Monday, July 23, 2012

Commemorating Alexander Cockburn


The Irish New Left journalist and stylist Alexander Cockburn is dead. I don't like dissing the just-deceased, but I have a standard response to the passing of people like Cockburn: I'm not happy that he's dead, and I'm not happy that he lived.

You won't see a lot of straight talk about Cockburn just now. To the extent that anyone still notices his long-dimmed star, it's mainly New Left mandarins and their admirers who are staggering to commemorate him. Katha Pollitt, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Greg Palast are stunned. Gorgeous George is lugubrious. The Nation, which doesn't fly flags, is at half-mast. Assorted padawans are performing homage. Even the Paulite non-interventionist Glenn Greenwald, who moves usually in less rarefied circles, has observed the occasion, and aptly, as we will see.

Cockburn was edgy, ballsy and in some ways brilliant. As a stylist and polemicist, he was a meet peer of Christopher Hitchens, whom he was close to but came to despise. I don't think Cockburn had quite the same level of talent, but he was formidable and was Hitchens' perfect foil.

It goes deep downhill from there. Cockburn was the son of a Stalinist shill, the journalist Claud Cockburn, who according to Bob Gordon, "worked closely [in Spain during the Spanish Civil War] with the Soviet agents who orchestrated both acts of violence against the anti-Stalinist left and the propaganda which whitewashed those acts." Orwell himself documented Cockburn's disinformation in Homage to Catalonia.

Alexander seems to have inherited his father's character and the core of his politics, though he went on to become a New Left icon. Along with Jeffrey St. Clair, he came to edit a political newsletter called Counterpunch, which was admired alternately by International ANSWER types, 60s radicals, libertarians and nativists. As such Counterpunch isn't garden variety radical flora. Its politics comprise global warming denial, pro-NRA and pro-Pinochet positions, as well as paranoid anti-banker populism, hysteria about the surveillance state and Palestinian solidarity. You might be thinking what some have remarked -- that Counterpunch is in some ways more far-Right than Left. Oliver Kamm rightly sources its harlequin politics in
convergence between what may reasonably be termed anti-American instincts on both wings of politics. During Labour's fractious debates in the 1980s, Denis Healey memorably described neutralism - then a vibrant sentiment on the British Left - as "isolationism with an inferiority complex". The identity is by now almost complete.

On Israel, Zionism and Jews, far Right and Left also find common ground, and Counterpunch in this vein is unambiguously anti-Semitic. It's not just over-the-top or an Asperger's affair like Mondoweiss. Counterpunch actually published a blood libel. This is Alexander Cockburn's wicked accomplishment.

The fact is... that substantiated evidence of public and private organ trafficking and theft, and allegations of worse, have been widely reported for many years. Given such context, the Swedish charges become far more plausible than might otherwise be the case and suggest that an investigation could well turn up significant information.

...

Israel’s organ donor problems

Israel has an extraordinarily small number of willing organ donors. According to the Israeli news service Ynet, “the percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the ethnic groups… In western countries, some 30 per cent of the population have organ donor cards. In Israel, in contrast, four percent of the population holds such cards. (17)

“According to statistics from the Health Ministry’s website, in 2001, 88 Israelis died waiting for a transplant because of a lack of donor organs. In the same year, 180 Israelis were brain dead, and their organs could have been used for transplant, but only 80 of their relatives agreed to donate their organs.”

According to Ynet, the low incidence of donors is related to “religious reasons.” In 2006 there was an uproar when an Israeli hospital known for its compliance with Jewish law performed a transplant operation using an Israeli donor. The week before, “a similar incident occurred, but since the patient was not Jewish it passed silently.”

...

Palestinian disappearances increase

Bostrom, who earlier wrote of all this in his 2001 book Inshallah, (20) reports in his recent article:

“While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

“Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.”

“... On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed.”
He describes the case of 19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, shot by Israeli forces invading his village.

“The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair… Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family.”
Five days later he was returned, “dead and wrapped up in green hospital fabric.” Bostrom reports that as the body was lowered into the grave, his chest was exposed and onlookers could see that he was stitched up from his stomach to his head. Bostrom writes that this was not the first time people had seen such a thing.

...

It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.
Cockburn, in publishing the ruminations by Alison Weir on Israeli organ harvesting, was the last notable First-World purveyor of blood libel. Weir's work is based on an earlier blood libel by Donald Bostrom appearing in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. She folds into it the research of anthropologist and organ trade investigator Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who documented sporadic unethical and illegal organ harvesting of Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers in the 1990s by staff at the National Legal Medical Institute in Tel Aviv. The staff "said that they believed they were helping to save lives, and that this was more important than trying to procure the consent of ill-informed and grieving family members." Chief Pathologist Dr. Yehuda Hiss was fired for these improprieties, which ended by 2000, though he stayed with the Institute.

