"Civilization is not self-supporting. It is artificial. If you are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization -- you are done." (Ortega y Gasset)
He makes a good case about the anonymity of the editorial stuff: "No one seems to want to claim responsibility for this website, as this paragraph quoted from the FAQ section demonstrates:
"There is no one individual editor. The site has been prepared by a team of writers and editors who are knowledgable of the history, politics, economics and military situation in the Middle East, based on information compiled from the best available sources. They have developed Palestine Facts to provide much-needed factual information to everyone who may be interested in the current situation in Israel, how it evolved to today's status, and what might be reasonable policies for the future."
I wonder how many of those "team of writers" are Zionist? or Arab?Would you trust the opinion of someone without a name?
However, I have a quibble with his objection. The source "Palestine Facts" provides facts and interpretation (Or, what Buj calls "propaganda"). "Opinion" belongs in the latter category.
Opinion need not be trusted. That is why it is called an opinion. An opinion can make sense if it relies on good arguments and verifiable facts. For example, when Ahmadinejad states that the Holocaust never took place, then he is obviously offering his opinion on the matter. Since his opinion is neither based on facts or knowledge or rationality, then of course all intelligent people reject it out of hand.
Facts are a different species. According to John Adams, the second president of the United States)“Facts are stubborn things,” and, as Simon Schama, in a very recent article, further elaborates here "democracy stands or falls with the courage of its history... .History beckoned ... to be brave, eloquent and indignant on behalf of the imperishable truth."
Facts can be checked, scrutinized, rebutted or verified. So, when the website under discussion refers to the area known as the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, it is basing its reference on historically verifiable facts and records. The region was politically renamed by the Jordanians "West Bank" after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when the territory was unilaterally incorporated as Jordanian-controlled territory . The areas of Samaria and Judea conquered by Jordan were renamed the West Bank (of the Jordan river). (wiki)
In other words, whether the authors of this website are anonymous or not does not affect the status of the facts the provide. Those facts will not be any differentwhether the editors choose to name themselves or not. Why they prefer it this way, I have no idea. However, I know I prefer to preserve my anonymity and I suspect that Buj Al Arab is not the blogger's name, hence, he too prefers anonymity.
As you can infer from his bad-tempered comments, Buj Al Arab seems to have a problem separating fact from fiction, and continues to substitute inclination for opinion, and invective for argument.
You can check out Buj Al Arab's blog here. His latest post, comparing Israel and Iran is a case in point.
I could make these points on Buj al Arab's blog but as you can see from the overflow of sarcastic venom in which he and his guests couch their opinions when it comes to Israel, it seems like an exercise in futility. Somehow he doesn't seem to follow his own demand for civilized discourse when it comes to the Jewish ("Zionist") members of the universe. Andconsideringhow and what Arabs are taught to think of Jews, I am hardly surprised. To paraphrase one commenter here: Most Arabs view the existence of an independent Jewish State as a "cosmic insult".
Update: A link, automatically generated to the post under discussion, which was there last night, disappeared this morning. A blogger can delete any unwanted links and the link to this post of mine was deleted, probably by Buj al Arab. Apparently, he cannot bear his arguments and facts to be challenged. It is a strange type of cognitive dissonance, after the promise of fairness and responsibility he makes:
"...we're not perfect.. but we have a responsibility to be fair towards ourselves and those we disagree with."
Holocaust denial and a yearning for the destruction of Israel seem like the two pet-peeves of much of the Arab world. These two bloggers represent a mainstream position, even moderate when you compare it with some others.
Americans and an Israeli won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on how the DNA code is translated into life, findings that have been used to fight infectious disease.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, 57, who heads the Structural Studies Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz , 69, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in Connecticut, and Ada E. Yonath, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, will share the 10 million-krona ($1.4 million) award, the Nobel Assembly said at a press conference in Stockholm today.
Their work revealed what ribosomes, which produce proteins that control the chemistry in all living organisms, look like and how they function at the atomic level. The Laureates also created three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome, research that has been applied to develop new anti-infective medicines. Yonath is the first woman to win the chemistry accolade in 45 years.
