Antisemites Are on My Side of These Issues. How Much Should I Care?

It's a case of misdirection to think that someone's argument is somehow negated because unsavory groups/individuals agree with it. I'd also discount a lot of the knee-jerk smears claiming someone is an anti-Semite for the positions that they have regarding Israel/Zionism. Every piece that I read in the papers about Walt & Mearsheimer's "Israel Lobby" book opened with the line (meme actually) that David Duke agrees with them. Look how many Zionist racists agree with any particular Israeli position and you can see that this happens across the board yet is only used as an argument against one side.

Phil,

In all my readings of Philip Giraldi, I dont see what you read in his work: Giraldi is angry at Jews, I can see that.

I can tell you what my non-Jewish friends tell me, and this includes friends in Manhattan who almost whispered it at the time. The anger is at not being allowed to talk about it. IT being Jewish political influence, Israel, national policy that does not serve US interests. The anger is at being muzzled. That anger mounts when so many lives are lost, and the economy tanks, and Christian crazies hijack a President.

You're going to see a lot of pressure valves explode before this evens out. To hurl "anti-semitism" "anger at Jews" [what are Jews? A religion? A race? A nation?] at this top coming off will undoubtedly exacerbate the situation. But maybe it's all to the good. It will hasten the discussion.

This is why I enjoy your blog because I think you are correctly framing the needed discussion on both sides. I'm not Jewish. But I have friends here in high places who have relatives back in Manhattan, and I hear from them here that they can't talk to their relatives back home about Israel and what it's doing without the threat of banishment, and an accusation of betrayal for their views.

So there is a lot of loosening that has to happen on both sides.

Follow the Israeli Sociologist Nathan Snaider's definition:
"Anti-Semitism is hating the Jews more than necessary".
(You may substitute 'hate' by 'criticise'.)

Phil, this is a difficult issue, but what can you take as a compass other than your own feelings and reason? …

Not too long ago (2002/3), I was pondering if Justin Raimondo, and thus antiwar.com were simply antisemites? The problem is the closer you look the more complicated matters get.

If, as you suggest, Richard possesses a higher spirituality than you, he has failed to communicate it to us. (apart from his dialog with you, or his admonitions about what is kosher and what not for you to write about.)

Concerning Morris to cite one of us "antisemites" (or for Bill "storm troopers":

One of the first Israeli historians to admit that Israel forced the Arabs off their land was Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University. Morris does not, however, think that it was a bad thing to kill other people and take their property. He only regrets that all of the Arabs were not driven out in 1948 and in 2004 recommended that those who remain be dealt with like animals, saying "Something like a cage has to be built for them…There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.

Maybe he can try to explain again. Why he thinks Morris is right, why Israel should have driven out all Arabs in 1948? And what exactly would be the difference now.

I think it's time to retire the term "antisemite," being that it's been misused for so long. As I'm sure most readers of Phil's blog are aware, an Arab is every bit as semitic as a Jew. Let's start calling things as they are: anti-Jewish sentiment should be called just that, anti-Jewish. Anti-Arab sentiment should likewise be properly defined.

Well I am angry, too, and when I find myself getting angry at a whole group of people I try to pull myself up short. When I try to describe my anger about these matters discussed here I often use the unwieldy phrase "the actions of the State of Israel and its unthinking supporters."

I am and have been angry about all kinds of things that Israel (the State, its military, etc.) has done against the Palestinians, the Lebanese and our lands. Since I live among Jews and am married to one (who is as non-Zionist as they get) I find it mandatory to make the distinction.

Anger "at the Jews" is not a useful sentiment in my opinion. All Jews? Noam Chomsky? Michael Lerner of Tikkun? Richard Silverstein? Jewish Voice for Peace? Brit Tzedek? Machsom Watch? Those wacky ultra-mystical Chasidim who think Zionism will prevent the return of the Messiah, and go around visiting imams in Lebanon and Teheran? Iranian Jews? Who am I angry at? None of these folk I just listed, and they are all Jews, and mostly identify strongly as Jews.

