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Jan 11, 2010

From the desk of Michael Santomauro: FIRST time in Amazon's history...

 

Jan. 11, 2010

From the desk of Michael Santomauro:

Dear Friend,

As an on and off shareholder of Amazon.com, I watch its business model with great interest. I am 100 percent sure, this is the first time in Amazon's history, that a book's release on the same day would get more one star ratings than five star ratings, as a protest vote at the publisher for not offering it as a Kindle edition on the same day as the print edition. 

The SAME running theme for all 17 one star reviews on January 11, 2010: 


--No Kindle, no purchase--


17 one star reviews on the same day, compared to 13 five star reviews also on the same day. Not a 'one star review' had anything to do with the book, just angry consumers, because it was not an E-book--yet. Amazon is allowing non-book reviews to lower the rating of the book based on anger, this is truly amazing history in the making.


Writers and publishers take note, just like MP3 changed the music industry forever, electronic book readers will change the way we read books. Many of the one star ratings say they refuse to buy print books, to save trees, or that they don't have the space for more print books in their home. 

SEE LINK for consumer advocacy in progress and the history of book publishing changing in the process:

Customer Reviews




Product Details

  • Hardcover: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Harper (January 11, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0061733636
  • ISBN-13: 978-0061733635
  •  (32 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)


Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com


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Re: Another Walt

 



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <frankscott@comcast.net>
Date: Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 12:23 AM
Subject: Re: Another Walt
To: ReportersNotebook@gmail.com
Cc: msantom629@aol.com


it's a sad tale indeed and with or without exageration a terrible curse was inflicted on the jews of europe, with almost none of them who suffered having done a damned thing  but being born, or at least believing or led to believe they were "jewish"...but with that and for all the legend and myth piled on top of actual pain and misery, the cry "where are all the jews" is a rather subjective one and just plays into the notion - false! - that this particular tragedy was the worst thing to ever happen to anyone....sorry but that just isn't true and not by a light year in miles...

where are the jews? well there are plenty of them all over the world, even with the death of so many in europe...we - americans- would do better to ask:

where are the indians?

 really, where the fuck did they go? this nation, this continent and the other one we call "south" were populated by untold numbers of indians, with no estimate entertained in popular knowledge  as to how many were obliterated, ethnically cleansed, sent to concentration camps we made sound like they were going to dinner " i have a reservation for two thousand - would you like something in the fucking valley or near the sewer?"...

seriously, it is disgusting that we can endlessly hear about one tragedy for which  we as a people have little responsibility and far less guilt, while the real genocide, to use that overused word, took place right here and is visible to this day in wretched reservations where the lowest economic and social order of the usa exists and for which there isn't a fucking tear shed or real social acknowledgment or retribution payment made...

i know they just had a land case settlement of big bucks long overdue for a handful of "survivors" and have a few casinos but big shit, and the boards of directors of those things, rest assured, have many a kelly, mastrangelo and cohen for sure and have big whitey with his hands in the til...but crap about "where are the jews" doesn't fill my heart with sadness because i was born on a goddamned island that was once populated by nothing but indians and in my life i have never ever known a single indian but have always known, been friendly with and often loved- never as i do my renee - plenty of jews...

and that has been the case wherever i;ve lived or been in america...washington dc, san francisco, marin county, the east bay...indians once lived in these places and where the fuck are they? now? plenty of jewish friends, loves , acquaintances and sometimes enemies but not one fucking indian, ever, not one in my experience!

seen em on tv and read about them but never ever had a social interaction with an indian...and how many of our 300 million have? and how many have known or dealt with people calling themselves jewish? gimme a fuckin break!


and don't get me started on the atrocity of slavery which is second only to the indians...

aaarrrgghh...and grrrrrrrr

sorry to vent but this just pisses me off...

fs



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The Transparent Cabal’ : Information Clearing House - ICH

 


We will never see this kind of interview done on
CNN (or on any other US media for that matter):
 
 The Transparent Cabal' : Information Clearing House - ICH
 
 


--
NOW AN AMAZON KINDLE BOOK ON YOUR PC, iPHONE OR KINDLE DEVICE

Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides By Thomas Dalton

In this remarkable, balanced book, the author skillfully reviews and compares "traditional" and "revisionist" views on the "The Holocaust."

On one side is the traditional, orthodox view -- six million Jewish casualties, gas chambers, cremation ovens, mass graves, and thousands of witnesses. On the other is the view of a small band of skeptical writers and researchers, often unfairly labeled "deniers," who contend that the public has been gravely misled about this emotion-laden chapter of history.

The author establishes that the arguments and findings of revisionist scholars are substantive, and deserve serious consideration. He points out, for example, that even the eminent Jewish Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg acknowledged that there was no budget, plan or order by Hitler for a World War II program to exterminate Europe's Jews.

This book is especially relevant right now, as "Holocaust deniers" are routinely and harshly punished for their "blasphemy," and as growing numbers of people regard the standard, Hollywoodized "Holocaust" narrative with mounting suspicion and distrust.

The author of this book, who writes under the pen name of "Thomas Dalton," is an American scholar who holds a doctoral degree from a major US university.

This is no peripheral debate between arcane views of some obscure aspect of twentieth century history. Instead, this is a clash with profound social-political implications regarding freedom of speech and press, the manipulation of public opinion, how our cultural life is shaped, and how power is wielded in our society.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_8?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=debating+the+holocaust&sprefix=DEBATING

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com

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Another Walt

 



This "Walt" is not the Harvard one.
 
 
"Integration of Lithuanian culture into that of the West is possible only through acknowledgement of the extent of the Holocaust," said Emanuelis Zingeris, commission chair. But reshaping public memory is difficult. "On some very basic level, the history is totally unacknowledged," Walt said.



