BatFlattery

You may not have heard of Mohammed Al-Dura, but to millions of Arabs he is a martyr akin to Hector Peterson, an innocent victim of Israeli action. But there has always been strong doubt about whether the IDF fired the fatal shot, or even if the boy died at the scene at all.

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Some well-meaning people seem to be circulating a petition which last did the rounds a few years ago. It concerns an anti-semitic site known as JewWatch.com, and the creator of the petition hoped to get Google to remove it from its position at the time as the first result for a search on the word “Jew“.

Although the petition easily exceeded its stated goal of 50,000 signatories, Google did not of course censor the results, for reasons which are obvious to anyone who knows how Google’s search algorithms work: they did produce an explanation for those who don’t.

Of course, that algorithm cuts both ways, and a web campaign of links to the Wikipedia page on Jews or on Judaism, using the link text “Jew“, means that a search for “Jew” now returns those pages as number 1 and number 2 results, and not JewWatch.org. So there is no need to continue to circulate the petition email. The problem has been solved, although if you want to include a few relevant links on your web pages, that could help to ensure it stays solved.

Fred Thompson makes some excellent points about Iran’s reported unhappiness with the movie ‘300′.

It does pretty much beggar belief that a regime which sponsors a conference entitled “A World Without Israel” can complain that a work of fiction, representing events that happened thousands of years ago, is an act of warfare against it.

Anyway, I think this guy would make a pretty good president.

I was reading this bit by Norm, and I remembered the bit at the end of Dumb and Dumber, where the cop is explaining to Jim Carrey’s character that, even though they had put him in danger, he had been safe, because he was wearing a bulletproof jacket. So Jim Carrey’s character thinks for a bit, and says “What if he’d shot me in the head and not the chest?” and the cop says “That’s a risk we were willing to take”.

That’s kind of how I see all these people who are so anxious for Israel to “give Hamas a chance” and take the first step, end the boycott, etc. Like, don’t worry that these people continue to talk about liberating the entirety of “occupied Palestine”, we’re sure it’ll turn out alright in the end.

Except, if they’re wrong, nothing will happen to them. Just to Israel. Which makes a slight difference, I think.

According to The Economist, a report by the Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism has accused airport staff at Ben-Gurion Airport of discriminating against Arabs.

I’m very happy to see that Arab organisations are taking an interest in human rights and racism. Maybe I should contact them, to tell them about an experience I had recently. I met with an employment agent to discuss job opportunities, and he started to excitedly tell me about a very lucrative position in Bahrain. Then he suddenly stopped, probably having noticed my yarmulke, and said, “Sorry, I’ve just realised that wouldn’t really work, now, would it?” Because of course anyone with an Israeli passport, or even just a stamp of entry into Israel, would be denied entry into most Arab countries. How’s that for discrimination? A bit stronger than so-called harassment by airport security, I would have thought. (And as anyone who has been to Israel can attest, airport security is pretty stringent for everybody, Arab, Jew, Gentile, it doesn’t matter.)

So maybe this Centre Against Racism could help! Maybe they could get newspapers like The Economist to highlight this pretty blatant racism. Or how about the law in Jordan which specifically denies citizenship to Jews? I’m sure they’d be up in arms against that.

Wouldn’t they?

It’s sad that while supposed intellectuals and people who ought to know better sign up to the ridiculous “Independent Jewish Voices”, a Muslim can see the realities in Israel with far greater clarity than bandwagon-hopping Jews. I mean, how hard is it to find this stuff out? How long does it take to mentally compare apartheid South Africa with Israel?

Oh wait; I know what you’re going to say. She’s an Uncle Tom, a traitor to her own people. Unlike the noble IJV, who are brave dissenters, standing up for a view of Israel that is held by only, what, 90% of the British media? For which they face no threats of death; unlike Ms Manji and anyone else who dares to point out the uncomfortable truth about Islam.

