"A new Zionist trick in Western media

Angry Arab Tartuffian moments:

The bigotry:

"Is there any act of violence by any Palestinian that Israel does not consider an act of "terror", or tewwoww, as pronounced by Shimon Peres"

 Imagine the shrieks if any Israeli prof. were to mock an Arab leader for pronouncing 'Peres' as "Beres" ...


The fig leaf:

" To Western supporters of Kurdish rights
How come there is silence regarding Turkish murder of Kurds"

 I searched for key words "Kurds" and "Kurdish" at the angry "news" service and found 13 posts all in all in which Kurds are mentioned by the pious prof. AbuKhalil, since 2005. That makes it an average of 2.1 posts per year. As a fig leaf, it can hardly do the job of covering up his indifference to Kurdish claims and suffering. So why is the pot calling the kettle black? And is the kettle really black, anyway?

Academic thinking:

"Lies of the Times

"In what some here saw as a rehearsal for September, thousands of Palestinians and their supporters, some wielding firebombs and stones, tried to breach Israel’s northern border with Lebanon"... That is the first I hear about "firebombs" during the border protests, not that they are not justified in defending themselves against Israeli aggression. Against an Israeli state that uses fighter jets to kill civilians in their beds, all means by Palestinians are justified."

Translation: It is all lies, but even if it is true, it is justified.

Academic research: Paranoia and Conspiracies

"A new Zionist trick in Western media

There is a new Zionist media trick about the Middle East as of late. Zionists plant a story in the Saudi and Hariri press. And then they cite that planted story as fact and then it gets circulated. There was such a story weeks ago in the Saudi junk media about a supposed meeting between Iranian representatives and Syrian opposition figures. So now, the reliable recipient of Hariri propaganda, Georges Malbrunot, recycles the story. So now, the Hariri media are now re-publishing their own story but this time they are citing the authority of Le Figaro.

PS I just realized that I had written about this phenomenon before."

The professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley does not shy away from a magician's sleight of hand when it comes to airing his infinite number of anti-Israel grievances. Please note how he starts by making an assertion that he has no intention of validating by hard evidence: "Zionists plant a story in the Saudi and Hariri press." and then goes on to provide some authenticity to his empty statements by linking to stories in media outlets . He hopes that readers will not notice that his links offer nothing by way of substantiating his initial accusation of a Zionist conspiracy. He is like a magician who produces a rabbit out of an empty hat, except that in the case of the magician there was a rabbit concealed somewhere.

Let me remind you that this is a professor in a respectable American academic institution, entrusted with teaching students the basic rules of theory and evidence.

No Tears for Gilad

Gilad Schalit is 25 years old today, and has spent nearly a quarter of his young life in a Hamas hellhole.

Gilad Schalit is a human being. He has done nothing to deserve this fate except be where his country placed him and where Hamas's evil and cowardly angels managed to get to him. His captors have malevolently refused to let any humanitarian visits from the Red Cross or anybody else. This is Hamas, on whose human behalf Jimmy Carter spoke so loquaciously, on whose behalf flotillas are organized and the hearts of all sorts of so-called do-gooders are being tugged into brutal, racist and exclusionary pity.

How come? Has Gilad Schalit's humanity failed to qualify to a certain grade, that he can be thus discarded by the Alice Walkers of this world, like some soiled, unwanted garment?

Alice Walker's God does not appear to have any pity for Israeli boys. Jimmy Carter could not spare a word for Gilad. Are they liars? Or just your garden-variety Tartuffs?

About Teachers and Moral Courage

Bertrand Russell, in one of his Unpopular Essays, tries to explain that the role of a teacher is to be the guardian of civilization. A teacher, says Russell, "should be intimately aware what civilization is'.

But what does Russell mean when he invokes the term "civilization"?

It's much more than advanced technology. It is "a thing of the mind"

"it is a matter partly of knowledge, partly of emotion... A man.. should see his own country not only as home but as one among countries of the world, all with an equal right to live, and think, and feel. He should see his own age in relation to the past and the future".

The danger and impossibility to fulfill the true role of the teacher is much less present in democratic countries. A teacher, however, in totalitarian countries, cannot hope to serve his noble goal, for

"In each of these countries fanatical nationalism was what was most emphasised in the teaching of the young, with the result that the men of one country have no common ground with the men of another., and that no conception of a common civilization stands in the warlike ferocity". In such countries, he goes on to say, "Collective hysteria, the most mad and cruel of all human emotions, is encouraged instead of being discouraged".

