Finkelstein vs. Gissan Posted February 18, 2010
Norman Finkelstein: One Man's Struggle for Justice
By RT
On Peter Lavelle's CrossTalk, Israel critic Norman Finkelstein faces off against a formidable spokesperson of Israel's "soft power."
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We live in a world where Holocaust Denial is increasingly a crime. Strangely, however, Judeo-Communism deniers have total freedom of speech. It is an incontestable fact that Jews dominated all communist movements until at least the end of the Second World War. Yet one hack journalist after another, such as Cathy Young in "Reason" Magazine, pretends that the Jewish Communist connection just isn't there. Cathy does not go to prison for Judeo-Communist Denial. Walter Duranty did not go to jail for Ukrainian famine denial in the 1930's. Instead, he got the Pulitzer Prize the year before for his expert lying on behalf of Joseph Stalin and the workers paradise. Judeo-Communism deniers are everywhere in the prostitute press. They will tell you that the charge was a delusion of a pathological Nazi liar named Adolf Hitler. But the Judeo-communism deniers shall not tell you that Winston Churchill made the same charge in 1920.
Judeo-Communism denial is safe and brings the blessings of a happy Jewish boss and a secure paycheck. Holocaust denial means career destruction and permanent unemployment. In the world of Judeo-Communism denial, facts mean nothing but a fat bank account means everything. Judeo-Communism denial does not bother Jewish academics who write proudly of the Jewish involvement in Marxism. Judeo-Communism is only for the stupid masses who need to be hoodwinked. Thus, Marci Shore, Yuri Slezkine, Benjamin Ginsberg, Henry Sbrernik, Andre Gerritts, Robert Brym, Jonathan Frankel, Gerald Sorin, Nora Levin, Tony Michels, Elliot Ratzman and a galaxy of academic authors can write extensively on Jews and Marxism, while the Walter Duranty clones deny Jewish commissars with Zyklon B on their breath. True, there are a few heretics like Eric Margolis with the Toronto Sun and the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but the latter can be dealt with by not translating "Two Hundred Years Together" into English.
Judeo-Communism denial shall continue to flourish, just as the New York Times shall continue to hold onto Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize. Facts are not the issue: polishing the platter of the Chosen People is the prime directive of every journalist desirous of a long working life.
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A Review of Shahid Alam's "Israeli Exceptionalism"
Feb. 2010
Zionism Laid Bare
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
The essential point of M. Shahid Alam's book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, comes clear upon opening the book to the inscription in the frontispiece. From the Persian poet and philosopher Rumi, the quote reads, "You have the light, but you have no humanity. Seek humanity, for that is the goal." Alam, professor of economics at Northeastern University in Boston and a CounterPunch contributor, follows this with an explicit statement of his aims in the first paragraph of the preface. Asking and answering the obvious question, "Why is an economist writing a book on the geopolitics of Zionism?" he says that he "could have written a book about the economics of Zionism, the Israeli economy, or the economy of the West Bank and Gaza, but how would any of that have helped me to understand the cold logic and the deep passions that have driven Zionism?"
Until recent years, the notion that Zionism was a benign, indeed a humanitarian, political movement designed for the noble purpose of creating a homeland and refuge for the world's stateless, persecuted Jews was a virtually universal assumption. In the last few years, particularly since the start of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2000, as Israel's harsh oppression of the Palestinians has become more widely known, a great many Israelis and friends of Israel have begun to distance themselves from and criticize Israel's occupation policies, but they remain strong Zionists and have been at pains to propound the view that Zionism began well and has only lately been corrupted by the occupation. Alam demonstrates clearly, through voluminous evidence and a carefully argued analysis, that Zionism was never benign, never good—that from the very beginning, it operated according to a "cold logic" and, per Rumi, had "no humanity." Except perhaps for Jews, which is where Israel's and Zionism's exceptionalism comes in.
