This is not going to become a Norman Finkelstein blog. But I may pay more attention to his message, given the recent attempts to censor that message. He speaks here on the prospect for a new, worse war in Lebanon -- and on the more basic issue of self-respect.
Even if you think you are going to hate what you hear, you owe it to yourself to listen to this man.
On racism: A short while back, there was a brouhaha over a cartoon which indicated that the Israelis had begun to act like goosesteppers. Such a comparison, we heard, was indefensible.
Oh really...? This comes (originally) from the anti-fascist publication Searchlight:
The Preserving Western Civilization conference drew about 100 men and women from Canada, the UK, and the USA to a suit-and-tie affair at a hotel near the Baltimore-Washington International airport. The event was organised by 76 year-old Michael Hart, who received his PhD in astrophysics from Princeton and is known in white nationalist circles for his proposal for a racial partition of the United States. Hart is also Jewish, as were a significant percentage of the conference speakers and the attendees. These were “scientific racists”, seeking to root their anti-Islamic politics in genetics, rather than simply in culture.
This was an attempt to create a new ideological pole friendlier to Jewish participation, but within the broader white nationalist movement. They would bind Islamophobia and nativism with scientific racism.Do you think that this unholy alliance can be consigned to the political fringe? Think again. Read what the estimable Chris Hedges (whose work we have praised in other contexts) has to say:
After the white nationalist American Renaissance began inviting a handful of Jewish racists, such as Michael Levin, to its conferences promoting old-fashioned genetic determinism, there has been an uneasy truce about “the Jewish question” in white nationalist intellectual circles.
It was unthinkable, when I was based as a correspondent in Jerusalem two decades ago, that an Israeli politician who openly advocated ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory, as well as forcing Arabs in Israel to take loyalty oaths or be forcibly relocated to the West Bank, could sit on the Cabinet.
The racist tirades of Jewish proto-fascists like Meir Kahane stood outside the law, were vigorously condemned by most Israelis and were prosecuted accordingly. Kahane’s repugnant Kach Party, labeled by the United States, Canada and the European Union as a terrorist organization, was outlawed by the Israeli government in 1988 for inciting racism.
Israel has changed. And the racist virus spread by Kahane, whose thugs were charged with the murders and beatings of dozens of unarmed Palestinians and whose members held rallies in Jerusalem where they chanted “Death to Arabs!” has returned to Israel in the figure of Israel’s powerful new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman openly calls for an araberrein Israel—an Israel free of Arabs.
There has been a steady decline from the days of the socialist Labor Party, which founded Israel in 1948 and held within its ranks many leaders, such as Yitzhak Rabin, who were serious about peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians. The moral squalor of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Lieberman reflects the country’s degeneration. Labor, like Israel, is a shell of its old self.
Lieberman, a former nightclub bouncer who was a member of the Kach Party, has the personal and political habits of the Islamic goons he opposes. He was found guilty in 2001 of beating a 12-year-old boy and fined by an Israeli court. He is being investigated for multimillion-dollar fraud and money laundering and is rumored to have close ties with the Russian mafia. He lives, in defiance of international law, in the Jewish settlement of Nokdim on occupied Palestinian land.
Lieberman, as did his mentor Kahane, calls for the eradication of Palestinians from Israel and the territories it occupies.
Lieberman, from the floor of the Knesset, openly fantasized three years ago about executing the handful of Palestinian Knesset members.
Palestinians have become, by Israeli design, impoverished, reduced to a level of bare subsistence and dependent on the United Nations for food assistance. They live ringed by Israeli troops in a series of pod-like ghettos in the West Bank and in Gaza, which is a massive, fetid open-air prison. And when these little Bantustans become restive, Israel swiftly turns off the delivery of basic food and supplies or uses F-16 fighter jets or heavy artillery to bomb the squalid concrete hovels.How can Americans continue to support this nation of bloodthirsty bigots?
The public embrace by a senior Israeli official of a policy of ethnic cleansing, however, is ominous. It signals a further evolution of the Israeli state from one that at least paid lip service to equality to one that increasingly resembles the former apartheid regime in South Africa. Racism, once practiced in private and condemned in public, has become to many Israelis acceptable.