Weir, and Counterpunch, want you to believe a broader, darker narrative: that Israel maintains the occupation of the Palestinians in part to shore up its reserves of organs for Jews in need of donations. This is necessary, the conspiracy theory goes, because Israel, owing to the religious compunctions of devout Jews, has a very low supply of donor organs.

This isn't like the case with Ron Paul and his newsletters, which were ghost-written and which Paul indirectly benefited from. Counterpunch was Cockburn's primary project, to which he contributed writing, and his sentiments elsewhere are congruous. "It's supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a discussion of how much the Jews do control the media," Cockburn observed, and published a book called The Politics of Anti-Semitism on the supposed misuse of the charge to silence people like him. About conspiracy theories fingering Israel for the 9/11 attacks or for having foreknowledge of them, Cockburn was noncommittal: "I don't know there's enough exterior evidence to determine whether they are true or not."

While the progressives grieve, consider all this and the following tweets and links that lead to a breviary of other anti-Semitic quotes and their primary sources at Counterpunch. Also see if you can obtain the latest issue -- it features a piece called "THE DREYFUS CASE, REVISITED" by the Holocaust-denier Israel Shamir, who asks "... was [Dreyfus] really a victim of anti-Semitism?"


Also:
  • Lenni Brenner, the American Trotskyist who is the leading Western amplifier of the Soviet lie that Nazis and Zionists were kindred collaborators: "The slaughter of between 5 and 6 million Jews has become history’s best known black hats/white hats movie."
  • Alison Weir on that same lie
  • Gilad Atzmon, the leading Jewish anti-Semite, was a favorite at Counterpunch, which liked to run him and articles defending him. Here's Atzmon at Counterpunch: "...there is good reason to believe that Hitler developed some of his anti-Semitic arguments after reading early Zionist texts"
  • Recall Bashar Assad told Pope John Paul II that the Jews continue to afflict Christians and Muslims the way they betrayed Jesus and Muhammad. 8 years later, Cockburn published an article called "Israeli Bodysnatchers" by Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to the Assad Presidency. The piece carries on about the Bostrom blood libel.
Philosophy professor Michael Neumann is a frequent Counterpunch contributor. The hate site Jewish Tribal Review admired Neumann's writings and tried to recruit him for collaboration. Neumann demurred and JTR published their email exchange, in which Neumann wrote: "If an effective strategy [of helping Palestinians] means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism... I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care." Here are a few of Neumann's Counterpunch writings:

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Friday, June 29, 2012

Iran Vice President Rahimi on the Jews


Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, the Vice President of Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's number two, gave a speech in Tehran on June 26 at the UN-sponsored International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking 2012 annual event. It was disfigured all over by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and is a fine specimen of the form.  Rahimi is not as well known as Ahmadinejad, but he surpassed his President by explicitly indicting Jews and Judaism rather than precision-targeting "Zionists".

It is frustrating and regrettable that so far no verbatim transcript of the speech has emerged in English.  I have worked hard over the last couple of days to find one or anything close -- an English-language summary or a verbatim transcript in Farsi.  All I can find are assorted quotes in several English-language news reports.

On a tip by Golnaz Esfandiari, I was able to disinter from the Google Cache a now-unavailable Farsi-language report on the speech that appears to be an eyewitness paraphrase of Rahimi's remarks.  It provides a clear and lengthy summary of what he actually said and serves as a better record than anything out there now.  Therefore I've labored to translate the document into English and present it here.
"The Vice President announced that the Iranian people, despite intense sanctions, are stalwart and content.”


The Mehr News Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) Mohammad Reza Rahimi, celebrating the anniversary of the global fight against narcotics, said: the trafficking of drugs and glass [“shisheh”, which means "glass", is a Persian idiom for crystal-meth -ed.] are rooted in the teachings of the Zionist Talmud. This book teaches them how to destroy non-Jews so as to nourish a fetus in the womb of a Jewish mother.

معاون اول رييس جمهور اعلام كرد كه مردم ايران با وجود تحريم‌هاي شديد قناعت مي‌كنند و ايستاد‌ه اند. به گزارش خبرنگار خبرگزاري دانشجويان ايران (ايسنا)، محمدرضا رحيمي در مراسم سالروز جهاني مبارزه با مواد مخدر گفت: توسعه و گسترش مواد مخدر و شيشه ريشه در آموزه‌هاي تلموت صهيونيست‌‌ها دارند. در اين كتاب آموزش داده شده كه غير يهود را چگونه نابود كنند و چگونه يك جنين در بطن يك مادر يهود پرورش داده شود.
 
