I have discovered the hard way that "But Israel gets to kill who they want!" does not actually hold up in a court of law as a legitimate defence.
This is very disappointing and, frankly, deeply unfair.
I guess we can't always get what we want. I mean, I got a friend who wants a tiny rabbit who can fit in her palm who'd be called Subcommandante Marcos so she can set up a Republic in her bedroom and rule it with the tiny bunny. (This is actually a true story -- you may not believe it but it is true: Carlo Sands does have a friend.)
But I still feel it would be fairer if we could all use the Israeli defence.
"The bastard spilled my drink, Your Honour, so I killed
three Egyptian border guards and destroyed more of
Gaza's power and water supplies."
"Oh, that's alright, Sands! Why didn't you say so! You are free to go, have a lollipop and the
Golan Heights."
But no. It is one rule for Empire's favourite
mass murderers and another for the rest of us.
It is quite stunning really. I mean it is nothing new but it is still quite stunning. Israel kills three Egyptian cops -- that is, you know, like another country's cops, *in Egypt* and Egypt's government ... asks for an apology.
I mean, they killed three fucking Egyptian citizens in an unprovoked attack. When your military murders another nation's citizen's in their own country for no reason, it kinda counts as a "significant diplomatic incident" -- just behind serving only light beer at the annual embassy piss-up.
The Egyptian people, fresh from having tossed out a
US puppet complicit in Israel's crimes, took it a little harder. There were days of furious mass protests outside the Israeli embassy, which gave the world a brand new superhero: FLAGMAN!
Yes, Egyptian man Ahmed al-Shehat scaled the 22-story building that houses the Israeli embassy, and -- to the roars of the crowd -- tore down the Israeli flag and raised the Egyptian one in its place. The flag was duly delivered to the crowd, who promptly burned the fucking thing.
You can watch the glorious even on
YouTube.
Finally, a Superhero to be proud of.
But not even Flagman's heroics were enough to shift the situation.
The humiliation for Egyptians was made worse when, more than a year after
Israel massacred nine Turkish citizens in an unprovoked attack in international waters (that some fools compared to an act of "piracy", which as
I have argued elsewhere is a gross slander on the good name of pirates everywhere), the Turkish government finally responded by cutting all military ties with Israel.
Israel still sees no reason to even say "sorry" to Turkey, let alone Egypt.
So, with the Egyptian regime still refusing to even expel the Israeli ambassador from Cairo despite Israel's refusal to even say sorry for its unprovoked murder of Egyptian citizens, the Egyptian people took matters into their own hands.
On September 9, a huge demonstration
descended on the Israeli embassy in Cairo and, with sledgehammers and their bare hands, tore down the security wall protecting the Israeli embassy and then stormed the building, removing a whole lot of Israeli embassy documents in a kinda of mass direct action WikiLeaks moment.
The Israeli ambassador, all the diplomatic staff and their families were forced to flee -- being evacuated back to Israel by plane.
The Israeli media
ran stories about how terrible this was, how as the protesters stormed the building, diplomatic staff were forced into some back room with nothing but armed Israeli guards to protect them against an unarmed crowd. Well, their lives were *clearly* in danger because there is simply no way Israel would kill Egyptians in Egypt is there?
It must have been absolutely terrifying for them, which is horrible because the border guards killed without provocation by an Israeli air strike probably at least had no time to be terrified. They were just blown apart with no warning. That is how *civilised* nations do it.
And so the Egyptian people decided to cut diplomatic ties themselves.
Let us recap.
On August 18, there were attacks in southern Israel that left eight people dead and 40 injured. It was, without any question, an atrocity. An atrocity to which no one has claimed responsibility.
Israel blamed the Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees -- who
denied having anything to do with it.
Cue fresh bombings of besieged Gaza. As well as the three Egyptian cops, by August 26,
22 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed, including children.
For attacks no one knows who was responsible for. Despite which, more than two dozen people are dead with no evidence a single one had anything to do with the initial attack.
If someone steals your iPod, and you go around breaking all the windows in your neighbourhood in retaliation, try the "Israel defence" in your inevitable court case. It won't work. You are not Israel.
Balance
But, it occurred it me, I may be guilty here of only presenting *one side* of the story. Perhaps I am not being balanced enough. And, as anyone who knows me can strongly attest, if Carlo Sands is anything, he is -- above all else -- *balanced*.
So I sought out the counter position on the question of Israel and its behaviour in general and I came across an article from
The Australian, which being a Rupert Murdoch paper is one of the
most balanced news sources you could find.
I found this article to very convincing and it made me seriously rethink everything I had previously thought.
In a
June 7 opinion piece entitled "Palestinians' deadly strategy doomed to fail",
The Australian's Middle East correspondent John Lyons opened my eyes to the true situation.
"It is time", he said, "for Palestinians to resume a non-violent struggle of negotiations and give up their strategy of confronting Israeli bullets".
This was in response to a series of protests that occurred in early June on Israeli borders by Palestinians and their supporters in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights in Syria and Lebanon.
The Israeli military
opened fire on unarmed protesters on the frontier of Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. More than 20 unarmed protesters were killed.
Now you might think the aggressor here was Israel -- shooting down unarmed protesters demonstrating for an end to illegal Israeli occupation. But that is where you would be wrong.
Lyons' explains quite clearly the aggressor in this case is not the ones doing the shooting but the ones getting shot.
The Palestinians, you see, should stop "confronting Israeli bullets" in such a threatening and provocative manner. They were virtually *begging* the Israeli Defence Forces to shoot them.
