What Gilad Shalit tells us about the respect for life in Europe, Israel and Palestine

[shira]

One of the supreme ironies among the European moral stances has to do with their discourse on the death penalty. It is a standard trope of European contempt for the USA that it still has a death penalty, a sign of its cowboy nature and its retardation in the moral progress of nations.

And yet when that same Europe turns its gaze on the Middle East, the country they have the most contempt for is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment, and they have the most admiration for a country that among a widespread political culture that extensively uses torture and execution for the maintenance of public order, shows perhaps the most contempt for the lives of its own peoples and its enemies.

Normally, this would not be even worth mentioning. Most people would just roll their eyes while others complain about Zionist imperialists trying to divert attention from their oppression of the Palestinians. But if you want to understand the “hostage-for-prisoner-exchange” that just took place in Israel and the Western media’s coverage of the event, then you need to pay attention to the issue.

....


If a European, concerned about the nature of the aggressive Islam that has begun to crop up in his cities, citing for example Sharia zones, wanted to understand the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he might spend a moment visiting the sites of Palestinian anti-Zionists, where this profoundly perverse culture teems. But of course, that would be politically incorrect. To spend any time pointing out the problems here constitutes the highest level of politically incorrect Islamophobia.

So instead of helping Europeans understand what’s at stake, most of the media and the NGO community have spun this story as one of violations of human rights on “both sides” with a heavy focus on Israeli misdeeds. The prisoners were considered “equal,” and Israeli primarily held accountable by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of enemy combatants when, in reality, the only one protected under these conditions was Shalit, a uniformed soldier kidnapped on his own soil in non-combat situation, and the thousand Palestinian prisoners were convicted in a court, primarily of crimes related to terror attacks on civilians (an, alas, necessary redundancy in these days of sophism).

more...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/8841737/What-Gilad-Shalit-tells-us-about-the-respect-for-life-in-Europe-Israel-and-Palestine.html

[Fumesucker]

1. Israel doesn't seem to have much problem with extra-judicial execution..

Even rock throwing evidently carries the death penalty sometimes..

Not to excuse anything any other state in the world might do, including the USA (Scott Olsen comes to mind readily)..

[shira]

3. So your point is that sometimes Israeli soldiers make terrible mistakes. That doesn't mean....

....it's Israeli state policy to automatically gun down people throwing rocks.

You just made - maybe inadvertantly - an idiotic attempt (one of many here at DU/IP) at moral equivalency between Israel and the PLO/Hamas that shifts the focus away from extreme rightwing Islamist fundamentalism and their enablers in the dumbed-down human rights community and media who deliberately ignore, deny it, or downplay it. The very point of the OP.

In fact, Israel is against what you accuse it of doing and has outlawed shooting at rock throwers...
http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=171731

[Fumesucker]

4. Sometimes?

And I don't believe it's all mistakes, just like I don't think Scott Olsen was a "mistake"..

Deeds>Words

I stopped listening to politicians a long time ago, now I watch what they do.

[shira]

5. Goodbye. Have a nice day. n/t

[Fumesucker]

6. Why post something in a discussion forum if you don't want to discuss the issues?

:shrug:

[shira]

7. It's impossible to discuss and reason with idealogues. For example, you state Israel deliberately

...executes rock throwers.

But you don't realize how idiotic that statement is.

How many rock throwers have been "executed" by IDF forces in the past couple decades?

Thousands?

Hundreds?

Not even 10,000 Palestinians in total have been killed since 1948 by Israeli forces.

That's why continuing this "discussion" is idiotic. And once again shifts focus away from the OP (the very point of the OP itself).

[Fumesucker]

8. And anyone who has a different perspective than yourself is automatically an ideologue?

If you want an echo chamber there's probably better and more congenial places to go than DU.

[shira]

9. No, it's idiotic to maintain Israel routinely executes rock throwers. Read my last post...

I just edited it so you may not have read it yet.

[Fumesucker]

10. The USA just tried to execute someone who wasn't even throwing rocks..

If Mr Olsen had been hit in the eye he would probably be dead now.

It's my personal belief that it was a deliberate act under color of authority which would have made it an execution had Scott died.

See this thread for how many politicians have spoken up against this violence..

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2198840

[shira]

11. No, the USA didn't attempt to execute Scott Olsen. That's ridiculous.

People should be outraged at what happened to Olsen but that's not an example of state sanctioned execution.

Police brutality at worst.

[Fumesucker]

12. Yep, note the vast numbers of politicians speaking out against the act..

I believe we're all the way up to two, Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich.

[shira]

15. Lee and Kucinich don't call that state sponsored execution, now do they? n/t

[Fumesucker]

19. An agent of the state tried to kill someone while acting in their official capacity..

Someone who was doing nothing to deserve any violent act at all.

Of course, you say this does not happen at all in Israel.

