Reply #63: You Are Rather Off Your Aim, Mr. Blair

[The Magistrate]

You have taken great exception to Mr. Priv's comments that this attack was unargueably criminal, in which he points out that those who launched it, and other such attacks as well, make no bones about it being their intention to kill Israeli civilians, and that they think killing Israeli civilians is a laudable and desireable thing. These things are true, and Mr. Priv, a staunch and effective advocate for Arab Palestine here, does his cause much good by acknowledging this: since he recognizes when his cause does wrong, he is entitled to be taken seiously where he says it does right, and where he says the other side does wrong. By engaging in apologia for this atrocity, Mr. Blair, you give every encouragement for others to take your comments in all aspects of this matter as those of a mere propagandist shill, to be disregarded as no more than foul noise. For the record, late reports concerning the casualties here seem to indicate the bus was filled mostly with medical personnel coming off their shift at a hospital nearby.

Perhaps more worth serious engagement is your refrain concerning de-humanization, which you seem to claim operates on one side only of this conflict. That is simply nonesense, and if you are at all informed on the subject, and honest in your intellect, you know it to be nonesense.

On a general level, it is a fact that the peoples of Israel and of Arab Palestine are at war, and have been for decades. De-humanization of the enemy is an inescapable part of war; it is both a consequence of the conflict, in which each side behaves brutally toward the other, with persons drawing the reasonable conclusion from this that the foe is a cruel and cunning thing, and an essential tool of its prosecution, for people are generally disinclined to kill other people like themselves, yet war demands of them that they do so, and the easiest way to resolve that conflict is to view the enemy as something completely other than themselves.

On a more particular level, it is well known to any honest observer of this conflict that tremendous effort is made by the political and intellectual and religious leadership of Arab Palestine to dehumanize Israelis, and Jews in general. References to them as dogs and monkeys, as natural liars, as the enemies of all that is holy, and marked for defeat by the diety, are so commonplace as to excite little comment anymore. Propagandist shills attempt to deny all this as mistranslation or selective notice, but even as they do so, they know that is not the case, and that these things are in fact common as dirt in the discourse of Arab Palestinian political and religious and intellectual circles. It cannot honestly be pretended that this drive to dehumanize the foe plays no part in prolonging this conflict, and increasing the brutality with which it is prosecuted, from the Arab Palestinian side.