15 comments:
Israel is a cancer on the world.
Since when do you characterize the people of any nation by a few hand-picked examples?
Ah yes, Meir Kahane...brings back all that Peter Lance stuff (also here).
"Since when do you characterize the people of any nation by a few hand-picked examples?"
Those very words could be used to excuse any actions by any nation at any time.
Your government is responsible for the deaths of 1,320,220 brown-skinned Iraquis in the last five years. They were responsible for the deaths of over 3,000,000 yellow skinned Vietnamese in the 60’s and 70’s. They torture and rendition. Your calling another whole country “a nation of bloodthirsty bigots” sounds more than a bit hollow, especially when that country is surrounded by bloodthirsty bigoted governments and terrorist militias that have been openly committed to their utter annihilation and eradication unceasingly for the last six decades.
You can’t possibly understand what it is like to live as they do. Just let one Katyusha missile fall within a half mile of your home and you would be screaming bloody murder. Let three fall in a month and let me hear you calmly speaking about how few people were actually killed by them. Try living that way for a few months, let alone 60 years.
Stop calling them names, stop acting like some moral exemplar. With the possible exception of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, there is nary a government on this globe that isn’t filled with self-important, bloodthirsty bigots. And your own government is the single most murderous of them all. As well, there isn’t a country in this world whose citizens as a whole aren’t generally peace loving and wishing for the end of war. Israelis and Jews, Palestinians and Arabs, alike.
Sometimes you really have good things to say. But your black and white portrayal of Israelis as evil perpetrators makes you out as a fatuous fool, a cartoonish caricature of a concerned moralist blogger. You draw yourself in two dimensions and no colors. Why don’t you grow up, wake up, and quit it already?
80 percent of Israelis supported the assault on Gaza. Hardly a few handpicked examples. And who voted in these racist goons?
The situation is so far advanced that those bloodthirsty bigots now feel free to use our money to slaughter not just Palestinians but American citizens -- openly, in broad daylight, with no fear of ever being held accountable. There is no other country in the world where this would happen. None.
Not racism, religious bigotry brought about by the constant war between the Jews and Muslims. They are from the same genetic stock just different tribes. Sort of a Stockholm syndrome. Poke a gentle dog with a stick enough times and it will take your hand off. As to Israel's right to exist, who are we to judge since most of us are living on land stolen from native American tribes.
Interesting stuff. The leader of the far-right British National Party in Britain has also been getting into the Zionist message recently. I'm not joking. He's even made a complaint to the police about Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of Tony Blair, with regard to her speaking out against Zionism and the Gaza massacre. He says her line involves supporting anti-Semitic violence. If that's not singing to the hasbara songsheet, what is? Again, I'm not joking. Such a message was promoted during the massacre itself by operators such as the Community Defence League.
But let's get this the right way round. Post-neo-Nazi politicians are small fry, from the point of view of big Jewish money. They could be turned off quite easily. Could be, but very probably won't be.
As for academia, well yes. First, 'scientific racism' has long been part of the real ideology of the nutters who rule us anyway. 'Science' is little but a chimera. Hypocrisy, money-grabbing, and contempt for the lower orders rule. The world is dominated by gangsters who know exactly what they are.
Second, 'scientific racism' is part of the line that 'the poor deserve to be poor because they're inferior'. It's about class.
Jewish supremacism is straining and pushing and I wouldn't be surprised if new qualitative barriers are crossed soon. Just remember how tiny an 'ethno-religious' group we're talking about, and how strongly it is 'represented' in the most influential circles of many countries and sectors. Of course the US doesn't have an independent foreign policy; nor does the UK; a person would have to be mad to think otherwise. I mean for goodness sake, what ideas do we expect the powerful to have?? That God made us all equal, that we're all born with the potential to achieve anything anyone else has achieved, and even more?!
b
"How can Americans continue to support this nation of bloodthirsty bigots?"
-- Which Americans?
Well, I'll echo some other commenter: Who's "we," white man? You can find this social darwinism crap all the back way before Darwin-- the Hierarchy of Man and the Divine Right of Kings all flow from the same poisonous well. And before that it was Egyptians enslaving the Jews via the same doctrine. The trick is move the future so the norm for our leaders is closer to center and more moderate, not have them become leaders based on polarizing extremes, as we are currently doing in all the democracies.
