Sometimes a subject matter is so complex we feel like groping inside a dark labyrinth when we try to tackle it intellectually. We wish we had something to help us navigate around the intricacies of the intellectual exercise we are grappling with in the same way that we can have a magnetic compass to help us navigate around the walls of a real labyrinth. But what could be an appropriate compass of the intellect? My answer is that every exercise comes with it a compass which may or may not be obvious but is always there. If we can find that compass and learn how to use it, we can find the answer to every intellectual exercise we take up. Therefore, we can say that to look for answers in a debate is the same as to look for the compass of that debate; and to find one is to find the other. The point is this: if you are engaged in a debate and you are not sure how to proceed, make a moral judgment and use that to guide you like a compass. The honest expression of your morality will be the correct answer no matter how it may sound to someone at the time or to you at the end of the debate. In the final analysis, my promise to you is not that the exercise will be made easy to deal with but that it will be made easier than grope in the dark. In addition to this benefit, honesty will help you move the debate forward and reach a conclusion one way or the other which is something that the other debaters will appreciate about you, and you about yourself.
An example I can use as springboard to illustrate how this works came in the international edition of the Wall Street Journal on September 9, 2010. It is an article titled: “Funding Palestinian Incitement” written by Matthew Sinclair and Raheem Kassam both of whom are said to lead the international "Coalition Against Hate Education" through the TaxPayers' Alliance in the United Kingdom. The point of the article is summed up in the subtitle that was chosen for it. Here is that subtitle: “European taxpayers are made to pay for the propaganda that fuels the Mideast conflict.” Well, I am not familiar with the situation in Europe to speak about it with authority because I live across the ocean here in North America, but I have an interest in this debate because it touches on many subjects that are close to my heart. And so I ask myself: what should I do? Do I accept what is reported by two individuals who profess to be experts on the subject as indicated by the name of the institution they lead? Or do I use my moral judgment as compass and try to navigate around the walls of the intellectual labyrinth in which I find myself? I choose to do the latter and I invite you, my friend, to come with me on a journey in search of a way out of the labyrinth and out of the darkness.
I see that the authors of the article begin it by making this emphatic assertion: “...many Westerners are bewildered by the conflict in Israel-Palestine. Confrontations ... make it easy for people to see the situation as too complex ... But we can't ignore what goes on in Israel and the Palestinian territories … Our money is supporting indoctrination in the territories that is sowing the seeds of future conflict...” The authors then list the monies given to the Palestinian Authority (PA) administering the territories, and they lament this way: “Much of that money comes through direct budget support, which means unconditional checks to the Authority, or paying off its debts. In that way our governments support everything, good and bad, that the Palestinian Authority does … [like] run official media and print schoolbooks that radicalize Palestinians...” They have thus identified the problem they want to solve as (a) the manipulation of the media which the PA does to educate the public, and (b) the ideas that the PA allows into the textbooks by which the children are educated. On the surface, it all seems legitimate because the authors say they stand against hate education and that their disagreement with the PA stems from that authority's involvement with the education of the Palestinian people.
And so as I was reading the words of Matthew Sinclair and Raheem Kassam I asked myself the following question: What does the PA say or do that these two authors call incitement and claim to be horrified by? This question comes to mind because you can only be astonished at the fact that the authors of the article are recommending the complete cut off of aid to the Palestinian refugees without mentioning, let alone worrying about the hardship that will befall these people in terms of hunger, disease and the hopelessness that will inevitably make them lash out in retaliation at the Israelis who occupy their land and blockade their people. To accept consequences like these, the authors must have concluded that the PA was doing something truly evil and doing it on a grand scale. Thus, reading through the article, you would have asked questions and looked for answers like I did, but instead of discovering what you might have expected, you discover something that goes beyond anything you could have imagined, something to clobber you so hard morally, you would have felt the pain physically. This is what happened to me ultimately and this is what I want you to experience, to feel and to understand because it goes to the heart of everything that is important to us as human beings.
What you discover in the article is what Matthew Sinclair and Raheem Kassam consider to be horrible crimes committed by the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC), crimes that deserve to be punished with a cruelty that is unusual in its intensity. Here is what they call incitement as described in their own words: “More recently, the European Union funded a television quiz show from Nov. 2009 through Jan. 2010 entitled 'The Stars,' which told its viewers that the size of 'Palestine' is 27,000 kilometers – an area that includes all of Israel. The show also described Nazareth as a 'Palestinian city.' The European Union funded the entire first season of 'The Stars' – the flag of the European Union was proudly displayed behind the host throughout the broadcasts.” That was one complaint and here is another description of what they call incitement: “During [the Annapolis] peace talks, the PBC was running graphics showing all of Israel-Palestine draped in the Palestinian flag. While the Palestinian leadership was sitting at the negotiating table supposedly working for a two-state solution...”
