Psychotic Palestine: Bret Stephens Nails it, alas! By Richard Landes. The Augean Stables, October 15, 2015.
Stephens:
The truth about why Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust.
If
you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that
“violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed
As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed
radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be
shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”
Read
further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is
perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli
Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza
Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.
Such
was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began
when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children
in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two
Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a
2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and
killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the
chest and back.
Other
Palestinian attacks include the stabbing of two elderly Israeli men and an
assault with a vegetable peeler on a 14-year-old. On Sunday, an Arab-Israeli
man ran over a 19-year-old female soldier at a bus stop, then got out of his
car, stabbed her, and attacked two men and a 14-year-old girl. Several attacks
have been carried out by women, including a failed suicide bombing.
Regarding
the causes of this Palestinian blood fetish, Western news organizations have
resorted to familiar tropes. Palestinians have despaired at the results of the
peace process—never mind that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas just declared
the Oslo Accords null and void. Israeli politicians want to allow Jews to pray
atop the Temple Mount—never mind that Benjamin Netanyahu denies it and has
barred Israeli politicians from visiting the site. There’s always the hoary
“cycle of violence” formula that holds nobody and everybody accountable at one
and the same time.
Left
out of most of these stories is some sense of what Palestinian leaders have to
say. As in these nuggets from a speech Mr. Abbas gave last month: “Al Aqsa
Mosque is ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.”
And: “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and
pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”
Then
there is the goading of the Muslim clergy. “Brothers, this is why we recall
today what Allah did to the Jews,” one Gaza imam said Friday in a recorded address, translated by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, or
Memri. “Today, we realize why the Jews build walls. They do not do this to stop
missiles but to prevent the slitting of their throats.”
Then,
brandishing a six-inch knife, he added: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”
Imagine
if a white minister in, say, South Carolina preached this way about
African-Americans, knife and all: Would the news media be supine in reporting
it? Would we get “both sides” journalism of the kind that is pro forma when it
comes to Israelis and Palestinians, with lengthy pieces explaining—and
implicitly justifying—the minister’s sundry grievances, his sense that his
country has been stolen from him?
And
would this be supplemented by the usual fake math of moral opprobrium, which is
the stock-in-trade of reporters covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In
the Middle East version, a higher Palestinian death toll suggests greater
Israeli culpability. (Perhaps Israeli paramedics should stop treating stabbing
victims to help even the score.) In a U.S. version, should the higher incidence
of black-on-white crime be cited to “balance” stories about white supremacists?
Didn’t
think so.
Treatises
have been written about the media’s mind-set when it comes to telling the story
of Israel. We’ll leave that aside for now. The significant question is why so
many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust—by a communal
psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish women, children,
soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic duty, a moral
fulfillment. Despair at the state of the peace process, or the economy? Please.
It’s time to stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother
making for themselves.
Above
all, it’s time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when
it comes to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially
when it is the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it
when the hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically
good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of
empathy.
Today
in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death,
one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to
serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.
On Bret Stephen’s hate speech [sic]. By Dorgham Abusalim. Mondoweiss, October 14, 2015.
Ali Abunimah on Twitter:
.@majornewstweets I don’t have any control, but killing of innocents, Jewish or Palestinian, is always wrong. Zionism is the root cause.
