Israeli Ambassador Explodes: Gaza War Critics Are Calling Us Nazis

[Meshuga]

By MJ Ronsemberg

Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, writing in The New Republic, says that the Goldstone Report "portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents--as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed."

(...)

Oren's take on the Goldstone report is ridiculous. In fact, nowhere in his piece does he dispute the report's finding that Israel (and Hamas) committed war crimes during the Gaza war.

Reading Oren, one would never know that 1,387 Palestinians (including 320 children) were killed compared to nine Israeli soldiers. Nowhere does he discuss the testimony of the Israeli soldiers who have told Goldstone, as well as Israeli groups investigating the conduct of the war, that the Israeli army repeatedly made no distinction between combatants and innocents.

(...)

Richard Goldstone would not strip Israel of its right, its obligation, to defend its citizens. Hardly. He has been involved in pro-Israel activities during his entire life. As for those who support the two-state solution, they are trying not to "compel Israel onto a course of self-destruction" but to help Israel avoid straying on to that course.

Doesn't Oren remember the late Yizhak Rabin? What would he think of this diatribe by an Israeli diplomat?


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/israeli-ambassador-explod_b_312608.html

[thunder rising]

1. I myself would never use that "N" word: genocide, ethnic cleansing mmmm maybe

Herding Palestinians into tight groups to make the effort more efficient.
But, never that word.

[Larkspur]

2. Jews in Israel are making the same mistake that Roman Christians did when...

Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire -- the persecuted became the persecutors.

Mahatma Gandhi foresaw how corrupted the Jewish state of Israel would become and that they would have to resort to violence to keep Israel Jewish. That's why Gandhi rejected 4 times Zionists pleas to give his moral blessing to the state of Israel. Gandhi also saw the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine as a mutation of Western European colonialism. Israel should have been carved out of Germany, since it was the Germans who committed the Holocaust.

[UndertheOcean]

4. [phone]

[Behind the Aegis]

5. Gandhi also said...

...the Jews should have sacrificed themselves to the butcher's knives (Nazis) and jumped into the sea.

[FarrenH]

8. I searched for that quote on the Internets and couldn't find it

[Behind the Aegis]

9. You didn't search very well.

[Violet_Crumble]

11. Have you got a link to what Gandhi said?n/t

[shira]

12. here it is...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2061831&mesg_id=2064818

Even as late as June 1946, when the extent of the Holocaust had emerged, Gandhi told biographer Louis Fisher: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs."

======

that quote is all over the internet.

[azurnoir]

17. Thanks that was so informative in so many ways n/t

[oberliner]

13. Link to quote

Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi

[Violet_Crumble]

15. Thanks. Wiki included the context, which was good....

Having read a bit about Gandhi, I find attempts I've seen elsewhere on the net to portray Gandhi as antisemitic to be a bit silly when it's pacifism that was driving his words.

[proteus_lives]

19. Pacifism never made much sense to me.

It's the opposite of absolute militarism. I don't like either extreme. Peace is better then conflict 9 out of 10 times but the situation does sometime arise where fighting is the correct thing to do.

I don't think Gandhi was an anti-semite but simply believed the philosophy trumped everything else.

[Behind the Aegis]

21. I agree with what you've said.

[LeftishBrit]

23. Exactly

I think he was taking his philosophy to a bizarre extreme on this point (almost everything, even pacifism, has its exceptions, and this is one). But he was not *justifying* Hitler's approach.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

24. Yes, Ghandi believed in non-violence.

I think it's clear given what else is known of his views that the fact that the victims of the Holocaust were Jewish was not relevant - the point he was trying to make is that it's always better to die, and even to allow other innocent people to die, than it is to fight or kill. That's a point I strongly disagree with, but it's not antisemitic.

[Behind the Aegis]

26. Did I say anything about anti-Semitic? Why no, I didn't.

[azurnoir]

3. The fellow sounds frustrated, a bit crazed

and eerily like most of the critics of the report, which apparently is not going away

[Donald Ian Rankin]

6. Goldstone wasn't, Netanyahu was.

Goldstone did not at any point compare Israel to the Nazis, and no influential or significant supporters of his report have done either.

Netanyahu, and many supporters of Israel, by contrast, regularly compare the Iranians, and in many cases the Palestinians, to Nazis.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

7. Another Israeli focusing on the words of critics rather than DEEDS of his country.

[Howardx]

16. +1

[FarrenH]

20. Another Israeli putting words in the mouths of the country's critics

spun out of whole cloth based on conjecture and inference, in a manner that should be familiar to anyone who's ever had shira tell them "So you advocate the takeover of the West Bank by Hamas and increased terrorism against Israelis" when all you did was state the humanitarian prescription that the Palestinians must be granted the right to self-determination.

This kind of response is the surest sign that the speaker reasons in a Bush-like way, doggedly clinging to foregone conclusions, without any effort to absorb or evaluate new information, and constructing straw men out of every opposing view.

I appreciate your sentiment, but there is no evidence this ambassador actually focused on the words of the critics in question at all.

[shira]

22. it's called coming to grips with reality, not fantasy

...and now that Israel sees, via Goldstone, that it has zero right to self-defense in the event they pull out completely from the W.Bank, why bother doing it based on the fallout from the Lebanon and Gaza pullouts? Nothing has happened suggesting a W.Bank pullout will lead to anything but more war.

[shira]

10. Oren is right, and here's why...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=124&topic_id=289382&mesg_id=289393

...for anyone interested in fact and not fiction.

[IndianaGreen]

14. What a drama queen Michael Oren turned out to be, and writing for a Freeper magazine!

My heart bleeds for him!

:nopity:

[oberliner]

18. The New Republic is a Freeper magazine?

"The New Republic is very much against the Bush tax programs, against Bush Social Security 'reform,' against cutting the inheritance tax, for radical health care changes, passionate about Gore-type environmentalism, for a woman's entitlement to an abortion, for gay marriage, for an increase in the minimum wage, for pursuing aggressively alternatives to our present reliance on oil and our present tax preferences for gas-guzzling automobiles. We were against the confirmation of Justice Alito."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Republic

Doesn't sound Freeper-like to me.

[bemildred]

25. Why is he calling himself a Nazi?

Deliberate killing of innocents is hardly something unique to Nazis.