Irritating Zionists (and Yes, That Is a Double Entendre). Unbeknownst to me, the New York Post recently published a letter I sent them about indignation that anti-Zionists are allowed to express their views at Columbia University. The Post has been very exercised about freedom of anti-Zionist speech, and it campaigns to suppress all dissent from the strict Zionist line everywhere in the United States. The way I found out the letter was published — I rarely read the New York Post, unless I find an abandoned copy, since I'm not about to pay my good money to support a bad (evil) paper — is that I got first a hostile phone call and then a hostile, 10-page, handwritten letter about it, which enclosed a copy of the text as printed. That text, by the way, says in part:

Before long, Americans in general will realize that Zionism is poisonous, violent, hate-filled madness that has put the United States in grave danger and made us betray everything we have ever stood for.

The caller, apparently a Jew, started out by saying I had a lot of nerve criticizing Israel, given Christians' '2,000-year' history of killing Jews. I promptly hung up on him.
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Crimes that Christians may or may not have committed against Jews in the past have nothing to do with crimes that Jews ARE presently committing against Arabs. In any event, I seriously doubt that Christian predations against Jews, prior to the Nazi era, resulted in a significant number of deaths, in either absolute terms or the proportion of Jews killed. Do we have hard numbers? Or are asserted Christian crimes against Jews thru all of history except for a few years in the mid-20th Century trivial, blown up beyond all reason by self-important Jews who ignore the deadly predations and persecutions every people has suffered at somebody's hands?
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I know something of history, so know that the Jews have NOT suffered more than many other peoples have. Julius Caesar, in conquering what is now Switzerland, killed 40,000 Helvetians. Hulegu, grandson of Jengis Khan, attacked Baghdad in 1258 and killed at least 200,000 people, and maybe 800,000. As I point out in the Expansionist Party's Iraq page,

A century and a half later, the Mongol conqueror Timur the Lame, known to literature as Tamerlane, "The Scourge of God", sacked Baghdad again, causing less devastation only because so much had been destroyed already. To give you an idea of what Tamerlane was like, we offer one evocative sentence from the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"The revolts which broke out all over Persia during these campaigns were repressed with ruthless vigour; whole cities were destroyed, their populations massacred, and towers built of their skulls."

Now Iraq has been attacked TWICE by the United States, and starved between wars. Maybe it is Iraqis, not Jews, who have been singled out by history! Consider this: the Hebrews are themselves Iraqis, having come, most historians believe, from Sumer!
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In any case, the indignant Jew who phoned me ignores the fact that it is Christians who FOUGHT the Nazis and ENDED the slaughter of Jews. Even the Soviet Union called a time-out in its war against religion to enlist Christian piety in the cause of destroying Nazism.
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But all decent people reject the notion that because Germans or other Europeans may have committed crimes against Jews, therefore Jews have a right to displace their anger onto Arabs, who did not participate in any way, to any degree, in any such crimes. Quite the contrary, thru much of the caliphate, Jews were treated very well, and numbered among the most privileged and trusted advisers to the monarch.
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As the king of Saudi Arabia at the time the State of Israel was being created told American policymakers, if Germany committed crimes against Jews, then the Jews should have been given a piece of Germany, not Arabia, as compensation. Recently, Germany has conveniently pledged itself to help 'defend' Israel from the Arabs, that is, help Israel continue to kill Arabs for the crimes of Germans.
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The idea that Jews should take Arab land to get even with Germany never made the tiniest bit of sense, but was always morally wrong. Everyone on Earth EXCEPT Zionist Jews and a few stupid Americans understands that.
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The long letter I received, hand-printed in block capitals on yellow, lined paper, tries to project onto me some kind of guilt for speaking out about Jewish guilt for crimes against Arabs. It is precisely the ploy of crying "Thief!" if you ARE a thief, to distract attention from the real culprit. That letter-writer would have you believe that to decry the crimes of Zionists is not simply seeing clearly the wrongfulness of their behavior but irrational prejudice against the Jews as a 'race', which of course they are NOT. No. Trying to turn my indignation at the crimes of Israel against Arabs into a crime by me against Jews is fatuous, dishonest nonsense. I haven't killed so much as one Jew. The Zionist movement has killed — what? 650,000 Arabs?
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Oh, we don't keep tabs on the number of Arabs murdered by Zionism. That would suggest that Jews are capable of evil, and no one must ever suggest any such thing. God's "Chosen People" can do no wrong. Or can they?
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And what exactly were they "chosen" for? Persecution? Why would God cause 'His people" to be hated and persecuted in almost every country in which they have ever been present in significant numbers, over centuries? Can the fault really be in everybody ELSE, never in the Jews themselves? Surely that strains credulity.
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But let's get back to how many people the Jews have killed for Israel. How do I reach the extraordinary number of 650,000 or so, for Arabs murdered by Zionism?
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Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's ancestrally-Jewish Secretary of State, was skewered by critics for an infamous statement she made in a public interview. On May 12, 1996, Albright was involved in the following exchange on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes:

Leslie Stahl: "We have heard that a half million children have died [as a result of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."

