Jewish Settler Attacks = Terrorism

Byrnzie said:

The searing hypocrisy of the West
July 1, 2014

By SUSAN ABULHAWA

The bodies of three Israeli settlers who went missing on June 12th were found in a hastily dug shallow grave in Halhul, north of Hebron.

Since the teens went missing from Gush Etzion, a Jewish-only colony in the West Bank, Israel has besieged the 4 million Palestinians who already live under its thumb, storming through towns, ransacking homes and civil institutions, conducting night raids on families, stealing property, kidnapping, injuring, and killing. Warplanes were dispatched to bomb Gaza, again and repeatedly, destroying more homes and institutions and carrying out extrajudicial executions.

Thus far, over 570 Palestinians have been kidnapped and imprisoned, most notably a Samer Issawi, the Palestinian who went on a 266-day hunger strike in protest of a previous arbitrary detention. At least 10 Palestinians have been killed, including at least three children, a pregnant woman, and a mentally ill man. Hundreds have been injured, thousands terrorized. Universities and social welfare organizations were ransacked, shut down, their computers and equipment destroyed or stolen, and both private and public documents confiscated from civil institutions.

This wonton thuggery is official state policy conducted by its military and does not include the violence to persons and properties perpetuated by paramilitary Israeli settlers, whose persistent attacks against Palestinian civilians have also escalated in the past weeks. And now that the settlers are confirmed dead, Israel has vowed to exact revenge. Naftali Bennet, Economy Minister said, “There is no mercy for the murderers of children. This is the time for action, not words.”


Israeli settlers torturing a young Palestinian

Although no Palestinian faction has claimed responsibility for the abduction, and most, including Hamas, deny any involvement, Benjamin Netanyahu is adamant that Hamas is responsible. The United Nations requested that Israel provide evidence to support their contention, but no evidence has been forthcoming, casting doubt on Israel’s claims, particularly in light of its public ire over the recent unification of Palestinian factions and President Obama’s acceptance of the new Palestinian unity.

In the West, headlines over pictures of the three Israeli settler teens referred to Israel’s reign of terror over Palestine as a “manhunt” and “military sweep.” Portraits of innocent young Israeli lives emerged from news outlets and the voices of their parents are featured in the fullness of their anguish. The US, EU, UK, UN, Canada and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) condemned the kidnapping and called for their immediate and unconditional release. Upon discovery of the bodies, there has been an outpouring of condemnation and condolences.

President Obama said,

“As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing. The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms this senseless act of terror against innocent youth.”

Although hundreds of Palestinian children are kidnapped, brutalized or killed by Israel, including several in the past two weeks, there is rarely, if ever, such a reaction from the world.

Just prior to the disappearance of the Israeli settler teens, the murder of two Palestinian teens was caught on a local surveillance camera. Ample evidence, including the recovered bullets and a CNN camera filming an Israeli sharpshooter pulling the trigger at the precise moment one of the boys was shot indicated that they were killed in cold blood by Israeli soldiers.

There were no condemnations or calls for justice for these teens by world leaders or international institutions, no solidarity with their grieving parents, nor mention of the more than 250 Palestinian children, kidnapped from their beds or on their way to school, who continue to languish in Israeli jails without charge or trial, physically and psychologically tortured. This is to say nothing of the barbaric siege of Gaza, or the decades of ongoing theft, evictions, assaults on education, confiscation of land, demolition of homes, color coded permit system, arbitrary imprisonment, restriction of movement, checkpoints, extrajudicial executions, torture, and denials at every turn squeezing Palestinians into isolated ghettos.

...This exceptionalism and supremacy of Jewish life is a fundamental underpinning of the state of Israel. It pervades their every law and protocol, and is matched only by their apparent contempt and disregard for Palestinian life. Whether through laws that favor Jews for employment and educational opportunities, or laws that allow the exclusion of non-Jews from buying or renting among Jews, or endless military orders that limit the movement, water consumption, food access, education, marriage possibilities, and economic independence, or these periodic upending of Palestinian civil society, life for non-Jews ultimately conforms to the religious edict issued by Dov Lior, Chief Rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, saying “a thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.”

