Moral Equivalence v Methodological Equivalence

I made this point on Sunny Hundall’s Pickled Politics site in reference to a discussion of this article, I think it’s important:

If you compare OBL or KIJ to GWB a lot of people say you’re making a moral equivalence — and that can’t be right, OBL wants to incite a massive and bloody holy war between the West and Islam, KIJ is a brutal dictator. Whatever the merits of that argument, you can just bypass it by saying that you’re not making a moral equivalence but a methodological equivalence. That is regardless of moral intention if an agent or an organisation is willing to use terrorist tactics that makes them terrorists.

Where is the coverage of this on the BBC?

Found this link on Norman Finkelstein’s site (visit it everyday):

Israel’s Large-Scale Killing of Palestinians Passes Unnoticed by Patrick O’Connor

Excerpt:

Israel ’s shifting justifications are repeated with little skepticism by the mainstream media. First Israel said it was acting to stop Palestinians from firing homemade Qassam rockets into Israel, rockets that have killed just eight people within Israel over five years. Then Israel said it was responding to Palestinians’ capture on June 25, 2006 of a single Israeli soldier, though Israel holds 10,000 Palestinians captive. News reports currently suggest that the on-going Israeli attacks may jeopardize the soldier’s safe return. Now the Israeli government is again playing up Qassam rockets, and arms smuggling into Gaza as justifications.

Israeli reporter Amira Hass put Gaza arms smuggling in perspective, writing in Ha’aretz Daily on October 18 that, “what exists in Israelis’ consciousness is not the millions of cluster bombs . . . or the tens of millions of bombs and shells and lethal bullets stored in our arms warehouses and our gun barrels and the bellies of our helicopters and planes. Although the amount of such explosives is measured in the millions of tons, it is the 20 tons of explosives and the few thousand rifles that permeate the Israeli consciousness.”

Despite the fact that they have vastly inferior weapons, are killed in much greater numbers than Israelis, live under Israeli occupation and are having their land taken from them by Israelis, Palestinians are generally portrayed in the US as the aggressor. Ironically, under the much vilified Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, Palestinians have killed by far the fewest Israelis in any period during this six-year intifada, nineteen Israelis over seven months.

Hamas has largely maintained a ceasefire since early 2005, even as Israel and Western governments demand that Hamas renounce violence and recognize Israel , and the Western media repeats simplistically that Hamas is “committed to the destruction of Israel.” In the meantime, Israel is actually destroying the Palestinian people and any hopes for a Palestinian state through heightened violence and land seizure. But the world has been silent about Israeli actions.

The dominance of the Israeli narrative and of Israeli voices in the US [and British] media is one factor that allows Americans to maintain this hypocrisy. Rather than providing comparable information about both sides, Palestinian attacks and weaponry are over-emphasized, and the Israeli government line repeated. Comparative figures and analysis of the overwhelming numbers of Israeli missiles and bombs fired at Gaza and Lebanon of Israel ’s vast weaponry, and of the numbers of Palestinians killed, are typically harder to find.

British Jews Silent Over Prominent Israeli Anti-Arab Hate Figure

As a British Muslim you’re constantly expected to if not apologise for, then at least openly acknowledge and not excuse the excesses of Muslims around the world. Rightly, Muslims have been upbraided over their (relative) silence on Darfur, or over the disgusting treatment of religious and ethnic minorities in Muslim majority countries. Every supporter of the Palestinian cause, Muslim or otherwise, is constitutionally obliged to denounce acts of terror initiated by Palestinians – almost as a condition of criticising the Israeli government (sometimes it’s even implied in Western discourse that these acts of Palestinian terror put in question the legitimate demands of the Palestinian movement toward self-determination). Basically silence is not an option.

Strangely enough the demand is not so strict on British supporters of Israel, or on the British Jewish community, the majority of whom are zealous and ardent supporters of Israel. One recent example of this is obviously the ease with which numerous prominent British Jews could declare themselves openly for Israeli terrorism and slaughter during the Lebanese conflict; then there’s the mass starvation experiment being conducted in Gaza, and now we have the overwhelming silence from British Jewish quarters over the appointment of Israeli race hate figure Avigdor Lieberman to deputy prime minister of the Israeli government. Lieberman as several commentators have pointed out is regarded as the Israeli equivalent of Le Pen or Jorg Haider. Yet those same members of the Jewish community who were so faling over themselves to denounce Le Pen, or Haider are now notable only by their silence.

Lieberman, himself, is your common or garden demagogue, pandering to the hateful anti-Arab sentiments of many Israeli Jews — views especially strong amongst the Israeli Russian emigre community, of which he’s considered the spokesman– in order to build himself up a support  base. Referring to the Arab members of Israel’s Knesset he stated:

“World War II ended with the Nuremberg trials and the leaders of the Nazi regime were executed; not just them, but also their collaborators. Just as [Pierre] Laval in France was executed, I hope that this will be the fate of the collaborators in this house [the Knesset]. Just as they knew to mete out justice to Laval, thus should justice be meted out to you, in precisely the same way.” Quote from forward.com 

Lieberman is also a strong exponent of ethnic cleansing as a means of preserving the sanctity of Israel as a Jewish majority state. Leonard Fein writing for the Jewish Daily Forward has the following to say:

“His grand proposal is to slice off of Israel an area of dense Arab population, trading it for parts of the West Bank where Jews have settled. The idea of stripping a fifth of your citizens of their citizenship, in effect exiling them without requiring them to move (never mind that it would be a clear violation of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, a document of constitutional status), has a populist appeal.”

Where are the calls for British Jews to denounce this venemous racist?

Other Links:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3321341,00.html

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/780996.html

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=712521

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=11319

http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery11022006.html