--
NOW AN AMAZON KINDLE BOOK ON YOUR PC, iPHONE OR KINDLE DEVICE

Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides By Thomas Dalton

In this remarkable, balanced book, the author skillfully reviews and compares "traditional" and "revisionist" views on the "The Holocaust."

On one side is the traditional, orthodox view -- six million Jewish casualties, gas chambers, cremation ovens, mass graves, and thousands of witnesses. On the other is the view of a small band of skeptical writers and researchers, often unfairly labeled "deniers," who contend that the public has been gravely misled about this emotion-laden chapter of history.

The author establishes that the arguments and findings of revisionist scholars are substantive, and deserve serious consideration. He points out, for example, that even the eminent Jewish Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg acknowledged that there was no budget, plan or order by Hitler for a World War II program to exterminate Europe's Jews.

This book is especially relevant right now, as "Holocaust deniers" are routinely and harshly punished for their "blasphemy," and as growing numbers of people regard the standard, Hollywoodized "Holocaust" narrative with mounting suspicion and distrust.

The author of this book, who writes under the pen name of "Thomas Dalton," is an American scholar who holds a doctoral degree from a major US university.

This is no peripheral debate between arcane views of some obscure aspect of twentieth century history. Instead, this is a clash with profound social-political implications regarding freedom of speech and press, the manipulation of public opinion, how our cultural life is shaped, and how power is wielded in our society.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_8?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=debating+the+holocaust&sprefix=DEBATING

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com

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.

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BRILLANT: Answering Helen Thomas on Why They Want to Harm Us

 


Answering Helen Thomas on Why They Want to Harm Us

by: Ray McGovern, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

photo
Helen Thomas. (Photo: mtkr)

Thank God for Helen Thomas, the only person to show any courage at the White House press briefing after President Barack Obama gave a flaccid account of the intelligence screw-up that almost downed an airliner on Christmas Day.

After Obama briefly addressed L'Affaire Abdulmutallab and wrote "must do better" on the report cards of the national security schoolboys responsible for the near catastrophe, the President turned the stage over to counter-terrorism guru John Brennan and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

It took 89-year old veteran correspondent Helen Thomas to break through the vapid remarks about channeling "intelligence streams," fixing "no-fly" lists, deploying "behavior detection officers," and buying more body-imaging scanners.

Thomas recognized the John & Janet filibuster for what it was, as her catatonic press colleagues took their customary dictation and asked their predictable questions. Instead, Thomas posed an adult query that spotlighted the futility of government plans to counter terrorism with more high-tech gizmos and more intrusions on the liberties and privacy of the traveling public.

She asked why Abdulmutallab did what he did.

Thomas: "Why do they want to do us harm? And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why."

Brennan: "Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents… They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that he's (sic) able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death."

Thomas: "And you're saying it's because of religion?"

Brennan: "I'm saying it's because of an al Qaeda organization that used the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way."

Thomas: "Why?"

Brennan: "I think this is a — long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland."

Thomas: "But you haven't explained why."

Neither did President Obama, nor anyone else in the U.S. political/media hierarchy. All the American public gets is the boilerplate about how evil al Qaeda continues to pervert a religion and entice and exploit impressionable young men.

There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks.

Obama's Non-Answer

I had been hoping Obama would say something intelligent about what drove Abdulmutallab to do what he did, but the President limited himself to a few vacuous comments before sending in the clowns. This is what he said before he walked away from the podium:

"It is clear that al Qaeda increasingly seeks to recruit individuals without known terrorist affiliations … to do their bidding. … And that's why we must communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that al Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death … while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress. … That's the vision that is far more powerful than the hatred of these violent extremists."

But why it is so hard for Muslims to "get" that message? Why can't they end their preoccupation with dodging U.S. missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Gaza long enough to reflect on how we are only trying to save them from terrorists while simultaneously demonstrating our commitment to "justice and progress"?

Does a smart fellow like Obama expect us to believe that all we need to do is "communicate clearly to Muslims" that it is al Qaeda, not the U.S. and its allies, that brings "misery and death"? Does any informed person not know that the unprovoked U.S.-led invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and displaced 4.5 million from their homes? How is that for "misery and death"?

Rather than a failure to communicate, U.S. officials are trying to rewrite recent history, which seems to be much easier to accomplish with the Washington press corps and large segments of the American population than with the Muslim world.

But why isn't there a frank discussion by America's leaders and media about the real motivation of Muslim anger toward the United States? Why was Helen Thomas the only journalist to raise the touchy but central question of motive?

Peeking Behind the Screen

We witnessed a similar phenomenon when the 9/11 Commission Report tiptoed into a cautious discussion of possible motives behind the 9/11 attacks. To their credit, the drafters of that report apparently went as far as their masters would allow, in gingerly introducing a major elephant into the room:

"America's policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world." (p. 376)

When asked later about the flabby way that last sentence ended, former Congressman Lee Hamilton, Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission, explained that there had been a Donnybrook over whether that paragraph could be included at all.

The drafters also squeezed in the reason given by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as to why he "masterminded" the attacks on 9/11:

"By his own account, KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed … from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."

Would you believe that former Vice President Dick Cheney also has pointed to U.S. support for Israel as one of the "true sources of resentment"? This unique piece of honesty crept into his speech to the American Enterprise Institute on May 21, 2009.

Sure, he also trotted out the bromide that the terrorists hate "all the things that make us a force for good in the world." But the Israel factor did slip into the speech, perhaps an inadvertent acknowledgement of the Israeli albatross adorning the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Very few pundits and academicians are willing to allude to this reality, presumably out of fear for their future career prospects.

Former senior CIA officer Paul Pillar, now a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the few willing to refer, in his typically understated way, to "all the other things … including policies and practices that affect the likelihood that people … will be radicalized, and will try to act out the anger against us." One has to fill in the blanks regarding what those "other things" are.

