Champion of displacement

Nobody is going to be surprised that today’s article in The New York Times, “A Champion for the Displaced in Israel”, is not about hundreds of thousands of Jews who were “displaced” (expelled and murdered) by Arab pogrom mobs throughout the Middle East, ethnically cleansing it of the ancient population that preceded Arab invaders by many centuries. These Jews and their descendants constitute half of the Israeli Jewish population, and have never been compensated for their losses. No, in the inverted world of the Times, the “displaced” in Israel are Arabs, the descendants of those invaders. It is unclear what exactly makes them to qualify for that status: the only people mentioned there who are displaced and whose homes are demolished are the Jews, Israelis, the Natives of the Land of Israel, who are given the preposterous misnomer of “settlers”. And the “champion” of those Arabs, whose only geopolitical dream is to displace the Jews from any piece of land, is a Jewish lawyer, Michael Sfard.

Usually, when a person raised in the Jewish culture (or a culture based on the Jewish values) takes an enemy’s side, it requires inversion of values and shedding of morality. When a lawyer in a democracy defends a murderer, he does not need to be on the murderer’s side to perform his duties. The murderer represents only himself even if he is a gang member. It is different when a lawyer takes upon himself the defense of a group against another group and does that consistently, especially when the group – in its overwhelming majority – is an enemy of the group to which the lawyer himself belongs. And not just any enemy. With some enemies, compromise can be and has been reached, but the Palestinian Arabs have given no sign of that possibility. They are self-proclaimed enemies of Israel. Their goal, at best, is Israel’s eradication, and at worst, the world-wide genocide of the Jews. It is symbolic that the name for the country they want to replace Israel is “Palestine”, the very same name that was invented by Hadrian the Roman emperor to eradicate the notion of Judea and the Jews from the same land. His wish has in part been fulfilled already, as the historic name of Judea has been virtually replaced by the nonsensical “West Bank”, an invention of Jordan that illegally occupied the land until 1967. Whereas the occupation ended, and the Jordanian annexation of the land had never been recognized by the world (with the notable exceptions of the UK and Pakistan), the name has stuck to the degree that somebody’s use of the original and true names, Judea and Samaria, is now viewed as a tell-tale sign of “right-wing” extremism. According to the article, those are just the “Biblical names” – and who cares about the Bible in our enlightened times. Obviously, since “right” is associated with fascism, it is easy to make the next step and accuse the Jews of nazism, a calumny that is so popular nowadays among antisemites in general and in the Muslim world in particular.

Sfard pathetically juxtaposes himself with the Soviet dissidents, expressing his satisfaction that he does his subversive work unmolested in a democracy. Soviet dissidents, which now have to defend the right of the Jews to live on the Land of Israel against him, have risked their lives for the Jews to be able to live in Eretz Israel, while he abuses Israel's legal system to ethnically cleanse it of the Jews. He is not "an enemy of the right" – he is an enemy of those who stand for what is right. He is the enemy's collaborationist. Along with other deluded or immoral people whom he defends, like the draft dodgers in Israel, he is adored by the likes of the NY Times and BBC, well known for their anti-Israel bias, and despised by the Israelis. Don’t expect this “defender of human rights” to defend the rights of the “settlers” – in his book, they are not listed as humans. Morally displaced, he is indeed a champion – of the displacement of Jews. No wonder that he has Gandhi's portrait on the wall - the "likeness" of a man who advised the Jews to comply with Hitler's plans.

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April 2013. - A follow-up to this entry, in response to Sfard's talk at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is at "Antisemitism By Other Means: Lecturing Against The Jewish State", and, a shorter version, in The Jewish Chronicle, "Michael Sfard: 'I Don't Care About History'".

