I try to avoid out-of-region blogging, but this was simply too much:
[Palestinian lawmaker] Saeb Erekat chided Israel after some people celebrated the reports that Arafat had died.
“I hope the Israeli public will show sensitivities. I’ve seen some Israelis dancing in the streets, hugging each other other yesterday,” Erekat told CNN. “I think it’s alien… I cannot describe my feelings. It’s heartbreaking to see Israelis hugging and kissing in such circumstances.”
Yep… real alien.
Sphere: Related Content
26 Comments
One could say the same for the Palestinians jumping up and down celebrating after 9/11 when 4000 people were killed. Talk about the need to be sensitive.
I really think that if the Palestinians elect a leader that really wants peace, progress can be made in that region.
Interesting blog you linked to, especially the tirade about anti-semitic Jews. Hmmmm it seems those commentors at the people’s daily, stormfront, et all, aren’t the only people angry about race-traitors.
And you know about these awful hypocritical Palestinians because your entirely unbiased media connections have provided you with these entirely unbiased views of these awful hypocritical Palestinians from which to make your reasoned and unbiased snide comments. Not like you were being fed these images or anything, a clear and accurate view from a clear and unbiased news source, hey hey.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a fire at the end of the world.
Yes, Lance… damn Jewish media.
Paul H. — That’s simply their automated trackback comment. It says that everytime someone trackbacks to them, which is actually pretty cute.
Jing — you liked it, eh? I gather you don’t visit Little Green Footballs much.
I’ve frequently heard it said that those dancing Palestinian pictures are false. It’s said that they were celebrating something else and that someone with an axe to grind misrepresented them. Who knows.
There was a rumor that the footage was real but was shot after some other event(not 9/11)and the US media ran it to look like the Palestinians were celebrating after 9/11. But the rumor was proved to be false and was actually shot after Palestinians found out about 9/11.
Lance Boyle. Media feeding this to me or not. Bias or unbiased. Cameras or no cameras. The fact that hundreds/thousands of Palestinians were jumping around celebrating 9/11 is very worrisome and just plain sad no matter what spin/bias the media brings to the story.
I mean, it’s not just 9.11, it’s all the celebrating that goes on everytime after a bomb goes off in Israel. Look, don’t get me wrong, one could argue that there are compelling reasons why Palestinians might feel the need to celebrate when a bomb goes off in some Israeli cafe or terrorists pilot large civilian aircraft into large skyscrapers in downtown New York — of course, I don’t believe there are, but then again, I don’t believe anyone’s death is cause for public celebration, including Arafat’s. But for Saeb Erekat to go out and day that such behavior was “totally alien” was simply too much.
Just for the record, that’s the automatic text we generate for trackbacks, because we found the words “trackbacks” and “pings” boring. So we decided to do something fun and that’s what we went with. “People who flung a shoe at us” just means people who sent that entry a trackback ping. Thanks for the link, Robert.
PaulH, we’re probably zionists, yeah. We’re both Americans, though, not Israelis. I guess I could kind of be considered an Israeli because I’m an Arab Palestinian. My friend who is the other main blogger on the site, zorkmidden, is a Greek. We’re both secular atheists who voted for Nader in 2000 (we did election-day posts about it this year if you’re interested) and underwent a political transformation on 9/11 along with so many other Americans.
Claire, as a Palestinian, I?€™ve frequently heard it said that those dancing Palestinian pictures are false. It?€™s said that they were celebrating something else and that someone with an axe to grind misrepresented them. Who knows.no, they’re not false pictures. And we’re not being misrepresented by people with an axe to grind. If anything my people are given the benefit of the doubt far above and beyond what they deserve, and those with the axe to grind are grinding with an eye towards the Israelis.
I make it a rule of thumb to not bother wasting my time reading the millenarian apostatic screeds of intellectual infant-terribles.
enfants-terrible, Jing. What the heck are millenarian apostatic screeds?!
Confronted with a devastating fact, apologists for the unspeakable switch to denial. The footage is real. Look at it. Look at the ticker running along the bottom of the screen. Take your anti-Semetic conspiracy theories back to the Bund rally.
Fuck the Palestinians. Sure, they can bury Arafat in Jerusalem. That’s what the sewer is for.
Paul H. ?€“ That?€™s simply their automated trackback comment. It says that everytime someone trackbacks to them, which is actually pretty cute.Thank you Marmot, we’re glad you like it, we thought it was funny.
You have a beautiful site. Thank you for linking to us.
