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.