The "Double D Offense"

I presume that in  mentioning "Double-D", some of you maybe thinking of a variety of things, including the Double-D Hamburger at my son's bar, The Lions' Den ("HaGov") in downtown Jerusalem.  No, I was thinking over the game of chess.  Good offense is crucial to playing - and winning - the game.

I am, however, referring to what I call the "Double-D Offense" on Israel's present policies, or rather Israel's post-1967 policies, which  include its continued administration of the territories of Judea and Samaria and the residency of over 350,000 Jews therein in over 140 communities including cities, towns, villages, kibbutzim and moshavim.

And that "offense" is predicated on two main buzzwords:

Democracy

and

Demography.

Both of those terms are intended to act as ogres, scaring people rather than actually deliberating a possible problem.

Here is Avrum Burg:

...tell Israel that it is impossible to be treated as "the only democracy in the Middle East", while it is also the last colonial occupier in the Western world….

What colonialism?  Judea and Samaria were part of the Mandate and the Partition of 1947 was not accepted by the Arabs (who also went to war to eradicate Israel, contined terror and in 1967 initiated a war of aggression) and having lost yet another war, the territory became Israel's again.

But the real point is that all these liberals are actually promoting the establishment of another Islamist terror entity which not only attacks Jews but oppresses its own Arab population.  So in the name of "democracy", Israel, which is a democracy, they push for the creation of a state that will be undemocratic internally and without a doubt will seek to destroy Israel sooner or later.

As regards demography, the simple fact is that 45 years have passed and the math doesn't add up.  The studies are out there.  The Pals. produce not only false statistics and data but are not producing the expected demographics.

But demography is trumpeted.  For example, a NYTimes' June 5 editorial links demography with the bi-national state:

Demographics are pushing Israel in that direction.

And in that editorial is another, third "D":

Meanwhile, Palestinians are despairing that settlements and outposts are expanding so fast that they could soon preclude any chance of a two-state solution. 

 

This D is a play of the victimization strategy of the Arabs of the territories of the former Mandate for Palestine.  All of this employment of terms of transformation leads to

Delegitimzation, Demonization, Double Standards.

In seeking to change the political situation, to be at ease with their liberal selves identity, to be comfortable with their image of Judaism, to be comfy with their non-Jewish comrades, they sacrifice Israel and surrender up Zionism based on inauthentic and misrepresented facts, all the while creating what will be a monster, and an uncontrollable one - all despite the information readily available to them and which, as relatively intelligent people, they should know and be able to draw different conclusions from such.

But they won't because it will cause them cognitive dissonance and will disrupt their ideological equilibrium.

So, the last "D" is for denial.

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Spotted - Two Liberals

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The "Wall" - Then and Now

I can remember - and I am sure so can all of you - when a tour group of Jews landing at Ben-Gurion Airport would be informed that their very first itinerary item is a visit to the Wall.

And the bus would take off for Jerusalem and the expectant visitors would arrive in Jerusalem, make their way to the Western Wall Plaza and each would then approach the Western Wall, the last standing element of the Second Temple they would be told, where Jews have prayed and cried tears for hundreds of years.  And they would even slip into the cracks between the 2000-year old stones a piece of paper, perhaps a prayer for a sick relative or a wish for a grandchild.  And they would feel the connection over the generations that just as their ancestors had done or tried to do or at least prayed to do, they could now do after the 19-year period of the illegal Jordanian occupation when Jews were banned from approaching the holy site and where, under the British Mandatory regime it was dangerous, at times, to approach and when, after 1930, the blowing of the shofar there could get you imprisoned.

What a powerful moment.  Spiritually and historically.

But now, I have been informed, there are groups, like the one from a city in upstate New York, who were informed that their first location to visit would be the Wall in Jerusalem - meaning the security barrier that tries to protect Jews from Islamic terror.

Yes, the "Wall" has now been transmorgrified - not the remnant but a propaganda ploy.

Woe is the Jewish people that Rabbis and lay leaders set this "wall" over their chief joy.

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Is "Palestine' A Liberal Cause?

Check these out and there are more posters here:

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From Jacobson's "Finkler" to David Mamet

Reported that "Chicago-born Jewish playwright David Mamet has undergone a political conversion that plants him firmly on the right.  Launches tirade against 'antisemitism' of British writers. Says books, plays and essays by contemporary authors are full of anti-Jewish 'filth'"


Details

Leading US playwright David Mamet has launched an attack on the British literary establishment over what he claims are inherently antisemitic attitudes.  Many contemporary British authors who write in the liberal tradition, Mamet said, produce plays, books and essays that are full of anti-Jewish "filth".

