A narrative of hatred and death

Posted on September 13, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

The greatest enemy of the Jewish state is neither Iran nor Hamas. Israel can defend herself against the concrete threats they pose.

Our greatest enemy is that which turns the rest of the world against us, that which justifies European boycotts and American demands for concessions to the PLO, that which provides a fig leaf for every kind of Jew hatred, both that of the Right and that of the Left.

Of course I am talking about the so-called ‘Palestinian narrative’, that version of history that removes all moral justification for the existence of our state, and is responsible for recent attempts to re-interpret international law in order to limit our right to the land of Israel.

This narrative is an internally consistent conceptual scheme. There are grains of truth in it, points of contact with reality that make it plausible. But overall it is false, in many ways a complete inversion of historical fact.

The Palestinian Narrative

According to it, ‘Palestinians’ are a unique people indigenous to the land of Israel, having lived there for hundreds of years (some versions even claim that they are descended from various groups mentioned in the Bible). Zionist Jews, fleeing persecution in Europe, colonized the land and dispossessed the Palestinians by force. Like European colonialists in Africa, Jews relate to Palestinians in an oppressive and racist way.

Unlike Palestinians, the narrative doesn’t recognize Jews as a unique people, or as having any connection with the land. Jews are just Poles or Germans who profess the Jewish religion. Mizrachi Jews are called ‘Arab Jews’. Some versions argue that the Jews of today are descended from Khazars, a Turkic people living in what is now southeastern Russia from the 7th to 10th century. Others even deny the existence of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem or claim that archeological evidence of a Jewish presence in biblical Israel is faked.

The narrative implies that the establishment of Israel as the Jewish homeland was an illegitimate act of colonialism, which voids the legal foundations of the state and justifies the violent ‘resistance’ against it by ‘Palestinians’.

Europeans are especially influenced by this narrative because of guilt over their own history of colonialism and racism.

But the main points of it are false. The facts are these:

There is a Jewish people and it is indigenous to the land of Israel

If there is any group that can properly be called a ‘people’, it is the Jewish people. Genetic studies have shown that both Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews have close links to the Middle East, links which are not shared by other Europeans (the Khazar theory is just nonsense). In addition, Jews meet all requirements for a people: a unique language, literature and religion; common cultural traditions (including a taboo on intermarriage – and even eating – with non-Jews); and, importantly, a consistent self-identification as members of a people.

There have always been Jews living in the land of Israel

This group has a historical lineage that can be traced back to the time of King David or before, a connection that has been maintained despite countless expulsions, persecutions, conquests and pogroms. Jews have lived in the land of Israel for thousands, not hundreds, of years, although the size of the population has fluctuated. This can be established beyond reasonable doubt by archaeology.

Arabs are newcomers

Muslim Arabs first came to the land as invaders in 629 CE (one could call them ‘colonialists’). Since then, the Arab population fluctuated widely, with the number of Arabs reaching a low point around 1830. Richard Mather writes,

Clearly it would be futile to argue that there were few Arabs living in Palestine in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, but the figures do show that the Arab population of Palestine had been in state of flux for centuries and that the overwhelming majority were migrants from the rest of the Arab world and/or the Ottoman empire. This is important because it tells us that the postmodern notion of a deep-rooted Palestinian Arab history/culture is bogus. All the evidence points to the conspicuous absence of Arab culture in late 17th century Palestine; and even in the 18th and 19th centuries the Arab inhabitants of Palestine were not indigenous but were latecomers. This explains why, historically, Arabs never talked about Palestinian identity – because there wasn’t one. They were Egyptian, Syrian, Moroccan, Iraqi and Ottoman Arabs, and many of them expressed allegiance to the concept of a Greater Syria. In fact, until the 1960s the Arabs refused to call themselves Palestinians because it was a name reserved for the Jews! It seems hilarious now, but Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century German philosopher, referred to Jews in Europe as “Palestinians living among us.”

The Arab population increased rapidly after about 1830, for various reasons. After the beginning of Zionist immigration in the late 1880s, the economic development created by the Zionists was a not-inconsiderable drawing card. Mather continues,

Firstly, several thousand peasant farmers had come to Palestine in the first half of the 19th century to escape Egypt’s military draft, forced labour and taxes. Secondly, the Ottoman authorities transferred a great many people from Morocco, Algeria and Egypt to Palestine in the early part of the 20th century, partly in an effort to outflank Jewish immigration. Thirdly, the Zionist project was very attractive to Arabs who were drawn to Palestine by the good wages, healthcare and sanitation offered by the Jews. Indeed, the Muslim infant mortality rate in Palestine fell from 201 per 1,000 in 1925 to 94 per 1,000 in 1945. Meanwhile, life expectancy rose from 37 to 49 years.

Furthermore, the Arab population of Palestine increased the most in cities where there were large numbers of Jews, which is a strong indication that Arabs were drawn to Palestine because of the Zionists. Between 1922 and 1947, the Arab population grew by 290 per cent in Haifa, 158 per cent in Jaffa and 131 per cent in Jerusalem. Tellingly, the growth in Arab-majority towns was far less dramatic: 37 per cent in Bethlehem, 42 per cent in Nablus and 78 per cent in Jenin.

The ‘Palestinian people’ are a recent invention

Arab Palestinian nationalism started to develop in the early part of the 20th century, but Arabs didn’t even refer to themselves as ‘Palestinians’ until the 1960s. If there is a ‘Palestinian people’ – and I would say that there is today – it came into being only very recently, as a direct result of the struggle against the Jewish state and even as a deliberate attempt to advance that struggle.

