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Mick Hume Goes to Sderot
By Adam LeBor / December 29, 2008
Trawling through the media coverage of Israel’s attack on Gaza, thankfully not every commentator follows the comment/analysis by the Telegraph’s Sean Rayment that Israel is “Addicted to violence”. How Rayment expects to be taken seriously as a supposedly impartial defence correspondent after churning out this nonsense is a mystery to me. Among some media at least, including some perhaps surprising commentators, there seems to be a more nuanced view of events.
This morning on the Today programme James Naughtie picked up on the AFP story that Hamas is refusing to allow the injured and wounded out to Egypt, where doctors are waiting in vain to treat them.
Over at CIF Seth Freedman, who is consistently and harshly critical of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, writes under the un-Guardianish headline: ‘The Recklessness of Hamas’:
As Israeli spokesmen have reiterated time and again in the media, there is not a country in the world which would allow such assaults to take place on a daily basis without taking action to defend their citizens. Hamas knew this, and that their barrage of rockets would inevitably bring retaliation on the people of Gaza. Despite the ever-louder sabre-rattling by Israeli politicians during the last week, Hamas continued to use heavily-populated civilian centres as launching pads for their daily attacks on Israel.
before asking:
Who will castigate Hamas for their reckless endangerment of civilian lives in Gaza?
While over at my own paper, The Times, Mick Hume, recounts a recent trip to Sderot:
To make sense of a conflict in which both sides claim to be victims requires more than an emotional response to gory pictures. I support the Palestinian right to self-determination. But I am disturbed by the rise of anti-Israeli sentiments in Britain and the West, as when my old friends on the Left declared: “We are all Hezbollah now.”
and:
“The Israelis I met bear no comparison with the caricature of expansionist “Zio-Nazis”. “
and even:
Back in Sderot, Mr Avraham, the [Israeli] paramedic spoke of his future hopes: “I am left-wing, I believe in peace, we don’t have a choice. I hope to live here side by side one day.” Just so long, many might sadly say today, as those sides have a security barrier between them.
The rights and wrongs of the security fence aside, such nuanced arguments all brought back happy memories of my student days arguing and debating (civilly) with my friends in the former Revolutionary Communist Party, publishers of Living Marxism magazine, for which Mick used to work. Unlike the brainless robo-mini-trots of the Socialist Workers Party, the RCP were usually at least willing to engage intellectually. Perhaps finally there is some kind of intellectual backlash or shift going on in parts of the British left over their comrades’ hero worship of Hamas and Hezbollah.
For more on the world’s responses to Israel’s attack on Gaza see Tom Gross.
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Micked Hume’s website http://www.spiked-online.com is very good, I can tell you as I know from personal experience! He also says Israelis and Palestians have to sort it out between themselves and foreign interference just makes things worse
I think everybody has turned away from both sides and from the whole region because we are all bored of the hysterical anti-Israel media rhetoric it is too nasty and kind of disturbing. The media have made the conflict all about themselves but they don’t know that everybody hates them and it puts us off. They must be bored of themselves by now, they work themselves up into such a state each time and congratulate themselves they are fighting for a meaningful cause and then despite all their columns and rage nothing happens and nobody cares what they think. They might as well take up their pen for whales or polar beers instead, they can’t talk back and say the wrong thing and embarrass everybody. Of course it is a real geo-political conflict not just a staged media spectacle, columnists and tv presenters find that more boring than anything.
But it is good for palestinians too if the western media has found a new celebrity cause, now they don’t have an audience to perform for, they can concentrate on sorting out their own society instead of acting as a symbol for the decline of ours.
Lbjack performs as a psychotic much better than he does as an historian of Islam or an epistemologist. I haven’t the patience to critique his boring and beery dorm-room pronouncements in their entirety, but let me make an observation or two.
"So, he’s personably vicious? Or viciously personable? Sounds like you’re in love."
Sounds like you’re jealous.
