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So you belong to a group of people who are feeling offended by other people’s attitudes towards you? Is that right?
Well, here is some advice from someone whose people have been offended by other peoples’ attitudes, hate speech, assaults, random and mob murders, mass evictions, and organised genocides on a scale not known before or since. The advice – “Get a life! Get on with living!”
My people have been insulted, humiliated, despised and rejected to such an extent that it is the Western tradition and the vituperation directed against us is the longest hatred. This venom goes back more than 3,000 years.
Since we first lived amongst the ancient Egyptians, we were despised by them and then by their conquerors, the ancient Greeks and Romans. We have been evicted from every European country, unless we were first killed or handed over to organised killers.
If your ancestors, dear reader, are European of any sort, they threw us of their countries, or stood aside while we were evicted, persecuted and murdered. If you’re a Muslim, your ancestors, in the days of the great Islamic Empires, relegated us to the inferior status of dhimmi.
Many of you are descended from ancestors who participated in the Crusades, which ‘incidentally’ killed my people while plundering through Europe en route to ‘liberating’ Jerusalem from the Muslims.
We were evicted from England in 1290, from Spain and Portugal in 1492, confined to the Pale of Settlement in Czarist Russia and forced into paying Russian “candle” and “box” taxes levied only on us.
We were not welcomed, despite being on the electoral roll, in the British Parliament, until 1885. Our numbers at Harvard, Princeton and Yale universities were limited. We were excluded from the Royal Sydney Golf Club and the Melbourne Club.
More recently, of course, the Final Solution, to which but a gallant and courageous few of your recent forebears objected. Your grandparents were citizens of countries, including Australia, which refused sanctuary to my people trying to flee Nazi terror.
And, after we finally managed to establish a sanctuary on a tiny piece of ancestral Mediterranean land, from which we had repeatedly been ejected over the past 2,500 years, 900,000 of us were thrown out of nearby Islamic countries. Having established that tiny sanctuary, my people have been repeatedly attacked, not only by invading armies, but by international organisations whose constituent nations are so dependent on Islamic oil that they care nothing for criticising or opposing those attacks.
And you are offended! Offended by something said about, or denied to, your people in the last few years or centuries. Sorry, but that does not compare with our multi-millennial entitlement to take genuine offence.
So emulate us and get a life! That is what we have done – and still do. As individuals. We have not spent 3,500 years wallowing in self-pity. We have got on with it.
Above all, we have valued education. Our Nobel Prize and Fields Medal recipients are totally disproportionate to our numbers. Imagine 0.2% of the world’s population winning more than 22% of Nobel prizes in medicine and the sciences! Our little strip of Mediterranean land provides the technology you use every day in you iPhone, your USB sticks and your computers.
Oh, you might still be wondering which group of people I belong to. The group of people still hated by tens of thousands – as expressed in their websites and blogs, and whose existence is threatened daily by Iranian mullahs. A clue… our motto is “To life!” Does that ring a bell? What about Fiddler on the Roof?
So, to my fellow citizens who feel offended, who feel insulted, by the way some bigot refers to them, who feel that “the others” owe you something , to you I say get over it! Get a life! By all means possible, draw attention to your critics’ and tormenters’ stupidity, but don’t let hurt feelings dominate your life. Get on with making the most of what you can, with your own talents.
We Jews have done it for 3,500 years. You can too.
You have made your very valid point spectucalarly Peter in this sparkling, feisty essay.
Well said, Peter, it should be displayed at every party branch office and recited prior to every party meeting just as we used to say the Oath Of Allegiance at schools in days gone by.
And when we were permitted to enter clubs, guilds, universities, orchestras, militaries, etc – there were no positive discrimination quotas or policies, and no demands for them – we just got on with it alongside others.
Professor Jordan Peterson has a theory that the modern offense industry and the need for safe spaces has been spawned by a nation of older, single-children parents who ‘hothouse’ their children – these same who don’t have siblings and never ‘learn their place’ in the pecking order – and who don’t let them grow resilience. I remember Theodore Dalrymple saying to Amanda Vanstone on an ABC Radio program a couple of weeks ago (yes, I accidentally was passing the execrable ABC on’the dial’and recognized her voice) that if you allow young people the opportunity to experience and survive adversity they gradually develop the confidence to experience another, bit by bit, knowing they CAN survive the experience.
