In what has to be an astonishing display of provincial ignorance, the has-been Norwegian radical socialist politician Stein Ørnhøi told Aftenposten that the foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, needs to learn more about the Middle East. He needs, Ørnhøi says, to learn the difference between the occupier and the occupied, pointing out that Hamas surely will accept Israel's right to exist when Israel accepts the Palestinian right to a state. (Hamas obviously didn't get Ørnhøi's memo).
Ørnhøi is the ignoramus, of course. But what is interesting, or discouraging, is what passes as "knowledge" in the current debate. I agree with Ørnhøi that Støre has a lot to learn, but the foreign minister is still way ahead of Ørnhøi, who seems to get his knowledge from dreams that he has after he's eaten too much too late.
The antipathy toward Israel seems to have become dogma on the European political left, something that defines the political platform rather than being a result of it.
Ørnhøi would rather defend a terrorist organization that seeks to set up a totalitarian regime where women are disenfranchised, religious minorities are at best tolerated, capital and corporal punishment are routinely imposed, and human rights are ignored - all that he'd rather defend, than saying a single nice thing about Israel.
Ørnhøi must honestly believe that if only Israel would give in to every single demand made of them, then everything would be ok. He believes that those Palestinians who are terrorists would suddenly give up their murderous tactics when they've been shown to work, that the awful means of terrorism are all in the service of a greater good.
Ørnhøi must also think that Norwegians like him, well-versed in socialist rhetoric and Norwegian public debate, know far better than the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians, what is right for them. He apparently thinks that the Israeli political process - which includes universal suffrage - is far inferior to his towering intellect and knowledge. He thinks that Jews the world over don't know what's really good for them, because if they did, Israel would never have come into existence. Better, he thinks, that about 800,000 Jews stayed in DP camps in Germany and Austria for years and years; and that Jews in the Arab world continued to be persecuted to this day, just like the Copts are in Egypt now.
Ørnhøi must believe that the Israeli democracy is clearly inferior to the regimes of Arab countries, that "religious freedom" in Saudi Arabia or Iran scarcely warrants a comment compared to "apartheid" in Israel, that Palestinian nationalist aspirations are far more important than such petty considerations as the lives of Jews in Israel, or for that matter the West Bank.
Ørnhøi apparently doesn't think there's reason for concern about rampant antisemitic propaganda in the Arab world.
He's okay with all this, it seems.
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