But what are the essential elements of ‘Palestinian’ culture, as opposed to the broader regional Arab culture? Only the ‘struggle’. Nothing else. Its heroes are the ones who have killed the most Jews. Its literature and educational and cultural institutions are focused on the Cause. This has produced a remarkably unbalanced culture that has been called a ‘death cult’.

Far more Jews were dispossessed by force than Arabs

During the 1948 war, about 650,000 Arabs (the number is in dispute) left their homes in what would become Israel. Some wealthy Arabs went to summer homes to avoid the coming chaotic situation. Some fled from fear of battles or revenge that they assumed Jews would take on them. After the battle at Deir Yassin, exaggerated accounts of a massacre of civilians, rape of women, etc., caused panic among the Arabs. And a smaller number were expelled because their villages continued to be a source of hostile activity in strategic locations, such as the Tel Aviv – Jerusalem road. But most legitimate historians agree that there was no overall plan for deliberate ethnic cleansing, and the fact is that some 150,000 remained.

In those parts of the land that were under Egyptian or Jordanian control at the end of the war, no Jews remained. And between 1920 and 1970 some 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries. These Jews primarily went to Israel, France and the US where they were absorbed and able to become citizens. Arab refugees were kept in camps by their host governments, their rights were severely limited, and they were not permitted to become citizens.

Palestinians, not Jews, are guilty of racism and desire an apartheid state

The PLO has demanded that no Jewish settlements remain in land that would be given to them in a proposed peace settlement. Mahmoud Abbas said that “In a final solution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – civilian or soldier – on our lands.” Of course he means “no Jews allowed” just like most other Arab countries.

Palestinian Authority and Hamas official media and education systems are highly anti-Jewish, combining the worst of traditional Muslim Jew-hatred with memes borrowed from Nazi Germany and Czarist Russia.

Violent ‘resistance’ is not a response to ‘occupation’

Part of the mythology surrounding the Palestinian narrative is that the terrorism that characterizes the Palestinian movement is justified as resistance to colonial occupation. As we have seen, if there has been any occupation, it was Arabs that did the occupying. But violence by Arabs against Jews goes back to the early 20th century (the violent riots instigated by al-Husseini in 1920, 1929 and 1936) and even before (see the pogrom in Tzfat in 1834). The fact is that Muslim Arabs always viewed the Jews as inferior and therefore legitimate targets. Violence became more focused as soon as the possibility – and then the fact – of Jewish sovereignty raised its head. For religious and cultural reasons, Arabs do not accept the idea of a Jewish state.

Conclusion

When the League of Nations established the Mandate for Palestine with the goal of creating a “national home for the Jewish people,” it made the decision to do so because they recognized that the Jewish people were indigenous to the land of Israel, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. It also recognized that there were non-Jewish groups living there, and the mandate specified that their “civil and religious” rights must not be abridged. But national rights were reserved for the Jewish people.

The Mandate, therefore, was the opposite of a colonialist document. It recognized the existence of an indigenous people and directed the colonial power that was in control of the area to gradually transfer control to that people. Of course the British almost immediately tried to subvert the intent of the document and keep control of the territory; and when that failed, to transfer it to the Arabs rather than the Jews. But the Jews succeeded in throwing the British out in a clearly anti-colonialist fashion.

By inverting the truth, the Palestinian narrative provides a basis to deny the rights of the Jewish people, both morally and in international law.

All this is easily verified. But for some reason official Israel itself has not stressed the indigenous nature of the Jewish people. Sometimes it even seems as though we accept the Palestinian story, and apologize for our behavior. When we do this we participate in the project to bring about our own destruction.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Zionism | 1 Comment

Obama’s remorse and Iran’s victory

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Does Iran really think it can defeat the US?

How could it? The US is the greatest military power the world has ever known. Its nuclear arsenal is enough to turn any possible enemy into ionized plasma multiple times over. Its ICBMs can reach any corner of the globe. One nuclear aircraft carrier (and the US has 11 of them) can deliver enough high explosive to – you know the story.

But America is drawing back into itself. Its military has been severely weakened by budget cuts and ‘sequestration’, equipment has been used and abused in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and not replaced. Morale in the armed forces is low as the gains won at great cost in Iraq are given up as a result of the decision to withdraw regardless of consequences. Even funds for medical treatment of veterans are lacking.

Other countries like China and Pakistan have been spending large amounts of money modernizing and building up their nuclear forces. The US has basically abandoned its program, depending on weapons built decades ago. Can we even be sure they would work if needed? Apparently the theory is that with the end of the Cold War, all nuclear threats disappeared.

The opposite is true. Arguably the most serious nuclear threat of all – because it is made by America’s greatest enemy, one that has demonstrated its enmity by killing Americans almost since its inception in 1979, and which swears every day to destroy her – is from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As I write, it has just been determined that President Obama has at least the 41 Senate votes he needs to sustain a veto if the Congress passes a resolution disapproving of the nuclear deal with Iran. There is a lot of discussion of how we got here, when it is clearly a treaty which should require 67 votes for ratification, but regardless of what the Congress does at this point, the deal is already a tremendous diplomatic defeat for the US.

