Mark Steel: fun with Afghanistan

H/T Jews sans Frontieres.

Brown Sauce: Fighting Racism with Racism...

Looking into the Oliver Stone flap I came across few Britbloggers that ruminated about it but Normblog and Harry's Place didn't disappoint. I won't go into 'Alan A's' (HP) predictably over the top reaction but reading through the comment section I found this little gem from regular contributor and racist Zionist 'Fabian from Israel', comment of 27 July 2010, 5:23 pm [emph. is mine]:

Most of you were born in the First World. I come from a relatively privileged area of the Third World, Argentina.

The slums I saw every time I left Buenos Aires city make Gaza look like London. Are concrete houses a refugee camp? In your dreams! Argentina’s slums are built of tin shacks stacked one over the other.

Seriously, Gazans live waaaaaaaaaaaay better than the average Argentinian. And they don’t even have to WORK! The day that UNRWA stops feeding them, the conflict will be over. Gazans don’t know what real life is. But not in the sense anti-imperialists think.

FFS, just visit any real third world country in Latin America and if you are honest you won’t give a damn about the Palestinians anymore!

After the ubiquitous 'really dude, if it ain't as bad as the Sahel, it can't be all that bad' trope comes the seriously racist codswallop of Palestinians 'not having to work'. Fabian's made similar statements about 'Israeli male Arabs not working because all they do is study the Qu'ran' (or words to that effect). Imagine anyone making comparable statements about da Joooos...

And 'when UNRWA stops, the conflict will be over'. Why's that, Fabian? Because then they will actually be even worse off? Wasn't that Israel's clearly failed plan all along?

At the Brown Sauce all this passes for reasonable commentary about possibly racist comments made by a public figure. It'll be fun to watch and see if any Zionist commenter at HP will point out Fabian's own racist position.

Regarding Oliver Stone, his statements were crude and very generalist and thus borderline racist. But the reaction from Zionists remains predictably gross and OTT.

And now I'm off to the slums of Argentina to get a cure for my pro-Palestinian activism...

Riz Khan on Combatants for Peace

I follow Riz Khan's (the smooth operator!) interactive Al Jazeera show almost religiously but last night felt a special connection because this episode's topic was the Israeli/Palestinian organisation Combatants for Peace (CfP), which is actively supported by Alex Stein, owner of the now dormant False Dichotomies blog, occasional contributor to Ha'aretz, author of possibly the only Harry's Place post on I/P worth reading ('Mr Netanyahu goes to Washington') and Internet Zio pen pal.

On the show, fairly carefully chosen CfP members Bassam Aramin and Elik Elhanan, both ex-combatants in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, both having suffered also very close personal losses as a result of the quagmire.

As regards CfP purpose and mission in life here's their vision.

We are a group of Palestinians and Israelis who have suffered greatly and have taken an active part in the cycle of violence in our area; the Israelis as soldiers in the IDF and the Palestinians as combatants fighting to free their country, Palestine, from the Israeli occupation. In a joint Israeli-Palestinian initiative, Combatants for Peace was founded based on the following principles:

• We are convinced that the conflict cannot be resolved through military means exercised by either side.
• We believe that only through joint action can we break the cycle of violence and end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
• We call for the foundation of a Palestinian state, the capital of which will be East Jerusalem and based on the borders of the 4th of June, 1967. The Palestinian state will reside side by side with Israel, and a relationship based on peace and security will exist between the two states.
• We choose to participate in a non-violent struggle in order to achieve our goals. We call for people from both sides to join us in achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
• We call for leaders from both sides to take a brave step forward and initiate a serious negotiation in order to end the conflict, to desist from taking one sided steps and to stop building the settlements in the west bank and in east Jerusalem, whose hidden goal is to perpetuate the conflict and block any chance for real peace.

I could criticise: I could tell Alex, Bassam and Elik for instance that at a growth rate of about a hundred members a year, it's a slow boat to China. But I'm not going to. These are brave and good people and I wish them all the best in their endeavour.

As regards the show, it was well worth watching, with some interesting interaction from viewers too. Watch it here:

Mark Gardner (CST) Goes Bonkers: Boney M and antisemitism...