Genocidal redefinitions

To be able to murder, to kill not in defense but on purpose, the murderer redefines his victim from a fellow creature into an alien, who  either threatens, or a tool providing sadistic pleasure denoting total power, or both. Nazis redefined the Jews into aliens, adding  biological subhumanity to the usual Christian depiction of the Jews as accursed for deicide and thus inherently and hereditarily evil. Even a small part of the Jewish "blood" was an intolerable threat to them. A Jewish child was a mortal danger to the mighty German nation. Genocidal Islam similarly redefines the Jews on  both biological and spiritual levels into descendants of pigs and monkeys, into which Allah turned Jews as their punishment. To reconcile with continuous Jewish existence, Allah has scripturally promised the Muslims that they would eventually murder every single Jew before ushering in the end of days. As genocide has become a desired goal, Muslims have redefined for themselves the notion of the martyr from one who is murdered for his religion to one who murders because of it. The loss of the terrorist's own life in the process is incidental, because it is redefined into life eternal, as long as the earthly life was lost while murdering Jews. Allah, "most compassionate, most merciful", has taken upon himself the personal torture of "unbelievers", giving a whole new meaning to compassion. Muslims have also redefined the notion of the "prophet". Muhammad, "the Seal of the Prophets", has prophecized nothing but murder, conquest, subjugation, and rape, which he himself indulged in. Islam means "submission", and not merely as the literal translation of the word. It means the strict hierarchy of both physical and spiritual submissions: the man to Allah (read, to whoever wields power under this name), the woman to the man (who is legally worth twice the woman), the Jew (or any "infidel") to any Muslim. Any violation of this hierarchy is punishable - often by death: conversion from Islam, woman's disobedience, Jewish independence.  

The Muslim murderers act from the pragmatic, rather than lofty spiritual, viewpoint, targeting civilians - children, women, the elderly - rather than soldiers. They know that these random murders produce a greater demoralizing impact than a death of a soldier, horrible as it is. A soldier's work is to risk his life, and he dies fighting even if it was in his sleep. Children and women, civilians, are not expected to live their life at the same kind of risk. They are not fighting. Children are supposed to be pampered, not tortured to death. Their parents and relatives are supposed to see them grow, not bury and grieve forever. This is exactly why the murderers choose to kill civilians, transforming everyday life into the expectation of death, thinking they will crash the people's spirit because everybody will be touched by death. The murderers cannot appreciate that they deal with the Jewish spirit, indomitable, inoculated by the millennia of murder and torture by the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, English, Spanish, French, Germans, Poles, Russians, Ukranians, Latvians, Lithuanians - the list can go on. Israelis rank 7th on Gallup's "happiness index" (life as a whole), just below the Netherlands (was above in 2011) and the happy Scandinavians, and higher than the UK, Germany and France. Even in Sderot, under almost ten years of incessant rocket bombardment,  only about a third of the population suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, a number comparable with that in trained combat troops - except that for the children of Sderot there is no "post" in "post-traumatic". The stress has never stopped. 

In all these innumerable slaughters, from a single person to the millions of the Shoah, the reasons have been the same: irrational hatred toward the Jews, to the very name of the Jews regardless of how different it is in different languages, and the permissibility of murdering a Jew, whatever ideology is applied - Christian, Nazi or Muslim. A Jewish baby, impaled on a Cossack's spear or a Nazi's bayonet or having his throat slashed by a Muslim, can be nothing to the murderer but a representation of the name, with all the hate that was connected to the sound and letters of this name by the murderers' parents, teachers, friends, imams and priests. The Poles who tortured to death, beheaded, dismembered, raped, and burned alive hundreds of their Jewish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne, 71 years ago this week, were led only by the name, made hateful to them by the myth of deicide justifying an utter removal of civilizational boundaries on behavior, even those that command humane slaughter of animals. They were driven by the same genocidal hate as their compatriots in many other towns and in Kielce, already after the war, when Nazis could no longer be claimed as the real enforcers of the genocide for their voluntary helpers to hide behind. Whether at the blood libel's pretext, as in Kielce, or at the Nazis' welcome permission, it was the common folk that committed those atrocities. 

Poles would never call their neighbors "Poles of Mosaic persuasion", nor would the Russians call the Jews "Russians". In fact, the Russian language distinguishes between the ethnic Russians and those whose citizenship is Russian. The former are called by the noun "Russkiy" (sing. masculine; "Russkaya", sing. fem.; "Russkiye", plural), which is also the adjective that means belonging to the Russian nation, the meaning of "nationality" in Russia. Those who are citizens of Russia but do not belong to the Russian nation are called semi-informally "Rossiyanin", i.e., only belonging to (but not "in") Rossiya-Russia rather than being of Russia like the language, which is "Russkiy". The Jews would always be alien in Russia or elsewhere in East Europe, under the fickle protection of the state, which, along with the church, would keep the hate fire going.  The East Europeans' condoning and participating in the genocide is not canceled by some Poles' and Russians' having risked their lives to save Jews, and by the fact that millions of ethnic Poles and Russians themselves were murdered by the Germans. Bulgaria, a country relatively recently liberated from Islamic yoke, was the only exception during WW2 where the church authority intervened on Jewish behalf. But we Jews coming from East Europe are now called "Poles" and "Russians" by the naive Americans and Israelis, who have a very vague notion of ethnicity.