Well, then, to borrow an Arab saying that illustrates with great Arab pithiness the superiority of the movers and doers to the populist appeal of "swollen envy" and futile clamour:
"Though the dog may bark the caravan (kafila) moves on."
For decades the Goldstone bunch has been conducting an insane incitement campaign against Israel. Israel contributed its part to this campaign with the occupation, the settlements and its arrogance. But the Goldstoners are not driven by an honest attempt to divide the land, create peace and establish universal justice that would apply to all nations. They are driven by a deep need to isolate Israel, condemn it and destroy it.
Although some of the leading Goldstoners are Jews and Israelis, they don't recognize Jewish history, the Jewish tragedy and the difficult circumstances in which the Jewish state is trying to survive. They treat Israel like a wicked, omnipotent power that is responsible for all the conflict's sins and the region's ills.
The Goldstone report would never have been written without the joint work, joint bias and joint Israel-hatred of all the Goldstoners. Thus the report reflects both the Goldstoners' holy fury and their complete belief that the Palestinians can do no wrong.
That belief is now endangering not only Israel but calm and stability. In their fanaticism and extremism, Goldstone and the Goldstoners have brought us closer to bloodshed.
Buj has recently discovered the very gratifying art of Jew-baiting. He learned that the publication of a Holocaust denying cartoonist's caricatures is deeply offensive to Jews, so naturally, what would a peace-loving Arab blogger who does not have an antisemitic thought in his mind, do but post in rapid succession a variety of the cartoons he can find by this Holocaust-denier? Exactly the sort of thoughtful conduct and universal morals one would expect from someone who prays for peace...
Update: More pygmitania from Buj: He is cool he likes motorcycles. Are you impressed yet? Too bad he doesn't manage to keep up his cool appearances: "Shame the artist is Israeli, ". To paraphrase George Orwell, Buj wears a mask but his face never grows to fit it. The mask keeps slipping off ..
Anyway, Let's give thanks for one blessing: that Buj is not an Israeli.
I. From the Dubavian (from Dubai) blogger Buj al-Arab I get to read a charming article by one Jeff Gates who predicts, with sanguine malevolence that in five years Israel will not longer exist. Read Buj's pleasure in this prediction and the comments left on his blog:
Online reports of a study by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency cast doubt over the survival of Israel beyond the next two decades. Regardless of the validity of the report, with what is now known about the costs in blood and treasure that the U.S.-Israeli relationship has imposed on the U.S., its key ally, Israel could fall within five years.
No one can claim that land is their "birth right" if they dont exist. I hope that next time, the Muslims who do end up in that situation commit mass genocide to make sure it's the last time.
Muslim Arabs should also start killing off christian Arabs in places like Egypt and lebanon... Jordan...
It will show it's benefits in the future.
In the interest of full honesty, Buj once remarked that above commenteris known among UAE bloggers as a nutcase. However, when I read Buj's blog and I read the presumably nutcase comments, I notice only a difference in style and sincerity, but not in substance:Buj clearly relishes the idea of an Israel destroyed without considering what this will mean to the 6 million Jews who currently live there. The other one only takes Buj's pleasure in the thought of Israel's destruction to its logical conclusion. They both pray for peace, though it is hard to figure out what they mean by "peace".
II: It is Nobel Prize season, and the nominees have been published.
"Prof. Yakir Aharonov is on the faculties of the University of South Carolina and Chapman University in Orange County, California. He, together with Prof. Michael Berry of the UK's University of Bristol, discovered the Aharonov-Bohm Effect and the related Berry Phase. The two theoretically predicted the effect, which was later proven experimentally and had a wide influence on the development of the basic principles of quantum mechanics. The effects clearly show that in quantum theory, the essence of electromagnetic forces is significantly different from the way in which they function in classical physics."
