Ever Since I posted a link to a Stanford lecture by Alan Dirshowitz, some of my readers have been giving me a, shall I say, hard time about it. In response, these same reader(s) have posted articles critical of Israel. I had the opportunity to read one of the posted articles, and I think that, given the circumstances, that a reasoned discussion of that article would be helpful.
First, let me be clear that this is not a post in support of Israel as a state or in support of the Zionist movement. Instead, this post is an exercise in the use of logical; a foray into the fundamentals of proper debate. In short, I want to examine the statements and position of Mr. Amayrea’s article from a critical standpoint. Let me begin by quoting a rather long passage in a piece by Mr. Amayrea:
Last week, Israel marked the “Holocaust Day” in West Jerusalem amid the usual fanfare of sanctimonious rituals, never-again speeches and glorification of Zionism… The solemn but also highly propagandistic occasion is manipulated to the fullest by Zionist leaders in order to justify the crime against humanity, otherwise known as “the state of Israel.” – This year, too, Zionist leaders preyed on the memories of holocaust victims by seeking to blackmail the collective conscience of the world into recognizing the “uniqueness of Jewish pain” — as if non-Jews were children of a lesser God and their pain was unimportant.
Thus we had the political and ideological gurus of Zionism, from the morbidly sanctimonious Elie Wiesel to the pathologically duplicitous Ehud Olmert berate the world for the “reincarnation of anti-Semitism,” a deliberately twisted reference to legitimate criticisms of nefarious treatment of Palestinians, including the adoption of such policies as apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the use of brutal tactics for the purpose of forcing the victims of Zionism to leave their ancestral homeland.
First, let us ask on the basis of language alone, whether this author has even the slightest hope of an objective argument. The employment of words such as “sanctimonious”, “propagandistic”, “manipul[ation]“, “preyed”, “blackmail”, “morbid[ly]“, “twisted reference”, all expose the author’s insatiable distain of everything Jewish. In every sentence, Mr. Amayrea liberally interjects emotionally-charged, subjective terms into every description of anything Israeli–and in doing so sacrifices the strength of whatever argument he was about to make.
Let us now examine whatever loose claims the author makes, in order. First, the author attacks the Zionist leaders as trying to “blackmail” the “collective conscience of the world” in order to prey on holocaust victims. Are we to make any sense of this? How on earth will doing anything to the world’s conscience have any affect on the minds of holocaust victims whatsoever? Perhaps if the propaganda was directed at the survivors themselves there might be some impact, but this is not what he is alleging. The language certainly sounds intelligent, but it certainly does not logically follow that any of his claims must be the case.
The next issue he addresses (in passing) is the “right” of Zionism’s victims to to remain in their ancestral homeland. He alleges that Israel’s “brutal tactics” force these people to leave their homeland (an allegation I find questionable given statistical evidence). It is easy to speak of rights… but if I can ask a question, where do these rights originate from? When can they be claimed? Who can enforce these rights? It seems that when one talks of rights, one must point to evidence that such a right actually exists. Should the Indians be able to enforce this right against the U.S. government? What about the millions of Europeans displaced by both world wars; should they also be able to claim this right? Furthermore, what is considered an “ancestral homeland”… a 10 mile radius from the spot of your birth? 50 miles? 100 miles? It seems very peculiar that such a right must be within the very small land mass that is the Israeli state.
He continues:
Nobody does or should question the enormity of the holocaust. Doing so, besides being morally unconscionable, serves the interests of Zionism, which has morphed the Holocaust Industry into a virtual religion that encompasses even Judaism itself.
If this statement communicates anything, it is a complete ignorance of the incredible history of the Jewish people and their faith. We are lead to believe that within the past 50 years, a modern movement called Zionism has encompassed an ancient religion at least 3,000 years old. This seems incredibly doubtful.
What are we to make of his second claim? Should we not question the enormity, or is it an accepted fact that it was ‘enormous’? It is quite unclear what the author is trying to communicate here. Are Zionists claiming it was even more enormous then it actually was? If so, how is this a problem if nobody is questioning it’s enormity? And regardless, does it matter how enormous it was? Is there some greater force to the claim that 12, 15 million were killed then the generally accepted 10 million? Are we also to believe then that the practice of statistical inflation is itself a morally reprehensible act? Is there any other way of reading such a poorly-constructed thought? I fail to see any logical weight to the paragraph. Perhaps he can pull himself back together:
However, manipulating the holocaust to justify the treatment Israel has been meting out to millions of helpless Palestinians is no less obscene and no less outrageous than the utilization by the Third Reich of the outcome of the First World War to wage war on Europe and cause the death of tens of millions of people.
