The other night at NYU, Tony Judt said, “Fasten your seatbelts it’s going to be a bumpy night,” and then dropping his scarf and jacket on the stage, gave a barnburner about the intellectual’s responsibility. Here are some of his salient points:
1. Television has greatly narrowed the freedom of the intellectual to do his job and “disturb the public peace.” 100 years ago, the French intellectual Julien Benda could stand up against the establishment for Alfred Dreyfus “because he was innocent… in the name of universal values, not particular interests.” But that moment is over. Benda and others were given a platform by the rise of mass literacy in the 1880s; they were then disempowered by the rise of television in the 1970s. In that short 90 years, “educated elites had a mass literate audience.” No longer. Today newspapers and foundations are not willing to support views “that make them uncomfortable.”
2. Intellectuals are now in four spots. 1. Pundits. 2. Thinktanks. 3. Investigative journalists (like Gideon Levy and Anna Politkovskaya). 4. the academy.
3. Intellectuals in the academy are like clergy in the middle ages, protected but with obligations. When Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper made Harvard uncomfortable, it stripped its logo from their online version, in what Judt called “a very cowardly gesture.”
4. Self-censorship is “far more efficient” than official censorship. All the worries about threats to the First Amendment from the executive are small next to “the real issue,” people not saying what they know to be true and “camouflaging the truth from themselves.”
5. The neoconservative idea of “productive disruption” in the Middle East—”to get a western omelet, you need to break some oriental eggs”—is rather similar to the “best line in the history of movies,” the famous Harry Lyme line in The Third Man. (”ln ltaly, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. ln Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce ? The cuckoo clock.”)
6. Liberals must not be “pressured into silence” on the Israel issue by the Israel lobby in America. “Why is the American Jewish community so determined to convince itself that we are living in 1938. Why does the most successful, the most well integrated, the most culturally and politically influential, the most socially and economically well situated Jewish community since the late years of the Roman republic, why is it so worried about the demon of anti-Semitism—more worried than the Jewish community in any other country I know and certainly more worried than Israel itself? It’s an American issue.”
7. If any European country had elevated a “racist and fascist” along the lines of Avigdor Lieberman, deputy P.M. of Israel, “every newspaper in America would be screaming 1938″ and calling for boycotting, “quite rightly,” the European Union.
8. The unfortunate trend in intellectual life is the prevalence of “identity intellectuals who ask themselves of a policy, of the law or of the war, not Is it true, is it just, is it bad or good, but rather is it good for people like me or people like us, is it good for my cause?” These identity intellectuals have their counterparts on campus. “The crippling organization of American intellectual life at large is reproduced and magnified here on American campuses, where many colleagues are teaching in effect identity politics masquerading as cultural classes.”
A few comments. Judt is a great speaker, confident, grand, slashing, brilliant, stylish. He kept my attention for an hour, and some of his insights left me shaking my head in wonder. That’s something. He has to be a little bit wrong about Pt. 2, inasmuch as he never mentioned bloggers, who are obviously having some effect. Also, I felt a little disappointment that his promise of a “bumpy ride” and his interest in “identity intellectuals” did not result in his talking about dual loyalty, which I think he must believe is an issue for some Jews re Israel. As to his own question in Pt. 6 about the incomprehensible fear on the part of the successful Jewish community in the U.S., I think the correct answer is: American Jews feel it is their political responsibility to protect Israel by keeping the U.S. government at Israel’s side. This is an American responsibility, not a European one, and it is a weighty one. It is made more problematic by the fact that typically only the most nationalistic Jews go to Israel to see what’s going on. And so liberal Jews here have allowed the nationalistic to report to them and dominate the discussion. When these nationalist friends tell them that Israel’s existence is at stake, and the U.S. is the only thing protecting the little sliver of land, the liberals with their shared responsibility become fearful. Yes, they ought to take more actual responsibility for Israeli policy (like the right-wing religious stuff that when they see it in other Americans enrages them), but that’s how I think the Rube Goldberg device works, and doesn’t.
