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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

The Promise - A Conclusion

The Promise was a four part mini-drama produced by British TV that purported to provide an historic narrative of the conflict between Israel and Arab.  Directed by Peter Kosminsky, it has been the subject of many articles in the British press, particularly the Jewish press.  It is the Palestinian Exodus except without the grace and honesty of Exodus. The one true similarity is that it loosely interprets the narrative of conflict. Where it differs however is that while Exodus evades some difficult issues, The Promise in its pretentious, and dualist propaganda entirely rewrites the history of the conflict in a way that it is intended will demonise all of the Jewish protagonists and by association, all Jewish Israelis. Presenting the story from one side only ‘The Promise’ is no more than a deceitful, dishonest polemic which contemptuously disregards all journalistic standards of probity. 

This mini-series is for the Arab World and the Fascist LibLeft (Liberals and the Left) coalition, which sadly today encompasses most of British Journalism, a call to arms and a justification for bigotry, prejudice and McCarthyist terror.  These allies, devoid of an ethical compass have been rewriting the Near Eastern narrative to suit their own prejudices and economic sub-texts.  For far too long they have been creating history in their own grotesque image, and without fear of consequence.

The logic of Islamic and in particular Arab hatred is that ethnic or religious equality refutes their ideological base.  The LibLeft coalition anticipates a Zionist surrender to the greater Arab nation. It is this crime against humanity that drives the Western elite’s ideological purpose. Without its Antizionism it is bereft of any meaningful ideological content around which it can successfully rally.

To quote Sever Plocker of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot (29th March 2011) “The left, even the radical left, is supposed to support unflinchingly the most fundamental human aspiration for liberty without asking who stands to profit from it.”  But Liberty cannot stand without democracy.  And the problem? The left has never supported liberty as a universal principle.  It has always supported repressive regimes. 

And Israel is allegedly born in original sin because it is Jewish and therefore irredeemably middle class (at least according to left wing class theory). The ethical issue that the LibLeft coalition can never reconcile is that Third World imperialism is worse than anything America or its allies can deliver. Some of those Third World countries are leaders in global drug trafficking, prostitution and slavery. And some of those countries have more wealth than most prosperous nations in the Western world but contribute nothing to it, save the dissension they sow and the chaos they celebrate.

Why do so many states within Christendom embrace the Arab and the Islamic narrative? It is partly because Israel has lost the narrative debate about its legitimacy. For more on this see my recent thoughts from 22nd of May 2011 and titled “Hasbara & Israel's Original Sin”. 

There is no payback to supporting an ethical stance if history is no more than the creative output of the powerful and an instrument of subjugation for the weak.

How can it be that history is so openly disrespected? To not place too fine a distinction on the event and its aftermath, history, is an event in past tense. Humanity has justified far greater crimes than the simple act of reshaping history to fit into our own perspective or rewriting a story to fit our own stereotyped image of what ‘the other’ should be. And international finance is far more important than truth and justice.  International relations should be based on ethics but they are not and this is also the problem because without consensus the greedy and corrupt will exploit an ‘altruistic’ response for their own benefit. Witness Switzerland, arguable the most ethically damaged European nation since Hitler came to power in 1933.

The Left has bought into the hegemonic demand for Islamic exclusivity. The Jewish people, their history and their narrative have been refused a place in the market.

The Promise represents one more assault on Israel and Jews by Britain’s hegemonic fascist press. The directors’ responsibility to provide an historic framework has been ignored.  British journalism is not about ethics but about viewer numbers and complex narratives do not win awards.  It is all about time and profits. Cant is the journalist’s bible.

Kosminski is a propagandist, an entertainer, a minstrel; he is no more than that.  Acknowledgement of his talent is its own reward and encouragement for further lies and deceit.  He said that perhaps one day he would write a program, not a mini-series, about Hamas. I can just imagine it.  Human beings will be shown decorously throwing themselves off the top of apartment buildings; Christians will joyously slit their own throats while women, ‘inappropriately’ attired, will exuberantly splash themselves with acid in expiation of their ‘sluttish’ attire.  Of one thing we can be sure. There will be no difficult questions and no uncomfortable silences to inconvenience the television cameras and al jazeera’s viewers.

