In Ramallah, West Bank, Palestinian police say that a family hanged a 15-year-old boy because they believed that he might be a collaborator with Israel. The police doubt that he was a collaborator due to his young age.
Police report that the boy was hanged by his own father, uncle, and cousin. One account says that the boy was tortured before being hanged.
For the full story, click here.
Mike S,
You said, “In truth the best solution would be for Jordan to absorb the West Bank, as it was before 1967 and for Egypt to absorb Gaza. Neither country is willing to do that because of highly unpleasant experiences themselves with the Arabs
calling themselves Palestinians.” I was wondering if you’d elaborate on why you think Jordan and Egypt are unwilling to go back to the pre-67 borders. Merely curious as to your learned take on the subject.
“CM
What I see in the world is that the immunizing effect that the holocaust had against human rights abuses is wearing off and supporters of all kinds of prejudicial ~isms proudly march under the banner of being against the great evil of political correctness.”
GWLSM,
I’ve been avidly following your dialogue with Carlyle and the back forth has been quite interesting. As he knows I mostly side with you on this, but I think you did misunderstand his point above. My sense is that he was using “political correctness” as the catch phrase of the bigots, who have been using it as cover to express their own bigotry. Carlyle has, since he began first posting here, maintained a consistency in his opinions and I believe he is truly not Anti-Jewish per se. Where I differ with him and where you have made a great case is in how he views the situation vis-a-vis Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State. I think he understands the need for a Jewish State, which is to his credit, but flounders rhetorically on just where that state should have been established, as you have pointed out.
Carlyle,
Your Germany solution to the “Jewish Problem” (i.e. deporting all Germans for their complicity with Hitler and the Nazi’s, would have created a situation far worse than what we see today in the ME. While it is an attractive solution, I for instance as a Jew will personally never visit Germany, the displacement of that many Germans throughout Europe would have created a situation in Europe today that would have made the ME seem like a walk in the park. The displaced Germans would be seething with hatred.
The European nations accepting them would be seething with hatred against the emigre’s and against the Jews for “being the cause” of foisting their one time Nazi oppressors onto them. As the decades passed, seven so far, this would have evolved into an Anti-Jewish feeling of appalling intensity and made the possible resurgence of Nazism in Europe a certainty. Except this time it wouldn’t be Germany, but all the other countries allied, antipathetically against a Jewish Germany.
The second point I’d like to make is this: The Israeli’s at this point cannot be displaced. They are an atomic power, with seven decades of having their backs up against the wall and would lay waste to everything before giving up Israel.
While I agree strongly with GWLSM’s presentation of Israeli history, at this point to me the point is moot, due to Israel’s atomic arsenal, they are not moving despite the equities of the situation. That being the case to me the only viable solution is the two state one and that seems the only hope.
In truth the best solution would be for Jordan to absorb the West Bank, as it was before 1967 and for Egypt to absorb Gaza. Neither country is willing to do that because of highly unpleasant experiences themselves with the Arabs
calling themselves Palestinians. Thus it is two state, or perpetual warfare deteriorating into a situation that would make today’s seem mild in comparison.
In my previous post in which I refer to “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” I forgot the author’s first name, his full name is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. The book makes extremely depressing reading but I think it is a true reflection of what happened.
Chris.
Yes I can be serious. Read Jonah Goldhagens book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. The holocaust was a German project not a Nazi one. Nazi antisemitism was simply a continuation of German Christian antisemitism which the Nazis stole. The Holocaust could not have happened but that the vast majority of Germans either thought it was a good idea or did not oppose it because of their antisemitism. If there were justice in the world something like my suggestion would have happened.
CM,
You cant be serious
GWLawSchoolMum.
I read about Shin Bet forcing sick Palestinians to collaborate by withholding access to medical treatment in Israel some time ago. I do not know where exactly the article was and I don’t as a rule bookmark every interesting article that I see. The reason that I referred you to the Guardian article is that it was the first on the hit list that Google gave and had the appropriate content. If you read the article you would notice that it is an Israeli Human Rights organization that is making the allegations.
