‘The Israeli government has ruthlessly and cynically exploited the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as a justification for the murder of Palestinians’

Member of Parliament Gerald Kaufman is the most beautiful Jew in the world.

Phil, you totally make me puke with this shit. Who exactly do you think you are writing for? Brainwashed children?

Rowan, take a powder you goose. Come back when you settle down.

Member of Parliament Gerald Kaufman is the most beautiful Jew in the world.

Good line Phil. I like this. You are hyperbolic but you do bring passion to this discussion.

Peter's,

Start an America First PAC.

I would rather be reading Mondo Blankfort. He doesn't generate this miasma of emotional garbage.

AP describes Kaufman as "a frequent critic of Israel who was raised as an Orthodox Jew," with the implication that he is now a lapsed one, although this may be an interpolation by Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055922.html

I want to note here that the ultimate expression of jewish identity is that one make provision during one's life for one's burial in a 'jewish cemetary.' It is quite remarkable how many self-described 'secular jews' do this, too, isn't it?

keep it up phil, wake up american jews who have been brainwashed beyond their ability to be the moral creatures.

this man hits the nail on the head.

zionism is a lie much like marxism leninism is a lie….a criminal ideology that is held up by oppression and torture and murders.

("This is my chief source of income…")

An insider's first comment? How many do you have by now?

Personal assaults are the weakest. No arguments left, sugar? Never had any?

David, I could at many, including some not so well known friends. This just went through my mind:

Obviously I am no fan of either the Israels=Nazi or the Palestinians=Nazis equation. In Germany the anti-Germans are propagators of the second view. I may have even been close to them once, before I leaned. Besides the mainly silent Germans who converted to Judaism, there is a visible league of Arab hunters and ardently pro-Israel right-or-wrong fighters. A phenomenon that that find more and more stunning. Compared to the resistance under the Nazis that seems to be a rather safe preoccupation.

Wordy introduction for this:

But this visualization on Norman Finkelstein's site is stunning.

reminicences of the attraction of the Nazi state of mind

For me the crux of the Philippe Sands & Alan Dershowitz debate. The legal wizard Dershowitz at one point used the Nazis as evidence that torture works: Hadn't the Nazis in France extorted all the wanted to know? Didn't the resistance members confess it all under torture? Hadn't they coughed up all the names even father, mother, brothers, sisters, but yes also friends, comrades?

One day someone should take a close look into these matters. The Nazis as someone to learn from seems have a strong attraction to the authoritarian mind. It is clearly discernible in the OSS files and the studies of e.g. Hitler's character. In a way they reached the peak in the Machiavellian control of the masses. So surely some of its methods must be attractive to a specific mindset?

i am tired of hearing about jewish gifts to the world. no "gift" jews have given were unique to their minds (maybe freuds sex garbage. but that aint a gift). whatever decent jews did was in a christian or muslim melieu. on their own they go without baths and spit at christian cemeteries.

hamas is not "a deeply nasty organization". it is a palestinian organization for palestinians. does that make hamas "nasty"?.

aipac, jinsa, likud, labor, collective of jewish presidents, us congress, some examples of deeply nasty organizations.

5 dancing shlomos,

As a (non-Jewish) Brit, I have to disagree with you.

A small example: Our greatest post-war comedian, Peter Sellers, was Jewish in the technical sense — his mother was Jewish. And his comedy was, to my mind, thoroughly Jewish.

Perhaps his greatest role was as Wing Commander Mandrake in Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove.

During the war, Sellers had served in the Royal Air Force, although relegated to ground staff, because of poor eyesight, and never rising above the rank of corporal.

His portrayal of Mandrake — who is both almost comically stiff, but also the centre of sanity in the film, insofar as there is one — is true to a certain type of British military officer.

It is a portrayal done with an outsider's amusement — but also with a certain kind of love.

I could go on at great length about the contribution of Jews to British artistic, intellectual, and political life.

But it is precisely because of my awareness — no, knowledge would be a better word — of the scale of this contribution, that I have come think that the influence of the Zionist lobby in the United States is an utter disaster.

Most British Jews I have known feel some commitment to Israel — if only because of the loyalty which people have to the dead. This is one of the odder of human loyalties, but also one of the most potent.

