An analysis of anti-Israeli thought
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.
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