Fancy having to tell people stuff like this!! You just couldn’t make it up. Imagine the nation battling WW2 in the current cultural environment!!!!
God only knows where we would be if the Saturday people were extinguished. They are the eternal flame..
Very well said. I have always held the Jewish people in awe at their capacity to survive and prosper. Equally I am appalled by the modern generation who panic and blubber at the most minor setback. I blame the latter on an education system that allows no failure. The kid who comes last still gets some sort of prize. The avoidance of subjects that are deemed too hard and may produce a lower HSC mark is pathetic. It certainly does not help the student to face the reality of living. Besides, and this may explain some of the success of Jews, one learns more from mistakes and failures than one ever learns from success.
Peter,
Inspirational! Time for the Greens to explain their BDS policy.
I have never been compensated for the trauma of one of my ‘indirect’ ancestors being massacred in 1692. Have you any idea the trauma this can cause today? It makes my victimhood predate the Oz aboriginal claims. Would therapy help, I wonder, or would $1M be a better option, or a Colouring Book of Troll Effigies …?
Thank you. Your article makes me proud to include the Judeo word in our Judeo Christian Culture.
Fortunately there are a few of us that carry an air of maturity about us, as our muscles sag a little, as our memories fade a little, yet we know of all you speak of and so celebrated 1948, as did the UN, much of America and even the USSR, though not the British government, who had made conflicting promises to both Arab and Jew. My celebration was partly based on Benny Morris’s 1948, because I was yet to be born.
In my teens I was invited to Que Que Synagogue, by Morris Hirsch, the head of my father’s practice, to watch the black and white footage of the Six Day War, and experienced a sense of shared exultation, at odds with my Anglo Saxon identity, but real nevertheless.
I followed Yom Kippur closely, and I was by then here in Australia, thousands of miles from Morris, my father, and everyone else back in Que Que. They were experiencing their own war, my father having to do his ‘tours’ of duty in combat areas, as a medical officer, Morris a little old for that by then. But having done my own National Service (before leaving Rhodesia) I had had a taste of what the Israelis were going through, just a taste, not the full three courses they had to wade through.
And as the world increasingly turned against Israel, in support of those she had defeated again and again; a world that no longer followed the 19th Century adage ‘to the victor the spoils’, instead the Woodrow Wilson philosophy of ‘peace without victory’ that sought to undo all the gains Israel had shed so much blood for, I remembered Morris, his son David, whom I went to school with, and many others who simply went about their lives in a manner no different to the the way I conducted mine. Circumstances enabled me to regard them no more or less victims than I, perhaps because a homeland enabled them to feel whole, whether or not they lived there.
My own homeland is lost to me, though I have made a home here in the one country in the world that came closest in heritage to the one I came from, to the extent I no longer feel any pangs for a past life I recall but dimly. My own heritage has bestowed sufficient riches, heaven knows how I’d feel had that been 3,500 years of culture.
When the lights go out in Europe, which they may well do in the not too distant future, they’ll burn brightly in a country that is both thousands of years old and yet just 69.
My great grandmother was a Jew whose name was Rubens; and my grandmother, who died in 1987, looked extremely Jewish and I often wondered why! Even without that family history (which I only learned within the last decade) I would still recognize and believe the Jews to be the greatest people. Ross Cameron says the same thing and I totally agree with him. This doesn’t mean they don’t play ‘hard ball’ when it suits them; they certainly do. But my eldest son is now also very proud of that family lineage, as am I. Just saying.
Jews are not a people. An Ethiopian Jew has the religion in common with a New York, Sydney, London or Manchester Jew, etc., and nothing else. A British Jew is more British than Jewish and ditto for an American, Belgian, Australian etc., Jew. Not race, not culture, nothing in common beyond the religion. Just like Christians, Moslems, Hindus etc.
Most Jews have no Semitic ancestry either given the intermixing throughout Europe for thousands of years and the conversions, sometimes forced in the earliest days. Jews have their own history of pogroms and violent conversions against others.
