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Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Gaza and the British Reaction



In the aftermath of continuing operations in Gaza and missile strikes across Israel our reception at a town fair in Richmond, South London was mixed but much of it was hostile.  I did not handle my second activist fair at all well.

One picture on display at our stall was of a Palestinian Poster ‘Boy’ clutching an automatic rifle and surrounded by weapons and slogans – the kind of poster we have become accustomed to Islamist terrorist groups releasing in the calamitous aftermath of successful suicide (homicide) bombings against civilian targets.  The caption read ‘these are the Palestinian civilians.’  Any casualties can be portrayed in the international press as horrific. It is unfortunate when even a single civilian is killed in war but with entire families willingly becoming human shields for HAMAS the press will play this card of ongoing Palestinian victim-hood with immense enthusiasm and unadulterated zeal.  It is time to redefine the 4th Geneva Convention. Missiles fired from civilian homes are not, to quote French fascist political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, ‘a minor point of detail.’

That poster led to a formal complaint which was lodged with police; names and addresses were taken down.  We were coerced into covering up the photo. This was our first failure. Perhaps we should have known better. It was an own-goal.

Next, the PSC (Palestine Solidarity Campaign) came and photographed our stall.  This was clearly, an act of intimidation.

One of the English PSC activists questioned a Christian friend of Israel on our stall. Upon learning of his religious identity he told him, without a moment of shame that he, a Christian, was lower that ‘those Jews.’  This Pro-Palestinian and British (‘Jewish’) racist is no different to any member of the extreme right.  I confronted him with my outrage.  I repeated his comments for all to hear.   He walked away.

His racialist demeanor is the Palestinian movement itself.  The horrifying aspect of this English PSC supporter is that he so easily slipped into the well established pattern utilised by all bigots of compartmentalising humanity into ‘friend’ (absolute supporter) and ‘enemy.’  But for the PSC and fellow believers the enemy is without any redemptive qualities that would save them. This is nascent Nazism.  These people are intellectually no different to the demons that lined up their opponents in Iraq and applied machine-gun justice to the settlement of their differences.  Of course our PSC campaigners are not IS (The Islamic State); they are the bureaucrats, the stoic, the ever smiling and calm but resolute supporter whose determination to eradicate their enemy has no boundaries.

Lots of people (including a gay couple) condemned the asymmetric unfairness of the conflict.   I was somewhat unhinged by this because there can be no ethical justification for this paradigm. If I asked how many Israeli or Jewish deaths would satisfy our interlocutor’s sense of balance they would reply by re-emphasizing the inequality of the battle with even greater vehemence.  I hoped that at least some of those questioners were expressing frustration at their inability to understand the roots of the continuing crisis in Gaza and also understood that any answer to the question (besides ‘zero’) would be unethical.  But I doubt it.  F16 fighter jets, drones and the 'Iron Dome' defense network deployed against ‘primitive’ Palestinian missiles create an asymmetry that the Judeophobic supporter of Palestine cannot or will not ever accept. The hundreds of millions of dollars that Israel has spent on bomb shelters and reinforced rooms in people’s homes will never be recognized by the anti-Zionist chauvinist.  HAMAS has no intention of investing money in protective structures or sirens for its citizens.  The higher the number of civilian deaths the greater is the global sympathy they garner for their cause.  Don’t forget also the millions that go directly into the pockets of the HAMAS Echelon.

Foolishly, I tried to explain that tens of millions of dollars of aid money had been diverted by Gaza’s religious (Islamist) regime for the purpose of constructing tunnels into Israel. Those tunnels are built with the purpose of kidnapping and committing mass murder against civilians. 

Attempting to illustrate that it is the choices we make that define us, was wholly futile.

And the Settlements.  Explaining that according to HAMAS and the majority of Palestinians, all of Israel is a settlement was similarly without benefit. The retort, even to those who professed ‘sympathy’ for Israel was that the settlements (to the uncommitted onlooker this is any construction in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem) are nothing less than an abomination.

Two journalists (they said they were, and we failed to ask for their credentials) photographed some of our leaflets.  They ignored any questions from us and spoke at us with imperious and contemptuous disdain.  Why they simply did not take leaflets was beyond our simple understanding but they were there to make a point.  Again, this was intended to intimidate us.

One shameless fool said all Israelis are conquerors. He also said that the Palestinians (whose identity is defined as wholly Judenfrei) ‘owned’ Palestine and had owned Palestine for 5,000 years.  This was even too much for my normally unflappable friend. He was enraged. The final Roman conquest of the Israelites at the turn of the Christian era, some 1,900 years ago, did not wholly destroy the Jewish presence.   It was the Roman Emperor Hadrian who renamed the Land of Israel, Syria Palaestina (in 131 CE) as one of the measures undertaken to erase the cultural identity of the Jews.  The Arabs conquered the Land of Israel in 638 CE and it was their actions that ultimately decimated both land and people.

A Palestinian narrative that removes any Jewish claims to history is an essential pillar of the Palestinian faith.  Part of this strategy involves repositioning the Jewish Jesus as a Palestinian.  Any true person of faith should be enraged by the sacrilegious nature of this act. The Palestinian narrative is based on hatred, the worship of death and an involuntary identity constructed around ‘eternal’ (until victory) victim-hood that robs us, and them, of free will.  The voluminous amount of bile that oozes daily from Palestinian society is both a theological abomination and a secular aberration that defines an ethically corrupt people.

Through the Internet anyone with eyes and ears can marvel at the unforced conformity that characterizes this apparently irreparable flaw in Palestinian attitudes.  It is not however untypical of a people who truly believe themselves to be existentially superior to their enemy.  It guides their every interaction with both Israelis and Jews.

A Palestinian Jesus can only ever be a Jesus, not of love or of peace but a Jesus of brutality, hate and conquest.  What does it say therefore of the current Presbyterian Church (in the USA especially) and other reactionary followers, such as those members of the PSC that they so wholly embrace this devilish and Orwellian restatement of both Jewish and Christian history.

It was that first encounter with the PSC (which positioned pro-Israel Christians in a place ‘lower’ than ‘those Jews’) that ruined my day! But the blows were also cumulative.  To come that close to evil is an unnatural experience for most of us. Or perhaps when the individual chooses to wallow in ignorance it locates them on a plane below that of evil. But does it make them less guilty? In the PSC version of religious faith, mercy is only for the believer. One of those vile propagandists speaks against us at churches throughout the South of England.

It is that evil which we must confront if we are to be saved from an escalation of a magnitude similar to events that have arisen over the last few days in Toronto, Paris and Antwerp.  In Toronto the police stood by while a man was beaten up by Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, the same righteous souls who threatened an old and frail woman.  In Paris hundreds of demonstrators rioted outside Synagogues, trapping Jewish worshippers inside their buildings.  In Antwerp dozens of men shouted slogans about slaughtering Jews while three local (socialist, labour and green) politicians blissfully looked on.

In World War II, the Nazis set fire to synagogues with the local Jewish population trapped inside. In Africa, Muslims have done the same to Christian communities.

Immigration officers, governments run by elected officials who are more concerned with the powerful Muslim vote than with making a moral choice, and the police: They are all inactive.  This is where populist democracy fails.

This is Nazism – it does not matter whether it is inspired by the Right, by the Left, by the Liberal Democrats in Britain, or the Greens; by the Islamic faithful or by frustrated Arabs.

The propaganda war is violent; its intent from the Palestinian camp is terminal.

Wake up.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. it is true and beyond depressing

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  3. Suggest you keep a voice recorder running next time you do a stall - you need to have evidence of these comments available. Congratulations on your bravery in all this.

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