Friday, July 9, 2010
[The following, by Margie in Telaviv, is crossposted from CiF Watch.]
The above weasel words pretend that all was equal and it was all gentlemanly negotiation. The stench of the blood shed by the Palestinians during the course of their bloody intifada didn't reach Camp David however. Ehud Barak's prime ministership didn't 'run out', the most liberal of governments, offering the most liberal of terms to the Palestinians was forced out by its inability to come to agreement with the kind of people performing and justifying the actions pictured on this page. Moratinos talks of how near the two sides were to agreement. Could it be that that is what terrified the Palestinians, who had run out of excuses not to accept Israel's offers?
A few incidents out of the many, a glimpse of the horrors should suffice. Amazing how people can lie to themselves and to others and attempt to foist their own picture of events on to a gullible public who perhaps didn't pay much attention to events in the first place.
The following two videos are not for those of tender years or tender stomachs, nor are they for those who want to fool the world that the Palestinians didn't behave towards Israelis -- Israeli civilians -- like bloodthirsty barbarians.
On October 2000, while the extended talks were going on two young men strayed from their path and ended up in nearby Ramallah - the chief Arab city in the West Bank. This was the result, captured by an Italian photographer, who afterwards apologised to the PA for doing so, promising never again to show Palestine in a negative light. So successful were the Palestinians at hiding this that without the product of this one photographer the whole incident would have been unknown. I wonder what threat was used against him and the others.
It wasn't only flesh and blood that was the prey of the terrorists. During the talks, while the second Intifada was raging, in the interests of peace and harmony that he thought would result, Barak ordered the guards who had been protecting the ancient and revered Tomb of Joseph in Schem, (or Nablus) in PA territory to hand it over to the Palestinian police, who didn't do much to protect it since hours after the handover it had been overrun by gangs of hatefilled hooligans who attempted even to unbuild it, prising the stones out of the mortar. The attempted destruction of the grave was a warning note -- it had stood for centuries undefiled and a centre for worship by adherents of all religions. There was a particular purpose to its desecration and attempted destruction at this particular time. The threat was the possibility of peace with Israel.
This may not be well received here, at Solomonia, but I was recently reminded that Martin Luther - not MLK, I'm talking the Protestant reformer - once said that "reason is a whore". By that he meant that reason qua rationalizations, qua sophistries, qua tendentious casuistries, etc. will whore itself out to whoever or whatever applies the most coercive force, to whoever is the highest bidder, to whatever the prevailing zeitgeist or the latest fashion demands.
What that suggests at a still deeper or underlying level that reason itself relies upon the underlying dogmas of the age, the period, the era, within which it is being applied. Reason per se, reason qua reason, is not self-sustaining, it rests almost entirely upon the spirit of the age within which it is applied - and we live in a thoroughgoing, a pervasively ideological age.
Too, all this ties in with my comment yesterday, concerning Katie Couric - as a representative of the largely co-opted western media, the DL/LEM, the dominant left/liberal establishment media.