It asserts that as soon as the IAEA confirms that Iran has taken certain specific actions (called “Implementation Day”), all sanctions on Iran – 6 UN Security Council resolutions going back to 2006 and others imposed by the US and the EU – will be removed. Much of the 159-page document consists of lists of organizations and individuals from whom sanctions will be removed. Details of how IAEA will perform its job are mostly hidden in a secret addendum to the agreement, but some disturbing ones have leaked out, for example that Iran itself will provide the IAEA with soil samples from its facility in Parchin. There are many additional serious issues with inspections, etc., which are discussed here.

The actions Iran is required to take before Implementation Day are all either easily reversible or difficult to verify. Although the deal calls for Iran to limit some nuclear activities for a period of 10 or 15 years, all sanctions will be removed on Implementation Day. Any attempt to re-impose sanctions are grounds for Iran to cancel the entire deal, and existing contracts are exempted from any new sanctions. Companies and nations are already behaving as though sanctions have been removed, sending missions of businessmen and diplomats to make trade arrangements. There can be no “snap-back.”

As soon as Implementation Day arrives (in early 2016) and sanctions vanish, Iran can simply proceed as though there were no restrictions placed on her by the deal. At that point she will have nothing to lose.

At the same time, she will get a windfall of about $150 billion in frozen funds to help pay for her worldwide subversion and terror operations, and of course her nuclear program.

Despite America’s international backing and massive military and economic superiority, the process of negotiation comprised one US capitulation after another.

The main reason seems to be that Obama never gave more than lip service to the military option. Only a credible military threat could have made Iran’s regime back down from what it sees as its most important military/political initiative since 1979, the one that will make it a regional hegemon and facilitate the establishment of a Shiite caliphate throughout the Middle East. But Obama would sooner see a nuclear armed Iran that carry out such a threat.

Two years ago Obama signaled his lack of resolve when he threatened to use force in Syria after Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against anti-regime forces, and then backed down in humiliation. At this point, the Iranians realized that they could dictate terms of surrender to the US (and at the same time Israel and the Sunni Arabs realized that they could no longer depend on America).

So what Obama has accomplished is to clear the way for America’s most resolute and implacable enemy to build nuclear weapons, while at the same time destroying the credibility of the US deterrent!

In terms well understood in the Middle East by both enemies and allies, he surrendered the honor of the United States.

Why did he do this? I think that he believes deeply that the West in general and the US in particular have historically oppressed ‘people of color’, and Muslims count as such. His sense of justice requires a sort of international ‘affirmative action’ in which formerly oppressed or colonized peoples are favored over their oppressors. The use of force or coercion is one of the main crimes of colonial oppressors and must always be avoided. He has in the past apologized for it, and now he is putting his contrition into action.

In addition, he believes that American society can’t deal with the side effects of war. They won’t accept the casualties or the cost. He believes that war in itself is always bad, even when the alternative is sub-optimal. Better to live on your knees than die on your feet.

Unfortunately, some of the ex-oppressed are not interested in justice. They are interested in being oppressors themselves, building empires and establishing caliphates. And they are not stupid. They understand the principles of ‘cognitive warfare’. The best way to defeat an opponent is to convince him not to fight you in the first place. So they appeal to Western post-colonial guilt on the one hand and to anti-war sentiment on the other.

The Iranian plan is not to face those 11 aircraft carriers – at least not for a long time. Meanwhile, step by step they will accomplish their intermediate goals, like the conquest of Iraq, the destruction of Israel, the building of a massive nuclear strike force based on ICBMs.

One day the United States will find itself on the receiving end of coercive diplomacy from Iran. But by that time, the balance of power will have shifted to the point that it won’t pay to try to defend itself. And that is what defeat will look like.

Posted in Iran | 1 Comment

What a historical inflection point feels like

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Germany and Austria have announced that they will for now allow all Syrian migrants that reach their borders to apply for asylum, as opposed to EU rules that require asylum-seekers to apply in the first country they enter. I assume this is because they understand that the actions that they would need to take to stop them would be, let’s say, illiberal.

Hungary is building a fence on its border with Serbia to try to control the flow of migrants from Syria and other war zones. But most of them don’t want to stay in Hungary anyway; they want to go to Germany, the economic powerhouse of the EU.

Can you blame them? Syria and Libya are almost uninhabitable, as are numerous countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a result of misgovernment, tribal and religious wars, and the Islamic death cult.

Some of it is the fault of the West, which chose to reap the benefits of colonialism without accepting the responsibilities, and whose policies consisted of taking resources out of and putting weapons into these ‘countries’ while ignoring their pathological politics. Sometimes, as in the case of Syria, outsiders took sides, nurturing the tribal conflicts.

It seems like the West took the wrong path time and time again. It intervened where it shouldn’t have and did not intervene where it should have. It betrayed the Kurds (again), but didn’t stand up to Iran or even Assad. Sometimes you can see the mistakes being made. The nuclear deal with Iran and the slavering rush to do business with the one of world’s most dangerous and evil regimes is the proverbial slow-motion train wreck.

Whatever the causes, the cancer of the Islamic State that has established itself and is growing, combined with the dawning realization all over the world that it is thinkable (although dangerous) to escape the unlivable places, has given rise to this massive migration that will change the demographic reality in Europe faster than anyone expected.

Yes, some of the refugees are refugees and some are economic migrants. It doesn’t matter. Europe in five years will be unrecognizable in many important respects. This is a historic change, a ‘point of inflection’.

Islamic jihad against the West, which was mostly asleep from about 1830 (when the French conquest of Algiers finally put an end to the terrorism of the Barbary pirates) roared back to life with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the revolution in Iran, and of course 9/11 and the rest.