Alam argues convincingly that Zionism was a coldly cynical movement from its beginnings in the nineteenth century. Not only did the founders of Zionism know that the land on which they set their sights was not an empty land, but they set out specifically to establish an "exclusionary colonialism" that had no room for the Palestinians who lived there or for any non-Jews, [http://www.counterp
How has Zionism been able to put itself forward as exceptional and get away with it, winning Western support for the establishment of an exclusionary state and in the process for the deliberate dispossession of the native population? Alam lays out three principal ways by which Zionism has framed its claims of exceptionalism in order to justify itself and gain world, particularly Western, support. First, the Jewish assumption of chosenness rests on the notion that Jews have a divine right to the land, a mandate granted by God to the Jewish people and only to them. This divine election gives the homeless, long-persecuted Jews the historical and legal basis by which to nullify the rights of Palestinians not so divinely mandated and ultimately to expel them from the land. Second, Israel's often remarkable achievements in state-building have won Western support and provided a further justification for the displacement of "inferior" Palestinians by "superior" Jews. Finally, Zionism has put Jews forward as having a uniquely tragic history and as a uniquely vulnerable country, giving Israel a special rationale for protecting itself against supposedly unique threats to its existence and in consequence for ignoring the dictates of international law. Against the Jews' tragedy, whatever pain Palestinians may feel at being displaced appears minor.
The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that came as the result of Zionism's need for an exclusivist homeland was no unfortunate consequence, and indeed had long been foreseen by Zionist thinkers and the Western leaders who supported them. Alam quotes early Zionists, including Theodore Herzl, who talked repeatedly of persuading the Palestinians "to trek," or "fold their tents," or "silently steal away." In later years, the Zionists spoke of forcible "transfer" of the Palestinians. In the 1930s, David Ben-Gurion expressed his strong support for compulsory transfer, crowing that "Jewish power" was growing to the point that the Jewish community in Palestine would soon be strong enough to carry out ethnic cleansing on a large scale (as it ultimately did). In fact, the Zionists knew from the start that there would be no persuading the Palestinians simply to leave voluntarily and that violent conquest would be necessary to implant the Zionist state.
The British knew this as well. Zionist supporter Winston Churchill wrote as early as 1919 that the Zionists "take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience." In a blunt affirmation of the calculated nature of Zionist plans and Western support for them, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, like Churchill another early supporter and also author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, wrote that Zionism "is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." It would be hard to find a more blatant one-sided falsity.
Alam traces in detail the progression of Zionist planning, beginning with the deliberate creation in the nineteenth century of an ethnic identity for Jews who shared only a religion and had none of the attributes of nationhood—neither a land, nor a common language or culture, nor arguably a common gene pool. Here Alam covers briefly the ground trod in detail by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, whose book The Invention of the Jewish People, appearing in English just months before Alam's book, shattered the myths surrounding Zionism's claim to nationhood and to an exclusive right to Palestine. But Alam goes further, describing the Zionist campaign to create a surrogate "mother country" that, in the absence of a Jewish nation, would sponsor the Zionists' colonization of Palestine and support its national project. Having gained British support for its enterprise, Zionism then set about building a rationale for displacing the Palestinian Arabs who were native to Palestine (who, incidentally, did indeed possess the attributes of a nation but lay in the path of a growing Jewish, Western-supported military machine). Zionist propaganda then and later deliberately spread the notion that Palestinians were not "a people," had no attachment to the land and no national aspirations, and in the face of the Jews' supposedly divine mandate, of Israel's "miraculous" accomplishments, and of the Jews' monumental suffering in the Holocaust, the dispossession of the Palestinians was made to appear to a disinterested West as nothing more than a minor misfortune.
Addressing what he calls the "destabilizing logic" of Zionism, Alam builds the argument that Zionism thrives on, and indeed can survive only in the midst of, conflict. In the first instance, Alam shows, Zionism actually embraced the European anti-Semitic charge that Jews were an alien people. This was the natural result of promoting the idea that Jews actually belonged in Palestine in a nation of their own, and in addition, spreading fear of anti-Semitism proved to be an effective way to attract Jews not swayed by the arguments of Zionism (who made up the majority of Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to the Zionist cause. Early Zionist leaders talked frankly of anti-Semitism as a means of teaching many educated and assimilated Jews "the way back to their people" and of forcing an allegiance to Zionism. Anti-Semitism remains in many ways the cement that holds Zionism together, keeping both Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews in thrall to Israel as their supposedly only salvation from another Holocaust.
