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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- mazel tov to @bluenatic and @grandstreet on the birth of their baby girl 2 weeks ago
- RT @JTownCrier: Tropper? Kolko? Margulies? Balkany? Dwek? Rubashkin? NO. Moetzes Gedolei Torah condemn AVI WEISS as more offensive. 2 weeks ago
- Rorschach from Watchmen is the new Freddy Krueger http://bit.ly/7s61Cj 2 weeks ago
- More updates...
Hate Begets Hate
The JTA reports,
About 18 percent of Israeli Arabs said they backed Hezbollah during the recent war, a new poll finds.A majority of Israeli Jews believe that most Israeli Arabs supported Hezbollah, the Dahaf poll found. [Emphasis mine.]
Twenty-seven percent of Israeli Arabs said they supported Israel in the conflict, while 36 percent said they supported neither side.
All too-eager to latch onto these figures to further damage the image of Arabs in its right-wing Orthodox readership’s eyes, Arutz Sheva declared “Only 1/4 of Israeli-Arabs Supported Israel in War, as Predicted.” Attacking the liberal Jewish media (no, no — the actual liberal Jewish media, ie., Haaretz) for being too soft on the A-rabs, the article begins, “Though some media headlines blared ‘Only 18% Supported Hizbullah,’ poll numbers show that 73% of the Israeli-Arab public refused to say they supported Israel in its war against Hizbullah.”
OMG! You mean to say the second class citizens of the Jewish State resent the Jewish State?! Could it possibly be?
I’m reminded of a recent essay in Haaretz, “Through the looking glass,” which illustrates this issue precisely. In it, an Israeli Arab journalist, Sayed Kashua, describes his experience monitoring a focus group assembled to investigate Israeli attitudes towards the war. The overwhelming outpouring of racism against Arabs which flowed so naturally from the tounges of his Jewish countrymen stirred within him a desire for Israel’s loss:
“Credibility problem” was the key phrase. “Knife in the back.” “Their natural increase.” “Car thefts.” “Crime, drugs, prostitution.” “To transfer them,” one of the young people said, using both hands to make a raking gesture. They were to be followed by a group that describes itself as center-right, God preserve us.
[...]
“I was against the war, but after it started I wanted the army to lose, or at least not to feel victorious. My hands tremble as I write, but in this war I was against Israel – make no mistake – my country. This has nothing to do with the other side, it has nothing to do with what I think about the side that fought in this round against the IDF. It’s true that I would prefer that the IDF, that the State of Israel lose without the consequence being that soldiers die. I would like to see it lose in arm-wrestling. Rows of tables in which soldiers from both sides sit and arm-wrestle. I would prefer a loss by penalty kicks.
“The past few weeks were so confusing, and included phone calls to friends I grew up with, whom I lived with and who I knew were fighting; looking for the names of victims with my heart pounding and my head exploding; and ending with a feeling of relief when I did not identify friends in the lists of names. You can say it’s treason, you can say what you want, but I am still unable to understand how I can be happy when I hear that another IDF tank has been hit and at the same time afraid that I have friends inside it and then cringe when I see the photographs and under them the ages of the fallen.”
[...]
“I am so happy,” said a pretty woman on the other side of the glass, “when Nasrallah’s missiles land in their villages.” It’s hard to believe, but I smiled indulgently.
Az, nu? Are you so surprised? Do you honestly think you’re entitled to their loyalty? When you can’t even acknowledge their tselem, other than with a disingenuous nod? “Yeah, sure, ‘image of G-d,’ but…” No such luck for the stranger in your midst. Remember the house that Nuri built?
Kafir, indeed.
Chris Rock, in a stand-up routine, once said, “There’s nobody more racist than an old black man.” Except for the Jews, apparently. The behavior I’ve witnessed in the last week, interacting with the Israeli public while distributing fliers and hanging posters around Jerusalem, let alone all the hateful emails and comments I’ve received, has made me ashamed of my people. They are so consumed with hatred they cannot see how their hatred is revisted upon them.
We’re just innocent victims, after all.
.áøåê àúä éäåä àìåäéðå îìê äòåìí, ôå÷ç òåøéí
Blessed are You, Hasehm, our God, King of the universe, Who gives sight to the blind.
[Update] A Gallup poll released May 10 shows that nearly 40% of Americans are prejudiced against Muslims.
Thirty-nine percent of respondents to the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll said they felt at least some prejudice against Muslims. The same percentage favored requiring Muslims, including U.S. citizens, to carry a special ID “as a means of preventing terrorist attacks in the United States.” About one-third said U.S. Muslims were sympathetic to al-Qaeda, and 22% said they wouldn’t want Muslims as neighbors.
[Update] ynet reports:
Almost two weeks after the war in Lebanon ended, Haifa’s stronghold of coexistence is finding it difficult to recover from the harsh blow it suffered. Suspicion and loss of trust, particularly on the part of Jews toward Arabs, are being felt these days in the neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas, where Muslims, Christians and Jews live side by side.
While some of the Arab residents seek to stress the cooperation and good relations between themselves and the Jews, the latter find it difficult to forgive what they view as almost a kind of treason the support for Nasrallah during the war.
Hate has always been a motivator. Revenge is the great equalizer of men. Our mythology is full of stories of a man of litle means toppling a man of great means.
But, the current cultural movement towards hate and racism, witnessed in its bountiful hypocrisy every day at websties such as Little Green Footballs or Free Republic or Democratic Underground, fails to understand the essential truth behind the hatred: You can’t kill them all. And, there comes a time when you actually have to pull back from the mental image of your mortal enemy as a vicious animal without morals and without an ounce of real human qualities and accept the fact your enemy is flesh and blood and all too human with the same fears and dreams that you have.
There is no doubt that there are psychopaths amongst us.