But no worries. Secretary Napolitano has a fix for this unmentionable conundrum. It's called "counter-radicalization," which she describes thusly:

"How do we identify someone before they become radicalized to the point where they're ready to blow themselves up with others on a plane? And how do we communicate better American values and so forth … around the globe?"

Better communication. That's the ticket.

Hypocrisy and Double Talk

But Napolitano doesn't acknowledge the underlying problem, which is that many Muslims have watched Washington's behavior closely for many years and view pious U.S. declarations about peace, justice, democracy and human rights as infuriating examples of hypocrisy and double talk.

So, Washington's sanitized discussion about motives for terrorism seems more intended for the U.S. domestic audience than the Muslim world.

After all, people in the Middle East already know how Palestinians have been mistreated for decades; how Washington has propped up Arab dictatorships; how Muslims have been locked away at Guantanamo without charges; how the U.S. military has killed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; how U.S. mercenaries have escaped punishment for slaughtering innocents.

The purpose of U.S. "public diplomacy" appears more designed to shield Americans from this unpleasant reality, offering instead feel-good palliatives about the beneficence of U.S. actions. Most American journalists and politicians go along with the charade out of fear that otherwise they would be accused of lacking patriotism or sympathizing with "the enemy."

Commentators who are neither naïve nor afraid are simply shut out of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM). Salon.com's Glen Greenwald, for example, has complained loudly about "how our blind, endless enabling of Israeli actions fuels terrorism directed at the U.S.," and how it is taboo to point this out.

Greenwald recently called attention to a little-noticed Associated Press report on the possible motives of the 23-year-old Nigerian Abdulmutallab. The report quoted his Yemeni friends to the effect that the he was "not overtly extremist." But they noted that he was open about his sympathies toward the Palestinians and his anger over Israel's actions in Gaza. (Emphasis added)

Former CIA specialist on al Qaeda, Michael Scheuer, has been still more outspoken on what he sees as Israel's tying down the American Gulliver in the Middle East. Speaking Monday on C-SPAN, he complained bitterly that any debate on the issue of American support for Israel and its effects is normally squelched.

Scheuer added that the Israel Lobby had just succeeded in getting him removed from his job at the Jamestown Foundation think tank for saying that Obama was "doing what I call the Tel Aviv Two-Step."

More to the point, Scheuer asserted:

"For anyone to say that our support for Israel doesn't hurt us in the Muslim world … is to just defy reality."

Beyond loss of work, those who speak out can expect ugly accusations. The Israeli media network Arutz Sheva, which is considered the voice of the settler movement, weighed in strongly, branding Scheuer's C-SPAN remarks "blatantly anti-Semitic."

Media Squelching

As for media squelching, I continue to be amazed at how otherwise informed folks express total surprise when I refer them to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's statement about his motivation for attacking the United States, as cited on page 147 of the 9/11 Commission Report. Here is the full sentence (shortened above):

"By his own account, KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."

One can understand how even those following such things closely can get confused. On Aug. 30, 2009, five years after the 9/11 Commission Report was released, readers of the neoconservative Washington Post were given a diametrically different view, based on what the Post called "an intelligence summary:"

"KSM's limited and negative experience in the United States — which included a brief jail-stay because of unpaid bills — almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist … He stated that his contact with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country."

Apparently, the Post found this revisionist version politically more convenient, in that it obscured Mohammed's other explanation implicating "U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel." It's much more comforting to view KSM as a disgruntled visitor who nursed his personal grievances into justification for mass murder.

An unusually candid view of the dangers accruing from the U.S. identification with Israel's policies appeared five years ago in an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004. Contradicting President George W. Bush, the board stated:

"Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.

"Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy."

Abdulmutallab's Attack

Getting back to Abdulmutallab and his motive in trying to blow up the airliner, how was this individual without prior terrorist affiliations suddenly transformed into an international terrorist ready to die while killing innocents?

If, as John Brennan seems to suggest, al Qaeda terrorists are hard-wired at birth for the "wanton slaughter of innocents," how are they also able to jump-start a privileged 23-year old Nigerian, inculcate in him the acquired characteristics of a terrorist, and persuade him to do the bidding of al Qaeda/Persian Gulf?

As indicated above, the young Nigerian seems to have had particular trouble with Israel's wanton slaughter of more than a thousand civilians in Gaza a year ago, a brutal campaign that was defended in Washington as justifiable self-defense.

Moreover, it appears that Abdulmutallab is not the only anti-American "terrorist" so motivated. When the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al Qaeda announced that they were uniting into "al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula," their combined rhetoric railed against the Israeli attack on Gaza.

And on Dec. 30, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a 32-year-old Palestinian-born Jordanian physician, killed seven American CIA operatives and one Jordanian intelligence officer near Khost, Afghanistan, when he detonated a suicide bomb.

Though most U.S. media stories treated al-Balawi as a fanatical double agent driven by irrational hatreds, other motivations could be gleaned by carefully reading articles about his personal history.

Al-Balawi's mother told Agence France-Presse that her son had never been an "extremist." Al-Balawi's widow, Defne Bayrak, made a similar statement to Newsweek. In a New York Times article, al-Balawi's brother was quoted as describing him as a "very good brother" and a "brilliant doctor."

So what led al-Balawi to take his own life in order to kill U.S. and Jordanian intelligence operatives?

Al-Balawi's widow said her husband "started to change" after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. His brother said al-Balawi "changed" during last year's three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. (Emphasis added)

When al-Balawi volunteered with a medical organization to treat injured Palestinians in Gaza, he was arrested by Jordanian authorities, his brother said.

It was after that arrest that the Jordanian intelligence service apparently coerced or "recruited" al-Balawi to become a spy who would penetrate al Qaeda's hierarchy and provide actionable intelligence to the CIA.

"If you catch a cat and put it in a corner, she will jump on you," the brother said in explaining why al-Balawi would turn to suicide attack.