How about my friend who is so wrapped up in her love-of-Jews-and-Judaism that she can't separate the ideas of Daniel Pipes out from her own wish to connect with her ancestors. She is just … uninformed, and goodhearted but not clued in. Should I hate her? When I got cancer the first time, she brought home-cooked organic food, and babysat my children. I just can't hate her. (But I don't talk MIddle East politics with her, and yes, I keep her at a bit more distance than I would if she "got it") Human beings do "mitzvahs." They also cling to religious, tribal, nationalist and political ideas that I might or might not agree with. Everybody's worldview is a mix of ideas and no one on this planet exhibits complete congruence with me. Hell, I disagree with myself from one day to the next.

I'm very uncomfortable with the anti-Jewish spewings in comments at this site, and if I had such commenters at my place I would scrub them. But that's my own feeling. I admire Phil for examining himself, his ideas and feelings, and his blog comment policy.

Wear it like a badge of honor phil. Especially if what they mean by anti semitism is the questioning of israels policies in the middle east and the american jewish lobby that pretends to represent all jewish sentiment.

zionism is a sick ism, and hopefully for the world it is in its dying throes, for the sake of humanity lets hope that it is.

the lies that uphold the myth of the benevolent jewish nation heavily supported by the kind pluralistic jewish communities around the world will fall like the walls of jericho one day.

there is way too much money behind the IT of zionism…it buys influence and silence.

Well, in the interest of staking a stand, this is my position:

I am not anti-Jew [I frankly dont understand that thinking; who backhands a people off the planet?];

I am not anti-Jewish (meaning the religion; religions fascinate me and have since I was three and a half, believe it or not: 3 1/2 years old! It was my mother reading me The Golden Bough then, and Rumi's poems, and C.S. Lewis, and listening to her funnier-than-hell yoga coach talk about life in the ME when they had drinks after practice);

I am not anti-Israel (the nation, but then I once bought into that 'light unto the world' crap, carried water for the idea);

but I am anti-Zionist (this position was learned).

Leila, I like your comments a lot and I understand this:

I'm very uncomfortable with the anti-Jewish spewings in comments at this site, and if I had such commenters at my place I would scrub them. But that's my own feeling. I admire Phil for examining himself, his ideas and feelings, and his blog comment policy.

BUT if you ask me to decide, would I prefer to see these sentiments censured or be able to watch them? My choice is the second, without a second thought.

I am listening carefully to the arguments of "antisemites hunters", who e.g. labeled a Sharon cartoon as antisemitic while not having the slightest idea that the artist might in fact have been inspired NOT by the tale of Jewish blood libel BUT in fact by Goja's Saturn.

…

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Richard, I hear sarcasm beneath the polite surface–"spiritually evolved"–too. The problem is, you keep presenting yourself as a wiser, more evolved person/Jew than Phil is, so what do you expect?

This by the way is rather conventional wisdom. I doubt the easy mixture of "them" vs the implicit "us", as I hope it is a narrative that will loose in the long run:

The right-wing, old and new con, the anti-semitic far right and far left, don't give a shit about mutual decency. They are in a war. They usually aren't fighting to genocide, but they are often fighting to silence.

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I subscribe to David Shasha's email newsletter about Sephardim, which I did based on Tony Karon's recommendation. It is wonderful, and I look forward to receiving it whenever it plops in my inbox.

Just got one. It's entitled "More Anti-Sephardic Racism" and here are some paragraphs from an article subtitled "Reading the 92nd Street Y Catalog: Sephardim and Arabs Need Not Apply." It is apropos given this thread topic.

Ah, those New York Jews.

Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Ed Koch, Alfred Kazin.

Katz’s Deli, Zabar’s, Pastrami Sandwiches, Lox and Bagels, Matzoh Ball Soup, Chopped Liver, Gefilte Fish.

The Lower East Side.

All one big Ashkenazi world.

