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Commentary :: Peace & War
THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT IS RACIST
Author
- Becky Johnson
Date Created
- 17 Apr 2004
Date Edited
- 17 Apr 2004 02:06:13 PM
License
This work is in the public domain
Professor Alan M. Dershowitz wrote this article entitled "The Palestinians' Genocide Campaign" which was published in the Jerusalem Post on April 14, 2004. I know it's more popular to call Israel "an apartheid state" and to accuse "Zionists" of racism. But what are the facts? Until you have considered the other side, you are coming to conclusions with only half the evidence. -- Becky Johnson
Recently, a young student at the Hebrew University was gunned down while jogging through a mixed neighborhood of Jews and Arabs in north Jerusalem. The Aksa Martyrs Brigade, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, joyously claimed credit for the killing yet another innocent Jew.
When it was later learned that the jogger was a Jerusalem Arab and not a Jew, al-Aksa quickly apologized to the family, calling it an accident.
But the killing of the innocent young jogger was not an accident; the murderer had deliberately taken aim at his head and midsection, intending to end his life. The only thing accidental about the murder was the religion of the victim. Al-Aksa had sent the assassin to murder a Jew – any Jew, so long as he was a Jew.
This is racism, pure and simple. And despite efforts by supporters of Palestinian terrorism to justify the murder of innocent civilians as national liberation or by any other euphemism, this case proves that the Palestinian terrorists' targeting of Jews and only Jews – as many as possible – is little different in intent from other forms of lethal or exterminatory anti-Jewish murders. (I don't use the term anti-Semitic only because some Arabs claim that because they too are Semites, they can't be anti-Semitic.)
Obviously the numbers are different, because Israel is capable of defending its Jewish citizens, but if it were not, the goal of Palestinian terrorist groups would not be very different from that of previous groups intent on murdering as many Jews as possible.
The Web sites of various Palestinian terrorist groups proclaim – usually only in English and almost never in Arabic – that they have no quarrel with the Jews, only with the Zionists. Yet they target every Jew, regardless of his or her individual political views, and they apologize when they accidentally kill a non-Jew, regardless of his political views. The racist acts of these terrorist groups speak louder than their sanitized English-only anti-Zionist Web sites.
YET THE international community – including the UN, the Vatican, and the European Union – claims to see no difference between Palestinian terrorists who target random Jewish civilians and the Israel Defense Forces that target specific mass murderers, such as Ahmed Yassin. It's all part of a "cycle of violence" in which both sides are morally equivalent, according to the double standard consistently applied against Israel by people who should know better.
The preventive killing of the mass murderer Sheikh Yassin received much more negative attention from the moral leaders of these organizations than did the racist attack that accidentally killed the young Arab. This failure – or refusal – to distinguish murder based on religious affiliation from preventive self-defense based on past and future murderous acts is the height of immorality. It would be as if the soldiers who killed Auschwitz guards in the process of liberating the inmates were deemed morally equivalent to the Auschwitz murderers.
It should not be surprising that Palestinian terrorists employ racist criteria in selecting their civilian targets, since the entire goal of Palestinian terrorism is racist to its core. It seeks to deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination. Under their version of Islamic law, it is impermissible for Jews to govern any land that was once under Muslim control, and it is equally impermissible for a Jewish majority to govern a Muslim minority, namely Israeli Arabs.
The time has come for the international community to listen to what Palestinian terrorists say to their own people: that this is a racist struggle to ethnically cleanse all of Palestine, which includes Israel, of all Jews (except, they say, those Jews who lived there before 1917 and are willing to remain as a minority in a Muslim land).
The civilian targets are selected on a racist basis – all Jews are fair game, and if a non-Jew is killed, that is an unfortunate accident.
The terrorist killing of the young Jerusalem Arab student, coupled with the apology when it was learned he was not Jewish, was not only a tragedy for his family (which lost another member to a terrorist attack years earlier), but it is also a revealing episode in the history of Palestinian terrorism. All who hate racism should condemn the selective morality under which a deliberate Jewish civilian death is applauded and a deliberate Arab civilian death is regretted.
All deliberate targeting of non-combatants must be equally condemned. And the deliberate targeting of civilians based on their religion is to be especially condemned.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan M. Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard University and the author of numerous books, most recently "Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge" (Yale University Press, September 2002).
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Comments
Who are the occupiers again?
Reality Check
for a little different perspective.
