Via Martin Kramer, who asks: “What happens to aging ’60s American Jewish radicals after the kids move out, the dog dies, and their parents (may they rest in peace), who so valued and cherished Israel, have passed on to their heavenly reward?”
If the trailer is representative, this is a slick piece of agitprop packaged as folksy interviews with thoughtful Jewish intellectuals who just happen to have doubts about Israel, no doubt because their integrity and independent-mindedness let them see clearly the evils of Israel that other Jews (and most non-Jewish Americans) are brainwashed into overlooking. In fact this is a bunch of leftist hacks repeating buzzwords (apartheid etc.) and citing events pruned of context to single out Israel for demonization. The woman in the last interview gives the game away by blaming Israel for the “stateless” condition of Palestinian refugees, even though Palestinian Arab statelessness, to the extent it still exists, is a racket maintained by Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves, and even though the post-WW2 world has had many refugee populations that dwarfed the Palestinian Arab refugee population and that, unlike the Palestinians, were mostly resettled within a few years. The difference is that people like those in this movie couldn’t use those other refugee populations as a weapon against the Jews. You would have to be profoundly ignorant to find this movie convincing, but ignorant people seem to be the target audience. Watch it for yourself.
I was fortunate to have had in high school a leftist, anti-Semitic history teacher, a man who was an enthusiast of Third World “liberation” movements run by kleptocrats and gangsters but who put Israel under a moral microscope. The Israeli Jews, as he saw it, had treated the Palestinian Arabs unjustly by (he would quote a particular historian whose book he always had at the ready) expelling them and this unjust treatment colored everything that Israel did subsequently. Two wrongs — an allusion to the Holocaust — don’t make a right. We should all be citizens of the world and should drop our parochialisms and be happy. Of course he mainly applied this argument to the Jews, and I was not clever enough to point out that the Jews’ enemies had often persecuted them for supposedly being too worldly. I argued, and learned a great deal in that class, and watching this movie trailer transports me right back to it. Shabbat shalom.
Wow ! When I saw Tony Kushner, I clicked the comment button. Talk about virulent anti-Semitism by a self-hating Jew !!
A map of settlements across the 67 line.
http://carnagepro.com/pics/settlements.jpg
Where are the Palestinians supposed live? You want the entire country right?
“Where are the Palestinians supposed live? You want the entire country right?”
1) I don’t care. How ’bout they occupy the homes formerly owned by Jews and Christians across the Muslim world?
2) So few settlements, such a large area. Israel won the land in war. As far as I’m concerned, they may keep it and do what they will with it. If not, I can think a few areas of France I’d like returned to England.
I would say that Pengun is a member of the movie’s target audience.
“Jewish Left” is like “Catholic Left” or “Left Libertarian.” The only operative term is “Left,” anything else is a rhetorical detail intended for deception, either ones self or the reader/listener.
Once you understand that, and keeping in mind that the two sources of Western Civilization are Greek Rationalism and Jewish Moral reasoning, then the film is nothing more than yet another piece of Leftist agitprop. That the particular Leftists are Jewish is nothing more than a detail thrown in to beguile people into thinking the film has some credibility.
It really shouldn’t be at all shocking that some Jews would hate their own people. After all, the African slave trade began with African chiefs of the coastal tribes selling surplus slaves captured from interior tribes. That they were basically the same ethnic group didn’t matter, just as these people could care less what happens to the Jews of Israel.
“I would say that Pengun is a member of the movie’s target audience.”
OK so with that I watched it. I don’t usually pay much attention to ether side. I make my own opinions from facts as I see them.
“All refugees have rights” was the gist of it. I agree.
“Where are the Palestinians supposed live? You want the entire country right?”
How about where the Sudaten Germans live ? Or where the East Prussians live ? The basic rule of life is, if you start a war, you’d better win ! The political left, like you, PenGun, are all afire for causes as long as they win. Losing, not so much.
“How about where the Sudaten Germans live ? Or where the East Prussians live ? The basic rule of life is, if you start a war, you’d better win ! The political left, like you, PenGun, are all afire for causes as long as they win. Losing, not so much.”
What goes around comes around, it’s called history. If you want to be winners you will have to face the consequences.
“As all the cops are criminals, as all the sinners saints, as heads is tails just call me Lucifer and I’m in need of some restraint” or as Sheogorath is fond of saying:
“You really should not have done that, enjoy the view”
Left wing … LOL.
“If you want to be winners you will have to face the consequences.”
My point was, if you start the fire, don’t be surprised when it burns. You sound like a nihilist and they are worst of all.
If you want to be winners you will have to face the consequences.
Only in a placid backwater like Canada or a modern western university can there be people who believe such nonsense. In the rest of the world, and in most times and places in history, the only options available to most ethnic and national groups have been winning and annihilation. The Jews, having in the past come close to being annihilated, chose to win this time, and having survived can deal with this outcome quite well. It seems to me that it’s the Palestinian Arabs and their western apologists who need to learn to face the consequences of their poor choices. Deal with it.
John Wolfsberger, Jr.,
I agree with all of your points.
Jonathan
From my twisted viewpoint where everyone gets what they deserve I worry about consequences more than you perhaps you do.
You have created in Palestine something very similar, a mirror almost of what happened to the Jews, with your expulsion of almost a million people to secure your state. You have created ghettos you force these people to live in with walls and military presence to enforce your will.
Perhaps you really do believe the Jews are superior and the Palestinians are inferior and should be marginalized but your people were recently in a similar position and that did not turn out at all well.
