A couple weeks ago I watched an Asian-American panel on C-Span talking about responses in their community to the Virginia Tech shootings. The main feeling was, shame; they worried that non-Asian Americans would blame the Asian community for the murders. I heard the same word, "shame," from two Korean-American friends. But in the end, no one blames Asian-American culture for a kid going crazy in Blacksburg. We all know that Cho is not representative.
I think that is the true thrust of my post yesterday on Scooter Libby: Where is the liberal Jewish soul-searching on Iraq? When will the liberal Jewish community dissociate itself from Libby and Feith and Wurmser, and Kristol and Abrams– and say, We understand that they were acting as nationalist Jews in pushing for the Iraq war; we denounce that sort of thinking, it must be discredited. Then discredit it by openly addressing the Israeli occupation. Until that soul-searching takes place, the "connected" liberal Jewish community, by which I mean the political insiders and public intellectuals, can rightly be accused of some degree of complicity in this horrible war. For by failing to perform that post-mortem, they are failing their jobs, as journalists and intellectuals, to explain to American how this debacle took place.
Let me be clear. I am not singling out rightwing Jews as the agents of
the Iraq tragedy. That responsiblity can be widely shared, with Bush and
Cheney and other American-nationalist militarists, as well as with the
credulous press and the chauvinist element of the American populace
that supported the war. But the Libby letters I wrote about yesterday
underline a crucial fact of this war: that Jewish nationalists who
opposed the peace process in Israel played a key part in
producing the ideas that gave us the Iraq debacle. This is simply
indisputable. They called for an Iraq war for years, and then they were all over the White House, notably Perle, Feith, Abrams, and Cheney’s Middle East adviser David Wurmser. I
imagine that Cheney met a lot of them during his and his wife’s sojourn at
the American Enterprise Institute before 2000. I say "imagine" because the journalism has not been done on Cheney’s
ideological education.
My challenge is to the liberal Jewish community because it has given cover to these crazed ideologues in a number of ways. First, a lot of liberals drank the neocon Koolaid on Iraq, and gained prominence for doing so: Thomas Friedman, Kenneth Pollack, The New Yorker Magazine. They endorsed the neocon view that the way to respond to the 9/11 attacks was to smash something in the Arab world. As I have noted here before, Friedman and Paul Berman (as well as neolib Lawrence Kaplan and neocon Bill Kristol in their book) said going after Iraq was necessary because Saddam subsidized suicide bombers in Israel–as though Israeli interests and American interests were congruent. More important, in justifying the war, Friedman and Berman and Pollack all overlooked the Israeli occupation of Arab lands. Pollack never mentions it in his 500-page war manifesto, a manifesto which presumes to inform us how the Arab "street" will respond to an invasion of Iraq.
Thus neocon support for a militaristic response to the Arab world gained wide adherence in the liberal Jewish community. And today the failure to anatomize the neocon madness for what it was, rightwing nationalist Jewish thinking, suggests that the liberal Jewish community is still infected by these ideas, still accepts them, or is in outright denial of its acceptance. Even as the horrors multiply in Iraq.
I understand why that accounting is not taking place: fears of antisemitism. People will blame the Jews. Leander hints as much in his comment yesterday on my post about necon social connections:
[Yours] is such a mad line of thought that on the net – at least considering the propagandists – it easily merges with the larger extreme right wing conspiracy lore: freemasons, jesuits, jews and somewhere secretly in the back a black pope pulling strings. I wouldn’t touch any of this stuff, if it wasn’t written by someone with superior knowledge of European and especially Russian history.
Leander is imposing a literacy test. You have to know European history before you can offer an opinion about important social and ideological connections in Washington today. That doesn’t stop the New Republic when it comes to Mormons! And imagine for a moment that there were Muslims all over the Bush Administration, and the U.S. then blundered tragically in the Middle East. Would those Muslims escape scrutiny from all but those writers who had studied the history of the Caliphate? Absurd. Journalists would try to anatomize Muslim thought (as Paul Berman does, to his great credit, in a piece on Islamic radicals in the latest New Republic). The same scrutiny should come to bear on the rightwing Jewish nationalists. And until the liberal Jewish intellectual community–which knows damn well that fervid Zionism played a role in the Iraq war planning–undertakes that post-mortem, it is providing intellectual cover to those nuts. Maybe out of fear of an antisemitic reaction, yes. But, a, how legitimate are those fears? And b, how selfish is it to continually valorize those fears– even as Iraq dissolves in pogroms that have nothing to do with Jewishness..
One of the most revealing pieces of information I learned this year is that Americans for Peace Now, a noble group that has always called for a Palestinian state, is a member of the constituent board of the evil AIPAC. Yes: AIPAC, which bangs the Likud drum in the States, is a representative organization. It includes rightwing groups like ZOA, but also Americans for Peace Now. Why hasn’t Peace Now broken with AIPAC? Out of fear, I am sure: the Jewish fear that if the Israel lobby in the U.S. is somehow compromised, the breathing tube for Israel will be crushed, and the Jewish state will die. I understand the fear, but look at the consequences: APN has been a party to rightwing lobbying, to an organization that refuses to condemn anti-Arab racists like Avigdor Lieberman.