The Western response was sometimes muscular, if not accurately aimed, and sometimes fearful and characterized by Stockholm Syndrome; but it was always inconsistent and ineffectual. With the election of Barack Obama, the most powerful nation in the West adopted a policy somewhere between appeasement and defection, which – unless something changes radically – guarantees an Islamic victory.

The demographic revolution in Europe (still self-destructively obsessed with Jew-hatred) and the tacit acceptance of a nuclear and terror-sponsoring Iranian regime are milestones that future historians, assuming that the discipline of history survives the coming dark age, will mark.

Western governments are still underestimating the danger and overestimating their capability to defeat their technologically inferior but spiritually more determined adversaries. But there is little time left before the demographic changes in Europe make it politically impossible for Europeans to fight back.

The US is a complicated story. Militarily, it is far weaker than it was in 2001, after economic troubles caused budget cuts, and equipment damaged in several long wars was not replaced. Ideologically there is still a strong core of belief in Western superiority and the dangers posed by the Islamic jihad. America is still primarily a nation of Christians, unlike the European countries where Christianity has atrophied.

Nevertheless the universalist, multicultural, post-colonial viewpoint that characterizes the universities (and the Obama Administration) is gaining ground. No reversal of policy can come about in America without a radical change in the regime, and the Republican opposition has proven remarkably ineffectual so far. It is also not clear to me that the foreign policy bureaucracy, much more difficult to change than the party in power, isn’t also corrupted by pro-Islamic ideology. Millions of dollars of aid from Arab countries to universities like Harvard and Georgetown have not gone to waste.

Israel is the front line in the struggle to hold back Iran, something of which the Iranian regime is fully cognizant. That is why they are concentrating their forces, both military and psychological, against her. At some point she may need to confront the IS as well. Israel is quite capable of defending herself, at least in the short term. But the effect of the changes in Europe and the US is to isolate her. It’s uncertain that a tiny country like Israel, surrounded by enemies, will be able to survive in total isolation.

The Western countries and Israel’s self-destructive Left are aware of this, and claim that the cause of the growing isolation is the presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria. But concessions on this front will seriously damage Israel’s self-defense capabilities and not reverse the trend to isolation, which is based on the growing tilt toward the Muslim world in Europe and the US. The day after Israel withdraws from the territories, new demands will be made on behalf of Arab residents of Israel and ‘Palestinian refugees’ living outside of her.

My conclusion is that there is no time to waste – not for Israel and not for those elements in Europe and the US that are capable of understanding the threat that is facing what we call ‘Western civilization’. Iran and its proxies must be defeated militarily before they obtain massive nuclear capability. The IS needs to be crushed so thoroughly that its ideology that ‘Islam is the solution’ can be discredited.

In addition, the West must reverse the ideological weakness that is making it such a soft target for Islamic conquest. It has to become common knowledge that Islam is not ‘just a religion’ whose members worship in a mosque on Fridays, but a religion that includes a political ideology of expansion and jihad. It must be understood that money from abroad that flows into mosques in the US or anti-state NGOs in Israel is a subversive influence, not an exercise of democracy.

Muslims in Western countries must be given to understand that they will have all the civil rights and privileges of non-Muslims in their country, but that they do not extend to political activity intended to establish Islamic supremacy.

Is it too late? That depends on whether the West can reverse course in time. If not, then a new dark age will descend, possibly ushered in by nuclear terrorism.

Posted in Iran, Islam | 1 Comment

Who killed the Dawabshes, and why doesn’t the Shabak want to know?

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Someone burned a baby and his father to death and severely injured two other members of the Dawabshe family a little more than a month ago on July 31, in the Arab village of Duma, southwest of Shechem (Nablus).

Beginning on the morning after the murders, as the investigation was just beginning, Israeli officials and media began claiming that the perpetrators were “Jewish terrorists.” The murder was conflated with the vicious knife murder of a 16-year old girl and the wounding of several others by a crazed ‘religious’ fanatic at the Jerusalem Gay Pride parade the same night. Two examples, it was said, of how we are the same as Arab terrorists. Two examples of our depravity as a culture.

Some of the strongest condemnations of “Jewish terror” came from right-wing politicians, like Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Education Minister Naftali Bennett. But the only evidence for it was Hebrew graffiti at the site, and there were persuasive reasons to doubt that Jews had placed it there.

Another hypothesis involves a violent dispute between Arabs in the village. There has recently been a series of at least 4 suspicious fires on property belonging to the Dawabshes in Duma, the latest on August 23. There is at least one other case (in 2011) of an arson probably carried out by Arabs in which Hebrew graffiti was written on walls, the mosque at Tuba-Zangariya. In this case too, “Jewish terrorists” were initially blamed. And also in this case, no one as yet has been charged.

The Internal Security Service (Shabak) has arrested several young “Jewish extremists” who are being held in administrative detention without charges. But despite the use of “aggressive interrogation techniques,” they have not announced any breaks in the case, although officials continue to insist that the those in custody are in some sense ‘responsible’ for the crime.

Others have been issued administrative orders forbidding them to enter the territories. At the same time, there is no indication that Arab residents of Duma are being questioned by Israeli authorities.

Duma is located in Areas B and C, which implies that it is under Israeli security control. It is therefore not only possible for Israeli police and the Internal Security Service (Shabak) to investigate, it is Israel’s responsibility to do so.

