Sustainability and Israel

Images from IHH showing "Peace Activists" with daggers and sliced Israelis

Images from IHH showing "Peace Activists" with daggers and sliced Israelis, cropped for "effect" by Reuters

Question: What do you call a “Peace Activist” with a dagger?

Answer: A supporter of the Palestinians.

Popular Logistics joins CameraYNet, Fox News, and the NY Post in documenting  Reuter’s “Fauxtography”, or propaganda by doctoring photos.

To look at the Israeli blockade of Gaza and not ask:

  • Why exactly is Israel blockading Gaza?
  • What would the US do to a flotilla of would-be blockade runners from Venezuela to Cuba?
  • What would happen if the Palestinians would say to the Israelis ‘Ok, we hate you, we really hate you, but we’re going to stop trying to kill you and your children. Will you please lift the blockade?’

To look at the Israeli blockade of Gaza and not ask these questions is to look with the mind’s eye closed.

A Joke:

A few years ago, following Israel’s attack on Saddam’s nuclear research facility at Osirak, at a small cafe in Paris, Kurt Waldheim, Francois Mitterrand, Hafez Al-Assad, Helmut Kohl and Poland’s Prime Minister, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, were having dinner. Jaruzelski brought up Saddam’s nuclear ambitions and Israel’s reaction. “They’re paranoid,” he said. “Altho Saddam did say “You know who these are for,”  he would never have launched nuclear weapons, he’s not that crazy. Besides, the Americans have, as Johnson used to say, his pecker in their pocket.”

Kohl said “They are scared. But I wouldn’t call it paranoid. Saddam is crazy, and the Americans only think they control him.  Back in World War II, we did terrible things to them. They accept our reparations. But they don’t trust us. And they will never like us. How could they?”

Jaruzelski, Waldheim and Mitterrand said, in unison, “Yes, you did terrible things.”

Assad said “you failed.”

The point is, except for Denmark, and to an extent Italy, the people occupied by the Nazis, especially the French and the Poles, cooperated with the Nazis in their war against the Jews. While alone in accepting responsibility for their actions, Germany didn’t act alone. The other point is that for some, the terrible thing is that the Nazis were not successful.

A True Story

A few days ago, outside a Jewish Heritage Celebration at the White House, Helen Thomas, who is old enough to remember World War II, when asked by Rabbi David Nesenoff, said,

“Tell [the Jews] to get the hell out of Palestine . . . go home. . . to Poland, Germany . . . America and everywhere else.”

Thomas apparently didn’t read Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl,” or “Shindler’s List.” Or maybe she is a tribal Lebanese.  Telling the Jews of Israel to go back to Germany and Poland is not the same as saying “Hitler’s biggest mistake was that he didn’t finish the job” but, as my friend Jim would say, “It’s a distinction without a difference.”

Here’s Rabbi Nesenoff’s video. Even Bill O’Reilly on Fox got this one right. It’s also on another right-wing blog. This letter, in the New York Times, sums it up:

To the Editor:

Re “Reporter Retires After Words About Israel” (news article, June 8):

My mother, growing up in Poland in the 1930s, heard demonstrators shouting “Jews, go to Palestine!” Now Helen Thomas tells me that Jews should not be in “Palestine.” They should go back to Germany and Poland.

So, in other words, 65 years after my mother was liberated from a concentration camp in Germany, Jews are still being told that they don’t belong.

No, Ms. Thomas, I think that my 85-year-old mother will stay right where she is, in Netanya, Israel, with her great-grandchildren, who were born in the Jewish state.

Sheba Mittelman

I’m with  Sheba Mittleman.

New research shows that Jews whos ancestors lived in Eastern Europe for the last 1000 years are more closely related to Jews whos ancestors lived in southern Europe, Iran, Turkey, North Africa, and these people are more closely related, genetically, than they are to others from the regions in which they or their ancestors lived.

This makes sense. I am sure that research on people who’s ancestors lived in and left Ireland or Sweden would show that the Irish are more closely genetically related to the Irish and the Swedes are more closely related to the Swedes than they are to each other or to Jews, Italians, or people who’s ancestors lived in and left Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia or Africa.

In “The Missing Link in the Defeat of Khan,” a story I wrote in ’85, set in the Star Trek universe of 2285, I suggested that 300 years from now there could be an almost global Federation on Earth. It could include 99% of humanity and encompasses every land but Israel, Tibet, parts of Afghanistan, and the Indian Reservations of North America. Helen Thomas is why. Her anti-Semitism may be the genteel kind that closes its eyes to certain atrocities.

Again, to look at the Israeli blockade of Gaza and not ask:

  • Why exactly is Israel blockading Gaza?
  • What would the US do to a flotilla of would-be blockade runners from Venezuela to Cuba? and
  • What would happen if the Palestinians would say to the Israelis ‘Ok, we hate you, we really hate you, but we’re going to stop trying to kill you and your children. Will you please lift the blockade?’

To look at the Israeli blockade of Gaza and not ask these questions is to look with the mind’s eye closed.