"My husband was anti-American; so am I," his widow told Newsweek. Her two little girls would grow up fatherless, but she had no regrets.

Answering Helen

Are we starting to get the picture of what the United States is up against in the Muslim world?

Does Helen Thomas deserve an adult answer to her question about motive? Has President Obama been able to assimilate all this?

Or is the U.S. political/media establishment incapable of confronting this reality and/or taking meaningful action to alleviate the underlying causes of the violence?

Is the reported reaction of a CIA official to al-Balawi's attack the appropriate one: "Last week's attack will be avenged. Some very bad people will eventually have a very bad day."

Revenge has not always turned out very well in the past.

Does anyone remember the brutal killing of four Blackwater contractors on March 31, 2004, when they took a bad turn and ended up in the wrong neighborhood of the Iraqi city of Fallujah — and how U.S. forces virtually leveled that large city in retribution after George W. Bush won his second term the following November?

If you read only the Fawning Corporate Media, you would blissfully think that the killing of the four Blackwater operatives was the work of fanatical animals who got – along with their neighbors – the reprisal they deserved. You wouldn't know that the killings represented the second turn in that specific cycle of violence.

On March 22, 2004, Israeli forces assassinated the then-spiritual leader of Hamas in Gaza, Sheikh Yassin — a withering old man, blind and confined to a wheelchair. (Emphasis added)

That murder, plus sloppy navigation by the Blackwater men, set the stage for the next set of brutalities. The Blackwater operatives were killed by a group that described itself as the "Sheikh Yassin Revenge Brigade."

Pamphlets and posters were all over the scene of the attack; one of the trucks that pulled around body parts of the mercenaries had a large poster photo of Yassin in its window, as did store fronts all over Fallujah.

We can wish Janet Napolitano luck with her "counter-radicalization" project and President Obama with his effort to "communicate clearly to Muslims," but there will be no diminution in the endless cycles of violence unless legitimate grievances are addressed on all sides.

It would certainly also help if the American people were finally let in on the root causes for what otherwise gets portrayed as unprovoked savagery by Muslims.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During a 27-year career at CIA, he served under nine directors and in all four of CIA's main directorates, including operations. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

This article was previously published onConsortiumnews.com.

--
NOW AN AMAZON KINDLE BOOK ON YOUR PC, iPHONE OR KINDLE DEVICE

Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides By Thomas Dalton

In this remarkable, balanced book, the author skillfully reviews and compares "traditional" and "revisionist" views on the "The Holocaust."

On one side is the traditional, orthodox view -- six million Jewish casualties, gas chambers, cremation ovens, mass graves, and thousands of witnesses. On the other is the view of a small band of skeptical writers and researchers, often unfairly labeled "deniers," who contend that the public has been gravely misled about this emotion-laden chapter of history.

The author establishes that the arguments and findings of revisionist scholars are substantive, and deserve serious consideration. He points out, for example, that even the eminent Jewish Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg acknowledged that there was no budget, plan or order by Hitler for a World War II program to exterminate Europe's Jews.

This book is especially relevant right now, as "Holocaust deniers" are routinely and harshly punished for their "blasphemy," and as growing numbers of people regard the standard, Hollywoodized "Holocaust" narrative with mounting suspicion and distrust.

The author of this book, who writes under the pen name of "Thomas Dalton," is an American scholar who holds a doctoral degree from a major US university.

This is no peripheral debate between arcane views of some obscure aspect of twentieth century history. Instead, this is a clash with profound social-political implications regarding freedom of speech and press, the manipulation of public opinion, how our cultural life is shaped, and how power is wielded in our society.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_8?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=debating+the+holocaust&sprefix=DEBATING

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com

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Mondoweiss

 


Mondoweiss


A war of values

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:29 AM PST

The video above was shot by Max Blumenthal a year ago today. I wonder if any of the people in it have changed their views?

I've finally gotten around to reading the Goldstone Report. It's an amazing document. In addition to the legal analysis and incredible documentation of the destruction wrought by the Israeli attack last winter, it is also full of small windows into Palestinian life that I find incredibly moving. Here's one that I couldn't help but think about as I re-watched the video above:

The Mission was struck by the resilience and dignity shown by people in the face of dire circumstances. UNRWA Director of Operations, John Ging, relayed to the Mission the answer of a Gaza teacher during a discussion after the end of the Israeli military operations about strengthening human rights education in schools. Rather than expressing scepticism at the relevance of teaching human rights in a context of renewed denial of rights, the teacher unhesitantly supported the resumption of human rights education: "This is a war of values, and we are not going to lose it".

Related posts:

  1. J Street: Israel increasingly runs counter to American Jewish values & US national interests
  2. Gaza, a year on: The (mental) siege continues
  3. Blumenthal: I wanted to be a liberal Zionist but liberal values were not compatible


Israel's crisis

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 09:23 AM PST

Just back from Israel/Palestine, the overwhelming sense I carry away is that the present state cannot last. Just how it goes down I have no idea. But conditions are so obviously discriminatory, and the knowledge of these conditions now so widespread– among the Christian pilgrims in my Jerusalem guesthouse, among European leaders, and now too among the Israeli elite and American left–that the situation is reminiscent of the delegitimizing of communism in the 70s and 80s. The period of apartheid struggle that Ehud Olmert warned of two years ago is upon us. So too his warning of possible "national suicide." 

The surprise for me is that the indifference of American Jews to this injustice is more than matched by that of the mass of Israelis: They live inside the bubble of their opinion that Israeli society is fair. So this trip has left me pretty depressed, even as it has renewed my sense of ethnocentric purpose: I will do what I can to bring the American Jewish community into the world conversation about the reality of Israel/Palestine.
This will happen. A few weeks back Israeli activist Micha Kurz said that a war had begun between one part of Israeli society and another; and I come home knowing that that war is about to erupt inside American Jewish life. You might say that it has already erupted: J Street's emergence and all the liberal Zionists in the New York Review of Books attacking the occupation are signs. But we ain't seen nothing yet. We are on the verge of a Jewish intifada, and about time too.

