Toulouse attacks harm Palestinians
An interesting take on Israel & the Toulouse attacks.
Toulouse attacks harm Palestinians in their own name
Charles Glass
It started in France in 1894, when a Viennese journalist covered the Paris treason trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. "In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism," Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary. "Above all, I recognised the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism." That futility led him to propose an escape from anti-Semitism to a nation-state in Palestine.
Topic IsraelPalestinian TerritoriesAnti-Semitism has returned to France with the murders at a Jewish primary school in Toulouse of a teacher, his two young children and a third child. The killer was a small-time hoodlum-turned-jihadist named Mohamed Merah, who told police during their 32-hour siege of his apartment that he was avenging the killings of Palestinian children by Israelis.
Merah's crimes were more complicated, as he had in the previous days killed three French paratroopers who, like him, were Muslims of North African origin. Their murders were Merah's protest against the French military presence in Afghanistan. His other claim to police was that he wanted to bring France "to its knees".
France has not been brought to its knees, and Merah has done the Palestinians only harm. Few would have predicted in 1895, when Herzl was writing The Jewish State, the lasting harm of his solution to what he called "the Jewish problem". In 1948, three-quarters of the indigenous population of Palestine were expelled. The refugees still live in the wretched camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. Israel banished thousands more in 1967 and, ever since, has demolished houses and seized land to achieve what the Palestinian scholar Edward Said called its goal of "more land, fewer Arabs".
Herzl's solution to one problem created another, but the root causes of both were the same: not a "Jewish" problem, but anti-Semitism itself. Where anti-Semitism flourishes, Jewish communities will understandably consider the option of emigration to Israel. The Israeli state offers immigrants subsidised housing and other benefits that make settlement in the occupied West Bank a more attractive option than buying an expensive flat in Tel Aviv.
As a result, Palestinians lose their farmland and livelihoods. This is no secret in Israel, the territories or abroad, where the US taxpayer funds the land-theft and dispossession process. Why, then, do so many who claim to support justice for the Palestinians succumb to the virulent anti-Semitism that is the cause of their woes?
Those who daub swastikas on synagogues, desecrate Jewish graves, taunt Jewish children in schools and exclude Jews from their clubs commit crimes against Jews and Palestinians alike. The demagogues and militants who make Jewish people outside Israel feel insecure force them to consider the option a majority of them have until now rejected: moving to the Jewish state and, possibly, settling on land stolen from Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
When Salim Fayyad, the nominal prime minister of the non-state that is Palestine, condemned Merah's murders, it was in the interests of Palestinians. "It is time for those criminals to stop exploiting the name of Palestine through their terrorist actions."
A previous Palestinian leader, Haj Amin Husseini, did his people no favours by taking Hitler's side in the Second World War in the perverse belief that Palestine's Arabs faced a threat from the Jewish people rather than from the anti-Semitism that drove them out of Europe. Until the mid-20th century, the Muslim world took pride in the Ottoman invitation to the exiled Jews of Reconquista Spain to settle in its Arab dominions. There, they were welcomed and often flourished.
Zionism had never taken root in Baghdad, Yemen, Morocco and the other centres of Judaic culture in the Arab world. After Israel was established in 1948, the Arab regimes, like Merah, took revenge on the blameless by expelling their Jewish citizens. Sephardic and Iraqi Jews gave the new state the demographic ballast it needed to fill the towns and villages emptied of their Palestinian inhabitants. It was an own goal that hurt both the Palestinians and the Arab world's Jews, who lost their homes and wealth.
In Toulouse's Place du Capitole last Friday, more than 4,000 people honoured the innocents who were shot by Merah. The participants, like the victims, included French people from Jewish and Muslim backgrounds. Pierre Cohen, the Socialist mayor, told them: "Toulouse, this is not us … because Toulouse is a world of welcome, a world of generosity."
Unlike in the days of Dreyfus, when Anti-Semitic Leagues formed in France, Merah's killings have engendered mass support for France's Jewish population - including from the country's most prominent Muslim leaders. Things have changed since Herzl's time, even if killers like Merah make it hard to convince those whose children, fathers and husbands are dead.
With champions like Mohamed Merah, the Palestinians' enemies can relax.
Charles Glass is the author of several books on the Middle East, including Tribes with Flags and The Northern Front: An Iraq War Diary. He is also a publisher under the London imprint Charles Glass Books
http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/toulouse-attac...
If belief (or religion) would be made a strictly private thing, there wouldn't be any problem anywhere. Unfortunately religion (or belief) is misused to serve the ruling classes since the beginning of time!
It's crimes like this that bring about disrepute and disgrace to an entire race/religion/nation. Makes me truly wonder then if the perpatrators are really that thick to imagine such acts will strengthen their cause. As a Muslimah, as much as my heart goes out to those poor murdered kids(may God grant them paradise and their killer what he deserves) I can't help but feel afraid as to what this will do to Muslims living in the Western world. It's only going to further isolate them, make various politicians only feel it's right to strip them of their rights to practice Islam, and increase crimes of hate against them, Audubillah! And all the while the world will just become a more hateful place with extrmists and haters of all kinds doing what they feel is right to avenge each other *sighs*
Israel is the big winner out of all this.
