(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Why groups like Jewish Voices for Peace are like "Isolationists" Pre-Pearl Harbor. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-25 This I imagine will take a lot of flack. It is also hardly a perfect analogy, because Bibi is hardly FDR, israel is not quite America between the world wars, And Japan did not take hostages, or brutally rape, murder and Dismember civilians on Oahu (They did, elsewhere). That said, groups like Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) And other organizations who call to Boycott, Divest from and Sanction (BDS) Israel remind me very much of the Isolationists before WWII. I’m not referring to the "America first" organizations with spokespeople like the Anti-Jewish Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, but rather of the Popular Front organizations who opposed America's entry into WWII because Stalin had a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Regardless of how any of us feel about Netanyahu (I despise him) or The Occupation (opposed) it can be argued that Hamas's attack on Israel is analogous to Pearl Harbor, and the organizations here in America and abroad who immediately spoke out and demonstrated against Israel are analogous to those who vehemently opposed American involvement against Hitler because Stalin told them so. Instead of expressing horror at the brutality hamas had perpetrated, we saw knee-jerk reactions and heard inaccurate "buzz words" designed to weaken or dissolve the State of Israel. Let's take a look at just one of those "buzz words": GENOCIDE One of the propagandists’ major tools is to make a statement over and over again until people believe it is true — “The Big Lie”. Article II of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 describes genocide “as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.” The population of a people on whom there has been a crime of genocide decreases. It does not increase. The population of Gaza has one of the highest increases per year in the world. In 2020 there were 2 million people in Gaza. In 2023, there are 2.1 million people in Gaza. That’s not how Genocide works. Yes, Israel is killing civillians. How many we don’t know, but clearly thousands by now. It is awful. It is wrong. It is vengeful. But it does not reach the definition of genocide. Sorry. It just does not. I hope it never does. To engage in hyperbole, however -- "genocide" here is hyperbole-- is to weaken your argument. If and when Bibi, God forbid, actually attempts to destroy Gaza, you will have been crying "Wolf." You know who can tell you about genocide? I’ll tell you who: Armenians. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, Physical annihilation. That’s the goal of Hamas against Jews. With all that Israel has done to suppress and even kill Palestinians, they have not attempted to physically annihilate them. Large scale massacres of Armenians began in the 1890s, and went almost to the end of the “War to End All Wars.” Those Armenians who were not killed were either deported or forced to convert to Islam. THAT is genocide. THIS is not. Do you want to know something else that is interesting? If you Google “Armenian genocide” the phrase populates into “Armenian genocide 2023 ”. What does that mean? It means headlines like these over just the past few months: It means that this was NPR’s lead paragraph in its article of September 29th, 2023, less than a month ago: That’s Genocide. This is not. But if JVP and the BDS crowd repeat it often enough, you will believe it. But you don’t hear about the Armenian Genocide, do you? Do you know where else there is genocide happening right now? YEMEN. Genocide Watch posted Yemen: Genocide Emergency less than a year ago: The civil war in Yemen continues to devastate the country. An estimated 233,000 people have been killed since the outbreak of hostilities in 2015. Seven years of conflict have decimated the country’s economy, infrastructure, and basic services, creating the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis. 24.1 million people in Yemen – over 80 percent of the population – require humanitarian assistance. 58 percent of Yemen’s population faces extreme poverty, and over 19 million people require emergency food assistance due to acute levels of food insecurity. The conflict has also triggered an internal displacement crisis : over 4.3 million people have been forced from their homes since 2015. Yes, people are starving to death in Yeman. This has been going on since 2015. But you don’t hear much about the Yemen genocide, do you? There are other places as well. Turkey continues to bomb the crap out of the Kurds in Rojava, in the Autonomous Region of Syria, as they attempt to ethnically cleanse the region. Just last week, this article’s headline: Rojava: bombings, millions without electric and water. The Turkish state has carried out a century-long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurdish people. These latest bombings, which have left over two million people without access to water and electricity, are another escalation. Two million people without access to water and electrity. That sounds remarkably like what Israel is accused of doing in Gaza, doesn’t it? Where are the protesters? Why is there no BDS movement against Turkey? There is a reason. All countries do what is in their best interest. It is in the best interest for Iran, Iraq, Lebanon Syria, and the Houthi Militia in Yeman, those who wish to destroy Israel, for them to popularize, and likely fund, the BDS Movement: Why wouldn’t all the countries that want Israel wiped from the map support a way that left-leaning protesters can do their dirty work for them? The picture above shows Mark Twain, but he didn’t write that. He wrote a few things that mean almost the same thing, but not this. Just because his face is next to the picture doesn’t mean that he actually said it. Still, the sentiment is correct: It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled. BDS is easy. It’s a “Plug ‘n Play”, pre-assembled, turn-key protest movement, easy to use, easy to be used. The Progressive Left can just jump right in and feel self-rightous, that they are defending the oppressed, that they are protecting the good from evil. Just pick up a sign. Share a meme. It’s easy. As I’ve written in several posts recently: The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. Some times they fool people into believing that, well, if Hamas is against Israel, and you’re against Israel,then somehow Hamas is your friend. They are not. Easy to be fooled, than to convince them that they have been fooled. As Helen Lewis put it in her recent