He added: Eighty percent of American wealth is in the hands of 6 percent of the Jewish world and a U.S. researcher says that in order to reduce the population of American Indians a Jewish doctor of obstetrics and gynecology rendered 8000 of them sterile -- all of these teachings are in the Talmud.

وي افزود: هشتاد درصد ثروت آمريكا در دست شش درصد از يهوديان دنياست و يك محقق آمريكايي مي‌گويد يك پزشك زنان و زايمان يهود براي كاهش نسل سرخپوستان هشت هزار نفر از آنها را عقيم كرده است و همه اين مباحث در آموزه‌هاي تلموت است.

Rahimi clarified: the Talmud's teachings are against Christianity and against Muslims. They think God has created the world so that all other nations can serve them.

رحيمي تصريح كرد: آموزه‌هاي تلموت هم بر ضد مسيحيت و هم عليه مسلمانان . يهود ديگران را در خدمت خود مي‌داند.

He continued: what happened in Russia [the Bolshevik Revolution -ed.] and the labor movements were all due to the actions of orchestrating Jews, but later research showed that none among the victims were Jews.

وي ادامه داد:آنچه در روسيه اتفاق افتاد و همچنين تحركات كارگري همه ناشي از اقدامات يهود و سردمداران آنها بود اما تحقيقات بعد نشان داد كه يك نفر از كشته شدگان نيز از بين يهود نبوده است.

The Vice President stated: Wherever blood is spilled there is a Muslim and located behind the scenes is the Jew.

معاون اول رييس جمهور بيان كرد: هر كجا خوني ريخته مي‌شود يك مسلمان آنجا حضور دارد و در پشت صحنه آن يهيود قرار دارد.

The Zionists spread destruction not only by drugs, but also by [attacking] cultures and they do this in a way that no son and daughter knows their parents. Rahimi said: Jews dominate the media world to disseminate Jewish thought and plunder the resources and wealth of their countries. He said: they create differences between Shiite and Sunni nations and wear away their understanding, to destroy peace and security and comfort is their main goal.

وي ادامه داد: تخريب فقط به مواد مخدر نيست، بلكه با مسائل فرهنگي است و آنها به گونه‌اي مسائل فرهنگي را رواج مي‌دهند كه هيچ پسر و دختري خود را فرزندان والدينشان نمي‌دانند. رحيمي اظهار كرد: تسلط بر رسانه‌هاي جهان براي القاي تفكر يهود است و كار آنها غارت منابع و ثروت فرهنگي كشورهاست. وي گفت: آنها با ايجاد اختلاف بين ملت‌ها شيعه و سني درست مي‌كنند و زدودن آرامش و امنيت و از بين بردن آرامش هدف اصلي آنهاست.

Rahimi continued: Since [United States -ed.] forces entered Afghanistan poppy cultivation has increased by 60%; alternatively the Islamic Republic of Iran might have bought all poppy produced in Afghanistan and turned it into morphine and medical drugs. He also noted that Iran could take money from the Afghan transit route of drugs to Europe, and open up the way to this income for the country, but this is immoral and contrary to our religion.

رحيمي ادامه داد: از زماني كه نيروهاي آنها وارد افغانستان شده كشت ترياك 60 افزايش پيدا كرده است و گرنه جمهوري اسلامي ايران مي‌توانست تمام توليدات كشور افغانستان را يكجا بخرد و آنرا تبديل به مرفين كرده و به مصرف دارويي برساند. وي همچنين اذعان كرد ما مي‌توانيم با گرفتن پول از افغانستان مسير ترانزيت مواد مخدر به اروپا را باز كنيم و از اين راه درآمدي براي كشور كسب شود، اما اين خلاف اخلاق و خلاف مكتب ماست.

He pointed out: 13 percent of European addicts are opium users, but they get their liquor elsewhere. Despite the fact that we have respect for the followers of the Prophet Moses, we are opposed to the international Zionists. He announced that the Zionists are the main element of the drug trade, saying their aim is narcotics, while among the addicts you cannot even find one Zionist, and the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay for anybody who can research and find one single Zionist who is an addict. The Vice President stressed: worldwide 210 million people will try a drug, there are 27 million people in the world that are addicted and this is most relevant to Asian countries. Rahimi said: based on laws and regulations concerning drugs mandating that each drug lord is to be executed in Iran, they will make noise. Our question is, if we execute drug dealers and don’t promote drugs, what is the fuss for? He attributed these recent discussions in our country to Zionist propaganda, and thieves and robbers in this country.

