Friday, June 15, 2018

Debunking the Hasbara of the Medic

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/nyt-carries-idf-attack-on-murdered-gaza-medic-reveals-its-a-smear-in-20th-paragraph/

I'd been thinking of other Hasbara rhetoric.  Imagining the assignment in some class, sometime in the future.  Debunk this or that Hasbara claim.

Such as the famous, "Israel has a right to exist."

Chomsky famously debunks this claim, and points out that the very notion of a states right to exist, began with Israeli rhetoric.  No other state had ever made the claim, nor had it entered written discussion.

Of course states don't have an unconditional right to exist.  Nazi Germany, the Third Reich, certainly didn't.  Any state depends on good will toward those within and without.  Any group or state that doesn't act in good will, doesn't "deserve" to exist, but to be replaced which one which does act in good will and is democratic, not that could ever be imposed, or has.

And no group of people deserves to take the land of another, to forcibly eject an undersired population for some internal reason.

In this and many other ways, Israel is not a democracy.  Nor is the US, of course.  They are vassal states of each other.

It's the same old game played over 57 previous times in history.  The ruling empire controls Palestine, it has mostly been called, now effectively Israel.  Jerusalem--named after a Cananite god--has changed hands 57 times.

In between the hundreds of years of Greek control, and the hundreds of years of Roman control were a scant 80 years of "Jewish" sovereignty, "the Hashemite Kingdom," which was really a coalition of Jews, Gallileans, Samaritans, and other Cananite groups.

The "Jews" (the rich elites, especially in Jerusalem, the ancient city) were the ones forced out by the Romans after the bar Kochba revolt,, but most of the others in the holy land remained.  And so their descendants have as much or more claim to sovereignty to the Holy Land territories, even assuming "the Jews" were a group of true descendents rather than religious title that people can claim by going through "conversion" which many people do, often to get married to a Jew, and that the Jews had some reason for a unique claim over many others on any such assumed claim, such as ancestry to descendant from the region.  And of course that sovereignty were determined by a religious nation's "God"'s,, rather than the brutal conflict that caused Jerusalem to change hand 57 times, and so on.

It gets difficult, the deeper into the Hasbara you get.




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