I view zionism as a particularly virulent and destructive form of racism. Now, in my humble opinion, racism may be abhorent and yucky, but it should not be a crime, as long as it remains someone's opinion.
So, for example, I would not support zionists being arrested and jailed for holding what to me are repulsive zionist views.
But once those views are translated into actions that cause physical harm to others, ah...then we are talking about crimes.
The thing about crimes, is that except in racist regimes, whether a crime has been committed does not depend on the ethnicity or religion of the victim.
In Israel, of course, as in the zionist paradigm, the ethnicity and/or religion of both the victim and the perpetrator determine whether the perpetrator is a terrorist or a hero, and whether there even WAS a victim.
In the zionist paradigm, Israel must never be forced, or even pressured, to comply with international law. On the contrary: it should receive unconditional support for its atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and those who object should be bullied into silence.
One way of bullying dissidents, is to accuse them of secretly being anti-semites, without any evidence whatsoever. The charge, theoretically, should be enough to intimidate anyone into shutting up.
So, for example, if someone makes statements of fact, such as:
1) Israel is a criminal rogue state, driven by a racist ideology that justifies, even sanctifies the genocide and ethnic cleansing in which it has been engaged since its inception;
2) Israel and its zionist agents are influential war-mongers who devote massive resources to propagate lies in the pursuit of wars that have cost millions of innocent people their homes, their lives and their freedom;
3) Israel and its zionist agents openly promote a dehumanizing, false, racist image of Arabs and Muslims designed to justify, even glorify the oppression, even murder of innocent people, as long as this is perceived to be for Israel's benefit, and rather than be reviled and discredited, are rewarded and honored as "scholars", "distinguished journalists" and "Middle East experts";
4) The zionist entity is illegitimate from a legal and moral point of view, because its very existence as a Judeo-supremacist state on Arab land is incompatible with international law and recognized standards of decency;
If someone argues that this is the basis for their utter opposition to zionism as an ideology and Israel as a state, then, according to the zionist paradigm they are a "disguising" their anti-semitism as anti-zionism.
I submit that such an accusation is itself racist. It presupposes that the victims of zionism are not sufficiently human to warrant such passionate opposition to the ideology that glorifies their oppressors and killers.
It presupposes that genocide against such inferior races is simply not such a big deal. That empathy and outrage are somehow not justified when the victims are just ragheads, sand-niggers and Islamofascists.
That Israel's crimes, the shamelessness of its zionist apologists and propagandists, do not justify active opposition by people of conscience. Or even by ordinary citizens whose taxes have funded a government comprised of individuals selected for their loyalty to the zionist state, and who wake up to the fact that the never-ending "War on Terror" is a big smokescreen behind which their economy and their freedom are being gutted in the service of
Oded Yinon's blue-print.
It would make sense to equate "anti-Jewish attitudes" with "anti-Muslim attitudes", because then we are equating racist VIEWS with other racist VIEWS. As an anti-zionist, I have no quarrel with that.
What I object to, most strenuously, on the other hand, is the utterly revolting zionist 'talking point' that the FEAR of anti-Jewish crimes justifies suppressing moral opposition to the ACTUAL crimes that are the prerequisite of the continued existence of the zionist state. There is no moral equivalency between racist attitudes and the kind of atrocities that have accompanied every stage of Israel's evolution and expansion.
Finally, I would submit that, while the racists of Stormfront are preoccupied with various "sneaky" subterfuges to disguise their foul racism, their zionist counterparts are not nearly as inhibited:
Dr. Daniel Pipes, American Historian, Distinguished Professor, Founder of Campus Watch, is a former member of the board of the federally-funded U.S. Institute for Peace (along with Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense and Harriet Zimmerman, of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), frequent contributor to the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and, according to CNN, "one of the country's leading experts on the Middle East", recipient of the Guardian of Zion award. He was a strong advocate of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, He is currently an advisor to the presidential campaign of Rudolph Giuliani:
“[The] increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims…will present true dangers to American Jews.”
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion ... m=2&y=2005More from the distinguished Dr. Pipes:
For years, it has been my position that the threat of radical Islam implies an imperative to focus security measures on Muslims. If searching for rapists, one looks only at the male population. Similarly, if searching for Islamists (adherents of radical Islam), one looks at the Muslim population.
And so, I was encouraged by a just-released Cornell University opinion survey that finds nearly half the U.S. population agreeing with this proposition. Specifically, 44 percent of Americans believe that government authorities should direct special attention toward Muslims living in America, either by registering their whereabouts, profiling them, monitoring their mosques, or infiltrating their organizations.
Also encouraging, the survey finds the more people follow TV news, the more likely they are to support these common-sense steps. Those who are best informed about current issues, in other words, are also the most sensible about adopting self-evident defensive measures.