By the Rivers of Brown Sauce

In a post at Harry's Place, Mark Gardner goes wild in the country with a post titled “By the Rivers of Babylon”: Denying Jewish History.

It's too funny to completely rip apart, so read it yourself. These sheople find antisemitism in empty cookie jars.

On this bit:

Furthermore, the age old association of Jews with Zion exposes, yet again, the hysterical invitations to antisemitism provided by the regular bastardisation of the word Zionism in today’s media and politics.

... comments 'johng':

Who knew that you could expose all critics of Zionism as making hysterical invitations to antisemitism by simply referring to a Boney M song?

Perhaps if Sands had only listened everything would be ok (one recalls critiques of his insufficient exhaustion of sources with amusement). No wonder they feared this song at a Palestinian solidarity gig.

Well done.

Israel's Descent into Madness, part 15 b...

Quite incredulous at first, I saw a newsticker on Jeera claiming 'Palestinian man convicted of rape for pretending to be Jewish' or words to that effect. This sounded positively bizarre: an Arab conspiracy theory? Tragicomically speaking, alas not. JsF ran the story via Ha'aretz:

An Arab resident of Jerusalem who had consensual sex with a woman who believed him to be Jewish, was convicted yesterday of rape by deception and sentenced to 18 months in prison by the Jerusalem District Court.

Sabbar Kashur, 30, was convicted as part of a plea bargain. According to the indictment, Kashur met the complainant in September 2008 in downtown Jerusalem, presenting himself as a Jewish bachelor looking for a serious romantic relationship.

The couple then went to a nearby building and had sex, after which Kashur left the building without waiting for the woman to get dressed.

When the woman found Kashur was not a Jew but an Arab, she filed a complaint that resulted in charges of rape and indecent assault.

In the verdict, deputy president of the Jerusalem district court Tzvi Segal, along with fellow judges Moshe Drori and Yoram Noam, wrote that although this wasn't "a classical rape by force," and the sex was consensual, the consent itself was obtained through deception and under false pretenses.

"If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated," the judges wrote.

Segal further wrote that this was not a case to be resolved by having the convicted defendant undertake community service, as was suggested by the defense team in the plea bargain.

It's getting more like Jim Crow every day in the Zionist Thingy... Imagine a French woman pretending to be British, getting convicted for a sexual crime for having had consensual sex with a British man (and leaving him with his pants on his feet...)

I'm disappointed in Ha'aretz for not condemning this parody in the harshest tones.

Friday Fun with Circus Israel...

Well, almost Friday then...

david bar echsam (Circus Israel):

PALESTINIANS STRIVE TO RESIST APPROPRIATELY

According to messages intercepted by an Israeli security service that may or may not exist, Palestinian leadership is struggling to identify a form of protest acceptable to Israel. The Palestinians had hoped their communal demonstrations in Bi'lin and Ni'ilin against Israeli’s “security barrier” would compare favorably with the hostilities associated with the 2nd Intifada, but Israel responded with gunfire, gas grenades and arrests. Palestinian opposition to the Jewish State’s admission to the multi-national Office of Economic Cooperation and Development was similarly panned, and even the Palestinian boycott of products from the occupied territories has been waved out of bounds by Israeli commentators. And of course the nine deaths during the Gaza Aid Flotilla completely failed to resonate with the Israeli public.

Consequently, officials from the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Islamic Jihad have been communicating frantically, groping for a resistance strategy that won’t offend Jewish sensitivities. Despite their differences and suspicions (including the question of which side the PA is actually on), their secretly recorded communications reveal a shared predicament. They also confirm that Arabs incessantly conspire (except when they incessantly quarrel and prove themselves incapable of self-government).

Circus Israel obtained transcripts of the Arab discourse from an Israeli espionage operative by posing as Jonathan Pollard’s publicist. The following conference call involved Khaled Meshal (Hamas), Salam Fayyad (PA), Abdullah Ramadan Shallah (Islamic Jihad) and Ahmad Sa’adat (PFLP).

