Offending Valerie: Dealing with Jewish Self-Absorption

[kalian]

http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02072004.html

I was kidding a couple of Muslim Palestinian-American friends the other day about being barbarians, by the lights of Israeli historian Benny Morris. This was a day or two after this paragon of dispassionate Israeli scholarship had expostulated in an interview published in Ha’aretz on the benefits (if you’re Jewish) of ethnic cleansing, the critical miscalculation of David Ben-Gurion in not having completed the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River in 1948 when he had a chance, and the barbarity of Arab and Muslim culture. “The Arab world as it is today is barbarian,” Morris declared. Islamic and Arab culture is “a world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West,” in which freedom and democracy are alien, in which there are “no moral inhibitions.” He was speaking in sweeping terms, of entire cultures, of the mass of individuals in the Arab and the Muslim worlds, not merely of governments that are oppressive or undemocratic. Palestinians in particular, Morris believes, are barbaric, “a very sick society,” and should be treated “the way we treat individuals who are serial killers. . . . Something like a cage has to be built for them.”

My friends have a good sense of humor, and so we laughed uproariously at the notion that they and every last Arab and Muslim throughout the world are barbarians. Hilarity is the way you often react when confronted with utter horror. What was so particularly horrifying about Morris’s pronouncements was their resonance, their representativeness, the banality of the evil they reflect. Meir Kahane, the assassinated Israeli-American rabbi and politician who made a career out of propounding racist views, always used to say that his anti-Arab pronouncements and policy positions were simply what other Jews thought in their hearts but did not quite dare to say out loud. Benny Morris -- who still considers himself a leftist, still favors establishment of a Palestinian state in part of Palestine, still exposes Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians in his examination of early Israeli history -- is one of those people Meir Kahane was describing, and he speaks for large numbers of his fellow Israelis and his fellow Jews throughout the world.

...more...

I'm reposting this since last time it was yanked because of
"copyright violations". This time I have only placed two paragraphs
and will refrain from making any additional comments.

[GabysPoppy]

1. This one sentence alone

"is one of those people Meir Kahane was describing, and he speaks for large numbers of his fellow Israelis and his fellow Jews throughout the world."

proves the worthlessness of the entire piece. Anyone with a smidgen of knowledge of Israel will understand my statement. Except for some wild eyed fanatics, Kahane is totally despised by Israelis and Jewish people.

[bluesoul]

2. I really do hope

he is...

[JohnLocke]

3. Some other person posted this anti-Semetic piece of garbage

It was deleted. This will as well - I'm alerting.

[undergroundrailroad]

4. Locking

Inappropriate content.


Undergroundrailroad
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