I was once told a story by Mickey Kairey, one of the patron saints of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community, that by now I have repeated many times, about his father’s experience on the Lower East Side in the first part of the 20th century. Mickey’s father was praying in an Ashkenazi minyan and was asked by the man sitting next to him, “Are you Jewish?” Mr. Kairey was praying donned in his tallit and tefillin and thought it a strange question. The “Are you Jewish?” question is a ubiquitous one among many Ashkenazi Jews – especially the Orthodox – and speaks to a sense of ethno-cultural prejudice that is endemic to the Ashkenazi condition. People are seen in gradations of ethnic acceptability: the Ashkenazi-Yiddish identity is central and all else is simply a drifting away from the core. Mr. Kairey made the mistake of not being able to speak Yiddish and was marked as suspect when it came to being a Jew. In fact, it should be remembered that the Yiddish language was even called “Jewish” by its native speakers.

Now in Israel, this idea that Ashkenazi culture is transcendent in the socio-political sense is one that is clear and needs little commentary. But in America, there is still the pretense that Jews – especially the fabled “New York Jew” – are filled with love and tolerance of their fellow Man.

So when I received the new catalog of events from the 92nd Street Y – it does not get more “New York Jew” than that – I carefully filtered out these Ashkenazi prejudices which are often thought by many to be a product of my own imagination.

Before I begin my argument, I should note that many events in the Y’s program series contain a plethora of non-Jewish figures. From the New York Mets’ Keith Hernandez to the African-American academic Cornel West to famed folksinger Joan Baez to Jazz pianist Dave Brubeck to media celebrity Martha Stewart, the Y has diversity seemingly covered. It is just that this “diversity” is of a very specific kind; a “diversity” that excludes two critical components – Sephardim and Arabs.

While it is not always easy to prove a negative – that Sephardim and Arabs are not welcome in this place of “civilization” – I will try and outline what seems to me to be an ideological bias that speaks to the current condition of the “Jewish” condition here in America.
[...]

Giraldis work sounds more than alot like phil weiss's except he's not jewish and weiss is.

The noble prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn (recently deceased) wrote a book eight years ago about Jewish-Russian relations over 200 years; his declared purpose was to untie the knot one is faced with when trying to understand that period of Russian-communist history. He kept running into the knot, the Jewish-Gentile knot. His declared hope was that both Gentile and Jew would look at what they have wrought. His book has yet to be published in English…

Your title would imply that you're joining in with Commentary's attack, Phil. That is a pregnant "but I don't know" after "I'm not convinced." You don't know whether Giraldi is everything Pollack wants to imply that he is?

Before the Iraq War many people knew the score but were afraid to speak out, except for the infamous "antisemite" Pat Buchanan. This kind of defamation is truly deadly, and not just in Iraq.

Where do you stand, Phil?

Those who stand by during a lynching only kid themselves if they think they haven't taken sides.

Witty:
This proves my point. Phil has a thriving anti-semitic fan base. They like what he writes. He likes that they like him. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Phil Weiss is a classic Jewish anti-semite. He is an advocate of the destruction of Israel and mocks all Jewish religious practices. I honestly don't see how you can defend a guy who appeals to the Keatings, Martillos, and Ed's wof the world.

Just need to add.

If I (or whoever) thinks their views and/or criticizisms on an issue are fair and accurate they are going to keep making them regardless of whether it involves Jews, Buddhist,Methodist, Russians, Arabs or Americans.

And like it or not even the anti-semites in the US have the same rights as the anti-Arab/Palestine Israelis in Israel.

Not regarding anyone as special or an exception to rights and rules is an old American tradition.

Another good old truism –> Your rights end where mine begin" is nice to keep in mind.

Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern and Michael Scheuer are among a significant group of ex-CIA who have been extremely critical of Israel and the Zionist lobby. Due to their decades of intelligence-insider status, they are probably the best informed group in the country on what is really going on behind the scenes in Washington, and none of them seem to like it one bit.

It was inevitable that they would eventually start hitting hard at the Jewish Zionists, because they know better than anyone that the Jewish Zionists are probably the biggest threat to America today. It was also inevitable that the Jewish Zionists would start hitting back at them, because they know that the ex-CIA know better than anyone that they are a threat.

These anti-semite charges against Giraldi are routine, standard operating procedure for Jewish Zionists attempting to overthrow sovereign governments. Just ask Richard Witty and SOG.