In an article published in Ma’ariv (Hebrew) on August 29, Sarah Beck reports that Israeli police claim that when they arrived to investigate the August 23 fire, they were met at the village entrance by army personnel whose job it was to accompany them into the village. The soldiers told them that Palestinian police had already investigated the incident, and decided that the fire was caused by an electrical malfunction. They were told that there was no need for them to open an investigation.

Ms Beck spoke to numerous security officials, and received some very strange responses. When she suggested that maybe an investigation of this latest fire could help in solving the horrific arson/murder that took place last month, she was told that there was an order forbidding publication of details of that inquiry and anyway no progress had been made. She was told the village was in Area A, under Palestinian security control, which is false. She was told that since the Palestinians did not believe the latest fire was nationalistically motivated, there was no reason to investigate it. None of this makes the slightest bit of sense.

Palestinian claims were contradictory. Witnesses first claimed that remains of a firebomb were found in the ruins of the house, but later the official statement said that the fire was of electrical origin.

The soldiers who had met the police at the village entrance told Beck the decision not to investigate was made by the Shabak. And the Shabak presented her with the same non-sequitur: it wasn’t nationalistically motivated, so there was no need to investigate. But what could be more relevant to solving the earlier, murderous, arson case than understanding this similar one?

It seems that the Shabak does not want to consider the possibility that the murders were not committed by Jewish terrorists.

This seems absurd. Surely one would expect Israeli authorities to prefer that it be known if the real murderers were Arabs and not Jews. But apparently they do not. Why?

The background is the phenomenon of nationalistically motivated “price tag” vandalism and alleged assaults on Arabs in Judea and Samaria that have been blamed on a relatively small group of young people in their teens and early twenties called “hilltop youth.” The perpetrators of these attacks are loosely organized and their cells have proven extremely difficult to infiltrate. Officials are frustrated, because “price tag” attacks are cited by Arabs and their supporters to justify Arab terrorism and to demonize Israel.

The Duma murders presented an opportunity to get these ‘extremists’ off the street, and to interrogate them in order to find out the identities of everyone associated with their movement, to break it for once and for all. So the government exploited the national sense of horror at the murders to justify the employment of measures against these youths that even Ya’alon called ‘Draconian’.

If Arabs committed the arson/murder, they will not be arrested, since nobody is looking for them. Even the Dawabshes would probably prefer the official explanation to be Jewish terrorism. They know who their enemies are and can get revenge later. Palestinian officials certainly would like to add another Jewish atrocity to their list.

After a while, when the Shabak has squeezed everything it can out of the young extremists, they will be released (some have already been). The “price tag” phenomenon will be more or less over. The world media will move on and not mention the fact that no Jewish terrorists have been caught.

But vandals aren’t murderers, and justice demands that the real killers be punished severely.

Like the al-Dura affair, it won’t matter that Jews are not guilty of the murders. The “Jewish terror” headlines will have done their work. Yet another blood libel against the Jewish people will be graven into the world’s collective mind.

And the psychological climate in Israel that caused the national breast-beating about “Jewish terrorism” will continue, and even intensify. We, Jews and Israelis, have internalized the accusations – including blood libels – of our Jew-hating enemies in Europe and elsewhere. Officials that chose to accuse these vandals of child murder even suggested that while they may not have actually burned anyone to death, they could have; and therefore they were guilty “in principle” (the actual words of Moshe Ya’alon)!

The price-tag attacks were really very minor as ‘hate crimes’ go. Far worse happens every day all over the US and Europe, not to mention the daily incidents of attempted and sometimes successful murder of Jews by Arab terrorists here. But because they were magnified by anti-Israel media, leftist politicians and governments, because Jews are so prone to obsessive self-criticism and so concerned about the opinions of Jew-haters abroad, they were given weight far beyond their actual importance.

So thanks to the intrepid actions of the Shabak, they won’t have price-tag attacks to decry. Now they will be replaced by references to “Jewish terrorist baby-burners.”

If in fact it turns out that Jews committed these murders, I will apologize to the people of Duma for having suspected that the perpetrators were among them. But if not, then the Shabak and the government of Israel, at the highest levels, owe its citizens an accounting of how such a damaging, unjust and immoral exercise in deception was approved and implemented.

Posted in Duma arson-murder, Terrorism | 1 Comment

Political correctness is mind control

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever. – George Orwell, 1984

Language has power. The way we describe things is the way we think about them. Change the name and you can change the thing.

Political Correctness tells you what you are allowed to call things, how you can talk about them and, especially, what you can’t say. PC always rears its head in discourse about race, gender, social class, or anything that can produce discriminatory attitudes. One of its functions is to enforce the view that it is morally wrong to judge any characteristic of a person or a group inferior or superior to others in any way. So to avoid saying that a person is ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled’, the locution ‘differently-abled’ was invented. And any word whose initial definition was neutral that has collected negative connotations over time – like ‘Negro’, ‘homosexual’, or ‘Oriental’ – becomes taboo. Words describing defects have also become forbidden, like ‘retarded’.

This sounds absurd, and it is. Consider: why do Kenyan distance runners do so well? Probably because, statistically speaking, there are genetic factors (low BMI, high lung capacity, long legs, etc.) as well as cultural factors that contribute to their performance. This doesn’t mean that any particular Kenyan will be a good runner, but it does explain why they are overrepresented among marathon winners.

