Friday, April 15, 2011

Terrible News, Your Excellency

[Vittorio Arrigoni]

The Times reports that a member of the hard-left pro-Palestinian group ISM (International Solidarity Movement) has come to a bad end. Vittorio Arrigoni went to Gaza to participate in protests against Israel. He wrote to a friend, "“I am very tense, exhausted, if they don’t kill anyone in the next 24 hours, I am getting out Thursday. Your V.” Which is to say he went there hoping someone would be killed in the fighting so that he could pretend to be angry about it.

Instead he was kidnapped by a Palestinian group named Tawhid and Jihad. T & J offered to trade him to Hamas for the leader of their organization whom Hamas had arrested earlier. (Though the line between arrested and kidnapped is a tad thinner in Gaza than in other places.) They gave Hamas a 30 hour deadline to comply.

The scandal, even by Gaza standards, is that T & J strangled Arrigoni with a plastic cord twenty four hours before their own deadline. Whether they never intended to free Arrigoni no matter what Hamas did, or whether they were afraid Hamas was onto them and had to get away fast, and murdered Arrigoni lest he identify them is not clear. But then, what is clear in Gaza?

What is so charming about all this is that the fundamental premise of ISM is its cynicism, its deliberate dismissal of fairness. And as cynical and cool as Arrigoni thought he was, he was nowhere near cynical enough to understand how murderous and primitive his hosts were. Arrigoni, as an Italian, was deliberately suspending his own notions of fairness and decency by participating in ISM. He assumed that his Palestinian hosts were doing the same. He didn't realize that people like Hamas and Tawhid and Jihad are not suspending principles of fairness and decency. By Western standards, they don't have any. By being in ISM, Arrigoni was defying Italian social norms. The Arabs who killed him were acting out Palestinian social norms, not defying them.

Arrigoni went to Gaza hoping Palestinians would be killed so he could use their deaths as propaganda for his cause. And the Palestinians who killed him did so to use his death as propaganda for their cause. The word for that is "justice".

But wait, it gets better. His captors didn't just kill Arrigoni. They tortured him first. According to the Palestinian doctor who performed the autopsy, while his hands were tied behind his back and before being strangled, Arrigoni was beaten above and behind the ear with a sharp heavy object. So the theory that he was being held as a hostage for exchange goes awry. Especially with his having been strangled six hours into a thirty hour deadline. So the line between political violence and random murders thins to invisibility for the Left's fair-haired boys?

After Arrigoni was kidnapped/arrested, T & J took credit for his abduction and sent an ultimatum to Hamas demanding the release of their leader. After Arrigoni's body was found, T & J denied having abducted him. Hamas, for its part, claimed Israel had kidnapped and killed Arrigoni. Since the alternative was to admit their control of Gaza appears to be slipping, that was the best Hamas could do.

Clearly these people need, deserve, and ought to have a state of their own in which to rationally and responsibly work out their destiny as a community. And I guarantee you that that is exactly what the UN General Assembly is going to vote to do some time this year.

For Jews, the temptation to laugh up one's sleeve at a European Israel-hater being beaten and strangled by Arab Israel-haters, the very people he supposedly had gone to Gaza to help, is strong. Fortunately we are too mature and forgiving to do that. (snicker) (chortle) (yuk yuk yuk) HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!


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11 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:01 AM

    He was killed by a tiny unrepresentative group, dissidents against Hamas. But don't let facts get in the way of your sick amusement over the torture and death of a fellow member of the human race, or indeed your general bigotry and ignorance.

    I suppose if the KKK kill a black man that probably means that the KKK represent the viciousness of the American people?

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  2. Anonymous has at long last stumbled on an intelligent thought, albeit in the course of denying it. Could there have been a Ku Kux Klan if racism had not been widespread in the South? While only a few percent of white Southerners actively participated in the Klan, a large fraction of them, probably a majority, strongly agreed with the Klan's racism.

    Similarly, could there be active hate and terror organizations in Palestinian society if a majority of Palestinians did not strongly agree with them?

    A recent poll by a Palestinian newspaper found that one-third of Palestinians supported the recent cold-blooded murder of Jewish small children including babies. One can safely assume that the number approving the cold-blooded murder of adult Jews is a large majority. Presumably they would have little objection to murdering a stray Italian or two as well if that were convenient.

    Yasser Arafat once shrewdly observed that the Palestinians would win because the Jews valued life above all whereas the Palestinians were in love with death. One might add, generally that of others, though occasionally even their own deaths.

