Sunday, January 4, 2009

"Jews Drink Children's Blood"

The infamous Blood Libel is alive and well, currently starring on the homepage of The Guardian. This morning the second caption on the page (since moved further down but still on the homepage) asks: "Do Israel Pilots feel happy killing women and children?".

Now I'm not going to argue with the author, a Palestinian woman named Fida Qishta, who probably lives in Rafah, though the Guardian never quite tells. Ms. Qishta has been living for many years in a society that indeed celebrates killing women and children, so long as they're Israeli children; such is the intensity of the hatred she's been living in that young Palestinians, men or women, are celebrated and their families feted when they kill themselves along with Jews. Statistically, she well likely voted for Hamas in 2006, and since then has been living under a regime that glorifies in killing Jews, but also in its own shahids, and that recently did everything in its power to provoke Israel into this round of violence. So Ms. Qishta, were she to live in a civilized rational society that treasures human life and raises its children to become rationally thinking adults, might be expected to restrain her histrionics about how the Israelis are trying to kill "every child and woman, man and teenager in Gaza". But she doesn't live in that society. We can hope some day she will, and we can pray that enough of her compatriots will be able to heal themselves of the poisoning they've committed on themselves, but in the meantime, since that future day hasn't yet arrived we'll avert our eyes from her outbursts and do our best not to succumb to the emotions she's trying to provoke.

Unless we're the Guardian, we're doing our best on our own to dismantle the harsh strictures of seeking truth and rationality, and to top it we're so steeped in the Jew-hatred of our historical legacy that we can't even see it. If that's who we are, we'll take Ms. Qishta's diary, we'll give it a title even she doesn't give it, one that fits comfortably into what our ancestors always knew about the Jews, and we'll put it at the top of the page on our website. If anyone ever complains we'll roll our eyes and exclaim that it's an authentic diary, it presents an essential perspective on the events, and the critics must learn not to be so squeamish, churlish and otherwise callous to the suffering of these the Americans and their henchmen trod on all the time.

To the question if it's conceivable that we'd ever approvingly quote such incitement against any other group, we can always respond that no other group is as evil as the Israelis, except perhaps the Americans, that one might ever allege that they enjoy killing women and children.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The ironic thing is that her question has an answer. More than one source has reported that on at least some occasions when people in a house think they may be targeted they rush up to the roof in hopes that the IAF pilots will see them. The pilots shoot warning shots and then wheel around, at some potential danger, and make another run after the inhabitants have had a chance to flee.

The Israelis, having finally learned something about propaganda, have on Youtube a number of their strikes--of course not all--and most show a building exploding as the missile or bomb hits and then at least one secondary explosion, indicates that they are not willy-nilly just bombing.

As you point out, it's also ironic that a Hamas supporter complains about killing women and children when Hamas overtly tries to do that, both actively--Israelis--and passively, their own people by frankly using them as shields and sometimes as weapons.

Leaving aside Hamas's stated goal of destroying Israel and killing Jews, it would be hard to negotiate with them because they are, and I use the term carefully, depraved.