...Asked whether he felt Europe was more sceptical about Israel than the US, the writer said: "There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitisim in the British...the authors of today," Mamet adds, "I'm not going to mention names because of your horrendous libel laws, but there are famous dramatists and novelists over there whose works are full of antisemitic filth."

...His new book, The Secret Knowledge, is a polemic that targets fundamental tenets of leftwing thinking, from the value of a liberal arts-based education to the importance of environmentalism.

...Mamet said that for him the "paradigmatic Brit as far as the Middle East goes" is TE Lawrence, author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and remembered for his portrayal in the film Lawrence of Arabia. "Even before the oil was there, you loved the desert," Mamet told the FT. "But there is a Jewish state there ratified by the United Nations and you want to give it away to some people whose claim is rather dubious."...

Mamet's 2008 essay, Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'.

Whoa-ho.

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Michael Walzer Attempts A Waltz And Stumbles

Michael Walzer, who doesn't "have much respect for Netanyahu", he admits, gets caught:

Web Letter: In Response to Michael Walzer's “What Does Netanyahu Think He Is Doing?”

To the editors:

Michael Walzer offers a stunning remark:

Palestinian leaders would be happy to accept an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, but they are in no way ready to end the conflict...Their strategic goal is what I am afraid it has always been: the creation of a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state that they don’t recognize and with which they are not reconciled.

I’m your ordinary mainstream liberal and have always assumed that the Palestinians are basically OK folks, just like us, and all they care about is a roof over their heads, their own national anthem, and then we’ll all break matzah and eat falafel together and sing Kumbaya.

Yet Walzer’s remarks suggest that even if the Israelis concede a genuine Palestinian state, the war is likely to continue.

With that in mind, does it make sense to give the Palestinians a base upon which to wage further war? Doesn’t that simply reinforce Netanyahu’s recalcitrance? That the idea of a greater Israel—i.e., to the Jordan River—actually makes sense? That there is not enough room for two peoples? And that the extreme right-wing Israeli stance is correct? If the outcome of a Palestinian state is likely to give the Palestinians an enhanced ability to make war against Israel, then why cooperate?

Horrifying and dismaying as such ideas may be, don’t they lead from Walzer’s view, above?

-David Sucher

---------------------------

Since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is a moral and political disaster for Israel, and since it is oppressive and humiliating for the Palestinians, the end of the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state would be a great gain, even if it didn’t end the conflict. This Israeli withdrawal would not be like the withdrawal from Gaza. Under President Obama’s proposal, it would be negotiated with the Palestinian Authority; it would result in a demilitarized state; Israel would remain the dominant military power in the region. Mainstream liberals in the United States would be free to sing Kumbaya.

-Michael Walzer

Nevertheless, Walzer thinks "Netanyahu’s rejectionism seems crazy" to him.

Walzer is free to deal in issues of "morality" and "politics" and judge whether there is a disaster stemming from those quite subjective considerations.

However, an objective analysis of Israel's security and survival requirements would behoove Israel not to adopt the American Jewish position as expressed by Walzer.

With the Pals., it is not a matter of negotiations but of simple agreement - and they are unwilling and incapable of providing that.

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J Street Correctly Defined

Found in here:-

Jeremy Ben-Ami is the president of J Street, a liberal lobbying group founded three years ago as a counterpoint to Aipac.

Yes, that was in the New York Times.

They know a liberal when they see one.

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More Kristof Kookiness

From his column:

Hamas may have lost popularity since the election in 2006 and since my last visit (2008). This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Israeli policies, but rather with weariness with Hamas’s Islamism, nuttiness and intolerance. Antics like Hamas’s attacks on summer camps for kids are emblematic of how the group antagonizes ordinary people. People are just tired of Hamas, and if Israel would stay out of the picture there’s some hope Hamas could eventually be displaced.

Now, if he could only persuade Hamas not to initiate, back and support terror attacks against Israel and to release Gild Shalit, well, then Kristof could be useful.

Instead of being one of those 'useless idiots' that populate the pages of the NYTimes.

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Words Worth Quoting

Judaism is not liberal and it is not conservative; it is Jewish. But this is the
beginning of the matter, not the end. For Judaism is immense and various: it
holds within itself an oceanic plenitude of opinions and tendencies, developed
over 2,000 years of philosophical and legal deliberation, and they do not all go
together. To say that a view is Jewish is to claim a provenance more than an
essence.

Leon Wiseltier

Have You Read Melanie Phillips "Liberal Fascism"?

This piece is important.

Liberal fascism


It's about

...the now common analogy that is drawn between Israel and the Nazis, or Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto, as used by such Israel-haters...It is used for very specific political purposes. Since Nazism is totally beyond the pale – and since the Israel-haters believe, falsely, that Israel’s legitimacy rests upon the Holocaust – tarring it as a Nazi state delegitimises it and thus advances the agenda of its destruction.

