"Disgusting" pro-palestine rally?

Zionism threatened by truth?

The Spectator: London’s pro-Palestine rally was a disgusting anti-Semitic spectacle
Yet they pretend to care about Muslims.

The above article is so ad hominem that I hardly know where to begin.

First of all, Palestinians are not all Muslims, though I grant that Muslims, like Christians, like many Jews, like atheists/agnostics/humanists, can discern Occupation and Apartheid when they see it.

Secondly: it's traditionally been seen as the duty of an occupied people to resist in whatever way they can.

Thirdly: to keep harping about Hamas - especially now that Hamas and Fatah have recently established their own detente - and the "thousands" of rockets - relatively harmless given the stats of Israeli deaths/injuries versus Palestinian deaths/injuries - is to ignore the massively lethal/maiming effect of Israel's routine military assaults on Palestinians.

Is it just a coincidence when multiple Israel apologists toss out terms like "anti-semitic" and "thousands of rockets" and "tens of thousands" of Israeli military deaths, without any backup references at all - or are these articles merely a Hasbara collusion? * See footnote

Take this well-schooled excuser, for instance. In attempting to neutralize this straighforward opinion piece, he employs all the common pity pleas to justify what's been done to a group of people who never did anything to deserve it except try to maintain a foothold on their own lives and livelihoods, while being deliberately pushed to the limits of their endurance - and yes, by sometimes desperate, if ineffective means.

We're all in agreement that terrible things have happened to Jewish children. They and millions of other innocents the world over have been casualties in all of the wars since the one that ended Hitler's assault on Jews and gays and the mentally challenged and gypsies and so on - glibly touted as "the war to end all wars".

Untold numbers of young soldiers died to help save Hitler's victims, or came back home physically injured and/or mentally screwed up. I, as one small child among millions, did not meet my own father until I was almost six years old, and he came back from WWII a wrecked man who sometimes made my life a living hell.

Does that give me the right to hate?  Or to deprive anyone of what I feel would compensate me? Or even to try to extract pity? Certainly not. But I sure hate war, and I hate Occupation/Apartheid as well, because it's screwing up even more fathers (and their kids) on both sides.

You want "disgusting"?  How about the language (some? most?) Jewish apologists for Israel use while dissing "goys", "shiksehs" and Ay-rabs (let them eat pork, haha) - and even those they feel are "lesser" Jews, like Mizrahi or Sephardic -  when they think they can speak freely. No doubt (some? most?) of Palestinians have choice epithets for Zionists, but certainly not for Jews en masse since they know they have Jewish supporters who frequently take it on the chin (like this guy), and they are grateful.

Zionists know this as well, and they don't like it, but, as always, lacking any kind of rational justification, they have invented another choice ad hominem:"Self hating Jew".

Add to all of this the gratuitous racial insults and threats made by illegal settlers, the imprisonment without charges of very young Palestinian boys, the house demolitions, restriction of food, water, electricity .... and on and on.

It's not such a big secret that Israel has the power to wipe out all of the neighbours it deems a threat, simply because they are not sympathetic enough about the "holocaust" to say, "Oh, well then, go ahead and push around anyone who gets in your way.

Like the bully on the block who tearfully cries after beating a schoolmate unconcious: "Well, his dad said my dad was a drunk" - there is absolutely no excuse for torturing one entity to avenge what was done by another.

And as for the complaint that completely innocent Jews were expelled from Arab countries, implying that tit for tat is okay, let's tell a bit more of the truth about that, shall we?

Was Zionism a happy gathering in of willing Jews, or was it not?  What about the Jews who really wanted to go to America, but weren't allowed to? Or those in Arab countries who felt okay where they were, until they were propagandized to believe they weren't so okay and deals were made by those countries with the Zionists - all to produce a majority of Jews in Israel, so Palestinians would have no power.

Jews were also "expelled" by Britain, in similar fashion. And if Israel ever does bomb Iran, it will be killing thousands of Jews who prefer to live there, rather than in Israel.

Not to mention that Putin and Netanyahu have come to an agreement about Russian Jews. Apparently, they've been leaving Israel in droves to return to Russia - for economic reasons - and that's the last thing Israel wants because numbers are everything in the power game. Putin has agreed to give Israeli Jews a pension, with strings attached, of course: they must give up their Russian citizenship.

Good for Israel, maybe not so good for Russian Jews in the long run - who knows? It probably won't cost Russia anything; I'm sure Bibi has made a reciprocal business offer that couldn't be refused.

And that's how it's done in the "expulsion" trade.

Israel and its Hasbara apologists need to wake up and smell the coffee. You can't indefinitely ghettoize and dehumanize a whole group of unwanted neighbours and expect the rest of the world not to recall that Jews were similarly isolated by the Nazis. So far, pointing out the irony is only met with ad hominems and pity bids.

Oh gawd, I'm about to quote Shakespeare again: The Israeli Hasbara team "doth protest too much, methinks." I suppose they get that a lot.

How about this: “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another". Whether attributable to Hillel or not, it's not an injunction aimed at non-Jews only. It carries with it the same message as "what goes around comes around".

If any of us wants to live in freedom, we must first demand and protect Freedom itself for all of humanity.

Additional Reading:

• Foreign Policy Journal:  Top Ten Myths About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 
• A Jewish Plea: How Can Children of the Holocaust Do Such Things?

Here's a fairly balanced news item with lots of photos of the London rally.

• Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters take to London's streets to demand 'equal rights' on the 100 year anniversary of the creation of Israel

* Hasbara: Why does the world fail to understand us?

• Hasbara is a form of propaganda aimed at an international audience, primarily, but not exclusively, in western countries. It is meant to influence the conversation in a way that positively portrays Israeli political moves and policies, including actions undertaken by Israel in the past. Often, Hasbara efforts includes a negative portrayal of the Arabs and especially of Palestinians.

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