Consider for a moment the Toronto Film Festival (Jane Fonda et al.) that reacted against blatant boasting that it would promote Israel positively. It failed: cultural boasting fails, assassinations fail, blockades fail, violent aggression fails, continual Holocaust recitals fail, flying planeloads of gushing Congressman to Israel fails. What in the world can be done?
Nothing that hyper-Israelis and their government do, it seems, will raise Israel from its lowly position as the world's worst threat to peace and neighborliness.
All right! It is our turn: we here, in our modest blog, can raise Israel to the heights of world esteem with Canaan State, USA 51.
Practically the whole range of rogueries and other misbehavior of Israelis, Americans, Palestinians, and their agents will plummet, cease abruptly - if not disappear, and at worst drop to the normal (still too high) level of everyday American misbehavior.
Mighty indignants howls have been assaulting the UN Goldstone commission report that favors international action against mostly Israeli offenses, but also in some cases Palestinians. There would be little occasion for all this if Jews and Arabs of Israel and Palestine were let to make their way in Canaan, USA. I quote a Jewish Telegrah Agency Report by Ron Kampeas:
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"A battery of Israeli officials are touring Washington and the United States in an attempt to convey the impression that Israel is more open to negotiations than the Palestinians and that the principal threat in the region is Iran. The report gives Palestinians and Arab nations an opportunity to complicate that effort. (Note: Sending an emergency anti-guilt crew out.)
Jewish groups said the strategy now should be to get the United States to dismiss the report as hopelessly biased. Statements Tuesday by Israel's Foreign Ministry, as well as by Jewish groups that maintain U.N. bureaus such as the American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith International, adopted that strategy. (Note: burdening Uncle Sam with another dirty job.)
"Israel does not require any external reminder to probe its just actions, especially from a radical body which is comprised from 'moral' nations the likes of Malaysia, Syria, Pakistan and Somalia," Israel's Foreign Ministry said. (Note: How happy these poor sods are to shame Israel!)
"Let us not forget that this commission was a creation of the Human Rights Council, arguably the U.N.'s most flawed body," David Harris, AJC's executive director, said in a statement. "The Council has consistently demonized Israel, while giving a free pass to some of the world's worst tyrants, from Sudan to Iran." (Note: Trying to disgrace international organs which have at best dreadfully hard tasks.)
Daniel Mariaschin, B'nai B'rith's executive vice president, told JTA that the report was a case of "There you go again." He said his group would intensify outreach to member nations to mitigate the report's damage. (Note: "There you go again" applies to causes as well as consequences.")
Left-leaning Israeli and pro-Israel groups said such an approach misses the broader point: Israel must account for its actions beyond the internal Israeli army reviews under way. (Note: Hard to dispute this point, but call them leftist anyhow.")
"The obstacle to peace is the festering anger" in Gaza, said Mitchell Plitnick, a spokesman for B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group. (Note: Palestinians are not entitled to "festering anger.")
Concerns about the report's bias date back to the Human Rights Council's mandate last February when it created the fact-finding mission and asked it to probe "grave" Israeli "violations of human rights" during the war, launched by Israel on Dec. 27 after Hamas-sponsored rocket fire from Gaza had intensified significantly. (Note: Repeated complaints that 1 equals 10,000 when it comes to an exchange of blows.)
Israel and Jewish groups slammed the council for pre-emptive conclusions and for not accounting for the intensification of rocket fire under the rule of Hamas. (Note: See above: now 1.5/10,000.)
Goldstone obtained the council's permission to broaden his mandate and consider Hamas war crimes. The report released Tuesday considers the years of rocket attacks on Israel that preceded the war and concludes that Hamas committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Note: Was Goldstone not unnecessarily fair and even-handed?)
Nonetheless, Israel refused to deal with Goldstone or the council, despite Goldstone's Jewish credentials and longstanding ties to Israel - he's a trustee of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, among other things. Foxman suggested that the United Nations was using Goldstone's credibility to disguise an inherently biased report. (Note: As my mother used to say, "There's just no way to please some people.")
None of the charges in the report's executive summary are new; the summary appears to compile and replicate many of the charges that were made by some international and Israeli human rights groups. (Note: Says the Defense Lawyer to Judge: "Your honor, my client has been before this Court 19 times on such charges.")
Among other allegations, the report accuses Israel of having created an "emergency situation" in Gaza through its blockade prior, during and after the war; describes as excessive Israel's use of white phosphorous, a chemical irritant used as an obscurant during the war; dismisses as unfounded Israel's claims that all of the approximately 240 policemen slain during the war were combatants; and chronicles about a dozen allegations of Israel shooting unarmed Palestinians without provocation. (Note: All of these are practically impossible - even as allegations - in the State of Canaan, USA.)
Eli Ovits, a Jerusalem-based spokesman for The Israel Project, suggested an on-the-ground approach to countering whatever deleterious effects the report may have on Israel's efforts to shape the conversation on talks with Palestinians and Iran. (Note: Could "on-the-ground approach" mean pledges never to do such things again?)
Ovits said his advocacy group would continue to highlight the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by Israelis within range of Hamas rockets and also would note that in the aftermath of the war, Palestinian moderates have grown in popularity at the expense of Hamas. (Note: Israeli PTSD is already exceedingly high, and where are Palestinians mentioned here, among whom, if the disease exists, it rapidly approaches the pandemic level of Shoah effects.)" |
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