And Aborigines aren’t aborigines unless they have 100% aboriginal blood?
Let’s say the educated European Jews who excel in, well, EVERYTHING. And if they’re not a ‘people’ why have they gravitated to a “homeland”?
When a ‘progressive’ world that portrays Arab bullies as victims, supports a Palestinian goal of driving the Jews into the sea, then playing ‘hard ball’ begins to sound like an attractive alternative. But, as Netanyahu indicated in his speech to the UN, attitudes are changing, and Israeli innovation is sought after, and Israeli muscle is profoundly respected . . . not by everyone: there is a significant number of lefty Jews that openly identify with ‘progressive’ ideology, to whom the home of their forefathers seems more of an embarrassment, than a yearning for Aliyah.
You have to be kidding? Palestinians driving Jews into the sea? What a joke. Israel on a daily basis kills Palestinians and seeks to drive them out. That is a real threat because that could be attempted. It would fail, but it could be attempted.
Religions don’t get homelands. Jews have no home of their forefathers. Indeed, if they did it would be Iraq, once Mesopotamia, where their religion was first invented. You do realise they invaded and colonised parts of Canaan/Palestine in the first place and so are simply colonisers returning?
If religions had homelands, birthplaces, the Christians would have Palestine and the Jews a bit of Iraq. Good thing then that religions do not get homelands.
Driving the annihilation of the Jews is still part of the Hamas charter and has posed a major obstacle to peace negotiations. It is not a joke for them (just us). It is utterly false to say that Israel kills Palestinians on a daily basis. Where on earth did you get that? Bob Carr? One cannot conduct any sort of informed argument with statements like that.
Sorry to keep bringing up the name of Jordan Peterson every time, but he says about this and other insanity…”there will be a price to pay”.
Interesting you should mention Woodrow Wilson. He very nearly caused the Allies total defeat in WW1. As it was, thanks to British Intelligence proving to him the duplicity of the German leadership, we at least managed an armistice. The real lesson taken from WW1 and Treaty of Versailles was that there is only one way to end war and that is unconditional surrender. That is why the Allies were so clearly united in ending WW2 – which started as a continuation of WW1 because in reality it had only paused – with unconditional surrender. It has been proven time and again. Even in my own limited experience of the Falklands, there was never any wavering , any consideration of ‘ending the violence’. Only unconditional surrender would do. It works. And I believe that so long as the world prevents Israel from defeating its armed aggressors war against Israel will continue. It is the world’s ‘duty target’ as soldiers would call themselves in Northern Ireland.
PS. A legal act I particularly like is one dated 25 February 1947:
‘the Prussian State, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has de facto ceased to exist.
Guided by the interests of preservation of peace and security of peoples, and with the desire to assure further reconstruction of the political life of Germany on a democratic basis, the Control Council enacts as follows:
Article I
the Prussian State together with its central government and all its agencies is abolished.
Signed..
etc etc.
When it comes to restoring peace, that one act is a salutory lesson today.
Well put Mr Arnold.
When you are left bewildered on Sydney Docks at 16 or so and no one to meet you in Australia 1924, I can appreciate the commentary is stated excellently. My father was eventually placed on a farm 300 miles out and rose to overseer status before he died at 58 years. We never heard any whingeing or whining or racist comments. AlanIO
Great article. I just happen to have been writing a script for a radio program to be broadcast in November about music inspired by Sir Walter Scott. Many streets and places in Australia are named after his works or characters from his works and his home: Abbotsford (NSW and Victoria) Waverley, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, Peveril, Durward, and Saladin come to mind. The heroine of his romance ‘Ivanhoe’ is a Jewess, Rebecca. The novel inspired the opera Ivanhoe by Arthur Sullivan, Il Templario by Otto Nicolai and the cantata Ivanhoe by Camille Saint-Saens. They are stuffed full of brilliant music which was forgotten until recently. Sullivan’s Ivanhoe was restored on the initiative of the late Richard Hickox, who would have conducted but for his untimely death in 2008. Il Templario was rediscovered in 1937 when Goebbels was searching for pure German operas but war broke out before he had sanitised it to remove the flattering nature of the Jewish heroine Rebecca. Both the German and Italian publishers’ archives were destroyed during the war and it was lost again until the 1990s when the music historian Michael Wittmann (not the famous waffen-SS tank commander) was finally able to reconstruct it from various versions in 2006. The only complete recording is of that reconstruction performed by Chemnitz Opera in 2008.
