Sixties Fan
Diamond Member
- Mar 6, 2017
- 68,754
- 12,338
- 2,290
- Thread starter
- #3,381
Where is Britain’s anger over this slaughter of three women who were British citizens? Actually, two women and a minor. A British-born child – 15-year-old Rina – was shot, executioner-style, for the crime of being a Jewish person in the West Bank and there is only deathly silence from Britain’s moral clerisy. Our opinion-forming elites expressed more sympathy for Shamima Begum, 15 when she fled Britain to join the Islamist death cult of ISIS, than they have for Rina Dee, 15, when she was cut down for her family’s offence of migrating from the UK to a peaceful Jewish community in the West Bank.
Officialdom’s initial comments on the murders were extraordinarily passive. ‘We are saddened to hear about the deaths of two British-Israeli citizens and the serious injuries sustained by a third individual’, said the Foreign Office. Deaths? The women did not just expire, of natural causes or something. These weren’t deaths, they were killings. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, said the lack of ‘outrage’ in the FO’s statement was strange and disturbing. According to the UK government, ‘The sisters merely “died” and a third person was somehow injured’, he said. The murders were decontextualised, de-moralised in fact – turned from wickedness consciously inflicted on three civilians into a mere regretful demise.
The passive voice could be heard in the media, too. ‘Daughters of British rabbi die in West Bank drive-by shooting’, was The Sunday Times headline. This elevation of the act of dying over the act of killing, of the passing away of the victims over the murderous intent of the killer, speaks to an urge to drain the incident of its true horror. To render it sorrowful rather than political; a tragedy rather than terrorism. The BBC’s first report on the attack swiftly stated that ‘the shooting took place hours after Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip’. As if these things are morally linked. As if the fact that Israel and Palestinian elements remain in a state of low-level war explains the massacre of three unarmed women. I trust the BBC still believes in the Geneva Conventions? They stipulate that in times of war no violence may be visited on individuals who are ‘taking no active part in the hostilities’.
The Western elites’ ‘othering’ of Israeli settlers has been one of the most feverish moral crusades of modern times. Of course, everyone should be free to raise political objections to the settlements in the West Bank, just as everyone should be free to criticise the actions of the State of Israel. But the anti-settler outlook of Western academics and activists goes way beyond political critique and crosses the line into neocolonial contempt. As the Israeli observer Avinoam Sharon put it a few years ago, the Israeli settler has become the ‘archetypical Other’. And of course, ‘Otherness is the darling of people who hate’. Western observers sometimes sound like Victorian-era explorers of the ‘Heart of Darkness’ in their commentary about Jewish settlers. They’re ‘the most abnormal people’, we’re told. They are uniquely cruel – they throw ‘shit and piss and used sanitary towels’ at Palestinians, claims Brian Eno. These odd people are a threat to ‘world peace’ itself, says a Palestinian official. ‘Throughout history, Jews have played the role of Other’, wrote Sharon – now it’s Jewish settlers.
This is where we can see the inverted colonialism of anti-Israel sentiment. Virtuous Westerners posture against what they see as Israel’s colonial crimes, in particular the colonial crime of settlerism, and yet they exhibit a distinctly imperious disdain for the supposedly inferior peoples of Israel and especially of the Israeli settlements. They call on the Great Powers to purge the West Bank of its settlements, like latter-day Balfours assuming authority over faraway people’s lives. Being anti-settler is a core part of their political and moral being. They ostentatiously avoid settler products. They noisily demand the liquidation of these evil entities. This is something far more intimate than political positioning. These people define their very virtue in contrast to the vice of the settlements. Their goodness is directly inverse to the belief system of those abnormal people who throw shit at Palestinians. And we wonder why there was so little sympathy for the Dees. ‘Occupiers dead’, the end.
The British silence on the massacre of these three British citizens is a new nadir in moral cowardice. The problem is that the faces of the murdered mother and her young, aspirational daughters pose too much of a threat to the self-aggrandising moral narrative of the anti-Israel set. These women dangerously call into question the hyper-racial depiction of Zionists as a wicked, abnormal people, and reveal that, in truth, some of them look and sound a lot like us. This must not stand. Too much moral capital has been invested in othering these people. And so Britain’s chattering class looks the other way – anywhere but into the eyes of the three women murdered for being Jews.
