Monday, February 18, 2008

New Extremist State: Israel at Work

Hate is a terrible thing; it festers in one’s spirit, leading to the commitment of dreadful acts. We are not born with hate in our hearts, nor do we gravitate to this most unnatural of human emotions, children must be taught to hate. The evidence of this is easy to see in any playground populated by pre-schoolers who have not been influenced by the political, religious or other biases of their parents. When there are other children present in the playground the children will play together, even when not having been introduced. Why is this? Why should children be capable of doing something that adults seem so incapable of accomplishing?

The reason is simple, and it is something that adults need to re-learn: while older children will become judgemental as they are introduced to the “adult” world, the innocent pre-schooler has yet to develop the ability to judge others. When does this change? When parents begin defining a child’s place in society it sets the course for the ingrained prejudices that will rule the mind of the growing child; by limiting who they are able to play with, who they are allowed to visit after school, and all of the other influences that go into the rearing of a child a child learns what is “good” and what is “bad” and establishes a demarcation zone within their mind in which all things to be hated are placed.

Having lived in neighbourhoods that have been very multi-cultural I have seen, with my own eyes, the truth of how beautiful it is to see children playing together in peace: a rainbow of colour, laughing and running around, totally absorbed in the very real business of having fun. I have also seen the obscenity of a parent physically dragging their child away from a sandbox because they shouldn’t be playing with such “dirty” children. It wasn’t difficult to understand that the parent was addressing the brown skin of the Lebanese children, and she even gave me a nasty glare as she passed me, errantly assuming that one of the “dirty” urchins in the sandbox was mine. As a response to this ignorant individual I gave her a greeting of “good afternoon” … in German … with a click of my heels and a slight bow of my head. Somehow it seemed appropriate to bestow as much of a Nazi salute as I would give, without raising my arm.

Hatred is what allowed the Nazis to thrive, survive, and drive across the continent, killing with impunity. Their hatred against anyone who did not fit into their paradigm of the “master race” was fanatical beyond comprehension, leading to the attempted extermination of not only the Jews but the Gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities and scores of others who fell into the category of “unter menschen”. The “sub-humans”, individuals that the Nazis deemed unworthy to share the world with, were gathered up, shipped off and slaughtered. Their rights were taken away, subjugated as slave labour they fed the war machine the weapons used to kill other innocent lives until their usefulness wore out due to sickness, exhaustion or through the mere malice of the concentration camp guards who killed with impunity.

While the Holocaust ended in 1945 the lessons learned by the horrors of the hatred perpetrated by Hitler and his henchmen have not been passed down through the generations of surviving Jews into the land that was supposedly created as a haven from another holocaust. According to an article that DesertPeace posted there is a law in the State of Israel making it a criminal offence to call any act of the Israeli government a “Nazi act” of aggression. The most recent outcry coming from the extermination of an entire Palestinian family while they slept in the middle of the night on the 15th of February. Three children and their mother died when the Israeli Air Force used precision munitions to assassinate their father, Ayman Al Fayeq, who was suspected in “acts of terror”.

I was born of Jewish parents and am aware that at anytime I can travel to Israel and claim the “right of return”, but I have not done this nor do I plan to do so: in fact, until my brother, Ishmael ibn Ibrahim is granted the same “right of return”, I shall not set foot in the land that has become a model of Zionist Fascism. I am not constrained by the laws of Israel so I shall say what DesertPeace cannot: the actions of the Israeli government are no better than those of the Third Reich. They use terror tactics to control weaker individuals, they control every avenue of economic advancement of people living within the land who are not Jewish, often preventing them from earning a living by closing the checkpoints that Palestinians must pass through in order to travel from their homes to their places of employments, and they impose punishments upon people without having had the benefit of a trial.

Ayman Al Fayeq and his entire family were slaughtered by the IAF in the middle of the night. How can this possibly be acceptable? Even if Al Fayeq was a terrorist, what could his children have done to warrant being immolated by a bomb in the dark of night? The Nazis did similar things to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Lodz Ghetto, through the travelling Einsatzgruppen, and other terror forces that made the Third Reich notorious for their inhuman treatment of non-Aryans. How is this different from what the Zionist Fascists are doing in Israel?

The land was given to us by God. We cannot divide the land. We must protect Israel. It is very easy to fall upon the old scriptures that promise the land to the children of Israel, forgetting that they immediately fell into disobedience and disobeyed the instructions that the Lord provided for the people before they took possession of the land. Inconvenient, and yet … what does it mean? First, you cannot go back in time and erase the mistakes of two thousand years with genocide today. The argument about not dividing the land that God has given as an inheritance hinges upon the first issue: since this present state of Israel is NOT that which was given to the children of Israel, there is no injunction against giving land to the Palestinians, though I still contend that living together is the best solution.

Defending the land must be proportional to the force being used by the attacker. You do not respond to a stick with snipers, you do not fire artillery at unarmed demonstrators … unless you are in Israel. When Hezbollah launched Katyusha Rockets, weapons that do not have sophisticated navigational equipment and rarely hit their targets with full effect, Israel has regularly responded with precision bombing and artillery far beyond the proportion of the original attack, striking the neighbourhood from which the rockets were launched. Given that the IAF has munitions that are capable of striking within 9.6 metres of the designated target (standard JDAM available for the F-16, used in the slaughter of the Fayeq family) it would seem reasonable that the IAF might start resorting to the "surgical strikes" that the USAF has been employing since the development of these precision guided munitions to such great effect in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

If the Israeli government does not want to have their actions and policies likened to those of the Nazis all they have to do is start acting more like humans and less like the monsters that they have modelled themselves after; take the lessons of history and apply them now, before it is too late.