In the same vein, Alam contends, Zionists realized that in order to succeed in their colonial enterprise and maintain the support of the West, they would have to create an adversary common to both the West and the Jews. Only a Jewish state waging wars in the Middle East could "energize the West's crusader mentality, its evangelical zeal, its dreams of end times, its imperial ambitions." Arabs were the initial and enduring enemy, and Zionists and Israel have continued to provoke Arab antagonism and direct it toward radicalism, to steer Arab anger against the United States, to provoke the Arabs into wars against Israel, and to manufacture stories of virulent Arab anti-Semitism—
Alam treats the Zionist/Israel lobby as a vital cog in the machine that built and sustains the Jewish state. Indeed, Theodore Herzl was the original Zionist lobbyist. During the eight years between the launch of the Zionist movement at Basel in 1897 and his death, Herzl had meetings with a remarkable array of power brokers in Europe and the Middle East, including the Ottoman sultan, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Victor Emanuel III of Italy, Pope Pius X, the noted British imperialist Lord Cromer and the British colonial secretary of the day, and the Russian ministers of interior and finance, as well as a long list of dukes, ambassadors, and lesser ministers. One historian used the term "miraculous" to describe Herzl's ability to secure audiences with the powerful who could help Zionism.
Zionist lobbyists continued to work as assiduously, with results as "miraculous," throughout the twentieth century, gaining influence over civil society and ultimately over policymakers and, most importantly, shaping the public discourse that determines all thinking about Israel and its neighbors. As Alam notes, "since their earliest days, the Zionists have created the organizations, allies, networks, and ideas that would translate into media, congressional, and presidential support for the Zionist project." An increasing proportion of the activists who lead major elements of civil society, such as the labor and civil rights movements, are Jews, and these movements have as a natural consequence come to embrace Zionist aims. Christian fundamentalists, who in the last few decades have provided massive support to Israel and its expansionist policies, grew in the first instance because they were "energized by every Zionist success on the ground" and have continued to expand with a considerable lobbying push from the Zionists.
Alam's conclusion—a direct argument against those who contend that the lobby has only limited influence: "It makes little sense," in view of the pervasiveness of Zionist influence over civil society and political discourse, "to maintain that the pro-Israeli positions of mainstream American organizations . . . emerged independently of the activism of the American Jewish community." In its early days, Zionism grew only because Herzl and his colleagues employed heavy lobbying in the European centers of power; Jewish dispersion across the Western world—and Jewish influence in the economies, the film industries, the media, and academia in key Western countries—are what enabled the Zionist movement to survive and thrive in the dark years of the early twentieth century; and Zionist lobbying and molding of public discourse are what has maintained Israel's favored place in the hearts and minds of Americans and the policy councils of America's politicians.
This is a critically important book. It enhances and expands on the groundbreaking message of Shlomo Sand's work. If Sand shows that Jews were not "a people" until Zionism created them as such, Alam shows this also and goes well beyond to show how Zionism and its manufactured "nation" went about dispossessing and replacing the Palestinians and winning all-important Western support for Israel and its now 60-year-old "exclusionary colonialism."
Kathleen Christison is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and the Wound of Dispossession and co-author, with Bill Christison, of Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation, published last summer by Pluto Press. She can be reached at kb.christison@
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M. Shahid Alam
Professor of Economics
Northeastern University
Boston, MA 02115
http://us.macmillan
http://aslama.
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Norman Finkelstein interviewed on Danish public service TV by Jewish, and pro-Zionist host Adam Holm. November 14 2009 Adam Holm was reprimanded by his superiors from Danmarks Radio recently for having published a news paper article expressing his strong support for Israel. The Danish Broadcasting Company prefers to keept the illusion of impartiality. On this [...] On February 24, 2010, In Uncategorized, by admin
It's fitting that chutzpah is a Hebrew word. Newsweek reports
How do you sell the American public on the idea that Israel has the right to maintain or even expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank? Be positive. Turn the issue away from settlements and toward peace. Invoke ethnic cleansing.
Those are three of the recommendations made by Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, in an internal study he wrote for the Washington-based group The Israel Project (TIP) on effective ways to talk to Americans about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The 117-page study, titled The Israel Project's 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was commissioned by the nonprofit group, which aims to promote Israel's side of the story, and leaked to NEWSWEEK. It includes chapters with such titles as "How to Talk About Palestinian Self Government and Prosperity" and "The Language of Tackling a Nuclear Iran."
The report is strewn with bolded examples of "Words That Work" and "Words That Don't Work," alongside rhetorical tips such as "Don't talk about religion" and "No matter what you're asked, bridge to a productive pro-Israel message." Taken together, the 18 chapters offer a fascinating look at the way Israel and its supporters try to shape the public debate in their favor...