...I would also make a further point that Rich does not make. Calling Israel a Nazi state retrospectively sanitises the Holocaust and lets complicit Europe off the hook – Britain too. After all, Britain was partly responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews to whom it refused entry to Palestine -- in order to appease the Arabs of Palestine who were in league with the Nazis – and who perished in the Holocaust as a result. If the Jews have become Nazis, then their victimisation at the hands of the Nazis stops being the crime of crimes.

It also allows people safely to hate the Jews once again...

Read it all.

Wood's Way With Words

How does a liberal, like James Wood, attack the tactic of Republicans to criticize Obama by using the key term of "words"?

With words (and notice the words he uses that I have underlined):

In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.” The fresher-faced extremist Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, called Obama “just a person of words,” adding, “Words are everything to him.” The once bipartisan campaign adviser Dick Morris and his wife and co-writer, Eileen McGann, argue that the McCain camp, in true Rovian fashion, is “using the Democrat’s articulateness against him” (along with his education, his popularity, his intelligence, his wife—pretty much everything but his height, though it may come to that)...Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself?

...Words are up for grabs: just follow the lipstick traces...

And can you count how many words there are in this one sentence?

Meanwhile, the campaign that claims to loathe “just words” has proved expert at their manipulation, from reversals of policy to the outright lies of some of its attack ads (“comprehensive sex education”) and the subtle racial innuendo of a
phrase like “how disrespectful” (used to accuse Obama of making uppity attacks
on Palin).

53.

And his parting shot:

If Obama is the letter (words, fancy diplomas, “authored” books), then the latest representative of the spirit is Sarah Palin. Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was “writing the difficulty”—that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty.

There's more. If you're wordy. Or Woody.

P.S. Wood's approach to being critical:

“I have no intention of going soft,” said Mr. Wood. “I intend to be a critic, which means, as Eliot once put it, ‘the elucidation of texts and the correction of taste.’ If I annoy people who publish stories or who have extracts published in The New Yorker, that will be the editor’s problem, not mine! After all, it’ll be him they complain to, not me.”

I'll Answer David Forman

Rabbi (Reform) David Forman, in his most recent op-ed, writes about his outlook on the Arab-Israel conflict and then, sort of, poses a question [my comments italicized and in brackets, like this]:-

I have little [how little?] confidence that the Palestinians, certainly under the present leadership, are either willing to or capable of reaching a peace accord based on a two-state solution.

It is becoming abundantly clear [becoming? boker-tov Eliyahu, as we say] that the Palestinians may never [may?] accept an equal [or inequal, actually] division of this land. Peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt notwithstanding, the majority of Arab nations will not tolerate a Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world. Perhaps the writing has always been on the wall but we failed to internalize it [we? we?!!!], as Arab countries rejected the 1947 UN partition plan and, upon the departure of the British, attacked Israel with the goal of driving the Jews into the sea.

Yasser Arafat may have been [may? may?!!!] to blame for the breakdown of the Camp David negotiations, but his reasons for walking away from a historic agreement were foolishly consistent [as foolish as you are/were together with your foolish friends?], as reiterated last week by Khaled Mashaal at the National Palestinian Conference in Damascus: "armed struggle until Jerusalem is liberated and all refugees are returned to the provisional borders of 1948."
While one can recount missteps Israel has made since its creation - including the settlement enterprise [what else did we misstep? uniting Jerusalem? refusing the so-called 'right of return'?] - the basic fact remains: The Arab world refers to Israel Independence Day as Nakba Day - the day of the great catastrophe. Hizbullah, Hamas, Iran and even the "moderate" Fatah are ultimately all dedicated to Israel's destruction, as was Arafat.

So let's face it, the sad reality [why sad?], for now anyway [for now? but you just said forever], is that peace with the Palestinians is not in the cards. Further, unless Islam undergoes a theological, cultural or social reformation, not only Israel but the entire free world will be threatened by Islamic fundamentalism.

Therefore, Israel must defend itself, which means retaliatory raids, targeted assassinations, preemptive strikes and building temporary walls. [so, now that all is moral? where were you yesterday/yesteryear?] With all the complexities of occupying another people, which necessarily [no it doesn't] compromises our Jewish moral value system, if we hope to stop rockets from falling on Sderot and prevent them from raining down on other parts of the country, we may [may? see above] have to intermittently lay siege to Gaza and remain in the West Bank.

YET EVEN as I may espouse the political philosophy above, it would be mistaken to brand me as an intransigent right-winger;.. [mistaken? why? why am I worse or different than you? because you claim to be humane? liberal? progressive? come on, all that is bovine manure]

My answer to his self-doubts is that it's okay David, you're simply one of us, the realists, the true Zionists. It's okay, you can come out of your shell now.