Sometimes we do encounter the miracle of civilization doing its work, despite the indoctrination, the teaching of implacable hostility, as evident in the figure of the Egyptian author and intellectual, Ali Salem, about whom David Price-Jones wrote:

"The world needs men like Ali Salem. He’s one of Egypt’s most distinguished writers, aged 72, with a long list of books and plays behind him. In every way, intellectually and physically, he’s very big. There is tremendous humour in his face. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks, being an outspoken critic of Islamism and an active campaigner for a real peace with Israel. In 1994 he first visited Israel, and the book he wrote about it was a runaway best-seller. Since then, he’s been to Israel many times, and has received an honorary doctorate there. He keeps saying that Arabs have nothing to fear from Jews, that there’s no place for hate, and that peace is better than war. Back home in Cairo, the elite boycott him and his writings, and those on the street can kill anyone who talks and acts as he does.

... Ali Salem’s humour came out the moment he started his acceptance speech. He quoted the scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when a citizen attacks Cinna the poet, shouting, “Tear him for his bad verses.” He also gave a great and apposite example of an Egyptian joke, told about a man going home one evening, only to find himself surrounded by an armed mob who demand “Are you with Us or The Others?” With Us, he replies, whereupon they shoot him dead declaring that they are The Others."

How appropriate, from a Russellian point of view, that this particular Arab teacher should be awarded a prize named "Civil courage".

You might have a greater appreciation of this one Egyptian man's courage in the face of the current incontinent hysteria in Egypt if you compare him to what his countrymen consider to be heroism.

You might have an inkling of the kind of hostility he faces among his own fellow Egyptians if you read what Prof. AbuKhalil has to say about him:

"Ali Salim, the vulgar and crude (and plagiarizing playwright) is Israel's only friend in Egypt. He, by definition, was a staunch supporter of Sadat and Mubarak's dictatorship. I wrote about him before: he speaks well of Arab-Israeli peace at WINEP, but on Aljazeera he rails against Israel and even Jews (all of the handful of Israel's friends in the Arab world are rabid anti-Semitic). Here, he attacks Ahmad Shahat in the mouthpiece of Prince Salman and his sons (Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat)."

It is eminently fitting that the professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley should thus castigate this Russelian Egyptian who literally speaks truth to power, in the most basic way, the truth of a single voice addressed to the massive Egyptian and Arab madding mobs that cheer for warmongering and hatred and would rather heed these words:

"O Muslim community! For too long we have had faith in [our] agreements with the Jews. Does history not attest to their treachery?" wrote columnist Ibrahim Abu Kila in an August 23 article in the Egyptian daily Al-Gomhouriyya. "What the descendants of apes and pigs [did] on the border with the occupied Palestinian territories is not their last [act], since we still have mutual agreements, contracts, friendship [ties], and security [arrangements that will be violated] until the Day of Judgment."

Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/3130/egyptian-government-press-rife-with-anti-semitism?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kramerlinks+%28Linkage+by+Martin+Kramer%29

If you wish to take the real ethical measure of the teacher who teaches young American minds at California State University, Stanislaus and Berkeley, all you need to do is read his blog where his idea of teaching about ideas and recorded verifiable facts is declaratively manifest. In this one example he rails against Egypt's de-facto government's attempt to provide Egyptians with a fuller picture of what has taken place on August 18 on Israel's southern border with Egypt. In another example, he is exasperated with an Arab journalist who "humanizes Israeli "victims" and talks about a baby".

We know that in AbuKhalil's moral universe, there are no Israeli babies. Only Israeli soldiers.

An Egyptian Hero

A hero is someone who understands
the responsibility that comes with his freedom.
Bob Dylan

A new kind of hero appeared on the horizon of the Arab Spring. He is the excitable young man who intrepidly scaled the building where the Israeli embassy in Cairo is located and ripped the Israeli flag from its high-perched post, replacing it with an Egyptian flag. This act of defiance in the face of the passive non-resistance of the building wall struck millions of Egyptians hearts with awe and admiration. Recently liberated from Mubarak's tyrannical regime, Egyptians know a resistance hero when they see one. And Ahmad al-Shahat it was, who "shot to fame after scaling the tall building, removing the Israeli flag and replacing it with Egypt's national colors as hundreds demonstrated outside the embassy on Saturday night."

