Not at all surprisingly, this absolutely excellent – near perfect – commentary comes from the great Victor Davis Hanson…
…who (with an admittedly large dose of immodesty) is, to a considerable extent, telling his readers exactly what I’ve been talking about for years…but most especially in the past month.
Here’s a taste of what Mr. Hanson has written – lengthy, but I guarantee you won’t be bored:
Peruse campus literature. Watch clips from university protests. Scan interviews with pro-Hamas protestors. Read the chalk propaganda sketched on campus sidewalks. Talk to raging students in the free speech area. And the one common denominator— besides their arrogance—is their abject ignorance. Take their following tired talking points:
“Refugees”
We are told that the Palestinians after more than 75 years of residence in the West Bank and Gaza are “refugees.” If that definition were currently true, then, are the 900,000 Jews who were forcibly exiled from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia after the 1947, 1956, 1967 wars still “refugees?”
Most fled to Israel. Do they now live in “refugee” camps administrated by the UN? Are they protesting to recover their confiscated homes and wealth in Damascus, Cairo, or Baghdad? Do Jews on Western television dangle their keys to lost homes in Damascus a half-century after they were expelled?
“Apartheid”
Israel is said to practice “apartheid,” although since 2005-06 Gaza has been autonomous. Mahmoud Abbas runs in his fashion the West Bank. Like the Hamas clique, he held elections one time in 2005, and then after his election, of course, cancelled any free election in the fashion of the one election, one time Middle East. Who forced him to do that? Zionists? Americans?
Are the Israeli Arabs—21 percent of the Israeli population—living under apartheid?
If so, it is a funny sort of oppression when they vote, hold office, form parties, and enjoy more freedom and prosperity than almost anywhere else in the Middle East under Arab autocracies.
“Genocide”
Genocide is now the most popular charge in the general damnation of Israel, a false smear aimed at calling off the Israeli response to Hamas, burrowed beneath civilians in Gaza City.
But how strange a charge! Pro-Hamas demonstrators the world over chant “From the River to the Sea,” unambiguously calling for the utter destruction of Israel and its 9 million population. Are the Hamas supporters then “genocidal?”
Perhaps students at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and Stanford will protest the real genocide in Darfur where some half-million black African Sudanese have been slaughtered by mostly Muslim Arab Sudanese. Did the Cornell professor who claimed he was “exhilarated” on news of beheaded Jewish babies protest the slaughter of the Sudanese? Did the current campus protestors ever assemble to scream about the Islamists who slaughtered the indigenous Africans of Sudan?
Are professors at Stanford organizing to refuse all grants and donations that originate from communist China? Remember, the Chinese communist Party has never apologized for the party’s genocidal murder of some 60-80 millions of its own during the Maoist Cultural Revolution, much less its systematic efforts to eliminate the Uyghur Muslim population?
Does what you just read make sense to you? If so – and I assume it is – please be aware that Mr. Hanson’s commentary has a lot more just like it.
The bottom line is that hating Israel for its reaction to hamas’ act of war requires discarding facts, reality and logic and consistency. Or, as Hanson concludes:
So why does the world apply a special standard to Israel?
To the leftist and Islamist, Israel is guilty of being:
1) Jewish;
2) Too prosperous, secure, and free;
3) Sufficiently Western to meet the boilerplate smears of colonialist, imperialist, and blah, blah, blah.
That says it all.
