Mondoweiss
- I'm crushed and livid (massive Jewish expansion set for Obama's lap, East Jerusalem)
- Religion doesn't matter any more,
- Supporting Iraq war was, and apparently still is, a good career move
- The movie where Ari Ben Canaan finds out his father is Darth Vader
- Elena Kagan made who/whom mistake in 2006
- To defuse one-staters, liberal Zionist must justify 'wrongs' of '48
- Anti-Zionist show in Rochester is back on, though not in original church venue
- 'NYT' makes excuses for Netanyahu
- Long predicted, Goldberg's eclipse finally begins
I'm crushed and livid (massive Jewish expansion set for Obama's lap, East Jerusalem)
Posted: 28 Jun 2010 10:49 AM PDT
I'm crushed and livid. Jerusalem master plan: Expansion of Jewish enclaves across the city:
The Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee is set to approve an unprecedented master plan that calls for the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, a move largely based on construction on privately owned Arab property.This is heating up to massive proportions. And Coteret brings us more info:
Channel Ten News: Construction starts at Shepherd Hotel settlement compound in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem
Last night, riots broke out in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan as settlers, backed by Border Police, moved to evict Palestinians from a structure used as a mosque. .... Yaacov Elon: Very quietly Israel began construction of a new neighborhood in the Shepherd Hotel complex in East Jerusalem. ..You can hear the construction sounds in the background. What's happening there, Roi? Roi Sharon: Work ended here this afternoon at the Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Work began this morning, the construction that has already caused several diplomatic crises between Jerusalem and Washington, materialized this morning when the construction team arrived here with a micro fine drill and began the work.Aha! Careful incisions! So livid. I'm practically speechless.
Religion doesn't matter any more,
Posted: 28 Jun 2010 07:30 AM PDT
Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School says in a piece in the NYT pointing out that Elena Kagan will make it three Jews on the Supreme Court, and no Protestants. It's easy for him to say, he's a winner. Also, Feldman served in the Coalition Provisional Authority in the Iraq war and occupation. Was Zionism, which has a religious component, a factor in support for the Iraq war among Jews manning the establishment?
By the way, Feldman doesn't credit E. Digby Baltzell with helping to open the blueblood doors in the '60s. His book the Protestant Establishment was very important, though; it said that a caste of WASPs was keeping out the talented, including many Jews. The honest question that Feldman won't go near here is whether the networks that I was part of at Harvard in the 70s, the rising Jewish establishment that lifted him too, didn't have a castelike quality. Certainly we looked out for one another. Is it mere coincidence that Lawrence Summers, a Jew, taps Elena Kagan to be dean of the Law School? What is our Jewish obligation, as winners, to hire diversely? (And yes, I include myself).
P.S. Here is Adam Garfinkle, also of the Iraq war braintrust, writing in Jewcentricity about religion and the neocons, and showing that religion matters very much indeed:
Neoconservatives are the purest expression of two phenomena simultaneously. First, they are an American Jewish example of the broad modern tendency for religious energies to attach themselves to politics, and second, they are an expression of stereoscopic chosenness, having filtered out the realism-inducing study of Jewish history and replaced it with the heroic narratives of American and modern Zionist histories…
Neoconservatives tend to unite aroudd the conviction that small, beleaguered groups of chosen believers can prevail over all odds if they stick to their beliefs… If this sounds like the sort of reaction one would have expected from Jews in centuries past who were assailed in their ghettoes and small villages by masses of threatening ignoramuses around them, that's no coincidents. There really is such a thing as the moral chauvinism of the downtrodden…
Supporting Iraq war was, and apparently still is, a good career move
Posted: 28 Jun 2010 07:16 AM PDT
I'm told that last year in a panel at Columbia Journalism School, a writer for The New Yorker said that only one member of the magazine's staff who dealt with foreign policy opposed the Iraq war. Wow. Why did this leading magazine that told people how to think about Vietnam flub this one so bad?
