The trees will speak
The quandary of how much tolerance we can tolerate never ends.
In a free society we are meant to tolerate the intolerant. But there is a point when appeasing intolerance becomes a death wish.
The paradox, and the extremes, of our tolerance for the intolerant came to life in Bankstown’s Al Madina Dawah Centre last week when Muslim cleric Abu Ousayd delivered a sermon about killing Jews.
Ousayd is his new name. This man is better known as jihadi preacher Wissam Haddad, who previously has expressed support for terrorist groups Islamic State and al-Qa’ida.
Haddad cited Islamic scripture and parables about “the end of times” when Muslims would be fighting Jews and “the trees will speak”. “They will say ‘oh Muslim, there is a yahud (Arabic for Jew) behind me, come and kill him’,” Haddad said.
As this newspaper also revealed, Haddad has a long history of preaching hatred from Islamic centres in southwest Sydney. More recently, after the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel, he said in a sermon: “If all the Muslims in that region (the Middle East) spat on Israel, the people of Israel would drown, the Jews would drown.”
Meanwhile police in the UK haul a woman in for saying that men are not women.
How about that? Crazy fundamentalist Muslims exist! I hear there’s also similarly deranged Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc., …
Meanwhile, Israel has murdered 10,000 civilians over the past month.
The issue is not “crazy fundamentalist.” The issue is incitement to mass murder. Jews are not Israel and vice versa.
From ‘Free Thought and Official Propaganda’ by Bertrand Russell, 1922 —
“In religion and politics (…) though there is as yet nothing approaching scientific knowledge, everybody considers it de rigueur to have a dogmatic opinion, to be backed up by inflicting starvation, prison, and war, and to be carefully guarded from argumentative competition with any different opinion. If only men could be brought into a tentatively agnostic frame of mind about these matters, nine-tenths of the evils of the modern world would be cured. War would become impossible, because each side would realize that both sides must be in the wrong. Persecution would cease. Education would aim at expanding the mind, not at narrowing it. Men would be chosen for jobs on account of fitness to do the work, not because they flattered the irrational dogmas of those in power. Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the millennium.”
Don’t think this rises to the level of incitement (but you’d think it might in place of lesser free speech like Australia) but it is certainly stochastic terrorism.
In any case Israel is mostly engaging in none-too-careful collateral damage, not murder. That only some 10k are dead is demonstration of more restraint than they should be using if they want to remove Hamas’s ability to hurt them forever (I am not praising them for their restraint; they should either go all in or not bother if we’re talking about strategic considerations).
“Jews are not Israel and vice versa.”
Well, I’m certainly glad that I never said that.
But, when it comes to incitement to mass murder, do you suppose that there are any extremist zionists who have been tolerated for far too long who might have some responsibility for the current slaughter in Gaza that has shocked the world?
Perhaps “Blood Knight in Sour Armor” could explain their hair-splitting between “none-too-careful collateral damage” (which is not to be confused with plain, old collateral damage such as the USA practiced in Iraq) and “murder”? While they’re at it, BKiSA could explain how 10,000 killed in a month is “restraint” by any sane measure? How anyone could think themselves justified in typing something so disgusting for the world to see is probably relevant for the point you were trying to make about violent, extremist, inciteful rhetoric.
Of course I think there are extremist Zionists, and that Israel has done appalling things.
@Me:
Let me do some throat clearing: I do not think Israel *should* exist, and not because I want to get rid of the Jews. I think it shouldn’t exist because it has extremely significant elements of both a theocracy and an ethnostate and both are abhorrent (again, I’d point people to Israel’s entry under the “miscegenation” in Wikipedia). Its “right” to exist is meaningless to me, because it does exist and will continue to do so no matter what I think.
Throat clearing done:
I say “none-too-careful collateral damage” because the Israelis feelings are hurt but are still not going total war, they could and should be more careful than they are, but are at least occasionally sort of observing the niceties of the whole business. No real virtue to be gained there but they still want the US to send them roughly the same level of funds (plus there are still Ashkenazi living there and as a population they’re less genocidal than the somewhat atavistic Arab Jews for obvious reasons).
Now if they actually wanted to achieve their stated war aims (destroy Hamas’s military infrastructure, remove them from government, and make it so Gaza can never again threaten their national security) they’re gonna have to depopulate Gaza and render it virtually uninhabitable; dunno if they’ve got the stomach for that yet. Give it another twenty or thirty years and the demographic shift will make the Israeli population as a whole more genocidal than it is now and it’ll happen anyways.