As to where the Jewish homeland should be. If the death penalty is appropriate for murder then the penalty for genocide should be genocide. The proper thing to have done in 1945 would have been to reopen the death camps and process the non-Jewish Germans through them until they had been thinned down by the same proportion as had European Jewry, then to expel the rest and make Germany the Jewish homeland. The expelled Germans should have been accepted as refugees in other European countries with the ratios in which they were distributed being related to the relative extent of anti-semitism in those countries. Any compensation to the refugees should also have been apportioned to anti-semitic nations in the same way.
carlyle writes:
You seem incapable of assimilating anything that I say for emotional reasons. You don’t even notice that on many points I am in fact agreeing with you.
If you don’t like the Guardian article, retry the same Google search that I did, I gave you the search string in my earlier post, just edit out the first and last double quote, see if all 17500 can be dismissed as anti-semitic.
me: the only thing I can respond to is what you actually write. if you cite the guardian as evidence of what Israel is up to wouldn’t you care to know that it is the guardian of anti-semitism and little else?
I don’t know why you would think I need to google the history of my own family. not that all Jews are my family….
and if you notice I don;t argue….I ask you to elaborate.
you agree that Jews need a homeland. do you think it should be Israel?
it seems to me that you think it should be Brooklyn maybe.
GWLawSchoolMum
You seem incapable of assimilating anything that I say for emotional reasons. You don’t even notice that on many points I am in fact agreeing with you.
If you don’t like the Guardian article, retry the same Google search that I did, I gave you the search string in my earlier post, just edit out the first and last double quote, see if all 17500 can be dismissed as anti-semitic.
Carlyle
On Shin Bet pressuring sick Palestinians to spy in return for medical treatment here is one link http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/04/israelandthepalestinians.middleeast1.
me: the Guardian? seriously? this is perhaps the most anti-semitic screed since Der Sturmer.
Carlyle writes: When I wrote that the Jews need a homeland I was not being sarcastic.
me: okay then. Jews do have a homeland. It is Israel.
you: As you point out they have endured 1900 years of Christian bigotry. Some Christians might assert that the excesses of the holocaust have cured Christianity of antisemitism.
me: that would be nice it it were true. you can’t possibly think it is true, do you? not after that nice christian man shot and killed a guard at the holocaust museum, do you?
you: What I see in the world is that the immunizing effect that the holocaust had against human rights abuses is wearing off and supporters of all kinds of prejudicial ~isms proudly march under the banner of being against the great evil of political correctness.
me: then you’ d be delusional. given what humans are capable of the question isn’t why the holocaust happened, its why more stuff like this doesn’t happen and the answer to that is this: it does. there is no immunizing effect to genocide. I could go into greater detail if you’d like.
also, I have no idea what you mean when you write “under the banner of being against the evil of political correctness” what does that mean?
you: Many Jews now feel safe living in the USA,Australia, Europe and South America but it is understandable that many others do not.
me: its harder to feel safe when synagogues and jewish community centers around the world come under attack. they do. not often, but they do, sometimes resulting a a few deaths and sometimes in hundreds of deaths like the bombing in Buenos Aires some time ago.
you: The fear generated by pogroms culminating in the holocaust does not wear off unless it is over many hundreds of years, and it is my opinion that a resurgence of vicious Christian Jew hatred is possible given that so many who call themselves Christian are members of anti-everything hate cults, better to call them Christian Taliban or Christofascists.
me: in order for fear to wear off people have to not only feel safe but be safe. I don’t care what they call themselves. one label is as good as another.
you: If I were a Jew I would certainly want a safe place to flee if or when the pogroms return. So yes the Jews need a homeland, not just want one.
me: okay then, so where would you go? where do you think I should run when the pogroms return? right now, the only country that would have me, no questions asked, is Israel. I think if you talk to the average American Jew you’d be told that we feel safer in the world, safer in general because of the existence of Israel.
what the world does not seem to like are strong Jews…. armed Jews. we are better loved when we are dead.
On Shin Bet pressuring sick Palestinians to spy in return for medical treatment here is one link http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/04/israelandthepalestinians.middleeast1.
It is the first of 17,500 that came up when I submitted the following search string to Google:-
“”Shin Bet” Palestinians from Gaza not allowed to cross into Israel unless they collaborate”.
GWLawSchoolMum.
The principle by which Australia justified the confiscation without compensation of Aboriginal land was “Terra Nullius”, that the aborigines wandered over the land but did not own it. “A land without a people for a people without a land” or something very similar was the slogan that the Zionists used to claim Palestine for themselves.
