Price Tag as a Blood Libel
Published: Arutz Sheva - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 10:30 PM
Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He is at work on a book about the Vatican and Israel.Israeli Police is investigating that Palestinian Arabs may have vandalized six cars in Kusra, near Nablus, so that they could falsely claim it was a “price-tag” attack by Jews. They have arrested on youth from Jerusalem for allegedly spraing Arab cars.
The blood libel of price tag, Israel's most spectacularly effective canard, reminds that of 1953 against nine Soviet doctors (seven of them Jews), who had been accused of "wrecking, espionage and terrorist activities against the active leaders of the Soviet Government".
As Stalin used the show trial to terrify Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union, the "price tag" quest is used to indict the Jews of Judea and Samaria. Story after story appear on price tag vandalism, and the innocent reader may be forgiven for assuming that, like Arab ambushers, the Jewish residents have been "shooting it out" in a Wild West free-for-all. So they deserve punishment.
As Stalin's show trial was meant to initiate a plan in which almost all of the Soviet Union's two million Jews, nearly all of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, were to be transported to the Gulag in cattle cars, the price tag is meant to justify evacuation and destruction of the Jewish homes beyond the Green Line and outside the "settlements' blocs".
The price tag conspiracy is meant to portray the administered territories not as areas where Jewish civilians are ambushed by Arab terrorists, but as a playground for crazed Jewish vigilantes.
This sensational fairy tales about "settlers" remind one that these are for the country's intellectual left - what the "bloody Jews" were for the British administration.
When one uses the price tag libel, one can't dinstinguish between truth and lies, victims and aggressors, right or wrong. It might be true that some Jewish anarchists have been involved in the acts, but the public is compelled to believe, like in Mao's China, that you have to punish one "settler" to educate one hundred.
The price tag has been deliberately fabricated to intimidate an entire people, its history, future and best energies. Threats of "civil war", "political assassination", "rebellion" are used to frighten people.
Through the price tag, even when Jewish youth is found guilty, painting graffiti may be downright offensive, and pelting a house with stones may be truly reprehensible - though the thousands of incidents in which Arabs pelted Jewish humans, not houses, with stones, shootings and molotov cocktails, which were thrown on moving vehicles with lethal effect, have yet to be mentioned disapprovingly by the Western and Israeli press.
The Orwellian double-speak of the price tag is meant to confuse people and stifle free speech. The disinformation brings along with accusations of massive violence on the part of "settlers".
The price tag anti-Semitic incitement is like the "witches' Sabbat", an expression describing the meeting of those who practice witchcraft in the Middle Ages, connected to the belief in the evil power of witches and in the malevolence of Jews.
Western journalists, Israeli corrupted politicians, failed IDF commanders and Arab leaders have adopted the "let's burn a witch" strategy. The scapegoats are the unspeakable Jews beyond the invisible Green Line. The entire "settler" public has been marked again with a scarlet letter of murder and threatened expulsion.
At least, in the Soviet Union, the authorities had the decency to publish in Pravda that the charges against the Jewish doctors were false. Will the bankrupt, leftist Israeli press have the same honesty about the hilltop youth?
Perhaps. But it will be too late for the Fogels, the Palmers, and all the other tear stained beautiful, lost faces.
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