Islam, in its foundational scripture, openly justifies the same treatment of the Jews as that allotted to them by the Nazi Germans and their many European helpers. The editor of Der Stuermer was the only non-governmental Nazi hanged in Nuremberg, executed for his speech. If not for his inhuman efforts, there would perhaps be fewer "willing executioners" (by Goldhagen's term), although it's just as likely that somebody else would have happily and as efficiently replaced him. The multitude of the Muslim Streichers, however, - from Muhammad the "prophet" himself to today's imams - are not only unpunished, but threaten the rest of the world with punishment, this time by nuclear fire. The Iranian mullahs, who head the whole branch of Islam, Shi'a, have promised to exterminate Israel - before they get to defeat the Great Satan, the US. The leaders of Sunni Islam, the other main branch of the "religion of peace", have many times called for the bloody "liberation of Palestine", celebrating terror, and blessing and glorifying the murderers. Nevertheless, nobody prosecutes their ongoing crimes against humanity, the very same for which Streicher was executed by the Allies. On the contrary, it is Israelis who are being demonized by the "world community" when they try to defend themselves - even when the defense is as passive as a fence separating the murderers from their desired prey. The same world community -  a generation back - not only cared nothing about the Jews murdered wholesale, but participated in that murder - by commission or omission. There are still old murderers that survive - but the slaughter of Jews has had no break. It seems nothing can invoke the world's outrage when Jews are slaughtered - not pregnant Tali Hatuel and her four lttle daughters killed point-blank by head shots. Not two-month old Shalhevet Pass, killed by an Arab sniper's shot in the head. Not the Fogel family, with three children aged from three months to 11 years and both parents, butchered by Arabs in their beds. No number of Jewish deaths can overcome the world's serenity - until this calm is broken into a million of screaming media pieces when the Jews attempt to hold the murderers at arm's length of checkpoints, delaying their reaching their final destinations. Unfortunately, those among whom the murderers live are also slowed down when they want to cross to the territory of Israel they hate so much but keep coming to.

The Fogel family slaughter was not viewed as worth mentioning by the leading news agencies like BBC. The priority was too low. Iran's promise to exterminate Israel is not viewed as a violation of the UN charter incompatible with membership. It's considered innocuous rhetoric, unworthy mentioning in negotiations. Jews building a house on their ancestral land, which nobody but them can legitimately claim, are called "settlers", like the British who came to colonize America. In fact, in contrast to those British, whom nobody has since been expecting to leave, the Jewish "settlers", the Natives of the land, are expected to give up their houses and orchards they grew on that land the first time in millennia - give it all up to the descendants of Arab conquerors whose names indicate their origins from Egypt, Syria, or other places subjugated by those invaders.  The Jews are not to get anything in return - except, perhaps, for another fake promise of "peace", that is of the end of terror murders that otherwise are viewed as legitimate by the world. "Palestine" is redefined from the Roman name invented to replace Judea - into the name of a future Arab state, with Arabs automatically attaining a new avatar - from the land they stole from Jews and Christians to the name they usurped. The whole world supports creation of the 23rd Arab state, despite terror that Arabs conduct under the pretense of desperately needing that state, all offers for which they have rejected. One wonders how many states would support the single Jewish state in 1948 if any Jews, for the sake of their national idea, blew themselves up in a British market and shot British children.   

No human treatment norm has been viewed by the Christian and Muslim world as fully applicable to the Jews - that is by the Christians who only recently have started changing their perception of the Jews as devil's inhuman kindred, and by the Muslims who do not consider even their own women human. Unless this changes, until civilized humanity rectifies and consistently applies its terms and definitions, our species' definition as human is false. We have a long way to go before "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" (Leviticus 19:18), as the Torah commands to humans.

9-11: Tears, no fury...