Related Posts
- Tony Judt on the Collapse of the Liberals
- Tony Judt Says It Is Becoming ‘Normal’ to Have Conversations About Israel’s Failings
- Annals of Self-Censorship (In ‘06, Judt Hinted What Klein Said Re Dual Loyalty)
- At Brandeis, Alan Dershowitz Snaps His Towel at Tony Judt
- Disgusting English neocon suggests that brooding on Israel made Tony Judt sick
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Tony Judt is a great scholar and a man of conscience. Most people don't know that he is a former Zionist who dropped out of Cambridge to aid Israel in the Six Day War. Here are some details of his life from Wikipedia:
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"Born in 1948, Tony Judt was raised in the East End section of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis. Professor Tony R. Judt got a BA (1969) and a PhD (1972) in history from the University of Cambridge.
Like many other Jewish parents living in postwar Europe, his mother and father were secular, but they sent him to Hebrew school and steeped him in the Yiddish culture of his grandparents, which the scholar says he still thinks of wistfully. Urged on by his parents, Judt enthusiastically waded into the world of Israeli politics at age 15, rising to become the national secretary of the Labor Zionist youth movement Dror. He helped promote the migration of British Jews to Israel. Just after the Six Day War, Judt, then 19, dropped out of Cambridge and went to Israel, where he worked as a translator for international volunteers aiding the Israel Defense Forces.
However, during the aftermath of the war, Judt's belief in the Zionist enterprise began to unravel. "I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country through work," Judt has said (see this article in the Forward). The problem, he began to believe, was that this view was "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible."[1]
Judt was also until late 2003 a contributing editor at The New Republic, a moderate magazine with strong pro-Israel leanings. However, his article in the 23 October 2003 issue of the New York Review of Books favoured a one-state solution in Palestine. Shortly after, he was dropped from the masthead of The New Republic and condemned by the magazine's literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, and other pro-Israel commentators."
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Thanks, Alan. Judt sounds like an admirable man. And thanks to Phil Weiss for providing us with more of his thinking.
Tony Judt has argued that the failure of Israel's Jew State to grow up now endangers its very existence 'The Country that Wouldn't Grow Up'.
Professor Judt is very much the typical jooish gatekeeper and, therefore, his short article is an interesting combination of candid admission and clever self-deceit.
Readers interested in exploring the seemingly unending layers of Jewish mendacity should study his article http://www.haaretz.com\ and not simply rely on my commentaries on the thirteen brief quotes below. My purpose here is not to defend Israeli Jews and suggest that they are decent people but to argue that American Jews are far worse racists, cowards, and liars and that some pseudo-leftist American Jews are now stabbing Israeli Jews in the back in order to leave their stupider co-tribalists in the Jew State holding the bag when the Jew State becomes the defendant at a second N�rnberg War Crimes Trial.
Judt's statements are in parentheses and quotation marks to facilitate reading.
1. – "the State of Israel remains immature and will not grow up" –
This is not true. Israel has matured into the crocodile-type monster that its reptile racist beginnings promised. Tony Jewdt simply nurses the age- old Jewish prejudice that his co-tribalists' bigotry and racism can lead the Self-Chosen into some Self-Promised Land [always stolen from others] and the whole operation will be a sweet and easy cakewalk and milk and honey solution to their problems. Meanwhile the cattle-goyim are supposed to admire the collateral genocides as G-d's will and accept all the basic jooish moral values. But Judt is now disappointed that the PR did not work out so well for the apart-hate "Jews Only" state.
But in another sense, Israel cannot grow up because Jews worldwide cannot grow up and acknowledge the core lies supporting their crackpot political schemes. Moreover, some Israeli Jews feel that the American Self-Chosen push Isrealhell into extremist policies so that UAssA Jews can live out fantasies of revenge against Gentiles for imaginary crimes. Some Israeli Jews complain that American Jewry sends mostly sickos and wierdos to do aliyah.
At any rate, an excellent example of this psychotic extremism is the PNAC [Project for a New American Century] document in which New York jooish chicken hawks urged Bennie Net'yahoo to remake the map of the entire Middle East. These New York armchair warriors are willing to fight to the last Israeli Jew in order to show how tough they are. Of course, they will first get lots of brain dead American goyim to fight and die for the Jew State.
