Am I an anti-Semite II ...

I (quite improperly) posted the following as a comment over at Dave Justus's place. I have repented and asked him to delete it.

Greg is the person who accused me of being "anti-Semitic" because I described Israel as "a nation founded on terror".

Note too, that the following information has been taken from a post dated 13 December, I made my comment on 8 December.

So to it, this is what I stuck into Dave's place (quite wrongly)...
__________________________________________________

Greg, you might want to take an objective look at this page.

A sample -

So while it is undeniably terrible that the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades would deliberately target civilian passengers on an Israeli bus, the men who murdered Lior Azulai, Nathaniel Havshush, Bnayahu Jonathan Zuckerman, Rahamiam Rami Duga, Yaffa Ben-Shimol, Ilan Avisedris, Yehuda Haim and Yuval Ozana in that attack are not a different “kind of people” from you or me or the soon-to-be-Israelis who unloaded Ibrahim Mohammed Ahmed El Haj, Mahmoud Hassan Attieh, Saleh Mohammed Suleiman, Abdul Fattah Hussein, Mahmoud Mustafa Khalil, Mohammed Ali Eissa, and Hassan Mohammed Eissa from a Palestinian truck in February 1948, lined them up in an orange grove and murdered them:

and

And the members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad who killed five innocent Israeli shoppers in an attack on a mall just last week committed a terrible murder, but they’re not different in kind from the members of the Irgun who committed a terrible murder in blowing up the shoppers at Ramle Market:

and the sources…

(1) Source CO 537/3855: Confidential reports from the British Criminal Investigation Dept (C.I.D.) to the U.K. Colonial Office on Outrages in Palestine, 1947-48. Now declassified and open to the public at the U.K. National Archives in Kew, London.
(2) Source CO 537/3856: Confidential reports from the British Criminal Investigation Dept (C.I.D.) to the U.K. Colonial Office on Outrages in Palestine, Feb-Mar 1948. Now declassified and open to the public at the U.K. National Archives in Kew, London.

(3) Source WO 261/573: Confidential quarterly reports from British Army H.Q. in Palestine to the U.K. War Office, Jan-Mar 1948. Now declassified and open to the public at the U.K. National Archives in Kew, London.

(4) Source WO 275/64: Confidential fortnightly newsletters from the H.Q. of the British Sixth Airborne Division in Palestine to the U.K. War Office, Mar 1947-May 1948. Now declassified and open to the public at the U.K. National Archives in Kew, London.

(5) Source CO 537/3857: Confidential reports from the British Criminal Investigation Dept (C.I.D.) to the U.K. Colonial Office on Outrages in Palestine, Mar-Apr 1948. Now declassified and open to the public at the U.K. National Archives in Kew, London.

(6) From United Nations Security Council Official Records, Supplements for 1948 - Palestine

But then, I guess, that is the kind of FACT that you just dont read…

_______________________________________________

OK, so there it be.

On reflection, and whilst putting this together, I want to thank Lawrence of Cyberia for his very timely post.

There is much there on the nature and purpose of terrorism which ties to the Tanaka piece I wrote on the other day. For example -

Palestinian terrorists do not attack civilian buses because they are a different species to the rest of us, they attack civilians because Israel enjoys overwhelming military superiority over them, and choose buses in particular because buses are uniquely vulnerable: they are numerous and therefore difficult to defend individually; they carry a large number of people in a small enclosed space which maximizes casualties; and they run on a published timetable, which makes them easy to ambush. In short, Palestinian militants choose to attack civilian buses for the same reasons that militants with a political agenda target civilian buses in Sri Lanka, and in Iraq, and in Colombia, and in Kosovo, and for the same reasons that Zionist militants targetted Palestinian civilian buses in British Palestine, which they did, by the way, with a regularity that makes Hamas et al look like a bunch of slackers.

But it would be unfair of me to say this much and not give Lawrence's conclusion...

Blowing up a bus for political ends is a criminal act, not an ontological insight into how Zionist Jews were in 1948 or how Palestinian Muslims are in 2004. As awful as it is, this is simply how sub-national groups – Zionists, Islamists or anyone else - fight an unconventional war. It’s “a way people wage war when they don't have F-16's or armored divisions”, as William Pfaff put it. You can only claim otherwise by consigning all the inconvenient atrocities committed by your own side down the memory hole. And the fact that A.H. would pick a bus bombing as proof that Palestinians are a kind of people you can't negotiate with – apparently totally unaware of the popularity of that very tactic among Zionists in Mandate Palestine - shows just how effectively we have done just that in the case of Israel and the terrorist campaign that helped to establish it. (I can't count how many times I have heard discussion of terrorism in Mandate Palestine reduced to "Ah yes, the King David...).

I’m not dredging all this up as some kind of academic historical exercise, or as an opportunity to say “yes but other people do it too”. It matters that we remember what we would rather forget, because it is only our deliberate forgetfulness over our own atrocities that allows us to pretend that the I/P conflict is a zero sum game of good versus evil, rather than a political conflict over land that is capable of a compromise solution.

If we remember that “our” side committed terrorism, not because they were morally defective, but as a tactic in support of political goals in an unconventional war, then we will be able to appreciate that just maybe the same is true of “their” side today. So get off your high horse, A.H., admit that nobody has clean hands, and stop looking for reasons not to negotiate.

All the emphasis is unashamedly mine. I stand by my comment that Israel is a nation founded in terrorism. If that makes me anti-JEWISH so be it.

Final note - in the papers this past week

Christ was not a Jew. His first tongue (and his last words) were Aramaic. That, I am told, would make him a Palestinian.