...What should we do, then? Palestine is quite literally being wiped off the map by a state that openly upholds Jewish supremacy and Jewish privilege. Our people continue to be robbed of home and heritage, pushed to the margins of humanity, blamed for our own miserable fate. We are a traumatized, principally unarmed, native society being destroyed and erased by one of the most powerful militaries in the world.

...But none of that matters either. Does it? It matters that three Israeli Jews were killed. It doesn’t matter who did it or what the circumstances were, the entire Palestinian population will be made to suffer, more than they already are.

Wicked. And cruel. No other way to put it.

The dragnet that has seen 570 people kidnapped and imprisoned as a response to the kidnapping and murder of the three teenagers is simply another excuse for wanton violence and heightened aggression.

Say nothing of the other contributions that illustrate a cold and callous population.

Front people responsible for articulating Israel's actions and mindset simply cannot defend these types of actions. Yoshi, I have really enjoyed the dialogue between you and Byrnzie. I feel you have done as credible a job as one might be able to do defending Israeli actions in this affair; however, it might be time to reassess your position. As well spoken as you are, and as patient as you have been with Byrnzie, your script has become hollow.

Byrnzie, nice to see that you're back to posting articles from Counterpunch.

Counterpunch

Gene, February 27th 2005, 9:33 pm

A Canadian court has cleared the way for Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel to be deported to Germany to stand trial.

Zundel, a leading proponent of white supremacy who claims the Holocaust never happened, is also the author of “The Hitler We Loved and Why.”

He has been held in a Toronto jail for two years while authorities determined whether he posed a security risk to Canadian society.

Federal Court Justice Pierre Blais said Friday that Zundel’s activities were not only a threat to national security, “but also a threat to the international community of nations.”

In his 63-page decision released in Ottawa on Thursday, Blais called Zundel a racist hypocrite and said his Toronto home was a “revolving door” for some of the world’s most notorious white supremacists who have promoted violence and hatred against Jews and minorities.

Last March a much more sympathetic account of Zundel was published. It described him as a “64 year-old painter and pacifist” and “the most widely recognized figure in the growing number of historians, both amateur and academic, questioning the veracity of orthodox accounts of the events which took place in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, specifically with reference to the number of Jewish dead and the means by which they came to their demise.”

There are of course grounds to challenge Zundel’s treatment by Canadian authorities as a denial of free expression, as did Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“Zundel, I have no difficulty saying, is a nasty, nasty character and everything I’m saying is without the slightest sympathy for him,” Borovoy said. “But the process in itself is unfair.”

But nowhere does the article’s author, Alan Cabal, suggest the true nature of Zundel’s repulsive ideas, or express uneasiness with those ideas. Instead he calls Zundel “the world’s premier thought-criminal.” He concedes that Zundel’s views may be “provocative,” but he seems more disturbed by the “Holocaust industry” for persecuting people like Zundel and for behaving “in every way like a fanatical cult.”

What makes Cabal’s sympathetic article especially interesting is that it did not appear in some publication of the extreme Right but rather in a publication of the hard Left: Counterpunch, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

Cabal’s piece is not currently posted on Counterpunch’s popular website, but it is posted (approvingly) on a pro-Zundel website. (The Counterpunch website continues to include references to the article.)

And this is hardly the first or only time Counterpunch has been a congenial host to writers minimizing antisemitism and dropping dark hints about “Jewish power” and Jewish loyalty.

Canadian professor Michael Neumann wrote in January 2003:

Talk of a Jewish power structure is increasing at two levels. In the nether regions of the internet, there’s more about Jewish control of the US’ Israel policy, or perhaps of the US itself. Higher up, one hears about a Jewish lobby, or a Jewish-Israel lobby, or, more often, about mean-spirited, unpleasant people who control the government, and who, it is said or coyly suggested, are Jews.

There is inconclusive but considerable evidence to support these claims. Jews loom large among the high ranks of government policy advisers, and in influential non-governmental policy organizations. Most media push a Zionist line; many are owned by Jews. And there are well-documented cases of senators and congressmen who have learned to regret, come election time, wavering in their support for Israel. Some suggest that Jewish pressure groups had a role in the downfall of Bush the First.

