"A Fresh Perspective"

[AdamH]

I received the following rant from a pro-Israel relative. It is credited to Dennis Miller but it's not his work (See:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/overview.asp

A brief overview of the situation is always valuable, so as a service to all Americans who still don't get it, I now offer you the story of the Middle East in just a few paragraphs, which is all you Really need.

Here we go:

The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in the 1967 war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians."

As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation."

So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our defeats until someone points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are: "Other Arabs Who Can't Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death."

I know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then: "Adjacent Jew-Haters." Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing: No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years a go at Camp David. But if you have your own country, you have to have traffic lights and garbage trucks and Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you actually have to figure out some way to make a living.

That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region want: Israel. They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course --that's where the real fun is -- but mostly they want Israel.

Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel - or "The Zionist Entity" as their textbooks call it -- for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers of Arab countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth, you know that's really saying something.

It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mid east. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.

Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five Million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that ifIsrael gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals..

Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.

My friend, Kevin Rooney, made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not.

Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab State into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children?

Disgusting.

No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.

Mr. Bush, God bless him, is walking a tightrope. I understand that with vital operations in Iraq and others, it's in our interest, as Americans, to try to stabilize our Arab allies as much as possible, and, after all, that can't be much harder than stabilizing a roomful of super models who've just had their drugs taken away.

However, in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing moral weight. We've already lost some. After September 11th our president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them. Beautiful. Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of anOklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint.

If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Well, that's about the most disturbing thing I've read all day .

Talk about painting entire swaths of people with the same shitbrush - what does this guy hope to achieve with this kind of vitriol? This strikes me as classic American anti-intellectual schmaltz that discourages readers from taking on an attitude of curiosity and predisposes them to condemn things as different because they've been told they're different and not worth learning about. I mean, wtf else is this line about?

It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about the great history and culture of the Muslim Mid east. Unless I'm missing something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and, by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.

Pathetic.

[TheGoodRev]

This diatribe is actually part of a column by humorist Larry Miller which appeared in the Daily Standard on 22 April 2002. It is a reaction piece to a 10 April 2002 FOX News Network interview conducted by Greta van Susteren with Ishmael Abu-Shanab, spokesman for the Hamas political wing in the Gaza strip, and American attorney Stanley Cohen, who has represented the head of Hamas.

I agree that his off-handed comments are inappropriate, DEM, but otherwise he makes some convincing points. Particularly this last part:

Chew this around and spit it out: Five hundred million Arabs; five Million Jews. Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that ifIsrael gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals..

Really? Wow, what neat news. Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive every Jew into the sea? Oh, that? We were just kidding.

My friend, Kevin Rooney, made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse the numbers. Imagine five hundred million Jews and five million Arabs. I was stunned at the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not.

Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to drive a tiny Arab State into the sea? Nonsense. Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible. Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread with the blood of children?

Disgusting.

No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews would ever do to people is debate them to death.

...

After September 11th our president told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the countries that supported them. Beautiful. Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the equivalent of anOklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do the same thing we did, and we tell them to show restraint.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Rev, I see where he's coming from in terms of trying to strike up analogies and discrepancies; these are important to think about. What I have a problem with is that in all my travels (and interactions here at home), I just didn't meet that many Muslims that had it out for Jews. Sure, they exist; enough murder is committed for that to be obvious. What I mean is that the nutcases haven't, in my experience, been representative, except inasmuch as their being loud noises makes them look that way. Psycho-talk is telegenic. How else does a goof like Pat Robertson get so much coverage?

I think it's a truism that most people you meet are moderates, whatever their background. People typically want less hassle in their lives, and went to get on well with their neighbours. Then professional agitators - and I think Miller passed that line with this piece - come in, stir the pot, and try to unmoderate people. Their hyperbole then gets read as fact, and people gloss over their own foibles so they can frame their enemies as essentially evil (and themselves as essentially good). You meet Hindus who would wish a holocaust on all Muslims without batting an eye. Do they represent the average Hindu? I imagine people in the region think of Jews through the historical filter of the Irgun days, when yes, there were Jews acting like no-holds-barred terrorists. Should that then be normative? Of course not. Why then do we allow the mentally unbalanced to be talked about as representative of all Muslims?

This thing about identity, especially religious identity, is profoundly fucked up, and profoundly fucks people up. If anyone thinks they can put their finger on the Infinite (with the implication that others who aren't identical with them are hopelessly alienated from it), then they are in fact deranged, imo.

The real pity is that this thing was written back in 2002 when things were completely off the rails for the US, and yet it's still making the rounds.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Anyway, maybe this is all so much ado about nothing .

Jerusalem: There Is No Such City!