Writing in 1819 Scott drew parallels with the twelfth century. He represents Anglo-Saxons, Normans and the third significant identity of the Jews. Jewish merchants were brought into England from Normandy where, as in most of France, they were subjected to waves of state sanctioned persecution and discrimination on account of their faith. They were not allowed to own land and few types of work were open to them. The Pope decreed money lending to be usury so finance and merchandising were really the only ways Jews could earn a living. Given the insatiable demands of rulers for money, Jews became both essential to and despised by the ruling classes, but many were quite rich as, indeed, are Isaac and his daughter Rebecca in Ivanhoe. The English resented them no less as financiers of oppressive Norman rule.
Scott describes Isaac’s daughter Rebecca, in some detail: her yellow silk turban, ostrich feather, diamond, gold and pearl jewellery set against her brown skin, her décolletage, exactly three clasps undone, “on account of the heat, which somewhat enlarged the prospect to which we allude. .. she was scoffed and sneered at by the proud dames who sat above her, but secretly envied ..”
The text is wonderful. “By the bald scalp of Abraham,” said Prince John, “yonder Jewess must be the very model of that perfection, whose charms drove frantic the wisest king that ever lived! What sayest thou, Prior …. she is the very Bride of the Canticles!”
“The Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,”—answered the Prior, “but your Grace must remember she is still but a Jewess.”
{The Normans had replaced the Anglo-Saxon senior clergy with French and Italian prelates, wholesale.}
Rebecca is condemned by the Norman Templars as a witch but saved by the gallant Ivanhoe in knightly combat.
At the end, Rebecca and Isaac decide to travel to Spain. In today’s commentaries their decision is explained in terms such as “hoping to find a more tolerant society.” This is puzzling because much of Spain was under the rule of the Almohad Muslim Caliphate of the Berbers. Scott’s text does not support this view and is closer to reality. In Scott’s text, Rebecca explains:
“I leave it, lady {addressing the Saxon heiress Rowena}, ere this moon again changes. My father had a brother high in favour with Mohammed Boabdil, King of Grenada—thither we go, secure of peace and protection, for the payment of such ransom as the Moslem exact from our people.”
Now there is a wee error in Scott’s text here: Mohammed Boabdil was not the King of Grenada in Richard I’s reign but the emir of Grenada in the late 15th & early 16th centuries.
Scott was specifically interested in the resolution of conflicts between systems of governance, cultures and peoples over time to form a new country or nation. His central and enduring theme in his works is to show discords and divisions in societies are overcome when people work together for the benefit of what they hold in common, their country. In a word, ‘patriotism’.
Scott’s ending, in which Ivanhoe gains the hand of Rowena and Rebecca’s love of him is rejected was much criticised. Scott defends it in his preface to later editions of Ivanhoe {Abbotsford, 1st September, 1830}, writing that, “not to mention that the prejudices of the age rendered such a union almost impossible,” he thinks a virtuous and noble character is degraded rather than exalted by material and purely emotional reward. It would be a dangerous and fatal doctrine to teach young persons, the most common readers of romance, that correct and principled conduct are rewarded in life by “gratification of our passions or attainment of our wishes.”
Well, most parents can probably relate to that. I wish politicians would.
Jews are not a people, beyond religious metaphor which makes followers of all religions a people in the same way.
Jews comprise all races and hundreds of nationalities. The first Jew was a convert, like the first Christian etc. If you drop Judaism you are no longer Judaism. If you convert to another religion you are no longer Jewish. If you convert to Judaism you become Jewish. Being a Jew is a religious label not a race, not a people.
Religion do not get land rights. Religions do not get self-determination. If they did then all religions would have the same right. Zionism, a fascist political spinoff from Judaism has sought to turn Jews into a people to justify the theft of Palestine and the continuing domination and abuse of the indigenous Palestinians.
