We developed a real antipathy to certain expressions that some reporters and editors like to use when describing the conflict in our area. One of the most offensive is "
two sides of the same coin". We hear it a lot. The idea: as bad as we say the other side are, our side is no better. And our arguments and justifications sound just like theirs.
It's self-evident that the "
two sides, one coin" cliche obscures far more than it clears up. We object whenever we hear it.
When a person considers the hideous allegations - genocide, apartheid, racist - routinely hurled at Israel and its people, it's evident that this is being done in at least two different ways. One of them is what the Arabs - not only, but principally, the Palestinian Arabs - do. When the extravagantly wild allegations of war crimes and conspiracies come from them, it all looks and feels like psychological warfare. They themselves, at multiple levels of their society and culture, are deeply engaged in terror. Thus, there's a strategic imperative to be able to hurl something no-less-noxious back at their opponents. So we get, for example, the lunatic and deeply offensive claims about how Gaza is the world's largest concentration camp, its people subjected to genocide, and how Israeli chewing gum is loosening Arab girls' morals.
The other, often expressed in more sober terms, is carried out by Westerners, increasingly in the guise of BDS, the boycotting, divesting and sanctioning campaign waged by elements deeply hostile to Jews and to Israel in North America, Australia and Europe. A close look at what many of the BDS groups say, and in whose company they say it, leads quickly to the realization that there is not much new there; they are engaged in
the world's oldest hatred. The passions motivating BDS usually map to deep, visceral and tragically familiar hatreds.
But look at what the Arabs, particularly some of the Arab "elites", are saying and something slightly more nuanced and calculated seems to be going on. Yes, there's hatred enough to go round. But in non-trivial ways, they demonstrate that their slogans and blood-libels are to a great extent for the 'benefit' of others. When they say their people are suffering "genocide" at the hands of "fascists", they want desperately to be believed, but they act as if they know perfectly well how contrary to the facts it is. They also show in the clearest way - by what they do, as distinct from what they shout and scream - that this is not about two sides of any coin.
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| The Rajoub article in Israel Hayom today |
Nayef Rajoub is a pretty good example. He's a terrorist with a senior role in one of the most
evil of the jihadist death-cults as well as being the brother of the notorious Jibril Rajoub about whom
we have posted quite a number of times. Turns out that Nayef Rajoub
is currently recuperating in a private hospital in Tel Aviv, apparently after having undergone spine surgery. Rajoub, who is expected to stay in the Assuta Medical Center's Ramat Hahayal hospital for the next few days, has been assigned a security detail. The hospital said it could not confirm or deny the reports on Rajoub's hospitalization, citing privacy concerns.
Assuta may be less well-known than hospitals like Hadassah, Tel Hashomer, Shaarei Zedek and Ramban. But it's impressive enough as
Israel’s largest and leading private medical services center... Assuta Medical Center offers advanced medical treatments and world-class equipment and technologies to ensure optimal outcomes for patients... Each year, Assuta provides approximately 92,000 operations, 683,000 ambulatory checks and treatments, 440,000 imaging tests (such as MRI and CT), 4,000 heart catheterization procedures and 16,000 IVF treatments. Each treatment at Assuta, whether minor or major, is conducted with the highest quality of care and proficiency... Assuta works with patients from all over the world including Europe, the UK and the United States. The staff at Assuta is dedicated to making every step of your medical treatment as comfortable and stress-free as possible, including accompaniment throughout the process with a staff member fluent in your language.
As of the time we are writing this (Thursday afternoon), the only news source reporting the Rajoub encounter with Zionist medical care is an Israeli daily paper,
Israel Hayom ["
Senior Hamas official arrives in Israel for medical care", August 13, 2014]. But we expect it will soon get mentioned in other media channels. That's because it has significance beyond the people involved.
Nayef Rajoub, 57, is a senior member of Hamas who was
convicted of several terrorism-related charges... In 1992, he was among the hundreds of Hamas terrorists who were deported to Lebanon after the organization killed an Israeli police officer. While in Lebanon, Rajoub began climbing the rungs of the organization until he attained a leadership position...
He's known for
his close ties with Ismail Haniyeh, who served as Hamas prime minister after the movement violently took over the Gaza Strip and formed a separate government in 2007.