MESHAL: Everyone hooked up?..Okay, gentlemen, we have a big problem, so I’m just gonna say what needs to be said. We’re screwing up the one thing we always agreed on – Israel’s needs come first. We must – I mean must – find modes of resistance that don’t offend the Jews. By the way, I just got a bootleg Avi Gefen CD and it kicks ass. I’ll burn copies for you guys.

SHALLAH: Cool. Listen, I couldn’t agree more about re-calibrating strategy, Khaled. I really thought the settlement boycott would be OK, since its stuff made on our land and all that, but it’s just way too aggressive. We should’ve run it by the Yesha Council.

FAYYAD: And that Aid Flotilla – what a bright idea. Not! Look, we were warned. When Lieberman calls something a violent provocation, it’s a violent provocation. Those crazy boats and what-have-you. Why? Because of a siege? It just makes Israel look bad.

SA’ADAT: Say, who’s gonna talk to these hotheads in Ni’lin and Bi’lin? It’s not okay to provoke tear gas and bullets and scrawl that potty-mouth stuff on the Wall. I don’t want Jewish kids seeing that trash on TV.

FAYYAD: You’re blaming the Authority, I assume.

SA’ADAT: Your turf, man.

FAYYAD: My turf? Listen, I have –

MESHAL: C’mon, c’mon. Guys, there’s plenty of blame for everyone. Let’s keep it positive.

SHALLAH: Hey, a rabbi, a sheikh and a midget walk into a brothel. The sheikh says –

SA’ADAT: This the one where the rabbi says “oy vey, it’s bigger than a palm tree”?

SHALLAH: You heard it already?

MESHAL: Who hasn’t? That joke’s older than the Jewish presence in Jerusalem. Look, let’s focus here. One suggestion - why don’t we just ask the Israelis what protest they’ll tolerate?

SA’ADAT: No, no, no, no, no! Khaled, are you trying to make things worse? Every lover wants you to just understand them and not ask a lot of questions. Besides, you’re just trying to shift responsibility to the Jews. As Abdullah said, it’s our duty to figure this out.

MESHAL: What about a Palestinian Gandhi?

SHALLAH: That’s just another version of asymmetrical warfare. With Sharon under the weather, the Israelis don’t have a comparable peacemaker.

FAYYAD: How about we use protest letters? Firm but polite. Good quality paper.

MESHAL: Better yet, does anybody know if the Israelis have a standard complaint form? We fill it out, submit quietly through proper channels, we can’t go wrong. It’s their own form.

SHALLAH: That’s good. Just let’s not flood them with complaints. We’ll look like a nuisance and it’s not very nice.

MESHAL: Right, exactly. Everything in moderation. Not too much and not too little.

FAYYAD: Well, too little’s okay.

SHALLAH: Of course. By the way, a friend sent me an old Jackie Mason album. Vinyl - mint condition! Guy makes me laugh so hard I plotz!

SA’ADAT: Jackie takes something, like, half-formed in my mind and says it perfectly. Like he’s in my head!

FAYYAD: You wish, Ahmad!

MESHAL: Hey, I hate to be a nudje, but we’re burning minutes. Listen, how about something like this Flotilla Commission the Israelis put together? A focus group of really old Jews that detest us. If something doesn’t offend those guys, it’s good to go.

SA’ADAT: Again you make the Jews responsible! Not only do you want painful concessions, you want them to tell you how to ask for them. Nutty.

MESHAL: Okay, Mr. Diplomat, make a proposal - for once. One constructive idea.

SA’ADAT: Well, maybe if you listened a little more carefully, you’d know I’ve been suggesting a petition drive from day one.

MESHAL: I like petition drives. I always said they’re very effective with the Israelis. But what do we demand?

FAYYAD: Demand?

MESHAL: Okay, not demand. Request.

SHALLAH: Something like, we, the undersigned, respectfully request…what?

SA’ADAT: Negotiations?... Discussions about negotiations?

FAYYAD: Preliminary discussions about preliminary negotiations?

SHALLAH: Jordanian citizenship and limited residency rights in restricted West Bank areas?

SA’ADAT: No, no – that’s to be negotiated.

SHALLAH: This’s really hard. Ya know, I just don’t think it’s so wrong to ask the Israelis for a little guidance. They know what they’ll tolerate.