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Something always gets lost in translation, but usually not an entire city.

"Jerusalem. There is no such city!" the Jerusalem municipality said in the English-language version of a sightseeing brochure it had published originally in Hebrew.

The correct translation: "Jerusalem. There is no city like it!"

Carrying a photograph of the brochure,

Israel's Maariv newspaper said on Wednesday tens of thousands of flyers had been distributed before city hall realised its mistake.

[phishtaper]

Larry Miller is a humourist who writes for the Daily Standard / Weekly Standard. The original article first appeared in 2002 and was in response to something he saw on CNN. He is best known as a character actor and anyone with a television will surely recognize him, having appeared on Seinfeld, and dozens of other shows.

Yes, what he writes is very distasteful, but he has also declared war on cell phone users, turkeys and golf.

[TheGoodRev]

I take your point, Dave; I find it particularly deplorable that Miller paints entire swaths of people with the same shitbrush, to use your humourous Lahey-ism. Per capita, I suspect there are almost certainly the same number of wildly fanatic Jews as there are fanatic Arabs, and I would never want to be painted with that brush myself (as a Jewish person). The fact is, though, that the Jewish population is so low to begin with that the fanaticism is hardly effective. True, they cause damage, and it is often as unfortunate as damage caused by suicide bombings.

Brushing aside the author's unfortunate anti-Arab comments (I suspect were the situation reversed and the comments directed at Jews, we would have heard about this piece the day after it was published), I think he makes a valid point here, pointing out an event that has reverberated ever since its occurance:

Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own country. Oops, just one more thing: No, they don't. They could've had their own country any time in the last thirty years, especially two years a go at Camp David.

No matter how the average Arab feels about Jews, whether living in the Middle East or North America, the leadership of Israel's neighbouring countries has repeatedly shown disdain for Israel's very existence in one way or another.

kookycanooky forwarded this video to me this week. The narration was written by Rabbi Meir Kahane, so right away you should understand where this guy is coming from. He founded the Jewish Defense League and the Israeli political party Kach, which was removed from Knesset for its extreme right-wing views (which is saying something).

Kahane's ideology has been called Kahanism. Kahane adhered to the belief that Jewish law contains directions for how to run a Jewish state, and that these directions are directly applicable at the present day. He believed that a Jewish Democracy with non-Jewish citizens is contradictory because the non-Jewish citizens may someday become the majority and vote to make the state non-Jewish. He, among others (such as author Joan Peters), believed that a Palestinian people do not exist, regarding Palestinians as disparate and unrelated Arab clans with no distinct ethnic identity. Kahane claimed that no description of Palestinian Arabs as a distinct nationality can be found in any pre-20th century text and he frequently challenged his detractors to prove otherwise. He also claimed that historically, there are no examples of Arab Muslims living peacefully with other ethnic groups. Thus, Kahane proposed the forcible deportation of all Arabs from all lands controlled by the Israeli government. In his view, evicting most Palestinian Arab Muslims (even Israeli Arabs), was the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

So this is a guy who was something of a fanatic in his own right. He was assasinated in New York City in 1990.

With that Kahane introduction out of the way for the sake of transparency, I still think this little video is worth watching. Granted, it's also somewhat riddled with Jewish guilt ("Look at all the bad stuff that has happened to us throughout the years" sort of sentiment) and a little bitter at times, but the point made at the end is essentially that there is nobody who will protect Israel except Israel itself, and so it will continue to do so as it sees fit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN_LxmkTSX4

[TheGoodRev]

Same video as linked above:

[TheGoodRev]

Hey, it just occured to me; do we still have a politics forum?

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Quite agreed - Israel absolutely needs to looks to its defence needs in an environment that is almost consistently toxic for it. I don't think anyone would argue against that (or if they did I wouldn't want to be talking to them). Even when there is entente, as the Egyptian government managed to find, there are still people off their kilter (e.g. within the Muslim Brotherhood) who will kill that same government for having done so (just as Gandhi had been killed by a fellow Hindu for daring to accommodate Muslims, or Yitzhak Rabin killed by a Jew for the same reason).

The fact is, though, that the Jewish population is so low to begin with that the fanaticism is hardly effective.

That is debatable. There are as many Sikhs as Jews in the world, and look what a ruckus they stirred up in India.

What makes any fanaticism effective is the terror it stirs up in its wake. There's another reason the phrase "war on terror" makes absolutely no sense. Everybody's got fanatics among them doing horrible things to other people.

We better find something to say here about music, or this thread's going to get knocked over to that nether region of the Politics Forum .

What would Roger Waters say about all this, then?

[d_rawk]

I stopped reading at "Dennis Miller". I will sleep better for it.