Peter Beinart is an Intellectual Fraud
Peter Beinart is an Intellectual Fraud

Everyone, including Abbas, knows that were Israel to withdraw, Hamas would eradicate Fatah and Abbas as they did in Gaza.
For those who have not heard of Peter Beinart, he is the ultimate in self-hating Jewish American "wunderkinds" who make a living by spewing vile falsehoods about Israel. Beinart is one of the biggest Jewish supporters of the boycott divest sanction (BDS) movement and Obama's nuclear-appeasement of Iran in America and the world. 

As are all Jewish BDSers, Beinart is either totally clueless about Israeli military security, or is using his Jewishness as a cover to try to push Israel back into "Auschwitz" borders so as to enable Israel's enemies to take over the Jewish state.

Beinart's latest piece of venomous bile came in his defense of two ultra-left New York Reform rabbis who, along with Beinart and 50 other self-hating and useful-idiot American Jews, wrote to New York Mayor de Blasio, after the Mayor met with AIPAC, saying that, "AIPAC speaks for Israel's hard-line government and its right-wing supporters, and for them alone; it doesn't speak for us." 

I, too, have criticized AIPAC. In 1994, when AIPAC lobbied to put US troops on the Golan Heights, and even more recently.  And, if AIPAC ever attempts to lobby to put US "Peacekeeping" troops in the "West Bank", I will criticize them yet again.  Anyone has the right to criticize AIPAC on the substance of a particular issue at hand.  But, Beinart went on to state that "To use the language of democracy to defend Israeli policy in the West Bank is linguistic fraud." 

I claim that Peter Beinart is an intellectual fraud.

First, the "West Bank" was taken over by Israel in a defensive move during the 1967 War.  On June 5, 1969, King Hussein related in his autobiography, “My ‘War’ With Israel”, that he had been tricked by Egypt into believing that Egypt had already decimated the Israeli Army and was advancing into Israel.  Israel, through UN General Odd Bull, warned King Hussein of Jordan not to intervene and Jordan would be left alone. King Hussein scoffingly disregarded Israel's warning relayed through Odd Bull and offensively attacked Israel before Israel made a single military move into the "West Bank".  The King's Jordanian forces attacked the Israeli "Mount Scopus in Jerusalem," "increased . . .[Jordanian] heavy artillery-long range 155's on the Israeli air force installations in our [Jordan's] line of fire," and launched a squadron of "Hawker Hunters" in a "combined operation with the Iraqi and Syrian" air forces against Israel. 

Only after Jordan's offensive barrages did Israel defensively respond.  In Israel's counter-attack, Israel gained control of the "West Bank" up to the Jordan River. In 1969, King Hussein self-authored his autobiography, "My ‘War’ with Israel", specifically detailing all of these events and how foolish he was for believing the Egyptians. 

Point one: Israel's current presence in Judea and Samaria is a result of a purely defensive war and as internationally legally valid and tenable as the 1948 armistice lines.

Second, let us put aside all of Israel's plenipotentiary rights under and from UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the additional facts that the Arabs rejected the Partition and waged wars and terrorist acts on Israel for over 20 years before 1967.  If, after US forces occupied Germany in World War II, had the Germans (or the Japanese for that matter) refused to sign an unconditional surrender and instead had continued to commit terrorist acts against US troops and continued to call for America's annihilation, would America have had every right to stay in Germany?  Of course it would have.

In fact today, America still, in a sense, "occupies" Germany and Japan by maintaining military bases in those countries.  And, on the contrary, at the original occupation, Germany and Japan admitted they lost, unconditionally surrendered, and then proved they held no continued intent to attack the United States and there existed no possible act (terrorist or otherwise) which could harm a single American. 

So, ab initio, Beinart is an intellectual fraud when he writes as though Israel's presence in the "West Bank" just happened yesterday and that there are no imminent existential military and security issues attendant to Israel remaining in Judea and Samaria. (And also, unlike Israel's historic claims and San Remo Conference justification to Judea and Samaria, in the German and Japanese examples, there was no pre-World War II American claim to either of those two countries.)

Using the United States of World War II as a model of "democracy," Israel should first demand a Palestinian Arab unconditional surrender as a pre-condition to any peace talks. Israel should hold "Nuremberg Trials" for all the genocidal war-crimes and crimes of all the Palestinian Arab terrorists (most especially including the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre Terrorist Paymaster Mahmoud Abbas) for all the terror acts committed since Israel's inception and before that.  