The link for Benny Morris did not work in the previous post. Here it is again http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris.
GWLawSchoolMom
You say “your insistence that Israel is a criminal state guilty of ethnic cleansing occupies the part of your brain you dedicated to world affairs.”
It is futile to judge collective entities such as nations or peoples by the same standards of law and morality by which one judges individuals. All nations are psychopaths. Nothing that Israel has done or is doing to the Palestinians is any worse that the things that Australia has done in the past to the unwanted indigines and their descendants or that the USA has done to the American Indians or Indonesia is doing to the natives of West Papua. However in the case of Australia and the USA these events have been edited out of the history that reaches the common people and these are unaware of the prior “criminal” acts of their great nations. In Australia right wingers use the term black armband history to describe the works of Henry Reynolds and the few other historians who concentrate on relations between Australians and the unwanted descendants of unlawful migrants who arrived 40,000 years before the rightful owners. Israel also has its revisionist historians who are reinterpreting events just prior to and soon after the establishment of the state of Israel, for example Benny Morris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris
and I have no doubt that he is as much reviled by Israeli rightists as is Henry Reynolds by their Australian equivalents.
I did not say Israel is a criminal state, simply that it is a state acting as other states do and have done in similar circumstances. It is you who are reading into what I said the accusation of criminality. Things that are crimes when done by individuals are not crimes when done by states unless that state is comprehensively defeated in war as was Germany in 1945. It is murder and robbery if you or I kill one person and rob them but it is not murder and robbery when a state kills 100,000 and steals their land.
GWLawSchoolMom
When I wrote that the Jews need a homeland I was not being sarcastic. As you point out they have endured 1900 years of Christian bigotry. Some Christians might assert that the excesses of the holocaust have cured Christianity of antisemitism. I as an ex-Christian atheist remain skeptical. What I see in the world is that the immunizing effect that the holocaust had against human rights abuses is wearing off and supporters of all kinds of prejudicial ~isms proudly march under the banner of being against the great evil of political correctness.
Many Jews now feel safe living in the USA,Australia, Europe and South America but it is understandable that many others do not. The fear generated by pogroms culminating in the holocaust does not wear off unless it is over many hundreds of years, and it is my opinion that a resurgence of vicious Christian Jew hatred is possible given that so many who call themselves Christian are members of anti-everything hate cults, better to call them Christian Taliban or Christofascists.
If I were a Jew I would certainly want a safe place to flee if or when the pogroms return. So yes the Jews need a homeland, not just want one.
Mike S and anyone that cares,
I think we can all make this Blawg better if we all take the approach of no nasty direct personal attacks. Attacks, yes trying to figure out ones logic. I have been guilty and I have been taking the High Road sense.
Thank you. The only options available as the Professor said is to ban or block these type of unkind attacks.
“GWLSM, you haven’t tried to stay out of the personal hoo-hah, as you say, for one moment. If there is popularity contest going on, you’re running it and you started as soon as you arrived.”
Patty C,
It really would be nice for awhile to hear from you with the depth of intelligence we all know you have. It does begin to seem that you resent almost every newcomer to JT’s blog and take pains to attack, rather than welcome them. You are old enough and smart enough to know that change in everything is inevitable. I have no doubt that in the halcyon days of yore, prior to my time, JT’s blog was a treasure house. That was what attracted me to it in the first place. Yes too there are annoying trolls, but i think that we would all continue to enjoy the experience even more, if you attacked the real trolls more and people who contribute, despite your differences of belief with them less.
Mike
CM writes: I agree that the Jews need a homeland of their own free of Christian neighbors who are likely at any moment to form mobs and turn on them, murder them and divide their property.
me: huh? when did I ever suggest that Jews are or ought to be separatist? if you want to get sarcastic, that’s fine. I enjoy a rapier like wit but remember the first rule in writing in that style is that you have to have the kernel of fact.
you: The core problem is finding an empty land where they could make their homeland without displacing by either ethnic cleansing or genocide the indigenous population. Such an empty land did not exist. Before Zionist immigration the population of the Ottoman province of Palestine consisted of about 300,000 Muslims and 40,000 Jews. This does not fit the definition of unoccupied.
me: the early zionists went to what we now call Israel for many reasons chiefly among them, an uninterrupted historical connection. had they been welcomed fully and completely as citizens of the European christian nations the zionist movement would never have occurred. 1900 years of persecution doe that to a people. why do you believe that Jews finding unoccupied land is the criteria for zionism?