"…personal experience is limiting…"
And what sort of experience can I have but the personal variety?
"What informs personal experience is, of course, the experience of others."
Ah, I see. But isn’t their experience "personal"? And isn’t my experience of their experience "personal"? Sorry, pal, but you can’t claim to transcend your own biases or inclinations by tempering them with the experience of others, since you only know the latter as instances of…your own personal experience. Oops, back to square one.
"When morality "informs" experience, you get the delusional world of Ismail and his ilk, a world where the perpetrators are the victims, where Islam means peace, where 9/11 was a Zionist plot, where mass murderers are martyrs."
Howler upon howler. Here you attribute to me a series of beliefs which I do not hold. And you do it in the service of warning us to be wary of letting our sentiments color reality! A perfect storm of stupidity! You have, before our astonished eyes, crawled up your own logical asshole and epistemologically vanished! Bravo!
"Nor does reason inform experience. Reason orders experience, makes it comprehensible, but again, experience is what it is."
More jejune piffle. You acknowledge that reason makes experience comprehensible, then claim that experience is what it is, as though this means something. By your own standards, experience without reason is incomprehensible. Is that what you meant by "experience is what it is’? If so, what gives you the impression that this is a useful or even coherent remark?
"Which begs the question of good and bad morality…"
My bete noire. You mean, of course, "Which brings up the question…". To beg the question is to assume the truth of what your argument is meant to demonstrate; it’s a variety of fallacy. Idiots and the uneducated often confuse the two. You’ve been schooled-now go, and never say "begs the question" when you mean "raises the question" again. It marks you as a ninny. No need to thank me.
"The left, being adolescent, think the whole world is a campus, a cloistered microcosm of classrooms, where all propositions, including moral propostitions, can be deconstructed. I got my first clue of Ismail’s ilk, when he gleefully boasted of "deconstructing" Edmund Standing’s piece. Deconstruction is the poseur’s way of looking intellectual without being intelligent. It’s why the left maintain their glib, facile fashion of moral and cultural relativism: They are too lazy or too cowardly to "judge others," so they equivocate and call themselves "intellectual" for it."
Fabulous! The wildly global and ridiculous characterization of some undifferentiated Left, the slope-browed suspicion of the academy…first-rate. As far as deconstruction goes, this is a useful tool which you, like Moliere’s bourgeois gentleman, may be surprised to know you’ve been doing all along! Despite the excesses of some pomo nitwits, the idea of querying what is taken as common sense and unpacking the assumptions of the conventional (or other) wisdom is a bracing and salutary activity.
As for your apparent belief that I am a Muslim, well, I’m not, but I’m happy to be opposed by morons like you who pronounce so assuredly about an entire religion, and who do so from a position of such profound ignorance.
You raise (not beg-remember?) important questions about epistemology and moral theory, but you’re obviously ill-equipped to discuss them fruitfully. Next time, don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.
And yet, Jewcy seems to be at least as high a quality web site as I’ve been able to find for intelligent comment on almost any given current event of import to modern culture, Jewish or not. They safely and wisely permit or even encourage his presence and participation here and his insults are funny, even when his analyses appear to fail, and admittedly sometimes massively so. He’s been personable with me and indicated that he’s appreciated the back-and-forth, as have I, even when I’ve gotten vicious with him or vice versa. Incorporating someone into this forum who appreciates the distinctly Jewish role that humor plays in learning from almost any given situation is intrinsically valuable, even when his soft-gloves approach to the most irredentist elements in our midst becomes so flaccid as to border on ridiculous.
Personal experience should and does play a role. I’m no more a rationalist than I am an empiricist. This doesn’t mean that experience can be allowed to over-ride reason and morality, just that it informs it either way – as it informs a whole host of things having nothing to do with reason or morality. The more richly informed our experiences are the better off everyone is. It’s a fallacy of the left (and one picked up upon by the right) to assume that broadening one’s horizons is synonymous with moral relativism. It’s not. At least, that’s how I see it. But I’ve always been much more skeptical about drawing long-lasting conclusions from singular experiences, no matter how emotive or intense they were.
