Yesterday in El Dorado, Kansas, Barack Obama told of his white lineage, and how his maternal grandparents had met and fallen in love (did people fall in love back then, or just hook up?) in Kansas. His mother was born there, later met his Kenyan father in Hawaii. They’re both dead now. According to the BBC radio coverage this morning, Obama sought out white cousins in the crowd after. One said she was praying for him.
"Bleeding Kansas" was a battleground in the fight against slavery, and then 100 years later in the fight against segregation. In 1954, just about when Obama’s mother left Kansas, the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools in Topeka.
Which is to say that the family story Obama was celebrating yesterday would have been denounced not that long ago in Kansas as miscegenation, or even "the mongrelization of the white race." Black men were lynched for doing what he was bragging about, and the crowd was adoring. Countries change. When Ali Abunimah says that Palestine is one country and that Jews and Arabs can learn to live with one another in freedom, I think of Obama’s Kansas. People surely doubted that blacks and whites could live as equals here. Progressive America has a lot to teach the world…
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So, we're still in Kansas? Where's Toto? Is this OZ, or does anyone see a connection between David Duke's worse fears and the fears of hard-line Jews? How do you balance survival with assimilation? The individual versus the group? Stay tuned.
"When Ali Abunimah says that Palestine is one country and that Jews and Arabs can learn to live with one another in freedom, I think of Obama's Kansas."
Well I think of the Fuhror's Reich. That's all I have to reference anything.
Everything else is lame.
Never Again means Muslims and Christians can NEVER be trusted. Never Ever Again.
I applaud Obama's recent letter to UN Amb. Khalilzad and his history of mostly kowtowing to AIPAC.
The photographs with Edward Said are a little bit troubling, however. But not knowing what their conversation details, I will conditionally forgive Obama for engaging an "activist" ideologue like Said.
Still, Obama surely knows that the separation fence, which failing extreme media and "activist" bias, would be more properly called a peace barrier, is for the good of BOTH sides.
The Palestinians hate us and want to kill us, as the massacres at Sderot and the homocide-bombing repeatedly demonstrate. THEY HAVE NO LEGITIMATE POLITICAL GRIEVANCE, only anger and bloodlust. They are eschewing ZioJew humanism's abundant peace gestures, instead succumbing to violent fascist impulses.
And the right of return is a fantasy that doesn't even exist. I've never heard of this Universal Declaration of Human Rights thing. Sounds pretty lame, since the ZioJews have been persecuted more than any other people in history, and would never slaughter innocents, or manipulate the trauma of the Shoa to justify a rank colonial landgrab.
I don't buy it. The rest of you "activists", go read some books. (And please, NOT ILAN PAPPE, or NORMAN FINKELSTEIN, but some real historians, like Alan Dershowitz.)
"People surely doubted that blacks and whites could live as equals here." It was a majority view in 19th century America that blacks were simply not on the same cultural plane as whites, and could never be full participants in a democracy requiring education and literacy. Of course, the inferior education (if any) provided to blacks made this a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education ended the era of segregated schools which had helped to buttress this self-perpetuating line of thought.
Israel, which likes to compare its democracy to America's, resembles an alternative United States in which the Supreme Court had ruled that 'separate but equal' segregated schools were acceptable. Israel is an alternative U.S. in which the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing of 1968 were never passed. And just as one might expect, the pressure cooker of conflict between the privileged group (Jews), the second-class citizens (Israeli Arabs), and the excluded illegals (Palestinians in the occupied territories) has boiled over several times.
It isn't hard to ascertain the facts about Israel's segregated laws, segregated housing and segregated schools. But somehow the U.S. press, even as it invokes the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King's civil rights struggle, never gets around to mentioning these anachronistic aspects of Israeli life. They would rather highlight Israel's vibrant democracy. But a segregated democracy, with different privileges and protections for different groups, is an unstable equilibrium.
There's a way out of this impassse. But Israeli zionists, like former U.S. segregationists and South African defenders of apartheid, have dug in their heels and vowed NEVER to yield. Disgracefully, the voices of organized Judaism worldwide have largely supported their futile delusion that they can carry on this way, receiving U.S. subsidies even as they reject U.S. values. Ain't gonna work!
PAZ-JEW: Very amusing. You had me going for the first paragraph or two, but the satirical nature of your post soon became clear. It's a hilarious exaggeration, taken far beyond all sense or reason, of what some of the more extreme supporters of Israel believe. Funniest thing I've read all morning.
Cooper and I don't think that the races should mix. What about you Craig?
Keating already married a jew so we know where he stands.
Phil: I'm with Jim Haywood on this one. It's really sweet of you to think that America's history with desegregation should give us hope for Israel, but Israel is really more a sign of what America might have become had the crucial judicial decisions gone the other way (and if JFK and LBJ had been replaced by the heads of the Ku Klux Klan). At most, the American example shows what Israel might have been, not what it might still become.
Really, one could just collect real-life stories and publish an alternative-future novel based on Craig's concept of JFK and LBJ replaced by the heads of the Ku Klux Klan.