Was this on the news when Muslim soldiers were killed? No.
But kill 4 Jews and France declares a day of mourning and it's a national tragedy.
And all over the world we see headlines about another Islamic Terrorist and more calls to ban veils and halal meat and mosques and minarets and korans.
Good work.
What abt the Intelligence Failure in this Attack???
Merah was Handled by DCRI Intelligence Service for Years and was under 24 hours Surveillance by the French Intelligence...
Who have Gained from this Terror Attack, Obviously Israel, though Countries are still denying the Fact that Jerusalem is the Capital of Palestine and Israel has Illegally Occupied the Land....
time will tell abt the losers all is written
I agree with you Brit. And I agree wholeheartedly with the article.
If crazy (or not crazy) people run around Europe shooting at Jews because of crimes committed in Israel/Palestine, where do you think all these Jews will go?
Palestine.
And whose land will they live on?
The Palestinians'.
So in a way it's extremely selfish for European and American 'activists' to chase Jews out of one country in protest over crimes against the Palestinians, since it is the Palestinians who will be the eventual losers.
I don't agree that it harms the Palestinian cause. What he did was totally wrong and cannot be condoned. It is an act of mindless violence against innocents, but in a perverse way, does bring about reminder of the Palestinian and Jewish issues..
remarkably, even Salim Fayyad has denied this criminal.
Yes I did DC, and the gist of the article remains the same. The people who murdered her did more to hurt their cause than help it.
umm. did you see this? http://news.yahoo.com/iraqi-woman-attacked-california-home-dies-040216192.html
thanks now email this to all the US / UK or western soldiers
The definition of psycho is:
The terms psychosis and psychotic are very broad and can mean anything from relatively normal aberrant experiences through to the florid and catatonic expressions of schizophrenia and bipolar type 1 disorder [5] Despite this, psychosis is a term generally given to noticeable deficits in normal behavior (known as deficit or negative signs) or more commonly to the florid experiences of hallucinations or delusional beliefs. People experiencing psychosis may exhibit personality changes and thought disorder. Depending on its severity, this may be accompanied by unusual or bizarre behavior, as well as difficulty with social interaction and impairment in carrying out daily life activities. It is also important to note that psychosis usually refers to negative expressions, that is paranoia, stereotypy etc. rather than ecstatic experience such as religious ecstasy, though with such a broad term, there are no hard and fast rules.
Also there is psychopathy:
Psychopathy (/saɪˈkɒpəθi/[1][2] from the Ancient Greek ψυχή "psyche", -soul and πάθος "pathos" -passion) is a personality disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others and the rules of society. Psychopaths have a total lack of empathy and remorse, and have very shallow emotions. They are generally regarded as callous, selfish, dishonest, arrogant, aggressive, impulsive, irresponsible, and hedonistic.
There is no consensus about the symptom criteria for psychopathy, and no psychiatric or psychological organization has sanctioned a diagnosis of "psychopathy" itself.'
So yes, the guy would be a psycho. However that should not absolve him from guilt.
Anyway, that is not the point, the point was that by trying to exact revenge on Jews for the Palestinian cause, he has in fact, made the Palestinian situation worse.
after the shooting or killing happens the person is declared as a psycho
is he a psycho LP?
in the school shooting, he chased the 7 year old daughter of the principal for more than 10 min, discarding all the other children around, than in the courtyard he graped her but his pistol jammed, he calmly picked up another arm to shoot the 7 year old in the tempes at point blank, than just left! he didn't shoot randomly; this poor 7 year old girl and the 2 sons of the rabby just outside the school.
it was premedited, but not random.
Exactly Fubar (nice to see someone read the article!)
It's similar to the idea that the more western countries, such as France, push Muslims (and other minorities) to the fringes of society as a way to try and get rid of them, or to force them to 'integrate', the more likely it will be that they will coalesce into hate filled ghettos.
thanks LP for clarification
I consider Palestinians to be the people LIVING in Palestine (a nation). The title says the people are being harmed by this, not the image of the nation.
Any killer is a "psycho", Babu!
LP u will notice any killings done by non muslims are called as psychos
MM, it says it "harms Palestinians". Now, if you don't consider the Palestinians a nation, then it's your view.
How should I know, Babu.
Who is saying anything about damaging the image of a nation LP?
i heard even the Norwegian was a psycho is it true LP ?
One person cannot damage the image of a whole nation! The Norwegian killer has not damaged Norway as a whole. One person can only damage the image of a nation if the image IS already damaged!
thanks to the neighbors of Palestine for making the situation worse
I agree Khanan, he was a psycho. However I think the author makes a point that anti-semitism only makes the situation in Palestine worse.
act and should not represent the whole Palestine issue.
He acted lonely, out of depression, furstration and some psychological breakdown. Can his actions be compared to to the lone marine who killed innocent civilian in Afghanistan??
it was sad loss of innocent lives.
what happend to BG ?
Did you actually read the article or did you just read the headline and make a stupid comment?
peacefull country till now not even 1 mosquito killed by israelis & americans