On Monday morning, the Israeli military again entered the town of Jenin, which since 1967 has been under Israeli military occupation, and attacked and killed nine Palestinians. They did so with American-made tanks, American-made missiles and guns, while American-made fighter planes flew overhead. The following the day, on Tuesday, September 11, the funeral-goers, hearing the tragic news of the attack on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon,??cheered.
The news reports?? in the United States and elsewhere all failed to mention the real and lived context of these political expressions of feeling, which did not occur in a vacuum, let alone in a state of real political or national freedom. According to a Brazilian journalist who compared the images, CNN reportedly used archival footage from the Gulf War??to represent these celebrations (http://www.counterpunch.org/).
Interestingly, only the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, mentioned the context of Tuesday’s events in Jenin: “Mourners at the funerals of nine Palestinians killed overnight during an IDF assault on Jenin celebrated Tuesday’s terror attacks against the U.S. yesterday.”
Embarrassed and ashamed by these expressions, the Palestinian authorities reportedly tried to prevent foreign film and news crews from filming them, understanding quite astutely how these images of ironically delighted mourners might be used against them, the better to make all Palestinians into potential terrorists.?? Indeed, the Israel Defense Minister, Binyamin Ben Eliezer, said yesterday that in the occupied territories the Israel military is a fighting a war against those who attacked the World Trade Center.
-from (http://www.crowmagazine.com/cnn.htm)
There was no other footage than CNN’s dancing Palestinian youths in Jenin footage, which was originally from Reuters and distributed to other network as well. Thus, any claim that Arafat and majority of Palestinian population were dancing in the streets as if they were celebrating on killing of 4,000 people is totally out of context for above reason.
For those who assume their moral is somehow better than others, I assume that you have never seen the news front pictures of Americans celebrating after dropping nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing innocent 424,000 civilians (250,000 in Hiroshima, 174,000 in Nagasaki).
Ah, yes . . . the context makes it all better, and all is forgiven. After all, who is to say what’s right or wrong? Who are we to condemn novel, alternative methods of warfare that are bringing honor and victory to Palestine and the Muslim Umma (which is also a porn star, but I digress) by shredding babies on buses, chopping the heads off aid workers, and cheering the murder of thousands of innocents? Surely such people must be rewarded for their good global citizenship and trusted with a treasury, an army, and a prison system . . . post haste!
But of course, we know that these ugly displays are just a fringe view among Palestinians. We know that because Jina tells us so, just as she helpfully chastises us to view Hiroshima as without the context of Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Manila, or Sodaemun.
I have just a couple of troubling doubts about Jina’s revelation: this survey, in which Palestinians were asked which world leader they most trust to “do the right thing.” Osama bin Laden came in first, at 71%, and Arafat was second.
Then there’s the fact that I’ve actually been to Palestine, stayed in Palestinian homes, and personally heard Palestinians vow to wreack vengeance on America and drive all of the Israelis into the sea.
So who are you going to believe? Jina, or the Zionist media and your own eyes?
First, I am sure this was not a one time isolated incident.
Second, even if it was a one time celebration, it is still awful.
Third, even if the events described before the ?€œcelebration?€? occurred, and it was a one time isolated incident, it is still sad.
FreekKorea,
I am a bit stunned by your immediate (and uncalled) hostility. (If it is how the forum/comment works at this blog, I will definitely excuse myself from getting involved after this - cuz, I am such a pussy.)
However, would it have been much more beneficial for both of us if you actually argued the points I was making, instead of what is thought to be my points of argument?
First of all, in my previous post, I didn’t say Palestinian youth in Jenin celebrating 911 is justified because of the murder of their family done by Israeli force (and American weapons/supports). What I said was that any claim or portrayal, which Arafat and Majority of Palestinian population were rejoicing solely because 4000 Americans were killed as if they were blood-hungry monsters, is “out of context ” and fraudulent. And I believe that there is a significant difference between that something is justifiable because of its context and that something is reported out of context: the latter focuses on the motivation behind the omission, on the other hand, the former is rather about the aftermath of its effect.
What does the context do in relation to its subject? The context of an action is not the cause of the action but rather a list of environmental elements or power relations circumscribing the subject’s action (so it rules out the assumption that contexts can justifies the incident/action–it is logically erroneous). In this light, the existence and function of the context of things or actions can be viewed as something that marks the boundaries of things or actions: differences. And thus, to examine the full context of a thing/action means to note and understand how one is differ from another and why (this “why” doesn’t assume one particular moral/political position, but rather it points to or draws various relationships among different moral/political positions.)
