The ‘Daily Show’ guests Anna Baltzer and Mustafa Barghouti, Pro murder propaganda center stage

For anyone who enjoys a professional work on television, especially satire, ‘The Daily Show’ with Jon Stewart is an almost guaranteed delight. Even on October the 28^th 2009, when his guests were leading Palestinian propagandists, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti and Anna Baltzer.

It was a wall-to-wall professional performance by all participants. Jon Stewart was naturally professional in managing a sensitive subject with a somewhat charged audience, and his guests were professionals in doing their job and administrating their poison.

Speaking to a pro Israeli, pro Jewish public opinion, they had to appear pro Jewish themselves. But with an anti Israeli purpose they had to shove in their anti Israeli massage somehow, and as professionals they did so.

Four simple massages, simple and false, slipped between praise for the Jews as people caring for the weak and the oppressed:

The first one was that there are a lot of Israelis behind them. The fact of the matter is that when people sharing Baltzer’s political convictions showed up to demonstrate during Israel’s Hebrew Book fair in Tel Aviv in June 2009, there were barely 15 people among them, shouting in English, carrying signs in English, in a Hebrew language event. In other words, they were not there to win over Israelis, just to get their pictures taken and leave. In Israel, organizations with convictions close to that of Anna Baltzer have to spread throughout the country just to get a hundred Israeli Jews.

Why?
Because they are not trying to win over Israelis!

Second was Dr. Barghouti statement that the state of Israel used the language of force for 60 years. This statement is evidently false by a simple examination of the historic facts: when the UN general assembly voted for the two states solution in 1947 the Yeshuv, Israel’s precursor, accepted, the Palestinians and the Arab world rejected, violently. When a new government took power in Egypt in 1952, Ben Gurion sent a massage of peace, but that government, that of Camel Abdel Nasser marshaled the Arab world against Israel, culminating in the wars of 1956 and 1967. After the Israeli victories of 1967, Israel offered territories for peace but was answered by the Khartoum no, nos, and war resumed. When president Sa’adat of Egypt offered peace in 1977 Israel replied with a YES and evicted the Sinai, including all settlements there. And this record goes on until these very days.

So why did Dr. Barghouti make such a monstrous lie? May because his definition of a forceful act is different then that of the rest of the world, and he regards the very existence of Israel as something he is forced to accept against his will and against his convictions.

Anna Baltzer made the false compression between Israel’s alleged violations of UN resolutions and those of Iraq that got bombed for it.

Does she want Israel to get bombed?
She stopped herself there.
But the comparison remind false, as Dore Gold had pointed out, all the resolutions against Israel are article 6 resolutions, non enforceable negotiate solution resolutions, while those against Iraq are article 7, enforceable resolutions against a recognized threat to peace. Sadly for Anna Baltzer even the bias UN does not see Israel as a threat to peace.

Anna Baltzer mentioned the familiar line about Jews living good under Islamic rule. It’s the old 50’s reasoning that said, ‘slaves like to be whipped’, the 1850’s that is. Because while there were relatively tolerant rulers in Islamic history; much like in the Christian world; they were not necessarily the norm, as recent history records.

With examples such as Ali Burzi Pasha of Libya who murdered hundreds of Jews in 1785, Algiers where Jews were massacred in 1815 and 1830, Damascus where a classical blood libel lead to the murder of Jews in 1840, Safed, whose Jews were brutalized, plundered and killed in 33 days long fest by their Palestinian neighbors in 1834. Mashed Iran, where Jews were forced to convert to Islam in 1839, and Baghdad where a famous pogrom took place in 1940, and more.
Now why would a Jew, or any other minority will have warm fillings for these kinds of memories? Why would his fillings be any different then those a slave has towards the whip?

Finally they claimed their divestment campaign is a non-violent resistance. Is it?
Have they ever condemned the murderous act of Palestinian terrorist organizations?
Challenged them?
Protest them?
Have they encouraged a single farmer on the path of Israel’s security barrier to say ‘not through my land’ to the members of those armed groups, crossing over in order to murder so many in his name?
Because if their punishment oriented boycott campaign against Israel hasn’t even tried to avert a single suicide attack, a single rocket, then it is not there to replace the violent struggle, but to assist it, and support it, by punishing Israel for successfully defending its citizens.

Jon Stewart Mid East guests, the wrong criticism.