That's the good news; the bad news is the near-universal disapproval of this realism. Leftist and Islamist organizations have so successfully intimidated public opinion that polite society shies away from endorsing a focus on Muslims.
In America, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II. Although more than 60 years past, these events matter yet deeply today, permitting the victimization lobby, in compensation for the supposed horrors of internment, to condemn in advance any use of ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion in formulating domestic security policy.
Denying that the treatment of ethnic Japanese resulted from legitimate national security concerns, this lobby has established that it resulted solely from a combination of "wartime hysteria" and "racial prejudice." As radical groups like the American Civil Liberties Union wield this interpretation, in the words of Michelle Malkin, "like a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate," they pre-empt efforts to build an effective defense against today's Islamist enemy.
Fortunately, the intrepid Ms. Malkin, a columnist and specialist on immigration issues, has re-opened the internment file. Her recently published book, bearing the provocative title In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror (Regnery), starts with the unarguable premise that in time of war, "the survival of the nation comes first." From there, she draws the corollary that "Civil liberties are not sacrosanct."
...
She correctly concludes that, especially in time of war, governments should take into account nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation in their homeland security policies and engage in what she calls "threat profiling." These steps may entail bothersome or offensive measures but, she argues, they are preferable to "being incinerated at your office desk by a flaming hijacked plane."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1309583/posts
(
I strongly recommend checking out the comments in the above link as well - Alice)
Michael Ledeen, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; contributing editor at the National Review newspaper; founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which counts VP Dick Cheney as a member; and
the only full-time international affairs analyst regularly consulted by Karl Rove. According to the Washington Post, "More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric."
A sample of Dr. Ledeen's expert guidance:
Blessedly, President Bush knows by now that the Palestinian question can only be addressed effectively once the war against Saddam and his ilk has been won. And then Scowcroft says "Saddam is a problem, but he's not a problem because of terrorism."
This is the head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Commission? Doesn't he read the newspapers? He doesn't seem to realize that Saddam is actively supporting al Qaeda, and Abu Nidal, and Hezbollah.
However, nobody is perfect, and Scowcroft has managed to get one thing half right, even though he misdescribes it. He fears that if we attack Iraq "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror."
One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists.
That's our mission in the war against terror.
The most dangerous course of action is Scowcroft's: Finesse Iraq, and squander our energies fecklessly trying to broker peace between Israel and the terrorists.
http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen080602a.asp
Arnon The Arab Counter And The Animals Of Gaza
Sometimes you hear people involved in the I/P conflict complain of the other side: "They don't want peace". I think that's a silly thing to say, because everybody wants peace - who wouldn't? It's just that some people want other things a little bit more.
"Of course everyone wants peace, but every bugger wants it on his own terms", as Admiral Sir Jackie Fisher once put it.
In Israel too, everybody wants peace, but the one thing that some people want just a little more than peace is land.
Somebody else's land. Israelis already have a land, theoretically in the legal boundaries of 1947, but in terms of international consensus, actually within the expanded boundaries of 1967. But some Israelis would like to keep all, or at least the most valuable parts, of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.
None of this land belongs to Israel, the vast majority (excluding Jerusalem which was to be an international city) was assigned by the UN to Arab Palestine, and Israel's ongoing attempt to colonize it ensures there will never be self-determination for the Palestinians, acceptance of Israel within the region, or peace for either of them (or for us). In its simplest form, the impasse in Arab-Israeli relations since Camp David I comes down to this:
"The Arabs wanted their land back and then they wanted peace with Israel. The Israelis wanted peace but wanted to keep some of the Arab land." (Fisk).
This is also the key to why, after 15 years of “peace process”, there is no peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Because, in a conflict over land, Israel used the process not to get out of the occupied territory, but rather
to colonize more and more of it.
For successive Israeli governments, the peace process simply meant the establishment of a Palestinian "authority" that would stop resistance to Israeli expansion while that expansion continued, and actually accelerated. The PA would be Israel’s security sub-contractor in the Occupied Territories, as Benjamin Netanyahu put it.
Israel’s governments treated the PA with such contempt because Israel enjoys overwhelming military superiority. Judging by Ehud Olmert’s proposed “convergence” of West Bank settlers into the major settlement blocs, the incoming government too believes that this military superiority will allow it to keep control of Palestinian land and have, if not exactly peace, then at least a manageable low-intensity conflict that can be fought
mostly out of sight in the Occupied Territories. To successive Israeli governments, managing an endless, low-intensity conflict has been preferable to resolving the conflict by agreement with the Palestinians, because this would involve finally giving up the Occupied Territories.
Meet Arnon Soffer.