Then, why certain incidents are discussed without proper introduction of their contexts and some are not? The answer simply lies in the effect of doing so: CNN and other media’s convenient omission of the context of the incident - brutality of Israel and America the day before, in turn, produced one dimensional and evil portrait of entire Palestinians, as being frequently observed and testified in this forum: it’s politically necessary to blur the difference between personal vengeance and the collective one, and simultaneously, to create/invent the difference between “our vengeance” and “their vengeance.”
Let’s talk about the differences:
First, between Jenin youth celebrating 911 and American rejoicing after dropping nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
In terms of the outcome, both people’s ecstatic mood and moral standard as they believed the killing of the enemies (civilian and non-civilian) had done justice to their sufferings, I don’t think there is any difference between them. (Do you?) If one views these incidents in the light of morality, the most crucial thing in the process is to maintain one’s own moral consistency or integrity. Reminding that the context is not the cause of an action, one should judge the moral hierarchy between two actions solely based on their outcomes and the values one ulhelds, and apply them equally, which differs from legal judgement. The parallel can be extended to the opposite cases: if Palestinian suicide bombers should be condemned, so should Israel’s bombings of Palestinian refugee camps; so should American’s bombings of Falujah; so should Japanese’s massacre of Nanking; so should all killings and violence against individuals committed under the names of collective ideology, religion and economical interests.
Second, between “Jenin youth celebrating 911 after their family being killed by Israeli forces (and with the help of US)” and “All Palestinians celebrating 911″:
In terms of the outcome, as ‘non korean’ pointed out, they are same - both tragic and awful.
But, in terms of context, there is very distinctive difference: the former is discussed in context of when, where, whom, and why, and the latter is not. (The factual ground for the article that I quoted in my previous message is pretty solid. If you do some extensive googling and compare various claims, you will get the picture of what really happened.) When viewed from the context of how this footage was used in America and elsewhere - first to blame Palestinian/Arab as prime suspect of the 911 (before the revelation of Al Queda), then to exaggerate the scope of celebrating by simply not providing the context-, noting the distinction between the two is more important because it shades some light on how various opinions about people, state, idea are actually formed; by emphasizing, omitting, and distorting the details and contexts .
As we accept that history has always been defined by the victors, we can also assume that certain killings and violence have been and will be justified regardless of their contexts and common sense. (As in Bush’s repeated “in the context of 911, war in Iraq was necessary and justifiable,” historical context doesn’t actually have to share the actual subject of the violence as long as it is used in the same sentence.) However, knowing the contexts - noting the differences of things and actions - will make you understand or, at least, sympathize with the real, individual human cause, being buried deep under the fancy charade of “morality,” “justice,” “victory,” freedom.”
Well, I know that I can only speak for myself. So I will shut up with my own response:
Knowing the context of Jenin youth celebrating after 911 doesn’t make me condone their reaction to human tragedy, but rather makes me simply realize the stark reality of human being. If the expectation of revenge is the only hope left for these people, just because of that - their bare reality, I cannot help but sympathizing with them.
PS)
“I have just a couple of troubling doubts about Jina?€™s revelation: this survey, in which Palestinians were asked which world leader they most trust to ?€œdo the right thing.?€? Osama bin Laden came in first, at 71%, and Arafat was second.
Then there?€™s the fact that I?€™ve actually been to Palestine, stayed in Palestinian homes, and personally heard Palestinians vow to wreack vengeance on America and drive all of the Israelis into the sea.”
Your punch line seems quite odd, as it doesn’t actually prove anything but your own moral bias: why Palestinians trust Osama bin Laden or Arafat to do the right thing should be anything different than Americans trust Bush or Kerry to do the right thing? Why Palestinian’s personal vows to revenge America should be different than American’s personal vows to revenge Al Queda?
Yes, Jina. Trusting Osama Bin Laden to do the right thing is the same as trusting George H.W. Bush to do the right thing. Bush = Hitler = bin Laden = Enron = Carrot Top. Six million of one, half a dozen of the other. One runs a gas chamber, the other farts in a crowded elevator. Who are we to say who is worse?
The prosecution rests.
Though what you said was actually pretty funny (thus good one), you are still caught up in a rhetorical question than actually arguing the points.
One example:
I asked “why Palestinians trust Osama bin Laden or Arafat to do the right thing should be anything different than Americans trust Bush or Kerry to do the right thing?”, which is quite different than saying “Trusting Osama Bin Laden to do the right thing is the same as trusting George H.W. Bush to do the right thing” - mine specifies the subjects as Palestinian and Americans, yours don’t.
Without the specified subject, the objects of “trusting” automatically become the main emphasis of the statement as whoever speaks the statement substitutes the empty place of the subject. This is very crucial because it implicates that ‘whoever” is trusting A and it is same as ‘whoever” is trusting B. Since they have common subject and action, therefore you can deduce the equation of A= B.
