Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Hamas, not Israel, is the War Criminal

My op-ed on this topic is the lead editorial on U.S. News & World Report's website.
Posted by Marty Nemko at 12:27 PM
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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

SPOT-ON, Dr. Nemko. I enjoyed the article. The link didn't work for me, so I accessed it through US News.

NATO can carry out a 78 day bombing campaign on Serbia (1999), but Israel is not allowed to defend itself when attacked? Not one NATO country shared a border with Serbia -- and it was an intra-state conflict!

As for anti-Semitism -- could it be the fundamental problem? There's clearly an effort to instill a horrific culture/mindset in Palestinian youth, one that sees Jews and Christians as infidels. Non-Muslims are 'the other' and this mindset exists throughout the Muslim world. Look at the way the Jews are treated in Iran. Look at the way the Coptics are treated in Egypt. It is often said that Hamas protects the Palestinian Christians, but their numbers continue to shrink. It's the same story in Lebanon.

There is Islam...and there is 'the other'... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gi-c6lbFGC4

I think the Muslim world has become increasingly theocratic over the last thirty years. Even youth in Egypt are embracing a conservative Islam, and I know Mubarak is nervous. It seems that the death of Nasserism and the demise of the United Arab Republic (post '70-'71) opened up a vacuum in the region. The Saudi involvement in regional and extra-regional affairs increased dramatically in the early 70s and it wasn't all because of increased oil exports. Nasser's death gave the Saudis the breathing space to export the wahhabism brand of Islam across the Arab world and into northern Africa. Islam is weak when nationalism is strong. When nationalism is weak, Islam is strong.

February 3, 2009 at 2:47 PM
Anonymous said...

Again on anti-Semitism -- Europe tip-toes when it comes to its Muslim communities. Any support for Israel will anger the Muslims, causing them to riot. Anti-Semitism in Europe has been on the increase, but I think it is due to increased immigration.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4qb2DPpBoAA

February 3, 2009 at 3:56 PM
Anonymous said...

Troubling.

Also read Daniel Pearl's father in the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123362422088941893.html

February 4, 2009 at 6:49 AM
Anonymous said...

Dave, some of the evil culture warriors did cry about the US morphing into the Greater Albanian Air Force in their successful war against their nation.

Those of us above such culture wars naturally understood the moral superiority of that particular Muslim nation, and the unwashed liberal masses accepted Clinton's sales pitch, which was in essence "the US is just like Mother Theresa would be, if only she had first-strike capacity."

As Dr. Nemko has pointed out in the past, as a rule, Palestinians are worth less than Israelis.

http://martynemko.blogspot.com/2008/04/false-equivalency.html

I do wish he'd post the rate of exchange, though - I hadn't realized just how bad the exchange rate had gotten, and I'm taking bigger than expected losses in my position - apparently right now, Israelis are 100 times as valuable as Palestinians, and I'd completely missed the slide.

I would have liquidated my position earlier if I'd had access to accurate exchange rates.

February 4, 2009 at 10:22 AM
Marty Nemko said...

Politically incorrect candor often imposes a great price but I blog because I believe that the free and open exchange of ideas is crucial to a true democracy.

In that spirit, I will respond to the previous poster's implication that I believe that the Israeli people in fact are more worthy than the the Palestinian and other Arab civilizations.

I understand that in liberal orthodoxy, being "judgmental" has become an epithet and that we're supposed to believe that all peoples are equal (except for some primitive cultures, which we're supposed to believe are more enlightened.)

But in my honest opinion, the Israeli culture is among the most worthy in the world and therefore deserving of extraordinary measures to protect it and more forgiveness when they commit excesses (which usually are inadvertent or not systemic) while Palestinian/Arab/Islamic excesses are often deliberate--for example, using children and other civilians as human shields.

Here's why I believe that: The Israelis are an amazing people, having triumphed over extraordinary adversity with remarkable intelligence and drive. After the Holcaust, in recognition that the long-oppressed Jews needed a homeland, the United Nations gave the Jews just a mere sliver of desert, surrounded by long-standing enemies. Israel's population was largely made of Holocaust survivors a people who suffered unimaginably merely because they were Jewish, not to mention deprived of their education, family, and resources. Yet the space of just a few decades, the Israeli people built the Middle East's only modern democracy: having turned desert into farms, a largely uneducated populus into the one with the highest per capital percentage of book buyers and biomedical patents in the world and is the only democracy where women have equal rights. Meanwhile, in many Muslim countries and Palestine, which will be a country, are more interested in keeping life pretty much as they were in the Dark Ages.

Of course I value all human life and am saddened by the death of any Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim, especially innocent civilians, but I do value the Israeli civilization more than the Arab civilizations. If that makes me judgmental or even the dreaded word "racist," so be it.

February 4, 2009 at 12:18 PM
Anonymous said...

The vast majority of the world's cultures are ethnocentric. They all think their ways are the best. They are very intolerant of other cultures, and they build walls to keep them out. The Western cultural tradition, of which Israel is a product, is the only one that puts itself under a microscope. Does this make the West superior? I think we could create an intellectual argument for that, however, I believe the Japanese have the balance right. Japan, being the progressive society it is, imports values and ideas from foreign cultures which benefit Japanese society. They leave the rest alone. The Meiji Restoration is one example and made Japan's leap from the 18th century to the 20th century possible -- all in the final 3 decades of the 19th century. Now that's progress. Japan also has one of the strictest immigration laws on the planet. They do this to keep out inferior cultures and their value systems. We've all seen cars burning in Paris. Do we see the same in Tokyo? They keep the scum far away from Japanese shores. Europe and North America take in the brown skins. What have the brown skins taken to British shores? Polygamy and Sharia Law (Sharia courts), honor killings. Yes, polygamy is now legal in the UK. It's happening all over Europe and the America isn't far behind. Do you see Japan taking in brown skins, the people who refuse to assimilate and reject the values of the indigenous people? Hell no. They keep the browns out.

What do you think would happen if the Palestinians were given right of return?

1. The Jewish state would be voted out of existence.

2. The sucessor state would become another post-aparthied South Africa.

FORGET IT!

February 4, 2009 at 4:01 PM
Anonymous said...

"Those of us above such culture wars naturally understood the moral superiority of that particular Muslim nation, and the unwashed liberal masses accepted Clinton's sales pitch, which was in essence "the US is just like Mother Theresa would be, if only she had first-strike capacity."

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Anonymous,

NATO's post-conflict peacebuilding efforts have not been successful. Kosovo is nothing but a failed state. Bosnia isn't doing much better and the government is beginning to question the existence of the semi-autonomous Serbian enclave. I think we will see another Balkan war in the next decade. And these places will be staging grounds for jihadi attacks in Europe. You'll see...

February 4, 2009 at 4:29 PM

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