Professor Soffer was a
confidant of former P.M. Ariel Sharon, and is a
leading theoretician behind Israel’s policy of disengagement from the Palestinians. Indeed, his work is believed to have been a
key factor in influencing Mr Sharon to remove the vastly-outnumbered Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, because
Prof. Soffer is one of Israel’s leading demographers, and his obsession is the growth of the Arab population and the “time bomb” this represents for a Jewish state. (Hence his nickname, “Arnon the Arab Counter”).
Prof. Soffer is a strong supporter of disengagement from the Palestinians and construction of a
separation wall. Not a wall on the Green Line, where it would be a safeguard for Israel’s security within negotiated, recognised borders, but
a punitive wall that is used as a weapon to incarcerate the Palestinians in those areas where they are most concentrated, leaving the land itself free for Israeli settlement.
Prof. Soffer is not stupid, and knows there is no hope the Palestinians will accept that their fate is to be penned in enclosures while Israel annexes their land, their future capital, and their water resources. On the other hand, he also knows that as they are vastly outgunned by Israel there is not a great deal that they can do about it. One of the few things they can do from their enclosures is to lob their crappy homemade Qassam rockets in the general direction of Israel, but Prof. Soffer has an answer for that too, and we are seeing that answer in action right now in the northern Gaza Strip, where the IDF is engaged in an ongoing campaign of artillery fire against residential neighbourhoods in the area of Bayt Lahia.
Qassams are portable, low-tech weapons. Even when the IDF was on the ground in the Gaza Strip, it could not respond quickly enough to prevent their launch, and neither could the PA security forces. So Israel's policy now is to bombard the civilian population of the Gaza Strip until their suffering is so great that they will find a way to stop what Israel and the PA cannot. Shaul Mofaz or Dan Halutz cannot come out and say that they are targetting civilians – they would be setting themselves up for a War Crimes tribunal – instead the IDF announces that it will fire shells 100 metres from civilian areas (knowing full well that shrapnel from even the most perfectly-aimed shell has a range of 100 metres from point of impact, and that they are therefore firing on civilians .
As a mere theoretician behind the policy, Amnon Soffer can be much more open than the Chief of Staff or the Minister of Defence about the fact that bombing civilians is simply something you have to do in order to terrorize the Palestinians into accepting your unilaterally imposed borders:
First of all, the fence is not built like the Berlin Wall. It's a fence that we will be guarding on either side. Instead of entering Gaza, the way we did last week, we will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won't allow their husbands to shoot Kassams, because they will know what's waiting for them.
Second of all, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger [b]animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive,
we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day (Source)
This is why it is a lie when the Israelis call the dead civilians of Bayt Lahia “collateral damage”.
Given a choice between negotiating an end to the Occupation or trying to hold on to the choicest Palestinian land by force, Israel has chosen unilateral annexation, in the full knowledge that this will involve inflicting harm on civilians in order to force the Palestinians to accept what they would never freely assent to. This is not “accidental” or “collateral”, it is simply what you are reduced to when you are running out of ways to hold on to land that isn't yours, and mistakenly believe that your military strength will save you from having to negotiate.
So, to sum up, this is Professor Arnon Soffer, Professor of Geography at the University of Haifa, who believes that firing shells at women and children is an acceptable method of enforcing Israel's unilateral annexation of occupied Palestinian land:
And these are the "animals" of the Gaza Strip, who have to be indiscriminately bombed and terrorized so that people like Prof. Soffer can hold on by force to what is not theirs, and continue to evade a negotiated peace:
A Palestinian baby wounded by an Israeli tank shell in Beit Lahiya lies in a hospital bed Tuesday, April 4, 2006. Israeli tanks fired shells at the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday, directly hitting one house and killing a Palestinian and wounding seven others, including a mother and her baby, Palestinian security and rescue workers said . (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra).
A wounded Palestinian baby is brought to a hospital after an Israeli artillery shell hit her house in the northern Gaza strip April 10, 2006. (REUTERS/Mohammed Salem).
A seriously wounded child is rushed into the hospital after a house was hit by Israeli shelling in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya Monday, April 10, 2006. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa).
A seriously wounded child is treated in hospital after a house was hit by Israeli shelling in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya Monday, April 10, 2006. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa).
The body of Palestinian girl Hadil Ghraben, 8, is taken off a stretcher at the hospital after her family house was hit by Israeli shelling in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya Monday, April 10, 2006. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa).
The wounded Palestinian mother and siblings of four-year-old Hadeel Ghabeen mourn during her funeral April 11, 2006 after an Israeli artillery shell hit their house in the northern Gaza strip. (REUTERS/Mohammed Salem).
Palestinian mourners carry the body of eight-year-old Hadil Ghaber during her funeral in Beit Lahia. (AFP/Mohammed Abed).
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news ... arabs.html