What Jews don’t talk about is their history of slaughter and persecution of others, beginning in Canaan/Palestine and continuing today in Palestine, and the revolutionary roles they played in many cultures, like the Russian Revolution, combined with their belief in their own superiority and a refusal to fully integrate with the culture in which they lived, all of which played a part in attitudes toward them.
I have worked with and for Jews from many countries and Israelis, and they are racist, elitist and prejudiced toward non-Jews in the main. There are exceptions of course, but, as a religion this prejudice is encouraged because the life of a Jew is considered superior to all.
Note the elitists reference to Nobel Prizes, a Jewish fantasy which does not hold since many of these winners were not Jewish in any real sense. Jews are not a race, they are a religion. Einstein for instance had atheist parents and attended Catholic schools.
And having stood at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem in Palestine, I have listened to Jews recount a litany of wrongs done to them, not decades ago, but thousands of years ago – the eternal victims, displaying levels of psychological dysfunction which would be destructive in an individual and are equally destructive in a religion and the country which erroneously claims to represent it, Israel.
In the name of this religion, it is bigotry today which sees the Palestinians dispossessed and murdered as European colonists, claiming to be Jews – most are atheists and not Jewish – steal their country.
p.s. I have Jewish ancestors who dropped the religion and so my side of the family is no longer Jewish. Neither is it Lutheran, Protestant, Anglican, Greek Orthodox or any of the other religions which my ancestors practised.
But, I could be accepted in Israel as a citizen because my great-grandfather was Jewish, until he married out and dropped the religion, while non-Jewish Palestinians, Christian and Muslim, holding keys to homes in which their ancestors lived for seven centuries and more, in what is now UN Mandated Israel and even Occupied Palestine, are denied the right to live on their land and in their homes.
If the world has anything to learn from the behaviour of all Jews who support the colonial travesty, which is Israel, it is what not to do.
This is the blood-soaked sop the UN holds up to appease the horde of OIC members that fill its seats. It is the same sop European progressives suck from to regenerate that precious sense of righteousness they so effectively use whenever they feel the slightest bit of doubt about themselves.
From a tactile perspective, there is something tacky, even vile about a sop, but when right seems wrong, and wrong a standard to go by, then even a blood-filled sop serves well as an ideological icon.
The gore is the untold centuries of Jewish/Hebrew blood shed by those who have consistently regarded them as pariah. The few comparative drops of Canaanite blood, spoken of in the Torah pale into insignificance; whilst the comparatively few Palestinians killed do not even begin to compare with the number of Palestinians killed by their self imposed Hamas leaders, who use terror as a mechanism of control.
I wonder what Fatah feel about the events leading up to their expulsion from Gaza? And I wonder what Israelis feel about Fatah ‘martyrs’ who have public squares named after them, whose widows and children are handsomely pensioned off for the murders their sons or husbands or fathers have inflicted on the hated Jews? I wonder?
During those untold centuries of Hebrew/Jewish blood shed by others, there also exists the blood shed by Hebrews and Jews. There also exists relative peace and harmony.
Having traced my Jewish ancestors back 300 years, in Australia, England and Holland, I can find no persecution or bloodshed and their experiences were no different to those faced by my non-Jewish ancestors, in terms of deciding to emigrate to Australia.
So, comparatively few Palestinians killed, tens of thousands when Zionist forces took control of Palestine with some 700 villages wiped from the face of the earth and men, women and children slaughtered, is irrelevant in light of claimed Jewish suffering? Is that your position? Is that not elitist, racist and just plain wrong?
What the prison committee, Hamas, does, in the Gaza concentration camp, does not let Israelis off the hook for their war crimes and human rights abuses. And let’s be honest, radical I know, but the regular slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza prison, most of them children, mowing the lawn the Israeli army calls it, far surpasses anything done by Hamas.
The Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza concentration camp are there because Jewish and Zionist European colonisers stole their homes and land and drove them there decades ago. The theft of Palestine has been ongoing.
I wonder how Israeli Jews will cope with the one-state solution, now inevitable, where they get to share the land of Palestine with the indigenous people as equals.