All humanity had suffered through history, recent, past and distant. Nobody, not even Jews, could claim that the suffering of one group is more special and more unique than the suffering of others.
Russia, for example, lost tens of millions to the Nazis in the course of the Second World War. The same thing applies to other European peoples, who too, suffered immensely. The Gypsies were also incinerated and gassed in great numbers in Hitler’s liquidation chambers, but we see no holocaust memorials perpetuating the memory of these hapless and unwept victims as if they were lesser and insignificant human beings.
I must be failing to grasp his point here (if there is one to be found). Is not the suffering of each people group unique? The Russians died in defense of their state and homeland; they suffered at the hands of their enemies — for the protection of their families and homeland. Jews, on the other hand, died at the hands of their state, because of their race/ethnicity. The rather banal premise here–that people died in each case–is the only commonality I can see.
As our collective morality evolves, we find certain crimes to be more reprehensible then others–this is why we rank manslaughter lower on the criminal scale then murder in the first degree. In each case, people die; but because of the mens rea (or the intent) element, we view each death through a different moral lense. The same theory applies in the international realm. We find the horrors of ethnic cleansing more reprehensible then inter-state warefare. People die in both cases, but we view the circumstances through different moral lenses. Mr. Amayrea is simply mistaken about his point.
Furthermore, he mistakenly assumes that we see no memorials for other victims of the war. Last I checked, we have many war memorials in Washington D.C. We also have a memorial on the beaches of Normandy, and in Hawaii, and in about every state in the country that lost men in World War 2 (we also celebrate Memorial Day).
This leads me to ask the question, what is wrong with unequal ‘memorialization’ of victims? Is he suggesting we mandate equal memorialization–even if the number of victims is greatly disproportional? Once again, Mr. Amayrea is making no sense.
He continues (and I have edited slightly for space purposes…):
Of course, nobody objects to Jews commemorating the holocaust and reminding humanity of its evils. I, too, would join conscientious Jews in remembering the victims of Nazism.
Except, you just were doing this very thing in the preceding paragraph.
The world, including Jews, doesn’t have to choose between “remembering” or “forgetting” the holocaust or any other enormous crime against humanity. Instead, the choice should be between learning the “right” or “wrong” lessons…
In the name of the holocaust and the “never-again mantra,” Israel wants the world to allow it to commit every conceivable crime and every abominable violation of human rights in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, from murdering school children on their way to school “for security reasons” to shooting pregnant women on their way to hospital (also for security reasons) to dumping tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians into modern-day concentration camps deep in the Negev desert.
Indeed, in the name of the holocaust, Israel has been hounding, brutalizing and tormenting four million impoverished Palestinians, barring them from accessing food and work, and utterly ravaging their lives and livelihood as well destroying their streets, colleges, bridges, and power stations. And, as if these obscenities were not enough, the Israeli state has augmented its oppression with an Satanic wall that is effectively reducing the bulk of Palestinian population centers into updated versions of the Ghetto Warsaw…
One ominous portent is the fact that a majority of Israeli Jewish citizens, who are bombarded 24 hours per day by virulent anti-Arab propaganda, readily support the deportation of non-Jewish citizens who make up nearly a quarter of Israel’s population.
Last year, Israel dropped as many as 3.000.000 cluster bomb-lets throughout Lebanon as, we were told, a ” defensive action” against Hizbullah. The three million bombs, for those who still don’t know, are sufficient to kill three million children. In other words, they could cause a holocaust, or at least half a holocaust by Jewish calculations.
Unfortunately, this outrage drew only sporadic, shy or half-hearted criticism from European leaders who never stop lecturing the Third world, especially the Muslim world, about human rights and terror.
But, did I read him right? “every conceivable crime and every abominable violation of human rights”?! How, may I ask, are we to take any of this seriously? Whatever it’s faults, no rational person can conclude that the State of Israel is guilty of every conceivable crime.
And to further his completely irrational mantra, he points out that the 3 million cluster bombs are capable of killing 3 million children. Notice his emotionally-charged use of the word “children”. Not ‘people’, ‘adults’, ‘civilians’, but a word designed to evoke emotional rage… “children”. Oh, and don’t forget that Israel did not actually killed even .1% of that number… the important statistic is the maximum number of `children` the bombs could have killed in a lab environment. If this is what Mr. Amayrea considers to be a relevant statistic, then we can forget about having a rational discussion. It is becoming increasingly clear that he is unequivably against Israel not because of their actual crimes… but because of the crimes Israel has the potential of committing.
