28-Sep-15: Vegans and a passion for blood

[Hats off to Petra Marqardt-Bigman for her ongoing close analysis of the Bassem Tamimi US tour (now underway - currently in San Francisco) and the ill-informed and frequently hateful activism of the tour's sponsors [see "13-Sep-15: A roadshow and its groupies"]. Here's her latest contribution cross-posted from Sunday's Jerusalem Post. It's called "Vegans against the occupation".]

...

When I first heard about “Vegans against the occupation,” I thought for a moment that this was surely a group opposing the Chinese occupation of Tibet. After all, even though Tibet’s climate makes it difficult to be a vegetarian or vegan, Buddhism has traditionally been very sensitive about the suffering of animals and is often associated with promoting vegetarian or even vegan diets.

But of course I was wrong: “Vegans against the occupation” is just another group with an intense hatred for Israel – so intense, in fact, that one of the leading members of this small group has been devoting a lot of energy to promoting the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh, who obviously couldn’t care less about veganism.

[Warning: disturbing screenshot below, showing a teenaged Tamimi family member posing mockingly with the severed head of a goat or sheep slaughtered for Eid al Adha, the Muslim Festival of Sacrifice, which often gives rise to debates about cruelty against animals.] 

In the Tamimi playbook, vegans (and other liberal-minded
groups) play the role of useful idiots. This image
of a Tamimi cousin with a passion for slaughtered creatures
was posted by Mrs Bassem Tamimi on her Facebook page [here].
The Tamimi clan exhibit an undisguised attachment
to slaughter.

But Ariel Gold, aka Ariel Gold-Vegan of Ithaca, New York, hates Israel more than she hates this kind of revolting “fun”. While “Vegans against the occupation” is a tiny group that doesn’t warrant much attention, it provides an excellent example of the bottomless hypocrisy that is the hallmark of anti-Israel activism.

According to her Facebook (FB) page (publicly accessible at the time of this writing), Gold’s profession – or maybe more accurately, her all-consuming occupation – is “delegitimizing zionism.”

In recent weeks, Gold has been pre-occupied with promoting Bassem Tamimi, whose current month-long speaking tour in the US has apparently been organized by Gold. Justlike the Tamimis, Gold also finds it useful to exploit her children for her activism, as she did most recently when she sent her 12-year-old daughter to accompany Bassem Tamimi to teach third-graders in a school in Ithaca about “the suffering of Palestinian children at the hands of Israel.”

Well, at least Palestinian kids sometimes have a bit of fun with dead goats, and sometimes they also have the chance to enjoy themselves while watching adults torture and slaughtercattle. Just in case kids get the idea that abusing animals is OK, Hamas once even devoted an episode of a notorious children's program to showcasing “the worst way … to teach kids to be kind to animals.”

Among animal rights activists, Palestinians have something of an international reputation for being particularly cruel to animals. But while her friends were getting ready to slaughter animals and pose with their remains, Ariel Gold was busy baking “Vegan Anti-Zionist Sweet Potato Challah” and bragging about how she raised her “vegan” children “to recognize zionism as a racist ideology rooted in ethnic cleansing.” Even her son’s bar mitzvah was all about Gold’s anti-Israel activism.

She concluded her little story about the successful indoctrination of her children and the “Vegan Anti-Zionist Sweet Potato Challah” with the bolded declaration: “Being Progressive except #Palestine is like being #Vegan except bacon.”

And it’s probably like real vegan bacon to hate Israel intensely while idolizing people who can get more than 200 FB “Likes” for a photo of a teenaged relative posing mockingly with the severed head of a slaughtered animal.

To be sure, that the Tamimis are amused by one of their family members imitating the look of a slaughtered goat is really a minor matter. What is incomparably worse is the fact that the Tamimis don’t mind the slaughter of human beings – or, to be precise: the slaughter of Jews.

I did quite a bit of research on the Tamimis for several articles I wrote in the wake of the recent viral video that showed the futile attempt of an Israeli soldier to arrest the 12-year-old Mohammad Tamimi for stone throwing. First I noticed that some of their publicly accessible FB posts include statements and material that is hard to square with their otherwise carefully cultivated image as “non-violent” activists and “human rights defenders.” There are, for example, FB “likes” from Bassem Tamimi for pages and comments promoting the Hamas-affiliated jihadist Al-Qassam Brigades. Moreover, while the Tamimis have always refused to condemn terrorism, I was taken aback to see that Bassem Tamimi’s wife Nariman openly shared a popular FB post that objected to the description of the perpetrators of several murderous terror attacks as “terrorists” and insisted they should be hailed as “rebels.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of these murderous “rebels” is Tamimi family member Ahlam Tamimi, the mastermind of the 2001 Sbarro pizzeria massacre in Jerusalem.

