for a.nony.mouse
Posted on: August 21, 2009 - 11:29am
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for a.nony.mouse
Just want to hear your opinion on this article.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/08/15/robert-fulford-when-criticizing-israel-becomes-ritual.aspx
"Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven. Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads. And recks not his own rede."
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Zionists have been accusing people who criticize them of anti-semitism for so long that people don't take it seriously anymore. It's the boy who cried wolf all over again.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
I second that. Read Prof. Norman G. Finkelstein's books: The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah
You can see and hear any number of video/audio broadcasts featuring Finkelstein, but none is more descriptive of the man and his work than the pannel of peers collected to speak about Finkelstein and academic freedom after his denial of tenure from DePaul University due to a prolongued campaign and verbal, writen and "legal" assaults from Alan Dershowitz and "the lobby" against the corporate leadership at DePaul. You can watch/listen video/audio of all of the different speakers (including Noam Chomsky during the time of his wife's sickness) here: http://www.academicfreedomchicago.org/?q=node/32
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
watching video now, thanks for the book suggestions, i'm not very well-versed in this area.
"Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven. Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads. And recks not his own rede."
First I would like to say I have never said Israel was any better than any other racist despotism. Nor is identification of its racist tendencies anything new. Currently this racist refusal against "nigger Jews" is making the headlines in Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1110604.html
This does not begin to address Israel's sixty year old policy of "separate but equal" schools for non-Jewish Israelis. Those schools receive about 20% of funding for schools Jews.
With this as lead in lets consider the specific case of Apartheid in South Africa. When that issue was taken up by the world it too started with mild and constructive criticism. It progressed to quite harsh and at times vulgar criticism. Eventually this resulted in economic sanctions and embargoes which eventually brought down the white only government. This process took about 30 years.
Let us compare this to Israel. As the author notes long ago the criticism of Israel was mild and constructive. And yes it has progressed to harsh and vulgar. Sanctions are only beginning to form among citizens but as yet none have come to fruition and embargoes are not yet on the table. This process has been underway for some 60 years and the end is no where in sight.
This is so obvious that the author reads like a paid apologist for Israel. In neither case did constructive criticism work. In both cases the response to constructive criticism was to increase the racist agenda both legal and social. It was then the criticism escalated. It was also at this time the oppressed by either became something of folk heroes who could do no wrong.
All during the 1950s and 1960s Israel had the opportunity to respond to the constructive criticism by living up to its public obligation to permit those expelled to return. I am not interested in recapping all the details. It is right there in the UN recognition of Israel and granting it membership. Neither did Israel allow those who remained in Israel to leave the almost concentration camps and return to their homes and still does not. It was not until 1957 that martial law was lifted from them. And that only happened after to many were killed at one time for violating a curfew they knew nothing about.
And as with South Africa after the 1967 war it proceeded to make matters worse with its criminal squatter towns in occupied Jerusalem and West Bank and Gaza. Yes, it is quite true in the intervening 42 years the criticism has become harsh and increasingly vulgar. And yes, it hardens Jews in Israel as it did Whites in South Africa to become more oppressive. In South Africa it came to an end nearly two decades ago. In Israel and the occupied territories it continues to get worse.
Is harsh criticism counterproductive? Maybe. Did mild and constructive criticism work? No. When mild and constructive failed should people have given up on Israel as a hopeless cause and moved on? People do not work that way.
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As to equating anti-racism with anti-semitism, it appears to me to be the greatest blood libel of all to declare all Jews are racists, murderers and thieves. Yet this is what equation says. How else can one declare being against oppression is to hate Jews? Was the anti-Apartheid movement hatred of Whites? Is the failure to cease criticizing Israel in the face of its obstinent and increasing racism a manifestation of a hatred of Jews? Is a failure to move on to other countries which are no better than Israel evidence of hating Jews?
There is a difference. For other countries mild and constructive criticism has paid off. Not overnight, not even in a decade but other countries have responded to the criticism. In India every government but one since independence has tried to end the caste system and it is slowly but surely changing. Saudi has a different problem but over the years its government has slowly stopped enforcing the dictats of the Wahabi imams. Although there were notorious setbacks after the death of Stalin the oppression gradually diminished and finally ended. China has been on the same road after the death of Mao but without setbacks.
Pick a country and look into it and see where mild constructive criticism has worked it has not progressed to harsh and vulgar criticism much less to divestment, sanctions and embargoes. They are not Jeffersonian democracies yet but then neither is England.
Look at the author's own examples. The longest standing one is Tibet but he only mentions independence. Like it or not Tibetans had it better under China than as slaves (classical serfs, the people are bound to the land, buy the land, buy the people) under the Lamas. He pretends an interest in the Falun Gong but specifically with regard to only one university. In fact the preachers in the US got the US to raise the issue with China. China has both toned down the response and also made a greater effort to expose Fulan Gong teachings to the world which diminished much of the criticism. It is the same with his other examples.
Bottom line is that if Israel had responded to the mild and constructive criticism it would not have progressed to its present state with sanctions and embargoes waiting in the wings and boycotts under active consideration.
