Saturday, April 09, 2011

Comments trail:

Rethinking Goldstone?

Noga
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

April 9, 2011 at 7:22 am

“a bigger shoah [note: “Shoah” is the Hebrew word referring to the Holocaust]

Well, no.

Shoah means disaster. And it usually comes with its own special verb: “Le-hamit shoah”, to bring upon someone or something a disaster. Hebrew speakers use it to describe a nuclear disaster (shoah garinit), ecological disaster (“shoah svivatit”) among other usages. The Holocaust, when brought up to by Hebrew speakers is always, always, always referred to as “Ha-Shoah”, THE Shoah, to differentiate from any other “shoah” (disaster).

Seems to me that some commenters are determined to give this phrasing at this time a particularly sinister meaning. Why? Is it because you believe that Vilnai blurted out some secret plan, or wish, when all he did was use perfectly idiomatic Hebrew to warn Gazans that they should expect more disasters to befall upon them if they continue with their qassam violence directed at civilian targets? If so, what could account for such readiness to attribute the worst possible meaning to an Israeli politician’s use of such a phrase?

Update: Just checked the status of my comment and it is still "awaiting moderation", nearly 7 hours after being posted, though another poster's later comment has gone through. I conclude that "Tikkun" is pretty resistant to tikkun (Hebrew for "correction") when that correction is at odds with the author's rationale of "Blame Israel all the time, first, last and never re-adjust".

UpdateII: Two days after posting my comment, it made it through the moderation. This morning, April 10, between 8 a.m. when I checked, and now (10:21 a.m.), it was deemed that Tikkun readers could be trusted to read it. Miracles never end ...


@ Bob From Brockley


@ Harry's Place: About the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis

@ Harry's Place: Galloway's prevarications


@ Jews Sans Frotnieres

Unfortunately I lost the comment I posted but the gist of it was that Mark Elf's omission is a thought crime, or the beginning of a thought crime. It does not make sense unless it was actually his subconscious admiration and love for Israel forced out into the open by the pressure of his amazing hypocrisy and maybe, unlikely as it may seem at first reading, even stupidity. It was in effect a Freudian slip of the tongue. Time for Elf to come out of the closet, perhaps?

@ Norway, Israel and the Jews: Two minutes of hate

Imprinting disgust through the choice of juxtaposed images, with an aim at creating a palpable feeling of aversion. Propagandists usually resort to this kind of methods to induce in their more hapless readers the “correct” understanding.

5 Comments:

At 6:47 AM EDT, Blogger levi9909 said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At 6:48 AM EDT, Blogger levi9909 said...

Noga, your fist comment was "approved" within 3 hours of your having submitted it and it got two responses within 5 hours, the first within 3 hours.

http://tinyurl.com/6keejtc

Here's my letter in full with the missing word added:

There are major differences between the State of Israel and other serial human rights abusers that Jonathan Freedland names. Whilst Arab regimes are oppressive to maintain the governments in power, Israel's oppression goes to the heart of its existence as a state to which Jews from around the world have more right to live than the native non-Jewish population. Freedland must know that this involves the ethnic cleansing of the native Arab population in order to secure and maintain a Jewish majority. Other states have carried out ethnic cleansing in the past and others will attempt it in the future. But Israel owes its ethno-religious majority to a recent, current and on-going campaign of displacement of the indigenous population. That was true of the US, it was true of Australia. It has been true of many states. But Israel's crimes are more recent and, therefore, its continued existence is predicated on its human rights [abuses].

It only makes sense with the word "abuses" on the end as you can see from the rest of the letter.

Moderation can take a little time at JSF because I'm out on the road most of the time. No miracles involved. Try reality Noga, unless you meant it was a miracle that Guardian published the letter.

 
At 7:12 AM EDT, Anonymous Noga said...

levi 99 etc is the Elf in my comment and as usual, suffers from chronic shortage of omprehensiin skills due to an inclination to rush through and thus misjudge and misread and mistake what he is reading.

Recently I have been trying to muster patience in my conversations on the Internet and one of the first exercises in patience-building is to stick to the rule of: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Hence my tolerance for the intellectual productions of Elf/levi is quite high.

 
At 8:30 AM EDT, Blogger levi9909 said...

Noga, how do you square this:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

with this:

Your malice is pathetically inadequate.?

Perhaps you're both stupid and malicious.

Anyway, I didn't come here to break your comments record.

 
At 3:35 PM EDT, Blogger The Contentious Centrist said...

"Noga, how do you square this:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

with this:

Your malice is pathetically inadequate.?"

They both mean the same, levi. The first is an ironic warning to people like me not to waste their time and mental resources on people whose malice is so inadequate as to merit the same kind of respect owed to stupidity.

And please, do stay away. If I want to hear from you I will come visit you at your blog. I've had a few nutcases posting comments here but at least they had the redeeming quality of actually believing, and understanding, what they were saying and aiming at. This is not the case with you. You are all noise, no signal. So please, go away. Find your own friends.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home