And for the Nobel in literature apparently Amos Oz is the favourite:
"According to the betting site Ladbrokes, Israeli author Amos Oz has the best odds of winning--the 4 to 1 favorite. The long shots are William H. Gass and Paul Auster, both with 100 to 1 odds. Bob Dylan clocks in with 25 to 1 odds. Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth both have strong 7 to 1 odds. Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon both weigh in with respectable 9 to 1 odds."
Considering this is a Swedish panel deciding I don't think Oz stands much of a chance to win this honour, considering the recent kerfuffle. But still, it appears that most literary pundits would like to see him take the award.
I myself am not a great fan of Oz. I read some of his novels and recall with special fondness "My Michael".
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, (then Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine), Literature, 1966
I am discounting #5 and #6 since the peace for which the two leaders were awarded the prize never materialized. So, only 6 significant Nobels have gone to Israel thus far, one for each million, or one for each decade of its existence, or one for each war ...
Why I placed these two stories in proximity to one another should be obvious to anyone who has intelligence and some sense of irony.
@ Nick Cohen: Jon Stewart's oxymoron("American leftists have yet to learn that they cannot be a little bit liberal. They can't denounce the idiocy of Fox and ignore the idiocies of religion. Maybe they will never learn.") Update
* Copy and paste from exchange (there is always the chance that, Buj being a sensitive soul that cannot stand to be challenged by verifiable facts, will delete)
What the photos make clear is that the countries were many but most of protesters expressing hatred in such aggressive and scary manner are Arabs and Muslims.
Maybe they were protesting something else but Israel is a good venting valve for their frustrations. It conveniently deludes the natives that this hatred is not directed at them.
hey good to see some proper haters come back here!
CC, i dunno why u even bother and give this weird barrage of "facts".
The UN report on human development index is for the whole country and not the minorities (from what i've read).
If Arabs were doing so well in Israel, why are you trying to enact new laws to screw them over every year? Arabs make 1 in 5 Israeli citizens, yet there are only 2 Arabs in the Knesset.... very exemplary.
Additional comments left there in response to buj's two statements dealt with his two statements in this comment (I'm recontructing them from memory):
1. "Arabs make 1 in 5 Israeli citizens, yet there are only 2 Arabs in the Knesset.... very exemplary."
“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.
“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.”
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.
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...
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)
"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."
@ Buj al Arab, in a liberal mindset, laments humbly and softly about Saudi segregationist policies in Mecca:
What does this say about Muslims and Islam? We have something to hide? Of course so! I've been to the Vatican and La Sagrada Famiglia and probably a hundred churches and a few synagogues too. They don't ask for your faith, but for your respect.
In the comments, however, he reveals his more reactionary inclinations and superstitions. I mean the need to insert the standard Arab-Muslim paranoia even when he intends to say something positive about synagogues.
I couldn't help but drop a comment in response to Buj, who presents Islam as "flexible and ... attacked since it was born".
Here is the comment:
Very curious. How did you know he was a an ex-Mossad guy? Why would an Ex-Mossad guy work as a security guard at some synagogue? It's like you expect ex-CIA agents to work as guards at a shopping mall in downtown Montana. You guys sure have some freaky hallucinations about the Mossad.
Even more curious I find your consistent avoidance of the obvious term you should apply to Saudi segregationist society: Apartheid.
You can check our buj's answer here.
____________
Parked comments (Comments I submitted to said thread which as yet have not been published; Buj may try to keep up an appearance of liberality but in fact he suffers from a severe case of veritasphobia:)
As you make up a lot of other stuff, I presume, such as your novel interpretation for "Mea culpa".
In the judicial system, a judge instructs the jury that if a witness is caught in a lie, it is up to the jury to decide whether that witness is trustworthy or whether to dismiss his/her entire testimony altogether.
Since you say things here that by your own admission are "made up" I guess it is a measure of your readers' credulity or ethical standards as to whether they should believe anything you write.
My favourite Arab blogger put up a typical post in which he finds something poisonous to say about Israel. It's a way of dispelling his daily doldrums, I suppose. Buj is a sort of lotus eater. He lives in that boring place, Dubai, where the most exciting event of the last millennium was the opening of an empty and pretentious skyscraper .
