I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Peter Beaumont’s Cheap Political Shots
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On Friday, Peter Beaumont wrote a piece in the Guardian attacking Netanyahu for using the term judenrein and going so far as to accuse Netanyahu of using the term “so cheaply to score a political point”.
In reality, the only one zoning in on this term for cheap political shots is Beaumont himself. Netanyahu is only using a term that has been used many times over by many American and Israeli politicians, all of whom have used it for a good reason: because, unlike Beaumont’s pitiful attempts to whitewash the Palestinians’ ultimate goals, the American and Israeli politicians are simply calling it what it is.
As Beaumont freely admits, judenrein is a word “that meant all trace of Jewish ancestry had been removed.” Yet, when the Palestinians don’t even hide their efforts to destroy every trace of Judaism upon being given any piece of land (think: Gaza, with the utter destruction of virtually every Jewish-built structure), all of a sudden that admitted definition doesn’t seem to suit him anymore.
I’d love to hear what term Beaumont would use to define the practice of destroying everything the Jews built, removing all traces of them, and refusing to allow any Jew to live on Palestinian lands.
Beaumont also attempts to rewrite history by erasing the Jews from the “occupied” territories over history. He says:
For while it is true that Jewish communities existed on the West Bank before the six-day war, the settlement programme that followed the occupation is regarded by most international bodies as a serious violation of international law.
This is complete and utter nonsense for two reasons:
(1) Before “Palestine” even existed as a state (or a mandate) prior to Israel, there were Jews living all along in the now-”occupied” parts of it for centuries. For example, Jews have always lived in places like Hebron (Nablus), long before Israel, long before “Palestine”, and long before any notion of international law. So, for Beaumont to rewind the clock to 50 years ago and freeze it there, disregarding hundreds of years prior, is misleading and deceptive.
(2) Beaumont is addressing the issue of settlements, when that’s not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is the term “judenrein”, which has nothing to do with settlements and has only to do with Jews. The Palestinians don’t just want to dismantle settlements under Israeli control. They want to deport every Jew living there and to prevent any Jew from living there, even under their control. That has nothing to do with settlements and everything to do with “judenrein”. For Beaumont to try to steer the issue towards settlements while attacking Netanyahu for judenrein is also misleading and deceptive.
Beaumont’s summation is that:
To use “Judenrein” so cheaply to score a political point dishonours the memory of history and its victims.
In reality, his blind eye to the Palestinian policies is in effect allowing history to repeat itself and allowing the “memory of history and its victims” that he claims to honor to fall by the wayside while the Palestinians try to finish the Nazis’ job. Now, that is the true dishonoring of the memory of history and its victims.
And, for his part in this, I hold people like the misleading, deceptive, and despicable Peter Beaumont complicit in whitewashing these attempts to finish the Nazis’ job.