The truth is irrelevant. Kosminski would have been equally comfortable writing for other more notorious journals of past history. Talent is no predicator of ethics.  In our dying world it is all about fame.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Deligitimization & McCarthyism

In spite of Judaism’s rich literary tradition there has been no effective response to ongoing attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel either from Israel or from Israel’s defenders.

On the States’ side perhaps this is because intervention requires an infusion of resources into Israel’s foreign policy community and Israel’s laissez faire obsession with almost everything leaves it incapable of delivering such consistent forward planning as would be required to tackle a relentless wave of disinformation and lies.  The present administration (and not just the present one) is divided by politics and by corrupt family ties that award key posts to partisans without knowledge or commitment.  This has created a class of civil servants unable to focus on any community but their own and unable to argue for Israel’s inalienable rights.  Jews have suffered persecution for their faith for at least a millennia and a half.  As a consequence many find it easier to adopt the narrative of their enemies in order to assimilate into society, even when it means prostituting all ethical standards save the ones that highlights their opposition to their former community.  These are the Jewish Uncle Toms, the House Jews.

Intermittent acts of ethnic cleansing interspersed by waves of violence, forced conversion, expulsion and mass murder are real events and we sanitise their impact by our use of words. Pogrom and genocide have no impact for anyone but the generation that follows the act and perhaps the unbiased but not too clinically remote scholar of history. How many of us remember the horror of Rwanda and Cambodia? And who cared, who cares, for the ethnic rape, pogroms and genocide being committed by Arab racists against the black nation of the Sudan?

The anti-war movement in the UK refused to condemn Mugabe’s regime because that would have been politically incorrect. It would have created problems for the coalition of extremists within the umbrella ‘Peace’ organisation.  The USA has always been the enemy for a majority within the Left and unsurprisingly, it created no issue at all to align Liberals and their Left wing allies with Islamic organisations so tainted by opposition to every principle of Western Society that the stench of their violent hatred must transfer across.  Any nation aligned with America is viewed as irredeemably damaged.

Colonel Qaddafi bombed his own citizens but then Libya was never an American Lackey.  Assad murdered up to 40,000 of his own people but Syria’s Assad was, like Iraq’s Hussein, an internationalist, a pan-Arab leader, a brother in arms. Robert Fisk – the left wing Antisemite joyously reported the decapitation of Israeli soldiers and the subsequent Arab game of ‘head’ football for the BBC some years ago (he reported on it from Lebanon). He has asked in one of his articles for the British ‘Independent’ Newspaper why Libya was an acceptable target for Western bombs while Israel is not. He said that Israel’s ‘crimes’ were no less serious. But then Fisk is an Arabist and while he is a dab hand at sophistry his tolerance for Jews has never included assigning to them equal rights to nationhood or protection from discrimination or persecution. But he writes well. And he blames American imperialism for protecting Israel. No word of course on Koranic incitement or the racist philosophy of Hezbollah or Hamas, seen as flag bearers for the anti Zionist front.

Fisk, like his LibLeft buddies prefers not to dwell on the past. And like far too many of his fascist friends assumes that Jews turning the other cheek as they have done through millennia of persecution will prevent the revenge filled mob from committing genocide.  And if he is wrong, who cares? The sacrifice of a few million Jews is an acceptable price to pay because LibLeft idealists, like their protean political forebears rarely have to make a personal sacrifice for their ideological folly.  This is the greatest crime of the LibLeft coalition. It has always and will continue to deny the equality and freedom from repression that has at all times been the goal for the Near-East’s Jews.

Similarly, the UN peace keeping force made up solely of African troops is funded to the tune of $1.8bn per annum.  Think about that number – that is one thousand eight hundred million dollars every year. To the black ethnic minority of the Sudan not a penny, cent, euro or a renminbi of those massive funds have been contributed towards the alleviation of their suffering.  The troops of the African Union Peace keeping force have enjoyed the experience of gang raping the refugees but done nothing to ameliorate the awful conditions for the Sudanese minority they were sent to protect. What the AU earned from Western nations allowed ‘the West’ to wash its collective hands of confrontation with an Islamic, Arab aggressor.

