A Kestrel for a Knave

Our Israeli correspondent MC returns with some thoughts on the latest round of BDS publicity, as represented by Stephen Hawking’s recent decision to cancel his visit to this year’s Presidential Conference in Israel.

A kestrel for a knave
by MC

So once more the idea of Israel as an apartheid state rears its ugly head, but I look around me, and it is not the same. I lived in South Africa during the apartheid era, and I do not see the trappings of apartheid here. What I see is the implacable hatred emanating from Israel’s enemies all around, even to the deceiving of the very elect.

Seldom has there existed on the planet a group of people with huge resources and a hatred going back thousands of years. This is a group who can buy hatred from their fellow men.

They can buy the sort of hatred that forces itself on elderly disabled physicists who just want a quiet life.

It is a shame that wealth can buy double standards. It is a shame when those bought-and-paid-for double standards are applied by people who should know better, but it is not unusual for greedy and ambitious people to apply double standards to things Jewish. It is something Jews learn to live with from an early age.

Think of the nations that violate human rights, day in, day out. Think of the Australian woman locked up for a year in Dubai for the severe crime of being a rape victim. Is this not a human rights violation that should invoke a similar response from British academia?

No, because the perpetrators are not Jewish. It is strange how Nazism once more raises its ugly head. It is strange how boycotts are once more a weapon against Jews. And it is strange that the great and the good do not have the integrity to remember the last time.

But then there was no last time, was there? It was a ‘hoax’. The Nazis were just putting Jews in labour camps with swimming pools. The Zyklon B was for ‘decontamination’ only. Those videos of the bulldozers were because there was not enough food to go around. The death marches were to try and save the Jews from the Russians, blah blah blah.

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement needs to compare itself to the Nazis — they will find huge commonality in attitude and methodology. But they are perhaps even more ignorant than the Nazis, for the Nazis had a good working knowledge of History, while BDS Socialists do not.

“To what degree British anti-Semitism, the anti-Israel BDS lobby and legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies are related is an inordinately complex question, but it is clear that anti-Semitism plays a role among some BDS supporters.” — From Occam’s Corner, hosted by the Guardian.

The legitimacy of Israel is based upon three rock solid foundations:

  • The treaty of Lausanne 1923 providing for a national home for the Jewish People in Mandate Palestine,
  • United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947, and
  • The fact that nascent Israel was able to beat off the Arab invasion in 1948, and form and maintain a legitimate state.

Any one of these three foundational acts alone gives Israel legitimacy. The object of the League of Nations object the Palestine mandate was to create a self-governing Jewish state. The object of United Nations Resolution 181 was to create a self-governing Jewish state. The 1948 war was a war of aggression by the Arabs. They lost and have been bleating about it ever since, but as a result Israel became a de facto self-governing Jewish State.

As for the ‘Naqba’, Israel did not even have a vote! And if you make war and lose, then — tough!

Israel is not the only state in this world to come into being through partition and bloody war. The Partition of Pakistan/India cost some three million lives, and tensions are still high. Pakistan annexed (occupied) part of Kashmir and have built ‘settlements’ there. Indeed there are many similarities between the two situations. But Jews attract animosity, while Pakistanis do not. Minority groups in Pakistan attract vicious civil rights abuses, while a Muslim in Israel has the same civil rights as I do, upheld by law.

So I challenge the Israel BDS group to prove that they are not anti-Semitic by telling the next country against which they are going to launch a BDS campaign. Or do they just want to finish the task their Nazi progenitors failed to complete?

NB: The novel whose title was borrowed for this essay, A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines, is available on Amazon.

21 thoughts on “A Kestrel for a Knave

  1. Powerful and so true, I believe in never again and will support Israel until the day I die, and it saddens me to see so many Europeans showing their short memories and developing anti-semite attitudes similar to the Nazi’s, actually they are Nazi’s and I have utter contempt for them.

  2. How painful it is to observe the developments of the last 20 years and to note the similsrities with the period preceding the appointment of Hitler to the Chancellorship of Germany! Anti-Semitism is springing up all around us. The huge levels of Muslim immigration into the West means that there is nowhere for Jews to go when the genocidal intent of the Islamists starts being expressed. How can an upcoming tragedy of mammoth proportions be avoided?

  3. I would think that the historical presence of the Jewish people in this region for more than 3,000 years would constitute a rock solid foundation. (Yes, I know most of them lived somewhere else for much of that time.)The claim of the Jews to Israel predates any Christian claim by more than a thousand years and any Muslim claim by more than sixteen hundred.

  4. Ah, BDS, a favorite weapon of the left, one they use ad nauseam eternitatem. A suggestion for keeping the acronym but changing the words to the Bullies’ Dynamic Syndrome.

