Never Again Means Never Again
A Quick Response to Michael Poisoner
Never Again Means Never Again
A Quick Response to Michael Poisoner
Dear Mr. Posner,
As you rightly point out[1]: any true, real, fast friend of Israel should be worried about Israel. Are you a friend or its worst enemy? Are you one who indulges Israel’s worst vices and who supports its tradition of arrogance, Fascism, genocide and ethnic cleansing…?
From what I gather nearly 70% of world-wide demonstrations between 8th and the 13th of October were pro-Palestinian. This has shifted since to 95%. The world stands with Gaza and by definition: against Israel. The Chinese have even deleted Israel from one of their maps. Will Israel continue to exist in the very near future? If I were a betting man, I’d say: most probably not. Once tainted with the mortal sin of genocide it’ll be cast into an abyss and forgotten.
It’s nice of you, as an arm-chair general, to cheer on the sending of the IDF into Gaza but have you considered, for a split-second, what this actually means for the individual soldiers of the IDF? It seems that the IDF lost sixty men in a recent incident, which means that on one day alone it lost nearly as many men as it lost in the course of the entirety of Cast Lead in 2014.
The pummelling of Gaza with bombs and the deliberate mass murder of its women and children has left a landscape reminiscent of both Stalingrad and Monte Casino, a landscape, which favours the defenders rather than the attackers. Furthermore, the Israelis are repeating the mistakes they made both in 2002 and 2006. They’re sending reservists into the field in such a way that they get themselves killed (as in Jenin in 2002) and they’re sending armored vehicles into battle without adequate infantry support (as they did in Lebanon), with disastrous results. These are unforgivable tactical mistakes. Yet the strategic errors are even more grave.
You describe Gaza as “the world’s largest urban terrorist camp” but you provide no context for this curious assertion. Gaza has long been compared to a concentration camp. Half of its population are children and the vast majority are victims of Zionist terror. If one evokes the mention of “terror” one ought at least pretend to be even-handed. Israel was created by terrorists (such as Begin & Shamir) and it continues to be ruled by them. It’s, as Thomas Suarez has rightly pointed out: a “state of terror”.
And what is the deliberate targeting of women and children, the desire to turn Gaza into “another Dresden” and a “parking lot”, if not terrorism?
As for your contention that Gaza is a “forward base of Iranian subversion”, this needs to be taken with a large portion of salt.
An American official recently made the curious assertion that Hamas was funded by Iran and to my horror the Financial Times took this obvious lie at face value and didn’t call it into question, as it should have done had it exercised due diligence.
To the best of my knowledge: Hamas was created by Israel and the CIA, is currently funded by Qatar (at the behest of Israel) and fought against Hezbollah (which actually does have links to Iran) in Syria. The linking of Iran to Hamas is as tenuous and ridiculous as the linking of al Qaeda (which was created by the Americans) to Saddam Hussein. Yet, however laughable this might be it could well have deadly consequences and could well unleash World War Three.
You assert that: “Much of the heavy lifting — all of northern Gaza, parts of Gaza City — has already been done.” I fear this is not the case. The guerrilla war against the IDF is only just getting started. The IDF doesn’t “control” ANY of the territory, however small, it is currently “holding” in Gaza and the incident in which the sixty soldiers are said to have been killed, was close to the border of Israel. This should give you an idea of how dangerous this operation actually is.
You assert that “thousands of its foot soldiers have been dispatched” but from the video evidence I have seen the Israelis weren’t able to display a single body of a Hamas fighter (I did on the other hand watch a video which purportedly showed how male civilians were being shot in the head and buried by the IDF). All I have seen are videos of the IDF shooting at houses or in houses but haven’t seen many of their elusive enemies. When the resistance fighters do emerge, there is no infantry on hand to defend the armored vehicles they destroy.