The UN throughout its history has provided employment for ambitious politicians and technocrats who have not contributed to the planet and its inhabitants a single altruistic benefit for the annual $40 billion budget they squander on scoring points and political posturing.  If they feed the victims of civil war with Western donations it is so the victims can patiently await their slaughter while we are protected from the vision. It is a cruel irony that hints at the true nature of international cooperation.  There is one organisation within the UN worth saving and that is the World Food Programme without which many hundreds of thousands if not millions of Sudanese would have died.  However, it has saved the people of Darfur (as elsewhere) from starvation so they may be raped, and die of disease.

It is ironic that the one nation theologically threatened with genocide, openly and without too much pretence from its more ‘religious’ member states is the one nation against which the UN has consistently demonstrated prejudice and discrimination since its inception. That state is Israel.  If a conspiracy exists it is here in the UN that it finds its voice. It is inconceivable that Israel can be subjected to this degree of demonization; that mendacity can become the currency of international diplomacy, without that is, the existence of a conspiracy to drive it.

The one and the only protection against contempt is fear of oblivion. The UN is the world’s greatest stage.  And its genre is farce.  It is time it was silenced.

There are two reasons that a people disappears from history. In the ancient world conquerors would first offer ‘surrender’ to an enemy. If they refused the people would be murdered, down to the last baby. The physical location would be raised to the ground.  The next village, town or city would be aware of their fate and therefore have a choice to make. If they were not more powerful than their antagonist they could surrender or be annihilated.  The Egyptians erased the name of those for whom death was supposed to be no more than a transitional stage to a better existence. But erasing the name meant that oblivion became eternal. No physical proof of existence was allowed to remain. The physical record was eradicated.

Islam theologically justifies this same methodology in its quest to conquer the globe.  Islam sanctifies cultural colonialism. The Koran and later writings (the Sura) support the concept of genocide as appropriate to those who oppose it. It is the theological proof of Islamic superiority over all the nations of the World.

Netanyahu, the most committed capitalist leader in Israeli history has also been its most failed propagandist. Benjamin Netanyahu, in his commitment to a laissez-faire economic policy has tried to replicate the American economic model. Instead of being transformational it has encouraged administrative and political corruption. Instead of encouraging reward it has encouraged a climate of short term greed that is contingent on individual attainment being its own reward.  This is only tangentially beneficial to the community.  The problem is that the nation is the community.

A conspiracy to control history is one that places first a restraint on debate and then works to create fear in those who oppose them.  It is what created McCarthyism in the 1950’s and it is what drives the LibLeft Islamic coalition today.  In order to have true debate there have to be rules that all nations follow; there cannot be intimidation and threats. It is essential that we follow equality of narrative.

This does not mean that all narratives are of equal legitimacy or that history is what we decide it should be, irrespective of the truth.  Edward Said’s contribution to the West’s intellectual decline was precisely this morally relativistic myopia.  This was the obscene equivocation of the new historians.  One persons’ history is not another persons’ mythology.

There is a reason that Jews are threatened in British universities and physically assaulted if they try to put forward their version of history. It is that Britain today is a fascist state that has always felt most comfortable in its Antisemitic skin.  Those who speak lies and commit assaults against the Jewish community go unpunished and instead have a public theatre to display their politically correct martyrdom at the hands of “the Jew” (or “The Zionist”). The British legal system has become a circus for Palestinian propaganda and Left wing fascist Antisemites. And Britain continues to profit financially from this situation.  As it has done for over a thousand years.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Political Apartheid

Some weeks ago I sent to a limited number of people a statement that was issued by a doctor. It is reproduced below. I received a response (copied below in red font) that questioned the veracity of the report based solely on the political bias of the protagonist.  What this reveals however is the way that truth has been debased. We have allowed it to be sacrificed to convenience, fear, ignorance and politics.  Political prejudice does not have to lead to McCarthyism but when truth hides behind the easy morality of fascism then one naturally follows on from the other. The series of events referred to below did occur. To read the views of its narrator does not legitimize its authors’ world view but equally it is hubris to dismiss a single narrative for the whole.