MESHAL: Do they? 2 Jews, 3 opinions.

SA’ADAT: Why can’t we be delightfully quirky like that?

MESHAL: Lemme tell you something Abu Tir said the other day. "Hamas wins parliamentary elections and they arrest 64 of us. So protest voting’s obviously not allowed. After 4 years in prison, they revoke my Jerusalem residency. So even thinking about resistance is not allowed in territory they control. Maybe they just want us out of here."

FAYYAD: Khaled, c’mon, man…

MESHAL: This never occurs to you? That everything we’re talking about, the expulsions, the land grabs, the contempt, it’s all on purpose to make us surrender?

SHALLAH: Wow. My brother, that’s really paranoid.

SA’ADAT: Worse, it’s anti-semitic incitement. Khaled, I’m very disappointed.

SHALLAH: Those Syrians slipped something in your falafel.

FAYYAD: Look, if we present the right request in the right way at the right time, Israel will always consider it. Just like Oslo.

MESHAL: Sorry. Guess I’m a little frustrated…

SHALLAH: Here’s a good one. Arab walks into a bar on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. Slaps a pile of shekels on the bar, says “let bygones be bygones – drinks’re on me!” Bunch of Jewish guys get drunk, they jump the Arab and beat his ass. Week later, the Arab comes back in. “Let bygones be bygones – drinks’re on me!” Jews get drunk, beat his ass again. Another week, in comes the Arab. This time he says, “I’m not buying you guys any more drinks.” Jewish guy says, “good, ‘cause we’re tired of you making us drink before we beat your ass!”

FAYYAD: Now that’s funny! I gotta tell that one to Tony Blair!

Why we don't like Israel...

Admittedly there's a tad more to it than this but Larry Derfner in the J'Post does sum it up rather well:

Given the way Israel behaves now, it’s pretty sad to remember that it was envisioned as a country where the Jews ran their own national affairs – but nobody else’s.

Now it’s not enough for Israel to have its own coast, its own territorial waters, its own airspace – no, we’ve got to control Gaza’s coast, Gaza’s territorial waters, Gaza’s airspace, too. The Gaza Strip is part of our sphere of influence. Let any Turkish ship, Libyan ship or any other ship we don’t like try to sail into Gaza, and they’ll get a taste of gunboat diplomacy, Israeli-style. Let anyone try to fly a plane in or out of Gaza and they’ll be at the mercy of the Israel Air Force.

Is this what any decent, fair-minded, peace-loving Zionist [cough! My edit] ever had in mind?

We’ve gone from being a Jewish state to being a Jewish mini-empire. A Jewish hegemon.

We fly spy planes over Lebanon on a daily basis. We blew up the beginnings of a nuclear reactor in Syria. We run the lives of two million Palestinians in the West Bank and take their land piece by piece.

Why? Because might makes right. If anybody tried to blockade our coast and our airspace, if anybody flew spy planes over us, if anybody blew up one of our nuclear installations, if anybody ruled our lives at gunpoint and built foreign settlements on our land, we’d kill whoever we had to kill to stop it.

AOF shoots at farmers and ISM in Gaza's buffer zone...

Adie Nistelrooy's (ISM) words directed at the shooters, "... that not fair, that's not right, is it?", must go down as the understatement of the conflict...



H/T to Max Ajl (Jewbonics), more by Max on live fire in the Gaza buffer zone, here and on the shooting of Bianca Zammit, here.

And the world looks on...

Fox mentions racial discrimination in Israel!

Wow! The largest news network in the US had a brief item about the difficulties Palestinians face when buying real estate in Jerusalem. The anchorman uses the expression "pretty intense discrimination". Hell will now surely freeze over...



H/T Loewenstein.

The Bassam Aramin Appeal

Our Final Appeal on Behalf of the

Bassam Aramin University of Bradford Scholarship Fund

This remarkable, brave Palestinian Peace Activist seeks funds to study for his MA Peace Studies in September 2010. Two months to go –please help! PLEASE DONATE TO BASSAM ARAMIN SCHOLARSHIP FUND BY PHONE, ONLINE OR BY CHEQUE (SEE BELOW).