In the report, Luntz describes the "best settlement argument" as one that draws a parallel between the Arab communities in Israel and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank—and refers to the idea of evacuating Jews as racist. "The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can't be any Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea," he suggests saying. "We don't say that we have to cleanse out Arabs from Israel. They are citizens of Israel. They enjoy equal rights. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews. We don't accept it. Cleansing by either side against either side is unacceptable."
One line of argument that Luntz says actually harms the cause is Israel's policy of restricting Arab housing construction in East Jerusalem: "The arguments about demolishing Palestinian homes because they are not within the Jerusalem building code tested SO badly that we are not even going to dignify them with a Word's That Don't Work box. Americans hate their own local planning boards for telling them where they can and can't put swimming pools or build fences. You don't need to import that animosity into your own credibility issues. Worse yet, talking about 'violations of building codes' when a TV station is showing the removal of a house that looks older than the modern state of Israel is simply catastrophic."
Luntz gets paid for this? On one hand, it seems obvious. If you want to win an argument in America, call your opponent racist. I bet the best way to put out a pro-life message is to say that blacks tend to have more abortions. If you're pro-choice, go around saying abortion bans would disproportionately restrict the freedom of women from "communities of color." But the "r card" being used by the only racialist state in the world this side of North Korea to justify its expansion? That's chutzpah.
In the report itself , Luntz reccomends saying
"As a matter of principle, we believe that it is a basic right of children to be raised without hate. We ask the Palestinian leadership to end the culture of hate in Palestinian schools, 300 of which are named for suicide bombers. Palestinian leaders should take textbooks out of classrooms that show maps of the Middle East without Israel and that glorify terrorism."
Muslim terrorists deliberately target innocent people. "Democracies" like America and Israel target their enemies knowing that in the process innocent people will be killed. There's supposed to be a moral difference here?
Notice that the word "hate." In selling an idea to Saudi Arabians you'd probably need to frame it in a way that made it clear that it was compatible with or, better, required by Islam. It's a sign that multiculturalism is our religion that everything moral has to be framed as against "racism" or "hate."
Luntz's report is also filled with Machiavellian tips like
A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick—that is just about the time the public will wake up and say "Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!"
and
K.I.S.S. and tell and tell again and again. A key rule of successful communications is"Keep It Simple, Stupid". Successful communications is not about being able to recite every fact from the long history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is about pointing out a few core principles of shared values—such as democracy and freedom—and repeating them over and over again.
In other words, the masses are stupid. Get them on your side the way you'd educate a slow kid: say what you'd like him to learn again and again in the simplest terms possible. This is great advice to anybody and why a "Jews good, Arab bad" message consistently repeated has beat out a more nuanced view of the situation in the Middle East.
Confrontation between student and professor at Portland State University raises questions about school security, guns on campus
By The Oregonian
March 06, 2010, 6:35PM
© 2010 OregonLive.com. All rights reserved.
Saul Alinsky: "Coach" A Review of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals Richard Hoste March 10, 2010 Few Jewish radicals have had as much influence over American politics as Saul Alinsky (1909-1972). Born to Russian Jewish immigrants, he graduated from the University Alinsky was known more as a tactician than an ideologue. His most famous book was Rules for Radicals, published a year before his death. It's still valuable reading today for its political insights and what it tells us about the transformation that has happened in America. To Alinsky, the world is divided into the Haves, the Have-Nots and the Have-a-little, Want Mores. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away. One thing that differentiates Alinsky's thought from that of conventional leftists is his more sophisticated understanding of human nature. To him, it isn't rational to hope that one day people will behave morally based on altruistic motives. Also, Alinsky didn't believe that we'll one day reach a utopia where all works of social justice have been done and people can live happily ever after. Every political victory brings new problems, and conflict is a permanent feature of life. Of course, you don't tell the people you're trying to organize that because they would lose the will to act. Another important part of human nature is our need to rationalize our actions. Once a young radical has forced a corporation or government into a certain direction, expect that the establishment will invent moral reasons for why it acted the way it did. Once again, getting people to do the right things for the wrong reasons with a moral gloss invented afterwards is the best we can hope for. "This is the low road to morality. There is no other." When it comes to motivating people, an organizer must convince them that they're 100% in the right. Imagine if the Declaration of Independence started out by listing all the benefits of colonial rule and all the