More reflections from Gaza: Keep off the grass
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The American International School in Gaza was bombed on 3 January, completely destroying the institution. Today it is a twisted wreck of concrete, metal and burnt vans. Surreally, when I visited a few days ago I found two green, grass ovals being watered by a highly effective sprinkler system. Sheep were grazing on the unused land. Two students of the school, Mohammed Samhadane and Walid Abuzaid, both 13, are like many pimply faced kids all over the world; addicted to violent video games and smoking cigarettes. They told me that like their friends they wanted peace with Israel but believed the state had no desire to negotiate honestly with the Palestinians, especially after the recent Gaza massacre. Politically aware, sceptical towards the claims of Hamas to represent the Palestinian people (they came from Fatah families) and Western-friendly, they resigned themselves to the idea that things might change soon. Maybe. This attitude has followed me across the Strip. From farmers to Hamas spokespeople and militants to academics, there is a little hope, but only because the alternative is despair and extremism. In a land such as this, where daily life is consumed with finding petrol, a job and respite from the searing heat, politics seeps into every facet of life. I’m yet to meet anybody who doesn’t want to share opinions on the Hamas/Fatah split or President Barack Obama (usually a positive comment that he’s not George W. Bush then dismissal of his chances to change the equation here.) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may believe that the people of Gaza despise the Hamas leadership and want to overthrow its rule but the picture is not that simple. The growing Islamisation of society concerns many Gazans — today I was given a list Hamas is distributing that urges parents not to allow children to wear t-shirts that contain words such as, “Madonna” and “Hussy” — but security has greatly improved since the group took over in 2007. During Friday prayers in Khan Younis last week, I witnessed thousands of Hamas supporters cheer Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and embrace his message of a devout Islamic society (though he also talked about a Palestinian state along 1967 borders, the internationally acceptable solution to the conflict.) Young men and boys, some devout and some more liberal, clearly found meaning in a movement that deftly melded faith with politics. I was nearly crushed in a push by the crowd to get close to Haniyeh as he departed the mosque. Unemployment now defines the Gazan population; tens of thousands of Palestinian Authority staff still pull a regular income from the West Bank but are directed by Fatah not to work in Gaza under Hamas. I’ve lost count of the number of men who tell me their wives are begging them to leave home during the day. “1500 people were killed during the war”, one man, Nafez Aldabba, told me, “but more babies than that have been born since because there is nothing to do except sleep, eat and have s-x.” People like Nafez and his son Mohammed confounded my expectations about attitudes in the Strip and indicated a deep desire in Gaza for some kind of normalised relations with Israel. Mohammed, a militant who fires rockets into Israel and treats all Israeli civilians as legitimate targets, told me that he still supported a two-state solution, the right of return and enforcement of 1967 borders. He rejected the “extremism” of Hamas. But like his father, he had no faith that Israel would ever end settlement building “and now is even telling America to get lost.” I rarely hear any hateful comments towards Jews. A few have asked whether public opinion in Australia was supportive of the Palestinians (I replied that recent polls suggest that they are.) Even farmers with little education stressed their embrace of “all religions” but opposition to Zionism. Hazem Balousha, a Gazan-based journalist who strings for the London Guardian, told me that he believes Israel doesn’t want to overthrow Hamas but merely strangle the economy. “Most people are fed-up”, he said. “They don’t really care too much about politics but have to focus on getting electricity, cooking gas and how to feed the family every day. They only care about themselves.” Gaza’s biggest rap group, Darg Team, were a breath of fresh air (their latest single, 23 Days, details the carnage during January’s war.) Six twenty-somethings, with matching white trainers, riff on religion, culture, honour, occupation and the right of return. I asked manager Fadi Srour whether they would perform in Israel. “We’d like to”, he responded. “Every society has good and bad and we want to reach people directly. We’d love to perform in the Knesset.” Under Hamas, the band has been unofficially banned but they say they’ll continue performing anyway, going underground, if necessary. Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist and the author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution. |
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21 Comments
The NazIsrael Defence Forces must by now be the most vilified military in the world.
And to think Frank Lowy’s close friend & confidante Ehud Barak calls the IDF the best military force in the world.
Israel’s illegitimacy as a nation State grows daily.
And to think Rudd & Co are one of only 3 national governments globally who supported Israel’s
terrorism in Gaza last January…..pewkworthy.