Jonathan,
Sometimes reality isn’t faced, even when an example is clearly given. I always use “Grammatical Gymnastics at the New Yorker” to point out that most of us would rather someone plagiarized and spread our ideas (not that a student won’t get a 0 for doing so) than misread and misappropriated our arguments for their own ends. Daniel Mendolsohn distorts Hanson’s passage from Autumn of War:
There is an inherent truth of battle. It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield, and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory. Wars are the sum of battles, battles the tally of individual human beings killing and dying.
I think someone writing history in the future may be very surprised by what happened in the second half of the twentieth century (where neither land nor tribute was a part of the post-war agreements and we, fearful of being drawn into another deadly war, chose to try to head it off in ways both effectual and not.) Whether that approach worked or not is going to be proved by the twenty-first century.
Israel’s exasperated attempt not to surrender – which is apparently because they have developed a stronger economy and because it won that series of battles, would, I suspect be seen as somewhat strange in other times. Seeing what works, the countries around them are less willing to notice what kind of a system (say rule of law) than to bitch.
“From my twisted viewpoint where everyone gets what they deserve I worry about consequences more than you perhaps you do.”
Only a fool would think that “everyone gets what they deserve.” I’m sure Hitler had a very high opinion of what he deserved. And he came very close.
My point, which went over your head by a couple of parsecs, was that you had best be careful when you disturb the equilibrium. The result may not be what you expected or “deserved.” In fact, it may be your worst nightmare and you have no one to blame but yourself or your stupid leaders who you chose to follow.
The Palestinians had occupied thousands of square miles for millennia without improving it at all. They lived in squalor, as Arabs do everywhere else today, with tiny islands of vast wealth derived from natural resources developed by others.
An industrious people who had been punished for millennia by jealous or superstitious neighbors, finally decided that one too many attempts to exterminate them had been made. A philosophy, let’s call it “Zionism,” came to be and by a happy accident (A Jewish chemist knew how to make smokeless gunpowder) they obtained the promise of a powerful government to help them take control of their ancient homeland, from which they had been driven in antiquity. Sort of like how the Indians had been driven from their homelands by Canadians. This people, let’s call them Jews, in order to try to minimize violence, went around buying up land from absentee owners. The shiftless occupants, who did not own the land, barely noticed until much of the land had been purchased. The analogy that comes to mind is the hatred of Korean grocers (and Jews) by an ethnic group in the US who have never made much of themselves even though they have had 150 years to do so and have been here 300 years.
Anyway, after the Second World War, the British decided they could not continue to occupy the Palestine Mandate any longer. The newly formed UN tried to negotiate a fair distribution of the land owned by the two ethnic groups. In 1948, the Mandate ended. The Arabs immediately invaded the Jewish zones promising to exterminate the residents. Then a funny thing happened. They lost the war they started. Just like the Germans. The Arabs had told the Muslim residents to go to safety in the Arab sectors until the war ended. Many of them even took their house keys with them for the return. They still have those keys.
The Arabs have encouraged these homeless losers to remain in refugee camps awaiting salvation, sort of like the coming of the occult Mahdi, and the UN has made an industry of caring for these shiftless losers. Several attempts have been made to settle with these losers and there was even a couple more wars fought, all lost by the Arabs, of course. If the “Palestinians” had any ambition, they would have developed a thriving economy next to Israel but they prefer hate and idleness, sort of like another ethnic group I know. Some got smart and left. Some, like the physician whose son I helped get into USC medical school a few years ago, have done well in their new surroundings. Interestingly enough, almost all the Palestinians I know who are thriving are Christian. I sometimes wonder why that is.
Anyway strange things happen, especially to those who ignore the lessons of history.
“My point, which went over your head by a couple of parsecs, was that you had best be careful when you disturb the equilibrium. The result may not be what you expected or “deserved.” In fact, it may be your worst nightmare and you have no one to blame but yourself or your stupid leaders who you chose to follow.”
Exactly my point too. We shall see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJv55ebJbhs
If you really want to go back weren’t the Palestinians” descendants of the Arab Muslim invaders of the 7th century? Some of the Palestinians chose to stay with the Jews and become citizens – the ones who became displaced chose leave expecting the Arab armies to wipe out the Jews.
So exactly who is “getting what they deserve”?
From my twisted viewpoint where everyone gets what they deserve I worry about consequences more than you perhaps you do.
Bullshit. Hitler, Stalin and Mao didn’t get what they deserved. The European Jews, the Tutsis, the Cambodians didn’t get what they deserved. Your philosophy is a rationalization for complacency about evil and for evenhanded efforts to prevent victims from defending themselves.
You have created in Palestine something very similar, a mirror almost of what happened to the Jews, with your expulsion of almost a million people to secure your state. You have created ghettos you force these people to live in with walls and military presence to enforce your will.
Oh yeah. Those poor Israeli Arabs have more freedom than do Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East. Those poor West Bank Palis, oppressed by the evil Jewish occupation, a regular Warsaw Ghetto it is, enjoy 8% annual economic growth. It’s a living hell, I tell you.
If the Arabs want peace with the Jews they can have it at any time. All they have to do is recognize the Jews’ right to have their own country. If they want the Jews to stop defeating them they can stop attacking the Jews. Apparently this is too much to ask. Better to keep the conflict going for a hundred years than to reach a reasonable accommodation with your adversaries and get on with life, the way most conflicts of the 20th Century have been resolved.
Perhaps you really do believe the Jews are superior and the Palestinians are inferior and should be marginalized but your people were recently in a similar position and that did not turn out at all well.
I believe it’s a tragedy that the State of Israel didn’t exist in 1939.
Thanks for reminding us that the Jews still have enemies. I think you would have gotten along well with my old high school teacher.
He/she would have gotten along well with al Husseini. Might not have been pleased with the final outcome, so to speak.
I notice that when he/she starts to lose an argument, the superior tone that leftist losers adopt. It’s pretty funny.