How Palestinians became the baby seals of the Western human rights lobby

The Telegraph ^ | 6/17/11 | Brendan O'Neill

[markomalley]

This new interview with American author Alice Walker gives a brilliant insight into what motivates trendy pro-Palestinian sentiment in the West today. Notice how effortlessly she flits between talking about Palestinians in Gaza and chickens in factory farms. In one breath she talks about the “cruel and inhuman” treatment meted out to Palestinians, who are “frazzled and suffering everyday”. And in the next she talks about chickens that are “raised under horrible, torturous conditions”, and the fact that people who tuck into chicken dinners don’t realise that they are eating “something precious, beautiful, rare”.

Palestinians and chickens – these seem to be the two big moral concerns haunting Ms Walker’s head. She sees their predicament as comparable: just as Palestinians are caged in Gaza, so chickens are caged in factory farms. And just as we “must help those suffering in Gaza”, so we must “change the way chickens are thought about and raised”. Ms Walker is certainly doing her bit. Next week she will be on the latest Gaza-bound flotilla, named “The Audacity of Hope”, which will deliver letters from concerned American citizens to Palestinians, which is of course just what Palestinians need. And she spends the rest of her time meditating with animals, in particular chickens, as a way of rediscovering “the peace we once shared with the other animals on the planet”.

She might sound barking, but actually Ms Walker’s lumping together of Palestinians and chickens reveals much about the cocktail of pity and paternalism that drives influential Westerners’ pro-Palestinian lobbying today. They increasingly see Palestinians, not as a group of people capable of exercising the same democratic and political rights as the rest of us, but as wide-eyed and pathetic victims who must be saved from Evil Israel by the better-minded, better-educated activists of the West...

[thethirddegree]

I love boneless skinless chicken breasts. As for the “Palestinians”, they should be removed en masse and sent to surrounding Muslim countries, leaving the land to Israel to whom it rightfully belongs.

[Sherman Logan]

people who tuck into chicken dinners don’t realise that they are eating “something precious, beautiful, rare”.

Precious, matter of opinion. Not mine. It's a remarkably stupid bird.

Beautiful, again a matter of opinion that's not mine. Although some breeds are more attractive than others.

Rare, factually incorrect. 8B to 12B of anything is not "rare."

[Sherman Logan]

rediscovering “the peace we once shared with the other animals on the planet”.

I'm curious when she thinks this was. We've always been part of the food chain. The only difference is that in the last 10,000 years or so we've managed to claw our way to the top.

[ClearCase_guy]

My eyes kind of glazed over, but I think the point of the article is that Palestinians are simply animals.

Right?

[puppypusher]

What a load of BS.Baby seals are not trained from birth to go out and murder other human beings.Not even animals do that,but Palestinian parasites do.They are like a cancer and unless that cancer his totally removed from the body the person with it will soon die.

It’s well past time to eradicate that cancer.

[markomalley]

My eyes kind of glazed over, but I think the point of the article is that Palestinians are simply animals.

I think the point of the article was to mock liberalism's attitude toward "Palestinians"

But the author of the piece probably wouldn't object to your conclusion either.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I think you need to view this video to truly understand the Hellish and degrading conditions that Palestinians in
Gaza have to endure on a daily basis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XoGaJiPsVg

This is the kind of inhumane treatment that brings tears to the pen of Alice Walker. And it’s paid for by your and Europeans’ tax money.

[Fred Nerks]

Alice Walker’s Jewish Problem

excerpt:

Here she is comparing Israel to German colonialism:

Q:Is there a sense in your mind of a connection between the colonialism and the horrors in Africa and the bombings and the victims that you witnessed from those bombings in Gaza?:

A: Yes. I see it as the same colonialism. I see it as the same. In fact, I think that one of the things we forget about the settlers in Israel, is that they are just as German as they are Jewish. And so that the German influence that caused so much damage in Rwanda is in some of the behavior of the German Jews in Israel. And that’s the part which we need to look at more.

http://mideastparalleluniverse.blogspot.com/2011/04/alice-walkers-jewish-problem.html