Your hypocrisy and double standards are breathtaking although, having worked with and for Jews and Israelis and having spent time in UN mandated Israel I know your position is a common one, however unjust and deluded it may be.
Looking for Jewish bloodshed in Australia, England and Holland are the wrong countries. Change these to Russia, Ukraine and Poland (three amongst several others) and read up on the pogroms there. With regards to persecution, go to the Jewish museum in Sydney and after you’ve gone through the entrance there is a readers display cabinet with an open news paper from the early 1900s (I’ve forgotten the date and the publication) but the anti Semitic vitriol is breathtaking. That was here . . . in Australia.
Perhaps it’s time for you to read Benny Morris’s history of the lead up to and the actual war of 1948 before using Arab rhetoric about ‘stealing’ Palestinian land, particularly when there were not Palestinians in the protectorate known as British Palestine.
@Warty,
My point exactly. Many Jews lived peacefully throughout thousands of years and even during WWII.
Quote: Quote: Imagine you’re the Palestinians. Perhaps residents of East Jerusalem. Forty-seven difficult years are behind you; a big, depressing darkness lies ahead. The Israeli tyranny that dooms your fate declares arrogantly that everything will stay like this forever. Your city will remain under occupation “for ever and ever.” The defense minister, second in importance in the government that subjugates you, says a Palestinian state will never be established.
Imagine you’re Palestinian and your children are in danger. Two days ago, the occupation forces killed another child because “he lit a firebomb.” The words “Death to Arabs” were sprayed near your home. Everywhere you turn, a soldier or Border Police officer may shout at you. Every night, your home may be invaded brutally. You will never be treated like human beings. They’ll destroy, humiliate, intimidate, perhaps even arrest you, possibly without trial.
There are close to 500 administrative detainees, a record number in recent years. If one of your dear ones is arrested, you will have difficulty visiting him. If you succeed, you’ll get half an hour’s conversation through a glass window. If your dear one is an administrative detainee, you will never know when he’ll be released. But these are trivia you grew accustomed to long ago.
Maybe you’ve also grown accustomed to the land theft. At every moment a settler can invade your land, burn your plantation or torch your fields. He will not be brought to trial for this; the soldiers who are supposed to protect you will stand idly by. At any moment, a demolition order or random eviction order may appear. There’s nothing you can do.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47967.htm
Thank you for submitting a sample, but when you’re upholding and attempting to propagate long term traditions like this well known one, you really shouldn’t leave out so much of that Megillah. You neglected the blood soaked Passover cakes, poisoned wells to spread plagues, and the slaughter of the Palestinian known as Jesus.
Clearly you do not read the Bible, or Shakespeare, or anything much. It is a race and has always been so regarded. The crime of genocide is predicated on the fact of Jews being a race. Having it your way would mean there is no such thing as genocide and no-one could claim to be aboriginal unless they can prove they have 100% aboriginal blood, clearly impossible.
Quote: So emulate us and get a life! That is what we have done – and still do. As individuals. We have not spent 3,500 years wallowing in self-pity. We have got on with it.
Go and stand at the Wailing Wall if you want to know about thousands of years wallowing in self-pity. That is exactly what they are wailing about.
And if Jews have ‘gotten on with it’ given that even during the Second World War most lived safely in countries beyond the war zone, why is it necessary to dispossess and murder Palestinians in order to take their country, since, patently it is not required and is no more than point-scoring?
Why, if Jews as a religion have suffered so much and ‘gotten on with it’ do too many choose to inflict the same sort of suffering on Palestinians?
The occupation of Palestine and the abuse of its people demonstrate that not only have Jews ‘not gotten over it’ but that the religion is vindictive and vengeful and has a need to punish someone, anyone, in the name of Jewish ‘suffering.’
RosRoss,
Name five good things about Israel or Judaism.
There are many good things about Israel as there is about any society, but the bad outweighs any good and until Israel creates one state where indigenous and coloniser share equally, it will be a travesty of democracy and a pariah.
Judaism like all religions, contains within itself some profound insights and thoughts, but the bad outweighs the good, as it does for all religions.