Illogical outbursts like Kevin Herbert’s do nothing but tell us that someone calling himself Kevin Herbert has had a burst of strong feelings. “Illegitimacy as a nation State”? As it clearly is a nation state amongst the sovereign states of the world, a member of the UN etc., maybe KH wishes to say that it should never have been created as a nation and that recent events are making that clearer and clearer. If so, why not say so and argue it - including where things started to go wrong and, if, as implied, KH is a moralist, where the morally wrong steps which could have been seen to be such took place?
That members of the IDF often behave badly, like Australians in Palestine 1919, Americans at My Lai (a much worse case), the French in Algeria etc. etc. surely doesn’t mean the IDF isn’t the best military force in the world. I would guess from limited experience and hearsay that the IDF is a lot better on average in its capacity to perform all its main military functions than the US Army, not counting the Rangers, Delta Force, or, by defiinition the Marines. You can count all the Europeans, and the Japanese, who don’t actually fight, out of the competition and Russia, China and India couldn’t match the IDF’s technical and planning know how. The rest of Asia and Africa wouldn’t be in the race.
As for “terrorism”, while it is legitimate to question the morality of methods of warfare which kill a lot of civilians and even compare the methods with those of terrorists it is not really helpful to rational discussion not to recognise that terrorism, in the sense of deliberate killing and injuring of the weak, especially civilians, because they are soft targets and the terrorists have no chance of winning a war by conventional means (but may be able to reduce others to such a state of fear and despair that they will concede a lot) is indeed a special tactic of the relatively weak but totally single-minded. Bombing of German cities didn’t occur until Germany had attacked others. The onslaught of Gaza didn’t occur until Israel had been subjected to hundreds, or thousands, of (not very effective) rocket attacks. You could argue that excesses of that kind of retaliation by a relatively powerful state actor are even worse than some terrorism but it doesn’t help to conflate the two.
Isn’t it BTW a damning criticism of any violent action that it doesn’t even have the pragmatic virtue of being likely to succeed? The terrorist attacks in Bali were utterly indefensible by that criterion, as are the recent ones in Djakarta. Jewish terrorism in Palestine after WW2 did work rather well in making the UK want to give up its mandage ASAP. Palestinian terrorism allied to the birth rate means that Israel’s real area of dysfunction - it’s domestic politics with government hamstrung by impossible coaltions of people with extraordinarily different cultures, secular and religious - is having and will have extremely serious problems in reaching any solution. Few democratic states act effecctively on the most serious issues much ahead of disaster and Israel will perhaps have proved to have thrown away as many chances as the Palestinians before some settlement is reached. It may therefore turn out to be a settlement that Israelis would abhore if offered to them now. Why, oh why, can’t the Palestinians be offered a slice of Jerusalem as a capital? (No doubt Iran won’t nuke Jerusalem anyway but there would be a lot to be said for having both capitals side by side, not least becasue Israel will always be able to threaten the use of superior force).
Words clearly fail you..as does your attempt to hide your far right wing fascist views behind a classical name.
Another Zionist far right zealot attempting rational argument but ending up in glaring sophistry..why are we surprised? Those Aussie Jews who turn away from the reality of Israeli mass torture, apartheid, State sanctioned murder, war crimes etc etc against the Palestinians, are moral cowards.
Get out of their country, and the rockets will stop. Which part of that simple proposition don’t you understand.
The sophistry of the Dover Heights/Balaclava armchair militarists always shows them up for what they are…modern day fascist Nazis.
Words words words with no meaning whatsoever…..
Well Kevin Herbert does have some problems doesn’t he? Could those bilious eruptions be some sort of displacement activity that obscures, at least for him, the anguish his own failings or misfortunes? Or could he just be an old-fashioned anti-Semite, possibly one who gathers up every unattractive happening that can be termed “Jewish” to consolidate his hate?
As it happens I have absolutely no Jewish ancestry (nor has my wife) but have long taken an interest in what has flowed from the Balfour declaration and the extraordinary, possibly insoluble, problems of the Middle East. I have never been to Israel.
