grouseman,
I see that you get your propaganda from two Ashkenazi Jews. If they wrote it, it must be true, right?
Palestinians are virtual prisoners within their own land. They do not have weapons with which to fight. Israel's slaughter of Palestinians is akin to the Nazi slaughter of the Poles.
I can not fix Stupid. Maybe Krauthammer can explain your Stupidity. I don't know that you will understand...By Charles Krauthammer 7/17/14
Israel accepts an Egyptian-proposed Gaza cease-fire; Hamas keeps firing. Hamas deliberately aims rockets at civilians; Israel painstakingly tries to avoid them, actually telephoning civilians in the area and dropping warning charges, so-called roof knocking.
�Here�s the difference between us,� explains the Israeli prime minister. �We�re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they�re using their civilians to protect their missiles.�
Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity.
Yet we routinely hear this Israel-Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent �cycle of violence.�
This is absurd. What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting?
Everyone knows Hamas set off this mini-war.
And everyone knows the proudly self-declared raison d�etre of Hamas: the eradication of Israel and its Jews.Apologists for Hamas attribute the blood lust to the Israeli occupation and blockade.
Occupation? Does no one remember anything? It was less than 10 years ago that worldwide television showed the Israeli army pulling die-hard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as Israel uprooted its settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians.
There was not a soldier, not a settler, not a single Israeli left in Gaza.
And there was no blockade. On the contrary. Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had produced fruit and flowers for export. It opened border crossings and encouraged commerce.
[...]
This is not ancient history. This was nine years ago.
And how did the Gaza Palestinians react to being granted by the Israelis what no previous ruler, neither Egyptian, nor British, nor Turkish, had ever given them � an independent territory?
First, they demolished the greenhouses.
Then they elected Hamas.
Then, instead of building a state with its attendant political and economic institutions, they spent the better part of a decade turning Gaza into a massive military base, brimming with terror weapons, to make ceaseless war on Israel.
Where are the roads and rail, the industry and infrastructure of the new Palestinian state?
Nowhere. Instead, they built mile upon mile of underground tunnels to hide their weapons and, when the going gets tough, their military commanders.
They spent millions importing and producing rockets, launchers, mortars, small arms, even drones.
They deliberately placed them in schools, hospitals, mosques and private homes to better expose their own civilians. (Just Thursday, the U.N. announced that it found 20 rockets in a Gaza school.) And from which they fire rockets at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Why? The rockets can�t even inflict serious damage, being almost uniformly intercepted by Israel�s Iron Dome anti-missile system.
Even West Bank leader Mahmoud Abbas has asked: �What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?�
It makes no sense.
Unless you understand, as Tuesday�s Post editorial explained, that the whole point is to draw Israeli counterfire.
This produces dead Palestinians for international television. Which is why Hamas perversely urges its own people not to seek safety when Israel drops leaflets warning of an imminent attack.[...]
In a world of such Kafkaesque ethical inversions, the depravity of Hamas begins to make sense.
This is a world in which the Munich massacre is a movie and the murder of Klinghoffer is an opera � both deeply sympathetic to the killers.
This is a world in which the U.N. ignores humanity�s worst war criminals while incessantly condemning Israel, a state warred upon for 66 years that nonetheless goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming the very innocents its enemies use as shields.
It�s to the Israelis� credit that amid all this madness they haven�t lost their moral scruples. Or their nerve.
Those outside the region have the minimum obligation, therefore, to expose the madness and speak the truth.
Rarely has it been so blindingly clear.
Remarks from Charles Krauthammer,
syndicated columnist, The Washington Post
To the Anti-Defamation League
On his acceptance of the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize
ADL Shana Glass National Leadership Conference
April 23, 2006, Washington, D.C.
...So now we return after this period to the normal situation of the last 2,000 years, which is widespread, virulent anti-Semitism.
Now, I think it's best to start with a definition. And Bernard Lewis, in a brilliant lecture he gave on the new anti-Semitism about a year ago, tried to distinguish anti-Semitism from the normal hatred, resentments, disdain of one people for another.
He gave a rather interesting example. He spoke of Denmark, which of course had been occupied by Germany in the Second World War, and Sweden had not behaved, at least in the eyes of the Danes, terribly well. Sweden, as you know, was neutral during the war, profited rather well from the war, so in the post-war era, the Danes had an expression: A Swede was a German in human form. And that he characterized as your normal antipathy of one people for another.
But what makes anti-Semitism different is that it is not this kind of casual, off-handed disdain of one people for another. It's an attribution to the Jewish people, uniquely, of a kind of cosmic evil. That's the phrase that Lewis used, "Cosmic evil," in which Jews are the agent of the corruption of all human activity.
