Larry Miller Dances on Arab Dead Bodies

Seriously, is that a kick-ass article title or what? Anyway, here is what it refers to to. Larry Miller, a long-time friend of Israel and one of the rare sane people out there who has retained his sense of right and wrong, was sticking up for war crime victims in Israel (how awesome would it be if the Israeli media actually said that when referring to Sderot?):

Of course, an Arab blogger, for reasons known only to him, labeled this as, I kid you not, "dancing on our dead bodies."

Yes, raising money for victims of rocket attacks directed at civilians involves dancing on Arab dead bodies. Unfortunately, this is very often the type of argumentation one has to deal with when perusing anti-Israel blogs. I especially love the first commenter on the Arab blog who says that he sees literally no difference between what's going on in Gaza and the Holocaust. In other words, precision attacks aimed at terrorists who consciously hide themselves among the civilian population (in gross violation of the laws of war) are the functional equivalent of the Holocaust, albeit, as the commenter argues, using different means (i.e., not gassing 10,000 people a day in an effort to eradicate every so-called Palestinian on Earth). Ironically, Sderot is a town largely inhabited by refugees of Arab countries, who were the victims of some old-school ethnic cleansing by the Arabs shortly after Israel was established.

My response to these Holocaust/"ethnic cleansing" arguments is always pretty much the same. If Israel is conducting a holocaust, ethnic cleansing or whatever, they're like REALLY bad at it and stuff, given how dramatically the Arab population (and their standard of living) has increased in Judea and Samaria and Gaza since the Six-Day War in 1967. If you're trying to eradicate a population, giving them a better life than pretty much anywhere else in the Middle East probably isn't the best way of going about it. But hey, Bizzaro World and all, right?

I Dare Call It Treason

I expect to see a lot of ineptitude from the Israeli media, but this dropped even my jaw to the floor. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz gave Op-Ed space to Ahmed Yousef, a purported "senior political advisor to the foreign minister in the Hamas government." That sounds all official and statesman-like, doesn't it? I would refer to him as nothing more than a barbaric member of a mass-murdering terror gang, but that's the difference between Ha'aretz and me, I guess. (I can't help but wonder how many junior political advisors there are to the foreign minister in the Hamas government, but we'll save that chuckle for another day).

Nevertheless, the issue is not the veil that Ha'aretz throws over this murderer to make him seem like something other than a barbarian. It's that they gave him any space at all to spew his propaganda and to justify his mass murder. Admittedly, I'm not familiar with the specifics of Israeli law when it comes to treason. I do know that the United States Constitution, which has one of the strictest definitions of treason in the world, speaks of providing aid and comfort to an enemy of the state during a time of war.

Nobody can rationally dispute that Israel is at war with Hamas, which denies its right to exist and claims the right to lob missiles and bombs at civilians without even the pretext of a military target. What greater aid and comfort can one provide to an enemy than giving him space in your own newspaper to disseminate his propaganda? I can only imagine what the reaction would have been if the London Times had opened up its editorial page to Joachim Von Ribbentrop in 1943. This is no different. Say what you will about Newsday or the New York Times, but they would never open up their Op-Ed page to Ayman Al-Zawahri.

This is sickening, and it is probably a serious crime at that. In a sane world, the person or people that made this decision to give the enemy space for his propaganda would be immediately arrested. But as I've said, we live in Bizzaro World. And in Bizzaro World, treason is cool, I guess.

The Hamas "Coup" and Bizzaro World

Here is another article I wrote about the so-called Hamas "coup" in Gaza:

Media coverage of the Arab/Israeli conflict often offers us a glimpse into Bizzaro World, and this Reuters article is no exception. You see, in the Bizzaro World of the so-called Palestinian Authority, the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip earlier this year was, in the words of Husni Mubarak, a "coup against legitimacy." Palestinian "President" and Holocaust Denier (we'll deal with that another time) Mahmoud Abbas called on Hamas to "end its coup in Gaza," calling Hamas "an 'illegitimate party.'"

Of course, anybody with short-term memory will surely realize that what Hamas did in Gaza was not a coup -- in fact, it was quite the opposite. While Hamas is an evil, mass-murdering terror gang, the fact of the matter is that they won the PA elections in January 2006 overwhelmingly. No less of an authority than the great Jimmy Carter himself signed off on those elections as legitimate.

The problem was that Abbas's Fatah guys didn't like the results of that election and refused to give up their offices. So after numerous attempts at negotiations and intermittent violence, Hamas basically decided earlier this year to simply seize the power they'd won in the election by force. Whatever that is, it's certainly not a coup since it involves the (apparently) legitimately elected government seizing the very power it had lawfully won.

The problem is that the US and the West in general, having preached the virtues of democracy in the Arab world, were taken aback by this result. They sought to do whatever they could to keep Abbas and his particular terror gang in power since they are the "moderate" good Jew-killers who will bring peace in our time (as opposed to Hamas, who, as everybody knows, are the "radical" bad Jew-killers).

So the US is only too happy to put forth the Bizzaro World scenario where Abbas and Fatah are the "legitimate" rulers of the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas is unlawfully pulling off an insidious coup. It's as if those 2006 elections never happened. That way, you can pretend Abbas is the spirited leader the PA carrying the flag of peace while Hamas is the "fringe" extremist group obstructing peace with their dastardly coup. Quite brilliant, really.