The fact is, there is nothing particular about either Israel or Judaism in a positive sense to be named. The religion for instance like all the rest, draws upon more ancient beliefs and religions, most particularly ancient Egypt, and did not create itself from nothing.
Israel as a colonising nation is worse than most and will not establish anything positive until it ends the occupation and military rule.
rosross,
So, giving citizenship to an ethnic group who regularly kill, stab, shoot, axe and murder children does not qualify as being overly tolerant?
Fighting six-wars to survive while outnumbered 34:1 deserves no admiration or round of applause?
I think you have covered your position perfectly with the comment: “… there is nothing particular about either Israel or Judaism in a positive sense to be named.”
Why has the Gaza Strip never developed a civilisation, nor the West Bank under Abbas?
Oh, the Jewish Israelis who regularly kill, burn, shoot, murder children already have citizenship.
As a matter of principle, in this supposedly enlightened age, the occupier has all of the power and all of the responsibility and Israel has no right to refuse human rights and freedom to the indigenous people whose land they have stolen.
Aborigines killed settlers because they took their country. The remarkable thing about the Palestinians is that over more than 70 years of horrendous slaughter and abuse by their colonisers, the violence in terms of response has been small.
Israel’s wars were self-inflicted and self-created. When you steal someone else’s country they will fight you. When you hold them under brutal and murderous military occupation they will fight you. Did you not know the right to resist an occupier is written into the Geneva Convention?
Israel is heavily armed and its ability to kill Palestinians and Palestinian allies is about as remarkable as the capacity of the English settlers to kill Indians in the Americas, given their superior weaponry.
Why has the Gaza concentration camp never developed? Name me concentration camp which has.
Why as the West Bank, you mean Occupied Palestine, West Bank is just a Zionist euphemism so they don’t have to say the P for Palestine word, not developed? Name me any people living under brutal and murderous military occupation which has?
The Palestinians have justice, time and numbers on their side and as a pariah in the world, Israel will ultimately be forced to do what every other coloniser has done, create one state with equal rights for all.
The only reason it has not is religious bigotry. Are you saying you support discrimination in the name of religious bigotry? For that is the cause you support.
It was called Palestine only after the Balfour declaration because it is the name of the land according to the Bible. To know what it was before you need to look up the organisation of the Turkish Caliphate of Islam. enjoy your homework.
Can I take it, from your position, you believe the occupier has all of the rights and might is right. Which means you were on the side of the Germans and Japanese in World War Two, and you believe Australia should have done to the Aborigines what Israel does to the indigenous Palestinians – lock them into concentration camps, or behind fences, checkpoints, denying them freedom and human rights.
Do you think we would have gotten away with it? Is it too late or is it just Israel which gets to commit human rights atrocities and war crimes in order to maintain occupation and colonisation?
Why is Israel a tiny beacon of creativity in a dystopian s*** heap of ME living hell in all directions around them? According to your breathless ranting, it is because Israel lives off Palestinian suffering. A total non-sequitur actually. You have no logical response to my opening question.
As it happens there are duties of an occupier in international law. One is to keep the peace. Israel does debate very seriously issues under the laws of occupation also in respect of property, so it does not allow its people to buy unoccupied property of non-resident Arabs.
I suppose you could argue that firing rockets indiscriminately into civilian populations kills relatively few people because they are now used to it and know how to take shelter so it isn’t really a disturbance of the peace. It’s just people letting off steam and enjoying a nice loud bang. But most people would see it as the duty of their government to do rather more about it.
And I never hear any warnings from these murdering so called Palestinians, Hamas or Hezbolla in the same way that Israeli forces give warnings before attacking known terrorist cells, rocket launching sites, comms HQs and other enemy installations carefully positioned among civilians for protection. Oops sorry my mistake. the civilians are carefully positioned to protect the rocket installations.
rosross, if you read my reply to warty you will see that international law provides occupying powers with a great deal of freedom to do much good. Without the legality of occupying powers Europe would be entirely a Nazi state. And you can thank the Jews for defining the crime of genocide, not just by being its victims but actually defining it and having it made international law.
