Job's Dungheap: Part Two

Clueless in Gaza: The Blood Libel

and the Killing of Innocent Children

We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to use their blood in their holy matzos.  This is not a figment of imagination or sometime taken from a film.  It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence.  It happened everywhere, here and there.

Osama Hamden, Hamas Spokesman, 28 July 2014[1]

In real life (if we dare to use such an expression in this discussion), that is, during the Israeli defensive action in Gaza during July and August 2014 known as “Operation Defensive Edge”, a Jewish-American blogger named Mike Goldsmith posted the following statement.

CNN and NBC have become the Networks of Orwell's Doublethink.To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth[2]

As in a fun-house hall of distorting mirrors, the two major news networks engage in a series of increasingly complex illusions and delusions. Goldsmith attempts here to elabourate on George Orwell’s famous notion of double-think in 1984, a way in which dictators in authoritarian states manipulate the minds of its virtually robotic citizens.[3]  Processes of mass advertising, crowd-control and similar aspects of the emergent consumer society around him were cast into the future by the science-fiction satirist, based mostly on premonitions of similar systems of brain-washing as were already evident in the 1930s in Soviet Russia and Nazi  Germany being applied in Great Britain and the United States.  But there is another and a darker dimension to such visions of dystopia when one takes into account the psychohistorical forces at work in making large numbers of people susceptible to distortions of reason, common sense and the ordinary or normal sensory appreciation of what is real and what is not.

In the 1890s already theorists were discussing the way in which poetry, art, music, dance, rhetoric and drama created situations based on suggestiveness, mesmeric trances, and other psychological tricks to make audiences see, feel, hear and think about things which were neither real nor true, at the same time as Freud and other early were systematizing new insights into the unconscious mind, anthropologists were discovering what they called the primitive or savage mind, and philosophers questioning the essential predicates of language and thought itself.  Certainly, aestheticians and scientists engaged in, if not a direct dialogue about such matters, often oblique and second-hand sharing of ideas. 

How these techniques of cognitive manipulation work in modern situations, I want to parse and expand on two brief essays I published during the 2014 Israeli “Operation Cutting Edge” in Gaza. Because they were posted on an American blogsite called Family Security Matters and were thus written and published in the heat of events and for a general audience, I did not cite my evidence nor expound of the historical background and epistemological processes referred to.

Now I will reproduce those two essays and add a series of notes to explain and expand what they are about.

The notes do not always match exactly the conditions prevailing when these blogs were written because news was coming in constantly, sometimes correcting, sometimes contradicting what was stated only a day before or an hour previous to my decision to write out the essays; nevertheless, I have tried to amplify the accuracy of the details now and give more substance to what was at that time only opinion, those of the reporters and commentators here cited or my own then and not very long afterwards.  My citations are usually from blog-sites which collect and distribute a variety of online newspaper and other sources.

Killing Innocent Civilians in Gaza: Israel

Falsely Accused of War Crimes[4]

If we were to believe what the New York Times writes,[5] or what we are supposed to see on CNN or the BBC, there are indeed terrible crimes committed in Gaza by the IDF.  In this light, Israel’s response is disproportionate,[6] and the only solution to the carnage is a diplomatic one,[7] a negoti-ated cease fire and then a truce that somehow returns the situation to what it was prior to the commencement of Operation Protective Edge. 

Unfortunately, as a Jew who feels deeply the charges, no matter how outrageous they are and however much they echo classical anti-Semitic tropes, I learned to distrust just about everything said or shown about Israel’s defensive actions by the main news media.[8]  Unfortunately because in my heart of hearts I don’t want to think that the whole of liberal, intellectual elite are liars, self-deluded and maliciously motivated.  But that is precisely what the evidence in the printed, electronic and digital media shows. 

Let us take the key terms in the title given to this little essay. 

That there is a lot of killing going on cannot stand as given, since in many instances all we have to go on are biased statements by so-called Palestinian sources, medical, political and militant, and by emotive terms expressed by well-known left wing Hamas supporters in the international media, as well as the ever-hostile and prejudiced UN agencies in the region.  Some of what is shown as evidence turns out to be: (a) images of death and destruction taken from other conflicts, such as Syria and Iraq, and already used one, two or three years ago; so that we have miracle victims and families who are known to have died several months or years ago, then were resurrected and shown dead on the streets of Gaza, in exactly the same poses and with precisely the same injuries; (b) completely concocted or staged events, so that the same persons keep jumping out of ambulances with the same dead or wounded bodies again and again, in the order of Mohammad Dura, the poor innocent child shot at a check point a few years back, but was never given a funeral, looked distinctly like a different person as a corpse in the morgue and as a cowering child on the street; and (c) some still photos purportedly of recent atrocities but subsequently shown to be grabs from Hollywood horror films.  But most callous and grotesque is the way Hamas has used photos of families they massacred in Israel to represent their own dead.[9]