KH’s opinion of what is sophistry as contrasted with subtle appreciation of the complicated facts and an attempt at accurate discrimination in usage on sensitive subjects wouldn’t, on the evidence of his output, be worth much. Consider my comments as attempting to honour
Antony Lowenstein’s courage at least. (There is a kind of exhibitionist who can be mistaken for a genuninely courageous speaker of the truth as he sees it, and either of course can be mistaken, but I don’t take AL to be an exhibitionist, though I don’t know him).
“Get out of their country and the rockets will stop” suggests a rather vague understanding of the Palestine issue. There are no settlers any longer in Gaza and haven’t been for a long time but that hasn’t stopped the rockets fired from a territory under a completely different government from that of the West Bank. The West Bank is where the settlers are and the rockets aren’t being fired from there, not even at the settlers for the most part, and certainly not into Israeli towns which have never been outside the state of Israel since it was formed. Is KH serious about suggesting that it is OK for Hamas to fire rockets at Israeli civilians within Israel because there are Israeli settlements still in the West Bank that the Fatah government is seeking, by negotiation, to have removed? And what about the rockets fired from Lebanon indiscriminately at places inhabited within Israel by civilians? Is it not reasonable for Israeli’s to worry that there is a fixed determination amongst Arab Muslims to push Jews out of Israel? Or is KH in fact saying that Israel belongs to some Arabs who are entitled to get Jews out of the whole territory of Israel? That inference does seem open on the words quoted at the beginning of this par. , in which case, if KH is not just careless, he is off the planet so far as any realistic discourse is concerned.
So, if KH wants to show that he know enough about the subject or can think rationally enough about it to involve others in his obsessions let him demonstrate that there is some sense in saying “Get out of their country” which has a sufficient relation with Hamas rocketry from Gaza. At least I know that my American Jewish friend, of Israeli parentage, who says that the best thing about Israel is that it keeps the mad Jews out of America and that the country is run with the efficiency of a Latin American country does know what he is talking about…..
Right, now I understand…
KH is a raving loony spitting venom at the Israellis at every opportunity.
M is much more verbose to the point of being unintelligible.
Isn’t the Middle East conflict worthy of better analysis than has come from either?
Speaking from what I believe to be an ethical viewpoint, it is difficult to justify the creeping continuity of Israellis taking more and more land from the Palestinians. It is equally impossible to justify either side’s reliance upon invisible friends in the sky as justification for their attitudes towards each other. Religion adds nothing to society, yet costs so much.
The antidote to religion is perhaps education, which makes this a promising starting point, for all nations. Why, in Australia, the churches have charitable status whilst at the same time promoting uncharitable acts is beyond comprehansion. Are schools pushing a religious story an asset to society or are they, as it appears to me, divisive and antithetical to peace, knowledge and goodwill?
I feel that the same is true of many international conflicts. Any action towards better educational outcomes is, when seen in this light, justified and urgent.
Imagine a world with a combined education and peacemaking budget equal to or exceeding the military budgets.
If religion meant anything at all, it would support peace and avoid war. This is definitely not the case, hence, religion - of all types - will find no place in a peaceful world.
Sorry you find me verbose. If you find it unintelligible I doubt it is either my writing or your intellect which is the problem, but your particular take on the subject. I have a lot of sympathy with that “a plague on both their houses” attitude and your connection of that with the Great Unseen Friend. However, a bit more hard thinking about the irreducibly complex (evolving an eye is nothing!) suggests that, unfortunately, religion is not something one can deal with airily by saying “If religion meant anything at all, it would support peace and avoid war [scil. instead of merely saying it does]” because religion means a lot to a lot of people and a lot in the sense of having a great deal of impact on almost everything that matters to any group of people above a small family in size.
You also may have overlooked the fact that the founders of Israel were largely secular and Israel would have a smaller proportion of god-botherers than the USA , and maybe even Russia now that the Orthodox Church has resurged as a vehicle for nationalism. My closest Arab friend, like my closest Pakstani friend, says “religion is the problem” because each is an atheist and I am not sure that Iraqi urbanites or educated Palestinians are much given to thinking about God - which maybe why they sensibly enough want something now except for kids hoodwinked into being suicide bombers.