So how do we know whether this equation is true or false?
Simple. Since they share the subject, if the subject trusts A and B equally (or believes that the values of A and B are equal), we can also conclude that the value system/assignment of the subject is applied to A and B equally: If somehow A and B exhibits different value system, the whole equation is false. So your excellent choice of “gas chamber= fart in the elevator” proves that the equation is false in this case: if someone believes that running a gas chamber and farting in the elevator have the same value, it means that his/her value system was not applied equally to the objects.
Then what about my statement? If it is converted to an equation, it looks like this:
“A trusts B = C trusts D” Do you recognize the difference between yours and mine?
If you understand the difference, you will also understand what it means: go figure.
If you agree on the logic, why dispute the result?
So long (this is my last post here, I am already bored with dull arguments-no offence, mine is equally tedious.),
sincerely,
Jina,
Reference “American rejoicing after dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.
Minor point: The highest casualty ratios (death and seriously wounded ratio for the size of the forces involved) suffered by American forces in WWII were in the Pacific theater against the Japanese. ALthough the Imperial Army lacked the firepower and combined arms capabilities of the Wermacht, their cult of death and no surrender attitudes led to much higher casualties. That butcher’s bill climbed higher as U.S. forces approached the Japanese mainland. Projected casualties for the invasion of mainland Japan was over one million, with one tenth of those killed. (i.e., soldiers expected to be killed in the invasion of Japan would amount to 1/5th of all WWII U.S. deaths in action)
They weren’t dancing in the streets because we’d just crispy-crittered a few ten thousand human beings, although the feeling that the Japanese had only brought this on themselves was present. They were dancing because their boyfriends, husbands, sons, and fathers at that moment stood a much better chance of coming home.
Ah yes, Counterpunch…and Disinfo!
Okinawa is a small island in comparison to the main islands of Japan. US casualties were around 38,000. 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan soldiers were killed. 100,000 Okinawan civilians died.
I don’t know about the study you mention. In light of the US experience at Okinawa, the projected casualty rates seem very low. US planners of the time, without the benefits of hindsight, would most likely have felt the same way. Moreover, if Okinawa was any sort of example, a full-scale invasion would have been a monumental disaster for Japanese civilians, much more than they had suffered even up to that point.
Of course, there are ways to argue that the Okinawan experience would not have been representative. There’s no way to be sure though, and the those trying to decide at the time had even less reason to be sure. There was no time at which “all possible doubt” was “dispelled.”
As far as the Japanese “trying to surrender for months prior to the atomic bombing,” one Japanese perspective on this can be found in the book “Japan’s Longest Day” (which I’d have a bit more confidence in than something from disinfo.org).
Now, I think that the atomic bombing of Japan was a Bad Thing. If I had been in Truman’s place, I doubt I would have ordered it, but I couldn’t say for sure. Neither could anyone else now living, however much they might want to ignore all the complexities of that time.
“In June 1945, Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate the cost in American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently, the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of Staff, dated June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone has to “accurate”: 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing. While the actual casualty count remains unknowable, it was widely known at the time that Japan had been trying to surrender for months prior to the atomic bombing. A May 5, 1945 cable, intercepted and decoded by the US, “dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace.” In fact, the US Strategic Bombing Survey reported shortly after the war, that Japan “in all probability” would have surrendered before the much-discussed November 1, 1945 Allied invasion of the homeland. Truman himself eloquently noted in his diary that Stalin would “be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini (sic) Japs when that comes about.”
http://www.disinfo.com/archive.....index.html
When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Truman was returning to the United States from Potsdam aboard the USS Augusta. “He was not actually laughing, but there was a broad smile on his face,” United Press reporter Merriman Smith said of Truman’s expression as he announced the bombing to crew members.
As a matter of fact, there was much celebration too on the streets of New York - yes, in Manhattan - and elsewhere in the United States and especially on a ship sailing back from Europe to the United States bringing back the U.S. President from Potsdam, Germany. The date was 6th August 1945. The cause for celebration was the utterly senseless atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the United States. The then U.S. President, Harry S. Truman, who was leading the celebrations without an iota of guilt, had just announced to the world the successful strike on Hiroshima by the U.S. airforce. The U.S. President had been informed over the wireless that the atomic bomb had achieved the desired results. The Japanese’ city of Hiroshima, which had been deliberately left untouched by “conventional” bombing, had been obliterated by a single atomic bomb. (When the truth began to sink in, those concerned U.S. citizens who were better informed quickly distanced themselves from the celebrations and started expressing their outrage at the senseless act. Later reports showed that over 200,000 of Hiroshima’s population of 350,000 had been wiped out.)
http://www.counterpunch.org/jayaprakash1.html
It was characteristic of Marshall that while others were celebrating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gen. Groves recalled that “General Marshall expressed his feeling that we should guard against too much gratification over our success, because it undoubtedly involved a large number of Japanese casualties.”