I do not wish to challenge CAMERA’s impressive record in monitoring media bias and inaccuracies regarding Israel and the Middle East conflict. However, Steven Stotsky criticism of Jon Stewart hosting Anna Baltzer and Dr. Mustafa Barghouti on ‘The Daily Show’ of October the 28th, is simply wrong. While I do share Stotsky’s outrage over the poisonous lies the two guests spread throughout the interview and like him I can point out their murderous intentions towards the Israeli population I see no reason why this outrage should spillover to ‘The Daily Show’ and its staff.
Throughout the years this show had maintained successfully a delicate balance, on one hand expressing unapologetically left wing liberal American views (not necessarily extremists), while hosting guests from a variety of political views, including the far right, such as Pat Buchanan and others. And each guest was given the same amount of respect, where he or she were given the time to express their views even when disagreements were prime. Regarding the Israeli Palestinian conflict the people behind the show took the neutral position, especially when interviewing guests, putting their own views aside.
These are all legitimate professional decisions, which should be respected. Along with the ability to make people laugh, even from things they disagreed with, they gave ‘The Daily Show’ its success and credibility. Deviating from them would have been bias in its ugliest form; the kind Israel is expose to from the more serious media outlets.
With guests like Anna Baltzer and Dr. Mustafa Barghouti this record was undoubtedly challenged to its maximum, and Jon Stewart did indeed handle it with care, trying to find a common ground with his guests on one hand (a common ground for Israelis and Palestinians), and allowing members of the audience to vent their emotions on the other hand. While these two were clearly there to spread lies and hate, ethics demands they should be given a stage, because the same ethics, when practiced gives us a stage:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Pierre Rehov
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Is there a hope for peace?

I gave up long ago, which makes me a member of the majority here in Israel, and probably among the Palestinians as well, but sometimes people can surprise us for the better.
Usually talkbackers are full of trash talk and hate speech, but in this article by Yoram Ettinger, Mohammad and Said from Jordan had a lengthy constructive conversation with William and Logic from Israel.
This is only a trickle of hope, but by god I was thirsty, and so do a lot of other people.

J Street won’t decide the future of the peace process

DDizengoff Street in Tel Aviv will,
YYaffo Street in Jerusalem will,
The streets of Haifa, Netanya, Hadera, Gedera, Ra’anana, Kfar Saba and Rishon Letzion. Beer Sheva, Eilat, Askelon, Ashdod, Netivot and Sderot. Those and more, big and small, are the communities, whose residents will decide the future of the peace process. J Street can boo the critiques of the Goldstone report, advance it in the halls of power, praise the apologists and advocated of the Palestinian mass murder campaigns, all they like. Our lives are at stake, we, the citizens of Israel, have the final veto.

Anti-Semitism: Sweden boxed in neutrality

Sweden’s historic neutrality during the Second World War and the Cold War was rightfully hailed by those defending the position of the Swedish government in its recent row with Israel, regarding the blood libel published by the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet where it had accused Israel of organ theft from dead Palestinians.
What they fail to realize is that in this case what is in the past stays in the past and the present is quite different. If during the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, neutrality was an act of courage with moral credit attached, by the end of the Cold War it was a status symbol, a high up on the mountain position for Swedish politics from which to look down at the world. Removed from its crisises and challenges, a taking a stand neutrality became a do nothing neutrality. It was a neutrality that in order to avoid tension worked with tyrannies rather then facing them, but it used the aura of old times, when it was one of a handful of pioneers that opposed South Africa’s apartheid regime, to cloth these new associations with morality. So boxed in was Swedish politics in this newly defined neutrality that when the crisis did call, and thousands of Swedish nationals were stranded in the tsunami stricken shores of south east Asia, many wounded, many dead, all lost, its government didn’t move an inch, while the whole world around them rushed to the rescue.
That may seem unrelated to the topic at hand but that administrative inaction was also a moral inaction, since people’s lives were involved. And just as the tsunami killed a lot of innocent people so does Anti Semitism. One tremor can cause tidal waves of hate and destruction that will engulf the world several times before subsiding. Governments may had changed in Sweden between that disaster and now, but for the current government whose delegates set through a demented lecture of the world’s most famous anti Semite, reciting old conspiracy theories, the waters are just as calm as they were four years ago for its predecessors. Thus giving the evidence that Swedish politics is in a chronic crisis of moral leadership. As Israelis, and other non-Swedes there is little we can do a bout it. The main victims of this boxed in neutrality are the Swedish people and the Swedish state, whose neutrality is no longer a commodity this battered world needs.

Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, about Jewish superstitions that are not much different then the Christian ones

Like Christians and Muslims we Jews number the years, only with Hebrew letters, and sometimes those letters combine into a word or something that sounds like a word in Hebrew. The most famous example was 1984, which was the Hebrew year of “You shell be destroyed”, and the air was full of mystical kabalistic doomsday predictions. The fact that that year was also associated with George Orwell most famous novel heightened the tension. Had the Internet existed back then the doomsday talk would have been overwhelming.
The irony of this is that in some respect we are sillier then the Christians. What make us sillier is not that we have a year/date with an ominous meaning, as they do, but that there also other years with meanings, meanings that are not so ominous. 1987 for example, was the year when “You shell shmuze”, 1988 the year when “You shell rejoice”, 1989 the year when “You shell drop something” or be dropped, it’s a matter how one reads it; and 1990 the year when “You shell sleep”.
The reason for these is simple, statistics. During the 1980’s those statistics produced a cluster of such accidental names, sometimes it is just one or two in decade, like 1962 and 1968, the year when you shell lie down and the year when you shell forget, accordingly. The first two decades of this century are mostly meaningless and not so easy to pronounce, with the exception of this year (“Ha Baa Aleinu Le Tova”), which means, “The nine”, and most of the time will correspond with the year 2010. Its numeric value is 5770 but it numerological meaning is “The nine”.
Another cluster will be in the 2020’s, with years like 2022, when “You shell be a pub”, or 2027 when “You shell be pure gold”, and pure tin in the following year. But the ultimate will 2029, when “You shell be judged” or “Shell you do the judging yourself?” again, depends how one reads it.
And on that year of judgment, on May, Friday the 13, the Apophis meteor is going to be very, very close to Earth. According to the scientists it is not gonna hit, so I guess its kind of close they way all that glassware fell on my head when I helped set the table for the Rosh Hashanah dinner, also the time when I was working on this piece, and the reason why I took some parts of – just to be on the safe side.
Happy Jewish New Year everybody.
May it give us our share of goofs but spare us its share of tragedies.

A review of Breaking the Silence testimonies on Operation Cast Lead, Part III

Previous

Manipulation of the witnesses
Did “Breaking the Silence” try to manipulate their witness?
This possibility rises from several places in the booklet.
It starts with a very important question that hasn’t been asked in the booklet or the videos:
What made you come forward?
A necessary prolog when the main theme in each interview supposes to be a confession, yet it is missing. Why?
Only one soldier gives his reason for approaching Breaking the Silence, He does this in a by the way manner, at page 29. He describes the role of the rabbinate unit in the preparations to enter the Gaza Strip. His story is very important to every Israeli; it is a part of an important internal discussion about the relations between religion, military, and politics. His testimony paints a picture of right- wing rabbinic ideologues, with their own separate political agenda, involved in military affairs. This is indeed disturbing, to say the least, but nowhere in the booklet is there any mention of any impact it had on the conduct of the soldiers and the IDF during the fighting. What is clear is that this anonymous soldier approached Breaking the Silence to talk about one thing, those right wing Rabbis, and they, Breaking the Silence, got him to talk about different things, the events inside the Gaza Strip, a related but separate topic.
How did one subject slip into another?
Are these really confessions or just war stories?
Only they can tell us.

And then there is this.
Page 22:
“What do you mean by 'waiting for something to move'? What were your rules of engagement? What were you told at the briefings?”
"Anything looks suspicious to you, open fire."
“What is suspicious? Arms and intent are both valid there, too?”
“Yes. You have to detect weapons, verify that person is not one of ours. If he has something on him, that is grounds enough to…”
“No intent, even without intent.”
“They were assuming that anyone present in a bombed-zone, carrying a Kalashnikov, is no weapons collector.”

This is a fishing attempt by the interviewer. First he is looking for unarmed civilians in this story; when it turns out that they are not available, he tries a question based on the reasoning that armed men in war zone can be considered victims just like unarmed civilians if they don’t have the intention to kill. This is a ludicrous assumption, which the interviewee noticed and made a mockery of.

And from page 14:
“It's a city, you know. Flyers were distributed, but people are bound to be on the move, obviously there would be civilian traffic. It's not a military area. People live there. No one addressed this in briefings? Commanders, anyone? No distinction was to be made between people and civilians, such as would escape in your directions? There are plenty of possible scenarios.”
“That's right. No special mention was made of innocents.”

Enough emphasis was made to clear civilians from 99% of the buildings. There can always be more possible scenarios, and no one can be prepared for all of them. It is the job of the relevant levels of command to assess probable scenarios and make determinations for the troops on the ground. Here the interviewer creates an over emphasis on this issue, when there is no evidence it was needed. And unfortunately here the interviewee fell for this maneuver.