Now why do I say that the current situation cannot last?

I use the words apartheid and Jim Crow on this site all the time, but it is something else to see these policies before your eyes and be overborne by the feeling (and over days to come, I will offer observations of such moments). And today there is no secret about these conditions. They are being discussed openly not just in the Palestinian community—and believe me, every Palestinian I met expressed hatred for this system–but in Israel and Europe, and even at the fringes of the American Jewish community. A week ago I got out of a taxi in the occupied West Bank at the Ofer prison for a demonstration against the arbitrary detainment of Palestinian human rights worker Jamal Juma', and there were Mustafa Barghouti and Omar Barghouti leading the protest–and a dozen American Jews from the visiting group American Jews for a Just Peace, also several news teams from the Arab world and Europe. What all these people recognize, and what Mustafa Barghouti woke up to three years ago, is that the peace process has been meaningless. Israel is today "the worst country in the world" because of the system it has set up, Barghouti told me: he would be arrested if he used that road right there, he said, pointing at settlers road 443; and the Jews in the West Bank use 26 times the amount of water as the Palestinians and Palestinians pay twice the price that Jews do for water and electricity. And when Barghouti says that Israel is now the worst country in the world he means that there is at last international outrage over the fact that a country claiming to be a democracy in the 21st century is creating these conditions.

A couple of dozen Israelis I met echo the understanding that their society faces an existential crisis, in one year or ten years. Even Ynet has columnists who say it is apartheid, and even Zionists I met are filled with despair. They know that it is like South Africa, they know the world is paying attention, they know that the Palestinians hate the system. And meanwhile the country's leadership is committing national suicide by expanding the realm of apartheid conditions even as Al Jazeera and Reuters train their cameras on the scene.

This is the war that Micha Kurz told me about. Zionism is today divided between those who want the Land of Israel and the more pragmatic Zionists who think that the landgrab is destroying the state; and the second group is joined by non-Zionists and anti's. This division did not exist for most of the occupation; previously, Labor Zionists went along with the religious crazies and Revisionist fanatics who wanted to populate Eretz Israel. But today liberal Zionist Tom Segev writes in the New York Review of Books that Zionism was never about having the land, it was about maintaining a Jewish majority. And Yoel Marcus writes in Haaretz that Israel must do everything to stave off the "demographic dominance" of non-Jews. 

The same war is visible in Ameican Jewish life, between mainstream Jewish organizations like AIPAC that have pushed the messianic occupation and J Street which has opposed it, so far mildly. But in Israel the battle is raging openly, and of course the expansionists are winning, as they always have. Netanyahu's settlement freeze means nothing when you consider that there are thousands of freshly-poured foundations across the West Bank and the settlers will now undertake to build houses on them during the freeze, and East Jerusalem continues to be ethnically cleansed.

What are they thinking? How does the right wing imagine that it can secure Israel's future when it is consolidating a system in which 5 million Jews will govern a non-Jewish majority in the so-called Jewish homeland? The answer I got from Assaf Sharon and other activist Israelis is that the leadership is counting on miracles: that God will take care of the Jews so long as they are in Eretz Israel, or that somehow American Jews will be granted voting citizenship in the land and so Jews will continue to outnumber the Palestinians (p.s. dual loyalty is an antisemitic canard), or that the Palestinians will undertake voluntary transfer and clear out of the land on their own. The last would seem to be government policy, of making the Palestinians feel very, very unwelcome.

It is the weakness of the Israeli system, of course, that feverish people are now guiding government policy. Even Netanyahu must be afraid of them; and his recent efforts to try to break up centrist parties so as to capture some of their more conservative members for his coalition is seen by some as a pragmatic effort by the Prime Minister to provide himself a political base so as to take on the right wing.

The feverish have taken political cover from the Jewish-only bubble. I mean all the Jews, including Americans, who are swaddled in Holocaust consciousness of Jews as victims and have refused to develop any knowledge of a situation in which Jews exercise oppressive control. One of the most startling discoveries of my trip was learning from Mikhael Manekin, a leaders of the soldiers' group Breaking the Silence, that the group had taken leading Israeli establishment figures, including government officials, on its tour of Hebron in recent months and they had come away disturbed and angry at the blatant apartheid conditions in the city, in which some Palestinians cannot walk on the street that they live on. The shock is that I took this tour nearly 4 years ago, but that even Israeli leaders have blinded themselves to a situation that has been an outrage for 40 years. Not to mention American Jewish leaders, here in the country where liberals attack you if you use the word apartheid.

This Jewish blindness will not last. There is too much stirring. Didi Remez is a Zionist, but he is using his Coteret blog to get facts to the American mainstream about the deadly occupation; and though he and I disagree about the necessity of the Jewish state, he doesn't mind marching alongside me and BDS-supporting Jews in the fight against the occupation. I saw him at the Sheikh Jarrah demonstration Friday, against the ethnic cleansing of the East Jerusalem neighborhood so that Jerusalem will be Jewish Jewish Jewish; and who else should I see there but Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker– so maybe the New Yorker will write about this at last and tell its readers what virulent Zionists are doing to old Arab neighborhoods.

I know that many of these Israeli activists are committed to the idea of a Jewish state. Even among Jews who oppose the occupation and are butting heads with soldiers in villages in the West Bank, there are many who are trying to preserve Israel as a national refuge for the Jews. They are like Daniel Levy of J Street, who has called for a return to the '67 borders to preserve the Jewish state. Or Bernard Avishai, also at the Sheikh Jarrah demo, who wishes to maintain a Hebrew republic, presumably in a form of partition.