A very similar complicity has taken place in the Iraq war connection. Liberal Jews have by and large banded with the neconservatives out of fear, in this case fear of reprisals against influential Jews in the U.S., and thereby utterly failed their mission as intellectuals: to tell us how this hateful war came about. Who has failed? I would single out The New Yorker and the Nation Magazines, and on from that The New York Times. If you want an honest description of the neocons as a Jewish movement, you have to go to neocons themselves, to Benjamin Ginsberg and the late Murray Friedman.
I think this entente is at last crumbling at the edges. Why? Because liberal Jews feel discomfort over the fact that they’ve been hijacked for a disastrous Middle East agenda. Three data points:
1. At a recent panel on New York intellectuals at the Center for Jewish History, Eric Alterman of the Nation said that if you look at 30 years of Commentary and The New Republic, neither magazine has "felt free" to criticize the actions of the Israeli government, despite a long history of disastrous policy. Michael Walzer half-agreed: "I do think Commentary is a Bolshevik magazine with a party line."
2. In the New Republic on-line John Judis made the heroic point that dual loyalty is imposed on Jewish intellectuals by the Israel supporters, and by accepting it they are guilty of a kind of "bad faith."
3. Tony Judt, a student of European history if ever there was one, Leander, brought up the same issue at NYU last year, lamenting that trend in intellectual life 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?" Judt was talking about leftwing Muslims on campus, yes, but also: Jewish neocons.
These statements are the shadow of the Iraq War. They represent a real discomfort in the liberal Jewish community over the bad thinking of their friends, their college roommates, their cousins: the neocons. Let the soul-searching begin!
Related posts:
- Liberal Jews’ Inability to Denounce Neocons Is Like Blacks’ Embrace of Michael Vick
- Iraq War Is Prompting Soul-Searching Among Jews of Conscience
- Not so long ago, liberal idealism ravished the Jewish soul, even Podhoretz’s
- Neocons will be talking up the greatness of the Iraq war forever, huddled in caves
- Neocons Tiptoe Away From Iraq
{ 35 comments }
Philip – As a Jew I would like to apologize for other Jews having opinions that mirror those of non-Jews and for seeing the world differently than I do. I feel deep shame that these other Jews analyze international power dynamics differently than you and I do. I know that deep in their hearts these Jews must have known the right thing to do, since we are such brilliant people, but they chose to do the wrong thing. While I am expressing my deep shame, I would also like to apologize for Herod and the Pharisees killing Jesus Christ, and I would like to apologize to all the New York Giants (baseball) fans for the terrible destruction done to them by Sandy Koufax.
Phillip,
although it wont show, my net pseudonym is LeaNder. Were the No stands for "No" and the Leader alludes to the German Fuehrer. I am both German & female, although leaNder is fine.
Besides I am painfully aware of all you write. And I am studying the neocons carefully but slowly, led by someone whom I fist and many still consider an antisemite. I in fact found myself defending him almost against my better "German" will. BUT ironically these people forward themselves antisemitic fictional lore or extreme right fictions without a further thought.
The problem I have with the Jabotinsky angle is that it seem to be fitted, without the necessary care in these matters,into a larger and older fictional conspiracy lore. A field that has to be "walked" with great care. Search for translations of the German: Michael Hagemeister, and you will realize what I mean.
Come to think of it; I have to check if he has finished his Habiliation on Sergei Alexandrowitsch Nilus.
Be assured though, I feel very, very honored by your reply.
leaNder
After I took a fast look I realized you wont be able to get a translation of the article I had in mind.
I wish Richard S. Levy had used this article in his encyclopedia of antisemitism, but it probably was too long.
Yes, rebbe, and let me as well take this moment to apologize to the goyim who so mercilessly attempted to surround the young 1969 NY Mets for the havoc and chaos wrought upon them by the David-like bat of Art Shamsky!
Roland ben Mikael
This House Resolution was passed yesterday with an unrecorded voice vote–
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:hc152eh.txt.pdf
(Remember when folks were still able to claim that there's no lobby? Seems like it was just yesterday.)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040223/lind
Methinks Phil is being a little hard on the Nation in this post. It has e published some first rate stuff on the neocons, for example the delicious polemic above.
I come to the discussion of Neocons from a background in Eastern European and Jewish studies.
While most conspiracy theories are inaccurate phenomenological attempts of people to understand political or economic situations in the face of a dearth of information, in Eastern European history we often find genuine secret conspiratorial behavior especially since the collapse of Poland as the first modern failed state.
Zionists, Bolsheviks, Polish nationalists, Serb nationalists and many other Eastern European political groups have often acted conspiratorially.