help that the Americans had gotten from the mother country in fighting the Indians. It then went on to say that since objectively the case was 60% for revolution and 40% against, the colonialists had decided to break away. In that case there would've been no revolution. It's vital that one have his side convinced of its own moral purity and the depravity of the enemy. One of Alinsky's greatest insights is that change has to be cloaked in the language of tradition. Liberals who burned the American flag were fools who were more interested in striking a posture for radicalism than actually changing the world. Such actions were counterproductive and turned many Americans away from the left. Let this be a lesson to any White nationalists that feel the need to periodically dress up as Nazis. Alinsky's analysis of the white lower middle class, whom by the 1970s he hoped to radicalize, could've been written today. He points out that they saw the unemployed as "parasitical" and were turned off by the "liberal, democratic, holier-than- While shrewd and practical, Rules reveals that Alinsky was like all radical leftists a disturbed man. He does little more than project his own misery when he talks about the pathologies of the American middle class and certainly doesn't present any evidence for his claims. His danger stemmed from the fact that he loved the process of liberal activism more than anything. The chapter titled Tactics shows the shamelessness of Jewish radicals and those they organized. To put pressure on a bank, Alinsky recommends getting a thousand or more people to paralyze the institution by each opening up a $5 or $10 savings accounts on the same day. Part of the fun would be "the general enjoyment of seeing the discomfiture and confusion on the part of the establishment." The bank would be ready to negotiate in order to be able to get back to business. One time Alinsky almost did put this "people power" to use was when he wanted to pressure a large department store. He planned to bus 3,000 Blacks to the store and have them overwhelm the clerks as they shopped for shirts and underwear. The business of any whites would be lost for that day. Such a tactic is legal and there would've been nothing anyone could've done to stop it. Alinsky made sure that word of the plan leaked to the store and after that 186 positions opened up and "for the first time, Blacks were on the sales floor and in executive training." Rules recounts a time the author suggested to a group of low class Blacks inRochester, I suggested that we might buy one hundred seats for one of Rochester's symphony concerts. We would select a concert in which the music was relatively quiet. The hundred Blacks who would be given the tickets would first be treated to a three-hour pre-concert dinner in the community, in which they would be fed nothing but baked beans, and lots of them; then the people would go to the symphony hall-with obvious consequences. Imagine the scene when the action began! The concert would be over before the first movement! (If this be a Freudian slip-so be it!) Once again, this is a completely legal tactic. While a stink bomb will get you arrested, a fart can't. No law could possibly change that. The city would've had its symphony destroyed until it gave in to whatever arbitrary demands the community organizer made. Rules goes on to describe the threat of a different "tactic involving bodily functions" which he used against the city of Chicago. The plan was to put people on flights going into O'Hare airport and having them occupy the lavatories. Then when people arrived they would be desperate to use the bathroom. Alinsky planned to have people (Blacks, I assume) tie up all the stalls in the airport at the moment when the flights arrived. While the city gave in before the tactic could be deployed, one can tell that the author wishes it would've gone through. One can see children yelling at their parents, "Mommy, I've got to go," and desperate mothers surrendering, "All right-well, do it. Do it right here."...The whole scene would become unbelievable and the laughter and ridicule would be nationwide. Alinsky spends relatively few pages on his standard liberal references to his love for humanity and many more in enjoyment of sick imagined scenes like this. It seems that it took both Jews and Blacks to create the modern PC state. There needed to be an outgroup hostile to White society that was unusually intelligent and spiteful, and another which was uniquely deficient in intelligence and a sense of dignity. Jared Taylor is fond of saying that for white nationalists to succeed they must show themselves to be better than their enemies. It's hard to see how one can read Rules and agree with that. Blacks and their Jewish mentors have been able to get their way by being incredibly shameless and without any concern for self respect. Blacks were and still are completely willing to use Whites' desire to avoid them as a political tool. Such a thing is incomprehensible to the European mind. Jewish radicals fantasized about the embarrassment White parents had over their children not being able to find a toilet, presumably picturing families hiding in corners as O'Hare airport was turned into a Liberian slum. While I don't think it's desirable or possible for Whites to ever use such tactics, knowing about what ethnic competitors are capable of should make us more forgiving of the at least honorable methods Europeans used in centuries past to deal with their enemies. Richard Hoste (email him) writes on race, immigration, political correctness and modern conservatism. His articles have appeared atVDARE.com, The Occidental Observer, The Occidental Quarterly andTakiMag among other places. His writes the HBD blog at Alternative Right, where he regularly reviews classic and modern works on these topics. Permanent URL: http://www.theoccid
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