The Sixth Deadly Sin

The prof. is pissed. Why? Because Israel keeps defying the image he wishes to impose on her. In this post he complains that Americans are inclined to regard Israel as a vibrant, decent democracy:

Israeli comedians are always funny, its poets are always talented, its writers are always brilliant, its politicians are always gifted, its people are always wonderful, its army is always humane even when butchering children, its courts are always fair even when ruling for apartheid, its women are always beautiful, its children are always cute, its culture is always vibrant, its diplomats are always skilled.

Here is the thing, though: Israeli comedians are not always funny,  Many of  its poets, but not all, are not necessarily very talented, many of its its writers are, but not invariably so, brilliant, its politicians are by no means always gifted, its people are not always wonderful (if they were, they would not be called Sabras, the thorny cactus fruit whose flesh is sweet bit somewhat pebbly to eat with comfort), its women are only almost always beautiful (what can you do? It's the mixtures of races and colours that produces this anomaly:).

However:

Israel's diplomats are, unfortunately very often far from skilled, or even thoughtful, sometimes embarrassingly so.

Israel's army is indeed always humane; it does not butcher children.  That particular crime is reserved for Palestinian terrorists such as Hamas, and some of their Hizzbala terrorist supporters, whom Prof. Angry Arab finds very congenial.

 Israel's courts are always fair, and scrupulously so when they deal with grievances submitted by Palestinians from the West Bank. The term "apartheid" is bandied about by the good professor in the same way good and shrunken-hearted women refer to a good-looking sexy woman as a whore for no other reason than she is good looking and sexy.

In other words, the slurring judgment comes from envy, and envy, as you know, is not unaccountably designated as one of the seven deadly sins.

According to wiki,

 "Dante defined this as "a desire to deprive other men of theirs." In Dante's Purgatory, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. Aquinas described envy as "sorrow for another's good".

Mark Twain once defined antisemitism as "the swollen envy of pygmy minds.” The prof. may regard himself as clear of antisemitism, because he can spot an antisemite when he sees one*, and that is not him, but the output on his blog as regards Israel is quite commensurate with the staple marks of antisemitism, the three "S"es: Singling out, slandering, stalking.

The prof may imagine he has nothing against Jews. His main beef is with the Zionists. But after you subtract the Jews of Israel, Jews who support Israel, Jews who don't mind Israel's existence, Jews who are not actively or by inclination against Israel, you are left with one or two Jews he approves. And when he writes posts like this, having nothing to do with facts, or arguments, or history, or proper science, or thoughtful rational criticism, but only a wailing scream of pure hatred and frustration, then what else can you conclude?

* Note how the prof. is all too eager to recognize Sadat's antisemitism, but not this man's genocidal Nazi sympathies. Why? Need I ask?  Because Sadat made peace with Israel.

All right. Enough said.

Isn't he the clever little boy?

Prof. AbuKhalil, who who teaches American students at an American university of a good standing, weighs in on the question of Jewish origins being from "apes and pigs":

... if one believes in evolution theory, we all are descendants of apes so this should not be insulting to us evolutionary theory believers.  

This might remove the taint from "apes" but what about the "pigs"?  Perhaps the scholarly prof. does not realize that pigs are known to be very intelligent animals, so it is not at all a slur to refer to Jews, known for producing lots of intelligent little Jews,  as "pigs".  It is actually a compliment. 

Let me repeat my wonderment at this unfathomable exhibit: that this is the kind of person who teaches young students how to think properly, at an AMERICAN university.

Oh, and BTW, it would appear that the prof. does not really know the Quran very well: 

Case Study: Portraying Jews as "Apes and Pigs" 

 In three instances (Surahs 2, 5, and 7), the Quran tells of Muhammad turning Jews into apes and/or pigs. For instance, Surah 5:60 states, “Those (Jews) who incurred the curse of Allah and his Wrath, and those of whom (some) He transformed into apes and swine.” Another section of the Quran compares the Jews to donkeys. There are two differing traditions in Islam regarding what happened to the Jews who were turned into pigs. One view maintains that all pigs alive today are descendants of the Jews who were turned into pigs by Allah. The other view holds that all the Jews who were turned into pigs by Allah died out without reproducing, and therefore there is no relationship between today’s pigs and Jews:

“There are two opinions among the Ulama [Islamic scholars] in this regard: The first is that the Jews, whom Allah transformed and turned into pigs, remained in that state until they died, without producing descendants. The other opinion is that the Jews who turned into pigs multiplied and produced descendants, and their line continues to this day.

Sheikh Othman [Ahmed Ali Othman, supervisor of the Da'awa (Islamic Indoctrination) of the Egyptian Waqf Islamic Holy places]: "I personally tend towards the view that the pigs that exist now have their origins with the Jews, and therefore their consumption is forbidden in the words of Allah: 'A carcass, and blood, and the flesh of a pig are forbidden to you....' Moreover, our master Jesus, peace be unto him - one of the tasks that he will fulfill when he descends to earth is the killing of the pigs, and this is proof that their source is Jewish. Sheikh Othman said that whoever eats pig, it's as if he ate meat of an impure person…

Sheikh Ali Abu Al-Hassan, head of the Fatwa Committee at Al-Azhar [Sunni Islamic university], said that the first view is accurate, because when Allah punishes a group of people he punishes only them. When Allah grew angry with the nation of Moses, He turned them into pigs and apes as an extraordinary punishment... but they died out without leaving descendants."

[Al-Moheet Arab News Network, May 10, 2009, Al-Hakika al-Dawliya, May 9, 2009] 

 I don't get it ...