It is part of the political equation, and Eastern Europeans, whether Jewish or non-Jewish have brought this type of political behavior to the USA, just as one might observe that south Italians have brought certain forms of pathological social behavior to the USA.
Michael Walzer's attitudes toward Arabs and Palestinians do not differ much from those of Neocons. Just go back and reread Just and Unjust Wars to see what I mean. (I have also heard Walzer spout off about Arabs when he was sitting behind me in a Harvard Square restaurant. It was not a pretty thing to hear.)
AIPAC is only a small part of the Israel Lobby and is a sort of distraction from the real web of control that interconnected Jewish communal organizations like the JCCs, JCRCs, the JCPA, the ADL, the AJCommittee, the AJCongress and a plethora of similar organizations are able to exert on American society from the tiniest school board to the national political level.
These groups can fund sophisticated viral and multi-tier marketing campaigns to distort serious issues like the rebellion in Darfur and US misdeeds in the horn of Africa to the benefit of a racist agenda mapped out by fanatic ideologues like Charles Jacobs of the David Project.
I bring this issue up because my congressman Michael Capuano has been thoroughly enmeshed in a Darfur advocacy campaign led by Neocon ideologue Eric Cohen and orchestrated by the racists at the Boston JCRC (like Ken Sweder) and at the JCPA.
http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/05/lobby-activities-its-just-frggin-novel_28.html describes a racist compaign that the organized Queens Jewish community threw together in a matter of weeks. I wish progressives could work as effectively.
Seeing the QJCC in action helped me to understand the pressures that Rep. Capuano experiences, but if the segregationists and states rightists of the 50s and 60s had been so organized, we would still have Jim Crow in the USA.
Yo, what's wrong with rice man showing some aggression? Yellow 4 eyes everywhere are not so afraid of speaking up for themselves anymore when cornered as scapegoats. Now they could speak up to ask for a raise for the first time in their life. Now they don't have to buy underwear in bulk anymore because they don't have to go home everyday with it stretched over the back of their head. All because their peers think all the gadgets they are carrying could be pieced together to become a UZI a la Transformer. Not unlike the right wing heebs taking a tough stance over their peacenik peers as weak and wimpy, and showing their toughness by flattening the global landscape with a imperial bulldozer. That is until backlash gives rise to the next pogrom.
Anyway, the Asian culture is based on shame, so that is their automatic response instead of looking introspectively and realizing working 90 hours a week and leaving the kids all on their own is not the right way to raise them.
I am so glad I stumbled upon your blog. You write with great insight and introspectionl, which is unfortunately increasingly rare among your Jewish peers. I have often wondered about the Jewish liberals/opinion leaders and their blind support for a rightwing Zionist ideology that will surely bring calamnity not just to America and Israel but to the rest of the world. While the driving force is to ensure a haven of safety and security for the Jews against the great historical suffering they have endured, the tilt to the other extreme resulting in the tragedy of the displaced and occupied Palestinians and the powder keg that is now the Middle East would someday be a different kind of footnote to the history of the Jewish people. I admire their exceptional accomplishments, indeed the Jews have a lot to be proud of, but the atrocities in the Middle East brought about by rabid Zionism will dominate in future the world's perception of Israeli and American Jews. 2 million Iraqis have died from the decade-long sanctions and as a result of this recent invasion. Iraq, once a functioning country, is now reduced to rubble. 2 million civilian deaths to me is also a holocaust and it keeps me awake some nights, thinking that I will go down in history not unlike one of those ignoble bystanders who lived through the horrors of WWII mass murder, unable to do a single thing about it. We all harbor fantasies of our own valor – I had thought experiments of what I would have done if I had been there during the time of the Nazis to stop the slaughter. Of course here we are, 2 million completely innocent Iraqis dead, and we are just as helpless as those who must have gone about their daily business unaffected by the carnage. Does this sum up the human condition, that history will surely repeat? Better them than us, then. At least you are able to blog about your angst, and it just might have an impact in changing opinions and at the very least, it cracks open a taboo.
Qwerty – Way to blame it all on the Jews. You go girl.
Clue in and get over your need for a scapegoat. Just because Philip is working out his own neurosis in public doesn't mean you get to be an idiot too.
QWERTY – Apologies for using the word idiot. Too strong a word. Foolish is more accurate.
Interesting background on Mr. Martillo. This would be your new peer group Philip.
http://www.somervillemejustice.com/marriage.html
MARRIAGE
History has always had a soft spot for the political couple: Anthony and Cleopatra, Bill and Hillary, and, of course, that odd-couple of American political consulting James Carville and Mary Matalin. Yet what is one to make of the oddest couple of all: Joachim Martillo (a.k.a. Juan Carlo Santos Martillo Ajami) and Karin Friedemann (a.k.a. Karin Maria Friedemann-Hussain, a.k.a. Maria Hussain).