Can they bring about a wider awareness of the crisis come soon enough to save the Jewish state? I don't know. Yet somehow I doubt that a Jewish state—an ethnocracy somehow redeemed by institutionalized respect for the rights of a minority population– will survive the crisis. The proliferation of settlements on strategic hilltops in the West Bank and the signs for Israeli businesses like Ahava a mile from the Jordan River, let alone the Warsaw-treatment of Gaza, would seem to have destroyed the prospect for a viable Palestinian state on the leftovers of Palestine; and without a real state that permits the self-determination of Palestinians, and some real accommodation of refugees' rights, Palestinians will continue to agitate, and the international solidarity movement will continue to advocate for them.

My despair springs from the fact that while I saw Arab media everywhere I went, the larger Israeli Jewish community and the American Jewish one are in denial. They have little knowledge of what is going on, and enfolded in nationalist ideals of 100 years ago, are ill-prepared for the impending crisis. And I'm afraid that this hardened, self-righteous resistance to the truth– let alone to 21st century liberal values– will result in greater violence and draw in the United States. 

The brightest hope I got on my trip came from young Jews. Standing on a hillside in the Palestinian village of Al-Walaje–which is being engulfed by the Israeli idea of greater Jerusalem embodied by the fortress-like presence of the settlement called Gilo that dominated the horizon a half mile away–I met two guys from my home town, Baltimore: Josh Levey and Michael Kaplan.

josh
Josh

They are just teenagers; but brace yourself– they attended an all-Jewish high school and are now working in a refugee camp outside Bethlehem for three months. As a boy, Levey told me, he yelled abuse at the anti-Zionist Jewish group Neturei Karta at pro-Israel demonstrations; but more recently, he has countered the hasbara in his own high school with vigorous opposition. Three months in a Palestinian refugee camp! These boys from my home town have no mental reservations about speaking of the Palestinians as human beings. So we are seeing a Jewish intifada at last, a shaking off of Zionism now that the ideology has sputtered out in ethnic cleansing and political prisoners and white phosphorus.

As we talked, an older American-Israeli woman, a Meretz/liberal Zionist type, who was also nobly demonstrating againt the landgrab, interrupted us to say that it is a simple matter to buy the settlers out; why, Naomi Chazan has said that is the case. As she talked with the boys about miraculously undoing the white stucco walls and red tile roofs of the elite settlement above us, it became clear that she regards the Jewish state as a necessity for Jews, but that somehow these boys do not. And in a couple of months, Josh Levey and Michael Kaplan will be coming home.

Related posts:

  1. '60 Minutes' gives Israel 3 options: ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or democracy
  2. US-Israel identity crisis
  3. Slaves of the peace process


Gaza Freedom March: Why I went to Cairo

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:31 AM PST

RabbiLynnCairo
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb at a demonstration outside the French Embassy in Cairo. (Photo: Anne Paxton)

Operation Cast Lead was a massacre filled with thousands of heart breaking stories. Each of the 1400 persons killed represents an entire world. Yes, it is also a war crime to fire kassam rockets into Israel with the intention to kill civilians. Over 2,000 rockets and 1,600 mortar shells were fired into Israel in 2008 alone. Some among the Palestinian population use armed force to resist Israeli's military occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank. According to international law, armed resistance against illegal occupation can be considered a just cause, as long as the rules of war are observed. However, as a person committed to nonviolence, I view the use of militarism by states or non-state actors to ensure security or resist occupation as a self-defeating strategy that promotes more violence and suffering and does not, in the end, result in well-being or peace for beleaguered populations. However, for those who believe in the use of military force as a viable option, Israel's response to kassam attacks went far beyond legal and ethical boundaries. The much maligned Goldstone report proved beyond reasonable doubt that Israel intentionally targeted civilians and civilian institutions with deadly weapons. This is nothing new.

Operation Cast Lead made clear that the sixty year Israeli military siege of the people of Palestine has increased in brutality and ferocity. Sixty years of evidence that includes eye-witness reports, analysis of video, satellite and photographic images, medical reports, forensic analysis of weapons and ammunition remnants, and the written observations and testimony of thousands of witnesses from Palestine, Israel and the international community reveal a continual pattern of continuous assault that has very little to do with Israel's claim of 'security'. Rather, the end game is creating 'facts on the ground' that establish a Jewish state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea which limits Palestinians to 20% of the national population. Israel employs forced displacement, blockade, air strike, land mines, rubber bullets, white phosphorous, dime bombs, torture, beating and sexual humiliation, arbitrary arrest and administrative detention of minors and adults, water and land theft, Jewish only roads, hundreds of military checkpoints, security fences, nightly incursions, human shields, collaborators, deportation, permit systems, denial of access to economic opportunity, health care, culture and education, targeting of sewage and electricity plants and water installations, uprooting of thousands of trees and the destruction of thousands of homes to force the remaining Palestinian population into small enclosed areas that can only be described as open air prisons. Ariel Sharon described these enclaves designated as the future Palestinian State as 'bantustans'. In short, all these tactics amount to what is considered the crime of apartheid for the sake of creating a state that awards national and civil privileges based on Jewish identity while confining the excess non-Jewish population to their own 'homeland'. This is the ugly truth that is so hard for Jewish people and millions of so-called Christian Zionists to face. Anyone who spends a day in Palestinian territories sees this truth immediately. The so-called two state solution which is based on this vision of reality is hardly viable or legal. People will not and cannot endure oppression forever. Our own history should teach us this lesson. The question is, how does an oppressed people change the situation on the ground and open history to new possibilities.