It is clear that American Jews are deeply involved in the formation of US policy towards what they call the Jewish homeland, the self-styled Jewish state of Israel. It is also clear that the interests of Israel are not identical with those of the United States. This naturally raises questions about the ultimate loyalties of these policy-makers, so the collection and distribution of such evidence is quite justified.

A few months earlier, he offered this lighthearted suggestion:

I think we should almost never take antisemitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun with it.

The Canadian Jewish Congress reported in 2003 on an email exchange between Neumann and the proprieters on the antisemitic website Jewish Tribal Review.

The Web site quotes Neumann as writing, “I should perhaps have said I am very interested in truth, justice and understanding, but right now I have far more interest in helping the Palestinians. I would use anything, including lies, injustice and obfuscation, to do so. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism or reasonable hostility to Jews, I don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still don’t care.”

Neumann still writes for Counterpunch.

And would anyone care to argue that Alexander Cockburn himself– who still contributes a column to The Nation– has not tumbled into an abyss of antisemitic paranoia when he writes stuff like this:

It’s supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a discussion of how much the Jews do control the media. Since three of the prime founders of Hollywood, were Polish Jews who grew up within fifty miles of each other in Galicia, it’s reckoned as not so utterly beyond the bounds of propriety to talk about Jewish power in Hollywood, though people still stir uneasily. The economic and political commentator Jude Wanniski remarked last week in his web newsletter that even if the Jews don’t control the media overall, it is certainly true to say that they control discussion of Israel in the media here.

Certainly, there are a number of stories sloshing around the news now that have raised discussion of Israel and of the posture of American Jews to an acrid level. The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former government scientist, Jewish, with a record of baiting a colleague of Arab origins, and with the intent to blame the anthrax on Muslim terrorists. Rocketing around the web and spilling into the press are many stories about Israeli spies in America at the time of 9/11. On various accounts, they were trailing Atta and his associates, knew what was going to happen but did nothing about it, or were simply spying on US facilities. Some, posing as art students have been expelled, according to AP. Finally, there’s Sharon’s bloody repression of the Palestinians, and Israel’s apparently powerful role in Bush’s foreign policy, urging him into action against at least two of the axes of evil, Iraq and Iran.

Well, we just can’t keep those darn stories from sloshing and rocketing around, can we, Alex?

The Jude Wanniski to whom he refers is one of the Reaganite fathers of supply-side economics who seems to share Cockburn’s paranoia about the Jews, and apparently admires the racist and antisemitic Lewis Farrakhan. He too has found a home at Counterpunch.

And yet… Counterpunch remains a prized source for hard-left anti-imperialist bloggers who frequently blogroll and link to it. Unsurprisingly it is a favorite among the conspiracy-minded denizens of Medialens.

Do Counterpunch’s devoted leftist readers ever notice these things? If so, does it matter to them? Or do they sometimes believe, in their heart of hearts, that maybe people like Cabal, Neumann and Cockburn are on to something about those Jews?

Furthermore, Counterpunch published an article by Alison Weir which alleges that the blood libel, (the charge that Jews ritually murdered gentiles), is true and is related to the false reports, in 2009, regarding Israeli thefts of human organs from Palestinians. If you want to see for yourself, you can find that article here, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.counterpunch.org/weir08282009.html&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

CounterPunch published the fascist Holocaust denier, and blood libel promoter, ‘Israel Shamir‘.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/22/what-really-happened-in-the-yom-kippur-war/

I'll also note that I brought all of this up before. In fact, B, I know that you are aware of all of this stuff because you were diligent enough to go find the article that explains CounterPunch's antisemitism where I found all of the above links. Your response, which appears earlier in this thread, was to dismiss all of this because the article was published by algemeiner.com, which you described as a "pro-Jewish" website (I've already said it, but I'll say it again, interesting choice of words). You made no effort to engage with the accusations, all of which were accompanied by extensive links. You simply ignored the fact that Counterpunch deals in anti-semitism, launched an ad hominem attack against the "pro-Jewish" website that would dare point such a thing out, and have gone straight back to relying on Counterpunch for your opinions and feeding their offerings to the good readers of this thread.