وي خاطر نشان كرد: 13 درصد از معتادان اروپا را ترياكي‌ها به خود اختصاص مي‌دهند، اما آنها در جاي ديگري شراب ميل مي‌كنند. ما عليرغم اين‌كه براي پيروان حضرت موسي احترام قائل هستيم، اما مخالف صهيونيست جهاني هستيم. وي تجارت مواد مخدر را كار صهيونيست‌ها اعلام كرد و گفت: هدف آنها مواد مخدر است، اين در حالي است كه حتي يك صهيونيست معتاد هم نمي‌توان پيدا كرد و ما مي‌خواهيم از محققان و سازمان‌هاي بين المللي خود را معرفي كنند كه چرا صهيونيست‌ها ترويج و گسترش دهنده مواد مخدر هستند، اما خود آنها معتاد نيستند. معاون اول رييس جمهور تصريح كرد: در دنيا 210 ميليون نفر يك بار مواد مخدر را تجربه مي‌كنند و 27 ميليون نفر در دنيا معتاد وجود دارد كه بيشتر آنها مربوط به كشورهاي آسيايي است. رحيمي با بيان اين‌كه هر معتاد 5 نفر را درگير مي‌كند گفت: در حال حاضر 70 درصد از زندانيان ايران را مواد مخدري‌ها تشكيل مي‌دهند و 300 هزار پرونده مواد مخدر در قوه قضاييه وجود دارد كه باعث شده قوه قضاييه را به خود مشغول دارد. رحيمي اظهار كرد: بر اساس قوانين و مقررات هر باره كه سردسته مواد مخدري در ايران اعدام مي‌شود آنها سر و صدا مي‌كنند. سوال ما اين است شما مواد مخدر را ترويج مي‌كنيد و ما اعدام مي‌كنيم پس سر و صدا براي چيست. وي ادامه داد: به اين گونه مباحث تبليغات صهيونيستي گفته مي‌شود كه اخيرا در كشور ما هم باب شده و دزدان در اين مملكت آي دزد آي دزد راه انداخته‌اند.

Rahimi said the spread of drugs has occurred mostly in Asian countries because in Africa there is no money to buy drugs.

به گفته رحيمي گسترش مواد مخدر بيشتر در كشورهاي آسيايي اتفاق افتاده چرا كه در آفريقا پولي براي خريد مواد مخدر وجود ندارد.

He also pointed out: 10 percent of Americans are addicted to drugs but the Zionists are behind the whole story. The Vice President also stated that three million immigrants are in their country for years and it is possible to call Iran the largest immigrant country. If these numbers are taken out of the country the number of unemployed in our nation of Iran will reach zero.

وي همچنين خاطر نشان كرد: 10 درصد از آمريكايي‌ها معتاد هستند اما پشت پرده همه ماجراي مواد مخدر صهيونييست‌ها قرار دارند. معاون اول رييس جمهور همچنين بيان كرد سالهاست كه سه ميليون مهمان افغانستاني به كشور ما تحميل شده است و گفته مي‌شود ايران بزرگترين كشور مهاجر پذير است. اگر اين تعداد از كشور خارج شوند بيكاري‌مان به صفر مي‌رسد چون به همين تعداد بيكار در كشور داريم.

Elsewhere in his remarks about America, he claimed that via satellite they monitor certain events such as in prison camps and military bases, he said: "So why do you not see all the poppy fields in Afghanistan? Are you blind?”

وي در بخش ديگري از اظهارات خود درباره اينكه امريكا ادعا مي‌كند از طريق ماهواره اتفاقات فلان پادگان يا زندان را مي‌داند گفت: پس چرا آن همه مزارع ترياك در افغانستان را نمي‌بينيد؟ كوريد؟

He said wherever Iran shows independence and freedom there are manifestations of global arrogance and World Zionism. Why should the Islamic Republic of Iran give 4000 martyrs for fighting drugs, but there should not even be blood from the nose of one of them?

وي گفت: هر كجا مظاهر استقلال و آزادي ايران است استكبار و صهيونيست جهاني آنجا را مي‌كوبد. چرا بايد جمهوري اسلامي ايران چهارهزار شهيد براي مبارزه با مواد مخدر بدهد اما از دماغ يك نفر از آنها هم خون نيايد.

The Vice President said: if a carpenter from the Secretary-General headquarters to fight drug trafficking built a wall around Iran to stop opium from entering the country, what to do with industrial materials? Who will organize this material? The hands behind the curtain.

