I had another round of exchange with Vinoth Ramachandra on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I did not intend to write another piece on Ramachandra but I am compelled to do so because he would not allow my comment pointing out his basic factual errors on his blog. So here goes.

This round started with Ramachandra’s most recent blogpost titled, Kiss or Kick Ass?. The article contained blatant falsehoods. This is typical for Ramachandra whenever he writes on Israel, as I have pointed out in detail here. But, in my view, this piece was the clearest articulation yet of Ramachandra’s Jew hate, in writing. Now, Ramachandra’s Jew hate – or, antisemitism – is something that I alluded to in my last piece but did not explicitly name and condemn. After the recent blogpost though, I decided to do so.

I replied to his blogpost thus:

” Vinoth, your Jew hate is predictably making you thick.

‘We are shown the faces and names of Israeli hostages, but never those of Palestinian prisoners who have been tortured and imprisoned for decades. The former are human, the latter are presumably not.’

You see the Israeli hostages because Hamas releases them in vile, choreographed propaganda stunts. They are broadcast on your favourite, unbiased Al Jazeera.

Your Jew hate also moves you to paint the Israelis as somehow more evil than the rest of the world. That’s the purpose of your Uri Avnery quote: a specious rationalization of your ‘uniquely evil Jews fantasy’ by way of their Holocaust experience.

If you exercised logic, you would realise that Avnery himself is a counterpoint to the broad and sweeping generalizations of the quotation.”

Some readers might find my assertion that Ramachandra is a Jew hater unwarranted. Let me elaborate. The essence of Ramachandra’s Jew hate lies in his insistence that Israel as a nation and Israelis as a people are uniquely evil. The Avenry quote that I reference is the following:

“I will tell you something about the Holocaust. It would be nice to believe that people who have undergone suffering have been purified by suffering. But it’s the opposite, it makes them worse. It corrupts. There is something in suffering that creates a kind of egoism. Herzog [the Israeli president at the time] was speaking at the site of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen but he spoke only about the Jews. How could he not mention that others – many others – had suffered there? Sick people, when they are in pain, cannot speak about anyone but themselves. And when such monstrous things have happened to your people, you feel nothing can be compared to it. You get a moral ‘power of attorney’, a permit to do anything you want – because nothing can compare to what has happened to us. This is a moral immunity which is very clearly felt in Israel. Everyone is convinced that the IDF is more humane than any other army. ‘Purity of arms’ was the slogan of the Haganah army in ’48. But it never was true at all.”

For instance, in his suggestively titled blogpost “Israel: A Unique State”, Ramachandra makes the following completely false–dare I say, frankly idiotic–claims.