This week TPM is having a bookclub about Avraham Burg's great new book. I'm in the conversation, which I find too highminded. Here's my first post, titled The Jewish conversation, and the American one:
Avraham Burg's book is great and important, no doubt. His idea that Israel pardoned Germany too quickly and shifted the rage to Arabs is significant. His identification of the neocons as powerful Jewish proponents of the Iraq war is one that American Jews resist. His impatience with Jewish ethnocentrism and his tolerance of intermarriage will also resonate. Jews will discuss this book for a long time. That's mostly a Jewish conversation.
Here's the American one. Last week in NY, Burg said that American Jews compose a "semi-autonomous" structure of Zionism, giving support to the Jewish state. I don't want that role, never had. Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams did, and look where our foreign policy is in the Middle East. Today Richard Falk, the special rapporteur for the UN in Gaza, states that the U.S. is complicit in Israel's "massive" violations of the Geneva Conventions that threaten wide famine and disease in the Palestinian population and that breed extremism. The international outrage over these conditions, Falk says, recall the outrage over apartheid 20 years back. This is the true context for Burg's revelations, and yes the Obama train is leaving the station--which is to say that my country will be paying more attention, at last, to Israel's grievous treatment of a minority.
His idea that Israel pardoned Germany too quickly and shifted the rage to Arabs is significant.
I agree. But the US did pardon Germany too quick too. Cold war.
So where does one go to talk if there are two separate discussions, one international jewish, the other straight American–when the issues discussed in both circles obviously overlap and are so related?
How can you have had a "special relationship" for so long and remain
yet divorced by mostly accident of birth?
How long can the enabling, the enmeshment continue? I guess it will take something really big, say, an attack on Iran…
I hope folks are keeping up with this Book Club conversation. The latest contribution is from Mearsheimer–
Invoking the Holocaust to Defend the Occuption
"It is hard to believe how stunted and biased the coverage of Israel is in the American media, not to mention the extent to which our politicians have perfected the art of pandering to the Jewish state."
(BTW, as far as I can tell there's still been no acknowledgment of this book's existence in any of the mainstream media.)
I have to say that Phil's blog is the center of the journalism universe when it comes to the most important issue of our times. This Mearsheimer post is dynamite. I sent a link to our local editors as an example of real journalism, just in case they're interested.
This snippet of the TPM conversation caught my attention:
Patricia DeGennaro: "…I was an intern in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. As a budding national security scholar, I asked the good Senator why the US did not work closer with the Russians to contain nuclear weapons. His answer was not about nuclear weapons but Jewish emigration."
syvanen: "…Does this really mean that someone as respected as Kennedy was placing the Jewish emigration issue above issues of nuclear war? … We now know that Israel,and the neocon clique in Jackson's office, were pushing this issue the hardest because of the need for immigrants to counter the Arab demographic threat."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjWoDKj-BoE
Dachau blues those poor jews
Dachau blues those poor jews
Down in Dachau blues, down in Dachau blues
Still cryin' 'bout the burnin' back in world war two's
One mad man six million lose
Down in Dachau blues down in Dachau blues
Dachau blues, Dachau blues those poor jews
The world can't forget that misery
'n the young ones now beggin' the old ones please
t' stop bein' madmen
'fore they have t' tell their children
'bout the burnin' back in World War Three's