Imagine a guy named Jed Babbin hired to
work as dishwasher in a diner located in a remote desert-like area of the
country. Sometimes when they get a busload of tourists, he helps the chef prepare
the meals by doing simple chores like grinding the meat or peeling the potato.
Normally, the chef takes his days off
during the tourist off-season, leaving precooked light meals and snacks in the
freezer for the hotel staff and the cook to serve the occasional traveler that
might come around and spend a night or two at the hotel. But then –– surprise,
surprise –– on an off-season day when the chef was away, a busload of tourists
came along to stay at the hotel for an extended period of time. And the staff
told the cook he's the chef now.
Do you remember the story of the
Sorcerer's Apprentice? At first, the kid made a mistake, and the more he tried
to fix it, the more he worsened the situation. Well, almost the same thing
happened to Jed Babbin … except that the real Babbin is not a dishwasher or a
cook in a desert restaurant. He is a pundit who writes columns for the
Washington Times. Something political happened, he stepped out of his element,
and messed up royally. If you want a metaphoric image of how badly he messed
up, think of the dishwasher trying to boil spaghetti in the oven, and baking
bread on the stove.
Well then, go over Jed Babbin's latest
column, and you'll see what I mean. The column came under the title: “The
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions war against Israel,” and the subtitle: “Its
first goal is to delegitimize Israel.” It was published on August 12, 2019 in
the Washington Times.
The problem with Jed Babbin is that even
though he began with an idea that is of his natural domain, he messed up
because he had to go out of the domain to advocate for the idea. You'll tell
what his domain is by the time you reach the end of the article. It reads like
this: “If any Democrat is elected next year they will be under the influence of
'the Squad.'” As you can see, his domain is local American politics.
But to make a good case, Babbin needed
energy, ideas and a strategy among other things. Well, he proved over the
decades that he is adept at picking the facts of a situation, and producing what
he needs to cobble together a piece that serves his purpose. But this time, the
facts happened to be related to the “Squad,” and the most energy that the Squad
has generated was in foreign policy … which is outside of Babbin's domain. And
so, he went out of his domain to cook-up something he can serve to his readers.
That's what you see at the start of
Babbin's column. You see it in the title, in the subtitle and in the first
sentence of the column, which goes like this: “Ilhan Omar unveiled her plan to
visit Israel, she also introduced a resolution that supported BDS that has, as
its first goal, to delegitimize Israel”.
Well, having a start and a finish for his
article was a good achievement already. But Babbin still needed to fill the
middle of the column in a way that made sense. And that's when the dishwasher,
working as a cook, couldn't tell the difference between the stove and the oven.
To sound like he is making a solid
argument in favor of the Jews grabbing Palestine from its Palestinian owners,
Jed Babbin invoked some of the legal points that pertain to the case. To that
end, he mentioned the UN resolution that gave the Jews a homeland in Palestine.
Aware that the partition of Palestine gave the Jews not even a tenth of what
they eventually grabbed by force of arms –– all of which was condemned by the
same UN that crated Israel –– Babbin had to do something.
To get around the difficulties, he invoked
the right to self-determination, saying that the Jews must be allowed to have Palestine
so that they can exercise self-determination. What he did not say, is that they
cannot exercise that right in someone else's home. The Jews were given a home
in what is known as the 1948 borders, and that's where they should have stayed.
By going outside those borders, they denied the Palestinians their right to
self-determination.
Having bastardized that legal argument,
Babbin was forced to bastardize another legal argument to sustain the first. He
mentioned the UN resolution that gave the Palestinians the “Right of Return.”
He said that when the UN passed that resolution, there were only 700,000
Palestinian refugees. There are 6 million of them now. He went on to argue that
if they were allowed into occupied Palestine, they will form a majority, thus
deny the Jews the ethno-religious purity they wish to maintain in the apartheid
state they have built.
Well, there were less than 50,000 Jews in
Palestine when this whole thing began, and their number has increased to now count
in the millions. So, nothing really has changed from the legal standpoint. The
right of Palestinian return that was valid then, is valid today. But why would
the world let this kind of garbage go on?
No, the world isn't doing that. It is
speaking about the Palestinian case the way it did when Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
and South Africa were running similar sort of regimes. Whereas the apartheid
governments of those two places advocated a political and military sort of
push-back against the world, the world responded with a BDS kind of movement
that ultimately triumphed over the two racist entities.
This is what the world is doing now with
regard to Israel's political and military push-back that is exercised in the
Middle East by Israel, and articulated in the Jewish influenced press of North
America.