Comment trail:

I was lazy about posting on my own blog this week but was pretty active dropping comments everywhere... Here is a choice selection:

@Combating the Apartheid Slander: Resources

“Can you please explain why calling Israel an Apartheid state is a) antisemetic?”

Can you explain why accusations of deicide, host desecration, anti-Christian bias, impurity, well poisoning, plotting to control the world, causing wars, revolutions, and calamities,usury and profiteering are called “antisemitic”?

Antisemitism is characterized by the perpetual stalking of, and defamation of Jews, and only Jews, with lies, and threatening Jews with sponsored violence.

Thus accusing Israel of “Apartheid” is such a violent lie that can be found out with the slightest intellectual exertion. Refusal to do so accompanied by a dogged pursuit of the Jewish state, and none but the Jewish state, with a determined, on-going clamour for its dismantlement is motivated by an antisemitic mindset. It’s a mindset that adamantly and consistently refuses to admit that there is an Israeli reality that absolutely, justifies the separation fence and checkpoints, even if they inconvenience Palestinian movement. That a Jewish kid’s right to reach school alive is somewhat superior to the Palestinian kid’s right to reach school on time.

Those who celebrate “Israel Apartheid week” aim at the dissolution and disappearance of the Jewish state. Such dissolution can only take place with massive violence against Israel’s 6 million Jews.

Perhaps Richard can come up with a more suitable term for such a strategy. I’ll be waiting to read what he has to offer.

@ Oliver Kamm: Pilger Deconstructed

“Rami is an Israeli graphic designer who lives with his family in Jerusalem. His father survived Auschwitz. His grandparents and six aunts and uncles perished in the Holocaust. Whenever I am asked about heroes, I say Rami and his wife, Nurit…

….On the afternoon of 4 September 1997, Smadar and her best friend, Sivane, had auditions for admission to a dance school. She had argued that morning with her mother, who was anxious about her going to the centre of Jerusalem. “I didn’t want to row,” said Nurit, “so I let her go.”

Inadvertently, Pilger, in his opening lines, re-inforces what many Israelis and Jews regard as the uninterrupted sequence of antisemitic persecution: From the genocide of Jews in Nazi Europe to the relentless persecution of Israeli Jews by the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Hizzbala.

But he tries to sever that sequence, by blurring the line between the two dead girls, to reduce their deaths to an equation. The passive voice when attribution to Palestinian terrorism is called for:

“There had been a suicide bombing in Ben Yehuda”

while Abir’s killing is graphically described, with attribution:

“Abir was killed by an Israeli soldier firing a rubber bullet point-blank at her small head”.

Who is Pilger’s Jewish hero? An Jew whose history includes both Auschwitz and Palestinian genocidal terrorism willing to see Israel dissolved in order to accomodate Palestinian aspirations (actually, I’m not sure Rami is a one-stater but Pilger seems to believe it).

Now there is a Jew worth his salt! Not resisting aggression but coming to terms with it! The kind of Jew Gandhi would have approved of, when he urged:

“the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife…They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

But Pilger gives the lie to Gandhi’s expectation that this “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany…”

Germany succeeded very nicely in nearly exterminating Eueope’s Jews. And today the hearts of Europe’s finest intellectuals bleed only for Palestinians. Somehow they, Palestinians, are not urged to “throw themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

This still remains a fate only fitting for Jews.

@ Norway, Israel and Jews: Aftenposten tries to present a fuller picture

Maybe Aftenposten is trying to undo some of the very real harm they caused Jews all over the world when it published the vicious blood libel about Jews harvesting Palestinian organs…

Too little, too late, too limp… in my opinion.

Like the proverbial feathers, it takes one moment to cut a pillow and scatter its contents to the wind and no human can possibly collect all the scattered feathers back into the pillow.

@ Buj the Arab: Buj the blogger continues to post caricatures from the cartoonist Latuff and continues to try to educate me about how good Jews had in Muslim lands.

Latuff, for those not in the know, was one of the winners of Ahmadinejad's appreciation for his entry in the Holocaust denial cartoon competition.

