Lara Logan should take solace in the fact that, at least, her rapists weren't racists...or something
By Daniel Greenfield
Hen Mazzig had been a member of Israel’s
most left-wing party. But that didn’t prepare him for the sheer level of Israelaphobic craziness
that he would encounter on campuses in the Pacific Northwest.
This
year, from January through May, I went to college campuses, high schools, and
churches to tell people about the history of modern Israel, about my experience
growing up in the Jewish state, and about my family. I also always spoke about
my military service as an officer in an IDF COGAT unit that attends to the
needs of Palestinian civilians who are not involved in the conflict and
promotes Palestinian civil society.
That
went about as well as expected. Especially when BDS was involved. BDS rhetoric
makes Nazi rhetoric look sensible and reasonable because it taps into whatever
dementia is in the air.
At
a BDS event in Portland, a professor from a Seattle university told the
assembled crowd that the Jews of Israel have no national rights and should be
forced out of the country. When I asked, “Where do you want them to go?” she
calmly answered, “I don’t care. I don’t care if they don’t have any place else
to go. They should not be there.”
When
I responded that she was calling for ethnic cleansing, both she and her
supporters denied it.
And
during a presentation in Seattle, I spoke about my longing for peace between
Israel and the Palestinians. When I was done, a woman in her 60’s stood up and
yelled at me, “You are worse than the Nazis. You are just like the Nazi youth!”
A
number of times I was repeatedly accused of being a killer, though I have never
hurt anyone in my life.
On
other occasions, anti-Israel activists called me a rapist. The claims go beyond
being absurd – in one case, a professor asked me if I knew how many
Palestinians have been raped by IDF forces. I answered that as far as I knew,
none.
She
triumphantly responded that I was right, because, she said, “You IDF soldiers
don’t rape Palestinians because Israelis are so racist and disgusted by them
that you won’t touch them.”
You’re a rapist? You’re not a rapist? Why
do you hate Palestinian Arab women? Why won’t you rape them? You’re a racist!
Hen Mazzig blames American Jews for not
being more vocal, but this particular piece of crazy actually originates from left-wing academics in his own
country.
According
to Dr. Gurevitch, This was a very serious paper that asked two important
questions: Is the relative lack of IDF rapes a noteworthy phenomenon, and if
so, why is it that there are so few IDF rapes when in similar situations around
the world, where rape is so much more common?
The
abstract of the paper, authored by doctoral candidate Nitzan, could not find
instances of rapes of Palestinian women by the IDF it sought to find, so it was
decided that the paper show that “the lack of organized military rape is an
alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals.” It continues, “In the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape
merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic
differences – just as organized military rape would have done.”
Ergo,
Nitzan could not find any cases of rape by IDF soldiers of Palestinian women
even though Palestinian media constantly accuses Israeli soldiers of this.
Apparently distraught over such findings, Nitzan had to twist her thesis to
attribute the lack of such rapes to a governmental program instilling in IDF
soldiers that the Arab women are sub-human or inferior.
This demented Catch 22 lunacy, or Reverse
Rapism, as some have called it, won an award at Hebrew University. The people
who endorsed it were likely to have been Meretz members or at least sympathetic
to its position.
Tal Nitzan has since compared the media
and internet criticism of her “Israeli Soldiers are Racist for not Raping” to…
being raped.
“Media(ted)
rape as a terror-inducing method
“From
my distanced position in Canada, the public responses to my thesis seemed in a
way similar. Obviously the effect on my life was not even remotely similar to
the physical and mental suffering these women and their relatives went through,
yet the mechanism used and the cultural logic behind it were quite similar.
“A
crowd of self-appointed state representatives, joined by a mob of concerned,
patriotic citizens gathered to defame my problematic character and disturbed
personality. Yet this wasn’t enough. A body had to be dragged into the main
square. It was examined, evaluated, mocked, ridiculed and then publicly and
repeatedly raped as a combined act of punishing me and terrorizing others.
“Modern
technology allows public events to be seen beyond the traditional spatial and
temporal limitations… Hundreds of people, maybe more, gathered to defame me and
my work… as an external distanced observer I could see the terrorizing and
disciplining message it sent feminists, left-wing supporters and society as a
whole.”
Then Tal Nitzan went on to defend Ariel
Toaff, another left-wing academic, who claimed Jews drank blood.
Tal Nitzan’s brand of anti-Israel crazy
apparently percolated throughout academia and confronted Hen Mazzig. The whole
thing is an example of how the international left works together to demonize
Israel.
But there is good news for Israeli
leftists. Muslim Arabs in the West Bank are far less racist
than Israeli Jews and far more willing to rape despite ethnic differences.
One
activist, who in the past used to frequent the protests in the West Bank but no
longer participates, told Haaretz, “Two years ago we had a meeting of women who
took part in the struggle against the occupation. It took place in an apartment
in Jerusalem, and disturbing things were brought up. Nearly all the women that
attended told of cases of harassment or discrimination.
This
correspondence, along with other testimonies obtained by Haaretz, tells of a
wider phenomenon of sexual harassment and assault of Israeli and foreign
protesters in the West Bank. In the past two years, at least six incidents were
recorded in the West Bank and East Jerusalem: two in Sheikh Jarrah, four more
in the Mount Hebron area, in Masra, in Kfar a-Dik, and an alleged case of
attempted rape in Umm Salmona, near Bethlehem, that was revealed in Haaretz.
Recently,
a special forum was started by a group of women from leftist groups for the
purpose of dealing and monitoring such incidents.
Israeli leftists should welcome these
acts of tolerance. And this call by an Egyptian female lawyer to sexually harass Jewish women as an act of
resistance.
Interviewer:
Egyptian lawyer Nagla Al-Imam has proposed that young Arab men should sexually
harass Israeli girls wherever they may be and using any possible method, as a
new means in the resistance against Israel.
Nagla
Al-Imam: First of all, they violate our rights, and they “rape” the land. Few
things are as grave as the rape of land. In my view, this is a new form of
resistance.
Interviewer:
As a lawyer, don’t you think this might expose Arab youth to punishment for
violating laws against sexual harassment?
Nagla
Al-Imam: Most Arab countries… With the exception of three or four Arab
countries, which I don’t think allow Israeli women to enter anyway, most Arab
countries do not have sexual harassment laws. Therefore, if [Arab women] are
fair game for Arab men, there is nothing wrong with Israeli women being fair
game as well.
I’m sure Judith Butler is writing up an
enthusiastic call for involving the LGBT community in this new daring form of
anti-racist activism.
Damned if you do.
Damned if you don’t.
http://tinyurl.com/k33xyho
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