No sooner did he commit this act of hitherto unimaginable boldness, then the heroic Ahmad was immediately rewarded for his courageous climbing, ripping and replacing with a job at a quarry and a red badge of courage by the regional governor of his hometown.

And we know from past experience how clever and sharp these governors tend to be. Remember this?

"Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, the regional governor, claimed it was not "out of the question" that Israel could have planned the attacks on tourists to dent the Egyptian economy.

He said: "What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark in the sea to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question. But it needs time to confirm."

Some people of high intellectual pursuits, like the professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, were quick to hail this gutsy young Egyptian as the embodiment of the spirit of the Egyptian revolution, the spirit explicitly explained here by another prominent intellectual of wit and learning. AbuKhalil also intimates to us, his fascinated readers, that so prestigious was this act of bravery that there is a contender to the title of the flagman. His name is Mustafa Kamel Jadallah and according to this machine translation of the article, he claims that he got there there first.

You couldn't invent these events even if you tried, or were blessed with a phenomenally creative imagination.

Quatable Quotes

“It would not be right, that the Aggressor Power should gain one set of advantages by tearing up all laws, and another set by sheltering behind the innate respect for law of its opponents.” (Winston Churchill)

The Terrorist Mindset

Prof. AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, teaches young American students. On his Angry Arab News Service today he celebrates the recent terrorist attacks in Israel.

" So there was an attack on Israeli military target today," he reports to his many readers.

Here is a description of the attack:

"GUNMEN yesterday opened fire on two Israeli buses in separate attacks near the southern city of Eilat, killing five and wounding many others before three were killed themselves.

The incidents prompted a defence official to describe the shootings as part of a ''wave of terrorist attacks''.

Israel Defence Forces killed three gunmen, a defence spokesman said, while in other incidents, attackers fired an anti-tank missile at a private car carrying civilians and a device exploded next to an IDF patrol".

You shouldn't be surprised that for Abukhalil, buses carrying passengers from one city to another and a private car carrying civilians are tantamount to "a military target". If you recall, Abukhalil really hearts Samir Quntar, the the "person' responsible for crushing a Jewish toddler's head against a rock because she was a "soldier". Terrorist minds think alike.

And this is the person entrusted by the University of California to teach its students about knowledge, truth and decency.

Update

__________

In this post, does the grotesque prof of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, hint at his satisfaction with the fact that "frostier relations ... have developed between [Egypt and the US] since the fall in February of President Hosni Mubarak, who for 30 years was one of America's most reliable allies."?

In this post, does the the grotesque prof of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, complain that the Jordanians " gave an early warning to the Israeli government about an impending attack." ??

In this post, does the the grotesque prof of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, express excitement over the possibility that more Israeli cars will be attacked by anti-tank missiles and more Israeli civilians get shot at point blank by Middle Eastern terrorists?

" I don't want to make prediction but I can make one: Israelis and Zionists worldwide will be shedding more tears .... I wish Zionists can read Arabic* so that I can share with them Arab youths' excitement over the attack on Israel yesterday. "

Can anyone believe that this "professor" is actually teaching young people about proper thinking and ethics at a respectable American University? Never mind the murderous hallucinations of this Pygmy mind; what about his IQ level?

* Google translation can give one a good impression:

"Tens of citizens this afternoon in Tahrir Square in preparation for the exit in a massive march to the headquarters of the Israeli Embassy to express their anger at death of an officer belonging to the border guards and recruits of the Central Security, others injured in an Israeli shell over the Egyptian border yesterday.

The protesters demanded the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador in Cairo and take firm action against the Israeli practices, calling for the severance of relations with the Zionist entity.

Not been affected by the traffic to demonstrate the field, where the Security Forces were present extensively and helped to clear traffic.

On the other hand, dozens protested outside the headquarters of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, carrying flags and chanting slogans condemning the blatant Israeli aggression on the Egyptian border, and calling on the forces of reaction.