Innocent victims, how is that expression defined? Are the families of Hamas operatives and commanders who do not leave their homes when warned to leave because of an imminent attack completely innocent, or are they victims of their own ideological delusion, or the enforced role as human shields imposed by other family members or political officials?  Granted the occasional incidence of collateral damage, should we not also take into account the deliberate booby-trapping of expected targets—as revealed in captured Hamas war policy and plans: so that Israeli precision rocket fire leads to secondary explosions set up to destroy nearby residences and shops? 

Related to the question of innocence is that of what constitutes a civilian in Gaza.  Normally it would be assumed be persons who are not engaged in combat or in organizing or directing combat, whether in uniform or not.  But in a situation where there is no formally constituted army, who have uniforms to wear or hold recognizable ranks and titles, the distinction between combatants and civilians fades to almost nothing.  Moreover, there is an ancillary ambiguity in the identification of women, children and old people as innocent victims in this kind of a struggle.  Women and the elderly persons can be seen as voluntary or coerced parts of a human shield to remain at home or brought to sites of imminent Israeli attack.  They may sometimes be innocent, caught up at the wrong place and the wrong time, but that cannot be assumed on the basis of gender or age.  In regard to children, when is a child a child: are sixteen and seventeen year old operatives who fire rockets or who act as runners with messages and ammunition exempt from being treated as combatants and thus legitimate targets?  Are eight and nine year old boys wearing suicide belts and found running through tunnels[10] on their way to targets inside Israel, such as schools, synagogues or private dwellings innocent of participation in armed combat?  Nevertheless analysis of so-called statistics of those Palestinians killed in Operation Defensive Edge shows that the vast majority of casualties fall within the 16 to 35 age group, with extremely few deaths among those younger or older than that range.[11] 

If weapons are stored in mosques, if hospitals are areas of coordination and intelligence gathering, and if schools, private houses and apartments are used as points from which rockets are fired into Israel,[12] they become legitimate targets, and any “civilians” killed or wounded are the responsibility of the of Hamas—acts of perfidy and war crimes.  Only if you take war itself—a defensive and therefore a just and legitimate military action—as a war crime is it possible to find Israel guilty; and this is what has become politically correct amongst certain left-leaning anti-Zionist movements.[13] 

And as for proportionality, does one expect the police to arrive at the scene of a murder, a home invasion or an armed robbery with only the number of officers that match the criminals known to be at the site; and do the law officers first calculate the type and number of weapons possessed by the perpetrators and then only act with a similar arsenal. Swat teams arrive in large numbers to secure the area, protect innocent bystanders and engage with the threatening individual or group.  Nor can it be expected that in a war zone each suspected enemy will be subjected to an ideological quiz or psychological profiling prior to the engagement.  Yet Israel goes out of its way to announce its targets, warns inhabitants to leave within a specified time, and calls off operations when it seems probable there are actually civilians on site, whether innocent or not.  In addition, the injured amongst the enemy are taken to Israeli hospitals for treatment.[14]

Of course, in the heat of battle, there are mistakes and accidents.  But war is hell.  Still, Hamas is a terrorist organization, as identified by many countries and inter-national agencies.  It bears sole respons-ibility for the deaths and destruction caused by the warfare it has provoked.[15]  As Golda Meier said many years ago, in effect, we will perhaps someday forgive them for killing our children, but we can never ever forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.[16]

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[1] Cited by Candida Moss and Joel Baden, “Blood Libel: A Short History of a Dangerous Myth” CNN Belief Blog (6 August 2014) online at http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2014/08/06/blood-libel-the-short-histoiry--of-a-dangerous-myth/?iref=allsearch

[2] Mike Goldsmith, New Conservative for 2016 (4 August 2014).

[3] Similar remarks were made by Charles Krauthammer on a television interview for FOX (and then posted as utube on Family Security Matters) on the same day. For a discussion of the concept of “doublethink” in Orwell’s novel 1984 and its relationship to the psychological idea of cognitive dissonance, see “Doublethink” online at http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/articles/col-doublethink (seen 5 August 2014).