The name Karin Friedemann (without the aliases) may ring a bell to readers of the Somerville Journal. On May 5, she wrote a standout letter to the editor supporting divestment that included the following gem:
"Soon after the governor of New Jersey invested all of his state employees' 401K plans in Israel, it was revealed that the governor was being poked from behind by an Israeli agent."
For anyone unfamiliar with the reference, Friedemann was talking about the former governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, who recently resigned due to a scandal involving his closeted homosexuality. The 401K accusation is total nonsense, and simply used as a hook for a homophobic slur directed at McGreevey's male lover (who was Israeli).
Lest anyone think Friedemann's anti-gay crack was an inadvertent slip of the tongue, here is what this outspoken woman and convert to Islam (under one of her many pseudonyms Maria Hussain) had to say about Islam, feminism and homosexuality in an article entitled "Observations on the Palestinian Solidarity Conference":
"Muslims … are not seeking peace. We get peace from Allah. In Palestine, we will stop only at victory, which will be, inshaAllah, in the end, a just implementation of Islamic religion. We have to guard against the Palestine movement being represented primarily by homosexuals and feminists."
Karin/Maria's involvement in the Somerville Divestment Project has been both clear and long term. In an October, 2004 communication with her comrades, Freiedmann/Hussain was in a near panic when the city's aldermen decided to make the SDP's activities known to the public:
"the remaining Alderman threw us for a loop by insisting that 'the other side' be allowed to speak … before letting the vote go through"
Needless to say, her fear was justified given how their movement shriveled to dust once it's activities was exposed to the light of truth
If Friedemann/Hussain, whose writing appears on various Islamist and anti-Jewish Web sites (including former KKK head David Duke's white supremacist publication WhiteCivilRights.org) is a strange one, she has nothing on al Jezeera's favorite "scholar" of Jewish history and anthropology, Joachim Martillo.
In addition to his many activities on various hate publications such as JewishTribalReview.org, Martillo has also been featured prominently on the Somerville Divestment Project's Web site which features a telling little essay in it's Counterpoints Section titled "How to Talk About Zionism: The New Improved Guide" which includes the following over-the-top talking point:
"…Zionist propaganda reinterprets the Ashkenazi ethnic group as the pan-Judaic ethnonational group in order to make a ridiculous primordialist claim to Palestine just as German Nazi propaganda equated modern Germans to ancient Teutonic and Gothic tribes in order to claim that only pure Germans had a right to reside in German territories."
If the bizarre ethno-history and discussion of "promordialism" causes a few blank stares, Martillo (and, one presumes, the SDP which has posted his "analysis") is struggling with the same problem faced by right-wing Jew haters who also fancy themselves religious Christians: how to continue to revere the Jews of the Old Testament (which they embrace) while leaving room to despise the Jews living amongst us today. Their solution is a witches brew of religion and ideology called "Identify Christianity" that claims the Jews of today have nothing to do with the Jews of the Old Testament, but are in fact descendents of Eastern European tribes called the Khazars who embraced Judaism centuries ago (much as the Slavs converted to Orthodox Christianity).
Middle Eastern nations and political movements that define themselves in opposition to the Jewish state face a similar problem: how to negate Israel's claim to being the historic homeland to the Jewish people, despite the chronicles of Old Testament prophets whom many Muslims also claim to revere. Their solution has been to import themes of Identity Christianity, mixed with claims that the Palestinians are not, in fact, Arabs (and thus recent conquerors of the region), but are actually descendents of the Philistines whose claim to the region pre-dates both modern and ancient Jewish history.
Into this maelstrom comes Joachim Martillo with his own wacked-out analysis of Ashkenazi and "primordialism," pseudo-scholarship embraced only by the Jew-hating fringes of the far Right and Left (which clearly includes the Somerville Divestment Project).
In compiling research on these two activists in the local divestment movement, a friend discovered this happy (if odd) wedding announcement:
"On July 1, 2004, Joachim Martillo and the former Maria Hussain joined forces a match made in heaven…"
While one could make jokes about which set of pseudonyms the happy couple used to give their vows, or explore the bizarre conversations that must take place at their dinner table, I am more struck at how this marriage of an Islamic hater of Jews and gays and a pseudo-scholarly negator of Jewish history reflects trends in anti-Israel political history generally, and the Somerville Divestment Project in particular.
This site has already noted the degeneration of tactics and discourse of the divestment movement as it moved from lobbying Somerville's alderman last year to pushing for a ballot initiative in 2005. Friedemann's screed in the Somerville Journal combined with Martillo's race-baiting "Guide" on the SDP Web site only confirms what I've suspected about the movement's move to ideology so extreme that even the most smothering blanket of human-rights vocabulary cannot obscure it's true nature.