How else is Israel meant to respond to such thugs confronting their bullets with with their bodies? Such a threat to Israel's very existence can not be expected to go unanswered.
The Palestinians getting themselves shot so willfully, Lyons points out, merely "allows Israel to argue that it cannot agree to a Palestinian state while it has so much instability on its borders".
The logic is so frighteningly simple, I cannot believe I never saw it before. The death of an Israeli at the hands of a Palestinian is a terrorist atrocity. Palestinians being killed by Israelis is "instability".
Instability, what is more, that is the fault of the Palestinians who brought it on themselves with all their unarmed "protesting" and other such anti-Semitic provocations.
So, "rather than being shot trying to climb through barbed wire" in such a horrifically violent way (just *imagine* how traumatising having to shot an unarmed Palestinian is for some poor member of the IDF!), Lyons argues reasonably that the Palestinians should continue to try and negotiate in the framework of the 1993 Oslo Accords that hs
brought them so much progress over the years.
I have thought this through and I can finally see the big picture -- this whole "getting shot dead by Israeli bullets" is just the latest anti-Semitic plot to destroy the Jewish race. The Palestinians maybe irrational fanatics, but they are not stupid.
The plot is clear. If the Palestinains can force Israel to shot enough unarmed people asking for the return of occupied lands, as per countless UN resolutions, then surely, eventually, Israel will run out of bullets.
And then they will be screwed.
You only have to think this thing through to its logical conclusion. Who arms the Israelis? The
United States, to the tune of US$3 billion a year.
And the richest nation on Earth is mired in a severe economic crisis and has a nationlal debt in the trillions. Some
$2.1 trillion in spending cuts are coming -- while most of it will come from social security for pensioners are other luxuries, it cannot be ruled out that a bit, at least, might come from military spending.
The US is weak right now. It is vulneralbe. If only the Palestinians keep up their violent strategy of of forcing Israel to shoot enough bullets at them at their unarmed protests, they might bring the thing to a tipping point.
The bastards.
A Palestinian confronts Israeli bullets in a bid to bankrupt the Jewish state and drive all Jews into the sea. (*** NOTE ON THIS BELOW)
But the plot thickens even more.
There is an arguably *even bigger* anti-Semitic threat emerging *right here* in Australia! Yes, Palestine solidarity protesters have been holding protests calling for
a boycott of Max Brenner chocolate stores.
Now, the protesters *claim* this is because Max Brenner is on a list of companies with ties to the Israeli military that
dozens of Palestinian civil society organisations have called for a boycott against in a
growing international campaign backed by the likes of South African Nobel Peace Prize winning anti-apartheid activist
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but really any thinking person can see it is being targetted simply because the multinational corporation was set up by Jewish people and this is *just like* the
Nazi's boycott of Jewish owned businesses in the 1930s.
It has gotten so dire than the poor multinational chain has had to resort to using such
renowned anti-fascists as the British National Party-linked Australian Protectionist Party to defend its stores from the anti-Semitic hordes and their chants asking Max Brenner to cut its ties with IDF army units responsible for
serious atrocities.
It was the Murdoch press to the rescue *once more*, with
a heartfelt piece in
The Australian on how poor Jewish chocolatier Max Brenner is stunned to find himself at the centre of the Middle Eastern conflict.
"Max Brenner says he is a man of peace who hates all forms of violence," an outraged Cameron Stewart writes. "So how has this chocolate maker become the target of anti-Israeli protesters in Australia who accuse him of being complicit with the Israeli military?"
Stewart tells his readers that Mr Brenner was "not available for an interview", but produced a quote from 2009, in which Brenner apparently responded to the protests by saying: "Whether it is in Israel or not, anything to do with violence, aggressiveness or appearing at protests or boycotts seems silly (to me). But then again, I am just a chocolate-maker."
What is all the more impressive about this heartstring-tugging piece is that
Max Brenner does not even exist.
There is no Max Brenner, he is just a corporate marketing creation.
Nonetheless, I see no reason why his non-existent status should blind us to how much he is suffering right now at the hands of the anti-Semites. Pretend people have feelings too! My heart breaks whenever I think of the fictitious Max Brenner crying himself to sleep every night, make-believe tears rolling down his not-really-there face.
All decent people should be haunted by the fictitious tears of the non-existent Jewish chocolate-maker Max Brenner, the result of his being targetted by anti-Semites asking that the multinational corporation his made-up name fronts stops sponsoring Israeli military units responsible for very real atrocities.
It is a terrible state of affairs. Having taking the time to *truly listen* to the other side of the story, provided with such objectivity by the Murdoch media, I can clearly see the error of my ways. As far as I am concerned, Israel can kill whoever the fuck they want!
Just so long, it is all I ask, that the rest of us are accorded the exact same privilige. It is really only fair and Kyle Sandilands has been *really* pissing me off.
"I wish I could take your tears and replace them with laughter, Long live Palestine, Long live Gaza!" Infamously anti-Semitic Iraqi-English hip hop artist Lowkey's anthem of hate calls for the total destruction of the Jewish race using code words such as "We stand for peace" and "I know there's plenty of Rabbi's that agree with me".
*** It has been pointed out, in the comment section, that this photo is incorrectly captioned. It is not a Palestinian woman in the photo who has so violently confronted Israeli bullets, but an American Jewish peace activist, Emily Honochowicz. Well, this just goes to show that evil anti-Semites come from all sources, no matter how unexpected. For more information on this question, check out
http://nabisalehsolidarity.wordpress.com. It'll shock ya.
