Let’s assume, for the purpose of the discussion, that you have written an article where:
- You declare that Israel today has “the purest Revisionist government in its history“. You forget to mention that the same people who are in government now supported the withdrawal from Gaza. That the same people supported that general you love to hate when he became the first Israeli PM supporting the right of Palestinians for a state of their own.
- You go into the pedigree of some of the current leaders, automatically ascribing to children the views held by their parents and grandparents. Guilt by association – some Stalinist exercise.
- You quote the revisionists, not mentioning that they were a minority in a largely socialist independence movement. And that it was Hagana that was the representative of the majority, not the Irgun.
- You bemoan the cruelty of the Jewish terrorists of Irgun who killed a few British soldiers, forgetting to mention that these were the soldiers of the same army that in cold blood has driven away thousands of desperate survivors of the unspeakable bloodshed who tried to find the promised land.
- You continue to carp on the wrongs on one side completely omitting the historic background. Imagine somebody describing the destruction of Dresden by Allies without mentioning the WW II and the Nazi atrocities.
- You put with obvious relish the following: “Only elements on the far left and some radical Islamists today care to call the Israeli government fascist. And yet…” Of course, your faithful crowd of Guardian regulars does not miss the opportunity to cry “Zionazis” and “Ziofascists” etc. Speak about elements on the far left…
- You resort to sentences like “There have indeed been outrageous and indefensible killings of Israeli civilians, but even that raises more questions than it answers.” and “It is a platitude to say that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Of course, it is not a platitude, it is just a deadly wrong crapola. But much abused by a certain category of “thinkers”.
So – assuming that you have written all this indeed, where do you get off and what does all this show?
Simply that you are one Geoffrey Wheatcroft – a thinker that for some reason is too shy to publish at Jewwatch or at BNP place, but otherwise – doing the Der Sturmer proud under auspices of Guardian.
As it was astutely mentioned (by a commenter JimmytheFox):
Bringing Mr Hecht into this Guardian article is masterly, by the way. Were Mr Hecht alive today, he might respond:
“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock”.
Cross-posted on SimplyJews
I’ll say the killings of Israeli civilians raise some questions. Mainly they raise the questions of “Why stupid Western leftists act as propagandists for Islamist terrorists who want to destroy the West” and “Why are the leftists apologists for anti-Jewish terrorist violence that has been going on for 85 years by now (since the Arab Riots of 1921)?”
America gets these ahistorical-context criticisms too. We often hear morons dumping on America for the nuclear bombings of Japan, as if WWII was not going on at the same time. I won’t go into the details here, but I’ve figured that those bombings, by forcing Japan’s surrender when they did saved 250,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of lives of people from the other allies, and probably millions of Japanese lives. The death toll of Japanese from an invasion of Japan could easily have totaled 100 times the numbers killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and perhaps more. It would have meant, most likely, the destructin of Japanese culture too, from the way the Japanese forces intended to fight.