The statement above violates PC ideology, although it might seem unexceptional, because it suggests that some groups are in some sense more competent than others. If you doubt this, consider the reaction to Herrnstein and Murray’s book “The Bell Curve”, which made essentially the same point. When I once mentioned something Murray had written to a PC person, the response was that it was discredited because he “is a racist.”

PC thinking is also responsible for the insistence that armies should expend resources to make it possible for women to be combat soldiers. There are certainly individual women who are suited to be combat soldiers, but statistically this is a small percentage of the population. Yet PC demands that accommodations be made for this fraction. Objections to this belief are automatically invalidated because of ‘sexism’.

It is also not permissible under PC to criticize a culture or religious group, although it is still acceptable to criticize a group defined by politics or ideology. Thus anti-Jewish remarks (“Moshe Jewed me down”) are not allowed, but anti-Zionist ones (“Zionist land thieves”) are OK. PC language supports multiculturalism and favors expression of ethnic and cultural diversity in a society. If you criticize these things, you are probably doing so in non-PC language. That’s the point.

One of the great examples of PC success was the success of the abortion-rights lobby in becoming the ‘pro-choice’ one. Who can object to free choice? It shifts the debate from being about the fetus – whether or not it is a person that has rights – to being about the woman, and her rights. It enables the ‘pro-choice’ person to say “a woman has a right to control her own body” without the circularity of that argument – the anti-abortion person would say that there is another body involved – becoming evident. This is precisely what Orwell had in mind.

PC, since it is a limitation on speech, is in conflict with the idea of free speech. It is enforced only informally – there are no laws yet that forbid the use of certain words or the expression of certain ideas, although possibly the Obama Administration’s guidelines that forbid officials to refer to “Islamic terrorism” come close – but compare the results of walking around using the “F-word” to those from using the “N-word” if you think that PC violations are not punished severely.

PC is often justified by a desire to avoid insult or offense. So the “N-word” is forbidden because it encapsulates the user’s hatred and contempt for its object. Lately, however, the concept of avoiding insult or offense has been expanded. For example, we have “microaggressions:”

Psychologist Derald Wing Sue defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.” Sue describes microaggressions as generally happening below the level of awareness of well-intentioned members of the dominant culture. Microaggressions, according to Sue, are different from overt, deliberate acts of bigotry, such as the use of racist epithets, because the people perpetrating microaggressions often intend no offense and are unaware they are causing harm. Sue describes microaggressions as including statements that repeat or affirm stereotypes about the minority group or subtly demean it, that position the dominant culture as normal and the minority one as aberrant or pathological, that express disapproval of or discomfort with the minority group, that assume all minority group members are the same, that minimize the existence of discrimination against the minority group, seek to deny the perpetrator’s own bias, or minimize real conflict between the minority group and the dominant culture.

The classic example is Joe Biden saying that Barack Obama is “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Oops. But things like “you don’t look Jewish” or “what cute hair you have” (said by a white to a black person) are also considered microaggressions.

There are two problems posed by this form of PC. One is that it is extremely difficult to avoid transgressing the rules, since what counts as a microaggression depends on the hearer. You are required to carefully evaluate what you are about to say in connection with the race, sexual preference, life experience, degree of sensitivity, etc. (assuming that you know these things) of the person you are talking to.

The other issue is that it is defined in terms of the “dominant culture,” which suggests that the limitation on speech acts primarily on members of this culture, and not the various minorities. It’s uncomfortably like the pernicious view that only the more powerful group in a given society can be culpable. For example, it’s argued by this logic that there can be no black racism, or that Palestinians can’t be terrorists.

The concept of microaggressions is an effective enforcement mechanism for PC ideology. It is not necessary for the ‘victim’ of a microaggression to prove that the offending statement is false, or even that it ought to be considered offensive. All that is needed to justify shutting the speaker up is that the listener be offended, something which is subjective and irrefutable.

Another new form of PC is the ‘trigger warning’. Based on the idea that some individuals are especially sensitive to certain forms of expression – examples are a former soldier with PTSD or a woman who has been a victim of rape – the trigger warning is presented so that the person can prepare or absent herself from the experience. Trigger warnings would be applied to books, films, lectures, etc. I imagine a label on a book like a list of ingredients on a box of cereal, listing all of the possible ‘triggers’ inside.

Not only is the requirement onerous, it is impossible to know what will be a trigger for every possible person. For example, we have a friend who is deathly afraid of cats, and whenever she visits we have to lock our cats in a room that she won’t need to enter. There are others like her. Should movies with cats in them carry a trigger warning? Here’s a serious list of possible triggers. A Dostoyevsky novel might contain 90% of these! Hemingway need not apply. And the list doesn’t include cats and dogs.

It’s just about protecting people, say the proponents. But the very choice of the things that will count as triggers (one list includes colonialism, racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, etc.) is an ideological statement.

A related concept is that of a ‘safe space’ – a place where a person can avoid triggering stimuli. One definition: “an area or forum where either a marginalized group are not supposed to face standard mainstream stereotypes and marginalization, or in which a shared political or social viewpoint is required to participate in the space.” In other words, a place where certain kinds of speech are not tolerated. Here’s an example of a “safe space” on Facebook where Zionism, eating meat and many other things are forbidden.

The ideal of free speech, especially in the US, is powerful and hard to attack directly. But the oft-quoted exception to unfettered speech is shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. If your speech will directly injure someone, it can be prohibited. Microaggressions, trigger warnings and safe spaces (some campuses have “safe space officers”) are all ways of bypassing the ideal of free speech and enforcing ideological conformity in the name of safety.