The Israel Philharmonic, Rubinstein, Itzak Perlman, Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Mendelssohn, Einstein, Heifetz, Emmanuel Ax….oh gosh, that’s more than 5.
Well, as part of that getting over it, you might want to remember that Benjamin Disraeli had entered parliament in 1837 and had been PM *twice* before your 1885 figure. And while I wouldn’t mention this anywhere any neonazi vermin could hear it and use it as propaganda, you really should look at the Jewish involvement in the medieval slave trade before commenting on the nations who exiled their enslavers.
Nor does ‘liberating’ need quotation marks when the casus belli of the crusades was the Islamic massacre of pilgrims peacefully travelling to Jerusalem. And since you (commendably) take the time to mention opponents to more recent massacres, you should recall that both princes and clergy sought to stop the massacres of the crusaders; that Emperor Henry IV and St. Bernard of Clairvaux were among those who condemned them; and the massacres were only possible because the vermin performing them were moving across borders rendering them safe from pursuit by either secular or religious authorities.
But despite that – on the whole, an excellent article.
Gardner.Peter.D. Just to add to your comments to Rosross (and I’m sure you are full aware of this anyway, but Rosross may not): Under the Oslo II accord, the West Bank was divided into three separate administrative zones, Section A being exclusively Palestinian; Section B being jointly administered by Israel and the Palestinian authority, and Section C being exclusively administered by the Israelis. All the new settlements have been going up in this Israeli administered sector.
Warty,
Give up your denial! There is nothing good about Israel. It is the epitomy of evil (for some). A Jordanian friend of mine (now resident in Dubai) won a scholarship to Tel Aviv University back in the late 1970’s. He was fully accepted and achieved a good degree. When he returned home with a degree in Electrical Engineering his family asked him if he now knew how to make bombs, and had he picked out the best targets. His reply resulted in his ending up in hospital. He fled back to Israel where he got a good, well-paid job and (amusingly to me at least) continued threats from his family to kill him for causing the family shame – and requests for money. I met him when he came to work in Oz, then we met up again when I worked in the M.E.. He has disowned his family as they continue to claim ‘victimhood’, though not even either parent has ever left Jordan since they were born there and were granted citizenship.
I am the ultimate victim as my DNA says I have 9 x ethnic strains – and my children have 11! True mongrel globalists.
rosross has a blind hatred that cannot be removed as there is always another inequity to be found. Yes, those damned medieval Jewish slave traders were unforgivable, and much worse than the benign ISIS M.E. Arab and North African ones we have today. You just have to keep things in perspective …
All of a sudden the Jewish nation of Israel is responsible for all the ills of the world. Well, this is playing right out of ‘progressive’ post-modernist song sheet. Here was me thinking they were actually perfect human beings in need of protection, and not a proud, resilient nation of people who’ve been spectacularly successful in whatever they’ve done and become worthy of, er, extermination for their trouble. Industrial strength jealous and envy isn’t far behind any of this.
Well, for some, like ‘rosross’, Jews are the repository of a deep-seated annoyance, disquiet and resentment. This is the fact of life, which we had to live with for millennia. While there’s nothing rational about this prejudice, this feeling is real enough for any Jew to contend with. I will not go into a dissertation about the reason/s for its existence – it is does exist, contrary to all facts and existing reality. As long as people like this limit themselves to the boundaries, ‘rosross’ has confined himself to – I have no problem with it. That is not my problem but exclusively his own. After all, I will not break down in despair just because ‘rosross’ does not like the Jews. In our law-abiding society the freedom to chose and to express one’s feelings and thoughts must be paramount. However, I must thank people like ‘rosross’ for their contribution to the Jewish success. Their palpable and consistent antipathy towards the Jewish people significantly contributed towards many a Jewish achievements, by creating a feeling of a free spirit and the drive to succeed no matter what, as well as creating a precondition for the continuous Jewish survival, instead of disappearance. Therefore, I have to pass my sincere thanks to all non-violent anti-Semites for being so helpful in the fascinating saga of the Jewish survival and success.
‘rosross’ is possibly Roslyn Ross. Browse here for a few samples – https://disqus.com/by/twitter-27121241/