The goal of this blog is to help you hold your own in political discussions--especially when the other guy's fighting dirty. Some dirty tricks are obvious, others are subtle. But even when they're blatant it can be hard to know what to say. I'll help. I lean Democrat myself, but I'm as against Democrats using underhanded tactics as I am against Republicans doing so. Fair is fair, and this blog aims to help anyone who shares this belief.
Thomas Friedman recently visited Turkey, and came away dismayed as the Islamist direction it's taking, writing about it in a NYT column.My comment:
Adding to the general grief are the facts that most Western leftists (in America and Europe) vehemently agree with Erdogan--and that Israel seems to be stumped by the Palestinians' demographic time bomb (also by the intransigence of Israel's own religious fanatics).
I bet you'll be able to gauge the path Turkey takes by the percentage of women who "take the veil" or worse. That's what happened in Egypt. And Afghanistan (well, in Kabul, which was quite western up until the Soviet departure). And Iraq (before we "liberated" it, ironically).
The first ones to pop up are a brave religious statement by conservative women. But after the tipping point, those who don't put one on get more and more pressure, regardless of their own convictions, and finally it becomes physically dangerous (i.e. you're risking your life) to not wear one in public--as is the case in Iraq today, for example.
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.
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.
The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer wrote an op-ed piece justifying the Israeli's raid on the blockade-buster flotilla headed towards Gaza from Turkish-occupied Cyprus (a bit of unintentional irony there, to be sure).
This is true--in exactly the same way that Southern Whites and Blacks “lived together peacefully” from 1865 through the 1970s.
You see, the Islamic world classifies Christians and Jews as “dhimmis,” with a long list of laws and customs regulating their existence in Muslim lands. These laws are pretty much the same as the South’s Jim Crow laws were: dhimmis were accepted unless they got “uppity.” Though lynchings and pogroms occurred fairly frequently, for roughly the same range of reasons that they occurred fairly regularly in the South.
This is hard for Americans to understand because it’s so different from traditional American stereotypes about Jews—and from the way the European Jews who settled in what is now Israel felt.
Imagine the reaction a group of sophisticated, educated, armed American Blacks from Harlem in the 1950s would get if they moved to, say, Huntsville Alabama in that era. Imagine the sort of culture clash you’d get.
This is exactly the situation from the Arabs’ point of view. These uppity SERVANTS dare to march around on our land with their noses in the air, acting as if they’re as good as us—even better than us. Insufferable!
On the other hand, the European Jews mostly didn’t know about their dhimmi status, and just saw a bunch of illiterate camel jockeys—i.e., people fit at best to be servants—acting all uppity towards them. I'm not justifying their attitude, just trying to put myself in their shoes. (Not to mention the fact that Hitler killed all the gentle, sensitive Jews he could get his hands on. Guess what kind of person survives concentration camps? The tough one.)
So for each side, each was each other’s uppity servant class acting above their station.
How’s that for a forumula for mutual misunderstanding and hostility?
Augmenting this mutual hostility was the appearance of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands, ethnically cleaned from Morocco to Iraq in response to Israel’s declaration of independence. They arrived stripped of their lands and goods, often with horror stories of themselves and neighbors abused or even murdered—and the Israelis’ attitudes congealed. These people and their descendants account for around 40% of Israelis.
As did the other side, when the Arabs who left their lands—or were run off them—arrived in the refugee camps with their own stories.
The difference being that the Arabs who now represent one out of five Israelis chose to stay and were allowed to, while almost none of the Arab countries’ Jews were given that choice, whether they wanted to stay or not. Arab apologists claim that all 750,000 or so Jews left their ancestral homes in Arab countries voluntarily. I find that improbable in the extreme.
None of this justifies either sides’ deeds or misdeeds. But it does help explain the intransigence of both sides, and both sides’ absolute belief in their historical grievance-narrative.
And if Americans want to help the goal of peace in the Middle East, the worst thing they can do is swallow either side’s “we’re 100% right—they’re 100% wrong” narrative. Yet over 80% of the comments here do just that.
It doesn’t help the Israelis to write op-ed pieces like this that justify anything and everything Israelis do. Nobody’s perfect. But in my book it’s even worse to adopt the Arab grievance narrative, because it has American leftists acting like Southern Whites from the 1950s—even though they think they’re being the exact opposite.