[4] This was published in Family Security Matters on 25 July 2014 and is available online at http://www. familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/killing-innocent-civilians-in-gaza-israel-falsely-accused-of-war-crimes; it was then reprinted on Ruthfully Yours at http://www.bruthfullyyours.com/ 2014/07/ 25/norman-simms-israel-falsely-accused-of-war-crimes, as well as several other blogsites.

[5] At first I was asked by Zev Gerber to prepare a short (450 word response to The New York Times editorial handling of Operation Defensive Edge for a collection of statements to appear in Iggeret, but could not condense my thoughts until a longer version of the essay had been prepared.

[6] Disprortionate  is a term often trotted out to blacken the reputation of Israel as a moral nation, whose army the IDF (Israel Defence Force) works under incredible constraints to avoid civilian casualties. It b elongs to the same scheme of false “moral equivalency” as expressions such as “asymmetrical warfare”, in which Israel is presented as the most powerful country in the Middle East, is aggressive beyond the requirements of “defending itself,” something grudgingly allowed to it, but operating “without constraint”—and thus unfairly creating a scores sheet having far fewer deaths than its opponents, who apparently seem always to be passive, despite the continuous firing of rockets out of the Gaza Strip and the twelve-year long project of constructing tunnels to sneak into Israel and commit mass murder.

[7] Though how such negotiations can be conducted by Israel with a Hams-led government that has as its only goal to eradicate the State of Israel and kill all the Jews in the world is never explained.

[8] Having lived in Israel in the mid-1990s as olim (newly arrived citizens by the right of return) and been there during the Lebanon War, my wife and I experienced the fears and anxieties of rocket attacks, as well as the fears engendered by the Intafada, with buses blown-up, restaurants attacked and other perfidious crimes by terrorist gangs; more than that, we read with disbelief the overseas news-media vilify Israel for its attempts to stem these attacks only after many months of caution and patience. 

[9] Most notorious was the showing of the bloodied bodies of the Fogel Family from two years ago as though they were recent victims of Israeli attacks on Palestinian children.

[10] Israel Matzay, “The Tunnels were in preparation for a Mass Terror Attack Involving Thousands of Victims” Israpundit (25 July 2014) online at http:www/israpundit.com/archives/63598477. In this report, the writer cites Jonathan Dehoah HeLevi of the Jerusalem center for Public Affairs: “Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, delivered a revealing speech on March 23, 2014, in which he stressed rthe strategic importance of the Hamas attack tunnels, which, he argued, have changed the balance of power with Israel, when taken together with his organization’s military build-up.”

[11] Several days after the month-long Operation more accurate figures of death and injuries became available, tables showing the age-range of the dead, and specific indications of who was a militant and who a civilian.  Alan Dershowitz, for instance,  in  The Algemeiner (7 August 2014) questions the disparity between what mainstream media, such as The New York Times, claims to be a prepon-derance of civilian death, including many children, and what the Israeli military tabulates, thus  concluding that Israel did not specifically target non-combatants. Similalrly Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu in :Hamas’ List of Casualties Includes those who Died Twice” The Jewish Press (7 August 2014), going further than Dershowitz in suggesting how the Hamas government doctored its figures; iotn was not just that many names appear on more than one list and are added as separate persons, which could be an understandable error in the confusion of the conflict, but that deliberate efforts were made to create an illusion of high civilian deaths and injuries. According to Ben-Gedalyahu, “Hamas warned Gazans this week ‘not to divulge information about “resistance’ casualties because the “occupation” [i.e., Israel] was collecting all the information and reports [about casualties] and would use them as evidence to “\”justify its crimes against [Palestinian] civilians.’”  On the other hand, also cited in this same article, “Retired British Col. Richard Kemp wrote for the Gladstone Institute this week, ‘Analysis of casualty details released by Qatar-based Al Jazeera indicate that so far most of those killed in Gaza have been young men of fighting age, not women, children or old people.’”  Indeed, if we compare the purported figures from Hamas and its agents in the UNRWA and Health Ministry with population figures for the Gaza S trip, one would have to conclude that nearly half or more of the women and children there died during Operation Protective Edge.  Nevertheless, prepos-terous as these claims are, they accepted in an unquestioned way by most reporters and editors.  In this essay, I am trying to understand why and how such outrageous distortions of reality can pass as truthful reporting in western news media.  No amount of rational mustering of facts can breakthrough the mindset of those congenitally opposed to Israel, Jews and Judaism; therefore we have to try to understand how such a mindset is constructed.