Beinart  proceeds to engage in a greater "linguistic" and substantive intellectual fraud.  In the heart of his article, Beinart goes on the following truly "Orwellian" rampage:

"Where is George Orwell when you need him? Democracy means government by the people.  Every single person in the West Bank lives under the control of the government of Israel. . .  The Israeli government controls the West Bank’s borders. It controls the airspace. It controls the currency. At times over the past decade, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have elected representatives to a parliament.  In 2012, the Israeli army placed the speaker of that (now-defunct) parliament under arrest.

"My point is not about whether Israel has valid reasons for controlling the West Bank. It is merely that Israeli [sic] does control the West Bank. And it can only do so because Palestinians, who comprise more than eighty percent of the West Bank’s residents, cannot vote for the government that controls their lives.

"That’s why defending the legitimacy of Israeli policy in the West Bank by citing one’s belief in democracy is so Orwellian. Because Israeli policy in the West Bank is premised on the West Bank not being a democracy. Were the West Bank a democracy, it would cease being under Israeli control."

Beinart is prevaricating.  The Palestinian Arabs not only twice freely voted for a national parliament, but also twice for a national "President."  And what Beinart purposefully omits is that in 2005 the Palestinian Arabs freely voted for a Hamas-controlled Palestinian national parliament where Hamas' charter swears to the destruction of Israel.  (The PLO's charter is still unamended and still calls for Israel's destruction but that's a separate issue.)  So, imagine if while America still occupied post-WWII Germany, the Germans freely voted back the Nazi party where the newly elected Nazi government was sworn to and openly called for the destruction of America.  In such a case, would America's continued indefinite "occupation" of the new Nazi Germany disqualify America as a "democracy"?  Of course not.

Beinart's bait-and-switch "Israel isn't a 'Democracy'" scam is as follows:  Beinart first righteously pontificates abstractly about a Palestinian Arab "democracy" to clueless American Jews.  Everyone, including Abbas, knows that were Israel to withdraw, Hamas would eradicate Fatah and Abbas as they did in Gaza.  And, Beinart knows Hamas and its "West Bank" state will try to annihilate Israel. 

Under this false 'I love Israel' veneer, Beinart is knowingly attempting to concretely empower a "Hamas West Bank Terror State". It's as if Beinart is saying, "I'm 'Jewish', and I care about Israel so much, that to cure Israel of its ‘non-democracy,’ I have to first kill it by ‘democratically’ creating a terror state."  Beinart's disconnection of his notion of ‘democracy’ from the reality of democratically-elected Hamas/Fatah terrorists proves Beinart doesn't care about democracy, or even about the Palestinian Arabs.  Beinart is only obsessed about bashing Israel.

Beinart also implies that Israel is the reason Abbas hasn't put the Palestinian national "presidency" up for a vote. Abbas has illegally over-stayed his term as President by several years and his entire claim to being a "president" is a fraud.  Abbas is refusing to stand for presidential elections and violating his own constitution because Abbas knows he'll lose to Hamas.  The entire notion that the Palestinian Arabs are capable of electing a non-violent non-Jew-hating "democratic" government is Beinart's total intellectual fraud to begin with. 

And there doesn't exist today a single Muslim government in the world that could even be called a "democracy."

The key to exposing Beinart's real intellectual fraud is his sentence, "My point is not about whether Israel has valid reasons for controlling the West Bank."   Here, Beinart has finally written a truthful sentence.  Beinart's essay has nothing to do with Israel's "valid reasons for controlling the West Bank."  Pray tell, why not?  If Beinart really cared for Israel, "Israel's valid reasons for controlling the West Bank" should have everything to do with Beinart's "point."  The fact that Beinart admits his entire argument has absolutely nothing to do with "Israel's valid reasons to control the West Bank" proves Beinart is an Israel-hater and a Jew-hater wearing the false guise of a caring Jew who trades on Jewishness to give him license to libel, boycott, and bash Israel.  Beinart's gives non-Jews total cover to libel, boycott, and bash Israel too.

As a coda, even Beinart's reference to "Orwell" is intellectually fraudulent and Orwellian. Beinart quotes Orwell as saying, “Things like the continuance of British rule in India can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties."  Beinart wants his readers to equate British rule in India to Israeli control of the "West Bank".   If Orwell knew intellectual frauds like Beinart were twisting his words and equating the military threat of Mahatma Gandhi of India to Great Britain from 4766 miles (7671km) away to the threat of a Hamas-Katyusha-rocket-West-Bank-state inches away from the 9-mile-wide democracy of Israel, Orwell would be spinning in his grave. 

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