I’m glad that you mention “Ismail Haniyeh and the rest of the charming Hamas cabal – billionaires barricaded in five-star Qatari hotels” because one does have to ask: if Israel were serious about Hamas why aren’t the Mossad etc. taking out Haniyeh? Might it be because they got their billions from Israel? Most probably. I think, given the circumstances, that they needn’t check for Israeli car bombs. Only those willing to testify to Israeli crimes against humanity need fear those.
You write: “In deference to the jackals on the Arab street, moderate Arab leaders have denounced Israel’s prosecution of the war, invoking the familiar canards — proportionality, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and collective punishment, yada, yada. Privately, however, they are cheering Israel on, grateful that it is doing what they would gladly do themselves, given half a chance. A few have even bold enough to say it out loud.”
How charming you are: to depict Arabs as animals. Isn’t this the same language, which was used by the Nazis to dehumanise their victims and isn’t this the same language being used by the Zionist leadership (there never was much ideological, tactical or strategic difference between the Zionists and Nazis, both are White Supremacist, right-wing extremists)?
And more charming still to make light (oh how funny!) of “proportionality, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and collective punishment”. Weren’t all those things EXACTLY what the Nazis did? Didn’t the Nazis (oh how funny that was!!!) say that they’d kill ten Frenchmen (or was it a hundred or two (I’m so much laughing that I forget!!!)) for each soldier of the Wehrmacht who was maimed? And didn’t the Nazis (at the behest of their American eugenics sponsors) practice ethnic cleansing in Russia (why would the Russians not fear NATO, that heir of the Waffen-SS?). Only ten million Russians were “ethnically cleansed” (oh how funny that was!). And didn’t the Nazis invoke that wonderfully fair and just practice of “collective punishment”? In fact (although I’m laughing so hard there are tears in my eyes) I can’t help think that one might be able to talk of the odd historical parallel or two, don’t you think?
Yet, I’m sure, for all your love of right-wing polemic, your hang to murderous, genocidal Fascism, your lies, disinformation and downright deception, that there is some truth to your statement condemning heartless Arab leaders. They’ve ALWAYS been corrupt patsies of the West and HAVE NEVER defended the population of Palestine. Yet this is nothing new so why talk of it now?
“It’s instructive that, while Israel’s critics convulse in paroxysms of grief,” you shamelessly assert that “not a single Arab or Muslim nation has offered to harbour a single Palestinian – not for an hour. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, dragged its heels even on delivery of aid, and on the release of Gazans holding dual citizenship. Can we speak the truth? The wider Arab world reviles Palestinians far more than any Israeli. And justifiably, given the havoc Palestinians have wrought in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait.”
What havoc? I fear, to be perfectly honest, that you are quite incapable of “speaking the truth” but that is neither here nor there. Your assertion fails to mention that over half of the population of Jordan is Palestinian and there are countless Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (despite the massacres perpetrated by the IDF and its proxies). Palestinians are scattered all over the Middle East. Why should any Arab country collaborate with Israel in yet another instant of “ethnic cleansing”?
Your statement that Egypt has “dragged its heels even on delivery of aid” ignores the fact that Israel (sadly) controls the supply of humanitarian aid into Gaza. In the same way that the Nazis starved Jews to death, the Israelis are starving Palestinian women and children to death as we speak.
Never again, Mr Posner, MEANS NEVER AGAIN!!!!
It seems unbelievable that this could go on unimpeded when the entire world with few exceptions is against what is happening. Beyond what is actually happening, this is one of the most audacious demonstrations of raw power ever to be displayed the world stage. No veil of secrecy necessary. That’s power. Following the last 3-1/2 years of many semester’s worth of Learned Helplessness training, this current in our faces, unapologetic murderous rampage ups the ante on everything, which, again, one would not think possible. The Boot is now stomping squarely on the face of every single living being in the entire world, and right now it does look like it is going to be forever.
When non-Jews ask me about Israel and what I think because they are confused and I am a Jew, I tell them to assume that everything the Israeli government says is a lie. That will give them a pretty good picture of what is going on.