By Vic Rosenthal
You are probably sick of reading about how the leaders of the anti-Zionist movement — that is, the leaders of the effort to dispossess the Jewish People from their state and end their right to self-determination — are Jews. The irony has warn off by now, and the man-bites-dog stories have turned into dull, routine dog-bites-man copy.
In fact, probably even the ‘rabbi vs. Israel’ theme is old hat today, what with Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the anti-Zionist rabbinical students, and last but not least, Rabbi Brant Rosen.
So this guy, Rabbi David Mivasair, of Ahavat Olam of Vancouver BC doesn’t seem remarkable. Just another anti-Zionist who happens to earn his living by being a rabbi.
But he may be the first rabbi to actually attempt to justify the firing of deadly missiles into southern Israel. In this video taken at a demonstration in favor of the flotilla to Gaza, Rabbi Mivasair speaks from about 03:00 to 06:15. Here are some of his remarks:
There’s really no justification whatsoever for a blockade in Gaza. Just absolutely none whatsoever. There’s over 150 million absolutely innocent people who live in Gaza. Most of them live there only because their homes and villages were taken from them and destroyed in 1947 and 1948. They fled and the place they ended up was Gaza.
Of course the population of Gaza is more like 1.6 million, but never mind — what’s a factor of 100 if your heart is in the right place? He argues that the blockade of Gaza is unnecessary because “the Palestinians can smuggle rockets in through tunnels.” Therefore, Israel should not try to prevent unrestricted access for the genocidal Hamas to all kinds of weapons, explosives and terrorists! This is as crazy as his population estimate.
Whenever we read about … I have to say about a puny, ineffective rocket fired into some place like Sderot, something to think about is very likely that very likely the people firing it are the children or grandchildren of people who perhaps once lived in Sderot. But it wasn’t Sderot, it was a Palestinian village that had existed there for centuries that had several hundred people who were forcibly expelled at gunpoint and when the place was empty, then Jews moved in and built a town…
OK, try to follow this. Because the Palestinian Arabs were allegedly expelled by force from Israel — something which in fact is true of only a very small number out of the 650,000 who fled after their leadership started a war whose aim was to kill or disperse the Jews — then it is understandable that their descendents try to kill Israelis, since their rockets are puny and ineffective and have so far only killed a few tens of people! Of course some of their rockets are military-use Grad missiles, not puny and ineffective at all, but never mind that either. And never mind what they could and would do if there were no blockade.
Rabbi Mivasair — “Reb David” to his congregants — gives us more of his ideology in a blog post he wrote in 2010:
The writer [of a right-wing sermon] avoids any mention that both the US and Israel might have done something to elicit such enmity [from radical Islamists]. It is as if it arose spontaneously, a completely irrational aberration in human thinking, with no relationship whatsoever to anything that the USA and Israel have ever done…
The lachrymose emotional appeal of the piece is an attempt to lead its readers to ignore Israel’s near total dispossession of the entire population of Palestinian Arabs, 43 years of brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, decades of occupation of southern Lebanon, massively disproportionate lethal attack on Gaza only two years ago and other continuing acts of aggression. It is not Israel’s mere existence which has led to growing enmity but rather Israel’s actions. Similarly, the reader is expected to forget current US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and decades of history, for instance, that the dictatorial regime in Saudi Arabia which produces Wahabi extremists and exports “radical Islam†is itself a direct creation British imperialism at the end of World War I and would not have survived without United States support.
‘Reb David’ suggests here that Arab wars and terrorism against Israel, as well as 9/11 and other acts of terrorism against the US are the results of the actions of Israel and the US. Is he unaware that 9/11 and various other terrorist attacks on the US were perpetrated before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? So Osama bin Laden was justified in murdering 3,000 Americans because of US support for the Saudi monarchy? What about the hundreds of Americans murdered by Hizballah in the 1980’s — was that justified by then-current American policy to try to stabilize Lebanon?
With regard to Israel, the learned rabbi accepts word-for-word the Arab narrative of dispossession and expulsion, which for the most part never happened. And he doesn’t mention the long history of violence by Arabs against Jews in the land of Israel which goes back at least 100 years and includes several major wars — wars which, by the Arabs own words, were intended to destroy the Jewish state — and an unending string of the most vicious and brutal terrorist murders, more often then not with Jewish children as targets. I’m sure Rabbi Mivasair can explain why 2-month old Hadas Fogel deserved to have her throat cut, too.
I expect that Rabbi Mivasair can list ‘atrocities’ against Arabs by Israelis as well — except that his list will be made of exaggerations and outright lies, just as the “massively disproportionate lethal attack on Gaza” was nothing of the sort, and indeed was carried out in order to stop a massive and lethal attack on Israel.
I don’t know why Mivasair and others like him believe every word that comes from Arab sources but none from pro-Israel or pro-US ones. I don’t know why he hates Israel and America so much that he thinks a few thousand [not so] “puny and ineffective” rockets striking civilian populations, or a small number of aircraft dumping burning fuel into buildings are understandable, if not justified. I don’t know why he so loves the ‘Palestinian people’ who would cut his throat like Hadas Fogel’s if they could.
Perhaps what the Jewish people needs is a massive army of psychiatrists to deploy throughout the world (Israel too) and deal with the problems of the Mivasairs before it’s too late.
Technorati Tags: Israel, Rabbi David Mivasair
It is not very pleasant reading about yet another anti- Jewish Jew, or perhaps better Jew- hating Jew.
As a people we seem to specialize in ‘righteous indignation’ often totally misplaced, part no doubt of our Prophetic heritage. I suspect here it may be combined with a little latter- day Trotskyism. Everyone has to be more moral than the next, even at the price of common sense, and basic decency.
As for the contempt for factual reality this surely makes this particular hater even more contemptible.
Your last sentence, Vic, says it all…….. Oy……
Once again, you hit the (depressing) nail on the head.