[shira]

20. How do you prove police intended to murder or execute Olsen? n/t

[shira]

2. Another excerpt from the OP...

Of course, in order to present the moral equivalence of all the “prisoners” in the swap, one has to play down the heinous nature of the crimes and personalities of the Palestinian prisoners released. BBC correspondent Jon Donnison showed the extent of ignorance among the supposedly professional news media by interviewing a man in prison for organising and abetting several suicide bombings. (Because the attacks only injured but did not kill, he did not receive life sentences.) “You are 31 years old, 10 years in prison, serving a life sentence for being a member of Hamas, I mean, how do you feel today?” BBC viewers could be excused for sympathising with a political prisoner, inhumanly incarcerated for belonging to an opposition party, free at last.

In acquiescing with a narrative in which hatred and murder are considered legitimate expressions of “resistance” to “occupation,” Western human rights activists – including many journalists – have degraded humanitarian language at the same time as they have allowed into the public sphere a discourse of genocidal hatred. They have excluded any sympathy for Israelis who defend themselves from the onslaught they have shut out from their and their audiences’ consciousness. As Leon Wieseltier put it in a different context, this all reflects “the new heartlessness toward Israel. A whole country and a whole people have been expelled from the realm of imaginative sympathy.”

This is deliberate.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

13. So many unsupported assertions...

The author appear to be talking about fictional Europeans, not real ones. There are probably some Europeans out there somewhere who think the way he's accusing us of doing, but I've never encountered one.

"the country they have the most contempt for is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment"

"The prisoners were considered “equal,” "

"To spend any time pointing out the problems here constitutes the highest level of politically incorrect Islamophobia"

"But of course, that would be politically incorrect. To spend any time pointing out the problems here constitutes the highest level of politically incorrect Islamophobia." - no, politically correct Islamophobia is when you use phrases like "culture of death", not when you soberly point out specific objectionable parts of specific Islamic cultures. Most Islamophobes pretend to be unable to see a difference.

"citing for example Sharia zones" - wtf? I'm not saying these *don't* exist, but I've certainly never heard of one.

-----

"and the thousand Palestinian prisoners were convicted in a court" - depressingly, this one is true - so far as I'm aware Hamas didn't bother to list any of the few hundred Palestinians currently imprisoned in Israel without trials on the list of people it wanted back.

[oberliner]

14. All of those assertions are supported

Whether you accept the support as factual is up to you, but each of the claims you cited is supported either within the article itself or beyond.

[shira]

16. It's Islamophobic to merely criticize Hamas for promoting a culture of death in Gaza? n/t

[LeftishBrit]

17. But the article doesn't 'criticize Hamas for promoting a culture of death in Gaza'

It doesn't say anything about Hamas from this point of view. It implies that Palestinian culture is intrinsically 'a culture of death'.

I am not even sure that this is Islamophobic, as I generally don't see the term used about other Muslim countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia or even Afghanistan. It's used about the *Palestinians* specifically, when used in this sort of context. The phrase seems to be used (a) by the Christian Right to refer to secular pro-choice people; and (b) by Americans hawks to refer to Palestinians (I don't think I've frequently seen it used by Israelis, though I could be wrong). And while America does get criticized for its use of the death penalty, not to mention the pre-emptive and disastrous Iraq war that has resulted in thousands of deaths, I have not seen it called 'a culture of death' for that reason.

I may be prejudiced against the phrase because a right-wing 'pro-life' Catholic official described the UK a year or so ago as 'the epicentre of the culture of death'. At any rate, I think it is a bigoted and oversimplified way to describe the Palestinians, who are in many ways a very diverse and disunited group, without a single political culture. It's a way of dismissing and scorning an entire group, without looking at the real problems.

And when people say, 'I can't say this without being accused of political incorrect Islamophobia' - just as when they say 'I can't criticize Israel without being called antisemitic' - they usually either really are Islamophobic/ antisemitic, or are trying to deflect genuine disagreements and criticisms by the pre-emptive accusation.

ETA: The person quoted as saying 'the Jews love life and we love death' is Nasrullah from Hezbollah. And in the context, it seems to be a rhetorical way of saying 'we are glad to die for our cause (e.g. in this case as suicide bombers) and this makes us more dangerous and powerful'. It's a typical warmonger/terrorist attitude, and does not represent an entire culture, except the culture of warmongers and terrorists worldwide.

Oh, and by the way, objecting to characterizing an entire group of people as having 'a culture of death' that by implication others don't have, doesn't alter the fact that Hamas are a right-wing, hawkish, vicious, bigoted, violent, dishonest party who deserve no more respect than right-wing, hawkish, vicious, etc. parties anywhere else! Or that the Muslim Right is at least as bad as any other sort of Religious Right.

[shira]

18. How about this article? Is it bigoted in your opinion...

The Palestine of Wafa al-Biss
http://blogs.jpost.com/content/palestine-wafa-al-biss

[shira]

21. The article 'implies that Palestinian culture is intrinsically a culture of death'

It's perceived that way due to rightwing, hawkish, vicious, bigoted, violent, dishonest totalitarian Hamas/PLO leadership which works very hard to keep it that way. They're very open about it and not ashamed at all to admit it, knowing their friends in the West won't dare expose them.