Another ingredient in this mix is an organization called One Palestine whose members (not including one who was recently deported to Jordan) moved into high positions within the SDP after last year's defeat. As the name implies, members of One Palestine are not particularly interested in a two-state solution, or any other elements of a peace process that does not give Arabs exclusive possession of the entire region, from the River to the Sea. Like the SDP (whose favorite scholar Joachim Martillo once wrote to a friend of mine that "The only downside to Palestinian terrorism is the death of the Palestinian attacker."), One Palestine does not have any moral dilemmas about blowing up children in a Jerusalem Pizzeria as a legitimate political tactic. And, like the SDP, their attempt to cloud the air with the progressive language of human rights cannot camouflage their true face.
Having spent time in the hothouses of Internet debate in the years before I hung up my keyboard and started raising children, this cast of characters (the religious spewer of anti-Jewish and anti-gay hate; the pretentious, aging Ivy League grad who has learned the format of scholarship, but none of its substance or integrity; the hypocritical "human rights" supporter of terror) are all familiar to me.
The trouble is, when divestment was allowed through the door last year, this freak show moved from virtual reality to the pages of my weekly newspaper and into my neighborhood. While I never felt resentment towards Somerville's political leaders who allowed themselves to be manipulated and thus let this circus commence, I would hope that all those who thought they were battling simply for human rights in last year's debate would now would turn left and right, look at just whom they are being asked to embrace, and get the toxin of divestment out of Somerville's bloodstream for good.
More on Mr. Matillo
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/01/joachim-martillos-e-mails.html
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/005292.php
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/UnderstandJI-3.htm
I believe Kevin MacDonald takes a far more rational, convincing and academic approach to understanding Jewish influence on and involvement with the neconservative movement.
FYI, the Religious Action Center, the largest lobbying organization of the American Jewish Community, opposed the Iraq invasion. (They are the largest in terms of the number of people they represent. Their membership is the membership of more than half the Reform Jewish congregations, which pay dues collectively).
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations also said, "Give the inspectors more time."
As usual, Jews were in the leadership on both sides of a major issue. That has been true of conflicts from the time of communism/anti-communism to the current globalization/anti-globalization. Therefore, it is foolish to say Jews need to collectively apologize for the misguided few in the leadership on one side of an issue; Jews were also leading the other side.
Damn good point Zippy. If we hadn't gone in and taken out Hussein and he had later been involved in supporting a cell of terrorists that harmed US civillians you can bet that some of the same anti-Jewish posters on this board would have had the long knifes out for all those anti-war Jews that influenced our foreign policy. Jews can't win with this crowd because they must once again serve the role of the scapegoat.
The "Religious Action Center"?
UIOP, Zippy the Pinhead, and Klaus Von Jones do an excellent job of showing why it is so difficult to have any sort of critical discussion of the behavior of the American Jewish community or any sort of rational discussion of Jewish identity politics.
If one does not follow the Zionist party line, one is subjected to all sorts of ad hominem attacks, selective quoting and a lot of general crap. (Just consider the treatment Carter received for a book that was much too generous in its depiction of Israel.)
For the record, most of the comments about my personal life have no connection to reality. My view of Ashkenazi ethnogenesis is fairly close to the mainstream in scholarly circles. (Just ask Shaye Cohen at Harvard and read The Myth of Nations by Geary.)
I was involved in the alumni effort to drive Summers out of the Presidency of Harvard. He had some sort of midlife crisis. He became super-Jew and came under the influence of the David Project and its friends. He began to believe he was chief intellectual of the USA.
The cumulative effect was an inability to run the University. My intervention against Summers was not generally unwelcome among the longterm University community.
The Shabbat 2000 dinner with the Lubovitchers was simply inappropriate as an official University function. Harvard tries to present itself as a center of scholarship for the world. Pandering one of the most racist segments of the Jewish community is not compatible with that goal.
I have hung out enough in Crown Heights to know how the Lubovitchers interact with non-Jews and especially non-whites. It is not merely typical New York intercommunal tensions. I have read enough writings from the Lubovitcher Rebbe and other important Lubovitchers that I can safely state that they follow a very vicious antigoyish political program.
Before the Shabbat 2000 fiasco, I made the suggestion that Summers have an unofficial dinner for Harvard Jewish Students off-campus with the Bostoner Rebbe. Summers decided to be a jerk on that issue and many others. The Corporation really did not have a choice. It wasn't me, and it wasn't personal whatever Dershowitz, Wisse, et al. may believe.
Kevin MacDonald's writings (like Cuddihy's Ordeal of Civility) are interesting, but they are based on an analysis of Jewish writings about Jews. MacDonald provides an analysis of self-perceptions, which is important, but he is not writing genuine sociology or history of Central or Eastern European Jews. I do not believe that he reads Yiddish, Latin, Rabbic Hebrew, Modern Israeli Hebrew, Russian or Polish in which the vast majority of the still untranslated primary sources about ethnic Ashkenazim are written. I believe he does read German and therefore can access some of the most modern primary German sources. To address the relationship of Neoconservatism and Jabontinskianism properly, one really has to read Jabotinsky's writings in Russian. The English and Hebrew translations are deficient.
