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Freeman’s admirers
After quoting two of Charles W. Freeman’s anti-Israel, pro-terrorist statements the other day, I added:
I don’t normally read Scott McConnell’s magazine, The Palestinian Conservative, but I’m sure Freeman has become its number one hero.Indeed he has. Writing at TPC, leftist Phillip Weiss describes Freeman as an American hero and a martyr to America’s “totalitarian” prohibition of any “criticism” of Israel, while Patrick Buchanan, in an article of such lowness you feel dirty reading it, paints a lurid picture of the sinister “Israel lobby” sinking the innocent Freeman. Neither Weiss nor Buchanan quotes any of Freeman’s actual remarks that have made him objectionable to any non-Israel-hater who reads them. Look at just the two I provided the other day. Freeman regards Israel as a uniquely harmful country whose oppression of the Palestinians is the main cause of Muslim terrorism in the world, and he says that Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians justifies Muslim terrorism against Israel. In a September 2005 speech to the The National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, Freeman said:
The fact is, of course, that Israeli occupation and settlement of Arab lands is inherently violent. Occupations are acts of violence. The dispossession of people from their land is an act of violence. Preventing people from coming to and going from their own country is an act of violence. And as long as such Israeli violence against Palestinians continues, it is utterly unrealistic to expect that Palestinians will stand down from violent resistance and retaliation against Israelis.In other words, for keeping in place the security measures that are absolutely essential to prevent Palestinian terrorists from killing Israelis, Israel is violent. Which is the same as saying that Israel, by the sheer fact of existing and defending its existence, is violent. This is the mere “criticism” of Israel for which Buchanan claims that Saint Freeman is being crucified by the Elders of Zion. Furthermore, Buchanan argues that Freeman was attacked because he “said aloud what few privately deny: Reflexive support for Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people is high among the reasons America is no longer seen as a beacon of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world.” The heavens weep at such an unjust characterization. It’s as though the peace process—during which Israel in the desperate, deluded hope of reaching a settlement with the Palestinians allowed its own citizens to be transformed into clouds of flying body parts by Palestinian suicide bombers, year after year—never occurred. To call Israel a “repressive” country when in reality it is a country of naive liberals who bent themselves over backward to give the Palestinians a state and weren’t able to because the Palestinian don’t want a state, they want to destroy Israel; to ignore all that history and portray the Israelis simply as oppressors, as an outlaw people deserving the world’s fury and contempt, indeed, as Charles Freeman has put it, as a people deserving of being blown up and killed by terrorists, is an act of unregenerate evil that makes the Israel haters worthy of inhabiting one of the lower circles of hell. March 18 LA writes:
I have sent a copy of this article to Patrick Buchanan. Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 18, 2009 12:43 AM | Send Email entry |