I have spent over 2 hours on this post trying to be a reasonable person looking at the article objectively. Those of you who THINK… that this is valid criticism of Israel are utterly mistaken. This is nothing more than emotionally-charged rhetoric masquerading as reasoned discussion. I highly suggest that those of you profess to be rational thinkers who think that this article offers any relevance to the ongoing debate immediately reassess these views. Whatever value his article has as a piece of rhetoric, it possesses no value as a piece of objective analysis.
Here’s Luke’s (a.k.a. lukasrowe.blogspot.com) thoughts…
I read that essay on Priscilla’s blog…all I can say is “wow”. If there was ever a greater lack of objectivity I have yet to see it.
When an author talks the “crime against humanity…otherwise known as the state of Israel” you know you’re in for some really objective stuff. This is evidenced by sanctimonious allowances to the holocaust that “no one does or should” challenge. I guess the author has never heard the words Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran or the read the official textbooks in Egyptian and Saudi schools. The author goes on to say that the treatment of Palestinians is no less awful than the treatment of the Jews by the Third Reich. Really? Do the Israelis round up Palestinians, pack them into train cars, burn them alive or gas them to death? No, of course they don’t. No, the Israelis are decried because they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. On the one hand, Palestinians demand that the Zionists get off their land. Then, when the Jews leave, the Palestinians get all ticked off that the Israelis put up borders crossing to prevent the Palestinians from entering Israel. They even have the nerve to get mad at the Israelis for not sending them free aid in the form of medicine, fuel and food.
So, not only is Israel supposed to leave the Palestinians alone, but they’re also supposed to support the Palestinians into perpetuity.
The author goes on in his ridiculous, fact-less rant to say that Israel’s mere possession of bombs which can “kill three million children” is equivalent to the atrocities of the holocaust. “Absurd” and “imaginative” are the only words I can think of to describe his essay because it is certainly not factual.
Joel,
You have got to be kidding me, your whole response was off on so many different levels…instead of splitting hairs you need to look at the substance of what he is saying….more later!!! Gah!!!!!!!!!
Um… I just spent 2 hours looking at his substance–at the specific language he uses, on the specific claims and the rampant subjectivity this article is riddled with. Whatever my article’s faults… it certainly is NOT a failure to look at the substantive portions of the article.
But go ahead… tell me about all the “levels” I am off on. I’ll listen.
What “substance” am I supposed to see in that article? If anything, the “substance” would be that a Palestinian is really mad at Israel and that it is not necessarily based on fact, but on emotional hype and sensational rhetoric.
Americans like to think that people start off neutral and must be shaped by experience in order to come to conclusions such as the author of that article. But that is not true in many cases, especially as it relates to Jews and Israel. I have known many Palestinians, Iraqis, Pakistanis and Egyptians in my day. Not a single one of them could have a conversation with me that required factual support. In other words, they would make outrageous allegations (like the Jews orchestrated 9-11 to frame the Saudis), but fail to provide a single fact in support. Many of these individuals were otherwise reasonable folks who you wouldn’t consider “religious fanatics”. The reason for this basic disdain for Israel and Jews is that most Arabs (middle eastern arabs anyway) are taught from childhood that Israel is an “illegal” state, that its government “kills children and women”, and that they want to “kill all Arabs and Muslims.” I put these phrases in quotations because I have actually heard them.
Here are some facts that most Arabs don’t know:
- Most “Palestinians” before 1940 actually considered themselves Syrians.
- Israel, as it is now formed, was virtually uninhabited as late as the 1920′s because it was either to arid or too swampy. Thousands died yearly from malaria, cholera and related diseases.
- Most of the Arabs living in Israel prior to the 1920′s were Bedouins, nomadic herders. They had no “land” that was their own as we understand property rights.
- The Chief Mufti, in the 1940s allied with Hitler. It was a stated goal that the Mufti would begin spreading anti-semitic propaganda among the Arabs so that when Germany took over Europe, it could extend its influence to the Middle East with greater ease. In other words, the hatred for Jews and Israel today stems from anti-semitic schemes laid in the 1940s.
There are plenty of resources to learn the actual history of what is now called, “Israel”. I suggest people start taking a look at the facts rather than the propaganda.
http://lucasrowe.blogspot.com
Luke-I already told you what I think of your views over on your blog, though you deleted my comments.
Joel-I am presently gathering all of my WELL RESEARCHED FACTS and will shortly post them ALL here in your comments section and over on my blog. As soon as the brief is done I shall show you the error of your propaganda filled ways. I can hardly wait baby!!!
Well… I guess it was too much to hope for to discuss the allegations and claims made by both Mr. Derhowitz and Mr. Amayrea… which is typical of you, Priscilla.