But — as Kaufman's remarks bring out — what Israel has become faces many of them with enormous problems. One of these is the — to my mind quite rational — fear that the behaviour of Israel will open the door to a revival of anti-Semitism.

Another is that the behaviour both of Israel and its American supporters has come to seem a threat to their notions of what it means to be Jewish.

Many American Jews, as a result of their commitment to Zionism, seem quite happy to form a political alliance with fundamentalist Christians who support Israel because they believe that its establishment is part of God's plan for the End Times.

When these come, the fundamentalists seem to believe, the prescribed number of Jews will convert, and the remainder suffer excrutiating torments.

I doubt whether any of the (many) Jewish friends and acquaintances I have had throughout my life would have felt anything but utter contempt towards the rabble with whom many American Jews seem happy to be associated.

Way with words, extreme cautiousness, chutzpah, cunning, greed. These seem to be main ingredients of jewish jokes and jokes about jews in Poland.
The huge amount of those jokes shows just how important jewish culture was in Poland before the war.
I am dying to know what main ingredients of polish jokes said between jews in poland were.

D.,

A very good question. It deserves a better answer than I have space to give it here.

I had partly in mind some remarks by the appalling Kevin MacDonald. In his paper 'Stalin's Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the U.S.S.R', MacDonald writes as follows of German attitudes to Jews in the nineteenth century:

'A major theme of anti-Jewish attitudes was that Jews were deeply involved in creating a “culture of critique” — that Jewish cultural influence was entirely negative and shattered the social bonds of the peoples they lived among. Slezkine cites Heinrich Heine as a prime example of a Jewish intellectual with sincere and tender love for German culture, but the Germans, from Wagner to von Treitschke to Chamberlain and Hitler, didn’t see it that way. For example, Heinrich von Treitschke, a prominent nineteenth-century German intellectual, complained of Heine’s “mocking German humiliation and disgrace following the Napoleonic wars” and Heine’s having “no sense of shame, loyalty, truthfulness, or reverence.”'

(See http://www.theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol5no3/53-km-slezkine.pdf.)

Note for one thing how by the reference to 'the Germans' MacDonald has implicitly categorized as alien to German culture all kinds of strands in that culture. Among these are central strands in German music, as the many composers who set Heine included Brahms, Schubert and in particular Robert Schumann (who clearly loved the irony.)

More generally, the situation of being partly involved in, and partly detached from a culture, when combined with a mimetic gift, can a produce a facility in rendering characteristic types from that culture. This is characteristically to a greater or lesser extent ironic — but irony is not incompatible with affection.

Classic instances both of irony and of affection come in the wonderful operettas of the Frenchified German Jew Offenbach, who libretti were co-written by Halévy (a Jew) and Meilhac, a gentile.

Another favourite instance of mine is Tony Curtis's mangling of Cary Grant's impersonations of stiff Anglo-Saxon gentlemen in Some Like it Hot — itself a movie based upon Billy Wilder's very Jewish sense of being hounded from pillar to post.

To my mind it is in this tradition that one needs to locate Peter Sellers's great performances — in particular as Wing Commander Mandrake in Strangelove, and the communism-admiring shop steward Fred Kite in I'm All Right Jack. I have never thought his acting was anything like as good when he moved away from the British culture he knew like the back of his hand.

Sometimes, incidentally, Jewish irony could be combined with an almost Old Testament prophetic spirit — as in the denunciations of Austro-Hungarian and German militarism by the great Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. (Kraus incidentally loved Offenbach, and used to perform him in solo shows, with the patter songs updated to satirise current events.)

Unlike Kevin MacDonald, I think that any reasonably healthy culture can benefit from being laughed at. Had the Germans played more Offenbach, and less of that appallingly overrated composer Wagner, we might have been spared two world wars, the Holocaust, and all its after effects, like current troubles in Palestine.

The pompous inanity one finds among many politically influential American Jews is something which I find particularly hard to take, precisely because of this admiration for Jewish irony. I first came across Richard Perle when he appeared on a satellite link on a television programme I produced, more than twenty years ago now.

That horrid pasty-faced apparition which popped up on the screen seemed to me exactly like one of the appalling civilian militarists out of Kraus's great satire The Last Days of Mankind — always enthusiastic for wars which they knew other people and other people's children would have to fight.