Haniyeh is an authentic arch-terrorist. A person deeply engaged in venomous denunciations of Israel and at the forefront of demonizing Israelis and everything our side stands for, the man has nevertheless - with barely any effort at hiding what he does - so far sent
- his granddaughter for treatment at Schneider Children's Medical Center [November 2013];
- his mother-in-law for cancer treatment at a Jerusalem hospital [June 2014];
- his sister, Suhila Abd el-Salam Ahmed Haniyeh, who accompanied her critically ill husband (Haniyeh's brother in law) to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva for emergency heart treatment [August 2012];
- one of his daughters to a week in an un-named Israeli hospital in order to recover from complications arising "from a routine procedure" in Gaza according to Reuters [October 2014].
and there's no reason to think he won't keep doing it in the future if there's a need. He has made greater use of Israel's superior medical care than most Israeli citizens. It's as clear as any Hamas screaming fit could ever be about what the terrorist-in-chief actually thinks about Israel, Israeli and the essential non-sectarian goodwill towards patients - irrespective of extraneous considerations - that prevails in Israeli society. Hard to own up to, but he assumes like numerous other extremist Arab elitists that he can shut any critics up when needed.
For those of us who track the hatred and stabbing/shooting/bombing warfare directed daily at us and our children by people like Haniyeh are entitled to draw inferences from the moral abyss that separates what they say from what they do and actually believe.
Jibril, the better known of the extremely unlovely
Rajoub brothers, is another case study. As we noted in "8-May-13: "I am your partner. I am going to kill you now."", Jibril Rajoub personifies much of what makes the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis so intractable. By words, deeds, history and public profile, he has personally done as much as anyone we can think of to deepen the venomous and corrosive hostility towards Israelis among the Palestinian Arabs, thereby raising the body count on both sides. He has no problem declaring that if he had access to nuclear weapons, he would have used them to inflict tremendous pain on Israel (check it here).
But this man of "principle" has not the slightest problem playing the dove when, and to the extent, it suits him:
He is a perennial participant for the Palestinian Arab side in the negotiations for peace that have been part of the political landscape here for two decades. An ad campaign on behalf of the Geneva Initiative included him as one of its central media figures back in August 2010. [Source]
We're not trying to find the good in him or those in whose company he moves. There is none of any interest to us. Nor is there anything at all that civilized people can or should learn from him and them. They are terrorists. They have removed themselves to somewhere outside the circle of civilized humanity.
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Europe's romance with BDS in its black-and-white days
[Image Source] |
A different kind of report yesterday illustrates how the
non-Arab aspect that we mentioned above operates. With our
deep, ongoing, non-sectarian involvement in creating better outcomes for children with severe disabilities, we burn with fury about incidents like the one reported here:
A Norwegian film festival recently rejected an Israeli documentary on children with disabilities, telling its director that it supports the boycott on the Jewish state and will not screen Israeli movies unless they deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Roy Zafrani, the director of “The Other Dreamers,” was turned down by organizers in a decision he termed “absurd,” the Yedioth Ahronoth daily reported Wednesday. “I’m sorry but we can’t show this film,” a letter from the organizers to Zafrani said. “We support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel so unless the films are about the illegal occupation, or deals with the occupation or the blockade of Gaza, or otherwise about the discrimination of Palestinians, we can’t show them.” ["Norwegian fest boycotts Israeli film on kids with disabilities", Times of Israel, August 12, 2015]
The film, following four Israeli youngsters with special needs as they pursue their dreams, has already been screened at festivals in the United States, Spain, Italy, Australia and India. And in case the customary alibis are trotted out by the Norwegian totalitarians
Zafrani maintained that the film received no funding from the Israeli government... "This is an entirely independent film, with zero funding from Israeli public grants, so the boycott cannot even be justified by saying that it was made with government support... This boycott is simply because it’s a film that shows a different, nice side of Israel..." [Times of Israel]
As if that were not already obvious enough.
As the Rajoub clan settle down in one of the delightful family rooms on the Tel Aviv campus of
Assuta tonight, they are probably laughing themselves silly at the witless, hypocritical fools in Europe and elsewhere who do Palestinian Arab bidding with greater gusto and enthusiasm than it gets from people living in our region, and with far less to gain from doing it.
Attallah, who has been busy traveling in Europe during these last few weeks, presumably to help ensure backing for the PA's Interpol strategy, will be going to Hamas-controlled Gaza this coming Monday "to discuss security matters with Hamas" [Jerusalem Post yesterday]. He has not been there since the Islamists seized control in 2007's blood-soaked violence. 