About Bassam Born in 1967, Bassam lives in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since 1992 he has campaigned for a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict. He is co-founder and tireless activist of Combatants for Peace (2005) and co-founder and Chair of Al-Quds Democracy and Dialogue (2006). He is the recipient of three peace prizes (2007;2008;2009).(google Bassam Aramin).

Personal History. The Israel-Palestine conflict has overshadowed Bassam Aramin’s life. Involved in the Palestinian resistance as a teenager, he spent seven years in an Israeli prison. Released in 1992, Bassam realised that the conflict could not be solved by violence and embarked upon an ambitious and ever growing grassroots dialogue project involving key players in Israel and Palestine. Aramin’s life collided tragically and brutally with politics, when his 10-year-old daughter Abir was shot and killed by an Israeli border policeman outside her school in 2007. This horrific event, a trauma for the entire family, resonated around the world. Despite this tragedy, Bassam strengthened his vision of a peaceful solution and remained committed to his activism.

Commitment to Peace. Aramin has demonstrated a lasting commitment to peace in the Middle East. His personal history of the conflict uniquely qualifies him to speak out for Palestinian human rights and self-determination while reaching out to former enemies as demonstrated by his tireless work for the remarkable organisation Combatants for Peace. His influence is apparent as a regular speaker in Israeli and Palestinian education institutes, invitations to speak in the Unites States, the far East and Europe including the European Parliament. He co-hosts with an Israeli former combatant a weekly dialogue radio programme. He writes and gives public talks and is the subject of an Israeli play, and films.

Benefits of Peace Studies (MA) at the University of Bradford. Having the opportunity to complete renowned Peace Studies MA at Bradford University will allow Bassam to further impact on conflict resolution in the political process, and even more powerfully with the struggle for peace in his home country and region. Ultimately, it is people like Bassam Aramin who will break down barriers and find solutions to end the conflict and we can help them achieve this.

Because of the death of their daughter, Bassam’s family will accompany him. Bassam has already secured half of the necessary funding: for donation details please click on: http://www.brad.ac.uk/giving-to-bradford/support-us-now/ and follow the steps below or over page:

- By phone: 01274 235743. Quote: D1926 The Aramin Scholarship Fund

- Online: To make an online donation, go to http://tinyurl.com/bassam1, and follow the steps on screen. Inserting Bassam Aramin and D9126 at the beginning is esential

N.B. Ensure you tick the box marked, I’d like to leave a message and copy the text: Please direct my donation to D9126 The Aramin Scholarship Fund into the field below.

- By gift aided cheque:

Making a Gift Aid declaration will increase your donation by 28%

The declaration below should only be signed by the donor if s/he pays UK income or capital gains tax at least equal to the amount of tax recoverable by the university.

I wish that this and any future donations to the University of Bradford be treated as Gift Aid donations until further notice.

signed:.............................................................

date:.................................................................

*Please make your cheque payable to “University of Bradford” and write Aramin Scholarship (d-9126) on the back of the cheque and post to;

d 9126 Aramin Scholarship
Maxine Douglan-Smith
Finance Dept, University of Bradford,
Richmond Road, Bradford. BD7 1DP

Americans must confront the dispossession of Arabs in ‘48

Excellent stuff here by Phil Weiss on Ussama Makdisi:

We are in the midst of an essential historical conversation. An essential discovery of U.S. policy going back to Partition and a commemoration of the Nakba. Thaddeus Russell is doing it at the Daily Beast, Glenn Loury is doing it in the New York Times (online), I am doing it here by trying to get folks to read Evan Wilson and James Forrestal, Ussama Makdisi is doing it in the Houston Chronicle. This is an amazing moment that we are all part of, it is consciousness raising. All of us are getting at the same truth from different angles, and we all do so because we believe in ideals like the self-determination that Makdisi quotes below:

The perverse irony of where we are today is that a century ago Arabs had a largely positive view of the United States.

Most of us are unaware that throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, many Christian and Muslim Arabs were inspired by America. American missionaries were the primary catalysts for this early perception....

Arabs appreciated this adaptation, just as they appreciated the lack of U.S. imperialism in the region, the possibilities afforded by emigration to the United States, and Wilsonian principles of self-determination.