Whenever you don’t want to discuss the substance (or can’t argue against it) you conveniently change the subject. I suppose I’ll have to respond to a bunch of new allegations now… which seems to be my lot in life… never do I get a single concession that MAYBE Dirshowitz had some good points or MAYBE Amayrea was a little off base… no… You wouldn’t dare afford me that pleasure.
Furthermore… judging by your description of your upcoming post, I am rather certain it will prove only that you are just as close-minded in your opinions as you accuse my good friend, Mr. Rowe of being (pot calling the kettle black, don’t you think). At least I got a list of things Israel should fix listening to Mr. Dirshowitz. Mr. Amayrea didn’t dare raise any criticism of the Palestinian people in his article.
I must share with you a little secret: I pay attention to people who provide a balanced picture… If you want my attention, I suggest you heed this advice.
“Well… I guess it was too much to hope for to discuss the allegations and claims made by both Mr. Derhowitz and Mr. Amayrea… which is typical of you, Priscilla.”
No sir, you are not asking too much, we can discuss that at great length young man:) I’m reading all of the pertinent materials during secured transactions when I should be listening to Campbell drone.
As far as Dirshowitz is concerned I still have to finish listening to his speech and I need to finish his book “The Case for Isreal”…before I feel like I can have a non shallow argument with you about this topic. I’m going to be honest though, so far with the things I have been reading my picture of the Israeli government remains highly disfavorable!!
I’m going to a lecture in Ann Arbor at U of M–The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy with Prof. John Mearsheimer and Prof Stephen Wait-I’m reading their book right now and doing an outline as well as checking their citations and sources for veracity. I have lots of questions for them, hopefully I’ll get to ask a few.
When I am finished with my THOROUGH research surely I will be able to win your much sought after attention and perhaps even afford you many pleasures, lol. Until then-the appellate brief…
Oh yeah, and…
I didn’t call your buddy Luke “close-minded”. It was much worse than that.
Joel, check this out….I didn’t know anything about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict a few months ago, lately I feel like all I do is spend my free time reading about it!!
In the introduction to The Case for Israel, Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School asserts that his account is supported by “facts and figures, some of which will surprise those who get their information from biased sources” (p. 2). Yet, the evidence Dershowitz adduces will surprise no one familiar with the most notorious source of historical bias on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever published in the English language. The charts below document Dershowitz’s wholesale lifting of source material from Joan Peters’s monumental hoax, From Time Immemorial. Dershowitz not only copies Peters shamelessly, but knowingly does so from a book serious scholars have uniformly condemned. (For details on the Peters hoax, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, and Yehoshua Porath, “Mrs. Peters’s Palestine,” The New York Review of Books, 16 January 1986.) He is effectively no different from a professor lifting sources wholesale from a leading Holocaust revisionist in a book on the Holocaust. On a note both humorous and pathetic, Peters, in From Time Immemorial and claiming to be inspired by George Orwell, coins the term “turnspeak” to signal the inversion of reality (pp. 173, 402). Dershowitz, apparently confounded by his massive borrowings from Peters, credits the term “turnspeak” to Orwell [1], accusing critics of Israel of “deliberately using George Orwell’s ‘turnspeak’” (p. 57) and “Orwellian turnspeak” (p. 153). Is this scandalous scholarship, or is it plagiarism, or is it both?
Norman G. Finkelstein
1. Changed from “turnspeak” to “newspeak” on Amazon Online Reader* in 2007 because the Online Reader displays only the later paperback edition; see original hardcover 2003 edition & debate.
* Amazon has since corrected this and added the original hard cover edition back to Online Reader with ‘George Orwell’s “turnspeak”‘ and ‘Orwellian turnspeak’ alongside the revised paperback edition (October 2007).
The Link: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1
interesting… (reading)
whatever value Finkelstein’s arguments have (and they may carry some force)… there is enough criticism of him out there to keep me from simply taking his word on the facts…
http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/?p=696
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/01/07/africa/ME-GEN-Lebanon-US-Professor.php
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/06/reviews/000806.06bartovt.html?_r=2&oref=slogin
I think that he should be read with a certain degree of caution… as we should with all interested parties (including Dirshowitz).
Actually this is where I have begun to get frustrated with the “authorities” on both sides of the issue….they spend a lot of time discrediting each other and it’s going to take monumental effort on my part to sift through everything, it’s worse than the appellate brief….
i just discovered that these two (Dershowitz and Finkelstein) hate each other…
sheesh… you just figured this out! OMG… I thought for sure you were just intentionally trying to push my buttons there for a while…
In the Dirshowitz/Finkelstein case… your are right; they are both trying to discredit each other. I personally would tend to think a harvard law professor has a bit more credibility then Finkelstein… but that’s just me. I had not read any of Finkelstein before you posted… so at least I am getting a well-rounded perspective.