2. – "But that, Israeli readers will tell me, is simply the prejudiced view of outsiders." –
Professor Judt would have us believe that jooish self-indulgent narcissistic racism is limited to Israeli Jews. In fact, Israeli Jews are by and large not as bigoted, ignorant, and fanatic as American Joos who do not have to see for themselves the state-terrorist crimes continuously committed against defenseless Palestinian civilians. Of course, there is the fringe core of Joo maniacs in Hebron who deliberately expose their children to danger in the chiliastic hope that c. 500 Jewish occupiers and colonialists can drive out several tens of thousand of Palestinians.
Moreover, Judt's essay was published by the English language website of an Israeli newspaper. Perhaps no American Jooish paper would touch it, so he had to send it to "the country that won't grow up" to get it published. Judt should grow up. The critical commentary in the English language Haaretz website would never make it into the UAssA joos media, so Judt is very unfair to his co-tribalists in the Jew State.
3. – "What Israel lost by its continuing occupation of Arab lands it gained through its close identification with the recovered memory of Europe's dead Jews [the growing international recognition of the the Holocaust in education and media]." –
Hah! Hah! "recovered memory" is the jooish code word for faked photos, outrageous lies, geriatric fantasies, and bogus work camp memoirs. Here Judt shows that he has not grown up. Somebody has to explain to him that the Hoaxoco$t is nothing but the most successful lie and filthiest blood libel in human history.
The "6,000,000 up in chimney smoke" is only a psychotic but profitable fairy tale. It is simply outrageous that a Jew is peddling the Hoaxoco$t from a university chair in a public or quasi-public institution. The Holyhoax fable should be confined to synagogues, Jooish summer camps, and geriatric institutes for joos whose Alzheimers state permits them to imagine that they are hoaxoco$t survivors.
4. – "Today only a tiny minority of outsiders [outside Isrealhell] see Israelis as victims." -
As usual, Professor Jewdt gets it completely wrong. The relevant contrast is not "today vs. 1960s" but "Jews vs. simple humans." [N.B. The Talmud refers to simple humans as "cattle-goyim." I refuse to be labeled as a "Gentile" and call myself and other Gentiles "simple humans."] The vast majority of American Joos will still not accept any public criticism of Israel from simple humans and to this very day go berserk when their precious little Jew State is referred to as a…well…Jew State.
5. – "It has become commonplace to compare Israel…at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans." -
It is very unfair to compare the Jew State to apart-hate South Africa, Franco's Spain, or Nazi Germany. These three governments never bombed the neighborhoods of their minorities or poisoned their drinking water. South Africa never imported thousands of Chinese coolies to displace the natives from their quasi-slave labor jobs. Izzie now does this.
Nazi Germany did what it could to help Zionists by permitting them to set up separate camps to train Jews to do useful work in Palestine, to publish Zionist newspapers in Germany, and to publicly display the Zionist flag. Germany wanted to help settle Jews in Palestine and Jews declared war on it. But got the stupid goyim did all the dying. Now the Iranian president wants to help peacefully settle Jews in Europe and Jews declare war on him. Once again the stupid goyim are supposed to do all the dying. Go figure!
6. – "Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust,…." -
Here once again, Jewdt peddles aspects of the most profitable Jooish lie. "Come to terms" means caved into outrageous jooish shakedowns, blackmail, and chicanery. The triumph of the Church of the Holocaust has nothing to do with a simple passage of time. The Hoaxoco$t has succeeded because of the ceaseless and shameless lies of Alley Weasel, Sly Weaselthal, Daniel Golddigger, etc. and support for them in all media branches from Hollywood to Harvard and from ZNN to the Jew York Times [which Joe Sobran has called "The Holocaust Update Sheet."]
7. -"Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books,…." -
Once again, Judt gets things completely bassackwards. The Hoaxoco$t fable started out at the N�rnberg Torture Show Trials as a trick to distract attention from the actual and horrific war crimes of the American Air Farce in the massive incinerations of Germans and Japanese. It got feverishly promoted by Jooish publishing houses, spread like an infectious disease to the classrooms, and finally took over the jewdiciaries in most European countries. That is why a serious Holocaust researcher like Germar Rudolf sits in prison in Jewish-occupied Germany and hoaxohucksters like Tony Jewdt run black propaganda [= filthy lies] pseudo-research institutes in Jewish-occupied America.