Leslie Groves, Now It Can Be Told, pg. 324
interview with Leo Szilard(A Manhattan Project scientist and The first scientist to conceive of how an atomic bomb might be made - 1933) from U.S. News & World Report, August 15, 1960, pages 68-71.
Q) Would a United States Government today, confronted with the same set of choices and approximately the same degree of military intelligence, reach a different decision as to using the first A-bomb?
A) I think it depends on the person of the President. Truman did not understand what was involved. You can see that from the language he used. Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima while he was at sea coming back from Potsdam, and his announcement contained the phrase - I quote from the New York “Times” of August 7, 1945: “We have spent 2 billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history - and won.”
To put the atomic bomb in terms of having gambled 2 billion dollars and having “won” offended my sense of proportions, and I concluded at that time that Truman did not understand at all what was involved.
(I understand that Counterpunch and Disinfo don’t have much respect from you guys here, however I don’t think there is any reason to discredit them as long as they clearly specify the sources, which were referenced elsewhere as well. By the way, the quote, “When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, …,” was from Bound by Bomb: Truman Had No Doubts about the Bomb ( http://archive.tri-cityherald.com/BOMB/bomb25.html ), not from disinfo: my mistake.)
1) United States Strategic Bombing Survey
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm (http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm#jstetw)
2) Hiroshima and Nagasaki:Decision to Drop the Bomb (Michigan Journal of History, 2002)
The official report prepared by the Joint War Plans Committee on 15 June 1945 presented the following calculations to the Chiefs of Staff: Killed ?€“ 40,000; Wounded ?€“ 150,000; Missing ?€“ 3,500; Total ?€“ 193,500. With Okinawa weighing heavily on the mind of Truman, top military officials assured the President that losses suffered in an invasion of Japan would be lighter. According to the Joint War Plans Committee, the Tokyo Plain had many more beaches suitable for amphibious assault, with its geography precluding the concentration of defense. The favorable terrain would allow American forces to outmaneuver the Japanese in combat. With this in mind, the military planners concluded, ?€œin terms of percentage of casualties the invasion of the Tokyo Plains should be relatively inexpensive?€? (1945, 342).
http://www.umich.edu/~historyj.....oh2.html#3
3) In his article A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U.S. Lives Saved, Barton Bernstein challenged the popular belief of how many Americans would have been killed in an invasion of Japan (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June/July 1986; note also his article Japan’s Delayed Surrender, Diplomatic History, Spring 1995, and his article in the book Judgment at the Smithsonian, ed. Philip Nobile). Bernstein documented that: 1) such a high estimate was not believed by U.S. leaders prior to the Hiroshima bombing; 2) it was specifically rejected by General Marshall and others; and 3) U.S. leaders guessed before Hiroshima was A-bombed that American invasion deaths would be between 20,000 - 46,000. Some have twisted Bernstein’s meaning to be that we should have sacrificed 46,000 Americans to avoid using a-bombs on Japan. This was not Bernstein’s position at all. Rather, the post-war need to exaggerate how many lives the A-bombs “saved”, once the emotionalism of war was over, indicated possible doubts by U.S. leaders as to whether the atomic bombings had really been necessary: “Perhaps in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman developed a need to exaggerate the number of U.S. lives that the bombs might have saved… Believing ultimately in the myth of 500,000 lives saved may have been a way of concealing ambivalence, even from himself. The myth also helped deter Americans from asking troubling questions about the use of the atomic bombs.” (from A Postwar Myth).
http://www.doug-long.com/rambling.htm
4) Truman Diaries: July, 17, 18, 25 (1945) / Letters to his wife Bess: July 18, 22 (1945)
http://www.doug-long.com/hst.htm
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/w.....ocumentary
Jina — just so you understand why your original posts didn’t go up — in case you hadn’t guessed — posts that contain more than five links end up being forwarded to my “moderated comments” section. Help cut down on SPAM mail. Noticed like 14 of yours in my “moderated” box, so I thought you might be wondering.
Oh, that’s why - thanks for letting me know.
And sorry for bombarding your comment section with my lengthy posts-I think I need a straight jacket and a duct tape