Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Spreading Hatred Toward Jews on Daily Kos

Michael L.

{Cross-Posted at Jews Down Under and the Times of Israel.}

dope1Outside of political Islam, the most racist political movement in the west, today, of any significance, is unquestionably the progressive-left... the movement from whence I sprang.

The style of contemporary progressive-left racism varies from the dying old-fashioned right-wing variety, because it is grounded in a condescension that sees the ethnic "other" as both inferior and in need of protection.  In this way it bares similarity to imperial western nineteenth-century notions of "white man's burden," rather than classic twentieth-century racism championed by the hard right and organizations like, for example, neo-Nazi or "skin head" groups, not to mention the National Socialists, themselves.

This form of progressive-left racism however does not apply to the Jews.  Instead they have swapped out hatred for the Jewish people with hatred for the Jewish State.  This is not the "humanitarian racism" that the Left practices on non-white peoples, but a form of overt hatred, rather than condescension.

Progressive-left disdain for the Jewish people takes the form of disdain for the Jewish State.  Disdain for the Jewish State takes the form of perpetually condemning it as a racist, imperialist, colonialist, militarist, apartheid, racist state.  It's the Big Lie and if you say it over and over and over again eventually people will come to believe it.

Let's take a gander at an example from the "progressive" Daily Kos website, shall we?

One of the more hostile individuals toward the Jewish people that posts in that venue goes under the moniker "Eternal Hope."

Eternal Hope currently has a "diary" posted entitled, Israel Denying Palestinian Christians the Right to Worship in Jerusalem.

First off, the title of the diary, itself, is a flat-out lie.

It is a lie of implication.  The implication is that Israel is denying Israeli Christians, in general, the right to worship in Jerusalem, which is plainly false.  Christians of all varieties and of all ethnicities worship in Jerusalem on a daily basis.  It is not Israel that practices religious apartheid, but almost the entire Arab world which does.  In other words, Christians and Jews are prevented from practicing their faith throughout most of the Muslim world, yet Eternal Hope lambastes the tiny besieged Jewish minority in order to piss all over them before a western audience for the purpose of spreading hatred toward Jews by holding them to an insidious double-standard.

Please note that Eternal Hope's source for this accusation is Der Sturmer Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera, needless to say, is in bed with "Palestinianism" (as is Eternal Hope, actually) and cannot be trusted as a fair source of news and information concerning the Jewish State of Israel.  Al Jazeera, itself, is heavily involved in the delegitimization project and this is precisely how it works.  It is a blatantly hostile and heavily biased source of news and information that advertises hatred against the Jews for people like Eternal Hope to further disseminate in venues like Daily Kos or the UK Guardian or the Huffington Post and innumerable smaller progressive-left venues.

Furthermore, just what is a "Palestinian Christian"?  Everyone who lives in the Land of Israel is a "Palestinian" in the sense that prior to the re-establishment of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people, the area between the river and the sea was alternatively known as either "the Holy Land" or "Palestine."  But "Palestinian" is no more a separate ethnicity than is "Californian."  No exclusive groups can lay claim to being "Californian."  "Californian" does not represent a distinct ethnicity and neither does "Palesinian."

The so-called "Palestinian" people only emerged as a separate variety of Arab toward the end of the twentieth-century and did so for the specific purpose of challenging Jewish self-defense and autonomy on Jewish land.  That being the case - which it most emphatically is - the Jewish people are under no obligation to recognize the government of an alleged people who came into existence for the specific purpose of undermining Jewish autonomy.

There has never been a Palestinian-Arab state and, unless they, and the Arab world, more generally, accepts Jewish sovereignty within Israel, there never will be.

Furthermore, the point in offering Christians the moniker of "Palestinian" is to encourage Christians to join with Muslims in their efforts to undermine, and eventually destroy, Jewish sovereignty and self-protection on historically Jewish land.

Thankfully, as I have read elsewhere, Christians in the Middle East are moving away from associating themselves with Arab political parties because the days of Pan-Arab Nationalism are over and the day of rising Jihad begun.  Most Middle Eastern Christians, like most Middle Eastern Jews, have no burning desire to return to the submissive conditions of dhimmitude which is why, outside of Israel, the Christian population in the region is being decimated.

Since the overthrow of Barack Obama's friends in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamists have burned down how many churches in that country?  Maybe 100 by this point?  Maybe more.

