Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
14 August 09
One of the first signs we were heading into an era of insanity was when some years ago Ariel Sharon, before he became prime minister, said something like this: Israelis must understand that we aren’t the grasshoppers, the Palestinians are the grasshoppers.
Anyone who was interested in understanding the statement in context—or who knew much about Jewish history—understood that Sharon was referring to the famous Biblical passage about the spies and the land of Canaan. Most of the spies came back and offered a very pessimistic report, insisting that the Canaanites were so powerful that the children of Israel could never defeat them. Compared to them, they said—with two dissenting voices—we’re like grasshoppers.
In Biblical terms this is presented as a lack of faith in the deity. Archaeologists say, and this makes sense, that when the Israelites saw the guards standing on top of the walls of Canaanite cities, they looked like giants looking down at the seemingly tiny Israelites below, and hence the grasshoppers' reference.
So what Sharon was saying is: Don’t be afraid. We’re the stronger party and we’ll win.
What happened though was an international controversy calling Sharon a racist for comparing Palestinians to insects.
I had a parallel experience, albeit fortunately more restricted, when a somewhat cracked former diplomat gave me similar treatment for saying that Arafat paced his cabin at the second Camp David meeting like a caged animal. That actually was a direct quote from an interview with an American official, quite friendly to the Palestinians by the way, who was there.
So the way many people try to win an argument nowadays is to try to find a single sentence which can be taken out of context to condemn someone, thus allowing people to ignore hundreds of pages of evidence and logical argument.
In contrast when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said—according to the official Iranian translation—that the Iranian regime was going to help wipe Israel off the map, there was a learned discussion, including an extensive New York Timesarticle, about whether he actually said it and what it actually meant.
Double standard? You bet.
And does the mainstream media tell its readers/watchers/listeners about the daily stream of abuse coming at Jews--including as children of pigs and monkeys--daily produced by the media, schools, mosques, intellectuals, political groups and rulers of pretty much all Muslim-majority states? And is there any discussion of what this implies about their leading figures, the origins of terrorism and radicalism, or the low likelihood of real peace?
You already know the answer to that one.
Anyone who was interested in understanding the statement in context—or who knew much about Jewish history—understood that Sharon was referring to the famous Biblical passage about the spies and the land of Canaan. Most of the spies came back and offered a very pessimistic report, insisting that the Canaanites were so powerful that the children of Israel could never defeat them. Compared to them, they said—with two dissenting voices—we’re like grasshoppers.
In Biblical terms this is presented as a lack of faith in the deity. Archaeologists say, and this makes sense, that when the Israelites saw the guards standing on top of the walls of Canaanite cities, they looked like giants looking down at the seemingly tiny Israelites below, and hence the grasshoppers' reference.
So what Sharon was saying is: Don’t be afraid. We’re the stronger party and we’ll win.
What happened though was an international controversy calling Sharon a racist for comparing Palestinians to insects.
I had a parallel experience, albeit fortunately more restricted, when a somewhat cracked former diplomat gave me similar treatment for saying that Arafat paced his cabin at the second Camp David meeting like a caged animal. That actually was a direct quote from an interview with an American official, quite friendly to the Palestinians by the way, who was there.
So the way many people try to win an argument nowadays is to try to find a single sentence which can be taken out of context to condemn someone, thus allowing people to ignore hundreds of pages of evidence and logical argument.
In contrast when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said—according to the official Iranian translation—that the Iranian regime was going to help wipe Israel off the map, there was a learned discussion, including an extensive New York Timesarticle, about whether he actually said it and what it actually meant.
Double standard? You bet.
And does the mainstream media tell its readers/watchers/listeners about the daily stream of abuse coming at Jews--including as children of pigs and monkeys--daily produced by the media, schools, mosques, intellectuals, political groups and rulers of pretty much all Muslim-majority states? And is there any discussion of what this implies about their leading figures, the origins of terrorism and radicalism, or the low likelihood of real peace?
You already know the answer to that one.
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