GERALD A. HONIGMAN: THE DUPLICITOUS TRIO….CHOMSKY, ASMA AND ASHTON
No sooner had a young Jewish girl been run down while at school by a rabid beast who grabbed her by the hair and then blew her brains out, a European Union’s spokesperson offered the following wisdom…
On March 19, Baroness Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, compared the murder of a young rabbi and his two little boys and the little girl mentioned above in Toulouse to what happens at times to children in Gaza.
While it’s horrific when any children are killed, there is no such valid comparison.
Israel repeatedly goes out of its way to endanger the lives of its own young soldiers –by telegraphing its punches in advance (dropping leaflets, making cell phone calls, etc.) to warn the non-combatant population of pending retaliatory strikes and arranging payback as surgically pinpoint as possible. How many other armies do that?
Committing the double war crime by the Geneva Conventions (the Perfidy Clause, etc.) of deliberately targeting Israeli civilians, the Arabs fire from and hide behind the skirts of their women and the carriages and homes of their own babies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded that there was no “… comparison between a deliberate massacre of children and the defensive, surgical actions” of the Israeli military that were “intended to hit terrorists who use children as a human shield.”
Baroness Ashton–like the others–knows this…but that does not matter. Indeed, it rarely does to such folks.
The world lost an exception to this all-too-typical European degeneration late last year with the passing of Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel–one of the true giants of the past century. The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson did justice to Havel in his December 23, 2011 op-ed, A Cold War Hero, which also graced the pages of my local Florida paper.
Revealed within that op-ed were some other telling comments. Follow these excerpts…
“In his speech before Congress, Havel urged Americans to put ‘morality ahead of politics’ and to foster ‘responsibility–responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success’…American intellectual Noam Chomsky called Havel’s speech an ’embarrassingly silly, morally repugnant Sunday School sermon.’ “
Now, for those who do not know, Chomsky–a linguist–has become a self-proclaimed Middle East expert and demi-god of academia among the Left and the masses of adoring, but largely innocently ignorant, students.
Chomsky likes to pontificate about Israel’s alleged sins. The problem is, those very sins he–like much of the rest of academia–are not shy about scrutinizing and taking Israel to task over are committed in far greater severity by the so-called Arab world which surrounds the Jewish State. Yet, for decades, it has been Israel and the Jews which have received the overwhelming brunt of his duplicitous wrath. He does not hesitate to speak of racist Zionists, yet I’ve yet to hear or read about his lectures about who the real victims of racism are in the region and who their real abusers are.
While Israeli society is not perfect, compared to what scores of millions of non-Arabs face daily in many of the almost two dozen member states of the “Arab League” (not to mention abuses elsewhere in the realm of Islam), Israel is indeed a virtual dream society. If you doubt this, do some easy research on the Internet regarding the plight of Kurds, black Africans, Copts, “Berbers,” native Jews, and so forth in the region…all at the hands of their (often genocidal) Arab subjugators. It’s no accident that the President of the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria wrote the Foreword to my own book about this very subject http://q4j-middle-east.com, and some of the major jacket comments are written by an Amazigh (“Berber”) publisher. Together, those two men alone represent some 70 million, subjugated, truly stateless, non-Arab peoples. And there are many others as well, all with similar stories to tell. Yet, who–besides a few authors like myself and those oppressed people themselves–has been telling those stories? Not the Chomskys, nor the Baroness Austins–that’s for sure.
As just another Chomskyism to consider, he typically speaks of justice in “Palestine” while ignoring the fact that purely Arab Jordan indeed sits on almost 80% of the original 1920 territory gifted to Arabs in 1922 by the Brits. He ignores the masses of Arabs who poured into the Mandate from elsewhere (Arab settlers setting up Arab settlements in Palestine)–documented by the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission and other valid sources–and refers to these folks simply as the only true natives instead.
While demanding Israel take steps towards suicide so that Arabs may get their 22nd state and second, not first, in “Palestine,” Chomsky, the world-renown linguist, remains linguistically-challenged when it comes to demanding similar rights for scores of millions of subjugated, truly stateless, non-Arab folks in the region. And I am aware of some bland comments he has made about Kurds and such. But, where are his books, lectures, pontifications, and articles on those subjects? They’re reserved only to attack Jews and their sole, minuscule, resurrected nation instead.
Chomsky’s views about Israel should be given the same respect as his comments about Vaclav Pavel deserve.
Alas, as with Baroness Ashton, none of this makes any difference to Chomsky. It’s only an admittedly imperfect Israel that either really care about. Both simply accept the Arab narrative hook, line, and sinker–despite the well-known propensity of Arabs to engage in blatant lying for the cause…taqiyyah.
Now, also related to the above, think about what has been going on in Syria for decades–let alone just this past year. The current Butcher of Damascus still has lots of catching up to do to match Papa Assad.
Yet, one would be hard-pressed to know this until very recently…
Scores of thousands of fellow Arabs, non-Arab Kurds, Jews, and others have been slaughtered and many others victimized in assorted ways over the past half century–most of it under Assad rule. All while Israel was being condemned for such things as building a security barrier to protect its kids from deliberately being disemboweled by their Arab neighbors.
And, given what we’ve seen from the two other folks already mentioned, why should Bashar al-Assad’s glamorous wife, Asma, be any different?
Keep in mind that before the current bloody mess this past year and other incidents in between, in one month alone in 1982, Hafez al-Assad slaughtered between twenty thousand and forty thousand opponents in what came to be known as “the Hama Solution” for taking care of business. That’s more dead Arabs than in all the wars Israel has been forced to fight for its survival in over sixty years.
During that same time period, the title of Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, The Syrian Mein Kampf Against The Kurds (Amsterdam 1968), also speaks volumes as to what Syrian Arabs were involved in. Etc. and so forth…
But, again, none of this matters.
For Asma, it’s Gaza that’s the real issue, and what those nasty, barbaric Jews are up to. The latter are simply expected to allow themselves to be targeted by missiles, mortars, rockets, and other acts of terror without doing anything about it.
Unfortunately, this is the world in which Israel must survive today–one filled with Chomskys in the Ivory Tower, Baroness Ashtons in leading world organizations, and numerous versions of hypocritical airheads like Asma al-Asad in Hollywood and elsewhere.
It is long past time for those who truly care about fairness and justice in the region to stand up and be counted.
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