Norm on the Independent Jewish Voices launched with such fanfare yesterday. Not much to add really: except continuing amazement that these people have the chutzpah to characterise criticism of their viewpoint as “oppression”, when non-Muslims (and even non-Sunnis) in the Arab world cannot even practice their religion except in secret. Ha. Aha.

This critique by Alan Dershowitz of the faults in Jimmy Carter’s recent book is notable not only for the content of his argument, delivered with its usual clarity, but also for the unbelievable antisemitism of the commenters: Dershowitz on the world according to Jimmy Carter

Mark Steyn, writing about a fictionalised account of what was bitter reality for millions of Europe’s Jews, restrictions on property ownership, makes the following point:

Israel is, in effect, subject to a geopolitical version of the same conditions endured by Lazarus the Jew in Anthony Hope’s Strelsau. The Zionist Entity is for the moment permitted to remain in business but, like Aaron Lazarus, it’s not entitled to the enforceable property rights of every other nation state. No other country — not Canada, not Slovenia, not Thailand — would be expected to forego the traditional rights of nations subjected to kidnappings of its citizens, random rocket attacks into residential areas, and other infringements of its sovereignty.

Which is true. Just for a laugh, I rewrote some of the current reporting on the war that Israel is fighting, as if it were Britain resisting attacks from terrorists in Ireland:

BBC BELFAST – 10 August 2006

IN WHAT HAS BECOME A familiar sight to the beleagured citizens of Belfast, RAF warplanes swept in over the horizon this morning to deal more death and destruction to a city in ruins. “This is a totally disproportionate response” said one. “They’re waging war on women and children!” Meanwhile militants aligned with the IRA have promised swift retaliation, vowing to launch new long-range “Guinness” rockets that are said to be capable of reaching Manchester.

Three weeks into the war, despite devastating attacks that have left hundreds of thousands of innocent Irish as homeless refugees, and killed hundreds more, the British Armed Forces seem no closer to stopping the daily hail of rockets that has led to the virtual evacuation of Scotland and the North of England. Prime Minister Tony Blair has defended his country’s actions, saying that the IRA’s strategy of using civilians has “human shields” has unfortunately increased the civilian death toll, despite the best efforts of the British to encourage evacuation by dropping leaflets on cities and towns affected by the IRA’s rocket campaign.

Meanwhile the UN has called for an immediate ceasefire, and an international force to ensure that the IRA does not threaten British civilians: the call was rejected by Blair, who reiterated his country’s determination to destroy the IRA militant infrastructure. This has led to international condemnation, and even America, traditionally a strong supporter of the British state, has come under pressure from its Irish-American citizens, who are outraged that laser-guided bombs are being sent to Britian to aid in the war effort.

It seems the death knell of hopes for a resolution of the cycle of violence that has plagued these Atlantic islands for nearly a century. The withdrawal of the British forces from Ireland six years ago, and the unilateral handing over of Northern Ireland last year, had led some observers to speculate that the road map was on track for a peaceful resolution. The present conflict was sparked by the kidnapping of two British soldiers from a border post on the Scottish island of Islay, by militants aligned with the IRA. Holding two seats in the Irish parliament, the IRA has a militia which controls much of the eastern part of the island, contrary to a UN resolution requiring the Irish government to disarm all militias. It’s not clear what the IRA hoped to achieve by doing this, since their nominal goal, a united Ireland, seems to have been achieved; but there are those who believe that nothing less than the total destruction of the Anglo-Saxon state, and a restoration of the Celtic dominion over all of Britain, will satisfy them. But whatever the truth, Britain seems to have been embarked on a venture it cannot win, and meantime the casualties mount up.

It just doesn’t work. There is no way such things would ever be written about a country like Britain. The rules are different. Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was murdered by Palestinian terrorists, is bemused by the British reaction to the averted terror plot yesterday:

If the plot was thwarted — a word that is being endlessly repeated in the British television reports on our screens this morning — why has the security alert level in the UK been pushed up just now to its highest possible setting? — “critical” meaning an attack is expected imminently, according to the BBC.