For instance, check out Scott Wilson's Dec. 20, 2007 article in the Washington Post, titled "For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion." He details the story of an assimilated Israeli Arab couple, the Zubeidats, who wanted to buy a home in a new town called Rakefet with 150 houses. Wilson describes what ensued:
———–
For the Zubeidats, who speak Hebrew and Arabic fluently, the months-long process began in the summer of 2006. It included a series of interviews and tests, some taken with the dozen or so Jewish applicants also seeking to move in.
"All the questions had to do with how we would integrate into the community," Fatina said. "We have many, many Jewish friends. We spend our holidays with them, and they do the same. We're not from outer space, we're from here."
The rejection letter followed a conversation the Zubeidats had with an official from the Misgav Regional Council, which oversees Rakefet and dozens of other nearby towns. He told them, Fatina recalled, that although they were "very nice people," he would have to begin marketing Rakefet as a "mixed community" to possible buyers in Tel Aviv if they moved in. The designation would hurt sales.
————–
http://tinyurl.com/3e5bmk
The Zubeidats' rejection would not only be unimaginable, but ILLEGAL, in the United States. In Israel, sadly, the idealistic concept of a safe haven for Jews has translated into crude, exclusionary policies on the ground. Fatina Zubeidat's eloquent plea that "We're not from outer space, we're from here" fell on deaf ears. In segregated Israel, the daring experiment of a 'mixed community' would hurt sales.
How is it that Jews who actively participated in the U.S. civil rights movement are comfortable with rank discrimination in Israel? An uncharitable interpretation would be that they were merely opportunistically obtaining privileges for themselves, rather than acting on any belief in universal equality. I'd like to believe that isn't true. But in light of the closed ranks of organized Judaism in defending Israel, right or wrong, it's awfully hard to disprove the assertion.
Can Kansas be a model for Israel? The question of what Israel might become, of whether there might be some future non-racist version of Zionism still possible down the road, is ultimately a question about Jewishness. In other words, is what we see in today's Israel the inevitable expression of an ideology of separatism, survivalism, and holocaustism, or merely an aberration that took some historical wrong turn and can still be "corrected"?
I'm not sure of the answer, but I suspect it's the former. Of course the pillars of Jewish identity change over time, and so there is always hope. But one thing is sure: this is the question Jews should be discussing but very few are. And what is discouraging is the fact that as more and more damning evidence from The Jewish State piles up, it seems there is less and less inclination to face up to the question.
Phil and Richard Silverstein are doing their part (and coming to slightly different answers), as are a few other voices here and in Israel, but basically it's still a taboo subject.
RE: "How is it that Jews who actively participated in the U.S. civil rights movement are comfortable with rank discrimination in Israel?"
I'm thinking such Jews aren't comfortable; otherwise, given the US Civil Rights movment, the history of the 1965 Immigration Act, the Holocaust Museum in DC even before we had a moument for WW2 GIs there (and its multiplication everywhere), the economic and media suppression of the white control in S Africa (and ignoring Israel's part in upholding that regime), and the tolerance of endless pursuit of old Germans suspected of NAZI atrocities whether legal or otherwise, the American public would have heard about the Palestinians in the MSM for years when exactly the dirth of such details is the actual case. Like an American GI come home with PTS disorder, who really cares other than his or her own family? Americans could give a shit; the proof is in the pudding–we only care when they clog up our sidewalks or parks in their cardboard boxes. Knowing this, Jews and Blacks comprise a separate but equal psychic VA of their own. I think they worry with good reason, hide what they can with good reason–and average gentile Americans should be as concerned about themselves since all political activity is least concerned about individuals even while (since the French Revolution) the rehetoric of individualism flies obfiscation.
PAZ-JEW: like Craig said, that was a nice job. (BTW, there's not a single idea in there that our liberal Mr. Witty has not endorsed, although without the capital letters.)
"Never Again!"
Coming from the lower middle class white goy masses (I knew what a Phillips head screwdriver was though I hated to work on cars), I once thought this refrain referred to "man's inhumanity against man." Before the Holocaust Industry Finkelstein has revealed, before the 1977 The Holocaust TV programming, ignorant of even Leon Uris's Exodus with blue-eyed Paul Newman, I chanced upon photos of Auschwitz. I was given a coffee table book entitled "The Family Of Man" by a Jewish American girl, the valadictorian of our college class, who's parents refused my relation with her without knowing me at all. I moved on, emmersed in the reality and romanticsm of individualism, pretty much ignoring Dahmer aspects; I stood between rabid pro-Israelis American kids and American neo-neo-NAZIS in Marquette Park. Now, in my dotage, I find myself here–funny, Phil made this blog and I have nothing to say to him. If he came to my house for protection, I would hide him. So sue me.
Keating – Didn't you say you had married a Jew?
Yes, why do you ask?
Maybe I can help you. Phil married a WASP. He has no children to my knowledge. I do. I thus have a more real vested interest in what his blog is all about. Let's say it is the future , a future we can see our living children living in–Phil lives in rarifed circles; I do not. I an neither a WASP nor a JEW. That's most of the planet omitting the ruling class, all ethnic groups considered proportionately. So?
