I very much enjoyed the LGF quiz comparing right wing American talk concerning the Iraqis on one particularly invidious and rather stupid website with the statements of prominent Nazis about the Jews.
Most people couldn’t tell the difference between the statements. The prolific and stimulating Billmon at Whiskeybar did score a perfect 14 out of 14 (he attributes it to having once written “a college term paper on the cultural antecedents of Nazi rhetoric”.
Most only managed just above 50% – this is a shocking score as there were only two choices per question. Nazis and LG Footballers are almost indistinguishable
In honour of that quiz, I’ve am proposing a different kind of rhetorical game.
Here is a list of quotations from famous Americans about North American Indian peoples during the 19th century. While checking population numbers for another article about genocide, I was struck by how much the American rhetoric reminded me of Sharon’s own rhetoric concerning Palestinians that I had read in passing over the course of the last couple of years.
Now I don’t read Hebrew and don’t keep up with the Israeli press closely enough to be able to find again the exact parallel statements. But I’m guessing that the bright readers of the Whiskey Bar can help.
In the comments section below, please post parallel quotations from the Israeli leadership about Palestinians, together with time and place. The quotations should be accompanied by some kind of cooberating link from within the official American or Israeli press. If the reporting is now archived and inaccessible, an exact date and page and publication will be sufficient for verification.
I would prefer quotations directly attributable to Sharon but quotations from other significant politicians in Israeli governments past and present including Netanyahu and Ben-Gurion are eligible.
Without further ado, here are the main quotations:
I believe in the [Indian] policy that exterminates the Indians, drives them outside the boundaries of civilization, because you cannot civilize them.
Congressman James M. Cavanaugh 1868
No State can achieve proper culture, civilization and progress…as long as Indians are permitted to remain.
U.S. President Martin Van Buren
The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian…. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel, they rob and murder, not the cowboys, who can take care of themselves, but the defenseless, lone settlers on the plains.
Future President Teddy Roosevelt, January 1886
They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement…Established in the midst of another and superior race…they must necessarily yield…and ere long disappear. U.S. President Andrew Jackson, Message of the President to the Two Houses of Congress, 23rd Congress, 1833
We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop and check the progress of the railroad. I regard the railroad as the most important element now in progress to facilitate the military interests of our Frontier….We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to their extermination, men, women and children…they must feel the superior power of the Government.”
General Sherman (letter to General Grant) 1867
Supporting quotations:
Not merely have all attempts to civilize them failed, but also every endeavor to enslave them. Our Indian tribes submit to extermination, rather than wear the yoke under which our Negro slaves fatten and multiply. Ethnological researcher Josiah C. Nott
Intelligence, activity, ambition, progression, high anatomical development, characterize some races; stupidity, indolence, immobility, savagism, low anatomical development characterize others….our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
L. Frank Baum. author of the Wizard of Oz
All history and honest observation will show that the Red Man is a skulking coward and a windy braggart, who strikes without warning—usually from an ambush or under cover of night, and nearly always bringing a force of about five or six to one against his enemy; kills helpless women and little children, and massacres the men in their beds; and then brags about it as long as he lives, and his son and his grandson and great-grandson after him glorify it among the “heroic deeds of their ancestors”.
Mark Twain, 1870
The idea that a handful of wild, half-naked, thieving, plundering, murdering savages should be dignified with the sovereign attributes of nations, enter into solemn treaties, and claim a country 500 miles wide by 1,000 miles long as theirs in fee simple, because they hunted buffalo or antelope over it, might do for a beautiful reading of Hiawatha, but is unsuited to the intelligence and justice of this age, or the natural rights of mankind.
New Mexico Supreme Court, United States v. Lucero, 1 NM S. Ct. 422, 1869
There will be a prize awarded for the closest matching and verified quote. Either a copy of textSOAP, the great text cleaning utility for Windows and Macintosh very useful in web writing or an equivalent donation will be made in the winner’s name to fund the work at either ISM (International Solidarity Movement) or First Nations Site.
The prize will be awarded one month from today, on condition that neither the Bush administration nor the Israelis deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East between now and then. In that case all bets are off.
Most quotes from First Nations Site.
“Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial.” – Ariel Sharon
“I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.”
Ariel Sharon to Shimon Peres, October 3rd, 2001, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours…Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”
–Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.
“Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
–Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, “Complete Diaries,” June 12, 1895 entry.
“The blood of the Jewish people is loved by the Lord; it is therefore redder and their life is preferable.”
— Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, head of the Kever Yossev Yeshiva (school of Talmud talmudtruth.html) in Nablus
“True, the white man brought great change. But the varied fruits of his civilization, though highly colored and inviting, are sickening and deadening. And if it be the part of civilization to maim, rob, and thwart, then what is progress? I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization…. “
— Chief Luther Standing Bear, in his 1933 autobiography
Too much red wine here! Easy enough to pick and choose to make a case. Why not then turn to what the Left in Israel has been saying? Oh? Sure, that would make this nonsense apparent.
