Keep meaning to pick this up. On C-Span's Washington Journal last Saturday, journalist Robert Kuttner of The avowedly-liberal American Prospect, author of Obama's Challenge, was on talking about, well, Obama's challenge, and saying how smart the next president is. Agreed. A caller asked about AIPAC and the "Jewish" lobby and Rahm Emanuel, whose parents were "Jewish terrorists."
Kuttner said he is Jewish, and then did the usual, and said that he hears a lot of people trotting out this idea about Zionists. But he doesn't care if it's the Jewish lobby or the Christian Zionists, he wants an evenhanded policy in the Middle East and we have to make Israel make hard choices. Good for him. But that old dodge: Christian Zionists. I guess they're the ones who cut off Howard Dean's head when he wanted an evenhanded policy, or cut Obama off at the knees when he said Palestinians are suffering the most.
Anyway, Kuttner also said that terrorism is sort of in the eye of the beholder, and Emanuel's father was fighting to "liberate" the British colony of Palestine, and by that token George Washington was an American terrorist. Pretty close to verbatim. Can't listen to it again. But he used the word colony to describe Palestine. Actually it was the League of Nations mandate. The Brits didn't love the job. That was one error. The other is that a lot of the Irgun activity was post-British control and aimed at ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The U.N. called for Jaffa to be an Arab city, the queen of the sea, 70,000 people. When the Irgun got done, there were just a couple thousand. Too close to Tel Aviv. Too many great old houses.
What's stupendous about this, as Charles Keating, who pointed it out to me noted, is the truly stupendous double standard: the glorification of Israeli history, by a good liberal American Jew–hey it's in our mythology–and when Palestinians rise up against tyranny they are to be denied all rights of self-determination. Arab liberation just doesn't count for anything, for 60 festering years. And we are recruited in this delusory doubleness by upstanding liberal journalists.
"I've noticed more and more Washington Journal call-ins are angry about AIPAC," Keating says, and no wonder. Keating also says, wisely: "Kuttner's views are usually pitted against the likes of William Kristol. But here the vision seems identical."
Related posts:
- ‘The Washington Post’ is pro-neocon, says Robert Parry
- ‘War Turns Me On,’ by Robert Kaplan, Jeffrey Goldberg and George Packer
- Washington Post Columnist Gives Private AIPAC Talks on How to Help Israel in ‘08 Election
- NPR’s Robert Siegel opens a door I want to go through
- Palestinians Are Finally Welcome in Washington
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And the words Israeli "settlers" and "settlements" mask thievery and murder, just as they did in the US theft from and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. Many liberals who've long felt guilt about American larceny 100-200 years ago now justify comparable crimes today. Reactionaries, on the other hand, see no harm in either set of atrocities, celebrating the "manifest destiny" that their side is entitled to take whatever it wants.
“But he doesn't care if it's the Jewish lobby or the Christian Zionists, he wants an evenhanded policy in the Middle East and we have to make Israel make hard choices”
Christian Zionists are too dumb to tie their own shoelaces, and their zombie masses have merely been leveraged by the Jewish Zionists in support of the Jewish Zionist agenda. Without the Jewish Zionists organizing and encouraging them, and for them to emulate, they’d still be a small cult of Branch Davidian-like screw balls. And Kuttner knows this.
This is why I despise liberal Jewish Zionists (Neolibs) even more than Neocons: In addition to being intellectually dishonest, they’re also gutless cowards seeking to scapegoat Christians for their own evil enterprise, the whole time implying they’re completely powerless to stop any of it — even as they know it’s their own people pulling the strings. They then mouth tepid calls for “hard choices” and slink off to other issues. There probably isn’t a more disgusting form of intellect on the planet.
Back to defining liberal Zionists as complicit again?
Tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.
Where is the promised discussion about the lauded Burg book?
Hey, in this day and age the Israelis are the Americans, the Brits are the Brits, and the Arabs are the Indians. Why do you think they style themselves settlers?
When I visited Israel first in 1968, Jaffa was an Arab town. Did the Irgun fail?
Commercialism changed Jaffa during Israel's tenure.
Irgun did not fail. It really did ethnic clensed Jaffa of 95% of its Arab people. By 1968 Jaffa had dirt poor Arab outskirts and prosperous Jewish population settled in grand houses in Old town and new (Jewish only) neighbourhoods.
Not what I saw.
In 1968, there was beginning of Jewish building there, but the majority of the town was Arab.
Maybe I was just taken on a "tour".
My almost 14 year-old memory though is not perfect. Better than guessing or repeating others' assertions though.
There's just one writer at the American Prospect that I like, and that's Sarah Posner.
Similarly, there's just one writer that I like at Firedoglake, and that's Marcy Wheeler.
I dare say the fact that they are females makes it easier for me to perceive them as being at the more acceptable end of their respective house spectra.
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