On the first anniversary of 9-11, I wrote, "On this day, a year after the fanatic Muslim—predominantly Saudi—attack on the American soil, it seems that the affect expressed by the administration as well as the American media has largely been that of teary frustration and pain, not unlike the 'why me?' feelings experienced and expressed by anybody in grief. There has been little anger, let alone fury, in words or facial expressions of the nation’s leadership; instead, there is a lot of solemnity, quivering lips, and—especially initially—calls for reconciliation with Islam that was translated by the President as 'peace' instead of 'submission'. The mighty thunder of the only great power left on Earth, which all terrorists in the world—from Arafat who donated his poisonous blood to injured Americans, to Saudi financiers of terror—braced themselves for, has never come. The mosques, planted in the US and everywhere in the world by the Saudis to teach hatred in preparation for the whole world to become Dar-ul-Islam, the 'abode of Islam', are still churning out brain-washed fanatics ready to die while killing unnumbered 'kaffirs' regardless of their age and sex. Arafat has just recently become undesired in the administration’s eyes, but still remains the 'leader of the Palestinian people' instead of being recategorized into the oldest living terror chieftain. The 'Palestinian' state is still discussed as a desirable goal, while the majority of its potential citizens support continued murder of innocent Israelis. The administration is still trying to convince Arabs that they should support an attack against Iraq, while even its European continental allies, faithful to their familiar tactic of appeasing the murderer, deny their support. And American airlines, ready to risk passengers’ lives in fear of offending “Middle Eastern” guests, waste the effort of their security personnel, incompetent as it is, on checking the underwear of grandmothers in wheelchairs for explosive nail clippers they could hide there.”


What has changed since? Arafat's poisonous blood has eventually killed him. The portrait of that brigand now decorates the office of his comrade-in-arms, Abbas, who is going to ask the UN for recognizing "Palestine" - a nonexistent state with an imaginary president: Abbas's "term", for what it's worth, ended in January 2009. Another US president has just declared now, "I’ve made it clear that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam." Never mind that this statement is irrelevant grandiloquence or worse - a chronic delusion: if militant Islam is at war with the United States as it is, so is the United States with Islam, however unwillingly. It would indeed make sense to say, "We do not want to be at war...", but it would make no difference. 


Yes, it is difficult to identify the enemy: the wars have been between nation-states for a long time. Those wars are "normal", I guess. It seems insane and abnormally regressive to speak in terms of religious wars. In fact, however, there is no need for it, nor would it be correct. This is not a religious war not only because the United States does not represent a religion in conflict with another. It is not religious because there is nothing in Islam relevant to a religion that concerns the non-Muslim world. Does it really matter to anybody but devout Muslims that they believe in having a deity by the name of Allah, who used to have three daughters  - until, that is, that information in the Koran was abrogated in the Koran? What is of concern to the non-Muslim world is Islam as a political ideology: the Koranic claim on the entire Earth and humanity, to be brought into submission to Islam. By force and terror or by dawa, Islamic indoctrination. 


There is nothing truly unfamiliar in this sort of war that is neither religious nor against a nation-state. The Western world has never come into a direct conflict with Soviet Communism - only with its numerous and weakly connected proxies who would kick their Soviet advisers out as soon as they were sure of attaining necessary power. Nonetheless, if it were a direct conflict, it would be an ideological one. The war with Nazism was an ideological war: even though the Germans were a "master race", that notion included, in their eyes, at least the Nordic nations. Also, their allies - Nordic or not - would benefit from Nazi victories. The Nazis were not worried much about the Semitic origins of the Arabs, or the Slavic origins of their SS divisions "Galizien" and "Handschar", organized from Orthodox Ukranians, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks - the latter with the able help of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, Arafat's relative. What mattered to Germans was those troops' zeal in exterminating the Jews, the Gypsies, and the enemies of Nazism. It's easy to forget that it was indeed Nazism and fascism that the world fought against in that war - because it is so much easier to identify the noun, Germany, and forget the adjective, Nazi, or just mean it as synonymous with Germans at the time but not now. Obviously, what's changed is not the nation - inasmuch as nations have continuity. It is the ideology that has dramatically changed. Even though we may conveniently think that it was Germany that was defeated, it was, in fact, Nazism, which had taken possession of the minds of Germans, like Islam has taken possession of the minds of Arabs and many others.