My personal view is that the Brits should’ve never left, but since they have we’re gonna see either the destruction of this relatively young state or the total genocide of its Palestinian-Arab population in my lifetime.
I agree, BKISA, Israel is playing nice. So nice that they are going to help evacuate babies from a hospital they have just destroyed.
I also note that Israel has now declared the number dead from the Hamas attack to be far lower than originally reported. Shades of USA and 9/11. Gin up the numbers to gin up the blood lust.
Since we’re doing “personal views”, mine is that Europe’s Jews should have been given Bavaria and Austria as a safe haven and homeland. It was never the fault of Palestinians that Europe’s Jews were slaughtered on an industrial scale, and it should never have been the Palestinian’s burden to fix.
To add historical context, Sderot where the main Hamas attack occurred was the site of one of Israel’s erliest attempts at ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
“The Israeli Negev Brigade had depopulated the area on which Sderot would be built on the 2nd and 13th of May 1948, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, expelling the 422 Muslim farmers there who cultivated citrus, bananas and cereals from the Palestinian village of Najd. The latter were relocated in Gaza as refugees.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sderot#20th_century
“depopulated”, such a nice way of covering up ethnic cleansing, eh?
First of all, we have to dispense with the fiction that Israel has done everything for peace and that all the violence is the result of the deranged Muslim blood-lust of the incorrigibly antisemitic Palestinians and the Israeli responses to same.
By “everything for peace” I do NOT mean Israelis have to smile and say “I love you no matter what” every time a Palestinian spits at or slaps an Israeli face. What I mean is to stop the illegal siege of Gaza and stop the illegal land seizures/ethnic displacement in the West Bank. At least.
In the last blog entry of yours I commented on I stated that I’m not a fan of Islamic fundamentalism. I didn’t celebrate the Hamas attack on October 7th. I’m an atheist and a hedonist and a secular humanist Epicurean. And if we agree that we are opposed to Islamic fundamentalism and to the results of creating angry Muslims perhaps we shouldn’t turn a blind-eye to Israel’s crimes. Perhaps we shouldn’t invade their countries with soldiers who have Crusader cross tatooes. Perhaps we shouldn’t begin our invasions of their countries with “Shock and Awe” bombing campaigns that destroy civilian infrastructure like water treatment plants and power generators. Perhaps we shouldn’t slaughter them and rape them and turn millions of them into refugees and then treat them like garbage in the countries they were forced to flee to.
Can we at least TRY to do these things and hold-off on posts about how crazy-violent their culture is? (As a woman and a feminist you have every right to condemn the stupid misogyny of Iran and Saudi Arabia and etc., because, for one thing, it’s inexcusable. And, no. I don’t think you need my permission to do anything.)
You know, a while back, people at this site were disgusted with Amnesty International for criticzing the Ukrainian military for using civilian buildings to house artillery and other military equipment. (Somebody thought that artillery used for offensive war was the same thing as London’s anti-aircraft guns in WW2, showing they had no idea what they were talking about.)
But there seems to be almost unanimous agreement that Israel’s bombing of hospitals, civilian housing, refugee camps, and anything and everything else, is justified because “Hamas.”
Why the double-standard?
Because here’s one of my points: If you want to know why otherwise intelligent, decent people, especially women, have chosen the side of the Trans-rights Fundamentalists, despite all the AGP, and the rape and death threats, and the medical malpractice on children based on incoherent gender cultism, and the documented threats to women’s safety, and everything else, … and all of the TRA and their allies’ ridiculous accusations of transphobia and “trans genocide” … And look at how we turn a blind eye to Israel’s decades of illegal occupations and ethnic cleansing, the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, the sickening yammering about Hamas using “human shields” to justify indiscriminate bombing of civilians, … the hair-splitting between “carpet-bombing” and however people here want to describe what the IDF is doing to Gaza. The fine distinction between “murder” and “collateral damage” and “none-too-careful collateral damage” as 10,000 human beings are slaughtered in a month.
Who is this “we” of whom you speak?
“Indiscriminate” has a meaning. If you’re going to accuse the IDF of indiscriminate bombing, you should be able to back it up with evidence.
