Blimp deflator: Letting out the gas

April’s edition of Crescent International contains articles headlined “The Afghans’ long agony and resistance”, “Zionist, Arabian rulers aligned against Islamic Iran”, “The Vatican’s child-molesting priests”, “Islamic movement needs to challenge the universal myth of democracy”, “Dilemma of democracy facing Muslims in Britain”, “Is Somalia’s ‘president’ a nationalist or agent of Western interventionists?” and “Dubai’s strange history and stranger investors”.

In the article on Muslims in Britain, which discusses the reactions of the police to the demonstrations against “the Israeli slaughter in Gaza last year”, Fahad Ansari notes:

“What is clear is that despite tens of thousands of people from all religions and backgrounds attending the demonstrations and being involved in aggressive behavior that followed, all but two of those arrested were Muslims. What is also clear is that the trouble at the Gaza riots was nowhere near the scale of violence witnessed at the G20 protests, where a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland was looted, yet only 20 people were charged for offences committed at that demonstration. The police response to Muslim protesters has been wholly disproportionate and seems intentionally designed to deter Muslims from protesting or demonstrating in future.”

In the April edition of Australia/Israel Review, there is an attempt by Bren Carlill, in an article headlined “A job well done” about the assassination of Mahmoud Mabhouh in Dubai, to justify Israel’s “apparent disregard” for what Carlill describes as “legal niceties” in its pursuit of security. (Note that the disregard is only “apparent” in Carlill’s view.) But of course, if you dispense with the rule of law and make security the highest good, you can resort to almost any expediency and come up with a rationale that speciously justifies it. You have to remember, though, that you can’t reasonably complain if the other side does likewise — unless you maintain that you and your rights are intrinsically superior to all others.

He goes on to claim that “any Israeli government that disregarded prohibitions against targeting civilians, and other laws of war, would … rightly be voted out” — as if Israeli governments didn’t get away with such violations all the time. Does he really think that all those Israelis who supported the attack on Gaza last year (nearly 90 percent of the population, according to Israeli public opinion polls) were worried by the deaths of 1,000+ Gazan civilians, or would have been concerned if another 1,000, or even 10,000, civilians had been killed? Besides, at the end of the day Israel would have claimed, regardless of the toll, that the civilians weren’t actually “targeted”. There would have been yet more of that trademark ballyhoo about the civilians having been warned to evacuate certain areas in advance of the attacks.

The reality is that Israel can kill as many civilians as it likes, whenever it likes, and then say the deaths were “inadvertent” or “accidental” — or come out with the usual nonsense about Palestinian “terrorists” being responsible for the deaths through their alleged use of civilians as “human shields”. (I haven’t seen any evidence of Palestinian fighters using civilians in this way. I have, however, seen evidence of Israeli soldiers using Palestinian civilians as human shields.) It is not for nothing that Israel’s critics often focus on its “culture of impunity”.

It is axiomatic, in the Zionist narrative, that the victims of Zionism are always responsible, directly or indirectly, for their own suffering. And anyway, non-Jewish suffering cannot be compared with Jewish suffering, which is indisputably more poignant.