{"id":7672,"date":"2014-07-23T04:50:39","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T11:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7672"},"modified":"2014-07-22T08:57:28","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T15:57:28","slug":"the-incoherent-excuses-for-hating-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-incoherent-excuses-for-hating-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"The Incoherent Excuses for Hating Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thorton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"Photo
Photo via www.marketoracle.co.uk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Israel\u2019s military operation to degrade Hamas\u2019 ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is the hatred of Israel by so many Europeans, ranging from leftover leftists and idealizers of the dark-skinned \u201cother,\u201d to far-right xenophobes and morally addled Christians. Whatever its\u00a0origins, one thing their bitter hatred of Israel does not have is any foundation in coherent principle.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Take the displeasure aroused by the continually publicized disparity in deaths between Gazans and Israelis in the current ground operation to stop the rockets. Many critics seem affronted that Israel has taken great pains to protect its citizens by building bomb shelters and developing the Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and so have suffered only 2 civilian deaths. They see the videos of dead Palestinian Arab children and blame those deaths on Israel\u2019s \u201cdisproportionate response\u201d instead of Hamas\u2019 indifference to their own people\u2019s safety. They ignore Hamas\u2019s tactic of using their own women and children as human shields, ordering them not to flee the fighting, and storing explosives and munitions in tunnels under mosques, hospitals, apartment buildings, and schools, subterranean space that could be used to protect their people.\u00a0They wink at\u00a0Hamas\u2019\u00a0conscious aim to engineer such casualties in order to create the \u201cpropaganda of the deed,\u201d the purpose of which is to elicit precisely the uncritical condemnations of Israel\u00a0that European useful idiots reflexively provide. They disregard Israel\u2019s\u00a0unprecedented\u00a0efforts<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to warn civilians that bombs are headed their way\u2013\u2013phoning them on cell phones and land-lines, sending text messages, scattering leaflets, and dropping warning duds on the roofs of targets. And of course, the Israel-haters don\u2019t care that Israel\u2019s actions are always a defensive response to terrorist aggression.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the underlying principle behind criticisms of \u201cdisproportionate\u201d actions and casualties? That tactical and mat\u00e9riel advantages in war are unfair? A war is not a game like golf, where an inferior player is given a handicap when he plays a better opponent. The objective is to stop the aggression and save lives, using all the resources at your disposal. Do you think during WWII that anyone gave a damn about \u201cdisproportionate\u201d casualties? Japanese bombs killed 74 U.S. civilians during WWII, 68 at Pearl Harbor and an Oregon family of 6 killed by a booby-trapped balloon. The U.S. bombing of Japan killed 500,000. Those are the tragic wages of aggression, what Aeschylus meant when he said, \u201cThe doer suffers.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the obsession with Palestinian Arab casualties, nearly all of them the consequence of Arab aggression and callous disregard for even their own families, is just another expression of the irrational hatred of Israel. If one calculated,\u00a0just based on the global media\u2019s intense coverage, how many Arabs have died because of Israel\u2019s defense of its people, you\u2019d think the conflict has taken the lives of millions. In fact, since WWII, 41 million people have\u00a0died<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in violent conflicts all over the world\u2013\u2013but about 40,000 Arabs have\u00a0died<\/span><\/a>\u00a0at the hands of Israel, most the result of 3 wars of aggression waged against the Jewish state. Meanwhile, 11 million Muslims have died in other conflicts, 90% of them killed by fellow Muslims.\u00a0Indeed, even as\u00a0international critics are devoting hours of coverage to the casualties in Gaza, tens of thousands of Muslims are dying in Syria and Iraq at the hands of other Muslims. Nor is Israel the premier non-Muslim killer of Muslims. If killing Muslims is an excuse for homicidal hatred, there are much grosser offenders than Israel. Russia killed 100,000 Muslims during the 1979-89 Afghan war,\u00a0and more recently\u00a0slaughtered about 150,000 Chechnyans, most of them Muslims. But Russia doesn\u2019t receive a fraction of the global hatred and opprobrium Israel suffers when it defends itself against terrorists like Hamas and Fatah.<\/p>\n

Then there are the Israel-hater\u2019s complaints about the \u201cillegal occupation.\u201d This phrase is meaningless, of course, since there has never been a modern nation in Judea and Samaria to occupy according international law, and the territory historically was the Jewish homeland for centuries. But those facts aside, how can anyone take seriously complaints about \u201coccupation\u201d coming from Muslims, one of history\u2019s all-time conquerors and occupiers? Muslims occupied Christian Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, and Greece for centuries. And North Africa, Egypt, and the coast of the eastern Mediterranean are still being \u201coccupied,\u201d the original possessors of those lands, if they managed to survive, still subjugated by the descendants of occupiers and colonists. Nor do decriers of \u201coccupation\u201d say anything about Tibet, occupied by China since 1950, or northern Cyprus, illegally occupied by Turkey since 1974. If a principle exists that \u201coccupation\u201d of another people\u2019s land is a legitimate reason to hound and demonize a country, then why the silence about Turkey and China?<\/p>\n

