The predominant stance of the Daily Kos I-P community regarding Israel can be summed up in that single word. Contempt. There is not a day that goes by without numerous people within Daily Kos spreading hatred toward the Jewish state.
For example, Assaf, an Israeli citizen, has a diary, published yesterday, Friday, September 25, calling for sanctions against his own country.
Mainstream Israeli Analyst: Only Sanctions will Make Israelis Care
The general idea behind this diary is that the Israeli people, 80 percent of whom are Jewish, are so vapid, are such moral pygmies, are such worthless human beings, that the only thing that motivates them is their own personal convenience and paltry desires.
As Assaf writes:
personal convenience is really all Israelis care about nowadays.
In his call for sanctions and boycotts of Israeli goods and cultural products, Assaf then goes forward to reduce terror attacks, suicide bombings, Qassams and Katyushas aimed at S'derot and Ashkelon, to examples of the kind of inconvenience that motivates Israelis.
He writes:
If what disrupts this convenience are terror attacks, then the public pressures the military to "do something about it" (e.g., crackdowns, Barrier, etc.) - as indeed has happened repeatedly during this decade. But if the convenience is disrupted by an international economic boycott - then what? Call an air force strike on Madrid?
In Assaf's mind, apparently, the murder of innocent Israeli civilians, including children, is merely an inconvenience to the callous Israelis who care for nothing whatsoever beyond satisfying their own petty personal desires. This is how morally bankrupt he would have us believe that Israelis truly are.
Given the fact that Daily Kos is a website devoted to getting Democrats elected throughout the United States, and given the fact that a strong majority of registered Jews are Democrats, one would think that the comments would reflect revulsion at the idea that Israelis are such vile and disgusting creatures. Needless to say, this is not the case.
Most of the comments, in fact, are supportive of Assaf in his quest to punish Israel and dehumanize its citizenry.
It should also be noted that after calling for such punishment, and after making such horrendous claims about the character of Israeli citizenry, he then feebly explains that the true truth is that he is doing no such thing:
This is not about punishing or branding an entire nation. This is about making the Occupation stop being so damned convenient.
The general idea seems to be that the loathsome Israelis like the occupation and wish it to continue. Never mind that Israel, not to mention Britain and the United Nations, has on numerous occasions offered the Palestinian leadership statehood, offers which are always, and forever, apparently, never good enough to accept. Never mind that Israel ended the occupation of Gaza in 2005 only to be rewarded with thousands of rocket attacks into the southern portion of that country. Never mind that the children of southern Israel often suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, due to what those rockets have done to their lives. Never mind that Israel, more than any other country on the planet, must expend a disproportionate amount of its financial capital and human resources to keep its citizenry safe.
Forget all that. The occupation is "convenient," according to Assaf.
I think that it's fair to say that it was because of the preponderance of attitudes such as this toward the Jewish state by so many people within Daily Kos I-P that this site was created to begin with.
Sometimes it's important to be blunt.
And the blunt truth is that Daily Kos I-P tends to view the country of Israel, as well as its perpetually harassed people, with poisonous contempt.
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Super post Karma as always. I have to giggle at the synchronicity of it as sophia today contemptuously talked to me about that "silly site you go to." Pudding meet proof.
ReplyDeleteThere have been many other proofs recently over there including the disgusting treatment of volleyball lately.
It's an interesting thought experiment to think about exactly what the roots are of this contempt and how it finds itself inexplicably at a place like dKos.
It all makes perfect sense to me in relation to the big tent aspect of the left. If you lay down with dogs you are gonna get fleas and by G-D that tent is flea-ridden as is dKos now.
And it's not just endemic to I/P. Obama takes a shit kicking lots of other places on dKos as do Dem policies by seperate AND the usual suspects. Sometimes the contempt of him/them is palpable. These orphans and outcasts are however, allowed to find succour and communion in that big tent no matter how heretical they become.
This is a rather simplistic explanation of the whole mosaic of reasons but it helps me focus when I start thinking about the schizophrenia that is sometimes dKos.
Thanks, doodad.
ReplyDeleteAs for just why dKos I-P oozes such contempt for Israel, there are a number of possible reasons, not the least of which, of course, is the occupation, itself.
The problem is that instead of viewing the history as one in which each side reacts to the negative behavior of the other, they view only one side as having any real responsibility for how things played out.
They do so, I suspect, out of a semi-understood, sometimes not even conscious, devotion to Post-Colonial Theory that distorts the outlook to one of Good Guys versus Bad Guys, the Opressors versus the Opressed.
They then take all the available evidence and data and fit it into that pre-conceived model. Anything that fits the model gets emphasized and anything that does not gets de-emphasized.
Cheers!
but there is another question that is never answered. Why Israel? I have an Iranian friend whose father told me a story about the village he lived in right after the revolution. Only Muslims were allowed to drink from the well. One day a Bahai from another village rode into town and drank from the well. They cut his head off.
ReplyDeleteRegards,
DKW (this is my last post for a few days because of YK.)
Why Israel? Well, it's full of Jews.....the only group the world has been comfortable hating for most of history. To be honest, I think much of the world envies Israel's SUCCESS, and was disappointed when she survived. Why else would the world now be tyrong to defang Israel and put her at the mercy of her enemies with International legal approval?
ReplyDeleteAmong parts of the left it is because she is a symbol of Western capitalism so anti-Americanism leeches over to Israel.
The list is legion after that.
"A journalist from Holland who linked Jews to the recent outbreak of flu pandemics drew heavy criticism from a prominent Dutch Jewish organization earlier this week, that claimed her words were tantamount to anti-Semitic blood libels.
ReplyDeleteHolland's largest daily, De Telegraf last week printed an interview with Désirée Röver, 61, who proposed the bird flu pandemic, caused by the virus H5N1, was part of an international conspiracy to reduce the world's population.
Röver is quoted as saying the conspiracy can be traced back to a group of descendants of the Khazars, a nation from the Caucasus believed to have converted to Judaism 1,200 years ago.
De Telegraaf quotes her as saying that these descendants are now "praying to another god; Lucifer, Satan, or however you want to call him" and "are called Rockefeller, Rothschild, Brezinski and Kissinger."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1106530.html
And so it goes around the world. Sigh.
Israel's success.
ReplyDeleteThanks for mentioning that, Doodad. I think that given how many people want to denigrate that country that we should always take the opportunity to stress how successful Israel is.
I mean, holy moly, the Jews of the Yishuv in the early part of the twentieth century had nothing. They went from being a small number of struggling farmers in Palestine to representing the strongest country in that part of the world with an economy more or less on par with western Europe. They have more Phds per capita than any other country.
Israel is, in fact, an amazing success story and they did it all while under constant threat and attack from their neighbors.