There is no introspective spirit in this New Yorker piece by George Packer about why we went to war with Iraq. Apparently, Peter Beinart and Packer himself did so because of Republicans, and a spirit that fairies implanted in the American establishment:
Reagan's rhetorical call for an end to the Soviet Empire prompted second-generation neoconservatives, such as Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Elliott Abrams, to imagine that democracy could be delivered to the whole world by F-22s...
President George H. W. Bush's invasion of Panama, in December of 1989, now seems hardly more consequential than Reagan's splendid little war in Grenada. But, as Beinart reminds us, Panama became a dress rehearsal for the ideological battle over Iraq, and a key transition from the hubris of toughness to the hubris of dominance.
But Beinart and Packer are liberal Democrats. What did they believe that made them so wrong? Packer gives us class-day bromides:"Beinart's fundamental message is to avoid hubris and cultivate wisdom."Got that? I bet those two isms that scare me so much, careerism and Zionism, had something to do with it. Beinart has said recently that he would sacrifice his liberal values in Israel for his Zionism. What else would it make him do? Why did Tom Friedman say he wanted the U.S. to smash something in the Arab world to answer suicide bombers in Tel Aviv? Why did Ken Pollack, leading the New York Times forward to the hustings, dismiss the Palestinian issue as meaningless to the Arab street?P.S. The piece misspells the word "overweening," putting an a in it. Hard times at the New Yorker. 
The movie where Ari Ben Canaan finds out his father is Darth Vader
Posted: 28 Jun 2010 07:07 AM PDT
From Slate's the best movies never made:
Genesis 1948
In 1970, Otto Preminger bought the screen rights to Dan Kurzman's 800-plus-page nonfiction chronicle of "The First Arab-Israeli War," intending a follow-up to his 1960 epic, Exodus. At a press conference, he said, "We'll show both the conflict on the battlefield and in the political arenas in Washington, Moscow, the United Nations, and the Mid-East." He expressed the hope that the film "will offend neither Arabs nor Jews" without acknowledging that Exodus had certainly offended Arabs. Israeli parents, meanwhile, had reason to be wary of Preminger's planned location shoot. While filming Exodus, he labored over one scene in which a dozen very young Israelis were to cry on cue as Arabs attacked their homes. When they wouldn't cooperate with tears, Preminger instructed an assistant to lead the children's mothers over a hill and out of sight. ''You see, your mothers have been taken away,'' Preminger informed them. ''You are never going to see them again—never!'' The children obediently burst into tears. But instead of Genesis 1948, he made a domestic-discord movie, Such Good Friends.
Elena Kagan made who/whom mistake in 2006
Posted: 28 Jun 2010 06:55 AM PDT
And oh god, I bet she's another sleeper Zionist, too; the Times says she praised an Israeli judge as her hero at Harvard Law School.
In 2006, while dean of Harvard Law School, Ms. Kagan introduced Judge [Aharon] Barak during an award ceremony as "my judicial hero." She added, "He is the judge or justice in my lifetime whom, I think, best represents and has best advanced the values of democracy and human rights, of the rule of law and of justice."
Of course this Times story paints Barak as a great liberal. The only democracy, right? God save the Jewish people, and the people people too.
To defuse one-staters, liberal Zionist must justify 'wrongs' of '48
Posted: 27 Jun 2010 07:58 PM PDT
This is further evidence that Zionists across the board are seriously out of touch with reality. In Haaretz, Chaim Gans invokes humanism and morality in condemning the post 67 settlements but accepts as just the far greater crimes that were committed in 1948, which he doesn't deny. Gans is forced to make the argument because he states that the one-state position has been given impetus not just by the left, but by right-wing settlers who are endangering the entire enterprise:
the wrongs committed after 1967 threaten the justice of Zionism in its entirety, while pre-'67 wrongs were wrongs of particular moves in the realization of Zionism.