Suggested interpretation: when it’s being done to you and your family, you don’t take chances. We absolutely agree that if there is an imminent threat of something awful, every possible security measure has to be taken. But then stop claiming it was thwarted. At best, it was discovered, and the real work is still ahead. You’re at war.

On the other hand, there has not been a single victim at this stage. Not one person wounded unless the police ‘inquiries’ led to some bruises or breaks among the suspects. Not one person killed. So we sincerely hope the British don’t over-react. Or, Heaven forfend, react disproportionately.

Yes, we wouldn’t want to have to chide Britain for a “disproportionate” response, now would we? Oh, hang on: they’re not Jews! The rules are different! Mark Steyn again:

This isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong: there are regional flare-ups all over the map — Ivory Coast, Congo, Bosnia — and, regardless of the rights and wrongs, for the most part the world just sits back and lets them get on with it. There are big population displacements — as there were, contemporaneous to the founding of Israel, in Europe and the Indian subcontinent — but one side wins and the dust settles. The energy expended by the world in denying this particular regional crisis the traditional settlement is unique and perverse, except insofar as by ensuring that the “Palestinian question” is never resolved one is also ensuring that Israel’s sovereignty is also never really settled: it, too, is conditional — and, to judge from recent columns in the Washington Post and the Times of London, it’s increasingly seen that way in influential circles — tolerated as a current leaseholder but, like Anthony Hope’s Jew, it can never truly own the land. The Jews are once again rootless transients, though, in one of history’s blacker jests, they’re now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East. Which would have given Aaron Lazarus a laugh. The Jews spent millennia on the Continent without ever being accepted as European. But no sooner are the Continent’s Jewry all but extinct than suddenly every Jew left on the planet is a European.

Abbagav makes an excellent point:

How often have you heard the excuse that the suicide bombers and terrorist attackers go after Israeli civilians with ‘Allahu Akbar’ fury because they have no other choice, since they don’t have advanced weapons and missiles like Israel does? But now on Israel’s northern border, and coming from Gaza too, we see that the moment Jihadists do get their missiles, they don’t use them to go after Israeli artillery pieces as the apologists would have you expect. Now that Jihad has a choice, it still prefers sending its explosives at hospitals and city centers, as if the missile is just a suicide bomber upgrade. Yesterdays missile strike on Israeli reserve soldiers gathered for a meeting is the exception that proves the rule: it was essentially a lucky shot, the first notable hit against a military target after the prior 3000 Katyusha’s had landed on apartment buildings, schools and businesses from Haifa to Naharia to Tzfat, leaving Israel’s uniformed combatants and equipment massed near the border all but ignored.

And Israelinsider talks about one of the Jewish martyrs, an incredibly selfless young man who gave his life to save his comrades (not to kill innocents):

It was that same high moral sense that led Major Roi Klein (H.y.d.) to volunteer to lead his unit in Lebanon. Roi, 31 years old and the father of two boys, was an accomplished musician, a superb commander and a Torah scholar. When his unit was attacked in Bint J’beil, he and his men were surrounded in an ambush. One of the terrorists lobbed a grenade towards the group. Roi yelled out “Sh’ma Yisrael” and jumped on the grenade. He took the brunt of the explosion and saved many of his men. This, too, was a different sort of morality.

While the world’s media remains obsessed with Lebanese victims and Lebanese refugees, manipulated by blatantly twisted reporting by Arab stringers, as usual the Jewish victims and the Jewish refugees (one-third of the country has been pretty much evacuated!) struggle on, ignored, discounted, “only Jews, after all”. Thank G-d for America, and for the millions of Jews around the world who are supporting their brothers and sisters in Israel in their fight for their lives, with solidarity, prayers, money, and material aid. We stand with you, we support you, we honour you, and we will continue to tell the truth in the face of the lies. Israel, we are so proud of you! A light unto the nations indeed.