It is the we-are-not-at-war-with-Islam-religion-of-peace attitude of a teary Bush that first portended today's situation, when, after Taliban has been defeated, it is still on the verge of return, when Saddam's Iraq has become Iran's Iraq with a Koran-based constitution, when "friendly" dictators are being replaced with Muslim Brotherhood, and Turkey of Ataturk has become Turkey of a new Islamic sultan, Erdogan. It is a bit like leaving Mein Kampf as the foundation of social thought in Germany after Nazi defeat. The same intentional blindness is expressed in Obama's nonsense that "Those who attacked us on 9/11 wanted to drive a wedge between the United States and the world." What about those who attacked England on 7/7 and Spain on 3/11?  Are they also about "wedges"? Or are all these terror attacks by Muslims different, as the world perceives terror against Israel? With Israel, it's always Israel's fault - it's all "occupation", even though it's the same terror that tortured Israel before 1967 and any "occupation". What is so hard for the West to understand in that it's not because of "occupation", land, or any particular grievances? It would be good if it was: if we were the reason, we could and should be able remove it. No, we are not, and we can't. It is because Islam has finally gained sufficient strength to resume violent jihad bequeathed to Muslims by Muhammad, or Allah if you will: "Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war" (Koran 9:5). Not enough strength to wage a war using armies and battles, but enough to blow up trains and restaurants, demolish buildings symbolic of non-Muslim might with thousands of the infidels inside, and shoot point-blank and cut throats of Jewish babies. It is cynical if not downright dishonest of the US president to claim that "people across the Middle East and North Africa are showing that the surest path to justice and dignity is the moral force of nonviolence". Those unnamed "people", aka Arabs, have shown nothing of the kind: ask Israeli diplomats who have just fled from Cairo, or Lara Logan, raped in the Tahrir square, a symbol of Egyptian newly acquired "freedom".  It is still tears for those who perished on 9/11 - not fury at those who murdered them - that dominate the 9/11 affect. America's post-9/11 wars, delimited by time and not by victories, are indeed not with Islam. That's why they will not prevent terror, a stratagem in the war Islam wages on humanity.

Deir Yassin and Other Morbid Arabian Nights

In our time, when remembering any history beyond the historic 2008 elections is not in vogue, many events may appear as new. Although the Arab world and the rest of progressive humanity are acutely aware of Israel's iniquities (hardly a day passes without them), they may still be surprised by another one because they have forgotten how it all started. One of the first events that formed that opinion of Israel was the 1948 "massacre" in Deir Yassin, an Arab village near Jerusalem.

This is a reminder of how anti-Israel Arab propaganda is made:


Then there was the Mohammed Al Dura blood libel (read here). Then Saeb Erekat's "Jenin massacre" (read here).  Now it's the "flotilla" with the innocent blood of peaceful humanitarians (calling for Jews to go to Auschwitz). Times change, but the Big Lie methodology does not. After all, the favorite leader of Pal Arabs is Amin al Husayni, Hitler's pal (here is some more, to place the "Palestinian struggle" into perspective).

Look who is talking

Imagine how American colonists would react if, after they fought Indians, built towns, cultivated lands and raised families, they were told to leave and go where their government would direct them, on the conditions dictated by the government, or be removed by force and punished. Let's assume for a second that the rationale they were given would be that the Indians needed their own state where no whites would be allowed. Keep in mind that the lands the American colonists settled were indeed Indian, with hardly any justification for any settlement there bar the dubious argument of "Manifest Destiny", whereas no renaming can erase the Jewish character of the Holy Land.

The only reason it is considered holy is because it has been holy for the countless generations of Jews. The Arabs in the Land of Israel are recent settlers and descendants of invaders, who never thought about creating their own state there before the Jewish state was reestablished. For that matter, Arabs' nationalism, which has resulted in their having a unique number of 22 states, had never existed before Britain and other colonial powers induced it in order to divide (the Ottoman Empire) and conquer.

The Arab "Palestinian nation" is also unique in that it is the only one in the world that has no self-name and calls itself by the name of a territory, which itself was invented by the Romans in 2nd century CE to replace and erase the name Judea. "Palaestina" was derived by them from the Hebrew name of a tribe of ancient enemies of Jews. The origin is the same as for the word Philistine, meaning, of course, a boorish, barbarian and antagonistic person. Moreover, in the geographic sense, until creation of Israel and even into 1960's, the name "Palestinian" denoted Jews who lived in the Land of Israel as opposed to the Diaspora. The desire of the Arab world to create a 23d state, as Judenrein as is Jordan, and governed by life-long terrorist chieftains and enemies of Israel and the rest of the free world, is understandable, but does not deserve respect. Since 1948, their goal has been not to create a state, but eliminate Israel. There is no reason to think it has changed.