In the face of the U.S. embassy in Cairo, dozens also demonstrated to condemn U.S. support for Israel and demanding the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman is being held in U.S. prisons"

A reminder of who Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman is:

" ... commonly known in the United States as "The Blind Sheikh", is a blind Egyptian Muslim leader who is currently serving a life sentence at the Butner Medical Center which is part of the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, United States. Formerly a resident of New York City, Abdel-Rahman and nine others were convicted of seditious conspiracy,^[1] which requires only that a crime be planned, not that it necessarily be attempted. His prosecution grew out of investigations of the World Trade Center 1993 bombings.

Abdel-Rahman was accused of being the leader of Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (also known as "The Islamic Group"), a militant Islamist movement in Egypt that is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and Egyptian governments. The group is responsible for many acts of violence, including the November 1997 Luxor massacre, in which 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians were killed." (wiki)

True to form, the professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, who teaches young American students, seems strangely elated by reports about young Egyptians calling for the release of an arch-terrorist, convicted of master-minding terrorist attacks on Western infidels. Maybe he had dinner with the venerable Sheik, during which he arrived at the conclusion that that everything that the US claimed about him was a flat out lie.

Where reality imitates fiction

In George Orwell's historical-futuristic novel, his protagonist, Winston Smith "works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs" (wiki)

Look at this.

Read this and this.

Depressing.

Questions to which the answer is "Angry Arab"

Guess who has friends at Human Rights Watch? (About Human Rights Watch) (Update)

Who is the greatest of them all?

Please note that this commendation from a fellow-traveler confirms my contention that AA channels the mood and mindset of the Arab Street, which is what makes watching him valuable for me, any time I'm tempted to believe the soothing and cooing bromides offered by Roger Cohen and like.

Comment Trail:

Still in a lazy mood, I'm just dropping comments here and there to dispel some of the boredom and doldrums of the late summer holiday (stores are already displaying winter clothes, for heaven's sake, don't they have some pity?):

@ Engage: a response to Jonathan Freedman's sadness over Israel's boycott law

Noga Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 14, 2011 at 12:54 pm

“A grotesque violation of the basic right of free speech, it makes it illegal not just for an Israeli living in Tel Aviv to boycott, say, goods produced in the West Bank but even to advocate such an idea. At a stroke, it undermines Israel’s repeated claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

This is what I mean about standing on a very narrow bridge. ”

With all due respect, I don’t think Jonathan understands Reb Nachman of Breslov’s brilliant metaphor.

The song Freedland refers to is a nigun by Reb Nachman, the founder of the Breslov Hasidic dynasty.

“Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od,
v’ha’ikar lo lefahed klal.”

And translates as follows:

The entire world is but a very narrow bridge,
and the main thing is to not be afraid, at all

In the song, and unlike Freedland’s expansion of the metaphor, there are no “sides” to this very narrow bridge. This bridge is all there is. A bridge over a very deep chasm. It’s a song about fear and life. Fear that impedes life, that gets us closer to the chasm and darkness. Letting go of fear means having a chance at life, but life that no matter what will still be lived on a very narrow bridge.

I don’t understand the relevance of this great poetic thought to Freedland’s problem with Israel’s boycott law.

I find Israeli journalist Ben Dror Yemini’s thoughts about it much more pertinent:

“… there are clauses in the law that are justified. Those are the clauses that disallow benefits for organizations that support the boycott. Whoever maintains the position that Israel deserves to be boycotted does not deserve any benefits from the state. Just as in the case of the first, and discarded, version of the “Nakba Law”, which suggested that those who commemorate the Nakba be censured, the final bill which passed, and rightly so, denied any funding for such commemorations by the state.

Israeli ethos has fostered a very special type of entitlement. As in the case of the painter who joined a Canadian campaign of boycott against the city of Tel Aviv; he returned home to receive an award from the city of Tel Aviv for his artistic achievements. And like hundreds of artists from the same political persuasion who demand money from the state to explain to the world that Israel is a pariah state. They are free to speak and preach as much as they like, but not at our expense.”

Perhaps, instead of speaking of “grotesque violation of the basic right of free speech” (the kind of language he shares with the boycotters’ he ostensibly opposes), Freedland should really exert himself to imagine what kind of existence Israelis have, on that “very narrow bridge” stretching over a chasm, and what they need to do in order to remain suspended over that chasm and continue to be. Freedland, it seems to me, thinks like a typical Englishman in Orwell’s times: from within the glorious safety of an island protected by a very powerful navy.