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For those of you who would like to subscribe to David Shasha's email newsletter mentioned above, here is his email address. You email him and he'll put you on his mailing list:

Davidshasha At aol dot com

When Sephardic Jews are exclusively represented in largely negative ways as if they lacked agency and an intellectual culture of their own, the corollary of a negative stance towards Arabs in general makes a good deal of sense. But here we can clearly see that there is simply no effort being made by the Ashkenazi community – the fabled “New York Jews” – to look outside itself. Sure, there is Toni Morrison and there is Mario Cuomo, but inside Judaism, where it truly counts, there is no good-faith attempt to deal with the endemic racism and insular pathology of an Ashkenazi world that wants to be catered to on its own terms. Jewish advocacy means falling in line with the orthodoxies of Ashkenazi thinking and remaining completely silent on the larger cultural issues that plague the Jewish world.

[...]

For any real progress to be made, we first have to acknowledge that this Ashkenazi intolerance exists and then find substantial ways to remedy it. If this discursive impasse is not remedied, we will continue to find ourselves caught in the perennial vicious cycle of mutual incomprehension and intolerance; toxic elements that have led to endless violence and socio-political dysfunction. Given the continued absence of new possibilities that have been knowingly blocked off from the agenda by Jewish institutions run by Ashkenazim, there is little hope that we will ever be able to solve the intractable problems that face the Jewish community at present.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Atzmon

good man, whether anti-semite or not.

US "charitibility" vis Iraq War would be imposed by the resistance and Iran.

Oh shoot, I really apologize for that double posting. What is the matter with my refresh cycle?!?

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'The best line I have read all year was from John Lukacs in his slam-dunk in The American Conservative of Pat Buchanan's revisionist WW2 book: "history does not repeat itself, and the rise and decline of Britain’s empire was and remains quite different from the American situation." ' — Phil W.

Oh, my. Lukacs condemns Buchanan for "special pleading," but is himself the author of a book about Churchill. Neither Buchanan nor Lukacs, with their deuling passions about Churchill, should be taken at face value.

But Lukacs is way off base claiming that "the reaching out of American power all over the world, the fact that there are now American bases and missions in more than 700 places around the globe, the building of a 600-ship Navy, etc., began with Eisenhower and Dulles." This is quite wrong. The U.S. empire happened because the U.S. (under Harry Truman, specifically) never demobilized from WW II. Is Lukacs one of those fossilized creatures from antiquity, the 'partisan Democrat'? I suspect so.

Lukacs goes on to claim that "the gradual liquidation of the British Empire, and the piecemeal acceptance by the British people of that, long preceded World War II." Well, yes. The clear demarkation point after which U.S. global influence exceeded that of Britain was in the aftermath of WW I, when Woody Wilson's nutball, usurious "peace" scourged Germany and Britain alike. An even stronger case can be made against U.S. participation in WW I (in which Churchill played a role) than in WW II. Nevertheless, given the prevailing warped account of WW II as a "good war," with its distorted emphasis on German (as opposed to Soviet) evil, Buchanan does yeoman service in calling the conventional wisdom into question.

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"Richard Witty has told me that David Duke posts some of my posts."

Not surprising. Politics is not a linear stage, but a ring. Left and right meet at a dark point near the backstage scenery, 180 degrees behind front center.

Phil's thesis that "why I have this blog, to understand myself, my background, and my country" evinces an bold willingness to explore intellectual territory that most others, having staked out a petrified ethnographic "political profile" for themselves, are unwilling to touch. This is intellectual ambrosia of the highest order. Carry on, my man!

The word anti-Semite doesn't really mean anything to me. Has anyone ever met a true egalitarian? I haven't. When the term anti-Gentile is taken seriously by most Jews, I'll worry about being branded an anti-Semite.

I have met many Jews that I like personally, but I don't care to have Jewishness shoved down my throat. Jews in power just have to learn that the rest of us are not going to morph into Jews, and that Gentiles want to be Gentiles just as much as Jews wish to be Jews- and no amount of propaganda or slandering will change this.

