Earlier today, Chris wrote a diary with a sober analysis of what the decades-long future holds for Israel/Palestine. But, of course, a denial of sobriety and long-range thinking is the very essence of what we see coming from Israel and it's even more extremist American "supporters," as witnessed in a demonstration this weekend in New York, that Max Blumenthal reported on. This morning he was on Democracy Now!, with footage of a video he took at the demonstration, which included, for example:
MAX BLUMENTHAL: So how many civilian casualties would it take before you questioned the attack?
ISRAEL SUPPORTER 3: There is not a number involved.
ISRAEL SUPPORTER 4: Nothing good is going to come out of it, unless they keep fighting all the way with this 'til they wipe them all out.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Wipe them all out?
ISRAEL SUPPORTER 4: Yeah, they got to go strong with this.
ISRAEL SUPPORTER 5: There's only one way to deal with a cancer. You burn it out or you remove it. And when people don't want to talk and just want to destroy you and not allow you to live, there's only one thing you can do.
ISRAEL SUPPORTER 2: They are forcing us to kill their children to defend our children.
This is, quite simply, mass hysteria. And it is being feed on lies, half-truths and relentless propaganda. Missing entirely from this account is the fact that it was Israel who broke the cease fire in early November, that Israel had blockaded Gaza throughout the cease-fire period, directly violating not only the terms of the cease-fire, but international law as well.
These were members of a crowd that was being addressed by Senator Schumer and Governor Patterson, both of whom cheerfully fanned the flames of ignorance and hate.
The math here is simple: every innocent child you kill produces a minimum of 100 new hardline rejectionist "terrorists". A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate reached a similar conclusion about the "success" of our fighting the "war on terror" in Iraq: It was a great recruiting campaign for the jihadists.
No wonder killing them all is the only "logical" alternative.
In his own article about the rally at Alternet, Blumenthal wrote:
No one I spoke to could seem to find any circumstance in which they would begin to question Israel's war. No number of civilian deaths, no displays of extreme suffering -- nothing could deter their enthusiasm for attacking one of the most vulnerable populations in the world with the world's most advanced weaponry. There are no limits, no matter what Israel does, no matter how it does it.
The rally made me think of a passage in "The Holocaust Is Over, We Must Rise From Its Ashes," a powerful new book by former Israeli Knesset speaker and Jewish National Fund chairman Avraham Burg:
"If you are a bad person, a whining enemy or a strong-arm occupier, you are not my brother, even if you are circumcised, observe the Sabbath, and do mitzvahs. If your scarf covers every hair on your head for modest, you give alms and do charity, but what is under your scarf is dedicated to the sanctity of Jewish land, taking precedence over the sanctity of human life, whosever life that is, then your are not my sister. You might be my enemy. A good Arab or a righteous gentile will be a brother or sister to me. A wicked man, even of Jewish descent, is my adversary, and I would stand on the other side of the barricade and fight him to the end."
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