Greetings all
Some interesting news. It appears a complaint is
being launched by person(s) unknown against the Jewish
Independent, a Vancouver weekly. I include herewith
two items:
(1) An editorial from the Independent dated April
18/08 which discusses the complaint and speculates it
will be based on "...incitement of hatred against
Palestinians as a people." (2) The editorial from the
March 14/08 issue which prompted the complaint.
Best,
Gary
(1)
http://www.jewishindependent.ca/
Archives/April08/archives08Apr18-15.html
Jewish Independent, Vancouver, B.C.
April 18, 2008
In whose defence?
Editorial
The thing about Zionists, if you read the organs of
the left, is that they prevent open discussion about
what is happening in Israel and Palestine by claiming
that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
Despite the threat of a "chill" brought on by this
nefarious Zionist hushing of criticism against Israel,
valiant and plucky defenders of "social justice"
somehow manage to continue to accuse Israel of
genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, holocaust and
much, much more. So, it was with some astonishment
that we heard the news that a complaint is to be made
against the Jewish Independent for illuminating one of
the major causes of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
The actual complaint, presumably, will contend that
the point of view expressed in our editorial March 14
constitutes some form of incitement of hatred against
Palestinians as a people. On this, we defer to the
defence also offered by Israel's critics. We're not
talking about the country or its people; we're talking
about specific policies. Our assertion is that the
conflict is rooted in the policies of Palestinian
elites to inculcate anti-Jewish hatred in their
people. This, of course, is no more racist or inciting
than any of the allegations against Israeli policies.
On April 1, the New York Times ran a story about
Palestinian incitement as a barrier to peace in
Palestine and Israel. The horrendous anti-Semitic
diatribes the reporter recounted – similar
anti-Semitic screeds are available in a million
sources online and have been for several years now –
should help North Americans understand the real
barriers to peace in the Middle East.
People who seek peace must first seek truth. Those who
close their eyes to the fact that Jew-hating
incitement to violence is a primary accelerant of the
ongoing conflict do not move us closer to peace, but
further away.
What is most ironic is that it is those who claim to
be defenders of Palestinian rights who seek to
underplay and obscure the role incitement plays in the
continuing conflict. The main victims of this
incitement are ordinary Palestinians – those who
will not live to see peace because their society has
been so corrupted by hatred that it will take at least
a generation to heal the intolerance nurtured by
Yasser Arafat and his ilk.
Which begs the question: Who are these supposed
defenders actually protecting? The Palestinian people
or the extremists and the terrorists?
(2)http://www.jewishindependent.ca
/Archives/Mar08/archives08Mar14-10.html
Jewish Independent, Vancouver, B.C. March 14, 2008
Wake up, apologists
Editorial
As grief-stricken Israeli families lamented the losses
resulting from the cold-blooded murder of eight
yeshivah students in Jerusalem last week, Palestinians
were celebrating the slaughter like they had won the
World Cup.
Apologists for Palestinian violence – who seem to be
ascendant in the Canadian, American and European left,
among other places – will insist these images of
Palestinians celebrating a massacre are extreme and
unrepresentative exceptions. They will make the same
justifications and utter the same easy dismissals they
muttered when Palestinians celebrated when the planes
hit the World Trade Centre; they will exhibit the same
nonchalance with which they greeted the lynching of
Israeli soldiers who took a wrong turn in Ramallah and
whose entrails were exhibited from a second-floor
window to ecstatic rapture from the throngs below,
while Palestinian police stood idle. They will make
the same tired excuses for Palestinian atrocities that
they have been asserting since this intifada began
eight years ago, after Yasser Arafat upended the
negotiating table and returned to his comfortable old
blanket of terror.
They will level accusations of racism upon those who
recognize the inherent inhumanity demonstrated by
these Palestinians; of tarring an entire people with
the acts of a few. But, this behavior is indicative of
something almost completely unique to Palestine, and
these violent acts and their moral supporters are too
common to be dismissed as exceptional.
If these acts do not represent an inhumanity
symptomatic of Palestinian society as a whole, this
would be due more to good luck than to good
management. For decades, the Palestinian leadership
has done everything in its power to turn its citizens
into just the sort of bloodthirsty murderers we saw at
Mercaz Harav yeshivah last week, or battling each
other, Fatah versus Hamas, in Gaza last year. The
indoctrination of brutality seems to be the one thing
the Palestinian government has been able to achieve
with any degree of comprehensiveness or success.
The universal inculcation of Jew-hatred - not just
garden variety anti-Semitism but murderous Jew-hatred
in the vein of Nazism and using the same imagery –
has been the sole noteworthy achievement of Arafat and
the democratically elected terrorists who succeeded
him. It is the official line of the Palestinian
Authority public broadcasters, it infects the orations
of imams who beat homicidal theology into their
supplicants, it defines the pedagogy of the teachers
who educate the next generation to hate Jews, it is
the policy of the civic officials who name parks,
playing fields and schools after mass murderers, it
is, most inconceivably of all, the pride of parents
who exude fervent approval of the murderous acts
perpetrated by their own, dead children.
This is not a cycle of violence. It is Israelis
struggling to find new, just ways to save their
civilians from incessant attempts to annihilate them
as individuals and as a people. It is a nation under
siege, forced literally to erect a wall to protect its
people, an act that itself has resulted not in global
empathy or understanding for the 60-year siege
Israelis have endured, just more frenzied baying for
Jewish blood.
Israel is a country that employs surgical precision in
targeting enemy combatants, endangering its own
soldiers and civilians in an effort to protect
innocent Palestinians. For this compassion, Israel is
rewarded with global condemnation when their precision
attacks kill children placed directly in harm's way as
human shields because Palestinians – some of them,
at least – care more about a PR war than about the
lives, safety or squandered potential of their
children.
But none of this is news. For anyone interested in the
truth underlying this conflict, it has been clear
since 2001 at the latest. Repeating this litany of
horror is probably of no consequence, since those who
need to hear it, those who desperately need to
understand the true root of this conflict, continue to
insist that this base inhumanity is the result not of
a monstrous and contagious Palestinian death fetish,
but rather is a natural reaction to decades of Israeli
oppression.
The reason this conflict continues is the simple
refusal of the world community to see this for what it
is and demand an end to the incitement of Palestinians
by their political, religious and intellectual elites,
which has been the fuse of this entire conflict.
The Palestinian leadership, which, with varying
degrees of support from Arabs, Muslims and
Euro-American "progressives," has successfully created
the world's most flourishing death cult, somehow
retains the goodwill and naive empathy of much of the
world community. And, at the same time, the world
community, large chunks of it at any rate, are
convinced that this inhumanity that rains down upon
the Jews is simple and deserved justice.
If the festivities and merriment that defined
Palestinian reactions to last week's mass murders do
not fundamentally shift the world community's view of
this conflict and its causes, it may not be just the
Jews whose existence is threatened, but that of the
entire civilized world.
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