Look at this post by Prof. AbuKhalil. Read the title he gives to this entry and then click on the link to read the whole article, authored by Bilal Y. Saab and Andrew J. Tabler.

Here is a synopsis of the main idea in the article: 

 After almost two years of bloodletting in Syria, there is little chance that negotiations of the kind UN peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has been urging would end the conflict. More likely, they would prolong it. And worse, they would perpetuate Bashar al-Assad’s favorite strategy of fanning fears of rebel sectarianism and extremism to dissuade the world from intervening against him.

 Here is the title the prof. gave this analysis: "Zionist hoodlums don't want peace in Syria, damn it"

 I ask you: Where is the "Zionist" angle in this article? Why is Bilal Y. Saab defined by AbuKhalil as a "Zionist hoodlum"? Where is the rejection of "peace" in the article? And why is the Prof. who teaches American students in a Californian university using "Zionist" as a demonizing adjective?

I keep looking at what this so-called academic writes on a daily basis, while he is assigned with the teaching young impressionable minds the foundational principles of good thinking, critical analysis and ethics, and I just don't get it. I really don't.
_______________

Later: Another baffling entry from the professor, blaming a report in the New York Times of  distorting a story:

"A spokeswoman for the Israeli military, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under army rules, said the purpose of Tuesday’s raid on the village, Tamoun, was to arrest a resident, Murad Bani Odeh, who she said was suspected of being a terrorist."  In the early version of this lousy article, Mr. Odeh was referred to as "suspected terrorist".

 

Isn't a person who is  "suspected of being a terrorist  a "suspected terrorist"? In the first instant, the "suspected" is used as a verb and in the second instant it is used as an adjective. One of Chomsky's discoveries in his thesis on universal grammar was the fact that a phrase like "A beautiful girl" means "A girl who is beautiful" and is a fundamental structure  common to all languages. AbuKhalil can hardly claim that he made this allegation out of ignorance of the English language.

 

What exactly is the point to this fulmination, then? Is the prof running out of material? If you read the several entries he devotes to his hobby of demonizing Israelis for the same day as this example appears you will notice how he is reduced to scrapping the bottom of the barrel. 

Like I always say, anger makes you stupid and no better model to exemplify this principle that Prof. AbuKhalil.

Zionism is always racism: the fear of Palestinian babies

Following this post on CiF I'm republishing this blogpost:


The Essence of Hatred

I. Remember the surreal  "proportionality " argument taken by some media persons as a convenient dart to throw at Israel when it launched its attack on Gaza in an attempt to stop the barrage of rockets aimed at killing Israelis and Israeli babies? What it boiled down to, was very simple: Not enough Israeli babies were killed by the Gazan rockets. Or, to put it more bluntly, in positive terms, more Israeli babies should have been killed, before those particular media persons could be persuaded that stopping the rockets would be justified.  

II. Prof,. AbuKhalil frowns at the rate of births in Israel.  He seems to find something suspect and even genocidal in the trend by Israeli families to make babies, and in the Israeli medicare system that goes to a great deal of effort and expense to make sure Israeli babies are born healthy, and that those families who cannot make babies so easily will get a chance to have their babies, despite their biological difficulties (I mean, of course, having relatively easy access to in-vitro fertilization).

How do I know the prof. perceives something suspect and even genocidal in the trend by Israeli families to make babies?

You need to read the entry on his Angry Arab blog, in which he quotes from three articles which discuss the increased birth rate of children in Israel, and the meticulous care by the medical institutions of the state, and labels them: 

Zionism is always racism: the fear of Palestinian babies 

According to the professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley,   the increased rate of child bearing levels among Israelis is tantamount to a genocidal instinct towards Palestinians. How else can you explain the fantastic leap from the subject of the articles he quotes to the title he chooses for this entry? Note how he starts with:  Zionism is always racism  before inserting the fear of Palestinian babies. 

AbuKhalil does not wish for the Jewish population of Israel to grow. The joy and optimism that are conveyed through the natural growth of the Jewish population is for him a form of genocidal racism.

III. Now combine that with the media premise that I pointed to in section I, and what do you get?

On the one hand, not enough Israeli babies are killed. On the other hand, too many Israeli babies are born. Both statements are presented as bad propositions. 

Let's see what we get when we take these premises and act on their logic:

More Israeli babies need to be killed.

Less Israeli babies need to be born.

Bottom line: There must be less Israeli (by which both premises imply actually Jewish) babies.

IV: Some tangentially relevant statistics:

In 1933, the world's Jewish population at that time was estimated at 15.3 million. 

Projected number of Jews worldwide for 2020: 13,558,000

80 years since world Jewry numbered more than 15 million, the loss of the six million has not been recovered.

Still, prof. AbuKhalil, who teaches American students at an American university of a good standing laments that Jewish Israelis produce more babies than would suit his perverted moral universe. And still, media persons fancying themselves on the side of universal justice, humanism and equality, lament that not more Jewish Israelis babies were/are killed  before their Jewish-Israeli parents need to take steps to protect them from such genocidal killings.

V. And just for the hell of it, here are some other tangentially relevant statistics:

According to this source, the number of Palestinian Arabs in 1946 was: ~ 1, 221,000 

According to this source, the estimated number of Palestinians all over World by the end of 2005 is 10.1 million.

Less than 50 years after the Palestinian "Nakba", and for all the genocide that Israel is accused by the likes of AbuKhalil and his ilk, to have perpetrated upon these Palestinians, their population worldwide sprang from 1.2 million to possibly 11 millions today.  

And still, the professor from the State University of California bewails the fact that Jewish babies are born in Israel at an unseemly rate.

How do you define the essence of evil?