William
All your quotes are BS. The Peres quote was proven years ago to have been made up by a Jordanian reporter.
talk about Nazis. You are one. So is baldy.
Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Israel are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.
That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”.
…they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.
–The Iron Wall by Vladimir Jabotinski, 1923
David Ben Gurion, wrote to his son 11 years before the birth of the Jewish state: “Negev land is reserved for Jewish citizens whenever and wherever they want. We must expel the Arabs and take their place.” By 1951, fewer than 13,000 inhabitants remained of a community that numbered somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 in the late 1940s.
link to merip.org.
But the native never lost his “last spark of hope”. The spark was not extinguished in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were terrorized, uprooted and expelled, several decades after Moshe Sharret announced, “We have not come to an empty land but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it”; several years after David Ben-Gurion declared, “I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it”; and several months after Menachem Begin gloated over “a splendid act of conquest ” the rape and massacre of 254 Palestinians at Deir Yassin. The spark was not extinguished in 1967, when Israel grabbed the remaining 22% of Palestine and began its military occupation as its war hero Moshe Dayan kindly informed the natives, “You shall continue to live like dogs.”
link to dissidentvoice.org
Moshe Dayan: “We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country [the total area was about 6%] we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish Villages were built in place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal [Dayan’s own village] arose in the place of Mahalal, Gevat– in the place of Jibta, [Kibbutz] Sarid– in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua– in the place of Tell Shaman. There is not one place in the country that did not have a former Arab population.” [Ha`aretz, April 4 1969]
Quoted from”The Question of Palestine” by Edward Said
link to californiaindianeducation.org
Several Indian education quotes.
“a Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population.”[6]
Morris now provides a moral justification for ethnic cleansing that he did not offer before the second intifada, arguing that “[e]ven the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.
Israeli historian Benny Morris.
link to merip.org
Amazing how many people on this blog say nothing themselves, but just cut and paste propaganda from anti-Jewish web sites, with incorrect historical facts, misinformation, and leaving out a lot of the truth in order to influence the ignorant.
No one has mentioned one word about the 900,000 Jewish-Arabs that became refugees when their “homelands” (some after 2,000 years) threw them out against international law, stripping them of all rights, money, and property, without any compensation. What happened to these Jewish refugees? Obviously none of you Jew-Hating bigots give a damn. It was the State of Israel that immediately absorbed 600,000 of them — therefore preventing them from having to exist as refugees and in refugee camps.
Ye also leave out the fact that the 640,000 Palestinian-Arabs were not forced out of their homes by any Jews whatsoever. In 1948 they were given a STATE of their own — they rejected it — rather their fellow Arab nations rejected it, and proceeded to invade Israel and tell the Palestinian-Arabs to leave their homes, as they would drive all the Jews into the sea and all of the land would be theirs.
Why is it that all other nations when they win wars are allowed to be victors and decide on the settlement and in fact keep land, while Israel has had to defend itself over and over while GIVING AWAY LAND?!
To compare Native Americans with Palestinians is an insult to Native Americans and to Jews. This person is irrational, illogical, and no doubt a racist eejit.
There has been a continuous Jewish population in land of Israel for over 3,000 years!!!! The majority of so-called “Palestinians” (Jews were called Palestinians until the 1950’s — Arabs never referred to “Palestinians until after the PLO was established in 1964) immigrated to the land of Israel (Palestine) only in the last 200 years.
Gee 3,000 years verses 200 years. And it was land that belonged to the Ottoman Empire, the MUSLIM TURKS. Arabs are not native to the region they come from ARABIA!
Tell me when did the nation of Palestine ever exist? Is their a language called Palestinian? What currency was used in the nation of Palestine? Where is all the archaeological and anthropological evidence of a Palestinian civilisation? Through the land of Israel and Jordan their is evidence of a long history of the Jewish nation! But just like ye choose to ignore the murder of Jews by cowards, so do ye ignore all the evidence of the history of the Jewish people and the land of Israel!
(Zionism is NOT Racism, Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism)
[owner: boring article from clifford d. may justifying the herding of people into prison camps deleted as non-original material, with the additional annoyance of illegal high-ASCII characters strewn throughout]
From: Ben Franklin and the Jews.
Source: Jew Watch
“I fully agree with General Washington, that we must protect this young nation from an insidious influence and impenetration. The menace, gentlemen, is the Jews.
“In whatever country Jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion upon which that nation is founded, by objecting to its restrictions; have built up a state within the state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal.
bollocks the end of time is nigh!!!!!
[…] post about Palestinians and Indians remains as valid today as it was then. One can now make the parallel to Iraqis and Indians, with […]