you: It is true that some of the colonists intended to live in harmony with the indigenous population, but the more realistic ones such as Jabotinsky did not and foresaw the necessity of expelling the Palestinians. There is nothing here that differs from the events of any other colonial settler nation. The process begins with the statement of benevolence towards the indigines and ends with either ethnic cleansing or genocide as in Australia or the USA. What makes Israel seem different is that Israel is still in the ethnic cleansing phase which was completed in the USA before the 20th century and in Australia by about 1960. The US and Australia have forgotten their dirty wars against their natives but in Israel it is still going on under the gaze of the whole world.
me: again, you speak from a place of conjecture and falsehood.
you: If Israel wants to complete the job as did Australia and the USA I suggest that they ban all foreign travelers and reporters for about 50 years.
me; clearly you are incapable of having a real discussion. your insistence that israel is a criminal state guilty of ethnic cleansing occupies the part of your brain you dedicated to world affairs.
israel left gaza and everyday rockets from gaza rain down on Israeli homes in s’derot. longer range missiles are now reaching ashkelon. soon they will reach tel aviv. what should the israeli response be?
Patty C writes:
You stated elsewhere that you used to blog incessantly and vehemently, daily for hours, with regard to the correctness of various religions claiming sole rights to the one and only
‘God’. AND that you ‘gave up’ and that you ‘don’t do it any more’.
me: yeah. I used to get involved in debates about religion. It was kind of fun in the beginning. I never disclosed what my point of view was and it’s true. I don’t do that anymore.
you: Only then you go on to suggest you were doing so without regard to our own Jewish bias. I don’t see that at all from you.
me: well, I am Jewish. and I never once wrote that I ignored that when I wrote from a jewish point of view.
You: You continue on with rants about how because you supposedly have been to Israel several times and have family there gives you greatest position to speak.
It doesn’t.
Me: of course it does. your experiences give you street cred just as mine give me street cred. if you’d ever travelled you’d know that
you: Their experience is not your experience. You can comment and reveal but only from arms length. That’s not what you attempt to do at all.
I never suggested that I shared experience with anyone,. I simply encouraged someone who’d clearly never been to israel that perhaps going might clarify some misconceptions. it could. it might. staying home and reading anti zionist propaganda does not edify or add to experience.
you: No more so than your initial statements that your mother and grandmother were supposed Holocaust survivors. And I am truly sorry if they really were but that is also still not happening now to you or anyone else – in WWWII Germany. Hitler is dead.
me: yeah. hitler is dead. the stuff he did to people is not. and stuff like that does happen with alarming frequency. darfur.
you: There are other things going on in the world, TODAY, which we all need to be concerned about with similar foreknowledge that can only be drawn from history.
me: yeah. there are. how do you work for peace?
you: p.s GWLSM, you haven’t tried to stay out of the personal hoo-hah, as you say, for one moment. If there is popularity contest going on, you’re running it and you started as soon as you arrived.
me: really. then why don’t you do what you do best? stay on the personal attack. dredge up, if you can, one post where I got involved in who might be using someone else’s name.
you: I have a sister-in-law just like you. You fool no one with the possible exception of my oldest brother who I imagine has nothing but respect for CA community property laws, also.
Otherwise, he should have divorced her years ago.
me: feel free to ignore my posts. I don’t think you can. I think you lie for this stuff. it makes you feel alive.
Carylton writes:
We are arguing at cross purposes.
I am sure that Israeli Hospitals are every bit as good as you say they are and accept all races and religions as you say, but that is irrelevant to the point I am trying to make. My point is that the Israelis use the withholding of access to hospital as a means to coerce sick Palestinians to collaborate. This is not done at the hospital doors but at the crossing points from Gaza and The West Bank into Israel where Shin Bet turns sick Palestinians back unless they agree to collaborate.
me: I am not arguing. are you? you seem to be making stuff up and I am responding with what life in Israel is actually like.
your point is false. Israelli do not provide medical care to coerce anything. it just is not done.
if someone has told you otherwise they are lying and chances are don’t know a single israeli doctor ( I know scores) and have never been to israel.
let me know when you are planning a trip. I’d be happy to get you connected with some people who’d be happy to show you what life is really like.