Zippy shows how shamelessly the history of the Jewish community is rewritten. See
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/09/14/jews_iraq/index.html . Jonathan Sarna, Ruth Messinger and Lucy Dawidowicz are also guilty of major rewrites of Jewish history in public writings and statements. Such contrafactual historical revisionism is a major modern Jewish pastime. If I remember correctly, both Dawidowicz and Sarna received important Jewish book awards for it.
I was tracking the marketing of an attack on Iraq by the JCRCs, the AJCommittee, the JCCs, the ICC, the Hasbara Fellowship, Hillels and a plethora of other Jewish communal organizations. The Organized Jewish community was on one side, and a few Jews invariably considered not part of the mainstream were on the other side.
To Klaus von Jones, I can only say, "Yeah right." Saddam Hussein was a control freak, was only concerned with his immediate neighborhood, and could barely keep his garbage trucks rolling. He was not going to arm of cell of terrorists to attack US civilians. People that argue on the basis of such a looney scenario need a lot of medication.
Zippy's post reminded me of that notorious article by David Frum in which he argued that it is morally permissible for Jews to lie to protect Israel.
http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmIyNzEyYjRlNDNjODQzZDU3Mzc1MzQ4MGJjNTBhNDM=
The trolls remains the same:
"Qwerty – Way to blame it all on the Jews. You go girl.
Posted by: uiop | June 07, 2007 at 10:16 AM"
"Good job of blaming everything on the jews … You go girl!
Posted by: Justin Raimondo | February 11, 2007 at 11:05 PM"
Yep, exactly as I expected. Attacks instead of factual rebuttals. It is also repulsive to read "dirt" dug up (out of context of course) on Joachim Martllio in a swift-boating tactic instead of addressing his points. It is true that a sizable portion of the Jewish community opposed the Iraq war, but a sizable Jewish group with enormous media and political clout is spearheading the neo-conservative agenda and they are "patrolling" sites like this. Just as a huge number of Americans are against George Bush and his wars and a sizable % of Americans are for them BUT *ultimately*, the world will blame America for the disasters, for Iraq, for Guantanamo, for the neo-conservative agenda. Good luck trying to tar the rest of the world angered by the debacle as "America-phobes". The anti-war Jewish Americans are on the right side of history, and I am on their side, but history will judge them collectively with the neo-cons as the Jewish-American consensus, which is the truly unfortunate outcome. Contrary to your attacks on them, writers like Weiss are the rare, true voices of conscience against the overwhelming tide of belligerent, aggressive stance based on an illusive, blind belief that subjugating and smashing the Arabs is good for Israel. They can't overturn the direction of the tide, but they are there for the good of the Jewish-American community. Stop your pitbull attacks, address the points, isn't it shameful to shut down his (and our) right to free speech, or does your emotional attachment to a delusional vision trump your reason?
And for the record, the Union of Reform Judaism, for whatever reason, never joined the rest of the religions of the world in speaking out against the coming invasion of Iraq. In fact they kept silent until about a year ago, when the war had become universally unpopular.
http://urj.org/pr/2005/051118/
This was memorable because it was so out of character with their liberal tradition and record of opposition to other (non-Middle Eastern) wars.
I'm also very suprised to hear that the Conference of Presidents took a public position against the war. Do you have a link, Zippy? Hopefully, it's dated before the fighting began.
From the world's greatest living writer who, for some unknown reason, cannot find a publisher willing to translate and produce his latest work in English:
Indeed, there are many explanations as to why Jews joined the Bolsheviks (and the Civil War produced yet more weighty reasons [e.g., the mass pogroms detailed in Volume II, Chapter 16]. Nevertheless, if Russian Jews' memory of this period continues seeking primarily to justify this involvement, then the level of Jewish self-awareness will be lowered, even lost.
Using this line of reasoning, Germans could just as easily find excuses for the Hitler period: "Those were not real Germans, but scum"; "they never asked us." Yet every people must answer morally for all of its past — including that past which is shameful. Answer by what means? By attempting to comprehend: How could such a thing have been allowed? Where in all this is our error? And could it happen again?
It is in that spirit, specifically, that it would behoove the Jewish people to answer, both for the revolutionary cutthroats and the ranks willing to serve them. Not to answer before other peoples, but to oneself, to one's consciousness, and before God. Just as we Russians must answer — for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for those crazed revolutionary soldiers, for those savage sailors. …
To answer, just as we would answer for members of our family.
For if we release ourselves from any responsibility for the actions of our national kin, the very concept of a people loses any real meaning.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Two Hundred Years Together, 1795-1995
To the Jews who are reading this blog, don't fall for the trap these Jew haters are setting for you. You are no more responsible for the Iraq war fiasco than your black neighbor is responsible for the epidemic of drug use and criminal activity in the african-american community, or Korean-Americans are responsible for the massacre at VT. These bigots want to group you Jews into one group and hold you each responsible for one anothers' actions. They would never dream of doing this to any other ethnic of religious group, but they've chosen you. Aren't you special.
