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June 7, 2010
In Flotilla rallies terror cheer squad David Burchill continues his weekly campaign in the pages of The Australian against his former political friends----the left intelligentsia. These are now his enemies. Burchill's frame in this op-ed is the terror-friendly, nay pro-terror, flotilla.
He says:
Of all of the sad, tawdry features of the Gaza flotilla incident, surely none is sadder or tawdrier than the immediate assumption, leapt upon by so many people of good intentions, that the Israeli state is in the business of killing unarmed civilians, for the pure sadistic pleasure of it. This view of Israel as a kind of devil-state, the spirit of evil made incarnate in the world, has been around in educated opinion since at least the late 1960s, when it buttressed the then-enthusiasm of the Western Left for the Palestine Liberation Organisation....Two generations of militants taught themselves that intoxicating Manichean logic, according to which the blacker one paints one's spiritual enemy, the more sheer awfulness one can tolerate in one's friends. And all the while one can feel oneself to be as pure and unsullied as a Cistercian monk.
Burchill's big theme is the moral decomposition of the progressive intelligentsia in his lifetime. What he forgets to add is that many of the Western Left defended Israel in the 1960s and slowly become more critical as a result of the conduct of successive Israeli governments towards the Palestinian people.
This kind of history is of no concern to his moral decomposition thesis. His argument is that the western Left now supports Hamas and al-Qa'ida, but they do not have the moral courage to chant Viva Hamas! Victory to the throat-slitters! Go the child-bombers! In other words they have joined the jackals.
There is not one word in Burchill's op-ed about the awful conditions in Gaza, the Israeli blockade of Gaza, or the settlements which can be distinguished from the actions of Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim organization that was created by Israel in the 1970s and 1980s to split the Palestinian movement and fight Fatah. We can also distinguish Hamas from the idea of Palestinain human rights.
Such messy considerations do not fit into Burchill's Manichean view of the world. Nor does he have any criticism—not a word--of Israeli policies and behavior towards the Palestinians. Does that mean Burchill thinks that Israeli violence against Gaza is justified?
Presumably, Burchill is in favour of the blockade of the evil doers. The neo-con justification would be that it prevents Hamas, and its backer, Iran, from triggering a larger war from Gaza; it isolates Hamas and allows Israelis to live in (relative) safety. The Australian Right stands with Israel (a free nation) as it tries to enforce the blockade against terror. William Kristol in Murdoch's The Weekly Standard states the Right's sentiment:
The dispute over this terror-friendly flotilla is about more than policy toward Gaza. It is about more than Israel. It is about whether the West has the will to defend itself against its enemies. It is about showing (to paraphrase William Gladstone) that the resources of civilization against terror are by no means exhausted.
On this account the flotilla was an act of aggression rather than a political statement aimed at weakening Israel’s embargo of Gaza.
The implication of this position is that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would actually increase the threats to Israel in that a Palestinian state ight create a sanctuary for terrorist organizations, which could use its territory, with or without its knowledge and cooperation, to develop and deploy a nuclear bomb on Israel's borders and near major population centers.
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One of the difficulties we have in Australia is that we have very little idea what Israeli society is really like. We are told by the lobbyists that it's a democracy with shared values. The mainstream media go along with this, even though events suggest that Israel is closing down, becoming more fortress like, turning inwards and becoming more intolerant of dissent.