Absurdities
And then there are the absurdities. In pages 21 and 22 a soldier describes what he sees as the inhumane use of white phosphorus in a sandy area near the border, a mostly open region where soldiers do need a smoke-screen cover, such as white phosphorus gives. The only observable victim he could see is the “glazed sand”; no mention of people, animals, domestic or otherwise, vegetation, or structures, just sand.
Is this soldier suggesting that it is inhumane to hurt sand, or worse, that it is inhumane to give his fellow soldiers smoke-screen cover in an open area?
Or maybe he tried to appease the interviewer's expectations for some kind of horror stories, preferably regarding white phosphorus?
Later this soldier will give a favorable description of his past activities in the West Bank, not something we would accept from a soldier who hates the service so much he will argue against giving his fellow soldiers cover from enemy fire.
There is irony here. This soldier describes his experiences in the West Bank as moral and uses them as the standard by which he measures what he saw in the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead. The irony is that Breaking the Silence was formed by a group of ex soldiers who decided to break their silence over immoral Israeli conduct they witnessed to in the West Bank, or so they say.

And if he was not an ill wisher, which was never likely in the first place, it is more likely he was manipulated, a possibility supported by another absurdity from page 54:

“Were there people who opened fire without detecting anything? On their own initiative?”
“I think so. I think that there was such a case in the force parallel to us. There was sniper fire. The bullet scratched a soldier's helmet and they began to fire in all directions. We were 200 meters behind, and began to inquire on radio and we were told there was sniper fire against the force.”

Do we realize what these two are saying? A soldier’s helmet was hit by a sniper’s bullet, and thank god nothing worse than that, and yet they claim the soldiers fired without detecting anything. The soldiers may not have identified the exact source of the enemy fire, but they had certainly detected it, or more precisely, it detected them. The absurd here is that grown men can argue such a lopsided absurd reasoning in the first place.

It maybe tempting for us to regard these absurdities with humor, but we must be careful in our judgment. These soldiers are clearly left wing in their political views. That does not make them traitors or malicious, or stupid. They left homes and families, risking their lives to protect other Israeli families in the south part of Israel. They’ve done their duty to the country and people of Israel, and to their fellow soldiers on the battlefield. In various parts of the booklet, they express pride in what they did and tried to. They do deserve our highest respect and gratitude. My point is that political and ideological convictions do affect our relations and feelings toward other people, organizations and ideas, whoever we might be. If something in our worldview has a certain status we either trust it more or trust it less, depending on the status and on our convictions. Here in Israel, some traditional Jews, masoratim, are more likely to trust Jews who are more religious than they are on issues of religion, tradition and morality, because in their worldview the more religious folks know better, especially if they call themselves Rabbis. A trust like this can be so deep a person can eliminate ones own personal judgment. The same is true in the secular world. A left leaning person can regard Breaking the Silence as those who know better than him what is or isn’t a war crime and what is right or wrong in times of war, even though he was there, and they were not. It may seem an absurd but it is human nature and if we examine our behavior we’re likely to find out that we have done that very thing to a greater or lesser degree.

Did Breaking the Silence try to manipulate the general public, in Israel and the rest of the world?
Maybe they didn’t?
But if not, why did they rushed to the foreign media first?
And why did they try to keep the Jerusalem Post military affairs correspondent off the story?
And why did all the hype turn out empty?
Why have they tried to use the relative lack of resistance as an argument that there was no need for all that force to be used in the first place, without at least acknowledging the opposite possibility? After all a case can be made that the presence of this massive force, accompanied by the warning from the flyers, is what made Hamas’ fighters flee the battle and hide in hospitals. A frustrated soldier talks about this at page 58 in the pdf booklet.
Why besides rumors and absurdities, haven't they got a single confirmed case of wrong doing on our part beyond vandalism?
I’m not saying a definite yes to the firat question in this section about manipulation, but if they believe the correct response is "no," they should explain why.
Based on that report is there any real room for concern over Israeli soldiers behavior during Operation Cast Lead?
Definitely.
And not just based on that report.
We Israelis sent our sons and daughters to the battlefield to protect us from monstrous enemies. God willing, war willing, luck willing, we would like them all back alive and unhurt, both physically and mentally. And most definitely not to became monsters. The infuriating accounts of vandalism by Israeli troops, which came from a number of sources, tell us that the evil potential is there, and for our own sake we must confront it and extinguish it. It may not be war crimes, but by our standards it is bad enough.

We Israelis do have some serious soul-searching to do after ‘Cast Lead’ as any other nation with a moral code has to do after any kind of war, but Breaking the Silence has some atoning to do for all those empty allegations.