Honored by Hatred: Elite Propaganda and U.S. Policy in the Middle East

But never mind all that. Before Bush went and screwed things up, we'd never given anyone in the Middle East cause to hate us.

There are no shortage of other examples of U.S. policies and actions in the Middle East that would incur the wrath of anyone who happened to be unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end, and yet Cohen would have his readers believe that the U.S. had little nothing to provoke hatred prior to 2001.

It's doubtful that this is due to ignorance and far more likely the result of dishonesty.

Cohen next attempts to demonstrate his objectivity by mentioning the slaughter of civilians in Sabra and Shatila in 1982. But he caveats his statement by saying that Israel only "allegedly" abetted this war crime. In truth, complicity was admitted.

The Israeli Defense Force, under then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, instructed the Christian Phalange militia to enter the camp.[11] Israel's commission of inquiry into the massacre, the Kahan Commission, found Sharon personally responsible and concluded that "it is impossible to justify the Minister of Defense's disregard of the danger of a massacre", adding that "this danger was certainly to have been anticipated".[12] After the onset of the slaughter, U.S. special envoy Morris Draper demanded of Israel that "You must stop the massacres. They are obscene.... You ought to be ashamed. The situation is rotten and terrible. They are killing children. You are in absolute control of the area and therefore responsible for that area."[13] Israeli writer Amos Elon likened it to "A man who puts a snake into a child's bed and says: 'I'm sorry. I told the snake not to bite. I didn't know snakes were so dangerous.' It's impossible to understand. This man's a war criminal."[14] Ze'ev Schiff, another well known Israeli writer, similarly commented that "whoever allowed the Phalangists to enter the refugee camps on their own can be compared to one who allows a fox into the chicken coop and then wonders why the chickens were all eaten."[15]

But Cohen's use of the word "allegedly" serves its purpose: Palestinians are evildoers who celebrate terrorist atrocities, while Israel is a good state worthy of our support despite occasional mistakes, real or "alleged". Presumably, U.S. support for the 1982 invasion of Lebanon of which the Sabra and Shatila massacres were a part were one of those occasions when U.S. support was "over the top"—but in the end, in Cohen's formula, necessary in order to adhere to our moral principles.

Besides our moral principles, we must also support Israel because "Israel is a legally sanctioned state, created by the United Nations in 1948." This, simply stated, is a fabrication—though an often enough repeated one that blame for its propagation cannot be placed with Cohen. The United Nations did not create the state of Israel in 1948. The U.N. neither has the authority to take land from one people and give it to another nor has it ever presumed to usurp such authority.

On November 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a non-binding resolution (only U.N. Security Council resolutions are legally binding) recommending the partition of Palestine, subsequent to the end of the British "mandate", into Arab and Jewish states.[16] Though Jews were a minority of the population of Palestine (608,000 Jews to 1,269,000 Arabs at the end of 1946), the plan apportioned a majority of Palestine, including most of the best land, to the Jews (approximately 56 percent to 43 percent). The Arabs, naturally, rejected the proposal. When the British withdrew from Palestine on May 15, 1948, the Zionist leaders under David Ben-Gurion unilaterally proclaimed the existence of the State of Israel.[17]

According to Cohen's logic, we must support Israel against the Palestinians simply because Israel is a "legally sanctioned state" while the Palestinians are stateless. The fact that this is a historical myth aside, it's instructive that according to Cohen's argument, it adherence to "principals" to support the oppression of one people over another based simply on the status of their statehood.

According to this formula, the U.S. should have supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq against the Kurds because Iraq was legally a state while the Kurds were stateless. How this position is reconcilable with serious moral principles seems a mystery, but this doesn't stop Cohen from laying claim to the higher moral ground.

In his effort to lay such claim, Cohen adds that Iran and various militant groups "fervently wish for Israel's destruction." Israel is thus the victim while its opponents are monsters which threaten its very existence. This is a dramatic departure from reality. First, even if were as Cohen says, the fact that some "wish for Israel's destruction" doesn't mean they are capable of destroying Israel.

Israel's existence has never been threatened, as history has demonstrated repeatedly, the most outstanding example of which was the June 1967 war.

Again, at that time, there was speak of a genocidal threat to Israel, a threat to the very existence of the state. Yet the outcome of the war was never in doubt, only how long it would take Israel to win a decisive victory. U.S. intelligence estimates were very near the mark and it took only six days for Israel to achieve its aim.

Second, the truth of this characterization is questionable. In one prominent contemporary example, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been widely quoted as having said that Israel "must be wiped off the map".[18] This translation uses the English idiom meaning "to obliterate totally",[19] and the quote has often been cited as proof that Iran harbors the intent to commit violence and wishes "for Israel's destruction", a veritable call for genocide.

The only catch is that Ahmadinejad never said any such thing.[20] He quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as saying, "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history." The context of his speech was concerning oppressive and illegitimate regimes, of which Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Shah's Iran were also included.[21] Even The New York Times, while incredibly defending their use of "wiped off the map" and suggesting

Ahmadinejad may have been calling for war, acknowledges that Ahmadinejad never said "Israel", but "occupying regime of Jerusalem", and that he actually used a metaphorical expression with an approximate meaning of "pages of time or history" and not literally "map".[22]

 1  |  2  |  3  |  4