Eternal Hope writes:
This undermines the basis that Israel has to claim that it is a democratic system. Instead, it is treating its Palestinian Christian population with the same sort of discrimination that it is the rest of their Palestinian populations.
Israel, while flawed, is far and away the most democratic state in the region.  No other country in the Middle East comes even remotely close to Israel as a fair and open democracy, yet malicious Jew Haters like Eternal Hope want to besmirch the character of the Jewish minority in the Middle East in order to erode what little support they have elsewhere in the world.  Whatever Eternal Hope thinks that she is doing, she is helping to isolate and harass a small minority of Jewish people who have had war waged against them by a much larger hostile majority population over the course of about one hundred years, now.

Eternal Hope writes:
The end result is that it is breaking up families and shutting people out of the process. This is hardly surprising coming from a government whose foreign minister openly advocates the transfer and revocation of citizenship for its Palestinian minority within Israel.
This is yet another lie.  I have never been an advocate for Avigdor Lieberman, but he has no intention whatsoever of forcibly transferring anyone to anywhere, yet someone who did not know this, reading Eternal Hope's malicious lies, would assume that Lieberman advocates for the physical expulsion of Arabs from Israel.  He doesn't and even if he did, just what do you expect from a minority population under siege by a hostile majority population?  Of course there are Jewish Israelis who would like to see the expulsion of Arabs from the country.  The reason for that is because a goodly proportion of those Arabs seek either to murder Jews or justify the murder of Jews, which is essentially what Eternal Hope is up to at Daily Kos.

Ultimately what Eternal Hope is endeavoring to accomplish - whatever she tells herself concerning her motives - is normalizing and encouraging violence toward Jews in the name of "social justice" and "human rights."

She concludes:
But Israel's policies of perpetual warfare against the Palestinian people as well as its rules and regulations designed to exclude Palestinian Christians from a meaningful civil life means that they are not the democratic system of government that was first envisioned when Zionism was first through up. Instead, they are an apartheid dictatorship which is designed to confer special rights on its Jewish majority population while denying rights to Muslims and Christians.
Notice the inversion embedded in the first sentence of that paragraph.  "Israel's policies of perpetual warfare"?  The Jews of the Middle East want nothing so much as to be left alone in order to write computer code, litigate against one another, and send Natalie Portman's out into the world.  What they do not have is a policy of perpetual war.  On the contrary, it is the Arabs who have for 13 long centuries kept the Jewish people under conditions of submission according to the doctrine of dhimmitude as expressed in the Pact of Omar during the seventh century.

Eternal Hope's writings on the Arab-Israel conflict are something akin to a self-professed "liberal" blaming African-Americans for the oppression of white people for daring to oppose the system of Jim Crow.  All Israel is doing is protecting the Jewish people from the intense malice around them and that intense malice long, long precedes the creation of the modern State of Israel.

In her commentaries on the Arab-Israel conflict Eternal Hope perpetually places all blame on the Jewish minority in the Middle East for the hostility against them, while siding with a majority population whose leaders often call for the genocide of the Jewish people through the wiping out of the State of Israel.

Furthermore, to claim that Israel has a policy of "perpetual warfare" is the classic anti-Semitic trope that we've seen in Europe for centuries and in the Middle East for at least one hundred years.  The Jews are warmongers!  They like war for the sake of war!  All good Germans people should ban together in order to confront this menace!

Finally, to call Israel an "apartheid dictatorship" is not only grossly unjust and malicious, it is also hugely hypocritical given the rest of the countries in the region.  Muslims and Christians vote for national leadership within the Knesset and the Knesset actually contains anti-Zionist Arab members.

How much more democratic can a country be if they allow those who seek to destroy it as members-in-good-standing within their own parliament?

Arabs and Muslims share schools with Jews and restaurants with Jews and hospitals with Jews and university campuses with Jews. Arabs, furthermore, have greater access to all of those things in Israel than anyplace else within the entire Middle East. This is partly due to the fact that Palestinian-Arabs within Israel also have greater economic opportunities than do Palestinian-Arabs elsewhere within that entire region.

Notice that Eternal Hope does not mention the treatment of Palestinian-Arabs by their cousins in Lebanon or Jordan or Syria where they are largely kept in refugee camps and generally refused access to Lebanese or Jordanian or Syrian civil society.

The very last thing that Israel is is an "apartheid" state and the only people who claim otherwise are those who absolutely have it in for the Jewish people.

And notice, of course, that Eternal Hope could not care less that Jewish people are not even allowed to enter the city of Mecca.

The hypocrisy could not be more blatant and it is an hypocrisy shared by the trends within her own political movement.

Eternal Hope is a racist, but as I said in the beginning, outside of political Islam the progressive-left is the most racist political movement of any significance in the west today.

I have watched it become more so in recent years and it is truly very sad, but it is also simply undeniable.

10 comments:

  1. The kind of world many of these people wish to bring about will be one without hope.

    By assuming that no one besides themselves are interested in a "just" world, they take license to exercise coercion, even as history shows the application of their theories is anathema to human life and potential.