@ Norway and Jews: A response to "The leader of Oslo Jewish community on Erna Solberg’s ‘Muslims are treated like 1930′s Jews’: "

The British journalist and historian,Oliver Kamm, has a rule: “Historical analogies are never exact but sometimes useful. If they are to be useful, then the precedent needs at a minimum to be stated accurately.”

This is a useful marker by which to gauge the intellectual and common honesty of an analogy, then, to try and at least pay some attention to the signifier (precedent).

Erna Solberg’s analogy ‘Muslims are treated like 1930′s Jews’ is offensive not because it is antisemitic but because it is a lie, a distortion of the historical record and a de-facto attempt to minimize the suffering of Jews under the Third Reich. For an analogy can work retroactively, as well: if ‘Muslims are treated like 1930′s Jews’ then the Jews in 1930 cannot have been treated as badly as they claim.

Why is Edna’s disingenuous analogy tolerated, then?

Oliver Kamm also has an answer to this enigma:

“If your heart is in the right place, so the assumption seems to be, then it doesn’t matter if your scholarship is sloppy or risible. Well, it does matter, because historical truth matters for its own sake.”

Let’s repeat:

Scholarship and accurate, verifiable, easily-accessible historical records do matter “because historical truth matters for its own sake.”

And Edna’s feet should be held to the proverbial fire for indulging herself in lazy and sloppy historical analogies which she is ill-qualified to make.

Dreaming of Palestine ...

Prof. Abukhalil dreams about the day Palestinians take over Israel's institutions, towns, cities, malls, universities, etc etc. Here are some of the fantasies he shares with his readers:

"... once Palestine is liberated, I don't think that Hebrew poet living under a Palestinian flag (and using the renamed George Habash International Airport) should be harassed unless they harm the security of the anti-Zionist state."
" But your delusions are good for us: you won't know what will hit you in the future in response to all the war crimes that you have committed against our people. "

"And once the Palestinian refugees are returned to their homes all over Palestine, I will make sure that you get decent rents in the formerly Palestinian refugee camps because we may be a bit short of space for the occupiers then. "

If you think Prof. AbuKhalil belongs to the lunatic fringe of a pro-Palestinian constituency, you had better think again. He is only channeling the perceptions, interpretations, aspirations and revanchist revolutionary zeal that characterize the much fabled, feared, and implacably unappeasable Arab Street. However, contrary to his hopes, Israelis and their supporters are all too aware of these trends, as Barry Rubin clarified in this article:

"Did Sadat make peace because he was capitulating to pressure or because it was in Egypt’s interest to do so? And suppose — it is not going to happen but I’m trying to make a point here — the Palestinian Authority made peace with Israel. Wouldn’t that mean they were capitulating “to the dictates of the United States and Israel” and thus should be overthrown or killed?

This is, of course, the line of Hamas which is now echoed by the New York Times. And, of course, the Palestinian Authority leaders are aware of this popular view which is one of many reasons why they won’t make peace with Israel.

So did Mubarak (actually his predecessor, Anwar al-Sadat) just “sell out” or did he: get back the Sinai, bring a much-needed peace that benefited Egypt, get back the oilfields, get the Suez Canal open, and obtain about $60 billion of U.S. aid including military equipment?

Yet this is the radical cry: We gave in and got nothing! So what’s the next step? Courageous resistance! More war, more terrorism, more intransigence, more decades of conflict, more wasted lives and resources! This is something to celebrate as some proof of thirst for democracy and justice?

And what is their goal? A just and lasting two-state solution based on compromise, or wiping Israel off the map?

In other words, once again, the march toward suicidal policies is being applauded in the West while the pragmatists who sought to follow another road –not democratic but at least more practical and development-oriented — are called traitors."

Like I said in another post, AbuKhalil and his many admirers who openly dream of the day they get the keys to a ready-made flourishing country, emptied of its people, are like that madman in TS Eliot's poem, shaking the dead geranium.

"To hell we are going. Zionists in the millions"

It is summer. It is hot. I don't feel like tackling any complicated subjects. So I am reaching for the low hanging fruit that Prof. AbuKhalil's news service blog always yields, in abundance, just the thing for a lazy blogger on a hot and slow summer day.