It is frightening. I have tried to consider alternative interpretations, to put my self in my opponents’ shoes. But ultimately, an inability to accept that a religious and therefore a cultural narrative informs and thus feeds human conflict is a peculiarity of the Left and its liberal allies. Islam claims to be a faith that is incapable of separation from the political state. It in fact informs all parts of society; left and right, religious and secular.

The debate in Israel extends across the political divide. To dismiss any one part of the national dialogue is to invite violence but it is also an act of intellectual arrogance and political apartheid.

“From: Dr. Arieh Eldad:

I was instrumental in establishing the Israeli National Skin Bank, which is the largest in the world. The National Skin Bank stores skin for every day needs as well as for war time or mass casualty situations. This skin bank is hosted at the Hadassah Ein Kerem University hospital in Jerusalem where I was the Chairman of plastic surgery. This is how I was asked to supply skin for an Arab woman from Gaza, who was hospitalized in Soroka Hospital in Beersheva, after her family burned her.  Usually, such atrocities happen among Arab families when the women are suspected of having an affair. We supplied all the needed Homograft’s for her treatment. She was successfully treated by my friend and colleague, Prof. Lior Rosenberg and discharged to return to Gaza. She was invited for regular follow-up visits to the outpatient clinic in Beersheva. One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt. She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her. This is only one example of the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel. It is not a territorial conflict. This is a civilization-al conflict, or rather a war between civilization & barbarism. I have never written before. I am asking you to please forward onwards, so that as many as possible can understand radical Islam and what awaits the world if it is not stopped.”

Dr Arieh Eldad

And the response of my acquaintance:

“Dr Eldad I can see from his CV is extremely right wing supporter of greater expansion in the Territories. I would be little concerned on the exact veracity therefore of the comments he makes ref the hospital in Beersheva.”

My response follows:

With respect my friend - what you are saying would be libellous if it was publicly expressed. You are of course correct that Dr Eldad is right wing but that neither makes him a fascist nor does it make him a liar. We know that this particular series of incidents did occur.  The only complaint I have observed in the global press referring to Dr Eldad's 'disclosure,' is that as a doctor he had no right to dismiss patient confidentiality as he did.

Some years ago a suicide/homicide bomber walked into a Pizza Hut in central Jerusalem - he saw young women with children, babies in prams and in high chairs and a heavily pregnant woman; and he smiled and then blew him-self up along with the diners. War is war.  The political Left always stated that there are no civilians in war. I suggest you think about that the next time you look around you at people you interact with on a daily basis.

And then perhaps you should spare a thought for the thousands of nuts and bolts flying at lethal speed in every direction along with bits of skin, bone and blood and the effect on human organs of percussive injuries inflicted on the victims by bombers at peace with their theology. There is a reason that we have rules of war even though some sections of society actively support the belief that rules need not be applied to Israelis (and that there are no Israeli, or Jewish civilians).  That is the reality of our conflict.

The ethics of Human conflict should not be defined by race, religion, ethnicity, colour or creed.  No points on a compass define political legitimacy or ethical prostitution.  Jewish ethics are clear that the ends never justify the means. Statehood makes it difficult to apply this in practice.  But it does not mean that we must either sacrifice ourselves for others or ignore the theological prejudice that makes us their victims. 

When a woman in Gaza boasts that she has many sons and would joyfully sacrifice all of them to the Islamic cause, maybe that is propaganda, but it is also truth.  It is a reality that we and not just Jews, but all non-Muslims have to confront.  I have read the Koran, and its 109 exhortations to warfare are not time specific.

