Thursday, August 18, 2016

She wants Justice, they want Dominion

Her name is Susan Shapiro, and she wrote an article about incidents that happened to Israelis at the Olympics. She submitted the article to the New York Daily News that's owned by Mortimer Zuckerman, and the publication chose to run it under the title: “Anti-Semitism taints the games” even though nowhere does the word anti-Semitism appear in her article. The piece was published on August 17, 2016 in the Daily News.

His name is Bret Stephens, and he wrote a column about the same Olympic incidents. His paper, the Wall Street Journal, ran the column under the title: “The Meaning of an Olympic Snub” and the subtitle: “The Arab world has a problem of the mind, and its name is anti-Semitism,” which is a quote from the article. With the word anti-Semitism appearing seven more times in the piece, it was published on August 16, 2016 in the Journal.

Susan Shapiro is not a militant Jewish leader the way that Zuckerman and Stephens are, and her article reflects this reality. By contrast, Stephens and Zuckerman are self-appointed Jewish leaders, and this is reflected in the Stephens column where the word anti-Semitism features ubiquitously. It is also reflected in the title of the Shapiro article for which Zuckerman's publication has falsely featured the word anti-Semitism.

What should we make of all this? Well, before plunging into a discussion concerning this one piece of the puzzle portraying the human condition, let's look at other pieces to get a sense of what else the puzzle may contain. For example, there was a time when apartheid South Africa had banned its Black athletes from joining the team that would compete in the Olympics, and the world responded by banning South Africa itself from the Olympics.

We can haggle all we want as to whether or not Israel is running an apartheid regime in occupied Palestine, the fact is that many people on this planet believe that it does. And they react as individuals or as a group by boycotting the Israeli athletes the only way they know how, which is to avoid them. Some people point to what Israel is doing to the region, and justify their stance; some point to what it is doing to the Palestinian population, and some point to what it is doing to the Palestinian athletes who wish to go to the Olympics but are banned through myriads of Israeli regulations designed to prevent them.

It is normal in a situation like this to discover that people take sides. Not only that, but they will support or reject one side or the other to one level or another – ranging along the entire spectrum from mild support to extreme rejection. There will even be a group of people who will see the situation as an unfortunate human tragedy, and sympathize with both sides at the same time.

This sort of conflict being a reality of the human condition, we ask if there is a way out. The answer is yes, and the resolution usually comes about in one of two ways. Either one side crushes the other and dictates its terms; or both sides take confidence building measures by gradually deescalating the hostilities between them while gradually increasing their cooperation. This is what the Arabs have tried to do with the initiative they proposed to normalize relations with Israel. And this is what Israel has been rejecting for ten years now.

It is clear from Shapiro's piece that she also prefers that option. The trouble is that she is handicapped by the fact that she is cut-off from the Palestinian side, thus has no idea how a Palestinian mother feels, seeing that her children are forced to live on a few drops of water a day because the Jews steal their water. They steal it to fill swimming pools of which they take pictures and tell prospective Jewish immigrants overseas not to worry about water being scarce in Israel. And they steal it to give a glass of it to a stranger so that Bret Stephens and those like him can brag about Jewish generosity.

And this brings us to the Stephens column. Neither he nor Zuckerman want a resolution of the conflict based on equality. Instead, they want to establish dominion over the situation in Palestine and America. In fact, the Jews have established dominion over many aspects of American life using the anti-Semitic accusation as a weapon to crush those who tried to stand up to them. The Jewish leaders also blackmailed evangelical pastors, forcing them to run around the country and tell their flocks to worship the Jew – any Jew – like they worship Jesus.

Aware that they are steadily losing those Evangelical flocks, and keen to tighten their dominion over America's teeming masses, Stephens and Zuckerman are reviving the use of the anti-Semitic accusation in the hope of making some gains. Worse, they are using the accusation in conjunction with the preaching that the pastors used to do effectively but no more. Here is an example of how Stephens is struggling with the situation now:

“Historian Paul Johnson noted that whenever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline followed … Spain expelled its Jews; the effect was to deprive Spain of a class notable for the astute handling of finance … In czarist Russia, anti-Semitic laws led to Jewish emigration as well as an increase in administrative corruption. Germany might have won the race for the atomic bomb if Hitler hadn't sent Albert Einstein et al into exile”.

It is that the Evangelical pastors were fraudulently warning their flocks: if America loses its Jews, it will go to hell the way that Spain, Russia and Germany did, and Stephens is repeating that idea. To cement it in the heads of the masses, he says it is happening to the Arabs because they got rid of their Jews.

To document that fiction, he resorted to the Jewish habit of mutilating history. And that's what his article is all about. It is a piece good for the trash can and nothing else.