How did Western leftists wind up in bed with Arab dictators?

Yesterday's Washington Post editorial "Managing the Blockade" recommended some sensible, politically centrist reforms of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

It garnered the usual raft of responses: Israeliphiles denouncing it for not supporting anything Israel's government chooses to do 100%; Israeliphobes denouncing it for not calling Israel the reincarnation of the Third Reich (the accompanying image conveys their attitude, not mine); Tea Party types denouncing Obama; and a few who, like me, endorsed the editorial.

Here's my comment:

Pretty ironic to see all these American leftists shilling for Islamist dictatorships--especially considering what thsoe dictatorships would do to these leftists if they moved to, say, Gaza and denounced the local government as freely as they speak here.

--while if they did likewise in Israel, nothing would happen to them.

I'm not saying this as a way of defending anything Israel does. In particular I regard the attack on the USS Liberty as a war crime, whose perpetrators we should be trying to extradite today.

And the WaPo recommendations made here seem eminently sensible to me--while I'm sure Israel's ruling party would object strenuously.

That said, no patriotic American will forget the Palestinian response to 9/11. These are not our friends. Israel is the closest thing to a friendly state that we've got there. Why should we help countries that loathe us against one that like us?

Especially when the arguments in favor of doing so describe Israel in a manner most Americans would find both ridiculous and despicable.

The blacks of Darfur would think they'd died and gone to heaven if they could be treated like the Israelis do the Gazans and West Bankers. Ditto the ethnic minorities of Burma. And the Tibetans, whom the Han Chinese are slowly erasing.

I could go on. The point is that there are dozens of situations around the world where governments treat their minorities or occupy-ees vastly worse than the Israelis treat the Palestinians.

But I never read dozens of frenzied denunciations of Burma, Sudan, China, and others. Not to mention how the dictators of Iran, Egypt etc. treat their majorities, much less their minorities.

So--why does Israel, a minor player in the mistreatment-of-peoples roster, get the star treatment?

I have never heard a Western leftist explain that satisfactorily.

Feel free to try. Absent that, it just looks like y'all act one way when a Jew does X than when a Muslim does X.

There's a name for that, isn't there?

BTW, note to leftists: when you equate Israel with Nazi Germany--as you do constantly--you're just pleasuring yourselves, because that's when everyone who doesn't already agree with you stops listening to you.

Though to be fair most Americans react the same way to the Tea Party wing nuts who fill newspaper comment threads with frenzied denunciations of Obama and the the Democratic Congress, regardless of the topic of article they're supposedly commenting on.

Just goes to show--wingnuts of the left and right are identical on the process level: Manichean* worldview, inability to communicate with anyone outside their tribe.

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* Named after a 3rd century Persian sect preaching black & white religious dualism--i.e. there's only good and evil--nothing in between.

I know, I could have just said "black & white worldview."

But it's such a cool word...

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And speaking of cool words, guess where "Palestine" comes from?

The name dates from before the 5th century BC, and means "Land of the Philistines." The Philistines were neither Jews nor Arabs, as it happens. A variety of peoples lived there. The Arabs conquered the land by force of arms in 638AD, becoming an occupier with the Jews and Christians and others there living as subject peoples under a different set of laws than the Arabs.

Of ferry ships and evil Israeli acts, oh my

I was just reading the lengthy comment thread for a NYTimes account of the Israeli boarding of a Turkish ferry ship and the ensuing hoo-rah. It included hundreds of fiery blanket denunciations of Israel. I said this:

For the sake of argument, assume that the most foaming-at-the-mouth accusations of the Israeli attack on the relief ship are true.

How does that compare to the routine, daily mass murders and rapes by the thousands going on in the eastern Congo and northern Uganda and all over the west and south of Sudan?

Or the war of oppression being carried out by the Burmese junta against its own citizens daily--especially against a number of ethnic minorities?

Or the mass murders by Iran's theocratic dictatorship against its own citizens who dared protest the recent rigged election?

Or China's progressive ethnicide being carried out against the Tibetan people as well as against China's non-Han Muslim minority in western China (the Uighurs)?

How about the ethnic cleansing of Christians from Iraq who have been there close to several thousand years, including murdering most of the men, with the tacit approval of Iraq's Islamist government?

These ongoing state-sponsored atrocities, taking place around the world, utterly dwarf what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians, even if you take the Hamas version of reality at face value. Yet none of these things inspire the outpouring of passionate denunciation that the letters in this comment thread exemplify.

Why?

How did Israel come to be treated by so many Americans and Europeans as the Worst Country on Earth? The responses I've read here are wildly, extravagantly disproportionate to the crimes alleged to have occurred, compared to what else is going on around the globe.