Which Americans? Well, unfortunately, most of our politicians and our entire foreign policy apparatus.
"Your government is responsible for the deaths of 1,320,220 brown-skinned Iraquis in the last five years. They were responsible for the deaths of over 3,000,000 yellow skinned Vietnamese in the 60’s and 70’s."
Right, and in this country, many many many people were outraged by those actions and expressed their outrage. Many of us recognized these atrocities for what they were, and have demanded that those responsible be held accountable.
We have the exact same right to criticize Israel because its despicable actions are funded by OUR government using OUR tax dollars. We have every right to demand that our hard-earned money not be used to fund repression, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.
Indeed we not only have the right, we have the moral obligation, to demand accountability, especially from a belligerent, war-crazed country that's very happy to take our welfare and our arms and use them to murder civilians, international relief workers, and our own citizens.
No prizes for guessing which foreign country has a company providing security for American nuclear installations - both civil and military. The US simply does not have an independent foreign policy where Israel is concerned. The Israeli lobby dominates US foreign policy; if it has a non-Jewish partner (although given the 'infrastructural' set-up in the US, I can't imagine how any such non-Jewish partner would ever be in a psoition to hold caucus meetings in private), then the latter is subservient to it. I'm f*cked if I'm going to deny the above for fear of being called racist.
I've just read this piece in the New Republic by Zionist scumbag Howard Jacobson. For him it's tantamount to Nazism to summarise the Gaza massacre with the word "massacre". Let's stop listening to people like him, the same way we close our ears to other hypocritical racist twisters who seek to justify the completely unjustifiable. Don't let's even start out by assuming intellectual honesty. Jacobson is such a twister he even asserts that comparing Zionist-committed slaughters with the slaughter meted out against Jewish people by the Nazis is verging on declaring that the earlier massacres were 'retrospective retribution' for today's massacres. That kind of loony assertion would only even occur to someone who wishes to encourage the view that what the classified-as-Jewish victims of the Nazis really needed was Zionism. But does actually anyone in the world believe that Jewish victims of the early 1940s deserved what they got, because of what a fascist army does today in the Middle East? Well maybe if Buddhists believed in time-travel?
In reality, it's Zionist racists (and all Zionists are racists, for Palestine was not a land without people) who believe that the horrors inflicted on innocent Jews during WW2 somehow justify the set-up and continued existence of the "shitty little country" in the Middle East.
Which brings me to my next point. This disgusting Jacobson 'argues' that "Calling into question an entire nation's right to exist is not exactly 'criticism'". But Israel is not a 'nation' in the way that France or Russia or even the United States is a 'nation'. It's an ethnic supremacist, fascist regime. The Group Areas Act got repealed in South Africa. So we'd like to see an end to the Jewish nature of Israel? Right. Not exactly on the cards, is it? The Zionists would blow the sh*t out of the world first, as their apologists have sagely 'explained' for a long time. Meantime, they've got nuclear weapons, the President of France is their 'former' agent, they control America, and don't get me going on the so-called 'oligarchs' in Russia.
Honestly it is a disgusting thought to think that someone like Jacobson, evilly keen on justifying the cool, calm, collected, highly organised slaughter of over 1000 people in Gaza by an invading besieging army which has corralled a million-strong population into what until a few decades ago would uncontroversially have been called a concentration camp...might be sitting next to me on the train some time, or passing in the opposite direction on the street. Looking like an 'ordinary' decent person who, like most of humanity, shares at least some values regarding the worthfulness of human lives without regard to people's ethnicity. But no, this kind of individual can't even get his racist head around the idea that people designated by the Nazis as Jewish (of whom a significant proportion didn't particularly identify themselves as such, or not until they were imprisoned anyway) who suffered so horrendously and on such a massive scale at places such as Auschwitz, should be understood as people first and foremost. It is Jacobson's type of vile propaganda and rabies that drags their memory into the dirt. Zionists really have no right.As for America, well...after all but a tiny handful of congressmen voted in favour of a motion upholding "Israel's right to defend itself" in the middle of the Gaza massacre (Dennis Kucinich being the only name I recognised among those honourable exceptions who voted against), what defence against a charge of intellectual cowardice is left for those who continue not to recognise that both Democratic and Republican parties are under Zionist control?