PC is all about making rules about things that cannot be said, and punishing transgressions. But it is not ideologically neutral. It supports universalist, cultural relativist, and multiculturalist ideologies, and insists that a subjective sense of ‘injury’ can be the arbiter of legitimate discourse, rather than ideals of truth or logic. It provides a way to bypass the ideal of free speech and to shut down speech that is uncomfortable.

Posted in Academia, Information war | Comments Off on Political correctness is mind control

A note to Abu Yehuda readers

Posted on August 28, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

If you are an email subscriber to Abu Yehuda, you will notice that posts will be coming from a new provider, MailChimp. This will enable me to eliminate the ads, which were multiplying and becoming intrusive.

The from-address will now be info [at] abuyehuda [dot] com. Please add this to your address book to prevent posts from being sent to your spam folder.

I have transferred all the email addresses to the new system – unless you have subscribed anonymously. Since I don’t see anonymous addresses, I couldn’t transfer them! So those people will have to re-subscribe.

Those who don’t subscribe, please consider it. It’s free.

This system will be a bit more complicated for me to administer, but should be better for you.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on A note to Abu Yehuda readers

How the Internet has wrecked political discourse

Posted on August 28, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

If you are reading this, chances are that you would describe yourself as pro-Israel and probably right of center.

You probably read several other pro-Israel and conservative blogs. You do not read +972 Magazine, or Mondoweiss. If you are American, you probably prefer Fox News to MSNBC. If you are Israeli, you might read Israel Hayom or Makor Rishon. You would not be caught dead buying Ha’aretz.

This is called an ‘information bubble’. If you are inside such a bubble, you are only exposed to opinions that you already agree with. A large part of the reason is the psychological phenomenon of confirmation bias, by which we tend “to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses while giving disproportionately less attention to information that contradicts it.”

Confirmation bias has been the subject of much study by psychologists and brain scientists, who have found that the process of finding confirming evidence for a proposition that one is already committed to is accompanied by brain processes associated with release of emotional tension and pleasure. Reading Gideon Levy in Ha’aretz is, for a certain kind of individual, similar to sex (or at least more available).

What has happened is that the Internet and especially social media, which might have been expected to remove limitations and provide a plethora of options to consumers of information, have had the opposite effect. They have become amplifiers of confirmation bias.

This is because of the economic facts about advertising-supported sites. The more clicks, the more money. So developers want people to look at their sites as much as possible, which they accomplish by doing their best to figure out what users want to see and giving it to them.

In his book titled “The Filter Bubble,” left-wing activist Eli Pariser (they can be right about some things) argued that search engines like Google and social media like Facebook amplify our own confirmation bias by trying to show us what their algorithms think we want to see, on the basis of our location, age, gender, interests, use of keywords, ‘likes’ and prior searches.

In Pariser’s search engine example, “one user searched Google for ‘BP’ and got investment news about British Petroleum while another searcher got information about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”

Facebook’s algorithm is tuned to produce pleasurable sensations from confirmation of biases and agreement with prejudices in order to keep its users clicking. It is applied psychology at its most sophisticated, rivaling addictive video slot machines which combine visual and auditory stimuli with just enough monetary reinforcement to keep the player going until she (usually) or he drops. In Facebook the reinforcement is in the form of agreeable information bites, but it is just as possible to become addicted to it as to slot machines.

In addition to the mechanical coercion of the algorithm, a principle of Facebook etiquette has emerged that one doesn’t challenge the initiator of a thread. So if the same link has been shared by a right-wing and left-wing person, the comments on each post will mostly support the position of the initiator. The ‘wrong’ kind of comment will be met with vituperation and announcements that the commenter has been blocked. God forbid that anyone might see something that they disagree with!

The problem posed by the bubble to those, like me, who want to influence readers, is that the only people who will see my content are those who already agree with it. So it would be a waste of time for me to write an article aimed at refuting false perceptions of Israel. All I can do is try to provide my ‘base’ with new information or arguments. But such material will be as useless to them as it is to me, since nobody who doesn’t already agree with them will see it either. And if I do succeed to talk to someone on the ‘other side’, I find that we are working with an entirely different set of facts and assumptions, so that substantive interaction becomes impossible.

All bubbles are not created equal. For example, the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is a fact, based solidly in history and international law. This ‘bubble’ is a bubble of truth, and the bubble containing Gideon Levy is not.

Another issue, since discussion only takes place within groups that share the same ideology, is the one-way reinforcement of more and more extreme positions. The way to ‘ring the bell’ of the pleasure centers of the brain in a group with a particular ideological bent is to push the envelope. Moderation is boring, and doesn’t impress your peers. So when such a group goes off by itself and bounces ideas back and forth — think of leftist academics — the more extreme ones are reinforced. As a result, there is a sort of centrifugal force pushing the adoption of more radical positions and driving opposing groups farther apart.

It’s true that ‘traditional’ media like newspapers and national or local radio and TV have similar issues – I mentioned Ha’aretz – but it is to a far lesser extent. If there is a limited number of newspapers or TV channels available, more diverse groups will be exposed to them. So in the US for example many conservatives read the NY Times or listen to NPR because they provide some content of interest despite disagreement with their editorial slant. But the Internet provides an unlimited variety of slants, and in effect everyone’s Facebook timeline has its own individual slant.