معاون اول رييس جمهور گفت: اگر دبير كل ستاد مبارزه با مواد مخدر (نجار) دور ايران را ديوار بكشد تا ترياك وارد كشور نشود با مواد صنعتي چكار كنيم. چه كسي اين مواد را سازماندهي مي‌كند. پس دستهايي پشت پرده وجود دارد.

Rahimi said: A United States Senator has said they will poison Iranians via cigarettes so we must tell the people and in the schools what kind of people they are. Rahimi said in another part of his speech: Doctors say there are enough drugs in the body and when someone is smoking all the time God has put enough of this in the body to discipline the body. This is why drug addiction affects the body with pain.

رحيمي اظهار كرد: سناتور امريكا گفته است ما ايرانيان را از طريق مسموم كردن سيگار از پا در مي‌آوريم پس بايد به مردم و مدارس بگوييم كه اينها چه كساني هستند. رحيمي در بخش ديگري از سخنان خود گفت: پزشكان مي‌گويند به اندازه كافي مخدر در بدن وجود دارد و خداوند اين مواد را به اندازه كافي در بدن قرار داده است زماني كه كسي مواد مصرف مي‌كند تمام نظم و انضباط بدن را به هم مي‌ريزد به همين دليل است معتادان در زمان ترك اعتياد به انواع دردهاي بدن دچار مي‌شوند.

He emphasized that the Zionists are behind all the stories of drugs and said that Iran is willing to pay the price of the research so all countries in the world know that Zionism is the main drug. He said that the Iranian people, despite intense sanctions, are stalwart and content. He stressed: there is no way except by making people ready to fight drugs and we shouldn't fill prisons with drugs.

وي با تاكيد بر اين‌كه پشت همه ماجراهاي مواد مخدر صهيونيست‌ها قرار دارند گفت: جمهوري اسلامي ايران حاضر است هزينه اين تحقيق را بپردازد تا همه كشورها بدانند كه صهيونيسم عامل اصلي مواد مخدر در جهان است. وي گفت: مردم ايران ايستاده‌اند و با وجود تحريم‌هاي شديد قناعت مي‌كنند. وي تاكيد كرد: هيچ راهي به جز آماده كردن مردم براي مبارزه با مواد مخدر وجود ندارد و نبايد زندان‌ها را از مواد مخدر پر كنيم.

End of messages
Journalist Code: 71 199

انتهاي پيام
کد خبرنگار: 71199 


Notes:

Unlike Juan Cole, who if Rahimi's remarks become more infamous will arise to tell us they are merely whimsical references to a medieval Persian poem, I do not "command" Farsi. Therefore, my translation has been an interesting travail whose product is imperfect. It is made up of five sources: 1) Google Translate; 2) the Babylon English-to-Persian Translation tool; 3) Google Web and Images (for when dictionary lookups failed or produced confusing results); 4) Rahimi's quotes reported in English-language media, which I correlated to their referents in the Farsi transcript which I then replaced (in blue); and most of all, 5) the considerably gracious help of a tehrooni Farsi-speaker, who fought through her annoyance and embarrassment to sort out the most difficult passages. Let me say again that the Farsi transcript is a paraphrase, not verbatim.

Each paragraph is followed by the original Farsi text. Reader edits are most welcome. Based on them or my own efforts, I may be able to improve the translation in the coming days or weeks. I'll make my own changes inline without notification, as that seems most efficient and ethically unproblematic. However, if a reader helps out and I can confirm the new text I'll update this post with an acknowledgement.

Annoyingly, Blogger's GUI won't allow you to format text right-to-left, which one must when writing Farsi, unless you change your whole blog to be an Arabic, Hebrew or Persian-language blog.  (American global arrogance!)  Because I shudder to imagine the effect that might have on the rest of my posts, which incorporate a lot of custom HTML, I'm not going to bother. So my apologies for the ill-formatted Persian text.

There are two significant, if not precisely crucial, differences between the Rahimi quotes circulating and the Farsi transcript. First, Rahimi was quoted claiming the Talmud teaches Jews "how to destroy non-Jews so as to protect an embryo in the womb of a Jewish mother."  According to the transcript, he didn't use a Farsi verb meaning "protect".  I felt the closest English interpretation of the verb he was reported to have used -- پرورش داده -- which might unite the means (destroying non-Jews) with the ends (conferring some benefit on Jewish fetuses), was "nourish". But yeah, it's still batshit crazy.

Second, Rahimi was reported to have said Jews kill "black babies" on the orders of "the Zionists". The transcript says Rahimi claimed that in order to control the population of Native Americans, Jewish doctors sterilized Native American women. The Farsi phrase used is "red-skinned" and as it once was here in rougher times, Iranians use it to refer to Native Americans. They do not use it to refer to black people.