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"Giraldi claims, citing an anonymous source, that Doug Feith forged documents for the White House." — Noah Pollak

The circumstantial evidence seems strong that raw intelligence was laundered through Feith's Office of Special Plans to make it seem definitive, even though it contradicted info from the UN inspectors in Iraq. This led to Colin Powell's debacle before the UN Security Council, in which he claimed certainty about WMDs in Iraq — which evaporated in the harsh light of day.

If Feith's OSP wasn't responsible for this, who was? No proper investigation since the Robb-Silberman Commission (whose conclusions were promptly blown away by the Downing Street memos) has ever been done. To pursue the ad hominem antisemitic angle against those (such as Giraldi) who hammer on this point seems like a rather transparent diversion. The lack of Congressional interest in pursuing the facts behind the Iraq debacle fairly screams. Giraldi is virtually a whisper in comparison to the enormity of this ongoing institutional malfeasance (which won't change under CFR 'made man' Obama).

.

Counselor Keating, I see your bid, and raise you with Paul Craig Roberts' spectacular scourging of the nattering neocons of nihility, as they incite the next pointless, lethal war on behalf of the USrael axis of evil:

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It is certain that the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was a Bush Regime orchestrated event. The American media and the neocon think tanks were ready with their propaganda blitzes. Neocons had ready a Wall Street Journal editorial page article for Saakashvili that declares “the war in Georgia is a war for the West.”

The neocon Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., quickly called a conference hosted by warmonger Ariel Cohen, “Urgent! Event: Russian-Georgian War: A Challenge for the U.S. and the World.”

The Washington Post hosted neocon Robert Kagan’s war drums, “Putin Makes His Move.”

The New York Times hosted Billy Kristol’s rant, “Will Russia Get Away With It?” Kristol thunders against “dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes” that “seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies.” In other words, “attack Russia now.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08132008.html

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Bush is now sending US military assets into the Georgian conflict zone in a deliberately provocative effort which is the mirror image of the Soviets installing missiles in Cuba in the early 1960s.

Roberts' head-snapping conclusion is one is that I HOPE Phil Weiss will laud as a "slam-dunk":

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"The only military threat that Europe faces comes from being dragged into America’s wars for American hegemony."

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BINGO! Sixty-three dismal years of Cold War I and II, distilled into a single sentence. Nail it on your forehead and tattoo it on your doorposts; this shit is important.

We've all been worrying about an attack on Iran. But will the U.S. puppet state of Georgia (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) prove to be the Iraq II, elect-McCain provocation? Christ, I hope not!

I think anti-Semite is a word for those who can't admire excellent Jewish qualities, can't have Jews as close friends, can't generally appreciate the contribution Jews have made to Western civilization.
Giraldi (whom I know and like) certainly doesn't fit into that category. His views are however typical of a large substrata of CIA and State Department people, those who are or who have been involved with American foreign policy — who constantly come up and chafe against the restraints posed by Jewish power/the Israel Lobby in ways most Americans don't.

Weiss wrote: "Believe me, if history starts to repeat itself re the Holocaust, I'm back with the Commentary boys in a New York second."

It is starting to repeat itself, only this time it’s Muslims, Christians and other non-Jews who are being targeted for extermination. This is also a repeat of the Jewish Bolshevik extermination of Christians in the former Soviet Union. But I guess since the Christians and Muslims aren't of your tribe, you'll stick with the so called anti-Semites for awhile, since it’ll look good on the resume, eh Phil? And once the Judeofascists are hit back in kind, why then you'll revert back to tribalism, whether the Judeofascists had it coming or not. Puh. And left-liberal Jews claim they want to get past all the tribalism. You can’t be a humanist without allowing tribalists to be severely punished for their transgressions against God, History and man. That doesn’t mean targeting tribalists because they are part of a tribe; it means targeting them when they try to impose their supremacist ideology over all of humanity merely because it is conducive to their own tribal dogma, and because they are megalomaniacs trying to prove that they are “Aryan,” “Chosen” or any other supremacist adjective.

Phil, you and all the other unwashed stunted tribalists of both Left and Right still have a lot to learn about the laundromat of Western civilization.