The point of knowing this history is not to indulge in romanticism or in nostalgia for a bygone era. Rather, it is to lay the basis for a genuine, historically informed dialogue between Americans and Arabs. It is also to discover the choices made by both Americans and Arabs that transformed this positive history into the fraught relationship that today ensnares both sides. Any honest recounting of this history will inevitably bring up the difficult subject of the creation of Israel in 1948 at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.

That is when U.S.-Arab relations began to unravel. Pressured by domestic Zionist groups intent on realizing their dream of a Jewish state, and by a post-war sympathy for the plight of European Jews, the U.S. broke with the Arab world by supporting the creation of Israel. In so doing, it lost the capital built up by over a century of educational and philanthropic missionary work. Despite repeated warnings at the time from Christian and Muslim Arabs, as well as the pleadings of many Americans who lived in the Arab world, the U.S. transformed, virtually overnight, an Arab faith in the United States as a paragon of anti-imperialism into disillusionment and anger.

This is because Israel's creation as a Jewish state has never been simply about ending European anti-Semitism: It has also been about displacing the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. At a moment when most of the rest of the world, including parts of the Arab world itself, were on the cusp of independence, Arab Palestinians were made stateless. The positive trajectory of U.S.-Arab relations suddenly became bitterly negative.

Understanding, rather than shying away from, this pivotal moment and its far-reaching consequences is not the same thing as wishing to undo what has been done, or to dwell self-indulgently on the past. What it does mean is recognizing how Arabs, Israelis and America have been, and remain, bound together in a fateful triangle. As President Obama said a year ago, the denial of the Holocaust or a history of anti-Semitism must end. But so too must a prevailing denial of just how important the traumatic loss of Palestine has been to Arabs and how great an injustice it represented to them. A history of Western anti-Semitism bled into a history of Arab dispossession.

Worse than a Gestapo!

Although nothing to get worked up about, the elaborate attempt at insulting reprinted below was penned clearly with some effort put in by 'Nick K' at Richard Millett's blog. It should stand at as a testimony to the willingness to open debate being reflexively replaced by Zionists with accusations of the most fantastical and comical variety. I thought over at Richard's when one commenter openly, very convincingly and repeatedly threatened me with physical violence I'd kind of heard it all (why does a respectable blogger like Richard Millett allow this kind of 'commenting'?) But I was wrong: they broke the mould when they made 'Nick K'. Take it away, Nick:

[snip]I don’t think Gert was invited, which brings me to the thrust of this entry.

Most evil doers believe they act in good faith and they would be quick to deny any pejorative intent. Gert is of this ilk.

Yet his hating credentials are impeccable and beyond reproach. A self-proclaimed anti-Zionist, (Zionism being defined as Jewish self-determination in its ancestral homeland), he extends that same right of self-determination to all except the Jew. He has qualified his denial by maintaining that he would also deny it to others, but he appears to be a bit short on examples of the non-deserving self-determiners. When pushed he will no doubt do the mandatory Google search and sideline the Crimean Tartars or Kyrgystan Tajiks, or perhaps the Egyptian Coptics, or even the Dr. Who Daleks, as a credible defense to his prominent Jewish exclusion. [Edit: these aren't the examples I had in mind at all]. But you can’t really blame him. A nuclear capability in the hands of a sovereign Dalek state might make good TV but would be a recipe for global instability.

He wields the term anti-Zionist with a deep inbred loathing that would not be out of sorts on the editorial pages of Der Sturmer. He spews his vitriol with the nonchalance of an unemployed Millwall skinhead – lehavdil. When cornered he concedes not wanting Israel wiped off the planet (thank you) [Edit: there was no 'cornering': I've never been opposed to the existence of Israel], then elucidates with some lofty and winging hullaballoo about Israel’s justification lying solely in its de facto existence [Edit: that is true of most, if not all states].

But to go as far as calling him Gestapo Gert, as one venerable contributor [Edit: this is the same 'venerable' contributor mentioned in the intro] has done, would be a slight on a small number of card-carrying Gestapo members. Most notably in 1940 Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels refused to arrest Jews, lost his job and risked his own imprisonment. Gert does not seem to have that problem, as he does not have a job [Edit: baseless conjecture, not to mention irrelevant and private].

