Israel Matzav

Aren't you glad he doesn't chair the US National Intelligence Council

For those who didn't figure out yet what happened, no I am not on a plane to the US. I collapsed in exhaustion last night. For those who recognize the picture in this post, you may even know why. For those who don't recognize the picture in this post, you will understand shortly.

Very early in his term, President Obama nominated Chas Freeman (pictured) to chair the US National Intelligence Council. Had Freeman gotten the position, he would have provided Obama with intelligence analysis like you are about to see below. Fortunately for all involved, Freeman was forced to decline the position by powerful bloggers like yours truly who exposed his disregard for the lives of Chinese dissidents and the extent to which he was (and is) in the pockets of the Saudi royal family.

On Wednesday, Chas gave the Hisham B. Sharabi memorial lecture to the Jerusalem Fund at the 'Palestine Center' in Washington. He thus joined other notable Jew haters in academia like John Mearsheimer, Richard Falk and John Dugard who have been deemed anti-Israel enough to give the Sharabi lecture. All of the other lecturers except for one have been 'Palestinians' or 'Israeli Arabs.' Here's a sampling of what Chas had to say:

Over the course of centuries, the Jews of the diaspora were grievously persecuted by Christians. This experience helped to inspire Zionism. It culminated in the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. Meanwhile, under Byzantium and the Caliphate, all but a few of the Jews of Palestine sought refuge in conversion to Judaism’s successor faiths: Christianity and Islam. As an ironic result, the homegrown descendants of Palestine’s original Jewish population – the Palestinians –now suffer because newcomers proclaim them to be interlopers in lands they have inhabited from time immemorial. And yet another Jewish-descended diaspora – this time, Christian and Muslim – has been ejected from Palestine to suffer in exile. Not even the most imaginative writer of fiction could have composed an account of traumatic suffering and human tragedy comparable to that which Zionists and Palestinians have undergone and continue to inflict on each other.

In other words, the 'Palestinians' have rights to the Land of Israel ahead of the Jews because they are Jews who chose to stay here but converted to Islam (there are very few Christians left here - forget that one). Got it?

Obfuscatory euphemisms are, unfortunately, the norm in the Holy Land. But rhetorical tricks can no longer conceal the protracted moral zero-sum game that is in progress there. A people without rights confronts a settler movement without scruples. A predatory state with cutting-edge military technology battles kids with stones and resistance fighters with belts of nails and explosives. Israel’s Cabinet openly directs the murder of Palestinian political leaders. There have been about 850 such extrajudicial executions over the past decade. Israel is vigorously engaged in the collective punishment and systematic ethnic cleansing of its captive Arab populations. It rails against terrorism while carrying out policies explicitly described as intended to terrorize the peoples of the territories it is attacking or into which it is illegally expanding. Meanwhile, the elected authorities in Palestine – indeed, most Palestinians – associate themselves suicide bombers and unguided missiles that indiscriminately murder Israeli civilians. Each side has suspended moral constraints in order to cause the other to suffer in the hope that it will capitulate to such coercion. To a distressing extent, moreover, each side has also been able to enlist unreasoning support for its cause and the indiscriminate condemnation of the other by powerful supporters abroad.

Holy moral equivalence Batman! I can tell you that I live here, and this paragraph is so detached from reality, it's pathetic.

As always in such mayhem, truth and the law have been the first to go missing. Israel regularly attributes to others the very things it itself is doing. It has become notorious for its refusal to accept objective scrutiny or criticism. It routinely rebuffs international investigators’ examination of allegations against it, even when mandated by the U.N. [United Nations] Security Council. Instead, it stages self-indulgent acts of self-investigation calculated to produce exculpatory propaganda. As a result, Israeli government spokesmen – who once were presumed to represent the intellectual integrity for which Jewish scholars have always been renowned – now have no credibility at all except among those committed to the Zionist cause. Meanwhile, regional and international respect for the rule of law, especially humanitarian law, has been greatly degraded. This is a special irony.

That assumes the the UN is objective. I don't believe anyone outside of the Third World and the 'non-aligned' countries considers that to be the case. Let's start with the most blatant indicator: Guess which UN member is the only one that can never serve on the Security Council. And guess which UN member is the subject of as many UN resolutions as all other countries combined. And no, it's not because we're so terrible. Far more Arab civilians have been killed in the 'Arab spring' than have been killed in the last 20 years in Israel.

Humanitarian law and the law of war are arguably the supreme moral artifacts of Atlantic civilization. Jewish lawyers made a disproportionate contribution to the crafting of both. The resulting legal principles were intended to deter the kinds of injuries and injustices that European Jews and other minorities had long suffered and to protect occupied populations from persecution by their occupiers. Both objectives are very relevant to contemporary Palestine. It is, however, hard to find any principle of due process, the several Geneva Conventions, or the Nuremberg trials that has not been systematically violated in the Holy Land. Examples of criminal conduct include mass murder, extra-judicial killing, torture, detention without charge, the denial of medical care, the annexation and colonization of occupied territory, the illegal expropriation of land, ethnic cleansing and the collective punishment of civilians, including the demolition of their homes, the systematic reduction of their infrastructure and the de-development and impoverishment of entire regions. These crimes have been linked to a concerted effort to rewrite international law to permit actions that it traditionally prohibited, in effect enshrining the principle that might makes right.

And that's just what Hamas has done....

For those who can stand it, read the whole thing.

Labels: Chas Freeman

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:31 AM