But, you don’t have to look in the IDF or Hezbollah or the US Army to find them.
Some of them are sitting right next to you in the movie theater, or standing in line next to you at the bank or in the car with you on the way to the football game.
Columbine was real.
The violence and hatred that spilled forth that day is exactly in same in its conclusion as that of a suicide bomber killing himself and innocent bystanders in a pizzeria in Tel Aviv, or of an American made jet bombing a neighborhood to get one man (not getting him) yet killing 50 innocent civilians, or of an Israeli morter being launched into a UN observation center.
It doesn’t matter what your motivations were.
In the end, the deaths all look the same to G-d.
I wonder who gets/got better/worse treatment; the arabs in Israel or the Jews in any of the islamic/arabic countries in the middle east. By no means does the vicous and unequal discrimination that we have recieved from arabs/islam (yes i know u like to cite the periods of tolerant caliphs but those were far and few between) justify our wrongs , but please try and view your own people with the same circumstantial understandings (not justification) that you so easily give to others, and maybe you wont be so ashamed of your brothers , maybe you will realize that despite enduring what no people on earth has for a longer period than any nation on earth we are pretty damn peacefull.
I think a good highlight of this was the “gold star” story that came out in canadian newspapers, that the persians were going to pass a bill making jews christians and other minority religons in iran wear symbols, the jews of course a gold star. All this was blasted to clearly try and attach in americas mind iran to the nazi’s. But as we found out about a week later, it was total bullshit, even the only jew in the parliment in iran said he had no idea what they were talking about.
These globalist scum, the ones who are the center of the NWO who fund and control people like the neocons and the ultra nationalistic zionists, whos religon is no longer that of abraham, but that of worshipping the state of israel itself. They seed this hatred in the people through propaganda. Groups like the CFR trilateral comission, bilderbergers, the masons, the shadow governments, and military industrial complex, CIA/ISI/MI5/MOSSAD raytheon carlyle KBR betchel, ect.
nothing is ever endured longer than a single lifetime.
ES, it is a slippery slope attempting to quantify one groups level of suffering to anothers.
Look at it this way: Because there were 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and 3 million Cambodians died in the Kymer Rouge purge, does it really matter that one group suffered more or less than the other or got better or worse treatment? Same with the situation you outline.
Breaking it down to more or less belies the real issue, which is that people died.
As a society, we have real issues with this concept. On one hand, we love to use large numbers of dead as a wedge to prove a point. Yet, we utterly fail to reconginze such genocidal tendancies (large and small) in our own soceity as we simultaniously make little to no real effort to stop the genocide before it occurs, or while it is occuring. Then, after tens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions have died needlessly, we look at each other with gob smacked wonder at the atrociousness of it as if it’s a fucking surprise and we have no idea at all what was going on.
Bill Cosby used to tell a joke about how kids will lie about the most obvious of things in ways that are utterly fantastic and totally believe the lie when they are telling it.
It goes something like this: (paraphrasing) You come home from a hard days work, and the kids are running around. “Don’t run around. Go read a book.” So, you sit down to read the paper and you hear a CRASH in the other room. You run to see what happened and the three kids are standing in the middle of the room and a lamp in on the floor, broken.
“Who broke the lamp?”
“Ummmm.”
“What happened…?
“Well, you see…. ummm…. we were in the other room…. and…”
“The other room?”
“Yeah. And, ummm….. a tiger…. ummmm. He ran by us really fast….”
“A tiger.”
The other kids nod in total agreement.
“Yeah. A really BIG tiger…”
Anyway, you get the idea.
We do the same thing in our overrationalization of killing each other.
And, killing is really easy. Look at history.
Not killing. That’s hard. Course, if you spend enough energy not killing, there is a good chance you’ll be killed…
Look at Rabin
Gandhi
Lennon
MLK
Good company to be sure but who wants to be a dead keeper of the peace?
Not too many are up for the challenge these days…
Im not trying to justify any killing – nor remove any responsibility for any of our own failures , just trying to protest the concept of Dan being “ashamed of (his own) my people” and this mistaken notion that we are “getting what we deserved”. His attitude is seductive because it seems to offer the moral high ground. However I believe objectively as a people we have nothing to be ashamed of concerning this specific topic; and saying we are getting what we deserve is self aggrandizing skullduggery, whatever yardstick you want to use. First and foremost understand your people with the same conscientious circumstantially understanding outlook you use to explain the behavior of those you dont judge so critically. Its a choice.
I think that if Dan is ashamed of “his people”, and has a valid reason… then I’d expect that there is probably a damn good reason to be ashamed.
I’m ashamed of the human race sometimes. For good reason. Does that mean that I’ve become a self hating human being? Hardly.
I feel ashamed because I see such great potential. I am ashamed valid and all to common reasons.
But, that shame in no way keeps me from loving the human race at the same time. Far from it. My love and respect is so deep, that when I see or know of things that inspire shame, it is because of that love, and hope and respect and deep longing for something we’ve not yet attained.
As Elvis Costello said: “What’s so funny ’bout peace love and understanding?”
I don’t wish to speak for Daniel at all for he’s imminently capable of doing so on his own, but I’d venture that his sensibilities are along those lines, if expressed in his own way and through the window of his own experiences and thoughts.
“I was against the war, but after it started I wanted the army to lose, or at least not to feel victorious. My hands tremble as I write, but in this war I was against Israel – make no mistake – my country.”
I can understand not wantng a war to begin, being afraid to recognize a name on a casualty list and not wanting a war to continue, but I cannot understand wanting to lose.
Dan..That is just plain wrong.
“But, the current cultural movement towards hate and racism, witnessed in its bountiful hypocrisy every day at websties such as Little Green Footballs or Free Republic or Democratic Underground…”
You forgot Indymedia. Was that intentional?