And that is the kind of thing that you see in �The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,� and in a more recent version, in an article on the Lobby with the "L" capitalized, by a pair of rather distinguished professors, about the Jewish lobby in America, and how through deception, manipulation and all kinds of powers, almost supernatural, the Jews have managed to beguile and manipulate the greatest power in the history of the world into serving the interest of Jews over the interest of that great country, namely, the United States.
Or, as Alan Dershowitz put it, "attributing to the Jews the possession of occult powers and participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments."
That's the core of this kind of cosmic evil attributed to Jews by this new kind of anti-Semitism.
[�]
Why is Zionism and Israel, among all the movements of national liberation in the world, of which Zionism was one, and why is Israel, of all the states on the planet, uniquely attacked and vilified?
The amount of paper spent at the United Nations in attacking Israel from every possible perspective is simply staggering.
Is it because the Jews allegedly took land from others? Is there a nationalism on the planet that has not taken land from others? And unlike the takers of land, who established Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and countless other countries who are not attacked as racist plunderers, the Jews had an extremely powerful claim to the land that they ended up in, namely Israel -- a historical claim. Because unlike all the others, the Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, the Argentineans, they were returning to their land, a land that they had inhabited and been sovereign over for hundreds of years. And having returned, the Jews had then repeatedly offered to divide the land amicably with those who had settled there in their absence
No, it's the idea of the Jew as a historical actor, with a Jewish army, a Jewish state, an independent Jewish presence and voice, which was so offensive and which would help to revive the old anti-Semitism.
Now, it draws on the hatred of ages, but the form and the shape today is of course focused on the new center of Jewish civilization, namely, Israel, and the almost criminal impudence of this expression of Jewish autonomy.
Anti-Semitism today occupies three radiating circles. The first, of course, is in the Islamic world, where there is not even pretence in the anti-Semitic literature of a distinction between Israelis and Jews.
If you look, for example, at the Charter of Hamas, it's all about the Jews. It's all about how they've infiltrated all the institutions on the planet, including the Rotary clubs, in their attempt to take over the world. (An odd way to approach that project, by the way.) The Hamas Charter is a perfect example of a raving anti-Semitic paranoia -- reconstructing �The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.� It shows how completely this kind of Arab and Islamic extremism has absorbed the racial and religious stereotypes of Christian Europe, and in particular the Nazi stereotypes. Today, the Islamic world is the greatest producer of anti-Semitic literature on the planet.
The second circle of anti-Semitism, somewhat diminished, of course, is in Europe. In the first circle, Iran, for example, is openly dedicated to the utter destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of the Israeli people. In Europe, we're talking about a different order of magnitude, but there is, as all of you know who've worked in this area, an alarming revival of the old anti-Semitism -- the attacks in France, the recent stabbings in Russia, the desecrations of graves - you all know about that.
Which brings us to the third circle, which is the United States. What is happening here? And of course, here, the level and intensity of anti-Semitism pales in comparison. America is a remarkable island of relative tolerance in this rather dismaying sea of resurgent anti-Semitism.
[...]
However, there are disturbing signs even here in the United States. And, again, I refer to this most recent document, the Mearsheimer-Walt document which essentially is accusing the Jews of betraying their country and placing their own sectarian interest above that of the United States.
And you have to ask yourself why this comes out now. People on the extremes have long been saying this.
Indeed, David Duke endorsed the report.
But now it has the imprimatur of a couple of professors, and rather distinguished institutions, which is why it will cause a lot of damage in the future.
And the question is why it happens now. And I think that has to do with the Iraq war. When war is going on, the country is at war, especially when the war is not going well, countries look for scapegoats.
Let me read you something:�"Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government." That's Charles Lindbergh, Des Moines, Iowa, 1941, the famous speech in which he said there are only three groups trying to get America into war--the Roosevelt Administration, Great Britain and the Jews. The Lindbergh charge disappeared at Pearl Harbor. The Gulf War charge, and its attendant anti-Semitism, sustained itself until the war, at which point the great and swift success wiped it away...
Now, 50 years later almost to the year, that was repeated by Patrick Buchanan who said, the only people who want to get us into the Gulf War, was the Israeli military and their "amen corner" in America. And we know who says "amen."
And then he went on and he named four Americans -- all Jews. Henry Kissinger was one of them. I was another dragging America into war. In fact, everyone knew that the people "dragging us into war" were George Herbert Walker Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and James Baker.
Hardly enough to establish a minyan in any synagogue in the world.
And, in fact, I don't think any of them would qualify.