That constitutes an admission that the figure given is approximately correct. Even apologists for the sanctions that killed enormous numbers of Iraqi children and old people concede that at least 227,000 Iraqis died as a result of U.S. sanctions against Iraq during the interwar period, Gulf War I to Gulf War II. The decade of 'sanctions' (aggression by another name) had nothing to do with anything but Zionism, since Iraq had already left Kuwait. Sanctions had nothing to do with liberating Kuwait (and thus Arabs) but only with preventing Iraq from becoming a threat to the only Middle Eastern country the U.S. media and political leadership care a thing about: Israel.
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Since even apologists for sanctions admit that at least 227,000 Iraqi children (and they give no number for old people, the poor, or other Iraqis who may have died as a result of the embargo), and Madeleine Albright did not indignantly reply, 'Oh, please, there has been no such death toll. That's alarmist nonsense', but said that no matter how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians may have been killed by U.S.-imposed sanctions, "the price [was] worth it".
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On November 1, 1999, CounterPunch magazine, in an article under the names of Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, reported that Iraqi children were dying from sanctions at a rate of 4,000 a month. (Cockburn (whose name is, I believe, pronounced Co-burn) is a left-wing Irish writer I first encountered in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal years ago.
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Do we know how many Iraqis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians, Lebanese, Palestinians, and others Zionism has killed? Has anyone even attempted to create and faithfully update a tally? The number of Iraqis killed by the "Coalition" in Gulf Wars I and II has been willfully and carefully suppressed by the U.S. Government,which is terrified of letting decent Americans know how indecently our government has behaved in the Middle East, lest we recoil in shock, horror, and deep moral shame, then explode in rage at what has been done in our name.
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At end, Madeleine Albright did not repudiate the assertion that half a million Iraqi children died because of U.S.-led sanctions up to November 1996.
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In October 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet reported that 100,000 "excess deaths" had occurred in Iraq due to the U.S.-British invasion of Gulf War II and the ensuing occupation. The U.S. Government has pooh-poohed that figure, but since it refuses to keep its own tally, it has NO hard evidence whatsoever with which to disprove that toll.
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Saddam's government released no figures for Iraqi dead in Gulf War I, neither military nor civilian, because he didn't want his people to know how horribly costly in human life his little Kuwaiti adventure had been.
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Similarly, the interim Iraqi government installed by the U.S. after Gulf War II certainly didn't want Iraqis to know how many people the U.S. invasion and ongoing (endless?) occupation has killed.
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Nor does the U.S. military want the American people to know how many Iraqis we have killed.
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So we have no reliable figures whatsoever, not for Iraqi military, not for Iraqi civilians; not for Gulf War I, not for the decade of sanctions; not for Gulf War II, not for the ongoing occupation. Will we ever know how many Iraqis have died because of U.S. aggression against Iraq for Israel?
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If Albright's admission of half a million Iraqi children, and The Lancet's 100,000 dead from the current war are correct, then the SMALLEST number of Arabs killed for Zionism is 600,000 — and that doesn't count so much as one Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Tunisian, or Palestinian! Not one! How many of these others have been killed?
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Well, we know of two intifadas, indignant uprisings by Palestinians in which Israel slaughtered some 5,000 Palestinians, most of them demonstrators armed only with rocks. Israel fires live ammunition into Arab demonstrations and kills children for the capital crime of throwing ROCKS — all the while pretending to be a 'civilized' country that disdains capital punishment!
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Think about that: 5,000 people, mostly youthful demonstrators, killed over the course of more than 5 years by the government of a country of 5 million Jews, and the people of that Jewish State do not rise in fury at the injustice. Quite the opposite: they insist that even more Arabs must be killed. Contrast that with Kent State, a single incident, never repeated, in which a mere 4 individuals were killed by nervous National Guardsmen — and the United States went NUTS with self-recrimination! Why aren't we indignant about the hundreds of thousands of Arabs we have killed and continue to kill for Zionism?
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I read a few paragraphs of dishonest argumentation by the letter-writer from Boston but will read no more. He accused me of projecting onto Jews my own sins. I don't have sins even remotely comparable to those of Zionists. My conscience is clear, and operating powerfully, in real time. Too many Americans, and especially Jewish Americans, have put their conscience into 'sleep mode'.
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Like a computer that reacts only to a key's being pressed, and not even to the motion of a mouse, scores of millions of Americans, and especially Jewish Americans, who like to think themselves decent, progressive people, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, as long as the evil is done in the name of Israel. But if the tiniest spoken or written offense is given to Israel, it is a crime against humanity! And if Arabs counterattack Israelis and Americans, killing the tiniest fraction of the number of Arabs whom Israel and its slave the United States have killed, they have committed extraordinary crimes against God and man.
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The message we are teaching our children is that it is wrong to kill Americans or Israelis, but perfectly alrite to kill Arabs.
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No decent person values the life of an Israeli or American more than that of an Arab. No decent person on Earth.
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(The most recent U.S. military death toll in Iraq (for Zionism), as reported at the website Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, is 1,471)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:27 AM