A world without religion? Marvellous but is it possible given what evolution has done to our brains since we acquired language and lived in larger and larger groups. Why is religion not peaceful but, as much as anything else, a vehicle for one lot of people’s dominance or control over others (which may produce peace in a reasonably acceptable way if it the discipline is to obey workable rules with the sanction of not going to heaven if you don’t but that’s the exception given a spectrum from Aztec human sacrifice to the Inquisition)? The reason surely is in our even more strongly implanted drives. Certainly the successful competitors in a totally religion free society can calculate that they need to be seen to be doing things for the weaker members of the species if they are not to be pulled down by envy or resentment but calculation carries a heavy cost, especially to keep on calculating and getting it right, and you have to deal with free-loaders too (note the difference in Australian philanthropic giving compared with American - anything to do with religion I wonder, or maybe the fact that far more Americans live in or come from small and medium sized towns where community pressure is greater than in cities over a million or so). On the whole an institution which helps to inculcate agreed rules will probably have some advantages in terms of overhead costs avoided by a society which adheres to it. So, while I happily take on my friends who are believers in that Creator who didn’t bother to give all mankind the same instructions I am not confident that we will benefit from getting rid of religion and substituting, as you seem to propose, education. Whose curriculum? Who are the teachers? What underlying principles do they subscribe to, how dogmatically do they teach them, and how do good are they at justifying their underlying principles and making them consistent. If you leave it up to to everyone to think everything through for themselves, what a field-day there will be for con-men and low-rent evangelists. Perhaps you assume that intelligent application of Rawlsian principles, that is imagining what rules you would subscribe to if you didn’t know what position in the world you would be born into, would be beneficent? I don’t. Moi. I think I might go for a much more exciting world where nature red in tooth and claw was the model and the big man got the girls and the losers were sold into slavery (rather like Africa till 150 or so years ago).
Dear readers,
I am forced to respond to the verbose Mestophiles.
I am not interested in loading this thread up with millions of words and poor grammar. My intention was to point out the root of the problem in the Middle East, which is also, unfortunately, the root of the problem in most, if not all, other intractible wars which have blighted mankind throughout the past one or two hundred years, if not 5 millenia.
Dear M, religion and other fantasies may be created by the powerful to subjugate the lesser classes. I have not commented on this. The important consideration here is that education, real education, is a measured thin - it deals with facts, with science and with society. It does not deal with destruction brought by wars and has no truck with matters which cannot be demonstrated to be true.
You may perceive religious schools as being an exception. I do not. Such institutions deal with both education and indoctrination.
Again, I make the point, which is:
Until military budgets are matched by education budgets and peace budgets, there will be an imbalance which will result in continuance of war and of issues such as the Zionists versus the adjacent populations and the loss of land and personal opportunity which feeds war will result in the other side, in this case, Palestinians, being forced to respond violently, because this is the language of war, which, in this case, is clearly endorsed by the jews and followed by the state of Israel.
Education is not a hard concept to understand, as long as we engage with its true meanings. And it is far cheaper than the alternative.
Fascinating. Poor grammar? Well, there may be a careless slip or two, and the odd literal, but I hardly think that an arrogant, dogmatic person whose intellectual style is that of the autodidact** who doesn’t keep much sophisticated intelligent educated company is the person to take that from without demonstration. As for careless slips, the misspelling of the nom de guerre of the person you intend to insult without provocation other that his writing at greater length than you care to attend to on aspects of Middle Eastern related matters that you deem unfit for your high-minded consideration, is pretty sloppy (and not your only misspelling, on which I wouldn’t comment except that you have assumed the high ground on grammar and I find that ludicrous from my own high ground of a great deal of drafting experience and a considerable reputation as a pedant - unfortunately I suppse). Not sloppy, in the case of the misspelling of a name, if your purpose in contributing to the blog is merely to be insulting to those who, though you would probably not read them carefully enough to be aware of it, don’t accept all your views in the terms in which they are stated. I can’t make up my mind whether you are totally innocent of the arts of persuasion and advocacy or simply like to hear, so to speak, the sound of your own voice, and don’t care a damn whether you persuade anyone: just like Kevin Herbert. FWIW I simply offer a few thoughts in the expectation that someone without a one track mind may paick up one or more of them and make something of it for themselves, or to share with others.
**I appreciate you may have a degree in something but there are an awful lot of people with pass and indifferent honours degrees about who, as your own views emphasise, are not too smart of assiduous at thinking about the big issues.
