A fisking

A great example of why Robert Fisk is so hated on the right. Cogent, truthful and to the point. The Israelis are not the Nazis of the Middle East. Nor is Israel a close parallel with apartheid South Africa.

But the Israelis do some bad things. And their treatment of the Palestinians has been shocking, and in some quarters is motivated by pure racism.

Fisk is absolutely right about Ahmedinajad. If he was a Mossad agent, he couldn't do a better job of discrediting everyone who opposes Israeli policies and creating sympathy for Israel. He espouses the same bad logic that Israel itself uses in a perverse way. Israel says we suffered once, never again. And takes that to be a justification for wrongs that it does. Ahmedinajad says you did not suffer, so why should Palestinians suffer because of the suffering you did not suffer? He seems to be saying, but if you did, you would be justified.

Well, no they would not. It's understandable that the Jewish people should feel a desire for security (although less so that they should couple it with an insistence that their homeland be in a place in which insecurity is practically guaranteed; I would buy this line of reasoning much more readily if Israel was next to Alberta rather than Jordan) because of what happened. (And it did happen. It is not, despite what neo-Nazis and their kin claim, a sacred cow of our age. It is open to question in the same way that any other hypothesis is. You look at the evidence and the observations and you see what fits. There is an enormous body of evidence that suggests that there was a Holocaust. Opposed to that is, erm, nothing. Deniers say "you can't prove it" because they cannot be shown a video or six million photographs of people's being killed. But they can be shown manifests, testimonies, the camps where it happened. Cynically, they suggest that there were not millions of dead because there aren't millions of corpses. Well, quite. It's like my claiming I couldn't have murdered my wife, even though no one has seen her for a year, because I took the precaution of dissolving her in an acid bath. To suggest that it didn't happen requires the suggestion that millions of Jews are simply lying about having missing relatives, that those who say they were in the camps are lying: Occam's Razor does not permit that explanation though. I'll explain why briefly. When you consider a message, you can think about a couple of dimensions (among others): its speed of transmission and its breadth of coverage. These are, of course, how quickly people receive the message and how many people receive it. We live in an age of mass communication, in which a message can be shared almost instantaneously, so that the speed of transmission can be very rapid, although it should be clear that some receive a message directly, others indirectly, so that the speed of reception is not uniform. The breadth of coverage is determined by considering how many people have access to the means of reception of the message and then how many of them actually do receive it. With any message, there will be those who receive it more slowly than others -- as I noted, those without the means of direct reception will receive it second hand -- and those who do not ever receive it. This is obvious. If a piece of local news does not receive wider coverage, it will not reach everyone. So some people will be, let's call it, "off message". They either haven't yet received the message or haven't any means to receive it. (Some will not have understood the message or will have received it in a garbled form, but for the purposes of this discussion, we are charitably assuming perfect transmission.) So here's the problem for the conspiracists: how, in an age without the interwebnet and without television, and with no discernible means of mass communication, did the "myth" of the Holocaust so rapidly and completely spread among the Jewish people? Why was no one "off message" shortly after the war? Okay, let's agree that not everyone was surveyed and that only motivated Jews came forward to give testimony. Now we have to think about how people are. They are never homogenous. There is no one way that English people think. No one way that French people think. Someone will think x and someone else will think y. X might be quite widely held but there is always a y. Where's the Jewish y? Where are the principled Jews who refuse to lie? The conspiracists suggest they have all been conned by an immense conspiracy. But the numbers of people required to create that conspiracy is enormous. And all involved must know that they are lying. Researchers, historians, soldiers, administrators, relatives of the people murdered. All in cahoots. How are they coordinating their stories though? Again, without a means to communicate rapidly and tracelessly, how did they achieve it? Our governments cannot successfully lie to us about anything. We find them out because they leave the means of communication behind them. But the people who "invented the Holocaust" did so without leaving a trace. You have to say to the conspiracists, okey dokey, the Jews invented the Holocaust, but dudes, if they did that *so well, so efficiently*, we probably should let them run the place. Readers of this blog will know that my answer to people who claim that Jews want to dominate the world is that given their belief in the value of knowledge and of culture, and the enormous, disproportionate contribution they have made because of that belief, I and anyone else vaguely sane would welcome it.) But that desire for security should not translate into a "whatever it takes" mentality. Nor is having suffered a carte blanche for causing suffering. Victims everywhere seem to think it is; this isn't restricted to Israel. Serbs excuse their outrages because of the outrages of the Turks; Kosovans excuse theirs because of the outrages of the Serbs; Islamists theirs because of the outrages of the Americans; the Americans theirs because of the outrages of the Islamists. And so it goes.

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:59 pm