Thomas Erdbrink, whose New York Times report on the speech (linked above) is the most heavily cited, told me he witnessed the event and ran quotes that were rendered into English by an official Iranian government translator.  The transcript I translated was made by the Iranian Students' News Agency.

Though the ISNA transcript appears to be an eyewitness rendering, it's been secreted away and I'll never find "Journalist 71199" to ask after the methods he or she used.

I've made requests of Ahmadinejad's office and relevant departments of the United Nations to obtain a verbatim transcript in any language of Rahimi's speech.  I'll update if I receive fruitful responses.

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Sunday, September 12, 2010

A Parochial Place


More than the usual suspects are after Marty Peretz. The New Republic's Editor-In-Chief has long been accused of regarding Arabs and Muslims, and Palestinians in particular, with Orientalist disdain. But a week ago Peretz published a blog post in which he crossed his own rubicon:
... no one has shown that a single serious demonstration against Muslims and Arabs, against their beliefs and behavior can be raised in this country... In fact, there has not been a single rally or demonstration in America aimed at Muslim or Arab interests or their commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies.

As an indicator of the health of our liberal democracy, we might be heartened that horror at the spectacle of lunatic pastor Terry Jones roasting Korans stirred the unwise intervention of General Petraeus, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and the President of the United States. But while Peretz denounced Jones' plans as "satanic" in a follow-up post that reads like damage control, he initially mused that non-Muslims are less cowed in Europe, where people do protest the "Pakis".

I'm no fan of Edward Said, but the foppish apologist for Eastern illiberalism is consistently borne out in his observation that the modes of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are the same. How precisely Peretz's charge of Muslim "commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies" echoes anti-Jewish boilerplate! I can't help thinking Peretz uses caesura -- the interrupting "yes" -- to intimate an impish awareness of this.

Now prestige commentators like Nicholas Kristof and James Fallows are calling him out. That's because, rather than sublimating his hostility into invidious delectation of rugs, Peretz is being too blunt about what he wants: protest "against Muslims and Arabs" -- not just radical Muslims and their ideas and beliefs. Peretz thinks we in the US are effete because we lack what he alludes to in another context as a "Walpurgisnacht" instinct -- the exuberant drive to protest "Pakis".

As is customary with ideological racism, this is fueled in part by corrupted concern for human rights. Peretz has long lamented illiberalism in the Third World, particularly among Muslims and Arabs and especially as it manifests in eliminationist hatred of Jews and Israel. And he is right to oppose this illiberalism as a coterminous defense of liberal democracy. At least as much as his Jewishness, that explains his view that "support for Israel is deep down, an expression of America's best view of itself." What is so odious about the neo-realist Left's embrace of Walt and Mearsheimer is the failure of these putative anti-fascists to see that American and Israeli interests unite in defense of the open society.

The problem is human rights obviously are a universalist concern. Violent intellectuals make Manichaean claims against people whose alterity threatens to corrode and destroy the society of which these ideologues appoint themselves the vanguard. In the words of Jack Shafer, Peretz envisions Muslims and Arabs as "an undifferentiated mass, consumed by antique tribal hatreds, fated to fratricide, torn asunder by their religious sectarianism." They must churn a ceaseless series of 9/11s. When humanism is scoped down to nationalism, it loses its humanitarian potential. You can't stake a claim against illiberal menace from a parochial place. That is not concern for the open society; it is concern for your own society. Peretz merely takes a side in a tribal contest.

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Saturday, February 20, 2010

To Harness History


As an analyst of the ideas behind New Antisemitism, I spend a lot of time trawling the oily floors of anti-Israel seas in search of stinking treasures. A good deal of what I pull up is amateur opinion material that I completely ignore. It would be boring to dwell on childish and sub-literate screeds, and I don't want to turn this blog into a medium of complaint or disproportionate outrage.

I'll violate my policy in this case, not only because the prose is breathtakingly dumb -- a notable outlier in an already squalid medium; the author can't even spell "vagina" -- but more because it nicely exhibits an important feature of utopian thought.

Let us put the debate of "is homosexuality nature or nurture" aside for the moment. There is a need to protect all minorities; however, there is clear distinction between legal protection, and aggressively encourage something. It is difficult to fathom, why homosexuality is increasingly pushed in our heterosexual faces, to the detriment of the majority and more importantly, the danger it poses to the survival of human race. Similarly, why the constant noise about the suffering of Jews in 1945, as if they have a monopoly over this issue? It was the Japanese, the Germans and the Russians who suffered most during the Second World War. If the Israeli-Zionists were really victims of a holocaust, how can they murder innocent Palestinian civilians en masse? How can victims exhibit such heartless and cruel behaviour towards innocent civilians, who had no connection with Nazi Germany?

