Beydoun is anxious that the Arab nations stop behaving like weaklings, and exploit the international ill-will towards Israel over the incident with the Gaza flotilla. (Or what the headline writer calls, “capitalize”). Brothers, this is our big chance, Beydoun urges, to start dismantling Israel once and for all.
As Diana West wrote a couple days ago, “We may not live in an Islamic world -- yet -- but we do live with an Islamic worldview. Witness the uniformly Islamicized consensus that met Israel's successful if costly defense of its Gaza blockade.”
For his part, Beydoun is helping spread the necessary lies that keep so much of that international malice against Israel alive.
His first whopper is describing the recent incident with the blockade-running Mavi Marmara as an example of “the cruelty and lack of humanity of Israel's occupation.”
This is a direct, bald-faced lie. Israel does not occupy Gaza. Israel withdrew every last soldier and drove every Israeli out of Gaza in 2005. The only Israeli soldier still in Gaza is Gilad Schalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas and taken into Gaza by force.
Next, Beydoun gives his readers his blunt conclusion without allowing us a look at his reasoning, or lack of reasoning. “Make no mistake that Israel ultimately bears the brunt of the blame for the Palestinian situation.”
This unsupported generalization is meant to shield the mountain of historical falsehoods its represents, and of course we don’t know which “Palestinian situation” he’s even talking about. In this context, I expect Beydoun means it’s Israel’s fault that Gaza is a religion-addled gangster warren that requires blockading in the first place. That any fault for this might be shared by Gaza’s genocidal theocratic government, Hamas, and the Gazans who chose, and still continue to choose, Hamas’s terrorist leadership, just doesn't fit into this discussion Beydoun wants to have about the plight of the Palestinians.
Beydoun follows that up with the charge that “Arab governments are culpable for their ineffectiveness and weakness in the face of Israeli aggression.”
“Israeli aggression” is a code phrase meant to include any act Israel has ever taken in her legitimate self-defense. Because Israel has no right to exist, her enemies figure, all signs of her vitality, especially her instinct of self-preservation, is automatically an act of aggression. In this case, Beydoun is calling it aggression that Israel blockaded Gaza to stop Hamas importing weapons they will then turn on Israel. It’s also aggression that Israel boarded the Turkish flotilla, after the blockade-runners defied several attempts by Israel to peacefully divert it to Ashdod.
Beydoun also lies by omission of essential facts. For one, he never once mentions Hamas, rockets, suicide attacks, the Hamas charter commanding genocide against Israel, nor any other fact that detracts from the narrative of Gazans as peace-loving, starving victims of Israel’s torments.
Beydoun also fails to mention that Egypt is also blockading Gaza. This might be because, if he did mention it, his own logic would require him to complain about “Egyptian aggression,” cruelty, and lack of humanity. Instead, he deceitfully says only that “Egypt is implicated for their support of the blockade,” falsely implying that Egypt is merely tolerating Israel’s blockade, instead of enforcing one of its own.
Beydoun’s single reference to the “peace process” is pure cynicism. “If Turkey takes the lead in protecting the Palestinians and imposing its will on the peace process,” he writes, “then we have a new paradigm that could reshape the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.”
A new paradigm where Turkey imposes its will on all sides?
Beydoun neither supports nor cares about peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Nor, as is obvious, does he even care about the Palestinians getting their own state. His column begins with a lament over how the Moors lost Spain, and ends with a hope for a restoration of the Ottoman caliphate, returning things to the way they were before the British Mandate following World War I, when, as Clifford D. May writes:
for centuries, the area called Palestine (including what is now Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza) was ruled by the Ottoman Empire with its capital in what is now Turkey. Needless to say, the idea of an independent Palestinian state never occurred to the Ottoman pashas.Beydoun trots out a belligerent image of the Mavi Marmara as Turkey’s Lusitania, the British ocean liner torpedoed by Germany in 1915, killing 1,198 victims, 128 of whom were Americans. His
comparison probably tells more than he means it too. “The sinking turned public opinion in many countries against Germany, and was instrumental in bringing the United States into World War I.” Never mind that Israel didn’t sink the Mavi Marmara, and that instead of being attacked by torpedoes, the Mavi Marmara was boarded by incredibly gutsy Israeli soldiers dangled one at a time onto a deckful of howling jihadists. All Beydoun cares about is turning world opinion against Israel so there can be a war. For some reason, editors at the Detroit News think this is an opinion it needs to make room for on its op-ed page.
The black-is-white, up-is-down insanity of all this is in columns like these, where crocodile tears for a phony “peace flotilla” call forth all-out war against Israel.
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