J Street And The Koch Brothers As Deniers Of Reality

Both wish to deny reality.

J Street consists of people who for some reason, no doubt in many cases quite personal, find that belonging to it, and presuming to decide for the people of Israel what it is they need to do in order to find a “solution” to their quandary, gives meaning to their lives. The members of J Street do not want to hear about the reason for being, the provisions of, the Mandate for Palestine. They don’t want to hear about the period 1948-1967, before the “Palestinian people” were invented, so as to re-present the unending war on Israel and Jews in the Middle East, one that had begun long before the state had been declared, as a “war of national liberation.” And above all else, they don’t want to hear about the texts and tenets of Islam, don’t want to consider, even for a moment, that the war on Israel is a classic Jihad, no different from those that have been waged in the past, over the last 1400 years, and which has acquired particular hysterical attention because the object, for Muslim Arabs, is a nation-state resurrected on territory that was once in Muslim —  for the past 500 years, Ottoman Turk — possession.  Whatever personal reasons have led these J Street people to want to help continue the deflection of attention from Islam, the result is that the entire world, and not only the people of Israel, suffer from such deflection. If more people understood the nature of Islam, that would make  the permanent campaign — Jihad through terrorism and qitaal (combat), Jihad through “pen, speech” (propaganda), Jihad through “wealth” (economic boycotts, bribery with Arab money of Third-World leaders, and oil and busiiness contracts dangled before Western businessmen) — against Israel, and the desire of Israelis, just expressed in an election, not to give up control of the tiny slliver of territory that they need for self-defense, and certainly not to a “sovereign state” (which Denis McDonough, Obama’s spokesman) called for, run by the terrorist-lionizing henchmen of Arafat who now run the “Palestinian Authority” or by their slightly-more disreputable fellows in Hamas and the redundantly-named Islamic Jihad) more understandable. J Street wishes to pretend that the texts and tenets have nothing to do with the war against Israel, just as so many political leaders in the West like to pretend that the Islamic State, that Al-Qaeda, that Ansar Al-this and Hezb-al-That, have “nothing to do with Islam.” But the war on Israel has never been a “nationalist” struggle — it was not when the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el Husseini, conducted that war, whipping up murderous attacks on Jews who had bought land and started to farm the desolate hills in Judea or the slightly greener ones of the Galilee. It was not a “nationalist” struggle under Ahmed Shukairy — remember him? — nor under Arafat who, of course, used the language of “self-determination for the ‘Palestinian people'” because it was the age of Vietnam, it was the convenient thing to do, and in many of the Arab countries, quasi-“secularists” — a word that has to be treated giingerly in the Arab context — were still in control, and women not quite as hijabbed, and men not quite as zebiba-ed, as they are in so many places today.

And you know the Koch Brothers. They are the billionaire brothers who have funded, with tens of millions of dollars, those who have for so  long denied the anthropogenic origins of global warming, or more accurately, global climate disruption. Like J Street, the Koch Brothers apparently want — for reasons known only to them — the evidence, and like J Street, in so doing they have delayed the day of recognition, and prevented or slowed-down the measures that need to be taken, not to avoid– that can’t be done — but to lessen the rate and state of change from global climate disruption, and to mitigate its effects.

It is doubtful  that the members of J Street, or the Koch brothers, would recognize how similar they are. But  in their attempts to distract or delay the recognition, by J Street of the war on Israel as a Jihad (with no solution, and mitigation through the perception of overwhelming Israeli military power the only way to keep the peace), by the Koch Brothers of the reality of anthropogenic global climate disruption, they are similar in their simpleminded, stubborn, and dangerous, attempt to hide or disguise, things which must be seen clearly.