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The special pleadings Zionists make for themselves rings hollow. Israel itself has destroyed the pleading of antisemitism by forever hiding behind it. It claims to speak in the name of all the Jews in the world and it is the very rare Jew who challenges that claim much less damns Israel for making it. Israel claims to be a western democracy but labels any attempt to hold it to the standards of a western democracy as antisemitic. It claims to be jewish but labels any attempt to judge its actions by the standards of Judaism (as known in the West) as antisemitic.
All the good and none of the bad and if not you hate Jews.
The greater Israel's atrocities the antisemitic the people who mention them.
An antisemite is not a person who hates Jews. An antisemite is a person Jews hate.
Christians treated Jews better than any other religion they had contact with. Ask the next Druid or follower of Odin you meet to tell you about it. Christians treated Jews better than other Christians. An Albigensian will happily tell you about it.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml
While on this subject this just happened to appear today in Haaretz, the oldest Hebrew language newspaper in Israel.
I have taken the liberty of adding emphasis and [commentary].
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1110795.html
Regardless of what people may think about that case, Enderlin's status among France's mainstream Jews is an apt illustration of how they feel about expressing open disagreement with Israeli policies outside of Jewish circles. [Are we to assume it exists without knowing the form?] To many of them, the freedom of expression enjoyed by Israelis themselves in this regard is barely conceivable. Serge Benattar, editor in chief of Actualite Juive, the weekly that best represents mainstream French Jewish views, once remarked - with an apparent straight face - in an interview with the Israeli economic daily Globes, that if the criticism of the Israel Defense Forces that appears routinely in the Israeli press was printed in the French press, it would surely fuel anti-Semitism.[But when it does appear it is declared antisemitic even though often milder than in Israel.]
It isn't even clear to what extent many Jews in this country dare to voice criticism of Israel's conduct among themselves. When I discuss Israel with relatives and friends here, I often wonder if they have any critical sense at all. Whether we're talking about the occupation, the security fence or the settlements, the argument that Israel has the right to defend itself against terror is often the only one put forth, and almost always the one mentioned first. The view underlying many comments and opinions expressed by French Jews, in informal conversations as well as via their representative institutions, seems to be that Israel is a besieged country that can do no wrong. Or that if it errs, it does so only marginally, with all the extenuating circumstances humanly imaginable.
This isn't just my own subjective assessment. It is a phenomenon regularly reflected in statements by community leaders purporting to speak on behalf of all or most French Jews. This was dramatically illustrated by Richard Prasquier, president of France's main Jewish umbrella organization, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), when he told a major French daily during the operation in Gaza earlier this year that "95 percent of the Jewish community in France agrees with Israel's policies and what its army does." Sharp criticism in the French press of that statement led Prasquier to rephrase, and refer to "a broad majority of France's Jews" instead. Needless to say, no polls had been conducted that could have supported either formulation.
This virtually unquestioned consensus goes even further, in that even those rare Jewish public figures who do, to various degrees, use negative terms to portray Israel's handling of the Palestinian issue are then reviled by their mainstream brethren and systematically viewed as self-loathing Jews. One example can be seen in the paroxysmal reactions to Rony Brauman, the Israeli-born founder of Doctors Without Borders and a staunch opponent of the occupation, who is generally looked upon as a traitor within the Jewish community.
These attitudes seem to be aimed principally at deflating any public criticism of Israel as an occupier of the Palestinian territories - an aspect of the Jewish state that is rarely the object of candid debate within Jewish institutions. Over the past decade, it has even become common practice among community leaders to characterize any condemnation of the occupation as anti-Semitic.
Admittedly, Israel's fiercest opponents in France today, mainly a brand of radical Muslims and representatives of the extreme left, often use anti-Zionist rhetoric as a guise to spread their deeply anti-Semitic worldview. But the portrayal of virtually any criticism of the occupation as anti-Semitic also seems to allow mainstream Jewish figures to avoid a debate that would touch on the heart of the matter. Yet some of those same Jews do not hesitate to display the Israeli flag[equating Israel the country with Jews] in demonstrations against anti-Semitic acts, as was the case in protest marches following the murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006. At the same time, community leaders such as the CRIF's Prasquier regularly warn against the danger of "importing" the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the dynamic of Jewish-Arab relations in France.
There is no obvious explanation for these widespread, firmly entrenched attitudes among France's Jews. Fear of fueling even more anti-Semitism is undoubtedly a factor. Another, less tangible cause might be the unspoken guilt many Jews feel toward Israel for having chosen to remain in France and not make aliyah, preferring to worship the Promised Land from afar. Yet I can't help thinking that this is not the kind of support Israel needs from Jews in the Diaspora. Readiness to speak bravely and candidly to all segments of the society at large would clearly be a much smarter approach. Among other benefits, it would help dispel a source of common confusion that mars the debate among opponents of the occupation: the blurring of lines between the legitimacy of the settlements and the legitimacy of Israel's right to exist.
Corinne Mellul is a political commentator in France.
Here we have somewhat candid commentary by a Jew on roughly the same subject as the Canadian author but from a perspect that shows Jews themselves are the cause of their own problems. The protest with the Israeli flags was about Jews being attacked by Muslims because of the actions of Israel. Here we see Jews identifying with Israel and protesting the consequences of being indentified with Israel.
Jews stole the land. The owners want it back. That is all anyone needs to know about Israel. That is all there is to know about Israel.
www.ussliberty.org
www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html
www.giwersworld.org/00_files/zion-hit-points.phtml