Reply #105: I am not saying that you cannot use any site you want; I just don't regard 'opinion' as 'proof'

[LeftishBrit]

E.g. I like Bradley Burston's writings and tend to agree with him on a lot of issues, but I would not say that the fact that he thinks something is 'proof' of it.

I think that you sweep a lot of people and groups into one category that I would consider poles apart. I think there is a big difference between Seth Freedman and Ben White, and an even bigger difference between Amnesty International and Counterpunch. I certainly do not take Counterpunch seriously, and do not consider it to be consistently left-wing. (I don't think, however, that we will ever agree on the acceptability of certain sites, though we will certainly agree on the unacceptability of a few.)

I consider sources to be right-wing if:

they endorse, or approve people who do endorse, right-wing parties like the Tories, Republicans or Likud - or Hamas.

if they support the Iraq war, or the 'war on terror' as currently practiced

if they support right-wing economic policies

if they dismiss Europe because of its welfare state, or claim that Britain or other Europaean countries are allowing themselves to be overrun by immigrants of undesirable cultural backgrounds

if they demonize Jews, Muslims or any other ethnic group

etc.

(Note that *any* of these will make a source right-wing in my view; they do not need to do *all* these things for me to consider them as right-wing.)

There are plenty of such sources on ALL sides of I/P.

I should add that my objection to right-wing sources being treated as valid is not remotely restricted to I/P issues and in fact most frequently comes up when opponents of some or all vaccinations justify their views by using right-libertarian sites that oppose all government involvement in health care.

In any case, my main objection here is to the use of the term 'genocide' to refer to *either* side of the I/P conflict- unless you are prepared to regard all war as genocide, and e.g. our actions in Iraq in this category: a lot more Iraqi civilians than either Israelis or Palestinians have been slaughtered! The term just creates heat, and *is* a form of demonization - whichever side it is applied to.

ETA: What worried me about the earlier quotation was not that I thought that Richter was necessarily demonizing the 'common people', but that he was implying that there is one group that is the Good Guys, and another that is the Bad Guys, and deserves anything that it gets. After all, not all supporters of terrorism against Israel are explicitly against ordinary Jews - many claim to be 'only against Zionists, not Jews'. But ordinary Arabs and ordinary Jews do end up as the ones who die.

In that quotation, the view was more implicit than explicit, but Richter expresses his views more explicitly in an 'Open Letter to Senator George Mitchell', on israelseen.com

'Like many who have thought long and hard about the troubles in our region, I have concluded that we have to stop talking about “the peace process”–a nebulous term, and use something more binding: respect for life, live and let live and human dignity for all. The “peace process” has resulted in thousands of Israeli and Palestinian dead..

As much as I respect your commitment to mediating the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, or more accurately, much of the Islamic world, I believe your model of “conflict resolution” -(i.e.”all conflicts can be between Israel and the Palestinians can be solved”) is no longer relevant to the region. This conflict is now being driven and overshadowed by the asymmetrically existential threats to Israel posed by Iran’s race to nuclear capacity, its leaders’ crude and explicit incitement to genocide and hate language, and their support for genocidal terror, and more. As we know from the Rwandan genocide, hate language and incitement by leaders is a predictor, initiator, catalyst and promoter of genocide. Iran, with its nuclear enrichment and missile development system, poses a far greater potential threat than that of the Rwandan genocidaires. It is now the epicenter of a global axis of genocide and genocidal terror, together with Sudan, North Korea, Hamas and Hizbulloh, Venezuela, and an array of enablers, allies of convenience, and protectors.'

Thus, he seems to see the world in terms of the good people vs an 'axis of evil', very much in the way that Bush and the 'Coalition of the Willing' did. He groups together all kinds of places that really have little to do with each other, except that they are seen as bad; e.g. there is really little connection between Iran and North Korea, or between Venezuela and Sudan, and treating them all as 'a global axis of genocide' *is* a form of demonization; and also trivializes the only real genocide in any of the countries concerned, Sudan.