As stultifying as this stuff is, reading as much of it as you can take is helpful because it presents so many of the clinical signs of totalitarian stupidity. There is the embrace of counterknowledge in the form of Holocaust denial; there is the catatonic reflex of absurd historical analogy; there is the conspiracist thinking. And of course the piece is a breviary of Jew-hatred -- note the arcane reference to the "Talmudic ethos of ethnic cleansing".

What I especially want you to notice is how such a wicked and imbecilic screed masquerades as human rights rhetoric. This Yamin Zakaria stages a passion play whose drama unfolds locally and internationally. There is the intrinsic threat to Islam posed by the homosexual lobby. There is the extrinsic threat posed by the Jews. The Muslims are a people of light who are "[gagged]" by "[cabals]" that seek to control our thought. While "there is a need to protect all minorities," homosexuals and Jews have an unnatural and parasitical drive to spread "annihilation" and "servitude". The inversion of human rights ethics is fundamental to utopian politics -- read Mein Kampf, or Osama bin Laden's public writings. This is perhaps what is most perverse about the "anti-imperialist" collaboration between left-wing and Islamist groups.

Millenarian thought seeks to stop history. Left-wing millenarians wish to harness and drive it toward a future utopia. Right-wing millenarians wish to harness and drive it back to a glorious past. Religious millenarians wish to destroy us and themselves to create paradise in place of the worldly purgatory. In this they are more dangerous than their totalitarian antecedents.

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Sunday, February 14, 2010

A Freemasonry of Filth


Modernityblog records lunatic Jew-hater Gilad Atzmon's latest low.
The Protocols is widely considered a forgery. It is a manual for a prospective new member of the “Elders”, describing how they will run the world through control of the media and finance, replacing the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation. Though the book is considered a hoax by most experts and regarded as a vile anti-Semitic text, it is impossible to ignore its prophetic qualities and its capacity to describe both the century unfolding and the political reality in which we live I am referring here to: AIPAC, the Credit Crunch, Lehman Brothers, Neocon wars, interventionist ideology, a British Foreign Secretary listed as an Israeli Propaganda (Hasbara) author trying to amend Britain’s ethical stand, a Zionist by admission put on an inquiry panel to investigate why Britain launched a Zionist war and so on.

I wonder if Chomsky facsimile and Tourettic Israel-trasher Dennis Perrin knows whose authority he's appealing to in this lament about the growing sadism of the Jews.

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Saturday, February 13, 2010

Calling Bullshit -- The Pilot Episode


I've been writing publicly since late 2002 about utopian and totalitarian ideas, mostly as they find expression in antisemitic reaction to Israel and Zionism. For unusual reasons I haven't fully articulated, I've tapped out an oeuvre that is largely consonant with the stance of the pro-Israel "community", as it were. You may not be awed by these credentials, but I hope they qualify me as someone who might briefly restore your interest in a tattered topic: the difference between criticism of Israel and abuse of Jews.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has composed a leviathan libel of Andrew Sullivan, all but calling him an anti-Semite.
Criticism of Israeli policy, and sympathy for the Palestinians, and support for a two-state solution, do not require, as their condition or their corollary, this intellectual shabbiness, this venomous hostility toward Israel and Jews. I have striven for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and territorial compromise, and two states, for many decades now, but Sullivan’s variety of such right thinking is completely repugnant to me. There are decent and indecent ways to advocate change. About the Jews, is Sullivan a bigot, or is he just moronically insensitive? To me, he looks increasingly like the Buchanan of the left.

Inevitably this has generated a lot of heat, earning angry responses from Matthew Yglesias, Brad DeLong, Gawker, of all things, and many others.

I have for a while been wanting to start a Calling Bullshit series about episodes like this, when oversensitive or oversearching friends-of-Israel decide to show-trial enemies-of-the-Jews. Otherwise perspicacious commentators, even brilliant ones like Wieseltier, can be seduced by the provocative crudeness of Israel's enemies, and the complex spectrum of ideological reaction to Israel, into launching McCarthyite counterattacks. And interpretation can be a carnivorous jungle when three political types, interrelated on the subject of Israel, overlap. These are the antisemite, the non-interventionist, and the foreign policy realist who has judged Israel harmful to the US.

