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Desperate comparisons

Wednesday, 5th September 2007

I'm not sure I've ever read a more ridiculous article than this piece of drivel in the New Statesman:

In 2001 shocking reports surfaced from Gaza of summer schools being organised by Islamic Jihad, which were teaching Palestinian adolescents to become suicide bombers. The Israeli government denounced the camps as evidence that a new generation was being brought up to hate and to kill.

What went unreported was that at a purpose-built barracks in the Negev desert, every summer hundreds of Jewish teenagers from Europe, Mexico and America pay to spend nine weeks saluting, marching, firing guns and otherwise pretending to be soldiers.

Don't bother reading the rest. It's dire stuff, attempting to make out there's some sort of comparison between the two. The Israel-haters really are desperate. As one of the commenters puts it:

Let's see - Holehouse is comparing a camp run for 12-15 year olds, that teach that dying for Allah while killing Jews is the ultimate goal, with a camp run for adults that teaches the importance of peace while preparing for war
What a scoop!

And judging from what a friend who has been on one of them told me, this is spot on:

Haha... this article is so off the mark it's hilarious! Marva and Gadna are nothing more than holidays that people go on for a bit of fun and a physical challenge. They are characterised by girls crying because they've broken nails and boys trying to look cool holding a gun that couldn't be fired even if they had been given any bullets to fire from it.
To suggest that any of these people are actually being trained to fight for Israel is laughable (and rather worrying if you're an Israeli!).
To try to draw an equivalence between Marva and a camp "organised by Islamic Jihad, which were teaching Palestinian adolescents to become suicide bombers" is actually quite sick and highly irresponsible.

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Lee Jakeman

September 5th, 2007 11:29am

In the days of the USSR, the left, in their attempt to justify Soviet human rights abuses, were always repeating the mantra: "The same things happen in Greece, Spain and Turkey". I can still remember Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic riposte to this: "The first unit on one scale may be ten. The first unit on another scale may be ten to the sixth power, that is to say, one million. And can their conclusion that 'both here and there the first unit has been reached' be explained only by their ignorance or by a hardening of the brain"?