I left the following two comments but there is no way of predicting which, if any, will make it past Buj's highly eccentric moderation policies:

1. "A preliminary investigation conducted by Hamas suggests that the assassination of one of its officials in Dubai last month was likely carried out by agents of an Arab government, and not by Israel's Mossad spy agency."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1146944.html

But I wouldn't believe any Hamas investigation. The most plausible explanation for the assassination and its staging-for-the-cameras quality is that Israel WANTED it to be attributed to the long-reaching arm of the Mossad by way of deterrence and a not so subtle message to Iran. It's in Hamas interest to deny any such deterrence since its success will interfere directly with the money and weapons flow from Iran and Syria. So no wonder they will encourage the thinking that this spectacular assassination of a death merchant and a terrorist was due to Arabs rather than Israelis...

2. BTW, ya Buj, "gentile" is not a derogatory name for a person who is not Jewish. It is just a term for a person who is no Jewish.

Unlike the Arab "kufir" (or whatever) which means infidel, and therefore contains a moral judgment in its meaning, the word "gentile" ("Goy") in Hebrew means simply a person who is not a member of the Hebrew tribes. It's a Biblical word.

The Arab word for "Yahoodi" has nothing to do with the root "hud". It comes from the Hebrew word "Yehoodi" which means, simply, a Jew. And Yehoodi comes from "Yehooda" the Hebrew tribe that used to live in Judea, and which YOU call "West Bank", or Palestine.

However, when the Arabs call for "Yitbach el-Yahood", respect, protection and embrace are the farthest meanings from their mind at that moment*. As it is with you, when you state things like:

"such is the way with the Jew.. for you even tried to be selective in tricking G-d, the stories are documented with the fishing incident and others in the Bible and Koran."

It is always an education reading your comments, Buj. A person of your schooling that can still explain his animus by referring to the Quran as a reliable source of knowledge and a guide for modern politics. (end of comment)

*Addendum:

"A mid-19th century eyewitness account from Jerusalem by the missionary Gregory Wortabet, (published in 1856) captures these routine sentiments, which Wortabet attributes to Koranic verses referring to the Jews as apes and pigs (Koran 2:65, 5:60, and 7:166), as well as the canonical hadith about Muhammad's reputed poisoning by an ancient Khaybar Jewess:

The Jew is still an object of scorn, and nowhere is the name of "Yahoodi (Jew)"more looked down upon than here in the city of his fathers. One day, as I was passing the Damascus gate, I saw an Arab hurrying on his donkey amid imprecations such as the following:"Emshi ya Ibn-el-Yahoodi (Walk, thou son of a Jew)! Yulaan abuk ya Ibn-el-Yahoodi (Cursed be thy father, thou son of a Jew)!"

I need not give any more illustrations of the manner in which the man went on. The reader will observe, that the man did not curse the donkey, but the Jew, the father of the donkey. Walking up to him, I said, "Why do you curse the Jew? What harm has he done you?"

"El Yahoodi khanzeer (the Jew is a hog)!", answered the man.

"How do you make that out?", I said. "Is not the Jew as good as you or I?"

"Ogh!", ejaculated the man, his eyes twinkling with fierce rage, and his brow knitting.

By this time he was getting out of my hearing. I was pursuing my walk, when he turned round, and said, "El Yahoodi khanzeer! Khanzeer el Yahoodi! (The Jew is a hog! A hog is a Jew!)"

Now I must tell the reader, that, in the Mahomedan vocabulary, there is no word lower than a hog, that animal being in their estimation the most defiled of animals; and good Mahomedans are prohibited by the Koran from eating it. The Jew, in their estimation, is the vilest of the human family, and is the object of their pious hatred, perhaps from the recollection that a Jewess of Khaibar first undermined the health of the prophet by infusing poison into his food. Hence a hog and a Jew are esteemed alike in the eye of a Moslem, both being the lowest of their kind; and now the reader will better understand the meaning of the man's words, "El Yahoodi khanzeer!"

Such hateful attitudes directed at the Jews specifically, persisted among Egyptian Muslims, as recorded in 1873 by Moritz Lüttke:

The Muslim hates no other religion as he hates that of the Jews...even now that all forms of political oppression have ceased, at a time when such great tolerance is shown to the Christian population, the Arabs still bear the same contemptuous hatred of the Jews. It is a commonplace occurrence, for example, for two Arabs reviling each other to call each other Ibn Yahudi (or "son of a Jew") as the supreme insult...it should be mentioned that in these cases, they pronounce the word Yahudi in a violent and contemptuous tone that would be hard to reproduce."

@ The Spine: About Mossad, Roma persecution in Europe, comparison with Muslim minorities and fisticuffs with Molly

A very vertiginous thread of comments but enlightening nonetheless.

@ Iranian.com: Rita