Ethnically Cleanse the Palestinians

Let me confess that I’ve never liked Ben Shapiro, ever since I first saw his smirking face on Fox-news. He spouts minicon banalities with all the smiling assurance of a con artist selling ownership deeds for Time Square. It’s also annoying to watch all the media-authorized conservatives drooling over Ben every time he opens his mouth to say something that is strikingly uninteresting. Therefore when he was dispatched to Berkeley by conservatism, inc. to defend free speech, values or whatever else he was sent there to defend, I found myself actually rooting for the antifascist mobs. These rowdies looked far more authentic and spontaneous than did the banality-spouting emissary of Fox-news.

But recently I found this column in Townhall.com from 2003 that made me think that Ben is willing to take daring positions. In a passage that is worth quoting, he proposed expelling the Palestinian population from the West Bank: “The Jews don’t realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements. … After World War II, Poland was recreated by the Allied Powers. … Anywhere from 3.5 million to 9 million Germans were forcibly expelled from the new Polish territory and relocated in Germany. … The Germans accepted the new border, and decades of conflict between Poles and Germans ended. … If Germans, who had a centuries-old connection to the newly created Polish territory, could be expelled, then surely Palestinians, whose claim to Judea, Samaria and Gaza is dubious at best, can be expelled.”

Time to buy old US gold coins

Shapiro’s advice warrants our attention. Why does Shapiro consider what was done to ethnic Germans after World War Two a model worthy of being followed? According to R.M. Douglas, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas and other reputable historians, about 13 million men, women and children of German descent were forcibly resettled from Eastern European countries after the War. Over half a million of these dislocated ethnic Germans were murdered, usually on the pretext of having been Nazi collaborators. Is Shapiro urging Israelis to emulate this example? It would certainly seem so. Shapiro thinks it’s all right to expel Palestinians from their homes, in areas that he describes in place names, Judea and Samaria, used by the Zionist Right? Does he advocate this extreme policy because the present inhabitants are creating a ruckus? If so, would he advise the US to kick out blacks or some other minority because their crime rates are disproportionately high? We may safely assume that Shapiro would not have advanced so far in conservatism, inc. if he had urged his policy of ethnic cleansing for American minorities. Yes, I know that in 2013 Shapiro expressed second thoughts about his expulsion policy for Palestinians living on the West Bank. But it took him ten years to amend his original position. And in the meantime his meteoric rise as as a media conservative had begun. Breitbart, Townhall Fox-news and other conservative enterprises all publicized this edgy young star long before he changed his mind on expelling Palestinians.

It’s not hard to figure out why Shapiro’s outrageous statements about expelling Palestinians and ethnic Germans did nothing to hurt his career. One need only look to another group beside the defense lobby that holds an honored place as conservative benefactors, namely the hyper-Zionist lobby, led by Rupert Murdoch, Paul Singer, and Sheldon Adelson. Since conservative media enterprises are awash in their funding, authorized conservatives are free to go after the Palestinians and other thorns in the side of the Israelis without being accused by the conservative media of bigotry. Since Singer has also showered millions of dollars on his other favorite projects, amnestying illegals and LGBT public relations, those who take this billionaire’s coin may not be itching to take on certain sensitive social issues.

A liberal columnist Jeff Goldberg has properly noted in Politico that Shapiro in 2003 made statements about expelling Palestinians that were similar to those of another extreme Jewish nationalist Meir Kahane. This controversial Rabbi was eventually condemned, rightly or wrongly, by the Israeli Supreme Court for inciting intergroup violence by demanding the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the West Bank. Rabbi Kahane in any case didn’t advance his career by expressing his views on ethnic cleansing. Shapiro by contrast did well by letting it all hang out and may have actually benefited from what he posted on townhall. To understand why, it may be necessary to look at who pays for what.

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