Those who both decry Palestinian armed resistance and the option of boycott, divestment and sanctions can't have it both ways. Once you accept the fact that Israel's behavior toward Palestinians falls into the category of the crime of apartheid, BDS is the logical and ethical nonviolent response. If any other state were engaged in similar behavior, BDS would be an acceptable form of resistance, as it was in the case of South Africa. Forty years of dialogue and negotiation with Israelis and Jews clearly has not worked to advance the cause of self-determination for Palestinians. The situation on the ground is far worse than ever before. The two state solution and all the peace plans and road maps have been undermined by the systematic effort to enclose Palestinians in bantustans and deny them civil and national rights. In this context, further efforts at dialogue only benefit those with privilege, unless they are accompanied by strategies of resistance to the systematic inequality Palestinians face on a daily basis.

While J Street and associated partners are a much appreciated alternative voice within the Jewish community to the AIPAC machine, they have thus far failed to address the concerns nor partner with Palestinians in their own struggle for human and equal rights. As Jews, we have to recognize that we are not going to be the ones who determine the direction of the Palestinian nonviolent struggle for freedom. What we can and should do, is find ways of acting in solidarity with that struggle by joining the Palestinian initiated international effort to use boycott, divestment and sanctions to force Israel to comply with international law and end the siege of Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine. We can also support those within Israel who are resisting the oppressive actions of their own state. We cannot truly work on this issue without understanding the meaning of resistance in our lives. For Jews, I believe resistance requires serious study and practice of the Torah of Nonviolence. Nonviolence is the only way forward. Accepting the violence perpetrated against Palestinians will destroy our beautiful tradition. By struggling in solidarity with those who oppose militarism and support boycott, divestment and sanctions we are also renewing the most sacred elements of our tradition that require us to protest in the street, pursue justice and peace and avoid violence. It is not an easy road.

Boycott is a strategy capable of being used for good and for bad. In this case, I believe that BDS is the only viable nonviolent method that can impact 'facts on the ground'. All of us who love freedom, justice and peace, all of us who love the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have a profound responsibility to act in alignment with the people who are the actual victims in this situation. They are calling for BDS. That is why I went to Cairo and created the Interfaith Gaza Satyagraha as an affinity group within the Gaza Freedom March, to join my voice with theirs.

As the only rabbi present in Cairo for the entire GFM experience, I was honored to stand with hundreds of other activists from over forty nations, many of whom spoke to me of their commitment to oppose antisemitism wherever it emerged. I spent ten days planning actions, protesting in the streets, talking about next steps, networking and envisioning. At one point, American Jews organized a protest in front of the Israeli Embassy which is fifteen stories above the street and visible only by the familiar blue and white flag. I was asked to lead a Sabbath service. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Egyptians and internationals of all persuasions stood round a simple kiddish cup, Egyptian flat bread and candles. I invited participants to envision a world where everyone could find a seat at the table and eat, unafraid. We sang and prayed in Hebrew in public and I saw tears flow. Standing among the crowd was a man with a Palestinian father and a Sephardic Israeli mother. He wept in joy because, for one instant, the worlds of conflict stretching across the borders of his soul could dissolve in a single vision of unification and peace. So may it be for all of us, Palestinian and Jew, living together on the same land in recognition of our common love for place and each other. Palestinians have the right to return to their own land, or receive just compensation.

Only a 'solution' which ensures 'the right to exist' and universal human rights of all people living on the historic land of Israel/Palestine will suffice. The children of the future will see the world very differently than those of us living now. They will face new challenges and inherit a new sense of globalism which hopefully strengthens the religious, cultural and national heritage of both Palestinians and Israelis in a renewed culture of peace. It is up to us to prepare the way.

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, cofounder of Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence and The Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point Center, NY

Related posts:

  1. Update from Cairo: Gaza Freedom March rejects Egyptian offer to allow only 100 protesters into Gaza
  2. Gaza Freedom Marchers issue the 'Cairo Declaration' to end this chapter and chart the way forward
  3. Update: Egyptian security forces confront Gaza Freedom March protesters, possibly at the request of the US embassy


monstrous

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 08:58 AM PST

From Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. Note that transplanted corneas must be harvested at great expense from deceased people.

Israel prevented 17 sight-impaired Gazans from leaving for cornea transplant operations on time; a donation of dozens of corneas went down the drain

The Israeli authorities at Erez checkpoint this week prevented the exit of 17 sight-impaired patients, suffering from various eye diseases, from the Gaza Strip in order to undergo cornea transplants, a treatment that is not available in the Gaza health system. Because of this delay, the medical window of opportunity to perform the transplants for these patients was closed, because corneas can be transplanted only within the shortest time frame (24-48 hours after they are extracted from the donor's body).

The patients from Gaza whose exit was prevented will therefore have to wait for another donation, which may or may not happen. At the beginning of the week Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHR-Israel) received an appeal from the Musallam Medical Center in Gaza. According to the appeal, a large group of 14 patients from Gaza, who were invited to Ramallah for cornea transplants from Sunday to Wednesday this week (January 3-5, 2010), did not reach their destination. Three other patients approached PHR-Israel separately. The group of patients includes some who were waiting weeks or even months for cornea transplants. The longest wait was 31-year-old S.A., who has been waiting for this operation for three years.

The main Musallam Medical Center in Ramallah this week received two deliveries from the US with dozens of corneas, donated by Tissue Bank International, an American organization that facilitates cornea and tissue transplants. Every year corneas are sent during Christmas break, during which such operations do not take place in the US, as a donation to the Palestinian health system, and dedicated especially to eye patients from Gaza.

Related posts:

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40 years after first epiphany, Judt still very bashable

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:56 AM PST

Evan Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Ed profiles Tony Judt, and does a nice job tracing his path to the groundbreaking one-state essay in the New York Review of Books. But note that Goldstein uses the opportunity to convene the liberal-Zionist bashers, most of them deeply invested in the Jewish state, instead of focusing on the central truth of the matter, that Judt was moved by his own Jewish experience in the liberal west to try and imagine a liberal future for Israel/Palestine. And that the NYRB has essentially retreated from his position. Extended excerpts:

Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. "I was the ideal convert," he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. (A smoker at the time, he seized the opportunity to denounce smoking by Jewish adolescents as a "bourgeois deviation.") In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were "right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views"; others, he says, "were just dumb idiots with guns." Israel, he came to believe, "had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society."..