Now here I descend to the snobbish and condescending. May I suggest to you, who insist on your assertions (and nothing more than repeated assertions, indeed you say you are making your point “again” and it is a repetition of mere assertion without even fleshing out the substance of the education or the objects of the “peace budget” that you adocate) that you should take some elementary course in debating (though that tends to be artificial) or perhaps advocacy from Prof George Hampel, with university level philosophy as well, to understand how ridiculous it is for one with pretensions to be able to lecture people to say, contrary to fact “Dear readers, I am forced to respond to…..” and then repeat the contentless assertions about education, undefined and undescribed. I pass over your words about the causes of war and violence which are of a generality that may be necessary in a short piece pitched at Year 6 children (and none the worse for that perhaps but it hardly takes us far. While you do seem to think you know the necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for peace in the Middle East I trust you don’t expect to have your dogmatic certainties taken seriously.
However, in the no doubt vain hope that you are not beyond education yourself, may I suggest that you ask the best educated, most intelligent person you know what is wrong with “Education is not a hard cocept to understand, as long as we engage with its true meanings”. Any decent university philosophy department would send you off for remedial education in language and logic before you were allowed to waste the time of the faculty. You don’t understand? That’s part of your problem. And, despite the clarity of your writing in the first piece you contributed, I can see you do have problems in a controversy such as any controversy on the Middle East. Why? For two reasons. Because you say “this is the language of war, which, in this case, is clearly endorsecd by the jews [sic]” . That contains the gross of error of language that there is nothing preceding “this is the language” to which the word “this” could apply. Worse, it contains the appallingly insensitive slight on Jews (who are contrasted with the state of Israel and presented as those driving the state of Israel, presumably whether they live in or outside Israel) of attributing warlike language and actions to a whole community or people or extended family (however one should properly describe all the people, secular and observant, who identify as Jews). That is the language of an anti-Semite or an ignoramus.
I am sorry BTW if I don’t bother to turn long sentences which presented no problem to people who had a classical education, as any familiarity with 18th and early 19th century prose would illustrate, into the short sentences with which Hemingway wrote and good modern journalists write. I could prune everything, as well as using shorter sentences, but I would be afraid that you would miss the connections between ideas. You do anyway I think, partly because you are not really interested in any ideas but your own.
I think that it was Einstein who said, “If you can’t explain relativity to a bright 12yr old, you don’t understand it”. He didn’t specify brevity but, given teenage attention spans (even in the mid 60s when he made the comment) one may assume it.
Otiose verbosity does not augment a rational argument. If an idea/refutation can’t be stated in 150 words then the originators are bluffing. Or fools/knaves. Probably both.
M,
You seem to be so uptight about your own presumption of a classical education and its worth that I am amazed that you have room in your noggin to form such eloquently lengthy insults as you seem to enjoy.
Mate, I too am educated. I am trying to write proper-like. So that even ninnies such as your good self will be able to understand.
For goodness’ sake, try to understand where your opponent (since you have chosen to make opponents of us all) is coming from. I do not see this forum as a place of battles and war as do you. I see it as a place for exchange of ideas and sentiments.
Perhaps your spleen would be much better vented elsewhere than on Crikey’s pages. I am sure that there is somewhere out there in the electronic wasteland where such nonsense is valued.
AR, thanks for your plea for common sense.
That’s it for me on this thread.
John Bennetts: my initial brief reaction is “It takes one to know one” and “the pot calling the kettle black”. It is almost funny to read someone using “spleen” of someone who is in fact poking dispassionate fun (OK a bit of contempt too I concede) at one who thinks I don’t know where “he’s coming from” which is either anti-Semitic (vide supra) or so insensitive that you can hardly expect to be taken seriously on something on which you do obviously intend to be taken seriously.
Indeed, my irresponsible urge to insult you (not vent spleen at all, I only get cross with sloppiness and bad arguments from family and friends of whom I expect better) is prompted as much as anything else by the way you take yourself so seriously. It is you, not me, running a line about views to be taken seriously by the great and good amonst policy makers. It is you reproving me for saying something because it was not something you had indicated an interest in, as though you were the agenda setter! [“I have not commented on this”. If you wished simply to pass over what you purported to summarise of my views I would expect you to say “I make no comment on this”. Just the simple principle applied of expression unius est exclusion alterius.]
You have shown good sense in not following up your supercilious comment on grammar. It shows there is just a glimmer of hope for your self-improvement.