And Hamas is using the Palestinian people as human shields. It’s not just that they embed themselves among civilians and tell civilians to ignore warnings to evacuate;* there’s also the fact that they use their vast underground infrastructure exclusively for their fighters and have never bothered to provide or provision evacuation areas there or anywhere else. They have the wealth to do so. They don’t care to.
These aren’t justifications for anything and everything the IDF does; they’re facts that point up the difficulties faced in trying to fight Hamas.
That you find it “sickening” for people to point that out has no bearing on the truth of the matter.
Meanwhile, Israeli hostages, mostly civilians, some children, are still being held by Hamas.
Nobody wants civilian casualties; if they’re inevitable, we want them minimized. At the same time, some of us, at least, do want Hamas defeated. Given the realities, what should the IDF do to achieve both these goals? I don’t know, and neither do you. But reminding us all that the situation isn’t black-and-white (thanks), and bringing up past US and IDF military actions isn’t going to help the people in Gaza any.
Ignoring the role of Islam and Islamism in this horrific mess isn’t going to help anyone, either. Least of all the people brought up in and amidst it.
Me
Don’t pretend you’re not a Nazi. Don’t pretend that your criticism of Israel isn’t bound in your hatred of Jews.
Because lets face it, the OP is about Wissam Haddad calling for the murder of Jews – in Australia.
And your response is:
“Meanwhile, Israel has murdered 10,000 civilians over the past month.”
Which aside from being extremely dishonest is a deflection intended to excuse Haddad.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/07/opinions/israel-hamas-gaza-not-war-crimes-spencer/index.html
I’ll deal with Bruce Gorton’s “argument” first, since that’ll be easier:
Bruce:
BWA-HA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Come back when you’re less deranged.
Eliza:
You ask me: “Who is this ‘we’ of whom you speak?”
To which I answer: The collective West, including everyone on this website who justifies Israel’s war crimes by pointing to how nasty Hamas is. This includes the way that they portray Hamas as having come out of nowhere except perhaps from the inherent antisemitism of the Palestinians.
You write: “‘Indiscriminate’ has a meaning. If you’re going to accuse the IDF of indiscriminate bombing, you should be able to back it up with evidence.”
To which I can only shake my head in disbelief. If I was better with html code I could embed image after image of the results of Israel’s current bombardment of Gaza. But since my html abilities are terrible, let me instead point out that Palestinians were killed while on the roads in Gaza, trying to flee south as the Israelis instructed them to do.
Are you going to insist that the bombardment of those civilians, in their cars, on the road, fleeing to safety, were “discriminate”? That the IDF used precision-guided missiles to kill those fleeing civilians? Because I don’t. I’d say their bombing was as indiscriminate as all the wiping out of entire city blocks that I’ve seen in photograph after photograph during this crisis.
You write: “And Hamas is using the Palestinian people as human shields.”
And therefore it’s open season right? “We’ll show you what we think of your ‘human shields’!!!” WRONG. Israel is guilty of war crimes.
You write: “It’s not just that they embed themselves among civilians and tell civilians to ignore warnings to evacuate;* ”
But if Palestinians ignore these [alleged] Hamas demands and flee, the IDF bombs them anyway.
You write: “there’s also the fact that they use their vast underground infrastructure exclusively for their fighters and have never bothered to provide or provision evacuation areas there or anywhere else. They have the wealth to do so. They don’t care to.”
And therefore, the IDF magically becomes blameless? Ridiculous.
“You write: “These aren’t justifications for anything and everything the IDF does; they’re facts that point up the difficulties faced in trying to fight Hamas.”
I’m sorry. You can’t write that you aren’t justifying the IDF’s barbarism after having just tried to justify the IDF’s barbarism. Oh wait; You said you weren’t trying to justify “anything and everything” that the IDF might do. So, … what, exactly, would be something beyond what the IDF is already doing that would be too much for you? Dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza? Using chemical weapons? Beheading people with machetes? (Which is
much worse than being blown to smithereens from missiles and shells I’ve heard.)
And, also, NO. What you wrote were not “facts.” What Israel is doing is counter to the laws of war.
You write: “That you find it ‘sickening’ for people to point that out has no bearing on the truth of the matter.”
I’ll answer that I agree. My revulsion has no bearing on the truth of the matter. What you say is false regardless though.
You write: “Meanwhile, Israeli hostages, mostly civilians, some children, are still being held by Hamas.”