Do you think that national zionist the world round, and israel (the state) can throw their arms around such an idea?
whats the best guess out there for the number of deaths attributed to man made wars in the last century? bolshevik leninist, trotskyism,stalinism, lets say 80,000,000.
maos chineese communism and its cultural revolution, lets say 100,000,000.
world war i, 45 million
world war 2, 25 million
im just guessing but any way one slices it, man has turned its back on humanity.
where ideologies rule humanity suffers.
Sorry, I am not too bright. What do you mean? What idea are yout thinking of when you say: "Do you think nationlist zionist uber de Welt can "throw their arms around an idea."
Charles, I think he's referring to the one-state solution in Phil's references to Ali Abunimah's book.
Samuel's question is at the heart of the matter.
If there were a presidential candidate that weren't blinded by Jewish Zionist money and/or Christian Zionist money and votes, he would say something like this to his Jewish American constituency.
There is a humanitarian crisis in the Middle East that can only be solved with the support of the American Jewish community.
To the people who suffered through their exile to Egypt desert and persevered, to the people who suffered through the Holocaust and yet persevered, this will mark yet another test of faith, and endurance.
The state of Israel as we know it must fundamentally change if it is to avoid American and international sanctions.
It must open the door to citizenship for its majority Palestinian Arab population, and grant them the civil rights enjoyed by its Jewish population.
In the last century up to the present, 2 million Palestinians have been killed or ethnically cleansed, and the situation on the ground indicates that this will continue, potentially for decades, and affect millions more, without American intervention now.
To the American Jewish community, I ask your help. For the transformation of Israel into a democratic leader of the Middle East, I will need your comprehension and support.
At the personal level, we must all embrace historical facts over any convenient or biased mythologies being passed off as history. We must acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of Palestine precipitated by the Zionist movement and the actions of the state of Israel, to transfer civilian populations to territory gained in war, in contravention of international law.
At the diplomatic level, there must be a capacity to trust, to engage and cooperate with, the indigenous Palestinian population of Israel, on mutually-agreed-upon terms. We must be honest about Israel's intentions and its actions, both past, and future, and we must be honest about Palestinian violence, its roots and its sustenance.
The elements that are provoking fear in Israeli and Arab populations must be identified, indicted, and convicted, because fear is what stands between us and a brighter future for the Middle East.
Images of Palestinian suffering are being used in the Arab world to arouse fear and suspicion, the sustenance of terrorism.
But not only Israel is to blame. The United State of America, too, has done much to insult and disrespect the Middle East, and must fundamentally change if progress is to be made.
We must eschew the childish stubborness of past presidents, and acknowledge the United States' errors in the Middle East, and I am prepared to extend that apology unconditionally.
…
Safe to say we won't be hearing that speech, not even from Mr. Wonderful, not even from the fundamentalist free marketeer you adore, Mr. Keating.
Two-party control of everything leaves the American people a bounty of options and over-abundance of reasonable positions.
Probably why a majority of American adults don't vote.
Knesset recognizes Ethiopian Sigd as official holiday
Beta Israel festival celebrating renewal of covenant with God to become national Israeli holiday
Amnon Meranda Published: 01.30.08, 17:46 /
The Knesset on Wednesday voted in favor of recognizing the Ethiopian Sigd festival as a national holiday in the State of Israel.
The festival, celebrated for over 2,000 years by Jews in Ethiopia, symbolizes the renewal of the covenant with God and the Diaspora community's longing for Zion. It originates from the time of Ezra and Nechemia and the renewal of the covenant upon the people's return to Zion from Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC.
The holiday will henceforth be celebrated on the 29th of the Hebrew month of Heshvan, and those observing it will be granted a vacation.
"The Ethiopian community was cut off from all Halachic developments and the evolution of the accepted traditions and customs, therefore customs dating back to the days of the temple and even biblical times were preserved," wrote MK's Uri Ariel and Yakov Margi in the bill proposal.
"The acceptance of this holiday but the Knesset and the State of Israel will allow the resuscitation of an age-old tradition and strengthen the Ethiopian community's identification with and increase their
involvement in the Israeli public."
The Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews turned to Chief Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger in November of last year and requested they recognized Sigd as an official holiday – effectively cancelling out 'Marheshvan' (bitter Heshvan) as the Hebrew month previously lacked any holidays.
MM: Please go google Ron Paul on the issues, and listen to him everytime he is included in TV debates (though he gets relatively little time compared to the "top tier")–He is saying exactly what you say he is not. As significant, look at his long legislative history.
Keating, similar, but no, not the same, not even close. Paul being an anti-interventionist, and an extreme one, would not want the U.S. brokering any peace deal between two foreign countries. That is most definitely NOT in the Constitution.
I love what Ron Paul has interjected into this race, his anti-imperialist rhetoric gets me every time (he was great again last night), but we should also examine his limitations, realistically.
So what's worse, what we have now or a hands off policy? Look at the last, say 40 years and you decide.
Odd to celebrate "progressive" America. Its the result of 40 years of a leftist cultural and academic establishment, letigious activism and mass-media propagandization of American whites – often by headed by liberal Jewish activists. This is not the process of some grand enlightenment, its plain arm-twisting, brainwashing and social control.
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