The source of this distinction is of course the well-known distinction between the jus ad bellum and jus in bello. There is no contradiction between the claim that Britain's bombing of Dresden during World War II was a criminal act and the claim that this criminality represented a step taken in a just war - even a sublimely just war, the war against Nazism.
We must acknowledge the great injustices committed by Zionism up to 1967. We have to take responsibility for them (via reparations ) - mainly for the expulsion of refugees. We must also acknowledge the high price the Palestinians paid for the realization of Zionism, even when Zionism did not commit injustices against them. But none of these admissions undermines the justice of Zionism in the least.
Thus, his embrace of Jewish superiority, in the end, makes him no different than those he criticizes. Comparing the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians with the allied bombing of Dresden, as if the Palestinians had initiated a massive war against the Jews and deserved no more consideration than did the Nazis, is mind boggling from someone who is attempting to present himself as a reasonable man. Are there, one may well ask, any reasonable Zionists?
Anti-Zionist show in Rochester is back on, though not in original church venue
Posted: 27 Jun 2010 06:21 PM PDT
Yesterday we ran musician Rich Siegel's report that a gig he was doing at a church in Rochester, NY, with Gilad Atzmon, like Siegel an anti-Zionist, got cancelled because of political pressure, including from a local temple, B'rith Kodesh. Some folks who read the report queried John Keevert, a Rochester social justice activist who had helped schedule the event at his Unitarian church. Keevert said that Siegel's report was inaccurate. "We did not cancel because of Temple pressure." Why then? "Scheduling conflict," he wrote in a note to the questioners. "it has been scheduled in a new location, same time." We asked Siegel for the latest:
The concert has been reinstated, but at a different venue. I am convinced that the concert was initially canceled because of the objection from the rabbi. And I believe that what is being said now is pure bull.
Here's the story: This concert/presentation at First Unitarian of Rochester has been booked for probably around two months- I can check old e mails to verify. All of a sudden we get a communication that the concert is canceled. Two reasons are given: 1) that there are other events scheduled at the same time in the building, and the noise level would interfere, and 2) that a local rabbi contacted the church objecting to Gilad Atzmon. So please note that it was stated outright from the start that ONE of two reasons was the communication from the rabbi. To deny this now is disingenuous. The concert/presentation came about when Dan McGowan, founder and chairman of Deir Yassin Remembered, booked us to play in Geneva, NY, which we are also doing, and then got in touch with the church and offered us for a second night. Dan continued to be involved, and when the church canceled giving those two reasons, Dan offered two options: to move the concert to a different venue, or to keep it at the church, removing the musical aspect of the evening and turning it into spoken presentations by the three of us- Dan, Gilad, and myself. No noise. The church turned him down, proving that the rabbi's objection was the one and only reason for the cancellation. The church was clearly determined to just shut down the event, and was not interested in options, and I have e mails indicating exactly that. Dan and I had a conversation and agreed that we should organize an e mail and telephone campaign. I'm good at that, so I spread the word and people started making communications. A friend of mine, Emman Chehade Randazzo, a Palestinian woman married to an American and living in Chicago, telephoned John Keevert, chair of the Social Justice Council. He was one of the two people involved in both the booking and the cancellation, the other being Ron Johnson of the church. (I'm not sure if the council is part of the church or a separate entity.) John Keevert took Emman's call, and explained to her that he had heard some very disturbing things about Atzmon (evidently from the rabbi). Emman communicated to me that he said, basically, that Atzmon is a Jewish Anti-Semite. This was significant because it made it clear that the people we were dealing with had been influenced by propaganda, and it was not just the rabbi's objection that caused the cancellation but it had evolved into a situation where it had become, through the rabbi, our own host's objection.I got in touch with Atzmon and communicated the situation to him. He in turn called Keever and explained that he is often quoted with "cherry-picked" quotes taken out of context, and was able to convince Keever that he is not an Anti-Semite and that it would be very bad indeed to cave into pressure from Zionists. I wasn't privy to the conversation but all of a sudden we were back on, at another venue, but still hosted by the church and the Social Justice Council. And it seems from the character of subsequent conversations that our hosts have returned to being as enthusiastic as they previously had been. It seems that they came to a realization of some sort, probably that the rabbi was part of an agenda that they don't want to support.