It would be good to know how you justify your reference to “the Jews” unless you concede that you are an anti-Semite. How could a man who says he is educated adopt that usage without understanding the connotations? Just a hint: it might be acceptable and least arguably true to say “most Jewish organisations are strong supporters of Israel and probably a majority would, at least in public statements, support the conduct of the recent Gaza campaign by Israel”. That, however, might require you to be interested enough in something beyond your own obsessions and belief that you have some formula that nearly everyone else shamefully refuses to recognise is the solution to much of the world’s problems.
Correction “expressio” not “expression” and “exclusio” not “exclusion” - the faults of haste.
While I have no personal responsibility in the matter I feel moved to apologise to Mr Bennetts for the mischievous behaviour of my mentor Mephistopheles, to whom I owe so much, but who is, at the same time, a cause for so many regrets.
He is not, as has been crudely suggested, the alter ego, or rather the original ego of Professor the Honorable Sir Leslie Patterson QC, although they do have similar modest claims to omniscience in common.
You mustn’t take it all to heart dear boy. Indeed don’t take it or yourself too seriously. In my 200 and more years of close acquaintance with his ways I have seen far too many worthy, high-minded people played for suckers. Perhaps you should consider doing a deal with him. I have, as you would know, and it has its upside.
Console yourself with the thought that, if you feel humiliated now, nonetheless you may end up having learned something - even about yourself.
Also having tried & failed to make sense of the above Mephistopheles rants, one can only deduce that he/she is one of those boorish ’ permanent undergraduates ’ one occasionally meets who have formal qualifications well beyond their intellectual capacity.
Meph’s immature attempts at ad hominen attacks, coupled with a total lack of rational argument, are the sign of a person with a good memory for facts…but not much else. AR is right on the money, as is Dr Faust ( nice retort, Doc).
Say Little Meph, does the saying ” I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have time to write you a short one” have any meaning for you? I expect not.
Oh dear, I think you’ve been had again Kevin Herbert because I am pretty sure I know both “Mephistopheles” and “Dr Faust” as two good friends chuckling together at the rather highbrow but borrowing conference we are all at in one of those places in the tropics which seem to make them a good idea at this time of the year. I rather got the impression that they were responsible when I observed that Antony Loewenstein had stuck his neck out rather interestingly and that it almost made it worth reading Crikey but that I was amazed that anyone would waste so much time blogging on the anti-Semites it flushed out.
No full admissions but they did note that our conference left something to be desired in the fun and mental stimulus business. If I am right you wouldn’t do well taking either of them on at “rational argument” (and you would have to check that they weren’t being demeaningly satirical if they thought you fatuous or ignorant or careless or extreme). Both of them would certainly know Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s famous line, without having to Google for it, and both would be interested to know what was the bad grammar alleged by one blogger and what an attempted as opposed to a real ad hominem attack was. You would certainly be right in supposing a good memory for facts (as well as a discriminating approach to accepting asserted facts as facts). I suspect that they sussed out a couple of bloggers with much passionate opinion but not much in the way of relevant fact to back it up.
Count me out of the argument, any of the arguments (whatever they may be). These are just my inferences and suppositions.
John Van Allen: you’re inferences & suppositions are….exactly as you allege.
Just a couple of computer nerds & their obtuse friend having a bit of fun, eh what?
Well, aren’t you the ones then…..as an obvious confidant of theirs maybe you could ask them to jerk each other off, rather than attempt a badly constructed, facile undergraduate prank on an issue you’re obviously not mature enough to engage.
In future, leave the important stuff to informed persons.
I trust you’re cosmetics sales conference goes better that your collective attempt at humour…but then, it will, of course.
Mephistopheles
And what exactly is your point? Are you for or against the God’s Chosen People?
I am honoured to be able to say I am a friend and colleague of Mephistopheles (and a doctoral student who owes him a lot). He told me about this blog and said he was sick of it but perhaps I would be good enough to see if there was anything he’d said that really was beyond the comprehension of any literate person.