There is a relationship between the Internet and the burgeoning of ‘political correctness’. We have all been admonished at one time or another not to talk about politics because it is ‘divisive’. But in the age of the Internet, it is not politics in general, but politics that don’t agree with someone’s prejudices that one is not allowed to talk about. The Facebook etiquette I mentioned that forbids going against the ideology of a thread is an example.

Some people have developed exquisite sensitivity to what they will allow themselves to hear. I strongly doubt that the meme of ‘microaggressions’ (also here) would have developed before the Internet taught people that they ought to have the right – because on the Internet they have the ability – to be free from hearing anything that they might judge to be the slightest bit offensive. The same idea pops up in student demands for safe spaces – local restrictions on free speech – and trigger warnings on books, films, etc.

These demands are couched in language about ‘protecting’ students who may suffer from PTSD-like conditions, but in fact serve to override the principles of free speech and academic freedom. And the effect is usually to support leftist views. You don’t hear a lot about ‘safe spaces’ for conservatives, or ‘trigger warnings’ for the presence of Marxism.

Finally, there is the much-discussed phenomenon that cyber-anonymity permits breaches of civility that would not occur in face-to-face discussion, or even signed correspondence. I think anonymity is just part of it; it’s the combination of anonymity with bubble-generated extremism and solipsism that have given us the ‘cesspool’ of the comments sections found on some sites. It’s ironic that the same technology that has encouraged acute hypersensitivity and attempts to restrict speech, has also given rise to a genre of take-no-prisoners verbal aggression.

Posted in Academia, Information war, Media | 1 Comment

Jewish terrorism? Maybe — or maybe not

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Minister of Defense Moshe Ya’alon justified the recent ‘administrative detentions’ of several young Jewish ‘extremists’ in a TV interview last week:

In such situations, any country — most certainly a democracy– must defend itself, including the taking of extreme measures,” Ya’alon said. “But when you have no choice, you have to protect yourself.”

“This draconian step was necessary in this case, because if we hadn’t taken it, we would have seen a string of attacks against Arabs,” he said.

The defense minister said he was confident that suspects in custody are connected to last month’s deadly arson attack on a Palestinian home blamed on Jewish extremists.

“I have no doubt we are holding the correct people in administrative detention,” he said of Jewish detainees such as Meir Ettinger, the 23-year-old grandson of assassinated extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the outlawed anti-Arab Kach organization.

When asked if he believed Ettinger was linked to the deadly arson attack, Ya’alon said “Ultimately, in principle, yes.” [my emphasis]

In principle? In other words, we can’t prove that they committed the crime, but they really disliked Arabs a whole lot.

The ‘extremists’ being held without charge are being subjected to ‘aggressive interrogation methods’. Meir Ettinger was arrested on August 3, three weeks ago.

The parents of another detainee, Evyatar Slonim, responded to Ya’alon that their son was with them on vacation in Ma’alot (in northern Israel, far from the site of the arson attack) when it occurred. It should be possible for the police to check this out.

It seems to me that after three weeks of ‘aggressive interrogation’ and – one hopes – intensive investigation of all possible scenarios in the case, including that the fire was set by Arabs involved in a feud with the Dawabshe family, the police should be able to charge the detainees, or let them go.

Unfortunately, the tone for all of this was set by the President of the State of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, who announced on the morning after the crime was committed, when security forces were just starting their investigation, that “Jewish terrorists” were responsible for the arson-murder. He didn’t say ‘suspected’. Naturally the media have been even less circumspect.

As I wrote at the time, there are several hypotheses about who may have firebombed the Dawabshe house in the Arab village of Duma. One of them is that it was members of another Arab clan. For several reasons (spelled out at the link) I thought at the time that this was more likely than that ‘Jewish terrorists’ had done it.

Last night another house belonging to a member of the Dawabshe clan burned, this time with no serious injuries. Initial reports claimed that the fire was a result of a firebomb thrown by “the occupation” or “settlers,” but Palestinians later said it was an accidental fire of electrical origin. One could speculate that if there were a feud going on, they would want to divert attention and investigation away from this incident.

Please note that I am not saying that Jews could not have done this. Every nation has its criminals, sometimes remarkably vicious ones. We have to face the fact that the murderers of Mohammed Abu Khdeir and Shira Banki were Jews.

I also do not think that the Jewish youth who are being held are innocent of all crimes. Some of them are probably guilty of vandalism and other infractions. They are unquestionably a great embarrassment to the nation if they are responsible for ‘price tag’ vandalism. These incidents, in addition to being morally indefensible, are extremely counterproductive at a time when the Jewish state and the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria are being demonized in world media. The culprits should be punished.

And I can understand the government’s frustration at the incompetence of the police in apprehending the price tag vandals. But the solution is not to use the murder as an excuse for employing administrative detention and aggressive interrogation in cases that don’t warrant such “draconian” (in the words of Minister Ya’alon) steps. It is not to accuse of murder those who are not murderers, just to get them behind bars.

Worse than finding out that the Duma murders were committed by Jews would be to find out that our government and security services were complicit in blaming Jews for murders that they did not commit.

Yes, we need to put an end to the price-tag attacks and similar phenomena. But there are limits, and it seems to me that we are treading a bit too close to them.

Updated [26 Aug 2039 IDT] for style and clarity.

Posted in Duma arson-murder, Israeli Politics, Israeli Society, Terrorism | Comments Off on Jewish terrorism? Maybe — or maybe not