Despite his penchant for Americanisms, which makes him seem a very hip sort of person, in the American conception of the term, Buj does not believe in free flowing discussion. Least of all he likes it when an opinion is presented which contradicts his outlandish premises. So my comments do not make it into the comment box on his blog. I blame it on a mental disorder known by psychologists as Veritasphobia(fear of truth).
I left the following comment on his blog and as he won't publish it, I've copied it to my blog by way of keeping a record:
"To bully: To treat in an overbearing or intimidating manner. To make (one's way) aggressively"
yet,
"Tzipi Livni, leader of the main opposition party in Israel, says she will travel to London soon, specifically to get arrested.
Ms Livni describes the move as an attempt to force the UK government to fulfil its promise to take “urgent” action to protect visiting Israeli officials and military leaders from arrest on war crimes warrants obtained by Palestinian groups in British courts."
Buj's loose usage of language rules at work, again. Does he really not understand what 'bully' means, or is he just adding imaginative touches to a venomous post, on the understanding that he his readers will not dare to disagree with him?
Where is the bullying in Livni's plan? Looks like Livni is planning to force the bully to come face to face with his own bullying futility.
A stroll through the Arab street (continued from here)
@Dubai Jazz, the ornery music continues, again resorting to the talented caricaturist who won Achmadinejad's Holocaust-denial cartoon competition. Make no mistake, in some circles such an honour carries a lot of weight. This time the bilious and antisemitic cartoonist, who would not have felt out of place in the company of Julius Streicher makes a comment on the so-called "Apartheid Wall" which Israel has erected in order to separate the terrorists and various suicide bombers from their intended victims.
I left the following comment on Dubai Jazz's thread but, based on his past record of very little tolerance for Jews or others who do not quite share his views, the comment will in all probability be deleted:
____________
Here is the "obligatory Jew"* to provide some balance and facts:
"The barrier is necessary to protect Israeli civilians from Palestinian terrorism, including the suicide bombing attacks that increased significantly during the Al-Aqsa Intifada;[4] The significantly reduced number of incidents of suicide bombings from 2002 to 2005 has been partly attributed to the barrier;[5]" (wiki)
The Berlin Wall was intended as a prison for East Germans, keeping them locked into the Soviet part of Germany. The Separation barrier is intended to keep terrorists from entering into Israel or the Israeli settlements it encircles.
It is indisputable that the presence of the fence (as well as the increased number of checkpoints) prevented many atrocities from taking place. It allowed a certain pacification of the population which in turn saved not only Israeli life but the life of Palestinians as well.
Most importantly, it is not an irremovable fixture. When (if) the Palestinians decide that they want their own statehood, and the final borders are negotiated, then the barrier can come down, a lot faster than it went up.
However, I'm sort of puzzled by this commiseration with Palestinians about their inability to reach their fields easily when I consider that a Syrian national of such high morals and international sensibilities like DJ would be so much more concerned about oppression and real apartheid in his own backyard:
"So how does Syria treat this minority?
Roughly 300,000 of them are denied citizenship thus denying them the right to education, employment, property ownership, and even marriage.
Nor are they allowed to speak, write or print their own language and their culture cannot be expressed openly.
Odd, isn’t it? Mind you, as everybody knows the Zionist Entity is much much worse. Palestinians have no access to education, cannot work, purchase property or get married. It even bans Palestinians outright from speaking, reading and writing Arabic.
Oh wait. I may be wrong here….
Stateless Kurds who try to leave the country for work risk torture and imprisonment.
To be honest, it reminds me of a two-tier political system in which one group in a country is denied the rights that another enjoys. Though I seem to have forgotten its name. Ap… App… Ah! Apartheid! That’s it!"
You guys make it so easy to knock you down. You simply are incapable in keeping the entrenched animus a little better restrained. This incontinent need to express the contempt for Jews which you have been and are being fed by your educators and your state media.