Re: THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT IS RACIST
yes, i know. you and other racial supremacists don't believe there is such a place or people but that does not make it true.
isreal is a white nation committing oppression and attempting genocide against brown people.
it makes me and most dark skinned people angry to see interviews featuring white israelis with brooklyn accents talking about "those people" (brown arabs) trying to take our (white israelis) land.
to me it's all about, as chuck d says, "fear of a black planet."
i abhor violence. however like my native american ancestors, i, you and most human beings would employ whatever means necessary to defend ourselves from a very rich, super-armed and malevolent oppressor.
i don't think it was a good thing that apaches attacked and killed "innocent" white settlers who were seizing their lands and brutalizing their people. but what would i, you or anybody else do in that situation?
when people become desperate after seeing their parents and children brutalized on a massive scale for generations, they become willing to do anything to strike back out of their pain.
many people like to spread the insidious myth that palestinians wake up in the morning with nothing better to do than say, "oh gee, i just hate the jews so much. i think i'll go out and strap bombs to myself and kill people.
people only rise up and become violent when they have exhausted all other means, including kissing the asses of their oppressors, to get someone's attention focused on their plight.
some of the police in santa cruz may be assholes and may mistreat poor homeless people. but that kind of mistreatment is nowhere near the murderous policies of the israeli military machine, funded by the fascist, imperialistic u.s. would-be world conquerors, toward native palestinian people.
at worse the scpd may have brutalized or even killed a few poor, homeless or "colored" people.
at worse homeless people may live in fear of arrest for the night or tickets or cold uncomfortable sleepless nights in a hidden grove of trees.
these things are bad and unacceptable in such a wealthy overconsumptive society.
but palestinians face massive military attacks in their homes. their children have their arms broken by soldiers and are shot to death for throwing stones or calling names. they don't get to go to court and sue their violators. they have no legal redress whatsoever.
the people there are made homeless, not because they chose to move to an expensive area and cannot afford the local theft we call rent. but because they, their family and everyone that looks like them have already been living on a land for many generations that u.s. and european immigrants feel they have some divine right to covet as their own.
if isreal would ever just acknowledge it's crimes, apologize and make a truly sincere gesture toward real peace with the native people of that area, i believe the majority of them would respond positively.
do you think they wouldn't? are they, like bush says, some kind of peace-hating, freedom-hating mutants. that's what it seems many isreali aggression apologists are trying to make us believe.
this bullshit rap about "peace overtures" by sharon, the butcher of shatilla, is just not credible to most of the people on the planet.
he offers peace only under the heal of israeli dominance.
how the hell do you expect people to react to that? "yes, massa. tell us how far to bend over and take your domination on the plantation or reservation so's you can say we are pacified and therefore deserving of a pat on the head and mercy from military occupation in lieu of actual human rights and respect."
the support that many leftists in the u.s., europe and most of the world show for the palestinian cause is not the result of hatred of the jews, but hatred of oppression.
as a black indian i can say that I would not support, and would militantly reject african-american or native-american oppression of whites or anyone else if we were ever to gain the upper hand by means of foreign funding and intrigue.
if we truly want world peace and justice, we cannot simply ask "is it good for MY people." we are all our people.
of course there are murderers and criminals with selfish and unkind intentions among the oppressed as well as all other groups of human beings. but it is unfair and disingenuous to point to them as an excuse for condemning whole nations or peoples.
when i see photos of poor raggedy-ass palestinian kids facing down the most modern and lethal machines of death (tanks, missiles, helicopters) with stones in their hands, i don't need a political scientist to explain that they are not in it for the money or "anti-semitism."
ask yourself. what would make your own children do such things? religious dogma?
last week i watched a documentary showing the israelis building a wall around a palestinian community. ironically, the same night i watched the a heart-wrenching drama, "the pianist," where german fascist were shown building an all too similar wall around the warsaw ghetto.
i believe the nation of isreal is here to stay no matter how many arabs rant about pushing them into the sea. so let's stop acting like the perils it faces are just because folks in the middle east just don't like jews. let's honestly look at the policies of the dominant military force in that area and ask ourselves: how would we react if we were they?
palestinians or israelis....
Re: THE PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT IS RACIST
What's really amazing, is that people whofoist the banner of peace support the murderous palestinian criminals. Where's the Arab peace movement? It's carrying an AK-47! The palestinians are not "homeless", Israel continues to defend itself against the murder of its citizens...how would you react if someone were blowing up your children and grandparents on a daily basis? Next time you see a man strapped with explosives, run up to him, give him a hug saying "I feel your pain"...
In the end, they won't be able to separate what's left of you from what's left of the tall double skinny latte you've been drinking....