Given that there are more ideological neo-conservatives who are NOT Jewish is irrelevant to these scapegoaters. That American Jews have attitudes that mirror Arab-Americans in regards to the middle east is also irrelevant to these people. They are out for blood. Your blood. And they have a wonderful useful idiot in Philip Weiss who validates their very paranoia and revenge fantasies.
They will take my comments as further validation of their argument, but that's to be expected. It's akin to calling a black man a violent nigger to his face and then claiming that his punching you in the face validates your description.
As rhetorical as the last post is, there is truth in the description of a few here to willingly generalize about "the Jewish community", when in reality the Jewish community is varied.
Even statements about what AIPAC "is", are at best only partially true, as AIPAC is also varied.
The recent AIPAC convention illustrates that. Cheney spoke there, Barak Obama spoke there, Hillary Clinton spoke there. (I know that is a range of quite far right to just left of center).
Cheney got an ovation, and the left described that as confirmation of the neo-conservative "nature" of AIPAC.
When Barak Obama spoke he got both boos AND cheers for speaking of Palestinians as human beings.
Diverse.
The majority of big donors are pro-Israel right or wrong. The big numbers however are pro-Israel but urging recognition of Palestine (and largely in conformity with the Saudi proposal).
There are few, if any, anti-Zionists among AIPAC.
Is that a surprise?
"For if we release ourselves from any responsibility for the actions of our national kin, the very concept of a people loses any real meaning."
I came over via Altercation's link to your piece in American Conservative (not a place I go to otherwise). I enjoyed your blogging at the Oberservor previously.
There is indeed a problem finding room in the public space for center/ liberal/lefty pro-Israel but anti-occupation, pro-real peace two-state solution Jews. The Neocons/AIPAC/Likudniks seemingly dominate the public discourse for the most part. And the truly anti-Israel seem to be what is highlighted in rebuttal. The space for what is arguably the majority of U.S. Jewish Opinion is suprisingly small.
You might enjoy my bloging on this at Daily Kos:
"The last Israel-Palestine diary we ever need"
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/16/15855/6096
and especially:
Right Wing Christianist Conspiracy to Listen to the Wrong Jews
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/27/13822/2376
"That American Jews have attitudes that mirror Arab-Americans in regards to the middle east is also irrelevant to these people."
Someone is in denial. Cast your mind back to last summer's rampage in Lebanon. The Jewish community's behavior didn't mirror any one else's on the planet. It was, as we say, truly anomalous.
Zionism has ideological content. It has implications for behavior. This is the message of the Palestinian people to the world. Stop denying it. Solzhenitsyn's message was apt.
I also just discovered Mondoweiss via a link to the American Conservative article, which is a telling story about the state of Zionism in American media, television print or net.
The comments above also do a wonderful job of illustrating something similar, a reluctance on the part of many otherwise socially conscious people, Jewish and/or American, to accept responsibility for the ultimate inhumanity of the Zionist project and the U.S.'s unequivocal support for it. It is a disappointing lack of courage and integrity from people with a great number of other distinguished achievements and values.
I thank Philip for what his introspection, research, and writing have contributed to the understanding Zionism, and I look forward to reading all that I missed previously.
My wife wrote an article that may be relevant to this discussion. You can find it at http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/04/zioshmooze-vs-plain-english.html .
By my standards it is somewhat idealistic. When Karin asserts, "In fact, Israel does not really exist. It is a figment of imagination, the defensive mechanism of the neurotic Jewish collective consciousness," she overstates.
Here in the USA we (Jews and non-Jews) generally believe in an Israel that has no real connection to reality and that is mostly conconcocted by Hollywood or the thousands of Israel-advocacy sessions that the organized Jewish community has put together over the decades.
Having been abused at checkpoints (much less than Palestinians I grant), I can safely accept the reality of the Israel of Muskeljudentum and "facts on the ground," but I have to admit that until I started to work in the Occupied Territories, I believed in the Hollywood Israel and ignored facts that belied that image even within the pre-1967 Israel.
Karin makes a comment about Jewish rum-runners during prohibition. I could be wrong, but I do not remember that any of them had much involvement with Zionism during the 20s even if some discovered much later that the Jewish state provided an excellent vehicle for hiding cash and assets obtained in questionable ways.
The Bronfman's were never arrested in connection with their criminal activities during prohibition and are now among the most important figures in Hollywood, in the organized Jewish community, and in political influence in North America.
Solzhenitsyn has some similar problems with idealistic perceptions. It simply is not possible to address the role of Jews (really Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim) in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union without analyzing the history of Eastern european ethnic Ashkenazim in historic Poland.
Even if they were not officially part of the Polish szlachta (nobility), the upper ranks of Polish Ashkenazim functioned as part of the Szlachta at least as high as lipki Tatars or perhaps rather higher. The ethnic Ashkenazi economic elite often cemented their ties with the Polish nobility by providing them with younger daughters as mistresses.
