Noam Chomsky: Israel’s Actions in Palestine are "Much Worse Than Apartheid" in South Africa

[Jefferson23]

Part 2 of our conversation with famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky on the crisis in Gaza, U.S. support for Israel, apartheid and the BDS movement. "In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid," Chomsky says. "To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by 'apartheid' you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There’s a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. … The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just don’t want them. They want them out, or at least in prison."

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. And we’re continuing our conversation with Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, has written many books, among them, one of the more recent books, Gaza in Crisis. I want to turn right now to Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS’s Face the Nation. This is how he closed a recent show.

BOB SCHIEFFER: In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that is embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause—a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters. Last week I found a quote of many years ago by Golda Meir, one of Israel’s early leaders, which might have been said yesterday: "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children," she said, "but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."

AMY GOODMAN: That was CBS journalist Bob Schieffer. Noam Chomsky, can you respond?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, we don’t really have to listen to CBS, because we can listen directly to the Israeli propaganda agencies, which he’s quoting. It’s a shameful moment for U.S. media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state. As for the comment itself, the Israel comment which he—propaganda comment which he quoted, I guess maybe the best comment about that was made by the great Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who just described it as "sadism masked as compassion." That’s about the right characterization.

in full: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/8/8/noam_chomsky_what_israel_is_doing

[Jefferson23]

1. CBS Host: Palestinians Force Israel to Kill Kids

Recent controversies over coverage of Gaza suggest that reporters can get into trouble over appearing too sympathetic to Palestinians (NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin) or too critical of some Israelis (CNN's Diana Magnay).

But some opinions are perfectly acceptable. On his July 27 show, CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer went on a rant about Palestinians:

In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that has embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause, a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters.

Last week, I found a quote of many years ago by Golda Meir, one of Israel's early leaders, which might have been said yesterday. "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children," she said, "but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."

When he uttered these words, Israeli attacks on Gaza had killed over 1,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians, including several hundred children.

To suggest that Hamas desires that Palestinian children be murdered is offensive and irresponsible in the extreme. It's the basic mistake of worldviews like antisemitism and Islamophobia: assuming that the people you hate lack basic human motives and instead are driven by their inhuman, alien perspective.

http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/07/28/cbs-host-palestinians-force-israel-to-kill-kids/

[Fred Sanders]

3. Weak criticism of Israel is anti-semetic, but claiming another race wants their own kids dead.....?

What is the word I am searching for to describe that?

Perhaps we can go to the streets of Jefferson, America for an answer from the common folk.

[Jefferson23]

4. Believing there is something inseparable from Arabs and or Muslims that they would

Last edited Tue Aug 12, 2014, 01:00 PM - Edit history (1)

want their own children dead. I think this mindset makes it easier for war hawks to
continue to kill indiscriminately. It is not a new concept, people have used it against
others forever.

Young Americans are not accepting of Israel's policies as they once were, so there
is some hope.

[Fred Sanders]

2. Chomsky advises Americans to only listen to the shameful propaganda of its own media.

Bob Schiffer is forgiven for he is not a willing tool of Israeli propagandists,, too rusty to make for a good tool, he is just being used anyway for his front value.

I am not sure elderly journalists actually can intellectually digest what they say anymore, they are more like obsolete robots drawing their last reserves of power by cannabilizing from the CPU, a last desperate act to remain relevant in the new media age, so the machine functions, but it is in low power life support mode..

[Jefferson23]

5. I will tell what I noticed this past Sunday, on the MCLAUGHLIN Group, which was a pleasant surprise.

See transcript below. That this excerpt was used at all, from a conversation on Democracy Now
is a change from the ordinary right wing crap you hear on the McClaughlin show. That Mort Zuckerman countered
the Rabbi with a list of every Israeli talking point is not as relevant as the fact that the Rabbi was
given time. Eleanor Clift to her credit, later countered a dope from the National Review when he claimed
Hamas was glad to see Palestinian children die..she made a point to say she did not believe that to be
true. Obviously McClaughlin did not invite the Rabbi on his show live, that would have been a huge
shift to give equal time, but they're evidently not prepared and or willing to go that far.


snip* Issue Two: Israel and Gaza - Their Future.

This issue addresses the legal, political and moral dimensions of Israel's recent bombing and land invasion of the Palestinian territory of Gaza, a conflict in which 1,886 Palestinians and 67 Israelis were killed, an area slightly more than twice the size of Washington, D.C.