    Arafat was partly right. In the end the Palestinians will lose. But everything we see of the two peoples suggests that he was exactly right about them both.

    As to Anonymous' deep compassion for "the torture and death of a fellow member of the human race", I admit he is the better and more moral person than I. I remember vividly Anonymous' active participation in the demonstrations in cities all over Europe and the Arab countries in protest of the wanton murder of the Fogel children and their parents. I remember his impassioned speech in front of the O'Connell monument in Dublin decrying the brutal murder of Jewish children.

    Wait, none of that happened. I take it all back. Anonymous is the same stupid lying hypocrite and asshole everyone who knows him says he is.

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  3. Anonymous10:24 AM

    Listen here dickwad, I'll condemn the murder of anyone, I am at heart a pacifist. The point is that your amusement at the death of a person - any person - is the kind of thing you would find on a far right website. The tragic irony is that ultra zionism and fascism hold a lot of common ground, particularly in its disregard for human life.

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  4. "I'll condemn the murder of anyone" but when it's Israelis who are murdered you DON'T.

    When has there been a march or demonstration in Dublin or in any European capital protesting the murder of Israelis? When has that ever happened? Name one instance.

    Oddly enough none comes to mind.... So with all due respect, Anonymous, you are a liar, a hypocrite, and a racist pig.

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  5. Anonymous12:12 PM

    I am a member of a small Hebrew-phile organisation (Which includes famous British Jews like Stephen Fry and Daniel Badiel) that is actively opposed to the Palestinian solidarity nutters, and supports the secular pro peace movement in Israel. Or I suppose the Israeli Labour Party are anti semitic too? Stop finding scapegoats you fascist thug, its the staple formula of every extremist organisation ever created to invent an external pariah to keep members meek and submissive.

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  6. Actually, Anonymous, you are the worthless piece of shit liar and troll, Christy. Christy, why don't you get a life? Or at least a job?

    Not to mention how invincibly stupid you are. If you were actually a member of an organization you would give its name. If you had even half a brain you would have made up a name. You are too stupid even to lie credibly. Instead you use the same ignorant invective and abuse that people like you are forever reduced to.

    Since your position is based solely on bigotry, you have no facts and no reasons. You are reduced instantly to invective because you have nothing else to say.

    One might object that I have written invective at the beginning of this comment. The difference is that those are facts - you, Christy, really ARE a worthless piece shit liar and a troll. Ask anyone you know -- they will confirm it.

    Actually the leading secular pro-peace movement in Israel is the government. The Israeli government has offered the Palestinians a state in return for peace and recognition no fewer than seven times publicly, and one knows how often privately. And the Palestinians have refused every time.

    The problem lies in the definition of peace. To Israelis, peace means the two state solution, and that is what has been proposed every time. To Palestinians, peace means a one state solution, Palestine and no Israel.

    And so of course, all the lying Anonymous-Christie bigots in the world abuse the Israelis as extremists for forcibly declining to be destroyed. Whereas the murderers of the Fogel family, whom the lying racist bigots somehow forgot to denounce or demonstrate against, are to them moderates.

    Did you know Christie that the murderers have been arrested? Their DNA was found at the murder scene and they have confessed. They are members of an organization which is part of the PA. The Palestinian moderates.

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  7. Admirer of Fascism2:48 PM

    Yes, we must indeed isolate all of the Muslims on a small 'strip' of land, maintain them in their open air prison, and then 'release the hounds', as it were.

    You are my hero, Kessler.

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  8. Unsurprisingly, Christie is such an ignoranus that he does not know that Gaza borders not only Israel but also Egypt. If it is such a prison why don't the inmates escape through the open door of the border to their brother Arabs' country?

    Once again, those are mere facts and we can't expect a moron bigot like Christie to even pause from his ignorant mouthings to consider them. Like his fellow anti-Israel bigots, he is all mouth and no brains.

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  9. Admirer of Fascism3:42 AM

    Yes Kessler! We must attack the Egyptians too! Together we can enforce the Muslims to be obedient to us! They can be our slaves! Death to the Mahomedean! Death to Islam!

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  10. Christie, you are too stupid to realize when you are making even more of a a fool of yourself than usual. You claim Gaza is a jail created by Israel. Yet the door of its border with Egypt stands wide open.

    Your last remark shows that you are descending from ignorant bigot to straight-out babbling imbecile.

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  11. Admirer of Fascism9:48 AM

    So when will the Nuclear first strike hit Cairo?

    ReplyDelete