(full article online)
www.spiked-online.com
Officialdom’s initial comments on the murders were extraordinarily passive. ‘We are saddened to hear about the deaths of two British-Israeli citizens and the serious injuries sustained by a third individual’, said the Foreign Office. Deaths? The women did not just expire, of natural causes or something. These weren’t deaths, they were killings. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, said the lack of ‘outrage’ in the FO’s statement was strange and disturbing. According to the UK government, ‘The sisters merely “died” and a third person was somehow injured’, he said. The murders were decontextualised, de-moralised in fact – turned from wickedness consciously inflicted on three civilians into a mere regretful demise.
The passive voice could be heard in the media, too. ‘Daughters of British rabbi die in West Bank drive-by shooting’, was The Sunday Times headline. This elevation of the act of dying over the act of killing, of the passing away of the victims over the murderous intent of the killer, speaks to an urge to drain the incident of its true horror. To render it sorrowful rather than political; a tragedy rather than terrorism. The BBC’s first report on the attack swiftly stated that ‘the shooting took place hours after Israeli warplanes carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip’. As if these things are morally linked. As if the fact that Israel and Palestinian elements remain in a state of low-level war explains the massacre of three unarmed women. I trust the BBC still believes in the Geneva Conventions? They stipulate that in times of war no violence may be visited on individuals who are ‘taking no active part in the hostilities’.
The Western elites’ ‘othering’ of Israeli settlers has been one of the most feverish moral crusades of modern times. Of course, everyone should be free to raise political objections to the settlements in the West Bank, just as everyone should be free to criticise the actions of the State of Israel. But the anti-settler outlook of Western academics and activists goes way beyond political critique and crosses the line into neocolonial contempt. As the Israeli observer Avinoam Sharon put it a few years ago, the Israeli settler has become the ‘archetypical Other’. And of course, ‘Otherness is the darling of people who hate’. Western observers sometimes sound like Victorian-era explorers of the ‘Heart of Darkness’ in their commentary about Jewish settlers. They’re ‘the most abnormal people’, we’re told. They are uniquely cruel – they throw ‘shit and piss and used sanitary towels’ at Palestinians, claims Brian Eno. These odd people are a threat to ‘world peace’ itself, says a Palestinian official. ‘Throughout history, Jews have played the role of Other’, wrote Sharon – now it’s Jewish settlers.
This is where we can see the inverted colonialism of anti-Israel sentiment. Virtuous Westerners posture against what they see as Israel’s colonial crimes, in particular the colonial crime of settlerism, and yet they exhibit a distinctly imperious disdain for the supposedly inferior peoples of Israel and especially of the Israeli settlements. They call on the Great Powers to purge the West Bank of its settlements, like latter-day Balfours assuming authority over faraway people’s lives. Being anti-settler is a core part of their political and moral being. They ostentatiously avoid settler products. They noisily demand the liquidation of these evil entities. This is something far more intimate than political positioning. These people define their very virtue in contrast to the vice of the settlements. Their goodness is directly inverse to the belief system of those abnormal people who throw shit at Palestinians. And we wonder why there was so little sympathy for the Dees. ‘Occupiers dead’, the end.
The British silence on the massacre of these three British citizens is a new nadir in moral cowardice. The problem is that the faces of the murdered mother and her young, aspirational daughters pose too much of a threat to the self-aggrandising moral narrative of the anti-Israel set. These women dangerously call into question the hyper-racial depiction of Zionists as a wicked, abnormal people, and reveal that, in truth, some of them look and sound a lot like us. This must not stand. Too much moral capital has been invested in othering these people. And so Britain’s chattering class looks the other way – anywhere but into the eyes of the three women murdered for being Jews.
(full article online)
The shameful silence on the West Bank massacre
Three British women were slaughtered by a terrorist, and the British elites look the other way.
www.spiked-online.com