The heavy lifting in this piece will be done by Rabbi Henry Siegman, whose bio is provided for us by Nermeen Shaikh of the TV program "Democracy Now!"

NERMEEN SHAIKH ("Democracy Now!" host): (From videotape.) Henry Siegman, the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, long described as one of the nation's big three Jewish organizations, along with the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League.

Henry Siegman was born in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany. Three years later, the Nazis came to power. After fleeing Nazi troops in Belgium, his family eventually moved to the United States. His father was a leader of the European Zionist movement, pushing for the creation of a Jewish state.

In New York, Henry Siegman studied and was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi by Yeshiva Torah Vodaas. He later became head of the Synagogue Council of America.

After his time at the American Jewish Congress, Siegman became a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He now serves as president of the U.S.-Middle East Project.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Rabbi Siegman on Israel's military operations in Gaza: Unjustified, he says.

RABBI HENRY SIEGMAN: (From videotape.) Couldn't Israel be doing something to - in preventing the disaster that is playing out now in terms of the destruction of human lives? Couldn't they have done something that didn't require that cost?

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Rabbi Siegman continues asking pointedly why the U.S. government has not identified the ideology of Israel's political right wing as being actually the same as the ideology of the, quote-unquote, "terrorist group Hamas."

RABBI SIEGMAN: (From videotape.) Why hasn't our government or anyone said, like Hamas, if you have parties like that in your government, you are not a peace partner and you are a terrorist group, if, in fact, you use violence to implement a policy, as Hamas does? So the hypocrisy in the discussion that is taking place publicly is just mind-boggling.

MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Is the U.S. government hypocritical for not negotiating with Hamas, Rabbi Siegman.

RABBI SIEGMAN: (From videotape.) We're very happy to meet with the Taliban and to negotiate with them, and they cut off hands and heads of people, and they kill girls who go to school. And that didn't prevent the United States from having negotiations with the Taliban. So that's nonsense that they don't talk to terrorist organizations.

http://www.mclaughlin.com/transcript.htm?id=1021

[Jefferson23]

6. Even Wieseltier is upset by ‘indifference in Jewish world’ to Gaza slaughter and wholehearted

Israeli support for it.

Mondoweiss:

Here are more signs that the Gaza onslaught has reshaped the American discussion of Israel and Palestine, in three arguments from intellectuals.

1, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch said on Democracy Now yesterday that Palestinians should end the “charade” and go to the International Criminal Court to have Israel hauled up on war crimes. Roth has been more careful in his indictments in the past. He is obviously angry about the Israeli slaughter, and about Israeli immunity.

“They seem not to learn… they are completely on notice. We’ve accused them of this in the past. They just keep repeating it.”

Roth sees a design, of targeting civilians: “to try to make the people of Gaza pay a price because Hamas is ruling over them.”

Full excerpt below.

2, Leon Wieseltier, a longtime supporter of anything Israel wants to do, confesses in The New Republic that he finds Israel’s failure to sort out militants from civilians “sickening,” and more importantly, that he needs to distance himself from the Israel lobby and Israeli society. The overwhelming Israeli support for the the slaughter makes him “queasy.” And as for the lobby, “I have been surprised by the magnitude of the indifference in the Jewish world to the human costs of Israel’s defense.” In refusing to defer to Israelis in his judgment of the massacre, Wieseltier parts company with Michael Walzer, who said on an Americans for Peace Now call that it was too easy to sit in Princeton and judge people in Israel, or Bill Kristol, who has said that it is “cavalier” to sit on the Upper West Side and second-guess Israelis. These men defer to Israeli judgment (presumably in part out of a religious understanding that Israeli Jews are aliyah, higher, while we in the Diaspora are yoredim, or lower); Wieseltier has no such astral body.

Full excerpt below.

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/wieseltier-indifference-wholehearted.html

[oberliner]

8. Unsurprisingly Mondoweiss totally misrepresents Wieseltier's views

It's almost a textbook example of how Mondoweiss operates.

[Jefferson23]

9. Feel free to post where he was misquoted or anything else you would like to link to

that gives in your mind a fair representation of his opinions on Operation Protective Edge.

[indepat]

7. Noam Chomsky must not have gotten the memo from TPTB that stipulated criticism of Israel

in any form shan't be tolerated and will be harshly dealt with accordingly.