8. – "The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti- Semitism is deeply ingrained in Israeli political instincts….But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic." -
Hah-hah-hah! Jewdt is really a shameless liar who wants to leave the poor Israelis holding the bag for the lies, treason, and deceit of diaspora Jews. Shouting "auntie-Semite" and "anti-Semenist" is deeply ingrained in Jewish instincts and not simply in Israeli. Alley Weasel, Alan Dirtshits, and the American headquarters of the Holocaust Industry smear, lie, and embezzle as Joos and not as Israelis.
9. – "it [using the brush of anti-Semitism] encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehaviour. -it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts…." –
Finally, Professor Jewdt says something intelligent and halfway honest. Israeli crimes are in actual fact Jewish crimes because Israel is the Jew State [Herzl's Judenstaat]. American Jews treasonously rob the UAssA to give Israel the life support system without which it would dry up and blow away tomorrow. Does Judt want to make the Eskimos or Mongolians responsible for Israel? No, it is Jews and only Jews. I do not say that 100% of Jews are responsible. Perhaps only 96% or so of Jews are co- responsible for the Jew State's rampaging behaviour. If the Biblical Abraham were to return to visit diaspora Jewry today, he would not be able to find his 50 honest Jews who would demand
1) the dismantlement of the intrinsically and hopeless racist Jew State,
2) the full forensic investigation of the Hoaxoco$t blood libel, and
3) a complete exposure of the Mossad false flag role in the World Trade Center fake terrorist attack.
As to Israel, some people talk of a two-state solution and others of a one- state solution, but the only real solution is: "No Jew State!"
10. – "The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea-change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S." –
The boring, superficial, and "nothing new" screed by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt is only important because they are high-level Pentagon intellectuals and academic mandarins who committed the career-ending mistake of publicly writing what everyone has been saying in private for years. Professor Judt should be much more worried about the Hoaxoco$t and 9/11 fables unraveling because the responsibilities for those two crimes cannot so easily be fobbed off onto the hapless Israelis but lead directly to the front door of Mr. American Joo.
11. – "This [phoney accusations of anti-Semitism are not taken seriously] is bad for Jews…." -
In simple English, Jewdt is saying that it is bad that Jewish lies no longer work. And so finally, he reveals his hand, stops hiding behind universalist Enlightenment phrases, and shows that the old Jewish question ["Is it good for Jews?"] is most basic to his thinking. He correctly realizes that that is the only way to get Mr. Jew's attention and to have it show up on his radar screen. After all, Judt himself does not yet see the real problem with Israel, i.e. it has no right to exist as the type of state that it is.
12. – "I was trying to explain…why Franco's Spain has such a special place in our moral imagination….I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great surprise, most of the class -including many of the sizable Jewish contingent- nodded approval." -
Congratulations to the students for waking up Professor Jewdt to some small degree! Actually, post civil war Spain was a model of toleration and ethnic harmony compared to the Jew State. Will Professor Jewdt change his lectures to his American Jewish students? I doubt it.
13. – "However, modern Israel also has options." -
Unfortunately, all the options listed by Jewdt boil down to Israel ceasing to be Israel, i.e. a "Jews Only" racist apart-hate state of Jews, by Jews, and for Jews. A crocodile cannot cease being a crocodile and attain Buddhist enlightenment.
In my judgment, more intelligent and leftish Jews like Tony Judt and Judy Andreas realize that Israel is a danger for all Jews and so they pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of criticizing the Jew State but they will not look at the depth and breadth of the historical roots of Jewish racism. They look upon Israel as an unfortunate epiphenomenon that appeared out of nowhere. Moreover, they still promote spurious Jewish victimhood by clinging to the Hoaxoco$t fable and the Auschwitz Lie.
If I suffered from the curse of being an Israeli Jew, I would vigorously object to the Judt-Andreas tactic of leaving me holding the proverbial bag when the excrement soon hits the fan and the Jew State goes up in figurative and/or literal smoke.
Patrick:
Do you think Phil Weiss is worthy?
Jimmy
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