The Contextomists against Israel
Contextomy (from context + -tomy) = the deliberate excision of relevant context
Please study the following three
statements. Each separately, and
even more so all three in combination, constitutes a strong indictment of U.S.
policies in modern history. I have
made up these statements, so they are, so to speak, hypothetical. But all are based on actual arguments I
have heard often.
1. Hiroshima and
Nagasaki
According to the U.S. Department of Energy
the immediate effects of the blast killed approximately 70,000 people
in Hiroshima.[44] Estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945 from burns, radiation and
related disease, the effects of which were aggravated by lack of medical
resources, range from 90,000 to 166,000.[1][45] Some estimates state up to 200,000 had died by 1950, due to cancer and
other long-term effects.[3][6][46] Another study states that from 1950 to 2000, 46% of leukemia deaths and
11% of solid cancer deaths among bomb survivors were due to radiation from the bombs,
the statistical excess being estimated
to 94 leukemia and 848 solid cancers.[47] At least eleven known prisoners of war died from the bombing. (Wikipedia)
On the
sixth of August in 1945, U.S. military aircraft dropped the first
atomic bomb in history, killing
somewhere between 90,000 and 166,000 people in one day,
leaving many others to die
painful deaths later, demolishing the city completely. Three days later, the
US again attacked a Japanese city, Nagasaki, killing another 70,000 or so, again demolishing
a city. No country in
history, before or after, has
been as destructive
as the United
States on these two occasions.
2. The American Mafia
The history
of the American
Mafia, also known as Cosa
Nostra, has been one of
shameful persecution by federal, state,
and local government.
The notorious
Kefauver Committee in
the US Senate (1950-51), no less than
the equally nefarious activities of Senator Joseph
McCarthy, ran roughshod over the rights of
accused, euphemistically called "witnesses." Kefauver and his associates
selectively accused Italian Americans appealing to popular
prejudices against this immigrant group.
Even long
before the Kefauver persecutions, and after them
until this day, Cosa Nostra
members have have routinely been victims of
police brutality, what
the police call "alley court," especially in the larger
cities. Once imprisoned, these inmates -- disproportionally Italian American -- frequently fall prey to
corrupt and brutal prison administrators
and guards.
Finally the
press, especially the tabloid press,
has seen fit to fan
anti-Italian prejudice with its lurid
descriptions of organized crime. Hardly
a day goes by without the
appearance of sensationalist articles, regularly featuring Italian-American names so as to
further enflame popular prejudices.
3. Dresden
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the
size of small
children, pieces of arms and
legs, dead people, whole families
burnt to death, burning people ran to
and fro, burnt coaches filled
with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers,
many were calling and looking
for their children and families,
and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all
the time the hot wind
of the firestorm
threw people back into the
burning houses they were trying
to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible
details. I can never forget them.
—Lothar Metzger, survivor.[70]
From February
13 to February 15 of 1945, Some 3600 British and American
airplanes attacked the 700-year old city of Dresden
in eastern Germany. Some 65,000 fire bombs were dropped,
leaving the city in rubble. Worst of all, perhaps
as many as
a quarter of a million people (according to a British historian) were killed, many
others were permanently wounded. Here was a war crime
of previously unheard-of dimensions.
1) The tragedies at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki are told here without a single mention of the World War
II context, and, in this telling, appear to be the unprovoked result of a
brutal, sadistic, murderous American policy. Obviously, no brief (or even long)
statement can include all possibly relevant context,
but absent any reference to the war at all, the statement is a clear case of
the fallacy of contextomy, the excision of context.
2) The
statement on the Mafia, similarly, fails to mention the fact that organized
crime, after all, is crime.
Whatever the shortcomings of law enforcement and the prisons, these must
be seen in the context of crime. So
statement #2, also, is an example of contextomy.
3) For
the apologists of the Hitler regime, the bombing of Dresden is the single
relevant event of the Second World War.
In this statement we find no mention of Adolf Hitler or the Nazi regime,
no mention of the war at all. Again,a case of contextomy.
Now to the question of how contecxtomy is used against Israel. It is an outstanding feature in the
writings and agitation by Islamists and their allies. Mr. Jimmy Carter is perhaps the most
prominent and the most conspicuous of these. Ralph
Seliger, a left-leaning writer and supporter of
Peace Now, describes Carters treatment of
Israels much-discussed security fence:
Carter speaks of the
"wall" as if it were not a response to hundreds of civilian deaths
from terror attacks; he coldly speaks of Israeli actions as if they were simply
malicious acts occurring in a vacuum.
Where Carters contextomies are often expressed in a language
of self-conscious restraint, others know no restraint at all. There is, routinely, talk of Israeli
aggression (in Gaza and elsewhere) and of massacres and war crimes by Israel,
all without even the shadow of recognition of the Arab violence to which Israel
responds. Sometimes even apparently
neutral journalists casually mention Israeli
treatment of Palestinians as a key
problem in the world, without the context in which this treatment occurs.
I obviously cannot hope to portray
here the whole of the Israel-Arab conflict. Many others have attempted such desccriptions, from various points of view, and with
varying degrees of success. But
whatever ones point of view, there are at least
three factors, as I see them, that need to be
faced. I consider these to be the
ineluctable basics for any discussion of Israel/Palestine, and I suggest that a
systematic exclusion of these factors results in contextomy.
A) As
soon as Israel was created in 1948 (under a 1947 decision of the United
Nations), the new state was attacked by the armies of all its Arab
neighbors: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and
Lebanon. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Lybia assisted, as did armed Palestinian forces. Alan Dershowitzs The Case for Israel , Chapters 11 and 12, gives a convenient and
reliable account, and does not shirk from relating the Deir
Yassin violence that was perpetrated by Jews.
B) Continued military aggression agains
the Jewish state – which includes
the current missile attacks from Gaza –
has never stopped, and is, to one extent or another, supported by the
leadership of all major Palestinian organizations. Currently Hamas openly declares its
right to bombard Jewish population centers; the PLO furnishes somewhat less
explicitly support for the violence, by celebrating the martyrs of Palestinian
terror groups and other hate propaganda against Jews. The MEMRI website offers
continuous reporting on this Arab violence, among its other important
information.
C) Anti-semitic
sentiments, to judge by public opinion polls and a reading of Arab media, seem
to be the norm in Arab populations.
The Pew Charitable Trust reported in 2008: anti-Jewish sentiments are
almost universal in the three Arab nations surveyed--95% or more in Lebanon,
Jordan and Egypt say they have an unfavorable opinion of Jews. Of particular interest is the
overwhelming endorsement of Holocaust denial by Arab writers and
journalists. Robert Wistrichs A Lethal
Obsession, in its Chapter Nineteen, gives the chilling details.
About contextomy
The term contextomy is of relatively recent
origin, and has been used by other writers to describe a narrower phenomenon
than the one I describe here, viz. the partial quoting of a
source for purpose of distorting its meaning. If a critic were to write There may be
people who find this movie absolutely fascinating, but I am not one of them,
and if the movies P.R. man then quotes this critic as having said Absolutely
fascinating, that would be a piece of contextomy in
the narrow sense.
One way of describing the fallacy of contextomy
as I describe it here is to say that it is a one-sided argument. But I find one-sidedness too weak an
expression. We are all one-sided in
one way or another. The fallacy of contextomy emphasizes the willful, flagrant one-sidedness
of those who have an axe to grind.
I see it as quite different from the (mild) one-sidedness of most
writers who express a point of views.
The fallacy of contextomy in the narrower sense of quoting out of context
is ably discussed by the philosopher Gary Curtis on his website Fallacyfiles.
May 9, 2011
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