piece in The Atlantic, titled The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test, “the attack refutes the flawed assumption that all social-justice causes fit neatly together.” She shows how Progressives use the word “intersectionality” without having the slightest idea what it means. As I wrote in an earlier post, Lewis writes that she "Will go to her grave defending the original conception of intersectionality, a legal doctrine advanced by the American critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw." But that conception has been warped beyond recognition. Crenshaw herself said that "'This is what happens when an idea travels beyond the context and the content,' she told Vox in 2019. In escaping from the academy into the mainstream, intersectionality morphed into both a crude tallying of oppression points and an assumption that social-justice struggles fit neatly together—with all of the marginalized people on one side and the powerful on the other." And that's how, as Lewis writes, "you end up with Queers for Palestine when being queer in Palestine is difficult and dangerous. (In 2016, a Hamas commander was executed after being accused of theft and gay sex.)" And that’s how the Progressives get used by the most insidious forces, the way the Left was used by Stalin before Pearl Harbor. And that’s how an horrific attack, including rape, dismemberment, kidnapping of hundreds, and the brutal mass murders of thousands — the most Jews killed in one day since the Holocaust (yes, of course that was also a genocide), compelled dozens of knee-jerk reactions supporting the attack(!) only to have to walk it back later — unless they doubled-down. Lewis proposed in her article, a simple test. She called it the “Hamas test.” I wrote about it before, and it bears repeating. The test is this: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians? A quick glance, or a thorough one, at JVP’s Instagram page will show you that they failed the test with alacrity. I noted up top that I despise Bibi Netanyahu, and I’ll say it again: I despise Netanyahu and all he stands for. I despise the attempt to turn Israel into a Theocracy, which had Israelis out in the streets protesting for over a year. I despise the Occupation, which has destroyed Israel from within as well as oppressed Palestinians who are caught between a rock and a hard place. As I wrote here on DK 4 years ago: ….[A]ccording to Palestinians, Hamas tortures Palestinians who are seen as "collaborators," defined as anyone who works with the Palestinian Authority, and/or who negotiates with Israel. Human Rights Watch confirms this in their post less than a year ago, “Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent: Arbitrary Arrest and Torture Under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.” And, many of the arguments of the BDS movement can be applied to all of Israel's neighbors, who see the BDS movement as a way to apply pressure on Israel -- their enemy, but hardly the friend of any Jew in the movement. There is not one Israeli neighbor who does not endorse "anti-Zionism" as it will destroy their enemy -- Israel. Again, a common enemy, but not friends. Helen Lewis concludes her article: "The sheer number of apologies and climb downs that followed the initial wave of inflammatory posts suggests that some of their authors issued knee-jerk statements of solidarity before they understood exactly what they were endorsing. As the full extent of the weekend’s barbarity becomes clear, some on the intersectional left are—to their small credit—revising their initial reactions. But others are doubling down. Confronted with real violence by genocidal terrorists, they failed the test." All that said, it is possible that, as Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times last week, “Israel Is About to Make a Terrible Mistake.” And it might. He may be right. He wrote today that Israel is engaged in a “Six-Front War”: This war is being fought by and through nonstate actors, nation-states, social networks, ideological movements, West Bank communities and Israeli political factions, and it is the most complex war that I’ve ever covered. But one thing is crystal clear to me: Israel cannot win this six-front war alone. It can win only if Israel — and the United States — can assemble a global alliance. Unfortunately, Israel today has a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a ruling coalition that will not and cannot produce the keystone needed to sustain such a global alliance. That keystone is to declare an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the overhaul of Israel’s relations with the Palestinian Authority so that it becomes a credible, legitimate Palestinian partner than can govern a post-Hamas Gaza and forge a broader two-state solution including the West Bank. If Israel is asking its best allies to help the Jewish state seek justice in Gaza while also asking them to look the other way as Israel builds a settlement kingdom in the West Bank with the expressed goal of annexation, that is strategically and morally incoherent. It won’t work. Israel will not be able to generate the time, the financial assistance, the legitimacy, the Palestinian partner or the global allies it needs to win this six-front war. I don’t believe that the PA is ever going to get that credibility. I don’t think he goes far enough regarding the settlements on the West Bank. It’s not enough to declare an end to the expansion of settlements, but it’s at least a start. And his solution is a pipe dream. But he’s mostly right about the fronts. These 6 fronts, include not only Hamas; Iran and its proxies, “Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Islamist militias in Syria and Iraq and the Houthi militia in Yemen;” the Israel’s Right-Wing Settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank; but also those on Social Media and in academia who have (in my words, not his), failed the “Hamas Test.” It is possible that pressure from all these fronts will cause Netanyahu to decide to make that terrible mistake. It is possible that Netanyahu will feel pushed to initiate the genocide that those who excused the actions of Hamas have said has been happening all along. It is possible that all this will harden Bibi’s heart. And yes. That is a Passover metaphor. But Bibi is not a Pharoah. There will be no plagues, just carnage — on both sides of the arbitrary border. It could well become catastrophic. And there is no Palestinian Moses. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/25/2201476/-Why-groups-like-Jewish-Voices-for-Peace-are-like-Isolationists-Pre-Pearl-Harbor?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/