As historic Poland fell apart and was absorbed into the German/Prussian, Austrian and Russian Empires, ethnic Ashkenazim lost their elite status even if straight through the 18th and 19th century, ethnic Ashkenazi income, education levels, health and life-span was far higher than that of their non-Ashkenazi neighbors (including Jews of the Polish Lithuanian Tatar ethnic group).
German Jews and Eastern European Ethnic Ashkenazim are rather unique among American immigrant populations in that on the whole they brought capital to the USA.
So why is their such a belief in the oppression of Jews/Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim?
Primarily because as a disenfranchised or thwarted elite they believed they were exceptionally oppressed. In fact, the belief was less in German and Austrian Poland where Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim managed to reestablish themselves as an elite of sorts by collaborating with the imperialist rulers.
The Russian elite had no similar use for ethnic Ashkenazim as a native collaborator population because within Russian territories Russian Germans filled the economic niche that ethnic Ashkenazim held in historic Poland. As a consequence in Russian Poland, the Russian Empire tended to use Ostdeutsch populations as native collaborators.
Russian Ashkenazim (especially the entrepreneurial class) seethed in anger because they did not have the freedom of movement in the Russian Empire that they had had in historic Poland. In fact nothing had really changed the Pale of Settlement corresponded to that part of the historic homeland of ethnic Ashkenazi that had come under Russian rule with the addition of two provinces that had not been part of Poland), and no ethnic group in the Russian Empire had freedom of settlement of the sort that ethnic Ashkenazim expected.
Nevertheless, Poland had changed. It was no longer a center of power but was the periphery, and Russian Ashkenazim had no access to the political and economic centers.
It is not surprising that toward the end of the 18th and throughout the 19th century ethnic Ashkenazim begin to reinterpret the religious concept of spiritual exile as a material political exile even though the origins of ethnic Ashkenazim lie entirely within Southern Russia and Eastern Europe.
While most ethnic Ashkenazim probably preferred assimilation or a mild sort of cultural nationalism (Yiddishist doigkayt) a large segment of ethnic Ashkenazim turned to radical revolutionary activities to overthrow the regime perceived as so unjust. Another tiny group turned toward Zionism and developed a primordialist essentialist fantasy to justify stealing Palestine from the native population.
The Zionist and the radical (ultimately) Communist ethnic Ashkenazi groups look very similar in most ways. Trotsky and Jabotinsky have almost identical family backgrounds and education. Except for (in my opinion insignificant) pilpul about economic social order, the thinking of Soviet and Zionist Ashkenazim parallel one another, and they treated Ukrainian and Palestinian peasants with the same level of murderous and genocidal brutality. (See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/02/pattern-of-ethnic-ashkenazi.html .)
Solzhenitsyn misses this aspect of the evolution of ethnic Ashkenazi politics. In fact, rather than addressing Soviet and Zionist Ashkenazi outrages as two sides of the same coin, Solzhenitsyn admires Zionism (see his address to the graduating Harvard class in 1978) because like Zionist Ashkenazim he himself is an ethnic fundamentalist and is to a large extent imbued with the mindset of Russian Orientalism.
Solzhenitsyn's perspective is fascinating. He has little sympathy for ethnic Ashkenazim. As far as I know he never studied Yiddish and has never read any Yiddish literature in the original. He has no background in Rabbinic studies and would not know his way around a daf gemore, but he actually shares many Zionist prejudices including the hostility to most aspects of Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi culture.
If he had sufficient self-critical awareness, he would probably have called his book something like "Reflections in a Mirror, Two Hundred Years Together, 1795-1995."
Didn't really want to get involved in this again. ( kind of feel like Al Pacino in Godfather3 ) But, I have two questions for Joachim and his lovely bride. First, what do you two do all day. Do you do things that normal people do. Second, do you not realize that your both really demented and have you ever thought about seeking mental help.
So they got Finkelstein. Let that be a lesson to the next young grad student.
Here you go again Bill Pearlman:
You sure as hell detected the mental-illness-causing anti-semitic virus in Joachim and Karin. There can't be any real basis for what Joachim writes therefore it must be an outflow of a hysterical mind.
Sigmund Freud used the same reasoning. As a premise he rejected the women's claim who told him they were sexually abused by their fathers or uncles when they were little girls – and Freud concluded the stories must be the outflow of hysterical minds.
This was even a fraudulent conclusion since Freud knew (and it's proven he knew) that child abuse did actually happen in his Vienna. But his hysteria interpretation won the day. But I doubt your's will Bill.
Klaus, Klaus, Klaus, Look I know your Julius Striechers love child and your probably pissed off about the way WW2 came out but give it a rest. The Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Furher days are over. By the way how is that trade going. the one where you murder all the Jews in Europe and replace them with a tidal wave of Moslems.
re: trade
I agree on this count: it's a bad deal for us (all the Jewish gold we pocked notwithstanding).
Philip-
Don't let all the critics get you down. I'm sure your post sounded much better in the original German.
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