Some days I wonder if I’ve lost a sense of proportion about my bugaboo, the Israel lobby. Then an item like this comes along and I tell myself: Go to the rooftops!
Greenwich, CT, used to be the heart of the patrician WASP elite. Exit 5, they called it. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody. Now it’s mixed, Allah be praised. We changed America. Lately a group called If Americans Knew, which is dedicated to the idea that If the media informed Americans about the conditions of the Palestinians Americans would change our Middle Eastern policy tomorrow, scheduled a talk at the Greenwich Library. Local sponsors did. The phone calls started. The chairman of the board of trustees then canceled the event as "offensive to public sensitivity." Which is in the library’s by-laws.
You might think that "offensive to public sensitivity" would be putting dung on a religious object or having a key-party at the Greenwich library, that kind of thing. I get that. But these people wanted to express themselves on the most important issues facing our country in the world. Offensive. Look at their website. There are only calm words here. "Israel is occupying land that does not belong to it…" Offensive to whom?
Something else. New England was the heart of the abolitionist movement that redeemed America 150 years ago on its claim that "all men are created equal." New England could do so because it wasn’t implicated intimately in the traffic in slaves. But today New England and fancy New York suburbs like Greenwich are home to the Israel lobby. And we need to re-redeem our American claim.
When Barack Obama in his victory speech Tuesday night in Wisconsin invoked the Freedom Riders of ’64 and said they were brave and some of them gave their lives for a cause they did not know if it would succeed or not, it was only necessary, he was talking about people like Schwerner and Chaney and Goodman, young men who died far from home because they actually believed in America’s potential nobility. When Obama stirs those ghosts today, they look in one direction: the American relationship with the Arab world.
Will the New York Times cover grotesque censorship in the bosom of its readership?
Phil writes: “ Something else. New England was the heart of the abolitionist movement that redeemed America 150 years ago on its claim that "all men are created equal." New England could do so because it wasn't implicated intimately in the traffic in slaves”.
Whoa…Phil…I respect your work. But I hope you don’t fall into the habit of promoting the idea of projecting racism outward onto another people and region instead of looking within. (It certainly would undermine some of your positions on the Middle East.)
With that in mind, I must note that the slave trade originated in New England and New England had a monopoly over the slave trade until it was outlawed in 1808. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe historically it began after New Englanders captured Pequote Indians and then created a slave market for them in the West Indies. New Englanders built the first slave ship, the Desire, in Marblehead and it was active as early as 1638. In 1641, Massachusetts legalized the slave trade. It became a major part of the New England economy. Wasn’t the slave trade known as the Triangular Trade? Rum to Africa for slaves and then to the West Indies (and later for a market in the Southern US ). I believe several New York families derived huge profits from the slave trade.
And the New Englander slave ships were horrendous torture chambers. The mortality rate averaged 8-10 percent, certainly higher than the plantation system of the South.
Also, to seque to “modern“ times, I was in Boston around the same time as you. The desegregation of the public school system in South Boston was just as violent, and potentially more explosive, than that which occurred in Atlanta and other Southern cities several years earlier.
My point: racism is not limited to one region of the nation, to one people, or to one race. Perhaps the best way to overcome racism — in the US and the world — is to look within.
Phil's nonsense about New England is second only to his nonsense about the Middle East in terms of sheer . . . well . . . nonsense. Will someone out there join me in pleading with Phil's wife to cut him off until he gets a job? Perhaps some incentive to produce something tangible might derail his Krieg Nach Juden for a little while.
The web site has been sanitized, and it is still misleading.
There summary of history is incomplete and biased.
Nevertheless, those points could have been argued by those that were more informed at the presentation itself.
But,
Your first point is accurate, you are likely losing your sense of proportion on the issue, especially the media and conspiratorial element.
I think you should get more engaged in the content, studying the history in great depth, from multiple perspectives.
So, that you are "armed" to think independantly on the issue.
If I am not mistaken, New England involvement in the slave trade ended in 1805.
Part of the motivation of early NE abolitionists was a feeling of guilt just as we Americans should feel guilt for our support of Zionist genocidalism.
It is worthwhile to mention that civil rights for African Americans was for the most part an activity of Jewish radicals and communists, whose role is actively written out of the official histories of American Judaism (including the one that recently appeared on PBS).
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Nowadays successful communal suppression of divergent American Jewish opinion often includes the purging of the historical record. Even relatively recent (not very) dissenting Jewish organizations like Breira (See Torn at the Roots, The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America, by Michael E. Staub) and New Jewish Agenda as well as their leaders have vanished from award-winning histories of the American Jewish community like American Judaism by Brandeis Professor Jonathan D. Sarna.
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, I write the following on the ongoing project of Israel advocates of:
Manipulating African Americans — usually via civil rights organizing and creating Jewishly correct African American leaders like Gloria White-Hammond.
[Originally civil rights was a project of Jewish radicalism although Jabotinskians used support for civil rights as the means to district from their racism against Palestinians. (See Militant Zionism in American: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926-1948 by Rafael Medoff.)
Terror in the Night, The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews, by Jack Nelson suggests that the organized Jewish community opportunistically used Jewish radicals to create conditions to scare up money from wealthy Jews and to manipulate the US government and law enforcement to do its bidding and eventually possibly to commit extra-judicial murder in response to a 1966 synagogue bombing. The skill set that the organized Jewish community developed in such efforts later proved extremely helpful in shutting down Arab and Muslim charities and think tanks.]
Loopy, Joachim.
I did not go much beyond what Jack Nelson wrote except to point out that one can speak of a Jewish communal organizational memory in exactly the same way that many scholarly papers on business corporations discuss corporate memory.
If you have a problem with it, talk with Jack Nelson.
No key-parties at the Greenwich library?!