I'm not trying to exculpate Israel. I assume that most of the commentors on this thread were on board the Turkish ferry and personally witnessed what took place there--otherwise their total certainly about the events means they believe Hamas and its allies always tell the exact truth, and Israel and its allies always lie.

But since I wasn't on board and I'm not clairvoyant, it's going to take time for me to figure out what happened, so I'm at a disadvantage arguing the facts on the ship.

So since these other people had to have been on the ship to achieve such certainly, I'd like to know how they evaded Israeli custody. If not, then they are jumping to conclusions, which betrays an irrational hatred of Israel--regardless of what actually happened.

And if that's so, I'd love to have someone honestly tell me why they hate Israel so much--given that by any objective measure of state-sponsored oppression and murder, they're the smallest of small potatoes...especially compared to the Islamic dictatorships around them (has anyone looked at what Hamas did to all the Fatah supporters it could find when it took over Gaza, BTW?).

I don't want America to be Israel's sock puppet. I didn't like Bush II's automatic support for anything Israel did. But I don't want to be the Arab League's sock puppet either.

And if you think you know exactly what happened on that ship at this point, and that it means Israel=evil; Islamists=good...that's what you are.

Israel butchers of Gaza--or vice-versa?

Comment posted to an Economist opinion piece on the war in the Gaza Strip. (The photo shows a map from a Palestinian textbook that omits Israel):

The Arab world reject's Israel's claims to its territory, based on prior claims of Palestinian Arabs to the territory Israel occupies.

But here's something not mentioned so far, I'll wager: the Kurds' ancient lands are claimed by the Arabs of Syria and Iraq and the Persians of Iran and the Turks of Turkey. In these Muslim countries the Arabs and Persians and Turks often treat the Kurds vastly worse than the Israelis have ever treated Arab Israelis or Palestinians in the occupied territories. It was Arabs who used nerve gas on Kurdish villages, remember.

So--when these countries volunteer to give the Kurds' lands back to them and thus grant Kurdistan "countryhood" I'll take their assertions about Palestine more seriously. Then there's the "right of return." It's a historical fact that when Israel declared its independence, all the Arab countries--every single one of them--expelled their Jews, many of whom had been living there for over a millenium. And took their lands and homes and businesses without compensation.

So--when the Arab world grants a "right of return" to all the Jews they'd expelled--and their descendents--and gives them back the lands, homes, businesses and money they stole from the Jews in their countries--then I'll take their chatter about a "right of return" seriously. As for the present situation: it's a big lose-lose for Israel.

Hamas has stated unambiguously that its goal is the conquest of all the land Israel occupies and the explusion or murder of every Israeli. I'm guessing this includes the Israeli Arabs, who Hamas' principles would require treating as collaborators. So how can Israel deal with Hamas?

To put it simply, Hamas has declared, in effect, total war on not just Israel but on every human being living in Israel.

What would you do if a hostile foreign state was regularly lobbing missles and mortar rounds into your community, not to mention suicide-murderers? What would you say if others said, well, they're not that many and they're not that accurate? (Actually they're exactly accurate, since they're intended to kill civilians and terrorize the civilian population.)

How many rounds would be lobbed into your community before you demanded that your government put a stop to it, by whatever means necessary? And what if your enemy used its own civilians as human shields? Would you then tell them they're welcome to kill you and your family rather than have your army hurt their civilians being used as human shields?

I pity your family if you do.

All this said, it's obvious that the Israelis have been conducting a stealth campaign to take and occupy a good deal of territory beyond what they had before the 1967 war. I don't have a dog in this fight. There are no angels here. The territory being fought over is miniscule by American geographical standards (I'm writing from Palo Alto, California).

Oh, and while Gazans voted in Hamas, that doesn't mean they're all fanatics. Fatah was and is monstrously corrupt, so the Palestinians faced a Hobson's choice. Plus they only get one-sided news, and moderates tend to be murdered as collaborators. So their consent to Hamas' rule was not informed consent in the Western sense.

I'm guessing that President Obama will try to broker a painful compromise that will involve Israel leaving territory it would really like to hang onto (though not everything it has occupied outside the 1967 borders) while demanding that the Palestinians formally recognize Israel and forswear violence--something along those lines.

But Hamas is fanatical. Regardless of Palestinians' material grievances, Hamas' theological position is absolute: that Allah demands that they always fight to expel every Israeli from "Arab lands." Period. You can't compromise with that. It just means that any truce = time to regroup/rearm.

So if I were running Israel I just might choose to take the P.R. hit and keep on grinding down Hamas.