Early in 2002, when Judt was at home recovering from radiation and surgery to treat cancer in his left arm, he became "more and more worried about the failure of Israel to do the right thing." In May of that year, The New York Review published his first major statement on the Middle East conflict, the solution to which, he contended, was obvious: two states, the dismantling of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and no right of return to Israel for Palestinian refugees. Judt fingered Israel for the bloody impasse, provocatively likening its actions to those of France in its colonial war against Algeria. By 1958, he noted, the damage that French policy was inflicting on the Algerians was surpassed by the harm France was inflicting upon itself. Israel, he wrote, was in a similarly dire predicament.

Judt's historical analogy drew sharp rejoinders. "If Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should Israel and its national doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as any more legitimate than France's imperialism?" asked the political writer Paul Berman. That was a good question. A few months later, Judt revised his position. "The time has come to think the unthinkable," he proclaimed in a widely disseminated essay in The New York Review. The two-state solution—a Jewish state and an Arab state—"is probably already doomed," and the least-bad option remaining was for Israel to convert from a Jewish state to a binational state. "The depressing truth," Judt wrote, "is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."

According to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009), Judt's essay placed the one-state idea "squarely and noisily on the table of international agendas." The Forward described it as "the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Zionism." Within weeks, The New York Review had received more than 1,000 letters to the editor. Suddenly, says Robert Boyers, editor of the quarterly Salmagundi and an observer of the liberal intellectual scene, Judt was a major voice weighing in on the Middle East. Indeed, if the death of Judt's friend the literary critic Edward Said, in 2003, left a "yawning void" in the national conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Palestinians, as Judt has suggested, then it is Judt himself who has filled that void.

And like Said, who also advocated a one-state solution, Judt has become a very public target for criticism. An op-ed essay in The Jerusalem Post accused him of "pandering to genocide." Omer Bartov, a professor of European history at Brown University, dismissed the binational idea as "absurd"; Walzer, co-editor of Dissent magazine, derided it as an escapist fantasy that "offers no practical escape from the work of repressing the terrorist organizations and withdrawing from the Occupied Territories." Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University and a close friend of Judt's for a quarter of a century, blasted the article as "one more in a long series of calls (perhaps the silliest yet) for Jewish self-immolation."

The most trenchant critique is that Judt's embrace of binationalism echoes the reckless, unrealistic style of trafficking in ideas that he condemned in Past Imperfect. "I, too, wish everyone was a cosmopolitan Kantian, and we had one huge democracy for the brotherhood of all mankind," says Gadi Taub, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of a forthcoming book, The Settlers and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism (Yale University Press). "But these are two peoples (Jews and Palestinians) severely traumatized by the lack of national independence." To argue that such a situation lends itself to shared sovereignty in a binational state is, says Taub, "the strikingly irresponsible kind of thing that intellectuals sometimes do for their own convenience vis-à-vis their own conscience. In reality, a one-state solution will doom Israelis and Palestinians to a permanent civil war."

Judt seems unconcerned that his public image is now so tied to his views on Israel. "Google me," he says nonchalantly. "You will end up at the binationalism essay straightaway." He goes on to observe that "to the outside world, I'm a crazed, self-hating Jewish left-winger." Joking aside, Judt is not entirely comfortable in his role as the public face of the anti-Zionist crowd. "I wouldn't call myself anti-Zionist, because there are openly anti-Semitic people who use anti-Zionism as a cover," he explains. Some of them, like the white nationalist David Duke, have reached out to him, prompting accusations that he is giving intellectual cover to bigots. Despite such "foul vilification," says the Columbia historian Fritz Stern, "Tony has, if anything, only become more outspoken."

There have been efforts to silence Judt.

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Karon says things will break faster than you think

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:25 AM PST

From Pamela Olson's blog, Fast Times in Palestine:

South African [-American] Jewish journalist named Tony Karon, who supported the Gaza Freedom March, recently posted this encouraging message on Facebook:

"In South Africa in 1988, if you'd asked any of us how long our struggle was going to last, the honest answer would have been twenty years. We couldn't destroy the regime and they couldn't destroy us; looked like a bloody stalemate. And then, barely a year later, a changing international balance of forces that none of us could have foreseen prompted a dramatic change of course. The darkest hour is just before dawn and all that… Happy New Year, and keep up the great work!"

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Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides By Thomas Dalton

In this remarkable, balanced book, the author skillfully reviews and compares "traditional" and "revisionist" views on the "The Holocaust."

On one side is the traditional, orthodox view -- six million Jewish casualties, gas chambers, cremation ovens, mass graves, and thousands of witnesses. On the other is the view of a small band of skeptical writers and researchers, often unfairly labeled "deniers," who contend that the public has been gravely misled about this emotion-laden chapter of history.

The author establishes that the arguments and findings of revisionist scholars are substantive, and deserve serious consideration. He points out, for example, that even the eminent Jewish Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg acknowledged that there was no budget, plan or order by Hitler for a World War II program to exterminate Europe's Jews.

This book is especially relevant right now, as "Holocaust deniers" are routinely and harshly punished for their "blasphemy," and as growing numbers of people regard the standard, Hollywoodized "Holocaust" narrative with mounting suspicion and distrust.

The author of this book, who writes under the pen name of "Thomas Dalton," is an American scholar who holds a doctoral degree from a major US university.

This is no peripheral debate between arcane views of some obscure aspect of twentieth century history. Instead, this is a clash with profound social-political implications regarding freedom of speech and press, the manipulation of public opinion, how our cultural life is shaped, and how power is wielded in our society.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_8?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=debating+the+holocaust&sprefix=DEBATING

Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com

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