    I’m sure our readers can come up with better substitutes. The threat to bully someone into agreement by impoverishing them is the tactic of despots and tyrants. It says that the end justifies whatever means one chooses to employ to defeat people who differ from you.

    Disgusting.

  5. It’s unhinged Zionist propaganda like this that spoils this site.
    Comparing Stephen Hawking to Nazis? Pathetic.

      • Bully for you mate! You are one of the best writers in the blogosphere. Your articles are interesting in the extreme and factual to the nth. Keep them coming.

    • OK, no response, this is a comment with a lot of venom and little substance, a sort of verbal einsatzgruppen.

      This is a standard ‘grade A’ catty remark of the leftist ‘intelligensia’,
      if you lack the gumption to challenge the statement, then belittle it and lie about it.

    • Apparently you’re too blinded by your unhinged hatred of Israel to read very carefully. The article presents Hawking as someone who “just wants a quiet life” but has been exploited by others to be an instrument of their own unhinged hatred.

      And apparently you haven’t found a factual error in this “Zionist propaganda,” since you didn’t mention any.

    • Well Elton John showed the way, pity Stephan Hawkings was not so brave… And you are the Nazi, you are likely to be a Socialist so you are half way there, actually what is the difference between an International Socialist and a National Socialist, very little in fact!

      • You raise an important point, I am a social nationalist, or a national socialist, but my brainy brother is an international socialist . There SHOULD not be much difference, but he
        definitely thinks that there is a World of difference between our two outlooks. When we DO talk it through we always end up with him wanting a World without borders and me insisting that we must have borders or the World cannot be governed properly. At that point we stop talking as we can’t move the argument anywhere else. It would be easy to assume that Obama is an international socialist, but only a fool would be able to ignore the other agendas emanating from his policies.

  6. As a physicist by both training and passion, I’ve always found Stephen Hawking to be an irritant. He is the Paris Hilton of science, someone famous for being famous. If he weren’t such a freak-show in his disability, he would have been a no-body as far as the media is concerned.

    How smart is he really? We don’t know. As a young man, he was an incredibly brilliant and promising mathematical physicist. And before is condition set in, he did some very original and ground breaking work on the nature of black-holes But none of his theoretical predictions regarding things like “hawking radiation” have been confirmed either experimentally or by astronomical observation. Since then, he hasn’t published any original work in his field in maybe 40 years!

    Regarding his communication, it can take 5 –10 minutes for him to form one sentence using his computer assistant. That text is edited by others, and then gets played back on live interviews to make it look like he can still communicate normally. It’s all a show

    Physically, he is completely and utterly dependent, 24/7, on a team of support people that have to bath him, dress him, feed him, and even change his diapers for him. It would be very easy for someone in this position of dependency to start echoing the thoughts and opinions of those that he is (for his very life) dependent on.

    • You’ve nailed it.

      He’s no longer a free soul — he’s a ‘going concern’ — economically not much different than circus freaks two centuries ago.

      Hence, the persistent weird ‘publicity campaign’ which puts his imprimatur on all things Leftist — from atheism on down.

      Be assured that his handlers didn’t want to make the trek, hence his ‘utterance.’

  7. After the Holocaust, the Jews decided to provide for their own survival. So they built a nation, a very successful nation, and did have great contributions to the world, and their neighbors.

    However, others are consumed by hate so much that their judgement is clouded. Try this thought problem. Israel is destroyed and uninhabitable by some act of war. Israel is gone. What happens next? Dollars to donuts, the neighbors will just continue fighting each other, and destroying each other. Israel is not the problem, the neighbors are the problem. Israel is not going anywhere. Get over it.

    • Your time line is bent: Zionism — as a modern movement — dates to the 19th Century.

      The Jewish desire to get out of Europe — the Pale in particular (Western Russia) — was intense long before World War One.

  8. BDS is nothing but a Palestinian hoax with minimal support in the mainstream. Most people are capable of realising that Israel has acted as civilly as possible, considering that they were and are attacked by Palestinians on a daily basis, and are forced to respond to prevent further attacks. Certainly, most of the world’s states do worse but attract little-to-no mention on the world stage. China regularly performs full-blown atrocities (Tibet occupation, political prisons, forced abortions, liberally-distributed death penalties, etc.) but it’s merely accepted because Chinese people do not have the double standard that Jews have suffered under for much of their history. North Korea does not attract as much disapproval as Israel. This is the same thing we’ve seen through all history: if a non-Jew does something, that’s just them. If a Jew does something, that is all Jews. Apply it to reasonable retaliation, something any modern State would do, and it becomes uniquely a property of Israel. You can call it anti-Zionism, as so many enlightened folk do, but this is an anti-Semitic double standard wearing new clothes.

  9. @DaffersD – “I believe in never again and will support Israel until the day I die…”

    **And so will I.**

  10. A informative and stimulating thread! Kudos to all, except that [insults redacted] Daniel. But then [insults redacted].

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