[12] For an exact account of rockets and their point of firing, see Times of Israel Staff ,“Israel says Hamas launched 600 Rockets from Schools, other Civilian Facilities” Times of Israel (6 August 2014) online atr www/timesofisrael.com.  Various reporters in the final stages of the operation were able to post film evidence of Hamas perfidy, showing rocket launchers operating from hotel courtyards,  next to school and hospital grounds, and within crowded civilian neighbourhoods. Other journalists, when speaking from outside the conflict ground—often in Europe—admitted they had been under intense pressure not to speak of or show Hamas fighters in hospitals, mosques and UNRWA facilities; some of these reporters asked for anonymity because their families were still in Gaza.  See Or Shaked, “The UNRWA-Terror Connection” Times of Israel (31 July 2014) online at http://blogs.timesofisrael.com

[13] The outrageous claim that Israel was committed genocide in Gaza can be measured against the facts.  Newspapers cited protestors and their banners as saying that millions of men, women and children were being killed in the conflict zone, when in reality there is barely over a million inhabitants in all.  It is not just that the total injured and killed is far lower than claimed by Hamas Medical authorities or UNRWA officials, but that even networks such as Al-Jezeera show that the proportion of civilian casualties is extremely low by the standards of regional wars and any urban warfare situations, and the age-range of “official figures” indicate an overwhelming majority within the age-band of 16 to 36, with only extremely small numbers in children under 8 years.  This final tally will have to be adjusted to take into account the executions, friendly fire, and distinction between “natural causes” during the period of conflict and casualties directly attributable to the fighting.  See”Death Toll Includes 900 Terrorists” in Times of Israel (5 August 2014) at http://www.israpundit. com/archives/63598944

[14] Someone almost disingenuously asked how there could be a war between Hamas and Israel or between Israel and Gaza, since on the one hand, Hamas is a militant political and terrorist mov-ement and does not constitute either an army or a nation, whereas Gaza also is at best a part of the Palestinian Authority, albeit a break-away faction and region from the main body of Palestinians and their temporary government in the West Bank (that is, Samaria and Judea).  Gaza also is not an “occupied territory” since Israel ended its occupation ten years ago.  It is a disputed territory over which a Hamas rules following a brief period of so-called legitimacy through elections and then only by right of power when it staged a coup d’état and murdered many of its opponent and send the rest into exile.  Perhaps it would be best to see Israel as trying to police its own borders and to stop an anarchic region run by a “thugocracy” from being the launching site of rockets and the staging place for tunnel incursions.  More than that, however, despite Hamas attempting to self-proclaim itself the innocent victims of foreign aggression and enslavement or imprisonment, and the rest of the world casually accepting this “narrative” of Israeli conquest and usurpation of an “indigenous people” in Palestine, Israelis see themselves as confronting a region-wide terrorist force, now more than ever encapsulated in the rogue state or caliphate of ISIS/ISOL in Syria-Iraq and parts of Lebanon.  Thus rather than a disproportionate struggle between mighty Israel and impoverished Gaza, the “war” that exists over an extended period is between isolated Israel and a score of Islamic states, some duly constituted and some ad hoc terrorist entities.  It is at least a “proxy war” between aggressive Iran (and sometimes Syria) and the confused and much-weakened West. Cp.Haviv Rettig Gur, “The Tragic Self-Delusion Behind the Hamas War” The Times of Israel (17 July 2014) online at http://www.timesofisrael.com.

[15] Innumerable films and first hand reports have been coming in of the way Hamasniks herd their own people on to rooftops, into cellars, and, most astounding of all, drag the bodies of victims from one place to another in order to create the illusion of Israeli violations of the rules of war.  See Ari Soffer, “French TV Shows More Evidence of Hamas Hiding Behind Civilians” Arutz Sheva (5 August 2014) online at http:www.israelnational news.com/News/News.aspx/183759#.U-LeBvmSx 8t.

[16] It should not be taken that all the men and women, as well as children, in Gaza were either completely innocents in the affair or that there were not some individuals (and perhaps small groups, family or neighbourhood) who did not resist Hamas directives and efforts to use them as human shields and propagandistic victims.  There were occasional reports of people refusing to follow orders to remain in buildings targeted by Israeli forces and who were forced back with whips or shot in the legs; other stories of roving bands of Hamas thugs beating up or assassinating those deemed to be spies and collaborators; and even, rarely to be sure, of small groups of Gazans who attacked these Hamasniks to poush themn off their streets or to gain their own rev enge.  See for instance, Mike Goldstein’s #ZionStandUp for 9:33 a.m. (6 August 2014).