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Tuesday, May First, 2007
There is new material in yesterday's debate. Go read that first.
Here is Joel Rosenberg's comment on the propaganda film. My apologies for its delay: it got stuck in a spam filter even though Joel is of course whitelisted.
Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. I finally made the time to watch that rather long video all the way through. Nice production values; much better than the usual Pallywood production, despite all the BBC footage. Pretty good agitprop, although without the flair of, say, Michael Moore.
I'm sure you'll be familiar with the points made at http://www.jcrc.org/israel/p3l/P3L-Review.pdf -- from the beginning, the filmmakers deliberately distort the history around 242 (it wasn't accidental that 242 carefully avoided talking about Israel withdrawing from "all" or "the" territory seized in the 1967 War or that it established a quid pro quo for withdrawal -- the famous "land for peace" formulation) and don't stop there.
I'm not sure how much of the BBC footage that was included was a Pallywood production -- but do let's not forget that the BBC is sufficiently embarrassed by its own anti-Israel bias that it's deliberately suppressed access to an internal report on that very bias -- see http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2398870.ece .
As to Pallywood, it's a pretty slick operation -- as long as there's no cameraman filming stuff beyond the set. When there is, you get the unintentionally humorous video of the phony funeral procession, where some of the cast hasn't been clued into the fact that the body is still alive, and where they flee in terror when the corpse comes back to life when it gets dropped . . .
Actually, I think the lack of widespread broadcast of that particular video puts paid to the notion of the effectiveness of the Israeli agitprop operation -- hell, they couldn't even get the very best of Pallywood's Funniest Videos on NBC, CBS, ABC, or Fox . . . ? How many Americans know the name "Shalhevet Pass"? How many know that the "Jenin Massacre" was a deliberate hoax? That the Sabra and Shatilla massacres weren't even the largest massacres of Arabs by Arabs in Lebanon that year?
But, sure, this sort of stuff is, as you suggest, believed throughout the Arab world -- the same Arab world that thinks that 911 was a Mossad operation.
If this is what comes from the well-coordinated ZOG agitprop operation that Chomsky and Fisk obsess about, what would incompetence look like? Pallywood?
Kind of indicative, though, that the film was dedicated to the memory of Edward Said -- an Arab propagandist who, repeatedly and blatantly, lied about his own history in order to promote the Palestinian narrative . . . and was, as far as I can tell, just barely this side of never called on his lies by the mainstream US media. (Justus Reid Weiner's "'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications by Edward Said" -- see http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3ad97b0d3dbd.htm for one copy -- remains the definitive debunking of Said's personal history.)
I'm tempted to spend a bit of time, well, fisking Fisk and Chomsky, but what would be the point? And if I'm going to do that, should I also point out that Pravda was not always entirely truthful?
If the point is that it's easy to get footage hostile to Israel from the BBC, or pious pronouncements from Fisk, and Chomsky, and the noxious Hussein Ibish, this isn't exactly news; if the point is that propagandists sympathetic to the Arabs will avoid discussing exactly how the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza came to their present remarkably unpleasant lives, I hope that's well-established by now.
As to the filmmakers finding the hands of the Elders of Zion everywhere, again, no surprise.
That said, it's clear that much of the daily lives of the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are miserable*, although I did miss the part about how the most miserable of the miserable are the Gazans -- who, let's remember, are no longer under Israeli occupation, and are free to move about, planting rocket launchers where they will, from one end of Gaza to another.
But, sure, it's worse than unpleasant, and is clearly going to get moreso. Partially replacing the Arafat kleptocracy with Hamas hasn't proven a big win for the Pallies; granted, Abu Mazen and his "enemies" haven't found quite the right formulation for false promises to get the US and most of the European aid flowing again, although some certainly has. The UNRWA dole does keep coming in, but it's basically a recipe for permanent misery.
Yup; it's bad there, and it's going to get worse for the Palestinians. (Over the years, in our discussions, I've repeatedly pointed at the Malthusian tragedy that is Gaza -- it's getting worse there, and will continue to.)
Complain as they understandably will about checkpoints and -- more and more -- the Fence, it's clear from the results that it's just that Fence and those checkpoints that have seriously interfered with the ability of the erstwhile shahids to detonate themselves in pizza parlors and kindergartens, and until the horse learns how to -- err, the Palestinian Arabs learn that killing Jews is counterproductive, that's going to continue to be their problem.
Still, the filmmakers did seem to avoid their own logic, such as it is: if the cause of Arab terrorism are all the difficulties that the evil Israelis keep ratcheting up on the poor defenseless Palestinians, it gets hard to explain how the increase in restrictions since the Fence started going up has been met, by and large, with a decrease in detonating shahids. Is the frustration among the Palestinians somewhat less now when there were fewer checkpoints and fewer settler . . . and more bombings?
This is where, I suppose, the filmmakers would have my secret ZOG masters have me solemnly intone that Arafat, in the famous formulation, never missed the chance to miss the chance to have his Palestinian state and a real peace by playing Clinton and Netanyahu at Wye River and Clinton and Barak at Camp David, but I don't think there was a chance. The Sudetenland didn't assuage the German thirst for lebensraum, and Judea, Samaria, and wouldn't do the same for the Palestinians.
Well, I've rambled on enough, I guess; time to wrap this up with a solution -- and, of course, it's not going to be a practical solution, because, well, there isn't one. In the long run, there really only is room in what once was the Palestine Mandate for two states, not three. In the long run, the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are going to have to murder somewhere around six million Jews, figure out a way to get their Jordanian cousins to take them in . . .
. . . or see how much farther downhill they can go before they reach bottom.
best,
jr
* And, frankly, one would think there'd be enough real misery to film that there wouldn't be a need to coach a fellow in a phony narrative about having delivered his child in an ambulance from the hospital room where the baby was delivered.
-- Joel Rosenberghttp://twincitiescarry.com http://joel-rosenberg.com
"Miscellaneous is always the largest category." -- Walter Slovotsky
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