jewish national culture was a negation of the worth of Jewish identity and culture. And he was oblivious to the irony of how in Israel both Yiddish culture and Mizrahi cultural traditions were suppressed and repressed in the name of nation building.
Migreli, my ideal state, whether Israeli, Palestinian, or closer to home, British or Irish, would be one that grants a common legal identity while leaving space for a complex plurality of cultural identities. So the only loyalty I would like to see demanded of a citizen or resident would be to legal principles, not to a narrow rigid cultural identity.
CC, I recognise the need to make the moral case, but if in the next breath we accept the argument that it is not practical for Israel to work towards the ideal, then we also grant that argument to Palestinians, and the whole thing can be dismissed with a meaningless statement of principle. Would a legal principle in support of the rights of Jewish residents have much meaning if undermined by actions on all sides?
If the principle is important, which I think it is, then it should lead to more than just a moral stick for one or other side to use in verbal combat.
Restating the principle of religious freedom is a good first step, but the second step should be a search for possible paths towards implementation of the principle, however incremental, rather than a dismissal of the possibility of the ideal being achieved.
I think it's also important that the strategic value of the principle be seriously examined, rather than just discussing it in moral terms. The benefit of having a pluralistic culturally diverse open neighbor over having a neighbor with limited political, cultural and religious freedom should be obvious when one looks at the consequences of the Gaza pullout.
I think an exchange of populations would be the best way to go. Muslims out of Israel and Jews out of West Bank and Gaza.
Once that is sorted out, then the war can continue.
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