As a people with a group identity we stopped carrying out human sacrifice 3,000 years ago. In terms of the ethical history of human civilization that represents an incredible insight. In my native Australia our Rabbi used to lecture at Catholic parochial schools.  The parochial school system was the main educational vehicle for people of Catholic faith in Australia.  The Rabbi always asked the same question and always received the same answer from those students.  He would ask, “Who thinks that Jews still carry out human sacrifice”? Most if not all the children would raise their hands.  The reason was simple. The Roman Catholic Church only taught the Hebrew Bible up to the first exile, to Babylon, in 700 BCE.  Now apply that lesson to Islam.  40% of the world's Muslims describe themselves as fundamentalists and Islamic faith is predicated on the belief that the Koran is the final perfected word of God and therefore timeless and unalterable. It is easy enough from there to externalize the ridicule that the Koran fosters and turn it into hatred.   Intellect and emotion often cohabit within the same corrupted space even though intellect is communal and emotion private.  When sanctioned by holy writ, murder, easily becomes a virtue.

That means that global domination develops into an ideal instead of a conspiracy and genocide an incidental path to perfecting the model.

Dr. Eldad is renowned worldwide for his treatment of burns.  He is also an expansionist.  He remains a minority shareholder in the Israeli national enterprise.  His political beliefs however do not invalidate his story.  

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Turkey and the Next Blockade Run

Turkey is a presence that we all, and not just Israel, must confront. On the 9th of January 2011 I published on this blog ten separate articles about Turkey, modern and ancient. 

History
Byzantium was founded in the 7th Century BCE by Greek colonists and re-founded by Constantine 1st early in the (4th CE. Beginning with the fall of Rome, Constantinople became the world’s largest city and the center of the Byzantine Empire.  With the expansion of Christianity it also became the center from which it consolidated its power and expanded into Europe and elsewhere. It remained the wealthiest city in Europe for a thousand years. In 1453 it was over-run by the Ottoman Turks led by Sultan Mehmed II; sacked and pillaged over three days its destruction was reminiscent of an earlier orgy of violation, devastation and death that occurred when it was captured in the First Crusade.  Under the Turks it was at the heart of the Slave trade and again grew in wealth and power.

What had been the Eastern Roman (Christian) Empire became the Ottoman (Muslim) Empire.  It can be argued that the shock that accompanied the fall of Christian Byzantium ushered in the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation; the rush to Empire of the Western European States and thus, the Western Colonial era. 

Modern Turkey was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1922.

It is ironic, given liberal bleating around Western colonial crimes, that the decline of an Islamic Imperial power heralded the ending of the Wests era of colonialism but that it receives no attention other than the sanitized, romanticized Hollywood approach.  Greece was the first nation to gain independence from a major Imperial power. It declared war on the Ottomans in 1821.  The last to gain independence, another Islamic colony subject to ethnic discrimination and persecution, was Israel in 1948. Note: This colonization movement excludes all of the African nations (excepting Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia and South Africa) that gained their independence from colonial masters in the last half century.  Spain and Portugal lost their main colonies in South America early in the nineteenth century but by then they were declining powers.

Turkey today is a nation with a large ethnically diverse population (over 70,000,000 people).

Turkey is a deeply intolerant society and any book shop will have a virtual cornucopia of racist and Antisemitic literature on open display. Theological hatred must inevitably metastasize. It may take generations but its essential message feeds muscular superiority and religious bigotry.  Turkey has persecuted the Kurds (between fifteen and twenty five million live in Turkey), destroying thousands of villages in its war against them and has refused to recognize that it committed genocide against its Christian Armenian subjects in 1895-96 and 1915-1917.  Turkey has a large Diaspora in Europe (six million plus) and is on record as demanding that its people not integrate into the Christian societies in which they live. Turkish Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu in late November 2010 held meetings with journalists and academics in which he repeatedly laid out his vision for Turkey to become a dominant force in the Middle East.  Davutoglu, a professor of international relations and the ruling parties’ principal ideologue stated that “Israel will disappear as an Independent Country.”

With this background we can look at the current troubles that Israel is experiencing with its former colonial master.

Recent articles point to Turkey being Israel’s third largest export market with some $500mil of exports out of total Israeli exports in 2010 of $80 billion but more about that at the end.

In 2010 Turkey funded a flotilla of ships to break the blockade of Gaza in order to precipitate an international confrontation with Israel. Let us be clear on one thing – when all the heart rending words of sympathy are dispensed with, Gaza (West Palestine) is a neo-Nazi state that has a constitution for all to see.  It is not ‘Anti Zionist,’ it is anti Jewish.  Its words alone would be a Casus Beli for war between Gaza and any other nation on earth if they were replicated between Gaza (West Palestine) and any other nation.