I am not a fan of Hamas. I did not celebrate the Hamas attack. I do not agree with the calls for the destruction of Israel called for by some people at some pro-Palestinian rallies around the world. I have tried, over and over, to say that perhaps one way to reduce the anger some Muslims feel towards Israel and the West in general might be to stop abusing them. Very simple. Just stop abusing them.
Likewise, … the IDF goes into Palestinian territory and routinely arrests children, civilians, activists, anyone it wants, and holds them illegally, in a prison system where mental and physical abuse have been documented.
In the very comment that you are responding to I have pointed out Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza (since 2007) and the continued ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. I notice you made ZERO effort to address these rather central points.
I don’t wake up smiling and click my heels remembering that Hamas has Israeli hostages. BUT if Israel doesn’t want these things to happen, PERHAPS they could do more to try to work for peace. WHY didn’t you address the rather important point of the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza? Of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in the West Bank? Of Israel’s blatant violations of the Oslo Accords?
You write: “Nobody wants civilian casualties; if they’re inevitable, we want them minimized.” Which simply isn’t true. And then you wrote a bunch of other stuff I can’t be bothered to address since you can’t be bothered to address decades-long Israeli provocations and contributions to this tragedy.
The last post I commented on at this site was the one entitled: “Hizb ut-Tahrir” wherein Ophelia was [rightly] concerned with the crowd’s call for “jihad” to liberate Palestine. Technically, “jihad” means “striving to do good.” But it’s also been used as a call to holy war. And in the comments to that post, I tried (as I have done here) to simply state that while I share Ophelia’s antipathy towards Islamic fundamentalism, and while I do not like to see inter-ethnic hatred, I think that it is incumbent upon the West (whether secular or Christian or Jewish) to do more to stop antagonizing Muslims and creating fundamentalist jihadists.
And I felt compelled to do all this typing because I admire Ophelia’s thinking on most topics, but I find it troubling that when Israel is committing atrocities, she can only find it in her to write about the violent rhetoric at some rallies responding to those atrocities.
As I wrote above, Ophelia was appalled when Amnesty International [which has criticized both the IDF and Hamas in the past] criticized the Ukrainian military for embedding itself in civilian structures like schools and hospitals, stating that the fight against the evil Putin didn’t have time for such niceties, somehow doesn’t have a problem with all the commenters here saying the IDF is justified carpet-bombing Gaza.
I notice you didn’t bother to address that double-standard either. For the record, Israel has killed more civilians in one month than Putin killed in Ukraine in over 500 days. But you insist on claiming that the IDF is making an effort to minimize casualities.
And I wrote this lengthy reply to you because I also admired the quality of your thinking and I think it’s a shame how corrupted it is on this topic.
I’ll say again: Defending Israel’s indefensible war crimes and its long-term ethnic cleansing of Palestinian lands, falsely claiming Israel is a totally innocent, helpless babe in the woods, and accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism, (exhibit “A” being Bruce Gorton calling me a goddamned Jew-hating nazi), reminds me of the way TRA’s accuse Gender Critical people of being bigoted, genocidal monsters.
I’m also reminded of the words “the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions” from the Declaration of Independence.
Or the hysterical, self-pitying of slave societies at the indiscriminate violence when their slaves revolted.
SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET. I did all this typing because I think some of the stuff written here is a damned shame.
Me
“falsely claiming Israel is a totally innocent, ”
Nobody has claimed that. At all. If anything this is you projecting your view of Palestine onto us.
Israel is an ethnostate, that in and of itself creates problems. Palestine would equally well be an ethnostate, just a much worse run one.
We can all rattle off issues with Israel past and present. We are well aware of the bullshit you’ve been spouting, those issues do not excuse the targeted mass rape, murder and abduction of civilians.
7 October fully justified a military response.
That means that yes, if Hamas use their civilian population as shields, a lot of them are going to die, and no it won’t be murder, it won’t be collective punishment, it won’t even be disproportionate. It is what happens when those tactics are applied in a war.
If you seriously want to reduce civilian casualties, the first step would be maybe not supporting tactics that put civilians in danger. Hamas is very guilty of using such tactics. The line of bullshit you push here, is what makes those tactics effective.