He has attributed the recent raid on a UN summer camp in Gaza by armed Palestinians, to Israel’s marginalization of the Hamas [Edit: this is a complete lie: I disagree totally with Hamas' behaviour re. the summer camp]. The Nazi who could have come up with that gem has not yet been born. Sadly Gert has.

Gert, you are a bad man, a very bad man.

Mwhahahahaha!

Update: It appears that my status of 'worse than Gestapo' has now been upgraded to 'ontological genocidaire'. Nick K again:

While selective or even near blanket criticism of a country’s policies can be legitimate and rooted in honor, Gert’s crass questioning of Israel’s very existence is nothing less than ontological genocide, the harbinger of its physical cousin.

Let it never be said that blanket accusations of antisemitism (and more) aren't regularly used to try and shut up critics of Israel and to railroad/shut down any meaningful debate on Israel/Palestine...

Singling Out Israel (Again!)

From the newly discovered, whacky and seriously funny Circus Israel comes this gem. Expect more entries cross-posted here in the future.

The righteous Hebraic air of Eretz Israel is again scented with the complaint that our nation is singled out, among all others, for rebuke. Such anti-Israel criticism is hypocrisy, we cry, and an expression of anti-semitism. To probe this troubling development, Circus Israel thrust its investigatory rectal thermometer into the shopping centers of the Jewish State. As customers squeezed out of busy supermarkets, we absorbed their discourse on the unequal treatment of their homeland. Whether they paced agitatedly or sat uneasily on stools, their pungent opinions represent the by-product of the unique Jewish experience in a stressful world. Representative samples appear below. (To ensure that Circus Israel took no side in the ongoing Sabbath desecration controversy, our researchers collected remarks at stores affiliated with both Supersol and Blue Square.)

SHMUEL R. (software designer): “All I’m saying is when you discuss Israel negatively, you have to mention every other nation in the same breath. Otherwise, you’re a Jew-hating shit-head. That’s all I’m saying.”

ELIE W. (professional survivor and honoree): “I’m only against being singled out. I don’t oppose saying our suffering must be elevated above all others, or that we’re unique, a Light Unto Nations, God’s Chosen People, never wrong and above international law. But, please, don’t single us out.”

ADINA L. (early childhood educator): “Once in a while, single us out for something good we’ve developed – like armored bulldozers or family punishment or certain interrogation methods.”

YISRAEL Y. (redeemer of sacred hilltops): “How about me and my posse single you out, you fucking traitor?”

TATIANA M. (beautician and drug mule): “Maybe they could single out Iran for once. Is Iran invisible? Look at all the trouble they cause in…all those places they cause trouble in."

STEVEN P. (Haifa University professor) “Why don’t they pick on all the other countries with undefined borders, ethnic-based public policy, a vast apparatus of usurpation and occupation, a siege on another people, a continuous history of attacking neighboring states and a disregard for international law? Why don’t they? Nothing to say, judenrat?”

AVIGAIL B. (fertile womb of the Jewish People) “Us they single out? The only ethno-religious democracy in the Middle East? Who ever heard of such a thing?”

MENACHEM D. (yeshiva student): “Can you believe what they’re getting for yogurt here? At these prices, who can afford to feed me?”

YORAM N. (IDF Lieutenant and DJ): “Which singling out do you mean, bro? Where Obama has to give us more military aid than anybody else?”

DOV L. (rabbi & mohel) “Blood libel!”

SHIMON P. (President of Israel): “It’s time to begin proximity negotiations to quantify the number and characteristics of other nations that must be discussed when criticizing Israel. But first there must be confidence building measures, such as the purchase of Israeli products and an airstrike on Iranian nuclear sites.”

AVIGDOR L. (Israeli Foreign Minister): “As a boy, I was often singled out for hitting other children with a lead pipe, so I know how that feels. It’s a real slap in the face to your self-esteem.”

GOLDA A. (painless dentist): “I have only one question about this repulsive singling out – is it good for the Jews?”

The Banality of Zionist Expansionism

H/T Anthony Loewenstein.