Oh my God! you exclaim as I did. These two wish to literally starve to death a population of three million people or more for something as inconsequential as this? I took a deep breath and thought to myself I am here in North America not even in Palestine or Israel, and I regularly see advertisements placed in Jewish and in mainstream media where the Canadian and American flags are intertwined with the Israeli flag. And I see articles filled with arguments to the effect that the West Bank of the Jordan River is called Judea and Sumeria and that it was given to the Jews by none other than God Himself. Are Matthew Sinclair and Raheem Kassam aware of this? If yes, are they asking the Canadian and American public as well as our governments to see to it that the Jews are made to starve to death? If so, do they want this to happen inside concentration camps built in the style of the camps that housed the Japanese in WWII? Or do they want the concentration camps to be in the style of those built by the Nazis to house the Jews before gassing them and cremating their remains? After all, the Jewish organizations, speaking on behalf of all the Jews, said decades ago at the start of this campaign that they were engaged in educating the public; and they have been doing just that in their style ever since.
And if education is the preoccupation of those two individuals, here is one lesson they must never forget: You will be judged by the rules you set for others whether they are your rules or those of your masters. Given that no one who reads that article fails to see that Matthew Sinclair and Raheem Kassam are but the faithful lackeys of the Jewish organizations, the consequences will go beyond them and spill over to the Jews everywhere. They have set the rules for the treatment of the Palestinians, and people the world over will decide that those rules must now be applied to the Jews who hired the two authors and allowed them to speak on their behalf. Such turning of the table happens all the time because justice dictates that a hole dug up by someone must serve as the grave to bury that someone whether or not the intended victim has been victimized. Thus, innocent Jews who may have no idea what is being said in their name or done on their behalf will be made to pay a price for sins they never committed and never knew were being committed – which is the story of the pogroms and the holocausts that have been happening everywhere on this planet, and happening all the time since the beginning of time.
This thing is so puzzling now that you want to stop for a moment and reflect anew on the whole subject. You ask yourself if a pogrom or a holocaust are not too drastic a reaction to what is basically a hypocritical stance taken by someone, and you embark on a fresh analysis of the whole matter right from the start. You look at the reason that triggered this chain of events and find it to be the grief that was expressed by the Palestinians in their own media. These people lost their land to an invading army and they responded with nothing worse than grieve over it the way that the Americans, for example, still grieve over Pearl Harbor and over 9/11, subjects they discuss in their media all the time. Yet, no one accuses the American broadcast outlets of inciting the population to do something so bad as to merit a call to starve the entire American population to death. And what about the grief that is regularly expressed by the Brits, the French, the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, the Quebecois, the Latin Americans, the Philippinos, the Vietnamese and so on and so forth, all of whom have gone through a painful moment or two throughout their history and still talk about them with pain and with anguish. Should these people be made to starve to death also? And putting all this aside, what about the Jews who never cease to grieve and to bellyache about everything real and imagined they say happened to them during their stay in the various countries where they drifted in and out since ancient times? Should the Jews be made to stave to death, for example, on account of the quack stories they tell about their enslavement in ancient Egypt when the evidence abounds to the effect that they lived the good life in that country and were treated well?
No. When a people grieve among themselves, they do not incite and they do not commit an act that deserves to be punished this severely. If at all, what they do will only merit to be rebuked verbally and this, if and only if the grieving is done over something as fraudulent as the story of Jewish maltreatment in Egypt. Otherwise it is acceptable to grieve if it makes you feel better. But here is a question: if grieving is not incitement, what is incitement? Well, incitement is the urging of someone to harm a third party for any reason -- a good reason or a bad one. And when we accept this definition, we see that Jewish organizations and Jewish individuals have spent the last half century inciting others to hate, denounced, rebuke, humiliate in public, fire from their job, loathe, go after, deport, bomb, maim or kill someone for one reason or another in the Middle East, the Far East, the Near East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Central America, Europe, Canada, The United States and so on and so on and so on without end or the promise of an end. If Matthew Sinclair and Raheem Kassam are asking the world to starve the Palestinians to death because they grieved over the loss of their land, what do these authors want to do with a people that call themselves Jews and do nothing but incite others to do this much evil everywhere in the world as a matter of religious worship? Is there punishment cruel enough in their estimation to fit these crimes?
To put the question another way: Is there enough here to prompt someone like Matthew Sinclair or Raheem Kassam to recommend the pogrom or holocaust of the Jews? It is important to ponder this sort of question because understanding what is involved here will explain why the Jews have been badly treated throughout history. Well, the answer is no, there is not enough here to call for the pogrom or holocaust of the Jews because a hypocrisy based on a double standard would only elicit a moral response whereas a pogrom or a holocaust are a visceral response. And so the next question to ask would be this: In addition to that hypocrisy, is there something that the Jews or their organizations do to trigger a visceral response in human beings, something that would make ordinary people wish that the Jews disappear one way or the other?