Maritime law is clear about national sovereignty and its limitations. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea stipulates the following:

Article 3
“Every State has the right to establish the breadth of its territorial sea up to a limit not exceeding 12 nautical miles, measured from baselines determined in accordance with this Convention”.

Article 11 (Ports) states that “For the purpose of delimiting the territorial sea, the outermost permanent harbour works which form an integral part of the harbour system are regarded as forming part of the coast”.

Article 17 Right of innocent passage:
Subject to this Convention, ships of all States, whether coastal or land-locked, enjoy the right of innocent passage through the territorial sea.

Article 19 Meaning of innocent passage
1. Passage is innocent so long as it is not prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State. Such passage shall take place in conformity with this Convention and with other rules of international law.
2. Passage of a foreign ship shall be considered to be prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State if in the territorial sea it engages in any of the following activities:
(a) any threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of the coastal State, or in any other manner in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations;
(d) any act of propaganda aimed at affecting the defense or security of the coastal State;

Article 25 Rights of protection of the coastal State
1. The coastal State may take the necessary steps in its territorial sea to prevent passage which is not innocent.

There have been vast amounts of professional opinion given as to whether Israel’s blockade of Gaza is legal and whether the taking of the Mava Marmara was a war crime (centered on whether or not Israel used disproportionate force to capture the ship).

On the ship of hate (the Mavi Marmara) the activists cried out: “heiber heiber al-Yahud Jish Mohammad sa-yaud”—the Muslim call for the destruction of Jews.  Nordin Sirin, one of the leaders of the Flotilla published these words in a Turkish article titled: “God is Great, This is the Time to Destroy Israel.” 

West Palestine – Gaza has stated unambiguously that it supports the extermination of the Jewish People. The bottom line will always be that Israel is at war with Gaza and those ships were running the blockade in support of Gaza.

Maritime law is clear that an independent state has the right to decide who enters and who leaves its ports.  When those ships represent a clear threat to the relationship between states then it may prevent them from using its facilities for sailing from its territory.

Turkey, by aligning itself with West Palestine is in essence supporting a nation that is at war with Israel.  It questions Israel’s right to sovereignty.  

Turkish Cyprus came into being as a result of Turkish military aggression and is sustained by military conquest and colonial transfers of ethnic Turkish Muslims from Turkey itself.  Muslim Turkey has refused to recognize Christian Cyprus and its independence.  Given this Imperial attitude by the Turkish political elite it is hardly surprising that indignation with Israel was precipitated by the signing of an international maritime agreement between Israel and Cyprus.

The demarcation of maritime territorial exploration rights between the two sovereign nations is a right between independent nation states. Any challenge to that right is a challenge to the sovereignty of both states, not just Israel.  Turkey demanded that Israel cancel the territorial treaty between the nations because it was a challenge to Turkey’s renascent regional interests. This, like the Mari Marmara incident tells us much about the way Turkey views itself.

Be clear that Turkey has the right to refuse any ship engaged in hostile activity passage from its shores.

Israel’s trade with Turkey is a side issue.  Anyone sailing on a ship whose aim it is to break the blockade of Gaza is actively supporting a war against Jews and not just Israel.  If this makes those sailing, next time round, prisoners of war (including those Jewish Uncle Toms that sail with her) then any who sail under the guise of diplomatic immunity lose that diplomatic immunity because during war time, free passage is conditioned on not taking sides.  Israel should state clearly at the UN and wherever else possible that the next flotilla to sail from the shores of Turkey will be regarded as being engaged in an act of war.  Diplomatic relations between Israel and Turkey will be severed.  And Israel will formally request that NATO investigate.

An ethical foreign policy requires Israel to look further afield than its own recent troubled history to the history of its interlocutors.  Peaceful relations between nations are dependent on the good faith that exists between them.  No such faith has ever existed between Turkey and Israel in spite of their former commercial relationship.