Angry Arab has another question for us:

"Protests in London and Israel

I want to do what the New York Times did with the Arab protests: how it strove to attribute them to a retired American professor and his writings. So here we go: it can be argued that Israelis and British people in London read the writings of, say, Naguib Mahfouz, and decided to protest. Oh, yeah. How do you like it when we do it to you? Do you know how silly you sound?"

"How do you like it when we do it to you?"

We don't. Please stop. It's too painful.

" Do you know how silly you sound?"

We might if we had the flimsiest inkling of what this rant is about.

Just a reminder that Prof. AbuKhalil is now professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley. He teaches young American students about disciplined thinking, objective knowledge and critical observation. He also likes fried eggplants and gets tickled all-pink by such knee-slapping humorous jokes that refer to Israeli Jews as "sons of dogs" and suggest that Israelis should adopt the slogan: "To hell we are going. Zionists in the millions". The same source of hilarity seems to have a lot of jokes about Israeli Jews and gas, too.

And speaking of dogs and such, as they say, kul kalb biji yomo; every dog - his day comes. Please notice how "AbuKhalil" contains "kul kalb", an additionally- poetic brushstroke on an already splendid academician.

Have you nothing original to offer at all?

"As a madman shakes a dead geranium" thus Prof. AbuKhalil, professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, rends his cloths, beats his chest and tears his hair in despair.

Today he asks:

"You Israeli terrorists/occupiers: you stole our lands, you stole our history, you stole our national dishes, you stole our folklore, you stole our national dresses, and now you steal our slogans? Have you nothing original to offer at all? "

Moved by Angry Arab's plea, I thought I might enlighten him by finding some answers. There is a long and incomplete list at the wikipedia entry. Go look.

Though not an analogy, AA's very question made me recall this Monty Python's episode.

Babies

Angry Arab, aka Prof. AbuKhalil, rejoices in the fact that not only is Samir Quntar not injured or dead but very much alive and holding his two day old baby boy in his arms. AbuKhalil approves of Samir Quntar. friend. Here is what he says:

"Israeli media and the lousy An-Nahar newspaper (the dying right-wing, sectarian Christian, racist anti-Syrian (people), anti-Palestinian (people)) carried rumors with jubilation that Samir Quntar was targeted in the explosion in the southern suburbs of Beirut a few days ago. Here he is (somewhere in a Beirut hospital) celebrating the birth of his son, `Ali, two days ago. (thanks B.)

PS If you meet Samir Quntar once, as I have, you realize that everything that Israel claimed about him was a flat out lie. But isn't lying the essence of Zionism--along with war crimes and racism?"*

Abu Khalil, who arrogates to himself the clairvoyance of impeccable judgment, tells us that he looked into Quntar's eyes and saw a good man.*

Let me remind people who is Samir Quntar:

"...there is, in any case, a telling remark from Kuntar himself that may help others to decide what kind of a man he is. ... it is clear that killing civilians wasn't something that troubled him. He knew before embarking on the operation that led to the killing of Danny and Einat Haran that he and those he was with would be killing civilians; they saw every Israeli civilian as a 'soldier'. They admired those responsible for the attack on Ma'alot in 1974, when 21 Israeli children were killed. So much is, by now, merely par for the course. But Kuntar reveals a special sensibility in this passage, which does figure in the Guardian version:

Smadar [Einat's mother]... could not understand that it wasn't personal. I didn't come [from] Lebanon with a note that said 'Haran family.' I came as part of a conflict in which I was convinced I had to participate. I did what I did for my people, for my country. If I sit in jail for a hundred years, I will never change my opinions. This is what I believe.

(In the full version Kuntar adds, for good measure, that he didn't steal or break into a car.) The mother of the dead child does not understand; she takes it personally. And Kuntar cannot understand that."

Does the callous banality of the speaker's defence against the mother of the four year old Einat whose head he crushed with the butt of his rifle against a rock, does it remind you of someone else's defence?

So here we are told by a person who calls himself an Angry Arab that the person responsible for crushing a Jewish toddler's head against a rock because she was a "soldier" has been blessed by being given a baby boy.

________

*(You can see in this example, in a micro specific way, the way denial works. The atrocity this person committed is too horrible for any human being to grasp so AA assumes it can't be true. It must be all lies. Add to it that Quntar and AA share a sensibility of pan-Arab nationalism and an enemy, and then try to recall who and what exactly this prof reminds you of).