So too with the usual harping on the \u201cPalestinian refugees\u201d who were allegedly ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, and whose \u201cright of return\u201d has been the perennial deal-breaker\u00a0preventing peace with Israel. Forget that most willingly fled the conflict, egged on by their so-called \u201cleaders\u201d who promised that they could return to loot Israel once Allah\u2019s armies had prevailed. Forget that, unlike every other refugee group, their ethnic and religious brothers have left them to rot in squalid slums, and refused to integrate them into their own countries. Forget that they are the only group of refugees out of millions to have their very own U.N. agency. If creating refugees is such a heinous crime justifying inveterate hatred, what about the 800,000 Jewish refugees kicked out of lands their ancestors had inhabited for thousands of years before Islam even existed? Or how about the ethnic cleansing of 180,000 Greek Cypriots from northern Cyprus, their land\u00a0taken by 150,000 Turkish \u201csettlers\u201d? Does anyone even remember the 10 million Germans forcibly removed from Eastern Europe after WWII, at the cost of a million dead? What makes the Palestinian Arabs, who were turned into refugees because of the aggression of their Arab brothers, so special that they have become the permanent wards of the U.N. and international charity, their existence the pretext for international Jew-hatred and terrorist violence?<\/p>\n

On count after count, the reasons for hating Israel collapse. In fact, even if every slander and lie about Israel were true, it would still be way down on the list of global offenders, and the hatred directed against it vastly disproportionate. Ideology, not principle or fact, explains this hatred. As a liberal democracy with an economy more capitalist than socialist, Israel is necessarily the enemy of the left, its success like America\u2019s a humiliating reproach to a failed ideology. Those same leftists, still addled by old Leninist obsessions over \u201cimperialism\u201d and \u201ccolonialism,\u201d have turned Israel into a neo-imperial outpost of the West appropriating the resources and oppressing the lives of the \u201cindigenous\u201d peoples. A sentimental Third-Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned \u201cother\u201d victimized by the racist West also finds in the Palestinian Arabs yet another exotic mascot that signifies these Westerners\u2019 superior sensitivity and cosmopolitan sophistication. And the juvenile romanticizing of revolutionary violence and guerrilla \u201cresistance\u201d attracts the same people who hang Che Guevara posters over their beds, and name streets after the vicious cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is no question that hatred of Israel reflects the continuing existence of anti-Semitism in Europe, intensified by millions of Muslim immigrants for whom hating Israel is theologically justified. As the generation responsible for the Holocaust dies off, as the current generation grows increasingly tired of guilt for atrocities they had nothing to do with, and as the Holocaust becomes just another\u00a0distant historical attraction in the museum circuit, a space is created for a return of anti-Semitism, one disguised as \u201canti-Zionism\u201d and \u201ccompassion\u201d for the suffering of \u201cPalestinians.\u201d The \u201cJew of nations,\u201d Israel is burdened with all the old slanders and bigoted stereotypes, now given a patina of leftist ideology and sentimental Third-Worldism. But it is still the same old ancient evil.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2014 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thorton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Israel\u2019s military operation to degrade Hamas\u2019 ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[28,97,152,842,22,167,102],"tags":[255,133,1027,1046],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1ZK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":545,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/romney-and-the-palestinian-culture-of-destruction\/","url_meta":{"origin":7672,"position":0},"title":"Romney and the Palestinian Culture of Destruction","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 1, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is under attack for speaking an important truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict. At a fundraiser in Jerusalem on Monday, Romney made the obvious, even banal, point about the economic disparity between nations. Speaking of Israel and the Palestinian-run West Bank,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Palestine"","block_context":{"text":"Palestine","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/palestine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7637,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/moral-equivalence-moral-idiocy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7672,"position":1},"title":"Moral Equivalence, Moral Idiocy","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 8, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Scenes all too familiar from the Arab conflict with Israel have followed the murder last Wednesday of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Mourners at his funeral\u00a0chanting the Muslim war-cry \u201cAllahu Akbar\u201d as they carry the boy\u2019s\u00a0open coffin, the crowd shouting slogans like \u201cIntifada\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/6b682571-56c4-4ad7-adc6-c762abf878af-620x372.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1676,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-pathology-of-double-standards\/","url_meta":{"origin":7672,"position":2},"title":"The Pathology of Double Standards","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 26, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The surreal moral idiocy that characterizes hatred of Israel is illustrated daily by states whose actions are shrugged away by the international media. Consider the recent Turkish invasion of northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish militants who killed 24 soldiers at military posts near\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3052,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/corrupt-language-breeds-bad-history-and-bad-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7672,"position":3},"title":"Corrupt Language Breeds Bad History and Bad Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 24, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As the history of communism and fascism both illustrate, modern political tyranny has relied on fabricated history to legitimize its claims and actions, and such history in turn relies on the debasement of language. Nowhere is this axiom more evident than in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1445,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/despicable-israel-libels-on-display-in-california-universities\/","url_meta":{"origin":7672,"position":4},"title":"Despicable Israel Libels on Display in California Universities","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 19, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The moral and intellectual corruption of American universities has recently manifested itself in the California State University system, the largest in the country. A group of faculty and administrators has sent a letter to Chancellor Charles Reed asking that he not approve the reinstatement\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5298,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/arafats-death-changes-nothing\/","url_meta":{"origin":7672,"position":5},"title":"Arafat’s Death Changes Nothing","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 23, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Do we really believe Arafat's rejectionism died with him? by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The post-Arafat age has begun, and the conventional wisdom about what might or should happen in the Israeli-Arab conflict is quickly hardening into a soothing mantra. What we're hearing goes something like this: since the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7672"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7680,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7672\/revisions\/7680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}