As I have noted elsewhere, I have thus increasingly come to understand that when the Tamimis invoke the Palestinian “right to resist,” they also mean the “right” to commit mass murder. This is particularly obvious in statements reported by an Israeli news site and highlighted in a recent post at the blog of Frimet and Arnold Roth, who lost a daughter in the bloodbath of which Ahlam Tamimi and her admirers are so very proud. As the Roth’s translation of the Hebrew original shows, Nariman Tamimi – the mother of the child stars of the recent viral video – declared in no uncertain terms:

“What she [Ahlam Tamimi] did was an integral part of the struggle. Everyone fights in the manner in which he believes. There is armed uprising, and there is popular uprising. I support every form of uprising.”

Chances are that Ariel Gold (-Vegan) will be more disturbed by the tasteless image Nariman Tamimi shared on FB than by her open display of support for an unrepentant murderer who was only too delighted to find out that her victims included eight children.

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Mrs Bassem Tamimi's Facebook timeline honors
the most celebrated of the Tamimi clan's numerous
murderers, Ahlam Tamimi, by displaying this photo

Our postscript to Petra's article:

Here's another image that currently appears on Mrs Bassem Tamimi's Facebook timeline. 

It's there because of the celebrity status this hooded person has in the Tamimi clan's village of Nabi Saleh. It depicts a woman who makes the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh proud, a matter of which they make no secret: she's Ahlam Tamimi, the remorseless mastermind of the Sbarro pizzeria massacre. 

In a tight-knit clan that is deeply committed to arranged marriages within the family, Ahlam Tamimi the killer is related by blood in multiple ways to the Bassem Tamimis - and not only by blood. The husband of Ahlam Tamimi, himself a convicted and unrepentant murderer, is the son of Bassem Tamimi's sister.

There's another snapshot from Mrs Bassem Tamimi's Facebook timeline - again, depicting the Tamimi clan's much-admired killer of Jewish children - here.

6-Oct-11: Can you understand how these diplomats live with themselves?

On Tuesday, the UN Security Council considered a resolution to condemn the brutal bloodbath being carried out for the past several months by the dictatorial Syrian regime of Bashir al-Assad.

The targets of the despot are his fellow Syrian citizens. The Assad family have led their country to several military disasters but this one they're determined to win. The score until now: 2,900 dead Syrian civilians [source]. The BBC says 16 died in today's clashes alone, at the hands of the well-armed Syrian military forces.

Because this is how things work at the UN, the text of the UNSC resolution was already severely diluted ahead of the vote. It condemned “the grave and systematic human rights violations and the use of force against civilians by the Syrian authorities” but stopped short of imposing an arms embargo on the house of Assad. It called (such optimism!) for an immediate end to violence, support for fundamental freedoms, a lifting of media restrictions and unhindered access for human rights investigators. Powerful stuff, no doubt of it.

And predictably it was defeated in a UN vote.

Reason, once again, for Syrian
dictator and sociopath Bashir al-Assad
to rejoice

The ambassadors of China and Russia exercised their right to veto, bringing the initiative to a screeching halt. Given their history in the Security Council, this was appalling but not surprising. What was a bit less expected, and simply sickening, were the abstentions from India, Brazil and South Africa. The non-permanent members, and the years in which they have to exit, are Bosnia and Herzegovina (2011), Germany (2012), Portugal (2012), Brazil (2011), India (2012), South Africa (2012), Colombia (2012), Lebanon (2011), Gabon (2011), Nigeria (2011). Little was expected from Lebanon which everyone knows is essentially a Syrian puppet. (The five permanent UNSC members are China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each of them has a right of veto in the Security Council.)

So what can be learnt from this?

One commentator called the debacle "a sad example of the failure of the world’s large emerging democracies to live up to their domestic values and assume the responsibilities of power". Sounds a touch ambitious to us. The US State Dept's spokesperson said yesterday the US leadership "obviously consider that the Security Council failed yesterday to address the urgent moral challenge... History will bear out which nations were right and which were on the wrong side in this vote yesterday.” Fighting words. It's a huge comfort for Israel's citizens to know that the absurd decisions made by the world's parliament year after year are going to eventually be judged by "history".

The Syrians are not only known for being great fighters. They also possess a keen sense of humour. Otherwise how to explain their decision this past May to compete for a seat on the UN's Human Rights Council as one of four Asian delegates? Better than most, they knew the UN General Assembly - which does the voting - has a proclivity for granting membership to dictatorships with a history of violence against their people.

Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review for more than 30 years, once said: "If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it."

He must be turning in his grave.