It seems that some corners of the mainstream media have actually begun to take notice of the double standard they consistently apply to Israel and its enemies in the Arabs’ war against the Jews.
[Actually, it might be more accurate to call said double standard a single one: the Arabs are always right, the Jews are always wrong. But I am about to elaborate on that very point.]
This week, the New York Times published an Op-Ed by Human Rights Watch’s chairman emeritus, Robert Bernstein [1] , in which he asserts that the organization he founded has “lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields.” He also asserted that the lobby had wasted its political capital by refusing to criticize the closed societies that were responsible for the majority of human right violations in their zeal to focus on Israel.
In the Guardian, usually a realiably Judeophobic publication, a piece by Harold Evans [2] asserted that, amidst the “the sickening spectacle of Britain failing to stand by Israel, the only democracy with an independent judiciary in the entire region”, that “poor Judge Goldstone now regrets how his good name has been used to single out Israel. The Swiss paper Le Temps reports him complaining that "This draft [UN human rights council] resolution saddens me … there is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report. I hope the council can modify the text."
Of course, the Guardian had to reclaim its progressive bonafides the next daym publishin a piece by Antony Lerman [3] praising the efforts of J Street to take back the debate from AIPac despite J Street being characterized as “urging Israel to make ‘further unilateral concessions to neighbours pledged to its annihilation’, as ‘self-hating Jews’ as they ‘stand at the vanguard of global efforts to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish state’; and its “appalling core premise: that Israel is to blame for Arab terror – the age-old calumny of blaming the Jews for their own destruction”; and “the Goldstone blood libel" which is "part of the UNHRC's strategy of delegitimising Israel to soften up the world for its eventual destruction".
Lerman, unfortunately, may be right when he claims: “We can dismiss this ranting”; he may be closer to the pulse of the debate because I will assume right off that he [and J Street, and Judge Goldstone] are being completely disingenuous—and that Evans and Bernstein are missing that point.
Re Evans claims regarding Goldstone’s “complaints”, they are intended to provide a façade of “neutrality” [which ostensibly fit with the predictable Israeli refusal join the proceedings], but his policies are informed by a cross between Gandhi-ism and Orientalism: that the Israelis are settlers, the Palestinians are natives, and, no matter how fascist or genocidal the Palestinians are, the “original sin” remains the “imposition” of Jews in the area. [That claim has been proven to be in and of itself historically fallacious, on two counts: one, that the “Palestinians” were actually “native” to the area; and two, that the assumption that all geographical areas have a salient exclusive ethnicity “native” to a particular area [which was the inherent flaw in Wilsonian “self-determination”]]. As Goldstone is a South African progressive Jew, these have to be unshakable core beliefs on Goldstone’s part, which he will always reflexively act upon, and will be unwilling or unable [or both] to entertain the notion that there are actually legitimate criticisms of his philosophy.
Bernstein likewise doesn’t realize that he [unwittingly, for certain] created a monster. HE may have wanted his organization to go after “closed” societies; BUT, if said societies are non-white, or third-world, or former colonies, they are ispo-facto absolved from any criticism of their political [and other] conduct. THAT is THE operative “human rights” truism. “Democracies”, because they can never be perfect, and are overwhelmingly run by individuals of European descent, are therefore fair game [if not the only game in town.]
The irony is that for centuries—at least in Europe and America—Jews tried to hard to be accepted as “white people”.
Now we are.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opinion/20bernstein.html
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/20/israel-goldstone-palestine-gaza-un
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/22/j-street-jewish-lobby
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