A hat tip to Peter Beinart, An answer to Mondofront... and anti-Zionists

What more can anyone really want? Well at least if they want controversy that is.

The Progressive Zionist gives a huge hat tip to Peter Beinart who absolutely skewered anti-Zionists in his strong piece; The Pro-Palestinian Left's Hamas Blindspot over at Open Zion:

This tolerance for certain brands of thuggery is an old story on the left. At its core is the belief that anyone who battles “imperialism” can’t be that bad. Fatah, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas, which controls Gaza, are both repressive. So why does Electronic Intifada direct so much more bile toward the former than the latter? Because Hamas is unequivocally hostile to Israel, the “imperialist” power, while Abbas and Israel are—from Electronic Intifada’s perspective—in cahoots. The yardstick, in other words, is not how a Palestinian group treats its own people but how it treats Israel. If it exhibits sufficient hatred of the Jewish state, Electronic Intifada overlooks its flaws. But if a Palestinian leader cooperates with Israel, Electronic Intifada amplifies his misdeeds because it sees the ultimate author of those misdeeds as Israel itself, the one and only true enemy of Palestinian human rights between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. 

We’ve seen this before. In the 1930s, many in the old left excused Joseph Stalin because he opposed capitalism. In the 1960s, many in the New Left excused Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh because they battled American hegemony. Since the Cold War, some in the anti-globalization movement have excused Hugo Chavez for the same reason. In each case, the character of the people fighting Western imperialism didn’t really matter; what mattered was that they were waging the fight. Similarly, many on the global left overlook the misdeeds of Hamas, which is, after all, Palestine’s version of the religious right, not because it has the correct values but because it has the correct enemies.

Of course, being "drilled"  by Beinart did not sit well with the crew over at MondoFront (we call it MondoFront due to the fact that the articles and commentary mostly trade in anti-Semitic memes that are popular on the neo-Nazi site Stormfront, and Mondoweiss is quoted there freely), who sent Adam Horowitz and Seth Roth to write a "response". It is this response that I want to address.

The gist of the MondoFront rebuttal relies on a few things. The first is that they feel as Americans they should criticize Israel because Israel is a "client state" of the U.S. while Hamas is not. They go further to say that because they are Jews, they should be criticizing Israel and really not worry about Hamas. The problem with this argument is that it is a flat out lie.

Here Horowitz and Roth mantain:

We occasionally cover internal Palestinian politics, but it's not a focus of the site. If the U.S. government were funding Hamas we'd feel differently, and if there was a propaganda and lobbying effort in the U.S. to justify and promote oppressive Hamas practices we would cover it. But this isn't the case.

But this is not true. U.S.aid goes directly towards funding the Palestinian Authority government AND helping the Palestinian people who at this point in time (according to Polls would vote to put Hamas in charge of their government. Also, the U.S. is the single largest contributor to the United Nations and the U.N. spends a lot of money directly aiding Gaza. So while the U.S. does not directly fund Hamas, money that it donates to both the Palestinian People directly and in the form U.N. aid does fund Hamas.

The second part of that statement is a bold faced lie. There very much is a propaganda effort sustained in this nation to justify and promote Hamas' oppressive practices. Just look at any major leftist or hard rightist blog sites (when I say Hard Right I mean sites like The Daily Paul, Stormfront, davidduke.com and others). Article after article after article shows up condemning Israel for any slight infraction or supporting every outright lie about the nation. Yet when it comes to Palestinian infractions (or any Islamic country in the MENA, see Syria for example), nary a word is said. If that is not a propaganda effort then I am not sure what one is.

Another lie that the MondoFront owners and participants spread is that they and their neo-Nazi commentators (who post on "screened blog") don't just criticize with an eye towards "improving" Jewish or American policy, they comment under the guise of "human rights activists". They assume the mantle of protectors of human rights for all people. NOT just Palestinians.

But this argument is easily turned aside by the fact that not only do they not give a crap about how the Palestinians are actually treated by their own people or by neighboring Arab nations, they don't give a crap about the Jewish peoples legitimate rights to self-determination. They don't care one bit about the fact that the Hamas charter is rife with genocidal rhetoric. They don't care one bit that Hamas represents a theocratic hard right regime that would restrict the rights of women and would not tolerate the presence of minorities.

They criticize Beinart here:

We stand with and support Palestinians working to make Palestinians society more equitable, and have published pieces to this effect, but we don't see it as our place to dictate to Palestinians what their society should look like. We demand rights for the Palestinian people that they demand for themselves.

Well the Palestinian people support Hamas and their values. If they want to call themselves (or be taken seriously as) "Human Right's Activists" they should stand up for all human rights not just the cop out to what Beinart accurately portrays as anything that smacks of "anti-Western imperialism".

But more than this. As a Useful Idiot, Horowitz (and other apologists like David Harris Gershon) are completely blind to the fact that while "demanding the rights of the Palestinian People" they subject the Palestinian people to incredibly repressive forces. Not much "Human Rights" activism there now, is there.

BUT even more than that exactly what are the rights that the Palestinian People demand for themselves? I mean what they demanding when they actually vote for Hamas. Has Horowitz ever read the Hamas Covenant. where they demand all of the land from the Med. to the Jordan. Or where they demand the right to kill all of the Jews (which ironically would include Horowitz, Roth, and Harris Gershon)? Are those the rights they demand?

Where does that leave the rights of Jewish people? Apparently out in the cold. Of course, they don't feel they should dictate to the Palestinians how they should run their government, because they agree with the goals of the Palestinian polity (One State from the Med to the Jordan, sans Jews). But they do feel the right to demand how the Israeli people should run their government without any regard for Israeli democratic institutions.

Beinart is dead on in his Open Zion commentary in this case. I am not 100% with him on certain things (though I do respect the guy), but, his argument about anti-Zionist sites like Electronic Intifada and MondoFront  is dead on.