Alan Dershowitz, the bane of human rights advocates in the US and every where else, has been given his day in court to vent for Israel on Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington’s left wing blogosphere newspaper.
Alan is not my favorite Democrat, far from it, mainly because his hypocrisy is so evident. When you discuss Israel, he falls into the deepest abyss of right wing Zionist ethnocentricism. He appears liberal and humanistic, and even advocates for human and civil rights, but when it comes to Israel, he falls into the exceptionalist trap. Alan is so rightward in his support of Israel, he is even able to justify the killings of Palestinian children, who he implies are terrorists.
Still let’s give Alan his day in court, even though he uses the occasion to ply Israeli propaganda by the barrel full and gives the usual exceptionalism to Israel’s occupation, colonialism, and state terrorism, the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As most objective observers throughout the world marvel at Israel’s efficiency and generosity in leading the medical aid efforts in Haiti, some bigots insist on using these efforts as an occasion to continue their attack on the Jewish state. Both the neo-Nazi hard right and the neo-Stalinist hard left cannot help but to demonize Israel, regardless of what Israel does.
The neo-Nazi website ReportersNotebook.com features a blog entitled “The Zionization of Disaster Relief.” It accuses Israel of “exploiting the suffering of poor, defenseless Haitians on behalf of Israeli Triumphalism.” It complains that Israel is rendering medical aid to Haiti only to deflect attention from its crimes against the Palestinians.
The hard left, even in Israel, complains that Israel should not be sending medical assistance to such a faraway place. Instead it should be sending it to nearby Gaza.
Well, Alan, some of us did notice. As just one example, many medical patients in need of essential care that is unavailable in Gaza, who were denied exit, have died. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel has long decried the deadliness of the Gaza siege, and Israel, with the help of the US and Egypt, is causing those deaths, not some natural event like an earthquake.
According to Alan, the reason Israel is not helping the Palestinians is that it is at war with them. Yes, he claimed that, in spite of what is the obvious reality to almost everyone.
In addition to the distorted reality that Alan helps to project, Israeli victimology, in particular, and his conflation of the Palestinian fight for freedom and self-determination with terrorism, which is central to Israeli propaganda today, he ignores mention of the very source of the conflict: Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people, the colonization of their lands, which has been going on for over 40 years, the weekly killings and assassinations of Palestinian resistance fighters, house demolitions, destruction of farmlands and orchards, the theft of water resources, etc., to say nothing of the brutal attack against Palestinian civilians in Gaza one year ago, which was described as a series of human rights crimes by the UN.
No one can look at Gaza today and not believe that Israel’s assistance to Haiti, although humanitarian, is not also hypocritical. And people who notice the discrepancy are not anti-Semitic, as Alan would have us believe. So yes Alan, the death and destruction in Haiti exceeds that found in Gaza. However, it is Israel, with the assistance of the US and Egypt, that has created death and destruction in Gaza, not nature.
Dersh is often among the advance troops when Israel rolls out a media attack campaign. As a Presbyterian, I witnessed his attacks among the first on my Church back in the summer of 2004. He has also been among the first to attack the credibility of others like Jimmy Carter and Mearsheimer and Walt when their books criticized Israel. (Of course, his attacks on Norman Finkelstein have become legend). Israel is planning a PR blitz on the aniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz to attack the Goldstein report. Expect more from Dersh to follow.
Mondoweiss and Tikun Olam have been on top of Israel’s Haiti relief PR story (especially the embarassing article in Hebrew about what a PR success it was).
I saw at least one of those articles. No one doesn’t appreciate what Israel did to relieve suffering and death in Haiti. But Gaza just hangs out there giving birth to charges of hypocrisy, which are well deserved.
The problem with Israel’s actions in Haiti is, of course, the brazen hypocrisy involved in performing high profile humanitarian missions while at the same time deliberately and intentionally creating and maintaining some of the worst, most inhuman made-made conditions on earth.
In addition to this brazen hypocrisy is the clear fact that this, as have been israel’s other “humanitarian missions”, was nothing more than a blatant PR campaign that just happened to have the positive side effect of saving some lives. The evidence is overwhelming, and others, notably Richard Silverstein, have enumerated them very effectively here, here, and here, so I’ll only mention a couple. First, they devoted a significant amount of space and budget to bring along a full PR team, complete with considerable broadcasting equipment which of course limited the size of the medical team and equipment they could bring along. Second, they have folded up their tent and gone home a mere eleven days after their arrival, instead of staying the generally-recognized two or three months a field hospital needs to remain in place to be truly effective. It appears the PR returns have diminished sufficiently after 10-14 days that there is no realy point in staying longer.
Juan Cole recently wrote extensively about the hypocrisy re. Gaza, and another writer of an Haaretz article commented on what great PR the Haiti mission accomplished for Israel. Somehow, this mission was supposed to erase the Gaza atrocities of a year ago.
Big chance.
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To the People of England!
This is a warning!
Jewish terror plot unearthed
More than 60 years ago, Jewish militants were arrested in Paris on suspicion – as newspapers in Britain, France and the US reported at the time – of planning to bomb London from the air.
The arrested men were members of the Stern Gang (or Lehi, as it is known in Israel), a group dedicated to the overthrow of British rule in Palestine, if necessary through violence, in order to create a Jewish state.
The Stern Gang certainly had a bloody list of victims to its name. But was it also an early planner of aerial terror?
The Sydney Morning Herald – Sept. 8, 1947
Their goal was a Jewish homeland to the Jordan river, no act of terror or loss of innocent lives could deter these gang members for the ultimate Zionist dream. Has the Stern Gang been dissolved or just morphed into political leadership of the state of Israel?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Remember Likud’s Menachum Begin (Irgun) and Itshak Shamir (Stern Gang), both leaders of terrorist groups elected as PMs of Israel. Amazing isn’t it?
Oui, where do you get this stuff? Thanks for posting it anyway.
“The neo-Nazi website ReportersNotebook.com features a blog entitled “The Zionization of Disaster Relief.” “
Poor ole Dershie doesn’t seem to realize that the author of that blog is uber leftie self-described “progressive* Zionist” Richard Silverstein.
* I will not quibble with Richard regarding his self-definition, though Zionist and progressive are – well – pretty contradictory. I will say that Richard is a genuine progressive, and as Zionists go he is as far left as he can be and still remain a Zionist.
Didn’t look the site up, but it is incredibly strange to hear Richard Silverstein called a Neo-Nazi. Next I suppose Rabbi Michael Lerner will be exposed as a right wing bastard of one anti-Semitic type or another.
Distortions which are par for the course with Dersh:
“The neo-Nazi website ReportersNotebook.com features a blog entitled “The Zionization of Disaster Relief.” “
The blog article (entry, diary, post …) is by Richard Silverstein posted at his blog entitled Tikun Olam. If it was posted or linked at reportersnotebook.com, I doubt it was done so with Silverstein’s permission.
Not just distortions, but red-baiting rhetoric from Dersh:
While some of the leftist criticism of Israel on marginal blogs comes from posters who appear to be to the left of the Democratic Party (like Greens, Socialists and Anarchists,), the majority of Israel’s critics on the major Progressive blogs appear to be Democrats. Even on the marginal blogs I’ve read, I can’t think of any regular posters who could be defined as neo-Stalinist. These disgusting McCarthyite tactics reek of desperation.
He is the worst kind of bigot.