Nothing is morally compelling absent the dialogue about it that has no choice but to admit reason as a participant.
He’s no more "intelligent" and "worth engaging" than the psychopaths he reperesents. In polluting these precincts, he’s not "walking into the lions den" — unless you describe lions as pussycats — he’s a suicide bomber walking into a pizza parlor.
As for "the role that personal experience does and should play in all of this," it’s a specious argument. If I were a Palestinian whose house was bombed by an Israeli attack, I’d hate the Jews, too, and maybe vote for Hamas. But that personal experience would make me less, not more qualified to opine about the war. Like the Germans, who chose the Nazis as the agents of their deliverence from the Jews, the Gazans have made their bed.
???? ???
"Really, Ismail? Really?"
Yes, really. On the 5th of November. Israel’s incursion into Gaza on that date broke the truce. Hamas’ rockets folowed.
"…lobbing rockets without cessation …"
Absolutely untrue. While some rockets were fired (most by groups other than Hamas), virtually all reportage agreed that attacks from Gaza were minimal during the period of the truce, despite Israel’s continued vicious assaults upon the health, nutrition, education and general welfare of the people of Gaza.
And you seem to be a fine representative of Zionism: ethically stunted, a master of projection, and addicted to the misery of innocents.
"Please recall that the recent truce was broken by an Israeli incursion into Gaza."
Really, Ismail? Really?
Seeing as how you’re rather comfortable in your position as Jewcy’s resident pro-Palestinian troll, I know I shouldn’t express incredulity at your excreable statements. But seriously, lobbing rockets without cessation at the civillian population of Sderot doesn’t count as "breaking the truce"?
You’re a fine representative of the Palestinian cause as a whole: without decency, logic, or legitimacy.
Long ago I worked briefly at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, near Sderot. This was long before the first Intifada. At night we used to go to sleep serenaded by grenades and gunfire from Gaza, which at the time was occupied. Our kibbutz, being nahal, was a stopping point for the comings and goings of the IDF, and I remember one day asking some guys in an armored carrier what was going on over in Gaza every night. Was it a battle? The soldiers grinned, and one said casually, "Nah, it’s just the Palestinians playing games."
Playing games. It’s hard to accept, but we must realize that the Palestinians are so intractable because they are a mass case of arrested development. We are dealing with adolescents. Is Gaza not a kind of prison? Is prison not a place to put people who refuse to grow up? The problem with Gaza is that the inmates run the prison, and they have elected to govern them the most brutal and incorrigible of the prison gangs — Hamas.
In reading about LeBor and his "student days," what stikes me is how the apologists for the Palestinians — academia, media, Movement – so closely resemble their clients, in mentality and maturity – also adolescents, who take themselves very, very seriously, yet are so fatuous, so feckless. Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy once walked into a left-wing movement’s campaign headquarters in NYC. As they looked around one of them murmured, "Every one looks like a big disappointment to his parents."
Schooyard delinquents and their sycophants, now become murderers and their apologists. Still adolescents. Still playing games.
???? ???
"As Israeli spokesmen have reiterated time and again in the media, there is not a country in the world which would allow such assaults to take place on a daily basis without taking action to defend their citizens. Hamas knew this, and that their barrage of rockets would inevitably bring retaliation on the people of Gaza."
Please recall that the recent truce was broken by an Israeli incursion into Gaza. Please also recall that Hamas’ promise to extend the truce conditional upon Israel’s cessation of violence against its people both in Gaza and the West Bank was not even replied to by Tel Aviv.
Finally, regarding the nonsensical quote above, please replace "Israeli" with "Gazan", "Hamas" with "Israel", "barrage of rockets" with "starvation of an entire population", and "Israel" for "Gaza". Done? OK, discuss.
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