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    1. When you find the time, please expand on this thought, School.

      Seriously.

      I am just not quite sure what you are getting at.

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    2. It's about Jew hatred, but the root is generally deeper for most of these individuals.

      The effect of their quest for utopia is from experience dystopian. Their theories result in great suffering.

      As worse, they are not hesitant to coerce others to instill and maintain conformity in an ideology where they can assert power based on elitism and corruption.

      Their way too often seems to approach nihilism.

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    3. For all too many, I think the root lies mostly in naivete, which is forgivable up until a point.

      That point is when they reach the state School notes here. When they truly begin to convince themselves that they are capable of seeing things so many others can't, despite a complete lack of evidence ("it's the Jooooz who are oppressing other religions and peoples in the Middle East," despite the mountains of contrary evidence, "no other people in the world are more oppressed than Palestinians!," despite the fact that dozens of other peoples are, including multiple groups oppressed by official Palestinian representative bodies themselves, etc etc)...

      Those like this person who clearly seem to be of the opinion that they hold The One True Answer to any given issue (and with these types, it's NEVER just one issue they hold The True Answer to...) are generally the types we should all be most wary of.

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    4. Nearly all forms of totalitarian fascism start out as populism, as a call to justice, a call to uplift the downtrodden. The problem is that all the people shouting 'power to the people' are the people they want the people to give the power to.

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  2. School, Jay, and Trudy,

    The effect of their quest for utopia is from experience dystopian. Their theories result in great suffering.

    Well, the Soviet Union proved that, for sure, School.

    I used to like to kid people that my ancestors came over on the boat, in the early twentieth-century, with a copy of Das Kapital in one hand a small round bomb in the other!

    Ultimately, I must agree with you. I expect nothing from the political right-wing, but we are definitely not getting results from the Left.

    Those like this person who clearly seem to be of the opinion that they hold The One True Answer to any given issue (and with these types, it's NEVER just one issue they hold The True Answer to...) are generally the types we should all be most wary of.

    Jay, I think that I would say that Eternal Hope has become a strident anti-Semitic anti-Zionist ideologue. She recognizes no virtue in the Jews of the Middle East, nor does she acknowledge any vice on the part of the large Arab majority.

    Ultimately, she fails Natan Sharansky's 3-D test.

    "The first "D" is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel's actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz - this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.

    The second "D" is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel's Magen David Adom, alone among the world's ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross - this is anti-Semitism.

    The third "D" is the test of delegitimization: when Israel's fundamental right to exist is denied - alone among all peoples in the world - this too is anti-Semitism."

    Nearly all forms of totalitarian fascism start out as populism, as a call to justice, a call to uplift the downtrodden. The problem is that all the people shouting 'power to the people' are the people they want the people to give the power to.

    I have to say, Trudy, it really wasn't all that long ago that I started engaging with left-wing political advocates on-line on places like Daily Kos or My Left Wing, among others. And, I have to say, there was a specific day, probably around 2009, when I looked up from my computer screen and realized that the very last thing that I want in this world is for my alleged political allies to actually control American politics.

    I've been dealing with the repercusions of that realization ever since.

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  3. Fantastic op-ed by Pennsylvania State Senator Anthony Williams (an African-American Democrat from Philadelphia) today.

    http://nypost.com/2014/04/11/the-racism-of-the-israel-bashers/

    Too bad I can't quote, or post a clickable link on my phone, but definitely give this one a read.

    He's not my State Senator, but I'm absolutely going to write him a nice thank you note when I get home from work this evening...

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    1. Check this out about Williams, and especially the video at the bottom.

      He is a really decent man.

      http://www.jewishpress.com/news/black-state-senator-slams-academic-boycott-of-israel-as-anti-semitic/2014/01/08/comment-page-2/

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    2. Excellent, thanks. I hadn't seen that one...

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  4. While it's frustrating to deal with these people it's a bit like knowing which kinds of dogs are useful for specific jobs. My beagles are great for what beagles do. Which is to be lazy, stubborn, obsessive and mooching food all the time. It's pretty well established that invisible fences are useless with beagles because once they track something, typically a deer, rabbit or a possum, they're gone. Doesn't matter what's in the way; traffic, electric fences, walls, whatever. Likewise they are terrible guard dogs because all they want to do is come up to you and beg for food. And they're terrible watch dogs because they howl and bark randomly at god knows what. But - if you're trying to stop people smuggling plants and food into the US, the Border Patrol has a job for your beagle. THAT they excel at.

    Point being there's no point in trying to convince Jew haters of anything other than hating Jews. It's not what they do, it's who they are.

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