'NYT' makes excuses for Netanyahu
Posted: 27 Jun 2010 06:04 PM PDT
Can it be a coincidence that just as Netanyahu is about to visit Obama, reports surface that the the un-frozen settlement 'freeze' continues in robust fashion ("Construction begins on 20 homes in Sheikh Jarrah").
I'm not a prophet, but I'm going to guess that this, too, will be chalked up to bureaucratic snafus that Netanyahu had no control over or knowledge of.
And I wonder if that excuse/explanation will make it into the NYT lede if/when they choose to report this. I always appreciate tips on how to think about news developments in the Middle East.
Oh: Isabel Kershner in the NYT:
another example of an awkwardly timed, seemingly bureaucratic Israeli maneuver that could upset fragile peace efforts.
Long predicted, Goldberg's eclipse finally begins
Posted: 27 Jun 2010 05:52 PM PDT
Everyone's talking about this post by Glenn Greenwald on Jeffrey Goldberg's journalistically-
disastrous performance in the buildup to the Iraq war. Greenwald puts more fuel on a fire that can only be built now, when that tragic decision is in the past, about why we made the mistake. He know that this has to do with "Israel-obsessive devotees" like Goldberg. Showing that the left understands, we can't get past the Iraq war without talking about the occupation. unlike [Judith] Miller, who was forced to leave the New York Times over what she did, and the NYT itself, which at least acknowledged some of the shoddy pro-war propaganda it churned out, Goldberg has never acknowledged his journalistic errors, expressed remorse for them, or paid any price at all. To the contrary, as is true for most Iraq war propagandists, he thrived
despiteas a result of his sorry record in service of the war. In 2007, David Bradley -- the owner of The Atlantic and (in his own words) formerly "a neocon guy" who was "dead certain about the rightness" of invading Iraq -- lavished Goldberg with money and gifts, including ponies for Goldberg's children, in order to lure him away from The New Yorker, where he had churned out most of his pre-war trash.One of his most obscenely false and damaging articles -- this 2002 museum of deceitful, hideous journalism, "reporting" on Saddam's "possible ties to Al Qaeda" -- actually won an Oversea's Press Award for -- get this -- "best international reporting in a print medium dealing with human rights." Goldberg, whose devotion to Israel is so extreme that he served in the IDF as a prison guard over Palestinians and was described last year as "Netanyahu's faithful stenographer" by The New York Times' Roger Cohen, wrote an even more falsehood-filled 2002 New Yorker article, warning that Hezbollah was planning a master, Legion-of-Doom alliance with Saddam Hussein for a "larger war," and that "[b]oth Israel and the United States believe that, at the outset of an American campaign against Saddam, Iraq will fire missiles at Israel -- perhaps with chemical or biological payloads -- in order to provoke an Israeli conventional, or even nuclear, response," though -- Goldberg sternly warned -- "Hezbollah, which is better situated than Iraq to do damage to Israel, might do Saddam's work itself" and "its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, maintain extensive biological- and chemical-weapons programs." That fantastical, war-fueling screed -- aimed at scaring Americans into targeting the full panoply of Israel's enemies -- actually won a National Magazine Award in 2003. Given how completely discredited those articles are, those are awards which any person with an iota of shame would renounce and apologize for, but Goldberg continues to proudly tout them on his bio page at The Atlantic.
Despite all of those war-cheerleading deceits -- or, again, because of them -- Goldberg continues to be held out by America's most establishment outlets as a preeminent expert in the region.
No comments:
Post a Comment