Saturday, March 1, 2008
Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was killed in the Sbarro Restaurant bombing, writes about John Dugard, UN "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967":
...He's erudite and talks well and smoothly, no doubt about it. In the course of about an hour of conversation, I learned some interesting things about how he does his job. Then we came to the end of our meeting, and he thanked me for making the time to meet. He very politely expressed appreciation that I had decided to share some views with him. And then, with no evident sign of realizing the impact on me, he said he had never met an Israeli victim of terror before. And our meeting was over...
Wow.
...Perhaps it follows that when you give a man half a job-title, you end up with a half-baked analysis. As a white South African, Dugard might be excused for framing conflicts in terms of the one of which he was part, the one he knows best. But with his one-eye-open, one-eye-closed view of the war of the Jihadists against the Jews, it's inexcusable that he seems to know nothing (to cite just one instance) about the role of Arafat, Fatah and the so-called fedayeen at a time (1966 for example) when the total size of the territory he calls "Israeli-occupied" was zero.
If we're wrong, and if Dugard really does know about those matters, about the role they played and play today, about the deep roots of hatred and of jihadism and of terrorism by Arabs in this ongoing war against Israelis and Jews, then his fatuous, simplistic wrap-up and resort to a discredited "root cause" is a disgrace to him and to those who gave him the job.
It's surreal, and worth reading in full.
Oleaginous is the term that comes to mind to describe a Dugard. Self-promoting, self-regarding and repulsively superficial when it comes to things that matter are other apt terms. He ingratiates himself, via a certain superficial and superficially applied intelligence and erudition, to the tempers of the times, to a certain broad spectrum of the zeitgeist, and for what? Self-promotion and career advancement? To be "relevant" within the moral and political economies of this present era and age? Who can know with any degree of certainty? The only thing that can be known is what the Dugards of the world, deserving of infamy and nothing less than infamy, positively and studiously and resolutely omit from their world view and political praxis.
A Jimmy Carter reflects a different type of oleaginous quality, one whose smiling, superficial and ingratiating appeal finds a more demotic register than does Dugard's and the Dugards of the world. Dugard is more representative of the "international community" and for that reason is a more pernicious factor, imo. They are equally repulsive, though, in notable part due to that oleaginous quality.