If not, please feel free to delete my comment.. otherwise, here is my reply to CC:
""The barrier is necessary to protect Israeli civilians from Palestinian terrorism, including the suicide bombing attacks that increased significantly during the Al-Aqsa Intifada;[4] The significantly reduced number of incidents of suicide bombings from 2002 to 2005 has been partly attributed to the barrier;[5]" (wiki)
The Berlin Wall was intended as a prison for East Germans, keeping them locked into the Soviet part of Germany. The Separation barrier is intended to keep terrorists from entering into Israel or the Israeli settlements it encircles."
Well well.. The State of Israel was itself born as a terrorist state. No one supported it except the big powers of the UK and USA (the biggest colonialists in modern history). After all, Israel is better and cheaper than combined UK/USA military bases in various Arab countries.
One of the main issues with the apartheid wall is that it is seen as a land grab as it is mainly built on contested Palestinian lands. The fact that it stops suicide bombers is irrelevant if it's built on the wrong piece of land.
I could go on and on about how Israel has directly made life hell for Palestinians and Lebanese and Syrians during its occupation of their land. After all Israel controls everything (including cement!) in a land that doesn't belong to her (e.g. Gaza)!
However, I will write to you about the epitome of irony. The Jewish people have produced some of the most brilliant minds in the world in the last 200 years. You have consistently punched way above your weight in the arts, music, science, politics, etc (the list truly does go on and on). Look at the Nobel prize for instance.
With about 180 Jewish winners (out of 829 total). This makes about 20% of the Nobel Prize winners Jewish while Jews make about 0.25% of the world population!
To do some maths: 20% / 0.25% = x80! Thus Jews are about 80 times smarter than the rest of the world, on average!
So, with such a smart race, why are they so impotent in finding a solution towards a peaceful realization for their 2000 years of dreaming of a state?
Peace,
BuJ
***
Note the inability to address directly the argument I made in response to the argument made in the Latuff cartoon:
A blames B for stealing a loaf of bread.
B says he did not steal it but bought the bread and here is the recipt as proof.
A responds by saying: who cares that you have a receipt? Your father was a thief and besides, if you are so smart, why do you have to steal bread instead of making it?
The whole exchange may seem non-sequitur and irrelevant but it makes perfect sense, for those brought up on the tradition that irrational thinking is the only rational way to think.
Why are you so concerned about the sentiments of people who recommend that apostates should be executed? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Is Rose hinting that the man might be Jewish or have some favourable inclination towards Jews, and that this fact somehow has any bearing on what he is being put through?
The Inquisition used to persecute Mooriscos, for the same exact reason.
I have to wonder at what point does the tension between what is averred and what is practiced snaps? And what would be the result of such a breakage? An epiphany? Or a withdrawal into complete La La land?
________
UpdateII:
@ Buj al arab's blog, the blogger fumes at the British legal for failing to prosecute Tzippi Livni for "crimes against humanity". My comment:
Buj: I wonder why you put so much faith in the good judgment and moral righteousness of a country which only last week you assessed as declining into third-worldism. This Livni fiasco, in my humble opinion, is exactly one of the symptoms that characterises this decline in which UK legal system acts more like the legal system that can be found in Arab countries: clearly political, skewed and corrupt. If this were not so, one would wonder why LIvni deserves such attention when the UK fails to prosecute its own suspects, like Tony Blair's involvement in the Iraq war, or all the other heads of states who comprise the occupation forces in Afghanistan. I mean, why choose to focus on Israel first, when these other events took place earlier and are responsible for killing civilians in much much greater numbers than little Israel's defensive war has ever done or will do?
Can you answer this question?
Signed:
Obligatory Jew :)
I would also like to point to the illustration chosen by the worthy Buj for adorning his learned opinion: Livni as Hitler. It is a staple of the Arab street that every criticism involving Israel should be couched in Nazi terms. It is also a mark of great cognitive dissonance: The Arab street likes to believe that the Holocaust is a Zionist invention. If so then it makes sense to conclude that it never took place. Yet the choice tropes of Arab antisemitic discourse (which this post by Buj is one example, given his choice of illustration) is the swastika and Hilter. These symbols being deeply offensive to Jews and Israelis, Arab bloggers will use them. The question why they would choose to insult and pain Jews by symbols of an event that they claim never took place remains one of the usual enigmas; don't look for logic, historicity or proper perspective when you read or scrutinize Arab bloggers' premises. It's all about raging hormones, irrational leaps, distorted view of reality, and thundering lacunae.