LOL! I was trying to push your buttons but just in the general way that I push buttons….
Just because someone is a Harvard Law Professor doesn’t make him more credible than anyone else, what makes him credible (or doesn’t) is non biased scholarship on this topic, of which I have been able to find NONE.
I would think that someone (Finkelstein) who’s parents both survived the Nazi concentration camps (while his entire remaining family on both sides were exterminated) might have a little more invested in the issues surrounding Israel, Zionism, the Holocaust, Palestine and Judaism.
Check out Finkelsteins website, it’s very informative.
true… true… (on the topic of credibility)…
BUT!!! Dershowitz didn’t write “the case for israel” as a work of ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP… he wrote it as an intentionally biased piece (he says so right in the podcast if you’ll listen). Finkelstein tries to pass off his bias AS SCHOLARSHIP…. any analysis by Dershowitz on Finkelstein’s tenure applications makes this pretty clear.
It is merely Dershowitz BIASED OPINION that Finkelstein’s studies are biased.
This is silly, if you know Dershowitz Case for Israel is blatantly biased, why are you championing it? Makes no sense.
Do you know anything about research methods? Do you have any sources that aren’t biased? Do you have a cross section of authorities that are informing your opinion or do you just nod your head when anyone with money, power and a title starts talking?
why would Finkelstein have any more INVESTED if both of his parents lived… how is that at all relevant? My grandfather survived conscription in the German army… many of his brothers did not… that doesn’t mean I have any more or less invested in world war 2 than anybody else…
I’m NOT championing Dirshowitz book… Why are you championing Finkelstein’s?
All we have so far is loose accusations of Dershowitz lifting sources (which is how everybody writes research books, right? Finding a good case in a law review article… and then citing directly to the case??? I fail to see what is so horrible about this) … and VERY little about what the sources actually say that is wrong. I’m holding off judgment until then.
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=8&x_nameinnews=169&x_article=985
Just as inaccurate as the Holocaust Industry is Finkelstein’s book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Dedicated to the proposition that Israel and Zionism are illegitimate, the book relies largely on anti-Israeli secondary sources and virtually ignores contrary evidence.
For example, Finkelstein’s chapter “Born of War, Not by Design,” about the 1948 Palestinian refugees, relies almost exclusively on Benny Morris’s book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which has been seriously challenged by mainstream historians for selectively using Israeli archival material. Finkelstein relies on information found in The Birth, but often distorts already questionable material. For example, Morris claims in one of his endnotes that Ben-Gurion said:
[a return] is out of the question until we sit together beside a [peace conference] table…and they will respect us to the degree that we respect them and I doubt whether they deserve respect as we do. Because, nonetheless, we did not flee en masse. [And] so far no Arab Einstein has arisen and [they] have not created what we have built in this country and [they] have not fought as we are fighting…We are dealing with a collective murderer.
Rather than checking the original source, Finkelstein distorts the secondary source. In order to demonstrate Ben-Gurion’s “extreme” “racis[ism],” he shortens Morris’s citation to read, “Arabs were not entitled to the same respect accorded to Jews because ‘so far no Arab Einstein has arisen…We are dealing with a collective murderer.’ ”
——————————————————-
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dershowitz-Finkelstein_affair]
James O. Freedman, the former president of Dartmouth, University of Iowa, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has defended Dershowitz: “I do not understand [Finkelstein’s] charge of plagiarism against Alan Dershowitz. There is no claim that Dershowitz used the words of others without attribution. When he uses the words of others, he quotes them properly and generally cites them to the original sources.” He noted that this practice is recommended by the authoritative Chicago Manual of Style, (rule 17.274), and “is simply not plagiarism, under any reasonable definition of that word.”
let’s get off this “finkelstein/Dershowitz” debate and just start talking about the issues.
I dont know why i thought Rossol was a french name?
I would’ve thought you would jump at the opportunity given that your footing was as tenuous as I had shown it to be…
Oh… I’m still waiting for these many “pleasures” you promised a few posts back.
I don’t know what that first remark meant at all…and you haven’t shown me anything least of all tenuous footwear. Nice try though, it always amuses me to see you tooting your own horn…lol.
I am now ready to argue about the issues pertaining to Israel and Palestine, what is the first topic? I’m ready to give you the spanking that you so dearly need…