Rena Zurawel I think you would recognise that his over arching point was to illustrate how extreme and unreasonable Kevin Herbert was when his initial words were held up to a bit of tossing around amongst the informed and nuanced. I don’t think he would have bothered if he had known that one Kevin Charles Herbert has form as an anti-Semitic (as well as anti-Israeli) ranter as a bit of Googling showed. He may or may not be the disgruntled chap sacked by the Real Estate Institute in 2006 but he sounds like the type (it makes it slightly amusing that he attempts a snobbish sally by reference to a “cosmetics sales conference” given his own background). The clincher might have been the knowledge that Kevin Charles Herbert is away with the pixies and Godwin Grech in his appreciation of himself in relation to the real world of politics and policy. On his own version he wrote to the Israeli Embassy to tell them he no longer recognised Israel as a nation state!!!!! I think a number of people knowing that detail about the self-important little man can cross any further contributions off their time-wasting reading list.
I can say with assurance that Mephistopheles - and Dr Faust for that matter - has Jewish friends who are mostly, but not all, secular, and mostly despairing of Israel’s prospects of making peace with Palestinians, some of them, like Antony Lowenstein putting most of the blame on Israel, some merely despairing, some….. Talking of “blame” anyone who wants to read something sensible and nuanced ought to read Thomas Friedman’s recent NYT piece headed (approx.) “Marriage counseling for….’” He particularly points to the uselessness of trying to attribute blame, in which connection he quotes an Israeli woman who said “I’ll give them Jerusalem, but don’t ask me to say I was to blame for starting it”. Mephistopheles has a number of Arab and Muslim friends too, though not many, I guess who are religious. They are generally, I believe just about as critical of Israel as of Saddam Hussein.
I think Mephistopheles made it clear enough that he doesn’t think God, the God or any god or godling, chose Jews or anyone, as the overwhelmingly clear point about the Abrahamic God is that he, contrary to reason and his supposed interest in humankind, gave or allowed to be given a whole lot of conflicting instructions over several thousand years. Curiously, it does not seem to be the mad religious Jews of Israel who are the most dangerous extremists. The recent Russian immigrants of whom Avigdor Lieberman seems to be a fairly typical example are extreme but secular (I understand - as I think does Meph) and a product of Slavic and,or Russian Orthodox racism to oversimplify the genesis of their attitudes.
If any of Meph’s circle had to answer a Yes/No question about being for or against Jews it would have to be Yes on the ground that, since liberation from their own past and oppression by the Enlightenment they have been the greatest ethnically distinct contributors by far. Just one indication is that 25 per cent of American Nobel Prizes have been won by the 3 per cent of the population who are Jews (slightly smaller proportion now). What if Jews had never been promised a homeland in Palestine? (Whatever a homeland might have been interpreted to mean). What if the Arabs had won the 1948 war, or one of the later ones? What if the Soviet Union hadn’t been so keen to see the state of Israel established? Certainly none of that has anything to do with an actual God.
What bunch of total losers are all of the ‘word waterfalls’ who have wasted everyone’s time with their vacuous comments above.
Your vain, undergraduate attempts at rebuttal, Thesaurus & dictionary of social sciences at the ready, have illustrated only one thing i.e. that you are a bunch of witless, spineless tools who lack judgement.
You have attempted to use an important international issue to pursue a personal vendetta, to no avail.
Following a phone call I received today, I know exactly who you are “Bert Schmidt”, and I’ll be looking you up shortly for a face to face chat.
But there’s no way I’m spending any more time commenting on the childish rants of you & your intellectually lightweight associates.
All of you will continue to be what you have always been…fabulous nobodies…. who obviously find it hard to express their ideas……poor things.
I can’t believe my 120 kg friend Bert (sometimes known as Bertrand or Bertram to his friends) Schmidt is being thought of as non-existent. His jovial presence would be much missed in a number of people’s lives if that were so. If only I could offer a prize for such precious information as who the real “Bert Schmidt” of Kevin Herbert’s phone caller might be. As I don’t think there is anything actionably defamatory which can be alleged one way or the other could Kevin Herbert please let us in on the secret please. If not the name (though why not?) , just a hint (“real” occupation perhaps), actual university, telephone number so we can abuse a pseudonymous Bert Schmidt (as I am sure my Bert Schmidt won’t mind).
Oh yes, and I admit to being - Jew-ish - as Jonathan Miller put it and not terribly keen on Middle Eastern politics or its practitioners. There is a lot to be said for making modest (indeed truly very modest) attempts to make Australia a better place without thrusting one’s inflated ideas of one’s own righteousness on the wider world.
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