And this is the kind of thinking Israeli politicians have to deal with, when they try to negotiate peace.
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.
______
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
He is doing his faithful part in building up for a second Holocaust
Oh one could only wish hope and dream!
________
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:
_______ 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.
___________ 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?
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.
___________ 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?
"...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”.
@Dubai Jazz: here and here (my comments are deleted, but here is my latest, which I posted Sunday morning and which will likely be deleted:
"I know of many Americans who would laugh at the notion that American foreign policy in the last 20 years went out of its way to protect and save Muslims (sometimes from themselves!)."
Your pathology is showing.
The US did not go out of its way to protect and save Muslims. It went out of its way to save and protect persecuted, genocided human beings, who happened to be Muslims.
Can you get the difference?
I suspect that your main beef is with this fact, that the US does not make it a priority to save Muslims qua Muslims but rather adheres to the the notion that human rights are universal, whether you are a Muslim, a Jew, a Bahai, black, white, yellow, whatever.
You are speaking from 14 centuries of indoctrination in the regularized contempt of him who is not like myself. It's strange experience to read this kind of medieval mentality in colloquial, modern, everyday English. )
(Choice quote: "if you have any problems with the video, then go and bitch to your Jewish brothers")
Update (9 December):
The brave and upbeat blogger Buj predictably deleted my original comment. And is now careful to censor any other contribution. I left this comment which will naturally not be posted:
"go and bitch to your Jewish brothers that made this video."
This incontinent need to drag in Jews when you are out of reasonable answers seems like a favourite tactic in Arab lands. Why is that, I wonder? I don't suppose it would have anything to do with your educational institutions and media culture, would it?
Anyway, more to the point, here is the most recent piece of news coming from the Egypt side of Gaza:
Why do you think Egypt is complicit in the blockading of Gaza? What could possibly be its reason for doing so? And how come most (by no means all), Arabs are only "bitching" about the blockade when it is done on the Israeli side?
I mean, Gazans do not launch rockets in El-Arish, do they? There has not been a campaign of genocidal terrorism against Egyptian towns residing near the border with Gaza, was there? So why is Egypt blocking passage of goods and people into Gaza? These facts, these ideas, are considered as a breach of civilized conversation. Which makes you wonder what exactly is civilized discourse in intra-Arabconversation? What are the premises that underline what is acceptable to propose, notice, talk about in this milieu?
"...it's the job of intelligent people to try to find common grounds and reduce the tone of hatred. "
and here Dubai Jazz's way of living up to it::
"Sounds like we’ve found something to piss off the Zionist hoodlums real bad. :)"
I wonder, what may we deduce from this strange dissonance between a fine ethical sentiment followed up immediately by aggressive animus about Arab leaders when they speak of peace?
A simple juxtaposition between a noble principle and bad-faith practice is interpreted as an insult, punishable by banning. No attempt is made by the blogger to take himself and his comrades to task for the inherent contradiction in the example I pointed to.
No self-criticism, no acceptance of responsibility or no admission of ill-will.
This comes not from thoughtful engagement with facts, arguments or learning. Where do you get to be so hermetically isolated from common sense and authoritative knowledge? Where is this deep contempt acquired?
Under: Gender-related Development Index (first column):
27. IsraelRank: 26
Female:
Life expectancy:82.7
Rate enrollment in education: 92.1
Estimated income: 20,599
__________
35. United Arab Emirates Rank: 38
Female:
Life expectancy:78.7
Rate enrollment in education: 78.7
Estimated income: 18,361
_________
It's not about who is better. It's about truth, facts and records. How lies can be cited, recited and taken at face value without the slightest urge to check up on sources.
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