Beyond debate

'Who Are the Real Nazis? With Hamas, Hitlerism comes to the Middle East wearing the mask of anti-Hitlerism.

‘Go back to the oven! You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

This is what one young woman thought passed for acceptable discourse during an anti-Israel rally last week in, of all places, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Other chants were similarly unlovely. You can watch it on YouTube if you like.'

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjRiODVjOGExYjM5YjhhMmQ1YTMzMzkzYTZlNWY0Njg=&w=MA==

I don't want a blue-on-blue incident here, but I don't think this article approaches a decent confrontation with the things being said by the Israel-haters. There is no sense of scale. At one end of the scale, we have the kind of debate participated in by English MP's and government ministers in the House of Commons in the 1930's. Learned, polite, well-reasoned, thoughtful and humble. Full of gravitas, but also the salty truths of bitter experience. Then, on the other extreme, we have what the arabs (and now their proxies in the west who copy their thoughts and syntax) do.

I'm in Norway at the moment, and yesterday lunchtime I got into a debate with a Norwegian about Iraq, George W Bush and Gaza. It got quite animated at times, but absolutely no one was rude, no personal insults were launched, no scatalogical launguage was employed, and no vaunting hyperbole either. It didn't end with threats to murder, just a gentle agreement to continue to disagree.

What the arabs do has nothing to do with debate. Debate has certain basic rules, even if those rules are somewhat flexible. What the arabs do is invent the most heinous lies they think they can get away with (there is a lot of cunning and triangulation involved), hedge them around with threats, and keep spitting them into peoples faces for as long as they can get a forum to do so. Their proxies in the west have modelled their own behaviour and 'argumentation' on this rabid diatribe. For those foolhardy enough to go into the minutiae of their rants, there is precious little to refute. Most of the assertions made are self-evident garbage. Most of the salient facts are left out.

What really marks out the Israel-loathers is their murderous hatred. It used to be that rallies in the West Bank or Jordan would be characterised by blood-curdling threats and vicious abuse; whereas the rallies in Europe and America would be much more genteel and 'reasonable-sounding'. That is no longer true. A high percentage of the 'protestors' in London this time were pakistani and somali youths, the same ones who wore mocked-up suicide vests and carried placards saying 'behead those who don't accept islam' in previous 'demonstrations'. Their Israel-hate is not moderated in any respect by the desire to appear liberal (in the old, true sense of that word). It is visceral and full of murderous intent. It is the same primal hatred the nazis used so successfully in their demolition job on German politics and culture.

We need more bite and stronger words to describe the behaviour of our enemies. Where are our Tom Paines? Mark Steyn is good, but seems to be preoccupied with something. But this piece by Jonah Goldberg is really hopelessly flaccid given the current state of affairs. We need people who get how far beyond decency, beyond civilisation, beyond any possibility of connection to debate the haters of Israel have travelled.