It's important to combat confusion arising from these complexities, as well as callow and partisan accusations of antisemitism, and the effort should be led from within the ranks. New Antisemitism really does exist, and decreasing numbers of people believe that when non-antisemites are smeared. Also, real enemies of Israel or Jews use these moments to exonerate themselves, to immunize themselves against future criticism, and to enlist supporters among people offended by political correctness and identity politics.

Wieseltier's confusion is expressed in the last sentence of the passage I quoted above. He calls Sullivan a "Buchanan of the left". This seeming absurdity makes sense to those familiar enough with the material. Invoking Buchanan is often metonymy for isolationism*, and in the context of Israel one stained by Lindberghian anti-Semitism. Andrew Sullivan was a foreign policy neoconservative, and like most regretful true believers, he has been making up for it publicly by raking his scalp with conch shells. Predictably, his post-neocon writings on Israel have been a furnace of debate over the merits of Israel-critical foreign-policy realism and non-interventionism, stoked by outrage at Operation Cast Lead.

This returns us to an important topic I've written about. Non-interventionists and antisemites are implicated groups, but they are not the same. They both hate, or at least fear, Israel, but the former is not necessarily hostile to Jews. To the extent that the non-interventionist in public discourse is even identified, most people can’t distinguish him from uncomplicated Jew-haters on the subject of Israel. This is owing to some rhetorical overlap -- the very term "anti-Semite" was invented by Jew-haters wanting to sound respectable -- and also the figure of Charles Lindbergh, who combined both personas. So people default to branding as anti-Semites non-interventionist Israel-phobes like Glenn Greenwald, because the dogma that generates their vilification of Israel is not well understood.

Confusion is compounded by further rhetorical overlap of these with Israel-critical foreign policy realists. For many Israel advocates, it is beyond dispute that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have recapitulated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But again this is a mistake: Walt and Mearsheimer's critique is shoddy, dubious and above all illiberal, but it is not antisemitic. (Ironically, the Lobby portion of their critique is probably its least antisemitic element.) Wieseltier loses his grip on this distinction in another revelatory passage:
These days the self-congratulatory motto above his blog is ‘Of No Party or Clique,’ but in fact Sullivan belongs to the party of Mearsheimer and the clique of Walt (whom he cites frequently and deferentially), to the herd of fearless dissidents who proclaim in all seriousness, without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that Jews control Washington.

Mearsheimer and Walt don’t believe the Jews control Washington; antisemites believe that. Mearsheimer and Walt believe the US is wrong to ally with Israel, because doing so brings us little benefit, and great harm in the form of terrorist blowback. Further, like all such analysts, they don't credit enough the power of irrationalism -- "unrealism", if you will -- in politics, and are indifferent to arguments based on the consanguinity of liberal democracies.

To muddy the waters one last time, non-interventionism is an illiberal doctrine that can be interpreted as antisemitic, and not only because of its anti-Israel excesses. The abiding theme of this blog is antisemitism is the engine of millenarian movements. So you do the math. Israel today is the Masada of the open society, under siege by Left, Right and especially genocidal Islamist forces. Moreover if Israel is compromised or destroyed, it is not only the Jews who will suffer. Complacency about antisemitism is a dangerous indulgence for all.

Maybe making these distinctions will be unsatisfying in a medium that is vexed by distance from Manichaean neatness. Inevitably, all organic and powerful movements produce a gestural simulacrum of themselves. This process is complete with the enterprise to identify and combat New Antisemitism. But it's too important to surrender it wholly to that historical imperative. Andrew Sullivan developed a touch of Israel-phobia during the hairshirt years of his anti-neocon penitence. He is not an antisemite.

* Isolationism comprises two related doctrines: military non-interventionism and economic protectionism. Even though the terms "isolationism" and "non-interventionism" are often used interchangeably, it is only the latter that is relevant to this piece.

Update: Here's Sullivan's cri de coeur.

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Thursday, January 14, 2010

The Future of a Negation


"We continue to be concerned about a new environment in Turkey which permits and even encourages extreme expressions regarding Jews and Israel," Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement. "While we have celebrated Turkey's history of coexistence with Jews and the protection Turkish society provides for its Jewish community, we cannot ignore this new atmosphere and its potential consequences."

Looks like selling out the Armenians, and the concept of remembrance, is paying real dividends.

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Thursday, January 07, 2010

Ditch Israel Watch -- II


Ultimately Israel is a country that is of no particular worth to the United States.

... They have no resources we need. Their manpower is minimal. Their association with us is a negative for the United States. Now that's a fact. What you want to do about that fact is entirely different. But for anyone to stand up in the United States and say that support for Israel doesn't hurt us in the Muslim world is to just defy reality.

Ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer on C-SPAN, responding to a caller who complained about the people who "jewed us into Iraq".

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