Update July 3, 2018 two links added to watch film "The Lab" about how weapons technologies, purchased from the USA with foreign military aid, and used by the IDF with disproportionate force are later re-sold on the global weapons market in competition with USA military contractors (merchants of death). Update July 5 one more link added.
The late Charles Krauthammer wrote the first of three 'Iran as next Hitler/nazi regime' columns, syndicated here, with analogies setting the rhetorical precedent of a godwin's law loophole (exception) in 2006.
Here is the unpublished letter I (rustedaspie) sent that clarified misperceptions supporting Israel's hasbara of the 'weaker victim' narrative to some other conflict actor if not Palestinians.
The creation of Israel, the “successor state to Judea,” is said by Charles Krauthammer (May 15, 2006 print not online title “Israel’s Potential Downfall”) to have announced to the world that Jews will, after the Holocaust, resort to “self-protection and self-reliance” (self-defense). The first Jewish army in 2,000 years was the result.
But Mr. Krauthammer fails to tell the full story of how that Jewish army was built. The IDF emerged from the Palmach which smuggled weapons from anywhere it could beg, borrow or steal for resistance to British immigration limits (adding to Holocaust death tolls) and mandate (occupation of territory acquired in war albeit preceding the 1949 Geneva Conventions to define the mandate as such). And from the Irgun and Stern Gang [and Haganah] which incited and carried out attacks on Palestine’s Arabs (Palestinian Arabs) that quite likely spread as much collective fear from, the Deir Yassin massacre for example, as suicide bombings on buses, in discotheques, and in pizzerias spread among subsequent Israeli bus passengers, dancers and diners.
Attacks like Deir Yassin had an undeniable effect on the individual decision-making processes that resulted in the ‘voluntary’ decisions of many Palestinian Arabs to flee-becoming refugees-who have since raised families still living in exile today. That population flight is what is known among Palestinians in Arabic as “Naqba” and in English as “Catastrophe.”
The godwin's law exceptionalism, or loophole, was repeated in 2012. The second rhetorical precedent was praised in an echo-blog to get more clicks to viewpoint-friendly content, written by a Camera intern, not a paid staffer like Alex Safian, Andrea Levin, Tamar Sternthal, or Eric Rozenman here. Search engines will rank the content higher in keyword searches using words like “Iran” and “nuclear” and “bomb” to search engine users who may not even agree with the content initially but may be persuaded if they click on results without scrolling down and reading the two line summaries and mentions of the search term. Studies have shown that many search engine users only look at the first 1-3 pages of results, if that, to save themselves time.
Another site with the same goal as camera. org specifically urges readers to share their articles to get higher search result rankings in google searches.
Please consider clicking +1, Tweet, Like or linking to this article on your blog or website. This article is only effective if it reaches a large readership, especially through the Google search engine. Creating a link to this page with the text “BBC Hardtalk Norman Finkelstein” helps this article reach the first page search results for the term.
Three major ‘social media’ sites, twitter, google plus and facebook, were targeted by honestreporting. com to get more clicks from searches and post recommendations made by algorithms that determine user-interest that disregard agreement or disagreement as a practice of long term center-right drift after centrist-extremist politics.
The rhetorical precedent of a loophole in Godwin’s law, not to use nazi analogies in public IRL or online, discourse was repeated in 2018 when ‘President’ of the USA Don Trump violated the JCPOA by lying about Iran noncompliance to withdraw from the agreement. That withdrawal happened the week before Jerusalem consulate upgrade to embassy, announced in Dec. 2017, when the IDF/Israel Occupation Force killed over 60 nonviolent Gaza protesters who were acting as a culmination of Great Return March that started on March 30 and ended on May 15, 2018.
A question to ask, if one’s use of a nazi analogy is disputed or shamed, is why the selective tolerance of using nazi analogies.
Israel has engaged in near-apocalyptical warnings of Iran’s supposed imminent intent and capability to develop nuclear weapons since the early 1990s, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invoked “an extraordinary new threat from Iran” for the “immediate domestic political objective” of “providing political cover for Rabin’s moves for peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization,” according to Porter. But if Rabin’s warnings were meant to convince the Israeli public of the need to come to terms with the Palestinians to focus on a supposedly greater threat, then current Israeli preoccupations with Iran’s nuclear program are designed with the opposite effect in mind: to divert the attention of the international community from the failed “peace process” and Israel’s ongoing, illegal colonization of Palestinian land. It’s no coincidence that Israeli demands that the United States green light an attack on Iran intensified after the failure of short-lived, U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in fall 2010.
Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will bring a similar agenda to AIPAC’s annual policy conference and his meeting with President Obama in early March [2014]. Members of Congress attending AIPAC’s conference who will wildly applaud Netanyahu’s bellicosity, rejection of international diplomacy to resolve the standoff on Iran’s nuclear program, and advocacy for more sanctions on Iran would do well to read Gareth Porter’s book. If they do, they will learn that the U.S. policy objective “to ensure that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon and that its program is exclusively peaceful,” as stated recently by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman [link dead after administration and Secretary of State changes] in Jerusalem, is well within reach. But this will happen only if the United States acts in good faith and in its own interests—rather than those of Israel—in the negotiations to resolve outstanding concerns on Iran’s nuclear program.
Protecting the individual, or nation-state demographic majority faith, rather than producing a conflict-ending, final-status, binding agreement after over 25 years of ‘trusting the (peace) process,’ of the hypothetical victim in the analogy may very well be the likely basis of the Godwin’s law exceptionalism to legitimize patriotism and nationalism (zionism) toward one nation namely Israel. Israel's supporters should reconcile their conflict narrative, that Israel was created as a refuge to prevent a recurrence of events that started the analogies in the first place, with Palestinian negotiators who represent the interests of their peoples’ narrative of rapid ethnic and religious demographic majority change after mass refugee flight from individual harm in war, to finally produce a mutually-agreed upon outcome to a process.
A final status, conflict-ending peace is preferable to people predominantly standing in solidarity with the Israeli government side delaying the process and blaming ‘the other’ for the delay as well as repositioning Israel, and Jews, as a weaker victim in conflict with a stronger enemy such as an Iranian nuclear bomb, or ‘the spread of radical Islam/sharia law’ by radical ‘Islamists’ formerly called ‘Islamofascists,’ to invoke continuing the Cold War results of the second world war from 1939-45 into a Middle East ‘combat theater’ that only enriches the merchants of death. Those merchants of death are military and counterterrorism security (including state and local law enforcement technology vendors) contractors, for the IDF ( if linked text "the IDF" will not load please click direct link https://en.qantara.de/content/yotam-feldmans-documentary-the-lab-palestinians-as-guinea-pigs ), who sell and sometimes operate hardware, software, and private prisons to deny people freedom of movement of their bodies and goods for peaceful and legal free, and fair, trade. That denial of freedom of movement of people and goods also helps with securing the situation Oxfam has documented where 8 people
to 85 people
have enough wealth to end poverty 3 times over if the wealth were subjected to progressive taxation and a progressive budget appropriation and authorization process, in each of 190 nations on Earth, within annual fiscal year time frames for public budgets.