Jacobson's full of it. There were Jews who revelled and danced in the street to celebrate the Gaza massacre while it was going on. I saw a film of them on this blog, and posted to say that some of them should be put into mental hospitals and, to give them a chance of recovery, isolated from others who share their mentality.
b
Unconnected thoughts:
It seems to me that had not Martin Luther King been assassinated, the reality we are discussing might not today be so horrific. Not that I'm aware of, or trying to bring into the discussion any views he might have had on Israel or zionism, but rather he was a powerful moral force; a lot of American morality has mysteriously slipped down the drains in the last 40-odd years.
Unceasing propaganda, lobbying, extortion and bribery have a big place in this, in my view. And I'd be surprised if there were not some pretty smart people who have served (or some yet serving) in government who are not exactly pro-zionist, pro-Israel, but dare not speak out publicly about it.
If someone wanted to stop development across Eurasia, setting up a never-ending war situation at Israel's (and other similarly extant) location seems like an effective geopolitical way of doing it. Don't want those dark-skinned creatures using up all OUR resources and multiplying themselves over the face of the Earth.
Couldn't stop those damn Americans... they grabbed the better part of a whole continent, built a railroad across it! Their first centennial and exporting the American system to Germany, Russia, Japan, China... Damned if we let that happen. Berlin-Baghdad railroad, trans-Siberian railroad... As if our shipping were not good enough for them! We will draw the bastards into destroying each other before we will see our usurious, monopolistic, oligarchical system--our EMPIRE--fall. After all, old chap, this is the way it has always been, what?
Depopulation is good for Mother Earth anyway; could be a utopia with us running it. Take the clock back some hundreds or thousands of years, I say! Nature reserves for us to hunt in as God intended. Sustainable, that would be. A hoe and strong back and a good day's work and they can have all they need for a thousand years!
Yes, if we must set them warring amongst themselves, use our wits to protect what is self-evident to people of culture, then let's get on with it. I admit it's a bit distasteful, but imagine the alternative!
After seeing some of the Finkelstein clips here, I watched a ten- or twelve-part debate between him and Dershowitz.
It was striking to note that almost the entire exculpation offered for Israel by Dershowitz, about no deliberate civilian targeting, etc., has been given the lie by Israel's more recent behavior in Lebanon in '06 (ONE MILLION CLUSTER BOMBS) and in the Gaza Strip. All of his apologia is now inoperative.
It is now a widespread position in Israel, supported by a majority of those polled there, that they ought to engage in the war crime known as ethnic cleansing in the West Bank to secure their realm.
Such a position was a radical fringe idea not so long ago. However, not long ago, the 'Israeli amen corner' in Congress (in Pat Buchanan's phrase) voted nearly unanimous support for their predations in Gaza. Several years before, the Congress also voted in favor of the proposition that Jerusalem is and should remain the eternal and undivided capital of Israel, prejudging what were supposed to be 'final talk' deliberations among and between the belligerents, and contrary to decades old US foreign policy.
XI
That Dershowitz debate is absolutely worth the time to watch.
"It is now a widespread position in Israel, supported by a majority of those polled there, that they ought to engage in the war crime known as ethnic cleansing in the West Bank to secure their realm."
Yep. Take a listen some time to Benny Morris, one of the so-called "New Israeli Historians." These historians have done a great service in revealing the extent of the Zionist project's racist, violent roots and the terrorist tactics of Israel's founding. Ilan Pappe is another, but Pappe takes the Palestinian side and calls this what it is, ethnic cleansing. What's amazing is that Morris, for all his groundbreaking historical work, flat-out says that the Zionists were right and their only problem was that they didn't "complete" the job of ethnic cleansing.
"If only we had driven those savages into the sea when we had the chance, and the world still loved us," is the bottom line of Morris's argument. And this is one of Israel's most respected historians. (Meanwhile Pappe had to leave his university post in Israel.) It's astonishing, it would be like the person who knew the most about the Holocaust, had researched it most thoroughly and had access to all the original Nazi documents, was also Nazism's biggest apologist. It's loonyville.
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