“and accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism, (exhibit “A” being Bruce Gorton calling me a goddamned Jew-hating nazi)”
Lets see, why did I call you a Nazi? Was it because you’re critical of Israel? No, its because you use Israel to deflect criticism from someone calling for the deaths of Jews in Australia, a totally different country.
Jews in Australia are not responsible for the policies of Israel – they don’t even live there. That whole “collective” guilt thing you’ve got going on when it comes to Jews, is a bit of a problem.
So far as Israel is concerned, you seem to be of the opinion that Israel has no right to defend itself, or its population. That in order to have a right to defend itself, it would have to somehow be blameless of all wrongs, or lack the capacity to do so. We have seen this line of reasoning before, it is the “no angels” argument applied to a state.
This isn’t a matter of Israel being helpless babes innocent of all wrongdoing, this is a matter of Israel being a fully modern, fully armed society that will damn well defend itself whether Nazis like you like it or not.
If you don’t like what Israel is doing, you’re going to have to come up with a reasonable alternative.
Here is what I can come up with, but it requires taking a different set of tactics to your perpetual bullshit:
The UN cuts the shit and condemns Hamas. Negotiations with the UN ensue, where the UN offers to take on the responsibility of seeing Hamas destroyed in lieu of aggressive military action by Israel.
The ICC issues warrants for the arrest of Hamas’ leadership. Global banking agrees to freeze accounts linked to Hamas. States that support Hamas cannot get loans from the World Bank or the IMF. We see if we can’t get the Bank of China in on the game (their excuses with regards to their treatment of the Uygers could be used as leverage for this purpose).
At the same time the UNRWA, which is extremely guilty of maintaining this forever war, gets folded into the UNHRC. The education the UN provides moves over to a soft curriculum designed to ease the next generation into reconciliation rather than radicalization. Israel is assured that it can employ observers to ensure that the education involved is not mainly propaganda for further war.
At the same time, Israel is required to come up with a roadmap for citizenship for its Palestinian population. The same requirement is placed upon the surrounding states. This aims to solve the problem of long-term statelessness with regards to Palestinians.
The two state solution is, bluntly, exactly what Apartheid envisaged with the Bantustans.
Instead the plan should be to emulate the one thing my country, South Africa, did right and move towards an integrated solution whereby the Palestinians become full Israeli citizens. This is a long-term goal, with a lot of work required to hammer out issues such as legal protections and suchlike, but it should be the overall direction for the future.
Yes, my country does have problems, very serious problems, but this I think is the only real workable solution long term. Otherwise you end up with a perpetually impoverished Palestine, next to a wealthy Israel, and more war ensues.
[…] a comment by Bruce Gorton on The trees will […]
bruce,
Let me assure you that you’re under no obligation to reply to my comments. Heck, you don’t even have to read them.
But if you’re going to pretend to reply to what I write, try to make the effort to read what I said first. There’s a boy.
I don’t think I ever expressed an interest in debating the relative merits of the Two-State Solution, or a One-State Solution, or BKiSA’s Solution of wiping the Palestinians out down to the last child.
I see no point in attempting to communicate with self-deluded, racist hypocrites.
Me
“I see no point in attempting to communicate with self-deluded, racist hypocrites.”
A more accurate description of yourself would be hard to find.
Me, I’m not Eliza Mondegreen. I’m flattered to be mistaken for her, though. It’s just coincidence that we share the nym.
Why didn’t you address the reasons for the blockade (Hamas’s takeover and the smuggling of weapons into Gaza)? Then we could discuss the reasons for the reasons, etc., ad infinitum.
As I said the last time, playing “He started it!” doesn’t help.
If by “isn’t true” you mean to say that there are monsters who are happy to see civilians die, point taken. There are some of those in Israel. Hamas is largely made up of them.
I was talking about us here. As for the Israeli government, I think you’re wrong.
And you can’t be bothered to address Israel’s reasons for the behavior you object to–and I would prefer not to get into that myself. For one thing, I’m not an expert on the history of the region. For another, see my opinion above. I only bring up Israel’s reasons, when I do, because your argument seems so one-sided. You seem intent on demonizing Israel.
The subject at hand is what Hamas did on October 7th and how Israel is responding.
I’m not claiming Israel is blameless.
Me, you’re generalizing wildly from one post about what one cleric said. I never said he stands for Palestine or all Palestinians or anything like that. I often post about something dumb one person said, and at least some of the time that’s all it’s about – one person saying something dumb.