Before we answer this question, we must think long, hard and seriously about something. Those of us who live in North America but outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States still feel protected by the First Amendment of the American Constitution which bestows the freedom of expression on everyone. As such, we watched with horror every time Israel sent the most terrible weapons of mass destruction to bomb the PBC and the other media outlets with the intention of killing journalists in their offices for no reason except that these people chose to reflect reality as they saw it, and to express themselves freely like journalists do everywhere all the time. Not only that, but Israel's agents in America mounted an effort of biblical dimension and of satanic caliber to incite the Bush Administration to bomb the Al Jazeera television network in the Middle East having failed before that to incite the Clinton Administration to silence the other Arab media, especially the Egyptian newspapers which the Jewish organizations absurdly accused of being anti-Semitic, disregarding the fact that Egypt is the most populous Semitic country in the world. Oh well, when you're out of it, you're out of it; what can I say!
Despite all that, you still observe and correctly so, that this does not explain why people everywhere on Earth and throughout time have wanted to do away with the Jews. And then it hits you. All of a sudden you see that maybe something serious accompanies all this. It is something that looks innocent when it begins, but then reveals itself so slowly that by the time it is fully revealed it is too late to do something about it because another victim would have fallen into the grips of the Jewish organizations. The victims are embarrassed by what has happened to them and they respond by pretending that nothing unusual has happened. In fact, what has been happening in North America and what continues to happen to this day is a well organized campaign to silence the people who disagree with the Jewish organizations. We have now reached the point where no journalistic outlet or institution of consequence in North America is out of the Jewish grip or its censorship. And anyone who wants to do more than menial work for a living in this part of the world must begin their career by declaring their loyalty and total devotion to the Jewish causes. People feel shame for doing this but they try not to think about it. In the meantime they see Jewish individuals, institutions and organizations do an end run on everything that is sacred to them but they remain paralyzed and they stay mum about it because the instinct of self-preservation kicks in and forces them to keep their mouths shut. Hello North Korea, you want to know what effective authoritarian rule looks like? Look in this direction because North America beats North Korea when it comes to effective and brutal authoritarian mind control.
In Canada, for example, it is the habit of the Jewish organizations to regularly do end runs on the system of justice then see their members go about their daily lives as if they only flushed the private toilet of an executive -- nothing more serious than that. In the United States, those same organizations have managed to turn nearly 100% of the legislators into male and female prostitutes who gain legitimacy not by being voted into office -- this is only a minor formality -- but by running to Israel and getting the blessing of the government there, something they earn by lending their name and the prestige of their office to a list of demands written by AIPAC or some such organization and printed in a prestigious publication. And then, the prostitutes get into the business of voting to transfer America's wealth and weapon systems to Israel free of charge but vote to defeat legislation aimed at helping the Americans who lost their jobs and cannot find work. The prostitutes also vote to stop the sale of weapons to paying customers, something that could put American workers back to work. And the question to ask is whether or not situations like these can trigger a visceral response on the part of the public thus lead to a pogrom or a holocaust.
Well, that silent shame mentioned a few moments ago is similar to the shame we used to read about when books and articles were written by victims of incest and of other forms of child rape. You could sense the rage that was built up in the hearts of the victims, a rage that would have prevented them from coming to the aid of a former abuser if the latter were about to perish in a horrible circumstance. In a similar fashion, the people who wake up to the fact that their country has been subjected to end runs and dragged into a life of political and journalistic prostitution consider their country and themselves to have been victims of child rape. They develop a rage so intense that you could not count on them to lift a finger and rescue the Jews if a pogrom or a holocaust were unleashed on these people. This is not anti-Semitism, it is normal human reaction.
Nothing could explain an attitude like this previously because the evidence was kept hidden. Thus, the common wisdom was to accept the explanation that Jews were saints and that humanity suffered from a genetic defect called anti-Semitism. But the hubris of the Jewish organizations has now brought the evidence to the fore, and we can see that humanity is innocent of all charges while the Jewish organizations are immersed in guilt up to their ears -- so much so that ordinary people increasingly fall into the category of those who believe that Jews are not saints but are the devil incarnate. Blame AIPAC and like organizations; don't blame humanity.
We can now see that the Palestinian institutions are as clean as a whistle. We can also see that the people of Palestine deserve to be lauded for what they suffer in their daily lives to redeem the sins of silence and of neglect being committed in their regard by a part of humanity. As to the question: What is it that bothers Matthew Sinclair, Raheem Kassam and their Jewish masters? The answer is that it is not the education of the Palestinian people that is bothering them because that trio could not care less what the people of Palestine are taught. Rather, it is the money that goes to the Palestinians, money that keeps them alive and in place instead of being forced to emigrate to other lands for which they would have to cede Palestine to the Jews.
And ceding Palestine is what the Jewish and the Israeli leaderships fantasize about and work for. That is what Matthew Sinclair and Raheem Kassam were commissioned to articulate.